A/N: I'm kind of evil, I'm aware. Well, I'm glad you all enjoyed the trauma and turmoil that was the last chapter of this little gem, I'd really been hoping that I was able to write it out the exact way I'd seen it in my head and thankfully, I did. Everything basically unravels from this point on; we're rapidly approaching the battle on the Helicarrier, the Battle of New York, but most importantly, the truth about what really happened to this poor girl who just wanted some answers. And also happens to be our favorite assassin's daughter. I'm glad that I was able to get you guys when you least expected it—my friend, who's been my advisor for a lot of this story didn't even realize it was coming and I was pretty glad when she said I shocked her by doing it that soon. My chapter titles always give it away though ;) Anyways, I'll shut up and let you get to it.


Chapter Nine: Questions Better Left Unanswered

LOCATION: STARK TOWER

"Phil, come in!" Pepper Potts' voice rang out as she stood up to go and greet the already straight-faced agent that was standing in the elevator.

"Phil?" Tony questioned as Pepper carried on, the smile on her face wide as can be.

"I can't stay," Coulson said stiffly. Tony rose, following right on Pepper's heels. This was their night together, celebrating Stark Tower's entrance into a self-sustaining, clean energy source thanks to the arc reactor. And now, here was Agent Coulson, showing up just on time to ruin, well, everything.

"Uh, his first name is agent!" he called after her, trying to catch up with Pepper's pace.

"Come on in," Pepper continued with her invitation, Tony wincing. "We're celebrating."

Pasting a fake smile on, Tony finally was face to face with Coulson. "Which is why he can't stay."

Extending a file towards Tony, Coulson began. "We need you to look this over, soon as possible."

"I don't like being handed things—"

"That's fine, because I love to be handed things. Let's trade." Pepper exchanged her glass of champagne for what Coulson was handing, before turning to Tony and grabbing his glass as she stuck him with the file, leaving Tony with a file in his hands and a none too thrilled expression plastered on his face. "Thank you," she chimed, giving Tony a look.

Clearing his throat and pushing his shoulders back, Tony then addressed Phil. "Official consulting hours are between eight and five every other Thursday."

"This isn't a consultation."

Pepper, who had been rather silent throughout the exchange, watched as Tony made his way back over to the desk in the far corner of the room before facing Phil once more. "Is this about the Avengers?" she asked, before quickly correcting herself. "Which, I-I know nothing about."

"The Avengers Initiative was scrapped, I thought. And I didn't even qualify," Tony muttered.

"I didn't know that either."

"Yeah, apparently I'm volatile, self-obsessed, don't play well with others," he rattled off, his tone bitter as he thought back to the evaluation Agent Romanoff had done on him when he hadn't been looking.

Pepper nodded. "That I did know."

"This isn't about personality profiles anymore," Phil protested, starting his walk over to where the billionaire was actively trying to avoid him, opening the file.

"Whatever," Tony grumbled, rolling his eyes.

"Surely you remember Natasha." That name was familiar, and Tony's head snapped up from the file at the sound of it.

"The redheaded assassin who went undercover as my assistant's assistant, did that evaluation on me as I was dying and can kick my ass into next Thursday? How do you forget someone like that, agent, because really, I'd love to know the secret."

Producing a flash drive from his coat pocket, Phil extended it out to a wary Tony, who took it hesitantly. "This is something I trust you with, Stark, something that if Fury found out I was doing, I'd get fired. Or killed."

Tony wiggled his eyebrows, smirking. "Playing dirty, are we Agent Coulson?"

Pepper, who had joined them over by the desk, retrieved the drive from Tony's hands. "And what is this, Phil?" she asked.

"I take it you're aware of Natasha's…predicament," Phil began. Tony cut him off with the dismissive wave of his hands.

"Mother Russia had a little baby Russia, yes, I very well remember that whole debacle. Need I remind you that she almost broke my nose when I oh-so-accidentally found out?" Tony spat bitterly. The whole event had been rather traumatizing in his experience; one very angry Natasha Romanoff was not a pleasant thing to have to deal with, and angry assassins plus an innocent Tony Stark never seemed to mix well in the first place. He continued, keeping his eyes trained on the first file Phil had given him. "Shipped the baby off to the Middle of Nowhere, USA, never saw it again. Then she disappeared, marked KIA, and if he'd had a religion, Barton would have lost it."

