Chapter Eighteen: Differing Perspectives

"Hiro!" The kit looked down from his discovered perch on a tall shelf at the back of the lab. Below him, the brown-haired teen had his arms crossed as he craned his neck up to find him. "Hiro get down from there!" His only response was to lower himself into a laying position that resembled the Sphinx and rest his head lazily on his front paws. He really didn't see why he needed to get down, other than the fact that he was embarrassing his friend – which, honestly, he was really enjoying watching the annoyed boy glare at him through his goggles – or that said friend was afraid he'd fall, in which case, he was offended at his lack of confidence in Hiro. "I know you like it up there, but really?" Spider-man huffed.

"How'd you even get a cat in here?" Mr. Stark wondered, glancing up from the screen he and Dr. Banner were crowded around momentarily. "Didn't think Eye-patch was a cat person."

"He snuck in in my duffel bag," the hero replied distractedly as he crawled up the wall to the shelf's height. "And somehow nobody noticed."

"Talented cat."

"Yes, well, you could say that." Spidey reached out carefully for the animal, who took great amusement in jumping away and down to the counter at the last moment. "Dang it! Or, you could say he's a dirty little criminal." Hiro smirked and turned up his nose while bounding lankily down to the floor, then up to the table the two adults were working at. Dr. Banner absentmindedly scratched the top of his head to a pleased purr as he read through the text, lips moving silently. Spider-man had apparently decided that he was going to stay on the ceiling for now, walking over casually to stand upside-down by the two scientists. A slight sniff caused both to jump out of their skins and whip around to find the third part of their group beside them. "Hey, guys."

"Sneaky little bastard," Stark muttered exasperatedly, though he could tell there was an underlying current of humor.

"Yep, that's me!" he agreed before pushing his lenses up off his eyes, into his hair, exposing chocolate eyes and squinting past them at the monitor. "Hm. Interesting readings."

"Yeah, Selvig's reports on the Tesseract."

"How do they compare to the scepter?" In answer, Dr. Banner grabbed one of the many devices strewn across the room and went to stand by the spear. With a steady hand, he ran it along the length as Hiro watched him with sharp green eyes.

"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract," he confirmed, continuing his diagnostic. "But it's gonna take weeks to process."

"If we bypass their mainframe," Tony mused as his fingers flew across the high-tech screen, "and direct route to the Homer cluster we can clock this at around six hundred teraflops."

Banner let out a small smile. "All I packed was a toothbrush."

"I didn't," Spidey realized and flipped down from the ceiling with nary a sound, going to work at another monitor near where Hiro still sat watching everything evenly. The kit jumped up cheerily and declared his rightful place in the boy's hair as soon as he stopped moving. They made quite the sight: Spider-man, minus the goggles, with a black cat in his hair.

Stark laughed a bit at all three. "You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. You too, Webhead. Top ten floors – all R and D. You'd love it, it's a candy land."

"Thanks, but… last time I was in New York I kind of broke… Harlem," the gamma expert turned him down hesitantly.

"As absolutely amazing as that offer sounds," the arachnid started, while simultaneously keeping his face carefully neutral, "I'm busy." He kept his head down until he had a reasonable excuse to turn around and pick up a tool laying by where Hiro had previously sat, mouthing silently "Holy crud, Tony Stark just asked me to come work in his lab!" The cat chuffed as his not-owner went back to his work on the fancy touchscreen, the other two brainiacs still bantering in the background.

"Come on!" Tony protested. "You can't be busy all the time!"

"You'd be surprised," he whispered to himself, though Hiro caught it with the same wry smile the boy had on under his kerchief. The statement was correct, while probably not in the way the man was thinking. There wasn't often a moment in the day or night that Peter wasn't dressed up as Spider-man and helping, trying to find food, trying to find water, hiding from an assortment of unsavory characters, or a combination of a few. Sleep was a rare luxury lately. Unfortunately, he had an inkling of a feeling that the teenager's real reason had something to do with the horribly misplaced blame he had on himself for getting everyone close to him killed.

