3. THE ARCHIVIST

JUNE 19, 1992; BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Nobody quite knew how long she had been there. There were guesses and office wagers, made by those who watched her hover at the fray of another break-room birthday party or retirement celebration. She liked it that way—liked to be kept quiet, like a secret whispered to oneself in the corner of their bedroom. She's been here since I got here, they would say. And she hasn't aged a day.

Audrey was good at being invisible and had always been good at it. It was why she had chosen to transfer to the archives after her injury. Career ending, a torn ACL, but survivable. That was okay. Her new life was very well-balanced: she rose at seven, worked at nine, left at five, and slept at ten. While the field agents went weeks at a time without a wink of sleep, she could count on a solid nine hours, plus three meals and five servings of fruits and vegetables. On Wednesdays, she went to physical therapy, and on Fridays, she ordered takeout from Stan's.

On a Friday in late June, to-go bag in hand, Audrey arrived back at her apartment and found Howard Stark's son sitting with his back to her door. He held his own paper bag, though it carried only a bottle of whiskey. "Tony?"

She hadn't seen him since the funeral, and even before then, only sporadically every other Christmas and the occasional Thanksgiving. She hadn't even realized that he knew where she lived. "Hey, cuz," he greeted, grinning despite the tears staining his face.

Audrey blinked. Cuz? Peggy was his godmother, but it wasn't like they'd ever had a conversation longer than five minutes. Cousin was a stretch. "Are you alright?"

"Dandy as ever." He shook the bottle. "Want some?"

"I'm good." In the back of her mind, she considered whether it would be smart to take it from him. She could do it—all that strength from her dad meant it would be easy enough, but it risked pissing him off enough that he left, and she would rather he blackout on her couch than on the streets of Brooklyn.

"More for me," he said, and promptly took a giant gulp from the bottle.

She nudged him with her foot, fitting her key into the lock. "Do you want to come in?"

Tony stumbled to his feet and offered another cheeky smile. "What's in the bag?"

"Uh," she said. "Grilled cheese and fries. You want some?"

"I'm lactose intolerant," said Tony as they stepped over the threshold. He spent a minute surveying her apartment—messy, with walls crowded with sketches and a floor cluttered with an odd mix of furniture and decor—and then grabbed Audrey's phone off her counter and ordered a large pizza from the place down the street. By the time it was delivered—with cheese, she noted—he had made himself at home on her couch and finished the bottle. He had yet to explain why he was visiting.

"How's school?" she asked, settling beside him on the couch. He looked young enough to be in school, still. Then again—so did she, in certain lights.

"I'm not in it. I'm done. Who needs that many PhDs, anyway? It's not like I need the funding." He kicked up his boots onto her coffee table.

"How's….everything else?"

"So awesome," said Tony. She got the feeling he didn't mean it, as he zoned out staring at a sketch on her wall of Stark's mansion upstate, looking for a moment like he might start crying again. Then, frantically, Tony grabbed the remote off the coffee table and flipped on the TV. "Hey, you seen this show?"

"Friends?" Audrey asked. "Not really. I prefer movies."

"This is the one where he gets into a fight with his dad and both his parents die before he can apologize."

Audrey blinked. On-screen, two blonde women lay on the floor of a kitschy apartment. "Really?"

"Nope," said Tony. "That's just—" He shrugged. "That's just my life." He sighed. "Do you think your dear old dad is proud of you? You think he looks down on you and goes, 'Awesome job, Audrey!'"

"I don't really care about what he thinks," Audrey replied honestly, taking a bite of her sandwich. Tony was confusing, but it was obvious enough that he was taking something out on her and trying to goad her into reacting. "He's been dead for fifty years. He didn't even know about me."

"Lucky you. My dad is definitely looking up at me right now and thinking, 'What an asshole! I'm so glad I left the nannies to raise him.'"

"Looking up?"

Tony flicked the whiskey bottle cap across the room, where it collided with a houseplant barely clinging to life as it was, and then gave her a look, like his meaning was obvious. "He's in hell," he clarified, when Audrey continued staring blankly at him. "I mean, come on. You really think Dear Uncle Howard made it to the pearly gates?" Audrey shrugged. Tony cocked his head. "Do you have anything else to drink?"

"I don't really drink."

"Why not?"

"Doesn't work." Audrey stood. "I have orange juice, though. And milk."

"Lactose intolerant," he reminded her.

"You're eating a pizza."

"So?"

