A/N: This story is about Hydra agents trying to kill the Avengers. There will be violence. How graphic the violence is depends on the amount of splatter in your imagination. Spoilers for Thor 2 as well as Cap 2.
Thor's Day
Farmhouse outside London, England, 1 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, day of the Insight launch
The Hydra-SHIELD agent who approached Thor was very careful of the thunder god. His mistake was thinking that Thor was the most dangerous of his motley crew.
When Thor left Asgard to live with his beloved and her friends, the five comrades formed a tight-knit family group. Maybe a little too tight. The flat had been fine for Jane Foster and her intern Darcy Lewis, but add Darcy's intern Ian Boothby and Jane's mentor Erik Selvig, along with Thor who took up as much space as any three average people and the living quarters more resembled living sixteenths.
Fortunately, Thor had the answer. This time he'd had a chance to pack before descending to Midgard and he'd remembered to bring the coin of the realm (his realm). Even small change from Asgard was worth a small fortune to collectors. Discreetly trading just three minor coins brought the team enough money to buy a small farmhouse, close to London but off the beaten path. It was surrounded by fields — to make it hard to sneak up on — which were surrounded by woods — to conceal it from the main road.
They weren't really hiding, but they liked their privacy.
On the day that SHIELD fell, Darcy woke up with a migraine so bad, she couldn't even stand the brightness of her iPhone. She hadn't been able to check her email or swallow so much as a mouthful of coffee — her two prime addictions.
Her grumpiness drove Erik and Ian out of the house — to do the weekly grocery shopping, they said.
"With a detour to the nearest pub," Darcy grumbled.
Jane finally got her to lie down in a darkened room with a cool cloth over her eyes. Darcy's medicine began to work and she started to feel more human, and suddenly very hungry. Wearing comfy sweats and a tank top, with a robe draped on her shoulders and bunny slippers on her feet, Darcy ventured back into the land of the living, relieved that the worst of the pain was past.
When she wandered into the kitchen, she was amused to see Jane and Thor looking like mismatched twins, both wearing blue T-shirts and jeans, but Jane's shirt hung loose on her slender frame while Thor towered over her with his broad shoulders threatening to rip his shirt in half.
Jane and Thor started to fix a meal for Darcy, when a car bearing the SHIELd eagle on its door turned onto their farm road. The thunder god and the astrophysicist immediately went to meet their guest.
"There goes lunch," Darcy complained, but she followed the others outside, eying the newcomer suspiciously.
Jude Petros came to the door wearing a neat suit and dark glasses in the classic style of the late Phil Coulson — a style meant to disarm Thor who had trusted Coulson.
The small, meek-looking man spoke respectfully and had no weapons showing, but in his coat pocket was an injector pen full of virulent poison.
Petros was cautious in his dealings with Thor and polite to Dr. Jane Foster — but he overlooked disheveled, bunny-slippered Darcy Lewis entirely.
The agent was careful to hide his Hydra affiliation and to give the impression that he was nothing more than a concerned SHIELD ally. He didn't know Darcy bore two grudges against SHIELD. First, they stole her iPod and, second, they failed to answer her call during the London crisis when Jane disappeared and Thor reappeared. And now this unwanted visitor was keeping her from her first nourishment of the day.
Darcy was not put at ease when she learned the visitor was SHIELD, she was suspicious, alarmed and annoyed. When she saw Petros casually put his hand in his pocket and grip something tightly, she tased him without a second thought.
"He was acting creepy," she said, shrugging at Jane's cry of alarm.
The electricity dropped Petros writhing to the ground, bringing his hand into view with the injector clutched in it. The shock also, incidentally, shorted out the communications device he wore on his lapel.
"What happened?" demanded Lou Zedeker, the leader of Petros' backup team.
"Malfunction," the technician answered tersely, while he worked to fix the problem. "We allowed for the god's natural electrical properties. The power will reboot in a moment."
The strike leader nodded, but signaled his team to be ready.
"Darcy, you can't just go and tase random strangers," Jane said in exasperation.
"That's exactly what the taser is for," Darcy argued. "Knocking down random dangerous strangers."
"But he's from SHIELD," Jane pointed out.
"And they're not dangerous?" Darcy questioned dryly.
Jane shrugged, accepting the argument.
