Who: Jan, Tony, Natasha, Thor, Sif, and Julie. + some nefarious Nefaria criminals, etc. When: Immediately following this. Where: Building D, Roeterseiland & Nieuwe Achtergracht, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. For the most part. What: Janet goes to rescue her father, gets in a bit over her head. Fortunately the Avengers have her back. Warnings: Violence, many many deaths. Failvengers. ___
Tony watched Jan grow smaller and smaller in the night sky, angry at her, at the pathetic excuse for a criminal empire that Nefaria was trying to build for itself, but mostly: at himself. His anger, however, was not explosive nor was it the frothing rage and uncontrollable fury of some -- it was deceptive and calm, always channeled into the next set of calculations.
Nat, Thor, Sif. Jan’s gone after Nefaria on her own. We have strong reason to believe he’s being held at the busted renovation site at the University. Sending you coordinates, he sent out mentally to his team. It took immense amounts of strength and pressure upon unforgiving metal, but Tony managed to strain his right arm just enough to reach the hidden release plates in his suit to disassemble the armor. A painstaking and slow process, but he managed to peel away enough pieces of metal to claw his way out of the Iron Man body like a creature emerging from a cocoon. Or, more fittingly, a sarcophagus. By the way, she can shrink herself down to the size of a wasp. May be a little hard to see, but I have a tracker on her.
"Understood," Nat told the team through her wrist comm. She'd showered (nothing like fish stink to really ruin a girl's day) and was suiting up when Tony's call came. It had probably been a mistake to leave Tony to tell Janet about the results of their run-in with the Nefaria thugs at the processing plant, but Natasha wasn't sure how much better it would have gone with her talking to Janet straight from the field either. "I'll be ready for wheels up, or whatever up we're taking, in less than five. Where are we meeting?"
That’s going to have to be decided amongst the rest of you. I’m going to be delayed. Tony stared around him at the empty park, blowing out a visible breath of frustration. Really delayed. Suit’s out of commission.
With a distasteful moue of frustration, Thor turned to Natasha and commandeered the communication device upon her wrist. “You needn’t be kept from this rescue party, Tony Stark, for there are more ways of travel than merely your suit and Natasha’s plane.” He’d happily fly Tony there and back -- more eyes, and more fists.
“Though, if time is of the essence, perhaps my efforts are better spent in escorting the --” and here, he turned with narrowed eye to both Sif and Natasha -- “the Valkyries.”
Sif merely raised a brow at that.
Thanks, buddy, but I’d rather you get to Jan and stop her before she does something stupid. More stupid. Besides which, Tony peeled off his outer t-shirt, wrapped it around his arm, and smashed it into the side window of the parked car whose owner had the great misfortune of being so close to the park. Whatever. He’d buy him or her a ferrari later. I am just a vulnerable sack of flesh at the moment. I can’t do much for you now. Go and get Janet and her father back. I know you guys have this more than covered. I’ll get there when I get there.
“I wish you well, Tony.” Knowing that Stark’s connections as well as his uncanny survival skills would have his situation well in hand despite being ‘a vulnerable sack of flesh’, Thor straightened and looked at his comrades.
“What will it be, ladies?”
"Whatever gets us there fastest," Natasha said, and hoped she wouldn't regret it.
___
Janet wasn’t even sure this was the right place. She was going on a spontaneous assumption, fueled by a random television news report that linked this building to Luchino Nefaria, whose organization Tony claimed had kidnapped her father. For all she knew she could be following a red herring. Maybe her father was elsewhere, or being taken out of the country. She fought against these doubts as she flew closer.
The only doubt she didn’t have was that she was going to save her father. She possessed a single-minded determination that no matter where her father was, she would find him and make whoever did this pay. She was not afraid. Taking down Tony in his seemingly invincible suit of armor gave her encouragement, and by the time she got to the buildings, she had formulated a strategy.
Nobody would notice a tiny insect flying around in the darkness, right? Buzzing around the outside of the different buildings, she spotted security guards, but upon closer inspection, there was nothing really ordinary about them. They were the typical hired guards that you’d see anywhere. If something nefarious was happening here, she expected to find men armed to the teeth as an indication.
