Miriam sat at the conference table once more, this time there was only Tony and Steve with her as Loki had succeeded in spreading the so called team apart. Thor had fallen into Loki's trap and been expelled from the Helicarrier so they had no idea where he could be, as well as Banner who'd last been seen tearing apart one of the jets before falling to the earth. Nat was with Clint who she had somehow knocked out of the spell and was now recovering in the infirmary and finally Fury was attending to Coulson's body.

Miriam had pulled away from Tony after she had realized just how weak she must have looked to him. Without a word she'd turned in the other direction and walked back to base, neither male had found anything clever to say so instead they had simply followed her lead. Now they kept silent, Tony and Steve occasionally exchanging glances but not once finding the courage to speak to her.

She hadn't paid much attention to them, in fact up until recently all movement around her had been a distant echo. Losing one person in the span of a month had been hard enough but losing yet another was not right. Sadness wasn't something she felt, in fact depression to her was difficult to conceive as everything that brought her down was incinerated in her mind to pure fury and right now she was livid.

Fury came into the room, for the first time expressing anything but his signature poker face—he was thoughtful. Miriam's smoldering look was planted on him but strangely enough she didn't blame him for the death of her comrade because it could have been Fury just as easily, it was all Loki's plan after all. She did however question why he seemed to give off a hint of vulnerability now and by the looks of Maria who trailed after him she too questioned.

Before either of them could question he dropped a stack of bloody cards onto the table. No one needed to question what they were, not even Steve seemed to want to speak, instead he merely leaned over to pick up a short few. Fury spoke with slight guilt to them, "these were in Phil Coulson's jacket. I guess he never did get you to sign them. We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, the location of the Cube, Banner, Thor... I got nothing for you.I lost my one good eye." For once he looked more the vulnerable or guilty, almost as if the death of his one good eye, so to speak, had put things into perspective for the director. "Maybe I had that coming. Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract.I never put all my chips on that number, though because I was playing something even riskier. There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea. In heroes."

Miriam shot up, feeling like her skin was boiling underneath the surface and all she needed was a release. She wanted to scream, to throw the power bolts out of her hands in all different directions and punish anyone, blame anyone in site but unfortunately she was no longer that careless. There was one person she could blame and it was going to take all the patience she had built up in the last 20 years. Tony shot up after her, pushing down Steve who had too gone to follow the brunette women.

"Well, it's an old-fashioned notion." Fury echoed after them.

|•|•|•|•|

Miriam made it to the edge of one the east wing before Tony stopped her.

"Miriam! Stop!" He yelled out, grasping her shoulder and pulling her to a halt.

Miriam responded by turning on her heel, burning glare almost scaring Tony into stepping away but he stayed firm, even when she snarled, "why? Why should I stop?"

"We don't have a plan Miriam? You don't even know where to begin and you're gonna go out there and get yourself killed like Coulson did!" He responded as calmly as ever despite her aggressive tone.

"Why do you care about me Stark? I called you an asshole when we met! We don't even like each other, we're all here pretending to be a team and look what happened we got someone killed! We're not a team!" She screamed, pushing him back out of pure frustration. Her tiny shoves were nothing more then aggression at the world escaping her onto the one person trying to help. "We should be out there looking for Coulson's killer not trying to play superheroes!"

Her large huffs of air followed the almost eternal silence that followed as she finally seemed to ask the one question Tony had asked himself from the moment he had met her; why did he care about her? Why did he not just let her go off and kill Loki? Why did he want her to stay put or at the very least let him tag along to make sure she didn't get herself killed. All these questions he didn't want to answer mostly because the answer would be an entire new complication.

Tony decided it was best to answer the simplest of the questions which oddly enough would also be the hardest for her to hear. "We will find Loki but we need to coordinate, you can't just leave like that Miriam. It doesn't work that way, wether we like it or not we have to work as a team."

She scoffed, "what a hell of a team we are, it's more of a shit show that Fury put together."

"Well no one ever said it was a good idea." He hummed in response, sensing her posture growing softer.

"Coulson didn't deserve that, anyone but Coulson. He was a good man, the best. He was one of the only people that trusted me to change from the beginning, he thought I could save lives instead of take them and now look." Miriam muttered after a moment of silence, remembering what a great friend she had. "We hadn't talk for years, he was busy being Fury's second hand and I was busy taking down arms dealers and escaping my past."

"This isn't your fault Miriam." Tony knew exactly where her words were leading because he too felt that way but at the very least he could be a hypocrite for her.

"Isn't it? If I had heard that stupid bomb or even gotten around quicker, if I hadn't been so worried about you and Steve out there. If I had remembered that Loki was the priority." She counted off the reasons, adding more to the slashes in her integrity. A part of her did remember that of the things she was capable being in two places at the same time was not one of them.

Tony shook his head, grasping her shoulders between his hands and shaking her softly to gain her attention. "Okay that's enough feeling sorry for yourself, I thought I was the conceited one. Miriam, if you don't see that the whole point of what you were sharing is you were helping people. Sure, Loki got out but that's all of our faults for arguing. Miriam, you were trying to save people, because of you Captain Underpants didn't get his ass handed to him and I didn't get turned into propeller juice alright, which by the way thank you for that. I didn't know you cared so much."

Miriam chewed on her bottom lip, realizing that indeed she did care. She cared a hell of a lot more then she was ready to admit which terrified her. Caring for someone wasn't strange to her, she cared for her whole team day in and out, she cared for Nat and most of the agents at SHIELD a great deal, she had even started to care for Steve and the Avengers unit but it was the way she cared for Tony Stark now, the way she was able to just tell him everything. He had hit the nail on the head, she never knew how much she could care for Iron Man.

