Mirth

Avengers (Mirth and Chello)

“Are you stupid?!” Cy exploded when Loki muttered that his family wouldn’t care if he died. “Your family would have been devastated! What’s wrong with you? What kinda idiot thinks their family doesn’t give a damn if they’re hurting or not?” She barely stopped herself from smacking him in the head, possibly more than once. Anybody who’d lost family would have been appalled—no matter what, family was family, and leaving somebody to die just didn’t fly. Frowning fiercely at him, Cy plopped down in a chair near Anna and crossed her arms.

Her own family was the world to her—Cy’s dad, Leon, was a security chief at a museum. Her mom Syl was a cook in a chain restaurant. The extended family was enormous, since both of Cy’s parents had four siblings, all of whom also had spouses and children. The Scheiffer clan stretched from one side of the US to the other, and where one was in trouble, there were likely three or four cousins nearby who were willing to help.

Agent Wilson managed to convince Loki to lie still so the medics could work. They were efficient and there were a lot of them. Within twenty minutes the God of Mischief was treated, bandaged, and well on the way to recovering from his wounds. Now that he was stable, Cy slapped him on his uninjured shoulder. She was still miffed he’d thought his family should leave him to his fate, and she let him know with a glare that could have turned steel to pudding. Returning to her chair, she folded her arms across her chest and looked at Agent Wilson. “Should we wait to ask about HYDRA?”

Wilson, apparently too curious to wait, inquired about the escape. Loki gave a bare-bones description of the jailbreak. After a moment of silence, Cy, gawking at him, spoke. “So you busted out, beaten to hell and half-dead, and ran here? Whaaaaaat?”

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

The hand that landed on Nathaniel Collins’ shoulder just then was as far from friendly as was physically possible. The shoulder of his suit furrowed under the pressure of the long, callused fingers.

The hand was attached to the browned arm of Artemis Lao, whose black chocolate eyes were hot enough to weld metal as she glowered down at Nathan. Her clenched teeth were startlingly white against a sunburned and tan face; freckles splashed across her pert nose. The sleeveless silk shirt she wore was an inch or two shorter than it should have been and she was obviously uncomfortable in the ruffled chiffon skirt and black heels that completed her ensemble. The whites of her eyes were tinged with red from crying, although the raw fury in her expression was masking her sorrow rather well.

“You really want to act like an ass here?” Arty hissed through gritted teeth. A fat tear rolled down her cheek and she dashed it away with her free hand.

***One Year Earlier***

Arty spat the mouthful of Coke across the desk and, gagging, blew a fair amount out of her nose. “Noah! Asshole! Goddamn, I can’t breathe.” Gasping and laughing, Artemis grinned at the smiling face in her monitor as a tinny voice said, “It’s not my fault you choked.”

Wiping the soda off the computer screen, Arty checked how long she and Noah had been on webcam: over two hours. She hadn’t gotten to talk to anybody else recently, so catching up had been high on her list of priorities once she’d gotten settled in Xiaochang. The Chinese portion of her exchange had just begun and she was already excited—she’d gotten into the most popular t’ai chi elective and her academic advisor was a former tennis champion. She was having a brilliant week.

Noah’s week hadn’t been quite as good, but it had been nice nonetheless. He’d gotten a job at the pharmacy as a greeter and stock-boy, he’d gotten to hang out with Matt, and Ross, his older brother, had gotten accepted to intern at the police department.

Smiling his trademark sweet smile, Noah shifted the camera so Arty could see his bed. Something was lying on top of it, and Noah got up, momentarily blocking the picture while he picked whatever it was up. “Matt figured you’d like this,” he said as he held the thing up so she could see it. “We know you love the Manhattan Blaze, so~” he trailed off cheerfully.

Noah and Matt had gone to a big soccer game at the stadium in Oakdale, the city Matt lived in. Apparently the Oakdale Aces had been playing the Blaze, because Noah had found a pennant with the Blaze’s logo and team colors on it. He waited, anticipating Arty’s joy. “Badass! Those’re the new colors but with the retro logo! Dude, those kinds run like, thirty bucks!” When Noah didn’t stop smiling, she protested. “You did not spend that much on a flag.”

