THEN

Even before he'd gotten shrapnel embedded in his chest, Tony had been accustomed to occasionally being at the centre of explosions. Thus, when he was fiddling around with his left gauntlet and the world dissolved in orange-red-white, his first reaction was to drop the gauntlet and throw his arms up to protect his face, even as the ground staggered out from under his feet. A moment later it came staggering back, with enough force to knock him on his ass – and although he hadn't felt like he'd gotten tossed through the air, apparently he had, because the lab bench wasn't there to stop him. Ow. That was his tailbone hitting concrete, and it fucking hurt.

Wincing, he lowered one arm – the one attached to the hand still holding the soldering iron; fortunately he realized this before he attempted to rub his wounded posterior – and surveyed the damage to the lab. A quick look told him that it wasn't as bad as he feared. In fact, there didn't seem to be any damage at all.

On the downside, it also clearly wasn't his lab.

The room he was in was all concrete, walls and floor and ceiling. The Spartan decoration and the way the racks of computer equipment were set up reminded him nothing so much as the Facility – certainly, the laser setup pointed disconcertingly in his direction was familiar. Two black-clad SHIELD guards – or at least he thought they were SHIELD personnel; it was sometimes a bit hard to tell when everyone wore black and balaclavas – stood guarding a steel door, the only exit from the room that Tony could see. There were two or three technicians, moving behind the computer bays, but otherwise the room was quite empty for a SHIELD-run lab. Though it was definitely a SHIELD-run lab:

"Well, I'll be damned, doctor," said Maria Hill, staring at Tony. "It worked." Her hair had been cut short since the last time he'd seen her, to little more than a buzz cut, and she was wearing civilian clothing. Beat up, grungy civilian clothing, he noted. She was standing off to the side, well away from the ten-foot-wide circle surrounding Tony, a circle made up of engraved – runes? What was this, was SHIELD practicing fucking magic now? Well, knowing SHIELD, they would if given half a chance, and probably without any fucking clue about what they were really doing.

And they'd used it to teleport him – him. Shit. Every hair on the back of his neck stood up; he pressed one wrist against the ground, gently, just hard enough to push the activation button on the bracelet. So much for worrying that wearing them in the lab was giving in to the paranoia.

"SHIELD really needs to stop doubting me," came Bruce's voice, Sahara-dry. Or maybe Antarctic-dry; there was more than a little chilliness in there. Maria held up her hands in, apparently, completely non-sarcastic surrender as Tony clambered to his feet and picked out Bruce's location – behind a bay of computers.

"My apologies, doctor," Hill demurred instantly – and sincerely. What the hell? That wasn't how SHIELD behaved toward Bruce – wariness, yes, but this was more than that, this was – what wasthis? His brain translated the runes on the ground into numbers automatically – 399285... 0009943...

"So, uh, hey guys," Tony said, shoving his left hand in his pocket and flipping the iron over and over with his right as he assessed his resources. Arc reactor – check. Bracelets – check. One soldering iron, still hot but rapidly cooling now that it was no longer plugged in – check. Too bad he hadn't held on to the gauntlet he'd been tinkering with instead, but, well, it had seemed the likeliest source of explosions. "What's going on?"

Hill met his eyes squarely, and there was not the slightest hint of either fear or compromise in her gaze. "We need your help."

"He's got an arc reactor!" the other technician called suddenly, sounding – panicked. What? Hill's eyes widened and her gaze shifted slightly to the side, to –

"Behind you!" Steve warned him.

Tony lunged forward, away from the sudden presence behind him at neck-level, but wasn't quick enough to avoid Natasha's legs tangling with his own, dumping him back on his ass again; a flash of red in the corner of his vision identified her, as if the move with the legs hadn't been enough. This time reflexes kicked in, and six months of sparring sessions, whenever Steve teamed up with JARVIS to get him out of the lab; he managed to at least not injure himself further in falling. But no amount of sparring sessions would ever put him at Natasha's level – he tried rolling, tried to get enough distance to disengage, but there was no chance. Something jabbed him in the thigh, a needle sliding easily through the material of his pants, and the room kept rolling over even though his body had stopped. His head lolled to the side, suddenly unsupported by his neck.

