Heaven Knows

by proudmarveltrash

Lockpick is notorious in the underworld while the woman behind the screen is unknown to all but herself, until Charlie decides S.H.I.E.L.D's hidden files Project PEGASUS and Avengers Initiative are too interesting to ignore. For the first time ever, she risks her anonymity to investigate the matter up close and personal. Slight Tony/OC

1. Prologue

Heaven Knows

Prologue

Normal is boring. Every angst-riddled teenager has declared it, every responsibility-addled adult has denied it, but the simple truth is that normal is, in fact, boring.

This is the precise reason Charlotte Merrick dropped out of school at the ripe young age of 17 to pursue her passion of technology. She disappeared into the online persona of Lockpick, a hacker that had no difficulty breaking into the most secure facilities. "No lock is without a key," she would say- or rather type out- to her clients when they asked just how she managed to obtain the information she did. Nobody knew who she was, where she came from, or how she did what she did. Nobody truly cared, either- save the people she stole from.

How does any of this relate to S.H.I.E.L.D or the Avengers Initiative? Simple- it doesn't. At least it wouldn't, if dear Charlie didn't find them so damn interesting. "Curiosity killed the cat, Mister Pick," her (semi-) partner in crime, Gatekeeper, would inform her the day she hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D's Project PEGASUS files under the guise of one security clearance Level 8 Agent Reed.

"Good thing I'm not a cat," she laughed as she typed her response and closed the private chat window. It wasn't that she didn't trust Gatekeeper to stay away from the S.H.I.E.L.D files on her hard drive, she just… Right, she didn't trust Gatekeeper to stay away from the S.H.I.E.L.D files on her hard drive, and she knew that he would understand this, even if he was a bit put off by the fact that she kept quite a bit secret from him. Gatekeeper didn't even know that 'Mister Pick' was in fact a 'Miss Pick'.

Back to the S.H.I.E.L.D files. Charlotte, affectionately called Charlie (by herself, as nobody else knew her real name), skimmed through these Project PEGASUS files, a cherry flavored Blow Pop hanging lazily from her lips as she tapped her fingers absent-mindedly on her keyboard to the beat of 'La Di Da' by the Victorian Halls. She read about the Tesseract, S.H.I.E.L.D's plans to use it for green, reusable energy, and perked an eyebrow at the mention of two Norse gods' visit to New Mexico a few months ago. "Gods, huh?" she remarked to nobody in particular. "Swanky."

Normal is boring. This very thought was on Charlie's mind as she shut down her computer and shoved her feet into her black combat boots. She packed a bag with her favorite homemade laptop and a handful of her favorite lollipops before leaving her shack of a home to investigate this Project PEGASUS further, and up close.