"Stark, we're on your tail — heading north-east," Natasha called into the radio.
"What did you stop for — drive-through?!" Tony shot back. "Swing up Park Avenue, I'm going to lay them out for you!"
Natasha pushed the jet hard into the city streets, threading between buildings toward Stark Tower. Tony came blazing past us a moment later with a wing of Chitauri on his tail. Natasha hit the machine gun and pinned the aliens, buying Tony room to breathe.
We climbed toward the tower. On the penthouse level we found Loki and Thor already fighting — one on one, hammer against sceptre.
"Nat!" Clint pointed downward.
"I see him," she said, swinging the jet toward Loki.
The god of mischief turned and levelled his sceptre at us. "Hold on!" I grabbed Steve and stuck us both to the fuselage as the plasma bolt hit the jet and the world went sideways.
We came down hard — a concrete plaza below the tower, the jet scraping and spinning before it stopped. The landing was violent but survivable. We piled out quickly and looked up at the sky. More and more Chitauri were pouring through the portal.
"We have to get back up there!" Steve called out.
"I can get us up — I think," I said.
But before anyone could respond, something came through the portal that stopped us all.
It came out of the blue vortex slowly at first — a vast shadow that resolved into a shape. A Leviathan. A creature the size of a battleship, serpentine and armoured in overlapping metal plates, cruising through the sky on alien anti-gravity with hundreds of Chitauri soldiers clinging to its flanks.
"Oh, hell," I breathed.
I had seen it in the films. On a screen, in a cinema, in my previous life. And even then it had been impressive. But here, now, with the creature's shadow washing over a city block and its riders already leaping to building walls and firing blue energy into office windows — this was something else entirely. This was the kind of thing that reached down into some animal part of the brain and simply said: flee.
I pushed it down.
The creature passed overhead and began depositing soldiers into the buildings. Flashes of blue energy. Screaming.
"Stark, are you seeing this?" Steve said into his communicator.
"Seeing it. Still working on the believing it," Tony replied. "Where's Banner? Has he shown up?"
"Banner?" Cap replied.
"Just keep me posted," Tony said, and cut off.
"They're being slaughtered!" I said, pointing at the tower blocks. "People are dying in there."
"Go!" Steve ordered. "Help them — we'll hold the ground down here!"
I nodded and leaped to the nearest building.
I found the floor with the most active fighting by following the sounds of energy weapons and screaming. I broke through a blown-out window.
The sight inside made my chest tight. Burning holes punched through walls. Bodies. The particular kind of mess that plasma weapons leave.
The anger came fast, clean, and cold.
SWIT.
Four red arms erupted from my back, blades gleaming. Fine. No more holding back.
"ARGH!" I charged into the corridor. Three Chitauri soldiers turned around as I came at them. They didn't get another movement. I put three arms through three skulls in rapid succession, and levelled a repulsor at the remaining soldiers and fired — scattering them into an emergency door.
I turned to the survivors. "Downstairs. Stay off the street. If they come to you — hide. Understood?"
They nodded and ran.
I kept moving. Building to building, floor by floor. Each time the same — Chitauri inside, civilians cowering, a few seconds of violence, then ushering people toward the stairs. I lost count of how many I cleared.
On one run I spotted two Chitauri flyers coming down the street. I grinned. I fired two thick concrete web lines across the street, anchoring them to the opposite building, and stretched them taut. Waited.
Two cruisers hit the lines at speed and flipped, crashing into the road. The remaining ones stopped short of the webs and turned toward me.
I jumped onto the first one.
They swung their lance weapons at me. I answered with a repulsor burst that threw both riders off. I backflipped to the next cruiser, drove my spider arms into the operator's chest, and felt the craft buckling as the others opened fire on their own position rather than let me hold it.
I jumped clear as the cruiser fell. I caught a building wall, ran down its side, knocking Chitauri climbers loose as I went.
