Double-feature time! I should be doing schoolwork, but, the way I see it, I owe you guys. Happy (early) Halloween. Merry (very early) Christmas. Whatever. :-)
Without further ado, Chitauri Battle: Part III!
She had lost Thor sometime between the last wave of Chitauri and this one.
Now, alone in an abandoned street, she felt her mouth go dry as a swarm of Chitauri – more than she took the time to count – closed in.
A step backward, and her heel scraped against the concrete face of a building.
She was running low on ammunition; she knew without checking that her knife belts were too light to be even close to full.
What she wouldn't give to be able to summon Mjolnir.
She drew a breath and two knives, giving them both a little spin in her hands. A Chitauri snarled in response.
At least these soldiers didn't have guns, or she would already be dead. But then, she would much rather die by a bullet to the head than by their claws and blades.
"Norns help me," she whispered, and she threw.
Her dagger lodged itself between the eyes of one soldier, the body falling in a heap of bone and metal. Before it hit the pavement, another knife had flown from her hand, killing another Chitauri. She drew two more.
She wasn't watching them die; there was no time for that. Instead, she became a machine, flinging blade after blade, confident that they all found their marks.
She could see herself reflected in the glass windows around her, and she knew the Chitauri saw it too. She fought twice as hard because of it, as her reflection made the Chitauri twice as determined to see her dead.
Her blades kept flying, keeping the soldiers at bay. Knives cooled the spaces between her fingers, glinting restlessly, all the more deadly when spun across the gap between her and a brutal demise. They were her guardians, and they were happy to do it, for they relished the taste of death.
She turned, shoving her dagger into a Chitauri's chest until her knuckles were slick with blood. Then, drawing it out again, smooth as from a holster, she used it to slice through another's throat.
Another dagger in her left hand, and she was tearing her enemy to shreds.
All the while, her reflection mimicked her actions. They made an excellent team. The Chitauri didn't reflect, though, leaving her image to fight nothing with all its spirit.
The Chitauri dropped dead steadily around her, but there were still so many. When one fell, it seemed, another grew to take its place. Almost like the Hydra of mythology, and nearly as impossible to beat.
She threw the two knives that she had been using in hand-to-hand combat, reaching for others to take their places.
Her fingers only touched the leather of her holster.
Damn.
From the Chitauri corpse nearest her, she yanked one of her daggers. Immediately, she whirled around, plunging it into the neck of an oncoming soldier.
She fought on, doing all that she could just to stay alive.
But was it worth it?
"Tony?" she asked over the com.
"Yeah?" came his strangled reply.
She took a breath. "Where are the others?"
"They've been pushed together somewhere around 47th."
She nodded unsteadily, slashing a Chitauri just because. "Do what you can to keep them there."
"Why?"
Her knives kept moving, almost of their own volition. She watched the Chitauri fall, hoping – praying – that it might somehow be enough.
She knew it wouldn't.
She swallowed and responded, "It's safer."
And, before Tony could respond, she dug the com out of her ear and dropped it to the ground. It broke into shards under the heel of her boot.
Sometimes, the only way to win was to concede.
Even she – with all her pride and stately determination – knew that.
It was time to give them what they wanted.
"Power level at seven per cent."
Tony's jets guttered for a second, coughing uneasily before firing once more.
He was big, yes. But even something big could be brought to its knees.
As the Hulk fell to the ground, wounded and weakened, he closed his eyes and moaned.
Steve caught his shield for what seemed like the thousandth time.
Beneath him, the ground shook as the Hulk crumbled. Above, Tony was barely flying.
He was shaking from exhaustion.
Finally, his calf – the first injury of many – gave out and his knees buckled.
Clint looked at Natasha.
Natasha looked back.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but he was silenced by the tear glistening in the corner of her eye.
She turned back around and the tear fell; she kept on shooting.
Sif had come back to earth when her skiff had spiraled out of the air, hit by a well-placed bullet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Thor gripping Mjolnir, something akin to fear in his eyes.
"One day, Valhalla will welcome us as kings and queens, and we shall never have need of any weaponry or armor ever again," she quoted, voice trembling.
