Pt1.66

"What did you do to me?" Tony asked, slightly panicked.

"I don't change your DNA, or anything, I just added a thin coating of my mutation to yours, your body should kill it, any issues and I can take it back out again since I put it there. But try it out, and tell me if this is 5%, just what you think I can do. Considering mine is a permanent part of me and regenerates… You get my point. Anyways, I heard the view from the roof of Avengers tower is nice. Care to show me?'

"Fine. but I still don't believe you about Loki and there is something off, and I'll find it out."

"Sure." She then muttered, too low for Tony to pick up, "And I'll try not to block off your vocal cords or erase the memory."

Leading her up to the roof, Tony raised his hand to block the wind from buffeting him in the face, seeing his roof yet again ruined by Thor's arrival via Bifrost. When they got out into the open air, Rose sighed. "This is my new favorite spot on Midgard." And she walked up to the ledge, and right over it. Tony rushed over to catch her as she fell, seeing her fall down, but then, to his amazement, she rushed right back up again. Just flying around the top of the tower.

A minute after she took off, Hermione rushed up, shaking her head. "Rose! What have I told you about jumping off buildings?"

"Not to do it. But Hermione, it's the easiest way to take off, and the adrenaline!" Rose shouted elatedly.

"Excuse me for a minute, Stark," Hermione told Tony and shot up right to Rose. She then grabbed Rose's ear and pulled her, struggling, back down to the roof. "Rose! We've talked about this! Every single time!"

"Yes, Hermione. But there are no cameras up here!"

"And how do you know that?" Rose just gave her a deadpan glare. Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose. "You, you.." she shook her head, "You are just begging to become a Banner 2.0"

"Hermione, I have an understanding with Thunderbolt Ross, let's just say we both respect each other's ruthlessness and unless I do something blatantly against the American Army I'll be left alone, jumping off Stark's roof doesn't count. Fury is terrified of me. Phil won't do anything, I know him well enough and Hill is unable to function without instructions. Rogers likes me too much to bring me in, Stark is more likely to experiment on me himself, Thor will get his hammer, metal and the other one smashed if he even dares to bring me in, for SHIELD or the idiot he calls an allfather. Romanoff won't be able to land a hit, and I've had enough various projectiles shot at me over the years to be able to avoid Barton." she told her friend nonchalantly. Then she said in a much more threatening tone, "And you know exactly what I'll do to the jolly green monster if I ever meet up with him. Either way, when he's not in Hulk form, Banner isn't even an issue."

Tony cleared his throat to make sure they knew he was still up on the roof, and Rose's face lit up in a smirk. She turned to Hermione, and tilting her face and pouting her lips a little, and widening her eyes to make the perfect cute puppy-dog pout face, she asked, "I gave Stark a 5% dose for the next week. I did promise to help him break the laws of gravity unaided. Please?"

Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. "Fine. But you better make sure there are no cameras nearby."

"Yes, of course. Double-check for any recording devices within a 2-mile distance." She turned back to Tony. She seemed to be doing a lot of turning while talking to different people today. "Stark, so the way I taught Hermione is you learn by doing. The ability will feel like an instinct after you know what it feels like."

"What exactly are you going to do…" he trailed off as Rose took him by the back of his designer suit (Armani today) and with him, jumped right back off the building. "Rose, flying usually means up, and now down!" Hermione yelled at her adrenaline-junkie friend.

"Yeah, I know" Rose yelled back as she shot back up, Stark's suit still in her hands, and somehow, miraculously, Stark was still in it, although his signature sunglasses had long since fallen off.

Then, thankfully, or not, for Stark a hundred feet above the roof, Rose Crossed her ankles, leaned back as if she was in a lounge chair, and let go. Stark immediately screeched worse than anything any of them had ever heard them do. Very luckily for him, about fifty feet off of his roof, he got the hang of it, and stopped in mid-air, gasping for air. "I don't care who you think you are, but you damn better never do that again."

