A/N:Rewriting the whole story. I don't think I had a good enough grasp on my characters the first time round.
They're Pinky , they're Pinky and the Brain, Brain Brain Brain –
Being woken up via shrill ringtone was not fun. With an almost sob Anne picked up the call wondering what in the name of all the heavens above had Michael calling her at that hour.
"What?!" She growled out.
"What took you so long, I've been trying your cell for ages." He said and she bit back the curse on the tip of her tongue.
"Mike it is-," She pulled the phone away to check the time on it and nearly sobbed, "Two in the middle of the night, what the hell is wrong with you?"
"Emergency situation at SHIELD, everyone has to report for work."
"What?" She whined, finally opening her eyes and sitting up, biting back a yawn. "But I have leave for the next week."
"Not anymore, something big is happening, the PEGASUS facility was downed."
"Downed?"
"As in destroyed. KO-ed. Mushroom cloud over it."
"That's ridiculous, I just checked in there five hours ago, it can't just go ka-boom in that time." She scoffed and fell back onto her bed.
"Somebody said it was nuked or something. Don't know all the details, we have to report to the Helicarrier."
And that had her jack-knifing off the bed. The Helicarrier was a military command centre and they were only really called there in case of a big emergency. Like war.
SHIELD didn't get involved in wars. Battles, yes, but not war. This was terrible.
"I'll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Have coffee ready."
"Ugh I was supposed to fly out to Seattle today. Jules and I were supposed to road trip it home for Mom's birthday!"
"Better work out a good cover story, you know how shit you are at lying."
"I'm not shit at lying!"
"Sure you are, your voice gets all high and shrill. Like it is now."
Anne cleared her throat and lowered her voice. "I'm not a bad liar, it's just that my sister happens to be a nosy reporter."
"Your sister is a nosy reporter." Michael agreed and Anne beamed. "But you are also a shit liar." And the beaming stopped. "Come on be quick about it. Louis is already there."
It took her more time than that to get ready. The Helicarrier had a strict dress code and her suit was nowhere to be found. She finally found it in the very back of her closet behind the very ugly purple bridesmaid dress from Cheryl's wedding. By the time she had finished pulling it out of the back without disturbing the rest of the contents of her closet, Michael was already ringing the bell.
"You're late." He said as soon as she opened the door, running all the way there and panting by the time she got to it. He was already in his monkey suit and she almost flinched at the sight of him out of his usual black t-shirt and jeans.
"Why is that surprising?"
"Who said it was surprising?" He stepped in without a care and set about fixing a batch of coffee. "Did you call your sister?"
"I haven't even showered yet!" But she stopped to make the call anyway. The time difference meant that Juliet probably wouldn't rip her another one if she called her at eleven. Probably.
"What?" Came the growled reply. So maybe she would rip her a new one.
"Jules sorry but there's a work crisis and we're being called in. My leave has been cancelled, I can't make it."
"Really?" Suddenly Jules sounded very much awake and sweet and saccharine which meant that Anne was in big trouble. "And what is this work crisis exactly?"
"Umm, uhh servers are down." Anne blurted out the first thing that came to her mind.
"Really? What happened? Was there a glitch in the system? I've been taking a tech class nearby so don't be afraid to throw big words at me!" Jules was cheerful and interrogative and Michael was right and Anne was, in fact, a shit liar. If she couldn't just throw jargon in Jules' face then she had no idea how to deal with this.
"I uh, I'll let Michael explain this to you, we're getting late and I need a shower." Anne hurled the phone at Michael and he glared as it nearly hit his head. With a mouthed sorry, she ran to the bathroom returning only when she heard their conversation end.
"You're welcome." He deadpanned.
"We're getting late we should go!"
"And there's the shrill voice again." He glared at her. "You owe me coffee."
She walked down the row of workstations, swinging around a chair whose owner pushed out suddenly and carefully balanced the two cups of coffee in her hands.
The Helicarrier was by far Anne's least favourite place to work. Between her dislike of most people and dislike of heights, it made for the worst environment to be in. Agents were practically on top of one another, especially since the collapse of the PEGASUS facility just hours back. Almost all personnel who had been evacuated from there had been sent over to the Helicarrier and there were way too many of them.
Her fellow techies had made a corner of the place into their own home, sequestering screens away from the sights of others and creating a niche for them to work in. It wasn't as good as the set up they had in the New York offices but it would do.
"What took you so long?" Michael hollered, throwing his arms out to welcome his fifth cup of the night. It had been a long and gruelling process trying to re-integrate all the data from the PEGASUS facility to their databases. After the multiple shots of caffeine he had downed Michael was now infinitely easier to work with. All they had to do was watch out for him jumping off the walls.
