Chapter 10

Mia materialized in the hallway by the lab. Unfortunately, the hallway was a warzone, with flames licking the ceiling, glass and metal flying in all directions—and those were just the more relevant problems. Besides this, there were alarms blaring and sounds from the ship and people screaming not far off—in other words, total chaos.

Thor was right about things, it seemed. You speak of control, yet you court chaos. Made a hell of a lot of sense when it came to herself, Mia realized—and that wasn't a particularly nice revelation.

Mia had hidden the part of herself away that had anything to do with her 'magic'—partially out of guilt, and partially because she didn't want to draw attention to herself or cause problems for others. Either way, her current situation had gotten wildly out of control, and deep down Mia knew that if there was ever a time for her to go back on her promise to remain average, it was now.

So it was that upon appearing in the hallway, Mia immediately conjured a sphere of golden sparks around herself, protecting her from the dangers running rampant—literally, it seemed. However despite her best efforts a few shards of glass embedded themselves into her left arm, causing several sharp stabs of pain to shoot up into her shoulder. She also got a nasty burn or her right thigh that would undoubtedly welt later.

Upon working her way through the debris and past the lab she found a Hulk-sized hole in the floor—Banner had changed, then. There was also a gaping hole in the window, the strong mid atmosphere winds whipping into the room and rebounding off of her golden sphere. Mia wondered where he was now—it was too quiet, and she dreaded the possibility of him no longer being aboard.

Then realization struck: the ship was losing altitude. Rapidly. No doubt Tony was already suited up and working on whatever problem was causing it, but where were the others? Romanoff had probably been with Banner when he Hulked-out—God help her. Who knew where Thor was, Steve…Steve would have gone with Tony, she realized.

"Where the crap are you guys?" Mia grumbled worriedly, taking off down the corridor towards Tony's storage compartment. There, she found his suit locker empty. She ran back out and found several dead agents further on—Loki's doing, she realized with a cringe. On the floor beside them was an intact SHIELD issue earpiece. Knowing she was completely out-of-the-loop and that was never good, Mia reached down against her instinct and nabbed it, pressing the piece into her ear.

Maria's voice immediately surged out. "Barton's been recovered. We've reached full evac on the lower levels. Somebody find Paxton, Stark says she was on her own with Loki—"

"Maria, I'm here," Mia yelled, over the crashing noise of several collapsing beams.

"Mia! Where are you?"

"Suit storage. I'm okay, but Loki's loose, he's got Thor…I've got no idea how he escaped."

"You didn't do that?" Fury's voice cut in angrily.

"Why the hell would I let him out, Fury? Use your head!"

"Rogers thought something had happened to you—we thought you'd been possessed. Seeing as Loki's got the scepter now" –a few shots rang off in the earpiece—"it still seems like a pretty damn good theory!"

"I'm fine!" Mia bellowed, outraged at Fury's lack of trust. So far, she done everything he'd asked, and this was what she got in response? "Where are Steve and Tony, Director?"

"Number three engine," Hill replied, before Fury could. "Mia, don't do anything stupid!"

"I can handle it, Maria!" Mia looked around at the golden sphere surrounding her, then down at her hands, now glowing with unused sparks. A look of determination took her face. "Trust me." She bolted in the direction of the wing that housed the number three engine.

She remembered the place from the blueprints Hill had given her earlier. As luck would have it, she wasn't far away. In three minutes she was standing at the edge of a gaping hole in the ship, looking down at the clouds while the wind whipped at her golden bubble, trying and completely failing to misshape it.

Mia glanced around. She could see the turbine struggling to pick up speed, dark smoke being sucked into its whirling blades—it was then that her earpiece picked up on a nearby channel.

"Cap, hit the lever." It was Tony.

"I need a minute here!" Steve sounded strained, wind blowing noisily in the static.

Then she saw him.

"Holy shit, Steve!" Mia yelped, seeing him dangling precariously from a length of electrical cording, golden hair glinting in the light. Before she could stop herself, a flashback brought the image of Clem struggling to the forefront of her mind.

Iggy, run! RUN!

"Mia! Thank God. A little help if you don't mind!" Tony requested with a slight note of panic in his voice.

"Mia?" Steve repeated. "Mia, what the hell are you doing here?! I told you—"

Mia jolted out of her memory, leaving Clem in the arms of the guard and returning to the equally disturbing scenario before her.

