Keepsakes 2.3
My coat billowed as I ran faster than I had ever done before.
As much as I'd like to say that it was because my heroic heart couldn't stand the idea of letting people get hurt because that carless bitch decided that she needed to flex her status as an Avenger by arresting an unknown in a very public and crowded space, it would be a lie. My swiftness was primarily due to my power's versatility. I ran as if Lung was trying to immolate me, which meant that I was running as fast as I was physically able to with my power keeping the weight off me. It wasn't as tricky as my stunt with the mob because its simplicity couldn't hold a candle to the complexity of moving the hundred or so pieces of shrapnel I used to keep the rioters at bay. It was almost like puppeteering my own body more than anything else, which relieved my aching legs.
The rest of it was desperation, pure, illogical, human desperation. It was hard to explain. I knew that X could take care of herself; I knew that out of the two of us, she had a better chance of escaping Miss Marvel without killing her, and I knew that whatever happened to X, she could heal. But that was the logical part of my brain telling me things that I knew, and there was nothing logical driving me to act as I sprinted out of the Hall of Biodiversity and its simulated rain forest displays and into the Hall of North American Forests.
There was too much interference to follow X's claws reliably, especially with the flickering presence that was rapidly approaching from outside. When compared to the Natural History Museum's colossal structure, they were a sliver of foam in a lake, which meant that I would need to rely on my observational skills.
Like the Hall of Biodiversity, it was dimly lit, which made following the blood hard, especially with the masses panicking and stampeding in every direction except the one with the closest exit. The Hall was circular with dioramas depicting the various biomes found scattered throughout North America. My eyes darted from diorama to diorama as I shoved through the crowd, trying to spot clues that would help me find X. There were swamps, grasslands, redwood forests, and pines, but nothing stood out. It wasn't until I turned a corner and spotted that the colossal tree stump they had on display had X's claw marks digging into the wood across its rings and a fine sheen of impact splatter over them like morning due.
The blood looked sprayed on, which meant that whoever that blood came from was hit with enough speed to mist it upon impact, which did not bode well for X.
She was fast, inhumanly so, but not fast enough to do that to a Brute. Her claws could cut through anything, but that was it. Her speed, years of dehumanizing training, and natural ferociousness made X dangerous, but that would only take her so far against someone that could bench press a tank and keep fighting after being sucker-punched by She-Hulk.
From there, I moved to the next Hall and only saw destruction left in their wake. This Hall mainly was marble white with lights bright enough that my eyes took a few seconds to re-adjust. There were holes in the walls where Carol's photon beams punched through them, ruining the geological exhibits and splitting the sixty-three-foot tribal canoe from bow to stern. The spacing between Carol's blasts told me that X used her agility to create and close the distance between herself and her target.
If I were in any other frame of mind, I would have found this saddening, but as I was, I couldn't focus on the destruction as anything more than data. So I ran past them, satisfied that I collected enough superficial information from the destruction to move on.
Or so I had hoped.
I had in my disparaging of Carol Danvers' forgotten that she had signaled someone and he was waiting for me in the following Hall.
I stared at him hard, my heart slammed against my ribs like it wanted to break free, and my vision, pun not intended, narrowed into a tunnel and bore down at the silent hero before me.
His face was red, and his eyes glowed a whitish-yellow. His features were sharp, pronounced, and perfectly symmetrical. The rest of his body followed the same classical look of muscular perfection found in statues like the David. His pants were short and yellow, with a shiny gold belt covering his abs. He wore a green and yellow cape with a pronounced collar that would have looked gothic if not for the garish combination of yellow and green. There was a yellow diamond over his pronounced chest, and he floated above the ground like some kind of godly messenger.
For a moment, I forgot all about my mother, the teacher, and my father, the dockworker. Those memories that I considered my own but whose meaning were stolen away by a mad witch were gone. In their place was the hungry child traveling with a caravan, looking at newspaper clippings of my Mother and her new husband again as they saved the world once more and about her new family.
Her family without me. Tommy, Billy, Vision, and the Scarlet Witch.
"You…" My voice escaped me as a whisper, as my memories waged a small battle for dominance that I was all too aware of as I was overtaken by irrational hatred. I knew that those false memories had never happened, but that didn't matter because they felt real. Every evil that occurred as a consequence of my abandonment, from the fire that horribly scarred my grandmother to the loss of my arm, just bubbled up to the surface. I was worse than apoplectic. My rage was volcanic.
