Thanks to RussianAssassin, Anonymous (Guest), Esha Napoleon, TheGirlOfTooManyFandoms, and csilla (Guest) for reviewing the last chapter!

This chapter concludes this story – be on the lookout for the sequel, called I'm Coming Home (To Breathe Again), probably to be posted within the next few days.

It's safe to say that all hell broke loose upon our entry into the control room.

It seemed to me like every guard in the facility was congregated in this single room – why did they always gather in the control room/command center/headquarters? Why was that?

In any case, they did seem to congeal here, which only meant more bloodshed…for them.

Hawkeye and I are a synchronized team, it turns out, both on and off the battlefield, and we go through the men and women serving the Mandarin with pragmatic efficiency.

(I got to garrote someone with a computer cord. 10/10. Would do again, if you piss me off.)

"A piece of cake," Clint pants once all the guards are dead. "I've faced worse. In worse condition."

"I don't doubt it," I retort, making my way over to the control console across the room – it's a HP computer with a flash drive plugged into the side, running an OS I'd never seen before.

That being said, my eighteen years of hacking experience allow me to worm my way into the main system pretty quickly.

"What are you doing?" my boyfriend asks curiously, watching the door from his perch on the workstation to my left.

"Poisoning the system," I reply absently, my eyes flitting quickly over the screen as my fingers fly. "The hell is this system? I don't even…"

Clint continues to watch my back, ignoring my semi-coherent angry mutterings. "So we aren't radioing the reserves in?"

I pause briefly to look at him. "Do you want to call them in, or do you want to burn this craphole to the ground and then dance on the ashes?"

Something flashes in his eyes – something dark, dangerous, jagged and raw. "It'd be my genuine pleasure. Care to explain what you're doing?"

"I'll skip the technical definition, but during my mini-warmonger days, I did design a few nasty viruses," I explain, turning back to the computer. "One of which I called The Bane, and it-"

I'm cut off as, with one final keystroke, every single computer screen in the room (and the surrounding area) flashes red and alarms start wailing.

"It does that," I finish lamely, having to shout to be heard. I reach around the computer console unplugging a flash drive and tucking it into the uniform's utility belt. "Come on!" I shout, taking point as we sprint from the room.

We make in down the hall and around a few corners without running into any guards, and for a split second I think I can breathe again, that it might actually be easy from here on out.

And then the explosions start.

They're a bit like fireworks, and at first I think maybe someone else had hit a munitions closet somewhere.

I'm corrected by the snap-crackle-pop of computers exploding.

Clint hears it too, because he turns to me and shouts, "Was the virus supposed to blow up the computers?!"

"No!" I scowl indignantly. "It must've overworked the cooling systems and overheated the system. These computers are absolute-" I'm cut off by a different crackling sound, this one the sound of a bonfire. "Wonderful! The fire is spreading! This is just great!"

My boyfriend, vastly experienced in ignoring my ramblings (hysterical and otherwise), just pulls me into a side room, the hydraulic doors – were all the doors in this place automatic? – slamming closed behind us.

This room is quiet, save for my light panting and the dull explosions.

"Guys?"

I shriek, scrambling to my feet (and definitely not clinging to Clint).

Natasha just smirks at me before sobering. "Are you okay?"

I take a moment to consider myself before replying.

I was covered in sweat (running from a major source of heat will do that to you) and there was blood splattered all over the bright yellow Beekeeper uniform. My metal arm was covered in blood – both drying and wet – up to the elbow, and I think I was in a slight state of shock. A quick glance at Clint showed him in a similar physical state, but with much less panic in his features and more bruising on his knuckles.

"Yeah," I nod, turning back to Natasha. "We're alright." I give her an inquiring look, noting her mussed hair, the blood under her nails, and the tears in her uniform. "Are you?"

She tilts her head, giving Thor, who was leaning against the wall to her left, a quick look before nodding. "As alright as we can be."

I nod in acknowledgement, turning to face a bickering Steve and Bruce, the latter of which trying to coerce the former into getting a stomach wound treated.

