"It only took you ten hours," Fury groused. Or at least, Stevie presumed that it was Fury, because he fit the description that Natalie told her to a T.
Stevie looked at the spy. "You've been milking this as vacation time, haven't you?"
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," Natalie said cheerfully.
"Yeah, now, you see, that's trouble," said a man with a goatee.
"Mr. Stark!" Stevie said, grinning. "You're a smart man. Do all of womankind a favor and invent a comfortable bra, would you?"
To his credit, he only blinked twice before replying, "That isn't my industry, Captain, but I have been in the role of doing womankind favors before."
Stevie eyed him. "I assume that you have found the one that drives you absolutely mad in every possible way by now, if you're making remarks like that?" She laughed at the disconcerted look on his face. "Don't answer that. You Starks and your emotions. You don't look much like him, but bring up feelings and you have the exact same expression."
"You are quite possibly the only person to have told me that I don't look like Howard," Mr. Stark said, utterly baffled.
She gave him a sweeping glance. "You have the same skin. Similar hands. That's about it."
"Huh. And what was this about Natashalie taking ten hours to track you down?"
"Oh, SHIELD screwed me over and tried to make me believe that it was still 1944 when I woke from the ice," she said casually. "I threatened the nurse, they sent six armed men to threaten me, I broke out, spent five hours looking for the black market, and got myself papers, a job, and off the grid as much as possible. These folks sent Natalie to bring me back."
Stark, a man with glasses and fluffy hair, a blond with medieval armor, and a dark haired woman dressed in a catsuit similar to Natalie's stared at her in disbelief.
"I don't know what their problem was," Stevie said, still very casual. "They could have bought me three cups of Dippin' Dots and a drawing tablet and I would've been happy. Still wouldn't have stayed in their cell-like apartments—don't give me that look, Fury, I'm a woman from the forties who fought on the front lines, I don't take bullshit from anyone." She paused. "And Natalie complained about them over coffee, so."
Stark broke, bending over and silently laughing until he straightened and let out loud guffaws. He finally stopped laughing and clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Stevie, I just realized where Aunt Peggy got her sense of humor."
"Once you got rid of the broomstick taped to her spine, she could drop some zingers that could make you spit out your drink," Stevie agreed. "And she would do it totally deadpan, too, like she didn't actually know what she was saying."
"Can we focus on the problem at hand?" Fury demanded.
"Sure!" Stevie said, plopping down in a chair. She tapped on the table twice and a window popped up. "Oh, crap."
They all looked at her. "The Cube," said the guy with the glasses.
Stevie scowled, her broad shoulders stiffening. "You say that you found this? When?"
"Howard Stark fished it out of the ocean while he was looking for you," Fury said. "Over twenty years ago."
If anything, Stevie scowled harder.
"Anything you want to share with the class, Captain?"
"Other than that you should've left it in the ocean? And that I'm seriously wondering if you're HYDRA after all and that Natalie happens to be delusional? And that if you aren't, I'll still call you an imbecilic gecko? Nope. Not a thing."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Stark swallow a laugh and mouth 'imbecilic gecko' to himself. Natalie rolled her eyes.
From there, it devolved into a discussion of something science-y, of which Stevie couldn't follow whatsoever.
"So let me get this straight, and correct me if I'm wrong," Stevie said. "This lunatic had access to this thing through forces that we don't understand and opened a portal with this thing while you were fiddling with it—something that we know is incredibly dangerous, but other than that, absolutely nothing. So you guys—" she jerked a thumb at Stark and Glasses, "are saying that now that he has physical access to it, he now has something that acts like a more versatile HYDRA weapon, kidnaps probably the only scientist in the world capable of creating a portal with alien tech, and high tails it out of a collapsing base with at least one scientist and a notable assassin." She turned around to look at Fury incredulously. "Have I gotten anything wrong yet?"
"No," Glasses said instead. He looked entertained.
"So now that said lunatic has access to the glowing cube of radiation, he's going to open up a portal—which has been stabilized by iridium, so it can stay open infinitely without collapsing like a house of cards in a hurricane. Now, I don't know how much went down in the history books, but the last time someone got ahold of the glowing cube of radiation, he was a lunatic, and he tried to take over the world." She leaned back and ticked off her fingers: "He has means, he presumably has motive, so the question is when and where he's going to open this portal. And Natalie, you people might be the good guys, but SHIELD has the brains of a bent doornail."
The amazon of woman stood and loomed over Fury. Words like delicate and feminine never so ill-suited a woman before.
"Let's get something straight," she said lowly, her voice dropping to a deeper register. "You want to save the world from a megalomaniac with magic. I want to save the world from a megalomaniac with magic. We happen to have similar goals. This doesn't mean that I agree with you, your way of achieving those goals, your resources, your ideas, or your fashion choices." She gave him a sweeping, obvious glance. "And that says something, coming from a girl who fought a war in what might has well have been neon colors. Am. I. Clear?"
"Captain Rogers, unless you're a sudden expert in megalomaniacs with magic, would you mind stepping aside and let me do my fuckin' job?" Fury asked, not batting an eye at the national icon.
"I do, in fact, mind," she said. "Mostly because the last megalomaniac with magic got put down because of me. I just got done with a war because of him less than a year ago, to me. I don't exactly feel like letting this guy start World War Three."
"And what do you actually propose to do, Captain Rogers?" Fury asked, looking like he was being torn between shrugging his shoulders in acknowledgement, grumbling, and plain curiosity.