Below, Natasha and Clint were fighting back-to-back in the plaza. I swung down, landed on a soldier charging at Natasha's blind side, and rolled to come up with it in my grip before webbing it to a lamp post.
Another came at Clint's back. I threw myself between them, and an arrow went past my ear and through its skull.
I looked back at Clint.
"I had it," I said.
"Right," he said, with the smallest smile.
A Chitauri landed three feet from him. I raised a hand and hit it with a repulsor beam that sent it into the wall behind us.
"Thanks," I said.
"You're welcome," he replied.
A fresh squad. Natasha had acquired a Chitauri energy weapon and was putting it to extremely effective use. Clint was cycling arrows without slowing down. I was picking off anything that got through.
I closed with the next soldier — snapped its arm, put my palm against its head, and channelled a concentrated burst of bio-electricity directly through it. The lights went out in one direction, and the soldier dropped.
I stood over it and breathed. That took a significant amount of energy. The biological fry was costly and slow. Something to use sparingly.
Then Cap came leaping into the fight, shield spinning — a beautiful, controlled thing, the physics of it genuinely remarkable — and between the four of us we cleared the plaza in under a minute.
"What's the story upstairs?" Cap asked.
Thor landed beside us, landing heavily, one hand pressed to his ribs. He was bleeding. He looked at me and the apology was written plainly across his face.
"I am sorry, Spider," he said. "I did not mean to hit that hard."
I shrugged. "Not the time, Goldilocks. We'll discuss it later."
"How do we close the portal?" Natasha asked.
"As a team," Cap said.
"I have unfinished business with Loki," Thor said.
"Yeah?" Clint said, adjusting his quiver. "Get in line."
"Save it," Steve said. "Loki's keeping that beam focused — which is exactly what we need. Without him, these things run without direction. We have Stark up top. So here's what we do."
The rumble of a small engine cut him off.
We turned. Bruce Banner pulled up to us on a battered old scooter in baggy civilian clothes. He dismounted with the slightly bewildered expression of a man who had just had a very unusual commute.
"So," he said, surveying the chaos of Manhattan with quiet resignation. "This all seems rather terrible."
"I've seen worse," Natasha said.
Bruce looked faintly pained. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," she said. "We could use a little worse."
"Stark, he's here," Steve said into his communicator.
"Banner? Good. Tell him to suit up — I'm bringing the party to you."
Tony appeared at the end of the avenue, moving fast and low. Something enormous was following him.
"I don't see how that constitutes a party," Natasha said.
"That thing is the piñata," I said. "And Bruce is going to hit it very, very hard."
Steve looked at Bruce. "Dr. Banner — now would be a good time to get angry."
"That's my secret, Captain," Bruce said, walking calmly toward the oncoming Leviathan as Tony screamed overhead. "I'm always angry."
He turned and punched.
The Hulk's fist caught the Leviathan mid-charge and stopped it dead — the shockwave rolled back over all of us, the creature's forward momentum simply cancelled. Then Tony came back around and put a missile directly into the exposed flesh of its underbelly.
It came down in pieces.
We spread into a loose circle, backs toward the centre, facing outward. Tony landed. The Hulk roared. I could almost hear the theme music.
"ARGH!" a surviving Chitauri shouted something guttural at us.
"Yeah?!" I yelled back. "Come and get some!"
The portal pulsed.
Three more Leviathans came out.
I felt hope waver. Just for a moment. I pushed it back down.
"Call it, Cap," Tony said.
"Alright," Steve said. "Until we can close that portal, containment is priority. Barton—" he looked up at the rooftops. "I want you on high ground. Watch for patterns, call out strays. Stark — you've got the perimeter. Turn them back or turn them to ash."
"Lift?" Clint asked.
"Clench up, Legolas," Tony said, and took him into the air.
"Thor," Steve said. "We need that portal bottlenecked. You've got the lightning — light them up." Thor was gone before Steve finished the sentence.
