Once again, thanks for everyone who reviewed, followed, and favourited! I apologize for the long wait between chapters, and as always, I hope you enjoy this one!
"The Tesseract can wait." Vanessa's voice surprised its owner with its obstinance as it rang out in the unexpected quiet. "Agent Hill is already seeing what she can do about Agent Barton's Quinjet, but we need to take precautions."
"And do those precautions involve locking me up somewhere?" Banner asked wearily. "I'll comply as long as it doesn't involve being anywhere near that maniac."
They all knew who he was talking about. Thor frowned at the jab at his brother's sanity but did not address it; it wasn't the first time the doctor had voiced this opinion.
"Agent Romanoff, can you please escort Dr. Banner to his quarters?" Fury instructed. The redheaded operative nodded and beckoned for Banner to follow her, and together they left the lab.
"I'll head down to Loki's cell," declared Vanessa. "I could use some company."
"I will accompany you," said Thor in his deep, formal tones. "I do need to talk to my-"
An explosion threw him across the room. Threw all of them across the room, actually. A wave of heat licked at Vanessa's ankles as she was tossed into an array of scientific equipment, desperately shielding her face with her hands and forearms. A sharp jolt of pain racked her body as her back connected with a metal cart, sending it careening through the wreckage.
She sat up, coughing through the smoke and debris, and assessed her injuries. She had various cuts and scrapes over the exposed skin on her hands, and bruises were undoubtedly forming along her spine. Thankfully, the injuries stopped there. She stood gingerly, kicking away shattered pieces of glass.
"Is everyone okay?" Steve rasped, swatting away the plumes of dust. "Stark, put on the suit!"
"Yep!" said the billionaire, any signs of the earlier aggression towards the super soldier gone. He scurried out of the lab, Steve assisting him.
A stream of unintelligible communications came through Vanessa's collar radio. She fiddled around with the device until Hill's clear voice crackled sharply through the tiny speaker.
"Number three engine is down! We lose one more engine, we won't be in the air anymore," said the woman grimly. "Someone's gotta get in there and patch that engine."
"Stark, you copy that?" Fury barked into his own communication device. A second later, Stark's voice responded with an affirmative.
"Thor, we have to go find Loki," Vanessa remembered. "Let's go."
"Yes," the Asgardian agreed. "Lead me to him."
She looked from the door to the broken window wall, which lead straight to the open area over top of the bridge. The elevators would have been locked down by this point so jumping from one level to the next would be faster than taking the stairs, so that's what she did.
Her training kicked in as she jumped out of the empty window frame and tucked into a roll to absorb her impact on the metal floor of the Helicarrier bridge. A piece of glass dug into her shoulder, but not enough to break the skin. She heard a shriek of surprise from a nearby female agent as Thor landed heavily next to her, the floor creaking beneath his boots.
She clambered to her feet, the collision still jarring her bones.
"Liang, when you get there, initiate detention lockdown!" Fury yelled from the research level.
"Got it," she called back, pushing into a sprint with the god of thunder close on her heels.
They ran through the Helicarrier halls, many of which were now filled with suffocating smoke, ashes, and frenzied SHIELD agents. Vanessa pulled her collar over the mouth, her eyes silvering in an attempt to see through the clouds of dust.
For a second, her vision turned hazy and disorienting and she almost tripped down the stairs she was attempting to navigate. After a few seconds of hard breathing, it focused and her sight sharpened in definition.
"Almost there," she choked out. There was only one more flight of stairs to cover before they would reach the detainment level, and it took them about ten seconds at their pace.
The chamber that held Loki's glass cell was miraculously free of all soot and debris. Loki stood outside his prison, smirking.
Vanessa stared at the scene, disbelieving. And his image wavered as her mind finally processed the signal that her eyes were trying to send her.
It was an illusion.
"No!" Thor roared, apparently having not come to the same realization as the agent did. He barrelled towards his brother, brandishing Mjölnir.
