After four months of fighting with New York City's electric grid and the public servants entrusted to its maintenance and care, Brittany's getting pretty annoyed that no city employees are apparently able to patch her on or off public electric power. Today, however, is supposed to be the last alteration before Pierce Tower goes live, so Brittany's whistling to herself as she cuts into a pipe deep under the bay. She hooks up the interrupt box and installs a feedback meter while she's at it.
"What are you whistling?" says Becky over the headset in Brittany's helmet. "You can't whistle Iron Maiden; it's wrong."
Brittany kicks the thrusters and shoots up out of the water. "I can whistle it if I want to," she says, smirking as she shoots forward over the water and toward the city.
"Nuh-uh. It's rock. You can't whistle rock."
"It's metal," Brittany corrects, flying high over busy streets with flickering lights. "And I reserve the right to pay homage to them however I please. Anyway," she presses on before Becky can interrupt again, "everything's go on my end. Give it a whirl. Time to become a beacon of self-sustained light."
With a huff, Becky says, "Assuming the reactor works."
"I do so assume."
"You shouldn't assume," Becky scolds. "Are we off-grid?"
Brittany rolls her eyes with a smile and hangs a wide right turn. "That's what I meant by 'everything's go.' Light 'er up."
Becky says nothing, but up ahead, the ribs of Pierce Tower flicker on. The white glow spreads upward through the edges until it fills in PIERCE along the upper rim.
"How does it look, boss?" Becky asks.
"Like Christmas," Brittany says with a wide smile as she leans back and flies up the face of it. "Except, I'm used to seeing a star at the top, instead of my name."
Happily, Becky says, "You are a star, remember?"
"Yeah," Brittany breathes, hovering to a careful stop on the circular landing pad. She bites her lips and steps forward; the weight of her foot triggers the new disassembly mechanism, which rears up behind her and clutches at her armor.
TUBBS chirps, "SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson is on the line."
"Nooo," Brittany groans. "Tell him I'm busy making a historic development in clean energy. No—tell him I'm busy getting plastered at that dive bar he hates."
"I'll tell him you're unavailable," TUBBS says drily.
"Do that."
The chest and back plates click apart and retract into the floor. Brittany watches the machines, amazed, as always, to find her creations moving fluidly through their tasks.
"I'm afraid he's insisting," TUBBS says, the computerized vocal pitch twinging as he sighs.
"Cut him off. I'm officially off the clock, even if he isn't," Brittany adds, stepping carefully out of the metal boots as they peel away from her shins.
Becky greets her with a smile and a flute of champagne. "Congratulations, Brittany," she says.
Brittany takes the glass and gives her a high-five in return. "It's better than I imagined," Brittany admits.
"I guess your imagination is your next project, then."
Becky's whining about leaving for the night and Brittany's staring at her holoscreens and trying to decide where to build the second tower when Phil walks out of the penthouse elevator.
"Rude," Becky declares in protest, gesturing emphatically from where she stands beside the window.
"Phil," Brittany corrects flatly. "I thought I explicitly blew you off."
Phil nods at them each in turn. He hesitates at the steps with the twitchy smile he wears when he's not sure if Brittany will do what he wants. "What is it?" Brittany asks without turning; she watches his lips squirm in the reflection off the window her desk faces.
"There's a bit of a situation," he says, gesturing with the thick black folder in his hand. Brittany reaches behind her with her left hand while she types with her right and makes grabbing motions until he puts the folder between her fingers.
Phil still sounds nervous when he starts to narrate what she's reading on the inside page. "It's called the Tesseract, and it's got something to do with gamma radiation. What's important is it's been stolen."
"Find someone else to play fetch with," Becky snaps.
Brittany's smile never reaches her lips. She's assembled the glass screens tucked behind the top briefing memo and frowns at the familiar information. "What's important is this file is about the Avengers. I thought you scrapped that."
Phil shifts uncomfortably. "It's being reconsidered."
"You mean I'm being reconsidered?" she asks with mock graciousness. She sets the doc display on her desk and surfs through the background data. When Phil doesn't say anything, she looks at him. "I thought I didn't qualify."
The way he squirms only verifies that he hasn't caught her amusement. "As I said, it's being reconsidered, in a new form. A response team."
"I don't play well with others," Brittany warns. She turns the screen halfway toward Phil and points at the words captioning her mug shot. "They got that right the first time around."
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Phil answers, trying to sound confident and failing endearingly.
Becky cuts in. "What's the Avengers?"
"What about everybody else?" Brittany asks before Becky gets an answer. Brittany swipes back and forth between profiles and looks at Phil expectantly. "Am I the belle of the ball, or a fallback?"
Phil scratches the back of his neck. "There's no I in team."
"But if you want a me in team, you're gonna need a team to go with me." Brittany eyes him and tries not to smile. "Am I really the first one you asked?"
"No!" he blurts. He shrugs awkwardly. "Third."
"Worst party ever," Becky grumps.
Brittany laughs. "Go ahead, invite Old Man America and the assassin and"—she pauses to glance at her screen and raises her eyebrows—"Dr. Jekyll? Seriously?"
"She was the second," Phil says, almost proudly.
Brittany raises her eyebrows. "Wait, really? Is she in?"
"Dr. Jekyll isn't real," Becky points out.
"Dr. Lopez is," Brittany says.
Phil checks his phone and opens a text message. "Actually, yes," he says, clearly surprised.
"Who cares?" whines Becky.
Brittany turns back to the screen's profile of Dr. Santana Lopez. It flashes between faculty and research staff ID photos and crappy security cam footage of a big, buff Ms. Hyde smashing concrete in black spandex.
"I'm in."
"Agent Fabray," Brittany says with a smile once TUBBS hacks into the helicopter's system. "You miss me?"
"Hardly," Brittany can hear Fabray sigh into her mic.
Just for shits and giggles, Brittany has TUBBS worm into the PA system and blast the opening chords of "Run to the Hills," just in case the other half of this retrieval team hasn't figured out who's here.
Of course, Captain America probably doesn't know anything about Iron Maiden, but there's no time like the present to start that education.
Fabray doesn't even turn around when Brittany lands behind her in the jet's open hangar. "That's Captain Underpants?" asks Brittany as her visor opens, following Fabray's sightline to the star spangled blob fighting the beetle on the open plaza.
"New and improved," Fabray deadpans without turning. "Nice background music, by the way."
"Microwaving him doesn't mean he's not still leftovers," Brittany mutters.
Fabray glances at her with an eyebrow raised. "What was that?"
"Nothing." Brittany zips back out into the air and down to where the Captain's getting his lumpy ass handed to him.
Chanting team player team player over and over only holds her off for about fifteen seconds before she immobilizes Blaine with two well-placed palm repulsor shots.
"I totally had him," Finn mutters as he comes up behind her, and Brittany just grits her teeth behind her helmet. She's got her palm and six miniature automatic weapons aimed at him, but he speaks before she can.
"I surrender," says Blaine with this slimy smirk.
Finn grins. "Awesome."
"I don't like this," Finn mutters, scuffing his shoe against the floor. Blaine still wears his weasel-grin where he sits with his hands bound.
Brittany rocks on the balls of her feet. "What, him giving up so easy, or him giving up to me?"
Finn purses his lips. "Holliday didn't tell me they were calling you in."
"She doesn't report to you, Capsicle," Brittany winks with a smile, just to annoy him.
Finn's about to say something back—probably along the lines of your face doesn't report to you—when a storm rocks the jet like a child's crib. Fabray barely says "What the—" before a big blond blur smashes through the ceiling, grabs Blaine, and leaps back out into the open air. Brittany jumps out after him while Finn blubbers, and she knocks the beetlenapper off a cliff and into a forest pretty easily.
The guy has a big mouth, a dopey grin, and a hairstyle somewhere between Justin Bieber and the Hercules TV show. "Don't touch me," he warns, raising his eyebrows and holding his free hand flat. He clutches a sledgehammer in the other.
"Then don't take my stuff," Brittany says, smiling.
"You cannot shelter my brother from the consequences of his actions," he says in this weird lumbering lilt.
"I am the consequences of his actions," Brittany snarks, repulsors at the ready. She's pretty sure this is Sam, the alien who decimated a town out west a while back. TUBBS confirms it.
Sam huffs and yells, "He must face Asgardian justice," in what must be a bad impersonation of someone.
"I just want the cube. He coughs that up and he's yours." Brittany's mask shifts back over her face and she turns to retrieve the captive.
The guy grunts and swings at her, and she catches the hammer square in the chest. It knocks her clear off her feet and into one of the evergreens surrounding them. Brittany grunts at the pain echoing in her chest and climbs to her feet.