A familiar pattern in the runes stood out, oscillated in his vision as it began to tunnel. One of the types that made more sense in hex... 0A93DD3...

"Fuuuh," he tried to swear, but his tongue wouldn't cooperate. The pattern wavered away and disappeared.

"Tony!"

So did everything else.

NOW:

" - this spell that so binds!"

The light brightened and flared toward green. The workshop vanished around them. Some invisible force flung Steve away; he hit the ground and rolled nimbly to his feet. His peripheral vision caught scenery that he didn't spend much time processing: grass, mostly brown and dead, a gently sloping hill on one side ending at the side of an unpaved road, and a field of old, dried cornstalks on the other. A line of trees denoted where the field ended and its neighbours began, dead stalks from different crops that Steve couldn't identify. Two fields over was a house and a couple of sheds. Sound – local insects; faintly, far off in the distance, cars on a freeway. The air smelled like autumn, old leaves and dead grass.

They were definitely not in New York anymore.

"What the - no!" the man who was not, could not be Tony Stark exclaimed. The device that he had been holding a moment before was smoking; he pulled out a tiny screwdriver from a pocket somewhere in those ridiculous pyjamas and prized the metal backing off, looking at the contents within in dismay, before looking up to glare at Steve. "What have you done?" he demanded. "I've lost the trail, now, when I was so close to the end, and to setting this all to rights!"

"Who are you?" Steve demanded in return. His voice came out hard and flat without conscious decision; he held the piece of U that he'd grabbed in one hand, ready to throw, as loath as he was to use it as a weapon.

"Steve." The man blinked at him in confusion – or possibly he winked. Only half his face was visible behind that gold-plated mask. "It's me – Tony. A different version than yours, yes," he continued hurriedly, "but me all the same." He blinked again, now looking concerned. "Are you alright?"

A different version than yours. Son of a gun.

"And 'my version'? What did you do to him?" Nothing worse than what he did himself, surely...

"Nothing!" the other Tony insisted. "I've been trying to track down the person responsible for all this confusion and get it undone." He waved the device about mournfully, and then snapped his fingers – the small metal box vanished into thin air, along with the screwdriver. Steve shifted, readjusting his stance – if the man could do that to small objects, could he do it to something larger?Threat, his brain screamed.

"Explain," he snapped.

The other Tony made an annoyed face, one so familiar that Steve's heart ached from the sight. "Didn't the one who got dropped in on you figure anything out? Well, certainly," he held his hands up to the sky, turning about dramatically to proclaim, "it's not like I have anything better to do, now that you broke the detector and stranded us somewhere off course!"

"Tony died two weeks ago," said Steve.

The other man's arms dropped and he turned back sharply. All the irritation had disappeared from his face; now his expression was something to match Natasha's on poker nights, except for his visible eye, which was cold and hard. He searched Steve's face for a long moment, then swallowed. "Damn it." The curse was quiet, but emphatic. "I was afraid that would happen. Damn them."

"Stop," Steve cut him off, done with irritatingly vague pronouncements. "Just – stop. Tell me. What is going on?"

Tony regarded him soberly, and strangely, in that instant, standing on the side of a farming road out in the middle of nowhere, he did not look half so ridiculous – blue pyjamas and all. "Six days ago – my time; it may be different for you – someone activated a catalyzing bio-locked multi-dimensional gate," he said, and that was Tony, English and all. 'Catalyzing bio-locked' didn't make any sense to Steve, but 'multi-dimensional gate' – that he got. He felt his jaw tighten. "It pulled a subset of us – Tony Starks from various alternate realities – into our neighbours' realities, so to speak. Everyone in the loop was shifted... well, not one reality down, or it would be a lot easier to find the person responsible and get it fixed." He sighed, putting his right hand to his temple, as if to ease a headache. "One reality along the loop - but there's nothing even approximating regular intervals on the loop, so that's not much help. I've been hopping through realities, following the energy trace, trying to track them down so I can reverse it – I'm surprised I haven't found more fatalities before now. We live dangerous lives, and being suddenly dropped into a fight without warning, against the type of villains so many of us take on..." he shook his head.

