TGS - #48

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Solar System

–Jack Sullivan–

"Ah, home sweet home," He muttered to himself as the ship finally reached the Gate past Mars. Apparently, there were two gates in Earth's solar systems, which in and of itself was a surprising thing because most places only get one.

The next one should be further away and yet, there was a gate located right on top of the moon and one in front of Mars.

Goes to show just how central Earth was to the events surrounding the global cosmos.

He ordered the ship to remain cloaked and station itself in Mars' orbit because he wanted to check in on a few things. This ship already had the fuck-you decryption built into it so getting access to the wider internet was not a hard thing at all. It was just a little slow, being just radio but he could work with that.

All he needed were a couple of articles to see what was happening.

He saw the time was April 2014 which he had already confirmed back on Xandar so that was good. He saw a couple of articles about the happenings of the Stonehenge along with the weird portals opening in London.

So, he was late for that as well. Tony Stark's grand proposal ceremony where he blew up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of suits had gone viral as well.

The Vice President's arrest was still fresh in the news as a series of scams he did during his tenure were unearthed and pressure was being put on POTUS to be impeached or for him to resign on his own.

Well, fat load of good it did for his political opponents when Tony came out with all the information on the Vice President and personally endorsed President Ellis as being the one who brought the one responsible behind bars.

'Well, more like Tony brought the one responsible down into flames, turning Killian into ashes' 

Then there was the bit about SHIELD and its role in the 2012 Invasion.

"Whoa!" He was so shocked that he stumbled back into his chair at the front page article. He had opened a series of articles and was waiting for the images to load.

On the screen was a still from when he was skewered by that damned sceptre, in HD, just printed on the news with his name for just everyone to see.

WHAT.THE.FUCK!

"What in the All-Father's name is going on here?" He leaned forward as he dug deeper into the series of articles. He even had the urge to bring the ship closer to Earth to get faster internet speeds but caution won over.

He was not sure if the Watcher or the Inhumans present on the Moon could detect his ship or not. Well, he knew that the Watcher already knew he was here, but the Inhumans were what he was worried about.

Not defeating them but of their interference. He didn't really have the bandwidth to deal with them, especially since he was still reeling from his identity revealed to the world.

It was all a haze. Whenever he tried to think too much about the memoirs of him dying in that energy storm, his head hurt a lot and since it mostly consisted of pain, oh so much pain, he subconsciously suppressed that part of his memories.

What possessed the Avengers to make his identity public, not that he had much of an identity in the first place. 

"I thought that they would just suppress everything because the idea of a teenager going out to fight aliens was bad enough but for said teenager to die fighting? That would have raised storms of unheard of proportion. At Least he hoped they did,"

And yep. He looked at the series of protests and riots that erupted around the Continental United States as well as other major parts of the world as they protested not just his involvement in the fight, but also the part where he had to die because somebody in the government had the bright idea to try and nuke Manhattan.

Well, the part where they likened him to Jesus Christ and tried to justify his supposed supreme sacrifice was kind of odd, he didn't know how to feel about that but the truth remained. His death was some kind of catalyst that revealed a whole host of things to the wider world.

Out of the blue, multiple reports citing confirmed evidence of alien artifacts along with the evidence of historical presence came forward, rattling many people's worldviews.

"Hmm? What's this?" He clicked on one of the clickbaity popup links that opened up on the webpage. It was about Romanoff and her supposed disappearance from the entire scene.

Now, that was supposed to be common because she was in the end..a spy but no, this went beyond that.

Oh…OH!

Apparently, there was a stupidly huge funeral procession for him, right in Manhattan, that every single Avenger, Politician, Businessman, and basically everybody worth a damn from every part of the world attended, even T'Chaka from Wakanda. Everybody came to pay their respects but nobody saw the Black Widow.

That led to speculations but that much was nothing. But the thing was, she was not seen in any of the big crises in the later years as well. 

For example, during the Killian crisis, Captain America was the one who actually helped find Tony once his mansion was blown up and he was stranded somewhere.

