The Deadly Nightshade | { BOOK 1 of The Flower series }

[37] Grenade Launchers

A fourteen-year-old Jade slowly strolled up beside her father as he studied each of his possible new teammates that Director Fury had formed together. Her amber eyes scanned each of the profiles. Natasha Romanoff was the one that really caught her attention. Her eyes slightly widened in surprise. "Wow, I did not see that coming."

Tony chuckled, pulling her into a side hug. "I was shocked too with the whole double agent thing." He glanced down at her. "And shouldn't you be in bed?"

Jade playfully rolled her eyes. "Dad, come on. It's only nine."

He cracked an amused smirk. "Okay, okay." He pointed at the holographic display that was in front of the two Stark's. "Let's see what we got here."

Jade focused on the displacement, her eyes going from Captain Steve Rogers to Bruce Banner to Clint Barton and finally back to Natasha Romanoff. In the middle of it, all was a blue cube called the Tesseract. "The Avengers Initiative. . .is this the project that you were trying to tell me about two years ago?"

Tony sighed, nodding. "When I found out that Ms. Rushman was an agent of some kind, I wanted to tell you, but me disappearing and you not talking to me because of me not being there when you needed me, I never got the time to tell you."

Jade stared at the Tesseract one last time, getting a weird vibe from it. She blinked away. "Who knows what you're going up against, but please be careful, dad."

Tony looked down at her, placing a gentle kiss on her forehead. "I will, sweetheart. Oh, and before Pepper gets on the jet, I want you to go with her since I'm going to be out for who knows how long."

Jade nodded. "Sure."

The present Jade, who wore the Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing glasses, walked up behind her fourteen-year-old self. She tilted her head to the side, studying her younger self. She realised that she hadn't grown that much at all since she was two inches taller than the fourteen-year-old.

"That's how I wished it happened," Tony announced as he did his own conference. The stage they were on was formed into a holographic bar area from Stark Tower as Jade's younger self, and his past self vanished.

The eighteen-year-old girl removed the glasses from the bridge of her nose, some of her memories beginning to flood back into the front of her hippocampus.

"Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing... or BARF. God, I gotta work on that acronym. An extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus... to clear traumatic memories."

"It doesn't change the fact that Jade never actually went with Pepper and she never got abducted because she did. . .or all the things I did to avoid processing my grief, but—" he took his glasses from Jade's grasp. "—I created it to help my self conscious for the memories and my daughter. To bring back her memories and help her from her amnesia."

He turned his attention on her. "How were they?"

She smiled, nodding. "To be honest, I now clearly remember what really happened that day and what happened after that."

Tony shared a grin with her, happy that she was making progress with her amnesia. He wriggled the pair of glasses in between his index finger and thumb. "Plus, 611 million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment? No one in the right mind would've ever funded it. Help me out; what's the MIT mission statement? 'To generate, disseminate. . .and preserve knowledge. And work with others to bring it to bear on the world's great challenges.' Well, you are the others. And, quiet as it's kept. . .the challenges facing you are the greatest mankind's ever known. Plus, most of you are broke."