Chapter Text
Of course Natasha knew where Sharon was. After giving Steve back his Shield and Sam his Wings, Sharon had quietly disappeared before the CIA could put her in the Raft for treason. But she didn’t disappear without first putting a draft message in an email account she and Natasha had shared for years. In it, she told Natasha of her plan to go off the grid in a safe house the two of them had bought in the Carpathian Mountains-a place that naturally blocked satellite and other scanning technology. Both agreed she would stay there until Natasha, having at that point reluctantly signed the Sokovian Accords in order to keep Wanda safe, could get away without attracting negative attention.
Less than a week later, however, Natasha found herself involved in the disastrous battle at the Leipzig Airport which was not so much a fight as it was a confirmation of everything the World Counsel was afraid of about the Avengers. Between Wanda and Vision’s flying, Scott’s transformation into a giant, and Tony’s Ward’s (as she called him) unsettling acrobatics and webcasting, there was no way any of them could expect ever to go unnoticed again.
No matter how long it had been until they had last seen each other, Sharon and Natasha maintained the connection they had created when Natasha had first defected and Sharon was the agent in direct charge of integrating her into the life and culture of SHIELD. Natasha didn’t know at the time that, almost no one but Nick Fury and Maria Hill did know, that she was uniquely suited to this task because thanks to being Peggy Carter’s Great-Niece, that was because she was SHIELD. No one had a more direct and unfiltered grasp on the organization’s mission and culture. But that was only partly why she had gotten this assignment because the truth is she asked for it. She had been Clint’s backup at headquarters as he had traveled the world hunting Natasha and during that time, Sharon had come to respect and admire Natasha. So when Natasha had unexpectedly been “talked into” defecting rather than continue the cat and mouse hunt that would inevitably have left one of them dead, Sharon was pretty sure that would have been Clint, Sharon had asked to be involved in the transition.
Seeing Natasha get off the Jet with Clint though was like seeing a black and white drawing convert into a full color, three-dimensional moving image. None of Natasha’s photographs fully conveyed her combination of stillness, to the point of passivity, and coiled energy that still reminded Sharon of a tiger watching its prey and waiting for the right moment to pounce. That first look at the living person of the Black Widow triggered a feeling at the top of her chest, just below the base of her throat, that had come to be permanently encoded in her brain as “Natasha.” She felt it every time she saw or heard her, thought of her, or even heard her name.
It was Natasha who had the contacts in Mandipoor who hired Sharon as security.
Natasha didn’t know that Sharon hadn’t disappeared in the blip-Sharon had used the event as an excuse to burrow even further underground. It had been her plan to reemerge, reconnect with Natasha, and perhaps even seek a pardon for what in retrospect seemed very small acts of disobedience. But when the blip ended and everyone returned, Sharon had to make a fast choice and decided to maintain the fiction that she too had just gotten back. The first thing she did was put a message in the draft folder of their email account. But unlike every other time she had done this, there was no reply.
--To Be Continued--