Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 20

Oof!  Time got away from me a little ... sorry for the delay in posting the next chapter!

Chapter 20

"So did you like, faint, being that close to Iron Man?" Cousin Lisa asked, her dark eyes wide with wonder. Lisa was fifteen years old. An age not so very far in Bernice's own past that she couldn't remember filling her walls with magazine posters of movie stars of whoever the beefcake-du-jour was featured in Tiger Beat that month.

"What was he like, what was he like?" the twins, thirteen year old cousins Amy and Amber clamored in unison.

"Well he was shorter than I thought he'd be," Bernice said, holding her hand a couple of inches above her own forehead. "With eyes that sparkled like a naughty boy about to put a frog down your dress."

"He is short?" Aunt Kamala asked, her voice lilting up and down with the accent all east Indians had. "But Iron Man seems so much larger than life on the television. How can he be short?" Aunt Kamala was Uncle Tom's wife.

"Well his personality is certainly larger than life," Bernice laughed. "You've never seen a man fill a room with his presence until you've been in the same room as Tony Stark."

"So what did you build together?" the twins asked together. "Is he going to build you an Iron Man suit?"

Bernice paused, her mind running through the Company Secrets 101 lessons all Stark Industries employees had to learn. It gave her a new appreciation for how careful Grandma Peggy had needed to be whenever she'd told her grandchildren epic tales of battling Nazi's, communists, and the Japanese, and yet neatly dodged questions about information that needed to remain classified. Bernice gave her cousins an enigmatic smile, the same patient smile her grandmother had given whenever she knew more than she was telling.

"He built something really clever," Bernice said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone. "But I can't tell you or Iron Man's enemies might prevent him from saving the world the next time we need him."

"Oh!" the three younger cousins said in unison.

Her audience grew larger as several male cousins drifted over, plying her with questions about had she seen the Iron Man suit up close yet (no), had she met any aliens (no), and had she met any of the other members of the Avengers team (she wasn't at liberty to discuss it). It was fun, being the center of attention of her large extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, but she was glad when Uncle Tom called out the burgers were done. Her cousins swarmed upon the feast like locusts, all talk of aliens and real life superheroes forgotten in favor of Great-Aunt Vera's potato salad.

Bernice made her way into Uncle Abraham's house after eating, utensils balanced precariously on top of sturdy reusable plastic plates as she threw them into a sink full of soapy hot water for recycling. She nodded to Aunt Vera swooshing off the worst of the food debris before loading them into the dishwasher. Bernice grabbed the overflowing pile of cloth napkins and threw them into the washing machine.

"Bernice?" great Uncle Abraham called from his study. "Could you come here when you're done, please?"

Bernice started the washer then headed in to speak to her great-uncle. At sixty-seven years old, Abraham Miller was now the de-facto leader of the sizeable clan grandma Peggy had left behind. Recently retired, Aunt Vera complained he was driving her up the wall with the renovations he was making to their home, still not sure what to do with himself after a lifetime of work. Bernice bounded into the study, remembering at the last moment she wasn't supposed to be acting like one of the giddy cousins anymore. As the second-eldest of the fourth generation, the cousins looked to her to be a ringleader, uh, role model.