Chapter 26 - The Marriage of Natalya Mikhailova

"Hey little sister, what have you done?" Natasha sang tunelessly. "Hey little sister, who's the only one? Hey little sister, shot gun. It's a nice day for a white wedding. It's a nice day to start again—"

"I think you skipped some lyrics," Clint told her, attempting to keep most of his focus on the road. "Maybe we should just listen to the radio? We're almost back to the tower anyway."

Natasha shrugged. She had her feet up on the dashboard of the Tesla Roadster convertible they had borrowed from Tony. She held a bouquet of white roses in her lap, tied together with a white ribbon, the ends of which had been stained by the same crimson that splashed across the front of her dress.

"Don't you at least think you should have changed?" asked Clint. "You're going to scare the kids."

"If we were going back to the farm first, I would have, but I don't think either Loki or the Maximoffs are going to be scared by a little blood." Natasha twirled the blood stained ribbon between her fingers absentmindedly. " Besides, this might be the only time I'm going to wear one of these. I kind of want people to see me in it. Do you know how long it took just to do my hair this morning?"

Sometimes, Clint found himself worrying about Natasha's sanity. He knew it was all a part of her unique brand of gallows humor, but he still had to wonder if her current level of detachment from reality could possibly be healthy. "You do know there's blood in your hair, right?"

"It's only a little blood."

"Look, I'm sure it won't be the last time. I mean, if you want to."

Natasha shrugged. "I don't know if I do or not. In our line of work, getting married is kind of selfish anyway—oh, sorry, Clint."

"No, it's alright. You have a point. I'm always afraid I'm going to walk in and my kids aren't going to remember me."

"You know, they could come to visit you in the tower if you just told everyone about them. I'm sure everyone there would guard that secret with their lives. Even Loki."

Clint shook his head. "The fewer people that know the better. If you do have kids someday, you'll understand—damn it. Sorry, Nat."

"Why, because I don't have a uterus? I think I might just want a dog, anyway. You know, if I ever have time for a dog."

"I'm sure Tony would get you a puppy for a belated Christmas gift if you asked," Clint teased her.

"I might want to get an older dog from a shelter, actually."

"Wait, are you seriously thinking about getting a dog?"

"Maybe, but like I said, I don't really have time for one."

"Maybe you could just ask Loki to turn himself into a dog sometimes. Then you could take him for walks."

"I already asked. He doesn't do domestic dogs. Only wolves or foxes."

"So have him turn himself into a wolf. If anyone asks, tell them he's a husky mix."

"He also said that if I tried to put a leash on him, I would suffer the same fate as someone named Tyr—whatever that means."

o( ･-･)o･^ミ┬┬~

When Loki woke up, she was alone, but she smelled coffee. That meant that someone was nearby in the common room. Even though she still found the taste of the drink too bitter, its smell had begun to grow on her, most likely because she associated it with Tony.

She rolled out of bed and stood in front of the open doors to her closet, contemplating the selection of clothing available to her. While nothing within it was quite as fine as the things her Asgardian wardrobe had once held, she sometimes found the variety of styles and colors available to her on Midgard dizzying. She had already begun to suspect there might be such a thing as too much choice, and that if mortals weren't so obsessed with the idea of individuality, their entire culture might be light years ahead of where it was. In the end, she couldn't make up her mind, so she closed her eyes and grabbed something, which turned out to be a forest green hoodie she knew would pair well with her black skinny jeans.

After dressing and applying a minimal amount of makeup, she wandered out into the common room. There she found Sif and Tony sitting on opposite sides of the same sofa, each with a cup of the coffee she had smelled. Sif seemed to have barely roused herself. She still wore the same clothes from the night before, and her hair might have made a perfect nest for swallows. Judging by the way she winced at each of Loki's footsteps, she suspected her to be nursing what Midgardians termed a "hangover."

On the other hand, Tony seemed uncharacteristically cheerful, especially when one considered the time of day. "You'll be happy to know that your brother's lackeys ate all our cereal and left."

