Chapter Sixty: Nightlight

"There's no way I heard that right," Natasha dug a fingernail into her ear to drive this point home.

"Swear to god," Barton said.

They were sitting on his bed side by side. After the meeting adjourned, he came straight back to tell her every last detail. He was uncharacteristically enthusiastic, due to the fact that Fury hadn't even put him on surveillance. As the meeting drew to a close, he was nearly positive that the boss man would give him some shitty busy work or something. The fact that the director had said nothing about Nat's absence forced Barton to believe he had a more subtle dig coming his way. He'd even hung by the room a minute longer than he had to, giving Fury every opportunity to execute what he had planned. Apparently, there was nothing. When he'd come back, she quickly turned off The Price is Right and waved him over. He recollected the events expertly, leaving out nothing of importance. She was enthralled. When he got to the bit about the party, she was appropriately suspicious.

"Stark must have really lobbied for this to get you on board. I'm surprised you're not yelling about it." She'd opened his window and a light breeze floated in, making sure they were the perfect temperature, if a bit chilly to warrant being close.

"He made some fair points. Besides-I can't think of anything better. Can you?"

"God, I hope so."

"You're welcome to try. I've been wracking my brain. Tony said something that really made sense to me, though. If we throw a victory party, Loki won't be able to keep away if he's still here. His pride spans alternate dimensions."

"When is it going to be? I mean, do we really want to get into this again so soon? We need time to regroup, I think."

"This weekend. You have to think, we don't want to give him time to regroup."

She pursed her lips, suddenly wishing the TV was still on so she would have something to look at and distract herself.

"Do you believe Thor's story or not?" He pressed.

"I want to. I don't see why he would lie. He wasn't at the meeting?"

"No."

"Hmm. Do we have to go to thing?"

Barton laughed. "I think we should."

"Alright," she nestled into his arms, brain busy with scrambled thoughts. "I've got this killer dress I've been dying to wear, anyway."

In the conference room, Darla was sitting and listening to Fury debate back and forth about the benefits and utter ridiculousness of Tony's plan. He never completed a thought. Not out loud, at least. His sentences would halt about three quarters of the way through, and he'd start an entirely new one after a pause, capital letter and all. Darla couldn't weigh in, nor did she feel comfortable doing so without others' opinions in the mix. The Avengers had all dispersed once the meeting was over.

"Right?" Fury asked and she nodded at him, only half paying attention. "Oh, am I boring you?"

"No! I, uhh-"

"That's okay, I'm boring me, too. Go do something else."

"Like what?"

"Like what, indeed."

He'd told her earlier to follow her gut. Right now, her gut wanted to go home and sleep. That didn't feel like an appropriate option. She wanted to impress her boss by being bold, confident and strong, like she had the day before, but about what, exactly? Yesterday there had been outlandish circumstances that would likely never be replicated in the exact same way. Now, there was nothing for her to fight for or against. Plus, if she was itching to impress him, and that was her only goal, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of his message anyway? She thought in circles until she was physically dizzy.

Fury saw her swimming in a pool of uncertainty and made way to ground her, at least a little bit. He didn't want to coddle her, but she responded best to positive reinforcement. "I'm glad you spoke your mind in the meeting," he said, "that's a tough group to get a word in around."

"Thank you, sir."

"Of course you're invited to this shindig, if it ends up happening."

"Oh?" She had assumed she wouldn't be.

"Of course! You've earned it. Showing initiative is important."

"Will other agents be there?"

"Probably."

She bit her lower lip, and he watched the familiar nervousness come over her in gentle waves. He waited patiently for her to spit out her thought, and it took a minute for her to gather the nerve. "You don't believe Thor, do you?"

"I'd like to. No matter how much I love to catch the bad guy, I should be glad a member of my team was able to do it without my input. But at the same time-how can I trust him when he kept it all from me? I sure as hell can't get that lug to wear a badge. I guess I don't really trust anyone. It's my job to be suspicious. And yeah it must be frustrating to those around me, hell it's frustrating to me too. I think they forget that I'm a human sometimes, and I make mistakes. Like you said about Thor and his cape. With me it's the eye patch."

His honesty took her by surprise, and she found herself speechless in the midst of it. If anything, her zeal to impress him only increased.

"Why don't you help Stark with the party planning? He's got the money but I'm fairly sure he has no idea how to organize a soiree."

"Right, well, I don't really know if I'll be good at that either."

"Let's see. Maybe it's a secret talent of yours."

