[1] Lions Inside | Tony Stark

nineteen

[Jade]

Her feet were swinging back and forth while she sat on the table and was devouring a bag of beef jerky that Tony had brought with him for her.

It had been a few hours since Jade and Tony arrived at the helicarrier and she had transformed back into a human when they arrived in the lab (since it was safe from prying eyes, of course). Banner's surprise was quite amusing for both Tony and Jade, but he seemed to understand her pretty quickly and they got along quite well. He even offered to run a few tests on her so that they could discover more about her powers once all of this was done.

Their search for the cube was still not finished and to make the time pass more quickly, Jade had decided to tell them the stories behind some of her scars, such as a bit of the top part of her left ear that had been bitten of during a fight with a raccoon and the scar on her neck she got just before she met Tony that was barely visible.

"Hey, Jade. How come you're not puking your gut out in the toilet by now? I thought you had motion sickness?"

Jade shrugged her shoulders since she didn't have a proper answer. "I guess it's because it doesn't feel that different from being on the ground."

"Huh."

She put her hand in the bag to take another beef jerky, only to notice it was empty. She tilted her head back and shook the bag to make sure she got every last piece.

"Hey, Tony. Do you have another bag of beef jerky with you?"

Tony laughed at her as he reached out another one, but pulled it back slightly when she grabbed for it. It only ended up with Jade giving him a glare of annoyment.

Banner started scanning Loki's spear as he looked at one of the many monitors in the room.

"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's gonna take weeks to process."

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops," Tony said as he looked at his own monitor.

"All I packed was a toothbrush."

"Hey, be happy that you packed something at all," Jade said with an accusing tone while she pointed at Tony. "And you didn't even pack another pair of clothes?"

Banner gave her an awkward smile in return while Tony grinned at her.

"You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it, it's candy land."

Jade scoffed at him as she mumbled a "maybe for you".

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke...Harlem," Banner said, making Jade didn't understand how someone as kind as him could have broken a place in New York even though Tony had read to her about the Hulk.

"Well, I promise a stress-free environment. No tension. No surprises," Tony said as he walked behind Banner before he suddenly poked him with a metal stick, giving Banner a small shock of electricity.

"Ow!"

Tony leaned in closer to Banner to see if anything happened.

"Nothing?"

That's when Steve walked through the door, not happy with what he was seeing.

"Hey! Are you nuts?"

" You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"

"Ah yes, because all of your problems can be solved with a big bag of weed. Why haven't I tried that before?" Jade sarcastically as she but a hand to her chin to make it seem like she was thinking about it.