Next to him Louis reached out eagerly for the cheetos he had requested but Michael made a grab for it before he could.
"Come on, gimme some of that, Fury came while you were gone."
"Fury?" Anne was surprised. They usually took their orders from Coulson, she hadn't thought Fury even knew they existed.
"Something big is happening." Michael said conspiratorially and Louis leaned forward pushing his glasses up his nose.
"I heard some guys in the cafeteria say that Captain America would be brought in! Isn't that exciting?"
"Not really. Sounds like more work for us. Can you imagine explaining smartphones to a guy from the twenties?"
The two boys shuddered.
"I bought my mother a computer for Hanukkah. Biiiiig mistake." Michael shuddered. Anne laughed, leaning back in her chair. When the coffee was drained and nothing was left of the cheetos but orange cheesy dust they were back to business, their brief snack break over.
"So what did Fury want?" Anne asked. The Director wasn't one they saw a lot of and between this and his pacing the command centre they had seen a lot of him in the past few hours.
"Oh he just wanted us to analyse all footage prior to PEGASUS going boom."
"I wonder if Selvig survived." She mused.
"He's the scientist right? The one you wrote the program for?"
"Yes him. He seemed...intense."
"That's a nice way of saying crazy."
She glared at Michael but couldn't quite disagree. Selvig had asked her some strange questions and always seemed to blink right after, as if surprised by what he was asking. Weird, sure, but she'd met weirder and wasn't that an odd statement to make?
"Just...let's just check it out?"
With a teasing grin, Michael turned back to their screen and drew up a video. On the side programs gave off output, registering levels of radiation during the passage of the video. On the screen Selvig and other scientists, worried and watched and observed. They prodded at the Tesseract and flinched when it reacted.
"Is that a smart thing to do?" Louis asked.
"Not considering the gamma radiation its throwing off." She read as the levels on the side continued to rise. "And the energy levels are off the chart, that place should have been boiling, how are they still standing there?"
"Looks like it's pretty contained." Michael noted.
"But it shouldn't be. This is practically nuclear reactor level. Fury's here." She observed.
"Oh my God, where?!" Louis floundered and she looked at him amused, pointing at the screen where Fury had come in full view of the camera. He had the decency to look sheepish. "Sorry. He scares me."
"Well apparently whatever this is, it's scaring him." Anne noted as on the screen the happenings played out. Selvig and Fury walked down the length of the strange device that Selvig had built. It looked like a platform with wires running from it to the Tesseract.
"Do you think he practises walking like that so the coat billows?" Michael asked.
"Doesn't need to, you buy the right coat it does all the billowing for you." She answered.
Agent Barton joined Fury and the two talked while scientists ran about.
"Levels are spiking again." Anne noted at the same time as the scientist on the screen.
"That Tesseract thing is creepy." Michael frowned and Louis concurred.
"Yeah, why is it glowing?"
Anne snorted. "It's literally supposed to be a doorway to space, the glowing thing is hardly the creepiest thing it does."
At that exact moment, the Tesseract's glow grew brighter, flashes of energy running over it in ripples and bolts, every surge sending the camera shaking. The picture on the screen itself broke, going on and off before stabilising itself as Tesseract withdrew energies inward. She crackled with barely contained energy and in a second of absolution, shot out a beam of pure energy coloured in her signature blue. A portal to space opened on the platform, the edges straining, bleeding energy before exploding and filling the contained room in blue flames and everyone was blinded by its light the screen through which the three SHIELD analysts watched, turned white for a good second before it receded.
When it cleared, a man was seen to be kneeling on the platform, the same blue flames crackling upon his back and as he stood they cleared. He looked up with a maniacal grin, even as the agents drew closer, weapons raised at him.
A fight followed, one that was over within seconds as the man incapacitated everyone there and stopped Barton before he could shoot him.
"You have heart."
Anne made a high pitched sound not unlike the whine she made when her lies were discovered.
"Zoom in on him." She said, a sense of urgency in her voice and Michael paused the video and blew up the face of the man who had appeared out of nowhere.
Anne's little gasp and look of utter horror caught their attention. She stared at the screen with wide eyes and whispered lowly. "Noooo!"
One year ago
Anne walked into the club still dressed in the clothes from her mission, moving the temporarily jet black bangs back from her face. The red dress earned her some attention but she didn't notice it, her mind still stuck on what had happened just a few hours ago.
It was her fault really. She was a tech monkey, not a field agent. She couldn't fathom what had been in her mind when she volunteered to go undercover to get access to the Triad's database. All of Black Widow's lessons had been unable to prepare her the bile that had risen when the target she was supposed to seduce had slid his hand up her dress.
