cv (ephemeras) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-12-13 14:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, gwen stacy, hulk, nick fury |
Who: Director Fury, Gwen, and Dr. Banner
What: A visit and discussing Venom
Where: SHIELD
When: Before Sam got locked up in rehab
Warnings/Rating: Nope
The sky beyond the sheet glass (seemingly innocuous, but in reality, it could withstand near-atomic force) was hazy, already dark for some hours. Besides the blackness of the New York night sky, the building hummed with activity, with the metallic drone of computers and of equipment and the low-level noise of those who guided them in their actions. Nicholas Fury stood with his hands clasped behind his back in a quasi-military posture that was unthinking as it was stiff-backed and unconsciously formal and he looked out at the world beneath and the world beyond with the unthinking gaze of one very much deep in thought.
Fury was rarely truly still. He was a man of action as much as he was a strategic counsel to those who operated beneath him and the stillness, the near impossibility of movement was as dangerous as it was significant. It might have been gone six o’clock for the people of New York City but SHIELD did not succumb to shutting down and switching off, quietly and constantly active and working. He took a long look at the lit streets far below the tower’s view, and Fury walked, his footsteps deliberate and hard as he paced between workstations and agents, leaning over and asking questions of each.
When the summons came -- a black-uniformed agent, young enough to be almost Ms Stacy’s age with the faint stamp of youth and thus both inexperience and capacity for potential written across her face, along with the freckles -- he did not glance at the ranked clocks on the wall (a glut of timezones neatly ticking down to nought) but he stood with his hands in his pockets and he waited until Gwen Stacy was guided in, flanked by ever-watching security.
Gwen knew no one trusted her to be there. Dr. Banner was hiding from SHIELD and from Director Fury, and she knew he was afraid to end up in their clutches. Flash was worried Director Fury would wear her down or appeal to her nerdish side, and that she'd tell him all about Venom and the suit and the progress they'd been making in Dr. Banner's lab. She understood their fears, even though neither of them had actually spelled them out for her. Dr. Banner didn't trust that SHIELD (and Director Fury), wouldn't lock him up for the Hulk, even though Gwen hadn't seen one hint of the green monster in her entire time with Dr. Banner. Flash was afraid they'd lock him up for Venom. SHIELD, she thought, must lock people up a lot, since that seemed to be the overarching concern.
And Maybe Gwen should have stayed away, but she was having a really hard time focusing on anything lately and staying still was an impossibility. Peter was gone, and everyone just expected her to sit around and wring her hands. Even Flash wanted to wait until it was the right time to go after Thor, while she was terrified someone would get wise and come grab the suit before they got a chance to do anything at all. No, sitting around in the lab, now that the Oscorp equipment had been "borrowed" and calibrated, just wasn't going to work. This was an opportunity to collect some real intel on Venom that might help Flash, and she was going to do it.
She showed up at SHIELD looking precisely as she always did. A harmless teenager in thick, black stockings to the knee, a sedate, grey pleated skirt and a bright blue sweater. Her dad had always liked the bright color, and she wore it to help herself be braver. Her hair was pulled back in a headband, and she had a bag over her shoulder that was packed full of books. They took the bag, which didn't surprise her, but there wasn't anything incriminating in it. They took the coat she wore too, but that also didn't surprise her. In the end, she was all blonde teenage girl as she was led into the room with Director Fury, no accessories and a very straight set of shoulders. No slouching in the Stacy household, and Gwen wasn't the kind of girl to shrink in front of adults. When the security stopped in front of the man dressed in black, she held out a hand and gave him an appraising look, possibly too direct for someone her age. "Gwen Stacy, sir."
He was not entirely certain what had been expected. Gwen S was neither overly emotional nor precisely factual (Fury suspected the latter was due to attempts at concealment than an imprecise nature). She constructed sentences without the trite idioms of excessive youth but nor were they the product of years of learning and experience. She showed a faint flare of stubbornness when pressed and he imagined - when Fury imagined anything at all, which was not evident in the blank, rather severe look he gave her back - that she would continue to be stubborn in a manner both ascribed to youth and blunt-headedness. What he had expected was not quantifiable. Nor was it a young blond thing who was strongly, overtly, still a schoolgirl.
