"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater."
-J.R.R. Tolkien
The street I was on was turning into a crater, and if I didn't move quickly, I was going to join the rubble.
My brain moved into overdrive. Colors blurred, the ground shifted, and I almost fell, but I was thinking and thinking and...what could I do? Use? Defend myself with?
The alien was fast, much faster than I was. I tried with a sudden flash of genius to use my empathy and stave away his fury, but it all happened too quickly for me to even focus let alone push the field out.
What would I use anyway? Could I deflect the emotions of a creature I didn't know existed before today?
All I could manage to do was back up, the blood making my fingers slip as I clenched my fists. The noise of panic was clogging the air and choking me. People surged around me, blurring with the sparks flying in the air. The alien was glinting silver and hate and I was off Steve's radar, and I might have been a mutant, but I was just a human, prone to panic attacks and bouts of self deprecation, and what power did I have against another world? The alien lashed out now, and I ducked in time to avoid the blue shot of light.
It all moved in slow motion then, and I thought I could see the sun in the cracks of the ground but it was really just Iron Man shooting from his hands against the Captain's shield. The alien fired again and I swear I could feel it, but my mind had fizzled down and turned my body numb and somehow I was off my feet.
It was a stupid thought to have but I had pushed my friends away, and I had pushed my parents away, and I had been alone for a while but I suddenly felt it.
The alien was momentarily distracted by a horde of people pushing past me. I noticed that as more time passed, more of the aliens filled the streets and more slug-like things flew through the air. The water level in my chest was rising to my throat.
The people were gone. I pressed my eyes shut when two of them crumpled to the ground. I couldn't think of Sean, or Joanna, because if I did, I might crumple too. Instead I looked the opposite way, to the sky, and thought for a moment I saw a flash of green but it was hard to tell with all the other colors bleeding around it.
The alien found me again.
I was just a human. I had no ascertainable powers to help me in hand to hand combat. I was going to die by the hands of metal and space.
But then, just as another blue shot headed toward my head, I realized something.
...Natasha was too. She wasn't injected or radiated or a demi-god, and she was out there fighting, killing them, saving us. She was cold but fierce and strong, and she was human and doing it, and so could I and she hadgiven me a gun and...she had given me a gun.
My brain reacted in world speed and even though I had never felt comfortable with metal in my hand like that, metal that could kill, I pointed it forward and switched off the safety and fired without a thought.
Maybe I had seen a flash of green. And maybe he didn't want to have a relationship with me, but I was going to live long enough to either convince him otherwise or to become strong again, because I had spent too much time being weak.
The sky was opening up, and Jack Walker was pretty convinced that it was the end of the world.
He had decided this once before, on the day that he put his only son in the ground. But at that moment, he was the only one in the city who wanted to run down the street and scream until his lungs bled. Right now, it seemed that everyone was.
The window in the lobby faced the street and he watched, transfixed, as people tore through the streets.
He never considered himself a brave man. He couldn't even talk to his family most of the time. Hell, his wife hadn't even expected him to help her with Sean's funeral. But this felt like a new low, standing with his hand turning white holding a briefcase and watching foreign things fill the sky.
He was a good runner, usually, but today his legs would not work.
He stood there for ages, wondering if Sean's death had tampered with his emotional response. It must have, because while people fled or hid or screamed all around him, he stayed in the same spot, watching with the numbness of desperation.
They were aliens. They must have been, because they sure weren't human. He saw fire and blood and screaming people. He saw flipping cars and...heroes? People fighting back at least. Sirens and cars.
All that movement and he still didn't have hope. All that activity and he still couldn't budge.
He probably wouldn't have moved an inch unless he saw his daughter.
He thought he was dreaming for a moment. Only a dream could have conjured this wickedness, this pure evil that would have placed his only living child who should have been safe on another continent into the very path of harm's way.
He was sure of it this time. The end of the world, and he couldn't do a thing about it.
I was in my father's building. It had snuck up on me, and after I ran out of bullets, it seemed in my best interest to head indoors.
It was strange, but it was like my father had been waiting for me. He looked like he did every morning before work, with his suit pressed and a briefcase in hand, but there was something wrong here because he was frozen.
"Dad?"
"Scarlett?" His eyes rolled like in a daze. "How...w-what are you doing here?"
"I came to help."
I was breathless and my body hurt to the core, but here was my father and for that I almost drooped in happiness.
"But how did you know? What about...India?" His face paled. "I don't understand."
