ext_34821 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cap_ironman2008-11-14 10:59 pm
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2008-11-14 10:59 pm
Entry tags:
When the Lights Go On Again 2/19
Title: When the Lights Go On Again 2/19
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: No much, really. Some swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
Author's Note:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq. Also, just a heads up; this fic is really, really long. Like, over two hundred pages long. We'll start by posting every other week, though we're hoping to start posting once a week, eventually.
X-posted to Marvel Slash.
Thanks todallin_dae and saraid for the beta job.
When the Lights Go On Again
The wind was stinging her face -- Carol could feel the burn on her cheekbone from the alien missile she'd just barely dodged, knew half her left eyebrow was gone, and really wasn't looking forward to looking in a mirror.
Avengers never gave up, never lost without a fight, and this time the fight was not just for a single person's life, or the fate of a single city -- they were fighting for the fate of the whole planet.
Which was why, even though Carol had sworn she was through with the Avengers for good, she had been in the air for eight hours straight. Once, she would have made this trip with no trouble, and probably in half the time; now, Carol could feel a dull ache settling between her shoulders from so many hours in the air, knew she wasn't moving as fast as she should have been.
When she had moved out to California, Carol swore that she was staying there for good. If the Avengers didn't want her, she wasn't going to come crawling back. She wasn't Tony.
She wasn't Tony; just because he was desperate for approval didn't mean that she was. Just because he couldn't handle alcohol didn't mean that she couldn't.
She hoped he was still alive.
Carol shifted her weight to the left, adjusting her course slightly, as the grey-green smudge on the horizon resolved itself into the low spine of the Appalachians. She'd been through there once, on a camping trip with a few friends from school; it was pretty, but she'd found it tame after the raw beauty of the Colorado Rockies.
The last time she'd seen Tony, he'd barely been able to stand -- and that had been before the aliens attacked Seattle. She had been mad at him for following her, for projecting his own problems onto her, and they had gotten into a stupid fight. He'd had no right to try and interefer with her life, but she should never have hit him.
Tony would have gone out to fight the aliens. He was an Avenger. It was what they did.
She hadn't been able to stop Seattle and LA from falling into the hands of the enemy, but she might be able to do something in New York. Even if she couldn't, even if the Avengers wouldn't take her back, she had to try.
Hell, in their shoes, Carol would be thrilled to have her back. She'd be more useful with her Binary powers -- if she'd still had them, the aliens might not have Seattle -- but even half-depowered, she was still one of the team's heavyweights. This time, instead of dismissing her based on a bunch of unfounded accusations, or because she no longer had the power she'd once had, they'd surely be reasonable and give her another shot, a chance to prove that she still had what it took. They needed her.
Reaching the East Coast had taken hours longer than it should have. After her run-in with the Argonian fighter craft over Minneapolis/St. Paul, she'd been forced to make a wide detour around Chicago in order to avoid finding herself on the wrong end of a squadron of alien ships.
The ground below her had shifted from the green and brown patchwork of open fields and the occasional low lying building into the ordered jumble of small towns, suburbia, and insterstate. She could taste salt and smoke on the air; she'd be in New York soon.
As soon as New York appeared on the horizon, a grey blur against the bright glitter of the Atlantic, she could tell there was something wrong. She was much closer, flying low to the ground to avoid the Argonians' radar-- or whatever they used instead of radar -- before she realized what the wrongness was.
The blur of buildings should have been resolving itself into the familiar skyline by this point, but instead, the indistinct quality remained, actually growing worse as she grew nearer. Between Carol and the city was a vast, shimmering dome, concealing everything from the Hudson to the Atlantic behind a blue-violet tinted veil.
Damn it. They had some kind of forcefield.
How the hell was she supposed to get in?
Two hours and a long, slow circuit around the city later, she had determined that yes, the damn thing covered everything except for Staten Island, and a brief experiment at the thing's eastern boundary had proved that it extended below the surface of the water.
It was a sphere, not a dome, she realized, staring down through the murky water to where it disappeared into the depths. A few feet away, a fish bumped futilely against the forcefield and darted away.
It looked like the thing worked on animals as well as people. It clearly wasn't blocking the water, though; she could still feel the current flowing outward from the river.
Wonderful. The best she had been able to accomplish thus far was to soak herself in salt water, which stung in her burns even more fiercely than the wind had.
Carol braced herself, and reached out to lay a hand against the blue-violet surface of the sphere. The jolt that ran up her arm was like grabbing hold of a live wire, except that instead of her body absorbing the energy, it stung like being zapped with a taser. She pulled her hand away abruptly, the motion sending her floating backwards through the water. So much for the 'sneaking in underwater' plan.
She was on the ground, inspecting the point where the forcefield bisected the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, when she heard the troop carrier. That was the only thing that saved her.
Carol ducked under the shadow of the bridge just in time to avoid being spotted. From below, the troop carrier looked ungainly, a broad, slightly bulging shape with round engine pods jutting from either side. A little like the Helicarrier, actually.
It was only about a fourth the size of the Helicrrier, which meant that it was still damn big, and like the Helicarrier, it was nearly silent, despite the massive amounts of vectored thrust it ought to have taken to keep something like that in the air. Maybe some form of anti-gravity was involved. Its' hull was plated in a dully reflective copper-colored metal, with strange blocky shapes etched along the sides.
The aircraft was headed towards the city; which meant that it was going to have to get through the forcefield somehow.
If she was quick about it, maybe she could hitch a ride.
If it worked, she would be trapped in the city, but since the rest of her team was already under there -- minus Tony, if Tony wasn't dead -- it wouldn't matter all that much. And anything that required as much energy as that forcefield had to be protecting one hell of a strategic objective.
Carol edged along the underside of the bridge, following the path of the transport. She would only have one shot at this, and if she screwed it up, well, she'd be monumentally screwed.
Flying to the top of the transport took bare seconds, but she spent the entire distance with her skin crawling, expecting the Argonians to open fire on her at any moment.
She flattened herself against the fuselage of the transport, fingers pressed against the metal so hard that they hurt, and watched the blue-violet distortion draw closer.
It probably wasn't going to electrocute her.
She held her breath anyway, putting her head down and closing her eyes. There was nothing to see from this angle anyway, except the smooth copper metal an inch from her nose.
She didn't see whether the forcefield opened, or whether the aircraft phased through it somehow, but after a long moment during which she failed to be fried by it, Carol opened her eyes again and found herself safely beyond it, inside the city.
She let go immediately, pushing off into the air -- the longer she stayed with this thing, the higher her chances of getting caught -- and dove down to street level, flying below the tops of the buildings.
The streets below her were completely empty, save for one or two abandoned cars. The streets were never empty, not in downtown Brooklyn.
There were no cars or pedestrians crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and only one or two ships moving in the water. An empty ferry drifted aimlessly with the current, a freighter sat half-submerged at its dock on the Brooklyn side of the river, and a fishing boat hugged the Bridge's western pylon. Carol thought she saw a flash of movement on its deck as she flew by, someone darting back inside the cabin, maybe, but she didn't stop to check.
Manhattan was nearly as deserted. The business district should have been shoulder-to-shoulder with pedestrians this time of day, so closely packed that it was impossible to move without brushing elbows with someone. Instead, only a handful of people were visible, all of them walking hurriedly, heads bowed, hugging the sides of buildings.
None of them looked up as she flew overhead.
The traffic lights were dark, and even the neon signs and massive billboards of Times Square were unlit. The power was out, probably throughout the entire city.
There would be looting, she thought, and out of control crime, and... and that was secondary to the fact that aliens had taken over the world. Military objectives first, then civilian peacekeeping ones.
The air was filled with a thin haze of smoke, leaving the faint, uncomfortably familiar tang of ash on the back of her tongue. Several of the taller buildings in Midtown still had fires smoldering in their upper stories; the only real human activity Carol saw between the river and Central Park was a ladder truck and its crew still attempting to extinguish a high-rise fire a block away from the Daily Bugle building.
There was plenty of alien activity, though. The Baxter Building was surrounded by a ring of alien fighter craft and ground troops; as Carol slunk past it, one of the fighters opened fire on the blue-white energy bubble that encircled the top of the building. Its weapons discharge was absorbed seamlessly, causing no apparent damage.
The Fantastic Four were still operational, obviously, but effectively immobilized, which didn't bode well for the Avengers.
The Avenger's Mansion wasn't burning -- that was something, at least. She would have been able to seen the smoke rising from blocks away, and there was nothing.
When she got there, nothing was exactly what she found.
Carol touched down in a corner of the Mansion's back yard -- the open lawn out in front was too exposed, the perfect site for some kind of trap -- and crept silently towards the house. There was a large scorch mark in the grass beside it, and streaks of ash on the white stone facade. One of the downstairs windows was broken.
A large hawk was perched on one scorched just outside the mansion's back door. It eyed her balefully as she approached, then took off with a flutter of wings, spiraling away into the violet-tinged sky.
The inside was a complete fucking mess. Furniture overturned and broken, rugs flipped up to expose bare floorboards, wall paper hanging from the walls in strips. It wasn't random destruction, either. There was a pattern to it. The Argonians had been looking for something, and whatever it was, they probably hadn't found it, or else why destroy so much?
The main communications room was a gutted shell, not so much a single circuit board remaining. The aliens again, or had Hank or someone else stripped them out when they left?
Or had they left?
Carol hesitated in the doorway to the kitchen -- also gutted and empty. Maybe the Avengers hadn't left. It was just as likely that the Argonians had captured them.
It would explain the burned patches in the lawn, would explain why the mansion was so utterly deserted.
If there had been a fight here, though, there ought to have been more visible damage. The kitchen was empty, but otherwise undisturbed, no furniture knocked askew. The big oil painting of the founding Avengers was still hanging in the front hallway, undamaged; it wasn't even crooked. The mantelpiece in the library still had the assortment of little knickknacks Jarvis has assembled over the years, none of them broken or out of place.
They had left willingly, not been taken.
Where the hell had they gone? With her communicator dead, there was no way to check in, no way to make contact. If they were hiding somewhere in the city, there was no way Carol could find them on her own.
