Gravitonium
Disclaimer: almost none of the characters here are mine. Some, however, are.
Note: this is an AU. You have been warned.
Note 2: spoilers warning.
Across the multiverse…
Phil Coulson was not having a good week, not in general. Between the fact that he was dying and the fact that there was a rift into a fear dimension of all things in their new HQ, S.H.I.E.L.D. was decisively on the defensive – right when they needed it the least, when the world needed to be saved…again. He and his agents were not precisely sure from what exactly, but judging by their literal experiences in the future, a save was definitively in the works.
…Sadly, it also seemed to be involving CyberTek, a place that evoked plenty of unhappy memories of its own, related to Grant Ward, and John Garrett, and a number of other things and people. Did they really need to revisit this part of the memory lane? According to the universe they did, or rather – according to the FitzSimmons, because of gravitonium.
Thoughts of FitzSimmons, and of their marriage – finally – left Coulson with mixed feelings: on one hand, he was happy for them, on the other, he was regretful that he will never have anything like this, because he was dying, again, and it was even less fun than the first time around, when Loki stabbed him with that staff…
"So, Phil, are you okay with this decision?" Daisy, who was partnered with him on this mission, gently asked her nominal father figure, breaking Coulson out of his reverie. "We don't regularly go up to the front gate and just ask anymore…"
"Then maybe we should," Coulson replied, somewhat crossly – Daisy's statement did strike a nerve with him, unexpectedly – "for you know what they say, if you don't knock, they won't answer-"
"This is why we're actually going to a side entrance instead?" Daisy's frown deepened. "Phil, are you fully here?"
"Yes, and we're doing a compromise!" Phil replied faux-brightly. "Me and Melinda still have some differences, but we're working them out!"
"Since when? Since when," Daisy amended her question, seeing how Coulson was apparently misunderstanding it, "you two are together?"
"…That's kind of personal," Coulson looked away, "and besides, we're on a mission…"
And this mission was kind of uncomfortable, he had to admit – Coulson didn't really like the direct approach, this was more of a Melinda thing, (though not by much), but since Coulson was on the outs with Melinda himself, he had to appease her…well, not to appease her, but-
But something. The fact that CyberTek in itself was not exactly going down either – it actually appeared to be a rather bustling enterprise here and now – was not helping Coulson's discomfort either. Something was either really wrong or really right, and he did not know what.
The door opened, and a couple of men came outside.
"We're from S.H.I.E.L.D.," Coulson said calmly.
"Yes, we heard from Petersen," the bigger, older newcomer replied as he moved into the street properly; for a moment Coulson thought that he looked familiar, or rather – he moved familiarly, because he looked like a perfect stranger, but-
"Excuse me. Are you you, or are you somebody else?" Daisy spoke from next to Coulson; clearly, he was not the only one having this sort of déjà vu.
"I'm me," the man looked down at Daisy and grinned. "I'm always been me, though just who I am, is something else."
"Really?" Daisy sounded not quite like her regular self and more like her old, hacktivist one. "Interesting…" she took her interlocutor by hand and led him some distance down the street, for some privacy.
"Okay, this is some serious sparkage here," the other newcomer told Coulson, who was feeling distinctively flat-footed at the moment. "Even I and Wu Ling aren't that bad…I think…" he trailed away. "You're not here because just of what Petersen told us, are you?"
"You know Petersen?" Coulson muttered back.
"More like the Boss man over there does," the younger man muttered. "Your turn?"
"We're kind of here to save the world – sort of," Coulson admitted. "We need gravitonium for that, though. You have any on hand?"
"No, though we did hear about it recently," his interlocutor muttered back. "Ah, boss?"
"I hear you," the other man returned, alongside Daisy…and Coulson could not shake away the feeling that the two of them were just too comfortable around each other, but maybe that was just him… "So, uh, you're her father?"
"Um," Coulson shot Daisy a look. The young woman flushed, but before she could answer, Coulson's comm.-link came to life:
"Phil? It is Melinda. Mack and I have encountered some…complications."
/ / /
The complications that Mack and Melinda encountered consisted of either two teenage girls or two young women; Coulson was not sure what the proper term here was.
The girl on the right, Mack's side, was a young…woman, in her early twenties, on the petite side of things, and…looking somewhat upset. She looked like a younger, civilian version of Bobbi Morse, just…not quite. There was something off about her that belied her appearance of being harmless, but Coulson could not quite finger just what it was.
