The guard at the main gate leading to the elevators didn't even deign her with a glance as she casually swiped her access card on the reader, her face down and pulled tight in concentration as she studied the contents of the file she nicked from one of the offices she passed on her way. The contents made very little sense to her, but it was still a good prop.

The card still worked, which meant Marcus did not report the happenings of the previous night to his superiors, or, even if he did, the connection hasn't been established.

Once inside the elevator, she had to swipe the card again. The lift itself was old, but the panel was one of the fancy, touch controlled ones, obviously a new addition, and only blinked to life once she ran the employee card against the side. It processed for a few nail-biting seconds, then lit up, showing her the available levels, each with a brief description on the side. She tapped on "laboratories – 5", while frowning at the "detainment -7".

She bit her lip, waiting for an unauthorized access alarm to sound or – at least – for a prompt to pop up, urging her to confirm the credentials with a fingerprint, or an iris scan, or whatever else could the system require. Then the lift jerked and started moving down.

Well, then.

The elevator stopped and she stepped out into a dimly lit corridor. Rows of doors lined the walls, with numbers and designations specified on the plaques beside each. She passed a couple labs and conference rooms until she reached one with a name. A personal office. She scouted ahead then pulled on the handle. It was closed. There was a magnetic card reader built into the door, but also a keyhole, presumably for emergency access.

Usually at that point she would have a skeleton key, designed to open all openable doors in the building, provided to her by her team beforehand. A sweep of the land, too. A main objective lined up and a straight path to reach it. She sighed and pulled out her precision tools.

The door closed behind her with a click and she breathed a sight of relief. The office was small, big enough to fit a desk, two chairs and a line of shelves on the back side and not much more. A single picture of a sunny beach adorned the otherwise empty walls. It was a bleak, cramped place and she pitied anyone who was forced to spend long work hours confined to it.

She unplugged the fax machine from the network socket (seriously, a fax machine?) and connected Hanima's device. The diodes on it blinked a couple of times then glowed steady green. There was a dialing signal in her earpiece.

"Hello?" sounded Hanima's voice, just after a single signal. "You in?"

"Yep, I'm in," Natasha whispered back.

Hanima hummed. "Yeah, I'm linking, right now. Where are you? Did you find the mainframe?"

"No, it's just some office. I need help finding the server, or at least an access point. Can you help me look for it?"

"The connection you're using is isolated from the rest of the LAN. I need a direct access."

"Uhm…"

"Is there a PC in there? A desktop or something like that?"

"Yeah."

"Plug the other end of the setup into the USB port."

Natasha pulled on the cable on the back end of the contraption. "It won't reach. The cable's too short."

She could hear Hanima rolling her eyes on the other side. "Just move the computer closer, geez, do I really have to tell you this stuff?"

Natasha ignored the jab in the words and wrestled the computer tower free from its place under the desk. It moved and pulled on the monitor cable. The display wobbled, forcing Natasha to catch it before it toppled over.

"What was that?" Hanima inquired.

"Nothing. It's connected."

"Push the power button. You know, big, circular thing that goes pushy-pushy somewhere in the front?"

Natasha bit down on the retort and pushed the button.

"Aaand… my god, why does it take so long, haven't you guys heard about SSDs?"

"It's still loading," Natasha provided.

"I figured," Hanima said. The login screen popped up. "Ugh, finally."

The cursor moved, then strings of letters started appearing, first in the password box, then in some sort of an overlay that appeared on top of it. An error message flashed a few times, then the loading animation showed up again, taking Hanima to the desktop. "Voila," Hanima exclaimed. "Now off to the harder part."

Natasha watched and waited, as Hanima tapped away commands, the sound of clicking carrying over the connection. She was running some sort of network scan, that much Natasha could tell from the addresses that popped up. "Okay, I know where it is in the network. As for the physical location…" There was some more tapping and Hanima hummed to herself or muttered "oh, that's curious" or "no, that's not it" a couple of times. Natasha sat back in the chair and waited.

"Okay, I'm pulling up the plan of the facility." A file opened, showing up the layout. "That's the floor you're on right now, right?"

"Yeah."

"You need to go down a level and then down here," Hanima said, switched layouts and circled the cursor around an area in the bottom right corner. "That's the BMS control room and there's an unmarked technical space with a huge air duct leading to it from the outside just on the other side of that wall, my bet is that's where they keep the servers. Any questions?"

"Nope."

"Great, hear you in a minute."

Hanima disconnected and Natasha picked up her equipment, replaced the items she moved, took one final sweep of the room to make sure its just how she found it, then retreated back into a hallway. Only to bump into a person that was just passing by. The impact knocked the prop folder she was still carrying out of her hands. It fell to the floor, spilling its contents.

