Natasha drove back to New York the same night. There was not enough money left on the card for a hotel and she didn't want to use any of the safehouses. They were all tracked, and she wanted to avoid SHIELD's scrutiny as much as she could. And her biological clock needed time to adjust again anyway.

The car handled just as nicely as she would expect it to and the traffic was minimal so late in the night, so she made good time.

She stopped just past Trenton to refuel and grab something to eat. She also got a prepaid sim card from the very uninterested gas station clerk, who didn't even deem her worthy of a single look.

She was still half an hour off when she made the call. First one went to voicemail, but the second attempt was more successful.

"Hello?" a sleep-ridden female voice answered. "Who's there?"

"Hi, Hanima," Natasha chirped. "It's been a while."

"Nat? Is that you?"

"The one and only."

"God, I told you not to call me! Especially not in the middle of the night! I'm hanging up now."

"No, wait…"

The call ended. Natasha dialed the number again.

It took seven signals for Hanima to pick up. "I told you, I don't want anything to do with your business. Stop calling me."

"I need your help, Hani."

"You always do. But I don't do that anymore. I shouldn't even be talking to you. So good night and good luck."

Natasha waited a second. The call stayed active. "Please? This is the last time, I promise. One quick favor and we're even and I'll never ever bother you again."

"Urgh," the woman on the other end growled in surrender. "What do you want?"

"It's best not discussed over the phone. I'll come over."

"Now?!"

"Yes, now. It's urgent."

The line rustled with a sigh. "Fine. Do you need my address?"

"No."

"Of course you don't."

The suburbs were quiet, the residents sleeping behind their drawn drapes. She parked an intersection away, under a cover of a great oak tree, and walked the rest of the way. The house looked like any other on the street, single story with a semi-detached garage, with whitewashed shiplap on the walls and gray shingle on the roof. She crossed the manicured lawn, jumped over a low picket fence then knocked on the back door.

There was a rush of movement and the light came on, then the door opened a bit and a face of middle-aged woman appeared. There was no makeup on the tan skin and dark hair slipped from under the hastily applied scarf.

"Good to see you, Hanima," Natasha said. "Can I come in or are we going to talk like that?"

The woman shushed her. "I go by Alisha these days, if you have to know," she whispered and opened the door to let Natasha in.

They were standing in a kitchen. There was a high toddler chair by the table and kids' toys strewn everywhere.

"So, who's the lucky gal?" asked Natasha, pointing at the photo of a smiling woman holding a baby wrapped in a blue blanked that was pinned on the fridge.

"I don't see how that's any of your business," Hanima hissed.

She led Natasha further into the house and down the stairs into the basement. The cellar was just as regular-looking and in place in a suburb house as the kitchen above; shelves lining the walls were heavy with preserves and unused household items and there was a laundry setup in the corner and a heating furnace in another.

"Under the rules of the plea I'm not allowed to own anything more advanced than an ipad," Hanima explained, flipped a switch on the wall and pulled one of the shelves away from the wall. It moved smoothly on the hidden wheels and revealed a new door. Hanima pulled a key from her back pocket, unlocked it, and pushed it open.

Natasha stepped inside. "Well, what do you know." This, for a change, did look like a secret lair of a super-hacker. The room wasn't big, but every possible surface was littered with electronics at least half of which Natasha couldn't even name, lest figure out a use for. One wall was dedicated to a multimonitor computer setup and that's what was the object of Hanima's attention. The displays flicked to life with a press of a button. There was a picture of a basket of kittens set as a wallpaper, multiplied on every monitor.

Natasha snorted.

"What? I'm a traditionalist. And I like cats," Hanima said, her tone changed now that she was in her own element. "Whose secrets do you want me to uncover for you?"

"World Security Council."

Hanima whistled "Your appetites has grown since the last time," she said, her fingers running across the keyboard already. "Not that I complain but this is a broad river to fish in. You'll have to be more specific."

"I need to find a prisoner they are holding. A very specific one."

"Do they have a name?" Hanima asked as she started patting away on the one of three keyboards. Why did she need three was beyond Natasha.

"Loki."

"Any surname?" Hanima questioned, only barely paying attention, focused on a login box that popped up. The string of letters she put into it looked like a jumble without much sense to Natasha, but it did something, redirecting to a different page.

"Uhm," Natasha huffed. Did Loki even have one? Thor went with "Odinson" but that was just a patronym, not a real surname, and Loki wouldn't use it, not in a million years.

"It's 'Loki' like the alien that attacked New York? That's an unfortunate name to have these days."

Natasha bit her lip.

"Wait," Hanima paused, turned and eyed her with a frown. "You can't mean…"

"Yep."

"And he is still on Earth?!"

"Apparently," Natasha said cagily. "Can you find him?"

