warnings: violence, "alien"
Chapter Fourteen: All We Are
"A kiss with a fist is better than none." Florence + the Machine
Well, Audrey thought, looking around, this is hell.
People were screaming and fleeing, buildings were on fire, traffic had stopped completely and families were abandoning their cars and belongings. Audrey knew that evacuation would be too hard to accomplish on such a large scale, especially now that Loki's army was arriving. God. If only they'd had their epiphany about where he planned on directing the attack the slightest bit earlier. Now, they were trapped in the middle of a battlefield with the risk of two million civilians getting caught in the crossfire.
She knew that Clint and Natasha were trained primarily in offensive measures. They were assassins, after all. She was their best bet for defensive strategizing and trying to save the civilians.
"What's the plan?" Barton asked her.
Audrey bit her lip, considering their options. "Evac's out of the question. But we need to get them out of the line of fire." They couldn't simply hide inside, as the city was catching fire and half the buildings she'd passed on the way were collapsed or on their way to collapsing. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a subway entrance and it hit her. "Get them underground." She looked up at Barton. "Tell them to get into the subway tunnels. Don't bring their belongings. Take their families, their pets, whoever is at risk of dying. We can get emergency aid crews to use the trains to get to injured people and bring food and water."
Clint nodded, turning to Natasha. "You got that, Nat?"
The redhead nodded, turning on her comms and alerting the rest of the team. In the meantime, Audrey set her channel to reach Caroline and relayed the plan. Before she could wait for a response from Caroline, a Chitauri was in front of her. She traced its path back to oh, lord—back to the gaping hole in the sky. It was an ugly creature, resembling a bug, only twice as big as her and wearing armor. It was on top of a… flying scooter? She guessed? Audrey didn't have the time to assess, because it was veering towards her way too quickly.
Audrey dropped to the ground and narrowly avoided having its vehicle collide with her head. She hit the switches on her batons and they began to hum with electricity. Lindsey had not been joking when she said she amped up the power. As soon as Audrey regained her footing, she lunged at the alien, smashing one of the batons into the side of its head. It crashed to the ground, disoriented, but still managed to stand up and run towards her.
"Oh no."
Lifting up both her arms, she crossed the batons to form an X before splitting them apart and pushing the Chitauri's arm into the air. She spun, kicking it across the face and sending it flying to the ground. As soon as it was down, she pounced on top of it, holding her baton to its chest. It twitched and hissed, before finally going limp.
She caught sight of Barton and Romanoff, working as a team like always. Clint was firing arrows at the Chitauri before they could reach the pair, while Natasha was aiming bullets at any approaching aliens.
Audrey felt something touch her shoulder and she whipped around, holding her batons up to defend herself, but it was only Steve. "Whoa," he said. "It's me."
"Sorry," she answered. "Sorry."
Instead of replying, he pushed Audrey to the ground and threw his shield hard. Audrey rolled over just in time to see it hit one of the Chitauri squarely in the chest, knocking it off its vehicle and sending it flying to the ground. The shield bounced back into Steve's hand, and he used the other to offer Audrey a hand in getting up.
There was a loud screeching noise from above, and Audrey raised her eyes to the portal. Emerging from it was something that looked like a prehistoric fish dinosaur thing, except it was made of metal, and also flying. "What. The hell."
Steve looked over at her, raising an eyebrow.
"This is not normal," Audrey told him. "Just… so you know. This doesn't typically just happen in this day and age."
"Get down!" Natasha shouted. Audrey did as she was told, ducking and grabbing her cape to protect herself as a grenade went off, knocking three Chitauri out of the sky.
"Those are… very effective," she mused.
"They're a lot stronger than I remember," Steve replied. He pointed to an overturned taxi a few feet away. "We need to get over there."
When the smoke cleared, the pair took off, ducking behind the car just in time to narrowly avoid a blast from one of the Chitauri's guns.
"You seeing this, Stark?" Steve inquired into the comms.
"Seeing. Still working on believing," was Tony's reply. "Where's Banner? Has he shown up yet?"
Steve and Audrey turned to each other, confused. As far as she knew, Banner's location was still a question mark. They didn't know where he was or even if he was still alive.
"Banner?" she asked.
"Just keep me posted," Tony said, before his audio was replaced by a loud crashing noise.
Audrey furrowed her brow but forced herself to move on. There wasn't time to try to understand Tony's comment. Instead, she needed to work on the task at hand: not dying.
There was motion behind her as Natasha and Clint joined them behind the taxi.
"There are a lot of civilians still out there. You guys work on getting them underground," Clint said.
Steve took a look out at the street running beneath the overpass, where hoards of screaming people ran for their lives. "Do you think you can hold them off?"