Sam's swinging the hammer in a circle, looking up at the peak where Blaine the Beetle still sits, so Brittany pumps the thrusters and flies straight into Sam's torso. She's satisfied when it knocks him almost as far as he knocked her, and his hammer falls a few feet away.
As she takes a deep breath and braces her feet to shoot again, Sam's hammer jerks back into his hand and Sam raises it to suck lightning down from the sky. Brittany barely has time to curse and widen her eyes before Sam aims his hammer and redirects the lightning straight at the glowing center of her armor.
Lightning is one of the few tests she didn't put the Mark VI through, and Brittany feels a shock of white-cold terror as the electricity hums all along her skin, buzzing ominously through the electrofibers of her suit and sending a thick hum through the arc reactor nestled against her sternum. For an instant, she's positive she's dying; there's no pain, though, and she squints at her periphery screens while her battery bar goes haywire and the suit crackles around her. "Battery at 468%," TUBBS narrates when it calms down, sounding tinny and watery in her ear.
"Aw, so close," Brittany says with a grin, because 69 is always a hilarious number, just before she empties most of that in a gut-shaking blast that hits Sam square in his barrel chest.
Sam jumps high in the air and Brittany jolts up to catch him. They're punching each other while they fly around until they nose-dive back into the dirt.
Once they're upright again, Brittany narrowly dodges a blow that would have incapacitated the left elbow joint of the Mark VI. She hits him with a blast that barely fazes him and a mighty kick to the nads that definitely fazes him.
"How unsportsmanlike," he groans in half-falsetto, cupping himself with one hand and raising his hammer with the other.
Then Captain America's there, messing everything up again, and smacking Sam in the face with his shield. Sam staggers and rubs his nose, but he gets a solid hit against the side of Finn's face and runs over toward Brittany.
They match blows for a solid thirty seconds, but then he gets hold of her right forearm and starts crushing the metal bare-handed. He's probably leaving fingerprints in the metal where it presses hard into the muscle of her arm, quickly passing discomfort and heading toward He's going to break my fucking arm in half.
"Hey, over here!" yells Finn, making himself useful for once. "Didn't anybody ever tell you not to hit a girl?"
Brittany doesn't even get the chance to roll her eyes before Sam takes the hint and lunges at Finn. He swings the hammer and it connects with the shield in what is either the best or worst trap ever designed.
The reverberation is almost worse than the lightning strike was. Again, the arc reactor hums in that way that makes Brittany certain her heart is about to stop for real this time.
By the time they recover, Finn is looking at them like he's about to say I told you so. "Are we done here?" he asks, voice patronizing.
Brittany sullenly hopes Fabray is going to take her side on how ridiculous this whole thing is.
It takes all of four minutes for Brittany to decide that Finn Hudson is actually the worst person she could possibly be sharing space with, including the annoying anti-corporations activist whose sharply worded letters became sharply worded musicals posted on YouTube. Brittany endures two more hours on the plane listening to him attempt to flirt with Black Widow, and no number of whiskey-cokes can improve the experience.
They hand Blaine off to a SHIELD SWAT team as soon as they land on the helicarrier. Word is, they're taking him to the glass cage they built for Snix after her first outbreak. The others head to the bridge to watch Holly's preliminary interrogation, but Brittany's so tired of Finn and Fabray and Blaine's stupid smarmy smile, she takes a detour to say hello to Phil and ask after his cellist lady friend.
Brittany's walking Phil to the bridge, insisting he bring Rebecca the cellist to a romantic dinner for two in Pierce Tower's penthouse, when she overhears, "You said he was in Germany for the iridium. What does he need iridium for?"
"A stabilizing agent," Brittany answers helpfully as the doors open. She glances around the room and notes Finn, Fabray, and Sam have added Holly, Schuester the idiot of a SHIELD agent, and what can only be Dr. Santana Lopez to their number.
Brittany forces her eyes away from Santana, who looks an odd counterpart to Snix in her plain gray slacks and dull red dress shirt. The shirt is just a touch too big across the shoulders; she clutches dark-rimmed glasses nervously in front of her. Brittany focuses on the iridium and continues, "He needs the iridium so the Tesseract won't collapse in on itself, like when it made that mess at SHIELD."
Her path brings her past Sam, and she smiles at him and smacks his arm gently. "No hard feelings, trouty mouth. You got a mean swing."
She sticks the access bug on the underside of Holly's computer. "A stable portal"—she swings back around and stops behind the empty chair next to Sam—"can also open wider and stay open longer."
"Perfect if you've got a big, ugly alien army you need to move," Finn gripes.
Fabray cuts him off before he can continue; Brittany's never liked her more. "He has the iridium," she snaps. "Anything else he needs that can buy us time?" Brittany smiles cheekily when Fabray glares at her again, but Fabray, curiously enough, looks away to raise an eyebrow at Santana.
To save Santana, who looks positively terrified of answering Fabray's unspoken question, Brittany pipes back up. "Your defector. Chang, was it?" It gets Fabray's attention faster than a slap to the face. Brittany stays blank-faced despite her amusement. "He can get his hands on the other raw materials pretty easily. All he needs now is a little kick to kick-start the cube, and then he's good to go and we're… gone." She snaps her fingers.
Again, Finn speaks. "You seem awfully happy about it."
"Since when are you an expert in thermonuclear physics?" asks Schuester from where he stands behind Finn. He's either insulting her on purpose or insulting her by accident—which would be annoying, if Schuester weren't about the second dumbest person in this room after Finn.
"Last night. When I read Dr. Selvig's notes."
No one speaks up. Brittany's a little surprised; she'd assumed at least Santana would have read them, or Fabray, the overachiever, but Fabray says nothing and Santana plays wallflower away from the table. Brittany notes with surprise—which quickly turns to a quiet satisfaction—that although Santana can't meet her eyes, she can't stop eyeing her body.
"The extraction theory papers?" Brittany tries, glancing around at Finn and Fabray. "Am I seriously the only one who did the homework?"
Nothing. Santana fiddles with her glasses, but no one answers her until Finn sighs in irritation. "What kind of power source does he need? Will anything do? Like a flare, or—"
"He needs to heat it up," says the voice that welcomed Brittany to the room. It's Santana's, warm and rough. She twists her glasses around like rolling a kite string up on a peg. "He'd need to get it to at least… no, a lot more than 100 million Kelvin, just to break through the Coulomb barrier."
She looks so nervous. Brittany feels a warm little twinge as she smiles back. "Unless Selvig's figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunnel effect," Brittany concludes with a wink.
Santana blushes and adjusts her footing, apparently three seconds away from fainting or turning green. "W-Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion in every—in any reactor he gets his hands on."
With her best attempt at a reassuring smile, Brittany walks toward Santana and quips, "Finally, someone on this boat speaks English." Santana braces one palm delicately against the wall behind her, a little short of breath.
"English?" whines Finn. "That's what that was?"
Brittany ignores Finn and shakes Santana's hand. Santana's palm is sweaty and she's looking at Brittany like Brittany's about to bite her throat or shove her tongue down it. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Lopez," Brittany says, a little delighted at Santana's ingenuous, obvious interest. Santana's mouth drops open, but she says nothing; Brittany's fingertips brush Santana's wrist as their hands drop apart. "Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled."
It's clear, now, just how hopeless Santana is: even now, she just stares. Brittany bites her lip happily. "I'm also a big fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster," she teases, taking in Santana's face, only made-up at the eyes and lips and redder at the rounds of her cheeks.
"I'm not sure you should be," Santana says. Her voice sounds even nicer when she's aimed it at Brittany. Santana wipes her hand on the back of her thigh, trying to be surreptitious and failing beautifully.
Brittany's about to say something back when Holly breezes past them. "Dr. Lopez is only here to track the Tesseract," Holly says sternly. "Nothing more."
Either Holly's presence or her words calm Santana slightly; her shoulders relax slightly and she hooks one arm of her glasses into her collar. Brittany notices a black undershirt covering any potentially uncovered cleavage where Santana's shirt lies open.
"I was hoping you'd be able to pitch in," Holly adds, snapping Brittany out of her boob haze.
Right as Brittany turns, Finn suggests, "Start with the stick." He touches his belly and screws his face up. "It doesn't look like much, but it packs a punch."
Brittany draws a deep breath, preparing to tell Finn exactly how interested she is in hearing his voice again at any time in the next month and a half, when Holly cuts in with a nod. "Sounds like a good idea. It sure looks matchy-matchy with the cube. I'd also love to know how it turned a bunch of my expensive, remarkably well-trained operatives into a gaggle of flying monkeys…. Or is it a pack?"
Unhappily—still sore at Finn—Brittany says, "A pack, I think."
