hide and seek

"No, ma'am... I'm afraid we haven't gotten any more information on that. I'm sorry to report that Pepper Potts and Christa Amory are missing."

Avengers Facility - January 12th, 2016

Sometimes life seemed to go by in flashes. Right now, Tony Stark was going through three that were each mere minutes long, flashes that occurred like bright lights over a period of days that seemed bathed almost entirely in the darkness of night.

ONE

If thoughts were sirens, Tony Stark's head would be blaring even more loudly than Manhattan at midday.

His heart was pounding a million miles a minute, and it felt like the world was speeding up around him and it was hard to be at the same speed.

He flew off towards the little girl in the bed to the left of the woman with the guns. There'd been too much collateral damage associated with Tony Stark's job for him not to run after the girl. The woman had fallen to the ground--it seemed she'd shot both herself and the little girl--on purpose. A gun in either hand led to a bloody bullet wound for two.

Lying in her bed, there was scarlet running out of her side. She wasn't even awake, still in her comatose state from before.

"Where are the doctors? C'mon--where are the damn doctors here?!"

He couldn't tell who was what and where around him, but in a moment that took way too long to end, people who worked at the facility were surrounding him and the little girl in white bedsheets covered in red. And as they took her into an area of the hospital wing where they could apparently treat her further he watched, still, and wondered how people wanted kids when there was the risk that they would look like that.

TWO

It was possibly less than an hour later. A worker at the facility stood beside Tony Stark, fingers to his earpiece as Tony, out of his Iron Man suit and back into a regular one, arms folded across his chest, stared out at the hospital wing in front of him.

"We've got the situation under control, ma'am. They've taken care of the prisoner and have the patient in intensive care."

The woman from Hydra.

Lila.

The only people present in the room were Tony, the man, and more facility workers cleaning the place up.

"Yes, ma'am. The other patient is in another room in the wing--yes, he's as safe as he's gonna get."

Clint.

The room was cleaner than before. Tony saw the last drop of blood being wiped away from his sight where the little girl's bed used to be.

"No, ma'am... I'm afraid we haven't gotten any more information on that. I'm sorry to report that Pepper Potts and Christa Amory are missing."

A pause.

"Copy that."

The man put his hand down from his earpiece. He stared off at the place before him.

He started to say something, but--

"The patient's name is Lila." Tony turned to look at the man. "The first one? The little girl? It's Lila."

And he turned around and left before the man could say a word.

THREE

A day or less later, Tony Stark sat in his office, doing nothing at all. He was slumped over in his chair, staring out the window in front of him, tired. He'd soared over everywhere he could, looking for something, for some sort of clue that would lead him to Pepper and Christa. But he couldn't find anything. He'd searched for hours and hours and hours and he hadn't found anything.

He'd looked into the security cameras, viewing footage of hallways in the facility near where Christa would or might have passed the day she disappeared, flipping through the past few days that Christa had been with him for. He'd found the license plate of the trailer that Christa and Pepper had last been seen in, but that had led to a dead end; the car with the matching license plate was a new Honda Civic for sale at a car dealership in Jacksonville, Florida. He'd tried to figure out why Pepper would take Christa in that truck in the first place but nothing had come out of it except a headache to rival those he got on New Year's Day. He'd looked at the facility's files on Hydra, looked up and into people who might have something against him. He had Vision (the only Avenger aside from himself currently at the facility due to Sam Wilson, Steve, Wanda, and Rhodey being gone on a mission) help him with his inhuman ability to process information. He'd looked into people who had visited Pepper recently at Stark Tower, phone calls, emails, anything, but that had only resulted in a visit to one of her high school soccer teammates who was completely perfect and innocent. He barely slept for a period of time he wasn't even aware of. And then, lost in his haze of sleeplessness and loss and rage, he flew up into the sky, looking for something, anything, for hours--and, like everything else Tony Stark had tried to do, nothing that he needed. Nothing to bring back Christa and Pepper. Nothing.

Not even a piece of dust floating in the air with a trace of whatever took them away from him.

Suddenly, a knock--reminiscent of the one that he heard just seconds before he would meet Christa for the first time--came at the door.

His heart froze.

Tony leaped up in his seat and ran to the door.

Was it them?

But when he opened it.... It wasn't.

"Mr. Stark?" It was Jackie, Pepper's assistant.

Tony's eyes glazed over the person standing beside her.

"What is it? Do you have any news on--"

Jackie's face made him stop.

It was sad--unlike any expression he'd ever seen on it before.

"I'm sorry."

"Well, you can leave then, because I'm working on some very important... things... right now," Tony responded snappishly. He began to shut the door, but Jackie kept it open with her heal.

"Sir, if you would wait just one--second--" she groaned as the pain in her foot intensified. A sigh of relief came over her as he opened the door again. "You have a visitor."

It was just then that Tony noticed the very tall young boy standing next to Jackie--a boy with brown hair and a backpack and a sweatshirt that looked suspiciously like it had come from a Lord of the Rings clothing store.

"Look, kid, I'm sorry but I've had enough problems with visitors lately, so if you could--"

"M--Mr. Stark, I'm sorry to interrupt but this is kinda important." The boy licked his lips nervously and paused.

Tony looked at him, arms crossed.

