Unexpected

Getting Back to 'Normal'

"See you at lunch then!" He chuckled and started away from the line.

"Promise."

It was hard to focus on my writing after that, my mind traveling more to worries for the future than recounting the past. I was just turning my thoughts onto taking Loki breakfast when I saw another familiar face come up in the breakfast line. It was Barton.

"Morning, Hawkeye." I greeted him, putting my pen down. I was pretty much caught up on journaling my recent events and I could no longer really focus on writing anymore.

"Morning, Penny. You're looking well."

"I'm feeling pretty good, yeah. Hungry? It's pancakes and bacon today,"

"Sounds great." He said, his voice lacking all the enthusiasm Doctor Selvig's possessed, "I've a message from Loki. He's not going to be in his room this morning, but he expects to be available for dinner."

I nodded, "Got it." Then watched as he piled a mountain of pancakes on his plate, "Gonna feed an army or just yourself?"

"I love pancakes almost as much as I love cookies." He shrugged with a bit of a friendly smile, then walked away.

Since I apparently wasn't going to have breakfast with Loki, I snuck a few hot, fresh pancakes for myself along with some bacon and ate before starting on washing the dishes that were starting to pile up. Slowly but surely people trickled out of the cafeteria and Ed, Ben, and I were left to clean and prepare for the next meal. I had my music playing through my earbuds so I let the boys clean up the cafeteria, package up the few leftovers we had, and start on the sandwiches while I continued to scrub dishes. It was around 11:30 when I had finally finished the breakfast dishes and Ben and Ed had almost finished with the stacks upon stacks of Ziploc baggied sandwiches. It amazed me how fast things truly got done now that I had the two of them helping me. I had been busy, getting up early, staying up late, and multitask cooking before, having little time beside my hour with Selvig and however long a time Loki would have me stay with him to relax and it made for long, tiring days. Now I had a half hour until lunch and everything was basically done and ready for the afternoon.

Taking up my pen again I scrawled down things we should make, meals and whatnot, so as to plan ahead and fill up our time. With my help and supervision, before we went to distribute lunch to the workers, the three of us had baked over fifteen loaves of sweetbreads, banana, blueberry, cinnamon sugar, and chocolate, for breakfast the next day. Leaving the loaves to cool, I started down the hallways with both Ed and Ben walking behind me with their trays of sandwiches. Upon entering the main room I took a turkey sandwich for Selvig and a peanut butter and jelly for myself and went to the brightly lit center again. Selvig was moving around in an agitated way, mumbling under his breath to himself. I seriously had to put my foot down again and insist that he take a shower and a nap again, he looked half-insane and worn out!

"Told you I'd be here for lunch." I said, tapping him lightly on the shoulder as I came up from behind him.

"Penny!" he took his sandwich from me and beckoned me to follow him around, "I've so much to tell you about my progress! We're so close!"

I then spent an hour, munching on my PB and J and following Selvig as he bustled on his lit platform, looking at computers, graphs, charts, the machine and Tesseract, and listening to him babble on about all his scientific, technological mumbo-jumbo. What little I could decipher from Eric's quick, mumbling, high tech talk made me feel off however. It sounded like he really was getting close, and by the time the hour was up he'd updated me on everything and was starting to fall back into distracted work.

"I'm so... happy... for you and it's... amazing that you're almost there, but Selvig..." my voice became tender as I looked at his worn out appearance, "You really need to take care of yourself."

He gave me a smile and waved his hand at what I had said, "I'll get to that later, Penny. I'm just so close, I can't stop now!"

"I know you're close, but please... for me. Take a shower, shave, sleep for a couple hours, then, when you're back a peak capacity, you can go back to work. You're going to work yourself to death if you don't." My words were not being exaggerative or anything. I'm sure in his state he truly would run himself into the ground working on this project.

He looked at the computer screen he was sitting in front of, then up at me, then back down and sighed, closing the laptop. "Alright."

"Thank you." I watched after him as he made his way through the crowded main room until I lost him among all the people in the general dimness.

My eyes then searched through the turquoise eyed crowd for Ben and Ed to see if they'd already gone back to the kitchen. I couldn't spot them, so I figured they had left and I was just about to leave the Tesseract's curtained platform when I caught sight of a man in a long, black leather coat sitting a ways away, rather isolated, with his golden scepter in his hands holding perfectly still. What was Loki doing? There was a strange look on his face. Was... was that fear?