Disclaimer: Nope. If you need to know more go back a few chapters.
Getting the entire Team into one space is a job that's been getting progressively more complicated over time. It had started as a question of coordinating schedules, then become something that could be solved by a larger conference room, then become a situation where everyone was slightly cramped, then very cramped, then so cramped everyone had a very high incentive to finish the meetings quickly. It is now a challenge of physics that requires just slightly less innovative thinking than the job of creating actual time travel.
Tony, Steve, Sam, Bruce, Thor, Natasha, Dr. Simmons, Agent Johnson, Agent May, and Agent Sousa, Shuri, and King T'Challa have always taken seats around the coffee table. Agent Sousa had tried to demur his seat to (in turn) Cassie, Reyna, Wanda, Meg, Valkyrie, and Bucky (for the sake of balance maybe?). They had each managed to very calmly, Cassie thinks, tell him no.
Reyna and Bucky had done so by quietly stepping in to one corner of the room together. Bucky is leaning against the wall and Reyna is standing with her weight braced against him. Meg had given him a bright grin and said "I'm good honey. Perks of a boyfriend. Chairs are shared real estate!" and sashayed over to Pietro who had dragged in and occupied a desk chair after walking in two minutes after everyone else and noting the already existing seating shortage. Cassie had followed her example with a lot less energy to take a perch on the arm of Steve's chair with her feet braced on the desk to anchor her in place.
She appreciates that Agent Sousa is from the sixties (fifties maybe? Cassie doesn't have all those details yet) and this is his version of being kind and polite. That said, she also understands that Agent Sousa is working with a prosthetic leg. An extremely advanced prosthetic leg, but still, a prosthetic leg. If there's one person in the room who definitely deserves a chair, it's him.
Valkyrie had done her part to relieve the problem by rolling her eyes and leaving the room. Wanda had shaken her head and said "that is very kind, but I am not actually here. Loki has suggested an alternative."
That had prompted everyone in the room to simultaneously turn to where Loki is standing behind Thor's chair. "Holographic projection," he says with a shrug. "I frankly didn't see a reason to stand in this room when I didn't actually have to be. I suggested the lovely Ms. Maximoff employ a similar strategy when I learned of her abilities. She picked it up very quickly. It's... fascinating."
Well.
Cassie is going to consider that a problem, but one for another day.
Vision has apparently decided that hovering is the answer to today's problems and is floating cross-legged five feet above the heads of the rest of the room. Barton has done as Barton does and is perching comfortably on top of a low filing cabinet. Percy, Annabeth, Piper, Jason, Hazel, Nico, Will, and the Kane siblings aren't physically there (thank all the gods) and are instead participating through Iris calls.
Rhodey has apparently just decided to take Tony's word for it and get the details of the plan later. Agents Shaw and Mack have taken up spaces along the wall.
On the one hand, Cassie really enjoys not having the fate of the world be down to approximately nine people. Having more assets, human and otherwise, is definitely preferable to limping across the country on questionable sources of transportation. On the other hand, if their team gets any better they're going to have to get things split in to sub-groups and have them each send single representatives.
Or build an extra-large conference room.
Or maybe do like Scott Lang and just shrink.
Anyway, back to quantum physics problem number two of the day.
Time travel.
Getting your head around the notion that time travel is something other than a theoretical concept is one thing. Being faced with the multiple realities that 1. there are three practical scientific methods before you to accomplish said time travel; 2. you will very shortly be expected to use one of them, and; 3. the fate of the universe may depend on your ability to do so successfully, is quite another.
What are these three methods you ask?
Well, Cassie would be delighted to tell you. So long as no one asks her to try to explain how they work. That's way above her pay grade. Which, considering she's pretty sure her paycheck is now less tied to a contract or pay scale, and more tied to Tony vaguely waiving in the direction of her bank account, and then vaguely waiving again at her usual living expenses, and calling it a day, is saying something.
Come to think of it, should they have been paying taxes in Wakanda? Have they been paying for... literally anything since they bailed out of the U.S? Surely the answer is yes, but who and how much and how regularly? She'll work it out later. After she's figured out the time travel situation. Will it still be considered "after" if she's going back in time? It'll be after in her personal experience so maybe...
Cassie wrenches her mind out of that particular tailspin in favor of paying attention to the user instructions and safety meeting. It's important to hear the whole game plan. For the time travel.
Gods.
Fuck.
Okay. Time travel method one: Actual Fucking Time Machine (Invented by... someone at SHIELD they haven't met yet. Made operational again by Tony, Enoch, Shuri, Bruce, Scott Land, Hank Pym a little, and Leo a little over the phone). This method will be the one used by a large portion of those who will be time traveling because it's, apparently, the safest. Given the ship recently suffered a severe breakdown and crashed in their backyard, Cassie doesn't really love what that says about the safety of the other options.
Time travel method two: Pym Particles. This apparently involves complicated suits, extra advanced technology, shrinking to the subatomic level, and traveling through something called the Quantum Realm. It also apparently involves doing some kind of heist thrown in on top of the time travel. Cassie regularly rips her own atoms apart by harnessing the power of the sun throws them all through physical space using her mind and then stitches them all back together again on the other end. So oddly, method two actually makes a weird amount of sense to her. This is, as it has been explained to her, pretty much the same thing. Only with time.
Method Three: Magic? Apparently, Doctor Strange can do some... things? Okay Cassie is just going to come right out with it and admit Method Three seems to consist of everyone crossing their fingers and trusting the dickhead with the magic green rock not to fuck up. Cassie is really hoping no one is actually going to end up having to use Method Three. Thankfully, it seems to be a back up rescue plan more than it is anything else.
Or not.
"What we're dealing with here is largely a numbers problem." Tony announces.
Steve nods. "We need to send enough of us back to the right points in time along two timelines. The one are friends from SHIELD came from where Thanos already won, and this one where it hasn't happened yet to avoid the paradox issue.
"That's the other big problem," Tony adds. "I don't actually know what the result of a time paradox is, but there's a pretty good chance it just rips a hole straight through reality calling a blackhole collapse which envelopes the universe."
"Ah," Natasha says. "So... something to avoid. How do we do it?"
"And before we get to that part," Reyna interrupts. "How do we do this without compromising existing assets? We can take out the Tesseract and the Power Stone pretty easily without loosing anything we need, but last I checked the Mind Stone is what got Wanda and Pietro their abilities. Not to mention it's currently in Vision's head. We kind of need all three of those people to retain their current power level in case something goes to shit in the future. Plus getting the Soul Stone involves someone giving up and I quote "the thing you love most" which for the people in this room pretty universally means someone else in this room. All of whom we need."