"I'm so sorry," the woman uttered and bent over to pick up the papers.

Natasha crouched next to her. "No, that's entirely my fault, I should've looked where I'm going."

Woman's eyes stopped on one of the pages she was holding and her brows furrowed, then she looked up at Natasha. Natasha pulled the page out of her fingers. Woman's lips were pursed.

"I don't think we've met before," she said, hesitation evident in her voice, then her eyes dashed to Natasha's chest, where her employee's ID should be. "Which division are you from?"

"RnD," Natasha said. "Third floor." That much she remembered from the plans. "Name's Welles. Like Wales, but with an E," she said, smiled, and extended her hand in welcome.

The woman got up and was now measuring her with open wariness. She did not shook Natasha's hand. "What are you doing down here?"

"My boss sent me down to grab this stuff from Hewlett's office and give it to doctor DeWitt. He forgot about it or something."

"You mean, 'she'?"

Goddamned gender neutral names. "Or her. It's like my third time down here and I don't think I've ever met doctor Hewlett. I was told you might require some further assistance, too," Natasha said. "Busy night, am I right?"

The woman eyed her for a moment longer, then scoffed. "If just that," she said, then chuckled nervously. "I'm Naomi." She chucked again and pointed at her badge. 'Naomi Randall, Bsc,' it said. "As you can see."

Natasha smiled back. "I need to stop misplacing mine. They'll fire me one of those days just for that."

"It's a wonder they didn't already," Naomi said and there was just a little bit of acid in her words. "Watch out for DeWitt. He is in a temper today. More so than usually."

"I will," Natasha responded with a small nod, "thanks for the warning."

"Don't mention it. We have to watch out for ourselves, cause no man will."

"Right. Now, excuse me, I don't want to keep the good doctor waiting, if he is as pissed as you say."

"Yes, of course. See you around!"

"Yeah, see you!" Natasha said, turned on her heel and marched down the hall, torn between praying to all that's saint that it was the right way to DeWitt's office and scolding herself for her carelessness.

There was a guard in the BMS room, hunched over his desk, his eyes firmly on the phone in his hands. He sprung up and started to shout something before the tranquillizer dart she jabbed into his jugular vein kicked in. The yell froze in his throat and he crumbled to the floor. She dragged him away and left his limp body behind a stack of electrical boxes. Some backup power setup, she supposed.

She jumped onto the seat, hooked Hanima's device into the port in the console and waited for the connection.

"Took you long enough," Hanima chastised. "I was starting to get worried."

"No need, I'm fine. Can you work your magic from here, or do I need to get to the other room?"

There was a glass partition dividing the part of the room with the console and the rows of server racks, but the door was closed shut and locked with what looked like a solid, dual layer magnetic lock, secured on both sides.

"Let me see," Hanima said and there was the unmistakable sound of her fingers running across the keyboard. Was it so clicky for some reason or was it just for show? "Yeah, this is good, there's a direct access from here. What are we looking for?"

"Everything between twenty-fifth of August and, let's say, twentieth of September."

"Everything everything? There's going to be terabytes of data…"

"As much as you can. Focus on the detainee transfer data, but any surveillance from the lower levels, daily reports, science data sheets might be useful. Just… anything you can find."

"I can't really look at the files, only the manifests. I'm just dumping it to your drive, downloading it over the network would take too long and I can't take too much bandwidth or they would know someone's hogging their upload."

"Just… get whatever that might look useful. I trust your judgment."

"It's not like you have any other choice," Hanima smirked. "Uh oh."

"What?"

"The firewall just blocked one of my little guys. Don't worry, I can… Motherfucker!"

"Hani?"

"No, it's fine, just a small hiccup. I can deal with it."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, yeah, this is a piece of cake." There was a strain in her voice. "I'm downloading first batch of files. Security reports, judging from the folder structure. Is the drive active?"

"The blue light is blinking."

"Yep, that's it."

"So, now what?"

"Now you're going to wait for it to copy over."

"How long that's going to take?"

"Dunno, a couple of minutes at least, depending on the transfer rate, then I have another download queued up. Some video files, so it's going to take even longer and the sequential read rate is abysmal. Seriously, don't you government folk ever heard about hardware upgrade cycles?"

"Can't you make it go faster?"

"I'm already using best compression. I might be a tech whizz, but I'm not a magician. Unless you are, all we can do now is wait."

Well, about that. "Okay. Should we stay on the line or…"

"No, no, we have to stay connected. My link is running through the same signal routes and I have to keep a tab on it. This works best."

