I AM NOT A SOLDIER NOR AM I A WARRIOR
I CANNOT FIGHT UNTIL MY BONES BREAK OR BLEED UNTIL MY BLOOD IS GONE
I AM NOT BUILT FOR THE LIFE OF A HERO
It's quite ironic that Sokovia, the place that started all this, is the place they have to go to end this. Elizabeth finds it funny that Ultron chooses to go back to the country he was created in; when Wanda Maximoff put a vision in Tony Stark's head.
The rest of them are gearing up while she's mindlessly strolling around the tower. Vision had been ushered into the lab by Bruce to do some last-minute checks while Tony worked on updating Friday, and Thor and Cap are stocking up on weapons both for Natasha and Clint, whose trying to decipher the radio signal he got from what they presume is the Russian spy herself.
She pauses in her walk when she spots the Maximoff twins sitting uncomfortably on the couch of the main living room. The setup for the party hasn't been reverted due to Ultron and so the main floor of the Avengers Tower looks so much more sophisticated and formal than its usual state. The twins sit straight up on the edge of their seat, hands on their laps and eyes darting consciously.
She clears her throat to indicate her presence and they, against reason, sit up straighter, more uncomfortable than before.
She presses her lips together, not knowing what to say to the two people that she had fought mere hours ago. Doesn't know what to say to the two children that the world had scorned. Doesn't know how to make any of this okay, doesn't know what to do to fix the obvious tear in their reality caused by a manipulative robot and unfortunate circumstances.
The growling of a stomach cannot be pinpointed to one twin but it gives her a little opening, causes her to smile a little more genuine and a little less uncomfortable.
She addresses both of them when she says, "There's leftover cake in the fridge, chocolate, I think. I can get you some if you want." There's laughter in her tone, just a sprinkle of it, but it causes the twins to relax just the slightest and so she chalks it up to a small victory.
Regardless, they shake their heads in unison, and Liz doesn't know how to prolong the conversation. She nods and steps back, calling back as she slowly walks away, "We're leaving in a couple of minutes. You can walk around the place if you want. You don't need to sit there."
"We were wrong."
She's only heard Pietro Maximoff's voice once; they were in the shipyard and he was speaking to her brother, all menacing and hateful and Elizabeth had thought the hate to be too much for a boy so young. It's safe to say that she's shocked when he hears her voice and doesn't have enough time to school her expression before she turns around.
"I'm sorry?" she says, even though she heard perfectly fine.
Pietro continues after getting his cue from Wanda, who refuses to make eye contact, "When we were kids, our house was attacked, it killed our parents and left us stuck in the house with an explosive with your brother's name on it, your name as well."
Elizabeth can already predict where this story is going to go. She's smart enough to put two and two together and figure out the reason for the hate. She's ready to defend; defending her brother is as instinctive as breathing but she knows how it feels to keep words buried for years and it's this acknowledgment that keeps her mouth shut, allowing Wanda to continue where her brother had left off.
"You see it was easy, blaming one person for all our messes. We went off the hook, became human experiments, we wanted revenge. Our hate for your brother fuelled us, kept us alive in a way. It's irrational, we know, but it was easier to see the world in black and white than to accept the gray areas."
Liz nods. She smiles, genuine and kind, unaware that it has been years since the two of them had received genuinely kind smiles, "There's a lot of gray areas."
Perhaps someone had once decreed that Elizabeth Stark's smile would break the ice in a man's heart. Perhaps man broke the ice himself because no one had ever smiled with such kindness the way Elizabeth Stark does.
Pietro and Wanda get a little braver, feel a little more forgiven after Elizabeth Stark smiles at them in a way that makes forgiveness a possibility, "Working with Ultron helped us see that the world isn't as black and white as we wanted it to be. The world isn't as simple as we thought it would be."
This, Elizabeth can understand. She understands how unfair it is that the world makes living in it harder for some an easier for others. She understands walking out the door thinking that everything is going to be okay only for the world to rip the carpet from underneath their feet, making them fall off a cliff.
The world has been so unfair to Elizabeth Stark that she had learned to make the best of her difficulties, make things simple again.
