YOU NEVER HAVE PLANS...
Disclaimer: I own no part of the Avengers (I wish I did). All rights belong to Marvel. I only own the character Tess Rogers / Tesseract / Amalia Schmidt and her plot and dialogue.
THIS CHAPTER IS DEDICATED TO FoxGurrl, Guest, Angel1D98 AND Cari. I'M SORRY FOR BEING MIA FOR SO LONG BUT I HOPE YOU LIKE THE CHAPTER!
"No way we all get through this. If even one tin soldier is left standing, we've lost. It's gonna be blood on the floor."
"I got no plans tomorrow night," Steve told the men and his sister.
"Please," Tess drawled, pulling her hair up into a ponytail, "The only plans you ever have are with the Avengers or me. Maybe you should have let Nat set a date up for you after all. I mean, you're not getting any younger."
Steve pursed his lips at her and Tony grinned, high-fiving her. They grew serious again as Tony spoke, "I get first crack at the big guy. Iron Man's the one he's waiting for."
Vision wandered past, "That's true, he hates you the most."
Tony turned his head slowly, watching the caped-man walk past. He sent Tess the same expression Steve had sent her – deadpanned and lips pursed. "He really is your kid."
Tess hummed with pride.
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The Rogers woman repressed a sob as she handed the baby over to the woman who was already surrounded by little children—all orphans, all underfed and under loved. Tess knew she couldn't offer the baby in her arms safety but she could offer him love.
But she also knew Steve hovered behind her, planning their next attack on another HYDRA base and her responsibility lay with them.
"I'll find you," Tess whispered to the baby and gently passed him over to the woman, who cradled him gently and bustled away into the crowd with her other children. And then he was gone.
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Steve was debriefing the team. Usually, Tess helped him do it, but this time, Tess sat beside Pietro, her hand clutched in his.
"Ultron knows we're coming. Odds are we'll be riding into heavy fire, and that's what we signed up for. But the people of Sokovia, they didn't. So our priority is getting them out."
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Pietro sped into a police station, Tess teleporting into the station alongside him. "We're under attack! Clear the city, now!" The boy ran out, Tess staying behind and watching with a smirk. Not a single person in the station moved and he reappeared with a gun, shooting into the ceiling, "Get off your asses!"
Tess teleported out into the street. She stepped out of the portal beside Wanda, who was using her mind manipulation to make the people leave. Tess added her own power, accelerating the process.
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"All they want is to live their lives in peace, and that's not going to happen today. But we can do our best to protect them. And we can get the job done, and find out what Ultron's been building." Steve continued, "We find Romanoff, and we clear the field. Keep the fight between us. Ultron thinks we're monsters and we're what's wrong with the world. This isn't just about beating him. It's about whether he's right."
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Tess opened portals on the side of buildings. Anyone who was willing to walk through electric-blue circles was able to, and it cleared up quite a bit of the congestion out of the city. Ultron's army began to attack, clawing their way out of the ground. Blasts were fired and people were screaming and running.
"Go!" Steve yelled, gesturing to people to run.
Tess stepped in between a woman and her child and a robot, and with a quick motion, the blue-eyed girl slammed her hand into the robot's chest and ripped out half of it's insides. The young woman heard Wanda instructing people, "Get off the bridge!"
A shield of red energy sprung up, protecting the people. Wanda called, "Run!" Her moment of distraction enabled the robot to blast her. Wanda hit the ground and in a second, Tess had teleported in front of her, slashing blue energy at the robot.
"Are you okay?" Tess asked Wanda as she helped her up, and at the brunette's nod, she teleported away.
Tess' energy slashed out as she teleported around the city and she destroyed robots. The blue-eyed girl gasped as the city began to shake and crumble. Tesseract flew into the air and stared, opening portals under the people who were falling. Sokovia was…flying…
"Do you see? The beauty of it, the inevitability. You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor, my swift and terrible sword and the earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers, turn my own flesh against me. It means nothing. When the dust settles, the only thing living in this world will be metal."
Ultron hovered above the city, speaking through his army in Sokovia, and getting annoyed, Tess threw blue energy at the robot, causing him to spiral to the ground and Tess watched, still floating.
"Oh, for the love of God," Tess drawled, "Shut up, you piece of scrap metal."
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Tess felt the pinching in her chest. Pietro was feeling so much pain and anger, worried that he would lose the only place he would ever call home. If he didn't calm down soon, he would have a panic attack and none of them needed that.
"Pietro!" Tess teleported behind him and called loudly, making the man stop for a moment and run back to her. Without thinking about it, Tess pressed her lips against the Sokovian speedster's. Her own worry mingled with his. There was an intense feeling of dread in her chest that Tess tried to stop Pietro from feeling. She pulled away, smiled gently at his stunned look and grabbed his hand, "Be safe."
She teleported away and Pietro smiled, his eyes dazed. "Anything for you."
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"Cap, you got incoming."
Steve groaned, trying to get up from the car he had been thrown onto. Tess ran up to him and helped him up as he grumpily muttered, "Incoming already came in. Stark, you worry about bringing the city back down safely. The rest of us have one job: tear these things apart. You get hurt, hurt 'em back. You get killed, walk it off."
"Come on, don't we ever catch a break," Tess muttered, watching Ultron's army fly in. She turned suddenly to Steve and pulled him into a quick hug. "I love you, big brother."
Steve hugged her back, just as tight. "I love you too, little sister."
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Electric-blue energy was flying everywhere, shooting in solid orbs through the robots' chests. She was punching and kicking the robots away, creating portals that cut robots in half and impaling the robots with knives.