"It wasn't – " Steve shook his head. He felt light, almost floaty. Tony was – Tony had been shifted. Was that the flash of light? Or had that been after? "My Tony – the Tony from my universe – he was... switched?"

"Yes," the other Tony said, and there was a hint of compassion there, now, in his icy blue eye. "Your universe was part of the loop. If you haven't had a visitor from another reality show up in place of the, ah, body, then the man you knew – that wasn't the Tony Stark who died."

"Oh," said Steve, feeling supremely, profoundly empty. Here it was: a straight answer, for once. The discrepancies in the autopsy hadn't been because Tony was testing immortality tech on himself. Tony hadn't killed his kids. He hadn't killed himself.

There should have been relief – but there was nothing. The man he knew – that had been the man who had built a mechanical virus responsible for the infection of nearly a million people. The man who had sprung murderers from jail and equipped two mercenary scientists with kill-switches to keep them in line. The man who had been secretly trying to build portals to other realities... which meant that maybe he was the one responsible for the switch.

And whether Steve had known him or not, the man who'd blown off his own head two weeks ago was still Tony Stark.

"Right, well," the other Tony said after a moment, sounding supremely uncomfortable. "My detector is fried. It wasn't built to account for the signatures of two people during the jump, and the way you grabbed on to me – we've fallen somewhere in the interval, but where, I have no idea." He looked around in faint disgust. "Not someplace with a lab, unfortunately. Maybe not even some place with modern technology – the timelines don't always match up."

"There's a freeway that way," Steve pointed. "And a house over there."

The other Tony blinked/winked at him again. "Always the observant soldier," he said, sounding amused, and then he shook out his wrists and... changed, the way that Loki had, when he'd donned his full regalia of cape and horns. Steve nearly brained him with the piece of U, and although he managed to refrain, wasn't able to conceal the flinch of motion. Tony – oh, god, he didn't look like Tony now so much as he looked like Howard, with that thin mustache instead of the Van Dyke, the suit in an older style than the ones Tony favoured...

But Tony didn't have magical powers. The ability to make things disappear from thin air – well, not yet, but he'd shown Steve that project – so, perhaps. But the way the light shimmered about the imposter's clothes as he changed... no, that was the exact same thing as Loki had done.

"Who are you?" Steve demanded again, this close to throwing the piece of U at him, hard enough to knock him unconscious – maybe hard enough to kill.

"Anthony Edward Stark," the imposter insisted, holding up his hands, placating, for all that his tone was lightly sarcastic. "Haven't we been over this? I could have sworn we just –"

"Try again."

"Steve – oh, this is about the magic, isn't it?" The imposter put his hands down, sighing, and Steve should have thrown, he should have – but something stayed his hand. "So many of me are irrational about it. Magic isn't evil, it's not the enemy of science – hell, I'm the Sorcerer Supreme of earth – my earth; Earth-9810, in most catalogues – and I would not be half so good at my job if I weren't an engineer."

"Magic is just science that's not understood," Steve threw back at him, because even if it wasn't a belief that he fully shared, Tony had ranted about the matter often enough.

"Is that how yours views it?" the imposter – the sorcerer – the other Tony – Steve had no idea what to think of him. Whoever, whatever he was, he waved a hand dismissively. "Technically, yes, correct, fine, everything breaks down to fundamentals, but practically... no, at this point in time, the human approach to them is too different. And you're giving me a tension headache out of sympathy, so would you, please, stop acting like you're on the verge of braining me with that," he gestured at the piece of U, and Steve flinched on the verge of movement again, causing the other to flinch in turn, "and calm down for a moment? Steve – your version of Tony may still be alive. We can get him back."

Steve searched his expression, but the other Tony looked, honestly, earnest. Earnest in a way that Tony sometimes dropped into, by accident, before he'd cover it up with flash and snark. Slowly, Steve let himself slip out of combat readiness, let his arm fall back to his side. He didn't drop the piece of U – it would have been just as disrespectful as using it as a weapon, without the justification of necessity – but the other Tony relaxed regardless.

