The Not So Silent Hill

[starkingenuity]

[Continued from: here]

Staring at the little house, Tony was noteably unimpressed. The child and other half of a god (however loosely you wanted to use the term) really ought to have not been so...small. He was expecting more, and the way he stood with his hip out and arms crossed proved it. They'd take a quinjet to the nearest open field and one of Tony's smaller cars after that, loaded into the back of the plane after he'd ripped out a few seats.

With Extremis stable enough to exist in several now fire-breathing and extra strong mice rampaging through specially designed cages to contain them, JARVIS' databases and hacking ability getting them the information they needed to arrive here, and Alessa more or less content with the nurse she and Banner picked out, this had been the next logical step. Even so, he expected it to be a little more difficult.

Wearing a black t-shirt and dark jeans that only accentuated his somewhat femininely proportioned hips and backside, Tony Stark was still Tony Stark and flashiness and he went hand in hand.

Like a brand name.

It didn't help that the yellow convertible was parked across the street, in direct contention with the overall look and feel of the neighbor around it.

"You can knock." He wasn't too keen on touching things other people did.

Comments

[honeyibrokeharlem]

Bruce turned in his seat, and the corner of his mouth quirked slightly. He knew neither Natasha nor Clint very well, but the fact remained that they all saved the world together. That earned them 'Bruce smiling at you' privileges.

"Glad to see you could make it. Pull up a seat."

Alessa, who up until now was trying to figure out what she was expected to do with food and chocolate milk, immediately looked up and narrowed her eyes at the newcomers, Natasha especially.

One of the utensil drawers clattered open and chopsticks flew out, getting thrown at both Clint and Natasha to see if they could see her.

Immediately, Bruce slapped his hand down on the counter, forcing Alessa to look him in the eye as he tried to look stern. "Alessa, that is not how we say hi to people! Play nice."

"I am playing nice!" she huffed. "I didn't throw sharp things!"

"You have your JARVIS bear, just talk at people!"

"But that's boring!"

[cognitive_recalibration]

Barton was fast. You had to be when your only superpower in a room full of super heroes (or trained former ballerinas turned KGB agents) was to move quicker than they could. He didn't even turn, half in the fridge despite Stark's commands, when he grabbed the chopsticks out of the air and tucked them behind one here.

"Who's the kid?" He balanced pancake mix, eggs and milk in one arm and kicked the door to the refrigerator shut. "Because that's creepy, even for you, Stark."

Tony was too busy helping Bruce deal with Alessa to pay attention to Clint Barton, invader of air ducts and disabler of security equipment. He assumed that was why JARVIS did no announce their arrival to the Tower. He needed to install lasers, he decided.

"Oh, hey, got blueberries? Nat, you want pancakes? Yeah you do." He grinned.

[honeyibrokeharlem]

Natasha caught the chopsticks heading her way easily enough, raising one eyebrow at the small child. "You know me, Clint."

Steve looked between Clint and Natasha, frowning. "You're seriously telling me I'm the only one who can't see her?" He had been thinking that maybe Stark was pulling his leg, but...

Natasha arched one eyebrow at him, slowly moving towards Clint and away from the child. "Why wouldn't you see her? She's right there. Glaring at me."

Alessa intensified her glare. Bruce frowned at her, but considering she wasn't throwing anything, he decided to just be satisfied.

"Are you a mutant?" Natasha asked, keeping her eyes on Alessa, because just because Tony let it in the house doesn't mean it isn't dangerous.

"We call it Divinely Touched where I come from, but I guess your word works too," Alessa grumbled, giving a small roll of her eyes.

"This is Alessa," Bruce cut in. "And she's honestly a sweet girl once she warms up to you."

"No I'm not."

"Tony, is she or is she no nice once you get to know her?" Bruce asked, taking a drink of orange juice and looking to his boyfriend for support while Alessa kept glaring at Natasha.

[starkingenuity]

"Banner," Tony said, smirking, "we are not playing 'gang up' on this one or she'll go out of her way to prove just how far right of the nice spectrum she is!" He couldn't help but laugh, the warmth in his eyes causing Clint to turn away from his pancake assembly line to glance almost secretly at Natasha.

