Carter walked into the office with her head held somewhat high. She knew she did well on the two tests, but there was still a sinking feeling in her stomach. She could barely eat breakfast with the sentiment, so she forced applesauce into her.
She walked over to her desk and found Bryce already there. She walked over and sat down in her seat, placing her satchel on the floor next to the wall. "You weren't kidding when you said you were always busy," she mentioned.
"Yeah," Bryce said, a bit distracted.
Hearing how far away he was by his tone, Carter asked: "Is something wrong?" She looked over at his screen and saw that he had his email open.
"Not wrong, per se, just weird," he told her before turning to face her. "Lawson just sent me work to do, but we're not supposed to be doing anything while our partners are being tested."
"That sounds like I got some kind of job already," Carter theorized. "I assume something with fixing computers and organizing information as a job since he thinks I'm terrible at hacking. That would be the only thing that makes sense."
"That's a definite possibility," he agreed. "I'm still not going to start it before he gets here. I'm still kind of hoping that he sent it to me so he wouldn't forget. This file is massive."
"Scared of hard work," she teased.
"No, but I am scared of busywork."
"What kind of busy work could you be given?"
"I once had to translate a bunch of menus of restaurants someone went to," Bryce deadpanned. Once he saw Carter's incredulous look, he continued. "I'm completely serious. Lawson said there might be a code in the documents because I'm decent at cryptography. By the way, they were just normal everyday restaurants that had nothing to do with the people we were investigating."
"And he got away with that?"
"Oh yeah. I was technically working on something within my expertise."
"I hate it when the baddies are smart," Carter told him jokingly. "It makes my job so much harder."
Bryce laughed at her statement. "I've never heard a truer statement."
Others, at this point, started to trickly in. As it slowly started to fill up with other agents, a question Carter had on the tip of her tongue finally let itself be known. "Why are there so few of us?" she asked Bryce. "I mean, there are only twenty of us here."
"It's because this is only one team," Bryce explained. "You haven't seen the other teams within the information sphere. Lawson is technically our handler, to say. This is a pretty large team, all things considered. As you go up in security clearance, the teams become a lot smaller as information needs to stay within a smaller group of people."
Carter listened intently to what he was saying. It made sense in retrospect. She didn't think she would have worked with everyone in the agency, but she thought she would have seen other people. As soon as the clock struck nine, Lawson walked into the room, and it because deadly silent. Carter was guessing that was because everyone was embarrassed with the results from yesterday. Lawson walked toward the front of the room with a semi-pleased look on his face.
"I'm pleased to tell you that one of you found her job," Lawson stated. It didn't take any time to figure out it was Carter since she was the only female in the room. "After her impressive performance yesterday on both tests, she is completely done with testing, and she will begin actually working. For now, I'm going to give the rest of you your next test."
Carter and Bryce tuned him out and looked at each other. Carter had an interested yet scared look on her face while Bryce had an annoyed look.
"Here's to no busywork," he whispered to her. He turned back to his computer and clicked the email back open. He downloaded the document and groaned once he saw it. "It's a hundred pages. This is going to take a while."
Bryce continued to skim through the document he received. Carter just watched all of the characters that flew across the screen. It was amazing to hear that someone wrote that much that wasn't a fictional novel. Sometime later, Lawson finished explaining the next test, and another timer was ticking down on the front wall. He slowly made his way to Bryce and Carter and cleared his throat. The two of them looked at him.
"I see that you found that file I sent you, Agent Gibbons," Lawson started. "I would like it completely translated within the next week."
"Yes, sir," Bryce answered without emotion. He turned back toward the computer and opened up a word file ad split the screen for the files.
"Agent Williams," Lawson continued. "If you would follow me."
The man didn't even wait for Carter to reply before turning around and started to walk. She quickly grabbed her bag and sped over to catch up with the man. Once she caught up to him, he continued talking.
"What I want for you to do is archive some of our older files as we never truly throw anything away. Based on how you organized things for the last test, you will be perfect for the job. Also, as problems pop up, I would like for you to deal with them. You showed yesterday that you are the only one capable of such a thing." He grumbled that last bit under his breath, but it was still loud enough for Carter to hear. He moved over to an elevator that was down the hall and pressed the up button.
