A/N: Thanks a ton to my beta, ElessarII, for reviewing this chapter. You are the best, mellon.
"Light! more light! for Death is weaving
Shadows 'round my waning sight,
And I fain would gaze upon him
Through a stream of earthly light."
- Let the Light Enter; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
November 1st, 2023
The Ark, Manswell Helicarrier
Somewhere in New York Airspace
Daisy has had a lot of bad days.
But this one really takes the cake.
She punches a Freedom Fighter, before spinning to face another sneaking up to her. Parrying a blow, she hooks her right leg with the back of his knee, and he goes crashing to the ground.
Behind her, Colonel James Rhodes has downed four of the Fighters and is currently grappling with a fifth one. He twists and wrestles the Fighter to the ground and pins him face-down into the floor.
He doesn't spot the shooter aiming at his back.
She feels the vibration of the gun more than hears the click of the safety, and she has her palm facing outwards even before the bullet leaves the revolver.
Her Quake isn't powerful enough to completely disintegrate the bullet, and the shrapnel hurtles back towards the shooter and embed themselves in her chest.
Daisy winces as the Fighter goes down. Rhodes twists around sharply, blinking at the woman for a second.
"Lethal force is still a measure of last resort, Agent Johnson," he says. His voice isn't admonishing, but she still feels as though she's been raked over the coals. Being on a mission with an Avenger has its downsides. "Lucky, though," he smiles faintly, " - that she's wearing cutting-edge Kevlar. Behind you," he warns before diving, once more, into the foray.
They make quick work of the rest of them. Rhodes magnetically handcuffs them to the walls as she makes her way to the ancient computers lining the back wall.
She'd been on the Ark with May and Coulson when the first explosion hit. Their response had been swift, but it had taken herself and Rhodes sneaking back into the Helicarrier to find out that one of the worst terrorist attacks since 9/11 had been little more than a diversion for something far worse.
There are five explosives hidden somewhere inside the facility. Energy emissions match the ones that had taken out the Statue, but pinpointing them on the massive Helicarrier proved impossible without direct access.
The computers are ancient, but she looks around until she spots the StarkPad she'd hastily tossed hidden beneath the wires. She winces at the crack on the screen.
The first thing she'd done after they'd returned to the Ark was to hack into the systems controlling the retro-reflective panels lining the hull and fiddled around with them. With any luck, Coulson would've decoded the message.
She types feverishly for a few seconds, hacking further into the Ark's internal servers.
What she finds makes her blood run cold.
Rhodes peers over her shoulder. "What's that pressure altimeter linked to?" His voice is deceptively easy as he points out the model of a circular dial on the screen. It has three different pointers displaying the altitude of the Ark above sea level and a digital gauge meter for the atmospheric pressure.
Daisy silently brings up the schematics of what looks a hell of a lot like a trigger.
He exhales. "Single barometric fuze, connected to all the bombs. If the pressure drops below a certain point, they'll go off."
"Actually, Colonel - I think it's the other way round. The gauge shows the pressure is actually increasing."
Rhodes is silent for a long time.
"The Ark is descending," he says, and she marvels at his ability to not appear even slightly tense. "You narrowed the location of the bombs yet?"
"Yeah," she sighs. "It's easier to triangulate the energy signatures from here. There's one near every arc reactor, Colonel."
"That leaves one." His calm, expressionless exterior is broken by a frown. Goosebumps break across his skin. "Did it just get… colder here?" he asks in a low voice.
She looks over. "The door's open," she remarks; they'd forgotten to close it after the Fighters had burst through. "Probably just a draft."
His face is scrunched, as though he's on the verge of a realization. "No, I mean…"
She never learns what he means because that's when she hears it.
The low hum coming from the entrance.
Her Terrigenesis hadn't just given her the ability to deploy powerful concussive blasts. It'd given her the ability to hear the vibrations of all things, at all times. For the most part, it's a pain in the ass, so she has trained herself to treat it as background noise; distant awareness instead of constant cognizance.
So she knows exactly when something's in the room that's not supposed to be.
"Can you hold this for a sec?" she interrupts him, and he blinks at her, before bemusedly taking the StarkPad she hands out. She sees the exact moment it hits him - the realization - and he opens his mouth, but she's already twisted around, her palm thrown outward.
