A/N And now... the next chapter.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Harry turned his comm off, putting all of his attention on the woman in front of him. He supposed that she could have been pretty with out the concentrated glare and if the hard lines of her skull weren't jutting out from beneath her taut skin. Her hair hung loose around her face in waves, it was obviously well cared for, more than her body at any rate which was made up of angles and anorexic lines which were only accentuated in her loose clothes which in themselves could have been a models. Her painted lips were thin and drawn up in a sneer while her almond eyes were narrowed in his direction. She had make up that made them stand out against her faded olive skin. He met the woman's gaze, running through his options.
"Hey, I'm Harry." He began, " Didn't really have a chance to introduce myself earlier. You know, when you got someone to stab me."
Her eyes narrowed.
"It's not as if you can die." She sneered dismissively, "Cockroaches can't."
"You know if you are going to be insulting me, I should at least know your name."
She rose a superior eyebrow. "You don't?"
"S'why I asked."
The look of hate intensified further, "You think you are so superior." She spat.
Harry was about to point out her hypocrisy when she drew herself up.
"I am Edrea. Hand of the Great Pestilence." Harry frowned when he heard the proclamation, "I am here to right the wrongs you have helped inflict. To save the world."
And with that she attacked.
She hissed something in a foreign language and threw out a hand. White shards formed in mid air and shot towards him.
Death's advice flashed in his head.
Envisioning a shield in his head he focussed on the cold flame of power he had been building an awareness of and brought his hand up in a defensive motion.
A great shield not unlike those belonging to knights that stood at Hogwarts came into being in front of him, hanging in the air between them. The shards thudded into the surface.
"To be honest you don't need say anything." Death said munching jelly babies as he looked out over the city.
"What?"
Death proffered him the bag and Harry absently took one of the sweets.
"To use Death's magic. I only told you to use words because that was what you were used to. Figured with a big battle coming up you'd prefer the familiar rather than trying something new, which needs focus anyway."
"You said that you shaped the magic!"
"Gave you the confidence to be throwing the magic around didn't it?"
Harry threw the jelly baby at him.
"Oi! That was an orange one!" Death squawked as he watched it spiral to the street below.
Harry ponder what Death was saying and what it meant for him.
"So, you're saying that I can perform it as wordless magic."
"Yup. You humans only use words to 'channel'" he put the word into air quotes, "magic as it gives your thoughts focus. It's all to easy to loose a train of thought which is risky in magic. The trick will be separating your human magic from your Death magic."
"How do I do that?"
"Meditation. Clearing your mind. All that jazz." Death replied with a full mouth. Harry glared at him.
"I'd offer you another one if I thought you weren't gonna waste it." Death pointed out.
"I do all the meditation I need for Occlumency but it's not exactly my forte."
"Fine." Death shrugged, "Continue to flounder about in your magic, I'll just stand at the side and laugh."
Harry sat back to look at the sun setting over the Manhattan high-rise.
"It's easier than it looks."
"Ever teach someone to do it before?" Harry asked curiously and Death scoffed.
"Me? Lord, no. You Hallowed don't come along all that often you know."
Harry digested this, slotting this information with what he had already gathered.
"Well that's me gone." Death declared, standing and licking his fingers. "Start meditating, ask your Brucey-friend. You'll know what you're looking for when you find it."
"You can't tell me?" Harry asked twisting around to look up at his friend.
"Nah, where would the fun be in that?"
With a cheeky grin he was gone.
He'd been right, he'd recognised the black fire the moment he'd found it. Now familiar with it, it was simple to stoke it and bring it to his fingertips. He was buzzing.
Bruce was busy with the infected, his mind only partially on the transactions over the comms. But he froze in the treatment of a young red head when the unfamiliar voice came across the comms. It was slightly faded: it was clearly being picked up by Harry's headset, but the tense feeling that had been building as the battle went on solidified. This was it.
"Is everything okay?"
Bruce brought his attention back to the young woman in his care. Her symptoms were more advanced than any he'd seen so far. She was pale and sickly, her hair falling from its once neat grip to be plastered to her head by sweat. Blood was splattered on her business shirt having fallen from her nose in streams, the napkin she was holding to it doing little to stem the flow. He idly recognised the 'Caffinator' logo through the blood. He met her nervous green eyes and smiled.
"Yes. Forgive me."
She smiled and he took the distraction to inject her with the antidote. He put a plaster on the wound and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
"That's that. You stay here, one of us will keep an eye on you. I would advise you to lie down."
"Thank you." Her voice was fervent and he smiled and nodded before moving on.
