Cruel Vengeance

[Classified Location] , SHIELD Helicarrier

April 2011

Natasha greeted Clint and Banner as they got off the jet with no small measure of relief.

It didn’t show on her face, but since Coulson had tracked her down in Russia, she’d been worried about Clint’s tangle with the mind-warping leather-bound man from outer space. Natasha had seen the footage, seen Clint dodge that scepter and get whacked into a wall for his trouble, seen Coulson almost die getting her friend out while Fury chased the compromised Hill, Selvig, and the alien out of the base. Seconds before it imploded.

It had been the first time in years that anything trumped her burning vengeance, which frankly pissed Natasha off a little bit. She’d come to care too much for Clint, and, if she was being honest, for Stark and Pepper. He was an obnoxious jerk and she was a control freak, but Natasha had somehow found common ground with Stark over his PTSD and bitterness, and she made an effort with Pepper for the sake of the narcissistic billionaire. It had turned out better than she’d expected.

Although she didn’t consider Pepper a friend , exactly. And she wasn’t sure what Stark was to her. They weren’t even on a first-name basis, which, according to Clint, was a thing friends did.

“Welcome to the party,” she called over the wind.

“Thanks,” the doctor said warily. She’d done a threat evaluation the second he came into view, and was not particularly impressed; the man looked nervous, unsure of himself, and also like he had an impossibly tight mental control. His heartbeat, when he got close enough for her to see his pulse point on his neck, was steadier than almost anyone she’d ever met. He had little to no combat training and his shyness was almost endearing.

“Hey, partner,” Clint said.

She gave him a nod. “You are not injured?”

“Hardly the most strenuous operation Fury’s ever given me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t talking about the retrieval.”

“I’m fine, Tasha.”

Banner made a little choking noise. Both agents turned to look at him.

“ Tasha ?”

“Have we met?” Natasha asked coldly, body tensing. Clint picked up on the cue and she felt him focus, shifting almost imperceptibly away from Banner.

“No, no,” the doctor said hurriedly. “I- it was in the files. That Fury sent for my debrief on the flight. You just… didn’t seem like a nickname - sort of person.”

He was blushing now.

“Ah,” Natasha said.

A siren wailed across the deck.

She glanced over the edge at the whitecaps lashing the sides of the helicarrier. “I suggest you get inside,” she shouted over her shoulder. “It’s about to get a little hard to breathe.”

The doctor’s eyebrows shot up. “Really. They want me in a pressurized metal can. Underwater.”

Natasha smirked and gestured over the side.

Banner approached the railing.

With a roar, the turbines started up, slowly unfolding from under the sea. Water poured from the sides of the helicarrier as the turbines gained speed and it began to lift up into the air.

“Oh, no, this is much worse,” Banner shouted.

Natasha gestured over her shoulder and led them across the deck.

“Dr. Banner. Glad you could join us,” Lang said. Natasha resisted the urge to glare at him - she disliked him, and the feeling was mutual.

She stepped aside and let Banner go ahead of her in the command hub, watching the way Fury, Stark, and even Clint automatically watched him. She remained in the shadows, just as she liked it.

Except - the Captain.

Natasha checked herself as she felt the tall blond man’s eyes settle on her, ignoring Banner.

She dipped her head to the Captain with an ironic tilt to her mouth. She didn’t expect that they’d get along well, but at the very least, here was another soldier. He’d immediately identified her as the primary threat in this room.

Natasha made a point of examining him and then turning away as if he were beneath her, testing him. No trace of annoyance flitted across his posture. Not arrogant, then, or vain - he didn’t mind that she’d apparently dismissed him. Interesting.

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Clint asked, glaring at Stark.

Natasha took a seat close to Clint, ready to referee if she had to. He and Stark rarely occupied the same room without butting heads.

Sure enough, Stark lifted his chin and gave Clint a challenging look. “Last night.”

Clint opened his mouth.

“Fight later, girls,” Natasha interrupted.

