Chapter Text
Spider-Man swung down the hallway, sticking to the fence, right as Yelena finished banging on the door. Again. “Those guys aren’t dead, right?” he asked, pointing towards the collapsed Damage Control workers on the ground from his spot perched on the wall.
“They’ll be fine, they’ll wake up in… a couple hours, give or take,” Daisy answered.
“Jean!” Yelena shouted, banging on the door.
“Why isn’t she opening the door?” Daisy asked, mostly just wondering aloud.
“She doesn’t want our help?” Yelena asked, with a shrug, lowering her hand. Daisy planted her hand on the door, again. Jean had—after a scream of frustration—wandered off with Metzger. But besides that and the sound of something metal and heavy hitting the ground, there hadn’t been anything of interest, so far as Daisy could tell.
“She in danger, in there?” Spider-Man asked, sounding pretty genuinely concerned.
“Why? Worried Castle won’t get a chance to shoot her?” Daisy snapped.
Spider-Man held his hands up in surrender. “We’re just here to help.”
Daisy froze when she heard Jean scream, again. Almost at the same time, she heard a massive, cacophonous crash, and the building shuddered. Daisy and Yelena stumbled, just barely catching themselves. Spider-Man leapt off the wall, attached a web on each side of the door, and yanked himself feet-first towards it.
The impact even sounded painful, as his feet just thumped uselessly against reinforced steel, and he hit the ground. He recovered quickly, however, popping to his feet with a growl of frustration. He leapt up, again, as Daisy caught a glimpse of Castle turning the corner at the end of the walkway.
This time, Spider-Man shot towards the door with shocking speed, and the door crumpled with the loud squeal and scream of metal being shorn off and twisted before it hit the ground with a crash. Spider-Man rode it for a few feet before hopping off, and looking around, trying to figure out where Jean was.
Daisy didn’t have the same trouble, she charged into the observation room right after Spider-Man, and immediately leapt through where the window of the observation room had once been. Instead, the glass littered the ground around a wall that had bowed inward from an impact. The expansive room on the other side looked like it’d been ground zero for the test detonation of a bomb.
Ceiling tiles littered the floor in pieces, the few pieces that remained in the ceiling were all askew, cracked and bending. Beneath the pieces of ceiling tiles and innumerable fragments of glass, the floor had bent and warped. Where it was visible, the flooring looked like it had been ripped up in large chunks where it wasn’t split. A dresser had been launched across the room to smash against the wall, breaking into a couple of large pieces, same with a wooden bedside table. A bed had been sent flipping end over end across the room, and landed upside down, leaving a single metal chair—presumably bolted to the floor—as the only surviving piece of furniture in what Daisy assumed had been a private cell.
Standing in the center of the chaos, unharmed, was Jean, her chest heaving while she seethed, hand clenched into a tight fist, a green and yellow scrunchie around her wrist. In front of her, floating just far enough off the ground that the tips of his shoes could just occasionally brush the floor, was Metzger, surrounded by a corona of shards of glass.
“Jean! Stop!” Daisy shouted.
“Why should I?!” Jean asked, “Do you know what he’s done?!”
“I can take a guess,” Daisy said, walking slowly towards Jean.
“Whatever he’s done, Jean, I… I know you think the only thing you can do is kill him,” Spider-Man said, “I’ve been there. It’s not worth it, to give in. It won’t help anyone. It won’t fix anything.”
Jean shook her head a few times. “You don’t know what he’s done. But you will.” She threw her hand out, and it felt like she reached out to smack Daisy in the head.
Blinking away a headache, Daisy watched Metzger guide Damage Control agents in their efforts to arrest people. Tandy Bowen and—she assumed—Tyrone Johnson in Ohio. Molly Hayes Hernandez in Los Angeles, saved only by the intervention of an unidentified woman. A woman that SHIELD knew was Karolina Dean. Plans to try and arrest a young woman named Kamala Khan in New Jersey, plans only halted by the presence of one Nicholas Fury at her family home.