Steve turned to Natasha and me. "You and I stay on the ground. We keep the fight here." He looked at me. "Spider — can you web those flyers? Same as before?"
"Not a problem," I said.
"And Hulk." Steve turned to the green mountain. "Smash."
The Hulk smiled. It was a small, slow smile, which somehow made it more terrifying. Then he leaped — straight into a building where the Chitauri had the poor judgment to be shooting at him.
I went.
I hit the repulsors for a boost, swung clear of the ground, and started thinking about the city the way I knew it — every block, every alley, every street that funnelled traffic a particular way. I knew this city like I had been born in it.
I landed on a building and adjusted my web gauntlets to mass-dispersion mode — a setting I had designed specifically for situations like this, that fired large quantities of webbing across a wide area rather than in a precise line. I had never used it in the field before.
I anchored lines to opposite buildings and pulled them taut. A moment later a wing of Chitauri flyers came screaming around the corner and hit the net at speed. They went down like flies.
I moved to the next block. Set another trap. Then the next. I worked across the grid of streets methodically, building a web-work of aerial barriers. I caught dozens of flyers in the first ten minutes.
"Watch it!" I called out as Tony nearly flew straight through one of them.
"Sorry, kid! Didn't spot it!" He pulled up and over. "There's a squad down on Sixth — can you handle it?"
"Easily," I said, already swinging.
I came down on Sixth just in time to find a group of Chitauri cornering a cluster of civilians against a plate glass frontage. I was about to go in when a figure in black dropped from above and hit the first soldier hard across the back.
I knew that fighting style.
"Cat?!" I landed on a soldier's head, driving it into the pavement, then pierced three Chitauri simultaneously with my spider arms. I whipped a web line at a soldier raising its weapon toward Felicia and yanked it off its feet. "I told you to stay out of Manhattan!"
"And you knew I wouldn't," she replied, reloading and shooting a Chitauri through the shoulder with the grapple gun I had made her, then putting a follow-up round through its skull.
"Where did you get a gun?!"
"Mum's a criminal lawyer. Where do you think?" Three more shots.
"That is extremely unsafe, Cat—" I drove an arm through an alien's head and used its body as a shield against incoming fire.
"You have nuclear weapons built into your palms," she pointed out.
"I love you," I said, and threw the last Chitauri through the air. Felicia shot it before it landed.
I turned to the gathered civilians. Fifty people, at least — maybe more. I looked at Felicia. "You need to get them out."
"I'm not leaving you to fight this alone—"
"Felicia." I put both hands on her shoulders. "I'll be fine. These people need you. Get them underground, get them out of the city. That's the job right now."
"You're just trying to remove me from the fight," she growled.
"Absolutely," I said. "Because you're not ready for what's out there yet. And I promise — I am going to help you get ready. But right now, Kitten — please. Be safe. For me."
She didn't like it. But she knew I was right.
She reached up to the side of my helmet, found the release for the mouthpiece — the modification I had added for eating on the go — and slid it upward. Then she kissed me.
Arms around my neck, her whole body leaning in, and I held her back and didn't think about the cameras going off all around us or the city falling apart in every direction. When she finally pulled back, her eyes were bright.
"Come back alive, Spider," she said quietly. "Or I'm telling everyone about that night with me, you, and Jean."
"I love you, Kitten. Stay safe," I said.
She nodded once — and then she was organising the civilians with the same quiet authority she turned on everything else, moving them toward the nearest subway entrance. I watched until they were out of sight.
I dropped my mouthpiece back into place. Time to work.
"Nat?! Was that you?!" I swung past a flash of red hair in an alien cruiser.
"Not now, Spider!" she yelled, banking the stolen craft hard between two buildings.
I blinked. A Russian in an alien spacecraft. Genuinely didn't see that coming.
I found another cluster of Chitauri cornering civilians and police on a main avenue. The police were firing at them but the numbers were wrong. I dropped a web grenade directly into the middle of the alien formation — plasma fire from the Chitauri caught the webbing, burning through it, but the structural tangle held long enough to trap them.