"I'm on it, Ironass." Scrambling away from the edge (and the horrifying sights to be seen there,) Mia jumped down through a hole in the plating, onto the deck below. Then she hurried down a short set of stairs (missing a few steps by now) and ran through a doorway. She found herself just below the decking where Steve was holding on for dear life.

"Hang on, Steve," she yelled. Mia could see the cord beginning to rip out of the wall, tossing him further out into the sky. Her stomach flopped in terror at the idea of him being thrown from the aircraft, and—

Enough. That kind of thinking didn't help anything, didn't save anyone.

"Mia, get out of here!"Steve ordered, still obviously struggling.

"Not a chance, Cap." Knowing she couldn't sustain her shield and do what she needed to do, Mia let the protection drop, the sparks blowing out into the harsh wind and turbine draft. The wind hit her as a blow to her entire body, and though Mia knew she'd be feeling that for a good week to come, she gritted her teeth and summoned all of her magic.

With an upward thrust of her hands she shot two long streams of golden matter into the air, directly under Steve's feet. It hit the soles of his suit and propelled him upward, onto the platform. He landed with a harsh bang and opened his eyes to look down at her through the metal grating, panting from exertion.

A slight grin twisted his lips. He was glad to see her, though worried.

"Help. LEVER!" Tony hollered. Immediately Steve shot up onto his feet and yanked on the lever. A raucous clanging resounded from the nearby turbine, and the next moment a rather battered Tony in his suit came tumbling out. An involuntary grin spread on Mia's face.

"Mia, look out!"Steve was frantic.

Perhaps it was the fear in his voice that prompted Mia's magic to create an involuntary invisibility shield. Regardless she did, and so it was that the man in the SHIELD gear and machine gun completely ignored her, shooting up at Steve instead, bullets ricocheting off of the walls.

"Hey!" a sharp shout cut through the alarms now blaring inside the House, and a beam landed on the girls. "Over here!"

Bridget swore under her breath, then regretted it as Clem had undoubtedly heard. She wrapped her arm more firmly around her sister. "Hold tight, Clem. We're almost—"

Her sentence was cut off when she ran smack into another guard, this one having just rounded the connecting corner at the same moment. With a sharp crack Bridget's forehead collided with his chin, a spurt of blood that wasn't her own dripping down into her eyes.

The next moment, Bridget was sprawled face first on the ground with a mouthful of frosted, rotting leaves. Clem was in the arms of the guard and not hers. The tiny blond was struggling, trying to get back to her sister. "Iggy!"

"Clem." Bridget dragged herself to her feet, vision swimming. The guard was backing towards the house, radioing frantically for reinforcements.

"Iggy!"

"Clem."

The sound of bullets rang out in the windy night, her sister's nightgown blowing in the frigid wind.

"Clem!"

"NO!"

Before Mia knew what she was doing, she thrust both hands forward, blasting the man with all of her magic. A rage tore through her, a rage she hadn't let out in years.

The next thing she knew, she was gaping at a glowing hole in the wall. The man had been blasted over thirty feet, through two rooms and six layers of metal wall, to rest in a pile of blackened ash. Completely disintegrated.

Mia stood there, a trembling shell shocked mess as the reality of what she'd just done began to sink in. Monster, her mind chanted at her. Her father's voice. Monster. Specimen.

Tony flew past her, crash landing in the hallway and knocking out a second man just as the lights faded out of his suit helmet's eyes.

"Oh, hell," he muttered, his voice metallic and dull. "Remind me never to do that again."

Mia hardly heard him. She couldn't breathe, her body rigid at the horrific sight before her. The man's machine gun fell out of his charred hands, a molten lump of metal. His head was leaning to one side at an unnatural angle—not that there was anything natural about this. Mia found herself desperately hoping that his death had been instantaneous, of a broken spinal column rather than the blasting he had endured at her hand.

She shut her eyes, lungs excruciatingly tight as she tried and failed to draw breath. Monster. Monster. Freak. Specimen.

"Mia. MIA." Strong hands had gripped her by the shoulders, holding her up. A sweaty forehead pressed against her own. "Mia, talk to me. Mia."

