"There's a way to lose more slowly."

- Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum, Out of the Past, 1947)


Glass.

Sometimes, she thought she was made of glass. Frail, quick to break - and maybe, she stares at the screen in front of her, she is. Her emotions were always quick to pick up their arms and rage conflict, and the words taunting her eyes elicited no different reaction. Glass. She is made of glass.

Diana shuts the laptop off, content with the bounties of her search and stares for a moment at the untouched phone on her temporary desk. She could call, share her information, or she could end it now; put another stopper to the chaos and bask in another batch of peaceful but borrowed years. She could do it. She could walk away and choose that option - yet, her phone rings. What could have been unknown numbers flash across the screen, but she has already familiarized herself with those digits. Had hovered her fingers over the very last few numbers in a toil of hesitation and confusion. She looks at the fine lines of the glowing clock above her: 10:26pm. She shrugs on her jacket and leaves her room.

New York City.

There is no grumbling motorcycle or yellow cab waiting for her at the entrance of her hotel. No, instead she is greeted by the cold ghost of her breath as she saunters towards the coordinates sent to her computer. The walk is short, or maybe she had encompassed a great amount of distance with her brisk pace - but she is there, nevertheless, staring at the decrepit ruins of a former garden. In the background, she can hear the telltale sirens of essential personnel responding to a call, but she knows none would ever visit her tonight.

"Mr. Everett Sterns," she walks further into the abandoned alcove. New York has many of them; but nature would never grow in a city of brick and carbon. "You invited me."

"I did," the man does not let her wait. He steps into the streetlights, skin waxen against the dim glow of simulated moonlight; Diana can't see the trepidation that previously marred his movements anymore. She concludes that she has gotten lax at being able to judge people but fortunately, she still has the mind to raise her arm in time to meet Sterns' assailing bullet. Her jacket gives away to the steel, but her bracers hold firm. The spark of gold and silver clash against her dark eyes.

"And so," he laughs shortly. "We know what we are, but not what we may be," he quotes as he brings down the gun. "Welcome, Diana - Daughter of Hippolyta," he mockingly bows his head.

Diana frowns, "You will end this."

Inclining his head towards her, his eyes catch the gleam of the night. "The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief," and he grins. And charges.

In Diana's eyes, he is slow. But she has made a mistake, and what she thinks is only one threat becomes two as something heavy smashes into her side. Diana grunts, turns her uncontrolled fall into a roll, and stops a few feet away from Sterns and the thing prowling behind him. "You underestimate me, goddess."

Diana remains silent, attention averted to the mass of darkness writhing behind Sterns. "Chaos." Sterns merely supplies her before the formless monster charges once again. This time, Diana thinks she is prepared - but again, she is mistaken as the shadows morph around her defense and slam into her back. Wind knocked out of her lungs, she only has a second to sweep Everett's feet off the ground as she lands in front of him, before his monster slams her against the far wall. Her head takes the brunt of the pain and she falls to her knees. Groaning, she holds a hand to her head and winces at the blood more than the pain. She would not do well with a head wound.

"Where is your friend, the Captain?" Sterns asks as she feels the swell of something...wrong...caressing her face. Diana tries to push away the shadows, but they only push back at her, restraining her back against the wall. "No matter, he is only a false god, that one. An abomination born of science."

"And what you have made is no different?" Diana targets Everett. The researcher laughs as the umbra fades away from her.

"What have I made?" he echoes. He gestures at the mass thrashing under him. "This is not science, Diana. Science may have helped me find it, but this," he smiles. "This is Chaos. Can you not recognize it?"

Diana frowns, but without the shadows draining her focus, she is able to properly concentrate on Sterns' words and at the monster at his feet. Chaos. She repeats in her head. She knows of no Chaos - she knows of no extremely destructive god beyond Ares and - her heart skips a beat. "What have you done?" she whispers.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings," Sterns quotes in reply. Diana quickly rolls out of the way as the thing called Chaos charges at her. With her head pounding with blood, she knows that she needs to be quick, and she reaches for the lasso at her back as she dives again to mauver out of her enemy's way. But she is fighting something as malleable as the sea, and soon, there is a tendril of black trapping one of her arms. Fortunately, she has freed her lasso and aims it at Everett. He easily moves away from her reach and Diana utilizes its returning momentum to direct it at the monster.

