Sy
She laughed as Clint nearly poked himself in the eye for the third time that evening with the chopstick he was twirling around. The best part was, if it had been an arrow in his hand, he'd have no issues at all. Put a bow in his hand he was the most graceful human being on the planet. Take it away and suddenly he was the clumsy idiot who occasionally walked into door frames. Clint scowled playfully at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him in playful retaliation.
The party was mostly over, but the core group and a few friends had ordered in chinese food and were lounging on the couch in a relaxed continuation of the party.
"It's a trick!" Clint insisted again, beginning to twirl the chopsticks around again. Sy just stabbed at her chicken with a sensible fork. She wasn't going to make a fool of herself with utensils she couldn't use. She was hungry .
"No, no. It's much more than that." Thor assured the archer, passing Steve a beer. Sy sipped on her water. She was barely twenty, and as such, according to Steve, was still banned from the liquor cabinet and the wet bar. Tony had winked and tried to slip her a drink, but they'd gotten caught. As punishment she couldn't even have soda. Just water. Sy had rolled her eyes at the fake punishment. He knew as well as she did that she didn't drink soda.
"Oh, so, 'whosoever be he who is worthy shall haveth the power.' Whatever man! It's a trick." Clint dramatized, gesturing wildly. Bruce scooted away a little to avoid losing an eye to Barton's lethal chopstick. Thor chuckled lowly. Loki rolled his eyes from his place next to her. He'd only joined them after the main party had ended. He still wasn't a very popular figure to the world; even if his attack on New York only happened because he was brainwashed.
"He's never going to be able to lift it." He muttered quietly. Sy nodded. Godly weapons with magical properties were serious business. The worthiness clause was ironclad. And it had very little to do with actually being worthy; everyone at the table was a hero in their own right. It was about which worthy person the hammer liked. And the hammer had picked Thor already. The whole system was not unlike wands in the Harry Potter series. It was unlikely that Thor's hammer would allow another person to lift it, even if they were worthy.
"Well, please. Be my guest." Thor challenged. The room goes quiet for a moment.
"Really?" Clint asked, the apprehension disappearing almost as quickly as it appeared.
"Oh this is going to be beautiful." Rhody jokes.
"Clint you've had a tough week, we won't hold it against you if you can't get it up." Tony needled. Everyone but her chuckled at the comment. Sy was worried. Even though Thor had given his explicit permission, messing with a god's symbol of power was still a good way to get somebody vaporized.
"Are we sure this is a good idea?" She asked Loki. The trickster god shrugged, indifferent to the consequences in favor of the potential entertainment value of the game. She groaned in irritation, but leaned forward in anticipation anyways.
"You know I've seen this before right?" Clint blustered before wrapping a single hand around the handle of the hammer. He yanked up with a slight grunt, and shock and mild embarrassment crossed his face when nothing happened. He stepped away with a half hearted chuckle, shaking his head.
"I just don't know how you do it." He joked, stepping away. Tony smirked.
"Smelling the silent judgement?" Clint's expression grew flinty.
"Please, Stark. By all means." Clint challenged. Tony with all his usual flair, rose from his seat and swaggered around the table. He flicked at the lapel of his much to expensive sports jacket before rolling up his sleeves.
"I'm never one to shirk from an honest challenge." He boasted. Sy rolled her eyes. This was coming from the man who refused to compete against Pepper in anything. Ever. And he cheated at Monopoly. Honestly, how he ever managed to successfully run a multibillion dollar company escaped her. He was utterly hopeless at the board game.
"It's physics." Tony began to explain as he slipped his wrist through the leather strap and gripping the handle. Sy and Rhody scoffed at the same time. Loki just groaned, hiding his face in his hands; no longer amused by the game now that nobody was even slightly singed. Tony glanced up at Thor once more.
"Alright, if I lift this, I then rule Asgard?" He asked.
"Yes, of course." Thor said, completely nonchalant. Loki leaned over to her again, his voice pitched to a low whisper.
"He's not going to do it. But if he does, I'm staging another coup." Sy snorted, even while she kept her eyes focused on Mjolnir. Tony nodded surely as he braced himself, wrapping both hands around the handle.
"I will be reinstituting prima nocta." He blustered before straining. Sy nearly leapt out of her seat in anger. Loki and Steve each grabbed an arm and hauled her back. Subconsciously she knew that Tony (who was failing miserably at lifting the hammer) was kidding. But it wasn't a funny joke. Prima nocta was the supposed right of a ruling monarch to have sex with any subordinate woman; primarily on her wedding night. It was legalized rape. She snarled wordlessly at the two men, pulling away from them both. She got up and plopped back down next to Natasha, deciding to ignore them for the rest of the evening. By that point Tony had gotten out one of his Iron Man gauntlets, trying to lift the hammer.
