TB2020 – Here

Title: Here
Author: Saydria Wolfe
Fandom: MCU
Genre: Interdimensional Travel, Future Fic, Sentinels and Guides are Known
Relationships: Tony Stark/Clint Barton, Morgan Stark/Nate Barton
Warning: Non-Consensual Dimensional Travel
Author’s Notes: 1.) Tony’s daughter/Clint’s second son from an SnG Canon AU drop in to see Tony/Clint from my Seeing AU. Not connected to my AU, I’m just entertaining myself. 2.) I have casted Daisy Ridley for Morgan Stark and Charlie Rowe for Nate Barton. 3.) To be clear, in my HC there are two Lauras in Clint’s life. The first is Laura Howlett who in my version of canon he marries but in this AU is just a squatter on his family’s old farm that eventually became his tenant. The second is his sister in law who is dead and having her face borrowed by Loki in this AU. This is the same in all of my MCU AUs whether it comes up or not.
Challenge: Just Write Trope Bingo, Square: Isolated/Trapped
Beta: PN Ztivokreb
Word Count: 3,234
Summary: When Nate and Morgan are trapped in an alternate universe by Dr. Doom, they have to make a decision—here or there?

 

 

“Doom is pulling back!” Nate announced over the comms.

“We got him on the run!” Lila declared and Morgan rolled her eyes. “Talon, see if you can close with him. Iron Heart, back him up. We can’t let Doom escape!”

Lila didn’t say again but Morgan heard it anyway as she tore through the air on the trail of her sentinel. From the look of things, Nate had Doom on the ropes but…that was odd. Doom didn’t stand around to fight. He had never engaged Nate one on one in all the months since he had come back enhanced from space.

Doom took one step back, drawing Nate forward. As soon as Nate’s foot crossed an invisible line it began to glow a poison green.

“Nate!” she shouted the warning and JUNO kicked her thrusters into overdrive without waiting for the command.

She got her gauntleted hands on Nate as his foot landed in the center of the circle. She heard Miles shout, “Morgan!” as light shot up around them.

They were falling, falling, falling.

They stopped, hanging in place for an eternal moment.

Then they reversed directions and immediately hit the ground with a soft whomph.

Morgan had a moment to be glad she was on top. If her sentinel had landed on her suit, he would have been really feeling it for the five or so minutes it would take his healing factor to clear up the extensive bruising. As it was, JUNO had managed to get the suit’s hands and knees under her so Nate wasn’t pancaked either.

“JUNO,” Morgan said as she stood, “where are we?”

“Not sure, boss,” JUNO admitted. She sounded steady but she only reverted to her mother’s preferred nickname when she was shaken. “I can’t reach my main server but wifi is widely available. Coding is different from what we’re used to—less secure. GPS data is saying we’re in Central Park.”

“But there are no food trees,” Nate objected, nose flaring. “I can’t smell any oranges, or apples, or nuts. Some cherry, maybe, but not near us. Just pine and oak and elm.”

Less secure, no food trees. “Are we before the First Snap? What’s the date, JUNO?”

“October 14, 2013,” JUNO said.

They watched as a Quinjet landed the standard Avengers’ Protocols Safe Distance away. A familiar red and gold streak flew closer to them.

“After the Invasion,” Nate told her needlessly.

“A little early for Halloween, isn’t it?” a distorted voice asked from behind the Iron Man mask.

Morgan swallowed hard. Was that…her dad? She only had the vaguest memories of him outside of all the videos FRIDAY had given her of him practicing how he was going to teach her science when she got old enough.

Lessons he hadn’t survived to give her directly.

“Genderbent Iron Man and Black Widow,” Iron Man said approvingly. “Good job, kids.”

“Sir?” a guy in purple clutching a bow asked cautiously.

Morgan looked to Nate, not sure what she was seeing. Clint Barton had gone to jail and died there when they were both very young, not long after the Second Snap. The world had wanted someone to blame for the chaos it had been thrown into again with the return of the Lost— Hawkeye had taken the fall so her mum wouldn’t have to.

“Dad?” Nate asked, confirming her guess.

“I did not see that one coming,” Iron Man said dryly and opened his face mask. Yes, that was her dad. Younger than she had ever seen him but inarguably him.

Morgan opened her face mask. “Dad?”

“Oh.” Tony Stark gave her wide eyes. “Well, this is awkward.”

-*-

“Sir,” JARVIS called his attention.

“Yeah, J?” Tony asked, continuing to stroke a hand through Clint’s hair absently.

