By the time the group made its way down from the roof and back into the street, the scavengers had already arrived.
SHIELD agents were moving through the outer perimeter in dark tactical jackets, trying to look official while pretending they had not almost helped get the city atomised. NASA liaison vans had turned up with federal badges and very interested eyes. DARPA field teams were unloading sealed cases and instrument racks. Department of Energy trucks had rolled in under escort, their people more concerned with radiation alarms and energy signatures than corpses or cameras. Air Force recovery officers were already arguing with agents over who had authority over alien wreckage lying in the middle of Manhattan.
Lucius took one look at the scene and nearly laughed.
There they were.
What remained of the Chitauri on the ground was mostly twisted junk, half-burned carcasses, broken plating, or weapons he had left because they were either too damaged to matter or useful enough as bait. Let them scramble, catalogue and congratulate themselves over whatever they managed to drag into their labs. The real blueprints were already in his mind.
He drifted down the broad steps outside Stark Tower with the others and watched the agencies spread across the avenue as if they had discovered a banquet. Every now and then, one of them looked at him and then quickly looked away again, which improved his mood noticeably.
At the edge of the cordon, the press pack had already thickened into something hungry and loud. Camera crews were shoulder to shoulder. Booms floated overhead. Reporters kept leaning past police tape with microphones extended as if volume alone could produce an exclusive. The moment Tony appeared in full view, the crowd surged, and the first wave of shouted questions crashed forward all at once.
"Mr Stark, did you carry a nuclear missile through the portal?"
"Captain Rogers, where have you been for seventy years?"
"Are the X-Men operating with the Avengers now?"
"Mr Noctis, did you deliberately remove alien technology from the battlefield?"
"Did the federal government order a strike on Manhattan?"
Tony raised one hand.
The noise cut down to a strained, brief silence built entirely out of surprise and professional greed.
Tony looked at the group beside him, at the blood, dust, soot, torn uniforms, half-broken armour, and one very composed mutant bastard floating an inch off the ground for no good reason other than style.
"You know," he said, voice rough with fatigue and the remains of space, "before this becomes a constitutional crisis with cameras, does anyone want to try shawarma?"
A few reporters blinked.
Logan actually barked out a laugh.
Before anybody beside Tony could answer, a woman in the front rank drove her microphone forward and beat the rest to the next question. She was short, Asian, had a black bob cut sharp enough to look expensive, and a face Lucius judged passable until she opened her mouth for work.
"Mr Noctis, some experts are accusing you of deliberately sending alien weapons, vehicles, and biological samples back through the portal. How do you answer that?"
Lucius turned towards her fully. Every nearby lens found him at once.
"They are correct," he said.
The answer dropped into the gathered silence.
Lucius continued with that same cool, perfectly audible tone.
"I personally experienced what institutions such as SHIELD do with my kind. Kidnapping, illegal experimentation, coercion, containment, and the usual little fantasies bureaucracies develop once they believe a laboratory table is morally superior to a person. So no, I had no intention of leaving them an entire playground of alien hardware to test on my brethren."
At his side, Barton grimaced. Romanoff's face gave away nothing. Steve's mouth tightened. None of them interrupted, mostly because none of them had anything useful to say that would not sound stupid in public.
The X-Men behind Lucius did not defend SHIELD either.
Storm stood with her arms folded and her expression composed. Scott's jaw had set. Jean's eyes moved once towards the federal teams clawing over the streetscape. Logan looked as though the statement had landed exactly where he thought it ought to.
Lucius let that sink in for a moment, then lifted one hand lightly towards the spread of wreckage, agencies, and uniforms further down the avenue.
"I left some on purpose," he said. "I am curious how our esteemed institutions will behave once they reverse-engineer the technology of the invaders. I also wonder what the fine citizens who spent years slandering, attacking or confining Homo Superior in bulk intend to say after today."
A murmur moved through the crowd.
He did not stop.
