A/N: Chap 29 reviews responses are in my forums. Now...for those still reading, brace yourself. This chapter is probably the hardest, but it is also a turning point. We're fast approaching the third and final arc of the story.
Chapter Thirty: Because I Can
Taylor wasn't sure what the Grandmaster expected to happen.
Yes, Bi-Beast was huge, strong and aggressive. Yes, he was far faster than anything his size should have allowed and would have been a legitimate threat to any Asgardian.
But the Grandmaster never confiscated her weapons or even her satchel. Perhaps he thought they weren't powerful enough to hurt the brute. It didn't matter.
Bi-Beast charged at her with his Volvo-sized warhammer, shouting with both his mouths. Taylor pulled her staff, released the Ymirish bone, and with a flap of her wings somersaulted over the charging monster, set her feet, and swung the staff with all the strength she could muster at its right knee.
The creature's lower right leg went flying one direction, while the rest of the beast went spinning in another, hammer forgotten. While she found the absence of blood odd, she made her way to where the Bi-Beast was trying to pick itself up.
The roar of the quickly growing crowd had been instantly silenced by the quick end to their champion.
It took a while to walk across the sandy stadium. She took her time, trying to think about next steps on securing a ship and getting Gna to safety. When she finally arrived, the Bi-Beast knelt on one knee while he examined his stump. To Taylor's surprise, she didn't see broken flesh or bone, but rather circuitry and a gleaming metallic frame.
"The force behind the blow necessary to destroy my leg measures in the hundreds of thousands of tons per square inch," the lower head intoned. "Warrior, this one is not an Aerian. None of their kind were so strong."
"I told you I wasn't," she said. "Do you yield?"
"Combat efficiency is down 52%," the upper skull said. "Skull-brother, we must make repairs."
"Very well, Warrior. We yield, Winged-one."
Whatever else the creature was going to say was lost in a flash of blinding white light. Taylor had only a moment to brace herself as the ground under her feet shot her up into the air, while a dense shockwave of fire and overpressure sent her tumbling toward the nearest wall. She wasn't able to regain her bearings before she slammed face-first into the dirt of the stadium.
"WRONG ANSWER!"
Spitting dirt, Taylor looked up, and then up some more, at the massive hologram of the Grandmaster. "I promised the people a fight. If my Bi-Beast won't fight, well...we'll just have to entertain ourselves by other means. Right, my children?"
The crowd roared their approval. Over the Grandmaster's head, the sky began to fill with ships.
"I think I've had enough of this," Taylor muttered.
For only the second time, she used her ring to form a portal. As the fleet of ships unleashed their fury toward her, she stepped through the portal and right back to the penthouse where she'd been just moments before.
"Oh you...tricky little thing!"
The Grandmaster noticed her presence before any of his people. He stood in an enclosed balcony that looked down over the stadium, having just risen from a couch surrounded by courtiers and hangers-on. The rest of them looked as stunned as he was.
He motioned to Topaz and the plethora of blindingly bright-dressed guards. "Go on, distract her with your lives while I run away."
"This doesn't have to get ugly," Taylor said. She glanced at Topaz. "Uglier, anyway. Return Gna to me, let me take one of your ships, and we'll call it even. I won't have to kill all of your people and destroy your city and rip off your head, and you won't have to die screaming while watching everything you enjoy torn away from you."
Everyone in the balcony, from sycophants to soldiers, stared at her with a gaping jaw. "But you're a good person," the Grandmaster said. "My brother has a nose for these things. You wouldn't do something like that."
One of his men grew too close. Taylor hardened and sharpened her wing, and without looking away from the Grandmaster, sent her wing slicing through the guard's chest. "I was a good person, I like to think. But you're not. You're a depraved, murdering monster."
He waved. "Oh, stop. You're making me blush."
"We can take her," Topaz said.
"No, you really can't." The Grandmaster stood appraising her. "If I had my Mindstone, I probably could. Maybe. It would certainly be an adventure. You've wielded it, haven't you, dear? You've tasted the cosmic power."
"It felt just like my normal magic back home," Taylor said.
The Grandmaster nodded. "Yes, it would. The power cosmic, inside a mortal shell with wings. What an incredible sight you must have been. I see now why so many already worship you as a god in your own universe."
Topaz's normal frown deepened a shade. "So we're not going to kill her? I could get the melty stick."
"The cohesiveness of her cells is multi-dimensional," the Grandmaster said, as if he'd examined her on Eir's soulforge. He casually waved away the suggestion. "Her flesh is immortal. But…". He shrugged. "It gets so boring. Always fun to see a mini-celestial in action."
He left the balcony, walking confidently toward Taylor. "Well, come on. Let's go fetch your friend—what was her name? Gonad?"
"Gna," Taylor said with a roll of her eyes. "You did all this because you were bored?"
