Chapter Text
Here’s the thing about terrible, no good, panic-stricken situations. After the first initial devastating event, where everyone screams and shouts, it’s quiet. People don’t know what to do and are waiting for someone to take charge of the situation. Panic isn’t loud and it isn’t bull-roaring; it’s a whimper and a look.
There are people who think they are leaders. And sometimes they are, when everything is neat and orderly, they can inspire people to work better, smarter, or harder. But most leaders too, when faced with an alien invasion are just like everyone else, they just need a voice to follow. It’s how charismatic people with poor ideas get ahead in life. But this isn’t, for fucks sake, Darcy Lewis’s first alien encounter. It’s not the first time she’s facing being killed at any second, and she’s got a real loud voice. Control she is, and control she will.
Barnes and Barton are dropped, carefully, by Rhodes before he’s switched his trajectory to match Pepper’s and roared back into the sky to intercept anything approaching Foster and Natasha.
Darcy takes a quick look around to assess the situation. She’s not sure what street she’s landed at, can’t tell from this angle, other than they are still in Midtown. She’s been lapse on her NYC map-memorizing, but there’s still some things that need doing. From her look around, there’s about ten of the ugly-ass dudes trying to round up people on foot, a few dozen on the skiffs, and a whole bunch of property damage and panicked peoples.
“Barton, Barnes, can you keep me covered?” She says trying to keep the tinge of breathlessness out of her voice and pushing it down. She has to bring back up the part of her that she’s been trained to do into action. And that’s to keep calm, keep others safe and kick ass if needed. She’s going to do all three. “Okay, first up. I need a people check. This is Control, I need your voices.” And one by one, each member of the team gives a sitrep, even if Natasha’s is mostly wind. Her team is whole and accounted for and their agendas are clear.
She looks over at her men and nods, and they pop up from where they are crouched down and Darcy just starts running towards the mass of people, confused and conflicted as to where to go and where was safe. Two Chitauri go down near her, arrows and bullets, her own very favorite gun in her hands, and that starts her countdown. She leaps onto the hood of a car. “Okay people! Let’s get you down into the subway!” A few people start to look up at her. Darcy wills herself taller, wills herself into authority.
It just takes a couple of pebbles for an avalanche to start. And it only takes a couple of well timed shots for people to realize that the chick in the paramilitaries probably has a good idea of what to do.
*****
Driving the suit is one of the more thrilling things Rhodes has ever done in his life, but it’s also one of the stupidest. He flies around in a tin can and shoots things, and right now, he’s alongside Pepper in her tin can, following a 5 foot 3 woman who transforms into a Norse god, and she’s carrying a supposedly-dead spy/assassin. And they are all on their way to try to plug a hole in the sky.
This would all be funny if it were happening to somebody else. Or on television. But no, this is his life and these are the choices he’s made. Right now, his choices include deciding which of the skiffs to target. His HUD shows several dozen of the small skiffs and two larger ships dumping the aliens out into the streets.
“Pep, you need me right now?” Those two ships don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, and every minute there’s more Chitauri heading down into the city that the ground trio are going to have to mop up on their own. Rhodes doesn’t like that plan. It’s time for a new one.
“Yeah, I think I can handle escort on my own,” Potts replies, blasting through a skiff through the center. It explodes in a fit, from the inside out, taking the pilot with it. The wreckage crashes through a building below, and he’s thankful he can’t hear the screams from up high. “What are thinking, Rhodey?”
That collateral damage is bad, he thinks, but Pepper is still a little squeamish about that reality, “That I can lead the big ones off towards the water, give them a little heave-ho?”
“I don’t think Stark Industries approves of dumping toxic waste into the ocean, Rhodey, but I think I can make a one day exception.”
He chuckles as he twists in the armor, a quick movement to change direction towards the Chitauri. He’s not sure how to distract the ships at first but he spends a couple of moments circling in a holding pattern around one of the ships. On a whim, he makes a larger circle, now encompassing both of them, and they draw closer together as if he’s herding sheep. Partially mindless, Romanoff said earlier, that play follow-the-leader and, more importantly, follow-the-largest-most-annoying-enemy.
