Chapter Text
Lucy Jones stared at the signs, scowling. “These are, without a doubt, the worst-marked exhibits I have ever seen. ‘This way to the seahorses,’ my ass. We just came from the seahorses, and they’re in the other direction. We just came from the seahorses again, I might add. You have the worst sense of direction I have ever had the displeasure of being navigated by, Emma. You must have been a hoot on road trips.”
The North Pacific giant octopus clinging to her back turned a deeper shade of red and squeezed her shoulders irritably. She took a drag on her cigarette and toyed with the sovereign ring on her right hand. “Fuck it. Too many exits to tell which one is the employee exit. You want to just pick one and deal with the alarms when they go off?”
The tips of two arms simulated a passable version of a shrug. Lucy sighed, then grunted as the octopus adjusted her position.
“You know, if you hadn’t gone snacking through researchers’ traps, I wouldn’t have to break you out of aquariums, and you wouldn’t have to hang off me like the world’s ugliest toddler,” Lucy commented, pushing open the next set of doors. She took a few more steps before realizing that the room was occupied. A set of familiar faces stared at her in shock. A set of familiar, heroic, super-powered faces stared at her in shock. “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.”
The stunned silence was broken by two simultaneous sharp cries when one delicate red arm snaked forward, plucked the cigarette from Lucy’s fingers, and flicked it at the nearest of their unexpected companions. It struck the dark-haired woman in the cheek just as a sudden jet of water from over Lucy’s shoulder caught a blond man in the face.
“Oh, fucking hell, Emma!” Lucy yelped. She turned on her heel and bolted, running back toward the seahorses as the sounds of startled, instinctive pursuit came from behind her. She made it through a pair of fire doors ahead of what sounded like Captain America and sealed them shut, breathing heavily and getting her bearings while he started punching through it.
“For a hundred-pound gelatinous backpack, you’ve got some pretty big balls, Emma,” she panted, trying to think. “Even MODOK wouldn’t pull that shit without his exoskeleton on.”
The octopus grabbed onto a tank and pulled her toward it, then submerged her body, siphoning water over her gills with a fair amount of vigor.
“I’m just saying, leave the supervillainy to someone more qualified,” Lucy continued, flinching slightly as the fire door gave way. “Come on, time to go.”
The octopus slithered up onto her back, and they raced down a flight of stairs, Lucy sealing the doors behind her as they ran. She finally burst out onto a balcony, only to find them still five floors up. The van was nowhere in sight. She cursed loudly. The van. She could probably outrun half the Avengers and whoever the hell had been with them, but a conversion van with an aquatic life-support system bolted into the back was absolutely not going to.
The captain dropped onto the balcony in front of her, and she jumped back with a start.
“Expelliarmus!” she shouted, gesturing sharply. He went flying back off the edge with a surprised look on his face but managed to catch himself on the railing.
“Seriously? Are you cribbing things from Harry Potter now? You are the worst magician I’ve ever met,” Iron Man snorted, descending from above them with a certain casualness that she found intensely irritating. Or maybe it was just the tinny quality of his voice broadcast through the external speakers. Or the smug look he always had on his face behind his visor.
“Just be glad I can’t remember the one that kills people,” she snapped, clambering onto the railing. Captain America looked up at her, and she gave him a quick wink. “No hard feelings, handsome,” she said, vaulting off the wall.
“Whoa, there,” Iron Man called, dipping to catch her. He found himself tumbling against the building as two stabilizers shorted out and wound up clinging to the same purchase as Captain America.
Lucy slowed her fall and touched down delicately, sprinting off through the parking lot with the octopus clinging to her hard enough that she wondered if her ribs were going to snap under the pressure. She flexed her fingers as soon as she saw the van, and it faded from view, invisible to the naked eye. She slammed into the side and pried the door open, scrambling into it without pause. Lucy tripped over the industrial mats on the floor and went sprawling into a pile of equipment. Emma loosened her grip, and Lucy groaned as the cold, slick flesh slid down her arm.
“Why are octopods so gross?” she muttered, sitting up. “And why are scientists so fucking messy? All the time, every lab I break into, it’s a fucking disaster area. Tubes and beakers and shit all over the place. Who can do proper science when nothing is clean, I ask you that.” She scooped the octopus up in her arms and helped her into the tank. “If the filtration and aeration doesn’t kick in when I turn it on, just throw something at my face or start a fight with a pack of superheroes or something.”
The octopus’s skin rippled with a few rapid color changes.
“Right back at you, buddy,” Lucy grunted, rubbing her shin where she’d barked it on a net handle.