Something sparks in Cassie's brain. She raises her hand a little. "Not to pile on more problems. But I assume we have also calculated the fact that we're going to need to time getting the Aether incredibly carefully? Hosting it fundamentally changed Jane's physiology and I do not have the capacity to deal with any possible mid-pregnancy alterations or reversions."
"We have calculated for that," Shuri assures without looking up from her tablet. "We have also calculated for the fact that Doctor Strange will need to retain working possession of the Eye of Agamoto for as long as possible in order to use it to bring you all back. Does anyone have any other addressed concerns they would like to reiterate? Or can we stop wasting time."
"Enough Shuri," King T'Challa chides from his seat at the head of the conference table. "Or I will use my sovereign powers to demand you take a nap until you can interact with others without being needlessly rude to our allies."
"You cannot order me to nap like a child."
"I can if you are going to act like one."
Credit to Doctor Strange (Cassie still can't believe that's his genuine legal name) he sidesteps the sibling squabble. "The Eye of Agamoto is both are biggest problem and our smallest risk," he states. "Last time, in the version where Thanos won, he did it because that timeline's version of me had to give up the Eye to set up an Endgame where we could ultimately prevent greater loss of life. With it, it didn't matter that you had destroyed another one of the Stones, he was able to rebuild it."
Now it's Bucky's turn to raise his hand. "So we're not just skipping the time travel and going straight to destroying the Time Stone you currently have actually on your person?"
"Because if we do that it's an all in play," Strange answers. "Without it we have no workable safety net if collecting and destroying the others doesn't work."
"Had to ask."
"Skipping to the solution might be good around now," Agent Sousa suggests. "As far as I can tell, the problem one way or another, is that if we can't pull this off the world ends. Since we know that, maybe we can just jump to the page where we talk about making sure that doesn't happen?"
This motion gets a lot of nodding so Steve seems to consider it passed and does as Sousa suggests. "The key word on this is redundancies," he says. "We're sending multiple two-person teams to retrieve and destroy three out of the six stones. The three we're going after are the Tesseract, the Aether, and the Power Stone. The Power Stone hasn't had any impact on our lives so far, it's being stored with someone called The Collector on a foreign planet in outer space and that information is current, not off a separate timeline. We're going to try to retrieve that first in the here and now for the sake of simplicity. If we can't get it, we'll switch to a time travel approach. Stark, Enoch, Banner, and Shaw have gotten the Asgardian transport in working order so that's what that team will be using. Due to their prior experience with space travel and the technology, Agents Johnson and Shaw, Enoch, Lady Valkyrie, will be going after that.
"Thor, Bruce, Sam, Pietro, and Agents Coulson and May will be going after the Aether at the point in the timeline immediately after it was extracted from Jane. I'd like more demigods on board that trip but Norse demigods are a limited commodity and sending another sect will draw the interests of the wrong kind of people. Thor is team leader. Thor, Sam, and Coulson are group A on that trip and Strange will be sending them. Coulson, May, and Sam will take the Zephyr. May will pilot.
"Stark, myself, Cassie, Castellan, and Agent Sousa will go after the Tesseract," Steve summarizes. "I was practically hugging the thing for seventy years and it didn't kill me, Lang and Stark can put together an understanding of the mechanics of the transport, Castellan is-"
"-a thief," Luke interjects. "So I'm guessing there's a concern we might have to steal this? Possibly from ourselves."
"Possibly from me," Loki corrects. He inclines his head towards Steve. "Putting the spawn of one trickster god up against another. Teamed up with a girl who might possibly be able to see through the illusion. Clever soldier."
"SPAWN?!"
Steve ignores the interjection. "The benefit of Agent Sousa being there is that he wasn't there the first time. He can provide a high level of strategic support without worrying about running in to himself. Stark and I are going to be running that risk but we're going to need to risk it to cover the skill sets."
"Uh," Cassie interrupts her husband from her space over his shoulder. "Quick question. Why am I in this group? I get Loki's whole point, but I will be ducking past me for this and if we just want another demigod on it with fast transport Meg can get that done."
Strange is the one to answer. "I've taken a look at the sans you have of your own molecular structure," he says. "I got curios after the last time we met and did some digging. You routinely rip apart your own molecular structure and then staple it back together again. It makes you a prime candidate to deal with the physical effects of the time travel I'll be using on you."
"Which is?"
"I'll essentially be transferring your present conscience in to your past body. It'll make it so we can properly portion out the Pym particles without being in danger of stranding anyone where we don't want them."
Cassie lets herself digest that and looks for words. What she comes up with is "oh." She swallows. Tries again. "You've done this before? Successfully? Hopefully many many times."
"This is theoretical."
"So... no. Okay. How do I get back when we're done? I get how everyone else is supposed to do it."
Strange shrugs. "Simple timing. I'll do the spell, wait two hours, then yank you back to here and now. Your past conscience will have two sets of memories which should reset in an overlay when I get you back here."
Reyna steps forward. "If that's an option to do the time travel then why are we screwing around with the Pym particles at all?"
"Because the more people I send the harder it is to hold your conscience in status to haul you back," Strange says bluntly. "If I were fine completely re-setting the timeline and crossing my fingers I'd send you all back six years knowing what you know now and let you figure it out. But I sort of figured no one here was particularly keen on re-living the last half a decade."
"Which isn't wrong," Tony interjects. "Back to the briefing? Banner will be here heading up Team Science with the whole and complete goal of getting the stone out of Vision's head without killing him or compromising his powers. That group is the princess, Solace who will be here in-" he cuts a look at the Iris message."
Will sighs. "Ninety minutes. Nico will shadow travel us over as quickly as we can go safely."
Tony gives a sharp nod. "Also Doctor Foster, Ms. Lewis, the Spider Kid who should be here around when Solace is, and someone from Egypt?"
"Jazz," Sadie contributes from her Iris Message screen. "She's a trained healer. I'll be coming along as well. My thing is less science more magic, but it seems like you'll need a bit of both for this. We'll be there in two hours when we can summon up a portal."
"You'll be partnering with Wanda for that," Banner tells her.
