Reputation is a funny thing. More importantly, how your reputation can precede you. People can hate you when they haven’t met you. They can admire you through what you’ve done. They can fear you through the stories.

                The criminal underground feared the Blackbird. They would take every single step imaginable to ensure that the Blackbird couldn’t find them while they were transporting illegal goods. Guards. Security cameras. Plated steel. Hostages. Everything. They could have their eyes peeled throughout the entire flight looking for the one who too often thwarted their plans. But the second they let their guard down, when they glanced down at their phones for a fraction of a second, when they were shifting their gun to their other hand, when their thoughts strayed ever so slightly, the Blackbird attacked.

                For the longest time, the underground never knew who the Blackbird was. The security cameras could only catch blurry glimpses of a black outfit. They didn’t even know the gender. Then, one day, they knew. And it wasn’t really being kept secret, either. They felt stupid. The Blackbird had never even been trying to hide, they just couldn’t figure out who they were. But really, all they would have had to do was search the techniques they caught on the security cameras, or the symbol they had glimpses of on their bow. Or they could have even figured out who this agent was by the fact that they had a bow.

                On TV, the Blackbird had been standing in broad daylight, perched on top of a high building, fighting aliens. Ever since the Avengers had died, Earth had become a popular target for the aliens. The Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel were trying to hold them all off, but once or twice they got through. And then the Legacies took over. The Blackbird was a Legacy. The Legacies were behind all of the raids on their cargo. Of course they were. In hindsight, of course the Blackbird had been working with a team. No one could have fought the guards and disabled the security cameras at the same time, and there was always a plane there to take the agent away afterwards.

                And really, if they had even tried to analyze the fighting techniques, they would have instantly recognized a combination of Black Widow and Hawkeye, two of the deceased Avengers. Only one person could have been taught both, and the TV had confirmed it. Nina Barton. The adopted daughter of the Bartons and Natasha Romanoff. However, knowing her identity made them let their guard down again. They foolishly assumed that, since they knew who she was, they would have the upper hand. They were wrong. The Blackbird had again managed to catch them unawares. But that’s all backstory. On to the actually exciting part.

                The underground had taken to sending out sporadic, unplanned cargos, hoping to avoid the Legacies. It only sort of worked. This time, it didn’t. The transport plane was heavily armed, with state-of-the-art tracking gear. But even that was too slow in detecting the plane that dropped a lone agent on the roof. Inside, the guards heard a dull thump. Curious, they looked up.

                “Should someone go check it out?” someone asked. The answer would have probably been yes, but they didn’t have time. The grate overhead fell away and the Blackbird flipped into the room. The guards didn’t even have time to react before she attacked, kicking them onto the floor. One leapt towards her, roaring. That was not a smart move. The Blackbird quickly whipped out her electric batons, and with two well-placed blows, felled him. Without missing a beat, she turned, pulling out her bow, and shot four arrows at the entrances to the room, all of which expanded into a net that was sparking with electricity.

                “Time!” Nina yelled, throwing up her hands. “What’d I get?”

                Jenny’s voice came through the coms. “Um, six minutes and sixteen seconds.”

                “Dang it. I’ll beat that record someday.”

                “I still think it’s impressive that you somehow managed to clear an entire room of guards in under five,” said Aaron.

                “We are not having this conversation right now!” Monitor chided. “Focus, Nina!”

                “Yeah, yeah.” Nina glanced around the room. “Aaron, you got eyes on me?”

                “Always.”

                “Where’s the cargo?”

                There was a pause on his side. “I can’t see it.”

                Amy piped up. “I’ll help you. Can you send me the blueprints?”

                “Yep.”

                As the two techno-geeks worked their magic to locate the cargo room, Nina swung her arms in circles, casting bored glances around the room. Sure, she was on an enemy plane surrounded by armed agents, but she was bored. For lack of something to do, she reached up and started pulling her blond hair out of its braided bun. She kept this hairstyle because people couldn’t grab it, and also because the bobby pins were useful for picking locks. She had just finished re-looping her long braid when the entire plane suddenly shook, causing her to stumble. Nina glared up at the ceiling. “Aaron, what are you doing?”

                “Maybe that wasn’t me?”

                “There’s a different sort of vibration from repulsor blasts and other energy rays or bullets or whatever.”

                “It could have been Jenny.”

                “Hey!” Jenny protested.

                “Am I electrocuted? No. Ergo, it wasn’t Jenny,” Nina replied.

                “Well, it will be soon. Jenny, get out there and help Aaron,” Monitor cut in.

                “Why…?” she whined. “It’s cold out there. Send Alex.”

                “Alex can’t fly.”

                “Exactly,” Alex confirmed. “And I’m doing important stuff.”

                “Like what?” challenged Jenny. Nina could hear faint crackling and rushing of air as she took to the sky.

                “He’s watching me type,” Amy informed her.

                “Traitor,” her brother grumbled.

                “Can we please focus?” begged Monitor. “Amy. Cargo.”

                “Monitor. Found. Sending.”

                “Nina,” said Aaron. “Down. Forward. Left. Twice.”

                “Please stop,” Monitor groaned.

                Nina stuck an arrow in the floor and backed up a few steps before triggering it with a press of a button on her bow. Red lasers expanded and a circle fell out of the floor onto the floor below. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was this mission’s episode of ‘Monitor Regretting His Life Decisions.’”

                “No kidding,” he grumbled.

                Jumping easily through the hole in the floor, Nina pulled up the arrow from the ground and put it back into her quiver. There were angry shouts behind her, but she didn’t even look as she loosed a few arrows in that direction. “Hey, Aaron?”

                “Yeah?”

                “Can you see the security around the cargo hold?”

                “It’s an empty room. There’s one, very thick door with a bunch of wires and technology. Looks pretty tough, but –”

                “Hold up. Empty room?”

                “Well, it looks that way. There’s a few cabinets, though.”

                “And what, pray, are in those cabinets?”

                “I don’t know. They’re titanium. I can’t see through them.”

                Nina started down the hallway. “You need to upgrade those scanners.”

                “Excuse me. My scanners are state-of-the-art –”

                “Focus!” Monitor yelled for what must have been the fiftieth time.

                Grumbling slightly to herself, Nina grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin out with her teeth, and rolled it into the control room in front of her. She ducked back behind the doorframe as it exploded, listening carefully to the following coughing sounds. There were only four men here right now. Stepping out into the doorway, she calmly shot three electric arrows, each of which felled one of the men. The other man quickly put his hands up in surrender. Without lowering her bow, Nina motioned to the door. “Open it.”

                The man glanced around nervously. “I don’t…”

                Nina stalked forward, grabbed the back of the man’s uniform, and hauled him to the security pads. She slid open one of the panels and shoved the man’s face into it. The scanner quickly took his retinal scan and one of the two lights over the door turned green. Nina dropped him and took out her phone to scan the keypad. The fingerprints lit up and arranged themselves into the right code on her phone. The door finally slid open.

                She took a step inside and surveyed the almost empty room.

                “What’s in there?” asked Alex.

                “Not quite sure yet. Aaron’s right. Just a bunch of filing cabinets.” Without even looking, Nina threw a knife behind her, pinning the collar of one of the guard’s uniforms to the wall as he was trying to hit the emergency lockdown button. “Don’t touch that,” she yelled over her shoulder.

                She slid open one of the cabinets and frowned. Empty. She opened the next one. Also empty.

                “What’s in there?” Monitor asked.

                “Nothing. They’re all empty.”

                “Empty?” Jenny questioned. There was a whooshing and crackling sound through the comms as she did who-knows-what. “Like, there’s nothing there at all?”