"Alright. We need to – "

Faintly, over the roar of the distant freeway, there was another thrumming sound – one growing louder, fast. Steve held up a hand, hushing him to silence. The other Tony picked up on it a moment later, tilting his head to listen as well. Steve turned first, pinpointing the location, and then a moment later a pair of blurs in the sky resolved into two cloaked quinjets. Their cloaking technology was vastly inferior to the cloak that Tony had cooked up, he noted absently. Vastly inferior – but they were also hiding much larger payloads. As the jets drew nearer the angle changed and the cloaking became completely useless, giving Steve a good look at the weaponry they were sporting.

"Or we could see if the lab might come to us," Tony suggested, but his expression had turned grim.

"UNREGISTERED METAS, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST," blared a voice from a loudspeaker on the right, as the jets pulled into a hover position a few dozen feet overhead. "PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD AND SURRENDER YOURSELVES TO THE AUTHORITY OF THE SUPREME HOMELAND INTERVENTION, ENFORCEMENT, AND LOGISTICS DIRECTORATE."

"Hmm, no," said Tony, and he threw out one hand in front of himself; the strange clothing and cape melted back into existence as a glimmering blue-white shield sprung up around them both. It was not a moment too soon; a moment later there was the roar of a machine gun opening up and the shield started throwing off bursts of light from the impacts of the bullets. Tony staggered, hard enough that Steve grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling over.

"Can you hold that?" Steve asked, eyeing the jets. The piece of U he was still holding felt very small, and useless, indeed.

"Don't need to," Tony grunted, crooking the fingers on both his hands in strange, arcane gestures. "By candle-dark and starry day – out from this place I would away!"

Light flashed, and the world fell out from under them again.

They landed by another dead cornfield, although Steve wasn't sent flying into the dirt this time. Their shield hadn't travelled with them; after a moment, Other Tony – Steve dubbed him Anthony, because while Tony hated his full name, a man who went around dressed like that deserved it – pulled away and stood upright. He was taller than Tony was, Steve realized; he'd vaguely noticed it before, but, distracted as he had been over everything else, it hadn't really registered.

He was also glowing faintly, a warm, golden light, as he rubbed at his temples. Some sort of after-effect of doing magic? "Well, that went well," Anthony sighed.

"Where are we?" Steve asked, looking around. It looked the same – maybe a bit greyer, like they'd hopped forward in time into later autumn – but the sounds were different. Quieter. He couldn't hear a freeway, he realized, or any insects. There was only the wind stirring dead stalks.

"Same place, just a few realities over," Anthony said looking around. "But since I don't know where we were, I don't know where we are, either – oh, that's not good." He held up his hands in front of him, inspecting them – or inspecting the glow, rather. "Be on your guard, Captain."

"For what?" Steve asked. Anthony was squinting around him, and the strange gem in his faceplate was glowing brighter.

"For anything. This ward is one that protects me from more subtle attacks – but this isn't a spell," he frowned. "The intent behind it... this must have been an enormous use of – oh, no." Anthony's eye widened and he reached out, grabbing onto Steve; the golden light spread over to encompass Steve, too, washing his vision yellow. "Candle-dark and starry day –"

The world vanished a third time. The golden ward faded with their landing in another – although not from Anthony's hands; he'd grabbed onto Steve's other shoulder, too, and was examining him with his right eye closed. The gem covering his left eye gleamed unsettlingly. "Hoggoth's beard," he muttered, and then, briskly, "Strip."

"What?"

"Strip. Remove your clothes," Anthony repeated impatiently. There was nothing joking in his manner – Steve wouldn't have put it past Tony to try to trick him into public nudity, but Anthony looked deadly serious. "You were just irradiated with over ten Grays. That is – very life-threatening."

"How did – " That was a stupid question, one with an obvious answer. Steve cut himself off and said instead, "I have a healing factor."

"I'm banking on that to let you survive the month," Anthony said grimly. "Strip. For god's sake, I'll conjure you different clothes after. You need to be decontaminated immediately – as futile a measure as that may be."

"This place isn't radioactive too, is it?" Steve asked, pulling his shirt over his head and kicking off his boots, not bothering to undo the laces. It seemed unlikely he'd ever get to wear them again; why bother with care?

"No, or the ward would still be flaring."

Steve hoped he was right – this world looked just as dead as the last one. Dead grass crumbled under his toes as he hopped out of his pants and boxers, pulling out his phone from his back pocket before he tossed them aside. "What now?" he asked, shivering. Naked, the air felt far colder than it had a minute ago when he'd been fully clothed.

