The story did not die.
It should have. That was how the internet usually worked. People got excited about a thing, and then the days passed and they drifted back to their own lives, or on to the next bright shiny thing instead. With the platforms pulling the video the instant it was reloaded, this should have died the same quiet death as everything else.
Even after the battle of London, it had all blown over inside a few short weeks.
But this time, it stubbornly refused to die.
Because unlike London, where the journalists had gone hunting for the broom riders and come back empty-handed, this time they came back with their hands full.
People came forward with stories of their own. Of waking in strange places with holes punched in their memories. Of watching someone vanish with the same sharp crack heard in the video. Of seeing impossible things done that could not be done. A few tenacious journalists even turned up something stranger still: children with unexplainable talents, quietly selected for special untraceable boarding schools at the age of eleven, and never quite explained to the neighbors.
The stories came from absolutely everywhere at once, from countries that had no reason to coordinate, and they kept coming, and they kept lining up.
Scoop by scoop, the picture assembled itself, and the public began to understand that the broom riders of London had not been any government's special forces. Something far, far bigger was being hidden from them. A whole hidden world, perhaps, riding alongside their own and beneath their notice, and there all along.
The public was being aggressively walked toward that terrifying conclusion. It was all far too neat, too perfectly coordinated to be a chance.
Anyone with eyes could feel the hand at the world's back. Someone with deep pockets and patience was pushing the narrative, and pushing hard. This was not a world waking up on its own.
Perhaps it was not even one hand. Even Eve could not put a single name or organization to whoever was actively fanning the flames, and that alone told Arthur something. They were doing their work in the physical world, mouth to ear, paper and handshake, well out of reach of the surveillance that watched everything that touched a wire. They were hiding, he suspected, from SHIELD as much as from anyone else.
But the want behind the massive campaign was plain enough. They wanted the hidden wizarding world dragged into the light, and they wanted it badly. They wanted a war. A brutal world war between the two sides, shaped to fit their own ends.
Why? Because war buys permissions that peace never will.
Unchecked emergency powers. Black budgets. Oversight that learns to look the other way. In this new age of aliens and superheroes, there were organisations that needed a frightened world far more than they needed a safe one. Because a frightened world stops asking what they are building in the dark.
So they fed the flames. When the governments leaned on the platforms and the leaks were scrubbed away, the stories simply went where the platforms could not follow. Into encrypted messages. Into private group chats. Onto pamphlets being passed around by hand on busy street corners. The existence of magic had stopped being a closely guarded secret and become something far harder to kill.
It had become a casual conversation.
The sensible mundane governments repeatedly denied all of it, as loudly and as calmly as they could manage, and their denials failed a little more with every passing day.
Their magical counterpart, for its part, did not appear to care in the slightest.
That was the part Arthur found grimly funny. The wizards carried on exactly as they always had for centuries. If one of their own made a mess in a Muggle street, a quiet team arrived and tidied it away, the same as ever. Beyond that, the Ministries read the Muggle panic the way a man reads about weather on a continent he will never visit. With mild interest, and no intention of packing an umbrella.
And the magical side had its own people praying for a war. Arthur was sure of that as well. There were wizards who wanted the secret out, because a secret was a leash, and that leash was the only thing still holding their hands behind their backs. They were tired of hiding from a world they believed beneath them. They wanted the Statute of Secrecy to fall at last, and they did not much care what fell with it.
Mercifully, while this invisible war of information raged back and forth across the globe, the physical world did not change much just yet. People still went to work. The sun still rose. The actual shooting war had not begun.
—
Arthur read the news every single morning over his tea, and he did absolutely nothing.
He also noticed that no one had called him for advice. Not Fury. Not Harry. Not anyone at all. The phone that had rung through every crisis of the last decade sat silent on the counter, and the silence told him what he had already begun to suspect.
They were all nervously watching, too. Waiting, exactly as he was, to see exactly which way the fragile tower would fall before any of them lifted a finger to try and catch it.
And Arthur, who had decided to stop carrying a world that did not want the carrying, sat idle as watched the foundations crack, and simply turned the page of his newspaper.
It was, he was almost completely certain, the right thing to do. To let them find their own way for once. To refuse to be the hand that fixed it all. Because a people forever rescued never does learn to stand on its own feet.
Then, on a quiet Thursday evening, the phone finally rang.
It was not Fury, and it was not Harry.
"Hayes." Tony Stark's voice crackled through the speaker, skipping past anything so ordinary as a greeting. "Clear your schedule for tonight. Pack up the missus and the terrifying pocket-sized versions of yourselves. Bring Winky too, if she swears on something holy not to sneak into my workshop and reorganise it while I'm not looking."
"Why?" Arthur asked.
"Because I'm asking nicely, which I never do, so you know it matters. Also there's news. Good news, for once." A pause, and Arthur could hear the grin coming straight down the line. "Can't tell you over the phone. Pepper will have my hide if I say it down a phone, and I'd very much like to live long enough to meet, uh..." He caught himself half a beat too late. "Just come, Hayes. Bring the whole circus. And don't be weird about it."
"We'll be there."
"Obviously you will. Nobody turns me down." The line went dead.
Arthur looked at the dark screen of his phone, shook his head with a faint smile, and went to tell Eileen.
—
Arthur opened a portal onto the terrace of the Malibu house just as the sun was going down, and the Hayes family stepped out into a world made of gold. The Pacific lay in front of them, the whole of it on fire with the low orange light.
