Thank you for the review! I write if others seem interested to read, so this is for you guys who've responded. I know the first chap was a real tease because it gave nothing away, but here you go: the real thing.
This fic will take place before and during the events of Age of Ultron. I want the two siblings to meet the other two (hehe), but I swear this isn't going to be one of those 'write out the movie with new inserted character'. Oh well, thanks for reading!
Every nerve screamed, creating a cacophony of sound that echoed through Violet's head. Her eyes felt heavy, her body felt lame, and her brain felt completely empty. It was a struggle to open her eyes – if only she could remember how to do just that.
Heat from above beat down upon her and through her eyelids which seemed to be stapled together, she could almost see the blazing inferno of the sun.
Sun?
She couldn't quite remember what happened but something about lying in the open sun didn't add up. Violet focused on moving her toes and fingers, groaning triumphantly when they wiggled.
Don't think about it; just do it! She heaved her eyes open and blinked against the glare of the sun. The bright ball of light sat high in the sky and she estimated the time to be early in the afternoon for the sun to still be blazing as hotly.
A gasp found her sitting upright. In a field. A farm? Where was she? She held up a hand to create some shade and peered around her.
Golden and green fields surrounded her on all sides. A definite fear of heatstroke and dehydration tickled at the back of her mind, and she swallowed down nauseating panic.
Where on earth was she?!
She craned her neck around, stiffly shuffling her joints to check behind her. If she squinted just right… A mirage? A barn? The image flickered. The likelihood of the vision being a heat-induced hallucination increased by the minute, but Violet could literally feel herself shrivelling up more and more as time ticked by. She didn't really have much of a choice either way. Field, field, field, or possibly civilisation? An easy choice that proved easier said than done as she tried to push herself upright.
One foot in front of the other, she chanted to herself. Her feet were bare and the scraps of clothing that hung from her thin frame shouldn't ever be qualified as clothing. But besides a few birds and the endless drone of insects, nobody was around to gawk at her.
Anyway, Violet had more serious things to worry about, such as how incredibly far the hazy image of a house and barn still was. At least she could make out two distinct shapes and they appeared solid enough.
Her shuffle-step continued even though every breath felt like sandpaper being forced down her throat. Her eyes struggled to focus and blinking became a chore since even the moisture around her eyes had long since dried up. Almost there….
The rumble of a tractor or some other farm vehicle reached her ears, and Violet gasped with relief, eyes burning with desperate tears her body couldn't afford to lose.
"Hello!" She couldn't even hear her own voice and decided against it. Trying to speak hurt too much in any case.
Cool, green grass appeared underfoot as she moved from the dirt road. The shock of it nearly drove her to her knees. She pressed on. Shade from a large tree dotted with white blossoms fell over her and she very nearly collapsed from the sheer relief of it. But she pressed on.
The roar of an engine grew louder and louder. She rounded the corner of the large barn, the big house that looked like something from a fairy-tale stood behind it and to the right.
A man? Yes. A man stood next to a rumbling tractor, his head stuck beneath its hood.
"Hello?" But again, dust filtering through a ray of sun made more noise than the soft exhale her attempt at speech wrought.
The man, though... his back stiffened as if he heard her. More likely, he sensed her presence.
Good enough, she thought with a delirious smile that made her dry lips crack and bleed. Without acknowledgement, her body gave out and she collapsed in a dusty heap just before the man swung around into a crouch, a gun trained on her shape.
"-just appeared out of nowhere! Laura, I swear, I had nothing to do with this." A male voice seeped into the stream of fog that hung over Violet's brain.
Slowly but surely her previous awakening came back to her and feeling the softness of a matrass beneath her and the cool, damp cloth on her forehead, she concluded that she was in a decidedly better position than she was before.
"Of course I ran tests. She's human. Do you really think I'd bring her inside, endanger you and the kids, if I wasn't sure? I couldn't just leave her – look at her and tell me you'd leave her outside."
A ticked off tsked in response and soft, cool fingers fussing over her face told Violet that the man had proven his point to be a valid one. "You're right, love. Doesn't mean I'm not still worried. Who is she? And where did she come from?" The new voice, gentle and female, whispered close to Violet's head and she connected the hands with it.