He was spinning her head in circles. Audrey rolled her eyes and went to retrieve a can of coke from the fridge to offer him. By the time she got back, he was crying again, hiccupping into his palms as he covered his face with his hands. "Tony," she said, unsure of what else she could offer. In response, he collapsed against her side, sobbing into her shoulder. Audrey wrapped her arms around his shoulders awkwardly, holding him.

For all his ego, for all his hatred of Howard, he was certainly less stoic behind closed doors than he'd been at the funeral. But maybe he was crying for his mother now, who had split her time between the bottle and her son. They'd both grieved Howard's estrangement as he chased women around every major city in the continental United States, plus a few more in Japan, but Tony had externalized his anger while Maria had cradled it close.

He didn't speak while he cried, which she was grateful for, because she had no idea what to say. Her own grief for her father had shaped itself differently, and she'd never been close to anyone but her mother, except maybe the friends she'd had at the Academy and since lost touch with. Even Peggy's other family, Daniel and his kids, had remained distant from her as they grew up. "Do you wanna see a movie?" Tony asked eventually, moving away from her awkwardly. "They're showing the Twin Peaks movie at the theater on Bedford."

Audrey's gaze flickered over to the unfinished sandwich on the coffee table, before going back to Tony. "Okay," she said. "I never saw the show, though."

"Of course you haven't," said Tony, flipping the cardboard pizza box shut and cradling it sideways under his arm like it was a newspaper. "Do you live under a rock or something?"

She shrugged. "Sometimes it feels like it."

MARCH 15, 1995; OLYMPUS BASE; MOJAVE DESERT, CA

Protocol changed sometime in '94, after Bertha Parker, a secretary who had worked in the archives as long as Audrey, asked too many questions. The Olympus Base was as close to hell as Audrey could imagine, sweltering at best and molten at worst. Still, Tony helicoptered out to her apartment every Friday and took her to movies at the drive-in. She always drove, because he was always drunk, but it was nice to see another person now that she had relocated to the middle of the desert, so she didn't complain. At least he made an effort. Peggy, meanwhile, was still dropping off the grid for months at a time, running operations in Afghanistan and Iraq that Audrey had to bite her tongue to keep from arguing about.

Sometime in March, while she sorted through data from the Manhattan Project and arranged it in alphabetical order, Audrey heard something that she had not heard in a very long time: voices in the lobby. "You familiar with the phrase 'welcome wagon'?" one asked.

"No," said another.

"Hint: this isn't it," said a third.

Something was so familiar about them. When Audrey rounded the corner, she found a man messing around with the fingerprint scanner, eliciting an error noise as he attempted each digit on his hand. "Wu, do you have access to this thing?"

"What are you doing?" she asked.

The blonde woman between the others stood up, holding a fist out to Audrey like she was going to fire something at her. "Who are you?" she asked.

"I'm the lead archivist here?" said Audrey. "Why are you playing with the security system?"

"Ho—ly—shit," said the man. "Audrey Carter, as I live and goddamn breathe."

She blinked at him. She'd known him, hadn't she? At some point, she'd known him. "Nick?" she asked. "Nick Fury?"

He pointed at the third person, an Asian woman in black platform boots and a cutoff shirt. Kelly Wu, Audrey realized. She'd known them at the Academy, sort of. When she tried to think back on it, she couldn't recall anybody else from their class but the two of them, even though they'd never been close. "She's been looking for you, you know," said Nick. "She thought you got out."

"Out of what?" Audrey asked.

"S.H.I.E.L.D.," said Kelly. She'd paled, as if she'd seen a ghost. "You—you work here? How long?"

"What is it, March?" asked Audrey. "Around eighteen months, then. I was at the Hub for a while before." Nobody said anything, so Audrey continued. "I—it's better there, but not as exciting as fieldwork was. Stupid ACL." She forced a nervous laugh. "Uh, you still haven't told me why you're here."

"ACL?" asked Kelly. "What—"

The blonde woman interrupted her. "Vers," she introduced. That didn't answer any of Audrey's questions, but she trusted Nick and Kelly enough not to press. "Have you seen this woman?"

She held out a photograph of an older woman, silvered hair and blue eyes, who was wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. vest. "I haven't seen her, but I don't see a lot of people around here. Do you have her name?"

"Wendy Lawson," said Vers.

"Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.?" Audrey asked.

"You tell me," Fury offered.

