Universal Headaches

Chapter 9

There was a throbbing ringing. It was loud. Sutton blinked, but the world was orbiting too quickly around her. The darkness was finally receding from her vision, but shapes were still blurry. She tried to take in more air. One breath, two. She could feel something solid. The wall?

Shaking her head, she tried to clear the confusion. Other fuzzy shapes were moving around the room.

"Is everyone okay?"

There was a voice coming from what seemed like several layers of atmosphere away and Sutton strove to reach it. A shock of blond hair became visible, and then a blue t-shirt. Sutton focused on him.

"Not at all like your dad, are you," Steve quipped. She could make him out fully now. "Couldn't help but touch those wires together."

Sutton found that she was up against the far wall of her living room. Or, rather, what used to be her living room. She sucked in air as she was finally able to notice the destruction. Her furniture had been violently strewn about, and she had actually just missed being squished by her couch. Everyone else seemed to be alright as well, now that she could actually see. It was no surprise that the ground zero of the explosion looked to be the kitchen. Both Tony and Bruce's faces were a bit blackened with whatever had been produced by the explosion.

Gosh darn it. It had only been a week, one week, since her melt down and now they were prompting another.

Pushing herself up onto her feet, Sutton made her way over to the people gathering in her once adequate kitchen.

"You okay?"

Sutton looked up to Natasha and nodded.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm good. What happened?"

"How many fingers am I holding up," the spy asked instead. Sutton was going to answer 'seven' before she remembered that that wasn't the normal amount of fingers on one hand.

"Five."
"Did you have to count?"

"I'm fine," Sutton insisted. "But my house isn't."

She turned her attention to the guilty parties and threw her hands up in exasperation.

"What did you science nerds do to my house? It is a rental! They are so going to keep the security deposit now!"

Tony was sputtering a bit, raking his tongue along the outside of his teeth and muttering something about tasting fruit punch; Bruce was blinking at the destruction as if it had seeped up from the kitchen surfaces it coated and greeted him.

"Idiots," Loki muttered from somewhere behind her. Sutton actually agreed for once, but wasn't about to voice that aloud. Vicki was going to murder her.

"Just a small mechanical error," Tony explained. "It's good to work the bugs out early on."

The wall separating the kitchen from the living room was partly crumbled and blackened; Sutton ran a hand along it morosely. With a sigh, she turned back to the group and told herself to keep calm. Channel her inner Bruce, as it were. The nice Bruce side.

"Yeah, well when I let you-Ahh!"

Her attention was suddenly stolen by the ragged hole leading to her back yard. Glass littered the floor and the cheap blinds that their landlord would never replace where scattered about outside.

"You broke my sliding glass door! There is a hole in my house!"

"On the up side, no one was seriously hurt."

Her fiery gaze turned back to Tony.

"Not yet," she seethed. "Do you know how much those cost? Tony Stark, you better hope that there is such thing as inter-dimensional wire transfers, because you owe me."