"She wasn't at the release site." He turned to see Luna looking at the woman with a curious expression.
"What do you mean?" He asked as he prepared the next injection, passing a comfort to the man he was about to inject.
"I'm not sure, but her infection is different to the others."
"Is that important?" Bruce asked concernedly, looking over at the young lady who had curled up on her gurney.
Luna shook her head. "Just odd."
"Then we'll come back to it later." Bruce said applying a plaster to the injection site and passing on the basic follow up advice before walking to the next bed.
"Can I help?"
Bruce looked at Luna who was watching the new needle as he prepped it.
"'Fraid not. You really need training before you go around injecting people. What about the deliveries?"
"All done." She replied still watching as he pushed the plunger to get rid of the excess air. "Neville should be back soon as well. I could do what you're doing now, then you can do the stabbing bit."
Bruce looked at the seemingly increasing number of infected crowding the ward. It would help speed the process.
"Okay. Once sec."
He finished with his patient and turned to Luna who had picked up the jar of antidote and a clean needle. He noticed that she had already put on a pair of sterilised gloves.
"Right then." He smiled wearily.
"Isn't it glorious."
Death looked around to see his childhood friend standing next to him on the ledge, looking out over the chaos.
"That's not quite how I would have phrased it." He responded stiffly, feeling souls pass into his domain below them. He watched his reapers dart into the crowds to collect the souls and take them to War. His fellow horseman would have been there herself but Death had outlined the situation to her and she had gracefully bowed out on the promise that all resulting souls would be directed to her domain despite her and her followers Horsemen together would be too close for comfort.
"An antidote has been created to the bioweapon." He said, pointing out what she already knew, "You won't be getting any souls from it."
"I know." She said, a happy lilt to her voice that he hadn't heard before. Vindictive. " That's not the point of this."
He looked at her in disbelief before following her gaze to Harry. With a flash his friend had thrown his opponent into a building with an explosion of dust and glass.
"You never did get more upset than when other people were hurt." She gloated.
Worry twisted in his gut which he pushed away. Harry could take care of himself. Death looked sadly at Pestilence.
"Haven't you held onto this for long enough?"
Her eyes flashed.
"Thirty years is nothing to you and me. You humiliated me!"
Death shook his head.
"It wouldn't have been fair. To either of us."
"Fair! You chose a human! A weak mortal who even now is wasting away."
Death knew that he had let his surprise show on his face at the mention of Jocelyn and he tried to use it in making her see sense.
"I never chose her. I haven't chosen anyone."
She snorted and her expression turned vindictive.
"You'll be collecting her before the decade is out- will you do this one personally as well?"
His eyes narrowed. She wasn't going to listen to reason. He tried to measure this woman against the young spirit he had played with before they had matured and taken on their titles and could see little of her besides her inherent stubbornness. It saddened him.
"Father was right, there is too much of your mother in you."
She spoke of his mum with a venom that riled him just as much as her dig at his treatment of Rose had. She was right, he had too much of his mother in him to remain as impassive as his father would have had he been in this situation. He wasn't violent, never had been, but in this moment he he found himself hating a spirit's inability to act directly against another spirit. He turned his attention to Harry, who was stuck in the holding pattern that Death had predicted for the confrontation. The victory of the battle wouldn't be dependant on the Masters, as ruled by the Laws of Balance, it would be actions of their companions that would end the day. He knew that for them to break out of the stalemate the scales needed help tipping.
Harry was breathing hard, the exertion of the spells cast getting to him. They were matched. Evenly. It hadn't taken long for him to realise that. He had tried to turn the tables by throwing sectumsempra at her, but she had brushed it off with barely a glance. It wasn't that she was blocking all of his Death spells, far from it, but they weren't as debilitating as he was hoping. He had noticed when a few of her attacks had got through his defences that they didn't hurt as much as they should. He could put that to adrenaline, but that soon became obviously impossible. He came to this realisation when a shard she had conjured to come from behind him slid under his ribs and out through is abdomen. Adrenaline or no, it should have killed him. It occurred to him then that there was some kind of twisted magic keeping him from dying from her attacks and plausibly vice versa. He briefly wondered if that was why she had used a lackey to attack him earlier that day. It felt like a lifetime ago. A small part of him mused how crappy he was going to be feeling when it was all over.
Fatal or not, it hurt. He had a hand over the wound as he sized his opponent up.
"What good do you hope to come from this?" He asked in the lull of attacks.
"To put Death in his place." The reply was backed with a certainty that could only come from complete belief. He recognised it from Death Eaters of his past. Harry tried to figure out what she thought she knew and how to reason with her but couldn't see where she was coming from.
