Thanks for all the follows and favourites~To make up for the fact that I left this fic for a long time, I'm going to be publishing a little more frequently. I've also been editing old chapters a bit and Chapter 3 has undergone some rather drastic changes to the dialogue between Loki and Vanessa. That being said, enjoy the chapter!
Romanoff and Barton sat at the helm while Steve, Banner, and Vanessa took turns pacing the floor of the Quinjet. Sick with worry, Vanessa pulled out her cell phone and dialled William's number.
"Who are you calling?" asked Steve, as she waited for her friend to pick up.
"My friend," she answered tersely. Four rings already. Four more and the call would be over before it even began.
"We have to make sure the civilians stay out of this," he protested. "And you know how the media is ー they'll come in swarming like buzzards. We can't put anyone in unnecessary danger."
"I know," she bit out. "That's why I'm calling."
He picked up. "Vanessa? Please tell me you're free now."
"Sorry, nope," she said, hoping to sound as apologetic as possible. "I need you to do me a favour."
"What is it?"
"Whatever you do, stay away from Manhattan," she ordered. "Can you tell Ryan and Cor this, too? I repeat, stay away from Manhattan."
"What?" William's voice was laced with confusion. "What's going on?"
"Something big is going to happen," she told him. Like an alien invasion, maybe. She couldn't tell him any more because Steve was right ー they couldn't risk the information leakage lest the media gets out there before the madness even started. "Just please, listen to me. Trust me, okay?"
The line hummed quietly as William hesitated. "Fine," he said. Then something seemed to occur to him. "Are you going to be on Manhattan?"
"No," she lied immediately. She couldn't give him any incentive to go there, no matter how slight. "I'm still in the middle of the Atlantic right now."
That was true. Except she was cruising towards land in a high-speed jet, with the Norse god of thunder flying by their side.
"Fine," he said again. "I'll tell them. Stay safe, okay?"
He hung up. Vanessa slipped the device back into her pocket, feeling slightly reassured. They would have to contain the fighting to as small an area as possible. The question was: what's possible?
New York was becoming visible on the horizon, looking like an image on a postcard with its beautiful, picturesque high rises that she had grown to love so much. The fact that it was about to become the site of a raging space battle made her chest feel tight.
Vanessa steeled herself and activated her power, experiencing the familiar rush of energy to her eyes. But this time, the sensation didn't bring any exhilaration to quell her nervousness. She let a curl of illusionary colour form around her arm and clenched her fist to vanquish it. This gesture did not go unnoticed by Steve or Banner, who crowded in closer in curiously.
"What was that?" Steve asked, his gaze still fixed intently on her arm, where the swirl of colour once was. "Is there more I don't know about?"
Unlike their earlier conversation on her powers, his voice was light and devoid of accusation, as if trying to raise her morale. She realized that was exactly what he was trying to do, and she smiled back in spite of the the tightly coiled wire that nicely described her nerves.
"Yeah," she answered. "I wanted to keep it a secret, since it makes a nice surprise. But I'd never tested it out in actual combat before, so that didn't go well. I'll have to train with it more before I try using it again." She touched her left arm, fingers lightly grazing over the bandaged wound. "At least it prevented Thor from being locked in a glass cylinder."
Her words were met with a round of noncommittal laughter, which was soon silenced by what they saw outside.
As they neared the city, they caught sight of Stark Tower, the famous beacon of sustainable power. Above it, a blue beam of energy was firing off into the sky, ripping a large hole in the sky above. Little figures were coming out of it, and Vanessa had no doubt that they were the Chitauri. Loki's army.
She saw Thor pick up speed and pull ahead of them. The scene (a muscular blonde man being pulled through the air by a hammer) was bizarre, but it was the hardly the strangest thing that had happened of late.
"I see my brother." The Asgardian's deep tones came through the Quinjet speakers. They had given him an earpiece, which made him uncomfortable, but he'd allowed it because they did need a better way of communicating than shouting. "I will go confront him."
With that, he sped off into the distance. It took a few more seconds before the Quinjet was also soaring over the island.
"Stark, we're heading north-east," Romanoff said into her headset.
"What, did you stop for drive through?" the billionaire quipped. "Swing up Park, I'm gonna lay 'em out for you."
Romanoff and Barton navigated the Quinjet towards Stark Tower, where Chitauri were flooding out of the portal in hoards. As they flew by, firing at the aliens like crazy, Vanessa got a good look at what they were facing.
They were purple, fleshy things, covered in a dull gray armour. They gave screeching battle cries as they roared out of the portal on vehicles that resembled more intimidating jet-skis. Luckily, they didn't seem to be very durable, as Stark took out several easily with his laser beams.
