Elevated

Thor really wants to see your dog.

Nora glanced at the text from Darcy as she brushed her teeth. She’d spent the entire week with Bruce running a series of increasingly complex numbers and she was feeling a little bit fried. She didn’t have weekend plans because she didn’t really have any friends in the city. She thought about it for a second. She never went to the tower on weekends, but if she didn’t go to the lab then it wasn’t like working on a weekend, right?

I could bring her to visit. She finally replied.

He’s so excited Lol

So Nora clipped on Luna’s leash and they took a cab to the tower. There were still people milling around the lobby, running to and fro, but it wasn’t nearly as busy as usual. The elevator ride was shockingly easy with Luna sitting at her feet. The dog stared up at her and Nora petted her soft ears gently and didn’t feel like she was going to have a panic attack.

“Who’s this?”

Nora glanced up as she stepped off the elevator. A blond man she hadn’t met but knew was another Avenger was striding down the hall towards her looking at Luna. He was as muscular as the rest of them, but in a different sort of way. Nora thought it might be something like the difference between a swimmer and a gymnast, though she couldn’t begin to guess what the skill difference might be between superheroes. “This is Luna,” she answered absently. She was used to people making friends with her dog.

The man dropped to his knees to better pet Luna while she sniffed him in earnest, “What a pretty girl,” He glanced up at her and then sort of squinted.

The door to their right flew open, “Nora!” Thor boomed. Then he caught sight of the dog too, “Is this the famed Luna?”

Luna, maybe at her name or maybe at the sheer joy in the man’s voice, started to wiggle. She rounded the man on his knees and Nora dropped the end of her leash so that she could go wiggle against Thor’s legs instead. The Norseman was delighted. He knelt to pet the dog carefully, “Hi Thor.” She caught sight of Darcy and Jane over the man’s shoulder, “Hi Jane, hi Darcy.”

The man in front of her stood and eyed her with interest, “You’re Banner’s assistant.”

“Uh-huh. Nora. Silver.” She stuck her hand out.

He shook it, “Clint Barton.” He looked at the cast on her wrist with interest, “You’ve got half the team on that thing.”

“Oh,” Nora glanced at it, “Yeah. It’s kind of starting to feel like a collect them all situation. You wanna sign it?”

“Yes.” Clint answered immediately, grinning.

Thor stood and beamed at them both when Luna darted back to Nora’s feet, “Will you join us Clint? Darcy says that dogs must be walked and that coffee can be procured along the way.”

“Sure, sounds fun.” He agreed.

The five of them and the dog piled back in the elevator. Nora knelt to pet Luna on the way down. “Okay Nora?” Darcy asked. Nora nodded. At Clint’s weird look she supplied, “She’s claustrophobic.”

Clint looked at her like that was interesting, but she ignored him and focused on the dog. In the lobby she passed the leash to Thor, who was delighted. Together they wandered two and a half blocks to a coffee shop that had an outdoor patio. It was practically empty. Nora supposed not a lot of people were looking for coffee in the middle of a Saturday in the business district. It was a little weird, but only when she remembered that two out of five people at the table were superheroes. Otherwise, Nora found she was enjoying the company quite a lot. Thor and Clint spent a lot of time petting Luna, who loved them both.

Clint stole a sharpie from the barista and spent ten minutes at the table doodling what had to be himself, shooting arrows at Sam’s little bird drawing, “Can’t believe Steve just drew a star. Guy’s an artist.”

Nora sipped her coffee, “He seemed a little stressed out.”

“Why?” Darcy asked, spooning whip-cream from her drink into her mouth. Jane, beside her, was doodling a complex looking equation on a napkin.

“I think he thought I broke my arm when I ran into his friend. Barnes.” It felt a little weird referring to someone she knew by news footage and hadn’t actually been introduced to. Clint and Thor traded a significant sort of look.

“You ran into Bucky?” Clint asked, capping the pen and setting it on the table.

“Oh yeah. Crashed right into him. I was actually trying to come see you Jane,” Jane glanced up from her doodle, “I thought you’d appreciate the insane numbers Bruce’s equation was giving me.” Jane nodded and hummed an affirmative, “I guess he must’ve been leaving the other lab? I don’t really know I wasn’t paying attention or I wouldn’t have ran into him. Smashed my tablet on the floor, but he caught me so I didn’t hit the ground.”

Clint made an interested noise, “Caught you, huh?”

“Yeah. I didn’t even apologize, I feel pretty bad about it.”

“What were they doing in the lab?” Darcy asked.

Nora shrugged, “Dunno. Not really my business. I really want to get in there and play with the particle splitter though.” She lifted her arm to inspect Clint’s drawing, “How many more of these do I need?”

Clint held up a hand and counted on his fingers, “Tony, Wanda, Nat, Bucky.” With the same hand he picked up his own cup and had a drink, “Surprised you don’t have Tony’s already.”