She tells the Maximoffs, "The world can be a little simpler once this is over."
It's an olive branch. It's the first step of many that end up saving the lives of two children whom the world had scorned and beaten and tested. The second step is taken by Pietro when he speeds in front of Liz before she can walk away, nearly eliciting a scream.
"Can I take you up on that chocolate cake offer now?" He asks sweetly and grins when Liz laughs.
She smiles at him, "How about I do you one better? There's apple pie stored in a fridge on one of the floors. I can cut you a slice and bring it down."
Pietro shrugs, "I've never had apple pie."
Liz, who had apple pie every Christmas, and holiday, simply gapes, "Ever?" When Pietro's answer is negative, she says, "Nope. That's not going to work out. Wait here, I'll get you apple pie. Bruce baked it and Bruce is amazing at making apple pie."
She prepares to make a run for Steve's floor, cut a slice off the side of the apple pie that she and the soldier didn't eat before she stops to look at Wanda, "Pie?" she asks hopefully.
Before Wanda can answer, Liz runs away, calling out comprehensively, "Too bad, you're getting pie. You can't be an Avenger if you haven't tried Bruce's apple pie."
The bridge isn't built yet. There is a lot more that needs to be said, a lot more that needs to be discussed, a lot more that needs to be fixed.
But for now, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff are going to eat apple pie with Elizabeth Stark. They're going to be joined by Tony Stark. They're going to smile and laugh only for a moment before they need to get on the ship back onto that large, inescapable area of gray.
Their mission has several priorities; rescue Natasha, destroy Ultron, save Sokovia, keep everyone alive. It's hard to keep track of who's doing what; all Elizabeth knows is that she's tasked with getting the people out of Sokovia.
Walking into the orphanage gives her an eerie kind of feeling. She knows that she'd have never ended up in a place like this, but the faces that stare back at her, haunted and scared are a mirror image of her years ago, when she had to attend the funeral of both her parents and didn't know how to make it another day without completely shattering to pieces.
Her reputation, not as Elizabeth Stark but as Infinity makes her plead to leave the city plausible and the owners of the large home usher the children out, making them put their most precious belongings into a single backpack on the way out.
The tight grip of a hand sliding into hers brings her out of her musings and she smiles down at a little girl with green eyes and golden hair that pulls her slightly as if she needed to leave with them as well. Liz wants to; she's not built for this life, she can't breathe during wars and she wants to claw her skin off when gunpowder falls on it. One look at the girl's face and she knows that she can't leave, not when there's still lightning coursing through her veins.
She's not built for this life.
She knows she's never going to forget the way the little girl; green eyes and golden hair, flew through the air and landed on the ground, body limp and motionless under the attack of one of the robots. She feels a scream threatening to get out and she doesn't stop it. She doesn't care if she gets hurt, if one of the robots might blast her into crisps as she runs to the little girl with green eyes and golden hair and a name she didn't know, a name she should know, and shakes her, trembling hands feeling for a pulse.
Her insides shatter when she feels nothing.
She's not built for this life.
Anger for her has always been dangerous; catastrophic. Anger means the lightning will rein unrestricted and the flames will burn like hell. Anger means the water will be electric and the ice will be knives. Anger means that the robots that Ultron created stand no chance against her fury because all she sees is a little girl with green eyes and golden hair; a little girl with blue eyes and fawn hair.
A little girl who deserved better.
The robots charge at her with programmed abandon; patterns etched into their systems, wires that keep them alive, algorithms that allow them to function. She is all impulse and anger. She's flesh and blood, lightning and flames.
She's the orange blast that spans through the sky and renders the robots helpless and the people speechless. She's the kind of power that could kill.
The kind of power that killed her years ago.
She lands and feels a hand on her back. Steve.
"You okay?"
She wants to tell him yes. Wants to erase the worry lines from his face and the concern in his eyes. She wants to tell him yes so that they can move on and fight the robots until Tony fixes this. She wants to go home, she wants a normal life, she wants to kiss Captain America and hug her brother and see her mom again.
What she wants never matters.
"No," she replies, plain and simple and Steve nods, seemingly understanding.