"Barton's going to lose his mind after he sees what you've done now," Pepper mused quietly from behind the two men, sitting on the couch with her laptop and already looking at the flash drive's components. Both men swiveling around to see what she was looking at, Pepper turned the laptop around, where a picture of a brunette in the woods aiming a bow and arrow at Fury was blown up to the size of the screen. Tony let out a low whistle.

"You and Fury are in such big trou-ble," Tony sang under his breath, to which both Phil and Pepper shot him looks for. "What? You know that the two of them made you swear that you'd keep the kid out of this…traveling circus act. That's why Natasha wanted her as far away as possible, why she shipped her off to a safe house. And if she finds out if you broke that promise—"

"She's not alive to know," Phil insisted.

"Well, in case her ghost comes back to haunt you for it, I'm not getting involved, since she'll probably still be able to kick my ass even in the afterlife. And there's also Barton, who, last time I checked, was very much alive."

"He's been compromised," Pepper piped up, her eyes still trained on the screen. "Some guy called Loki took him?"

"It's…a story for later," Phil explained. "The problem here is that we don't have Natasha and we don't have Clint. Fury's insisting we round up the troops—"

Tony stared at Phil, his jaw agape. "Oh my god," he said. "Has Fury recruited her?" His thoughts were confirmed when Phil's gaze averted quickly to the floor, looking slightly embarrassed. Tony let his hand drop to his side, hitting the side of his leg as it fell. "Well that's it. Fury's a dead man. He's dead. Did you come to make funeral arrangements, because I know a guy who can—"

"Mr. Stark," Phil interrupted, his voice stern. "I'm not here to condone Director Fury's actions. I'm here because I need for you to do me something."

"Yeah, and what part of 'I am not getting in the direct line of this' doesn't sink in? Barton's a world-renowned marksman, I'm not looking to have an arrow sticking out of one of my eye sockets," Tony refused.

"I'm not asking you to get into the direct line of anything. Fury thinks I'm here recruiting you to help find the Tesseract, but I'm here to ask you to keep Natasha's promise."

"Well, as you can see by the pictures Miss Potts is currently perusing through, you already kind of broke it," Tony gestured towards Pepper and her laptop, where she was still flipping through the flash drive's contents.

"Natasha wanted us to keep her safe, and that's what I'm asking you to do. Do I think Director Fury will stick her in the line of fire? No, but he knew better when it came to recruiting the girl, so there's no telling what he's got up his sleeve. We're doing everything that we can right now to find Barton, but in the meantime, we need to keep the girl safe."

"She was safe back wherever the hell you shipped her off after she was born."

Phil sighed. "You don't think we know this? We can't send her back now; Fury's told her enough to make her want to stay and she's already proven herself to be her mother's child. She's not going to walk away from this even if Fury gives her the out, and we have to do our best to keep Natasha's promise, even it's just from there on the ship. We owe it to her to at least try and let her rest in peace."

"So you need me to come on board and babysit the little assassin?"

"I need you to watch out for her. Again, if she's her mother's child, trouble will come knocking before she can go looking."

"And when Barton comes back and realizes what the hell you've done?" It was quiet for a moment, Phil not needing to respond since the answer of what he'd do was blatantly obvious to the both of them. They stared at Pepper in silence, watching quietly as she flipped through the photos projected there above them. Tony crossed his arms over his chest, opening his mouth again. "What's her name?"

"Katniss."

. . .

Slipping quietly into the room of her set destination, Katniss rolled up the file and stuffed it in the back of her utility belt. She wasn't about to carry on a conversation about this, not here and most certainly not now, and she didn't need to wave around the very catalyst for it. On her way up from 10-C, she'd tried desperately to hide the fact that she had been crying, but it proved a little complicated when she couldn't seem to stifle the flow of her tears. She'd found out who her mother was. Her real mother, not the mother who she'd had her whole life back in Twelve, not the mother who fell into a deep depression after her father died, not the mother who all but gave up on her. She had every reason to validate her tears, every reason to want to cry and nothing holding her back, except the fact that she couldn't walk in wearing weakness like it was a tattoo. She had to slap on her poker face and pray it held up.

