The timeline is between Age of Ultron and Civil war for the movie verse, for the series is just after Maveth.

This fanfic will not have pairings. Why? Because some people don't like them and we want this history to be enjoyable for everyone. For us, Bruce Banner fled at the end of Age of Ultron because he fears hurting people (general, not just of hurting Natasha like the movie seems to portray), his returning is caused by his friendship with Tony and the 'unbelievable, people from SHIELD are more idiotic than I thought' news he has for him.

Also this is also a warning for the next one-shots that will come out at some point after this multi-chapter is finished.

Chapter 1: The Engineer

After rescuing FitzSimmons from Hydra the team returned with the Zephyr One to the Playground.

Everyone was relatively happy, but chaos would descend soon.

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When Pepper had told him, that she had seen someone that looked exactly like Phil Coulson from afar at her last business trip, he had thought that she was too tired from working. But Tony was nothing if not a scientist, so he did a bit of research.

That research consisted mostly of having Friday running a facial identification program of all the country's footage, it didn't take longer than a few minutes to obtain results.

There was someone with Agent's face fooling around since few months after Reindeer Games' alien attack and, curious enough, he had a team formed with some SHIELD agents and a nameless hacker.

Now, Tony saw two options: Either the man was a fake and investigation of his objectives were required, or he was the real deal and some upper scallions of what had been SHIELD at the battle of Manhattan needed to give some explanations.

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When the Zephyr One landed, Tony turned off the magnets that maintained an Iron Man suit hanging from the plane.

Tony fell silently and started following maybe-fake-Agent's team and Friday hacked some systems to grant him access inside the base.

It was pretty funny. They didn't notice him walking nonchalantly behind them, but the agents at the sidelines looked at him with bulging eyes.

One to one maybe-fake-Agent's team (maybe it needed another name? MFA's team?) noticed the staring and turned around, their expressions were priceless (though there were two stone-faced women, ugh, spies). MFA continued until he reached the door at the end of the corridor.

And then, MFA realised that no one was following him, and turned around. Tony would have had a fit of laughter just then if he hadn't been so angry/curious. His face! Hilarious!

"Hey MFA! Had you stolen any faces lately?" said Tony sassily.

"Wha...? Who…?How...?Whe…?" stuttered MFA, then he steadied himself "What are you doing here? And who is MFA?"

"Checking if you're real or not, maybe-fake-Agent" said Tony without missing a beat.

"How would you check that, exactly ?"

"I can recognize an Agent with a stick up their ass without problem. And I'm starting to suspect that you have that particular stick." accused Tony.

MFA's team had different reactions:

He-scientist and Hacker Jr. were freaking out, gaping at him.

Skyscraper and Agent stone-face were, seemingly, indifferent.

Giant was checking his armor out.

Scruffy mercenary had his eyes glassed and his mouth agape.

She-scientist was bouncing in one place, thought she seemed a bit uncomfortable with the conversation.

"What's going on?" ventured Skyscraper

"He is not Agent OR he faked his death" complained (childishly) Tony while he was pointing at MFA.

"The second one, but not like that, exactly" confessed Agent.

Tony looked at him mostly confused (though neither MFA nor anyone else saw it).

"What?" he asked dumbfounded.

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After everything had been explained to Stark (now without the armor) silence fell in the common room.

"Fuck, baby scientists, you come with me to do some sciencing at my tower!" exclaimed Stark.

"Yes, yes!" Phil heard that Fitz was muttering under his breath.

"No." admonished Phil while he grabbed Fitz's shoulder.

"Awww, c'mon Agent!" whined Stark.

"Is Dr. Banner in the tower? I heard that he lives there" asked Simmons

Phil had the temptation of face palming. But instead he grabbed Simmons' shoulder with his prosthetic arm.

"It's 'Director' now, Mr. Stark" he pointed out.

"So cyclops gave his sheeps away? So easily?"

"If it helps Fury 'died' first" interjected Hunter.

"So 'Director' why exactly didn't you tell us you were alive?" retorted Stark while he ignored Hunter.

"I was ordered to not contact any of you" was the answer.

