Chapter 1: Prologue: Icebreaker
Chapter Text
Leonard McKenzie's boots scraped and crunched through the thin layer of snow. The places where the snow had worn away, leaving sharp ice, showed dark and dangerous in the dimming twilight. He stepped around these spots with a practiced ease that was at odds with the determination of his bearing. A freezing wind was coming from the South, but he faced it, pushing into it with only the slightest bow to his head. After a time, he stopped, turning just enough to look back the way he'd come.
Far back, half-obscured by a jutting, ice- and snow-covered hillock, sat a ship. Not large, but no mere tug, her thick hull and stout, heavy stacks stood out even from a distance, giving her the compact but powerful look of a good workhorse. The Oracle had started life as a merchant vessel, but that calling hadn't suited her, and she'd been converted to an icebreaker not long after. She and Leonard had that in common. He'd never felt at home in the shipping trade. They'd been together four years, now, and had gone across the globe, making way for less hardy vessels, and sometimes picking up odd jobs along the way. He'd kept his crew paid, and she'd kept them safe. By Leonard's reckoning, they'd done damn well.
Up until he'd stranded them both in the shifting ice of the Weddell Sea.
They'd been trapped for three weeks, now, in the increasing dark of the Antarctic fall. The days were slowly being consumed by an ever-hungry darkness, and the already-chill summer was giving way to truly freezing winds that howled out from the continent. At first, Leonard had been amused by their setback. The Oracle's heavy bow had made short work of thicker floes, far too often to even be remembered. But now, each time she plowed through, more ice moved to take its place. The glimpses of open water on the horizon became rarer and rarer, until they ceased altogether. When Leonard awoke on the morning of the ninth day, and saw the ice downwind of the ship still stained black and muddy from the strain of the Oracle's stacks the day before, he knew they were truly trapped.
Some time around their fourteenth day, Leonard felt a pull at his skin. A restless desire to go, to do. What, exactly, he was supposed to do wasn't forthcoming, so he ignored it. There were daily matters to take care of, rations to be figured – he didn't have time to give in to anxious whims.
The feeling didn't leave him be. As the week wore on, it nipped at his neck, knocking his concentration away and making even moments of rest a trying process. He was eating dinner in his cabin when he felt it starting to gnaw, again, a weird phantom of a feeling in the back of his skull. He shook it off, opting instead to walk to the ship's small galley and get another cup of (admittedly awful) powdered coffee. He'd just only left his cabin and made to close the door behind him when he heard it – the men were talking in the galley, as they were wont to do in the evenings, huddled around the small stove like the groups of penguins they sometimes saw out on the ice, but this time his own name caught in his ear. After weeks of stressful nothing, curiousity got the better of him. He let the door go, following it with his hand so it would make no noise, then continued down the hallway.
---
There was an unfamiliar sound off to his right. He turned, squinting into the wind and darkness. There was something else, not unlike the Oracle venting steam, and then two round eyes glowed back at him from somewhere on the ice ahead. They stared, unblinking and unmoving, and Leonard felt his already-chilled face grow even colder behind the fur of his hood. Although most of the wildlife he'd seen in Antarctica had been small, harmless things, stumbling penguins and too-curious crabeater pups, there were creatures here that would do a man harm. He pulled the rifle from his shoulder and reached for the bolt, fumbling when his gloved hands slipped at their task. He cursed, looking down at the gun momentarily, just long enough to get a bullet in the chamber. There was a scrape, then a splash, and when Leonard looked back up, the creature was gone.
He walked over to the hole it had left in the ice. Large, man-sized, with nail-marks where it had dragged itself up out of the water. A leopard seal, then.
If he hadn't had a gun...
He stared down at the rifle, primed but now useless. It felt heavy in his hand. Everything felt heavy and awkward, like he was moving through molasses. He'd been standing too long, and the night was only getting colder.
He swung the rifle back over his shoulder, and turned to continue on the way he'd been going.
---
There was the steam-vent sound, again, just behind him. He whirled. Too slow. Something hard and heavy slammed into his middle. He hit the ground badly, rolling in the snow, catching something sharp with his shoulder. The pain was sudden and hot, a strange mixture with the freezing cold the gash in his coat now let in. He came up quickly, driven by instinct more than actual thought, rifle in his good hand, trying to keep the injured one steady enough to reach the trigger.
