The Unseen Avenger ∘ Marvel

chapter four; cages and cinna

I end up in a SHIELD medical bay as they take another look at my shoulder. I hate hospitals for certain reasons. Everyone I've been in reminds me of the day I held my father's hand as he died. I can see his lifeless eyes, feel his cold hand, smell death everywhere. I hate them.

I end up given some new healing cream and my arm bandaged again before I head off towards the bridge. I walk in, checking one of the monitors. I see Loki in a clear glass cage, Fury looking at him from the outside.

"In case it's unclear, you even scratch that glass, "Fury says going over to a control panel, and presses a button. The bottom right underneath the cage disappears, only the air beneath Loki, "Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?!"

Fury closes the hatch by pressing one button. He points at Loki.

"Ant."He then points at the button which would drop Loki into the sky, "Boot."

Loki starts to stroll around, smirking, "It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me."

Fury just stares, "Built for something a lot stronger than you."

I see Banner squirm a little in his chair. I look at him, watching how he reacts. He obviously doesn't like to talk about the big guy.

Loki looks into the camera, "Oh, I've heard. The mindless beast makes play he's still a man. How desperate are you, that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you? "

Fury scoffs, "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."

Loki just smirks, "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."

My eyebrows knit together. And he is real power?

I watch as Fury's face goes tight, then smiles, "Well, you let me know if Real Power wants a magazine or something."

Fury walks off, leaving Loki in his glass cell. We all look up from the monitors, silent.

"Really grows on ya, doesn't he," Banner finally says.

"Loki gonna drag this out," Rogers starts, coming out of thought," So Thor, what's his play?"

"He has an army called the Chituari," He immediately answers, "They are not of Asgard or any world known. He intends to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."

"An army," Rogers says quizzically, "From outer space?"

Banner fiddles with his glasses, "So he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for."

Thor suddenly becomes interested, "Selvig?"

"He's an astrophysicist."

"He's a friend."

"Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours." Natasha says, speaking for the first time. I watch as a cloud passes through her face, but it's gone in a second.

Rogers continues, "I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here."

Banner shakes his head, "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."

I give a small snort.

Thor glares, "I don't care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he's my brother."

"He killed eighty people in two days." Natasha states flatly.

His head drops, "He's adopted."

Don't laugh Sienna, don't laugh.

Banner goes back to thinking, "Iridium, what did they need the Iridium for? "

"It's a stabilizing agent."Stark says as he enters the room, Coulson right behind, "Keep the love alive. Means the portal won't collapse on itself like it did at SHIELD."

He turns to Thor, tapping his arm"No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing."

I glare at him from behind Thor, and he goes back to talking about things that matter, "Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants."

He looks at the bridge and I spot the guy playing video games earlier. Apparently Stark does to,"Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the topsails. That man is playing GALAGA! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did."

He then goes on to complain about Fury's control panel, when I see him slip something behind it. I peer at it. Small, circular, electronic.

Stark goes back to his favorite pastime, talking, "Well, that sounds exhausting. The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily."

I almost gag at Stark addressing Clint like the enemy, but I have to as well. It's the only way to battle Loki. If he's dangling him in front of us, he'll think we won't budge. But that can't stop us.

"Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density, something to kick start the cube."

I look away from the control panel and stare at the billionaire, "When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?"

"Last night," he looks at all of us, as if disappointed, "The packet, Selvig's notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?"

Rogers blatantly ignores Stark, "Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?"

"He got to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier." Banner answers.

"Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect." Stark answers back.

"Well, if he could do that he could achieve Heavy Ion Fusion at any reactor on the planet."

The billionaire smiles, "Finally, someone who speaks English."

Rogers looks around, bewildered, "Is that what just happened?"

Stark and Banner shake hands. A glimmer in their eyes shines as if they had found their long-lost brother. Nerds.

"It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your 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." he says.

Banner just looks down, "Thanks."

Fury walks in swiftly, breaking the budding bromance moment, "Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you might join him."

Rogers leans on the table, "Let's start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a HYDRA weapon."

"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."

Thor looks up with an odd expression on his face to convey his confusion, "Monkeys? I do not understand."

"I do! I understood that reference." Cap exclaims, looking quite proud of himself.

Stark rolls his eyes, then turns to Banner, "Shall we play, doctor?"

