New York City, USA

Spring 2015

Naturally, Nadine barely slept a wink after the whole Ultron debacle. She was far too distressed. Part of her had wanted to cry, to scream, to rage at the injustice of it. Another part of her had wanted to plan, to strategize, to regroup.

Those parts had warred all night, long after the impromptu 'debriefing' in the lab had wrapped.

Nadine honestly didn't remember as much of it as she should. She had been far too lost in her own head.

The previous evening had ended up being far, far more exciting than Nadine would have liked. She hadn't been in the mood for 'open bar' excitement in the first place, so even though 'homicidal robot', had been slightly more fitting to her mood, it had been just as unwelcome.

Although, fighting said robots had been rather cathartic...

Nadine had nearly lost her temper more than once as the Avengers argued and debated what had happened and what to do about it. She'd watched the whole thing from where she'd stood just past Barton on the landing hemming two sides of the Lab, not far from the set of stairs where Natasha lingered, listening to the Avengers bickering about their new threat with half an ear. What little she did pay attention to left her hidden scowl dangerously close to emerging despite her enforced expression of neutrality.

It meant there was going to be another delay. She'd known it then with a sick, disappointed feeling in her gut. Ultron was going to take precedence over Nina. Tactically and rationally, Nadine knew it was the right play. A threat like Ultron had to be considered a priority and be dealt with accordingly and quickly.

But that hadn't stopped—still didn't stop—the slightly less rational, maternal side of Nadine that was rebelling violently against the idea.

At least she could take some small comfort that at least some of her new colleagues had felt some genuine remorse for having to bench their promise to help find Nina. She knew Barton and Natasha had been leaning on their old contacts in effort to help, and judging from the reassuring hand Barton had laid on her shoulder as he'd passed when they'd all filed into the Lab the night before and the matching expression on his face, she knew he was still planning on keeping up the search. Just as the determined glint in Natasha's eyes every time she'd glanced to Nadine had said the same thing, even despite her words to the contrary at one point.

For all that the terrifying, psychopathic robot with a 'destroy the Avengers' complex and all but unlimited access to anything connected to the internet worldwide should naturally take precedence over a missing teenager, it had been incredibly reassuring that at least some of the Avengers had shown no intention of forgetting her daughter completely.

Not that it was the biggest of reliefs just then...

Even when talk of nuclear codes had started or when Thor had stormed in to confront Stark by lifting him clear off the ground by the throat—which was oddly satisfying, if she was being honest—Nadine couldn't help but feel apathetic.

Oh, she was concerned. She wasn't heartless or wholly without a conscience. She could easily recognize the threat Ultron posed and the idea of him running about unchecked made her feel ill. But with the uncertainty of Nina's safety hanging over her head like a building waiting to come down on top of her, Nadine couldn't focus on the Ultron threat. Not completely.

Besides, Avenging was their world. Not hers. She was just a highly-skilled assassin who had been along for the ride in what was now starting to feel like a vain hope of getting her daughter back. Dealing with Ultron was their responsibility—twice over, really, since it was their fault he'd been created in the first place. Her responsibility was Nina. That was the promise she'd made to her child the very instant her baby girl had made her presence known with her first fluttering kicks in the womb. Nadine's responsibility was Nina. That had to be her priority, no matter that a small little voice in the back of her head was trying to convince her that helping in the fight against Ultron was the right thing to do. That the A.I. was just as much a threat to Nina as he was to everyone else...

Because he was a threat. A very big one, and not just for all the surface reasons the Avengers had been obviously worrying about. A spear of dread had gone through her like a bullet at Natasha's comment about Ultron knowing them better than they knew themselves; did that include her? She had forcefully pushed the thought aside then and was resolved to keep doing so now. She couldn't afford to think on that. Not when the chance of Ultron digging into her past seemed slim. Not when she had other concerns.

Yet, she still couldn't fight the feeling that, somehow, she would end up getting recruited to fight against Ultron. She hadn't been able to the night before, and she still couldn't now.

