Natasha swiveled around in the fancy office chair, setting her steaming mug of tea down on the desk in front of her. The eye scanner immediately lit up, a pale light scanning over her pupil and opening the screen in front of her. She gently ran her thumb over the fingerprint reader in the keyboard, unlocking her file system and private operating system.
The smell of chamomile and honey floated towards her as she opened her code, opened her server, examined her data mining and archives. The programs hunted through millions of social media profiles on a daily basis, searching news websites, military communications, governmental security surveillance footage. A list of two hundred and fifty flagged items popped up for her to review. She sighed and leaned back, prepared for another long night. She had set the search parameters deliberately wide. She would rather have hundreds of false positives than even one false negative.
As she shifted her weight, a bone cracked in her neck. She kneaded the tight muscle over it with her knuckles as she clicked through images. The same tension spot as always.
"Oh my god, look at this monster we spotted today!" A girls caption read on her Instagram post, a giant turtle on a beach somewhere tropical where she was vacationing.
"Happiest place on Earth!" Another caption read, a girl posed next to a Mike Wazowski cut-out at Disneyland. Nat cursed under her breath. She must have cleared a hundred images of that cut-out by now, she really should just go back into the code and write out a function to handle it. .
She continued browsing, sipping her tea, scanning the world for anything large and green and unsightly. Nothing. Same as every night for the past nine months. She didn't even bother running her facial recognition software anymore, or trying to track his credit cards or bank withdrawals.
Her days were filled; training the powerful Wanda, the excited Sam, the hesitant, more reserved Rhodes, conversing and strategizing with Vision and Steve, putting up with Tony flitting in and out of HQ, remodeling things or dumping some new gadgets on the trainees before jetting out again. He was always eager to get back to Pepper these days.
She slipped away for weekends as frequently as she could to Clint's house. Sometimes, holding Nate, with Cooper and Lila running around wreaking havoc in the living room and Clint and Laura canoodling in the kitchen, she could pretend her life was normal. It felt nice to add to her list of identities she could take on. Domestic.
Clint had no desire to return to work. He had always been the one she could share things with; undercover experiences, odd moments of guilt, the strong desire to get back to the danger and adrenaline but the hidden, small fear with every assignment as well. His days were filled with Laura, with his kids, with farm projects and living off the land.
Steve helped her stay sane. She almost never got a chance to actually get out in the field anymore. Having her face plastered in the news and Avengers merchandise in Times Square really put a damper on most of her undercover work. She had had only three assignments since Ultron, and she could feel the disapproval for her rising in the bureaucracy with each one. Sokovia had put a bad taste in everybody's mouth, and whispers behind closed doors seemed common in every government she visited nowadays. She didn't like it much anymore either; arriving somewhere for someone else's mission, someone else's agenda. SHIELD sent other agents now, leaving her with more time on her hands at HQ than she had anticipated.
So, she trained. A warm, kind training; physically demanding yet rewarding. Nothing like what had made her. This training was to make more good in the world. To only fight when needed, to show mercy whenever possible—Natasha reveled in it. The pain, the soreness, the long demanding hours assuaged her guilt. Day by day she watched the new Avengers improve, she watched the other trainees at the facility grow more competent with their weapons, more strategic with their planning.
Every night, she returned to this office set aside for her at HQ. It was stark and barren, just a desk, a ridiculously overpriced office chair, and her equipment.
The code had taken a few weeks to write. She remembered that time without fondness; stressing over every bug, panicking that one minute later would be one minute missed online, one minute where he'd appear somewhere, in the background of a picture, in a satellite image, as a heat signature on some weather tracking device. When she finished she had breathed a sigh of relief.
Now all that was left was just personally mining through everything her software passed on to her. She was careful with every image, every article, every reading, even as it faded into monotony. She wouldn't miss him. She couldn't.
A knock on the door broke her hypnotic routine. She spun around, minimizing her windows. Steve's head was already poked in the doorway.
