[A/N Sorry for the slower updates. School and writing is hard to combine sometimes, especially if eggs and blood join the chaos. According to some, the last chapter lacked action. I apologize if last chapter did not make sense, or if it was boring, I was just trying to make things a little… less serious. Alright, on with the next:]

Part 23.

"There has to be a way." Natasha mumbled, impatiently drumming her fingers on the table. She had been for a while, now, and it was driving me insane. We were the only two in the house; Clint, Bruce and Thor were at S.H.I.E.L.D. to ask for Fury's help. Natasha and I thought seeking Fury's assistance would be useless, because there is only so much Fury can do, and we thought we could better spend the time brainstorming. I grabbed her hand and stilled her movements, and she looked up at me. She snatched her hand away.

"Hey, Nat, come on. We will figure out a way, I promise." I said, gripping her hand back in mine and pulling her up into a hug. "I promise." I repeated, trying to convince both her and myself.

"Oh!" She jumped but accepted my embrace, waving her hands a bit spastically before returning it. We stood there for a while, getting used to the feeling of having family to share the pain with. It wasn't long before Natasha decided she'd had enough of these sentimental shenanigans. "Alright, Steve, I get that this is necessary if we want to keep up this bonding and family stuff, but let's not over-do it." She murmured, trying to break free.

"Nat! It's only been 5 minutes, according to about every modern soap-series I've seen, a we-are-mourning-best-friends embrace should last at least 20!" She gave me an eye-roll, only barely able to contain a smile.

"He's not dead, remember?" she smirked playfully at me. Right, Tony wasn't dead, I knew that. But it had been so long since I had heard of him, talked to him, felt him. It just felt as if he had vanished, and although Natasha had meant to be playful, her words certainly had impact. I let her go, rubbing my face with my hand and her face was starting to show disbelief, playful smile abruptly replaced by raised eyebrows and scowl. "Steve Rogers, you do know we are going to save Tony, right?" I nodded, starting to collect some dishes and coffee cups that were scattered around the living room and trying to avoid looking at her by all means necessary. She stopped me by pinching my shoulder in a hard and painful way that only Natasha could manage on someone filled with strengthening serum.

"Ow!" I shouted, knocking her arm away and she looked at me in horror.

"Steve! What are you being all ass-holey for all of a sudden? Jesus, I was just trying to help." She mumbled, nervously rubbing the arm I had just slapped away. "Men.." she added when I looked at her incredulously.

"You pinched me!"

"Because I wanted your attention." I made a 'so' movement. "Oh, don't tell me it hurt." She scoffed, slapping my other shoulder too for good measure. I made a face.

"I know he's not dead." I continued our earlier conversation, "I just don't know how we are going to get him back. Like, ever."

"You are losing hope." She concluded, watching me closely. "We can't have that. You know Tony wouldn't want us t-" She fell quiet mid-sentence and I waited for her to finish impatiently. "We have completely ignored Tony's message ever since Loki came to play games. He was just distracting us from the important part, buying himself time. Tony wanted something from us, and we ignored it."

"I thought you said there was nothing more to find in that damned technological wonder of a portable suit."

"Nooo," She dragged out the word, looking away in a sort of sheepish way, "We kind of gave up looking when Loki started dropping hints."

"OK… So what now?"

'What now' turned out to be the wrong question, because Natasha's enthusiastic moods might be a seldom occurrence, but when she decided it was time for one, it pretty much always got out of hand. She was determined to find out what Tony had been trying to say, because she was convinced that Tony had not left a gap in 'his precious Javissy' as she'd said. She also said that Tony had probably made some sort of sentimental kind of code that had something to do with our ever-lasting love, despite my protests.

"Natashaa!" I whined, "I know nothing about technology!"

"No matter!" She tapped around on his floating tablets, moving around digits and documents like it was no big deal, while my head was spinning with all the numbers she was throwing around. "You just need to put in the password. I'm sure he told you the password sometime!" she smiled, hands moving rapidly over the screens.

"He didn't." I sighed, sitting down on Tony's desk and picking up a few sketches to play with them absent-mindedly. "Hey!" I said, holding them up in the light, "I drew those, of Tony." I smiled, playing with the edges of the paper and looking at my own drawings of Tony. Of course, my sketches could never come close to Tony's real beauty, but I had tried. Thrown them in the trash can when I got frustrated, and here they were, on Tony's desk.