Tony's personality was certainly off. Natasha did not return the look to her friend and her savior. She might have cleared her ledger when it came to Barton but there was still something there that would never be erased by paying one good deed with another. Much too capable of schooling her expressions, she didn't reveal her surprise at Tony's interactions with Banner or the girl.

When poor Steve just started to get lost in the confusion of the bickering with a person he couldn't see, Tony hooked him up with an earpiece and JARVIS was able to approximate Alessa's voice for him. It was only strange, thereafter, not to see the girl, even if he could see her manipulating objects.

The story, like it had with Thor, came out slowly. The two assassins were quiet, well, relatively. Barton ate noisily, fork to plate, but he kept his mouth shut otherwise. Natasha more or less ignored the pancakes in favor of watching Alessa and her scowling act all through the tale.

Other than the sex, their relationship and some of Bruce's trials in Silent Hill, the three of them managed to fill the Avengers in on what was happening.

[honeyibrokeharlem]

"Good move, Tony."

Alessa nodded towards Tony. "You see, he understands." Which might or might not have been a good thing. People shouldn't understand the recalcitrant and violent mind of Alessa.

Bruce just rolls his eyes and smiles. He was smiling more in this conversation than he had smiled throughout the build up to the Battle of New York. If the others noticed, they weren't obvious about it, mostly because Barton and Natasha were trained to not let on if they noticed something weird.

Bruce let Tony tell the story. Alessa kept glaring at Natasha. After a few minutes of just glaring at each other, Alessa started pulling Natasha's hair.

"Alessa, play nice," Bruce said quietly when Natasha's brow furrowed just a little in surprise and she instinctively touched the hair being pulled by nothing.

"I am."

Steve, meanwhile, was listening to the story, his face gradually getting stormier as the narrative continued. "This Order... How long has it been in operation?"

"Since the pilgrims," Alessa immediately answered, still glowering at Natasha. "Puritans burned one of our saints at the stake or witchcraft. It was how we discovered the power of the land Silent Hill is now built on."

[starkingenuity]

Tony set his arm along the back of Alessa's chair, not because she could really feel him but because he might normally brush her hair away from her neck if she was sitting beside him. He let Bruce do the discipline because he wanted to be the fun parent. The thought made his lips quirk up.

There was a lot of information getting tossed around here. The Order. Silent Hill. The power behind it.

"And HYDRA followed you--" Clint twirled his fork around. His mouth was still full.

"And died for it."

He glanced at Natasha. "Hey Nat. Wanna go on vacation?"

[honeyibrokeharlem]

“I’ll pack my bathing suit,” Natasha said softly, already mapping things out in her head. HYDRA had tried to intimidate the Order into coughing up Bruce. Clearly, direct tactics like that didn’t work, even when working under the assumption that they had no ability to pull people in or out of the magic town (since when was that in her job description she did not sign up for magic).

“Don’t swim in Toluca Lake. The people at the bottom will drag you down.” Alessa ignored how Steve flinched next to her at the thought. She could feel the darkness radiating off of Natasha. She had no doubt the woman could wake up the spirits in the lake.

“Noted.” Natasha was unsettled, even if her expression was just as impassive as ever. Dead people were supposed to stay dead. She was going to run into a lot of problems if they weren’t. “Maybe it’s time the Order met a couple hopeful converts.” She moved her food out of the way, leaning forward so her face was level with Alessa’s. The room began to get warm as Alessa’s eyes narrowed and her shoulders tensed aggressively. “What can you tell me about how it works?”

Alessa’s eyes stayed narrow. The room was getting uncomfortably warm.

“They’ll be less suspicious of him.” She jerked her head towards Hawkeye. “But they’ll tell you more, if you play it right.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a woman. Our council is made of women. Our leaders are women. Everything except some splinter denominations is ran by women, because they’re the ones who might learn how to control bits of the town. They’re the ones who are connected to God. Men?” Alessa shrugged with a scowl. “No one really worries about them, but no one really respects them either. They’re just sort of kept out of the way.” Unless they managed to earn a religious title, but Alessa hadn’t met any man who had. Unbeknownst to her, Vincent had managed it. JARVIS’s search for records on her friends would eventually turn up very little for Claudia, but a wealth for Vincent, because he was running social media inviting people to the loving, totally innocent arms of the Order and was labeled not only a priest, but the one who managed donations and finances of the church.