Vanessa's body, her power, all moved on its own as she instantly erected an illusion of a brick wall in front of Thor, stopping the Asgardian in his tracks. The illusionary Loki dissipated into nothingness as the wall also crumbled, leaving Thor bewildered.
Two can play at that game.
"You're an illusionist, too?" asked the real Loki, who was clad in armor and had somehow gotten ahold of the scepter. He was shocked, and was making no effort to conceal it. "And you can see through mine?"
She let a string of profanities run through her mind as the god approached, her vision blurring slightly as her nerves meddled with her abilities' performance. She inhaled deeply, not responding to Loki's questions, waiting for her eyes to refocus.
"Stop this madness, brother," Thor pleaded, having overcome his initial disorientation. "It is not too la-"
Thor was interrupted, for the second (third?) time in the last half hour, this time by a shower of gunfire from a soldier that Vanessa, in her state of panic, hadn't even noticed entered the room. The bullets did little to harm the god, shattering harmlessly against his armor. Even the ones that hit his skin only caused him to roar in annoyance. Watching this, Loki laughed.
"The humans think us immortal," he mused. "They just haven't found ways to kill us yet. But they are quite good at killing each other."
The blue of his eyes flashed correspondingly with the blue in the irises of the mind-controlled soldier. Like that, he turned his weapon on Vanessa instead, and opened fire.
She ducked instinctively, the bullets clanging against the metal walls of the chamber. Rolling behind the control panel for the prison, she drew her own firearm, unsure what use a small pistol was against an assault rifle.
"Vanessa, hide behind me," said Thor, crouching down and shielding her with his armor. She nodded gratefully, her heart pounding in her chest. Her vision spiralled in and out of focus as she desperately tried to calm herself, tried to convince herself that she wasn't going to die.
"Oh, Thor, always so soft," Loki taunted. "Protecting a mortal girl?"
He shot a glance at the soldier, who ceased his fire. Vanessa remained crouched behind the control panel, trying her best to quell the tremors running through her body. Beside her, Thor stood, tightening his grip on Mjölnir.
There was a tense moment, when acrid electricity met searing cold, and the brothers charged at each other. With a loud clang, Loki deflected Thor's hammer with his scepter, but the force of the blow sent him flying into the wall. Grunting with frustration, his blue eyes flashed in command, and the soldier once again opened fire.
Vanessa clutched her Glock tightly as the rounds lodged in the control panel at her back. Sooner or later, one would penetrate and she would die. She had to find a way out of this situation alone, because this time, Thor was too preoccupied to help her.
A sudden lull in the gunfire gave her some time to peek out from behind the device and look at the soldier, who was coming around the circular catwalk towards her. She took the chance and rolled away from the panel and ran towards the glass prison, taking refuge against its bulletproof walls. Quickly, she circled around the cylindrical cell until she was directly opposite her assailant, with two feet of impenetrable glass between them.
Meanwhile, Thor and Loki were still struggling, the latter having distanced himself from his physically superior brother and was firing off blue beams of energy from his scepter. Thor swatted each of them away with Mjölnir, roaring Asgardian expletives.
Vanessa was just walking in circles with the mind-controlled agent, neither able to get a shot at the other. Not that she wanted to shoot him, but did she have any other way?
An illusion, a voice encouraged her. Trick him.
No, she argued with it, quite unconvincingly. I've never tried to use it in combat before. I can make a light show and that's it.
What choice do you have?
Caving to the voice's advice, Vanessa summoned up her energy and wove it around her, making her disappear into the surroundings. Seemingly perplexed, the soldier stopped in his tracks with a frown.
She allowed herself to stay still and invisible for a second to catch her breath. She was cursing herself madly, for having never seen much use in her ability other than creating a quick diversion and giving her enough time to shoot, for never taking the time to hone it, believing it would never really be needed.
She regretted it.
Vanessa took an experimental step. Her whole disguise rippled as her background changed, and she realized that with an invisibility illusion she would have to modify it each time she moved.
