When Lynn came out of the bar, the New Mexico sun had climbed directly overhead, and desert heat waves distorted the outlines of the temporary camp in the distant exclusion zone.
He stood outside the bar and stretched, still replaying that final look Coulson had given him.
He took a deep breath of dry desert air and pushed those thoughts aside for now. He was hungry. Time to go mooch a meal. He raised a hand and drew a circle, opening a portal straight to the stairs leading down to Tony's underground lab.
The lab looked much the same as ever. A few new sets of nozzle-angle simulation data had appeared on the holographic screens, and two cups of coffee still sat on the workbench. Tony stood on the left side of the bench, holding a stylus and frowning at a newly opened cross-sectional diagram of a thruster on the screen. Ivan stood on the right, drawing something in a notebook with a pencil and muttering in Russian.
Lynn walked down the stairs and stopped beside the workbench. "You two haven't slept yet?"
Tony and Ivan turned to look at him at the same time. Their synchronization was uncanny, as though his question had triggered some shared confusion. They stared at him for several seconds. Tony's expression shifted from confusion to scrutiny, while Ivan narrowed his eyes slightly, as if checking whether Lynn was joking.
Their stares made Lynn a little uneasy. "...What? Did I ask something wrong?"
"Neither of us is Superman. How could we possibly go without sleep?" Tony set his stylus on the workbench and folded his arms, speaking in a tone that said, "Do you ever actually use that thing on top of your neck?" "Is something wrong with you? How could you say something that stupid?"
Ivan nodded beside him. It was a slight movement, but its meaning was clear: this time, he was on Tony's side.
Lynn looked at the two of them in disbelief, pointing back and forth between them. "How long have you two even been working together? And you're already teaming up to pick on me?" Tony and Ivan exchanged a look without answering, but the agreement in that look said everything. Lynn raised both hands in surrender and sat down in a chair beside the workbench.
"All right, enough messing around. Let's talk business." He lowered his hands to his knees, his tone gradually growing serious after the banter. "I just went to talk to Coulson."
He recounted his conversation with Coulson at the bar from beginning to end: Mjolnir's origins, Thor's banishment, the Destroyer's pursuit, the Chitauri Army's invasion of New York, and the second matter that remained unresolved between them. He did not mention the name "Serpent S.H.I.E.L.D." But he told them everything else, including the hammer's energy field, Asgard's Bifrost, the scale of the alien army, and the question that concerned him most: every word he said to Coulson might set off a chain of consequences he himself could not predict.
"I told him everything I should. Coulson will investigate in his own way, prepare, and do what he can. But my head's still a mess." Lynn looked down at his hands. Those hands had scanned for surveillance equipment and listening devices in a New Mexico bar that morning. Now they rested on his knees, fingers loosely interlaced, fingertips tapping gently against his knuckles. "I don't know whether telling him all this was right or wrong. What if I mess up the timeline? What if Fury... What if..."
"Enough." Tony interrupted him, his tone not particularly stern, but firm. "Listen. I'm giving you back something you told me before! 'There's always a way to solve things.' You gave the information to the best possible recipient. Coulson isn't the kind of person who acts rashly. He'll tell the right people the right parts, at the right time and in the right way. You chose the right person."
"But no matter how smart Coulson is, he can't control every variable..."
"No one can control every variable." Ivan leaned against the edge of the lab bench and set his pencil beside his notebook. His English still carried a heavy Russian accent, but every word seemed to have been weighed over and over by those hands he used for experiments, neither too light nor too heavy, landing exactly where it should. "When I was in Siberia, the first thing I did every morning was count how many things I could still control that day. Later, I realized that no matter how I counted, something was always outside my control. If you only focus on what you can't control, you'll miss what you can do right now."
"Like you," Ivan added, picking up his pencil again.
"For once, this big Russian guy and I agree." Tony leaned back in his chair, picked up his cold espresso, and took a sip. "What you can do right now is pass along the information that needs passing along and let the people who need to prepare get ready. And you still have time. You have your abilities. You have us. If something really does go wrong, we'll still have time to fix it together. As long as you think you should do it, it's the right thing to do. Don't worry about the consequences. You can't shoulder them alone. You still have Yinsen, Banner, Ivan, and me."
Lynn leaned back in his chair. One of these two was backing him up with the logic that "Coulson isn't an idiot," while the other was giving him a lesson in "the survival philosophy of a Siberian prison." Neither offered anything like warm comfort, but somehow, they worked better than any comforting words could have.
Out of the corner of his eye, he surveyed the lab. Two men with extraordinarily high IQs stood opposite him, one on either side, one holding a cold espresso and the other gripping a half-sharpened pencil. A mischievous grin spread across his face. "When's lunch getting here? I'm hungry."
Tony and Ivan stopped what they were doing at the same time and stared blankly at him. Tony's coffee cup halted at his lower lip, and Ivan's pencil hovered above his notebook. Neither spoke.
Tony set his coffee cup down, closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath. "...JARVIS, order three lunches. Chinese. One without onions."
"Noted, sir." JARVIS's tone was as level as ever, but perhaps Lynn was imagining it: the first beat of that "noted" came just a little faster than usual.
After lunch, Tony and Ivan returned to the holographic screens, their argument shifting from thruster nozzle angles to the arrangement of energy transmission lines. Lynn did not join in. He moved a chair from beside the workbench to the floor-to-ceiling windows, sat down, and watched the clouds drifting slowly over the Pacific Ocean outside. Behind him, their arguing rose and fell. Tony's voice was sharp and impatient, Ivan's low and stubborn, interspersed with a mixture of Russian and English technical terms.
He remembered himself long ago, staring at that moldy hamburger in the subway station. He had gone five days without eating, with only three dollars and twenty-five cents to his name. Back then, he had not even had a legal identity. His only thought had been to survive the day. Then the Ancient One had come to him, and he had thought he could finally live peacefully at Kamar-Taj. Later, his own abilities had nearly burned out his brain, and he had genuinely thought he would have to lie flat for the rest of his life. Now he sat here alive and well, with two geniuses behind him arguing fiercely over a nozzle angle.
He had saved Yinsen. The New Element he had created with his own hands had cleared the palladium poisoning from Tony's chest. Vanko had not died in an explosion of his own making; he was standing beside Tony, poking the holographic screen with a pencil. Coulson was evacuating the residents of that small New Mexico town ahead of time. Coulson was still alive, still investigating the truth he needed to know.
He was still just a nobody.
He had no Vibranium Shield, no Iron Man Armor, no Super Soldier Serum.
But he had already changed some things. Although he could not possibly save everyone, he had no intention of standing by and doing nothing.
Marvel was not just a battlefield for superheroes. It was also where ordinary people lived.