Tell Me When You Know

The Mission from Hell

—FOUR MONTHS LATER—

Adina slurped her hot chocolate, the drink burning the back of her throat with just the right amount of warmth and pleasantly shaking awake her sensory organs, as she waited for Rogers to finish his pep-talk. She had seen him do it before every Avengers mission she had supervised during the past three months. It was a ten-minute speech that, to anybody not in the know, would seem like it had been rigorously practised before the mirror, but that was, in reality, off the top of his head. Sure, it wasn't, in the strictest sense, practical, but then it was meant to boost their morale, not to chalk out a workable plan of attack. A little exaggeration, she supposed, was to be expected.

She took another noisy sip of her hot chocolate and smiled around the straw when it gained Tony's arched eyebrows. His best friend didn't appear impressed with her. It was funny, being on the receiving end of that bemused glare. Usually, it was the other way around.

"Alright, then. Shall we do this?"

Oh, thank God. Adina sprang up from her seat at those beautiful words. "You guys ready to go?"

"Eager to get rid of us, Adina?"

"Eager to complete the mission." She flicked Tony's nose, pursing her lips to keep down her amusement at his squawk of outrage.

The team had come a long way in the past three months insofar that she could actually tolerate their presence for more than ten minutes without having to fight the strong urge to either appease her mind with a full tub of ice cream or pummel the punching bags into nothing more than dust in her apartment's training room every night — the former was not good for the hourglass figure she had finally achieved in her mid-thirties after slaving away her entire mid-to-late twenties, and the latter was definitely not good for her knuckles and wrists — but there were still limits to her comfort around them, and smiling at her best friend's antics was where she drew the line.

It wouldn't do for them to create a wrong impression of what they would and what they wouldn't get away with; irritating her before a mission, or even generally, was firmly in the "Don'ts" camp.

"Okay, guys!" Tyler, her appointed right-hand man for overseeing the Avengers' operations as soon as they found a more concrete footing, called out from where he was surrounded by an array of monitors. "This is as far as we can go."

Adina looked out the front glass of the quinjet. If she squinted hard enough, she could even make out the distant outline of the HYDRA base, hidden behind dense forests and jagged snow-covered hills.

Shaking away the ominous feeling that had been nagging at her since dawn, she took a single step back and squizzed every member of her team, because they were her team now. She might not have been too fond of most some of them, but they were her people and she refused to be the reason why any person on her team didn't get to go home today.

"Avengers, I need all of you to bear one thing in mind today." Growing up, she had always been a shy little girl; the mere thought of going up on stage and speaking to a crowd would send her down the rabbit hole of anxiety and panic attacks. It had taken her a long time to master it, to get over that baseless fear of who-knew-what, but there was something about being the sole point of focus of the Avengers that scratched at those raw parts of her that she'd rather remained buried under ten feet of solid fake confidence. "I don't need to stress the importance of the mission to you, a lot rides on this and you know it. We need the sceptre before HYDRA does something drastic like project its energy on the whole world and achieve global domination."

She snapped her fingers and pointed one at Tony. "We are not going to test if world domination through projection of the sceptre is doable or not." Her best friend pouted, which she ignored in favour of speaking once again, "But I do wish to stress the importance of your lives. Please try not to take any unnecessary risks in some sort of self-sacrificial stunt. Use your brains, I know each of you has one of those, and make a professional judgement on whether the cons outweigh the pros.