"Small team. Steve, Strange, myself. Ships hold more if we need them, but I want speed and flexibility going in, not a crowd."
Laura's eyes narrowed slightly, processing that, weighing it against whatever internal calculation she ran on every plan handed to her. Eventually she just nodded, satisfied enough, and went back to leaning against the wall.
"When do you leave," Cecilia asked.
"Little over a day from now."
"Then we should stop wasting your time with questions," she said, practical as always, "and let you finish whatever else you need to do before then."
Tony appreciated that more than he said out loud. He looked around the room once more, at all of them, kids who'd been thrown into something enormous long before they were ready for it and had mostly risen to meet it anyway. 'This is the part of the job nobody warns you about,' he thought. 'Not the fighting. The leaving. Trusting people young enough that you still feel responsible for them to hold the line while you're gone.'
"One more thing," Tony said. "If anything genuinely outpaces what this team can handle, and I mean genuinely, not just scary, actually beyond you, FRIDAY pulls in the full Avengers roster immediately. No waiting to see if you can handle it first. That's not a insult to any of you. That's just math. Clear?"
A round of nods answered him, Peter's the firmest of all.
"Good." Tony clapped his hands together once, breaking the heaviness of the moment. "Now get back to training, because Miles was clearly winning that spar and I'd like to see if Peter can actually close that gap before I leave."
"Hey," Peter said, indignant, while Miles grinned and Kamala laughed loud enough that it echoed off the hangar's high ceiling.
Tony watched them fall back into motion, watched the tension in the room ease into something closer to normal. He stayed a few minutes longer than he strictly needed to, just observing, filing away the shape of this team the way he filed away everything else these days, twelve parallel processes running quietly underneath one ordinary conversation.
'They'll be fine,' he thought, finally turning toward the exit. 'Better than fine. They've earned that.'
The portal opened behind him, chaos energy rippling at its edges.
Whoosh!
He stepped through, already turning his attention toward the next stop on a list that was getting shorter by the hour, and heavier with every name he crossed off it.
.....
The Cairo command center had been a bank vault before the war, thick concrete walls repurposed into something that could survive worse than robbery now.
Tony walked in to find most of the room already seated around the long table, the low murmur of conversation dropping the moment the door sealed behind him.
Steve was the first to speak. "Tony."
"Cap." Tony took the empty seat near the head of the table, not quite at it, close enough to Fury and Peggy that the arrangement read as intentional without anyone having to say so. "Everyone's here. Good. Let's not waste the thirty hours I've got left standing around being polite about it."
Natasha, across the table, arched an eyebrow without looking up from the tablet in front of her. "No warm up? No opening remarks?"
"You want warm up, go talk to Barton."
"I resent that," Clint said, from somewhere near the far end, "mostly because it's accurate."
Fury didn't smile, but something in his posture eased half a degree, the closest he came to acknowledging a joke landing. He stood, tapping a control on the table that brought the room's central display to life, a rotating star chart with a single red marker pulsing somewhere past the outer edge of Jupiter's orbit.
"Four days ago, a listening post out past the Belt picked up a fragment," Fury said. "Degraded. Barely holding together by the time it reached us. But the frequency checks out. Avengers band, encrypted with a cipher only a handful of people ever had access to."
"Thor's team," Sam said.
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