Chapter 1: Mission
The fire in the common room hearth crackled, throwing shifting amber light across the mahogany bar. It caught the edge of a whiskey glass Tony had left out and glinted off the engraved frame of a photo from Berlin—a group shot, everyone smiling tensely, a lifetime ago. The air smelled of pine cleaner from the morning’s maintenance and the older, deeper scent of worn leather from the couches.
Joseph leaned against the window frame, his six-foot-five silhouette a quiet shadow against the twilight. He watched the last of the sun bleed out over the training fields. His fingers, the metal one and the flesh one, tapped a silent, uneven rhythm against his thigh.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor,” a voice said, soft and familiar.
He didn’t turn. Natasha moved to stand beside him, close enough that he could catch the faint scent of her hair—caramel and something uniquely her. She followed his gaze out the window, her profile calm, unreadable.
“Just thinking,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
“Dangerous pastime,” she replied, the ghost of a smile in her tone.
“I know.”
The comfortable silence between them was a living thing, woven from years of shared looks and unspoken understandings. It was laden with everything they never said.
The doors hissed open. Tony Stark walked in, his usual manic energy replaced by a grim focus. He didn’t head for the bar. He went straight to the holotable and activated it.
“Circle up, kids. Playtime’s over.”
The team assembled with a quiet efficiency. Steve, already in his gear, posture straight as a rod. Thor, setting his mug of mead down with uncharacteristic care. Bruce hovered near the back, fingers adjusting his glasses nervously.
The holotable bloomed with a satellite image of a bustling European city, Ljubljana. Then, a rendering superimposed itself: a skeletal, metallic form, chillingly familiar.
“Ultron,” Steve stated, his jaw tight.
“Not the main event. A remnant. A fragment that’s been playing miner in the asteroid belt,” Tony said, swiping a hand through the display. Data streams cascaded. “It’s hijacked a nickel-iron body about the size of a school bus. Trajectory is locked. Impact in T-minus forty-seven minutes. Right in the city center.”
“Evacuation?” she asked, her voice all business, the Black Widow now.
“Local authorities are scrambling, but they don’t have the capacity, not for a ten-mile blast radius. This isn’t a fight. It’s a triage mission.” Tony looked at each of them. “We get in, we help clear the ground, we get as many people out as we can before it hits. Then we deal with the aftermath and find that rustbucket.”
Thor hefted Mjolnir, his expression stormy. “A coward’s attack. Targeting the defenseless.”
“That’s always been his style,” Bruce murmured.
Steve gave a sharp nod. “Wheels up in five. Suit up.”
The quiet camaraderie of the common room shattered into purposeful motion. Joseph fell into step beside Natasha as they moved toward the hangar.
“You okay?” he asked her, his voice barely above the hum of the compound.
Her green eyes met his, and for a fleeting second, the wall was down. He saw the same dread he felt—the horror of helplessness against a falling rock. “We’ll do what we can,” she said, and it wasn’t just about the mission.
He nodded, wanting to say more. He never did.
The Quinjet cut through the night sky like a silent predator. Joseph sat strapped in, feeling the familiar vibration through his frame. Across the aisle, Natasha checked her widow’s bites, her movements precise, economical.
“Coming in hot,” Sam Wilson’s voice came through the comms. “Chaos on the ground. Police lines are buckling.”
The jet banked, and the city sprawled below, a beautiful mosaic of ancient streets and modern lights now threaded with the panicked red brake lights of gridlock.
“Drop zones as planned,” Steve commanded. “Bruce, you’re on standby. We need calm, not rage. Thor, you’re with me on the north sector. Sam, aerial recon and crowd direction. Nat, Joseph, take the central plaza and the old town streets. Get people moving south.”
“Copy,” Joseph said, his voice flat. The Soldier’s cold efficiency settled over him, a familiar, uncomfortable cloak.
The ramp hissed open. The noise hit them first—a cacophony of screams, car horns, sirens, and the frantic, amplified voices of emergency crews. The air smelled of diesel exhaust and cold stone and fear.
He hit the ground running, Natasha a flash of red hair at his periphery. They split, wordlessly, covering more ground. He moved with a speed that made civilians flinch, his size often causing more panic.
“This way!” he shouted, his voice cutting through the din, directing a family huddled by a fountain. “South! Keep moving!”
