Mission

Five months ago, the Avengers changed. Not for the better.

Because five months ago, Celia arrived.

Celia—the kind of girl who thrived on attention and left resentment in her wake—joined the team like a fault line splitting stone. She didn’t fit, didn’t blend, didn’t soften the tension in the Tower. She sharpened it. Missions began to unravel the moment she touched them. Plans collapsed. Cover blown. Objectives failed. One disaster after another, as if chaos itself followed her everywhere.

And worse than the failures was the simple fact that she’d never truly been one of them. The irony was that she’d been allowed to join on the strength of recommendations.

Now, once again, they were trapped inside the Quinjet, tearing through a storm-lashed night toward the Avengers Compound. Rain hammered the hull. Thunder rolled somewhere beyond the clouds. Inside, the light was harsh and thin, throwing the injured into stark, unforgiving shadows.

The team looked wrecked. Blood had dried in dark streaks across torn fabric. Bruises bloomed beneath split skin. One arm was wrapped badly, another shoulder hung at an ugly angle, and every breath seemed to cost more than the last. Exhaustion sat on all of them like a weight, heavy and silent and furious.

What had happened?

Celia.

As usual, she’d abandoned the plan the moment it stopped being convenient. She’d looked at a careful, stealth-based infiltration and decided, against all reason, that charging straight into the enemy base was the smarter move. The result was a fireball of shattered concrete, screaming alarms, and open warfare. Their covert operation died in a single blinding blast.

They would have died with it, too, if Bruce hadn’t Hulked out more violently than usual—an unhinged green miracle tearing through the chaos, hauling them out through collapsing debris with the mission burning behind him.

Even after all that, Bruce knelt in the aisle, focused and calm in the way only he could be, hands moving with practiced precision as he checked wounds and wrapped bandages. His voice was low and steady, more medic than man, a calm that only made the fury around him feel sharper.

From her seat, Celia gave a small, mocking scoff.

“Well, gee,” she said, her voice dripping with fake innocence, “I’m sorry I tried to help you finish the mission faster. So ungrateful.”

Silence hit hard.

Not the empty kind. The dangerous kind.

The kind that came before someone said something they couldn’t take back.

Because everyone in that jet knew the truth: she had nearly gotten them all killed. She had turned a mission into a massacre and flirted with capture, disaster, and death like none of it could touch her.

Celia noticed the glares and rolled her eyes, flicking her hair back with lazy arrogance, as if the whole room existed purely to disappoint her.

Tony pushed to his feet, his Iron Man suit battered, scorched, and holding together by stubborn force alone. He stepped toward her with the kind of fury that still burned bright even through exhaustion.

“Help?” he snapped. “Does this look like help? No, that wasn’t help. That was—”

Steve’s voice cut through the heat, cold and hard as steel. He fixed her with a stare that could have pinned her to the wall. “We have mission briefings for a reason. Everything was laid out perfectly, and you disregarded all of it.”

Clint leaned back, eyes closed for a second like he was trying to survive the aftershock of the night. When he spoke, it was low, rough, and tired enough to sound like a warning. “That girl’s gonna get us killed…”

Outside, thunder cracked like the sky itself was splitting open.

Inside, the Quinjet screamed through the storm, carrying the wounded Avengers home.