Safety Coffin
PenPatronus
Chapter 3 of 4
Abandon Ship
Steve Rogers re-dialed for the sixth time. "Answer," he growled into the phone.
"You know who I am…"
Steve slammed his fist into the Quinjet's rear hatch (and left an indentation behind). "Why aren't you answering the telephone?" he demanded. "I'm so mad at you right now I can't see straight!"
"Cap!" Barton called from the cockpit. "Come look."
Steve pocketed his cell, squeezed past his teammates, and peered down through the window. Manhattan was louder than ever. Helicopters, ambulances, firetrucks, cop cars and every other rescue vehicle in the state zipped around the city. Bright, beautiful sunlight on the spring day made the grotesque destruction even starker. One leg of a fifteen-foot tall letter 'A' poked like a shipwreck out of the debris that used to be the Tower.
"There's no safe place to land," Clint commented as he scanned the streets.
"Slender Man, Tweety Bird, and I can ferry the team," Rhodes said, nodding at Vision and Falcon.
Natasha suddenly sat up straight in the co-pilot's seat. "Did you see that?" she gasped.
Wanda leaned over her shoulder. "I thought I saw something moving in the clouds."
"There!" Sam pointed west. "It's small. Is that…is that a suit?"
Rhodey stretched up on his tiptoes to see past Cap's head. A flash of red zipped by. "That's him! That's Iron Man! Tony's alive!"
Clint flipped a switch to activate the jet's com system. "Stark! It's us, we're on your three, over!"
Static. Natasha turned on the radar and found nothing. "Where did he go?"
Barton bit his bottom lip. "Tony?" he called.
Natasha scanned the skies. "Nothing," she said softer than she intended.
"He must have activated the stealth technology," said the Vision.
"Why would Tony ignore us?" Clint wondered.
"Tony Stark is dead," a slimy, slippery, robotic voice announced over the coms. "And you're about to join him in his grave."
Wanda squeaked and plastered her hands across her mouth. "Ultron."
"That's impossible," Steve muttered. "We ended him." He looked at the Vision, but before any of them could think another thought, a repulsor blast suddenly rocked the ship, sending half of the group rolling across the floor.
"SHIT!" Barton sputtered. "Nat, what direction did that come from?"
Natasha wrapped one gloved hand around the safety belt across her body. "I didn't see! And we can't track that suit in stealth mode!"
The War Machine mask slammed down across Rhodes' face. "Open the hatch!" Natasha obeyed, and the rear flap folded outwards. A second before Rhodes and Wilson stepped outside, another shot sent the Quinjet into a tailspin. Barton got the ship back under control but not before several fires erupted, and one of the engines sputtered to a stop.
Clint struggled to zigzag around more shots while keeping the plane level. "Get out of here!" he hollered. "Rhodes, help her!"
"Wait—!" Before Natasha could fight back, Rhodey yanked her off of her seat and flew out. The Vision grabbed a teary-eyed Wanda, and Sam picked up Steve. "I'll be back for you!" Wilson called just before he leapt out of the ship.
"Take your time," Clint quipped between clenched teeth. "This is fun for me…" Smoke made his eyes water, but it didn't impact his vision enough to keep him from locking onto the red figure that zoomed off starboard. Barton fired, but the suit zipped away. Clint pursued, firing everything the ship had to keep the armor away from the evacuees. "Dammit," Hawkeye cursed when another blast sent the ship spinning. He lost track of which way was up, which was down, and abandoned the controls. With one slice of the knife from his pocket, Barton slid out of the seat, grabbed the nearest bow and arrows, held onto the weapons for dear life and let his body roll. A final hit sent the Quinjet into a somersault. The jet did a cartwheel, and Barton tumbled out through the hatch barely three seconds before it slammed into the already tilting side of a skyscraper.
Tractor's not so boring now, Clint thought as his body sailed through the air on the outskirts of a fireball. Gravity kicked in, kicked down, and Hawkeye hurled towards the debris. Clint pictured his children's faces, and shut his eyes.
