Back on the bridge the video footage cut out and everyone lapsed into silence, lost in their own thoughts. Lucy, Steve, and Natasha were seated at the conference table as Bruce, Thor, and Maria stood near by.
"He really grows on you doesn't he?" the Doctor remarked humorously.
"Loki's going to drag this out." Steve considered as he removed his hand from his chin, "So, Thor, what's his play?"
"He has an army called the Chitauri, that none of Asgard nor any world know." Thor turned to face the others; "He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."
"An army." Steve repeated dryly, looking from one person to another, "From outer space."
Lucy sighed in exasperation, rubbing her temple, "The world only grows more and more complicated, doesn't it?"
"So he's building another portal." Bruce thought out loud as he paced, "That's what he needs Erik Selvig for."
"Selvig?" Thor questioned, looking up at the familiar name.
Bruce nodded, "He's an astrophysicist."
"He's a friend." Thor corrected.
"Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours." Natasha added bitterly.
"I want to know why Loki let us take him." Steve continued logically, "He's not leading an army from here."
Doctor Banner jumped in, "I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell the crazy on him."
"Have care how you speak." Thor warned him, "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he is my brother."
Natasha blinked stone-faced, "He killed eighty people in two days."
Thor hesitated, "He's adopted."
Bruce continued, "I think it's about the mechanics. Iridium, what did they need Iridium for?"
"It's a stabilizing agent." Tony answered loudly, walking into the command center now dressed in a fine dress suit, before turning back to Coulson to finish their whispered conversation.
Lucy rolled her eyes, "Means the portal won't collapse in on itself, like it did at SHIELD." She explained to the confused individuals.
"Precisely." Tony agreed moving past Thor and patting his arm, "No hard feelings Point Break, you've got a mean swing." He stopped at Director Fury's station, "Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants." Looking around the bridge he pretended to be captain, "Raise the mizzenmast, jib the topsails!" he commanded to the incredulous SHIELD agents. "That man is playing Gallaga." He tried to recover, "He thought we wouldn't notice, but we did."
Lucy face palmed as everyone else looked around.
"How does Fury even see these?" Tony spun around, cupping one eye.
Agent Hill answered simply, "He turns."
Tapping a few of the screens Tony remarked, "Sounds exhausting." Hiding a chip below one of the monitors he continued, "The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density, something to kick start the cube."
Maria stared the genius, "When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" she questioned sarcastically.
"Last night." Tony shrugged, "The packet, Selvig's notes, the extraction theory papers? Am I the only one who did the reading?"
"Four for you, Eddie.*" Lucy grinned, "First time you actually did your homework."
Steve ignored her slightly confusing comment, "Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?"
"He'd need to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier." Lucy supplied.
Tony countered, strolling over toward her, "Unless, Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect."
"Well," Bruce considered, "if he could do that he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet."
"Finally!" Tony beamed, "Someone besides Arie who speaks English.
"Is that what just happened?" Steve questioned quizzically.
"It's good to meet you, Doctor Banner." Tony shook Bruce's hand, "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."
"Thanks." Bruce replied skeptically.
Fury finally reentered the bridge, "Doctor Banner is only here to track the cube, I was hoping you two might join him." He nodded to Lucy and Tony.
"I'd start with that stick of his." Steve suggested, "It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapons."
"I don't know about that, but it is powered by the cube." Fury contributed indignantly, "And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys."
"Monkeys?" Thor paused, "I do not understand."
"I do!" Steve asserted proudly. The rest of the group rolled their eyes. "I understood that reference." He added quieter looking over to Lucy who patted his hand encouragingly before moving to stand.
"Arie?" Tony called, before turning to Bruce, "Shall we play, Doctor?"
Banner nodded gesturing to the lab, "This way, Sir, Ma'am."
As she made to leave Lucy yelled to nobody in particular, "Try killing all of the aliens except the two blue ones on the far left side. * It might help." She finished as the door shut behind the trio of scientists.
