Shocks and Snacks

I waltzed into the lab as if I had been personally invited, smiling brightly at the two scientists when they turned away from their work to look at me at the sound of the doors sliding open and shut again. "Hello boys," I greeted. "You don't mind me intruding, do you?"

Bruce shook his head, though it was ambiguous as to whether it was in answer to my question or if he wasn't sure why I bothered asking in the first place. Tony looked at him in question before turning to me. "You don't have anything better to do?"

"Than spending my valuable free time impressing the most famous man in America and my favorite doctor?" I waved a hand dismissively. "Don't be silly."

"Impressing?" Tony raised one eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest with a smirk. "That's a bold statement, considering all you've done so far is fall off a building and get your ass kicked."

"Tony," Bruce mumbled disapprovingly. "Can we please just work?"

"No," I answered for him, shaking my head. "C'mon, Umbruce. Work is so boring, especially sciency work. I thought we went over this already?"

Tony's mouth gaped open as his hand flew to his chest and he stared at me like I just ran over his beloved childhood pet. "Science is boring? I'm sorry, did I hear that correctly? Also-" he turned to Bruce with a quizzical look, pointing at me over his shoulder, "-Umbruce? Am I missing something?"

"You didn't know?" I strolled around the lab, smiling at Bruce- who had pushed his glasses up into his hair and was staring intently at the monitor in front of him, muttering to himself that we weren't there. "That's Dr. Banner's real name. He told me so himself. By the way," I turned back to Tony with a mocking glare, "I do more than fall off buildings. I happen to be quite the skilled magician."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah." I changed my path to stand in front of Tony with a lopsided grin, mimicking his earlier expression of one teasing eyebrow raised. "Would you like to see?"

Tony scoffed skeptically, pointing at Bruce. "Has she tried this with you yet?"

"Mhm," Bruce nodded once as his hand faltered slightly over the screen. He hesitated a moment before dropping his hand onto the table top and turning to look at me. "You never did explain how you did that trick. Or how they changed back after you left."

"Yes I did," I insisted. "Magic, Dr. Banner!"

"No such thing," Tony immediately dismissed with a shake of his head. "Everything can be explained one way or another. Magic tricks are just that- tricks. They're illusions."

"Not my magic," I defended. "My magic is genuine. None of that tomfoolery crap those hacks on YouTube do. Like this." I reached behind Tony's ear and produced a quarter, holding it between my middle and forefinger as I twisted it in a small circle in front of his face. "See? Magic."

"Trick."

"Magic!"

"Trick!"

"Guys," Bruce groaned.

I whipped around to point a finger at Bruce, bouncing slightly on my feet. "Tell him, Umbruce! My magic is legit." When Bruce sputtered nonsense and held his hands up in a shrug, I groaned and twirled in a circle before dropping dramatically onto the nearest table, holding the quarter above my face to glare at it with a pout. "How do I convince them?" I half-asked the quarter, and half-asked myself.

An idea struck, and I pushed myself away from the table while holding the quarter out in front of me. "Look at this quarter," I instructed. When neither of the two men looked at it, I scurried forward and grabbed Bruce's hand, shoving the coin into his palm. "Look!"

Bruce sighed and took the quarter, holding it between his fingers. Once Bruce was involved, Tony became more interested and stepped closer to watch what I was doing. I looked between the two of them to make sure their attention was on the coin before sliding one of my hands under Bruce's and the other one over it to hide the quarter. When I removed my top hand, the quarter was gone. "Ta-da!" I shouted, pulling my hands back to clap them excitedly.

Bruce knit his eyebrows and turned his hand over, as if somehow it might have ended up on the other side. Tony raised his eyebrows slightly before pursing his lips and shaking his head. "Still don't believe it."

"Of course you don't. But if the magic wasn't real, how did I get the quarter up there?"

Tony glanced up when I pointed my finger towards the ceiling, where the quarter was being held up by a clear piece of tape. "That... Okay, I'm confused."