Her partner, at least, got the message, and flopped into a chair next to Natasha.

“Settle down,” Fury grumbled, turning away from his command platform and its three sides of screens. “Banner. Welcome to the party.”

“Thanks,” Banner said, glancing around with a combination of nervousness and curiosity. “I think.”

“You’ll be working with our good friend Mr Stark here,” Fury continued, gesturing at the billionaire. “I trust you read the briefing?”

“All caught up,” Banner said.

Stark glanced at Natasha, a question in his eyes. She nodded.

The billionaire turned away, a magnanimous smile on his face. “Well! I think we are going to get along fabulously, Doctor. Your work is unparalleled. And can I just say - I am a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

Something flickered in Banner’s eyes. “Uh, thanks.”

Stark led the gamma ray specialist out of the room, speculating about the best way to track the gamma radiation emitted by the Tesseract. Natasha watched them go with consternation. Her loyalty was to SHIELD now, and as fond as she might be of Tony Stark, he had a penchant for breaking rules.

The Captain’s attention still flickered over her skin.

[Classified Location] , SHIELD Helicarrier

April 2011

There was something going on here that Tony didn’t like.

He carefully maintained his public persona of irreverent playboy, but behind his awesome facial hair and the smirk that made men and women alike fall over themselves, he was always calculating. Naivete did not survive long in the business world, and Tony was CEO of one of the most successful tech corporations in the world. One of his cynical moments had resulted in him telling Pepper that he had “too much bitterness and not enough faith” to expect good from anyone.

So when it turned out that Nick Fury had had this top-secret program running for months at the very least, and probably longer, Tony’s suspicious nerves all pricked right up.

But he didn’t know Banner well enough yet to ask. The man might well go squealing right to Fury. Tony held his tongue.

“Welcome to my playground,” Tony said, grinning and throwing his arms wide.

“Welcome back, sir.”

“Hey, JARVIS! Settled in?”

“I am an artificial intelligence, sir. There is nothing for me to settle into.”

“That’s a yes ,” Tony said to Banner. “This lab is state-of-the-art, Doc. Not quite as many toys as I’ve got back at my tower. Fury gave me a weight limit, and my portable gravity reducer still has a forty percent explosion rate, so the man wouldn’t bring it on the ship.”

Banner was staring at him as if he’d grown an extra eye. Tony resisted the urge to find a mirror. It frankly wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him.

Maybe he needed to reevaluate his life choices.

The doctor must have decided to ignore this as meaningless blather and turned to the nearest screen. “So, ah… How do I…” Banner gestured at the transparent glass, nonplussed.”

“Ah. So this is the interface I designed personally two years ago - gah, Fury’s still running the 3.8 platform, I’m on to 4.3 at the tower - you log in here, see, it’s a biometric scanner, reads your DNA and vitals and thumbprint, won’t let you in if someone’s holding you at gunpoint, for example, your pulse skyrockets and weird hormones get in your bloodstream - and then you navigate over here - no, that bar - seriously, where have you been for the last few years?”

Banner raised an eyebrow. “Helping people.”

“Good to see you’ve got a spine in there somewhere,” Tony said, undeterred by the thinly veiled implications in the doctor’s statement. He’d heard worse. “Where exactly was that? World Vision? Doctors without Borders?”

“Private clinic in Calcutta,” Banner admitted after a minute, during which (surprise) he managed to pull up spectrometer readings on his own. “I was… removing myself from stressful situations.”

“Calcutta. Yes, that’s absolutely the first place my mind goes when someone says stress-free environment ,” Tony drawled.

Banner ignored him and kept working.

The man might have been out of touch with the technology, but within half an hour, Tony had decided that the packet on him had far from overestimated the man. In fact, it had probably under estimated him, if anything. There was a keen intelligence in there, and unless Tony was mistaken - which he very rarely was about people - there was an edge of… cynicism, bitterness, anger, something underneath the dorky, diffident exterior. Banner had an unusual amount of control, but Tony had an unusual amount of intuition. Plus there was JARVIS talking into his earpiece with an occasional analysis of the doctor’s little facial tics, since Tony couldn’t stare at him; there was work to be done.

