New York, United States
April 2011
Steve landed on the patrol car's hood with a slam. The two arguing cops stared up at him in shock.
"I need men in these buildings," he snapped, well aware that he was a formidable figure in his battle-scarred armor and helmet. "There are people inside who could run into the line of fire. You take 'em through the basement or the subway; keep them off the streets." Clint's advice had come through the comms, and Steve seconded it. "I need a perimeter as far back as 39th; turn back anything that gets that far. This has to stay contained."
"Why the hell should I listen to you?" the fat older cop demanded.
Steve barely had time to register his indignation before three Chitauri soldiers dropped off a ship above and charged at him, hissing.
He hooked one's weapon with his shield and spun the thing into the one in the middle, deflecting an energy blast from the third with his shield in the same movement, and slammed a booted foot into the first one's chest. It caved in like a pinata. Steve nailed an uppercut in the jaw of the third, exchanged a flurry of blows with the remaining Chitauri, and snapped the thing's neck.
The two cops stared at him.
Steve glared back.
The older cop marched away, shouting Steve's orders at his squad.
Steve smirked and took off running.
New York, United States
April 2011
Tony screamed around the city, moving faster than he ever had for this long. The suit was performing beautifully; it had taken several scrapes along walls and pavement that had done little more than scratch the paint. Tony knew the red and gold was mostly vanity, but he didn't care. If he was going to be helping people, they didn't get to criticize how he looked while doing it.
"Sir, there are fourteen Chitauri on your tail."
"Good, that'll keep 'em off the streets. Rogers?"
"Kinda busy," Rogers panted over the comms.
Tony whipped his hands out and made a ninety degree direction change. Two Chitauri ships slammed into a building and exploded. He prayed no one was in there.
"Where are you?"
"Uh-"
"Captain Rogers is here, sir," JARVIS chimed in, and a location appeared on Tony's HUD.
"Perfect." He whipped around, blasted two Chitauri ships - one went down with a dead driver, the other swerved into a third and took them both out - absorbed three shots to his armor, and took off in Rogers' direction.
"Sir-"
Tony looked up.
"What the everloving shit is that !" he yelled.
The leviathan was enormous, the length of several city blocks at the very least, looking like a flying mutated sky whale the size of a shopping mall in heavy armor. Tony soared up next to its side. "JARVIS, find me a soft spot."
"The armor is impenetrable. I see no visible weaknesses in its carapace."
"Lovely," Tony muttered. He didn't see any either.
The leviathan flew (swam?) through a building, leaving thousands of tons of steel and concrete rubble in its wake. Tony aimed downward, scanning for biosigns: there, there -
He fired his thrusters and flew into the dust cloud, hauling rebar and blocks aside until he could pull three women and two men out of the remains of an elevator shaft. Tony passed on the orders he'd heard Barton and Steve giving and sent them on there way.
With no other biosigns close enough for him to save easily, Tony forced himself to take off again and head for the leviathan. He had to leave them behind. The sooner they ended this battle, the sooner the rescue workers could get in here, and that wouldn't happen with that leviathan in the air.
Tony careened around a building and came face-to-face with the thing.
"God, it's ugly," he said. "Let's make it uglier." He fired a swarm of rockets.
The tiny guided missiles screamed through the air at the target highlighted on Tony's HUD. They slammed in quick succession into a patch of less-armored flesh (or whatever) on the thing's cheek. The leviathan let out an air-shaking roar and turned toward Tony.
"Well, that got its attention," he said. "What the hell was step 2?"
"I recommend you lead it up higher, away from the buildings, and keep it focused on you," JARVIS said.
"Yes, that's very helpful," Tony said, and took off into an ascent. The leviathan roared again and followed.
New York, United States
April 2011
Natasha leaped off a car and landed hard on a Chitauri's shoulders, clinging with her legs while it spun and flailed at her with that damn energy spear. She seized the weapon, yanked it out of the thing's hand, and stabbed a knife through the weak point she'd discovered on the tops of their helmets. The Chitauri collapsed and she rode it to the ground, exchanging the knife for a pistol and taking down three more before she hit the pavement and rolled. The empty pistol went back in her boot until she could reload. She uncoiled to her feet, bent backwards away from an energy beam, and slashed a Chitauri with the spear in her hands. The fight lasted seconds before she cut its throat and dodged behind a car, breathing hard and waiting for the next one.
