Stumbling about the empty corridors, of what should have been a bustling helicarrier, Kari did her best to keep welling tears from continuingly fuzzing up her sight before a door with a well-known sign came into view. Ducking into the men's bathroom, she marched into the first cubicle, slamming the door shut only to exit it a moment later having realised there was no toilet roll available. The second stall had proven just plain disgusting but by the fifth she had given up wrapping loo roll around the seat before locking herself inside and sitting down for a jolly good cry.
As she sobbed, body vibrating in rhythmic motions, the taste of salt mixed with chocolate cake washed over her cheeks seeming to find its way annoyingly to her tongue despite the consistent wiping motions she made with her palms. It was not so much the fact Loki had been rude to her, she came to realise, but something much worse. Being on asgard had left a peculiar stain on her, the kind you could never wash out, hope and dread bled into one thing. He had been right, she had returned to where she so longed to be for the past few years and come to find it wanting. It was not supposed to be this way. She was supposed to return home, be free at last and possibly been missed a little as well. The reality, however, was almost if not the complete opposite. Kari missed her grandfather, was being held as some sort of hostage by possibly the CIA and the only ones who had missed her were the estate agent wondering where the back rent was.
The hopelessness was exhausting and damn right irritating - if she was being completely honest with herself. Biting down on her forearm, Kari in took a deep meaningful breath before screaming with some frustration as hard as she could – the resulting sound being muffled and ringing in pitch as her foot collided with the locked door as if to add some emphasis to the lack of sound.
"Err, is everything all right in there?" A voice, low and tired but equally pleasant, called to her from the other side of the locked door. "You probably should have stayed clear away from the chilli. I know I did."
"What?" Kari released her teeth imprinted arm in order to stare at the graffiti covered door – apparently Laura from section nine was the girl to call.
"You're a woman?" The male voice sounded taken aback, dust covered black shoes dancing from left to right just insight from the lower opening of the cubicle.
"Last time I checked."
"Err…"
"I know it's the men's toilet but I couldn't find the… the stupid…" Kari suddenly burst into tears once more, realisation dawning on her abruptly that she always seemed to be in other people's way and at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Oh, you're the one that came with the crazy Norse god, Loki. Shouldn't you be…" A head appeared above her, the man in question straightening his glasses as he balanced atop the opposite toilet and leaned on the partitioning wall.
"Locked up?" She glared up at him, both humiliated at her tear streaked face and incensed at the dark haired, purple shirt wearing – probably gay – man's violation of her private space in his genders bathroom. "Right because existing is my ultimate crime. Why don't you go to hell? It's lovely this time of year. I aught to know, I just got back from there." Kari simmered down into a head shaking, thigh-squeezing appraisal of the floor. "Hello?" She looked back up when the man added nothing new to their conversation only to find he was gone. "Hey, look I uh… are you even there?" She stood unlocking the toilet door and peered out, in the midst of a lip biting session, only to snap it shut again upon seeing a guard urinating in the urinal across from her.
"Curly Sue!" A new male voice, cringe fully bright eyed and bushy tailed, corralled at her as she failed to find a reason to keep standing and sat back on the loo seat.
Kari drooped heavily onto her knees, arms from the elbow down dangling lifelessly around her perched calves as she exhaled with great deliberation, eyes closed tight. "The man with the rat on his face."
"Rat on my face? Oh this." Stark was hovering over the wall partition now, fiddling with his beard in a mock thoughtful manner as the woman below him sighed and continued to hide her face with her forearms. "I think it makes me look rugged and charming but to each their own." Stark disappeared from sight but thumped his closed fist along the cubicle wall to gain the occupants full attention. "Get up, lets go, quick, quick, you're starting to scare the agents. Hi there agent, err, you. Carry on, nothing to see here."
With a great hulking sigh, Kari took a well-folded line of tissue from the dispenser to her left and paused for a rather deliberate and loud nose blowing. As she finally plied herself away from her not so comfy sitting place, patting down the back of her gym pants to rid herself of cheap loo roll bobbles, she distanced herself from the mess she had made with a swift and latch snapping clatter. On the other side of her panic room awaited a distracted, bearded, megalomaniac with a see-through tablet in one hand and a pointless pen in the other. She had to take a second to eyebrow raise at his apparent interest in some sort of handheld game console before her eyes fluttered surreptitiously across the room landing on a new occupying male humming as he peed.
