"That is quite… potent," Loki said tactfully, taking a step back from the vial that Reed held under his nose. The scent lingered, something that left an awful taste at the back of his throat, and he tried to blink the burning out of his eyes. He couldn't imagine what the man would have combined to get that awful green colour, and he certainly didn't want to ask. All Loki wanted were results that could be duplicated, and he would take the necessary steps from there.
"It seems like a worthy candidate," Reed noted with a nod. He carefully set it back down on the metallic laboratory table, placing it next to the other seven that he had already made Loki smell. "Does one affect you more than the others?"
He arched an eyebrow. "Why would that matter?"
"Well, you aren't human," the man said, no hint of delicacy in his voice. "I assumed that if one may be more overwhelming to you—"
"They are all equally horrible," Loki told him, his tone flat. "I hardly think a pungent odor is key to killing our enemy."
Yes, our enemy. Over the last four days, he had made the effort to announce that he was on Earth's side. Although he still had little faith in Reed's plan, there was a glimmer of hope in the tower, and should things actually work, he wanted it known that he had been an ardent supporter from the beginning.
Reed stared at him for a moment, the skin on his forehead slowly wrinkling, and then nodded. "Of course."
The sound of the heavy door creaking open caught both of their attentions, and Loki spotted Sue sauntering in to the well-lit laboratory with a plate of food in hand. Reed slouched a little at her arrival, but the heavy bags under his eyes and the pronounced gurgle of his stomach indicated that he needed a break more than anything else. After all, the man had been cooped up in this room for almost four days, ever since they had the meeting, and he was starting to look peckish.
Max, on the other hand, was finally starting to look better. Just as Reed had been stuck in this circular haven of technology for the last few days, Max hadn't left their bedroom for any lengthy intervals. She drifted down to the kitchen for the occasional meal, though Loki usually brought her a plate when she didn't, and last night she had sulked in front of the television box with the children when they demanded her presence for a movie. It was quite apparent that she wasn't herself—there was no light or laughter in her expression. Now that Loki knew what pained her, he could tailor his approach to her moods better. He could handle sadness—tears were a little more tiresome.
She seemed appreciative of his efforts, which was always a plus. Although, he missed the way she had teased last week with a small smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eye. He would have preferred that brand of torture to this, but there was nothing he could do about it now except wait.
Mind you, Loki had an idea in mind that might hopefully shift the balance in her, but he couldn't be completely sure of the outcome. Still, he hoped that it might make her see things from a different perspective. He had spent the last two days readying things, but there were a few more items he needed that he was unable to find anywhere in the tower.
He turned to Sue, giving her a quick onceover as she strolled by, and then debated the best way to approach her about a favour.
"I think we should start subject trials soon," Reed insisted, the plate clinking noisily against the table as Sue set it down. "Preferably by the end of the week."
Loki watched her frown deepen, and she folded her arms across her chest. "Already? You've barely made duplicates of anything."
"We don't have the luxury of waiting."
The man spoke carefully to her, as if one word might set her off. Loki had watched their dynamic change since his arrival: Sue had been the one to call all the shots—she was a worthy matriarch. However, now that Reed had the support of the rest of the tower, his woman fell to the wayside. Loki considered using that for his benefit, but he also figured that the calculating woman would see right through it. He needed to be more subtle.
"Can we immobilize them before we bring them in?"
"I don't want to skew the data," Reed told her, shaking his head and touching her arm gently. Loki noticed her stiffen. "We need to make sure it works on fully functioning aliens… We can't have them compromised."
"No one will let any harm come to your children," Loki interjected, seizing his moment to fall into her good books. "I'm quite fond of them, and I'd sooner spread a Pagurolid's entrails on the wall than let it come into contact with Franklin or Valeria."
Reed made a bit of a face, an expression that was disgust crossed with shock, but Sue seemed unmoved. Instead, she turned her attention onto him wholly, and then arched an eyebrow.
"Speaking of your fondness for Franklin," she started, eyes narrowed. "What exactly have you guys been talking about during your marathon chess sessions?"
"He's simply been teaching me—"
"Don't lie to me," she said sharply, and Loki pressed his lips together, smiling somewhat. He took a beat, letting the silence drag out, and then turned his palms toward her—a sign of submission.
