Smith Doyle read Natasha's message twice, then set the device down on his desk.
Something big at S.H.I.E.L.D. Barton has gone dark. They're pulling Banner in.
She'd kept it brief — she hadn't had the full picture when she sent it. But she didn't need to. Smith filled in the rest himself without effort. He'd been waiting for this particular domino to fall since before Loki ever stepped through that portal.
So it begins, he thought. The Battle of New York, right on schedule.
He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. Coulson would probably be the one to come get him — that was usually how these things went. A polite knock, a carefully worded briefing, and an invitation that was really an order dressed in nicer clothes.
He was wrong about which S.H.I.E.L.D. face would show up. But that came later.
Natasha's jet touched down outside a quiet town in rural India before the morning had fully broken. The air was warm and close, smelling of dust and diesel from the road that ran past the edge of the neighborhood.
She'd already positioned her team before landing — a standard perimeter, wide enough to give Banner room but tight enough that he wouldn't get far if things went sideways. Then she'd paid a local girl a small amount to knock on the right door and run.
She watched from the shadows of the room's far corner as Bruce Banner came in from the street looking mildly exasperated, his eyes tracking the window where the girl had disappeared.
"I should have taken the money upfront," he muttered to himself.
He wasn't afraid. That much was obvious from his posture — the loose set of his shoulders, the way he scanned the room with more academic curiosity than alarm. The Hulk made conventional threats largely irrelevant, and Banner knew it.
"For someone who's supposed to be avoiding stress," Natasha said from behind him, "you picked a nice spot."
Banner turned around slowly. He took her in — the posture, the tactical clothing, the complete absence of surprise on her face. "Staying away from stress isn't really something I'm good at."
"Is that yoga?"
He glanced around, reading the geometry of the situation. A quiet building on the outskirts of a small town, a woman who'd moved through his perimeter without triggering anything he'd set up. "You were smart, bringing me out to the suburbs." He tilted his head. "This place is surrounded."
"Just me."
He gave her a dry look. "What about the girl? She start early, or is that a new recruitment program?"
Natasha didn't blink. "It's what I did at her age."
That landed. Banner studied her for a moment. "Who are you?"
"Natasha Romanoff."
He looked at the floor, processing. When he looked up, his expression had shifted — not quite wary, but more careful. "Ms. Romanoff. Are you here to kill me? I should mention I'm not especially easy to kill."
"No. I'm here for S.H.I.E.L.D."
He said the acronym back to her like he was tasting something he wasn't sure about. "How'd they find me?"
"We've been tracking you for a while, Doctor. Kept our distance. Ran interference when curious people got too close."
"Why?"
"Because Nick Fury thinks you're useful. And right now, he needs you to come with me."
Banner folded his arms. "What if I say no?"
"I'll be very persuasive."
He was quiet for a second. "And what if the other guy says no?"
Natasha held his gaze. "You haven't transformed in over a year. I don't think you want to break that." She let that settle, then continued. "Doctor, we're looking at a potential global-level threat. We need your help, not your other half."
Banner's expression flickered between skepticism and something more serious. "I've been specifically trying to stay away from exactly this kind of thing."
She placed her phone on the table between them, a photograph of the Tesseract on the screen. "The Tesseract. It has enough energy to level entire cities. It's been stolen."
Banner picked up the phone, pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, and studied the image carefully. "And Fury wants me to — what, eat it?"
"Find it. The gamma radiation signature is too faint for our instruments. You know more about gamma than anyone we have."
He set the phone down. "So Fury didn't send you to catch the monster."
"That's not what I was told."
"Does he tell you everything?"
Natasha didn't answer that. "Come talk to him yourself. He needs your expertise."
"He's going to put me in a box."
"Nobody's putting you anywhere."
Banner's jaw tightened, and something shifted behind his eyes. "Stop lying to me!" The words came out louder than he intended — loud enough that the agents outside shifted on the other side of the wall.
Then he stopped. Exhaled. A short, humorless smile crossed his face. "Sorry. I was testing you."
He watched Natasha's hand drop back from wherever it had been moving, and he waved vaguely in the direction of the door. "Tell them to stand down. You can put the gun away. I'll make sure the other guy stays put." He tilted his head. "Deal?"
Natasha held his gaze a moment longer, then touched her earpiece. "Stand down. Situation normal."
By the time the jet leveled off over the Indian Ocean, Banner was in the seat across from her, reading through the incident briefing Coulson had encrypted and forwarded, his glasses balanced on the end of his nose and his expression doing a slow migration from reluctant to genuinely concerned.
Hill had taken the drive from the Triskelion to the Fraternity's New York headquarters in one of the pool vehicles, a standard-issue black SUV that looked appropriately official and had absolutely no business parking in front of a sixteen-acre compound whose security involved things that didn't appear in any S.H.I.E.L.D. manual.
The werewolf on gate duty gave her a long look before waving her through.
Smith Doyle's office occupied a comfortable section of the main building — well-appointed, unhurried, with the kind of quiet that came from genuine soundproofing rather than emptiness. He was already at his desk when she was shown in, and he greeted her with the mild, pleasant expression of a man who had not been expecting anyone in particular.
"Miss Hill. This is a surprise." He gestured to the chair across from him. "I don't usually get visitors this early. Coulson's normally the one who draws the short straw."
Hill sat down. "You do have an office at the Triskelion, Inspector General."
"I do." He nodded agreeably. "A very nice one. Great view of the parking structure."
"You're almost never in it."
"Occupational philosophy. If I set up permanently at headquarters, the agents start watching the door instead of doing their jobs. The oversight works better when nobody knows when I'm coming." He let that sit for exactly a beat, then asked, "What happened?"
Hill straightened. "S.H.I.E.L.D. has issued a Level Seven alert, Inspector General."
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