Temperance stood unmoving, staring up at Hulk with wide eyes. She was frozen in place, terrified that even the slightest movement would bring on the attack. Hulk's eyes looked dazed at first, and then turned angry again, as if he were struggling against something. He shuddered in frustration and let loose a roar that sent saliva all over her.
Then he brushed past her and stomped away.
Temperance let out a breathy, nervous laugh after a moment. She was shaking all over.
"Are you okay?" She asked Thor, who was now climbing to his feet.
"What was that?" He asked, one eyebrow arching as he sized her up.
"I don't know. I guess Dr. Banner's got some control after all." She replied, still breathing heavily.
"Yes, I suppose so." Thor agreed. Temperance wondered briefly if he'd sustained a head injury or if he always looked this confused. "I'm going after Loki. You should find some place to hide."
Temperance nodded, swallowing hard. Her heart was still racing hard, and her relief was quickly fading as she remembered that she was still on an aircraft that was falling out of the sky.
"Right. Be careful." She called out awkwardly as the man ran off in the direction she'd come from earlier. She stood there for a moment, glancing around in indecision. There were probably parachutes somewhere around here. Perhaps she could just...jump? She stood there a full minute before walking out of the hangar and back through the hallways of the helicarrier. She wasn't exactly sure where she was going, but she knew she didn't want to be alone. As she walked the halls, she picked up her ear piece, which had been dangling from her shoulder, and placed it back in her ear.
"I need you to get to that control panel over there and tell me which relays are in overload position" Tony was saying. She briefly recalled them mentioning before Hulk had attacked her that engine three had failed.
"What's it look like in there?" Tony pressed a moment later.
"It seems to run on some form of electricity." Steve replied. There was a long pause.
"Well, you're not wrong." Tony said. Temperance rushed to a navigation panel on the wall nearby and pulled up a map of the helicarrier. She quickly located engine three -it was nearby, but it spanned multiple levels, due to its size.
"Steve, what level are you on?" Temperance asked.
"Four." He answered after a brief pause.
"Don't move, I'll be right there." She exclaimed, taking off in a sprint. If there was one thing she knew after three years of hanging around Tony Stark, it was relay switches. Tony and her father had spent countless hours playing with the circuitry of Stark Tower's clean energy and more often than not, there needed to be somebody at the control panel resetting the relay switches after they tripped and broke the circuit.
She arrived at the engine room in under two minutes and hesitated for a moment when she saw that most of the room was now missing, exposing them to the open air. She grabbed onto anything she could reach as she stumbled toward the control panel that Steve was staring at. The wind alone would be enough to suck her out of the ship if they fell any faster than this. She sank to her knees next to the Captain and brushed her hair away from her face as she ran her fingers over the panel.
"Where are the relay switches?" Steve called over the noise. Temperance shook her head, her heart hammering.
"I don't see them!" She called back.
"Today would be nice." Tony said in the earpiece, his sarcasm undercut with a hint of uncertainty. Temperance continued to explore the panel with her fingers and her heart skipped a beat in relief as she found another small door that popped opened to expose the switches.
"Got 'em." She told Tony. "We've got four in overload."
"Okay, good. I want you to flip them, but wait about 20 seconds between each flip. Can you do that?" He instructed carefully.
"Yep, working on it." Temperance told him, flipping the first switch and beginning the countdown in her head. Her countdown was interrupted as a bullet ricocheted off the control panel, and she flinched away from it.
"Keep going and stay down. I've got it." Steve told her, getting up to face the men in masks who had emerged with their guns on the platform just below them. One threw a grenade toward the engine and Steve leaped into the air to meet it, swatting it away from the ship. Temperance flipped the second relay. Steve landed on the agents' platform and began fighting with them, easily shoving one off the ledge. The man's scream faded quickly as the atmosphere whisked him away. Temperance flipped the third relay. Steve picked up the gun of the first man and shot at the second, forcing him to retreat. He hid behind a corner and the two continued to shoot at each other intermittently. Temperance flipped the fourth relay.
"What now, Tony?" She asked.
"Even if I clear the rotors, this thing won't re-engage without a jump." Tony replied, thinking out loud. "I'm gonna have to get in there and push."
