fiction | Part of the journey is the end

3. What if... the world lost its mightiest heroes?

It was Monday. Nick Fury and Natasha Romanoff were sitting inside a car. Fury said, "There was an idea to bring together a group of..."

"—Remarkable people to see if they could become something more," the original six Avengers recited.

"Remarkable people?" Natasha finished. She said she heard the speech.

"We've all heard the speech," Bruce said.

"Many times," Steve added.

"It's a cool speech," Scott said. He still couldn't believe he was actually an Avenger!

"I'm surprised you'd wanna bet the future of the Avengers Initiative on that," she said, pointing at Tony Stark eating doughnuts, sitting on a giant doughnut.

"Shit," said Tony and Natasha.

Rhodey groaned. "Of course, this has to be after that night."

"What night?" Quill asked.

"The night Tony got completely shitfaced and we fought. It was his birthday."

"The shitfaced part doesn't sound so bad," said Rocket.

"It's not just that night," Clint said. "This is that week."

Tony, Natasha, Clint, Steve, Bruce, and Thor blanched.

"I hated that week," said Bruce.

"So did Fury since he never shut up about it," said Tony. "We've heard the complaints for years."

"I was still in the ice at the time of this week and even I couldn't escape the complaints," Steve whined.

"What week are you talking about?" Scott asked.

"Fury's big week," the original six Avengers answered.

"The Stark Expo, my incident in Harlem, and Thor's arrival on Earth all happened during the same week," said Bruce. "You can see why Fury never let us forget about how big of a headache we caused him."

Loki's eyes widened. "This is that week? Fury was right, that was an awful week." He found out he was adopted and a Frost Giant that week, and had also fallen off the Bifrost. He'd had better weeks.

"The Stark Expo?" Peter said, surprised.

"Oh right, Peter said he was there too," Natasha frowned. "That wasn't a good week for a lot of us."

Thor nodded. "That was an awful week." It was when was banished—which turned out to be a good thing, in hindsight—but he thought Loki had died after he fell off the Bifrost that week. At least I got to meet Jane, he thought. But even that relationship ended poorly.

"Stark may be eccentric, but he's got potential," said Fury.

Tony smiled slightly. He was angry at Fury for not telling them about Carol and the Skrulls, but it was always nice to hear compliments from him.

Peter snorted. "Eccentric is putting it nicely. Tony is weird."

Tony opened his mouth to protest, but Peter just had to say three words: "Gerald the Alpaca."

Tony closed his mouth.

"What he's got is a hangover," said Natasha.

Natasha and Rhodey frowned. They did not have fond memories of Tony's birthday that year.

"Also true," said Tony. "It was a wonder how I could even sit in the giant doughnut." He was glad that he was sober now.

Fury reminded her of the time he recruited a Russian assassin to join his American covert ops team.