It All Started In A McDonald's...

snippets of random shit

I missed all the homework assignments but didn't get detention, which was great. MJ wanted to kill me for that. Sucks for her. By the time Saturday rolled around, and I finally returned to the Tower for a full day, I felt like I'd been there forever, and I swear, attempting and failing to beat the shit out of Loki never felt so great.

I mean, he was the one who beat the shit out of me, but we won't talk about that.

Rogers was knee-deep in research, so I barely ever saw him. Despite the limitless Stark Tech he had at his disposal, the guy still preferred to write analogue reports and profiles and shit, so I guess it was a good thing his hand-writing was so neat. And thank God I wasn't in charge of that.

From what I could gather, that terrorist gang we bought down the other day was a Sokovian-based organisation, and although it was unclear what their motives were, Loki had his suspicions. Although this was their first attack, Rogers had apparently (according to Barnes, who liked to leak secrets because he was a badass drama queen, though that doesn't have to do with any of this, moving on) been receiving threatening messages for a while, and Loki thought this was their way of drawing the Avengers out to take them seriously.

Yeah, he had a lot to say on the subject.

"It can't be a terrorist gang," he'd said once, while we were meant to be working in the parkour section of the training centre, but we were taking a break. "They wouldn't send Rogers those messages and warn him so blatantly obviously if they were."

"How do you know he's actually getting messages and Barnes isn't messing with your inner Sherlock?" I'd asked, examining my nails.

"Because I have my own ways of knowing if something is true or not which I choose not to explain to people," Loki said, turning towards me whilst somehow not falling off the tiny ledge we were sitting on.

"Prove it."

"Tell me a fact about yourself, and I'll decide if you're telling the truth or not," Loki shrugged.

I frowned, thinking. "OK. My middle name is Alex."

Loki did that slight tilt of the head, examining me. I tried to keep a poker face, which I think I could do pretty well. "No. it's not. But it's your dad's name, isn't it?"

My jaw dropped. To the floor. Beyond the floor. It buried itself. And my eyebrows went the opposite way. He was right, and I know I've never told him that. I've never told anyone my dad's name. "Oh my fucking God. Please tell me that was a lucky guess."

He never really told me, but that was proof enough for me that he could tell a lie from the truth, so I was forced to accept the fact Rogers was, indeed, getting those messages. And I agreed – they didn't seem like the traditional type of terrorists that I'd heard of. But yeah, I found out the meaning of the name, I suppose. Nemilosdrni was a Sokovian word, meaning merciless or ruthless, and we called them Nemilos to shorten the word, basically. Easy peasy. Now I knew what bread and merciless meant.

Putting that aside though, I soon fell into a new routine which meant I could balance school and Avenger business and also have time with my friends and Dad. I'd come after school for two days a week, one day of the weekend, and more if I felt like it, in which I'd go do patrol with Peter and Loki. The downside meant less training, but Loki was going to ask Rogers about letting us off patrol one day in the week so I could still get enough training.

So, things were going great. A couple of weeks passed before I'd even realised it. Flash still hadn't caught on to it being me who was putting stickers on his locker every time I passed. Or that MJ was the one who kept flicking paper at his head while he wasn't looking in science, while I tried to sneak a look at Peter making his web fluid. Interesting.