Tony struts into the control room ahead of him. That just leaves Bucky to shadow him through the doorway, quietly taking a space next to it, leaning against the wall. Everyone else is already in the room. Tony immediately begins poking at various things in the room that are within reach, hesitating only when he encounters an agent – Hill, Bucky thinks her name is – watching him, unimpressed. Then, he pointedly takes a seat at the round table, which almost immediately flickers.
It's another screen, Bucky realises, craning his neck to get a closer look. One in front of each chair; he peers at the one nearest to him, and clenches his jaw to see an image of Loki in it. Security footage, looks like. The man is ambling uncaringly around what Bucky assumes to be his cell, and Fury comes into view a moment later.
"In case it's unclear," Fury's voice calls, from where Bucky hasn't the faintest idea. He raises an eyebrow. "You try to escape, you so much as scratch that glass?" A rumble through the intercom muffles his voice, then, and Bucky can't make out what the director is saying over it until it abruptly dies out. "Ant, boot." Fury makes an exaggerated movement at first Loki, then at a control panel, respective to each word.
Loki only chuckles. "It is an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me."
"No. For something much stronger than you. That should give you some idea."
"Oh, yes. A mindless beast. Makes play he's still a man." Loki is prowling now. "How desperate are you? You call on such lost creatures to defend you, and believe yourself safe?"
"How desperate am I? 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."
"Oooh." Even from his distance to the screen, and Loki distance from the camera, Bucky can see the grin he gives. "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."
"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Bruce sighs, massaging the bridge of his nose. The screens shut off.
"Very charming," Tony replies drily. "By the way, it'd be nice to know his gameplan here. Point Break?" He swivels in the chair towards Thor.
"He has an army called the Chitauri," Thor rumbles. "But they are not of Asgard, nor of any world known. He means to lead them against your people – they will win him the earth, in return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."
"Then he could be building a portal," Bruce says thoughtfully. "Maybe that's what he needs Erik Selvig for."
Thor seems to start, shooting Bruce a confused glance. "Selvig?"
"Oh. Yeah, he's an Astrophysicist—"
"He's a friend," Thor cuts him off. "Where is he now?"
"Loki put him under some kind of spell," Romanoff explains quietly, her expression darkening. "Along with one of ours."
Bucky hesitates as she turns away, then crosses his arms, clearing his throat to tentatively speak. "Something's off here. Loki doesn't seem like the kinda guy to just give up the way he did. People like him never do."
Bruce shakes his head at him. "That's something we can deal with later. We should be focusing on stopping whatever plans he's already put in motion. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you can smell the crazy on him."
"Have care how you speak," Thor interrupts. "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he is my brother."
Romanoff fixes Thor with a hard glare. "He killed eighty people in two days."
"…He's adopted," comes the apologetic response.
"What about the mechanics? Iridium. What do they need the Iridium for?" Bruce begins to tap his pencil against his chin.
Tony inspects the leather of the chair, flicking off some unseen speck of something. "It's a stabilising agent," he comments, almost idly. "Think about it. The portal collapsed on itself when our guys here at SHIELD tried. So, with it, the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Loki wants. That man," he raises his voice suddenly in triumph, rising from his chair to gesture towards the row of computers just off the platform. "Is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did."
Bucky's mouth gives a reluctant twitch towards a smile.
Tony whips back to attention, strutting towards the consoles. "I'm sure Agent Barton can get his hands on the rest of the raw materials pretty easily. If he finds a power source, high-density energy? Boom. Kick-starts the cube, massive headache for us."
"When did you become an expert in thermonuclear-astrophysics?" Agent Hill queries, an eyebrow raised.
"Last night. The packet. Selvig's notes. The extraction theory papers – am I really the only one who did the reading?"
"What do you have?" Fury's demanding voice cuts Tony off, making Bucky start to attention as the man strides right past him. Fury goes straight for the table, leaning forward against one of the chairs and pressing at the screen on the table.
"Well, our new roommate certainly has a penchant for the dramatics," Tony inclines his head towards the screen.
"I don't need to remind you that his goons are still out there trying to finish off what he started," Fury snaps.
"Well, once we find the cube, we'll be taking away their portal," Bruce replies. "As long as they don't have the iridium, we'll still be a couple steps ahead."
Fury sighs, his shoulders dropping. "The clock is already ticking, gentlemen. They got the Iridium while you were dealing with Loki."
Bucky scoffs, looking pointedly to Tony. "Diversion. Told you."
Fury swivels around, casting that hard eye on him. "If there's anything you'd like to add, Barnes, say it."
Bucky shifts, uncomfortable under all the eyes that are now turned to him. "That staff of his. You say it's magic, but, way I see it is it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon. Got anything to say about that?"
"It's powered by the cube in some way," Fury says slowly. "But other than that, this is completely unprecedented. I'd like to get Doctor Banner and Mr Stark into the lab to take a look at it, find out how it turned two of the sharpest men I know against us."
Tony's face lights up like a kid on Christmas. "Well, Doctor. Shall we play?"
In that split moment before Fury turns away, Bucky catches a spark of something in that eye, still fixed on him. Tony shepherds Bruce out of the control room, and, casting a long, hard look at the back of Fury's head, Bucky slips out after them, uneasiness settling in his chest.
He goes over it in his head a dozen more times than he probably should, pacing back and forth in the lab. It works like a Hydra weapon. Fury's deflection, that look in his eye. What are you hiding?
"Attennnntion!"
