Will You Fight or Walk Away
One year! Sorry for the long wait, but at least it's half as long as last time. I'm getting better at this! I'm hoping to improve on timing even more in the future, since this was the most daunting of all the chapters to write (even after all the research into impact events, natural disasters, and the geology of Eastern Europe, there was figuring out what to go into detail on and what wasn't necessary to include, plus how to work it together in a way that kept up plot momentum. I have a new appreciation for writers. Exposition is hard, y'all!)
I've stopped tagging Fitzsimmons dialogue when they're rattling off science stuff to each other. I hope it's not confusing. I just felt like it broke up their dialogue too much.
5/19/21
~3500 words (excluding my commentary)
Can you stand the pain?
(How long) How long will you hide your face?
(How long) How long will you be afraid? Are you afraid?
(How long) Will you play this game?
(How long) Will you fight or will you walk away?
(How long) How long will you let it burn?
Let it burn, let it burn
May sat in the Zephyr's cockpit, studying the city, perplexed as she kept ready to take off at the first sign of descent. Every so often, she caught a glimpse of… something. A glimmer of light around the city? Probably just a reflection in the windshield or light reflecting off a damn robot.
Robots.
Again.
Ugh.
"Medically, the maximum altitude by which we should complete the evacuation is 12,000 feet," May overheard Simmons say from her position on the bridge. "It's where mountain climbers start to risk pulmonary and cerebral edema if they rise too fast. With the speed the city is rising, symptoms may range from much less severe to much more based on individual health and how high their energy output has been while running for their lives…" She trailed off. "Excuse me, we may be getting new information."
May kept her eyes on the city, looking for that light again, but Davis glanced back. "Fitz and Daisy are back in. Will we take off?"
"She look worried?" May asked. Davis nodded.
May almost reached for the console but thought better of it. With the Zephyr's vertical liftoff capabilities, they could always make a quick exit, and they'd chosen a spot far enough away from the city they'd have the time. The team was still in fact-finding mode, and if they took off early, they'd have to delay for landing if they needed more samples. The Zephyr could always make a quick getaway in a pinch.
Jemma met her friends at the hologram of the globe just as Daisy told Fitz to zoom in on the area they were in. As the view zoomed in on just Sokovia and its neighbors, Daisy explained. "With the impacts of everything falling off the city, I can get a sense of the bedrock for miles in every direction by the vibrations coming through the different areas." Simmons made a mental note about this newfound aspect of her powers as Daisy drew a northwest-oriented line from the black sea in the direction of Denmark, passing through the crater in Sokovia.
"Where we are," Daisy pointed at the first line, interrupting the train of thought Fitzsimmons were about to verbalize before it started, "the ground moves fairly easily, but the vibration quiets to almost nothing along the mountains to the east of us. There's a change in the vibration along this line for as far as I can feel—farther than just the valley, farther than just the country."
"Paleogeography," Fitz said in awe. "If you extend the line through Europe, that's right along the Trans-European Suture Zone…"
"Of course!" Proto-plates! They had ruled out far-reaching earthquakes because of their distance from any tectonic plate boundaries, but the massive Eurasian plate had once been made up of many different plates of varying age, composition, and thickness that had meshed together over time. "The Eastern European Craton is an incredibly thick and stable, ancient slab of rock but where it was sutured to the younger, less stable bedrock…" The vibrational difference between the two would cause a lot of harm to the area where they met.
That couldn't be enough on its own, though…
The impact might damage a large area along the TESZ, but it would hardly rip the Eurasian plate from Moldova to Denmark. It might open up a canyon along the surface of the suture zone but wouldn't reach through the full thickness of the plate, even in the immediate area. She shared a look with Fitz, knowing he'd thought the same.
"Before you say it, that's just the first of two things that feel off with the ground here." With a knowing smirk on her face, Daisy didn't even glance at her or Fitz's questioning faces. "I know the Look."
"And the second?" Jemma asked.
"Right under the crater, the vibration kind of stops, or sloshes–it's hard to explain. The vibrations coming back are all muddled. And it goes all the way down."
