b'Derech – on the way

Six years after the Holy grail war, Shirou has gotten sucked into an alternate universe, one which will give him a second chance to be a hero. But is being a hero the only thing he desires, or has his experience changed him? Fate Stay Night / Avengers (movie) crossover.

Final installment of the FSN: No Route trilogy

STORY Start

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Nick Fury got out of the Humvee as the driver pulled through the gate of Area 54, "So what's going on here, Private?" He barked at the soldier standing guard outside cinder block building. Except for the cluster of featureless buildings surrounded by barbed wire fencing, there was nothing in sight out to the distant horizon. Those, plus a few dry tumbleweeds, just to drive the desolation home.

"Sir." The soldier snapped to attention, "I don't know, sir. Dr. Selvig said to expect you. Sir."

Fury nodded and went in. He hadn't expected for the private to know anything, but that was his way of making conversation. He figured it made the men serving under him feel more comfortable. (For the record, he was wrong).

Inside, the building was one giant lab. On the left side of the room there were a bunch of smaller experiments running based on the data collected in the other half. And that other half consisted of an array of sensors surrounding a crystalline 'something'. At first glance it was a cube, but on closer inspection it had too many sides, some of which were somehow inside each other.

It was the Tesseract.

"Ah, Director Fury, great to see you." The speaker was a gray haired scientist type - Dr. Erik Selvig, directory of this laboratory. "I know you are planning to come by for a tour with your staff next week, but since you are on base now anyway, I thought you might want to take a look at this. 'Tessie' is acting very strangely – energy is coming off of it in ripples." He walked up the the Tesseract and peered at it for a moment before turning back to Nick Fury, gesturing to it with the sort of pride usually reserved for your child's first steps. "Oh, it's not dangerous or anything. It does this once every few weeks. But it would be a shame if you come next week and Tessie just sat there. You should see what the government's money is paying for."

Nick gave a thin smile at the scientist's loquaciousness. "And what does it pay for?" He stepped up to peer at 'Tessie' as the good doctor affectionately called it. He had to take care not to get in the way of a bevy of lab techs who were wheeling over a cart with some jury-rigged instrument attached to a PC.

"Why, we record the Tesseract emanations across the entire spectrum, and we correlate with any known stimuli. We know that some low frequency sounds will make Tessie emit light, for instance, but we are still uncertain what is causing the other phenomena that we have seen, such as these ripples."

All of a sudden, the Tesseract began to throb, and gave off an unpleasant keening sound.

"Is this normal?" Fury stepped back from the device.

The sound grew louder.

"No, it's not," replied one of the techs, surreptitiously taking shelter behind a rack of computer equipment.

"Oh, dear," Dr Selvig was debating hitting the evacuate button when the keening turned into a wail and a ripple formed in the air, at shoulder height.

THUMP.

Everything stopped.

Nick drew his side arm as he ran to the other side of the Tesseract. Sitting on the floor where he had landed, butt first, was a young man.

He looked very confused. He glanced first at Nick, then the Tesseract. When his eyes made contact with the alien object he jerked as if touching a live wire and passed out cold.

Nick grabbed his radio, "Command and Control, I need an Alpha team to Lab T, Area 54, stat."

/\ b'D /\

Shirou opened his eyes. His head hurt. His memories were all jumbled up – he remembered fighting against a tide of zombies, then a tornado. Rin smiling at him, then flashes of light and after that he had a vague memory of something that overwhelmed his mind, and now... He looked around. He appeared to be in a hospital room. It looked very modern, so that ruled out most of Africa, where he had spent the past several years.

A nurse walked in and checked the tablet attached to his bed. When she saw that his eyes were open, she gabbled something, gave him a smile and walked of, calling out down the corridor.

'That sounded like English?' Shirou's brain started to make connections between reality and memory.

A few moments later the nurse returned, followed by a doctor and an intense looking blond haired man in street clothes. Despite the clothing, his entire posture screamed 'military'.

"Hello, do you know who you are?" The doctor asked.

That confirmed it – something had gone majorly FUBAR if the doctor was leading with that question, instead of the usual 'how are you feeling?' (yes, Shirou had sufficient experience with the doctor / patient interaction to know what was normal).

"I'm feeling ok," he managed to shape the words in stilted English. He was fluent in a half dozen languages, but right now he could barely string a few words together – his brain was still trying to deal with whatever had almost fried his mind.

