Part I: Fighting For The Future

Former New Mexico, Earth, 2712 AD: Seven Hundred Years After The Defeat Of The Avengers and The Rise Of Loki…

The golden heat of the desert rose from its dusty floor as the sunset's last tendrils of shining light faded from the sky.

It cast a heavenly glow over the smoking battlefield that stretched across the desert, misty wisps still rising from the burned out husks of hover cars and bikes, the tiny bodies of humans and the hulking ones of Chitauri warriors strewn across the dyed sand, crimson in the sunset.

There was a flash of silver light and a group of twenty men and women appeared as if from thin air, all clad in black leather jumpsuits and overcoats to protect against the quickly falling temperatures of the desert.

One, clad in a silver robe over her jumpsuit, a hood covering her face, rushed forward, a small black satchel banging against her hip as she ran.

She bent over the fallen body of a young woman, blood draining from a severe head wound, laser burns all over her body.

"Eira!" someone called, a middle-aged man with a bow and quiver slung across his muscular, leather clad back. "Be quick! We haven't much time until Loki will be here!"

The woman looked up, sombre grey eyes looking up at the man, before looking down at her charge. "This one still lives," she breathed. "Have Aidan and Reuben transport her to base."

The man motioned, two others rushing forward to take the injured woman, while Eira moved on to another, pausing only a moment before shaking her head sadly and moving to another.

The skirts of her silvery robe pooled around her, glinting in the scant light of the moon as it began to rise over the distant horizon, a wind picking up and chilling Eira's skin.

The King was coming.

Her companions felt it too. "Eira, hurry!" he snapped.

"I know, Peregrine!" she replied tersely, her eyes dwelling on the carnage around her. It had been a nasty fight; Resistance against Chitauri, and in the end, neither side had triumphed.

It was all so pointless.

It had been 700 years to the day since Loki defeated the Avengers and took control of Earth, or Midgard as it was now known. Eira had heard stories about that final fight, the last stand of Captain America and Dr Bruce Banner, the capture of Iron Man and the legions of Chitauri he took out before the King subdued him, keeping him alive for his genius. Thor had been sent back to Asgard, since the new King did not want the whole of his former home taking up arms against him. Odin had forbidden retaliation against his younger son, and so the Asgardians watched instead.

It was for decades that the Black Widow and Hawkeye eluded him before he finally caught them, joining their remaining living comrades in mindless slavery under Loki's control, serving their new King as his most loyal vassals and warriors, their former free will destroyed. Their decades of freedom had served them well, however. Black Widow and Hawkeye had left behind a child before they were taken, and that child's descendants still lived and fought in the Resistance even so many centuries later.

One of them stood before her, watching her closely, his bow now in his hands, an arrow nocked and ready.

The temperature readily lowered, and Eira shivered. He was close.

She stood and closed her eyes, calling on the sense she'd possessed since birth that would tell her if any still lived among the heaped bodies of the dead.

She found five more, three merely unconscious from laser wounds, the other two more severely wounded.

She hurried over to them, her robe flashing in the moonlight. One possessed a broken arm, and a bleeding gash in his leg which looked like a Chitauri had tried to take a bite out of him. She applied a splint to the broken limb, rubbing a salve on the bleeding gashes to halt their flow, and then closed her eyes, placing her hand on the man forehead. She searched deep within, looking for the wellspring of that sense which had told her he was alive, and then drew it out, into her veins and down to her hand. She forced it into her patient, enthusing his blood with some of her own vitality, pulling him from the darkness he lay in.

His breathing, still shallow, became regular and smooth. With a sigh, Eira opened her eyes and nodded to the recovery party. Two men rushed forward, taking hold of the man gently and disappearing in flashes of light, leaving Peregrine and Eira alone with the last of the injured.

Eira stumbled as she stood, Peregrine grabbing her elbow to steady her. It always took it out of her when she pulled someone back from the brink.

"Eira…" he began half-heartedly, but Eira just glared at him. He sighed. "Where is the last?"

She nodded over to the very edge of the blood-soaked battlefield, pushing away from the man and rushed over, pushing away her tiredness.

It was a young boy, barely sixteen, new to the Resistance. He was only just alive.

His chest gaped, blood pouring sluggishly from the wound. He would need transfusions when he got back to base. Eira gritted her teeth, spreading her hands out together, thumb to thumb and placed them down on the boy's chest, concentrating.

"One of these days you're going to kill yourself doing that," Peregrine hissed, watching the skies warily for signs of Chitauri or worse, the King.

"And one of these days, Peregrine, you're going to come back to base with a wound you can't laugh off, but you don't hear me complaining," she snapped back.

"Yeah, well. I'm just an archer. You're the only healer we have," he huffed, but Eira smirked anyway.

"Nice to know I'm appreciated," she quipped, before she sobered. "Now quiet! I need to concentrate unless you want us both to end up in one of the King's holding cells."

Peregrine fell silent, but he glanced up at the sky pointedly. Eira returned to her task, readying herself for the weariness she knew would come.

It was not quite true that Eira was the only healer in the Resistance, but she was the only one to possess this skill. She did not know if she should call it magic, or genetic mutation as was once rumoured to be not uncommon before Loki took control. Now all children born with the genetic markers in their blood which denoted mutation were taken and brought up to be the bodyguards of the King.

