Narnians Assemble! 2/2 - for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
intrikate88
Aug. 25th, 2012 07:11 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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narniaexchangeTitle: Narnians Assemble!
Author:rthstewart
Recipient:intrikate88
Rating: Gen, mild T, PG (for reference to wartime actions)
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Minor spoilers for Captain America: The First Avenger; Marvel Comics; The Incredible Hulk (2008); The Avengers (2012); Alternative Universe for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle. Contains references to war crimes and uses period-appropriate terms for race.
Summary: Susan and Peggy go shooting; Peter and Steve get in a bar fight; Crow, Spider, Hawk fight the Cold War; Hulk like Lucy.
Narnians Assemble!
Author's Notes for Part 3:
The Marvel wiki identifies 1928 as the approximate year of the Black Widow's birth and states she ages very slowly. The year she defects is unclear and I can't reconcile it with Hawkeye's apparent age in The Avengers particularly since "defection" usually denotes the Cold War era before the Berlin Wall comes down in November 1989. AU for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle. Inrthstewart's stories, King Edmund is strongly identified with crows and he is married to a banker-accountant during the Golden Age.
ooOOoo
Part 3: Crow, Spider, Hawk and the Cold War
Time didn't run in the normal way for them. The Crow of Narnia and the Black Widow of the Soviet Union were born in the same year, yet neither of them was the age that appeared on the birth record (real or forged) or passport (real or forged). Edmund spent his first adolescence and young adulthood in Narnia and then repeated it all over again in Spare Oom. Given what was done to her by a long line of overseers, controllers and apparatchiki, Natalia "Natasha" Romanova didn't age normally. This meant that when, after nearly four decades of crossing paths, they did finally actually meet one another, Edmund looked (if he did say so himself) a young 55 but had lived for 70 or more years, and Natasha looked an old 25 but had lived for 55 years.
It was the sort of mathematical calculation that made Edmund miss his Narnian wife, dead over a thousand years, or forty, depending on how the years were counted and when.
The first time Edmund saw Natasha was in January 1944. For that operation, he was Private Harold Linch, bag carrier and secretary to the British-American delegation invited by the Soviets to lend credence to the lie that it was really Nazis and not the Soviets who had murdered over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals and buried thousands of them in the Katyn Forest. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 16, pretending to be 19 but really about 32; Natasha was 16, pretending to be 19, and if he had seen more than her eyes, she would have looked about 25.
The whole escapade was a whitewash and the stench of the Soviets' lie was greater even than that of the thousands of corpses that were being exhumed, stacked like cordwood, and autopsied by Soviet physicians. The mildewed dead were still in their faded blue-grey Army uniforms; you could see the Polish eagle on the tarnished brass buttons. Edmund was a veteran of Narnian battlefields and had borne witness to the mass graves left by Jadis and the Telmarines; Katyn was far more terrible.
All the Poles had been killed the same way – a bullet through the back of the skull. The Soviet physicians conducting the postmortems swore the bodies had been in the ground for two years – perfectly coinciding with the time in which Germans rather than the Red Army controlled the area. Terrified and intimidated witnesses insisted that the Nazis had killed the Poles in August and September 1941 though the testimony was rote and inconsistent with the physical evidence. Why did so many of the dead wear fur-lined winter coats if they supposedly died in the summer? Why were the few postcards and receipts dating from 1941 that were exhumed seem so much newer than the grubby, yellowed, filthy letters from 1940? Might it have been because the Poles were murdered by Soviets in the early spring of 1940 and not by Nazis in the late summer of 1941 and evidence was manufactured to absolve the Soviets and cast blame on the Nazis?
As the farce wore on, Edmund suspected that the Americans summoned to "investigate" were as coerced as the witnesses. Preserving the ever-shaky Anglo-American alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union was, in 1944, more important than the truth of who killed 20,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia.
In a cold, stinking tent, Edmund was standing at an autopsy table taking notes in his journal as a British journalist tried to question one of the physicians through the translator. Edmund's own Russian and German were passable enough that he could tell that what the correspondent was asking was not at all what the translator was repeating. The physician was obviously confused.
In the middle of the frustrating exchange, a nurse approached their table. White smocked and masked, she was wearing a bulky coat over an orange apron and luridly red gloves. Her hard, cold eyes peered over the surgical mask and met Edmund's own in a blunt, unblinking challenge. She didn't say anything, but she did not need to do so. The physician took one look at her and dissolved into incoherent stammers. With a satisfied nod, the nurse turned and walked away.
When it was time for the delegation to leave, they all washed their hands, scrapped the foul muck from their boots, and lined up at the edge of camp to make their farewells to their hosts before climbing back into the cars that would return them to the train station. Edmund again saw the nurse among the medical staff, still masked and watching him closely. Luggage changed hands, bodies bumped, and they were herded into the waiting cars. As their train pulled away from the station, Edmund discovered that his journal was gone.
ooOOoo
The second time Edmund saw Natasha was in September 1945. For that operation, he was Lieutenant Merle Just, bag carrier and secretary to the British security detail hurriedly dispatched to Ottawa in the wake of Igor Gouzenko's spectacular defection to Canada. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 18, pretending to be 23 but really about 35; Natasha was 18, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen more than her lithe shadow, she would have looked about 25.
The truth of Katyn was victim first to the brutal exigencies of wartime alliances, and then to the Cold War. The Cold War itself probably started when Gouzenko told his wife, Svetlana, he had just decoded a cable that ordered his return to Moscow. Gouzenko knew that meant a welcome home with a GRU, KGB, or NKVD bullet in the skull, just like those 12,000 Poles in Katyn. Svetlana told Gouzenko to open the safe in the Russian Legation in Ottawa, take everything out of it, change the combination, and take the top secret papers straight to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a plea for asylum.
When the Mounties went to monitor the Gouzenkos' apartment, Edmund joined them. They were all hidden in a park across the street and observed four men from the Soviet embassy come looking for Gouzenko. As the drama unfolded, Edmund couldn't shake the feeling that, as they watched the Soviets, there was someone else watching him, the Mounties, and the Soviet agents stomp about in the apartment building. The harder he looked, the more elusive it was, but he was sure someone had seen it all from the rooftop of a building on the other side of the park.
Gouzenko's defection was sensational news. It was, after all, only September 1945 and the Soviets were still supposed to be allies. After a broadcast was planted that Gouzenko had been spirited away to a safehouse in the Laurentians, the Soviets and the press went haring off in that direction while the debriefing actually occurred hundreds of kilometres in the other direction. They moved Gouzenko to the abandoned Camp X on Lake Ontario; the SOE had trained there during the War.
During a break in the questioning on their second night, Edmund went outside for a cigarette. He met one of the guards, a cautious, loyal, unimaginative Mountie, who was pacing the length of the barbed wire perimeter of the compound.
"What is it?" Edmund asked, reaching for his gun rather than the light.
"I don't know, sir. I thought I saw something on the other side of the fence. It's probably nothing."
Edmund peered out into the darkness and looked for movement independent of the autumn breeze. "There?" he asked quietly, pointing in the direction of a stand of trees. "Something darker than what is around it?"
"Yes, sir. It wasn't there a minute ago." And a minute later, it disappeared.
They doubled the guard.
Weeks later, in civilian clothes, Edmund Pevensie (no longer Lieutenant Merle Just) was embarking on the long journey that would return him to London for the Christmas hols. He was weary and even more worried for if the Soviets had infiltrated the Canadians, surely they had done the same to the Americans and the British.
He picked up the shadow when he got off the bus in Ottawa and couldn't convince himself that he had lost the small, dark shape he saw only in store windows and taxi cab mirrors before he boarded the train to New York. He exhausted hours prowling the train's aisles. He broke into the baggage car and paid a fortune to keep his ideal vantage in the dining car when he did sit. Edmund didn't see anything sinister but he also was certain he was being watched.
When the train pulled into New York, it was the usual crush to leave the cars. Edmund hung back, moving slowly, letting others push past him, and closely watching out the window as people disembarked. Ahead of him in the line, Edmund saw the back of a slim, nimble, red-headed woman. No luggage. Snug black trousers and a trim coat. Her silhouette reminded him of the nurse in Katyn and if she turned around, he thought he would see the same cold, eyes.
It was the self-sufficient professionalism that gave her away. She eschewed the porter's offered hand, jumped down from the train, and expertly melted into the crowd on the platform without succumbing to what Edmund knew was an overwhelming desire to look back and see if your mark had marked you.
Edmund tried to push through the crowd to follow her, but he was hopelessly far behind. And he was already too late. In the taxi to the seaport, he discovered that his briefcase had been expertly cut open and, again, his journals taken.
ooOOoo
The third time Edmund saw Natasha was in the summer of 1953. For this operation, he was carrying papers from three countries (all identifying him as local variations of Georg Acković), his saddlebags were stuffed with the favoured currency of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain (chocolate, gum, and cigarettes), and he had a notebook, Romanian lei to buy fodder for his horse, and a small camera hidden in a canteen. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 26, pretending to be 26 but really about 43; Natasha was 26, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen her threatening the villagers of Băiţa, she would have looked about 25.
That summer, as Edmund rode through the Carpathians and the no man's land between Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, he could shut his eyes, hear the bleating of goats, smell the hay, and think he was traveling again in Narnia or Archenland. The 20th century had never come to the area. Crops were still being cut by hand; everything still moved by horse or ox; livestock roamed the dirt roads. The men were toothless, weather stained, and stooped. The women wore the same shapeless, dark skirts and flowered scarves they'd worn for generations. They used crowbars, hoes, and pickaxes to break rock and till the hard, thin soil. The Serbs, Hungarians, and Romanians (and anyone who bothered to meet them and listen to their languages should realize that each was culturally, ethnically, and temperamentally different) had been waiting for the American liberation since the War. But after Yalta, it was the Soviets who came, demanded reparations, and stayed.
He'd been sent to investigate what the West called SovRoms, joint Soviet-Romanian enterprises intended to develop the economy but which their intelligence had indicated were mostly the Soviets bleeding Romania of oil, wood, coal, iron, and natural gas. The one of particular concern was a mining operation Edmund tracked down in Băiţa. It was called Sovromcuarţ – but they weren't mining quartz.
Pulling mere quartz from the Băiţa mine wouldn't have caused the terrible effects he saw in the villagers. At night, under limp trees, Edmund talked with the local people and shared glasses of homemade ţuică – every community of Eastern Europe had its own brand of plum moonshine. He learned that the first workers sent into the mines were political prisoners. They died by the thousands. Then, the locals began working the mine and they, too, began to get sick.
