A Call to Action (Avengers Fan Fiction #1) | REWRITING

Chapter 19

Gone insane from the pain that they surely know. For whom the bell tolls.

Music blasted from the lab speakers and filled the entire floor with sound. The glass walls in the lab barely shook with the vibrations. Tony danced around a bit and swung his head from side-to-side with the beat of the instruments. His fingers tapped away at the blue screen he was at until he traded places with Bruce. Bruce's brow furrowed and swiped his fingers against the screen. He corrected Tony's mistakes and tapped his foot to the beat of the song.

I strolled into the lab and turned down the stereo. The music was so loud that I couldn't hear myself breathing. I could only imagine what was going on in the boys' heads, if anything was at all. They probably had music going in one ear and out the other.

"Hey! You can't touch my stuff," Tony became defensive, but didn't look up at me. He was too intrigued in whatever he was looking at on the screen.

I scoffed, "I just did." I pushed over the wrappers and dirty dinner dishes from the past few nights onto the side of the table to make room for them to eat. I set some boxes of Chinese food down with two bottles of water. I felt like a mother providing dinner to her children. Tony sure acted like a child sometimes. "You guys need to eat. You haven't eaten all day."

Both scientists sat down on stools and opened the steam-filled boxes. Bruce looked up at me and lifted one corner of his lips to form a slight smirk. "It's really nice of you to bring us food." He used the chopsticks to eat the chow mein in the box.

"Well, someone's got to look out for you two." Sometimes, we wouldn't see the dynamic duo for days on end. They were always cooped up in the lab working on something new or on Tony's suits to improve them. I took one of Tony's egg rolls and popped it into my mouth. I munched on it as I spoke, "Is there any new info on Hydra?"

Tony glared at me with the uttermost look of disgust. His eyebrow raised and his brown eyes narrowed. He almost scrunched up his nose until he replied, "No."

Bruce swallowed the food he had in his mouth. He licked his lips slowly in thought and tilted his head for a second. His eyebrows knit together slowly and his brown eyes narrowed. "We're trying to trace Loki's scepter, which shouldn't be too hard. There's something else I could try..."

He was about to stand up and I quickly said, "At least take the food with you and eat over there. You need something, Bruce." I knew he usually ate three times more food than that one tiny box full, but he had to leave the lab sometime. Food was an incentive.

He nodded and took his food to the console. Tony drank some water and exhaled loudly. "How did you guys not notice Loki was in Asgard?"

I shrugged. "It was very tense there. We didn't even see Thor's father." How could we, anyway? The King was said to be driven crazy by depression. I contemplated. I sat down on the counter next to Tony and looked off out of the window across from me. The only things that could be seen were the tops of a few sky scrapers and the blue sky. Not a cloud was in sight. It was peaceful being so high up.

Bruce tried to stay in the conversation while typing away at a keyboard. "How would he get control of the army if his father was there?" His fingers stretched a picture on the screen of Loki from the footage Coulson left. We watched him slowly change into his usual armored attire by using his powers of magic.

That's when the idea hit us.

Bruce backed away from the screen and turned to us. His eyes widened for a second in realization and locked onto ours. His mouth twitched with unspoken words because he didn't know what to say. He brushed back his dark curly hair in worry. He finally forced out, "You guys don't think..."