Chapter 31 - Sorry Betty, It's Still January

Bruce and Leonard ran down the hallway towards Karla. When they reached her, Bruce stuck his nose up her skirt, and Leonard attempted to mount her leg.

"Ugh," said Karla, kicking him off. "Who let these hideous creatures out of their cages? If I didn't know that Ross would have my head for destroying his daughter's precious research, I would put them out of their misery."

Betty knelt in the middle of the hallway next to Bruce the human, who was currently naked and unconscious. No one else seemed to be particularly concerned that Bruce was naked, but thinking he might be cold, Betty took off her lab coat and covered him up.

Karla continued to point her gun at Leonard—the human, not the dog, who had whimpered and run down the hallway in the other direction when Karla snarled at him, Dog-Bruce following at his heels. "When he wakes up you can take him to your room," she said, nodding towards Unconscious-Naked-Not a Dog-Bruce. "But I want the two of you to go straight there, understand?"

Betty knew that she couldn't say no to Karla. Not when she put it that way, and not when she had a gun pointed at one of the men she now suspected she still might have feelings for. She nodded meekly.

"We're going to my office," Karla announced, this time nodding in the direction they had been headed before they had run into her. Leonard turned around, and she nudged him between the shoulder blades to make him walk forward.

;( •⌓•) (-, – )…ZZZzzz

Following Tony, Loki trudged uphill through the snow that had begun to pile up. All he really wanted to do was go back to the car, but no matter what Tony said, he still felt responsible for losing his new "siblings." Also, something told him that he shouldn't let Tony confront them on his own when originally, they had confronted Tony because they wanted to kill him. Tony could call the suit if he had to, but there were still two of them and one of him. Even in the suit, he wasn't sure Tony would be any match for Wanda's powers if she lashed out at him.

Tony stopped and turned around. "Try to keep up, Lokes. The last thing I need is for you to disappear too."

Loki rolled his eyes. "Do you want to hold hands?"

"I'm not sure that would be a bad idea. The snow is coming down pretty hard now. Maybe you should have waited in the car. Or back at the tower, for that matter, except that I didn't really want to leave you alone again, or worse, leave you alone with yourself."

"I can't have stayed at home when you might need me," Loki protested. He hadn't been too keen on staying in the tower with the feminine version of his other self either. He'd had enough of being talked down to and treated like an inanimate object for one day.

"Look, I appreciate that you want to help, but it really wasn't your fault that Frick and Frack went AWOL."

"I might at least be able to convince Pietro to come back if you can't," Loki pointed out, even though he almost certain that Wanda would be the one in need of convincing.

"I doubt it will take much convincing to get them to go back with us. They won't want to stay out here in this storm. Where else are they going to go?"

Loki wondered if Tony was just trying to make him feel better, or if he was truly that much of a fool. "I've never walked in this part of the park before. Who's the man on the horse with two swords? He's wearing a crown. Is he an ancient American king?"

Tony squinted at the statue as if this was the first time he was seeing it too. "I actually have no idea who that is, but I'm going to say no. Americans don't really do kings."

"Then why is there a castle up ahead?" Loki asked, pointing to a green sign that said "Belvedere Castle."

Tony shrugged. "Again, I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure there's a gift shop in it. We do gift shops like nobody's business. I've been thinking about putting one in the lobby of the tower to sell off the excess Avenger's merchandise. Maybe we could even sell some of the Hawkeye stuff if we have Clint stand around down there and sign autographs for the tourists."

Loki followed Tony up the stone steps that led to the oddly placed castle. They came to a strangely nondescript door that looked more like it belonged on a public restroom than anything else. Tony attempted to turn it, but it seemed to be locked. "They've probably closed up early because of the storm."

Loki felt Wanda's chaos magic pulse as if it were an erratic heartbeat. Wanda was agitated, he could tell that much. "They're above us—or at least Wanda is. I can feel her magic."

Tony glanced at his phone. "Tracking data backs that up. They must have gone in before they closed up and hid somewhere."

"If they were normal children, I would agree with the likelihood of that scenario, but for all we know, Wanda convinced the people who were here to leave. Remember what she did to Clint?"

Tony backed up. Then he rammed into the door with his shoulder, as if he thought he could break it down that way. Predictably, he bounced off it, rubbing his shoulder and swearing. He disappeared back down the steps, and came back holding a rock the size of his head. Holding the rock over the door handle, he prepared to bring it down.

Loki thought about telling Tony that he could pick the lock using magic, but he found it much too fascinating to watch him use his mortal reasoning skills to try to break into the building; like watching a YouTube video of a monkey trying different primitive tools in order to obtain a banana a researcher had put just out of its reach.

