To All Those Brave and Lovely

Legacy

Sometimes, time crawls.

Nora watches the seconds tick by, stretching on and on and on, one minute turning into the next.  She can't sleep anymore, and in the end, she always wanders out into the garage and picking through the files, starting a long line of trial and error until she was putting a suit together, piece by piece by piece.

"Oh God."  Wanda jumped the last stair, having run down from the guest room when she heard the bang.  Now she was clutching to wall and staring at the mess spread across the floor.  "What are you thinking?"

Nora grinned.  She was hovering, a mere two feet above the ground.  The instructions were all there, and the supplies.  Building it was like putting together a puzzle.  "Peter can be Pepper's sucessor."  That was another thing that they found in that will of his.  "I'll be Tony's."

They're in a coffee shop when it happens.  She and Pepper had just gotten back into their routine of going to brunch once a week.  It was comforting, to fall back into patterns.  

Someone bumps into their table.  Nora has to reach out to grab her water before it tips over, and the woman was already apologizing, talking about how clumsy she is and laughing.  "It's alright."  Pepper's smile was stretched too thin across her face but at least it was real.  "Happens to the best of us."

They wouldn't have thought anything of it.  The woman had nothing remarkable about her, and wouldn't have been somone they could have picked out of a line up.  But when she walked away, she left something behind.

"Pepper."  Nora had read about the rest of the room falling away, of not being able to move as the horror washed over you.  She hadn't thought it was real.  "Pepper, look."

Nora reached out and picked up the ring on the table, even though she knew she should probably just leave it lay.  But she couldn't, because there, right in the middle of this clean tablecloth and fancy china, was Tony's engagement ring, rusted over with blood.

(There had been a piece of paper, too, of intrusctions and guidelines, but Nora had picked that up and stuffed it into her pocket first before Pepper could see it.)

Nora wasn't allowed to talk to anyone about it.  Pepper had just waved her down to her room and said to wait for Fury to come down to her.  So she did, even though she filled the time with welding and trying to perfect her aim with the repulsors.

"Jesus."  He didn't sound surprised like Wanda had been.  "I just got one of you off my back, and now you're starting the whole story over again."

Nora landed with a thud.  "Find anything?"

"No."  His one eye was staring at her like he knew everything she wasn't saying.  "But I bet you did."

She doesn't ask him how he knew.  Instead, she just pulls the piece of paper out and spreads it flat out across the table, the one that said where she could meet if she wanted to trade her life for her father's.  

"Are you going to do it?"  Fury didn't tell her not too.  That's why she had hid it.  Pepper would tell her not to be stupid and then put her under house arrest.  fury would look at the bigger picture, about security and getting a superhero back, which Nora only liked because it worked in her favor.  "Because you can't do it alone."

"That's why I showed it to you."  She spun and fired the repulsor so it shattered one of the suits that Tony left behind, one that wouldn't open no matter what commands she tried or how often she attempted to pry it apart.  "I figured you would want to help."

He doesn't help, exactly, because that would be putting SHEILD in a mess that he couldn't dig them out of.  But he does agree not to get in her way, and wishes her the best of luck.

She's got a week before it happens.  A week before she walks into the arms of the people who had stolen her away, a week before she has to say good bye.  A week before she might die.

Still, she's got one last plan before she gives up, a lifeline that had been shoved into her hand on a airport tarmac, written in loopy lettering.

"Hello?"  The voice on the other end of the phone sounded French.  She liked the idea of that, that SHEILD has stolen her away to someplace nice.  

"Evangeline?"  There is shocked silence from the other end of the line.  "It's Nora.  If you meant what you said, then I need you."

For a moment, Nora thought that she had miscalculated things.  That this was not Evangeline, or that something had happened to make her not want to help her or unable to help her, or maybe, just maybe, it had been an empty gesture all along.

"Give me twelve hours,"  She said, and then there was nothing.