Calcutta, India
April, 2011
The only thought in Clint's head was that if Banner was looking for a low-stress environment, he'd come to the wrong place. Calcutta was a screeching, chaotic mess of loud children, shitty cars, road rage, crazy druggies, and back-alley brawls. At least in this region.
He followed the child through the streets, confident in his disguise. She had no idea he was there as she dodged motor scooters, shrieking vendors, and grabbing hands with the ease of lifelong practice. Clint paused long enough to deck one sleazeball who grabbed at the poor kid's bottom; he was sure he took out a few of the guy's teeth and definitely broke his nose. The SHIELD agent almost lost track of his target, but it was so worth it.
Why the blessed hell did Banner pick this city of all places?
At last, the little girl cut away from the street and slipped through a door. Clint eyed the building unhappily before he set off down the alley to its left; it looked rickety and unstable.
The alley was worse than the street. There were three people passed out in varying stages of drug- or alcohol-induced lethargy on the ground amid rancid puddles and piles of garbage. Clint breathed through his nose, shot a grappler arrow into the shadowed eaves of the roof three stories above, and used the motor on the harness built into his suit to pull him up the side of the building.
He first spotted Barton through a second-story window.
The man was bent over four adults on pallets on the floor; curly, sweat-soaked dark hair was the only visible part of him. Three of the interior walls had been knocked out, turning the whole story into one big space. Eight more pallets were unoccupied, though Clint noted that three of those had signs of recent use; he'd have to be careful their occupants wouldn't get in his way when he eventually confronted Banner. The walls were lined with shelves stuffed with various medical supplies probably purchased as outlet surplus; Clint could also see IV stands, two bathrooms, and an industrial-sized fridge-freezer set that had definitely seen better days.
Guess SHIELD was right; the guy's running a makeshift hospital.
The little girl walked in seconds after Clint took up his post outside the window. He pulled a mike from his pocket, held it to the window, and listened.
She pleaded with Banner in a combination of Hindi and heavily accented English; Clint didn't know the language, but he got the gist: the little girl's father was here at the clinic, and her mother couldn't scrape enough together to pay the doctor.
Banner calmed the girl after thirty seconds of her high-pitched and exhausted explanation, gave her a glass of water and a pack of fruit snacks, and said something along the lines of pay me later (it was a longer sentence with Hindi words thrown in, so Clint couldn't be sure) and then said something that made the SHIELD agent's ears practically perk up.
"I live upstairs," he said slowly, pointing at the ceiling, and showed the kid a rope hanging along the wall. Clint squinted into the shadows of the far side of the room; sure enough, it seemed to go up through the ceiling. Some kind of bell-pull.
Banner showed the kid how to tug the rope, gave her another pack of fruit snacks, and sent her home. The way he watched her go, worry and affection showing on his face, told Clint a lot about the man.
Then the doctor's posture changed.
In the span of a heartbeat, he tensed, head snapping up and eyes focusing. All softness vanished from his face, and he started to turn to the window-
Clint jerked away, pressing himself flat to the wall, barely breathing.
There had been something incongruous about Banner's expression in that second. Clint trusted his gut, and right now, it was telling him two things: one, that he was no longer the only predator on the scene, and two, whoever had just been looking out of Banner's eyes was not the same person as the one who'd given fruit snacks to a little girl and told her there was no rush on the payment.
Also, Clint was fairly sure that Banner's eyes had changed color to a livid, radioactive green.
As if he didn't already have enough weirdness in his life.
After three long minutes, he moved again - slowly, slowly, making no sound. Feet braced on the wall to keep him from swinging, he put tactical glasses over his eyes, deactivated the Night Vision they were set to, and pulled a periscope from his pocket.
It wasn't a proper periscope, more like a button camera on a stick if he was being honest, but that was the name the little device had gotten in the agents' cafeteria, and it stuck, much to the consternation of the scientists. Clint had told one of them to stop using nine-syllable names that were eighty percent technical jargon if they wanted their own names to stick. SHEILD's R&D people still hadn't forgiven him that one.
He carefully shaped the flexible periscope stalk and hit the button with his thumb. A slightly grainy image that was at least in color appeared on the inside of the glasses. Clint slowly maneuvered the device until it was just barely peeking around the top corner of the window frame.
Only years of SHIELD training and operations kept him from twitching. Banner was standing right there , less than two feet from the window, head turned slightly away. Clint suspected that only that small angle had kept Banner's eyes from picking up on the movement of the tiny camera.
The man's head turned slowly back toward the window. Clint held his breath when he noticed that fading neon green still flickered in Banner's normally dark-brown irises.
At last the tension eased, the bright color faded, and Banner turned back to his patients.
Clint waited until one of the men was crying out in agony before he activated the winch on his harness; the faint whirring it made would be covered by the man's noise. It lifted him quickly and easily up the side of the building until he could swing carefully over to a third-floor window. Clint disintegrated the glass with a Stark ionizer charge, tucked the spent black device back into his pocket, and climbed feetfirst through the window.
