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You cannot bring together a disparate group of extraordinary people to fight impossible battles on behalf of queen and country without causing fireworks. Fireworks expressed, as emotions so often are, in a seething kettle of pretend disinterest and relentless sarcasm.
Initially it was about the name.
‘What, exactly,’ said Mr Bond, ‘Are we avenging right now?’
‘Oh, you know, stuff. Plenty of stuff that needs avenging done to it. Or for it. Or in it. Use your imaginations.’
The Doctor flipped his screwdriver, running straight towards the reported site of the outer space satellite impact (a small building that had, until several moments ago, been a public toilet) before thinking better of it and running around the back of it.
‘Make your mind up nancy boy,’ Hunt spat at him. To hell with the lot of them, he'd take over while the poncy Doctor licked the grey plastic loo wall instead of focusing on the investigation at hand.
No, not an investigation. It was an avenging, apparently, if you believed every pencil-pushing twat in a suit who thought a job in the civil service gave him the power to lick god’s own arsehole. Hunt kicked the door in, exposing a half-dressed corpse that had distinctly naked tits and violently red lips to match her violently red bloodstains.
Sod it all, now it was a murder avenging. That sounded ten times worse than a normal avenging.
‘Stuff,’ repeated Harry as he took in the corpse, shivering next to Sherlock in their matching coats and scarves, looking like good and evil twins from mirror universes. ‘Well, I’ve done stupider things for vaguer reasons. This is your area of expertise, right, Mr Holmes?’
Harry hovered his wand over Sherlock’s head, casting a pretty ineffectual light charm to aid the detective in detecting things.
‘Woman, late forties. Vegetarian, on her way to the dry cleaners to pick up blue satin dress for a work luncheon. No, it was a retirement party. Pick up was at half seven, but it’s just as well she’s dead. That shade would have done nothing for her skintone.’
‘Anything about how she died?’ Mr Bond asked, as bland and cold as every other person who had anything to do with the SHIELD initiative. It was something they put in the water over there. Or maybe you had to pass a test, only men with icy bollocks, sociopathic charm and designer suits allowed.
‘Do you think the enormous fucking bullet hole in her chest is a clue?’ Gene asked.
‘Intelligence indicates conventional firearms were not responsible for this.’
‘No gun would make holes like this in the walls, either,’ Sherlock said, growing bored with the corpse and toddling off to investigate the mysteries of a ladies loo.
‘Something’s weird,’ Harry muttered, taking Sherlock’s vacated space and leaning closer. His wand was vibrating out of all control in response to something powerful in the area, but he didn’t know how to say that out loud without inviting five minutes of distracting innuendo from his teammates.
‘Not weird,’ said the Doctor, shoving through the crowd to pull the dead woman over, pausing respectfully before he started jabbering again like a nervous virgin. ‘Ionized molecular resonance. It’s a thing. Ooh,’ he ducked up, bouncing on his toes like a child presented with a new toy. ‘A sexy thing. Hello pretty, you’re not from around here.’
It was a small cube that fit neatly into his cupped hands, emanating a soft blue glow that looked similar to Harry’s lumos charm. There was silence, everyone slightly awed by its presence, until the Doctor gave a little shriek and started juggling it between his hands like a shiny hot potato.
‘Ow, ow, oh dear lord this was a mistake!’
Gene took a last drag of his cigarette and flicked the butt away, hulking his shoulders. ‘Well. Director Shit For Brains isn’t going to like this, is he?’
---
Director General Edmund Blackadder of SHIELD did not, in fact, like anything. He didn’t like his job, he didn’t like his underlings, nor the bloody mysterious wankers who made up the world’s council and with whom Blackadder was so often in trouble. The same idiots who thought his hastily improvised, budget-and-bollocks-saving idea of bringing together a group of volatile loners and miscreants who could barely stand existing in the same time period, let alone the same cramped office block was fantastic and had to be put into practice immediately. He hated the fact that now he had proposed the idea, no matter how obviously idiotic and unstable it was, he now had to make it succeed or he’d soon be finding himself in an unfortunately fatal accident with a Boris bike. And most of all he hated Agent Tucker. By god, did he loathe that civil servant go-between who thought he ruled the entire government.