The Chitauri had marched her through the city, parading her like a trophy.
The procession stopped on 47th Street.
All of the Avengers, plus Sif, stood huddled, backs together, weapons raised in one last feeble attempt at victory.
They all stared as the Chitauri shoved her forth.
"No!" Thor gasped, lurching forward. Sif caught his shoulder, but Elizabeth merely looked away.
The soldiers forced her to her knees, though it truly wasn't much of a struggle.
"I want them to see this," hissed a Chitauri in her ear. A cold, fleshy chill ran down her spine.
She saw Thor's feet take half a step toward her, though she didn't look up to see the rest of him. She heard him say, "Tell me you've got a plan," and, for the first time in many, many years, she decided not to lie.
Slowly, she glanced up at him, towering over her. "This is the plan. The whole plan." She took a breath. "No tricks. No lies."
"No," he repeated, and she knew he saw the honesty in her eyes.
She didn't respond. Instead, she drew a shaking breath, bowing her head as the Chitauri paced before her, speaking to the Avengers. For a moment, she knelt silently, jaw clenching and unclenching, fists mimicking in kind. Then, she whispered, "Please."
Somewhere behind her, another Chitauri had taken over the speech. She didn't care what it said.
"Please," she repeated, a dry tongue licking dry lips. "I don't need much. Just enough."
She thought she heard Thor's breathing go ragged. Tony and Steve had begun speaking on her behalf. She wished she could tell them to stop, but she knew they would never listen.
"Just enough to save them." She blinked her eyes closed, and a tear slid from each. "I care not what happens to me. But, please. I beg of you. Just enough." An unbidden tear dampened her cheek, and she swallowed. "Please."
Somewhere deep within herself, Elizabeth felt a tiny light begin to glow. She looked down at her hands and her face broke into the faintest of smiles.
"Thank you."
Nobody understood what was happening.
The shock of seeing Elizabeth in the custody of the Chitauri had shaken them all to the core. Now, her knees bit into the hard pavement; she was bloody, broken, and staring death in the face.
She was crying, and reasonably so.
What nobody understood was why she had let it happen. They all would have rather died than see their friend like this.
She was muttering to herself. Sif said quietly that she was praying.
All they heard was the last thing she said: "Thank you."
Then, her eyes flicked upward, looking at them each in turn. Something new and frightening shone in their depths – something that had been tamped, smothered. Something that had only just awoken, rising to the surface, thrashing, very much alive.
She spun on her knees and grabbed a Chitauri – the one who held a blade to her head – by the wrist.
Almost immediately, his unearthly wail rent the air as his body burned black under her touch.
"You," she hissed, pushing herself to her feet, "used me." Her teeth were bared, and her face had gone dark. "How dare you come after me? How dare you blame me?"
The other Chitauri shuffled back a step or two; apprehension was clouding their skeletal faces – a truly loathsome sight.
Her other hand was on the screaming Chitauri's face now, and her words stabbed. "But you had the unmitigated gall to touch them." She jerked her chin at the cluster of wounded and battered Avengers at her back. Then, she turned entirely, and they couldn't see her face any longer. "You put up a good fight, yes, but, like I told your Scrimorus," she snarled, voice venomous, "you picked the wrong target."
The Chitauri she had been touching shuddered once, disintegrating into the dust that became of bone and metal, neatly blowing away in the breeze.
The other soldiers balked, gaping at what had just become of their comrade; a moment later, they were drawing their weapons in self-defense.
She rounded on them before they even had a chance to aim.
Her hands shot out toward them, and the frigid, icy wastes of a thousand worlds spewed from her fingertips.
To her left, a Chitauri tried to escape. She was faster, encasing it in the very heart of winter.
A wave of ice rolled over the Chitauri, burying them in her wrath.
With a grand, sweeping motion, she swung the stream of frost that leapt from her fingertips across their ranks, leaving them frozen solid, glinting in the sun. Living ice sculptures.
Her shoulders rose and fell dramatically as she breathed, and Thor was reminded of a certain Casket that rested in the Asgardian vaults.