I landed in front of them, crouched behind a police cruiser, and lifted it. I looked at the stunned officers beside me. "Borrowing this for a moment."
I turned and brought the car down on the webbed mass with both hands.
I moved on. I worked the perimeter that the police and army had established, forcing the Chitauri back one block at a time, buying space for civilians to get clear. I pushed inward slowly.
I found Steve near the centre — suit burnt, face bruised, looking like he'd been at it for a decade.
"Cap!" I landed beside him. "Are you alright?"
"Just a bit bruised," he said. "I'll live."
A Chitauri squad came around the corner before he finished speaking. Steve raised his shield. I leaped over him as the fire stopped and drove my repulsors into their formation.
Steve's shield spun through the ranks and I caught it on a web line, spinning it in a wider and wider arc — a devastating disc of vibranium cutting through the Chitauri line again and again — before I released it back to Steve, who caught it clean.
A plasma bolt hit me in the stomach.
I hadn't moved fast enough. It burned through the suit and scorched the skin beneath. I hit the road and skidded.
"Spider!" Steve put himself between me and further fire while I got up. My gut was screaming. I pulled myself together and checked the damage — bad, but not catastrophic. The armour had absorbed most of it.
Lightning came down and killed everything still standing. Thor landed.
"They grow bolder," he said.
"We can't hold them forever," I said, looking at the sky. The portal was still wide open, still pouring out enemies. "We need it closed."
"Anyone read me?" Natasha's voice came through. "I can close the portal from here."
"Do it!" Steve said immediately.
"No — wait!" Tony's voice cut in.
"Stark, these things are not stopping—"
"There's a nuclear missile incoming. Less than a minute out. And I know exactly where it needs to go."
I looked at Steve. He looked at Thor. Thor looked at me.
"Stark," Steve said carefully. "You know that's a one-way trip."
"Save the rest for when I'm back, J," Tony said — and killed the feed.
We looked up. Tony came out of the sky beneath a missile — guiding it upward with his hands, tilting its trajectory, pointing it at the sky.
Pointing it at the portal.
For a moment we all just watched him go.
Then more Chitauri dropped around us, and we had to stop watching.
I charged up my repulsors. The Chitauri came at us in a wave — and then, one by one, they stopped moving. Every single one of them.
And fell.
All at once. Across the street, across every rooftop, across the city — the Chitauri went dark and hit the ground like puppets with their strings cut.
I looked up.
The portal was closing.
And Tony wasn't coming through.
I watched the gap narrow. I willed it wider. I waited.
"Close it," Steve said quietly.
"Wait," I said. "He might still—"
"Spider."
"He can still make it—"
"Widow," Steve said. "Close it."
The beam from Stark Tower cut out. The portal began to collapse inward, the edges drawing together.
And then, in the final second — in the absolute last sliver of light before the portal sealed itself — a red and gold shape came tumbling through.
Tony. Falling. No thrust, no stabilisers. Just falling.
"He's not slowing down — Thor, go!"
Thor was already spinning his hammer. But the Hulk crossed a rooftop at speed and made the catch first — hand over hand down the building face until he landed on the street with Tony safe in his arms.
We ran.
Thor tore Tony's faceplate off. His eyes were closed. His face was still.
"Give me room," I said, pushing through.
I gathered bio-electricity into both palms — concentrated it, focused it — and pressed my hands to his chest.
The discharge hit like a defibrillator.
"AH!" Tony lurched awake, gasping, eyes flying open. He looked around at all of us. "What — what just happened? Nobody kissed me, right? Please tell me nobody kissed me."
"Steve was considering it," I said.
Cap gave me a look that was trying very hard not to be a smile.
Tony let his head fall back. "We won," Steve said, looking out across the broken, smoking city.
