A/N: This story is beginning to take on a life of its own thanks to the encouragement of the readers who favourite and follow!
I apologize for the length of this chapter, uni exams are this week and next. I have some one-shots ready to post next Monday in Culprits of Action because for this story there will be no chapter update next week. Sorry!
Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel.
Best Defence
The god looked tired. She blinked up at him, still chained to the wall and shackled to the floor. Anna understood why Loki Odinson was reluctant to remove her restraints. This was safer for them both.
He doesn't have full control.
Whoever had been chanting in her mind earlier that morning was long gone, taking her remaining strength. If not for the heavy iron chains she would have fallen over like a felled tree.
The god still paced, and Anna got the vague notion he was restless for separate reasons than being in the same room with a half-blown away robotic girl. He looked worried but not for either of them, and kept glancing at the camera in the corner of the room, deep in thought.
"You have questions." Both flinched at her voice, filling the room like white noise from a broken radio. Anna bit her lip.
Loki stopped in his tracks. He slowly pivoted on his heel to look down at the metal cuffs around her legs holding them together at the knees. "My questions can wait. I seem to have lost my manners." His low crouch invaded her personal space, but there was nowhere for her to back away so instead she looked him over properly. His wore black leather with green trim, metal gauntlets on his arms, his hands pale.
As the took stock of the god, Anna filled the silence, "Maidens being chained to walls must happen often if there is a custom dictating their release, or be thought of as ill-mannered."
He was dressed for confrontation, not in the way she remembered in the kitchen the morning before with dark faded jeans and black sweater.
Loki grinned wide, shaking his head a little. "It's not a custom, just polite. I seem to hold myself to a higher standard than Asgardians."
"Almost forgot you're not one of them. I am sorry if I offended you. I guess I should be nice, since you are the one holding me captive now."
"You are not my prisoner, Anna." To prove just that, Anna saw his hands retain an ethereal glow, muted in the soft light of the room and giving off a golden halo around them. Rendered silent by the display, Anna thought more about what Loki wore.
"You sought him out. The man who speaks into my head." It was the only explanation. Everything happened so fast yesterday if Doom had really taken him, he would be wearing the jeans and sweater and not mild battle armour.
Loki stopped running his delicate fingers over the cold metal, the glow of magic fading from their tips. It was only a seconds pause before he was at it again, willing the metal to become wax so he could pull it away. "Yes. Victor von Doom."
She closed her eyelids, hiding what she was sure eyes of cold steel and not the liquid mud she had seen in the mirror the day before. "Anna is not my name." She had suspected. When Tony Stark had asked, it came too quick into her mind and was unfamiliar. At the time she thought she'd made it up herself, so that she would have more time for…
Anna tensed. More time for what? It was there, her purpose, her reason and understanding why she had been taken to the Avengers by SHIELD. She remembered wandering into SHIELD, the agents who had stopped her, asked for clearance before she had fallen into a black abyss.
Why did she go to SHIELD? Why didn't she ask questions of them, why did she passively stay there?
Loki's voice invaded her thoughts, the raw concern that she knew wasn't faked like his had been, the voice of Doom in her mind which had guided her through the subway station. "Anna?"
"What is my name?"
"We believe it to be Ryan Galton. A scientist of some standing within SHIELD."
"I can't remember."
"Yes, probably due to half of your head missing. Who did that?"
"The Widow."
Loki Odinson laughed deep but sparing before letting the magic disperse into the air, pulling apart her shackles. "Agent Romanoff can be violent when pushed. Do not take it as a personal offence."
Anna ran a hand over her legs, checking that they could still function. In the back of her mind there were diagnostics running. Ignoring how alarming the feeling of just knowing the calculations and blueprints of her leg mechanics was, Anna decided to take it in stride. The program ran itself in whirrs of numbers and calculations, in her mind's eye playing out in streams of coded information.
The mainframe of her makeup. Is this what Tony Stark sees in the helmet of his suit? She knew somehow that's how he programmed it to run.
"Doom did not create me." Her statement was followed by Loki tossing a balled spectrum of blue-green light at the corner camera, and it fell from the wall mount, crashing in an explosion of glass and plastic bits.
"We do not have much time. Another man, Jonathan Grant created you based on your research."
"I am no longer Ryan." The heaviness set into her artificial bones like a cold winter ice at the truth of her words. She knew somehow that she had been Ryan at some point in her life, but no longer.
"No, you're not. You may still have her memories. Can you trust I have a plan?"
"No. That does not mean I will not go with you. Unchain me."