Now it felt a bit like he was trying to get rid of her. She'd never felt any sudden urge to plan a party, or even to attend one, but she was at the very least excited to part from Fury. She'd spent so much time with him today that it was starting to wear her down. His attitude, while refreshingly lenient, was hard for her to cope with as she'd come into work today expecting the worst. She felt she deserved to be punished, for losing her phone on the surface, and for all the other things she'd done wrong and lied about that he didn't have knowledge of. Instead, she was receiving special treatment. She was on a first name basis with the boss-though she would never dare to call him Nick-and had been pulled from her service to participate in top-security-clearance-only meetings with a group of superheroes. Now she was asked to plan a party with intimidating, snarky billionaire Tony Stark. She stopped herself before standing. Was she sure this wasn't all a dream? Maybe Loki had cast the same spell he had on Jane and she was confusing dreams with reality, naively believing it could all be true.

"Do you know where he is?" She asked as a test. If Fury knew exactly where he was in the entire building, without checking or asking, her suspicions would continue.

"He's probably in the lab, but I'm not positive."

"Where is the lab?"

He gave her specific directions, which she recited in her head, erasing steps from the mantra as she took them. Get on the K Elevator, check. Turn right at the mosaic, check. She could see the impressive space from the end of the hallway it resided in. It took up an entire floor, with glass panels in the hallway so she could look in and watch them work. A handful of assistants were puttering around in there with test tubes and beakers, but no faces she recognized. It had two doors, one for each side, and there seemed to be no one at all working in the right hand side, which was filled with complicated technology and tall monitors. The technicians on the other side noticed her looking and whispered to each other. She averted her gaze and came upon the doors-one for each section. She glanced at the left side and saw the workers still watching her, her cheeks grew hot. She slid her ID badge over the sensor by the right door, and it flashed red, denying her entry. Another glance back at the techs. A girl with a long, blonde ponytail was coming her way now. Darla tried her ID badge again, but it flashed red over and over, taunting her.

Ponytail, whose name badge read Marista, flung open the door on her side of the lab. "What are you doing up here?"

"I'm looking for someone," she said.

"Who?"

"I don't think he's here," Darla looked around the right side again. She thought that saying she was looking for Tony Stark would make her sound like she was trying to get his autograph, and there was little chance this already peeved woman would help her. The fact that Fury sent her would sound like a lie out loud, especially with her cautious, wavering voice behind it.

"You shouldn't be up here," Marista examined Darla's SHIELD jumpsuit. "What are you, surveillance? Only lab techs and scientists are allowed up here."

"I'm just looking for someone," she took a step back, and the hand extending her name badge out off its retractable line brushed it up against the sensor again. An alarm began to sound, high pitched and deafening. Everyone covered their ears.

Marista was scowling. She shouted back into her lab, "Does anyone know how to turn that thing off?!" Her workmates looked befuddled and useless. She glared at Darla. "Great." She pulled out her cell phone and stormed back into her lab, the glass door clanging shut behind her.

The door to the right lab opened, and Bruce stepped out into the hall. He swiped his own badge, out of his pocket, over the sensor and the alarm stopped. "Marista!" He called across the hallway and through the glass. She looked up, shocked, as though they'd never interacted before. They had, but she was surprised that he knew her name. "It's fine! Thank you!"

She put her phone away and waved feebly at him, returning to her work, dejected.

"What are you doing up here?" Bruce was slightly agitated with Darla for startling him out of a nap.

"Director Fury wanted me to help Tony, ah, Mr. Stark, with the party planning."

"Call him Tony. I don't know why, but it's a little creepy the other way. Anyway, he's not with me, but I get why Nick sent you here. I do and I don't. He could have asked Tony for his location over the walkie, but he didn't. I know it's not really a walkie talkie but that feels a lot more natural to me than saying headset, don't ask me to elaborate. I just woke up."

"Oh my god, I woke you up with a crazy loud alarm, oh god, oh god, I'm sorry." She looked away from him and ended up looking back into the left lab, meeting the gazes of curious onlookers wondering how a surveillance agent knew Dr. Banner-Marista included.

"It's alright," he looked where she was looking, "why don't you come in for a minute? I'll help you figure this out." He led her into his lab. Whatever worries she had about the busy bodies across the way melted into placid nothingness at the sheer impossibility of the things in front of her. Robots and lasers and holograms-more than she could process. Handfuls upon fistfuls of things she could never begin to understand. Things it would take her years of schooling just to study. She felt, instantly, very stupid. "That Marista is pretty abrasive, huh?" He tried to distract her from how overwhelming it all was.

