United Chapter 34

      Brian, Chase and Dylan were leaning against the wall talking, watching other couples file into the gymnasium. "Girls always be late." Brian shook his head. "Where are they?"
                  Chase scanned the crowd for the hundredth time and was rewarded. "Hey, here they come."
As they got closer, Chase muttered, "Holy shit, would you look at Brenna." he held out his hand and she took it in hers as he looked her over. "Bren, baby, you are a goddess."
               Brenna flushed pink, "Chase, I am not all that." though she was flattered that he thought so, "You look so handsome though. I love your suit." Chase grimaced. Miss Munro had insisted that all the guys dress semi formal for the first dance of the season at least and suits were acceptable but he was taking off the jacket and loosening the collar as soon as possible.
         "You wanna go inside?" Dylan had his arm linked around Sophie's.
          "Sure, go on." Chase waved at him, "We're right behind you." He put out his arm and Brenna grasped it tightly. He could feel her trembling slightly, "Hey, you're doing great, what's wrong?"
          "I have never been to a dance. I am nervous."
           "What for? You know a lot of the students here now."
          As her schooling had continued, she had been placed in a couple of mainstream classrooms, taking English and Math along with everyone else, though she still went to Mr. Wagner's class twice a week with her current events and culture studies.
         "It is still something new for me. Don't leave me alone, okay?"
          Chase patted her hand as they walked into the gym, "Not a chance."

          At first, Brenna stayed on the bleachers, her dress smoothed over her knees, tapping her feet to the music but not willing to commit themselves to the dance floor until finally, Rachel and Sophie convinced her to get up.
        "But I do not know how to dance like you do." She moaned as Sophie took her arms and rocked her back and forth to the beat of the music.
         "Just follow my lead." Sophie started to dance and Brenna was given over to giggles.
         "Come on, try it." Rachel pushed her farther onto the dance floor.
          Brenna looked at Chase who was smiling from the sidelines and she sighed. "Very well, I suppose I must make a fool of myself as well."
          She started to imitate Sophie's moves and with a few adjustments, she was giving a passing effort.
           "Pretty good, Bren." Chase called out but his compliment was lost in the loud music.