                “No…wait.” Nina slid open the largest drawer at the bottom and pushed on the bottom of it, bending down to look at the proportions. “Ah. Secret panel.”

                “Ooh, fancy,” Alex commented.

                Nina fiddled with the bottom of it for a moment before it popped out. “Let’s see what this plane is hiding. Oh, look. Should’ve guessed.”

                “What is it?” asked Aaron.

                “What else goes in a filing cabinet? Files.” Nina flipped through them. “Three, to be exact. Let’s see…ah, here we go. This one has future transfer processes, that’s good.”

                “Yeah,” Amy murmured distractedly. There was a distant clacking of computer keys. “I’ll scan them later and we can…” She trailed off, apparently having forgotten she had been saying something.

                Nina flipped open the next one. “Oh! Nice! Underground leaders! We can send this one to Arthur.”

                There was silence from the comms.

                “Anonymously.”

                “Oh, okay.” Alex sounded relieved. Arthur Rogers was Alex and Amy’s younger brother, but they had had a falling out a few years ago when Alex and Amy were going to go join the Legacies. Arthur thought they should honor their father’s memory more and not go “gallivanting off to join a badly-knit group of vigilantes who apparently are fine wasting their life”, as Arthur had elegantly put it. He had joined the FBI a few years ago. It had devolved into a huge fight (mostly just between Arthur and Alex. Amy mostly just tried to get them to stop fighting, which failed.) and Alex and Arthur had barely talked since, except at family events where they were each assigned by their mother to say twenty words to each other. In conclusion, there was a brother feud in the Roger family.

                Nina began fiddling with the thin straps around her chest that had specifically been attached so she could carry files. “Well, that was successful. Stark, I’m heading out -”

                “What’s the last one?” Monitor interrupted.

                “Oh, yeah.” Nina unclipped the unopened one. “It’s probably just -” She stopped, staring at the first page. It had a large insignia with a circle and two hands grabbing each other’s wrists. The symbol burned into her brain, cracking barriers she had forgotten she had created. And then the plane faded around her.

        Twelve-year-old Nina hung her backpack up on a hook by the door. She unzipped it and grabbed a sheet of paper before skipping into the office. Natasha was sitting at the desk, writing something in a file. Nina hopped up to her and lowered the sheet of paper until it was in front of her face.

        "Ta-da!" she announced.

        Natasha took the paper and glanced over it. "Good job, angel!" She leaned up and kissed Nina on the cheek. "The studying really paid off, huh?"

        "Yeah! Nate came up with these funny sayings to help me remember the dead guys' names."

        "By 'dead guys' you mean famous historical figures and geniuses who helped shape our society into what it is today and find out ground-breaking discoveries about the essence of life and distant space and other worlds?"

        "Yep!"

        "Good job." Natasha handed her the test back. "Go pin it up on the fridge. It deserves the place of honor.

        Nina grinned, but before she went into the kitchen, she leaned down and inspected the different papers. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to a piece of paper with a sketch of a logo with two hands grabbing each other's wrists.

        "Boring work stuff."

        "Nothing you do in S.H.I.E.L.D. is boring, Mom."

        "This is. I'm just filing these reports and stuff about this new group your vater and I found in our last mission."

        Nina smiled slightly. Growing up with three parents, she had had to find ways to distinguish between them, especially between her two mothers. Laura had refused to take the "Mom" or "Mother" title, so she was Mutter, which was German for "mom". And then Clint, of course, had to be the German Vater, which was dad. "The logo's cool."

        "Meh. Not when you hear their name."

        "What's their name?"

        "The Clasping Hands."

        Nina laughed. "You're right. It's not as cool now. Are they dangerous?"

        Natasha waved a hand in a dismissing manner. "They're new. Hardly competent. Fury'll just send over a couple of level fives or something and poof! They're gone."

        "I thought Vater said that the new ones were more dangerous because they don't know what they're doing and can take risks without knowing about the consequences."

        "Well, Clint's right, but that only applies to the powerful new ones. The ones who have technology or resources or something and don't know what to do with them." Natasha pulled Nina closer to her and hugged her. "Don't worry. The Clasping Hands aren't dangerous. And I'll keep you safe. Always."

        Nina grinned and hugged her mother back. "I know."

        Laughing, Natasha pushed her away. "Ah, there you go again taking me for granted. Go hang up that test or something."

        The twelve-year-old skipped obligingly out of the room, black hair bouncing behind her. However, she knew in her heart that she would never take her mother for granted.

        Ah, how cruel fate is sometimes.

*  *  *

        It was a few months later. Clint was out in the yard, instructing Nina through archery, while Natasha watched from the steps. Laura was on vacation, Nate was currently a councilor in a nearby summer camp for a month, and Cooper and Lila had just started their college year. Normally Laura would have been nervous leaving the house almost empty like this, but with two expert assassins there, she figured she didn't have to worry.

        Nina had just hit one of her first sort-of-bullseyes, and Natasha was heading into the kitchen to see if there was any lemonade or something when Clint's phone rang. He picked it up and raised his eyebrows at the caller ID. He made eye contact with Natasha and mouthed, "Fury", before accepting it.

        "To what do I owe this honor?"

        "Barton. Is Agent Romanoff there?"

        "Nice to hear from you, too. Yes, she is here. Why?"

        "You two need to report here now."

        Natasha walked up and leaned over to the phone's speaker. "Really? We just went on a mission a few months ago. It's vacation."

        "I don't care," snapped Fury.

        "C'mon, Fury," Clint huffed. "Can't you go pester Steve or Bucky about it?"

        "We are."

        Clint and Natasha exchanged looks, and Nina walked closer, leaning on her mom's arm. Fury continued. "We're waiting for Captain Rogers to pick up, the Starks and Langs are en route, the Maximoffs and Banner are already here, we're trying to get in contact with King T'Challa-"

        "We get it, Fury," Natasha hastily interrupted.

        There was a beat of silence before Clint whispered, "This is a full-out Avengers level threat, huh?"

        "Yes. It is."

        Natasha began unconsciously running her fingers through Nina's hair. "We haven't had one of those since Nina was two."

        "That's right."

        "And if I hypothetically bet ten dollars that it's a trickster god who's definitely not dead because there's absolutely no way that he would ever die?"

        "Then, hypothetically, you would lose ten dollars," Fury informed her. "Now get over here."

        "Hold up," Clint interrupted. "If it's not Loki, what is it?"

        There was a pause as Fury said something to someone else on his end before returning. "You know them. That terrorist group you discovered a few months ago."

        It took Nina a few seconds to realize what he was talking about. "The Clasping Hands?" she questioned. "I thought you said they weren't dangerous."

        Natasha gently put a finger to her lips. "They aren't."

        "They are, Agent Romanoff."

        Clint blinked. Nina could practically see the different scenarios running through his head. "But the only way they would actually become dangerous is if they had some way of obtaining nuclear missiles or something."

        "Actually," Fury responded, "it's worse than that. Alien tech. We don't know where they got it, but we know it's explosive enough to bust through the Hulk."

        Natasha looked like she was about to choke. "You're joking."

        "I'm afraid not. Now get over here!"

        "Wait, wait," Clint said. Fury huffed, so he quickly clarified, "This is the last question. How long should this take?"

        "Yeah," Natasha said. "It's Nina's birthday in two weeks."

        "We're being optimistic and estimating you should be back in just a few days. Is that all?" Without waiting for a response, Fury hung up.

        Clint and Natasha exchanged amused glances. "Well, angel," Natasha murmured, looking down at Nina, "I think that's our cue. We gotta go."

        Nina frowned. "Be safe."

