AN: Here it is! Sequel to Loki's Match! I still can't believe how well received my first Avengers story was! =] Thank you so much to all who read it. I hope you will continue and read the sequel as well. I'm not going to say too much about it because I don't want to spoil it, but I can say, LOKI WILL RETURN... just not right away. School is started to get busy for me so updates will take some time and I'm sorry but I can't update as frequently as I did before. HOPEFULLY, I will be able to work on this on the weekends and post a new chapter then but we'll just have to see.
I hope you all enjoy the sequel and as always, please review!
I own nothing except Waverly, Tarra, and the plot idea for this story!
Chapter One:
Ice Hawk sat crouched on the roof of an office building in downtown Manhattan. Next to her, bow armed and ready, was her brother, Hawkeye. The archer's eyes were focused with the unblinking concentration of a sharp shooter. Ice Hawk lacked the patience of her brother.
"This is pointless," she whispered beside him. Her voice was layered with frustration and annoyance.
Eyes not leaving his target, Hawkeye responded. "This is our job."
"No," Ice Hawk said irritably. She shifted so that she was kneeling on the edge of the building. Between her fingers she held throwing knives made of ice. She followed her brother's gaze and her brown eyes locked on their target. "This is a job for the police. Not the Avengers."
Below them, in the lobby of a bank, a masked man with a gun held the bankers and their patrons hostage while his partner waved around another gun, demanding money from the safe. Glancing back up around them, Ice Hawk located their fellow team members. On the building across from them stood Black Widow and Captain America. In an alley way behind the bank, the Hulk stood with Iron Man.
"Fury called us in," Clint said. "Maybe the police couldn't handle this."
Ice Hawk sighed. Despite the fact that it was midsummer and at least 80 degrees in the city, her breath crystallized before her face. Hawkeye shivered beside her. "Do you even see the police here? No." Ice Hawk stood up, tired of waiting for the precise moment to strike. "This is just an average guy with an ego problem and a gun. The police are more than capable of dealing with this. We should be dealing with super villains. Or finding the Tesseract."
"Fury dropped that project. The Tesseract was destroyed when Loki stabbed it."
Ice Hawk dropped the ice knives she was holding and they shattered at her feet. Her heart skipped a beat as it always did when she heard the god of mischief's name. "I'm not so sure," she said, her voice flat.
It had been months since Loki's death. She told herself that she was done mourning. She told herself she was ready to move forward. But she wasn't. Ice Hawk still felt an emptiness inside her. The newest Avenger gritted her teeth and pushed Loki to the back of her mind for the time being.
"Anyways." Ice Hawk flicked her hands as one would do when shaking off excess water. The motion resulted in new blades of ice forming between the girl's fingers. "I'm sick of this sitting around and waiting."
"Fury gave us our orders." Hawkeye said. He finally tore his eyes away from his target and looked up at his sister. He knew she was about do something against their mission's protocol. If Hawkeye had a dollar for every time his sister had been summoned into the director's office because of some type of insubordination… well, he'd have a lot of dollars.
"You know I don't agree with the director." With that, Ice Hawk jumped off the lip of the building. Using jets of water from her feet that blasted through the pores in her specially designed boots, Ice Hawk used window ledges and other aspects of the building's architecture to slow her descent until she landed safely in front of the bank.
From her ear piece, she heard her brother sigh. Then she heard, "Hey, Ice Princess, what the hell are you doing?"
"I got tired of waiting, Stark." Ice Hawk took a step towards the bank's front doors and threw her knives at the glass. The glass shattered the second her ice hit its surface. "Bullet proof. Yeah, right," she scoffed.
Upon hearing the sound of shattering glass, the two masked bank robbers wheeled around, their eyes and guns locked on Ice Hawk. Before either of the men could take aim and fire, Ice Hawk shot a jet of water from each palm. The force of the streams of water knocked both men backwards. Ice Hawk then closed her fists and the water froze around the barrels of the criminals' guns, rendering them useless.
Bank robber number one stood, his useless gun frozen to his right hand. "Wrong move, missy."
