Hello again. No Thor/Loki in this chapter, just some exposition and foreshadowing. Enjoy!
A fluorescent light bulb buzzed off and on overhead as Bruce let himself into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s primary research lab. It was quiet this morning, and with each transparent monitor turned off, looked full of layered windows. Though it bustled with activity on a daily basis, when empty it looked so white and clean that an onlooker might swear it had never been used. It was fully stocked with any scanner, gadget, or material a scientist could use (and then some). A candy store for someone like Bruce, but to him it was even more than that.
Walking further into the room, Bruce felt like he was coming home. He shivered in his drawstring pajama pants with an audible "brrrrr," trying to shake off a long night of sleep. He was sleeping better nowadays. His solitary travels, fulfilling and refreshing as they were, never netted him more than 4 hours of rest each night. That was when he wasn't by the train tracks. Or trying to sleep while goats were in the room.
The lodging at S.H.I.E.L.D. was bigger on utility than comfort. Beds were thin and ergonomic. Walls came bare unless one took the initiative to dress them up. There were no mirrors in the rooms- he had to go to the communal bathroom to shave. Bruce eventually found that he liked living this way, though at first it was jarring. For years he had lived amidst rich cultures, walked through shady markets that offered cheap spices and cheaper spells, climbed green hills previously untouched by the soles of modern shoes. Now he found himself in line for breakfast with dozens of identically dressed twenty-somethings who kept their heads down and didn't even laugh that time Tony remotely hacked the menu display to make it say "steamed vagtables."
S.H.I.E.L.D was more foreign than foreign. It was…peace.
Catching sight of his formidable bedhead in the reflective surface of a smoke hood, Bruce balked.
"Maybe I'll buy a mirror."
He could have kept staring, maybe even fixed the hair situation, but there was work to do and Bruce believed there was no room for vanity in science, despite what Tony might have said. He padded in sock feet towards the back of the lab. There, along the wall, was an aluminum panel studded with large drawers. It resembled the inside of a morgue…and was one, in a way. Each drawer was a self-contained cryogenic chamber with full life-support capabilities. Most of the bodies therein were dead, with a few exceptions.
As far as the body Bruce was working on…well, that's what he was hoping to find out.
He keyed in the individual security code to the chamber marked "15," which contained his subject. The drawer began to slide not outward, but inward, as the gap it left was rapidly filled with whorls of mist. He would meet it on the other side of the (meter-thick, titanium) wall.
Donning a hazmat suit from a nearby closet, securing his gloves and boots, he left the helmet off long enough for a retinal scan and entered the first level of decontamination. Two more levels and an airlock later, he stepped into the cold, sterile autopsy room.
Casually standing in the middle of which was Steve. The Captain held a steaming mug in one large hand. On the side it read "Ask me when I'm done drinking this." Bruce immediately recognized it from a novelty gift basket that a fan had sent Steve anonymously through the mail. After being scanned for explosives, it was passed along to him.
Steve dipped his head for a sip, then seemed to register Bruce's nitrile-rubber-clad presence.
"Hey, champ," he said brightly and took a taste. "Jeez!" He recoiled, blowing on the coffee's surface. Bruce stared in annoyance, crossing his arms with a sound like a balloon animal being made.
"What?" Steve asked, genuinely confused. "It's hot."
"What the hell are you doing in here without protective gear?"
Steve tapped the side of the mug that displayed the caption, then leaned down to look at Bruce's experimental subject.
"Ok, cute. Genetically perfect and all that. But you don't know what kind of moon-viruses are all over this thing and you can get sick just as fast as I can." He gestured towards the crumpled, frozen Chitauri.
"Well, it didn't infect Tony with anything before he killed it with his cufflinks," Steve countered, "so I think it'll be just fine."
"Snufflinks."
"…excuse me?"
Bruce faceplate-palmed. "He calls them snufflinks. Portable photon cannons that hone in on alien elemental signatures. Tony…" Bruce chuckled, taking off his helmet with a defeated shrug. "…Tony got drunker than usual last weekend. Texted me at length," he emphasized, "about the idea. I guess he works even faster lately."
The Chitauri's left arm snapped off, but Steve deftly grabbed it before it hit the floor. "Whoops. Guess he really did a number on these things."