She knew about Lawson only because of the incident that had happened at the base back in '89. It was why the site was so understaffed—they were running experiments here that most of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't know about, and that didn't have public government approval. Audrey was assigned both because of seniority and her ability to defend herself without a security team. "Follow me. Fifth sublevel." She pressed her own thumb against the scanner and the lock clicked open.

When the elevator doors slid open, Audrey was greeted by a familiar meow. Goose the cat was the only person who didn't seem to hate the base, meandering free-reign around the archives and spending most of his days sleeping in empty filing boxes.

"Hey, Goose," she greeted, leaning down to scratch him behind the ear. She'd assumed that her own detour would irk the rest of the group, but Fury only doubled down, cooing at the cat happily and eventually picking him up like a baby.

Kelly sneezed. "You know I'm allergic," she scolded.

"Look at his little feet," Fury said, holding out one of Goose's paws. Kelly tapped it unaffectionately, and the cat squirmed out of his arms.

"We don't have time," Vers reminded them.

"I'll be back," said Fury, and Audrey started down the hall towards the archives. She scanned her other thumb this time, and the door unlocked. Inside, she slammed the light switch, and the room came to life with a series of violent, echoing thuds.

"P.E.G.A.S.U.S. is filed under P-E," said Audrey, heading towards the shelf. As she rotated the wheel at the end, separating it from its neighboring shelves, she continued, "Any personnel information we have would be under P.E.G.A.S.U.S.-comma-staff."

"You're a saint," said Nick.

"Thanks," said Vers.

"Sure," said Audrey.

As she turned to leave, Kelly grabbed her on the shoulder. "What did you mean by ACL?" she asked.

Audrey's brow furrowed. "I—that's why they took me off field duty. I tore my ACL on a mission in Ukraine."

"Kelly!" Nick barked. "We got something."

"Will you be here in a week?" Kelly asked. "I'll be visiting my aunt in Irvine. Maybe we can catch up."

"Yeah, I'll be here," Audrey said. "As far as I know, I'll be here until I retire or die of heatstroke."

"Don't retire and don't die," Kelly instructed, and then turned on her platform heel and disappeared into the shelves. Audrey wasn't sure what to make of her—Kelly and Nick had been friends, she remembered, but they'd only been cordial roommates. She finished up her sorting at her desk an hour later, and by the time Tony arrived on Friday, determined to convince Audrey to watch some gory horror movie, she'd already been served the notice of her transfer back to New York. When she searched the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel data for a Kelly Wu, just to let her know that she'd be moving, nothing came up.

DECEMBER 11, 2003; THE HUB; MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

"Hi. I'm Clint Barton. I need to update my personnel file."

Audrey was technically on lunch when the blond man arrived in her office without so much as a knock, but it was her fault for taking lunch at her desk. "Okay," she said, mildly startled. "I need your ID, and I need to know what you need changed."

He dug into his pocket and withdrew: seventeen cents in loose change, an REI receipt, a two-dollar bill, a small knife, and finally, his ID. "I got divorced."

She set her sandwich aside and brushed the crumbs off her hands. "Got it," she said, typing his employee number into the system. She'd once made the mistake of expressing sympathies for someone's divorce and been subjected to a forty-five-minute rant about the personal lives of each of their ex-husband's mistresses. These days, she did as little as possible to acknowledge what she was hearing. "You know, you could do this with HR."

"Nope," he said, popping the P. "Those women gossip too much."

"You don't know me. I might gossip."

He looked around at the archives department, deserted for lunch. Everyone was probably down at the canteen, leaving her alone with one of the interns making copies. "Something tells me you're a bit of a loner. No offense."

She shrugged. "Fair enough." When his personnel finally loaded, she scrolled down to the tax section. "Your ex-wife is Barbara Morse, correct?"

"Yeah."

Audrey switched the relationship from wife to ex-wife. An alert popped up, asking, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO MAKE THIS CHANGE? "Um," she said. "Is your ex-wife a S.H.I.E.L.D. employee?"

Clint Barton shrugged. "Yeah. Why?"

"You're still listed as partners," Audrey informed him.

"Yeah," said Clint. "We're great in the field together. Apparently, that doesn't translate well to marriage."

She scrolled further down. "Have you been divorced from her three times? That has to be a mistake."

"Not a mistake," said Clint, pursing his lips in some mixture of shame and reluctance. "I'm an optimist, okay? Can't blame me for trying."

"Right," she said. "Maybe you should try with someone else."