"The power of Jotunheim," Sif breathed, astonished, beside him.
The freezing air from Elizabeth's ice reached back, stinging Thor's cheeks.
Finally, once she was content that every last Chitauri was frozen solid in her unmeltable frost, she stopped. For a moment, she stood, swaying on the spot. Then, she glanced over her shoulder at the Avengers.
Her skin was the color of a frozen pond against the black-as-night backdrop of her hair, her eyes the searing red of embers. Across her face were ridges, arcing and sweeping over her forehead and cheeks in an ancient, ceremonial fashion.
Thor heard Natasha gasp. Sif's mouth had fallen open for just an instant before she righted herself, though the way she gripped her glaive proved that she was just as surprised. Thor himself hadn't even known what to anticipate, and he would have been lying if he had claimed to be completely nonplussed. Around him, the other Avengers stood in stunned silence.
"I suppose," Elizabeth slurred, the blue color slowly draining from her skin, "that this has inspired some questions."
"I suppose," Elizabeth slurred, "that this has inspired some questions."
A moment later, all the blue had faded from her skin, leaving her as familiarly fair as ever. Her eyes were slower to turn, but, when they did, they too looked perfectly normal.
"What the hell just happened?" Tony asked, breaking the silence.
"You were blue," Natasha pointed out.
"How'd you do that?"
"That was freaking awesome."
"What was that? Liquid Nitrogen?"
Before any of them got any answers to their multitude of questions, though, Elizabeth's knees gave out and she fell with a soft groan.
Instantly, Thor was at her side. "Are you hurt?" he asked, hands hovering over her as if he wished to help but didn't know how.
She let out a dry laugh followed by a deep, deep sigh. "No. Just tired." She looked up at the ring of worried faces peering down at her and added weakly, "No single being was meant to possess all that power, I don't think."
Thor cradled her in his arms, holding her close. "I know," he told her. "You wielded it well."
With a small, very fragile grin, she said, "You have no idea how much that means, coming from you." Her breath was labored, heaving in and rushing out like gusts of wind. When she blinked, it was for too long at a time.
"Stay with us," Thor instructed, giving her a little pat on the cheek.
"After what I just did for you," she said, words interrupted by her ragged pattern of inhales and exhales, "I don't owe you anything." Then, trying desperately to keep the smirk on her face, she noted in a voice barely more than a whisper, "I do what I want."
Her eyes closed. This time, they didn't even try to open again.
"Please," Thor begged, shaking her gently. "Please don't go."
When she didn't respond, he felt tears tighten his eyes, and he bent over her body to hide them. When he looked up again, his first sight was Sif's right wrist. The fingers of her left hand fiddled uneasily with the leather bracelet tied there.
Around them, New York City was still standing. Battered, scarred, and in need of much recovery time, yes, but standing. Much like them.
"Elizabeth –" Steve said quietly, his voice trailing off as if he hoped she might wake at the sound of her name.
Bruce, now shrunken back to human form and wrapped in a blanket, laid a hand on her forehead, feeling its temperature. "She's freezing," he murmured.
"Of course she's freezing," Sif snapped. "She just channeled the life force of Jotunheim."
Bruce's fingers slipped under her jaw, feeling her throat. "She's got a pulse, but it's weak." He looked significantly around the circle, his face conveying one thing: she's still alive.
Suddenly, a warm, ethereal glow tinted Elizabeth's skin. It grew steadily, until her entire body was engulfed in warm, pulsating light. Then, very slowly, things began to change.
She grew about an inch taller first, the shape of her legs and feet shifting. Her torso followed suit, hips narrowing and shoulders broadening. The last thing to change was her face, and, as the Avengers watched, Elizabeth disappeared.
Instead, resting in Thor's arms, covered in Elizabeth's wounds and scars, laid his brother, Loki.
For an instant, nobody moved.
Then, Loki coughed, and everybody else jumped.
His eyes opened, blinking up at them with the exact same green that Elizabeth's had been. The barest ghost of a smile crossed over his face, and he whispered, "I think I just won my freedom."
A/N: Ta-Da. :-)