Chapter 1

From the perspective of one of my OC's.. I know I said it was post-Avengers, but this actually starts pre-Avengers

I never really understood the word hopeless.  I’d heard it used so many times, by so many people.  And yes, their situations were horrific. They were the people who had lost everything, everyone, who’s darkness was so heavy at the time, at that moment, the darkness must have seemed impenetrable.  But I’d had my own share of desperation, of loss.  I’d lost everything, everyone I ever cared about. That had been me.  But there’s never nothing. Everytime grief, whether my own of someone else’s seemed to swallow me up, I’d known it wasn’t the end.  Nothing lasts forever, including the darkness, it always fades to light, eventually.  A small light, but enough. within every terrible mudpit there was that one, beautiful flower that blloomed despite everything that had happened.  That one, simple moment that made it all worth living.  After every night the dawn would come.  I knew this.  I’d always known it.
But not anymore.

***
“ABBY, ABBY, ABBY, ABBY, ABBY! I sang as I raced down the hallway. I was used to running fast, and I was used to running in socks, and used to running down the slick floors that made up the hallways of the place I guess I could consider home, even though that word felt totally weird when being applied to it.  What I wasn’t used too, however, if I backtrack to my original thought, was all three at once.

So I slipped, right past a doorway in which a tall figure in a white tank and black pants with wine-red hair had just stepped upon, crashing instead into the tall door that divided our living quarters from the rest of the joint.

“Yes, Sara?” Abby said in a bored tone as I stood up carefully �" no longer trusting my feet�"and brushed myself off.

“I had something to tell you,” I said, hunching over with my arm clasped tightly over my stomach, sucking air in and out as loudly as I could while still sounding somewhat realistic.  I wasn’t sure why I bothered with that realistic part considering I was also trying to make it obvious that I was just exaggerating for the fun of it.  Thinking…nope, no idea. That doesn’t make sense at all.

“Obviously.” Abby said. I wasn’t looking up, but I swear I could hear her eyes rolling as she leaned against the doorway, staring down at me like I was bug that both irritated her and mildly interested her, and she was just waiting for me to lose my interesting bits so she could stomp on me. That was about how things went with Abby.

“I don’t ‘member what it is.”  I said as I puckered my lips, having finally managed to straighten myself. She gave me a look, the Abby look of death, as I’d once called it.  The one that said ‘you’d better figure out whatever it was that could have possibly made you think you had any right to disturb me real fast sweetheart or you’ll never get too.” Except that sweetheart wasn’t in Abby’s vocabulary, and she’d probably kill me for imagining her using it.

I used to gulp every time I saw that face�"if I backtrack to my face thought�" but in my defsense it wasn’t a very pleasant face.  Now though I just gave her an indigant look, my indignant look�" a posture so straight it’s not and looks completely awkward, face twisting into a grimace that attempts to still be cute, and apparently succeeds, with my arms splayed out in a line beginning at the elbows.  Sometimes they’re on my hips, but I was still struggling to find my balance and for whatever reason hips seemed scarier in that regard than splayed. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

“I crashed, my brain has to reboot.”  Another look, more pointed, “Or whatever a brain has to do after it crashes into a wall, thing...” I trailed on.  She rolled her eyes again, and I grinned.

“Sara,” she said again, her voice had that long, controlled drawl that told me she was seriously thinking about about putting me into a headlock, or possibly a crucifix. The grin slipped off my face, replaced by something far more�"apologetic, or really just pleading.

“Yes?” I said, cute face time, not that cute ever worked with Abby, but it was about all I knew how to do.

“What is it?” She looked at her fingernails as she said this, the most casual of gestures, but casual for Abby for actually secret code for I am about to kill you.

“Sarah.” I said, trying to remember what came next.  “She had on her Sarah look and she gave me the Sarah voice earlier.”

“Which means...”

“Which means we might actually get to do something today!”  My voice jumped up a few octaves. the corners of my lips trying to reach my ears, and about succeeding as I jumped up and down a bit and clapped my hands together.

“That, would be extraordinary.” Her slightly wistful tone had nothing on my excitement, but since it was coming from Abby mine paled in comparison to it.