"Oh, you're waiting for me--sorry--anyway--" The boy started pulling something out of his backpack. It almost fell twice. "I'm so sorry--oh, gosh--here." He held up a big black laptop. "Mr. Stark, my name is Angus Prewitt. I'm here because I know your daughter and might know how to find her."

| | |

"My dear... you're in Hydra."

Hydra.

HYDRA.

The words echoed around Christa's head long after they had left the woman's lips. The words she would never have thought would be told to her in her darkest of nightmares.

Not for the first time since all this crap had started happening to her, she wanted to scream. But it was for a different reason this time. Not merely out of anger, not merely out of sadness, not merely out of utter frustration with the universe, but instead with all of that... and fear.

She could feel it trickling down her spine.

Her palms begin to sweat.

Her face grow cold and clammy.

Her stomach grow sick.

"No, no, no, no, no--"

She slowly pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, huddled in a ball that she, somewhere subconsciously, thought would help, that if she could make herself small enough, she could disappear here and reappear back home--back at her old house, her old, un-bombed house, and hug her mother, her living mother.

But she couldn't.

Rustling beside Christa faintly penetrated her fractured eardrum, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. The place in her shoulder where she'd been penetrated by a bullet screamed with fire, and she bit her tongue to stop herself from crying out in pain. The metallic taste of blood penetrated her senses, and she nearly gagged. Tears starting to come out of her eyes from the pain, her head turned towards Pepper lying on the ground. She was beginning to stir.

And then, finally, a voice Christa hadn't heard from the correct source in what now felt like years--

"What...." Movement as Pepper achingly sat up. "Where--" She saw Christa. She winced. "What--" Her eyes began to light up with realization and fear. "Christa?!"

Christa gave a half-hearted, extremely forced smile. "The one and only."

"Oh, my--" Pepper said, voice full of stutters and emotions Christa knew must be killing Pepper right now. "Oh, my word...." Covered in grime and what might have been blood, she coughed. "I can barely see you."

It was dark, but not that dark. Maybe? Barely? Hmm. Christa's eyes were probably already adjusted to the lack of light.

Christa dropped the smile.

"Do you know where we are?" Pepper continued, grunting a little as she rubbed the back of her neck.

Christa gave the half-hearted smile again. It was difficult. Her body was shaking slightly. "Wanna take a guess?"

Pepper looked around herself in the darkness and coughed again. She shivered. "Antarctica? The North Pole?"

Christa gave a shaky chuckle. "It's certainly cold enough to be one of those places--and I wouldn't put it past Santa to go kidnapping people all of a sudden." He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake--who would ever trust the guy? "Maybe we are--but no, I need more specifics from your guesses."

Pepper gave a chuckle to echo Christa's. "Christa, I have no idea."

Christa sucked in a breath. "Want me to just rip off the band-aid, then?"

"Sure. What could be worse than the North Pole?"

There was a pause.

And then Christa's response.

"Hydra."

The shock on Pepper's face could have been enough to burn down the Avengers Facility.

"But--b--" she spluttered. "Hydra is gone. It was destroyed the year that Ultron was."

Christa gave a shrug, the only thing her limited energy and current bullet hole situation would permit. Even that caused a seething pain in her shoulder. She sucked in a rattling breath and, without thinking, lifted the arm connected to her uninjured shoulder to the burning one.

Pepper's eyes followed Christa's movement, and she rushed over to her as quickly and far as her chains and injuries would permit.

"Christa--oh, gosh--what happened?"

Christa gave the half-attempted smile again.

"I got shot in the shoulder."

"Oh, my word--" Pepper gently put a hand to it, examining it in the near complete darkness. She seemed about to pull away Christa's shirt to examine the bloodied spot more closely, but then stopped. "May I?" she said.

"Go ahead." What more pain could Christa go through?

Tentatively, gently, with the hands of a mother with a newborn baby, Pepper peeled back the shirt and looked at the place.

"It's been bandaged up," she relaid to Christa. "But it looks like you got shot in--"

"--the back of my shoulder. Yeah, I know. I was there."

Pepper kept looking, and her hands stung a little on Christa's skin, but they weren't as cold as she thought they would be in this environment, and the human touch wasn't as terrible as she might have thought it would be.

Christa felt Pepper begin to peel back the bandaging slightly. "It doesn't look infected."

"Well that's a bit of a plus."

Pepper arranged the bandages back on Christa and came away from her.

There was a pause in the darkness.

"Why do you think we're here, Pepper?"

"I have no idea, Christa. I'm sorry."

"They used your face."

"What do you mean?"

"To kidnap me. They had... technology. A woman who had this sort of... mask--I mean, that's a crude word for it--anyway, it made her look exactly like you," Christa said softly.

"And she kidnapped you?" Pepper's voice came from out of the darkness.

"Yep. Said Clint and Lila were being attacked. T--Mr. Stark went off after them, and evil you took me to 'somewhere safe.' Plot twist: it wasn't."

"That's a lot more interesting than my kidnapping. I was on my way back to Stark Tower and they were driving the car."

"Damn."

"You could say that." Pepper started coughing.

Then there was silence.

Christa's mind was going a million miles a minute.

Her eyes met Pepper's, and as a horrifying thought came to her mind, she spoke. And her voice, in the pain and uncertainty and fear of it all, trembled.

"So then, since you were used to kidnap me, and they're done with that, that leaves... that leaves the question.... Do they still need you?"