"Everyone else is going to prepare for a battle to take place in Wakanda," Steve says. "In case we end up right where we did last time, we'll make Thanos take the fight to us there. Wong will be taking magicians to retrieve and condense our forces. "Reyna, Jason, Annabeth, Bucky, Rhodes, and King T'Challa will be in charge of co-ordinating our defenses. Bucky, I want you and Barton in charge of splitting up and deploying snipers. Work with Cassie's siblings and the Hunters of Artemis. Thalia Grace in particular. King T'Challa, Annabeth, and Reyna will martial the ground forces. Carter, Reyna, and Jason will determine our air support. Everyone has free rein to prepare and utilize the best defenses they can devise, but I want everyone reporting to King T'Challa for central command. Hopefully, none of this will be necessary, but if it is then we need to be ready to fight like holy hell."
And on that cheerful note, the meeting wraps up so all the teams can gather their supplies.
For the time traveling.
Gods.
FUCK.
Cassie's goodbye to Steve before they both go off to their extremely dangerous time travel mission is quiet, fervent, and done while Strange is standing twenty feet away not at all hiding how impatient he is. Why they're in a hurry right now when they're talking about doing FUCKING TIME TRAVEL (okay so Cassie isn't really chill with that yet. Give her time. Time. Hahahahahaha) Cassie can't fathom. In any event, she does not allow the impatient sorcerer rush her through kissing her husband goodbye.
When they pull away Cassie takes a moment to lean her head into his chest, smoothing her hands over the rigid material of his time travel suit at his shoulders. She forces herself to smile, drags up a joke from... somewhere. "Have a great day Honey," she says, forcing a saccharine sweet note into her voice.
A choked sounding laugh half-breaks through so Cassie considers this a half-success. "Yeah, I better get going if I want to beat traffic."
Cassie lets herself smile again, for real this time, and levers back up on to her toes to kiss him again. She means it to be light, but Steve deepens it. He shifts the way his arms fit around her to take her weight, exploring her mouth with his like he's planning to map her out and re-commit everything about her to his memory. One of his hands travels along her side to cup her shoulder, traces down her arm to tangle their fingers together.
Suddenly, Cassie realizes that memorizing her is exactly what he is doing. This is how the serum has made his brain work. He can create a full sense map of her with touch and take it with him even in places that he can't take her.
When the kiss breaks, Cassie is out of breath and not a little dizzy. She has to take a few moments to breath and settle her thoughts. When she has she says, "Okay, I know you and Bucky have your own version of what I'm going to tell you next, but don't do anything stupid, okay. I know you're going to be... you, and be a hero. I know you're going to do everything you feel like you have to do, but one of the things you have to do is everything you can to come back to me, okay? You're coming back and I'm coming back and we and our friends are going to save the universe and then seriously contemplate just fucking retiring."
"I like that plan," Steve agrees. "Stark must have a beach house somewhere. We'll make him lend it to us for a month while we figure out what we want to do. We'll sit by the water. You can listen to your music and sleep in the sun and I'll sketch."
Cassie nods and kisses his cheek. "I approve the edits to the original plan. As an extra addendum, maybe around the time we're lounging on the beach we can contemplate the production timeline of the little cherub children the genetic simulators are all convinced we're going to have?"
The smile breaks across Steve's face like the sun coming out on a rainy day. He kisses her forehead, then each of her cheeks in turn. "Yes," he says on a breath. "Yes we can talk about that then."
"I'm telling you know now I'm up for having at least two," Cassie informs him. "Though I warn you, if one of the pregnancies turns out to be twins, which are technically a thing in my family, there might be just the one pregnancy. Odds are whatever kids we make are going to have Super Serum effects and demigod quirks and I am a very small person structurally speaking."
"And I am letting you know now that when we talk numbers, you have complete and total veto power," he tells her. "Probably on names too."
"I accept the terms."
He kisses her one more time, then backs away. "I'll see you in a minute."
"And I'll see you six years ago," she replies.
They don't say goodbye.
It's better that way.
Strange doesn't bother giving her any time to reset herself before he walks in. "Ready?" he asks brusquely. "I recommend lying down. You have a nice couch over on that wall."
"And if I don't lie down?" Cassie asks, though she's not sure why she's challenging him even as she does it. Other than the fact that his personality irks her. "Since you told me twenty minutes ago downstairs that you've never actually done this before."
"Okay then don't," Strange says with a shrug. "I'll just rip your consciousness out of your skull and use magic to launch it nearly a decade back in time while you stand there. When I yank you back to the here and now, make sure you stay on the floor where you're going to land so I can check you over for the concussion the impact will cause you."
Cassie rolls her eyes and makes her way over to the couch. "Don't worry, I have the word list memorized."
"You've seen the Scat5 before I'm assuming?" Strange asks, following her over as she lies down. He has the same slightly superior and supercilious tone of some of Cassie's more irritating instructors at Columbia.
"Extensively," Cassie confirms, nestling her head back in to the pillow. "I've never had to use it on myself before though. No concussion I've ever had lasted longer than four minutes. I just stand in the sun until it goes away."
Strange takes over her desk chair and drags it over to sit near her head. "What happens if it's dark?"
"That's when it takes four minutes."
Strange makes a semi-interested humming noise that could mean anything from "I'm fascinated" to "what was it I was planning to get for lunch again?" to "oh wow, a massive cancerous tumor!" and Cassie gets the sudden and unwelcome realization that she's getting a first person up close and personal look at his bed-side manner. "When you get back you and I are going to have a drawn out conversation about your exact physiognomy."
Cassie doesn't hide her eye roll this time. "Sure. Or we could do quite literally anything else in the world."
He makes a feint clucking sound with his tongue as he begins to coach his hands through a complicated pattern of movement. "Doctors shouldn't self-treat or self-diagnose," he chides. "I taught a few lectures at Columbia so I know your medical ethics class covered that. If you want kids you're going to need an outside doctor who understands the complications of your biology combined with those of Captain Rogers. Do you have one of those?"
"You're offering to be my O/B now?" she asks skeptically.
Green symbols float upwards from his hands to hover over Cassie's head. She has no idea what any of them mean or if they're supposed to symbolize any kind of language. She really hopes there's some kind of rhyme or reason to it and they all have some effect greater than adding dramatic flair. "From what I can tell your options are me or Banner," Strange says, his eyes not breaking from the symbols and his hands don't deviate from their pattern. "Someone from Wakanda might be able to help since I'm sure they have some fairly advanced technology and knowledge here, but as far as I can tell none of them deal in actual magic. I'm taking a shot at being a team player."