Plucking it out of Steve's hand, Bruce placed the spindly appendage back at the alien's side, then engaged the mechanism on the side of the slab which converted it into a rolling operating table. He used its newly descended wheels to move the body to the middle of the room. A large round lighting fixture with settings for every spectrum option hung just above them. Bruce settled for "visible" and pulled out the table's collapsible tray of sterile examination tools.
"Doing things the old fashioned way, huh?" Steve glanced up at the series of idle robotic arms and remotely controlled tools that festooned the ceiling. Usually they were used for examinations.
"Look who's talking." Bruce winked, running his gloved fingers over his materials. "Nahhh, I like to freehand it. Some habits die hard." He looked Steve in the eye. "You never told me why you were in here."
"Oh. Of course," Steve answered, somewhat sheepish all of the sudden. "Two days ago I was giving a speech at Westpoint's commencement and this rogue scientist who defected from the Human Genome Project showed up. You might have heard about him on the news."
"Mmhmm," Bruce said noncommittally, his attention divided.
"Well, anyway," Steve continued, "He literally dropped down from the rafters and onto my shoulders. Started wailing on me as hard as he could. I could barely feel it- guy must have weighed 120 pounds soaking wet."
"You don't sayyy…" Bruce trailed off as he began to liberate the Chitauri's chest armor from the charred skin underneath. There was a sucking sound when he pulled it away, then it clattered to the floor. He chose, then raised, a diamond bone saw.
"Yeah, gotta give him points for effort. He actually managed to lift my hood and shave a stripe off the back of my head before I got him off of me. "
Steve turned and sure enough, there was a long bald area stretching from his nape to the top of his right ear. Bruce snorted.
"That's a good look."
"I'm aware of that." Steve remained deadpan. "They took him to jail immediately. I wasn't concerned about it- there are crazies everywhere."
"And how." A pink mist rose intermittently as Bruce sawed through carapace and muscle alike. He was still listening, kind of.
Steve stared down at the body as Bruce began taking organs out of it handful by wet handful.
"He showed up in Times Square last night, maybe to wreak havoc, maybe to hurt some people. Regardless, when he got there, he looked like me."
A seven-ventricled heart plopped onto the hanging scale and Bruce peered over it. Now he was interested.
"He had busted out of county for long enough to pick up a costume, too."
"Wait…don't tell me."
"Party City. Leveled the paper goods aisle."
Bruce laughed as hard as he could with his arms up to the elbows in alien guts.
"So he ganks your genetic material, uses it to imitate you somehow, and goes on an old-fashioned New York rampage. How'd you beat him?"
Staring into his half-finished coffee, Steve shrugged.
"I didn't."
Bruce paused pulling away a membrane with his forceps and looked expectantly at his friend.
"The guy got about 30 seconds into his big villainous monologue and started falling apart. 'Least that's what the NYPD told us."
"Falling apart?"
"Skin, muscle, the works. S.H.I.E.L.D. containment scooped up what they could find and brought it here." He indicated the nearest cryo drawer with a tap of his knuckle. "Curiosity got the better of me, so I looked at him."
"Verdict?"
"Ever had lasagna MREs?"
Bruce gulped.
"Nope. And thanks to that, I never will."
Steve laughed and finished his coffee in one long gulp. Bruce watched his friend's Adam's apple bobbing as he himself removed his bloody gloves. He slapped them down on the side of the table. Lowering his mug, Steve looked over the dissected body with interest and slight apprehension.
"…Verdict?"
Running a clean hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, Bruce gave a confused half-smile.
"It's funny you told me that story."
"Oh?"
"Yeah…" Bruce shook his head and moved towards the intercom beside the door, placing his hand on it. "This thing might look like one...but it's not a Chitauri."
He pressed a single button which established a video link to the command room. A pretty but already annoyed face popped up in seconds. Behind Bruce, Steve simply kept staring at the splayed-open body, his posture defensive, as if at any moment the creature might leap up and grab him.
"Oh, hi, Agent Hill. Not a morning person, I take it."
She glared, then relented with a sigh…and a yawn. "May I help you?"
"Depends. Is Fury around?"