Hanima hesitated, her gaze still on Natasha. "Only if there's any info in the system," she said in the end, then turned back to the screen and added, "luckily for you there's barely anything you can do these days without leaving a digital trail."

Natasha picked a pile of dismantled hard drives from a stool, put them away on a similar pile on one of the shelves and sat down, tapping her fingers on her thigh.

"Stop it. You're distracting me. And don't touch my stuff," Hanima muttered half-heartedly. "I'm in… Woah."

Natasha swept the screens but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, just lines of code. "What?"

"See that?" Hanima pointed at one of the windows, with quickly scrolling lines of text running through it. "It's a DNN running on the server."

"And what's that?"

"A deep neural network."

"Uhm…"

"An AI. At least a beginning of one."

"What does that mean for us?"

"It means this is going to be a challenge. And that I need a coffee. There's some in the cupboard above the stove."

Natasha sighed, went up the stairs and back to the kitchen. She stepped through the threshold and only then realized something isn't right. The light was on when it certainly wasn't when they left. It was too late though.

There was a clank of broken porcelain and a surprised yelp and then she had to dodge as a knife was tossed in her direction. "Hey," she yelled from behind a doorframe, "I'm Hanima's…. Alisha's friend." She peeked into the kitchen and had to retreat immediately, as another blade flew by and stuck into the wall down the hallway. "Can you stop?"

There was a trumpet of footsteps on the wooden stairs and Hanima burst into the room. "She is telling the truth! Don't kill her," she yelled. "Sarah, this is Natasha, my former… coworker," she said and pulled her from behind the cover and into the doorway. "Natasha, this is Sarah, my wife."

"Hi," Natasha said and eyed the older woman. She was tall and lean, and her hair had a deep chestnut color. There was another knife still in her hand that she was still considering throwing, judging by her stance. "I see your taste in women hasn't changed all that much."

"Shut up."

"What are you doing here?" Sarah hissed and stashed the blade back into the knife block on the counter. Her eyes drifted away from Natasha and onto her partner. "You were down in the basement."

"Yes, but there has been…"

"Keep it. I'm tired of listening to your excuses. It's always the same one," Sarah said. "I'm going back to bed."

She left. Natasha stood there, unsure what to do.

"I hope you're happy," Hanima said with a sniffle.

"Not particularly, no," Natasha said. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't have come, if I had any other options."

"Why the hell do you want to find a guy who attacked us anyway?"

"I'm trying to prevent more people from getting hurt." That much was true.

"You should have started with me," Hanima grunted. "Am I getting the coffee or not?"

"That's it. There's nothing more recent, or anything in the gap between May and this."

"That can't be right," Natasha said, staring at a single page document. "There has to be more. Anything."

"If there is, it's hidden under some code name and we won't find it without crunching through all the data, cross-referencing dates, names and places. It would take years to sift through with my hardware. And there may be other servers that I can't even know are there, because they are not directly connected to the main one."

"Can you print it for me?"

"Print? Are you still living in the nineties?"

"I don't want to leave a trace like that if they screen my devices."

"They?" Hanima asked, got up and retrieved a printer from one of the lower shelves. There was a significant layer of dust on it.

"SHIELD, the Council, you name it."

"What did you get yourself into?"

"I'm not entirely sure yet."

The printer went live with a screech, but the document still printed. It took a world-renowned hacker to get that to work on first try, it seemed.

"Here," Hanima said, handing her the page.

Natasha took the last look before folding it and stashing it into her back pocket. "Thank you."

"What are you going to do now?"

"Go to Norwalk, Ohio, apparently."

She didn't go to Norwalk, not yet. Loki wasn't there anyway. According to the scrap of an admission file – most likely an oversight from someone tasked with purging any mention of him from the records – the base right outside the city was where Loki was taken right after they arrived back on Earth. And it was clear from Fury's words that he was transferred… somewhere.

It was still a good place to start, but she had to be careful. It wasn't a SHIELD facility, just a military base, used by various agencies and, it turns out, Council's own forces. Why they even needed those always seemed weird to Natasha, SHIELD was supposed to be Council's extension. Then again, SHIELD was a state agency, while the Council was not, and it was designed to provide oversight, not establish direct control. Some discord had to find its way in there, sooner or later, especially after that massive fuck-up with the nuke.

The final report didn't even mention the warhead's original target. All it said was that it was used in coordination with Stark's Iron Man to bring down the mothership. They tried to kill millions of people, more than the swarm ever could, yet no one was even held responsible for the decision.

She browsed through the rest of the report too, looking for clues, potential hints about what the Council could want with Loki. She played the recording from the Pegasus facility, at least the part from the Tesseract chamber that managed to upload to the cloud before the base blew up, and watched Loki kill seven people with little hesitation. She knew that it happened, she knew why he did it, but it was still hard to watch. The fact that he looked extremely confused and like he was about to collapse any minute made it in no way easier and only reminded her of his fate immediately before that moment.

