Chapter Text
"Report to your stations immediately. This is not a drill. We are under attack. We are under attack."
It starts just the same as everything normally does - with a bang.
Or in this case, it starts with someone bouncing off an invisible forcefield surrounding a HYDRA base in the snowy mountains of Sokovia.
"Shit!" The genius billionaire shouted, his heads-up display glitching in response to the unexpected bump as JARVIS attempted to steady his flight path.
"Language!" Steve scolded, driving through a mass of patrol guards on his motorcycle. "JARVIS, what's the view from upstairs?" he continued, seizing one by the ankle and dragging them through the snowy dirt before tossing them forcefully into a tree.
"The central building is protected by some kind of energy shield. Strucker's technology is well beyond any other Hydra base we've taken." The AI responded dutifully over the team communication earpieces, their systems spying and scanning the base from the satellite stationed in the air.
Thor crashed into a guard tower, kicking away one man and sending another flying through the air with Mjolnir. "Loki's sceptre must be here. Strucker couldn't mount this defence without it." He hit the final one off the tower, spinning the hammer around ready for another attack. "At long last."
"At long last is lasting a little long, boys." Natasha drove her truck ploughing through a gaggle of soldiers shooting blue energy weapons at the team. Sending it careening into a tree, she leapt off the side and onto two additional soldiers, snapping bones and taking them down to the floor with ease.
Clint flinched as a beam of light energy breezed past him, singing the side of the tree he was ducking behind. "Yeah. I think we lost the element of surprise." He unloaded another arrow, firing back.
"What gave it away? The fact that the alarms are blaring or something less obvious like the soldiers trying to shoot you in the ass?" The delightful voice of the twenty-four-year-old techie entered the conversation, typing away at her laptop from the safety of the Quinjet waiting outside the city.
"Did everyone just hear that?" Tony interrupted. "I swear I could have heard a... a mouse over comms or something. A squeaky little thing. Or maybe it was my imagination," he trailed off with a teasing mumble.
"Shut up, Tin Can, before I fly you into a snowbank to cool off," Evelyn threatened, computer screen flooded with CCTV of the team and Tony's HUD connected, displayed in the corner.
"Hold that thought a second. No one else is going to deal with the fact that Cap just said "language?"
"I know," Steve grumbled, flipping over the front of his motorcycle, using his momentum to fling it into an oncoming jeep of soldiers who quickly abandoned ship as he found his footing again. "It just slipped out."
"Captain, sir, with all due respect, come on. I just patched up that bike." Evelyn whined quietly as she watched the supersoldier toss away her hard work into a fiery mess that she was not looking forward to fixing yet again.
Clint jogged further into the snowy woods, bow in hand and eyes scanning his surroundings. He spotted a bunker not far away, tracking the energy blasts the turret on top fired out at rapid speed. Ducking behind a thick tree, he poked his head around and gauged the distance, doing the math in his head and pulling an arrow from his quiver. Taking a second to nock it, he angled his upper body around the tree, held a moment, and fired before ducking back.
But he didn't hear the explosion he expected.
There was silence rather than an explosion. The turret gun had stopped firing, and there were boots crunching in the snow following HYDRA agents stomping around trying to find him. Furrowing his brow, the archer pulled out a second arrow to aim, and his fingers had no sooner released when something crashed into him and sent him flying through the air a few feet away to land in a snowy ditch on the hill.
Rolling over and looking up, snow falling off his coat, a blue blur entered his vision, and then a body followed. Tall male, early twenties with a shock of white hair and dark roots appeared in front of him, smirking as he casually walked past the fallen agent.
"You didn't see that coming?" The boy, presumably a local according to the accent, sped off before Clint could get another arrow up. He stared a little too long after the blur, and missed the bunker turret firing up again, falling down as his skin began to melt with a hiss under the hit from the gun.
"Clint!" Nat rushed over, kneeling down and starting to drag him behind the cover of a tree.
The thing continued to move through the woods, flipping up Steve into the air when in mid-observation, landing with practised ease and looking around quickly. "We have an enhanced in the field."
Evelyn closed in on any security cameras she could access, multiple screens tracking the figure speeding across each one. "I got eyes. Looks like a... weird thingy. What the..?" She attempted to pause and zoom, but the figure was too distorted to make out on any recording she could access.
"Clint's hit!" Natasha called out as the bunker continued firing around them, small explosions in the snow showering dirt across the landscape. "Somebody want to deal with that bunker?"
A distant roar came to her aid, the lumbering Hulk heroically trudging through the bunker destroying it and the patrolling guards before stumbling off into another part of the woods.
"Thank you," she said politely.
"I'm closing in. JARVIS, am I... closing in? Harley, do you see a power source for that shield?" Stark flew around overhead, firing beams at the guards attempting to shoot him down with the base-defence heavy artillery.
"According to the scan, there's a pair of gates leading to a pathway below the north tower." Typing a few things into the coding screen, Evie smiled. "And, oh, lucky for you, the gates are now open."
"Great, I wanna poke it with something." Stark rotated, grabbing a missile launched towards him and quickly turning his path around to send it under the newly opened gates, blowing up the power source for the invisible base shield and watching the forcefield retract from the building. "Drawbridge is down, people."
"Clint's hit pretty bad, guys. We're gonna need evac." Natasha bandaged the archer up as best she could.