Her Quake leaves a depression on the metal wall it's aimed at. "Who's there?" she demands, before feeling a heavy hand on her elbow.
Rhodes - who'd calmly given out orders while watching Lady Liberty fall and who hadn't flinched even while attempting an insane dive from a plane onto the Helicarrier - is white.
"Stop," he whispers, the StarkPad clattering to the ground. He dashes to the wall, before stumbling to a stop, his eyes wide, terrified. She follows his gaze and is barely able to make out a vaguely humanoid figure made of little more than steam.
Rhodes reaches out with trembling fingers, and the vapor condenses into watery, wobbly limbs, which themselves morph into a black uniform with dark blue highlights. Daisy's stomach plummets as she watches the familiar hooded figure slowly, painfully reform itself into human; Rhodes steadying it - her - when she falls to her feet.
She is staring with horrified fascination, but she can't find it in herself to close her eyes out of shame, even though she'd just basically disintegrated an Avenger.
"I'm not missing any bits, Jim," Isabelle Collins - Aquamarine - finally assures as the Colonel, her husband, pats her down almost frantically. She sounds exhausted.
Collins rises slowly, her legs trembling for an instant before she nods at Rhodes and moves away. Her eyes meet Daisy's.
"I am so…" Daisy doesn't even finish her apology before Collins holds up a hand.
"You have good instincts," she says, "and I shouldn't have snuck in." She glances at Rhodes. "It's difficult to… focus on more than one thought, when I'm in vapor form."
His fingers still linger on her shoulders, before lightly grazing against the familiar eagle-shaped badge on her uniform.
"S.H.I.E.L.D," he whispers, and his hands drop as if burnt. Their eyes meet, and there's an intensity to their gaze that makes her look away; Daisy has known Rhodes for only a few hours, but she's never seen him this focused about anything the way he is towards his wife.
Collins nods. "Was headed to the Lighthouse with Talbot when we got the news," she says. Her expression is eerily, uncomfortably blank, but unlike Rhodes, who's mostly - enviably - calm and composed, her face reminds Daisy of the walls of Troy.
Unbreachable.
Talbot's name breaks through her musing, and Daisy shoves down the pang of guilt that always accompanies any mention of the General - Major, he's a Major General now. "Coulson got our message then?" She doesn't care that her voice gives away her desperate relief.
Collins inclines her head. Her eyes, hazel brown, fix on hers. "Heard what you said about the pressure trigger. Four arc reactors, four big booms. Where's the fifth?"
Rhodes inhales and backs off to a publicly appropriate distance. "Don't know. Most likely the bridge. I'm gonna try and liberate it - it's pretty heavily occupied. Plus I think the pilots can tell me how to stop this bucket from going down."
"Want me to come with?"
Rhodes smiles, and it looks almost uncomfortable. Daisy glances away from the very obvious display of trouble in paradise radiating from the couple.
"Johnson is going to need you more than me. Both of you are going to be on bomb disposal duty."
Daisy gapes, but before she can argue, Collins cuts in. "Not really my speed, Rhodey. I'm muscle, not a bomb expert."
"No, but she is," Rhodes nods at her. "I looked over the schematics - you don't need training for this. Make your way to each of them - the proximity will help you hack into and interrupt the signals between the trigger and the explosive. We can dismantle them after we've cleared the Ark."
"Sounds too easy."
He laughs lightly. "It's not. Not even for someone who can hack into a Stark-secured internal server inside a Helicarrier." Collins stiffens, then looks over to her, an eyebrow arched as though she's looking at her in a whole new light.
The oblique regard just serves to raise Daisy's hackles, though, and she suddenly remembers why she has always disliked Isabelle Collins.
"You'll attract attention the second the Fighters figure out what you're up to," the Colonel is saying. "Johnson's going to need to focus on interrupting those signals."
"Which is where I come in," Collins says.
"Remember," Rhodes says, and his voice is suddenly solemn, " - if the bombs take out the reactors at that height - there won't be any New York City left to save."
They nod in unison.
"Radio silence until you've deactivated the explosives."
The Ark
Isabelle's still feeling the after-effects of the Quake which had literally shaken her apart.
"I'm really, truly sorry," Agent Johnson says, not for the first time.