"Let's play some."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wander the halls, waiting for something to happen. Fury isn't happy with me about going after boys in the forest, so he dismissed me from all work today. I hate being bored. Fury knows this. I go to my room, sitting on my bed silently.

I've always found comfort in silence. A strange thing. No noise, just you and oxygen. It has been my abyss to hide in or my shroud to cover myself in.

Silence becomes a spy's best friend. It is your warning when sound breaks it, or a comfort in late hours. It hides us because to be silent is to be invisible. To be invisible is not be seen, heard, even felt.

But it's a torturer as well. It allows grief to swallow you when no one is watching. It reveals the horrors when you're alone. It lets you wallow in sorrow, plunging you into regret. It can be a spies' worst enemy as well.

For now, it is just silence. Nothing harmless, nothing harmful. I think about all the things that have happened the past few days. It's a crazy story. It's a fantasy, but it's real. I still can't fully believe it.

It's night. I am tired. I slip into pajamas before hopping into bed. I feel my eyelids drop, and I fall into sleep.

Nightmares tend to rule my unconscious dreamings. My late father will show up on occasion. Odd recollections of my early training days will bleed into my mind. The people I've murdered are often characters, but more often it's those left in the wake of their death. This time it's the daughter of a terrorist.

I poise my weapon to Senator Albras head.

"Last words?" I say. The man just looks behind me as I c**k the silenced pistol. I pull the trigger. The man falls.

"Baba!" I recognize the Arabic word for father. I turn to see a girl not older than ten, tears streaming down her face.

"Killer!" she screams. I'm guessing this is the only English word she knows. She screams it at the top of her lungs, over and over again. Her tears swim around me before swallowing me.

I drown in the dark water as the young girls screams fade out. I hear the whoosh of water instead, but it soon replaced with different screams, screams I know all too well.

I don't wake up so startled as I used to when I was a child desperate to return back to a safer reality. My eyes simply blink open, taking a moment to focus on the room around me. I remove the uncomfortably warm covers, my skin coated in sickly sweat from nightly stress.

I get out of bed and shake my head, swallowing dryly as my senses slowly come back to me. I have no desire to try sleep again once my feet touch the cold floor. I might as well be productive while awake. I look at the clock. 3:57. Early, but still considered getting up in the morning.

I throw on a jumpsuit and jog down to the gym, my boots almost silent as they hit the metal. SHIELD boots are about as quiet as you can get. I arrive at the door to the gym, about to press the button when I hear something. Pounding. I put my ear to the door to listen. Someone's using the punching bags. Two people.

I gingerly slide back the door to see the mysterious company, peering through the made opening. Blond, tall, muscular. Rogers? There's a second man to the right which I identify as another one of the agents. I creep in, unnoticed, and look at the unknown one's side profile. Yep, that's Cap. He's deep in thought, but still punching to what seems to be a beat.

The fellow field ops specialist, Bradley, is the first one to notice me. He pulls away from his own training with headphones still in. I bob my head toward one of our resident superheroes. Bradley only lifts his shoulders in a shrug and returns to his own workout.

I glance back at the Captain and speak up, "Couldn't sleep?"

Startled by my sudden appearance, he immediately looks up, "No ma'am. You?"

"Early training." I cross to the other side of the room to where paper targets are already set up. I remove the poison-tipped knife from my hip, not caring to spare more than a seconds glance at the black silhouette. One easy throw hits dead center of the red circle, acidic properties on the edge eroding a hole in it's chest.

"Oh," Rogers says with curiosity, straying from his own task, "I didn't know people still used throwing knives. Even back in my day, they were uncommon."

I whip out another one, hitting the right eye, "Still are. It's a specialty of mine."

We go back to our separate activities. In ten minutes, I've completely demolished ten targets, and Cap has killed two punching bags. I change from knife throwing to pistol shooting. I add my silencer on and start picking off moving targets.

"Ma'am," Rogers speaks up. I quickly shoot two more targets before offering any attention.

"Hm?"

"Do you possibly have World War 2 history books? No one else on the carrier has any."

My eyes gleam in delight at the mention of history, "Three different ones. I never have the time to read them though. I can run them by your room later."

"Thank you ma-"

"Oh," I say, sorta cutting him off," It's not very 21st century to say ma'am."

"So I call you Cinna?"

I don't mean to roll my eyes, but I do. Rogers just looks completely and utterly lost. I quickly replace a smile, "Agent Firman is fine."