There were the eyes. Huge and staring, glowing just enough to be seen. And now that they were so close, he could see the rest. Pale, long-limbed but sturdily-built. Human-shaped, but not human. The eyes were huge and black, and the face too long, rimmed by fleshy fans that swayed out from the neck like wet, glistening leaves. It bared its teeth at him, brought its hands out in front like it wanted nothing more than to grab him and tear him to pieces. He kept the gun up, pointed at its midsection. It didn't come any closer.
They stood for a moment in that stalemate. Leonard felt the throb in his shoulder getting worse. He chanced a glance, caught the dim color making its way out of his coat, the slight steam rising from the tear. The pain from the injury and the seeping cold were making their way up his shoulder. It was crawling, hair by hair, down to his chest. He felt the rifle's barrel dip, just the slightest fraction of an inch. That was all the creature needed.
It happened in an instant. It leapt. They were on the ground, together, the rifle between them, rolling and sliding, pushing and clawing and punching. Leonard felt it grab his arms and pull them to the side with more strength than he thought possible. He kept hold of the rifle, but it did him little good, pinned as he was. Now they were face to face. The creature bared its teeth, again, snarling out hissing, guttural sounds punctuated by those great fans about its neck convulsing when it breathed. Leonard writhed in its grip, but all that earned him was a quick lift from the ice, slammed back down again with enough force to knock the breath out of him, and more strange sounds all-but roared in his ear. His shoulder screamed at the movement, and he grit his teeth, urging himself stay focused. The creature lifted him again, seeming intent to bash him against the ice once more.
“Wait!”
Its expression didn't change, but it hesitated just long enough. Leonard looked over at the rifle, still gripped in his hand. The creature followed his gaze, narrowing those great black eyes. He released his hold on the barrel, letting it drop to the ice. He turned his palm up towards the sky, showing he had nothing left. The creature turned back to him again. Its nose screwed up, and Leonard braced to he dashed against the hard ground, maybe for the last time. He felt himself dropped suddenly, instead.
The weight on his arms and chest lifted, and he was staring up at the clear, black sky. He laid there, gasping, pain and adrenaline mixing freely, the rush of both making him lightheaded.
He rolled over, pulling himself into a crouch, preparing to face the strange thing, again.
It was gone.
He turned, searching the through darkness, but was met with only blowing snow and ice.
Out in the distance, the Oracle's lights glowed bright against the night.
---
The order was given the next morning, and the men dutifully went out with picks and heavy hammers, breaking the Oracle from her frozen moorings, intent on freeing enough space to let her bring her own powerful head down to bear on the ice.
Leonard could feel the tension of the previous day still simmering under their forced “aye”s, but the task seemed enough distraction to lay that aside for the moment. It would take the better part of two days to clear room for the Oracle to turn, and likely at least another day to give her the run up needed to make any sort of dent in the thick floes. From there, it was anyone's guess how long it would take them to reach open water.
If they reached open water. Leonard scrubbed at his face, tired from more than just the previous night's excitement. He felt the entirety of the last few weeks pressing down on his shoulders. This was all his fault. And now he was giving his ship false hope. He was adding to the weight of his sins with stubborn pride.
Still, what choice did he have?
If they stayed, they would die. They would meet their end from the Antarctic's cold darkness...
Or from the creatures that lived there.
Chapter 2: Like Oil and Water
Summary:
Leonard and Tony have never liked eachother.
They're very good at finding new reasons to keep it up.
Chapter Text
Tony saw the glint of the chrome out of the corner of his eye, heard the way the press outside shifted and readied themselves for another volley, their excited chatter dying for just a moment. There was the roar of an old, powerful engine that calmed to an idle. Then the hush broke. He clenched his jaw.
Leonard McKenzie came through the doors with his face pressed to the ear of the pretty blonde on his arm. It managed to look frustratingly innocent and startlingly lude at the same time. The woman laughed, cheeks flushing; maybe at whatever Leonard had said, or from the rush of having just done worse in the car on the way in. It was hard to tell. After a little nudge at her ear with his nose that made Tony sure it was the latter, Leonard looked up, met Tony's eyes, and gave him a little predatory smile.
Tony felt something in his eyelid twitch.
Pepper brushed her hand against his, knuckle to knuckle, then whispered a quick “behave” before making her way over to greet Leonard.
Officially, they had to smile and be courteous at public functions like this. Stark Enterprises and Oracle often competed for the same contracts. Their companies had even worked jointly on some infrastructure deals, in the last few years. A public fued or spat could affect things. That didn't mean Tony had to like it.
