X-Men Mission: Avengers vs X-Men: Hawkeye and Deathlok 2

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

Everett and Blink do their best to shut down Deathlok and Hawkeye.



Everett had just handed Falcon over to Sharon when the familiar portals of Blink appeared around him. Wordlessly, the X-Man transported them both to a different part of the rooftop. While Arthur had been successful in making Hawkeye fall back, she had found Deathlok and the pair were doubling back on the medical team, intent on finishing the job. All that stood between them were the two mutants.

Sharon had been able to quickly patch Ev's injuries from his fights with Vision and Falcon, but it was the adrenaline that was keeping him on his feet. The X-Men had pushed back the Avengers, Earth's mightiest superheroes, but the battle still raged. Now facing the cyborg and Clint's gender/palette-swap, they would finish this. For the third time, Ev's aura reached out to the nearest mutant to synch him to her, turning both the aura and his skin purple.

"There's an awful lot of purple here tonight."

"Purple is a fabulous colour. Never too much," Clarice countered, amused at how Ev's skin matched hers now. Only willpower was keeping her upright. It was amazing what a refusal to give in could do. "But it's better for skin than clothes," she added, opening a portal and tossing some marbles in to get some speed going. Ah, physics, her bitch.

"Bishop's not as good as Clint," Ev informed Clarice, recalling what little he knew about the new crop of Avengers, "But that's like saying Orson Welles isn't as good as Hitchcock. Gotta get her off balance. And the robot . . . Y2K bug? I have no idea." He withdrew his pistol from his holster and double-checked that he had loaded it with ICER cartridges. "Ready?"

Snorting, she nodded. "I can take the robot," she offered, more than willing to break things, but less willing to kill people. Her hands were far from clean in that respect, but she never enjoyed it and never did so willingly. She preferred saving lives to taking them, but she was also a pragmatic sort when it came to things like this. Shoes were a different discussion entirely.

"Try not to get too far away or I'll lose this lovely complexion." Ev fired a warning shot at Hawkeye, who responded to the insult with a not-so-warning shot of her own. He rolled through a hastily opened portal to avoid the three rapidly fired arrows and reappeared behind Hawkeye, catching her ankles with his, dropping her to the ground. She took the fall with surprising grace and reversed the hold, now trapping Ev's feet with her own so he was ensnared and she could strike him with the end of her bow.

Ev grunted, trying to mask his reaction to the attack that might have broken his foot. He shot again, but he was off balance and the cartridge narrowly missed Hawkeye. She raised her bow to strike again but Ev opened a portal underneath them, and the second one dumped them several feet away, disentangling them.

"That goes for you, too," Clarice called over the comms, unsure how far Ev's powers stretched as she moved, creating multiple portals to play her own personal version of Mario, disappearing and reappearing rapidly to try to confuse the machine trying to track her. People tended to think in defined patterns that robots could figure out. The key was to ....ah ha!

She shot the marbles at the beast as it shot at her, using a portal as a shield while the little glass balls did their job hammering into the metal to weaken it. For some things, the marbles were enough, but not this time. That was okay.

Several more arrows whizzed past Ev's head. One would have struck him right in the gut had he not fortuitously opened a portal in front of him . . . and a second one behind the distracted Deathlok. Not that an arrow to the shoulder would do much to incapacitate the cyborg, but it would give Clarice a momentary advantage while Ev pressed on against Hawkeye.

He vanished again and yelped when she seemed to predict exactly where he would reappear next to her. Was he so predictable? He must be out of shape. But he did not quite go down when she struck him, and he kept close, too close for her to use her archery. Spitting away blood and possibly a tooth that would be hell to regrow when Kyle would lend him a healing factor, Ev tackled Hawkeye, sending them both to the ground but with Ev on top, pinning her down.

Using her portals as a machete, Clarice got close enough to Deathlok to finish what the arrow started, severing his mechanical arm off, mostly certain it could be rebuilt, then teleporting it all away. "Need a hand?" she called to Everett, a double-ended javelin-shaped portal in her hands pointed at Hawkeye, though she was ready to pivot against Deathlock.

"Thanks." Ev briefly gave in to Hakweye's struggle, tumbling over so she could be on top and an easy target for Clarice's attack. Suddenly ungrappled, Ev rolled back to his feet and fired the rest of his clip at Deathlok. The cyborg staggered back and raised its own gun, but dropped it and collapsed in a heap of flesh and metal, unconscious and missing one arm but otherwise unharmed.

"That's a neat trick," he complimented Clarice. "Gotta show me how to do that."

Sending both Deathlok and Hawkeye away, Clarice shot a withering eye at where they had been, "Really, really tight control," she replied. If he could do it, great, but it had taken her years to get her control that tight. In some ways, it was easier for her to teleport to the other side of the planet as opposed to next door.