Loki should have been relieved that they were gone, but instead she found herself overwhelmed with the feeling that she had forgotten something important. "How long ago did they leave?"

"They got on the elevator just a few minutes ago. Why?"

"Damn," said Loki, and ran for the stairs.

"Hey, wait—where do you think you're going?"

Loki had no time to answer him. She pressed the button for the elevator five times before giving up and heading for the stairwell instead. On her way there, Tony caught her by the hood of her sweatshirt. "Yo, I asked you a question."

"Let me go," Loki demanded, attempting to pull away. "I need to catch up to them."

"Want to explain why?"

"I need to send a message back to Asgard."

"To your brother?"

Loki gave up on trying to squirm out the bottom of her sweatshirt and turned to face him. "To Sif's, actually."

Sif looked up from the cup of coffee she had been entirely absorbed in moments before. "Why do you need to send a message to Heimdall?"

"Because unless someone's used magic to cloak him, Heimdall should be able to tell us where Bruce is. I'm not sure why neither of us thought of it before—"

"I thought of it, I just didn't want to."

Loki blinked at her. "Sorry, you didn't want to?"

"Maybe I just didn't feel like speaking with my brother. It's really none of your concern."

"Hold on," Tony interjected. "We're talking about the big dude that can see everything in the universe at once, right?"

Sif rolled her eyes at him. "He doesn't see everything at once. All-seeing isn't the same as omniscient. He won't know where Banner went unless he's been watching him, or if he's able to see him now."

"The only way he could be hidden from Heimdall's view is if he's cloaked by magic," Loki reminded her, "and even though I must begrudgingly admit that some mortals seem to have attained a small amount of mastery in the art, as far as I'm aware, Bruce is no mage."

"That's not entirely true," argued Sif. "Heimdall can't see particularly well through certain materials, including most metals."

"So if he's hiding behind a steel wall, your brother won't be able to see him?" asked Tony.

"Actually, he would have to be inside a metal box," Sif admitted.

"Right. So, he isn't omniscient, but he does have weird omni-directional vision—"

"It's best not to think too much about it," Loki told him. "Don't take this the wrong way, but as singular as your mortal mind is, it just isn't equipped to handle high level magical concepts."

Tony opened his mouth and for a moment as if he wanted to object, but then he closed it. "You know what? You're probably right."

Loki turned his attention back to Sif. "Anyway, how likely is it that Bruce is inside a metal box?" Obviously, she had known that Heimdall couldn't see through metal, but she hadn't thought it to be much of a consideration.

"I don't know. Midgardians seem rather fond of building things out of it, though."

"But there can't be that many buildings that are made only of metal," Loki argued. "The tower might be made of metal, but there are windows."

Tony stroked the hair on his chin. "True, but the basement of this building is pretty much encased in metal. And there are more buildings that are entirely made of metal than you'd think. Warehouses, secret government facilities—"

"How likely is it that he's in a secret government facility?" demanded Loki.

"Not too likely. I mean, I hope it isn't, because if Bruce is in a place like that, that could be really bad for him." Tony's hand moved to rub over his neck stubble; he seemed to be in desperate need of a shave. "But it doesn't matter. If there's any chance Heimdall can tell us where Bruce is, someone needs to ask him."

"And that's why I need to catch up with my brother's idiot friends!"

"No, you don't." Tony pointed at Sif. "You—either go catch up with your buddies and get them to ask your brother to look for Bruce or go ask him yourself."

Sif crossed her arms in front of herself defiantly. "I could not possibly abandon my duties here."

"Do you really think Thor would be happy if he found out you refused to help us find Bruce when it's totally-sort of your fault he went missing in the first place? You'll do it, or I'll totally find a way to send a note home to Asgard telling both Thor and your big brother what a naughty girl you've been, drinking all my liquor and giving alcohol to a minor."

Sif stared at him for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip. "There's no need for you to tell them what they'll already know."

