Chapter Text
Hey, Tony Stark, you look lost.
Six words. That’s all it would take for her life to be completely different. Staring at the words in the mirror for the billionth time in 4 years, she wondered what she had done to get the brilliant billionaire playboy as a soulmate. A brilliant billionaire playboy. When in the world would she ever even cross paths with him??
Then there was the bitch of a stepmother, Chrissy, who decided that Ellie didn’t deserve a soulmate and if she ever saw the words would probably try and remove them. Violently, if necessary.
Since getting her words, Ellie had made sure to wear clothes that covered her side, no more bikinis for her. She also made sure no one posted a picture of her without her permission to make sure that the words weren’t showing.
It’s not that she didn’t want to meet him. It just wasn’t the right time and posting a picture seemed to be asking for trouble. It was hard enough to convince Chrissy that sending her away for college would actually be a good idea. She wanted a live-in maid and tried to sway Ellie’s father, Dean, by saying that Ellie had no future and was too dumb to get an actual degree. Luckily, while Dean wasn’t the greatest father in the world and let Chrissy get away with saying anything she wanted, he recognized that Ellie had done very well in school (understatement but she would take what she can get from him) and let her go. He would only pay for half of tuition though saying he needed to save the rest for her brother (who was 8 at the time and a moron already) and the rest was up to Ellie, so she was stuck taking out loans and having a work-study job to make up the rest.
After attempting to maintain a relationship with Dean for the first 2 years of school, Ellie finally gave up when he forgot to buy her a ticket home for Christmas, tried to lie saying they couldn’t afford it that year and then posted pictures of himself with Chrissy and their 10-year-old in Cancun. Ellie had flown herself home, packed the rest of her shit making sure to grab the jewelry that her mother had left her and flown back before new year’s. Chrissy had tried to say Ellie stole the jewelry and press charges, but she had anticipated trouble for years over the collection of bracelets, necklaces and earrings with real precious gems that had a copy of her mother’s will to show the police and the courts if necessary. It was a slam dunk and worth every penny she didn’t have to see that smug bitch walk away empty handed.
Now 22 with an engineering degree and a computer science minor, she needed to find a job quickly to keep her head above water.
“Excuse me miss.” Some suit caught El’s attention.
“Can I help you?” She replied carefully. Strange men and all that, but didn’t want to come off as rude.
“You are Ellie Robson?” He replied coming a little closer.
“I am A Ellie Robson, depends on which one you are looking for I guess.” She quipped trying to keep her nerves under control/
“Ellie Robson, born May 6th 1986, just graduated with a BS in Biomechanical engineering, minoring in computer science?” The suit listed off.
“Sounds like me to be sure. And just who are you?” Ellie said backing away.
“I am Agent Phil Coulson from Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division or SHIELD.” He replied letting her go just a little bit.
“And what can I help you with , Agent Phil Coulson?” Ellie replied, still strung tight at the unfamiliar but clearly government agency being listed off.
“I am here to offer you a job. We could use someone like you in the research and development part of our organization.” He states.
“Right, a guy in a suit from some government agency I’ve never heard of wants to give me, a freshly graduated female engineer a job? Not likely. One of two things is happening. 1) you are trying to kidnap me which A+ for effort but I’ll pass or 2) I’m being punked.” Ellie says crossing her arms.
“Fair enough. Smart enough to be skeptical. Always a good trait in my area of expertise. I know you are looking for a job and that you need one soon to keep your apartment. Why don’t you stop by tomorrow at 9am, a perfectly normal time that other people will be around and ask for me at the front desk.” Phil says, handing her a card with an address and a phone number but nothing else. “Have a good day.” He says and swiftly walks away.
“Well that was weird.” Ellie mumbles dropping the card into her bag and moving along.
***Jump to 8 am the next morning***
Staring at her email screen, looking at yet another rejection email, Ellie pics up a pillow and starts to scream into it. This wasn’t going well. Throwing the pillow across the room, she manages to knock over her bag, spilling the contents onto the floor.
