Author's note: Hey guys, hope you're all hanging in there. Update on the uni situation, they've offered me an unconditional place now so I'm definitely going in September! That is if this virus has calmed down by then :( ANyways, here is chapter nineteen, I've been thinking about ideas for a part two of this (I have a lot of time on my hands now okay) involving the events of Ragnarok/IW/Endgame, but I'm not actually sure I have the emotional capacity to write about Loki's death (or Nat's... or Tony's...), so yeah. Comment or message ideas, also include a title for this bcos I still can't think of anythingggg. Okay I'll stop rambling now byeee <3
...
It had been two weeks since the building collapsing incident, and there had been no missions since then, leaving you plenty of time to get back to full health and do a load of training with both Nat and Loki. You felt stronger than ever, both physically and in the sense of your magic; you were certain that, if tasked with holding up a building now, you would be able to hold it for much longer than you had two weeks ago. Although that might just be you being optimistic.
This morning you had trained with Loki for a couple of hours, and were rewarding yourself for your efforts with ice cream and a movie, as there wasn't much else going on. It was a cold and gloomy November afternoon and you were quite happy to curl up under a blanket with a tub of your favourite flavour of ice cream and a film. It was barely ten minutes before Loki joined you; he was rarely not around you recently, and you couldn't say you minded. Your feelings for him were definitely... progressing, but you were determined not to think about it too much in case he heard you and your friendship (if you could call it that) was ruined. You couldn't afford for that to happen. You'd find a time to sort things out when there was no chance of him overhearing... is what you'd been telling yourself for the last fortnight.
"What's this?" Loki asked you, positioning himself a respectable distance from you on the sofa. The same sofa, you noted happily, before shoving that thought far down into the deepest crevice of your mind.
"It's called Harry Potter. It's about a boy who finds out he's a wizard and goes to a school of magic where he learns... did you just compare me to Harry Potter?" you laughed, hearing his thoughts in your own head.
"You're getting too good at reading minds, it's beginning to get quite unnerving." Loki told you.
"Maybe you're just-" here you paused and looked around dramatically. "Letting you guard down?" you finished in a whisper, looking at him in wide-eyed sarcasm. He rolled his eyes with a smile.
"Maybe." he replied, and you fought to stem the thoughts that had been about to enter your head.
"Tell me more about this odd sounding film." he said, and you obliged; managing to get him to sit all the way through it: an achievement in your eyes. Various people had joined you throughout the course of the film, including Bucky, Clint and Thor – you had to re-explain the whole plot to Thor when he arrived, assisted this time though by Bucky and Clint.
The rest of the day passed fairly uneventfully, and you turned in for the night early, tired despite not having done anything much all day. You got into your pyjamas using magic (an insanely helpful trick, especially when you needed to get changed quickly, which you had taught yourself) and lay in bed listening to the rain against your window and listening to the sounds of the city below. Deciding to finally honour the lie you'd been telling yourself for two weeks, you put up the mental wall around your mind which meant that Loki wouldn't be able to hear you even if he wasn't trying to listen in (which you very much hoped he wasn't). Better safe than sorry.
It felt weird finally being able to think about it freely after so long trying not to. You loved that you could talk to Loki in your head, and sometimes even hear bits of what he was thinking, but you would be lying if you said it didn't get tiring sometimes. It made you better equipped in training when he was trying to explain something though, you were able to do whatever he explained fairly quickly; if it was in his head it was in yours too. The two of you had an odd relationship, but then, not many people could read each other's minds. It was only now you thought about it you realised how close you were, much closer than you'd ever been to anyone else before in your life. And now you'd stopped lying to yourself, it was safe to say that you liked him, and not just in a friendly kind of way. But shit, now you'd admitted that to yourself it was going to be hard to not think about it when he was around, and if you kept this wall up he'd get suspicious... things weren't looking good. Unless...? No, you couldn't tell him. You'd gone mad with that last thought; you were too tired. You fell asleep thinking about his eyes, those gorgeous eyes... how on earth were you meant to carry on keeping your thoughts quiet around him?