I bit my lip as he shook his head. His hair was grayer than I remembered, but maybe he only looked older because his speech was confused and his eyes were dull and he was the only one standing still and looking small in the large windowed lobby.
"I don't really have time to explain. Do you know if Mom's okay?"
"She's not here, she's on vacation with your Aunt," he said distractedly, his eyes fixed on the window while my body drained of the idea of my mother trapped somewhere. "What are they? What's going on?"
I followed his gaze out the window and felt my heart jolt as I caught a glimpse of Bruce.
"What is that?" my father gasped.
"I'll introduce you two at the next Sunday dinner."
My father actually broke his stare to look at me funny, but I shook it off. My head was pounding and my back was soaked with sweat, and this still wasn't over.
"What should we do?" my father asked, his movements jerky now that he was moving at all. "Hide?"
I looked out at the street. Most people were off of it, but the emotions were palpable in the air. Anxiety and fear turned my vision cloudy and colored and I felt suffocated.
"Let's move from the windows."
We settled away from them, our backs against a wall near the front desk. My father probably thought we were waiting it out, but I had other ideas. If I couldn't fight physically, I would mentally.
It was hard to think of calming things in such panic, but it helped that my dad was still and silent as a stone. I closed my eyes and tried to think of quiet and soothing pictures. Light dappling across water. Bruce's hand in my own. Dylan reading Madira a book. Watching stars before bedtime.
I pushed it all out. It was the least focused my energy had ever been, but I tried to imagine it like a cloud, rising up and finally settling over large spaces. There was a group of workers not too far from us, all connected by at least one touching limb, and I chanced a look at them. It was hard to tell, but I think some of their shoulders visibly relaxed.
My head was still pounding from a harsh blow, and I was sweating even more, but I didn't stop. Mindset is just as important in a bad situation and I wanted to be of some help. As long as my brain worked, I was going to use it. My shirt stuck to my skin and my eyes grew heavy, but I tried to relax and closed my eyes.
I'm not sure how I long I sat there. There were no clocks in here and time was subjective in a crisis. But when I felt myself drifting out of consciousness, I turned to my father.
He broke his daze to make eye contact with me.
"I'm glad you're here," he whispered, his voice almost unrecognizable. "Well, no...I wish you weren't here. But if you had to be here, I'm glad you're here. Does that make sense?"
My dad never really said what he was feeling, so I nodded but couldn't actually force words from my throat. I grabbed his hand and squeezed, but my fingers felt numb.
His eyes narrowed in concern as my body grew heavier. His gaze flitted to the space around me.
"You're bleeding."
My hand was crusted in blood, but it was old now and had stopped somewhere around my last bullet.
"It's okay, just got glass in my hand..."
Why did it suddenly hurt to talk?
"Not your hand, your back..."
I saw him gulp and he put a hand on my shoulder, which immediately sent hot spikes of pain rolling down my back. I cried out and he recoiled, when a sickening thought entered my mind.
It wasn't the sweat making the shirt stick to my skin.
My eyelids were weighed down again, but this time I gave up and let them close.
After Agent Hallows told Scarlett he was a mutant, she hadn't responded with a lot of excitement or surprise but he didn't really blame her. They didn't know each other well, they were being attacked, and her boyfriend or unrequited love or whatever the hell Banner was was turning into a huge monster...but she had found him later and he would never forget it.
"It's not a curse, you know," she said, sitting beside him in the hallway. She was still visibly shaken up from Joanna, and then Bruce leaving the Helicarrier, but she wore the tiredness in dignity. "Your mutation. You said it hurt the people you love, but isn't it sort of a gift?"
"Oh yeah, a real gift," he'd muttered with bitterness, rolling his eyes. "Let me reveal exactly what people don't want to know..."
"No," she said, shaking her head. "You can sense other mutants. You have the power to help them with something they might have been too scared to ever say out loud. You have the power to find people who are just like you."
"And what if they resent me for it?"
"Then they resent you. Then they're angry. But the way I see it, you're going to stumble across someone who's glad they're not alone. Well, someone else...because you've already made me feel better."
"You're just saying that cause I saved your life."
She grinned now, for one moment her eyes growing brighter.
"Doesn't make it any less true."
He hadn't looked at it that way before. And maybe she was a pain in the ass, but when things settled down, and the dust fell to the ground, and Bruce shook with fury when he realized she wasn't there...
Well he thought it was time to use his gift to find her.
Well...that took a while. But your reviews are simply LOVELY and I hope you liked this one!
Note: I know technically Natasha is all enhanced and whatnot, but I feel like Scarlett wouldn't know that, so let's roll with it. :)