Hey awesome nerds! Firstly, I highly recommend seeing Pitch Perfect if you haven't seen it yet! That's my favourite line from it! And Fat Amy is HILARIOUS! Anyway, I'm so sorry for not updating sooner! Gosh it's been over 3 weeks! I feel so bad! I'm sorry! I'm going to update 2 chapters tonight to make up for it! Here's the first one!

Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers :( if I did, there would be more Clintasha scenes!

Chapter 7: Conversations

Anastasia, Natasha, Steve and Dr. Bruce Banner were all sitting around the large table at the back to the bridge watching Fury talk to Loki on the screens set up on the oval glass table. Thor was standing ten feet away from the table, listening, with his back to everyone sitting there.

"Incase it's unclear, you try to escape, you so much as scratch that glass." Fury pressed a button which opened up a huge hole underneath the cage that Loki was in. "Thirty-thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?" Fury pointed at Loki. "Ant." He then pointed at the button which would drop Loki from the Helicarrier and send him tumbling down the ground. "Boot." He pressed a button to close the hole.

Loki laughed. "It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me."

"It's built of something a lot stronger than you," Fury told Loki.

"Oh, I've heard," Loki replied. Out of the corner of her eye, Anastasia saw Natasha and Bruce exchange a look.

On the screen, Loki walked in the cage towards the camera that he somehow spotted, looking at everyone watching the interrogation. "The mindless beast, makes play to be the man." Loki walked back to face Fury. "How desperate are you? You call on such lost creatures to defend you."

"How desperate am I?" Fury repeated. "You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace and you kill 'cause it's fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did." Loki kept a straight face throughout Fury's speech.

"Ooh. It burns you to have come so close. To have the Tesseract. To have power. Unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share, and then to be reminded what real power is," Loki spat, his words laced with venom.

Fury looked put out to Anastasia, but he tried to hide it. "Yeah, well, let me know if 'real power' wants a magazine or something," he smirked, walking off and leaving Loki in the glass cell.

Loki walked back to face the camera, smirking. Then the screen on the glass table disappeared. Everyone looked up at each other.

"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Bruce said, hiding his annoyance at the god.

Steve looked at Thor, who was still standing with his back facing the group. "Loki's gonna drag this out. So, Thor, what's his play?"

Thor turned around to look at everyone. "He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."

Cap looked a bit surprised. Anastasia wondered how he was coping with all of this change from his old life. "An army, from outer space."

"So he's building another portal," Bruce realised. "That's what he needs Erik Selvig for."

"Selvig?" Thor asked.

"He's an astrophysicist," Bruce explained. Anastasia briefly wondered if Thor even knew what an astrophysicist was.

"He's a friend," the thunder-god replied.

Natasha decided to speak up then. "Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours," she said, looking away at the end and avoiding everyone's gaze. Anastasia put two and two together, figuring out that this 'Clint Barton' was the one that was under Loki's spell, and that was why Natasha was so worried about him.

She lifted her hand and put it on Natasha's, which were sitting on the table. Natasha looked up and gave her a small smile. No one else seemed to notice this exchange; they were too focused on the situation at hand.

"I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here," Steve said.

"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him," Bruce replied, letting some of his annoyance seep through the cracks.

Thor looked slightly unhappy. "I have care of how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he is my brother."

"He killed eighty people in two days," Natasha commented.

Thor paused for a second. "He's adopted," he muttered loudly. Anastasia snorted. Everyone looked at her strangely, apart from Natasha, who knew about her younger sister's sense of humour.

It was quiet for half a minute before Bruce spoke up again. "Iridium. What did they need the iridium for?" he wondered aloud.

Stark suddenly walked through one of the various doors, quietly talking to one of the SHIELD agents that Anastasia had noticed before. "It's a stabilising agent," he announced. Everyone looked up at Tony, going quiet again. Some of the group looked at him indifferently, and some mildly glared at him, including Steve.