...
"Y/N, I'm sorry, you need to wake up, we have to get going."
Tony? Why was he speaking to you? You were still in bed.
"Y/N!"
"Mmhff?"
"I'll interpret that to mean 'yes I'm getting up right away Tony.', we need to leave, there's... I'll explain on the way, just hurry up." he rambled, already leaving the room.
A mission? But it was...
"Fuck." you groaned, looking at your clock. It was 1:22am. You rolled out of your warm bed, listening in dismay to the rain on your window and the wind blowing a gale outside. It took less than a minute for you to get ready with your new trick, and you went out into the corridor right as Loki appeared from his bedroom, obviously also having just rolled out of bed. Unhelpful.
"What's going on?"
Your brain was trying to coordinate a sentence whilst taking in the view in front of you, and it wasn't going too well.
"Mission." you finally managed to croak, clearing your throat loudly and pointing towards the elevator. Smooth.
"What, now?"
"Yup."
"Lady Y/N, hurry, we must leave now!" Thor called to you from the elevator.
"Be careful." Loki told you, watching as you rubbed your eyes which were still puffy with sleep. Did he sound worried about you? It was probably your half-asleep brain playing tricks on you.
"I- yeah. I will. See you." you said, jogging to the elevator where Thor was waiting for you.
On the roof you made a shield around yourself and Thor as you ran to the jet through the torrential rain.
"Nice weather for flying." Tony commented cheerfully, handing you an earpiece as you entered the jet and took the shield down, slumping into a seat next to Bucky, who looked like he might have actually fallen back asleep.
"Not all of us don't need sleep Tony, keep the noise down." Nat grumbled, tying her hair back and punching Clint to make sure he was awake.
"Buck." you said softly, nudging him awake with a slightly more subtle method than the one Natasha had employed with Clint.
"It's not time for being awake yet." Bucky moaned, and you nodded in agreement, feeling the jet take off in a slightly bumpier fashion than usual what with the weather being so bad.
"Okay troops listen up, here's the deal..." Tony was talking, but your head was elsewhere, namely back down in the corridor with a half-asleep Loki. Bucky's head slumped on to your shoulder, doing nothing towards helping you stay awake; you slowly felt your eyes becoming heavier again.
"Y/N, Buck, this is important! Did you hear anything I just said?" Tony snapped, who knows how long later, and you jerked back to consciousness, cold and tired. You missed your bed.
"Yes." you said defiantly, but then when there was a pause in which you were supposed to tell him what he'd said...
"No."
"Right, we're there now, just... cover Steve and I okay? We're doing the important shit."
"Roger that." you said, giving a half-hearted thumbs up and trying to get some magic running through your veins to warm you up. As the jet landed you managed to get your eyes purple, and tried to keep them that way so that you were ready for instant action, if it were to occur.
"Let's get this over with. Be careful." Tony said as the back of the Quinjet opened up into the stormy weather outside, blowing your hair back from your face and waking you up far more effectively than trying to keep your magic at the surface. You all piled out into the rain, which was almost painful with the wind driving it into you, and were soaked within seconds. It was so dark; you all followed Tony and Steve trustingly through the darkness towards a building, when suddenly Clint yelled out, startling you all.
"Look out!"
Everyone instinctively ducked, but nothing happened.
"Clint, what...?"
It was less than five seconds before you were surrounded by figures all dressed in black, hidden by their outfits and the pouring rain.
"Who...?" Steve started to voice the question you were all thinking, and then seemed to realise that no one would have an answer. Tony stepped forward towards the intimidating crowd of figures, clad in black, unmoving in the rain, uncovering his face. You and the rest of the team stood poised behind him, facing all different directions staring at the silent group who had surrounded you.
"Hello, we come in peace, what are you...?"
And, all of a sudden, then they were attacking you. Pure panic fuelled your magic, and you fought off countless figures as they approached from seemingly nowhere. There were so many of them.