Steve wouldn't be satisfied with just hiding, though. As long as he was alive and free, he'd be fighting back, which meant that he would want a base of operations and a rendezvous point, not just a safe house. And since he'd know that the Mansion was the first place any former Avengers showing up to join him would look, he had to have left some kind of clue as to their new whereabouts.
She just had to find it.
An hour later, she'd gone through all the common rooms without finding anything, and had moved on to searching the bedrooms. It felt uncomfortably intrusive to go through her former teammates' belongings. Little things stood out: the half-filled sketchbook on Steve's bed, open to a pencil sketch of the Waldorf-Astoria that he must have been working on it when the aliens attacked, the handful of fabric swathes scattered across Jan's bed, the empty terrarium where Hank had clearly been keeping something small and chitinous -- had he let it go before leaving? If so, what was it and was it still here?
Carol tapped a fingernail against the glass, half expecting something to come skittering out from behind a rock, but nothing moved.
"Don't worry. It was just ants."
Carol spun around, her feet leaving the ground and her hands coming up, ready to launch an energy blast at whoever had been stupid enough to sneak up on her.
Jan Van Dyne hovered in the doorway, no larger than Carol's hand, her wings beating so quickly they were nothing but a blur.
Carol dropped back to the floor again, letting her hands drop back to her sides. She couldn't have done anything with them anyway; she'd long since lost the ability to throw energy around like that.
"Wasp." Carol offered her an embarrassed smile. "You caught me by surprise. I thought this place was empty."
"It was." Wanda Maximoff stepped into the doorway, a reddish-pink glow of chaos magic surrounding one hand. She entered the room, smiling at Carol, and the hex sphere faded and disappeared. "Carol. The last I heard, you were in California. How did you get here?"
"I flew." The last time she and Wanda had spoken, Carol had been storming out of the Avengers' Mansion before Steve had the chance to throw her out. She was abruptly conscious of her horribly tangled hair, the burns on her face, the smudges of pale ash on her costume.
Wanda and Jan both looked impeccably put-together for a pair of displaced refugees. Wanda was in civilian clothes rather than her costume, an off-the-shoulder white blouse and long, red skirt that seemed to have miraculously escaped so much as a speck of dust or ash. Jan's costume was untouched, too, but then, Carol had long suspected that one of Jan's super powers involved the ability to always have perfect clothing and hair.
"I snuck through the barrier by hiding on an Argonian transport," she finished.
"Is there anyone else with you?" Jan asked, at the same time that Wanda blurted out, "Are you all right?"
"Just me, and I'm fine. Are you two -- who else is with you?"
Wanda's smile faltered. "Most of us got out. Not everyone, though." She looked away, arms folded across her chest.
"Vision had to be deactivated," Jan said quietly. "So that Hank could pull the computers out. We still don't know what the Argonians want, but they've been attacking technical institutes, so we didn't want to take chance. Hank is sure he can get Vision operational again when get the computers back online, but..." she trailed off, shaking her head.
Vision, whose android body had been badly damaged in a recent fight with Morgan Le Fey, had been uploaded into the Mansion's server while his body was repaired. He and Wanda were no longer married these days, but it was clear from the misery in Wanda's eyes that she still loved him.
"We're staying at the Waldorf-Astoria," Wanda said abruptly, clearly wanting to change the subject. "In one of the towers. The aliens are in the subway tunnels, so...it's good to stay above ground."
Carol felt her lips twitch in spite of herself. The Waldorf-Astoria. So the half-finished drawing in that sketchpad had been Steve's 'message?' "I found a sketch of it in Steve's room. Was that supposed to be a clue?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.
Wanda sighed. "I told him no one would be able to figure that out. That's why Sam had Redwing keeping watch."
Carol remembered the hawk flying away when it caught sight of her approach. Going to bring reinforcements, obviously. Then another detail struck her.
"If the subway tunnels are out-of-commission, how did you guys get from the Waldorf-Astoria to all the way up here?"
"How else?" Jan shrugged, bobbing in midair with the motion. "We walked. Wanda used her powers to hide us from sight."
Carol hadn't known Wanda's chaos powers extended to things so sophisticated and specific. But then, she'd never been entirely sure how they worked to begin with.
"Great," she muttered. "Another hour before I get to sit down."
The walk took closer to half an hour, and they passed the shells of three more buildings where flames were still smoldering sullenly, as well as several burnt-out skeletons.
They didn't pass a single person.
The Waldorf-Astoria's massive art deco faade was smeared with soot from the fires, the normally bright golden letters over the front entrance dulled by a coating of ash. The front lobby was dark, lit only by a handful of dim emergency lights, but even in the comparative gloom, Carol could tell that it was filled with people.
She was pretty sure the Waldorf-Astoria's lobbies had a dress code, and that only a handful of the people huddled in groups against the walls met it. Some of them had luggage, some were empty handed, and all of them had that lost, shell-shocked look Carol associated with refugees or disaster victims. One woman was holding a small dog in her arms, and the family sitting together under the gilt-covered monstrosity of a clock in the central lobby had a cat carrier with them.
"Who's paying for all this?" she asked, turning a slow circle to take it all in, her heels scraping on the dully gleaming floor tiles. "It would take more than an alien invasion for this place to start letting people in for free."
"If you mean our suite," Jan said, "I am." She had grown back to normal size, and was leading the way through the lobby toward the bank of elevators. "Technically speaking the rooms are part of a standing reservation kept by Stark Industries, or Stark-Fujikawa, or Stark International, or whatever Tony's company's calling itself these days, but my debit card is what's footing the bill. This," she nodded around the packed lobby, "was part of Hank's price for getting the hotel's emergency generator up and running after the aliens fried everything electronic in the city."
"How many people are actually left in the city?" Carol shook her head, remembering the empty streets and darkened buildings. Until she'd stepped in here, Manhattan had felt like a ghost town.
"At least a quarter of the city's population was evacuated when the attack started, but a lot of people are still here." Wanda shrugged, her blouse slipping a little further down one bare shoulder. "Who knows how many people's houses have been destroyed."
Carol sighed. "Has the looting started yet?" It had been four days since the beginning of the invasion, two since the aliens had burned Seattle. Human nature being what it was, someone was eventually going to take advantage of the chaos to smash in a store window and grab themselves a free TV.
"Last night." Wanda shook her head, frowning at the fancy metal dial over the elevators, which indicated an elevator's slow approach. "But then the aliens started shooting any looters they caught. They're not letting anyone out on the streets without a pass."
On the one hand, the fact that the aliens were attempting to keep order in the city meant that at least someone was doing it. On the other hand, that meant that the aliens were probably intending to stick around for a while; if they were enforcing laws of some kind, it meant that were setting up a government, and that would make it much harder for the superhero community -- not to mention the American military -- to do what had to be done. "We don't have passes," she pointed out.
"We've been carrying fake ones, just in case, but we can't be certain they'll pass a close inspection." Jan said. "Which is why we were careful to avoid any Argonian checkpoints on the way here."
The elevator chimed softly, and the doors slid open.
It was one of the nicest elevators Carol had ever been in -- for about two seconds, and then the doors closed, leaving them in absolute darkness.
"If the emergency generators don't have enough power to keep the lights on, where are they getting the energy to run the elevators?"
"Hank gave the elevators a higher priority than lights." Jan's voice sounded faintly amused. "Do you know how many floors there are in this hotel?"
Carol didn't, and didn't ask, but the elevator seemed to take ages to rise to their floor.
Tony's company clearly spared no expense when reserving rooms. The elevator opened on a marble-floored foyer, which led into a high-ceilinged parlor decorated with furniture that looked both expensive and antique. The room was lit by candles, and the wooden tables and chair legs, polished to a high gloss, gleamed golden in the soft light. Everything was done in shades of pastel, all pale blue and green and cream; it was like being inside an Easter egg.
Steve was sitting in one of the room's overstuffed Edwardian-style armchairs, an ornate silver candelabra sitting on the delicate end table beside him. He had a large New York City subway map spread out across his lap, trying to read it by candle light.
Carol could feel herself tensing up, shoulders and throat going tight in anticipation of his self-righteous disapproval. He had had no right -- they'd all had no right -- to condemn her for making a few mistakes. Her powers were her own business, and just because she hadn't felt like opening herself up to everyone's pity by revealing how much she'd lost, just because Tony thought that because he couldn't handle alcohol, nobody else could either, just because...
None of them had any right. Half the Avengers at the so-called court-martial Steve had convened to discuss her screw-up during the failed Kree invasion last month had started out as super-villains.
The first words out of his mouth were going to be a warning that she was here on probation. She'd bet money on it.
"Carol." Steve stood, setting the map aside. "It's good to see you. There are still--" he hesitated for a fraction of a second, "a lot of people who haven't checked in yet."
"We haven't heard from Clint in almost two days," Jan said in an undertone, "or Thor, or SHIELD. And Tony..." she trailed off, leaving whatever she'd been about to say unfinished.
In that case, they needed her even more than she had thought. "I'm here to help fight," she said, not giving Steve the chance to start setting conditions, "whether you want me to or not. You couldn't have stopped the last bunch of aliens who came calling without me, and I'm not letting you sideline me now." Not like last time, when the Avengers had gone out into space for the final battle with the Kree and left her -- the only one of them who actually had any serious experience with Kree warfare -- behind.
Steve blinked, his slightly distracted look of worry changing to a frown. "We'll be glad to have you. We need all the firepower we can get."
"Even from someone who's 'obviously lost a great deal of power'?" she quoted.
"Carol," Steve actually looked wounded, "my decision then had nothing to do with how much power you had. It was about honesty, and taking responsibility for-"
"So who else has shown up?" she interrupted, "and what's the Argonians' strength here?" She was not going to listen to this, not from the guy who'd sent Tony out to the west coast to spy on her.
God, Tony. When she'd left Seattle, his house had been a smoldering crater. Steve must not know yet, or he wouldn't be this calm or collected. Which meant that she'd have to tell him.
"We're missing at least half the team. You've seen Jan, and Hank is here too, but Vision is offline, no one's heard from Thor, or Clint, or the new guy, Triathlon, and Tony-"
"Steve," Carol interrupted again, more gently this time, "when I left the West Coast, Tony's house outside of Seattle had been burned to the ground. I don't know if he got out or not."