The implication of this made itself known a second later.
There was the loud crack of gunfire, and she turned her body a split second before the bullet would have impaled her lung. Instead, it grazed across her upper left arm, tearing through her uniform and leaving a trail of pain in its wake.
Thankfully, her gun arm was her right.
She fired as her disguise fell apart, the image dismantling as the wound distracted her. Her bullets found their mark, muted as they entered flesh. The body crumpled to the floor, fearsome assault rifle clattering out of its grip.
It was frightening how little difference there was in the action of shooting a dummy and a real person.
But there was a world of difference in the aftermath, Vanessa realized, silvered eyes widening in horror.
Oh God, I just killed someone.
A trickle of warm blood ran down her arm.
Oh God.
She had prepared for this… but not this.
She was snapped out of her stupor when a red-hot blast of energy blew through the wall and hit Loki squarely in the chest, sending him crashing through the reinforced metal.
"So that's what it does," said a familiar voice as Thor got to his feet, recovering from being knocked down by a scepter blast.
"Agent Coulson," she croaked, reholstering her weapon. She stumbled towards him, clutching her injured shoulder.
"Are you alright?" he asked her, jogging up to her with what appeared to be one of the weapons she saw on the Destroyer plans. "You need medical attention."
She shook her head mutely. She couldn't bring herself to give voice to the truth, the truth that she was now a murderer.
Coulson gave her a pained, understanding look before pressing his lips into a thin line. "Let's go," he said, giving her a nudge with his elbow as his hands were occupied by the huge weapon. "Engine Three's been fixed and we can leave Loki to Thor."
The god of thunder nodded, and jumped through the hole in pursuit.
Vanessa stumbled numbly after the older agent, her sight spinning in and out of focus. Somehow, she made it to the bridge before sitting down heavily on the floor and allowing a paramedic to attend to her injury.
She peeled her hand away from the wound, her palm sticky with blood.
There's no time for this, Vanessa, her mind-voice chided her. You knew what you signed up for.
Yeah, I did, she responded to it. I just need time.
The team was once again sitting around the briefing table, with the exception of Agent Romanoff, who was attending to a recovering Agent Barton.
No one spoke. No one knew what to say.
Loki had escaped. He used an illusion to distract Thor, and made his escape with one of the agency's Quinjets. The location of the Tesseract was lost when the first explosions destroyed most of the equipment in the lab.
Vanessa had made a habit of prodding her wound, which was now tightly bandaged with sterile cloth. The pain seemed distant, like an afterthought. Involuntarily, she thought of her closest friends in New York and wished for nothing more than to be there, not in this damned Helicarrier where the ghost of that soldier still seemed to hover at her shoulder.
What would they say if they'd knew she'd confronted a god, narrowly escaped death, and killed someone? And didn't even accomplish anything?
If William were here, she thought, he'd tell her to be optimistic.
On the bright side, there was no Hulk.
Thanks to the precautions they took, Romanoff was able to escort Banner to a safe, untouched part of the Helicarrier by the time the second round of explosions went off. The first round nearly triggered him, but he was just out of the danger zone.
"We're dead up in the air here," Fury started, his voice hoarse with fatigue. "Our communications, location of the cube, I got nothing for you."
There was a pause.
"Yes, we were going to build an arsenal of weapons with the Tesseract," Fury admitted what they all already knew. "I never put all my chips on that number though, because I was playing something even riskier.
"There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, see if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could."
"And look how that turned out. You should have chosen better people," said Stark bitterly. "You said it yourself. I'm unsuitable. Why bring me back? Why involve someone - sorry, Doctor - with such breathtaking anger management issues?" He glanced at Vanessa. "And why drag a girl who's barely an adult into all of this?"