So, that was it; Sif hadn't wanted to talk to Heimdall, because he would already know everything that had happened. Loki couldn't help breaking into a huge grin.

"Oh, shut up, Loki."

"I didn't say anything."

"Perhaps not, but you're clearly enjoying this."

"Why shouldn't I? For once, I'm not the one who's in trouble."

"Actually, we haven't really talked about that," Tony interjected. "You messed with JARVIS's head, you left the tower without permission again, plus you broke the rule about drinking last night, even if you didn't drink enough to throw up or pass out. Now, what do you think I should do about that?"

Loki tilted her head down and looked up at him through her eyelashes. "Forgive me, because I'm much too adorable to be held responsible for my own actions?"

"Sir," said JARVIS, "Agents Romanoff and Barton have return, and are on their way up to the common room."

Loki couldn't help smiling at the interruption, but Tony must have known what she was thinking. "We are going to talk about this later, Loki. I'm not going to forget. Sif, time to put your big girl panties on and go find out what you can about Bruce. It's the least you can do after you impaled him with a mop, don't you think?"

"Oh, I suppose so," grumbled Sif.

( ° ෴ ° ) (͡ °0 ͡ °) (눈‸눈;;)

"Captain Rogers."

Steve opened his eyes and watched dust motes drift through the sunlight in front of his nose. He tried to remember why he had been sleeping on the couch in the sitting room of his suite instead of in his bed, and why he still wore the t-shirt and jeans he'd been wearing the night before. He had the strangest feeling that he had forgotten something important.

"Captain Rogers."

Still feeling groggy, he sat up. "JARVIS?"

"Agents Romanoff and Barton are back, and Sir has called for a meeting to discuss what to do next regarding Doctor Banner's disappearance."

"Avengers Assemble, huh—"

"Sir's exact words were, 'tell Steve to get his sorry ass down here.'"

Steve realized what he had forgotten. "Oh, shoot. JARVIS, he's not mad at me, is he?"

"Are you asking if Sir is angry with you for abandoning your duties as 'babysitter' and leaving the children with Sif and her 'drinking buddies?'"

"Drinking buddies?"

"I believe they went on what Sir might have characterized as, 'a real bender' last night, and took Loki with them."

"Oh, shit. Tony's going to kill me," Steve realized.

"Language, Captain Rogers."

Steve groaned, rubbing his temples to ward off the headache he felt coming on. Artificially intelligent or actually intelligent, he could do without JARVIS's snark this early in the morning.

"Good morning."

Steve turned his head in the direction of the door to his bedroom. It took a few moments for his mind to accept that it was looking at what it thought it was looking at, but when it did, he diverted his eyes as quickly as possible. "Morning," he said, trying to keep his voice casual. "Do you, um, maybe want put some clothes on?"

"But I am wearing clothes." Steve detected the amusement in Zora's voice, and he had to wonder if she had wandered out of his bedroom in nothing but one of his own t-shirts, which barely came down to the top of her thighs, just to fluster him. "I hope you don't mind that I borrowed this. I seem to have forgotten to pack my nightshirt."

"I don't mind, but now that you're up, maybe you could put on some pants?"

"You Americans are so puritanical. I still say there was no reason we could not have shared the bed last night. You can't have been too comfortable on the couch."

"What? I'm not—I mean, you can't be—we barely even know each other—"

Zora laughed. "I am only playing with you. Thank you for letting me sleep here last night, by the way. Doctor Banner said I could stay, but no one ever told me what room I was to sleep in."

"It wasn't a problem." Steve felt a twinge of guilt. He could have found her an empty guest room to stay in, but they had gotten to talking the night before, and afterwards he hadn't been ready to part ways with her. He found Zora to be a fascinating woman; she had told him all about how she had lost her parents at a young age, and how since then, Victor Von Doom had taken her under her wing, becoming almost a father-figure to her. According to her, while Doom might come off as a little megalomaniacal to the rest of the world, he deeply cared about his own people, and as a result, she had grown up with a strong sense of loyalty towards her homeland as well. She wanted to do all she could to serve her country and its people, which was why she had come all the way to the United States to formally train in medicine.