The men and women who entered the mines aged almost overnight. They coughed and complained of headaches and bad stomachs. They were pale, their teeth and hair fell out, and their burns and wounds would not heal. Births had plummeted and the children who were born were sick, maimed, and many died.
The villagers and miners believed they were mining quartz, but quartz would not have caused the wasting illnesses and deformities. The Soviet overseers had sent the Romanians of Băiţa into mines to bring out uranium ore and the Soviets were hauling it way by the ton, north and east, to fuel their atomic program.
In cajoling the truth from drunk witnesses across cultural divides, it was hard to know precisely when the wary Romanians became even more cautious. The warning signs though, were there and were familiar once they began to happen. The villagers stopped sharing their palincă and refused the cigarettes he offered in trade. When he strolled into the village for a bowl of çiorba for supper, they closed their doors and sent him away.
A new element had entered the area and it was very like the fear in Katyn and from Gouzenko and in some of the other places in between and since where he'd tried to document Stalin's atrocities and the reach of Soviet oppression. For the miners' safety and his own, Edmund knew it was time to move on.
Two days later, he stabled the horse in the next village and crept back into Băiţa on foot. After dark, he prowled around the huts, listened at the open windows and doors, and heard the word păianjen spoken in frightened whispers.
Spider.
He hurried back to where he had kept his horse and was relieved to find the mare still alive.
There was a note, in English, stuck to the horse's halter: Fly Crow or die..
The Spider did not intend to delay him. She did not steal the papers and money he had buried in the manure pile that were necessary for a quick departure. She did take everything else, including his journal.
ooOOoo
Edmund finally met Natalia "Natasha" Romanova in the winter of 1982. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was (he thought) a young-looking 55, and didn't have to pretend anymore, though he was really about 70. Natasha was 55, had finally stopped pretending, too, and she looked about 25.
He was Edmund Pevensie again. It had been a relief to leave Crow and all the other aliases, working names, and code names behind. The uncertainty about his true identity, and the sheer number of fake ones, was probably what kept him alive through the 50s and 60s. His pension – and he did wonder if the British intelligence service regretted that he survived long enough to collect it – went further in places other than England. So, for the moment, the former British agent known as Crow had a flat in Trieste.
It was once the Free Territory of Trieste, Zone A, under joint American and British rule until 1954 when the Allies ceded part of Trieste back to Italy and another part of the area to Yugoslavia. One would think superpowers were done with partitioning the world into pieces that suited mapmakers and geopoliticians who could only think in straight lines.
He knew this jumping off point into the Adriatic and the Balkans very well. The city's locale made it a crossroads for trade, business, coffee, spies, and refugees. The latter two meant Edmund could augment his meager pension with a little work on the side that the lax Italian authorities ignored. Ostensibly, he was a printer and bookbinder. Edmund had learned the forger's craft from the very best – the criminals hidden in the basement of the British Embassy to the United States during the War. (The War, the one that came after the War To End All Wars and not the "conflicts" in Korea and Vietnam). People fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain know that his little shop at the edge of the Città Vecchia would get you very good papers for a very good price.
Edmund had crossed and crossed paths with a lot of people over the years and he was fortunate that none of them seemed inclined to want to kill him now. Though fear of his sister's anger if he were to meet an untimely end had probably stayed the hand of many.
Clint Barton appeared one day, looking like it had been a long succession of planes, trains, boats, and cars to find him. From the dirt, he probably came from the east. Barton grunted a greeting, dropped a bag in the guest bedroom above the shop, shut the door, and Edmund didn't see him for another eighteen hours. When Barton finally reappeared, he walked through the front door of the shop, even though Edmund never saw him leave the upstairs flat. Edmund knew Hawks needed their freedom and so he always left a window open when they stayed.
Barton brought coffees and warm putiza from the bakery.
Edmund closed the store and they went out to the harbour and sat on a bench to watch the barges come in.
"It's an assignment for S.H.I.E.L.D.," Barton said, carefully picking off the last of the sticky crumbs from the paper wrapper and flicking them into the water for the fish. "I heard you've run across her, too."
There could be only one assignment that would send Clint Barton here, for a her.
"Yes, I have," Edmund replied.
"I've met her before, in the States. A few other places."
A tugboat's horn blasted, startling the gulls who had been hovering about them looking for scraps. Barton stirred the foamy top of his cooling coffee and finished it off.
"I greatly respect her skill," Edmund said. "I am sure she's been stealing my journals since the 40s."
Barton's mouth twitched into a thin smile. "She mentioned that and complained that they were all coded."
"Well, they are mine and I wasn't going to make it easy," Edmund replied. "After she chased me out of Băiţa in '53, I began leaving things for her to find."
"She mentioned that, too," Barton said.
Edmund was suddenly reassessing why Barton had come to see him before setting out to assassinate the Black Widow. "So it might have helped?" he asked cautiously, purposefully injecting a note of hope.
"We've talked a fair amount. She's been asking the right questions. I had some answers."
Barton looked around, seeing as the raptors of Narnia did, and apparently seeing nothing concerning. "Word is that the Crow always believed that no one is a lost cause. She'd heard the same thing. If I'm wrong about you…"
I'll kill you and go about my business.
"No," Edmund replied calmly. "You aren't wrong. I would be sorry if you had to kill her."
Barton had made a calculated risk in starting here rather than some other far more convenient insertion point into the Soviet Union. Barton knew Edmund's reputation, knew his history with the Black Widow, and his current trade in forging papers that would get a fleeing dissident or defecting spy through Eastern Bloc checkpoints and border crossings.
"I will need a few days and not-to-current pictures of her if you have them."
"That's fine," Barton said. "I've got cash. Haven't told S.H.I.E.L.D. that it wasn't all for the bribes."
"Just to cover my expense is all that is necessary. But if you could get her to return my journals, I'd be grateful."
Within a week, Barton was gone. Edmund did not expect any news. Assuming Romanova didn't kill Barton, and that Barton didn't kill Romanova, and that the KGB or the GRU didn't kill one or both of them, there was no particular reason why they needed to return through Trieste.
He did hold out a forlorn hope of getting his journals back.
Two weeks, then three, passed. Then a month, and then a second. Winters on the Adriatic were usually mild but that December an early, cold Bora blew in. The knock on his door was barely loud enough to be heard over both the wind and the Beatles on his stereo.
Barton and Romanova stumbled in. From the smell of oil, vomit, and fish, the dark rain slickers, and their green faces, he assumed they had come by boat.
They argued about who would dig the bullet out of Clint's upper arm and who would stitch up Natasha's knife wound. As Edmund was the only without injury, he thought he should be the one to do it and finally prevailed and performed the minor surgery on both of them. They were both starving so Edmund fed them two kilos of pasta and then sent them to the guest room.
He spent the rest of the night at the window with Susan's old Beretta in his lap. Barton and Romanova had thought they'd lost the last of their pursuit in Tirana. Still, they would keep a lookout until Barton hammered out how he was going to get them back both back to the States and explain to S.H.I.E.L.D that he hadn't killed his target but had lured her into defecting.
The wind began to quiet and Edmund thought maybe they might actually see sun in the morning. Behind him, he didn't sense any movement but heard the warning creak of the stair and then a muttered curse in Russian.
"At dawn, I'll go to bed and you or Barton can keep watch," Edmund said to the woman silently creeping toward him. It wasn't comfortable to have the Black Widow at his back, but if she wanted to kill him, she would have tried harder years ago.
There was a soft thunk on the table beside him. "Thank you for returning them," Edmund said, glancing at the stolen notebooks then returning to stare out the window.
"You're welcome," Romanova replied. "Thank you for getting us the papers. You and I are clear now."
Edmund would have done the work for her even without the return of his journals but did not argue the point to the Black Widow. She was leaving a brutal past behind, had a very uncertain future totally dependent on what Barton could negotiate with S.H.I.E.L.D., and she didn't want new obligations going forward. Some people always needed their personal ledgers to balance.
She pulled a chair forward, just behind his, careful to neither expose herself at the window nor block his own view of the street.
"I tried, for years, to understand what you wrote," Romanova said. "It's why I kept stealing them. I was hoping to find a key."
"There is no key. It's all in my head. Though Barton said you were able to decode some of it."
"Yes, some. The word kavossed," Romanova said. "The word appeared in your entries about Katyn, Ottawa, Băiţa, Yugoslavia, Prague, Poland, Budapest, northern India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Guatemala, Argentina, and Cuba."
"And others," Edmund said. He looked over at her and then returned to watching the street. Romanova was very composed; she wasn't the sort to restlessly fidget, unless it was her cover to do so. He had seeded the journals for her. Now, she logically had questions and had patiently waited a long time for her answers. "In the code, kavossed means many dead people."
"Galma is the Soviet Union and Jadis is Stalin? Miraz is Khrushchev?" she asked.
"Yes. You probably noticed that kavossed frequently appeared in conjunction with those words.
"And the tally marks next to kavossed were how you counted the number of dead people?"
"Yes."
"There were a lot of dead people," she said slowly. "Thousands."
"Tens and hundreds of thousands of dead," Edmund said. "One of my assignments has been to document the atrocities of your former masters, and the other dictators who followed their example."
"And you gave just enough information in your journals for me to be able to decode it and read what you were discovering."
"You aren't blind. Surely you had your doubts about those who created you," Edmund said.
"You assumed I would be weak and would care."
"Feeling compassion is not necessarily weakness," Edmund replied. "As Barton has now demonstrated in pulling you out rather than killing you."
A gust of wind rattled the windows and he sensed Romanova tense next to him. Edmund listened closely but the banging outside was only the loose shutter on the bakery window across the street. It turned quiet again.
"And Hound? There were letters to Hound in the early notebooks but you stopped writing about it."
"Yes," Edmund said. "I wasn't comfortable knowing that anyone was reading them. I stopped writing to her in any journal I thought you might steal."
"Her?" Romanova repeated.
"My dead wife."
"I didn't know you were married. It wasn't in your file."
No, it wouldn't be.
"It was a long time ago," Edmund told her.
She got up and moved around behind him and shuffled the journals on the table. "There was one letter to Hound that came after, though. You were in the middle of writing it when I stole it from your hotel room in Czechoslovakia, in 1968. I was able to decipher most of that one."
"Could you? At that point, I suppose you had enough material." In fact, the letter tucked into the 1968 journal had not been written to his dead wife, who had learned the truth contained within that letter during their marriage. It was a message he had written specifically for the Black Widow to find, in the hope that she might some day heed it.
"Here," Romanova said, pulling the letter out of the journal on top. Even in the dark, Edmund could see that the letter was well-creased and thumbed. "You wrote to her that you had done something terrible, once."