"I've already sent in her prints and a photo. They'll let me know if anything pops up. But she's pretty badly burnt. I don't know if facial recognition is going to be all that useful."
Violet didn't like to think of herself as being vain, but that last comment lanced through the cobwebs and her muscles clenched.
"Hush, Clint! You're upsetting her," the woman scolded the man, Clint.
Violet clenched her fists and curled her toes and tried, with all her might, just to open her damn eyes! Light, soft and warm and yellow, filtered through.
A hazy blob in the vague shape of a face with kind eyes and a golden halo of hair appeared in her line of sight. A smile. "Hi, honey. Don't worry, it's not bad, you're fine. Just a bit of a sunburn. You'll be lovely and tan when this all blows over. Just relax," the woman, Laura, cooed like she would at a small child or a hurt animal. A mom, Violet decided. Laura had 'mother' written all over her.
The cloth on her forehead was replaced with another and Violet took a second to take stock of her limbs and appendages. Everything throbbed and hurt but seemed to be where they should. She blinked rapidly, trying to get a clearer image, but her eyes felt crusty and drier than her parched mouth.
As if reading her mind, Laura wiped her eyes with another cool cloth and then prodded her lips with a straw. "Some water. Just water, I promise." Honestly, Violet didn't think she would resist even if Laura outright told her that the cup contained some drug. She gratefully gulped down the cool liquid. Glorious!
A buzz sounded from the other side of the room and her eyes darted to the man. He was shorter than he sounded, with close cropped hair and a muscular build. He had kind eyes, though, just like Laura. Husband and wife?
He flicked open a phone and turned to the side so that she couldn't see his lips, but that he could still keep an eye on her. "Yip," he barked at whatever had been said. He looked serious, nodded, and ended the call with a beep.
Laura looked at him inquisitively, guessing or knowing what the phone call had been about.
Herself, me, Violet assumed.
Clint shook his head and studied her in turn. "Who are you?" he asked, direct and to the point.
"Vi… Violet," she rasped. "Parr." Two words and they left her panting, gasping for breath.
Clint entered something into his phone, not once taking his eyes off her.
"Where are you from, Violet?" Laura asked, smoothing Violet's hair back and offering her another cup of water.
"Metroville."
Laura looked startled, her head swivelling around to catch Clint's eyes. Something about the cool mask that he maintained screamed professional law enforcement of some kind. Violet was sure that he must work for the government or some agency. He looked as if he would be good at keeping secrets.
His wife, though, not so much. "Metroville? Sweetie, there's no such place," Laura looked concerned. "Are you sure?"
It took a few seconds for Laura's words to really hit home. And when the possibility of it all, the fact that Metroville didn't exist and the simple wrongness that vibrated in the air, finally sunk in, Violet's lungs felt about the size of raisins.
"Mr. Incredible? Elastigirl?" The final test. If those names meant nothing… Elastigirl was incredibly popular in Japan and Korea, and Mr. Incredible had been in the top five supers since the chart had begun… If those names meant nothing, Violet could only imagine that she had landed in some other dimension. Her brain supplied all of this quite rationally – when you eliminate the possible and all that - whereas her heart was beating a mile a minute and black dots danced in front of her eyes.
"I'm sorry, honey, but we don't know who these people are. Are they comic book characters? Do you mean like the Avengers?"
"Who?" Violet asked distractedly. A more pressing problem had suddenly registered. Dash… Jack-Jack…. "Where are my brothers?"
"Shit!" Clint swore and furiously tapped some more buttons on his phone. "More of you?"
Laura glared at him, before returning her gaze to Violet's. "How many brothers? What are their names?"
"Dashiel… Dash and Jack-Jack. Two. Fourteen and nine. Have you seen them? They can't be far." Violet struggled to sit up.
The thin sheet covering her scratched against her tender skin. She was red and blistered, skin missing and peeling in some places. Violet winced at the feeling and sight of it, wishing not for the first time that she had either her dad or brother's healing factor.
Laura gently pressed her back down. "Clint has some very smart friends. He'll find them, I promise. But you need to rest. Have some more water." The straw appeared in front of her lips, and Violet gulped it down, not thinking twice about the slightly sweeter taste. Not until shadows started creeping from the corners of her vision.
