SPECIAL NOTE!: this is also a CROSSOVER! whoa, lookout. i have some major end-of-movie Superman spoilers in this so i hope you've seen that already. Now, i have changed the ending up a bit to fit my needs, but the essence is there. i hope you love the very dark depths i've taken this!

Gravity Part 1

by, PeechTao

"We can't help at all, can we?"

"I'm sorry, we just can't risk anyone getting in close to that terraforming device. We have to believe this man, this Superman, is somehow going to help us."

"Does Hawkeye really have to go?"

"It's an impossible shot. And we only have one chance to make it happen. One bullet to throw at it. We need him. The whole Earth needs him."

:_:_:

Clint tried to remember the supportive words of his companions as he receded into the back of his mind. He was flying on auto-pilot. Mentally at least. A C-17 was no easy bird to manage and his limited experience with the airbus's handling system was not boosting his confidence in any way. He'd been debriefed for a grand twelve minutes in the time it took him to leave the SHIELD fortress in New Mexico and arrived at the NSA headquarters in the midst of the desert. The alien payload had already been stocked onto the deck of the plane and was awaiting only the clearance to fly from the base command. Behind the yoke of that pivitol mission was none other than Agent Clint Barton. There was no better marksman on the planet that the US government knew of. If this really was an impossible shot at an alien space craft, Clint was uniquely qualified to make it count.

He'd heard a woman's voice as the rocky flight had her heels clicking across the floor of the cabin. Who she was mattered little in retrospect but supposing Clint may be curious, Colonel Hardy felt it necessary to fill him in on her status.

"Civilian. Reporter actually. Lois Lane. Has some kind of deal struck up with the alien. She's arming the bomb." Hardy said. The end of his statement had a disjointed air. It was difficult to tell if he was jealous or incredulous.

"A civilian is arming the bomb?" Clint turned away from the front window for a moment with a snap of his neck. "I Thought this was serious? Life and death serious?"

"It is. She's the only one the alien entrusted with the means to arm the device."

Clint bit the inside of his lip to prevent from saying something he shouldn't. He wasn't necessarily among friends here. This wasn't Tony Stark he was barking at or even Natasha. A colonel in the US Army may have enough pull, especially in this very horrible situation, to make sure a subordinate officer just didn't make it out of a situation alive. So he held back his reservations to let his mind work instead.

"She's trustworthy." Hardy said, focusing on his equipment gauges again. "And if not, we're all just going to die anyway."

:_:_:

The screams of the pilots being vaporized, smashed, and blasted to kingdom come reach Clint's headset before the orders from HQ did. There was an initial wave of fighters, an attack brigade of ten strong meant to soften the alien ship with a barrage of missiles that could break a hole wide enough for Clint to deliver the payload and bug out. But they never got close enough. The gravity machine, the Terraform machine and World Maker, had grabbed hold of the missiles like a haywire five-year-old. Metropolis was being laid to waste by the Air Force's own military while the jets that attempted the initial attack were flung across the sky. Clint was still far enough and high enough to miss the sight of the carnage. But he wasn't deaf.

Hardy glanced his way but said nothing.

"Get that bomb armed." Clint said, gripping the stalk a little tighter. They were getting close. He was already decreasing speed and lowering the massive ship down from its cruising altitude.

Hardy relayed the message to the reporter in the back of the C-17. He flipped several switches and brought HQ up on the overhead so Clint and he could both listen in.

"Eagle base, Eagle Base, this is Starliner. Making approach."

The radio crackled and buzzed. Clint continued to drop the skip down through the sky.

"Roger Starliner, cleared to make a run. Operation First-Go was a futile. I repeat, Operation First-Go was futile. Orders are to set course and evac before reaching the Gravity flux. Relay those orders, over."

Hardy and Clint exchanged an unnerving glance. Clint was the one who answered the radio message.

"Roger, Operation First-Go futile. Arming Device and leaving payload. Will proceed to manual evac after drop, over."

"God-Speed, crew."

Clint switched off the radio altogether. He quipped to Hardy to make sure the device was good and ready to go immediately when he called for it. Hardy called back into the cabin once more to relay the message. The response from Lois and the scientist with her took a little long to come. When it did at least appear, the words were much less than helpful.

Clint gave a disturbed look to Hardy. "Get back there and see what kind of trouble they're having."

Hardy unbuckled himself from the jump seat and moved toward the back of the plane. A second man Clint didn't know sat beside him in the copilot's chair. Clint gave him a slight nod of acknowledgement but that was all. They were nearing the alien ship now. And regardless of all the words in the report he'd been handed only minutes before setting out, nothing could have prepared him for seeing that horrid ship carving scars across the land.