            "Ya know, no one would suspect you weren't born and raised here if they didn't actually start talking to you."
              Brenna was tucked under Chase's arm. She'd been admiring the decorating job they had done the night before in the gym, but at his remark, she sat up. They had retired to the bleachers, halfway up, in the semi-darkness, to rest. "Am I that obvious?"
              Chase put his hand on her leg, "Let me put it differently. You sound like you attended prep school before you came here and since that's going to make zero sense, forget I said it." He made to pull her back to him again but she gently shrugged him off. "Do I not fit in yet?"
            "You do, honey," he was rubbing her arm now, "People like you, they talk to you, they include you."
             "But I am still different." Brenna sighed.
             "No, no you're not. Not here." He waved his hand at the crowd below, "The first middle school I went to was, in fact, a prep school and I was bullied mercilessly as a rule. It was like a constant college hazing until they found out what I was, then they simply ostracized me, called me a freak until I  begged my dad to take me out of school and find somewhere else for me to go. Get me a tutor or something. Of course that meant I would have been home and underfoot and parenting isn't his style so he heard about this school from a friend and put me here." he pulled her towards him again and this time she didn't resist, "Here we may still be freaks, but here, we're freaks united."
              "Chase, that is terrible. Do not call us freaks."
              "Okay, mutants then, but you're missing the point. What I'm saying is that it don't matter if you're different, here, that's the norm." Chase paused to let his words sink in.
                "So it's okay to be different?"
                Chase smiled as Brenna leaned back against him, "Now you're getting it."
                 "That is what trips me up so often here on Midgard, being able to speak the language is one thing but there are the subtleties of dialect and slang that I have yet to master. Frankly, it exhausts me sometimes." She saw Sophie looking up the bleachers at her and she waved. Sophie wagged her finger at them and smiled.
                "For example, tonight before we headed to meet you, Sophie said this dance was going to be the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I have been turning that phrase over in my head all evening and I am still no closer to kenning it."
                 Chase chuckled as he stroked her hair. "Okay lets work this a different way. There are plenty of fun things you can do with your clothes on right? And a limited number once your clothes are off, unless you live in a nudist colony but since we don't, let's throw that out. Okay so what can you do naked that you can't with your clothes on?"
               Brenna giggled at this, "Swim?"
               "And?"
               "Bathe?"
               "Keep going."
                Brenna seemed stumped, her thoughts ranging wide until they hinged on one last thing and her eyes widened. "Oh my! Is that what she meant? Sex?" She whispered.
                "There now say the phrase back to yourself and insert that answer at the end."
                 She found, as the meaning began to sink in, that she couldn't look at Chase, the meaning of it all pointing so directly to him and as she put her head on his chest she could hear his heart pounding in unison with hers. "So tell me, was Sophie right?"
                 She felt his hand at her chin as he lifted her face to his. "I have no basis for comparison.." and her words were halted by his lips against hers. She reached her arms up to encircle his neck, wishing for more darkness, more privacy but all at once, the DJ was on the loudspeaker. "Okay everyone, this is what we've all been waiting for. Let's get everyone down on the dance floor. Leave an aisle up the middle. Brenna sat back and looked at Chase who stood up and offered his hand to her. "Come on, they're choosing the court for Homecoming." Brenna took his hand and they descended the bleachers. "It's all a popularity concert you ask me but what the hell, right?"
            As they reached the crowd, they were joined by Brian and Rachel, hands interlaced, smiling. Chase winked at Brian who returned it as they laughed.
             "Are we ready?" The DJ piped up again and the crowd cheered, a deafening roar that reverberated off the gym walls as one by one, the names of the attendants were read and they filed to the end of the gym where the thrones and attendants chairs had been set up. Brenna had been delighted with them, recalling in her mind, the few times she had see the throne room in Asgard when she was little. Odin and Frigga sitting on their own thrones. She had admired and feared them all at once.
            So lost was she in her recollection that Chase had to shake her, "Come on, Bren. They called our names!"
            Brenna stood blinking until Chase led her to the middle of the gym, where she was handed a small bouquet of sweetheart roses by a court helper and suddenly she was walking up the aisle to the seats two spaces down from the throne. As she passed, she could see Sophie cheering and clapping for her just as the other students were. Chase guided her to the chair and sat her down, standing behind her as the rest of the names were called though she found it hard to concentrate on them and when they were all assembled, they stood in unison to be presented to the school. Chase had to take her arm, her feet felt unsteady as the roar of the students grew even louder. When the music started up again, Chase led her out to the dance floor with the rest of the court for the final slow dance of the night.
          He wrapped his arm around her waist, took her other hand and leaned in. "Baby, you okay?"
           She couldn't stop smiling then, "I am more than okay, I am fantastic." she whispered in his ear, pressing close to him. People kept approaching them, congratulating them. Grace, who had volunteered that morning to chaperone on her return from vacation, patted her on the back. "It's more fun to behave isn't it?"
           Brenna nodded, knowing better than to disagree with her. She lay her head then on Chase's shoulder and let him lead her along to the music until all too soon, it was over and Sophie and Rachel were bounding over to them, hugging her. "And you worried about fitting in." Rachel teased her. She laughed, she had done more than just fit in, she had become one of them.


