Forget Me Not

Doesn’t rhyme with bacon.

It strikes something in his memory, a small thing he can remember but a face he cannot. A voice, and, for some reason, all of the psychology books on his bookshelf, some there longer than he can remember.

Daken.

“Well, SHIELD is..” He doesn’t say it, but there’s words upon words on his tongue, bitter and angry. His mother never had a very high opinion of the organization, though she’d loved certain members individually. And SHIELD had never been friends to people like him and Anya.

Mutants.

Not people like - there was a specific word and one plastered everywhere.

Mutant.

Touch-memory and manipulative empath, they sit side by side and feed on eachother’s rage and mourning.

“It’s SHIELD. We do what we have to on our own, yeah?

–And what are we gonna do?”

For a while Anya follows her own thoughts, lips pressed together. She pictures the face of her father’s killer, the photograph somewhere in between the stack of paper of the file.

She’s glad she doesn’t have to ask him if he’s with her. They are tighter than siblings, of course he’s with her.

“We’re going to look for him”, she finally says. “Hill said he’s vulnerable right now.”

The thing she knows best about her father -not remembers, but knows- is how good of a person he was. People constantly tell her. And she knows he tried to raise her to be a good person too.

But he is gone, and she isn’t.

“Oh.”

She doesn’t have to reach out for him - he can feel it, as sure as he can feel his heart breathing and the breath he takes into his lungs. He can feel it so purely, he’s not sure anymore where her feelings end and his start and he plops down next to her, the side of his body pressing against hers.

They’ve practically been raised together, and though Abram never met Clint before he died (Darcy adopted him after, and now that Abram is an adult, it’s easy to see he was meant to fill the gaping chasm left in her life after her best friend was gone forever), there’s still an ache of rage at the back of his throat.

“Who are we killing?”

Anya licks her lips, slowly. His question comes so casually and she knows she doesn’t have to turn and ask. She knows that he can feel how under the storm of rage, build up over years of grieving over the loss of her father, there is a cold, calculating sort of anger.

She knows exactly what she wants, and she knows that he does too.

That doesn’t mean she isn’t scared.

“His name is Daken”, she says and the name alone is almost enough to make her furious. “Apparently they...they always knew. Not my dad or mama. Not the Avengers. But SHIELD knew and they...”

“You’re stressing, you’re anxious, you’re sad and god, girl, have you ever considered taking up meditation because you’re so angry, you’re makingmy blood boil.”

She laughs, despite herself, despite everything. For a second, it doesn’t seem so bad.

She wants to reach out and take Abram’s hand, but instead wraps her arms back around herself, fighting with the words for a second.

“Ryan. Ryan– uh.. something. But he’s tall, and he wears preppy clothes. Like country club clothes.” He explained.

“I can pay you any way except for monetarily.”

“Casual anti-mutant bullies.” Tim scoffed.

“Found out I’ve got powers. I end up with iced coffee down the back of my shirt when I’m just trying to study.

Nothing illegal– just scare em’ enough to leave me alone to get some work done?”

She didn’t ask why Tim couldn’t take care of it himself, being the older one and all. She simply shrugged.

But a few days ago the mood had shifted and now it was heavy, silent, enough that she felt sad simply from how everyone acted around her and when she walked up to her dad she was nervously chewing on her thumb already.