In the magical world, might makes right.
Why should a sorcerer return the dimensional energy they borrow, if they have the power to simply keep using it? Energy is the one thing dimensional entities have in infinite supply. If you lack the strength to sustain your own workings, you go and negotiate more credit. The cycle continues. The entities complain. Nobody pays them back.
This was the essence of magic at the highest level, and Jordan had made his peace with it.
Wong's answer had visibly dimmed the room.
Four thousand light-years. Current capability: insufficient. Tony Stark alive but adrift, the ship losing ground daily. The captain's expression had done something controlled and unhappy, and Natasha's eyes had moved to the projected star map with the specific look of someone updating threat assessments in real time.
Jordan stepped forward.
"Captain. I think I can handle this."
Steve Rogers turned, and for a moment the practiced composure broke slightly—genuine surprise, the kind that surfaces before you can manage it. "Jordan—are you serious?"
"We have the coordinates now." Jordan kept his voice even, the quiet confidence of someone stating a logistical fact rather than making a dramatic offer. "I can bring Tony Stark home."
Steve's hand closed slowly at his side. The pause that followed was brief but complete—the kind of silence that contains something that doesn't need to be said aloud.
"...Thank you."
Two words, low and sincere.
There it is, Jordan thought. The Steve-and-Tony dynamic. Even separated by years and a civil war and the literal collapse of civilization, the connection is still right there, just under the surface.
He caught the shift in his own expression a half-second too late.
Natasha, who missed nothing, caught it immediately. Her gaze moved from Steve to Jordan and back, and something in her face did a very subtle recalibration—the professional assessment of a woman who had spent her career reading rooms and was currently reading this one with maximum precision.
—An otherworldly superhero, her mind concluded, with that specific expression at that specific moment. Well. It's the 21st century. Everyone's free.
Jordan, whose Mind Network had passively received this entire thought process, turned to look at her with an expression of profound injustice.
I have a wife, he thought directly in her direction. I am not. Whatever you are thinking, I am categorically not.
Natasha blinked once.
He did not have time to clarify further, because Steve was already giving him the coordinates look—the one that meant we should move now—and Jordan converted his armor to travel configuration with a single thought and stepped through the portal before the misunderstanding could deepen.
I will be correcting this record, he told himself, when I return.
The Benatar had been in deep space for twelve days.
Tony Stark had spent those twelve days doing the only thing available to him: keeping the ship alive, keeping Nebula functional, and keeping himself from thinking too hard about the math of their situation. He was good at not thinking about math when the math was bad. He had built an entire adult personality around productive denial.
But the ship was slower than the repairs warranted. The fuel was lower than the projections suggested it should be. And the silence of deep space, which had a particular quality that no earthbound experience adequately prepared you for—absolute, textureless, indifferent—had been wearing at something behind his sternum for days.
Pepper was out there somewhere. On Earth, or not on Earth. He didn't know. The ship's communications couldn't reach that far. The not-knowing had a specific weight.
He'd lost weight himself—visible in his reflection on the porthole glass when he looked. The Thanos wound had been crudely stitched by Nebula with the field kit she carried; functional, uncomfortable, not ideal. He presented optimism to her because she needed something to orient around, and Iron Man had always been better at performing composure than feeling it.
"Rest."
Nebula's voice came from behind him. Tony could see her reflection in the porthole—blue-grey, partially mechanical, her expression doing the thing it did when she was concerned but lacked the vocabulary for it.
"You're an unaugmented human. Sleep deprivation has cumulative effects."
"Yeah, you're right, I'll get there in a minute." He turned, forced a half-smile. "Appreciate the medical consultation."
Nebula wasn't listening anymore.
Her eyes had moved to the porthole.
Tony turned back.
Something was out there—a point of light moving against the star field, accelerating, growing. Too fast for a meteor. Wrong shape. Wrong—
"Brace—" Nebula was already moving for the cockpit. "We're going to hit—"
Tony stood at the porthole, tilted his head, and stared at the incoming object with the expression of a man whose caloric deficit might finally be producing hallucinations.
"Is that," he said, "a person."
Nebula's emergency evasion maneuver died half-completed.
"...What."
The light resolved.
A figure, standing in open vacuum, one hand raised in a knock.
Knock knock knock.
The sound somehow carried through the hull—metal through structure—and Tony Stark heard it perfectly.
The figure materialized inside the cabin with a brief displacement of air: tall, blond, wearing a scarlet cloak over a jet-black suit threaded with gold circuitry. He looked around the interior of the Benatar with the mild, assessing curiosity of someone arriving at a hotel room they'd booked sight unseen.
"Mr. Tony Stark." Jordan's voice was pleasant, conversational, entirely inappropriate to the situation. "Someone has booked your return ticket to Earth." He paused. "You'll need to settle the balance."
Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, former futurist, a man who had stared down alien armies and a purple warlord with a jeweled fist—
—exhaled.
It was long, involuntary, and deflated approximately twelve days of accumulated tension in about two seconds. Then he shrugged, pulled out his phone out of habit, looked at the zero-signal screen, and held it up.
"I'm going to need my to connect to my bank first."
"Soon," Jordan said. "But first—" His eyes moved over Tony's face, his frame, the poorly-stitched wound visible at the edge of his collar. He raised his hand. "You're going to want this."
"I'm fine—"
Jordan took his hand.
The Super Healing card activated.
The effect was immediate and, by Tony's subsequent report, alarming in the best possible way: warmth flooding through every system simultaneously, cellular repair running at a speed that registered as heat, the cumulative damage of twelve days of starvation and cold and vacuum exposure simply ceasing to exist in real time. The Thanos wound—the one that had nearly killed him on Titan, that Nebula had stitched shut with ship-kit sutures—was gone. Not scarred over. Gone.
"What—" Tony yanked his hand back, stumbled, grabbed the bulkhead.
From across the cabin, Nebula's pistol was up in one movement. "What did you do to him—"
"Nebula! Stand down." Tony caught himself, grabbed the front of his own shirt, pulled it aside to look. Smooth. Unbroken. Not even a mark. He pressed the spot where the wound had been. Nothing. He pressed harder. Still nothing. "He—fixed me. He completely—" He looked up. "What was that?"
"Supplemental medical services." Jordan dropped his hand. "Included in the fare."
"Supplemental—" Tony stood fully upright for the first time in twelve days, breathing in a way that didn't hurt, his body running at full capacity rather than the managed-decline version he'd been operating on since Titan. He looked at Jordan for a long moment with the focused, cataloguing expression he usually reserved for technology he urgently wanted to understand.
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