Nothing came.
Cautiously, she poked her head up and over the hood of the vehicle. No Chitauri in sight, at least not alive.
Clint ducked out from a shattered storefront. "Where'd they go?"
"I think we killed them all," Maria said, yanking a throwing knife out of a Chitauri's chest. Natasha approved. "You two are amazingly efficient."
"That's what happens when you work together as long as we have," Clint said, grinning.
Natasha winced. Maria looked annoyed for a fraction of a second before she tucked it away, but Natasha saw it, and made a note to talk to Clint later. He and Maria would have enough problems halting their passionate debates long enough to get together without Maria thinking Clint was into Natasha, too.
"There're still soldiers around," Steve said on the comms. "I'm two blocks south. Meet in the middle?"
"Can you get here? I'm salvaging arrows," Clint said.
Natasha shot him a look and started to reload her guns. She'd gone through half the ammo she had on her.
He raised his hands, one of them full of arrows dripping Chitauri gore. It ran over Clint's fingers and down his forearm. He didn't seem to notice. "What? I have limited resources. And don't give me that look. They're more reusable than bullets."
Maria laughed.
"En route," Steve said.
Natasha spotted him seconds later, jogging their direction. Aside from his footsteps, the city was eerily silent as he came to a stop next to them.
Clint wiped arrows one by one on the seat of a shattered nearby car and stuck them back in his quiver, which whirred and spun to accommodate the new additions.
"We need to-"
With a boom , Thor landed next to the group.
There was a subtle but instant shift, as Natasha, Maria, Clint, and Steve all turned and squared up against Thor. Their last encounter with him hadn't ended well.
Steve was clearly simmering with tension. "What's the story upstairs?"
"The energy field around the Tesseract is unbreakable," Thor said in his deep voice.
"Thor is right," Stark chimed in over the comms. "We gotta deal with these guys."
Natasha decided it was time to move them along. "How do we do this?"
"As a team," Steve said simply.
"I have unfinished business with Loki," Thor said angrily.
Maria raised an eyebrow at him. "I suggest you get in line."
Clint snorted.
Thor glared at them both.
The put-put of an engine sliced through the rising tension. All five of them spun to analyze the newcomer.
Banner.
He pulled up on an ancient motorcycle wearing clothes that clearly did not fit, hair disheveled. "So, this all seems… horrible," he said, clearly uncomfortable.
Next to Natasha, Steve softened.
"I've seen worse," she said pointedly.
He winced. "Sorry."
"No. We could… use a little worse."
"Is that Banner's dulcet tones I hear?" Stark asked.
Clint laughed.
"Yes," said Steve.
"Good. I'm bringing the party to you."
A rumble shook the ground beneath them, and the team turned to stare as Tony swung around a corner and headed straight toward them at top speed. There was a leviathan on his tail.
"I don't see how that's a party," Natasha said as calmly as she could.
Banner glanced at the rest of them, then began to walk forward.
Tony dove low, shooting toward them. The leviathan followed suit, barrelling along close to the ground.
"Dr. Banner," Steve said. "Now might be a really good time to get angry."
"That's my secret, Cap," Banner said, and the smile he shot them over his shoulder was a strange combination of bitter and relieved, frightened and content. "I'm always angry."
He turned away.
The movement became transformation. Skin faded from pale to green; his muscles twisted and grew; Banner's skeleton expanded upward. It was altogether smoother and faster than the one Natasha had seen.
The Hulk roared a challenge back at the leviathan and charged straight for it.
The rest of the team flinched back when the impact rolled through the pavement. The Hulk drove his fists into the leviathan's jaw, feet digging huge scars in the street as he roared with the strain. Force echoed up the leviathan's long body as the scales slammed into one another - and came loose.
Alien metal thundered to the ground around the Hulk and the leviathan as the Chitauri beast shuddered and died, collapsing along the length of the street.
In the silence that followed, furious Chitauri screams rose from the surrounding streets.
The Hulk appeared, leaping over the thing's corpse and slamming into the street next to the rest of them. Natasha tensed, remembering the last time she'd been this close to the Hulk, but he just snarled and joined their circle as everyone braced themselves for the Chitauri who came swarming over the buildings toward them.
There was a pause.
The portal pulsed and flared wider. Hundreds more Chitauri ships, four more leviathans…
Natasha's breath caught. This was a nightmare.