"Explain that with your silly science," I challenged, crossing my arms defiantly over my chest as I grinned widely. "Want more convincing? I can do more. I can do this all day." When Tony didn't answer, still staring at the quarter on the ceiling with confusion, I turned to Bruce. "What about you? Have I converted you yet?"

Bruce chuckled, looking away from the coin to grab his glasses from the top of his head and twist them between his fingers again. "I still don't know how you do that. And not with magic," he interrupted, causing me to close my mouth before I could retort. "I mean really. Have you always done things like that? Did you develop it later? Does anyone else in your family do that? Have you ever tried to figure out where these powers came from?"

"What am I, a science experiment?" I joked, shoving his shoulder playfully. "Yes, I've always been able to do that. No, nobody else in my family could do this. According to SHIELD, the technical term is 'reality warping'," I answered, putting finger quotes around reality warping.

Bruce mumbled the term to himself as his eyes took on a far-away look, and I figured he was trying to put a scientific explanation for the phenomenon together in his head. Meanwhile, Tony had finally looked down from the ceiling with a little smile. "Do something else."

"Why?" I smirked. "Are you impressed?"

Tony scoffed at that, shaking his head furiously. "Umm, no. Obviously not. But it's common knowledge that when conducting an experiment, you have to collect multiple results to make sure you get the same result every time. So... do another trick."

I laughed quietly to myself as I thought about what else to do, absentmindedly taking Bruce's glasses out of his hands and slipping them onto my own face as I stroked my chin, dragging my fingers down an imaginary beard. "Um, I need those," Bruce pointed out, motioning towards the glasses on my face.

"But they look so good on me," I countered, tapping the back of the stems to bounce them up and down against the bridge of my nose.

Bruce simply knit his eyebrows and chuckled under his breath, glancing at the computer monitor when it beeped. Something must have caught his attention, because he easily gave up the fight for his glasses and moved across the lab to pick up what looked like a fancy metal detector that he started waving over Loki's scepter. "Whatcha got?" Tony asked, leaning to his right to look over my shoulder at Bruce.

"Well, the gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports of the Tesseract. But at this rate, it would take weeks to process."

Tony moved from standing in front of me to another computer that had been set up to the left of where Bruce was standing. "If we bypass the mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster we can clock this at around 600 teraflops."

"All I packed was a toothbrush," Bruce chuckled.

"Teraflops?" I asked, scrunching my nose. "That's not a real word."

"Teraflops are as real as magic."

"So you admit I have magic!" I announced, throwing my hands triumphantly in the air. "I converted you! Oh, I am so cool."

"Don't flatter yourself," Tony commented off-handedly as he picked up what looked like a slim silver pen and left his computer, pointing it towards Bruce. "You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it, it's Candy Land."

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York I kind of... broke Harlem."

"Ah, the past is the past." I pulled off Bruce's glasses and handed them back to him with a smile, shrugging when he furrowed his eyebrows. "Move on, Brucie. That was years ago. You seem like a chill guy these days."

"Exactly," Tony nodded, rounding the desk to stand on Bruce's left. "Like she says. Move on. Go with the flow. Go with the flow all the way to Stark Tower, where I promise a stress-free environment. No tension, no surprises..."

Bruce jumped and let out a small, "Ow!" when Tony zapped him with what I realized wasn't actually just a pen.

Tony narrowed his eyes and leaned closer to Bruce, studying his reaction as the door whirred open and I watched as Steve marched into the room shouting, "Hey!"

"Nothing?" Tony asked, sounding disappointed.

"Are you nuts?"

"Jury's out. You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret- mellow jazz, bongo drums, huge bag of weed?"

"You should try E," I suggested. Tony's eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and Bruce tilted his head with a withering expression, so I held my hands defensively in front of myself. "Not that I'm condoning drug use! Give hugs, not drugs. Who wants a hug?"

"Is everything a joke to you?" Steve asked, though it was directed more towards Tony than myself judging by the annoyed look he was shooting the man.

