Klaxons blaring in the quinjet startled everybody, and the comms were filled with Tony swearing. It was a SHIELD alert to assemble the Avengers, but it was short on details.
"The fuck is going on, Stark?" Clint demanded, doing his best to stow his snacks as Natasha sped up the trip.
Tony sounded pressed, like he was running. "No idea. I'm working on a location now but it seems like the message was cut off prematurely."
"Sir," Jarvis interjected, "I'm getting reports of explosions at SHIELD headquarters. Several of them."
Steve's heart seized for a moment before lodging firmly in his throat. Before he could speak, Natasha was banking the plane hard right and heading directly there.
"Banner's with Meredith. I'm on my way now, Cap," Iron Man promised and then went silent.
Thor stood up and took Mjölnir in hand. "Let me out and I shall scout ahead."
Clint stood up, strapped up with his quiver and bow. "I'm with him."
Natasha looked to Cap, the team leader, and he had just a second to consider it. He pulled his cowl back over his head and nodded, and she opened the cargo doors through which Thor, with his arm around Clint's waist, were immediately sucked through.
"She will be fine," Widow murmured.
"She better be," was all he could manage to reply.
Everything happened really quickly after the first explosion. There were three more in quick succession, followed by ridiculously loud alarms, flashing lights, and evacuation orders shouted over a loudspeaker. And yet, for some damn reason, they were still in fucking interrogation.
"Shouldn't we be going?" Delilah asked after Phil cracked the door to get a look out in the hallway. She could hear people running past but other than that, she didn't know.
"You're still under arrest," Fury informed her primly, like he had her by the book and that was the only thing that mattered instead of the situation in front of them.
"Think very carefully about how much you really want to die on that hill, because at this point, it appears that can be arranged." When his hand went to his sidearm, she waved a dismissive hand at him. "Oh whatever, dude. Only one of us here is more or less immortal."
Phil's eyes widened and then he shut the door quickly, leaning against it and bracing for another explosion that made the lights flicker and dim. "Director, we have to evacuate. This room won't hold up forever."
Fury held up a finger as he snarled quietly into his phone, going back and forth with someone before calmly touching the screen and slipping it into his pocket. "It seems that HYDRA would like another shot at you, Miss Ford."
"Another kidnapping? Should I start collecting them like trading cards?" The next explosion was close and knocked her to the ground and sent her humor skidding out the door. Phil helped her to her feet, but she was horrified. "I can't… all these people… " She gripped Coulson's arm tightly, wrinkling the sleeve of his suit jacket. "You gotta get them out of here. Get everyone out of here. If it's me they want, they can have me."
"Sitrep!" Cap calls through the comms as he and Widow near the landing strip for SHIELD HQ. Smoke is showing in several places at the site from the air and it appeared to be complete pandemonium on the ground.
"Inbound in thirty seconds, welcome to the shitshow. There are civilians everywhere, Cap." Tony's repulsors roar in the background as he begins taking fire from the HYDRA foot soldiers on the ground.
"Thor's trying to organize the civilians and I'm moving in to help Tony," Hawkeye called while running.
Steve ran to the cargo bay doors and nodded to Natasha. "Clint, help Thor get these civilians moved out and Tony, I'm coming to you." Deep breath and he was out the door, dropping down from about two stories overhead as Natasha drew fire from the ground.
"Comms just died," Phil said ominously and goosebumps broke out all over her skin as a wave of heat rolled through her.
"What's the plan?" Delilah asked, injecting way more calm into her tone than she felt.
Fury settled into his chair and steepled his hands in front of him on the table. "The Avengers are on their way."
Her glare was full of penetrating trauma. "So… post up in here until they get here or what?"
Phil shook his head, not with this plan at all. "There's a lot more of them than there are of us. Our best bet is to evacuate and mix with the civilians."
"I could go out there," she offered blithely. "Give myself up and end this quickly before there are any more casualties."
"No!" Both men shouted at once. Phil went back to watch the door, his gun out and the Director just stared at her.
"You are under arrest," Fury reminded her smugly.
"So you keep telling me." As the commotion grew closer, she felt the control she had on her body's reactions slipping slightly. Every loud noise that made her jump brought her that much closer to the edge. "You know the only reason neither of you is a baked ham is because I'm in a relatively stable mood, right?" Phil slowly turned from the door eyeing her warily. "Let me out of here, before this becomes a problem none of us can control. I don't want to kill anyone who doesn't have it coming. Please."
"I'm not sending you out there," Phil insisted as she got to her feet. "You're in no condition to fight, unless you…" he gestured up and down her person.
"Understood. I'd like not to do that inside if I could help it." Setting the building on fire or worse, causing some sort of detonation would only complicate an already messy situation.
The agent nodded slowly. "You and me both."
Annoyed that neither of them are paying attention to him, Fury stepped up between them. "We have agents coming through here shortly and we'll leave with them."
