...

"Why, you ask yourself, why you're so afraid?

Why you hesitate when someone asks your name?"

First Aid Kit, "Blue"

On his way to the labs, Tony Stark fought to suppress an exasperated sigh. Captain Fucking America. What was all the fuss about, really? A bit of added strength and endurance, and a fancy shield? Please. Mark II could outfight him on the worst day, and when it came to the VII prototype...

Not now. They needed to find the Cube now, which better be more fun than the briefing he's just left behind on the bridge. Fury asked him to help out their expert, mentioned they were searching for the thing by some kind of faint gamma-radiation trace. In the privacy of his own mind Tony was ready to admit that it was not exactly the area of his expertise, but he still did know the relevant people.

So, who was SHIELD going to snatch, on a short notice and under strict secrecy? Richards? He had some ties to radiation research, but nothing really solid. Pym? Unlikely, given their history. Arturo was rather too old for this kind of stuff, and Fuller… Well, maybe, though she was known for her dislike of working with government-sponsored agencies.

He entered the laboratory, taking quick stock of the layout, machinery, six heavily-armed guards (four in the corners and two by the exits), and a scraggy civilian man near one of the tables.

"So, you're 'the expert', I take it?" Tony asked loudly, coming to stand in the center of the room.

The man – middle-aged, middle-height, cheap and ill-fitting clothes – startled a bit at that, his hand darting, rather inexplicably, to tightly grip the rim of his glasses. He gave Tony a quick, jerk-like nod.

"Got a name?"

The man frowned.

"Robert Green," he said after a small pause. There was a faint, almost questioning uncertainty in his tone that seemed out of place in an answer to such a simple question.

"Pleasure," Tony replied simply. "Fury thought you might need a hand. Well, here I am."

"Oh. Of course, mister…?"

Tony stared. He honestly couldn't recall the last time he had to introduce himself, especially to a fellow scientist.

"Tony Stark," he said, in a perfect imitation of nonchalance. "I'm not shaking hands."

Now it was the other man's turn to stare.

"It's… an honour to meet you, Mr. Stark."

That's better. "Call me Tony," he smirked, and received another jerky nod in return. The man turned back to his work then, and Tony looked for a place where his tech was supposed to be brought. Unfortunately, instead of stacks of labeled cases with SI technological equipment, all he saw around him were modified Hammertech assault rifles, clutched in the hands of grunts with square jaws and blank stares.

"Are these guys just gonna stand here?" he addressed one grunt, then turned to the room as a whole. "I hate crowded workplaces."

The one to reply him was a short-ish man near the north entrance, with Lieutenant's insignia and an air of barely controlled disdain for anything civilian about him. "We're under orders not to leave the laboratory unsupervised, Mr. Stark."

"What for? Think we gonna steal something?"

"We have our orders, sir."

Tony rolled his eyes. "Look, I'm pretty sure ol' Cyclops isn't going to-"

"We are not under the authority of Director Fury, sir, and we are not leaving this room unsupervised," the soldier said through clenched teeth, then darted a quick glance at the other scientist in the room. When Tony followed his gaze, he found the jerky Dr. Green hunched over one of the displays, still and almost painfully tense, pointedly not looking at anyone.

"And you're okay with that?" Tony asked, taking a step towards the man. If he was right in his accessions so far, the physicist liked being babysat no more than Tony did himself.

Then again…

"Yes, of course I am."

Well, that was just mean. Not to mention completely against the spirit of fellowship that was supposed to instantly have formed between two brilliant scientists set up against dozens upon dozens of barely educated muscle-force. And Tony was already opening his mouth to give his new-found "colleague" a quick course on professional solidarity when he heard the man continue, with calmness so complete and resigned it gave him pause.

"It is for the best."

Something then, some detail of Green's posture, or his voice, or the way the light reflected off his glasses – whatever, really, - has triggered a strong sense of déjà vu in Tony's mind; the cold dampness of a cave, smell of gunpowder and sand, and a vision of a tense man in a dusty suit looking at him with worry, frantically whispering in his ear "Do as I do!".

So Tony did. Something was definitely fishy about the whole deal, though he wasn't yet sure about what aspect of it exactly raised the most of his concerns. The presence of the armed guard in a research lab, them not answering to Fury directly, or the weird high-strung scientist that looked kind of like he was left out of his top secret bunker for the first time in a decade? Either way, he could just as well play along for now, and see where it got him.

For some time then, he concentrated on unpacking his equipment and setting it up for work, pointedly ignoring the soldiers in the room, but keeping an eye on the physicist. The man looked like a compressed coil at first, but seemed to get engrossed with his work pretty fast, stopping to notice anything around him after that.