        Clint laughed. "That's you mutter's line."

        "Well, she's not here, so now it's mine."

        Natasha smiled and hugged Nina tightly. "I'll miss that sass, even for a few days."

        "Yeah," Clint cut in. "We'll have to put up with Tony's second-class sass. And Peter's. And Sam's and Scott's and Bucky's and – oh. Wow, our team's really sassy, huh? Well, they still aren't as good as you are at this point, hotshot."

        Nina giggled. "I'll miss you. Is Aunt Pepper coming over to babysit?"

        "Nah." Natasha straightened up, flashing her a smile. "I think you're old enough to take care of yourself."

        "Just call Laura if you need something," Clint said as they started towards the car. "Or Cooper. Heck, anyone'll do. Hopefully it's not too serious, though."

        "By anyone, you mean anyone besides the cops, right?" Nina smirked.

        Clint gave a fake shudder of disgust. "Gosh, no. Don't call the cops."

        Natasha laughed. "Don't give Nina a distrust in the authorities, Clint. It's unhealthy. Can you make food for yourself, angel?"

        Nina frowned. "I think so? Can I order pizza just in case?"

        "You can order pizza on...Mondays and Thursdays. That's it. Takeout is Saturday only." Natasha kissed the top of her head. "There are some leftovers in the fridge. I love you, angel."

        "I love you too, Mom. See you soon."

        Clint picked her up and spun her around. Nina giggled. "Love you, hotshot. Don't recreate the Quantum Incident while I'm gone." He winked. "I want to be there too next time."

        "That was Nate, Vater, not me."

        Natasha climbed into the driver's seat and Clint came in next to her. "Stay safe angel!"

        "Don't trust the cops!" Clint yelled. "They're incompetent!"

        "Clint!"

        Nina giggled. "I love you!"

        There were two echoes of the phrase as the car drove away. Nina sat on the front steps, watching her parents disappear. She hadn't known then that she wouldn't see them again.

*  *  *

        "Nina? Nina!"

        Nina jumped, startled back to reality by Aaron's voice. "Sorry, what?"

        "You still with us, Ena?" That was Amy. Nina distantly noted that she must be worried if she was using her nickname on a mission.

        "Uh...yeah." She looked back down at the page, this time holding back the rising tsunami of memories building up behind her eyes. Dang it. She thought that she had been done with the flashbacks. They had been so regular in her childhood that sometimes she would just forget they were even happening most of the time. The doctor had thought that it was some sort of undiscovered mental disorder or something, but since it didn't seem to be life-threatening, they pretty much just dismissed it. The flashbacks had been part of her regular life until after her thirteenth birthday, when she realized that they were just too painful. She would be perfectly happy, joking with her brothers, hiding cards for her mom to find, and practicing archery with her vater, and then suddenly it would all be gone, and she would have lost hem all over again. So she stopped wearing white, dyed her hair blonde, and pushed the flashbacks so far away that she thought she would never have on again. And then she did.

        "Really? Because you're not exactly sounding like it," said Monitor. "Are you okay?"

        Now Monitor was worried. Nothing new there. But now he was worried about her. That definitely didn't happen very often. Nina blinked a couple times and tightened her hold on the file in her hands. She felt it start to bend. "No."

        "No? Nina, what the heck is in that file?"

        Swallowing hard, Nina forced her hands to loosen and clasped the file back in the straps around her chest. "The Clasping Hands."

        The comms instantly went silent. Alex was the first to speak. "I'm sorry, what?"

        "Weren't they the terrorist group who..." Jenny trailed off. She and her brother had still been in New Asgard when it had happened, so they hadn't been directly involved in it. It made sense that she might not instantly recognize the name.

        "Yes. Yes, they were." Nina turned, trying desperately to pull herself under her calm façade again.. She only kind of succeeded, but it was better than nothing. "Aaron, I'm coming out."

        Amy said, "I'm sorry, are we seriously ending that conversation there?"

        Nina strode out into the control room, trying to pretend like nothing had happened as to keep up appearances with the few men there that seemed conscious. "No, but we can continue it back at the plane when I'm not in an enemy plane –"

        Suddenly she was ambushed from behind. Without skipping a beat, she grabbed one of the men's arms and flung him up over her shoulder onto the floor, smoothly going from that position to kicking the second man's legs out from under him. Loud yells and gunshots from behind her alerted her to the appearance of reinforcements. Many reinforcements. Cursing in Russian, Nina began to run. "Aaron. Now."

        "Gimme a minute. A bit busy here."

        "You have five seconds." Nina was currently following the sound of explosions. So close so close so close. The gunshots were getting nearer. Then suddenly, around a corner, the hallway disappeared. A smoking hole was in its place, with nothing under it but empty sky. A dead end. Nina glanced quickly behind her. They were coming. Aaron wasn't there yet.

        Nina jumped.

        Jenny was right. It was cold at this altitude. Nina would have been shivering, but she was kind of distracted on wondering when she would hit the clouds. She hoped she wouldn’t. Then she would be wet. And cold. And that wouldn’t feel very nice. It was kind of cool in the clouds, though. She liked the mysterious quality of how you didn’t know what was there. Just you and the mist around you. Oh, right. She had forgotten for a moment that she was free-falling. She began to count. One Mississippi, two Mississippi… On three Mississippi, something suddenly slammed into her from behind and grabbed her, flying upward instead of down. She flinched slightly at the freezing metal.

         “You’re late!” she called up.

       “Better late than never!” Aaron called back. Aaron had created a similar suit to his father in how it functioned, but he had taken precautions to make sure no one would ever mistake him for Iron Man. Instead of red, he had painted it a light blue and gold. He also had two smaller arc reactors over his wrists instead of on his chest.

        “Yeah, well better on time than late!”

        Aaron ignored her, flying further upward until they arrived at their plane. Part of the roof slid open, and Aaron let Nina go. She landed easily inside, glad to be out of the cold.

        Monitor glanced up. “Great. You’re here. Jenny, come back in.”

        Jenny probably replied, but Nina had already removed her earpiece. She fiddled with the straps around her chest before unclasping them and removing the three files. Nina tossed the first two over to where Amy was seated at a console, but everyone’s focus was on the third one. As she laid it down on the table and flipped it open, Jenny arrived.

        Her gray hair was windblown and messy, and her eyes were still sparking with the same red-tinged electricity as were around her hands, propelling her up to the plane and gently setting her down. On her forehead, the Asgardian symbol of Thor was glowing faintly, but she brushed her sleeve over it a few times until it disappeared.

        “Let’s look at this,” Alex murmured. Nina flipped open to the first page, and he blinked. “Okay, that’s definitely the Clasping Hands.”

        But Nina had noticed the date on the bottom right corner of the page and her throat clenched. No, no, no. She wordlessly pointed to it. The date was in October. The entire plane froze.

        Aaron was the first to speak. “That’s…two months after.” He looked up. “Right? Is it wrong? Is it the wrong year or something?” He seemed to be getting frantic. “Two months after. They were supposed to be gone by then. Why aren’t they gone?”

        Nina could barely make her hands move, but she forced herself to flip the page and her vision locked on one of the first sentences. “Following the Avengers’ failed attempts to prevent our plan…” Failed attempts. “Oh my gosh,” she whispered. Two months after. The Clasping Hands hadn’t been destroyed. That meant that the Avengers had died for nothing. She was so horrified that she didn’t feel the flashback in time until it came crashing onto her.

