The Universe's Mixer

Ted stood out in front of City Hall, looking at the building.

He had seen the news spot about it being burned down and rebuilt. He knew that the City was capable of a lot of things. He shouldn't doubt that it would be able to restore a building almost as soon as it was taken out. But he did. He was looking for differences. Flaws. Changes. Anything. Even a window that was cracked.

Either this was some other building that the City had moved to replace the old City Hall, or the fire had never happened. He was sure of it. Okay, so he wasn't sure of it. But he didn't believe that the whole thing had burned down and nobody inside had noticed. Not one employee had witnessed it. Not one. Even his office was perfect, and nothing smelled of smoke. It bothered Ted more than many other things about this place did.

How can a building burn with nobody to see it?

He wondered if Charlie would turn it into one of those trees falling in an empty forest questions.

It wasn't that Ted was afraid to go inside. He'd been in already. He'd been in a lot, actually. They'd only just found out about this fire, and they'd gone into work the next day as if everything was normal. All of them.

Ted made a bit of a face at the building.

The Amazon wasn't firing on all cylinders, and she wasn't sure she had that saying right. Thrusters made more since as cylinders had gone out with combustion engines long ago. There were better ways to power vehicles, and thankfully her preferred vehicle was one such examples. Sure, it was known to smoke on occasion, but that was usually after getting shot. She tried to keep Batmule shootings to a minimum.

She reached for a tea cup high on a shelf, and soon found herself cursing in a way she hadn't in a long time. She'd gotten used to more anglicized expletives, but the Chinese seemed more appropriate as it was her past and its very mishmash of languages that had come back to haunt her. Or spook the every loving goshe out of her. Something like that anyway.

Zoe reached for the tea cup, and doing something she rarely did, especially these days with her more extensive and continued training, she slipped. It happened to everyone, but what didn't happen to most was that the tea cup came down, falling through her fingers to crash on the floor. The pattern wasn't one she'd noticed, but the cup had become a favorite. It wasn't until the cup was in many pieces that she realized why it had become so important and comforting: the pattern on the china matched the common room on Serenity.

She didn't feel like the warrior woman, the Amazon, the Bat as she stared down at the broken pieces. She felt like a very lost and tired woman who needed a hug and to be told everything would be okay. Question was, who did she want that from? Actually it wasn't much of a question; perhaps the answer hit her just as hard as that broken cup.

No, the better question was, why wasn't the damn man here?

After talking to Tony about everything that she'd seen, Annie decided that she was going to visit one of those places. Not the zoo, since she was still determined to get both Megan and Rufio in on that one. But the Botanical Garden seemed to be calling her name. Her world didn't have things like botanical gardens. Really, not many people had gardens, period. But one that the city kept and sustained? It was unheard of. There were more important things to take care of, such as destroyed buildings that threatened to fall and whole wastelands that they needed to try to clean up.

Her walk over gave her plenty of time to relive the night she'd spent glamored up and on the arm of Tony Stark. It was safe to say that her crush was growing. If he had been the Tony from the other world, she wouldn't have worried so much about telling him. That Tony had given her clear signals. This Tony seemed caught up in Pepper. Annie didn't want to tangle herself in that. At this point, she thought that if Pepper showed, he wouldn't hesitate to run to her. That would be uncomfortable to say the least.

But that didn't mean she couldn't live in her mind about it.

They had walked all over the place. Just talking and admiring the sights and the relative quietness of the city around them. There had been much laughter. Maybe a little flirting on Annie's part, but she felt that it must have gone unnoticed. When they'd gotten back to the car, her feet had been filthy. Tony had washed them so she could put her fancy shoes back on without worrying about ruining them. It had been a sweet gesture, an unexpected one. And he'd found out that her feet were really ticklish right by the toes. There had been a little more alcohol on their way back to the tower, but then they had parted ways.

All in all, the night had been wonderful. Annie hadn't wanted it to end.

She was smiling as she approached the entry window for the garden. There was a very small line. Annie felt that if she had a botanical garden in her world, she would have been there all the time, so the small number of people going into this one was a little saddening to her. It might have also intrigued her because even from the outside she'd seen plants that were unidentifiable, and there were whole sections that couldn't be seen from the fence. And an inside area that boasted who knew what.