The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 1

Barton Home, USA

Fall 2015

If Nadine was being completely honest with herself, she was struggling a bit. Not in any real, serious way, which was actually a bit of a novelty, but it was still unsettling.

When she had been in training, free time had been a distant dream. A luxury they had never known in the Red Room. They'd had illusions of it, but in reality every waking moment had been bent toward a purpose. Their 'free time' should have more accurately been called 'free study' given the expectation that they use the time for activities that contributed to their training in some way; studying popular magazines and books to acclimatize them to places where they might be called on to blend in; activities involving memory games, logic puzzles and the like intended to exercise and strengthen their minds; reading books assigned by Madame B or one of their other instructors. Activities in that vein. Nothing that was leisure purely for leisure's sake. While incidentally enjoyable for the most part, none of it was intended for enjoyment.

But now? She wasn't a young recruit anymore. Why shouldn't she be allowed some down time? The past few weeks really had been productive, after all. Training had been going quite well, their new team members coming along quite nicely under Natasha's near unforgiving drive and Nadine's exacting eye. Nicely enough that Rhodey and Sam were both effectively 'done' training, so to speak, and only really needed to show up for the teambuilding exercises and the odd small mission Steve and Nat had needed the support on that the younger members weren't quite ready for.

Nadine had even been on another—successful, thank you—mission of her own, taking care of another significant chunk of her threat list. Only three from that list had needed more permanent precautions enacted to ensure their silence, and two of the other names had led her to another HYDRA head's intelligence stash, which she had promptly copied and destroyed. All in all, it meant that Nadine was feeling rather satisfied with her progress on that front.

And on the front of her other search? A little less productive, admittedly, but she was fairly sure she was making some headway. She was pretty certain she had Barnes' route mapped from the day he left DC up until about two weeks after she suspected he'd reached Europe, hitting a few roadblocks in Georgia. It was further than she knew she would've gotten in the same amount of time without the Avengers' unmatched resources, but it was still frustrating.

For the most part, though, she'd stuck pretty close to home. And the Compound had, bewilderingly enough, begun to feel like home. Not that she'd admitted as much to anyone, yet. She'd barely even admitted it to herself. But she'd breathe an inadvertent sigh of relief whenever she returned there, and it almost felt like she walked a little lighter, a little more comfortably through the halls of the Avengers' Facility than she had even in her and Nina's little apartment in Vienna, or their place in Hamburg before that. She had nearly managed to convince herself that it was simply an unconscious reaction to the top-notch security of the facility and the presence of the Avengers; that she could relax simply because she didn't have to be on her guard all the time there. Not to mention that it was where her family was; just knowing her daughter and her sister were close by was reassuring to say the least.

But comfortable as she had become at the facility, and welcomed as she'd felt, she had yet to be idle. Every minute had been bent to a purpose, much as it had all those years ago. Some masqueraded as moments of leisure—her time with Nina in the evenings, for instance, were often bent toward studying or working toward strengthening their fragile relationship—but Nadine had always been doing something that counted as productive.

Not like now. Not like the break they had taken from training at the Compound.

As nice as it was to visit the Barton homestead again? Between the nagging sense that the conversation was eventually going to turn to topics she'd be more comfortable leaving alone—while no longer entirely secret in her present company, they weren't ones Nadine was overly fond of talking about—and the antsy feeling that she should be doing something, the blonde assassin had begun absently wondering if it would've been wiser to stay behind at the Compound while Natasha, Nina and the Twins made their visit. She could have settled in and gotten some more work done on her different tracking projects in relative solitude.