Frustrated, she landed on a rooftop to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. Even if daddy’s in one of these buildings, I don’t know which one. Most of the windows are dark, though.
As she considered this, some movement caught her eye. There was movement in the upper floors of one of the buildings that was going through major renovation. The walls the building had been completely stripped away, exposing the girders, and a few safety lights were set up inside, but it was still plunged in shadow. Not exactly the sort of place where you’d expect people walking around. Taking flight once more, she cautiously headed inside the exposed building, her tiny heart beating furiously inside her tiny chest. There were more guards, but these looked significantly more dangerous, carrying assault rifles, patrolling the unfinished eighth floor. Janet recalled that the ninth and tenth floors of this same building were already complete - could her father be inside one of those rooms?
The guards didn’t even see her as she went right past them, taking inventory of how many there were. Five.
I can do this, she convinced herself.
One of the guards standing alone had stopped to light a cigarette. Janet knew from her experience with Tony that her tasers didn’t work full power while shrunk. I’ll have to get Hank to make me some new ones that do, Janet decided, since Tony was now probably so mad at her he probably didn’t want to talk to her again. She came up behind the guard and converted to regular size just long enough to...
ZZZZZZZZZZZZT!
The guard’s body seized up and fell twitching to the floor.
“Ooops, I think I might’ve used a little too much power,” she told the guard in a tiny, insect voice that he couldn’t hear in his condition. “Not sorry.” She wanted to be sure these assholes were going to be down for a while. She buzzed off to find her next victim.
Two armed guards walked side by side, the expressions on their faces revealed their boredom. For them, it seemed it was going to be just another dull evening. They hadn’t even been notified about the attack on the fishery yet. Again, Janet appeared from behind and seemingly out of nowhere appeared with both arms extended to tase the pair of guards, simultaneously. She quickly shrunk down, but hadn’t expected to be spotted.
“Halt! Blijf waar je bent!” From a short distance, another guard had seen Janet and witnessed her attack on his friends. He lifted his rifle to fire, but Janet had disappeared, leaving him startled and in disbelief. Had he really seen the woman? Janet had hoped this guard was far enough not to notice, but she’d been wrong. He lifted his arm to use a wrist communicator to notify the others upstairs, but before he could even use the device....
ZZZZZZZZZZZZT!
Janet had reached him. Unfortunate for him, though, he had been standing near a ledge and Janet watched his twitching body fell eight stories.
“I hope you’re dead,” she snarled.
The sound alerted the final guards, who came rushing over. He was quickly taken care of in the same way she’d dealt with the last.
“Who says I’m not ready?” Janet said proudly to herself, thinking about what Tony had told her, before.
Just before that last guard was zapped, Janet had heard him speaking into his communicator. Unlike the other guard, she hadn’t stopped him in time. She’d heard him request for reinforcements.
“Let them come,” Janet said with determination. “I’ll be ready for them.”
A few short minutes later, steel reinforced elevator doors located in the center of the building slid open and out poured no less than ten guards, on full alert, weapons raised and on full alert. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, only that an intruder had been seen. Their laser sightings cut through the darkness every which way, moving constantly as they advanced and spread out, searching.
Unnoticed, Janet slipped inside the elevator just as it opened and flew to the top, perching high in the corner to avoid being caught on the security camera. It didn’t take her full-size energy to zap electronics, as she also discovered from her tangle with Tony. So, she waited until everybody left, then used her taser to destroy the camera. Quickly, she then flew down to the control panel and pushed the close door button, and when they shut, she soundly zapped the panel. Then, flying up to the ceiling again, she zapped her way through the top to access the elevator shaft, and once there, used her tasers on the cable. The cable broke away, sending the elevator plummeting down - nobody would be using it again, soon. But now, she had access to the upper floors. Upwards she flew, high on her success and fixed in her determination.
At the top most level of the half-finished building, woman, dark of coloring and beautiful of countenance if severe in gaze, watched her men fell prey to the little shrinking and growing insect woman on the wall of monitors adorning the central office.
