Universal Displacement

Home Again Home Again Lickety Splat

 Inconsiderate and ungently, Sutton was dragged through the space between spaces. There were stars, there were colors, there was pain.

There wasn't exactly a transition when she became aware of herself. One moment she was nothing and nowhere and being ripped apart at the seams, and the next moment she was whole and tangible. It wasn't dark anymore. She felt sick.

She tried to lean over to vomit, but couldn't stop twisting. Her eyes opened and widened in realization as the wind whipped through her hair and her sickness was swallowed back down as she screamed.

She was falling!

All Sutton could see was a whirl of blue sky and white clouds. Her arms flailed and legs splayed as she tumbled over and over in the air.

Blue. That was all she could see. Blue above, blue below. She was falling, but it was still hard to tell which way was really down. Was she falling into the sky or out of it?

Her lungs hurt and ribs felt like they were cracking anew as her cries were cruelly silenced by the rushing force of gravity pulling on her.

As she continued to fall and scream Sutton could now make out a gray blobby shape during every rotation. It continued to get bigger, quickly, and Sutton felt her fear spike again. Her chest burned; she couldn't breathe. Her mane of hair was blocking her vision of it now, but she knew how she was going to die in a moment. As if hitting the ground or her heart giving out wouldn't have been good enough; she was going to hit a plane. Land on top of a plane, to be precise, but at these speeds a fact like that was irrelevant.

Sutton let out a terrified sob, her tears beaten back by the wind before they could ever form.

Maybe she deserved this. After what she'd done, maybe this was fair.

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Tony's face was white like paper as the machine confirmed that both codes had been successfully transferred over. He was moving before he'd fully realized he was still in control of his legs.

"Jarvis! Give me the coordinates for where those two were sent!"

[Latitude:N 39° 1.66313', Longitude:W 57° 49.921875', sir.]

Throwing a hand forward, various sections of Tony's Iron Man suit came flying towards him to snap on to his body.

[Sir,] Jarvis continued. The AI's tone was actually cautious. [That location is out over the Atlantic Ocean. Even your suit is not capable of speeds-]

But Tony wasn't listening. He'd donned his suit and shot out of the tower so fast that the others hardly had a chance to react.

A map was projected at the end of the lab. Two dots blinked on the screen and Jane covered her mouth with her hand, shaking.

"He's not going to make it."

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Tyrese awoke to a thundering crashing that reverberated around the walls of his room. He shot up in his bed as he shouted in surprise. The wall across from his bed looked like someone had thrown all his pictures and notes onto the floor.

The shield was gone.

His bedroom door burst open and his parents stood in the doorway in their pajamas, looking haggard and frightened.

"What's going on," his mother asked. "What was that?"
His father eyed the mess on the floor and then looked at his son.

"Are you ok?"

Tyrese still couldn't fully grasp that he'd just lost the one connection he had left to his sister.

"It's gone," he said. "Captain America's shield is gone."