"Monkeys?" Sam frowns. "I do not—"
"I do!" Finn beams; everyone stares at him. "Wizard of Oz. I… understood that reference."
With Herculean effort, Brittany restrains herself and rolls her eyes. After an appropriate moment of silence for the scarecrow's brain, Brittany turns to Santana and says, "Shall we play, Doctor?"
Shyly, Santana smiles back and nods.
"After you." Brittany gestures to the hallway.
"Thank you, Ms. Pierce," Santana says on her way past, sounding for all the world like a schoolgirl staying after class.
"Call me Brittany." It's a little early for schoolgirl stuff.
Without turning, Santana fiddles with her hair and whispers, "Okay."
The embarrassed goo-goo eyes turn appreciative when Brittany starts unpacking her equipment. Eventually, Brittany smirks and knocks the glass exam table with her knuckle. "Let me guess: You just packed a toothbrush."
Ever-bashful, Santana bends her head down to stare closely at the portable gamma reader she holds over the scepter. "Actually, I didn't even pack that. I had to buy one at Rite Aid before I got on the ship."
Typical SHIELD. Brittany snorts. Santana glances at her—meets her eyes nervously—and turns back to squint at the data. "The gamma signature matches the tesseract."
The words scratch the lower edge of her register; Brittany wonders, unbidden, if that's what Santana sounds like when she's turned on, and immediately scrubs the thought from her mind before she blushes as red as her armor.
"It'll take a while to process the wavelength, though," Santana adds.
Brittany shrugs. "Not if we bypass their mainframe." Brittany walks over to a screen to make it so; she grins when she feels Santana's eyes on her. "If we use their systems to multitask, it'll go way faster," she says, though she's pretty sure Santana knows that.
"Using SHIELD's computers." Santana sounds half doubtful, half awed.
"Of course." Brittany glances at her, still grinning, and shrugs. "I mean… this is their mess. We might as well use their resources, right?"
Brittany enters custom codes into the programs. Eventually, Santana comments, "Those are quite some carpet bags you brought. Mary Poppins would be jealous."
Mary Poppins. Adorable. "You should come by Pierce Tower," Brittany offers, carefully casual. She approaches Santana and explains, "The top ten floors are all R&D. State-of-the-art. You'd love it; it's Candyland."
Santana aims her eyes downward when Brittany closes in on her personal space; Brittany could count every eyelash from where she stands. "I'm pretty bad at Candyland," Santana murmurs.
Brittany tilts her head and leans on the monitor, wearing a slight smile and waiting curiously for Santana to say what she really means.
It doesn't quite work. "Besides," Santana says, suddenly plopping down on the stool, "last time I was in New York, I kind of broke—Harlem."
There it is. First mention of the alter ego. "I promise a stress-free environment," Brittany says softly, leaning closer. Santana hunches over the table; Brittany swipes an electric screwdriver and circles behind Santana's back, eyeing the graceful bumps along her spine. "No tension," Brittany soothes, "no surprises—"
The screwdriver buzzes against Santana's side. Santana yelps and knocks the table with her knee, jerking in a curve away from the pain. Brittany peers closely at the surprise and alarm on her face, but sees no hint of rage nor tinge of green. Santana opens her mouth, probably to ask Brittany to move away, but they're interrupted by none other than Captain Underpants, Shit Stain of America.
"Hey!" he yells, lumbering into their lab like Snix into a crystalware store.
"Nothing?" Brittany asks, hoping to ignore him out of existence and still fixated on Santana's apparent control of her other half.
Santana's mouth hangs open.
"Are you nuts?" demands Finn, wheeling his arms uselessly.
"You've really got it locked down," Brittany murmurs. She's duly impressed. "What's your secret? Brainwashing? Mellow jazz? Huge bag of weed?" she reels off while Santana stares, stunned.
"Stop being an idiot," Finn whines. Finally, Brittany turns to him, eyebrows raised. "Not everything is a joke."
Of course, being called an idiot by Finn is a joke of itself, but Brittany just replies flatly, "Funny things are."
In the corner of her eye, Brittany thinks she sees Santana smile.
"You're putting everyone on this ship in danger," Finn says, like Santana's not even in the room. "I don't think that's funny." It takes him a full second to add, "No offense," to Santana.
Santana rolls her eyes and sighs, "Don't worry about me, Cap. I wouldn't be here if I couldn't handle disrespect, or… pointy things."
Brittany turns fully to Santana—who is far easier on the eyes than Finn, to be sure—and gestures with her screwdriver. "You're tiptoeing. You're hiding. You oughta strut." She offers a smile and a wink and coaxes, kindly, "Show everybody the awesomeness that you are."
"From what I understand," Finn interrupts, "the awesomeness that she is smashed half of New York into rubble."
Venomously, Brittany turns and says icily, "And from what I understand, you were five different flavors of popsicle when that happened. So how about we stick to what we know?"
"As long as you stick to the problem at hand," Finn shouts, jabbing a stubby finger at the scepter.
Brittany squares her stance. "You think I'm not?"
When Finn just stares at her with his nostrils flared and his arms crossed, Brittany scoffs. "Why'd Holly call us in on this? Why now? What isn't she telling us?" She taps the screwdriver against her fingers. "I can't do the math without all the measures."
Slowly, her words sink through the wax caked in Finn's ears. "You think Holly's hiding something?" he asks with childish innocence.
"She's a spy, Captain Crunch," Brittany says, a little surprised at his surprise. "She's the spy."
Finn frowns under the effort of thinking so hard. Brittany glances at Santana and smiles a little. "It's bugging you, too," she says, tapping Santana's hand to make her look up.
Santana startles. "I—uh—"
"Isn't it?" Brittany shimmies onto the table.
"I—" Santana struggles, waving at her monitor and notebook. "Listen, I just wanna do my work, and—"
"Doctor?" Finn prompts darkly.
Santana sends an S.O.S. look in Brittany's direction. Brittany nods gently, encouragingly, and Santana takes a breath and stares hard at her lap. After a moment, she tugs her glasses off. "'A warm light for mankind to share,'" she quotes. "Blaine's jab at Holliday." Santana's tongue flicks over her lip and she looks at Brittany. "I think that was meant for you."
The energy project. Pierce Tower. Brittany laces her fingers together and tilts her head, waiting for more.
"Even if you haven't been working with SHIELD recently, Pierce Tower has been all over the news for—months and months," Santana elaborates hesitantly.
"Pierce Tower?" asks Finn. His dull eyes grow duller. "That hideous"—he notices Brittany aiming her rage in his direction and redirects—"that building downtown?"
"Yeah," Santana cuts in before Brittany can give Finn a piece of her mind or a taste of her fist. "It's run on a large-scale ARC reactor. It'll run itself for—what, a year?" Santana verifies.
Brittany blinks and a smile spreads over her face. Only scientists read the journals that covered the ARC reactor, and though Santana is a scientist, Brittany finds her stomach fluttering at the thought of Santana reading about it, wherever she was.
"And it's just a prototype," Brittany says, glancing at Finn. He's apparently too dense to be suitably impressed, so she emphasizes, "I'm basically the squeaky-cleanest in clean energy right now."
"Sooo," Santana says, "why didn't they bring her in on the Tesseract project? What's SHIELD doing in energy anyway?"
It's a good point. A really good point. Brittany watches Santana nervously glance back and forth; Brittany's gaze drops to Santana's mouth, as if drawn by magnets. She sees Santana's throat shiver as she swallows.
Brittany hops off the table and tugs her shirt so Iron Maiden is centered over her chest. "I'll be sure to ask TUBBS the exact same question, once my decryption program finishes sneaking into SHIELD's secure files."
Santana's jaw drops. "I'm s-sorry—what?"
"TUBBS?" says Finn.
"That's right," Brittany says brightly, tugging her phone out of her pocket and holding it in front of Finn's face. "It's been running since I hit the bridge. Pretty soon, we'll have every dirty secret SHIELD does."
Brittany grins at Santana because Finn looks constipated again; she grins wider when she sees Santana blushing again.
"And you want them to trust you," scoffs Finn, as usual zeroing in on not-the-point.
"They're an intelligence agency, and they're afraid of intelligence?" Brittany says, incredulous. "Historically, not awesome."
Finn's stuck off-topic. "This is classic divide-and-conquer. Blaine wants to weaken us and if we don't stay focused, it'll work."
"Blaine doesn't know about any of this," Santana says uncertainly, like she's afraid she's missed something. "How could he be—"
"We have our orders." Finn glares at Brittany. "We should follow them."
With a conspiratorial glance at Santana, Brittany pockets her phone and quips, "Following's not really my style."
"And you're all about style," Finn mocks, looking her up and down.
"You're the one wearing an American flag in a research laboratory. Which, might I add, you have no place in."
