Title from "River of Dreams" by Billy Joel
Purely a fanwork. Characters belong to Marvel
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Chapter 3: Something Somebody Stole
"Whoawhoahwhoah! Take it easy on the coffee, Jane! This is all we have to last us for a while, and I do not want to be stuck hauling your equipment around without the boost of caffeine to help me."
From her vantage point in the loft, Natasha could hear the sounds of her companions beginning to stir for the day. About time, it was nearly noon.
"I need this!" Jane Foster's voice was rough with exhaustion. "I was up all night converting the data from our equipment."
"Yeah, and I was up all night lugging your equipment around so you could get the readings!" Darcy shot back, but there was no real anger in her voice, and Natasha felt no need to interrupt their fairly regular morning ritual. "Ugh, I miss having my own intern."
Natasha took another sip from her own warm mug of tea and kept her eyes on the street outside as her lips curled into a small smile. Their mostly friendly discord reminded her of her old team, and brought fond memories for her to dwell on when she should be focusing on her lookout position. She was becoming such an old lady. Just needed a knit sweater and maybe a throw blanket to complete the look as she stared out at the dreary city.
The lighthearted arguing below wound down to its usual stalemate, and Natasha gave a languid stretch before abandoning her post for the time being. It was more habit and a cautious nature that kept her up here so often, than any immediate threat that they were being followed or in danger of being discovered just yet.
"Did you find anything?" she called down as she descended the ladder leading up to the loft, her borrowed teacup balanced carefully in one hand.
Jane let out a long breathy sigh that told Natasha all she needed to know before the scientist even said a word. "No," she shuffled a few of the papers in front of herself as though she felt the need to prove that there was nothing of interest on them. "Just the same old gibberish and white noise."
Natasha offered the dejected woman a warm smile and a soft pat on her shoulder. "Did you want to stay here another night and try again or move on to another location?"
From her seat across from Jane, Darcy made a face at the mention of changing locations again.
Jane ran a hand roughly through her hair. "I don't know. I was so sure we'd finally find something this time. I don't even know which direction to head next."
"I vote somewhere downhill," Darcy said, raising one hand.
"Where is Erik?" Natasha asked. "He might be able to help steer us on from here."
Darcy made a snort. "Erik can't steer himself to the breakfast table without getting lost along the way." Beneath her harsh words was the heavy weight of worry for her friend who had been injured in ways that none of them could understand or begin to heal.
"He's in the back room." Jane pushed out her chair and stood up. "He helped us find this place," she reminded Darcy quietly, then swallowed the last of her coffee in one swig.
"And what a gold mine it has been." Darcy stood as well and began gathering the pages scattered across the table into neat piles as the other two women left.
The back room was once upon a time a master bedroom belonging to someone who had trouble separating their home life and work life. A great deal of the space was taken up by a bland old desk with a whiteboard hung over it, and a flock of sticky notes with names and numbers and all manner of nonsense scribbled across them. Another wall was taken up almost entirely by a large closet with four sliding panels, each one a massive mirror. Erik was drawing on these doors with some dry erase pens that Darcy had somehow managed to breath life back into, though they made ear-splitting squeals when they moved against the glass. Heavy curtains blocked out the window, but a portable solar lamp sat in the middle of the king sized-bed, casting everything in a warm yellow glow.
"Erik?" Jane called, knocking against the door frame when Erik continued to mumble to himself, apparently unaware of their presence.
He jumped, and the pen he'd been using clattered to the ground. "Oh! Jane! And Natal- Natasha. You snuck up on me."
"Sorry, Erik," Natasha apologized with a smile. "We didn't mean to startle you."
"No, no, of course not!" Erik bent and retrieved his pen. "I know you wouldn't. I was just so distracted I-" He paused suddenly and turned back to the mirror, his lips moving as though to form words but no sound came out.
"Erik?" Jane asked.