Quietly, she tiptoed to the front of the glass chamber, folding her arms as she stood there, just waiting. His back was to her as he paced, and all of a sudden he stopped in his tracks, head lifting ever so slightly. "You know, there's not many people that can sneak up on me," Loki said, turning around slowly.

"Do I win a prize for that?" Katniss replied.

Loki simply grinned. "After whatever tortures Fury could concoct, he'd hoped you would appear as a friend."

"I'm not here on Fury's behalf," she cut in coolly. "I'm here for me."

"Do tell," Loki insisted.

Glancing at her surroundings before bringing her eyes back to Loki, she shrugged. "I figured it was time we chat. About…different things." The god in front of her cocked an eyebrow, and she carried on. "Gale," Katniss said, her voice clipped. "I want to know what it is that you've done to him."

Loki lifted his hands, moving his shoulders in a small shrug. "Well, I'd say I've simply expanded his mind," he responded.

Katniss' eyes narrowed into slits. "Expanded his mind? Are you talking about the possession…thing? How did you even know how to target him in the first place; you didn't even know I existed, that I was connected to this, that SHIELD even had me on their radar to start. Why go snapping up people who aren't involved?"

"In order to win a war, Miss Everdeen," Loki said, the sound of someone saying her last name now so foreign to her that she hardly even knew he was addressing her. "One must be aware of every possibility."

"Not an answer," she snapped.

Loki's hands lifted slightly, a sign of showing innocence. "I knew that you would be recruited by SHIELD eventually—one of my men informed me; my only hope of finding a way to you was through your friend, Gale." The beginnings of a smirk appeared on his lips. "Is this love, Miss Everdeen?" he asked.

"Love? It's never been about love, I owe him my life. "

Sitting down on the bench in the farthest corner of his little cage, Loki gestured for her to continue. "Tell me." Katniss mirrored his actions, seating herself in the chair closest to the glass that the guard keeping watch had used previously.

She let out a small sigh, leaning forward. "Growing up, our fathers worked together. They died in an explosion when I was still pretty young, and my mother didn't take it well. Left me to my own devices, I guess. I was starving away because she wasn't feeding me and we had no other way to get our hands on food after my dad died. Gale was the one who taught me how to hunt, how to use the woods as a resource. He was the only one who got it, who understood. We helped one another survive," she explained, muttering the last little bit very quietly.

"And I don't think you realized then that those weren't your real parents." Loki nodded in her direction. "That's where you were before visiting me, finding out things for yourself." Katniss could feel the heat rise in her face as he continued talking, the file beginning to feel like a knife pressing farther into her back. He let out a small laugh. "You aren't well with hiding your secrets, and after all, we're more alike than you think.

"Gale told me everything," he continued. "How you're impatient, stubborn, hot headed; how your temper gets the better of you sometimes and you allow it. You're not very complicated to figure out, Miss Everdeen. Your anger and rage over the years of hearing people discuss and pry into your life, being abandoned by your mother after the death of your father, being lied to; it's been bottled up inside of you, festering. Now it's coming to the surface, and you're about to explode. This ship is the lighter, and you are the fuse."

"You don't know a damn thing about—"

"What?" Loki cut in, Katniss' teeth set on edge as she ground them together in hopes that they wouldn't break under the intense amounts of pressure she was applying. "You? You don't think that I don't know of your quandary? Your superiors have me in a cage, Miss Everdeen, not on another world. I know you're struggling to fit in here, like you have everywhere else, that you're desperately searching for answers in the hopes they may bring a change your way. And that's why you've come to me. You want the one thing that has always remained back with you, your constant."

Katniss stiffened in her seat. "You're right, I do want Gale back. I also want to know what you know about my parents," she said. "I know you know something. Everyone on this damn boat does, except for me."

Crossing her arms over her chest, she kept her eyes trained on Loki. "And if I comply with your…requests? Vow to spare Hawthorne, agree to tell you what you so desperately wish to know?" he asked.

