A/N: Okay, this took longer than I would have liked. I watched the Avengers again over the weekend and realised that I may have been screwing up the order of things, and I haven't been able to find a copy of the script online anywhere, so I've been taking my time to be sure it's all right (I know it's not, but this is the best I could do without any references). If anyone knows where I can read a copy, I'd love to know.
Doctor Banner actually wasn't that bad; he was like a big, fluffy haired teddy bear hiding a secret.
I also really liked his purple shirt, and was eager to tell him so before he started scanning me with some kind of gamma device. I may have flinched a couple of times, like the thing was going to jump out at me. I got the feeling Doctor Banner thought I was nervous around him, though, and I spent the rest of that meeting trying to prove him wrong.
"See?" Doctor Lin prompted from her place against the doorframe. "Same gamma signature." I don't know how she could come out with something like that as if she was talking about the latest Rangers game. The only thing stopping me from flipping my shit was probably shock.
"I'll have to calibrate the system searching for the cube to ignore her signature, but it may help us in the long run." Banner said. Lin smirked smugly, throwing a few kernels of popcorn into her mouth.
"As lovely as it is to see a new member in the Gamma Mutation Club, I've gotta ask how you came about your membership. As I've heard, it's a pretty exclusive group." I hadn't quite been able to forget that Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, was there, partly because of his own insistence that we pay attention to him, like a petulant child. He had his own kind of sarcastic humour I greatly appreciated, even though he didn't seem to be able to stop from making a joke out of everything. Mind you, I think at that time there was nothing I wanted more than to joke about stuff as if the world wasn't on the precipice of destruction.
He also gave me some of his blueberries. So that's nice.
"That information is classified," shot Lin before I could respond, earning a disdainful look from Tony. I huffed and crossed my arms until Banner pulled them back down to my sides.
"Aw, come on! I can't even pout around here without someone stopping me."
"I know, right?" Tony gasped, seemingly just as exasperated as I was with the amount of restrictions on the Helicarrier. "It's like a prison on this thing. They wouldn't even let me plug in JARVIS."
"They wouldn't let you plug your AI into their top secret government system?" Banner said, sarcasm practically looking at his feet. Tony just waved him off, shaking the aluminium bag until more blueberries fell into his mouth.
"Have you had any side effects so far?" Banner asked me, focusing on his scanner again. The hum of the scanner eventually faded away, and Banner unplugged the device and started wrapping the cord around it for storage. Tony moved across the lab, hopping up onto the bench beside me to fiddle with a nearby hanging monitor.
"Nothing conventional," Lin prodded. The laugh in her voice was unmistakeable; even through the unsettling feeling of unrest in the pit of my stomach, I could feel the same excitement she did over the two scientists discovering my 'talents', and what their reactions may be.
Just as I was about to open my mouth, Tony gave a thoughtful, amused hum and spun his monitor around, playing a video recording taken earlier in the day.
The screen showed Doctor Lin placing tiny electrodes onto my skin, speaking to me quietly in tones the camera couldn't seem to pick up. Right as I smirked at her apparently amusing words, my image blurred slightly and video-me disappeared into thin air. I felt Banner tense beside me, moving closer to the monitor. After a few moments video-me returned, a light sprinkling of snow melting into my hair.
"Where'd you go?" Video-Lin asked with a chuckle, rechecking the electrodes flashing red from the loss of connection.
"Dunno, wasn't there long," Video-me chattered, rubbing her pale, blue-tinged arms. "Cold as hell though." Video-Lin snorted, and the clip began again.
"We've been calling it displacement, what she does," announced Lin, still chewing on her popcorn, "after the psychological principle, a little bit, but mostly particle displacement; you know, the measurement of distance of the movement of a particle as it transmits a wave? If you slow down the clip and get a good look, you can see how she does it." Tony did just that, zooming in the clip and slowing it down by at least ten times, the image grainy and blurred.
Video-me, smirking in slow-motion, suddenly seemed to pull apart into a cloud of skin-and-cloth coloured dust, before it all sucked inwards, kind of like a black hole, with a space-agey vacuum sound.
