Clint shook his head and adjusted his hearing aids, since the triplets' frequencies always messed with them a little. As he looked around, he spotted an embossed knife lying on the floor.
Loki looked up and saw him spot his dagger. He reached to snatch it away, but Clint stomped his foot down on it. Loki sprang back as Clint swiped at the air where he had been.
"He's here, isn't he?" Clint hissed.
"That's enough," Fury barked. He sighed and ran a hand over his face. "You don't learn, do you?"
"What are you talking about, sir?"
"I told you." He shook his head. "The bunch of you wouldn't last five minutes together without them. And normally I'd let you at each other, but right now the whole damn free world is on the line, so shut the hell up, all of you, and listen to them."
Natasha put a hand on Clint's arm, and leaned into his ear. "Uspoykoysya. Eto to, chto ikh bespokoilo. Im nuzhno zna', chto my ikh ne nenavidim. I ya znayu, chto ty ikh ne nenavidish'." (Calm down. This is what bothered them. They need to know that we do not hate them. And I know that you don't hate them.)
He licked his lips for a moment and then nodded. Holding up his hands, he moved back and sat on the couch again. "I'm calm," he said. Natasha sat down next to him, her eyes scanning the triplets.
"Everybody sit down," Steve said.
Tony opened his mouth to snap back, but glanced over at the triplets, took a deep breath, and moved back to his perch on the couch. Thor nodded after a moment and sat down too. Lizzy glanced over at Bruce. He shook slightly as he shifted back onto the couch, but when he met her eyes he gave her a half smile.
Steve turned to the triplets, avoiding meeting Arriana's gaze. "I know you understand this is a charged subject. However we all agreed, even after the battle, that Loki should have a fair trial. Thor said he never got one, so then it's up to us." He looked over at Fury. "With all due respect, sir, I think this should be a decision up to the nine of us. We fought him, so we should judge him. Does everyone agree?" He looked around the circle.
Murmured agreement answered him.
"We respect you, but given the current circumstance, the Avengers are no longer under the command of SHIELD."
Fury nodded slowly. "Sounds fair enough. I'm not looking to be anybody's mommy."
"Do we all agree that, criminal or not, Loki should receive a fair trial?" Steve asked.
"Yes," Tony said right away.
"Fine by me," Bruce said. "So long as everybody calms down."
They all turned to look at him. He worked to breathe slowly, running a hand through his hair every few moments.
"Sorry, Bruce," Steve said. "We got a little out of hand."
He gave a harsh snort. "A little? You're just all lucky Arriana went off and not the other guy."
"Big guy's pretty good at calming things down," Tony said with a chuckle.
"Yeah, I don't think calm is usually the feeling most people have, Tony."
He shrugged. "It'd make me feel better."
Steve shook his head, but let the comment go for the moment. He turned back to the triplets. "Is Loki here?"
"We're not telling you where we hid him," Lizzy said.
"I meant on this floor?"
She glared at him.
"So he is in the tower," Clint said.
"Smooth, Capsicle," Tony said. "So we can say stealth isn't your thing, huh?"
A vein began to twitch in Steve's temple. "Knock if off, Stark."
"Can't take a hint, apparently."
"Stop fighting!" Arriana yelled, leaping to her feet. "I'm sick of everyone fighting. We are grown-ass adults. Can't we act like it?" She spun to look at Clint and Natasha. "We're sorry we didn't tell you, but we couldn't get in touch with you and there wasn't time to wait and hold a committee meeting. We figured we could go break him out of jail, bring him here, and keep him under our guard. Then, when we could get a hold of everyone, we'd discuss everything." She huffed out a breath and dropped back onto the couch. "We didn't mean for things to happen. They just did."
Clint and Natasha looked at each other for a moment. Finally, Clint nodded.
"It's okay, Carebear," he said. "I understand." He got to his feet and wandered over to them. "You're right. We trained you to make the best decision you could at the moment." He opened his arms. "Come here. You're okay. I'm not mad at you."
The triplets looked up at him for a moment, and then Arriana sprang to her feet and into his arms.
"Hey, you're okay, Carebear. You're right." He looked at the other two. "Come here."
