Back to Hailey's POV!
Beck.
As my mind started to clear, I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth as the pain started to subside, just enough for me to sit up and weakly stand up. I leaned on the nightstand next to my bed and hobbled to the door using the walls as a crutch.
I refused to die. I've gone too far in this story and I will not be a plot device and be fridged like Gwen Stacy. I refuse!
I slumped out my door and limped to Peter's closed-door urgently, suspecting he should be back by now. I needed to warn him about Beck. My head finally cleared, the buzz, the static was nearly gone and I remembered him. Quentin Beck, my fathers' old employee and inventor of the Binarily Augmented Retro Framing project who was fired for being a raging psychopath. Granted, his life's project was called B.A.R.F. but he was paid $75 an hour for 10 years and was paid a very, very grand bonus for inventing that so I think he could've pushed through the bitterness.
I heard rustling coming from inside and opened it, the electric lock immediately glitching at my charged touch and let me through.
"-can't believe I gave Beck those glasses. I mean, how could I be that stupid? He's probably spying on me right now or sending a drone to come and kill me," Peter mumbled as he ran through the room, closing the curtains and grabbing his suit. My mouth fell open and I pushed the door wide open revealing MJ and Peter turned around at the moment, not seeing me.
"You did WHAT?!" I shrieked making Peter and MJ look at me with wide eyes. Electricity shot out from my body making his lamp explode just like mine making MJ flinch wildly. I whipped my head towards the open door and kicked it shut, flailing my arms around in a struggle to successfully close the door. "You did what?!" I repeated with electricity still crackling around my body in uncontrollable anger, looking back and forth between MJ and Peter, figuring Peter revealed his identity to another person but that wasn't as important as him giving a weaponized intelligence system to a random guy he's known for a couple of days.
"Beck's evil and I gave him Edith," Peter rushed out as he gripped his super suit in his hands and winced as he looked up at the look on my face which I assume was filled with rage, which I rightfully was. "And he might be coming to kill me. And you. And everyone else that knows about him faking the Elementals," he gulped as he took off his shirt and undid his belt to get his spider suit on.
"Oh my god, give a girl a warning first!" MJ cringed, shielding her eyes from his abs and binder making me huff at his lack of self-awareness.
"Sorry," he mumbled sheepishly as he kicked off his pants urgently, not wanting to waste time chatting and just standing around.
"I need to get a makeshift suit, my com- my fathers' arc reactor doesn't have my suit nano-particles in it," I shot at Peter passive-aggressively making him glance down at my ripped shirt with the arc reactor clear as day in my chest. He nodded as he gave me a sympathetic and guilty look but I ignored it and hurried to the door, opening it to reveal Ned with a raised fist, about to knock on the door.
His eyes widened as his eyes scanned the sight in front of him, Peter with a too big spider suit on, MJ shielding her eyes to preserve her lesbian innocence, and me who looked like death with a ripped shirt that exposed my corrupted chest and arc reactor.
"Ned, perfect," Peter smiled at the boy as he pressed the spider logo in the middle of his chest making his suit suck in and fit him perfectly.
"...The costume looks great... for the costume party, at the...prince's castle..." Ned lied as he shot freaked out glanced at MJ, not just assuming she probably already figured it out.
"She knows. I told her," Peter explained making me whip my head at him in fury and him instantly regret his choice of words.
"You told her?!" I demanded looking back at the terrified teen. "Did you leave all the little common sense you had left in New York?!" Peter opened his mouth to defend himself but MJ beat him to it.
"He didn't tell me. I figured it out," MJ bragged casually towards Ned and me as I rolled my eyes at her boasting in a situation like this.
"That's cool. I figured it out too. Like, a long time ago."
"You and I are so having a very, very, very long discussion when this is all over," I pointed at Peter making him shrink back. "You explain the situation to them while I get dressed and you can fill me in on the way," I nodded at him and he returned it.
