MORPH ✿ T. Stark's Daughter [Rewriting!]

ᶠᵒᵘʳᵗᵉᵉⁿ

"Too slow."

Air rushed out of Lenna's lungs as she took the force of the punch. She coughed trying to regain her composure before squaring up again. Fists guarding her face just like Clint taught her, she sidestepped Natasha's kick and grabbed her leg. Romanoff stumbled forward when she pulled her leg but quickly recovered and swept Lenna off her feet. Once again, the air left her lungs, but she was quick to kick herself back up. This time she didn't hesitate to move first, swiping at the air in front of her opponent before her fists were caught.

"You're getting sloppy. Keep it tight."

Lenna copied Natasha's earlier move and swept her legs out from under her. She pounced on the woman using her arms and legs to pin her down.

"Pause! Say you have me like this. You're barely keeping me down, so how do you plan on subduing me? If you move your arm I can get back up. You move your leg and I can get back up. This is not a good position to be in." The two stood up and took their positions on the opposite sides of the mat. "Think about how you're going to subdue me quickly so you can move on to the next guy."

"Looks intense." Lenna glanced to the entrance of the training room. Coulson stood there awkwardly, adjusting the sleeves of his suit and trying not to look out of place in the casual atmosphere. "Hiya. Lenna, I have your mission for you."

"She's not ready," Natasha interjected. Lenna went to protest but was silenced by a look. "She's not combat-ready."

"That's fine, her mission is to retrieve intel and nothing more," Coulson looked at Lenna pointedly. "You need to get briefed. Clean up, get dressed, and you leave immediately after."

Lenna nodded and made her way to the locker rooms. As she stood in the shower, Lenna recalled the crazy events that lead to her becoming an agent.

Lenna had been relaxing in the completed living room of Stark Tower; her first day off in a long time. Tony was out meeting with people for work and Steve had made her promise not to call Grant while he conducted his own business. Very strange that he had business of his own to attend to, but it wasn't for her to pry.

Her eyelids were getting heavy as the TV blasted the intro music to some nondescript sitcom. Despite the absurdly loud music and the sirens and honking of the street below, what woke Lenna up was the ding of the elevator. Looking lazily over her shoulder, she watched as Phil Coulson stepped out of the elevator, binder in hand and sunglasses being folded up and placed gently in his lapel.

"Lenna, just the person I was looking for," he teased as he stepped further into the home.

Lenna smirked and sat up, "Bold of you to walk in here uninvited. Please, do tell me what might be so important that you had to intrude on a perfectly good nap?"

"I had a proposition for you," Coulson said sitting on a chair across from the couch. Lenna turned the TV off and, swinging her feet over the side of the couch, motioned for him to continue. "Well, considering your strange circumstance, I was wondering if you might consider becoming an agent. Working for me?"

"Aren't I already an agent? I mean I helped out Stevie last year–"

"That was a special circumstance. It's not often we pull a super-soldier out of the ice after seventy years," Coulson paused and cleared his throat. "No, I mean an agent in the sense that you are trained to carry out missions. You'd be trained by Natasha and Clint, so it's not like some random agent, but do keep in mind that they have busy schedules and a substitute will be assigned any sessions they couldn't make."

Lenna blinked three times in rapid succession. The offer sounded perfectly fine. Which was the bad thing. Obviously being the superpowered daughter of Tony Stark, a.k.a. Ironman, would come with its own dangers, so training would be inevitable. However, becoming an agent was never something Lenna considered. She figured she would just go to college and become an engineer and work alongside her father. As a kid, Lenna was never that athletic or good under pressure, but... it made sense.

"What's the catch?"

Coulson looked at her, surprised. "There is no catch. You'd come train to become an agent and then work for me. Training periods can last from a month to multiple years, it's all about the readiness of the agent."

Lenna hesitated again. Grant. This would mean less time with Grant... but was that really such a bad thing? –NO! Of course, it was a bad thing. She wouldn't be hesitating otherwise.

"Alright, I'll do it, but don't expect too much from me. I've been in the lab the past year."

Earlier in the day, before Coulson had dropped the M Bomb on her (that is Mission Bomb) Lenna had been enjoying a nice day with her father. The first one, probably, since she began training. Tony had always been... a little overprotective of her. He feared they were going to lose movie nights or time spent bouncing ideas off each other. Ever since picking her up in Idaho almost a year ago, Tony realized that a companion was what he needed. Pepper was great, but she couldn't understand the complex ins and outs of the suits like Lenna did. They had become more than a father-daughter duo: they were best friends and lab partners. He was already jealous of Steve–whom he refused to meet–for spending so much time with Lenna.

Lenna and Tony had been wandering around Chinatown buying clothes and food willy-nilly.

"So, do you speak Chinese?" Tony asked, eyeing a vendor who was selling clocks and watches.

Lenna followed Tony to the stall and scanned the selection. "Not really. I mean I can count to one hundred, say my favorite food, and ask for directions, but I'm not fluent by any means. Ooh, here, look at this one."

It was an Ebel Skeleton Double Hunter Pocketwatch that Tony snatched from her fingers in awe. According to his mumblings, it was an antique from the fifties.

"How did you get this?" He asked, rhetorically.

The man at the vendor answered anyways, "Small man, fat man, big glasses. He give this to us. Tell us to sell only to..." He paused and rifled around behind the counter before pulling out a picture. Swiveling between the picture and Lenna, he smiled and pointed. "To her! Yes, as gift from father!"

"I'm her father," Tony said slowly. "Let me see that paper." The vendor shrugged and handed Tony the paper. Smiling back at him in black and white was Lenna's picture, seemingly taken from afar and unknowingly. Lenna snatched the paper from her father and tapped it quickly.

"That's from when I first moved to New York," she said anxiously. "That was not quite a year ago. Who gave this to you? What did they look like."

The vendor, now irritated by the barrage of questions, shrugged jerkily and motioned quickly. "Tall. Sunglasses. Short hair. Accent," he rattled off the traits on his fingers and waved them away. "Free. Take it and go."

Tony turned Lenna with a gentle arm on her lower back and they walked home. They examined the watch quickly once they got home and found nothing weird about it. No GPS, no camera, no bomb, no hidden messages. It was just a vintage watch. Lenna spent the hours before her session with Nat staring at the picture of her and rereading the text printed at the bottom.

"When you see this girl, please return her father's watch to her."

"That's what I hate," Tony said as he sat down next to her as she tied her boots. Lenna looked at him as he picked up the paper from the glass coffee table in her room. "'When'. Not 'If'. 'When'. As if it was a guarantee that you would visit that exact vendor at some point in your life."

"I don't want to even think about it anymore today." Lenna had kissed her father goodbye and went on to think about it on the ride to S.H.I.E.L.D.