Now that a safety timeline had been established, it meant that lives could return to a semi-normal routine. Steve had headed out his mission with Hawkeye and Black Widow. I didn't know the details of what they would be doing, but I had heard from Tony that they had been planning it for months. In the aftermath of the crisis, it had been delayed as long as it possibly could have been and they had started looking at scrapping the whole thing, and then having to deal with whatever global political instability popped up as a consequence. But, things had worked out in time, and they had headed out on mission, mostly according to plan, just a little delayed. I wondered what Steve's role in the plan was, and hoped he was doing well.
A return to routine also meant that I could return to my own work, dropped for the emergency that had overturned my life, but now pressing enough to demand my attention in person.
I packed up my few belongings and consolidated my research in the lab, organising my notes on the substance, so they would be useful to anyone who needed to refer to them. Anna and Helen had pretty much gotten a handle on an approach to treatment. They had settled on a combination of blood filtration, using a modified dialysis machine, and stem cell treatment, reversing the modification the substance had made to the bone marrow of those affected. Tony was to be the guinea pig, taking the first round of treatment to see if it was effective, and to monitor any side effects. If everything worked out fine, Steve and Anna were next on the docket. We all had high hopes that what we had would do the trick. I had confidence in the Doctors' work, and was looking forward to moving on from this. Although, my own treatment was to be delayed: postponed in case Steve's condition wasn't fully resolved or the radiation returned. It meant extra medical monitoring in case the substance in my blood started to affect me, but I was feeling fine, and not contagious in any way, and so I was okay with that.
With the situation at the Avengers' Facility mostly wrapped up for now, I said my goodbyes to my friends in the lab, and headed out to check on the progress of the site remediation at the ruined bunker. My Damage Control team had been keeping me up to date on the progress, but I wanted to see the site in person. The drive out gave me a chance to gather my nerve, and shift my mindset from the strange sense of urgency that everything at the Avengers' Facility had been steeped in, and back to my own everyday life of scientific meticulousness in organizing site remediation projects, and managing my lab team. Already, everything since the crisis was taking on a dream-like quality; it seemed so surreal I was having a hard time convincing myself it had really happened.
As I pulled up to the site, it showed all the signs of having made good progress. The hazmat tents that had been put up after the explosion were mostly gone, although I could still see one small one for suiting up and decontamination. With the upheaval and damage to the bunker's structure, focus had shifted from remediation to containment, but that was a temporary stop-gap, and now it was time to try to make the area safe again. My main concern had been keeping the contaminant out of the water supply, and the engineering team assured me that they had set up sufficient barricades to stop up the contaminated underground streams, and keep contaminants out of the water table. We had set up regular testing to be sure anyway, and so far all the results had come back clean.
With containment looking successful, the next step was either going to be removal or the breakdown of the contaminants into less harmful molecules. At Damage Control, we had a whole suite of bio-engineered microbes that would digest and break down a number of known harmful substances, but I was hesitant to make use of any of them this time, due to how unpredictable that one contaminant had been with human physiology. There was no way I was going to risk making things worse.
My team had assembled a list of identified chemicals that had been released during the bunker take-down and subsequent explosion. Some of them I recognised right off the bat, as having short half-lives, and knew they would break-down on their own. Others would take some experimentation as to the best approach. I favoured heat for the soil contaminants. Their molecular structure looked relatively unstable, and the subsequent by-products would be much more straightforward to deal with. I was waffling between filtration and draining for the contaminated water. Maybe both. With the way that the streams intersected the bunker, draining would probably be easier to accomplish, and would probably end up being more effective. I went with that, and began giving directions and assignments for the next phase.
After a long day of intensive work and decision-making, I was just about beat. I knew my staff would keep going as long as I was, but I could see they were starting to flag, too. They'd been working steadily at this task since that first morning when it all went down, but safety had been securely accomplished, and things had progressed to important, but not urgent, so I sent everyone home, and headed out myself.
I hadn't been back to my own place since the start of the crisis, almost a week ago now. As I walked in the door, the relief of familiar surroundings hit me like a wall. I hadn't realised just how much I had missed my little cabin in the woods. I was looking forward to an evening relatively free of demands, and a bit of solitude.
I collapsed onto the couch, and relaxed with a sigh. I looked around fondly at the rustic, but comfortable, furnishings that I had acquired over the years. I was pleased with how I had outfitted the rural cabin, really making it into a home. I had been happy here. But now, as I looked around, I couldn't help imagining what it would be like to share it with another person, with Steve. I could just see him walking in the door at the end of a long day, or laying in a fire in the woodstove at the start of a cold evening. Looking up at the loft, where my bed was, cold and empty, I reflected on how nice it would be to have Steve to warm it with me.
I wondered where he was spending his night, and if he was thinking of me, like I was thinking of him. In two days, he was due to be back, and our whole whirlwind acquaintance would start back up again.
Reluctantly, I got back up off the sofa to take care of the little housekeeping tasks that had been neglected for the week I had been away: cleaning out my fridge, gathering my laundry, generally tidying. Some of my plants were looking a little droopy, but I had chosen mostly succulents and cactuses for a reason. Tomorrow I would head in to the Damage Control headquarters in the city, and oversee the remediation efforts there. There were a few promising neutralisation experiments that I wanted to see the results of. And then one more night at home, then back to the Avengers' Facility to hopefully finalise the treatment approach. And, a twinge from my heart reminded me, to be there when Steve got back.