A/N: First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has read the story so far. Special thanks go to those who followed, favorited and/or reviewed.

I took myself by surprise with this fic. I had the idea for a while now, but I didn't think I was going to write it, and apparently I did. I have a general plan for it and it's quite detailed, but writing this chapter it became painfully clear that my plan lacks details. So if you have any ideas or requests for things you would like to see in this fic, don't hesitate to say so. I would be grateful for any idea even if I don't end up using it.

Business and gratitude aside, I humbly present today's chapter!

"You son of a bitch! You goddamn son of a bitch!"

"Mommy wants me to go. Do you want me to go, too?"

"Get away from her! Get away from her right now!"

"Dad, what are you doing here?"

"Dad, stop!"

"Where is he, what have you done with him?"

"No, please, please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, just let me out of here, please!"

"Idiot! You goddamn idiot! You're so STUPID, Jessica!"

"Just leave me alone!"

Jess woke up crying. She was used to the nightmares, but for some reason this one felt worse than those she had when she was with Lawrence. Maybe it was because usually the nightmares weren't much different from real life, but now there was a shocking contrast between the two.

In real life, she was sitting up in an expensive looking queen bed in a spare bedroom in the Avengers Tower, crying.

In her nightmares, everything used to be real, too. She stopped having nightmares about imaginary fears when she met real horrors. Now she just dreamed memories, memories she wanted to keep well-hidden in parts of her brain too deep to be reached.

When Jess woke up, even though she knew she was safe and that her father could no longer harm her, she still felt the taste of fear in every fiber of her existence, bitter and disgusting. It made her feel sick, and it wasn't just the fear. The fact that the fear had to be there in the first place was just as bad. She was telling the truth the first time she talked to Steve: she knew exactly how shitty her situation was. She was very well aware that she was going to have a tough time adjusting to normal life now that she was out of the monster's claws. She just really didn't want to.

It's because I'm naturally lazy and I don't want to have to work for anything, thought Jess in an attempt to cling onto her sense of humor. But it was all but hopeless. Humor and sarcasm were excellent for self defense mechanisms, but at three in the morning it was a bit difficult extracting the funny bits from difficult situations.

And as she sat there in the dark, all the horrors she managed not to think of during the day came flooding her brain as she knew all along would happen eventually. The memories she refused to think of during the day made her want to scream, and nearly worse were the thoughts and worries her own mind came up with. Jess had no idea what was going to happen to her after the questioning at SHIELD, and that scared the life out of her. She didn't know how her friends were going to find out she was alive, and she knew she made them suffer and the guilt was overwhelming. She didn't want to think about any of that before, and she didn't want to now. All she wanted was a distraction. She just needed to stop crying first, which was less easy than she hoped.

You're safe now, she thought fiercely. You're safe, you're safe, you're safe… She's lost track of how many times that thought desperately repeated itself in her head, but eventually it seemed to do the trick, or maybe it was just the time passing. "JARVIS?" she asked hesitantly after several minutes, her voice frustratingly weak and raw and pathetic. She stopped crying, but her breathing wasn't quite right yet. She didn't think she could wait much longer, though.

"Yes, Miss Cory?" replied the disembodied voice instantly from somewhere in the ceiling, seemingly oblivious to her distress.

"Is there anywhere I can find books?"

It was Bruce who found her, curled up on a sofa in the library with a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone at five thirty in the morning.

"Jess?"

She jumped, startled by his voice, and her head turned to him so fast he thought it must have hurt her neck. "Oh, hey, Bruce," she said when she properly processed it was him.

"Morning," he said with a sheepish smile. "Sorry I scared you."

"It's morning?" asked Jess with a confused frown.

"Sort of. I mean, it's five thirty."

"Oh," said Jess in a tone of surprise. "Huh. Why are you up at five thirty in the morning, anyway?"

