Stark leaned back, causing his rolling chair to push away from the desk that he had commandeered in the medical lab. He stared up at the ceiling and blew out a weary, frustrated sigh.

Banner didn't need his empathic gift to feel his friend's frustration. "That bad, huh?"

Stark nodded. "SHIELD never got past the basic planning stage with its Tesseract weapons. Even if I could modify any of them to work with a different power source, there's no way I could get them ready in time."

"Not even you, huh?" Banner teased.

"I'm a genius, Bruce," countered Stark. "I'm not God."

Fitz perked up, inspired by the last two words he overheard from Stark's brief conversation. "Not God," he muttered. "Maybe you're not God..."

Simmons pushed away from her own computer when she heard furious typing behind her. "Fitz?" she asked. "What have you found?"

"Nothing definitive yet," Fitz insisted. "I was going through a folder full of old SHIELD reports when I found an analysis of what Ward discovered in Berlin...when we thought he was...when he was still..."

Simmons forced her partner to steer his focus away from the past. "What did he find?"

"That's just it, even he wasn't certain at the time," Fitz argued. "But there was a note made by an analyst that stuck out to me..."

By now Fitz' enthusiasm had Stark and Banner's full attention as well. "You think you might have something, Fitz?" asked Banner.

Fitz stopped clicking through windows when he landed on the file that he had been searching for. "The analyst thought that HYDRA might have been searching for an alien version of the Rosetta Stone," he explained quickly. Fitz sighed as his excitement was replaced with disappointment. "But if this is his Rosetta Stone, I shudder to think of what he thought this would translate..."

Simmons, Banner and Stark all let Fitz' frustration trail off as they stared at the video in front of them. "It looks...it looks a bit like a deconstructed diagram of a very complex organic molecule..." Simmons mused.

"It does, a bit," agreed Banner. "But it looks much more like a..."

"Circuit board," Stark declared excitedly. "It looks like a circuit board." He grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and carefully started to copy what he saw on the screen.

Banner turned to his friend with a skeptical glare. "That looks like a circuit board to you?" he asked.

"Stick with the particle physics, big guy," Stark countered, "and leave the tech to me...". The billionaire's bravado faded as quickly as it had emerged, leaving disappointment and frustration in its wake. "Goddamn it," he muttered, cursing the screen.

"What is it?" asked Fitz.

"If this is a circuit board," Stark explained, conceding to his friend's earlier question, "then the wiring is like nothing I've ever seen. Hell, it's like nothing that's ever been conceived of on this planet. But..."

"But what?" asked Simmons.

Stark finally admitted defeat with a frustrated sigh. "I can't see enough in that video to know for sure what I'm looking at."

"I think I might be able to help with that."

The scientists turned around to see Coulson standing in the lab's entryway. "You?" Stark asked in stunned disbelief. "How?!"

Fitz turned back to the computer as two puzzle pieces came together in his mind. "Someone tagged as MX left a note on the file that someone tagged AC has been having visions of this diagram. Is that you, boss?"

The next lightbulb went off over Banner's head as Coulson nodded. "MX is Master Xiānzhī, isn't it?" Coulson nodded again.

"How long has this been happening?" Simmons asked, her voice tinged with worry.

"It started shortly after I got my memories back," Coulson replied. "After..."

No one seemed to want Coulson to finish that sentence. Banner, in particular had already moved past the cause of Coulson's visions...to the chemical that was responsible for that cause. "The GH-325," he told Stark.

Stark caught on immediately. "You think this was some sort of...biological or chemical encoding in that Kree's DNA?"

"Hell if I know," Banner shrugged. "It could have been nanites floating around in the blood the Guest House drew. But whatever it is..."

"Phil's got it running through his veins," agreed Stark. His energy renewed, Stark grabbed a fresh piece of paper and a pen, then ushered Coulson into a nearby empty chair. "I need you to draw everything that you've been seeing," he ordered Coulson. "Leave nothing out."

Coulson stared up at Stark incredulously. "You want me to fit everything I've been seeing in my dreams on this little piece of paper?"

Stark grabbed a dry erase marker and pointed to the nearby wall. "I don't give a damn how much space it takes you," he insisted. "I need to know what you know. And I need to know it right now."

Coulson's humor evaporated when he saw the desperate, urgent expression on Stark's face. "This is that important?" He asked Stark.

Stark held the dry erase marker so that it would be within Coulson's easy reach. "Phil," he declared with absolute sincerity, "I'm pretty sure the fate of the world depends on it."

