Alex was like a deer caught in headlights, giant marshmallow stoppering her mouth as the bedroom door was flung open.
The six Avengers, as well as Rhodey and Maria stood in the door way and outside hall. Thor, who had been the one to kick the door open, had a small smile of relief on his face the moment he saw her.
Tony was barrelling towards her, even before Thor had gotten out of the way. He skidded to a halt before her and grabbed her arms, turning them over to examine them.
"You're alright. Oh my god, you're alright." He poked her cheek, as thought he was expecting some kind of camouflage that would fall away if he disturbed it. When that satisfied him that she was, in fact, real, he pulled her into a hug. Alex allowed it to happen, but it also only made her more anxious as the last time Tony had hugged her, it had been because they nearly died.
"Yeah, I'm alright. What's up?" Alex mumbled through the marshmallow. She looked more closely at the six people crowded at the front of her room. Thor had already left. Pushing Tony away from her, Alex questioned, "Why is Nat sweating?"
"Did you not hear anything? No one came in here?" Steve checked.
"No, it's just me and my Friends. Oh, J.A.R.V.I.S. is down, by the way." She said to Tony, whose look of happiness at her safety fell into concern again.
"What? He can't be."
"Well he is, wouldn't play me music."
"Goddammit Alex, I've told you not to use him for that. He's probably just sulking." Maybe there wasn't a life or death situation happening, if Tony was willing to snap at her.
"And he didn't alert me that you were in this hall. That's a feature you installed, unless it's been bypassed for some reason then J.A.R.V.I.S. is down." She noticed the somber expression on Tony's face too late, even if she didn't understand what it was for.
"Tony," Steve said carefully, placing a hand on his shoulder, "Ultron said he killed someone. We're all safe."
"Who's Ultron? And why did he kill them?"
"You don't need to know," Tony said, looking crestfallen at Steve's suggestion that his proudest achievement might be gone. "We should go tidy up the living room. I'd offer to do it alone but I need to go to the lab first."
Bruce nodded to Alex, but kept his distance like always, "Stay in here."
They left together, conversing quietly. Bruce's hand was on Tony's shoulder, the same way Steve's had been a few moments ago.
"Pà, what's happened?"
"Nothing." Steve looked down when he lied, something Alex had learnt from Natasha. He was distracted, glancing everywhere, but at Alex's question he still managed to drop his gaze to the floor for a split second.
"Dad?"
Clint shook his head, turning away from her.
"We should send her to Sam." Steve said, in a very loud whisper, to Natasha, who shook her head,
"It's safer for her here."
"If it was, we wouldn't have all come rushing to see if she was still alive."
"I'm not letting her go without one of us going with her." Clint risked a glance at Alex.
"Well it can't be you, I saw that fall you took, you were told to take it easy by Dr Cho. You're in no position to protect Alex."
"So she should stay here. With us."
"Sam can look after her, probably better than we can right now."
"Steve-"
"Black Widow. I need you to think clearly about this rather being swayed by your feelings. What's best for Alex is a safe house with someone trustworthy."
Natasha paused, growing more serious than Alex had seen for a while. "Fine, I'll drop her off at Sam's then see if Thor's caught anything."
<~~>
"Hey, Ketchup. Cap told you anything?"
Sam had been the one to introduce Alex to the Avengers. Not directly, he hadn't even known Steve back then, but he had found Alex sleeping in his kitchen one day. She had teleported away the moment he woke up, but had been too weak to get far. He'd tracked her down, asking around if anyone had seen a fourteen year old and when they sent him to a church, he found her curled up on the bench outside.
Alex's memories were scattered and sparse, like a beautiful painting smeared and smudged till there was only a semblance of what it had originally been. She could see random faces, perhaps a few of them even matched up with the many voices in her mind, but there was nothing stable in there from the first thirteen years of her life. Sam had told her the story of them meeting countless times, he had too because the only thing she remembered from it was his face in the kitchen, looking at her with sympathy- a look she had never received before then.
It became a routine, instead of a bedtime story, Sam would tell her how they met. After a few months, they would tell the story together, and Alex slowly began to remember more details that Sam didn't. She remembered how she felt, what the coffee tasted like, even the speck of red paint on the edge of the church bench came back to her.
The story always began the same,
"I approached you, and was like 'Hey kid'. Now I don't know who the hell you were, but you got into my house and I was both impressed and concerned. And I told you that too."