*  *  *

        Nina hummed a tune under her breath as she skipped around the kitchen. She didn’t really trust herself all that much with the oven, so she tried to have most of her meals be not baked or else cooked on the stove. Just then, her phone rang. She wiped her hands on a dish towel before going to answer it. It was probably Laura. She had been checking in with her a few times a day. However, looking at the screen, she saw it wasn’t labeled “Mutter,” but “A Random S.H.I.E.L.D. Operative.” Nina blinked down at it in confusion for a moment before shrugging and accepting the call. She usually wouldn’t have answered an unknown number, but a quick flashback had flashed before her eyes, with Natasha mentioning at the dinner table that Tony had set up an automatic caller ID for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. So then this one was legit.

        “Hello?”

        “Hello,” the agent answered. “Is this Nina Barton?”

        “Yes.”

        “Is anyone else there with you?”

        “No. Mutter’s on vacation, Nate’s at camp, and Lila and Cooper are at college. Why?”

        “Okay.” There was a pause and distant chatter on the agent’s side before he returned to the phone. “Miss Barton–”

        “Nina.”

        “Nina, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Should I wait until your mother, er, mutter gets home?”

        Nina froze, ignoring the second part of his sentence. “Bad news? How? What happened? Are Mom and Vater okay?”

        “Nina, I think we should wait—”

        “What happened?” she insisted.

        There was a long sigh. “Nina, I’m sorry to tell you that while your parents and the rest of the Avengers were deployed in Saudi Arabia, there was an explosion.”

        Flashback. Nick Fury’s voice saying, “We know it’s explosive enough to bust through the Hulk.”

        Nina shook off the memories. “What? I—what?”

        “The explosion was too strong. I’m sorry, Nina, but your parents…well, no one could have survived it. I’m really sorry. We’re notifying your mutter now, and she should be over soon.” There was a pause. “Nina? Are you all right?”

        The phone fell from Nina’s numb fingers and landed on the couch. She thought the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent might be calling her name, but she couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear anything. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She couldn’t think straight. All she could think of was that she had to run. She had to move. She had to get out of there.

        Later Nina would remember running blindly through the pouring rain to the garage, grabbing her bicycle and pedaling furiously out in no definite direction. She couldn’t think through the deluge of flashbacks in her head. There they were. They were fine. No, they were dead. Later she couldn’t even remember when she started crying. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe the wetness on her cheeks was just the rain falling in sheets.

        It was a miracle that she didn’t get hopelessly lost somewhere. Apparently she had been paying some attention to where she was going, because she found herself at the Starks’ cabin. Looking back at the route afterwards, she realized that she must have been on her bike for hours. She had absolutely no memories of that trip. The next thing she remembered was abandoning her bike in the woods and sprinting blindly up the hill to the cabin.

        Nina burst through the door without knocking and collapsed into the arms of the first person she saw. Later they told her it had been Aaron. She clutched his shirt, sobbing. Aaron was probably surprised that she had suddenly arrived, but he immediately hugged her back. She realized then that he was also crying, and his tears were now mixing in with the rainwater streaming off her hair.

        The Avengers were dead. They had sacrificed themselves to take out one last terrorist group. Only now, she realized, they hadn’t taken them out.

        They had died for nothing.

*  *  *

        “Nina.”

        Nina jolted at the touch of a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see Aaron. His face was pale and sweaty, and concern was etched into it. He looked at her silently.

        “I-I’m okay.” Nina hadn’t told anyone about the flashbacks. The only ones who knew were her family and the Maximoffs. This may seem surprising, but taking into consideration the fact that Billy could read minds and didn’t keep anything from Tommy, it actually wasn’t. Nina was also pretty sure that Preston knew, but she wasn’t sure. She had no idea what went on in that man’s brain.

        Nina straightened and cast an anxious glance around the rest of the plane. Suddenly, she was very glad that Aaron had installed an AI driver, because no one was currently steering. Amy had grabbed Alex’s hand and was hanging on with what must be very nearly cutting off his blood circulation. No, really. Half super-soldiers will do that. Jenny had one hand covering her mouth, and her white face was a stark contrast to her stormy hair and the fading remnants of red energy flickering around her hands.

        Nina caught Monitor’s eye. He seemed the calmest out of all of them, which made sense, because he wasn’t directly connected to the Avengers before the explosion. “We have to tell the rest of the AV-Kids, Nina.”

        “Right, right.” Nina fumbled with her phone, thankful for a distraction.

Awesome AV-Kidz

Nina: Guys

Nina: This is really important.

Morgan: I’m in a meeting. Is this urgent?

Aaron: Yes. More urgent than, like, anything.

Nina: For once, he’s not kidding.

Lucy: Well, can you be quick? Class starts in fifteen minutes.

        Nina steeled herself, snapping a few photos of the file, logo, and first page. She made sure to zoom in on the date.

Nina attached three images.

        There was a pause on the chat. Clicking on the icon next to the photos, Nina could see that more and more people were reading their texts. She bit her lip as the silence stretched out and exchanged worried glances with Aaron. Just then, her phone started to ring with the song “Centuries” by Fall Out Boy. T’Channa had started a group call. That was surprising. Usually T’Channa didn’t like to talk in the chat, always being overwhelmed with “monarch work” or whatever she was doing. Nina entered the call.

        “Tell me this is a joke,” T’Channa said as soon as the audio turned on. Morgan was there, too, as were Lucy and Aaron.

        Nina motioned to the others in the plane to accept the call before turning back to the screen with a sigh. “I almost wish it was.”

        “You know we wouldn’t joke about this, T’Channa,” Aaron murmured.

        “Where did you find it?” Lucy asked. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t look quite as shaken up as the rest of them. She hadn’t really known them that much. She hadn’t even been four when Bucky, her father, had died. She did look scared, though.

        Nina grabbed the file off the table and walked to the back of the plane, where she plopped down on one of the couches. “Um, random underground plane. I thought there was some pretty high-tech security for three normal files. Turns out, I was right.”

        There were several dings at once as Jenny, Alex, Amy, and the Maximoff twins logged on.

        “How do you two always enter at, like, the same time?” Morgan demanded.

        “Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Tommy at the same time as Billy said, “I don’t know. I think it’s just coincidence.”

        “Billy, you spoiled it,” complained Tommy. His demeanor quickly changed, however, when he saw the looks on everyone’s faces. “What’s wrong?”

        “Read the texts,” T’Channa muttered. “What else does it say, Nina?”

        Nina flipped open the file. “Um…I don’t speak this language.” She pushed it up to Aaron, who was standing next to her couch. “Translate.”

        “This is English, Nina.”

        “No, it’s government legal rights kershfuffle. Translate.”

        Aaron sighed as he snapped a few more photos and posted them in the chat. “Honestly, I’m not sure what this is saying. Hey, Harley.”

        Harley Stark waved, having just entered the call.

        “My translator has failed,” Nina grumbled. “Secondary translators! Morgan and T’Channa! Go!”

        There was a distant explosion from someone’s end.

        “Who was that?” Alex asked.

        “Oh, that was me.” Billy glanced at something off screen. “I forgot about that. Um, I’m kind of in the middle of a multiverse thing. Be right back.” He set down his phone and ducked out of the screen.

        Glancing through the participants, Nina saw that Lila, Nate, and Cassie had also joined. Cooper was sitting next to Cassie. Good, she thought. It would be nice to have her family next to her while dealing with this.

        “So?” That was Lila. “What does it say?”

        Morgan’s eyebrows were furrowed. “You know, I never thought the word ‘kershfuffle’ could accurately describe anything, but I have been proven wrong. It would help if I knew what they were talking about.”

        “Can you find anything?” Tommy asked.

        “Um…oh! Here! Page five. It mentions a prisoner report.”

        “Prisoner report?” asked Jenny.