"Okay then," Natasha said and sat back on the chair.

The entire left side of the console was a panel of monitors, showing camera feeds from inside of the facility. Most showed darkened, empty rooms, the furnishing and equipment barely recognizable with the faint light coming from the hallways, some showed labs with people in white coveralls drifting between workstations or hunched over devices and benches. Then, relegated to one of the smaller monitors in the corner, was the feed from the basement.

Natasha's hand went for the controller without much thinking and she flicked between cameras. First in line were views on the corridors, long and nondescript, with gray concrete floor and tilled walls, rows of reinforced doors lining each side. Then came the interrogation rooms, with their metal tables bolted to the floor, chairs folded along the walls and conveniently placed D-rings on the floor with an easy-to-guess purpose.

Then, there were the cells. Dark and cramped, some with just a narrow metal shelf on the wall to serve as a bunk, and some devoid even of that little comfort. Some were empty. Not all.

Natasha flipped between images of men and women, slumbering or sitting huddled in the corners of their little, dark boxes.

She pressed the button again, the image changed and she gaped at the screen. It was another cell and in the middle of it sat a girl, long, fair hair falling onto her narrow shoulders, a thick chain running from a wide metal collar around her throat, linking it to a lug in the wall. Her eyes, set deep in her gaunt, emotionless face were staring directly at the camera, glowing bright violet.

"Hani?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you intercept a feed from a camera?"

"Uhm, depends. Is it connected to the server?"

"It runs through the console. I'm looking at it right now…"

"Then yeah, possibly. Can you identify the stream source? There must be at least a couple dozen running on the network at one time."

"I don't know… It's coming from the level below."

"So…" There was a couple of clicks in the background and murmurs as Hanima sifted through the sources. "The detainment level? Okay, I… " There was a moment of silence. "What the fuck? Who are those people?! Why are they there? What's going on?"

"I don't know, Hani," Natasha said bluntly.

"Woah, why are her eyes glowing?"

"I don't know," Natasha repeated.

"Are those… is this some sort of superpowered folk prison? Did you know about this?"

"I… suspected."

Hanima uttered something unintelligible under her breath and tapped away.

"This is where they kept your guy, right?"

"Yeah."

"But he is not there anymore, is he?"

"No."

"That's why you're trying to find him…"

A pause.

"Natasha?"

"Yes?"

"What are we going to do about it?"

Natasha didn't answer. What could they do? She was alone, without any backup, her only support connected via wire from five hundred miles away, her spare pistol and two dozen bullets her only weapon, against an entire facility, with dozens of armed guards. And, if that weren't enough, she had no idea who those people were and the reasons why they were confined. They were hostages kept there without any record or oversight and that alone made it wrong, but they could still be dangerous. No one would employ this level of security just for a bunch of unfortunate bystanders.

"Nat?"

"I don't think there's anything we can do… Not like this."

Hanima made a little noise that sounded like she wanted to protest, but didn't say it out loud.

"Are you recording this?"

"Yes. I'll try finding out who they are, at least. Maybe…"

"That's the…"

"Someone's coming! Hide!" Hanima yelled.

Natasha dropped to her knees on instinct alone, tugging the pistol free. Just as she did, the door beeped and opened and someone stepped inside. There was a sound of a gun's safety lever being released and she matched it.

"Come out," a male voice said. "I know you're in here."

She sprung up and aimed her gun at the man. His own weapon was up already. They stood like that for a moment, aiming at one another.

John DeWitt crooked his head and studied her curiously. "It was you, wasn't it? In my house."

Natasha pursed her lips and stayed silent.

"Come on, the place will be swarming with guards in just a minute. They will get it out of you, in the end. They always do. You can tell me now just as well."

He was bluffing. Even if there was no audible notification, Hanima would have warned her if an alarm was raised.

"And what if I were?" she answered, playing along for now.

"I would ask you why were you there, why you're here now and where your allegiances lie."

"It's… complicated," she evaded. She had no idea what kind of answers he wanted to hear.

"It's a simple question."

"Well, it's not a simple answer. But we can start with you lowering your gun and putting it away. If you were going to shoot me, you would have shot me already."

"You first," he said and flicked his wrist.

Natasha decocked the gun and slowly lowered it, waiting for him to make his move. He stared at her for a moment longer, then followed. He stashed the gun in the pocket of his apron, still within his reach. Natasha did the same.

"How did you know I was here?"

He scoffed. "My subordinates are very loyal. The cameras got the rest."

But of course. "And yet, you came to talk instead of dropping all the heavy artillery on my ass."

"You came looking for something in my house. You're looking for something now. I want to know what it is and why it's so important."

"Why does it matter?"