"A little bit, yeah."

They sat on a pair of stools by an average-looking lab table. "Why did Director Fury ask you to help Tony?"

"I guess he thinks I'm good at something, but I don't know what. I guess this is to see if my secret talent is party planning."

"Do you think that's what it is?" He fought back a smile, finding the entire thing ridiculous.

"Well, no," she laughed, and he did too. "Good to start crossing things off, I guess."

"Do you have any other ideas? About what you might be good at, I mean?"

She thought about this for a heavy minute. "Being quiet, maybe. Or staying out of the way." This statement made Bruce profoundly sad for her.

He was a sensitive man, in tune with his emotions and aware of the feelings of others. It didn't make him an expert at consoling. It definitely didn't make him a licensed therapist. Though he could recognize that there were unresolved issues floating around her brain, preventing her from being confident and self-assured, he was in no position to help her get to the bottom of it all. Because when he thought about it, he then wondered if she would even want his help-in a train of thought that was more similar to the way Darla operated than he could have predicted.

Neither of them knew what to say next.

"Wouldn't it be funny if my talent was surveillance?" She managed to break the tension with a thought she'd been toying with all morning.

"I don't think that's it," he muttered a bit too seriously, then adding, "I mean, you didn't even notice I was in here."

"Right," she laughed politely.

"Oh, here," he abruptly reached toward her to take her badge, and she leaned away from him out of pure reflex. "Ah, I'm not going to hurt you," he narrowed his eyes, slightly offended but mostly amused by how jumpy she was. She straightened her back and he unhooked her badge from her collar. His fingers brushed her chin as he drew them back, and she locked eyes with him cautiously, wondering if he'd noticed. He set the badge down on the lab table and the surface sprung to life as a touchscreen. He pressed a few buttons and her badge was scanned. "Now you can get in here without tripping the alarm." He handed it back to her.

"Wow, that's great, thank you!"

"Yeah, no problem. Let's track Tony down."

Elsewhere

The train stopped at last and Loki and Eve were able to set foot on solid ground, finally at their destination. She had expected him to pout and be miserable about the fact that he had to travel at all, but there hadn't been a single moment of unpleasantness. They went to a casual restaurant within minutes of their arrival, ordering and devouring enough food for three people.

"Stop giving her scraps," Loki said. "She's going to get fat." He was now so used to casting the aura that made everyone around them alright with a dog being places it shouldn't be. It ran on in the back of his mind, always present.

"So?" Eve gave Sasha two more hunks of grilled chicken off her plate. "She deserves it, she's had a long day."

"We all have."

Eve picked up another piece of chicken, but this time she put it up to Loki's mouth. He hesitated, tempted to be a spoil sport, but eventually nipped it out of her fingers. "It's funny," she said, "I was so exhausted on the train, but now I feel like I could run a marathon."

"Let's not."

"Right, let's not."

"What would you like to do instead?"

Eve's eyes lit up. "Can we go to the beach?"

"I don't see why not."

They walked down the street toward the sound of the ocean. It called out to Eve, a beacon. They managed to get turned around nonetheless. "We should ask for directions."

"Okay."

"I guess that you should. I can't speak Spanish. Wait-you can speak Spanish?" He had ordered all their food fluently. "Why? How?"

"I speak All-Tongue. Here," he stood in front of her and put his fingers on her temples. Much like when she'd received The Sight from him, a hot, white line crossed from one edge of her brain to the other. "Go ask for directions now."

She spotted a man standing on a corner nearby and went up to him. "Hello," she said, and it came out in English. She felt like a fool.

"Hello," said the man.

"Oh, you speak English?" She was elated.

"No, I never learned it."

"But-"

Loki jumped in. "Can you tell us how to get to the beach?"

The man pointed down the street to the left of them and said, "Just go straight. Can't miss it."

They walked away from him. Eve felt a little silly. "Oh." It clicked. "I guess it wouldn't make sense for me to speak Spanish and also hear in Spanish, a language I don't understand." She was embarrassed, and thought he must think she was dumb. She couldn't comprehend how it worked, couldn't wrap her mind around it at all. Just knowing that it was magic didn't satisfy her.