“Een geest?” asked one of the men by her side.
She nearly scowled and resisted the urge to lift her gun to his temple and pull the trigger. “No, you idiot. An Avenger.” The insect woman seemed to disappear completely once she had entered the lift, but Giulietta knew better. “She is coming, but I have an idea to squash this little nuisance once and for all.”
Thus, when Jan would finally arrive at the top floors of Building D, it would be to total darkness and deafening silence, for the windows had been shuddered and sealed over long ago, and within that impenetrable darkness, the men and women of the Nefaria organisation lay in wait, infrared goggles settled over their eyes, gas masks firmly affixed over their noses and mouths.
Janet stopped at the first set of doors up. They were sealed too firmly for her tiny arms to wedge them open, so she placed her hands upon them and gave them a firm ZAP! Immediately, she realized something was strange, because when she peered down the hall, she expected to see bright lights to indicate that the floor was occupied. She wasn’t stupid. She realized by now that those in charge must’ve realized the elevator had fallen. She also anticipated that she’d be expected. But the darkness made her pause.
Instead of rushing out like she had planned, she shrunk down to miniscule size and peeked through the opening, her heart beating in her throat. She didn’t like the looks of this because she couldn’t see anything at all. And for the first time this evening, fear really kicked in, and she wished she hadn’t stopped Tony in his suit. Maybe she should go to another floor? There she hesitated, not knowing whether to proceed or go back.
Gaan came the whispered voice through earpieces. The sound of a seal being ripped off a canister rang through the quiet, a sharp hiss, and then the clang of metal clattering against metal as smoky gas was released thickly into the air.
What was that noise. A chill ran down Janet’s spine as she stared wide-eyed into the darkness. The gas struck her almost immediately after that, and she screamed, cupping her hands to her face as she flew away from the door. She tried to concentrate on flying but she was in too much pain, and kept bumping into the walls of the elevator shaft as she tumbled downward. She needed to get out of the shaft, but she didn’t know where she was going - she was trapped. By the time she reached the bottom of the elevator she couldn’t even maintain her diminutive size. She blindly tried to get through the top of the elevator compartment, and fell through, where she scrambled using one hand to find the door and the other she used to lift the hem of her night shirt and hold it over her face to help keep the gas out. She was battered from the fall and currently regretting her decisions.
Giulietta heard the screams and smiled behind her mask. Haar breng me. she commanded as her men stood and flooded the stairwells after Janet.
Janet couldn’t see them, but she could hear them - people descending the elevator shaft. Where was the door? Where was the door? She scrambled to find it and managed to zap it open with her taser, opening it up. She scrambled out, right into the waiting arms of more soldiers, who had been there waiting for her. Screaming, she began lashing out tasing recklessly, for now she found herself surrounded. The fresh air helped to clear both her lungs and eyes, but seeing what she was up against didn’t help.
Men jolted and collapsed, some falling right into her, as the volts found their targets in the first wave of men, causing the others to hesitate.
“Verdoven haar!” someone shouted frantically. “Pak haar armbanden!”
A man stepped forward, taller and larger than his compatriots. He raised a hand and backfisted Janet across the face over her flailing limbs, stilling frantic attacks. As she slumped back, the others immediately took hold of her wrists and ripped off the bracelets. “Haar brengen Madame naar boven.”
By now, the smoke was ventilated and the lights turned back on. Giuletta remained still as her men brought in the unconscious body of the insect woman, letting her collapsed ungently to the floor and keeping her encircled with their guns firmly trained upon her form, lest she pull one of her disappearing tricks again.
“Time to wake up now, Ms Van Dyne.” A toe was nudged sharply into Janet’s ribs.
Groggily, Janet regained consciousness. Her throat still burned from the gas, and her muscles were sore from her fall down the elevator shaft. A throbbing in her left ankle indicated that she’d either twisted or broken it, and her wrists ached from having her taser bracelets wrenched away. The first thing she saw was the foot that had nudged her. Janet's eyes followed the foot up the body to look into the face of the lady looming over her. “Those boots are so last millennia."
