Yuh-oh! Looks like our main protagonist is not out of the woods yet! Many thanks for anyone who favs and follows this story, you're all great. And I also appreciate the words of the reviewers. Pop quiz to you mega fans of Marvel: do you recognize the people from last chapter since two of the three are actually canon characters? If not, keep reading and you'll find out (or not, depending if you caught onto the whole thing).
Please remember to leave a review!
Disclaimer: MCU belongs to Disney and Marvel Studios/Comics, I only claim ownership over my Original Character(s) and a little bit of the plot!
Warning: Language, Violence, Adult Content, possible Triggers (there will be heads-up for these things), and whatever comes to mind.
Trigger Warning! References to SUICIDE! Read at your own risk!
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ᴀʟᴏɴɢ ᴄᴀᴍᴇ ᴀ sρïdєя-ωσмαη
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Things went from bad to worse.
A panicking female passenger rushed towards the front, disappearing behind a curtain while frantically calling for help in a shrill tone before it was promptly silenced by the sharp crack of a gunshot. It wasn't long when the other passengers started screaming, all of them bolting out of their seats to run for the back in a vain attempt to find safety.
The whole thing reminded me of a time somewhere in my early childhood; my brother and I had been watching a movie, a cartoon about a small group of rabbits leaving their burrow because one of them had a horrible dream about their home being destroyed by construction workers looking to expand the land and turn it into a neighborhood. I could never forget that horrible picture painted on the telly. Rabbits piled together as they tried to escape, all exits blocked and danger just closing in all around them, and the bodies of the rabbits choking everything and everyone else going insane from the mayhem and death.
Right now, I felt like a helpless rabbit that was driven to a corner and was about to be killed. I would be amongst the piles of dead bodies as we all were pushed against the wall with bullets riddling our bodies with the last thing to see and hear were people screaming and dying all around us.
"Shit!" the man, Rick, cursed as he ducked down behind a seat while opening his computer and furiously tapping away at it.
"No, no, no, no, no...!" I trembled as I slid back down, pressing myself against the back of a seat as tears fell from my eyes.
I was naive to believe that the organization didn't have eyes and ears everywhere. Somehow I had slipped up, somehow they recognized me through my cheap disguises and stealthily replaced the original flight and cabin crew with agents of their own to find me. The movies always painted pictures of secret organizations always having an eye on everything and anything, and it caused a lot of paranoia in real life (especially when in the case of Snowden). It was one thing to see on the big screen, another to feel some doubt when holding a smartphone in my palm, but a whole different dimension when I was constantly stalked and hunted down by people who were trying to sink their claws back onto me.
'The woman,' a tiny voice of reason called out to me. 'That woman knew something!'
My wide eyes snapped to Rick, a small feeling of betrayal and bitterness coiling at the tip of my tongue when I looked at him. If the woman who was associated with that man knew a thing or two about the organization, then there really was no doubt that he knew something of it, too. I jerked at the sound of footsteps, looking past the seat I was hiding behind to find a couple of men and women in dark gear making their way through the aisle.
They were heavily armed.
"You haven't passed out."
My head whipped back to the man, his eyes roving over me before they found my eyes again. While I was glad that the effects of the drugs didn't result in me falling unconscious, I was alarmed about how quick he was able to immediately catch something off about me. It was bad that the people of the organization knew, and it would only get worse if more and more people discovered things about me that I didn't want them knowing. Was I really so easy to read?
"You drank that water bottle. I saw you. Why didn't you fall unconscious?" he continued.
"Did you know this would happen?!" I hissed at him. "Are you from that organization, too?!"
He stared at me.
"You know HYDRA exists."
It was a statement. It was like I had written something of my own doing and the man read it with concrete finality for the world to hear, a proof that I had thought of something and he simply said it out loud. I said nothing more, my body shrinking in further on the floor of the seat as I waited for the agents to sweep across the aisles. I swallowed thickly, feeling a shudder, feeling little vibrations that I knew where muffled gunshots the agents in black were using against the helpless and unconscious passengers of the plane. I couldn't see anything, my eyes being scrunched closed tightly, but I could feel, smell, and just hear it happening as they grew closer to where I was.
There was never a moment where I hated my enhanced senses than I did now.
Oh, God. Was this how everyone felt when they were trying to get away? No matter how powerful a person is, they would still feel helpless and paranoid because it would take just one moment for them to slip up to suddenly find themselves swarmed by their pursuers.
'They're going to catch me!'
"Hey, listen to me." Rick shook my shoulder, jostling me out of my black hole of defeat. "I don't know why HYDRA is trying to get to you, but we're in the same boat together."
"So what?!" I hissed at him, slapping his arm away from my shoulder as I angrily snarled at him. "You want us to team up and hope to overcome the odds thrown against us?!"
"Exactly."