A car began to fall off the broken edge of the bridge and Steve grabbed it. The bumper broke off the car and the car plummeted off the bridge, the woman inside screaming as she fell. Thor reached the car and threw the woman up to Steve, who almost fell off in the process of catching her. "I got you! Just look at me."
The woman looked up and Steve pulled them up. Tess sighed and threw herself off the edge of the bridge and opened up a portal. The woman was swallowed up into the portal and landed on the bridge. Tess put Steve through a portal and both reappeared.
A robot ran at the Rogers siblings, "You can't save them all. You'll never…"
Steve threw his shield into the robot and used the magnetic feature to pull the shield back to him, robot still attached. Tess tossed the robot over her shoulders.
"You'll never what?" Steve yelled at the falling robot.
Tess grinned, "You didn't finish!"
Thor suddenly landed back on the bridge with the other car that had fallen off the bridge. The three walked away as Steve questioned, "What, were you napping?"
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Tess slashed at the robots, pulling off metal limbs and throwing them through inter-dimensional portals, only to pull them back in pieces. Her knives slashed through metal and her chaos magic warped the metal bodies of the robots into complicated patterns. Tess' chaos magic engulfed the ground, spiraling up to the robots and tearing them to pieces.
Wanda was powerful, but Tess had had an entire seventy years more to use her powers and to extend their limits.
"Alright, we're all clear here." Clint told them over the comms and Steve slammed his shield into a robot.
"We are not clear! We are very not clear!"
"Alright, coming to you."
Over the comms, Tess could hear a whooshing sound that she could only assume was Pietro and him yelling, "Keep up old man."
"Nobody would know. Nobody." Clint grumbled, "'The last I saw him, when Ultron was sitting on him. Uh...yeah, he'll be missed, that quick little bastard. I miss him already.'"
Tess grinned, appearing in front of Clint, "I would know. And I would miss him." Tess grabbed Clint's shoulder and teleported them back to the others.
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Tess teleported to the twins, adding her own psionic blasts to destroy the Ultron copies.
"Hold your fire!" A police officer shouted as the two witch's used their powers but Tess gasped and paused, grabbing her arm in an attempt to heal herself.
Pietro stopped running, turning back to look at the officer who had fired and grazed him with the bullet. The man spread his arms out in an 'are-you-kidding-me' motion and Tess glared fiercely at the officer. Sighing and stepping back, Tess observed her handy-work. Apparently healing Pietro's arm seemed to make Tess' own arm heal.
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Tess appeared beside Steve, talking to Tony on the comms. "The next wave's gonna hit any minute. What have you got, Stark?"
"Well, nothing great. Maybe a way to blow up the city. That'll keep it from impacting the surface if you guys can get clear."
"I asked for a solution, not an escape plan," Steve replied.
"Impact radius is getting bigger every second. We're going to have to make a choice."
"Cap," Natasha said, "These people are going nowhere. If Stark finds a way to blow this rock..."
"Not 'til everyone's safe."
"Everyone up here versus everyone down there?" Natasha asked incredulously, "There's no math there."
Tess shook her head, "I'm not leaving this rock with one civilian on it. And I'm sure Steve agrees."
"I didn't say we should leave." Steve and Tess turned to look at Natasha, who was gazing out over everything below them, "There's worse ways to go. Where else am I gonna get a view like this?"
"Glad you like the view, Romanoff. It's about to get better." Nick Fury's voice came over the comms and Tess grinned as the Helicarrier came into view, "Nice, right? I pulled her out of mothballs with a couple of old friends. She's dusty, but she'll do."
Tess jumped up, punching a fist in the air, "Fury, you son of a bitch!"
"Oooh!" The former director of SHIELD teased and Tess' grin widened, "You kiss your mother with that mouth?"
Pietro ran over to the trio, watching the Helicarrier, "This is SHEILD?"
"This is what SHEILD's supposed to be," Tess told him, sliding her hand into his. Pietro smiled down at the blue-eyed girl.
"This is not so bad."
Tess smiled, "I know."
The small ships began to stop alongside the edge of Sokovia and Steve turned, instructing, "Let's load 'em up."
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He was seventy-years-old and bleary-eyed when she found him again. He was dying and Tess didn't even know his name; he hadn't had one while Tess had known him. His many family members surrounded him—sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He had forgotten almost everything but he would never forget his life in Germany, under the thumb of the controlling woman who had raised him or how he had run to America the first chance he had. He had forgotten had to speak English too and when he rambled about his earliest memories, his family would write it off as the insane ramblings of a German man who was scarred deeply by his past.
Tess smiled rather lovingly as the old man looked up through the glass window at her. His brow furrowed for a moment, seeming to find something familiar about her. But he could not have known her, he was only a baby when she had saved him and he had grown.
Oh, how he had grown and she had missed it all.
Tess stepped back, tears threatening to spill as she finally walked away, leaving another reminder of her past in her wake. He had become such a wonderful young man—a man Peggy had enlisted personally as a SHIELD agent and then, when his time came, he had settled down and left the life behind.
That was something Tess and Steve could never do.
And so, she turned her back on the elderly Roger Davis as he smiled, never once forgetting the beautiful vibrant eyes which had hovered above him as she sung him to sleep as an infant, and let his eyes slip shut.
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UNEDITED
This chapter is kind of a filler and I swear, the flashbacks are my favorite part. I wanted Tess to be a bit more personal and to show what she lost, because we already know what Steve lost.
PLEASE REVIEW!
~ Raven