"Yes, sir," was the only thing Carter replied with. She wouldn't know what she would need to do until she saw what she was working with. He put his badge against a scanner before pressing a button for one of the top floors. When the elevator doors opened again, she saw the number "5" painted on the wall. She hadn't seen any other floors painted with numbers.
Carter continued to follow Lawson as he walked through another door set after putting his badge up to another scanner. She followed him through a long walkway. Carter was wide-eyed at the equipment that she saw through other locked walkways. Carter was in absolute awe. Lawson led her to the very end of the hallway and swiped his way into the room. There were no windows, and this room was only lit by two blinking lights.
"I hope you remembered the way to get here because I will not be showing you again. You only have access to this floor and this single room, so don't try another door. This is where you are going to find everything you need."
"Is there any preferred order of archiving?" Carter asked.
"Oldest first and then move on. You will be organizing everything by year. You can bring everything down to the office. You should be able to bring an entire year downstairs in one go."
"Carter unlatched a box that was closest to her. She looked inside and found piles of papers inside of it. "So I just need to scan everything and organize them into the computer? I can definitely do that."
"You won't be scanning anything," Lawson informed her. She turned toward him in shock. "They may be old files, but we don't want them to have any access to the internet. There are flash drives available to you, and I ask that you label them accordingly."
Lawson left the room before Carter could explain to him that that was not how scanners worked. She was left alone in the cramped space. The flashing lights were starting to annoy her, so she felt her way into the light bulbs' wiring. The metal inside was slightly off, so she smoothed it back into place. She opened her eyes up again to see that there was no more flashing.
Carter took in a deep breath and looked for boxes from the earliest year. She was amazed to see boxes label from a couple of years before World War II. She found three boxes from the most initial year found. She would guess that bringing an entire year down was an order rather than a suggestion. She moved the boxes close to the door. She turned to search through the desk there. Sure enough, there were unopened packages of flash drives—she opened one and put a flash drive in the pocket of her bag.
Before she moved to open the door, she ensured that the boxes were securely closed and stacked them all on top of each other. She opened the door and stuck her foot into the walkway so it wouldn't close on her. She squatted down and lifted all three boxes. Had she not have been decently strong, she would have dropped them all on her foot.
She walked backward out the door and out into the hallway. She heard the door slam in front of her, but she couldn't see for the boxes in front of her face. She looked ever to the side and saw that the door did, in fact, close behind her. She started to walk down the hallway along a path she remembered. Every so often, she would peek her head out from behind the boxes. She was halfway through when she hit something. She leaned back from the surprise, but before she could right herself, the weight of the boxes pushed her backward.
Carter hit the floor hard as the boxes also fell on top of her. The weight was slowing, leaving as someone she saw from the corner of her eye pick up the boxes.
"You know," a familiar voice said, "We should really stop meeting like this."
Carter turned her head to where the voice was and saw the same cocky grin from a few months ago. He grabbed for her arm and helped her stand up. She gratefully took the help and started rubbing her back on the way up. This time, she looked into the starking blue eyes of the person in front of her now that he wasn't wearing aviators. "Let me guess," she said, "not Jeremy."
"Nope," he said, popping the P.
"Let me guess you bumped into me to plant a listening device in my apartment."
"I didn't plan on bumping into you. I was just going to sneak in when you weren't there, but the opportunity showed itself."
Behind him, a woman with bright, short red hair walked up. "Clint, what are you doing?" she said with a no-nonsense voice and raised an eyebrow. "Are you messing with people again?"
"Come on, Nat," he replied. "You know me."
"That's exactly why I was asking."
Carter just stared at the two of them. They were obviously reasonably comfortable with each other as they were having a quite playful conversation. Without a doubt, Carter would say they were both attractive and so far out of her league. In their uniforms, she could tell they were very fit. Both had detectable muscle definition through the jacket and seemed to have the most perfect bodies. If anything, it made Carter more insecure about herself.
She turned toward the boxes she had dropped before. She stacked them up again and picked them back up. "I really should be going," she said, interrupting their conversation.