Moments later, he watched Tony jump around holding his foot. The door knob hadn't budged, and the rock lay where it had landed after smashing his guardian's toes. "Alright, that's it," the man said into his phone. "J, deploy my right gauntlet."

"Of course, Sir," said JARVIS. "Shall I also make a donation to the Central Park Conservancy in advance?"

"Probably a good idea," said Tony. A few moments later, something came flying towards them, and Loki sidestepped it just in time to avoid being punched in the stomach by a flying metal glove.

The gauntlet attached itself to Tony's hand, and he pointed it at the door. He traced a circle around the handle with a concentrated laser.

"Is vandalism not a crime for the wealthy either, so long as they can pay for the damages?" asked Loki.

Tony glared at him. "Just don't tell Pepper about any of this."

"She'll make you tell her what you did anyway when she gets the receipt for that donation."

"True, but you weren't here when I did it, got it?"

"Right, just like I wasn't there when you parked where you weren't supposed to. I'm learning so much today about just how much the wealthy can get away with in Midgard. Surely breaking and entering is a crime for commoners, but not for Tony Stark."

"Hey, kids I'm responsible for are in there, and there's a snowstorm coming through. Sometimes you have to bend a few rules to protect the people you care about."

"I'll remember that," Loki warned him, though truthfully, what Tony had just said was what he loved most about him. Tony thought the way Loki did, able to see the gray in life that Odin, or Thor for that matter, never could.

Tony finished dismantling the lock and pulled the door open. On the other side of it was a room empty save for a large reception desk; they made their way through the door past the desk and into the adjoining room, and Loki felt another throb of Wanda's magic. This time, it was less like a heartbeat and more like a small earth quake.

He grabbed Tony's sleeve. "Maybe you should stay down here and let me go up first. Or at least call for the rest of your suit."

"They're just a couple of teenagers. We're not about to face down a fire breathing dragon."

"I'd feel better about it if we were," said Loki. "In my experience, the combination of barely controlled magic and fluctuating estrogen levels present in an adolescent witch can be much more dangerous than a dragon. Especially during certain times of the month, if you catch my drift. I can't speak from experience because I've never spent enough time in my other form to have such a cycle, but both Sigyn and Amora could be positively murderous—"

"If you think she's that dangerous, maybe you should stay down here."

"You're the one who ought to be careful!" Loki objected. "You don't have any magic to defend you. You're not even wearing your suit."

"Because I don't want to make them think I'm the enemy."

"They already think you are."

"I know that was true at first, but I like to think I've made some progress with them. Maybe you should stay down here and wait. I don't want you to end up in a wizards' duel with Wanda."

"I'm not looking for a fight, but I'll defend us both if I have to. You can't feel it, but I can. She—"

Tony cut him off again. "Look, it isn't your job to protect me. I understand that you're scared, but I need you to trust me. Otherwise—" The man kept talking, but Loki tuned him out. As much as he wanted to, he wasn't sure he did trust Tony. At least, he wasn't at all certain he trusted his judgment. Clearly, he underestimated how helpless he would be in the thralls of even an unexperienced magician.

Perhaps he was partly responsible for that; after all, Loki was likely the only magic user Tony had fought directly, and he hadn't bothered using magic to fight him at all; instead, when the scepter had failed him he had lost his temper and used his superior strength to toss him through a window. (Which wasn't his style at all. How had Thor not realized that there was something seriously wrong with him?)

He hated it, but maybe he needed to show Tony what magic was capable of before he went blundering upstairs and got himself obliterated by Wanda's magic. The man might never trust him again afterwards, but that was better than standing back while Wanda killed or permanently maimed him, either on purpose or by accident.

Loki took a step back. Then, with a wave of his hand, he sent Tony flying into the wall behind them and held him there with a matrix of glowing green threads.

"Ow! What the hell?" Tony struggled against Loki's magic, but it was useless. "Damn it Loki, what do you think you're doing? Let me go right now, or when I do get out of this, you're going to be sorry."

"I'm already sorry, Tony. But can't you see now? If I can do this to you, there's no way I can let you anywhere near a magic user as potentially dangerous as Wanda. You can threaten to ground me all you want—"

"Oh, I'm not going to ground you this time. If you don't rethink this right now, there are going to be serious consequences, you hear me?"

"Be that as it may, like you said, sometimes you have to break the rules to protect the people you care about." Loki held his head held high; like Tony, he had never particularly been afraid of punishment when convinced that his actions were justified. Before his guardian could object again, he turned his back on him and headed for the winding narrow staircase that would take him up to the level where he knew he would find his "little sister."