Steve looked down, inspecting the seam along the edge of one red leather glove. "The aliens have him."
"He surrendered," Simon broke in, walking through the room's wide doorway -- it was crowned with an ornate piece of molding, and the double doors' polished brass doorknobs gleamed in the candle light.
Simon. Walking. When Carol had left the team, he'd been a disembodied energy field, called into being at need by Wanda's magic. The Simon Williams standing in the doorway right now looked entirely solid and very much alive.
"How did you-" she started.
"He did not surrender," Steve snapped. "Tony would never surrender."
"They've been broadcasting lists of important businessmen and world leaders who've surrendered and sworn allegiance to them," Wanda offered, seeing Carol's surprise and misinterpreting it.
"And Tony was on this list?" she asked, dismissing the subject of Simon's return to corporeal state from her thought. More magic at work, probably. Either way, it wasn't important right now.
"One of the first ones whose name they gave out," Simon confirmed. "Not that-- don't look at me like that," he held his hands up defensively as Steve glared at him. "They probably held a laser gun to his head. Anyone would surrender. After all, outside the armor he's only a regular guy."
Simon was probably closer to the mark than he knew, given the state Tony had been in the last time she'd seen him, battered and bruised and barely able to stand under his own power. He wouldn't have had a prayer of standing up to any kind of attack.
Which didn't necessarily mean he'd actually surrendered. "How do we know the Argonians are telling the truth? They could just as easily have captured him and claimed that he'd surrendered as some kind of propaganda move."
"Captured Tony?" Jan's eyebrows rose in two perfect arcs. "If they did, it's only because he let them do it. He must have some kind of plan."
"To be captured and locked up in an Argonian prison?" Steve demanded.
"I didn't say it was a good plan. This is Tony we're talking about."
"The last time I saw Tony, he wasn't in any condition to fight." Something she hadn't helped with, not with the way she'd started out their meeting by trying to pick a fight with him. Granted, Tony and his projection of his own problems onto other people had been half the reason she'd been kicked off the Avengers, but she should have noticed that he'd been barely able to keep his feet. Should have come to his aid in that fight against his business rival's hired thug sooner. "He had broken ribs, a concussion, and possibly internal injuries." He'd passed out in mid-air, in the middle of a fight, something she'd never seen Tony do -- his armor had an autopilot function for a reason -- and he hadn't come to until several minutes after she'd already chased off the hired muscle and carried him home.
If she thought about it too hard, she could still feel the sickening lurch in her stomach she had felt when she'd seen him drop like a rock. She had caught him before he hit the ground, but the damage had already been done.
Steve's hand was half-raised in protest as he defended Tony; now it closed into a fist. "I hadn't-- He was hurt last week," Steve said stiffly, "before the fight in Central Park, but I didn't know he was that badly injured."
Carol shook her head, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of her long flight. "He probably wasn't, before he fought zombies in Central Park and then climbed out of bed and put on his armor to stop the attacker in the fake War Machine armor from destroying Astrodyne Industries."
Steve blinked. "Astrodyne's one of his biggest competitors. Why-- never mind. The thing that matters here is that he didn't surrender, and we're not giving up on him." His shoulders were stiff, his face grim, and he spoke in a tone that allowed for no argument.
Wanda laid one hand on Steve's arm, looking up at him with a concerned crinkle between her brows. "No one's giving up on him, but pretending it isn't true isn't going to make him suddenly appear in the hallway."
Steve pulled his arm away from her touch. "We should go find Carol a sleeping bag and some civilian clothes. You can't go out on the street in that," he added. "We're trying to keep a low profile until we have more knowledge of their movements."
"Fill me in on what you know so far," she said, letting him lead her away from the others, toward the suite's dinging room, where the mahogany table's twelve-piece china service had been replaced by more maps. The table's legs formed sinuous curves, and were decorated with carved lotus blossoms.
As Steve started to give her a more detailed tactical rundown, she could hear Simon's voice in quiet protest behind her.
"I didn't mean for him to take it that way. I mean, if I couldn't turn into ionic energy and someone was holding a gun to my head..."
"We don't have a clear estimate on their numbers yet, but there are several thousand at least in New York alone. God knows how many there are in the other cities." Steve pulled back a chair for her at the map-covered table, and Carol sat, for once not minding the way Steve occasionally forgot that she was perfectly capable of pulling out chairs and opening doors for herself.
Steve went on, detailing the areas of known alien occupation -- most of Midtown, it seemed like, as well as LaGuardia airport -- and Carol absently traced a finger along the red line that marked the track of the two and three lines as she listened.
"They're mostly using energy weapons, from what we can tell, but they've also got some more standard firearms, and they have some kind of bladed weapon on the ends of their tails so they're dangerous in close combat, too. The National Guard unit the Governor sent in to try and stop them was completely decimated by their laser cannons. They hacked most of the survivors apart."
"So how do we stop them?" Not stopping them wasn't an option, no matter how many laser cannons they had.
"We're working on it." Steve was frowning fiercely down at a handful of black and white photographs of the Argonians. Where the hell had he gotten those? Several of them were close range shots, or possibly done with a very long-range zoom lens -- professional quality. "We've got the five of us and Sam," he went on, "as well as the Thing and the Human Torch, and Spiderman has checked in and offered his assistance. We also," he grimaced slightly, "have Franklin and Valeria Richards."
Carol stared at him, her finger freezing in place over Penn Station. "Why?" she blurted out.
"Ben and Johnny were taking them out to dinner so that Sue and Reed could have a night alone. They got trapped outside the Baxter Building when the Argonians attacked."
Coming back had been the right thing to do, she thought, as she watched Steve point out the portions of subway lines the aliens had taken over. Steve had welcomed her back so easily -- no lectures, no warnings that further mistakes would get her tossed out again, no references to the circumstances she'd left under except that one, when she'd first walked in.
If it hadn't been painfully obvious how desperate they were, that alone would have told her.
Several minutes later, the rest of what remained of the team joined them, and the six of them, plus Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, sat around the nineteenth century, art nouveau table and began to plan a war.
***
Grand Central Station was ringed by armed guards, both inside and out. Luckily for Jan, there were other ways inside than through the doors. None of the Argonian guards looked up as she darted to the top of one of the massive glass windows. It was a shame to damage it -- the windows were works of art -- but getting inside the building was imperative.
A hairline crack in one of the glass panes gave her the in she needed; several point-blank blasts from her stingers were more than enough to open a hole just big enough to allow her to slip inside.
She had been prepared for her entrance to set off some form of proximity alarm, but as far she could tell, it had gone completely unnoticed. Below her, the main concourse was a sea of red fur and black and grey uniforms, dotted with the glitter of light reflecting off tail blades and copper jewelry.
The Argonians should have looked horribly out of place here, in the middle of one of New York's most iconic buildings, but the severe lines and slightly old-fashioned cut of their dark uniforms and bright gleam of their ornate copper insignia harmonized surprisingly well with the grandeur of the vast hall. Even their fur -- sandy, red-gold, russet, bright fox-orange -- matched the reds and golds of the marble floor.
The Argonians had set up their center of operations here, according to the intelligence Steve had been able to collect. Which was a fancy way of saying that Spiderman had heard from Daredevil who'd heard from a former low-level thug of the Kingpin's currently employed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that the Argonians had completely sealed off all the subway stations and positioned armed guards outside of them.
They had missed the subway station underneath the Waldorf-Astoria, probably because it wasn't connected to any of the main lines, or included on any maps. Nobody but SHIELD had used it since the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency; the only reason the Avengers knew of its existence at all was because Steve had been down there briefly during World War II.
The Argonians were basing their operation out of the subways, and if you were working out of the New York subway system, there was only one place in the city where you wanted your command center to be.
Jan had been sent to take a look around, to try and get a better estimate of how many Argonians there were, how they were organized, and, if possible, what their command structure was like.
Carol wanted to know who their leader was. Wanda wanted to know what their goals were. Steve wanted to know exactly what kinds of weapons they had, what sort of tactics they used, and where they were keeping their prisoners. Hank wanted to know whether the sharp tips on the ends of their tails were a metal blade, or something organic -- there had been conflicting reports.
Personally, Jan's main goal was simply getting into and out of this place safely.
Most of the Argonians were busy disassembling the storefronts and restaurants that lined the main concourse, clearing away merchandise and furniture. Most of the clothing had ended up in pile by the central clock, haute couture mixed with tourist kitsch. Jan flew a little lower, hugging the wall, and was able to make out the sleeve of a coat she had designed for her new Fall line, sticking out from under a pile of lingerie from Pink Slip. The trim on the cuffs had been redesigned twice before she'd gotten it right.
New modular structures of plastic and metal were already going up where several of the storefronts had been. They were square and low-roofed, and despite the haste with which they'd been constructed, copper scrollwork had been inlaid into the black plastic walls.
Regardless of what their purpose was, the Argonians were clearly intending to stay for quite a while. She wasn't sure if that was better or worse than if they'd wanted to destroy the world.
There were also a lot more of them than she had expected. A steady stream of Argonians were moving up and down the stairs to the lower levels, some of them carrying building materials, and some empty handed. Most of them were armed.
The ones in black carried a firearm at one hip and some kind of edged weapon either at the other hip or across their backs, and the ends of their tails were decorated by sharp metal barbs in gleaming silver or matte black. The ones in grey didn't have any visible weapons -- many of them even lacked the tail blades, which answered Hank's question about whether they were organic or not.
Their hand guns were actually small energy weapons, as the city police and National Guard had learned to their cost. The guns fired a thin beam of plasma, capable of burning a hole through two inches of steel. At that level of technology, why did they feel the need for so many bladed weapons? It would be tempting to say that they were ceremonial, but she'd seen the evidence of their use in footage from the Navy Yard, where they had hacked sailors' and marines' bodies to pieces.
The Argonians filled so much of the room that it took her several minutes to notice the humans. There was a small group of people over by one of the ramps, carrying boxes down to the lower level under a black-coated alien's supervision.
The Argonians were clearly putting their hostages to work. Unless these were the human volunteers they had put out a call for, the ones who were supposed to 'gain honor in the service of the Imperator.'