The girl on the left was about the same age, but taller, proportionally skinnier than her European counterpart, and…she was Melinda's girl. From her relationship with Andrew Garner. Meaning that she was possibly an Inhuman. Just what they did not need in the mix right now.
"Hey, Wu Ling?" Coulson's interlocutor asked quietly. "What's going on?"
"Mum and her friends need help saving the world – again," Melinda's Mini-version, (well, not really, she was actually taller than Melinda was, though even slimmer, proportionally wise), said crossly. "Mum? This is Werner. We're going to get married."
Melinda blinked, looked at the young man in question, and…clearly something snapped inside of her, as she whirled around and began to yell at the younger woman in Chinese, (and Coulson wasn't so fluent in Chinese as she was), and in general behave more like her mother. The younger woman – Wu Ling – looked down at Melinda from her greater height, and began to respond much more tightly and quietly, (but also in Chinese), behaving more as how Melinda usually did.
…Before things could get even more bizarre, Coulson felt a nudge on the shoulder. "Yes?" he turned to face Daisy's interlocutor, who was apparently in charge here. "What is it?"
"You tell me – what does Wu Ling mean about saving the world?"
"Oh, that," Coulson looked sheepishly away in a rather Daisy-like manner. "Ever heard of gravitonium? And – of Ian Quinn?"
"We know about Quinn – he was the previous owner of CyberTek, we bought it from him," the other man, (not Werner), replied. "And as for gravitonium… ever heard of a certain Dr. Hall?"
Coulson did, actually. Knew him, in fact. Moreover, their last moments together had not been very good…especially for the other man. "Oh dear," he muttered, not making eye contact with anyone. "How hard will it be to get it?"
"It all depends, ultimately, on Hall," came the reply. "We can get you to him-"
"Out of goodness of your heart," Daisy piped up, sarcastically.
"…Not exactly, no," came the reply. "My sister, whom you already know, is on InHuman business in Hawaii. Could you fly afterwards with me over there as a representative of your Department?"
"…Let's first get the gravitonium," Daisy muttered, turning red. "How hard can it be?"
"Very!" came the stereo reply, causing the two men to look at each other with a mixture of emotions.
"…Right," Daisy tried again, gamely. "Can we get inside before this gets any weirder?"
"You're heading in the wrong direction, then?" the other young woman, a blonde, muttered – and was rewarded by several glares. "Sorry, but I mean that…in a good way…"
"Ruby, just get in," Daisy's interlocutor said simply. "Your friends are waiting for you."
"Let's not get that far," Wu Ling stopped channelling her inner May and sounded more like her age.
Everyone just face-palmed.
/ / /
Inside, Coulson's feeling of discomfiture continued. He had been in plenty of ambushes and similar situations both before and after S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed, and this…did not feel like one. It felt more…homey, kind of how the Lighthouse was beginning to feel, but also – wary. People clearly knew him and Mack, May and Daisy and were…wary of them. Not hostile, more like cautious: people knew them and…feared them, rather than hated them. This was not exactly bad, (hate would have been worse), but not good either: Coulson knew that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s reputation was bad, but regardless, he had no intention of it becoming or staying something that was to be feared. He – and the others – had to fix it, but how?
…Well, this was something to be thought about in the future, but now… Now, a door opened at the other end of the corridor and Hunter and Morse, of all people, appeared. "Ruby, are you ready to go-" Bobbi began, when she noticed Coulson and his people, and her good mood visibly soured. "Hello, Coulson. Long-time no see. Fitz rescued all of you at last?"
"Oh crap!" Melinda put Coulson's feelings into words before Coulson himself could. "This is the 'real S.H.I.E.L.D.' mess all over again?"
"I'm sorry?" for the first time this morning their host – whatever his name was, he still did not give it, actually – "what are you talking about?"
"…That's right, probably few people outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. know it, and not everyone in S.H.I.E.L.D. does, either," May muttered, looking somewhat flat-footed herself, for a moment. "Basically, we had…yet another falling-out with our fellow agents, not long after Hydra came out of the shadows and bit us in the back. This time, though, it was no Hydra, no malice, just our fellow good men and women who only disagreed with Coulson's leadership. They weren't wrong, it's just that they chose a wrong way of doing anything about it, and now…Bobbi, really?"