Fury looked at her hand. He looked at her face, the lines (or the lack of them) that were there and his hand, cool, and calloused and strong, clasped hers with the solemnity of a salute. “Miss Stacy,” his voice was very calm and very deep, the dark sound of authority pressed to the very back of it, hidden there if needed. He lost his temper a great deal, but there was no trace of anger. His face was composed, as if carved and if there were more than the usual lines about the eyes and mouth in the last few days, Gwen Stacy had never seen him before in her life to know.
“Welcome to SHIELD.” The armed guard was a little excessive, he supposed. She looked more like she should have been carrying pom-poms rather than the possibility of a weapon. He gave no sign of being a man who was overly fond of locking people up, but nor did he give any sign of being a man weighted down with the knowledge of a boy lost, and a very real danger very present. “We’ll take the elevator. The labs are on a secure floor.”
She took in his eyepatch curiously, without looking away or shying away from him in general. Her dad had been an intimidating man in many ways, and she'd seen plenty of people shrink to nothing in his presence, but she wasn't like that. Her dad had taught her to hold her head high, and to meet other people's gaze, and to be direct; she did all those things. "Thank you for the invitation," she said, once he'd issued the welcome. He was, in many ways, exactly what she'd expected him to be. Intimidating and large and with a commanding presence. She couldn't imagine Dr. Banner being so afraid of someone who wasn't all those things, so she was prepared heading in. She gave him a nod when he said they'd take the elevator, and she fell into step beside him.
"I'm not armed, sir, and I don't think I could take you in a fight," she said, her gaze sliding over to one of the guards, then back at the imposing man at her side. There was a hint of a smile on her face, young and playful, but it was only the hint of a thing. And then the smile was gone so quickly that it was impossible to be absolutely sure she'd been teasing him in the first place.
Even that smile, tiny as it was, felt liberating to Gwen. Since Peter had gone missing and since Harry had disappeared, there hadn't been a lot of smiling. Despite the fact that Flash tried to keep her spirits up, which she appreciated but would never mention being wise to, she hadn't felt much like smiling. She knew Peter would be back, she did, but she was still worried. And Harry, well, she wasn't sure Harry would ever come home at all.
That ghost of a smile turned into a slightly worried frown, and she huffed a soft breath before looking up at the director again. "Are interrogation rooms on a secure floor too, sir?" she asked.
Fury noticed the smile. There and gone, quick enough to be missed by those who weren’t focused enough to catch it, or forgotten by those who were distracted enough to let it slip. Fury was neither, his attention was honed, keenly trained on Miss Stacy and if he kept his steps reined in enough to allow for the soft footsteps of her own to echo his heavy tread then it was not at all noticeable as something that required conscious effort, to bring the vast stride of a man used to moving quickly into line with that of a teenage girl.
He looked at her as they paused by a bank of elevators, glossy-metal finish and slick lack of obvious entry. When they arrived, it was with the hiss of decompressing machinery, the lip of the doors sealing apart with a little gasp of a vacuum of space, clearly air-tight. “If there were interrogation rooms,” he inclined his head gravely, “They would be on a secure floor. But not one you would have clearance for.”
She hadn’t asked, and he had not spoken before about security checks, about clearances. There was paperwork with Gwen Stacy’s name at the top and everything she had done since her existence had begun neatly printed down to the bottom. Fury knew all that could be printed on records so far, and he had issued Ms Stacy with another, albeit so secret that it was practically sealed. It was this that permitted her access inside the building. He pressed a number, almost at the very bottom of the rows and rows of them, and clasped hands in front of him, stood in the typical ‘at-ease’ posture of a soldier, waiting.