[starkingenuity]

"It was bound to happen. Somewhere, some day someone was going to like me better," Clint grinned, even if no one else shared his smile. Tony was too busy being creeped out again. Alessa's attitude towards Pepper now made a whole lot of sense.

Tony watched Alessa for a moment before he snapped his finger by her ear. "Let me talk to you in your room a sec," he said, standing up with a little difficulty.

No one said anything about his limp as he led the little ghost girl back to her flowers and her pink walls. Tony flopped down on a bed he hoped she would soon use and propped one foot up on the headboard.

"Not too fond of women huh?" He was trying to level with her, not talk down to her. "I know that one out there is a liar and a pain in the ass, but she is going to help us. Think you can call a truce?"

[godandhermother]

Alessa scowled, giving Natasha one last glare before floating after Tony, taking her bear with them.

Steve pursed his lips before glancing at Bruce. "If you and Stark are planning on keeping her long-term thing, you have your work cut out for you."

Bruce nodded in agreement before standing up and pouring himself orange juice.

Alessa followed Tony to her room--still far too pretty for her, she never got pretty things--before settling down next to his leg, giving him a frown.

"This is a truce." Alessa hugged her knees and brought them under her chin. She was normally an articulate girl, but it was hard to explain the culture of the Order to a man who had absolutely no context to go by. "In the Order... you earn your power, and you earn your respect. You earn everything by fighting for it. Boys don't have to, but the girls have to be tough. Our mommies make us tough by hurting us, so then we can handle ourselves with the rest of the Order."

The fact that Alessa wasn't outright attacking the women she was presented with was a concession on her part, because despite her power, she was vulnerable. Her body was on life support. It would be simple to kick her respirator over and she would be defenseless. She responded to that by wanting to assert dominance over any potential threats, like she was a dog. Like they were all nothing but feral dogs.

"No one will fight for you. No one. So you fight for yourself."

[starkingenuity]

"You and I are more alike than you think," Tony said, smirking a little as he looked up at her fabric covered canopy. Were those little red dots or strawberries? He'd never taken time to notice some of the things about his home. He really had to pay more attention. He didn't want to lose what he'd only recently obtained. "My dad was a genius. I pretty much lived in his shadow-- Still do if you want some honesty there. He was smarter than I can ever be, but I have to keep trying. I only had myself growing up. I only had myself until I met this guy in a cave who saved my life. And then the guys out there, they helped save my life too. Even Natasha. It wasn't too long ago that her entire life history was leaked online... You want to see it?"

Maybe Alessa would respect Natasha a little more if she knew what the Black Widow had lived through.

Then again, maybe she would just want to fight her a little more feircely.

I know you spent the last forty years or so hanging out hating women "and being abused, but you have a chance at a real childhood again. Banner and I are going to give that to you. First things first, though...you have to learn to tolerate women. The Order--"

"Sir, sorry to interrupt, but I have that digest ready," JARVIS piped in.

Tony frowned. "Send it to my phone, I'll look at it later." This was how quality time was suppose to be spent...not worried about business. "So will you at least try not to hate everyone?"

[godandhermother]

"Your father loved you."

She didn't often let in on it, but she saw things. Pieces souls left behind, random details about the people around her, feelings and memories left streaked on walls and furniture. The darkest parts of people, usually without any kind of goodness contextualizing it. It wasn't just the future she could see. In the town, she was able to read people's histories like books if she cared to, but even out here, in the real world with only a fraction of her power, she could see the little things.

"He didn't know how to show you." She played with the hem of her skirt, frowning at the sheets. "I don't need to see her history. She bleeds it everywhere. She hurts and she's been hurt. She wonders if she's a bad person, and she's bothered that the fact that she is doesn't bother her more than it does. She'll fit into the Order pretty well." She buried her face in her knees. Despite that, her voice was still loud and clear. She didn't think to modulate it to make it seem like she was a real girl being muffled by real clothing, instead of just a ghost of a diseased, decrepit near-corpse.