The only other thing that really got to her the night before was the news that the 'guy' Ultron had killed was J.A.R.V.I.S.. That had felt like a kick in the chest. J.A.R.V.I.S. had been her best tool in her search for Nina. She'd also been growing rather fond of the U.I.. She had even begun seeing him as a member of the team. A feeling that was apparently unanimous. Hearing that they'd lost J.A.R.V.I.S. had been hard on all the Avengers. J.A.R.V.I.S. had been far more than just a U.I.; he really had been part of the team.

It hadn't been long after that that Nadine had slipped from the room, only barely managing a reassuring glance—of sorts—in answer to Natasha's questioning one when Banner and Stark began bickering about whether or not they had actually succeeded in creating Ultron in the first place.

She'd had no interest in listening to Stark pontificating about how he'd thought they were doing a good thing. Not that it really mattered anymore. As Natasha had said, the genie was out of that bottle. But overall, Nadine had to agree with Thor: Stark and Banner shouldn't have messed with the Sceptre.

And now she was what felt like a hundred steps further away from finding her daughter.

It was hard not to feel a little resentment against the two geniuses for that...

Nadine sighed as she leaned back in her chair, fingertips rising to massage at her temple. She was tired, physically, mentally and emotionally. But there was no way she could stop now. Not when she had been all but sent back to square one in her search for her daughter.

Natasha hadn't been kidding when she'd said Ultron had access to everything. When sleep had proved elusive, Nadine had dived headfirst back into her search for Nina and the Maximoffs.

Only to find everything gone. All her work, all J.A.R.V.I.S.' work, everything he'd been still running to try and track the Maximoffs. Gone.

And she thought she might have been onto something too. The evening before, just as Natasha had absconded with her to get her ready for the disaster of a party, Nadine was fairly certain she had spotted the Maximoff brother skulking around one of the smaller market squares in Novi Grad, not far from two of the suspected former addresses she'd managed to track down for them. It was grainy and J.A.R.V.I.S. had done a great deal of enhancement on the sad, lonely little camera feed from that market to even get her a closer look, but she was fairly certain it had been him. It was one of the searches she'd had been running and monitoring the night before—she'd had J.A.R.V.I.S. scanning through that camera's footage on previous days to try and discover if he'd been returning regularly to that market—and something she'd been intending to investigate further today. Only now?

The feeds were gone. Not even dead. Gone. Just gone. She couldn't even tell if the files had been erased or the cameras disconnected or both. But to her, it seemed almost like the cameras weren't even there anymore. Some of the footage she'd been combing through with J.A.R.V.I.S. was still on the servers, but without the U.I. there to help her enhance and analyse it? Well, to say it was going painfully slow was an understatement; really, she'd probably be much better off to simply head to Novi Grad herself...

And really, the only reason she hadn't was because she didn't want to just run out on Natasha again. Not without saying goodbye this time.

So when the Avengers had started reappearing earlier that morning, Nadine had already been at work for hours reconstructing what she could. She'd made some progress beyond where she'd been before Ultron's interference, but not enough to alleviate her frustration or the irrational feeling that she was no closer to finding Nina than she had been when she started her search.

But there was something that didn't sit right with her. Something that niggled at the back of her mind, further fuelling her frustration. It was another, smaller reason behind her reluctance to simply disappear again.

Why on Earth would Ultron delete all her progress in her search for Nina? What possible motivation could he have? At first she believed he'd wrought a complete wipe of the Avenger's database, but she'd quickly realized that wasn't the case, especially when the others began their own task to try and find him in earnest.

Her next suspicion was that it had something to do the Sceptre. After all, he'd been created from it and apparently the Maximoff twins owed their abilities to the alien device as well. Moreover, the robot had stolen the thing. Perhaps there had been something in the Maximoffs' files that he didn't want them to find out about the Sceptre?

Whatever the reason, there was some other motivation. A piece she was missing.

But when the piece presented itself, Nadine was, for far, far from satisfied.

She was furious.

More than that, she was terrified.

She was interrupted from her work on the CCTV feeds from Novi Grad when Steve passed the corner of the Tower where she was working, tablet in hand as he headed for Stark's main Lab.

"Ryker," the Captain called, pulling her thoughts irritably from the video enhancement program she'd been running on some of the remaining footage from Novi Grad, "we may have something." Without waiting for a response, he was slipping into the Lab, leaving a fuming Nadine in his wake. As she'd cynically anticipated, there was the assumption that she was on board with the Ultron hunt...