"If that thing gets up to speed, you'll get shredded." Steve argued, still somewhere on the platform below Temperance's.
"That stator control unit can reverse the polarity long enough to disengage maglev, and that could -"
"Speak English!" Steve said, growing impatient.
"See that red lever?" Tony began again, frustrated. Temperance and Steve both glanced around for a moment before spotting the lever in question. It was on the same level as Temperance, but there was a large gap separating her from it, where the floor had been destroyed in the explosion. "It'll slow the rotors down long enough for me to get out. Stand by it. Wait for my word."
Temperance was relieved when Steve leaped up and pulled himself onto the platform near the red lever. This was going to work. It had to. However, before Steve could step toward the lever, the helicarrier pitched sideways. Temperance clung to the control panel to keep her balance, but Steve stumbled backwards, stepping on a piece of loose metal that slid under his foot, causing him to pitch backwards off the ledge.
"Steve!" Temperance cried, watching him fall. At the last moment, he managed to grab a loose cable that was blowing in the wind and dangled from the platform.
"Stark, we're losing altitude." Fury spoke through the earpiece.
"Yep, I noticed." Tony replied, his voice strained. He was pushing the rotors. Temperance glanced down at Steve, who was slowly managing to climb back up the cable. She whipped around and looked at the red lever. She had to get to that lever. There was a small metal line of some kind of piping that ran along the wall. If she could manage to grip it and shimmy across the gap, she could drop onto the other side and pull the lever. She took a moment to steady herself and then rushed over to the wall, reaching up for the piping. It was attached flush against the wall and only stuck out about two inches, which meant she could only grip it with her fingertips. She jumped up and grabbed on, using the toes of her shoes against the wall for extra stability. She began to shimmy sideways, over the gap.
"Cap, hit the lever." Tony said in her ear. Temperance grimaced, her whole body shaking as she kept all of her muscles tensed in an attempt to keep control. Holding her weight was less of a burden than she'd suspected, but the ship continued to sway and her fingers had very little purchase on the metal piping.
"I need a minute, here!" Steve called from somewhere below, his voice strained. Temperance had made it more than halfway across the ten-foot gap and was trying to tune them out, focusing instead on controlling her breathing.
"Lever! Now!" Tony said again, his tone growing nervous. Temperance heard gunshots from below and ignored them, instead letting them spur her on faster. Finally, she kicked off of the wall and landed on the metal grating with a painful thud. She could hear Steve struggling with an agent down below as she shakily crawled over to the lever. She grabbed it and used her weight to help her pull it down, collapsing back to the floor when it was done. The gunshots stopped, as did the racket of clanking sounds and shouting coming through her earpiece from Tony's end. Her chest tightened with panic - she'd been too late.
"Tony," She called, halfway between a gasp and a sob.
"I'm alright." Tony announced after a moment. "Now I know what going through a garbage disposal feels like."
Temperance didn't laugh, still laying there in a heap until Steve climbed up onto her level and pulled her into a sitting position, holding her shoulders. "Ward, you okay?"
Her chest was still heaving and she was shaking from exertion, but she nodded wordlessly. He helped her to stand and led her back inside, watchful for any more rogue agents.
"Here, have a seat." Tony told Temperance after they reconvened in the conference room and shared a quick embrace. The relief of their survival had been short-lived when they heard that Coulson hadn't made it. She, Tony and Steve took a seat at the table, and Temperance wondered briefly where the others were, but didn't want to ask for fear of more bad news. Fury, who stood at the head of the table, pulled out a handful of vintage Captain America trading cards.
"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket pocket." He announced. "Guess he never did get you to sign them." He added, tossing them across the table at Steve. Temperance winced as she saw the blood splattered on them. Steve reached out and picked one up, looking at it.
"We're dead in the air up here," Fury continued. "Our communications, location of the cube, Banner, Thor...I got nothing for you. I lost my one good eye. Maybe I had that coming." He began to walk around the table. "Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the tesseract. I never put all my chips on that number, though, because I was playing something even riskier. There was an idea -Stark knows this-called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people. See if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to. To fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea. In heroes."
Tony rose from his seat abruptly and they all turned to look at him. He stood there for a moment before storming out of the room. Temperance, who had already begun to feel out of place as the shock of everything wore off, now felt even more misplaced without Tony there.