Delilah shook her head and opened the door. "Nope. HYDRA wants me for the same reason SHIELD does, and I can't wait here and let more people get hurt or killed because you wanna be a territorial dick. I can still be arrested afterwards, provided there's anyone left to do it." She was out and hobbling down the hall before either man knew what happened.
Fury's annoyance was approaching critical mass. "Well?" he demanded of Phil as he shooed him out of the room.
Taking it as permission to accompany Delilah on her suicide mission, Phil grabbed up her purse from the floor and dashed out, headed in the same direction she had. "I'm on it."
"At this moment, it appears there are fifteen confirmed DOA, approximately another seventy that are critical and more casualties coming in all the time," Jarvis informed Tony who was coordinating the evacuation on the ground. His was the only system still online because of the integral nature of the AI with the suit. The siege was ongoing with more waves coming and it was clear that SHIELD Medical would likely be overwhelmed sooner rather than later.
"Do we have an ETA on the Richards?" The Avengers were holding up but none of them could go forever, except maybe Thor. Even Bruce joined the proceedings having left Meredith under guard at the tower.
"Less than three minutes, however, sir, another signal has just come onto the radar."
"Hostile?"
"The cane, sir. It just appeared in the center the building on the sixth floor and began transmitting a moment ago. She's proceeding slowly to the west stairwell."
Firing his repulsors in a strafing run to take out a couple armored personnel carriers, he thought about it. Tony finally felt like he could exhale. "Excellent, I'll meet her on the ground floor."
This seemed like a much better plan when she was sitting in interrogation, she fumed as she shuffled down the hallway. The cane was such a help and took so much pressure off her legs and back, but even then, the distance between the interrogation room and the front door was a long damn way, down a few floors and on the opposite side of the building. Not including a couple wrong turns thrown in for color.
She had just made it into a bullpen of sorts, an open floor cube farm that was all but abandoned. A noise behind her had her ducking into a cube and checking the direction it came from.
Delilah had no idea what to do with the image of Agent Phil Coulson pushing a rolling office chair with one hand and his sidearm in the other. Her grey purse strap was visible hanging from his shoulder.
"You call for an Uber?" He was actually smiling when he asked.
She slowly pushed herself to her feet with her head cocked so far to the side it could have been mistaken for a broken neck. "Dude. The fuck is this?"
"Technically, you're still in my custody," he replied cheerfully as he herded her into the chair and began to push her toward the opposite elevators and emergency stairs at the far end of the building.
"Uh huh." He chuckled at her non-response and continued their journey. The respite was doing great things for her pain, but as they neared the stairwell, her anxiety began to take up the slack. "I will do everything I can to warn you before I go supernova, okay?"
"I know." He sounded so disinterested, they could have been discussing curling scores from the seventies. Her purse dropped into her lap as he walked.
"Promise me you'll get clear." She wiggled around in the chair to stare at him over her shoulder. "I mean it. I don't want to kill anyone I don't absolutely have to."
He reached down and squeezed her shoulder. "I promise." He didn't even stop walking.
"Jarvis, I need an update, dammit! That damn tracker is going down more often than a cheerleader on prom night."
"Colorful aphorism aside," the AI noted acerbically, "I can only tell you what I have. Her last known location was the fourth floor heading toward the elevator. I have no further beyond that."
In addition to taking a fair amount of fire from the seemingly endless horde of minions, good god so many goddamn minions, the chip's transmission wasn't consistent. Tony didn't know if it was a side effect of the downed communications or if something bad had happened to Delilah, but either way, if he didn't find her soon, Cap was just going to level the building a brick at a time if that's what it took. That was absolutely the last resort.
The Great Escape had been going well for the most part, down a floor on the stairs and then had to bolt when they heard people coming up from the floors below, grabbed a new abandoned office chair in the bullpen from this floor, when they ran into a snag somewhere near the supervisors' offices.
"Third floor, east wing! Stop!" Then there was more yelling as several more storm troopers came tromping in behind the first one, from both sides of the hallway.
Delilah could feel the breeze against her face as Phil broke into a run, shoving her in the chair and shooting behind him. They rounded a corner and found an open office with a blown out window, which he quickly thrust them into and overturned the desk in front of the door.
"That-" she paused to take a deep breath and flex the fingers that practically squeezed dents into her cane. "That was close." She'd rolled into a corner in the chair and got to her feet unsteadily as she took in the room. It was relatively generic, with the light brown carpeting and moderately blue-grey walls. It would have been fairly tidy if not for papers strewn everywhere by the open window and the overturned desk that even now was keeping out the ravaging hordes. Fortunately there were no windows out to the hallway to worry about, at least until they started shooting through the wall.