"Where would you like to treat that, doc?" I ask rhetorically, motioning to the room around us – it appeared to be a break room of sorts.

The not-a-medical-doctor just stares at me for a moment before taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Please tell me that blood isn't yours."

"Nope," Clint interjects. "Mostly Beekeepers'." He gives me a proud grin; to which I roll my eyes but don't hesitate to return.

And speaking of proud grins, where were the two guys usually giving the to me?

"Are Bucky and Vader back yet?"

Natasha shakes her head at the nickname, but doesn't comment. "Not yet, young Skywalker. They," she motions between Steve and Bruce, "were the first here, followed by the two of us," now she points at herself and Thor. "I haven't seen either of them."

My response is cut off by the door flying open and two figures diving into the room, the door slamming on the sound of ray gun fire and angry curses.

"Tony, vous idiot! Vous ne pouvez pas attaquer les gens comme ça!"

"Eh bien, je suis désolé! Il fonctionne dans les films!"

"Hey!" I shout over the French exchange. "Shut it!"

Bucky and my father look up at me, thankfully silent. "Are you both in one piece?"

They both nod.

"Okay. Good. Now, if you're done acting like you're five and not ninety-five and fifty-one, respectively, can we get to work?"

"You didn't have to point out the age," they chorus, again in French, but shake themselves off anyways, standing up. Bucky wanders over to Steve, who immediately begins a full-body medical check.

I slowly begin wandering around the room, observing my surroundings.

The break room is sparsely furnished, just like everything else here, but it seems more comforting than anywhere else I'd seen thus far – there's the faint hum of the ceiling fan overhead, the light flickering every once in a while. There's various office supplies and papers scattered everywhere. There's a clock on the wall opposite the door, informing me that it was a quarter to midnight.

I still didn't know the date – or, for that matter, if I was currently twenty-one or twenty-two. If we got kidnapped in the middle of May, and it might've been a few weeks, which might mean-

"Taylor?" I blink at Steve, who had apparently been trying to get my attention. "Yeah, Cap?"

He waves a hand at a sheet of paper on the table in front of them, and I trot over to his side. "What's up?"

What was up was that someone had found a map of sorts, although it was more like a rough sketch of a large building, with notes like more exits? Need better security – tell Jensen, and Must reinforce walls scribbled in messy handwriting.

But it was better than nothing, and it was all that we had.

The most obvious rooms were the two big ones – one was near the middle of the building, like a castle's keep, and marked "Command Center". (Been there, wrecked that.) The second, much bigger, one was near one side of the building, and marked "Hangar".

"That's probably our best bet out," Steve had reasoned, tapping the room with a finger. "If we can find it."

Yeah, because that was our next problem: we didn't know where we were. There were four rooms labeled "Break Room", each a fairly equal distance away from the command center.

"We just need to figure out which one it is," Bucky mutters, and Clint nods beside him, his keen eyes scanning the map as if it held the secrets of the universe.

Steve clears his throat, and we all turn to look at him, mainly on instinct.

It turns out the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan had just that – a plan. "Barton, Romanoff, go check out the area. Don't engage if you can help it. Be careful." The spy twins give him a dry look, and our leader quickly backpedals. "Sorry...be discreet."

Natasha nods, and she and Clint slip out the door and into the hall, neither one making a sound. I stare at the door for a while after it closes - I trusted in their abilities, given that Natasha had been "in the business" since before I was born, and Clint had gotten unbeatable scores on every marksmanship test he'd ever taken; but this was new territory, and that was one of my closest friends and my boyfriend out there.

"-ta. Iron Beta!" I jump, turning around to face Steve, who was looking at me expectantly. "Did you not hear a word I just said?"

"Um...no," I say apologetically, before stiffening my spine. "Sorry. Can you repeat that?"

"I asked if your aim was still on point."

"When is it not?" I scoff.

"Sapporo," Bucky pipes up. "Remember? You couldn't have hit the side of a barn at point-blank range."

"I was seeing three of everything," I remind him, a slightly whine to my voice. "How was I supposed to know Kosei Nakamura would have specially designed drugs?"