Mia opened her eyes into wide, anxious blue ones—and she felt like she would throw up. Blue eyes. Always the blue eyes. "Mia," the Captain said, a slight relief apparent in his face at her response. "Breathe. Come on. In and out. Breathe."

"Steve," Mia croaked, the word sounding brittle and ragged. Tears suddenly flooded her eyes as air rushed into her lungs. Monster. Murderer. She took another gasping breath, the last word resounding. Murderer.

At last, the barb her father had flung so many years before hit home. It was true, finally. After all of these years, it was finally true.

Mia knew who she was, despite years of living under an assumed name, years of trying to prove she was something else. Something better.

She really was a monster.

Now, at long last, she knew it.

The woman drew air weakly, a long sob wheezing out of her. Steve pulled her close into his arms as Tony walked into the room to stare—silently, for once—at the hole in the wall and the remains of the man at the end of it, then at the sight of the Quinjet that flew past them—carrying Loki to safety.

Mia knew Steve was whispering comforting things into her ear, stroking the hair that had long since tumbled haphazardly form its bun, but she couldn't hear any of it. The last thing she heard before fading into a grief and shock induced faint was Fury's voice in her earpiece.

"Agent Coulson is down."

"A medical team is on its way to your location."

"They're here. They called it."

The last sight Mia saw was a wobbly silver star on a bright blue background, fading into a miserable, haunted darkness.

. . .

The quinjet flew away from the helicarrier, taking the demi-god turned spurned lover away from his failed romance attempts and in the direction of his next step towards victory.

Certainly, he regretted the loss of agent Barton—he had been a valuable and deadly asset. But it was worth losing him to deprive his enemies of his broth—that is, of Thor.

Part of Loki hoped the Asgardian had perished in his fall. Another, more vengeful part hoped that he had lived, in order to inflict a better means of repayment for the enormous debt of pain he owed Odin's son.

"Come around the damaged wing of the fortress," he ordered the pilot, who immediately obeyed the demand without question.

With his keen and godly eyesight, Loki watched from the tail of his stolen aircraft as his Intended crumbled under the weight of her true power—under the realization of what she was capable of. Through the slight mental connection he had retained he could feel her angst, her pain, her confusion. Her horror. She had finally seen her inner demon come to light, and how it tormented her.

Soon, he thought with a devious smirk, she would truly break. She was too distressed now, but after she began to recover from the shock…the guilt would kill whatever last vestiges of justice and morality that still dwelt in her heart. It would purge her of the weighting ideals that she'd struggled to uphold in the face of progress—his progress, and she would open herself to his influence in her despair.

Then, he would claim her.

For as much as Loki had thought he could shake her off like unwanted dust from his feet, he couldn't. Her image haunted his every thought, her memory walking through his every idea and leaving footprints in his mind—and on his heart. Yes, he would break her now—but he would rebuild her afterward, creating a palace from had once been a hut, unworthy of her dwelling therein.

Then, he would forge a queen in the ruins of a princess, a goddess from the ashes of a righteous mind.

He would create for himself the ideal woman he had always craved, and would want for nothing in his new empire.

. . .

The sound of a steady beeping was the first thing that reached Mia's ears. The sound of a heart monitor.

Opening her eyes, the journalist found herself in some kind of makeshift hospital room. It seemed to be some kind of converted lab, and it was entirely empty except for her.

At least so she thought initially. Until her eyes began to focus, and she found the shape of a blurry blond headed person sitting beside her, large blue clad shoulders hunched over clasped hands, head hung.

It all came swarming back at an alarming rate. Loki, Phase 2, Steve, Tony, Project Midas, Clem…the attack on the helicarrier, and…

Murderer.

Mia cringed, inhaling sharply, painfully. Steve's head immediately lifted, his kind gaze locking onto her green, uncertain one.

"Mia," he said, sounding relieved but strained. There was a deep sadness in his eyes that didn't belong there. Looking at Steve, Mia felt the same urge she'd always had with her sister, to keep him from feeling that sadness—to protect from harm. She knew it wasn't her job, and it definitely wasn't her place, but…still. The feeling remained.

Seeing her awake brought a rapid change to the Captain's expression, morphing into something between happiness, relief, and an overwhelming sense of concern.

Mia tried to prop herself up on her elbows, and Steve immediately moved to help adjust her bed. Mia felt herself blushing at his close proximity, which surprised her because she would have thought she was far too upset for that. She stared down at her hands, which for some reason were swarming with golden energy sparks in spite of the fact she hadn't summoned them.

