Let the Sky Fall

Chapter 3: A New Routine

With my body healing faster than normal, it took me only a week to be healthy enough to train. I was soon out of the hospital, and into my own room. We were at the newly built SHIELD base in New York, commissioned after Loki's attempt at invasion, and the World Wide Security Council's attempt to nuke the Tesseract portal. That had been all two months ago. The timelines of my Earth and theirs varied by about nine months or so, because I had been kidnapped at the end of January 2013 and it was the beginning of July 2012 here.

The portal had closed immediately after I had been rescued, with no further activity. Everyone at SHIELD was extremely on edge, waiting for the next invasion or occurrence or whatever. I wasn't worried; I didn't even think about it. I was distracted by the prospect of training. My new teachers were essentially the Avengers, with the exception of Thor, who had returned to Asgard to search for his brother.

I guess some of the tension does come from me, due to the 'incident' a couple days after I had moved out of the infirmary. I was having dinner with my new team, and Director Fury, after the tour of the training floor that had been set up for me. I was glad for their welcoming attitude, but I did have a feeling, however, that they were all a little worried about me, after all that had happened. But they all hid it well, and soon we were all caught up in Tony's drunk story, laughing at him. He was using his hands to emphasize a point, when he knocked over the untouched cup of water next to his plate. I flinched, time seemed to slow down, and then pick back up. But the water stayed frozen in air, unmoving.

We all stared at it, wondering what in the world was going on. But then I started to feel it, a slight pulse coming from the water that blended with the rest of my thoughts. I imagined it moving, and it did, forming a ball. To my surprise, my hands moved with it, as if they were attracted to each other. The other stared at me in awe, as I made it bounce around the room, form a dolphin, then a synchro team. As I experimented with it, the pulse grew stronger. I could feel it in my palms as well as in my head. But it took a lot of concentration, and after a couple minutes the water fell, splashing everyone. I got a round of applause from everyone but Fury, who sat at the other end of the table, with a mischievous grin on his face.

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The next day I got a new schedule, which had been modified by Director Fury himself.

My week starts with Monday, working with Agent Romanoff in the field of espionage. She has quite the extensive knowledge, having had many teachers. We mainly worked on my acting and social skills, which need lots of work. I quickly improved, being at least passible in my attempts. Next we moved on to body language, being able to have control over my body in times of duress, as well as ways to use it to manipulate. I failed at the latter; to make a long story short, I'm not sexy. I also observed others' body language, looking for tells, giveaways that the subject was lying. I did fairly well in this department, I'd always been very observant. After that I learned different thinking techniques, ways to memorize and remember information. This was by far the easiest, I had a great memory to begin with, and this was right up my alley. The last thing we went over was what happened when everything went wrong, escape techniques and such. This included how to hotwire and drive different vehicles, crawling through air vents, and some basic computer hacking. My 'homework' in this 'class' was to learn new languages, another helpful skill in being a spy. I had chosen Spanish, Korean, and Russian to begin with.

Tuesday my teacher was Agent Barton, and we practiced different styles of combat. Sometimes Steve would join us, having nothing else to do, plus I think he enjoys my company just as much as I value his. Clint taught me how to defend myself with different guns, a bow and arrow, throwing knives, a piece of lead pipe, even sword fighting. We went over hand to hand combat, and when we got cuts and bruises, I got to learn some basic medical skills. This was probably the easiest class, anything physical was simple for me now, because I had gotten stronger and more flexible due to the mutation. After I had learned basic weaponry skills, Natasha came in for a couple weeks and taught me basic gymnastics. Thankfully though, I didn't have any homework in this class.