"What is this device?" Thor asked, pointing at the injector.
Jane started to say it was just a pen, then she looked closer and saw what it was. She abruptly switched to Darcy's side. "That's made for injecting drugs in a person," she said sharply. "There's no reason for him to be holding that."
She slipped it gingerly out of his twitching fingers. The device was marked with two symbols. One was the skull and crossbones that indicated poison and one was a skull-headed octopus. Jane might not have remembered the Hydra symbol from her school days, but her obsession with the absent thunder god had led to looking up everything she could find about his New York battle companions.
"This is the Hydra symbol, Thor. They were Captain America's enemies during the Second World War," Jane explained quickly. "Everybody thought the organization had been destroyed when Cap destroyed their leader but …"
"Cut off the Hydra's head and another two will grow in its place," sneered Zedeker, leading his heavily armed team out of the woods to surround Thor and the two women, cutting them off from their home.
Thor's fingers twitched, but otherwise he didn't move, because his friends were in danger. The women saw the twitch.
"Damn," Jane muttered under her breath. "We just got new drapes."
"What did you say?" Zedeker demanded.
"She said, you made a mistake," Darcy answered sharply. "Never get between Thor and Mew-Mew."
"And what?"
Thor clenched his fist. Jane and Darcy hit the deck. Mjolnir smashed out of the front window, dragging the new curtains with it. Two gunmen raising assault rifles were flattened by the enchanted hammer, while the men on either side were hit by the trailing curtain rod. Tangled in gauzy fabric, they struggled to get up.
Without getting up, Jane kicked the nearest man in the face. The sturdy heel of her handmade New Mexican cowboy boot caught the gunman under the chin. He fell back, eyes glazed. Jane kicked two more times until his eyes closed in unconsciousness.
Also without getting up, Darcy slapped a new cartridge into her trusty taser. Twisting on her side she fired at the second curtain-clad gunman. He dropped. She scrambled over on hands and knees and used shreds of the curtain to hogtie him just like a cowboy in New Mexico had taught her — minus the slipknots because this was for real not for fun.
Thor let the hammer's momentum spin him to face the men behind him.
"Fire!" Zedeker yelled.
He and his three remaining gunmen blasted away with their automatic weapons. The bullets flew as thick as hail, but Mjolnir was a blur, spinning between Thor and his enemies in a shield as effective as Captain America's.
Flattened slugs fell at Thor's feet. Others flew back at the gunmen. One man grunted and collapsed with a hole between his eyes. Two others fell screaming, clutching gushing wound in a side and a leg. Zedeker was the only one still standing when his weapon coughed on empty.
"My turn," Thor said grimly. He dropped his hammer and advanced on the traitorous SHIELD agent.
Zedeker charged, driving the butt of his rifle at Thor's face. Thor caught the gun butt, contemptuously, squeezing it into splinters. Then he grabbed Zedeker by the front of his flak vest, raised him high in the air, and slammed him down.
Fallen enemies littering the ground all around him, Thor checked on his friends.
"We're fine," Jane assured him.
"Sure, no probs," Darcy said, as she casually seated herself on a groaning, well-tied attacker.
Thor took more curtain shreds and went to bind any wounds that were still bleeding. Watching Thor and keeping an eye on their own captives, the women didn't see that their first victim had recovered from Darcy's attack. Petros' hand snaked down to his ankle to withdraw a hideout gun. He brought it up to aim at the back of Thor's head.
The movement caught Jane's eye.
"No!" she yelled and lunged with the weapon still in her hand — the poison injector.
It seemed she hardly touched the man's leg with the pen tip, when he began to convulse and foam at the mouth. His gun fired randomly into the air.
Thor leaped to grab his gun hand, but the man had fallen limp and was undeniably dead.
Jane put the back of her hand to her mouth. She'd never killed anyone before. Darcy hugged her.
"It served him right," the assistant said. "That's what he planned to do to Thor."
"Hail!" a hoarse whisper came from Zedeker's broken body. "Hail, Hydra!"
He clamped his teeth together. Foam dribbled from his mouth and his eyes rolled up in his head.
All the agents still conscious echoed Zedeker words and actions and in a moment, Thor and his friends were surrounded by dead men.
"What sorcery is this?" Thor asked.