"Yeahhh," he agreed. He pointed to the clock on her computer screen. "Is that thing right?"

"Yeah?"

"Aw, no. I'm supposed to meet someone for lunch ten minutes ago. Every time, Barton." He saluted, began to dash away, and then hooked an arm around the doorway to stop himself. Popping his head back in, he said, "Never got your name."

"Audrey Carter," she introduced.

"Audrey Carter," he repeated, snapping and pointing finger guns at her. "I'll remember that."

FEBRUARY 14, 2008; THE HUB; MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

"Audrey," said Clint, once again in her office on a lunch break. "This is my new friend Natasha. She needs her personnel file uploaded."

"I feel like I've mentioned this before," Audrey replied, not looking away from her computer, "but that's really more of an HR thing than an archives thing."

"Not this time," Clint announced, shoving a young redheaded woman forward into the cubicle. "Natasha's file is currently categorized as S.H.I.E.L.D. Enemy. She needs to be updated as an agent."

Audrey blinked. They didn't get many defectors these days. The last time she'd logged one was back in '91, when KGB agents were jumping ship left and right. "Welcome," she said. "Can you spell your last name for me?"

Natasha was stoic, and clearly unmoved by the greeting. "R-O-M-A-N-O-V-N-A."

"Natalia?" Audrey asked. She nodded. "Which do you want to be listed as? Natasha or Natalia?"

She hesitated. "Natasha's more of a nickname. It's not my legal name."

Audrey shrugged. "It's hardly the biggest change you're making. If you want to be Natasha now, you can."

A beat passed, the redhead's eyes skirting the office, clearly still skittish in a S.H.I.E.L.D. building. "Okay," she agreed. "Natasha. And Romanoff, for the last name. R-O-M-A-N-O-F-F."

"Natasha Romanoff." Audrey saved the file changes and printed out an employee ID confirmation number. "You should be able to get your paperwork from HR downstairs now. Just give them this. They'll handle the rest of your file."

"Thanks," she said, and stalked out. Clint gave her a thumbs-up and followed suit.

When she heard the elevator doors slide shut, Audrey peeked out once more, before rolling her chair back towards her desk and opening Romanoff's full dossier. She was Russian, certainly, but looked too young to have been involved in anything Soviet. Beyond the demographic information and the attempts to guess her birthplace and age, Audrey found only surface-level intel. She'd been an agent of the Red Room, one of the for-profit spy rings that had toppled any number of regimes in the last fifty years. Raised in Moscow, trained at the Bolshoi. It all sounded familiar, but she couldn't figure out why.

"Hey." Audrey jumped, scrambling to exit out of the file, but it was only Evan, the intern. "Are you going to the Valentine's Party in the breakroom later?"

"Oh," she said. "No, I'm not."

"Okay," he said, sounding mildly disappointed. "Well, I'll save you a cookie."

"Thanks," she said, turning back to her computer, hoping he would get the message and leave her to her work.

AUGUST 3, 2009; SOMEWHERE UNDERGROUND; HARLEM, NEW YORK

There was only so much filing someone could do without losing their mind. Audrey snapped in the July heat when the air conditioner broke and pronounced to Tony soon after, "I think I'm going to quit S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Stupid choice," he'd said, shoving a handful of popcorn into his mouth. At the time, they were the lone audience members of some German arthouse film in a Williamsburg theater. At some point between his public reveal as Iron Man and his erecting that eyesore of a tower in the middle of New York City, he'd begun to require a security team to block out the entire theater for him for their Friday night shows. She'd suggested DVDs at first, because it was more convenient and more private, but he had made a big deal about driving all the way out to Williamsburg when she brought it up. I'm not a total asshole. So she'd let him, and they'd kept up the tradition, even when there was nothing good playing. "S.H.I.E.L.D. is steady. And you need your routine."

"Maybe I want a new routine," she'd replied. Onscreen, two people had embraced under red lighting. "I've been working in those archives for thirty years, you know? There's nothing in that building that I haven't read. Mission reports. Personnel dossiers. Research notes. I am the S.H.I.E.L.D. archive, at this point."

"Maybe you just need a hobby," Tony had insisted, slurping noisily from his cup of coke. "Fixing up cars? Soccer?"

"Both of those sound really boring."

"What do you like?" Tony had asked. "We've been friends for—what—twenty years? You don't do anything but work."