"Yes. And I received a great act of mercy in return. Every day since then has been a calling to show others the same hope for forgiveness that I received, even when it is not deserved."
"That's very naïve, Crow."
"I call it grace, Black Widow. Everyone deserves a second chance."
ooOOoo
Part 4: Hulk like Lucy
Author's Notes for Part 4:
Marvel movieverse with minor spoilers for The Hulk (2008) and beginning of The Avengers (2012). AU for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle.
ooOOoo
Bruce isn't sure when he first notices the announcement. Later, he'll recognize that that's just how S.H.I.E.L.D. does things. He has to give them credit – it's hard to fool him and it all seemed so innocuous – no, it was innocuous, he never saw it coming.
Knowing what he does now, what he learned because of those notices, he would not have stopped it either and would not have done a thing differently.
There isn't much in Bella Coola, British Columbia, population 600, and there's even less in his remote cabin. He misses living on the grid and a lightning fast Internet connection. He misses Mythbusters and Top Chef, misses Reds baseball, and misses the Portuguese feijoada and the food trucks that would come to the bottling plant in Rochina. He misses being in a laboratory with bright students and brilliant post-docs, and colleagues with vacant looks, astounding ideas, Tootsie Pops, and sonic screwdrivers in their lab coat pockets. He misses clean rooms, bright lights, properly calibrated equipment, and safety goggles. On the other hand, in Bella Coola, there are no university administrators, pharmaceutical sales reps, and nosy oversight committees concerned about following rules for human subject research.
Still, it's worth it. The isolation is good for keeping the Other Guy in check and keeping Them away from both of Them. He's not going to risk the conveniences that could come with a satellite phone given what could come to him from the other end. So Bruce contents himself with a relaxing 20 km roundtrip jog into town twice a week to pick up his mail – the Vancouver newspapers, physics journals, yoga magazines, Mother Jones, , Rolling Stone, and Bon Appétit.
Wedged between Applied Physics Today and the Journal of Spiritual Awakening he finds a flyer, This Month at the University of BC, Vancouver Campus.
Bruce turns the flyer over, and his eyes skip over the photography exhibit on carnivores, the Women in Microeconomics symposium, and the annual Robot Building Contest. He stops when he sees her, a fuzzy black and white photograph and bio blurb copied and pasted from the thousand that have preceded it. He recognizes her name in the vague way of colleagues discussing who did not earn Nobel Prizes that year and that Dr. Lucy Pevensie was always on a short list for Peace.
He didn't know she was so old.
Answering Your Call – How To Be Valiant In Every Day Life. Jointly sponsored by the Faculties of Arts and Medicine. Join world-renowned humanitarian Doctor Lucy Pevensie for an evening discussion about aiding the whole person. Dr. Pevensie comes to us having just returned from her work with a network of clinics in Rwanda and Zimbabwe providing HIV/AIDS treatment and support for women and children. Her special focus has been psychosocial counseling to populations traumatized by political violence and natural disasters. She is currently assisting local healthcare professionals in meeting the unique patient needs in India-administered Kashmir and vulnerable tsunami-affected communities in Aceh Province, Indonesia.
Doctor Pevensie with her brother Edmund Pevensie are noted also for their work investigating mass grave sites and disappearances, with significant work in Poland, Romania, Argentina, Chile, and Sri Lanka.
Bruce thought he tossed it in the trash but somehow the flyer gets wedged into the Mother Jones and he brings it home. Maybe there were two flyers.
He sees a poster at the grocery store four days later and there's an article about Doctor Pevensie in the Vancouver paper the day after that. It's not very well-written, obviously picked up from wire services and outdated Wikipedia entries, but even that makes for a compelling story. Doctor Pevensie has been walking the walk for a very long time. The article dates her political awakening to 1942 when she was making noise about the Holocaust before it was even called a Holocaust.
The weather is good (for British Columbia). Then he notices the price of gas falls. It's a long drive, but he's got his iPod – he rocks to the hard and sings off key to the rest. He has Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Book on Tape (though they aren't tapes anymore) and 12 hours in his hybrid isn't going to be a problem and he can even charge it up in Vancouver.
The Other Guy has to come along but he's not been out in 113 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes, 25 seconds. Bruce wishes more than anything he could leave him behind, but it doesn't work that way. On the safe side (and Bruce always plays it safe where the care and feeding of the Other Guy are concerned), he uses a pay phone (they are hard to find these days) and makes a reservation at a camp site on the Bay.
The drive is relaxing and he alternates between Glam Rock of the 70s (for the irony), Best of the 80s Top 40 (for the singing along) and classic rock which he thinks the Other Guy likes. They both seem to agree on Zeppelin, the Stones, and Pink Floyd ("all in all you're just another brick in the … SMASH"). Bruce remembers a vegetarian place near the university that does a great spicy mock duck. He's completely relaxed and the Other Guy isn't making any noise at all.
Again, later, Bruce will realize that S.H.I.E.L.D. is greasing his wheels and that's why there's no wait anywhere, no one speaks to him unless spoken to, and there's a free parking space a two block walk to the auditorium where Doctor Pevensie is speaking. Lucy will say that you don't have to like them to take advantage of what they offer, and so it is.
The auditorium isn't as crowded as he would have expected it to be and he takes a seat on the aisle, drinking in the pleasure of being in an academic environment again. Doctor Pevensie is walking up and down the aisles of the amphitheater, shaking hands and hugging people. The article made him think she was about 75, give or take. She's wearing khakis and rolled up sleeves, boots that have seen a lot of wear and a bright scarf of red and gold around her neck. Her face is lined and tanned and her gray hair close cropped but something really bright seems to shine from her. Everyone seems to follow her, in the way that moths are attracted to lights in the dark.
She turns around and Bruce has that sense she's looking for someone as she scans the filling auditorium.
Their eyes meet and hers widen. He freezes in his chair, feeling panic, worried for a moment that the Other Guy is surging out to take over. Then he thinks he's got it all wrong because he'd swear the Other Guy is smiling back, gap toothed and crookedly, at Doctor Lucy Pevensie. She strides up the aisle, taking two steps at a time, holding out a hand.
He doesn't want to take it, but she's already seized his and is pumping it.
"Thank you so much for coming," she says. "I'm Lucy, obviously."
"Bruce Banner," he manages.
"It is lovely to meet you, Bruce." She releases his hand, reaches out, and rests her palm on his chest. "And your friend?"
"He's…" He stammers and gulps. What just happened? "Not a friend." He stares down at her hand resting over his heart, wondering what he would see if he could see gamma radiation flowing from him to her over the bridge of her arm. "The Other Guy," he whispers. "Hulk."
"Well that does not do at all for me." She purses her lips in a frown. "You remind me a little of a Giant I once knew."
She's not talking to him, that is Bruce, but to the Other Guy locked inside him. Lucy rattles on. "He was prone to fits, which is certainly to be expected when one's understanding is not strong and everything moves far too fast to catch up and bad people are always trying to use you for their own corrupt purposes. He was a good friend to me. Might I call you Stormybuffin?"
Bruce doesn't say anything. Doctor Lucy Pevensie is obviously not sane on any parameter of the DSM and she's touching him as if they were old friends, and not only has she somehow seen the Hulk within him, she's naming him like a pet gerbil but who was a Giant? Except the Other Guy seems perfectly content with all this and Bruce senses that if he tried to sneak out now, the Other Guy would put up a fight.
Doctor Pevensie kisses him on the cheek. "You both will join me after? For prayer?"
And then she flits away.
He doesn't recall much of the talk. Doctor Pevensie doesn't speak in intellectual terms about data and facts, figures, budgets, fundraising goals, and costs of patented prescription drugs that are interfering with treatment options in the places she serves. She speaks of embracing and healing the whole person, and of security in mind and body being a fundamental human right. She tells stories. She makes people laugh. She makes them cry. She inspires.
There's wild applause and he tries to slink away but Doctor Pevensie gives a warm smile and a steely look and it's like demented love at first sight for the Other Guy.
oOOoo
Bruce tries to convince her that he should just go back to his reserved camp ground. He shouldn't let her link her arm in his and walk through the parks around the UBC campus. It's late, his car will be towed, mutant commandos will swoop in, someone will try to rob them and hell will open up.
"Lucy," she says firmly when he keeps calling her Doctor Pevensie. "Bruce, you must call me Lucy." She complains that it's too dark and late to go to Wreck Beach.
"That's the nude beach, Lucy," he replies laughing at her joke.
"I know! It would be marvelous, wouldn't it?"
So, not a joke. Given that the Other Guy will grow right out of and rip to pieces whatever clothes he's wearing, leaving him naked when he changes back, nudity is something Bruce has had to become more accustomed to – not a normal state for a physicist. Still, he can't comprehend going all natural with a 75 year old woman he met barely three hours ago.
At her hotel, he wants to take the stairs, not the elevator, to her suite. The Other Guy isn't good in small, closed in spaces.
"Oh nonsense!" Lucy says, tapping his chest again. "You'll be fine, won't you Stormybuffin?"
Bruce has to admit that he is fretting more than the Other Guy. At least they are only going to the third floor.
In her hotel room, Lucy tosses her backpack on a chair and flops down on the floor. Moving a little stiffly, she pulls off her boots and shoves them aside. "Sit!" she commands. "Wherever you like. You need to meditate and I need to pray. We'll talk after."
Lucy doesn't say another word for the next 45 minutes. He is rattled yet still rational enough to know meditation would help. With the strange environment and the unsettling person, he should be simmering with dangerous impatience. But it's quiet in the hotel room and Lucy is already leaning against the wall, eyes closed, murmuring to herself. What did housekeeping use to give the room the wonderful smell?
Bruce joins her on the floor, takes a deep breath, and begins his mantra.
It's so peaceful and he relaxes so quickly, Bruce nearly falls asleep. He rouses when he senses Lucy moving quietly about the room.
He lets out the breath, unfolds his legs, and stretches his neck. He feels great.
She hands him a glass of water and sets out bags of nuts and fruit on the floor that are from a local health food store. "I have some Pop Tarts," she says, sounding a little defensive. "Brown sugar cinnamon. I always take a trip south of the border when I'm in Canada and stock up."
"Thanks, but this is fine." Brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts are evidently a personal favorite of Lucy's, and he doesn't want to deplete her stash; he knows how he'd feel about sharing Tootsie Pops – the Other Guy always wants to crunch down to the chewy center right away so they are a good exercise in compromise and control.
"How did you know?" he asks.
"About Stormybuffin?" Lucy shrugs and sits again on the floor. "I spent ten years here with a spiritual guide, of sorts. I'm very intuitive. I've been a healer all my life. And I'm very familiar with that phenomenon of something that is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. I see things others don't, Bruce."