"I'm a scientist. Every question is potentially worth finding an answer."

Now that was just some first class bullshit. "Mhm."

"I'm going to ask you once more: who are you and why are you here?"

She bit her lip, considering. He wasn't trying to kill her. He wasn't calling the security. He was standing there, talking to her. It couldn't be a coincidence.

"You kept someone here," she said, carefully. "Someone who is my friend."

"Oh, is that so?" he sneered. "Those people have no friends, at least not important ones," he added, pointing his chin at the monitor, still showing the view from the basement. "They wouldn't be here otherwise."

She swallowed the protest that welled up in her throat. "What is the purpose of this facility?"

"We are doing exactly what is required of us, nothing more, nothing less. We keep people on the outside safe. And blissfully unaware."

"For the good of mankind," she said dully.

"Yes, exactly. It's also exactly what you and the entirety of your agency does, whichever one it is," he flashed a nasty smile at her surprise. "That's right. I've seen enough of you people to know the type. Silent and deadly and with zero ideas how reality truly works. So, I'm asking, one last time: what is the real reason of your presence here and who do you work for?"

"I don't work for anybody, not anymore. I'm here to find my friend."

"And who would that be?"

"Loki."

His face twisted in a wince, then he glared at her through slanted eyes until his eyes widened with recognition. "I know you," he muttered. "You're one of the Avengers."

"The one and only."

He scratched his nose and adjusted his glasses. "You're not with them."

"Them?"

He shrugged dismissively, but she had her suspicious none-the-less.

"You mean Hydra?"

He winced again and leaned on the console, his fingers clenching the edge with white-knuckled intensity. She kicked the chair and it rolled in his direction. He clapped down on it with a heavy sigh. She propped herself on the desk and folded her arms. "That's one name to call it, I guess," he muttered.

"What do you know?"

"Not much, but you do hear things, read things between the lines. And they hold all the power here. Not directly, of course, all orders go through the usual hoops, but in the end they tell us what to do and we do it. It wasn't that bad at first, but now…"

"You sound like you mind it"

He shrugged again.

"Yet you still work here."

"And where else am I supposed to work? I abandoned my academic career years ago. Military had best funding then and I just got married…" He sighed again and pushed his fingers under his glasses, rubbing his eyes. "I don't have anything else. If I quit, I would never find work in the field again, they will make sure of it. I'd be nobody."

"Who are all those people?" she asked.

"I don't know," he admitted and looked down to his hands, his fingers picking at the button on his cuff. "It's not wise to ask such questions, so we do not. They are brought here and we are told what to do with them and we do it. We don't carry out investigations or look for motives, that's not our purpose. We're here to find out what makes them tick."

She listened to him speak in silence, the com-link in her ear airing only static. Hanima was listening, Natasha knew she was, but she was too smart to interrupt.

"I tried to help him, you know, I truly did," DeWitt said after a moment of silence, still not looking up at her. "I knew who he was and what he has done, but…" He paused. "It still wasn't right."

"None of this is."

He slowly shook his head.

"He is not here. But you know that already, don't you?" he said. "And before you ask the follow-up question: no, I don't know where he was taken. I was never told and I would never ask. You don't want to know more than you need to if you want to survive here."

"When was that?"

"On the… eleventh, I think. I wasn't here when they took him away, I only found out later, when I came back to work. We still had some… procedures lined up and we had to scrap it. We were directed to other projects and the subject was never brough up again."

"Who else was on that?"

"A few of my colleagues and an outside team. I'm not sure what jurisdiction they fell under, it was a package deal and we were told to work with them, so we did. They were gone the same day."

"Do you have any names?"

"Yes," he said and pulled out a small notepad from his pocket, then started scribbling. He handed her the note and she skimmed through the list. None of the names seemed familiar. Hell, most could even be false, knowing the principles under which SHIELD – and Fury in particular – operated."

"Thank you," she said, even though the gratitude was the last thing on her mind.

He waved his hand in dismissal. "I'll have to report you."

"I know. Can you give me some time?"

"Some. Not much."

"Ten minutes?"

"Five. Starting now."

Natasha passed the main building entrance before she hit into a sprint. She was almost at the hole in the fence when the alarm blared and the emergency lights came on, turning the night into a day. She dove into a patch of bushes and landed flat on her belly, her head close to the ground, then she started crawling. A floodlight swept the area, once, then twice and she froze, each time, and breathed in relief once it passed without stopping. Sounds of rushed movement, boots clattering on the beaten dirt, engines roaring to life, chased after her.