"Finn." He looks at Santana begrudgingly. Gently, she asks, "Really, honestly, none of this smells fishy to you?"
He hesitates. With a grimace, he says, "Just find the cube," and stomps out of the room.
Brittany takes a few deep breaths to purge her growing hatred for Finn, then crosses back to Santana's monitor. "That's the guy my dad was obsessed with? He had vintage trading cards and everything." Brittany glances at the door. "I think he made a better popsicle."
"He fought Blaine," Santana says, almost like a question.
Brittany rolls her eyes. "So did I. That guy has drunk about six gallons of the Kool-Aid, and I think he's about to wet himself."
It makes Santana laugh; that makes Brittany smile. "Gross," says Santana.
Their faces stay close. "People aren't meant to be sheep," Brittany says. "Sooner or later, he's gonna follow orders right off a cliff. I just hope I get to be there." She smiles a little, in case Santana worries Brittany really means to kill Finn.
Santana turns back to the table and smiles. "Yeah, well. I'm sure I'll read about it when it happens."
"Or," Brittany drawls, "you'll be suiting up with the rest of us."
Immediately, Santana withdraws and bites her lips. She touches the screen without purpose. "See, that's the thing, I don't—get a suit of armor." Santana breathes deep. "I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's… a nightmare."
Santana stays still for a long moment, her eyes closed and her breaths shallow, focusing on something inside her. When she finally opens her eyes, Brittany sits away from her slightly, to give her space. "You know"—Brittany hesitates—"that chunk of shrapnel is still trying to cut into my right ventricle. It tries every day." She taps the mini reactor and murmurs, "This stops it. It's part of me now. Not just armor."
Santana looks down and away. "But you can control it," she says quietly. The way the words waver makes Brittany wonder if she's ever talked about this with anyone.
"Because I learned how," Brittany pushes, trying for optimism and an implicit offer to help.
"Not the same, not the same," Santana says instantly. She laughs sadly and touches the screen. Brittany brushes her hands away gently so Santana will look at her. Finally, after a long stare, Santana whispers, "The shrapnel wants in. The—she—it wants out."
Santana gazes through the glass at her hands. Brittany watches her, both of them barely moving, and tries to imagine something inside her trying to crawl out. It's not as difficult as it might be.
Finally, Brittany gulps for courage and tries, "I read about your accident. That much gamma radiation… It really should've killed you."
Santana sputters, disbelieving and sad and discouraged. "Are you saying it—Snix saved my life? Or are you just saying I should've died?"
The last question comes out a breathy whisper; Brittany feels her heart stutter and her face blank out at the idea. Brittany reaches out—as if possessed—and tucks Santana's long bangs behind her ear. "I don't really know… but maybe that's the way the universe balanced it out. To keep you alive."
"My life for my control over it?" Santana chokes, looking away.
Brittany touches the edge of Santana's ear and wills herself to say what she means. "To return good to the world, it had to return a little evil, too."
Santana looks at her with wet eyes, her hurt turning slowly into uncertainty. "You don't know I'm good."
"Yes, I do," Brittany breathes, feeling it more than thinking it. She takes in Santana's caved-in expression, her hope and her fear of hope, and feels Santana's fragile pulse under her fingertip.
"You said she's part of me, though. So I'm evil, too," Santana whispers hoarsely, begging to be convinced otherwise.
"Nobody's just good or just evil," Brittany swears. "We're all just people."
"Some of us are more than 'just people,'" Santana whispers, searching back and forth between Brittany's eyes. It's so clear which of them she means; it makes Brittany's heart hurt.
Words aren't working. It's like her childhood—her mother complaining about how hard it is to understand what she says—so Brittany really, really says what she means and presses her lips against Santana's, carefully and completely.
Santana stiffens and trembles, and she just barely touches Brittany's collarbone when she remembers herself and draws back. Brittany breaks away and breathes, "You're more than 'just people' too, Santana. You're more than Snix."
The trembling takes over, and Santana looks at her with uncomprehending worry, as if Brittany will disappear any second. "You don't know anything about me," Santana protests meekly.
Brittany melts. She clicks her tongue sadly and whispers, "You don't know anything about you, either."
Again, they get interrupted, when Holly ruins Brittany's punchline with her obvious annoyance.
"What the hell are you doing?" Holly demands. Brittany hops off the counter and Holly points right at her. "Yes, you."
Santana shrinks at Holly's tone and Holly adds, "You're supposed to be looking for the Tesseract, not braiding each other's hair."
"We are," Santana insists in apology. "We logged the search algorithm and the server is sweeping for the Tesseract now."
"We'll get a hit within half a mile, thanks to your exceedingly efficient Big Brother technology," Brittany cuts in, stepping up to Holly. "George Orwell would be proud—or, should I say appalled"—she skirts Holly and tilts a monitor toward her—"Although, speaking of appalled, exactly what is Phase Two?"
Holly raises her brows, unsurprised that Brittany's getting up to mischief as usual. "And how do you know about—"
"Weapons?" bellows Finn as he dumps a HYDRA weapon on the metal work counter. He sneers at Brittany. "Sorry, computer was a little slow." He turns back to Holly and shouts, "You're using the Tesseract to build weapons? Did SHIELD used to be spelled H-Y-D-R-A?"
Annoyed, Holly explains, "HYDRA had the Tesseract before, so we gathered everything we could to—"
Brittany taps an image of missile schematics on the screen. "Sorry to interrupt," Brittany interrupts to give them a taste of their own medicine, "but your lies are a little outgunned at the moment."
Sam and Fabray join the party and chatter with Finn and Holly. Brittany overpowers them when she shouts, "Did you two know about this?"
Fabray blatantly ignores her—she's such a bitch sometimes—and glares pointedly at Santana. "You wanna think about removing yourself from this situation?"
Affronted, Santana seems to react on instinct. "I gave that a shot, but you thought Calcutta was too far removed. You're the one that brought me here!"
"Blaine's manipulating you," Fabray says, stepping toward her like a ranger getting ready to trap a wild animal.
Santana scoffs indignantly. "I haven't set foot in the same room—I haven't shared air with the guy," she splutters. "The only people manipulating me are in this room."
That stops Fabray in her tracks, her quasi-honor getting the better of her. "You didn't come here because I bat my eyelashes at you," she says, more accusatory than anything else.
"Your eyelashes aren't gonna kick me out of my lab, either," snaps Santana. To Holly, she pushes, "I'd like to know why SHIELD's making weapons that make Hiroshima look like a misfired flare gun."
Holly sighs her long-suffering martyr sigh and points at Sam. "Because of him."
Sam and Finn both do double-takes. "Me? What?" asks Sam nervously.
"Your brotherly spat leveled a small town," Holly reminds him. "Not only are we not alone in this universe; we're also sitting pretty at the bottom of the totem pole."
"Asgard has no fight with your people." Sam glances around the room, clearly wondering if he's surrounded by enemies.
"What if it did?" snaps Holly impatiently. "And there's plenty of other worlds out there itching to take a bite out of us. I notice Blaine didn't have any trouble getting his hands on a bloodthirsty army-for-hire. We needed to send a signal."
"Wielding the Tesseract certainly sends a signal," Sam says incredulously. "A violent signal! It signals to others that Earth is prepared for a conflict on that level."
Holly crosses her arms. "We need to appear formidable until we become formidable. We needed—"
"A nuclear deterrent?" says Brittany drily. "Holly, can you think of anything less likely to prevent interplanetary war?"
Holly shoots a withering glare her way. "You got a better idea, Pierce?"
"If we don't know what they're packing, how do we know it'll even deter them?" asks Santana, gripping the table edge tightly. "We could still be hilariously underprepared, but this way they know the best we've got before they show us their cards."
Finn makes a noise. "Good grief, stop mixing metaphors. This isn't helping us find the Tesseract or stop Blaine."
"Lay off her," Brittany spits. "You're the one so eager to follow, you'd trail SHIELD into the mouth of a gun."
Fabray says, loud and authoritative, "You're all so naïve. SHIELD monitors potential threats. Without structure and order, all you get is chaos—"
Santana touches her temple with a pained expression. "What do you think this is? You think we're a team? A club?"
Her eyes are wild. Brittany steps toward her.
"No, no"—she glares at Brittany, then Fabray—"we're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're—we're a time bomb."
"You need to cool it," warns Fabray.
"She's got a point," Brittany says, keeping a watchful eye on Santana. "Would it kill you to let her talk for five seconds?"
Finn sneers. "It just might. You know she's a danger to all of us, so back off."
Brittany turns toward him, livid. "Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me," she says darkly, her fists tightening.
"Yeah," snorts Finn, "puttin' the big-girl panties on in the suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?"
