A Time of Gods

Black Cat made it her job to keep up to date with current events.
While she was aware that the big boss, Nick Fury, had an agent or two keeping an eye on her, Cat knew it would be in her best interest to keep track of the motions at S.H.I.E.L.D. That interest only increasing since Fury's initial offer to have her join the team he had hoped to put together a couple of years ago.

There hadn't been much since to perk up Cat's life. Of course there was the Thor sighting in a small town in New Mexico a while back, where he had fought and defeated a machine that gave even the US Army wet dreams. The appearance of a God, or Demigod as some referred to him, was definitely interesting. God or not, there was no denying his power. Yet nothing had been heard of him since.

Then there was Captain America himself. It wasn't common knowledge yet, but the star spangled superstar had finally been found. Frozen in a state of suspended animation. Upon this discovery Cat found herself torn over whether or not to follow her senses and question Fury. But something made her refrain for the time being and focus her attention on other things.

In the world around her, heroes duked it out with villains. Everything was becoming more advanced; the suits, the weapons -even if the reasons for fighting remained the same.
Cat didn't care much. She didn't exactly deal in antique armor herself. As long as things didn't disrupt her job, pilfering rarities and selling them on to the highest bidder.
Stealing from the rich to sell to the richer.

Occasionally she would flex her muscles by foiling a store robbery or street mugging, to then go home and smile at the irony. This was unconnected to her lifestyle choice though. Cat didn't view the regular, hardworking people of the cities with the same contempt as the ignorant upper class who paid her handsomely, just to adorn their walls with blase prints of soup cans. Yet she lived amongst the rich in a high rise apartment all of her very own.

Cat was enough to give a psychiatrist a nervous breakdown.

Her continued interest in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s business was what brought her to that particular underground base. It was dank and ugly, she didn't care much for it at all. Yet she appreciated the little trouble it had taken for a talented gymnast such as herself to gain access, undeterred and now able to watch unseen from above as she crouched on a ledge.

Just below she could see the skilled archer, Hawkeye, deep in conversation with an operative and she smiled to herself. S.H.I.E.L.D. certainly had some attractive men on the payroll.

Her private amusement was cut short by the revelation of Erik Selvig's work. Cat very nearly lost her footing when she saw the source of all this secrecy.

Cat had heard stories all the famous stories of World War II. From her father in fact.
He had gone a long way to describe the tales about the great Captain America and his nemesis The Red Skull.

But stories lose power over time, they start to die. Especially colourful ones involving super soldier serums and a man with a deformed red faces. It was stuff of fiction to the new generation, no matter in what context they were told. And if there were those who believed their parents and grandparents stories about Captain America, not all knew of the Red Skull and the great threat HYDRA had been. Even fewer knew of the power of the cosmic cube which he had stolen from its safe keeping in Norway. The Tesseract they called it now, and it was still just as powerful as ever, capable of providing limitless, absolute power. Capable of changing the world for the greater good.

Or destroying it completely.