In MCU with One for All -Chapter 5

Poll Winner - Here you go!

Disclaimer - All the usual Yada Yada Yada. I don’t own any rights to any characters in this fic save for my OCs. Marvel owns them. Don’t sue me

Earth - 16969 [MCU AU]

The Forest of Perseverance, Kamar Taj [2008]

–Jamie Bell–

Okay, something was definitely wrong with this place, he thought to himself without slowing down his stride, as the greenery passed him at a slow enough pace that he would have never noticed the similarity in the landscape if not for how long it had taken him to run through this damned thing.

To his knowledge, he had never run this far, and despite the CHI cycling in his body, removing any signs of fatigue, he still felt as if he had run a marathon, without any CHI rejuvenation. The second he tried to stop running, he had an ominous premonition, something he had never felt before in his life and thus he continued to run.

More than once, he tried to deviate from his path, turn left or right but no matter how many turns he took, or how much he tried to slow down and investigate, the path remained the same.

For some godforsaken reason, some of the initiates had trapped him in this place, and without any knowledge of how to get away from there, he was stuck, running.

Good thing was that he had CHI in spades so he could do this for quite a while before his entire body began shrivelling up from lack of resources like food and water. He chuckled bitterly at that, what a grim thought.

If it was going to be like this, he might as well have stayed at his boring old job. No fuss no muss, just good old monkey typing that gave him a decent paycheck and let him bedrot whenever he wanted to.

Why did he leave his old life behind anyway?

Oh yeah, he wanted to do something, to mean something. For that, he needed to leave his old, comfortable, cocooned life behind and step into something completely unknown because despite what his meta knowledge told him, he knew that for him, the rules of engagement with Kamra Taj were going to be different. 

He was going to be treated differently, for better or for the worse, that was the only thing he needed to find out. And find out he did. In the first week itself, he was somehow sent to this hellscape that he couldn’t outrun, no matter wh—

He stumbled on something unseen as the ground came alarmingly close to his face. At the last moment, he saved his face from eating dirt as he came to a complete halt. A chill ran down his spine as the feeling of impending doom intensified. He scrambled to get back up but the feeling only increased in intensity. 

He had just managed to get up when it hit him. His eyes turned glassy for a bit as his vision of the deadly forest was now replaced with something he had never expected to see here.

The Chitauri Invasion of New York.

He flinched as he saw yet another Leviathan exit the blue hole in the sky, joining a dozen more in devastating Manhattan and then New York, all with the horrendous screeching/roaring sound that he expected to come out of a monstrosity like that. It was simultaneously one of pain and anger as he imagined those cybernetic enhancements to hurt like hell.

“HELP!”

He flinched as he turned around, his eyes widened as he saw a family of three, huddling behind a line of concrete and rebar, somehow safe from the carnage going on all around him. 

He wildly looked around, hoping that one of the Avengers was nearby or even someone from the police who could help them or at least guide him as he took a step forward in their direction, one borne out of fear and caution.

“HELP!” Another desperate call for help had him running towards them with all his might, his eyes constantly darting to the sides as he looked for any Chitauri foot soldiers who could very easily kill him right now. He was not made for this, his powers were not made for this.

The best he could do reliably was heal them, nothing he could do in combat against regularly trained humans let alone cybernetically enhanced aliens. Still, he must do something, he couldn’t just stand there, looking around dumbly, expecting help to jump out of a corner.

A chill ran down his spine as he heard a faint growl behind him, his hands instinctively lighting up with the most devastating attack he had in his containers. Electricity, or lightning.

The metal enhancements would only make the attack worse for the aliens as his gaze wandered all around him, in his quest to reach the family sooner.

“MOVE!” He shouted as he hoped they would listen. Staying out in the open like this was the height of stupidity. The least they could do was hide somewhere, in the buildings or even in the subway. This was–

A faint whine entered his ears as his gaze inadvertently turned up. His eyes turned to slits as he saw an entire storm of glass, shining in the air, hurtling at the family at speeds he knew he could never rival. 

Everything happened in slow motion, the people looking at him, with their hands outstretched, desperation practically written on their faces, as the glass continued to hurtle at ever greater speeds at them.

His hand involuntarily was raised in their direction, his hands switching from the blue glow of electricity to the yellow glow of CHI as his mind hoped to heal them, even as he consciously knew that there was no healing from….that.

He flinched and turned his eyes away as the voices were abruptly stopped, the sound of hundreds of shards of glass hitting the floor and breaking reached his ears as he turned around and saw a lone Chitauri with a gun in the distance, looking around, probably looking for the source of the sound.

He would forever regret it but he turned around to check if anyone was left alive and had the haunting vision of the mother looking straight into his eyes before the light left her eyes, seared in his memory.

Turning around, his face twisted in a snarl as he ran at the Alien. Even as his mind supplied to him that there was nothing he could have done in that particular situation, he ran, his hands crackling with the dual glow of red heat and blue electricity. In the heat of the moment, he had done something he had been too afraid to even try before.

With a war cry, he stepped on a piece of concrete, sent every ounce of CHI he could manage into it, and was greeted with a sizable boom as the piece of concrete cracked, launching him toward the alien. Due to the adrenaline rush, he couldn’t even feel his leg screaming in pain, so consumed by the hatred he felt at the alien in that one particular moment.

At the last moment, he could see it in slow motion, the alien turned towards him, seemingly just hearing him, raising the gun in his hand to aim at the human flying towards him. And yet, in that moment, he could not feel any fear of being at the end of a gun, of an energy gun that could tear a hole in his brain, and then no amount of CHI would be able to heal him.

No, in that specific moment, all he could feel was a savage glee as his hands, both red hot and crackling with lightning, plunged into the chest of the alien, both his arms burning as if lava was coursing through his veins.

Despite that blinding pain, he looked into the eyes of the alien, as he felt blood coming out of all its orifices, the burns on both his hands ignored in exchange for seeing the alien suffer.

After about 5 seconds of continuous high output, the alien now smelled of burnt meat as he took his hands out of the alien’s body, ignoring the sting of the alien blood now sizzling on his skin as he ignored it and looked around him.

There was now an entire squad of Chitauri foot soldiers, looking straight at him, with energy blasters in the hand of only one of them. He raised his hand, wincing as the pain of the burns and the tears in his leg muscles hit him at the same time as the adrenaline rush waned.

Despite that, his rage never bated. 

The despair, hopelessness, and sheer rage he felt the moment he had to see someone die right in front of him still remained at the forefront of his mind as he ignored the pain and focused on how he could make these sons of bitches pay.

Even beyond the haze of rage, he was cognizant enough to realise that all of this rage was not just because of those people. It was also aimed at himself because he realised at that moment that he could have prevented this.

There was no reason he couldn’t have warned the right people, been in the right place at the right time, done something, instead of spending his life behind a computer screen on a chair that squeaked every time he sat on it, working on a desk that rattled every time he typed particularly hard.

He should have done something, anything, and yet, he didn't, which led to this.

So, he grinned, and raised his hands, CHI boosting his body as he jumped towards them, uncaring of the damage done to his body.

If he couldn't save them, then the least he could do was bloody Avenge them.