Chapter Text
Day four.
Natasha Romanoff had been on medical leave for four days and had already exhausted the entire recreational capacity of a flying aircraft carrier.
The injury itself was insulting. Not a bullet, not a knife, not anything with a decent story attached — a hairline fracture in her left wrist, acquired when a Hungarian arms broker's balcony railing turned out to be decorative. She'd still gotten the intel. She'd still put the broker through a coffee table. But the SHIELD medical officer had looked at the X-ray, said "three weeks, minimum, no field work," and written it into her file where Fury could see it, which meant it was law.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Five hundred and four hours, of which she had now burned ninety-six.
Here was the inventory of what she had accomplished in those ninety-six hours:
She had reorganized her locker. Twice. The second time by threat level.
She had beaten the flight simulator's Impossible setting, and then beaten it again with one hand, and then beaten it a third time with one hand while eating a granola bar, at which point the simulator technician had asked her, with visible strain, to please let someone else use it.
She had read four mission reports she had no clearance for and two she'd written herself, and discovered that past-Natasha was a worse writer than she remembered.
She had alphabetized the spice rack in the Deck 2 galley. This one was petty. A cook named Petrosian had implied she couldn't tell cumin from coriander, and now his entire station was in alphabetical order and he couldn't find anything, and Natasha had watched him hunt for paprika for six minutes with the deep, still satisfaction of a woman who had absolutely nothing else going on.
And now it was 0400 and she was walking. Really. Walking.
The Helicarrier at four in the morning was a strange and specific country — engines humming through the deck plates at a frequency you stopped hearing after a week and never stopped feeling, lights dimmed to their night cycle, the corridors emptied down to a skeleton crew who all moved like people trying not to wake a baby. Natasha had walked all of it. She could have drawn the ship from memory by now, every junction and access hatch and dead-end maintenance crawl. She'd found two structural blind spots in the internal camera coverage and hadn't told anyone, because they were hers.
She turned onto Deck 3 out of habit rather than intent. Command level. Offices, mostly, which at this hour meant a long dim hallway of closed doors and nothing to look at.
Except there was light under one of them.
Natasha stopped.
It was a thin bar of white across the deck plating, the kind of overhead work light nobody used at night because nobody was there at night. She looked at the placard.
DEPUTY DIRECTOR M. HILL
Huh.
Her first thought was entirely professional: something's happening. A crisis had come in overnight — an asset burned, a station overrun, something in the Gulf again — and Hill was up running it, which meant somewhere in the world people were shooting at each other and Natasha was standing in a hallway with a splint on her wrist and no assignment.
Which, frankly, sounded great. Natasha would have taken a crisis. Natasha would have taken a bad crisis.
The door was ajar. Not much — three inches, enough for the light — and Natasha didn't push it, because she didn't have to. She stopped just short of the gap and looked in at an angle that let her see most of the room without occupying any part of it. This was a skill. It had taken years. It was currently being deployed to spy on her own boss for no reason at all.
The office was small. Smaller than it should have been, given the woman in it — Fury's deputy, second in command of a global intelligence apparatus, and she'd taken a room with one narrow viewport and enough floor space for a desk and two chairs. There was nothing on the walls. No photographs, no commendations, no flag, no plaques. One tactical map of the Eastern Med, pinned up and marked in three colors. That was the entire decorative program.
Maria Hill was at the desk.
Sleeves rolled to the elbow. Uniform jacket over the back of the chair — not hung, thrown, which was the only untidy thing in the room. She was reading something on a tablet with her chin propped on one fist and her mouth pulled into that flat line she got, working through it line by line, and every few seconds she'd reach out without looking and make a note on an actual paper pad, which Natasha found unaccountably charming and would have denied under oath.
There were two coffee cups on the desk.
Both empty. One had a ring of dried residue that suggested it had been empty for a while. The other was tipped slightly against a stack of folders, which meant she'd set it down without looking, which meant she'd stopped noticing it hours ago.
Natasha stood in the dark and studied all this and waited for it to add up to a crisis.
It didn't. That was the thing. Hill's shoulders were down. Her breathing was even. She wasn't on comms, she wasn't standing, she wasn't doing the thing she did in the war room where she talked to three people at once and made all of them faster. She was just reading. The way you read at eleven in the morning with a full night's sleep behind you.