Where were they being kept? Somewhere down in the station's lower levels, probably, but Grand Central penetrated beneath the island's bedrock, and 'down' covered a lot of territory. The worst case scenario was that prisoners were actually being held in the subway tunnels themselves, somewhere in the city's hundreds of miles of underground tunnels.
A flash of sandy hair caught Jan's eye, and she turned to watch a man carrying a large box of metal sheets walk down the long ramp.
There was a resounding crash as one of the other prisoners/collaborators lost his grip on the corner of a large piece of electrical equipment, sending the machine crashing to the floor.
The man with the box jerked around, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet in a familiar fashion, and Jan froze.
Clint. It was Clint.
What the hell was Clint doing here? The last she had heard, Clint had been out in California, and now here he was in the middle of the Argonian's base camp, a black armband tied around his arm.
She had to get him out of here somehow. Bad enough that the Argonians had Tony -- she couldn't leave Clint here to be used as slave labor in an alien prison. She'd known him for nearly a decade, since the days when he'd been a loud, overconfident nineteen-year-old tagging along after the Black Widow like a lovesick puppy.
Except, she realized with a pang of guilt, she couldn't get him out. There were hundreds of armed Argonians in the station, and only the two of them. As soon as she made her presence known, she would be captured, too. Then the Argonians would have three Avengers, and Steve would never get what little information she'd been able to gather. Worse, unlike Clint and Tony, Jan knew the locations where all the superheroes still at liberty were hiding.
Even flying low enough to make contact would be a risk, probably too much of a risk.
Clint turned again, and began walking away, and Jan decided that it was a risk she was just going to have to take. If she didn't move now, she might never have the chance to speak with Clint again.
She shrank even further, as small as she could easily go, and darted after him, swooping down to land on his shoulder.
Clint flinched as her weight hit him, almost dropping the box he held, and twitching his shoulder as if he were trying to dislodge an insect.
"It's me," she whispered, "Jan."
Clint stilled, coming to a halt in the middle of the ramp.
"Keep walking," Jan hissed at him. "Act normal."
He started moving again, and she breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of any outcry from the Argonian guard. Clint was wearing a denim jacket over a faded blue t-shirt, the material rough beneath her hands as she clutched at it to keep her balance. "Turn up your collar," she told him.
Clint did as she said, and Jan slipped inside it, hidden from view between the fabric of the upturned collar and Clint's neck. She was immediately enveloped in the warm, slightly sweaty smell of his skin.
"What are you doing here?" Clint mumbled under his breath, ducking his head. From a few feet away, it would look like he was cursing to himself.
"Reconnaissance," she answered. "Why are you here? Did they capture you, too?"
"Nope," Clint's voice was barely a thread of sound, but it held a familiar brash cheerfulness. "I volunteered to serve under our new furry overlords."
So Clint was spying, too. Except that Clint was essentially undercover alone in the middle of the enemy stronghold, with no contact with the outside world and no way out. "You--" she started, then broke off again, trying to force her voice back under control. It wouldn't do to forget herself and start shouting. "What exactly did you think you were going to accomplish, other than getting yourself caught and killed?"
"I got to New York, didn't I?" Clint sounded slightly wounded. "And anyway, we're going to need people on the inside to take these guys down, and I figured hey, why not?"
"Because if they catch you, they'll kill you," she hissed through clenched teeth. "In a messy, bloody way."
Clint nodded just a fraction. "Yeah, but it's too late to back out now, and somebody needs to make sure Tony eats."
"You know where Tony is?" Jan blurted out. "Can you take me to him?" He'd been in the Argonians' hands for nearly forty-eight hours now, and if anyone could have gotten an accurate head-count of their numbers in that time, it would be Tony. Not to mention that he had probably already figured out how the Argonians' energy guns worked just by looking at them.
Clint gave a single, minimal shake of his head. "They're keeping the scientists way down below, some kind of sub-basement you can only get to through one elevator. I don't know how they even knew it was there."
"They seem to know a lot of things," Jan muttered. She rose to her knees, one hand against the side of Clint's neck for balance, and peered over the edge of his collar. They had reached the lower concourse now, full of gutted shop fronts and the beginnings of construction work. The Argonians were converting the long, open space into a series of closed-off rooms, she couldn't tell to what purpose. There were more humans down here, most of them busy with hammers and electronic screwdrivers, as well as more grey-uniformed Argonians. One of them was at work on a section of metal pipe that had been exposed beneath a segment of ripped up floor, doing something to it with a welding torch.
"Stop moving around," Clint muttered, twitching his shoulders. "It tickles."
"How badly-- what kind of shape is Tony in?" Jan countered, as she dropped back to a crouch and did her best to hold still.
Clint's hesitation told her all she needed to know. "He's kind of beat up," he said eventually. "Nothing a couple of weeks won't fix."
Damn. As if getting them out wasn't going to be difficult enough already. "Cap wants to know how many of them there are, and what they're doing. What their command structure is like."
"Cap's all right?" for the first time since she'd run into him, Clint's voice sounded uncertain, as if he were afraid the answer was going to be no. "Of course he's all right," he answered himself before she could respond. "He's probably leading some kind of resistance movement already, right?"
"Cap's fine. So are Hank, Wanda, and Simon. And Carol just checked in the day before yesterday."
"That's... good," Clint breathed. Looking up, she saw his eyes close for a fraction of a second, a look of pure relief on his face, and then they re-opened, and it was gone. "That's very good. Tony was kind of worried. You know how he is."
Tony had been worried. Of course. Jan hesitated. "We still don't know Triathlon is, or Firestar and Justice. And Vision... Vision's offline. We had to take the mansion's computer system down."
"But we can switch him back on again when the aliens are gone, right?"
"Hank's pretty sure he can." What he wasn't sure of was whether it would still be the same Vision who'd been shut down, or if he would revert to an emotionless android again, the way he had the first time he'd been disassembled and rebuilt. "He'll be fine."
"Once the aliens are gone," Clint said.
Jan glanced around the gutted shell of the lower concourse again, its decades-old restaurants emptied of furniture and patrolled by armed Argonian guards. "Once the aliens are gone."
"Vance and Angie will be okay. They're tough kids." Clint's voice was soft, tentative, but that could just be because he was trying to speak as quietly as possible. "And Delroy's smart; he'll keep his head down and stay safe."
"Unless the Argonians make him mad," Jan couldn't help but point out.
"He's a perfect Olympic athlete who's three times better than me at everything," Clint muttered. "He'll be fine."
Clint was less than ten feet away from one of the Argonians now. Jan ducked down low and flattened herself against the side of his neck. She could feel the heat of his skin all over her body, through the fabric of her costume; she wasn't used to doing this with anyone but Hank -- riding around on people, yes, but not crawling inside their clothing.
She wrapped both hands around the collar of Clint's t-shirt as he bent down, presumably to set down his box.
"All done," she heard him say brightly. "I'm heading back up for more, sir."
Several overly warm moments later, Clint whispered, "you can come back out now."
They were heading back up to the main concourse; if Jan looked up, she could see its blue-painted ceiling up ahead of them. "I have to go before somebody catches me," she whispered back, laying one hand against the side of his neck again. At her current size, touching him felt like stroking a horse's flank, or maybe, she though in a flash of whimsy, an elephant's. Something big, anyway.
"Don't do that." Clint hissed. "It tickles. And I haven't told you everything yet. I haven't found out much, but I know they've got some kind of hierarchy. The ones in black have all the weapons, and they're in charge of the ones in grey. They have these little machines like the universal translators from Star Trek that let them speak English, but most of the black-coats won't use them if the don't have to. Their leader is somebody called the Imperator, or maybe the Archon. I took an oath to serve and obey both of them."
Which answered part of Carol's question, at least. "And Tony?"
"They made him swear, too." Clint paused, and then, even more quietly than he had been speaking, said, "He's really beat-up. Broken ribs, bruises all over. He's only barely on his feet. I don't think he could have run if he'd tried."
Which meant that even if the Avengers had had a prayer of getting a team in past all of these guards to try and rescue the two of them, Tony might not be able to make it out under his own power. "Carol mentioned something like that." Did they have any kind of medical treatment for humans down here? If Tony and Clint were stuck here for more than a few weeks, that might become a concern.
They were out into the main concourse again, now, and Clint was bending down once more to take hold of another box. She had already been inside the station for a good twenty minutes. Another ten, and Hank was going to send his ants in after her.
"Clint, I-" she started. She'd only found him by dumb luck. She wouldn't be able to count on luck next time. And without a link back to the rest of the team, Clint and Tony would be entirely alone in the middle of an Argonian stronghold. "I have to go now. How can I find you again?"
"We're still going to be busy getting this place set up tomorrow, but after that, they're going to have us working regular shifts," Clint said. "Meet me by the clock day after tomorrow, twelve o' clock high. The Argonians don't seem too fond of sunlight, so once we're done with the construction work, they're going to have humans guarding the upper level during the day. At least, that's what the grey guy who's in charge of Tony says."
"Putting a lot of trust in you, aren't they?" Jan felt a surge of hope, strong enough that she felt jittery. If the main concourse was going to be watched entire by humans...
"We both volunteered for this, remember? We're pretending to be traitors. Well, that," Clint added, "and they stuck a tracking chip in my arm. And there are still going to be Argonian soldiers on all the doors. That was the first thing Tony asked."
"Oh." Jan peeked over Clint's collar again, checking the positions of the closest people, human and Argonian. As soon as the guard with the twin swords strapped across his back turned away... "Are you-- you're sure the two of you will be okay? If they catch you-"
"We can handle it," he interrupted. "The only thing I was worried about was how to make contact with the rest of you, but now that that's taken care of..." He shrugged ever so slightly, more a tensing of his shoulders than a real movement. "I was going to split and join up with you guys when I got here, but that was before I found Tony. I can't just leave him here alone in the basement. And... I think I can do more good here."
When had Clint gotten so mature, she wondered, a hollow ache settling into her stomach.
She could remember a time when he would have refused point blank to play spy, insisting on being in on the actual combat, when he wouldn't even have thought of going undercover.
"Remember," Clint said. "Noon by the clock."
The Argonian with the two swords turned slightly to watch a handful of his fellow black-uniformed soldiers walk by.