That didn't prevent Vanessa from being scared, but it gave her hope.
She spotted Loki and Thor fighting each other on the landing pad on Stark Tower. Loki was firing off bolts of cobalt magic at random, and one caught a wing of the Quinjet, rattling the aircraft and sending Vanessa tumbling to the floor. Nearby, Banner grasped at the walls for support while Steve was somehow still upright.
"We're going down," said Romanoff, impossibly calm. "Brace for impact."
Vanessa crouched down and gripped a pole tightly with white-knuckled hands but kept her eyes open as the craft hurtled towards the ground. A second later, she felt the jarring impact tear her fingers from the pole as she fell forwards onto her knees, bracing her body with her hands. Her heart pounded almost audibly as the jet came to a scraping stop on what was likely pavement.
"Everyone alright?" Steve yelled over the loud groan that Vanessa guessed to be a wing breaking from the fuselage.
Banner coughed an affirmative while Barton and Romanoff unbuckled their seatbelts as if nothing had happened.
"Yeah," Vanessa choked out, still trying to comprehend the fact that she just survived a plane crash relatively unscathed. She stood shakily, wiping her sweaty palms on her pants. The dust left whitish marks on the dark fabric.
The rear doors of the Quinjet creaked open, allowing the outside sunlight to stream in. Vanessa squinted as she clambered down the ramp after Steve, followed by Banner, Barton, and Romanoff. The quintet looked around, discovering that they had very nearly rammed straight into a building but instead stopped just short of it, tearing up a green space in the process.
Not too bad.
Following Steve's lead, they made their way to a four way street where Stark Tower was in plain view. The nearby buildings were in various states of 'on fire' and 'filled with screaming people,' and if that weren't enough, a colossal beast roared out of the wormhole.
"What the fuck is that?" asked Barton in disbelief. The rest of the group stood frozen as a fish-like creature snaked out of the portal, easily as long as some buildings were tall. It was covered in the same plate armour as the Chitauri, and had a huge maw dripping with saliva. From its sides, it released dozens of regular Chitauri foot soldiers, who fired their strange weapons into buildings indiscriminately.
"Stark, are you seeing this?" Steve yelled into his comm, staring up at what Vanessa decided to dub the 'Leviathan.'
"I'm seeing, still working on believing," Stark admitted. "Hey, Banner… you think maybe you could do something?"
Banner only looked at the Leviathan, looking unsure.
"Yeah," Captain America agreed. "Now might be a good time to get angry, doctor."
This seemed to prompt something in the man that made him slowly walk towards the Leviathan, still fixated on the beast. He took one look back and said, "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry."
The giant alien seemed to notice the Banner standing alone in the abandoned street and came hurtling towards him, just as he swelled, his skin taking on a green hue.
Vanessa watched in equal parts horror and awe as the mild-mannered Dr. Banner morphed a fearsome mountain of a man ー the Hulk. He roared with the Leviathan, grabbing the thing by its jaw and stopping the creature in its tracks single-handedly, muscles rippling with the exertion.
She had never been more glad to see something on her side before.
Stark swooped in and fired his lasers at the Leviathan, finding a soft spot and searing off massive pieces of flesh that fell to the pavement, still sizzling from the heat. The beast cried out in pain and anger, attempting to attack Iron Man, but found itself preoccupied by the Hulk again.
I don't belong here, Vanessa realized. Not with these people.
"Liang," came Romanoff's sharp voice. "Snap out of it. We're moving on!"
She shook her head, clearing away her shock, before sprinting after her fellow agents and Captain America. A mixture of fear and resolve was running through her veins, keeping her going, and she wasn't quite sure which one was dominant yet.
As such, she just unquestioningly followed Steve's lead to another intersection, where traffic had been stopped by a hoard of Chitauri. People were screaming and cars were on their backs with their passengers still trapped inside them.
At that moment, she was painfully aware of the fact that the fight was more than them, Loki, and the Chitauri. She knew it well on the Quinjet when she made a call to William, telling him to stay clear of Manhattan. But taking in the scene with her perfect vision suddenly made everything more real.
Inexplicably, she remembered her mother, an altruistic woman and renowned surgeon who always had a ready smile. Dead for four years from a terrorist attack, trapped in an automobile like much of the people in front of her. She remembered why exactly she decided to lend her skills to SHIELD.
Protection, Fury's voice echoed in her mind. You want to work towards a world where something like Macau will never happen again, right?
Yes.
"Those people down there need help!" yelled Steve, pointing further down the street where dozens of people were cowering in an overturned bus.