Tony and Pepper came quickly out the glass doors to meet them, Happy Hogan trailing a few steps behind.
Pepper looked genuinely radiant. She pulled Eileen into a tight, warm hug, then stepped back to greet Arthur.
"Welcome," she beamed. "I'm so glad you could all make it on such short notice."
"Tony practically demanded it." Arthur gave her a gentle hug, then stepped back, and his eyes narrowed a fraction as he took in the glow of her, and the nervous, hovering energy coming off Tony. His gaze moved between them.
"So," he said, a knowing grin spreading across his face. "When's the due date?"
Tony froze. Pepper gasped, both hands flying to her mouth. Happy dropped the pair of sunglasses he was holding.
"How did you do that?" Tony demanded, levelling an accusing finger at the wizard. "We haven't told a single living soul. We got the confirmation from the doctor this morning. Did you read my mind? Are you reading my mind right now?"
"I didn't read your mind, Tony." Arthur laughed softly, holding his hands up in surrender. "Pepper is glowing. You're hovering nervously around her like she's made of spun glass. It doesn't take cosmic awareness to work out the rest."
Eileen let out a delighted squeal and pulled Pepper into a second hug. "Oh, Pepper. That's wonderful. Congratulations."
The terrace erupted into joyful noise. The children, realising a baby was coming, crowded in with a barrage of questions.
Arthur shook Tony's hand and held it half a beat past the handshake, which, between the two of them, did the work of a whole speech.
"I'll admit," Arthur said, letting go, "I came here braced for the worst."
"The worst?" Tony repeated, confused.
"I had a whole tragic picture in my head. You. Weeks unshaven and smelling of oil. Bolted into that workshop, building something terrible to shoot at the next thing that fell out of the sky. Stopped sleeping. Started holding conversations with the suits."
Tony's grin flickered. Just for a second. Caught out.
"That's, ah." Tony cleared his throat awkwardly. "That's weirdly specific, Hayes."
"Maybe because it's exactly what happened," Pepper said.
She came to stand beside him and slid her arm through his, and there was steel running under the warmth of it. "Three whole months. Three miserable months down in that lab. Wouldn't sleep for days. Wouldn't eat a single proper meal. Building things to kill aliens that aren't coming, with the windows blacked out so he didn't have to look at the sky he was so sure something would fall out of again." She squeezed his arm. "So I finally got angry. I marched down there, unplugged every single thing he was working on, packed two bags, and told him we were going to the Maldives whether the suits came with us or not."
"It was a kidnapping," Tony muttered.
"It was a mandatory health retreat," Pepper corrected. "The quiet beaches and the warm sun were exactly what we both desperately needed. And then, well." Her hand found her stomach. "It turns out the private beach villas are good for a great many things."
"Clearly." Eileen lifted the glass that Winky had appeared, beaming, to press into her hand. "To the beautiful Maldives. To private beach villas. And to the happy continuation of the Stark line. We can't have it ending miserably inside a dark workshop."
Laughter rolled across the terrace, and even Tony had the grace to colour slightly under the setting sun.
To climb out from under the embarrassment, he pivoted hard to business, the hungry gleam coming back into his eyes.
"So," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Since we're officially celebrating the future heir to the Stark empire... where's my vibranium?"
Arthur took a slow, deliberate sip of his drink. "I remember promising you vibranium when my goddaughter is born, Tony. Not a single day before."
Tony stared at him, aghast. "Your — okay, several things to unpack here. One, who said it's a girl. Two, who said you're the godfather. Three, that's unfair."
"It's a girl," Arthur said comfortably, "because I said so, and the universe usually has the decency to agree with me. I'm the godfather because I've nominated myself, and I do not take no for an answer." He set the glass down. "And it isn't unfair in the slightest. What's actually unfair is you getting your vibranium tonight, walking straight back down into that dark workshop, and forgetting you have a pregnant wife upstairs at all."
A chill went straight down Tony's spine. He turned his head, slowly, and found Pepper watching him with an expression that could have melted steel.
"That's a good point," Tony said carefully. "That's a... you know what, that's incredibly well made. Solid point."
"We can easily come to an arrangement," Pepper said, in the calm voice of a woman who had already drafted the entire treaty in her head and was merely reading it aloud for the benefit of the room. "While I'm at the office, Tony can be in the workshop. He can build whatever he likes. I do not care in the slightest." A pause. "Every other hour is mine. And in my hours, we do what I choose. Dinner. The doctor. Sitting on a sofa doing absolutely nothing, like two normal human beings. My hours, my choice."
"That seems fair," Eileen nodded in approval.
"And." Pepper lifted one finger. "If he breaks the rule even once, if I come home and find him in that workshop in my hours, every last piece of that vibranium comes straight back out of this house." She looked at him pleasantly. "What do you think, Tony?"
Arthur inclined his head, impressed. "Watertight contract."
"This is a conspiracy," Tony announced to the terrace at large. "My wife and my arms dealer, openly colluding, in my own home."
"Do we have a deal?" Pepper asked sweetly.
Tony looked at her. At the curve of her hand against her stomach. At the grin she was, once again, failing to suppress.
"We have a deal," he said, and there was nothing transactional in it at all.
And that was the end of the serious business, more or less. The party folded back into itself, warm and bright and easy, and for a few good hours the burning month stayed outside where it belonged.