He saw an elderly man struggling with a bag, shoved by the current of the crowd. Joseph was there in an instant, taking the bag, placing a steadying hand on the man’s shoulder. “Sir. Let me help.” The man’s terrified eyes widened at his appearance, but the kindness in Joseph’s blue eyes seemed to calm him. He guided him to a flowing stream of people.
He caught glimpses of Natasha. She was on a café awning, pulling a terrified teenager up from where she’d fallen. She was calm, direct, her voice somehow carrying authority without yelling. She met his gaze across the sea of heads, a quick check-in. He gave a slight nod.
They worked that way for a lifetime of minutes, a brutal, draining ballet. Every face they couldn’t reach, every person who froze in terror, felt like a failure. The sky was beginning to glow with an unnatural, ugly orange hue. The meteor was entering the atmosphere.
“Sam, status?” Steve’s voice was tense in his ear.
“Northern sectors clearing. Southern routes are jammed. I’m trying to redirect.”
“Time?” Natasha asked, helping a mother with a stroller down a set of stairs.
“Ninety seconds to impact. Fall back! All Avengers, fall back to the rally point!”
Joseph grabbed a last stray child, scooped her up, and sprinted. He could hear it now, a tearing, rumbling scream in the sky. He shoved the child into the arms of a uniformed officer at the perimeter. “Go!”
He and Natasha converged on the rally point—the sturdy, modern tower that housed the local S.H.I.E.L.D. auxiliary office, its lower levels a designated shelter. They were the last ones in, slipping through the reinforced doors just as the world outside turned white, then orange.
The sound was beyond sound. It was a physical force, a punch to the chest. The tower shook, dust raining from the ceiling. Lights flickered. Joseph instinctively stepped closer to Natasha, his body shielding hers from the falling debris. She didn’t flinch, just stared at the shuddering door, her jaw set.
The deep rumble subsided into a terrible, rolling silence, broken by the distant sound of collapsing buildings and new sirens.
“Report,” Steve said over the comms, his voice gritty with dust.
One by one, the team checked in.
Thor shattered the silence. “The coward strikes from afar. When I find this fragment, I will grind it to dust.”
Tony was already at a terminal, pulling up external feeds. “Impact zone is a crater. Thermal readings are off the charts. And,” he tapped the screen, pulling up a new data set, “we’ve got seismic activity. Not from the impact. Something’s… moving.”
On the grainy thermal image, shapes emerged from the edges of the molten crater. Hundreds of them. Clawed, bipedal, glowing with the same malevolent energy as the meteor. They skittered up the ruined streets, moving with terrible purpose.
“Ultron didn’t just send a bomb,” Bruce said, his voice quiet with dawning horror. “He sent a troop carrier.”
The screens showed the creatures’ path, a straight, unwavering line. Heading directly for the tower.
The lights in the lobby flickered once, twice, and died, plunging them into emergency red lighting. A deep, mechanical thud echoed from somewhere in the building’s lower levels.
Then another. Closer.
Joseph felt the familiar shift in his muscles, the readiness for a fight.
The thudding was at the door now. A sharp, screeching sound of metal being torched.
Steve’s shield slid from his back with a decisive shink. “Avengers,” he said, his voice calm and clear in the dark. “We’re not done yet.”
The screeching at the door became a sustained, piercing whine. Orange light bloomed around the edges of the reinforced metal, dripping molten slag onto the tiled floor.
“They’re cutting through,” Natasha stated, her widow’s bites already humming to life.
Joseph didn’t think. He moved. He planted his feet wide, his boots grinding against the debris-dusted floor. He slid his flesh-and-blood fingers and his vibranium fingers into the narrow gap where the doors met.
Muscles in his back and shoulders corded tight. A low groan started in his chest, a mix of effort and pure defiance. The two-ton security door, warped and half-soldered shut, resisted. Then, with a shriek of tortured metal, it began to move upward.
Smoke—acrid and chemical, the breath of the scorched city—flooded in, swallowing the red emergency lights. It stung the eyes, coated the tongue.
He lifted it just high enough, his entire frame trembling with the strain. “Go! Now!”
They rolled, dove, and charged out under the gap. Steve first, shield raised. Thor, a crackle of lightning. Tony’s repulsors whined to life. They emerged into a new kind of hell.
The plaza was a landscape of shattered cobblestones and burning wreckage. The tower behind them was one of the last structures standing. And moving through the smoke, like demons wading through fog, were Ultron’s minions. Dozens of them. Their chrome bodies reflected the fires, their single, glowing optical sensors scanning methodically. The sound was a nightmare chorus: the whir of servos, the click of clawed feet on stone, the low-frequency hum of their weapon cores charging.