"A genius? A billionaire?" Brittany bites.
"I know guys with none of that worth ten of you," Finn dismisses.
Brittany raises an eyebrow, wishing he'd take a swing already. "Just because you count women as one-tenth of a person—"
"You always gotta make this about you," Finn interrupts, throwing his hands up. "You're no saint. You look out for Number One. You're not the guy to lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over you."
Brittany feels the anger rushing through her—or maybe it's adrenaline. "I'd just cut the wire," she spits. "Not all of us have been genetically altered to survive a grenade blast to the face."
Weirdly, Finn turns away to glare at Santana. "Whatever," he mutters, "but if you're not gonna step aside, you can at least stop playing the hero."
"Hero? Like what? Like you?" Brittany laughs bitterly, ever surprised at how ridiculous Finn gets. "News flash, Hudson: You're a laboratory experiment. Everything special about you came out of a bottle."
Finn smiles cruelly. "Put on the suit. Let's go a few rounds."
Suddenly, Sam breaks the spell and chuckles. "You're being ridiculous. Stop being so petty."
As if stepping from a fog, Brittany steps back a pace, glancing around. Holly sighs and says, "Agent Fabray, would you please escort Dr. Lopez to her—"
"To my what?" snaps Santana. "To my cell? You already rented it out."
Holly's expression flickers uneasily. "That was just—"
"—in case you needed to kill me," Santana finishes. Her eyes glitter with tears.
"Well—"
"Well you can't," Santana spits. "I tried." She looks around wildly, at each of them, her expression angry and dark. "I got upset," she admits as her voice climbs higher, "I didn't see a way out, so I put a bullet in my mouth and the other girl spit it out."
Santana shudders visibly and glares at everyone. "So I put it behind me," she struggles after a long pause, "I tried to focus on—on helping people, and I was good, I was actually living a sort of life, and then you drag me back into this freak show and put everyone on this ship at risk. I didn't want to come in the first place, remember?" she adds at the end, grabbing her stomach with one hand and the scepter with the other.
Holly says, "Dr. Lopez."
Santana's wild eyes snap to her. "What?"
"Put down the scepter," says Finn behind Holly, sounding nervous for the first time.
Santana looks confused and surprised to find it in her hand. Just as she sees it, the tracking program beeps triumphantly. Santana puts the scepter back on the table and hustles over to the monitor. "Sorry, kids, looks like you don't get to see my party trick after all."
Sam says some shit about the Tesseract belonging on Asgard, but Brittany ignores everyone and announces, "I'm going after it."
"You're not going alone," yells Finn as she turns to get her suit. He grabs her arm.
"I'm going wherever I damn well please," Brittany spits at him, yanking her arm from his clammy hands.
"Put on the suit," he threatens, getting in her face. "Let's find out."
Brittany sneers. "I'm not afraid of you, old man."
"Put on the suit."
Behind them, Santana murmurs, "Oh my god," and then the bomb goes off.
Brittany squints in the smoky air and laments finding Finn right in front of her face. He looks panicked, appropriately so, and he jostles Brittany to her feet and says, "Put on the suit," scared and urgent.
"Yeah," Brittany says, sprinting into the hallway to her quarters.
She jabs her earpiece in as she jogs, and she's activating the suit storage when Schuester checks in with Holly to report Engine 3 as completely offline, but mostly intact. "Someone has to get out there and repair it," Schuester sighs with his usual sluggishness.
"Pierce, do you copy?" asks Holly, sharp and alert in Brittany's earpiece.
"I'm on it," Brittany says with her thumb on the mic button as she snaps the suit into place on her body.
On the channel, Fabray's voice warbles, "We're okay," before she cuts out.
"Fabray, are you with Lopez?" Brittany asks, tapping the mic twice when there's no response. "Fabray, do you copy?"
"She's offline," says Schuester from the bridge.
Brittany closes the mask and makes for the engine bay, cursing under her breath.
She's floating between problem areas—which pretty much means the whole area with electrical arrays and relay boxes, because that's where the bomb took a bite out of the hull and everything inside it—when she hears Finn yell, "Pierce, I'm here!"
"Good," she says, a little surprised he's chosen to make himself useful. "Let's see what they've got."
The suit gives her a visual overlay of the schematic; the cooling system's offline, so that comes first. She only realizes she's murmuring to herself when Finn bellows, "What?"
"Get to that panel over there," she instructs, pointing for him. "Tell me which relays are overloaded." She digs into the guts of the system and goes in, asking Finn over the comm link, "What's it look like inside?"
He drags out his martyr sigh and says, "It appears to run on some form of electricity."
"You're not wrong," Brittany says, grimly amused. At least this time, it makes sense for Finn to be missing major pieces of information. "Describe what you see, as precisely as you can."
Another voice cuts in. Phil. "Sam's got Lopez on the hangar deck," he updates in a rush, then cuts off.
"Great," Brittany and Finn both mutter, for different reasons. Brittany takes a deep breath and overlooks it in favor of guiding him through the relay repair.
She's made it to the rotors by the time he's finished. "Everything's set," he grunts.
"Great," she says, surveying the situation. "Even if I clear the rotors, I'm gonna have to jump it to get it turning again."
"Doesn't it spin awful fast?" asks Finn, dumb but at least concerned by the prospect of the rotors shredding her to pieces.
"There's an override switch that'll reverse the polarity, enough that I can slip out and we can reset it," Brittany thinks aloud.
Blankly, Finn says, "Huh?"
"The red lever. Get to it and pull it when I say."
"Can do."
Brittany rolls her eyes, a little less bitterly, and sets to clearing the debris. It's easy enough, with the laser and repulsors on her side. The battered spoke falls into the clouds. Suddenly, the whole craft slants toward her. "Pierce, we're losing altitude," says Holly over the link shortly after.
"Yup, noticed," Brittany grunts in reply, setting her palms against the rotor and firing the thrusters. Slowly, she gets the fan spinning; then it picks up speed, almost dramatically. "The lever, Captain," she calls.
"Need a minute," Finn says back.
Brittany frowns and squints, worried and fearful. "Lever, now," she nags, watching the rotor slip to her fingertips. All too quickly, she's flat against the wing behind the one she pushed—she just has time to curse again, loud—and she snaps under the rotors.
The suit takes the brunt of the pain, but Brittany's not made of iron, and she's being scuttled around under the rotors and against the fan's casing like a slice of banana just under the blender teeth. "Lever!" she hollers, turning into a shriek, when suddenly Finn must throw it and the fan slows enough for her to slip off.
The thrusters catch and sputter when she fires them, but they hold, and she doesn't plummet to her death. The screens swim ominously in her periphery. She shoots over to the lever—sure enough, there's a pack of infiltrators beating on Finn—and smacks them down like bowling pins.
She makes it into the interior with Finn when it comes over their earpieces: "Agent Coulson is down," Holly announces, her voice dry.
"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket," Holly says tiredly. She flicks a dozen bloodstained trading cards onto the table and says, "Guess he never got you to sign them."
Finn flinches. He looks at the cards without touching them. Brittany bets this set is as good as her dad's, and wonders if Finn's really worth this much fuss.
Holly clears her throat and speaks with the careful reverence of a eulogy, although she doesn't say more about Phil. "We're flying blind," she admits. "Communications are down on a wide scale; we've lost Sam, Lopez, the Tesseract… You're pretty much what's left."
Finn reaches hesitantly toward the cards, then changes his mind and pulls his hand back. Holly watches him like a hawk.
"Yeah, we were gonna build an arsenal with the Tesseract," she says bluntly. "So what? None of that matters now. And, anyway, I wasn't really betting on that." Holly pauses and glances at each of them, almost encouraging. "I was betting on you. Betting you'd work together when we needed you; when no one else could do the job. Phil Coulson died believing in that idea." She pauses again, dramatically. "In heroes."
Brittany leaves. Holly's no hero; neither is she. That was never the reason she came.
Finn finds her staring at the emptiness where Snix's cage hung before it dropped Sam to Earth. "Was he married?" asks Finn, clearly talking about Coulson, though he's not the first thing on Brittany's mind.
"No," she says, trying to retract her glazed stare. "There was—a cellist, I think."
Finn leaves a respectful pause. "He was a good man."
"Who should never have gone up against Blaine solo."
Finn bristles. "Now hang on—"
"He should have waited," Brittany insists. "Blaine dropped Sam anyway; he should've—"
"Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?" asks Finn, almost amused by Brittany's angry grief.
"We are not soldiers!" she spits at him. When he stares at her, frowning slightly, she presses on. "I don't—I don't know what we are, but we're not soldiers," she warns.
Finn shakes his head with an expression like he's seen an angel. "No, no we're not, we're superstars," he says.