#

An hour later, Coulson had filled up most of the back wall...and seemed no closer to finishing. Banner studied the diagram with amazement, then turned and studied his best friend as the man watched Coulson with a laser-like focus. "You still think this is a blueprint for something?" he asked Stark.

Stark nodded, never taking his eyes off of the wall. "Still not sure what, though." It was then that Stark realized the one resource he had yet to tap into. "Mistress Yìzhī?" he asked Lanie.

"Yeah, DW?" Lanie asked Stark, her eyes never looking up from her microscope.

"Your husband around?"

The mention of her soulmate was enough to pull Lanie away from her own research. "He's in Tibet, but there's a portal open," she replied. "Why?"

"Can you ask him to come to the lab?" asked Stark. "I really need an extra set of eyes on this."

"He says he'll be here in a couple minutes," Lanie replied.

Stark never took his eyes off of the wall. "Thanks," he told Lanie.

It was only then that Lanie noticed Coulson's 'graffiti'. "What the hell is that?!" she exclaimed.

"A weapon," Stark explained.

Simmons frowned at Stark's definitive statement. "You're sure it's not an organic alien molecule of some..."

"I'm sure," insisted Stark.

"You're both wrong."

Lanie and Stark both turned to greet Esposito as he entered the lab. "I'm wrong?" asked Stark. "You're sure?"

"Well, you're both half wrong," Esposito replied. "Technically."

The vagueness of Esposito's response caught Simmons' attention. "He's half wrong? How?"

Esposito inched closer to Coulson, careful to let the older man continue his work. "I agree with DW that this is a weapon," he told Stark before turning back to his wife. "But come here and take a look at this."

Lanie walked over to her husband, overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the diagram on the wall. "What am I looking at?"

Esposito pointed out a few small sections of intricate dots and lines. "What do these sections look like to you?"

Eyes wide, Lanie and Simmons came to the same realization at the same time. "It's DNA," they agreed in unison. The two women split up and carefully started to scan the finished portions of the diagram. Simmons soon frowned, though, and inched her way closer to a section of the wall.

"What is it, Agent Simmons?" asked Lanie.

Simmons turned away from the wall to compile her thoughts before she spoke. "I'm pretty sure that six of these sections you pointed out are DNA," she explained. "But then what about these two?"

Lanie studied the sections of the diagram that Simmons had pointed out to her, then backed away from the wall to compare those sections to the other five. "Okay," she mused, thinking out loud, "if we presume these five strands are human DNA...what if these last two are non-human DNA?"

"You think it might be humanoid DNA?" asked Simmons.

Lanie could only shrug. "You don't know? I just assumed you've seen more alien DNA than I have..."

Simmons shook her head. "Sorry."

"What do you think you see, babe?" Esposito asked his wife.

"Humanoid means a being that would 'pass for human', right?" asked Lanie. When Esposito and Simmons both nodded, Lanie pointed to the very center of the diagram. "I think whatever being is represented by this DNA strand would be humanoid." Lanie then pointed to the other area of concern. "But this one...this one looks more human than that one...it just doesn't look 'completely' human."

"Quill," Esposito muttered under his breath, thinking out loud.

Lanie was the only one to catch her husband's comment. "What about him?"

Esposito looked up, slightly surprised that he and his soulmate were having this conversation audibly. "Oh? I thought I must have mentioned it at some point. Quill's only half-human."

Almost all activity in the room ground to a halt as everyone but Coulson focused their attention completely on Esposito. "Quill is only half human?" Simmons repeated. When Esposito nodded, Simmons pointed to the wall and turned to Lanie. "If this is Quill's DNA, then is it possible that the rest...?"

"It's not only possible, I'd bet it's likely," Lanie agreed, answering Simmons' unfinished question. "But I'd want to run typing on them to be sure."

Stark grabbed a dry erase marker of his own and added to Coulson's diagram. "If these are the carriers..." he mused, "then this section would connect to this one, and this section to this one..."

Banner watched as his friend set off on his own train of thought. He then brought his focus to the center of the diagram. "If these six strands of DNA represent the carriers," he asked Lanie, "then who is the being in the middle?"

Stark stepped back and admired his work even as Coulson seemed to be finishing up his. "Whoever that being is, if we can find him," he replied to Banner's question, "we just might have a shot at saving the world after all."

#

A/N: Just a reminder guys (so I don't get gripes about it in the comments), in this crazy little AU, Skye was not dosed with GH-325 - she was healed by Lanie. Read my story "Power of Persuasion" if you want to want to see (or remind yourself) where the branch-off occurred.