Chapter 106: Self-Defense, Technically
Steve threw the shield.
It was a good throw. It always was — decades of practice, the arc computed in the body rather than the brain, the angle calculated for maximum surface coverage. Against most opponents, it ended conversations.
Ethan reached out and caught it.
With his hand. One hand. The shield slapping into his palm with the sharp crack of vibranium meeting something that wasn't moving.
He turned it over once, examining it. The metal was remarkable — the way it caught light differently from every angle, the specific density of it. He'd known what vibranium was for his entire previous life and this was his first time holding any.
This, he thought, is coming home with me.
He handed it to Tony.
"Hold this. I'll be back."
Tony took the shield, looked at it, looked at Ethan, and then looked at the shield again with the expression of a man who had just been handed several hundred million dollars worth of rare alloy and was running a significant number of calculations simultaneously.
"This is vibranium," Tony said, mostly to himself.
"Yes," Ethan said, and turned to face the assembled SHIELD response.
Steve was already getting up. Natasha was moving laterally. Clint had an arrow drawn. Behind them, on the Triskelion's upper levels, Ethan could hear the sound of additional response deploying — the distant thunder of something large being repositioned, rotors beginning to turn.
He looked at the people in front of him.
"Since Cap's already started," he said, "you might as well all come at once. Otherwise you're going to miss your turn."
He moved.
The thing about Gravity-Gravity Fruit combined with combat statistics at Ethan's current level was that the math of most physical altercations resolved very quickly.
Steve had super-soldier reflexes. They were excellent — genuinely the best that unaugmented training and biological enhancement could produce. They were not fast enough to compensate for Ethan already being somewhere else when the body expected him.
The strike landed before Steve had fully oriented. Not with full force — Ethan wasn't trying to put Steve Rogers through the building — but enough that Steve went down, and when he tried to get up, he found the gravity above him approximately three times heavier than it should have been.
He tried to push through it. He was, to his credit, making progress.
"That's impressive," Ethan said, not unkindly, watching Steve slowly working against the enhanced gravity field.
Then the aircraft opened up.
Ethan watched the ordnance coming toward him — missiles, cannon fire, a volume of hardware that would have been decisive against most targets — and thought: this is going to be a liability conversation if anyone survives to have it.
He let the magnetism reach out.
Metal moved. It was the most natural thing in the world, after months of integrating this ability — the sense of all the ferrous material in a given space, the way you could put a hand around any of it and simply redirect. Bullets stopped. Missiles held. The aircraft that had fired them found their own ordnance suddenly interested in returning home.
He deflected everything that would have hit bystanders. What remained went back to its sources with significantly less restraint.
The sounds that followed were loud.
When the dust settled — which took a few seconds — the plaza looked considerably different from before. Several vehicles had new configurations. A number of SHIELD agents had been reintroduced to their own ammunition in ways that varied in severity.
Ethan stood in the middle of it, uninjured, listening to the aftermath settle.
He walked to Steve, who was still pinned but conscious, and crouched down.
"Look at how many people just got hurt," Ethan said, "because you wouldn't negotiate about a body."
Steve glared at him with the cold fury of a man who was entirely capable of homicide and was currently physically prevented from attempting it.
"Don't look at me like that," Ethan said. "They shot at me first. I redirected. Self-defense is a recognized legal framework." He paused. "I know you don't believe me about Bucky yet. That's fine. You'll see the evidence when Tony opens the body up. But in the meantime—"
"You're lying," Steve said, through his teeth. "Bucky wouldn't—"
"He wouldn't have chosen to," Ethan said. "That's different from whether it happened." He held Steve's gaze. "I know you know the difference. You were at war. You know what people can be made to do when they don't have a choice."
Steve didn't answer.
Ethan looked at Tony, who was sitting on the steps with the vibranium shield in his lap, apparently conducting an impromptu materials analysis.
"Come on," Ethan said. "We're going to find Fury."
He used Chaos Magic to lift Steve off the ground — levitated, not slung, with the careful support of someone moving furniture rather than a combatant — and carried him along as a variable.
Tony fell in beside him, shield tucked under one arm.
"You're taking him as a hostage," Tony said.
"I'm taking him as a negotiating chip," Ethan said. "It's more polite."
"That's the same thing."
"Different energy."
They walked through the Triskelion's entrance.
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