Lost, Yet Found

Steve had been in some pretty strange meetings since he woke. The past several months especially. With Loki, the Chitauri, and the billions of dollars of damage fighting them had caused, bringing in the entire team for conference was nothing new. But this, out of everything he’d heard and witnessed since the ice, was the strangest debriefing of all. They'd been at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s local headquarters for hours, the first of which they had all been left entirely alone. The newcomer who had responded to the name of 'Stark' hadn't been seen since they walked through the doors.

Moments like these, Steve really wished that Coulson was still around. Maria Hill had taken his place, and while Hill was more than a capable agent, she had the tendency to act rashly at times where Coulson would have kept a clear head. He prayed that she never took over as Director one day.

“What do you mean the explosion came from nowhere, Rogers?” she asked skeptically.

Steve also wasn’t too fond of her because she didn’t like him for some reason.

“He means that is came from nowhere, Maria,” Tony interjected, rolling his eyes and speaking to her as if she were five. “As in, no seen, known, or detected cause, which it to say, we don’t know where it fucking came from.”

“I wasn’t asking you, Stark,” she snapped.

She also didn’t like Tony, which Steve supposed would mean he and the other man shared something in common except Steve hadn’t drunkenly slept with her, enraging both the agent and Ms. Potts in one go.

“Where is the Director of Furies?” Thor asked in his usual kind yet commanding voice. Barton stifled a snicker. Romanoff gave him a silencing glare, though the corners of her mouth were twitching as well.

“He’ll be here soon, pal,” Tony said with a smile and a pat on the Asgardian’s shoulder.

Thor looked at Tony for a brief moment, as if trying to decide if he should be upset with Tony patting him on the shoulder, before turning his gaze back to Hill. “Agent of the Hill—”

“My name is Maria,” she seethed.

“Hey, how come he’s allowed to call you Maria and you get all pissy when I do?” Tony quipped, gesturing between her and Thor. “I know you much more personally—”

“You don’t know the first thing abou—”

“--Oh, I could name a few.”

“There a problem in here?”

The thickening tension that had been blanketing the room seemed to skid to a standstill at Fury’s voice. Even Hill’s red-flush of anger in her cheeks started to fade away, though her jaw remained clenched. Tony, however, didn’t discard his smug expression.

“No, sir, no problems here,” Hill said, tone back to being as professional as possible.

“Good, because we need to talk, and I don’t feel like talking over everyone’s bickering like last time,” he said solemnly, tossing a file onto the table before him before sitting down with a sigh. Steve almost wanted to ask which last time the Director was referring to; they all bickered about one thing or the other almost every meeting. And if they weren't at meetings, they bickered about things in the Tower. Most of it was harmless joking, but sometimes someone said something that pushed someone's buttons and an actual argument ensured. No one was innocent from this in their group.

“Have you talked to the armor thief yet?” Tony asked.

Fury gave him a stern, one-eyed stare before saying, “I have. And funny, she called you the same thing. But I’ll get to that in a moment…Captain Rogers, would you mind running the story down one more time?”

“There…isn’t a whole lot to tell, sir,” Steve admitted. “We were all inside, just relaxing during the downtime, when we heard the explosion.”

“I thought the tower was about to collapse, honestly,” Barton added. “Shook the whole damn building.”

“Well, we weren’t all inside,” Tony said, sparing a second’s length of a glance at Steve before looking back to Fury. “Thor was outside.” When Fury remained silent and staring, he added, “What? He likes to look at the sky.”

“Thor?” Fury asked, turning to the Asgardian.

Thor was silent for a moment. “Some days here on Midgard can be tiring, and sky-watching unburdens my mind to some great extent. While doing so, what appeared to be a large, spiraling black mass began to form in the middle of the air before me. I would have studied it for a longer amount of time, but it lashed out in a violent manner.”

“So it exploded?” asked Hill.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that it exploded,” Thor nodded.

“You suppose?” Tony asked, making a face. “That thing left a crater on the landing level of my tower.”

“Well, yes,” said Thor calmly.

“I think what Thor is getting at is that the explosion was more of a release of energy,” Bruce said. He always waited a while before putting his word into the debate. Steve respected that a lot about him.

“But explosions are releases of energy, Bruce,” Tony said, spinning in his chair to face the other man.

“Yes, I know that, but they’re also caused by the rapid increase of the volume of some sort of energy,” Bruce clarified. “Most explosions here are caused by bombs, dynamite, chemicals, gases, or electricity. To us it seems like this came out of nowhere, but energy like that doesn’t just appear. It’s basic physics, in order for something like that to have happened, it had to have come from somewhere and something had to have caused it.”

“Thor, do you think this came from your end of space?” Barton asked.

“Oh, no,” Fury answered before Thor could speak. “Our guest is very much human, and from Earth….”

“Yeah, you said you talked to her? I’d like to get to that part of the conversation now,” Tony said, narrowing his eyes slightly at the Director.

Fury took his time in opening the file in front of him. Steve almost felt that he was doing it for theatrics. “Where were you born, Mr. Stark?” he finally asked.

“Uhm, a hospital,” Tony replied, a confused yet amused tone to his voice.

Fury just stared at him.

"Long Island, New York...raised in Brookville,” Tony said with a sigh. “And it was North Shore University Hospital, by the way.”

“Date of birth?”

“April 17th, 1974…would you like my star chart as well?”

“Parents?”