"By the clock," Jan whispered, and took off.
***
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonRated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: No much, really. Some swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
Author's Note:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq. Also, just a heads up; this fic is really, really long. Like, over two hundred pages long. We'll start by posting every other week, though we're hoping to start posting once a week, eventually.
X-posted to Marvel Slash.
Thanks to
dallin_dae and saraid for the beta job.The wind was stinging her face -- Carol could feel the burn on her cheekbone from the alien missile she'd just barely dodged, knew half her left eyebrow was gone, and really wasn't looking forward to looking in a mirror.
Avengers never gave up, never lost without a fight, and this time the fight was not just for a single person's life, or the fate of a single city -- they were fighting for the fate of the whole planet.
Which was why, even though Carol had sworn she was through with the Avengers for good, she had been in the air for eight hours straight. Once, she would have made this trip with no trouble, and probably in half the time; now, Carol could feel a dull ache settling between her shoulders from so many hours in the air, knew she wasn't moving as fast as she should have been.
When she had moved out to California, Carol swore that she was staying there for good. If the Avengers didn't want her, she wasn't going to come crawling back. She wasn't Tony.
She wasn't Tony; just because he was desperate for approval didn't mean that she was. Just because he couldn't handle alcohol didn't mean that she couldn't.
She hoped he was still alive.
Carol shifted her weight to the left, adjusting her course slightly, as the grey-green smudge on the horizon resolved itself into the low spine of the Appalachians. She'd been through there once, on a camping trip with a few friends from school; it was pretty, but she'd found it tame after the raw beauty of the Colorado Rockies.
The last time she'd seen Tony, he'd barely been able to stand -- and that had been before the aliens attacked Seattle. She had been mad at him for following her, for projecting his own problems onto her, and they had gotten into a stupid fight. He'd had no right to try and interefer with her life, but she should never have hit him.
Tony would have gone out to fight the aliens. He was an Avenger. It was what they did.
She hadn't been able to stop Seattle and LA from falling into the hands of the enemy, but she might be able to do something in New York. Even if she couldn't, even if the Avengers wouldn't take her back, she had to try.
Hell, in their shoes, Carol would be thrilled to have her back. She'd be more useful with her Binary powers -- if she'd still had them, the aliens might not have Seattle -- but even half-depowered, she was still one of the team's heavyweights. This time, instead of dismissing her based on a bunch of unfounded accusations, or because she no longer had the power she'd once had, they'd surely be reasonable and give her another shot, a chance to prove that she still had what it took. They needed her.
Reaching the East Coast had taken hours longer than it should have. After her run-in with the Argonian fighter craft over Minneapolis/St. Paul, she'd been forced to make a wide detour around Chicago in order to avoid finding herself on the wrong end of a squadron of alien ships.
The ground below her had shifted from the green and brown patchwork of open fields and the occasional low lying building into the ordered jumble of small towns, suburbia, and insterstate. She could taste salt and smoke on the air; she'd be in New York soon.
As soon as New York appeared on the horizon, a grey blur against the bright glitter of the Atlantic, she could tell there was something wrong. She was much closer, flying low to the ground to avoid the Argonians' radar-- or whatever they used instead of radar -- before she realized what the wrongness was.
The blur of buildings should have been resolving itself into the familiar skyline by this point, but instead, the indistinct quality remained, actually growing worse as she grew nearer. Between Carol and the city was a vast, shimmering dome, concealing everything from the Hudson to the Atlantic behind a blue-violet tinted veil.
Damn it. They had some kind of forcefield.
How the hell was she supposed to get in?
Two hours and a long, slow circuit around the city later, she had determined that yes, the damn thing covered everything except for Staten Island, and a brief experiment at the thing's eastern boundary had proved that it extended below the surface of the water.
It was a sphere, not a dome, she realized, staring down through the murky water to where it disappeared into the depths. A few feet away, a fish bumped futilely against the forcefield and darted away.
It looked like the thing worked on animals as well as people. It clearly wasn't blocking the water, though; she could still feel the current flowing outward from the river.
Wonderful. The best she had been able to accomplish thus far was to soak herself in salt water, which stung in her burns even more fiercely than the wind had.
Carol braced herself, and reached out to lay a hand against the blue-violet surface of the sphere. The jolt that ran up her arm was like grabbing hold of a live wire, except that instead of her body absorbing the energy, it stung like being zapped with a taser. She pulled her hand away abruptly, the motion sending her floating backwards through the water. So much for the 'sneaking in underwater' plan.
She was on the ground, inspecting the point where the forcefield bisected the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, when she heard the troop carrier. That was the only thing that saved her.
Carol ducked under the shadow of the bridge just in time to avoid being spotted. From below, the troop carrier looked ungainly, a broad, slightly bulging shape with round engine pods jutting from either side. A little like the Helicarrier, actually.
It was only about a fourth the size of the Helicrrier, which meant that it was still damn big, and like the Helicarrier, it was nearly silent, despite the massive amounts of vectored thrust it ought to have taken to keep something like that in the air. Maybe some form of anti-gravity was involved. Its' hull was plated in a dully reflective copper-colored metal, with strange blocky shapes etched along the sides.
The aircraft was headed towards the city; which meant that it was going to have to get through the forcefield somehow.
If she was quick about it, maybe she could hitch a ride.
If it worked, she would be trapped in the city, but since the rest of her team was already under there -- minus Tony, if Tony wasn't dead -- it wouldn't matter all that much. And anything that required as much energy as that forcefield had to be protecting one hell of a strategic objective.
Carol edged along the underside of the bridge, following the path of the transport. She would only have one shot at this, and if she screwed it up, well, she'd be monumentally screwed.
Flying to the top of the transport took bare seconds, but she spent the entire distance with her skin crawling, expecting the Argonians to open fire on her at any moment.
She flattened herself against the fuselage of the transport, fingers pressed against the metal so hard that they hurt, and watched the blue-violet distortion draw closer.
It probably wasn't going to electrocute her.
She held her breath anyway, putting her head down and closing her eyes. There was nothing to see from this angle anyway, except the smooth copper metal an inch from her nose.
She didn't see whether the forcefield opened, or whether the aircraft phased through it somehow, but after a long moment during which she failed to be fried by it, Carol opened her eyes again and found herself safely beyond it, inside the city.
She let go immediately, pushing off into the air -- the longer she stayed with this thing, the higher her chances of getting caught -- and dove down to street level, flying below the tops of the buildings.
The streets below her were completely empty, save for one or two abandoned cars. The streets were never empty, not in downtown Brooklyn.
There were no cars or pedestrians crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and only one or two ships moving in the water. An empty ferry drifted aimlessly with the current, a freighter sat half-submerged at its dock on the Brooklyn side of the river, and a fishing boat hugged the Bridge's western pylon. Carol thought she saw a flash of movement on its deck as she flew by, someone darting back inside the cabin, maybe, but she didn't stop to check.
Manhattan was nearly as deserted. The business district should have been shoulder-to-shoulder with pedestrians this time of day, so closely packed that it was impossible to move without brushing elbows with someone. Instead, only a handful of people were visible, all of them walking hurriedly, heads bowed, hugging the sides of buildings.
None of them looked up as she flew overhead.
The traffic lights were dark, and even the neon signs and massive billboards of Times Square were unlit. The power was out, probably throughout the entire city.
There would be looting, she thought, and out of control crime, and... and that was secondary to the fact that aliens had taken over the world. Military objectives first, then civilian peacekeeping ones.
The air was filled with a thin haze of smoke, leaving the faint, uncomfortably familiar tang of ash on the back of her tongue. Several of the taller buildings in Midtown still had fires smoldering in their upper stories; the only real human activity Carol saw between the river and Central Park was a ladder truck and its crew still attempting to extinguish a high-rise fire a block away from the Daily Bugle building.
There was plenty of alien activity, though. The Baxter Building was surrounded by a ring of alien fighter craft and ground troops; as Carol slunk past it, one of the fighters opened fire on the blue-white energy bubble that encircled the top of the building. Its weapons discharge was absorbed seamlessly, causing no apparent damage.
The Fantastic Four were still operational, obviously, but effectively immobilized, which didn't bode well for the Avengers.
The Avenger's Mansion wasn't burning -- that was something, at least. She would have been able to seen the smoke rising from blocks away, and there was nothing.
When she got there, nothing was exactly what she found.
Carol touched down in a corner of the Mansion's back yard -- the open lawn out in front was too exposed, the perfect site for some kind of trap -- and crept silently towards the house. There was a large scorch mark in the grass beside it, and streaks of ash on the white stone facade. One of the downstairs windows was broken.
A large hawk was perched on one scorched just outside the mansion's back door. It eyed her balefully as she approached, then took off with a flutter of wings, spiraling away into the violet-tinged sky.
The inside was a complete fucking mess. Furniture overturned and broken, rugs flipped up to expose bare floorboards, wall paper hanging from the walls in strips. It wasn't random destruction, either. There was a pattern to it. The Argonians had been looking for something, and whatever it was, they probably hadn't found it, or else why destroy so much?
The main communications room was a gutted shell, not so much a single circuit board remaining. The aliens again, or had Hank or someone else stripped them out when they left?
Or had they left?
Carol hesitated in the doorway to the kitchen -- also gutted and empty. Maybe the Avengers hadn't left. It was just as likely that the Argonians had captured them.
It would explain the burned patches in the lawn, would explain why the mansion was so utterly deserted.
If there had been a fight here, though, there ought to have been more visible damage. The kitchen was empty, but otherwise undisturbed, no furniture knocked askew. The big oil painting of the founding Avengers was still hanging in the front hallway, undamaged; it wasn't even crooked. The mantelpiece in the library still had the assortment of little knickknacks Jarvis has assembled over the years, none of them broken or out of place.
They had left willingly, not been taken.
Where the hell had they gone? With her communicator dead, there was no way to check in, no way to make contact. If they were hiding somewhere in the city, there was no way Carol could find them on her own.
Steve wouldn't be satisfied with just hiding, though. As long as he was alive and free, he'd be fighting back, which meant that he would want a base of operations and a rendezvous point, not just a safe house. And since he'd know that the Mansion was the first place any former Avengers showing up to join him would look, he had to have left some kind of clue as to their new whereabouts.
