Double-Edged Sword ─ age of ultron ✓

twelve

This chapter is a total clusterfuck, mostly written after 1 AM instead of studying for finals. Have fun. 

★★★

EVERYBODY else headed to Korea to get Helen Cho's regeneration cradle away from Ultron and the Maximoffs. They decided Steve would be the one to go into the lab. Natasha, Clint, and Alex hovered in the quinjet nearby, listening in the entire time.

"He's uploading himself into the body," a panting Helen Cho's voice came through Steve's comms and broadcasted into the jet.

"Where?" Steve asked. There was a pause before Helen's voice piped up again.

"The real power is inside the Cradle. The gem, its power is uncontainable."

"Well, that's always good news," Alex muttered. Natasha smirked. Sasha really was a bad influence.

"You can't just blow it up," Helen went on. "You have to get the Cradle to Stark."

"First I have to find it."

"Go."

There was another moment of silence before Steve spoke directly to them: "Did you guys copy that?"

"We did," Clint answered. Alex watched, mesmerized, as Natasha messed around with a screen in search of any signs of Ultron. She still hadn't quite gotten accustomed to the scope of modern technology, how there were devices that could do just about anything with the press of a button.

"I got a private jet taking off across town." Natasha zeroed in on the screen. "No manifest. That could be him."

"There." Clint looked down at the highway below them. "It's a truck from the lab. Right above you, Cap. On the loop by the bridge." A scan of the truck appeared on the screen beside him. "It's them. You got three with the Cradle, one in the cab. I could take out the driver."

Alex hopped to her feet and hovered just behind him to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, a large truck with the lab's logo on it sped by beneath them.

"Negative," Steve responded in true Captain America fashion. "That truck crashes, the gem could level the city. We need to draw out Ultron."

"I'll go down," Alex volunteered immediately. She was sick of sitting around feeling useless. Clearly, she didn't know her way around a computer like Sasha, or her way around any of the technology the Avengers used. She didn't know how to fly the Quinjet. She didn't know how to do anything but be KillSwitch.

"Negative to that too." Steve shut that down before it started. "I've got the truck. I'll tell you what to do next."

He went silent again. Alex watched him leap onto the truck, wishing she knew what to do.

"I miss Sasha," she mumbled under her breath. Sasha always made her feel a little less helpless. Although Alex felt like she could never be that confident, or that useful, seeing another kid jump into action and take control sometimes gave her at least some hope. Granted, Sasha had the brains, the trauma, and the colorful mouth of an adult, so maybe they weren't exactly on the same level, but close enough.

Sasha did not, of course, have the level of confidence and self-assuredness Alex thought she did. She had far more than her share of insecurity. She felt useless often, both when it came to the Avengers and when it came to life in general. On the inside, what little self-esteem she had left was in pieces clung together by duct tape. So, so often, she struggled with the urges that landed her in the hospital last year. She felt like garbage when she ate half the time. She needed to use every bit of strength she had to keep herself from checking calories on packages and looking up the numbers of anything else. She sometimes stared at herself in the mirror and thought about how much she hated the skin she was in. She thought about how worthless she was to everyone and everything. She was eternally caught between hating herself for being weak by giving into her ED in the first place and feeling weak for giving up on her old measurement goals. Internally, she was a shit show. She was simply an expert on pretending she was a high-functioning member of society.