Isabelle shrugs. "Anyone who defends my husband so swiftly is fine in my books," she says honestly. "How far is it?"
They're making their way to the fourth reactor, which is situated deep in the bowels of the Helicarrier. Johnson had done a brilliant job deactivating the first three explosives, having grown more and more confident with each one.
The lithe agent's fingers fly across the keyboard of her StarkPad. "Not far. This explosive's the biggest yet. Expect heavy resistance."
Isabelle nods. Johnson's unnatural talent in hacking the Ark's servers is almost superior to her ability to blast away enemies with her palms.
She has heard of Quake. The Inhuman had first come under her radar when the UN had ordered her to bring in the vigilante toppling banks to donate to the poor, like some kind of modern-day Robin Hood.
Isabelle had smelled a coverup when the then-Director of S.H.I.E.L.D, Jeffrey Mace, had made a public announcement legitimizing Johnson as an undercover operative. Of course, that status hadn't lasted long, because a few months later, Mace was found dead and Johnson had been directly responsible for the attempted assassination of General Glenn Talbot.
Isabelle wonders how Johnson had gotten herself out of that particular pickle. And then it hits her - the world had been preoccupied with something far worse than one rogue Inhuman assassinating a highly decorated Air Force official.
In the here and now, Johnson stops near a metallic door. "Here we go," she says and pushes it open.
Beyond lies the central control hub for the entire Ark. It's a large cylindrical room, at the center of which are sets of mechanical extensions reaching out from the floor and the ceiling. Each set is conical in shape, like flower petals about to bloom. The whole setup is surrounded by a humming, hexagonal-patterned proximity shield.
And between the two sets of arms is the all too familiar light of an arc reactor, shining so bright and blue as though it could never go out.
But you've seen it go out, haven't you?
"Explosive?" she demands, wrenching her mind back to the present.
Johnson makes her way to a narrow opening on the far side of the room. "On it. Central terminal's through here," she nods at the tunnel that the opening leads to, beyond which Isabelle can see strains of faint reddish light. "This signal's difficult to isolate, so it's going to take a while, and I'm not going to be able to hide us."
Isabelle glances at the contraption powering the most essential systems in the Ark. "Is the trigger going to be in any way affected by a slight decrease in temperature?"
Johnson blinks. "Uh, no. We are rapidly approaching the pressure threshold, but it won't be for another fifteen minutes. Why?"
Isabelle silently raises her hands, palms up. Mist begins to flow down from her semi-gloved palms, sliding over the floor in thick, smoky waves.
Quake looks over shrewdly as the mist slowly obscures the room. Anyone who bursts through the door is going to have a tough time seeing anything. "I thought your gift was hydro-kinesis, not genesis."
"It is," Isabelle confirms. "But the suit's superabsorbent - the pores can hold a lot of water without gaining volume. And so can I. Stay out of the way - they won't be able to see you, but you won't see them either."
Johnson nods and disappears down the tunnel.
The Fighters come in slow.
Isabelle's pulled up her hood - her haze lenses allow her to easily discern figures and shapes through the mist. They're all packing heavy heat, something that makes her pause.
The reactor's shielded, but she can't have weapons discharge so close to the core. There's no telling what other essential mechanisms are inside this room, so she needs to go about this delicately.
Plus, it wouldn't do to get Daisy Johnson accidentally shot.
She tiptoes to the first Fighter, slips behind him, wraps an arm around his throat and tugs. The man gasps and grapples at her arm. Her other hand snaps out to snag the assault rifle before it falls. She keeps her hold tight until she feels the man slump then gently lowers him to the ground before snapping a magnetic handcuff onto him.
She uses the butt of the rifle to knock out a second Fighter, and then silently deals with a couple more before they finally catch on.
The next one manages to sense and evade her, and Isabelle isn't able to stop her from calling out a warning. After that, it's an all-out war.
It's a good thing the Fighters are just as afraid of accidentally firing off a shot and hitting their own comrades, but it doesn't stop them from using knives or their firearms as melee weapons.
She ducks beneath a rifle, and throws a jab at one's ribs, before spinning around and aiming below the belt at another. He crumples, and she grabs the rifle of the first, yanks hard, and rams it over the head of the second before driving it back into the first one's nose.