I jogged out the door and headed to my room, unlocking it, and dug through my bag again for something to hide my identity. I grabbed an emergency hoodie and a black t-shirt with leggings. I still had my emergency normal plastic mask and grabbed that too, quickly putting on the oddly casual and normal clothing before hopping out the window to be met with 'Night Monkey.'
"We need to get to Berlin and meet Fury there, explain what we know," Peter told me simply and I nodded in confirmation.
"Let's get this over with so I can kill you later," I huffed, levitating my body, and began flying towards Berlin as Peter hooked onto a nearby building with his webs and swung next to me.
"Hailey-" He started but I stopped him before he could continue to defend himself.
"So while I'm dying and trying to perform surgery on myself, alone, did you think to yourself 'hmm you know what sounds like a good idea? Giving the second most sophisticated, weaponized artificial intelligence system to a man I met five days ago!'" I ranted incredulously making him look at me.
"That's not fair-"
"I get it. I understand you are in a very emotionally vulnerable state and Beck is a creepy thirty-something man who took advantage of your current state of mind while you were probably having a breakdown somewhere but can you just explain to me your thought process and decision making? Because I'm kind of lost," I admitted, a humorless laugh escaping my lips as I tried to comprehend how the hell this even started in the first place.
"Beck convinced me to go to a bar-" I gave him a weird look making him stop. "I had a lemonade," he defended and I nodded, letting him continue. "We sat down and a woman gave me back the glasses that I dropped on the ground without me noticing-"
"You dropped them and you didn't notice?!"
"Hailey!"
"Fine! Continue," I grumbled as I stayed by his side while he swung over the city.
"We got into a conversation about them, I tried them on in front him, he...well, looking back he manipulated me into feeling like they didn't look like they belonged to me so he tried them on, he looked good, I started freaking out and did mental gymnastics and switched Edith's control over to him while he made it seem like it was my idea!"
"Damn you and your insecurities!" I cursed, shaking my head at him.
"He's been using highly advanced drones to project the monsters and himself," Peter started and I just realized the severity of this situation.
"And now he has access to ultra deadly Stark drones..."
"That are also insulated with layers upon layers of rubber," he finished making me grown.
"I hate rubber," I scowled before I realized something. "He knew about me. What I don't know is how he knew I was glitching and couldn't remember for shit?"
"You think he could've hacked into your system and seen the corruption?"
"I don't know...it's possible but the only one, or thing, that has ever been able to do that was Ultron," I cringed at the memory of my dead "brother." "He was a scientist at Stark Industries but got fired for being a raging psychopath so he could've known how to get through my firewall," I informed Peter, thinking of the ways he could've known about my existence and sickness.
"Wait, he was a former scientist for Mr. Stark?"
"Yep. Even when he's dead, he's still causing problems and fucking everything up," I spat angrily, looking down at my healing chest. I'm becoming more and more like him and that was probably my worst fear coming to life. "We just have to get to Nicholas before Beck launches the drones and probably kills him and thousands of others or something. Easy," I shrugged casually, knowing that was a long shot.
"Easy?" Peter asked incredulously, giving me a look underneath his mask.
"Peter, let me lie to myself because that is the only thing keeping you alive right now," I threatened as my body sparked with unconfined energy making him shut up. We finally got to the train station and hopped on top of the train that was going to Berlin.
This was going to be a long ride.
Before the train rolled to a complete stop, I flew off it while Peter jumped off it, swinging to the outside of the train station before landing dramatically on the ground.
"Excuse me. Do you know where-?" Peter started to ask a woman near us but she stopped him.
"Nacht Monkey!" The lady screamed before running the opposite way down the sidewalk, baffling us.
"No, wait, I didn't..." He tried to reason but she was already gone making me shake my head at him. "Oh man," he sighed watching her turn the corner and disappear.
"Webs, you can't just appear out of nowhere in your super suit and expect a girl to not freak out," I scolded but before he could reply a black car rolled up beside us and the window rolled down to reveal Nicholas Fury himself.