The apartment was small, dark, and cluttered. Clint was surprised by the things possessed by the man, considering he seemed ready to up and run at any minute; three minutes' searching found four go bags and several guns stashed in easy reach in the room. Each of the bags had cash, clothes, and passports. Clint was mildly impressed. He'd met SHIELD agents with set-ups that were pathetic compared to this.
Mostly the things Banner had everywhere were books. Used, battered physics and biology textbooks shared space with stuff from the 1600s and spy thrillers of the last decade.
Clint at last settled in the kitchen, placing a table between himself and the door. There was a pistol taped to the underside of said table. He spun it so the gun was on his own side rather than the one that would be facing Banner when he came in, readied his bow, and waited.
It was forty-one minutes before weary footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Banner walked into the apartment. Clint heard him rummaging about in his front hall, probably trying not to trip over books, then in the shabby living space.
Then the sound of his movements came down the hall toward the kitchen.
Calcutta, India
April 2011
Bruce was having a bad day.
Three new patients were in with some mutated form of the flu; his rent was due and he was going to have a hard time making the payment this month; there were those three people who'd been asking questions about him at the market for almost a month and then mysteriously disappeared a week ago; and now this pervasive feeling of being watched. It had cropped up a few days ago and he'd seen nothing concrete, but the other guy's instincts were rarely wrong, and Bruce could feel him growling and peering about restlessly.
He hoped he wouldn't have to move again. He liked this little hospital he'd built. He was doing good, helping people-
Then he stepped into his kitchen and registered the man sitting at his table.
Bruce stopped dead in his tracks.
"Evening, Dr. Banner," the man said. American, with that trained relaxation that only came from mastery of very specific skill set. Despite that, he seemed… goofy. Affable. Not the usual type Bruce met in these situations.
It was a mark of how upended his life had become that Bruce even had a baseline for strange armed men breaking into his apartment and very possibly preparing to threaten him for one reason or another.
"Who are you?" Bruce said warily, moving a few steps closer to the table. If he could reach the gun underneath it…
"Agent Clint Barton with SHIELD," the man said, and Bruce stopped and sighed.
"SHIELD. Of course." He worried at one shirt-cuff. "How'd they find me?"
"Didn't have to," Barton said. His left hand was out of sight beneath the table. Bruce would bet money there was a weapon in it. And - was that a quiver on his back? "We've been tracking you from a distance. Not your exact location, just - general area. We've stayed away. Even chased off some other nasties who were sniffing you down."
Bruce didn't want to show his interest, but he couldn't help it. "Ross?"
"Among others."
"Why?" Bruce asked.
Barton shrugged. "Wasn't my call. At a guess, it's because Fury trusts you." Bruce couldn't figure out what Barton thought of that assessment. "But now he needs your help."
"Bet that was fun to admit," Bruce muttered.
Barton smirked and leaned forward in the chair. "Just between us, when he got to that part of the briefing, I could've sworn there was a lemon in his mouth."
"Just between us?" Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow. "So this place isn't surrounded right now?"
"We're in the middle of a city," Barton said dryly. "I'm hoping you're not going to… you know. Kinda my top priority, actually. And I can handle human you. So yeah." He held up one empty hand. "Just you and me."
"You, me, and whatever weapon is in your other hand," Bruce pointed out.
Barton's lips twitched, and he finally moved. Bruce tensed, but all the agent did was lay a complicated compound bow on the table.
"Why me ?" Bruce asked when Barton didn't seem inclined to speak more.
"You're the world's leading expert on gamma rays," Barton said quietly. "And we need to track something that's emitting them. That's all I can say right now."
"And… if I say no?" Bruce asked. He had to.
Barton tapped his bow. "I'll persuade you."
"That might end poorly. For a lot of people."
"And you care. Don't you?" Barton said, but it wasn't really a question. "You care about people getting hurt. So you can say no, in which case I walk away, because I definitely don't want to meet your lovely lime green alter ego, and I don't want to introduce him to Calcutta, either. But if you walk, and we don't find this thing we need…" His face darkened. "Let's just say it will be worse. For a lot of people. Like, the whole world."
"The whole world," Bruce repeated. "You're trying to save the world , and you're calling in me, of all people?"
Barton nodded. "Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, and we fail…" he let the sentence trail off.
Bruce heard the unspoken words. It's on you.
"I love coercion," he muttered, and reached under the table.
His fingers came up empty.
"Looking for this?"
Bruce's gun was dangling from Barton's fingers.
He held up his hands. "I mean no harm."
Barton looked skeptical but let it slide, stuffing the weapon into his waistband. "Look, Doctor, I know you've got three more of those hidden around this place. I know you don't want to make any building pancake tonight, and I'm guessing you also don't want to keep hiding in Calcutta while the world goes to shit. So are you gonna stay here and keep treating flu patients, or come with me and save thousands of lives?"
Bruce paused, unwilling to give up his answer so easily, but the truth was, from the minute they'd met in this dingy little kitchen, there was only one way this was going to end.
"I'm coming."
[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.