“We went half and half?” Noah offered, trying not to laugh. “Anyway, we figured it’s for your room there, so we’ll send it when I can get to UPS. Matt’s kinda tied up with Bone Girls playing the Metradome all next week.”

“The Bone Girls got the Dome? How’d Matt get to work there?”

Noah shrugged. “I guess one of the times he did stuff for them at Roscoe’s they liked him, so they asked him to help with this. It pays two dollars an hour more, because the venue’s bigger.”

“So Matt’s bringing in the bacon. He still giving most of it to your mom and dad?” Arty propped her chin on her arms. Matt had lived with the Logans for a while, ever since his grandmother passed away, and he was always trying to pay them back. He’d managed to convince them to accept half of his pay, despite their continuing protestations. When Noah nodded an affirmative, Arty snorted with laughter and shook her head. “Dork. He’s got such a freakin’ weird sense of… I dunno, duty?”

“Nah, obligation,” Noah replied, putting the pennant back on his bed. “He’s got a strong sense of obligation.” After a beat of silence, Noah sat back at his computer and looked hard at Arty. “I miss all of you guys, you know that, right?”

Arty furrowed her brows. “Well, yeah, but I’m coming home, and Matt’s not far… Where’re A and Nate?”

“Nate’s at a big school way upstate. Audrey’s still here, but… I don’t see her often,” Noah finished thoughtfully. “Anyway, I gotta go to bed, got work in the morning,” he said briskly, brightening so suddenly it surprised Artemis. “Work hard, get good grades, try not to Hulk out and murder anybody!”

“Shut up,” Arty laughed as the call ended.

Falling Feathers ((Setherine and Mirth))

Levi rolled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchenette and began blindly jabbing buttons on the coffeemaker. After a few seconds of punching various combinations, the machine beeped cheerfully and burbled, spitting out a stream of brown liquid that pooled on the counter. Levi stared stupidly at it until he realized he’d forgotten his mug. Fumbling through the cabinets, he knocked four (plastic) glasses to the floor and almost broke the only nice cup he owned: his mug. He jammed it under the weakening stream of coffee just in time for the coffeemaker to turn itself off.

After wrangling a full cup of coffee, he shuffled to the fridge, retrieved a squeeze-tube of yogurt, and ate it at the open window overlooking the fire-escape. His downstairs neighbor was smoking out her window, so the scent of ash quickly wafted inside. Levi squinted unhappily at the onslaught of unpleasant odor and shut the window. He’d forgotten to close it the night before, when he’d returned home from his impromptu rescue of the human woman.

While Levi could feel cold and heat in a similar way to humans, he was much hardier and able to withstand more extreme temperatures without suffering adverse effects. This also allowed him to leave his heating and air conditioning off without being (very) miserable. It didn’t make him any happier about freezing his ass off, though. His toes felt like ice cubes.

He squeezed the rest of his yogurt out of the tube and dug around in the fruit drawer for something else; he probably needed to go grocery shopping, but without a job money was always tight. He had some savings, money made doing odd jobs in the city, and occasionally a bit from one of the people who were a part of him.

The knowledge that he was made up entirely of other souls was disconcerting, in a way: Levi felt he wasn’t a real person. People, real people, were born, they grew up. Levi had spontaneously come into being when hundreds of soul shards combined into a single consciousness; he looked the same now as he had then. He wasn’t the child of loving parents. He didn’t have a family. He hadn’t gone to school. Everything he’d ever known was left over from a human life that was wrapped up inside him. Levi knew how to sing a German folk song because Irma Steinmetz sang it to her grandchildren before she died. He knew how to play Monkey King because Will Edlynd had played it constantly as a child. He knew the streets because Frank Jonas had driven them thousands of times in a checkered yellow cab.

Each soul had ended before its time, crying for help when there was none, searching for safety but finding peril instead. Pieces of the souls, parts that couldn’t pass on without closure, lingered in the physical world, hidden from human eyes. They replayed their pain, over and over and over, unable to escape the harshness of their fates, until something happened.

Something drew the shards together, pulled their frayed and flurried humanity into itself, took their heartache and refashioned it. And in a moment, an angel stepped into the world to live the life the souls had been denied, to be the champion they had needed. Levi had known immediately what he was, who was part of him, and what he was intended for. Before he was even four hours old, he had carried a woman out of the path of a subway train and rescued a toddler from falling out of a broken window. That was his purpose.