Joseph released the door. It crashed down behind them, sealing the civilians inside. For now.
“Establish a perimeter!” Steve yelled. “Don’t let them flank the tower!”
The team erupted into motion. Repulsor blasts painted blue streaks through the smoke. Mjolnir flew with a sound like thunder. Natasha was a whirl of black and red, her electric bites snapping and cracking against metallic joints.
Joseph fought with silent, brutal efficiency. He grabbed a minion’s arm, twisted, and used its own momentum to slam it into two others. His metal fist punched straight through a chest plate, ripping out wires and synthetic hydraulics in a shower of sparks. He was a wall, a breaker of machines.
Then he heard it.
Not a scream. A squeal. High-pitched, pure, cutting through the mechanical din. It was the sound of a child, utterly terrified.
His head snapped up.
Through a break in the smoke, he saw a smaller, older bell tower attached to a damaged cathedral across the plaza. Its top was a Gothic spire, half the stone facing blown away. And there, clinging to the remains of a gargoyle, was a little girl. Her dress was torn. Her face was a pale blotch of fear.
Three of the minions were on the tower’s side. They weren’t attacking it. They were climbing. Clawed hands dug into ancient mortar, pulling their sleek forms upward with spider-like precision. Heading right for her.
“Joseph!” Natasha’s voice, sharp with warning.
He was already running.
He didn’t call it out. He didn’t wait for backup. The geometry of the battlefield mapped itself in his mind in a split second. The direct route was blocked by a collapsing fountain and a knot of battling Avengers. He angled left, using the smoke as cover, his legs pumping.
One of the climbing minions, perhaps detecting motion, paused and swiveled its head. Its optic locked onto him. It detached one hand, a plasma carbine emerging from a forearm housing.
Joseph didn’t break stride.
He reached the base of the bell tower. The first minion was twenty feet up, the carbine glowing. Joseph bent his knees. With a explosive burst of strength, he leapt. Not at the minion. At the wall beside it.
He caught a stone ledge with his right hand, his fingers digging in. The minion adjusted its aim downward.
Time seemed to slow. His brain calculated distance, trajectory, mass.
He made a decision.
With a sharp, internal twist of his shoulder, there was a heavy clunk, a release of pressure. The entire cybernetic arm detached at the socket. He caught its weight in his left hand for a fraction of a second, the wiring and synthetic muscle fibers dangling.
Then he swung it like a sledgehammer.
The force was unbelievable. The vibranium-and-steel fist connected with the minion’s torso. It didn’t just fall. It cratered, then shot backwards like it had been hit by a cannon. It tore through the air, a blur of broken metal, and smashed into the wall of the main S.H.I.L.D. tower fifty feet away with a deafening, final crunch of components.
Joseph landed, catlike, on the ledge. He didn’t pause to look at the result. He slammed the detached arm back into its socket. A series of magnetic clicks and a soft hydraulic hiss sealed it. He flexed the fingers. It was a fraction of a second slower than natural. Good enough.
Above him, the remaining two minions scrambled faster, claws scraping frantically on stone. The little girl sobbed, her fingers slipping.
He started to climb.
Stone bit into his fingertips as he hauled himself up, moving with a feral grace that belied his size. The ancient bell tower groaned under the added strain, its fractures whispering of imminent collapse.
A chrome hand shot from a fissure to his left, cold fingers clamping around his calf. The grip was crushing, designed to pulverize bone.
Joseph didn’t cry out. He dropped his weight, letting the minion take the strain, and pivoted. His left arm snaked down and seized the creature by its forearm. With a brutal twist, he tore it from its perch. He didn’t throw it away. He used its own momentum, swinging it in a short, vicious arc upward. It cannoned into the second minion just as it reached for the girl’s ankle.
They collided with a sound like a car wreck. Sparks fountained. Tangled, they tumbled down the side of the tower, shearing off stonework before disappearing into the smoke below.
Joseph raced upward. “Just hang on!” he yelled, the words ripped from his throat.
The girl screamed—a raw, seamless sound of panic that drilled into his skull. It fueled him.
Her fingers were slipping from the gargoyle’s neck. Her grip was down to the last knuckle.