"Things larger on the inside than on the outside violate the law of the conservation of mass," Bruce replies. He's never been able to figure out how the huge Other Guy comes out his small self. It shouldn't happen.
She laughs. "I suppose it is magic, then."
"There's nothing magical about the Other Guy," he replies bitterly. "He's a monster. It's very dangerous for anyone to be close to me, including you."
"That's not what Aslan just told me," Lucy says. She slowly unwinds the bright scarf around her neck and Bruce sees it had red and gold lions on it. Lucy sets it reverently aside and pops almonds in her mouth.
"Who is Aslan?" Bruce asks sharply. Is it an acronym for something he needs to run from? Should he start running now?
"I call him Aslan. I'm not sure what you call him."
"When did you talk to him?" She'd not made any phone calls. He'd not seen anyone suspicious approach her.
"Aslan and I talked while I was praying."
"Aslan is in your head?" Now Bruce wonders, not about government conspiracies and super soldiers, but about dissociative personality disorders and schizophrenia. Except Lucy seems to be one of the saner people he has ever met.
"Of a sort, yes. As I said, I don't know what you call him and he has many names in many worlds. I met him first as Aslan and that is who he will always be to me." The cellophane package holding the dried nuts and fruit makes a crackling sound as she digs into it. "I appreciate your worry, Bruce, and I thank you for it. However, I have nothing to fear from you or Stormybuffin. When Aslan calls me home, it shall not be at your hand."
She offers him some grapes. The brown paper they were wrapped in has turned soggy but the fruit is very sweet tasting.
Was Lucy talking about God? Or a god? He doesn't know what to make of it. The only god Bruce knows is the ridiculously-named god particle that Higgs proposed in 1964 and he feels a brief pang for the prospect of working at CERN with brilliant colleagues on world-changing revelations of science instead of meditating in the wild with only the Other Guy for company.
"Aslan has told you when you will die?" If Aslan could tell him how to kill the monster within and die, Bruce would have Lucy Pevensie baptize him into her religion right there in room 343 of the Sheraton suites.
"When my work is done, I shall die, and not before," Lucy says with great confidence. "As my work is not done, I shall not be dying today or anytime soon. Which brings me to you. I want you to come with me."
"Where?"
"Well anywhere is a start, but how about Kolkata. I'm affiliated with a clinic there. Wonderful staff. They need another doctor."
"I thought you meant out to dinner or to Wrecks Beach?!"
"Well, maybe them, too. But Kolkata." Lucy pauses, looks a little vacant. Bruce wonders if Aslan, whoever Aslan is, it talking to her
"Yes," Lucy says, sounding decided. "Kolkata."
"Me?" he squeaks, now seeing she's wholly serious. "Pack up and go? India? Just like that? To Kolkata?"
"Yes! It would be so good for you, to be helping people. You've been a hermit long enough and you and Stormybuffin have things under control. The nurses at the clinic are lovely and are completely overwhelmed. The needs are so great, HIV/AIDS, TB, parasitic infection, cholera. There is so much you could do there."
He wonders where she fits on the DSM – probably some sort of delusional disorder not otherwise specified. "Lucy, me and the Other Guy in a crowded, urban, Indian city could not be good for anyone. I should not be seeking out things that make me angry."
Lucy snorts. "Oh Bruce, I do hate to quote trite American bumper stickers, but if you aren't angry at what has been done to our world and the poorest, most vulnerable people in it, you haven't been paying attention."
"You don't want to make me angry," Bruce repeats. "That's when the Other Guy comes out."
"I don't doubt that, Bruce. But you and Stormybuffin would benefit from learning how anger is not always the enemy. It can also be a powerful motivator. I am angry all the time."
"It's different, Lucy. The last time I was truly angry, the Other Guy and I broke part of New York City."
"In a place like Kolkata, you won't let that happen."
He has no idea where her confidence comes from. "How can you know that?" he demands.
"Bruce, in Kolkata, you will be among people who have far more reason to be angry than you do. I think a place like that is perfect because you and Stormybuffin know that if you lose control, you will hurt the people you are trying to help and destroy whatever little they do have."
She leans back, looking satisfied, certain she's carried the argument. "Yes, I think Kolkata is perfect. Good yoga instruction, too."
Bruce feels the anger rise up, but it's his own, not that of the Other Guy. Lucy shifts, digs into her pocket, and pulls out that very old fashioned British thing known as a handkerchief. She presses it into his hands.
"Don't worry, it's clean," she says. "I gave one to a very good, respectable Giant I knew a long time ago. I'd like you and Stormybuffin to have one, too." She sniffs and looks sad. Neither Bruce nor the Other Guy wants to see Lucy sad.
He stares at the delicate little white square and imagines it torn to bits in a big, green hand. "Lucy, there are some very important people who are very interested in me, and if they can't control me, they would certainly try to kill me."
She shakes her head. "As I see it, it is good if they are afraid of you. We'll sail right through airport security."
"You are willing to travel with me and the Other Guy in a pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet?"
"That means the flight will be on time! They will probably upgrade us to first class!"
Bruce learns that in the abused, poor, and exploited places in the world, Lucy Pevensie is angry all the time. Sometimes, that isn't a bad thing.
Original Prompt: (e.g. specific ship or character, England fic, Golden Age fic, AU, set during a ball, someone falls ill, whatever, etc.) Lucy, Polly, and/or Susan being badass in England, bonus points if they end up commandeering a plane or something. Crossovers, especially with Marvel-verse characters, where the Pevensies get to use their unique adult skills for wartime/Cold War purposes. Anything set in rthstewart-verse.
Author:
rthstewart Recipient:
intrikate88Rating: Gen, mild T, PG (for reference to wartime actions)
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Minor spoilers for Captain America: The First Avenger; Marvel Comics; The Incredible Hulk (2008); The Avengers (2012); Alternative Universe for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle. Contains references to war crimes and uses period-appropriate terms for race.
Summary: Susan and Peggy go shooting; Peter and Steve get in a bar fight; Crow, Spider, Hawk fight the Cold War; Hulk like Lucy.
Narnians Assemble!
Author's Notes for Part 3:
The Marvel wiki identifies 1928 as the approximate year of the Black Widow's birth and states she ages very slowly. The year she defects is unclear and I can't reconcile it with Hawkeye's apparent age in The Avengers particularly since "defection" usually denotes the Cold War era before the Berlin Wall comes down in November 1989. AU for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle. In
rthstewart's stories, King Edmund is strongly identified with crows and he is married to a banker-accountant during the Golden Age.ooOOoo
Part 3: Crow, Spider, Hawk and the Cold War
Time didn't run in the normal way for them. The Crow of Narnia and the Black Widow of the Soviet Union were born in the same year, yet neither of them was the age that appeared on the birth record (real or forged) or passport (real or forged). Edmund spent his first adolescence and young adulthood in Narnia and then repeated it all over again in Spare Oom. Given what was done to her by a long line of overseers, controllers and apparatchiki, Natalia "Natasha" Romanova didn't age normally. This meant that when, after nearly four decades of crossing paths, they did finally actually meet one another, Edmund looked (if he did say so himself) a young 55 but had lived for 70 or more years, and Natasha looked an old 25 but had lived for 55 years.
It was the sort of mathematical calculation that made Edmund miss his Narnian wife, dead over a thousand years, or forty, depending on how the years were counted and when.
The first time Edmund saw Natasha was in January 1944. For that operation, he was Private Harold Linch, bag carrier and secretary to the British-American delegation invited by the Soviets to lend credence to the lie that it was really Nazis and not the Soviets who had murdered over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals and buried thousands of them in the Katyn Forest. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 16, pretending to be 19 but really about 32; Natasha was 16, pretending to be 19, and if he had seen more than her eyes, she would have looked about 25.
The whole escapade was a whitewash and the stench of the Soviets' lie was greater even than that of the thousands of corpses that were being exhumed, stacked like cordwood, and autopsied by Soviet physicians. The mildewed dead were still in their faded blue-grey Army uniforms; you could see the Polish eagle on the tarnished brass buttons. Edmund was a veteran of Narnian battlefields and had borne witness to the mass graves left by Jadis and the Telmarines; Katyn was far more terrible.
All the Poles had been killed the same way – a bullet through the back of the skull. The Soviet physicians conducting the postmortems swore the bodies had been in the ground for two years – perfectly coinciding with the time in which Germans rather than the Red Army controlled the area. Terrified and intimidated witnesses insisted that the Nazis had killed the Poles in August and September 1941 though the testimony was rote and inconsistent with the physical evidence. Why did so many of the dead wear fur-lined winter coats if they supposedly died in the summer? Why were the few postcards and receipts dating from 1941 that were exhumed seem so much newer than the grubby, yellowed, filthy letters from 1940? Might it have been because the Poles were murdered by Soviets in the early spring of 1940 and not by Nazis in the late summer of 1941 and evidence was manufactured to absolve the Soviets and cast blame on the Nazis?
As the farce wore on, Edmund suspected that the Americans summoned to "investigate" were as coerced as the witnesses. Preserving the ever-shaky Anglo-American alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union was, in 1944, more important than the truth of who killed 20,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia.
In a cold, stinking tent, Edmund was standing at an autopsy table taking notes in his journal as a British journalist tried to question one of the physicians through the translator. Edmund's own Russian and German were passable enough that he could tell that what the correspondent was asking was not at all what the translator was repeating. The physician was obviously confused.
In the middle of the frustrating exchange, a nurse approached their table. White smocked and masked, she was wearing a bulky coat over an orange apron and luridly red gloves. Her hard, cold eyes peered over the surgical mask and met Edmund's own in a blunt, unblinking challenge. She didn't say anything, but she did not need to do so. The physician took one look at her and dissolved into incoherent stammers. With a satisfied nod, the nurse turned and walked away.
When it was time for the delegation to leave, they all washed their hands, scrapped the foul muck from their boots, and lined up at the edge of camp to make their farewells to their hosts before climbing back into the cars that would return them to the train station. Edmund again saw the nurse among the medical staff, still masked and watching him closely. Luggage changed hands, bodies bumped, and they were herded into the waiting cars. As their train pulled away from the station, Edmund discovered that his journal was gone.
ooOOoo
The second time Edmund saw Natasha was in September 1945. For that operation, he was Lieutenant Merle Just, bag carrier and secretary to the British security detail hurriedly dispatched to Ottawa in the wake of Igor Gouzenko's spectacular defection to Canada. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 18, pretending to be 23 but really about 35; Natasha was 18, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen more than her lithe shadow, she would have looked about 25.
