There were bad ideas. And then there was this idea.

The mission briefing was a tense affair. Fury generally looked like he was pretty much brimming over with barely contained temper but today there was an edge of something else. Like he was actually nervous.

It started with Jarvis. A distress call, barely legible, picked up through some of the equipment they'd been tinkering with, a radio frequency which had been frustratingly silent for years.
Bruce had barely looked up at the time, absorbed in something entirely unrelated. In the early days it wasn't uncommon for them to pick up junk signals from here, there and everywhere, before they'd fine tuned the frequency, cast a tighter net. And had ultimately ended up with static silence.

Jarvis had ensured authenticity of the message, a primitive nine-element signal in Morse code pistoning away from Somewhere, Outer Space. And the curious thing was, Jarvis insisted that he’d accurately identified the the sender: the signal had come from himself.
From then it had been a flurry of activity. Bruce had assumed, not unreasonably, that his involvement would end after he'd traced an approximate origin point and passed all the information on to SHIELD and James Rhodes.

Rhodes was more than capable of handling things from there as far as tracking the signal went. The hype subsided a little when they realized they were dealing with a two-year old mayday that was only still broadcasting because it ran on a loop. Remote scanning of the area where the signal originated hadn't thrown up anything but empty space, either.

So it was a coldly unpleasant surprise to be called in to see Fury and be informed that they wanted him, Bruce Banner of all people, to go into space. He'd spent a good forty minutes arguing precisely why that was a terrible idea and surely someone, anyone else could go along as the resident scientific advisor. Someone who had a slightly more normal response to stress, perhaps. But he'd somehow ended up steamrollered into it anyway, not even slightly mollified by Maria Hill's repeated assurances that it had been over four years without a spontaneous incident and he'd probably be fine. The 'probably' was the killer.

Judging from the faces around the briefing table, Bruce wasn't the only one who'd been forcibly persuaded by Nick Fury. Steve Rogers looked positively depressed at the idea and normally he perked right up like an eager puppy when someone threw him a good old-fashioned rescue mission. Natasha was entirely unreadable, as ever. Only Rhodes seemed keen to get the show on the road, champing at the bit.

It wasn't that Bruce didn't want to help. He'd been trying to help for four years. It was why he'd moved into Stark Tower at Pepper's request instead of going back to India after the disaster that had been Manhattan. It was why he was pulling all-nighters fine tuning equipment that had little to no hope of yielding anything productive. He just hadn't envisaged that helping would lead to him getting shanghaied into a space mission.

So here they were, four years after Tony Stark had flown a nuke through a portal and never come back in an act of self-sacrifice which had ultimately been futile. Three and a half years since they'd beat back the last of the Chitauri invaders, with an immeasurable death toll, an unimaginable cost in human life. Three years after Tony had been declared legally dead, after his funeral and the public outpouring of grief that had come with it.

Bruce was under no illusions. He didn't share Rhodes' wild hope and optimism, that restless brimming energy which radiated off him in waves. He didn't share Natasha's quiet confidence either, or Steve's palpable anger at having to step in and clean up Tony Stark's mess, four years on.

No, this wasn't a rescue mission, not even close. They were going out there to bring back a corpse.

If they were lucky.

---

“Fury's lost his mind,” Steve declared as they sat around waiting for things to kick off. Bruce didn't normally agree with the supersoldier on many things, but on this he was in complete accordance. “This is a shot in the dark at best… and no offense, Dr Banner, but I have no idea what you're doing here.”

“None taken,” Bruce replied mildly. He fiddled with the strap on his bag and wondered himself how exactly he'd ended up in this situation. He shamefully suspected that he might have been more firm on not coming if it wasn't for the fact that Natasha was going. But it didn't do to admit that.

There was the matter of Pepper too. He'd never seen, up close and in such excruciating detail, what just the right cocktail of grief and hope could do to a person. If there was a chance that bringing Tony's body home would bring her some closure, it was worth it. Of course, there was always the outside chance that they might find him alive, but he'd run through the probability calculations with Jarvis before setting out, taking as many variables as possible into account. It wasn't looking good.

They had no idea what they'd even find once they got there. A two year old signal meant that Tony must have gotten on board a ship. They weren't likely to find him floating around in the Iron Man suit somewhere in space; he couldn't have possibly lasted more than a few hours in that, let alone a couple of years. Jarvis had been adamant on that, not least because if they went with the theory of the source of the SOS being the AI itself, that presupposed a functional Iron Man suit, which in turn required a viable power source, say, Tony Stark’s arc reactor.

“I mean, you said yourself there's nothing out there,” Steve continued, pacing the holding area, a ball of tension in human form.

“I said we're not detecting anything; there's a difference. Either there's nothing there, or whatever is there is really good at hiding.” He wasn't sure if that made things better or worse.
“So either we're going on a wild goose chase, or we're walking into an ambush. Great.” The captain sat back down and pursed his lips, glaring at Bruce like he wanted to shoot the messenger. “You're really making this whole thing seem worthwhile.”