Again, it conforms around her attack and traps her rope within it. "You would do well to give in, Diana." With her only free hand, she pulls against the darkness, but her lasso is trapped. It will not move. "Some of us are born to be gods," she hears Sterns' monologue. "Some of us are only born to be beneath them." Her hearing is growing faint. The beast, the Chaos - is surrounding her. Suffocating, but still breathing, Diana struggles, but she is immobilized.

"I will honor your sacrifice, Daughter of Hippolyta."

No - and with that subconscious thought, Diana wills her body to die.

She is immortal but she is still human. Her body thrives on the same physiology as mortals, but with her being born from the blood of gods, she is able to control the inner-workings of her cells. She is able to slow them, force them still; her heartbeat insert, breath absent - in all appearances both physically and physiologically - she is dead. But her mind is still alive, and Chaos easily recognizes her as its own. The shadows leave her and Diana is quick to retaliate and throw her lasso around the opposing man.

With a frozen grin on his face, he stares, aghast at Diana. "How do I release Chaos?" she asks him, eradicating his ability to lie. When Everett stares at her, he knows his knowledge is forfeit and he laughs. Diana tightens her hold on him and he winces.

"Release Chaos? Would you really want that in this world?" he retorts. Diana knows what he is referring to. Chaos is an anonymity, an existence predating heaven and hell - the origin of Eros, Gaea, and Tartarus; a god yet not quite a god, domineering the existence of the inbetween. Yet in its current form, it is nothing but a slave controlled by the whims of a madman, and Diana would rather risk it heeding no master than him. As it is, the form embodying Chaos holds no threat and she suspects the shadow is nothing but a farce that will dissipate with time.

"You are making a mistake, Diana," Sterns says, soberly. He looks at the shadows prowling around them. "Do not think you are above fabled mistakes. Stories are stories, but we too, are the foundations of future tales."

"And yours will be one like many more, Sterns. Now tell me how to free it." Diana can feel the researcher briefly struggle against her before the hold goes slack.

"You think yourself above humans?" he mutters, loud enough for her to hear. He is resilient against the demands of her lasso, but Diana can feel his will ebb away with his consciousness. It would be soon -

"To release Chaos, you must kill its master." Diana stares at Everett Sterns. He is a gangly man, quick to stutter in both his words and actions. She does not know how she has underestimated him, failed to see beyond his facade, but here is he now, and she stalks towards him. "Can you do that, Diana? Can you kill a man?"

Pulling hard on her end of the rope, she brings Everett to his knees. "That is your mistake, Sterns," she snaps the lasso toward her and uses its momentum to bring it back, around the man's neck. "Because you are not just a simple man." Death by asphyxiation is not quick or clean. By the time her lasso grows lax against the blue skin of Everett Sterns, she has looked long enough at him to be able to recall the man's face; bloodshot eyes, parched lips, crooked nose - he had blood on his lips that she had not caused. A chill runs down her arms. Covered by her jacket, she can still feel the frigidness emanating from Chaos. The formless mass is by her side, surveying the researcher, and for one brief moment she wonders if it has enough power to give him life. Yet fortune is on her side. It sniffs at the new corpse, inspecting.

Then it turns to her and Diana takes a step back, arms raised. She knows she can inflict no physical harm on the being, but she would try. For a moment, she thinks she sees it nod at her - but then New York is never quiet and it is gone with the nearest resonating blast of police sirens. Diana's arms drop back to her side. She could clean up, probably should - no one deserved to find a body at their door, but her head is flaring with pain and she moves fast to collect and hide her lasso. Briefly, she contemplates searching Everett's body for the missing documents, but she knows lost tales caught no one's interest and decides to leave him be. The documents she had helped deliver were originals, but as she had relayed to the redhead, Natasha, she always had a way with fixing broken things - and in her line of work, finding them is a skill that came to her easily as well.

