Loki is now free from his cuffs and is contained in a large glass cell. Fury walks up to the control panel of the cell.
"In case it's unclear. You try to escape. You so much as scratch that glass." Fury says as he pressed a button. The hatch opened and Loki peeps down. "Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?!" He asks as he pressed something, then points at Loki.
"Ant." He points at the panel. "Boot."
"It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me." Loki says calmly.
"Built for something a lot stronger than you." Fury replies.
"Oh, I've heard." He replies looking directly into the camera. "The mindless beast, makes play he's still a man. How desperate are you, that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you?" He jabs.
"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." Fury replies.
"Ooh. It burns you to 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." Loki mocks.
Fury is quiet for a few seconds and I frown. "Well, you let me know if Real Power wants a magazine or something." Fury replies walking off. Loki looks back at the camera, smirking.
The screen goes black and I look around at everyone, well everyone except dad.
"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Bruce says, breaking the silence.
"Loki's gonna drag this out. So, Thor, what's his play?" Steve asks from beside me.
"He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract." Thor replies.
"An army? From outer space?" Steve asks.
"So he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for." Bruce states.
"Selvig?" Thor asks.
"He's an astrophysicist." Bruce replies.
"He's a friend." Thor replies.
"Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours." Natasha says and I let out a small breath.
"I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here." Steve says.
"Yeah. He didn't deny it when I asked. I think this is all part of his plan." I spoke out.
"He answered you?" Natasha asks and I shrugged.
"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him." Bruce says.
"Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he's my brother." Thor says.
"He killed eighty people in two days." Natasha says not looking up.
"He's adopted." Thor replies and I smile a little, Asgardians are not so different from us after all.
"I think it's about the mechanics. Iridium, what did they need the Iridium for?" Bruce ask.
"It's a stabilizing agent." I started but I stop when dad enters with Phil.
"I'm saying, take a weekend off. I'll fly you to Portland. Keep the love alive." Dad says to Phil and he nods leaving.
"Means the portal won't collapse on itself, like it did at SHIELD." Dad finishes for me.
"No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing." He says tapping Thor's arm.
"Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants." I continue.
"Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the top sails. That man is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did. How does Fury do this?" Dad asks covering one of his eyes.
"He turns." Agent Hill replies in a bored tone.
"Well, that sounds exhausting. 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." Dad says tapping different screens. I noticed he put something under one of the monitors.
I wouldn't have if I didn't watch his every move and if I didn't know him well enough, I just brush over it. His eyes meet mine and I raise my brows at him, he simply shrugs.
"When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" Agent Hill asks, unimpressed.
"Since Lisa took a liking to it and dropped books and notes all over the place. And also the packet, Selvig's notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?" Dad asks, nobody answers.
"Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?" Steve asks.
"He's got to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier." Bruce says.
"Unless, Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect." I said and dad nods.
"Well, if he could do that he could achieve Heavy Ion Fusion at any reactor on the planet." Bruce concludes.
"Finally, another person who speaks English." Dad says.
"Is that what just happened?" Steve asks in a soft voice.
"That's his language." I replied and Steve nods.
Dad and Bruce shake hands. A glimmer in their eyes shines as the mutual respect for each other shows.
"It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. You're 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." Dad says and I rolled my eyes.
"Uh...Thanks." Bruce replies.
"Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you and Lisa might join him." Fury says as he entered the room.
"Let's start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a HYDRA weapon." Steve says.
"I don't know about that, but it is
powered by the cube. And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys." Fury says.
"Monkeys? I do not understand." Thor asks in confusion.
"I do!" Steve suddenly exclaims. "I understood that reference." He says more calmly. God, he is so adorable.
Dad rolls his eyes, while Cap looks proud of himself, I was too. This might be the first reference that hasn't passed over his head since he woke up.
"Shall we play, doctor?" Dad asks.
"Let's play some." Bruce replies.
"Lis, you coming?" Dad asks.
"Yeah." I said as I stood up.
▪️▪️▪️
Bruce continuously scans with a gamma ray detection scanner on the scepter for radiation.
The scepters energy was just like that of the Tessaract, I could feel it. Like it was calling out to me, just like the Tessaract did at SHIELD. I stayed away from it as far as I could without dad or anyone noticing.
Dad and I looks at the monitors, shifting and solving as many algorithms and equations.
"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's gonna take weeks to process." Bruce says and I look up from the screen.
"What if we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster..." I start turning to dad.
"...we can clock this around six hundred teraflops." Dad completes and we turn to Bruce.
"All I packed was a tooth brush." Bruce replies.