"It's a yoga thing," explained Bruce. "I've got a whole program of when I'm supposed to wake up and go to sleep. It helps me stay calm." Jess scooted over on the couch and made room for him, and Bruce sat down tentatively. "What about you?"

"Um…" Jess hesitated. "I just got up in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep, so I asked JARVIS where Tony kept his books. You don't think he'd mind, do you?"

"He won't," Bruce assured her. "I am wondering why he has a Harry Potter book, though."

"He's got the whole series," reported Jess with a smile. "I checked."

"Right," said Bruce with a nod. "So, what you're trying to tell me is that you're a Potter nerd?"

"Yes," answered Jess immediately. "Dude, I'm the Potter nerd." She sighed. "God, I missed those books. I could really use them in the… well, there."

"Why?"

"Because Harry Potter is the ultimate comfort book," she said simply.

"Which one?"

"Any of them. Seriously, when the zombie apocalypse starts and everyone I know is either infected or dead and there is no hope for anything, while the other survivors look for stuff like food and tampons I'll just fight zombies in a Barnes & Noble to get to the right aisle."

Bruce chuckled. "Well, that's now two people in the Tower who have plans for what to do during the upcoming zombie apocalypse."

Jess grinned. "Seriously? Who else?"

"Clint once spent twenty five minutes explaining me with exact details how he's going to save the world someday soon, except I think he came up with it on the spot. He was drunk."

Jess laughed.

"Yeah, I think it involved stealing several scooters."

"I think I want to hear the whole twenty five minutes," Jess decided.

"I'm pretty sure Clint doesn't remember ever telling it," said Bruce. "He was pretty drunk. I mean, you don't want to ever get this drunk." He paused. "Well, actually, you're fifteen, so you don't want to get drunk at all."

Jess snorted. "Don't get drunk, kids," she joked.

Bruce smiled. "Really, though, don't," he said, just in case.

"Oh, please," said Jess. "The only reason I'd ever get drunk at all would probably be peer pressure, and you need a social life to be exposed to peer pressure. And anyway, I'm too smart to get drunk at this age." She added with a sigh, burying her nose back in her book.

"How many times have you read that already?" asked Bruce.

Jess shrugged. "A bunch. I stopped counting around sixth grade."

Shaking his head, Bruce decided he had better leave her be with her comfort book. He didn't say anything about the darkness beneath and inside her eyes.

By the time Jess put the book back onto its shelf it was nine in the morning, and the pit the nightmare left in her stomach was manageable. She still felt it and it still hurt if she thought too much about it, but it wasn't too much for her to handle. She's dealt with worse things.

She wandered around the Tower for a bit, wondering if she could find something to eat. That was another thing she's noticed – she found she didn't need as much food as she needed before the Incident. Her body must have gotten used to not eating much, she figured. It annoyed her, and she wasn't sure why. By all means she wasn't supposed to care about that. Other girls might have even enjoyed it. But she did care, and she didn't like it, and she thought it might have related directly to the little bit of independence and pride left in her, that part of her that didn't want to be in any way effected by the last ten months of her life, the part of her that knew with a bitter certainty that it lost but didn't really want to accept it.

It was the noise that drew her closer. She didn't usually like noise. Sometimes she went as far as hating it. But after six hours on her own (except for the few minutes with Bruce), there was something almost magical about it. It felt like life. Life was something she's missed terribly.

What she saw when she walked into the dining room (which was conveniently right next to the kitchen) was absolutely ridiculous.

When people said the Avengers they usually said it with awe, appreciation and the occasional deeply impressed curse word. When it was made public (or rather, leaked to the press) that the Avengers were all taking residence in the building formerly known as the Stark Tower, most people, particularly grown-ups, immediately assumed they were going to be extremely professional and serious with each other and that considering the size of the place they would be almost completely separated when they weren't working. Naturally, some people disagreed and came up with the most hilarious scenarios, which Jess always found amusing, but she found the more popular idea likelier and thought the grown-ups, as boring as they were about it, were probably right.