In fact, the only thing he had liked about his life was the man he‘d stabbed to get this job. Bloody typical.
‘What part of “I cannot work with a bunch of posh twats” aren’t you getting?’
‘Let me use a language I think you’ll understand,’ Sherlock did not look up from his phone as he gave Gene the finger.
‘Brilliant, I bet it took you ages to come up with that.’
‘Blackadder, I do believe you oversold me on the collective intelligence of the group when you offered me the job.’
‘QUIET. ALL OF YOU BE QUIET.’
The Doctor slammed his hands on the table, glaring at each squabbling individual in turn. There was something tense and crackling just below the surface of his skin that made them take notice. Something- something in his eyes. Even Gene, even Bond shut up and stared at him. The Doctor switched to a beautific, if awkwardly adolescent, smile. ‘There. See, it’s not that hard to get along, is it?’
Blackadder leapt on what could be his only chance to seize control. ‘Agent Tucker, before I succumb to the overwhelming urge to reinstate the SHIELD disciplinary protocol of repeatedly punching your neighbour in the face every time they say something moronic, can you elaborate standard briefing session policy for the benefit of our guests?’
Agent Tucker was a rat-faced gentleman, who did not look so much affable and bland, but more like he was permanently red-faced and extremely Scottish. He stepped up to fulfil his job admirably. ‘Alright, you leaky cunt cockmunchers, if I hear one more fucking word of complaint I’m going to shove this tesseract so far up your arses your piss could work the lightshow at a posh bollock’s rave, do you fucking understand that?’
On a scale, the Avenger’s expressions varied somewhere between ‘unimpressed’ and ‘fucking terrified’.
‘Once again, an excellent clarification of our current situation. So, you’re all special, kill kill, etc etc. Now does anyone have any idea what we can do about that funny knobbly fellow who’s running around killing our agents? Any plans? Anyone?’
---
The members of the Avengers, it turned out, were not very good at plans. They were good at running (most of them), they were good at improvising explosions (and often walking- or rolling- away in a cool manner), they were extremely good at watching evildoers accidentally throw themselves to their deaths, or become otherwise distracted from the final battle and show themselves out.
They did not have a plan.
‘We should have come up with a plan,’ Harry gasped as another wave of aliens dropped down from the skies. He toppled one with an expelliarmus, hitting two others with a jelly-legs jinx that reflected off its shiny armour.
The aliens had first invaded SHIELD headquarters with a subtly deceptive plan involving tourist badges, possessed agents, and root vegetables, and then had stolen the tesseract. And hidden it somewhere for some reason. And now these things were falling out of the sky. Probably because of the tesseract.
Sherlock had suggested attempting to trace the signature, but of the SHIELD equipment that had survived the initial attack, one was stealing wifi from a Starbucks down the road and the other had bits of melted chocolate in the charger and the ‘i’ button had gone missing. It turned out there was only so far you could match a Blackberry Curve to an alien artefact of ambiguous origin, but luckily the aliens had only moved to the council estate just down the road. They could see where the portal thing was opening up, and sent Sherlock and Gene, in their secretly voted capacity as the most useless members of the group, to try and locate it.
‘Nah, if you come up with plans you end up missing all the fun bits,’ the Doctor grinned. He was not so much fighting back as he was waving his sonic screwdriver around aimlessly and occasionally hitting things. Harry thought most of those blows were accidental. At their backs, Bond covered them with his handgun, effortlessly shooting zigzagging alien bodies backwards while dodging around the tiny paved area outside SHIELD’s rubbish-looking office tower.
‘Still think we should have one,’ Harry muttered.