With a groan, she goes over to straighten everything up and make sure nothing is broken. She is relieved to find that the once tube of very expensive concealer she managed to get on sale was unharmed. Picking it up, underneath was the white card.
Turning the card over in her hand, nothing wrong with looking it up. She thought.
Heading to her computer, first she looks up SHIELD, unsurprisingly nothing helpful turns up. Next she googles the address, it’s in the middle of a business heavy area with a lot of foot traffic. Well, if they are looking to kidnap people they didn’t chose a very good place.
Making a snap decision, Ellie quickly smooths out her “interview outfit” that she had out just in case, texted her best friend, Jessica, that she was going for an interview.
Hey, got an opportunity I think but just to be safe, date protocols. Ellie writes on her way out the door. Date protocols being if you don’t hear from me in the next 4 hours, call. If everything is ok, you will be sent to voicemail by the third ring and sent a text. If I need an excuse to leave, I will answer. If something is wrong, no answer get police involved.
Good luck girl!! I will call at 12:30!. Jess replies not phased at the request.
By the time Ellie reaches the building that may or may not be SHEILD, its 8:55.
Good thing I left when I did, Ellie thinks to herself.
Stopping at the reception desk which seems to be the only piece of furniture in the lobby, the woman behind the counter holds up one finger in a gesture of “I need a second but deemed you unworthy of a cursory greeting so this is all you get” making Ellie scowl at being dismissed already.
“How can I help you?” The woman asks as if Ellie was inconveniencing her by making her do her job.
“I was told to give you the name Phil Coulson. He gave me this card but it only has an address and a phone number on it.” Ellie replies smoothly and as civilly as she can muster.
“Really?” The woman looks surprised and looks her up and down again. “Give me the card.”
Ellie hands the woman the card and the woman again looks surprised as if she expected a fake card.
“I will page him. Please wait here.” She says formally.
Finally some fucking manners, Ellie thought to herself but just nodded to the woman.
5 minutes later, Phil Coulson, in a different while looking exactly the same suit, comes out of the elevator. “So good to see you Ellie, right this way.” He waves Ellie into the elevator. “I will give you a quick tour of the facilities at this location, but there are other locations that you could choose from if you wanted to relocate.”
“I am just fine where I am for now. A tour sounds wonderful.” Ellie says diplomatically as the elevator comes to a stop on the 9th floor.
“This is the engineering lab floor. We have a couple of others for the pure life sciences as well.” Phil states. Clearly used to giving tours like this even though he seems to be in charge around here. Why would the boss be the one giving tours, Ellie thought, Maybe he doesn’t get out of his office much otherwise giving herself a mental shrug and goes back to paying attention.
“Collaborations happen quite often and considering your specialty you would probably be in on a number of them. After a starting period of 3 months working with others, you can start your own projects. You will have your own lab space to work on your parts of the projects right from the start.”
“You’re joking!” Ellie cries. That was not normal.
“Not at all. We’ve found that while teamwork is important, the people we hire tend to like their own space and work better that way.” Phil says with a smile. His facial expression told Ellie that he knew it was a big selling point.
“Well that’s different.” She tries to appear nonchalant about it. Damn it, now she wanted to work here.
“We don’t really need to do a formal interview. With our resources we know pretty much everything. You would be contracted for 40 hours a week. How you want to parse that out is up to you. If you want to do data entry and analysis at home go ahead but make sure to use the computer we give you.” Phil starts to list.
“Whoa, I haven’t agreed to anything and I won’t until I see an offer with everything your saying and a salary.” Ellie states firmly. Dean wasn’t the best father but he did teach Ellie how to get the best out of a contract. Ellie knew that should Dean and Chrissy get a divorce, Chrissy wouldn’t know what hit her.
“Wouldn’t expect anything less. If you follow me I have that and some starting paperwork in my office. You can use my office to look it over and we can go from there.” Phil says leading her back towards the elevator.