But she could admit to herself she needed a distraction from waiting and staring at a screen while her image enhancements rendered, and Rogers' briefing would provide just that. Besides, there was no such thing as too much intelligence. So despite her annoyance, she stood and followed the Captain into the Lab.

She was entering just behind Banner as Steve was handing the tablet he'd been carrying to Thor. Natasha was sitting at the computer station they were all gathering around as Stark approached himself, peering curiously between the Captain and the Asgardian.

"What's this?" Stark asked as he came to a stop beside Natasha, only to have Thor wordlessly shove the tablet in his direction in response. Things had obviously not thawed between them, Nadine noted without surprise.

"A message," Steve supplied instead. Tactfully ignoring Thor's less than friendly behaviour, Tony flipped the tablet from where he'd awkwardly caught it against his chest. "Ultron killed Strucker." Nadine's heart sunk, anger beginning to pool in her belly.

Strucker was dead?

The anger grew. She hadn't allowed herself to think on it seriously before, her thoughts focused on finding Nina first, but she had been fully intending to make Strucker pay herself.

Dearly...and painfully...

And now Ultron...Nadine caught sight of Natasha's assessing look in her direction. It took a great deal of willpower to push thoughts of her now impossible intentions of serving justice on the German Baron aside, carefully rearranging her features into her default neutral expression.

And considering how furious she was quickly becoming?

It was hard.

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us," Tony commented back, his usual irreverence dulled by a similar reserve to the feeling weighing on the rest of his teammates. Even his trademark dry humour didn't stand a chance in the face of his uncertainty about Ultron's plans, it seemed...

"This is a smokescreen," Natasha broke in, bringing Nadine's thoughts back to the present. Natasha was frowning as she glanced pointedly between her teammates. Something about this turn of events was bothering her. But running over the news in her head again, Nadine couldn't seem to pick out why. Her anger that she'd been denied a chance at Strucker was too distracting. "Why send a message when you've just given a speech?"

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve said carefully, his face thoughtful. Nadine nearly groaned...her head was certainly not in the game...not with her anger and her worry for Nina clouding her judgement. She needed to get her head back on straight, otherwise she was never going to find her daughter.

She needed to step back from this Ultron mess.

Natasha was already turning back to the computer to dig into the Avenger's Database as Nadine made her decision. "Yeah, I bet he...yep. Everything we had on Strucker has been erased," Natasha was confirming as Nadine turned, heading for the door with silent steps. There was nothing more she could do here.

"Nadine?" The blonde assassin paused at Natasha's questioning tone, glancing back toward the huddled Avengers. "You're leaving?" Nadine's face went instinctively—defensively, if she was being honest—blank at her sister's alarmed tone.

"Strucker was the last avenue I could pursue here," she said quietly, meeting her sister's gaze pointedly, though there was no hiding the regret in her tone, not entirely. "The cameras are a wash; if there was anything substantial to find anyway, it's gone. There's nothing more for me to try here. There's no point in me staying, lisichka."

"What about Ultron? We could use your help, Ryker." It was asked innocently enough, even hopefully, but Nadine levelled a cool glance at Banner, dimly satisfied at the apologetic expression it brought to his face as he remembered just why she'd been there in the first place.

"Killer robots are your thing," she answered, surprised herself at the faint softening of her tone, "not mine. I need to find my daughter." She didn't wait for a response, continuing on to the door without another backward glance.

"Ultron's recruited the Maximoffs." Nadine's hand froze a hair's breadth from the handle as she registered what Rogers had said, all but feeling the final piece click into place.

That was why Ultron had wiped all her work toward finding the Twins...

Slowly she turned back, her eyes intent as they latched on to the Captain. She could feel her fury rising again. Rogers stared impassively back.

"Banner's right, Ryker. We could use your help. More than that, you still need us," he said firmly, though his own voice softened for a moment, a flicker of apology passing briefly over his features before the soldier took over. Nadine was too astonished and too angry to care. "We find Ultron, we find the Maximoffs. They might even be the key to finding him just as they are your key to finding Nina. You helping us find Ultron will help you find Nina." Nadine nearly scowled despite herself.

She knew she'd somehow get roped into dealing with this mess...

