Chapter Text
The sky is raining doombot slugs from an alternate universe, Tony’s suit is (impossibly) falling apart, Loki decided to pop by for a visit and hijack all the world domination fun, and the Avengers have racked up enough in damages to feed a small country for a century.
Must be a Tuesday.
“Left flight stabilizer down, sir,” JARVIS informs him, and Tony bites his cheek to keep from snapping that he knows. The last time he’d snapped at JARVIS in the middle of a fight, he got home only to discover that his bathrooms would only provide him with cold water, and it was only when he, specifically, was using that bathroom. That’s the last time Tony designs an AI with an attitude.
He fires a couple repulsor blasts at some relatively smaller doombots, and flies another two into each other. The bots are ridiculously easy to destroy—Hulk took out fifty in the minute after Cap told him to smash—but it’s the sheer number that are making this less than an in-and-out fight.
That, and they now have to deal with Loki trying to add to the chaos, though Thor is (mostly) dealing with it. The last Tony checked, they were having some sort of hug-fight. He’s learned to stop questioning Asgardian ways, specifically when it comes to Thor and Loki. Besides, even if Loki kills a hundred people every time he’s feeling a little bit unloved, compared to the other supervillains, he’s like a kitten. An angry kitten obsessed with being equal to Thor in his (now dead) father’s eyes, but a kitten nonetheless.
“Iron Man, behind you!” Clint’s voice cuts in through the com, and Tony spins just in time to catch the bot flying at him with razors sticking out of it, ripping out a cable that looked important and chucking the thing toward the ground.
“Nice catch,” Hawkeye says, smirking down at the tiny fleck that is Tony.
“I aim to please, Barton,” Tony’s voice shoots back, all his bravado still firmly in place, even when they’ve been fighting these things for awhile now. They just won’t stop coming. Even Clint’s bow arm is starting to tire, and the last time that happened was in Budapest, and he hadn’t been fighting at all. Though he supposed Tash would probably beg to differ on that particular point.
He thinks they’re close to finishing this up, but that’s when the king of all the doombot slug things comes crawling out of a portal, dripping in some sort of acidic slime that melts right through concrete and steel. “Shit,” Clint says, mostly to himself, and starts firing arrows at the thing in time with Iron Man’s repulsor blasts.
“It’s not—” Tony starts, and then cuts out, and even JARVIS doesn’t know what caused the comms to go out.
Which is about the time Loki pops in out of nowhere, does some weird magic spell with his staff, and then swings it like a baseball bat to knock Tony out of the sky. His jets spark out because damn it, technology always gets weird around magic, despite Thor’s firm belief that it’s just a different kind of science.
He’s spinning through the sky at an angle, headed straight for one of the portals the slugs are coming through, and he has just enough time to think not again before there’s a searing pain ripping through his chest like a fucking flash fire, and everything goes black to the sound of JARVIS informing him (in a dying, distorted voice) that his arc reactor just blinked out.