Tesseract Child

Bird Flu

Because yes, the government can be stupid but so can anybody. Just keep trying to make things better...

For a few days things went fairly smoothly.

Thor and Dr. Banner had started to commiserate over the fact that Robin wasn't eating. Pepper even made chocolate chip cookies. Robin wouldn't eat them. Tony was incredulous. "What kind of kid won't eat fresh baked chocolate chip cookies?"

Refusing to let him leave the table until his plate was clear? Robin was happy to sit in front food for hours. He had a captive audience. He started telling knock knock jokes. He prattled on about elephants. Bruce was rather surprised when the child spelled out pi in peas to the fourteenth decimal place. He ran out of peas and Thor ran out of patience letting Robin be excused from the table.

Forcing the child to eat had resulted in a mess to clean up.

"Is he ill?" Thor asked Bruce.

"Sort of," Dr. Banner tried to explain. "A lot has happened to him. His mind and body aren't coping well."

The day before they were due to head out, Director Fury contacted them cancelling the mission. The two guards who had been stationed in Robin's hospital room were showing flu like symptoms.

"Seriously?" protested Stark. "There's been something going round since before Robin got here."

Natasha sneezed and Clint coughed.

"The lot of you are quarantined," snapped Fury. "This is not something we can mess around with."

Dr. Banner took charge of things reluctantly. HAZMAT suited Shield agents swarmed the building. There were a few glass walled isolation rooms in the basement of the tower. Clint and Natasha were ordered into one. Thor had no idea what was going on, so Tony explained to Robin why he was being put in the next room while Dr. Banner coordinated with the Shield disease and infection control team.

Natasha wanted to hit something. Clint was drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair in annoyance. Robin standing wide eyed holding his bear and his laughing puppy quilt backed into a corner of his new fish bowl room while stern HAZMAT suited soldiers, set up high tech equipment. He glanced over at Clint and Natasha looking terrified.

"This is ridiculous. All this over a simple cold?" protested Natasha.

Clint sighed, "At least they didn't insist on the entire team in containment rooms; only the kid, and anyone with symptoms. The kid is healthy though."

"He did throw up at lunch," offered Natasha.

"Thor was trying to force feed him beef stew," protested Clint. "It was cold by then too. Have you ever been force fed cold beef stew?"

Eventually Dr. Banner came accompanied by a Shield doctor. Protocol forced him to suit up in a HAZMAT suit and go through decontamination before entering the isolation rooms. He went to Natasha and Clint first.

"I'll need blood samples and swabs and we'll be doing a full physical," he explained. "I don't want this going on longer than necessary. I've put Robin in his own room because I think this illness is local and just as we may not have defenses against something from his home dimension, we don't know how resistant his immune system will be to something from our dimension."

"This strikes me as horse poop. The dimensions are similar enough that a higher order being such as a human still looks, acts and talks like a human and we are concerned that single cell organisms are so drastically different as to be a world wide threat?" Natasha spat.