Giulietta merely arched a brow. “Perhaps the Avengers took you on for your fashion tastes if not your fighting skills. Speaking of, where are your fellow team members? They seemed to enjoy breaking into my other places of business. Did they abandon you, Janet? Did they give you up for a hopeless cause?”
“I’m not an Avenger,” Janet told her, and it was the truth. When she flew away from Tony, she was going solo. “And you can eat shit and die.”
Noticing that she was surrounded by soldiers with their weapons aimed at her, she calculated her chances of being able to shrink and still escape a heavy barrage of artillery beating down. Chances were slim. But she hadn’t given up hope. Even though last saw Tony crashed on the ground, trapped in his own suit that had been destroyed by him, she knew Tony wouldn’t give up on her. Tony knew where she was heading, and there were other Avengers, like Thor. They were probably on their way, right now. She would try to stall.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?”
Giulietta tipped Janet’s chin up with a gloved finger. “Like you, I am my father’s daughter.” She smiled and pushed Janet’s face away. “It’s a shame you won’t get to see yours before you die. But rest assured, Janet, he is doing very good work.”
She took a step back and pulled her her gun from her holster, flicking off the safety and aiming it between Janet’s eyes. “Any last words I should pass on to him?”
"Hey Nefaria!" And that was Natasha's voice, echoing down from the rafters that held up the roof they were sheltering under. "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?"
Distracted momentarily, Giuletta tilted her head upward, almost a reflex, to scan for the newcomer. She wasn't quite fast enough to block the taser disk that arced down from Natasha's position to strike her in the face.
With a cry, Giulietta’s body seized and crumpled to the floor. Immediately all weapons that had been previously been trained on Jan were aimed at the ceiling, swiftly followed by a barrage of gunfire sparking against the metal rafters.
At least until two knives embedded themselves between the shoulder blades of two of the men, halting their contribution and causing them fall against their comrades. Too late -- as soon as one guard took heed of his fallen brethren, the sharp end of a blade was protrude from his chest.
Sif yanked the blade back out and shook off the excess blood before pivoting on her foot and slashing the head clean off another guard. “That’s one!” she shouted to Janet excitedly.
A light flashed, and whether it was thunder and the lightning that followed, or simply the bright gleam of armour, those who remained upon the ground could not say for they were temporarily blinded. In it’s wake a red, billowing cape arched its way down before heavy boots hit the concrete floor.
“We do not give up, you noxious arse, nor do we abandon our friends.” This came from Thor, who with a swipe of the hammer couched easily in his hands, dispatched three of the guards who’d been previously shooting at them. And as much as he would have liked to have done with Giulietta then and there, this was good sport. And perhaps it would buy Sir Van Dyne precious extra moments.
Squealing with glee, Janet took full advantage of the Avengers’ arrival and the sudden distraction to immediately shrink and bolt away from the circle of soldiers that had surrounded her. Zipping in between larger bodies, she went searching for her bracelets. "I knew you'd come!" she declared. She realized that Giulietta had been holding them, but when she’d fallen to the floor, so had they. “Good job, Natasha. Although, I wished I could’ve gotten her.” She flew by and scooped the bracelets up to carry them to a relatively safe corner where she could expand in size long enough to put them back on.
“Is Tony alright?” she asked. “Is he here?” She was still trying not to feel guilty for zapping him mercilessly inside his suit.
It hadn't been difficult to follow the Asgardians and Natasha. She had hesitated outside the building for a moment, wondering if she'd done the right thing. She was way out of her element here, but --
But, Janet needed help, and her father needed help, and deep down, Julie knew that wasn't something could ignore.
She took a deep breath. She could do this. It was just like in the cave. Just like the cave. Once she got up to where the others were, she used her speed - her energy - and directed it towards a guard in front of her, knocking him clear on his back and unconscious as she flew by. "Sorry I'm not Tony," she said sheepishly when she came to a stop by Janet. "Gotta stick by your friends, right?"
