No Time for Free-Time
Vacation.
In America?
Honestly, by now you were certain that this may not have been the best idea to ever climb out of the depths of your mind.
Your legs were comfortably stretched across the wooden table between the red couch you were resting on and the TV—which blasted news so unfathomable, so deranged you needed to pinch yourself twice before accepting this to be real.
That this was indeed happening.
And even with that done you turned around to your best friend seated on the opposite end of the couch, whose expression remained glued to the small, old school TV in your rented room to ask them to reassure you as well. Without even sparing you as much as a glance a hand reached across the space between you and pinched your arm. Hard.
Ow.
Okay, it was real.
Absurd, terrifying creatures were shown on the flickering screen, the shaking video betraying the deeply rooted fear residing in the camera team as they tried their best to hold still and show the situation at hand, swaying over to show citizens running around—their screams mingling together with the war cries of whatever-the-loving-hell was currently racing on flying vehicles through the air. Explosions sounded all around while the moderator, who was barely in focus at all as everyone was too busy to panic to think about how to properly handle a camera, tried to explain the entire ordeal going on.
Only few words managed to reach your numbed ears.
Aliens took over New York.
You would have liked to laugh at this—the one time your barely 18 year old self managed to get your ass out of your family home to visit a city far away, a city you had always and forever since dreamed of seeing in its glory, is the one time it gets torn into pieces.
Your distracted brain decided to run on autopilot without the rest of your body registering, mouth opening to yell words around the room your ears didn’t catch, eyes still sticking to the glow of the TV, where you caught a glimpse of a truly unprofessionally filmed clip of a silhouette vaguely standing at the top of the famous Stark Tower; Golden Horns on their head catching the light of the sun as well as the glow of the explosions nearby and reflecting it to the world below.
A sentence appeared at the bottom of the displayed video, something along the lines of an alien-prince-god-thing leading the army of monstrosities which was currently wrecking havoc in the city.
A leader. Aha.
The clip quickly switched to show an assembled group of people fighting to keep the creatures at bay and you honestly felt like you woke up to some kind of major joke in which everyone just dressed up and played pretend.
But even you had heard of some of these people before, vaguely, despite living safely tucked away from the stress and chaos and general attention they seemed to attract.
By now your ears had finally caught on and understood the words you had yelled around in a hurry, just as you realized that your friend looked at you expectantly, waiting for you to join the escape you had demanded of them mere seconds ago.
Your lips pressed into a thin line as you made up your mind.
“I’ll join you in a minute.”
Oh, but you were so not going to join them now, were you?
In less than a heartbeat you sprung to your feet, bolting to the bedroom to your left and closing as well as locking the door behind you with varying levels of sharp noises created by the slamming of wood. You hurried to your backpack, hands scrambling around in its insides while you tried your best to block out all the intruding noises, the screams and explosions from the outside world, until your fingers finally brushed against what you needed and you pulled it out with a desperate grin. You took the dark scarf resting in your slightly trembling hands and tightly tied it around your throat, covering your mouth and parts of your nose with it, before moving on to the black set of goggles, only spec of color the reflecting glass embedded into the frame. You set them firmly over your eyes, successfully covering your entire face while your heart beat a mile a minute, almost threatening to leap out of your body and right onto the laminate floor.
But you simply swallowed the lump in your throat, harshly breathing in and out.
And in and out.
Before clenching your hands to fists and throwing yourself out of the opened window.
The wind tugged and pulled on your clothes as your body glided through the air like a bullet right out of a pistol; higher and higher up into the sky until you could finally lock eyes with the gigantic tower looming quite in the distance.
One try, you chimed. Take down the leader.
With these more or less reassuring thoughts you zoomed through the air, willing yourself to become faster and faster as the grip, the lock you always had on your mind loosened in your panic—as voices upon voices, screams upon screams invaded your consciousness, filling every empty space inside you had valued so much. The sheer agony of all these people screaming and begging for their very lives tried to desperately pull your focus away, but you shook your head fiercely, steeling yourself until you finally locked eyes with the silhouette out of the news.
