Where is the Flash Drive? Safe.

                                    

                                          
Three Weeks Earlier
"Why was Fury in your apartment?"
"I don't know."
Lie. That man had lied to her. Steve Rogers had lied to her.
She'd be offended if his lying skills weren't so pathetic that she felt nothing but pity.
He practically wore his feelings on his sleeve, what made him think he could lie to her and get away with it? It was laughable, really!
There were very few people who could fool her, and Steve Rogers was not one of them.
"Do you have any sense of privacy?" A familiar voice broke her out of her internal grumbling — not that she'd ever admit to doing such an outrageous thing as grumbling. "Or time?"
Natasha shrugged. "It was important."
"Three–in–the–morning important?"
"Yes." Natasha almost smiled when her response was met with the usual gripes. "I need your help."
The other woman abruptly paused, her hand stilling and awkwardly hovering over the coffee machine before she lowered it down. "Help, you say?" She looked wary. "Does this have anything to do with the untimely death of a certain man we both happen to know?"
Natasha simply nodded.
"What do you want?"
Natasha took her hand out of her hoodie-pocket, and along with it, a silver-coloured flash drive tightly clutched in her palm. It probably said a lot about their equation that a Black Widow such as her did not require a single moment of hesitation on whether to trust the other woman or not.
"Fury gave this to Steve." Natasha twirled the pen drive in her hands like she would one of her knives.
"You're flipping the thing like you plan to throw it at me. There's only so much harm an USB can do. Although I suppose, you are talented enough to make a good weapon out of a blunt pencil."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't meant to be." The retort was immediate. "You want me to keep the drive. Why?"
Natasha had to practically force herself to meet the steady gaze of her companion, the intensity in those honey-dipped orbs not making it any easier on her. "There's no one else I trust more."
"You don't trust people so it's a short list of whom you do at least partly." A beat or two of silence later, she continued, "I am not going to take the fall for you, and I am not going to cover for you if I think the alternative is necessary."
"I would expect nothing less."
The woman nodded, a few rebellious strands of her dark hair leaving the nest of her braid, framing her round face and making her look a few years younger. Natasha maintained her poker face, only letting a twitch of her lips pass when the brunette turned her back towards her.
Natasha took the gesture as what it was: an opportunity; for her to do what she had come to do, and for the brunette to claim plausible deniability if — when — things went to shit.
"I'll take your leave now."
The woman turned around from where she was rummaging through a cabinet. "I'm sorry, I don't have your special coffee brand to offer you." The words were hollow before they took on meaning. "What are you going to do next?"
Natasha gave a seemingly insouciant shrug. "Find out why Steve lied to me. Find out who murdered Nick. You know, the regular stuff."
"Someone lied to you?" The woman's voice was laced with amusement — to which Natasha definitely did not huff. "Any chance this 'Steve' is Steve Rogers, or as the War nicknamed him, Captain America?"