"To be honest, I did not particularly want to help humanity in its hour of need." A faint smile touched his mouth, almost polite, which made the line worse. "As I speak, there are hundreds of facilities still conducting brutal and inhumane experiments on my kind, and quite a few of them belong to governments. The same governments, incidentally, ordered a nuclear strike on Manhattan."
That last line hit like a second detonation.
Several reporters started shouting over one another again.
"What do you mean nuclear strike?"
"Are you alleging the federal government launched a nuclear weapon at New York?"
"Do you have proof of that?"
Lucius did not even glance at the people asking. He looked straight into the camera bank instead.
"If it were not for Iron Man and me, the city you are standing in would have been wiped off the map. If it were not for Homo Superior, including that gentleman over there with remarkable healing powers, there would be hundreds more dead in the streets."
He pointed openly at Josh Foley with blood still on his costume, and the expression of a man who had not expected to become a symbol before dinner.
Every camera in the line swung to Foley.
The young mutant froze for half a beat under the attention.
Then the crowd noise changed shape.
The silence that followed was not agreement. It was shock, calculation, disbelief, and the very early stages of political panic, trying to stand up without looking frightened.
Steve stepped forward with the need to defend the slandered party.
Whatever Lucius thought of flags, uniforms, governments, or the polite lies nations told about themselves, Steve Rogers had spent too long believing in what the country should be to leave the field entirely to bitterness.
"If what Mr Noctis just said about those facilities is true, then they need to be shut down, and the people running them need to be brought to justice."
That dragged the cameras back to him.
Steve planted his feet, broad-shouldered, and still somehow carrying that impossible old-poster steadiness.
"This city was saved today by police, firefighters, medics, civilians, mutants, the X-Men, and the Avengers. Anybody targeting people who helped hold the line today isn't protecting America. They're betraying what it's supposed to stand for."
That, naturally, opened the floodgates.
"Captain Rogers, where were you for the last seventy years?"
"Were you in hiding?"
"Did the government conceal you?"
"Why show up now and not before?"
Steve exhaled once through his nose.
"I wasn't hiding." He glanced around at the city, the wreckage, the ambulances, the people still limping away from the worst of it. "Right now I'm more interested in the people still bleeding than in my biography."
That answer bought him approximately one second.
Another reporter shouted past him towards Tony.
"Mr Stark, is it true you redirected the missile yourself?"
Tony put one hand to his chest.
"No, I asked the missile very politely to reconsider its career path."
A few laughs actually broke loose.
He rolled one shoulder, winced, and kept going.
"Yes, I took it up with Lucius. Neither of us recommends the experience. Yes, the city is still here, and I'd like it to continue that trend."
"Mr Stark, are you leading the Avengers?"
Tony glanced at Steve, then at Thor, then at Banner.
"Today?" Tony asked. "No. Today I'm improvising very expensively."
A different voice called out towards the X-Men.
"When did you arrive in Manhattan?"
Storm stepped forward before Scott could turn the answer.
"We came as soon as we understood the scale of the attack." Her voice was calm, resonant, and carried without strain. "People were trapped. They needed help. So we came."
"Are the X-Men now working with the Avengers?"
Scott answered that one, clipped and guarded.
"We worked the same battlefield. Professor Xavier will always stand with humanity, and we, the X-Men, will guard as long as we can."
That got a few knowing smiles from the press pool.
Jean took the next question directed at her.
"Ms Grey, are mutants the only people equipped to face this kind of threat?"
"No," Jean said. "But today made it very obvious that pretending mutants are the central danger while aliens pour through a hole in the sky is not a serious position."
Logan, who had not intended to say anything at all, got ambushed by a microphone anyway.
"Mr Wolverine, do you support Mr Noctis's accusations against federal agencies?"
Logan looked at the reporter, then at the federal teams picking over the avenue, then back again.
"I support the right of no comment."
