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.
Avengers Initiative: Reset
09. Rediscoveries
Natasha had woken up early and after breakfast and a quick check-up with Simmons ─ who had still not cleared her for combat duty or training ─ she'd decided to vent some of her frustration at the shooting range, since she was at least cleared from confined bedrest and free to move around on her own without the use of a wheelchair.
She let the activity ground her to the moment, clearing her head and focusing on pulling the trigger and hitting her target. Usually this was something that worked and she called it her own weird type of self-therapy. But today she kept picturing Hank Pym's form in the shape of the target and regretting that she hadn't been able to put a bullet through his head. Ever since she'd left the Red Room behind she didn't wallow much in thoughts of revenge; it seemed like wasted energy as she felt she'd at least done everything she could to burn that whole thing to the ground and leave it all behind. But losing Clint and this whole alien invasion thing that followed afterwards got her pretty rattled ─ not to mention the fact that she'd been very close to dying and it wasn't something she contemplated a lot, as she was very good at what she did even if she did live a very dangerous life.
Even so, Natasha got lost in her inner ruminations and lost track of how much time she'd been there when she heard a faint sound close by. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Steve Rogers at the threshold into the base's shooting range.
"Good morning, Agent Romanoff." He nodded at her politely as he stepped closer and whatever it was he was about to say seemed momentarily forgotten. "Wow," he noted, his eyebrows going up as he looked across the range at her target. "Sharp shooter."
She felt her lips curl up at the compliment slipping almost unconsciously past his lips and noted the slight blush that colored his face as she kept simply looking back at him.
"What can I do for you, Captain Rogers?" She asked with that smile that had just a hint of teasing to it.
"Please, it's just Steve, ma'am," he said with a slight shake of the head and a half smile of his own.
"Only if you return the favor. And stop calling me 'ma'am'," she replied with a full-on smirk now. "It makes me feel ancient."
"Right." He replied with a rueful smile now. "I'm sorry, still getting used to the current social norms."
"Don't worry. I'm sure you'll catch up pretty soon," she said easily, holstering her gun and turning fully to him, deciding she should be done at the shooting range anyway and getting back to business. "You were looking for me?"
"Yes, Agent Coulson said I would probably find you here." He said with a nod. "I wanted to see if you've checked on Stark and started working on Howard's research again."
"Not yet." She said, gesturing out and the two of them headed out of the shooting range towards the R&D labs. "I needed a moment before getting back to that."
For a moment he merely nodded back at her in silent understanding, then he cleared his throat before speaking again. "I hope you don't mind… Coulson told me how you lost another agent last week and that he was a friend." He said in a soft tone then stopped in the middle of the hallway to look at her. "I'm sorry for your loss."
"Thank you." She also paused and turned back to him. "Clint was…" She trailed off for a moment, shaking her head mostly to herself as she didn't know quite what to say. "He's the reason I'm still here." She thought that summarized things really well. Natasha wouldn't be here at SHIELD if not for Clint. She wouldn't be at this specific base, working in the shadows with this team if it wasn't for his death either, as when he got killed she put herself on high alert ─ whoever had been causing those deaths wasn't targeting just their agency's assets or people of interest, but Agents inside SHIELD, too. And most of all, she wouldn't be alive after Budapest or working to be a better person now.
"I know what that's like." Steve said still in the same soft tone, as his mind turned to Bucky and all the ways his best friend had saved him over the years ─ from street alley fights and his own stubbornness, to covering his back in their campaigns across Europe fighting HYDRA. He shook his head a little as he focused back on Natasha and the present. "I wish I could say it gets easier, but with time I think it just hurts a little less."
She only nodded back at him. Mourning was still a strange feeling to her. For so much of her life she'd tried shutting out anything related to feelings in a self-preservation move and she'd refrained from making attachments while in the Red Room ─ no point getting close to others when she would need to kill them to survive in the end. But befriending Clint had brought something back to life in her own heart, some primal need for affection and companionship that she'd pushed down since she was a little girl and got immersed back in her training to become an assassin.
The worst part is that she couldn't even contact Laura and the kids to help them through this whole harrowing process. To the world at large, she was dead and that needed to remain so until they could get a fighting chance against Loki and this Asgardian invasion. She had no idea how Clint's family was dealing with everything and she wanted to clean up this mess as soon as possible so she could at least be there for them.
The two of them then walked into the R&D lab and turned on Tony's hologram, ready to get back to work on Howard Stark's old research. The AI genius inventor seemed at least less upset than late the previous night as Steve and Natasha reached for the box and started going through the notebooks once more.
"I had a thought," Steve said tentatively after a few minutes of them working in silence and looked up to see Tony gesturing a little impatiently at him. "How about my shield?"
"What about it?" Tony said, arching a brow.
"It's made of vibranium. Rarest metal on earth," Steve continued, elaborating on his train of thought. "Would that work as a replacement for the palladium in the arc reactor?"
Tony seemed a little surprised, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. "Well, sorry to say but in the last seventy years or so it continues to be the rarest metal on earth. I heard some black market merchants got hold of a haul of vibranium out of Wakanda some time ago, but it's still extremely hard to come by."
"I know that," Steve said with a frown. "I was offering the metal in the shield itself."
"You'd give up your shield to build my new body?" Tony said, blinking his eyes and completely taken aback by his offer.
"Why not?" Steve said with an easy shrug. "Your father was the one to give it to me in the first place and while I did grow used to fighting with it and it saved my life quite a few times, I'm sure I can find something else if I have to go into battle."
Natasha watched the two men regarding each other for a moment, just staring at each other in silence before she moved around to one of the workbenches and turned on a computer. "Well, Coulson would probably get his heart broken if Captain America's shield is no more," she said with a hint of humor to her voice. "But I'll start running a simulation, just in case."
