Shattered

“They’re not here.”

Proxima Midnight kicked a nearby wall. Oh, Thanos was going to kill her! Well- probably not. He’d sent her these coordinates, after all… perhaps they had moved elsewhere on this planet.

The communicator at her belt went off, and she pulled it out. “What, Ebony?”

“The Time Stone is nowhere to be found.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have just led an attack on one of the Sanctums only to find that the Time Stone is not there.”

“I’ve had similar trouble with the Mind Stone. Thanos had tracked it to some compound- it appears everyone has left, however, we haven’t been able to find a soul.”

“Damnit.”

She sighed, and debated kicking the wall again, but decided against it- these shoes were not cheap. Instead, she walked deeper into the ship- maybe there would be a clue, somewhere, as to where they had gone. Terrans were not known for their astonishing technological or stealth skills- in fact, Terrans were not known for anything in particular- so they were bound to have left some sort of trace behind.

Five minutes later, she found it- a shipping log with coordinates plugged in for the other side of the continent, with a ship that had left not even half an hour ago. She picked up her communicator.

“Ebony.”

“What?”

“I’ve found them.”

-------------------------

“When did you say they were supposed to be here again?”

Scott turned to look at Hope, and grinned. “You sound like Cassie.”

She shot him her nastiest glare from her spot in the driver’s seat. “Scott.”

Alright, he knew when he was beat- there was more power carried in that word than Scott could handle right now. “They should be here in, like, ten minutes.”

“Then why did you say we had to leave so early?”

“Because I didn’t know how fast the mini car could go, and I was worried we’d be late!”

“Oh, no, god forbid your fancy Avenger friends have to wait a couple of minutes.”

“You know, they’re not technically my friends, I mean Wanda kind of is but I’ve met Vision like once-”

“Are they always like this?” Ava interrupted. Scott chanced a glance back- he was so glad he’d managed to call shotgun, because Ava, Hank, and Janet were all crammed into the backseat and looking incredibly uncomfortable.

“No,” said Hope.

“Yes,” said Hank, at the exact same time.

Ava looked like she trusted Hank more, which said a lot, since she kind of hated Hank, he thought. But he had no time to dwell on this, because there was a giant spaceship descending to the Earth.

His first thought was oh, cool, a spaceship! He’d never seen one of those before! Then his brain caught up, and he panicked, because there weren’t supposed to be any spaceships because they were on Earth. Which meant that these must be those bad aliens that Captain America had been talking about.

“Shit.”

“What?” Hank pressed. “Is that bad?”

“Um, yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be here.”

Four different figures climbed out of the ship, and they were definitely not Vision and Wanda. Because, as far as he knew, Vision and Wanda weren’t aliens (even if one was a witch and the other was a robot, which weren’t things you usually found on Earth- but, like. He was pretty sure they weren’t aliens), and these guys definitely were, since they were weirdly colored. (And, yes, he knew Vision was bright red, but whatever.)

He was starting to wish they’d left the car in mini size, but he’d wanted the people coming to pick them up to be able to see them. Now, he was regretting that- the location he’d picked had been a soccer field in a nearby suburb, and it wasn’t exactly hard to see a car across a soccer field.

They sat there, frozen, as all four figures seemed to see them at once, and turned towards them. “Shit. Hope, drive. Drive drive drive-”

She scrambled for the transmission, putting the car in reverse so that they could get as far away from the scary aliens as they could. The car jerked into motion, bringing them back to the road they’d driven to get to the field- Hope put the car in drive and they sped off down the road. Scott didn’t know what the speed limit was, but they were definitely breaking it.

“Holy shit, they’re following us!” Scott said in what was definitely not a shriek. “They’re fast.”

Hope suddenly got that look in her eye that usually preceded something dangerous, and he gulped. “Hope?”

“Hang on!”

“Wha- aaaahh!”

She had jammed the button that turned the car tiny at the same time that she jerked the wheel to the side, towards the side of the road. As they shrank, they missed hitting the bottom of the guardrail by mere inches, but managed to slide under it and into the woodsy area near the road.

“What are you doing?!”

“Driving!”

“Hope, don’t run into that tree root!” Hank shouted.

“Shit!”

Hope jerked the wheel again, and Scott heard the distinct sound of three people getting squished together up against a window. 

“Scott, make sure your suit’s activated,” she told him, sounding relatively calm considering the circumstances. “Dad, give me anything that might make this easier.”

Hank immediately started rifling through his bag as Hope made another sharp turn (Hank grunted as he slammed into the windshield this time, Janet pressed up against his side and Ava nearly falling off the seat). “Can you see them?”

“Let me- oh, god, one of them’s flying!”