It came to the part where Loki used the scepter to turn Barton then jammed and stopped playing. She skipped forward, but the rest of it was just a muffed, pixelated mess, then the player crashed. Maybe it was for the best, just seeing Clint's eyes turn dark and then bright blue churned in her stomach and she suspected seeing the rest of it wouldn't be any more pleasant.

She went through the casualty list, trying to find the man Loki mentioned, the one with Hydra in his brain. It turned out a harder task than she expected. There was a list from the facility, the guards in Stuttgart (apparently Schafer, the man whose eye Loki took in the opera house, survived and made full recovery, sans the eye), the staff on the Helicarrier, and then the people from New York (the number was a lot lower than the initial estimations, landing in low hundreds instead of thousands), but nothing more. She went through unsolved homicides for Brooklyn, where Loki's base of operation was situated in an abandoned warehouse, then for the entirety of New York and then surrounding towns, at first for a week, then a month after the invasion but found nothing that could match.

Her own report was still showing up as "due", as she never got to finish and submit it. Clint's one was full of holes and little inconsistencies, but the transcripts of interviews and re-examinations he went through later proved a bit more helpful. The further from the battle they dated, the more coherent and more informative they've grew. Just like Loki, Barton had a hard time differentiating between the wishes of the scepter and his own wants and feelings, but the memories came back fully, in the end.

She kind of wished they didn't, judging from the content.

The fact that not everyone in Loki's circle of henchmen was mind controlled was another surprise, if of a different kind. Clint was a bit fuzzy on the details there, as they were apparently the enemies of SHIELD he knew about beforehand.

Then she got to the relevant piece of info. She read and reread the transcript, then followed the link at the bottom to watch the video recording.

It showed a dropdown isometric view of a stock standard interrogation room, a metal table bolted to the floor and two flimsy plastic chairs, currently empty. The timestamp and filename in the bottom corner informed her it was recorded at the Triskelion, a week and two days after the attack.

The door to the interrogation room opened and Clint Barton stepped in. It felt out of place, seeing him in his regular clothes in such a sterile, obviously militaristic environment; unless he was home, he tended to wear standard issue cargo pants and gray t-shirts. She knew him long enough to know the choice wasn't random, no, he was driving a point home. A point that he was still a human after all. Well, Clint did pick up a thing or two from Natasha's repertoire over the years.

Clint looked at his wristwatch then scoured the undeniably empty room before sitting down in one of the chairs and shooting a nasty smile at the camera. She fast forwarded the next ten minutes of him growing more and more impatient, toying with the buttons of his shirt and dragging his fingers over the edge of the metal table.

There was a sound of the door opening on the other side of the room and a woman in formal civilian clothes stepped in, her face obscured by the position of the camera.

"Agent Tucker," Clint acknowledged her with a brief nod. Natasha didn't know anyone of that name who worked at the Triskelion, so it was either a fresh transfer of someone from a division they never interacted with.

"Good to see you again, agent Barton. Please excuse my lateness, there were some unexpected affairs that had to be dealt with."

"It's all good, it's not like I have anywhere to be," Clint said and smiled at her. It looked genuine, but Natasha knew Barton enough to know that it wasn't.

"Well, if I'm not mistaken, you're scheduled for your final psychological reevaluation later today and, if all goes well, you'll be cleared for active duty."

Clint shrugged and nodded. The smile was gone.

"So, is there anything new that came to you since we last spoke… When was it, two days ago?"

Clint nodded again. "Kind of."

She pulled out an old-fashioned clip pad with a page of tight machine print clipped to it then noted something on the margin. Resolution of the recording was not high enough for the writing on it to be readable. "Care to elaborate?" she prompted.

"I remembered what happened to agent Cole. The man I grabbed from the SHIELD's armory and brought to Loki to change."

"Yes, it's all right here, agent Barton," the woman said, tapping her pen on the clipboard, without looking up at Clint. "We were working under the premise that the control unraveled and he escaped."

"Well, the control did fail for some reason, but he didn't escape." Clint curled his hands into fists and clenched his jaw. "I put him in the trunk and dropped him in that back alley behind the motel, right where he was found."

"You let him go?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Clint licked his lips and narrowed his eyes. "I'm not sure. I was ordered to deal with the man after he went nuts. So I did."

"You weren't ordered to kill him?"

"No. I would if I were," he added bitterly, "even if it was implied. But it wasn't."

"Do you know why?"

"No. I just… It was Loki's wish for the man to be gone, not to be dead. There was a grey zone there and I used it, I think."