Which just wouldn't do as far as Tony was concerned. Silence gnawed on him, and since blaring Rolling Stones wasn't an option at the moment, he was ready to settle for the next best thing.

"Sooo… Come here often?"

Green jerked again, breath hitched, eyes wide, hands darting away from the keyboard as if he'd been burned. Like a startled animal. Like a-

"N-no. I've never been here before, actually."

"Are you working for S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"Who? I mean, the Army. For the Army. Most of my… work is… classified," the man said carefully, as if deliberating over every word. It made something click in Tony's mind then, some sort of vague revelation clumsily forming on the edge of his consciousness, just out of reach. He tried to chase that thought and see what it meant, but only succeeded in working himself up into a headache. Rubbing at his eyes, he looked away from the screen to notice that an hour has already flown by without him accomplishing much of his actual task.

Green, on the other hand, seemed to be working like a man possessed.

"That's some neat coding you've got going there, Bob," Tony said, coming to the other man's station and looking over his shoulder at pages and pages of the gamma search algorithm he was typing in at an impressive speed. "Can I call you Bob?"

A weird mix of amusement and horror was all that Tony could get from the guy's expression then. "S-sure."

"You know, I can't seem to recall any of your publications," he said, deciding now was as good time as any to start getting some answers. "I mean, given S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resources and stuff, I half expected to see someone like Arturo or Fuller, coming here."

"Is Arturo still alive?"

"He is," Tony smirked. "Still, it must mean you're top of your field, and I've never even heard of you before."

"Maybe I was just the best they could come up with on a short notice?" Green fidgeted. He looked away from Tony, tore off his glasses in one swift motion, then put them back on the next moment. "I assure you, when they… asked me to come here, it was just as much of a surprise to me as it is to you now. Maybe even more so," he added in an undertone.

"I don't think so," Tony went on, enjoying the other man's valiant – and sad – attempts at hiding his bosses' secrets. "About you being the first one they grabbed, I mean. With Fury, when it comes to staff, it's top dogs or no-one at all. Can you believe they've originally scratched me off because of some half-assed personality assessment? 'Compulsory behaviour' my ass..."

Green's efforts to hide a smile were no less pitiful.

Tony decided to keep the guy on his toes though. "So, you're doing radiation research for the Army?"

"Y-yes," the physicist tensed again. "Sorry, it's-"

"Classified, you said. Still, pretty great. Great that someone's doing it. God knows there was no decent work done in the field since… well, since Bruce Banner's death, I guess, back in 2006."

Green's fingers, that were flying all over the keyboard just a moment ago, inputting and correcting strings of code, stilled at once – inhale, exhale – before resuming their work, though at a much slower pace. The lines on his face hardened, then slackened once more.

That half-formed thought at the edge of Tony's mind tugged again, but he dismissed it for now in favor of pressing some more, going for what he believed was the gold here. "You knew him?" he asked with the previous masterfully faked nonchalance. "Banner, I mean."

"Yes," Green replied quietly. "We worked together, right before the, um… Accident."

"A friend of yours?"

A strange sort of expression came over Green's face then, but was gone almost immediately. "I never liked him much," the man ground out through clenched teeth, then went on without a change in tone: "The readings are definitely consistent with Dr. Selvig's reports of the Tesseract. But it's going to take weeks to process."

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster, we can clock this at around 600 teraflops."

Green smiled, though there was nothing happy or genuine in that sloppily constructed grimace. "The Director was right, I do need a hand. Desperately."

Tony knew he was onto something here. He tried to keep an eye at the guards, as well as the physicist, throughout the conversation, and noticed them grip their rifles a little harder every time Green so much as flinched, and vice versa. A peculiar vicious circle that, as far as Tony was concerned, was begging to be prodded a little more.

"You know, you should come by the Stark Tower sometime," he began with a lazy smile, once again going over to where the other man stood. "Top ten floors – all R&D. You'd love it. It's Candy Land."

The fluster on Green's face was almost comical. "Thank you, but I don't… get out. Much. A lot of… work. Sorry."

"Well, you're bound to have a weekend off sometime, right? Drop by, I'm sure I can promise a much… lighter environment," Tony shrugged, passing Green by from behind and dropping a casual hand on the man's shoulder.

There was nothing casual about a reaction he's got.

Green flinched violently, as if from an electrocution, throwing all of his body to the other end of the table, turning away from Tony, curling in on himself in… fear? Of Tony? That wasn't what he expected to see, wasn't what he was going for at all, and what kind of reaction was that anyway, you'd think the man expected to be attacked at any given minute, or-

"What are you doing here, Stark?"

His focus so firmly on Green, Tony has managed to miss Captain Righteous entering the room, as well as, he noticed with raising concern, all of the guards in it standing at utmost alert, their fingers actually on the triggers of their rifles.

