He began to move towards the exit, retrieving his phone and calling a contact as he went. "Hello, Dominic?" he said as the person on the other end answered. As he slipped into the elevator, he spoke the words he and his contact had agreed upon, "My chest is acting up again. Mind taking a look at it? … Great, be there soon." He ended the call and slipped the phone into his pocket before depositing the case into his jacket's inside pocket. The problem with suddenly transforming into Megan Stark was she has a hole in her chest. Her leg was at least healed, but her chest has an arc reactor in it, and Extremis couldn't replicate that. Dominic could handle that problem, but he had to keep up appearances for now, lest S.H.I.E.L.D. notice too soon. He had no illusions about them finding out eventually, but the further he could push that back, the better.

Once he reached the basement and slipped into his car, he glanced at the empty passenger seat, a wave of remorse washed over him. He wished this wasn't necessary, that she could be with him and still be safe — that he could see her smile one last time, even if she was wearing the face of Megan Stark.

He wished she could be here, his beloved Maya.

Incorruptible

By: Eva Grimm

Chapter Six: The Castle of Her Ways, Pt. 01

"The crashing, stormy waves erode her shoreline everyday

Until the castle of her ways turns to sand."

Pearl Jam, Lightning Bolt

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Iron Man, Tony Stark, or any other Marvel intellectual property. Incorruptible is a fan-based work and not sold for profit.

***WARNING: I tend to be very brutal in my descriptions of violence, and this chapter is no exception. You've been warned.

***SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers for any Marvel movie and comic book are going to happen. They're mixed in with other material, but they are there. You've been warned.

Friday, December 30th, 2005 09:24a, EST | A.I.M. Facility, Miami, FL

All this blood and killing really ought to bother me more, Megan thought to herself as she viciously threw a blast of electricity at yet another nameless A.I.M. grunt, eliciting a scream from him as the ball of pure energy wrecked half of his face and knocked him off his feet. The man's head crashed into a nearby wall with a sickening crunch that made a fleeting feeling of queasiness pass through her, but she studiously ignored it. But this isn't really the time or place for me to have a moral debate with myself over what level of violence is called for when I'm being constantly rushed by people who want to kill me. Oh, and they might explode at any moment, can't forget that little gem!

Though none of the guards at this facility had yet to exhibit any of the regenerative or explosive traits shared by the man she had killed (in self-defense, she hastily amended to herself) in the A.I.M. facility in Washington D.C., she knew that she had to be on guard. That man's death had leveled an entire building and most of the buildings surrounding it; with Bruce in this building, she couldn't afford to have a repeat occurrence.

A gunshot echoed through the hall and Megan cried out in pain as a bullet slammed into her shoulder. The shooter released a brief cry of triumph, thinking she had crippled her target, but her elation evaporated when Megan snarled and whirled around to face her with electric blue glowing eyes.

"That hurt, you bitch!" she growled out as the bullet that had been partially imbedded in her jacket fell to the floor with a clink, the torn fabric and red, but otherwise undamaged, skin beneath the only indication she had been shot.

A noise caught between a gasp and a whine emanated from the guard as the gun in her hands began to waiver. "Y-y-you're one of those enhanced, aren't you? Like that ghost kid!"

"Only if the kid's got a dog," Megan quipped, unable to help herself, the thought of her brief encounter with the ghost girl Izzy flitting through her mind. Honestly, I'm still not sure I wasn't imagining that altogether. I never saw her again after that…

Her brief moment of reminiscing was broken when Loki stepped into her view, still safely hidden from view by anyone else thanks to his magic. "We can make this one break."

"Took you long enough," she muttered under her breath, knowing the Jotun would hear her. She tossed a brief glance over her shoulder to check if anyone else was coming to investigate the disturbance. Either nobody had been close enough to hear all the noise, or they had decided the valued their own skins more than their job. Frankly, she was betting on the latter, since neither gunshots nor guards having their faces destroyed were exactly quiet.

"One of us is walking, not running around doling out death," the trickster snarked back, though a small smirk belied his harsh words. Without hesitation he walked right up to the guard and whispered into her ear, his pale green eyes rippling, "Just do what she wants. Is it worth it to die over this?"