In many ways, Gwen was older than her years. She was a responsible teenager, one that was top of her class and gifted in science, and she'd been raised by a disciplinarian police captain. But in other ways, she was still a girl, and she didn't think far ahead enough to realize about clearances or checks. Even at Oscorp, her badge and thumbprint was enough, and the countless interns she showed through the facility only had badges and her to keep an eye on them. She didn't stop to think that there should be more to the whole process of being at SHIELD. But that didn't mean she naively thought that Director Fury didn't know absolutely everything about her. Luckily, she looked very good on paper. Straight-A student, all the appropriate charities and afterschool activities, early acceptance at the best universities. There were no brushes with the law, and her presence at Oscorp the night Curt Connors tried to turn the entire city's populace into lizards hadn't made it onto any police file. No, she looked like a harmless, nerdy, teenage girl, once whose father had died tragically in the service of the city he protected.
"Director Fury," she said, once the elevator was moving, and a good minute after his assurance that she didn't have sufficient clearance for the interrogation floor, "why am I here? You seem like a capable individual, even though some of the things I've heard about you aren't so great. You have to know I won't tell you anything. Even if I knew something, which I don't, I wouldn't feel like I could tell someone who people are afraid of," she explained, plain and blunt.
People were rarely surprising, and they were often predictable. However, Nick Fury’s mouth tugged at its corners in a way that could, on closer consideration, be called not dissimilar to a smile even if it was creased back into the sturdy lines of his face before it warranted commentary. The elevator was mirrored, reflections of the both of them echoing back at them until in each direction and corner, Fury could see the not-small but neither superiorly tall teenage girl at his elbow and her own almost-military straightness. Fury did not unbend, he held himself in such an unconscious way that one might suppose the rigidity had become habit and then more comfortable than breaking the habit would be. He turned his head and he gave her a long look. His eyes (the one that could be seen and the other that could not) were a steady brown and the kind of calm in them that suggested control. Fury looked neither frightening nor imperious, simply someone of indeterminate age and good fitness who perhaps had spent an unhealthy amount of time taking and then giving orders.
“It’s a strange thing about fear,” Fury said gravely, and he addressed the metal buttons of the elevator and the reflection of the girl at his side at the same time, as they sank lower into the building and floors lit up silently one by one. “Often when a man is afraid of another, he is likely to do that which incurs the lesser threat or punishment. Sometimes, his fear is enough to prevent him from something altogether.” Fury was usually plain and he had an appreciation for blunt language, even that which was dented with curses (possibly even more so). This roundabout way of talking had its own heaviness, bluntness to it.
“You are here because you have some knowledge - even if that knowledge is so little to be a name, that name is significant. Knowledge is as powerful as weapons and war, and experience defines knowledge.” Fury turned his head to look at her once more, and the elevator chimed as the doors slid open with a hissing escape of air. “The experience we have at SHIELD may inform you as you make decisions.”
Getting into SHIELD was not the hard part - at least not for Bruce Banner - it was getting out that he was concerned about. As soon as Gwen had hung up on him (ish) he’d paced for about three and a half minutes and decided to go in. He wasn’t an idiot he knew Fury had been looking for him, but he had stayed at more than an arms length away and asked basically everyone to keep his profile as low as possible. So naturally it made sense that he would go running toward them. When the cab dropped him off and he went through the motions of getting close enough inside that it meant something when he said “Dr. Bruce Banner is here to see Director Fury.” And he was led quite urgently to where he could find -hopefully- the both of them.
Bruce was dressed in a pair of brown slacks and a green (ha) button down that was a bit wrinkled on the hem and not tucked in. He was keeping an eye on every door they took him through just in case he needed to make a quick escape. He could tell that the green guy was none too pleased with the whole thing, but so far he felt just fine. Apprehensive. But fine. He was in the elevator that came up after the one that carried Director Fury and Gwen up and his “handler” nodded and stayed behind while he stepped out. “Hello,” he said looking the both of them over. This wasn’t the Director Fury he remembered. At all. Which almost gave him a bit of hope, the timeline thing was weird, but this time he hoped it would work in his favor.