He would protect, always protect. Everything he was was for the defense of others.

***

Ronnie Ya raised an eyebrow at Reyna’s story the next day. She hadn’t thought the blonde had it in her, but apparently she’d done it. "Wait, hold up! You tellin' me you sprayed that guy in the eyes? That's pretty cool." She grinned, and shrugged thoughtlessly when Reyna gave her an incredulous look.

"Really? That whole story, and you focus on the paint, of all things?"

"That's what we're here for, yeah?” Ronnie opened her mouth to say more, but got cut off by James, a friend of Reyna’s. He admonished her for coming in after that kind of brush with death and dismissed Ronnie, who yelped an indignant “Hey! I can’t help it paint’s my thing! I went to school for this!” Narrowing her dark eyes at James, Ronnie made a rude gesture he didn’t see and shook up her can of spray paint. Urban art was her specialty, and when she’d been in high school she’d had her own crew of taggers. A couple of the bigger pieces on the sides of bridges had been her work.

Nostalgic, Ronnie began applying a layer of white to outline a design. She was older than Reyna and James and most of the other R.A. members; she’d gotten a degree in art at the local university and when she wasn’t painting buildings she was publicizing her urban art exhibits at whichever museums would take her. With short, spiky black hair tipped in blue, purple-black lipstick, and piercings, Ronnie looked every bit a subversive alternative artist. She had never told anyone, but the piercings were fake and she took them off before she went to bed. She was actually terrified of needles.

Avengers (Mirth and Chello)

“This pipsqueak?” Arc asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “She looks like she weighs maybe a hundred, a hundred twenty soaking wet.” He had seen what Cy had done just as clearly as Anna had, but he was naturally playful and liked to test the waters with new recruits. He liked to know if he could joke around with them, since it was much better to find out before he tried anything and got set on fire, smashed, frosted, or otherwise. Cy’s powers were firmly in the ‘smashed’ category. Still the way she had played back, he figured she could take a joke and would probably dish it out as well as Arc did.

“We got wounded!” An agent yelled from an upper level, leaning over a railing to gesture for Anna’s attention. Elsewhere in the base, sirens had started to go off. The noise drew everyone’s attention, even Cy’s. She had been in the middle of gawking at the machinery and banks of computers, but Anna’s sudden brisk walk had surprised her enough that she scurried after her. They moved along a winding passage further into the base, passing in and out of the lights. At the end was a large room fitted out like a hospital, and someone was being worked on in the center of the commotion.

The man was lean with long, lank dark hair and an incredibly pale face—which may have been due to the amount of wounds he’d suffered. He’d been beaten badly, probably more than once, and he was dripping blood all over the surgical table. His pulse beat a rapid, quiet tattoo in the background as the medics swirled around him. Cy gathered he was the Loki Anna had mentioned. How had he escaped from HYDRA? In his condition, it couldn’t have been easy.

His eyes fluttered open. Loki tried wildly to sit up or get the medical team away; he apparently didn’t appreciate being cared for. Cy stepped forward and focused on him, gently but firmly pushing him flat on the table. “Relax, alright? You’re beat up pretty bad and you’re bleeding, so why not let them do their jobs? You might not need their help, but it’ll sure as hell make it easier to heal.”

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

I JUST WANNA CUDDLE 'EM. I hope you're having fun at your cousins'; I will hopefully have a post up when you read this ;_;

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

We just made the kid and I'm like NO YOU CAN'T DIE YOU COME BACK THIS INSTANT

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

I actually don't know. I still feel like resurrecting him because such a sweet guy dying like that is just WRONG.

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

So much blame, lol. And Ross going "AUGH NOAH WHY DO YOU LEAVE ME WITH ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS."

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

..... Ross'll have to intervene. He's tall enough to pick Arty up, even if he's not strong enough to outright stop her ^_^;...

When Five Becomes Four [Mirth and Book Thief]

It's cool, lol. I'm probably in a different timezone, so it's evening here. Yeah, Arty's gonna fight with Nathan-- perhaps even physically, lol.