Against My Will 0 (Green Lantern/Ultimate Marvel) (Patreon)

“-ere is ultimately, albeit not technically a scaling problem.” The not-so-good doctor adjusted his glasses, the pair halfway to broken the way they kept sliding down his nose. “The part everyone keeps getting wrong and refusing to listen to me over is that it’s mass, really, and the mass needs its own development otherwise you’re not growing anything. Arguably, you’re… I mean, I would say you’re just describing a hole—”“Mm.”“And Dr. P-” Banner’s teeth clenched around the name, tongue licking dry lips. “Hank doesn’t quite like it when I put it that way.”Hank doesn’t like much. The Director of SHIELD took the corner one step faster than Banner could keep up, the man’s loafers squeaking against floors that remained as freshly waxed as an eighty-seven billion dollar budget could afford. Half Fury’s age, and yet Banner followed him like the older man had already lived twice as much life.That half-panicked shuffling continued down the corridor that ran gray on gray, recent paint over recent weld and that newly-finished smell still sitting in the vents of the Triskelion — barely eleven months after the final ribbon on this place kissed the scissors.

Fury’s sole eye traced the long glass on the right, the Upper Bay staring back at him under a night sky doing nothing much at all, somebody’s tugboat working its way southbound as Manhattan stacked up high in the distance. That’s a three-hundred-million dollar view right there.

More than a little black boy from Huntsville ever expected, that much was true.“So can the man hold a shape or can’t he, Banner?” The question didn’t need an answer, not when Fury had all this information fed to him by analysts who knew they’d risk treason by getting on his bad side. It was simply a way to get the man to actually feel worth his paycheck and title, Fury’s own way of giving back.The little nebbish nodded, looking more like a mouse than ever. “Y-yes, Director. He can hold a shape.”“And for how long?”“Th-that’s—” Banner’s glasses trailed down his nose, two fingers edging it back up. “The question, that is in fact a question I personally don’t have the data on. Hank has… uh, taken it upon himself to test it.”“Alright.” Not what he asked, but of course Banner would rather dither till the sun died before he let himself risk being even the slightest bit wrong. Saying it plain — saying anything plain — had risk and Banner was a man who couldn’t even play Risk. “Rogers.”“What about him, Director?”“His fitting?” His duster swished behind him as he took another corner. “How’d it go?”“I wasn’t—” Banner shrugged, the collar of his lab coat tilting up. “They don’t really, uh… put me in those. I heard it went long, though.”It went long… Entirely expected given the design shop was full of women the same age as Janet Pym, each and every one of them who went to school for something called Visual Identity and had too much fun fondling a man old enough to be their grandfather. Fury had already been through the first round himself, watching panels and piping and suggested striping that ran far too long for anyone’s sanity. Rogers had stood up after a patient hour and looked his way, measuring tape still draped around his shoulders and said I’d like it to look like the flag, sir.Real polite for a man that had beat Fury’s ass like a drum in his first quarter-minute of consciousness.Kid was adjusting, though.That was the language in the psych workups, at least, and Fury had signed off on them. Being honest, he would have signed off on anything that said he wasn’t going to be jumping headfirst out of windows any time soon.

“He asked me about Betty.”Fury raised a single eyebrow as Banner volunteered some information, apropos of nothing. “Did he?”“Yes, just— he asked if she was, if we were…” The man swallowed a small breath. “He was very kind. Very easy to talk to, actually.”“You’re not that hard to talk to yourself, Banner.” A lie, if there ever was one; Banner was asocial enough that pulling teeth was barely a lateral move.“I… I…” The man blinked up at him from behind those spectacles, eyes wide and open. “Sir…”"That's a compliment, Banner."