"I promise, just something to help you sleep and to ease the pain. Everything will be better tomorrow," Laura soothed.
In the background, Violet could hear angry chattering, children laughing and a bird that seemed stuck on three simple notes in a loop.
High, low, low. High, low, low. High, low, low.
Coffee.
Nicholas Fury led a very complex life. It came with the territory of being a master spy, a fugitive, an assassin, and who knows what else. And because he lived such a complex life, Nick thought it only right that he indulged in the simple things in life.
So, coffee. There was nothing better than that first waft of freshly ground coffee beans as one enters a coffeeshop. Fury had many cafes and coffeeshops that he liked, but very few that he could return to without forming a habit or creating a trail that could lead his capture. He was human too, though, and he had a favourite.
It was small, kitsch, and the food was mediocre at best. But the coffee! He would sell his black as sin soul for an endless supply. 'Oops!' was also very much out of the way of his normal routine of doing nothing the same way twice, and it had been exactly thirty-seven days since his last visit. He knew where the milk was from, where the beans were harvested and roasted. He knew that the machine was cleaned daily and that the café had never had any complaints regarding cleanliness. The coffee was worth the risk.
The bell above the door dinged cheerfully and neither of the two customers already inside looked up. Neither did the barista. She was some college kid with permanent shadows underneath her eyes and deserved a much better paying job with her phenomenal coffee-making skills, but Fury was always secretly glad to see her face.
She was chewing on a sorry looking thumbnail but as soon as his shadow fell over the till, her pale green eyes darted up at his face. A smile quirked and she set to work. Thirty seconds later, his coffee was ready, and he left the ten dollar note next to the till. He inhaled the aroma, took a delicate sip, dismissed the old man flipping through the newspaper that sat at a booth table and walked over to the young man in the corner.
His blond hair stood up in every direction and he nervously bounced his leg. A stack of all-you-can-eat waffles sat in front of him, drenched in syrup and chocolate and sprinkles. The young man or rather, boy, stared out of the window in between stuffing waffles into his mouth.
The cook, a sleazy British fellow, entered through the revolving door, slammed another portion of waffles on the table, picked up a stack of dishes and disappeared once more into the kitchen as Fury meandered his way over to the boy. Clearly, the boy had taken the all-you-can-eat sign as a challenge.
Fury didn't usually amble or meander. He usually stalked with purpose. However, he was stalling, trying to figure out what exactly intrigued him about the boy. What exactly had caught his attention in the first place?
Aside from the fact that the boy was wearing a blue t-shirt several sizes too big, khaki shorts with holes in them and sneakers that were worth at least a few thousand dollars… There! The knee bounced and blurred, just a little too fast for the eye to follow and more than a little too fast that was humanly possible.
"Would you like some company?" Fury didn't wait for an answer but simply slid into the booth opposite to the boy. He was prepared for quite a number of reactions. Surprise, shock… Try to bolt, throw a waffle… Choke, draw a gun… However, he was not prepared for the reaction he received.
The boy, with wide blue eyes and a mischievous mouth, started and melted into a picture of absolute relief. "Oh, thank you!" He raised his eyes to the heavens and cheersed the ceiling with a stack of waffles impaled on his fork. Syrup dripped onto the plastic table. "I have never been so happy to see you," the boy smiled and stuffed the aforementioned fork in his mouth.
"Uncle Lucius, where is everyone? I can't find Metroville. The maps are weird. Mom and Dad don't even exist…. Wait a second." The boy, chewing thoughtfully yet with his mouth wide open, frowned at him. Or to be more exact, frowned at his eyepatch. "Uncle Lucius? What happened to your eye? Are you cosplaying? Undercover? No, wait! You're not…."
Fury's darted out, catching the boy's wrist. For a few seconds, the naked trust he'd seen in the boy's eyes had clawed open some old wounds. Some part of him knew it was foolish, but he couldn't not help this boy. The heartbeat he felt, a thrumming vibration against his fingers, confirmed his suspicions. Speed-related abilities if he was not mistaken.
"Stop. Don't be afraid, son," Fury tried to sound reassuring. He hadn't worked with kids in so long. "I think I can help you."