A lot more than just tracking the cube.

Tony ignored the… unpleasant … patriarchal memories dredged up by too much focus on the Tesseract and dove into the code. He was working programs and tech while Banner handled the gamma signatures and told him what he needed the equipment to do, a partnership that worked surprisingly well but gave Tony rather too much free time for his own good. There was a reason Fury had called Banner in on this instead of just using his consultant. Tony was not too proud to admit that this was Banner’s field of expertise.

Although Tony might well be caught up in a few more days of it.

In the meantime, though, Tony was quite happy to use the snatches of down time to start probing SHIELD’s network. A brute-force hack run by JARVIS would be faster but the firewalls would probably notify one of Fury’s minions. And this job called for discretion.

Tony could practically hear Pepper teasing him, asking if he could use discretion.

I can be perfectly discreet , he would tell her. I just usually choose not to.

He missed her.

It was a startling and somewhat unpleasant realization. Tony had grown into the belief that caring for other people only gave them the opportunity to hurt you. It was akin to handing someone a knife and turning your back, waiting to see if they would use it or not, only you stayed like that for years.

Better to just not care.

But Pepper was there, in his heart, and Tony wished she could be here on the helicarrier with him. His ballast and his brake system.

“This is… astrophysics,” Banner said abruptly, looking up at Tony.

“So?”

“So it’s not my field or yours,” Banner said, and started to turn his screen.

“No, no, just - there, use that tab in the top right that says SS, then screen 4 - yes, good.” Tony examined the data that popped up on his own console when Bruce shared his screen. “Where’d you find this?”

“In the data from the day the portal opened in New Mexico,” Banner said. “I was looking through it to separate the gamma rays out from the other background radiation and other readings, get a baseline to see what changes happen during portals versus when it’s more or less stable. I got the gamma signature, but…” He gestured at the screen. “This isn’t anything I ever learned.”

“Even I can’t quite master astrophysics in one night,” Tony admitted. “Might take me a week of no sleep.”

Banner stared. “You can do that?”

“With enough caffeine? Easily. No caffeine? I’ll be hallucinating by the end of it, but hey, I’ve gotten some of my best ideas while majorly sleep-deprived. I wrote a third of JARVIS’ code on six days of no sleep.”

“I believe that there are several latent programming errors in that section of code, sir,” JARVIS cut in.

“Whose side are you on?” Tony asked. “Anyway. JARVIS, tell Fury to get Jane Foster up here, and message her on STARKnet that she can bring - what’s her name, Delilah?”

“Darcy Lewis, sir.”

“Right, her. Might be useful to have a PR person up here anyway and she’s used to keeping Jane’s secrets. Banner’s right. This is characteristic of an Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

“Foster is the scientist who was there at Puente Antiguo,” Banner said, understanding.

Tony nodded. “And she was dating that blond space muscle dude until he listened to Daddy dearest and dumped her last year, so don’t bring it up if you don’t have to. His Royal Highness Odin sounds like a major pain in the ass.”

“Problems with your father?” Banner asked shrewdly.

Tony pointed at the shorter man. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, it’ll give you a migraine. JARVIS-”

“Sir, Director Fury has just sent you a message,” JARVIS said. “The man who stole the Tesseract has shown up in Stuttgart. The Quinjet with Agent Romanoff, Agent Barton, and the Captain is taking off as I speak.”

Tony sighed gustily. “JARVIS, get the Mark 1.8 operational. I’ll catch up in the air.”

“Sir, I don’t believe Fury intended you to go-”

“You can handle this, right?” Tony asked Banner. “Say yes.”

Banner nodded.

“See, JARVIS? It’s fine. I’ll save the Captain’s star-spangled ass and everything will be fine. Get the suit ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Later,” Tony told Banner, and left the lab.