The ship was all sleek ridges and curved lines. It was beautiful in its construction and terrifying in its nuance. Clint felt like he'd seen it all before in a terrible nightmare from the first moment he'd joined the Avengers. But whereas the Chitori had ships of dead, rotting flesh infused with the devices of war, this sight encompassing Metropolis was glorious. Evolved. Intelligent. Dangerous in a way that the Chitori never were. This was not brute force Clint was facing it was sheer otherworldly intelligence and technology.

Clint was beginning to turn in his chair, to shout into the back of the cabin for whatever was keeping the bomb from being armed, to get on with it or die. But he was interrupted by the sudden loss in cabin pressure. The yoke was torn from his hands and Clint clawed against his restraints to grab it again. The C-17 rolled right and stuttered. She threatened to stall, but Clint flipped his emergency switches and lifted the wings flaps to get them altitude again.

Warning claxons rang overhead. Clint punched a button to silence them partly so he had a chance to think. Another shock, like a punch to the ship's belly sent them toppling on their nose. Clint fought against the controls to keep them from crashing into the crumbling city below.

Ahead of them, the alien ship loomed like the harbinger of death. With pulses from its shimmering underbelly the city below was subsequently uprooted from the ground then slammed back into the earth with tremendous volley. Cars, buildings, rubble, and even people floated through the air and after a moment of suspension were flattened as if a mighty fist crushed them. There was a line, an ever increasing one pushing out in a circular wave surrounding the ship. Like a tornado, it was only visible by the debris that it pulled into the air and thumped down again.

The ship lurched onto its side like a whale breaching the ocean surface. It was all Clint could do to keep the bird from completing its rollover and sending the team into the nearest skyscraper. Already the buildings were coming up fast. Too fast. He dropped the flaps to try and steal some altitude but his battle was a losing one. He prepared himself for what was most assuredly going to be a crash landing. Or perhaps, just a crash.

"Get ready to bail out!" He screamed into the intercom, hoping someone in the back of the airbus was still alive to follow instructions. The World Maker ahead of him loomed larger and larger, blotting out the swirling black skies in the ever increasing wave of gravity swells. The hurricane of movement floating up, crashing down, floating up, crashing down...

There was an explosion directly at his back. Clint partially turned in his harness to watch as the cabin door was ripped from its hinges and tossed aside as if it were made of paper mâché. Standing on the other side was an exotic battle worn beauty. The look of murder in her eyes was more than Clint needed to realize the position he was in. This was one of the aliens. She'd compromised the ship. She was here to kill everyone.

Clint unclipped himself from his harness with one hand, letting the yoke fall from his grip as he pulled his side arm and fired a bullet directly through her eye. Then he watched, shocked, as that bullet twisted and folded into itself as it hit the brick wall of her face.

"Ok." He breathed. Unsure of what he should do, Clint grabbed the only thing he had available, which turned out to be an emergency fire extinguisher on the wall. With it he created a temporary shield. It blocked her first glancing blow for his head but did nothing to stop the second which sent him flying into the cockpit windshield. The glass splattered around him, threatening to give way. He pulled himself free but not fast enough to avoid the hand to his throat. The Kryptonian claws dug into him as she lifted and threw him to the back of the cabin.

Clint knew there was nothing he could do to stop this super human. Not alone. He'd done what he came for and that was to set the alien weapon on a collision course. Now was the time to bail out himself before he got killed.

Without waiting for the woman to attack again, he grabbed one of the army chutes and barely affixed it to his back before he ran down the open back deck and exited the plane.

:(:):(:):

Jumping out of the back of a crashing C-17 was the equivalent of BASE jumping into a den of lions infected with rabies. When Clint hit the ground nearly fifty stories down, he was already unconscious from those things he'd run into along the way. Flag poles, ledges, and fire escapes were unkind to the pilot and impeccable marksman meant to spare the world of a horrid death. And still, even as the destroyed plane littered the landscape in chunks of fire, the World Maker churned. It's deadly band of destruction pushing out, out, out until nearly half of metropolis was lying in ruin.

Clint awoke in time to spare his own death. He was close to the line, too close. Before he was even aware enough to know which way to run, he was at his feet already. He heard a woman screaming. He wandered in a daze.

Maybe it was that reporter, Lois was her name. But as he followed the sounds he realized it was just an ordinary citizen. She'd been driving at some point, trying to race the gravity cloud out of the city. An SUV sized piece of fighter wing had her pinned between a poll and the rest of the fallen jet. She thrashed her hands against the tangle of metal. the pilot was dead still strapped into his seat. She was trapped.

Clint came awake to many thoughts confusing his mind. He realized he was bleeding. He'd cut his eye somehow. The woman needed to be rescued, now, or else she'd be dead when the next pulse came. Clint had to keep running, find shelter.