She fingered her guns. Good thing she was a nightmare, too.
"Guys," Maria said, shifting backward.
"Call it, Steve," Stark said.
Natasha couldn't help glancing at him and noticed Clint and Maria's surprise as well. Stark was… asking someone else to give him orders?
He must've noted their expressions. "I can bend to someone who's better at battle math than I am," Stark said irritatedly.
"Until we can close that portal, we're gonna use containment," Steve said, ignoring them. "Barton, I want you up on that roof-" he pointed- "eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays; take down anything that tries to get out. Stark, you're border patrol. Anything gets farther than three blocks out, turn it back or turn it to ash."
"Give me a lift?" Clint asked Stark.
"Right," Stark said, stepping behind Clint and securing a grip on his tactical harness. "Better clench up, Legolas."
With a roar of thrusters, they were gone.
"Thor, you bottleneck that portal," Steve continued. "Use your lightning. Tear them apart."
Thor nodded once, shot Steve one more glare, and took off, Mjolnir humming in his hand.
"The three of us are on the ground," Steve said, gesturing at Maria, Natasha, and himself. "We protect the innocents of this city, keep Loki focused on us, or these guys'll go wild. And, Hulk?"
The beast snapped his head to Steve in a vicious movement.
"Smash," Steve said.
A cruel smile crossed the Hulk's face, and he launched. Natasha watched as he leaped from building to building, using Chitauri soldiers as ragdolls and weapons, impervious to their energy blasts.
Natasha pulled her focus back to the street as Steve and Maria shifted and prepared for the next wave. She fell in on Steve's right flank while Maria took his left.
"Ready?"
Natasha and Maria shared a glance. It was all they needed. "Yes," Natasha said.
Steve took a breath and ran forward.
New York, United States
April 2011
Thor aimed for the tallest building he could see near the portal. There was a ledge near the top, and he planted his feet there, leaned back against the roof, and raised Mjolnir.
Thunder cracked and rumbled.
Teeth gritted, Thor summoned as much storm energy as he could without setting off a chain reaction that would destroy the Midgardian city. Clouds swirled above his head; lightning flashed between them.
He felt the bolt coming. The hair on his arms stood up. Energy made the air tremble in readiness.
The lightning slammed into Mjolnir.
The bolt was a single glowing connection between Thor and the heavens, and he rejoiced as he felt Mjolnir drink and drink and drink of the lightning's power, sucking it into an almost bottomless pit. Only twice had Thor ever exhausted Mjolnir's capability to contain this power before releasing it on an enemy. The first time he'd destroyed an army; the second, a large moon. Both incidents had left him violently in need of sustenance and incapacitated for days. He had no intention of drawing that much power now, but he would need a significant amount.
Wait… wait… now .
Thor roared a challenge as he thrust Mjolnir at the portal.
Lightning lanced from its end, finding target after target. Bolts played between Chitauri ships, lashing out at new targets once one was destroyed; Thor felt one massive drain and then another and then a third as the leviathans shuddered and died beneath his onslaught. And still, they came.
Thor clung to the building and grimly poured his strength and Mjolnir's into the battle. He was a warrior by blood and birth and training; he knew how to conserve his strength. He also knew this was a losing battle. If they could not discover how to shut down the portal, they would not win.
New York, United States
April 2011
Tony found himself facing one of the leviathans. Again.
Hulk had taken down a second four blocks away, but the beast was somewhere near the tower and Tony couldn't summon him or Thor. They both had their own fights.
He raised a hand and aimed his laser cutter at the thing's shell.
" Sir, we will lose power before we penetrate that shell."
Tony shut the laser off and gunned it, catching up with the leviathan's head. It was aiming right for an apartment complex that glowed like a Christmas tree with biosigns. The people were frantic, screaming and scrambling, but they'd never get out in time.
"JARVIS, you ever hear the story of Jonah?" Tony asked.
JARVIS hesitated. "I wouldn't consider him a role model."
Too bad . Tony screamed like a banshee and shot a rocket at the leviathan's face. It roared its anger, and there was his opportunity. Tony flew straight down the thing's throat.
He had a feeling that it would smell nasty as hell in here if the suit weren't filtering it out. The leviathan's gullet was dark, wet, slimy, and revolting.
Tony deployed almost all his remaining explosives and flew as far down the leviathan's throat as he could.