Cassie laughs acidly. "You're going to monumentally regret that impulse when I make you actually be my primary treating physician for the pregnancy and birth," she tells him. "Don't think I won't. I'll do it just for spite because I know you are both actually capable of providing the correct care and the kind of asshole who constantly put down gynecology and pediatrics."
"Yeah," he sighs. "I'm already regretting how I approached this situation. Now, I need you to concentrate on the day Loki invaded. Where you were and what you were doing at the time. I'm giving you the force and the general direction of travel, you need to do the precision steering."
"I love this less and less as it develops," Cassie mutters.
"I need you to not fight me," Strange says shortly. "if you do you might win and then this has absolutely no chance of working. If this doesn't work the world ends in fire and ash at the hands of a power hungry megalomaniac wielding the power of a deranged god."
Cassie bites down on her instinctive retort of must be fucking August again and exhales sharply. "Fine." She bends her focus as Strange had suggested, letting her mind fill with memories of that day. "How will I know when it wor-"
The world behind her eyes flashes a brilliant glowing green. The bottom drops out of her stomach and her heart lodges in to her throat. Someone has pulled the pin out of the universe and she is falling, falling, falling.
She starts her sentence in 2018. She finishes the last word of it in 2012.
She's wearing the clothes she'd donned after the worst of the fighting was over in New York, the clothes she'd put on to do her healing rounds. The familiar weight of her field bag is hanging from her shoulder. The air around her smells like sugar and dust, coffee and rubble. Sight is the last sense to come back to her to communicate information to her brain. The shape of the diner she had worked in through the first year of her medical school education. In the original timeline, Cassie had come back here about halfway through her healing route.
O...kay.
First thing first. If she's remembering this right then she should have a bag with her armor in it right - oh good right there next to her feet where it should be. Thank the gods - only usually not because face it foresight is a pain in the ass and not something Cassie plans on thanking anyone for - she had had a premonition six years ago (possibly last week) telling her to be ready for aliens falling out of the sky.
Now here's the thing about armor. It takes time to put on. More time than the crumbling infrastructure of the city is apparently planning on giving her. Cassie hadn't had to stop to change or take the time to adjust to having time traveled back in 2012. Plus, she doesn't know how much time elapsed while her awareness got back to where it should be. All this to say, she has not managed to help evacuate all of her co-workers and begun to triage their medical treatment (only minor injuries if she's remembering it right) when half the roof caves in this time.
Fortunately, Cassie is well trained. She is accustomed to the ways of the falling rubble and some muscle memory simply does not leave you after having been in multiple cave-ins, a labyrinth collapse, and a minor volcanic eruption. Basically, she hits the floor, curls in to a very small ball to cover her head and everything soft, and then rolls herself under the linoleum counter as quickly as possible.
When an appropriate amount of time has passed - i.e. the air has stopped shaking - Cassie reverses the process. Her ears are ringing a little so it takes her a few minutes to organize her brain and realize that a familiar voice is calling her name. "Over here!" she calls, or tries to, her throat is choked with rubble dust. Gods only know what this could be doing to her lungs if the sun doesn't undo it.
She swallows and tries again. "Over here!" she shouts, this time layering a little power in to the sound to amplify it. "Luke! I'm over here!" But it's not Luke who she sees first when the collapsed door is pulled out of the way of the entrance. Instead it's Agent Sousa wearing an NYPD uniform.
He reaches out a hand to help her over a large chunk of fallen concrete. "Are you alright Doctor Morgenstern-Rogers?"
Gods bless him. He uses her full hyphenated name. "Yes I'll be fine thank you, Agent Sousa," she says. "Nice uniform."
"Thank you," he says graciously. "It was under the time travel suit. It was floated by Mr. Stark that it would help me blend in down here. I thought the extra authority couldn't hurt in a crisis zone."
"Yeah," Luke contributes sounding annoyed. In his defense, he has a good reason. From the far side of the door, it becomes very clear that the reason Sousa had helped Cassie climb out instead had been that he is the one holding the blockage out of the way. He has to be holding up about two hundred pounds on his own right now. Annoyed is a permitted emotion. "Meanwhile I'm in jeans from five years in the future and you look like you should be running a Red Cross blood drive." He lets it all drop back in to place as soon as Cassie is clear. He takes a better look at her. "Wow your face did not change at all between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight."
Cassie rolls her eyes. "Yeah it's a thing I have going on. You two turn around so I can change." They both do, though Sousa's ears turn red, and Cassie begins the process as quickly as she can. "Hey, general question. Should we have re-blocked the entrance? Surely we could have dropped the rubble in a direction that would let my current co-workers get out?"
"Limiting civilian casualties in the aftermath," Luke answers. "Someone will let them out later and the structure won't be collapsing any further according to you. They'll be safer inside."
This is most probably true so Cassie chooses to finish changing rather than respond for the sake of banter. She rejoins them approximately ninety seconds after stepping away and Sousa immediately hands her a com link which she pops in to her ear. "The Doctor is in," she announces in a pleasantly bland voice over the line.
"Nice to hear from you Little Miss Sunshine," Tony is the first to great her.
"That's Doctor Sunshine thank you," she corrects. "Though if anyone tries to make that my official call sign or anything I'm going to have to lodge a formal protest."
"With who?" Luke questions.
Cassie waives her hand in a vague motion. "I don't know. Someone with authority. Mackenzie is the new SHIELD director right? I'll probably start there."
"You might want to re-think that," Sousa cautions. "He let Agent Johnson be called Quake."
Cassie can't help the expression her face twists into. "Duly noted. Thank you. Steve? You on the line?"
"I hear you and I copy," Steve's voice says. "Start making your way in to the Tower." Now that his line is engaged, the sound of combat is dimly audible in the background. "A few points. One, given the time travel I don't think Director Mackenzie has present authority. Two, we fled a whole hemisphere so an external agency wouldn't have authority over how we operate. Three, Cassie's call sign is just Doctor. Strange is Strange, Banner is Hulk, and Foster doesn't go in the field so no one should get confused."
"Yeah yeah," Tony sighs. "Doc, Dead Boy, and PD are incoming. ETA?"
Sousa rolls his eyes. "That personality," he mutters. Then louder he says "two minutes to get in the building, five to get to your floor. What kind of security are we going to need to beat."