They got to their feet, but he didn't wait for them to come to him and pulled them into his hug. "I know we trained you well. You don't make stupid decisions." He held them for a few moments and then stepped back, looking them in the eyes one at a time. "Okay. Now that I'm satisfied you're all you, we want to hear everything you found out. Just run us through what convinced you. We'll go from there."
They nodded and curled up on their couch again.
"Well, for weeks before we had to leave the Lightman Group," Lizzy said, "we'd been having nightmares of a strange-looking prison cell. All four walls were glass, the walls and ceiling were white, and there was bright light on all the time. No windows, no visible door. We couldn't even tell what time of day it was."
"No clock?" Natasha asked. "You couldn't see into a hallway to see a nearby window or anything?"
She shook her head. "The area around the cell was dark, so we couldn't see anything outside, and there was no clock or other way to tell time."
"Most of time the nightmares were just pain," Michael said. "Like, inside of us."
"Physical?" Clint asked.
"Mostly. The rest was probably mostly fear."
The triplets glanced at Loki out of the corner of their eyes. He put up his hands and nodded.
Tell them whatever you experienced, he said in their minds. As much pride as I have, it is more important you are honest with your friends. He wandered behind them, stroking the back of their necks. It is more important you are happy, than I maintain my pride and dignity.
A smile lifted the corners of their mouths.
"We didn't know what we were seeing and didn't really say anything at first," Arriana said.
"But as time went on," Michael said, "we'd make a comment here or there, and one day we all looked at each other, wondering if we were having the same nightmare."
"Is that unusual, for you to have the same nightmare?" Bruce asked.
"Most of the time," Lizzy said. "Sometimes we share similar nightmares, but our individual minds usually interpret even the same thing differently, so for us all to be seeing the same things... it was strange. We discussed it and decided to keep an eye on it. Then, I think it was the 2nd or 3rd of July, we were all asleep and we saw the same thing. The cell as usual, but guards dressed like something out of the Renaissance festival came in and beat the hell out of us."
"I do not understand what the Renaissance festival is," Thor said.
"Sorry, Thor," Michael said. "It's a Fair that's held in various states. The point is that the men were dressed in old-styled armor and carried swords rather than guns."
"And they..." A frowned darkened his usually cheerful face. "They hurt... you?"
"It seemed like us," Lizzy said. "We were in the eyes of the person."
The words did nothing to calm him, but he didn't say anything further.
"When we woke up," Arriana said, "we were all sore. Not as severe as it should've felt if it had been us, but sort of a dull ache. Like we'd been beaten up a week or so ago."
"We went over everything," Michael said. "We knew something was wrong, and we started telling each other about the little flares of our powers we'd been having."
"You hadn't told each other?" Clint said.
He shook his head. "We didn't think it was a big deal. We figured it was the after-effects of the battle and it would die back down. I mean, we hadn't used so much of our power at one time since we were kids, really. But it was becoming clear that things weren't dying down. We still didn't think it was anything to raise an alarm over, however."
"In the few days before my birthday," Arriana said, "all three of us were having more and more powerful flares. I was having trouble with feeling listless at times, or intense fear would grip me. Michael was having flashes of the cell even during the day, and Lizzy was having thoughts and memories that sure weren't her own. And it didn't seem to be coming from anyone near us either, which is the usual cause."
"People near you?" Bruce said. "Meaning if someone physically nearby has a strong thought or emotion you can sense it?"
"Sometimes," Lizzy said. "We try to keep our brains to ourselves, but if it's particularly strong, yeah."
He pressed his lips for a moment, but nodded, falling silent again.
"Things started breaking through by the fifth," Michael said. "I think Arriana had a full channeling on the fifth in a full panicked breakdown. I channeled on the sixth. I got stuck somewhere else, looking through eyes that weren't mine."
"We'd managed to keep everything hidden, though," Arriana said. "Even Lightman, as observant as he was, didn't notice. I mean, he knew we seemed to be stressed out and we weren't doing well, but he helpfully chocked it all up to the attack on New York. But on the seventh we were sitting in his office when Lizzy channeled."
"What happened?" Natasha asked.
"From what they said," Lizzy said, "I went into the trance-like state I do and then started spouting gibberish. At least, gibberish to us."
"What did you see?"
