Loki, Unraveled|| NovaVerse 2

9||Truce

The lush garden Nova sat in melted and the bright greens of grass and trees blended in swirls of grey, blue, and black of machinery and oil splattered on tabletops. There were red blobs and something that resembled two people a few feet in front of her, and rock music blasted throughout the room.

As one world settled into another, her vision cleared up, and she saw that the two people were Tony Stark and... herself? They were hunched over Tony's hand, which wore the red Iron Man glove, and had panels removed so Nova could connect wires- and she did so very slowly, careful not to damage the glove that Tony was trusting her to fix.

"How do we know that it'll work?" Nova asked, searching through the hundreds of wires for the one she had to connect to the micro-reactors input terminal, and she had no idea where to begin, but she wasn't going to give Tony an explanation about why she couldn't follow the instructions written on the board in front of her. She would never hear the end of names he would tease her with for being illiterate. So, for now, she was going to wing it, and hope the glove didn't explode.

"It won't," Tony said, shooing her hand away from the glove, but it was too late, because Nova had disconnected the wrong wire and reconnected it to at the input, missing not only the correct wire, but also about fifteen steps leading up to it. A little crackle led to a little flame, that led to the whole glove exploding while on Tony's hand. Black smoke wafted to their faces as Nova tried to wave it away. DUMB-E rushed over, spraying the whole table with the fire extinguisher. Tony rolled away on his chair, holding his bad hand to his chest and using the other to wave the smoke and the white contents of the extinguisher, and said, "It won't, because that wasn't the steps I wrote on the board. You missed 23 of them exactly. Well done, Glowstick," he said, creating a nickname on the spot.

Nova stared at the little flame that caused the smokey explosion and remembered when she had made a room explode in HYDRA, once. She killed fourteen people that day, when she was eleven. And there was so much smoke, blood, fire.

Her hands trembled and memories flashed before her eyes as a pit sank in her stomach.

It was happening again.

Each time she thought she was getting better, a bit more in control of herself, the smallest thing set her off and she would find herself curled crying in a ball on the floor. It was always so much easier when it was her, alone in her cabin, with no one to witness her slipping through the cracks. She didn't even know why this was happening to her. Why was her mind punishing her like this?

Tony placed a hand on her shoulder, and said, "Hey, kid, what's wrong?" His voice was laced with concern and his forehead creased with worry. When it was clear Nova was in no condition to answer, he tried to reassure her that she was safe, and tried to guide her through breathing.

After a little while, Nova calmed, and Tony gave her a juice box from the refrigerator. He then sat next to her, and said, "You okay there, Lightbulb?" His nickname for her attempted to lighten the mood.

It did not.

Nova put on a little smile, and whispered, "Yeah, I'm fine," trying to reassure herself. She then clenched her fists and punched the floor, anger flooding through her veins. "You know what, bullshit, no, I'm not fine.  I keep seeing things from before- things I would give anything to just forget- and I don't know why, and they won't stop." She tried to keep herself together, despite the fact that she was yelling, but ultimately failed, a tear escaping her eye. "I don't know what's wrong with me," her voice cracked in the middle of her sentence.

Tony looked at Nova, unsure how to comfort someone. "Nova, I think you might have PTSD."  He raised a hand and to pat her back in a comforting gesture, hesitated, and then pat her on the back, waiting for any form of conformation that what he did was appropriate in the situation.