AN ~ Wow, I can't believe the response this has gotten! Thanks for expressing interest! : ) This chapter contains no spoilers for season two but I want to let you know now that I plan to basically use Fitz's canonical condition (at least, before a certain pre-series-2 event). This will come up next chapter and will carry through the story and they always say if you're gonna bail, bail early so I thought I'd give you a heads up.

Other than that, I'd love to hear from you including things you want to see (lines you want used, references, characters you want to interact – if it's story-plausible I'd love to make it happen). You're also welcome to correct me *but please try to be nice. Anyway, enjoy!

Chapter 1

As evening fell the next day, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, and Tony Stark flopped back on the lounges of the 37th floor with a deceptively nonchalant air. Tony examined a burn, just cleared of metal fragments, that twisted from his right elbow down to his fingertips. Clint leaned away from a few cracked ribs, while beside him, Bruce slowly bent and flexed his black, blue, bloody knuckles.

Pepper sets drinks before them and sits down, nursing a sore hand – she might have broken a metacarpal firing the quantum blaster, but she wasn't going to tell anybody else that. There were bigger problems.

"So how many divisions are still standing?" she asked.

"About three?" Clint put in skeptically.

"That I can contact," Tony qualified. Clint drew a deep breath and winced at the sting in his ribs. He hadn't expected his cynical estimate to be even in the ballpark of correct.

"I should have seen it," he muttered.

"We all should have," Bruce corrected him. "But we didn't, for whatever reasons, and now we've got to move past that. We've got bigger problems now – like the Fridge."

"So it's true." Pepper looked to Tony.

"Yeah, as far as I can tell. It started later than the others, but it fell fast. Security footage shows two guys being shot at by a black 'copter, they got in without proper checks, they had a showdown in an elevator and bam. Icebox opened."

"Makes you feel a hell of a lot more confident about who's been allocating power to whom, now, doesn't it?" Banner commented. He shook his head. It wasn't worth getting angry over. Those who had turned had turned. There were new problems to solve.

"I wonder if Fury knew," Clint mused. A collective sigh went around the room, and Pepper reached for the first drink.

As she lifted it from the table, a face appeared that made her squeak in a very undignified manner and drop her glass, sending orange juice and cognac over the screen.

"What happened? Are we losing them?" The face looked off-screen, to a colleague, who apparently gave him a negative answer as he came back to speak into the screen again. "Stark? Pepper? Hello?"

"Yeah-" Tony attempted to start, still swallowing his shock. "Yeah just give us a sec."

Banner lifted the tray of glasses, and a small windscreen-wiper-like device squeejeed the mimosa off the screen, appearing to filter it off into the body of the table itself. The face of the table then rose into a vertical position, like a television screen that could be watched from both sides. Because the camera was only on one side, the Stark Tower Avengers gathered on Barton and Banner's couch.

"Barton! Banner! Good to see you," greeted the man on the screen. "Honestly, you don't know how good."

"Oh," Bruce said, "I think we do." He held up his knuckles and Coulson's smile sunk a bit.

"Maybe you do but the sentiment stands."

"Get bored being dead or what?" Clint asked.

"Oh yes, that," Coulson said, with a smile that suggested it had never slipped his mind at all. "It's a long story. I'm Director now. I was going to give you the rundown on Hydra but it seems you've had a run-in that's sufficient. Anything I need to catch you up on?"

"Is Fury really dead?" Clint asked.

"I'm not at liberty to say."

The Stark Tower Avengers shared a glance.

"You didn't hear it from me. And you probably won't be hearing from him for a while either. Where's Cap at?"

"I couldn't get him," Tony said. "Or Romanov."

"Hill?"

"She's the one who gave us the heads up."

"Good." Coulson sighed and glanced low for a moment. "Good," he repeated a little more wistfully. Then he looked up again, but the wistfulness did not entirely disappear from his tone. "A headcount's not why I called you. SHIELD's been stripped bare of credentials, of money, of weapons, of people power. I'm afraid your business isn't looking good, Stark. Sorry about that. But my point is, I need your help. Beyond that, I'd rather speak in person. I'm sending each of you some numbers. Together they make up my co-ordinates. How fast can you get here?"

Pepper, Banner and Clint pulled out their devices. Tony conjured a textbox in the bottom corner of the screen, then eyed the messages the others had received.

"Four hours?" he assessed.

"Great! See you then."