"Those too," Anthony said, still impatient. Steve looked down at the phone in his hand, and the broken-off piece of U.

"Can't you just decontaminate them, too?" The thought of throwing away either made him feel faintly ill – or, no, that wasn't it. He just felt... ill. Nauseous, like he might vomit. Of course - radiation poisoning. How much was ten Grays? Enough to kill him within the month, apparently.

Anthony closed his eye. A vein was throbbing in his forehead. "Steve. I am trying to save your life. Fine, yes, I will see what I can do, now will you toss the heavily irradiated materials away?"

He did. Before they even landed, Anthony had gestured and they'd disappeared into thin air; a moment later his clothing did the same, although this time there was a burnt smell that made him think he would not be getting them back. Before he could protest, however, the sorcerer started chanting something else. "Waters of the seven seas, rise forth to answer me!"

It was like somebody had opened up a firehose directly overtop his head – like he'd crashed into the ice again and it was bursting through the glass. Water rushed over him, in such a torrent that he could scarcely breathe; it wasn't cold, exactly, but neither was it warm – combined with the chill of the air, the churning nausea in his gut doubled, until he leaned over and vomited. The spray of water washed the sick away immediately, but he kept retching, half-choking on it; he scarcely noted that the spray had shifted, aimed at his shoulders, now, and at an angle.

"I thought you'd just have a healing spell," he finally managed to force out, some minutes later, when the water stopped rushing out of nowhere at him. The cold seemed to emanate from some point inside him, like a spot in his heart hadn't thawed out properly from the ice; one more nightmare that he thought he'd left behind. The deluge had left him dizzy; he couldn't get his bearings. His feet squelched in the mud, the grains of dirt and rocks scraping painfully. He felt like the water had blasted off at least one layer of skin, maybe two.

"Magic, much like everything else, is better at breaking things than fixing them," Anthony informed him. Another wave of his hands, doing something... complicated, and suddenly he was holding a fluffy blue and white towel, which he held out to Steve. Clumsy, his hands numb, Steve took it, while Anthony muttered other spells at him. It was at least soft enough not to irritate his raw skin too much more.

"There's nothing further I can do from here," Anthony decided, flicking his hands again and then handing over shirt, pants, and boxers. Steve shimmied into them, trying not to get mud on the pants, which was more difficult than it looked when his feet were caked in it. Anthony conjured up socks and boots, too, before apparently realizing Steve's difficulty, and banishing them back to wherever they'd come from. "We need proper medical facilities." He ran his hand through his hair, thinking, and it stuck up all over the place, just like Tony's.

"Can't we just go back to my world?" Steve asked. His teeth were still nearly chattering; he wrapped his arms around himself and felt no warmer. The nausea had returned – had never really gone away – but he didn't feel like there was anything left in his stomach to bring up.

"Hah. I wish. We got dumped off-course when you tagged along and broke the – anyway, if I could transport us back to start, we wouldn't be lost, now would we? If I don't know where we are, then I don't know where I'm going. But you've got the right idea – we need to get away from this subset. Far too apocalyptic." He grabbed Steve's shoulder again, light flaring between them, and this time when he chanted his voice was deeper and somehow more resonant than before; Steve braced himself. "Shades of the Seraphim, take from the day, power enough to wish us away!"

This time, they didn't land at the side of a cornfield. They landed at in the middle of a crowded New York sidewalk, eliciting several cries of surprise from various passerby. A woman bounced off of Steve's side, nearly falling over; golden light sparked between them like a shield when he tried to grab her to keep her upright, and he missed her when he flinched back.

"Sorry, ma'am," he apologized immediately, offering her his hand to help her up. The golden light sparked again, repelling him.

"Don't do that, I'm not shielding you for your health," Anthony snapped at him, pulling a phone from thin air - literally; he flourished his hands and there it was, in the same way that he'd produced clothing.

"Not another wizard!" somebody else exclaimed, as the woman, wide-eyed, found her feet and backed away.

"- on earth dresses like that?" A cell-phone camera flashed.

"Is that Tony Stark?"