For her part, though, Pepper didn't seem to mind. She hugged Leonard, a quick little thing, but Tony felt his molars grind when he leaned in far closer than he had to. Now he was making introductions; Pepper and Leonard's date– her name was Candy, or Bambi, or something else Tony was sure only belonged to a hooker –shook hands and smiled and laughed at something trivial, while Leonard looked on, self-satisfied.
---
“Because Type D Orca are the rarest kind out there,” Candy-Bambi-Mandy cut in, her Valley Girl squeak making the concern in her voice even more pronounced. “If sonic tests are allowed off Chile's coast, it could disrupt the normal behavior patterns of the entire subspecies!”
Tony blinked. Alright. “And you,” he gave a quick, dismissive gesture, “want us to... what? Stop testing completely?”
“No,” Leonard said, eyes narrowing behind his glasses, “but I would strongly urge you to reconsider where you've decided to do those tests. The damage they might cause would be immeasurable, and the effects... could be disastrous.” He sighed, taking his glasses off and rubbing them briefly on the breast of his jacket before slipping them back on. “I have no desire to challenge you openly on the matter, Stark. But you should know that anything can be litigated into purgatory, if you know the right words.” He leaned down, and placed a quick peck on the blonde's cheek. “And the right people.”
---
“I'm sorry. Am I supposed to be afraid of Marine Biologist Barbie?”
“You should be.” Pepper put a hand on his chest. He felt something there, and took it. A business card. Heavy cardstock, simple gold lettering on a black background: 'Candice Seeley, Attorney.' “She's a former lawyer for the California EPA. And the current head of Oracle West's legal team.”
Tony stared at the card in his hand. “So, McKenzie is fucking his legal department?”
Pepper made an annoyed sound, snatching the card out of his hand. “First off, she's married. He brought her to the gala because her wife's at Rutgers for a few weeks, and he wanted to take her mind off things. He's being a good friend.”
“Do friends usually neck in public–”
“Secondly, Leonard wasn't blowing smoke. He absolutely could get an injunction filed to stop testing.” She scrolled through something on her phone, then handed it to Tony.
It was a bit of international law, a treaty signed by a handful of nations sometime in the 80s that handled shipping trade. Buried pretty deep in the ifs and thens and ands was a single paragraph, only two sentences, but they made Tony groan. “Any merchant ship in international waters shall carry no experimental depth sounding devices...”
“You've got to be kidding me. The Horn isn't some fancy sonar!”
Pepper crossed her arms, “Would you be willing to explain that, in court? That your little pet project is really an acoustic railgun–”
“It's not a gun, Pepper!”
“–that you want to use against aliens?”
“It's not a weapon,” Tony hissed.
“Then why are you so afraid of people finding out about it?”
Chapter 3: In Deep
Summary:
Liz loves her job.
Sometimes.
Chapter Text
Leonard ran a hand along the side of his face, tiredly rubbing at his eye briefly before settling on just slumping down on the desk, pulling his arm across his eyes and telling the world to fuck itself with the most articulate of muffled grumbles.
Liz looked up from her phone– Diane from Research was having a meltdown in her inbox –and scoffed at the lump of expensive Italian wool and mussed, disheveled hair. “You can't be dead, yet.”
“I still own this company. I may do as I please,” said the lump.
“After that bullshit you pulled? I've got all of R&D breathing down my neck, CNN has called twice in the past hour, and some of the board have paged me– paged, boss, do you understand –so things are pretty fucking fucked. And if you shuffle on off this mortal coil and leave me to deal with all this shit, I will personally reanimate your corpse!”
The lump shifted slightly. Liz caught a green eye glinting out from somewhere in the wrap of Leonard's long arms. It was a glare, that much Liz was sure of. But there was something else there, too. Then she heard it. The soft, huffing, tongue-at-the-back-of-the-throat sound that meant...
“Don't you fucking laugh at me!”
“I knew I did the right thing.” Leonard's voice was wry.
“What? When?”
“When I hired you, obviously.”
Liz made an annoyed noise, flipping him the bird, but it was half-hearted. Something loud buzzed on her hip. She looked down and swore.