Catching on to what he was doing, Megan told the guard, "You have two choices here. You can either tell me what I want to know, or you can die like the others. It's pretty straightforward, so don't make the wrong choice — it gets messy."

"Just look at what she did to that man," he whispered, his grin becoming toothy and feral. "Can you imagine the pain he felt? The terror? The regret?"

The guard's eyes flicked over to her fallen coworker, drawn by Loki's coercion to truly look at the horrible electrical burns on his face, the unnatural bend of his limbs from where he'd fallen to the floor, and the blood pooling underneath him. She hastily set the gun down on the floor and kicked it towards the mana-user before placing her hands on her head. "J-just tell me what you want to k-k-know."

A wicked grin crossed Megan's face at that. "Smart. Tell me where they're keeping Bruce Banner."

"I d-don't know," the guard replied before hastily adding when Megan scowled and raised her hand, "but I've s-s-seen some of the eggheads disappear into the restricted area in the basement for hours at a time! That Bruce guy's got to be in there! He's nowhere else in here! I swear!"

"Take me there."

Friday, December 30th, 2005 04:04a, EST | Clint Barton's Apartment, NYC

Clint's eyes snapped open the instant his phone began to ring, though he rubbed at them a bit as crossed the short distance to his rather spartan apartment's desk where he had left his phone to charge overnight. After working for S.H.I.E.L.D. as long as he had, he had developed the ability to wake up at a moment's notice, but that didn't mean he had to like being called in the middle of what sleep he could manage after… Well, he avoided thinking about that.

"Barton," he announced in a clipped manner after tapping the button to answer the call.

"Get to the closest facility ASAP," responded the unmistakable voice of Nick Fury. "Full gear. You'll be briefed on arrival."

"Understood," the blonde replied before setting the phone down, the other end of the call disconnecting upon hearing the agent's answer.

With a weary sigh, he quickly set about dressing in the dark, minimalist attire he always wore while on the job. Ready to leave, he snatched his bow case and quiver, the two weapons concealed as a briefcase and knapsack, and stalked towards the door. Adjusting so he was holding the case on the same side he had slung the quiver, he reached towards the door before pausing to spare a glance at the one personal touch in his apartment: A picture of a brunette woman with two young children, a blonde-haired girl with pigtails and a boy with messy brown hair. The trio were all smiles and in the midst of some sort of adventure in a brightly lit yard.

After a moment more, he left the apartment and the photo behind.

"We had a breach at the Triskelion at 12:42p yesterday afternoon," Agent Sitwell grimly announced to Clint once they had reached a secured room. "The device used was a personal computer belonging to an employee named Stan Lee in Technical Support. The infiltrator was not caught on camera, despite several cameras being in the area. For some reason are experts are still trying to ascertain, all the cameras refused to vicinity of the computer. Whether the infiltrator had inside assistance is currently being investigated. More importantly, everyone in the area before and after the window of the infiltration is accounted for during the actual event by other footage captured of that floor. Put simply, whoever this infiltrator is, they managed to evade being seen by every single camera on that floor, even when they were functioning normally."

"So it's an enhanced person of some kind," Clint interjected. "I assume that's why I was told to bring full gear."

"Precisely," the other man affirmed. "Based on the data accessed, the infiltrator is interested in two people: Aldrich Killian and Megan Stark." A dark look crossed Clint's face at that, but Sitwell continued without acknowledging it. "Both of these people are persons of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D. and under surveillance, but as of 10:58p on December 25th, they both departed Stark Tower and subsequently fell off the grid for a period of time. Stark resurfaced three days later, and she is currently at Stark Tower. Killian is still off the grid. Our infiltrator thankfully does not know this because that information has not yet been recorded in our systems. Your role in this is to go to Stark Tower immediately and protect Stark from any potential attack."

"She's been avoiding me since late July, so she may not be happy to see me," the blonde warned.

"She'll get over it," Sitwell drawled, obviously uncaring. "All that matters is that she's under armed guard. She has security systems in that tower, so put them to good use. Dismissed."

"Do we have any leads on who I should be expecting to come knocking at Stark Tower?" the archer asked as he started towards the door. When Sitwell didn't reply, he stopped at the door and turned to face the other agent, noting that the man's posture had gotten stiff.