"And to get my bauble back," he noted. He led her back out toward the main penthouse floor. "Did you know that all of the Infinity Stones combined grant more power than even the One Above All? Why, with all the stones you could...I don't know, snap your finger and cause half of all life in the universe to cease. Or, perhaps….maybe, just maybe, now...you could transverse the walls of this creation itself and return to your home Universe. Wouldn't that be a thing to see?"
The Collector had mentioned using the stones to return to her home. It was, however, the first time she'd heard the other. He turned to glance at her with a half-lidded smile, like he'd just shared some cosmic joke with her.
"Thanos," she whispered.
"I've met Death, you know," the Grandmaster said. "An old friend of mine, really. A concept bound by the Universe that birthed her. Turns out, those of us that came from beyond or before don't...really fall under her domain. A shame, really. Eternity can be so unbearably dull. So... there's your friend, Gnaw."
He pointed out a puddle of melted fat and water on the floor. "She made such delightful screams. Asgardians take three times as long to melt as any other sentient being I've ever met."
Taylor's eyes fell onto a short dragon's fang laying on the ground near the puddle.
"Just can't have people putting obedience disks on my scrappers, you know," the Grandmaster continued in an absent, distracted tone. "It sets a terrible precedent. Besides, I love 142. She's just the best. I know someday she's going to bring me a real contender. But your friend there? Well, you my dear are really quite extraordinary. But that woman was just another Asgardian, and I only wanted the one."
She couldn't say if it was conscious thought or instinct that sent the hardened, razor-sharp primary feathers of her left wing through his chest. Blue blood spurted from his lips.
"Ahh, that's the stuff," he said, as if speaking of a particularly good brand of drink.
Topaz screamed and charged with a large baton topped with a bulb. Taylor beheaded the woman with her other wing, but with her fist drew Grandmaster close enough to grip his throat in her hand and lift him off the floor. "Why?" She whispered.
With his own blood staining his lips, he smiled at her with empty eyes. "Why not?"
No remorse. No doubt or sign of humanity at all. Staring into this creature's eyes she saw only endless, empty eons without purpose or reason. He was a god of nothing but nothing itself. Unchanging, unfulfilled. Empty. Even his murdering was casual and without purpose.
For the first time since arriving in this Universe, she realized she was in the presence of someone she could never even truly fight. She could kill his body over and over again, but she had no doubt he'd heal or revive somehow. She couldn't have been the first to try it, not over so many eons of existence. There was nothing he would defend, because nothing held value to him.
"You see now, don't you?" He sounded almost sad, while still grinning through his blood. "You see what you have to look forward to? An eternity of nothingness. What does Odin with his few thousand years know? Try a few trillion, then get back to me. When you've lived that long, look me up. I'm sure I'll still be around. We can take tea."
"I'm taking a ship," she said dully.
"Oh, of course. Access code is TentacleGurl69. Take whatever one you want."
She still gripped him by his throat a foot off the ground. He didn't seem to know or care. She couldn't leave it that way, though. She saw the window that Bi-Beast had driven her through.
"It won't make any difference, I'll still walk away," the Grandmaster said, seeming to know exactly what she was thinking.
"Your people want a spectacle," Taylor said. "So, I'll give them one. Burn!"
The magic surged through her ring and engulfed the utterly amoral immortal in flame. He actually cried out in pain from it as she threw him out the window. He flailed as he fell down the kilometer drop to the coliseum. Only then did her eyes begin to water. She couldn't bring herself to look at the puddle of fat on the ground.
None of the guards tried to stop her. In fact, they got out of her way as she left the penthouse and retraced her steps back to the docking bay. By the time she reached the ships the tears were pouring down her cheeks. Her nose ran and her throat constricted as sobs began to boil up from her chest.
She spotted one sleek red-gold ship that stood out from the rest. It looked almost like a disk, with a central fuselage bisecting the outer circular rim, with a powerful twin fusion thruster drive. The side hatch opened to reveal a relatively spacious interior.
The cockpit, surprisingly, followed the Kree layout. She didn't know if it was because the Kree built it, or stole their own layouts from it. Regardless, when she entered the access code, the ship hummed to life.
She closed up the hatches, and then just sat with tears running down her cheeks as she stared out at the daylight at the end of a long launch tunnel. "Gna was my friend," Taylor said aloud. "My sister in arms and blood shed. She deserved better. May her ancestors guide her to her resting place in Valhalla. May...her...oh. Oh, Gna. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
A fresh wave of grief struck, stealing her breath more surely than any blow could. She could only sit and weep for her lost friends, until after some time the tears dried. At the end of the long tunnel, she saw darkness and city lights. She didn't know how long she sat grieving, but the day was long past.
The ship hummed back to life at her touch. Though she'd only flown for a few minutes, she'd watched two older, experienced pilots and learned much. The familiar Kree controls answered to her commands, and in moments the ship surged forward with barely a hint of inertia.