"We've been teaching each other," he admitted smoothly. "He has been teaching me chess. According to Franklin, I'm quite good… something about my ability to think ahead and anticipate a player's moves."
Sue shifted, and he noticed her swallow thickly. He cocked his head to the side, observing her unabashedly in front of her man. These people had no idea what sort of being he was. They thought him cowed after his defeat all those years ago, as though he were a simpering sentient after the Avengers were through with him. No one could take his cunning, his calculating, his ferocity. But those three qualities did not define him, nor would he ever let them again—he was much more than a desperate boy.
"I, on the other hand, have been teaching your son about focus." He enunciated the word sharply, making Reed look up from his sandwich. "He has the start of a gift, one that he thinks you both fear and despise… I've offered to help hone his talent while you two are otherwise preoccupied."
"He doesn't—"
Loki cut Sue off swiftly, keeping his expression light and his tone conversational. "Now, now, I meant no offense. His natural talent isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and you cannot simply ignore it or there will be a catastrophe."
"I know how to raise my kids," Sue snapped, taking a step toward him. Loki held his ground, unafraid of the Invisible Woman—though not ignorant of her abilities.
"You are a perfect adept mother, yes," he said, the praise falling easily from his lips. "However, you are understandably distracted. As I do not quite have the burden you do at the moment, I can dedicate the time to teaching him focus. His powers seem stronger when he is unfocused and emotional, so, naturally…"
"But we are his parents." Reed finally spoke up, perhaps sensing he ought to support Sue in these matters. "You shouldn't have just started—"
"There is nothing wrong in imparting wisdom and discipline on a boy Franklin's age," Loki said sharply. "He will hurt someone, perhaps his sister, should his abilities go unchecked. Getting him to concentrate on the here and now is essential. He needs to learn to quiet his mind."
"Franklin is a special boy," Sue told him, her tone tight, "and I don't want him getting caught up in your—"
"My what?" Loki raised his eyebrows. "My warmongering? My foreign ideals?"
She pursed her lips, looking somewhat unimpressed. He took a quick breath.
"I'm not filling his head with nonsense," he insisted. "If you wish for me to stop, I will, but I think I could help him in the way that I was helped as a boy."
Frigga would have set the boy right. She would have had him producing small wonders of magic by now—Loki paled in comparison to her patient teaching abilities. Still, Franklin hadn't pouted when he was told off for his distractions thus far, and Loki consistently reminded himself that he needed to be more thoughtful in his approaches—he was quick to anger when the boy's mind wandered off on a tangent.
"I'd never intentionally harm a child," he said finally as the tense silence lagged on, "particularly one as intelligent as your boy. He wants to learn, and I am willing to teach. Naturally, the decision now falls to you."
"You don't even know what he has," Sue started as she shook her head somewhat. "I mean, we can't be sure if he's a mutant, or if something went wrong—"
"He's your son," Loki said flatly. "That's all that matters."
"Yes, but—"
"And you'll tailor your approach with that in mind," he continued. "Whether it's me or you who teaches him, he needs it. He'll be a man in no time, and his power will grow with him. You have the courtesy of control with your gifts, but can you imagine how lost he feels when he is punished for his lack of knowledge?"
"Don't tell me how my son feels."
"Yes, perhaps you should ask him yourself." Loki smirked a little. "Although, are you truly looking for an honest answer?"
"Okay, that's enough," Reed interrupted, speaking over Sue as she parted her lips. "You can help him with his focus for now. I want you to tell us if there's any progress… and Sue should sit in on a few lessons."
The woman sucked in her cheeks, staring Loki down with an intensity that would have frightened a lesser man, until she finally nodded.
"I'd like that."
"You are more than welcome to join us," Loki told her, his smile growing—he couldn't help himself. "We convene in the early afternoons, usually after lunch when the children have some free time to themselves."
His sister had yet to join them—Loki suspected there was nothing special about the girl aside from her almost painfully acute intellectual abilities. Those could easily be controlled by a human tutor, and he saw no need to interfere with her. Besides, the girl had warmed to Max considerably in the last week or so, and he figured she wouldn't bother to look to Loki for any sort of advice in the way that Franklin did.
"Yeah, I'll be doing that for your next lesson."
Hmm. He had hoped that Sue and Reed would be happy that Loki was taking the time to teach their son something so important—perhaps even grateful. They remained suspicious, however, and he thought it best to change the subject.