A weird blue guy was flying over the forest, clearly scanning for any sign of them. The other three he could hear crashing through the undergrowth, presumably conducting a similar search.

“Hope, try to hide under something, maybe we can- oh, shit.”

It was too late for that- the floating guy had spotted them, and the next thing he knew, there was a hail of spikes of wood coming at them.

“Hope!”

“I know!”

“Under that rock!”

A spike of wood just barely missed them, taking off one of the side mirrors as it went. 

“Go, go, go!”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“We’re gonna die!”

“Hope, open up the sunroof!”

“What?”

“Open up the sunroof!”

“Why?”

“I’ve got something to throw at this guy!”

Oh, thank god. Trust Hank to always have a trusty gadget handy.

That gadget turned out to be the oldest trick in the book, at least for them- a mini truck that he managed to turn giant in midair, soaring right towards Floating Guy.

Scott grinned- that always worked. But the grin dropped right off his face when he simply flicked the truck aside, sending it into a tree, and kept on flying.

“Oh fu-”

He was catching up to them now, and he could see the other three closing in, and now Floating Guy was right on top of them-

Hope turned the car big again, and Floating Guy actually got caught off guard, because he got pushed back by the expanding car and landed on his back on the forest ground.

“Ha! Take that, you weird blue alien!”

Their victory was short lived- one of the other aliens, what looked to be a woman, pointed a glowing stick at them and shot something at their car.

Since cars generally don’t like having blue balls of energy shot at them, it immediately stopped, and started steaming and making awful noises that a car should not make. It occurred to Scott that this would probably be a good time to get out, and he told his team this, and then they scrambled out of the car just in time for it to explode.

“Well, shit.”

One of the aliens was on him in a second, holding a sharp blade to his throat. “Where is the stone?”

Stone? What was he talking about? What- ohhhh. Steve had said something about stones.

But, of course, playing clueless tended to get you places, so that was what he did. “Huh?”

“Tell us, or your friends die!”

He played for time. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. There are some stones on the ground, here, if you want-”

“Foolish human!” The one holding him shook him around. “This one is useless.” Well, excuse him. “You! Where are the stones?”

Yeah, that was more like it. He’d have much better luck interrogating Hope- wait, no! That was his girlfriend!

She was being held by one of the other aliens- she was busying herself kicking at its shins, even when it was nearly twice her size- while Hank had his arms held behind him by the one who’d destroyed their car. Floating Guy had both Janet and Ava suspended in the air and held back by some weird rope things. In short, they were screwed.

“We don’t have any stones,” Hope growled. 

“Then why did you run?” asked Floating Guy. 

“Because we saw some weird space guys get out of a spaceship, why wouldn’t we run?” They all turned to look at him weirdly (even some of his own friends, how rude), and Scott decided that he should probably just stop talking.

“If we followed a bad lead again-” Floating Guy growled, glaring at the woman.

“Those were the correct coordinates! If you think you could do a better job-”

“Yes, I probably could. We could interrogate them and find out where their friends went, I’m sure they’d be more than happy to divulge that information… with some persuasion.”

“Look, buddy, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. We don’t really even have any friends, loners, really-” Hope made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat, and she leaned her head back in exasperation- “so you could probably just let us go. We won’t tell a soul, promise.”

“If you are innocent,” Floating Guy said in a voice that implied that he did not believe this in the slightest, “why were you at the coordinate points, sitting there by yourselves? What were you doing there?”

Um. “Lucky coincidence, I guess. We were just- looking at- bugs?” What else did they have at  soccer fields? He certainly couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation for five fully grown adults sitting around at a random field. “Because we, uh, think that they’re cool?”

“What?” asked the woman, completely flabbergasted.

“Hey, it’s not normal, but we’re a bit weird,” he said, which was probably the most truthful thing he’d told them so far.

“I don’t believe them,” Floating Guy said flatly, and so they were exactly where they started.

“Well-”

And then, everything happened at once. Two people descended from the sky- one, Vision, shot a beam of light at the alien holding Hank, and the other, Wanda, sent a burst of red energy towards the alien holding Scott. Hope pressed her regulator, shrank down, and the woman holding her went flying backwards. Ava phased and managed to slip out of the ropes binding her, and before Floating Guy could register what had happened, she’d kicked him in the balls.

He winced in sympathy- he’d been kicked by Ava plenty of times in the last couple of days, and that must have hurt. Floating Guy winced and stumbled back, but to his credit, recovered relatively quickly. Unfortunately for him, Wanda, apparently done kicking someone else’s ass, grabbed him in a shroud of red and swung him up towards the trees.