That got him quiet for a good four steps, words stopped rather than stuttering. The elevator took its time, high-speed a relative term when one had to factor in safety and tension and all the other little factors that kept you from a soup-inducing freefall. Six hundred feet of vertical and every trip from top to bottom took twelve seconds over a minute.“Stark blew off the eleven o’clock.”“Did he?” The doctor didn’t even hide how he brightened up at that. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a test of his new propulsion systems?” “Yes.” And it was the only thing keeping the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter grounded. “There was.”“Sounds like Stark.”“Mm.” Fury nodded to himself more than anything else. “Second one this month.”“Where was he this time?”“Nice.” The doors finally whispered apart, Fury exiting first and Banner quick at his heels. “A yacht or something was involved. Man had the balls to send flowers to my assistant. Flowers and a card. In French, if you can believe it.”“That’s— that’s so disrespectful.”“That’s Stark.”And it would keep being Stark, and not just the man himself. The entire bloodline behind that name seemed to be cursed with a level of irreverence and distaste for the concept of others to the point that Howard Stark Sr and the man’s sheer attitude was still imprinted on Fury’s brain generations later. And, of course, they all had to be competent in a way that made it both better and worse because the simple arithmetic on this one? The propulsion package worked.It wasn’t just promising.There was no talk of simulation tolerances.It simply worked, because Tony Stark was the kind of God-given engineer that could look at another scientist’s design and think of a dozen ways to practically and drastically improve what already worked.And then deliver.Fury would tolerate a whole lot of French flowers for that.“If you say so, sir.”“Hm.” The research deck ran cooler, the faint hum of those hard-working sample fridges audible to his ears even behind closed doors. Bluer lighting made it feel colder than it actually was on top of that, the fluorescents so much sharper to the eye. Fury let his stride lessen just enough for Banner to keep pace properly, his steps halting completely by the time they both reached the observation run. Subject Jade…A single brown eye narrowed at the glass, sixteen by twenty and clear as day. Behind the glass itself, a cot and toilet were bolted to the ground, a monitor cart parked just outside arms reach with lines running down to the person of interest lying on his side. Back to the door and knees drawn up, a thin blue blanket hung off one shoulder — enough to expose the IV in the left arm, the line taped down twice.A month goes by quick, doesn’t it?

A month ago, that intake photo was taken; the chocolate-skinned face on it young-ish, still round with baby fat and with a head laden with enough dark curls to make him just the slightest bit jealous. That baby fat was gone now, cheekbones sticking out of him tent poles and hair hanging far more limp than it had thirty days past. The kid shuddered, seventy-one degrees not enough to induce that reaction, and rolled over to expose a field of deep purple from breastbone to ribs.

“The derivative’s falling off.” Banner’s hands found his coat pockets, a frown on the man’s face as he stared past those glasses. “It’s an oddity.”“Oddity.”“The scopolamine derivative we gave him, the newest attempt to get something out of him and meant to induce submissiveness but…” The doctor frowned deeper, eyes nearly squeezed shut as he squinted. “He reacts physiologically as he should, but the mental effects don’t seem to be induced. Not effectively, at least. And the tolerance curve for those effects are moving faster than anything simulations would even allow for…”“Mm.”And yet, the answers were still the same, weren’t they? A month of questioning and varying attempts to get something from him and they hadn’t gotten one step closer. Fury said as much with a slight tilt of his chin, the Director staring half as intently as the doctor. “And no progress on this either, Doctor Banner?”“N-no, there is progress. Just not with the direct questioning.” Banner’s lips twitched, a hand jumping out of his pocket. Fury knew the man wouldn’t bite his nails in front of him, but the urge was clearly still there. It was funny how people worked, decades of making it his job to understand them only served to kill the novelty but not entirely the humor. Quick to jump to torture, Banner. Director Fury stared at the man eager to force results, so desperate to hold on to his new chief scientist position rather than be returned to second-place. But can barely handle a conversation.“The answers haven’t changed, Director Fury.” Banner nodded quickly, sweat already beading under his bangs. “He just keeps saying the same things.”“Say it for me.”“You’ve read the—”“I didn’t say that now, did I?” He didn’t need to raise his voice to make the man shrink back but it was no grand achievement; not when a twenty-nine year old with a Communications Degree did far worse to him every day. “I trusted you with this because I’m busy keeping the rest of this world from going under.” And he’d already regretted that decision twenty-four hours in. “Now say it for me, Banner.”“O-Orin Hunter Kelly.” The man took in a quick breath through the nose, his thumb working at something inside his coat pocket. “Supposedly nineteen years old, sir.” 