I stared at the lunatic with eyes wide and mouth dry.
He reached inside his pocket and pulled out some circular-shaped device that looked about as thick as short novel and could fit in the palm of his head. He showed me the item, letting me take in the thing properly.
"It's an EMP." he told me. "It'll knock the lights out, but only for a few short second so that it doesn't do anything with the plane's control panel—"
"That's all I need."
It really was all I needed to turn the tables.
Seeing as this was our last chance to fight back and gain some control, Rick nodded and moved his thumb closer to the middle where there was a button outlined at the central of the device. Pulling one leg up to my chest while the other remained folded to the crusty floors of the plane, my fingertips pressed down and I nodded at the other man that I was prepared to make my move.
The moment he pressed the button, I was already crawling along the ceiling.
My body could feel the agents, their vocals sending vibrations of the likes a person only felt when they were standing next to a booming speaker. Closing in on the grunting sounds of the dark agents, I looked down to see three standing below me, talking in another foreign language with hints of irritation found in their tone. Quickly, without the notice of the first two, I quietly knock down the third agent to the floor and quickly muffled him when he tried to scream. Knocking his head harshly to the floor, his struggle ceased and he fell limp in my arms.
There was a click and light was cast upon my body.
'Flashlight!'
Jumping out of the way, bullets rained down where I had been. I clung to the side walls of the plane before flinging myself away, watching as their guns flickered randomly as they tried to take me out.
Somehow, through the adrenaline and fear, I noticed something out of all this.
They weren't trying to capture me. No, if that organization had been after me, they would have come with heavy tranquilizers because small stuff like the drugged beverages wouldn't keep someone like me down. These agents were armed to the teeth, they were prepared to kill—
Rick and the woman. The only reason why I was involved in this was because of those two.
I threw myself to the next agent, feeling something go past my arm and my ankle before my fist collided with a face. Bones cracked under my knuckles and I ducked away just as the lights flickered towards me.
And then the electricity came back on.
Frozen, all guns were aimed at me from my spot on the ceiling, my fingers and feet planted on the surface that it must have painted quite a bizarre picture of what the agents initially thought they were up against in the darkness.
Bam! Bam!
Two agents fell, three others ducking away from where Rick had fucking pulled out a pistol from his coat and started shooting agents (how the holy hell did that get past security?!). Distracted by the noise, I dropped down to the floor of the aisle and viciously wrenched an open tray that stuck out of the backseat and threw it at one agent's head. They flailed, taken off balance, before they too fell dead when Rick shot them through the face of their mask.
Unfortunately, a bullet made itself welcome in Rick's ribs.
The older man fell down with a yell, collapsing down the aisle. I reacted by jumping at the shooter, knocking the agent off balance and yanking them with a sharp tug, using their body as a shield when the last agent aimed their gun at me. I charged at them with a roar, throwing the limp body out of the way and crushing the one against a nearby open wall, hearing bones crack when they collided against the wall.
My breathing was heavy despite not feeling tired. No, the excitement of it all was making me feel jittery, like a high I had seen people develop when they rode on motorcycles without protection, hopped on wild rides from a theme park, or took off in the skies to jump out of a plane and descend back down to earth with a parachute waiting to be shot out of their packs.
My fear was at the back of my mind throughout the whole assault when Rick pressed the EMP. What I was feeling, I swallowed thickly, my throat still dry, it was something foreign and alien to me.
It made me wonder if this was a feeling Steve Rogers felt when he stepped out of that chamber, his body molded to become a superior man that would fight a war bigger than the boy from Brooklyn.
"Kid...?" a shaky voice called out to me, wet and weak.
Remembering what happened to Rick, I hurried over to the other side of the aisle, hopping over the fallen bodies of the agents and falling to me knees where the older man lied. His chest was covered completely in red, the fabric absorbing the blood and staining the ground. Despite not knowing who he was, what he was doing on the plane, or why he and the woman were attacked, I reached out and held onto his trembling hands.
I was not some cold person who didn't blink or flinch at the sight of someone dying in front of her, I was not some person who was always in control of her mind when crazy things started to happen all around her, and I was not a genius with facts and logic aiding her... I was an emotional, confused, and conflicted girl who was lost in some place she wasn't even suppose to be.
So, despite everything, I couldn't leave Rick alone while he was laying there, dying in my arms.
"Oh, God," I eyed his bloody chest, my voice rising in a shrill pitch. "Oh, God! Rick! What do I do?!"
"L-listen to me," he spoke, voice calm despite the fact that he was practically bleeding to fucking death!
It only got worse when the plane suddenly rocked violently. I, along with the forgotten people hidden in the back of the plane, let out cries of alarm, and my eyes caught the sight of something bright flashing outside the windows of the airplane.
"Oh, my God! A wing's been blown off!" I cried, feeling the plane tilt dangerously.