Now she knew with a calm kind of certainty just how wrong she was.

Nothing said "Your life is a fucking mess" like a group of superheroes eating breakfast together, earning exasperated glances from Pepper and Natasha.

Nothing.

Because Anthony freaking Stark was sitting there eating some colorful kind of cereal, like those she never got near even when she was little because they were practically poison, and Bruce's pancakes were drowned in chocolate, and the God of Lightning was eating pop tarts. Clint had gotten blueberry muffin crumbs all over the table and there was something just a little bit spectacular about seeing Captain America's bed hair, which was, by the way, completely fantastic.

"Jess!" Pepper called with a wide smile when she noticed her, causing the heads of everyone else to turn her way. "Come join us. Hungry?"

Jess smiled nervously. "Yeah," she murmured, sitting in a chair Tony pushed her way.

"Well, you can help yourself to whatever you want," said Pepper. "God knows the boys are eating enough as it is."

Tony made a whining sound while Steve smiled at her joke. There was something about that simple and beautiful dynamic that made her almost forget where she was, and why. Just a simple jest revealed how the Avengers really were like a kind of a family, even if it was a very dysfunctional one. Still more functional than mine, thought Jess, but it wasn't a bitter thought. It was just her own brand of dark humor, which she's had since she learned to use sarcasm (which was fairly early), found again at last.

"Did you sleep okay?" asked Pepper casually, spreading butter over her toast, as Jess loaded a pancake onto her plate.

"Uh-huh," said Jess in a noncommittal sort of way, deliberately avoiding looking at Bruce. She could feel his eyes on her, just for a moment, but he didn't say anything, for which she was grateful. However, she forgot about Bruce entirely when she bit into the pancake. Last night's pizza was a complete shock and had such a vivid taste to it Jess had wondered if she was going to burst into tears. It was a different kind of shock now. Pizza was pizza. Pancakes were sweet.

"Holy shit, who made those?" she asked.

"I did," said Clint, raising his hand.

"Well, they're amazing," Jess told him sincerely.

Clint leaned back in his chair and gave a not-so-humble shrug. "I like anyone who likes my pancakes," he said nonchalantly, and Jess grinned. She poured herself a glass of orange juice as well, and it tasted nothing like oranges in that unhealthy industrial way she missed so much.

And then Tony dropped the real bomb.

"Coffee, anyone?"

"Oh my god, yes," Jess blurted out without even having to think about it.

"Cream? Sugar?"

"Just cream, thanks," she said with a smile, and Tony cocked an eyebrow.

"No sugar? Really?" he asked. "Aren't you too young for that?"

"I liked sugarless coffee since I was twelve," Jess countered.

"And that was, what, last month?"

"Lucky for you, no," said Jess. "Trust me, you don't want to have met twelve year old me."

Tony stopped everything he was doing and looked her in the eyes. "No."

"Yes," she said with an amount of embarrassment to her tone.

"Jessica Cory, tell me you did not have a seventh grade emo phase."

"I did, spectacularly so," she admitted. "And we've been through this, it's Jess."

Tony waved her off absent-mindedly and handed her a steaming mug of fresh, beautiful coffee. The first sip stung her tongue, but the warm, rich taste seemed to fill her body and mind alike and her smile turned into a grin.

And that was something. Because even if she woke up crying and read comfort books for six hours straight, things like the seventh grade emo phase still made her cringe and a good coffee still made things better.

It was when comfort books stopped being comforting, and when she stopped wanting to punch her twelve year old self, and when coffee stopped making a difference, Jess decided, that she would have to start really worrying.