Even though Latveria and the States were very different places, Steve could identify with that.

"Shouldn't you be getting to your meeting?" asked Zora.

Steve realized that he had just been sitting there, staring at the wall in an attempt not to look at Zora in her sleep clothes again. He stood up, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in his pants. "Right, I'm going to head down now." He would just have to hope Tony would either be in a forgiving mood or too distracted by Bruce's disappearance to give him hell for screwing up on the babysitting thing. "You should get dressed and come down too, so you can meet Clint and Natasha."

Steve ran a hand through his hair; he would have liked to have at least combed it before he went down, but his comb and the rest of his grooming supplies were in the bathroom, and the bathroom was through the bedroom, which meant that to get to them he would have had to shimmy past a still half-naked Zora. He didn't want to keep Tony waiting anyway, so he went straight to the elevator, which opened just as he reached it. The doors closed, and the elevator started its decent. He wondered if JARVIS thought he might try to make a run for it had he allowed him to press the buttons himself.

The door to the elevator opened onto the common room, and as soon as he stepped out, he saw Tony coming straight for him. "You are in big, big trouble. What the hell were you thinking, leaving the kids alone with Sif and the Frat Brothers Three?"

"That there were five other adults here, if you count Zora"—Tony didn't know Zora had been with him, after all— "and that they should have been fine." As soon as he'd said it, though, Steve didn't feel good about it. Watching the kids had been his responsibility. It didn't matter how many other adults had been around; he was the one Tony had left in charge.

"Steven Grant Rogers, I am highly disappointed in you," Tony scolded him. "Shirking your responsibilities and pointing the finger at other people? That's just not the kind of thing I'd expect from Captain America."

He felt a warmth begin to build at the tops of his ears. "How do you even know my middle name?"

"He got it from your Wikipedia page," said Pepper, as she stepped beside her fiancé. "Tony, stop giving him a hard time. I'm sure he already feels bad about disappearing when he was supposed to be watching the kids." Despite her words, the way she pressed her lips together as she looked at him made him think she wasn't too happy with him either. "For now, we all need to be focused on finding Bruce."

The elevator opened, and out stepped Natasha, wearing a dress with lace sleeves and a plunging neckline. If he didn't know better, he would have called it a wedding dress, as it happened to be mostly white. Mostly, because there were a couple of red splashes down the front. Clint stepped out of the elevator as well, edging his way around Nat's voluminous skirts.

Pepper gasped as she rushed towards her, stopping a couple feet away. "Is that a House of Van Dynewedding gown? It's gorgeous, Nat. Other than the blood—that isn't yours, is it?"

"Nope, not mine." Natasha spun around, modeling the dress for her.

"It's a shame, but once you take it off, it needs to go into the biohazard disposal bin up in medical," Pepper told her. "Loki, don't touch it, please."

Loki seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, although probably, Steve had just failed to notice her, as focused as he'd been on his own regret over the night before. "I wasn't going to touch the part with the blood on it," she protested, though she withdrew her hand as asked. "I just wanted to see if the lace was as high quality as Asgardian lace."

"When I go shopping for my wedding dress, I'll take you with me and you can touch as many dresses as you want. Nat, you do look beautiful, but you need to take that off and shower now."

"Hold on," said Tony. "Why are you wearing that thing anyway? You guys didn'tget married, did you?"

Natasha arched an eyebrow at him. "Are you asking me if Clint and I got married? You've got to be joking."

Clint had already wandered into the kitchen and had begun rooting around in the refrigerator, though he seemed to be having difficulty finding what he was looking for. He stopped long enough to look up at her. "Hey now—"

"You know what I mean. It would be like marrying my brother."

"Odin tried to force Thor and I to marry one another," Loki told her, as she once again reached out to try to touch Natasha's dress.

Pepper grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her away from it. "We can exchange stories after Nat's cleaned herself up."