The agent blinked at her then stalked over to the door before moving to the jaggedly open window, not even really paying attention as he checked the magazine in his pistol and slapped it back into place. They were up on the third floor, and the window looked down upon a hangar with doors open. In the middle distance between them and the freedom were so many people in black uniforms the concrete tarmac wasn't even visible. He blew out a breath that started so deeply within him, the exhalation made him drop his head. A moment later, he looked to her with a new resolve in his eyes. "Okay."
"There's an alarming note of finality in that one word. Alamo?" Delilah wasn't opposed to making her last stand here, but he had to be out of the room. She would not willingly kill someone who'd gone out of their way to look after her when she needed it.
"Oh no. We're far from making our last stand here." His lips twitched, curling into a faint semblance of a smile, or a grimace, she couldn't tell. "You think Tony was serious about your cane?"
"Tentatively? Yes." Yeah, she was certain Tony had been serious, he'd been way too exuberant when he'd presented her with it for him not to have been, but that wasn't something she wanted to cop to readily. "I'd say highly likely."
He nodded. "Excellent, then we're gonna need the grappling hook."
"I'm sorry, what now?"
"Still no word, sir."
"Fuck." Tony was running out of options as he flew around the building scanning for her presence or a radar ping from the tracking chip in the cane. More and more HYDRA troops were filing inside and it was going to be a bloodbath if he went in there to search floor to floor. The heat signatures in the building all but obscured individual hits and there was no way to separate her unless hers became the only, likely lethal, heat signature. He really hoped it didn't come to that.
"... there's no exit on this side of the building, so they're not expecting anyone to make a break for it. Especially from up here." The alarming part about the plan, and the plan itself scared the bejesus out of her, was how rational Phil sounded explaining it.
"Grappling hook, zipline down, commandeer a vehicle and bolt. That's the plan."
He nodded grimly, watching the few people wandering between the hangar and the building. Delilah moved over to look at the scene herself. No one was looking up, paying any attention to them, and there weren't that many people there.
"This could actually work," she marveled.
Agent Coulson smirked. "Don't look so shocked. I've done more with less. It's kind of the informal SHIELD motto." He held out a hand and she gave him her cane. "So, let's see how this works, shall we?"
The next couple minutes were spent shooting the hook from her cane across the way, using some kind of super-strong, stretchy cable that Phil secured to the desk, and waiting to see if it was noticed. It appeared they were in the clear, so Phil casually holstered his pistol and took off his belt.
"You're really going to do this. You could just as easily fall and break your neck. You don't have to do this." Delilah was babbling, she knew, but the longer she stared at the line between them and the hangar, the more visceral her terror became, and words were a pressure relief valve.
"I have a duty to escape," he explained as he wrapped one end of his belt around his hand and tested the strength of it. "I'm also not leaving you behind. So get your ass up, because you're coming with me."
"With what? My good looks and charm?" His eyes flit to her purse and back to her face with a raised brow.
"You know I have a bad leg, right? How do you expect me to land this?"
He dismissed her concern with a flick of the wrist. "You've got one semi-decent leg, right?" She nodded. "Then you'll land it. I have faith."
"Infinitely more faith in my joints than I do, that's for damn sure."
With the arrival of the Fantastic Four, as well as some members of Xavier's school, the tide began to turn. Good thing, too, since the suit was running low on power, Cap was busy commanding the ground assault, and Tony still couldn't find Delilah. Coming back from the main gate which was now firmly back in SHIELD control, a movement from one of the upper floors of the headquarters building caught his eye. "What the-oh fuck!"
When Agent Coulson made it down to the ground like an extra from Mission Impossible, and with no one any the wiser, Delilah felt at least a little bit better about his plan, at least his part of it. Still, she knew they had a finite window of escape that was shrinking with every second that passed.
"This is going to go so, so badly," she muttered to herself as she came up to the window and perched on the ledge, purse strap around her hands and the zipline. Under other circumstances, she'd have erred on the side of her fears and physical frailties, but the moment she heard an attempt to breach the door to the office, she knew her time was up. "Fucking awful plan," she breathed as she pushed away from the building and began her long slide to freedom.
She couldn't even look behind her when she heard a shout coming from above her, she was halfway there and focused on landing and not blowing out her knee. Or hip. Or back. At least she was until the searing pain ripped through her thigh and the world blasted white.
The blinding flash between the building and the hangar rivaled the sun, and the heat damn near knocked Iron Man from the air. Somewhere nearby, the Hulk roared in displeasure. It was like a bomb exploding and sent everyone, both HYDRA and friendlies scurrying for cover. Tony recovered enough to approach the scene again, a streak of blue on the ground told him that Cap was almost there as well.
Bedlam, that was the only word for it. It was a dystopian wasteland of scorched concrete, broken and melted glass, warped metal, and charred human remains, and floating in the center, the woman with the golden glow.
It was a scene out of a Kubrick movie.