Anthony ignored their audience. "Reed will be set up better for this, if we're far enough over that a version of him exists here," he said, shaking his hand so that his gauntlet disappeared and then tapping at the touchscreen of his phone. "And if he is, then my combination of magic and technology ought to be able to get his phone number – ha, there we go." He held the phone up to his ear and looked around, over the heads of the pedestrians, who were giving them both a wide berth. "Reed! It's Tony – yes, Stark. I'm from an alternate reality and I have a friend who needs medical assistance – could you lower the defenses so I can teleport us both in? What? No, we landed at random – what? No... uh – ...I'd be happy to tell you all about it in person if you'd – Eh? No, he's fine... Ah. Yes, that could be a problem. We'll need to get off the streets – of course not. Thanks." He hung up with a touch of his thumb and muttered, "Suspicious bastard."

"Who's Reed?" Steve asked, trying not to shiver, and to stay out of the way of passerby. Anthony seemed to have absolutely no concern for the way they were blocking the sidewalk.

"A friend," Anthony said distractedly, more intent upon his phone. "A good friend, really – I should be kinder, but when this all began, I wound up stuck in an alternate reality where he was a super-villain who'd blown up the White House, and I had to spend a week dodging his smart-drones until I could finish the Dimensional Tracer." The one that Steve had broken, apparently. Steve winced. "But usually, yes, a good friend." The phone blooped, and Anthony exclaimed, "Aha! Shades of the Seraphim - "

The jump this time was short, like a hiccup, but Steve stumbled anyway as reality whirled back into place around them. The nausea was still chewing at his insides.

"You didn't say your friend was Steve," a woman's voice reproached Anthony. Steve looked up and blinked until the room stopped tilting. They were in a lab – one just as advanced as Tony's or Bruce's, maybe even more so; it had less holograms and more enormous machines that Steve couldn't identify, but it also included what looked to be a medical centre, if the padded examination table surrounded by monitoring equipment was what he thought it was. "You said, 'He's fine'. Steve, what happened?" The woman – blonde; late thirties; wearing a lab coat over a form-fitting blue spandex suit – reached out a hand to touch him, and was repulsed again by the shield spell.

"Don't touch him," Anthony said sharply. "He absorbed at least ten Grays – he's radioactive as hell. And he's not from my reality, he's a hitchhiker."

"Are you sure about the dose?" another man joined in the conversation, and Steve nearly tripped over himself while recoiling. Since when was he this clumsy? Maybe it was whatever was wrong with his vision – the man, who was wearing the same type of getup as the woman, had his neck stretched out like... some type of snake. That couldn't be possible. Experimentally, Steve waved his hand in front of his own face, wondering if his fingers would look all stretchy, too, but they didn't.

"Not very, the spell isn't that precise."

Both of the strangers did double-takes, and then the oddly-stretched man waved Steve over to the exam table, one arm stretching out to a distance of ten feet to flick on the machines around it. Bemused, Steve sat down.

"Spell?" The woman eyed Anthony. "No... It can't be." Her voice was almost accusing. "That looks like Strange's outfit."

"Yes, he does seem to wind up Sorcerer Supreme in most universes aside from mine," Anthony drawled. He did something complicated with his hands, and yellow light flared up around the entire medical bench, and then flared and faded away from Steve's skin. "There – run your tests."

"Ten Grays is a lethal dose – "

"He has a healing factor."

"Fifteen-point-three," Stretchy reported. Steve tried to crane his own neck around to see the screen the guy was looking at, but neck muscles didn't work like that. They didn't. So how was Stretchy seeing the screen?

"Who are you?" Steve burst out, and then he flinched when they all turned to look at him again, away from their screens and machines. He badly wanted his shield, wanted some measure of protection – something.

"Oh," the woman paused, looking surprised again. "Susan Richards. This is my husband, Reed – we don't exist in your universe?"

Reed craned his head away from the computer screen he'd been looking at. Part of his neck stayed behind. "Hmm, several years younger than our Steve Rogers – what time is it in your universe?"

"He knew my counterpart," Anthony broke in, "He's not from the forties. You're not that ubiquitous, Reed."

"Both of you shut up," Susan said, staring at Steve. "Steve, what year is it?"