Cassie stops abruptly in her tracks, causing both Luke and Sousa to stop too, her brain suddenly whirling to a halt. "Hold up," she says. "We're being idiots. I'm right here and I can literally teleport us anywhere. It'll be faster and we won't have to deal with any guards. "Tony, Steve, ETA twenty seconds." She extends one hand each to Luke and Sousa. "Grab on," she instructs. "Hold on tight."
Luke immediately does so with a slightly alarmed expression, but Sousa has never experienced this particular ability of hers first hand and doesn't know any better. He does take her hand, but Cassie assumes the move is more out of ingrained habit to listen to orders coming from women who speak decisively, particularly because this is another man who spent a significant amount of time working for and with Peggy Carter.
Also she's pretty sure one Daisy Johnson could ask Agent Sousa to shut his eyes and hop in a circle standing on one foot on the vague promise that it was important and he'd do it first and ask why later.
Cassie lets sunlight pour through her, overcharging her atoms and dragging her out of one part of the universe and in to another. She pulls Luke and Sousa along with her and between one heartbeat and another all three of them are standing safely in Stark Tower post-Hulk smash up. She feels fine. Luke and Sousa are both blinking a whole lot.
Luke lets out a deep breath, following the exhale in to a forward bend. The movement is heart-wrenchingly familiar. Luke has always held his breath anytime she zapped them anywhere. Of course, she'd only really done it once. This particular ability of hers had barely manifested beyond short hops from one side of the lake to the other the summer that Luke had royally fucked them all over by pulling off an Anakin Skywalker and listening to the deep dark forces pulling him to the dark side. Luke had done it without a genocidal rampage through a pre-school, but plenty of kids had still died.
"You've gotten better at that," he says. "You're stronger."
"Fifteen years," Cassie says shortly. "Lived long enough to get good at it."
He tips his head to the side and gives a considering nod. "One of those things would probably help with the other. Being able to vanish and re-appear if you're about to die would help you avoid dying."
"Doesn't work that way," Cassie tells him. "It's not like Shadow Travel. It doesn't creep up on me or pull me apart when I'm not thinking about it. It definitely isn't automatic. I have to want to go. It takes focus. If I'm losing a fight to the death, I'm not going to have the focus to just ... bail. It's not a reliable survival mechanism. Just travel."
"Noted." Her face must pinch because he shrugs and adds, "I like to know how to get out and if I won't be able to. You know that."
Cassie acknowledges that with a short nod. It's a trait they share. Thieves don't walk in to places they might not walk out of. For her and Luke, locks fall apart in their hands, they know which floorboards will creak without ever stepping on them, and they always have an exit strategy. It kept them both alive, along with Annabeth and Thalia, more than once.
She wrenches her head out of the past and back to the present, turning to look to her other travel companion in time-travel shenanigans. "Are you okay there Agent Sousa?" He starts to open his mouth, then seems to think better of it, slamming his jaw shut again. He nods, then immediately seems to regret that decision too. "Nauseous?" Cassie checks sympathetically. He nods again, more slowly, and Cassie gives him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "It'll pass."
"LIKE OUR WINDOW TO SAVE HUMANITY!" Tony shouts, practically blowing out their earpieces.
Cassie winces and takes approximately one-tenth of a second to wonder how long it's going to take her eardrums to recover from that kind of decibel exposure. "A very good point. Not one I needed at that volume but..."
"WHY ARE YOU THIS CALM WITH THE WORLD ENDING?"
"Dude," Luke says. "Not to make this less special, but the world almost ends like, a lot. Once or twice a year minimum. I mean, not the time travel part of it, but the crazy god part is actually not a big departure."
"Are we even calling Thanos a god?" Cassie queries, voicing a question she's actually had for a while. "I mean, he's not Thanatos. He's not an official titan in the Greek, Roman, Norse, or Egyptian pantheons. Isn't he just kind of an alien with the power to use the infinity stones and no actual understanding of responsible resource management or civic planning?"
Sousa makes a small noise somewhere between a cough and a strangled hysterical laugh. "I don't love that this is a conversation that can happen," he says. "Just, you know, for the record."
"All points noted," Steve says, voice clipped and direct. "New point to think about - Past Avengers team incoming to your floor. Clear the box."
It probably says something about her and Luke when they both immediately look at the newly created gaps in the ceiling for the way out. It maybe says even more that despite their wide range of issues, Luke doesn't pause before turning to her and holding his hands out for her, forming a cradle for her to step in to. Cassie steps in to it without thinking and pushes off as Luke throws her in to the ceiling. Cassie catches herself on the edges of the gap and levers up through the hole.
Oddly, it's much less surprising to be launched on a twenty foot vertical than it is for Sousa to follow her a breath later. He shakily pulls himself the rest of the way in to the crawl space with Cassie with the same confused, but stoically holding it together to facilitate panicking on the inside, look that he seems to adopt about eighty percent of the time. "So..." he says, stretching out flat on his stomach since he's too tall to crouch up her comfortably the way that she is. "Castellan is stronger than I expected."
"He wasn't always," Cassie tells him. "But there was a thing with a magic river and possession by an immortal evil titan. Then he died. But then he came back thanks to forces and reasons unknown. Long story. Ending TBD."
"Sure."
Cassie leaves that conversation where it is and lowers the upper half of her body back in to the room. Luke is pacing the room below, carefully counting the perimeter. It's what he used to do to gage distances and make mental maps of his environment when they crashed at new safe houses. "You coming?" she asks. "Or do you have another brilliant plan you're going to use in the next three seconds?"
He tips his head back to look at her. And smiles. It's a lazy expression that pulls the scar sharply across his face. It's the expression that belongs at a card table. The one that said that since playing by the rules wasn't going to let him win, he was planning to cheat. "Get back up there Cass," he says. "Clear the space. I wanna try something new."
Those words pretty much guarantee that Cassie starts shifting to roll herself over and drop back in to the room to drag Luke out of there before he can do... whatever it is he's about to do. She's stopped by Sousa putting a hand on her shoulder. He shrugs in response to her questioning look. "We're on a team," he says, like it's that simple.
It's going to have to be.
Cassie grips the edges on the gap in the ceiling so tightly the plaster crumbles under her fingers, but she stays where she is. She makes herself let go to avoid wrecking their hiding space by dropping plaster in to the room. Instead, for no particular reason she can name, she crossed her fingers, the middle two over the outer two, then double layering the twist by twining her index finger over her pinky. Maybe it's ridiculous in a world where there are gods and fates and pre-written destinies they can't get out of, but none of that is more ridiculous than time travel, so maybe Cassie is just figuring that they're grading on a curve.