The truth of Katyn was victim first to the brutal exigencies of wartime alliances, and then to the Cold War. The Cold War itself probably started when Gouzenko told his wife, Svetlana, he had just decoded a cable that ordered his return to Moscow. Gouzenko knew that meant a welcome home with a GRU, KGB, or NKVD bullet in the skull, just like those 12,000 Poles in Katyn. Svetlana told Gouzenko to open the safe in the Russian Legation in Ottawa, take everything out of it, change the combination, and take the top secret papers straight to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a plea for asylum.
When the Mounties went to monitor the Gouzenkos' apartment, Edmund joined them. They were all hidden in a park across the street and observed four men from the Soviet embassy come looking for Gouzenko. As the drama unfolded, Edmund couldn't shake the feeling that, as they watched the Soviets, there was someone else watching him, the Mounties, and the Soviet agents stomp about in the apartment building. The harder he looked, the more elusive it was, but he was sure someone had seen it all from the rooftop of a building on the other side of the park.
Gouzenko's defection was sensational news. It was, after all, only September 1945 and the Soviets were still supposed to be allies. After a broadcast was planted that Gouzenko had been spirited away to a safehouse in the Laurentians, the Soviets and the press went haring off in that direction while the debriefing actually occurred hundreds of kilometres in the other direction. They moved Gouzenko to the abandoned Camp X on Lake Ontario; the SOE had trained there during the War.
During a break in the questioning on their second night, Edmund went outside for a cigarette. He met one of the guards, a cautious, loyal, unimaginative Mountie, who was pacing the length of the barbed wire perimeter of the compound.
"What is it?" Edmund asked, reaching for his gun rather than the light.
"I don't know, sir. I thought I saw something on the other side of the fence. It's probably nothing."
Edmund peered out into the darkness and looked for movement independent of the autumn breeze. "There?" he asked quietly, pointing in the direction of a stand of trees. "Something darker than what is around it?"
"Yes, sir. It wasn't there a minute ago." And a minute later, it disappeared.
They doubled the guard.
Weeks later, in civilian clothes, Edmund Pevensie (no longer Lieutenant Merle Just) was embarking on the long journey that would return him to London for the Christmas hols. He was weary and even more worried for if the Soviets had infiltrated the Canadians, surely they had done the same to the Americans and the British.
He picked up the shadow when he got off the bus in Ottawa and couldn't convince himself that he had lost the small, dark shape he saw only in store windows and taxi cab mirrors before he boarded the train to New York. He exhausted hours prowling the train's aisles. He broke into the baggage car and paid a fortune to keep his ideal vantage in the dining car when he did sit. Edmund didn't see anything sinister but he also was certain he was being watched.
When the train pulled into New York, it was the usual crush to leave the cars. Edmund hung back, moving slowly, letting others push past him, and closely watching out the window as people disembarked. Ahead of him in the line, Edmund saw the back of a slim, nimble, red-headed woman. No luggage. Snug black trousers and a trim coat. Her silhouette reminded him of the nurse in Katyn and if she turned around, he thought he would see the same cold, eyes.
It was the self-sufficient professionalism that gave her away. She eschewed the porter's offered hand, jumped down from the train, and expertly melted into the crowd on the platform without succumbing to what Edmund knew was an overwhelming desire to look back and see if your mark had marked you.
Edmund tried to push through the crowd to follow her, but he was hopelessly far behind. And he was already too late. In the taxi to the seaport, he discovered that his briefcase had been expertly cut open and, again, his journals taken.
ooOOoo
The third time Edmund saw Natasha was in the summer of 1953. For this operation, he was carrying papers from three countries (all identifying him as local variations of Georg Acković), his saddlebags were stuffed with the favoured currency of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain (chocolate, gum, and cigarettes), and he had a notebook, Romanian lei to buy fodder for his horse, and a small camera hidden in a canteen. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was 26, pretending to be 26 but really about 43; Natasha was 26, pretending to be 25, and if he had seen her threatening the villagers of Băiţa, she would have looked about 25.
That summer, as Edmund rode through the Carpathians and the no man's land between Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, he could shut his eyes, hear the bleating of goats, smell the hay, and think he was traveling again in Narnia or Archenland. The 20th century had never come to the area. Crops were still being cut by hand; everything still moved by horse or ox; livestock roamed the dirt roads. The men were toothless, weather stained, and stooped. The women wore the same shapeless, dark skirts and flowered scarves they'd worn for generations. They used crowbars, hoes, and pickaxes to break rock and till the hard, thin soil. The Serbs, Hungarians, and Romanians (and anyone who bothered to meet them and listen to their languages should realize that each was culturally, ethnically, and temperamentally different) had been waiting for the American liberation since the War. But after Yalta, it was the Soviets who came, demanded reparations, and stayed.
He'd been sent to investigate what the West called SovRoms, joint Soviet-Romanian enterprises intended to develop the economy but which their intelligence had indicated were mostly the Soviets bleeding Romania of oil, wood, coal, iron, and natural gas. The one of particular concern was a mining operation Edmund tracked down in Băiţa. It was called Sovromcuarţ – but they weren't mining quartz.
Pulling mere quartz from the Băiţa mine wouldn't have caused the terrible effects he saw in the villagers. At night, under limp trees, Edmund talked with the local people and shared glasses of homemade ţuică – every community of Eastern Europe had its own brand of plum moonshine. He learned that the first workers sent into the mines were political prisoners. They died by the thousands. Then, the locals began working the mine and they, too, began to get sick.
The men and women who entered the mines aged almost overnight. They coughed and complained of headaches and bad stomachs. They were pale, their teeth and hair fell out, and their burns and wounds would not heal. Births had plummeted and the children who were born were sick, maimed, and many died.
The villagers and miners believed they were mining quartz, but quartz would not have caused the wasting illnesses and deformities. The Soviet overseers had sent the Romanians of Băiţa into mines to bring out uranium ore and the Soviets were hauling it way by the ton, north and east, to fuel their atomic program.
In cajoling the truth from drunk witnesses across cultural divides, it was hard to know precisely when the wary Romanians became even more cautious. The warning signs though, were there and were familiar once they began to happen. The villagers stopped sharing their palincă and refused the cigarettes he offered in trade. When he strolled into the village for a bowl of çiorba for supper, they closed their doors and sent him away.
A new element had entered the area and it was very like the fear in Katyn and from Gouzenko and in some of the other places in between and since where he'd tried to document Stalin's atrocities and the reach of Soviet oppression. For the miners' safety and his own, Edmund knew it was time to move on.
Two days later, he stabled the horse in the next village and crept back into Băiţa on foot. After dark, he prowled around the huts, listened at the open windows and doors, and heard the word păianjen spoken in frightened whispers.
Spider.
He hurried back to where he had kept his horse and was relieved to find the mare still alive.
There was a note, in English, stuck to the horse's halter: Fly Crow or die..
The Spider did not intend to delay him. She did not steal the papers and money he had buried in the manure pile that were necessary for a quick departure. She did take everything else, including his journal.
ooOOoo
Edmund finally met Natalia "Natasha" Romanova in the winter of 1982. Assuming his calculations were correct, at the time, Edmund was (he thought) a young-looking 55, and didn't have to pretend anymore, though he was really about 70. Natasha was 55, had finally stopped pretending, too, and she looked about 25.
He was Edmund Pevensie again. It had been a relief to leave Crow and all the other aliases, working names, and code names behind. The uncertainty about his true identity, and the sheer number of fake ones, was probably what kept him alive through the 50s and 60s. His pension – and he did wonder if the British intelligence service regretted that he survived long enough to collect it – went further in places other than England. So, for the moment, the former British agent known as Crow had a flat in Trieste.
It was once the Free Territory of Trieste, Zone A, under joint American and British rule until 1954 when the Allies ceded part of Trieste back to Italy and another part of the area to Yugoslavia. One would think superpowers were done with partitioning the world into pieces that suited mapmakers and geopoliticians who could only think in straight lines.
He knew this jumping off point into the Adriatic and the Balkans very well. The city's locale made it a crossroads for trade, business, coffee, spies, and refugees. The latter two meant Edmund could augment his meager pension with a little work on the side that the lax Italian authorities ignored. Ostensibly, he was a printer and bookbinder. Edmund had learned the forger's craft from the very best – the criminals hidden in the basement of the British Embassy to the United States during the War. (The War, the one that came after the War To End All Wars and not the "conflicts" in Korea and Vietnam). People fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain know that his little shop at the edge of the Città Vecchia would get you very good papers for a very good price.
Edmund had crossed and crossed paths with a lot of people over the years and he was fortunate that none of them seemed inclined to want to kill him now. Though fear of his sister's anger if he were to meet an untimely end had probably stayed the hand of many.
Clint Barton appeared one day, looking like it had been a long succession of planes, trains, boats, and cars to find him. From the dirt, he probably came from the east. Barton grunted a greeting, dropped a bag in the guest bedroom above the shop, shut the door, and Edmund didn't see him for another eighteen hours. When Barton finally reappeared, he walked through the front door of the shop, even though Edmund never saw him leave the upstairs flat. Edmund knew Hawks needed their freedom and so he always left a window open when they stayed.
Barton brought coffees and warm putiza from the bakery.
Edmund closed the store and they went out to the harbour and sat on a bench to watch the barges come in.
"It's an assignment for S.H.I.E.L.D.," Barton said, carefully picking off the last of the sticky crumbs from the paper wrapper and flicking them into the water for the fish. "I heard you've run across her, too."
There could be only one assignment that would send Clint Barton here, for a her.
"Yes, I have," Edmund replied.
"I've met her before, in the States. A few other places."
A tugboat's horn blasted, startling the gulls who had been hovering about them looking for scraps. Barton stirred the foamy top of his cooling coffee and finished it off.
"I greatly respect her skill," Edmund said. "I am sure she's been stealing my journals since the 40s."
Barton's mouth twitched into a thin smile. "She mentioned that and complained that they were all coded."
"Well, they are mine and I wasn't going to make it easy," Edmund replied. "After she chased me out of Băiţa in '53, I began leaving things for her to find."
"She mentioned that, too," Barton said.
Edmund was suddenly reassessing why Barton had come to see him before setting out to assassinate the Black Widow. "So it might have helped?" he asked cautiously, purposefully injecting a note of hope.
"We've talked a fair amount. She's been asking the right questions. I had some answers."
Barton looked around, seeing as the raptors of Narnia did, and apparently seeing nothing concerning. "Word is that the Crow always believed that no one is a lost cause. She'd heard the same thing. If I'm wrong about you…"
I'll kill you and go about my business.
