The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 44

Novi Grad, Sokovia

Spring 2015

Nina was sure something was wrong.

She hadn't heard from the Twins in over a day. Neither had Ultron passed along any messages like he'd been doing since he and the Twins first left on their missions.

The last she'd heard was that Wanda had woken up and was doing much better after being attacked by one of the Avengers. Nina had barely believed it when Ultron had told her the news that the Avengers had ambushed them during their mission to South Africa and that Wanda had been injured.

Despite everything she'd heard from the Twins and Ultron, Nina still hadn't been able to reconcile the idea that the Avengers were as bad as they seemed to think. It had to be a misunderstanding. Even now, she was sure there was more to it—like what had Ultron and the Twins been doing when Wanda was attacked? The robot had been rather evasive on that score.

Nina knew she was sheltered and naïve—these past few days had made that abundantly clear—but she wasn't that naïve...

But with what little she did know about the Avengers—even Stark, who the Twins blamed for their parents' deaths and for the dark turn their lives had taken in the days following, who they hated with a passion—she simply could not wrap her head around the idea that they could be bad guys.

They'd saved the world from aliens!

...Though, hearing about Wanda had admittedly caused her to waver in that conviction even if only slightly.

The Twins had been her rocks, her support, through everything that had happened since she'd been snatched from outside her front door. They'd looked after her, protected her and helped her as best they could after whatever it was Strucker had done to her. They hadn't had to do any of it. They could've just left her behind when the base was attacked, but they didn't. She was like them now...probably...maybe... Nina just wasn't sure. She didn't think she felt any different or Enhanced or anything. She just felt weak and tired and she hated it! But Enhanced or not, in the Twins' minds, that she'd endured what they had meant they had to stick together. To protect one another.

More than that, they'd become her friends.

And she'd never had many of those. Not real ones. It made that friendship all the more precious to her.

Pietro always managed to make her smile between his brash antics and surprisingly genuine moments of sweetness. Wanda made her feel safe, and the brunette was easy to talk to. She somehow never left Nina feeling like she was being stupid or weak or deficient even when she felt very much so. They had both listened to her fears without judgement, really, and neither had downplayed that seriousness of what had happened to her. Neither had brushed off how hard recovery or simply living with what had happened would be with patronizing platitudes that she would've known were false. Save the knowledge that all of Strucker's other test subjects had died during the Baron's experiments—an omission she understood completely in retrospect, given how terrified she's already been when she'd found out what had happened to her—they hadn't kept anything from her. She may not have known them long, but she had come to trust them implicitly.

After all, she was one of them, now.

Ultron, however? It was hard to tell sometimes with his mechanical features and body language, no matter how human he seemed at times, but Nina was certain he wasn't telling her something. Something big.

Something had happened.

Her gut churned unhappily at the idea. Especially when she kept catching him watching her with unreadable looks...it was so much harder to read the static features of his sentries than the far more animated, human-like features of his main body. She'd felt uneasy about the human-like robot right from the beginning—there was something unnatural and extremely unsettling about him that she just couldn't shake—but she'd figured that was the fever's influence. Or the fact that she'd never met a living robot before. The Twins seemed to trust him, though. So she had convinced herself he would just take some getting used to.