She just had to find it.
An hour later, she'd gone through all the common rooms without finding anything, and had moved on to searching the bedrooms. It felt uncomfortably intrusive to go through her former teammates' belongings. Little things stood out: the half-filled sketchbook on Steve's bed, open to a pencil sketch of the Waldorf-Astoria that he must have been working on it when the aliens attacked, the handful of fabric swathes scattered across Jan's bed, the empty terrarium where Hank had clearly been keeping something small and chitinous -- had he let it go before leaving? If so, what was it and was it still here?
Carol tapped a fingernail against the glass, half expecting something to come skittering out from behind a rock, but nothing moved.
"Don't worry. It was just ants."
Carol spun around, her feet leaving the ground and her hands coming up, ready to launch an energy blast at whoever had been stupid enough to sneak up on her.
Jan Van Dyne hovered in the doorway, no larger than Carol's hand, her wings beating so quickly they were nothing but a blur.
Carol dropped back to the floor again, letting her hands drop back to her sides. She couldn't have done anything with them anyway; she'd long since lost the ability to throw energy around like that.
"Wasp." Carol offered her an embarrassed smile. "You caught me by surprise. I thought this place was empty."
"It was." Wanda Maximoff stepped into the doorway, a reddish-pink glow of chaos magic surrounding one hand. She entered the room, smiling at Carol, and the hex sphere faded and disappeared. "Carol. The last I heard, you were in California. How did you get here?"
"I flew." The last time she and Wanda had spoken, Carol had been storming out of the Avengers' Mansion before Steve had the chance to throw her out. She was abruptly conscious of her horribly tangled hair, the burns on her face, the smudges of pale ash on her costume.
Wanda and Jan both looked impeccably put-together for a pair of displaced refugees. Wanda was in civilian clothes rather than her costume, an off-the-shoulder white blouse and long, red skirt that seemed to have miraculously escaped so much as a speck of dust or ash. Jan's costume was untouched, too, but then, Carol had long suspected that one of Jan's super powers involved the ability to always have perfect clothing and hair.
"I snuck through the barrier by hiding on an Argonian transport," she finished.
"Is there anyone else with you?" Jan asked, at the same time that Wanda blurted out, "Are you all right?"
"Just me, and I'm fine. Are you two -- who else is with you?"
Wanda's smile faltered. "Most of us got out. Not everyone, though." She looked away, arms folded across her chest.
"Vision had to be deactivated," Jan said quietly. "So that Hank could pull the computers out. We still don't know what the Argonians want, but they've been attacking technical institutes, so we didn't want to take chance. Hank is sure he can get Vision operational again when get the computers back online, but..." she trailed off, shaking her head.
Vision, whose android body had been badly damaged in a recent fight with Morgan Le Fey, had been uploaded into the Mansion's server while his body was repaired. He and Wanda were no longer married these days, but it was clear from the misery in Wanda's eyes that she still loved him.
"We're staying at the Waldorf-Astoria," Wanda said abruptly, clearly wanting to change the subject. "In one of the towers. The aliens are in the subway tunnels, so...it's good to stay above ground."
Carol felt her lips twitch in spite of herself. The Waldorf-Astoria. So the half-finished drawing in that sketchpad had been Steve's 'message?' "I found a sketch of it in Steve's room. Was that supposed to be a clue?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.
Wanda sighed. "I told him no one would be able to figure that out. That's why Sam had Redwing keeping watch."
Carol remembered the hawk flying away when it caught sight of her approach. Going to bring reinforcements, obviously. Then another detail struck her.
"If the subway tunnels are out-of-commission, how did you guys get from the Waldorf-Astoria to all the way up here?"
"How else?" Jan shrugged, bobbing in midair with the motion. "We walked. Wanda used her powers to hide us from sight."
Carol hadn't known Wanda's chaos powers extended to things so sophisticated and specific. But then, she'd never been entirely sure how they worked to begin with.
"Great," she muttered. "Another hour before I get to sit down."
The walk took closer to half an hour, and they passed the shells of three more buildings where flames were still smoldering sullenly, as well as several burnt-out skeletons.
They didn't pass a single person.
The Waldorf-Astoria's massive art deco faade was smeared with soot from the fires, the normally bright golden letters over the front entrance dulled by a coating of ash. The front lobby was dark, lit only by a handful of dim emergency lights, but even in the comparative gloom, Carol could tell that it was filled with people.
She was pretty sure the Waldorf-Astoria's lobbies had a dress code, and that only a handful of the people huddled in groups against the walls met it. Some of them had luggage, some were empty handed, and all of them had that lost, shell-shocked look Carol associated with refugees or disaster victims. One woman was holding a small dog in her arms, and the family sitting together under the gilt-covered monstrosity of a clock in the central lobby had a cat carrier with them.
"Who's paying for all this?" she asked, turning a slow circle to take it all in, her heels scraping on the dully gleaming floor tiles. "It would take more than an alien invasion for this place to start letting people in for free."
"If you mean our suite," Jan said, "I am." She had grown back to normal size, and was leading the way through the lobby toward the bank of elevators. "Technically speaking the rooms are part of a standing reservation kept by Stark Industries, or Stark-Fujikawa, or Stark International, or whatever Tony's company's calling itself these days, but my debit card is what's footing the bill. This," she nodded around the packed lobby, "was part of Hank's price for getting the hotel's emergency generator up and running after the aliens fried everything electronic in the city."
"How many people are actually left in the city?" Carol shook her head, remembering the empty streets and darkened buildings. Until she'd stepped in here, Manhattan had felt like a ghost town.
"At least a quarter of the city's population was evacuated when the attack started, but a lot of people are still here." Wanda shrugged, her blouse slipping a little further down one bare shoulder. "Who knows how many people's houses have been destroyed."
Carol sighed. "Has the looting started yet?" It had been four days since the beginning of the invasion, two since the aliens had burned Seattle. Human nature being what it was, someone was eventually going to take advantage of the chaos to smash in a store window and grab themselves a free TV.
"Last night." Wanda shook her head, frowning at the fancy metal dial over the elevators, which indicated an elevator's slow approach. "But then the aliens started shooting any looters they caught. They're not letting anyone out on the streets without a pass."
On the one hand, the fact that the aliens were attempting to keep order in the city meant that at least someone was doing it. On the other hand, that meant that the aliens were probably intending to stick around for a while; if they were enforcing laws of some kind, it meant that were setting up a government, and that would make it much harder for the superhero community -- not to mention the American military -- to do what had to be done. "We don't have passes," she pointed out.
"We've been carrying fake ones, just in case, but we can't be certain they'll pass a close inspection." Jan said. "Which is why we were careful to avoid any Argonian checkpoints on the way here."
The elevator chimed softly, and the doors slid open.
It was one of the nicest elevators Carol had ever been in -- for about two seconds, and then the doors closed, leaving them in absolute darkness.
"If the emergency generators don't have enough power to keep the lights on, where are they getting the energy to run the elevators?"
"Hank gave the elevators a higher priority than lights." Jan's voice sounded faintly amused. "Do you know how many floors there are in this hotel?"
Carol didn't, and didn't ask, but the elevator seemed to take ages to rise to their floor.
Tony's company clearly spared no expense when reserving rooms. The elevator opened on a marble-floored foyer, which led into a high-ceilinged parlor decorated with furniture that looked both expensive and antique. The room was lit by candles, and the wooden tables and chair legs, polished to a high gloss, gleamed golden in the soft light. Everything was done in shades of pastel, all pale blue and green and cream; it was like being inside an Easter egg.
Steve was sitting in one of the room's overstuffed Edwardian-style armchairs, an ornate silver candelabra sitting on the delicate end table beside him. He had a large New York City subway map spread out across his lap, trying to read it by candle light.
Carol could feel herself tensing up, shoulders and throat going tight in anticipation of his self-righteous disapproval. He had had no right -- they'd all had no right -- to condemn her for making a few mistakes. Her powers were her own business, and just because she hadn't felt like opening herself up to everyone's pity by revealing how much she'd lost, just because Tony thought that because he couldn't handle alcohol, nobody else could either, just because...
None of them had any right. Half the Avengers at the so-called court-martial Steve had convened to discuss her screw-up during the failed Kree invasion last month had started out as super-villains.
The first words out of his mouth were going to be a warning that she was here on probation. She'd bet money on it.
"Carol." Steve stood, setting the map aside. "It's good to see you. There are still--" he hesitated for a fraction of a second, "a lot of people who haven't checked in yet."
"We haven't heard from Clint in almost two days," Jan said in an undertone, "or Thor, or SHIELD. And Tony..." she trailed off, leaving whatever she'd been about to say unfinished.
In that case, they needed her even more than she had thought. "I'm here to help fight," she said, not giving Steve the chance to start setting conditions, "whether you want me to or not. You couldn't have stopped the last bunch of aliens who came calling without me, and I'm not letting you sideline me now." Not like last time, when the Avengers had gone out into space for the final battle with the Kree and left her -- the only one of them who actually had any serious experience with Kree warfare -- behind.
Steve blinked, his slightly distracted look of worry changing to a frown. "We'll be glad to have you. We need all the firepower we can get."
"Even from someone who's 'obviously lost a great deal of power'?" she quoted.
"Carol," Steve actually looked wounded, "my decision then had nothing to do with how much power you had. It was about honesty, and taking responsibility for-"
"So who else has shown up?" she interrupted, "and what's the Argonians' strength here?" She was not going to listen to this, not from the guy who'd sent Tony out to the west coast to spy on her.
God, Tony. When she'd left Seattle, his house had been a smoldering crater. Steve must not know yet, or he wouldn't be this calm or collected. Which meant that she'd have to tell him.
"We're missing at least half the team. You've seen Jan, and Hank is here too, but Vision is offline, no one's heard from Thor, or Clint, or the new guy, Triathlon, and Tony-"
"Steve," Carol interrupted again, more gently this time, "when I left the West Coast, Tony's house outside of Seattle had been burned to the ground. I don't know if he got out or not."
Steve looked down, inspecting the seam along the edge of one red leather glove. "The aliens have him."