The fireballs bloomed around him. The temp controls on the suit went into overdrive, frantically trying to keep Tony from cooking alive inside his armor. The leviathan shuddered and its roar seemed to fill its belly and the Iron Man suit.
Tony was flung away from its carcass and hit the pavement in a rain of scorched flesh, suit smoking and defenses low.
"Well, that sucked," he muttered.
A furious squad of Chitauri descended on him, chittering and screaming.
Tony groaned and readied himself for another flight.
New York, United States
April 2011
"Steve, these guys aren't going to stop coming!" Maria shouted.
Steve bashed a Chitauri away from him and deflected a shot with his shield back into the squad that had fired it, tearing them to pieces and earning the trio a brief reprieve. "Not much we can do," he snapped.
Natasha finished off an alien, used its energy spear to shoot down several crawling over the walls of the surrounding block, and rejoined her team. "I need to get up there and shut it down."
"Our flyers are occupied," Steve said.
Natasha backed up toward the edge of the overpass they were fighting on, glancing up at the Chitauri ships screaming by overhead. "I got a ride. Could use a boost, though."
Maria looked at her and nodded once. Natasha appreciated the other woman for simply accepting her capabilities. "Maria," she said quickly. "In case I die? There's nothing romantic between me and Clint. Never has been, never will be. He knows that. I thought you should know too."
Maria was silent.
"You sure?" Steve asked.
"Yeah," Natasha said, thinking about what would come: testing herself against these things, killing creatures that no one would care were dead. "It'll be fun."
Steve backed up, knelt, and raised his shield.
Natasha saw a ship coming toward them and picked her moment, sprinting forward and jumping onto the shield. Steve hurled her upward and she jumped in the same movement, shooting upward and catching the bottom of a Chitauri craft with both hands.
It was worse than the exercises of her youth, which had involved jumping onto moving trains. This thing was going faster, was less stable, and she didn't have nearly as good a grip.
Teeth bared with effort, Natasha hauled herself up onto the back of the vehicle.
There were two Chitauri soldiers with ranged weapons of some kind in the back and one up front, flying. The two in the back were chained to the deck to keep them aboard. Natasha slashed both sets of chains, shoved one of them off the craft, and exchanged a flurry of blows with the second before it, too, lost its balance and she snapped its neck. The corpse tumbled for the street.
"Okay," she said, drew two knives, and climbed up the back of the one in front.
It chittered and thrashed, but she nailed both sides of the thing's neck with little brutal blades concealed near her wrists.
The Chitauri screamed, and Natasha knelt on top of it with teeth bared, swinging and leaning to direct it. They were clumsy and slow, but progress was being made.
A shot clipped the tail of the craft.
They spun almost three hundred and sixty degrees and slammed into a wall. Natasha killed the Chitauri pilot, shoved it out of the way, and took the controls herself. They were complicated and organic and unlike anything she'd ever seen, but she had seen the pilot use them enough to figure out acceleration, deceleration, and turning, and that was really all she needed.
Natasha gunned the craft and it leaped forward.
More blue shots flashed past, shattering buildings as she dodged. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed that it was Loki at the vanguard of the pack on her tail.
Her earpiece crackled. "Tasha, what are you doing?"
Natasha glanced at the rooftop where Clint was posted. "Uh… Little help?"
She saw him draw an arrow before she had to turn and face forward again, trying to stay in his range but not die.
"Got him," Clint said.
Seconds later, an explosion shook the air.
Natasha glanced back once and saw bodies flying from Loki's craft and those around it, hurled by the force of Clint's explosive arrow. Loki landed on the balcony outside Stark's penthouse suite, but Natasha didn't have time to worry: the Hulk smashed his way into the penthouse seconds later and Nat clearly saw him batter Loki about until the Asgardian was unconscious on the floor.
More explosions came from behind. Natasha glanced behind: there were no more Chitauri aerial units on her tail.
Time to make her move.
She aimed her craft upward, looping around the energy beam on top of Stark Tower and beneath the portal. Thor's lightning still flickered around it, weaker now but frying a third of the soldiers who came through.
She had to close the portal before Thor's lightning was gone completely.
Rather than try and figure out how to land the craft, Natasha pointed it over the top of the tower, let go at the last second, and dropped off.
The craft kept going. She hit the gravel on the roof and rolled and rolled and slammed into a metal electricity access panel.
