Memories
Let the Dead Rest
Disclaimer: What do you think?
If you want to use Tora, or any of my other characters, PM me.
Marie screamed as the woman from before landed neatly on the floor, whipped around and fired something into James' chest. He was flung backwards and then he rose, swearing rapidly and fluently. And then he turned to stare at her, to stare at her with such fear in his eyes.
"Tora…?"
She was hyperventilating. The woman was back and James wasn't treating her as a threat. Instead it was her getting the distrustful looks. The woman sent out the red light again and hit Laura as well and now both Laura and James were staring at her as if she'd suddenly sprouted two heads and expressed an interest in tasting human flesh. She looked around, desperate for an escape. And once more the woman flung red light at her. And a rippling ball of water leapt up to protect her, absorbing the red light then vanishing without a trace. She staggered, about to fall. And another red ball hit her right in the chest.
Tora stiffened. She looked around the room, her mouth half-open. What…? What had…? What had she done? She looked back at the looks on the faces of Logan, Laura and Wanda. She half opened her mouth. Wanda raised her hands up in a placating gesture.
"Tora… Don't freak… Listen…"
"What have I done?"
"Tora, listen to me…"
"What have I done?"
"Tora…"
"Help me, what have I done…?"
"Tora, listen…"
She rounded on them, barking out the question in staccato bursts.
"What! Have! I! Done!"
The silence was all the answer she needed. She closed her eyes.
"What have I done…?"
And she looked up.
"I'll fix this. I'll fix all this."
Wanda opened her mouth, desperate to say something but Tora had already thrown her arms out, grasped the threads of reality and tugged.
"Her imagery needed a bit of work."
"Well, strictly speaking, she'd only ever seen the World Tapestry. And you kind of need a visual metaphor to begin with. Not quite at the point of relative causality yet."
"Oh… Yeah, that does take a bit of getting used too…"
Logan jerked upright. In bed? What the…?
He leapt up as he heard a noise from the corridor, a soft whistling. Reached out.
"Tora?"
No answer. Where the hell was she? Creep out the door, snikt claws and… What the…?!
The dust was swirling in a circle and as he watched, he suddenly realised what he was seeing as the dust –no, the ash began to form a shape…
…There was something fundamentally wrong about watching your best friend be reconstructed from the inside out and as he watched, the ash began to become solid as the skeleton and organs and muscle all started to form. And then, slowly, skin began to cover organs and fur sprouted and the long tail whiplashed from side to side and bleary eyes looked up at him just long enough to say "Ich habe es getan, nicht wahr? Ich rettete ihr...?" before collapsing, Logan barely getting there in time to stop him crashing to the ground. He turned his head around, opening his mouth.
"HANK! HANK, I need you here right now!"
Kurt looked up, his eyes half-shut.
"L- Lo- Logan?"
And what could he say but "Hey, Elf."
"That was always the sweetest thing about them. They could be apart for months at a time, think the other dead, but when they saw each other again, they could be so understated about it."
"Or they just gave each other a huge hug."
"That too."
Steve woke to a tapping on his window. Given that this was thirty stories up, he was admittedly nonplussed. The shock came when he saw the person tapping; their wings beating and hair flickering in the breeze.
"Tan…?"
"Open the window, Discus-Boy. It's freezing out here. And the wind-chill isn't helping."
He opened the window in a daze and she fell in.
"You're alive…?"
"Obviously, genius. And slightly worried with it. I was supposed to die and stay dead."
"We… We were married…"
"Tora's missing."
That silenced him.
"Logan thinks he knows where she is. He wants the Avengers as back-up. We don't know what state she'll be in, or even if she'll do a Wanda and vanish for a few years."
She moved for the door. He grabbed her arm.
"What, Steve?"
"Before you go out there, I am going to do something and I don't want you to stop me."
"What?"
He pressed his lips to hers, half-expecting her to attack him. Instead she kissed him back then pulled away.
"Seventy years. I waited seventy years for that."
He grinned.
"Puts my suffering in perspective, doesn't it."
She laughed.
"Come on. We really haven't time for dallying. Tora may end up destroying the Universe and it'll be because you were too busy kissing me to assemble the Avengers."
"Decent trade-off."
She hit him around the head then twitched her wings out.
"Notice a difference?"
"Tan… They're healed!"
She grinned.
"Yep. I think I shocked a few people when they wandered downstairs to find me lying on the sofa in a shroud. Why Tora had to bring me back in winter when I had to break through the frost to get out of the bleeding coffin, I will never know."
She opened the door and marched out.
"AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!"
The doors opened as people tripped out. Hawkeye pointed at her.
"Great. You're back. I thought we just got rid of you."
She shrugged.
"Look, I haven't got a clue. One minute I'm in the middle of a Scrabble Grandmaster Tournament in the Afterlife; the next I'm a physicist and married to Steve; then I'm stuck in a freezing cold coffin who knows where. I couldn't teleport out so had to dig. It was cold."
She raised her hands, showing fingernails caked with blood and dirt.
"Now, Logan thinks he knows where Tora is. He wants everyone he can get to try and talk her down."
"Where are we going? Where is she?"
Her eyes darted down then back up.
"The one place she never left."
"Oh, how sweet. And how terribly, terribly sad…"
Death grunted.
"Humph. That was just cheating."
"You're still sore about that, aren't you?"