#christineverhart

There’s a table in one corner of the library that belongs exclusively to Tony. It’s secluded, practically hidden between Magical Theory and Arithmancy. Once upon a time he’d used it as a hiding spot, reading books he had no business reading, experimenting with spells that he really shouldn’t. Kissing girls he probably shouldn’t have been kissing. The last couple of years he’d even ended up running some kind of unofficial homework trade, little Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs who whisper to their friends that Stark is great for helping you with homework. 

This year, nobody ever approaches his table. Tony tells himself, and everyone else, that he prefers it that way. He reads and he experiments and he keeps himself to himself. He hides out in the library on the nights he can’t sleep, which is more often than not these days. He avoids the librarian, avoids his teachers, avoid his old friends --- and most of them are avoiding him too. It’s lonely. It’s easier. Tony leans back against the steady wooden bookshelf and buries his nose in wandlore. 

It's early evening when Tony leaves Stark Tower. A blonde woman standing in the atrium catches his eye, looking at him, but Tony just keeps walking, zipping up the old leather jacket he'd just stolen from his younger self ( it's a bit loose on him, his frame leaner, his face more gaunt. but that’s what time, and an apocalypse does. at least it still totally suits him. ) He's planning to head back to his apartment downtown but he walks past a little coffee shop and the cakes in the window catch his eye. Tony’s not as impulsive as he once was, but that doesn’t stop him turning around and heading in the door.

Five minutes later he's settled himself at one of the small tables outside, with a couple of donuts and a mug of hot chocolate. ( He'd never grown coffee in the dome, focusing instead on cocoa beans for the children. Chocolate tastes like home, now. ) 

He's about to take a bite of his snack a blonde woman abruptly pulls out the other chair at his table and sits. Tony raises an eyebrow, even if, in all honesty, he doesn't really mind. 

     It would happen then of all times-- with Thor off-planet, Banner in hiding, and Stark too shaken from the Manhattan ordeal-- that another, this time very human, threat arose. This time in DC, where a press conference was about to go down with some of the brightest (and most aggressive) reporters, the few who were willing to get down and dirty to get the truth and speak their mind. 

     And of course this time it was from their own government. Trust a government to have two undercover agencies that knew nothing of each other and had very few overlapping areas, kept secret from the other “for safety purposes”. Except clearly that one (I.P.S.P., Internal Proactive Security Program, as they called themselves) knew a lot about S.H.I.E.L.D. and was targeting people who knew anything related to S.H.I.E.L.D. activities. Some of those had been of benefit over the years, if a bit mysterious. People who were causing trouble where missions would have been required were suddenly dispatched, crime rings that started drawing their attention began breaking up. But it went the other way as well, and now the reporters were all in the line of fire too.

     That left what remained of the Avengers to pick up the pieces, not knowing if there was a mole in S.H.I.E.L.D. or some sort of hacking going on or anything else. Nat, Clint, and Steve met with Fury briefly for a meeting before flying down (all at different times from different airports) to the conference. Each person had a list of four primaries to protect, in order of importance. Even here, everything had to be done on a triage system if there was an attack.

meme │ christineverhart

└ ♛ ( sharing a dessert )

     “ of all the desserts in the world, i didn’t think you’d order a damn root beer     float. — how old are you again? “

Jackie was doing fairly badly on her own, but at least she was surviving. It amazed her how much food restaurants threw out at the end of the day, but she was glad for it, because it was keeping her alive. She kept odd hours, waiting until the restaurants closed for the day, but it was food, and she wasn’t complaining.

She didn’t sleep much, anyway. She spent her days wandering the city streets, a jacket and gloves over her metal arm, looking for any faces she recognized from Hydra. She was still bent on killing them all, but she felt like she was beginning to lose herself the more progress she made, so she had stopped for now, waiting to track down Hydra people again until she had a better hold on herself.

Jackie still hadn’t shed her programming entirely, and it was hard for her to think of herself as a person, and not a machine. Especially when her vision scanned and locked onto targets like a machine.