Bed of Roses [N. Romanoff]

Chapter 11

"Bailey, I'm not afraid to kick your ass too," she threatened the younger woman.

"What is with everybody and their cussing today?" Bax let out a whistle, and continued to chomp her food.

"Doesn't matter anymore. We should go up to Tony, he must have something by now."

So Bailey ditched her half eaten food, and walked up the stairs at Natasha's side. They entered the lab with three boys in it already, the scientists and God.

Nat took a seat down at the computer, typing at things and trying to get a response in their internet connection. Both, she came out to no avail.

Not soon after luckily, Cap walked in with Maria and Clint in tow, but none of them looked the slightest bit pleased or happy. What could've happened in a simple phone call that would damper Clint's mood so drastically?

Steve handed over a tablet to Thor to look at a picture on it, curious Bax tried leaning over the back of Nat's chair to get a look at what it could be.

"What's this?" Tony asked, walking over.

"A message," was Steve's reply.

Thor then slammed the tablet into Tony's chest, his way of handing it over to him.

"Ultron killed Strucker."

Bailey's eyes widened at this, and she drew in a quick breath of disbelief. The woman then leaned towards Tony instead and took a look at the picture that captured the corpse of Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, and one word written with blood on the wall: Peace.

"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us," Tony sighed out, still managing a tone of cheery and playfulness.

"This is a smoke screen," Bailey confirmed, looking back up to everyone.

She then looked Natasha in the eyes.

"Why send a message when you've just given a speech?" Nat shrugged, asking the group of people, a sense of orderliness masked her voice.

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve thought up.

"Then why show us that Strucker was killed?" Bailey asked out of confusion. Why would he hide information only to show them that they were missing it?

"Yeah, I bet he... yeah," Nat typed out on the computer in front of her, coming up with a notification showing all records had been deleted.

"Everything we had on Strucker's been erased," she explained to those that didn't know what she was doing (Bailey).

"Not everything," Steve disagreed.

Bruce looked to Bax next to him for an explanation to what the soldier meant, and realisation hit her.

She was way too lazy for this kind of action.

"Files," she groaned out, and asked two boys to follow her to where they could retrieve the boxes full of old files. These files were the ones that got printed and sent to Stark Industries in order for them to log it into the system, and Bax had the unfortunate pleasure of walking into the room in which they were stored one day.

She felt much sympathy for those interns hired to type out the meaningless data to make it a little more useful.

They all came back with multiple boxes and dropped them onto the tables.

"If we want anything, we'd better start now," Steve ordered and grabbed his own box to shuffle through.

"Well this has got to be fun," Natasha pushed herself up and brushed past Bax in order to take her own box.