*。ζლ(*´▽｀*） (ˆoˆԅ)

After Natasha had changed and hopefully showered, everyone in the tower's residential floors had gathered in the common room, and all the attention was on Nat, including that of Thori, who sat at her feet staring up at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Tony wondered if he could still smell the blood on her. "Now that Nat's less of a walking health hazard, you guys mind telling us what you've been up to since Christmas?"

"Well, to begin with, you are now looking at Missus Werner von Strucker, son of prominent HYDRA leader Wolfgang von Strucker." Natasha held up her hand to show off the gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. "We got married in Atlantic City. If it hadn't been so cold, we could have gotten married on the beach, but the Oceanview ball room of the Starlite Casino turned out to be a beautiful venue."

"Sounds classy," said Tony. "Hold on, the wedding was in New Jersey and you didn't even invite the rest of us?"

Clint, who had settled next to Natasha with a can of soda after coming to the terms that the tower was now devoid of all alcohol, wrinkled his nose. "You know, maybe you could take that ring off now."

"I could," Natasha agreed, "but I think I'm enjoying married life."

"Wait, you didn't marrythis guy for real, did you?" Tony couldn't say why, but something about his little Natasha going off and eloping with the son of a HYDRA leader bothered him. "I'm not sure I can give you my blessing, Nat."

Natasha leaned down to pet the top of Thori's head, making the little hell-hound's eyes roll backwards and his tongue loll out of his mouth. "Natalya Mikhailova married him, and she didn't need your blessing. You're not her dad, you know."

"Okay, fine. I can kind of see where this is going. You seduced this Werner kid to get information about his dad. But why did you need to marry him?"

"Russian mail-order bride," said Clint, as if that was all the explanation they could possibly need.

"Cool, so you didn't seduce him so much as you human trafficked yourself to him. This gets better and better. I hate to ask this in front of the kids, but was that your new husband's blood on your dress? You're not an actual widow now, are you?"

Thori jumped up in Natasha's lap and flopped over on his back. "I didn't kill him," Nat told him, rubbing the proffered furry belly. "He just got a bloody nose."

"After you gave him one?"

"He kept trying to tell me that he didn't know anything, so I had to persuade him."

Tony bit his own tongue to keep himself from swearing out loud. This was the kind of stuff that made him not want to ask Nat about work. "And what did you find out?"

"That he really didn't know anything."

"Fantastic," said Tony. "You catfished and tortured an innocent person."

Natasha put a pause on the belly rub, though she started it up again when Thori nipped at her hand to let her know she wasn't allowed to stop. "I wouldn't exactly call him innocent. He might not have had the details, but he knew where Daddy's money came from. And now so do I—as soon as I figured out that he didn't know anything useful, I made him give me access to his online bank accounts, and from there I was able to trace several large deposits back to my new father-in-law's numbered Swiss bank account."

"So that had to be a dead end, didn't it?" Contrary to most people's expectations, Tony didn't have any offshore accounts himself. He was too rich and too well-versed in the use of legal tax shelters to bother trying to hide anything.

"Not necessarily. Numbered Swiss bank accounts are difficult to trace, but it isn't impossible if you're willing to blackmail a few Swiss bankers."

The conversation was starting to make Tony feel a little icky, but he knew Nat wouldn't have done anything shady unless she had deemed it absolutely necessary. "Does that mean you have a location for Strucker?"

"Yep," said Clint. "Turns out he's got a not-so well-hidden evil castle. We put in a call to Fury, and he had some friends of his go check it out. They're pretty sure he's got the thing, plus some other awesome supervillain stuff for us to either destroy or confiscate. You know, stolen Chitauri weaponry, human lab experiments, that kind of stuff."

Tony whistled, genuinely impressed. "Sounds like you guys have been busy." Also, Fury still had the kind of friends you could ask to go check out an evil castle? That was news to him, but then again, the fact that Phil was still alive had been a bit of a shocker too. Had Clint and Nat known about that? He decided it wasn't the time to ask.