Be annoying, that he can do. He fires off of ship’s haunches, the articulated hinges moving in an serpentine wave, but it stops the individual aliens from rappelling into the city. The few that are still clinging to the sides swing from their ropes as he leads them on a chase through the city, and while he doesn’t completely avoid them running into buildings, it’s more property damage as opposed to human lives.
Buildings can be repaired, people can’t be brought back to life. If there really is a truth universally acknowledged, not that Rhodey has read that particular novel in any form since college, it’s that the dead stay dead. In the ground, and they don’t come back just because you want them too. The dead stay dead and priorities shift because of it.
Rhodey runs them round, almost cartoonish in the simplicity of the strategy, and then blasts himself straight up and lets the ships collide before barraging them, shooting them down. He drowns the ships and the aliens inside, far enough away from the harbor and the docks that no one else gets hurt.
*****
“Hawkeye, are you scaling a wall?” Darcy has a voice that cuts through the wind with ease, and Clint smiles through a grunt.
“Uh, yes?” Clint responds, “I thought that would be obvious, given that the buildings around here are a little tough to jump over, Control.” He wasn’t entirely stupid for climbing the building, after all, he has an arrow with a rope and it’s very sturdy for this sort of thing.
There’s a pause over his earpiece where he can hear Darcy breath in an awkward sigh, and the unmistakable sound of gunshots. “I suppose the more reasonable question to be asking is, why are you scaling buildings?”
Clint’s sure that that’s some sort of reasonable question, but it’s probably not the sort of question that has a reasonable answer. Hey, when in doubt, the truth is best right? “I happen to know that there’s a great vantage point up here. Control, I’m good on the ground, but I’m better when I have at least a little distance.”
“Barnes, you able to keep low with me? I’m not going to have two snipers when I need ground pounders.” Clint doesn’t have a fear of heights and when he looks down, he sees Darcy running interference with the local cops. Her lack of height is more obvious from here, but she’s running at least two conversations other than the one with him. He’s not always the best judge of character but she’s kind of perfect, really. He never really knew the other Darcy, since Jane worked out of her van most of the time, when she wasn’t ensconced in academia and never much in New York. Different worlds. But he likes this Darcy, fearless even though she’s more than a little broken. They are probably a bit too much alike, and whatever this is will implode eventually, but he’ll enjoy it for now. Assuming they get out of this fight alive.
Barnes grants an affirmative, not very talkative, but then there’s a Chitauri falling from above him, bouncing less than a foot away from him off of the building. So okay, this might be bad. He keeps climbing until he reaches a familiar ledge. This was way easier last time when he had air support.
“Whoever did that, you’re just great,” he says as he’s scoping out the scene, nocking an arrow and letting it loose at the last of the suckers near him, threatening his position.
Darcy’s still arguing with someone on the ground, standing on the tips of her toes to try gain some leverage with one of New York’s finest, as she’s trying to give instructions to him. Her voice over the VOX is strangely reassuring. Rhodey breaks through for a moment, letting them know he’s breaking ranks to take out a large target. Clint’s down with less work to do.
“Control,” he says through a smirk, prepping another arrow, “Do you need a little backup down there?” If she gives him the okay, he can time this shot right and be really, really impressive.
“Hawkeye, do I look like I need help?” she groans, but she nods her head quickly, and he fires. The arrow, explosive tipped, finds it’s target in a skiff.
“Boom,” escapes his lips as the skiff does what it should, bursting nicely in mid-air. But the real beauty of the shot is how the Chitauri falls off, gun falling from their hand right above where Darcy is engaging with the cop. “Catch, Control.” Darcy’s stretches out her hands and the alien gun lands perfectly in them. She’s quick to turn and fire three quick bursts at some suckers she must have been tracking.
The cop shuts up and listens to her now.
He’s only got so much ammunition when he’s up here, where he can’t scavenge from the dead aliens, and while he’s best with a bow he’s more than adequate with a gun. And this time, he knows where to aim.
**
“Well, we can’t land on the roof,” Natasha says, and it’s hard to talk when your are flying, but Jane’s slowed down since they started approaching the warehouse, and she can breath deep enough, get enough breath through her vocal cords to speak. “Because that would assume that there’s a roof to land on.”
