Disarm • Stark

Not long after Tony and Steve jumped out of the jet, chasing after the two Asgardians, Mazzy found herself in a giant hovercraft in the sky. She sat beside Natasha at a large table in a shiny room full of all sorts of strong materials made for withstanding more than Mazzy could imagine. There were workers all around, staring into screens and typing away at their keyboards. Mazzy wondered what they could all possibly be doing. Probably something boring. 

What was more interesting- in Mazzy's opinion, anyway- was the black-haired God on the screen in front of her. In her dad's defense, she did think the man, Loki, sounded quite British. But she now knew that he was actually from a completely different planet named Asgard, which was also where the blond God was from. 

Mazzy had a lot of questions to ask. First of all, where had her dad gone? She still hadn't seen him since he jumped out of the jet. She'd just been sticking to Natasha's side like glue. Second of all, who were all these people? She recognized Nick Fury, who was talking to Loki, and now she knew Steve Rogers, too. But there was also a woman dressed in all black who looked like she meant business, and there was a new nervous-looking man in a purple shirt. And third, what the heck was going on?

All Mazzy could hope was that her questions would be answered by Fury as he interacted with Loki on the other side of the screen. And maybe she'd learn some based on the conversations of the adults around her. She hated being out of the loop. 

Everyone seemed tense and a little frightened as they watched Fury's interaction with Loki through the security camera's footage. Fury said that Loki threatened their world with war, which was alarming to Mazzy. War was never good, in her opinion. She wished everyone could just get along, but deep inside, she knew that was impossible. No one could ever agree on anything. Especially when power was at play. 

Mazzy leaned forward and held her chin in her hand, focusing in on the security camera footage. 

"You steal a force you cannot hope to control," Fury said to Loki. Mazzy assumed he was talking about the Tesseract, which she learned was the magical Rubik's cube. She still wanted to know more about the cube and what type of power it contained, though. From what she could tell, it was incredibly dangerous

"You talk about peace, and you kill because it's fun," Fury went on, standing across the glass from Loki. 

Killing. Mazzy hated killing. The idea of it made her stomach hurt. Just the idea of taking away someone else's life made her heart feel like it was going to break in two. She couldn't imagine herself killing anyone, let alone doing it for fun. She wondered if Loki really was doing it for fun, or if there was something else to it. People usually turned out to be more complex than she would have guessed. 

"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" the man in a purple shirt joked, breaking Mazzy out of her thoughts. The man wasn't in any of the videos Mazzy had seen back at home, so who was he?

"Loki's gonna drag this out," Steve said with a sigh. He was still in his spangly outfit, as Tony called it. Mazzy thought the suit looked uncomfortable, but she kept those thoughts to herself because she figured it wouldn't be useful right now. "So, Thor, what's his play?" Steve asked, looking at the blond God.

Thor was the blond god's name, Mazzy learned. They had quite uncommon names in Asgard, apparently. But Mazzy wasn't that common of a name either, she supposed. Anyway, from what Mazzy had gathered, Thor and Loki had some sort of dysfunctional relationship.

"He has an army called the Chitauri," Thor said darkly, his voice low and grumbly. He sounded like a character out of a Disney movie, Mazzy thought. He was cool. "They're not of Asgard, nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth." 

Mazzy's eyebrows shot up. Loki wanted the entire Earth?! Gods must have been ambitious, she figured. 

"In turn, I suspect, for the Tesseract," Thor continued.

"An army," Steve sighed, "from outer space."

"So, he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for," the man in purple suggested, fidgeting with his glasses in his hands. 

Erik Selvig? Boy, being a kid in this situation sucked. Mazzy felt stupid. She didn't know anything. And she hated not knowing anything because she was a Stark. She was supposed to be smart. Smart like her dad. But how was she supposed to know any of this stuff if no one told her? She wasn't supposed to be there in the first place, though, so instead of telling her what was going on, they all just expected her to sit back and do nothing. Mazzy hated sitting back and doing nothing. 

Luckily, though, some of the others had missing pieces as well. "Selvig?" Thor asked, voicing Mazzy's question.

"He's an astrophysicist," the purple-shirted man said. Mazzy wasn't one hundred percent sure what an astrophysicist did, but she figured it was something complicated and important. Considering the astro and physicist in the word, she guessed it had something to do with outer space and physics. 