Tony's worthiness was now up for debate, she thought to herself vindictively. She did not however, attack her teammate the way she had wanted to earlier. Not that the urge had disappeared entirely...
"Rhody?" Tony glanced up at his best friend. Less than a minute later the two of them were using combined War Machine (Iron Patriot?) and Iron Man gauntlets to try and lift the hammer. They failed. Bruce gave it a try, and when he failed, roared jokingly as though transforming into the Hulk. Which Sy remembered from the helicarrier all those years ago; couldn't lift it either. Bucky tried, using both his human and metal hand, but the hammer wouldn't budge.
Steve went next. Sy exchanged shocked glances with Loki when he lifted the hammer enough to shift it an inch or so; having temporarily forgotten her anger at the god. Thor looked incredibly relieved when Steve gave up. Sy suspected Steve didn't really try. He wouldn't take that from Thor, even in the testosterone fueled test. He might want to have proved worthy, rub it in the team's (Tony's) face, but he wouldn't take this away from Thor for something so petty as a late night, beer fueled competition.
"Widow?" Tony offered. Natasha laughed lightly, taking another sip of beer.
"Oh, no. That's not a question I need answered."
"Sy?" She shook her head even before the question was finished being asked.
"Mixing pantheons is always a bad idea. Might accidentally blow up the place." Tony shrugged dismissively, clapping Clint on the shoulder.
"In all deference to the wouldn't be King, but… it's rigged." The billionaire pronounced.
"You bet your ass." Clint muttered bitterly, but Sy knew his ego had been assuaged by the string of failures that had followed his. Director Hill spoke up with a smirk plastered across her face.
"Steve, he said a bad language word."
Steve turned to look at the team in shock. Sy snickered slightly at his bewildered expression. Bucky had filled her in on the whole language debacle during her rescue while she'd still been in the hospital.
"Did you tell everyone about that?" He asked Tony in playful disbelief. The billionaire ignored him, and everyone seemed to ignore the tension that rose a notch in the room. Sy tensed slightly, remembering a snowy cabin and a video stuck on loop. Everyone else seemed to shake it off after a moment.
"The handle is imprinted. Like a security code. Whosoever has Thor's fingerprints, is the literal translation I believe." Tony joked. Thor just smirked, standing up.
"Yes, well. That's a very very very interesting theory. But I've a simpler one." The god lifted the hammer up easily, tossing into the air and catching it again one handed. He pointed it around the table.
"You are all not worthy." Loki groaned and rolled his eyes. He leaned across the table and snatched the hammer from the air as his brother was tossing it around.
"They are also neither gods nor asgardian. It would take a more than a simply worthy mortal to wield the hammer." Loki mimicked his brother, tossing the hammer in one hand casually before tossing it back to Thor. The thunder god groaned in irritated defeat before sitting back down.
"Must you take all my fun?" Thor asked his brother.
"If I didn't, you would have been dead a thousand times over brother." Loki replied sarcastically.
Suddenly a harsh, high pitched sound scraped against her ears. Sy screamed in pain, clapping her hands over her ears, curling in on herself. Steve practically leapt across the table to check on her, even as Natasha and Bruce both turned to check on her from their positions sitting beside her. A moment later the rest of the group groaned, as the feedback she'd registered first became audible to normal ears. A mechanical whirring was audible, even while a heavy stomping approached the group.
"No. How could you be worthy?" Came a deep gravelly voice. A familiar voice. Sy stood up, shaking slightly. It was one of the projects that Strucker had been working on recently. It had something to do with her but she'd always been to groggy from drugs to be sure of what. Even with her restored memories, most of her time in HYDRA had been spent drugged. Even without the brainwashing, her memories would have been clouded.
"You're all killers." The robot accused as it stepped into the light. Sy squinted, looking at the Avengers logo on the broken chest plate, even as the junkyard reject moved ever closer.
"Stark." James asked coldly, his metal arm wrapping around her shoulders securely as Steve stepped out in front of her defensively.
"JARVIS?" Tony snapped back. The lack of response from the calm british voice was unsettling.
"Sorry, I was asleep. I was a… dream." The machine continued. Steve shifted even further in front of her, trying to hide her behind his bulk. Sy shook James' arm off, edging to the left, aiming for the piano. The ex assassin glanced over from her to the piano and reluctantly let her go.
"Reboot, JARVIS we've got a buggy suit." Tony muttered, tapping away on the thin glass tablet in his hand.
"And the noise. I was tangled in… strings…" The robot seemed completely unaware of what it was saying or doing as it stumbled about. But at the same time, it seemed oddly… human.
"I had to kill the other guy. He was a good guy." The robot muttered. Steve's expression hardened.