"I don't hate women." She pressed her head harder against her knees. Her voice came out in the slightest of shamed whispers when she said, "I'm scared of them."

[starkingenuity]

"He loved me," Tony said, with a smirk. "And he never let me know. What good at having feelings if you can't share them?" He tended to mask his own too, but he knew he was a hypocrite so this didn't matter as much in the grand scheme of things. Parents on TV were constantly telling their kids to be better than they were any way.

And TV parents were the only sort Tony ever knew.

He let Alessa tell him more about herself, his eyelids falling, not from sleep but from the horror of it. Alessa was just a little girl who wanted to bring paradise to the world but because of her crazy mother and he genes, she was forced to live in hell for thirty years and had turned into...this.

Tony rested his hand near her when she confessed to him.

"They scare me too," he said, and not just to be cheeky. "That woman out there is something to fear, I'll give you that, but Lessy, you have to know that Banner and I are going to protect you...even if you don't need it. Even if it's from women. No one is going to hurt you again like the Order did."

[godandhermother]

"I don't know. I don't know what good feelings are anyway. They're just all awful."

She peeked out from her little ball, staring at him from under her hair.

"You can't promise that. No one can. I'm not..." She loosened her grip on her knees just a little. She closed her eyes. She didn't want to be aware of her surroundings anymore. "I know I'm not a good person. I know I'm not... things don't work out here like they did in the Order, and I only know what an Order girl should do. And I know what happened will never go away. That will always hurt, and you can't save me from that."

She'll never be able to touch a mirror without leaving. She'll never be able to smile and be carefree. She'll never be able to look upon other people and not see the horrible festering darkness inside all of them. An indelible mark has been left on her.

"Wanna hear something weird?" She fiddled with the hem of her skirt again. It looked pristine, as usual. Too stiff. Too formal. "I miss Mommy sometimes. I miss her stories. I miss listening to her humming in the living room while I fell asleep. I still love her, even though I know she had to die. And I hate her, too."

[starkingenuity]

Tony wasn't the sort of guy to really seek out physical comfort but he wanted to hug the girl just then. She might have helped to put Banner (and himself) through hell, but he had grown attached to her very, very quickly. In the few weeks since they'd gotten back from Silent Hill, Tony really had come to think of her like their kid.

He probably needed therapy. And Bruce was a terrible therapist in the end. He just...gave in too much. Tony sort of liked that about him though.

He patted the bad beside him instead, trying to coax the girl closer. Banner didn't have to be the only parental one! "I think your mom did love you," he said, eyes half closed. "There's no mother that can completely hate their kid. And she sang to you, she taught you, she tried to make you like her. I mean she was sick and crazy but she was trying to do what she thought was best for you." That didn't make it all right again.

"So I really don't think you're weird at all."

Bruce loved his father too.

And Tony...he hated his old man but he loved him just the same.

What a curse life could be.

[godandhermother]

Alessa slowly unfurled from her ball and lay down next to Tony, pillowing her head on her hands and staring at him.

"I'd like to think so. I don't know. I don't even know if I was what she wanted. I never met my dad." The room was warm, but not unpleasantly so. The sort of warm that came with sunlight on one's back. "I don't know if he left because he didn't want me, or Mommy killed him, or if he was a demon or a person... I like to think that she didn't mean to have me, though. Then maybe they liked each other and it wasn't always about power."

She hoped that somewhere, at some point, her mother loved someone else. That would mean she was capable of loving Alessa, too.

Alessa had never really felt loved by any of he adults in her life before.

"Tony..." She averted her eyes, looking towards the red spots that might be strawberries on the canopy. Too pretty for her. "Why do you want me?"

He didn't have to keep her. He could adopt a child without her baggage and capacity to hurt. He could have all the benefits of of children with none of hardship that would come with living with her. Why, then?

