Intertwine

105 - Just A Regular Day

ALINA

We'd been walking for hours, with no sign of a way out. I'd done more research on little Tommy, but not much that would help me with... well anything. What I did find out though, was that apparently his father had some sort of connection to Thor but I didn't quite know how. Something about him going on a date with an old flame?

"I swear we've been here before." He said, looking at the dead end. "We came to this wall like half an hour ago."

I nodded. "It's got the same old graffiti on it. Cantonese characters I think."

Clint shook his head. "It's Mandarin. Says something along the lines of suck my-"

I held up a hand, "I don't wanna know."

He shrugged. "It's weird, I'd have thought we'd have found the others by now."

I grimaced. I'd been thinking the same thing. I hadn't seen any life forms come up on my interface either, Cas would have alerted me if she saw anything either.

"I'm going to sit down." I announced, removing my helmet.

"Why haven't you tried blasting a wall?" Clint asked as I dropped to the cobbles, my knees wobbling with the effort of trying to sit gracefully.

"It's reinforced with several different metals. Some of which I don't even think are from Earth. I'm already down a lot on power and it'd take more than I have to get through them." I leant my back against the brick and sighed. "I'm fucking exhausted."

Clint shrugged. "It's just a regular day for me."

I rolled my eyes. "I don't even know what regular means anymore. I would say a normal day for me is getting up, going to my lectures and seminars, doing work, meeting up with my friends for food..." I paused. "I haven't gotten in contact with my friends. They still think I'm missing."

"I don't think they're very good friends if they didn't make sure your only living relative was aware that you disappeared." Clint looked down at me, his hands on his hips. "They sound like pretty shitty friends."

I sighed. "Yeah, I guess. Anyway, then there was the right months of darkness and torture, so for a while that was my usual day to day. And now... now there is no such thing as normal. Every day is completely different, and most of them include mortal peril."

Clint came to sit beside me. "That's a pretty old way of saying your life's in danger."

"Roara used to use that phrase a lot. She likes those kinds of things. Once I caught her saying good morrow instead of good morning." I chuckled and Clint even smiled a little. "She wasn't even embarrassed. Morrow meant day apparently, and that's why we have the word tomorrow to mean the next day."

"Did she explain that immidiately after you caught her saying a phrase from the 1600s?"

"Oh absolutely." I grinned. "I've missed her man."

Clint shrugged. "I dunno if I missed her, more became terrified of her, and then really pissed off with her."

"And now?"

"Now relieved that I don't need to worry about her squeezing the air out of my lungs or drowning me from the inside." He looked across at me. "Although I'll be honest, I've been closer to death."

"I'm sure you have." I replied glumly. Half of the times I though I'd been close to death I'd been completely helpless. I'd been starved, without powers, without backup, kept in a cage I could barely stand in... I was jealous that Hawkeye had been in dangerous situations but known that he'd had abilities he could rely on to help him. He'd been 'Hawkeye' for a very long time. I was still Alina Stark. Somehow I may have just about manage to break out of the shell that was 'Tony Stark's niece' but I still wasn't quite my own person, and I certainly wasn't a superhero. I remembered how painful it had been coming out of the operation that the Ascendency had performed on me. It was a memory that had only resurfaced recently, and I wasn't too happy that I'd got it back. More and more memories of the time I'd spent locked away had begun to come back to me, since I'd had that first recollection weeks ago as Bruce, Tony and I had been brainstorming. Part of me wish I'd never got them back. In fact most of me. I'd felt more peace before, even if it wasn't much.