His attention snapped back to the women he'd been speaking to. "Right! Distracted, I get so distracted, but you-you know that. Why are you here? Can I help with anything?"
Jane stepped closer to Erik and placed on hand on his arm. The action seemed to ground him and his nervous fidgeting slowed just a fraction under her touch. "Yes, Erik, the reading are still coming back empty. We were wondering if you could help us figure out where we should go from here?"
"Back," he answered right away.
"Back where?"
Erik licked his lips. "Back, back. Back and over, really more of an over than a back, but it's how we get back, you see? By going over?"
Jane glanced up at Natasha helplessly, but Natasha was just as confused as she was. Erik's answers often made little sense to anyone but himself, but it seemed he was getting worse again.
"Where do you want us to go back to?" Jane tried. "Is it somewhere we can walk to from here, or-?"
"No," Erik said with a soft smile, like Jane had just told him a joke. "We can't walk there from here. We can't walk there from anywhere." He stopped and tilted his head as though listening to something, then gave a small laughing huff. "Yes, yes. Not us, though. We can't."
"Erik," Natasha stepped in to interrupt whatever conversation he was holding with himself, "we need to know if you have anything that can help us decide where we should go next. We're looking for anomalies on Jane's equipment, remember?"
That seemed to help, a new wave of clarity washed over his eyes and he perked up. "The anomalies, right, of course. They're so faint right now, but they'll grow."
Jane rubbed his arm in an attempt to keep him with them. Sometimes when he got excited like this he'd fall back to talking with the voices in his head for long fits, and they couldn't afford to have him doing that right now. "We know, Erik."
"We just have to be there," he continued. "We just have to be ready when they are. They'll help us- They want to help us."
"Erik," Jane pressed a little louder. "I need you to stay with us right now."
"I'm here," he promised. "You're right, this isn't the right place. It's too clean- too bright. What we're looking for will be darker, I can smell the rain sometimes, and I heard the kids laughing."
"Kids?" Jane asked. This was a new detail.
Natasha brought one hand up to rest a finger against her chin. "Like a school?" She was already thinking about where the nearest possibilities were, and which would be the safest to test first. "Or a playground?"
"No, they're not supposed to be there, I think," Erik admitted, beginning to fiddle with the marker in his hands. His mood had taken a sudden shift, and now the corners of his lips were tugged downward and the groove on his forehead had deepened, a sure sign that they had pressed him too hard and needed to take a break.
Jane began rubbing big circles on his back. "That's great, Erik, that's all we need. Now, why don't you tell me about what you've written here?" This always did the trick, and Erik immediately brightened back up and launched into a winding explanation about his work on the mirrors.
While he rambled between breathy, half-finished, explanations that she knew even Jane only half-understood, Natasha studied the symbols scrawled in several colors before her. She didn't recognize any of them as any language she had ever seen. Nobody did. Yet they seemed to make perfect sense to Erik, who was tapping the butt of the marker against a picture of nine circles with a line piercing through them.
The sound of footsteps racing down the hallway broke her concentration.
"Hey Nat?" Darcy called as she reached the doorway and leaned through. "I think you might want to come take a look at this."
Darcy lead her back to the main room, where she indicated the front window which had been boarded up since long before they had arrived here. Between two of the boards was a thin gap, probably left there intentionally by whoever had put it up, which allowed them to look out onto the main road. Natasha pressed her face up against the boards and peered through the gap. At first she saw nothing. The street was just as empty and desolate as it had been when she'd left her post, and the sky was an uninterrupted canvas of ugly grey clouds, smeared and raggedy, promising nothing but a damp breeze and fine layer of mist in the morning. Then she caught just the faintest flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. Something had shifted in the gap between two tall houses, and a low hum, one that she felt in her bones more than she heard with her ears, filled the air.