Not that he needed them, really. But they served to intimidate and to suppress rebellions. Eira was surprised there were not any there tonight. The few which escaped Loki's grasp ended up in the Resistance; likewise the few children born with the inherent ability to resist Loki's mind powers, to shrug off his manipulations and control, were taken and spirited away to relative safety.

She and Peregrine were two such people, with the gift to remain free.

Eira had been brought up in the Resistance, never staying in one place, always moving if they caught the slightest sniff of discovery. Her mother had died giving birth to her, and she had never known her father. She had been raised by one of the Resistance healers, where she had discovered her talent one grey morning after an attack which ended in disaster…

The emergency medical bays were filled to breaking point with wounded men and women, all bloodied, all burned. Healers rushed around, helping those they could and closing the eyes of those they couldn't.

Little seven year old Eira stood beside a low cot, staring down at the bloodstained man lying on top, eyes staring at the ceiling as he shook from the gashes and burns on his chest and arms.

"Help…me," he gasped, one hand reaching out to her. Without thought, she touched his fingers, and then collapsed.

"Eira!" an elderly woman with plaited hair of steel grey, and wearing a grey jumpsuit, rushed to her aid. She pulled the child away, holding her in her thin, wiry arms. "Eira, you foolish child."

But the man on the cot sat up, eyes wide not from pain now, but awe. His wounds had been healed.

"She…she healed me," he gasped. "She touched me a-and she healed me!"

The healer stared at him, before Eira stirred in her arms, blinking up at her with wide grey eyes. "Jaina?" she asked. "Jaina?"

Eira looked at the bloodied man, now hale and whole, and looked back to her carer. "Jaina, did I do something wrong?"

Jaina could only stare in shock at the little golden-haired child watching her for signs of displeasure or anger. As she looked into those wide eyes, she glimpsed something which sent shivers down her spine. She remembered it from the one time she had seen King Loki Laufeyson up close, an aura of power, a sheen of magic flashing in his bright eyes as he had released his power and the power of the tesseract…

She saw it in her charge.

Eira could do magic. Not a mutation, not a strange quirk of DNA but magic…

Jaina told no one what she had sensed. Not even Eira. The man she had healed died a week later, in another attack, the worst they had suffered at Loki's hands since the beginning of the Resistance.

No one knew, although many suspected. But none could know for certain, and Jaina made sure to keep Eira blind to what she truly was. She would not see that sweet child used as a pawn or a weapon.

Worse, she did not wish for the King to discover her. Who knew what he would do if he took her for his own…

No, she kept it a secret until the day she died, three years later when their base was falling down around her ears, and she gazed up into the cold, menacing eyes of the King before he turned her into a statue of ice, a satisfied smirk lingering on his cruelly sensual mouth.

But Jaina smiled too. Because Eira had got away, and her existence remained a secret to the King. The last mortal magic-user remained free. And she would set them all free, Jaina was sure of it. Her surety warmed her even as her body froze, and he shattered her with a blow from his sceptre.

Eira gasped, pushing herself away from the injured boy, her hands bloodied and shaking. Peregrine rushed to her side as the tiredness took her, and she struggled to remain upright.

"He's ok. He's going to live," she gasped, her gift taking its toll. He nodded grimly, releasing her to pick up his charge, slinging him over his broad shoulder. Eira rolled her eyes through her weariness.

"Always your usual gentle self, Peregrine," she shook her head, pushing away the dizziness as she stood, her hood falling back to reveal long, dirty, lank blonde waves of hair, her face smudged with dirt. She had not been able to bathe in weeks.

She was slender and tall, taller than all in the Resistance except Peregrine and a few others, but she was compact, hard muscle lining her skeleton, and no excess flesh to make her look womanly. Only her face showed any sign of her femininity, the gentle planes of her cheeks and forehead, the clear skin, when it was clean which was rare, and the intelligent grey eyes which watched everything with a coolness like ice.

A warning shout from Peregrine made her spin, eyes flashing up to see a Chitauri warship bearing down on their position, the wind howling in its wake. Eira felt static fill the air, the first signs of magic being used, and lunged for Peregrine. The wrist strap he wore flopped open to reveal a keypad and a blank screen. With Eira hanging onto one arm, the unconscious boy over his shoulder, he typed in a code and they disappeared in a flash just as another came, and mortals in the black and green of the King, as well as Chitauri, poured over the desert, surrounding a tall, elegant man in green and gold armour, two arching horns standing proudly from his gleaming helmet.

As his minions searched for survivors among the dead, his cold eyes fell to the space where Eira, Peregrine and their patient had stood. He felt the residue of technology, like a living aura vibrating around his hand as he stretched it out, flexing it slightly.

One of Stark's inventions, he decided. He had been useful before his death some centuries earlier, but it appeared someone had managed to leak out details of his inventions for his King. Sometimes, he wondered if his control over the genius had been as complete as it had been over his comrades. It worried him that his control was not complete even now, hundreds of years later. There were still those born into his realm who could resist his power, and eluded him even now. He had heard rumours of them, of the descendant of Hawkeye and the Black Widow, Peregrine Romanov, and of the mysterious healer, and more.

A cold, cruel smirk stretched his thin lips as Loki disappeared in a flash of emerald. The rebels were gone, but he would find them all, one day. After all, he had eternity and they had only decades. And when he did, they would either bow to his will or perish.