Complicated Love (Bucky Barnes x Reader)

Chapter 38: The Tesseract

I was in the computer lab, flipping through some of my old flies I had put together about the Tesseract, as Steve walks in. "Hey, you ready?" he asks, and I nod. I follow him to the meeting room, where everyone was in. I caught up with all of the original Avengers, met some others, so they were all familiar.

I walk in, memorized by all of the holograms and new technology in the room. I didn't know they could get any more advanced then they already did. 

"Okay, so the how works. Now, we gotta figure out the when and the where," Steve says, as he stands by the monitor. "Almost everyone in this room has had an encounter with at least one of the six Infinity Stones."

"Or substitute the word 'encounter' for 'damn near been killed' by one of the six Infinity Stones," Tony interjects. I lean against the wall, getting used to the familiarity of the Avengers again.

"Well, I haven't, but I don't even know what the hell you're all talking about," Scott says. He's so sweet, he should work at an ice cream shop or something.

"Yea, you get use to it," I say, referring to the amount of times I have timed jumped, and trying to do it again.

"Regardless, we only have enough Pym Particles for one round-trip each. And these stones have been in a lot of different places throughout history," Bruce says, which whom slightly still freaks me out because of his green state.

"Our history. So, not a lot of convenient spots to just drop in, yeah?" Tony adds.

"Which means we have to pick our targets," Clint says on the opposite side of me.

"So, let's start with the Aether," Steve says. "Thor, what do you know?" We all turn to him, finding Thor (who gained a bit of weight) holding a beer, hand over his stomach. 

"Is he asleep?" Nat questions.

"No, no. I'm pretty sure he's dead," Rhodey says, making me giggle under my breath. Clint, next to me, grabs his pen, throwing it to hit Thor in the head, jolting him up.

"It's your turn to present," Steve says, ignoring the fact he was asleep. He's the only one to encounter this stone out of all of us, so he needed to do this.

Thor slowly gets out of the car and made his want to the front projector. "Uh, where to start?" Thor says, talking off his sunglasses, using them to point at the screen. "The Aether, firstly, is not a stone. Someone called it a stone before. Um, it's more of an angry sludge sort of a thing... so, someone's gonna need to amend that and stop saying that."

I look at Steve, both of us internally agreeing how drunk off his ass he is. "Here's an interesting story, though, about the Aether. My grandfather, many years ago, had to hide the stone from the Dark Elves.  Wooooh, scary beings."

"So Jane," Thor says, and a picture of her pops up onto the screen. "Oh, there she is. That's Jane... She's... an old flame of mine... She... she stuck her hand inside a rock this one time... and then the Aether stuck itself inside her... And, she became very, very sick. So I had to take her to Asgard, which is where I'm from. And we had to try and fix her. 

"We were dating at the time, you see. I got to introduce her to my Mother... who's dead, and oh you know, Jane and I aren't even dating anymore, these things happen though you know, nothing last forever," Thor continues, and Tony starts to push him back to his chair. "I'm not done yet, the only thing permanent in life is impermanence."

Tony claps, trying to get this done with and says, "Awesome. Eggs? Breakfast?"

"No, I'd like a Bloody Mary," Thor says, and Tony leads him out of the room.