The Tear of Celeste

Chapter 10: Meet the team

Mr. Stark takes you over to Nat and her friend. Nat looks up at you with a warm smile. "Hey there, does the dress fit okay?" She asks, looking you up and down with a pleased smile.

"Yes! Thank you so much Nat!" You say, turning a little to show her that it does indeed fit. She had insisted on you calling her Nat, so that was what you were going to do. You then hold out a hand for her friend and introduce yourself.

He grins and gives your hand a firm shake. "Clint, but others call me Hawk" He gives a wink and straightens up, "Nat told me about your situation, sounds like a lot," He says, giving you a worried father vibe.

You nod and look around you "Yeah, but honestly a bit exciting too" You say, shrugging "I mean, yeah it sucks to be kidnapped and all that, but my world does not have real superheroes!" Now that the shock was over you were starting to get excited.

Clint nods looking at you "Yeah, it's a lot to take in, but I get the 'exciting too' part. When I was told about aliens I didn't believe it at first"

You look at Mr. Stark with big eyes. Aliens too?! He just gives you a shrug.

Next, he takes you over to Steve and his friends. Steve quickly introduces you to them and gestures to his friends one by one "This is Bucky, my childhood friend and fellow soldier from the war, and this is Sam, my friend who helped me adapt after I thawed out."

You shake Sam's hand first since he offered. "It's nice to meet you" And then offer Bucky a hand to shake. He hesitates before shaking your hand and giving you a short nod.

"Don't worry about James over there" Tony says, nodding toward Bucky as he guides your away "He is always like that"

You are shocked about Tony actually using someone's name, but something about the way he says it and his tone makes you think he is not that friendly to Bucky, and might even be slightly hostile. You put a pin in that. Story for another day.

He then takes you over to where Pietro and Wanda are, a tall blonde man having joined them. Wanda hugged his arm while talking with her brother until you came over.

You present your hand to Wanda and the blonde man while introducing yourself.

"Wanda!" She says, grabbing your hand first to shake and giving you a big grin. "I'm very excited to have another girl in the tower!" She looks up at the man with a grin. You have a feeling Wanda needs some girl time, which is understandable if she and Nat are the only girls here.

"I'm Vis," The man says, shaking your hand. You smile warmly back at him "Nice to meet you"

As soon as he takes his hand back Wanda is back to hugging it. You can recognize a girl in love so you motion for Tony to go to the next group. Give them some alone time.

You timidly regretted going to the next group as there was only one left, but you decided not to act like a coward. So what if you were caught staring?! He had been stared right back at you!

You walked with Tony over to Mr. Banner to be introduced to the last two members of the team.

"Hello again Mr. Banner," You say, giving him a small nod. He quickly grins at you "Bruce is fine!" So you make a mental note of that.

"This here is Point Break and Reindeer Games," Tony introduced. You learned to ignore his nicknames by now, but you still rolled your eyes to show the two men that you did not appreciate his nicknames either.

You then introduced yourself to the two others, holding out a hand to shake.

The blonde one was the one to grab and shake it. "Thor," He says "God of thunder"

You looked at him with big eyes. You know that name and title and are shocked. "..." You turn to look at Tony raising an eyebrow.

He just shrugged "Really more of an alien than a god, but that is what they call themself," He said, thinking that your shock was that he called himself a god.

Thor clapped the black-haired man's shoulder, making him glare at the hand like he wanted to rip it off. "And this is my brother Loki"

"The god of mischief," You said without pause, your eyes widening.

Loki looks at you shocked, and you remember you are not supposed to know any of them. Before now you didn't think you did, not that you knew Loki personally or anything, but you read about him.

From the way Loki glared at Mr. Stark now you suspected that he too thought you were not supposed to know him and was displeased that apparently, he had been lied to. You thought you saw a shimmer of light appearing behind one of his hands, and you could have sworn that for a second it looked like he had a dagger hidden behind it.

"Oh! You know of us?" Thor asked, surprised! Making you look up at him again, blinking slowly.

"Well, yes and no, Thor and Loki, gods of Asgard" You could not believe this was real!

Tony gave you a shocked look, and you noticed Loki. You could no longer see a dagger, or maybe he never had one in the first place and it was just a trick of the light. "They are in your world too?" He asked, looking over to the two gods before looking back at you.

"Well, again, yes and no" You point to the two of them "Part of the Norse mythology I studied, but in it, they are not brothers"

Thor blinked surprised at your knowledge "Well, he is adopted" He simply says. Like that fixes the 'not brothers' part.

You shake your head to correct him "No I meant-" You sigh and rub your forehead "No you know what, never mind! That was just rather shocking!" You hold up your hands defensively "I don't wanna judge you on bad information from my world!" You said. You meant it as in your information did not apply to this situation, but Loki seemed to take offense.

Loki growled "What information?" He looked over at Mr. Stark again, looking displeased, and back at you "What bad things?"

You shake your head quickly "No I didn't mean it like that" but he interrupts you.

"Tell me," he says seriously, and you get a feeling that he won't let this go. Not like you hiding information about him.

You sigh, you don't wanna go into a whole lecture about Norse mythology, so you just give the correction you were about to give Thor before. "I mean that you and Thor are not even on the same family tree in my world or the same age!" You hold up your hands defensively

"In my world, the closest 'family' relation you have is that Loki is blood brothers with Odin, so if you were family it would be more accurate to call Thor your Nephew" You used your fingers to put quotation marks around the word 'family'. Because even though it was called blood brothers it was more like a sacred pact than being family.

There is a slow pause, they all seem frozen by the information you gave.

And then Loki breaks out into hysterical laughter. Thor seems super embarrassed and speaks quickly like he has to defend his honor.

"HE IS MY YOUNGER BROTHER!" Thor booms, red in the face. But you feel it is more from embarrassment than anger.

"Aw! Don't be so shy, dear nephew!" Loki says, still laughing and grins at you "I look forward to hearing more about this later." He looks back at Tony "I like this one"

And with that, it seems like you have met everyone on the team.

Dinner consisted of pizza, and they didn't even bother using the dinner table, people mostly just sat on the couches and armchairs around a coffee table and chatted.

You were sitting between Nat and Steve, eating mostly in silence. No one forced you to be social and after a day like this, you were pretty tired.

So you mostly watched the others, giving a mental note of their interactions. They reminded you of the family gatherings you see on tv sometimes, they were all friendly, but not overly polite. They just chilled, joking with each other and discussing different topics around you.

And even though you were an outsider, it made you feel for a moment you were part of a family, making you relax.

You did catch Loki and Wanda at one point exchanging a look, not sure why it reminded you of when you were caught staring at Loki, but it still made you blush.