"He's a friend," Thor said. He knew him, apparently. Interesting.

"Loki has him under some kind of spell," Natasha explained, a little solemnly. Mazzy scooted her chair closer to hers. "Along with one of ours." 

"Well, we can make him better, I bet," Mazzy said, frowning slightly. She hadn't seen Natasha seem sad before and she wanted her to be happy again. Natasha forced a small, tight-lipped smile and placed her hand on top of Mazzy's. 

"I wanna know why Loki let us take him," Steve spoke up. "He's not leading an army here."

"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki," the purple shirt guy said. Mazzy liked him. He was smart, it seemed like. And awkward people are funny, usually. Also, she liked purple. "That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You could smell the crazy on him."

Mazzy giggled at that. She turned to Natasha. "I like the purple shirt guy," she said to her quietly. Not quietly enough, apparently, because Thor looked her way, unamused.

"Have care how you speak," Thor said. Why was he talking like Yoda? It seemed like everything was backward. "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother."

Brothers. That made more sense to Mazzy. Brothers didn't always get along. Like in the movie Brother Bear.

"He killed 80 people in two days," Natasha said, a blank look on her face.

Mazzy frowned again. She wanted her dad. Where the heck was he?

Thor pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows. "He's adopted," he clarified. 

"But you were still raised by the same parents," Mazzy pointed out somewhat nervously. She wasn't sure whether or not she was supposed to be talking in this situation, but her dad wasn't there to tell her not to, so she figured she'd just cross that bridge when she got to it. 

"I'm sorry, who is this little girl?" Thor asked, gesturing to the girl. Mazzy furrowed her eyebrows at him.

"I'm not little," Mazzy told him. She sat up taller in her chair and crossed her arms. Of course, she knew she was technically little, but she was smart enough not to be dismissed as just some little girl. 

"She's Stark's kid," Natasha answered.

"I'm seven, for your information," Mazzy clarified. Natasha only rolled her eyes. "I'm just short. But I'll be taller than you someday, if I eat my vegetables," Mazzy went on, raising her eyebrows at Thor.

"No, you won't," Thor told her.

"Thor-" Natasha began to reprimand, but was quickly interrupted. 

"I think it's about the mechanics," the purple shirt guy spoke up, switching the subject back to what was important, which was Loki and what he was planning to do. "Iridium... What do they need the iridium for?"

"It's a stabilizing agent," Tony said, announcing his presence in the room. Mazzy spun around in her chair to look at him. He looked down at her. "There you are. I thought the space magician made you disappear or something." Everyone looked up at him with questioning looks. "It means the portal won't collapse in on itself, like it did at SHIELD," he explained.

Tony walked deeper into the room, messing up Mazzy's hair as he passed by her chair. She furrowed her eyebrows at him and smacked his hand away. Tony passed by Thor next. "No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing," he said, tapping the God on the arm. "Also, it means the portal can open as wide and stay open as long, as Loki wants." Tony walked up to where Fury would usually stand and uttered some jumbled-up words, making everyone look at him confusedly. Then, he pointed off to a random man at a computer. "That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn't notice, but we did." 

Mazzy looked over at the man's screen and, nevertheless, he was playing Galaga. Eyes burning at the back of his head, the man scrambled to shut off the game and click to a different tab. 

Tony raised a hand up to his left eye and looked around at the screens around him. "How does Fury even see these?"

"He turns," the woman in black answered. She looked cool. Mazzy wanted to know her name.

"Sounds exhausting," Dad said. Mazzy rolled her eyes, slouching down in her chair. She was getting bored of this. Bored and tired. She had her sugar in that ice cream and she was about to crash. 

She watched as her dad messed around with Fury's technology and continued to explain what Loki needed to execute his plan, which was to get the Tesseract and make his big portal that would bring his space army. Everyone else seemed so focused on what he was saying and how he was messing with the computers that they didn't notice when he planted a small listening device underneath the desk. But Mazzy noticed. She made a mental note to ask him about it later. 

"When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" the cool-looking agent in all black asked.

"Last night," Tony answered in a snarky voice with a tilt of his head. "The packet, Selvig's notes, the extraction theory papers," he listed. Those must have been what he was reading after he sent Mazzy to bed. "Am I the only one who did the reading?"

"Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?" Steve budded in.

"He'd have to heat the cube to 120 million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier," the purple shirt guy said. 

Tony held his hands out to his sides. "Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect."

"Well, if he could do that then he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet."

"Finally, someone who speaks English!" Tony said enthusiastically, gesturing to the purple shirt man.

"Is that what just happened?" Steve asked rhetorically.

"I knew the purple shirt guy seemed smart," Mazzy said with a proud smile. She scooted her chair closer to the table again and rested her head in her arms. Her eyes felt heavy and her voice started to feel difficult to use. Usually, she'd be able to understand at least some of what they were talking about because Tony Stark was her father and all, but today, she didn't know what they were talking about in the slightest. Half their words weren't even registering in her brain. "I knew he was smart 'cause of how he was standing, Dad," Mazzy said. 

"Good job?" Tony murmured, pinching his eyebrows together. 

"Um, my name's Bruce, by the way," the purple shirt man said.

Tony walked up to him and shook his hand. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner," he said. 

"Yeah. It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner," Mazzy echoed. 

"Your work on antielectron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous, green rage monster," Tony went on. 

Dr. Banner looked away for a moment before muttering, "Thanks."

Mazzy's eyes widened and she sat up in her seat again, suddenly full of energy all over again. "You're the green guy?!" she asked. She stood in the chair on her knees, leaning over the table. 

"Yeah," Bruce murmured somewhat uncomfortably.

"Did you get attacked by a leprechaun? I heard they turn things green at school on Saint Patrick's Day, but I don't know for sure because I've never been to school before," she said in a quick, mildly jumbled rant. 

Bruce seemed a bit less uncomfortable answering that question. He let out a quiet laugh. "No, not a leprechaun. It was something called gamma radiation. Have you done any chemistry stuff before?"

"Not yet. I'm doing biology stuff right now, but I'm doing chemistry stuff next," Mazzy explained, tapping her hands on the table excitedly.

"Well, gamma rays are something you'll learn about when doing chemistry. It's a penetrating form of electromagnetic radiation-"

"We don't need to hear about it now," Natasha interrupted before Bruce could go on and start rambling about science jargon that only he and Tony would be able to understand. 

Mazzy didn't know that the green man would just be a normal human, let alone the awkward genius whom she was sitting in a room with. 

"Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube," Nick Fury said as he marched into the room. He looked at Tony, raising his eyebrows. "I was hoping you might join him."

"I'd start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon," Steve said. Mazzy wasn't sure what Hydra was, but it sounded familiar to her. Maybe she'd ask her dad about it later, she thought. 

"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 told them all. 

"Monkeys?" Thor murmured, furrowing his eyebrows with confusion. "I do not understand." 

Suddenly, Steve shot his hand out to Fury and said, "I do!" There was an awkward silence as everyone stared at him. "I understood that reference..." he said sheepishly.

"It's from The Wizard of Oz," Mazzy clarified for Thor.

Tony ignored them both and turned to Dr. Banner. "Shall we play, Doctor?"

"This way, sir," Dr. Banner said, gesturing towards the door.

Tony leaned over the top of Mazzy's chair. "Let's go, Sleeping Beauty," he said. 

"I'm not sleepy," Mazzy lied as she stood up and followed after the two geniuses. She leaned into her dad's side tiredly, despite her claims of not being tired, and Tony kept an arm around her shoulders as they followed Dr. Banner through the halls of the hovercraft.

Dr. Banner led them into a room with a bunch of windows. The magical stick that Steve was talking about was on a table, precariously placed above some pieces of technology that Mazzy had never seen before. Mazzy found a spot on one of the desk chairs in the room and curled up in a ball on top of it. 

Dr. Banner began talking some more about gamma radiation as he hovered some weird device over the staff.

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster we can clock this at around 600 teraflops," Tony said as he messed with a computer. Mazzy giggled at the word teraflops.

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

"All I packed was nothing 'cause my dad picked me up and made me fly against my will," Mazzy muttered, making Tony roll his eyes and Bruce laugh. "Guess I should've packed a sleeping bag, apparently, 'cause no one sleeps around here."

"I sleep," Dr. Banner said, slightly raising a hand. "Just not when a God is threatening our planet with world domination, apparently." 