( ಥ_ಥ)⊃ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ (⊙෴ ⊙;;)

In addition to being roughly the size of one of the tower's storage closets, the white plaster walls of Sofen's office were bare with the exception of the kind of industrial analog wall clock you would see in a school or military facility and one of those posters with a cat hanging off of a branch, emblazoned with the words "Hang in There, Baby." Karla waved at a couch that took up an entire wall of the tiny office. "Take a seat, Leonard. No, wait—I suppose I should sit there, doctor. You sit in my chair; you're playing psychiatrist today."

"I am a psychiatrist, Karla. I don't just play at being one, like you do." He sat down in the rolling office chair that she had pointed to, which faced the sofa.

"I'm currently licensed to practice psychiatry in both New York and Virginia, which is more than I can say for you. I'm not the one practicing illegally."

Leonard realized she had a point; while he was still licensed to practice psychiatry in Virginia, when he'd moved to New York, he had never actually applied for a license to practice there. Technically, he was being paid by Stark Industries as a "consultant." But truly, he had been running an illegal psychiatry practice for the residents of the tower, and had even written a few prescriptions. It was far from the only illegal activity going on in the tower—Bruce had also been practicing medicine without a license, Tony was hosting both a war criminal and an endangered animal, and then there was whatever Natasha and Clint got up to, which most recently involved pimping Natasha out to the son of a Hydra leader—but that didn't make it right. Leonard felt his cheeks warm, but then he realized what Karla was trying to do. He gestured towards the sofa. "You're not going to make me start questioning myself, so you might as well sit down."

Karla sat down primly, crossing her legs in front of her.

"Alright, you want to begin by telling me why you have an office here?"

Karla wrinkled her nose. "It's hardly an office, but the general insisted it was the only space available. Nothing like what you're used to working out of Avengers Tower, I'm sure."

"I don't know; I think it's kind of cozy. Personally, I prefer a more intimate space." Leonard crossed his legs as well, mirroring her body language.

The edge of Karla's lip quirked upward. "I know what you're doing."

"I'm sure you do," he said, smiling at her gently in the way one might smile at someone you suspected of being completely unhinged. "Is it working?"

Karla cackled in response. Leonard kept smiling.

"Fine, if you're not going to answer that, let me ask something else. Have you been working for Ross this entire time, or did he approach you after you started seeing Bruce?"

Karla scowled at him. "I don't want to talk about Ross. You wanted to psychoanalyze me, didn't you? You should be asking about me, not him."

She still held what appeared to be some sort of sci-fi laser gun in her lap, so he decided it would be best to humor her. "Alright, fine. Why don't you tell me about your childhood?"

Karla smiled like the cat who got the cream, then stretched out on the sofa with her hands clasped over her chest. "I grew up in Los Angeles. My father was Charles Stockbridge's personal assistant."

He had heard the important parts of her back story from Tony. "You were friends with Stockbridge's daughter, Deanna," he prompted.

"We were more than friends. Deanna and I were raised as if we were sisters. Daddy and I lived in Charles' house. Ostensibly, for convenience sake, so that Daddy would be around to take care of whatever Charles needed at any time of day. But what most people didn't know about Charles Stockbridge is that he and my father were domestic partners."

That certainly wasn't what he'd expected to hear, but he let Karla keep going.

"I thought of Charles as a second father. But do you know what he did when Daddy died? He had a heart attack when he was forty-two. Anyway, Charles sent me to live with my mother in Van Nuys."

"And how did that make you feel, Karla?"

Karla made the same face she had when she had spoken about her office. "How do you think it made me feel? Overnight, I went from a mansion in Beverly Hills to the Palm Terrace Apartments. He said that there was nothing he could do, because he had no legal right to keep me. But I don't even think he tried. He didn't want me anyway; I wasn't his real daughter. Thinking back on it, he always favored Deanna."

"How do you mean?"

"Deanna always got the best of everything—the largest bedroom, designer clothing, things like that."

"And you didn't get any of those things?"

"Mostly, I got Deanna's cast-offs! 'Oh Karla, this dress I just bought looked better on me in the store, but why don't you take it? You look good in anything,'" Karla said in a high-pitched voice that must have been her approximation of the girl she had thought of as a sister.

Leonard wasn't sure that sounded like an insult, but he reminded himself to stay neutral. "And how did that make you feel?"

"You ask me that whenever you're judging me," Karla accused.

"I'm not judging. Not for your feelings about things that happened when you were a child, anyway. You can't blame me for judging you a little about some of your more recent decisions, since they involve psychiatric malpractice, harming people I love, and threatening me with a gun."