She saw the uncertainty cross his face for a moment before he was using his magic to melt the chains away. "We do not have time to second guess. As soon as we get outside that door, we run."
Loki offered her his hand to stand, and she took it. Far be it for her to brush off someone being considerate and willing to help her. Anna did not realize until the moment they were standing in front of the bolted door how much she had needed the help. What would have happened to her if it wasn't for Loki Odinson?
Reprogrammed, upgraded, no longer sentient. Yes, the Jotun and the Avengers were her safest bet to building on the little freedom she had left. To escaping the cycle of not knowing what had happened with what she hoped did not happen. I am no longer that woman, but she had friends, a family. I owe it to her to find out what happened to them. To kill this Jonathan, the man who stole her life.
Bracing herself for what lay beyond the door, Anna nodded to Loki. She knew it must be more than disconcerting to him to be looking at her half-blown away head still sparking every so often when broken neuron wires fired electrical impulses and met no other connection. She could feel the buzz of leftover current siphoning off into the air.
Loki pushed on the door and it unlocked with a surge of magic, revealing a dark hallway. Anna did not wonder why there were no guards, that among many of her questions could wait until they were safe outside the building.
Loki whispered as they made their way down the corridor, bare brick walls stealing all of the light he created by painting runes in the air above them. "What do you remember of this place?"
"There are sewers. First, Jotun we take that door to the right."
Not asking why, Loki preceded her and opened the first door on the right. It was a small laboratory, with one bench and tools scattered along its metal sirface. In one corner near another door, a restraint table sat with leather straps and limb cuffs hanging off of it limply.
"This is where they did their experiments, where I was created. Where I think I tried escaping from, which means…" Her words trailed off as she spotted it, the thing she was looking for. A long dark green raincoat with a wide hood. Pulling it around herself to hide the blood and oil stained clothes she wore and pulling the hood to hide her head, "We take the sewers only half the way. I do not want to attract attention."
"Lead the way, my Lady," Loki bowed with a playful grin, and Anna curtseyed before moving past him and instructing him to close the door again. They walked down the corridor a few minutes longer.
Coming up to a small circular door in the floor, Anna tugged on the connective chain from the trap to the wall, the stench of underground New York meeting their nostrils before their eyes adjusted to the dark and a ladder appeared.
Anna descended first, Loki sent the rune torch before her to float above the few inches of muck water covering the stone floor of the wide passage. "Where do we go once we resurface?"
"A rooftop. I must call an old friend." There was the note of someone hiding an inside joke, but Anna ignored it.
Once Loki descended and closed the door above them did Anna ask who this old friend of his was. "A great Seer." His reply left more questions than they answered, but Anna allowed her protector that secret. Pulling the raincoat closer to her body, pretending that the cool damp was her imagination, that robots did not feel weather and that it was just her sentience tricking her into remembering she used to be human, Anna led the way down the widening sewers into the heart of New York.
The walls were plain beige, no pictures or decorations. In the shuffling din of medics passing to see to the other team members, Tony paid attention to the woman seated on the bed across from him who patiently waited, bored expression mixed with twinges of pain every so often.
Natasha had burns along her jawline in odd sparked patterns, like lightning, her face and neck was covered in small pricks from glass, and from the way she leant back against the head of the bed, torso straight as if attached to a board, she had a few cracked ribs.
Clint looked tense, but his injuries minor with cuts and bruises on his exposed skin, flipping through a magazine and every so often glancing at the doors. Tony guessed he was waiting for Coulson to reappear so Clint could assure himself he hadn't been hallucinating.
Thor was the healthiest of the Avengers, with only bruising around his neck from Anna's small indestructible fingers.
There was a television mounted in the corner of the room, and if he had his phone, Tony would have hacked it to see what they were doing to Steve.
"Stark do I have your attention?"
He pulled his focus from the screen to Hill's sour pus face. "Don't let me disrupt what I'm sure will be a riveting speech about staying a team and whatever else is in your manual." His innocent smile went uncommented. Maria was used to his attitude problems and stopped trying to rein him in sometime the year before. in her eyes, Tony Stark was a lost cause when it came to discipline, and he was a great asset to SHIELD, so she bit her tongue. Hill spoke to the Avengers with her usual decorum and impatience. "We're trying to locate Doctor von Doom and this Anna woman-"
"You mean Ryan Galton?" Clint interrupted. Natasha threw her partner a searching glance but returned attention to a red-faced Hill while a medic oversaw the burns on her face. Natasha tried shooing the medic away but it proved moot. She was tired and hurting so instead she focused her energy into keeping up her indifference to the entire situation. That still didn't mean Natasha wouldn't back Clint up. Even she was getting bad vibes off of Hill where Anna was concerned.