"You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it. It's Candy Land," Tony told him. Mazzy figured he was excited to have someone around who was actually as smart as him. Unfortunately, however, not being the only genius in the room didn't humble him.

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York, I kind of broke Harlem," Bruce said, sounding a little ashamed.

"Well, I promise a stress-free environment," Tony said.

"He's lying," Mazzy interjected.

"Not lying," Tony said as he walked up next to Bruce. "No tension. No surprises." He stuck a metal object into Dr. Banner's side, making him jump.

"Ow!"

"Hey!" Steve yelled as he walked in on the scene.

"Nothing?" Tony asked disappointedly. 

"Are you nuts?" Steve asked, clearly irritated by Tony. 

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

"Is everything a joke to you?" Steve asked, looking annoyed. He seemed to look annoyed whenever Tony was present.

"Funny things are," Tony said, pointing the metal object at Steve.

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny," Steve said. 

Mazzy frowned. Did they really have no faith in Dr. Banner? Did they think he was gonna hurt them all just because Tony gave him a little shock? Were they really that scared of him? She just felt so bad for him. He seemed nice. He probably didn't like being the way he was, based on how he was acting about it earlier.

"You're being rude to Bruce, Captain America," Mazzy said, holding her hands on her hips. 

Steve sighed, turning to Bruce. "No offense, Doc," he said quietly.

"It's all right," Bruce said. Mazzy was glad that he didn't take offense to any of it, but she still felt bad for him. Even if he didn't take offense, that didn't give them the right to talk about him like he was a monster. Maybe the green man was a monster, but Bruce didn't seem to be one. "I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things," Bruce said. 

"You're tip-toeing, big man. You need to strut," Tony told him as he made his way back to stand next to Mazzy. 

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

"Do you think I'm not focused on the problem?" Tony asked argumentatively. "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."

Steve looked at him seriously. "You think Fury's hiding something?" he asked. 

"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets," Tony insisted, popping some blueberries into his mouth. "It's bugging him, too. Isn't it?" He gestured to Dr. Banner, who was still focused on whatever work he was doing.

"Uh..." Bruce seemed very unsure of how to go about this without getting involved in an argument. "I just want to finish my work here and..."

"Doctor?" Steve interrupted.

Dr. Banner sighed and took off his glasses. "'A warm light for all mankind'. Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."

"I heard it," Steve said.

"Well," Bruce said, "I think that was meant for," he pointed at Tony, "you." Tony didn't say anything and offered him a blueberry, which he accepted before continuing. "Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"Do Gods watch the news?" Mazzy asked, raising her eyebrows.

"When they're trying to take over the world, maybe," Bruce said. 

"You're talking about Stark Tower?" Steve asked. "That big, ugly-" he paused as Tony turned and Mazzy sat up to glare at him, "...building in New York?"

"Meanie," Mazzy muttered.

"It's powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for, what, a year?" Bruce asked Tony.

"It's just a prototype," Tony answered. "I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now. That's what he's getting at," Tony explained to Steve, who seemed confused before. Steve did not have a science brain, Mazzy decided.

"So, why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project?" Bruce asked.

"Because Natasha told them that he's a narcissist," Mazzy answered.

"But what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"

"I should probably look into that, once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files," Tony said, walking back over to the computer that was next to Mazzy.

"I'm sorry, did you say-" Steve tried to interject. 

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge. In a few hours, I'll know every dirty secret Shield has ever tried to hide. Blueberry?"

Steve ignored his offer, standing stiffly in front of him. "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around."

"No, they said it's because he's narcissistic," Mazzy said once again.

"Is it, though?" Tony asked her, pressing his lips together. "Or is SHIELD an intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Which is, historically, not awesome." They didn't want smart people around because they were scared that they would uncover their secrets, which was exactly what was happening.

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up," Steve suggested. "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 said. 

Steve tilted his chin up at him. "And you're all about style, aren't you?"

"Of the people in the room, which one is, A, wearing a spangly outfit, and, B, not of use?" Tony asked, his eyebrows raised.

Mazzy began typing on a keyboard in front of her, although the screen wasn't even on. "Captain America," she answered.

"Rhetorical question," Tony told her. 

"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?" Bruce asked.

"Just find the cube," Steve said before quickly walking out of the room.

Mazzy waited until he was out of the room to say, "Jeez. He's a party-pooper."