Jemma shared an alarmed look with Fitz. There was one thing that could dampen the vibration all the way down the lithosphere, and if it intersected a tectonic suture line that could be damaged by an impact, it would more than explain why Ultron chose here of all places.
Fitz went to the screen displaying the whole Iron Man network and retasked one of Stark's satellites for a thermal scan of the city. After eliminating the heat caused by the friction of the rock tearing away from itself and by some fires on the ground, the rock at the crater's base was still just a bit too warm.
Humans had the technology to detect a mantle plume at least a thousand years before it reached the surface, but an impact event at a weak point on a fissure waiting to happen? That would do much more than a thousand years of damage to the lithosphere.
Daisy caught his eye, and Coulson came over to the holotable. "We figured out the worst-case scenario," she said. "It should give us an idea of how to prepare people if things go pear-shaped." She, Simmons, and Fitz stood shoulder to shoulder, brushing up against each other for comfort as a new simulation played out on the giant hologram of the globe.
The three kids he'd brought onto the Bus, facing down the world together.
"We're looking at a supervolcano, not in terms of explosivity, but volume," said Simmons. "Flood basalt eruptions have contributed to at least five major extinction events," she explained as the hologram started to move.
The scenario started off like all the others that had played out over and over on the hologram. The city plummeted, destroying Sokovia as it drove into the ground and blew apart in a cloud of rock and concrete dust, but this time, it set off a chain of nightmarish events. The impact itself jarred the area so much the once-stable suture between the ancient proto-plates crumbled, the vibrational difference between the craton and surrounding bedrock destroying the land at the surface giving way to a deep gash that, at first, stretched from the Moldovan border to Poland. Then, a volcano lurking beneath the city burst through the surface of the Earth in an enormous eruption, filling the valley, chasing the fracture in the Earth's crust, flooding it, and then spreading it, widening and lengthening the crack until it ran from the Black Sea to the North Sea.
"It's the type of volcanic activity that creates large igneous provinces, only instead of adding to the top of a continent, it would be filling and spreading the rift in the Earth's crust. The Deccan Traps in India consist of roughly one million cubic kilometers of material, and that's after 66 million years of erosion. The St Helens eruption produced one."
"It would spread," continued Fitz, "until the TESZ is essentially a divergent plate boundary through the middle of eastern Europe, separating the Eurasian continent in two."
With the rest of the team now gathered around the table, Fitz sped the scenario up, playing the days and weeks following the impact. The ash cloud spread fast. In the first months, the volcano poisoned the air with gases and sent so much ash into the atmosphere that it blocked most sunlight. Within three months, it had become thick enough to prevent photosynthesis worldwide. Within six, the remaining land-based plant life had all been obliterated by acid rain, halting the entire food supply.
The tectonic plates, usually so slow-moving, had at least a year's amount of movement every month from the start of the eruption. This turned into earthquakes that swallowed entire cities and tsunamis that took whole chunks of populated land into the sea. The lucky ones would be killed by those within the year.
By the end of that first year, the rain had acidified the oceans until no oxygen-producing plant life was left on the planet.
And still, the Sokovian volcano kept erupting.
And the accelerated movement in the tectonic plates erupted even more; around the ten-year mark, every active volcano in the ring of fire also had erupted, their magma stores built up through the plate movement. And even the least fortunate of humanity, those at peak physical condition with access to underground bunkers, and top-of-the-line air filtration, and years upon years-worth of food, would be dead. No amount of filtration could make up for the lack of oxygen in the air.
And they would have just been waiting for what uninhabitable conditions that killed the rest of the world to kill them too. Better to be killed quickly.
Thankfully, there was no way they'd let it happen.
Phil let out a slow breath, turning from the team as he contacted the helicarrier. "We need to blow that city to dust the second it's evacuated," he told Maria Hill. "I trust you guys brought an arsenal onboard to make up for the lack of Insight weaponry?"