In less than a second some sort of scepter directed itself at you, blue core flaming up dangerously, pulsating with an astonishingly powerful energy. But the movement was too late.
With a clank of glass shards on the ground you crashed through what was left of the gigantic window panel, throwing yourself onto the stranger and sending the scepter sliding over the floor into the far corner of the room. The impact of the collision knocked the air right out of your lungs and you heaved a quick, sharp breath to collect yourself. Opening your eyes they locked right onto the green ones of the person barely a hair length away from your face.
Time seemed to slow considerably as you felt a hand move to your right, as you caught a glimpse of silver being reflected by the beams of sunlight barging into the room, as fear wanted so desperately to creep up in your body, but was rendered useless by the sheer amount of adrenaline coursing through your veins.
For the tiniest fraction of a second you saw it.
A glowing blue flashing across the stranger’s eyes, twirling and dancing around to an inaudible melody; like an unwelcome passenger on a ship, an uninvited guest at a party. Then it vanished.
Before the knife to your right could connect with your side, barely managing to graze the clothes covering it, your hands had already shot up right to the stranger’s face, fingers flying up to press right onto their temples.
Everything seemed to still for a moment.
A short moment.
Then a wave of agony came crashing into you with a force you would have rather left unimagined. Tears welled up in your eyes as you forced yourself into his consciousness, fighting his influence to push right past into the depths of his subconsciousness. You barely managed to heave yourself into a somewhat more sitting position, tears sliding down your face as your mind remained focused solely in finding it.
The blue.
The blue thing that had swirled around in the stranger’s eyes, as if mocking you to come and find it.
It was clearly not meant to be there.
The pain only worsened as you weaved around in the far depths of his mind, feeling as if your very soul got tortured by whatever was happening all around you—and you felt genuinely happy as you finally managed to hold onto something.
Your own consciousness, a formless spec in the vastness of his being desperately tried to twist and pull on the thing you found. It was but a ball of energy, glowing in different hues of blue edging into a yellow and you tried to focus hard despite feeling like you were being incinerated, focused hard to direct the energy into you instead. Sweat trickled down the almost feverishly hot skin on your face while your heart beat in synch to that of the person below you, his labored breathing mingling with your strained groans of pain and you felt your own strength wavering, vanishing into non existence.
Your veins felt as if on fire, flames burning your body from inside out and you fought hard to suppress a wail, clinging on despite your consciousness fading from his mind as your focus slipped. You refused to let go; you wouldn’t let whatever that was roam around any longer.
And so you sat still—having long since felt the body below you growing weak and motionless while your own tried to desperately double over, writhe on the floor to distract yourself from what you felt.
Then the flow of energy stopped.
And with it, the pain.
You fell to the side right onto the cold tile floor, limply. Directly next to the stranger who felt most likely just as near-dead as you were. Your sight was blurred after you had screwed your eyes shut so very tightly, spots dancing around your vision in hues of red and black as you blinked profusely to regain clarity. Labored breathing slowed with every passing second, heartbeat returning to a normal rhythm—one which wouldn’t make bystanders call upon an ambulance in an instant, that is.
With an agonizingly difficult movement you turned your head to the side, to cautiously watch the person, the alien-god-thing or whatever you had called him before.
After he had almost stabbed you with a knife and blasted your head off with some sort of wand straight out of Harry Potter it seemed like the safer option.
Even though the safest option would have probably been to not come at all.
Your eyes trailed along his form to observe his condition; black hair clung to his face obstructing his view and his skin seemed just as feverishly hot as yours felt, sweat trickling down his cheek and falling to the floor. There were small scratches with small amounts of crimson blood pooling out of some minor wounds and you noted with a hitch in your breath that you most likely hadn’t gotten out of this entire ordeal unscathed either.