And that when the plane began to nose-dive back towards the earth.
"HYDRA wasn't taking any chances." Rick said, voice so tired that he sounded like he was going to fall asleep.
I cursed. I cursed, cursed, cursed, and cursed some more because—
Freedom was right within my grasp before it was gone. It was more like a tease, something being waved in front of me to provoke me into reaching out and brushing my fingers against it, and just when I thought I could really grab it... it was gone.
"GODDAMMIT!" I screamed, tears pouring out like a fountain from the feeling of being cheated.
Not for the first time, I wished I had never left that apartment I shared with my brother. It was one of those moments where I thought things like, "this should have never happened to me" and "why is this my life now?". Because this was it, as much as I tried to deny it for the past several months, this was going to be a common occurrence for me as long as I kept running and running and running until my feet left behind bloody trails... or I just stopped and simply let it end there.
I felt my body go lax, my turmoiled mind go still from all the static, and just let everything go.
The plane was falling from the sky, the surround sound of the hulking metal nose-diving through the clouds, and the screaming of the passengers in the back spelled out to me that I never stood a chance in a world like this.
"Listen to me," I blinked, my body numb and barely feeling the squeeze on my arm which Rick used to draw my attention back to him. "Listen to me!"
Reaching for the computer with his bloody fingers slipping a few times over the slick surface of his laptop, he pulled out a thick USB from the computer's side and pushed it in my limp hands. I stared at the item for a few long seconds before my eyes trailed over to him, my mind still not registering what this meant.
"HYDRA cannot win," the man said, blood trailing out the corner of his mouth as his breathing grew more wet and forced. "You... you have to make sure that HYDRA does not get away from this, thinking that they can continue on what they've been doing long after the war ended."
Why was he so confident that I would come out of this whole thing alive? The plane was flying over the Atlantic ocean and it was going to destroy the vessel the moment it hit the water. And like he had said earlier, we were four hours away from mainland.
I jerked when I felt a hand touch my cheek, blood staining my bare skin as my eyes focused back on the older man on the floor.
"You can do this," he told me, his voice growing quiet that it threatened to be overwhelmed by the noise surrounding us. "You have to live to make sure that this—"
He waved a hand at the aisle, his unconscious wife, the majority of dead passengers, and the fallen agents.
"You have to make goddamn sure these bastards get uprooted and exposed to the entire world." he gritted out, his teeth pink from the blood and saliva. "The world will go into a global man-hunt to publicly execute the parasites that had been hiding in their countries, their cities, their offices, their homes, their entire lives!"
Blinking, I stared down at the older man.
"B-but... I'm just..." I shook my head, my voice failing me as I looked helplessly at the USB in my hands.
It was like carrying a doomsday button.
I was beginning to have a semblance of understanding what Oppenheimer was talking about when he spoke solemnly about his Atomic bomb.
Should I survive this, should I actually walk out of this impact alive with the mission to expose the darkness hiding beneath the world all around, I would be the impending catalyst that would destroy the world the organization was trying to reshape to their liking.
(IAmBecomeDeath)
"Hey," I swallowed thickly, looking back to Rick. "I know this shouldn't... this should never have come to your shoulders, but you're all I've got, kid."
My eyes closed, inhaling a calm breath as I felt my heart steadily rise as reason returned. When I opened my eyes, I met the older man's unsteady gaze, his blood spread so thick and wide that he was beyond saving at this point. I could feel his tight grip on my wrist loosen each passing second.
"Here," he placed something my hand again. "It's a safe house in Manhattan. Just find it, hide there, and connect the USB to the server. The password's on the back, and the computer will do the rest of the work."
"Okay," I replied, quiet and prepared.
"I'm sorry you got dragged in this," he closed his eyes, his words slowing down and slurring together. "... Can you put me next to my wife?"
Wordlessly, I carefully hauled him up and pushed him in the seat I had previously occupied before the whole fiasco began. Buckling him up, I pulled away from him and stood tall on the aisle.
If you took away the blood, the impending crash, the screams of the people, you would think that Rick and his wife were simply taking a nap with their heads tucked close together and their hands lovingly intertwined.
With no more words left to spare to each other, I grabbed my duffel bag, turned, and walked away. Each step felt heavy, my heart telling me to stop and try to save the innocent people on board (Rick was innocent, right?), but my mind wondered what could I have done to save them?
Absolutely nothing. That's what.
But, I thought with each bold step forward, my eyes growing hard and my body tightening up like a spring about to uncoil violently, I was not going to forget them as I would watch HYDRA burn for this.
(andallthethingstheydidtohurtandkillanddestroy)
Stopping by the emergency door near the end of the plane, I looked down at the floor and pondered if it was possible there was an inflatable raft somewhere.