"[Clearly, it's good we did]," she said, not remotely sheepish about it, even unaware of the why he'd asked for her assurance. He grinned. Fury's fatalistic approach to missions had its downsides, but when the situation called for it, it called for it. "[We have enough firepower to turn the city to dust five times over]," she promised. "[And we're about to make contact with the Avengers. We'll patch the Zephyr through—only to hear it, obviously. If ever there was a good time to find out you're back from the dead, I sincerely doubt it's now.]"
He made a sound of agreement, stepping away from the team. "We're sending you the breakdown of the worst-case scenario. It's non-survivable, but not immediately," he said quietly.
"[Copy that,]" she said thoughtfully, "[If the worst happens, we'll send out the call. But it won't.]" Hill's voice switched like she was talking to someone next to her. "[Did you see that? There was a light-]" Her comms cut out.
As soon as he'd told his team about the commlink, the live audio of the Avengers started playing throughout the bridge.
"[-not leaving this rock with one civilian on it.]"
"[I didn't say we should leave.]" Someone on the bridge whispered 'Holy crap.' "[There's worse ways to go.]"
"[Glad you like the view, Romanoff,]" Fury interrupted. "[It's about to get better.]" Phil heard a snort from the direction of the cockpit. The man had always loved to make an entrance, and May knew it as well as he did. "[Nice, right? Pulled her out of mothballs with a couple of old friends.]" They all grinned. "[She's dusty, but she'll do.]"
"[Fury, you son of a bitch.]"
"[You kiss your mother with that mouth?]" Phil smiled at that. It seemed Cap was acclimating to modern times.
"[Now, we've been seeing a strange light around the city since we got within visual range. We're not sure what it is yet, but we'll find a way to make this work.]" Fitzsimmons rushed to the cockpit windows.
"[Altitude is 8000 and climbing.]"
"[Lifeboats secure to deploy.]"
"[Send a Quinjet first to test the waters. We need to see how it's affected.]"
Tony watched the approaching Quinjet with a combination of relief and trepidation. Finally, they were so close to this nightmare being over, but if something went wrong now… At first, everything seemed normal. But, about fifty feet from the edge of the city, the plane started slowing down until just as it was almost to the edge, it came to a momentary standstill and then was flung backward.
Jesus. If the Quinjet had been subject to the aerodynamics of a regular plane, it would have had no choice but to hit the helicarrier. As it was, the pilot had barely managed to maneuver around it in time. His private comm link with the SHIELD scientists engaged. "[Sorry to bother you, sir, but could you see what happens if a robot goes too far past the edge?]"
Well, that was easy enough. "Hey, Not-jolly Green Giant!" he called, barely getting it out before the Hulk promptly threw a robot off the city. Hard.
Like the Quinjet, it made it about a ways past the city's edge and then rebounded.
"[Does that happen if you aim up too?]"
Tony flew upward (his large green friend was otherwise occupied, repeatedly jumping on the robot that had been flung back at him). The same effect happened to him, and he used the momentum to plow through some of Ultron's bots at high speed.
"So, a bit of a snag getting your Lifeboats to the city then. Any ideas? Contributions are welcome," he quipped, much less sarcastically than usual. The scientists were a bit odd, but in the time since they'd established communication, they'd proven their academic chops. He'd already forgotten which was Fitz and which was Simmons, but it didn't seem to matter. Listening to them was like listening to one person thinking aloud in two voices.
"[Well, it's not any sort of magnetism repelling them, not if he can fly straight at it.]"
"[But it only seems to affect metal; we know rocks falling off the city aren't affected.]" They addressed him again, "[So sorry to ask, but could you try to find something wooden to throw through the barrier?]"
Friday searched the ruins beneath him and found a chair. He tossed it off the city, and it fell like there was nothing but air.
"I've never seen anything like this." Friday couldn't even give a general type for what the force consisted of, for it appeared to behave like some sort of selective, stretchy membrane only traversable by specific materials.
"[Not in person.]"
"[Only once.]"
"[There was a lab accident your father had in the forties.]"