Partly, Cassie is just thinking that maybe, just maybe, if she can twist her fingers far enough, she can twist the odds away from her being screwed over by the same person she trusts twice.
Weirder things have happened for her, okay?
"Cassie," Steve says evenly over the calm, "Do I want to know what's about to happen?"
"If I knew I'd tell you," Cassie says, forcing her voice to match the calm of his. "Right now all I know is what the inside of Tony's ceiling looks like." She casts her gaze around. "It's dark."
"Lighting for the potential cat burglars wasn't the top of my priority list when I was designing the building," Tony says, thankfully not yelling anymore.
Cassie clucks her tongue at him. "Inconsiderate of you really," she says. "Barton spends a lot of time in these things."
"Bucky says they're good sniper perches," Steve muses. "He has really strong feelings about those."
"I've heard the saluting story," Sousa says. "I always wondered how much of that was embellishment."
Cassie's ears perk up when she hears the rush of static from Steve's com. It sounds distinctly like the put-upon sigh of someone who hopes an embarrassing story about them is not abut to come spilling out in to the open. "I don't think I've heard this one. Do share Agent Sousa."
Sousa's brow furrowed. "I only know what Peggy did and she heard it second hand," he says. "Apparently Barnes had good cover and took out an enemy sniper. Rogers saluted him."
Cassie feels her eyes bug out and she lets out a disappointed sigh. "Oh Steve you didn't!"
"I know..." Steve says. "I promise I got yelled at plenty at the time and have never done it ever again."
"Lovely and edifying as this chat is," Luke says casually, still standing in the center of the floor down below them. "I'm about to try something incredibly complicated for the very first time when those elevator doors open, and if it goes wrong I'm definitely going to die. It'd probably be easier if everyone shut up."
Unsurprisingly, it is factually dead silent when the elevator gives a cheerful Ding! and slides open. Inside is a gagged and chained version of Loki escorted by the entirety of the group of people who Cassie now considers family. People who won't know her at all for another five hours at minimum. People who are fresh off a battle and working on hair-triggers.
Luke doesn't give them time to pull them. He doesn't attack and he doesn't evade. Instead, he raises both hands level with his ears, and gives his fingers a sharp snap. The sound clicks, stretches, and then almost seems to bend in Cassie's ears. Then something happens that Cassie isn't sure how to describe. It's as if the whole moment sort of - shudders. Then it all just stops.
Not the odd sensation. That is most certainly still there. The whole world has just...stopped.
Because Luke told it to.
"Cass," Luke calls, not letting his eyes move from the moment in front of him. "Come down and get the cube. You won't break the spell."
Cassie lowers herself through the ceiling, dangling from her fingertips for a moment before releasing her group and dropping soundlessly to the ground. She draws level with Luke, staring at the scene in the open elevator door with a fascination she can't help but indulge. "You can't get it?" she asks, not looking away from the scene either. Loki is paused mid-eye roll. Thor has his head tipped slightly upward as if scanning the ceiling. If any of the group would have known she and Luke were there, it would have been Thor and Loki.
In her periphery she sees Luke shake his head. "The time stop takes focus," he says shortly. "It won't hold long or if I'm distracted. I'm keeping it focused on a small space or it won't work."
Cassie frowns. "I can break the perimeter?"
"Oh she won't have to," says a cooly delighted and familiar voice from behind them. Cassie whips around to track the sound. Luke makes a frustrated sound through his teeth but doesn't turn. Behind them, wearing green and gold Asgardian armor complete with decorative helm and horns is...Loki? Cassie spins back to the elevator where the first Loki is still standing bound and immobile.
She turns back and the second Loki grins, wide and bordering on maniacal. "A good effort I'll grant you," he says. "A time stop. Now that's magic I haven't seen in a long while. But you see, the thing about Magic is that it is so very tied to the present, to reality, as soon as you step away, it's all just perception. It's never far to go from perception to illusions."
Cassie keeps a hold of herself even as something inside her screams. "So," she says, doing her best to sort through this calmly. "You're saying you were only bound and week in that-" she jerks her head at the elevator "-moment. Luke stopped the moment and that let you get free. Or at least, a piece of you."
"Clever," he approves with a faint click of the tongue. Cassie isn't positive, but she thinks she sees... "Catching on much faster than most demigod drivel."
"Speaking of us demigod drivel," Cassie replies in a leading tone. "I don't suppose it matters to you at all that two of your children live less than two hundred miles from this city you just tried to level?"
Loki waves a dismissive hand. "Both have had ample warning and ample opportunity to cast their lots with the winning sign. If they cannot manage to survive with what they've been given then what use can they possibly serve me."
Anger flares hot at the base of Cassie's spine. "They are children," she bites out. "Your children."
"And as such the whole world will already want them dead," he fires back, voice a cold hiss.
Ah. There it is. A little jump in his image. A skip in consistency as her words poke in to a sore spot.
"Their first responsibility as my offspring is to ensure the world does not get that satisfaction," he finishes.
Cassie refuses to be cowed. Besides, three times is the standard for scientific confirmation. She pushes harder. "And your first responsibility as their parent is to ensure they survive! To make that more important than whatever petty fucking chaos you want. I swear I will never understand how a being that has lived over five thousand years can still get that wrong!"
Loki's expression twists, and his entire image shudders back and forth like heat-haze. "And you've always been so well coddled by your father?" he mocks. "Apollo must have gone soft hearted and more foolish than ever if that's the case."
"Hardly ever actually," Cassie replies, voice now calm. She knows what she wanted to now. "My godly relatives hardly ever did anything for me. They took to much without asking and hardly ever gave anything back. But they also never tried outright to kill me."
Luke barks out a bitter laugh. "The bare minimum of demigod standards."
Loki's head has cocked to the side, eyes narrowed in a way Cassie doesn't like. "And how exactly are you here and Apollo's Daughter? It's some kind of an illusion, some magic throwing your conscious to this point, yet your mind is quite your own... tell me, what sorcerer is helping you with this?" his eyes narrow. "What could possibly be important enough to take this chance?"
A million possible answers go through Cassie's head in that moment. She could say nothing. She could try to lie and see if she can stand against the god of mischief. Instead, she weighs it carefully, then she tells the truth. "You'll know," she tells him. "Six years from now you'll know. And you'll help us." It's her turn to tip her head. "What do you think of that God of Tricks? Am I lying?"
