Disoriented » Captain America

chapter thirty two

32 x I always have my reasons, and this one was kind of bigger than I let on

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[ Third Person ]

Sue had had her doubts about facing Doom, even with the android known as Vision. She knew full well that it had taken the entire team of the Fantastic Four to take him down the first time, and that had been quite some time ago. He'd escaped prison since then, and taken over Latveria . . . heaven only knew what he had been doing there.

Sue had a feeling that most of the business he'd conducted there involved what they were seeing now. Doom bots were everywhere, vicious looking things that attacked everything mercilessly. She was proud of Reed, seeing him every once in a while as they fought.

She couldn't do near as much as she'd hoped when it came to Doom. Somehow, it felt like he'd gotten more powerful.

She just felt lucky that he apparently couldn't affect Vision.

Doom had tried to zap and demolish the android several times, but Vision just kept coming back. Though the attacks left him relatively unaffected, he was starting to become frustrated, given he was doing little to no damage to the metal-covered man in return. Vision didn't comprehend Doom's abilities as much as he'd initially thought he did -- the files he'd found had said he was capable of various forms of energy manipulation, and had enhanced strength and durability.

He was beginning to feel that the energy manipulation was a more complex, dangerous power than the files had let on.

He assisted Sue in every way that he could, though it felt as though they were merely stalling. Doom was even beginning to become frustrated with them; it felt as though he was disregarding them as pests rather than considering them true opponents. Vision assumed that, should Doom face the entire Avengers team at once, he'd fall quickly . . . but that seemed highly unlikely to happen at this point, given the armies that surrounded them all.

"Vision!" Sue shouted then, drawing the android's attention to her in a fraction of a second. She'd been maintaining a forcefield around Doom for longer now, almost a full two minutes, which Vision counted as a win.

Except then he understood why she'd wanted his attention.

A fiery redhead with a streak of white in her hair had appeared within the forcefield. Vision watched with practiced patience as the redhead completely ignored the ricocheting energy, instead adjusting the collar of her worn leather vest before there was a brilliant flash of lavender . . . and they were gone.

"She took him," Susan gasped, dropping the forcefield and turning to Vision immediately. Brilliant blue eyes narrowed as she looked past him, casually shouting, "Duck!" before she dropped a flying doom bot out of the air beside him.

Vision observed the doom bot with noncommittal interest before looking back to Susan, curiosity still visible on his face. "Jo clearly intends to deal with Victor herself."

Sue was incapable of stopping her frown from showing. "I hope she knows what she's doing."

"I believe," Vision said then, shooting down a doom bot with a beam from the mind stone, "that perhaps we should focus on the matter at hand, rather than Jo. Given she has proved quite capable of handling herself."

Sue nodded grimly. "Well said."

--

[ Jo's POV ]

Ever since my powers developed, I have had a reason for everything I have done. I stopped aging because I knew I would grow old and die if I didn't; I left fixed points in time alone because I understood the implications of messing with such important moments as those. I tried to stay out of people's personal lives, at least the major details, because I understood the incredible influence I had over the flow of time.

I never did something without thinking it through first. Even with Steve . . . I knew. I knew what I was doing, and I knew why I was doing it. I knew I was falling in love with the super soldier; I knew I was doing the one thing I'd vowed to myself that I would never do in all of my existence. But I had a reason.

It may have been a sappy, emotional reason, but it was a reason all the same. I was in love. It was something that hadn't happened at such an intensity in all of my life, and it was something that I was most certainly not going to disregard because of the complications. I mean, my entire life is complications. My very existence may as well have the term 'it's complicated' stamped into it's very essence.

With all that taken into account, I also had a very good reason for avoiding Victor Von Doom. The man poses a slight problem for me, you see. Because as he progresses in life -- I suppose I should progressed, given my current location in his time line -- he makes some rather unfortunate discoveries that allow him to manipulate things he has no right to.

Am I being too vague? Allow me to elaborate: Doom figured out how to build a time machine, and he uses it for his own advantages.

Why does this cause me a problem? You may wonder; but Jo, why don't you just stop him, wipe him out, get rid of the problem?

The answer is unfortunate. Once someone has written themselves into various points of the time stream, if you remove them from it completely -- I don't want to say kill, but I think we all know that's where I'm going with that -- it causes some disruptions. Such as, well . . . their entire existence being erased.

If I got rid of Doom, then Doom would never have existed. This means the Fantastic Four would never have been formed, there would be no memories or traces of Doom's existence whatsoever (except for me, of course) and anything and everything he's ever been involved in would not have happened. A great thing, when you take into account the deaths he's caused . . . but then you have to remember other repercussions, like the Fantastic Four not being around when Galactus comes for the planet.

Do you see the problem now?

With what he had done, putting himself into various points on the time stream, I couldn't kill him without terrible, awful things happening in return. It was a painful fact that I was incapable of ignoring.

Yet as with every rule, even the rules of time, there is an exception. Where usually that exception only extends so far as myself, today . . . today I could feel it. Time was in flux. There were no set points in this day; there were no rules of history I needed to abide by for this moment. It was a rare opening that I had never experienced before, and it was one I planned on taking full advantage of.

I knew the possible consequences. I knew what I was about to do, I understood just how absolutely dangerous this was going to be. Beyond that, now I knew why I'd had the feeling of something bad about to happen.

None of that stopped my mind from being made up. I didn't hesitate to whisk Doom away, because now I knew where I was going.

Now I was in control.