A grin spread across Clint's lips, and he strung an arrow into his bow. "Captain," he said, taking aim at one of the Chitauri, "It would be my genuine pleasure."
Steve nodded, motioning for Audrey to follow him. Audrey raised her batons and watched the captain dive gracefully off the side of the overpass, tucking and rolling as he landed atop a car. Knowing there was no way in hell she could ever match that finesse, Audrey chose to simply leap off the side of the road, bending her knees to prepare for a rough landing.
The shocks radiated up through her legs for a moment. They were bad, yes, but not as bad as she was expecting. It was only a moment before she'd recovered, and was off running after Steve as he threw himself in front of civilians, pointing them towards the nearest subway entrances.
When they'd cleared off the sidewalk, Steve turned to her. "We stick together, okay?"
Audrey nodded. "Okay, d—" she cut herself off. She had been about to call him dad. But now was really, really not the time to make it weird. "Okay," she reaffirmed. "Let's go."
Together, they charged across the street, directing people towards the nearest subway tunnels and encouraging them to spread the word. While Audrey was holding one kid in her arms and letting another hang onto her back, Steve was hurling his shield at any alien that dared come near. As Steve actually carried an older woman towards the entrance, Audrey watched his back, whacking a Chitauri that attempted to attack them. She held the baton to its neck for a moment, watching as the entire thing began twitching. Then it collapsed, pieces of armor flying off.
As they cleared off one block, they moved onto the next, where the street was barricaded with police cars. While Steve hurled himself over the cars with ease, Audrey struggled to keep up, choosing to hop from the roof of one car to the next instead of throwing herself up and down from the street to a car and back again.
"Get down!" she shouted at a police officer holding up his gun. She dove in front of him, tackling him to the ground and pulling her cape over him as a Chitauri blast hit a few feet away from them, shattering the concrete of the road.
"What the hell are you?" the officer asked, coughing and brushing rubble off his face. Audrey didn't know how to answer his question, so instead she offered a hand to help him up.
"No real time to answer that," she replied, before stepping onto a hood of a nearby car and taking off. Steve wasn't far ahead, using his shield to block another group of officers from a blast.
"I need men in these buildings," Steve told them. "There are people inside that are gonna run into the line of fire. You take them through the basement or through the subway. You keep them off the streets. I need a perimeter as far back as 39th."
"Why the hell should I listen to you?" the man grumbled. Audrey rolled her eyes. Why did people choose now to be stubborn? In the middle of an alien invasion?
Neither one had the chance to answer, as a group of the Chitauri approached toward them at impossible speeds. Audrey jumped off the roof of the car she was on and latched onto one of the aliens, wrapping her arms around its neck. She threw her fist at its head over and over again, until she had time to unsheath one of her batons and hold it to the monster's chest. It became quite apparent as the creature collapsed that Audrey hadn't thought this through very well, because as the Chitauri fell to the ground, so did she. At the last second, she kicked off its body, landing on the roof of a nearby car and sliding off it pathetically.
"Oof."
Steve hopped down to the ground next to her, holding his shield up to deflect another alien's assault.
"Convinced?" Steve asked the police chief.
The man nodded, taking out a walkie-talkie and repeating Steve's orders. The officers got moving and began moving civilians out of the way.
From above them, Audrey heard a piercing roaring noise. Cautiously, she righted herself and searched for its source. It was one of the prehistoric fish monster things, reacting as Tony fired a few dozen warheads at it, sending it crashing into a building and turning the entire structure to rubble.
"Well," came Tony's familiar voice through the comms. "We've got its attention." Audrey saw him flying around haphazardly, trying to avoid being knocked out of the sky. "What the hell was step two?"
Quite honestly? Audrey hadn't thought that far. She didn't even remember the establishment of a step one. "Maybe trying to fly higher?" she suggested, wincing as the flying vessel crashed into another building, sending bricks and furniture raining down on the streets. "It might help reduce collateral damage."
"Good point," Tony answered. He flew up another hundred feet in the sky, and the vessel followed. "Now what?"
Audrey rolled her eyes. For someone who normally refused to listen to anyone, Tony was asking a lot of questions. "Now fly away."
Tony did so, leading the flying vessel east, towards the coast. She wasn't sure if it was a creature, a machine, or both, so she didn't know if it would become tired out. She hoped.
"Meet us back on the overpass," Natasha commanded. Audrey turned, looking for Steve, and found him a few feet away holding his shield over his head.
She was about to call out to him when yet another Chitauri stopped in front of her. Audrey was unable to act before it lunged for her, throwing her back into a car so hard she felt the metal around her being crushed by the impact of her body. As she sank to the ground, Audrey tried to find her footing, but the world was spinning and her head was throbbing and the alien just kept getting closer. She felt heavy and tired, and it seemed like her bones were actually rattling. When the alien moved to attack again, she lifted up an arm in an attempt to block its hit, but the punch never came. Instead, the Chitauri lifted her and hurled her back onto the ground again.