Honestly though, he looked like a complete and utter wreck and you sure as hell didn’t want to see yourself in a mirror for the next couple of days, your hand trembling as it reached up your arm to yank out a smaller shard of glass buried inside of it, before chucking it away with a flick of your wrist.
You could still feel the remnant of the terrific agony you had gone through mentally, periodically making your entire body tense up as a cramp echoed though your body. There were feelings swirling inside of you which hadn’t been there prior to this encounter.
Feelings of hatred and guilt, jealousy and disgust and an overwhelming amount of self-loathing and grief. So much so that you questioned everything you had ever felt, alien emotions washing over you and threatening to push and pull you under with its unpredictable, messy currents.
A groan to your side made your eyes regain their focus on the man next to you, watching his eyes open with difficulty as he stared up at the ceiling. The light seemed to blind him as he opened and closed them a good couple of times, gaze still numbly directed straight ahead. His dark brows furrowed in confusion, pupils staring to dart around as much as possible without further moving his head, which was most likely throbbing as if he had just got run over by a car.
Inappropriately the vivid image conjured itself into your head and prompted you to utter a light laugh. A tired, exhausted laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. The man flinched and turned his head around just as cautiously to glance at you.
In your clouded mind you could only wonder what he still remembered of this encounter. Whether you accidentally took some memories of his, perhaps.
Wouldn’t be the first time.
Creeping around someone’s head is serious business after all and the lack of training partners doesn’t actively help in improving your abilities, now does it?
Tuning back to reality you caught him still looking at you with a glare, eyes narrowed in seeming anger but you felt nothing but confusion seeping out of his entire being. You stared back, eyes bland and hidden behind the mirrored and colored glasses of your goggles as you simply observed.
Loud noises crept closer and ripped both of you out of your exhaustion and confusion related trance, leaving you to try and crane your head into the direction of where footsteps are apparently thundering down a hallway. Apart from voices talking rather hurriedly and angrily you couldn’t hear any screams anymore. There were no explosions, not a multitude of people yelling in their heads for salvation and whatnot—
Oh.
You must have missed the entire attack.
Time indeed flows differently when you are toying with someone’s mind.
In a shaky movement your hands firmly planted themselves on the floor next to you as you tried your best in hoisting your almost limp body upwards into at least a half sitting position. Probably didn’t look fancy in the slightest, but considering the sweat dripping down your forehead as well as your at times still rather ragged breathing and blood dripping from your arm and all the other cuts—
—You had definitely seen better times.
The alien being next to you apparently sat up as well.
Or tried to.
Glancing over you saw him sitting with one leg stretched out, the other one pulled close to his chest with his left hand clinging onto it and his right propped behind him on the floor to not fall back down. His black hair was disheveled with thick strands sprawled across his face which he made to quickly brush away.
You took one, last thorough look at his eyes and to your relief they seemed positively green. Not a single trace of the blue swirl left.
As if on cue another cramp wrecked your body, prompting you to clutch your head with both of your hands as you fully sat up, squeezing your eyes shut to distract yourself.
When the pain subsided another time and you opened your eyes, you found the alien-god eying you with a hint of suspicion, but you felt a light pain swirling inside of him.
Okay.
Maybe you should have not helped him.
You made a mental note to leave him to his own devices should you ever encounter him again, returning his glance with a slight glare of your own.
Finally the incessant stomping had come to an end and you looked up to see a bunch of people standing in the doorway, weapons readied and more or less pointed at you as well as him. With widened eyes you recognized these people as the assembled group from the news.
Oh wow.
You had never expected to meet them, much less with their weapons directed at your head and stern expression grazing their faces. With careful movements you raised your hands up in surrender, but flinched as another jolt surged through your body.
Damn all this magic-alien stuff.
The man next to you spoke up, ripping you out of your pain.
“If you are still up for that drink—I would not mind having it.”
His words rang through the broken down room, glass shards littering the floor and whenever someone shifted, the resulting crunch filled the rising silence. As you glanced at him from the corner of your eyes you could still very well feel the agony coursing through his own body. Apparently he was trying terribly hard to seem nonchalant.
