Chapter 16 : GRAVITATIONAL PULL
The lab was chaos contained.
Gravitonium swirled in a massive generator at the room's center, silver-black liquid that moved like something alive, something hungry. The air itself felt wrong—heavy in places, light in others, my inner ear screaming conflicting signals about which way was down.
Dr. Franklin Hall stood before the generator with his arms spread wide, face illuminated by the otherworldly glow. He looked peaceful. Content. Like a man who'd finally found his purpose.
Skye was on her knees near the door, hands behind her head, two of Quinn's security team covering her with automatic weapons. Quinn himself stood nearby, phone to his ear, speaking rapid Italian to someone who presumably handled problems like unexpected SHIELD infiltrators.
None of them had seen me yet.
I crouched in the maintenance corridor, assessing angles. Two guards on Skye, one more by the main entrance, Quinn distracted by his call. Hall was... somewhere else mentally, communing with his gravitonium like a man at prayer.
My enhanced reflexes could get me to Skye before the guards reacted. Probably. The problem was what happened after—two trained security personnel with automatic weapons versus one guy with a knife and some enhanced reflexes.
Bad odds. But better than leaving her there.
I moved.
The first guard went down before he registered my presence—knife handle to the temple, hard enough to drop him without killing. The second spun, weapon coming up, and I was already inside his reach, grabbing the barrel and driving my elbow into his throat.
"Jake?" Skye's voice, shocked and relieved in equal measure.
"Move!"
She scrambled away from the fallen guards as Quinn turned, phone forgotten, face cycling through surprise, anger, and calculation in rapid succession.
"Who the hell—"
The building shook.
Not an earthquake. Something worse. The gravitonium in its generator pulsed, and suddenly the floor wasn't level anymore. I stumbled, caught myself against a console, watched Quinn slide toward the far wall as gravity decided to cooperate with something other than down.
"Franklin, what are you doing?" Quinn shouted.
Hall didn't respond. His eyes were closed, hands moving through the air like a conductor leading an orchestra only he could hear. The gravitonium responded to every gesture, swirling faster, glowing brighter.
"He's activating it," Skye breathed, grabbing my arm for balance as the floor tilted another ten degrees. "The whole generator—he's trying to—"
"Overload it." I understood now. Hall wasn't a victim. He never had been. "He wanted to be here. He wanted access to this."
"Why?"
"Because the only way to destroy something this dangerous is from the inside."
The building groaned. Metal stressed beyond its limits. Somewhere above us, glass shattered.
---
We found cover behind a bank of equipment as the gravity fluctuations intensified. One moment we were pressed against the floor, the next practically floating, then slammed sideways into walls that shouldn't have been walls.
"We need to get out," Skye said, her hand finding mine and gripping tight. "The whole compound is going to—"
"We can't leave him like this." I watched Hall through the chaos, his form flickering as gravity bent around him. "If the generator overloads with all this gravitonium inside, it won't just destroy Malta. The shockwave could—"
"Could what?"
I didn't have a good answer. In the show, Coulson had stopped Hall by shooting the floor out from under him, dropping him into the gravitonium itself. The element had absorbed him, stabilized, and waited. But that solution created its own problems—Hall was still alive in there, slowly going mad, eventually becoming Graviton.
Could I change that? Could I find another way?
The decision was taken from me.
Coulson burst through the main entrance, Ward half a step behind. They must have found another way in when my unauthorized infiltration created the distraction Quinn's security team needed to investigate.
"Hall!" Coulson's voice cut through the chaos. "Frank, you need to stop this!"
The physicist opened his eyes. They were calm, resigned. "Phil. I wondered if you'd make it."
"The gravitonium can be contained. We can study it safely, find ways to—"
"No." Hall's voice carried despite the screaming metal and groaning stone. "You can't contain this, Phil. No one can. It's too powerful, too dangerous. Quinn wanted to weaponize it. SHIELD would want to study it. Someone else would want to control it. The only way to be sure is to remove it from the equation entirely."
"By destroying Malta?"
"By destroying everything within the blast radius, yes." Hall smiled sadly. "Including myself. It's the only way to be certain."
Gravity spiked. I found myself pressed against the ceiling, staring down at a floor that had become a wall. Skye's hand was still in mine, both of us pinned by forces that shouldn't exist.
