Hey, all! Finally got enough time away from the 'rents to finish this chapter. Sorry for such a long absence! It's been a pretty stressful time on my end.
Anyhow, this chapter quickly (and sort of cheaply) tells Hal's side of the battle. I'm not one for long, drawn-out action scenes, so I've stuffed it all into one chapter. Hooray! Tbh, I'm just glad to finally be out of the Ultron story-line. Well, mostly out of it, anyway.
WARNING: This chapter contains violence and violent descriptors. It also contains choking/asphyxiation. If you think these may trigger you, please do not read this chapter. If you merely want to avoid the choking, skip from the line "Hal peels open her eyes..." to the line "With a resounding squeak..."
Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel, the Avengers, or...anything, really.
"Go, go, go," she whispers to herself, tucked into an abandoned storefront.
Her eyes are focused somewhere far away, seeing through the optical sensors of her repurposed Ultron unit. She spins it out of the way of a flurry of bullets, turning in midair to fire back at the three other units trailing hers. Obviously, by this point, Ultron's noticed one of his own has gone rogue and – unbelievably – the captcha's actually keeping him at bay. Either that or he's just too overwhelmed at the moment to try.
Two of the enemies on her tail begin smoking and the other bursts into flame. Hal flips back around just in time to avoid crashing into a building, although screaming from a blown-out window draws her attention. She pilots the bot over to the shattered glass, dodging falling bits of steel as she peers inside. Another Ultron unit stands there, aiming a repulsor straight at the head of a cowering young woman, and Hal wastes no time rushing forward.
Her bot grabs the other by the metaphorical scruff of its neck, twists, and tosses the remains of the decapitated unit out the window. The woman sits on the tile floor of what used to be her kitchen, shaking and attempting to make sense of what just happened. A thrill of excitement runs up Hal's spine, because not only has she saved someone's life, but also because she realizes the awesome opportunity she has in this moment.
Accessing the voice control, she inputs a familiar phrase, cackling the whole way. The bot holds out its hand to the woman on her command and its monotone words echo in the relative quiet of the room.
"Come with me if you want to live."
Hal almost bursts into tears she's laughing so hard. Then she remembers where she is and what's going on as the building suddenly shifts, threatening to topple over. Now's not exactly the right time for movie references. The bot swoops forward at her command, scoops up the woman, and jets out the window.
"Чекај, чекај!" the woman cries, clinging to the metal frame of Hal's robo-pal. "Моја беба, он је још увек тамо!"
Quickly popping her words through a translator, Hal curses. She sets the woman down on a relatively sturdy-looking patch of concrete a safe distance away from the collapsing building, and then whips back around to retrieve the woman's son. On the approach, she notices the Hulk burst through one of the lower floors, the apparent catalyst to the structure's demise. Of course.
Hal uses the bot's bio-scanner to check the rest of the building, biting her lip when several other figures pop up on different floors. She won't be able to get to them all in time. Switching back to her own view, she brings her watch up, speaking into it so that the rest of the Avengers can hear.
"Those of you with flying capabilities, I need you over here stat," she says, feeling a little like a soldier and very absurd (but, referencing the Terminator in the midst of a battle is completely normal.) "There's a building coming down and there's several people still inside."
"What is your position?" Captain Ladybug replies, not missing a beat.
"Just look for the Hulk."
Hal returns to her robo-pal and flies into the apartment she visited previously. She checks each room thoroughly, sighing in relief when she finds him hiding underneath his bed. Without waiting for him to register her as a good guy, she picks him up and bursts through the bedroom window. Captain Ladybug zooms past her, yellow cape flickering in the wind. She twists around to watch the cyborg work, although she's quickly distracted when the units she previously injured return.
They're smoking a little harder than before, and the one with the severely charred exterior is missing an arm. Hal pushes her unit's thrusters to the max, nearly burning them out in attempt to get the kid to safety before her pursuers can open fire. The telltale zap of laser discharge sounds just as her bot swoops around the corner, flinging the kid into Hal's real body. She distractedly wraps her arms around the shaking kid, keeping him from moving while she continues to dodge laserfire from the other robots.
She easily dispatches the one missing an arm and its damaged thrusters accidentally send it spiraling into its friend. The two fly over the ledge not ten feet away in a twisting hunk of burning metal. Hal turns her attention to the last unit, revving up her repulsors, but they sputter out before she can make proper use of them. Her temperature gauge oh-so-helpfully alerts her to her overheated weapons system after the fact. Cursing under her breath, she grabs a loose brick from the crumbling wall to her left, barely dodging the enemy unit's own attacks as she lets it fly.