“I haven’t seen him in the lab since my first day,” Nora said, and was glad she hadn’t. She scratched her nose, “I think Natasha was at the lab last week? Red hair?” Clint gave her a look like she was insane, “I was seeing Barnes pretty often in the elevator for a minute there, but I’m not usually in a good place to ask for an autograph when I’m in a metal coffin.”

“Yeah,” Clint replied chuckling, “Good luck with that. Nat and Bucky aren’t gonna sign shit.”

“Nora,” Thor said with gravity, “Does Luna know the game of fetch?”

They took the rest of their coffees to go and wandered three more blocks to the park. Thor was thrilled and played fetch with Luna for thirty minutes until the dog was drooped and panting. Promising to bring her to the tower again, Nora directed the dog into the back of a cab and headed home.

She was pretty sure on Monday that Clint had jinxed her. Bruce was late so she was running calculations on her own when the door swished open and he wandered in with Tony Stark on his heels.

“It’s unprecedented, the readings we’re getting are like nothing I’ve seen,” Bruce was saying, gesturing in a way that would have been mild on anyone else but was, for him, extreme.

Stark was nodding along and already approaching one of Nora’s boards of Galler math. A board which had taken her half of Friday. Nora shot out of her chair and ran to put herself between Stark and the board, “Absolutely not.”

Bruce gave her an alarmed look and Stark laughed aloud, “Calm down Silver, I’m not going to touch your precious board.”

“I don’t trust you.” Nora said, before it occurred to her that the man was her boss and she probably shouldn’t.

Stark raised his hands in an appeasing gesture, “I wouldn’t mess with Bruce’s research.” Nora glanced at Bruce who gave her an encouraging little nod, and she stepped to the side, frowning. Stark grinned, “That’s why I like you, Silver.”

That was news to Nora. She frowned, “What?”

The man waved a hand, “You’ve got a backbone. You’re the only person on R&D who didn’t let me fuck up all their hard work.”

Oh, she realized, he’d been testing her. Her frown deepened, “You went around messing with everyone just to see who was willing to tell you no? That’s insane.”

Stark barked a laugh. He eyed the math on the board with interest and reached for a marker. Nora made an angry noise. He stilled, then grinned, continuing the movement with deliberate slowness, “Barton said you’re collecting autographs.”

Nora wasn’t really sure she wanted his signature. She squinted at him, “Sure.” and held out her arm. Stark popped the cap off the marker and took her arm, signing a huge, angular ‘Tony’. He took an extra second to turn the ‘o’ into a tiny arc reactor. Then, while she was distracted inspecting it, he started scribbling all over her board.

She was furious, but he did actually accomplish some work instead of just ruining everything, so she let it go.

Bucky’s week was going okay.

After an exhausting weekend of no sleep, the fact that he hadn’t broken the woman, Nora’s, wrist had settled him enough that he could lie down and not feel like he was drowning in the past.

He wasn’t exactly rested, but he wasn’t falling apart either. He managed to make it to the gym every day with Steve and Sam, but he couldn’t bring himself to take the elevator. He took the stairs instead. There was still the thorn of Nora’s fear wedged in his chest. He hadn’t hurt her, but he could have.

Steve said she had apologized for running into him, but that didn’t seem right. He was sure that she had only wanted to appease Steve and the horrible disappointment he projected onto people when they couldn’t manage Bucky’s presence. It was a little unfair of Steve, he thought, to be disappointed in her. She wasn’t superhuman. She wasn’t trained. She was tiny. Tiny and fragile. How could anyone expect her to face him and not be afraid?

He made it up the stairs to the lounge and opened the door. It was a huge open space with big couches and a massive kitchen. He saw Thor instantly where he sat on the couch. There was often someone from the team in the lounge, so he wasn’t surprised by the man’s presence, but he was surprised by the dog.

It was tiny, sleek and yellow, and it ran immediately across the room to wiggle at his legs. Bucky could remember a time, suddenly, when he’d had a dog. He knelt almost automatically, burying a hand in the dog’s fur. She sniffed his hands, metal and flesh, with interest. His dog, he thought, was brown. Some sort of mutt with long fur. It had slept on his feet from the time he was five until he was fifteen. Bucky had wanted another, after he had died, but first he was too sad and then he was too poor and then he was too busy working and then there was a war. His dog’s name had been Sully. A wave of sadness rolled over him, but he found it was a gentle kind.

“Bucky,” Thor greeted warmly, “Luna the dog seems very taken with you.”

Bucky found Thor easy to be around. He treated him like he treated the rest of the team. Like he was glad Bucky was there and wasn’t concerned if he was sad or broken or liable to snap. He supposed that the man genuinely wasn’t concerned because he was probably sure he could win in a fight. Bucky rubbed the dog’s ears, “Hi Luna.” He wasn’t sure where the hell Thor had gotten a dog, or why, but he didn’t care. She was thrilled to see him and wiggled against his legs as he pet her. He felt like a person.