rogue avengers return │ peter parker¹

.Ａｄｕｌａｔｉｎｇ Ｓｕｃｋｓ.

This is a biggie😉

Word Count: 4459

"How much time?" Rogers snapped out. "How long do we have? What do they want? Jesus, Y/N. Why are we spending this time on the Accords? We should be planning for what we're going to do."

"Maybe a year, maybe less. They want to sacrifice the lives on Earth as an offering to Lady Death. Because I want the distractions gone. We are planning. We're just not planning with you."

Rogers was out of his chair and pacing. "How do we fit in?" He stopped and looked Y/N in the eye. "How do we help?"

Suddenly the door opened and Tony walked in, placing a hand on Y/N's shoulder.

Tony laughed. "God, you know, three years ago it would have made me so happy to hear you ask that. Even two years ago, when we were caught up in your boyfriend drama, I would have been ecstatic." His face hardened. "But then, after everything, I remembered that fundamentally I'm a numbers guy. And I ran the numbers."

He tossed a Starkpad onto the table, flicked his fingers and the wormhole disappeared, replaced by a set of projected holographic charts. "Here." He prodded one of them and a graph expanded to show a set of lines in various colours. Romanoff stood and leaned close to see better. At her movement the rest of them crowded around. Hope and Y/N knew them all by heart and stayed where they were

"This is a graph of the approximate Chitauri casualties dealt by each Avenger during the Battle of New York," he said, firmly in lecture mode. "This line," he poked a black line near the bottom, "is Black Widow, who accounted for roughly one hundred eighteen Chitauri. This line," a purple one this time, "Is Hawkeye, with about the same, though the exploding arrows gave him an advantage in the fighting. Captain America is in the same area, with another hundred to hundred twenty." He traced a finger along the bright blue before tapping a white line. "Thor, with three hundred that we can account to just him, and Hulk, here, with about a hundred solo and two leviathans, one with Thor, that brings their joint total to about seven hundred between the two of them. And finally," his finger brought the final line, bright red, into focus. "Iron Man, with four thousand, plus a leviathan, not including the mothership or Chitauri deaths after the wormhole closed. With those, Iron Man has an enemy casualty count of well over fifty thousand."

Everyone was speechless, and Tony didn't wait to find out if silence would get someone talking.

"Ultron," he said, and flicked that graph into focus. "Black Widow, Hawkeye, Hulk, and Captain America all under fifty. Thor, one hundred. Scarlet Witch, two hundred. Iron Man, two hundred. Vision, fifty. And Y/N here, she was fighting on the other side of the city, unknown to us with three hundred. Now, this was a completely different kind of fight than the Chitauri were; there were significantly fewer androids and it was contained in a smaller area. But it's important to note that in both cases, it was a highly contained area. Now," another gesture and the graphs merged and expanded, the lines sliding to the side as the graphic grew. More lines in additional colors appeared; some arcing high and others remaining low. "We projected the maximum useful battle capabilities of each of the original Avengers lineup, along with everyone else who could possibly qualify as enhanced or even enhance-able, and what we found was that we can't afford to fight this war on the ground." He took a sip of his water.

Rhodes picked it up. "This guy who's coming, he doesn't want to take over like the Chitauri did. He wants us all dead. And let's be clear – he can accomplish that from well beyond orbit. The only thing we have going for us here is that he wants the sacrifice for Lady Death to be served bloody, and that means he intends to close with the planet."

"And that fleet –" Tony stabbed a finger at the air and obligingly Professor Xavier restored the image, "is going to be parked above every part of sky we've got. No choke points, no wormholes. Having hand-to-hand fighters, even excellent ones, is going to be useless against that. We need real heavy hitters – mutants like Spider-man, or magic users like Stephen Strange. We need fliers like Colonel Danvers, we need people who do almost everything like Y/N, we need ships, we need space-capable craft that are able to engage outside of the orbital envelope. We need interceptors that can operate while landing craft are vulnerable during descent. We need adamantium and vibranium to reinforce those ships, which is why Stark Industries developed a way to synthesize both elements and is currently generating roughly ten tonnes of each per day. It's still not nearly enough for what we need, but we're continuing to expand production.