"My job, Spangles," he retorted at once. "The real question is why your big red boots are stomping around all this circuitry. Aren't you afraid the spectrometer over there's gonna steal your soul or something?"

"Is everything a joke to you?"

"Funny things are."

"There's nothing funny about compromising the search procedures for the Cube by harassing the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel, Stark," the soldier scowled, nodding at the physicist still trying to regulate his breathing. "Is he bothering you, sir?"

Green's response surprised Tony once again. Instead of taking refuge in Captain's care, he looked more like the man was threatening him. "No! No," he quickly shook his head for emphasis. Tony decided to seize the opportunity that so fortunately presented itself.

"If there's anyone bothering anyone right now, it's you and your buddies here, Caps."

"Buddies?" the soldier frowned.

"Yeah, I'm afraid all of the corners are occupied, but I guess you can still stand right in the middle of the room and glare at us some more, like a Ghost of 4th of July Past. Or, you can do a sensible thing and order them the hell out of here so Bob and I can work in peace."

Rogers took a quick look over the room, as if noticing the armed guard for the first time, a frown still on his features. "These people are not under my command, Stark. And even if, I'm pretty sure they were put here for a reason."

"Yeah, and I'll find out precisely what it was once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure files."

"What? Did you say-"

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge," Tony went on, reveling in the expression of bewilderment and muted outrage on the soldier's face. "In a few hours, I'll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever tried to hide."

"Maybe this was the actual reason you've been scratched off, Mr. Stark," Green muttered from his side, a wry smirk clear in his voice if not on his face. "And it had nothing to do with your, uh, behaviour?"

Rogers didn't seem to have caught what Green said, all of his focus still on Tony. "Are you out of your mind?" he exclaimed.

"On the contrary," Tony smirked, "between the two of us, I'm the only one who has not only kept his mind, but also been using it very productively for quite some time now. This whole Tesseract business is extremely shady, and I will get to the bottom of it."

"You think Fury's hiding something?"

Tony just huffed. "I'm surprised you don't. 'No-one trusts a spy' doesn't ring a bell? I thought you were in the Army."

"He's on our side."

"'Ours not to wonder why,' then, Captain? Well, be thankful that at least some of us have retained a measure of independent thinking. It's bugging him too, isn't it?" he jerked his head towards Green, and, rather unsurprisingly, saw the man once again flinch from attention, one hand clutching at his glasses like a lifeline.

"I just want to finish my work here…" he mumbled to no-one in particular.

"I swear, if you hide behind your 'work' one more time-"

"It's not my place t-to talk."

"Leave him alone, Stark," Rogers interjected.

"Why? He has just as much right to speak as-"

"I don't, really…"

"Come on, Stark, let go-"

"Do you trust Fury?" Tony pressed, taking a step closer towards Green, forcing the man to look him in the eye.

What he saw made him wish he didn't bother.

Dark and cold. Tony has seen people with eyes like these before. People returning from battlefields. People who were starved, wounded, broken. Dead.

"I don't trust anyone."

There was no passion in Green's voice as he said that. No anger of the malcontent, no zeal of the conspiracy theorist, no resentment of the slighted. And still, the sheer simple, tired conviction of that phrase hit Tony like a brick.

There was something wrong with this man.

"You see?" Rogers's voice jerked Tony right out of his reverie. "This is exactly what Loki is trying to do. Wind us up and set us against each other. This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don't stay focused he'll succeed. We have our orders. We should-"

"'But to go and die,' yeah, we've got that already," Tony rolled his eyes, glad to be back on a more familiar track. "So why won't you get on that while Bob and I do some actual work here?"

Rogers set his jaw, and looked at Green. "Just find the Cube," he said simply, before turning around and walking out into the corridor.

Tony has looked at the door he left through for several long moments before shaking his head and getting back to his equipment.

"That's the guy my dad never shut up about? I'm wondering if they shouldn't have kept him on ice."

"Well, he's not wrong about, um, Loki. He does have a jump on you."

"'You'? I kind of thought it concerned all of us…"

"Us. Of course, I meant 'us'. Sorry."

The guy started fidgeting again, hiding his eyes, constantly touching his glasses, as if to check they were still there. Five minutes ago Tony would have probably found that almost adorable, but not after he actually looked the man in the eye. The awkward, fish-out-of-water façade was just a façade, or at least nothing more than a surface level of the physicist's personality. Down under, there lurked something else entirely, something bigger, heavier, something… dangerous.

