These Endless Days (Are Finally Ending in a Blaze)
Following the events of Civil War, the Avengers are disbanded, scattered and in hiding - and not coping all that well. The rise of anti-superhuman feeling continues, and it's not only the Avengers who are feeling the effects. Steve Rogers and team are about to discover a whole other world, and with it comes what might be the biggest threat they've ever faced.
“Whole town, devastated, on the whim of a child.”
Agent Riley Finn, waiting in the shadows of the Hagia Sofia with his recon team, takes a deep breath as he watches Captain America dust a vampire.
“Carters are Watchers,” he intones, and Peggy turns to face him, fascinated against her will to hear her father’s words from her little brother.
“We’re not super, Xander,” she says, a brief flash of annoyance colouring her eyes before she rolls them at him. “We’re nothing like the Avengers.”
He had had such high hopes for this one. Had thought that she had been the key, the girl that he had been waiting for, the one to fulfill the prophecy. And yet, as they all had before, death had claimed her. This one was the same as all the rest.
“Last set of people I ‘had to meet’ turned out to be Nazis,” Steve returns flatly, but she’s been in the game long enough to be able to detect the note of underlying interest running through him as he says it.
“What is - what is your work?” Peggy asks, curiously. “What could the Council possibly want with a scientist?” Erskine sits back in his chair and rubs at his chin, feeling the beard that has grown there over the long months he has been kept at Kastel Kaufmann.
“Vampires, right,” Scott yawns again, waving a sleepy hand in Steve’s general direction. “Tennis vampires, or-” He pauses, hand out-stretched towards the kitchen counter, frozen in the act of reaching for what passes for a clean mug these days. “Wait, what? Like Dracula? Bleh, bleh, bleh?”
She has strength enough to focus on the task at hand, to despatch the three vampires that come at her fast, one after the other with teeth bared and bloodlust in their yellow eyes. As they explode into dust at the point of her broken chair leg, the men who watch at the window are silent, but their eyes see all.
The girl wakes in a new sort of darkness, gasping for air that is thick and heavy and does not fill her lungs the way she needs it to. For a moment or two she feels as though she is more than one person - that in one body exists more than there should, a jostling within herself - themself? - she shakes her head, blinking into the gloom and the feeling starts to recede.
“I’m guessing you all recognise Steve,” Maria says, nodding toward him as she speaks.
“Don’t you, uh, usually come with real shield action?” Xander mimes throwing an over-large frisbee, and the little redhead - Willow, Steve reminds himself - beside him puts a hand to her face with a grimace.
“Here’s to making history,” Erskine says, nudging the small glass tumbler back across the desk toward her, and raising his own.
“A history no one else will ever know the truth of,” she says, ruefully, as she toasts him in kind.