"Yeah, nice." Natasha waved her hand at me. "Password?" she asked when at last, she managed to open the all too familiar in-log screen of Tony, where we had seen him fill in his code countless of times.

"I told you, I don't know." I shrugged, still intrigued by the fact that Tony had kept crumbled drawings of himself, drawn by me of all people. Natasha snatched them away, throwing them behind her on a different desk.

"Passwooohoord."

"Okay, fine!" I sighed, adding a dramatic eye-roll for fun. I sat down in front of the screen, feeling odd for sitting in Tony's favourite desk chair. I wiggled my fingers, looking up at Natasha with a frown, then back at the screen with the empty password box waiting for me. "Tash, I just- How can I know what to type?"

"Well, I don't know, you are supposed to know Tony like no one else. Oh, and you are hella sappy let me tell you." I nodded, quite agreeing. Okay, then. My fingers hovered over the keys, and then finally I typed, 'Steve'. The system beeped loudly in protest, and Natasha crossed her arms over her chest, raising an eyebrow and hopping around on her feet. '2 more attempts' was displayed on the screen that I currently wanted to throw out of the window more than anything.

Think, Steve, think. Something he said, something important. The problem was that Tony mostly said stupid things, and did great things. It could be anything from 'captain', to 'love you', and in the worst case 'science forever'. He had never said something specific that sprung out, except for that one magical moment when he said 'I love you'. I bumped my head onto the table before it was too late, accidentally pressing a shitload of keys with my forehead, hearing the blaring from the system when the code was once again, surprise surprise, not correct!

"What did you do?" Natasha screeched, looking at the '1 attempt' warning in horror.

"I tried to type the password with my head, duh." I rolled my eyes, "I face-desked! I couldn't help it!"

"And you had to face-desk on the keyboard? I thought face desking was for desks!"

"I get it! I shouldn't have, momma. You try and figure out a password you've never even heard of. Or hack your way through it for all I care." I scoffed, mimicking her bitchy stance.

"Drama queen." She muttered, picking up the keyboard and scanning the keys intently. "Looking for fingerprints." She clarified when she saw my frown. When she was satisfied with her findings, she smirked at me and typed in letters I could not make out from my lower position on the chair, and pressed enter. Miraculously, JARVIS welcomed us enthusiastically into the system.

"Welcome back, sir. Long time no see. I have stored the Titan plans on your private server, because you haven't touched it for a while. I was afraid it might end up in the wrong hands. Should I transfer it back to the Avenger-Family server, sir?" Of course Tony had called our united server the Avenger-family server. Typical.

"What was the password?" I asked, and Natasha gave me another evil smirk but didn't answer. "Wait, why didn't you do the finger print thing earlier?" She decided to ignore silly, naïve me, and continued to look at the screens as if mesmerized by her own passcode cracking skills.

"The Titan plans, JARVIS? Open them up, please. I want all the documents open and a summary, if you will." Natasha was ordering him around as if she'd owned this system for ages.

"Yes, my lady. I hope you have not overridden my system, and that you are a friendly party." JARVIS answered, as if he really was a person and I thought back to the time when I thought JARVIS was Tony's friend. Things sure had changed.

"Unbelieveable." Natasha breathed when she had all the sketches, text, information, everything Tony had stored in the file in front of us. All the little planets, microbes and whatnot meant nothing to me, but apparently a lot to her. "He created a way to get to Titan. He invented a portal to Thanos' habitat. Oh my God. He's even more of a genius than I had expected."

"The prototype has been ready for a while, madam. The production time is about 24 hours, but hard to estimate at this point. Do you want to proceed?" Her immediate answer was yes, of course, and I sighed in relief. This meant that there was a way for us to seal the deal with Thanos, this meant we were almost there. Natasha concluded that there wasn't much we could do, just enlighten the rest of the team and wait for JARVIS to finish. I walked into my room to get ready for bed, Natasha would stay up and talk to the others when they arrived. She followed me to my room and waited in the doorway.

"The password was Steve The Virgin." She smirked before walking out and closing the door behind her.

[A/N thank you all for the amazing reviews. I have read them all and have yet to reply to them. Not enough time ;_;]