He wasn't sure he should answer, but she didn't seem hostile, at least. "2012."

"What day of the week is it?"

He stared at her, at a loss.

"Monday? Tuesday?" she prompted him. But he couldn't answer. His thoughts wouldn't line up in a straight row. They felt snakey, like Reed's neck.

"High enough dose to cause rapid CNS deterioration," Reed noted quietly.

"Should it be happening that fast?" Anthony asked, sounding uncertain for the first time.

"Steve – Steve, look at me," Susan said firmly, and she moved until she stood between him and Reed. "Reed – stop stretching, you're distracting him. Tony – go be useful somewhere else."

"Sorry, dear," Reed said, and moved somewhere out of sight behind a machine, dragging Anthony with him, the two of them arguing in technobabble. "When Captain Rogers was infected with ultrapox, a burst of vita-14.5 was able to reactivate the binding compounds in the serum – "

"This was broad spectrum – he already got hit with vita-14.5, you want to irradiate him some more?"

Steve tried to figure out if Reed had left his feet behind, but Susan moved forward again, to the edge of the golden shimmering dome about the medical bay, and clapped her hands together to get his attention.

"Building, give us some privacy," Susan said, and humming beams of light cut down all around him, blocking everything but the medlab. It didn't seem to affect any of the monitoring machines still within, though. Some type of forcefield? Steve wondered. Susan's voice still came through clearly, but Reed's argument with Tony had been cut off. "Steve, ten Grays is a lethal dose."

"Yeah, I, uh... I heard." He shook his head. Why was it so difficult to think? His gut rumbled in protest again before suddenly trying itself into knots, and he doubled over as he tried desperately not to embarrass himself.

"Building, get a nurse module in here – Steve, it's going to affect your brain functions. It's already starting. We need to know what happened while you can still think clearly. Can we trust Stark?"

"I don't know," Steve mumbled through gritted teeth, and then a robot rolled through one of the blue walls of light and unfolded itself between him and Susan, into a... port-a-potty? Steve didn't know, didn't care – its use was obvious, and he managed to transfer himself from the bed to its seat just in time. His body felt like it was trying to turn itself inside-out.

"Did he do this to you?" The reminder that she could still hear him, even if she couldn't see him, made Steve flush even further – and then he wondered when he'd become flushed at all.

"No? It was an accident, he just – he showed up, I grabbed him while he was trying to teleport out, then there were quinjets and we tried going elsewhere but it was radioactive." He shivered, fighting down nausea as another wave of cramps rolled through his body. "Then he jumped us out and doused me in water for a while, and then we jumped here."

"Why here?"

"Random," Steve said, trying to think. It had been random – no, that wasn't right. Something had been broken. They had been lost? Where was he now? "SHIELD," he managed. "Call SHIELD."

The sounds of the two arguing scientists – well, arguing scientist and arguing magician – abruptly resumed, although thankfully his privacy walls didn't go away. "He's saying to call SHIELD. If he's from one of those fascist mirror-universes – "

Steve's body ached. He doubled over, clenching his teeth to keep from groaning – they could hear him, but they couldn't see him, so he folded his hands into fists tightly enough that his short-cropped nails broke skin.

" – need samples – "

" – need painkillers – "

"Please hold out your arm," his toilet asked him. A metal armrest folded itself up around and bleeped at him expectantly.

Holding out his arm meant that he had to unwrap it from around his stomach. It took a few moments for Steve to manage that, and then there were two pinpricks that barely registered as pain compared to the sensations coursing through his insides.

"...call Steve..."

Words drifted around him, but they weren't making much sense as they had been, previously. Snatches of phrases were understandable, but he was lost in his own internal misery, uncomprehending of however much time was passing. It was too hard to think.

"...transfusions..."

The armrest beeped at him unhappily. "Increasing dose," it informed him. Gradually, Steve became aware that his arm, unlike the rest of him, no longer hurt. And then the rest of him also did not hurt quite so badly. He squinted up at the blue walls. They were quite a pretty shade, the colour of open sky.

"...won't help his brain..."

"...what else can we..."

"...wind up a vegetable..."

"...not letting him die!"

And then, for a long time, nothing made much sense at all.