"I didn't know you could care for anyone else Tony, I guess we are all a little surprised today." She responded with the only plausible thing to escape her lips.

Tony stepped back, seeming to have gotten the memo, he cleared his throat and smiled deeply. "I'll take that sass as a sign you're feeling better."

"Maybe, just a bit." She hummed at him. The hallway was so empty she was tempted to step closer to him but then decided against it, looking away and finding herself levelheaded once more. "I need to go check on Barton, make sure he's really back. Will you be okay?"

Tony nodded, sensing her urgency to leave and for a moment he didn't want to her to but then he was reminded that he could do nothing to stop her. He cleared his throat and nodded, "yeah, okay."

Miriam stilled as he turned away, noticing how his voice had dropped slightly. "Tony, are you okay?"

"Yeah, fine." He responded.

"You know that Coulson's death wasn't your fault either right? You only did what you were best at, he would never hold that against you." She walked away, knowing that if she stayed any long it was just gonna cause an even bigger issue she would eventually have to deal with.

|•|•|•|•|

"Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out and stuff something else in? Do you know what it's like to be unmade?" Clint Barton's voice was deep and distorted as he came out of the trance he'd been placed under. Miriam heard him just as she walked into the infirmary, pressing the door open to find her comrades. Clint was laying on the cot, barely moving his head long enough to see her.

"You know that I do." Natasha responded, standing and walking over to the same wall Miriam was now leaning against.

"I take it you're not feeling all 100 percent back." Miriam commented, tapping her head against the wall. This is the first time she'd seen him in years it the thing about being SHIELD agents was time was irrelevant to them, all that mattered was you were alive. Clint and Natasha had it easier, they were partners for many missions and therefore had seen each other over the years. Natasha was even called aunt Nat to Clint's children, Miriam hadn't seen the oldest since she was a newborn. Despite all the obvious space between them it didn't matter, she'd come here originally under the pretense of getting Barton back to his family and that included both her and Nat in a very unorthodox way.

"When did you get here?" Clint squinted his eyes, still adjusting to the harsh light or maybe having control of his own body once more. "I thought you told Fury no."

"I did and then you decided to get yourself compromised so we had to come save you. You're welcome by the way, it's not like I have better things to do." Miriam shot back, attempting to hold back a smile.

"Why am I back?" He groaned. "How did you get him out?"

"How did you Nat? I thought we were going to have to electroshock him." Miriam turned her head, narrowing her eyes at the redhead with interest.

"Cognitive recalibration." She answered back, and when both of them didn't quite seem to get enough details she shrugged her shoulders with a simpler answer. "I hit you really hard on the head."

Miriam whistled lowly, nudging her friend in approval. "That'll definitely work and you didn't even make a dent."

"Very funny Miriam. Thanks." Barton remarked to either women. After another second of slowly piecing himself together he looked solemnly at them both. "How many agents did I... "

"Don't." Natasha immediately shut him down, knowing exactly where his questions where headed. "Don't do that to yourself, Clint. This is Loki. This is monsters and magic, and nothing we were ever trained for."

Miriam felt her chest throb, knowing she'd been there once. After coming to SHIELD and learning of the harm she had actually caused on her own and all the innocent people she had taken down with her it was hard to accept it all. She swallowed a lump that tried to force its way up at the nightmarish memories and nodded her head in agreement. "Nat's right, you're back so focus on that cause we're gonna need it."

"Loki, did he get away?" The male agent decided to change the subject.

"Yeah. I don't suppose you know where." Nat muttered.

"I didn't need to know. I didn't ask. He's going to make his play soon, though. Today."

Miriam groaned, sliding into the steel chair besides her with tired shoulders. "Great, as if they say hadn't been hard enough already."

"We got to stop him." Nat remarked.

"Yeah? Who's "we"?" Barton questioned, looking towards both of them with intrigue.

"Well..." Miriam trailed off, looking at the redhead as if to ask which one would try to explain just what was going on.

"I don't know. Whoever's left." Natasha decided to answer then, knowing that an explanation of what could potentially be a team was even further confusing now that everyone was scrambled.

"Well, if I put an arrow through Loki's eye socket, I would sleep better, I suppose." Clint didn't need much of an explanation it seemed as he was already getting off the bed. He stopped short though, turning towards either female, "although I'm not sure SHIELD is going to approve of this trio happening again. Prague didn't end so well."

"Budapest didn't either but that wasn't my fault and besides, we're older and experienced. We probably won't get arrested this time." The brunette chose to retort, biting her bottom lip to stop from reliving the easier times.

"Budapest didn't end with me being labeled a danger to Europe." Clint scoffed with an eye roll, "which I will gladly do once more if it means I get dibs on Loki."

"Now you sound like you." Nat retorted.

"But you don't, neither of you. You're a spy, not a soldier. Now you want to wade into a war. Why?" He questioned her and then turned to the inhuman. "And you, you don't leave that group of kids and the jungle unless one of us is dying. What did Loki do to you both?"

"He didn't. I just... I got red in my ledger. I would like to wipe it out." Nat responded with honesty.

"One of us did die Clint, and he has to pay for that."

Captain America walked into the room then, looking determined as ever in full suit. "Time to go."

"Go where?" Nat shot out with intrigue.

"Where's Tony?" Miriam said at the same time, furrowing her brows and looking behind him to see an empty hall.

"I'll tell you on the way." He responded to them both. "Can either of you fly one of those jets?"

"I can." Barton answered.

Steve blinked at him for a moment, looking between Nat and Miriam who nodded at him. Once he took notice of their approval he agreed. "You got a suit?"

"Yeah."

"Then suit up."