The blond haired man crouched down by the bed, "That's good, but the question was 'do you know who you are?' Because we have no idea." After a pause, he continued, "I'm Steve Rogers, incidentally."

Shirou nodded, "Leblanc. Emile Leblanc." He was too tired to do the accent correctly, but maybe they wouldn't notice that a Frenchman had a Japanese accent.

Steve nodded, "Good. Given how you arrived, we were worried that you wouldn't speak English. Or any known language." The doctor tapped Steve's shoulder, and the larger man nodded to him, "Why don't you get some rest, and when you are up for it, the doctor will contact me to help you with your orientation."

"I'm fine now." Shirou activated his mage circuits and pulled a little prana into his body. It wasn't the same as an actual healing spell, but it would give his body a boost. And he did feel fine, except for being tired and the 'something' in his mind that he couldn't recall. He was surprised at how remarkably easy it was to draw in the Prana – like standing on a lei line, except without the out of control sensation of sipping from a fire hose.

Steve looked up at the doctor. The doctor shrugged. "Except some bruises, there is nothing physically wrong with Mr. Leblanc. And the full spectrum pathogen workup came back negative. So he's free to move about."

"Well, the long and the short of it is, Mr. Leblanc, you may be in a different world – a different reality than you started out in." Steve paused, but when Shirou didn't make any denials or appear panicked, he continued. "You appeared out of thin air in a laboratory in the American Midwest, you have been brought here, to the CDC Bio-hazard center in Maryland."

"Do you have coffee in this world?"

Steve gave the stoic visitor a once over. He wasn't intensely muscled, but he appeared to be in good shape. And he had the poise of somebody who had gone through the storm and passed out the other side.

"Get dressed. Your civvies are over there."

[[Yesterday]]

There was a knock on the apartment door. Steve opened it to find Nick Fury looming on his doorstep. "How do you do? Come in."

Nick stepped into the apartment, "Nice place you got here. I like how you decorated it." He walked in and set to pacing around the living room like he owned it. The apartment was small but comfortable, with a separate living room complete with a sofa and a recliner bracketing a low table. Nick stopped behind the the recliner and inspected the book case decorously filled with a mixture of books and knick knacks.

"The army gave me a fully furnished unit." Steve replied, "I have no idea where to even shop for things in this new world. It's all catalog orders. How can people buy furnishings without first seeing them?" Steve walked into the kitchenette, "You want a beer?"

"No, thank you. I'm on duty."

Steve stopped immediately, his ears perking up, "So I can assume that this isn't a social call?"

"No," Nick turned to face Steve again. "We just had a guy appear from thin air at a top secret research facility and pass out. He does not appear to be a threat, but we aren't certain where he came from. We aren't even certain if he's from our world. I bought him here to have the CDC check him over, make sure he's not carrying any alien plague or anything. But once he regains consciousness, I want you to liaise with him."

Steve nodded, "Makes sense. I just arrived from the past, so I have first hand experience about how disorienting that an be." He had been at loose ends for the past several months. Once he had gotten cleared by the military, he had moved out here, but other than helping train some special forces (and sneaking out at night to fight petty crime), he wasn't doing anything, and he was getting bored. Steve was the sort that always needed to be working at 100% of his potential.

"Not just that. When the doctors were giving him a physical, they found his body was covered in scars, many of them from bullet wounds." Nick paused, before adding, "And some of them were overlapping. Meaning they didn't happen at the same time. This guy is a warrior."

[[now]]

"Do we have to stay in the hospital? I want to see how this world is different from my own." Shirou and Steve Rogers were in the hospital cafeteria, drinking coffee. Shirou appeared relaxed, but he remained watchful: this Steve Rogers was obviously a guard to make sure he didn't escape or cause trouble. Or maybe he was just there to evaluate him (except he wasn't subtle enough for that – he kept making it obvious that he was military). Shirou tried surreptitiously drawing on his magic and projecting a knife. It was ridiculously easy. He barely had to think of doing it, and it was there. A small smile quirked up his mouth.

Life just got easier.

Steve shrugged, "I don't see why we can't take a walk. And the coffee here is truly awful." As they headed out through the lobby, he added, "You have accepted that you are in a new world pretty calmly. Has this sort of thing happened to you before?"

Shirou considered how to reply, "No. But you're pretty calm about the fact that I might be from another world. Has this sort of thing happened to you before?"