"Get in," he ordered and we obliged, me too busy trying to come up with a plan to argue with him. Peter and I both reached for the front seat door at the same time and we looked up at each other.
"Wha...I-I just thought-" Peter stammered as I raised an eyebrow and stared at him blankly.
"You're getting in the back."
"I'm getting in the back," he repeated in defeat without argument and opened the backseat door. I quickly sat in the passenger's seat and was suddenly hit with the sound of static filling my head. Not the static I used to hear but a slightly different kind, like a radio getting a different frequency. I blinked away the pain slowly coming back to me and focused on the task and conversation at hand.
"Mr. Fury..." Peter trailed off from behind us as Nicholas sped through the streets to the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters.
"You two got a lot of explaining to do," Nicholas grunted with his eyes glued on the road.
"No, no, no, listen," he insisted but Nicholas stopped him.
"Wait until we're secure," he interrupted.
"Ok," Peter nod and leaned back into his seat. Nicholas pointedly glanced at him and his seatbelt making him gulp. "Right," he nodded and pulled on the seatbelt beside him but to no avail since it was stuck. He pulled three more times before he completely ripped out it out from the wall and he awkwardly dropped it on the ground.
Nicholas glanced at him before shaking his head and looked back at me causing me to sigh and grab the seatbelt only to realize it was stuck as well.
"You really need to start oiling these things up or something," I commented not-so-helpfully, quickly giving up on the thing before I pulled it out of the wall as well.
Soon we got to the headquarters, a secluded normal-looking building until you got inside to reveal a rather fancy, white government office. Stairs were littered all around with glass railing and balcony's around the floor and even I was slightly impressed. We walked up to one set of stairs to an isolated meeting room where Hill waited for us, brooding as she looked out the window in her usual mysterious fashion.
"So...is there anything you want to tell us about your girlfriend?" Nicholas asked with crossed arms causing Peter to glance at me and back at him questioningly.
"He's talking about EDITH," Hill clarified helpfully making Peter wince at his past decision-making.
"Look, I know I made a mistake and I'm sorry,
but he is not who you think he is. Beck is a liar," Peter rushed out as he and I reached the end of the long table in the middle of the room with Nicholas and Hill on the other side.
"Mysterio, the Elementals, it's all fake. He has some sort of illusion tech, drones we think. And now he has more," I added, thinking back to the weaponized drones that almost killed our class when we heading to Prague.
"That's how he tricked you guys and tricked me into giving him EDITH," Peter pulled out a webbed, broken projector that fell out of the sky when we were fighting the fire Elemental. He placed it on the table and slid it coolly to Nicholas who picked it up and inspected it.
"It's a projector. I pulled it off the fire monster in Prague," Peter informed, lying to not get MJ involved with S.H.I.E.L.D. and victimize her to the wrath of Nicholas.
"So all that death and destruction we witnessed was created by this?" He asked skeptically, eyeing it with Hill who looked it up and down.
"And his original drones. He probably has hundreds more, especially now," I briefed causing Peter to look down in guilt. Hill put a hand to her chin in thought and walked over to the window in concentration.
"Well, if this is true, then Beck's very dangerous and we need to be smart," Nicholas pointed out the obvious looking at Hill who nodded in agreement. "Who else did you tell about this?" I whipped my head up, wincing at the static in my head get louder, filling my ears and it looked like Peter got a similar feeling. "Parker?" Peter looked over at the window and pulled down his spider lenses, preparing for the fight. "Parker!"
"What's wrong?" Hill asked turning towards him in concern at his stiff figure as he looked over the room. We were in a hologram.
"It's Beck. He's here," he warned.
"What?" Nicholas asked, not knowing how we knew that, and looked over at Hill who was slowly dissolving pixels with the rest of the room, revealing we were still being watched by Beck. "Hill?" The whole building faded into blue pixels, revealing an old abandoned building with rusted pipes and broken floors around us.