"Just one person matches the M.O.," Sitwell replied after a moment. "You were not chosen for this assignment only because you are the closest agent that is on… speaking terms with Stark. Thanks to the events of this past March, you are the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who has most recently engaged the suspected perpetrator."

"Oh," was Clint's simple reply. "That guy. My arrows went straight through him last time, but hey, that's what round two is for." With that, he left the room with his quiver slung over his shoulder and his bow case in hand once more.

Friday, December 30th, 2005 09:35a, EST | A.I.M. Facility, Miami, FL

"Well doesn't this look familiar," Loki drawled, an undercurrent of exasperation evident in his voice as the two mana-users stepped into the restricted area they'd been led to, leaving the unconscious body of their guide slumped against a nearby wall. Megan couldn't blame him though; the last time the trickster was in a server room he was punched in the head by some sort of super-strong living bomb guy who proceeded to blow up the place. The heat didn't help matters either, but getting knocked out and nearly blown up tends to trump discomfort.

"Your very good friend isn't here," he added, a small smirk playing across his lips.

The silver-masked Megan tossed the Jotun a look that he undoubtedly couldn't see through her mask. "Still, this is good. I didn't really get a good chance to investigate the computer at that other facility before it got blown up. And wherever they're holding Bruce is probably stored on here too." He had nothing to say to that, so she quickly located a terminal and began to work magic of the technological variety while he stayed near the door where it was colder.

It was a minute later while he was examining the room in boredom that Loki saw it. "Megan."

"Quiet!" she snippily replied as she tossed him a frustrated look. "Now is literally the worst time to use my real name!"

Loki did not reply, however, the entirety of his attention focused on a syringe lying on a table she had passed by in her haste to get to a terminal. Following the direction of his gaze in confusion, she froze when she saw the syringe, or more specifically what was inside it. "L…" she murmured, her eyes wide and her hands now trembling, unable to type. "That's… that's the serum they injected me with!"

His eyes snapped towards her, a sharp gleam in them. "Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain of this?"

"Yes," she breathed out, her own eyes slowly moving to return his gaze. "I remember every detail of that day."

The trickster's pale green eyes twisted back towards the syringe, a look of horror and fascination on his face. "How this can be, I do not know, but this is mana."

"The fuck? Are you absolutely certain?" she replied in a harsh whisper, turning his words on him.

His eyes snapped back to her again, and in one swift movement, he crossed the room and grabbed her hand. Though weaker than it was the day prior, the euphoric sensation that occurred the last time the two of them physically touched coursed through Megan once more, an icy cold suffusing her as the server room around them began to ever so slightly distort. The moment was over in a flash, however, as Loki dropped her hand as he snarled out, "Damned humans, what have they done?!"

"L! Stop and explain this! You're scaring me!"

"Do you not remember what was said the night we struck our deal? 'No one would believe that I was Megan stark, much less how my body had changed,'" he retorted.

She was initially confused by his non sequitur but realization dawned on her quickly. "'What your world can do with this science is fascinating,'" she quoted back, her eyes widening in horror. "'To recreate what only magic could accomplish, all without a drop of mana…'"

"They used mana all along," Loki finished, his expression dark. "Mana they somehow created or extracted themselves."

Friday, December 30th, 2005 04:49a, EST | Stark Tower, NYC

"Agent Barton, this is an unexpected surprise," Jarvis said as Clint stepped into the lobby of Stark Tower. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"Put the tower in lockdown, J," the sharpshooter replied as he crossed over towards the elevator. "And get me to the penthouse. Let Meg know I'm on my way and it's urgent."

"There's a slight problem with that, sir. You see, the Megan Stark upstairs is not Miss Stark."

That gave the blonde pause, stopping in front of the elevator. "Want to run that by me again?"

"Oh, that wasn't really a good explanation, was it?" the AI responded. "There is a person upstairs who looks like Miss Stark but is in fact an imposter."

"Uh huh," he drawled out. "And you know this… how?"

"It's a bit involved to explain, so in the interest of time I will say that I was contaminated from mid-July through yesterday. Miss Stark restored me to rights using the secret backup server that she keeps isolated from the rest of my systems and brought to light that she had been replaced by a doppelgänger in mid-July."

And Meg's been avoiding me since late July, Clint noted to himself, remembering his discussion with Sitwell. Still, this is farfetched… "How can you be sure you weren't hacked yesterday, and someone planted all of this in your head?"