They had access to that? He didn't even have access to his father's old SSR work. And not for lack of trying.
"[Before he made the shield for Captain America, he had been experimenting with vibranium but never was able to recreate the effect, and it only lasted an hour.]"
"[Light, organic matter, stone, and some rudimentary plastics could pass through unaffected, but not metal.]" Hmm. He assumed they hadn't said all non-metallic inorganics because of the limited things his father had been able to test it with. Would vibranium go through, if it was what created the field?
"[Metals couldn't even maintain pressure on the force field, not unless it had exponentially more mass than the vibranium, and had a fair amount of force behind it.]"
"[In your father's case, the vibranium was the size and weight of a small bead, but the only non-vibranium metal that could move across the field was a Rolls Royce with the gas pedal floored. Even that didn't pass through; it just maintained position without rebounding the other way.]"
"[If the Lifeboats can't get through, perhaps the helicarrier itself,]" they continued, and he went back to fighting the robots as the pair worked this out among themselves. "[But they can't bring the runway flush with the city because the turbines would crash into it.]"
Also, falling off, he thought but didn't say. Listing all potential options seemed to be part of their process, and they were just searching for any way to get people off the city before they could blow it up.
"[The only other option is to enter through the lower-level loading bay where the lifeboats come out from.]"
"[That could only work if they had the helicarrier at an angle so as not to crash the turbines on that side.]"
"[It requires at least a 40-degree angle downward for the lower level to be flush with the city with the turbines out of the way; if evacuees go in on their own, masses would fall and get crushed.]"
"[They'd need to be taken one at a time by flyers or speedsters that can maintain velocity upward and down at that angle to get them through the open doors of the tied-down lifeboats within the helicarrier.]"
Blow it up. Hell.
"[We'll have to make sure no one has any metal on them. No jewelry, take out piercings.]"
"[Screws or metal plates in bones, artificial joints, and pacemakers won't make it.]"
"[Hopefully, no one has braces.]"
Ugh, that was a horrible thought.
"[With the level of cardiac, orthopedic, and dental care available in the area, there won't be many who do.]"
"[Iron Man and Thor can fly them out after the core powering it blows. They'll be trapped until core blows.]"
"[Medics standing by will also need to prepare injections of glucose, altitude medications, and saline for our speedsters.]"
"[We need to know which of the flyers and if the new speedster can get through the barrier; Yo-Yo should be fine.]"
"Am I right in thinking your weapons, no matter how high tech, are of the explosives-cased-in-metal variety?"
There was a long pause. Damn it. The Iron Man suit didn't have the ammo needed to take out the city.
"[Bloody hell.]"
A chill crept up Daisy's spine when she heard her friend swear. She turned away from her conversation with May in the cockpit. "What is it?"
"The force field will prevent any of our Jericho missiles from reaching the city," announced the pair.
Coulson came over with Mack, making a slight cut motion to the scientists, so they cut comms with Iron Man. "We have a few plasma weapons—"
"None that do the type of damage we need."
"As things stand, the only way that city is breaking up is if Hulk and Thor smash off parts of it, and that is not going to be enough."
"Okay," Daisy said decidedly. "So we call the Quinjet back, and I go up."
Coulson, Fitz, and Simmons all turned sharply to look at her. "What?" she asked, genuinely taken aback. She was made for this. "Why-"
"Daisy," Simmons said sympathetically. "Even if you survive what would now be quite rapid decompression, you wouldn't be able to get onto the city."
She looked at her friends' matching expressions in utter confusion.
"The bullets," Fitz croaked.
"After Quinn shot you," Coulson explained, resigned, "the doctors tried their best, but with your injuries, they couldn't even keep you stable, much less get the bullets out without causing more damage. They were still inside you when you were given the GH serum."
May turned in her seat, taking her eyes off the city just long enough to say, "You healed around them."
Daisy leaned against the edge of the table, knocked back by what that meant for her now. That mission in Italy felt like a lifetime ago. She'd been a different person back then, in more ways than one. But the image of what was waiting for the world if they couldn't stop this crept into her mind. Without the ability to hit the city with explosives, she still had to be their best chance. She was made for this. With the world at stake, what happened to her didn't matter.
