Thanks to Rue Dawn for reviewing again! And for being my only reviewer... I know there are more of you reading this, I can see you on the traffic graph! Y u no review?

Sorry this took a little while. I was on vacation in Chicago. Did you know they renamed the Sears Tower the Willis Tower? I didn't. Made me want to watch Die Hard.

Tyler whirled around and came face to face with his beloved Auntie and Uncle. Well, maybe? They looked like them, but Auntie Tasha's hair was way shorter, and Uncle Clint didn't have the grey streaks that they loved to tease him about. They looked... younger. Like, way younger. He had seen them when they looked like this in pictures, but other then that this sight was totally alien to say the least, not to mention the fact that they were wearing their old SHIELD uniforms. They never wore those, and only rarely talked about the time when they had been employed there.

Tyler's train of what-the-hell thoughts were interuppted when his uncle (actually biologically one of his dads, but he and his sister had always thought of Tony and Pepper as their parents, and all of the other Avengers as being their aunts and uncles) cocked another arrow and aimed at him.

"WHOA!" Tyler shouted, throwing his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "No need for that, Un- Cli- Agent Barton? I come in peace!"

"Come from where? The security cameras say you just appeared. Who are you working for, and how did they get their hands on teleportation technology?" the Black Widow snarled. Tyler realized he had never seen her this vicious before, and he was rather terrified, even moreso because the only explanation he could think of involved traveling through time somehow, and he knew them well enough to know they were too smart to buy it for a second. Still, it was worth a shot (as opposed to being shot).

"I'm not working for anyone! As for where I come from, well, technically, here. Me and my sister were created by SHIELD as lab experiments... or we're going to be? Geez, time travel hurts my brain. If that's what even happened, I dunno!" Tyler shouted, green light flashing across his field of vision. He froze and took a deep breath. In, out. In, out. The green faded away and Tyler sighed in relief. He had inherited his Uncle Bruce's ability to hulk out, but he had more trouble controlling his green side then his uncle.

"Wait a second, slow down. Time travel? Are you claiming to be from the future?" Uncle Clint chuckled, but there was barely any humor in it. "That's the worst excuse I've ever heard for trespassing."

Auntie Tasha nodded in agreement. Her grip tightened on her gun and she motioned for him to get up. Her finger was on the trigger. Tyler suddenly realized he could die here, in the past, and his future family would never even know what had happened to him. His dad had probably discarded the machine that had sent them here after deciding it didn't work, so there was no chance of rescue coming. Jesus, what had they done?

"Yes. I am. Please don't shoot me," he added when he saw his aunt's hand twitch upwards. "I'm pretty sure I am indeed from the future, since you look much younger and... um... meaner then when I know you."

Uncle Clint looked a little bit offended by his last comment. "Mean? I don't look mean. Nat, do I look mean?"

Auntie Tasha rolled her eyes. "From the perspective of a teenage boy whom you just attempted to kill, I'd say yes, you look mean." She ignored her partner's offended 'humph' and turned back to Tyler. Tyler wasn't pleased by this, because he wasn't used to receiving his aunt's infamous death glare, and this was the second time in five minutes he was on the butt end of it. "You say you know us in the future?"

"Yeeeessss...?" Tyler was hesitant about answering too many questions about the future. Unlike his sister, an action junkie, Tyler loved science fiction movies, and had seen enough of them to know that knowing anything about your own future was B-A-D. Like, universe-destroying quantum-loophole erased from existence bad.

"So we're still alive in the future?" Uncle Clint questioned. Aunt Tasha shot him a look and he shrugged. "What? People don't live long in our line of work, Nat. I just wanted to double-check."

Natasha grabbed Tyler by the arm. "We better take you to Director Fury. He'll know what to do. Don't try any funny business, or you're history."

Tyler froze in his tracks, involuntarily attempting to dig his heels into dirt that didn't exist in SHIELD's smooth, polished hallways. No. No. No no no no no. He couldn't go back to Fury, back to the lab, back to the cage, where they had run all of those awful experiments and... and hurt them just to see to they were strong... oh no oh no oh no...

Tyler was hyperventilating, and his field of vision was tinted green. It must have been obvious, because Clint held up a hand for Natasha to stop pulling him. "Nat, look at him. He's sick. He looks sort of greenish. We can't take him to see Fury like this. We have to get him to the sick bay."

Tyler felt like he was slowly being pushed towards a chasm of nothingness. No matter how much he fought, he would eventually fall, lose control, and hulk out. There was nothing to cling to, no way to gain traction, no way to stop what had been set in motion by that one evil, awful, unspeakable word. Fury. He was on the brink of the crevasse now, and he knew that when the inevitable destructive blackout came, he would welcome it. He had the vague sensation that he was being carried. That was no good. If Uncle Clint or Aunt Tasha were anywhere near him when he hulked out, he would surely kill them.

He managed to force a few words through lips that were rapidly turning into rubber. "Put... me... down... run."

Then he fell into the chasm and green closed in on him.