Ice Hawk rolled her eyes. "Oh please." She jumped high into the air, propelled by another blast of water from the soles of her feet. She flipped in the air and landed on the robber's shoulders. With her elbow, she hit him square on the top of the head and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
Bank robber number two took that moment to run for the shattered remains of the door. Flinging her arm out to the side, Ice Hawk conjured up a sheet of ice under the man's feet. He slipped and wheeled his arms around in the air, but finally lost his balance and fell to the ground. Ice Hawk calmly walked over to him. She knelt down beside him and froze his hands and feet to the ground, securing him in place.
Ice Hawk stood and walked down the street as if this was a normal everyday bank transaction. Into her communicator, she addressed her teammates. "I think the cops can handle it from here. I'm going to get a drink. See ya back at base."
Before she could hear her brother's argument or the rest of the team's objections, Ice Hawk ripped her communicator from her ear and stuffed it into one of the pockets of her blue jumpsuit. She didn't bother changing from her combat suit before she entered the bar that she often frequented. It was only a few blocks away from the crime scene and she didn't feel like going all the way back to Avengers Tower to changes. Plus, it wasn't like the world didn't know who she was. Everyone knew who all of the Avengers were. It was stupid they had to go by codenames when on a mission. Everyone in America knew billionaire and genius Tony Stark was Iron Man. Everyone knew Dr. Banner transformed into the Hulk. It was pointless for Steve Rodgers to wear a mask anymore; his face was the face everyone associated with Captain America. And then, there was Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, and Ice Hawk herself; Waverly. Why the three of them had codenames, Waverly didn't even know. They ran around in jumpsuits, they didn't even have masks. Their faces were plastered on news screens all the time. Codenames were a waste of time, in Waverly's opinion.
Waverly pushed open the thick, wooden door of the bar and entered the dimly lit room. Since it was so early in the day, the bar was mostly empty; only a few regulars here and there drinking slowly from large glass mugs and exchanging stories. They nodded at Waverly when they say here. Waverly had been in this bar at least once a week ever since she turned 21 which was just two weeks after Loki had saved them all on The Other's home planet. Waverly was still in a depression at the time, so she thought she'd try and drown her sorrows in alcohol. The night of her birthday, she was so drunk, Clint had to carry her home. She sobbed the entire time mumbling about Loki, Odin, Project X and a million other depressing things that Clint lost count. Since then, Waverly was careful to only drink what she could handle. Clint had let her drink with him before the magical age of twenty one, but on the night that she turned legal, Waverly threw caution to the wind and downed everything the bar tender offered. After a severe hangover the next day, Waverly decided no more.
But she liked the bar. It was a small, owned by a woman in her late twenties. The bar had a jukebox that played the "golden oldies" and most of the bar-goers were men and women in the forties and fifties, going out for a drink while reminiscing about old times. It was quiet and the owner was kind. It was quite the opposite of the normal bar scene in New York. Waverly had tried that once with Tony, Steve, and Pepper. It was clear the naïve super soldier and young Waverly didn't enjoy the pounding music, thrashing around that was supposedly dancing, and the drunken partiers yelling in everyone's ears. The typical bar scene was for sure out of the question in Waverly's opinion once a drunken frat boy grabbed her by the arm and mumbled something about going back to his place for some fun. She flipped him over her shoulder and turned his beer so cold, the bottle froze to his hand.
Waverly took her usual seat at the counter and the bar owner leaned across from her, cleaning a shot glass with an old rag. "Usual?" She asked.
Waverly nodded. "Thanks Tarra."
A few seconds later, a glass of rum and coke slid across the counter and rested in front of Waverly. The girl downed the glass, letting the warmth of the rum spread across her. She set the glass down and then filled it herself with ice and cool water from her hands.
"I see you've been working," Tarra said. Her back was to Waverly while she was straightening some bottles on a shelf behind the bar, but Waverly could feel Tarra looking at her out of the side of her eye. Waverly and Tarra had become close friends ever since Waverly started coming to the bar; but Waverly never told her new friend where her powers originated from. It was still painful to think about. The lies, the kidnapping, the torture she was put through.
"Yup," Waverly answered, completely ignoring her friend's desperate and not so subtle plea for more information.
