Hey, look! I didn't take a month this time! Isn't that great? Man, I sure hope so.
I don't know if next chapter's gonna be up as soon since I've got a few tests coming up, but not making any promises, I think I'm picking up the pace a little bit. It's only fair, I think, seeing as I want to finish OHAM before me and you forget the entire plot.
Anyway, enjoy this chapter (I really hope you do since it was kind of a bitch to write), and thank you all for following, favoriting, reviewing and just reading and what not. If you can spare a few moments at the end and leave a review that'd be just peachy.
There are different sorts of bad times in this world. No one is safe from them, but most people are lucky enough to never meet the truly horrible face of the Earth. Those who are not as lucky can tell you that the nights are hard.
They can also tell you how hard it is to get close to somebody who had not seen as much as they have. They can tell you all about how bonding it can be to meet somebody with as much life experience. No matter who you are, it creates a nameless, unspoken connection that's near impossible to break.
So while Loki and Jess most certainly did not like each other, there was no denying they could understand certain truths about each other in a way no one else would ever be able to. They shared similarities, more than they could see at that point of their very slight familiarity. For instance, neither of them particularly liked the nights. As was stated before, the nights were somehow more difficult than the days, maybe because at night the darkness of the world becomes physical, or because there's nothing you can use to distract yourself when you're all alone trying to fall sleep.
Loki didn't sleep most nights. He found it easier to deal with. Physical exhaustion could be fought off and had several artificial solutions. Memories and feelings were more complicated to get rid of. He wouldn't even know where to begin.
Loki's lack of sleep created several extra hours a day in which he was forced to find ways to keep himself busy. His hideout was painfully plain, and there was only so long one could sit still and rake their brains trying to come up with an ingenious plan, and so it was the middle of Jess's first night in her new cell when he found himself staring aimlessly at the security cameras' footage.
The screens Jess had noticed earlier when first arriving to Loki's hideout were indeed the live feed from several security cameras that were placed in strategic places around the building. One outside fixed at the front doors, one in the entrance, one in each hallway, one in every main room and finally, one in the cell. Considering the utter lack of movement in all rooms and hallways but one, it was only natural for Loki's eye to be repeatedly drawn to the feed of the cell, where he could see Jess's sleeping form.
He wondered what it was like to easily sleep. He didn't even remember anymore. Those happy, or at least happier, days in Asgard seemed millennia away.
Of course, Loki had no way of knowing that his prisoner shared that certain difficulty with him. He hardly knew anything about her, really, and he couldn't help but feel curious about the way she spoke during their brief banter earlier. She was clearly more intelligent than he'd have expected a human her age to be, and handled the situation with admirable rationality. And the things she said…
There was something cryptic about her. She spoke like she had experience, and hinted at having a rather troubled past. Loki supposed he could just ask her. Judging by her quick replies before he assumed she wouldn't attempt to hide information about herself, or at least not all of it. Maybe she wasn't cryptic and Loki just didn't possess the knowledge required to understand her.
He was distracted from his pointless wondering by movement on one of the screens in front of him, his eyes automatically responding by readjusting their stare. Jess was thrashing in her sleep, a grimace plastered on her face and her hands clenched in fists. Loki couldn't tell for sure as the screen was too small and the footage quality too low, but he suspected her nails were digging into the skin of her palms. A nightmare, then. It wasn't really a surprise now that Loki thought about it. Nightmares the night of being kidnapped weren't an unreasonable response.
And still Loki wondered.
Jess could have easily been dreaming about something else entirely than this. She had mentioned child abuse, which was a well-known cause for post traumatic stress in humans, especially at such a young age. Her nightmare could also be a mixture of Loki and whatever the cause for her not as recent misfortune was. It could even be an entirely random night terror.
Again, he told himself he could simply ask. Jess being locked up in a cell left Loki in a powerful position over her which would not be so easily diminished. A few personal questions would do him no harm. If anything, they might even make Jess feel that her privacy is being violated, and that might either make her more or less docile. Loki could easily handle both outcomes. As clever as Jess was, she was just a mortal, and not even a fully-grown one. There was not much special about her when Loki pondered about it.
But in the meantime such thoughts were of no use. Jess was asleep, even if apparently not as peacefully as Loki had initially thought, and he couldn't allow himself to seem curious. Jess could mistake it for vulnerability, or possibly worse, for caring.
Loki sat and watched the screens with a passive expression, not moving even as Jess woke in her cell, not even when she curled up around herself and cried.
Yet there was no denying he was being awfully still, and there was no denying the strange impulse he felt to clench his hand into a fist at the sight of the child falling apart.
"Tony."
Steve's tone was more or less patient, but there was annoyance hinting at its edges that Tony did not appreciate. He gracefully ignored the super soldier and continued to walk in large, hurried strides through the Tower.
"Tony, wait," repeated Steve, catching up with Tony and grabbing his arm, pulling Tony to face him. Tony gave him his best scowl in return. "It's only been one night," said Steve, not minding Tony's expression. "You might be overreacting."
Tony exhaled irritably. "I'm not overreacting, Steve. In fact, I seem to be the only person in this Tower not reacting like an idiot."
Steve bit back the snappy comment on his tongue and proceeded. "Jess is a teenager," he reminded him. "Teenagers pull stunts like this all the time. She could just be at her friend's house."
"Yeah, cause Jess is just like every other kid her age," said Tony sarcastically.
"Just because she's not doesn't mean she can't do normal teenager things, Tony," Steve pointed out.
"Okay, fine, but Jess isn't really the kind of girl to just spontaneously not come home a whole night. She would've at least called. She's still tiptoeing around this whole adoption business. I doubt she's already comfortable enough to fight the system."
"Maybe her battery died," offered Steve innocently.
Tony rolled his eyes. "Rogers, please get used to modern times already, this is getting exhausting. Everybody's got chargers and practically everywhere has somewhere you can plug them into. Her battery didn't just die." He turned to walk off again, but once more Steve stopped him.
"Look, I get that you're worried about Jess," said Steve. "I'm worried about her, too. But going through her room and her personal things is a bad idea. She's still in recovery and she really wouldn't like it."
"You got a better idea?" snapped Tony. "Because right now I seem to be the only one trying to find Jess, and except for having JARVIS searching the whole damn city I don't know what else there is to do."
"So what, you think if you violate her privacy and break her trust you'd suddenly know where she is?" asked Steve.
"I don't know, alright?" Tony ran a hand through his already messy hair. He was tired. "There's nothing else I can do. Something's wrong, Steve. You know it, too."
Steve sighed. "Fine," he said reluctantly. "But we're just looking for a clue about where she might be. Anything that doesn't tell us that we don't even look at twice."
Tony nodded stiffly. He didn't dignify Steve with a response as he turned around and resumed the journey to Jess's bedroom, this time accompanied by one extra patriotic superhero.
They'd both been in Jess's bedroom before. Despite the age difference – and sometimes because of it – she nearly always made an interesting conversation partner, and things that were meant to be short questions or announcements such as the state of dinner often turned to full-length talks. It wasn't an unfamiliar environment to either of them.
And yet it was different now. Tony wasn't sure he was ever in Jess's room without her, and the stillness of it was oddly unsettling. It didn't look any different, exactly, but the absence of Jess felt too solid. Her room was her natural habitat, and seeing it empty felt like looking at an unoccupied picture frame. Tony forced the bad feeling of uncertainty away – they were already there, and there was no use getting all doubtful now.
Jess's desk was a mess. The computer sitting silently in the middle of it was the only constant, whereas everything else was always somewhere different. School notebooks and textbooks, pens, a calculator, a single pencil she used for math accompanied by an eraser and a ruler, and a book were all scattered across it, and Tony wondered how she even managed to fit all of that on one desk.
At the moment, all these objects were useless.
"What are we even looking for?" asked Steve uncomfortably.
Tony ignored him yet again. His eyes scanned the desk over once more, just in case, before thinking screw it and opening a drawer. He could practically feel Steve biting his tongue to avoid saying something, but he didn't care as he stared at the object inside the drawer, contemplating his next move.
Steve quickly caught on. "What is it?" he asked and joined Tony in front of the drawer, looking in. The moment he understood what he was looking at, his expression changed to match Tony's.
"We can't open that," said Steve quietly. "Jess has trust issues already, and she might never trust us or anyone else if she finds out we read that."
"Yeah," murmured Tony in agreement. "But I'd rather have her untrusting and angry than dead." Without allowing himself any more time to think about what he was doing, Tony reached into the drawer and pulled out the simple notebook that lay in it peacefully. Steve didn't try to stop him.
The notebook didn't look like much, but it was familiar to both Steve and Tony. It was not uncommon to find Jess half-buried in it with a pen when walking into her room, and they had learned to identify it as Jess's journal (She had always insisted it wasn't a diary, as diaries were for wimps who were in touch with their feelings). They only ever got glimpses of the outside of it. They never read anything inside. And to read it now, without Jess's permission… it felt like a violation.
But Tony simply didn't see a choice. He glanced at Steve one last time, and opened the journal.
The first page was a song. Tony wished he could stop and read it, but he kept flipping the pages in search of anything that might shed the slightest bit of light over Jess's whereabouts. He tried not to look too hard, mind flooded with the irrational hope that maybe if he just skimmed through the contents of the journal rather than carefully read it then maybe he wouldn't remember anything he shouldn't see, but it was a hard battle to win. Many of the pages were simple and as would be expected from any writer's journal – a little bit of poetry, story ideas, potential plots and character flaws. But some…
Tony thought back to when they had first encountered Jessica Cory, the scared, beaten child among ruins and dust, and to her holding cell. More specifically, to the walls of it. Prisoner, Jess had written then, in her madness of rage and grief, over and over again. Several of the pages in her journal reminded him of that now.
Unlike most pages, which were carefully filled out and used up until no space was left to write in, a seemingly random few were marked only with a few sentences, sometimes even just with one varying word. These pages made Tony's blood run cold.
Not my fault, said one of these pages. The sentence looked like it was written by someone in a hazy sort of state, like the pen wasn't being held correctly.
Your boldness stands alone among the wreck, said another. Somewhere in the back of his mind Tony registered the quote and the song the line was taken from. He had to struggle not to dwell on the rest of its lyrics.
Two down, one to go. That hit both Tony and Steve hard, at least as far as Tony could tell by the way Steve's shoulders seemed to tense up as he stood behind him. It wasn't hard to guess what Jess had meant by that; both her mother and brother were dead, leaving only herself to the mercilessness that was life. At this point, ignoring the blood-chilling implications became unarguably impossible. Tony felt his heart begin to beat harder in his chest as his mind raced with morbid possibilities of what Jess could have done to cause her sudden unexplainable disappearance.
Ungrateful liar, the pages further accused. Liar? Tony wondered. When the hell did Jess lie about anything? What is that girl hiding?
Stop.
Fire.
Burning.
Stop it.
Just STOP.
Flames.
STOP IT.
Tony's entire body was stiff when Steve knocked the journal out of his hands with a strong blow of his fist. It took him a moment to react, turning his head at Steve with a dazed expression.
"We've read enough," Steve growled.
"We haven't seen it all," said Tony quietly.
"We've seen more than we should have."
"There could still be some information there –"
"It's not worth interfering with her life like that!"
"Her life's worth more –"
"She didn't tell us for a reason, she doesn't want us to know –"
"To know what, that she's hurting? That she's in pain? We all knew that, Steve, since the moment we took her in. This is more than we thought we'd see, I get it, but it doesn't change the fact that we might find something in here to help us find Jess! And I'm willing to sacrifice her trust in me if it means possibly saving her from god knows what!"
Steve went quiet. His jaw was set and his eyes looked angry, but Tony could see his hesitation. Slowly, Tony moved to pick up the discarded journal from the floor, carefully eyeing Steve as he did. Steve made no move to stop him, so Tony opened the journal again and returned to flicking through the pages, this time away from Steve and hiding the contents from him. Steve didn't object to that, either.
Tony let his face betray nothing as he skimmed through Jess's soul, forcing his mind to forget it all the best he could. He reached the final page, and stopped.
Without a word or change of expression Tony handed the journal to Steve.
Steve frowned slightly, hesitantly reading the page that caught Tony's eye. As he read, he felt his heart sinking deeper and deeper in his chest.
The final page was an untitled list. It read the following:
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."
Fury: "Miss Cory, do you know why you're here?"
Below the list, in carefully written lettering, two words were written in black ink: Thank you. Under that, there was what appeared to be a title in the wrong place. Jess must have come up with it some time after creating it. Trust Page, she seemed to have called it.
Steve shut the journal. Neither of them said anything for a while, allowing each other's mind to race. They didn't understand the purpose of the Trust Page, not truly, but it was rather clear what it was. Steve wondered how the hell Jess even managed to remember everybody's first words to her. Then he thought about the fact that they were all on that list, even Coulson and Fury.
"We have to find her," said Steve quietly. "We have to find her soon."
A whole day went by with nothing. No news on Jess. No phone calls, no information from the police or SHIELD – nothing at all.
As it was, movie night was cancelled, without anyone having to point it out or refer to it at all. No one was really in the mood for a movie. They still all sat down in the lounge, however, in relative silence besides the occasional half-hearted attempts at conversation that were quickly dropped and pushed aside carelessly. The Avengers and Pepper sat in front of the giant TV screen without talking. The TV was off.
Until suddenly it wasn't.
The machine flickered to life unexpectedly, raising puzzled heads from all directions. It took them a moment to understand what they were seeing.
It seemed to be footage of an empty room in a place unknown to them all. For a few minutes, the room remained motionless.
"What's going on?" asked Pepper anxiously.
"Something's wrong," murmured Natasha. She and Pepper exchanged looks, Natasha's jaw set and eyes concerned.
Then their eyes were drawn to the screen once more by a combination of movement and sound.
Footsteps echoed across the unfamiliar room and a pair of feet entered the camera's view, visible until the knees. The person's legs were clad in jeans and dark boots. Then that person sat down on the floor, revealing their face.
It was Jess.
Tony rose to his feet in an instant, not even entirely realizing that he had.
"Oh my god," Pepper half gasped.
Everyone else remained stiffly silent.
"Hey, guys," said Jess from the screen awkwardly. She looked tired, and there was a faint bruise around her cheek. Her dark hair was matted and wild. "So, uh, this looks bad."
She bit the inside of her cheek momentarily, glancing at something beyond the camera they couldn't see. "Um, I can't see you all right now," she said, "but I know that you can see me. So I'm just gonna start off by saying that unfortunate circumstances aside, I'm okay. You're not going to like what you're about to hear and you might worry. Don't. I'm fine, I'm not even scared, don't be irrational about this –" Jess abruptly stopped, looking once again at something or someone behind the camera. "Yeah," she mumbled, as if responding to an unheard complaint. "I figured as much myself."
Jess took a deep breath, shutting her eyes momentarily before letting them open again. "That night I didn't come home… I was kidnapped," she informed them. "Again. I'm supposed to be some kind of safety insurance. I've already said that SHIELD doesn't care about one kid, but the message wasn't received well apparently." Another glance behind the camera. Jess swallowed before continuing. "Okay," she said. "I'd tell you who the person behind the camera is, but I'm not supposed to because that'd ruin the element of surprise. It's… a little pathetic."
This time a quiet growl could be heard, presumably coming from the person Jess had been silently communicating with. Whoever they were, they didn't like Jess's bold commentary. Tony wished she'd stop. He didn't expect the already existing bruise on her face would be her last if she kept talking the way she was.
"I need to get off now," said Jess quickly. "I'm being rude, I think. So to quickly summarize, it's not as bad as it looks and don't do anything stupid on my account. Bye for now." And as unceremoniously as it was, Jess rose to her feet and walked out of the camera's range. When the sound of her footsteps stopped, a new set of feet was heard. It sounded like leather and metal against the floor.
Thor recognized the black shoes first.
The others didn't take long to follow.
"Son of a bitch," cursed Tony before Loki's face even became visible.
"Hello," said Loki with a devilish grin to the camera. "Have you missed me?"
A/N: I hope no one's getting too used to Author's Notes at the end of the chapters, since those are not supposed to be a regular thing. I just wanted to let you know that the line your boldness stands alone among the wreck is from the song "Little Lion Man" by the amazingly talented Mumford & Sons. It's also the chapter's title since I'm not actually original. Oops.
See you all in chapter 9!