Avengers Teamup

Once upon a time, on a Thursday morning that had started like any other, Kurt Wagner was in the library reading a poem when Wolverine appeared in the doorway.

"Stark's on the line," Logan said. "The Avengers Stark. Says it's urgent."

Kurt set his book down carefully and went to take the call.

Tony Stark's voice was clipped and direct. "I need a teleporter. Specifically yours. Can you be at Avengers Tower in an hour?"

Kurt packed his rapier. BAMF — Manhattan.

Avengers Tower's briefing room held four people: Tony Stark with a holographic display; Steve Rogers — Captain America — leaning forward with his forearms on the table; Thor, enormous and careful about the light fixtures; and an engineer named Dr. Elspeth Park, who had not slept in two days.

The problem was the Oscillation Engine — a device planted inside the sealed reactor core of a power station in New Jersey. Four feet of reinforced concrete enclosed the core. A magnetic containment field would detect and neutralize any significant energy source that entered.

Iron Man's armor: shut down at the threshold. Thor's hammer: too powerful, would trigger the device. Captain America's shield bounced perfectly, but bouncing was no use here.

Tony looked at Kurt. "Your teleportation crosses through the Brimstone Dimension — outside this field's parameters. You'd materialize inside before the field registers you." He paused. "You have four seconds before the failsafe activates."

"Four seconds," Kurt said.

"At the outside."

Kurt asked for the blueprints.

Tony handed them over with the expression of a man who had been expecting more argument.

Kurt took the blueprints to the end of the table and sat with them for thirty minutes. His tail was coiled in a neat circle beside the chair, the way it always did when he was concentrating deeply on something that mattered. He traced every wall and pipe and distance with one finger, building the space in his body the way he built any new circus act — not as a list of numbers, but as something lived and known, present in the instinct for space and timing that ten thousand hours of practice had put there. He found the secondary housing bracket in the floor plan. He closed his eyes and walked through the interior of the core in his mind, again and again, until he could do it as easily as walking through his own room in the dark.

He set the blueprints on the table.

He stood up. "Ready."

Tony Stark raised his eyebrows slightly. "Just like that?"

"I've been preparing for thirty minutes," Kurt said pleasantly.

At the power station, Kurt stood before the sealed core door. He found the blueprint image in his mind and measured it once more.

He turned to the Avengers. "Don't open the door. Trust me to come back the same way I go in."

Steve Rogers said, "We trust you."

BAMF.

Cold. Completely silent. Nothing like the warm Brimstone Dimension, which always had that quality of a room that had been lived in. This was simply the absence of warmth — a sealed concrete vault, perfectly quiet, lit by nothing.

But the floor plan was exactly right. The secondary housing bracket was exactly where it should be, at chest height, six feet to the left. The Oscillation Engine was mounted to it — cylindrical, unremarkable, looking like something from a plumbing supply shop.

One second: fingers on the device. Two seconds: pulling — military-grade bolts, torqued firmly and not inclined to cooperate. His tail wound around the mounting bracket for extra leverage, the same grip it used for a trapeze bar. Three seconds — everything he had, one full pull —

The device came free. BAMF.

He was in the antechamber, holding the Oscillation Engine, breathing in a way that suggested he had entirely forgotten to breathe inside the containment field.

The room was silent.

Tony checked his watch. "Three seconds. I said four."

Thor smiled. "The acrobat is efficient."

Steve Rogers made a sound that was part relief and part laugh, and then the laugh won and it filled the room.

Later, over coffee, Rogers asked: "What's your process?"

Kurt thought honestly. "The same as any circus act. Study the layout until it lives in your body. Trust the jump. Once you decide to go — don't hesitate in the air. Hesitation is the only thing that guarantees it goes wrong."

Rogers held his cup in both hands and looked at Kurt with that steady, measuring attention. "Good advice," he said — meaning it for considerably more than trapeze work.

BAMF. Nightcrawler had just saved New Jersey. A good Thursday.