Once again, Karla grinned proudly. Then her eyes drifted back toward the ceiling and she continued. "Charles cut off all contact with me, and didn't even offer to help with my expenses when I went to college. Instead, my mother worked three jobs to put me through medical school."

"Something about the way you said that makes me think you're not entirely grateful for her sacrifice."

"Seeing my mother's smiling face at my graduation, I'd never felt so much contempt for anyone in my life. What kind of idiot goes to such extremes to put the needs of someone else before their own?"

Leonard wasn't sure what to say to that, so he asked a question instead. "Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?"

"Why do you think? I wanted to learn how to make people do what I wanted them to. And I was good at it. It was easy enough to convince Deanna that I was entitled to at least half of what she had inherited from Charles."

"Are you sure she wouldn't have agreed with you if you hadn't manipulated her into it? Like you said, you were raised as sisters."

"She might have, I suppose. Deanna was like my mother, in a way. They were both much too sentimental for their own good."

"Tell me about what happened with Deanna."

"It sounds like you already know about it."

"I want to hear about what happened from you."

"Oh, fine. Deanna signed over half of the estate, but I thought, why not have it all if I could? So I convinced her that her life had no meaning. Whenever anyone looked at Deanna Stockbridge, all they saw was Charles Stockbridge's daughter. She would have to do something remarkable to change the way people remembered her."

"Like lead a police chase over a pedestrian trail and crash into the Hollywood sign?"

Karla shrugged. "Deanna tried to be an actress for a while, but she didn't have any talent. Even her father's name wasn't enough to get her anything but bit parts."

"But now everyone remembers her, because of the way she died. That's a high price to pay for fame, if you ask me." The most disturbing thing was that in some ways, Karla reminded him of Loki. Both of them felt rejected by men they had thought of as fathers, and both had siblings they felt had received preferential treatment. They had felt out of control over their own lives, and had reacted by attempting to control others. He had even heard Loki use the word "sentimental" in the same way Karla had said it; as if it were something distasteful. But Loki had ended up hurting himself more than anyone else, whereas Karla—

Karla pushed herself up off the couch. "What are you implying? I didn't tell her to kill herself."

"You just said—"

"I didn't want her to kill herself! I just wanted to convince her to sign the rest of the estate over to me and go start her life over in a commune or something."

"But she did kill herself, and you felt responsible," Leonard guessed.

"No. It wasn't like with Daddy, I didn't—" Karla trailed off, then glared at him, her eyes filled with suspicion.

"What do you mean, 'it wasn't like with Daddy,' Karla? Do you think you had something to do with your father's death?"

"I didn't mean what I wrote in my diary, I was just angry. Deanna got a car for her sixteenth birthday, and Charles was going to buy me one too, but Daddy said no, he had allowed him to buy me too many things already and he didn't want me to become spoiled—"

Leonard couldn't help thinking that Karla's father might have been too late there, but he kept the thought to himself. "What did you write?"

"It's none of your business," snapped Karla, but it didn't matter; Leonard could guess.

\(ﾐㅇ x ㅇﾐ)/ - hang in there, baby

Bruce sat up, looking around as if seeing the hallway for the first time. Betty couldn't blame him; it must be extremely disorienting to wake up in strange places without any clothes all the time. She had been sitting against the wall watching him sleep, but now she leaned towards him, stretching out the muscles in her own back and preparing to move. "You awake?"

"Where's my clothes?"

"In shreds on the floor of your cell, I suspect."

"Cell?"

"You don't remember? My father locked you in there."

"Why? Did I do something bad?"

Maybe she shouldn't have given Bruce that cupcake. She had been aware that there might be side effects, but she certainly hadn't expected short-term memory loss to be one of them. She reached towards him to put a comforting hand on his arm.

He drew away from her. "Who are you?"

Make that long-term memory loss. "Bruce, you know who I am."

"I'm not Bruce. I'm Robby, and I'm this many." Bruce held up six fingers, five on one hand and one on the other.

"Oh, shit—I've completely lost track of time in here, but please tell me it's April Fools' Day and that this is a joke."

"Robby's" eyes grew wide. "You said a bad word."

"I'm sorry." Betty forced herself to smile in a way that she hoped would be comforting; meanwhile, in her head she screamed every curse word she knew. She stood and stretched her hand towards her new young friend. "Why don't we go find you some clothes, okay?"

The little boy in a grown man's body grasped her hand and pulled himself up shakily, making sure to keep Betty's lab coat pulled tightly around him. Luckily, it was one that had always been a bit too large for her, or it might not have covered him completely. She led him down the hallway in the direction of her room. Hopefully, she could find him one of her own t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants that would fit, otherwise she wasn't sure what she was going to do.