Hello, all! Long time, no see! I know I promised flying pigs, but I just wanted to revisit Rasputin and introduce a new minor character first. As always, please let me know any story ideas or requests, either for this story or anything else, whether it be Avengers or any other fandom. I'd love to hear from you, so please leave a review if you can. Thanks for reading and, as always, enjoy!

PS: If anyone would be willing to do a cover or some fan art for this, they would have my undying gratitude and beta-ing services if requested. Just let me know! :)

Nick Fury hated many things, such as Tony Stark, paperwork, weekdays, weekends, mornings, afternoons, and evenings. (And Tony Stark.)

But there was one thing he did like, and that was interns. Who was he kidding? He loved interns. No particular intern, but interns as a whole. Forgettable, replaceable, unpaid interns. Individually they were meaningless, but collectively they were indispensable — like the Red Shirts in Star Trek. Because Nick Fury didn't care if the hand that gave him his coffee was black or white or green or purple with orange goddamn polka dots as long as he got his motherfucking coffee.

Which was why the latest addition to his hate list would become the responsibility of one particularly unfortunate poor sop. Because although Tony Stark would go to the trouble of making a goldfish/Banner hybrid with the latter's spectacular anger issues and installing a system of tanks connected by acrylic glass tubes around the perimeter of the several labs located on the 45th floor of SHIELD/Avengers/Stark Tower (they had reached a stalemate with the naming situation) to give the mutant fish a veritable penthouse, it was safe to assume he would not remember to feed it. Particularly considering he had managed, to the amazement of everyone, to kill off a cactus. (His defense? "I forgot I had it".)

Now, Nick Fury's original plan was to euthanize the so-called "Hulk Fish" to save everyone the inevitable trouble and property damage. But then Tony Stark somehow managed to contact PETA (the little motherfucker, stealing his own idea and using it against him), and somewhere around the sixth day of hate mail, death threats, and the headache-inducing chants of the protesters outside, he decided it wasn't worth it. (And that Coulson would be letting Stark do his own post-mission reports from then on.)

So he decided to do what any other man in a position of power with a migraine-inducing problem on his hands would do, and let someone else handle it.

Namely, an intern.

Luckily for him, they happened to be getting a whole new shipment of them that day.

Nick Fury paced solemnly before the fifteen fresh-faced new interns that Coulson had just delivered, partly because he was trying to decide which would be saddled with the responsibility of the Hulk Fish, but mostly because he enjoyed seeing them squirm.

They were all inwardly debating in an outwardly obvious manner the fundamental question of whether to look him in the eye or the patch, and all instead decided to focus their gaze squarely on their feet.

Except for one. But she wasn't staring at him either.

Nick Fury tried to follow her gaze, but only found a rather uninspiring bit of wall. What the hell was she staring at?

"You, with the dreads!"

He noticed with some amusement that she actually jumped in shock. After touching her curly hair with a mixture of confusion, disbelief, and irritation, she pointed at herself nervously, just to be sure he was referring to her.

"Who else in this room has dreads?"

"They're curls, sir, not dreads. And my name is Cassandra." Was it a smart thing to say? Probably not. But he insulted her hair!

Nick Fury's eye narrowed slightly.

"As I said, you with the dreads."

Fury was of the belief that (no matter what Coulson or Hill said) interns did not have names, and he would stick with it as stubbornly as Columbus did to the belief that he had found India.

She let out a small, irritated huff but resisted the urge to retort. Nonetheless, the interns on either side of her edged away slightly, trying to remove themselves from the line of fire. Just because she had a death wish didn't mean they did.

"Follow me. I have a special assignment for you. The rest of you wait here. Coulson will be in shortly to continue your orientation."

Cassandra nodded meekly and followed, suddenly unable to speak.

As he lead her down the hallway, her mind raced wildly with the thoughts of Where are we going?, Why couldn't I keep my damn mouth shut, and, most importantly, When I beg for mercy should I look him in the patch or the eye?

Her growing hysteria only worsened once they stepped in the elevator. He's not going to take me to some secret torture chamber, is he?

She watched nervously as he presses the button for the 45th floor, but the reveal of their destination calmed her somewhat. No one would put a secret torture chamber/prison/human experimentation facility on the 45th floor. They're always in basements or sub-basements or something like that, right? Right?

She takes in her surroundings as much as she can as Fury leads her though the 45th floor hallways. As far as she can tell, the level contained a several laboratories and a few offices, with no torture devices or bloodstains in sight. Her fear began to subside, quickly replaced by confusion.

Why on earth would he bring her here?

Instead of answering her questions, the discovery of her final destination only confused her further.

"A fish?"

She eyed the large aquarium system suspiciously, noting that Nick Fury seemed far more solemn than the environment called for.

But maybe his face was just stuck that way.

Because, after all, it wasn't like the fish was even a barracuda or a puffer fish or anything. It was a goddamn goldfish, like the one her little sister won at a carnival that only lived for six days (or the other goldfish her sister won at a carnival, which lived an incredible two years and five months before committing fishy suicide by jumping out of his bowl.)

Cassandra watched as Nick Fury stepped up to the tank, and stared down the fish like she imagined he would some life-long enemy.

Then he tapped the glass.

"Jesus H. Christ!" She screamed, jumping a good few feet higher than she thought she was capable of (which was saying something, as she had plenty of experience jumping in fright—she was rather easily startled).

But this was no ordinary fright, because, in the span of about three seconds, the itty bitty goldfish was big and green and rage-y, like a very angry watermelon.

... "his name is Kiefer Rasputin the Second, but he is most commonly known as Jaws Junior."

After her initial shock wore off, though, Cassandra thought she handled the situation very well. She took a few steps closer to the tank, peered into it intently, and gave a nervous smile.

"He's actually kinda cute, in a Frankenstein's monster sort of way."

"Good, because you'll be taking care of him from now on."

Cassandra gulped.

In the end, Cassandra Kyle proved to be the first caretaker of the Hulk fish to stick around long enough to be referred to as "the caretaker of the Hulk Fish".

As the weeks went by without incident, Fury could feel his stress levels slowly decreasing.

Until Cassandra unthinkingly lent her copy of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids to Laurel Hooper, her new friend and research assistant to one of Stark Industries' best botanists—a brilliant, but notoriously absent-minded, graduate student.

Then it all went to shit.