A Different Call

Who Are You?

A.N. I'm about to get into the five-year gap that occurs in Endgame so if there's anything that you want to see let me know before this Friday.

Natasha's P.O.V.

Steve and I were gathered around the table that had become our hub for tracking population reports as they came in, and from the look of things Thanos did exactly what he had planned to do, pretty much every country was reporting a fifty percent drop in all population – humans and animals alike- all vanished.

"Hey," Rhodey called, taking Steve's and my attention away from watching the climbing numbers of those reported missing. "So, that thing just stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing."

As we gathered in the lab Bruce and Rhodey informed us of the recent development that occurred to our recently found device. Steve told Banner to find another way to get it turned back on and Banner expressed concern at not fully knowing what the device was meant for.

"Fury did," I responded, "Just do it, please." I knew that Fury wouldn't have left us high and dry with no way to move on. While he did have a tendency to hate and distrust most of the world, this team wasn't something that he would abandon even in death. "You tell me the second you get a signal. I wanna know who's on the other end of that thing." I was pretty sure that Fury was calling his super-secret alien fighter, but the man was known to pull the unexpected.

I turned on my feet and almost ran into a blonde woman in a red, blue, and gold jumpsuit that would make someone think that she did drag racing as a past time.

"Where's Fury?" The woman asked holding a defensive stance and body posture, though I could see a hint of concern in her eyes.

"Who are you?" Steve asked, stepping forward, trying to protect what little he had left of his team.

"Carol. Now I'm going to ask again, where is Fury?"

"We don't know," I answered, stepping forward softly. "All that we found was that signal transmitter. Please tell me you're the alien destroyer that Nick had encountered when he was still a regular agent?"

"He's Fury and how did you know about that? The government just issued a statement about some training exercise."

Rhodey let out a soft chuckle before I responded, "Because I work for SHIELD, or I did, and you actually inspired Fury to create a program to gather more enhanced individuals to help and prevent more events like what happened in that desert."

Carol crossed her arms over her chest and looked our ragged band up and down, "And you're that group?"

"Hey, I didn't see you fight-," I cut Rhodey off before he could offend a much-needed asset. Whether she really did stop an alien invasion or not, she was a body and we need more of those.

"How about I catch you up on everything while Steve gathers the rest of the team," I offered. Both Steve and Carol nodded in agreement and I lead Carol off to one of the many conference rooms in the compound.

"So why don't you tell me more about who you are. All that I know was you were one of the first truly enhanced people that Nick met and that your name is Carol, and I only just learned one of those details."

The woman sat down, resting her forearms against the glass tabletop. "My name is Carol Danvers. I was born on Earth and was enlisted in the United States Air Force until a training accident with my mentor where I absorbed energy from what you call the Tesseract. I lost my memories and began to live and fight with the Kree in their war against the Skrull. It was during this time that I ended up back on Earth and met Fury, who helped me get my memories back and I realized that the Skrulls were being unfairly targeted. After fighting the Kree Accuser corps I realized I needed to protect the Skrulls and finish went my mentor had started. Before leaving though I left Fury a way to get in contact with me."

"Which brings us back to now. Well, your time with Nick left an impact on him and he proposed what became known as the Avengers Initiative, which was a plan to gather enhanced individuals, heroes, to fight battles no normal army could."

"And that group that I just met are those people."

"For the most part. The Initiative kind of got scrapped after SHIELD turned out to be ninety percent Hydra sleeper agents, but the idea remains the same."

"And who are all these heroes?"

"Of who's left there's Rhodey aka War Machine slash Iron Patriot, he's ex-Air Force too and a literal rocket scientist, he pilots a flying suit and the only person who can stop Tony Stark's harebrained schemes. Next is Banner he's the one with the grey-black hair, while he doesn't look like much, he's the second smartest man I know and has the ability to turn into a giant green rage monster. The blonde was Steve Rogers aka-"

"Captain America," Carol supplied, "but I thought he died during World War Two?"

"So did we until a few years ago, turns out the serum allowed him to go into a state of hibernation. Who you haven't seen yet is Thor, who needs no explanation, and a raccoon that calls himself Rocket, I don't really know what his thing is but Thor trusts him and we currently don't have an overwhelming amount of experts in out of galaxy affairs."

"And you? What's your power?"

"Eighteen years of training with the Soviets and another sixteen with SHIELD, plus a dash of diluted super-soldier serum added just for fun. Nick was one of the closet things I had to a decent father figure."

"So that's all of the team,"

"All that we know are still alive. Some of our members ended up in space and we haven't been able to make contact." I grabbed the tablet that was sitting on the table and pulled up what information we had. "Rocket managed to track to their ship to this point," I slid the tablet across the table so that the other woman could see it, "but we searched that area and found nothing."

"I'll find them, we'll need everyone we can get to fix this," Carol said, standing up and heading out of the conference room.

So much for Steve's meeting.