---
Gene and Sherlock had followed the trail bodies right to the loopy knobbly guy’s hideout in the nearby council estate, from where he was posturing really loudly. They couldn’t really hear what he was saying, snatches of ‘-orious lifetimes of Asg-‘ or whatever. They were too busy arguing loudly themselves.
‘Look at this, the grain of the knife wound here, if you compare it to the metal alloys left on the last victim’s fingers-‘
‘Yeah, looks to me like we got a guy who really likes killing people. I suggest we stop him instead of guessing whether he wears boxers or briefs.’
Sherlock bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Excellent. Tell me, were you born stupid, Hunt, or did you have to work really hard at it?’
‘I got an idea, why don’t you bring a collapsable deck chair next time we go investigating, so when you lip me and I end up beating you with it, you have something to sit on and make your cracking jokes in comfort.’
‘Yes, that was terribly diverting from a man who makes his living pretending to solve crimes in the dark ages, but if you could shut up for a moment, you could let some of us get on with the real detective work.’
‘You’ve got no gut.’ Gene snapped.
Sherlock’s eyes slid to his waistline. ‘And you have far too much of it.’
‘Fucking hilarious. Don’t cream your knickers with all that wit.’
Sherlock swirled around, looking all fancy and lean and dead. Fucking. Annoying. ‘Look, you imbecile, if you stop and think for a moment, the alloy clearly corresponds with the rusting roof of the the civic centre, which, combined with the direction of the knife wound, suggests the tesseract is located up there!’ He punctuated this last, slightly screamed, bit of dialogue with a stab at the sky. They both squinted upwards expectantly, but no light shone forth to confirm Sherlock was right. However, Gene was never one to do more footwork than was necessary.
‘We haveta tell the others now, don’t we? Bollocks the lot of it, come on.’ And Gene took off running towards the SHIELD building.
Sherlock watched him go, amusing himself with the man’s slow jiggling path before pulling out his phone.
tesseract civic centre roof. no need to thank me—SH
---
‘Roof! Right, come on!’ The Doctor yelled maniacally, sonicking a locked council flat door and compromising the safety of the entire block. He took off up the stairs. ‘Only thirty of them to reach the top.’
‘Lift broken,’ Bond said laconically as he followed with a steady pace. ‘How depressing.’
‘I’ll stay down here,’ Harry called, sticking himself in the doorway and eyeing the sky. ‘Hold them off. Buy you a bit of time.’
Bond raised an eyebrow, clearly not trusting Harry’s ability to fend off an invasion with a bit of wood, but nor was he bothered about trying to save him from himself. ‘Don’t be a hero, kid’ he said, before vanishing full pelt up the stairs.
‘Didn’t we get info packs about each other?’ Harry muttered to his retreating back, stepping out into the frosty air thick with lights and clawed, toothy things, several of whom had caught sight of him. ‘Am I the only one who read those things?’
And he took aim.
---
Director Blackadder crouched down in the lift. A clipboard precariously balanced over his head offered him his only protection from a sudden burst of gunfire. Agent Tucker coiled like a tight spring, balling his fists to Blackadder’s right. To his left, his second-in-command Lieutenant Ros Myers went through her pockets.
‘Come on! You’re secret agents, for Christ’s sake. What am I hiring you lot for if we can get taken down by four elderly traffic wardens in hazard gear?’
‘Fair’s fair, boss, I counted more pensioners than that.’ Ros had run out of weapons early on in the invasion, on account of most of the guns Bond hadn’t secreted on his person being plastic ones strategically placed to convince any visiting World Council members that Blackadder hadn’t lost most of the SHIELD budget through an extremely ill-advised investment in an aquatic helicarrier secreted under the Thames that had been seized after they tried to dodge the congestion charge by registering it as a taxi. She now had a stick of gum, her SHIELD ID card and a pair of glasses.
The door slid open. Blackadder moaned low and long and curled up on the floor. Malcolm slid around the wall of the lift to cram himself behind the tiniest bit of wall and shouted, ‘Get them, you fucking scary broad!’