By now the alarm had well sounded and reinforcements arrived, hampered as they were by the broken lift. Though they carried with them large black rifles, their bullets glanced harmlessly off Sif’s shield as she slayed the enemy. And as the blood upon her blade grew thick, so too did the spirit of battle within her, rising up like a tide of red haze across her vision, until she had lodged her sword deep within the belly of one man, knocked enough clear across the room and into a group of arriving guards, and grabbed another by his throat with her bare hands. “You humans break so easily,” she hissed, “I know not why you should even try!” She pressed her fingers slowly through his skin as he struggled wildly within her unrelenting grasp and tried to scream.
Janet’s smile brightened when Julie appeared. “Wow. WOW! That was amazing!” She was so happy, she gave Julie a hug, and told her, “You bet! Now let’s save my daddy!”
But then, she noticed, for the first time the sword-wielding Sif hacking her way through the oncoming reinforcements. She already had butterflies in the stomach from fear and excitement, but witnessing this sort of carnage for the first time was, in a word, disturbing. She’d seen movies like the Hobbit where people got stabbed and slashed, but this wasn’t CGI - it was real life. Plus, Sif’s comment about humans frankly offended her. In a moment, she went from being excited to jump back into the fight to help the Avengers to telling Julie, “I think I feel ill, now.”
Three more guards were in the middle of a tangle with Natasha while Sif and Thor and Julie--where had she come from again?---disposed of a significant part of the rest. Sif's berserker rage was a concern that Natasha didn't have time to deal with. A strike to the gut followed by a second strike to the chin dropped one. The place was too loud and too busy for Natasha to intimidate them into surrendering by claiming the rest of the team was en route. She kicked the gun out of the second one's hand and leapt onto him, throttling him while the third henchman tried to get at her. There was a door back toward the more-finished part of the building and Natasha needed to finish these two and get to it. She hoped the library meant no more fish guts. The second henchman dropped when she hit him with the Widow's Bite, and leapt clear onto the third, bowling him over as his head cracked hard against the pavement.
The hug was welcome, but short-lived. Between the arrival of more guards, Sif's attack and seeing Natasha in action, there was a lot to take in. "Me too," Julie told Janet before turning away. This was real - of course it was, just as real as it'd been when she'd broken out of the cave. "Come on, we can't just stand here."
Behind her, she heard gunfire, but her speed was enough to get her out of the way. She was behind the guard before he knew where she'd gone, hitting him with the butt of one of the rifles that had fallen to the floor. The next one grazed her bicep, but even he was no match for her in the end.
A brief flicker of concern crowded the set of Thor’s jaw as he beheld the lack of mercy shown to the Lady Nefaria. Their time to provide salvation to Janet’s father grew short, and when he heard Julie Power’s suggestion, he smiled. “ -- I believe you are correct.” Then, the hammer flew, crumpling the doors to permit their exit toward the back of the building, where purportedly the man in question would be waiting.
“Let us find your father, Janet, and be quick.”
Janet hesitated, looking at Thor. She didn’t exactly like the people that Sif was butchering, but still identified with them by the mere fact that she too, was human. To hear Sif’s berating words about humans breaking so easy and why they should even try, had disillusioned her; she knew the Asgardians were different, but she assumed they were all in this to help, together. But here, Sif sounded derogatory and elitist, and with a sword in her hand, crazy dangerous. Did Thor think the same way? Janet thought she knew Thor, that he was a nice guy, but at that moment, she wasn’t sure.
Ultimately, Janet realized all that didn’t matter now - saving her father was most important. Shrinking down to wasp-size, she flew to Thor’s side, maneuvering and avoiding the battle along the way. In Thor’s ear, so she could be heard above the fighting, she urgently told him, “We need to hurry, before they move him again!”
By contrast, the very top floor of Building D was as calm as a sterile lab, brightly lit and nearly empty save for the patiently waiting Luchino Nefaria himself and the two guards who had their weapons steadily trained on a drained-looking but otherwise uninjured Vernon Van Dyne.