He bares his teeth. "You certainly don't think you are," he says viciously. "You may not know what I intend."
Cassie shrugs. "Maybe not. But you knew immediately why they'd send me. See, the you from six years from now knows something about me the you from here doesn't." She takes a step forward, straight in to a large pool of sunshine falling through the window, she beckons the god closer as though she's planning to tell him a secret. Loki steps forward in to her space. "The secret is," she says, lowering her voice to a near whisper, "that I always see the trick."
Then she blasts the illusion fragment of Loki with a wave of pure golden light so powerful it blows out all the windows. It's not sunlight precisely, and it's not pure magic either. Cassie's abilities don't take that shape no matter how much she can do. But it is... something.
The whole world jumps and shudders again as Luke's control flutters in the wake of the explosion. Sousa uses the distraction to join them back on the floor. He and Luke charge forward together to grab the tesseract in it's silver carrying case. Cassie lunges after them, grabbing both men by their coats and pulling them out of the building and in to nothingness in the split second before Luke's concentration on holding the illusion snaps completely.
They appear sprawled inelegantly on the grass on the very far corner of Central Park from Stark Tower. Sitting up, Cassie catches sight of a bench where she had used to spend mornings studying in the sun.
Agent Sousa sits up, exhales sharply, then uses the com link to announce. "Package secure."
"Proceed to ex-fil double time," Steve instructs. "Keep a low profile. Stark and I will meet you there ASAP. Whatever you did caused a bit of a commotion. It looks like I'm going to need to have a fight with myself on the way out."
Sousa, Luke, and Cassie started to jog in the direction of the Zephyr as soon as the order was given and Cassie doesn't break her pace, but she does ask, with a frankly unfounded amount of blind hope, "You mean that metaphorically, right? As in, 'you're feeling a little conflicted about this plan'?"
"No."
Yeah those odds hadn't really been with her given the circumstances.
"In that case," Cassie says. "Remember two things. One, that version of you has a large piece of re-bar stuck between his ribs. Two, that version of you meets me in under six hours and that girl will fix any damage you come to her with."
"Copy," Steve says.
What follows is the entirely bizarre auditory experience that is hearing her husband engage in mortal combat with his six-year younger self.
Cassie doesn't have time to dwell on it for long. She's back at the Zephyr with Luke, Sousa, and the Tesseract in ten minutes, and then vanishes herself back to the restaurant so her past self will have fewer questions when she comes back to herself. She's been sitting on the pavement for exactly as long as it takes her to form the thought I wonder how much longer-before her vision goes swimmy and black at the edges.
Cassie shuts her eyes against the sudden sea-sick feeling that washes over her, and when she opens her eyes she's looking back at the ceiling in her office in 2018.
The first thing she does is throw up in to the very helpfully provided garbage can offered by Dr. Strange. "Oh gods that was disgusting," she groans. "I vote very strongly against ever doing that again."
"If you got the Space Stone you won't ever have to," he says brusquely, vanishing her vomit and producing a travel toothbrush for her all in one sweeping movement. Cassie gives him points for lack of squeamishness. Apparently the background in medicine isn't something he's totally ditched in favor of sorcery.
"Luke and Sousa were bringing it on the ship," Cassie says as she makes her way to the bathroom off of her office to clean out her mouth. She gives her entire mouth the most thorough cleaning she can manage without feeling like she's wasting time and gulps several large mouthfuls of water straight from the tap before rejoining Strange in her office. "Are the others back yet?"
He nods. "And so far no one seems to have irreparably damaged any time lines. I monitored them in between monitoring you."
"I'm glad to know the entirely experimental time travel I was going through was something you could multi-task," Cassie mumbles irritably.
Strange doesn't respond and hands her a granola bar, possibly by habit and possibly by way of apology. Cassie decides she doesn't much care and eats it in three bites as they return to the conference room. Strange hands her a second one and a bottle of water without comment. Cassie chugs half of it before they go in and almost feels her blood volume and energy levels perk up in real time. Hopefully, she won't look as 'why yes, I was recently violently nauseous. Thanks for asking' as she feels.
The whole team is once again (twice in one day) assembling in the conference room making Cassie's sense of de ja vu goes haywire. She doesn't have time to find Steve in the crowd before he's in front of her and lifting her off her feet in a hug. Cassie is immediately aware of the crushing tension and pulsing relief radiating simultaneously through his body as she curls her arms over his shoulders.
"I'm okay," she tells him. "Tired and very recently motion sick, but okay. Are you?"
"Fine," he promises, setting her back on her feet, giving her a cursory and habitual check for injuries. "A few bruises on me but they're already healing. It was harder than I thought it would be to have a literal fight with myself. You made a good call on the rebar."
They all settle in and the meeting proceeds in a very similar tenor to the one from mere hours ago. This one is longer because it's a combination brief for the next phase in their plan, and de-brief from the last one. Miraculously, all parts of the plan have gone successfully and they now have . The odds of this happening, a now extremely human looking version of Vision tells them, were approximately four hundred and ninety seven million to one.
They have four out of six infinity stones in their possession. Destroying them should make it impossible for Thanos to complete his plans.
Should. Cassie isn't loving the use of the word "should" in that sentence. Fortunately for her and her paranoia, neither is anyone else. The entire combined forces of Camp Halfblood, Camp Jupiter, the Nine Realms, and the House of Life are assembled with the Wakandan army on the fields outside of the capital city, ready to meet Thanos in combat if he comes to claim them. Best case scenario, they have a lot of very bored, very powerful friends that they're going to owe favors to for making the trip and thoroughly wasting a weekend. Worst case...
Well, in the worst case scenario no one is going to be alive to be angry at in either direction.
For the actual destruction, the chosen team splits off to an abandoned patch of forest to the far west of the battle field. The team blessed with this glorious assignment consists of Enoch, Strange, Nico, Luke, Thor, Banner, Wanda, Loki, Reyna, Cassie, Sadie Kane, and Zia Rashid-Kane. It's a complex and haphazard assemblage of dangerous personalities and incredible power.
It's also an extremely carefully selected team.
And about the last people Cassie would put together to go for a hike. Unfortunately, there had been some concern that any overt use of the various power options they have for teleportation or faster transport might react badly with the raw power of the stones. Which would be, you know, Bad.
So, hiking.