"Nat—what were you doing?" He asked, his eyes on the screen where a satellite reading had been moments before. It had picked up a large heat signature over a secluded forest in Northern BC. It was obviously a grizzly bear, but she had been examining the outline, hoping perhaps he was folded up, sleeping.
"Just uh, looking at some readings. For work."
"Right. . ." Steve could obviously tell she was lying. "Nat. . ."
"Steve," she threatened. She wasn't looking for a lecture.
"Sorry." He bowed his head and held his hands up in mute acknowledgement. "I was just going to ask if you wanted to grab a drink or something. Get some air. I can't remember the last time you took a day off."
"I take days off when I need them," Natasha replied, her tone measured. "Why don't you ask Sharon to get a drink? I'm sure she'd be thrilled to join you," Natasha's eyes sparkled as she watched Steve's cheeks redden.
"Yeah, I don't know about that," he chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly.
"Never know til ya try." Natasha pushed.
"Maybe I will."
They looked at each other for a moment. Steve broadcast his concern for her like a radio signal. Nat smiled warmly—a smile always put him at ease. She knew Cap, knew how to push his buttons when he needed some pushing.
"But Nat," Steve warned, holding the door open a moment longer. He clearly wanted to say something, but didn't have the words. He scratched his neck awkwardly.
"The world isn't balanced right now," he finally started. "The military discontinued support for Sam's wings."
"That seems like the opposite of a problem," Nat smiled. "Tony can finally have his way with them. He must be thrilled."
"What I mean is, it's a delicate time. For us. For all of us. It would be a bad time to. . .lose control."
Natasha gritted her teeth. "He's in there, Steve."
"He wasn't in Johannesburg."
"You know that was because Wanda got in his head. He hated himself for that."
"It doesn't matter how he felt, it's the other guy I'm worried about."
"He's our teammate. We at least owe him the effort to try and make sure he's alive."
"Just make sure that's all that effort is. He doesn't want to be found, or he would have turned the trackers on."
"It's not him that kept them off. It's the other guy. Don't go confusing the two."
"Make sure you don't either." Steve turned and left without another word. Natasha sat in the silence, her thoughts churning. He didn't want to be found. She knew that. He had wanted to not be found with her. To run. She pushed him over the edge instead. And here she was, blatantly ignoring his wishes yet again, hunting him down anyways. Why?
She didn't know. She took a sip of tea and returned back to her hunting, refusing to let herself consider the possible answers.
Hours passed in the same way they always did. Natasha slipped on her pair of blue-light glasses when the clock ticked past midnight. The extended hours staring at her screen, trying to find something in the pixels had started giving her migraines. The glasses helped sometimes.
It was 2:38 in the morning when she found him. Or rather, found a picture with a large, vibrant green thing breaking through the surface of the water near an island in Indonesia. The post was on some minor Asian social networking site she wasn't too familiar with, the caption translated from Cantonese: "Our whale watching tour guide didn't say there'd be green whales!"
Natasha zoomed in on the image, pulling it up as large as possible, letting her software refine and zoom, refine and zoom. After a minute she was certain: there were no aquatic creatures she had ever seen with green skin and hair.Black hair, thick and wet, just covering the top of a very green, very humanoid ear.
She tracked the location of the image source and saved the coordinates onto her tablet. She couldn't put them into the compound's OS or she would be trackable. And she didn't want to be found.
She didn't stop in her quarters, heading straight to the Quinjet Stark had set aside for their use. She had packed a go bag when she started the hunt, and it had lived in her locker by the gym since she began this whole process. She grabbed it, leaving her locker door hanging ajar.
She didn't have a flight plan, so she radioed the air tower and faked some secret business. She knew it was exactly that kind of thing that was giving the Avengers a less-than-stellar reputation among government leaders, but in this moment she didn't care. She had her eyes set on a pair of coordinates.
It was a twenty hour flight. She already hadn't slept in eighteen hours. She prepared herself for the discomfort of sleep deprivation. She had training for this; she had handled worse in Russia. Caffeine, mental acuity exercises, and periodic stretching breaks while leaving the controls to autopilot would get her through. She had a giant to go retrieve.