When the Avengers cautiously entered, it was to the sole and slow applause of his two large hands smacking together and nearly echoing in the sparsely filled space, slightly muffled by what Luchino held in one hand. “Rumours of your prowess did not entirely exaggerate. I am impressed. You may not want to be so hasty to deal with me as you have my men and my daughter, however.”
He opened his palm to reveal the slim black object. Dead man’s switch.
Natasha understood her role as support here. How she wished Clint were here: they'd have drawn bead on the two thugs instinctively, and in this group there wasn't a single other team member she felt so confident of. Janet was focused on her father; Thor, even if so inclined, was not a precision player, which was the effect needed here; the level of violence and bloodlust Sif was displaying had disturbed even Natasha, who'd killed more than her share of opponents earlier that day; and Julie was an 084 whose abilities weren't quantified or trained. Natasha was calculating likely outcomes before Nefaria had stopped monologuing.
The Black Widow was the best. She'd just have to be good enough to get them both.
The first thing Janet saw was her father. She was so excited, that she lunged, shouting, “Daddy!” Had it not been for her teammates preventing her, she would’ve flew forward, but only then did she notice the guards and the creepy man clapping his hands. Janet was so infuriated, her wings buzzed angrily. She didn’t know what the man was holding, but it couldn’t be good.
“Let my daddy go!” she ordered.
Luchino looked at Janet and smirked. “As you wish.”
He pulled out the gun he had tucked into his waistband, flicked off the safety, and shot Vernon in the stomach without warning. Even the guards appeared stunned as Janet’s father sunk to the floor, gripping his torso, trying to stem the flow of blood leaking out between his fingers.
“Noooooo!” Janet shouted, and immediately tried to fly to her father’s side. She would’ve made it, if it hadn’t been for Natasha catching her before she got too far. “Let me go! Let me go, or I’ll zap you, too!” she exclaimed, threatening Natasha. Her only thought was on her father.
"Janet." Natasha's voice was calm and cool, a contrast to the distress in Janet's. "Nefaria's got a deadman switch. The place is almost certainly mined with explosives. If he drops the switch, the whole building goes up and your father will have no chance of surviving." She held on to Janet, aware even as she did so of Nefaria's position and his grip on the switch.
The pain laced in Janet’s voice at the sight of the unjust harm to her father made Sif want nothing more than decimate the man before them, who was the most vile of all humans she had encountered thus far. She wanted to run the man through with her sword, tear him limb from limb -- but Natasha’s words managed to cool the red haze that had started filtering through her mind again and boiling her blood. To touch this man would bring death to them all. “We mean to let this creature leave then?” The very thought was nearly unacceptable.
“Tell me, what other choice do you have?” Luchino asked, seeming amused by the roll of emotions barrelling through his audience. “It is a bitter pill to swallow, yes, but sometimes life teaches us difficult lessons. And this lesson, Avengers, is that you have been outwitted and outmanoeuvred every step of the way by an opponent much cleverer than you. Now, if you do not mind, I will collect my errant daughter and depart from here. If I find out I am being followed or am stopped in anyway, I shall simply…” He mimed an explosion with his hands, full as they were.
It seemed unlikely that, with all their shared tactical prowess, that a man so blunt as Luchino Nefaria could get the better of them. And though Thor had side-eyed Sif, weighing their options when it came to simply protecting their team as the building caved in all around them, any thought of changing their stars ground to a quick halt when Janet’s father was shot before them. No. “The honour you purport to possess, human, is limp and waxen. It will wilt when given to the light --”
So came the hammer into Thor’s hand and whirled, while somewhere distant thunder rumbled, as clouds gathered and he intended to simply direct the lightning straight into the kill switch in the murdering man’s hand. (If he got singed in the process, more the better.)
Julie was already on edge, so the gunshot and the threat of a bomb only heightened the anxiety moving through her. She struggled to keep her feet on the ground, barely able to contain the urge to fly to Janet's father and drag him away. She wanted to get out before anything else happened. She wasn't even sure she could lift Janet's dad, but she wanted to try.
"We can't just let him bleed like that," she said finally, shrinking away from the power of Thor's hammer, "what good is any of this is if we can't help him?" The man probably had an answer for that question, Julie thought (no good). Still, she didn't want them to just stand there.