"Technically, sir, I cannot be sure. But my probability calculations indicate there is a much greater likelihood that I am presently in my right mind. So as Miss Stark would say, 'the balance of probability dictates' that I must assume the person upstairs is an imposter until further evidence is acquired."

Just wonderful. "Yeah, I'm not getting in the elevator when there's any chance you could be corrupted, so I'll get upstairs the old fashioned way," Clint replied as he turned on his heel and marched back towards the entrance.

"If I may say so, Agent Barton sir, your grapple arrows are not exactly 'old fashioned.'"

The sharpshooter smirked at that. "Well, I was just going to hail a helicopter, but I got to admit, J, that does sounds like a much more entertaining way to get up there." And more importantly, more stealthy way.

Friday, December 30th, 2005 09:38a, EST | A.I.M. Facility, Miami, FL

Everything that happened over the past half a year — no the past half a decade — were finally beginning to make sense to Megan; all the variables of the mystery of Extremis were finally coming into view. "When I helped out Maya in Bern," she began to murmur to herself, drawing Loki's attention, "even I thought it was crazy I could grasp how to improve her Extremis formula so quickly. I knew absolutely nothing about bio-engineering, but when I saw that formula, when I saw her notes describing the change in the serum's properties as its formula was altered… It just made sense to me on some intuitive level."

Slowly, her trembling hands began to still as adrenaline started to push through her veins — through the very veins that housed at least a portion of some variant of Extremis. "That man in D.C., I suspected he had been injected with Extremis too, but I couldn't believe they'd use Extremis in humans if it still had explosive properties. But if Extremis is mana… not everyone has mana, and not everyone has the same reserves, so it would make sense that it might effect people differently when injected into them. Maybe they had some successful test subjects, and they got too cocky and took shortcuts because of it?"

"It doesn't matter who made it or who you used it!" Loki sharply interjected. "You're missing the point."

"Then what is it?" she replied in a similar tone, not appreciating the interruption.

"It will always explode."

She paled at that. "What?"

"You said it yourself just now, everyone is different, some have mana and some don't. When you take a gear from one clock and force it into a different clock, then the clock will ultimately fail. If the gear is similar to the one it's replacing, then it will take longer to happen, but eventually, something will wear down and just stop working."

"I'll fix it."

Loki blinked in confusion. "You'll what?"

"You heard me. I said I'll fix it," Megan replied, her voice firming up, the tremor in her hands finally gone altogether.

"This is not your precious science!" the trickster seethed, though she could detect a slight undercurrent of fear. "You Midgardians have already dabbled in what you should not have, attempted to force nature to conform to your whims! Have you learned nothing these past few days?! Why do you think mana only works when you are in unison with your true self?! Because you cannot make yourself something you are not!"

"I have been listening," she calmly replied. If he had been anyone else, she knew she would have responded with violence, but despite the violent tendencies she'd picked up in the past half a year, something in her could no longer get truly angry at the raven-haired god. "I've listened to every word you've said, L." Picking up the syringe from the table, she said, "Look at this syringe. Look at what's in it. Mana. You said earlier that you thought this might have been extracted from someone else, but it's not — it wasn't. I know it. This was made. This mana was made by science, by a formula I helped create in some way."

She set the syringe back down, seeing that Loki had finally begun to calm down, though his gaze was now locked onto hers. "I. Will. Fix. It." And without another word on the matter, she returned her attention to the terminal. No alarm had gone off yet, but that was only because she had systematically killed every single guard spare the one who they had coerced into giving them directions. Sooner or later, someone was going to get brave enough, or stupid enough, to do something about their intrusion. The insight on Extremis was very welcome, but it wasn't why they were here.

Hm? What's this?

There on the server was a folder labeled 01_01_2004 that contained a video and a lone document. It might have been the oddness of finding a folder with so few items in it, or perhaps that it had simply been a long time since Megan had revisited anything around the time she lost her leg on New Year's Eve 2003, but something about this folder felt off to her. Acting on the feeling, she double clicked the video.

Thursday, January 2nd, 2004 03:05a, EST | Miami, Florida

"Aldrich!" Maya Hansen said from the doorway to the man's room, her voice the sort of loud whisper one only ever used to wake up someone sleeping.