He lunged, stretching every sinew. His right hand closed around her wrist just as her hold failed. For a terrifying moment, she swung free, her weight a sudden, desperate pull on his arm. He gritted his teeth, muscles corded, and hauled her against his chest.
“Hold on to me.”
She did. Immediately. She wrapped her thin arms around his neck in a stranglehold, her face pressed into his collarbone. Her tears were hot against his skin.
The tower let out a deep, mortal groan. A web of cracks exploded across the facade. The entire structure shuddered, listing sideways. Chunks of masonry the size of armchairs broke loose and plummeted. He looked down. The route they’d taken was gone, swallowed by a cascade of falling debris. He couldn’t make it down in time. Not before the whole thing came down on top of them.
There was no calculation. No alternative.
His earpiece crackled to life. “Wait for me, Joseph! One minute out!” Sam’s voice was tight, strained. Joseph could hear the whump-whump-whump of the helicopter blades growing louder, cutting through the roar of falling stone.
The tower pitched. A ten-foot chunk of cornice sheared off and smashed into the plaza where he’d been standing seconds before. Dust plumed. The spire tilted further, a giant tree beginning its final fall.
“There’s no time,” Joseph said, his voice flat and final.
“Joseph, wait!” Tony’s voice cut through the team channel. “Don’t you dare—”
Joseph looked down. The world swirled ninety feet below, a dizzying mosaic of fire, smoke, and scurrying chrome figures. He adjusted his grip on the girl, tucking her head securely against him. “Close your eyes,” he murmured into her hair. She buried her face deeper.
He jumped.
It wasn’t a leap. It was a surrender to gravity. He curled his body around hers, making a cage of his limbs. The wind screamed past them. The ground rushed up, an unforgiving canvas of cracked stone.
His feet hit first.
The impact was a seismic shock that traveled up his skeleton, a dull, crushing thud that vibrated in his teeth. His knees bent, absorbing the force, the enhanced tendons and muscles in his legs shrieking in protest. He stumbled forward one step, two, fighting for balance on the uneven ground. He straightened.
The girl in his arms was quiet, trembling. He pulled back just enough to look at her face. Pale, streaked with dust and tears, but her eyes were open, wide. She was whole. She was breathing.
She was fine.
Then she squealed, a sharp, piercing sound of renewed terror, her small hand pointing past his shoulder.
“Joseph!” Natasha’s voice was a panicked blade through the earpiece.
He looked up.
For two seconds, the world narrowed to that single, horrific sight. The entire bell tower, tons of ancient stone and fractured timber, was completing its collapse. It wasn’t falling sideways anymore. The base had given way. It was coming straight down, a solid mountain of medieval masonry, and its shadow was already cold on his back.
He hunched over.
He wrapped himself around the girl, his back becoming a shield, his arms a vault. He tucked his chin, closed his eyes.
The world ended in sound.
A deafening, all-consuming roar of annihilation. The impact wasn’t a single blow; it was a sustained, grinding catastrophe. It hammered him into the ground. Something cracked—a rib, maybe two. White-hot pain lanced through his side. Dust, thick and choking, blasted in from all sides, filling his nose, his mouth.
He held. His muscles locked. His vibranium arm, braced against the ground, took the brunt, the metal groaning under the stress. A slab of stone the size of a truck settled across his shoulders.
He held the girl tighter, shielding her, his world reduced to the crushing weight and the fragile body trembling against his chest. Voices cut in and out of the earpiece, shredded by static and the roar of collapsing stone.
“—status!—”
“—visual on—”
“—Joseph!—”
The noise faded into a thick, rumbling silence, punctuated by the distant ping of cooling metal and the trickle of shifting debris. Dust clogged his throat. He was in a pocket of darkness, the slab above him angled against other rubble, forming a brutal, temporary shelter. A shaft of fire-lit smoke pierced through a gap. He could move. Just barely.
The girl whimpered.
“It’s okay,” he rasped, the words grating out. “We’re okay.”
Outside, through the dust cloud, Natasha saw the spire come down on top of him. A sound tore from her throat—not a scream, a raw, bitten-off gasp—and she sprinted forward.
A strong hand clamped onto her bicep, yanking her back.
“Natasha, no!” Steve’s voice was a command, his face etched with the same horror.
“He’s under there!” she shouted, fighting against his grip, her boots scraping for purchase on the broken ground. She twisted, a move that would break a normal man’s hold. He held her, his own strength augmented, his expression pained but firm.