There is no end to them, and eventually, she finds herself facing off against a big guy. Well, 'facing off' might be a bit of a stretch because she is pressed with her back to his front, her very life being squeezed out of her.
She is finding it difficult to breathe, difficult to think, and she can't pull off another vapor mode or even water mode. They're dangerously close to the reactor's shield - Isabelle can feel its hum in her teeth. She stomps her heel down on his instep, and as he loosens his grip for a second, chambers her knee and follows it with a hard kick to his shin.
His grip slackens, and she wriggles free, spins around, but he's faster, and he backhands her so hard she smashes into the floor.
Her head is spinning, both from the earlier suffocation and the hit. She can feel the sting of her split lip, and has barely enough sense to roll and avoid another punch aimed at her head.
She holds up her hands, gathers the mist around her, and propels them towards his head. He stumbles to a stop, completely blinded by the thick, literal fog in his eyes, so he doesn't see her when she twists and hooks a leg behind his knee and jerks as hard as she can.
The huge Fighter trips, his flailing arms unable to find purchase - and crashes into the reactor's shielding.
The shield lights up like fireworks. An electric charge brilliantly illuminates the hexagonal pattern, and the Fighter jerks hard. She imagines his eyes bulging, popping as the current courses through his body, lighting up his veins through the fog, frying him from the inside out.
She scrambles backward as the body slides off the shield and collapses at her feet - almost retches as the smell of burnt flesh wafts towards her.
The stench brings the others too, and soon she's fighting for her life again, her head ringing with the effort to keep ancient, horrifying memories from consuming her.
The rest is easy if numerous. Her body is tiring, and she has had to constantly restore her constitution by absorbing the mist, which just allows them to see her better. She finally just gives up and redirects the rest of the mist to the entrance of the terminal booth where Johnson's still working on interrupting the signal.
The mist is a worse beacon than the Bat-Signal, so she just retreats into the far side of the room and makes it as thick as she can while she waits for them. The narrow tunnel is a choke point, which is a double-edged sword because even though they're able to come at her only one at a time, she doesn't have enough space to move around.
She punches, kicks, bites, grabs, twists, but receives just as many wounds as she hashes out, and the white of the fog is tinged with red now because the water in her suit had run out long ago and she's had to use the blood plasma from her own deep cuts to fuel the mist.
Just when she thinks she can't handle another hit, she hears a muffled thud from behind her, and a voice orders, " - duck."
She hits the ground almost gratefully. The last few Fighters go down under Johnson's powerful Quake and for a few moments, there's a blessed silence broken only by her loud breathing.
She brushes off Johnson's outstretched hand and rises on shaky legs. The remnants of the mist cling to her skin and judging by Johnson's stare, it's not a pretty sight.
"You done?" Isabelle asks, and she knows her voice is too abrupt, but she's too exhausted to care about niceties now.
Johnson's eyes narrow, and she glances to the body of the huge Fighter lying next to the core. "Are you? You weren't supposed to kill anyone."
It's not as if she hasn't killed before - she's been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent almost her whole life, and her very first kill had been when she'd been sixteen.
"It was him or me."
And it's not as though it's the worst death she's ever seen. She's been personally responsible for plenty of gruesome deaths, but there have been few in her life that have stuck with her throughout the years.
"What the hell was that flash?"
Isabelle shrugs. "The shielding is powered by the reactor. He must've hit something critical when he fell, and the shield overloaded."
"Sounds like experience talking."
She closes her eyes. "I've seen it happen before."
The Fighter's body flashes behind her eyelids, merging with another kill she hasn't allowed herself to think of in years - that of one Obadiah Stane. Tony had reached out when Stane had been falling, and the Monger had grabbed on - and had tried to reel him in.
Stane had always been the kind of man to pull others down with him as he pitched into the abyss.
In the end, it hadn't been much of a choice at all. She had frozen Stane's wrist until he'd screamed and let go - and fallen into the overloading arc reactor.
Tony had never quite forgiven her for that.
An urgent beep interrupts her descent into the hell of unwanted memories, and she blinks at the StarkPad Johnson's peering into.
Quake turns so white that adrenaline starts to flood Isabelle's body again. "What?"
She just turns the Pad towards her.
It's the footage of the deck outside, surrounded by thick, dark clouds - Johnson probably hacked the external cameras.
