Red Room

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"I'm sorry," he said when he realized what had happened "It's all starting to come back after the damn powder bomb.

"No," she began, cutting him off. "Don't apologize for feeling, not with me at least," she said and gave a sweet smile, the same smile that Natasha had always given him. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes when he grabbed her into a hug, but she loved the feeling.

"Ahem, so," he said, changing the subject, "how is your head feeling?"

Ksenia laughed but answered anyway at the change of subject. "It hurts but I'll heal. It's only been a few days since I had a bomb removed you know." When Loki gave her a look, she realized that it wasn't him that she needed to convince. With a sigh, she brushed past him and made her way to her...Natasha's bathroom, and took her medicine. "Tell them that I'm fine and taking my medicine. And please tell them that if they really wanted to know, they can ask me themselves."

"That's exactly what Darcy said," Loki recounted with a laugh as he leaned against the door frame. "That SHIELD team has been walking on eggshells since they've arrived."

Ksenia gave him a look through the mirror before turning to face him with her eyebrows raised.

When Loki rolled his eyes, she pushed past him and headed for the lab. "Okay," he admitted, "The Avengers too."

"I'm freaking everyone out," she admitted as they walked. "The daughter of The Black Widow and Winter Soldier. I mean, who wouldn't be a little on edge. They went through losing her to finding out about me. I understand that it's a little hard to process, but damn."

"Hey, you know you have me on your team, Darcy and Bobbi too. The others will come around, especially when we get your mother back."

"And Bucky," she added.

"Yes," Loki said with apprehension, "and Bucky. And look, the reason I came to get you is because we found something."

Ksenia stopped in her tracks, she knew what they had found. "They found The Birdcage?"

The smile on Loki's face told her that yes, they had found it. When it faltered, she picked up her pace once again, leaving Loki to catch up. "I know, I know," she said. "They think that Echo moved them, and it would be a fool's errand to go there. You believe it too."

"No, 'Sen, I'm on your team with this one. It's just that everyone else thinks that she's been moved. 'It would be the logical play'," he said with air quotations as he mimicked the very thing that Skye had suggested.

"That's what Echo wants us to think! They 'killed' her so that we would stop looking, they just didn't count on Bobbi still being alive. Like I said before, it would be a suicide mission for us to go in just to retrieve a 'body'. They only did that because you showed up; Echo thinks of everything. They had that powder ready so that it would screw with your senses and your connection to that place if you had somehow found it. They thought that by killing her in front of you would throw you guys off their scent for a while, and it worked. It's still working because they have only just now found The Birdcage. And thank god for Bobbi. If she wasn't connected to my mother, I bet not one soul here apart from you and me would believe that she was alive."

Loki agreed with her, but he didn't show it. They walked in silence the rest of the way and when they got to the lab, Ksenia sighed, not really ready for the anxieties inside of that door.

"Ksenia!" Darcy called when they stepped through those metal doors. Ksenia focused on her and ignored the other wandering eyes of the rest of the teams.

"Hey, Loki said that you guys found it," she said as she looked over her shoulder at the computer she was seated at. It had a map pulled up of the Kolyma mountains with a heat overlay. "There's no heat signatures," she noted as her shoulders dropped. "How deep does the thermal imaging go?"