Coulson was fighting to stand, every step a battle against physics that no longer followed rules. He had his weapon drawn, but the angle was wrong, the gravity was wrong, everything was wrong.
"Frank, please. There has to be another way."
"There isn't." Hall's voice was gentle, almost kind. "You know there isn't. You're just not ready to accept it yet."
I saw the moment Coulson made the choice.
His expression didn't change—that was the terrifying part. No dramatic struggle, no visible anguish. Just a man calculating odds, weighing lives, and finding an answer he didn't like but would live with anyway.
He aimed at the floor beneath Hall's feet.
He fired.
---
The floor gave way.
Hall fell, or rather was pulled, gravity doing what Coulson's bullet had merely enabled. The gravitonium rose to meet him, liquid metal embracing flesh, absorbing the man who had tried to destroy it.
The generator's light shifted from threatening pulse to steady glow. The gravity fluctuations smoothed. The building stopped screaming.
We dropped from the ceiling as physics remembered its job. I landed hard, ribs protesting the impact, but kept my grip on Skye's hand. She landed beside me, breathing hard, eyes fixed on the generator.
Hall was gone. No body, no remains. Just the gravitonium, swirling peacefully in its containment field, waiting.
"Is he... is he dead?" Skye's voice was barely a whisper.
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to give her the clean answer, the simple grief. But I'd seen this episode. I knew what was waiting in that silver-black soup.
"I don't know," I said instead. The truest lie I'd ever told.
Coulson holstered his weapon and walked toward the generator. His face was stone, but I could see the cracks underneath—the places where this choice would live, would fester, would haunt.
"We need to contain this," he said. "Get it back to a secure SHIELD facility."
"Sir." Ward's voice, professional despite the chaos. "Quinn escaped during the gravity fluctuations. Compound security is compromised."
"Then we work fast."
The next hour was a blur of SHIELD protocols and containment procedures. Teams arrived. Equipment was secured. The gravitonium was loaded onto a transport vessel bound for somewhere deep and dark and hopefully forgotten.
Nobody mentioned Hall except in reports that would be classified above my clearance level.
Nobody talked about what Coulson had done.
But I watched his face as the transport lifted off, carrying the element—and the man absorbed by it—away from Malta.
Some choices didn't leave you clean. This was one of them.
---
The Bus was quiet during the flight back.
Skye sat beside me in the common area, close enough that our shoulders touched. Neither of us spoke. The silence was easier than words.
At some point, I realized I was still holding her hand. Had been since the lab, through the extraction, through the boarding. She hadn't let go either.
"You came for me," she said finally. "You disobeyed direct orders, infiltrated an enemy compound, and came for me."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question deserved a real answer. I turned to face her, not releasing her hand.
"Because I couldn't sit there and listen to silence. Because my instincts were screaming that you were in danger. Because—" I stopped, searching for words that were true without being too true. "Because you matter. To the team. To the mission. To me."
She studied my face with that sharp attention I'd learned to recognize. Looking for lies. Looking for angles.
"You barely know me," she said.
"I know enough."
"That's not—" She stopped, frustrated. "People don't just do that. Risk everything, throw away their careers, for someone they've known a few weeks."
"Some people do."
"Jake—"
"You would have done the same for me."
That stopped her. She opened her mouth to argue, closed it, opened it again.
"Yeah," she admitted finally. "I would have."
"Then we understand each other."
She didn't say anything else. But her grip on my hand tightened, and she leaned her head against my shoulder, and the silence became something warmer.
The copying was progressing—I could feel it, that slow absorption of her dormant potential into my own genetics. But that wasn't why I'd gone in after her. That wasn't why I was sitting here, exhausted and bruised and probably facing serious consequences.
Some things mattered more than power. Some people mattered more than plans.
I found Coulson in his office an hour later, staring at Hall's personnel file with eyes that saw something else entirely.
"I'm sorry," I said from the doorway.
He didn't look up. "For what?"
For not saving him. For knowing and not being able to say. For all of it.
"For all of it," I said out loud.
Coulson closed the file. "Get some rest, Mordered. We'll talk about your unauthorized infiltration in the morning."
"Yes, sir."
I left him alone with his choices and went to find somewhere quiet to process my own.
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