"How soon do you suspect you will have a serum?"
"I'm hoping trials won't take any longer than a week," Reed replied, seemingly pleased to have changed out of the tense situation too. He gestured back at his vials, his sandwich in hand. "I think we have some strong candidates here."
"Good."
"And the sooner the better," he continued. Setting his meal aside, he strode across the lab in long, sweeping strides, pausing in front of the large black monitor. Moments later, it flickered to life, and soon there was an image of the patriotic captain. Loki's gaze hardened.
"He appears to be on the retreat," Loki noted, studying the short video that Reed played for him. The man seemed to be recalling his men, and they locked themselves in a building under heavy gunfire. Reed watched it twice before shutting the screen off, sighing.
"He can't do it by himself." The comment seemed more for Sue than Loki, but he nodded all the same.
"Pagurolids are notorious pests," he mused. Sue scoffed under her breath, and then stalked by him, heading for the door. Not wanting to lose his opportunity, he darted out after her, leaving Reed to his late lunch.
He called her name, catching her just outside the lab, and she whirled back with her arms folded.
"I realize I might not be your favourite person in this tower at this very moment," he started, hoping to appear somewhat boyish and charming as he smiled at her, "but I was wondering if I might ask you for a brief favour."
"You mean aside from the favours I already do?" she asked, having none of his charm. "Aside from the cooking and cleaning and roof we've given you?"
"It's not really for me," he told her. He had used the Spider for most of his plan already, but there were a few things that he needed, and it would be handy to have the Invisible Woman to procure them. "It's for Max, actually."
Her expression softened somewhat, but she still appeared steely toward him. Loki suspected it was an act—she couldn't be a loving mother when she was like this most of the time. He suspected she needed to be hard in times like these.
"I've been… Well, I have a surprise for her," he said, feeling a little silly saying it. "It's supposed to help her with her grieving for her brother."
The woman's features continued to warm toward him, and she let out a sigh. "What do you want?"
He grinned, taking her by the arm and marching her toward the stairwell. "A number of things, actually…"
"Jump, Max!"
"I'm jumping," she cried, hopping up and down to the best of her ability. "My guy isn't moving!"
"You have to use your whole body," Valeria scolded from Franklin's bed.
Max glanced over her shoulder at the tiny girl, who had been absolutely unimpressed that they were spending the precious hours before dinner in front of Franklin's Wii. She seemed involved in the game at this point, shouting out directions to help Max—never Franklin—as their characters navigated the incredibly realistic game-scape in front of her. She was beyond jealous that a kid who wasn't even ten yet had a TV that was bigger than hers—and a Wii to himself—but she had come to realize that Reed and Sue had a small fortune to spend on their kids, and they hadn't held back when decorating their floor.
Neither of the Richards kids struck her as greedy or demanding, but they seemed to be living in kid paradise. They had an entire floor all to their own, complete with suites that had private bathrooms, bedrooms, and offices. They weren't quite as large as the rooms that Loki and Max had been given up on their floor, but there was so much happening in each room that it hardly seemed to matter. Valeria had a loft-bed constructed out of old bookshelves, for heaven's sake, with an entire library beneath and a chic desk for her laptop. Max held her tongue, but she hadn't been given a laptop until she was well into high school, and that was because Nolan could afford to buy his own and donated their parents' spare one to her.
Each bedroom seemed to represent a facet of the child's personality, and Max could appreciate the time and energy Reed and Sue took to personalize each room. Franklin's was full of games and homey wooden furniture. His TV was impressive, and all four walls were different colours—which played into Loki's ramblings about the boy's inability to focus on anything for too long. Valeria, on the other hand, kept everything neat and perfectly arranged. She had a method to her organization, and she informed Max that she hadn't let her mother clean her room since she was four—back when she didn't know better, apparently.
As much as she didn't really want to be in Franklin's room playing some game she hadn't heard of before, she knew that she needed to get out of bed sometime. After her meltdown over Nolan's sweater a few days earlier, she hadn't felt like doing much at all. At the back of her mind, she still knew there was a war going on—and she was pleased that the tower was actively taking steps to join the fight. Loki updated her each day on Reed's quick progress, and if she hadn't been sulking, she would have gone down to see for herself.