The warehouse is standing still, and relatively in one piece. Except the roof has been blown clear off, likely from the initial blast that rent the sky open, and they can look straight down into the building, clear to the ground floor.
“Well,” Jane yells over the whirl of the hammer, “I suppose we can start at the bottom then.” She can’t dive, but the sudden drop is exhilarating and they pass through several floors of wreckage and splintered materials before landing on something solid. At this point, it only mildly resembles a floor. It used to be carpet, but it’s all been melted away to patchy plastic gunk and thatching.
“Careful,” Natasha says in the moment before Jane sets down her full weight, “I think it will hold.” And even though she speaks softly (not a whisper, whispers carry longer than everyone thinks) she can hear her voice last longer than she’s willing to suffer.
“Where should we look first?” Jane asks, before setting her eyes on what used to be the center of the building, “I’m going to bet right there. Check to see if any of the computers —“ she looks around as if she is realizing for the first time exactly where she is and raises her eyebrows.
“No computers.” Natasha confirms. Anywhere that there should have been a terminal or even just a laptop has been ripped out, destroyed or melted. The heat must have been tremendous. But it’s not even warm in here now, just the same pleasant temperature as the outside. “But there’s equipment there.”
Whatever HYDRA made this out of withstood the blast, and withstood it well. It doesn’t look like the same apparatus that Selvig had made, it’s shorter and squat. Efficiency rather than the strange beauty and elegance that Selvig’s had. But then, Loki had his hand in that, and even in rebellion he had internalized the aesthetic of Asgard. This thing, with sharp corners, is far more brutal. “I don’t suppose you see a reverse switch?” Natasha asks.
Jane still has a grin that could light up the world, and when she uses it in combination with her determination, electrifying isn’t even the word. “No, but I bet I can make one.”
Natasha watches in the eerie quiet, as Jane sinks in front of the machine and opens a panel and just watches the wiring with her head tilted. There’s no living thing here besides the two of them; they’ve made enough noise for anyone still able to move to find them, and when she looks up, she can only see the horrible scar in the sky.
“The previous time, the portal stayed open only as long as it was being powered by the beam.” Natasha is not a person of science, but she is a smart woman, this situation is very different from the one they had before. They are on their own, no backup or voice from the helicarrier in her ear.
“Mmmm, this one was trying to do that, but the power overloaded and burned out the circuits.” Jane removes the casing of the object completely to find the Tesseract glowing brightly in the center. “I bet if we actually measured the hole, we’d find it was very slowly shrinking and at some point after it finishes feeding off of itself, it will just collapse.”
“So we just need,” Natasha smiles with a flash of teeth, “to find a way to drain the energy.”
*****
There's no time for a break in between escorting Jane and guarding them, but energy constraints dictated that Pepper spend a little time on the ground. RESCUE isn't supposed to be used for long, sustained flights. If anything, she's meant to be, in Tony's vocabulary, flirty. Able to get in places where other suits can't or couldn’t. They didn’t keep the other suits, JARVIS had helped them take them down for parts or study. Every day, a little less of Tony in the world. But everyday, RESCUE was a little bit more brilliant, even with her foibles and limitations, and everyday was a new chance to build her own legacy.
Personally, Pepper would just like to live through today. She has meetings tomorrow that don’t involve her armor, but a different sort of power suit.
There’s no people here, none at all on the streets at least, which means pretty much anything that moves is either a Chitauri on the ground or over her head, and she fights the few that are stationed around this side of the building. They are, however, certainly standing watch. It seems that Chitauri have a blind spot that is very similar to humans, they don’t look up, and they don’t see Jane and Natasha go through the roof to get inside. A blessing.
The Chitauri are linked though, and her attacks on the guards set out the alarm and there’s a veritable stampede heading straight for her. A dozen, at least, and everywhere Pepper looks, there’s yet another reason why she was really meant for the boardroom. These things don’t go down with one shot; they can’t be manipulated, appealed or reasoned with, they just attack.
“War Machine,” her bravery doesn’t weaken with something a mere as overwhelming odds. She’s Pepper Potts, she’s a force to be reckoned with on her own, “How’s about heading back? I could use a little air support.”
“Roger that, RESCUE. Control, I’m heading back to guard position.” Rhodey responds. Darcy’s breathy when she confirms his plan.