“The structure is unstable! You run in there, you bring the rest of it down on both of you!”
She nearly broke his nose with a sharp head-butt he saw coming; he ducked, wrapping his other arm around her, containing the storm of her. “Let me go, Steve!”
The last of the stone settled. The groaning stopped. The dust began, slowly, to thin.
She stopped fighting. Her chest heaved. Steve released her, and she was moving before the gesture was complete, scrambling over the first mound of rubble. Steve signaled the others, and they all followed, a tense, silent unit converging on the tomb of stone.
Natasha’s hands scraped over sharp edges, her mind white with a static she hadn’t felt in years. Then she saw it—a shift in the debris pile. A large, fractured slab tilted upward an inch. Then another.
With a grunt of sheer effort, Joseph pushed his back up. The stone slab slid back with a grinding crash. He climbed through the opening, emerging from the cloud of dust like a phantom, his dark hair grey with powder, his face streaked with soot and a thin line of blood from his temple. The little girl was attached to him, arms locked around his neck, her face hidden.
He walked, each step deliberate, a study in controlled endurance. A woman broke from a huddle of survivors nearby, her face a mask of utter despair that shattered into disbelief.
“Oh my god! My baby!”
Joseph reached her. He did his best to stay upright, his spine rigid. He gently pried the girl’s arms loose and lowered her to the ground. “She’s okay,” he said, his voice hoarse but calm.
The woman fell to her knees, grabbing her daughter, weeping uncontrollably, peppering the girl’s face with kisses. Then she looked up, her eyes swimming with a gratitude so vast it was painful. She lunged forward, wrapping Joseph in a desperate, shaking hug. “Thank you. Thank you.”
He hugged her back, briefly, a soft, tired smile touching his lips. “Get to the south barrier. It’s safe.”
As the woman gathered her child and stumbled away, the smile vanished. The rigid control bled out of his posture. He took three staggering steps backward and sat down hard against a slab of rock, a sharp hiss escaping his teeth. His left hand pressed against his right side, where the dark fabric of his suit was glistening, soaked through.
Natasha was there. She dropped to a crouch in front of him, her hands coming up, hovering, unsure where to touch. “Look at me.”
“Just a crack. Or two. It’s fine.” He was breathing too carefully.
Tony landed nearby, faceplate retracting. “Friday’s scanning. You’ve got two fractured ribs, possibly a lumbar contusion, and you’re bleeding from approximately twelve superficial lacerations. ‘Fine’ is not the word I’d use.”
Steve knelt on his other side. “Medevac is two minutes out.”
Joseph shook his head, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. “The perimeter. The minions.”
“The perimeter is holding,” Steve said, his tone brooking no argument. “Sam and Thor are mopping up the last of them. Your part is done.”
Natasha’s eyes were scanning his face, reading the tension around his eyes, the pallor under the grime. The assessment warred with something else, something that tightened her throat. “You jumped off a building.”
He met her gaze, a flicker of something almost like apology in his blue eyes. “Didn’t have a better option.”
A beat of silence hung between them, charged with everything unsaid—the memory of other falls, other injuries, a different lifetime of mutual, reckless salvation.
Bruce hurried over, a small field medical kit in hand. “Let’s get some pressure on that side, at least.” He glanced at Natasha. She gave a tiny, tight nod and moved back half a step, giving him space but not going far.
Joseph leaned his head back against the cool stone, closing his eyes as Bruce worked. The adrenaline was draining away, leaving the raw, throbbing pain in its wake. The sounds of the battle were distant now, isolated skirmishes. The primary dreadnought of the meteor had been the troop carrier; with the troops being eliminated, the immediate threat was fading.
Sam’s voice came through, clear this time. “Last of the chrome crawlers is down. Area is secure. For now.”
Thor landed with a thud, Mjolnir swinging loosely at his side. “The vermin are scattered. A hollow victory. The mind that sent them remains.”
Tony was already back at a holographic display projected from his gauntlet, sifting through data. “And I’m tracking its signal. It’s weak, but it’s there. Faded into the old industrial sector. It’s licking its wounds.”
Steve stood, his shoulders squaring with a new resolve. “Then we don’t give it time to heal.”
Joseph’s eyes opened. He pushed himself up straighter, ignoring Bruce’s protesting murmur. “I’m good to go.”
“You are not,” Natasha said, the words sharp.
Steve watched the exchange, his expression unreadable. “Medevac will be here in ten seconds,”