She burst into a night sky filled with firecrackers and holograms of Bi-Beast, oddly enough. The city was celebrating his death. No enemy ships came after her as she flew out of the city toward the wormholes that seemed to dominate the sky around them.
Brunnhilde mentioned a wormhole outside of the city that could take her to Xandar. Most of the wormholes were smaller and set high in the sky or lower orbit of the world. Once, though, dominated the horizon and caused a permanent, swirling vortex of trapped moisture.
"That looks like a gateway to me," she said. She set the thrust, and flew straight on 'til morning.
~~Titanomachy~~
~~Titanomachy~~
When Quake removed Site's armor, the stench made her gag.
"That's not a good sign," he whispered. He didn't have the strength to speak any louder.
Their med kits were not designed for disembowelment. A dermal generator would do nothing for a punctured intestinal tract. The antibiotics would do nothing against the sepsis that was driving his fever so high. Not even his inhuman constitution could stop the inevitable.
"Site..." The words failed. Finally, she admitted what they both knew. "I can't fix this."
"You can't fix everything."
He'd teleported the two of them to a mountain glade, high above the gleaming city. She looked for a sun to gauge the time of day, but there was none. The daylight just seemed to fill the air with no discernible source. Below, she could hear bells ringing across the city.
She could not cry. Her chip would not allow it.
Site struggled to remove his gloves-she helped him. Then she helped him remove his shoes. "Just want to feel something, you know?" Sweat dripped down his deathly pale face, passing over the unbroken skin where his eyes should have been.
"Yeah, I know."
She sat beside him and dug out a tasteless ration bar. She shared a little water with him, but he couldn't drink more than a few sips.
"I'm sorry, but I need to tell you something. It's going to hurt."
"What do you mean?"
"Jiayang Five-Five-Two," Gordon whispered.
Quake didn't understand what he was saying. But it didn't matter, because suddenly, almost like a fist to the head, she began sobbing. In her mind, she watched Ion falling again and again, and there was nothing she could do about it. She could feel the cold touch of his diodes on her back. She remembered the glistening in his eyes when the Kree implanted him with their machines—stripping his humanity away even more than the slavery did.
More came-blow after blow of horrible memories stole her breath and left her sobbing uncontrollably as the last few months seemed to coalesce into one long condensed wave of agony that left her curled up on the ground.
Eventually, though, the tears stopped. She didn't feel numb from the chip, but because everything hurt so badly, it didn't seem possible to get worse. Wiping tears and snot from her face, she picked herself up and sat beside Site. "What was that?" Her voice cracked as she spoke.
"Freedom," he whispered. "A little, anyway. I was too late to keep you from being chipped. They probably would've anyway. I was already an inhuman when Hydra came for us. It was your mom who helped me through my transition. When Hydra and the Kree came and killed her, I escaped. I mean, how could they catch me? I went to find you, but you were already captured. The EDO was hunting Hydra down and killing them so fast, I was afraid I'd lose my chance. I found the last Hydra cell in Austria, and made a deal with them. The Kree came just for me because I was the only known teleporting Inhuman."
"What deal?"
"That I be given the codes to change your slave chip to its lowest restrictions and stay with you, wherever you went. The code removed everything but the base loyalty clause. You can do whatever you need to survive, as long as it doesn't harm the Kree."
She had to blink away her tears. "I don't...why would you do that? What were you thinking? Site, they enslaved you!"
"I did it for your mother, Daisy. I did it for Jaiyang, just like she did so much for me and so many other in humans. I owed her."
Quake opened her mouth, and then closed it again. "I don't understand, Site. My name is Skye, I'm an orphan."
"Your name is Daisy Johnson. Your parents were Dr. Calvin Johnson from America, and Jiayang. You were born in Hunan Province. I've seen your birth certificate. I don't know all the details of how you got to America, but I do know your mother never forgot you. When she told me about the little girl that Hydra took away, you could see how much it hurt her. You were the only child she'd ever had, Daisy. And she was at least a hundred years old."
His voice trailed off and he lay very still. His chest moved, but slowly. "Daisy?"
The name startled her. "Yeah?"
"My name is Gordon. Gordon Timmerman."
"It's nice to meet you, Gordon."
"It's nice to be Gordon again," he said with a wry smile. "At least for a little bit. Site was a stupid name for a guy with no eyes." His chest stopped moving.
~~Titanomachy~~
~~Titanomachy~~
Their med kits had nothing that could save Gordon, but they had something that could dissolve his body. She stripped his gear of weapons, water and rations, and anything else that she could use, and then piled his armor onto his opened stomach.
"Gordon Timmerman was a good man," she said, unsure of what else to say, or who she was even saying it to. She lit the plasma torch and tossed it on his body. The heat forced her to step back, even in the bitter cold of the mountains, as his body began to dissolve and sublimate into its constituent gasses. When the last trace of her last teammate was gone, she looked around the mountains for a path.