Which didn’t work on you though and by the look on everyone’s faces, it also didn’t work on anyone else.
With heavy steps a man stepped forward out of the group, light blonde hair barely reaching his shoulders, red cape clipped onto his back. He mustered a look of utter disappointment at the black haired man, before directing his attention over to you. Two other men stepped up and hoisted the alien-god to his feet, the sudden movement almost sending him crashing down due to the excruciating amount of energy which had just been drained by your little experiment.
Oh god, you hopefully never had to do this ever again.
You watched in seeming fascination as one of them reached into a pocket to retract some kind of device, clamping it over the man’s mouth as it turned into some kind of muzzle before he could say anything else. Whatever came out of there didn’t seem to be helpful in any form either way. They further proceeded to shackle his hands together with handcuffs you had never seen before—odd runes edged into its sides and in general appearing to have an old and withered look.
You were so disoriented and distracted that you didn’t even notice the blond man from before kneeling in front of your crumbled up person, a worried glance clouding his blue eyes.
“Hmm?” you asked, having just been snapped out of another trance.
“I was inquiring about your condition,” he repeated himself, eyebrows drawn together on his forehead, “You do not seem to be of adequate health.”
You laughed at that—that is, his way of expressing himself as well as the question—but it was merely because of exhaustion and pain taking over your common sense.
“Sorry,” you quickly mumbled, “too tired to think.”
Your hand shot up to your forehead, wiping away some of the sweat, blood and grime with the back of it. Meanwhile the others carried on with what they were doing, apparently leaving you to be in the man’s custody.
“I just—“ you tried again, gesticulating vaguely in front of your face, “over-exhausted myself?”
You added an unconvincing question mark to the end of your statement, making the man raise an eyebrow.
“I guess.”
The blond stranger seemed deep in thought for a while, before stretching out his hand in a friendly gesture.
“I am Thor Odinson, Prince of Asgard and God of Thunder.” he introduced himself with a smile, despite the uneasiness being terribly obvious in his rather open features. You didn’t even need to delve into his mind to read him like a book.
A book for third graders that is.
You offered a small, tired smile as reply and told him your own name, to which he nodded and repeated it as if to try out the pronunciation and to better keep it in mind.
“Alright, could you stand? I am sure my friends will feel obligated to ask you a few questions and I do have a few of them myself. Would you mind answering them?”
Oh crap. The questions.
You held onto the hope that they had no idea who exactly you were. A name means nothing, right? There are quite a lot of these floating around the world after all.
A sigh ripped through your throat, but you gave a light nod nonetheless.
With difficulties and therefore the help of Thor—who you, in all honesty, not quite believed to be a god—you stood up, pushing all the dizziness and fatigue into neat little boxes in the far recesses of your mind to be dealt with later. But as soon as your eyes fell onto the black haired man from before, his eyes locking with yours in but a second, all these overwhelming, alien emotions bubbled up inside of you again and you hoped with all you had that whatever was currently going on within you would subside as soon as possible.
You were all urged inside of an elevator, which felt especially uneasy considering it was not only filled to the brink with just people, strangers at that, but instead some weird self-proclaimed god-aliens from which one of them killed a bunch of people, tried to annihilate an entire city and attempted to murder you—also, it was an elevator.
Your eyes kept glued to the doors in front of you, trying to desperately think yourself into any other situation. You were only glad that the green creature, the Hulk apparently, didn’t manage to press himself inside this limited space as well.
This would have made your heart literally skyrocket in panic—the fist colliding with the door and leaving behind a deep dent was troubling enough already.
With a shake of your head you tried to keep your wandering thoughts to yourself, tried to ignore your own curiosity in wanting to find out more about the people you were perched into this elevator with, prioritizing your own exhaustion and lack of strength as a strangled sigh escaped your slightly parted lips.
They were all going to introduce themselves soon enough, you reasoned.
After all they had questions.
And wanted your answers.