Pepper flies up, there’s no shame in a strategic retreat, particularly when it isn’t really one. She picks off the farthest of the Chitauri, firing her repulsors and some good old-fashioned hand to hand. A rash of bullets swarm the Chitauri and as they hit their target, War Machine hovers beside her. “Man, Potts, you sure know how to plan a party. Look at these folks wanting to dance.”
Pepper barks out a laugh so inelegant that it’s hardly even her vision of herself, “Would you like first pick, Rhodes?”
The continue on together, even when it’s overwhelming, because if she doesn’t make it through the day, she’s going out in the service of the world.
***
When you have to push back into your head, everything that’s really you and it competes with the things you have done, that are also you, it actually causes physical pain. Or maybe that’s what it feels like when you don’t have programming jammed into your head and your body iced when it’s no longer needed. Maybe that’s just what anger feels like when it coils inside the roots of your body. There’s a lot of possibilities for what this sensation that doesn’t fade inside of Bucky, but he doesn’t actually mind them.
If he can feel pain, then he’s still got feelings. He lines up with his sight - he doesn’t have the preternatural aim that Barton seems to have. Barton doesn’t even look half the time, just trusts that the patterns he tracks have continued. But no, Bucky’s talented, exceptionally so, but he still has to aim and all it feels like is that he’s just killing time until the inevitable happens.
“Hey, if y’all get your hands on their guns, they are amazing.” Lewis mugs over his ear piece before there’s a scuffle and her sharp inhale and gasp.
“Lewis, you still with us?” He says at the same time he watches Barton literally take a running leap off a building, twisting and firing an arrow that burrows into the side of the building.
“So, I can say with great gusto that being knifed hurts an entire metric ass ton more than getting shot,” Darcy groans. “I’m fine. Fuckers just have claws. Hawkeye — no, I don’t need you to….Fine okay, whatever, hang out with me. I’m the one with the sweet ass gun.”
His tactician’s eye watches the spot where Darcy is catching her breath behind a car, face bloody and rips in her combat gear. She’s got the look of well-worn hidden pain, and he keeps that area clear while Barton makes his way closer to her.
They trust each other. Even in the little time that he’s figured out that this Barton and Natasha have been here, they’ve found their way into this collective. Bucky is kneeling on the shield that Foster had given him. It’s nothing like Steve’s. It’s heavier, it’s less finished and it doesn’t shine, but it’s like a beacon nonetheless. He kneels over it and it keeps him steady as he aims and picks his shots.
Foster says he’s got to earn their trust. Are these the people he wants to put his own trust in, though? He listens to the com chatter, Foster and Natasha checking in, the suits almost gleeful in their counting, and he can damn watch Hawkeye and Lewis as she puts herself back together and gets the steel in her eyes.
And it’s all so similar, he’s almost got to laugh. They are in fucking alleyways refusing to back down, and constantly getting back up. Bucky’s been here before, that’s for sure. Things don’t look good for any of them, and they are still getting back up to fight. The part of him that’s the Winter Soldier says to draw back and let them get killed, and he’s going to bury that damn voice. He’s Bucky Barnes and has always favored the brave and overwhelming odds. He can earn their trust, and more importantly, he has already earned the right to watch their backs.
***
Jane takes off and throws her earpiece across the room and to her credit, Natasha doesn’t even go to grab it. “I can’t finish this with them jabbering at me.” It’s not really the talking, if she had to be honest. It’s also the increasingly shallow breaths that Darcy is making while she fights. Jane doesn’t have all the tools she needs to do and if her focus drifts to how much longer her friends can stand on their feet, this isn’t going to work.
“How long?” She asks Natasha. “How long have I been working on this?”
“Over an hour since we landed,” Natasha says before they both hear heavy footsteps and an inhuman yell. Her voice is steady. “They’ve started to break through. Whatever it is you have planned, I think you need to —“
Natasha is interrupted by the need to shoot a Chitauri at the edge of her vision and Jane gets back to whatever it is she can do. She thinks she has it, and putting the mechanism in reverse is probably the closest thing she can articulate what she has done. And even that feels a little ridiculous. She’s a particle physicist not an engineer, but a year of being a mechanic has given her a grounding that she can’t deny. If this works, it might be time for another doctorate.