God, it was like I was being Mastered.
'You stole her from me!' The child in me shouted with all its considerable emotional might, making me feel more of an echo than I already was.
My magnetic sense retreated towards me, forming a sphere of magnetic energy around my body like a protective barrier. I could feel the building groan as power collected itself in a violate and red haze, and my feet lifted themselves from the ground until I could meet the eyes of this machine.
Its stoic face morphed into a visage of confusion at the sight of my rage, and it took all of me not to lash out.
'I am in control.' I mentally seethed. 'Not her!'And for a moment, I was in control.
The anger began to ebb away, and I could take in what had just happened. I had fundamentally misunderstood Magneto and, by extension, my power. Having lived in a world where powers were fundamentally limited by extradimensional parasites, I limited myself to the most basic expression of magnetism.
Then he spoke, and I was no longer in control.
"Greetings," His soft voice said neutrally. "I am Vision, let us end this amicably before-"
Everything went red with rage, and I hit him with everything I had. The building shook, causing the lights to flicker before shutting off. The sphere of violet and red energy slammed into Vision center mass, launching him against the diorama of homo Erectus discovering fire. The machine hero fell limply in the arms of the proto sapiens as I hovered closer, gathering more magnetic energy. His expression was frozen in that of absolute shock as his empty eye looked towards me.
His muscled body twitched uselessly with the aftershocks of my attack.
He wasn't dead. The sane part of me knew but seeing this machine brought low filled me with satisfaction. The irony that I did so in the Hall of Human origin was not lost to me as my booted feet touched the ground. I was part of the next stage in human evolution, and I defeated the pinnacle of machine engineering. I placed my boot on the diamond on his chest and pushed. My power-focused where my foot made contact with his body, digging into his hard synthetic chest and forcing him into the ground, he fell from the arms of the mannequin and into the fake dirt.
Then I knelt above him and struck him across the face with my bare fist. Once, twice, and thrice more, and while I did so, I cursed him.
"May you never know joy." I started softly, but not neutrally. I found that people took me more seriously when I spoke softly, but that didn't last. "May you never find peace for what you have stolen, you pathetic puppet!."
I threw him away from me, past a trio of skulls, and into the unknown. He landed with a crash, knocking into things that were out of sight. My rage subsided, and with it, my adrenalin came down to levels where I could feel pain again, which I noticed with a violent throb from my hand. Then came the pain from my legs, but I could at least remedy that by making my clothes lighter.
I was panting, and my hand was bleeding, but I felt surprisingly light, all things considered, and I learned a few things valuable things.
The first was that I didn't know enough about my power and that I needed to explore that when I had the time. If there was one positive thing I could say about my time in the PRT was that they did not skimp on power testing. There were people asking questions, and eventually, you'd discover some application that had never crossed your mind.
Second, Vision could be knocked out by a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse. As far as I was concerned, the skirmish was just the push that would inevitably become a shove, and I needed all the advantages I could get if X and I were going to face a Cape team with decades of experience.
And third…
"I really need to find a good therapist." I admitted to myself.
I was lucky that the masses had already evacuated the Hall, but if it hadn't been…
I was angry enough that I wouldn't have cared about collateral damage.
I shuddered at the thought.
And what would have happened if my attack hadn't worked? In that state, I would have brute-forced the issue regardless of the result and would have been promptly taken down.
"Fuck you, Carol, for putting me in this position." I spat at the empty Hall. Clearly, peace was never going to be an option, thanks to that overzealous jackass.
I gave it a cursory glance and deduced from the lack of holes in the walls, scratches on the floor or ceiling, and a general lack of destruction that was not of my own making that they did not come through here.
A quick backtrack revealed a flight of large gaudy stairs that I had missed in my rush and a burn mark at their top.
Well, tunnel vision is -6/-7, as they say.
XXX
A/N: Well, here's the chapter a day later than I had intended, but at least I got it out. I wanted to do a whole extra fight for this chapter, but it wouldn't have fit well with this chapter because I really didn't want to turn this arc into a boss rush. Now, I know that some might complain that Vision was taken out too quickly, which to some extent, I can agree with, but her attack wasn't just a wave of physical force. He can tank energy beams with ease but this was the equivalent to a flashbang detonating right in front of his face and at this point his brain is a computer. So he's down but certainly not out.
