Fire Starter

Chapter Ten: The Avengers

Short A/N: this chapter takes place in several different povs from different members of the team. This is the point of view of some of the members after they find Aiden's note and Natasha's thoughts from the previous night after she went to bed. 

The italics are memories

Bold, underlined italics are what they were thinking during the memory

Underlined italics are what they said.  

Hope you enjoy!

At first, Peter's new friend had struck Happy odd. It was a mixture of reasons- first she was dressed in a lot of dark colors, she also had the distinct habit of wearing long sleeves and sweaters in the Spring when it was a sauna outside yet she never had to take them off. She didn't behave like any other person her age, where Peter was overly hyper, she was well reserved and kept to herself. Where Peter's attention was anywhere and everywhere at the same time, hers was focused; she took in everything around her. If anything, she reminded him a lot of Natasha Romanoff. The teenage girl was about five feet tall, she had large green eyes that seemed to take everything in, and waist length black hair. The girl had an off-putting energy at times, at times her expression was cold and distant, it was used to keep people at a distance and at other times it was also welcoming and happy at times. The memory of the girl's face going from a reserved smile with Peter to her turning around and resorting to blank, cold, empty and distant was permanently burned into his brain. So he'd started watching her from the car. During that time, he noticed several things about her. First off, she was extremely protective of her friends; she was constantly sticking up for Peter even when he wasn't around to hear her to the stupid kid that was always harassing him. She also seemed to carry a lot of weight on her shoulders, as if there was something constantly on her mind. One of the most concerning things, in his opinion, was how tired she'd seemed at times; he'd seen her waiting for Peter or walking out of the school building at times where she looked half-dead. When he'd brought it up to Peter, the teenager told him that she suffered from serious headaches that affected her sleep and that at times she'd missed school for a few days and then come back like she wasn't even missing. The exhausted look on the fifteen year old girl was something that he'd seen on Tony; he'd never thought he'd see it on a teenager. That was why it struck him as odd; he didn't think that a headache would cause her to look so tired. The episodes hadn't happened recently; she'd been coming to school every day for the past three weeks. But despite her difference, she was polite; she was always smiling at Peter, it was a soft smile and he didn't think that she realized that she did it in the first place. She also had the habit of fussing at Peter every time he started to put himself down, it was a habit of his that none of them liked but she seemed to particularly hate it. She always greeted him with a reserved "Hello Mister Happy," it didn't matter how many times he'd try to correct her, she never changed it. Overall, she seemed like a good kid, but the way she changed every time he watched her leave the compound or when she'd climb into her at school didn't sit well with him. Something was going on and he was going to figure it out.

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Almost two months ago when Peter had come home rambling about a new girl that he'd met at school, Tony was convinced that the kid had a crush. But after listening to him talk about her, he seemed to admire. Before he'd even met her, he knew almost everything there was to know about Aiden Moran. He knew that she was as smart, if not smarter than Peter was, that her family had died when she was young much like the kid's had, that her interests were mostly the same as Peters and that she was good at almost everything including languages and music. He had to admit, when he'd first seen her in the compound; he would've sworn that it was Loki sitting in his compound until she'd looked up at him. The resemblance from a far was uncanny- the straight jet-black hair, the green eyes, her pale skin, slightly angled features; it was almost as if he was looking at what a teenage Loki would've looked like. But when she'd looked up at him for the first time, he wasn't met with the same pale green eyes and bored expression; he was met with bright green ones that had held many emotions in them. Her expression had quickly changed from confusion to something that he couldn't quite place still to one of admiration. She was quite expressive both with her words and her expressions and she was incredibly intelligent, it was impressive. Peter hadn't been lying when she said she spoke several languages but beyond that she understood both Bruce's and Doctor Reed's works fairly well, she could keep up with Peter on almost all topics and at some points her knowledge was more advanced. He'd nicknamed her flames for a reason; it was that the teenager had a temper and he'd seen it slightly poke through her usually calm demeanor on several different occasions. He felt himself starting to slip in the memory of the first day that he'd started calling her flames as he looked down at the short letter in his hands.