He typed in a few simple requests into Jarvis's interface on his mini-tablet. The results took no more than several minutes, and were more or less what Tony came to expect. Jarvis's scanning of the databanks of the US National Academy of Science turned up exactly two individuals named "Robert Green": Robert Patrick Green, 62, a marine biologist, and Roberta Lee Green, 39, a seismologist. Further scouting of the reaches of the Internet did not turn up any significant publications by any Robert Green on the subject of gamma radiation in particular, or even particle physics in general. Which begged a question.

"Are you a criminal?"

"Sorry?"

"I had this idea you were some kind of Hannibal Lecter-esque evil mad scientist they let out of his pen for a time, but you say 'sorry' entirely too often for that to be true," Tony shrugged. "So, what's up with you?"

Green blinked a couple of times at him, not understanding, but clearly starting to worry. "What's… up?"

"Yeah, what's your deal? I mean, it's clear that the Cheer Squad here is for your benefit rather than mine or the Tesseract's. There's no mention of you in the S.H.I.E.L.D. or NAS files, and somehow I'm pretty sure were I to get into the Army databases I wouldn't find a 'Bob Green, Ph.D.' there either."

The worry on the physicist's face increased. "Mr. Stark-"

"Tony."

"Tony, I'm sure this is some kind of mistake…"

"Are you under witness protection or something? That'd explain the absence of info on you, though not the soldier boys."

"No, really, it's-"

"Or maybe you are a criminal after all. Do they think you're gonna take a .6 screwdriver to my neck the second I turn my back to you, and try to escape the 'carrier with me as a hostage? I mean, I don't know where they think you'd actually go - unless you can fly a jet – but, let's be honest, expecting logical thinking from the Army is setting yourself up for a disappointment."

"No, no, I'm not going to escape!"

Tony smirked. "But you'd like to."

"No! Please, w-why would I want to, uh, 'escape' from here? I'm here of my own free… will," Green pled, frantically looking at the soldiers around the room. Tony was pretty sure the man didn't notice his glasses were no longer on his face, but clutched firmly in one of his shaking hands instead.

"Yeah? Okay. Then why are they here then, and why do they twitch for their guns every time you so much as breathe wrong?"

Green's eyes widened at that, then closed, as if on reflex, as he took a couple of deep breaths and attempted to center himself. Tony watched, transfixed, as the physicist breathed slowly, in and out, consciously relaxed his tensed up muscles one by one. The process seemed practiced, tried-and-true, as seamless and natural as the heavy rainclouds moving sluggishly across the sky. The man who has slowly put his glasses back on and looked at Tony several moments later had no traces of panic or pleading about him. In fact, there were no traces of emotion whatsoever on his pale, worn-out face.

"Mr. Stark…" he began evenly.

"Tony."

"…I would really appreciate it if you left the whole thing well enough alone."

This! There it is again! Tony has almost cried out. In his eyes, in his posture – that low-key, repressed, dangerous intensity, like the waves crashing against the walls of a dam in a thunderstorm. Like watching a thriller film.

Tony felt a smile tugging at his lips. He was almost there. "You would, wouldn't you? I thought you too polite for the 'evil' part of the 'evil mad scientist', but that doesn't really discount the 'mad' part, does it? What, they're here in case you snap at me all of a sudden and go on a ship-wide killing spree?"

He could swear he heard Green's teeth grind. "Yes."

Tony laughed.

"Come on," he let out at last. "No offense, but look at yourself. A guy with a tranq-gun could take care of that. A full-geared squad of best and brightest? You'd have to be some kind of complete monster to deserve this level of precaution."

Green went still.

A moment or two passed in complete silence, when Green didn't seem to be breathing, and Tony was kinda afraid to. But then the physicist moved, jerkily, back to his keyboard, and Tony felt a heavy hand land on his shoulder.

"Mr. Stark," one of the guards said, "It might be better for you to leave the room. Now."

"Hey, I'm not-"

"It's alright, Lieutenant," Green spoke from his station, perfectly calm, smiling even, as if that bizarre mini-breakdown of his a minute ago didn't happen. "It's fine. And I don't think Mr. Stark can reasonably leave the lab now – his, um, 'decryption program' has not yet run its course."

The guard looked dubious, a frown on his face and a firm grip on his rifle. He shot a glance back at his superior, received a slow, hesitant nod, and finally took a step away from Tony. The engineer heaved a deep breath, only then realizing he's been holding it before.

There was something so very wrong with this man.

"You're tiptoeing, Bob," Tony said under his breath, deciding to immerse himself in his work for a while and think through everything that has just happened. "You need to strut."

"You might not enjoy that," came a quiet response.

Tony wondered.

A/N: hoo boy, was this one a long time in the works! But now it's here, and I hope you're enjoying it :D

Next chapter should be up pretty soon, but until then please leave a comment if you're so inclined!