Ow. Owowowowow. Her spine ached. She could barely feel her legs through the pain. It was like trying to distinguish voices through a chorus of screams.
Audrey flinched as the alien reached down and picked her up by the hair. She let out a scream in agony as it dangled her a few feet above the ground. Her vision was turning blue at the edges and she was forgetting how to do the whole breathing thing. As the alien proceeded to deliver punch after punch to her stomach, she began coughing up blood. Audrey finally mustered up the strength to pull one of the batons from her belt, flailing around until it touched the Chitauri, surprising it enough to force it to let her go, and she dropped to the ground, wheezing and shaking. She watched it raise a fist above her, and crossed her arms in front of her face in a last attempt to block it.
Before the hit could come, the Chitauri collapsed, landing on top of Audrey and pinning her to the ground.
Someone crouched down next to her. "Audrey?" the person asked. "Sweetheart?" Whose voice was that? The only person who ever called her sweetheart was Peggy, or sometimes Daniel. She remembered studying butterflies in a garden and Peggy calling her in for lunch. She'd made sandwiches. Audrey was little. Daniel was there, and he was kind and brought her books to read about butterflies and other insects, and how caterpillars went through a process called metamorphosis.
Audrey could practically feel the sunshine of the memory, the blades of grass itching her ankles, the way her mother radiated as Audrey ran over gushing about the bugs she'd seen that day. But a series of gunshots tore her from the memory.
She blinked her eyes open slowly, her head still throbbing and her heart still racing. Her mouth tasted metallic, and she still had blood caught in the back of her throat. It wasn't Peggy or Daniel looking down at her. It was her dad—Steve—holding her head above the ground and checking her neck for a pulse.
"I'm okay," Audrey rasped. "I'm—" She broke off, sputtering out coughs. She held her hand over her mouth until the fit passed, and when she looked at her palm after, it was sprayed with red. Steve eyed her with worry, but she shook off his concern. Now that she'd finally gotten a break from being treated like a human rag doll, she could feel her body begin to repair itself, mending her skin back together and the pain slowly began to subside. She was weak, but she'd heal soon.
"Can you walk?" Steve asked.
Audrey slowly sat up, easing herself onto her feet again. "I'm okay," she repeated. "I swear, I'm okay."
"We have to meet back up with Romanoff and Barton a few blocks up."
Nodding, Audrey resheathed her baton. The first tentative step she took sent shocks up her leg, and her brain felt like it was bouncing off the sides of her skull. She winced, but tried to ignore the pain. If they didn't get going now, they would die. Worse, the entire city could be wiped out, and then the entire planet could become enslaved.
"Let's go," she said. Although Steve looked worried, and more than a little unconvinced, her followed, and the two began sprinting back to the rest of the team. Audrey opted not to hop from car roof to car roof this time, instead weaving her way through the lanes of traffic. The area had grown almost quiet, abandoned by the Chitauri since there were no more civilians to kill.
As soon as the bridge was in sight, Audrey began to pick up her speed. She and Steve climbed over an empty bus and used it to boost themselves back onto the overpass, where Natasha, Clint, and Thor waited. Bodies of Chitauri soldiers lay scattered around the area.
"What's the story upstairs?" Steve asked, though Audrey couldn't tell if he was talking about Stark tower, where the Tesseract was located, or about the gigantic hole in the sky. As soon as the thought struck Audrey, she remembered a Pixies' song that she and Tony had loved when they were younger. Everything is gonna burn, we'll all take turns, I'll get mine too. She winced, remembering how it ended, hoping that it wouldn't prove to be true.
"The powers surrounding the cube are impenetrable," Thor relayed. He lifted his arm suddenly, throwing his hammer at one of the fish monster things, and it shattered, metal plates flying everywhere. It bounced back to him soon after. "These Leviathans and the Chitauri soldiers must be our focus for now." Leviathans. So that's what they were called.
"Thor's right," Tony agreed. "We gotta deal with these guys first."
"How do we do this?" Natasha asked.
Somehow, all of them knew that the question was directed at Steve. Through recent events, he had become their unofficial leader.
Steve, noticing everyone's eyes on him, clenched his jaw and looked around. "As a team," he finally decided.
"I have unfinished business with Loki," Thor declared.
"Yeah?" Clint scoffed from his place beside Audrey. "Get in line," he muttered, loading another arrow onto his bow in preparation for another attack. Audrey sympathized with him. No doubt Loki had done awful things to Thor, but Clint had lost agency. That was terrifying and violative and cruel.