I can't believe I never hit send. ><

[starkingenuity]

Tony turned his head to smile at the girl because it's a question he might have asked in her shoes too. That was the real reason he wanted her, not just to stave off loneliness (he had Banner now), was to sort of do for someone else what he wished was done for him. Tony was constantly trying to atone, perhaps not as dramatically (or maybe more dramatically?) as Bruce, but paying it forward meant more than giving to charities and hosting fundraisers.

"Why do I want you? Because you almost beat me at chess." He wasn't exactly teasing. He was beating around the bush. "Why does there have to be a why, Alessa? It's not every day I meet a little girl older than me whose mom burned her alive and might very well be pregnant with something that could kill us all."

And that was putting it bluntly.

"I want you because you need me. I guess that sounds selfish, and I'm honestly a pretty selfish sort of guy, but Less? There's some old footage of my dad and it took me thirty years to ever hear it, but he told me that I was his greatest creation. I don't have kids. I have JARVIS and DUM-E, but I want to have a greatest creation too. So why can't that be you? You're actually pretty all right for a little demon girl."

Ugh, I hate it when that happens! >.<

[godandhermother]

Her eyes flicked back down to her face and she stared, her face impassive. Whenever serious topics came up, she smoothed out her expression, separated herself from her feelings. That was how she knew to weather things she wouldn't ordinarily manage.

But...

"I don't think I'd mind being your greatest creation." She scooted a little closer, enough so that her foggy presence brushed against his shirt. "I think I'd kinda like it."

She didn't know if he would be able to keep his promises. She didn't know if she would have to keep living on life support at the top of his tower for the rest of his life. She didn't know if he would finally tire of her and leave her unfinished like an impossible project.

But she had faith he would try.

"Do you think you could teach me how to make things, too? I think I've spent long enough only knowing how to break things."

;__;

[starkingenuity]

Even Bruce had trouble getting that particularly affectionate look from Tony, though likely that was due entirely to the fact that Bruce was not a little girl that Tony had adopted in a cesspit of some version of hell while they played chess. Some understanding of that had to be made.

"You've already done the most important part then. Knowing how to take things apart is crucial. The trick, however, is doing it so that you can put it back together again...or add something new to it. There's no such thing as invention, not truly. You have to build off of what you already have or already know. So yes. I can teach you. I don't know if you'll be any good at it, but hey, we can try." He wasn't going to talk down to her and praise her for what he wasn't sure she was capable of just yet. "Who knows, you might even be better than me. You have the added benefit of tiny fingers...and telekinesis."

Tony laughed.

"Some people still have to obey the laws of physics you know. So you'd better not get use to using your mind to move stuff. Once you get your fingers back, you're going to have to relearn how to use them. And it's not going to be easy if you've been chilling in hell for thirty years sending triangle beasts to stab people."

[godandhermother]

"Telekinesis would definitely make it easier to deal with the hot things. Or the electrified ones."

She didn't know if she'd be any good at it. She was, after all, used to breaking things and approaching problems with either strategic deceptiveness or brute force, but she still had the mind of a child. It could be adapted.

The expressionless mask cracked. The corner of her mouth quirked in her crooked smile. "I'll have to learn a lot of things again. It's nearly been forty years, now." She stretched out her hand, wiggling her fingers, but she knew it wasn't anything like moving real fingers. The projection, the projection's movements, it was all a product of her mind. An illusion. "I don't remember how it feels. I used to like wrestling with Claudia, or pushing around Vincent, or lying in the backyard when the sun was out. I don't remember what any of it feels like."

She had spent the vast majority of her life time without a working body. She doubted she would have any idea how to properly use it once she got it back.

[starkingenuity]

"Maybe we should keep you out of the sun for a little while," Tony teased. "I wouldn't know what SPF to put on you and we already have to worry about premature aging and skin cancer."

In the other room, Clint and Natasha were already going through JARVIS' digest. Tony had said to send it to his phone and he'd left his phone on the table. It probably was a breach of privacy but given their roles and their life choices, privacy was not something to be concerned about for now.

It was Clint that decided to share it with the scowling pair bookending him. Banner and Rogers were just no fun.