"No," Edmund replied calmly. "You aren't wrong. I would be sorry if you had to kill her."
Barton had made a calculated risk in starting here rather than some other far more convenient insertion point into the Soviet Union. Barton knew Edmund's reputation, knew his history with the Black Widow, and his current trade in forging papers that would get a fleeing dissident or defecting spy through Eastern Bloc checkpoints and border crossings.
"I will need a few days and not-to-current pictures of her if you have them."
"That's fine," Barton said. "I've got cash. Haven't told S.H.I.E.L.D. that it wasn't all for the bribes."
"Just to cover my expense is all that is necessary. But if you could get her to return my journals, I'd be grateful."
Within a week, Barton was gone. Edmund did not expect any news. Assuming Romanova didn't kill Barton, and that Barton didn't kill Romanova, and that the KGB or the GRU didn't kill one or both of them, there was no particular reason why they needed to return through Trieste.
He did hold out a forlorn hope of getting his journals back.
Two weeks, then three, passed. Then a month, and then a second. Winters on the Adriatic were usually mild but that December an early, cold Bora blew in. The knock on his door was barely loud enough to be heard over both the wind and the Beatles on his stereo.
Barton and Romanova stumbled in. From the smell of oil, vomit, and fish, the dark rain slickers, and their green faces, he assumed they had come by boat.
They argued about who would dig the bullet out of Clint's upper arm and who would stitch up Natasha's knife wound. As Edmund was the only without injury, he thought he should be the one to do it and finally prevailed and performed the minor surgery on both of them. They were both starving so Edmund fed them two kilos of pasta and then sent them to the guest room.
He spent the rest of the night at the window with Susan's old Beretta in his lap. Barton and Romanova had thought they'd lost the last of their pursuit in Tirana. Still, they would keep a lookout until Barton hammered out how he was going to get them back both back to the States and explain to S.H.I.E.L.D that he hadn't killed his target but had lured her into defecting.
The wind began to quiet and Edmund thought maybe they might actually see sun in the morning. Behind him, he didn't sense any movement but heard the warning creak of the stair and then a muttered curse in Russian.
"At dawn, I'll go to bed and you or Barton can keep watch," Edmund said to the woman silently creeping toward him. It wasn't comfortable to have the Black Widow at his back, but if she wanted to kill him, she would have tried harder years ago.
There was a soft thunk on the table beside him. "Thank you for returning them," Edmund said, glancing at the stolen notebooks then returning to stare out the window.
"You're welcome," Romanova replied. "Thank you for getting us the papers. You and I are clear now."
Edmund would have done the work for her even without the return of his journals but did not argue the point to the Black Widow. She was leaving a brutal past behind, had a very uncertain future totally dependent on what Barton could negotiate with S.H.I.E.L.D., and she didn't want new obligations going forward. Some people always needed their personal ledgers to balance.
She pulled a chair forward, just behind his, careful to neither expose herself at the window nor block his own view of the street.
"I tried, for years, to understand what you wrote," Romanova said. "It's why I kept stealing them. I was hoping to find a key."
"There is no key. It's all in my head. Though Barton said you were able to decode some of it."
"Yes, some. The word kavossed," Romanova said. "The word appeared in your entries about Katyn, Ottawa, Băiţa, Yugoslavia, Prague, Poland, Budapest, northern India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Guatemala, Argentina, and Cuba."
"And others," Edmund said. He looked over at her and then returned to watching the street. Romanova was very composed; she wasn't the sort to restlessly fidget, unless it was her cover to do so. He had seeded the journals for her. Now, she logically had questions and had patiently waited a long time for her answers. "In the code, kavossed means many dead people."
"Galma is the Soviet Union and Jadis is Stalin? Miraz is Khrushchev?" she asked.
"Yes. You probably noticed that kavossed frequently appeared in conjunction with those words.
"And the tally marks next to kavossed were how you counted the number of dead people?"
"Yes."
"There were a lot of dead people," she said slowly. "Thousands."
"Tens and hundreds of thousands of dead," Edmund said. "One of my assignments has been to document the atrocities of your former masters, and the other dictators who followed their example."
"And you gave just enough information in your journals for me to be able to decode it and read what you were discovering."
"You aren't blind. Surely you had your doubts about those who created you," Edmund said.
"You assumed I would be weak and would care."
"Feeling compassion is not necessarily weakness," Edmund replied. "As Barton has now demonstrated in pulling you out rather than killing you."
A gust of wind rattled the windows and he sensed Romanova tense next to him. Edmund listened closely but the banging outside was only the loose shutter on the bakery window across the street. It turned quiet again.
"And Hound? There were letters to Hound in the early notebooks but you stopped writing about it."
"Yes," Edmund said. "I wasn't comfortable knowing that anyone was reading them. I stopped writing to her in any journal I thought you might steal."
"Her?" Romanova repeated.
"My dead wife."
"I didn't know you were married. It wasn't in your file."
No, it wouldn't be.
"It was a long time ago," Edmund told her.
She got up and moved around behind him and shuffled the journals on the table. "There was one letter to Hound that came after, though. You were in the middle of writing it when I stole it from your hotel room in Czechoslovakia, in 1968. I was able to decipher most of that one."
"Could you? At that point, I suppose you had enough material." In fact, the letter tucked into the 1968 journal had not been written to his dead wife, who had learned the truth contained within that letter during their marriage. It was a message he had written specifically for the Black Widow to find, in the hope that she might some day heed it.
"Here," Romanova said, pulling the letter out of the journal on top. Even in the dark, Edmund could see that the letter was well-creased and thumbed. "You wrote to her that you had done something terrible, once."
"Yes. And I received a great act of mercy in return. Every day since then has been a calling to show others the same hope for forgiveness that I received, even when it is not deserved."
"That's very naïve, Crow."
"I call it grace, Black Widow. Everyone deserves a second chance."
ooOOoo
Part 4: Hulk like Lucy
Author's Notes for Part 4:
Marvel movieverse with minor spoilers for The Hulk (2008) and beginning of The Avengers (2012). AU for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle.
ooOOoo
Bruce isn't sure when he first notices the announcement. Later, he'll recognize that that's just how S.H.I.E.L.D. does things. He has to give them credit – it's hard to fool him and it all seemed so innocuous – no, it was innocuous, he never saw it coming.
Knowing what he does now, what he learned because of those notices, he would not have stopped it either and would not have done a thing differently.
There isn't much in Bella Coola, British Columbia, population 600, and there's even less in his remote cabin. He misses living on the grid and a lightning fast Internet connection. He misses Mythbusters and Top Chef, misses Reds baseball, and misses the Portuguese feijoada and the food trucks that would come to the bottling plant in Rochina. He misses being in a laboratory with bright students and brilliant post-docs, and colleagues with vacant looks, astounding ideas, Tootsie Pops, and sonic screwdrivers in their lab coat pockets. He misses clean rooms, bright lights, properly calibrated equipment, and safety goggles. On the other hand, in Bella Coola, there are no university administrators, pharmaceutical sales reps, and nosy oversight committees concerned about following rules for human subject research.
Still, it's worth it. The isolation is good for keeping the Other Guy in check and keeping Them away from both of Them. He's not going to risk the conveniences that could come with a satellite phone given what could come to him from the other end. So Bruce contents himself with a relaxing 20 km roundtrip jog into town twice a week to pick up his mail – the Vancouver newspapers, physics journals, yoga magazines, Mother Jones, , Rolling Stone, and Bon Appétit.
Wedged between Applied Physics Today and the Journal of Spiritual Awakening he finds a flyer, This Month at the University of BC, Vancouver Campus.
Bruce turns the flyer over, and his eyes skip over the photography exhibit on carnivores, the Women in Microeconomics symposium, and the annual Robot Building Contest. He stops when he sees her, a fuzzy black and white photograph and bio blurb copied and pasted from the thousand that have preceded it. He recognizes her name in the vague way of colleagues discussing who did not earn Nobel Prizes that year and that Dr. Lucy Pevensie was always on a short list for Peace.
He didn't know she was so old.
Answering Your Call – How To Be Valiant In Every Day Life. Jointly sponsored by the Faculties of Arts and Medicine. Join world-renowned humanitarian Doctor Lucy Pevensie for an evening discussion about aiding the whole person. Dr. Pevensie comes to us having just returned from her work with a network of clinics in Rwanda and Zimbabwe providing HIV/AIDS treatment and support for women and children. Her special focus has been psychosocial counseling to populations traumatized by political violence and natural disasters. She is currently assisting local healthcare professionals in meeting the unique patient needs in India-administered Kashmir and vulnerable tsunami-affected communities in Aceh Province, Indonesia.
Doctor Pevensie with her brother Edmund Pevensie are noted also for their work investigating mass grave sites and disappearances, with significant work in Poland, Romania, Argentina, Chile, and Sri Lanka.
Bruce thought he tossed it in the trash but somehow the flyer gets wedged into the Mother Jones and he brings it home. Maybe there were two flyers.
He sees a poster at the grocery store four days later and there's an article about Doctor Pevensie in the Vancouver paper the day after that. It's not very well-written, obviously picked up from wire services and outdated Wikipedia entries, but even that makes for a compelling story. Doctor Pevensie has been walking the walk for a very long time. The article dates her political awakening to 1942 when she was making noise about the Holocaust before it was even called a Holocaust.
The weather is good (for British Columbia). Then he notices the price of gas falls. It's a long drive, but he's got his iPod – he rocks to the hard and sings off key to the rest. He has Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Book on Tape (though they aren't tapes anymore) and 12 hours in his hybrid isn't going to be a problem and he can even charge it up in Vancouver.
The Other Guy has to come along but he's not been out in 113 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes, 25 seconds. Bruce wishes more than anything he could leave him behind, but it doesn't work that way. On the safe side (and Bruce always plays it safe where the care and feeding of the Other Guy are concerned), he uses a pay phone (they are hard to find these days) and makes a reservation at a camp site on the Bay.
The drive is relaxing and he alternates between Glam Rock of the 70s (for the irony), Best of the 80s Top 40 (for the singing along) and classic rock which he thinks the Other Guy likes. They both seem to agree on Zeppelin, the Stones, and Pink Floyd ("all in all you're just another brick in the … SMASH"). Bruce remembers a vegetarian place near the university that does a great spicy mock duck. He's completely relaxed and the Other Guy isn't making any noise at all.
Again, later, Bruce will realize that S.H.I.E.L.D. is greasing his wheels and that's why there's no wait anywhere, no one speaks to him unless spoken to, and there's a free parking space a two block walk to the auditorium where Doctor Pevensie is speaking. Lucy will say that you don't have to like them to take advantage of what they offer, and so it is.