        “Yeah. Only it doesn’t say their name or gender or picture or anything. Most of what’s here is deals with the prison warden. The prison’s in Turkey, though.” Morgan frowned at the rest of it. “The rest of the file’s complete chaos. Either the person creating it was really bad at their job, or they didn’t want other people to know what it said.” She paused. “Or both.”

        “Well, I’ll check out the prison tomorrow or something.” Nina glanced at the GPS in the wall. “We’re too far away today, though.”

        “You’re going to…break into a high-security prison?” Billy had returned. He seemed a bit disheveled, but overall unharmed.

        “Yep!”

        Nate frowned. “How exactly are you going to do that?”

        Nina cracked her knuckles. “Leave that to me.”

        “She’s going to show them her record,” said Harley with a straight face. The call burst into laughter.

        “Ha, ha. Very funny, guys. I’ll get back to you later. Bye!” Nina logged off.

     The call continued on the rest of the plane, but Nina ignored it. As far as she could tell, they weren’t talking about anything really important. She went up to the pilot’s seat to fly the plane and think about the new development.

*  *  *

        As the plane landed, Nina could make out Preston standing there, arms crossed, tapping his foot. He had clearly seen the messages and wanted to see the file for himself. Unlike Jenny, his younger sister, Preston never went on missions with them unless they were pretty sure someone was going to get hurt, in which case he would act as their doctor and do his best to heal them. If they were still wounded by the time they got back to headquarters, they would get out the supply of healing equipment from Wakanda.

        As Jenny and Preston conversed in hushed tones, Nina walked past them into the building. It was situated on the outskirts of New York City, but it wasn’t your usual skyscraper. It looked a bit more like the Avengers Compound (which, yes, was still standing, but no one visited it anymore).

        She got to her bedroom and closed the door behind her. She changed out of her suit (it got really uncomfortable sometimes) and into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Nina flopped on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. She should probably start preparing for her mission the next day, seeing as it probably wasn’t going to be an overnight job, but she didn’t really want to right now.

        Sighing, Nina grabbed a few darts from the dresser and started to throw them at the dartboard on her door. The dartboard was a sort of joke between the Legacies. Aaron got her a new one every year for her birthday, and by the time a year had rolled around, she needed it. The center would be so full of holes that no one could even tell what color it had been before. After a few minutes, Nina put down the darts and sighed. This wasn’t helping. So she went for a walk. She knew exactly where she was going.

*  *  *

        The Avengers Memorial was one of New York City’s biggest claims to fame after the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Times Square. So no one was really sure why there was almost never anybody there. Maybe it was because the area was so secluded, tucked behind tall hedges with only one opening. Or maybe the visitors who came to the memorial understood to some degree how much this place meant to the AV-Kids. It seemed like it was made more for the families than tourists.

        In the center of the memorial was the Avengers insignia. Situated around the logo in a perfect circle was the Avengers. Each statue was carved even larger than life, and each was in their most well-known iconic position. The circle was supposed to represent how none of the Avengers was more important than the other, and Nina had noticed straight off the bat that Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor had all been placed as far away from each other as possible, so that none of them could be identified as the “best Avenger”. The architect had even included Pietro Maximoff. That wasn’t the best part, though.

        Nina startled upon realizing that someone was already there, seated upon the pedestal for the White Wolf. She was about to turn and leave, unwilling to stay there if she had to put up with random civilians, but then she recognized the person.

        “Hey, Lucy.”

        Lucy glanced up and smiled. “Hey, Nina.” Her open hand closed around the locket she was holding and she reached up to hang it back around her neck. “What’re you doing here?”

        “I don’t know. Just bored, I guess.”

        “You do get bored easily.”

        Nina sat next to her. “How’s technical school?”

        “Great! It’s so interesting! Everyone was impressed that I had seen some of Stark Industries’ productions. Do you think Morgan would be mad if I took some of their machines to show the class?”

        “Nope. In fact, she’d probably love the idea. Are you working on a new project?”

        Lucy’s eyes lit up and Nina smiled. The best way to get Lucy talking was to ask her about some sort of machinery thing. She launched into a long explanation about her new idea for a class project, all the different coding she was using, and how she was thinking up ways to solve this or that problem. Nina didn’t understand half of it, but she was glad that Lucy was talking about something she loved.

        Nina’s gaze drifted to the rest of the park. The sun was glowing on the green lawn, and the trees and hedges provided a nice sense of isolation that she didn’t usually get, especially while living near New York City.

        Nina noticed that Lucy’s speech had trailed off, and she glanced back, mentally rewinding the conversation to figure out why she had stopped. She had been talking about neurological signals or something...oh.

        Nina leaned over and hugged her. “You okay?”

        Lucy nodded, but then hesitated and shook her head. “It’s just so weird, you know? I barely even knew him, but I miss him. And it’s been so long I didn’t think I would miss him, but with all this stuff about the Clasping Hands, well...”

        “You don’t need to know somebody to miss them, Lucy. You can miss them just knowing they loved you.”

        Lucy pulled on the chain around her neck, something she did when she was nervous or sad. “I know. It just doesn’t make that much sense to me.”

        “I don’t think it does to any of us.”

     Lucy gave Nina a shaky smile, and reached beside her to lay her hand over her father’s. That was the best part about the Avengers Memorial. The architect had found a way to make it so that people didn’t remember just the Avengers the heroes, but the Avengers the people. Maybe that was why not many people visited the Avengers Memorial. They realized that they had come just to see the heroes, and were embarrassed that they had forgotten about a whole other side to them.

        Scattered around the park were statues of the Avengers the people. They weren’t in uniform or in heroic poses. They just looked like regular people who had stopped in the park for lunch or to talk with someone. Tony and Peter were sitting on the Iron Man pedestal with sandwiches, looking like they were mid-conversation. Scott and Hope Lang were sitting next to the Ant-Man statue with two cheeseburgers sitting next to them. (Cassie would joke that it was inaccurate because there was no way her father would leave an untouched cheeseburger next to him for even two seconds.) Pietro Maximoff was trying to climb up the leg of the Quicksilver statue, and Wanda and Vision were sitting on a park bench, gazing at the park with smiles on their faces like they were watching their children play in the grass.

        Nina glanced over to the other side of the park. She knew, even if she couldn’t see them, that her parents were lying in the grass, watching the clouds. Sometimes she would lay there with them, wondering what pictures they saw in the sky.

        “Do you ever miss them?” Lucy asked quietly.

        Nina looked down at her hands. “Yeah.”

        There was a pause. “Nina?”

        “Hm?”

       “You’re going to look at the Clasping Hands thing tomorrow, right?”

        “Yeah.”

        “Can you do something for me?”

        Nina looked up at Lucy. The younger girl’s eyes were burning with a fiery determination. “Of course.”

        “Kick their butts.”

        “Yes, ma’am.”

 “Remember the code, Nina.”

 “The code sucks.”

 “Well, it’s necessary.”

 “Could it be necessary and make more sense?”

 “It’s fine as it is.”

 “No, it’s not. Look. If I want to tell you to get me my bow, I have to tell you that I’m going to be late for my cello lesson. I don’t take cello lessons.”

 “No one else knows that.”

 “Yes, they do. And why in the world would I want cello lessons in a high-security prison?”

 “It doesn’t matter.”

 “They’ll think I’m crazy!”

 “Better crazy than an infiltrator, right?”

 “Better sane than crazy.”

 This conversation had been going on for at least half an hour by now. Alex and Nina argued about this almost every single time she went on a solo mission.

 “Well at least we know what it means,” Alex was saying. “All I’m saying is that you need to learn this to communicate with us. We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

 “Oh, yeah.” Nina grinned. “That was funny.”