For a second he thought that the heat around him was another laser from Ultron, but instead of bursting every cell in his body, it wrapped around it, cradled it. Clint opened his eyes to find that the world was red – a bright scarlet light had enveloped it. He blinked, squinted, and then looked down to see that he was floating now instead of falling. Wanda's magic cocooned him so gently, and lowered him so softly that it felt like standing on an escalator. Clint relaxed so much in her grip that when he finally landed on top of the debris, his legs buckled as if they'd fallen asleep.
"Whoa," Barton muttered when Steve and Wanda rushed to his side. "You're, uh, better at that," he told her.
Wanda nearly knocked him over with her hug. "I couldn't let you die," she sobbed against his neck, "not when Pietro died for you…"
"I'm all right," Clint assured her. He smoothed down her hair like he would do with his daughter's. "You were amazing."
Steve picked up the bow and arrows and tugged on Barton's elbow. "We need to get out of sight."
"We need to take down that suit," Clint argued. "Ultron…How did he do it? Did he do this?" Barton wondered, gesturing at the broken 'A' twenty feet away.
"We can ask Tony when we find him," Steve said in a voice that shut down any questions.
"Steve!" The three Avengers whirled around at the sound of the Black Widow's voice. She and the others stood on the other side of the 'A,' waving. Barton, Rogers, and Wanda climbed over the ruins. When they were all standing on the same slab of steel, the creaking started.
Suddenly, the slab shifted like a surfboard on a wave. The Avengers scurried away as the creaks turned to squeaks, and the entire field of debris started to slide. Seconds after they reached the relative safety of the street, a section the size of a McDonald's crumpled downwards.
Something green burst out of the hole like boiling water from a geyser. It shook the ground when it landed, and rolled across the remaining debris. The opposite of a snowball, which increases in size as it rolls, the green ball of limbs seemed to shrink as it tumbled head over heels. Two men rolled to a stop at Steve's toes – a very dirty Bruce Banner cradling a very pale, blood-spattered Tony Stark. For a moment – barely a second of time – everyone stared, slack jawed, as the two men lay on their backs staring up at Cap with shocked eyes.
Stark blinked, frowned at the group, and croaked, "Banner's home…"
Red burst through the smoke hovering around the tower. "All of you? Even better!" the Iron Man suit announced with Ultron's voice.
Tony looked at the sky. "Son of a bitch. That's the suit I wore in Sokovia. That son of a bitch downloaded a piece of himself into my system."
"This was his backup plan?" Steve wondered.
Bruce's arms trembled as he sat up. "You…didn't…check?" he gasped. "What about the Safety Coffin program?"
"Coffin?" Rhodes asked what everyone else was thinking.
"A program that was supposed to warn me if Ultron still existed. I should've been alerted if he was still operational. I checked – I sent the program through everything but my own damn suit. It's like looking everywhere for your car keys and finding them in your pocket," Tony whispered. He held out his right hand. Steve took it, and helped him stand. "He was just sitting in my armory, waiting for the right moment to attack…"
"I couldn't destroy this planet by dropping a meteor on it," Ultron called down at them, "so I'll shake it apart from below. If I vibrate the Tower's arc reactor power fast enough, I can shake the entire earth apart!"
"That's one hell of an earthquake," Natasha whispered.
"And he wanted us to have front row seats," murmured Steve.
Tony only stood on his feet because Steve held him there. "Guys, you have to get me that suit," he told the team. "Bring it to me, but don't destroy it."
Ultron cackled. "One more minute and the reactor will be ready! One minute, Avengers. What do you say we keep busy to make the time go by fast?"
A flap opened on the armor's shoulder and a missile the size of a man's forearm shot towards them. Wanda spread her arms like a bird's wings, and though the shield of red energy blocked most of the blast, it couldn't protect them from all of it.
To Be Continued