"The particles making up her body are unstable, and separate themselves when she displaces; she tears herself apart, and then puts herself back together somewhere else." Lin continued.
"It feels a lot simpler than that to me," I muttered.
Tony was still watching the clip with that calculating look a lot of scientists had on this boat. Plane. Thing. "Well paint you blue and call you Nightcrawler," he mumbled. I shot that down instantly, much to Tony's amused chagrin.
"Hunter will do, Mr. Stark," I smirked. We had a short, barely serious stare off before he turned back to his monitor, removing the video from the screen and focusing on what looked to be a complicated search through a lot of restricted files. I furrowed my brow and leant forward over Tony's lap for a better look.
"What is that?" I asked.
"SHIELD's secure files," stated Tony absentmindedly, not at all bothered by the fact that he was, as far as I knew, breaking into SHIELD's database. I stared, slacked jawed at him, before transferring my gaze to the much more easily guilted Doctor Banner, who already looked like a child being sent to the naughty corner.
"It's just, all a little fishy; they could have called us in at any time, so why wait until now?"
"Because the cube's been stolen?" I hissed.
"Well, yeah. Fury says they were using the cube to create clean energy, and I'm really the only name is clean energy right now. So I'm not only confused, I'm down right insulted they never called me in. And that makes me a little curious." With Tony giving me that 'it's so simple, how can you not see it' stare, I couldn't help the feelings of doubt seeding in my brain.
Across the room, Lin cleared her throat. "Fury's on his way." She pointed a finger at us as she backed out the door, popcorn bowl tucked under the other arm. "If he asks, I didn't have anything to do with your little espionage mission here." Just as she slipped out one door, Fury thundered in the other, black coat flung out behind him, looking marginally more wrathful than usual.
"What do you think you're doing?" he fumed at Tony. Without thinking, I moved a little closer to the genius, Banner doing the same from the other side, as if to protect him from the full wrath of Director Fury. It wasn't like we were bestest buddies, or anything, but I couldn't let anyone take on Fury alone, even if he was my boss. "You're mean to be looking for the cube."
"We are," Tony bristled, not missing a beat. Banner pointed to a computer across the lab, stating it was doing a global search now, and all we could do was wait.
"Then Houdini here can go get it," added Tony.
"Ha ha, no," I drawled, "I've already lost a finger going places I don't know. If the cube is in some secret underground lair or whatever, I risk 'displacing' into a wall. Or a person." I shuddered internally at the thought, the pulling and sinking of nausea suddenly pooling in my gut. Losing my finger had been painful and disorienting, but losing a limb would be far worse. Or, God forbid, cutting myself in half because of my own bad aim.
I actually shuddered at that.
"Or not." Tony finished. "What is Phase 2?"I looked back at the monitor; each time the cursor fell over a file marked 'Phase 2' the screen flashed a violent red 'Access Denied'. Some other documents Tony could get into mentioned Phase 2, but not what it was or anything related to it.
A loud, metallic thump sounded from behind Fury, drawing my attention to the vintage sci-fi style weapon now resting on the table, and the man in red, white and blue who had put it there.
'Holy shit, that's Captain America. Honest to God, Captain America! I thought they were bullshitting me about that one!'
"SHIELD's been using the cube to make weapons," the blonde said, voice full of authority, before switching his gaze from Fury to Tony. "Sorry, computer was going a bit too slow for me." He looked about the room, his (damn perfectly sculpted) brow furrowing as he saw me. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but who are you?"
I waved. "Molly Hunter. Big fan." The star-spangled man himself smiled at me, before his determined gaze fell again on an advancing Fury.
"SHIELD was sure to collect all Hydra weapons for analysis only-"
"I'm sorry, Fury," interrupted Tony, flipping the monitor around, "were you lying?" The screen showed what looked like a complex diagram for some kind of atomic bomb, the power source for which was a glowing ball of blue energy eerily similar to that emitted by the Tesseract.
