The Armorer

I woke with a start, forgetting for a moment that I had fallen asleep in the bathtub and startled by the faces looking in at me. Damn it, privacy, people! No trespassing! Cap flushed and turned away when I sat up. Realizing what I had done, I pressed myself to the side of the tub and waved them away. "Go away!" I yelled.

Thor, the only one of us not bothered in the slightest, said calmly, "We will go to the front door." I waited until I could see them go around the corner, then I hopped out of the tub and threw on my robe, then rethought this. They scared the bejezus out of me, they could wait while I got dry and clothed. While I didn't loiter, I didn't go full speed either, despite the adrenaline rocketing through my system.

I stomped out to the door. "Greetings!" Thor started, but I smacked him and yelled at them both about decency, privacy, and why nobody wants to be woken up by people looking at her in the bathroom.

"Why are you yelling?" Thor asked, genuinely baffled. I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead in frustration.

"You scared me!" I shouted some more. "And I'm embarrassed."

"I saw nothing of which you should be embarrassed," Thor said, apparently in a ham-handed attempt to reassure me. "May we come in?" I gave up and stood aside.

"Why were you afraid?" Cap said, ignoring the whole bathroom debacle, which I was also willing to forget. "Why is there a piece of plywood over the window?"

I realized an explanation would take awhile. "Does anybody want a drink?" I offered. Both of them accepted whiskey, which surprised me a bit for some reason. After giving them their beverages, I slammed a shot and took a beer out of the refrigerator. What can I say? I'm an American. Cap's eyebrows rose.

"So when I left Asgard, I ended up in Innsbruck. I found this house while looking around," I said, glossing over Heimdall's role in this. I didn't want to get him in trouble after he'd done me a favor, even if the benefit of the favor was up for grabs currently. Thor nodded.

"Heimdall said he'd given you a task," he noted, and my lip curled.

"I might note that a) I didn't need a task, b) an explanation would have nice, as would have been c) more data," I said tartly. "I had a drawing of this place and found it and bought it. And renovated it, it needed help. When I was looking around, I found a WWII era facility hidden toward the back of the property." I looked at Cap. "It was a lab that was apparently working on the Super Soldier serum."

"What?" he asked, looking shocked.

"Yep," I confirmed, then went on with the story. When I got to the part about why I went back to the lab, I paused for a moment and scanned the environment, looking for anomalous power use, but saw none, so the police hadn't bugged the place while I was gone. I'm pretty sure I would have gotten in trouble for destroying the research, and I didn't want to be kicked out of Austria. I couldn't detect any bodies outside, and parabolic mikes wouldn't work through the trees. I mentally slapped myself. Paranoid much?

"I went inside, locked the door behind me. When I got downstairs I turned on the lights and collected all the notes, putting them in my pack, then looked around. Aside from some chemicals and glass ware, nothing was in the lab." I hesitated, then decided to spill it. "I did find a sample of what I presumed to be Super Soldier serum in a lockbox and poured it down the drain. When I was getting ready to come up, I heard people coming in. They'd gotten the door open, so I hid and went up after they were farther in the facility." I omitted telling them about the terror that rode me as I crept up the stairs, the adrenaline creating a strong urge to run. My personal feelings were private, not for a strange alien to dissect. "I made it home and burned the notes. Then the men broke the kitchen window and came in. The police got here in the nick of time." I shook my head and drained my beer. Then I looked at Thor. "Maybe you know something about the generator, maybe you've seen something like it somewhere else." I described it to him and his face got tight.

"That's HYDRA technology," Cap said tensely.

"It is made from the Tesseract," Thor corrected him brusquely. "I need to take it back." I thought about what I'd seen of the generator, and thought that I could get into the power source easily enough.

"It's containing the matter that's the problem," I said slowly. Thor frowned.

Cap interrupted and wanted to know what I'd seen of the notes, why I'd destroyed them.

"I didn't read the notes," I said. "And given what I found out about the serum and when it was used, I decided that the notes weren't any kind of benefit."

"Why not?" asked Thor, diverted.

"Couple reasons. First, this was early work on the formula. I found out that everybody who'd been given it either died in agony...the lone survivor suffered paralysis, deformation of the spine, and distortion of the muscles, but his brain wasn't altered. He was stuck in that body, unable to speak or move for over twenty years. So that's the outcome of this stage of the formulation. Then the man responsible for the formula was captured by HYDRA and spent a few more years on it; the end result of that was the Red Skull." I shook my head. "That formula was used successfully exactly twice." I jerked my chin at Cap. "He's one of them. And I can guarantee that anybody looking for super soldiers isn't going to selecting for integrity and morality. Conflict on this planet is bad enough without amoral super soldiers in the mix."

"Who was the second recipient of the serum?" Thor asked.

"Bucky," Cap sighed, and I nodded. We sat in silence.

"So what brings you to Earth?" I ask suddenly.

"Heimdall indicated that our presence was needed," Thor said. Cap grinned suddenly.

"I think he likes you," he said to me. Thor pondered this.

"He has a high regard for her," he said thoughtfully.

"So why now?" I asked sourly. "Why not yesterday, when I could have used the help?"

"Thor took some convincing," Cap said after a moment. I held back a snort.

"Are you staying?" I asked him. "Because things have changed some since you were last seen here." I grabbed my laptop, typed in my password, and handed it to him. He got online to check the news.

"About that power source," I said to Thor. "What do you need to transport it? If you're going to take it, it needs to be soon. The state has experts examining the site and they'll find it soon enough."

"You've seen it, but it isn't found here," Thor said glumly. "The Bifrost is made of it."

I scowled. Oh, Heimdall. I got up and retrieved the pill bottles from the bathroom. I peeled off the labels and rinsed off the sugar before returning to the living room. I handed Thor the bottles; he opened them, pouring out the matrix pieces. "Where did you get this?" he said, his scowl matching mine.

"Heimdall," I said shortly. "How big a bottle do you need and how thick does it have to be?"

"You can't do anything with this," Thor scoffed. "No man on Earth can work it." I repeated my question.

"About the size of the container," he said reluctantly. "Perhaps twice as thick. But I say again, you cannot work it."

I snatched the bottle from his hand and sat down again. "I'm no man," I assured him breezily and heard Cap reassuring his friend as I spilled the matrix pellets onto my hand and set the pill bottle on top of them. I concentrated, and gradually the material submitted to my will and began forming over the bottle. When I reached the top of the container, I slid the orange plastic out and formed shoulders and a rim. The remaining material was formed into a stopper. I stuck the stopper into the jar and tossed it over to Thor, who caught it but looked gobsmacked. I smirked.

"We'd better get a move on if you want to retrieve that power source," I said.