EZEKIEL BASTIAN ROSS
GREEN LANTERN
MIDTOWN AIRSPACE, MANHATTAN
I came back to the world with a flash of blinding white and something cracking the side of my skull hard enough to make my jaw click.
For one horrible half-second, the whole shield dropped.
The ring caught it before the leak got real.
It pulled the green construct back to a solid wall before any of those Chitauri freaks on the other side could squeeze through.
I felt the cost of that automatic fix hit my chest like a physical weight, draining what little juice I had left.
[Charge: 7%]
I hovered in the heavy black smoke above Stark Tower, blinking hard and waiting for the world to stop spinning.
Who in the absolute hell just snuck me?
I tapped the comms, my voice sounding completely thrashed.
The effort of holding that oath for so long had left my throat feeling like sandpaper.
“Green Lantern to Captain America. I’m running on fumes up here. Also, could somebody please tell me who the flying fuck just clocked me in the head.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” A new voice cut into my ear, bone-dry and sounding zero percent sorry.
“That was me. Needed to get your attention and your radio was dead.” He started to say something else, but then the noise hit us both.
It was that screeching, metal-on-metal whine of repulsor engines redlining.
Iron Man was cooking it low and fast from the northeast, and he was piggybacking a straight-up missile.
I stared at the damn thing for a whole second, my brain trying to process the scale of it.
Captain Rogers came over the comms at a volume that nearly blew my eardrums out.
“Son, you need to move! Right now! Stark has a nuclear warhead and you are standing in his landing zone.”
I had about fifty questions regarding how a literal nuke had entered the chat during the five minutes I was spaced out, but Tony was closing the distance so fast I could see the green booster flames coming off his calves.
I had maybe six seconds.
I looked at the barrier, at the hard-light shields still keeping the alien horde at bay, and then at the glowing portal hole right in the middle of it.
Five seconds.
I stopped thinking and just built the lane.
The barrier ripped open from the center out, panels of heavy green light sliding apart and rotating to form a tube five meters wide cutting straight through the shield.
On the flip side, a cluster of Chitauri trying to crowd the door got absolutely trucked.
I shoved them clear with a construct that had zero elegance to it.
Just pure, unadulterated brute force to buy Tony three seconds of clean air.
Tony blew through the tube like a comet.
The fire of his repulsors completely filled the lane for the split second it took him to cross.
Then he was out the other side.
The displaced air of his entry hit my aura like a freight train, and I held the walls open, watching his line curve straight up into the deep dark.
The nuke broke away from his suit, tracking on its own arc toward the massive mothership sitting in the distance.
The ship was so big it looked huge even from the New York side of the hole.
Then, in a split second, it wasn’t there anymore.
The explosion didn’t even have a sound.
It was just pure, blinding white light expanding in a perfect ball out in the vacuum.
The portal framed it like a window to somewhere we were never supposed to see.
It hung there for three seconds, maybe four, before the light snapped shut.
Whatever was left of that mothership was just dust.
The aliens pressing against my shield stopped dead.
Every single one of them.
Simultaneously. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Mid-swing, mid-flight, mid-everything.
The whole network just collapsed in the exact same heartbeat.
The sudden drop in pressure on the other side of the construct was so absolute that I felt it right through the ring, like taking a heavy breath after being underwater.
I shut down the shield.
Then I dove straight into the portal after Stark.
The space on the other side should have been freezing, but the aura keeping me alive made sure I didn’t feel a thing.
Iron Man was falling listlessly, completely limp, floating back toward the city on the back of the blast wave.
Natasha’s voice echoed over the comms from all the way back on earth, the ring dropping her words right into my head.
“Rogers, should I shut it down now?”
“I got eyes on Stark, we’re coming back in,” I barked into the channel, my voice wrecked as I scooped up the armor.
My green aura wrapped around the suit, stabilizing him as I hauled ass back through the opening.
The second my boots cleared the threshold back into Manhattan, Black Widow pulled the plug, and the sky finally snapped shut behind us.
I dropped down toward the middle of the avenue.
A few of the guys were already on the pavement.
Thor was standing there with his hammer still smoking with static electricity.
Rogers had his jaw set, his eyes locked onto the metal body I was carrying.
And then there was the Hulk.
He was standing right at the back of the huddle, making the whole crowd look tiny by comparison.
He was staring down at the unresponsive armor with a look I couldn’t really read on a face that big.
I set Tony down flat on the concrete.
Thor dropped to his knees immediately, his thick fingers tearing the gold faceplate straight off the helmet.
When it came loose, Tony Stark’s face was completely grey and still.
Rogers crouched down on the other side.
“Stark.” His voice was steady because that is just how the man talked, but you could hear him working hard to keep it from cracking.
“Tony. Can you hear me.”
Nothing.
I looked at the billionaire’s body, a heavy knot forming in my stomach, and I started to look away when the big guy moved.
The Hulk shoved right past Thor and Cap without asking nicely, the asphalt cracking a little under his feet as he shifted his weight.
He leaned his massive head right over the suit, opened his mouth, and let out a roar at a frequency that vibrated straight through my back teeth from six feet away.
Tony Stark’s eyes flew wide open.
He caught his breath in a massive gasp, staring wildly at the sky, then at Thor, then at Cap, and finally at the Hulk’s face sitting about eight inches from his nose.
“What the hell,” he croaked out, his voice completely shot.