"Don't hurt them, just keep them at bay... we need to find out what they want." Tony instructed, reacting calmly as you were attacked.
"What could they possibly want that we have on us?!" you heard Nat yell breathlessly through your earpiece.
It was beyond you, you were just concentrating on keeping these creepy dudes away from you.
"One of us." Thor replied through clenched teeth, sending the figures flying with Mjolnir as if there was no tomorrow.
"What?!" Bruce had also abandoned the 'don't hurt them' rule and was now going full Hulk mode on the figures, who seemed to be dropping back slightly.
In your desperation, you hadn't realised that the figures around you had their own personal agenda of getting you away from the rest of the group, who were still fighting back to back now at least twenty metres away from you.
Fear gripped you as you realised what was happening, too late. These were the people who wanted to take your magic. You blinked rainwater out of your eyes frantically, doubling your efforts to keep them away from you, but there were so many of them, and they kept on coming... you cursed yourself as you started to feel tired already. You'd only been going for five minutes and you already felt like you needed to rest, but you couldn't, not if you wanted to...
"Y/N! Where are you?!" Tony yelled. Your chest tightened as you heard the fear in his voice. You couldn't keep this up forever; your magic was only knocking them back, not doing any serious damage so that they couldn't keep coming at you. Unable to reply to Tony, you were so out of breath, you formulated a plan. You couldn't get out of this, you needed to give yourself a fighting chance when they inevitably overpowered you. Breathing hard, you purposefully missed a beat with your systematic blasts of magic, which, up until this point, had been keeping the figures back, and used the split second to tear your earpiece from your ear, turn it off and shove it down your bra. The panicked voices of the team vanished from your ear, and you were left with the sound of your erratic breathing and the pouring rain. Praying none of the figures had seen what you had done, you braced yourself as one of them ran at you and rugby tackled you to the ground, letting out a cry as pain shot through your ribs and then more of the figures were surrounding you, pinning you to the ground and pressing something against your mouth.
A strong scent of something acidic and unpleasant filled your mouth and nose, and you felt yourself losing consciousness yet again. You really needed to work on staying awake in dangerous situations like these.
...
Loki's POV
Something was wrong. Something was really, horribly wrong. Loki didn't know how he knew, or why, he just did. It was you, there was something wrong with you; something had happened on the mission. What a stupid time to leave for a mission, in the dead of night while the weather was like this, of course something bad had happened. He was still in his room, wide awake, as he heard the Quinjet approach and then land on the roof. About time, it had been at least three hours since you'd left, and two since he'd known something was wrong. The rain hadn't stopped.
You weren't dead, he was sure of that, but still he braced himself for the worst as he invaded the thoughts of the team who were descending in the elevator towards him. He didn't want to try and get into your thoughts, in case something had happened with your magic. He didn't want to harm you more than you already might be.
Loki blanched as he realised what had happened.
Tony's thoughts were the loudest.
We left her. We left her. She's in danger and we left her.
They'd left you? You weren't back here with them? Loki struggled to comprehend what had happened from the mess of thoughts in everyone's heads, but gradually it began to make sense. They'd spent an hour and a half looking for you, and they weren't going to stop. After a minute of pushing down the initial rage (how could they have been so stupid?) and worry he had felt, he strode to his door and yanked it open as the team trudged past in the corridor; they turned to look at him in surprise as he took in the state of them: soaking wet, disheartened and feeling like they'd betrayed you.
"I'll help. Find her, I mean."
Ordinarily he would have rather died than help any of them, but when it came to you, things were different. And he wanted to get rid of this tight, awful feeling in his chest which he got whenever he thought about what state you might be in. Was this what it felt like to be worried about someone?
"Come on then." Tony said, without breaking his stride. He was a man on a mission. None of them questioned how he knew what had happened. Maybe this is what it felt like to work together with a group, rather than against them. It was alright, he supposed. It would be alright, once you were back here. Safe.