The auditorium isn't as crowded as he would have expected it to be and he takes a seat on the aisle, drinking in the pleasure of being in an academic environment again. Doctor Pevensie is walking up and down the aisles of the amphitheater, shaking hands and hugging people. The article made him think she was about 75, give or take. She's wearing khakis and rolled up sleeves, boots that have seen a lot of wear and a bright scarf of red and gold around her neck. Her face is lined and tanned and her gray hair close cropped but something really bright seems to shine from her. Everyone seems to follow her, in the way that moths are attracted to lights in the dark.
She turns around and Bruce has that sense she's looking for someone as she scans the filling auditorium.
Their eyes meet and hers widen. He freezes in his chair, feeling panic, worried for a moment that the Other Guy is surging out to take over. Then he thinks he's got it all wrong because he'd swear the Other Guy is smiling back, gap toothed and crookedly, at Doctor Lucy Pevensie. She strides up the aisle, taking two steps at a time, holding out a hand.
He doesn't want to take it, but she's already seized his and is pumping it.
"Thank you so much for coming," she says. "I'm Lucy, obviously."
"Bruce Banner," he manages.
"It is lovely to meet you, Bruce." She releases his hand, reaches out, and rests her palm on his chest. "And your friend?"
"He's…" He stammers and gulps. What just happened? "Not a friend." He stares down at her hand resting over his heart, wondering what he would see if he could see gamma radiation flowing from him to her over the bridge of her arm. "The Other Guy," he whispers. "Hulk."
"Well that does not do at all for me." She purses her lips in a frown. "You remind me a little of a Giant I once knew."
She's not talking to him, that is Bruce, but to the Other Guy locked inside him. Lucy rattles on. "He was prone to fits, which is certainly to be expected when one's understanding is not strong and everything moves far too fast to catch up and bad people are always trying to use you for their own corrupt purposes. He was a good friend to me. Might I call you Stormybuffin?"
Bruce doesn't say anything. Doctor Lucy Pevensie is obviously not sane on any parameter of the DSM and she's touching him as if they were old friends, and not only has she somehow seen the Hulk within him, she's naming him like a pet gerbil but who was a Giant? Except the Other Guy seems perfectly content with all this and Bruce senses that if he tried to sneak out now, the Other Guy would put up a fight.
Doctor Pevensie kisses him on the cheek. "You both will join me after? For prayer?"
And then she flits away.
He doesn't recall much of the talk. Doctor Pevensie doesn't speak in intellectual terms about data and facts, figures, budgets, fundraising goals, and costs of patented prescription drugs that are interfering with treatment options in the places she serves. She speaks of embracing and healing the whole person, and of security in mind and body being a fundamental human right. She tells stories. She makes people laugh. She makes them cry. She inspires.
There's wild applause and he tries to slink away but Doctor Pevensie gives a warm smile and a steely look and it's like demented love at first sight for the Other Guy.
oOOoo
Bruce tries to convince her that he should just go back to his reserved camp ground. He shouldn't let her link her arm in his and walk through the parks around the UBC campus. It's late, his car will be towed, mutant commandos will swoop in, someone will try to rob them and hell will open up.
"Lucy," she says firmly when he keeps calling her Doctor Pevensie. "Bruce, you must call me Lucy." She complains that it's too dark and late to go to Wreck Beach.
"That's the nude beach, Lucy," he replies laughing at her joke.
"I know! It would be marvelous, wouldn't it?"
So, not a joke. Given that the Other Guy will grow right out of and rip to pieces whatever clothes he's wearing, leaving him naked when he changes back, nudity is something Bruce has had to become more accustomed to – not a normal state for a physicist. Still, he can't comprehend going all natural with a 75 year old woman he met barely three hours ago.
At her hotel, he wants to take the stairs, not the elevator, to her suite. The Other Guy isn't good in small, closed in spaces.
"Oh nonsense!" Lucy says, tapping his chest again. "You'll be fine, won't you Stormybuffin?"
Bruce has to admit that he is fretting more than the Other Guy. At least they are only going to the third floor.
In her hotel room, Lucy tosses her backpack on a chair and flops down on the floor. Moving a little stiffly, she pulls off her boots and shoves them aside. "Sit!" she commands. "Wherever you like. You need to meditate and I need to pray. We'll talk after."
Lucy doesn't say another word for the next 45 minutes. He is rattled yet still rational enough to know meditation would help. With the strange environment and the unsettling person, he should be simmering with dangerous impatience. But it's quiet in the hotel room and Lucy is already leaning against the wall, eyes closed, murmuring to herself. What did housekeeping use to give the room the wonderful smell?
Bruce joins her on the floor, takes a deep breath, and begins his mantra.
It's so peaceful and he relaxes so quickly, Bruce nearly falls asleep. He rouses when he senses Lucy moving quietly about the room.
He lets out the breath, unfolds his legs, and stretches his neck. He feels great.
She hands him a glass of water and sets out bags of nuts and fruit on the floor that are from a local health food store. "I have some Pop Tarts," she says, sounding a little defensive. "Brown sugar cinnamon. I always take a trip south of the border when I'm in Canada and stock up."
"Thanks, but this is fine." Brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts are evidently a personal favorite of Lucy's, and he doesn't want to deplete her stash; he knows how he'd feel about sharing Tootsie Pops – the Other Guy always wants to crunch down to the chewy center right away so they are a good exercise in compromise and control.
"How did you know?" he asks.
"About Stormybuffin?" Lucy shrugs and sits again on the floor. "I spent ten years here with a spiritual guide, of sorts. I'm very intuitive. I've been a healer all my life. And I'm very familiar with that phenomenon of something that is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. I see things others don't, Bruce."
"Things larger on the inside than on the outside violate the law of the conservation of mass," Bruce replies. He's never been able to figure out how the huge Other Guy comes out his small self. It shouldn't happen.
She laughs. "I suppose it is magic, then."
"There's nothing magical about the Other Guy," he replies bitterly. "He's a monster. It's very dangerous for anyone to be close to me, including you."
"That's not what Aslan just told me," Lucy says. She slowly unwinds the bright scarf around her neck and Bruce sees it had red and gold lions on it. Lucy sets it reverently aside and pops almonds in her mouth.
"Who is Aslan?" Bruce asks sharply. Is it an acronym for something he needs to run from? Should he start running now?
"I call him Aslan. I'm not sure what you call him."
"When did you talk to him?" She'd not made any phone calls. He'd not seen anyone suspicious approach her.
"Aslan and I talked while I was praying."
"Aslan is in your head?" Now Bruce wonders, not about government conspiracies and super soldiers, but about dissociative personality disorders and schizophrenia. Except Lucy seems to be one of the saner people he has ever met.
"Of a sort, yes. As I said, I don't know what you call him and he has many names in many worlds. I met him first as Aslan and that is who he will always be to me." The cellophane package holding the dried nuts and fruit makes a crackling sound as she digs into it. "I appreciate your worry, Bruce, and I thank you for it. However, I have nothing to fear from you or Stormybuffin. When Aslan calls me home, it shall not be at your hand."
She offers him some grapes. The brown paper they were wrapped in has turned soggy but the fruit is very sweet tasting.
Was Lucy talking about God? Or a god? He doesn't know what to make of it. The only god Bruce knows is the ridiculously-named god particle that Higgs proposed in 1964 and he feels a brief pang for the prospect of working at CERN with brilliant colleagues on world-changing revelations of science instead of meditating in the wild with only the Other Guy for company.
"Aslan has told you when you will die?" If Aslan could tell him how to kill the monster within and die, Bruce would have Lucy Pevensie baptize him into her religion right there in room 343 of the Sheraton suites.
"When my work is done, I shall die, and not before," Lucy says with great confidence. "As my work is not done, I shall not be dying today or anytime soon. Which brings me to you. I want you to come with me."
"Where?"
"Well anywhere is a start, but how about Kolkata. I'm affiliated with a clinic there. Wonderful staff. They need another doctor."
"I thought you meant out to dinner or to Wrecks Beach?!"
"Well, maybe them, too. But Kolkata." Lucy pauses, looks a little vacant. Bruce wonders if Aslan, whoever Aslan is, it talking to her
"Yes," Lucy says, sounding decided. "Kolkata."
"Me?" he squeaks, now seeing she's wholly serious. "Pack up and go? India? Just like that? To Kolkata?"
"Yes! It would be so good for you, to be helping people. You've been a hermit long enough and you and Stormybuffin have things under control. The nurses at the clinic are lovely and are completely overwhelmed. The needs are so great, HIV/AIDS, TB, parasitic infection, cholera. There is so much you could do there."
He wonders where she fits on the DSM – probably some sort of delusional disorder not otherwise specified. "Lucy, me and the Other Guy in a crowded, urban, Indian city could not be good for anyone. I should not be seeking out things that make me angry."
Lucy snorts. "Oh Bruce, I do hate to quote trite American bumper stickers, but if you aren't angry at what has been done to our world and the poorest, most vulnerable people in it, you haven't been paying attention."
"You don't want to make me angry," Bruce repeats. "That's when the Other Guy comes out."
"I don't doubt that, Bruce. But you and Stormybuffin would benefit from learning how anger is not always the enemy. It can also be a powerful motivator. I am angry all the time."
"It's different, Lucy. The last time I was truly angry, the Other Guy and I broke part of New York City."
"In a place like Kolkata, you won't let that happen."
He has no idea where her confidence comes from. "How can you know that?" he demands.
"Bruce, in Kolkata, you will be among people who have far more reason to be angry than you do. I think a place like that is perfect because you and Stormybuffin know that if you lose control, you will hurt the people you are trying to help and destroy whatever little they do have."
She leans back, looking satisfied, certain she's carried the argument. "Yes, I think Kolkata is perfect. Good yoga instruction, too."
Bruce feels the anger rise up, but it's his own, not that of the Other Guy. Lucy shifts, digs into her pocket, and pulls out that very old fashioned British thing known as a handkerchief. She presses it into his hands.
"Don't worry, it's clean," she says. "I gave one to a very good, respectable Giant I knew a long time ago. I'd like you and Stormybuffin to have one, too." She sniffs and looks sad. Neither Bruce nor the Other Guy wants to see Lucy sad.
He stares at the delicate little white square and imagines it torn to bits in a big, green hand. "Lucy, there are some very important people who are very interested in me, and if they can't control me, they would certainly try to kill me."
She shakes her head. "As I see it, it is good if they are afraid of you. We'll sail right through airport security."
"You are willing to travel with me and the Other Guy in a pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet?"
"That means the flight will be on time! They will probably upgrade us to first class!"
