Steady as a heartbeat, the sound of her feet hitting the ground seemed to echo through the forest. Her breathing heavy, labored, her lungs aching with each breath of icy cold air. Her hair whipped about behind her, and her palms were scratched and bleeding from all the times she had fallen to the ground.
Yet she continued forward.
In the back of her mind, she silently cursed herself. How did she always manage to get herself in these messes? Her whole life seemed like some sick joke, some endless cycle of 'It couldn't get worse than this,' all culminating to this point. From Jane to Thor to Tony to him, her life was just an endless crescendo of one in a million happenstances that led to this particular situation.
A Political Science major should never have met an astrophysicist.
A human should never have befriended a God.
A stupid girl should never have worked for the infamous and brilliant Tony Stark.
And Loki should never have even looked twice at her.
But it happened. It all happened. And that god damned Tesseract… so much pain. So much suffering caused by it. Oh, how she hated the thing… yet here she was, running endlessly through the forest, feeling the dull warmth of it pulsing in her backpack.
She did not know where she was going or what she was searching for, but for once, she had swallowed her pride and done as he had demanded of her.
He told her to take the Tesseract, to run as far and fast as she could, and to not for a second look back.
And so, she did.