Silhouette in the Dark

IV.

                                                                  [2014]

They've been kept busy, but no longer. Now's my chance. At last, I can make my move.

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A lot had happened in the past two years. Natasha and Steve spent much of their time trying to track down more information on this mysterious 'Lark,' as they called her. There was little fruit for their labors, and with an increase in missions being given to them by S.H.I.E.L.D., it was getting increasingly harder to continue their hunt. Then came a mission that left a major impact on all of them, none more so than Steve.

"I'm just saying, if he's alive then maybe it's possible that she is, too!" Steve insisted.

"Two years ago, you were convinced it was impossible for someone to live that long," Natasha countered.

"That was before I knew about Bucky."

"Do you really think we could find her, though? We searched for almost two years and found pretty much nothing."

"We have to try again, now that we know. It's possible she was like him—experimented on, made into a weapon. Although, that doesn't really explain why she would only attack HYDRA agents."

A third voice intruded into the conversation. "Okay, hang on a minute," Sam Wilson remarked, holding up his hands. "You mean there's another one like him? But it's a girl?"

Steve turned his head toward his new friend and ally. They had met on one of Steve's daily runs, and Sam had proved to be an invaluable resource during the past few days' events. Now, he and Natasha were spending much of their time in Steve's hospital room, discussing said events while Steve recovered. "We don't know." He glanced at Natasha, who was looking at something on her cell phone. When she noticed the silence, she looked up. "Do you want to explain, or should I?"

"I'd rather you do it. I had a hard enough time two years ago, trying to convince you," she responded with a smirk. Steve shot one back at her then turned back to Sam.

"About two years ago, Nat found some old S.H.I.E.L.D. files about a female warrior from what we believe to be 1940s Europe. At the time, we couldn't learn much about her, except that she dressed in black, never spoke, and fought HYDRA agents without killing them. We have a list of aliases that she went by and proof that she's been seen in New York—"

Sam cut him off with another upraised hand. "Hold up. You mean she's in the States now? And she's still alive?"

"That's what we're thinking. The first sightings were around D.C. in the 70s, maybe 80s, but then she was all over the place. Two years ago, though, she was seen in New York soon after the whole Loki thing."

"Dude. A guy wearing golden antlers tried to take over the world with an alien army, and you're just going to call it a thing?"

"Yeah, I am. That's not the point. The point is she's here, which by the way—" he turned to look at Natasha again, "now we may know why. If she was hunting down HYDRA agents, and we now know they've been over here this whole time, she must have known, too."

Natasha tilted her head back and forth. "I guess it's possible."

"Anyway, Nat and I have not had any luck finding her since."

Steve started to say something else but was cut off by Natasha exclaiming, "Found her!" Natasha held up her phone. "Or at least, I found some more files on her. Ones I couldn't get before, but thanks to my little antics in the World Security Council chamber, I now have access!"

Steve shifted in his hospital bed and winced at the residual pain from the gunshot to his abdomen. It was quickly healing, but it still hurt from time to time. "Anything new?"

"Hang on. Let me read it first, Rogers."

"Whatever you say, Romanoff." He tried to sound annoyed with her, but he couldn't keep from smiling.

"Most of this is stuff we already know. A few more locations of unconfirmed sightings, mostly out west. That's where Fury first saw her. Then she apparently disappeared for several years. Whoever saw her in New York in 2012 was the first person in a while to do so." Natasha scrolled through some more lines on the document before holding the phone out in triumph. "She was believed to have been captured and experimented on by HYDRA in 1940s Austria."

Steve gingerly took the phone and read over the new information. He looked up and locked eyes with Natasha. "So it's confirmed." She nodded. He turned back to the phone and read some more of the document. "Oh, this is new."

Natasha held her hand out for the phone, and Steve handed it to her. He watched as she read the part that had grabbed his attention. She looked up at him with raised eyebrows.

"What is it?" Sam demanded, holding his hand out for the phone.

"A new name." Natasha held the phone up so Sam could read what was on the screen.

He squinted at it before finding the new discovery. "That's an unusual one. Silhouette."