Bruce learns that in the abused, poor, and exploited places in the world, Lucy Pevensie is angry all the time. Sometimes, that isn't a bad thing.
Original Prompt: (e.g. specific ship or character, England fic, Golden Age fic, AU, set during a ball, someone falls ill, whatever, etc.) Lucy, Polly, and/or Susan being badass in England, bonus points if they end up commandeering a plane or something. Crossovers, especially with Marvel-verse characters, where the Pevensies get to use their unique adult skills for wartime/Cold War purposes. Anything set in rthstewart-verse.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 01:04 am (UTC)THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO ME THIS WEEK NOT EVEN KIDDING
I SHIP EVERYTHING SO HARD IT HURTS OMG
Peggy/Susan/Glenlivet all the way. I just want to make all the graphics of them together ever, they are THE BEST. Of COURSE they'd be flying around jumping out of planes and touching up their lipstick and having perfect aim and dancing in clubs throughout the war. I would watch that movie.
Peter and Steve and the Howling Commandos fighting an entire pub. Just, amazing. Peter so needs to be on their team
and not just because he is so much like Steve that he'd make a good leader once Steve flew his plane into the iceCrow, Hawk, and Spider. You did an excellent job making the timing make sense, and pulling together the parallels between Edmund and Natasha's untimely ages. They live so much life despite the odd length of years they squeeze it into, and I'm glad that Edmund was just there in the background, providing her with nudges all along, making her question. And her stealing all his journals, him starting to leave them for her.... awww, it's adorable.
Lucy and Bruce and Hulk and nude beaches! Lucyyyyyyyyyyyyyy how are you the greatest? She's just so wonderfully glowing with vitality and fearlessness. I love that she is the one who motivates Bruce to go to Kolkata, and that she knows how being always angry doesn't have to handicap him. And. And. Stormybuffin.
STORMYBUFFIN.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:45 am (UTC)Edmund and Tasha were hard because I did not want to diminish what Clint and Tasha have and his role. So Edmund is in the background and provides an assist when they need and she's always getting the better of him. At that point, Tasha will do things Edmund will not and she's a very cold person whose doubts come on slowly.
Thanks so much for giving such a great prompt!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 01:07 am (UTC)Peter meeting Captain America was great! I loved the action of the bar fight, and Peter recognizing that Steve wasn't human, was something different, and how easy that is for Peter to accept.
I loved the Cold War story of Edmund, Natasha and Clint. It gave me chills reading all the scenes where Edmund and Natasha crossed paths, and how he started leaving her clues and hints, and helping her, in the only way he could. And the end, where they finally meet and talk, was a wonderful pay-off to all the years of them dogging each other's steps, working against (and sometimes, for) each other. And how brilliant of Natasha to be able to figure out some of Edmund's code!
My favorite, though, was the meeting of Lucy and Bruce Banner. I love this AU life you've given Lucy - Dr. Pevensie who works to ease the suffering of the poorest and most needy people in this world. And I love how she can see through all the defenses Bruce has built, how she can see what no one else can, and how only Lucy, of all people, can make friends with the Hulk. I love how funny that whole part was too - Bruce and his surprise over all the ways Lucy is... herself. :D And I love his realization at the end, about Lucy's anger, and how that works.
Very well done!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 01:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 02:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:49 am (UTC)Thank you again.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 04:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:52 am (UTC)Thank you so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 04:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 12:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 05:58 am (UTC)As for the other three, I liked Peter's frustration and embarrassment at being stuck in England and congratulated for what D company did when all he wants is to be back doing something useful instead of collecting praise for something he was only a small part of. I liked that Edmund could almost always spot Natasha, either directly or by correctly identifying the signs of her presence, but couldn't stop her from stealing his journals... and then took that weakness and turned it into a new tool, by writing things specifically for her to read. And I love that Lucy could see the Hulk inside Bruce and gave him a handkerchief, because that is exactly the sort of thing she would do. And yes, she would be angry at the state of the world, but Lucy is the sort of person who can put anger to use without getting consumed by it or forgetting that joy and love and peace also exist in the world.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 01:03 am (UTC)Peter became, in my Rat and Sword story, very much the common working man and soldier -- the High King was deconstructed a bit and he's just angry at being sidelined.
I don't think anger is a bad thing. I think being Valiant is close to anger in a way -- she's angry at injustice and wrongdoing and is brave enough to do something about it. Lucy is fearless. Thank you again, so much for the lovely story you did for me and for reviewing this one.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 05:48 pm (UTC)This reviewer has always harbored a soft spot for Edmund, so I suspect part three (although reading this backwards, sorry) will remain my favorite...the evocative descriptions of Eastern Europe during the second half of the twentieth century were superb here, and the dance of spies between enigmatic Crow and the Spider Woman were flawless from start to finish....and the references to Edmund's late wife were an added, romantic, plus....
Loved the beginning of part four, with Bruce Banner not missing IRBs and University administration!!! hee hee....and ADORED, MADLY, the future the author has envisioned for Lucy!!! and how wonderful that Ed documented atrocities in the last stage of his career!! Lucy's handling of the Hulk was particularly inspired!!! Truly Valiant and magnificent!!
Looking forward to reading parts 1 & 2
Clio1792
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 01:08 am (UTC)Thanks so much for your support.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-26 08:44 pm (UTC)Susan and Peggy! Target practice! "You're taking it in your hands like it's an egg. It's not." And Susan knows how to breathe from her swimming! And special prototype guns! And dancing! And ARMOR-PIERCING CROSSBOW BOLTS!
And Peter. I love how Peter's feeling grumpy and while he's not going to start a fight, he's not above nudging it along and wading in with both fists when it sparks. This is a different vision of Peter than is commonly found in fandom--he's not the pure haloed golden boy--but he's still the High King, and he's still awesome, and he can be counted on to land one of the last punches. "I don't like racists, sir. And begging your pardon, but a soldier should be able to enjoy a drink with his unit and not hear from his own countryman the same hate we're fighting from Hitler." Yes! And now he can go and fight with the superheroes!
I'm really intrigued by the interactions between Crow and the Black Widow over the years. It took me a couple of times through to fully get what was going on, but the accounts of the mass graves and the uraniam poisoning were chillingly real. I loved the lines about Edmund's journals being in code, and the matter-of-fact revelation that he'd started leaving stuff for her, because of course they were in code, and of course he knew she'd be doing her darnedest to read them anyway (oh, and his aliases! Merle Just! love it!). The ending of that section is moving and lovely--everyone, even the Black Widow, gets a second chance with Edmund the Just.
But the last section. THE LAST PART. I LOVE IT. Old!Lucy! How to be Valiant in everyday life! Lucy being on the shortlist for the Nobel Peace Prize! Lucy and Edmund being noted for investigation of mass graves and disappearances! Lucy GLOWS and she's still so very Lucy, even if she's old now, and she sees the Other Guy inside Bruce and is perfectly comfortable with the idea of something that's larger on the inside than the outside, and with Giants who are prone to fits when they don't understand what's going on! And she names him Stormybuffin. STORMYBUFFIN.
"There's wild applause and he tries to slink away but Doctor Pevensie gives a warm smile and a steely look and it's like demented love at first sight for the Other Guy."
I want to draw little purple hearts around this whole section and savor it forever. It's perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 01:48 am (UTC)The Peter and Susan parts were one way to build upon the unsatisfying ending of Rat and Sword and illustrate why I ended it where I did. Peter gets shot. Susan goes off to do something else which might be exciting but is very different and a whole other story.
And as for Lucy, Bruce and Stormybuffin, I'm so glad you enjoyed them! They were so much fun to write! I really appreciate you reading and reviewing and you are very, very kind to do so.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-27 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 01:51 am (UTC)Thank you again.
Ruth
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-27 09:15 am (UTC)wonderfully entertaining and a happy companion to Rth Stewart's Rat and Sword!!!
Clio1792
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 03:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-30 10:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 03:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-30 11:24 pm (UTC)Peter just needs to immediately become a part of the Howling Commandos, no question - that section was really just FUN, which actually gives me more Steve feelings than Peter; I feel like Peter knows how to have fun, but Steeeeeeeeve oh man him and Peter hanging out would just be glorious for the both of them.
Hawk, Crow, and Spider is THE SHIT. ugh the ages and the appearances and Nataaaaaashaaaaaaaaaa and I love love love how she is equally as competent as Edmund; yes, he's leaving things for her and allowing her to see certain things, but it's not patronizing and I just adore seeing him kind of prod both her and Barton towards the answer of defection rather than takedown.
But you really did save the best for last - Bruce learns that in the abused, poor, and exploited places in the world, Lucy Pevensie is angry all the time. Sometimes, that isn't a bad thing.
Shivers all up and down my spine just rereading and copy/pasting this. I LOVE Bruce getting this philosophy from Lucy for so many reasons. It only adds to the badassness and glee of his reveal of it in Avengers, it makes so much sense for him to have found it not just through himself but through a rolemodel - and most importantly, you let Lucy be angry. It's seriously the perfect characterization of her, and it's the perfect ending to this section which has a wonderfully accomplished Lucy, very sweet and charismatic and understanding, seemingly silly/naive wrt the Stormybuffin naming, and then BAM, angry all the time. LKJdapoiwjeaproijtpohiajpoiejwpoi j
perfection.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 03:26 am (UTC)Peter and Steve Rogers are fun, but it's not deep, especially. It's just guys doing guy things and it was nice to use the racial inaccuracies of the film (which I'm glad they did) and use it in the story.
And I'm glad you liked Bruce and Lucy. It's always fun to do Pevensies from other POVs and yes, I think valiant and angry are closely linked. Lucy is angry at the things that violate her sense as a healer and she's valiant enough to do something about them. She's not normal, she's a living saint and it's wonderful to think of her charging through life in khakis and boots with a lion scarf and pop tarts.
Thank you again.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-01 07:37 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing!
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Date: 2012-09-12 03:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-04 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 03:42 am (UTC)Thank you for coming and finding the story and reading it here.
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Date: 2012-09-08 12:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-09-08 05:14 am (UTC)I think the section with Susan and Peggy is my favorite, though the journal "exchange" between Natasha and Edmund still makes me squee! This fic works so wonderfully on so many levels, and you get a thousand kinds of kudos from me!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-12 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-09-22 12:31 am (UTC)Also, I really love the way you wove it all together, and the Pevensies are so great like this, and oh Peter, I hope you were helpful after Steve went down. :(
(For some reason Peter is the one I can never see living on too long, the way I can see Lu and Su and even Edmund aging too slowly, staying too long.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-22 01:18 am (UTC)Thanks again!
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