Investigations into a boy in Kansas who destroyed part of an orphanage, a geneticist in Scotland who made regular trips to New York, a woman from Massachusetts who had a suspiciously high success rate on her investments, a girl from Mississippi who put a classmate into a coma, a young man who burnt down a town in Missouri after spontaneously developing powers and tragically died in the fire, and more. Requests to get Matthew Murdock transferred to Damage Control custody, contingency plans for what Metzger seemed to think was the inevitable day that Wanda Maximoff would wind up back in Damage Control custody. On and on and on, an unending barrage of Metzger’s memories, names and faces marching on in a procession of suspicion, an overpowering need to figure out the root causes.
The last was the most painful. Or maybe Jean had accidentally transferred some of her own pain with the memory. Since Jean had first mentioned Sara, Daisy had suspected that she hadn’t made it off Roosevelt Island, that she’d been one of the far too many bodies thrown into the crematorium. But seeing Sara, collapsed back in the chair, looking a kind of exhausted Daisy had only ever felt while barely clinging to life… that was the worst possible way for her suspicions to be confirmed.
“Jean—” Daisy said, taking a step forward, but stopped when Jean flinched, and the glass edged closer to skewering Metzger.
“Don’t!” Jean shouted, nostrils flared, “He deserves it!”
“I know,” Spider-Man said, “I know he’s hurt a lot of people. I know he hurt you. But this is still wrong, and you know it.” He paused for a beat, seemed to be examining Jean for a few seconds. “It’s… it’s scary, knowing that there are people out there like Metzger who are always going to hate people like us, like you and me, like Agent Johnson, like all the people he tried to arrest. Like Sara. Just because we’re a little bit different, just because we’re special, and they don’t like that.”
Daisy glanced over her shoulder when she heard glass crunching to see Yelena climbing into the room, Castle just behind her, both shaking their heads as they fought off headaches.
“I’m not scared,” Jean said, her voice trembling slightly, just enough that Daisy caught it, “I’m definitely not scared of him.”
“If he deserves to die, then so do I,” Daisy cut in.
“Whatever you did, it’s not the same. He killed my sister,” Jean said.
Daisy shrugged. “I’ve done worse.” She glanced over her shoulder, at Yelena and Castle, who were getting closer. She gestured towards them. “So have they. Do we deserve to die?”
“I…” Jean swallowed, glancing at Daisy, past Daisy at Yelena, at Spider-Man, who took a slow step forward. “He killed Sara,” she said, her voice cracking, tears spilling onto her cheeks.
“Yeah, and I know that that hurts. Hurts like nothing else you’ve ever felt, before,” Spider-Man said, “Makes you feel empty and angry and scared and alone.” He took another step forward. “But killing him won’t fix that. It won’t even help.”
A few seconds of silence passed before Jean asked, “What does?” Her head was still turned to mostly face Spider-Man, but her eyes kept bouncing between Daisy and Yelena.
“Other people,” Daisy said, “Letting other people help you. Letting them care about you.” Jean looked skeptical. “We’ll never be able to replace Sara.”
“We don’t want to,” Yelena interjected, “Nobody wants to replace your sister.”
Daisy nodded. “But you at least won’t have to face this alone,” she said, “If you let us, you’ve got me, I assume you’ve got Spider-Man—” He gave a nod. “—you’ve got Yelena, and…” Daisy glanced over her shoulder, at Castle, who was glowering. Or, more accurately, doing a poor job of pretending to glower. “…I don’t know about Castle, that might be a stretch, but you’ve got the rest of us.”
“You’ve just got to let Metzger go,” Spider-Man said.
Yelena was quick to step forward when Jean’s expression tightened. “He will not escape his punishment,” she said, with the kind of intensity and confidence that settled deep in Daisy’s chest. “I promise.”
It took a few tense seconds, but eventually, Jean nodded. With a wave of her hand, the glass went flying across the room away from Metzger, scattering across the floor. Before Metzger’s feet hit the ground, Spider-Man helpfully webbed up his hands behind his back, then webbed up his mouth before he could say anything. Yelena surged forward to grab Metzger by the collar, dragging him a few feet away from Jean, and forcing him down onto his knees, while Daisy gently guided Jean the opposite direction with a hand on her arm. Castle didn’t move, at first, but when he did, he went to stand menacingly near Metzger, just inside his eyesight, holding his rifle. It wasn’t a subtle message, but it got Metzger—who tried to yank away from Yelena—to freeze where he was.