“But I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” she said as she stepped back into her room, “I’m starting to think we’ve hit the end of our usefulness and she’s just going to leave us here to rot.”  I rolled my eyes as I slipped passed her.  Rolling eyes was something Abby and I both did a lot, but the gestures looked nothing alike.  What was it Chris had said the difference was? Oh yeah, my eyes “smiled.”  What does that even mean, smiled?

I collapsed on Abby’s bed, yawning with my arms extended over my head. I knew she hated it when I did that, but Abby hated almost everything I did, and she’d given up trying to stop them long ago.

“Sara?” she asked.

“Hmm?” I answered, stretching.

“Did you just get up?”

“Umm...” I pressed my lips together, refusing to look away from the ceiling, “maybe?”

She sighed, the Abby�"why the hell do I even bother anymore�"sigh.  It was kind of odd that she would ask me that considering I was the one who’d shown up in her room, but odd was the norm with Abby and I. I had just gotten up, and she’d probably been awake for hours�"training, studying, messing with the androids�"and had only just now come back to her room. I still wasn’t used to the androids, metal people who did our work for us.  Even though they had hearts of steel they still acted too much like humans for comfort.

I felt pressure at the back of my head, and for a moment I thought Abby had decided to make good on that unspoken headlock threat, but then her voice came, soft, and as close as Abby got to gentle. “sit-up.” so I did, letting my feet hit the floor so I was sitting on the edge while she scooted up behind me.  She placed a firm hand on the back on my shoulder, and then her other hand moved up before pulling down. She was brushing my hair.   It was kind of odd, these moments between Abby and me, they came so unpredictably, though I supposed this time there was a reason. They’d just recently rescued me from a situation.  A situation that had involved a prison camp with some not so nice treatment or great nutrition.  It been almost a month since they’d rescued me, but they still treated me like I might collapse at any second and they needed to be there to catch me. I looked up then, straight into the mirror.

it was odd,  me trying to sit still while Abby hovered over my shoulder.  Her hand occasionally brushing against my neck as the brush made its way through the curly mess that was my outrageously thick, waist-length black hair. It kind of clashed with her hair, red hair that was so dark she was only the only redhead I knew that actually deserved that color, rather than the orange that usually passed for red.  It was almost as long as mine, I realized.  Abby’s hair had always been long, until I’d convinced her to donate it to locks of love all those years ago. It was almost as long as it had been before then, funny how it had taken me until now to notice.

I fidgeted.  It wasn’t uncommon for Abby to take it upon herself to brush my hair, though I wasn’t even allowed to touch hers.  Which was kind of backwards, considering she was pretty much a living stone statue and I well, couldn’t sit still. ever.  I’d been diagnosed ADHD back when I was home, on earth.  Before Sarah suspended my ability to age and made me her littlest sidekick among three other sidekicks.

“Abby?” I said, trying to give my brain something to focus on, plus silences had never really been my thing.

“mmm...” she answered, like she was barely listening, but I knew that she was taking in everything I was saying as well as everything I wasn’t as well as the position of every random thing in the room, as well a bunch of other random things I couldn’t even comprehend at the moment.  It was one of the�"ahh�"side effects of being a spy since before you could walk.

“Should I dye my hair again?”

She paused.  “You could, but you know you’ll just dye it back.”

I pinched my face together. She was right, of course,  and I didn’t like it when they were right about me.

I stared at the mirror again.  I would have cocked my head slightly, but Abby would have snapped it back into place before I actually started moving.  

Black was not my natural hair color. It was actually a light brown, and poofy and wild like Hermione’s from Harry Potter.  Every now and then I’d revert back to it, for nostalgia's sake, but it usually only lasted for a day or two tops, before I’d switch back to something else. Usually, as you may have guessed, black.

I wasn’t sure why I liked black.  Sure, it went with the goth theme since my skin was so pale and all, but I was still pretty sure I didn’t count as goth, as least, not all the time. I’d kind of passed my goth phase and only reverted back to it every now and then for fun.