 “You had us sitting in Los Angeles for days waiting for a missile strike when what you were trying to say was that there was a counterfeiting ring in Virginia.”

 “Maybe if your code was better you would have understood it more.”

 “It was not the code’s fault.”

 Amy called from the front of the plane, “Would you two please stop arguing? It gets really annoying to have to listen to.”

 “That’s a good point,” Aaron agreed. “Nina, I think your phone is ringing.”

 Nina walked into the other room and scooped up her phone, checking the caller ID before answering. “Hey, guys.”

 “Hi, Nina,” her family chorused.

 “Gosh, you haven’t called to check in with me before a mission for, like, a year now.”

 “That’s because we’ve had no idea when you were going on a mission,” Lila pointed out.

 “Yep,” Cooper agreed. “Tell us when you’re going on one and we’ll gladly call you.”

 Nina smiled. “But there is an occasion, right?”

 “We just want to check in on you,” her mutter replied. “All this stuff about the Clasping Hands suddenly showing up is really shocking. You okay?”

 “I’m fine, Mutter. Really. I’ll just sneak into this prison thing, check some stuff out, and be back in just a few days. Promise.”

 “Well, you know we’ll always be here for you,” said Lila. “Right, guys?”

 “Right!” Nate replied enthusiastically.

 “Cassie and I will be ready at a moment’s notice.” Cooper did a little salute.

 “If you need us, Nines, just say...what was the code again?”

 Nina smirked. “I’ll tell Alex that I’m going to eat breakfast next to the bear enclosure.”

 “Seriously?” Laura wrinkled her nose. “That’s weird.”

 “Exactly! Someone agrees with me! It’s so weird. Honestly, I don’t know where in the world Alex comes up with this stuff.”

 “Hey!” he shouted from the other room. “Stop trash-talking my code where I can hear you.”

 “He’s right,” Nina replied, quickly switching to German in the blink of an eye. “But now he can’t hear us.”

 “I know you’re talking about me!”

 Nina yelled something at him in a jumble of Russian, German, Xhosa, and French that probably should not be recorded here, because I have not included a Profanity tag here. “Anyway,” she said, turning back to the call, “where were we?”

 “We just want you to know that we’ll always be just a few minutes away,” Laura assured her.

 “Yep! Us bears won’t be hibernating for a while now.” Cooper winked.

 Nina burst into laughter as Alex grumbled.

 “We’ll stop insulting your code once you stop eavesdropping!” Nate yelled, apparently having heard Alex.

 “Alex, Nate says-”

 “I know what he says.”

 Nina walked into the back room and shut the door. “There. Now even a half-super soldier can’t hear us.”

 “We love you, Nina,” Laura said.

 “Love you, too, guys. I’ll stay safe. Bye!”

 Her family began logging off, but before Nina could leave the call, Nate spoke up. “Nina?”

 Nina looked down at her phone screen. She and Nate were the only ones still on the call. “’Sup?”

 “Are you sure you’re okay?”

 Nina looked away. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

 “Because we just found out that Dad and Aunt Nat weren’t able to stop a dangerous terrorist group before they died. You probably didn’t want to say anything in front of Mom, but I won’t judge. Really, Nina.”

 “Thanks, Nate, but it’s nothing. I’ll get through it. It’s nothing big.”

 “It’s probably one of the biggest things in our life and you know it.”

 Nina didn’t look at him.

 “Nina, you can’t just keep running from this.”

 “I’m not running,” Nina said forcefully. “I don’t run from things. Ever. I don’t run, I don’t hide, I meet them head-on.”

 Nate was silent for a moment. “Okay. Just...if you need someone to talk to, we’re always here.”

 “I know.”

 “I should probably let you get ready for your mission now, huh? Love you.”

 “Я люблю вас.”

 “Ich liebe dich.”

 “Ndiyakuthanda.”

 “Te amo.”

 “أحبك”

 “Um...je t’aime.”

 “Tôi yêu bạn.”

 “That’s not a language.”

 “Is too. It’s Vietnamese.”

 “Since when do you speak Vietnamese?”

 “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

 Nate huffed. “Fine, fine. You win.”

 Nina grinned and hung up. She stared at her faint reflection in the screen of her phone for a moment before tossing it aside onto the couch next to her and walking back into the main room of the plane. “All right, how long until we land?”

*  *  *

 It was four thirty local time in Turkey. Nina knew it would take her a few days to get used to the time zone, but she was used to that by now. Since she would be infiltrating a prison, Aaron had somehow managed to get her one of the standard prison jumpsuits. She immediately hated it. The fabric was a bright yellow and extremely papery. Even more annoying was the fact that it didn’t quite cover her wrists. About twelve years ago, Nina had taken to wearing padded wrist guards. She had been scratched or cut there a few times before, and the thought always made her shiver. So now the wrist guards protected her most vulnerable part (in her opinion). That’s why the jumpsuit bothered her so much. She wasn’t allowed to bring the wrist guards, and the papery fabric of the uniform didn’t even offer the slightest bit of protection for her.

 “All right. We good to go?” she asked, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet as she made her way to the front of the plane.

 “Yep,” Amy replied. “This is the prison. Question: How are you going to get in?”

 Nina just grinned. “You got one of those band thingies?”

 “Are you sure? They could find it.”

 “Psh. I’ll keep it around my arm and I’ll only take it out at night.”

 “...okay. But only if you absolutely need it.”

 “I do. And besides, it’s a good thing to have in case things go south. Is all my stuff chipped?”

 “All the normal stuff, yes. Do you need anything else?” Amy grabbed a thin, clear, stretchy band off the table next to her and handed it to Nina.

 “Yes, actually.” Nina motioned with her head to the other side of the room. “I set it up over there. Can you chip it?” She had arranged a rope on a shelf, looping the end around a corner of it and tying it.

 “Yep. Just like this?”

 “Mhm. It’s part of my awesome plan to get in.”

 “You’re...climbing up the wall using a rope?”

 “No, but that’s what they think I’m doing.” Without elaborating, Nina pulled up the sleeve of her jumpsuit so that she could attach the band to her arm right under her shoulder. She clicked it closed and ran a finger across it, testing to make sure it was connected. It lit up with a faint blue glow where she had touched it, so it was working. “Great. Ready for deployment.”

 “Do you need us to wait for a different time?” Aaron called across the room.

 “Nah. This is the best time for a breakout.”

 “But it’s not a breakout. It’s a break-in.”

 “They don’t know that, now, do they?” Nina grinned over at him. “Alex!” She clapped twice and held up a hand to catch the small earpiece that he threw at her. As she slid it into her ear, she realized she had forgotten something. “Wait, what am I looking for again?”

 Monitor rolled his eyes slightly. “Do you ever pay attention when I’m talking?”

 “Only when you’re talking to someone else.”

 “So, like eavesdropping?”

 “Yeah.”

 Monitor let out a lengthy sigh. “Do you remember the file?”

 “I remember that there was a file. I don’t remember what it said because no one had any idea what it was saying.”

 “Would someone please enlighten us?” Monitor asked the room. “Perhaps one of you were listening.”

 “Probably a prisoner,” Amy called from where she was attaching the microchips to the rope. “It was a prisoner report that Morgan was looking at, right?”

 “Exactly. Thank you, Amy.”

 “You’re welcome, Professor Monitor.”

 “Never mind. I take that back.” Monitor turned back to Nina. “Now are we clear?”

 “A prisoner.”

 “Yes.”

 “Which prisoner? It’s literally a prison.”

 “I don’t know. You’re supposed to figure it out. Someone that has something to do with the Clasping Hands.”