The brick hits its mark. Aided by the brute strength of the robot unit, the brick snaps the enemy unit's head to the side. It's not dead, but definitely incapacitated as it attempts to shoot her with a wonky targeting system. Easily sidestepping the white-hot beams of light, she grabs the enemy unit by the neck and drops him easily over the edge of the now-floating city.
…wait.
"What."
Hala scans the vicinity quickly and, when she confirms that there are no enemies nearby – and those thunderbolts effectively occupy those whom are – she returns to herself. The child in her arms has clearly gone into shock, quivering with wide eyes and repeating the Serbian word for mother repeatedly to himself. While she can't speak on behalf of his mental health, he's physically fine, aside from a few scrapes and bruises. About the same as herself. Assured that the child's life is in no eminent danger, she creeps out from her shelter and over to the ledge, peering over the newly installed, 100-foot drop.
She knows Ultron is rooting for the end times, but this seems like a pretty convoluted way of going about it. Although, since apparently Stark's previous AI buddy was blocking him from nuclear access codes, this is probably the next best thing. A city-sized meteor will certainly send the right message to the world. And send it into the next ice age, probably.
Hal is not very fond of the cold.
A laser beam zips by Hal's shoulder, causing her to yelp and stumble back from the deadly drop. Almost a dozen bots are rushing her from the other end of the street. She turns on her heel and takes off in a sprint. The enemies' shots hail down all around her, her own bot standing in as an impromptu shield. She can feel her connection with him slowly wearing thin as the laserfire fries his circuits. Hal has just enough time to activate the self-destruct mechanism before the link is completely gone.
The small implosion from behind sends her flying forward, but she turns at the last minute to keep from squashing the boy beneath her. The left legs of her pants tear (subsequently tearing up a good bit of her thigh, as well) and she can feel the sore sting of shrapnel embedded in the bulletproof material of her shirt. Her special garb kept the explosion from being deadly, but she's sure to have bruises if she makes it out of here alive.
Stark, on the other end of the line, says something about gathering at the key, but with a child in her arms and a bunch of bots on her ass, she doesn't have the time to go anywhere. Instead, she grunts, lifting her watch up to her face.
"Kinda busy here, Stark," she growls into the device.
"Aw, your presence will be sorely missed."
"Kiss my ass."
"At least buy me dinner first."
She rolls her eyes and gets to her feet, dodging around flaming piles of scrap metal and crumbled walls. Hal nearly loses her footing when an explosion shakes the earth underneath her, but she throws out a hand to steady herself on a nearby lamppost. Stark's silver counterpart – some guy named Rhodey, if she remembers correctly – flies overhead, vaporizing Ultron's minions in the process. She swears he gestures to her as he passes and she realizes that he's trying to show her the way to safety.
Hal shifts the boy in her arms so that he's clinging to her neck instead of hanging limply in her arms. Rhodey's waiting at the corner for her, clearing the road ahead of her. Peering through the concrete dust and smoke, she can barely make out a group of ships waiting at the edge of the city. Other survivors are already piling in, guided by a few SHIELD agents. Thank god. She thought this whole battle was going to be a game of musical civilians.
The aching of Hal's feet becomes more apparent as she hurries down the street, zipping through rubble and hiding behind cars whenever stray bullets or lasers flew her way. At one point, Rhodey rushed past her, clocking a few bots in the head as they took aim behind her. With no time for thanks, Hal keeps moving. The child in her arms squirms, as if just coming to his senses and begins crying, no doubt calling out for his mother in Serbian. Hal tries to calm him as best she can, but it's difficult trying to be comforting while you're also trying not to die.
Finally, Hal makes it to the intersection where the lifeboats are waiting. The boy's mother spots him just as she's being ushered onto the ship. The woman starts screaming and crying and, for a second, Hal thinks it's because she's relieved to see her son in one piece. Then something smashes into her side and they go flying. The force of the shove sends her skidding into the railing around some building's basement entrance. She curses loudly, gingerly removing her abused back from the iron bars. She'll be lucky if all her vertebrae are still intact after today.
Hal peels open her eyes to spot the bot that'd so rudely pushed her. It's bigger than all the rest, armed with an assortment of lasers, canons, and guarded by a firewall with coding three times as long as she is tall. She sighs. The boy continues to cling to her, even as she attempts to drop him into the basement access where he'll be safe. She's barely pried his fingers from the sleeve of her shirt when something grasps her by the collar. She didn't anticipate that juggernaut to be so fast.