"Loki knew about this… initiative much better than any of us did." All heads in the room turned to Vanessa as she found her voice for the first time since the incident in the detainment facility. It was quiet and raspy, but at least she was saying something. "He didn't want a group of remarkable people working together and fighting against him; that's why he let himself get caught. So he could manipulate us into tearing ourselves apart."
Her speech were met with a circle of stares. Fury, Banner, Stark, Thor, and Steve, all of them waiting for her next words. She didn't have much more to say, but she concluded, "And that's what we did. Had we not started working together, who knows how much worse this could have been?"
"It could have been so much worse," agreed Steve. He met her dark, tired gaze with his blue one. "But if you hadn't yelled at us in the lab, Vanessa, we might still be arguing now."
She blinked at the unexpected gratitude, the credit for something she hadn't given a second thought. The only response she could come up with was, "I was yelling?"
Her expression must have been funny, because Steve laughed shortly. "Yeah, you were. I was surprised, too. Didn't think you had it in you."
Like that, the defeated tension drained out of the air, no one wanting to use what little effort they still had left to maintain it.
Stark clapped his hands together. "Well, let's get down to it, team. Show Loki what we've got."
Vanessa managed a smile, a genuine one. Guilt still prickled at the back of her mind, but she had to set it aside to get the job done.
"Loki needs a power source," said Banner, folding his hands on the table. "If we can put together a list…"
"He made it personal," said Stark, and Vanessa realized that he was onto something. He looked at her in understanding. "You said it ー Loki wanted to tear us apart. But that isn't all. He wants to be seen beating us, wants an audience."
Steve was nodding along. "Right, I saw his act in Stuttgart."
"Yeah," Stark concurred, on a roll. "But that was just a preview. This is opening night. Loki's a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a monument built in the skies with his name plastered…"
A look of horror dawned on his face.
"Son of a bitch!" he swore.
Vanessa could only silently agree.
New York suddenly wasn't such a great place to be.
Vanessa trailed a few steps behind Steve as they head to the infirmary, where Romanoff and Barton were, presumably. As they drew near, she caught Black Widow's lithe, primed energy, accompanied by Hawkeye's piercing, controlled presence. Traces of the scepter's mysticism still seemed to cling onto the latter, but it was steadily decreasing.
"Time to go," said Steve solemnly, sliding open the infirmary door. Barton was nowhere to be seen, but Vanessa could sense his signature behind the closed door. Romanoff looked a little taken aback at the sight of Steve in full uniform.
"Go where?" she asked.
"I'll tell you on the way," he replied. "Can you fly one of those jets?"
The door opened, revealing a weary-looking Agent Barton. "I can."
Romanoff gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head to confirm that he was on their side.
"You got a suit?" Steve questioned.
"Yeah."
"Then suit up."
Steve gave the two a curt nod, before shutting the infirmary door. Vanessa followed him silently.
"Hey," he said gently, as they were making their way to their lockers. "Are you okay?"
Vanessa gave him a tired smile, trying not to see the dead soldier that flashed behind her eyelids when she blinked. "Yes."
"You don't have to come with us, you know," he offered. "We can handle it."
"No, I want to," she said firmly. That was the one thing she was sure of. They stopped in front of her locker. "I think I have the right to punch Loki in the face as much as any of you do."
Steve smiled. "There's a line-up. I think Agent Barton's going to be first."
She returned the terse grin before shutting the door to the locker, which illuminated itself as she did. She didn't really care about punching Loki. She just wanted to make sure her friends made it out alive.
Inhaling deeply, she swapped her torn jacket and blood-stained shirt for a set of identical, new ones, the supple material of the SHIELD uniform feeling familiar to her skin. She restocked on ammunition and clipped a sheathed boot-knife onto her right boot. She wore a longer one on her thigh holster, right next to her Glock.
That gun was a murder weapon.
She rubbed her eyes with her forefinger and thumb. She was in no danger of tears, still too numb.
In a moment of decisiveness, she slipped the weapon out of its holster and exchanged it for a clean, new one, leaving the old, guilty one sitting on the metal rack.