As the program started running, Natasha turned back to Tony with an arched eyebrow. "By the way, did you consider the possibility of using adamantium? I know SHIELD should have at least a small amount in storage in a few of our labs."
"I never had access to adamantium," Tony replied with a raised eyebrow of his own. "It wouldn't really work as a replacement for palladium, the properties are too different. I did try to get some when I first started building Mark II, and I could find some secondary adamantium, which is of course a subpar version and when I was testing prototypes the gold-titanium alloy actually worked better. But finding true adamantium, no such luck."
"I think Coulson should have clearance to get some, if you'd like." Natasha offered as she sat down by the computer to check on the simulation. "Come to think of it, we might not need to use Cap's shield at all. I think SHIELD also has a supply of vibranium somewhere. We built some reinforced cells using it, if I'm not mistaken."
"I'll think about it and good to know, in case the vibranium simulation pans out," Tony said with a nod then he heaved a somewhat heavy sigh. "But the main problem is replacing the palladium for the arc reactor."
"Then we should keep looking through your father's notes." Steve said, as he went through the box and grabbed one more of Howard's notebooks.
"There's nothing in there." Tony said with a frown. "We've gone through everything that's written down in those things and I still can't see it, whatever it was that I was supposed to see."
"Look, I get that you're frustrated," Steve said with a placating hand gesture. "But I knew your father. He was a rightful smug son of a gun, but he could deliver it. If he thought you would be the one able to solve this, then I think you can do it."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, but there's nothing to actually see," Tony replied in frustration. "We've gone through the notes and I have them in my memory, I don't need to keep checking them over and over. There's nothing new to find there."
"What about something that was presented at the actual 1974 Stark Expo?" Steve suggested. "I remember visiting the Expo right before I joined the army. Sometimes he'd present prototypes and ideas that wouldn't come to the actual finished products until a few years later. Maybe there was something at the expo that is the key to all of this."
"The key," Tony repeated, a sudden gleam coming into his eyes then. "The key to the future. He said 'this is the key to the future'." He murmured to himself, suddenly turning to walk up and down the corridor, snapping his fingers as he thought out loud before he turned to Natasha. "Do you have access to any data from the '74 Expo? Like buildings, stands, presentations?"
"I think so," she said, going through SHIELD's database on the computer. "Given that your father was working for both SHIELD and Stark Industries at the time, I'd say we should certainly have something in the files. Ok, here we go."
She pulled up everything she could find on the Expo, throwing it on the screen and Tony leaned closer to the screen to look at it, his eyes roving quickly over everything and taking it in. He read through lists of the topics presented, interviews, mentions on the news, both local and international and anything that had panned out from new developments. Just as he was once more growing frustrated that it would be another dead end, he pulled up suddenly.
"Hold on, go back to that other page. No, the one before that." He said, gesturing with his hands.
"This one? It's just the layout of the Expo," Natasha said, looking at him over her shoulder with a frown.
"Yeah, I had a small scale model of it in my office at Stark Industries while I was putting together this year's Expo," he said quietly, his eyes eagerly taking it all in. "Let me see. Now zoom out… I'll be damned."
"What?" Steve asked as he came closer, trying to see what it was that got Tony so worked up all of a sudden.
"Do you know how to handle a holotable?" He asked Natasha, still not fully explaining his thought process.
"Just the basics," she said with a curious frown. "If you need someone with expert knowledge I can get Fitz-Simmons."
"No, basic will do. Can you convert the layout into a manipulatable projection?" He asked and she nodded back, fingers striking quickly at the keyboard.
Then she got up and walked to the back towards the holotable, turning it on and projecting the layout, following Tony's instructions ─ "Turn it sideways, no not like that! Yeah, now lose the pathways, the shrubbery, parking lots, exits, get rid of it all, keep only the buildings" ─ so that he could see the resulting image.
"Now what does that look like to you?" Tony said with a triumphant smile, turning to the other two with his arms wide open.
"A model of the solar system?" Steve said with an arched eyebrow. "Although it looks like it has too many planets…"
"No, it looks like an atom," Natasha said, the realization hitting her suddenly. "Howard Stark hid the working model of an atom structure in the design for Stark Expo."
"Yep," Tony nodded with a grin. "Good old dad, still showing me up after all these years."
After a few more manipulations in the design with Tony's guidance and Natasha's hands in the holotable, they came up with a proposed new element that would fall into the metal area of the periodic table. Working out the hypothetical properties of this hypothetical element, they realized it would be a suitable replacement for palladium.
"This is amazing," Steve said in admiration. "I mean, I knew Howard was smart, but he actually came up with a new element?"
"He said he was bound by the technology of his time, so he couldn't synthesize it then," Natasha said, turning with a thoughtful look from the projection of the element to Tony's hologram. "You think we can manage that now?"
"We would need a particle accelerator," Tony said with a resolute nod. "And work out some modifications, but I think it's doable."
"I'll have Coulson to scope out a lab nearby with a particle accelerator then," Natasha said with a nod, as she got up and pulled her phone out of her pocket.
"And get Fitz-Simmons," Tony said. "I'll need them to get out there and work that part for me, since I'm bound to this lab."
Nodding once more, Natasha logged into SHIELD's systems to check out the facilities they had access to nearby and work on their next steps. It finally felt like they were going somewhere after so much planning and researching.
A.N.: I thought of doing without Tony's new element and working out vibranium or adamantium in its place instead, but it seemed like an inevitable discovery considering Fury was all set on giving Tony the box with his father's belongings right before his death and that wouldn't change if he came back as an AI, I think. Next chapter comes with a little field trip for part of the team and some other happenings.