Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Miriam sat at the conference table once more, this time there was only Tony and Steve with her as Loki had succeeded in spreading the so called team apart. Thor had fallen into Loki's trap and been expelled from the Helicarrier so they had no idea where he could be, as well as Banner who'd last been seen tearing apart one of the jets before falling to the earth. Nat was with Clint who she had somehow knocked out of the spell and was now recovering in the infirmary and finally Fury was attending to Coulson's body.
Miriam had pulled away from Tony after she had realized just how weak she must have looked to him. Without a word she'd turned in the other direction and walked back to base, neither male had found anything clever to say so instead they had simply followed her lead. Now they kept silent, Tony and Steve occasionally exchanging glances but not once finding the courage to speak to her.
She hadn't paid much attention to them, in fact up until recently all movement around her had been a distant echo. Losing one person in the span of a month had been hard enough but losing yet another was not right. Sadness wasn't something she felt, in fact depression to her was difficult to conceive as everything that brought her down was incinerated in her mind to pure fury and right now she was livid.
Fury came into the room, for the first time expressing anything but his signature poker face—he was thoughtful. Miriam's smoldering look was planted on him but strangely enough she didn't blame him for the death of her comrade because it could have been Fury just as easily, it was all Loki's plan after all. She did however question why he seemed to give off a hint of vulnerability now and by the looks of Maria who trailed after him she too questioned.
Before either of them could question he dropped a stack of bloody cards onto the table. No one needed to question what they were, not even Steve seemed to want to speak, instead he merely leaned over to pick up a short few. Fury spoke with slight guilt to them, "these were in Phil Coulson's jacket. I guess he never did get you to sign them. We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, the location of the Cube, Banner, Thor... I got nothing for you.I lost my one good eye." For once he looked more the vulnerable or guilty, almost as if the death of his one good eye, so to speak, had put things into perspective for the director. "Maybe I had that coming. Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract.I never put all my chips on that number, though because I was playing something even riskier. There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea. In heroes."
Miriam shot up, feeling like her skin was boiling underneath the surface and all she needed was a release. She wanted to scream, to throw the power bolts out of her hands in all different directions and punish anyone, blame anyone in site but unfortunately she was no longer that careless. There was one person she could blame and it was going to take all the patience she had built up in the last 20 years. Tony shot up after her, pushing down Steve who had too gone to follow the brunette women.