"Nothing more than what you were probably already planning," she admitted. "Let the scientists—" she waved at Glasses and Stark "work their science that might as well be magic, because I certainly don't understand it." Glasses smirked wryly, and Stark grinned. "Then, once you get said megalomaniac, set Natalie on him. I know that I'm basically nothing but the brawn, but you guys had twenty-something years to study this, and what have you learned?" She paused, waiting. "That was an actual question, please respond."
"Not much," Fury said.
Stevie pursed her lips. "Then unless you trust Stark to take a crack at it without destroying the world, I would chuck it into the Mariana Trench in a box that will keep it from broadcasting whatever the hell it broadcasts, wipe its existence from the record, and pass out NDAs like beads on Mardi Gras."
"We can't do that, Captain Rogers," Fury said.
"Yes, you most certainly can," Stevie disagreed. "You just don't want to, because you want more toys." Her eyes went gray and flinty. She jerked up her pant leg and brought out a clearly alien gun, and tossed it to Stark. "Like that."
A dozen guns were drawn and aimed at Stevie.
Natalie buried her head in her hands.
"Okay, wait," Stark interrupted, holding up his hands—one with the alien energy gun—in a standard peace position. "Hold your horses. She could have gone about it more diplomatically, but Captain Rogers kinda has a point. There's no need for something this advanced on a battlefield. Plus, um, this looks like my father's schematics for old HYDRA weapons."
Stevie linked her hands behind her back, arching an eyebrow at Fury.
"Will wonders never cease," Fury said sarcastically. "It looks like a HYDRA gun because it is a HYDRA gun. It gets within thirty feet of the Tesseract and it starts charging inexplicably. Why the hell do you think that it was in the research facility rather than the armory?!"
"Why the hell do you think I grabbed that one rather than the others?" Stevie shot back, mimicking his phrasing. "Because I recognized it for what it was, and then you had at least eight others that I didn't. I'm a soldier, Fury, and a damn terrible one at that, but even a terrible soldier knows not to pick up something that they don't recognize."
"Not to interrupt the entertainment," Glasses said mildly, causing everyone to shift, "But I think Loki got picked up by facial recognition." He tilted his fluffy head towards the bank of computers on one side.
Fury sighed and rubbed his temples. "To hell with it—Rogers, go suit up and bug someone else."
Stevie bit back a grin. "Yes, sir."
"Stevie," Natasha called over the roar of the engine, wrestling with the controls. "Why are you a 'damn terrible' soldier?"
"You know the thing that I'm most famous for?" Stevie yelled. "It's disobeying orders, going behind enemy lines, and taking excessively long to get back to where I started. It's not being a bigot, being female, and being successful through whatever means necessary."
Natasha laughed. "Fair enough!"
Loki packed a wallop, Stevie thought, nursing several rapidly-healing cracked ribs and a deep bruise over the same area. But, unfortunately, not nearly as much of one as his pursuer.
Her arms ached in a way that they hadn't since the thirties, when she'd tried to disguise herself as a boy (not for the first or the last time) and go down and work at the docks with Bucky. She didn't even make it three hours before she lost her job due to her asthma, and her arms ached for days afterward from the heavy lifting.
Thor, she learned his name was, was told to be generally pretty laidback, if fairly oblivious. Stevie saw none of that now. She saw anger and guilt and sadness, along with the same too-wise eyes that Bucky's sisters wore once the depression hit. There had been mistakes made, and the repercussions of it were hitting him like a socked brick to the eye.
"The Lady Warrior tells me that you are a troublemaker, much as my brother," Thor said glumly. "Do you have insight to his mind?"
Stevie kind of wanted to be offended, but she gently explained to him that it was unlikely for two troublemakers to be alike. "I also understand that there are cultural differences between us and Asgard," she added. Stevie huffed a laugh. "In fact, there are severe cultural differences from when I came from to the present day. And something else: I don't generally cause trouble unless I or someone I love is already in trouble, or I am avoiding trouble of malicious intent."
"From when...?" Thor asked, trailing off.
"I had an accident and ended up in ice," she said. "Because of my healing, I was kept alive for decades until someone found the plane I crashed. I woke up six months ago. I understand that your people have much longer lifespans than us?"
Thor nodded.
"The difference is about a lifetime of a human," she said. "I imagine that a full Asgardian lifetime in the past would be much different than the Asgard of today?"
"I understand," Thor said, smiling ruefully. "And indeed, it would be."
Loki, gagged and chained once more, watched the exchange.
"Lady Natasha said that you caused trouble earlier on this day," Thor said. "Why?"
"You live with a troublemaker yourself, so you have probably been tricked at one point or another," Stevie said slowly. Thor nodded. "When I crashed, it was violent and frightening. I believed that I would die. When I woke, my surroundings had been engineered to think that no time nor not much time had passed—but I could see through the illusion. I thought that I had been captured by the enemy."
Thor winced.
"Yes," Stevie agreed. "I broke out, and later found out that they were the good guys who have flaws. One of them was working with my old enemy's weapons, as well as alien energy sources that have never been used for benign reasons."
"You fear betrayal," Thor rumbled.
Stevie considered it. "No, not really. It's not betrayal if I never trusted them in the first place, is it? No, I fear that one day they'll poke something that shouldn't be poked in pursuit of SCIENCE! Then the world gets blown up, which won't be fun."
"The dealings with the Tesseract was what brought the attention of the realms," Thor said.
Stevie paused for a moment, and then took a deep breath to refrain from screaming in frustration, tearing her hair out, or doing something else along those lines.