"I'm on it," she said, swallowing her apprehension and sprinting towards the wreckage. A Chitauri leaped into her path but she took it down with two bullets, one glancing off its armour but the other finding its head.
"We got this!" she heard Romanoff call. "It's good. Go!"
As she climbed onto the bus, Vanessa felt the Captain's powerful dynamism thrum and spike before running off into the distance. Hawkeye was jogging towards her and the toppled vehicle, while Black Widow was firing round after round into Chitauri skulls.
She pried apart a window that was already half-open and was immediately met by a pair of small, clammy hands.
"Help," cried a woman, holding her shaking child up to the SHIELD agent. Tears were streaming down her face uncontrollably. "Don't let my child die."
"We won't let anyone here die," said Vanessa with as much conviction as she could muster, desperately hoping that if she was sure enough, the promise would come true.
She pulled the little girl out of the window and handed her to Barton, who carefully lowered the child to the ground. Then she grabbed hold of the mother and allowed the woman to clamber out. As she evacuated the civilians, Hawkeye held off the surrounding Chitauri.
Once all the victims were safely out of the bus and ushered into the basement of a nearby building, Vanessa, Romanoff, and Barton stood in a triangular formation, surveying the carnage. Chitauri were closing in on them, baring their fangs and brandishing glowing cannons.
As if an unspoken signal had went off, all three agents simultaneously opened fire, with Romanoff and Vanessa emptying clips into the aliens while Barton took down multiple Chitauri with a single explosive arrow.
Vanessa ignored the rippling pain in her arm from her earlier injury and focused solely on the fight. Her enhanced vision ensured that each bullet found its target while helping her avoid attacks with its predictive capabilities. After a little while, her movements seemed to become automatic ー duck, roll, fire, dodge.
"This is like Budapest all over again!" she heard Romanoff shout over the gunfire, presumably some sort of shared experience.
"You and I remember Budapest very differently," Barton responded, firing an arrow into a Chitauri's skull, where it lodged with a sickening crunch.
It wasn't long before Vanessa had emptied several magazines, but the onslaught of alien forces showed no sign of stopping.
"There's no point unless we close that portal," Vanessa said into her mic to whoever was listening. "They'll just keep coming."
A moment later, lightning struck a Chitauri and bounced from one monster to another, striking a dozen of them down. Thor touched down regally like the deity he was, despite being covered in dust and what was likely… remains.
"The powers surrounding the cube is impenetrable," he announced gravely.
Vanessa glanced up at Stark Tower while futilely depressing the trigger on her gun, realizing that she was out of ammunition. Up on the tower, a massive energy ー the Tesseract ー was humming with active power as it brought more and more enemies into New York. But just beneath it, she detected a familiar tingle of mystical force, as beckoning as ever ー the scepter.
And Loki's frosty aura was absent.
Perfect. I could use a weapon.
"Thor-" she started, before being cut off by a pouncing Chitauri. Without any bullets, Vanessa resorted to spinning around and kicking the thing hard in the face, years of taekwondo and her more recent SHIELD training teaching her how best to utilize her body weight. She sent the alien flying backwards and she took the brief opening to slip her boot-knife out and stab.
She winced slightly as the exertion caused the gash on her arm to throb with the flex of her muscles.
"Tornado roundhouse kick," Romanoff commented approvingly. "You're well-trained."
She brushed a thin strand of hair out of her face, acknowledging the compliment with a nod.
"What is it, Vanessa?" asked Thor, throwing his hammer, which made a whistling sound as it travelled through the Chitauri ranks. It returned to his hand, but not before defeating several creatures.
"Can I have a lift? To the top of the tower?"
The god frowned. "Trying to close the portal is futile."
"Loki's scepter is also up there," she pointed out. "I could use something that shoots energy beams."
He shrugged. "Fair. Come close, then. I travel fast."
Vanessa followed his instructions and grasped onto his waist tightly, feeling Thor's muscles lying taut beneath his skin as he spun Mjölnir in alarmingly quick circles. And then-
Weightlessness.
The Asgardian kept one large, strong hand around her hips while she clung onto him for dear life, the Chitauri and her allies all becoming tiny specks as they rose higher and higher into the air. She couldn't close her eyes because the scene was both terrifying and breathtaking at the same time.
The breeze whipped her ponytail into her face and caused Thor's red cape to snap like flags on windy days. When they finally touched down on Stark Tower, her legs wobbled slightly as she found her footing.
"That was… something I'd like to do again," she breathed, meeting Thor's blue eyes with her dark brown ones. "I'm jealous that you travel around like that all the time."