"This isn't 'the real S.H.I.E.L.D. mess all over again'," Bobbi snapped, looking completely unfriendly now. "You people drove S.H.I.E.L.D. into the ground, and then Jeffrey Mace finished the job for his own reasons-"
"Jeffrey was a good man-"
"Mace is an ancient, completely non-human alien with his own agenda and his own opinion on human race," Bobbi snapped. "And you people gave S.H.I.E.L.D. over to him, literally! At least Hunter, and I, and our people, we're dealing with him through intermediaries, and not directly!"
There was a pause that no one knew how to break. "Um, Bobbi?" It was the younger May woman who spoke, this time. "This is really a bad moment, but mum, and agent Coulson here, and the others, they really need to go and save the world, and, um, remember what we told you about – Dr. Hall? They need to see him, and I think that we need to take Ruby with us instead of Werner, and-"
"You're rumbling, kid," Hunter spoke in a kinder tone of voice than the one used by Bobbi. "And firstly, sorry about that – it's just that we've invested so much into our new version of S.H.I.E.L.D. to make a new start, and now you're back with the same old mess-"
"And why we wouldn't be back?" Melinda asked quietly, but in a manner, that raises everyone's hackles.
"Because you would be in the future, helping the humanity of Earth fight the good fight?" Bobbi does not back down either. 'That's what Lance got from Fitz, anyhow."
"I was going to!" Daisy snapped unexpectedly, startling her end of the corridor. "Coulson actually ICE'd me to get me back to the present!"
There was another pause that no one knew just how to fill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lance Hunter filled it again.
"And secondly," he gamely told the blonde who wasn't his wife, "Katrin's community accepts only women, so Werner going there in Ruby's place won't work, so instead, I'll be coming with Coulson and his people to Dr. Hall."
"Hunter, you don't have to," Coulson said quietly. The incident with the 'real S.H.I.E.L.D.' had been one of the worse periods in his career as the director and he was not looking towards this repetition of it either. The relationship between the former team Bus on one hand, and Morse and her friends among the late Gonzales' people on the other, (with Hunter caught in the middle) was handled badly and ended worse, with Jiaying killing most of them via Terrigenesis crystals, and now…
Dr. Hall had not been an InHuman, at least he never revealed himself to be, but if he was still around, and given the circumstances of his defeat…Coulson really disliked where this was heading-
"Oh yes I do," Hunter replied cheerfully, but with sharpness around the edges. "Phil, we all know that you've got the gift of gab and can win over anyone, at least for a while, but the good doctor doesn't trust new faces very easily, and is scary-"
"Very much so," Daisy's new…friend rumbled.
"Yeah, that," Hunter pointed to the other man. "Usually, the big guy is scary himself, so when he becomes concerned, the rest of us should take heed."
"I'm not that formidable, Quake here is stronger than I am, so's May Mk III," the other man shook his head. "Hunter's exaggerating."
"Yes, well," Daisy looked uncomfortable, now. "You're not. I have apparently destroyed the Earth in the future – I'm Quake, the Destroyer of the Worlds-"
"Bull," came the reply, (over May's indignant glare that had something else in its' depths). "You're a creator, not a destroyer – maybe you got framed? However, you know, I can always call you Quake, the little Death Star with Legs-"
"I'm going to kick you right in the balls-" Daisy began, turning red-
"Only later, please? I have to fly the plane, because Hunter's piloting skills suck-"
"Oy, they do not!" Hunter protested, but this time everyone disagreed with him, even Bobbi.
/ / /
"…This is cozy," Mack commented a brief while later, as he and others flew in a CyberTek aircraft, rather than an S.H.I.E.L.D. one. "So, who's Hall?"
"An asset of S.H.I.E.L.D. who tried to destroy the world using gravitonium," Coulson replied, since neither May nor Daisy were going to, and no one else seemed to know about it.
"Which is what?" Mack was not backing down: the big man was that uncomfortable, it seemed.
"A mineral, a metal, an ore, an element that affects gravity," Hunter replied this time. "Hall has complete mastery over it, regardless of what it is. Is he a friend of S.H.I.E.L.D., though?"
"You've seen him last, you tell us," Coulson told the Englishman rather sharply.
"We didn't meet him for ourselves, we met him on behalf of Ruby's mum," Hunter did not back down. "Ruby is messed-up, but no worse than the many of others that we've met. Her mum is something else – she is building her own version of Hydra, but is in denial." He paused and added. "And we tricked her into thinking that we're also Hydra, working for Rumlow, so she's letting us be, and even doesn't contest when Ruby goes to work with us. The less time Ruby spends with her, the better…" he trailed away.