"Now who's obsessed with style," Brittany mutters, surprised at him.
"We're big-name freakazoids, the lot of us," Finn says. "He wanted to be here; he wanted to be here because we were here."
Brittany frowns, afraid he's actually had an idea. "Are you saying—we were the point?"
"He grinned the whole time," Finn shrugs.
Brittany turns away thoughtfully. "He didn't just want to beat us, he—he hit us right where we live, and… he wants to be seen doing it. That's what Blaine wants. To show he's better than us. Publicly."
"Yeah, yeah," says Finn, nodding along. "He wants to beat us and get a statue in his honor."
Brittany's eyes widen, pinned strangely to Phil's blood stained on the wall. "Or a tower."
"A what?"
"Son of a bitch."
Even after patching up the Mark VI, Brittany beats everyone else off the helicarrier. She lights out for New York—literally; she never tires of that phrase, now that it's punny—and makes her way to Pierce Tower.
Sure enough, there's what looks like an enormous CoffeeMate with blue filaments set up on the highest rooftop, with old Dr. Selvig slaving dutifully over it.
"Shut it down, Dr. Selvig," Brittany says through the voice amplifier.
As she says it, TUBBS chirps, "The device is already self-sustaining. I'm afraid it's no use."
"It's too late!" shouts Selvig, staggering toward his creation in wide-eyed awe. "She wants to show us something!" He turns to her, his eyes icy blue. "A new universe."
Brittany twists her lips to the side. "Okay." She blasts two medium repulsor shots at the machine and instantly regrets it: they bounce off a spherical blue shield and wipe both her and Selvig off their feet. Brittany flies back into the air, recovering several yards away above empty space, and Selvig gets knocked out against an air conditioning box.
"It's no use," TUBBS repeats gently. "The shield is pure energy: impenetrable."
Brittany curses, then sighs. "I got that," she murmurs, noticing Blaine on the second level balcony, staring up at her. "Plan B," she mutters to herself, hovering slowly toward the landing pad.
"The Mark VII is not ready to be deployed," TUBBS scolds her.
"What are you, my mother?" Brittany hisses, tiring of his attitude. "Skip the spinning rims. We're on the clock. Just have the cuffs on the table."
She clanks onto the circle and walks off the suit, the machines tugging it gently from her body. As she takes the final strides through the door and out of her boots, Blaine comes round the other way and drawls, "Please, appeal to my humanity."
"You're not a human, first of all," Brittany says, hooking her thumbs in her pockets and wandering toward the bar, "and secondly, I'm actually planning to threaten you."
Blaine smiles thinly. "Should've left your armor on, then, metal maiden."
"Iron Maiden," she corrects him casually. "Anyway, suit's seen a lot of mileage, and you've got the Pretty Princess Glowstick Wand, so." She shrugs as she reaches the bottles. "You want a drink?"
He laughs breathily. "Stalling me won't change anything," he warns, shifting the scepter to his other hand and approaching slowly.
"No, threatening," she corrects with a smile. "No drink? You sure?"
Blaine narrows his eyes at her, trying to figure out her play. "I'm having one," Brittany entreats; Blaine wrinkles his nose, annoyed he can't read her expression, and he turns to pace near the windows.
"The Warblers are coming," he says with an ugly sneer. "You can't stop that, drunk or otherwise."
"Speak for yourself," Brittany says, pouring herself a whiskey-coke in a crystal glass. "I've got a higher tolerance than this."
"You've little to threaten me with." Blaine looks at her, confused and suspicious still.
Brittany shrugs. "There's the Avengers," she says, screwing the cap on the Coca-Cola bottle. When Blaine stares blankly, Brittany rolls her eyes and shrugs again. "Dorky, I know. I didn't pick the name, trust me. But it's a little team, Earth's mightiest heroes, yadda yadda."
"Not that mighty, it seems," Blaine says defensively.
Brittany wags her head thoughtfully. "Rocky first chapter, I'll give you that. But let's do a quick head-count, shall we? Your brother, the demi-god," Brittany begins, watching carefully as Blaine scoffs and turns away. She snatches twin receiver bracelets from the countertop and latches them onto her wrists as she continues: "A legendary super-soldier plucked out of the past; a woman with heart-stopping anger management issues; couple of master assassins—and you," Brittany cuts off before she lists herself, "have managed to piss off every everloving one of them."
"I did that on purpose," Blaine sputters, annoyed.
Brittany shrugs, takes her drink, and steps toward him around the bar. "Yeah, not a great plan. You turned yourself into a big ol' target."
"A target protected by an army," Blaine spits. "The Warblers are coming, and they will swarm this planet like the shadow of death."
"But when the Avengers assemble, you're the one we'll find." Brittany gulps half her drink and smiles cheekily. "Even if you destroy the earth and build yourself a nice throne to sit on, as long as any of us is around, we'll keep coming after you. Either way, there's no version of this that comes out with you on top." She shrugs and downs the rest. "You only win when everyone on this planet is dead, and then there'll be nothing for you to rule."
There's a pause, where Blaine just squirms his lips and grips his scepter unhappily. "They won't have time for me," he finally mutters, stepping toward her and raising the scepter, "because they'll be too busy fighting you."
The tip of the spear taps Brittany's ARC reactor and the blue light shorts out. Blaine frowns and tries again; the tip clinks against the disc. "This usually works," Blaine admits, sounding confused.
Brittany hums, "Well—there's no shame in that, they have pills you can take—"
"Shut up." Blaine snatches forward and grips her by the throat.
"So touchy," she chokes. Her pulse beats wildly against his thumb, trying to fight past the pressure.
Before her vision begins to blur, Blaine smirks icily at her and chucks her through the plate glass. "TUBBS!" she yells as soon as she hits cold air; she screws her eyes shut against the pain of the wind, almost slow-motion against her face. "Any second now!"
TUBBS says something in her ear—the wind blots it out—but almost immediately after, her suit's gauntlets latch onto the wristlets and sew her carefully into the Mark VII. The boot's sole slides over the bottom of her foot just in time to kick the thrusters and swoop up away from the pavement. "Close one," she mutters.
"Don't grouse," TUBBS scolds her.
Brittany ignores him and flies back up the Tower to glare at a surprised Blaine. "I forgot, you also pissed off a completely awesome guy named Phil." She sends a repulsor blast at Blaine's face and smirks grimly when it knocks him off his feet.
At that moment, the Tesseract sends a blue beacon up into the sky. Brittany looks up and curses quietly when it splits a seam overhead. From the darkness beyond the portal, small alien pods seep out like ants from a pile of sand. They look like flies from this far down; Brittany shifts the suit into weapons-free and kicks the thrusters.
As she approaches, she can better see the strange Warbler vehicles and the ugly red veins crossing their dark blue bodies like piping. All wear what looks like a crest burned into their chests. Brittany lights them up with homing microshells from the shoulders of the Mark VII.
"Good thing we reloaded, I guess," she says to herself, wondering if the VI she was wearing had any ammunition left.
"Right you are," TUBBS agrees.
Even with the shells and individual shots from the palm repulsors, a few Warblers slip past Brittany's watch. "TUBBS, please get me an update on everyone else's lazy asses," she growls. A Warbler almost catches her in the gut and she takes him out with a pang of vengeance. "Fuck! Feel free to say I called them that, too."
"Lazy asses?" asks TUBBS obediently. "Or 'fuck'?"
A Warbler craft snags her. "Fuck! Both!" She wrangles them off and snaps one neck while a palm shot takes care of the other. Another pair of fighters pick up her tail, and she weaves through sharp corners in hopes of losing them against the business end of a skyscraper.
Just then, Fabray's in her ear. "Pierce, we're on your 3 headed northeast."
"Jesus, did you stop for coffee and a Danish?" Brittany snaps. "Swing up Park, I've got some clay birds for you."
For once, they both make good on the deal: Brittany brings a trail of fighters up through the intersection and a SHIELD viper takes them out. "More incoming," Fabray announces.
"Let's keep 'em busy," Brittany says.
And she does: After another trip back to Pierce Tower to lure another pack away from the civilians, Brittany tricks most of them into wiping out against a stone building back on Park and drives the remaining pair back around into one another. Once she's picking her next fight, she frowns and asks, "Fabray, you still there?"
"Still here, on the ground," comes Fabray's voice, garbled by background noise or a shaky finger on the micbutton.
Through the portal comes an enormous eel with an exoskeleton straight out of the video game Brittany beat a month and a half ago. From the shadows of its nubby vertebrae spring two squadrons of Warblers, punching straight through the office windows on either side of the flying monstrosity.
"You seeing this, Pierce?" asks Finn, sounding almost nervous.