He smiled briefly, before being forced to address the Chitauri flooding out of the portal. Vanessa quickly scooped up the scepter that was lying idly on the tarmac, feeling its ancient power thrum beneath her fingertips. There was strange sensation that felt almost invasive, as if the weapon's vitality was melding with her own, but that was soon forgotten. There was so much latent potential, and it was waiting for her to use it.
Experimentally, she pointed the thing at a passing Chitauri chariot and mentally willed it to shoot off a blue bolt. After humming briefly, it did, firing off a beam of pure energy that knocked the screeching thing out of the sky. The recoil threw her backwards a few steps.
It'll take some getting used to.
She tried again, this time pointing the weapon up at the spinning portal. She willed the beam to increase in intensity, firing off into the portal before the aliens could come out. She managed to incinerate several Chitauri before they even made it into the New York airspace.
This isn't so bad.
And then another Leviathan came roaring out of the portal.
Almost instantly thrown into a state of panic at the thing only a couple hundred feet away from her, Vanessa nearly dropped the scepter as her previously impeccable vision blurred for a second. When it cleared again, she could only stare at the fish-like creature as it undulated into her world with a low rumble of aggression.
"There's another one," she said into her microphone, her voice small.
"We see it," Stark responded sarcastically. "It's a little hard to miss."
Iron Man swooped in next to her, his red and gold armour scratched and dirty in numerous places. But still fighting.
"Let's see if we can cut through the shell," he decided in a tinny voice, probably due to the layer of metal that was his mask. Vanessa could only watch as he fired a white-hot laser beam at the creature's plate armour. "And I'm talking to you, too!"
Vanessa blinked, her previous, relative calm all but gone. "Me? What can I do?"
"You're holding the destiny stick, kid!" Stark shouted, exasperation edging his voice. "So maybe you've never really thought yourself as one of us. At the start, I had my doubts about it, too. But hey, you've stuck with it, given an alien a lecture on coffee, and got the rest of us to work together. You've been an Avenger from the beginning, whether you like it or not!"
She stared at the weapon in her hands for a second, and then at the Leviathan snaking between the buildings and the man confronting it alone. She never thought that she could compete with the rest of them. She still didn't, not really. But did it really matter?
No, I guess not.
As if hearing her thoughts, Stark's wry tones blasted out of her radio. "So make yourself useful, Creepy-Eyes!"
Creepy-Eyes?
She grinned a little.
Give me the biggest beam you've got, she told the scepter silently. The metal seemed to heat up beneath her palms as it charged up the gemstone, pulsating with magic.
A brilliant blast of intense blue energy exploded from the tip of the scepter, hitting the Leviathan near its back end and cutting through the plate armour easily. Large pieces of metal fell away from the monster and it shrieked in pain as the beam progressed onto its flesh. She could hear the sizzle and resisted the urge to cringe in sympathy for the thing.
The beam stopped, causing Vanessa to stagger slightly. Strangely, it almost seemed to have tapped into her own energy, but she told herself that it was probably just fatigue. After all, she had been at a high level of exertion since the battle began.
"See?" Stark laughed. "You're getting it. I'll take it from here. Focus on the portal."
The Leviathan flew away, chasing after the speck of red and gold that was quickly retreating into the distance.
Vanessa turned her attention back to the wormhole, where the onslaught seemed to be never-ending. At the base of the generator, she detected a stirring energy. Someone was up there, and it was human.
"Mr. Stark, who's on top of your tower?" she questioned, making for the signature immediately, scepter in hand. There was no way for her to make it to the top except by going through the Stark penthouse, which she did, climbing in through the broken window.
"Oh, that's Selvig," responded the billionaire. "You know, the guy Loki controlled."
The last time she had sensed Loki's pawns, they had the same ambience as the weapon in her palm. Selvig's vitality held none of that.
"Well, I don't think he's still being controlled," she said. "Are your security mechanisms still up? I need to get to him."
"You're in my house?" Stark asked with mock annoyance. "Fine, JARVIS, let her in."
She picked through the wreckage that was previously a living space, just as an elevator pinged and slid open. Vanessa stepped inside, and it closed and began ascending.
"Thank you, Mr. Stark."
"Remember, you've just enjoyed the privilege very few people get. Riding my elevator."
Despite the fact that Manhattan was crumbling around her, she laughed, grateful that there was still someone to maintain the levity in such a time of crisis.
The doors opened and wind once again greeted her face. She was standing on the tip of Stark Tower, overlooking a burning island. The moment was going to be carved into her memory, like every bit of the battle so far. As long as she saw it through eyes of silver, it would be irrevocably recorded in her brain.
She wasn't sure what to make of it ー it was both magnificent and terrifying at the same time.
