An Unlikely Romance - The Avengers (Part 1)

Change of Meanery

Most of the contents of the unofficial "junk drawer". Three weeks' worth of frozen dinners, untouched since several months ago. Several pieces of training room equipment, which since Fury doesn't trust me with free weights or anything I could easily hide, consisted mostly of difficult to assemble bits of various exercise equipment. Seven gallons of mayonnaise... largely unused. Purpose uncertain.

Your eyes struggled not to glaze over as they viewed the listing you had made. Unlike most of your diary entries, this was not of notable events or things you wanted to make sure you remembered later. This was all about inventory, so to speak. Ever since your apology to Natasha, things had settled into a bit of a rhythm. Few things disturbed that rhythm... with the rare exception of your occasional medical tests, though those were becoming fewer and farther between it seemed.

However all that had changed as of - by your count - three days ago. That was when things started to disappear. Slowly at first, so slowly you weren't entirely certain if they had been removed or if Clint had gone on some kind of rage-induced mayonnaise frenzy. When he didn't die of some massive coronary the next day, you became suspicious. You hadn't done anything to piss the team off since your little spat with Natasha, and even if you had, a huge portion of the things that had gone missing were of no use to you anyway. Fury was far more clever and effective with his punishments.

But what really bothered you was the fact that even when things like the gym equipment and frozen dinners started vanishing, things that were too obvious for you to really miss, they never mentioned any of it to you. You brought it up to Clint and he just said something about budget cuts. Natasha just said that everything there was technically SHIELD property, and that whatever Fury did with it was barely her business, much less yours. You two... still weren't on great terms. On the plus side, she was at least using sarcasm most of the time instead of outright ignoring you.

Still, this whole mess had made you start wondering what they could be planning. If they were shutting the facility down, that would make the most sense... but why wouldn't they tell you? You had been assuming that if the place was shutting down that it meant you were going free. What if they were moving you somewhere else? You couldn't think of anything to justify that off the top of your head, but if Fury had discovered something in one of his tests - something that he hadn't disclosed to you... well, you were growing more concerned by the day that perhaps they were finding somewhere more secure for you. Not that you had any real ideas on escaping this one, with every path toward what you assumed was the main entrance sealed by the high-level security doors Fury always arrived through.

After you considered that option, you couldn't help but to run through a dozen different ideas in your head. They ranged from moving to a more secure facility - or worse, a prison - all the way up the ideas Fury and his agents had been planting in your head since the beginning. Ideas like working for SHIELD, becoming one of their agents... every time Fury walked in on you in the training room, the few times you were allowed in there with supervision, he couldn't hide the surprise on his face at how well you were performing.

Still, you'd never even been asked on whether you wanted to or not. Not outright, anyway - and even if you had, your theoretical answer had changed so many times since you first awoke here that you weren't even sure where you stood at a given hour. So you were quite sure they weren't preparing for a theoretical answer - best case scenario you could imagine was that they were preparing to take you to the entrance of this place and offer you either freedom or to join them.

Every option seemed either depressing or highly unlikely. That was why, when you returned to your room one night to find Fury sitting in a chair against the far wall, your heart started to beat so loudly you were sure that he could hear it.