Jess strolled around the Tower aimlessly. Her feet were still a little sore, but she could hardly feel the burns by now. A quick inspection of her arms in the bathroom mirror earlier showed there would probably be some scarring, but they weren't too bad, all things considered. They weren't even obvious enough for her to avoid exposing her arms. But her book was finished (too quickly in her opinion) and she didn't want to go on the internet. There was nothing there for her except spoilers for stuff she's missed and a lot of guilt, even if things weren't her fault. She still had a significant number of TV shows to catch up on, which normally would have been a priority, but she couldn't be bothered to watch anything. She was far too restless. She nearly grabbed her crayon again before remembering she didn't want to, so she took to walking around instead.

Eventually she found a room that caught her eye.

It was a music room, and it was very well-equipped. A piano, a set of drums and several different types of guitars were only a few of the instruments in it. "Hey, JARVIS?" she called out. "Who plays these?"

"Mr. Stark plays the piano on occasion," JARVIS told her. "The rest of the instruments are not generally used."

"Huh," she muttered. If that was true, she didn't suppose anyone would mind her trying to play for a little. It's been a long time since she last did, but she didn't think she forgot. Hesitantly, she grabbed a black electric guitar from a stand, plugged it in and sat on a red stool just next to the stand. She glanced at the door. She closed it when she walked inside, but she wasn't sure whether or not the room was soundproof. She didn't know if she cared about anyone hearing, but she wanted to avoid it in case she did. However, it looked like there wasn't much to be done about it.

Jess was never magnificently talented with a guitar or with music in general. She wasn't horrible, but she wasn't good, either. It was the same with her singing; her voice wasn't painful to hear, just like it wasn't extraordinarily pleasant.

She didn't sing now. She didn't want anyone to come in while she was, and she had a vague feeling that after going so long without singing she would sound similar to a mating owl. She played The House of the Rising Sun, not because it was a favorite (it wasn't really her type), but just because it was a fun piece to play, and not particularly difficult. Plus she couldn't think of anything else she remembered by heart at the moment.

And at some point as she strummed, she stopped thinking about what she was doing. She stopped thinking about her dream and about the Incident and about what followed. She just stopped thinking and started feeling.

And for once, she didn't feel the bad.

She felt the good. She felt the true meaning of her father getting locked up and taken away from her. She felt the true meaning of the Avengers trusting her not to be evil like Lawrence. She felt that she was free, for the first time in far too long.

She stopped playing before she was finished. Before she really knew what she was doing, she put the guitar back onto its stand, left the music room and took the elevator back to her bedroom. She found a blank notebook and a pen in one of the drawers. She paused for a moment, and then shoved her crayon into the drawer before shutting it. She opened the notebook, clicked the pen and wrote.

She wrote a song, which was odd as she hardly ever wrote songs. In fact the only times she did were when she was working on a project with her best friend, Amy, or when the creative writing club back at school required it. She had almost forgotten what writing on paper felt like; she has grown so accustomed to the crayons on the walls, that were clumsy and difficult and everything but this. She wrote of what she went through, except not really, in a very vague way – vague enough to allow the reader to adjust the meaning of the song so that it fits to their own personal problems, something she considered to be of utmost importance with nearly everything she wrote. She barely paused to think, until her wrist hurt too much for her to continue.

And then she stopped. The song wasn't an especially good one, but that didn't matter. An idea settled in her brain, growing and evolving until it was so real she could almost touch it. She flipped through the notebook's pages until she hit the last one. And on that last page she wrote an untitled list:

Steve: "He's alive. But he's unconscious. We're going to take him in."

Tony: "Hey, come in. Walking again?"

Bruce: "Are you alright?"

Natasha: "What's your name?"

Thor: "You look well. Would you like to sit with us?"

Clint: "I didn't know you arrived, how are you doing?"

Pepper: "Hi, I'm Pepper Potts, but just call me Pepper."

Coulson: "Miss Cory, I'm Agent Coulson. Please come with me."

Jess looked down at the list and felt something warm in her chest and she knew she was feeling hope. Under the list, in gently written letters, she added two more words:

Thank you.