"I don't know what you mean." He said, honestly before twisting away from the fire she sent his way in retaliation.
"Like Hell." She growled. "You believe you're so much better. But guess what, your quest in greed and power is destructive. You are destroying the balance."
"What?" Harry was left flummoxed by the rubbish that was being spouted.
"Like you don't know." She sneered, her expression disdainful.
He couldn't find the logic in her statements so Harry decided to try a different tact.
"I don't know if you've noticed, but we are in a holding pattern, we can't hurt each other. What's the point?"
A conniving smile spread on her thin lips.
"You can't die." She corrected and voice in his head that sounded strangely like Tony's muttered that he could die, he just didn't stay dead. "But you can be hurt." Her eyes flickered to the raging war around him and focussed briefly on a figure in the fighting. Harry glanced that way and saw Steve surrounded by crazed rioters. He let his gaze travel further and saw Ron and Hermione surrounded by a blaze of spells.
"They can die." Edrea said smugly as he looked back at her.
He wasn't in control of his actions when he reached for the blaze of black fire and stoked it, letting it grow, fuelled by his need to defend his friends and anger at the one who dared threaten them.
The resulting explosion of power destroyed the road he stood on.
Tony had successfully cleared the area with the menial assistance of the S.H.I.E.L.D agents. And all without too many dints to his suit. He took a moment to note a particularly deep one near his central reactor before shooting into the air, leaving the agents to take care of the machine and the resulting paperwork. Soaring over the city, he could make out the field of battle from the moment he crested the high-rise.
The fighting in the street was still in full force, lined by fires which shone off the moving figures. The enemies numbers had been depleted he noted, but how many of their own had it taken to do so. Jarvis hadn't announced any of the Avengers being down for the count, which was promising.
He set his visor to zoom in on the scene and found Harry. He wasn't hard to find, the crowd having parted to allow a clearing for him and Pestilences' girl to fight. He'd heard the comment when she had made herself known, and had let his retort mask his anxiousness about Harry's upcoming fight. Since then they had had radio silence. So, seeing his friend standing, albeit crookedly, was reassuring.
They seemed to be having a conversation. He saw Harry glance off to one side and something in his stance shifted. The arm that had been clamped to his side rose with the other one and Tony could see something back building in their palms. His heat sensors could detect it from here as it built and it exploded out, encasing his friend, his opponent, several meters of street and a number of enemy forces in a great ball of what he identified as black fire.
"You're doing good." Bruce said to Luna as she presented him with a new syringe that had been quickly and efficiently prepped for him to insert in the next victims arm.
She smiled at him.
"So are you.' He looked confused at the praise and turned to treat the man sat on the floor in the corridor. They had run out of chairs and gurneys. She looked around the muggle hospital. She could see traces of it's imposed order even under all the chaos. Nurses who weren't handing out antidotes were registering the patients or trying to make them more comfortable, keeping track of their condition and other muggle medical stuff.
She did have a great measure of respect for how muggles had managed to make functional lives for themselves without magic. It was fascinating. Almost as fascinating as the strange new friend of Harry's. He wasn't quite what he seemed.
"Hey Luna."
She turned to see Neville looking on edge and read to act.
"Neville." She greeted.
"That's the last of the deliveries." He informed her and she nodded. Bruce glanced up at her friend and nodded in acknowledgement as well.
"Thanks." he said gruffly, "I don't know where we would be without you. Without both of you."
His second comment was expanded to included her as well and she smiled as she filled the next syringe for his use.
There was a loud bang.
Suddenly the fighting that was somewhat muted by the hospital doors wasn't muted anymore as the fighting came inside the hospital. There were sharp cracks as the muggle weapons were fired and the shouting echoed down the corridor.
She immediately started cursing the intruders, defending patients as they scrambled away. She felt Neville join her and remembered the last time they had fought together.
A shrill scream ripped through the air and she spared a glance to it's source, a young woman, crouched on the floor instead of running. She was about to advise she run before her gaze followed the woman's downwards into the lifeless face of a young boy. He couldn't be anything other than dead, half of his face had been ripped away by those bullets muggles were so fond of.
She still had to get the mother out of the line of fire.
"Come on." She said to the woman, guiding her up and away from the body, "He won't come to more harm." The woman seemed to be too in shock to resist. Luna trusted Neville to cover her and he did without needing to be asked. Luna shut the woman, the last of the patients into the adjoining corridor. After confirming that all the innocents that hadn't been killed in the initial onslaught were out of the corridor, she locked it with a quick charm and put up an impervious charm to protect the door from bullets.