"Funny things are."

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny. No offense, Doc."

Bruce shook his head, tapping away at a laptop that had appeared sometime when I wasn't looking. "It's all right. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things."

Tony clicked his tongue and circled the metal desk, wagging his finger at Bruce. "You're tip-toeing, big man. You need to strut."

"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark."

I backed away from the two men as Tony grabbed a silver package and stepped slowly closer towards Steve, wanting to stay out of this argument as much as possible. I was a lover, not a fighter. Well, I was more of a joker than a lover. Same difference, right?

"Do you think I'm not? Why did Fury call us in? Why now, why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables."

"You think Fury's hiding something?"

"He's a spy," Tony explained, ripping the package open and pouring a handful of blueberries into his palm. "Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets. It's bugging him too, isn't it?" he said, smacking Bruce's shoulder. When did they have the time to discuss Fury? Did I tune that part out?

Bruce looked back and forth between Steve and Tony, pulling his glasses off and twirling them around, which seemed to be a frequent habit for him, while he waved his hands in loose circles over his laptop. "Uh, I just wanna finish my work here, and..."

"Doctor?" Steve interrupted, nodding once to encourage him.

Bruce let out a small puff of air, tapping the table a few times. "A warm light for all mankind. Loki's jab at Fury about the Cube."

"I heard it."

"Well, I think that was meant for you." Bruce pointed at Tony, who pursed his lips before offering the package. Bruce pulled out a few blueberries and bounced them in his cupped palm as he continued. "Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"Stark Tower?" Steve clarified as Tony passed behind Bruce to offer the same bag of fruit to me. "That big, ugly..." Tony raised one eyebrow as he turned to Steve, daring him with his expression to finish that sentence, and Steve rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. "...building in New York?"

I pulled my hand out of the bag, but instead of blueberries there were chocolate chips sitting in my palm. Tony knit his eyebrows at the treats in my hand before glancing inside his bag, but instead of questioning it, grabbed three of the chocolate chips out of my hand and tossed them into his mouth. I held my hand out to Bruce, who had eaten his blueberries while Steve was talking, and he smiled his thanks after taking some of the chocolate before I downed the rest.

"It's powered by an arc reactor," Bruce continued explaining after swallowing the candy. "A self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?"

"It's just the prototype," he said to Bruce before turning to Steve. "I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now. That's what he's getting at."

"So," Bruce drawled, finishing his explanation with a wave of his hand. "Why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project? What are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"

Tony finished his second rotation around the table by walking away from me, behind Bruce again and right by Steve to stand in front of one of the multiple functioning monitors in the room. "I should probably look into that once my decryption program finished breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files."

"I'm sorry, did you say-"

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge," Tony cut off Steve, glancing down at his phone. "In a few hours I'll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide." He held the silver package out towards Steve. "Blueberry? Or chocolate, if you ask Alice nicely."

Steve ignored the offer, adopting an annoyed expression as he straightened his back and looked down at Tony. "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around."

"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome."

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up. 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."

"Following's not really my style," Tony shook his head, popping another handful of blueberries into his mouth.

"And you're all about style, aren't you?"

Tony chewed his snack quietly before holding his hand up to tick off two of his fingers. "Of the people in this room, which one is A, wearing a spangly outfit, and B, not of use?"

"Well, technically I'm not of any real use," I suggested, shrugging my shoulders with my palms upward.

"You're entertainment," Tony dismissed.

"Steve," Bruce added, leaning forward onto the desk. "Tell me none of this smells a little funky to you."

Steve took a moment to look at each of the rest of us in the room before telling Tony to, "Just find the Cube," and marching out of the room.

Things were silent after the door closed behind Steve, the air filled with an awkward tension. The first sound after he left was the quarter falling from the ceiling, clanging against the floor as it spun on its side a few times before landing on tails. "Uh-oh," I said quietly, leaning over to pick it up and show the tails side to Bruce and Tony. "Bad luck."