"Well, I promise a stress-free environment," he continued to propound. "No tension, no surprises." The billionaire sauntered up behind Dr. Banner and promptly poked him in the side with something akin to a miniature cattle prod.

"Ow!"

"Hey!" And that would be Captain Rogers, who now marched up to Stark angrily and accusingly, causing Hiro to question his motives. Sure, if he was trying to defend a friend from something he saw as rude or mean, that was cool with him, he was all for it! Or there was the more-than-slightly offensive version of he thought of the nice, quiet doctor as a ticking time bomb who could hurt or kill everybody on board. "Are you nuts?"

"Jury's out!" Mr. Stark proclaimed, and Hiro really needed to decide what to call the man. He kept flipping between Tony, Stark, and Mr. Stark in his head because the first sounded too friendly for someone of his stature, the second was too callus for someone he was beginning to like, and the third was too formal for the entertaining – read, childish – brunet. He could see similarities and clear difference between him and Peter. Both overly excited about science, always ready with a quip – though Peter was more withdrawn around people lately – and brown-haired, brown-ish eyed. Chocolate versus hazel. While the comparisons whizzed through his head, the high-strung men were still talking. Mr. Stark, what Hiro had decided on for now, had turned to Dr. Banner. "You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz, bongo drums, huge bag of weed?"

"Is everything a joke to you?" the war captain accused, missing the raised-eyebrow look that Spider-man was giving him. He was accusing Mr. Stark of that when he was in the same room as a guy who patrolled the city night and day, making cracks at criminals and spewing snarky commentary the whole time?

"Funny things are," he gestured with the stick-prod-thing.

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny," the taller man cleared up seriously. "No offense, doc."

"How was that not supposed to be offensive?" Spidey murmured over by the screen he was typing away at. No one heard him, of course, but Hiro grumbled protectively in accordance.

"No, it's alright. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things," Dr. Banner assured them with a forced cheeriness.

The cocky inventor started walking carelessly around the room again. "You're tip-toeing, big man. You need to strut."

"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark," Captain Rogers maintained, uptight.

"You think I'm not? Why did Fury call us in? Why now, why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables." The internationally famous Iron Man grabbed a silver bag of blueberries, the irony not lost on Spider-man as he kept from laughing hysterically and causing them to question his mental stability even more than they probably already did as his eyes caught on the silver accents of the enhanced man's blue suit. The superhero with the kit fidgeted nervously with the end of his gloves as the two watched the exchange with growing anxiety. There were good points being made – and he definitely thought that Mr. Stark had some valid concerns! – but the conversation was getting a little too close for comfort with the whole "secrets" theme. The boy's identity was one big secret, and he'd rather not the whole Helicarrier find out.

"You think Fury's hiding something." And yet they kept on going, oblivious to Spider-man's inner panic. Hiro sympathized with his plight.

"He's a spy," Mr. Stark enlightened them obviously. "Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets." He popped some fruit in his mouth before turning to Dr. Banner. "It's bugging him too, isn't it? And him?" The finger was then pointed at the skittishly hyperactive spider a little farther away from their group.

"Uh, ah," the doctor stammered as he tried to re-immerse himself in the scepter. "I just wanna finish my work here…"

"Doctor?" Captain Rogers enforced, not unkindly.

He sighed, taking his thin-framed glasses off tired eyes "'A warm light for all mankind,' Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."

"I heard it."

"Well, I think that was meant for you." All eyes followed the loose gesture to the man with a blue torch in his chest, who simply offered him the snack bag. "Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"The Stark Tower? That big ugly –" The star-spangled man cut off when Mr. Stark gave him a look, and without looking down, Hiro knew his friend was giving him the same half-glare for insulting a "pinnacle of modern technology," as Peter had fawned over it a few days ago when it first was announced. They'd stayed up, the kit rather unwillingly, to watch it light up like a Christmas tree for the first time, right before they were snatched up by Agent Coulson and Co. "—building in New York?"