“Please tell me nobody kissed me.”
Captain America let out a heavy, exhausted breath and looked down at him.
“We won.”
Tony let his head sink back against the pavement with a massive sigh of relief, his signature sarcasm slipping right back into place.
“All right, yay.” He closed his eyes for a second.
“All right, good job, team. Let’s just, let’s just not come into work tomorrow. Let’s take a personal day.” He cracked one eye open, looked over at me, and pointed a metal finger.
“You’re a local. You ever have shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks east of here. I don’t know what it is, but I want to try it.”
Before I could even open my mouth to tell him where it was, Thor stepped up, lifting his hammer.
“We are not finished yet.”
Tony sighed.
“And then shawarma after?”
LOKI LAUFEYSON
The silence that inherited the penthouse was a far more terrible thing than the clamour of the war preceding it.
It pressed upon the unyielding drum of his ears, a heavy, suffocating vacuum accompanied by the stench of charred stone, pulverized marble, and the sharp, metallic sting of Starks repulsor fire. Get faster updates on g.com.
Loki lay within the basin of his own jagged crater.
The grand, expensive tilework reduced to grey dust beneath his spine.
Each shallow breath he took cut like a razor blade against the lining of his ribs.
His gilded armor, once a proud and unyielding testament to his sovereign right to rule, now weighed upon him like a shroud of lead.
The scepter was gone, the great Chitauri host lay dead.
Yet for the first time since he had been gifted it for his conquest, the cruel whispers that had haunted his mind were gone as well.
The burning sapphire eye of the scepter no longer flared behind his eyelids.
The frantic, venomous loop of unearned hatred and borrowed grandeur had simply dissolved into nothingness, leaving behind only the cold, unvarnished, and hollow clarity of his own complete undoing.
He stared blankly up at the vaulted ceiling of this mortal monument, his vision swimming in a sea of grey, his fingers twitching helplessly against the glass-strewn dust.
A heavy, deliberate shadow fell across the rim of his crater.
Loki did not turn his head to look upon it.
He had no need for such sight.
He could already hear the low, rhythmic crackle of lightning weeping from the blunt head of Mjolnir, humming in perfect, maddening synchronization with the heavy, unhurried thud of Asgardian leather boots.
“Brother,” Thor spoke.
The word fell into the room like a heavy stone.
It lacked the booming, arrogant thunder of the prince Loki had grown up alongside; it was a voice fashioned only of weariness.
Deep, fundamental, and tragic weariness.
Slowly, and with agonizing deliberateness, Loki dragged his broken weight upward.
He propped his bruised elbows against the ruined tile, his muscles screaming in bitter protest as he forced his torso out of the dirt of his grave.
He tilted his chin backward, letting his tangled, ink-dark hair fall away from his brow, and permitted his eyes to wander over the silent court assembled at the lip of his ruin.
They stood in a ragged, watchful semi-circle, framing him against the smoking panoramic canvas of the city he had so grandly failed to burn.
The archer stood at the absolute center of the line, bow and arrow aimed at him, to his right was his brother, the hammer hanging loosely from his great fist.
To his left stood Rogers, his patriotic shield caked in thick soot and alien blood, his jaw set.
Beside him stood the Romanoff woman, her posture perfectly still, the dark metal of the recaptured scepter balanced casually within her grip like a minor trophy she had already forgotten she won.
And then there were the others.
The mortal Stark, his gold and crimson armor scorched to a dull, matte finish.
Next to him stood the giant, the green beast looking down into the pit at Loki with a low, rumbling growl that vibrated through the very floorboards beneath them.
Finally, his eyes flicked to the young one.
The Seid-madur.
He stood on the outermost edge of the gathering, floating in the air, his suit smudged with the dark soot of the battle fought, his glowing ring casting long, flickering green shadows across the ruined penthouse walls.
Loki swallowed the metallic taste of blood pooling in his cheek.
He looked upon the array of weapons pointed directly at his face, at the absolute finality of his defeat, and felt the old, familiar mask of the trickster slide back over his features.
It was a flimsy thing, brittle and entirely hollow, but it was the only armor left to him.
He forced his lips into a thin, venomous smirk, his voice emerging as a dry, raspy wheeze.
“If it’s all the same to you,” Loki croaked, tilting his head toward Stark with a desperate, elegant flicker of his ancient pride, “I shall have that drink now.”
Stark offered no answer to the jest.
It was the Seid-madur who responded with a scoff.
“Yeah,” the boy muttered, his sharp cadence cutting cleanly through the grand, theatrical silence of the room.
“Keep dreaming, pal. Bars closed.”
Thor stepped forward from the line, the heavy iron chain of the Asgardian shackles clinking loudly in his hand, and the grand illusion of Loki’s empire finally dissolved into the dust.
Authors note: That’s it for chapter 5, I know it might seem a bit rushed but I really wanted to get the invasion over with, if I hadn’t gone crazy with the last two chapters this entire intro would have been cut into like 10 chapters or something, next chapter might be an aftermath thing, or maybe I’ll continue on with the scene for a bit, have Zeke with cap coordinating search and rescue, I don’t know stick around to find out.
Also tell me what you thought of Loki’s pov, I realized while I was rewatching the first Avengers movie, that he is a pretty Shakespearian figure in the first movie, even when he speaks or swears, like when he called Natasha a cunt basically when she was interrogating him.
So it was fun leaning into that way of thinking for a bit.