"Well, without Michael I didn't really see anything, but the thoughts were terrified. Thoughts of not wanting to be hurt anymore. Pain, hunger, and thirst. Really similar to the nightmare where we'd gotten the crap kicked out of us."
"When she came to," Michael said, "she told us in our minds that something was wrong and we told her she'd just channeled all of that and that Lightman saw. So we said we weren't feeling well and rushed to see Tony."
Clint shifted several times.
"We did try to call you," Arriana said, "but we got your usual message that meant you were on a mission. We needed help and we needed help now. And even you've always said Tony's the expert on our powers. He understands more what's driving them and how they function, not just on a behavioral basis, but on a molecular level."
He forced a breath out, but nodded.
"We told him everything that had been happening and he suggested we were channeling someone specific since we were all experiencing the same things from our individual perspective, and nothing made sense as just a PTSD response to the battle."
"Tony suggested we try intensive meditation to try to reach out to whomever this was," Lizzy said. "Since there didn't seem to be any other good explanation, we decided it was worth a try."
"It took two days of almost constant meditation," Michael said, "before we made contact. At first we couldn't hold the connection for long. No more than a few minutes. Slowly we got better at it. We started making physical contact with each other while we meditated to try to combine our efforts."
"That's when we were able to make a solid connection," Lizzy said.
"What do you mean combine your efforts?" Natasha asked.
The triplets looked at each other for a few moments, frowning.
"I guess, we sort of moved into our shared mind space and reached out from there," Arriana said. "We tried to make ourselves into a single being. Once we made the connection, we were able to see, feel, and hear the thoughts of the person we were contacting."
"Why didn't you just ask who it was?" Clint asked.
"I did," Lizzy said. "But the person we were talking to was hearing a voice and feeling the presence of three people in their head..." She shrugged. "They rather sensibly thought they were going crazy."
"The strange part," Michael said, "was that they were happy to be going crazy."
"Happy?" Steve said. "Why would anyone be happy about going crazy?"
Lizzy shrugged. "If disconnection from the real world is better than the real world..."
"But couldn't you just have pushed until they gave their name?" Clint said.
She sighed. "It's not that simple in the mind, Clint, you know that. It wasn't important to the person, and their mind wasn't..." She fell quiet for a moment. "It wasn't a stable mind. They were fragile. Really fragile. I couldn't go poking around for information without risking collapse, and if their mind collapsed with us inside it, we could risk being trapped. We've never had that happen before, but with the way our powers function, it seems like a reasonable conclusion."
"And keep in mind the one thing they knew for certain," Tony said, "was that this person had managed to contact them. This wasn't the triplets just hearing someone close or them searching someone out. Everything was happening to them, and to such an extent that they couldn't just lead their normal lives. They had to figure out what was going on and how to stop it."
Arriana nodded. "And since it was so hard for us to reach them, we didn't want to lose the connection. Clearly whoever this was needed help."
"So we started asking other information," Michael said. "We got snatches of memories, thoughts on what was happening now... just things here and there."
"When our energy was almost exhausted, the person was really freaked out that we had to go," Lizzy said. "So we promised to come back. They wondered about what time it was. Arriana managed to reach back into herself enough to reach into Tony's mind to ask what time it was and relay it back to us. I told the person and it soothed them a lot, to say the very least."
"So, clearly suffering time deprivation," Natasha said.
Clint's face darkened. "They were being tortured then."
The triplets nodded.
"We managed to return to our own minds and then passed out," Michael said. "When we woke back up, Tony said we'd slept for almost 12 hours straight. We re-energized as much as we could, and then made contact again."
"The person was so happy to feel our presence again," Arriana said. "Intense relief and just... that feeling when the person you love most in the world comes home after being gone for months."
Steve shifted and stared out the window again.
She bit her lip, but continued. "We had briefly talked before making contact again that we needed to find out how the person got to their current circumstance. From there we might be able to figure out what was happening to us. So Lizzy asked."
"The person didn't really want to dwell on it," Lizzy said, "and I couldn't demand. They were so fragile I had to have Arriana do her best to comfort, even Michael worked to be as comforting as possible. Eventually I managed to convince them to talk to me while Arriana and Michael mentally hugged them. Finally they agreed. They said they were adopted, but hadn't known until recently..."