                He dropped the handle on his suitcase, his other hand frantically searching the pockets of his great coat, inner vest, his slacks for the urgent ringing that was his cell, finally catching hold of it in his right hand pocket. "Hello...Hello?" He closed his eyes, "Anna.....yes, I am here......safe and sound."
           He looked about the hotel room and walked to the window. The lights of the city blazed across the horizon. "I would've called but I've only just arrived at my hotel room......" he gazed upward at the sky. "Crystal clear........the flight was uneventful....."
            Martin dropped onto the bed, "I know.....I promised we'd watch the meteor shower together, but that was last year. I didn't know about the convention then. I couldn't just back out............you take the telescope out and watch it. Then you can tell me how beautiful it was...........there's always next year....." As if on cue, a bright streak crossed the sky and he sighed, deigning to mention it. Truth be told, he wouldn't have cared if they'd been at home in thick cloud cover, lounging on the settee watching bad telly so long as he wasn't here alone in the states in the same building as Wells. The same hemisphere was even a bit too close for all of him.
          "My dear, I shall bring you a souvenir.....a plane ticket? Clever girl......but who would run my household with such efficiency?" He shrugged off his great coat and stood from the bed, looking about the room for the closet, finding it by the door he'd come in. "Tell you what........when I return, give me a week to rest and we'll go on holiday to Venice, you love those little shops along the Piazza del Campo.........I promise....and if I break my promise, may I be strapped into my easy chair and be made to watch reality TV until my eyes bleed...." He laughed along with her, "Now don't forget to feed the fish and put Pierre out at night, not the other way around...." He teased her, "Yes.....I'll call you tomorrow.......I know, it's quiet here too.......take the car and go see your sister for a few days if you like......." He sighed then as he sat back down on the bed to wrestle his shoes from his feet, "Of course I love you........whatever made you ask such a question?................next time around, you will come with me........now, it's late there, I know that, go to bed.......yes.........goodnight, luv."
             Martin dropped the phone on the bed beside him. He often wondered why a young, well thirty five was young to him in any case, why a young pretty girl would cleave so to a middle aged retired professor. He supposed it was familiarity, he was all she'd known being her first job as housekeeper for him when she was but twenty-two and caring for him and the house day in and day out for the last thirteen years. One got used to being together, comfortable but he hoped it was so much more than that. He needed her as much as she needed him. Not for the housekeeping, that was for sure. Oh she was clean on herself, the house was well kept but she was a bit addled oftentimes, the jibe about the fish and the cat had only been half teasing. She could be trusted too, with keeping his secrets, had done so on more than one occasion. He had offered many times to take her to Alfheim but she had always refused, whether from fear or apathy he couldn't be sure. She often told him she was quite content where she was.
            He picked himself up from the bed then and found the remote for the TV. Might as well look for anything good to watch, if indeed there were such an animal here in the states. It would do him no use to sit and think of her and wish he were there or vice versa. In any case, he preferred to keep his private life separate from his work. She was an innocent and he would do what he could to keep her as such.
           He wondered if Luntz had told Wells he was attending the convention, thought it over and was sure he knew by now, not that he could see, in any possible way, what Wells would need from him now.
        After the night David Wells had accidentally wandered into Martin's private study and Martin had been made to tell the truth of what he was, David had asked, no, demanded his help with grades. Martin thought it laughable at first, the boy had a genius I.Q., was in his third year, working on a Doctorate. But as time wore on, he realized the help was not meant for David. It was meant for other students, his friends. Some of them from very powerful, very influential families, others to whom he owed favors, still others who would subsequently owe favors to him. Luntz was one such person.
          He was a superb mathematician, a crack science student, but couldn't write a term paper to save his life. Martin was undecided whether it had been his constant partying and ensuing hangovers or his inability to put the words he so eloquently spoke, onto paper. In actuality, Luntz didn't need all that much help. He was one of the smarter, albeit, lazy students. Others wouldn't have had a prayer without Martin's help and David soon skyrocketed from unknown prodigy to the Alpha male on campus, graduating with honors and a PhD under his belt.
          Martin had been at the graduation ceremony to applaud his accomplishments but also to see with his own two eyes that David Wells was truly on his way into the world and off campus. He would liked to have said that it ended there but every once in a while, there would be a phone call and he would end up helping another student whose father was having a hard time buying his way to a degree.
        At his retirement party, he had gone home and cried with relief. Countless times during his career, he had considered returning to Alfheim and all because of that one man.
        He wondered if it was possible to avoid David during his stay. His presentation was Wednesday night. Perhaps he would change tickets, fly out that night after the program instead of waiting until Friday, surprise Anna with an early return.
         By the time he had decided to force himself to bed, it was almost one in the morning. The jet lag had turned him all around. He exchanged his old suit for a pair of flannel pajamas, set the alarm on his cell phone and slid beneath the covers of the double bed then turned towards the window, looking  up at the sky again, watching for more meteors, hoping Anna was doing the same thing an ocean away.