But when her brother's sweater was ruined in the hot suds of a washing machine, Max felt like the wind had been knocked out of her—and this time, it stayed clear. She really had the time to process Nolan's death, and while her head had been a bit of a haze since Loki helped her back to their bedroom, she thought she was making progress.
She hated being miserable. Nolan wouldn't have wanted her to mope, but she couldn't help it. It was hard to comprehend that she no longer had a brother, technically, and every time she put too much thought into it, she was a mess.
Loki had been surprisingly good with her. She expected him to distance himself, to tell her to buck up and get over it, and yet he'd been there to listen and he'd been there to hold her.
Franklin had come looking for her after breakfast that morning. With Johnny in tow, he had climbed all the way to the top of the tower to ask if she wanted to play with him and Valeria, and while she could have refused, Max nodded and dressed in something other than sweats. She had no idea where Nolan's sweater had gone, but she didn't have the energy to ask about it. The garment hadn't come back to her when Sue returned the rest of their laundry, and she assumed the woman was keeping it away from her to avoid another meltdown.
The kids must have known something was wrong with her. When she followed Franklin down to his floor, which she had only ever observed from the stairwell before, he spoke to her like she was the child and he was the adult. With a freshly washed face and clean clothes, Max had thrown her shoulders back and tried to smile, and eventually the effort became less tiresome, and she finally started to enjoy herself. She seldom saw the kids laugh as much as they did when she and Johnny tried—and failed—to play a racing game on the Wii.
She liked to think she was fairly updated on modern technology, but the whole Wii system really seemed to throw her for a loop. Johnny gave up after a few consecutive losses, and Franklin tapped in to take his place in a new game. Valeria seemed content to watch, but she had started vocalizing her frustrations with Max's inability to play any of the games all that well more and more as time ticked by.
"Do you want to play?" she asked with a chuckle after hearing the girl's noisy sigh. "You can jump in at any point, you know."
"No." Her response was almost grumbled out, and Max laughed again. It was nice to feel carefree for a while—to focus on a game with kids instead of the real world and all its awful problems. The only creatures she had to deal with at the moment were weird cartoon characters, and when you died, you came back at a checkpoint. It wasn't forever inside the monitor.
"You're so bad at this," Franklin teased when Max's character was clubbed over the head by a giant gorilla, which appeared out of nowhere and scampered off as her controller vibrated three times in her hand. She shot him a look, but he had the same smug smile on his face that he had when she was losing at chess—the boy liked to win, and he had a tendency to beat her.
Maybe that was why he always asked her to play?
She flicked her hand, trying to get her player back up, and then urged him forward. The screen was split into two sections, and it was a race between the two characters to find all ten objects in the jungle terrain. Initially, Max thought it was incredibly unfair that Franklin had already played and beat the game—he probably already knew where everything was. However, she had four items in her inventory at the moment, and Valeria was being far more helpful to her than she was to her brother.
"You know you can go in the water, right?" the little girl said innocently as Max's character jogged by a pond.
"Stop telling her where everything is," Franklin snapped. Max turned and made her character wade into the water. She let out a triumphant cackle when the character retrieved a book—wouldn't it be ruined at the bottom of a pond?—and set it in its bottomless backpack.
"Well you already know where everything is," the girl insisted. Max glanced over her shoulder and saw that Valeria was on her feet, bouncing absently on Franklin's bed. "That's hardly fair, is it?"
"I haven't played this character before," he argued, leaping up and propelling his character over a mountain pass. Max stared at his side of the screen—where the hell were the mountains in all this? Pursing her lips, she kept her player moving. "I don't know where these objects are."
"Okay, okay," she said, trying to keep her voice calm. These two had been pent up together for too long, and it seemed that neither needed much provocation to start a fight over nothing at all. Even with Loki giving Franklin lessons, she had still seen her fair share of things move or fall, though it happened less so around Sue and Reed now. "It's just a game, guys."
"Yeah, a game that I'm winning."
"A game that you have an unfair advantage in," Valeria hissed. Max grabbed Franklin by the scruff of his shirt when he turned back to have a go at his sister, and then nodded pointedly toward the TV monitor.
"Focus."
She assumed the command would have some meaning, as it was the one thing Loki seemed to be working on with the kid these days. The boy huffed, but soon turned back to the game. The movement unpaused his screen, and he raced forward to collect an item from a mountain peak.