Rose chuckled. 'It worked, didn't it? You're not the first person to threaten me with bodily harm for my teaching methods. And not the first to carry out the threat." Stark looked confused until he saw Barton shooting an arrow at Rose, point-blank range, at least for Barton, nothing in the path of the arrow. The speed it was going at, nothing Rose could do would stop her head from being skewered.

Just as the arrow was a foot away from her head, and she didn't seem to be making any attempt to move from its path, her hand darted up faster than their eyes could catch and stopped the arrow less than an inch away from her head. The action was so scarily reminiscent of Loki during the battle, Barton's idea was further cemented in his brain. "Agent Barton, that'll be the second time you failed to land a shot. I'm honored you wasted an arrow on my humble self." she sarked at the archer. The arrow was thrown back with such force and accuracy that it landed right in front of Barton's shoes, and embedded the arrowhead and a bit of the shaft into the concrete.

She floated back down and landed right in front of Barton. "Now, would you care to tell me exactly why I got an arrow shot at me?"

"I was ending Loki 2.0 before we had another battle, killing civilians and destroying the city."

"Alright, I'm honored that you have me as a 2.0, not so much that you're saying I would destroy the biggest city on the planet. Care to share?" she asked as casually and nonchalantly as if she was discussing the weather.

"Well, I would think the fact that you took Stark, jumped off the building, and then dropped him from a hundred feet up should be enough, don't you think?" Romanoff asked as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "I would think murder via superhuman abilities is enough to bring you up."

"Ok. So that's your play? That's your logic? Well, no wonder you drafted big, blond, and dumb onto your team. Well, if you had gotten here ten seconds earlier, you would have heard that, as you can see by the fact that stark is not dead yet, it was not attempted murder. I was teaching him unaided flight, useful thing, you know? As you can see, he's halfway there." She pointed to Stark, who was just hanging in midair fifty feet off his roof. He wasn't moving up, nor down either. He was just inspecting himself, with a gaping-mouthed confused expression on his face. He then tried to right himself, vertically and gave his legs a bit of a push. He rocketed up to the sky.

Hermione rocketed up to him and yelled, reminding him, "Stark, Rose only gave you 5%, you won't be able to manage more than twenty minutes o flight in on go, about 20 minutes an hour until it regenerates."

"Got it," Stark yelled, striking poses in midair, from classic superhero, poses to just relaxing in midair. Everyone on the ground still hadn't gotten used to it.

Steve Rogers finally spoke up. "Rose, how exactly are you, and Stark doing this and can I learn?"

Rose came back down to slightly around the roof's surface. "Steve, I don't know how this will interfere with your serum-enhanced genesis so I would rather not have a mob of angry Americans banging down my door because I accidentally put Captain America into a coma or worse. Sorry. As for how I just gave Stark a temporary boost, so, in layman's terms, he has magic genes for the week."

"Great. As if human Tony wasn't hard enough to manage," grumbled Pepper Potts, in the back of the group who had climbed up to the roof.

"If it makes you feel any better, it's temporary, and I wasn't stupid enough to give him too much, I only gave him my 5%, which, regenerated by now, so it's not even that much."

Barton gave Rose an indecipherable look. "What, exactly, are you?"

Hermione sighed. That was the worst question to ask Rose, of all people. "Hi, I'm Rose!" she said in a high-pitched imitation of a five-year-old and waved to add to the impression. Her face melted back to what it should be. "I was born and raised on this planet if that's what you mean. Earth, Terra, Midgard, C-53, whatever you want to call it. What did you want me to do?" She made her face into a caricature of a monster and wiggled her fingers. "Wooo! I'm a scary witch and I'm your worst nightmare!" She relaxed her face back into its normal shape. "I'm not human, but then again, out of all of us right here, only half of us are." Barton's bow had yet to lower.