She crawled into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition, right where she’d left them. The chase seemed to have been abandoned in favor of getting Captain America and Iron Man off the balcony safely and, presumably, figuring out if she’d stolen anything besides an unusually pugnacious octopus. Lucy settled in and took several deep breaths. Her hands were shaking. She hadn’t expected to get into a fight with anyone more imposing than the security guards. Emma hadn’t been entirely wrong in pointing out that wearing high-heeled boots and a peasant skirt to a robbery had not been the best decision she’d ever made. Oh, well. She was sure she’d make worse ones.
Lucy shook herself, rolled her shoulders, stretched her neck, and cracked her knuckles. She was mostly steady again. She added a silence spell to the invisibility spell and turned the van on. Everything cranked to life, and she relaxed a little at the whir and humming of the aquarium’s support systems coming online. She just had to get down to the bay, and then Emma could ride the tide back to where she’d settled in.
“You know,” she called, “this would have been about ten times easier if you’d just let me turn you back into a human fucking being. You only wanted to be an octopus for a couple of years, remember? You were going to come back and publish all these groundbreaking, revolutionary papers? Really put your name in the history books?”
She glanced back to find that Emma had arranged her arms into a reasonable facsimile of a rude gesture.
“I’m just saying,” she sighed. “The point of this wasn’t so you could spend the rest of your life as calamari on the lam from your fucking mortgage. You initially wanted to learn something from this. And, you know, tell other people about it.”
She put the van in gear and pulled forward. Slow and steady and under the radar. That’s all she had to do for the next half hour.
*****
“Did we really just get into a power-fight at a private party over an octopus?” Jan asked, rubbing her face gingerly. Bruce tsked at her, and she waved him off. “The skin’s not broken. It’s a little tender is all. But that did just happen, right?”
“Yes, so far as I can tell. Nothing else was disturbed,” the docent sighed. “We’ll need to do a full inventory in the morning, but the only specimen obviously missing is that octopus. I’ve never seen one of them do anything like that before.”
“Lucy Jones is a magician,” Bruce explained with a shrug. “I imagine that had something to do with it.”
“One can only hope.”
“Are Tony and Steve okay?” Natasha asked as Clint returned, not looking up from the manifest the docent had provided.
“Steve got the wind knocked out of him. Tony’s going to be picking gingerbread and caramel out of those thrusters for a week. Both of them had their egos banged up a little. Aside from that, they’re fine.”
“I imagine ‘fine’ is a relative term for Tony if he got beat up by Jones again,” Bruce sighed. “He takes it awfully personally.”
“Hard not to when she does things like turn his rockets into an easy-bake oven,” Clint observed with a shrug.
“Not to mention that Coulson seems to like her more than he likes Tony,” Jan added.
“Coulson does not like Jones more than he likes me. He just has to act like he does, because she could turn into an asset, or, you know, she could turn him into a frog,” Tony protested, clanking toward them. Steve shot him a sceptical look. “Did anyone figure out what she was doing here?”
“Stealing that octopus,” Natasha supplied.
“That’s it?”
“So it would seem.” She looked at the docent. “Was the octopus an exhibit or a research specimen?”
“Research,” he answered immediately. “The ones on display are lab-hatched and -raised to socialize them properly. Wild-caught specimens sometimes have difficulty adjusting to the lack of privacy and unfamiliar environment. They’re generally fairly shy animals.”
“Who was working with it?”
“Um, it should be on the manifest in the last column. I think it was Dr. Swanson.”
“Would it be possible to talk to Dr. Swanson in the morning?” Natasha asked, pulling out her phone and punching the name in. Nothing interesting came up.
“I’ll be sure she sees you first thing.”
“Thank you.” She updated her calendar to reflect the appointment. “We do appreciate your cooperation. This may be nothing--this particular offender spends a lot of time on petty vandalism and criminal mischief--but we’d like to be sure of it.”
“We appreciate your attention. It would be terrible if this were just the prelude to something more serious. Obviously, our security isn’t geared to handle a substantial threat.” The docent shivered, running a hand through his thinning hair.
“Oh, one more thing?” Tony asked. The docent raised his eyebrows in question. “Do you have security cameras? I’d like a copy of the footage from tonight.”
“Seriously, Tony?” Steve asked, groaning.
“I’m sorry, you don’t think the look on her face when her octopus started the fight for her was hilarious? Also, who doesn’t want video of an octopus starting a fight? I’ve seen bikers who were less efficient about starting brawls than that cephalopod. Sorry about your hair, though, Hank. I know it took you a while to get it looking that precisely terrible.” Pym glared at him.
“I guess I’m a little biased, since we both wound up hanging off the side of a building sixty feet up on account of her.”
“Live a little, Cap. She jumped off it with a hundred pounds of undercooked appetizer hanging off her shoulders and was fine. For real, though, I would like a copy of that footage, if there is any. There are, uh, legitimate purposes it will serve.”
“I’ll make sure security sends a copy home with Ms. Rushman tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.”