“I think I’m going to try this!” Jane throws a look at Natasha, trying to get across stand back, because she can’t seem to vocalize unneeded words right now. With her work in place, it’s just pulling a lever. The machine whirls and rumbles, connects with the Tesseract for power and another beam of light emerges. Instead of the clear blue before, it’s an almost sickening green, and thicker, and it ambles its way up, so much slower than she expects, and it stops not long after it clears the rooftop. Jane and Natasha have to dodge falling debris.
“I’m going to have to get closer,” Jane decides almost as an afterthought, because this has to work, and she has to do everything in her power to make it work. The machine isn’t that big, she decides, and she could condense it enough that she could carry it in one hand.
It’s lighter than she thinks, and she wonders if that's more because of her new found strength or because of the actual materials. Doesn’t matter, of course, and she picks up Mjolnir and starts building up the momentum needed to carry her straight up. The wind rushes against her face and doesn’t look down until she’s halfway to the rift, and can just barely make out Natasha’s face and nothing of her expression.
She flies up until the beam of energy makes contact with the rift and she has to steady herself against the backlash. The edges of the rift crackle and waver with the influx of the strange energy until they start to knit back together. It’s slow at first and she’s nearly sobbing with the effort. It’s over, it’s almost over, and the repair picks up speed, until the rift is just a ribbon and then just a scar, a horrid green against a beautiful blue sky.
She hovers there, watching as a couple of the larger skiffs drop and fall to the ground. “Must have severed a connection,” she muses, and she goes to talk to the rest, but remembers that she threw her earpiece off already. The machine suddenly grows hot in her hand and the beam cuts out. Jane can’t hold onto it much longer, but she can’t lose the Tesseract, and juggles it under her arm so she can rip into it and pull the cube out, dropping the rest and it explodes, knocking her around with the shockwave.
Jane is falling. She can’t feel or reach for her hammer, and she can’t seem to muster it back to her grasp. The cape would have looked impressive, she thinks, as she falls and it’s growing very dark inside of her head.
***
“You lived up to your name again, RESCUE.” Darcy says between shuddering gasps, “I think I might need some help here. Probably an IV, a transfusion, maybe?” Darcy keeps herself propped up between Barnes and Barton. Everyone’s banged up, but she’s apparently the squishiest of all the them, getting the brunt of the attack it seems. But she can’t stop looking at Jane, holding her head and looking at the devastation with a stunned face.
“Are they all dead?” Jane says, closing her eyes.
“Yes,” Rhodey answers, his faceplate up, and so is Pepper’s, “Police are evacuating the buildings, getting everyone out so they can start cleaning them out.”
“And us?” Natasha crosses her arms over her chest, “Where are we going?”
Barton looks over at her, “I don’t think we are getting schwarma this time. We’re going to catch our breath and find someplace to get patched up, and try to get out of here before —“
Several cell phone shutters go off, and there’s a small crowd of people crowding against the police barrier. They name off RESCUE and War Machine, easy words off their lips. They’ve been in the papers dozens of times, but there’s questions ringing out about the rest of them.
If this were two years ago, if Coulson were still here, there’d be swarms of black-suited agents getting the lookie-loos out of here. They wouldn’t let them ask questions at all. But he’s not, and while she hurts, and she’s bleeding, this is what Darcy does now.
“Dude, is that a Captain America shield?” a teenager, his face covered in plaster, asks. “No, really, I’m asking. Is it? ”
Bucky looks over at the barrier, his face unreadable but soft, sweat soaked. “No, no it’s not. Captain America was a good man, I wouldn’t try to take his place. I couldn’t, no one can.”
“Who are you guys anyways?”
We should go, she thinks, now that the fights over there’s other people that have work to do. There’s so much to do in this city now. They can’t hold up the evacuation process because they don’t really want to move yet. The crowd keeps calling out names and descriptions of them, but more and more, they just want to know who they are. None of them have been hiding their faces from the cameras or the video. It’s too late for them to try to be quiet, try to live their strange lives in the shadows anymore.
“Clint,” she says quietly, shifting so there’s even more weight on him. She likes how solid he feels, and warm, “What did you guys call yourselves?”
Avengers. It’s as good a name as any.