Slowly, Leonard pulled himself up from his desk, and then, just as slowly, to his feet. He stretched, arms above his head, and yawned wide. Liz was furiously typing away at her phone, sending out another email, trying desperately to stave off the sharks that both knew were nosing the boat. Still, she looked up, just for a moment, to shoot Leonard a withering glare. She'd intended to catch his eye, to let him know that he was still Fucked and they were still Fucked and Oracle was still Very Much Fucked and it was all His Fault. But he wasn't looking at her. He didn't seem to be looking at anything in that particular moment. So she looked at him, instead. In most situations, she'd say he was good-looking, if stern and prone to resting bitchface. Most other people would call him handsome. Probably a not-insignificant number might even say exceedingly so. (But he was her boss, so she wasn't allowed to say such things out loud. Even if she thought them. Frequently.) How she liked to describe him, though, was driven. He always looked like he knew exactly what needed to be done, and would stop at nothing until it was completed. But, just then, with his uncombed hair and dark patches forming under his eyes, his heavy stance and unfocused gaze, he looked tired. More than that, he looked exhausted. The last week had been hard on everyone, but it had been brutal to Leonard.
Chapter 4: Committing
Summary:
...crimes, conspiracy, and to your tinhatting.
Tony goes digging.
Chapter Text
The false bottom of the desk drawer came out easily. The fit might have been tight, once, but use had dulled the edges and worn the corners down to rounded nubs. Whatever Leonard kept there, he accessed it often.
Images of files full of incriminating paperwork and plain-worded confessions mixed freely in his mind with that of finding a comical rubber mask, worn to hide Leonard's alien antennae or whatever else an alien infiltrator might have. He could just see Leonard with a pair of googly eyes emerging from his head, ranting about saving the whales as they bobbed back and forth. It was ridiculous. The whole situation was ridiculous. What did he hope to find, a key fob labeled 'spaceship'? A raygun? Without warning, “My Favorite Martian” suddenly flashed into the chitinous face of a Chitauri shocktrooper. Tony gasped, screwing his eyes shut, gripping the edge of the drawer hard enough to lose feeling in his fingertips.
A few deep breaths. A hand scrubbed across his face.
Right.
He set the well-worn board down on the carpet, and looked inside the drawer.
Honestly, it was a bit anticlimactic.
A black and white notebook, some cheap ballpoint pens, an opalized seashell the size of his hand, and... a clay tablet.
An honest-to-god clay tablet, set into a frame that might have been abalone, but it was so discolored from use and time, it was hard to tell. Tony picked it up, disbelieving. Leonard McKenzie was keeping secrets, plotting with aliens, funneling money into who-knows-what, and his secret shame was writing in Phoenician? He set the tablet down on the desk, annoyed.
He opened up the notebook, instead.
It was a journal. Seemingly only the most recent in a long line. The first entry jumped right into talking about the office cat– who named a cat “Sushi”? –like it was continuing a thought. He wondered where Leonard kept the others. Or if they would even be worth reading. Tony flipped through several pages, making a frustrated sound when the entries were each more ridiculously-boring than the last. He didn't need to know that this was the fourth time Leonard had sent his wristwatch in for repairs that year, and yet, Tony now shared that deep, dark secret with his rival.
Worse, despite Leonard's otherwise neat and tidy handwriting, he started new paragraphs seemingly at random, leaving huge chunks of white space. No wonder he used cheap composition books. He probably went through one a month.
Tony pinched at his eyes. This had been a wild goose chase from the beginning. There was nothing here but a really strange hobby and an anal desire to record everything in the most inefficient way possible. He tossed the notebook back into the desk. Something clattered, then rolled slowly down the incline. Tony put out his hand to stop it. It was a small pen-shaped piece of worked bone, slightly thicker and rounded at one end, dully pointed at the other.
He picked up the clay tablet. A part of him wanted to get revenge for the whole situation, to be childish and awful, and leave Leonard a nasty note in the clean, smooth surface. It pracically begged him to. But what good would that do? Leonard wasn't some alien invader, or a spy, or whatever else Tony's mind had assumed for the past few weeks. The strange ships, the attacks on the tankers, they had been real, but Leonard had no part in it. He was just an ascended hippie who got on Tony's nerves.
But boy did he get on Tony's nerves.
He lifted the stylus to the tablet.
And immediately dropped both onto the desk.
The tablet's formerly-smooth surface had erupted into a crowded mess of strange symbols and glyphs, each seemingly carved out of the clay. Even from the desk, Tony could hear a strange new thrum in the room, the newly-awakened tablet humming along with a life it definitely had no right possessing. Tony carefully ran his fingers over it. It felt cold and slightly damp, like real clay would. But it had no give, no texture. It was more like glass than anything else, slick and unyielding. The edges of the symbols were hard and sharp, almost enough to cut, but not quite.