"Well, there goes his anonymity. It was good that everybody thought he was dead and barring Heimdall if he was watching, nobody should know about his continued life.

Yeah, he must be very busy, what with Frigga, one of the stronger figures in the Nine Realms, dying to the Dark Elves attack? There was no way he would—

"HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!" He suddenly stood up and cursed out loud as his powers flickered around him.

SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

He left the F*cking REALITY STONE on Knowhere. He knew, knew, that he was forgetting something and his literally enhanced mind couldn't go for a second like, yeah it's the freaking Infinity Stone that he left on Knowhere, unguarded.

What do do? What to do!

He couldn't turn back right now, he would be too late. There was no way pirates hadn't already descended on Knowhere to try and strip everything of value from the Collector's collection.

It took him about 3 days to get to Earth in this admittedly slow ship from Xandar. From Xandar to Knowhere was close enough but he had no way to get faster ships. 

He was not worried about the surviving people because Kumpo and the others were there. They were literally as strong as Asgardians, some even more so. What he was worried about was Kumpo leaving the place without looking for anything else, leaving the Reality Stone to be stumbled upon by some unsuspecting fool.

Worse, some fool who might try to use the stone for their own purposes and bring the attention of the Mad Titan to them. It would be the perfect time to strike as well.

Losing Frigga would undoubtedly deliver a big blow to Odin's already waning spirit so Thanos could use the opportunity to shore up his reserves of the Infinity Stones.

"Take me to Earth," he said out loud, hoping that voice feature worked. With barely a jerk, the ship started sailing forward, still in stealth mode. Due to the need for stealth, the ship was slow going but it was still much faster than he had expected.

ETA was less than an hour until he breached Earth's atmosphere.

That was good. It gave him time to think about his next step. He, in all his infinite foolishness, literally forgot an Infinity Stone in his haste to finish the job on Xandar and come home.

"Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" He banged his head on the table in front of him as he realised there was only one way out of this mess if there was even the mess of the Reality Stone being traceable in the first place.

Chances were that Thanos already noticed the energy signature of the Stone and had already claimed it. In that case, he could do nothing but shore up his plans for the other Stones and hope that Thanos doesn't use Reality Stone to devastating effect like Malekith was about to.

He had to go to Asgard and ask for Odin's help to get a ride to Knowhere on an emergency basis. 

Shit, Nidavellir as well.

Oh my god, he was so late for a lot of stuff. He always thought that he still had time but he had zilch.

He had to make sure that Strange understood everything, maybe stop the Ancient One from dying. That would help a lot.

What more happened in 2014, not that he could completely trust his memories of canon anyway, what with his very existence throwing things into disarray. He was sure that Loki would have a much greater fear of the Green Guardian than he did of the Hulk.

He was still unsure as to how he could approach the topic of his death,

'The reports of my demise have been greatly….exaggerated' He did always want to say that out loud but he had a hunch it might be considered inappropriate for the occasion.

For starters, he would don a disguise and after checking up on Pops, go to the Ancient One and see how bad things had gotten.

What else? What else could he predict?

The finger he was tapping on his chin as he tried his hardest to think of any significant events that happened post the whole Extremis thing, stopped abruptly as his shoulders slumped in disappointment.

He promptly slammed his forehead on the steering in front of him.

Of course, HOW COULD HE FORGET!

The Winter Soldier! Bucky Barnes.

This was when the whole project INSIGHT would take place, introducing six new state of the art Helicarriers for world peace, supposedly.

Well, the 40 minutes until Earth seemed a lot longer than they did just a while ago.

So many problems and not a lot of time to do it.

In the meantime, he sifted through the mountain of articles published with his moniker in SEO.

Most of it was just speculation about his life, his powers, and what led to the exact circumstances that led to his gruesome death.

The video was leaked somehow but he knew from the angle, that it was recorded by the suit that ROmanoff was somehow piloting and without Tony's express permission, something like this would have never found its way to the web.