"Well, it's an old-fashioned notion." Fury continued, clasping his hands behind his back. There was a heavy silence for a long moment, before Steve laid the trading card he'd been holding back on the table and went after Tony. Temperance was left with Fury and Agent Hill, who'd been watching the exchange from the corner.
"I don't suppose I can catch a flight back to Manhattan any time soon?" She spoke up after a moment, unable to bear the silence any longer. She glanced up to see Fury already watching her with his good eye.
"Do you know why you're here, Temperance?" He asked.
"Because my employer has too high of expectations?" She answered after a moment, her tone light. Fury made her nervous, which made her want to break the ice with jokes. It wasn't working.
"We don't just bring civilians here." Agent Hill chimed in, crossing her arms.
"Wouldn't be the first time he got me into some place exclusive." She returned.
"I'm gonna cut to the chase." Fury told her. "You were always meant to be here. And you proved today that you're ready to be here."
Temperance's eyebrows furrowed and she stared at the two of them for a long moment, trying to understand. "I...flipped a few switches and pulled a lever." She said, finally finding her voice. Fury didn't reply, instead pulling up a projection screen in the middle of the table. It was showing security footage from the hangar. Temperance watched as the Hulk grabbed her helicopter and swung it around, slamming it against multiple surfaces before tossing it across the room like a crumpled paper ball. She paled watching it - she hadn't realized from inside the helicopter just how bad it had been. She continued to watch as Thor pulled her out, unscathed, and as Hulk charged her, stopping at the very last moment. The hair on her neck and arms stood up. She didn't want to watch it.
"You stopped him." Fury said, noticing her discomfort and pausing the footage. Temperance's eyebrows rose.
"Who?" She asked. "Hulk? No, that was Banner. He had...a moment of clarity...or something. I saw it." She insisted.
"You told him to stop." Hill interjected, stepping forward. "And he did. Immediately."
"But that wasn't -" Temperance stopped herself. It was ridiculous; she shouldn't even have to argue against it.
"And how do you explain walking away from the helicopter unscathed?" Fury asked. Temperance said nothing, looking back at the figure of herself standing over Thor's prone body in the projection. "There's a reason you've been kept Avengers-Initiative-adjacent all this time." He continued, "We weren't going to involve you, but we got desperate. We are desperate. And we're gonna need your help."
Temperance walked into the lab that Tony had reclaimed to prepare for the confrontation at Stark Tower. After Steve had gone after him, the two had decided to go along with the Avengers Initiative for the sake of avenging Coulson and protecting the world from whatever Loki had planned. Tony was currently using a blow torch to mend his Iron Man mask. His suit had taken pretty extensive damage inside of that engine. Temperance winced thinking about it.
"Did Fury mention that I'm coming along?" She asked, leaning against one of the lab tables.
"He did. I can't say I'm a fan of the idea. He showed me the footage, though. I've got to say...it's interesting." He replied, pulling his welding mask up to look at her. She crossed her arms.
"Yeah. S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to think so. Apparently they've been...aware of me." She said. "Did you know?"
"I had no idea. I swear." Tony told her seriously. "Do you think it's true? That you can control Banner?"
"Of course not." Temperance replied, giving him a look. "It's ridiculous."
"And yet you still agreed to come along." Tony noted. Temperance hesitated before responding.
"I have just as much stake in stopping this as you do. Just because I'm not some hero doesn't mean I can't help. I'm the one who reversed that rotor, you know." She said.
"So I heard." Tony replied. "And I appreciate it. I just...it could get pretty ugly. I don't want you around."
"Yeah, well, that's what I said about my 21st birthday party, but you crashed that anyway." She retorted, shrugging a shoulder.
"Okay, that hurts." Tony said, placing a hand over his heart to feign offense. Temperance smirked. The doors to the lab slid open, and Natasha came strutting in, already armed to the teeth with gadgets that Temperance couldn't make heads or tails of.
"Come on, Ward." She told Temperance, gesturing for the younger woman to follow her. "Let's get you into something a little more combat-appropriate."
"Preferably bulletproof." Tony called out as Temperance followed the redhead out of the lab.