"Alright," Tony said. "Yay. Good job, everyone. Let's not do this again tomorrow. Give ourselves a day." He looked at me. "You ever had shawarma, kid? There's a place about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is exactly, but I want to try it."
I thought about it. "I could eat."
"We are not finished," Thor said, eyes on the tower.
I nodded. "Loki."
Tony sighed deeply. "Fine. But shawarma after. Non-negotiable."
We went up. Natasha and Clint met us at the penthouse.
Loki had crawled out of the crater the Hulk had made of him at some earlier point in the evening and was currently attempting to get to his feet when he saw all of us looking down at him. Clint's arrow was trained at his head. Thor's hammer crackled with restrained lightning. Tony and I had our repulsors levelled. Natasha held his sceptre with the particular ease of someone who had made it hers the moment she picked it up.
Loki looked at all of us.
He slowly raised his hands.
"If it's all the same to you," he said, "I'll have that drink now."
"Cocky little person, isn't he," I said.
"Runs in the family," Tony said, glancing at Thor, who looked caught between regret and profound embarrassment.
I took out my phone and photographed Loki on his back among the debris of Tony's penthouse.
Twitter: Bad guy taken down. Stay safe, everyone. #Avengers
The replies came immediately.
THANK GOD
This is the guy who tried to kill us?!
You SAVED us! #Avengers #Amazing!
SHIELD arrived quickly, put Loki in chains, and took him away. The Hulk gradually subsided back into Bruce, and Tony found him a change of clothes from somewhere.
Together, the six of us walked two blocks to the shawarma place. The restaurant had a broken front window and a coating of plaster dust on every surface, but the owners were still there — and they looked at us with the particular expression of people who had seen too much today to be surprised by any of it.
Tony ordered for everyone. We pushed tables together. We sat.
We ate in silence.
I was exhausted. Bone-deep, cellular exhausted. My gut wound was sealing up slowly; the rib was still cracked. I was fairly certain I had glass in my hair.
After a while I couldn't stand the quiet anymore.
"So," I said. "Are we a team now? I mean — I did sort of name us the Avengers. But is that actually a thing we're committing to?"
Bruce looked up from his food. "I suppose."
"SHIELD can't officially sanction us anymore," Natasha said. "We're too visible now."
"That's never been a problem for me personally," I said.
"You're one person. This is a team — that's a different situation."
"Wait," Clint said, looking at me. "He's an agent?"
"Where did you think I was after the Stark Expo incident?" Natasha raised an eyebrow.
"I assumed...Canada?"
Natasha closed her eyes briefly.
"We need to be a team," Tony said. He said it quietly, with the voice of someone who had just spent ten minutes in the dark on the other side of a wormhole and come back different for it. "We need to be ready. For the next time."
"You really think there will be one?" Steve asked.
"It would be naive to assume otherwise."
"What will happen to Loki?" I asked Thor.
"He will face Asgardian justice," Thor said. "He will not be causing further trouble on Midgard for a very long time."
"Good," I said. "Because if he shows his face here again, I'll throw him into a volcano."
"And I thought I was the one with anger issues," Bruce said, with something approaching a smile.
"Enough gloom," I said, and pulled out my phone. "Come on. Let's make this official."
"This isn't a family outing, kid," Natasha said flatly, though she was already — barely — smiling.
"Why not? I need a new cover photo," Tony shrugged.
"It's still remarkable," Steve said quietly, looking at Tony's phone. "That one small device can be a camera and a telephone and a computer all at once."
We gathered around — me in the centre, Tony and Natasha on either side, Clint beside Natasha and Thor beside him, Bruce and Steve flanking Tony. I handed the phone to the shawarma shop owner and asked him to take the picture. We arranged ourselves.
Natasha glared at the camera. Everyone else managed something between a smile and a stare. It was, all things considered, exactly right.
Twitter: #Avengers — here to stay.
Instagram: #Avengers — here to stay.
Snapchat: #Avengers — here to stay.
Why change what works?