Scott, who had basically been standing there frozen with fear the entire time (it wasn’t like they really needed him- Hope, Ava, and Wanda could more than handle themselves), turned to Wanda. “Holy shit, you guys saved our asses!”

“Don’t worry about it,” she gasped. He noticed, dimly, that her accent had started to fade. “Go take care of that guy.”

Oh, right, there were bad guys to fight. He shrunk down and ran towards one of the aliens who was starting to get up, and went to work.

Where the odds had been not so in their favor before, now they had the advantage- they had more people, and they also had Wanda and Vision, who were substantially more powerful than any of them were. And so it was only a few minutes before the alien woman shouted “Retreat!”, and all of the other aliens seemed to agree with her, even Floating Guy, who looked like he might be concussed (did aliens get concussions?) from all the times Wanda had slammed him into the ground. 

He had not been expecting them to get suddenly beamed up into the sky, and apparently none of his teammates had either, because none of them stopped them as they flew into the sky.

They stood there in silence for a second, chests heaving, before Hope groaned. “Jesus. I can’t believe we survived that.”

“Though not without a couple of injuries,” Hank frowned, dabbing at a cut on his forehead.

“Yes, of course,” Wanda said, looking completely uninjured from what he could see.

“That was actually pretty fun,” Janet shrugged, stretching out her legs. “Haven’t gotten to do the whole fighting thing for a while. What’s next?”

Wanda grinned. “Another bit of a plane ride. We’re going to Wakanda.”

--------------------------

Ever since the battle of New York, Tony had thought he could handle anything the universe threw at him, at least mentally- nothing could possibly be weirder than a megalomaniac god of mischief trying to take over the world with an alien army, right? This confidence had been tested a few times- first with Ultron, because that whole situation had been insane- there had suddenly been witches and robot armies and a synthezoid that he’d adopted, somehow- but, overall, it didn’t completely stun him. The whole “spaceship on his tower with Bruce and two scary ladies in it” had been a bit of a stretch, too, because he knew space existed and, hey, they hadn’t been able to find any sign of Bruce on Earth. And actually going to space- well, it was insane, but it didn’t take too much stretching of the imagination. So, yes, Tony Stark lived in relative confidence that not much could surprise him anymore.

And then Thor’s crazy Death sister showed up to the next council meeting sitting on a giant wolf with an army of what looked to be the literal walking dead behind her.

Peter would think this was so cool, he thought, because at this point, he didn’t even know where to begin questioning this.

Looking at the throne, Thor seemed to be in a similar position. “I- what. I. Um.” Then, he seemed to remember that he was a king, and straightened. “Sister, I- explain yourself.”

“Hm?” Hela looked up from where she’d been pretending to check her nails. “Oh, yes, sorry I’m a bit late, I had to grab something. And then Brunnhilde insisted we get drinks.”

“Hey, I haven’t had Asgardian mean in forever!” Brunnhilde protested, peeking out from where she was sitting behind Hela.

Thor let out a strangled, choked noise. “That’s not- I mean- that’s- what’s happening?”

“Oh, you mean Fenris? Yes, this is my dog. Don’t worry, he’s trained, he won’t jump on people unless I tell him to.”

“You know that’s not the point I’m trying to make,” Thor sighed. “Norns, Loki does the same thing to me. Where did you get the giant dog and the- army of the dead?”

Hela smirked at him. “Odin’s vault.”

“How did you- ok, no, I’m not going to ask.”

“Good idea. I had to use the eternal flame to reawaken them, sorry about that, but I figured we’d need all the help we could get. Besides, I thought Fenris was probably lonely all the way down there, and I needed to rescue him immediately.” She put a pout on her face.

Dimly, in the part of his brain that wasn’t still trying to accept the image in front of him, he noted that Hela seemed a little different now that they’d gotten to Asgard. More confident. Less like she was going to fall over if you shoved her a bit, which he’d been a little worried about, to be honest. But she had adorned a cape and armor instead of the frankly ridiculously big clothes she’d had on earlier, and was sitting up straight on Fenris, and was looking at Thor directly in the eye (although, he noticed a couple of cracks in the facade- her jaw was too tense, and her fingers were tapping against her leg, and her breathing was too regulated to be completely normal).

“That. I. You know what?” Thor said, suddenly sounding very tired. “Just- take a seat. We have some things to discuss.”

Hela grinned at him, and dismounted Fenris (Brunnhilde stumbled a bit when she hit the ground), and led him over to the side of the room.

“Right,” Thor muttered, still sending them wary glances. But, again, he seemed to remember that he was a king now, and turned his gaze to the waiting council. “Now. Let’s get down to business….”