Worlds Apart

Chapter 17

Puente Antiguo.

That was the name of the town that Max needed to get to. As she had expected, after seeing the name of the town on the map, it immediately clicked for her and she knew that was the place she was looking for. That was the easy part.

The hard part was getting there in a timely manner. The first thing Max did after leaving Tony Stark's mansion (after having Happy drive her back to her apartment and searching for the town's name) was pack a bag and head for the airport. Unfortunately for her, the next earliest flight to New Mexico wasn't until 12:45pm the next day, because by the time she'd gotten there, the last flight there had already left. This also meant that she wasn't going to get in until about 8:00pm, because for some reason that she could not comprehend, the only flights going where she wanted to go went all the way to Dallas first, before turning around and heading back for New Mexico.

She almost wondered if it would've been faster for her to drive. She debated on getting a rental car, but not only was she absolutely dreading the almost one thousand mile drive, but she didn't want to drive all night, and if she left in the morning, she'd probably get in around the same time the plane would anyway. No, the easiest, cheapest, and least sleep depriving option was to take the plane leaving the next day at 12:45pm.

What was going to be perhaps the hardest part of all was finding a way to interact with Jane and Selvig without disrupting the chain of events that needed to happen within Thor's time on Earth. She supposed she could just wait until she knew that Thor was back on Asgard and approach them then, but she was going to have to stay fairly close and keep an eye on their whereabouts, so that when the time came for her to insert herself, she would know exactly where they were, and also make sure that she was about to catch them before they leave town. Not only did Max not know exactly how long she had for all of these events to take place, but there was no guarantee that Jane and her team were going to be staying in Puente Antiguo to continue their research when this was all over.

Max took the extra time she had before her flight to get her affairs in order. And by that, she meant coming up with a believable enough excuse to Pepper as to why she needed the next few days off. After taking the night to think about it, she finally settled on telling her that she had some sort of family emergency back home in Mississippi that would require her to be out for a few days, or potentially the whole rest of the week, depending on how things go.

When Max told Pepper her story, Pepper was very sympathetic towards Max and, thankfully, didn't press for anything more specific than that. She only told Max that she hoped everything was okay, and that she could take as much time as she needed. Max hated lying to Pepper (she felt especially bad about using her kind-hearted nature to get her way) but, as usual, she told herself that it was necessary. This wasn't just her calling out of work to get a mini vacation; this was about potentially furthering along the process of her getting home. As much as Max was absolutely reveling in the fact that she was in the actual MCU, she had been here for six months now, and she was more than ready to go home - to see her family again. Her friends. She loved the life she had made for herself here, but she wanted her old one back, too.

When Max's plane finally arrived in New Mexico, she still had about an hour taxi ride to Puente Antiguo, because unfortunately, the closest airport to it was indeed that far away. So, by the time she was able to settle down for the night in the town's motel, it was about 9:30pm. As exhausted as she was from the trip, she knew she needed to get started on trying to find Jane, or someone in her group. At the very least, she figured she should probably get the lay of the land and see if there were any landmarks she recognized from the movie. Maybe then, once daylight came, she could try those places and see if any of them were there.