She also appeared to have circular burn marks on her palms—as if she'd shot sparks from her hands like Stark's repulsors did, instead of from her fingertips as usual. The skin was actually singed and peeling away from the wounds in craters of red inflamed flesh, leaving raw layers of skin painfully exposed.

Steve saw her staring. "They tried to bandage your hands, but the energy wouldn't let them," he said solemnly. "They did apply some kind of quick healing balm though. The doctors can't seem to make you stop."

"Neither can I," Mia added, realizing with a slight sense of dread that she couldn't stop the glow from enveloping her hands. It was harmless— only trace amounts— but she couldn't make the sparks fade like she normally could, and that bothered her. Immensely.

Had she finally lost control of her powers?

"Do you wanna talk about what happened?"

The question surprised her. Mia supposed she should have known Steve would be the one to be beside her when she woke, to be the one to try and talk to her. Stark used sarcasm like she did to distance himself from others, to block out the hurt—plus he was currently pissed with her. Romanoff had clearly been through hell in her lifetime and bore her emotional scars behind a wall of mistrust and silence. Banner was waging some kind of inner struggle that transcended words, which left Steve.

Steve Rogers still carried his share of troubles, but he also had the biggest heart that Mia had ever had the privilege of knowing. She'd often wondered in her childhood if his goodness had been exaggerated—surely no one could be that selfless, that honest, and that perfect. It was one of the reasons she'd ended up hating him—that is, until she actually met him, and found it to be true.

She respected him now, she realized. Not as a legend, or a Captain, or even as a man. Mia respected him as a person, and that was an honor she had yet to bestow on any male individual she had met. Even Tony didn't have that—not yet. And it didn't end at respect with Steve, either. For the first time in a long time, Mia found that she cared—bringing her list of people to care about up to a grand total of seven. The others being Jane, Darcy, Pepper, Tony, Maria, and Clem.

Besides this, there was the rather intriguing fact that he'd kissed her—and then held her close—without Mia making any kind of advance. If anything, she'd been shooting him down when telling Tony off for calling her his girlfriend. Oh God, she hoped Steve hadn't taken that personally.

Realizing her mind was wandering, Mia looked up at Steve and found him watching her with concern.

"Sorry," she apologized quietly. "My thoughts are everywhere right now."

"I know the feeling." Steve sighed, and looked down at the floor. "Loki's gone," he told her. "Apparently Banner Hulked-out and fell off the carrier, and we don't know where Thor is—but the cage is missing."

"Loki trapped him inside," Mia realized. "It must have happened just after I left." She looked down at her pulsing hands. "I went to talk to him," she went on. "Loki, I mean. I thought that if I talked to him alone, maybe…"

"You could get him to change his mind," Steve finished. "Mia, I know you think you can protect yourself—and now, I know that to some degree you can." He stared at her hands for a moment before continuing. "But he could have killed you—Coulson was an amazingly brave agent, and he's dead."

Mia's breathing caught at this. Coulson. She had given him so much hell. She wished she could take it all back, because he had just been following orders. She'd barely known the man, but he'd been seemed like a kind, intelligent and loyal person. At least part of their bantering had been all in good fun—she never could have lived with herself if he'd died with bad blood between them.

Not that she could live with herself now, but…

"…do you hear me?" Steve was still talking, and Mia had missed part of it. Seeing her blank look, he sighed again and ran a hand through his hair. "Mia, please. I need to know what happened back there. Fury's already upset that you used your…powers, in the first place, to protect Stark and I. But if I can't explain what happened by the turbine, I don't know if I can….Mia?"

Quite against her will, Mia found herself stiffening, pulling her knees to her chest as tears threatened to leak out of her eyes. Monster. Murderer. Freak.

"I killed him," she whispered, staring blankly eyes over her kneecaps. "That man, I just…I saw…" She couldn't say her name aloud. She just couldn't.

"You had a flashback, didn't you?" God, how did he know everything? "It's alright, I get them too sometimes. Mostly war stuff, but sometimes…" He trailed off, his voice deepening when he asked, "Was it someone personal?"

Mia nodded once, slowly. "My sister."

"Clemency." Steve moved to pick up a file from the table beside her hospital bed. Mia's heart rate sped up, as attested to by the monitor's steady rise in beeping.