Phil’s office is covered in Captain America memorabilia. Not WW2. Just Captain America. To each their own I guess, Ellie thought and focused on the paperwork before her. She had asked for a pen and paper to make notes on. First thing she did was list out exactly what she needed for benefits and such, knowing that health insurance was going to be a bitch. Looking at the starting salary, while it would be fine, there was no harm in trying to get them to come up a bit.
Once she was satisfied with what she had written down and compared it, she was impressed by the time off and sick day policy, seems SHIELD didn’t bother with “earning” the time off and everyone got 20 vacation days and 10 sick days for the year. Observed holidays were also given. Ellie was impressed to see that if someone didn’t celebrate a certain holiday, but did celebrate one that wasn’t a national thing, they could swap it out. They didn’t even have a dress code besides closed toed shoes, which were a no brainer when working in a lab.
This probably was going to be the best offer she would ever get, especially right out of school. Ellie would be a fool not to take it. She resolved to ask for 5,000 more a year, which would put her at the top of the salary range for a starting researcher and see if Phil came back with anything. Other than that, Ellie was sold.
Sticking her head out of the office, she spied Phil talking to a very official looking woman. Quickly signaling that she was ready when he was, Ellie retreated back into the office and started to study the posters to pass the time.
“What did you think?” Phil asks startling Ellie.
“Crap, how did you do that?” She demands jokingly, “I think that it’s a great offer but I would like to ask for 5k more a year.”
“Done.” Phil says and goes to adjust the paperwork.
“Really? Just like that? Don’t need to consult anyone?” Ellie says kicking herself. “Not that I am trying to talk you out of it or anything.”
Phil gives a small laugh and says “I have the authority to make this change and speed up the process. WE find that too many people recruiting and looking over stuff makes things go slowly and more mistakes are made. Here is the offer, if you just sign at the bottom. Once you do that, I will need you to sign an NDA.”
“It’s a standard NDA, everything that I do belongs to the company, don’t tell anyone what I am working on?” Ellie asks cautiously before signing the offer.
“Pretty much. Also says you can’t tell anyone where you work.” He says noting the hesitation.
“I guess that makes sense.” Ellie says moving to sign. “Out of curiosity, what do the people that work here say about where they work?”
“I think the most popular for the scientists and engineers is a government think tank or something like that.” Phil says filing Ellie’s paperwork and handing her a stack of papers that made up the NDA.
“You might want to step out and continue talking to whoever you needed to. While I trust what you told me I will still read most of this before signing.” Ellie warns Phil.
“Reasonable. I will check back in soon. If you get done before that, stick your head back out the door. It’ll let me know.” As if that didn’t make Ellie have five more questions.
Shaking her head, she focuses on the legal terms before her. After 30 minutes and 10 google searches for various legal terms, Ellie feels confident that while her work would belong to SHEILD, there were ways to get her name on patents and that if there were harassment or other problems that she could take legal action. Barely. She was barely confident about all of that but that was a problem for another day.
Quickly initialing and signing at the different arrows, she gets done just as Phil walks back in, not scaring the shit out of her this time.
“I’ve gone through and signed everything.” Ellie informs him.
“Great, when did you want to start?” Phil asks.
Taking a moment to think, it was currently Wednesday. “How about this upcoming Monday?”
“That works. The first day will be some training videos and more HR paperwork, retirement plans and direct deposit and other fun stuff. Be here Monday at 8:30 to do all of that. After Monday, you set your own hours.” Phil informs her and escorts her out of the office and to the elevator. “Forgive me for not walking you out but I have another meeting coming up.”
Ellie waves him off, “Pleasure meeting with you, I can show myself out. Thank you for this opportunity.” Ellie says politely and says goodbye as the doors close.
She looks at the time that reads 12 exactly. Ellie quickly texts Jess that the interview is over and that she is heading to lunch.
Well??? Jess texts, never one for patience Did you get it???
Yes. They even gave me the salary I asked for. I will take you out for dinr in 2 weeks when I get my first paycheck to celebrate. XOXO Ellie texts back not having the heart to keep Jess in suspense.