"Maybe because he was a drug lord," Bucky retorts, sarcasm dripping from every word. "And you had a concussion."

I open my mouth to argue, but Steve beats me to it. "Iron Beta. Sergeant Barnes. Focus. Cut the chatter."

"Aye, aye Captain."

"Okay, Cap."

He nods sharply, in full Captain America mode as he gathered us around the table. "Okay. We're heading towards the hangar – it's our best way out. Beta, you, Hawkeye, and/or Widow will either be on guns or in the pilot's seat, depending."

I nod once. "Do we know what they might have up their sleeves?"

"I'm guessing a cross between Hydra-like tech and military planes," a familiar voice suggests behind me, and I do my best not to flinch as I turn my head.

Don't think about Stane, don't think about alcohol, you're going to be okay…

"I mean, I don't know who the Mandarin is," Dad continued, slowly walking as he spoke. "Maybe he just likes oranges. Who knows? Point is, I've seen him, and he doesn't look like the type to settle for, say, Microsoft. Or, god forbid, Apple." Our faces twist into identical expressions of horror and disgust, and for a split second I allow my lips to quirk up.

That's quickly squashed by the realization that my father has maneuvered himself so that he was across the table, managing to put Thor and Steve between the two of us.

But is that for protection of defense? a sardonic little voicein the back of my mind asks. After all, the best defense is a good offense.

I curl my lip, causing Steve to pause and look at me in concern. "Are you okay?"

"We need to get out, ASAP," I mumble. "The voices in my head stopped making sense."

"Mine stopped making sense a long time ago," Natasha deadpans as she walks back in the room, Clint hot on her heels. "We have reasonable proof to believe that we're in break room two, Cap."

The Captain nods. "Good work, Agents."

"Not Agents," I mutter under my breath, but Steve either doesn't hear or ignores me completely (which isn't new) as he turns to back the map, tracing a finger along a path before he seems to decide on something, nodding and straightening up.

"Gear up," he orders as he folds the map up. "Grab what you need – we're on the move."

I nod and grab a tote bag in the corner, filling it with as much paperwork as possible and slinging it over my back, fashioning an odd quiver-slash-backpack.

"Are you ready?" Natasha asks, sidling up to me. "To go home, I mean."

"After this long?" I ask, partially rhetorically. "Well, let's just say I'm not exactly shedding any tears."

She nods, a small smirk teasing her lips. "But are you ready for after that?"

I pause. "After?"

"Life will go on," she reminds me bluntly. "Do you think you're ready for that?"

"Are you?" I retort. "I don't think anyone is, Tash. But for right now, getting out is our top priority."

"I agree," she hums, nodding again. She places a hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently. "Make sure you make it out, suzume."

"I will, kumo," I promise her, just before Cap calls for us to huddle 'round.

"We're moving together this time," he explains. "Iron Man, Banner, keep to the center of the 'pack'. No offense, but you can't exactly fight without the suit or Hulk."

"No offense taken," Bruce says, giving Cap a small smile. He seems peacefully resigned to the fact that he's only useful for a) the Hulk, b) his brain, or c) his medical skills (because we superheroes are an "accident" prone bunch).

Dad, on the other hand, looks a bit more indignant, but he nods anyways.

"Black Widow, Hawkeye, you lead us to the hangar and watch ahead," Steve continues. "Beta, Thor, and Winter watch our flanks. I'll be watch our backs. Understood?"

Confirmations are echoed around the room, and, with a nod, Captain America leads our little troop out of the room and back into the network of hallways.

It doesn't take long for us to run into opposition, in the form of about sixteen to eighteen Beekeepers.

They meet their ends quickly and efficiently, and I discover that Thor fights with a grace, fluidity, and swiftness that, ironically, reminds me of lightning.

The two of us make a decent team, especially when the god uses his size and strength to his advantage, aiming for heads and chests while I go in low, aiming for knees and legs and all the squishy bits below one's ribcage.

