The Girl Who Held the Universe in her Hands | marvel [1] ✔

TEN

CHAPTER TEN
' AND THEN
SHAWARMA AFTER ? '

Ash gritted her teeth, the magic continuing to weave and solidify to create grandiose walls casting shadows on the ground beneath. A sharp breath escaped her, and one of her hands shot back to stop herself from collapsing backwards. Her chest heaved, and she wiped the sweat from her forehead. The pain in her eye grew as she made contact with her skin, and Ash pursed her lips.

"Nice job, Ash," Rogers complimented through her earpiece. "Now, do you wanna help close this portal?"

"Captain Rogers," Ash replied, forcing herself to her feet with a wince. "It would be a genuine pleasure." She threw her hands down, ignoring vertigo which shot through her head as she came to terms with partial blindness. The wind whipped around her head, and she nearly overshot the Stark Industries tower. As she lowered to the ground, she had to grab a rail to keep her upright. Dizziness blurred her thoughts for a moment, and her grip tightened.

Romanoff appeared in front of her. "Jesus, your eye." The redhead lifted a hand to go and inspect the wound.

Ash pulled away before she could make contact, straightening from the railing. "Yeah, still a bit tender for prodding and poking." She moved past her and towards the Tesseract, which projected a wormhole above them. "Woah," she breathed quietly, turning in a circle to admire the machinery. "I've never seen an Einstein-Rosen Bridge this close before."

"Is that what it is?" Romanoff asked, coming to a stop beside her.

"It's the collision of two very distant points in spacetime. No one really knows how far this could stretch. You know, maybe we're staring at the secret to time travel, and we don't even know it."

"Somehow, I feel you've got a shot at it."

Ash glanced at her before scoffing quietly and moving towards the computer. "I'm just a humble scientist." Her eyes flickered over the screen, a furrow forming on her forehead. "I can't see a thing on this," she murmured.

"You want me to read it?"

The two females glanced at each other. "Sure, what does it say?"

There was a moment of silence. "I think I underestimated this."

"I think we both did," Ash replied. "Shit," she cursed, turning away and pushing her hair from her face. "I don't even have my glasses. I mean, when I started trying to kill everyone, finding my glasses from the rubble wasn't really first on my priority list." She turned back to Romanoff. "Actually, while we're on the subject, sorry for trying to kill you. I don't really want to kill you, I think you're really cool, and if you died, I would probably be sad."

"Probably?" Natasha repeated.

Ash shrugged. "I don't like to promise things, but the likelihood is quite high."

"Okay, great. Thanks, I guess, but we really need to work out how to stop this thing from making an alpha-Rosen-Heidler bridge or whatever it's called."

Ash didn't comment on her incorrect naming. She didn't think it was the right time and turned her attention to the computer. "Okay-okay-okay, I can guess what it's saying, and I'll go with that. What's the worst that could happen? Well, you could make the wormhole bigger and let more Chitauri in or cause the Tesseract to emit a huge amount of energy and kill everyone in a forty-mile radius or-"

"-You know, the more you're listing these scenarios, the more I'm thinking of siding with just killing these things by hand."

"Yeah-" Ash stopped, head whipping up. A furrow took hold of her eyebrows, and she angled her head. Her sight landed on a building, the bottom destroyed and decayed by bombs, teetering on the edge of tumbling to the ground. Underneath, Rogers and Thor tried their hardest to clear everyone away from the kill zone. A bus sat directly under it, littered with others trying to free them from the wreckage. Her eyes flickered back to the building as a brick tumbled from the top, signalling its slow descent to the ground.