The rest of the bridge exchanged perplexed glances over the comment from the eccentric woman. All except for the man in the corner who clicked on a minimized screen, bringing back up his game of Galaga and taking her advice.
-sublimation-
Before following Tony and Bruce, Lucy made a quick stop off to the mess hall to grab a few snack pouches. As the door to the laboratory slid open she entered into their conversation, whilst popping a few blueberries into her mouth.
"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract." Banner was saying as he waved an instrument over Loki's scepter, "But it's going to take weeks to process." He lamented reading the monitor.
On the other side of the room, Tony fiddled with the equipment he brought, "If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops."
"All I packed was a tooth brush." Bruce chuckled, taking notes on his findings.
Lucy strolled over toward Banner, leaning on the table as she read the data over his shoulder.
"You know," Tony remarked as he walked over toward the doctor, "you should come by Stark Towers sometime. Top ten floors are all R&D. You'd love it its candy land."
"Thanks," Bruce smiled sheepishly, "but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke Harlem."
"Well, I promise a stress free environment." Tony promised, "No tension. No surprises." He suddenly jabbed Banner with a pointy object.
Bruce jumped, "Ow!" he rubbed his side, looking over in disbelief at the other man.
"Nothing?" Tony scrutinized the Doctor.
Lucy's jaw dropped, "Eddie!" she reprimanded, cuffing the back of his head lightly before sighing and passing him a bag of blueberries.
"Hey!" came a shout from the door. Looking over she saw Steve stride into the lab, "Are you nuts?" he questioned Stark.
"Jury's out." Tony shrugged before turning back to the Doctor, "You really have a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret?" he rattled off quickly, "Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"
Steve's brow furrowed in frustration, "Is everything a joke to you?" he demanded.
Pointing the same stick he used against Banner at the Captain, Tony admitted, "Funny things are."
"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny." Steve's eyes flickered protectively toward Lucy, "No offense, Doctor." He apologized.
Bruce waved off the assurance, "No, it…it's all right. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things." He laughed.
"You're tiptoeing, big man." Tony thanked Lucy for the fruit, "You need to strut." He called back toward Banner.
Steve clenched his jaw, "And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark."
"You think I'm not? Why did Fury call us and why now?" Tony walked back over toward Steve and the Doctor, "Why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables."
"You think Fury is hiding something?" Steve concluded.
"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. Well, I mean, maybe second to Arie here." Tony nodded to his aunt, "I can't find anything on her in any database on the planet, and that's not for lack of trying." He shook his head trying to get back on topic, "His secrets have secrets. Its bugging him too, isn't it?" Tony nodded over to Banner, tossing a few of the berries into his mouth.
"Uh, I just want to finish my work here and…" Bruce hesitated.
"Doctor?" Steve encouraged.
Bruce sighed taking off his glasses, "'A warm light for all mankind', Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."
Steve nodded, "I heard it."
"Well, I think that was meant for you." Bruce motioned to Tony who in turn offered the Doctor some of his snacks. Bruce thanked him, "Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it's still all over the news."
"The Stark Tower?" Steve clarified, "That big ugly…" Steve paused as Lucy cleared her throat; "building in New York?" he finished as Tony stared at him.
Bruce continued, "It's powered by an ark reactor, a self sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what a year?" he looked to the building creator.
Tony agreed, "That's just the prototype. I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now. That's what he's getting at."
"So why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project?" Bruce concluded, "I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"
"I should probably look into that once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files." Tony checked his phone's progress.
Steve raised his eyebrows, "I'm sorry, did you say…"
"JARVIS has been running it since I hit the bridge." Tony interrupted, "In a few hours we'll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide. Blueberry?" he held out the silvery sack nonchalantly.
Steve belittled, "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around?"
"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically not awesome." Tony smiled snidely, "Besides I'm not normally the hacker, that's usually my godmother." He nodded toward Lucy who was standing quietly in the corner, "Yet, she's there and I'm digging for answers. So what do you know Arie that you're not telling us?"