“The little girl has a point. Perhaps there is still time to save the father,” Luchino said, and upon seeing the Avengers so frustrated and impotent in their anger, could not help but add, “But I doubt it.” He gave his guards a silent look to follow him and started for the back stairwell--
--only to open the door and nearly run into Tony slumped against the frame. “Do you realize how many stairs there are to get up here? So many stairs. Hey there,” he said to a somewhat bewildered Luchino and the guards who had immediately brought their guns up to aim at him. Tony raised his hands slowly. “I listened in to your little speech. Yeah, about that bomb.” He reached forward and simply plucked the switch out of the other man’s hand and tossed it away, enjoying the resultant flinch it produced.
For once, Luchino appeared uncertain and unnerved. “...how?”
“That’s for me to know and you to always wonder. You should probably try to run now. There are some really pissed off scary people behind you, and I’m just really glad it’s not at me this time,” Tony said and dove down to the floor against the adjacent wall before the other man had time to even utter a questioning noise.
Janet was first to move, squirming out of Natasha’s hands so she could zip forward. Natasha's focus on keeping Janet still had dropped the moment Tony had pulled the deadman switch from Luchino's hand. Someone else could get the ringleader; Natasha dropped the guard closer to Tony with a taser disk and was moving to aim at the second.
In the moments it took Natasha to bring down a guard, Julie was already flying full steam at the second. Tony's arrival had changed things; they couldn't save Janet's father, but they weren't in danger of being blown up now. She slammed into the guard before he could notice the blur and switch his aim to her instead. She sent both of them crashing into the wall behind him, unable to stop her momentum fast enough.
All of his cool logic had fled Luchino now. As his men were taken down one by one, he made fast for the stairwell but froze at the sound of the THUNK beside him not more than an inch away from his eye. From his periphery, he could see the sword halfway embedded into the wall, and gripping it, a furious and far from human Sif. “The true test of a man’s character is not in how he behaves in the flush of victory, but in the face of his adversary.” And before Luchino could reply, she gripped his neck and lifted him clear off the ground. “How do act now, you wretched creature?”
“We need him alive!” Tony said as he climbed to his feet, but it hardly appeared as if Sif had heard him and given the situation, he was hesitant to approach.
Julie pulled herself up (after hitting the guard in the head again just to be safe) out of the rubble from the wall. She was stiff and bleeding, but she knew she didn't have time to think about that just yet. She could see Sif holding Luchino up. "Sif!" Would she kill him, Julie wondered. She wouldn't have been surprised, but if Tony wanted him alive, that was what they needed to do. "Don't -- we've got him now, right?"
It was Thor who laid a large, quiet hand on Sif’s shoulder. Though unease furrowed his brow, his voice remained steady and low in command. “Calm, Lady Sif.”
After several tense moments, as Luchino’s face grew redder, Sif at last released her grip and let the man drop to the floor like rubbish. The fury, however, was not so easily abated. It forced her to storm past them all and leave.
Once at her father’s side, Janet expanded to regular size and held her father as she bled on the floor. For her father’s sake, she forced herself from crying, though the tears naturally streamed down her face. “It’s alright now, daddy. I’ve got you. You’re safe. The Avengers are here. We’ve won.”
The expression on Dr Van Dyne's face was one of resolute peace, which showed past the excruciating pain he was experiencing. His first response was to slowly shake his head No.
"No, no, no." Janet was desperate and stubbornly unwilling to let her father go. "Don't die. You can't die! I was going to spend Christmas with you! We could go skiing, remember? Like last year?"
There were more important things on Vernon's mind. With strained breath, he muttered, "Janet," to stop her from rambling. "I'm sorry. They forced me to do bad things, and I'm sorry." Janet, who had idealistically imagined that her daddy wouldn't work with his kidnappers, was shocked by this revelation. "Please. Please don't let them win."
Meekly, she meekly pleaded one last time, "Please daddy, don't die."
"I love you, too, Janet."
Vernon closed his eyes, took one last breath and then became motionless.