“I am receiving extreme readings of non-standard energy in Central Park.”

“Non-standard energy?” Laura asked from one of the other couches.

“Magic,” Clint said as he rolled off the couch.

Ten minutes and the team was loaded up in the Quinjet, ready to bring the house down on whatever confused or malicious magic-user was making a mess.

“A little early for Halloween, isn’t it?” asked more for the team than for his audience. He had come in closer and gotten eyes on and they didn’t look the most threatening. Okay, no, they looked plenty threatening just not…like villains. “Genderbent Iron Man and Black Widow.” He approved of them actually—equal opportunity was everything. “Good job, kids.”

“Sir?” Clint asked as the team approached. He was slightly behind Cap who hand his shield up, ready to protect, which was good. And protocol.

“Dad?” not-Black Widow asked.

Tony opened his face mask to get a better look at the kid and quoted his favorite speedster. “I did not see that one coming.”

Iron Lady opened her face mask and squinted at him with familiar brown eyes. “Dad?”

Oh, boy.

Rhodey landed and half-ordered/half-suggested, “…Let’s take this back to the Tower.”

Thank the entire universe for Rhodey.

-*-

“So, let me get this straight,” Tony said one more time because it was bothering him. “We’re not together where you’re from? Did we…break up?”

“You were never together,” Nathaniel ‘Nate’ “Talon”—Barton said evenly. “My dad was married before you ever met.”

“To who?” Clint asked.

“Do you know Laura Howlett?”

“Of course,” Clint scoffed. “She’s the squatter on my farm. I met her after—”

“Yes?” Nate pressed when Clint cut himself off.

Clint gave him the stink eye. “Why do I think you already know?”

“Because you aren’t dumb. no matter how much you pretend to make people underestimate you—which is dumb, you’re a superhero. You keep up with Captain America and Iron Man without an enhancement, no one should underestimate you.”

“I am enhanced,” Clint corrected. “I have a minor healing factor.”

Nate blinked. “That’s new. Did you not have to kill Uncle Barney and Aunt Laura in this world? Did they not go crazy?”

“They did. And I did,” Clint admitted outright for the first time ever that Tony had heard, flicking a guilty look over to Loki-as-Laura.

“Was Lila not…born?”

“Lila?” Clint asked.

“It’s what Aunt Laura named her and Uncle Barney’s daughter.”

“No,” Clint shook his head, looking sick to Tony’s experienced eye. “She wasn’t pregnant when I killed her.”

“I don’t think you killed her per se in our world,” his daughter, Morgan, hastened to reassure. “From the stories I heard from…Nate’s Laura, Lila’s Laura took the news of her husband’s death badly and…died. After giving birth to Lila. You took her home to your farm keep her safe and met Nate’s Laura who helped you take care of her. What happened after that was just…natural for two adults trapped alone with only two kids for company.”

“Two kids?” Clint asked.

“My older brother Cooper was at the farm with Laura,” Nate said. “He was probably why you didn’t kick her out when you had every right to.”

“I know Cooper,” Clint admitted. “Sweet kid.”

Nate snorted. “Maybe now. He didn’t take you going to jail with any sort of grace in our timeline.”

“Clint went to jail?” Tony demanded. “What for?”

“The Second Snap,” Nate explained. “The Snap the Avengers did to undo the Snap of Tha—”

Laura hissed, cutting him off, and jerked in surprise.

“We do not say his name,” Laura said when they all looked at her. “With the magical resources in his coterie, it is simply unwise.”

“Then you already know about him?” Morgan asked.

“He is why I am here,” Laura admitted.

“Ah.” Morgan nodded. “We had wondered.”

“Any tips?” Tony had to ask because, seriously, preventing The Snap just got a whole lot more personal if it was key to defending Clint’s freedom, too. No one was taking Clint away from him—ever.

“After the Snap, Sentinels and Guides re-emerged among the population of Earth,” Morgan said. “Auntie Neb said that if we had emerged before the Snap her father would have never come to Earth. That he feared Sentinels and Guides beyond any other forces we could have amassed.”

“Okay,” Tony drawled. “Who is Auntie Neb? And what are Sentinels and Guides?”

“Auntie Neb is a child that…he stole from her home planet before he wiped out the rest of her race. Most of his coterie are children he stole and raised for his own ends—a collection of the rarest form, beings that all the last of their kind. Most of them worship him but Auntie Neb and her sister Gamora break free of him.

“Auntie Neb got you home after the First Snap,” Morgan told him seriously. “Space travel wasn’t really a thing for Earth back then.”