"So it was 'confidential'. What a surprise, the liar that lies orders to not mention that the responsible for the cohesion of the Avengers' team is not really dead. Did you know that we all went to your funeral? Pepper CRIED" Stark raged.

"I'm sorry, you don't know how much, but I couldn't do anything about that" Phil sounding devastated.

"Give me a reason to believe that you had no options" requested Stark.

"I've been saving the world with my team after S.H.I.E.L.D. brainwashed me, then I had Hydra to deal with, along Inhumans popping up. Tell me, when, in the middle of all of that, I could have searched for any of you to tell you. Besides, how did you expect that to go, me showing up out of nowhere and say 'Hey, I'm alive'?"

"Thor would have cried in happiness. Cap would have avoided a heart attack only thanks to the supersoldier serum. Legolas and Natashalie would have killed you again. Bro… maybe would have had tea with you. And for me...I would have punched you on the face"

"So everything would have been fine, after months of you believing I was dead?"

"Have you heard the assassins-duo and my parts?"

"Yes, but a punch in the face doesn't sound that bad, after everything I have lived lately..."

"And the 'kill you again part'?"

"I've been dead before"

"Wow, who would have thought that D.C. could sass like that" Skye-Daisy joked.

"D.C.?" asked Stark turning towards her "By the way wouldn't you mind to explain why did you hack MY tower a time ago? And how?"

"Umm.. Aaaa… E.." mumbled Sky-Daisy looking alarmed at Phil, who just nodded at her to answer. "D.C. is Director Coulson. I'm sure that if you look at what files I hacked you'll know why and it was pretty simple I cracked through a backdoor in your system that allowed me to plant a logic bomb for when you or Jarvis put in your master password and keylogged it from there it was easy just getting to the files I needed"

Stark whistled "So you passed the firewalls I put in my systems, you passed the firewalls that JARVIS is constantly modifying to stop new kind of attacks".

"It wasn't hard… I mean that system was not as random as it could be, so I used that in my advantage, besides I tried to do the same some months after that and I couldn't because you changed the algorithm" she explained "Now, can you tell me how did you enter the base?"

All the team felt out of the loop there, minus Fitz, who understood more than half of it and was nodding.

"You are great attacking but I only needed three rootkits to obtain access to your master computer and make it allow me access to the base, if it makes you feel better, it was a zero day exploit"

"I'll fix that" Sk-Daisy concluded, already thinking how to improve the security in the system.

"That explains how you entered our aerial space?" pondered Mack.

"No" said Stark with a gloating grin.

"How, then?" asked Fitz.

"I took a ride on your plane"

"You took a ride on MY plane" said May drily sending death glare.

Stark retroceded on his seat, almost slamming his back with it.

"And I thought Natashalie was scary" then he added "Although Pepper is still the scariest."

Then Billy Koenig entered the room, and freezed when he saw Stark, who waved at him almost sheepishly.

"Umm... I forgot to warn you of his presence…" explained Phil.

"What I am now? An undesired pet?" blurted out Stark, Phil kicked him lightly, Stark looked at him with a pout.

"No authorized, out" said Koenig robotically, and started ushering Stark (who had a disbelieving face) out of the room.

"But we were talking!" he protested.

"Get authorization first or talk out of the base" retorted Koenig, Stark shot a pleading glance towards the team, it seemed that Fitz wanted to help but Phil stopped him, amused.

"Ugh… Ok, let me put the suit on" conceded Stark, doing exactly this. Then all of them followed him to the hangar.

Stark pulled the faceplate up and looked at Phil directly.

"I'm glad you're alive, Phil" he confessed, and took off, leaving Phil with his mouth hanging. Had Stark just called him by his name?

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"So that's the situation" explained Tony to Bruce some hours later at the Avengers' tower.

"I will not believe it until I see for myself" said Bruce, leaving his travelling bag on a chair "And you should have explained it to Natasha and Clint first."

"Then go and see for yourself" said Tony, giving some kind of GPS to Bruce "There, it should mark Agent's location. And besides, assassin duo is in a mission."

Bruce looked at Tony disbelieving.

"Tony, you know that having a localization device of someone is not precisely etic, right?"

Tony let out a non-comical sound and waved with his hand.