“You and I should probably leave. I don’t think we want to be here when Yelena’s friends show up,” Daisy said, to Jean, who was staring at the scrunchie around her wrist.
“This is all I have left of her,” Jean muttered.
“I’m so sorry, Jean,” Daisy said, “I really hoped we would be able to rescue her.”
“You assumed we wouldn’t be able to,” Jean said, her voice heavy, “You assumed she was already dead. That’s why you asked how old she was.”
After a moment, Daisy nodded. “I did. I didn’t tell you, because I wanted to be wrong.”
Jean nodded, seemingly mostly to herself, and sniffled, reaching up to wipe away some tears. “I don’t… I don’t have a home, or anything, to go back to. It was… it was just Sara and me. I never… I never thought about what I’d do if I didn’t find her. I always assumed I would, and we would… we would figure it out after.”
“That’s fine, I don’t really have a home to go back to, either,” Daisy said, like she was bringing Jean into a conspiracy, “We can figure it out together, back at Yelena’s safe house.”
Jean nodded, again. “Okay.”
“Would a hug help?” Daisy asked. When Jean nodded her head after a few seconds, she hugged Jean, tight but not too tight. It took Jean a moment to hug her back, and Daisy waited until Jean let go to step back.
“Thank you,” Jean muttered.
With a soft squeeze of Jean’s arm, Daisy glanced at Yelena. “You guys got this? I’m gonna get Jean out of here.”
“I have this,” Yelena said, pulling a phone from a hidden pocket on her suit and waggling it. “I am going to alert my annoying coworkers, shortly.”
“Great. Castle, you want your van back?” Daisy asked.
Castle glared at her for a couple seconds, then waved dismissively at her. “Ahhh, take the damn thing, I never liked it, anyway.”
Humming, Daisy looked at Jean and nodded towards the door. “Let’s go.” With a nod of her own, Jean followed her out, picking her way across the ruined floor.
…
Yelena waited a couple minutes after Daisy and Jean left, after she sent a message to Bucky that said ‘SOS bring everyone! (Except Bob, obviously)’ and her location, until she was confident Jean was probably out of the building or at least well out of earshot, before she pulled her handgun. Just the sound of it clearing leather was enough to make Spider-Man whip around. Castle slowly turned to look at her, a second or so later.
“What are you doing?” Spider-Man asked.
“Killing him,” Yelena stated.
“You’re an Avenger.”
“I was an assassin, first,” Yelena replied, aiming at Metzger, and grabbing him by the collar when he tried to pull away. “Any more protests? Castle?”
“Nah, I think you’ve got the right idea,” Castle replied. He even took a step backwards, and rested his hands on the butt of his rifle, let it dangle on its harness.
“Frank! Yelena! This is wrong!” Spider-Man said, his focus ping-ponging between them for a few seconds before it settled on Yelena.
“Yes, it is,” Yelena agreed.
“Then why?!”
“Because I don’t think there is any amount of prison time he can do that will make up for what he has done,” Yelena said.
“And killing him will?” Spider-Man asked. A beat passed in silence. Metzger tried to pull away, again, but Yelena yanked him back. He froze when she pressed the barrel of her gun against the back of his head.
“It will stop him from hurting anyone else.”
“So would prison,” Spider-Man said, “So would the official and extensive investigation you’re already planning to do into Damage Control, revealing everything they’ve done wrong. Drag it all out into the light, even if the government at large doesn’t want to do anything, you can send it to the newspapers, I’m sure the Bugle would be happy to take the story and run with it. Jameson’s all about accountability. Especially with the clout of the New Avengers behind it, the investigation could do some serious good. Don’t the friends and families of the other people he hurt deserve to know what he did? Get some amount of closure?”
“They will get their closure either way. He does not need to be alive for the investigation.”
Spider-Man sighed. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to be just an assassin. You don’t have to be the worst parts of yourself,” he said, taking a step towards her, “You can be better.”
“Maybe,” Yelena said, “But I don’t care. He hurt girls.” She fired, Spider-Man lurched forward, and Metzger’s corpse crumpled to the floor.