"Roger that," Brittany says, pursing her lips and preparing herself to do what she signed up to do when she built this suit in the first place. "It's totally cool," she jokes grimly, "I beat this sucker in Zelda just last month. Where's Lopez? Has she shown up yet?"
"Lopez?" Finn's voice crackles.
"Just keep me posted." Brittany paces the eel, watching its body slither in easy, slow rolls. "TUBBS, find me a soft spot, please."
"Working on it," TUBBS chirps helpfully. Brittany flies closer. With a quick maneuver, she gets around in front of it and sends a second batch of microshells out; the explosions pepper its face like pimples, and it writhes in irritation. It pulls a truly novice U-turn by way of two half-demolished buildings and trails slowly—ominously—after her. "Well, you got its attention," says TUBBS.
"Thought you were finding me a weak spot," Brittany reminds him nervously, kicking on the thrusters and leading the eel farther from the city center.
Finn's voice breaks in again. "Pierce, we got her. Just like you said."
"Great," Brittany says, relieved to have the real heavyweight back on their side. "You tell her to suit up. I'm bringing the party to you." Just as she finishes, she hangs a right and there they are, the four of them visible by Finn's ridiculous outfit and the destruction surrounding them.
Chang sighs. "I don't see how that's a party."
Sure enough, Santana's there beside them. With quick zoom, Brittany can make her out clearly, wearing a faded too-big t-shirt and men's jeans rolled at the cuffs. Brittany smiles, liking the way they hang on her hips, until the eel shrieks behind her.
In the side screen, the zoom shows Santana turning around; Santana breaks into a smile and Brittany smiles back, as if Santana can see. Santana turns back to say something as Brittany gets closer; she turns back and steps toward Brittany and the beast, away from the group. Santana squares her shoulders just before they start to twitch and grow wider.
The nobs of her shoulder joints and collarbone and elbows jut out, almost grotesquely, for an instant before muscles grow up around them like History Channel models of mountains forming. Santana's skin goes green, shade by shade, and Santana's scream reaches Brittany's ears. As Santana's body grows, bulky and lean and tall, tearing through the borrowed clothes, the shriek becomes a low grunt.
It's finished by the last seconds of Brittany's approach: Snix snarls, ready to tango, in a spare dark spandex suit with her fists curled. Brittany zips by and Snix punches the eel square in the nose, her heels plowing a trough in the center of the street as she grinds the eel to a stop so suddenly it tips over the other way. Brittany does an about-face and fires several shots into the eel's guts as its exposed ribs pop off one by one.
They regroup in the center—though Brittany's more worried than anxious, Snix seems too distracted by the chaos to start pummeling her teammates—and two more eels slither out of the portal.
"Alright, until we close the portal, our priority is containment," Captain Underpants informs them. "Chang, I want you on that roof: eyes on everything, call our shots when you see 'em. Pierce, you've got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or turn it to toast."
Chang, whose defection apparently wore off, seems just as interested in hearing the rest as Brittany is. "Give me a lift?" he asks before Finn can continue.
"Right," Brittany nods, grabbing him by the quiver. "Better clench up, Legolas."
Brittany's just dumped Chang on the rooftop when he's back in her ear. "Got some strays on your tail, Pierce," he warns.
"Just trying to keep 'em off the streets," Brittany teases, glancing at the portal where Sam's lightning trick has sent another pack of eels packing.
"Well, they can't bank worth a damn," Chang observes helpfully. "Just find a tight corner and let 'em crash."
"Thanks," Brittany says, glad she's not pulling the weight alone. She takes a let into a parking garage and a right on a T and gets rid of the rest. "That about did it. What else you got?"
"Sam's taking out a mess of them down on 6th."
Brittany tsks. "And he didn't invite me."
She cuts a swath in a wide loop, taking out fliers and footmen and the pack of Warblers scaling Chang's tower, and hops down to help Finn for a second when she sees a pair creeping up on his back. She passes one of the eels and catches a glimpse of Snix doing a number on the exoskeleton and the squadron of Warblers inhabiting the eel's back like lice. Sam's backing her up, and Brittany turns a corner away from them after a Warbler vehicle just when she sees Snix yank a sharp shard of bone and wedge it into the eel's head.
Over the comm link, Chang says, "Q, what're you doing?"
Fabray answers him: "Little help would be nice."
Brittany's emptying her battery trying to laser through the shell of the last eel when TUBBS sighs. "We will lose power before we penetrate that shell," he tells her regretfully.
Brittany rings around the front and frowns. "Ever heard the story of Jonah and the whale?" she asks.
"No. No. Not a good idea," TUBBS stammers, even as Brittany zooms right at the eel's gaping gullet. It's hot and dark and sticky inside, but the missiles make contact almost immediately and Brittany blows out as soon as she gets midway inside. The beast comes apart and Brittany lands face first on a taxicab.
This is the group on 6th Chang mentioned, but Sam's long since moved on. They encircle her, shooting their blue-powered rifles in turns, and the suit warns her its power is waning. She curses, struggling to get to her feet while a Warbler bats her about the head with its weapon.
She's fallen for the third time when the call comes through from Holly, in the soft, anxious-guilty voice she uses when she feels bad for asking. "Pierce, you've got a nuke coming your way from a rogue bird. Can you stop it?"
"Yeah," she grunts, forcing her body upright and blasting blindly at the Warblers. "TUBBS, put everything left into the thrusters."
"Just did," TUBBS says.
Brittany takes off toward the helicarrier.
"I can close it," says Fabray over the comm link as Brittany nears the bridge.
Finn shouts, "Do it!"
"No, not yet," Brittany cuts in quickly.
Finn speaks before Brittany can finish. "Pierce, these things are still coming. We have to close it, now!"
"I've got a nuke coming in," Brittany bites. "Less than a minute. There's only one place to put it." No one questions her on that: All too quickly, she spots the missile and lines up underneath it. She grips its fins and eases her thrusters, letting it carry her toward Manhattan and the portal.
"Pierce, you know that's a one-way trip," Finn says, firmness hiding his surprise.
"TUBBS, save the rest for the return trip," she instructs, knowing it's probably fruitless.
TUBBS sounds hesitant. "I—Yes, ma'am."
He never calls her ma'am. Brittany tries not to think about it and works on judging the angle for the portal. She's a block and a half from the Tower when she starts guiding the missile up; it follows a sharp exponential as she guides it up, and a millisecond later, barely a breath later, they're who-knows-where in space and the Earth is safe.
Her suit darkens immediately, all power sucked into pressurizing the inside against the crushing power of space. Brittany can taste how little air there is in her helmet, and her eyelids flutter in slow motion when the nuke hits the Warbler base ship.
She feels herself sinking. Earth's gravity barely reaches her: It touches her with thin fingers, like hair against her face.
Her eyelids feel heavier, like her body, sinking into warm quicksand.
A bright, red-yellow-white-hot light burns in front of her face. It glows red against her shut eyes.
Heavy.
A howl wakes her, gasping. "What—what the fuck was that?" Brittany pants as she looks around. The others hover around her; Finn crouches beside her; Snix howls again, triumphant, and smacks her fist against her sternum.
"Holy hell," Brittany manages with an uncertain smile. "What just happened?" She glances among their faces and then at Snix's. "Please tell me nobody kissed me," she says, wondering if Santana can hear her from inside.
Instead of answering, Finn looks off in the distance and nods to himself six times, like a bobblehead. "We won," he finally says.
Brittany heaves a heavy sigh. She was starting to worry there were six more eels headed their way, or everyone had turned into zombies, or something crazy awful like that. "Alright, yay," she says weakly, trying to pump her fist and dropping it as soon as she lifts it. The armor feels heavy with her fatigue. "Yay us. Let's—let's just not come in tomorrow, huh?"
She glances up under her brows. Sam cracks a smile at her. "You ever tried shawarma?" she asks Finn. "I saw a shawarma joint like two blocks from here… or there. But I don't know what it is, and I wanna try it."
Sam smiles grimly. "We're not finished yet."
Right: Blaine and the Tesseract are still at large, it seems. Brittany smiles hopefully. "But then shawarma after?"
Sam laughs and walks over to offer her his hand. Brittany expects her muscles to work, but they fail halfway up, and Sam holds her arm until she steadies. "Yes, shawarma after," he says with a chuckle.
Snix snuffles and wipes her nose on her forearm. She seems strangely docile; she grabs a fallen Warbler and flops its leg in the other direction, like a pet bored with its toys.
"Let's go get Blaine, then," Finn suggests rather happily. He touches his ear. "Quinn, Mike, do you copy? Meet us at Pierce Tower to collect the prisoner."
