The Girl Who Held the Universe in her Hands | marvel [1] ✔

TWO

CHAPTER TWO
' IT'S A
JUDGEMENT -FREE
PLACE . '

The size of the laboratory made Ash look tiny. A whole glass wall amplified the bright light and revealed the stretching corridor alongside it. Although the other walls were painted white, they intensified the glare by reflecting the painfully artificial glint of the bulbs across the ceiling. An assortment of scientific equipment littered the many tables, all linked to computers and large monitors.

Ash stood in the centre of the laboratory with a smile on her face. She was still for a brief moment before racing towards a computer, pulling a pair of black glasses out of her pocket. Frames sliding onto her nose, her eyes adjusted, and they flickered over the machine. Her fingers flew around the keyboard, and binary code lit up the black screen, igniting the lab with enhancements.

The boy appeared, sitting on a metal table with his legs swinging. He raised an eyebrow, eyes flickering over the room before shaking his head.

Ash caught the movement in her peripheral vision, and she turned to face him. "You got a problem?" Her hands found her hips, and she mockingly raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, no-" he waved his hands in front of him, shaking his head vigorously-" of course not."

She approached the table with pursed lips. "No, I know that look in your eye. Come on, Noah, it's a judgement-free space. Spit it out," she beckoned with a pouted lip, staring with wide, innocent eyes.

He glared at her. "You're an arsehole. You know that?"

"But you were an arsehole first," she replied in a slightly higher voice. She smiled, letting laughter bubble from her chest. Noah looked to the floor, shaking his head. "Ah!" Ash jabbed a finger at him. "That's a smile! You can't deny it!"

"God, you're such a dork."

"But a dork who's going to save the world." She pulled out a chair with her head held high.

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The door swung open with a loud bang, but Ash didn't seem phased. A pair of headphones blasted music into her ears, and her hand tightly clutched a pencil as she scribbled longspun equations. The room was silent aside from the girl leaning against the metal desk, humming contently. Noah sat on the table beside her with crossed legs as he watched the girl work, eyes flickering up to watch a man enter the room with an air of authority. He pulled a chair out, scraping it along the floor, and the room swelled with the colossal sound of metal against metal.

Noah knew that nothing would get through to Ash in this state. He clicked his fingers in front of her face, and her eyes flickered upwards. He nodded to the man, and the girl jumped at his presence. 

A frown was carved onto the man's face, causing Ash to remove her headphones while uttering an apology. "How far have you got?" he questioned, and she straightened, pushing her sliding glasses up her face. 

"Well, Director, I've come to a few resolutions. But some solid walls I'll probably have to fly over," she replied as she spread her chaotic pieces of paper out.

"We both know that won't be hard for you." 

Her eyes flickered back to him for a moment, the sides of her lips lifting slightly before going back to her work. "Loki, I think, would need Iridium." She pointed at different equations with labels above them. "It's a stabilizing agent. It's strong and relatively abundant, and I think it's a good option. If I was going to build something with the Tesseract, Iridium would be at the top of my shopping list."

"Why would he need a stabilizing agent?"

Ash furrowed her brows, but before she could reply, Agent Hill entered. "Sir, we have visitors."

Fury nodded in acknowledgement and stood from his chair. Ash looked down at her papers again, her lip pulling between her teeth. She stacked them back into a neat pile before following behind the adults. 

As they entered another part of the Helicarrier, Ash scanned the room. She stopped behind Fury, picking at her fingertips as she studied, in an absent-minded manner, what Hill called "Visitors".

"We're at lock, sir," Hill shouted.

"Good. Let's vanish," Fury replied, standing near the command chair. He turned to two of the new people. "Gentlemen." Rogers made his way over to them, and as he reached Fury, he pulled out a ten-dollar note. Ash raised an eyebrow and looked up at the Director. He winked at her but then turned his attention to Banner. He extended a hand in greeting. "Doctor, thank you for coming."

"Thanks for asking nicely. So, uh- how long am I staying?"

Noah scoffed under his breath. "How is no one noticing this?" He shook his head as Ash followed his focus to a man sitting in front of a computer, causing her to furrow her eyebrows.

"Once we get our hands on the Tesseract you're in the clear," Fury replied to Banner.

Ash kept her voice low, "Is he playing-"

"-Yup." Noah widened his eyes with a wince. "and he's doing a shit job at it." Ash stifled a snort as she rolled her eyes.

"Where are you with that?"

"Like you could do better," Ash jabbed softly, her eyes bouncing back to Noah from Agent Romanoff, who stared at a screen.

"We're sweeping every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. Cellphones, laptops. If it's connected to a satellite, it's eyes and ears for us," Coulson replied.

Ash let a smirk creep onto her face, reverting her attention to the conversation at hand as Noah let out a noise of protest. "You know, you would have found it by now if you'd have asked me," she remarked, looking at Fury, who remained silent at her comment.

It must have been the first time any of the three had noticed her as Rogers spoke, "I'm Steve Rogers."

"Ash," she replied, turning around with a small smile.

"Doctor Banner, meet your new lab partner," Fury introduced.

Banner raised an eyebrow but smiled in greeting nonetheless. "You have to narrow the field. How many spectrometers do you have access to?" he asked, continuing the discussion from earlier.

"How many are there?" Fury asked

"Call every lab you know, tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition. At least we could rule out a few places. Do you have somewhere for me to work?" Banner asked.

"Ash, would you show Doctor Banner to your laboratory?'