The blonde haired businessman startled awake and glanced around blearily for a moment before noticing who's woken him up. Tossing a quick look at the alarm clock, he groans before sleepily replying, "You've been up all night playing with that leg, haven't you?" He'd only managed a few hours of sleep since he finally returned to Miami.

The brunette opens her mouth to respond, but at first no words come out. Eventually, she manages to say, "I've had a breakthrough."

That got him out of bed. "Show me."

The pair made their way down to the basement, Aldrich not even pausing to throw on more than the wife beater tank and boxers he'd been sleeping in. Some things were more important to the man than appearances. Besides, Maya herself was wearing pajama pants and a matching low-cut top. Whether or not she'd slept yet, she was certainly dressed for it.

In short order, they reached the server room and entered the old elevator, shutting the scissor gate before descending into her lab. The first thing Aldrich noted when they reached the lab was the leg. It wasn't every day, after all that one saw a severed leg, and though he had arranged for Megan Stark's body part to be brought here, he had yet to actually see it himself. The second thing he noticed was lying on a plastic mate with the cooler nowhere nearby, yet it seemed… healthy.

"How long has that been out?" he asked, already suspecting what her breakthrough was.

"For nearly eight hours," she proudly responded. "When I initially injected the leg with Extremis, there was no visible response whatsoever. About a half an hour afterwards, it occurred to me to test the decomposition rate of the flesh by removing the leg from the cooler altogether. I examined a small sample for cellular decay after the limb was outside the cooler for another half an hour, and I noticed none whatsoever." She gestured at a nearby camcorder set up on a tripod. "I set that up immediately to record for posterity's sake, and I've been examining samples ever since. Aldrich, there has been no cellular decay whatsoever! If anything, the limb seems to be getting healthier!"

The blonde's mouth felt dry. He was no doctor, but even he could see the implications. "This could potentially preserve a severed limb indefinitely then?"

Maya frowned at that. "Well, it's too early in testing to be sure, but my initial guess is along those lines, yes. The main concern I'd have would be what would happen if the limb was reattached to someone."

Aldrich frowned as well. "What strain did you put in it?"

"V1.1," she admitted, wincing. "I had meant to use the original strain, to see if the body might begin to regenerate without the mind, but I was so caught up in the moment that I grabbed the wrong one by mistake."

"Wouldn't that mean the Extremis has internalized its current state?"

"How many times am I going to have to tell you, Aldrich?" she responded in exasperation. "Just because the strain does something with one person — one thing even — doesn't mean it will do the same with another! That's why it's so important to do testing on multiple subjects, and why you injecting yourself with the original Extremis was unbelievably risky!"

"Pardon me, doctor," the blonde snarked. "I'll just leave the science to you and get back t—"

He stopped speaking immediately when the leg on the table began to do something decidedly strange. It began to bleed.

"What the hell," she muttered, noticing the phenomenon too. "There was no blood in it when I checked a couple of hours ago…" She took a few steps closer to the limb. "Wait. This isn't blood. The color's off, it's too bright…" It was a color they both would know well in the coming two years: A mixture of the bright red of Extremis and the dark red of human blood.

Maya got to know it up close very quickly, however, when she proceeded to trip and fall forward. With a pained yelp, she slammed head first into the metal corner of the table, cutting open her scalp and sending the table's contents flying, and as luck would have it, some of the liquid oozing from the limb splattered over her fresh wound.

Aldrich, who had begun to rush forward to help her, froze in place when she released a blood curdling scream and began to change. He watched with wide eyes as her skin began to crawl and writhe, her bones cracking and reforming, her honey brown eyes slowly changing shade to sky blue, and, most telling of all, her sternum began to tear apart, leaving a bloody, gaping wound that was visible over her low-cut top.

Instinctively realizing what was happening, he snatched out his phone and with shaky hands dialed the number of one of his longtime friends, a man who excelled at making things happen.

"Dominic, I know what time it is, but this is an emergency. I need you to get medical staff to the facility here in Miami now. I'm here in Maya's lab, the one in the basement that you can only get to through the server room. Tell them… Tell them there's a woman here with a hole in her chest. I need discretion on this, Dominic. I'll pay you whatever you want, just make this happen."