Tarra turned back around. "Getting back into your old routine then?" Another reason the girls were so close was that they felt each other's pain. Sure, Tarra didn't know that Waverly had been romantically involved with the god of mischief from the not so mythical realm of Asgard, but Tarra knew Waverly experienced the loss of a lover. Tarra had been brought to the bar scene in the same way. Her fiancé was a solider. He had been killed in combat in the Middle East. After spending many drunken nights sobbing alone in the corner of the bar, the former owner pulled Tarra out of her hole and offered her the bar, so long as she stayed relatively sober. That's what Waverly liked about Tarra. Even in the midst of such pain, Tarra's strength was still her most obvious feature. Tarra reminded Waverly that she too was strong and that she would be all right in the end.
Still, Waverly missed Loki so badly that it hurt.
Waverly set her glass back on the counter and nodded. "Yeah, I guess."
"That's good."
Waverly nodded once more but said nothing else. She was trying, she really was. But she just couldn't let go. Loki had stirred something inside of her that she wanted desperately to hold on to. With the god of mischief gone, however, that feeling turned into a gnawing, unresolved knot in Waverly's stomach. There was just something about the whole situation that didn't sit right with Waverly. She dreamed about Loki almost every night. The dreams were so real and felt so vivid. In addition to the dreams were the nightmares. In her sleep, Waverly watched Loki die over and over again. But, the more she watched, the more it didn't make sense. When Loki stabbed the Tesseract, the energy released burned The Other to a pile of ashes. Loki simply disappeared. Shouldn't he have been fried too? It didn't make sense. Plus, Loki was the god of mischief. He would have had a way out. He wouldn't have been killed so easily.
Waverly had brought her suspicions to her brother. Clint, as understanding and comforting as a master assassin can be, told Waverly she was just imagining it; holding on to a hope that wasn't there. After angrily dousing him with cold water, Waverly told him she wasn't so sure that he was right.
If anyone would believe her theories, it would be Thor. Waverly desperately wanted to talk to the god of thunder. But, ever since Fury scrapped the Tesseract project, Thor had been on Asgard, resuming his kingly duties.
Waverly was pulled out of her thoughts by Tarra's voice. "Are you listening, Waverly?"
Waverly looked up. Tarra was standing across from her, hands on her hips looking miffed. "Sorry," the younger woman mumbled. "What were you saying?"
"I said," Tarra said angrily, though her expression had softened, "Two guys were in here last night asking about you."
Waverly's eyebrows disappeared into the angled bangs that framed her face. "Two guys?"
Tarra nodded. "I think they're brothers. They look a lot alike. Anyways, they came in here and asked if I knew where the ice girl was."
Waverly's stomach twisted uncomfortably. Everyone knew she was Ice Hawk, but still, unless she was in uniform, which honestly wasn't often, people would refer to her by her given name. "What did they want?"
Tarra shrugged. "They didn't say."
"What did you tell them?"
"I said that you were probably busy. They should come look for you another night." Tarra leaned against the bar counter and lowered her voice. "They weren't bad looking Waverly. They're obviously interested in you. It might be good for you to go out with one of them."
Waverly looked skeptically at her friend. "Maybe." Waverly pushed her now empty glass back towards Tarra. "If they come back and I'm not here, text me." With that, Waverly left, giving a friendly good bye to the other customers.
On her walk back towards the tower, Waverly couldn't help but feeling uncomfortable. Something about the two men who had asked about her just didn't sit right with her. Since she had gone public as the newest member of the Avengers, she had gotten quite a large fan base, mostly consisting of young men. But, after the frat boy incident and several other similar occasions, most boys were too intimidated to even look at Waverly when she was out in public; especially if Clint was around. Why would two guys all of a sudden be looking for her? It felt weird.
Plus, Waverly was weirded out by the fact of getting together with some other guy. She still felt so close to Loki; like he was just out of her reach. Dating some other guy after she had become so close with the god of mischief just didn't sit well with her.
To make matters all the more uncomfortable, Waverly couldn't help but feel like she was being watched. She felt the nervous prickle of a pair of eyes locked on her back, but whenever she turned around, there was no one beside the average city goer. Waverly was more than capable of defending herself if someone was following her for whatever reason, but still, she couldn't help but think the feeling was being watched was somehow related to what Tarra had told her about the two men looking for her.