AVENGERS: PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY - less than an hour after the incident
Loki stepped through the temp-pad portal with Mobius close behind. He scanned the darkly lit room with his green eyes. A number of armed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents ringed the perimeter of the room, preventing anyone else from entering or leaving by the doors. Another open temp-pad portal hummed on the far side of the room, and Loki saw two medical personnel rolling a stretcher through the opening. A man wearing a black eyepatch over his left eye followed them out of the portal. In Loki's briefing, Mobius identified this as Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. At the center of the room three other men huddled around a fourth sprawled motionless on the floor, the glowing blue Tesseract cube still in his hand.
"Get him up onto the stretcher!" barked a man with short dark hair and facial hair to match from his place in the huddle on the ground, pointing with a hand covered by a red and gold metal glove. Tony Stark, Loki recalled. The medical team quickly complied, helping the others lift the motionless man at the center onto the stretcher while Tony used his gloved hand to place the Tesseract into a separate case Nick brought over to him.
As the others shifted places around the stretcher, Loki saw the fallen man clearly for the first time. Almost hair for hair and mark for mark, the other man could be his identical twin even more than the one he saw in the TVA photograph. Loki glanced at Mobius, the question unspoken in his eye. Mobius nodded once in response. "That's him. Tom Hiddleston, the man you're going to be impersonating."
"He doesn't look very good," Loki whispered as he took in the actor's waxen complexion and dark circles around his eyes. "I think we should be prepared for a long-term masquerade."
"If that's what it takes."
A soft-spoken man with wavy dark hair attached adhesive medical patches to the temples of the man on the stretcher. He pulled a small scanner from a satchel at his side and turned it on, adjusting dials rapidly. Once again Loki recognized this man from his briefing, identifying him as Doctor Bruce Banner.
Tony leaned over Bruce's shoulder to read the screen. "Tell me we have a good word, Bruce."
Bruce nodded. "Brainwave activity confirmed."
The others in the group heaved audible sighs of relief. "At least that thing didn't fry him," Tony observed.
"You're not helping matters, Stark."
Tony glanced over at the man with the eyepatch. "Hey, we agreed that Banner was in charge of the patient, and I'm in charge of the glow box along with Doctor Selvig. Give me time, Fury, and you'll see what I can do."
"Will he live?" The question came from a man with a headset hanging around his neck, the unit assistant director Brian.
"So far it looks good," Bruce said, "but I want to get him to the lab to run tests. Keeping him stable is only half the battle until we figure out what the Tesseract did to him and why. Once we figure that out, we should be able to reverse the effects."
"He pulled it out of the case and it gave off a massive energy discharge in his hand. Until that moment we thought it was one of our prop cubes."
"It wasn't." Bruce continued poking at his scanner. "Someone switched your prop for the real Tesseract."
"Which we're glad to have back," Nick interjected.
Brian frowned at the news. "But who would swap our prop for the real thing in the middle of filming? And why?"
"We're going to investigate," the man called Fury acknowledged, "but we don't intend to interrupt your schedule. If anything, we need our people to blend in with the cast and crew in order to catch those responsible."
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Of Two Minds
Fanfiction**What if Loki Laufeyson and Tom Hiddleston existed in the same parallel universe, and that universe made them work together as a team?** During a freak incident involving the real Tesseract stolen from S.H.I.E.L.D., actor Tom Hiddleston is injured...