"She's bringing Hydra back?" Daisy said in a small voice. "And building her own version? Why?"
"She's crazy and okay with people getting hurt," Wu Ling answered her. "All that is missing is the octopus stencil on a wall, and then she'd be all set."
Daisy muttered something to her friend, who was busy quietly piloting the plane. Melinda was close enough to hear their exchange, but she did not share it with Coulson, who was not.
"What am I missing?" he called out to her, determined not to be out of the loop.
"We're about here," Hunter yelled back instead. "Wu Ling, it's our turn."
"Got it," the younger May woman nodded, grabbed him by the neck, and the two of them tumbled out of the parachute hatch.
"…" May rushed to a window on the plane, trying to catch a look of them. "Where's their parachutes?!"
"They don't need a parachute, Wu Ling can fly," Daisy's new friend is remarkably unshaken and unimpressed by May about to have some sort of a maternal meltdown. "See, while she may look like the latest version of a May woman, she's got some qualities from her InHuman father as well-"
May whirled around to face him, at last her old fire returning to her eyes, when the plane's comm.-link came to life. "Wu Ling? Hunter? Is that you?" May called out into the speaker.
"No," the voice was familiar and strange at the same time. "I think that I remember you. You were a part of Coulson's team. Is Coulson with you now?"
"Yes, I am!" Coulson called out before May could. "Franklin. Long-time no hear. How are you?"
"Let me show you," came the reply, and the plane moved…without anyone piloting it. Coulson, May and the others got to experience what Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and friends experienced in the fourth SW movie, when the Death Star caught them in a tractor beam at the place of Alderaan's destruction – and they did not like it.
They liked the view that opened to them even less: a ship, floating in the air amongst the clouds – not an airship of some sort, but a regular one, one that goes on water rather into the sky…but right now it was in the sky, and it was surrounded by a cloud of debris…a fairly sparse cloud, but the debris was still twisted and misshapen by no human means…which left InHuman ones…and Hall didn't part ways with Coulson and his team on good terms…
The aircraft was pulled down to the ship's deck. Hunter was there, as was Wu Ling, though now she looked less like Melinda's daughter, and more like the daughter of Lash, though she did have her own feature – wings.
"Wu Ling," Melinda inhaled, not exactly intimidated by the sight. "How-"
"Excuse me," Dr. Hall spoke from a side. "But can we talk first?"
Coulson and his people looked at him. Coulson and his people stared. Unlike Wu Ling, Dr. Hall had not sprouted wings or anything like that; rather he was now completely composed of gravitonium – and yet he was alive and mobile, at the very least.
"Hello, Phil," he spoke, amenably enough, to the agent in question. "Long time no see. How you're doing?"
"…Been better," Coulson admitted. "I'm dying, actually," he added – somehow it felt like a right thing to say.
"Mm. I'm stuck as an eternal, certainly inorganic, life form," Hall nodded, faux-thoughtfully. "Any chance you clever people built a machine that could allow us to switch bodies?"
"…I was thinking more among the lines of you coming along with us down to our base and helping us save the world from the menace that will arise and tear Earth apart – somewhat," Coulson replied brightly. "Humanity will survive, but gravitonium will help."
"Interesting," Hall rubbed his chin. Sparks shot from the friction. "Think that you will able to separate me from it? Seems fitting, since we fused because you dropped me into it."
"You were planning to destroy the world yourself-"
"So will you separate me?"
"We'll get the FitzSimmons on it," Coulson promised wholeheartedly.
"As soon as they attach new arms to Yo-Yo," Daisy piped up, at perhaps not the best moment, but-
"What she said," Coulson muttered. "Doctor, we are juggling several problems at once, not just you-"
"I don't mind," Hall said magnanimously. "Want to take your ride or mine? I could always use a good boating accident!"
Coulson winced. "Won't it crash as soon as you're gone?" he asked instead.
"Phil, I've adjusted its gravity just so that it won't crash," Hall replied calmly. "Believe me; you don't have to worry about it."
Coulson smiled faintly. It seemed that Hunter's worry about Hall being perhaps one of the scariest people around was true – and Coulson just signed him up for S.H.I.E.L.D. once again. Yay.
To be continued…