She seemed to have settled the potential for drama for the moment, and they managed to play the rest of the game without Valeria antagonizing her brother. As Franklin reset the match, bringing them back to the main screen after his tiger-zebra character emerged victorious, Max thought she heard something down the hall. Peering over her shoulder, she felt her stomach rumble—it had to be close to dinnertime. However, rather than seeing Johnny or Sue or Reed appear in Franklin's doorway, it was Loki, and she smiled warmly at his arrival.
"Hey." She fiddled with the controller in her hand as Franklin spun around. "We're just about to play another game… Want to give it a whirl?"
"What is it?" He stepped into the room, coming straight for her to examine the remote in her hand.
"It's a Wii," Franklin squeaked, speaking when it was obvious Max was too distracted by Loki's presence to give him an answer. She wasn't sure what it was, but something about him today made her knees weak. Her eyes swept up and down his frame, but quickly decided there was nothing different about him that might bring up these feelings.
"And what does a… Wii do?" Loki inquired, stumbling over the word with a bit of a grimace. Max grinned, knowing he felt weird saying something that sounded so ridiculous.
"It's… You use the remote to control characters in the game," Franklin babbled. Max noticed Valeria had taken a seat on the bed, in the corner, and was now hugging a stuffed bear to her. Despite the fact Loki had been in the tower just as long as Max, the girl still hadn't warmed to him much.
"Ah." A puff of air danced against her cheek, and she looked up at him curiously.
"Did we have a lesson today?" Franklin seemed quite distressed at the idea. "Did I miss it? I'm sorry! We were just playing some—"
"No, we did not have a lesson," Loki said, cutting him off smoothly. "We'll resume tomorrow at our usual time. Your mother insisted she sit in with us too."
"Oh." He seemed relieved at the idea, and then frowned. "Why?"
"That is a question you'll need to ask her," Loki insisted. He then took her by the hand. "I've actually come to steal Max away… I trust there are no objections?"
"We can play again later tonight," Max promised when she saw the boy's face fall. He nodded begrudgingly, and then accepted the controller from her when she handed it back to him. She locked her fingers around Loki's, a giddy feeling churning in her stomach. They rarely ever held hands—the gesture always seemed to have a connotation that neither were looking for.
"Okay."
Loki tugged her out of the room without a word of farewell, and they walked down the hall together in silence. Once they were in the stairwell, he looked down at her, his expression obscure.
"How are you feeling today?"
She shrugged. "Okay, I guess. How are you feeling today?"
He laughed softly, his hand tightening around hers, and continued to stroll up the stairs at a leisurely pace.
"I'm fine."
"Good." She waited for something more, something to explain what might have sent him hunting for her in the tower, but he seemed oblivious to her curiosity. Finally, she cleared her throat and asked, "So, where are we going?"
"I have a surprise for you," he told her. He seemed quite pleased with himself, with a smile that was borderline smug, and she arched an eyebrow.
"Do you?"
"I do."
"And can I ask any questions about this surprise?"
"You could," he replied as they turned a corner, tackling the next stairwell together, "but I'm afraid I'd have no answers for you."
"Huh." She shot him a sly look out of the corner of her eye. "Where have you been all day?"
His smile grew, and Max nudged his side when he chuckled.
"That can't be part of the surprise," she said, her excitement growing with each step she took. No one did surprises for her anymore—she hadn't had a surprise party thrown for her since she was in high school.
Loki kept his silence, though he did stop and kiss her at one point. She stood two stairs above him, and for the first time in over a week, she pressed her lips to his with fervor, happy to be kissing him again. When he pulled away, taking a deep breath with his eyes closed, she scoffed.
"That better not have been the surprise."
"It wasn't, I assure you," he muttered, shooting her a look before pulling her along behind him. They eventually stopped at the eleventh floor, which she knew was one of the many unfinished ones in the tower, and she hesitantly followed him through the door. Just as she was about to tell him that sex in random places around the tower wasn't a surprise either, her breath caught in her throat.
The eleventh floor was completely gutted into one open space. There were no dividers or walls—nothing but glorious windows from floor to ceiling. She couldn't imagine what Sue and Reed wanted to do with it, but anything they did would be perfect in a space this nice. The floors had been done up already—hardwood and rustic. However, that wasn't what shocked her.