"You'd better be right, Rogers," she said lowly, not caring to hide just how angry she was that he hadn't told her of that development immediately, or that he seemed to be using her drive to find Nina to help them with Ultron. She was probably overreacting—Natasha obviously thought so, considering the alarmed and bewildered look in her eyes—but Nadine didn't care. Not when her daughter's life was at risk. Steve frowned at her reaction himself, stepping toward her with a hand raised in appeal.

"We're not your enemy, Ryker," Rogers broke in, his normally calm tone beginning to betray his frustration.

"Then you should have told me he was working with the Twins," she snapped back. The tension in the room was rising quickly along with Nadine's rising temper.

"Nadya," Natasha broke in then, standing from the computer, her face unusually open with concern, "we're still going to help you get her back. You know that!" At the plea in her little sister's tone, Nadine's temper broke, leaving her feeling tired again.

She just wanted this to be over...

"I know, lisichka," she said, her voice heavy and threaded with apology. "I do. But you all need to focus on Ultron. I get it. But I need to focus on Nina."

"If the Maximoffs are with Ultron, it's possible your kid is too," Barton said softly from where he'd come up behind Nadine. "Steve's got a point, Ryker. Joining forces is the best way to go." Nadine let out a loaded sigh. She'd known as soon as Steve had mentioned the Twins that her best option was to keep working with the Avengers.

That didn't mean she had to like it, though.

Even if a little part of her actually did.

Silently she nodded, earning a faint, relieved sigh from Natasha.

"So how do we go about doing that?" Banner broke in, bringing them all back around to the task immediately at hand: how to find Ultron.

"We find out what Strucker knew that Ultron didn't want us to find out," Rogers said in response.

"How? Nat just said everything's gone," Banner countered. Stark made a small, objecting sound before amending the statement.

"Not everything."

And by 'not everything', Stark was referring to boxes and boxes of hard copy files on Strucker, some of which had even been brought in on short notice from the billionaire's contacts in a few different agencies in Washington and New York.

It would've been almost amusing to see the likes of the Avengers fighting through a mountain of paperwork instead of bad guys, but Nadine wasn't in the mood to see the humour just then...though Thor carelessly throwing cardboard lids hither and yon as he dove into each new box did nearly manage to bring a grin to her face.

It wasn't exactly how she'd envisioned continuing her search, but at least it gave her a purpose, which was something. She'd hit a dead end for the time being on her search for the Maximoffs specifically, so helping out the Avengers in their needle and haystack search at least gave her a task to put her mind to.

As Nadine was digging into a set of files on Strucker's education, Rogers was setting another box down across the table. "Known associates," he said quietly as Banner reached in and grabbed a small stack, shooting Steve a look as he did so. Rogers shrugged. "Well, Strucker had a lot of friends," he added dryly. Banner made a face.

"Well, these people are all horrible," the doctor replied sarcastically. Nadine nearly snorted beside him. Really, was that any sort of surprise? She probably had the box with the fewest horrible people: people who just had the bad luck of attending the same schools as the Baron.

"Wait." The entire table paused with interest, looking up to Stark as he focused intently on the file Banner was flipping through. "I know that guy." Frowning, wondering as everyone else was what Stark was on to, Bruce handed it over. Just as curious, Nadine absently closed the file she'd been skimming through, placing it back in the box in front of her; there was nothing there that she was seeing. Tony was nodding absently as he glanced over the file, handing off a page for the others to look at as he did. "From back in the day. He operates off the African coast; black market arms." As Thor took the page he'd offered, Steve was levelling Stark with a hard, accusing look that immediately had Stark bristling. Nadine eyed the pair as she edged around the table to get a look at the page Thor was holding.

If there was one thing Nadine had learned about Stark, it was that he was very much opposed to the black market arms trade and got very serious very quickly when he was accused of any sort of involvement in it back in the day.

"There are conventions, alright?" the billionaire defended sharply, nearly succeeding at hiding his anger at being even inadvertently lumped in with such people behind his usual offhanded attitude. "You meet people, I didn't sell him anything." Nadine glanced down at the page in the Asgardian's hand, Thor lowering the page slightly so she and Steve both could look over it with him. Ulysses Klaue...the name sounded familiar.