"Calm down," Steve told her gently but firmly, noticing the subtle change. He pulled his chair closer to her bed and balanced the file on his knee. "I won't ask if you don't want me to. They only gave me your personal file, anyway. Fury doesn't seem to want to share whatever's in the Midas file."

Gracious, even after having been lied to. Somehow, Mia felt that this was a special privilege Steve afforded her because of her delicate state.

"No," Mia breathed, and let out a slow sigh. "No, he doesn't. But I might as well explain the one you've read." She stared for a long moment at the thin grey SHIELD issue hospital blanket spread over her legs. "I didn't have a lot of people close to me, growing up. My parents held me at a distance—my mother was afraid of me, my father saw me as a..."

Monster.

"…As a specimen," she finished. "I didn't really connect with anyone until Clem was born.

"She was so small," Mia said, smiling faintly, her eyes shining softly. "Nobody thought she would live. I used to sit with her, in her nursery. Listening to her heart beat. It would stop sometimes, and I would set a finger to her tiny chest…" she held up a glowing fingertip, staring at the sparks. "And it would start up again. It wasn't until she was two months old that it stopped happening.

"Clem was sick most of the time. They stopped taking her to the hospital after awhile because of all the attention it attracted. You would have thought my parents would want the publicity, but…" she shrugged. "They brought the doctors to her after that. There was even a phase where people had to go through three steps of sterilization before coming in contact with her. She had a recurring case of pneumonia, a blood disorder…she was always so pale. And a brittle bone condition. Clem had had six fractures before she was two years old."

Steve let out a soft laugh. "I know what that's like," he told her grimly. "I've done my time as a high risk patient."

Mia looked at him carefully and saw that he was telling the truth. "Despite all of that, Clem was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. I never had dolls as a child—my father used to encourage me to develop my skills, instead." My father was just dripping with venom. "I didn't need dolls, anyway. Clem had blonde, almost white hair, and the biggest, most beautiful blue eyes you could ever hope to see. That's why I can't always look at you, in the eyes," Mia confessed. "I look at you, and I see Clem."

Steve actually took a breath at this, as if it was a lot to take. "That explains some things."

Mia swiped at an irritating twitch in her left eye. "Clem was six when I discovered the truth about Project Midas. I won't tell you about it now—it would take too long." She swallowed hard, waiting for Steve to give her some sign that that was okay. When he did, she continued. "The night I decided to run away, Clem found me trying to break out. I realized then that I couldn't leave her behind—how could I? They didn't understand her like I did—and no one understood me better than her. So I tried to take her with me."

"Tried." Steve tried to be careful with his tone, but it still hurt to hear him admit her failure.

"We were caught breaking out. I tripped the alarms in a manner that should have brought all the agents and guards on duty to my father's office. We had the misfortune of running into the very last guard left outside." She closed her eyes, trying not to replay the memory.

Iggy, run!

"He knocked up my head pretty good, took Clem from me before I could use any of my powers to stop him. Then he radioed for backup."

Iggy!

"Clem—" Mia's voice cracked.

"Take your time."

She started over. "Clem told me to run. I didn't want to leave her—God, I didn't want to leave her." She rubbed her face with her glowing hands. "But she was right; I couldn't save her and get away. They would treat her well— they always treated her well. But if I was caught, if my father found out I knew about Midas…I have no idea what he would have done to me."

She sat there, hands shaking against her face as she tried to steady her breathing. The heart monitor next to her was slamming out a fast paced rhythm that sounded like the backbeat to a techno song. She was living it all over again, seeing every excruciating moment of her sister being pulled away from her.

A doctor rushed into the room, looking as if he were about to jump in and intervene. Steve waved him out silently with one hand, hurriedly—but the doctor refused to budge.

"Her heart rate climbs much higher and she'll go into cardiac arrest," he warned the Captain.

"Mia." Steve's voice crept into her memory, drawing her out. Back to the present. "Mia, it's just a memory. Let it go." Then, after a pause, "Let her go."

Mia was staring straight ahead, eyes locked on a fixed point before her. Body completely rigid as her breathing became so shallow it was hardly an intake at all. Through the accompanying numbness, she vaguely felt Steve's large warm hand rubbing circles on her back.

"It's okay, Mia. It's going to be okay."