Nineteen years old. Supposedly.And powerful enough to leave a massive crater out in the Pine Barres like the hand of God had chosen that spot to rest. Of course he didn’t seem to be able to do all that on his own; not without the little green flashlight in the lab a few doors down, and certainly not without the ring he had on him.Had.“And the other work?”“Physical? Banner’s fingers edged those glasses back up one more time. “He’s compliant, but that’s the minimum of the regiment. There’s no more resistance but it’s failed to produce a sufficient explanation. They even cut the intake again last week and I don’t— I’m not sure what the theory is there from…” Banner bit his bottom lip, teeth working flesh for a few seconds before he opened his mouth again. “With a combination of those medications, you would expect recall to get worse but he repeats the same information.”“Mm.” Fury watched that blanket rise and fall again.He had the identification they pulled from his body the night of the crash — a driver’s license complicated enough to outdo any SHIELD ID card considering cryptographic keys, a magnetic seal and a hologram. 

None of that was impossible, of course, and the license certainly wasn’t.

The problem was that it was standardized and seemingly unremarkable. If it had been impossible, Fury could have simply filed it under alien and slept fine, but no— everything on it had to be the obvious inevitable next step, a human step, a comfortable stride ahead of state of the art.

That was confusing enough on its own, even before the birthdate being four years out and the issue date being four times that. You could fake strange. 

Nobody fakes mundane a half-decade out.

“Even his cellular…” Banner came up onto the balls of his feet a little. “It’s amazing, frankly. It took us too long to build the adaptor and, I want to be honest, that was only due to caution as we didn’t want to risk damage and had no intention of running it off the charger it came with. If it came with any sort of handshake or authentication, feeding it power while i—”“I understand that much, Banner.”“Anyway, we can power it now. We still can’t get past its encryption but we can power it.”“And the bigger one.”“That laptop…” Banner made a sound that was too near a laugh and somehow anything but all at once. “That laptop is a beauty and a different animal, sir. Storage architecture alone… it’s just that… better is a claim, a straight line. This is just…” The doctor shook his head. “I never thought Apple could possibly get this good…”“And no attempt at cracking it?”“I’m not allowing any attempt that could even come close to destructive, Director. If we move too fast, then we break things. And then, all we’re left with is a very aesthetic paperweight.” His other hand came out of his pocket, both arms folded over his birdlike chest. “Four to six weeks before I would even risk making an attempt and that’s being excessively optimistic. There’s so much we can learn from it without even turning it on. This drive, it’s the only one there is.”Fury almost laughed again.The most honest sentence Banner had ever said to him and the man didn’t even see it, all those points in his intelligence quotient going to everything but self-awareness. No flinch in him or stutter in his voice for the first time all morning. Ask him about why his ‘girlfriend’ keeps being seen with other men and he loses all control of his lips, but ask him to weigh a machine against a person and there’s not even a wasted breath.Alright. Fury started walking again. Good to know what you actually are, genius.Truthfully, the only reason Fury was even allowing this much was because — no matter what the driver’s license or debit cards said — there was no Orin Hunter Kelly. No birth certificate, no immunization record, no draft registration; hell, the boy didn’t have dental records and those teeth had definitely known the discomfort of a orthodontist’s tools. Fury had run analysts and a chunk of the Psi-Division to ground in four languages and four countries and there wasn’t even a thread.Just a boy found in a crater with a lamp.And a ring.

He started walking again, Banner right behind him as usual, and lab doors hissed open in front of them — both sets of interlocking blast doors unsealing. The temperature dropped another few degrees, noise level rising as the low argument thirty days long continued.

“—ot saying it’s Cherenkov.”“Yes, because if it were, you’d have a m—”“That’s why I’m not saying it’s Cherenkov.”"You said it loo—"

"I said it looked like.”Fury walked past the six white coats with clipboards, a seventh sitting on the floor against a cabinet with glasses pushed high up on his forehead. That single eye landed on the subject of the argument behind another set of bulletproof glass, sitting on a pedestal.The lamp sat there, greener than anything he had ever seen.No reactor signature, no decay curve, no heat; the thing ran half a degree off ambient and had since the night they’d bagged it. Confusing as all hell, and the ring sitting right next to it on the same pedestal was no different.Just as green but entirely dull, compared to the shining light of the lantern. Whatever had kept it going had gone out of it about two hours after Fury had plucked it off the kid and the Director had read a dozen reports a dozen times looking for exactly why.He still hadn’t found it.Fury had stopped caring all that much about the boy or what happened to him by day three, far too interested in what sat in front of him right now. Dark knuckles rested on the rail as the head of SHIELD leaned in and stared into that green light.“...the hell are you?”