That produced more laughter than the questioner had wanted.
Kitty was asked whether younger mutants had also come to help. She answered yes before anyone could stop her, and then immediately looked like she regretted how many future arguments that yes would create. Piotr answered one question in slow, careful English about evacuation work and then seemed relieved to retreat into silence. Foley, still stunned to be standing there at all, confirmed only that he had been treating civilians and first responders and had no interest in becoming a televised slogan.
Then the inevitable question came.
"Mr Noctis, are you saying you saved humanity even though you didn't want to?"
He looked at the reporter as though the man had only just proved literacy was not a guarantee of thought.
"I am saying I have standards," Lucius replied. "Also preferences. Being wiped off the map by space vermin would have ruined my evening."
That one made Barton chuckle. Natasha shot him a look. His meaning was clear. If a disaster was not going to touch his daily life, he had no intention of lifting a finger.
--
Further uptown, inside the Helicarrier, Fury and the others watched the live feeds in a silence thick with swearing that had not yet left anyone's mouth.
Of course, they were aware of the facilities. Half of them had SHIELD money in their walls, SHIELD paper trails under false names, or SHIELD influence keeping them buried under enough classification and patriotic language to survive oversight. Lucius was not unveiling a myth. He was dragging a very real corpse into daylight and kicking it until cameras noticed.
Fury folded his arms and watched the bastard do it with almost elegant malice.
Hill stood beside him, face cool, eyes hard, and gave nothing away. That was professional instinct now. The rest of the room was less controlled. One analyst muttered something under her breath about media blowback. Another was already trying to calculate public response curves. Somebody at the back said, "Oh, this is bad."
Fury did not bother correcting the understatement.
-
Elsewhere, in another safe room far away from Manhattan, Erik Lensherr watched the same broadcast and smiled with slow, private satisfaction.
The mask slipping in front of the whole world.
He had spent years telling anyone who mattered that the state would always choose fear over principle when mutants gained enough power to stop asking permission. Now the sky had opened, the city had nearly been nuked by its own protectors, and a mutant the authorities had already abused was standing in front of live cameras, spelling out the structure of the lie for everyone too frightened to keep pretending.
Erik almost admired the theatre of it.
-
Charles Xavier watched from another screen in another room and felt something colder than frustration settle into him.
He had spent decades building a doctrine out of patience, restraint, reassurance, and the belief that coexistence required mutants to prove themselves better than the fear surrounding them. Then Noctis had arrived and begun tearing through every neat moral arrangement Charles had relied upon, not by argument alone but by action.
And worse, not all of it was wrong.
That was the part Charles found hardest to forgive.
-
Back outside Stark Tower, the questions were finally beginning to burn themselves out. Tony saw the opening.
He stepped forward, pointed lightly at the crowd, and put on that public grin of his that always looked two parts charm and one part escape plan.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is a moment to celebrate. We just won our first battle against aliens, which frankly feels like a sentence nobody should have to say twice in one lifetime, and I would rather begin my celebration with something to eat."
That got real chuckles this time, tired and a little stunned, but real.
Tony turned to the others.
"Shawarma? Last offer before I become hostile."
Barton lifted a hand at once.
Steve rubbed at the back of his neck, still looking vaguely as though the war had changed genre without telling him.
"I don't actually know what that is."
Tony clapped him once on the shoulder as they started moving.
"That, old man, is the first truth that came out of your mouth all day."
The group began to peel away from the cameras at last.
Reporters still shouted after them. Agents still circled debris. Sirens still cut through the avenues. Smoke still climbed. The city had survived, but survival was not peace, and everybody there knew it.
Lucius fell into step with the others anyway, mood vastly improved by the press damage he had managed to do for free.
One public condemnation, one attack on government experimentation, one reminder about the nuclear strike, one good visual of him saving civilians, and now dinner with a table full of strange frenemies and some woman worth looking at.
Yes.
The day had recovered nicely.