There was no crisis. This was administrative. At four in the morning, this woman was doing homework.
Hill turned a page on the tablet and rubbed the bridge of her nose with two fingers, hard, once. Then she picked up the tipped-over cup, tilted it, discovered it was empty, and set it back down.
She did not get up to get more coffee. She just went back to reading, like the discovery had been filed and dismissed.
Something in Natasha's chest did a small, unauthorized thing.
She retreated. Silently, four steps back down the corridor, and then walked away at a normal pace like a person with somewhere to be.
Late night, she told herself, in the elevator. Everybody has late nights.
Except she came back.
The next night she made it all the way to 0230 before she found herself on Deck 3 again, and she'd like it on record that she took the long way around, past the observation deck and the secondary armory, so that the walk had a reason.
Light under the door.
Natasha stood at the top of the corridor with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at that thin white bar for a good thirty seconds.
Two for two.
The night after that was Thursday, and she got smart about it, which is to say she got worse. She brought a cup of tea from the galley so she'd look like a woman going somewhere with a cup of tea. She came up the aft stairwell instead of the elevator. She was, she recognized somewhere behind her sternum, running a light surveillance pattern on the Deputy Director of SHIELD.
Light under the door.
Friday she told herself she wasn't going to check.
She checked at 0410.
Light under the door. And this time Hill was actually standing — pacing the four feet of clear floor with a hand flat against the small of her back, stretching out something that had clearly been sitting too long, and Natasha watched her do a slow circuit of that pathetic little room and drop back into the chair and pull the tablet toward her again, and thought, with the first real flare of something that wasn't curiosity:
Are you kidding me.
Because here was the part that was actually getting under her skin.
Natasha had been at SHIELD for years. She'd worked under Hill on nine, ten operations — she'd have to count. She'd been extracted twice on Hill's direct order, once from a rooftop in Odessa when the whole op went sideways and there'd been a voice in her ear, perfectly calm, saying Romanoff, north stairwell, now, I've got a bird on the roof in ninety seconds, and the bird had been on the roof in eighty-four. She had a great deal of respect for Maria Hill. It was, in fact, the single largest quantity of respect she held for anyone at that organization, Barton included, and Barton had once carried her nine miles.
And she realized, standing in a dark hallway at four in the morning, that she had no idea whatsoever whether this was normal.
She was never here. That was the problem. Natasha Romanoff didn't live on the Helicarrier; she staged out of it. She came aboard, she got briefed, she went out, she came back bleeding or not bleeding, she got debriefed, she left. Her longest continuous residency on this ship prior to this week had been eleven days, and she'd spent six of them in medical. The Helicarrier's night life was, to her, a complete unknown.
So maybe this was just what Hill did. Maybe the Deputy Director was famously nocturnal and everyone knew it and it was a running joke in departments Natasha had never set foot in. Maybe there was a whole culture around it. Maybe there was a mug.
Or maybe it wasn't.
Natasha stood there and felt the shape of a question form, and it was a genuinely irritating question, because it was the kind you couldn't answer by watching a door.
How long has she been doing this?
She went back to her quarters. She did not sleep, which was standard. She lay on the bunk with her splinted wrist across her stomach and looked at the ceiling and thought about two empty coffee cups and a woman who had checked one, found it empty, and simply hadn't done anything about it.
That was the detail that wouldn't sit down. Natasha had spent her entire life reading people off small things — the weight distribution, the glance at the exit, the hand that goes to a pocket. And that little moment with the cup had told her something specific and unwelcome.
It wasn't the behavior of a woman having a rough week.
It was the behavior of a woman who had stopped expecting anything to change if she got up.
At 0600 Natasha got out of bed, went down to Deck 3, and walked past the office at a normal speed with her eyes forward, the way any agent would.
The door was closed now. The light was off.
Natasha checked the corridor camera log later from a terminal she wasn't supposed to be using, because seventeen days of medical leave was a very long time, and found that the Deputy Director had left her office at 0538 and badged back in at 0722.
She looked at that for a while.
Then she pulled up the badge logs for the previous month.
This, she told herself, opening the query, is a legitimate operational concern. The second-in-command of this organization is a strategic asset. Asset degradation is a security issue. Anyone would look into this.
She was fooling absolutely no one.
But it was four in the morning in the part of her head that never turned off, and there was no one else awake to argue.