In the middle of the room appeared to be a picnic of some sort. There was a blanket and a number of pillows—many of which looked vaguely familiar from Johnny's pillow palace downstairs. Candles helped illuminate the area on such a cloudy day, and while she initially thought it was a romantic gesture, she realized she couldn't have been more wrong the closer she drew.
There was Nolan's sweater. There was his favourite beer and two pans of homemade lasagne. There was a laptop with a box set of Friends DVDs scattered around it—Nolan's guilty pleasure. There was pie—she assumed it would be cherry. The closer she looked, the more she noticed that the candles were arranged in the shape of a boat.
"What…" She couldn't formulate words, let alone coherent thoughts, and she turned to Loki with her mouth hanging open, pointing at the set-up. "What?"
"In Asgard, the deceased are both mourned and celebrated," he told her softly, pushing some loose hair out of her face. "As much as I dislike using Asgardian traditions, I believe it is suited for this moment… You've mourned more than you've celebrated. I thought it might help to do the latter tonight."
"Oh…"
"We can do whatever you'd like tonight," he continued quickly. "We can watch those… friend characters do things, or talk about your brother. Anything you'd like that you feel would celebrate who he is as a person."
"That's…" She trailed off, turning back to survey the spread. She noticed a few of Nolan's car magazines poking out from under the laptop. "How did you get all this stuff?"
"I can't say I did it entirely myself," he admitted after a moment. He pointed to the lasagnes. "The Spider made those with the ingredients in the kitchen."
"While you supervised?" she asked with a laugh.
Loki smirked, his hands now clasped behind his back. "Yes, I played a supervisory role… Your Johnny provided the seating and the… flames—" He rolled his eyes. "—for the candles. Ben had the videos of the friends at his disposal, and Sue agreed to do a jaunt to the store earlier today for the ale and magazines."
Max blinked back her surprise. "Sue did that for me?"
"I suspect that her cold exterior is just an act," Loki mused. "I think seeing you so emotional has broken down her barriers."
"Good to know that's all it takes," Max muttered, sauntering around the blanket to admire the way Loki had arranged the candles. Sue was going to murder him when she saw the amount of wax coating the hardwood panels. "A full-blown panic attack is the way to anyone's heart…"
In the silence that followed, she simply stared at the arrangement. Finally, she shook her head and picked up Nolan's old sweater. However, instead of wearing it, she simply hugged it to her chest, refusing to smell it. It felt clean, which meant her brother's scent was gone.
"How did you know to get all this stuff?" she asked finally. That was the real question of the evening, and when she looked up at Loki. He seemed to have been watching her, and when their eyes finally met, he shrugged.
"Max, in the time that we've known one another, you have filled my head with your incessant chatter about your brother," he told her. "I happen to have quite a good memory… I know when his birthday is, when he lost his virginity—"
Her giggle cut him off, and her hands flew to her mouth to stifle the laughter that followed. When she stopped, she realized her cheeks were wet, and she used the sweater to wipe the few stray tears away.
"Are you… Are you unhappy with me?" Loki crossed the distance between them, his hand resting on her back. "I thought… I can take it all down if it upsets you."
She shook her head, sniffling a little, and then smiled up at him.
He had tried to capture whatever he knew about Nolan and cram it into one room—in the middle of an invasion where supplies were scarce. There was probably nothing that anyone could do for her in the years to come that would top this.
"These are happy tears," she promised, pointing at her face. "I… I'm really touched that you did this."
His posture relaxed a little, and he seemed genuinely pleased at her response. "So this is… good?"
"Yes." She nodded, setting the sweater aside so that she could throw her arms around his neck—they hadn't hugged properly since her breakdown. "Yes, it's really good."
She kissed his cheek, cradling his face to hers, and then realized what those feelings were—the ones she felt when she first saw him in Franklin's room. They were symptoms of love.
She closed her eyes tight, keeping her face hidden in his hair as she tried to process the realization.
Was she? Wasn't she?
Fuck.
Johnny scampered down the hall, glanced over his shoulder, and then yanked open the heavy metal barrier between the rest of the tower and Reed's private world. He hadn't realized it until now, but he had left his cell phone in the lab a few days ago during their meeting—the one where Sue's vote finally stopped counting—and he now had the sudden urge to pick up his intensive game of Angry Birds.