 Nina raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for narrowing it down. I’ll get out my survey sheet. ‘What about you? Are you or are you not affiliated with a terrorist group who everyone thought was dead? Oh, you are? Great! Then...um…’ Then what?”

 “It depends who it is.”

 “Thank you. Very helpful. So this is a Clasping Hands agent?”

 Before Monitor could reply, Aaron called across the room, “Probably not, actually. Usually people don’t stick their agents in jail.”

 “Except for us, apparently,” Alex responded. “Not sure if Nina counts, though.”

 “Hilarious,” she deadpanned. “So it’s someone who’s a threat to the Clasping Hands?”

 “Looks like it,” Monitor responded. “Now leave before we miss our window.”

 “Yes, sir.”

 “Remember the code,” Alex called.

 “Again, the code sucks.”

 “I’m sorry, what was that?”

 Nina just winked and slid open the doors of the plane. Since the cloaking aspect didn’t work too well when the door was open, she knew she had to act quickly. Grabbing the hook off a nearby table, she quickly attached it to the side of the plane and jumped, sliding down the rope to the ground.

 When she landed, she knew she had about five minutes tops. Come on. Come on. She ran to the heavily fortified wall of the prison and used precious seconds sizing it up. Nimble as a squirrel, she leapt over the barbed wire at the base of the wall and grabbed the small crack in the side of the otherwise completely smooth wall. She clung to the wall and froze, holding her breath as a spotlight from one of the towers swung over her way. Thankfully, it didn’t see her.

 Nina climbed up the wall, pressing herself against two of the outer supports for better leverage. She was almost to the top. Suddenly she got to the point where the outer supports vanished into the wall, leaving Nina with no way to get the last few feet. Nina took a deep breath, steeling herself. This was one of the times where she wished she was Peter. She readjusted her grip on the corners of the supports and, before she could lose her nerve, launched herself into the air. For a moment she was afraid she wouldn’t make it, but her fingers caught on the top of the wall and she managed to haul herself up without getting cut by the barbed wire.

 Nina slid the band down to her wrist and pressed a small circle drawn carefully on it. It began to glow blue and thin beams of light began forming themselves into the rope she had arranged on the plane. It was always an agonizingly slow process, especially for a rope this long, that could reach down to the ground on the other side of the wall.

 Footsteps. Nina mentally cursed. A guard was coming, thankfully on the inside of the wall. She bit her lip and willed the rope to form faster. If she was caught doing this, with high-tech Wakandan gadgets, no less, she would instantly be busted. She began to mutter under her breath in Russian. Come on. Come on. The last beams of light were settling into the now-solid rope...done! Nina quickly slid the band back up into her jumpsuit, and just at the right time.

 The guard rounded the corner and instantly saw the dangling rope. “Oha!” he yelled in surprise, moving his flashlight up to see who had placed it. Nina paused just long enough for him to catch a glance of her before quickly turning and starting back down the wall. She slid down the smooth surface to one of the supports that were braced against the wall at a slight angle, getting farther away from the wall as they went down. In short, they were like a very steep slide.

 Nina slid down it, paying no attention to the shouting and flashlight beams that were now coming at her from every angle. She hit the ground in a roll, quickly jumping up and starting to run. Not too fast, though. She didn’t want to get away. Thankfully, the guards were fast and strong, and in a few seconds, one had caught up to her and tackled her to the ground.

 “Don’t move!” he yelled in Turkish. “Don’t move!”

 Nina glared up into the harsh light of the flashlight, trying her best to appear defiant and disappointed.

 The guard raised his gun. “Don’t move!”

 “All right! All right! You don’t have to repeat yourself!” Nina raised both hands. It didn’t really do much, because she was lying on the ground, but the guard relaxed.

 He turned and shouted over to the rest of the guards. “I got her!”

 There was a resounding cheer and Nina resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Honestly. She had been trying to get captured. And that, she thought smugly, is how you break into a prison without them even realizing you don’t belong here in the first place.

*  *  *

 Nina sat in a plastic chair, swinging her legs and generally being bored. While no one was looking, she had slipped the earpiece from her ear behind the zipper in the front of the jumpsuit. She would find a better hiding place soon. What was she doing here again? Oh, right. Waiting for the prison warden. Apparently he usually wasn’t awake at four thirty in the morning. Shocking.

 Nina glanced around at the guards, trying to think of something to do while she waited. She would be keeping an eye out for the prisoner she was supposed to be looking for, but whoever it was probably wasn’t here. In the warden’s office. At four thirty in the morning. Or maybe it was closer to five thirty by now.

 Suddenly something caught Nina’s eye. Her heart nearly stopped. Was it—no. No, it wasn’t. Thank goodness. For a moment, she had thought that one of the guards had had a red star on his left arm like the Winter Soldier or something. But he didn’t. She just hadn’t seen it straight. The Winter Soldier. Actually, that was a great example for someone she would be looking for. Someone affiliated with the group, but feared by them. Someone with the potential to kill anyone. Someone they were pretty sure would obey them, but not totally. Someone potentially strong enough to do anything with the right tweaking. Maybe even...survive an explosion.

 Nina’s eyes widened and a sickening feeling started forming in her gut. If someone had known an explosion was coming, like someone who had triggered it, they could have easily fled the scene. Especially if they had been genetically modified to be able to survive something like that. Oh, gosh. Did I just get myself stuck in a prison with the person that killed the Avengers? No. No, it’s too soon. I can’t speculate right now. Focus on the task at hand. Find the prisoner. Then find out who it is.

 Thankfully, her train of thought was interrupted by the warden finally arriving. He was a bit younger than she had been expecting. Maybe mid-thirties.

 “Leave us,” he commanded the guards. “I want to talk…lonely. Er, alone.”

 Nina immediately saw that he didn’t know Turkish all that well.

 The guards were apparently accustomed to this request, because they immediately stepped outside, closing the door behind us. The warden let out a long sigh. “Prisoner 17934...8.”

 “I speak other languages,” Nina interrupted in English.

 The warden blinked in surprise. “Oh, good,” he said in fluent (albeit heavily-accented) English. “My Turkish is terrible. Now, Prisoner 179348. The guards say you were trying to escape, right?”

 “Almost did, too.”

 “Here’s the thing. You won’t ever get out. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. We’ve had almost a hundred of escape attempts over the years. They’ve never succeeded. We’ve held prisoners here for a lot longer. Maybe, with good behavior, I can get your sentence shortened slightly, but not if you keep trying to escape.” Nina must have looked surprised, because a faint hint of a smile played around his lips. “There are some people here who I think should be free, Prisoner 179348. Since I can’t help them, I just try to help everyone else. If you really want to get out soon, you should just not try to get out. Because this was your first attempt, I won’t punish you, but this is your warning. Don’t try again, all right?” Nina just looked away, The warden sighed again. Gosh, why did he do that so much? “You’re being reassigned to a new cell.” Good. Nina hadn’t even had an old one before, and that would have caused some confusion. “It’s nearly time for breakfast. You are excused, Prisoner 179348.”

 “Thank you, sir.” Nina stood up and left, ignoring the guards still standing by the door.

*  *  *

 Of course, the prison food sucked. Why wouldn’t it? It was a prison. The point was to keep people there while they...thought about their actions or something like that. What was the point of a prison? Anyway, the purpose was not to have the chefs practice their cooking skills.

 Nina ultimately decided she wasn’t hungry. At least for breakfast. Maybe if lunch was better, she would have that. It probably wouldn’t be, though. Whatever. She was busy searching the crowd of prisoners for the person she was trying to find. It would have probably helped if she knew who she was trying to find. Unfortunately, she didn’t.