"Looks like we've got our in," he said cheerfully enough. "I've always wanted to be a cultist."

[honeyibrokeharlem]

"I'm going to end up really, really pale, aren't I?" But she was smiling, and that was what mattered.

Bruce, meanwhile, was pretty sure he was being a very bad boyfriend. Good ones kept world-class assassins from rifling through their boyfriends' phones, right?

"You really should have waited for Tony to come back," he grumbled softly, privately glad that he and Tony had never spent a long enough time apart from each other to turn to sexting. He had no doubt Natasha would take this opportunity to glance over Tony's text messages, too.

"So... you're going to just email them? Are you sure you won't need back up?" Steve asked, still chafing at the thought of an entire organization abusing children with impunity under the guise of religion. He was very tolerant of different kinds of faith, but this... this was defilement of something that was supposed to be beautiful and intimate between a person and God.

[cognitive_recalibration]

"And that's the attitude that benches you," Clint said with a grin, not really reading into Bruce's body language because it didn't concern him. He was very good at keeping things he was sure were none of his business exactly the way he left it...

After taking lots of photographs and having a little smug conversation with himself as to why he was still single and should keep it that way.

"Nat and I are pretty good at playing double agents. With or without that asshole's interference." He could feel Natasha's eyes on him so he smiled through it. He didn't exactly have a whole lot of choice.

What was done was done.

"You might want to delete the pictures of you off of here," he said as an aside, already breaking his promise not to say anything.

Evidently, Tony liked it when Bruce was asleep.

[honeyibrokeharlem]

Bruce made a very strange noise and glared at Clint as hard as he could, his cheeks immediately flushing. Natasha covered her mouth to hide how the corner of her mouth quirked upwards. Steve glanced between the three of them, feeling as he usually did: something was going over his head.

"What, has Stark been taking embarrassing pictures of you?" That sounded like something Tony would do as a joke.

Bruce glanced at Steve, keeping his lips pursed. "...Yeah. That's it."

Steve had a feeling that wasn't it. But, as a man raised in the 40's, while he was well aware that gay people existed, it just didn't occur to him that any of the Avengers might be interested in someone of the same sex. Embarrassing pictures was really the best he could come up with, at least until he stopped thinking about it later and then came to a horrifying realization while making himself dinner.

Bruce glared at Clint, daring him to make Steve's confusion go away.

[starkingenuity]

If only Tony could be a fly on the wall when Steve realized that Howard's kid was bonking Bruce Banner. Well, mentally at least. One day there would be too much sexual tension and they might rip each other apart, but for now, Tony's hand was good enough for the worst of the aches.

"What did I miss?" he asked a moment later, escorting Alessa back to the conference room with a quiet truce on the hair pulling of women that were trying to help her out.

Clint shrugged and tossed him his phone. "Got a website," he said. The last image he'd scrolled through, where Bruce was tucked up against Tony's chest (and it had to be Tony's, with that scar and the angle of the photo) still on it. "Found your stash."

Tony blinked. "This isn't even the best one. Did you look back to two weeks ago?"

Steve's cheeks puffed out. "Can't you take anything seriously, Stark? We found a way to get to the Order!"

Tony just rolled his eyes and tucked his phone away, unabashed by the found footage of his new obsession. "Yeah, got that," he said with a shrug. "Bird Brain and Not From Legal, ahem, are going to do what they do best right? Good, problem solved for now."

[honeyibrokeharlem]

All Bruce had to say was that he'd better not be naked in any of those pictures. Which... really meant nothing, since everyone in the room except Alessa had seen him naked, but he drew a mental line between post-transformation naked and post-heavy petting naked.

He rolled his eyes and huffed before patting the seat next to him for Alessa to sit down. Natasha was back to all business, keeping Alessa visible in the corner of her eye. "We'll do what we do best, but that also means we'll need ways to have untraceable communication with the outside world and each other. We also should see how much background information we can find on the leadership."

She glanced expectantly at Alessa, but she only shrugged.

"The last high priestess was killed thirty-one years ago, and I don't know anything about who came into power since. I can tell you how the structure works, but I can't tell you who's in charge now."