"No, it's just an illusi-" Peter exclaimed before a shot was fired next to him, hitting Nicholas in the chest making him slam into the wall behind him.
"Fury!" He cried out as my eyes widened but before we could do anything to help him the drone turned to Peter and blasted him as well, throwing him off and through the broken floor.
"Peter!" I screamed, running to catch him but stopped when I couldn't see the floor anymore and I was surrounded by green fog. I swiped at the colored mist, blowing it away to see only an infinite dark void around me. "Peter?" I called out desperately but got no response. I closed my eyes to focus on hearing him but it was nearly impossible with the static filling my head and stalling my thoughts.
"Wow. I mean, I really shouldn't be surprised," Beck's voice echoed out of nowhere making me whip my head around to find the rather annoying source.
"Beck," I growled, glaring at nothing. "Stop hiding and face me like the bitter man that you are!" I insulted even at a time like this.
"Miss Hailey Stark, the all-knowing Android getting herself, or should I say itself, into unnecessary trouble. Or was it synthezoid? Sorry, it's just really hard to keep track," I heard him mock and suddenly I was in my fathers' old workshop and my old room. My charging port sat in the middle of the room and I hesitantly walked toward it, the metal still shiny and new. So shiny I could see my reflection but it wasn't me staring back at me but the ten-year-old version of me. I gasped, walking back from it in shock, and fell through the floor, falling painfully on the concrete floor. I was still in the old, abandoned, safety hazard of a building.
"How the hell-?" I groaned in pain, confused about how he would possibly know I was a synthezoid.
"Did I know that? See that's the thing with you Starks. You think you know everything. You think you're invincible. That nobody in this whole 'multiverse' is as smart as you! Well, guess what? I'm smarter than you! I outsmarted you," Beck bragged appearing in front of me in his superhero uniform. I shot a bolt of electricity at him but that just went right through him and hit one of the concrete pillars holding up the unstable building making the place shake.
He was a hologram. Everything was a hologram.
"But of course, your arrogance doesn't let you see that. Just like your father, your arrogance is what kills you. Sad, I know. I thought you were better than that, Hailey, I really did. I thought you could share the spotlight but just like Tony you only want it for yourself." A group of paparazzi appeared and started to take pictures of me, a million lights flashing into my eyes, burning them. Questions flew at me as they started to corner me to stop me from escaping and they started to climb on top of me, dog piling and crushing me.
"I have to admit, I feel a little bad Peter has to deal with it." The lights stopped and I felt the weight leave my body, throwing me forward towards Peter, or a hologram of Peter, who glared at me resentfully. I reached forward to comfort him but he walked away in disgust before I could lay my hand on his shoulder.
"Wait-!" I called out but a loose news reporter grabbed my hand to pull me back, asking me a random question I couldn't make out. "Peter!" I peeled the reporter off of me and ran towards him instinctively but fell through the floor again. I groaned, picking my battered self off the floor.
"But I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." A large apple tree appeared next to me, looking like it was from a picture. I hissed in pain as I felt something hit me on the head and looked down to see a fallen red apple but when I instinctively picked it up but it just dissolved in green smoke.
"I hoped you wouldn't be but you are exactly like him, aren't you? And you know it too, don't you? Your little arc reactor is undeniable proof of that, isn't it?" A sixty-foot tall glass case fell beside me making me jump back and realize it was a giant copy of my fathers first arc reactor sitting in the glass case Pepper gave to him with the words 'Proof Tony Stark has a heart' engraved on the bottom.
"You're just a makeshift clone of him. A copy. A simple reproduction of him." I looked a little closer at the glass, something moving on it and realized it was...
"Father?" I choked reaching for the glass reflection of my father's tired face but when my finger pressed against the cool case he grabbed my wrist, pulling me in. I shrieked in surprise as I felt myself fall into a pile of rocks and looked around, only to be greeted by my father's active-decaying carcass laying on top of me. I screamed, pushing myself up and the corpse off myself, pushing myself out of the hole in terror at the body. I finally got out I turned around to see a gravestone at the other end of the hole with only the words Anthony Edward Stark etched in it.