Tony took out his phone, snapped a photo. This wasn't a clay tablet. And that definitely wasn't Phoenician.
Some was obviously an alphabet of... some sort. Though Tony recognized exactly none of the letters; there seemed to be far more than 26. If they were part of a cypher, it was certainly a creative one. Every now and again, the strange alphabet was broken with lines of small, intricate pictoral glyphs that were both familiar and foreign. One was definitely a bird. Another a tooth. Or a knife. Or maybe it was a tent? It was hard to tell. The images were small, and stylized, and the tablet's surface was full to the point that the writing and the weird hieroglyphs seemed to almost overlap. The only saving grace was that they seemed to be grouped together into chunks; a section of writing here, a line of glyphs there. Hopefully, it would make translating easier. The pattern they made was almost predictable, switching off back and forth, leaving ga–
Tony yanked the desk drawer the rest of the way open, and pulled the notebook back out. He grabbed a random page, holding it up to his phone's screen.
In the reflected blue glow, the notebook's pages were just as full as the tablet. The blank spaces were filled in with those same strange characters, and rough approximations of glyphs. Leonard hadn't written with ink; he'd used the stylus to press them into the page.
Somewhere down the hall, a door opened. Tony froze, listening. The door shut, again, and a cat chirruped in greeting.
Shit.
Tony looked at everything in front of him. He grabbed the notebook and tossed it into his bag. He went to put the tablet back into the drawer, but paused. This was what he'd been looking for, the proof he'd wanted. He touched the sharp-edged sigils on the tablet, again. Leonard would know. He grabbed for the board, still leaning against the desk.
The dingle of the cat's bell got closer.
He stopped, worked his jaw. Okay. Penny, pound, let's go.
He shoved the tablet and the stylus and even the seashell into the bag with the notebook. He quickly replaced the drawer's false bottom, closed everything up, and was firing his jetboots six stories down by the time the office door creaked open.
Chapter 5: Promise
Summary:
Jose's never liked the ocean. He's really more of a space guy.
But, sometimes, you just have to make an exception.
An old-ish side-character snippet, about one of the OCs that like to wander through this 'verse.
Chapter Text
It was well past two before the throng had even begun to thin. A huddle of tourists stood near the entrance, talking and swaying, indecisive as the rain continued to thunder outside. The locals, jaded and stubborn, knew better. The rain would last the night. They were content to wait at their tables until Jose kicked them out. On any other weekday, he'd have been wiping down the bar and shooing stragglers out the door half an hour ago. But between the weather and the cleaning he'd managed to get behind on during the night, he didn't see any hurry.
Across the room, the tourists' conversation died down for a moment. Jose looked up, intending to give his well-versed warning of “we're closing in ten,” but a smile beat the words to his mouth.
Well, he might give the holdouts the boot sooner than he'd thought.
---
Jose ran his hand along Leonard's jaw, working his thumb in circles through his beard. He felt Leonard's fingers at the back of his neck, mimicking the motion through his hair. It had barely been a month since they'd last seen eachother, but just touching made Jose's chest tighten with excitement.
When they'd first met, things had started out... well... like they weren't really starting much of anything, at all.
Leonard had rolled in deceptively under the radar. Jose had poured his drinks and made idle chatter with nothing more than a passing thought about how Leonard's tailored suit marked him as a little far from the law offices across town. They came in every now and again, junior partners and corporate ladder climbers, looking for something different. Or something familiar. Jose never pried, but the stories generally came out, anyway.
What surprised him with Leonard was that his story stayed firmly untold, even after a good run of Old Fashioneds and at least one dip into the raspberry schnapps.
Jose hadn't noticed when the conversation turned to himself. He was well into a story that he had begun, without any sense of irony, “So, this one time, at Space Camp...” before he realized they'd talked right up until closing. The rest of the bar had gone quiet nearly an hour before, the last of the night's regulars willing themselves invisible.
He'd muttered an apology as he hurried to clean up and shoo the reluctant remainder firmly into the street. Leonard had just smiled– a small, quick tug at his lips that Jose nearly missed as he swiped his bleach rag across the bar –and said he'd come back to hear the rest of the story later.
Jose came away from the experience feeling profoundly confused, and even a little cheated by the universe.
An entire night's talk, and he hadn't learned enough about Leonard to fill a shot glass.
What Jose did find out was that Leonard kept a promise.
ImperiusRex on Chapter 5 Thu 06 Oct 2022 07:43AM UTC
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