“Wouldn’t be here without having some.” Tony’s voice was now slightly annoyed, staring at a patch of gray wall to the right of him.

“Names?”

“Howard Stark and Maria Carbonell, why?” There was no hiding the sharpness in his voice. “You and everyone else who’s read a Times magazine already know these things, so why ask?”

Fury didn’t reply, simply took a sealed envelope from the folder in his hands and slid it down the table in front of Tony’s hands. He sent Fury a questioning look.

“Open it,” the Director said, nodding towards the envelope in Tony’s hands.

With a clenched jaw, Tony tore into the envelope. Barton leaned over slightly to try to get a glance of what was on the paper, but Tony quickly put the paper to his chest and shot the other a venomous glare. When the archer had finally sat back comfortably in his seat, Tony glanced down at his paper.

“This is a list of all my personal information,” Tony said darkly, eyes flicking from the paper to Fury’s face. “Bank accounts, social security…and in my handwriting. I don’t remember writing these down for you. Or anyone, actually. I mean, I know I make horrible decisions when I’m drunk but that usually doesn’t lead to me giving people my personal information, just giving them—”

“--You didn’t write those down,” Fury said.

“But this is my handwr—”

“—Our guest wrote those down.”

A tense silence followed that statement. Tense, but short-lived. Fury continued. “I asked you those questions to double check that everything she told me was as I suspected. She was able to give me all of your personal information, your correct date of birth, parentage, location you were raised, and, more so, astonishingly accurate accounts of your imprisonment in Afghanistan and the mess with Obadiah Stane.”

“So…what? She’s a super stalker or something who thinks she’s me?”

“No. I didn’t ask those questions in concern to you. I asked them as basic debriefing questions.” Fury turned a page of the file in his hand and read, “Natasha Stark, born April 17th, 1974 to Howard and Maria Stark – maiden name Carbonell. Raised in Brookville, Long Island, New York. CEO of Stark Industries.”

“So she does think she’s me?” Tony asked, brow furrowed.

“Well, that would be the most sensible conclusion, yes, but that conclusion would also be inaccurate. We ran DNA analysis—”

“How? You don’t have a blood samp—”

“—using the DNA left behind from the lithium dioxide shot that Agent Romanoff injected you with last spring.”

Tony shot Romanoff a look. She only shrugged. “I didn’t know he kept it,” she lied said.

“And the DNA analysis…what did that have to say?” Steve asked. He’d been almost entirely silent throughout the meeting, just trying to take in everything that he was hearing. He thought he knew already where this was going, thought he knew back at the tower when both Tony and the stranger had responded to ‘Stark’, but it was still a little difficult to process it all. He’d only just recently come to terms with all the new technology, the flying hellicarrier, and the alien attack on Manhattan. Then again, he supposed that he shouldn’t begin to feel comfortable with anything seeing as he worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. now.

“The DNA matched up to such an extent that Tony and our newcomer could be twins,” Fury said, turning to Tony. “Now, no worries, Stark, you don’t have a long lost twin sister, but you do, however, have an interesting situation on your hands.”

“You don’t say,” Tony scoffed.

“Going off of what Dr. Banner said, I – and several of the agents that I consulted with – believe that the explosion that occurred was the result of a door being opened and closed; a portal between two dimensions. This portal would have lead her from her dimension to ours.”

Tony was quiet for a moment, biting his lip and adjusting his shirt collar, before he said, “Well, tell her to hop back on over to where she came from. There’s only room for one of me here.”

“It’s not that simple, Stark. She doesn’t have the means to travel back.”

“So…she’s stuck here?” Steve asked.

“For the time being…yes,” Fury sighed.

“How’d she get here in the first place then?” Tony asked incredulously.

“I’m sure she’ll tell you all at the Tower,” Fury said, grabbing his folder of information, tapping it on the desk, and standing.

Tony blinked. “Excuse me?”

“We can’t just place her anywhere, Stark. Until she’s able to recreate the means to travel back to her proper dimension, she will be staying in Avengers Tower.”

Tony blanched, hands on the table and leaning forward as if he were going to attack Fury. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no. She has all my personal information, and you let her have access to my building and everything in it? I don’t even know her!”

“To say that you don’t know her is to say that you don’t know yourself, which is quite sad, if that’s true. And, ah…Ms. Stark knows that she is not to abuse her shared identity.”

“Are you crazy?” Tony barked. “I would abuse a shared identity!”

“Then that’s an issue you will have to discuss with her upon your return,” Fury said indifferently. “You’re all dismissed.”

Fury motioned for Hill to follow him and walked out, trench coat swishing behind him.

"This is bullshit," Tony seethed as the door closed behind them. "Complete bullshit. I mean, I'm not overreacting, right?"

"Well...it is...inconvenient," Steve said reluctantly.

"Exactly. That's 40's for bullshit, right? Never mind, don't answer that, of course it is."

"I just think you're afraid of sharing your playground, Stark," Barton said, no longer bothering to withhold his laughter now that there was no one to act professional around. "Afraid we might like her more than you?"

"Of course not. That's ridiculous. No one even knows her," Tony said, scrunching up his nose at the thought. Despite Tony's denials, Steve thought there was a note of truth to Barton's words, a truth that even Tony couldn't completely deny. And, apparently, he didn't, judging by the way Tony made a hasty exit of the room, leaving the rest of them behind in the wake of his repressed worries.