She wasn't sure why she wrote down the first words they've all said to her. She just felt like it needed to be remembered. The people she now trusted were on that list, and she wanted to remember how that trust first came to be.

Jess thought she might never get used to just how unprofessional things were in the Avengers Tower. The Avengers seemed much more like a family than a team with the way they bickered over domestic things such as "Who the hell ate my Skittles?" and "I swear to god, Clint, if I have to see any more of your dirty laundry around this place I am kicking you out to live on the goddamn street", and something about the dynamics in the Tower made Jess happy, though she wasn't sure who for. One of the things that made it clear for Jess the Avengers were long past being just coworkers was the fact that they had Wednesday movie nights.

They were all spread along sofas and couches in the lounge, bowls of popcorn settled in strategically chosen spots, when Jess found them.

"I don't know if I've been here long enough to ask," she admitted after taking a long look at the Avengers acting like her friends have in slumber parties.

"It's movie night," Natasha informed her. "Wanna join us?"

"Sure," said Jess with a shrug, wondering what the last movie she saw was.

"I vote for American Pie," said Tony.

"Stark, there are children present," Natasha reminded him sternly, and Jess considered confessing to have seen the movie with Amy and Charlie. "Nothing R rated." Tony and Clint both groaned loudly. "Alright, nothing rightfully R rated."

"Men in Black," suggested Steve.

"No thanks," said Bruce. "That's a little bit too much sci-fi for me."

"Dude, your life is sci-fi," said Tony.

"Well, exactly. I know what sci-fi actually looks like now, so anything else looks like a cheap attempt at it. Besides, my life and my movies shouldn't share genres."

"Fair enough," Steve deemed. "Anyone else got any ideas?"

"Jess," said Tony. "What do you wanna watch?"

Jess looked at him, startled. "You're asking me?"

"Is there another Jess here? Yes, I'm asking you. Just no chick flicks please."

Jess pulled a disgusted face. "Ew, of course not. But I really don't think you should let me choose."

"Why, you have that bad a taste?" asked Clint with a teasing smile.

Jess snorted. "No. I have kickass taste. But when I'm forced to make a decision for more than one person I tend to make a really crappy decision."

"Well, we won't hold any effects your kickass movies might have against you," Tony told her. "Now pick a movie."

Jess rolled her eyes. "Er, Zombieland?" she suggested uncertainly.

"What is Zombieland?" asked Thor.

"An awesome movie," Natasha said. "Very kickass, a respectable choice, we're watching it."

And that was how Jess Cory ended up watching Zombieland with Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow, and it was the best Zombieland experience she's ever had (and she had quite a bit). It was a harmless movie, and that was one of the things Jess loved about it. It wasn't very sophisticated, but it didn't make her think about stuff she didn't want to think about in the wrong light and instead made her think about the possibilities of healing and finding the right people with whom to heal. And as she watched the stupidly hilarious comedy, she regretted only staying in the Avengers Tower for five more days.

"Okay, I've got a question," Jess said when the movie was over. "Officially – what is your job, exactly?"

"We're SHIELD agents," said Natasha. "Some of us are, anyway. Tony and Bruce are technically consultants, and Thor…" she paused and turned to glance at Thor. "What is your job?"

Thor scratched his head thoughtfully. Eventually he said slowly and uncertainly, "I… don't know."

"But we all definitely work for SHIELD," said Tony unhelpfully.

Jess shook her head disbelievingly. "You know, people outside this Tower – normal people – they seem to think you're all very professional. Should I start telling them they're wrong or am I missing something?"

"Spread the word," said Tony with a dramatic hand gesture and a shrug.

"Anything else?" asked Steve with a smile.

"Yes, actually," admitted Jess. "This one is gonna be just me being really, really, pathetically excited about the ideas of superheroes –"

"Now there's a word you shouldn't use around Tony," joked Bruce.

"It's true," said Tony indifferently. "You might not have noticed, but apparently my ego is getting big."