"We've actually been working on this for a while," Clint told him. "Setting up the mail order bride scam took a couple of months."

"And you guys didn't think you should tell the rest of us what you were doing?"

Natasha smirked at him as she continued to stroke the Hel puppy in her lap. If Thori had been a white cat, she would have looked just like a Bond villain. "Would you have wanted to know?"

"Probably not, now that I think of it. You're sure they've got the thing?"

Loki had been draped over the edge of the couch next to Tony, hardly seeming interested in what was going on, but now she sat up, ramrod straight. "Wait, are you all talking about the thing I think you're talking about?"

Damn. He knew he should have had Natasha and Clint give their report without the kids around. Wanda and Pietro, who had huddled together in their usual spot on the carpet, looked highly uncomfortable. He could only guess had to do with all the torture and blackmail talk, which certainly made him uncomfortable. "It's nothing you need to worry about."

"But I'm the one that—"

"No buts. I know you feel responsible for the thing being here in the first place, but we were the ones that let HYDRA take it right from under our noses. So just let Daddyhandle things, okay?"

Loki blushed, but Tony didn't regret using Loki's slip up from the other night against her if it meant she would shut up and listen to him for once.

"We should organize an operation to retrieve Loki's scepter as soon as possible." Natasha now held a completely limp Thori. Tony gave her a look, and she arched an eyebrow at him. "What? There's not much point to calling it 'the thing' if Loki knows what we're talking about."

"Don't call it 'Loki's scepter' either,'" said Loki. "It isn't my scepter. It was only a loan."

"Whatever we call it, there's no way we can go after it until we get Bruce back," Tony told her.

"I'm not sure this can wait," Natasha argued. "If they figure out we're on to them—which is probably going to happen as soon as the wire comes out of my new husband's jaw—there's nothing to keep them from moving."

Tony felt a migraine coming on. As happy as he was that Natasha and Clint had found the glow stick of destiny, why did they have to find it just when Bruce had had a major freak out? And poor Doc had just been sitting there listening to all this, looking as if he was about to throw up. "We can't just abandon Bruce."

"I'm not saying we should, but we don't even know where he is."

"It's true that unless Xena's big brother can tell us something, we have zero leads," Tony admitted.

"Right, and we don't know when she'll be back," Natasha pointed out. "Remember how Thor used to disappear for months, and when he came back he'd act like he'd only been gone for a few days?"

"Damn, you're right. You know, no one's ever explained how that works."

"If you have about three hundred years to spare, I could try to explain it to you," Loki offered.

"Yeah, I get it. Stupid human, tiny brain."

Loki rolled her eyes at him. "That's not what I meant this time. Converting time between realms can be an extremely complex task. It took me longer than three hundred years to truly grasp the mathematical concepts involved. But then, I did have to learn how to count first."

Sometimes, it was easy to forget that Loki had already had a thousand years longer than he'd had to accumulate secrets of the universe that Tony could only dream about. He tried not to be too jealous. "Alright, fine. If you know how this time conversion thing works, can you give us an estimate for how long it's going to take Sif to go to Asgard, ask her brother a quick question, and get back?"

"By my calculations, she should be back any time now," Loki told him, breaking into a huge grin. "After all, the large time discrepancies we experienced before were almost undoubtedly caused by Thor's travel via a magical artifact that he had no clue how to use properly. Now that the Bifrost is operational, travel between Asgard and Midgard should have a much smaller, almost imperceivable effect on the fabric of time."

"You know, you could have just led with that—wait, are you saying that using the Tesseract actually affected the flow of time itself?"

"Or at least our perception of it."

"Sir," said JARVIS, "You should know that Sif has entered the lobby."

Tony sucked in two big lungfuls of air. "Here we go."

Loki scooted closer to him on the couch, putting her hand in his and leaning her head against his shoulder. Pepper sat down on his other side, grabbing his other hand.

...φ(ｰ￣*)

Author's Note:

This brings us up to three weddings. Any speculation on whose wedding will be the fourth, and whose funeral it will be?