Disclaimer: The Avengers, its characters and The Marvel Cinematic Universe belong to Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company, among many others. Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and its characters belong to ABC Studios, Marvel Television, Mutant Enemy Productions, among many others. What If…? belongs to Marvel Studies and The Walt Disney Company, among many others. I'm only a fan, writing this for my love of this film/television franchise.

A.N.: A little more exposition before we can move on to other parts of the plot ─ it is rather amazing how this AU is all just coming together in my head as I'm writing it; I'm liking this experience of making things up as I go.

Avengers Initiative: Reset

04. Resynchronizing

With the current impasse on which materials to use to build an LMD for Tony Stark, Fitz-Simmons had agreed on a compromise and created a holo-projection for the AI so that he could interact with them in the lab, somehow making the spacious room seem much more full with his presence as he was prone to walking up and down as he postulated and they kept smoothing up any wrinkles in their plans. Additionally, Natasha had been moved from the medical recovery room into the medical bay at the corner of the lab so that she could work with the team while still on bedrest. She wasn't sure if that had been the best idea, but she'd been frankly growing too anxious staying all alone in her room while working through recovery that she'd agreed with Simmons's suggestion, as the team's medic wanted to keep an eye on her to keep her up to her promise of bedrest.

Now seeing as she was within earshot of three genius scientists arguing with (and over) each other while they worked on the LMD project, Natasha was definitely starting to regret it. Most of the time they were going through brainstorms, discussing materials and systems, but sometimes the brainstorming turned into something that looked more like full-on shouting matches that she was doing her very best to ignore while sitting in bed and working on her laptop.

"You can't use that composite texture with the low cycles─"

"You can if you up the density and decrease the insulation─"

"But then you'll disrupt the polarity of the medium─"

Natasha honestly had no idea how they all managed to understand each other considering not one of them was able to complete a full sentence before someone else interrupted, but apparently they were able to follow each other's thoughts. She was doing her best to treat the half-finished sentences as white noise as she tapped away at the laptop and did her own investigation when suddenly the screen was blinking with an 'Access Denied' notice in red before the entire thing just shut down.

"Shit," she muttered to herself.

Not one minute later, Coulson walked into the lab with a stern face and unceremoniously interrupted the group's discussion. "Everyone, out." His voice was firm, and even if it hadn't been above his normal speaking volume there was something in his tone that made them all stop and look at him.

"Sir? Is something wrong?" Jemma asked with a cross between a concerned and curious frown.

"I need a moment alone with Agent Romanoff." Coulson said, crossing his arms and offering no further explanations.

"Why is she even here?" The Tony holo-projection questioned, making an exasperated hand gesture. "You see, this is I why I told you it'd be better if she stayed─"

Coulson had reached out and shut off the holo-projector and the AI system entirely, which was enough to send Fitz and Simmons fairly scrambling out of their own lab.

Coulson then turned around and walked towards the corner with the medical bay, where Natasha was sitting in her bed and facing him head on, her chin lifted with just a hint of defiance. "What the hell were you thinking?" He asked, shaking his head a little.

"I needed to get in the system." She replied with a quick tilt of the head.

He motioned with his hands at her laptop. "I gave you a new ID, one that you can use for now while we work in the shadows."

"It doesn't have the same clearance." She insisted, shaking her head. "I needed my old one."

He scoffed a little in disbelief at that. "Are you seriously compromising this entire team by making the same mistake that Hank Pym did when he used Hope's ID to hack into SHIELD?"

She maintained her stance, setting her jaw. "I wanted to find out what happened to my missions when I was taken out of commission. You haven't given me anything, Coulson. You just told me it was handled."

"It was handled." He retorted, his tone becoming a little harder. He couldn't believe he needed to go over this with Natasha, of all people. She wasn't a rookie who wasn't used to the way they did things. "You don't need that information. That's how this works, compartmentalization. The missions are done, you move on."