"You know, you should come by Stark tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R and D. You'd love it, it's candy land." Dad says walking towards him.
"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke...Harlem." Bruce said.
"Well, I promise a stress free environment. No tension. No surprises." He replies as he walk past the doctor. I look back at the screen to finish my calculations.
"Ow!" Bruce suddenly shouts and I jump and a wisp of energy leaves my hand barely grazing Steve as he walks in.
"Sorry." I mouthed and he nods.
I turn back to dad to see him looking at Bruce closely.
"Nothing?"
"Hey! Are you nuts?" Steve asks.
"You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?" Dad asks ignoring Steve.
"Is everything a joke to you?" Steve asks again.
"Funny things are." Dad replies.
"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny. No offense, doc." He says.
"No, it's alright. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things." Bruce says trying to dilute the growing tension.
"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut." Dad says to the doc.
"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark." Steve says.
"You think I'm not? Why did Fury call us and why now? Why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables." Dad says as he picks up a packet of what I'm guessing to be blueberries. He tosses something in my direction. I look up at the last minute to see the packet a few seconds from hitting me.
My eyes widen in shock, but the packet stops right in front of my face, suspended in the air with blue whisps.
"Show off." I heard dad mutter.
"You think Fury's hiding something?" Steve asks.
"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets." Dad replies. He gestures to Bruce after popping blueberries in his mouth. "It's bugging him too, isn't it?"
"Uh...I just wanna finish my work here and..." He splutters.
"Doctor?" Steve says pointedly.
"'A warm light for all mankind,' Loki's jab at Fury about the cube." Bruce replies after a beat.
"I heard it." Steve says. I opened the packet taking a bite of the chocolate.
"Well, I think that was meant for you. Even if Barton didn't post that all over the news." He says dad offers him the blueberries.
"The Stark Tower? That big ugly..." I stop mid bite, glaring. He stops when his gaze lands on me.
"...building in New York?" He completes.
"It's powered by Stark Reactors, self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?" Bruce as taking from the packet.
"That's just the prototype. We're kind of the only name in clean energy right now." Dad says.
"So, why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project? I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?" Bruce continues.
"I should probably look into that once my decryption programmer finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files." Dad says.
"I knew you were up to something." I muttered.
"I'm sorry, did you say...?" Steve asks.
"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge. In a few hours we'll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide." Dad says as he holds out the bag of blueberries. "Blueberry?"
"Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around?" Steve says.
"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not possible." Dad replies.
"I think Loki's trying to wind us up. This is a man who means to start a war, and if don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders, we should follow them." Steve says, military side coming through.
"Following is not really my style." Dad replies.
"And you're all about style, aren't you?" Steve mocks.
"Of the people in this room, which one is; A. wearing a spangly outfit, and B. not of use?" Dad replies.
"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?" Bruce says diffusing the already growing tension.
Steve pauses for a few seconds, taking in the possibility, but as an obedient soldier shakes it off.
"Just find the cube." Steve says as he walks out.
I settle into the chair behind me, dropping the half eaten bar in the table and rub my head. All this tension and the energy from the scepter was getting to me.
"That's the guy dad never shut up about? Lisa wouldn't shut up about him either. Wondering if they shouldn't have kept him on ice." Dad says a few seconds after Steve leaves.
"The guy's not wrong about Loki. He does have the jump on us." Bruce says from behind a screen.
"What he's got is an ACME dynamite kit." Dad says walking away from the scepter. "It's gonna blow up in his face, and I'm gonna be there when it does."
"And I'll read all about it." Bruce says.
"Uh-huh. Or you'll be suiting up like the rest of us." Dad says looking at Bruce.
"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare." He says with a distant look on his face.
"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart." Dad says pointing to the reactor in his chest. "This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a... terrible privilege." Dad reveals.
"But you can control it." Bruce argues.
"Because I learned how." Dad replies.
"It's different." Bruce says with defeat in his voice.
"You can also learn how." I spoke up. "Maybe you should stop treating the...uh other guy like disease, maybe you should treat him as a cure." I said.
"When Edgar put these in me.." I started letting my hands glow up little whisps of energy glowing and dancing between my fingers.
"...he put it to kill me. He knew, it was supposed to kill me, slowly, steady. I couldn't bear it, my body shut down on me, Phil found me. Someone once told me everything happens for a reason. I survived for a reason. You survived that amount of gamma exposure for a reason." I said.
"So you're saying that the Hulk... the other guy... saved my life?" He asks and I shrug.
"That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?" He asks almost bitterly.
"I guess we'll find out." Dad replies.
"You might not like that." Bruce says.
"You just might."