 She did try to focus, but it was kind of boring. Her mind drifted, thinking of other things instead. Nina could tell how long someone had been in the prison by the state of their uniform. Well, a rough estimate. That man with the scruffy beard looked like he had been there for a few months now. That one, a few years. That one—wow. Whatever it was, it had been a while. That guy with the tattooed arms looked like he was a newbie. It obviously wasn’t his first time in a prison, though, seeing as he acted like he owned the place—oh, wait. Nina suppressed a sigh. He was coming straight at her.

 Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him.

 “Hey, girlie.”

 Oh, he speaks English. Good for him. Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him.

 “What’s wrong, girlie? Not talking, huh?” The punk leaned down next to her, hot breath hitting her in the face. Nina waved a hand slightly like she was brushing off a fly, smacking him lightly in the face. “Whoa, there.” He caught her wrist loosely. “No need to get feisty, there, girlie.”

 Ignore—oh, never mind. Nina suddenly stood, twisting her hand around to grab his wrist. She slammed it into the table, jerking Punk down so he was eye-level with her. “Really? Because I think there is.”

 Punk just smirked. “I like my ladies who aren’t dependent. You don’t seem to be. That’s good.”

 “Right. Well, I like my men non-existent, thank you very much.”

 “Got a little spice. I like it.”

 Nina rolled her eyes. “Last warning.” Punk apparently didn’t take the hint. He leaned in, trying to get closer. Nina flipped her legs around, catching him around the neck and slamming his head into the table. “Don’t bother me anymore,” she hissed. Without waiting for a response, she leapt nimbly off of him, sat back down at the chair, and began watching the prisoners again. Without looking, she listened intently as Punk stood, hesitated for a few moments, probably stunned and trying to gather himself up again, and swaggered off, likely looking for another woman to flirt with.

 Honestly. The nerve of some people. Nina hoped she would never have to face another guy like Punk again. In America, most men noticed who she was in the first five minutes, tops. This, however, was Turkey, and she had added extra makeup to give herself something of a disguise. It wasn’t much, though. If someone had ever gotten a good look at her, they would be able to recognize her, but the television cameras had never really gotten good photos. In fact, the only place where accurate pictures could be found of her was probably AV-Kids Magazine. No one really read that, though.

 Realizing she had lost track of her thoughts, Nina glanced around to locate Punk again, making sure he was very far away from her. Sure enough, he was busy flirting with another woman. Typical.

 Nina was going to look away, but something caught her eye. There had been a group of other men following Punk loosely, but now they were hanging back, brows furrowed. To anyone else, it would just look like they were confused or something, but Nina had been reading and imitating body language for long enough to know that they were nervous. They held their arms in more of a defensive posture, like they were worried someone was going to attack them, and their bodies were ever-so-slightly tilted to the side like they were preparing to run. Frowning, Nina glanced around the area, trying to figure out what was making them so nervous. Nothing seemed amiss...but the crowd was acting odd. They were starting to drift over, but there was a large circle of space around Punk and the woman he was flirting with, like the prisoners wanted to see what was going to happen, but didn’t want to get too close. Nina suddenly realized what was wrong. The prisoner he’s flirting with. They’re scared of her.

 She turned to a man standing next to her. “Who’s that?”

 The man startled, glancing at her. “You don’t know?”

 “I’m new.”

 “I can see that. That’s Prisoner 102314. No one messes with her.”

 “Well that guy is.”

 “Yes. But he has to learn his lesson.”

 Nina craned her neck to try and get a better look at Prisoner 102314, but she couldn’t see very well though the crowd. She did notice, however, when the woman stood. Prisoner 102314 turned to face Punk.  “You’re new,” she said calmly, in slightly accented Turkish, “so I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Don’t bother me.”

        Punk just smirked. “Boy, am I hearing that a lot. Don’t hold back, sweetheart.” Apparently he spoke Turkish as well as English. Nina wouldn't have thought he had that mental capacity, but apparently he did.

 “Then again, a warning may not cut it. Usually only two people try to bother me. Really brave or really stupid. I’m guessing you’re the latter.”

 “Don’t be fooled by first impressions, sweetheart.”

 “Usually I’m not, but this time I don’t think you’re fooling anyone. Are you going to leave me alone now?”

 “Why? Do you not want me to leave?”

 “On the contrary.” The prisoner tossed her head. “Tell me something.”

 “Anything, sweetheart.”

 “What are you scared of?”

 There was a soft ooh from the surrounding crowd, like the prisoner had just said something that meant more than how it appeared.

 Punk seemed slightly taken aback, but he recovered quickly. “A life without you is the only thing that scares me.”

 “Wow, you’re dumb. Everyone’s afraid of something, you know. The people who think they don’t are usually the ones with the most. Would you like a demonstration?”

 Nina noticed that the entire crowd around her flinched simultaneously. A demonstration of your fears? Who is this person?

 “Watch this,” the man next to her hissed. “That guy’s gonna get what’s coming to him.”

 Punk looked slightly nervous. “I...don’t totally get what you’re saying.”

 “Don’t worry. You will,” Prisoner 102314 replied calmly.

 A few seconds later, Punk started to scream.

 Nina jumped. She hadn’t seen Prisoner 102314 do anything, but Punk looked completely terrified. He fell to the ground, still screaming. The woman stood over him a minute before turning abruptly and walking away. The crowd quickly cleared to make way for her.

 Another surprising fact was that the guards didn’t do anything. When Punk started to scream, a few of them had jumped and looked over their way, but upon seeing Prisoner 102314, they had quickly turned away and pretended like they hadn’t seen anything.

 “Aren’t they going to do something?” Nina whispered to the man standing next to her.

 “Who?”

 “The guards.”

 “Heck, no. They’re terrified of her, too. And she’s tight with the warden. Once one of them tried to hit her, like they do with everyone else. The warden called him inside. He got midnight watch duty for two months.”

 “If the warden likes her, why doesn’t he let her out?”

 The man shrugged. “How should I know? I'm not dumb enough to ask.”

 Nina craned her neck to look around, but Prisoner 102314 was gone, and Punk was whimpering on the ground. “Where’d she go?”

 “Probably back to her cell. Why?”

 “Do you know where it is?”

 “It’s number 232. Again, why?"

 “I want to talk to her.” Nina turned to leave, but the man caught her arm.

 “Are you crazy?”

 “Probably.” Nina smirked and walked in the direction that the prisoner had gone.

 It didn’t take her long to find cell 232. It was one of the larger ones, which made sense, because she was friends with the warden. Prisoner 102314 was there with her back to her. She might have been reading something, Nina wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, but her hair was quite impressive. It reached all the way down to her knees and was a reddish-brown with a streak of gray running from the left side of her face. There was a moment of silence as Nina watched her, until Prisoner 102314, without turning around, asked in English, “Do you need something?”

 “No. Just wanted to talk.”

 “Well, then. That settles it. You’re new.”

 Nina smirked. “Totally. You don’t get many visitors, I take it?”

 “Ha. The ones who come are either brave, reckless, or stupid. Sometimes all three.”

 Nina laughed softly. “Like that punk guy outside?”

 “He leaned more towards stupid. Usually all the prisoners know who I am, but I have to clearly mark my territory with a few.”

 “By doing...whatever you were doing.”

 “Exactly. You said you wanted to talk about something?” Prisoner 102314 finally turned around, and Nina’s breath hitched. Oh. My. Gosh.

 The prisoner looked equally startled. “Nina? Nina Barton?”

 Nina blinked a few times, trying to reorient her thoughts. She struggled to speak.

 “Aunt Wanda?”