She took in a fortifying breath. "I'll still do more damage to that rock than all the Avengers put together." She could pulverize the city before it had a chance to fall. No one else was capable of that; not even the Avengers.
"Tremors," Mack implored.
"You were gut-shot," Coulson explained softly. "Daisy, you wouldn't have time."
"The gauntlets couldn't cross the barrier with you," Fitz added.
"Between the new injuries and the recoil on your arms without any protection…" Simmons finished, drifting off as comprehension dawned on Daisy.
"I'd probably shatter my arms or bleed out before I did much damage." Damn it.
There had to be something she could do. To have this power and not be able to use it… She looked at the holotable. "Run the effect of my powers through the simulator," she commanded. "If I hit it from the side, would I change the angle it falls? Could I slow it down from below?"
At the alarm on the faces of her family, she continued, looking down at the gauntlets on her arms. "I could already feel a difference with these things on my arms. My powers…" She paused. "Jia Ying once said that as she'd watched generations of Inhumans go through the mist, she saw us get more refined. As the Inhuman gene adapted, powers became less strong, but also less harmful to the user until almost none had adverse effects."
In the folklore her mother had shared, the earliest known Inhumans were all titans at the level of Hive, though he'd posed a singular threat to the group. But the ones with physical powers like Daisy's had usually died, killed by their own abilities soon after getting them.
"My powers rebound like this because I had several generations less adaption in the gene." Jia Ying herself hadn't been sure of her age, though she'd guessed at least a few centuries. "She said the limitations on the strength of my vibrations were going to be self-imposed, based on how much of the recoil I was able to take. But these gauntlets have reduced their effect on me more and more with each new version.
"We have no idea how strong I am with these."
Fitz and Simmons looked at each other, concerned but resigned. "We'll need to run tests."
Daisy nodded. She would stop this. No matter what.
Hope you liked my way to end the world. Sorry for the lack of Robbie in this chapter. I'm writing a small scene that, for pacing, I think needs to be a part of this one, so I'll edit it onto the end in the next few weeks. But after how much work went into figuring out how to end the world and to set the scene for her below it, I was too excited not to post this once I finished.
The part about the first Inhumans has been a part of my headcanon ever since they continued with Daisy's powers hurting her in season 4 after it was explained at Afterlife that Inhuman powers just didn't do that once one knew how to use them. And since Daisy's powers hadn't been used at this scale before the centipede serum in S5, I felt like it required some explanation.
The helicarrier is based off the Age of Ultron one, not the one in Avengers 1. And the "call" Maria Hill would send out if the city came down is not some Chekhov's gun that will come back later. It's just that we're dealing with SHIELD, not the Avengers, and they have to have backup plans. If the Avengers failed and the start of the end of the world was triggered, but there was still time for most of humanity, I figured SHIELD would have a plan to contact whatever alien races they knew of for the rescue of humanity. Like in season 5, when they (in the timeline that never was) made the deal with the Kree for the technology to keep the Lighthouse in exchange for Inhumans. If the scenario had been survivable, they would have sent word to governments and factories to immediately raise production of gas masks and sub-terranean housing or whatever, but since it wasn't, their backup plan would focus on the long game.
Loved WandaVision so much. Hoping there's a Jimmy Woo-Darcy Lewis spin-off or that they're both in whatever Photon movie/show is in the works. That trio was magic. Did the last scene where Wanda's astral projection was reading the Darkhold remind anyone else of S4 when they'd beaten Eli and Radcliffe was playing his guitar and the camera went to another room where Aida was building her brain?
Loved Falcon and the Winter Soldier, though I felt like their edits to remove the parts about some sort of epidemic left some big gaps in the storyline. Carly seemed like she was less fleshed-out a villain than she was meant to be, and that seems tragic for a villain who meant to fight injustice.
At the same time, Sam and Bucky are comedy gold. I'm totally shipping him and Sarah.