The Seventh Avenger by ElrondsScribe

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Chapter 8: It's On Us, Every One

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Anyway, all rights belong to Marvel Studios and to the Tolkien Estate.

Also . . . warning for some violence. Not too graphic, but it's still violence. And Glorfindel says a strong word or two.

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BANG! The explosion seemed to come from nowhere, engulfing the middle of the lab in flames and blasting the quarreling occupants in every direction. Glorfindel went hurtling through one of the glass panels and down to the floor below. He landed flat on his back, his head banging the steel floor and glass shards poking into his exposed flesh (thank the Valar I didn't take my uniform off!).

Stars wheeled before his eyes for a moment, and when his head cleared he was aware of both Bruce and Natasha Romanoff near him. The woman's leg was trapped under a fallen beam that looked too heavy to move, and she was struggling tug herself free.

Bruce lay writhing as if in pain, gripping the floor, his breathing loud and heavy. Glorfindel saw with alarm that his jaw was clenched and his eyes glowed green in the dim light.

He's going to turn! He is turning!

Glorfindel scrambled up on hands and knees and crawled (through more shards) around Bruce to get in front of him, dangerously close even in his own estimation (look at me, I want to die, apparently). "Banner," he said in a low voice that was as commanding as he could make it. "Banner, look at me - look at me!"

Bruce raised himself on hands and knees stared wildly at him, still huffing and puffing.

"Are you nuts?!" hissed Natasha from under the beam. The sound of her voice seemed to set Bruce even more on edge. He gave a deep growl, and his face and neck began to look decidedly green.

"Shut up and get out of here!" said Glorfindel frantically to her, and then turning back to Bruce, he caught him by the arms. "Look at me, focus," he said. But the touch seemed to aggravate the man further - he twisted away from Glorfindel with a snarl. The sudden strength in him was like that of a wild boar, and Glorfindel could barely keep his hold.

"Banner," he said again, and he bent his will upon the enraged Man. Reluctantly Bruce stopped struggling and slowly turned his head back to Glorfindel. The distinct green undertones rising in his eyes and flesh began to recede.

"That's it," said Glorfindel soothingly, even as his eyes found Bruce's. "Keep looking at me. Nothing else matters - there's only you and I. Look at me, Bruce Banner."

Bruce's eyes, held fast by Glorfindel's power, began to turn brown again. His breathing slowed.

It's working!

"There," breathed Glorfindel. "You're safe, you're all right. Hush-sh-sh."

Bruce blinked slowly, his eyelids fluttering. He began to slump forward into Glorfindel's arms. Glorfindel continued to soothe him, humming low in his ear. In a quarter of a minute he was nearly asleep - it was actually going to work -

Clack! Natasha had finally tugged her leg free of the fallen beam. It was a small noise, but it was enough to break the spell. Glorfindel felt Bruce go rigid.

Damn it, I almost had him!

The Man gave a roar, and tossed the Elf through the air like a doll. The last Glorfindel saw as he went hurtling (again) was the great green behemoth seeming to burst from Bruce Banner's body. Then Glorfindel crashed into some large crate and fell down to the floor.

Ow. I hope I don't have to keep doing this.

He struggled to his feet as soon as he could, ignoring his bruised limbs, and looked around. It was mostly dark around him, and apart from being generally two floors or so below the lab he did not know where he was. Drat this maze of an airship, he thought sourly. Where am I? And where's my sword?

Somewhere nearby there came a great clattering and clanging, and then another roar from the Hulk - for the Hulk he obviously was by now. Glorfindel muttered an oath under his breath, groped his way out of the storage compartment he seemed to have fallen into, and immediately saw a flight of steel steps to his right. After a moment's deliberation he decided to try and find his way up to the command room - there was probably nothing he could do to help Bruce or Natasha Romanoff now - and he began to climb the steps.

The whole ship seemed to be in chaos - Glorfindel saw agents of various clearance levels racing in every direction, the distant clanging and clattering never seemed to cease, and every now and again the Hulk's bellowing reached his ears. And now that he was on the move, he felt his sense of balance shifting as if the floor was not level. It was disconcerting, and made his stomach drop.

And then the voice of Agent Jasper Sitwell came over the loudspeakers: "We have a perimeter breach! Hostiles are in SHIELD gear! Hold on to every junction!"

So I have to assume anyone I meet with a weapon may be an enemy. Wonderful.

