Running Scared (Avengers Fanfiction)

Chapter 6

Sleep. Who needs sleep? Apparently not Ms. Banks. Because the moment she walked through the door of her beach house, she'd opened her laptop and was back to searching for answers. She knew part of her really wanted to help her friend. She wonders when she started thinking of him as a friend, or if he really was her friend. For the moment, for all intents and purposes Tony Stark was her friend who had a big problem. The arc reactor in his chest was leaking pallyadium into his blood stream slowly killing him. Aka the device that initially was keeping him alive was now doing the opposite. This was going to be a challenge, but Katie could never turn down a challenge.

She'd been researching all night, when something finally caught her eyes. It was in Howard Starks files, he seemed to have lots of diagrams and notes on some diorama that looks like the Stark Expo of 1974. The only problem was she had no idea where that diorama was. There was a knock on her door, that made her jump. She looked up surprised that the night, had turned to morning without her even noticing. There was another knock and Katie stood to her feet to go see who it was. Opening the door, Katie sighed wishing she hadn't.

"You look like hell." Natasha greeted walking past Katie into the house.

"Oh, Come in Ms. Black Widow." Katie said before turning to the woman. "You are here because?"

"The director is meeting with Tony today and he wanted me to see if you had any luck, anything he could pass to him to get him on his way." Natasha said and Katie shrugged.

"I'm not sure, but I think the answers he may need might be with his father's things. There's a lot of data there, but it seems like there's something missing, some sort of key." Katie said looking over to the woman. "Tell Fury to hand them over to him." Katie noticed a slight smirk on the assassin's face and couldn't help but be worried. "Is that you happy, you don't have a wide range of emotions so I'm kind of confused." the smirk was gone and an icy glare returned.

"No, it's just it's not all too often that a lab tech can order the director to do something and he complies." Natasha replied and Katie shrugged.

"Well if he has a better idea tell him to do it." Katie said rubbing her tired eyes. "Any word on how Mr. Stark is doing this morning?"

"He was still at the mansion last time I checked." Natasha replied and Katie nodded. "Do you plan on going over there?"

"No, not this time." Katie said. "Last night he told me to leave, and I'm going to take that literally." she shook her head. "Plus I think I have to see Pepper to sign a bunch of new employee forms today." Katie plastered on a smile. "I'm going to have a busy day, and you should probably get going too, Lucifer hates when you make him wait."

"You still call him that?" Natasha asked with a shake of her head as she walks to the door.

"Well it is his name." Katie said with a shrug of her shoulders as she followed the woman to the door. Natasha opened the door before turning to Katie.

"This isn't something I do often." the woman said and Katie quirked an eyebrow in confusion. "But after thinking about everything that happened with Mockingbird-" Katie held up a hand to stop her.

"Every day of my life I spend trying to forget what happened with that mission." Katie said. "I can't-" she shook her head. "I can't think about it anymore, so how about from this point on we just move on and return to being the frenemies that we are."

"Frenemies?" Natasha asked and Katie chuckled.

"Google it." Katie replied.

Katie stepped out of a taxi outside of Stark Industries, suddenly feeling completely under dressed in her Pie t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. The people that walked around, all were in the standard business attire and they all looked like there was sticks surgically implanted in their asses.