“Dr Banner.” Fury did not sound surprised, nor disconcerted. He stood, as relaxed as it was possible for Fury to be (which was not a great deal) with Ms Stacy at his side and no guilt or otherwise emotion displayed prominently to be seen. If bringing Gwen to SHIELD had been designed to bring Dr Banner (it had not been, it had been perhaps, a secondary tactic, but the intention had been for Gwen and not Dr Banner as this was how conversation was being conducted) there was no pleasure at a plan executed. But Fury was not a man given to excesses of visible emotions.
“Were we expecting you?” We applied, in this case, to SHIELD. It was a rhetorical question. “Are you joining us in the labs?”
Gwen groaned. She hadn't actually expected Dr. Banner to come running down to SHIELD. She was worried about Peter and Harry, and she hadn't considered all possible outcomes before talking to Dr. Banner. It was sloppy, and Gwen Stacy was never sloppy. She could blame Sam, too, blame the things happening in Las Vegas, but that wouldn't be fair.
"I informed Dr. Banner that I was coming, sir," Gwen explained, and she sounded only slightly sheepish. Well, at least she wasn't worried about Director Fury coaxing any information out of her now, not with Dr. Banner present. But now there was a new concern: That Director Fury would refuse to let Dr. Banner go, which would then be on her head. She wondered if she should sneak away to the bathroom and surreptitiously dial Tony Stark. He and Dr. Banner were friends, right? "Director Fury was about to tell us all about Venom, Dr. Banner," she finally added harmlessly. Or, well, as harmlessly as she could manage when she was freaking out on the inside.
Bruce raised eyebrows and shrugged a bit, “Yes I am, I hope you don’t mind,” he didn’t know how they weren’t expecting to hear his own paranoid mind tell it they probably had 40 cameras set up at his chinatown apartment and his warehouse in Jersey. But he admitted he was probably wrong about that even if it was hard to. He smiled a bit at Gwen and even managed a little wave as he walked over to stand next to her. “Excellent, I think that’s a good place to start.” He said trying to sound as mellow and comfortable as he could.
Had he been privy to either the teenager or the esteemed doctor’s private understanding of how SHIELD would operate, SHIELD’s intentions (or indeed, his own) Fury might have laughed. It would have been a solid bark of a sound, rasping and hard and it would have come with a none too gentle reminder of the numerous checkpoints both were oblivious to, at which point the metaphorical black bags to put over their heads could have been produced. Fury was not -- however, he was fluent enough in the awkward conversation communicated entirely in tone and body language to understand Banner had not been an intended guest. Interesting. He gave Bruce a considered look, one all steady gaze and unremitting demand for detail. He was obviously in a hurry - last minute, perhaps?
“Not all,” he corrected Gwen, and it was not gentle but neither was it abrupt. It was a little like being rebuked by a teacher, someone invested in your own factual correctness. “Some. Some has greater clearance than I could give you. Either of you.” His gaze flickered to Bruce once more but he turned and he led the way toward the labs along the shiny, polished-metal corridor.
Gwen, after a lifetime of teacherly correction, didn't bristle at Director Fury's tone. She wasn't on the receiving end of that tone very often from anyone anymore, but her dad had taught her to respect people in authority, and she wasn't the kind of teenager that would mouth off like that, even if she wanted to, which she didn't just then. She just gave Dr. Banner a why are you here?!?!?!? look, and then she fell into step behind Director Fury. "When did Venom first show up here?" she asked Director Fury harmlessly, all teenager working on a science project with an honest love for the subject. Admittedly, neither she nor Flash were as scared of Venom as any of the adults around them seemed to be, and she was hoping to find out why they were all so terrified, while she was here.
She moved ahead of the two men, hoping Director Fury would start talking, and that the situation would just calm down as a result.
“If not all, then what?” Bruce asked curiously, it wasn’t defensive but he was definitely curious. He wasn’t sure when SHIELD got into the habit of inviting teenagers that weren’t superheroes in, but he was going with the flow.