"He surrendered," Simon broke in, walking through the room's wide doorway -- it was crowned with an ornate piece of molding, and the double doors' polished brass doorknobs gleamed in the candle light.
Simon. Walking. When Carol had left the team, he'd been a disembodied energy field, called into being at need by Wanda's magic. The Simon Williams standing in the doorway right now looked entirely solid and very much alive.
"How did you-" she started.
"He did not surrender," Steve snapped. "Tony would never surrender."
"They've been broadcasting lists of important businessmen and world leaders who've surrendered and sworn allegiance to them," Wanda offered, seeing Carol's surprise and misinterpreting it.
"And Tony was on this list?" she asked, dismissing the subject of Simon's return to corporeal state from her thought. More magic at work, probably. Either way, it wasn't important right now.
"One of the first ones whose name they gave out," Simon confirmed. "Not that-- don't look at me like that," he held his hands up defensively as Steve glared at him. "They probably held a laser gun to his head. Anyone would surrender. After all, outside the armor he's only a regular guy."
Simon was probably closer to the mark than he knew, given the state Tony had been in the last time she'd seen him, battered and bruised and barely able to stand under his own power. He wouldn't have had a prayer of standing up to any kind of attack.
Which didn't necessarily mean he'd actually surrendered. "How do we know the Argonians are telling the truth? They could just as easily have captured him and claimed that he'd surrendered as some kind of propaganda move."
"Captured Tony?" Jan's eyebrows rose in two perfect arcs. "If they did, it's only because he let them do it. He must have some kind of plan."
"To be captured and locked up in an Argonian prison?" Steve demanded.
"I didn't say it was a good plan. This is Tony we're talking about."
"The last time I saw Tony, he wasn't in any condition to fight." Something she hadn't helped with, not with the way she'd started out their meeting by trying to pick a fight with him. Granted, Tony and his projection of his own problems onto other people had been half the reason she'd been kicked off the Avengers, but she should have noticed that he'd been barely able to keep his feet. Should have come to his aid in that fight against his business rival's hired thug sooner. "He had broken ribs, a concussion, and possibly internal injuries." He'd passed out in mid-air, in the middle of a fight, something she'd never seen Tony do -- his armor had an autopilot function for a reason -- and he hadn't come to until several minutes after she'd already chased off the hired muscle and carried him home.
If she thought about it too hard, she could still feel the sickening lurch in her stomach she had felt when she'd seen him drop like a rock. She had caught him before he hit the ground, but the damage had already been done.
Steve's hand was half-raised in protest as he defended Tony; now it closed into a fist. "I hadn't-- He was hurt last week," Steve said stiffly, "before the fight in Central Park, but I didn't know he was that badly injured."
Carol shook her head, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of her long flight. "He probably wasn't, before he fought zombies in Central Park and then climbed out of bed and put on his armor to stop the attacker in the fake War Machine armor from destroying Astrodyne Industries."
Steve blinked. "Astrodyne's one of his biggest competitors. Why-- never mind. The thing that matters here is that he didn't surrender, and we're not giving up on him." His shoulders were stiff, his face grim, and he spoke in a tone that allowed for no argument.
Wanda laid one hand on Steve's arm, looking up at him with a concerned crinkle between her brows. "No one's giving up on him, but pretending it isn't true isn't going to make him suddenly appear in the hallway."
Steve pulled his arm away from her touch. "We should go find Carol a sleeping bag and some civilian clothes. You can't go out on the street in that," he added. "We're trying to keep a low profile until we have more knowledge of their movements."
"Fill me in on what you know so far," she said, letting him lead her away from the others, toward the suite's dinging room, where the mahogany table's twelve-piece china service had been replaced by more maps. The table's legs formed sinuous curves, and were decorated with carved lotus blossoms.
As Steve started to give her a more detailed tactical rundown, she could hear Simon's voice in quiet protest behind her.
"I didn't mean for him to take it that way. I mean, if I couldn't turn into ionic energy and someone was holding a gun to my head..."
"We don't have a clear estimate on their numbers yet, but there are several thousand at least in New York alone. God knows how many there are in the other cities." Steve pulled back a chair for her at the map-covered table, and Carol sat, for once not minding the way Steve occasionally forgot that she was perfectly capable of pulling out chairs and opening doors for herself.
Steve went on, detailing the areas of known alien occupation -- most of Midtown, it seemed like, as well as LaGuardia airport -- and Carol absently traced a finger along the red line that marked the track of the two and three lines as she listened.
"They're mostly using energy weapons, from what we can tell, but they've also got some more standard firearms, and they have some kind of bladed weapon on the ends of their tails so they're dangerous in close combat, too. The National Guard unit the Governor sent in to try and stop them was completely decimated by their laser cannons. They hacked most of the survivors apart."
"So how do we stop them?" Not stopping them wasn't an option, no matter how many laser cannons they had.
"We're working on it." Steve was frowning fiercely down at a handful of black and white photographs of the Argonians. Where the hell had he gotten those? Several of them were close range shots, or possibly done with a very long-range zoom lens -- professional quality. "We've got the five of us and Sam," he went on, "as well as the Thing and the Human Torch, and Spiderman has checked in and offered his assistance. We also," he grimaced slightly, "have Franklin and Valeria Richards."
Carol stared at him, her finger freezing in place over Penn Station. "Why?" she blurted out.
"Ben and Johnny were taking them out to dinner so that Sue and Reed could have a night alone. They got trapped outside the Baxter Building when the Argonians attacked."
Coming back had been the right thing to do, she thought, as she watched Steve point out the portions of subway lines the aliens had taken over. Steve had welcomed her back so easily -- no lectures, no warnings that further mistakes would get her tossed out again, no references to the circumstances she'd left under except that one, when she'd first walked in.
If it hadn't been painfully obvious how desperate they were, that alone would have told her.
Several minutes later, the rest of what remained of the team joined them, and the six of them, plus Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, sat around the nineteenth century, art nouveau table and began to plan a war.
Grand Central Station was ringed by armed guards, both inside and out. Luckily for Jan, there were other ways inside than through the doors. None of the Argonian guards looked up as she darted to the top of one of the massive glass windows. It was a shame to damage it -- the windows were works of art -- but getting inside the building was imperative.
A hairline crack in one of the glass panes gave her the in she needed; several point-blank blasts from her stingers were more than enough to open a hole just big enough to allow her to slip inside.
She had been prepared for her entrance to set off some form of proximity alarm, but as far she could tell, it had gone completely unnoticed. Below her, the main concourse was a sea of red fur and black and grey uniforms, dotted with the glitter of light reflecting off tail blades and copper jewelry.
The Argonians should have looked horribly out of place here, in the middle of one of New York's most iconic buildings, but the severe lines and slightly old-fashioned cut of their dark uniforms and bright gleam of their ornate copper insignia harmonized surprisingly well with the grandeur of the vast hall. Even their fur -- sandy, red-gold, russet, bright fox-orange -- matched the reds and golds of the marble floor.
The Argonians had set up their center of operations here, according to the intelligence Steve had been able to collect. Which was a fancy way of saying that Spiderman had heard from Daredevil who'd heard from a former low-level thug of the Kingpin's currently employed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that the Argonians had completely sealed off all the subway stations and positioned armed guards outside of them.
They had missed the subway station underneath the Waldorf-Astoria, probably because it wasn't connected to any of the main lines, or included on any maps. Nobody but SHIELD had used it since the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency; the only reason the Avengers knew of its existence at all was because Steve had been down there briefly during World War II.
The Argonians were basing their operation out of the subways, and if you were working out of the New York subway system, there was only one place in the city where you wanted your command center to be.
Jan had been sent to take a look around, to try and get a better estimate of how many Argonians there were, how they were organized, and, if possible, what their command structure was like.
Carol wanted to know who their leader was. Wanda wanted to know what their goals were. Steve wanted to know exactly what kinds of weapons they had, what sort of tactics they used, and where they were keeping their prisoners. Hank wanted to know whether the sharp tips on the ends of their tails were a metal blade, or something organic -- there had been conflicting reports.
Personally, Jan's main goal was simply getting into and out of this place safely.
Most of the Argonians were busy disassembling the storefronts and restaurants that lined the main concourse, clearing away merchandise and furniture. Most of the clothing had ended up in pile by the central clock, haute couture mixed with tourist kitsch. Jan flew a little lower, hugging the wall, and was able to make out the sleeve of a coat she had designed for her new Fall line, sticking out from under a pile of lingerie from Pink Slip. The trim on the cuffs had been redesigned twice before she'd gotten it right.
New modular structures of plastic and metal were already going up where several of the storefronts had been. They were square and low-roofed, and despite the haste with which they'd been constructed, copper scrollwork had been inlaid into the black plastic walls.
Regardless of what their purpose was, the Argonians were clearly intending to stay for quite a while. She wasn't sure if that was better or worse than if they'd wanted to destroy the world.
There were also a lot more of them than she had expected. A steady stream of Argonians were moving up and down the stairs to the lower levels, some of them carrying building materials, and some empty handed. Most of them were armed.
The ones in black carried a firearm at one hip and some kind of edged weapon either at the other hip or across their backs, and the ends of their tails were decorated by sharp metal barbs in gleaming silver or matte black. The ones in grey didn't have any visible weapons -- many of them even lacked the tail blades, which answered Hank's question about whether they were organic or not.
Their hand guns were actually small energy weapons, as the city police and National Guard had learned to their cost. The guns fired a thin beam of plasma, capable of burning a hole through two inches of steel. At that level of technology, why did they feel the need for so many bladed weapons? It would be tempting to say that they were ceremonial, but she'd seen the evidence of their use in footage from the Navy Yard, where they had hacked sailors' and marines' bodies to pieces.
The Argonians filled so much of the room that it took her several minutes to notice the humans. There was a small group of people over by one of the ramps, carrying boxes down to the lower level under a black-coated alien's supervision.
The Argonians were clearly putting their hostages to work. Unless these were the human volunteers they had put out a call for, the ones who were supposed to 'gain honor in the service of the Imperator.'
Where were they being kept? Somewhere down in the station's lower levels, probably, but Grand Central penetrated beneath the island's bedrock, and 'down' covered a lot of territory. The worst case scenario was that prisoners were actually being held in the subway tunnels themselves, somewhere in the city's hundreds of miles of underground tunnels.