Cassie decides to catalogue and survey her companions rather than think about the infinity stone in her backpack. Thor is carrying the Aether and Loki the Tesseract, being the two in the entire group with the power and experience to know how to handle them. Wanda is carrying the mind stone, floating in front of her wrapped in an orb of glowing red power.
The power stone in in Cassie's backpack resting innocuously next to her water bottle.
Not thinking about it isn't going that well to be honest.
Enoch and Strange are out in front of the group scouting for the best location. They'll be the ones in charge of monitoring the stones to confirm their actual destruction. Apparently, once they're in pieces Strange can use some of his own magic and the Time stone to prevent the others form being reassembled. Thor, Banner, and Wanda are in charge of carrying out the actual destruction. Cassie, Loki, Sadie, Zia, and Nico are in charge of maintaining barriers to protect everyone within a five hundred mile radius from both the powers needed to destroy the Stones, and the fallout of their destruction. Cassie, Thor, Loki, and Nico are also on double duty to get as many of them out as possible if the force can't be contained. Wanda has an alternate double responsibility of both holding a shield in place, and channeling as much destructive energy as possible.
Reyna will be lending strength to whoever needs it the most in the moment. Luke is present mostly just on the merits of being technically indestructible. And having volunteered.
Psycho pseudo maybe still a brother. The psycho walking calmly directly on her left. Thor has one of those too. Maybe they could form a club.
"Something I've been wondering," she says, carefully continuing to look straight ahead as she says it. "Strange told me we haven't fucked up any of the timelines. I've been trying to figure out how that's possible when most of the original Avengers team would have seen three people appear and disappear apparently out of nowhere, stealing the Tesseract and blowing out a window in the process."
Luke gives a faint humming noise. "Not hearing a question in any of that."
Cassie has no compunction in rolling her eyes in a dramatic arc. "Fine. Luke, did the time stop hold when I blew out the windows?"
"Completely," he confirms. "I didn't know if it would and I almost dropped it. If you hadn't gotten us out when you did I wouldn't have held it any longer. I worried it had slipped but Strange says it didn't, and we don't have much choice but taking his word for it."
Cassie feels her brows furrowing before she can set her expression at neutral and leave it there. She could have sworn there had been... something. A shuddering little flick when the windows exploded and they'd rushed in to action. Then again, Luke isn't giving off any of the physiological signs of lying. Instead, she shifts topics. "Something about all this feels off." She says it quietly so the rest of the group won't hear.
"Of course it does," Luke says, and Cassie is taken aback to hear the faint traces of dark amusement in his voice. "Your father is the god of prophecy, the future, and foretelling. We've been fucking around with deliberately changing the future we've been told we have coming to us. We're actively engaging in doing the one thing literally all of our parents stories tell humans not to do. And your dad is a particular hater on the topic."
Her throat feels very thick when Cassie swallows. "Well," her throat still doesn't feel clear so she swallows again. "I had not thought about that yet. For the love of..." she presses the heels of her hands against her eyes so hard black spots appear in her vision. "Fuck. Anybody wanna throw out some incredibly hubristic comment about being better than one of the gods just for kicks? That's another one that always works out well."
Luke pats her shoulder making a vague sympathetic noise. Cassie surprises herself by letting him. It doesn't make her feel much better, but it's still a tiny bit of a relief to let Luke take her weight for a second and guide her over and around tree roots. She lets her brain take a moment to really feel the utter panic swamping in around her and process it before getting everything packed back up in to the little boxes labeled THE PLAN.
Cassie opens her eyes again when she feels someone else step in to the space on her other side. The body emanates cold, so Cassie knows exactly who she'll be looking at when she turns her head. "Loki," she greets. "How am I doing this hike with eleven beings and the two talking to me are highest on my list of Don't Trust You and Please Don't Talk?"
"It's your delightful smile and welcoming aura," Loki says with a grin that does a very good job of looking completely genuine. It in no way erases Cassie's very recent memories of the same god six years younger snarling at her. "An aura I suddenly have new memories of having encountered before. One that doesn't match with the rest of my mind. I have a few questions I'd like answered about that."
Cassie sighs. "What do you want to know? You have all of the information about why and how it happened now. What else is there to find out?"
"Why did you tell me the truth?"
It's such a simple question, so bluntly phrased, that it makes Cassie second guess herself. She makes herself sort through the question twice before forcing herself to concede that ti only has one level to it. She answers it with that in mind.
"You're the god of mischief," she states. "The god of mischief. And I'm a bad liar. Of course I told you the truth. Besides," she shrugs. "No lie I could ever tell was going to be more distracting, and I needed to keep you interested until we had a plan. Everything else was just trying to figure out how strong an illusion you were using."
He arches an eyebrow. "And you thought it smart to anger me. Tell me, what would you have done if that scrap," he drags out the word like it offends him. "Had been more of my essence than you had realized? What if I had seized your mind and liquified your sense of being?"
Cassie spreads her hands. "You didn't know who I was or what kind of power I had. Doing what you're talking about takes energy and I could see the main portion of your body ten feet away still in restraints. I assumed you'd deployed a fraction through the loophole you had found to scout things out. Then you'd add more power as you thought you needed it and as you managed to gather it together."
"Why would you think I had not done so?"
He sounds like he genuinely wants to know. It's the only reason Cassie answers him. "Gods always underestimate humans," she says plainly. "And you're arrogant. I've been dealing with beings like you my entire life. I acted accordingly."
Cassie doesn't know where the conversation might have gone next because they emerge in to the clearing Strange had selected for the purpose. It's nearly perfectly round and Cassie wonders what technology the Wakandans had used to make it that way and why they had bothered. There's water running nearby and birds singing their little hearts away in the trees. The air smells like warmed grass and petrichor. The sun is beaming down, filling Cassie with a profound sense of warming power and well being.
A picturesque place for them all to be to destroy objects that survived the birth of the universe or die trying.
fuck.
Disclaimer: *pokes head out from behind my laptop* Hey... So... It's been a minute hasn't it? Oh god please no one hurt me :(. I have nothing to say except that law school is hard even during the summer. I hope this somewhat longer chapter does a little bit of appeasement? I do have plans to wrap up in the next chapter, maybe two, plus an epilogue possibly. The next posting will definitely contain one of the scenes I've been actually dying to write. You know those ones where huge chunks of your story are actually about getting to that scene? Yeah, one of the ones for this fic will be in the next posting. Bonus points if you can spot it when it happens! Anyway, I hope you liked it! Review for me! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxo
