Prismatic ⇒ Avengers [ 2 ]

Consequences

The water hits cold, and I thrash about as soon as the shock begins to wear off. Even with my thicker skin, the feeling of hitting the surface of the lake is intense, and my eyes blink away streams of water as I emerge, gasping at the surface, and then swear colourfully.

Fuck.

The helicarrier is falling fast, right above my head, and pieces of shrapnel are already dotting the water. I swim as fast as I can, limbs flailing, lagging, and I notice that the green is fading away at my fingertips, into a brown that's rapidly spreading up my arms.

No, no, I need this strength.

I swim as fast as I can towards the thin concrete walkways that separate the lakes the helicarriers came from, my feet eventually hitting solid ground as the pool I'm in becomes shallower. Soaked to the bone, I stagger, hissing as burning bits of metal crash down around me.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I brace my hands over my head and push the remainder of my energy into a flailing run, blinking away water from my eyelashes. My legs wobble beneath me, and I gasp, my lungs burning from their sudden infestation of water. I'm convinced, absolutely sure that I'm about to die by being horribly crushed by an enormous chunk of metal, when a scream rips through the air.

Mary Walker kneels in the middle of the lake- no, on top of the lake- her hair streaming around her shoulders like a flame, and her head is in her hands as the helicarrier falls down towards us both. I stand ankle-deep in water, frozen, my mouth beginning to open in a warning scream as I watch the scene, but then her head raises- and so does her arm.

The scream that rips from her lungs is inhuman, so much so that all the hairs on the back of my neck rise up, and as her hand raises up above her head, her eyes screwing tight shut, the helicarrier above our heads freezes.

Thousands of pounds of metal hangs above our head, the rubble and shrapnel falling from it paused mid-air. The power, the sheer power, is so vast I can't comprehend it. The whole structure, which is bigger than most of the buildings around us, is being held up by a woman who screams as if she's being torn apart. Maybe she is, I don't know.

For some time, maybe seconds or minutes, I can't move, captivated by the image of Mary, her teeth bared in a primal scream. If I had known that this was how far her power went, I would have never fought her- never.

I snap out of it as the metal begins to screech under the pressure, and begin to stagger out from under the looming metal, my feet dragging onto the concrete. But I can't help but look back as the helicarrier shakes, and as Mary Walker also begins to move, dragging herself to the side.

There's a boom, and a flash of wings, and Lee swoops out of the way of the helicarrier to my right, as it impacts the lake it came from. Water explodes from all sides, and the tidal wave that it creates knocks me forward, drowning over me as I fall flat to the ground.

The concrete is flat and cold and I press my face to it, holding my breath as the water pounds against me. The shaking bright-yellow sound of an explosion shakes the ground to my left, and I screw up my eyes as the helicarrier I've barely missed being crushed by makes impact.

My head raises wearily, choking, and I shudder as I look around. The helicarrier has shattered, and there's a stench of burning metal in the air that makes me cough horrendously. I'm pull myself to my knees, and then my feet, and crawl over a chunk of metal in my path, my limbs groaning a protest as I slowly make my way down the path, dodging falling parts of the two grounded helicarriers and the parts that are already on the ground.