Ros jammed the earpiece of her glasses into the first goon’s axillary artery, lashing out with her ID card to slit the second’s throat, and kicking a third in the balls. The floor was littered with bodies of possessed SHIELD agents, their leader crying and mumbling in a ball next to a parsnip-infested lollypop lady, and Malcolm making an absolute tit of himself like always. Ros composed herself and smoothed down a fly-away hair as the Director rose unsteadily to his feet and watched the second wave of possessed elderly infantry pour in.
‘We’re not going to last long here, boss.’
Blackadder nodded, adjusted his standard issue Secret English Organisation Embarassing Beret with one hand and seized a parsnip with another.
‘All is not lost.’ He said, as the left wall of the SHIELD Crappy Office Block exploded inwards. ‘Gentlemen, I do believe I have a cunning plan.’
---
One of the aliens was on Harry. He was looking the wrong way, and it had swooped down behind him, claws extended and he couldn’t react fast enough. His side hurt too much, and he was going to die-
And then a girl punched it in the face. She spat on the ground when it tumbled, shaking her scraped ponytail sassily. ‘Fucking aliens. Hey, mate, you alright?’
‘Huh? Oh, thanks.’ He said, feeling a bit stupid.
‘This is all pretty weird, innit? Kelly by the way.’ She turned, headbutting the abused alien that had sprung back to its feet. It fell with a crunch of bone and an unholy shriek.
‘Harry.’ He shot a jinx over her shoulder, then grabbed her arm, running towards the building. Now there was two of them they couldn’t stay out in the open. Not when she had nothing to protect herself with. Kelly protested loudly, but her only other action was to roll her eyes and she followed him into the building. It took forever to climb the stairs, pausing to beat back the ones that had figured out the doorhandles, but eventually they hit the roof door. Harry pulled his wand and unlocked it with a breathless ‘Alohomora!’, much to the visible irritation of Bond, who had locked it in the first place. Git.
‘Oh my god, how did you do that? Have you got one of those superpowers too?’
‘No. I guess? Sort of, I don’t know. I guess I’m part of the Avengers, but I’m starting to think that doesn’t actually mean anything.’
‘Avengers? What are we avenging?’
Harry shifted, embarrassed, and pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘We haven’t really decided yet. And uh, it’s just me, you’re not actually part of the team, so…’
‘Are you saying I couldn’t fucking be on the Avengers, mate?’
‘No,’ stuttered Harry, taking a step back out a very middle-class need to protect himself. ‘No, I’m definitely not saying that.’
‘I have powers you know. I’m a fucking rocket scientist, me. And looks to me like your blinking light fingy needs a spatial-reversal flip of the temporal properties before it explodes the shit out of all of us, yeah?’
‘Oh,’ said Harry, as Kelly shoved him out of the way and pulled at the control panel, sticking close to it so she didn’t collide with the Doctor, who was running frantically in circles, pulling at bits here and there and generally making a really smart mess of everything.
‘So what do you do, then?’ she asked, as she did his job of saving the day for him.
‘I’m a wizard.’ Harry paused briefly to shield them from some kind of sci-fi laser, before responding with a nasty hex. ‘And I came back from the dead once.’
Kelly stared down at him, cheekbones lit by frazzing blue light of the tesseract, aliens on flying surfboards twinkling around her like stars, or spotlights on a Hollywood boulevard.
‘That is fucking nuts, mate.’
He liked to think she was impressed, but her face didn’t seem quite capable of moving, so that was only a guess.
---
Sherlock sat in the safety of a nearby bus shelter and reprimanded John through texts for not popping out to buy the milk before the aliens invaded and all the shops closed.
---
‘And who are you?’ The Doctor asked, handing her a very large spanner.
‘Kelly. I’ve decided to join the Avengers too, alright?’
‘Of course you have, why not?’ Mr Bond muttered, pulling a gun out of a space that was hard to identify, but appeared to be located between his rib cage and his navel.
