/Heyyy... It's been a while. This unfinished narrative has been nagging me throughout these months and I'm here to give everyone involved some closure. Especially when I left y'all at a cliffhanger... My bad! Everything except the last chapter is complete, so I'll be uploading them pretty quickly in the next little bit of time. Please continue to read the story and let me know what you think!
Inside the Quinjet, the Avengers sat, tensely exchanging looks with each other and at the kid. Naomi began breathing heavily. Her eyes darted around her, seeing clearly for the first time in hours. Clint put his hand reassuringly on her knee. Naomi covered her face with her hands, rubbing her eyes and head as if she were trying to erase a memory. Tears brimmed in the corners of her eyes, but she wiped them before they could fall and be seen.
Clint couldn't restrain himself any longer. "What happened back there, kid?" He searched her wrecked frame and distressed expression for a clue, hoping to find an answer other than what he suspected.
Naomi scanned the faces around her. She couldn't imagine a world where what she said next wouldn't bring more pity, but she couldn't leave this memory to fester inside of her. When she was content with the attendance, or lack thereof, she began telling her story. Clint translated to the Avengers as she signed. "Before, Scarlet Witch was not good. She worked for U-L-T-R-O-N. He made her be in the city. If you looked at the crowded town square, you wouldn't have been able to spot her. She looked," Naomi searched for a brief moment, "normal. But there were some people in my town who began reporting horrible nightmares, so vivid that they thought they were real. It was rumored that the visions pushed some over the edge. Most people said that they were just becoming looser with age, or that they drank some bad liquor. I believed that until she reached me." She began to compose her next sign, but stopped. She pressed her hands into her lap, trying to avoid diving back into the fear of her nightmare.
"I was on my way home from practice when she bumped into me. It was fast. I didn't know what was happening. And then I was there. I am tied to a ragged wooden post with my hands roped behind me. My parents are maybe 30 meters ahead, yelling, crying, scared." Her expression became almost numb from the excess of pain. "I can't hear them. I can't understand them. I can't communicate to them. But they need me. They need me to know something, or do something. Then two gunshots go off and they stop struggling. I feel my hands become wet with a warm liquid. They die in front of me." Before Naomi could continue, Clint pulled her into one of those hugs that is so tight, you'd think your broken pieces may just be put back together.
There was not one dry eye on the jet, not even from Natasha. Bruce had stepped to the cockpit, struggling to keep his cool. Tony stood with a hand on his shoulder, looking away from Naomi, frozen with guilt.
"I see it over and over and over again. Each time I close my eyes, their petrified faces are begging me to help them. Sometimes, I get the full cinema run- start to end."
For once, no one speaks up. Not even the Avengers who experienced Wanda's nightmares knew what to say. Everyone simply mumbles words of assurance, of peace. With each squeeze of the hand or sympathetic look, she knew what they're saying.
Clint stood and entered the cockpit, silently instructing Natasha to leave and Steve and Tony to follow. "How dare you go behind my back and put her in danger? How dare you?" Clint could get angry, but he looked ready to murder both of them on the spot. "I know what you had her get. I know they are important. But nothing is as important as keeping her safe, especially not a couple of papers we could've gotten some other way."
"She wanted to do it," Tony quietly commented.
"Tony-" Steve's attempt at mitigating was cut off.
Clint was now shouting, spitting his words with fury, "Are you kidding me!? She is a sixteen year old kid! Do you think I let my kids fight Ultron's robot army every time they ask if they can come? I don't care if she's fast! I don't care what small crevices she can fit into! Did it even occur to you that you'd have no way to contact her? We don't even strand each other like that! Or-or to, I don't know, give her any training or means of defending herself?"
Steve placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. "We're sorry, Clint."
A sob choked at the back of his throat as Clint held his face in his hand, knees buckling underneath him. "You took my trust and spat it in my face at the risk to someone else's life."
"What we did was probably not the best way to handle this. Go be with her." Tony didn't know what else to say. Sure, they hadn't told him everything, but he didn't expect him to be this infuriated.
Still fuming, Clint left the two men and sat next to Naomi with his hand on her knee- all that he knew how to do.
A thin crack of light momentarily peaked in from the hallway as someone entered her dark room, highlighting the teen as she lay on her back, staring up at the bare ceiling. "Sometimes when I lay here like this, I can float away and pretend I don't exist. I'm just a star suspended in the sky for eternity." She didn't know if Clint was there. Even if it was him, her room was pitch black. No one could see her words.
Her bed dipped from the new body sitting next to hers. She felt a smaller weight land between them. Naomi rolled her head to look as the tablet clicked on, illuminating the face of the Tony Stark in her bedroom. Even her internal monologue was dripping with sarcasm. The tablet faced her, a keyboard pulled up on a blank page. Looking back to Tony, she saw his face lacked its usual...amusement. His eyes stared at her, but they weren't filled with pity, as with the other Avengers. He looks like he understands?
"FRIDAY, dictate this."
"Yes, boss," FRIDAY's voice spoke from the tablet.
As Tony began to speak, he kept his eyes trained on Naomi, as if he was actually talking to her. He was the first person to do this. "A couple months ago, Wanda showed me a nightmare too." His usually confident-to-the-point-of-arrogant facade had completely disappeared. "She made me see all of my friends, the Avengers whom you have met, dead. I saw their bloodied bodies, laying there, with their eyes still wide open." Naomi read his text as the words appeared in real time, closer than she had ever been to having a fluent conversation with a hearing person. She swallowed the lump in her throat. "Steve, he grabbed me. He said, 'You could have saved us,' before life left him again. And I was still alive."
"I'm sorry," Naomi typed. Tony brushed her hand away from the keyboard, shaking his head.
"Months ago this happened, kid. Months. Wanda is even on our side now, but I still see their corpses at night. They've become just another instigator of my insomnia. Shit, even before that, I was messed up. Do you remember seeing the news about the alien invasion in New York a couple years ago?" Naomi nodded, but Tony didn't continue speaking. Naomi saw him reliving the experience behind pained eyes.
Recalling the footage and photos in the newspapers from three years ago, Naomi replied, "It screwed with your head, didn't it?"
"Yeah kid, it did. These...things don't just go away. They stay with you, and every time you remember them, they hurt a little differently. Sometimes it's worse; sometimes it's just for a second. The point is that ignoring them and pretending that these memories aren't happening just makes it worse. Trust me."
"So what now?"
Tony blew air. "That's the part I haven't figured out. But talking to people helps, and we've got a lot of traumatized people in this place. Anytime you can't sleep, tell FRIDAY and she'll get me up. I don't want you to be alone."
Naomi paused, waiting to see if the predicament would dawn on Tony. When it failed to register, she replied, "Thanks, but um..how?"
Closing his eyes and rubbing his face, he said, "Shit ah, give me a half hour and I'll program her into the text messaging software, so you can message her on the tablet I gave you." Tony began thinking through the code he would need to write, momentarily forgetting Naomi's presence.
"Sorry for before," he signed.
Though Naomi's face remained still (a skill she was picking up from Natasha), her eyes opened a fraction wider. She stayed like that for a moment, just breathing, contemplating the small gesture that had just occurred. From what she'd heard, Tony Stark apologies were about as rare as someone lifting Thor's hammer. "Don't be. Nice to be needed."
With a small smile, Tony clicked the tablet off and left for his lab.
"Tony.": right hand begins in "T" shape; GROW.