He turned to her car. He braced himself on the hood and pulled at the wing to get a large enough opening that the woman could crawl out.

"Move back, get back, I need to kick the glass!" He instructed.

"GET ME OUT OF HERE! Please help me, get me out!"

"Just hang on, move back." Clint kicked out the window. He still had the parachute strapped to his chest. As he reached into the car and helped pull her out, he thumbed the buckles on his chest to get the chute off.

"Come on, we've got to run!" He grabbed her hand, shrugging off the rest of the gear as they dropped off the car hood and started across the road way. She trailed behind him. She was wearing hot pink high heels and black leggings. They slowed her down. Enough for Clint to stop and turn. He was prepared to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way, wherever that meant.

Her hand was in his. The world had already begun to slow once more. Clint knew they weren't going to outrun the next gravity flux, but he tried. Oh how he tried. She was still trailing behind him at arm's length. He was shouting at her, turned to pick her up but that is when the gravity flux ripped her away from him. Her painted nails left five perfect scratches in his hand. He had a ring in his palm, it must have come from her finger. He watched from the road, mesmerized as his eyes followed her mannequin movements in the air. She floated overhead, just out of reach. He knew the inevitable was coming. He knew she'd slam back down, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. They screamed, almost at the same time, and her body hit the asphalt.

Not all of her had been crushed at once. Her upper half was almost normal. Her head looking up to the treacherous sky that had pulled her up. From mid-thigh, to the tip of her shoes was another matter. They were flat. Like two long rolls pressed into a pizza. She was essentially only half a human. Her lower half being gorily unrecognizable.

For a time she said nothing, as if her brain was trying to work out exactly what had just occurred, but it wasn't more than a few seconds before she began to scream.

Clint reached for her, tried to drag her, but the legs couldn't move. They had become married with the asphalt. Two piles of mush that were once human muscle and bone. Just moving her was tearing her body in half. Clint didn't know what to do. Her voice shrieked and wailed. The invisible claw that had stolen her the first time reached out and snatched her again. The breath sucked from her chest as she was heaved into the air. The Avenger was left on the street with the flattened remains of her legs.

A voice rose in the back of his mind. It told him to run. He had to run.

RUN!

Clint pushed to his feet, he turned and sprinted. He ran for his very life. He ran from the sounds of strangled voice of the woman he didn't know. He ran from the high pitched pop her body made when it hit the concrete again. This time none of her was sparred, and the world was filled with the horrible quiet of her silenced screams.

Clint tried to look at the street signs and get his bearings. He had little on-the-ground knowledge of Metropolis and what he did know was breezed by him via Colonel Hardy during the brief flight. In essence he was probably running in circles, like a rat caught in a maze. The creeping horror continued to eat at him with every step. The knowledge that his running would be useless. The world was actually ending.

Clint searched his immediate person for a cell phone. He had a single lifeline. A direct contact number to Tony Stark and all the Avengers back at the Tower. If his mission went south, if he needed an immediate EVAC, Tony would be geared and waiting. Clint found the phone and dialed the number. He was surprised, horrified, when he heard no dial tone on the other end. He stopped for a moment. He leaned against a bent telephone pole and looked at the phone in his hands. The gravity line was half a block behind him and closing fast. He couldn't afford to stop now, but if he couldn't reach Tony, then what did it matter how hard he ran?

The phone signal was active. The satellite was linked correctly. Clint dialed again, but this time he saw the error message that scrolled across the screen. No towers. Every cell tower in Metropolis was being scrambled by whatever the World Maker had done.

Clint felt a piece of him curl into itself until it was extinguished. As his eyes looked back over the destruction of the city he knew exactly the name for that little piece of himself. It was Hope. Hope, for him, was dead.

From the depths of this revelation came another. He looked at the roadway he'd been running along, only to realize he was trapped by a wall of debris. The two side alleys were already blocked off by the approaching line of destruction. He wasn't alone. Two men stood behind him beside the debris. Clint moved toward them, as far from the approaching wave as possible. It was then he realized how the men had come here themselves. There was a woman stuck in that wall of debris. She was shaking, filthy, and terrified. And still the expanding line of invisible force continued to approach. Unaware of the lives it was destroying, the otherworldly creation continued forward. Destroying everything in its path with the relentless climb upwards into the free air, then crash downwards into the cracking concrete and asphalt. Looking out when the world settled, Clint could see clear to the other side of Metropolis unimpeded.

"Perry?" the woman in the rubble whispered.

Neither of the two men replied. Standing together, the four looked out over the distance and quietly waited for the end to come.

please continued to "Gravity" part 2!