"Not let you out—"

Loki grinned. "Ah, no, but I like this," he chuckled darkly. "Your world hangs in the balance, and you bargain for one man and a scrap of news; news that will destroy you just as much as finding out whom your mother was?" Katniss leaned back slightly in her chair, Loki's grin growing wilder by the second. "Your eyes are rimmed red, you sit so uncomfortably; the vulnerability leaks off you, Everdeen. I may not be of your world, but I know of your inner workings, the signs of when you've uncovered a truth. You know who she is, and I must say you did a pitiful job of hiding the proof behind your back."

Standing up slowly and embarrassingly readjusting the poking out file back into her utility belt, Katniss squared her shoulders. "And if I do?"

"Well, I hardly see a reason to bargain."

"You still have something I want. Gale."

Loki rose from the bench, striding over to the glass at a slow pace, meant to lure her in for his strike. "I've seen his mind, I know of the things that he wants from you, and they're not of the things you think," he sneered. Katniss shook her head.

"If you think you're manipulating me into believing something else, you're not succeeding. I know that Gale and I are just—"

"Friends? Oh, Miss Everdeen, this is pathetic. You are pathetic. You've seen the way he's looked at you your whole life, you just elect to ignore it. He sees you as so much more than just his right hand; he sees you as his counterpart, the only one he could ever imagine being with. The only person in this world who fully trusts you, and in return, holds all of yours, even if he's been so dishonest about who you are to him. And what am I to do with something so sweet as the child at prayer, your basest sentimentality of wanting a man back who means nothing more to you than I do? What to do with the wolf among sheep, the one who wears the uniform but takes no orders from any man, who thinks herself separate from the monsters around her when they have latched onto her and will never leave her?" Loki slammed his fist against the wall of the cage, startling Katniss. "You eliminate the one of the least amount of use; drop them so you can deal with the real threats at hand. And that's what I intend to do. Only after I make him kill you in every way he's capable of, ways you're sure to fear, to which I'll wake him long enough to see his good work, and once the scream rips from him, I'll split his skull! That is my bargain, you mewling quim."

Katniss stepped closer to the glass, her eye contact with Loki never breaking. "Under your influence or not, Gale won't kill me."

Loki scoffed, his lip curling upwards in a smirk. "You truly believe I mean to have Hawthorne kill you? Oh no," he jeered. "Hawthorne won't have that pleasure. I'm talking about someone who you matter much, much more to."

"You're a monster."

"You're the one who's friends with the monster," Loki sneered.

Raising an eyebrow, Katniss stepped back from the glass cell. "Bruce. That's where you're going with this."

Loki straightened out, his fist relaxing out into just his palm pressed up on the wall. "What?"

"You want the Hulk unleashed. That's what all your little mind games are about; we're a powder keg and you hope when one of us explodes, we hit Banner."

"I don't—"

Walking away from the cell, she tapped into her comm unit, interrupting Loki. "Coulson, this is Everdeen; I'll be down at Banner's lab in five, send Fury and Thor. Keep Bruce and Tony there, we've all got quite a bit to discuss," she said, before turning back to face a puzzled Loki. "And thank you, for your consideration." She then turned on her heel, and started off to Banner's lab, leaving Loki behind the glass completely unaware of what sort of spark he'd just ignited.


A/N: This is definitely one of the shortest chapters I've written for this story, but I wanted to keep things nice and orderly going scene-wise, and this had to be a standalone chapter. But we really are moving right along, next chapter is without a doubt one of my favorites and I know that you're all going to enjoy that one—hint hint, it's the giant lab argument. And there's going to be a lot of tension. Also, how did you like that little bit showing what Tony was really called in for? I really loved getting to write out of Katniss' third person POV and focus more on everyone's favorite billionaire, not only because of his sass but because of what he knows. Trust me, it's so much more than any of you think. So yeah, please let me know what you thought of this chapter and what you think is going to happen next chapter! What's Fury going to do when he finds out? What's Tony going to do when Katniss almost kills him? And who do you think Loki's talking about when he said that he wasn't referring to Gale? (Even though I think we all know, I just want to hear you say it.) Remember: reviews make me write faster