"He's right," The Black Widows purr was quiet but Hill gestured for her to continue, knowing she wouldn't have control of the conversation anyway. "SHIELD knows Anna is Galton, without a doubt. So why dump her on us?"
"Is that why you two broke into command?"
All eyes turned to see Director Fury stride through the door. They were all too tired or uncaring to have noticed his heavy footfalls down the hall. Tony pushed aside the doctor looking over his reactor with a sensor Tony designed himself and grabbed a clean shirt that had been left for him by Pepper.
Tony waited for- He's not here. Steve wasn't present to stand at attention. It seemed every Avenger noticed the absence now more than before. finishing pulling on the shirt, Tony almost missed Natasha owning up to her and Clint's B&E stunt.
"Yes sir," Natasha continued as if she hadn't noticed Steve's absence as well. She recalled a time when they had all ended up in the infirmary- not a seldom occurrence- and despite Steve having a few broken ribs, he had stood up when the Director came into the room and a medic has to insist he sit his ass back down.
Fury ignored her tone of voice clearly disappointed SHIELD had kept vital information from her team. "We do know about Galton, Wells and Grant. Until yesterday, we thought you had a handle on it. Until yesterday, our plan was to extract any information from her we could before decommissioning her."
"How did you find her, sir?"
"She came to us," Hill pulled up a security feed from the previous week onto the screen in the corner, time stamped as one in the morning at the SHIELD command base a week ago. It was Anna, stumbling up the stairs, in the state she had been handed to them in. She was waiting at the front of the stairs, almost confused if she was in the right place. Her hands were visibly trembling, roaming over her own body, eyes wide. A few seconds later she tried opening the doors, peering in through the frosted glass.
Three agents came up behind her; got her attention by calling something out and it looked like she obeyed their commands.
Hill stopped the feed, paused on Anna's emotionless face, the perfect mix of fear and hope she was safe.
"Why not keep her there under security? Why us?"
"You were the best defence we had. Unfortunately, that isn't an option now. She's MIA and we need to find her before Doom does. We've tried contacting Regina Wells, Galton's old assistant but can't. We think Doom has her and Grant as well."
Tony perked up. "Well, if that's all, we should be going."
There was no need to let Fury in on his plans, the ones that had been coalescing since they'd set foot on the roof of Stark Tower. They'd get Loki back, and Grant and Wells if Doom had them, Tony just need to speak with his team privately. Away from the eyes of pirates.
"Stark, a warning. Don't hack into our databases again. Behave for the next few days." Fury left with Hill at his heels, leaving to the care of SHIELD medical.
Natasha knew the gleam in Tony's eyes.
"Cassie, could you guys give us a moment?" The sweetness in her voice sounded dangerous, so rarely heard. Cassie Williams, the doctor looking at her burns, went still before smiling.
"Of course Agent Romanoff. I'll go find Coulson and send him in, yeah?" the doctor waved out the remaining nurses before following outside the doors.
"Okay, Tony, what crazy plan do you have this time?" It was endearing, seeing Stark's child-like grin. Most of his crazy ideas usually worked in their favour, so Natasha kept the condescension to a minimum.
"Point Break, what's that Seer's name, the one on the end of you Lucky Charms bridge?"
"Bifrost." Thor warned but as he caught up to what Tony was implying, the god broke into a mega-watt grin. "Heimdall." Without preamble or his usual parting words, Thor swiftly left the wing, hammer in hand.
Clint shook his head. "Lucky Charms bridge?"
Nat had to add, "Tony you know what it's called." She sounded like a put-upon mother purposefully, an eyebrow raised.
Pouting dramatically, Tony stood up and stretched. "Don't take away my fun."
Clint followed suit. They weren't about to stay there like sick children. Loki wasn't an Avenger, but he was Thor's brother and they each had a weird soft spot for the guy. "So, this Heimdall can tell us where Loki and Anna are?"
"Unless Rudolph hid himself from the Seer, yeah."
"Let's hope it doesn't end like the last time magic boy pulled that stunt." Clint snorted, happily remembering that day. The sad realization was Clint knew it would be boring without the trickster god around and was just as adamant as the rest of them to get him back.
Get rid of Doom for good in the process. Yeah, Clint really enjoyed imagining taking the wacko down, and those images kept a smile on his face as they went in search of Thor.
A/N: So as I said before, there will be no update next Monday.
In other news, there will be an update to Culprits of Action instead, if you're reading those one-shots!
Review if you have time, it's much appreciated!