It shows three individuals on the deck, two clustered together, while one lingers almost uncomfortably close to the edge. There's no audio, and she can't make out their faces, but she would know Rhodey's figure anywhere. She clutches the tablet with a white-knuckled grip.
"Fred Moppino," Johnson whispers, pointing at the lone figure gesticulating wildly, the unmistakable shape of a large rifle in his hands. "He was the one who blew up the Statue of Liberty early."
And suddenly all the pieces come together.
Isabelle stands there frozen, all her pain and exhaustion slipping from her mind. The wedding ring she always wears in a chain around her neck during battle feels impossibly heavy now. She's somehow numb and cold at the same time.
"What are they doing, just standing there?" Johnson demands. "Stalling?"
"No," Isabelle breathes. "They aren't stalling… he is."
"What?"
"I know where the fifth bomb is. Can you hold down the fort?"
Johnson blinks, and her hand is suddenly like a vice around her shoulder. "Hold on a second - you are in no condition to go anywhere, I'm coming with…"
Isabelle twists sharply. Johnson, to her credit, doesn't rear back when her eyes flash a deep cyan. "The shield around the reactor is down," she whispers, and it's so intense it might as well have been a shout. "The rest of the Fighters breach this room - it won't matter if we deactivated the signal, you hear me?"
Johnson examines her for a long second, and Isabelle is almost shaking, but then, she lets go. "You can't deactivate it on your own."
Isabelle meets her eyes squarely. "I'm not planning to."
Jim's fingers twitch as they wrap around Victor Manswell's elbow.
It'd been hard to breathe when he'd first jumped onto the Ark with Agent Daisy Johnson. But ever since Moppino's men had overwhelmed him right outside the bridge and threatened Vic if he didn't accompany them, he's found the air to be almost comfortable.
That isn't good, because that means the Ark is descending. The pressure threshold is rapidly approaching. His comms had been ripped from his ear and smashed, so he has no way of knowing Izzy and Johnson's status. His throat tightens.
He turns his attention to Moppino, who's shaking at the edge of the deck. He's already fired a few shots at them in warning when they'd attempted to come closer.
The terrorist mastermind has no intention of actually jumping, of course not.
He's planned for something far worse.
And all in a desperate, vain attempt to stop something years in the motion.
"We sent men and women into space," he's yelling through the wind. Behind him, dark clouds hang heavy and foreboding. "We didn't plant a flag on the moon, we waved a red one in the face of destroyers of worlds!"
Victor tries to calm him, yet again. "Thanos isn't coming back, son. He's gone." Despite having zero experience with being a hostage, Vic is doing an admirable job of staying composed.
Billionaire moguls face rabid hordes of media sharks on a regular basis, Jim reminds himself with a flinch. He'd been on the side of one for years, after all.
"He might be gone," Fred's shouting, "but worse things are waiting for us out there in the cold! How much worse will it be if you start building houses on other planets? We shouldn't be looking to spread out there, we should be shoring up our defenses here! Out there is darkness humanity was not meant to breach!"
"You have to know - we don't negotiate with terrorists," Jim tries.
"Oh, I'm not looking to negotiate, Mr. War Machine, sir," he says, and for the first time, the fury in his eyes has been replaced by an almost manic calm. He checks his watch absently and Jim's blood runs cold. "The time for negotiation was over when a burning plane crushed my babies five years ago. I got lucky, you see. I was the one who got turned to ash."
"You're not the only one who's lost." He's not at his best today, sick with worry at the thought of his loved ones on this damned Helicarrier.
Moppino's face twists with rage. "What have you lost? What can compare to losing your children, your entire family?"
"Nothing."
If Jim was afraid before, it's nothing compared to what he feels when an all-too-familiar voice emerges from the entrance. "Izzy…"
She looks terrible, drawn and exhausted, her uniform soaked with blood. She steps onto the deck lightly, her hands raised in surrender. Her eyes are fixed on Moppino. "Nothing can compare to losing… everything."
"Stay back!" Moppino shouts, waving his gun, and she stills. Jim's heart leaps to his throat and he makes an aborted motion forward, only to freeze when her eyes snap to his in a silent warning. "Don't come any closer!"
She nods gently. "Do you know who I am?"
He stares for a long moment. "You're Aquamarine, the Avenger."