She looked back to see something unexpected. She was able to take the time to focus on Bruce who was standing frozen in the middle of the corridor, his eyes focused on the young corpse. His expression was one of anger and pain. This was a man that took each death to heart, taking some of the guilt with it. She had seen that expression on Harry in the past, the time she remembered most keenly had been that time, in the Great Hall, during the reprieve just before he snuck out to meet Voldemort in the forest.
But then Bruce did something Harry never had. He began to grow as his eyes flashed green.
Neville reached for his wand as the otherwise gentle man's form rippled out, the skin dappling to a bright green. She put a hand on his arm to prevent him drawing it or doing anything foolish as Bruce grew. It was amazing, unlike anything she had witnessed in magic before. It could be likened to a werewolf she supposed, but this had so much more power and beauty in its individuality.
"He won't hurt us." She said watching his muscles tense before he charged into what was left of the intruders. He barrelled through them, creating a new entrance to the hospital as he did. He left none of them conscious, something he didn't need to check before he gave a great roar and tore into the battle in the streets.
"Wow." Neville breathed. "What was that?"
"A sad man." Luna replied simply.
The fire had billowed about him but hadn't touched him. It had however caused the tarmac to crack and disintegrate beneath him and he had lost his footing. He regained it before the smoke cleared however and stood in the base of the newly formed crater he was in watching for his opponent, his anger still tight in his chest.
There were still traces of black fire flickering in the periphery of his vision which he ignored in favour of the crouched figure in front of him. There was a stillness from the rioting as well as those at the edge of the destruction paused to look at him and quite possibly the charred remains of their companions that had fallen to lie amongst the twisted wreckage. He realised that she wouldn't have been fatally wounded by the attack and he used the pause in fighting to think his options through.
He couldn't kill her. But she had been able to kill him earlier that day. It had to be through an intermediary, someone else to strike the killing blow. He spotted something moving out of the corner of his eye and a plan began to form.
He turned his comm on.
"Tony can you get Bruce here?"
"On it."
He saw the red and gold streak in his periphery his gaze now focussed on Edrea, pulling herself out of the curled up position amongst the twisted metal of the piping system that had once run under the street.
She was shaky as she pulled herself up, her clothes charred and her once beautiful hair singed.
She swung around to face him, her mouth curled in a grin.
"Did that make you feel better?" She asked, her accent thick. "Do you realise how impotent you really are?
Harry started to walk to the right around the base of the crater and she matched him, the same smile twisting her face.
"Dont you see?" he tried once more, "You are loosing! Your forces will be beaten back and all this," he waved an arm to gesture at his surroundings, "will have been for nothing."
"You delude yourself." she declared, not even looking at her diminished fighters, "the balance of the world wants to be righted. You will see!"
"It is you who is deluded." he exclaimed, seeing how eschew her view of the world was. "What Pestilence has been telling you is wrong. We are not 'hands' on earth. We are their Masters-"
"Ha! That is your arrogance." she spat, vindicated, "Master indeed. Like we could ever order their great powers, bind them to our bidding."
"It should be a partnership." Harry tried, he had stopped walking now, and could see down the street towards the hospital "You should work together."
"And we do!" Edrea shouted, "to right the balance. You must learn-"
Harry realised that there was no reasoning with her. She was lost. When he had killed Voldermort he had been triumphant. Now a sadness washed over him for how this girl had been twisted.
She was but a girl. She must have been young when she was chosen. He looked past the blood and destroyed clothes, taking in her eyes which beneath the deranged sheen were young and truly unexperienced.
"Tony, now." He said, simply and did not tear his eyes away as Tony flew up over the Hulk's head, leaving the path between him and Edrea clear.
There was a clear sense of vindictiveness in Tony's next words.
"Hulk. Smash."
And the Hulk did.
With the intelligence that Harry suspected belonged to Bruce which was belied by his current demeanour, the Hulk targeted the girl, leaping into the crater to grab her.
She had seen where he was looking and had turned in surprise, but not in time. She fit in the Hulks fist. If that hadn't crushed her then the throw into the ground certainly did, one of the pipes that cracked through the earth impaling her chest, leaving her broken on the ground.
Assessing his target as dealt with the Hulk moved on to other pickings.
Harry stumbled over to where she lay.
She wasn't quite gone he saw, her small chest still gasping painfully against the pipe.
"I'm sorry." He murmured taking her small hand. Her eyes narrowed.
With the last of her strength she spat at him one last insult, but it was in a language he didn't understand.
A/N Wow it's weird to be near the end of this. By the way, all of the Chapter Titles are derived from films. I'll be interested to see how many people picked up.