Steve snorted. His sense of humor was vestigial, but this Emile seemed very much in tune with him. He carried himself with the bearing of a soldier, and he had a seriousness about him of somebody who was always trying to do more. "No, but there are reports that Thor, the Norse god of thunder, paid us a visit not too long ago. And I was chosen to show you around because I was frozen in suspended animation for 70 years. So it's not completely a foreign concept." The two of them walked down the street to a Starbucks.

Shirou was somewhat surprised at how casually Steve was treating his security. Or maybe he was just that good.

The hospital was in a downtown area, and there was lots of foot traffic swirling around despite the city center looking grungy and run down. Shirou craned his neck left and right, gawking "Well, so far this world seems fairly similar to mine. There is a Starbucks on every corner." If he had to flee, there was plenty of cover, but the danger of a civilian getting caught in the crossfire was high. Shirou glanced a Steve. Not that his captor was carrying a gun or any other obvious weapon.

"Are you certain that it's not? Yours, I mean," Steve asked as they ordered their drinks. The coffee bar was mostly empty at this time of day.

Shirou shook his head, "No. The.. air feels different." Shirou wasn't certain how open magic was here. Steve seemed very accepting of magical phenomena, but that didn't mean that Shirou was going to completely abandon caution. This was an unknown world, after all. "Incidentally, was there a woman that arrived at the same time as I did?" He changed the topic to something that had been churning at the back of his head for a while. He didn't want to talk about Rin until he knew more, but he couldn't stand the idea of just ignoring her when she might need his help. She really wasn't as tough as she pretended.

"No, should there have been?" Steve looked out the window as a convoy of cars crawled down the street. It was a pair of military issue Range Rovers bracketing an ambulance – not the sort of thing you typically saw. Just as he was looking away, one of the Ranger Rovers exploded, showering the area with shrapnel and shattering the window in front of them. The back of a parked truck swung open and a bunch of men in what looked like yellow hazmat suits poured out, firing semiautomatic rifles.

"Excuse me," Steve recovered, grabbing a serving tray off of the neighboring table and whipping it at the closest goon so fast that it knocked him unconscious when it hit his head. He then followed the tray, jumping out the broken window and leaping to engage the terrorists.

'So much for being a captor,' Shirou watched as Steve went through the attackers like they were store mannequins. 'His technique is pretty good.' Shirou noticed that despite the danger that he was facing, Steve was taking care to disable the enemy, rather than kill. The former would-be hero didn't want to get involved – he still wasn't certain what this world was all about – but he was liking it more and more. This Mr. Rogers was definitely his sort of guy. He could feel a smile try to pull at the corners of his mouth for the first time in weeks (that time when he was chatting with Rin didn't count). He quickly squashed it back down.

But then a van slammed around the corner, spilling out several more mooks, and one of these was wielding a large weapon that looked like it had came straight out of science fiction. Or maybe it was a particularly Rube Goldberg-ish Mystic Code. When the terrorist fired it, a cone of blue light enveloped everybody in front of him, causing them to stagger and fall to their knees. Some vomited.

"Ah, shit." Shirou stepped up to the window and projected a bow and Tora-shinai, which he promptly reshaped into an arrow. He almost casually shot the goon with the gun, and quickly repeated the process to take out the second. It all happened in under a second. The driver panicked, leaping back into his van. As he slammed on the gas to crash through the people blocking his escape, Shirou ran forward, projecting Kanshou and Bakuya and throwing them through the van's engine compartment. The motor sputtered and died, leaking fluids all over as the van slid to a halt. While the driver desperately yanked on the wheel of the now unresponsive vehicle, another Tora-shinai arrow smashed through the windshield and hit him in the chest.

Shirou had never tried reshaping a shinai into an arrow before, but with the ridiculous amount of mana available on this Earth, he had easily brute-forced the transformation.

It was all over in a matter of moments. The police arrived, and under the direction of the surviving FBI agents (for that was who had been driving the Range Rovers), arrested the A.I.M. terrorists.

"That was a nifty trick," Steve nodded towards the terrorists that had been hit by Shirou's arrows. They were raving in terror about a giant tiger that was going to eat them. "How long will that last?"

"It should wear off in about an hour. You're pretty good at this yourself."

"Thanks," Steve nodded, "Let's go see if our coffee is ready."