Bucky stiffens, but there's nothing of an obedient soldier in the way he turns and glares at Tony.
"Whoa. At ease. Please don't hit me again, Terminator," Stark's hands shoot up in surrender, and Bucky's stomach twists again at the reminder.
"Sorry," he says, just as stiffly. "For hitting you."
Tony waves him off, jabbing a pencil in his general direction. "What keeps bugging you like that? Seriously. It freaks me out."
"Nothing." Tony raises an eyebrow at him. "…Something," he amends reluctantly.
The other man breaks out into a triumphant grin. "Great! Now that we're all on the same page—"
He's interrupted by a soft beep, lets out an "aha!" and makes a dive halfway across the room to another table, where he'd set down a duffel bag when the three of them entered, and rifles through it. Bucky steps away, moving slowly towards the sceptre Bruce is working on.
He flexes his fingers – the prosthetic ones, absently tapping against the counter, the soft clank, clank, clank putting his thoughts into focus as he glares at the glowing stone nestled in the eye of the staff.
"What are you thinking?" Bruce asks, casting a glance at him out of the side of his eye.
Bucky sighs. Tries to collect those thoughts into order. "Hydra used the Tesseract to make weapons. Why… what was Fury doing with it?"
"'A warm light for all mankind'," Bruce says, slowly, thoughtfully. "Maybe…"
Tony reappears at Bucky's side, rattling a silver packet in one hand. "I could probably tell you that. Once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files." Out of the silver packet comes a handful of blueberries.
"What'd you do?" Bucky asks, curious.
"Nothing too fancy," already chewing on the blueberries, Tony produces a small notepad-like piece of tech. "JARVIS has been running it since I got to the bridge. In a few hours, we'll know every dirty secret Fury's tried to hide."
"Don't think he'll like that very much."
"'Do you really care what Fury thinks?'" Tony quotes back, and Bucky assents. "That's what I thought."
"That little thing will really get you all that information?" He asks.
"Well, yeah. A lot has changed since 1945, Demolition Man." Bucky gives him a blank look, and the other man all but throws his hands up in defeat. "God, you're going to need to be doing some serious catching up on pop culture."
"Can we get back to this?" Bruce interjects, pointedly. "We're supposed to be finding the cube, remember?"
"Well, what do you think about all this, Doctor Banner? Hm? Nothing a little fishy to you?"
At Tony's words, Bruce's eyes spark with hesitation. "I just… want to do my job here. I'm…"
"You were saying something before," Bucky points out.
The doctor's shoulders slump. "Well. Yeah. Loki's jab at Fury. I think that wasn't meant for him, it was meant for you, Tony."
Immediately, Tony crosses over to the other side of the counter and holds out the silver packet towards Bruce. "Blueberry?"
"Loki's smart, but I think he doesn't want his genius to go unsung," Bruce continues. "He wants us to know his plan, on some level. And I think it has something to do with Stark Tower."
"Stark tower?" Bucky questions.
"It's Tony's," Bruce explains. "Powered by an arc reactor, self-sustaining energy source. It'll run itself for, what, a year?"
"It's a prototype," Tony says, almost smugly.
"The point is, you've been working on this already, for longer than SHIELD has. So, why didn't they bring you in before, to work on this thing? What are they even doing in the energy business in the first place?"
Tony holds up the small screen again. "I will get back to you on that in a few hours."
"Don't forget about finding the cube," Bucky says drily, turning to leave.
"Don't get lost," Tony calls after him.
It's not getting lost that Bucky intends to do, anyway. He's not going to sit and wait around – and surely, SHIELD will have some secrets hanging around here.
It's surprisingly easy to start snooping around. Through more doors that slide open and shut as he passes them, past the occasional agent who pays him no mind. Bucky slowly but steadily winds his way down several levels in this massive carrier, wary of the cameras in every corner as he goes from room to room, trying to look aimless, or at least lost. He's not sure what he's looking for. He hopes he'll recognise it if he finds it.
The door hisses shut behind him as he enters what has to be the hundredth room so far. It's bigger than the rest, almost hangar-like, with less of that same old sleekness that the rest of this place seems bound to. He glances around. One camera in the corner, lazily making sweeps of the room.
Tugging the collar of his coat closer around his face, Bucky turns his back on the camera and moves around the room, gaze landing almost immediately on dark, smoothed-out crates stacked up against the wall. With another wary glance at the camera, he strides forward, laying a hand atop one, his prosthetic making a click as it comes into contact with the box.
He tugs the lid up – and nothing. Some bits of gear marked SHIELD. He moves on to another box, sparing a rapid look towards the camera. He's just out of its field of vision, he thinks. He opens a second box, disappointed to find more of the same. He turns towards a shelf, eyeing the boxes. One more box, he reasons. Then he'll leave it.
He reaches out to the box, using the prosthetic fingers to slide under the latch and pull it upwards, finding that moving is becoming easier. This lid is ever so slightly heavier, and he pushes it upright –
And his blood runs cold. He stares into the depths of the eye-guard of the helmet.
In a dark room, those eye-guards had reflected his blurred shape right back him, hiding the eyes behind it.
Every one of those men that they killed before and after Azzano wore this same helmet.
He's gripping the edge of the thick box so tight that it's cracking under both of his hands, cold fury settling into his chest. The weapons nestled next to the helmet. The Hydra insignia. He rips open the lid of a second box, finding the same sight.
With one hand, he lifts the heavy weight of the first gun and strides from the room, not caring that the cameras are watching his progress.