"I think … I think they had poison in a hollow tooth," Jane said shakily. "I thought that was something out of spy fiction, but …"
"Nobody's more old school than Hydra," Darcy finished.
The Asgardian warrior pried open Zedeker's mouth and studied the gap in his teeth. He wiped the foam off his hand, then pried open the mouth of their only living captive, the man Jane had kicked unconscious. He pulled out the false tooth and set it carefully aside.
"I hate to be a buzz kill, but what do we do with eight dead bodies and one live fanatic?" Darcy asked practically.
Jane got a look of concentration on her face as deep as if she was confronted by an abstruse physics problem. Thor scratched his chin thoughtfully. But before either could answer, Ian's beat up Land Rover emerged from the screen of trees and tore down the farm road, kicking up a cloud of dust. It slid to a halt, spraying dirt across the enemy bodies.
The men bounded out and made a beeline toward the front door, ignoring the jumble of corpses. Ian actually leaped over one of the men who had been smashed by Mjolnir.
"What?" "Where?"
"Telly!" Ian answered, barging inside with single-minded focus.
The women followed curiously. Thor took a moment to cover the bodies with the remainder of the curtains, then he followed the others, dragging the unconscious Hydra agent by the collar.
The television was set on DVD and it took Ian a moment to find the remote control hidden between the couch cushions to switch it to TV.
That gave Darcy a chance to ask, "What? No questions about the battlefield outside?"
Ian shrugged and Erik said, "No, it makes perfect sense."
The intern's intern found the remote and clicked it triumphantly. "Look!"
Thor and his friends watched as three SHIELD helicarriers blasted each other out of the sky. The commentator was talking about Hydra infiltrating SHIELD and Captain America being missing.
Thor clenched his fist around Mjolnir's hilt. "I must go."
"No!" Jane exclaimed. She pointed at the label "replay" in the corner of the picture. "No, it's all over. You're too late to help."
"They broke into the football game at the pub," Ian explained. "That was 15 minutes ago."
"Why didn't you call us?" Jane demanded.
"We did," Erik said dryly. "I kept trying all the way back here. I suppose the sound of machine gun fire drowned out the phone."
"It'll do that," Darcy said in the voice of experience. "Now we know why Hydra agents masquerading as SHIELD agents tried to kill us, but the original question remains. What do we do with the bodies?"
"We need to call someone," Jane said.
"Not SHIELD," Erik insisted. He had no love for SHIELD after they abandoned him following the Loki incident. He actually felt better about it, now that he could blame his suffering on Hydra.
"Maybe, Tony Stark?" Jane suggested.
"But how do we get his number? It's got to be, like, unlisted. If there's something more secret than unlisted, that's what he's got," Darcy said.
"Ah!" Thor went to his armor and fished beneath one of the bosses, he pulled out a small piece of cardboard — a business card, creased and frayed but legible. "Will this help?"
It was a beautifully embossed Stark Industries business card, but on the back was scribbled "super secret superhero emergency phone number." Jane picked up her cell phone off the kitchen table (no wonder she hadn't heard it ring).
She dialed and heard, "Dr. Foster! You're alive! Good." There was some noise in the background. Jane wondered if Stark was on an airplane. "How's the god of static cling?"
"Thor's fine. We're all fine," Jane answered. "But we have a little mess to clean up." She explained. Then listened. After a moment, she thanked him. "He wants to talk to you," she told Thor, handing him the phone.
"Stark, are you well?" Thor asked.
While Thor talked to Tony, Jane told the others that the billionaire was going to sift through the SHIELD files that had been released and find a trustworthy agent to send to pick up their prisoner for interrogation.
"He wasn't sure what agency his representative would be from, but he'll tell us 'Jarvis sent him.'"
"Thank you, Anthony." The four friends returned their attention to Thor, as he wrapped up his call. "Fare you well. I hope you find the good captain uninjured."
"Uninjured is probably too much to ask for, big guy. I'll settle for recuperating. Gotta fly."
Thor handed Jane her phone. "He said to beware of additional attackers," Thor reported.
"What did he say to do about the bodies?" Darcy asked, beginning to feel like a broken record.
Thor frowned. "I am not sure I understood," he confessed. "Do you know where we can obtain a 'backhoe'?"
A/N: Next week, Bruce Banner's story "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."