Hal gags as she's swung around and slammed against the wall. Her head knocks painfully against the bricks and she briefly sees stars, but numerous fistfights with prison guards prepared her for this moment. She pushes past the pain to focus on the bot currently holding her captive by her neck, trying to force her way past the firewall, but to no avail. Its fingers tighten around her throat, the anti-materiel rifle on its shoulder aiming precisely on her skull.
"Hal!"
Her attention snaps to Hawkeye, running up to her from the lifeboats. He looks determined to help, but she waves him away. The juggernaut begins to turn to address this new threat and Hal reaches up with a leg to kick it in the face. Its head immediately twists back toward her.
"Get the kid!" she rasps, pointing vehemently into the basement access. "I can…handle this!"
Hawkeye seems to doubt her skills, but does as she instructs, jumping over the railing to retrieve the boy. It shouldn't matter to him, anyway. He barely knows her; her death would be no skin off his nose. With that problem out of the way, she suddenly becomes aware of the deadly pressure on her windpipe.
Again, she tries to break through the firewall, pulling at the juggernaut's massive fingers with all her might. They shift slightly against her force, but she's not strong enough to tug them away completely. At the very least, their shift in position allows her an easier time breathing. She scans its coding as fast as she can, simultaneously fighting gravity and the fingers slowly crushing her trachea. She kicks her legs wildly in an attempt to find purchase on the juggernaut's jagged surface. If she can ease the pain and get blood flow back to her brain, hacking this asshole would be a breeze.
As it is, finding a loophole in the coding and not suffocating has her attention sorely divided.
When she suddenly finds a hole in the firewall – as if the powers that be finally decided to cut her a break – she dives in without preamble, only to find that one half of the bot's controls are stored on a separate server. And, of course, the side she has control of isn't the one choking her. She spits out a curse, sputtering as she reaches up and crushes the anti-materiel rifle on the juggernaut's soldier, ensuring the bot won't be able to use it on her or the lifeboats. The bot's free arm tightens its grip exponentially; Hal's almost surprised that her head doesn't immediately pop off.
She reaches out with the arm under her control and forces the juggernaut to grasp its own neck. It stumbles back at the action, leaving her body hanging without any support whatsoever. Hal wheezes, using her bodily strength to pull herself up, moving the center of the pressure off her neck. Then, with her robot arm, she squeezes, upping the amount of force as quickly as she can without busting the hydraulics. Metal bends and wires snap underneath her hand, the fingers around her own neck tightening to nearly unbearable pressure.
Finally, just as her vision begins to darken, the sound of machine gun fire breaks the relative silence. By some miracle, a stray bullet catches in the hydraulic accumulator of the left arm, causing a small explosion of fluid and oil. The arm clutching her throat drops her all at once and she gasps for air, coughing on hands and knees. She doesn't spend much time watching her life flash before her eyes, instead forcing as much pressure into the juggernaut's right arm as possible.
With a resounding squeak and the tearing of metal, an over-sized head drops to the ground in front of her, quickly followed by the rest of its body. Hal breathes a ragged sigh and struggles to her feet, tilting her face to the sun-brightened clouds, relishing in the fact that she can still do such a thing.
"Hal!"
She turns to see the last of the lifeboats preparing to depart. Hawkeye and Rogers are standing there, the former resting on a bench and the latter waving to her frantically. In her dazed state, she waves back merrily. He looks so silly in that getup. Like the American flag personified, though she supposes that's the point.
For the second time today, something slams into her at high speeds and she swears she feels her spine shift. She regains her senses just in time to black out, barely able to catch herself as the blood returns to her brain and, subsequently, returns her to consciousness. Hal leans against the railing of the lifeboat as it takes off and tries not to barf.
"God damn," she groans, turn to glare at her 'attacker.' Bullets riddle the thick material of his shirt, complimented by a busted lip and bruised temple. "Maybe a little warning next time?"
"You're welcome," Pietro mocks, collapsing into an empty seat.
She watches the wind tousle his hair, trying to convince herself that, yes, the battle is over, yes, they actually won, and, yes, she's still alive. Hal slowly lowers herself to lie face down on the floor, the feel of cold tiles pressing comfortingly to her swelling cheek. She lifts her watch to her mouth with the last of her strength.
"Hey, Hill," she mutters.
"Hal!" Hill responds, sounding almost relieved. Hal merely wonders how many people are going to shout her name to the heavens today. "Are you alight?"
"I took out the trash; now tell me where my parents are."
On the other end, Hill lets out a half-laugh, half-snort, but agrees to meet with Hal once everything's calmed down. Hal lets her head thunk heavily to the floor. Sleep comes to her readily.
Off in the distance, the floating chunk of what was once Novi Grad explodes.