He trailed a few paces behind her and she stopped, gazing back. He thought about how she was so scared to make mistakes, how she was anxious to try new things. Not in a normal way, not in an average new-things-are-scary way. Anything departing from her routine was sinful and unallowed. Now that her life had taken the shape of an abstract work of art, now that freedom was ahead of her in all directions, now that she could go to the beach in the middle of the night if that was what her heart desired-she was terrified. Her body hadn't sunk into it yet, no. But it would. How long could she be in denial? How long could she pretend it was all alright? She was a ticking time bomb, and he had lit her fuse.

The beach was amazing. Flawless and not deserted. The sounds and the smells relaxed them both right away. Loki approached a young couple and convinced them to give up their towels. The sand was cool on their feet and the wind coming off the water produced in their bodies an icy chill. He heated the towels to the temperature of sunburnt sand.

Sasha was having the most fun out of the three of them, yipping and running and demanding to be played with. She brought them small hunks of driftwood, shells and on one frightful occasion, a crab that pinched Eve's pinky finger in fright. Loki levitated and tossed Sasha's new toys for her, slowly teaching her the concept of fetch.

"Let's get closer to the water," Eve suggested, staring dreamily at the waves.

Their towels slid down toward the tide like shoes on a freshly waxed floor. Eve giggled into her hands and for the first time in a decade felt giddy like a child.

Sasha tired herself out and curled up in Eve's lap, smiling in her sleep. "Where are we going to stay?" Eve asked. It was something she'd been fighting back asking, trying not to steal from the mood of it all. At the end of the day, they still needed a place to rest their heads. She never worried for a moment that Loki couldn't provide for her, he could do all that and more, but she needed a plan.

"My god, woman," his tone was light but his point was grounded in reality, heavy like a stone. "You are addicted to planning."

"I am not!"

"You are. In fact, I'm worried about you."

"Stop that. I'm plenty spontaneous! We're at the beach in the middle of the night."

"You decided you wanted to come straight to the beach while we were on the train. The first train."

She hung her head a bit. "Shouldn't you be saving your energy instead of wasting it reading my mind?"

"Being in your head is like living in an abacus. You're always calculating. Doesn't it exhaust you?"

"Don't do that anymore."

"You can't exactly stop me…"

Overall, he was right. Though she had the emotional baggage to back up her over planning issue, that didn't feel like an appropriate excuse. It didn't feel like the sort of thing she needed an excuse for, at least she never had before. Planning was what kept her life running smoothly. It kept her bills paid, her security in tact. Still, she could see the validity in his concern. He'd brought her to a land with no bills and no security to maintain. Could she exist without structure? She was with a man who threw a bus into a building on a whim, for a plan that hadn't even worked the way he'd intended. Ignoring the fact that she couldn't physically throw a bus into a bakery-could she ever be the type who would?

She watched the tide roll in and out, in and out, thinking about what to say. There it was again, though, her need to control anything and everything. What she said next had to satisfy both her desire to defend herself and steer the conversation toward a topic she would enjoy discussing instead. But why? In what felt like a flash of brilliance, she realized she didn't have to say anything at all. She set Sasha down on the sand, where she let out a sleepy wheeze and kept snoozing. Then she stripped down to her underwear and sprinted into the ocean.

The water resisted her and she couldn't maintain her speed, so she plunged herself into it, ignoring the cold. She found herself deep enough that she couldn't touch the sand and keep her head above the surface. Feeling peaceful, she tread where she was. The dark water was scarier than she'd anticipated, but the exhilaration of what she'd done fought back thoughts of sharks and eels. "Are you coming?" She called to the beach.

"No, thank you," he said.

"My god, man," she enthused, "you must be addicted to being dry!"

This got a laugh out of him. "Isn't it freezing?"

Now that he'd mentioned it- "Oh, yes. Afraid of the cold?"

If only she knew just how little he feared the cold. This was enough to persuade him to join her. He left all clothes but his underwear in a pile by the dog and jogged into the salty, smooth waves. He broke into a swim and submerged himself for a long minute, eventually creeping up on her feet and snatching an ankle to pull her under.

They broke through the surface in the same moment, laughing. She hit him on the chest with a wet smack. His hair had a blinding white stripe from the moon and clung to his face and neck, saturated.

Her smile was honest. Actual. It spread up through her eyes, cheeks and forehead. Below them, he made the shells in the sand glow like rubbery, pastel nightlights. It was so beautiful it looked fake, a painting underneath their dangling, suspended bodies. It was something that could never be real if she hadn't met him. He kissed her perfect smile and thought maybe, just maybe, he had nothing to worry about.