Kelly stripped the tesseract machine with speed, slapping the Doctor when he tried to jump in and make adjustments to her work. He slunk away to his side again, cowed. ‘Yeah, I used to be part of a superhero thing, but it was a bit shit, you know. Everyone kept dying, like.’
Bond fired his tiny gun at a massive alien. Against all probability it exploded and looked really cool while doing so. Harry’s victims just fell over rather unhappily.
The Doctor nodded and waved his arms, but his enthusiastic babbling was muffled by a bit of plastic between his teeth.‘Well, you’re in luck. We consider that first rule of avenging round here. Being alive to avenge again when we’re done.’
---
Huffing and puffing, Gene reached the rooftop at last, catching his breath with hands on knees. The tesseract was off, which good work team, but now everyone was posturing and bargaining with the scumbag with the poofy hair that no one had really caught the name of. All except Bond, who was now wielding two completely different guns from the ones he’d had when they’d started, and had both of them trained on the man’s face.
‘Look! I can give you this one chance! No one has to die today!’ The Doctor was yelling, pleading, waving his hands back and forth expressively.
‘Bollocks to that,’ Gene said to himself, rolling his eyes at the incompetence of everyone in London. Even the London aliens were bloody divs when it came down to it.
Americans probably imported proper heroic aliens to save the world, not girls dressed up as a maths teacher. Bloody Yanks.
‘And you think to stop me? You, this collection of half-witted apes playing at heroes? Who scurry around this earth like rats chasing their tales. You have no plans, no hope, you are inconsequential, pitiful-‘
Gene nutted him.
The man windmilled backwards, eyes widening for a fraction of a second before he tumbled off the roof , down four stories and straight onto the cast iron railing spikes. His eyes rolled back in his head.
Bond strolled over to the side, casually glanced down, and said: ‘What a piercing observation.’
---
They collected for one last time before going their separate ways. Gene had liberated a bottle of vodka from a shop that had been sabotaged in the fight and was sharing with Bond and the Doctor, who was finding new and unnatural ways of contorting his face. Kelly had stolen Harry’s glasses and was trying them on, informing him of how shit his vision and general taste in accessories was. Sherlock was texting. Director Blackadder had a turnip down his trousers and was acting very much like he didn’t.
When the prisoner started getting a bit antsy and tearful, they decided to call it a day.
‘Yes, well, time to be off, eh? I’ll just drop this one home, give him a bit of a stern talking to. No harm done.’ The Doctor smiled, clapping the mangled man on the shoulder and laughing apologetically when he whined in pain. ‘Right, well. See you all around. Off we go.’
With a bit of force he shoved the squirming green guy in through the TARDIS doors, and could be heard encouraging him to admire the wonder of something that was bigger on the inside before fading from reality.
Gene blinked between his vodka and the TARDIS, and shrugged it off. ‘Bugger it. I thought that box was for me.’
---
The rubble of SHIELD headquarters spread out in every pitiful direction a four story building could reach after being semi-demolished. Its leader surveyed the dusty remains of his legacy.
‘Director Blackadder, perhaps you can explain a pressing question.’ Ros stepped up beside him. ‘You have not only destroyed the only European branch of SHIELD, we’re in an enormous amount of government debt because we got involved with an impromptu council demolition project, and your idea to pull in five chaotic and untrained strangers to hit monsters has, frankly, worked out exactly how we all expected it would.’
‘Yes, I’d say that was accurate so far.’
‘We could have used the army. We could have simply retrieved the tesseract through the channels that already exist to deal with exactly this sort of problem and stopped this madness before it began.’ Ros glared him down, arms tense at her side, bloody ID badge pinned to her lapel. ‘I appreciate the continued job benefits, but why on earth did the World Council just grant you funding to keep this insane scheme going for another decade?’
‘It’s hard to say.’ Blackadder stretched out on a surviving plastic IKEA chair with casual grace. ‘It could be they’ve cultivated faith in the little people. It could be the spectacular amount of taboo porn I’ve been planting on them for blackmail purposes. Or perhaps, Lieutenant, it could be because I was right.’