CONGRATS GIRL!!! G2g but we will def celebrate l8r XOXO Came the reply and Ellie smiles at her phone.
That’s one thing down in the adulting category. Ellie thought to herself with a mental pat on the back. Who needs family when I have great friends and apparently amazing luck now. Go me.
As Ellie walks down the street, she can’t help the bounce in her walk and the smile on her face.
Ellie was in heaven. It had been three months since joining SHIELD. The tech she was working on was insane. She wouldn’t have touched anything like it for years if she had gotten any of the other jobs she applied for, even if she had gone on to grad school.
After her mandatory rotation on projects that were already in development, she was able to start looking into starting her own projects. Ellie had not anticipated the amount of reading that it would take. Going into biomechanical engineering, she had always wanted to work on prosthetics. Things that would improve quality of life.
Unfortunately, working for a super shady spy organization meant that things like that weren’t a priority. So to pivot and still work in that area, Ellie had begun to develop an interface for prosthetics so that agents who were really injured could keep working.
But first she had to read every paper she could find on previous attempts to avoid the same pitfalls. SHEILD was apparently really used to this and simply had her working a couple hours a week in an engineering lab that did more repair work than inventing. Worked out great for her so she didn’t go insane just sitting at her desk reading all day.
Having the news on in the background, it was yet another report on the infamous playboy who’s name was burned onto her side. She didn’t mean to question the universes plans but everything about this guy irked her. At this point she wondered if he even had Words or if she was cursed in a one sided match. It had never happened before but there were theories out there.
This report was different though. She noticed a distinct lack of smiles and jokes and turned the volume up.
“As of this morning there is still no word on the whereabouts of Tony Stark of Stark industries. Reports from the scene of the attack have indicated that he was not among the casualties found but no further information has been released”
She quickly turns off the TV and sits down shocked. Ellie hadn’t watched the news yesterday. She hadn’t known that her soulmate was in trouble. Quickly running to the bathroom and throwing herself in a stall, she whips off her shirt frantic to see if the words were still there.
Breathing a sigh of relief, the words were there. She had never been so grateful to see the bad pickup line. Despite her earlier thoughts questioning the match, Ellie had no wish to be one of the ones to lose her words. She heard how painful it could be, mostly used in ads to deter drinking and driving or other such nonsense but there had to be some truth to it.
Ellie decided to head home for the night. Really she stayed home for the next four days counting the weekend. Luckily she had already met the 40 hours a week and didn’t even need to use her sick time.
She had the news on religiously. And even on Monday when she went back to workshe made sure to have an alert on for any new news.
A month and a half after the story broke of his disappearance, they started talking about what would happen if he was dead. How his company wanted to declare him dead for tax purposes. It made her sick and every time she saw Obadiah Stane on her screen she wanted to hurl.
I have to do something, Ellie thought. But what???? I technically have proof he’s alive but I don’t really want anyone to know about me. Come on Ellie you’re a fucking genius, solve the puzzle.
She came up with using a new email address from a local library to send a message with a picture of her words to Colonial Rhodes. She had seen him around Tony a lot and he seemed very affected by this. If anyone would continue the search off an anonymous tip, it would be him. Ms. Potts might too but Ellie couldn’t find her information to copy her on the email.
After sending the email, she logged out and never logged back on to that email. The whole time she had her hair up in a hat and fake glasses on. One good thing about working with spies is that you learned that the simplest disguise is often the best.
The next day on the news cycle, they said that the military was continuing the search for Tony form new information that they had declined to share. Ellie was grateful that Rhodes had taken her tip seriously. She could breathe just a smidge easier knowing that they were at least still looking for him. Who knows, maybe this would be the reason they met.
Now that she had faced the possibility of never even really meeting her soulmate, she had a lot more patience and forgiveness for his past. It’s not like she was a saint either.
I wonder what the first thing I will say be? Ellie thought trying to focus on the future where she had a soulmate, alive and well.