Sorry for the long wait! I have started so many other projects in the meantime that this kind of faded in the background.

Word Count: 2,367

Teenagers will do anything for money

Darcy awoke from the post-Disney marathon slumber earlier than the gods, Erik or Jane, but she was completely fine with that.
At least this way, she had some time to prepare food. She had seen the amount of popcorn these guys had consumed and was smart enough to realize that she should be prepared.

Unfortunately, they didn't exactly have a lot of food in the house. Their supply of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate was almost ridiculously large (the almost part was a lie), even if it was dwarfed by their chocolate stash.

But they only had enough cereal for one potion (and that was stretching it), a slice of toast that was starting to rot, three poptarts, two bananas and a spoonful of oatmeal.

In other words, not nearly enough for them. They may have managed a day or two if it were only Jane, Darcy, and (possibly) Erik, but the Asgardians (Darcy still wasn't using that fancy name) would destroy any possibility of that.

She needed to get new food and she needed to get it fast. She could make a run to the store, but Darcy wasn't sure she trusted the other guys not to destroy anything while she was gone.

There had to be some other way.

She could take everyone to Isabella's diner. That, however, had the downside of the whole talking about the weird friends of the weird scientist for the next six months and, no, thank you, Darcy could live without that.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a teenager passing the street in front of their...let's go with house.

She sprinted to the door. "Hey! You there! Yes, you with the amazing hair!"

The young person (what? Darcy didn't know their gender after all) stopped. "Are you talking to me?"

"I said 'you with the amazing hair', didn't I? Because I love your afro. But anyway, can you do some shopping for me? I'll pay you."

The teen shrugged (once the pay was mentioned). "Alright. What do you need?"

Darcy considered this for a moment, before she dug out two or three twenty dollar bills (thank God for her parents' money). "As much food as you can get from that. And not only fast food, please." She pulled out another ten. "This is your pay. You'll get it when you come back. Should you be back here within the next hour, I'll throw in another ten."

That should be enough motivation for them to come back.

(And it worked out well.)

Meanwhile Tony was having a mental breakdown over the secret code he had found.

YKEL STEIE

What could that possibly mean? Between him and JARVIS, they had tried just about every single decipher method known, but to no avail.

It was frustrating, really. If it was someone on their side it would've been nice, but this was the work of the bad guys, so it kind of sucked.

It wasn't a Vigenere or a Caesar code, that much was obvious. It wasn't an Engima code either and the list of things it wasn't grew increasingly longer.

The worst thing was that Tony had a feeling that the code wasn't that complex. If only he knew what method was used, then he would be done in minutes, at most.

"Tony?" a voice suddenly spoke from the door.

The genius turned around. It was Pepper who had spoken, and she was closely followed by Rhodey and Happy.

"Hey guys," Tony greeted.

Pepper stormed across the room and slapped the engineer. "That is for not telling me you were dying." Then, she kissed him. "And that is because you survived."

"I have a feeling that this is a private moment," Happy muttered to Rhodey.

"I agree," the other man replied equally quiet.

As Tony's brain started working again, he called Rhodey over. "Do you have any idea how to decipher this code?"

"Let me see." Rhodey moved over towards the billionaire and looked at the hologram for a few seconds. "Not at the top of my head, sorry."

"What is so important about that code?" Pepper asked, frowning.

"It has something to do with my weapons being sold to General Ross who used him to hunt down the Hulk also known as Bruce Banner."

"You're not kidnapping Banner," Pepper scolded.

"Depending on your definition of kidnapping it might be too late for that, but that's not the point here," Tony waved it off. "The point is that neither JARVIS nor I can get this code deciphered."

"Sir, Mr. Potter is attempting to contact you," JARVIS interrupted.

"Patch him through on my phone," Tony ordered. "No point in having him on screen if he doesn't have a camera better than a potato."

"Who is this Potter guy?" Happy questioned.

"Some British dude from an alternate universe."

Before anyone could question that further (and all three of them tried), Tony was already conversing with Harry.

"Hey. Why are you calling?—Yes, I always am that rude—No, I'm not. Tell Dr. Banner I'm sorry."

A few seconds passed before Tony continued speaking. During the entire conversation Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy were trading looks of confusion.

"I'm glad—Yeah, I'm doing my best, but I have absolutely no idea how it works. It frustrates me—You think I didn't think of that myself? Of course I looked in the Internet, but I didn't have the time to go through every single website yet." Tony closed his eyes, put his hand in front of his face, and sighed. "Yes, there are that many."

Rhodey snorted as Pepper chuckled.

"It's not like we can ask Stane what it means and be done with it. He's a bit dead for

that—what do you mean you can? Why didn't you mention that earlier?" Tony's expression turned to one of pure confusion (a truly rare sight) before he threw his arms in the air. "You forgot? How exactly do you manage to forget that you can speak to the dead?"

"It's not a poison per se," Jemma Simmons explained to her partner, Leo Fitz, and—dare she believe it—Peggy Carter. "It is a chemical formula that attacks certain enzymes in the hippocampus, thus preventing some of its functions."

"Alright," Director Carter nodded. "What are these functions exactly."

"There are several things handled by the hippocampus, but I believe that whoever created this had the intention to attack the process of turning short term memories into long term ones," Dr. Simmons theorized.

Fitz nodded in the background as he was checking for at least the third time that all bugs were still sending the sound of Director Carter working on paperwork and that only.

"In other words, it would have made me forget anything from that point forward?" Director Carter asked for confirmation.

"There is a possibility—I obviously didn't test it on humans and the simulations proved inconclusive—that is might attack older memories as well."

Director Carter nodded slowly. "Essentially, there is a possibility it would simulate amnesia, thus discrediting me and getting me out of the way" she summarized.