Jess smiled. "Oh, really?"

"So they say."

"I see."

"Quit distracting her," Thor told Tony and looked at Jess. "What is it you wish to know?"

She bit her lip and leaned back on the couch. "What was the most ridiculous thing that ever happened on a mission?"

"Oh, man," laughed Clint.

"Individually or as part of the Avengers?" asked Steve.

"Both work," replied Jess. "It sounds like there are some properly hilarious stories in this business."

As it turned out, Jess's assumption was not wrong. She could fill a novel with the stories she heard that night, and that only if she chose the best ones. For all of them it would take at least two long ones. And she didn't think it was a mistake to think such novels would sell. She heard stories from New York, from Budapest, from Asgard, from the 40's and from countless other places around the globe. They just didn't seem to end. Eventually they were shooed out of the lounge and ordered to go to bed by Pepper, and even though practically everyone groaned and/or complained, no one really argued with her. Jess had a feeling no one argued with Pepper about little things except maybe Tony.

That night, Jess didn't dream about anything.

It was the best sleep she's had in ten months.

It was the fourth day since Jess first stepped into the Avengers Tower, and Tony was bored.

Not that he didn't have anything to do. He had quite a lot of work that needed to be completed and he still had his new suit to finish, but he was procrastinating.

"Hey," said Jess, walking inside the workshop. "JARVIS said you called?"

"Yep," confirmed Tony. "You're just in time."

"In time for what?"

"Nothing, I was just bored," said Tony, shrugging. "Were you doing anything important?"

"You caught me in the middle of a very serious session of sitting and staring, actually," said Jess. "It was a very good one."

"Well, sorry for interrupting."

"I don't know if I can ever fully forgive you," sighed Jess.

"Everyone always says that," Tony disregarded her. "Wanna learn mechanics?"

"What, you wanna teach me?" asked Jess, surprised.

"Well, yes."

"Er, okay," murmured Jess.

Tony gave her a dark look. "Don't sound too excited."

"Sorry," she said. "It actually sounds really interesting, and I'd love to, I'm just not a very good student, so I don't know if you're going to like teaching me as much as you think."

"What do you mean 'you're not a good student'?" asked Tony with a frown.

Jess shrugged.

"No, seriously, what did you mean?" Tony persisted, his frown deepening.

"I just wasn't really good at school, that's all," Jess explained. "I'm pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to things I don't enjoy learning."

"Well, this you're gonna enjoy," Tony promised her. "Trust me; I'm better than the teachers at your school."

"I find that easy to believe, seeing as a large portion of my teachers are assholes."

Tony chuckled. "Rude," he pointed out.

"Yeah, maybe a little," agreed Jess with a smirk. "So, mechanics? Though I gotta warn you, I don't know jack."

"Good, that means no one ruined it for you yet."

So Tony still did the work he needed to do, so maybe it didn't count as real procrastination, but Jess was helping him out and it was fun, and if Jess's grins and laughs were anything to go by, she felt the same. It took her a while to really get into it, but the moment things started making sense to her it was like a spark has gotten the flame running in her. It was like she got the rhythm of a song and could now dance to it. And if living was to be compared to dancing all the way, Jess danced fast and mad and unstoppable. Neither Jess nor Tony danced, and when Tony shared his little analogy with her she laughed and said it was ridiculous, but when she stopped laughing there was something about her smile in the moment their eyes met that was so honest and serious, like she understood exactly what he meant. Like she felt amazed that it could be thought of her.

For a moment, Tony wanted to tell her not to, because he couldn't imagine that girl considered as anything but a fast, mad, unstoppable dancer, but he didn't because he was Tony and he didn't do sentimental and anyway they only knew each other for four days and weren't quite there yet.

But he thought that maybe it didn't need saying.

He thought that maybe when Jess understood what he really meant she understood the second part, too.

He thought that she was brilliant enough to.