Thor joined Steve on the ground, landing with a thud and kicking away another soldier. "I can get Barton to the jet. The sooner we're gone the better." The God spun his hammer, rebounding his power off Steve's shield to split up a platoon lining up to shoot, the tank at their backs quickly split down the centre. "You, Summers, and Stark secure the sceptre." Mjolnir quickly pulled its owner off the ground and towards Clint coordinates in a rush.
"And for gosh sake, watch your language!" Tony chimed in with an overtly motherly tone.
The ninety-five-year-old Captain sighed. "That's not going away anytime soon."
Iron Man burst through the window of the facility, the inside soldiers starting to aim their weapons at his suit. "Guys, stop, we gotta talk about this." The suit quickly started shooting agents in the legs and sides to disarm them, mowing them down without a seconds' chance of firing back. "Good talk."
"No, it wasn't."
Evelyn snorted at the agent's response, switching her view to the inside building cameras to follow Tony's movements as Thor, Natasha, Bruce, and Clint all stumbled through the open doors to the jet, laying Clint down on the table in the centre to tend to. "Clint, you okay?"
"Been better," Clint grit out, biting down hard on a cloth handed to him by Bruce as Natasha began applying antiseptic to his wound. It looked pretty bad, seared as if his skin was literally being eaten alive by something.
Stark landed on the floor of the lab, stepping out of his Iron Man suit which closed back up behind him. "Sentry mode," he instructed JARVIS, the suit quickly raising its arm, aiming in defence. The billionaire walked over to the computers lined against the wall, plugging in a secure Stark Industries USB. "Okay, JARVIS. You know I want it all. Make sure you copy to Hill at HQ. Harley, you watching this?"
"Eyes on target. There's not much here." She squinted at her screen, a habit Clint kept telling her she needed to kick before she got frown lines -not that he could talk-, flicking her view to different angles through the option of cameras. Finally, JARVIS's room scan blinked twice, highlighting a wall in a ring of red light, indicating a discrepancy. "The wall to your left. JARVIS is reading some steel reinforcement. And an air current. But something's blocking the scanner past that point." She couldn't see further past that part of the wall, not as if it weren't there but instead just a closed-off space.
Tony approached the section of the wall with a little helpful guidance of "cold, warmer, red hot" by the techie, sticking his hands out tentatively to feel around the rough surface of the bricks. "Please be a secret door, please be a secret door, please be a secret door..." He gave a push to the bricks and the wall opened up revealing to him indeed a secret door. "Yay!" The genius cheered quickly and entered through to a secret passageway. Tony reached into his pocket, sliding on a pair of glasses and tapping the rim of the right eyeglass twice to send the feed to Evelyn's computer. "H. Keep on my back," he instructed, footsteps echoing throughout the room.
"I'm watching. Keep walking," she assured him, eyes flicking over to Clint looking pretty bad on the table, but soon meeting her eyes and giving his best smile around the cloth gritted between his teeth. Trust Clint to try and be smiley in a situation like his.
"We have a second enhanced. Female. Do not engage." Steve suddenly interrupted, then a pause. "Guys, I got Strucker."
"Yeah, I got... something bigger." Inside the secret passageway, Stark walked forward into a room littered with recovered artefacts from the Battle of New York, including a gigantic Chitauri Leviathan hanging on display from the ceiling and some of his Iron Man scrapped armour he didn't remember loaning away to HYDRA. He narrowed his eyes at that, slightly ruffled. Then, as he wandered around to do a little more exploring, the glowing blue light in the centre of the room caught his attention, and he finally spotted the sceptre in its holding display. "Thor, I got eyes on the prize."
Movement on the sentry camera caught Summers' attention, a shadow passing through the doorway. "Stark, wait-"
Too late. Red magic was already flowing from the young enhanced's fingers, flooding into Tony's mind and affecting his vision before the shadow crept away to a darkened section of the lab, leaving Tony in a dreaming trance staring ahead at the sceptre. It was too dark to pick out details on the profile of who it had been, the grainy footage more of a hindrance now presented to Evelyn, but it had definitely been the second enhanced Steve mentioned moments before.
"Stark? Stark? You okay?" Evelyn asked, tapping her keyboard to make his glasses flash in front of his eyes in an alert. No response. It took a few seconds of concerned glances between herself, the assassin, the archer, the doctor, and the God, and some more flashes before Tony finally snapped out of his dream state.
"Yeah," he breathed out, rubbing his eyes with a gruff grumble when a flash caught him off-guard.
Evelyn stopped pressing the button, mumbling an apology.
Focusing back on the mission at hand, he shook his head free of the whispering aftereffects his dream, thrust out his arm to the side, circling around the sceptre before the arm of his suit finally followed his call and attached itself to him and he grabbed the sceptre from its holder, triumphantly. "I've got the sceptre. And I'm bringing it home."
Evelyn breathed out, setting her laptop to the side and slumping against the bench, Bruce soon joining her in a new jumper and sweatpants, looking dishevelled and sweaty. She got up, walking to the centre table and perching on the edge, looking at Clint as Natasha moved away to tend to the jet. The techie reached out, taking Clint's hand and squeezing, feeling an equal squeeze in return as he drifted off with the drugs at the same time Tony and Steve returned, and the plane started flying off back to headquarters.