Chapter Three
Nick Fury stood on the bridge of the Helicarrier, hands clasped behind his back, watching the Quinjet descend through the rain-streaked viewport. His good eye tracked every movement, every detail. This was it. The Avengers Initiative—years of planning, billions in funding, political capital he'd never get back if this went sideways.
And it was already going sideways.
The landing bay doors opened. Fury made his way down, Coulson falling into step beside him, tablet in hand, rattling off status updates Fury was only half-listening to. His mind was on what was walking onto his ship.
The Quinjet's ramp lowered.
First out was Romanoff. Black Widow. She moved like liquid shadow, all controlled grace and lethal precision—sex and death rolled into one perfectly weaponized package. Good. She was exactly what he expected, exactly what he needed.
Then came Rogers. Captain America. The hero of at least four generations. The World's first super hero, looking like he'd stepped right out of a propaganda poster and into a world that had left him seventy years behind. The man was a living legend, and Fury needed him to be exactly that.
Stark came next, Iron Man himself, the living embodiment of human creativity and genius—and ego, and recklessness, and every other damn thing that made Fury's job harder. But the man had built something impossible in a cave with scraps. That counted for something.
Behind Stark came the reason they were all here in the first place: Loki. The man—being, whatever the hell he actually was—who'd started this whole shitshow. God of Mischief, magic, and lies, if you believed the files Thor had provided. Fury was keeping his opinion on whether these so-called gods were actually gods to his damn self. What mattered was Loki had killed eighty people in two days, stolen the Tesseract, and had plans that would make that body count look like a warm-up.
Then Thor himself descended the ramp—a mountain of muscle looking like he'd just walked out of a fashion shoot for some bullshit medieval times spread. The armor alone was made out of metal that would bankrupt a good portion of the world to acquire. Fury had read the analysis. Uru metal. Asgardian forged. Priceless didn't begin to cover it.
Fury's eye swept over them all. This was his team. This was what he had to work with. A spy, a soldier out of time, a billionaire with a god complex, a prisoner who actually might be a god, and—
Something was not right with this mother fucking picture.
Behind Thor, still on the ramp, was a girl.
Not a woman. A girl. Couldn't be more than seventeen, eighteen at most. Blonde hair pulled back, wearing some kind of blue and red uniform that looked like it belonged in a comic book. And her face—
Wide-eyed. Open-mouthed. Grinning like she'd just walked into Disneyland.
She was looking around at everything—the hangar, the personnel, the equipment—with the kind of wonder that belonged on a kid's first field trip, not on a classified military vessel thirty thousand feet in the air.
"Who the hell—" Fury started.
The girl took a step forward, still gawking at the Helicarrier's interior, and walked straight into one of his techs. The collision sent the tech sprawling, tablet skittering across the deck.
"Oh! Oh, forgive me, I did not—" The girl's voice was high, panicked, accented in a way Fury couldn't place. She backed up quickly—
—right into a bolted-down operations desk.
The impact made the whole station shudder. Monitors flickered. The desk—which was bolted to the fucking floor—shifted an inch. The screens were lit up with ship operations, navigation, engine status, all the important shit that kept them in the air.
The girl yelped.
And then she flew.
Yes. Mother fucking flew.
Shot straight up like a rocket, arms flailing—and smashed her head directly into the ceiling.
The sound was like a car crash. Metal shrieked. The impact dented the twelve-inch-thick titanium-reinforced roofing, buckling it inward like it was made of aluminum foil.
Personnel scattered. Alarms didn't go off, but they should have.
The girl dropped like a stone.
Fury watched, frozen in disbelief, as she plummeted toward the deck—directly at Coulson, who was standing there with his tablet like a deer in headlights.
"Coulson—" Fury barked.
Thor moved. Fast. Faster than something that size should move. He lunged forward and caught the girl mid-fall, arms wrapping around her waist, arresting her momentum inches before she would've cratered through Coulson and probably the deck below him.
"Sister!" Thor boomed, setting her on her feet but keeping one massive hand on her shoulder. "Thou must take care—"
The girl's face was beat red. Crimson from hairline to collar. She looked like she wanted to sink through the floor.
Fury stared.
Everyone stared.
Somewhere behind him, he heard Stark start to laugh.
Fury closed his eye. Took a breath. Opened it again.
The girl was still there. Still red-faced. Still looking like she'd just committed a war crime.
Thor was smiling at her. Smiling. Like this was endearing.
This would be funny if it didn't piss him off.
This place was not a preschool. This was a billion-dollar aerospace carrier with experimental turbines, classified weapons systems, and a nuclear-powered engine that could level a city if something went wrong. And this girl was walking around like an infant in a china shop—except everything around her wasn't made of china. It was made of tissue paper.
Which, from what he'd just witnessed, might be exactly accurate.
She'd dented titanium. With her head. And walked away from it.
Fury's jaw tightened.
That didn't make her an asset.
That made her a liability.
Fury looked at the dented ceiling. At the sprawled tech station. At the girl still glowing crimson under Thor's protective hand. At the wreckage of his bridge.
He took a long breath through his nose.
"I'm too old for this shit," he said quietly.
Then he turned on his heel and walked toward the conference room, his footsteps sharp and deliberate. He didn't look back.
"Coulson," he called over his shoulder. "With me. We need to get Loki secured in the detention cell. Now."