Her aura receded and delicately deposited a very pissed off Delilah in the epicenter of the blast radius swearing virulently the moment she touched down. Her legs wouldn't hold her and she immediately collapsed to the ground in a heap. "Mo-ther-fuck-er! God dammit that hurt!" The way she pronounced each syllable underscored the amount of pain she was in, but it wasn't enough to push back some of the more motivated HYDRA troops. "Come any closer and I'll cook your fucking face off," she snarled as she pulled herself toward the hangar with only her arms.
"I wouldn't test her. She means that," Tony remarked as he came in for a landing not far from her. The leftover goons halted their advance and were quickly overwhelmed by SHIELD forces. He waited until they were clear to crouch down beside her. "Hey there, Delilah." He giggled as he opened the faceplate on the helmet.
She snorted and dropped her head, the humor taking all the starch out of her. "Couldn't resist, could you, Hot Pocket?"
He shook his head at the nickname, an affectionate grin curling his lips. "Clearly not. Hey," he turned his attention to the people creeping out of the wrecked hangar. "Be a mensch and grab a flight suit, wouldja?"
It was in that moment Delilah realized she'd forgotten a fundamental issue with her flare-ups: the post flaming nudity. She was too pissed off to be embarrassed exactly, but man, was it a near thing. "Naked Tuesday, huh?"
The servos of the suit whined a little as he lifted a shoulder in a dismissive, but understanding, shrug. "Happens to the best of us." A SHIELD member in a uniform that looked like it'd been cut away with a blowtorch in places ran out and handed the suit to him, and he pressed it into her hands before standing. "A little privacy for the lady?" he asked of the group, and fired up the repulsors when they didn't move fast enough.
Delilah did her best to dress and not move around too much. She'd been shot while she was still human, which meant that while she wouldn't die from it, and it would hurt like a son of a bitch, but it would leave a mark. An ugly, likely to scar, currently cauterized mark.
"Need a hand?" The deep voice didn't belong to Tony, he was still over doing crowd control. Looking up, she saw the most brilliant blue eyes she'd ever seen, and while a part of her was beyond mortified, it was hard not to be a little captivated by the man offering her a hand up. Her smile was met with an affectionate, answering one, even if he was blushing. "Hi."
She let him haul her to her feet, and she took a second to finish dressing before throwing her arms around him in a hug and burying her face in his neck. "Hi back." Though the cowl somewhat obscured his face, that smile, she'd know anywhere. "You have no idea how good it is to see you."
"It has been a day," he agreed as he squeezed her closer. He was huge and solid and so comforting, a sob she'd been holding back welled up in her throat. The words he spoke were barely audible above the din of the scene, but the rumbling in his chest as he spoke helped calm her as she finally took a moment to offload a bit of her anxiety. She hated the hot tears soaking his stealth suit but having just that small moment let her quiet the noise in her head gave her a deep level of solace.
"And it's not over yet." Fury emerged from the hangar wreckage then, looking surprisingly unblemished. Phil, however, wasn't quite as lucky. Sunburnt, suit charred in a couple places and shirt looking like it lost a prize fight with an iron, he was behind the Director looking like he was in the mood to shoot the next person who looked at him. "Delilah Ford, you're still under arrest."
Steve pulled her close and physically picked her up to move her away from his approach as Tony inserted himself in between them. "You want to arrest her, on what charges?"
Nick Fury was practically beaming as he stepped around Iron Man. "In addition to the deaths of numerous federal agents, we can now add extensive destruction of government property, too."
Cap set her down on the ground next to the wreckage of the building before turning to face his boss. "What-?!"
"You're blaming her for this?!" Tony was practically foaming at the mouth with rage.
There was a lot of yelling as they attempted to argue the Director down from his lofty perch, and while they did, the transport from SHIELD medical arrived.
"Guys?" All eyes turned to her as she was loaded onto the stretcher and the medic ran an IV. "I kinda gotta go."
Looking absolutely gutted, Steve took her hand and skimmed a kiss over her knuckles. "I'll be down to see you shortly," he promised.
In the same moment, Tony informed her, "My legal team will be here within the hour to bury him. Don't start talking without them." The look on his face was positively murderous.
Satisfied he was getting his way, the Director turned to Phil who still looked like he'd be inclined kick a child if he had to stand there much longer. "You heard the man. She's under arrest, cuff her," he commanded triumphantly.
Agent Coulson was spent. Just… over it. He was not here to be a pawn in Fury's little game, nor was he going to arrest a woman who had tried valiantly to end this situation before it had gotten this far. There were so many unnecessary things that happened, he couldn't even count that high, and he was numb to the bullshit machinations of his boss. He needed a bourbon, a bath, and his boyfriend, and not even in that order. Taking the cuffs from his pocket, he walked up on Fury and slapped them into his palm. "You know what? Do it yourself."