Be Thou my Vision

I Can Do What?

Chapter 2

Someone is shaking me. I can feel that much. I open my eyes groggily, and a woman's face comes into focus. She's looking down at me with concern, and has a split lip and short, red, curly hair. I sit up and shake my head.

"What happened?" I ask, looking around. I remember being dropped onto Stark Tower by Loki, and realize I'm still there. A machine sits a few feet away from me, clear blue energy shooting up into the air, directly into the hole into space. So this is the machine that created the hole.

"We've got to destroy that," I mutter, pointing at the contraption. The woman nods.

"We don't know how, is the problem. By the way, I'm Natasha."

"Alienor. You wouldn't happen to be Nat, would you?"

She looks at me suspiciously. "Yes, people call me that."

"Oh," I say. So this is who Clint called my twin?

I groan, and notice a man sitting on the edge of the tower for the first time. He's looking down at the destruction of Manhattan, and Natasha seems to know him.

"Doctor," she says, glancing back at me before walking over to him.

"Loki's scepter, the energy... the Tesseract can't fight. You can't protect yourself against it," the man, who I guess is a doctor mutters. But past that, what is the Tesseract? It can't fight against Loki's scepter?

"It's not your fault. You didn't know what you were doing," Nat consoles, but the doctor shakes his head.

"Well, actually, I think I did. I built in a safety to cut the power source."

Something finally clicks; the Tesseract must be what is creating the hole into space.

"Loki's scepter," Nat replies, and the doctor nods.

"It might be able to close the portal." The doctor looks back down. "And I'm looking right at it."

Nat and I rush to the edge of the building and look down, and see Loki's scepter lying on balcony.

"I'll go get it," Nat offers, but I shake my head vigorously and point upward, where a new swarm of Chitauri aliens are moving in from the portal.

"Let me go," I say hastily. "You fight those. How do I get down?"

Nat directs me towards a door, and I wrench it open and hurtle down the stairs, running through Stark Tower, which is very nice, if I do say so myself. I grab Loki's scepter and run back up the stairs to where Nat is fighting the oncoming aliens and the doctor is typing away at a laptop attached to the machine.

"Just break through the force field with that!" Nat shouts as she wrestles with an alien. I point the tip of Loki's scepter through the energy guarding the glowing blue cube, which I guess is the Tesseract, but stop. Nat finally beats the alien and presses her hand to her ear.

"We can close it! Can anyone hear me? We can shut the portal down!"

She listens for a minute, but holds up her hand.

"Wait, Stark's coming with a missile," she says, still holding out her hand.

"A missile?"

Something zips by us, and I look up to see Iron Man steering something that does indeed look like a missile. Right into the portal.

"He'll die," I whisper, and Nat looks at me sadly. "He might."

After a few moments of waiting, nothing flies or drops back out. Nat presses her hand to her hear to listen, and then nods at me.