"I can't move on." She said, something in her voice catching a little in her throat. "I'm literally stuck to a bed, not being able to go out and do anything to help and that hasn't happened to me since─" She stopped and averted her eyes.

"The Red Room." He completed the thought for her when she'd abruptly shut her mouth, his voice instantly softening up at seeing the pain in her eyes before she'd looked away. "I'm sorry, Natasha."

She turned back to look at him and spoke in a softer tone. "Don't be sorry. Just help me."

"Why is it so important for you to know this?" He asked, looking back at her and trying to gauge if she was somehow manipulating him or if this was a genuine display of distress ─ after all, he'd seen her use her vulnerability as a way to exploit weaknesses and get the intel she wanted before.

She looked away for a moment, her lips pressed into a thin line before she turned and looked back at him straight in the eyes. "Hope Van Dyne," she said, seemingly reluctant to share this, but she knew Coulson wouldn't help her until she gave him her reasons. "She died on a mission to escort a nuclear engineer out of Iran when someone shot her outside of Odessa to get to the target. That detail was supposed to be mine, but at the last minute Fury pulled me out to do something else for him and had her reassigned in my place."

"Natasha," Coulson said, shaking his head as he knew where she was going with this.

"If I had just gone in as planned, she would still be alive and none of this would've happened." She insisted. "I want to know what happened with my missions because I need to know if other people somehow ended up paying for my mistakes. The fact that I can't get out and do anything is not helping, either."

"This wasn't your mistake," Coulson argued back. "It was Hank Pym and it's all on him, not you."

"Actions have consequences, Coulson. You know that."

Many people at SHIELD would accuse Director Fury of having a soft spot for Natasha Romanoff, as the former Russian spy had been given more leeway than most specialists. But the same could be said of Phil Coulson. Even when she'd directly disobeyed orders and had gone dark during missions before to pursue her own agendas he'd been there to look after her and clean up her messes. It wasn't the first time and it probably wouldn't be the last he'd gone off the books for her.

"When Mr. Stark was killed, we prioritized the investigation and all aspects related to it." He said, launching into a verbal recount of events she hadn't known of while she'd been on the run and then in recovery. "We were already looking into it, but since circumstances had changed we put more people working on it and were able to trace the explosion at the facility holding Ivan Vanko back to Justin Hammer ─ Fitz-Simmons actually had a hand at uncovering that."

A look of dawning realization lit up in her eyes. "That's how they fell in your radar."

"Yes." Coulson nodded back. "We found Vanko was planning to infiltrate the US armed forces with a set of Iron Man-like drones that Hammer Industries were putting together, so we sent a team in to stop it. And we did. Vanko is dead. He'd also tampered with the suit that Colonel Rhodes had taken from Mr. Stark, but our specialist managed a reboot before any harm could be done."

"Who was the specialist?" She asked, raising an eyebrow. "Can I at least know that?"

Coulson seemed to debate internally for a moment on whether or not to divulge that information before speaking up. "Agent Bobbi Morse."

Natasha nodded back in appreciation, a sense of relief washing over her. She liked Bobbi and knew the specialist knew how to take care of herself, as they'd gone training together before. She'd also cared a lot for Clint, so it was an added bonus that her cases went to someone who also had a personal stake in everything that had happened. "What about the Banner case?"

"We followed General Ross and his team after they showed up at Culver University, as we weren't sure they didn't have anything to do with Banner's death. We had Bobbi shadowing one of the General's men, Emil Blonsky and we managed to locate a place in Harlem that was harvesting Bruce Banner's blood. We got in just in time before Blonsky could inject himself with the blood. He's staying at the Fridge for now."

"And you have Banner's blood." Natasha said with a nod, her lips curling up at the corners.

"Currently at the Sandbox." Coulson nodded back.

She just looked back at him for a moment then smiled in appreciation. "Thank you."

He returned her smile. "We'll get your ID back in place once this is cleared up, but for now you can't use it."

"So I guess I'll be Nancy Roberts for a while." She drawled out, amused at his choice of a new alias for her.