"Yes, Director Carter;" Jemma confirmed.

"Call me Peggy, Dr. Simmons," the older woman smiled at her. "That goes for you as well, Dr. Fitz. It seems like we have some work to do."

"Excuse me, but...we?" Fitz questioned, completely fluttered and flabbergasted.

Director Carter (no, Peggy) nodded. "Yes, Dr. Fitz, we. We have no idea what exactly we are dealing with, it's good to get as much help as possible and the two of you have already proven helpful." She paused as she considered something. "That is unless you don't want to be a part of this operation?"

Jemma looked at Fitz and smiled.

"We'd be honored," they chorused.

Jormungardr was glad that his father had finally found him.

He had been alone in the cold, dark ocean for long enough.

He was glad that that was finally over.

Jormungardr had been reunited with his father after dozens and dozens (possibly hundreds, how was he to know?) of years. His father had gotten help from two humans and a snake.

They had flown (flown!) across the ocean in a strange...something. Jormungardr had seen a few of them before.

Destroyed

At the bottom of the sea.

It was safe to say that Jormungardr didn't exactly trust that thing (according to his father, it was called a 'plane').

But they reached the continent fairly quickly. For the first time in...a while...Jormungardr was actually standing on solid ground again.

It was wonderful, no matter how hard it was to keep balanced (his father assured him that he would improve, that he had already done so before).

Jormungardr didn't particularly like the fact that they had to get into another 'plane' fairly quickly (granted, it was the next morning), but his father was hugging him and the (other?) snake, Saszul, was curled up around him, so he was able to manage it.

Barely.

But once they arrived at their destination (and his flight took a lot longer than the one before) his father swore that he would not have to fly again until it was ready if he had any choice in that matter.

Jormungardr didn't understand a word of the humans. He hadn't heard more than muffled conversations since before he had been taken. Language had changed since then (and his father told him that they were in a different place as well):

They had to walk to a really big house that was not a palace. The way wasn't very long, but Jormungardr's legs got tired fairly quickly nevertheless.

At first he was determined not to let anyone notice, but it wasn't long until raising one foot and putting it down in front of the other was too hard.

One of the humans turned to his father and asked something (it had to do with him. He knew because he had heard his name). His father turned to Jormungardr and translated what the man had proposed.

He wanted to carry Jormungardr and was asking for permission.

His first instinct was to reject the offer (he didn't know this man and he was old enough to walk by himself), but a look into the bleeding eyes of his father made him reconsider.

Jormungardr nodded in the direction of the man and the man bent down to pick him up.

It kind of felt nice, Jormungardr supposed. Maybe it was the fact that the human cared.

Unknown to anyone else, Fawkes was off on his own. The phoenix had sensed the worry Loki had for his children, had grasped a vague idea of the pain they were going through and he decided to act.

They had already found Jormungardr and gotten hims out of his situation, so helping him was not the priority right now. The twins were (currently) safe with their mother Sigyn, Hel was shut away in her own realm (that Fawkes wasn't sure he could enter), and Sleipnir was in the royal stables (where any change would be noticed).

Which left Fenrir.

Fawkes flew onto the island where Fenrir was imprisoned and landed on the child's fur. Fenrir instantly tensed.

The phoenix began to sing a calming song and started to cry on the worst wounds of Fenrir.

Slowly but surely, the wolf relaxed his muscles and lay down.

Stay strong, Fawkes told Fenrir. Your father is looking for you. You will not be here much longer.

It might not have loosened the chains, but it gave the child hope. And hope was something everyone needed to continue fighting.

Steve Rogers didn't know where he was when he woke up.

The fact that he even woke up was odd by himself. He should have drowned in that plane, there was no doubt about that.

So he was understandably confused when he woke up in a room that desperately attempted to look like a recovery room, but wasn't. There were several details that were wrong (the bed was too comfy, for example), not to forget the fact that the game they were playing was an old one.

Something was wrong here. He didn't know what exactly it was, but he knew that there was no way he was really in an American recovery room.

The question was, why were they (whoever they were) pretending that that was the case?

Steve couldn't really think of a good answer.

As he was trying to think of literally any reason, a woman entered. She was pretending to be a nurse, but her costume had a couple of mistakes. The tie, the hair, and the bra were the most noticeable ones.

"Where am I?" he demanded.

"In a recovery room in New York City," she replied. Why were they keeping up that charade?

"No, I'm not," he argued. She was about to disagree, so he pointed to the radio. "I know that game. I know it, because I was there." There were a lot of things to pick from, but that had seemed like the best one.

The expression on her face changed and she attempted to contact someone.

That was enough for Steve he jumped out of the bed and ran. Out of the room, out of the facility.

It took a few moments until he noticed that everything seemed different. The cars, the fashion, the buildings. None of it where like anything he had seen before, not even in the movies.

What was going on?

A car (at least that was what he assumed) stopped behind him and a black man in a leather cloak stepped out.

"You were asleep for a while, Captain, I'm afraid."

"How long?" Steve asked. How long had it been? It had to be at least a decade, given how much technology seemed to have progressed. Maybe two or three.

"You were asleep for almost seventy years."

Seventy?! Seventy years?

That would mean that everyone he had ever known—Rebecca, Dum Dum, Frenchie, Monty, Gabe, Morita, Howard, Peggy—they would all either be old and gray, or, more likely, dead.

"Everything okay, Captain?" the man asked.

It wasn't. Not really.

"Yeah, it's just…" Steve trailed off, unsure what to say for a moment. "I had a date."

Althalus57 (on chapter 4 and 6): Thank you!

Taile tale: Thank you! Sorry for the wait!

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