January 19, 2022

Dream CCXXIX

I was a member of the Avengers.  My abilities were kind of vague, but they were similar to the Hulk in that I could not completely control them.  Black Widow and I were particularly close.  

We were on a mission to combat some malevolent force in a foreign town.  We had to get the people to lie perfectly flat on the ground to stay safe.  Two dogs wandered over, and I tried to signal that they needed to get down; later a small kitten with ketchup on her neck came over to me.  I looked around to see if I could find something to clean the ketchup off, but just before I grabbed a napkin she rubbed her neck against my shirt.  I tried to clean her, and saw that she had broken glass all over her neck, and I wondered if the ketchup was blood.

The mission completed shortly thereafter, and we returned to headquarters to relax.

All of us knew that the Widow was being blackmailed into giving information to some hostile foreign power.  I tried to help, by taking the information away from her when she was distracted and trying to hide it, but she always found where it had been hidden.  She knew it was me, and she knew why I did it, but she liked me enough that she never confronted me about it.

At some point, we all knew she was being compromised in her ability to help us on missions.  Finally, I convinced her that we could make it appear that she had been killed, and she could go into hiding.  She told me we would have to use convincing evidence, so we split the information she was supposed to deliver into bits and left it where her blackmailers would find it, but scattered so that it looked like the aftermath of a giant fight.  The information resembled coils of wet dental floss.  One was a review of a story by H.G. Wells.

I told her that I was willing to fake my own death and disappear with her, and she was pleased.  We looked for a place to live, and found a small village made up of rows of regular housing arranged over the hills.  We both thought the town looked great.  It was smallish enough not to be noticed, but modern enough for our needs.

The houses in the distance seemed to move, as if they were being manufactured out of the hills, but Widow said that had to be an illusion.  I smiled and said, "Just like the story by H.G. Wells."