"Just in the system." He replied with a careless shrug then added with a smirk. "No matter what name you use, you'll always be Natasha Romanoff to me."

She was caught a little off guard by his words. She'd always shed her own identity and gone undercover as someone else with such ease because she didn't care much for being Natasha Romanoff, truth to be told. But ever since Clint had given her an out and she'd defected to SHIELD, she was liking more and more the person she was becoming since she'd gotten her own agency and sense of self back.

"Before you go and disappear to do whatever it is you need to do, I need another favor." She recovered herself quickly, as Coulson had made a turn to go out.

He looked back at her with some amusement, as of course she would be asking more things from him right now. "Name it and I'll see what I can do."

"I need you and May to go out and pick up someone for me."

Coulson raised his eyebrows at that, clearly intrigued.

It had been a quick trip to and back from Atlanta. Their target was exactly where Natasha had said she would be and May did quick work of taking her down and jamming her arm with a sedative. A few hours later they had her back at the Playground, black hood over her head just as the sedative was wearing off when they walked her to one of the interrogation rooms of the base. Sitting her down on a metal chair and removing the hood, the brunette young woman looked back at them with wide eyes.

"Okay, what is this?" She said, looking around, noticing her surroundings and that she had her hands handcuffed behind her back. "Handcuffs? Check. Dark, dimly lit room with no windows? Check. Guy in a suit? Check. Scary-looking assassin, I assume? Check." She said, eyeing Agent May, who stood on the corner beside the door. "I guess you guys are SHIELD, then."

"So you've heard of us." Coulson said, as he walked behind her and removed the handcuffs, walking back around the table and sitting down in front of her. "But I guess you would have, seeing as you've been hacking into our servers and leaking our files on the web."

"I'm a hacktivist," she said, brushing her hair back from her face and her chin going up in defiance. "That's what we do."

"So I've heard." Coulson replied, his eyebrows momentarily going up. "Yet it's interesting how with all this 'freedom of information' speech you guys are always on about, there's not a single thing about you in our database. Or any database, really. No pictures, no fingerprints, no social security, not even a Facebook page or DMV file which begs the question of how you were able to live in your van. It's like you don't exist."

The young woman just looked back at him, her dark eyes unwavering despite the fear that Coulson could see that was running through her. It was admirable and he had to admit he was a bit impressed that she was trying hard to project an aura of casual nonchalance when they clearly had the upper hand.

"What's your name?" He asked then.

"Skye," she said, her voice sounding almost like a question mark at the end, as if she weren't sure they'd accept the one first name and no last name.

"Alright, Skye." Coulson said gamely; it was clearly a pseudonym, but they could go over official records later. "Why are you hacking into SHIELD and leaking classified files?"

"I was looking for the truth." She replied after a beat, as she'd been expecting a follow-up to the question about her name. "About what happened with Tony Stark and what brought this Loki guy over out of nowhere and had him suddenly declaring himself ruler of the world."

"What makes you think SHIELD was involved?" Coulson asked the obvious follow-up.

"Please." She said with a small eyeroll. "SHIELD is involved in everything. There's not one thing going on in the world that you guys don't have a hand in, plus all those secret projects like PEGASUS, GOLIATH? There's no way these so-called Asgardians would come over and you would know nothing about it, not to mention all the chatter that SHIELD was trying to recruit Tony Stark to join you just before he died."

"Okay." Coulson said with a nod. "I can see you're actually very well informed."

"Of course I'm─ wait, you're telling me I'm right?" Skye said, tilting her head, as if making sure she'd heard him right.

"Yes, I'm confirming what you said." Coulson said, still in the same calm, controlled tone.

"Which part?" She asked, narrowing her eyes a little.

"Everything." He said, clearly enjoying how she was thrown by the way he was conducting this conversation.

"Why?" She asked, furrowing her brow in confusion.

"Because we need your help, Skye. We'd like to recruit you."

A.N.: Aw, yeah! I couldn't leave Skye out of this; more to come on how Natasha located her and what she'll need to do.