Three months after Sam first found her, Alex remembered how she had nodded mutely, hands too cold and mind too tired to teleport away again. Sam had always told her before that she too scared to speak.
"I said to you, I said 'I'm not a whole believer in fate," Sam would continue, and this would usually be when Alex reached over to hold his hand, keeping him grounded, "but I've just lost someone real important to me. Then you turn up in my kitchen and you look a bit like him. Same disapproving look. So it seems to me like there's a reason you were hiding there.'"
Alex had only seen one picture of Sam's ex-wingman, Riley and he was smiling in it. There was another one, kept in Sam's wallet, but it was folded away and he'd scolded her when she'd tried to get it out. She knew he'd died, didn't know why or how. From the picture she was allowed to see, of the two men in Afghanistan, it must have been an army incident but Sam wouldn't tell her more.
Sam cheered up when telling this next bit, putting on an extravagant Italian accent to mock Alex, though he promised that was how she actually sounded, using the few English words she remembered to talk to him. "And the first thing you ever said to me was, 'You hurt me?' and I was like, 'pardon?' because you were so quiet."
Alex had licked her lips and asked the same question again.
"I promised I wouldn't hurt you. I wanted to make sure you were alright."
"You asked where I was from."
"I did. You said Italy, and I said-
"Italy? Well, unfortunately I failed Spanish so this isn't going to go too well." They laughed at that bit. Well, Sam did and Alex copied until she later understood why that was funny.
In her memories, she saw herself sit up and that was when she first saw the spot of red paint by her knee, almost unnoticeable on the bench. But she had noticed, she'd remembered, even though it was five months after the event.
"I really struggled trying to ask you to come back to my house with me, without making it seem like a threat. In the end I just kept gesturing between us and saying 'you, me. Home.'"
"I remember that. I think I drew it out a bit longer because it was funny watching you struggle."
"Hmm, and you kept asking me why I was offering you a home. I couldn't give you a proper answer. Mainly because you didn't understand English well enough, but also because even I couldn't explain why I felt like I had to find you."
The only reason she'd hesitated was because she didn't trust herself enough to speak. Sam assumed she'd hesitated because she was still scared. When she had said 'yes', Sam always said he felt like he was going to cry.
"You were just this little kid who broke into my house then disappeared. I knew I had to find you, and it wasn't just chance that I did. I like to think I saved your life that night, and you made mine more exciting."
That was always where Sam stopped the story. But nine months later, when she was looking for gloves to take on their camping trip, she had remembered the last part of their conversation before Sam convinced her to walk to his house with him:
"Okay, first things first, I'm finding you a pair of gloves. And a hand warmer too, just as another precaution."
"And what about my illness?"
"Illness?"
"I can do bad thing. I go anywhere I want. I am ill."
"You're not ill." She had doubted that then, even sometimes now, but Sam had insisted it on that night. "You're special. We'll keep it a little secret for now, but it's not because it's an illness or something that should be hidden. It's because the normal you needs taking care of before we deal with something less normal."
Sam was the first person to tell her there wasn't something wrong with her, even if he didn't remember. She laughed to herself the first time that memory occurred and she laughed now, and it was that which brought her back to the reality of standing on Sam's doorstep.
"I lost you there for a bit." He was looking concerned, glancing behind his shoulder incase there was anything there which pushed her mind back in time. "Did Cap say what was going on?"
"No. None of them did."
"That sounds like familiar."
Following him into the kitchen, Alex slumped into a chair. Sam whistled to her, and she looked up in time to catch the packet of digestives he threw at her,
"Chin up, Ketchup. I know you hate being left out of the loop, but they only do it because they love you. We always have more fun here anyway."
That was debatable, but it was true that the rules were more lax at Sam's. There was no bed time, no healthy eating or diets for her. He was even the one to introduce her to the beauty of sit-coms and she would spend hours watching them while he was at work, using them to learn English quicker.
"Can I have a beer?" Sam laughed, then caught Alex's eye,
"Oh, you're being serious. You know Stark would kill me, right?"
"I would make sure you had a nice funeral."
A/N Marvel confirmed when Wanda/Pietro were born but I am choosing to ignore that as it messes with Alex's age and changes everything I've planned. Isn't fanfiction beautiful...