“Well, it is now,” Tony admitted with a frown. Someone he didn’t even know had saved his life. The other him’s life. It was a weird sort of knowledge, so he packed it away and ignored it. “How do we get Sentinels and Guides to emerge?” Because he wasn’t going to stop building Earth’s Armada, but multiple levels of protection seemed like the smart thing to do.

“A huge threat to the tribe did it for us,” Nate said with a shrug. “But it’s not like you can reveal that the Oversized Raisin is coming to Earth, right?”

“I don’t know.” Tony made a face. “After we found out about Hydra and all that, we started trying to be more open about stuff, but we also don’t want to insight panic.”

“Or destroy the planet’s morale,” Clint agreed.

“I’ll have people run some numbers,” Tony offered.

“While you do that, look up Sir Richard Francis Burton’s monograph,” Morgan told him. “If it exists in this world, it’s probably your best hope for scientific information about Sentinels and their bonded Guides. It’s by no means complete—Burton did not have the tools to fully understand what he was seeing, and he was disgustingly hetero normative—but it’s a place to start.”

“J?” Tony asked.

“Already searching, Sir.”

The kids exchanged a look but didn’t say anything about JARVIS. But then, if they were Avengers’ kids, they had to know JARVIS.

“We’d also like to go home at some point,” Nate said. “Or at least have the option, rather than being trapped here.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tony flapped a hand at him. “I got people working on it. We sent them all the readings we could find, and we’ll check in with them tomorrow.”

-*-

“They have a lot more magic users than we do,” Morgan said as she pulled her shirt over her head. It was…amazing getting to meet and bond with a man that was almost her dad but her sentinel needed her attention after the long, stressful day they had had. “And Wanda’s not crazy, did you notice?”

“She was never Hydra,” Nate agreed, dropping his uniform pants. “And they didn’t give her her powers here.”

“Maybe they didn’t in our universe, either,” Morgan offered as led entered the large bathroom in the suite Tony had given them. “Maybe that’s why she’s crazy.”

“You think they just convinced her they gave her powers,” Nate accurately guessed. “With what? The Mind Stone?”

“Could be,” she agreed, turning on the shower. “Maybe her powers and the Mind Stone programming are in conflict.”

“Do we really have to talk about Wanda Maximoff while we’re naked?” Nate lamented.

Morgan stepped into the shower with a saucy grin over her shoulder. “Was there something else you wanted to talk about?”

Nate rushed the short distance between them and pinned her against a wall. “I can think of a few things,” he rumbled into her ear.

Morgan shuddered brought a leg up around his hip, dragging her foot along the back of his thigh in the way she knew drove him absolutely mad for her.

“Hold on to something,” he warned her as he went to his knees in front of her.

“Fuck,” she groaned as she sank her hand into Nate’s hair.

She fucking loved her sentinel.

-*-

“Good morning,” Tony greeted the crowd hidden among the flashing lights. “Thank you from coming here today we have a bit of ground to cover so I would appreciate it if you would all hold your questions until the end.

“As you all know, with the convictions and imprisonment of so many government officials for various forms of theft and corruption, many other public figures have started keeping a policy of transparency with the world—the Avengers are no different. To that end, two weeks ago a magical portal opened in Central Park and ejected two people. We would like to introduce them to you now. The first is my daughter from the future of an alternate timeline—everyone, meet Morgan Stark.” Tony turned to his daughter.

Right on cue, Morgan stepped forward and nodded to the gathered reporters. “Hello.”

“With her came my partner, Clint Barton’s son from that same future alternate timeline, Nathaniel Barton.”

Nate stepped forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Morgan and nodded as well but did not speak.

“We as a team and as fathers have been getting to know the kids—and they have been getting to know us as our alternates did not survive to know them for very long.”

The crowd gasped.

“We have learned what they know to be the signs and portents of future catastrophes and are doing everything in our power to prevent these tragedies—”

“Like what?” one brave reporter shouted out.

“The Chitauri Invasion,” Morgan answered before Tony could. “In our universe, it was…a scouting force. Loki of Asgard was mind-controlled by a third party and used to probe both Earth and Asgard’s defenses. The Avengers and SHIELD had already realized that here and placed Loki in protective custody in an unspecified location but the Third Party may still come to Earth regardless. And as individuals, we would rather our fathers not die so horribly a second time.”

“Their survival increases your survival,” Nate said bluntly. “The events that caused their deaths in our timeline killed more than half the population of the universe.”

There were several shouted questions—the crowd of reporters actually surged forward, and the Stark Security Personnel present had to force them back.

