The Avenger's Soul

The Only Light in the Darkness (Part 2)

Skye's POV

I didn't even notice when Ward walked into the room I was so focused on trying to get Eric to agree with me.

"You can't goad me into..." Eric spotted Ward and hurriedly used a folder to cover his tablet tracking our movements.

"Can you help me convince Steve Rogers here to suit up, grab his shield, head into battle?" I asked, inwardly blushing as I thought about the blonde super soldier. I had already been thinking about him way too much lately what with working on his birthday surprise and worrying about how he was doing after the events at the Triskelion.

"Okay. Who's he supposed to battle?" Ward asked.

"If we hack NSA satellites, we can get footage from The Fridge breakout, see who was there, where they went!" I told him.

"Well, she's right. It's worth trying," he told Eric. I turned to Eric and crossed my arms in victory happy to have Ward's backup. You know, I can't hack the NSA but maybe I can upload the hard drive you gave me, get the specs on the weapons they might be carrying," Ward added.

"Absolutely, we should. But we can't. The encryption is location based. We'll have to take a field trip at some point to decrypt it," I explained. Noticing that Ward looked so disappointed by this. I wonder why.

"Okay! All right!" Eric said standing from his chair. "Color me impressed. Now impress me more. Get me that footage," he told me. He handed me a lanyard out of his pocket but held it back before I could grab it. "These are the keys to the comm/sat room. The mainframe is in there. Start the hack but then send the feed to these monitors," I nodded and grinned as he handed me the keys, both of us failing to notice as Ward looked away worried and disappointed at how things were going.

"Let's live dangerously!" Eric said with a grin.

"Yeah!" I cheered high fiving him before starting to head out of the room.

"How long before you get visuals?" Ward asked.

I turned back around with a sigh thinking.

"NSA satellites should be tough. Give me an hour," I told him. Sincerely glad that I had already managed to edit all the footage from earlier and fully prepped the music videos and everything else to be ready for Steve's birthday at midnight. It was looking like I was going to be busy & I didn't want to end up forgetting anything for tomorrow since I had fans all over the world now who were looking forward to seeing their messages etc play out tomorrow.

*****

"Eric?" I called out as I entered his office. I looked around but didn't see him anywhere. "Eric?" I called again. I walked up to the bank of monitors and saw the feeds from the NSA satellite, now cleared up, displayed on the monitors.

"You did it," I heard a voice behind me say.

I jumped a bit and sighed after realizing it was Ward.

"Koenig said you managed to hack the NSA," he said.

"Yeah, it looks that way. Where did he go?" I asked.

"He's sending everything over to NATO, CIA, Interpol. Guess he hopes they'll take it as a sign of good faith from Shield," he said.

"That's smart. Though, it looks like all I got was lots of views of an empty rooftop," I said dejected as I flopped down on the couch.

"May's gone," he informed me as he sat down next to me.

"What do you mean, "gone"? Gone where?" I said sitting up.