Suddenly even just wearing a SHIELD uniform felt like a major betrayal to humanity.
The gaze of Captain Roger's fell on me again, with far more ice than last time. "Did you know about this?"
"No!" I quivered, "I didn't even know about the Tesseract until a few days ago. I'm just a part of the maintenance crew. They don't tell me anything." The Captain stared at me for a moment, almost through me, as if searching my soul for any trace of a lie.
Apparently, he decided I was trustworthy, and turned away.
"Doctor Banner, you want to think about removing yourself from this environment?" Natasha Romanov, truly terrifying SHIELD operative, had stormed straight into the room and the conversation, followed silently by a towering man in some kind of ancient Viking armour. I could vaguely remember reading the file about this guy; Thor, supposedly the Norse God of thunder, from another world called Asgard. His brother, Loki, God of Lies, was the one who had taken the Tesseract the day of my 'accident'. At the time, I thought the whole file was some bullshit attempt of Coulson's at a prank.
"Hey, I was in India, I was pretty well removed," Banner retorted, his chuckle filled with darkness and cynicism.
"I didn't make you come here," hissed Natasha.
Banner snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm not going to leave just because you get a little jittery." He grabbed the monitor and angled it carefully. "I want to know why SHIELD was planning to use the cube to make bombs." Fury stilled, jaw tensed, before pointing towards the tall, blonde, walking Pantene ad beside Romanov.
"Because of him."
Thor paused, puppy-faced confusion blooming, arms crossed but still somehow pointing to himself, "Me?"
"Last year we had a visitor from another planet whose grudge match levelled a small town," Fury explained.
"My people have no quarrel with you-"
"But you're not the only people out there, are you? We are hopelessly – hilariously – outgunned."
"So you built a nuclear deterrent? Because that's always worked so well." Tony drawled. Fury turned on him, eye almost popping out of his head.
"Why don't you take a minute to remember how you made your fortune," he replied.
"Look, I'm sure if Stark still dealt in weapons-" Captain Rogers stepped forward. Tony balked.
"Hold on, when did this become about me?"
"I'm sorry, isn't everything?"
Ooh. I sense rivalry. As much as I would have loved to see the two wrestle it out (preferably shirtless) some small, rational part of my mind knew it wasn't the time for it.
"Okay, boys, calm down."
"Why don't you keep out of this, Hunter?" Romanov hissed at me suddenly.
'Okay, woah.' "Why? I'm just as much a part of this as any of you." She rolled her eyes; a flare of anger swelled within me.
"Just because you're here doesn't mean you're a part of this," she snarled, 'you're not prepared, you're not trained. You have no idea what you're doing. If anything you're a liability to this mission." Fire raged behind her eyes. I ducked my head, the sudden onset of a raging blush and furious, embarrassed tears had me backing off. I had always been easily broken down by people who yelled at me, but it seemed she knew my greatest weakness; wanting to belong.
She had made it very clear I didn't. It felt like they all knew it.
Luckily, they were all too busy yelling at each other to yell at me, but the damage was already done. I was stressed, I was upset, I was barely in control of displacing – just like Romanov had said. I could only watch, in some distorted version of an out-of-body experience, as everything seemed to blur and then blink out of existence, vertigo blinding me to my landing place until I was falling through the air onto the stiff metal grating below me.
The clatter of unsecured metal filled the room I was in, echoing back and forth along with my pained groans. My elbows and tail bone had dug into the metal, an ache that was minimal but would last a while, and I couldn't say I had the highest pain threshold, so I was likely to complain about it. The impact seemed to vibrate up and down my bones.
"Well," a voice crooned, soft yet ragged and curiously formal, "another visitor to my humble abode." I wrenched my eyes open, facing the blurry dark figure in the startlingly white cell beside me, looking down at me with amusement and disdain.
So. This was Loki.
A/N: Any reviews would be greatly appreciated; they're also good motivators! I'm also going to shamelessly advertise my Tumblr () because I'm such a miserable person who rates my self worth by the number of Tumblr followers I have. So yeah. Hope you enjoyed it!