The Devil's Keeper - Blackhill

Chapter 18 - Damage Control

[April 28th, 2007 – Helicarrier, location classified]

Natasha logged into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database from one of the computers in the deserted lab. It was the middle of the night and, like any self-respecting secret agent, she took care of the security camera first, ensuring that the rotation on the surveillance monitor would skip that particular camera while she was in there. She only had to erase the video once she was done.

She searched the report Fitz and Simmons did about her and started reading through their evaluations. The math checked out - not that Natasha ever had a doubt that two geniuses would mess up simple calculus.

They estimated, according to the time she was gone in the present, the approximate time she'd spent in the past. The report had the video records of a camera in Fury's office with the exact time she had been gone. She picked the most recent event and went through the data. She checked the seconds the jump lasted and noticed that Fitz-Simmons wrote down the correct number. She knew instantly how long that would have been in the past so she watched the video of her through the street cameras they checked. Somehow they managed to recover the exact moment she jumped in and out and they used the time on the feed to calculate exactly how long she had been there.

Then Natasha noticed something.

It was the mission on April 17th - eleven days ago - and she remembered it quite precisely. She had taken twenty minutes to accomplish the data placement Fury had assigned to her. And checking how long she was gone in the present, it was consistent with the twenty minutes the mission lasted. The problem was, she remembered quite well what happened after the mission as well. She had jumped to 2001 and visited the French restaurant with Maria.

The jump had lasted over five hours. Why was it consistent with twenty minutes? It didn't make any sense.

She noticed something else. The estimations were off by a few milliseconds. She did the math again. Fitz-Simmons did it flawlessly, but put the spare milliseconds down to approximation. Natasha knew that there was no approximating time travel. She checked the video again, but the feed was cut to the point when she jumped to the past and jumped back, and it was those twenty minutes she remembered taking to complete the mission.

For a split second, she thought maybe she had imagined it all. Maybe Maria wasn't even real. Maybe she wasn't even able to time travel, she was just a crazy assassin that was incidentally so good at her job in the present that everybody else just decided to humor her. Otherwise, why would she be missing in the present for half a second if she had really been gone for more than five hours – which should have spelled a five second delay in the past?

Then she frowned at her own lack of sense and started hacking the source of the video, downloading the original version. She was glad Fury never made her file official reports when her missions involved time travel, because that might have been an instant mess when she wrote she had been gone for five and a half hours and instead had just been gone twenty minutes.

Once she retrieved the video, she let it play entirely instead of just looking at her arriving and departing times. But it hadn't been tampered with. It was just as Fitz-Simmons had put it in the file. And, when she thought about it, why would they lie to protect her anyway? It was logic that they wrote down exactly what they saw. So she watched it again, then again, then a fourth time. But she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

She put it on again for the fifth time, but let it play at its normal speed instead of watching it at an accelerated speed. The alley was empty for almost the whole time. That was why she'd chosen to jump into and out of it in the first place, after all. It was an isolated, quiet place.

She sighed and thought back to what Maria said to her when they were leaving Fury's office. She sat back in her chair and sighed again. It was ridiculous that Maria was so hell-bent on making sure she was arrested. Did Natasha think Maria should lie on her behalf, if she happened to bump into the truth? No, of course not. But for Maria to be investigating her personally, now that was a whole other level of commitment. Maybe it was the lies that Maria couldn't stand. She always seemed to react badly when Natasha lied to her. It didn't matter if it was with the truth machine, through a sarcastic remark, or a blunt lie, Natasha lying just sat wrong with Maria.