"You killed someone?" He asked, his voice hard and uncompromising. It was his captain voice.
"Wouldn't have been my first call, but down in the real world, we are faced with ugly choices."
"Who sent you?" Thor asked, his hand clenching tightly around his hammer. Sy was halfway to the piano now. Suddenly the sound of a tape winding fills the room. Tony's voice echoed in the recording.
"I see a suit of armor around the world."
"Ultron." Bruce said, understanding crossing his face. Sy was still confused.
"In the flesh. Or no, not yet." The robot, Ultron, replied. The machine was still moving in an awkward fashion, jerking harshly with every movement. Tony and Bruce shared a horrified look, while the others slowly got their weapons ready. Sy tensed, still a couple feet away from the piano.
"Not this… chrysalis." Ultron said distractedly, looking down at the broken body it was inhabiting.
"But! I'm ready. I'm on mission." He said decisively.
"What mission?" Natasha asked. Sy heard the distinctive click of three separate gun safeties being turned off. Director Hill stood up, and so did James, both of them hiding the guns in their hands. Sy dove for the piano as the robot made its' final chilling statement.
"Peace in our time."
Sy heard the Iron Legion before it burst through the walls. She heard the sounds of fighting begin even as she crossed the final few feet to the baby grand piano. Lunging across the bench, she slammed her hands down on the keys, sending out a musical shockwave that repelled the first wave of robots, metal crumpling under the force of the sound waves.
The sound of glass shattering and bullets firing filled the air as her hands settled into a desperate pace. But there was nothing to manipulate, they were machines. Not something with a soul or any kind of inner power; not under any god's direct domain. Nothing to convince, influence or control. Just metal shells. All she could do was send out vicious waves of sound, breaking the robots. The problem is that sound isn't a controllable attack. Sy dove under the piano, rolling away from the attacks, desperately looking for a weapon of any kind. Her hand closed over a bottle opener that had been knocked to the ground. Her hand closed around it just as a metal hand caught her by the foot, dragging her into the air. Sy screamed in defiance, twisting her body up and around the mechanical monster, stabbing the metal implement into the junction between the robot's head and shoulders. It took a few tries but she ripped the head clean off. She dropped to the floor when another one grabbed onto her.
"Where is the stone? Where is it?" It asked her mechanically. Sy just growled and attacked.
"Sy!" Steve roared from across the room. She didn't bother looking over to know that at least three people were charging to her rescue. But Sy was a demigod and an Avenger. She didn't do damsel. She stabbed the next robot through it's faceplate, even as it repeated the question. She did the same to the one after that, and after that one she managed to rip out a bunch of the wiring in the neck, the question echoing robotically through dying speakers. The fight continued, and she continued fighting with everything she had inside her. It was almost cathartic to be able to fight back tooth and nail and win. She hadn't won very frequently when captured by HYDRA. But here, battling the machines, back to back with Steve or ducking under Mjolnir or leaping over Natasha's back, she was tearing through an enemy that couldn't put her back down. The problem now was that they weren't fighting something that was alive. You could tear it apart and the separate pieces would get back up and keep fighting.
Steve flew across the room, and Clint fell through some glass. Natasha and James were protecting Bruce while firing from behind a large stone column. Sy ran to cushion Tony's fall when Clint shouted from across the room.
"Cap! " Steve's shield sailed through the air, the famous red, white and blue disc flashing in the light. In a single fluid motion Steve caught and threw the shield, destroying the the second to last robot.
"That was dramatic." Ultron's disembodied voice said dismissively. The broken robotic body began to pace haltingly, seemingly indifferent to the raised weapons pointed in its direction.
"I know you mean well, but you just don't think it through." Sy growled as she propped Tony up carefully, seating him on the stairs. How a mechanical voice could be so condescending she wasn't sure. But it sure as Hades was annoying.
"You all want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change." It continued. Sy slowly got to her feet, almost entranced by the words Ultron was saying. It brought horrific echoes back to her from when Kronos used to whisper in her sleep, trying to persuade her to fight for the Titans. Sounded like Luke when he'd tried to recruit her for the Titan's cause. It had been painful to say no then. Now it was just a painful reminder of everyone she'd lost.
"How is humanity saved, if it's not allowed to… evolve?" Ultron mused.
"Is it with these? These puppets?" Ultron asked disgustedly, crushing the head of one of the destroyed drones.
"No. The only path to peace is… the Avengers extinction." Ultron snarled. Thor hurled his hammer and shattered the final robot into pieces. But instead of feeling relieved, Sy just felt her apprehension build.
"I had strings but now I'm free." Came a final ominous sing song tone before the machine finally powered off.
"What in Hades just happened?" Sy demanded, rounding on two suddenly very guilty looking teammates.