Doomed

Chapter Fourteen

Good God, this hurts.

Carol's arms felt like they were tied to Mjolnir, and every time she fired a photon blast she could feel the energy leaving her body. Normally she had enough reserves that she didn't have to think about it, but now it was starting to worry her. She took down another robot that was standing between Steve and the Quinjet, and the effort dropped her to her knees.

Before she hit the floor, Peter was there, his arm wrapped around the front of her shoulders. Her chin rested on wetness, and as he raised her back to her feet, her eyes trailed down to the three holes in his bicep. She looked him over: his nose was broken, though it looked like he'd popped it back into place at some point, and the bruise around his exposed eye served as a second mask; blood was flowing freely out of his arm, which she saw bore both entry and exit wounds as he turned around to deflect a blast with Cap's shield; and there was a gash in his forehead that had red running down his face like it was a map of the Amazon.

But then he turned his head, his eye met hers, and she saw in the hazel a perfect mixture of anger and concern.

"Carol," he said, helping Steve into the Quinjet, defending the open doorway with the shield, "Have you completely lost your mind?"

Her eyebrows furrowed. "Oh, well excuse me for showing up to fly your asses out of the fire. Would've loved to have seen how you guys made it back to the city if I wasn't here."

Steve worked his way up to the cockpit, sitting in the co-pilot's seat on the right. He started flipping switches, checking the plane as much as he could before restarting the engines.

"Carol," Peter said, not bothering to turn around to deflect more blasts, just letting his arm move the shield as his Spider-Sense told him was necessary, "You're sick. Your powers have been on the blink for over a week, and you decide to fly a plane out here by yourself to try to rescue us with powers you shouldn't be using?!"

She was about to respond, but Steve hobbled back from the cockpit and turned to Peter. "We're gonna need those Doombots taken out if we're going to take off," he said.

With a final glare at Carol, Spider-Man jumped back out of the plane, kicking a Doombot in the head as he fell.

"You need me up there, Cap?" Carol asked.

Steve wrapped an arm around her shoulders and nodded his head toward the fight. "Watch this."

Carol turned her head back toward Peter, and stood in awe at one of the most breathtaking sights she'd ever witnessed.

Peter was fighting the Doombots, maybe twenty in total, all at the same time, and flowing between them like he was made of water. It was a ballet before her, like watching Baryshnikov in his prime, only if Baryshnikov were dodging laser fire in the middle of his performance. He fought with the shield on the web-line like it was this strange combination of flail and yo-yo; he would spin his body in the air, pulling the web, and the shield would follow, cutting through the robots as though they weren't even there. Then, when his Spider-Sense would go off (she could see it, his head would always twitch slightly in the direction of the danger) he would pull the shield back in, block whatever was coming at him, and immediately send it back out again.

She wanted to go out there and help him, or at least get some shots off from inside the ship, but her feet were suddenly fused to the floor. And she just felt so drained. Steve tightened his grip on her shoulder and patted it. "If I ever decide to retire," he said, "You remind me about what we're seeing right now."

His words snapped Carol out of her trance, and she turned toward the cockpit. "Well, we gotta get out of here, first," she said. "Let's get this bird in the air, Cap."