Sue and Reed were bickering in the kitchen. He had been in there with the kids, hoping to settle them in for a movie night—it was Valeria's turn to choose what they were all going to watch, and his niece was beside herself with her choices. Naturally, they were all impossibly mature movies that he'd probably sleep through, so Johnny didn't have an opinion on the matter.
He wished Sue and Reed would have kept a lid on it until the kids were in bed. As much as he thought the guy was a square, he didn't like to see them fight. Hell, Johnny would be the first person at the chapel on the day those two crazy kids finally decided to put collective rings on it—he was one of their biggest fans. However, they really needed to learn to sort their shit out somewhere else. Couples fighting in public only made the rest of the room feel awkward.
Standing at the helm of the lab, he scanned the large space quickly, his hands on his hips. If he were a cell phone, where would he be hiding? Obviously he couldn't call it—Reed disabled a lot of their mobile devices weeks ago. However, the games were still good…
He perked when he spotted it on the control panel across the way, and then jogged over to it. Snatching it up, he swiped his finger across the screen, and then deflated a little when he realized the battery had died. No matter. There was a plug-in near the TV: he could watch Valeria's political epic and destroy walls with birds at the same time.
Suddenly, the screen above him flickered to life, and he took a step back—it must have still been on and hibernating, and he must have knocked it when he grabbed his phone. Frowning, he reached for the button to turn it off entirely, and then paused when something caught his eye on the screen.
It was an email. The address was blocked out, but the draft was open. He shot a look toward the door, and then took a step back to see the message in its entirety.
Don't waste your time with testing. Use something that actually works, you idiot. Just take the attachment and run a trial if you need to, but stop sitting on your ass.
Mark 70
"Mark 70?" Johnny said aloud, squinting at the name. He went through a mental list of any of the men named Mark he knew, but he drew a blank.
"Mark 70… It stands for Make 70." Reed's voice came out of nowhere, and the tips of Johnny's fingers set alight as he whipped around. That damn man could creep up on a shadow.
"What does—"
"Make 70 is for a man I know who was born in 1970," Reed continued, stepping further into the light and nodding up at the screen. "Tony Stark was born in 1970."
"Tony stark?" His arms fell to his sides. "Where the hell is that guy?"
"I can't trace him."
"How long have you guys been talking?"
"Two days," Reed replied with a sigh. "He thinks he's found a serum that will effectively kill those things, and he'd like to deliver some the ingredients… personally."
"What?"
Reed smiled a little, the expression tired and worn. "Do you think you can out-fly their fighter jets?"
"I'm a little rusty—"
"Save the metal jokes for Stark," the man insisted, shooting him a look before turning and stalking back toward the door. "I'm sure he'll actually appreciate them."
"Reed…"
"Don't open the attachment." The man turned just before he reached the door. "It'll wipe the hard-drive. And Valeria chose The Green Mile for tonight, so hurry up."
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Surprise! Surprises all around in this chapter, and there will be more to come in the future. I loved reading all your guesses in the reviews, and I just wanted to reply to each one personally about to what degree of correctness you were… Many old faces are going to pop up in this story, so sit tight!
I think this is the extent of Loki's sugary sweet patience with Max. Not that he's at the end of his rope, but I think this gesture is about all he'd be willing to do to help her with her grieving—if she wasn't okay with this, he'd definitely be at a loss. I doubt there were many who turned to him for comfort with important issues in the past, so I think this is a whole new territory for him.
I defos wanted to get this out sooner, but I ended up stuck at work because it was hectic all week, and by the time I came home, I was exhausted. And then I was feeling awful yesterday and still worked, and then went to the walk-in clinic for solutions. So. It's been a wild ride this week, and I'd like for it to simmer dean. Also, I may have been miiiildly on painkillers for some of this chapter, so if things are a little wonky, I'm sorry.
So Tony Stark is back in the game! I'm pretty excited to write him again—excited and hesitant, as he's a pretty fucking difficult character to write properly, but here we are. Him and Reed are actually pretty decent buds in the comics (from the research I've done and whatnot), so their partnership makes sense to me.
Can't wait to read all of your reactions to the chapter, and I'll try to have the next one out sometime this week. MUCH LOVE TO ALL OF YOU. IF I COULD GIVE YOU THINGS (other than updates) THROUGH THE COMPUTER, I TOTALLY WOULD.