He drew his sword, for it was still in its scabbard, and went with more caution. He had just reached the level where he thought the command room might be when suddenly three men in tactical gear set upon him. Glorfindel ran the first one through, the blade slicing through the man like a knife through soft butter (thank you, Egalmoth!). The second tried to shoot at him, but Glorfindel spun aside and knocked the man to the ground, the gun bouncing out of his hand. Glorfindel stomped down on the man's neck hard enough to hear the bones crunch, and turned to deal with the last attacker. The man made a run at him, and Glorfindel raised his sword and cut off the man's head.

He then spied an open doorway nearby, and raced through it into what turned out to be the command room, which was in chaos. Glorfindel had just time to catch a glimpse of Fury and Hill with their guns pointed toward the other entrance, shooting at more armed men. Then he had to jump over a railing and down behind an abandoned row of computer stations to avoid a small explosion. It seemed to have been caused by a trick arrow (of course modern arrows would do things like that!), and Glorfindel instantly remembered the archer Barton.

He looked up and saw the man for the first time - his eyes seemed entirely frosted over with a blue haze, a very clumsy and obvious mind control apparently at work. He was just fitting another arrow to the string, and it flew across the room and landed next to a computer station. Instantly, all the computers in that row went black, followed by every computer in the command center. The Helicarrier began to tilt at an alarming rate, and Glorfindel was sure he could feel the ship actually falling. He clutched at the desk behind him to keep from sliding across the room.

A senior agent - it was Sitwell, actually - rushed as best he could to one of the dead computers. "Sir!" he shouted to Fury. "We've lost all power in Engine 1!"

"It's Barton," Glorfindel heard Fury say grimly. "He took out our systems. He's headed for the detention level, does anybody copy?"

Nobody seemed to have noticed the arrow that had caused the damage. For a moment Glorfindel hesitated, torn between the immediate danger of the failed engine and the threat of Barton freeing Loki. He decided to deal with the greater danger, and pulled himself up into Fury's line of vision. "I copy," he said.

He saw Fury blink at him in mild astonishment as if to say where did you come from? But all he said was, "Well, get on it!"

Glorfindel was already scrambling up the tilting floor to get out of the room. He scrambled out into the main passageway and flung himself down the stairs, taking them four or five at a time. He vaguely remembered the way, but knew for certain he was nearing the right place when he started running into clusters of armed men that tried to resist him. He managed to get rid of them without much difficulty, as his armor rendered most of their bullets useless. He did not see Barton, however, and he began to fear that the man had already reached Loki, and he would be too late.

He was too late.

When he struck down the last resisting soldier and bounded into the room where sat the great glass cell, a terrible sight met his eyes. Thor was trapped inside it, a look of anguish and horror on his face. Glorfindel looked wildly around, only to see a freed Loki withdrawing his scepter from the body of a gasping Agent Phil Coulson, who had just been impaled through the heart.

Glorfindel made a dead run at Loki, his sword raised to strike off his head. Loki smiled, and oddly enough made mo move to run or get out of the way. "Glorfindel, don't!" came the voice of Thor behind him, but the Elf had already fallen for the trick. The illusion of Loki's body shimmered away as Glorfindel went crashing through it and knocked his head against the floor.

When he returned to his senses he could hear voices speaking nearby - one was Agent Coulson's, very faint, and the other was Fury's. Glorfindel looked around, and saw Agent Coulson slumped against the wall with Fury kneeling in front of him. There was no sign of Loki, or of the cell that Thor had been trapped in.

Loki had escaped. The Avengers Initiative had failed.

". . . I'm clockin' out here," Coulson was saying.

"Not an option," said Fury sternly.

"It's okay, boss," every word seemed to be an effort. "This was never going to work, if they didn't have something to - to -" Coulson's voice trailed off and his eyes drifted away from Fury's. He did not move again.

Glorfindel had just pulled himself to his feet with some vague idea of helping, and when Fury looked around and caught sight of the Elf a strange look passed over his face. "What happened?" he asked sharply.

"I was too late," said Glorfindel dully. I live, and he is dead.

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"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket," said Nick Fury, and he tossed a number of bloodstained Captain America trading cards onto the table. Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Glorfindel were all seated at the same table around which they had first discussed what to do after having brought Loki aboard. The weight of their failure sat heavy on their shoulders as the ruins of the command room surrounded them. The engine problem seemed to have been resolved, but all the power in the command center had been cut.