"Could use home help on the bridge. Red Witch is powering out." Clint shouts through the chaos of the crowd and robots combined and Steve gives her hand, the hands she didn't realize he held, a squeeze before watching her run away to the bridge, an occasional spark of lightning streaking through her suit before it disappears.
The bridge, the pathway between Sokovia and Ukraine; between life and death, holds more chaos than the rest of the city combined. The bridge is where most robots are, simply because the bridge is where most people are.
The bridge is where Wanda is holding up a shield of power than hurts her every time it is shot at. She can hear the people running for their lives from behind her, can feel sweat dripping from her forehead, can anticipate the slow loss of the strength of the barrier.
She's learned to differentiate between the lightning of Thor's and the lightning of Elizabeth Stark's. They're both powerful in their own sense but Elizabeth Stark's lightning is never purely blue. In fact, nothing of Elizabeth Stark's, from her hair to her lightning, is ever a singular colour.
The lightning that saves her from collapsing from exhaustion is blue, as lightning is, but tinted with purple, a translucent kind of purple that one can only find if they look for it. The purple glows bright a moment before impact before it shatters and hits home.
Liz looks at Wanda and the girl wonders if she's ever seen Elizabeth Stark more haunted than she is right now, "Can you hold them apart?"
She's referring to the robots and Wanda nods, parting her hands and watching the robots part with it, creating a pathway devoid of artificial activity and Liz allows the people to pass, occasionally striking the robot that would fly too close to her vicinity with an orb of fire that Wanda cannot determine the colour of; cannot decide if it's red or orange.
The two of them only stop when the people cease to cross the bridge. When there is no more of them left to cross the bridge.
"I'm going to go find Pietro," Wanda tells Liz, only waiting for her nod of acknowledgement before running away to find her brother.
Another voice cuts through the line and Liz smiles the slightest of smiles the first time since they landed, "Missed me?"
Natasha Romanoff walked out to complete chaos and a scene one sees in a sci-fi movie, but she could see the Avengers, her team, scattered around the place and Bruce had handed her an earpiece before she, very regretfully forced him into the Hulk.
"You okay?"
Liz asks, rising through the air, both to search for threats and to find her friend whose red hair stands out among others. Natasha replies with an affirmative and Liz says, "Good. Now get back to work."
It should be a phenomenon; the way that among thousands of people, among buildings and robots and cars and buses, she somehow sees Steve Rogers, clad in his customary blue and white, first. She doesn't have time to contemplate the chances of her spotting Captain America out of everyone in a city because she can see as she gets closer that the soldier is the only thing in between the robots and a group of people and she has a wall of ice up before one of the robots can shoot.
The bullet bounces of her ice as bullets have always done, and she sees the people running off the bridge. When they're at a relatively safe area, the ice wall comes down, giving her déjà vu of the very first time she wore the suit, fought a battle, was an Avenger.
She's exhausted beyond compare and each use of her powers picks apart at her strength. Steve sees that but there isn't much he can do besides comfort her.
He's long learned to fight the uncharacteristic need to take Elizabeth Stark and run away from the fight so that he wouldn't have to see her bones break and strength crumble.
"We're almost done, Liz." The words sound fake even to him, but it's the best he can offer and she takes it.
"Can't wait until this is over." She complains, shocking a robot as she does.
He throws his shield and she catches it, infusing with lightning and watching in satisfaction as it bounces off enough robots and gives them enough time to breathe and for Steve to ask, "Stars away from the city, ya?"
She melts, just a little and he can't help but wonder how, even with a face full of soot and cuts and bruised head and matted hair, Elizabeth Stark manages to be the most beautiful thing on this planet.
She melts and she doesn't recover in time to use her powers to lift herself off the ground when Sokovia rises and she's on the part of the bridge that falls.
He's quick in his reaction, grabbing onto her hand before she can tumble and he knows that she can fly through the air but he's not taking any chances, not with her.
He pulls her up and they hold onto each other as the country rises into the air, the ground shaking and people panicking.
Elizabeth is only left standing because of the tight hold the Captain has around her waist and her hands that grasp his forearms.
She's not built for this life. This life is going to kill her.
This life doesn't care.