She knew nothing about Asgard. Her helmet computer had only the data necessary to accomplish the mission. She had no idea how to get off the word, or if there were space ports. All she knew was that she had the freedom, thanks to Gordon, to want to live and survive.
She sealed her helmet against the increasing cold of the afternoon. Though there was no sun, the light around her seemed to dim as if a sun was setting in the distance. She began climbing down the range, planning to skirt the edges of the vast valley below that housed the mountain-sized Golden cathedral that seemed to dominate the entire world.
The climbing should have been treacherous, but it didn't take long to find ancient paths carved through the stone. Within an hour she ran across a ruin that looked older than the pyramids. It had high, shattered columns and a partially collapsed roof of weathered, pock-marked marble slabs that lay haphazardly over what once must have been an extraordinary courtyard.
When the fall of night fast approaching, she searched the ruins until she found a relatively small, sheltered spot in a back room. It must have been a storage room at one point; now she could see signs of a large animal having lived there at one point long ago, but her helmet sensors told her the scent was old.
She used her power to move a large stone into the middle of the room and then fired her rifle at it on it's lowest charge. At such low power, the rock soon took on a dull red glow and began radiating enough heat that she risked taking her helmet off.
The sharp, sudden stab of pain when she sat down let her know her own pain meds were wearing off. She took another dose, and nibbled on the rest of her ration bar, before the darkness took her.
~~Titanomachy~~
~~Titanomachy~~
She woke to smoke, and the smell of cooking meat.
Quake sat up in alarm, her hands shooting out defensively to blast her attacker. Only, the figure sitting across from her did not attack. He was a large man, with skin a shade lighter than Morph's but darker than her own. He had striking, inhuman gold eyes and a kind smile as he sat over a roasting animal. She couldn't tell if it was a rabbit, or something completely alien.
For the longest time, neither spoke, until finally the very large man stood, used a knife as large as a sword, and sliced a quarter of the animal off. It dripped grease into the fire, making it sputter. He leaned over, offering it to her. "Surely fresh meat is better than Kree rations."
"I'm not Kree," she said. It was a programmed response—the Kree always wanted deniability.
"And yet, you bleed blue," he noted.
"What…?" She reached up a hand where he pointed; over the night she'd removed her gloves. When she pulled her hand back down, she saw old, flecked blue blood.
"Oh," she whispered. "I...forgot."
"I see." The giant Asgardian sat and cut another quarter of the animal off for himself. "Eat, child."
She was hungry enough, and the smell enticing enough, that she did just that. It tasted like succulent, chewy bacon. Or like the pork ribs that Mr. Crenshaw used to make, during her short stint in his foster home. He was one of the good ones, which is why they didn't let her stay there long. The good ones never lasted.
Tears stung her eyes. "I'm not Kree," she finally said.
"Of course not," the giant said. "But are you truly human anymore?"
"I...how do you know?"
"Child, who do you think stopped the Kree experimentation on your ancestors? I was there when Odin threatened to crack Hala in half for daring to interfere with Midgardian development. He did not have the heart to kill those the Kree changed, and thus here you are. You exist because of the Kree, and you bleed as they do because they transfused your blood to make your body strong enough to handle your power. They've done so before. And you sit here because they stripped you of your free will and made you a slave."
She couldn't argue with anything he said. "Who are you?"
"I am Heimdall," the giant said. "I am many thousands of years old. And yesterday, I saw your team murder my queen and her brother. My heart aches, for I loved them both so."
She stiffened and almost dropped the meat. "Are you here to kill me?"
"If I intended to kill you, I wouldn't have shared my breakfast with you. Oergats are very hard to catch, but are quite delicious."
He then proceeded to finish the rest of the animal, eating away until only bones were left. Those he tossed in the dwindling fire. Quake ate cautiously, torn between fear and hunger. Finally, when nothing was left but bone, she licked her fingers and watched as the giant stood and thoroughly extinguished the fire. He sheathed his huge knife and threw a thick scarf over his shoulder.
Unlike the only other Asgardians she'd seen, this man wore thick woolen trousers, heavy leather boots and what looked like a leather cuirass over a linen blouse. He did not appear to mind the biting, brisk cold.
"Well," he asked. "Are you coming?"
"Coming where?"
"With me. Unless you wish to stay in these ruins?"
"Where are you going?"
"I know of another like you. A good person once stripped of her will and self with a Kree chip. She is coming, and I believe she will help you escape this world."
"I don't understand. I helped kill your queen. Why are you helping me?"
The man smiled sadly. "My king has been betrayed, and all that I hold dear is at risk. Why help you? You were the weapon, child, not the hand that wielded it. I help you because I can. That is enough. Come. It's a long journey."