"Just because my father was an asshole to you doesn't justify you killing innocent people! And if I'm a copy of him then you are too, maybe even more than me because you are just all his bad qualities amped up to 100. You genuinely think you have a right to being the 'hero' while he knew he didn't! At least we are self-aware!" I spat at the nothingness which probably just pissed him off even more.
"Really because I remember a bitter little girl throwing a tantrum when she didn't get enough attention?" The water Elemental appeared before me, bigger and angrier than last time. Its fists rise above his hand and came hurling towards me but before it could hit me I flew out of the way.
"Aren't you throwing a tantrum right now because we won't let you have the attention you want?" I shot back, hastily avoiding the creature who swatted its massive hands at me, trying to grab me. Beck didn't answer but chose to use his actions instead of words.
Blasts of some sort of energy started shooting at me out of nowhere, probably from the invisible, thermal cloaked drones. Lucky me. I narrowly avoided the shots, dodging them easily until I got cocky and one hit me square in the chest. Hitting the arc reactor. That I just got.
This is why we can't have nice things, Hailey!
The arc started to crackle uneasily as I felt my power falter and myself get weaker, sicker. Godsdamnit.
Warning: System Failing. Please seek mechanical attention.
I gritted my teeth in anger, my fingertips lighting up in blue energy but I held back. I have no idea where Peter is in this damn building, hell he could be right next to me for all I knew. If I let myself go I could fry his brain to a crisp and no one wants a potato chip boyfriend. Well, okay, you might but I can't eat so I don't want that.
"Face it, you're still that little girl following around your little humans," Beck's voice echoed as I stood facing a graveyard. Names were elegantly engraved in each one. Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision, Steve Rogers, Pietro Maximoff. I choked back a sob, my eyes widening as I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from crying.
Suddenly hands burst from the soil and zombified versions of my family crawl out of the ground, glaring at me. Natasha was bleeding from her head, fathers half was completely burnt just like at the end of the war, Vision had a chunk missing from his forehead where his soul stone should be, Steve was, well, his usual boring, basic self but as a zombie, and Pietro had several bullet holes in his body with blood still gushing out. They all had a grey hue to their slowly decaying skin, some parts of thrift flesh dangling from their face and neck as they crawled quickly toward me.
I cried out in horror, stumbling away from my former friends but unfortunately, they were the fast zombie types. Nat grabbed my ankle, pulling me down the drown so they could start piling on top of me and grab onto me like they wanted to get my skin. I screamed before randomly throwing energized punches, wincing as I heard them cry out in pain. I peeled myself away from the rotting corpses and ran straight forward through the darkness. I turned my head as I ran seeing the paparazzi and zombies join forces in trying to get me making me run faster.
Warning: Body overheating. Please cool down.
Warning: Systems failing. Please seek mechanical help.
Warning: Body overexerted. Please rest.
Warning: System in critical condition.
Warning: Body in critical condition.
Warning: System not compatible. Please try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again.
Red flashed across my vision as I desperately ran away from the havoc, clawing through the green smoke and sobbing while still trying to remain calm. I felt myself take one step and for one nanosecond I felt nothing below me but when I realized what was happening behind the red warnings in my eyes it was too late. I fell.
I felt my head bashed against something hard. The concrete ground. Before feeling water absorb me and finally the illusion was over but not without me so much I could barely move. The water flowed straight through the open, devastated arc reactor creating pain to course through my body, seizing me up. I choked subconsciously, swallowing a bunch of saltwater.
Warning: Severe damage to the skull. Please seek help.
Warning: Water entering system and circuits. Please seek mechanical help immediately.
Warning: Water entering body. Please seek help immediately.
Red was the last thing I saw before it all went black. Typical.
Good night, H.A.I.L.E.Y Stark