"Damnit," she hissed. "How did they get so close?" Natasha pulled away from the boarded window to wave at Darcy. "Make sure the others know and get the essentials together, then I want you all to lay low in the-"
"In the mud room with the back-door so we can make a quick exit," Darcy interrupted her, already grabbing a handful of charts from underneath the data sheets on the table and sweeping the arm full of equipment into a heavy canvas satchel which she hefted over her shoulder. "We know the drill by now."
Without another word, Natasha scaled the ladder back to her lookout position so she could have a better view of the whole street. It was possible, -actually it was quite likely,- that the Chitauri didn't know that they were here, and this was nothing more than a poorly timed regular sweep. In this case, their best bet was to hunker down and wait them out. A hand reached out to pat at the black and silver weapon strapped to her hip. It had been modified with technology stolen from the invaders, and could do some serious damage in a pinch, but if it came down to a fight, it might not be enough to protect everyone, especially since she had no way of knowing how far away the alien's backup was, or how many of them were out there.
-x-
"So what's the verdict Wonder Woman?" Darcy's only somewhat hushed question greeted Natasha as she peeked into the mud room some hour or so later.
"It was just a scout, and I don't think he saw anything worth returning for."
"Well, I think that answers our question about staying here or moving on," Jane sighed from where she sat on the floor beside Erik who was fiddling with a piece of paper, folding it and unfolding it with a frown on his face.
"It doesn't answer where, though," Natasha said practically, reaching for the map in Darcy's bag.
Darcy pulled out the map and handed it over. "Sure it does. Whichever way the Tin-Man went, I say we go the other way."
Natasha resisted the urge to chastise the younger girl for her hastiness. However she had phrased it, with no idea which way they were supposed to be going in the end, away from the enemy was a perfectly valid direction. It just Irked the trained assassin to be stumbling around in the dark like this with no real plan, and only a half-baked idea of what they were looking for.
"Okay," she breathed, unrolling the map on the floor for all to see. A dozen small 'X's marked off a smattering of buildings, and Natasha added a new one over the house they were in now. "Somewhere dirty, where kids aren't supposed to be, but can get into anyways... Probably not the playgrounds, but that doesn't really discount the schools. If it's dark, it could be after hours, or just abandoned."
"This close to the city, they're probably all abandoned," Jane hummed, scooting closer to peer over the map. After a silent moment, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ears and pointed at a shaded rectangle that indicated a school yard. "Here, what about this one? It's in the right direction, looks like there are plenty of places to stay hidden along the way, and the area around it looks pretty open. As long as it's not in some sort of hole, the equipment should be able to get a really good read from there. What do you think, Erik?"
The man jumped at the sound of his name. "Hm? What? Oh, yes, that looks just fine to me."
The answer was less than promising, but it was as good a place as any for now. "We'll leave as soon as the sun goes down. Until then, let's gather everything and get some rest. Erik, did you already erase your work from the closet?"
"I did," Darcy piped up, rolling her map back up and stuffing it into the canvas bag.
Erik gave her a look of betrayal. "I wish you wouldn't do that every time," he grumbled as he stood to leave the crowded mudroom. "Now I have to start over."
Once he had vanished from sight, Natasha shared a look with Darcy.
"I'll take care of it again when we leave for real," the younger girl promised with a quirk of her lips. "Besides, he was out of space. Another hour and he'd of been writing on the walls, and that's much harder to get rid of."
End
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Chapter 4 Preview: "...Tony was quickly distracted from his worries by the thought of food, real food, not just the horrible slime they had fed him in space. "You have any shawarma?"
The younger girl, Kitty, made a face. "What's Shawarma?"
The smile on Tony's face wavered when his mind churned up no answer. "I don't know," he murmured, trying to dip into the cloudy bank of memories around New York, but coming up with nothing. He felt like he was missing the punchline to his own joke..."
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Sorry, life got busy, and I've barely been able to touch my own projects. Hopefully regular updates can resume for this and Luciferous soon.
Thank you for your patience!
-OMaM