The atmosphere in the men's toilet rapidly turned a pinkish shade of awkward as the urinating agent turned his head upon the sensation of being watched and locked eyes with the now dual eyebrow raised woman. A clearing of throats was instantly followed by the sounds of a zip being fastened and then boots pattering away with a restrained haste.
"That's disgusting."
"You may not have known it already, Curly, but all boys have them."
"What? No, not his dick, his lack of hand washing."
"Oh, right." Stark looked up from his game of tetris towards the closing exit. "Hey, Agent You, get back in here and wash those filthy hands. Don't you know a lady is present?" He paused shaking an indignant pen towards the retreating back of the agent, now shrouded from sight by a steel door, and shrugged unapologetically. "Well I tried. Perhaps shield should add a chapter on good hygiene in their training manual." Stark suddenly streaked forward at a caffeinated pace causing his new companion to wobble whimsically into his wake. "Come on, I haven't got all night to play with you, as fun as that sounds, not when there are villains to catch and science to be done."
"Science? Villains? But, you already have Loki in that big glass jar."
"But we don't have Agent Bartan in that 'big glass jar'. Fury should start calling it that. I'll let him know of the name change."
"Right." Kari winced as a stitch exploded into life between ribcage and digesting stomach fighting to understand where she was being taken to and what exactly was going on. "Who's Agent Bartan?"
"Hawkeye."
"Um, who's Hawkeye?"
"Agent Bartan."
"Seriously?" She growled her frustration at the lunatic's looping logic.
"Why would I lie about a thing like that?" His eyes were busy calibrating things on plastic but his tone reeked of a level of systematic sardonic sarcasm that could only go unnoticed to the deaf – and even then it would have been a push. "Besides, we both know, you know, what is happening here. You're one of Loki's henchmen or henchwoman in this case."
"What? No I'm not." Kari halted her following steps a fraction as the accusation fired a wounding bolt to her pride.
"Sure, play the innocent card. But I'm not buying it, I've been lying for a lot longer than you have, twenty years more give or take."
"I'm technically thirty seven you know."
"Really?" He froze; looking the woman up and down in calculating fashion before continuing their walk down the endless array of corridors she was sure he was deliberately taking her in circles around. "You're looking good for a woman almost in her forties. What's your secret? Yoga? Acid peels? A diet of small infants?"
"Ha! Wouldn't you like to know?"
"I would - if you weren't still lying. I have to give you credit for the consistency but hasn't this Stockholm syndrome mania gone on long enough, Sue? Lives are at stake, Earth hanging in the balance; there's only room for one incredibly handsome and not entirely above board member of team save-the-world here. Even if you do have the big blonde's belief you're not going to convince me some nineteen-year-old girl, from gods know where, with the hots for a long haired, magical, alien just happened to show up at a kneeling party with her pet dragon."
"Dragon? What dragon?" The purple shirt wearing, possibly gay, man from earlier looked up from a console as the pair marched into some sort of technical laboratory he was inhabiting and confusingly became witness to a rather hard and resounding 'slap'.
"Well that hasn't happened in a while." Stark pushed himself away from the desk he had been knocked into and traced the red of his cheek in a slow and hissing manner only to get knocked towards the other side of the room by a returning blow. "Okay, you can stop now!"
"Why are all men such dicks?" Kari hiccupped through a bristling of tears, stood bolt upright but shaking, striking hand still raised in a decreasingly threatening manner.
"I didn't do anything." Banner hesitantly answered from the safety of his position out of reach.
"What's going on here?" A third male tone entered the arena completely unaware of the current situation but eager to discover the truth.
"I don't want to get involved. I'm just trying to work here." Banner brushed the occurrence off and turned his back on the whole debacle in favour of hard work and the pursuit of the electromagnetic spectrum. "Ask Tony. Something about a dragon."
"Ma'am, are you all right?" Steve Rogers was taken aback at the sudden occurrence of a sobbing woman's head buried against his torso from little more than a placating hand placed on her shoulder. "Uh, miss?"
"Don't look at me like that, cap." Stark need not have looked over from his workstation of safety; not with the burning sensation, oddly reminiscent of a long weekend he once spent in Phoenix, lasering the back of his skull. "I'm the one with the throbbing cheeks. Girl's a lot stronger than she looks."
"I can't say it wasn't deserved, Stark."
"Hey!"
"Come on Tony, we haven't got time for this." Banner sighed discontented at the disruptive situation to there otherwise time sensitive task.
"The voice of reason. Okay cap, Curly Sue's all yours now." Stark shooed from a distance before becoming immensely and immediately intimate with introspection.
Steve huffed in irritation, an arm coaxing his new charge around him and out the sliding laboratory doors, with a final intense stare to the otherwise preoccupied occupants. Kari continued to feel sorry for herself but at least the crying had stopped once more. One arm draped around her body gripped the opposite as she fell into a side-by-side march through a corridor miraculously filled with busy agents – at least she had not imagined them all before.
"Where is the 'Curly Sue' reference from?" Rogers broke the silence, though by the glimpse of furrowed brow she stole it had been a question on his mind for longer than was probably necessary – or perhaps he was simply weary of never understanding the punch line to Stark's jokes.
"Ugh, a early nineties movie by the same name about a little girl with hair like mine." She replied in a tone that reeked of sympathy for not really getting the joke either.
"Sure." The furrowing decreased at an answer, though continued to plague him as if being weary and on guard were a tradition for him. "I would have pegged you as more of a Shirley Temple myself."
"My mother used to say that." Kari snorted in reminiscent amusement. "She loved those movies. We used to watch one every Sunday when I was little but she was around when they first came out. Think it was nostalgia for her, the 'hope of the nation' stuff despite being Canadian. Well, Bulgarian-Canadian, sort of."
"No offence, ma'am, but your mother can't have been as old as I think she was when you came along."
"Uh, she was born in nineteen forty, forty one, whatever, somewhere around then." She shrugged not really wanting to recall the answer, the grip on her arm tightening as she sought a new line of conversation – or even none at all. "I'm not as young as I look. Time travel and magic blue stuff."
"Is that what mister Stark and yourself were disagreeing about?"
"That and dragons." Kari began to chew her lip out of awkward habit.
"Well, I don't know about the dragons, ma'am, but the rest I can relate to." He sounded reassuring and on further inspection was giving a rather bolstering appraisal. "How long did you miss?"
"I don't really know. What year is it?"
"Two thousand and twelve by my count."
"Oh, um, about eight years then or ten if we include the whole kidnapping?" She 'tsked' as there company and conversation was parted to allow a swarm of hurrying armed agents between them. "It certainly wasn't as science-fiction as this when I left." Kari thumbed towards a window into what appeared to be another laboratory full of flashy things she did not understand.
"Before I was frozen, we didn't have colour television."
"That… must be a nice change." She chuckled as they continued their walk to wherever they were going.
"So, you like Shirley Temple flicks?" He probably regretted that question the moment it left his lips if the slightly off tune singing he received in response was anything to go by.
"You gotta eat your spinach baby, that's the proper thing to do, it'll keep you kind of healthy too, and what it did for pop-eye-"
"-it will do for you." Steve finished for his companion before it was too late to stop her starting the next verse.
"Don't think I've ever met a guy that even knows who Shirley Temple is let alone one of the songs from her movies." Kari could not help the look of, well something, which glinted into life as she stared across at the taller man somehow without tripping on anything and making her fool of herself.
"It's like what you said about your mother." He seemed oblivious to the staring or just incredibly well mannered. "Nostalgia from that time."
"Right." Well that ruined the moment and gave her left eyebrow a boner. "So…"
"You really don't know who I am do you?"
"Captain Steve?" She shrugged her response now on the defence.
"I…" He had to pause, not having had to deal with this sort of lack of infamy - no matter how hard he may have tried to remain unknown – in quite some time. "I'm Captain Steve Rogers, ma'am, Captain America."
"Like the old Captain America from the war?"
"Yes, ma'am. What I mean to say is, I am him."
"Yeah right." Her disbelieving tone was evident but by the second sideways glance she had to admit his embarrassment at having just announced himself, as 'captain America' seemed legitimate. "Hmm. You do look a bit like the autographed picture my mother had."
"It was autographed?" He seemed surprised something so trivial may have survived so long and in his non-believing companions care.
"Sure, she met him when she was about five or whatever, when grandma took her to live in Canada during the whole Bulgarian protection of the nation anti-Jew law stuff in the forties."
"I'm sure I was very glad to meet her then, ma'am."
"Yeah okay." Kari rolled her eyes still refusing to give in but phased once more by the man's staid appearance. "Really?"
"Yes, ma'am." He nodded gravely in response to her continual scepticism. "I was frozen for, well a long time, in the ice after I crash landed a H.Y.D.R.A aircraft."
"That's… very cold sounding." She sighed her surrender, deciding to give the possible madman the benefit of the doubt. "I was at some history exhibition in London when I touched a big rock and got sucked through a rainbow rollercoaster to another realm where I vomited on someone's boots and spent two years being threatened, molested and had books thrown at me. Then I lived in this snowy place for a year which was pretty nice and kind of 'popped' through time before arriving in Hel and having to fight zombies and a dragon."
There was a long, silent, pause between the two as Captain America, having sped up at the sight of their destination, trailed his cohort. Kari frowned at the man's overly casual speed walking, there was something unnaturally natural about it that rubbed her up the wrong way – or perhaps it was just the way he broke eye contact and stopped talking the moment she told him her equally insane story. Whatever the reason, something was off and she did not like it, though all the science fiction consoles inside the star trek bridge overlooking the ocean were certainly a good distraction.
"Agent Coulson!" Steve called across the control room towards a recognisable figure watching several screens at once but hurrying over at the sound of his name. "I found your missing person."
"Good job, Rogers." Coulson looked the well-fed, skinny woman, over once to check it really was her before instantly distracted by his costume-wearing hero to drag back to his lair of screens. "Hey, could I just borrow you for a second there's a-"
"Well that was rude." Kari rolled her eyes at getting dumped alone in yet another strange room.
"Fandralkin?" The booming voice of Thor ricocheted through her spine as large hands spun her around to face him. "Are you harmed? We thought you lost again."
"What? No, I was just in the men's toilets." She blurted out feeling somewhat like a child caught with her hand in a cookie jar but one she might actually be the owner of.
"Is that not a place for-"
"Men. Yes." Kari nodded her agreement at how silly her words sounded. "Um, so, uh, how's things? What did I miss? I mean, apart from Loki killing people on earth and you being here and me being here and something about a stolen thing and a Hawkeye." The level of awkward in the room suddenly hitched up a knot, as Kari fought to find somewhere else to place her focus on. "What?"
"It is just good to see you again." Thor smiled the smile of a man with great boulders on his shoulders that was now free to shake one off.
"I…" She grimaced, partially winded, as the great oath finally quit his strangely adoring stare and lifted her off the ground in the second hug of the day. "Okay… As much as I enjoy all this sweet cuddly side of you, Thor, could I perhaps be allowed to at least keep my feet on the ground? You're kind of hurting me a little here."
"Forgive me, I just…" The bimbo relented after one final spine-aligning squeeze.
"Oh god, it's not Serana is it?"
"Who?"
"Never mind." Kari chuckled with relief at finding out the twinkle in the looming blonde's eye was not for the cleavage shaped woman. "Whose the girlfriend?"
"I know not of what you speak, Fandralkin."
"Uh-huh." Her disbelieving tone only managed to fluster further the already red-faced god – since when had Thor learned to blush like a fourteen-year-old girl? "Granddad hasn't knocked anyone up has he?"
"He has knocked many an enemy of asgard up, down, left, ri-" He clung to the new topic like a life line and he a love sick man drowning in an ocean of secret sighing.
"I get it, I get it, but not what I meant." Kari rolled her eyes chewing her lip into submission as she tried to find some new, obvious, yet delicate way of asking the blonde dolt a very serious question. "He hasn't had anymore illegitimate children has he?"
"None that I have heard of."
"Good enough I suppose." Well at least that was one thing going right nowadays; and what a relief it was, not getting replaced and all that.
"I witnessed your discussion, with the son of Coul, through one of these image makers." Well that had her undivided attention, in a caught in the headlights manner – hopefully the part where she called him a stupid dog got edited out of the CCTV footage. "If I had known, no, that is to say I was too blinded by my foolishness not to see your plight. I refused to see how truly dire your circumstance at my brothers hands as well as my own. I hope only I may gain your forgiveness someday."
"Oh god, you really do have it bad." She had to sigh on his behalf; the poor bastard was losing his mind on hormones and feelings. "Seriously, who is she?"
"I know not-"
"Thor."
"Very well you have beaten it from me." He momentarily tugged at his collar, under arm-folded scrutiny by his best friends granddaughter. "She is known as, Jane Foster."
"Wait, wait, wait. That's a very-"
"Midgardian yes, she is." Thor's expression was tense, tired and stressed at the revelation; as if this were some intense battle he was afraid he might actually lose or already had lost.
"So I got replaced then?"
"I… Fandralkin I did not realise you harboured such feelings for myself but-"
"What? No! NO!" She had to stop feeling sorry for herself a moment and pay a bill her mouth had just charged on account before things got seriously awkward – well more discomfited. "That's not what I was saying. Uck. I mean, yeah you're hot you know it, I know it, Serana knows it-"
"Who is this Serana you speak of so often?"
"Just a uh, courtesan? I think."
"One of my fathers-" Bimbo was suddenly cut off by a palm placed across his preoccupied lips.
"I don't want to hear the end of that sentence." Kari shot her companion a dangerous glance with the shake of her head before retrieving her lifted arm.
"Very well." He relented, eyes following the mess of curls across a walkway before his feet did the same over to a table surrounded by chairs.
"Thor?" She looked up at the asgardian, having slumped into a spare chair and waited for him to do the same.
"Yes, my friend."
"I… what happened? After I left I mean. Why do I get the feeling I missed the biggest party of my life?"
"A party? Yes, my coronation you mean?"
"Your coronation? Odin's dead?" Though fleeting, such a wondrous imagining brought a joyous upturning to her features not seen in some time but instantly crushed upon making eye contact with the aforementioned problems son. "Sorry I didn't mean to sound quite that excited about your dad dying but you know…"
"Ah, yes. Your old feud." Thor scratched his head as if trying to clear an outbreak of confusion fleas. "I am afraid I must disappoint you, Fandralkin, my father yet lives though he is old and weary of life as a king. Seasons passed, after your dea- disappearance, the all father decided he would step down from his throne and that it was time I take his place as rightful ruler."
"So you're the king of asgard now?" Well this was an exciting turn of events, especially, if old one eye was no longer allowed to try and kill, maim or send her to deepest darkest mines.
"No." The blonde's words cut like a well-maintained knife, the atmosphere between them icy cold as he looked up then down at the table in serious contemplation. "Forgive me if I seem bitter but my anger is directed at my own folly rather than any disappointment at being denied my birth right."
"Okay… so, something went down?"
"Indeed it did. Almost the realm of Asgard and Jotunheim combined."
"Oh god…" Her thoughts suddenly jumped to that of her grandfather, though in truth, Thor would have told her if the sex-addict had gotten himself killed being all heroic and stuff – and begun recounting over-exaggerated tales of grandiose with ale her stomach was too full to absorb.
"Loki was playing one of his tricks during the celebrations. Frost giants were allowed access to the palace weapons vault but vanquished by the defences. In my anger at such trespass I called for war but father forbid it." He stared across the room at a blank wall, a permanent scowl fixed across his forehead. "I dragged my friends and brother into my plans of vengeance, assaulting the Jotun king's men in his house against the all fathers wishes. As punishment for igniting a new war between the realms I was banished to earth without friend or power until my lesson was learned."
"And you met a girl."
"Indeed I did." A smile swiftly returned to the blonde's features.
"And she mended your wicked ways." Kari chuckled enjoying the concept of such a big burly man being conquered by a puny mortal woman.
"Perhaps tempered a well forged sword." The bimbo corrected.
"Eh?" Right, well, whatever to that she figured; he did not seem like an angry sword. "That sounds very romantic I guess." Kari shrugged and leaned back into her chair to try daydreaming something a little more pleasant sounding than the prince's idea of romance – with a sunset and a dance number. "So where is she? Back on Asgard?"
"That is a good question, Fandralkin. I must leave you for a moment."
"Yeah sure. I'll just, you know…"
Kari rolled her eyes at the departing blonde, eyelids drooping in a mixture of over filled tiredness, genuine exhaustion and annoyance. Just when the story was starting to get good and the big bad, tamed, Casanova still had not explained to her why Loki was… well, being super Loki. Whatever, she would find out later, after a nap or something. It was not as if the naughty princelet was going anywhere.