She rolled over and peered through slitted eyes at the clock on her stand. It was almost nine a.m. She had missed morning meal. She rolled back over, looked at the red dress hanging on the back of her bathroom door and smiled, stretched. She felt a little sore from the dance, she'd done a lot of it. She had told everyone that she was going to lounge around and do homework this morning but why hurry? She leaned out of bed, reaching as far as she could without physically touching her feet to the floor and snagged the strap of her backpack with her forefinger, dragging it to the side of her bed where she spread her books and papers on the coverlet beside her.
          Instead of starting right in though, she took a pencil and studied it. She had been thinking of what Sophie had said. If she could get faster at healing things, maybe she would have a place on the team someday. She laughed to herself, her father would likely try to tie her up and drag her back to Asgard if she so much as hinted at it. Perhaps if she were to become a nurse, or a doctor?
          She snapped the pencil in half and lay it on the covers, sat up and started to even her breathing, closing her eyes and concentrating upon the two halves of the pencil. She took it in her hands, put the pieces together and began to visualize them combining, the graphite melding, the splinters of wood interweaving, the paint flowing across the surface until the pencil was whole again. She looked at the clock and frowned, she'd forgotten to note the time. She snapped the pencil again, glanced at the clock and proceeded as before. When she had finished, she noticed the time. It had taken at least a minute and a half. She sighed, broke the pencil, and started over again.
          After nearly an hour, she was exhausted. She felt a bit warm so she got up, cracked the window that looked out over the rear lawn and returned to her bed. She had managed, at last count, with forty tries, to shave nearly twenty-five seconds off her time. Each time she would see the break, it was as if she was storing the information to increase her efficiency at the next try. It was as if the more familiar the object became, the easier and faster she could repair it. Like she was memorizing its structure.
       It made sense. She had repaired a broken pocket watch for a student. That had taken a lot of effort and time, almost ten minutes if she recalled. The workings of the timepiece had been so complex, unfamiliar. She would have to try again on an object she'd never tried, perhaps force herself to remember quicker but how? She lay back on her pillow with the pencil next to her face and was jolted awake by the sound of footsteps running past her door. She looked at the clock and realized she'd fallen back asleep for two hours. She still felt sore and warm. After she did her homework, she decided she would take a shower and find Chase for the evening meal.
         She pulled out her math homework first, taking only fifteen minutes to complete it. Then she lifted the Newsweek magazine from the pile and grimaced, "As Kurt says, soonest begun is soonest done." She opened the magazine up to the table of contents, noted the page number of the cover story and turned to it.


                          The Attack on New York: Looking Back, Looking Forward.


We've all heard the phrase, "Where were you on...". My great grandfather would have filled in the blank with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Move a little forward and his son, my grandfather, would have said The day Kennedy was shot. A little farther and my father would answer 9/11. Now we have a new answer to that question.
          Though it's been over 12 years since the day the sky opened over Manhattan and showed us Hell isn't below us, we still remember that day like it was yesterday. We still recall the horror. The heroes who saved us, and at the risk of sounding too cliché, saved the world. The thousands of people who died in the initial attack. The devastation that crippled half of the city's infrastructure for three years and cost billions of dollars in damages, losses, and lawsuits. We ask ourselves what we could have done to prevent it, tempted to point fingers at the root of the cause even if it became the solution in the end..

She turned the page then and nearly dropped the magazine. Along the top of the next two pages were head shots of six people superimposed over an aerial image of Manhattan laid waste. Tony Stark stared at her out of one photo, the other four people she did not know, but the fifth photo contained her uncle, Thor whose picture was bordered in red with a caption that made her feel sick to her stomach.

Thor Odinson: The Avenger who brought to life for us those dusty old books on mythology sitting on the library shelves was one of the reasons for the attack which was orchestrated by his adopted brother and a nightmare in his own right, Loki.

She turned the page with trembling hands and at once threw the magazine to the floor beside her bed where it lay open as if taunting her, a grainy but distinct image of her father in a three piece suit holding a man down atop a massive table, blurry people running past him, their mouths open in silent scream.
          She scrambled from the bed, her homework forgotten, scattered about the floor as she rooted frantically in her wardrobe for clothes to wear, throwing on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt before kicking the magazine shut with her toe and picking it up as if it were diseased. She rolled it into a tube then and  slipping on her flats, she ran from her quarters down the hall, heading for the computer lab.

"Attack on New York" She typed into the search bar and hit enter. Thousands of hits appeared. She clicked on images at the top of the page and sat there, hands to her mouth. Pictures of buildings nearly flattened, emergency vehicles responding, the road into Grand Central terminal where she'd first arrived on Midgard strewn with cars and rubble, still more pictures of the hole in the sky centered over a tower with the name of Stark on its side, immense alien creatures high in the sky. She closed her eyes, opened them again, added a word to the search, "Loki" and hit enter. The images that sprang up were worse than anything she had imagined. She had prayed, hoped that the magazine's portrayal of him as the cause was meant indirectly and yet here he was, though the angle of the photo was from someone who was clearly on the ground below him. There was another picture, seemingly taken from the window of a skyscraper of her father in the distance, at the end of a ramp in the sky, the words below him the massive word yet again, STARK.
        Suddenly it was starting to make sense, horrible, heart-breaking sense. She closed the window and leaped up from the computer in a panic unable to decide where to go, what to do. She wanted to learn more and yet she was terrified. Only one solution remained in her mind, one person that might be able to explain what had happened, Tony Stark.