Night came over what remained of Kamar-Taj, the sky outside dark and quiet in the way only a world with most of its population gone could manage.
They hadn't found much. The Darkhold had the only references to dimensional travel worth reading, which created its own obvious problem.
Tony was sitting with a pizza slice, one Luke had pulled from his inventory without comment.
"So you didn't find a way out?" Tony asked between bites.
"Tony, do I look like a wishing well to you?" Luke said, eyes still on the Darkhold. "Where you drop a coin in the morning and your wish is granted by afternoon?"
"Kind of, yeah," Tony said without hesitation. "Every problem so far you close your eyes, snap your fingers, done. You destroyed an entire city in about four seconds."
"I'm flattered you have that image of me," Luke said. "Genuinely. But I have limits. Tearing cleanly through a universe barrier and arriving in the correct one isn't something I can just snap my fingers at."
He paused.
"Technically I'm powerful enough to tear a hole through a universe."
Tony pointed the pizza slice at him. "Then do that."
"The problem," Luke said, "is what comes through the hole from the other side before I can close it."
Tony slowly lowered the pizza slice.
"If you want I can open it," Luke said, "but you'll have to deal with whatever fucked up things come through it before I can close it. Do you really want that?"
Tony looked at him.
Then looked at the pizza.
Then back at Luke.
"Read the Darkhold," he said.
"May I ask why it's called the Darkhold?" Natasha asked. "That doesn't sound like a proper book name."
Steve shared the same expression, the same quiet suspicion sitting behind his eyes.
"Well," Luke said, looking down at the book in his hands, "to tell you the truth this thing contains what you could call the synthesis of all dark magic across existence. Every corrupted spell, every forbidden technique, every piece of knowledge that was deliberately kept out of every other book because the people writing those books were smart enough to be afraid of it."
He turned it over once.
"Wrong use of this and you can cause reality destruction. A universe starts losing its fundamental properties, the basic rules that hold everything together begin dissolving, and slowly that universe stops existing entirely."
"So yes," he said, setting it down on the table in front of them. "This is genuinely dangerous. You could destroy an entire Earth without much effort if you don't know exactly what you're doing with it."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"And you're planning to use it," Steve said. It wasn't really a question.
"Yeah," Luke said.
"Because of this guy," he added, pointing at both Tonys before correcting himself.
"The other one. I don't know how he managed to block my ability to open a pathway back to my own universe and that alone tells me he's more capable than I initially gave him credit for."
"And I'm not comfortable with someone like that having his eyes on the universe where my family lives."
He looked at the Darkhold.
"My family members are powerful, I know that. But I still worry about them." He paused.
"And I don't care what method I have to use to get back. Tony knows well enough by now that I'm not a hero. At the end of the day I'm just a normal family man."
"Spare me from any prep talk on being okay with losing," Luke said.
"No one wants to be on the losing side, and what if losing means half the population of an Earth stops existing. Do you still want to be on the losing side when the stakes look like that?"
Nobody answered.
"Thought so," Luke said, and opened the Darkhold.
***
In Luke's house, the atmosphere had shifted somewhere between irritated and suspicious over the course of the past week.
"Where the hell did this guy go without telling any of us?" Selene asked, arms crossed, the particular energy of someone who had been patient for six days and was now completely done being patient.
"He mentioned something about meeting Tony," Wanda said.
"But that playboy also disappeared," Jill added.
Alice looked around at the group. "You guys don't think those two went off to fool around, do you?"
Jean and Clarice heard that and both wanted to say something in his defense, something reasonable about trust and giving benefit of the doubt.
But then again they knew Luke longer than most people in this room, which meant they also knew better than anyone what he was capable of when left unsupervised, and that made the defense harder to construct with any real confidence.
They said nothing.
"Ummm," Tauriel said carefully, from her corner of the room where she had spent most of the week quietly observing a world that made very little sense to her.
"So when can I go home exactly? There are no elves, no dwarves, no monsters. Just these strange metal boxes that move by themselves and small glowing rectangles that everyone stares at."
"Without him, none of us can manage that," Esdeath said flatly. "So."
Selene looked around the room.
"So we all agree. We find him and drag him back."
"Yes," said Alice, Jill,Wanda, and Esdeath simultaneously.
Jean and Clarice exchanged a look and then joined in, because truthfully nothing interesting had happened in over a week and chasing Luke across wherever he had disappeared to sounded considerably more entertaining than sitting in this house waiting.
Tauriel looked at all of them.
She had thought Luke was the strange one when she first arrived.
She was now understanding it was the entire household.
*****
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