Thor had been tossed out of the Helicarrier, the Hulk had tossed himself out, and Romanoff was reportedly keeping an eye on Barton, whom she'd apparently knocked out earlier.

"Guess he never did get you to sign them," Fury went on, while Steve slowly picked up the cards and stared numbly at them. "We're dead in the air up here - our communications, location of the Cube, Banner, Thor. I got nothing for you." He shook his head. "Lost my one good eye," he added grimly. "Maybe I had that coming."

There was a moment's silence; none of the Avenger candidates at the table could speak.

"Yes," said Fury heavily. "We were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract. I never put all my chips on that number, though, because I was playing something even riskier. There was an idea, Stark and Glorfindel both know, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, and fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea, in heroes."

Tony's face tightened, and he stood from his chair and marched out of the room. Glorfindel stared darkly at Fury, wondering if the Man knew that he could have saved Coulson if only he had been just a few seconds sooner.

"Well," said Fury, his eye lingering on Glorfindel. "It's an old-fashioned notion."

Steve did not put down the cards.

Glorfindel laid his sword and sword-belt on the table, and went back down to the detention level, standing in the same spot where he had been when Phil Coulson had died. He did not see or hear Tony Stark enter the room later; he only became aware that he was not alone when Steve's voice spoke. "Was he married?"

"No," said Tony, turning. Then as an afterthought, "There was a . . . cellist, I think."

"I'm sorry," said Steve sincerely. "He seemed like a good man."

"He was an idiot," said Tony roughly.

"Why? For believing?" asked Steve quietly..

"For taking on Loki alone." I should have been there, went unsaid.

"He was doing his job," said Steve, and a hint of Captain America had seeped into his tone.

"No," said Glorfindel suddenly and bitterly, speaking for the first time. "No, Captain, he wasn't doing his job. He was doing our job, which we weren't there to do because we were so busy measuring dicks earlier! This is on us, Cap, every one of us. We let him distract us so that he could wreak havoc on us. We let him make the matter personal." And he turned and stalked out of the room, eventually going back to the command room to retrieve and clean his sword.

He was surprised to run into Steve again on the way down to his locker, now accompanied by Natasha Romanoff and a much more human-looking Barton. All three looked purposeful and determined.

"How soon can you be ready to go?" asked Steve without preamble.

"Go? Go where?" asked Glorfindel, startled.

"We're taking a Quinjet," said Natasha. "You're still armored up, so you can go now, right?"

Glorfindel opened his mouth to ask what why where when who, and thought better of it. "Good thing I just cleaned my sword," was all he said, and he fell into step with the other three. "You must be Clint Barton," he said to the man with the bow.

"Sure, that's me," said that gentleman. "Nice to meet you. I'm guessing you're Glorfindel, which means I didn't manage to kill you."

"That would be me," said Glorfindel, feeling his mood lift in spite of himself. "And you'll have to try harder than that if you want to kill me."

The four of them strode up into the garage which held all the Quinjets and strode up into the nearest one, where a young agent was sitting in the cockpit. His eyes widened as he took in the four heroes. "You're not authorized to be here -" he began nervously.

"Son," said the Captain sternly. "Just don't."

The young man shut his mouth, and walked out of the Quinjet. Barton immediately went up to cockpit, and Natasha shut the door and joined him.

"Wanna tell me where I'm taking us, Captain?" inquired Barton.

"Stark Tower," returned Steve shortly as he fastened himself into one of the seats.

"Stark Tower?" Glorfindel arched his eyebrows.

"The Cube," said Steve simply. "Barton, how soon can we get to New York City?"

"We're pretty far out over the Pacific, Cap," said Barton dryly. "It'll take us a couple of hours."

"Do the best you can," said Steve.

"Stark's not coming?" inquired Glorfindel as Barton took off.

Steve rolled his eyes as he put on his helmet. "Said he could get there faster in the Suit."

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I don't know the internal plan of the Helicarrier. I don't know anything about real hypnosis, whether used in therapy or otherwise. I'm not sure exactly how much time all the action actually covers. I'm pretty sure chainmail wouldn't stop a bullet or arrow in real life. So, I hope you're willing to extend your disbelief pretty far :)

Phew! Now that I've got some momentum back, the next chapter shouldn't take nearly as long. I got stuck trying to work out the action sequences, and I couldn't work past the block for months. I'm not sure about the next chapters, but I don't think they'll take this long (at least I sincerely hope not!) As always, please tell me how you like it!