Normally Mia would have sat there until she snapped out of her trace, sometimes hours later—that was her normal routine in that kind of circumstance. Jane and Darcy had never been around during her crises because she carefully scheduled them to occur in their absence. They knew nothing of her history, and she didn't share it with them. She was afraid of what they would think of her, that she would lose them too. This was actually the first time that anybody had shown any kind of concern for her regarding her family.

And it felt…nice. To have someone there for her, after so long of having nobody.

Her breathing eventually began to increase, her heart slowing its wild tempo to an acceptable pace.

The doctor, who had a bandage on one of his own arms, looked at Steve in surprise, as if impressed that he could have that kind of effect on such a volatile patient. The man quietly withdrew, the blinds ticking against the door's glass pane as the door clicked shut.

Eventually Mia pulled her head up from her knees, face pale and drawn. "I'm sorry," she apologized stiffly. "I don't normally…do this, in front of people. I shouldn't even be wasting your time right now, I—"

"I'm here because I want to be," Steve cut in firmly. "It's okay to fall apart sometimes, even in front of people…and if not people, then me." He took her right hand in his own, without hesitation. Like he already knew she wouldn't harm him. Even Mia didn't know what she would or wouldn't do at this point.

"Doesn't it hurt you?" she asked, seeing him not paying the sparks of golden energy any mind whatsoever.

"What?" Steve looked down at their hands, confused. "The sparks? No. Does it normally hurt people?"

"Not hurt, exactly. More of a sort of stinging, like a light static, though for some people it's more like sticking a finger in an electrical socket. Usually that's only with people I don't like."

"You must like me a lot then, if it doesn't feel like anything." Steve blushed at his own forwardness. "I mean…"

She looked at him, brimming with the most confusing array of emotions she'd felt—well, ever. "Why are you here, Steve?" Mia asked. "I lied to you. And you…" she paused worriedly. "You kissed me. Why? After everything."

Steve looked at the ground a moment, pink tingeing his cheeks. "Because, I wanted to," he told her. "Which may have been out of line, seeing as I really should have asked you first. If I had, you wouldn't be asking why right now."

Mia stared at her glowing hands, one of which rested inside of both of Steve's, making their hand sandwich glow with ambient light. "Would you kiss me now?" she asked. Seeing his blush deepen she added, "I mean, would you ever kiss me again, knowing what I'm capable of."

"Capable of?" Steve replied, a note of disdain in his voice. "Mia, what you have is a gift, not something to be ashamed of—"

"I'm a monster, Steve," Mia argued. The sparks around her hands thickened. "I killed that man, in cold blood—"

"You killed him because in that moment, you saw Clem instead of me!" Mia looked up at Steve in shock. "I may be old, but I'm not stupid, Mia. It's not hard to piece together." He stared at her, blue eyes insistent. "I know she didn't get away with you. But you're not a monster. Don't take Loki's word to heart. He wants to break you, make you vulnerable so he can take advantage of you when you're least prepared for it. Don't let him do that to you." He squeezed her hand. "You're stronger than that."

"Steve…"

"As for the lying," Steve went on, the remembrance of which made a knot in the journalist's stomach, "you're not the only one who didn't give the whole story." He stared at their clasped hands. "It's not a story to tell now, just like your Project Midas isn't. But I'll tell you sometime, when all of this is over. If you want." He gave her a slight smile. "And I promise to tell the truth this time—since you trusted me with yours."

Mia sat looking at him for a few seconds in silence, just taking him in. For the first time since Clem, she found herself simply admiring the inner beauty of another. He was so honest, open, kind…and why did she find that so attractive, when it was so damn inappropriate?

"You've got yourself a deal, soldier."

At her consent, Steve gripped her hand more tightly and flashed a quick, genuine smile—like a glint of sunlight in a storm. "Good." He rose to his feet, surprising Mia by pressing his lips to her forehead. "And to answer your question," he added thoughtfully, looking her in the eyes, "I would kiss you again—if, and when you wanted."

Mia felt her cheeks heat as a blossoming feeling arose inside her chest. A warmth, a fluttering, and that ache she'd felt before. It was something beautiful in the midst of all the chaos and Mia found herself holding on to that feeling like a lifeline.

She looked up at him, green eyes shining. "When all of this is over, I may just take you up on that."