“We are working on multiple layers of defense,” Tony promised the crowd when they calmed enough to listen to him once more. “We are working on every conceivable angle to address this threat—from keeping the fight that may be coming for us off-planet to awakening a genetic legacy that we have confirmed humanity still carries from our time in caves and as tribes across the globe.”

“You’re going to turn us into freaks!” someone shouted, and Tony struggled not to roll his eyes.

“On the contrary,” Tony disagreed. “Sentinels and Guides are natural to our species in a way that automobiles and skyscrapers are not. After spending two weeks in the presence of a bonded pair, I can personally tell you, I have never felt safer than I have under even the informal guardianship of a sentinel. And the mental health benefits of spending time with a guide are instantaneous. Together they make me want to be a better person, to be more considerate, and do more for those around me.

“In Morgan and Nate’s timeline, Sentinels and Guides had re-emerged in response to the issue we are trying to prevent. Morgan and Nate along with the one living sentinel and his bonded guide that we have been able to find in this world agree that such a development before those events could be key in preventing them altogether.

“That said, this genetic legacy is unlikely to awaken in someone that is not invested in protecting the Tribe—that is, humanity in general.

“As our children have awoken this genetic legacy, Clint and I will be going through various exercises to attempt to awaken the legacy within ourselves. We invite everyone interested in emerging as a sentinel or guide to invest themselves in these exercises as well. You don’t get to pick which one you get—it’s a genetic legacy, guys, it’s in your blood, decided before you were born—but you can find everything we know about sentinels and guides by looking up the Guardian Initiative online. Everything legitimately from us will contain the GI watermark which you can see here,” Tony pointed to the screen to his right and JARVIS put up the image right on cue.

“Questions?”

-*-

“And he’s going to be alright?” Tony asked, yes again.

Morgan the Cheeky rolled her eyes at him. “He has to struggle, or the isolations won’t awaken his sentinel gifts.”

“I don’t see why you can’t tell me where your isolating him,” Tony complained.

“Dad.” Morgan shot him a come on look.

“Fine,” Tony huffed. He knew why he couldn’t know, because he would monitor Clint to make sure he survived, sentinel gifts be damned… which was rather counterproductive to the entire exercise.

“If you want to be agitated about it, that’s fine. As connected as the two of you are even inactive, it might motivate him to come online more quickly—just don’t make the rest of us suffer for something you said you understood and agreed to. That’s not right.”

“Yeah,” Tony agreed with a huff. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to keep his agitation to himself. “When will Nate be back?”

Morgan rolled her eyes. “He already is.”

“That was quick.”

“Quinjet—” Morgan stiffened. “Nate!” She scrambled to her feet and ran. Tony immediately followed.

When they made it to the hangar deck, Nate was hanging on to the Quinjet with metal claws stuck through the paneling. His feet were in the air pointed toward a circle of light glowing gold in the air.

“JARVIS, lock the car!” Tony ordered. The second the elevator stopped, electromagnetic locked sealed the door.

“Dad!” Morgan objected, slamming a fist on to the door before taking a step back to watch the security footage JARVIS projected onto the inside of the elevator car for them.

There were several angles of footage available and they got to watch live as a man wearing an actual facts red came stepped out of the golden light. He was so overly dignified that he came out the other side as ridiculous but nothing about the situation inclined Tony to laugh at him.

Morgan slumped in relief. “It’s Dr. Strange,” she explained. “He’s a part-time Avenger in our time. You haven’t met him yet.”

“So, we’re safe to go?”

“Yes!” Morgan immediately agreed.

“JARVIS.”

The doors opened and Morgan scrambled through to her sentinel. “Nate,” she said gratefully as he pulled her into his arms.

“I’m okay,” Nate said, running his hands up and down Morgan’s arms to warm her. “I’m okay.”

After a few moments, Morgan drew herself back up and glared at this Dr. Strange. “Stephen.”

“You’re fine, obviously,” Stephen Strange frowned at them. “Hawkeye was ridiculous in her demands that I retrieve you.”

“Lila’s always ridiculous,” Nate muttered. “That’s why she’s team leader—her sheer ridiculousness.”

Strange shrugged and nodded like he couldn’t argue with that. “Well, what do you two want? To stay here or go back?”

“Can we visit?” Morgan asked. “If we go back?”

“No,” Dr. Strange shook his head. “The energy to reach this place by myself was extreme. I cannot agree to popping you back and forth without my duties suffering for it. You have to pick. Here or there.”

Morgan and Nate exchanged a look.

 

 

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