"Save it," Steve interjected. "Loki's gonna keep this fight focused on us and that's what we need. Without him, these things could run wild. We got Stark up top, he's gonna need us to…" Steve trailed off, and Audrey looked up from brushing rubble off her uniform to see what had stopped him mid-sentence.
It was Bruce. He was covered in dirt, missing his glasses, and riding a motorcycle that looked literally three seconds from falling apart into a pile of metal scraps. Relief filled her that he was alive. Not only that, but that he was here and that he'd managed to shake himself from the Hulk stage. She would never admit it, but with his hair tousled, and the top two buttons of his shirt undone, as he strode confidently towards them, he looked rather handsome.
Oh my god, she told herself. So, so, so not the time.
"So," Bruce remarked, his tone conversational. "This all seems...horrible."
"I've seen worse," Natasha replied, a knowing smile spreading across her lips.
Bruce returned the smile with a wry grin of his own. "Sorry."
"No," Natasha cut him off. "We could use a little worse."
"We got Banner," Audrey told Tony, switching her comms to him. "Just like you said."
"Tell him to suit up," Tony answered.
Audrey looked from Bruce, to Steve, to Natasha, and then back to Bruce. "Uhhh… okay."
Tony announced, "I'm bringing the party to you."
There was a humming sound coming from the sky, and it was getting louder and louder as the seconds passed. Audrey spotted Tony as he made a sharp turn around a skyscraper, a Leviathan following not far behind. The creature/machine smashed the building as it passed, sending glass flying everywhere.
Natasha raised an unamused eyebrow. "I don't see how that's a party."
Bruce raised an eyebrow at the monster, watching it tear through buildings as it approached. He glanced over his shoulder at it and then looked back at the group. Slowly, Bruce began striding towards it.
"Doctor Banner—" Steve interrupted. He seemed like he was going to stop Bruce, but his train of thought changed entirely. "Now seems like a really good time for you to get angry."
Audrey's heart began to thud in her chest as the Leviathan got closer and closer to Bruce. He and the rest of them were going to be crushed if something didn't happen. And soon.
"That's my secret, Captain," Bruce announced, smiling slightly. "I'm always angry."
As he turned back to face the creature, he slowly turned green, gaining height and muscle. His shirt split into a heap of rags that eventually fell off, and before Audrey knew it, the mild-mannered doctor was gone, replaced by a beast that was unafraid of anything. The Hulk whipped around, throwing a fist straight into the monster and sending shockwaves through its body. It flipped over, and as its tail began to block out the sun, Audrey realized that now would be a good time for her to get the hell out of the way.
As Steve threw himself and his shield in front of Natasha, Audrey tackled Clint, putting herself between him and the danger. Just before the Leviathan crushed them, Tony aimed and fired a blast at it, tearing it into pieces that flew in a hundred different directions.
Once the shrapnel had settled, Audrey moved out of Clint's way and looked up at the skyline. Dozens of Chitauri, all screaming what appeared to be battle cries, were clutching the sides of the buildings lining the street. If they weren't angry before, they certainly were now.
In response to their shrieking, the Hulk let out a roar. Audrey pulled her batons from their sheaths and crossed them in front of her.
The Avengers stood in a circle, facing outwards, weapons at the ready. The Chitauri, a so-called unstoppable force, were barreling towards an immovable object.
As Audrey switched the voltage on in her batons, flipping her hair out of her face, she dared the Chitauri to come closer. Let's see how unstoppable they actually are.
a/n: Oh my god it's been so long. I'm so sorry, school this past year has been really tough and there was a lot of ~family drama~ happening, but I'm back to writing now. I've finished chapter 15, most of 16, and started 17, so those should all be coming soon. In fact, chapter 15 should probably be coming your way on Friday!
I want to thank Quinn (jabberwocking) and Emilia (Emilia Christine) for being so helpful in letting me bounce ideas off them and for hyping me up. They're both incredible and both of them have amazing Marvel fics out. Quinn's story Mirror Mirror is about the Token Evil Teammate that the Avengers should have, and Emilia's is about the romance that blooms between a SHIELD agent and Steve Rogers following his defrosting. Both are excellently written and so fascinating and I can't recommend them enough!
I haven't seen Infinity War yet but I did read the spoilers and I'm very excited to ignore a lot of what happened in the movie! But we've got a long way to go until then.
As always, thank you to my beta CatrinaSL, and to you all for sticking with me. I love you guys.
Leave a review if you feel so inclined!
Chapter Fifteen: Faking Glory
Bruce was covered in dirt, missing his glasses, and riding a motorcycle that looked literally three seconds from falling apart into a pile of metal scraps. Relief filled Audrey that he was alive. Not only that, but that he was here and that he'd managed to shake himself from the Hulk stage. She would never admit it, but with his hair tousled, and the top two buttons of his shirt undone, as he strode confidently towards them, he looked rather handsome.