"Are you alright?" he asks once we're both covered in gore and there are bodies littering the ground. At my nod, he grins largely. "'Twas a wonderful battle, Lady of Iron, and I thank you for it."

"No problem, big guy," I drawl. "It was a pleasure."

He gives me another smile as we continue down the hallway, cutting down anyone who was stupid enough to get in our way, and even those who never did.

This was, essentially, a gigantic middle finger to the Mandarin, in the form of death and bloodshed and maybe a little fire.

And speaking of fire, there was no sign of our earlier bonfire – my guess was they at least had a sprinkler system installed, judging by the smell of rain in the air.

Cap stops us at another pair of doors. "This is it," he announces. "The hangar."

"Are you sure?" Bucky asks, his eyes narrowed at the door.

"I'm sure," Steve assures us with a nod. "Come on, let's get this open."

The door doesn't last long under the brute strength of two super soldiers and a god, and we soon creep into a very large and very quiet cavern. It was also noticeably empty, and that put every single one of us on edge.

"Look," Natasha nods past my shoulder.

I turn on my heel, my eyes widening as I take in the multiple aircraft behind me. Dad was right – they looked like a cross between a Quinjet, a fighter jet, and a gunnery helicopter. They had narrow, two-person cockpits, the seats situated in a single file line, like they were in a fighter jets. The planes themselves had narrow cabins, with an open panel on each side, presumably for guns.

"I'm flying!" I declare, dashing for the nearest jet and pulling myself up so that I was standing on a wing.

"Hold on, Iron Beta," Cap warns. "We aren't going anywhere until we get those doors open," he says, pointing to the northern side of the room, where the floor sloped upwards to a pair of massive doors – probably the only thing between us and freedom.

I push down on the heat rising in my cheeks, half-heartedly glaring at Clint as he smirked at me from the ground.

"Sorry, Cap," I call down from my perch atop the wing. "So how do we-"

"There's a keypad over here," my dad calls, over by the door through which we had entered. I look over and squint at the small device, topped with a blinking red light.

"Do we happen to know the code?" I ask, not expecting to get a good answer – I highly doubted that even the stupidest of guards would just leave the access codes to the hangar door on a sticky note somewhere.

If they did…then we fully deserved to take those codes, fly our way out, and blow everything to hell as we did so.

But, alas, it wasn't that easy; it was never that easy. We had no clue what the code was, and we needed to know soon.

So Dad set to hacking that keypad, with me on standby – not that I would be needed, because keypads were usually child's play – and sure enough, the little light soon blinks green, and a deep rumbling fills the hangar as the bay doors unlock and slowly open, sunlight flooding the room and causing us all to flinch.

The first sunlight we'd seen in a long time, and it hurt.

"We need to move quickly," Steve orders. "Beta, get in that cockpit. Hawkeye, Winter, man the guns. Wheels up ASAP!"

I scramble up the wing and onto the main fuselage of the plane, finding the latch for the cockpit cover and, together with Natasha, pull it open. I quickly slide into the front seat, the pilot's seat, while Natasha, who was apparently my co-pilot, sits behind me.

I close the hatch above me and take a deep breath at the sight of the unfamiliar controls, squashing down my immediate feeling of panic and first grabbing the headset. "Check, one two three."

"This is Romanoff, I copy."

"Rogers, I copy."

"This is Barnes, copy."

"Hawkeye, I copy. Thor does too, but he doesn't have a headset."

"Banner here. I copy."

"Iron Man. I copy."

"Alrighty then," I breathe, buckling myself into the harness. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for flying Air Stark. My name is Taylor, and I will be your captain today. Is everyone in position?"

"We are, Beta," Steve assures me.

"All systems are a go," Natasha echoes.

I nod, even though they can't see me, and flick a few switches on the console in front of me, causing the engines to roar to life. "Is now a good time to admit I barely know what I'm doing?!" I shout over the noise.

"No!"

"Bring us up and around!" Clint instructs. "Full rotation!"