She scribbled something on the page again. "I see. Is there anything else?"

Clint took in a long breath and his fingers dragged on the edge of the table again. "No… I mean, it's nothing solid. Just… a feeling. I've told doctor Hasher about that already and he thinks that it's just an aftereffect of the scepter's control on my mind."

"You're free to share those here as well. We never know which parts could be useful, do we?"

Clint grunted out a reluctant agreement. "So, you know how the control worked, right? It projected Loki's wishes and overwrote my own will," he paused and sat up, resting his hands on the table and looking her in the eyes. "I was commanded, and I obeyed without questions. I had no other choice."

"That's the assumption we are working under, yes."

Barton rolled his eyes at the "assumption" part and Tucker left if without a comment.

"I feel like there was something else there, too," Clint muttered. "I don't know how to describe it, precisely, but – underneath those direct orders – there was this sort of... stream of consciousness, of half-formulated thoughts, feelings. Frustration and boiling anger and... Fear, deep, primal fear. I thought that was that was just another way to assert control, to make sure I did what I've been told, to force me into submission. But then I read the preliminary reports from the experiments R&D did with the scepter. It does something to hijack the frontal lobe connections and rewire them, making it impossible to make any sort of conscious decision not in line with the wish of whoever wields it. It can be used by humans with a relative success."

"You shouldn't have this level of clearance when you're still on your probation period." There was no real reprimand in her voice, only a dry statement of facts.

"You should complain to director Fury directly then, not to me."

The way agent Tucker squared her shoulders at that made Natasha absolutely certain that she did. "So, what do you think this – as you put it – stream of consciousness meant?"

"Loki's thoughts seeping over the link."

"What makes you think that?"

Clint made an impressive "are you fucking kidding me, I've just told you" face before answering. "Think about it. Humans don't do well in too stressful situations. And we were the strike team, the vanguard. Why hobble us with unnecessary doubts and fears? Also, those grew stronger when he lost his focus, when we were waiting for the next move or just resting before..." he cut himself off. "You catch the drift."

"The strategy division went through the entirety of Loki's plan back and forth and judged it highly risky and not tactically valid. Your observation, if true, doesn't stand out as uncharacteristic in that context."

"The thing is – as hard as it is to praise someone who did to you what he did to me – Loki could plan ahead and anticipate opponents' moves without much effort. But the framework of the whole invasion was just sloppy and every move he made us take was just postponing the inevitable."

"And what is your take of that?"

"It wasn't his plan. And he was afraid of whoever coined it."

Agent Trucker didn't respond, only made another note on the notepad.

"Before you write if of as a sympathy for the devil, Stockholm syndrome or whatever fancy words you're going to use, let me tell you one more thing," Clint demanded.

"Yes, agent Barton?" she stopped and raised her head.

"What Loki did to me – to us – was despicable and I hate his guts. And I still plan to put an arrow – or hollow point bullet if that doesn't work – through his head if he ever shows his ugly mug on Earth again. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that he wasn't here just because he wanted to redecorate Lower Manhattan. Someone has sent him. And, even if Loki is gone for good, there's no reason to assume his boss is going to stop further attempts just because Hulk smashed his lapdog into a concrete floor a few times. Make sure to note that down."

She paused the video – according to the transcription there wasn't much past that point anyway – and stared at the screen, still showing the frozen image of Clint, his hand on the table clutched in a fist.

There was so much to unpack here.

Even though Clint's reasoning was faulty – he had no idea Loki was working under duress and acting against his own will – he still reached a proper conclusion. And SHIELD knew that, which meant the Council knew as well. For months now and they still did fuck-all about it then wasted at least two weeks without asking Loki a single question, deciding instead to use that time to… She didn't even want to think about what exactly, although it wasn't that hard to guess.

SHIELD didn't even wait for the battle dust to settle to start experiments with the scepter. Human experiments. Now Pierce had both the glowstick and Loki. Implications of that were disturbing at the very least.

Then there was agent Cole. The man with Hydra conditioning in his head. An agent of SHIELD. If Hydra had one person on the inside, how likely it was that there were more? The very thought made her break out in cold sweat. What if it was someone she knew? What if it was someone who she relied on during her previous missions or someone she would have to rely on in the future, if she had to run more of those? What if it's someone with an access to Loki?

She squeezed her eyes shut, but it only brought more horrific images to her mind's eye.

Her core shimmered at the edge of her awareness and she pulled it forth, finding consolation in the way it gleamed and changed. She let it extend past her body and the solid presence of the room around grounded her and mellowed the fear rattling in her brain. She was here, she was still alive, and she was going to solve it, even she was alone with this.

She always was, in the end.

Well, Agent Cole was still alive too. And it looked like they needed to chat. She pulled up the SHIELD database and searched away.