It was risky, this wasn't like an episode of MythBusters where there was a dummy involved, but if it was proven possible for a person to survive by using a life raft as a parachute when falling from the sky—well, I knelt to the floor and prepared to force open the compartment holding the inflatable life boat, I won't know until I try.
So easy it could have been for me to just wait for it to end, to stop the journey there and let things unfold as they did... but somehow, people, whether they be my own family, friends, or strangers I've just exchanged words with, were always giving me the same message:
"Don't ever take the easy path when it comes to the road of life."
From the new found strength I held in me, I forced open the bottom compartment (after tearing off the carpeted floor of the aisle) and was greeted by the sight of a neon yellow deflated life raft. Pulling the thing out, I gathered it in my arms, holding it close as I pulled out the last bit from the floor.
Another explosion rocked the plane, and I could still hear the wind whipping outside as the plane continued its path to a destructive landing. I didn't have a lot of time left, I had to act quickly before—
bang!
Something hot and sharp dug itself into my side, just below my ribs and dangerously brushing against my lungs. I stumbled against the plane's door, looking back to see a wobbly agent in black pointing a pistol at me. She (because I could see the dark eye shadow above her eyes past her goggles, probably the stewardess who tries to drug me with the water bottle), pulled out a oval-shaped thing in her hands, her thumb flicking to the top and—
'GRENADE!'
With no chance to prepare myself, especially since I had been shot, I wretch the enforced door open and was immediately sucked out into the sky while barely missing the tail of the plane. Just in time, too, as the side of the plane exploded in fire and smoke that it split in half and began a wild downward spiral to the ocean. It was horrifying, something I had only witnessed on the news or in some action/thriller/war films. The cinema companies and rolling cameras could never compare to the up in front scene that burned brightly in the night sky that reflected almost beautifully on the surface of the ocean below.
There was no safety between me and this place I was inside, there was no parents, no brother, no family, and no friends to comfort me. There was no familiarity that would keep me truly grounded; I was alone, and it was just me against the world.
And what a scary world it was.
Seeing as I was dangerously close in falling to death by slamming into the ocean water, I spread my arms open to let the damn thing finally inflate itself so it would cease the speed of the fall.
Then, of course, my hold on the thing wasn't quite reassuring as the inflatable life raft threatened to leave nothing for me to hold onto. I yelped when one side of my hand slipped off due to the blood coating it (from Rick's or mine, I had no idea), my fingers on the other side barely hanging on until it too would be forced to slip away as the air continued to fill itself up.
With quick reflexes, I whipped my free hand up, two fingers pressed against the center of my palm while my index and pinkie pointed outwards. Aiming the familiar gesture towards one end of the nearly inflated life raft, I felt the tingly and new sensation of something bubbling on the surface of my wrist before it spat out something to connect with the intended target. Secured, I wrapped my fingers around the thin but strong string that had come from my wrist and connected with the tail end of the life raft, doing the same with my other hand.
A burning ache reminded me of the bullet lodged against my side, and I winced to feel something wet growing on the fabric of my shirt and sweater. Hopefully, I thought as I watched and listened to the plane finally collide with the sea water, there was something of a first aid kit tucked away somewhere inside the blasted life raft.
The plane was still burning, giving a glow and brightness that helped me see how far away I was from the ground. I inhaled as my body finally took a plunge in the ocean water, my eyes immediately shut closed to avoid the sting and I winced at the salt stinging my still open wound. Quickly, I swam to the surface and threw my duffel bag on the life raft, afraid of getting the whole thing entirely wet (I wasn't sure if it was water-proof material) before hauling myself.
I lied on the thing, shuddering from the feel of the cold air whipping all around and the slowly fading light that dimmed as seconds went by.
I had to go. I couldn't stay to be rescued, for no place was safe for me.
It wouldn't take long for the organization to get word, after a thorough investigation with the plane (making sure the people they were after were dead and gone, another target crossed out of their hit list), that there was a life raft missing.
The bullets, the body of their agents, and the autopsy reports would paint them a story that there was someone else they didn't foresee boarding onto the doomed airplane. And from there, it wouldn't take them long to connect the dots with the escapee back in Spain to the airplane crash here.
Remembering Rick's card, and fearing that it would it be wet and no longer legible, I pulled out the card and narrowed my eyes to read the words in the dying light.
I stared at the card, blinking a few times to see if I was reading it right, hoping to God the words of that man's passwords weren't what I think they were.
PETERPARKER
This had to be one of the biggest, fattest, ugliest cosmic joke ever told.
The organization after a man and woman who were aware of their existence, the intended airplane crash to ensure no truth would escape, a dying man's wish to be close to the thing he loved while making a stranger promise him that they would expose the organization that loomed over the unsuspecting child waiting at home for his parents...
A child who was now orphaned, and would soon find himself being taken under the wing of his aunt and uncle.
I let out a noise that was a cross between a laugh and a sob, lost on the joke thrown in my face.