A groaning old man lay beside the portal generator, which was exuding enough power to give her a headache. She tightened her grip on the scepter as she warily approached Selvig and knelt by his side.
"Dr. Selvig?" she asked lightly. "Doctor?"
The man sat up slowly, opening his eyes to reveal wild, blue-gray eyes with dilated pupils. They were just the ordinary sort of blue, not the glowing sapphire that indicated Loki's mind control.
His face was etched with despair and desperation as he watched the carnage that he had unwittingly helped create.
"Loki's scepter," he whispered. "The energy… The Tesseract can't fight. You can't protect against yourself."
Vanessa didn't let any confusion show on her face.
"It's okay, doctor. It's not your fault," she soothed, going with the safest conversation option. "You didn't know what you were doing."
Selvig looked at her, his expression almost fierce. "Actually, I think I did. I built in a safety to cut the power source."
He was staring at the scepter in her hands.
"Oh," Vanessa gasped. "Okay, let's try it."
She grasped the doctor's arms and helped him get shakily to his feet.
"There's a way to close the portal," she shared into her mic, her voice raw with hope. A round of cheers came through the tiny speaker in response, but Nick Fury's urgent voice cut through their ecstasy.
"Liang, what's the situation?" he asked. "The council wants to know."
"We can hold it," she promised. "We're closing the portal now."
She was helping Selvig stumble awkwardly towards the force field surrounding the Tesseract. It was almost over.
Fury sighed in relief. "Thank goodness."
"Just hit the force field with the scepter and keep going, even if it resists," Selvig instructed. "If you can touch the device with the thing and pull it out again it'll shut itself off."
Vanessa nodded, prodding at the energy with the golden tip of the weapon. She carefully pushed the thing through the force field, grunting slightly at the resistance. Finally making it through, she tapped the generator lightly and quickly extracted the scepter.
Above her, the portal shrunk and rolled inwards, like clouds closing over a rift in the cerulean skies. And like that, the dark hole vanished.
A little anticlimactic, but better than more aliens.
She looked at Selvig and smiled. "Thank goodness, doctor."
Cheers, this time with more finality, exploded through her communication device. Selvig returned her smile weakly, the gesture not reaching his haunted eyes. She wanted to somehow help him, but that had to wait, since there were still more Chitauri running free.
"We're almost done mopping them up here. We just need to get Loki," said Romanoff, sounding reprieved. "He'll be heading to Stark Tower to turn that thing on again for sure, so be careful up there, Liang."
"Roger that." Vanessa hefted the scepter before helping Selvig onto the elevator and punching in what she hoped was the right floor. After a few seconds, it arrived back on the bottom level of Stark's penthouse, just in time for her to see Loki flying towards her on a Chitauri chariot. She pointed the weapon at him, ready.
"I got him," came Barton's deep tones, before she could charge up the scepter. An arrow came whizzing through the air, but Loki snatched it a split second before it would have impaled his face. Smirking, he made to fling it aside but it detonated, blasting the Asgardian off of his ride and onto the rooftop landing.
Warily, Vanessa pointed the weapon towards the heap of green and gold and slowly advanced towards it, ready to attack. As the god straightened, however, a larger green thing flew up the side of the tower and punched Loki hard, causing him to fly through a shattered window, past her, and collide with the wall with a loud crunch.
Am I glad that guy is on my side, Vanessa thought again, almost fondly, as the Hulk stormed into the building and straight for Loki.
"Enough!" he yelled, rolling to his feet in a flurry of broken glass, still in remarkably good shape. He looked thoroughly unhinged, now, eyes wide with the reality of his defeat. "All of you are beneath me. I am a god, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by-"
His monologue was interrupted by the Hulk, who promptly grabbed him by the leg and repeatedly slammed him into the floor like a rag doll, destroying what was left of Stark's expensive tiling.
Vanessa was certain the guy was dead after such an ordeal until he gave a faint whimper of pain.
She almost felt sorry for him.
With the scepter still ready to fire, she walked towards the figure lying idly on the floor. Even after such a brutal beating, he only had some cuts on his face. That wasn't to say that there wasn't any internal damage, of course, but if his skin was so durable, she could only begin imagine what it would take to break his bones.
Behind her, she sensed the metallic signature of Stark, the lithe ambience of Romanoff, the precise energy of Barton, the acrid electric force of Thor, the dynamic power of Steve, and the raw strength of the Hulk.
The Avengers.
Loki gingerly pulled himself to a sitting position, hissing in agony.
Barton nocked an arrow as they slowly closed in around the defeated god, pulling the string taut.
He choked out a wispy laugh. "If it's all the same to you, I'll have that drink now."