Sure, the video was censored in most places, due to how gruesome it was but it was the truth so they couldn't exactly place a blanket ban on it. Clips of it must have been circulated so many times on the web that it wouldn't even be funny.

Once it was on the internet, there was truly no way of erasing it permanently. The Government could try to curb access or make it harder but never outright block things.

The ones that want to access information and know how to do it will reach the information anyway. The curbs will only work for the majority of non tech savvy people of the world.

The conspiracy theorists would get the docs one way or another.

Speaking of information, the events that saw the death of SHIELD as an organisation also saw the uploading of the entirety of SHIELD's database, which no doubt held the wet dreams of every conspiracy theorist out there.

Well, another thing on the list to prevent them. SHIELD had to survive, in one form or another, the planet needed a globally unified organisation.

Since he knew that getting a unified central government for the entire planet was just a fool's errand, at least not without shedding the blood of millions while being in constant worry about rebels and whatnot, he would settle for the next best thing and that was something like a combined agency of SHIELD and SWORD.

Well, he was going for the stealthy approach here so he could not just go out blazing green and then drop right into the New York Sanctum. He was not that well versed with shrouding and concealment spells.

Opening a portal was out of the question because he just did not have his sling ring on him. According to some truly wild theories thrown about by the Masters at Kamar Taj was that his barriers would one day grow to be so magically conductive that he could just use his barriers as a magical focus, to open portals or anything else that needed enchantments.

In fact, the only enchantment focused Master of Kamar Taj, aside from the Ancient One, that woman was a master of everything, given her long life, had all but begged him to take time and learn Enchantment as the main specialty.

Master Gupta had been nearly brought to tears when he showed him the way enchantments could be layered on his barriers, on the fly, without any preparation time.

No, relying on the stealth systems of the ship was the best bet and besides, he was going to the New York Bay. Traveling to the Sanctum from there with his stealth maintained should be easy enough.

He just hoped that Stark Industries had not made ridiculous advancements in the field of deep space sensors.

With his luck, that might just be true.

____xx____

Bernin Zana, Wakanda

"My Prince! The ship has started moving and its trajectory shows New York to be its destination though the ship could change its direction any moment,"

T'Challa of the Golden Tribe, watched as a Red Alert event happened. 

'Was that City cursed to have all the aliens go to that place? Or do the aliens not know about anyplace else than New York?' He thought to himself in mild frustration that turned to sadness as soon as the aftermath of that invasion flashed in his mind.

After the New York fiasco, riddled with guilt in not being able to help the defenders with the aliens, he had personally led aid efforts with Wakanda and a trust fund they had established in Switzerland in case they needed to move money around in the Western world.

After that, they turned on the lights on some of the forgotten projects about the wider space they occupied in the galaxy.

They knew more about aliens than any other government on the planet, mainly due to their interactions with Mar-Vell, a Kree rebel scientist who revealed himself to Wakanda.

He needed a large amount of vibranium for something and his father, recognising the opportunity, made a deal in exchange for auxiliary systems from the Kree along with a basic data cache about the situation in the galaxy.

They did get the knowledge but the decryption and then the subsequent building of the equipment proved to be difficult. Basically, they were stuck in the cycle of building the tools to build the tools to build the tools to finally build the machine.

At the rate things were going, it would have taken another decade for the deep space scanners to finally be in the prototyping phase. With the sudden surge in funding and resources, they had it ready in less than a year.

That was how they detected the arrival of the ship near Mars.

The ship stayed in the same place for a while he informed his father about the event and in a show of trust, his father placed the decision making on T'Challa.

It was up to him how to respond to this threat. They didn't have a direct line to SHIELD or even the Avengers.

He might have to get creative with this.

He was just about to suggest contacting Stark's AI when he was alerted about the ship moving.

"Okoye," He asked Okoye, the General of Dora Milaje, "Get the Raptors ready and a small squad of WarDogs. We are going to New York,"

'I will not stand idle, not again, waiting for someone else to fight and possibly die for me. Not after Jack, never again'

Word Count - 2746

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