"Yes sir," I nod, grabbing the control yoke and pulling up, letting out a shaky breath as the jet lifts. I rotate the jet clockwise, spinning on a pivot and listening to the rat-tat-tat of gunfire accompanied by explosions from around the hangar – Winter and Hawkeye were aiming for the gas tanks, I realized as I finish the circle. "Alright, boys?"

"A-Okay, Beta," Bucky radios back.

I nod before gunning the throttle, roaring out of the hangar and onto what looked like a military compound – compete with big guns that were shooting at us.

"Nat, what's our weapons status?" I ask, peering out the window as I maneuver us through the gunfire.

"I've got control of the nose guns. Not sure what caliber."

"Doesn't matter," I grin widely. "Point and spray, Widow, point and spray."

She agrees, and I can hear a spray of gunfire coming from in front of me as I watch guards on the ground fall, one after another.

A litany of cursing comes through the headset, followed by Clint's urgent voice. "Beta, we've got company coming in at four o'clock!"

"Roger that. Hold on." I suck in a deep breath. This was just like the suit, I'd pulled maneuvers in the suit for years now, I had this…

I yank the control stick hard to the left, the plane mimicking my movement with a steep roll to my left as there's an explosion where we had been only moments before. I straighten the plane out and force the nose down, dropping our altitude under we just barely brushed over the rooftops of the compound before pulling into a fifty-degree vertical rise.

"Holy mother of god," Bucky moans (or whimpers) after I right the plane again. "That – you suck. You know that, придурок?"

"I told you to hold on," I defend, moving into a gentler serpentine pattern. "Besides, that was nothing. I do worse in the suit."

"Yeah, well, not everyone has stomachs of steel," Natasha reminds me. "We must've pulled 4 Gs in that turn."

"Well," I hum, watching a blip on the radar come closer, "you might want to hold on, because it's going to get worse."

I gun the throttle and pull back on the yoke, sending us backwards and lifting the nose so that the almost went nose-over-tail before twisting us left, performing a barrel roll that has a few screams coming over the radio.

I had a feeling this would be the last time I was allowed in the pilot's seat.

"Prepare to fire, Nat," I request, doing a 180 so that we were facing the other plane. It gets pummeled by bullets – first just from the nose gun, then – once Clint and Bucky caught on – the artillery guns.

I let out a whoop as the plane goes down, steering us away from the resulting fire and explosion. "Hell yeah! Take that, you jackwads!"

"That's gonna attract attention," Steve points out. "We need to mobilize. Do we have missiles?"

"No," Clint replies, before I can say anything. "But they do. Munitions, nine o'clock. Shoot it up…"

"…and it goes 'boom'." I finish, turning the plane around. "On it."

I point the noise of the jet at the pallets of missiles – seriously, who left missiles on wooden pallets? – and literally swoop in all guns blazing, maneuvering the plane so that we hit all the weak spots that most missiles had.

I bank left, tossing the plane sideways and turning on a dime and soaring away just as the munitions go up in a giant ball of fire, which quickly latches on to everything else that was remotely flammable within a ten-foot radius.

I push on the throttle, ramping up the speed as I watch the outer limits of the Mandarin's compound fly by below.

And then it hits me: we were out.

We made it out.

"We did it," I say breathlessly. "Oh my god."

"Woohoo," Clint cheers. "Avengers: 1, Mandarin: 0."

"But technically they did get a few on us," I muse. "If you count everything in between then and now."

"Point."

Between the two of us, it doesn't take Natasha and I that long to figure out the autopilot on our getaway vehicle, and soon enough we had a course set for Park Avenue, in Manhattan, in New York (which, as it turns out, wasn't that far away, meaning we'd been on US soil the entire time).

As I lay back in my chair, watching the sky and clouds zoom by outside, I can still feel the dull throb of terror that had existed for my entire stint as a prisoner of the Mandarin.

It's not a foreign feeling. It can't be.

But this was a new breed of terror, one born not out of explosions and aliens but of the people around you being peeled open and stripped to their very core, exposed for all to see.

And suddenly, Natasha's earlier words come to mind:

"Life will go on. Are you ready for that?"

Was I?

I didn't know.

But now, there was only one way to find out, now wasn't there?