She felt disgusting.
The sultry music throbbed in the background and she ordered a martini absently. Most of the people were at the dance floor for some reason. Anne didn't go out clubbing often so she didn't know the norm for them but she knew that people tended to go where the alcohol was. This was strange to say the least but who was she to complain. For once she didn't have to shove her way through a crowd to get a martini and she was grateful for it.
She sat on the bar stool wincing as the short hem of the red dress slid higher, the slit revealing what felt to be an unnecessary amount of flesh and wondered if she'd ever be able to wash the feel of his fingers off her skin.
There was only one other person at the bar near her and as the bartender went off to tend to another customer she picked up her martini and raised it in his direction.
"To you," She said, whether emboldened by the alcohol she had consumed prior to that or simply because depression always tended to make her chatty, she didn't know. "May you never feel as crap as I do right now." She toasted to the man before draining the drink in one go.
The man however instead of looking at her like she was strange and shifting away like she'd expected him to, simply snorted and took it as a conversation starter.
"Don't bother, you couldn't possibly compete with me."
And she turned and looked at him, really properly looked at him. He was quite attractive in the broody way that characters from books always seemed to be. Dark hair and bright eyes, hawkish nose (aquiline, her mind supplied) and general aura of sadness.
"What's got you down, Green-eyes?" She asked, hoping that whatever his story was, it would be depressing enough to take her mind off things.
"I am about to do something that many would consider wrong. If discovered I will probably lose everything I consider important."
"That was...vague."
He snorted but smiled wryly.
"And you?"
"Me?"
"Why do you feel like, what was it? Oh yes, crap."
"A stranger made me feel dirty." She confessed.
He shot her an appraising look. "That was vague."
But it was apparently enough because he didn't press any further. And it was probably the fact that he didn't pry, that he didn't ask that loosened her tongue so much.
"How do you get rid of the feel of an unwanted hand on your skin?" She asked, lips pursed into a frown.
"You don't," He answered. "You replace it with the feel of a touch that's actually welcome."
She thought it over. Anne didn't know how to deal with this and it seemed as good a suggestion as any. She turned to him and looked him over.
"Are you offering?"
He cocked his brow. "Are you asking?"
"Yes." She said through a dry mouth.
His teeth left marks on her throat moving with no rush. Her dress was pushed down and his fingertips grazed her sides, calluses catching on her skin leaving a trail of goosebumps behind before curling on her ribs right under the curve of her breasts.
She thought there would have been something dirty about being touched like this in the handicapped stall in the ladies washroom but there wasn't, it didn't feel anything but hot when he hauled her up over him, the angle of their kiss changing, her hands pushing the crisp white shirt off his shoulders, sighing into his mouth, pressing into his hand. For a moment when his hand reached up her skirt she tensed but he drew circles on her skin and she eased. Every single bit of power her target had taken from her he gave back to her in spades.
They had more clothes on than she ever had during sex, the dress still hanging around her waist although more of a belt than anything else and his clothes were off but still hanging off him but they didn't notice.
"What's your name?" She asked abruptly and he stopped in his motions.
"What?"
"I get the feeling I'm going to be saying it often in a few minutes." She bit back a moan as his hips rolled into hers and he chuckled into her skin.
"Loki."
"Anne."
"Anne." He tested it out before leaning close. "I'm going to make you scream."
"I'm more of a moaner actua-" Her words broke off into a gasp as he pushed inside her, raising her up so she fell onto him at an angle that worked so well for both of them that they unravelled embarrassingly quickly.
"You were right, that did it." She said once her lungs had stopped burning.
And then the guilt crushed in and she awkwardly put herself together again. He must have noticed because the lazy grin on his face melted away into a cold facade and he fixed himself as well and she felt the need to explain that it wasn't him.
"Sorry it's just...I can't help but feel terrible, what if someone needed to use the bathroom?!" She whispered and he blinked before smiling.
"That's what's making you feel guilty?"
She rolled her eyes. "I'm not about to feel guilty for the best schtupping I've gotten in my whole life. Might regret its location though."
"I suppose we should leave." He said absently.
"Should I go first?"
"No I'll leave." He hesitated and stopped with his hand on the door knob. "May you never feel that crap again."
She couldn't help but laugh as he parroted her words before melting out of her life. "Thanks."
She shook herself out of her memories and watched the footage instead. On the screen the now unpaused video continued with Loki of Asgard taking the Tesseract, turning agents into his minions and finally leaving, bringing the facility down with him.
Anne cursed brilliantly. "Son of a bitch!"