Brittany sticks close to Sam as they walk, though she finds her strength returning. TUBBS is quiet; on battery reserves, the suit's power is only used to keep the suit itself moving, to keep Brittany from getting trapped inside it. Snix trails behind them, though Sam glances back at her warily now and again.
"What's the matter? She hasn't squashed us yet," Brittany finally says, when they're nearing the Tower's entrance and sidestepping the giant E smashed on the plaza.
Sam looks away and purses his lips. "She punched me again earlier."
Brittany laughs. Sam turns back to her in surprise. "Did she bruise your tender feelings, trouty mouth?" Brittany teases.
"Hardly." Sam puffs up and Brittany just giggles more.
This time, when Blaine surrenders without a fight, his smile is nervous instead of slimy. Snix barrels forward and socks him one more time, but no one feels obligated to shield him. Schuester shows up in a SHIELD chopper to collect them, but once the SWAT team takes care of Blaine and the Tesseract, Sam declares they're staying behind.
Schuester looks confused, so Sam explains, "We have promised the woman of iron to sample something called shawarma. We will return to SHIELD when this mission is completed."
As usual, Sam sounds ridiculous, but once he's gotten rid of Schuester and the rest, he turns to Brittany with an amused glint in his eye. Brittany grins at him and they head back to the streets.
Rescue efforts have begun, with ambulances and EMTs and Red Cross. They're a few blocks from the Tower, and the ragtag Avengers—now reunited with Fabray and Chang, who keep exchanging these sappy little smiles with what they probably imagine is subtlety—pick their way among the crushed cars and downed Warblers.
"Hey, the Tower looks a little better now," Finn says smugly, looking up at where most of the letters in Pierce have fallen down.
Brittany curls her lip in a hostile smile, but before she can say anything, Snix socks Finn right across the cheek. Finn gapes—half because his jaw is crooked, half from shock—and Brittany snickers.
For once, Finn knows better than to say anything—though Brittany may be giving him credit over his wounded mouth. Snix lumbers ahead of the pack and stops a few yards from a group of very startled civilians and rescue workers. Snix bares her teeth at them, huffs, and flops unceremoniously onto the hood of a battered yellow taxi. The metal caves easily under her weight, and she yawns and curls up into the nest she's made for herself. She punches the inside of the crater under her head, presumably to make it more comfortable, and settles in to fall asleep.
Brittany and Sam glance at each other, as do Fabray and Chang. Finn just cradles his jaw and whines inarticulately.
The rescue workers shy away from them, apparently assuming they're qualified to handle their own wounds. Sam passes supplies to the others from inside an ambulance and Fabray and Chang take a look at Finn's jaw.
Snix has shifted back into Santana in sleep. Brittany makes a five minute trip into a destroyed GAP and grabs a pair of sneakers and a t-shirt in what she's 90% sure is Santana's size, then grins and grabs men's jeans because she liked the way they looked and she's doing Santana a favor, anyway.
When she gets back, Santana's still sleeping soundly, though she seems a little cold in what little she's wearing. The bra and shorts must be engineered somehow to follow her size changes, because they still cling tight to her skin; they don't protect the rest of her, though. Brittany can see the muscles in her side quiver when a breeze kicks up.
Brittany's pretending not to stare at Santana's abs and wondering if she should grab a blanket from the ambulance when Santana stirs.
"Hey," Brittany says gently, unable to keep from grinning. They saved the world and Santana's awake: No better combination exists.
Santana squints. "Wh… what…" She touches the metal crater to push herself up, but winces and freezes instead. She touches her forehead and hisses quietly.
"I was wondering how long you'd take to come around," Brittany says conversationally, adjusting her helmet under her arm. Santana looks behind Brittany, around to the sides, and at the car hood she sits in. Her eyes are still glazed.
A siren sounds a block away. Santana stares into space and touches her heart gingerly.
"I brought you some clothes," Brittany offers, holding them out.
Santana looks down at herself suddenly, apparently realizing what little she's wearing, and blushes. It's more obvious now, across the paler skin usually protected by cloth, and Brittany bites her lips to hide her smile when Santana snatches the pile with embarrassed eagerness. "Thanks," Santana mutters, her voice that delicious deep rasp that sends shivers down Brittany's spine. Santana yanks the jeans up her legs—the blue a nice contrast with her skin—and does up the fly and button with her tongue between her teeth.
Santana spreads the t-shirt across her knees and clears her throat. "Where'd you get these?" Santana asks.
She sounds nervous. Brittany glances at her eyes—sees how they shift back and forth and flicker across Brittany's face and eyes and lips—and fibs, "I made Finn grab 'em from some store on our way up the street."
Santana blinks. "You stole them?" she asks, pulling the shirt on hurriedly.
Only Santana would worry about that in the chaos that surrounds them. "Look around," Brittany says gently. "You think somebody's gonna miss them?"
Santana glances around and mumbles, "Guess not." She catches sight of the socks and looks up right when Brittany hands her the shoes she grabbed. Santana simpers, wipes the dirt off her feet, and pulls the socks on. "So… I guess we did it?" Santana asks.
"Absofruitly," Brittany says. She smiles; the shoes look to fit correctly. Santana smiles back, timidly, and Brittany reaches out to tuck Santana's hair out of the way. "We all did it," Brittany reminds her.
"Anything you wanna bring me up to speed on?" Santana asks, her voice still gruff, her tone nervous to hear what she's done. It's more sad than funny, since Snix basically saved the day and Santana's ready to beg forgiveness.
To drive the point home, Brittany traces Santana's ear and tells her what the others said. "You saved my life."
Santana's wide-eyed. "She did?"
Brittany's face falls. "No," she breathes, touching Santana's jaw, "you did."
It's still not quite enough—words never are—and Brittany's about to tell her again, with her mouth but without the space between them, when Sam calls out.
"Come on, let us find food," he bellows.
Brittany smiles at Santana, a promise for later, and takes in Santana's shy smile. She touches Santana's cheek once more and turns to Sam. "You better mean shawarma," she reminds him, "'cause I was serious."
"Shawarma?" Santana repeats. She clambers off the car and touches Brittany's elbow.
Brittany grins and grabs Santana's hand. "Yeah. I saw a food joint with a sign in the window. I dunno what it is, but I wanna try it."
Fabray sighs. "We have more pressing matters," she drawls, nodding at Finn where he clutches his face with both hands. "Finn busted his jaw. We need a real medic."
Brittany manages not to roll her eyes, but she's not about to offer, even if Finn proved useful and less of an ass when the planet's fate is at stake.
Luckily, Chang steps in with a sigh. "I'll go grab one." He jogs around the ambulance to the clot of medics and civilians.
Brittany feels Santana squeeze their fingers together. Brittany turns happily and sees Santana pout impatiently, hidden behind Brittany's shoulder from Finn's sullen eyes.
Brittany grins at her, so adorably shy and grumpy and hesitant and happy all in one expression, and squeezes back.
Then, Santana's stomach grumbles loud enough for Brittany to hear. Santana blushes hard and Brittany wrinkles her nose at her with a wide, dopey grin.
Sam finds the manager doing damage control, and though they only ask where the kitchen is and what the recipe is, the manager insists they sit and gets the two waiters helping him clean up to help him make the Avengers a meal.
They're deciding how to sit when Santana whispers to Brittany, "Sit on my right. I'm a leftie."
Sam overhears. "Fate!" he proclaims, grinning widely at Brittany. Brittany grins back; she's not surprised he's picked up what's going on. When they sit, Brittany lets her left hand settle on Santana's knee, and Santana blushes and tries to hide it.
Once the manager hands out their food, babbling excitedly about their choice to patronize his establishment on the heels of a truly epic battle, Brittany notices Fabray glaring at the table. It's about the spot where Brittany's hand sits underneath, and Brittany grins at the thought of Fabray getting her panties in a wad about the gay happening right across from her.
When Santana's not looking—she and Fabray seem to have some weird understanding, or at least Santana cares what Fabray thinks of her—Brittany sticks out her tongue and Fabray glares in a different direction.
Finn can't eat with his jaw wired shut. Brittany stuffs her face to keep from grinning too smugly about it.
Without Finn mucking things up, the group gets along pretty well, it seems. The whole experience is only improved by the little squeaks and jumps Santana makes when Brittany squeezes her knee without warning. Fabray keeps shooting them occasional glares, but Chang, sitting next to Brittany, eventually nudges her with his elbow and grins at her.
Then, Sam finishes his drink and smacks his lips loudly. "Another!" he shouts, smashing the cup on the floor. Everyone turns to look at him and Brittany sneaks a peck to Santana's cheek.
"Thanks for socking Finn, by the way," Brittany whispers with a sly smile.
Santana does a spit-take and gasps. "What?"