She laughs, then, and they all stare at her, stupefied. "That word doesn't mean anything anymore," she says, shaking her head. "I don't even know if I still deserve that title, if I still fit… not after what's happened. You know what makes me different?" Her smile turns incredibly bitter.
"I was the only one of the original seven Avengers to not survive the Snap."
Even the wind is silent now, the previously rumbling clouds still and quiet - the world is just as transfixed by her as the humans. For all their differences, Izzy has always had the ability to command a room, just like Tony. It's how Jim had first met her, when she'd walked into that bar, and ever since then, he's been drawn to her orbit almost helplessly.
"The survivors said the ones who got Snapped were lucky. But the survivors knew what they lost. We never did, not until it was too late."
He's always sensed when she enters a room, even if he couldn't see her immediately. It's how he'd known almost immediately when Izzy had snuck into the server rooms where he'd been with Johnson - even when his conscious mind had been struggling to adapt to her presence in a universe that she hadn't existed in for five years.
"I got Snapped out of existence by a genocidal alien and was resurrected five years later to fight that same guy. And they say we won. From where you and I are standing, it sure as hell doesn't feel like that."
The very worst day of his life had been when he'd watched his wife crumble to nothingness even as he reached for her helplessly. There hadn't even been a body to bury. She'd returned five years later only for him to watch as, once again, she got attacked in the exact same way by a supposed ally - her molecules being scattered by a powerful force.
For a moment, he'd drawn some very unfortunate comparisons between Thanos and Agent Johnson. He'd wondered whether he had always been fated to lose her to nothingness.
Izzy is still speaking, her hands are still raised but they're spread wide. "You're not a secessionist, are you, Fred? No, you don't give a damn about the UNAS - the Freedoms First just got you in through the front door."
The world gets darker, colder the closer she inches towards Moppino. He's still alert, his gun still pointed towards her, but he's also hypnotized by her words. Behind him, the black clouds loom threateningly and seem much closer to the ark.
"Let me guess - you probably approached them as a scientist, pretending to be enthralled with their cause, showing them what you could build. Showing them your inventions, your bombs that the most advanced scanners couldn't detect."
Moppino is sweating profusely, even though the temperature's gone down. He wipes at his forehead and blinks at the wetness. "What - what?"
Izzy's fingers twitch. The wind is picking up, blowing hair into their faces. "We couldn't find it, you know. The fifth bomb. And Rhodey's belief that it might be on the bridge was good. But what would be the point of that?"
"And then I saw you all here through that camera," she points towards a lens on the outer wall without looking. "That peashooter you're holding isn't going to stop my husband from tackling you, so it had to be something else, something worse."
Moppino is shaking his head, but she doesn't stop talking. "We were never going to find the fifth bomb in any of the rooms because it was never in the Ark, was it?"
She points directly at his chest.
"It was always on you."
Moppino is shivering now, goosebumps bursting across his skin, and his lips are turning blue, even though sweat is pouring down his body in rivulets. "What… what's happening to me?" He gasps.
"It's a bad day to be in New York, Fred," Izzy's voice plummets from empathizing to icy. "The Statue of Liberty's gotten blown up, a Helicarrier got hijacked, and oh - looks like it's going to be pouring like a bitch."
Fred's eyes snap to hers, and he opens his mouth in alarm, only to be interrupted by a harsh, incessant beeping coming from his chest.
The pressure threshold.
Fred blinks down at himself almost comically, and that's when Izzy snaps her wrists.
Almost instantly, a large sphere of ice, tinged with faint streaks of red, snaps into being around Fred and the bomb he's got strapped to his chest - altered from all the moisture and vapor she's extracted from the atmosphere, from the dark clouds - heavily pregnant with water and with ice crystals.
It hadn't been sweat.
Just ordinary condensation.
She flings her arms upward and the sphere shoots skyward, as though fired by a cannon.
She hits the floor when it detonates, and the explosion blinds him, but Rhodey's always, always known where she is at any time, so he lets his instincts carry him to her.
Catching her as she sinks into his arms feels like absolution.
Marvel Comics Context: The Statue of Liberty was once destroyed by a man named Moppino who blew it up with an atom expander ray. Never read it myself, but the coincidence was eerie, so I decided to flesh out his backstory, make him a little more sympathetic.
A/N: Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below!