"I'm still not convinced you're not Loki 2.0"

"Yes, well maybe the fact that anyone who knows anything can look right in my eyes and tell you that I'm in my own mind and not possessed by the Mad Titan. I mean really, where else would a cast-out Asgardian raised Jotun get an army?"

Tony finally floated back to the roof. He pointed with his thumb at Rose. "She's convinced the battle wasn't Loki's fault and that he wasn't using his full potential either way."

Barton glared at Rose even harder. "I'm leaving. I would like to avoid getting my mind taken over this time."

"So that's where you got the grudge from. No wonder. If it makes you feel any better I am physically incapable of doing that? Getting it cast at me a few times in my teens thoroughly destroyed my ability for mind control."

"I feel worried that you even had the potential once upon a time."

"Haven't since I got mind raped for two years from when I was 15 to 16. Not pleasant."

"What did you do in your teens that you got mind rapedso repeatedly?" Romanoff asked

"Superhuman evil megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and an army that was also fully superhuman, and competent once in a while had it out since my mother died offing him when I was a year old," Rose shrugged.

"Do I have to worry about my organization being targeted because of you?" Fury asked this girl who couldn't be older than twenty but was systematically messing up everything and anything she got her hands on.

"Nah, I finally offed him for good when I was 17. Him and everyone that killed in his name, which, admittedly, added up to a lot more people than expected."

Fury gave her a look and Rose gave her a look back. "Oh no. Don't give me the recruitment look. I will not be one of your little shield attack dogs, and neither will I assist your little group of idiots unless it suits me. I'm not another deluded little girl who thinks that switching out one flawed leadership for another with an equal amount of blood on their hands will wipe out anything from my ledger. I have blood on my ledger, and I'm just fine with that. I'm a weapon only I can wield."

"Well, if you're willing to stop adding blood to your ledger, contact me."

"Yeah, no Fury. You know, your old friend Carol told me a lot of interesting stuff about you. See, the thing is, I don't need to hack into SHIELD to get the dirt about all of you. I already have it, and I'm not afraid to leak it."

"Are you blackmailing me, girl?"

"Yes. I thought it was obvious, but no…. It took a long time to catch on."

"And why exactly do you repeatedly insult us, Avengers, every chance you get?" Barton asked icily.

"Because you deserve it. Romanoff and Rogers need to lose the pride and switch it for common sense. Stark needs to do the same, and accept help when he needs it. Steve needs to stop living in the past, Barton needs to open his mind so he doesn't restart the witch hunts of the 16th century, Fury needs to accept he doesn't know or see everything. And thor, I don't even know where to start. A forceful restart of the brain could help, although he's Asgardian as they come. All brawn and no brains. No thank you."

"So why are you telling us this if you don't like us that much?"

"It's not that I don't like you. It's just that I see you as beneath me and unnecessary for my plans."

"Loki 2.0, I'm telling you."

"Barton, not all plans involve chaos, murder, destruction, and overall mayhem. As of now, I have a bit of business in Wakanda I need to attend to. Goose!"

Goose, as a nundu, walked out of the minimal shadows on the roof, and when Rose grabbed onto her fur, she looked to Hermione. "Are you going to talk science with Stark, or do you want to come? I'm visiting Luna and Nev after Wakanda, it's their youngest's birthday, and I'm bringing Teddy with me."

"It's ok, Rose, I'll stay. Someone needs to diffuse Barton, I think a bottle of Ogden's and a refillable quiver will get him and the rest of the Avengers away from the witch-hunting track. That and maybe an unbreakable Iron Man suit as well as bulletproof skin."

"Just don't give them too much, I don't know for sure if they won't end up trying to bring in or off me, and I don't want my enemies any worse than they are."

"Yes, General!" Hermine gave a salute, Rose nodded, and steed into the shadows with Goose to go on her errands.

A/N: Alright, I don't actually ignore guest reviewers. But it does get extremely annoying. But anonymous has a point, so here you go. No evil (minor) cliffie today.