Nightmare

It All Goes to Sh*t After 5 Minutes

(May 4, 2012)

I go for a walk outside, helping myself along with the crutch, my phone in my pocket. Dad and Pepper have a date, and as much as I ship them, it feels a little embarrassing when I see them doing mushy stuff. I get a call on my cell phone from Nick Fury. "Come to the SHIELD base with the Tesseract. Now. We're having problems with it."

"Can't your cat just... eat it?" I suggest.

"My cat refuses to go near it." He replies briskly.

"Then your cat is smart. I'm on my way." I hang up, and then, right away, I teleport to my room. I quickly throw on my catsuit, the hood, and my mask (which has glasses built into it, by the way) and shove my claws in my pocket.

Oh, fuck, Fuck. Shit, shit, shit, shit! Fuck, no, please, just fucking no.

It didn't work. The plan. Thanos found someone else to attack anyway. Okay, time for Plan B! Which... does not exist. This is happening, and I don't know how to stop it without messing all the shit up. Now I don't even know who the enemy is. It might be someone much stronger than Loki, who would have attacked in the first place had I not interfered. Everything has gone to shit.

I wonder why Wade let me do what I did a year ago.

Soon enough, I find myself in the room with the Tesseract in it, at the SHIELD base. I'm greeted by Dr. Erik Selvig with a brisk nod, who is doing something with the panels in front of the blue cube. Nick Fury is behind me. "The Tesseract's... behaving." Selvig continues his conversation with Fury as I stare at the sparking Space Stone. I'm in potential danger here, seeing as an insane-seeming Norse god that I used to consider myself in love with is going to try to take over the world in a few minutes.

"Get them all airborne." I talk briskly to Fury. "Activate the pager and get everyone on site airborne. As soon and as many as you can. Activate it at my signal, if I give you the signal. If and only if I tell you to activate it, then you do it. Not yet. Now start the evacuation."

If I were any other agent, I would be dead by now for talking like that to him. But I told Fury where I was from and he knows that some of the things I do are caused by foresight.

"Actually... No. Don't activate the pager. Forget it. Sorry."

Selvig is looking back and forth at us, confused.

"Where's Clint?" I ask Selvig.

"Up in his nest, like usual," he replies.

Just then, Clint Barton slides down from the ceiling vent on a wire.

"Ohhh, who lives in a vent at the top of a room?" I ask him.

"I do!" he responds, and grins.

I frown. "No, you were supposed to say, 'Clinton Barton.' "

"I know."

I sigh, but can't stop the grin on my face from breaking through. "So, what do you think is going on with the Tesseract?" I ask him, trying to get back on track again with the script.

"Well, it's obviously not us that's making this happen It's someone else." he says.

"Someone else?" Fury questions sharply.