The billionaire finished talking to the agent and kept walking up to the table. "Means the portal won't collapse on itself, like it did at SHIELD," he explained, walking over to Thor. "No hard feelings, Point Break. You got a mean swing." Anastasia covered her mouth to suppress her chuckling. There was a female agent standing behind Thor that rolled her eyes in exasperation.

Tony turned the conversation back to iridium as he walked to stand between four controlling screens. "Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants."

He then turned towards the agents working in the room, asking the BridgeTechs to raise something, but Anastasia didn't speak what Stark thought was 'English', so she didn't understand. Everyone else went quiet and looked up at him. Natasha and Anastasia both snorted at him, as he had just made a fool of himself for having more advanced technology than SHIELD.

Stark covered up his mistake, though. "That man is playing Gallaga!" he half-shouted, pointing to one of the agents. Anastasia noticed Steve looking at Tony in confusion, not knowing what Gallaga was.

"Thought we wouldn't notice," Tony continued, "but we did." He turned around to look at a screen behind him. He covered one eye, trying to see how Fury saw the monitors.

He gave up trying to see the screens and turned to the agent behind Thor. "How does Fury even see these?"

"He turns," she answered him, showing no emotion. She apparently had a mild dislike for Stark.

"Sounds exhausting," he muttered, turning back to the monitors. The agent rolled her eyes again.

"The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily," Stark told everyone. Anastasia noticed Natasha take a silent shaky breath. "Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density. Something to kick stark the cube." The younger redhead noticed the little metal gadget that he discreetly placed under the screen and stored the information away for possible later use.

The agent looked at the genius confusedly. "When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" she asked rhetorically, partly surprised.

"Last night," Tony answered, making many people look at him in surprise. "The packet? Selvig's notes? The Extraction theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?"

"Does Loki need any particular power source?" Steve asked, still struggling to understand.

"He had to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million kelvin just to break through the coulomb," Banner answered. It obviously wasn't the answer that Steve had wanted, but he had expected it to be something quite technical. To Anastasia, it looked like he had given up trying to understand the conversation now. The only reason that Anastasia and Natasha understood the majority of the conversation was because they used to sneak into the public library down the road every few nights when they lived in the orphanage to read. Eventually they had read every book in the library over four times each.

"Unless, Selving had has figured out how to stabilise the quantum tunnelling effect," Tony added.

"Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet," Bruce concluded.

"Finally, someone who speaks English," Stark exclaimed.

Steve still looked extremely confused, as did Thor. "Is that what just happened?" the poor soldier asked.

Tony and Bruce shook hands. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster."

Bruce looked fairly annoyed. "Thanks," he said, a bit unsure of what to say.

Fury had just walked into the room then. "Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you might join him," he told Tony.

Steve spoke up again. "Let's start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon," he said, trying to add something to the conversation.

"I don't know about that, but it is powered by the cube. And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys," Fury insisted.

Thor looked confused again. "Monkeys? I do not understand," he frowned.

Steve raised his hand. "I do!" he exclaimed, then he noticed everyone looking at him. "I understood that reference," he added, significantly quieter.

Tony and Anastasia rolled their eyes. "Should we play it, Doctor?" Tony asked Bruce, who nodded. They both walked out of the room, Steve left the room through a different door, probably to go to his room. Thor walked down to the agent that had come into the room with Tony and asked about 'Jane Foster'. Natasha and Anastasia looked at each other.

"Let's go finish the conversation, hey Nat?" Anastasia asked. Her older sister nodded and they both stood from the table and walked to Anastasia's room.

Well, that took forever to write, coz I get easily distracted and there's a tv sitting in front of me so that doesn't work! And I'm sorry if there's any mistakes - if there are any, it's also because of getting distracted :/ Okay, on second thought, I'll update the next chapter or two tomorrow because it's 10:30pm now and I have heaps of spare time tomorrow because I'm not working :) I promise that I'll update one or more chapters tomorrow! Please review and tell me what you think!