The ascending whirr of chopper blades winding up permeated the air just as she reached the thicket she used to conceal her car. She jumped onto the driver's seat and started the engine, hoping it would drown in the ruckus raising from the base. She didn't turn to go to the main road, she would be too easy to spot there, she turned off the dashboard backlight, kept the road lights off and allowed the vehicle to slowly roll down the field track, the path barely discernible in the moonless darkness. The chopper took off and flew past, its downwards facing searchlight missing her by a few dozen yards.

Stepping down on the gas pedal and getting out of the area as quickly as possible was a tantalizing prospect, but she squashed the thought. The road was narrow and ran on an embarkment and she couldn't go faster than a couple of miles an hour, not without seeing where she was going. And, even if that wasn't an issue, going faster would make the tires raise a cloud of dust, way too easy to spot from above.

It wasn't until she could no longer see the floodlights shining from the base in the rearview mirror and the noise of helicopters making their rounds faded into a background buzz that she turned on the lights on and sped up a little.

She stayed on the dirt roads, meandering between fields and – at one point – on a dyke between two reservoirs, avoiding main routes. They must've already figured she didn't leave by foot, and there were roaming patrols and roadblocks waiting for her there.

A faded sign marked a narrow path, leading through an overgrown meadow, towards dark outlines of farm buildings. She slowed down, then turned.

The gate was missing, it's remnants hanging sadly from one of the posts, and she drove onto the courtyard. There was a cottage, or, more precisely, what was left of one – a ruin with a collapsed roof and all the windows missing, then some brick outhouses and a huge straw barn further in the back. One of the door-leaves was ajar and the structure has stood there for so long without collapsing, so – after a minute deliberation – she guided the car inside and turned off the engine. The doors squeaked and protested when she swung it close on the rusted hinges. Then she stood in the darkened interior, listening to the faraway sounds of the choppers, the adrenaline levels slowly subsiding.

What a waste of time. Not only she put herself in danger, again, she also didn't learn anything she didn't know or at least suspected already. Two weeks and she got nothing, no new leads, no solid info. The names of Fury's team DeWitt provided carried little value and the file transfer didn't complete before she had to scram, so that ought to be a dud as well.

At least she didn't get shot at, this time.

The phone rang and she startled, dropping into a fighting stance, before she got her bearing.

"Hey," she whispered into the com-link.

"Oh god, are you all right?" Hanima breathed, her voice thick and trembling with worry.

Natasha had to disconnect without a warning when she evacuated the facility, so the last thing Hanima heard was DeWitt giving her five minutes before all hell broke loose. "I made it out. I'm hiding, for now. I'll make a break for it tomorrow, but for now I'll let them spread their forces further and thinner. Hopefully."

"I was worried," Hanima said. "I still am, to be honest. What the hell did you get yourself into? What was that science guy talking about. What's Hydra?"

Natasha stifled a groan. "It would be better for all of us if you didn't hear that part. The lesser you know, the safer you are."

"Well, I feel like it's a bit too late for that, I'm already in this shit up to my chest. Or my nose, if I were to go by how much it stinks. So go on, spill."

Natasha hesitated.

"Come on," Hanima prompted. "You dragged me into this, you owe me some answers. And I sincerely hope they are better than what google tells me. Who are those geniuses who figured that sharing a name with a bunch of Nazi terrorists is a good idea?"

"Uhm, yeah, about that…"

"You can't be serious!"

"I am."

"But it says here that they disbanded in forty-five, after Captain America killed their leader."

"I have no idea how they survived and how they got into SHIELD," Natasha admitted. "But they did. I have no idea how deep it goes, but every scrap of evidence I find seems to have their fingerprints on it."

Hanima said nothing for a long while. "So those people there… They are basically imprisoned by Nazis. In the middle of Ohio. In twenty-twelve."

Natasha grunted an uncomfortable confirmation.

"What's the plan? You want to expose it? Make it all public?"

"That's the idea, eventually. But so far I have only three testimonies of which not a single one would stand in court. I need something solid, something that couldn't be handwaved away and buried."

"Well, we have the surveillance recordings and there might be something in the files we got."

"I had to unplug the drive before the copy finished. I guess I just wasted your time. I'm sorry."

"Now, now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The drive should still be fine and I went with smaller packages, so some of the files must've made it. I kept on dumping data while you were busy talking with doctor pawn, too. And, even if some of it got corrupted in the process, there's a way to get something out of it."

"Hani? I think I love you."

"You've told me that before," Hanima said, and there was just a hint of reproach in her voice.

The hay smelled of dust and prickled her skin even though her clothes. The moon rose and shone through the cracks between the weathered boards and the wind whistled among the beams and she lay there, thinking of nothing at all, until sleep claimed her.