And really, Bruce felt pretty good all things considered. “Director Fury, you,” he paused and furrowed his brow. “You look different.” He stated bluntly. This was not the same person he knew, and if it was the person that Tony knew, then maybe he wasn’t going to be held here against his will after all. Not that he trusted it, but he was smart enough to make deductions. Anything to keep this from getting ugly at any time in the near future.
There was little that sent Fury off-course, little that made him give visible indication of disconcertion. But he had neither expected Banner’s blunt observation nor had he knowledge enough to understand what it was Banner was suggesting. He stood still instead, stopped in the middle of the corridor with Ms Stacy half a step ahead and Banner at his side and he looked between them.
“I had intended to show you the last encounters we have had with the symbiote on record - the data we have collected and the information on host subjects,” he was speaking half to Gwen, all blond teenager and seemingly-biddable, but his gaze was solidly set on Banner. Rumpled, wary but Banner had the focus he recognized.
“What is different to you, Doctor Banner?”
Bruce listened seeing the encounters certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing, he’d seen plenty in his time too and heard of a few more. He couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth as he took his glasses off and cleaned them with his shirt tail, his eyes squinting just a bit before they were back on his face. “To be frank, Director Fury, you aren’t an angry white guy with cool dude stubble. You’ve got the eyepatch though. And...There are a lot less agents with guns pointed at me than there normally are.”
Gwen almost rolled her eyes, and she almost groaned an embarrassed groan, and she definitely sighed an exasperated sigh. Her social skills weren't the best, but even she knew not to go there. "Dr. Banner," she whisper-hissed, before turning her attention back to Director Fury and giving him a nervous smile. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and she wound her arm with the Director's, and then she tugged him ahead, far, far ahead of Dr. Banner. "Why don't you tell us about Venom, sir?" she asked with something bordering on desperation.
Fury did not laugh but his mouth creased at the corners in benign bemusement, and he looked at Banner as though he’d never seen him before in his life. “Perhaps,” he said carefully, because it was not as things should be, he had assumed Banner far behind in timeline but not completely different in location - Natasha, thankfully so, but where the Captain was and where everyone else for that matter - a small, abbreviated sigh that was barely audible, “We had better establish where exactly we overlap, Doctor Banner, prior to delving too deeply into Venom.” He stood in the corridor and he looked at a man he had seen many times over previously, and who was now exactly the same but not at all.
He looked at Gwen, an innocuous teenager in a corridor she would never be expected in, and he spoke to her rather than Banner, as his mind span and ticked over this new information, like rusting clockwork.
“Venom is a symbiote. We do not know its specific origin, but we know it is one of many, an intelligent life-form and parasitic compound that requires a host to survive,” Fury’s voice was even, he could have been discussing the weather, or his preferences for how his coffee was served, “And that those who are attached to it are drained until they die.” He moved toward a door that was a thin crack in the paneled walls and placed the palm of his hand over a concealed plaque that lit up green as he touched it.
“Inside we have the photographs and the film from our interactions with the symbiote. One of its first pairings as it passed through destroyed its host -- we have seen that Venom affects the adrenal function of its host.” Fury paused, and looked at both Banner and Gwen with the particular intensity peculiar to Fury and Fury only. “Should I continue?”
As soon as Director Fury began describing the scientific information they had regarding the symbiote, her attention became pinpoint and focused entirely on him. That she didn't like what she was hearing was obvious. That it worried her, that was obvious too. Flash hadn't told her about being drained until he died, and he hadn't mentioned any negative effect to adrenal function. She wondered, too, if there was more of them here. Director Fury said Venom was one of many. If it had found its way here, what was to say others of its kind hadn't?
When he mentioned the film, she moved ahead eagerly. "Please, sir, can we see the film first?" she asked, determined not to be told no, and then she walked ahead, making the decision for all of them,
She needed to talk to Flash.