A flash of sandy hair caught Jan's eye, and she turned to watch a man carrying a large box of metal sheets walk down the long ramp.
There was a resounding crash as one of the other prisoners/collaborators lost his grip on the corner of a large piece of electrical equipment, sending the machine crashing to the floor.
The man with the box jerked around, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet in a familiar fashion, and Jan froze.
Clint. It was Clint.
What the hell was Clint doing here? The last she had heard, Clint had been out in California, and now here he was in the middle of the Argonian's base camp, a black armband tied around his arm.
She had to get him out of here somehow. Bad enough that the Argonians had Tony -- she couldn't leave Clint here to be used as slave labor in an alien prison. She'd known him for nearly a decade, since the days when he'd been a loud, overconfident nineteen-year-old tagging along after the Black Widow like a lovesick puppy.
Except, she realized with a pang of guilt, she couldn't get him out. There were hundreds of armed Argonians in the station, and only the two of them. As soon as she made her presence known, she would be captured, too. Then the Argonians would have three Avengers, and Steve would never get what little information she'd been able to gather. Worse, unlike Clint and Tony, Jan knew the locations where all the superheroes still at liberty were hiding.
Even flying low enough to make contact would be a risk, probably too much of a risk.
Clint turned again, and began walking away, and Jan decided that it was a risk she was just going to have to take. If she didn't move now, she might never have the chance to speak with Clint again.
She shrank even further, as small as she could easily go, and darted after him, swooping down to land on his shoulder.
Clint flinched as her weight hit him, almost dropping the box he held, and twitching his shoulder as if he were trying to dislodge an insect.
"It's me," she whispered, "Jan."
Clint stilled, coming to a halt in the middle of the ramp.
"Keep walking," Jan hissed at him. "Act normal."
He started moving again, and she breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of any outcry from the Argonian guard. Clint was wearing a denim jacket over a faded blue t-shirt, the material rough beneath her hands as she clutched at it to keep her balance. "Turn up your collar," she told him.
Clint did as she said, and Jan slipped inside it, hidden from view between the fabric of the upturned collar and Clint's neck. She was immediately enveloped in the warm, slightly sweaty smell of his skin.
"What are you doing here?" Clint mumbled under his breath, ducking his head. From a few feet away, it would look like he was cursing to himself.
"Reconnaissance," she answered. "Why are you here? Did they capture you, too?"
"Nope," Clint's voice was barely a thread of sound, but it held a familiar brash cheerfulness. "I volunteered to serve under our new furry overlords."
So Clint was spying, too. Except that Clint was essentially undercover alone in the middle of the enemy stronghold, with no contact with the outside world and no way out. "You--" she started, then broke off again, trying to force her voice back under control. It wouldn't do to forget herself and start shouting. "What exactly did you think you were going to accomplish, other than getting yourself caught and killed?"
"I got to New York, didn't I?" Clint sounded slightly wounded. "And anyway, we're going to need people on the inside to take these guys down, and I figured hey, why not?"
"Because if they catch you, they'll kill you," she hissed through clenched teeth. "In a messy, bloody way."
Clint nodded just a fraction. "Yeah, but it's too late to back out now, and somebody needs to make sure Tony eats."
"You know where Tony is?" Jan blurted out. "Can you take me to him?" He'd been in the Argonians' hands for nearly forty-eight hours now, and if anyone could have gotten an accurate head-count of their numbers in that time, it would be Tony. Not to mention that he had probably already figured out how the Argonians' energy guns worked just by looking at them.
Clint gave a single, minimal shake of his head. "They're keeping the scientists way down below, some kind of sub-basement you can only get to through one elevator. I don't know how they even knew it was there."
"They seem to know a lot of things," Jan muttered. She rose to her knees, one hand against the side of Clint's neck for balance, and peered over the edge of his collar. They had reached the lower concourse now, full of gutted shop fronts and the beginnings of construction work. The Argonians were converting the long, open space into a series of closed-off rooms, she couldn't tell to what purpose. There were more humans down here, most of them busy with hammers and electronic screwdrivers, as well as more grey-uniformed Argonians. One of them was at work on a section of metal pipe that had been exposed beneath a segment of ripped up floor, doing something to it with a welding torch.
"Stop moving around," Clint muttered, twitching his shoulders. "It tickles."
"How badly-- what kind of shape is Tony in?" Jan countered, as she dropped back to a crouch and did her best to hold still.
Clint's hesitation told her all she needed to know. "He's kind of beat up," he said eventually. "Nothing a couple of weeks won't fix."
Damn. As if getting them out wasn't going to be difficult enough already. "Cap wants to know how many of them there are, and what they're doing. What their command structure is like."
"Cap's all right?" for the first time since she'd run into him, Clint's voice sounded uncertain, as if he were afraid the answer was going to be no. "Of course he's all right," he answered himself before she could respond. "He's probably leading some kind of resistance movement already, right?"
"Cap's fine. So are Hank, Wanda, and Simon. And Carol just checked in the day before yesterday."
"That's... good," Clint breathed. Looking up, she saw his eyes close for a fraction of a second, a look of pure relief on his face, and then they re-opened, and it was gone. "That's very good. Tony was kind of worried. You know how he is."
Tony had been worried. Of course. Jan hesitated. "We still don't know Triathlon is, or Firestar and Justice. And Vision... Vision's offline. We had to take the mansion's computer system down."
"But we can switch him back on again when the aliens are gone, right?"
"Hank's pretty sure he can." What he wasn't sure of was whether it would still be the same Vision who'd been shut down, or if he would revert to an emotionless android again, the way he had the first time he'd been disassembled and rebuilt. "He'll be fine."
"Once the aliens are gone," Clint said.
Jan glanced around the gutted shell of the lower concourse again, its decades-old restaurants emptied of furniture and patrolled by armed Argonian guards. "Once the aliens are gone."
"Vance and Angie will be okay. They're tough kids." Clint's voice was soft, tentative, but that could just be because he was trying to speak as quietly as possible. "And Delroy's smart; he'll keep his head down and stay safe."
"Unless the Argonians make him mad," Jan couldn't help but point out.
"He's a perfect Olympic athlete who's three times better than me at everything," Clint muttered. "He'll be fine."
Clint was less than ten feet away from one of the Argonians now. Jan ducked down low and flattened herself against the side of his neck. She could feel the heat of his skin all over her body, through the fabric of her costume; she wasn't used to doing this with anyone but Hank -- riding around on people, yes, but not crawling inside their clothing.
She wrapped both hands around the collar of Clint's t-shirt as he bent down, presumably to set down his box.
"All done," she heard him say brightly. "I'm heading back up for more, sir."
Several overly warm moments later, Clint whispered, "you can come back out now."
They were heading back up to the main concourse; if Jan looked up, she could see its blue-painted ceiling up ahead of them. "I have to go before somebody catches me," she whispered back, laying one hand against the side of his neck again. At her current size, touching him felt like stroking a horse's flank, or maybe, she though in a flash of whimsy, an elephant's. Something big, anyway.
"Don't do that." Clint hissed. "It tickles. And I haven't told you everything yet. I haven't found out much, but I know they've got some kind of hierarchy. The ones in black have all the weapons, and they're in charge of the ones in grey. They have these little machines like the universal translators from Star Trek that let them speak English, but most of the black-coats won't use them if the don't have to. Their leader is somebody called the Imperator, or maybe the Archon. I took an oath to serve and obey both of them."
Which answered part of Carol's question, at least. "And Tony?"
"They made him swear, too." Clint paused, and then, even more quietly than he had been speaking, said, "He's really beat-up. Broken ribs, bruises all over. He's only barely on his feet. I don't think he could have run if he'd tried."
Which meant that even if the Avengers had had a prayer of getting a team in past all of these guards to try and rescue the two of them, Tony might not be able to make it out under his own power. "Carol mentioned something like that." Did they have any kind of medical treatment for humans down here? If Tony and Clint were stuck here for more than a few weeks, that might become a concern.
They were out into the main concourse again, now, and Clint was bending down once more to take hold of another box. She had already been inside the station for a good twenty minutes. Another ten, and Hank was going to send his ants in after her.
"Clint, I-" she started. She'd only found him by dumb luck. She wouldn't be able to count on luck next time. And without a link back to the rest of the team, Clint and Tony would be entirely alone in the middle of an Argonian stronghold. "I have to go now. How can I find you again?"
"We're still going to be busy getting this place set up tomorrow, but after that, they're going to have us working regular shifts," Clint said. "Meet me by the clock day after tomorrow, twelve o' clock high. The Argonians don't seem too fond of sunlight, so once we're done with the construction work, they're going to have humans guarding the upper level during the day. At least, that's what the grey guy who's in charge of Tony says."
"Putting a lot of trust in you, aren't they?" Jan felt a surge of hope, strong enough that she felt jittery. If the main concourse was going to be watched entire by humans...
"We both volunteered for this, remember? We're pretending to be traitors. Well, that," Clint added, "and they stuck a tracking chip in my arm. And there are still going to be Argonian soldiers on all the doors. That was the first thing Tony asked."
"Oh." Jan peeked over Clint's collar again, checking the positions of the closest people, human and Argonian. As soon as the guard with the twin swords strapped across his back turned away... "Are you-- you're sure the two of you will be okay? If they catch you-"
"We can handle it," he interrupted. "The only thing I was worried about was how to make contact with the rest of you, but now that that's taken care of..." He shrugged ever so slightly, more a tensing of his shoulders than a real movement. "I was going to split and join up with you guys when I got here, but that was before I found Tony. I can't just leave him here alone in the basement. And... I think I can do more good here."
When had Clint gotten so mature, she wondered, a hollow ache settling into her stomach.
She could remember a time when he would have refused point blank to play spy, insisting on being in on the actual combat, when he wouldn't even have thought of going undercover.
"Remember," Clint said. "Noon by the clock."
The Argonian with the two swords turned slightly to watch a handful of his fellow black-uniformed soldiers walk by.
"By the clock," Jan whispered, and took off.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
no subject
Other people may not, but Steve almost always at least tries to give Tony the benefit of the doubt, and under these circumstances in particular, he's not going to give up in him without proof.