#srisingstarter

They went down hard, fast, and Marc’s bag was mostly in tact. One of the straps was now on the ground and the other one dangling loosely. The problem was the switch blade one of them had jammed into his shoulder. Now he was the asshole standing on the street, holding a bag of cash he still had to get to the drop point, with a knife jutting out of him. “This, uh, isn’t what it looks like?”

With a more clear goal in sight now, he approached one of the occupied tables and clambered up onto a spare seat, standing on it to get a more clear view of the top of the table. “What’s that you got there?” his nose twitched as he awaited an answer. “Smells like it’s got a high sugar content. You probably shouldn’t eat all of it. Bad for you.” he raised an eyebrow, looking up at the other.

It didn't hit Sam that this was all happening, that his brief respite from the goings-on in Sokovia was over, until he dropped out of the plane a few dozen miles away. His wings took him the rest of the way, dipping in and out of the cloudline as he got closer. A respite it'd been, no matter the stress of a solo mission. But now it was time to come back, face the music and the work and whatever else he'd missed.

Louisiana seemed farther and farther away as he dropped down towards the Mousehole. It'd been beautiful, to spend even a sliver of time with his family, kept secret by his cover story of a mission. He felt the familiar prickling telling him to stay, be there, but he already had a call. And it was back in Sokovia.

When his feet hit the ground, he already missed the air. But with a sigh and a lungful of that crisp air, he turned to greet whoever was waiting.

"We have a welcome back committee now?" he said.

Donna Troy was a horrible influence. 

That was probably why Angelo found himself wandering the outside market of Matchak in search of fresh fruit. He had money that the vendors back home didn’t need quite as badly, and he was growing grudgingly fond of the city. And its very cheap produce. 

And it was also why the next bit happened. 

The concerned murmuring was what caught Angelo’s attention, followed by a market-goer’s yell. He turned to see a car swerving along the street, veering wildly into the opposite lane, straight towards the sidewalk where the lone pedestrian was turning just in time to meet their fate head-on.

Angelo pulled the angler from his suit jacket and pointed it at the unfurling tragedy.

And—they were standing on the side of the building, twenty feet up, away, and perfectly perpendicular to the ground, with Angelo’s hand steadying the other’s shoulder. “Don’t panic,” he said in English, his Sokovian still next to nonexistent apart from coffee orders. He figured it was probably the right thing to say to anyone who suddenly found themselves bending the laws of physics so flagrantly. “You aren’t going to fall. Are you alright?”

Back on the street, the car had slammed harmlessly into a sidewalk tree. At a perfect ninety-degree angle from the direction it had initially been going. 

“Incoming!” Shouted as he plummeted down through the air and right into the lake.

In retrospect, Roberto should have been more careful. One moment of distraction – he thought he had seen something in the woods from up above, what could that possibly be? – led to a haste in trying to get a closer look and then a sharp swerve off course to avoid hitting a tree. Falling into the teeth-chattering cold water, he concentrated not to let his energy burn out until he managed to escape, throwing himself onto the ground with a gasp.

“Well, that didn’t go as planned,” he sighed, flickering to his regular form as he laid there on his back, catching his breath. Another surge of heat and the dampness clinging to his uniform and hair sizzled out, before he tilted his head to look at the poor soul that had just witnessed it all. “I swear I’m usually much better at flying.”

The sensible thing, Steve knew, was to go straight to the hospital. 

He was injured, after all, even if those injuries didn’t match what he thought the source to be. Welts should have been burns, and that was if he had survived the explosion at all (which he really, really shouldn’t have). Things had gotten even stranger when he’d taken inventory, turning out his pockets and the little bag around his waist, none of the items helping him paint a picture that would connect a to b. He had identification, but the years were (way) off. He had a job, but he’d never heard of the organization. He even had a picture of Diana (hidden away, strangely), but just the one and of the collection in his wallet, she was the only person he recognized. 

He had a life, just not the one he knew. 

He would have to lie. Steve supposed he did have amnesia, but he’d never known it to work quite like this (and he had seen his share of examples). He knew exactly what kind of trouble it could get him into, the horrible places he might end up, and so it was probably better to claim nothing than to try and fumble his way through his theories about magic conspiracies and time travel. At least until he could find a phone and (hopefully) reach … well, Diana looked like his best (and only) bet.  

He at least had a few things that might help (and some that wouldn’t). Weapons and water. Keys and money. A watch that looked like his father’s but definitely wasn’t. Steve even found a little Sokovian-English dictionary that gave him a probable location. He had looked up a few words and when he found his way into a more populated area, had simply asked: “Phone?” He fumbled with even just the one word and while it had earned him a number of looks (which he supposed was fair), he had already double and triple-checked. He had the right word. Maybe wrong place. So he tried again - casually as he could when he wasn’t getting distracted by each new thing he passed - a few more people, a few different words, a few other languages. He asked for a phone, the hospital, or even directions to the hostel depicted in a badly folded brochure and he did it (with varying degrees of proficiency) in Russian, Spanish, and German then Italian, French, and English. 

Pam had a pounding headache. 

It had started as a tickle in the back of her head a week ago, coming and going, and had somehow gotten worse and worse no matter what she did—no matter what plants bloomed to aid her, no matter what twists and turns she attempted with her own bodily chemistry. Her head was aching, and worse than that—

She felt... Unbalanced. Unmoored. Paranoid, yes, but she’d been paranoid for years now, and this was something new. A foreign growth in the back of her mind, scaling the walls of her consciousness like...

God. This little spit of a town was supposed to be a pit stop, the forest a place for her to rest and recoup for a few days off the radar. And now... Now Pam felt too off-balance to go anywhere. And Woodrue’s trail had gone cold in the meantime. (That damn ARGUS agent had been right. Pam was going to be bitter about that for a while. She hoped he’d tripped into a ravine and snapped his neck.) 

So, given that she was stuck, she may as well get herself some supplies. Pam was still waffling about whether she wanted to stay in the woods, pondering as she picked through the local supermarket.