Leaving the garden, she evades the customary perusary eye and finds herself back in her hotel room. She is not too ignorant, she knows when her things have been touched; decades of false identities tends to make one sensitive to the precision at which things are returned to when moved.

But that is not what arrests her attention. Sitting amid the minimalist decor, bathed in the lights of the city, is none other than the Russian spy. Nursing a chilled glass of whiskey, she tilts the drink towards her in greeting. "Diana."

"Natasha," said woman decides she would play this game of charades that the spy is orchestrating. She has no reason to be wary of the Black Widow - her trails all carefully buried - there is no past to be brought up into question.

"Steve was worried," the redhead offers as Diana busies herself in the suite's kitchen; a cold glass of water and a cloth for her wound. She would not hide it from the Black Widow, the signs of battle are all too well dispersed on her person. "I told him he was being a mother hen, was I wrong?"

"No," Diana smiles half-heartedly, not quite. She had been in trouble, but the moment of panic had passed as quickly as it came.

"You two could be better at answering your phones then," Natasha sighs as she finishes off her drink. Once done, she saunters towards the granite counter and smiles at Diana. The woman, herself, could not help but compare her position to that of a mouse being cornered by its predator.

"Hurt a lot?"

"Nothing I cannot handle," Diana softly replies, taking a sip of her drink. They stand in the silence for a while, neither woman giving an inkling of their thoughts; Natasha has crafted her face into a perfect slab of ice and Diana wonders which would be colder - the cubes in her drink, or Natasha's presence?

"Listen," the woman finally speaks up, dropping her empty glass of whiskey into the sink. "I'm not here because of Steve, I'm here on behalf of SHIELD," Natasha explains. "I won't beat around the bush, both you and I are above that kind of tactic. So I will say this once and only ask you once, will you come with me to SHIELD or not?"

Glass.

Diana is glass - transparent and fragile. But when it - she breaks?

She smiles disarmingly at Natasha, knowing her act won't bring down the woman's polished walls. Her lips part, as if searching for words to say, but only an apology leaves her mouth as she slams her cup into the counter. The detailed chalice breaks and Diana quickly flips her palm around to hold one particularly large shard to dig through Natasha's sleeve. The woman is on par with her and reacts with a block, but Diana is one step further - she has had the dance memorized since her arrival to the hotel, and puts her other hand on the blocking forearm for leverage. She pushes, and both arm and spy go down onto the counter as Diana kicks herself over to Natasha's side. With a tug, she easily locks the same arm behind the redhead's back and cancels her attempt at escape by knocking her elbow against Natasha's head. The blow is swift and hard, and Black Widow hits the counter with a loud slam; she slips to the floor, knocked out. Cold and merciless, Diana may have been, but necessary it also was.

Most likely, she suspected, the spy had not expected resistance from her. Maybe a silver of it, if Diana had dragged their conversation, but this scene had played much too frequently in her life. Diana had been prepared, and moving fast, she scribbles a quick note on a napkin and leaves it by her phone and laptop. Moving into her suite's closet, she pulls out her suitcase - having never truly unpacked, and leaves the hotel suite under the false alias she had checked in with. This time, when she walks past the glass doors, there is a yellow taxi cab awaiting her arrival.

"Newark Liberty International Airport, please."

Sharp.

When glass is forced to break, it becomes sharp.


Author's note: No, no good excuse as to why I left you all for so long. I'm really sorry but the real concise explanation is that I was hoping to wait a bit for the next WW movie to come out to better modify this story. However, it did not come out during its projected time and when I returned to it to at least close this arc - I found that the saved documents from my USB had been erased along with other things. That's the short story - but I'm back! I've no set schedule on the updates for this story as of yet, but feel free to check my profile regarding said update as I keep that one accurate. Hopefully I'll have some kind of schedule up there for this story by the weekend...

Anyway, this arc is almost done. I think one chapter is due before we jump into an MCU movie or I may combine the transition into one. Who knows. Again, I'm sorry and say thank you to those who are for even coming back to this story! On that note, to any who check up on it - thank you and sorry too! I was surprised, after having not logged on for a while, to see that this story consistently gets quite a few visits still.

Best!