At the end of the table Stark had turned thoughtful: "He was talking about finding something new, a game changer; it was all very 'Ahab.'" Next to her Thor pointed to one of the photos on the sheet.

"This." Nadine leaned in closer as the others did, peering at what the Asgardian had noticed. It looked like scarring of some kind. She couldn't quite get a good look from where she was, not with Thor angling the sheet toward Stark so he could see.

"Uh, it's a tattoo. I don't think he had it..." Thor shook his head, correcting the billionaire as he gestured to the sheet to make his point.

"No, those are tattoos, this is a brand." Nadine frowned. He was right. Branding was a very distinct form of punishment in certain areas of the world with certain organizations. She was familiar with many of the more common ones, but this one was pretty obscure. She'd never seen it before.

"Do you have access to a database on this sort of thing? Find out what it means?" she asked softly, glancing around the table. Natasha nodded even as Banner reached for the page, Thor obligingly handing it over.

It was several minutes before Banner's search bore fruit.

"Oh, yeah." The doctor leaned in as the computer screen presented them with a translation on the symbol the brand was of. "It's a word in an African dialect meaning 'thief,' in a much less friendly way," he summarized, turning back to the rest of the team.

"What dialect?" Rogers asked, beating the rest of them to the question. Banner turned back to the screen for a moment.

"Wakanada...? Wa...Wa...Wakanda." The atmosphere in the room shifted tangibly. Obviously they'd stumbled on something important. Nadine glanced to Natasha, not quite following even as Rogers and Stark turned to each other. There was no doubt from the suddenly serious, concerned expressions on their faces that they definitely knew the significance.

"If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods..." Stark said worriedly to the Captain, his voice low and thoughtful as he mulled over the implications of whatever he'd realized. Steve shifted, looking distinctly unsettled.

"I thought your father said he got the last of it?" Nadine was very confused now, Rogers' comment not clearing things up in the slightest. Natasha, though seemed to have a lightbulb go off. Still, Nadine apparently wasn't the only one who'd lost the thread of the conversation.

"I don't follow. What comes out of Wakanda?" Bruce asked as he returned to the group surrounding the table covered in files. Even as Stark fixed the doctor with an unreadable look, Steve was turning to glance over his shoulder. The pieces immediately clicked for Nadine even as Stark voiced it, her gaze following the Captain's to land on the iconic red and blue painted shield sitting off to the side.

"The strongest metal on earth." As Nadine turned to exchange a loaded glance with her little sister, Steve was turning back to Stark.

"Where is this guy now?" That was something Nadine could answer. As Banner had been looking up the meaning of Klaue's brand, she'd picked up the rest file on Klaue as it was passed around once Tony had finished with it. Not only had the file indicated his suspected base of operations, it had refreshed Nadine's memory. She had heard of this guy before through the different Underworld channels she kept an ear to for her work as The Ghost.

"Still out of a defunct salvage yard on the African Coast, near Johannesburg," she supplied, passing the file off to Rogers. He glanced up to her in surprise, as did Stark, Barton and Banner. Natasha, on the other hand, looked on the verge of chuckling at the surprised looks of her teammates. Nadine shot her an exasperated look before explaining.

"It's in the file as a suspected base of operations. And you hear things when you've got ties to the Underworld. Like it or not, assassins and arms dealers do sometimes cross paths," she pointed out dryly. As Rogers nodded slowly, glancing down to the file another thought struck her, causing the blonde assassin to frown thoughtfully.

"There was someone a few years back trying almost desperately to get me to go after T'Chaka, Wakanda's King. I don't do that, so I barely paid it any notice," she mused aloud. A few of the others glanced up to her, curious as she leaned against the side of the table, nodding toward the file in Rogers' hand as she did so. "I can't help but wonder now if it was him. I've heard he can hold quite the grudge." Across the table Stark shrugged, a faint, distant expression of agreement on his face. Rogers, meanwhile, was nodding absently to himself as he finished skimming through the file.

"Okay. So he's in South Africa." Flipping it shut, the Captain glanced around the table. "So I guess that's where we're going." Immediately everyone was shifting and straightening, dropping files left in hand even as Steve gave the order.

"Suit up."

A/N: Thanks for reading!

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