"Aww," Clint said. "Why can't you stay here?" Nat, she assumed it was a nickname, also looked at her with interest.
"I've been here for a while," Carter explained. "Agent Lawson probably want me back soon." Instead of saying goodbye, she stepped to the side and walked at a faster pace away from them. After she made it through the locked doors, she slowed down to an average speed. She nudged the down button as she got to the elevator and took deep breaths as she waited for the elevator to come to the floor.
As the doors open, she walked inside and nudge the button she needed. As the doors closed again, she rested against the metal wall, letting the coolness calm her down. When the doors opened up again, she felt calmer. She walked the familiar path to the office. As she got to the scanner, she could nudge her bag into a position for it to read her badge. She cursed the fact that these doors opened outward as she tried to encourage the door to open. Thankfully, the doors were electric, so she could open it slightly enough to put her foot inside the gap and pushed it the rest of the way open with her shin.
She quickly stepped inside before the door could come back and hit her on the way closed. She walked around the back corner toward her desk and saw Bryce hard at work. She set the boxes down behind her desk and plopped into her chair.
"That took a while," Bryce told her as he looked up from his work. "What happened?"
"He sent me to a room to gather a bunch of files so that I can archive them."
"Something else happened, though," he insisted.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"If you grabbing files was the only thing that happened, you wouldn't be supporting a huge amount of blush."
Carter brought her hands up to her cheeks, and they were indeed still warm. She brought her hands down and continued talking. "I may have run into someone on the way back, literally."
"Who?" Bryce whispered at her.
"The woman called him Clint."
"Describe the floor you were on," he insisted with a look of recognition on his face.
"It looked like any other floor. It just had a gigantic five pained on the walls."
"Did he have blonde hair and blue eyes?"
"Yes..." Carter answered cautiously.
"You ran into Clint Barton!" he whispered.
"Is that bad?" she asked him.
"He's practically a legend here. He and his partner, Natasha, are the best of the best."
"Would she have red hair by any chance?"
"She does," he said with an inquiring tone.
"He called the woman that walked upon us 'Nat.'"
Bryce looked at her as if she blew his mind. It's only been three days, and you've already met two celebrities. I bow down to you."
Carter felt that mentioning that it wasn't the first time she met Clint Barton would be too much for him, but he continued.
"But they are one of the cutest couples I've ever seen," Bryce informed her. "They really balance each other."
"They're together?" Carter asked.
"Yeah. It's not exactly frowned upon here unless it affects your work. If anything, it prevents others from finding out the extent of what we do."
"Makes sense. But can we talk about something else?"
"Sure thing. We can talk about what work you have to do. I mean, it could be worse. You're just scanning a bunch of files onto a flash drive and organizing it."
"Yeah, about that," Carter said awkwardly. "I'm not allowed to scan the documents."
"Why not?"
"Apparently, using a scanner makes things get leaked out on the internet."
Bryce stared at her, blankly for a few seconds. He blinked a couple of times but didn't say anything else.
"And he wants them to be done by year. And they go on for about fifty years or so."
"Let me get this straight," Bryce started. "Lawson wants you to type up to fifty years' worth of documents and then organize them into a system." Carter nodded. "Wow, I knew he was evil, but not that evil. You are going to be working on that for months."
"Yeah, and that's assuming computers don't break in the meantime or I get assigned something else."
"I'm so sorry."
"There's really nothing I can do about it right now except get started," she said with a resigned sigh. "you have a hundred-page document to translate."
"I'm done with five pages," Bryce said confidently.
"Great job," she said cheekily. "At this rate, you'll be done by next Friday."
"I'm sorry, you were just gone for so long; I was worried. That and this makes absolutely no sense."
"I thought you were a master translator."
"I am, but this just sounds like someone put the real document through Google Translate a bunch of times and ended up here."
"That's gotta suck."
"At this rate, I'm going to have to finish translating it and then try and back translate it to a couple of different languages to see if some of the contents make sense."
"Well then, we both better get to work."
Bryce and Carter both turned towards their computers. Bryce went back to translating the awful document. Carter logged into her laptop and grabbed a record from the box closest to her. Once the desktop showed up, she plugged in the flash drive, opened a word document, and started copying.