It didn’t go with�"me�"either. Even with Sarah’s�"enhancements�" I was still soft.  Small head, petite nose, face covered in puppy-fat and indistinct green eyes.  the black made this all look�"harsher�"and perhaps that was why I liked it.  It made me look older,  and my eyes look darker, and if I looked at them long enough I could almost convince myself I no longer looked like a fifteen year old, I could forget for a moment that no matter how much time passed, I would always be the same. A child, never more.

Abby’s hand tightened on my shoulder. I smiled, letting the thoughts slip away.  She could always sense when I was starting to disappear down that misty path called thoughts that you really shouldn’t think about because all they do is make you bemoan things that you can’t control.  Basically, she could read me, and while there may have been a time when that bothered me. Now, it was...needed. I smiled again and sighed, the kind of sigh that pushed all your stress outward instead of pulling it inward and allows you to breathe deep and free afterward. A good sigh.

“So, hypothetical situation says I’m wrong and we’re still stuck here, but now I’ve gotten both our hopes up and we’re totally crushed but we’ve geared ourselves up too much and so we obviously have to do something...”

“What did you have in mind?”  I couldn’t tell whether she was actually on board, not that I expected to.  Abby never revealed anything until she knew the whole picture, that way she was still absolutely free to make her own plan thats endgame was probably to screw up whatever plan you’d just tried to pitch too her.  It was pretty good strategy, as far as I had experienced.

“I don’t know, I was just thinking of busting some drug dealers because that, you know,  is always a small local problem that never amounts to anything bigger.”

“Mhmm.” she said, “Because that always works out well.”

“Yeah,  we never just happen to pick the one dealer who’s cartel actually cares and it never ends up spiraling into a full on drug war that puts us that top of five different hit lists and ends with us running across the US for three months and finally ending up in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico where we get into a showdown that we all impossibly walk away from unscathed.”

“That never happens.”

“Never.” I said, and she, what? Chuckled? I made Abby chuckle?  That was actually something I took great pride in.  She may be able to read me like a�" whatever lame rip-off I normally would have inserted here in an attempt to not use the word book�" but I, I, I was the only person I knew who could make her, the great, secretly robot abby, laugh.

“We’ll see.”  She said, which was as good as I was going to get at the moment. She pulled the brush away, finished.  Her hand brushed over my hair one more time, sweeping it over my shoulder, before her presence was gone with a swish.
I stood up, glancing at her over my shoulder.

“You’re not intending to just hide in your liar for the rest of day, right?”

“Why?” she answered, which meant yes, yes she was.

I made a sound at the back of my throat, running my hand through my hair before practically lunging toward her.

“Let’s go find Chris and Zack and do something that will probably piss Sarah off and make her not want to take any of us in the first place.”  That wasn’t how I’d intended to end that sentence, considering it was kind of counter-productive, but like everything else it just kind of popped out right as I was thinking it without going through any sort of logical filter first. There was reason why I wasn’t the most persuasive person in existence.

I reached for her hand, my fingertips touching hers, before I pulled back.

“Sara?”  Abby said.

I’d felt it, another one, again. But this time it was, different; stronger, darker, faster, so much faster.  I bit my lip.  I’d never felt anything quite like that, and that made me nervous.  Something was coming.  Something we weren’t ready for.  Darkness, fire, destruction,�"we weren’t ready.

I shook my head.  No, these didn’t always mean what I thought they did.  They didn’t always mean anything, and as for this one being�"more�"it was just my outrageously bored brain trying to make things interesting.  I’d been cooped up for too long, and I was desperate. Yes that was it, it had to be...

“Sara?”  Abby said again, her voice dropping to a worried  pitch I’d scarcely heard before, at least when she actually meant it.

“Sorry,”  I tried to smile, but of course she saw right through that, time for a more direct avoidance approach.

“Come on,” I grabbed her hand.

She resisted, “what the hell are we going to do with them anyway?”  If I didn’t know better I would have said it sounded like a grumble but luckily, I did, know better, that is.

I looked over my shoulder again,taking in abby’s paler than mine skin, her gray eyes, her curves that formed into a beauty that resembled a scorching sun, breathtaking and perilous.

I grinned, a grin that belonged on the face of a five year old boy who had just taken the last cookie out of the cookie jar and successfully blamed it on the dog.
“No Idea,”
And we were off.