Shooting stars
"Shooting stars are angels falling to Earth, sweetheart. If you see one, you should make a wish." A woman's voice, a hand pointing to a streak of light across the sky. "But it's getting late, and you need to sleep."
Waking up and tiptoeing to the window, like she did every night, hoping to see another angel and make another wish. She wasn't really sure what a wish was. She thought it was like asking mummy for another sweetie, or to wear her blue dress to nursery, only she didn't ask mummy. And tonight there it was, shooting across the night, a vein of fire against all the other stars. It kept falling, burning brighter, brighter still, until it fell to Earth in the woods behind the house.
She wasn't supposed to go out alone. If she wasn't in the house or the garden, then she had to be holding mummy or daddy's hand. But this was an angel. Angels were good. Angels granted wishes. If she went and spoke to the angel, and said please and thank you, then surely it would do what she asked.
Creeping across the carpet, she reached for the door handle—
"Asta. Asta. You need to wake up." A gentle voice insisted. The wrong voice. Only one person ever called her Asta and he…
She opened her eyes. The thought fled with the invasive light, and she found Coulson stood at the foot of her bed, fully dressed. For a moment she wondered if she'd overslept, but a glance at the window showed it was still fully dark outside.
"Hmwhat?" she managed, flinching back from the overhead light.
"We have a situation and we need to leave this base. I need you to dress and be ready to leave in the next few minutes."
By the time she'd regained the ability to control her mouth, Coulson was already on the other side of the door. She was too woozy-headed to even think about what was going on, stumbling into the bathroom and then around the room for her clothes. She knocked when she was ready and the door swung open. The corridor was deserted, but she could hear activity echoing down from other parts of the building. For the first time since she'd met him, Coulson was visibly armed.
If that didn't wake her up, nothing would.
She followed him without waiting for more information. He didn't run, exactly, but his pace wasn't slow, and she was breathless as they took the stairs down, two at a time, to the underground garage. There were dozens of other people around here, in suits like Coulson's or the soldiers' black uniforms. Boxes were being hauled into trucks, and she could hear the irrhythmic stomping of boots echoing down all the corridors that led here. This was weird. In all their trips out of the compound, there had always been two of the agents with her—Coulson and Romanoff, or Romanoff and one of the nameless soldiers. The attention had always been on her, but this time it was just Coulson, the other soldiers all to busy, and he seemed more focused on bundling her into a car. The driver was already accelerating out into the desert as she buckled in.
"What's going on?" she finally whispered. Theirs wasn't the only car heading out across the scrub—the entire bases' fleet seemed to be crawling across the desert like overgrown beetles.
"We've been compromised," Coulson replied. He was quietly inputting a message into a tiny device—a phone, Asta guessed—and she waited for him to continue, but he never did.
They were going in the complete opposite direction to the town they went to on their trips out. It'd been a while, actually, because Coulson was only around for a few days each month and Romanoff only checked in occasionally. She hadn't realised how much she missed the outside world until her excursions into it were curtailed. Without Coulson around, no one else was much interested in an amnesiac. Now she wondered how much of the outside world she could handle, because compromised made it sound like they wouldn't be going back to the base.
The ground rumbled beneath her and at first she thought it was the car engine, but the sensation grew until she turned around to stare out of the back window. Dust billowed up into the air around the compound, one wave after another, and she realised she was witnessing sections of the buildings being swallowed by the earth.
In one fireball that engulfed the view, the base ceased to exist.
"Oh," was all she could manage, any profanity or blasphemy she might be tempted by stolen with her breath. Besides her, Coulson went absolutely still.
She was ashamed of her next reaction, the idle thought that her favourite books—the ones she'd never given back—were still piled up beside her bed. And then she realised that she didn't know if everyone had made it out of there before the explosion, and what if they hadn't? She didn't want to look at Coulson; she didn't want to look in the rearview mirror at the retreating flames. She wouldn't really miss that book about Norse mythology—it could be replaced. But perhaps she'd miss the compound. It was, after all, the only home she could remember knowing.
The story is slightly AU from the Avengers, in some places more than others. That means Coulson had different priorities the night Loki arrived and snatched the Tesseract than he did in the film-namely, getting Asta safely out.