Lucy straightened, thinking back to more than a year ago to a particularly difficult week. Listening to the trio of men argue she had finally figured out what Fury was hiding. Her mind remembered the project he had asked her about and she hesitated to be a part of. Calmly she replied not really answering the question, "I don't control SHIELD and I don't spend every waking minute monitoring them." She shrugged, "Besides I've been completely off the grid for the past few months."
"I think Loki's trying to wind us up." Steve declared he believed if Lucy knew something she'd tell them, "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."
Tony shook his head, "Following is not really my style."
"And you're all about style, aren't you?" Steve criticized.
"Of the people in this room, which one is: A, wearing a spangly outfit; and B, not of use?" Tony taunted.
"Steve," Bruce appealed, "tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?"
"Just find the cube." Steve ordered, turning to exit the lab, tired and confused by their comments.
"Wait!" Lucy called, setting down her snacks as she went to follow him.
"That's the guy my dad never shut up about?" Tony scoffed, "Wondering if they shouldn't have kept him on ice." He finished muttering.
Turning back just as she reached the door Lucy rounded on her godson, "Anthony Edward Stark!" she poked a finger accusingly into his chest, "You and I are going to have a conversation later that you will not enjoy. Steve is a good man and your father learned a great many things from him, things that would benefit you to learn as well. Do not make me lock JARVIS from you again because I swear to god I will do it." She gave him a glare as he nodded, gulping in response to her anger. "Good." marching back to the sliding door she went after the super soldier, "Steve!"
Bruce stared after the irritated agent; "She's your godmother?" he looked over to the shaken billionaire.
"Only 'parent' I have left. Scariest woman alive she is." Tony shivered, "I shouldn't have said that." He remarked a tad remorseful; "She's been waiting on the Capsicle for almost 70 years."
"They're together?" Bruce looked up at the information, "That must have been some wait." He whispered softly, feeling sorry for the pair of super soldiers.
"Hmm." Tony agreed watching the door Lucy had just disappeared from, "She was always so lonely. She hid it of course, quite well. But people always forget just how observant children are." He thought back to his youthful memories, watching his aunt's face change from a smile to a frown when she thought he wasn't looking.
"At least she's happy now. That's good right?" Bruce said, thinking to his brief interactions with the mysterious agent prior in the day. "She seems like the kind of lady who knows what she wants and gets it. Steve makes her happy, I'm sure you'll understand what she sees in him one day."
Tony protectively regarded the recently recovered super soldier's relationship with his, for all intents and purposes, mother, "Maybe." He relented.
Bruce shook his head, understanding why Stark had such an intense dislike for Steve, more so than was expected when two people with conflicting personalities interacted. "The guy's not wrong about Loki, he does have the jump on us."
"What he's got is an acme dynamite kit." Tony scoffed, "It's going to blow up in his face and I'm going to be there when it does."
"I'll read about it." Bruce adjusted a few controls on a monitor hanging form the ceiling, sending a file to Tony with a flick of his wrist.
"Uh huh." Tony countered, "Or you'll be suiting up like the rest of us."
Banner scoffed self decrepitatingly, "You see, I don't get a suit of armor." He paused in his amendments, "I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare"
"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart. This stops it." Tony tapped his arc reactor, "This little circle of light, it's part of me now. Not just armor." He strolled over to his fellow scientist, "It's a terrible privilege."
"But you can control it." Banner corrected.
"Because I learned how."
Bruce shook his head, "It's different."
"Hey." Tony cleared the screen so Banner would listen, it wasn't often the unconventional playboy was serious. "I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you. So you're saying that the Hulk," he paused correcting himself, "The other guy, saved my life?" he smirked, "That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for…what?"
Tony shrugged, "I guess we'll find out." He walked back over to his side of the lab.
"You may not enjoy that." Banner said, going back to his monitor.
"You just might." Tony insisted.
* Mean Girls reference
* quote from wiki how to play galaga, I don't know anything about the game