Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers or Ferrari.
Chapter 1: Dog Tags and the Sahara Desert
The cold rain had saturated her skin. Her hair was soaking wet. There was a dark storm overhead, and it had been there for the past two hours, pouring it's guts out all over the poor fifteen-year-old, runaway orphan, who's name, when self backwards, is heaven. Of course, she doesn't look, act or even talk like an angel, so maybe it means the opposite of an angel - a devil. At least what everyone says.
She didn't exactly know how long she'd been walking for or where on earth she was headed, but she was sick of her brother shutting her in orphanage after orphanage when she breaks out of them every time without fail. Surely he would know by now that she doesn't like those places one bit.
The street was deserted, and the last few towns had been quiet for a while now, so it must've been close to midnight. She walked over to the nearest open shop and peered in the window to check the time. 11:26pm. Wow. That meant she'd been walking for nearly eight hours, which meant the she could be expecting her brother to track her down anytime now, since he always turned up to take her to his house after she ran away. One of the advantages of his secret government job was that he had the resources to keep track of his mischievous little sister's movements around the globe. That could get annoying for her at times.
Just then, she saw a flash of headlights coming from down the dark street. She knew that it could be anybody just driving around this late at night, so she turned and continued walking, knowing that if it was her brother, he would stop for her.
Glancing over her shoulder at the bright shine of the headlights, she noticed that the car had slowed and was now following her alongside the pathway. It was her brother's dark, cherry red Ferrari F430 that was just one of the many cars that she knew he owned.
The shiny car came to a stop and she went to open the door but stopped when she noticed through the darkly tinted windows that it wasn't her brother. Although, she did vaguely remember the fire-like, long, red hair of his work partner.
She tapped on her window and signalled for her to put it down so she could talk to her. Once the window was down, she spoke before the redhead could get a word out.
"Hi," she said, arrogant and sarcastic.
The redhead, who's name she'd forgotten, smirked at the younger girl. "Well, I didn't know I'd come to pick up Stark, because I wouldn't have come."
"Where's my brother?" she ordered, ignoring the woman's remark. The smirk fell from her face and she put on her poker face. Her brother also had an equally good poker face as this chick.
"Look, Nevaeh, I have better things to do. Are you getting in or do you plan to build a makeshift house out of sticks down the road?"
The teenage girl sighed hastily, trudged back to the car door and got in, soaking the whole backseat in less than ten seconds. The familiar redheaded woman stomped her foot on the gas and Nevaeh was thrown back on the seat.
"Gosh, woman! Don't you know how to drive?" The woman didn't reply, though, she just smirked in the rear view mirror.
"So, are you going to answer my question or not?" Nevaeh asked after a minute of silence had passed.
"Your brother is busy," came her short reply. Nevaeh waited for her to elaborate, but she stayed quiet again.
"What's he doing?" she hinted rudely, trying to pry information from the impossible woman.
"Working."
"When will he be finished, then?" The short-tempered girl was growing more impatient by the second.
"When he finishes his work." Nevaeh huffed in annoyance.
"Why don't you give any information that's actually worth knowing?!" she half yelled. The redhead smirked in the mirror again, which only made Nevaeh angrier - she growled at the reflection.
"Fine. You want some useful information? Here it is: your brother went on a mission without me, and now he's gone missing somewhere in the Sahara desert. Happy now?" the woman almost shouted as she kept her eyes on the road in front of her.
Nevaeh didn't know how to react to that. She just sat, sopping wet, in the backseat of her brother's shiny Ferrari, her mouth hanging open as she tried to make sense of this information.
"Is anyone looking for him?" she asked quietly, a minute later.
The woman turned the heating on in the car before she spoke, and Nevaeh suddenly realised how cold she was now.
"A team has been sent to recover him, but he could be anywhere. The Sahara desert is 5,841,000 square miles." Her tone was clipped, but after knowing her brother for her whole life, Nevaeh could tell that she was hiding something, and it was bothering her. This woman was exactly like her brother.
She suddenly remembered the last time she saw her brother. She had been sitting in his room, waiting for him to finish in the shower and get dressed, when she noticed his dog tags sitting on his bedside table. She had picked them up and inspected them, only to find that one of them wasn't even his, and belonged to someone else.
Natasha Romanoff.
Nevaeh had realised that this was his partner's tag, and thought that maybe all partners did that for safety or something, so that if anything happened to one of them and someone found them, they could find the other.
Nevaeh looked back up into the mirror to find the redhead's eyes trained on her instead of watching the road.
"You're Natasha Romanoff, aren't you?" she said in realisation.
The woman nodded. "Why do you have one of my brother's dog tags?" the young girl asked curiously. She saw Natasha reach up and hold the dog tags around her neck in her spare hand. It then hit Nevaeh that this woman obviously missed her partner and wanted to have him back more than she showed anyone.
Natasha took a deep breath before answering. "We traded on of our own tags for safety reasons." Her answer sounded like it was worded carefully and only half true.
Nevaeh nodded, no longer in the mood for asking questions, although she still had plenty. Her main question that she wanted an answer for, which she knew would never be answered by Natasha, was this.
Why isn't Natasha out looking for Clint instead of finding me?