Shaking dust out of her hair, Natasha climbed to her feet.
There was Selvig, looking dusty and sweaty and dazed as he stared at the battle beneath them.
"Doctor," she said cautiously.
As he turned toward her, she recognized the sign: she'd seen the footage of Hill and Selvig when they were taken. The bright blue eyes were the sign of the scepter's influence. Selvig's were back to his own watery gray-blue shade.
Where else had she seen eyes like that?
Natasha pushed that thought aside. She could consider the niggling sense of missing something later.
"The energy from the Tesseract," he said, urgently. "It can't… protect against itself. The scepter…"
"It's okay," she said, uncomfortable. Providing comfort was not part of her training. "You didn't know what you were doing."
"Someone did," Selvig said. "There's a failsafe built into the CMS machine."
"Loki's scepter," Natasha said, realizing.
"It's the only thing that can shut down the portal," Selvig said, and turned to look back at the balcony below. "And I'm looking right at it."
Natasha ran for the rooftop door.
[Classified Location], SHIELD Helicarrier
April 2011
Fury shut down the Council's screens.
A nuclear strike. He hadn't thought they'd have the balls for that kind of action, but he had to admit that the battle wasn't going as well as he had expected either. It might be the only way to contain this.
He had to keep resisting the strike, though. He had to give the Avengers a chance to pull this off - for his plan to work.
"Sir, we have an unauthorized bird launch!" Balik shouted.
Fury swore and bolted from the bridge. They'd launched the nuke anyway with an override code. Fucking Council…
This was why he needed this plan to work.
Fury grabbed a shoulder-mounted missile launcher from a weapons locker on the way up. He dashed out on the deck just as a jet screamed by, aimed carefully…
The missile took out its left wing, and the jet spun into a stop on the deck.
Fury straightened.
Another roar made him spin. A second jet was taking off from the lower runway. And he had no more missiles.
Fury's hand twitched toward his pistol, but it was no use.
The jet and its deadly payload were gone.
New York, United States
April 2011
The shots rang against Tony's suit.
He blasted two Chitauri and simply kicked two more, caving in their chests, but the shots kept coming. He was exhausted, power low, arsenal depleted, but he wouldn't give up.
"Stark! You hearing me? We have a missile heading straight for the city!"
Fury's words filled Tony with dread. "Ow - shit - how long?"
"Three minutes tops. Stay low and wipe it out!"
"Got it," Tony got out. "JARVIS, put everything we've got into the thrusters!"
"I just did," JARVIS said, and the suit blasted away, a Chitauri soldier losing his grip on Tony's ankle and falling to the ground. He left them behind. Bruised, aching, sweaty and bloody and tired.
He got a radar scan going. The missile popped up on top, out over the water by the bridge. Tony angled toward it, almost overshot, and came up beneath the innocent white casing from behind. With a grunt, he clamped his arms around it and transferred power to his chest thruster to balance his flight.
"I can close the portal!" Romanoff shouted into the comms. "I can shut it down! Does anybody copy?"
"Do it!" Steve said instantly.
"No, wait!" Tony shouted.
"Stark-"
"I've got a nuke coming in," Tony said. "And I know just where to put it."
"Sir, shall I put in a call to Ms. Potts?" JARVIS asked.
"Might as well," Tony said.
The missile was stubborn, like leading a drunk cow with a heavy rope. It did not want to go off its programmed course. Tony ground his teeth and forced it up, up, up-
He skinned the face of his tower, caught a glimpse of his shattered, empty penthouse and then Romanoff and Selvig on the roof, and then he was in the open sky and the energy beam was crackling across his suit and the call to Pepper was still ringing, ringing-
And then he was in space.
It was beautiful and terrible.
Tony had seconds to thank himself for having taken the time to seal and pressurize the suit. He released the missile with a shove in the direction of a ship the size of the moon, drifting in the black. Leviathans and soldiers poured toward him, a never-ending stream.
They'd have lost.
Tony's HUD flickered, and he fired his thrusters once with the last of his power for the portal. This was space; his inertia would keep him going until he could get back through and Earth's gravity took hold of him again.
At least that way, they'd have a body to bury. He knew… this was it.
The call failed.
At least he was going out with a hell of a view. This was something no other human had ever seen.
He fixed his eyes on the distant stars and decided that was a fitting end for Tony Stark.