Whenever the world of espionage became too loud. Sharon Carter never sought the sun. She didn't fly to exotic beaches or lose herself in the thumping music of city bars.
She came to Umbrella. She came to the quiet building at the edge of the city, and to the old house behind it where the man who had once saved her life used to live before his health began to fail. It was a pilgrimage to a sanctuary built on pure gratitude.
Umbrella was the only soil on earth where she didn't have to be Agent 13. There were no code names here. No compact firearm hidden beneath the clean lines of a tailored jacket. Here, she could sit in the garden and drink tea, listening to the wind move through the ancient oak trees, and pretending that the world wasn't constantly trying to kill her.
The old man, Edward Spencer, liked to say, "A person needs one place where no one expects anything from them." He was the only one who never asked about her missions, never probed about the shadows under her eyes or the fresh scars on her knuckles.
She had known about Aryan for years, but she had never met him. The old man had been careful, shielding the boy from her world like a sacred flame.
"He's busy," he would say whenever she asked, his voice a gentle but firm barrier. "Studying. Working. Too tired today."
Once, she had smiled and said, "You're protecting him from me, aren't you?" He had smiled back, a knowing look in his kind eyes. "Yes." She understood that better than anyone. She worked in a world where people disappeared simply for knowing the wrong name.
She had seen Aryan only in photographs. On the mantle, in framed family pictures lining the hallway, in graduation photos sent from MIT. Blue eyes. Dark hair. An intellectual expression that looked far older than his years. She remembered studying one photo in particular. Aryan standing beside his grandfather, both dressed formally for some corporate event. The old man's hand was resting on the boy's shoulder.
"He doesn't smile much," she had remarked once, tracing the boy's serious face in the silver frame.
The old man had chuckled, a fond sound. "He smiles when he thinks no one is watching."
One evening, after a mission in Prague had gone bloodily, horribly wrong, she had sat in that same living room, bleeding through the sleeve of her coat. The old man had stitched the gash on her arm himself, his hands remarkably steady despite his age, the needle moving with a gentle precision.
"You shouldn't be doing this anymore," he had said gently, his focus on his work. She had only offered a tired smile in response. Then, unexpectedly, he looked at her. "If something happens to me… look after him."
The words had hung in the quiet room.
"He won't ask for help," the old man continued, his voice low. "He'll pretend he doesn't need anyone. He thinks the world is always trying to take something from him. He's lonely, Sharon. He doesn't have anyone his age. No real friends."
Then he had asked her the question that would change the course of her life, a request heavier than any order Nick Fury had ever given her. "Would you be his friend? Just... be there." She had hesitated, the weight of the promise settling on her, before she finally nodded.
When the news of his passing reached her, she had come to the funeral in simple civilian clothes. She stood at the very back, a ghost among the corporate mourners in their expensive suits. She watched the young man with the blue eyes and black hair stand alone and looking exactly like someone who had just lost the only person he ever trusted.
She didn't approach him.
Now, she worked at Umbrella. She sat across from him in meetings, she brought him coffee he never asked for, and she tried to start conversations that he always ended politely. He didn't recognize her. He didn't know that she was the girl who had once broken down crying in his grandfather's garden, and that the old man had simply sat with her for an hour in silence, handing her a handkerchief and saying, "You're alive. That's what matters."
He didn't know the executive kitchen prepared the food he liked because she discreetly told them to. He didn't know that when she brought him coffee or prattled on about movies and trivial nonsense, she was deliberately dragging him back from the edge of the void.
The office was a tomb of glass and silence, and as Sharon watched Aryan from her own desk in the anteroom, she realized she was witnessing the quiet disappearance of a human soul.
She had been watching him for months now with the aching familiarity of someone who knew the ghosts that haunted his lineage. She observed the way he sat at his desk. Back perfectly straight, fingers moving over the holographic keys with a rhythmic precision that felt less like work and more like a joyless ritual. He existed in a state of high-tensile tension, like a wire stretched until it was humming at a frequency no one else could hear.
She wasn't investigating him. Not really. She was keeping a promise to the man who called her 'child' and gave her a place to breathe.
She knew Aryan thought her friendliness was a probe from an enemy agent. He saw a threat where there was only an inheritance. He didn't realize that she was not standing in his office to watch him for Fury.
She noticed the small things, the things the board members and the tech journalists inevitably missed. She noticed that he never looked at the photos of his grandfather that still lined the halls. He had turned the ones in his office slightly away as if the weight of those kind eyes was more than his iron clad heart could bear.
She watched the way he ate, if he ate at all. It was fuel for the engine. There was no joy in the taste, no pause for the scent. He was consuming the world, and in exchange, he was letting the world consume him.
"He thinks he's building an empire," she whispered to the empty air of her own office one evening. "But he's really building a fortress to keep himself in."
She remembered the old man's voice, raspy and soft in the twilight of the Spencer garden. "He believes that if he owns enough of the world, it can never hurt him again. He doesn't realize that the more you own, the more you have to lose."
There were moments when the mask slipped. She would walk in with a file or a fresh cup of coffee, catching him staring out the window at the skyline. For a second, his shoulders would drop, and the predatory stillness would soften into something that looked like profound exhaustion.
In those seconds, he looked like the boy in the graduation photo, the one who smiled when he thought no one was watching.
"Aryan," she had said once, stepping closer than the professional distance allowed. "The sun is down. The staff has gone home. The building is empty."
"The world doesn't sleep, Sharon," he had replied, not looking at her, his voice flat. "And neither does Umbrella."
"Umbrella is a company," she had countered gently. "You are a man."
He had finally looked at her then, and for a second, she felt as if he were seeing right through her skin, through her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge, and into the very promise she had made to his grandfather.
That was the moment she realized the depth of her task. She was there to remind him that he was still made of flesh and blood.
She deliberately introduced chaos into his perfect world. She brought him tea that was slightly too hot so he would have to wait and be still for a moment. She left magazines about art and history on his desk, obscuring the technical manuals. She spoke of the smell of the rain and the taste of the street food in Queens, dragging the mundane world into his celestial calculations.
She saw the way the employees looked at him, with a mixture of awe and genuine terror. They saw a god in a tailored suit. But she saw the man who had lost his only anchor. She saw the way his hand would occasionally hover over the empty space on his desk where a family photo used to sit, before he caught himself and turned the aborted movement into a reach for a pen. He was a masterpiece of self-denial.
And so, she stayed. She endured the coldness, the dismissals, and the suffocating silence. She played the part of the slightly too earnest secretary, the one who cared a little too much, because if she didn't, there would be no one left in his life who wasn't either an employee or an enemy.
She was there because a dead man had asked her to make sure his grandson didn't have to walk through the dark alone. And as she watched Aryan's car disappear into the rain-swept night, she felt the profound weight of that promise. He was brilliant but he was also exactly what his grandfather had said he was. He was lonely. And as long as she was standing, he wouldn't be.