Bruce shrugged. “Sorry. I thought I was here as a scientific adviser. I didn't realize it was my job to boost team morale.”

Steve ignored him and looked to their third team member, who seemed to be far more collected about the whole thing. “What's your take, Natasha?”

Natasha was either tight-lipped or straightforward about things and currently it was the latter one in effect. “I don’t like it,” she said bluntly. “It’s rushed, it’s unplanned, we’re out of our element and one man down.”

Clint Barton still nursed the fallout of their last mission together and, despite stiff-necked arguments on his part, Fury had rightly decided that an archer with one leg in a cast had no business on a space mission.

As far as Bruce was concerned that was about the extent of Fury’s comprehensible decisions, because shooting three unwilling Avengers plus one emotionally compromised Lieutenant Colonel out of Earth’s orbit was probably the worst idea since publicly executing Loki. Which, admittedly, had earned SHIELD a PR upswing, but had also hounded Thor off the planet for good. Which was too bad, because they could have really used an alien demi-god plus indestructible hammer that wasn’t confined to the laws of physics right about now.

“I agree with Cap,” Natasha continued. “I’ve been in the business long enough to recognize a trap when I see one. We’ve all enjoyed front row seats when it came to dealing with Chitauri. Who says they haven’t salvaged Stark’s suit and activated the distress beacon? It wouldn’t be the first time in human history someone had done that.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Four years is a long time. Stark is almost certainly dead.” She looked around at her team mates. “If you all think that this is a mission to bring Tony home, you're idiots. Fury knows fine well that there's little-to-no chance he's survived. He's more interested in that Chitauri ship, and the tech on board.”

Bruce sighed as several things slotted into place for him. Of course this was about the ship; the cost of this mission alone was astronomical and Fury wouldn't be setting it up if he didn't think there was going to be a big pay-off at the end. Still, right as she might have been, Natasha's comments rankled. He wasn't sure at what point he'd become the cheerleader for the Save Tony movement, but somehow he'd been the one who'd spent four years relentlessly trying to track down any possible signal or sign of life in the first place.

Bruce Banner, patron saint of hopeless cases.

“Probably dead,” he corrected, because that was the best he could muster up in terms of optimism.

“So we're walking into an alien ambush for what? A new toy for SHIELD? A one in a thousand chance that Stark is still alive?” Steve demanded.

“Actually, it's closer to a one in twenty-six-thousand chance,” Bruce corrected him apologetically, a statement which was apparently received about as well as a fart in a proverbial spacesuit, judging by the look on Steve's face.

“Yeah, well try telling Rhodes that,” Steve muttered. “The way he's acting, you'd think we'd already found his buddy.”

“I’ve talked to Fury about it,” Natasha offered. “Vetoed his spot on the team. War Machine could be an asset, but Rhodes is too emotionally invested in this. He could jeopardize the mission.”

Because bringing along one more helping hand was going to so spectacularly thwart their odds on an already hopeless cause.

Natasha furrowed her eyebrows. “Has anyone entertained the idea that Jarvis could be malfunctioning?”

Bruce frowned. He thought briefly about the concept of a probably-sentient AI going slowly mad alone in space with the decomposing corpse of his master. It was not a pleasant idea to entertain and he was ashamed to realize that he hadn't really considered the possibility. He was so used to working on an almost daily basis with Jarvis, the Stark Industries iteration of Jarvis at least, that he'd come to see him as completely, incontrovertibly dependable.
But there was also no question about the fact that Jarvis was far, far more human than a computer program should be.

“It's unlikely,” he said, pushing that thought out of his head. “I know it's a long shot but I still think that the most likely explanation is that Tony was alive when that signal went out. Jarvis isn't something that can easily be brute-forced into doing something unless it was in Tony's interests. I'm not entirely convinced that we're going to find him alive. But I'm equally not convinced that this is a deliberate trap.”

Or at least, if he said it enough, he might believe it.

“Well, you'll forgive me if I don't share your faith, doctor.” Steve had a really irritating habit of refusing to call Bruce by his first name, despite the fact that they'd known each other for years now, been fighting side by side and that the Hulk had saved his life on a few occasions. He suspected it was because Steve had never been at ease with the idea of Bruce being 'on the team'. Not that he'd ever wanted to be on the team in the first place.

He looked at Natasha and tried to offer some kind of reassurance. “Look, we'll check it out. If it looks suspicious, we can turn around and come back. It'll just be the most expensive recon mission in history.”

Notes

Welcome to Beyond The Walls of Sleep, which is the first in a pre-written quadrilogy. Updates weekly.

At the end of every chapter you will find a small Easter Egg, ranging from concept art, puzzle, video or audio. We want you to have an out-and-out experience with this. Feel free to submit stuff of your own. All media will be separately published on our tumblr, spacewhalesrock.

For today's extra... we secured a recording of Jarvis' distress call for you. Dr Banner had great success with Morse code and spectrum analyzers, which we recommend checking out in case you want to further... expand your reading experience. View it here.

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