"It's powered by an arc reactor," Spidey spoke up, and Hiro chuffed shortly when the captain jumped, as if he'd forgotten they were there, "self-sustaining energy source. The building runs itself." The red-and-black boy pushed himself lightly from where he'd been leaning on the counter, making his way over to actually be voluntarily social.

"Yeah," Dr. Banner nodded. "For what, a year?"

"It's just the prototype. I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now, that's what he's getting at," the engineer bragged.

"So, why didn't S.H.I.E.L.D. bring him in on the Tesseract project?"

"Why were they meddling with clean energy anyways?" Spider-man continued the doctor's thought. "They're a military, spy, whatever secret organization. There was no real reason for them to be poking around with it."

"I should probably look into that," Mr. Stark strode around the counter they were at to stand directly beside Captain Rogers, pulling out his phone with one hand, "as soon as my decryption program finishes breaking into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure files."

"I'm sorry did you say—"

"J.A.R.V.I.S. has been running it since I hit the bridge," he cut the taller man off. "In a few hours I'll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever tried to hide." The top-of-the-line phone was shoved into his back pocket, and as an afterthought, he held up the shiny bag again. "Blueberry?" Hiro could feel the boy flinch from his head and nuzzled in further as he tried to send warm, comforting feelings to the panicking vigilante with a – currently – functioning secret identity.

"Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around," the captain deadpanned.

"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome."

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up. This is a man who means to start a war and if we don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders, we should follow them."

"And when has that ever turned out well for me?" Spidey muttered to himself, unaware that the feline in his hair was thinking the exact same thing. As for getting riled up, he was the one who was doing all that. Mr. Stark was calmly making a point and Dr. Banner had kept on studying the spear with practiced hands as the young hero rejoined him in his work. Hiro's first impression of the All-American had been a good one, as had Peter's, from what he heard in the bag, but if the blonde didn't allow a bit of leeway in his rigid views of the world, he would end up with his worldview broken… or as an isolated hermit.

"Following's not really my style."

"And you're all about style, aren't you?"

"Out of the people in this room," the billionaire proclaimed, "which one is A, wearing a spangly outfit, and B, not of use?"

"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?" Dr. Banner tried to mediate between the two. They were either too similar or too different, no one had figured out which yet.

"Just find the cube," the soldier demanded after a second and tramped heavily out of the room uneasily. Observant viridescent irises tracked his movements out to the hallway through the window, glinting when their subject paused after turning, then spun on his heel and headed in the other direction with a purpose.

This one was mostly a lot of talking talking talking and I'm sorry if it was boring. I really love writing this story and fanfiction in general, but I feel that lately my writing has gone down in quality. I'm still always trying my best, so please bear with me! Relatedly, I Apollo-gize for the terrible chapter title (and for the awful Greek-mythology-themed pun I just made). Well, maybe not that second one.

Still no votes for the update schedule! People! Please vote, otherwise it's just automatically once a week and I'll pick a random day! (Sorry if this sounds harsh, I'm kinda sick and rather tired)

On the other hand, there are 5 votes for continued A/N's (aw, you guys!), 4 people who don't care (I don't blame you), and 2 people who want them to stop (that's fair). So, A/N's staying is winning at the moment.

Y'all have 'til Tuesday afternoon to vote! So please do!

Lucky

To Vladimir Mithrander: Yeah! Sadly, I haven't gotten a chance to see the Captain Marvel movie quite yet (though I really really want to!). But I've read the comics, and those are good, and I can't wait! Carol is just badass.

To ellainaparker: Aw, you're sweet! Thank you! (I literally said this out loud after reading your review then got a weird look from my mom because I was talking to my phone… but that's just life) My solo went well, so yay for that!

To Dylan-A-Friend: And I have a feeling you're right! (More on that in later chapters…)

To Merlin (Guest): Sort-of kind-of. Hiro can't do any real magic in his cat form (though there's a little something in a chapter later on that hopefully you'll stick around to see). Loki… is another conundrum altogether, but – again – there's a tad bit on that in other chapters. I believe Chapter Twenty is where that stuff gets interesting.