She'd opened her mouth to disagree, but the words didn't come. What did she like? She'd been fixated on miniatures as a kid, and then maps, and then houses. At some point, she'd wanted to become an architect. Audrey had tried everything she could think of growing up, and when nothing stuck, she'd resigned herself to the Academy. But even fieldwork didn't work out.

So she found herself taking classes at the community college in the Bronx after work. During shopping week, she'd tried languages, math, computer science, world history, politics. Nothing. She took an art class that she enjoyed, but her sketches were rudimentary, and her instructor reminded her so much of the Middlebury professor who'd shamed her for her lack of creativity. Audrey was somewhere under Manhattan in the subway, headphones on, when it hit her.

A literal hit. Concrete from the tunnel ceiling had burst through the roof of the train car, hitting her squarely over the head. The pain sent ringing through her ears. What the—

The train shrieked to a stop, a dozen people stumbling over themselves and falling to the ground. By the time Audrey had recovered from the blow, the entire subway car had taken cover, strangers huddling together and shielding themselves with purses or books or whatever was in arm's reach. What the hell was that? A bomb? An earthquake? Audrey's S.H.I.E.L.D. training kicked in, and she forced the car doors open. "There are maintenance stairways out between stops," she told the nearest person, a trembling businessman. "Go left. Stay on the side, shelter in the stairway but don't go out onto the street. Tell people in other cars as you pass."

Before he could say anything, she reached up for one of the railings and pulled herself onto the roof of the car. The street was a good ten feet above her, but if she got enough momentum with a jump, she would be able to pull herself over the crumpled concrete.

And then what? Was she going to outrun a blitzkrieg? Stop a natural disaster with her fists?

This was stupid. This was so stupid. She wasn't trained for this—she hadn't been in the field in thirty years, and even then, it had been such a brief moment of her life. This could be anything, she thought, jumping up and seizing a fistful of gravel. As she dragged herself over the edge, she braced herself. Nuclear warfare. A tornado. An alien invasion.

It was worse.

Standing thirty feet tall was—what was it? Something pale and fleshy, bony ridges running down its back. Something charging past her down the street and kicking cars out of the way like they weighed nothing. He reeled back suddenly, revealing a face that pulled violently at the skin of his neck and eyes that had bloomed at the whites. Audrey nearly stumbled back, before remembering that she stood mere inches from a gaping hole in the street. She had never been so happy to feel so afraid—to finally feel something that wasn't bored.

Screaming nearby snapped her out of it. Audrey wished, not for the first time, that her father had passed something down to her that made her less jumpy in high-pressure situations. The strength was great, the speed was great, but none of it was any use when she started panicking. Her father, surely, had never seen anything quite like the beast snarling in front of her.

What would her father do? Punch it, probably, but her bravado hadn't quite reached the point of hubris, yet. The second best thing was getting people to safety, and so Audrey started going car to car, pulling doors open and ushering people out of the way as NYPD beat-cops scrambled around the streets aimlessly, fumbling in the midst of something way above their pay grade. She had so many questions—a creature of this caliber couldn't possibly have flown under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar, but if they'd known, and if it was in New York, she should've known, too. She cast another look up at the thing. A nearby tank had fired a warhead at it, and it had caught it like a baseball. Even as it went off, the creature didn't flinch. Was it some sort of alien? Mutated animal? Science experiment gone wrong?

A taxi cab skidded to a stop in front of it, and the thing hoisted it up over its head. "Give me a real fight," it demanded, before hurling the car at the tank. Both went up in flames. Audrey pressed back against the instinct to run away, though she wasn't sure what she was doing here, either. She was not a real fight—she was a retiree. And anyway, she didn't want a fight, she wanted the thing to stop killing people.

As if answering its invitation, something else came crashing down onto earth, slamming so hard into the concrete that Audrey lifted off the ground ten feet and landed atop an overturned minivan nearby. Was that a nuke? A meteor? Damage to one of the buildings?

A large green fist slammed through the shattered pavement, sending gravel skidding across the street. Audrey braced herself again as something equally huge and equally terrifying emerged from the ground. It roared like it was dying, and charged for the first creature. Suddenly, all prospects of bravery disappeared. The green thing picked up a car and flung it two blocks down, where it collided with the other creature's chest and crumpled.

Audrey suddenly stopped caring about what her father would do, or whether or not she should stick around to try and stop the fight. She just ran, and she didn't look back.

A/N: the way i watched the incredible hulk movie to write this. insanity and madness.