The setting is in the marvel cinematic universe, except I hate that they nerfed her in the whole universe so I emphasized her character strengths like how they are in the early comics. Steve's abilities are also canon to the older, late 60's comics. Not to spoil, but really mad about how they treated her in endgame, so decided to write myself to do her some justice :)
Also Rated M solely for the gory parts and extreme violence.
I don't own rights to Marvel. If I did, romanogers would be canon.
Sure own a lot of black for someone responsible for a lot of red. Her internal monologue helps put everything into perspective. She never really had a sounding board, just professional relationships with just about everyone she has met. Her profile's classified, as is everyone's, and despite Fury and his superiors and maybe Maria Hill having access to them, they were all hardly friends. Natasha explains her dynamic with her colleagues as a...mutual commitment? She does not ask them for a late night drink and no one asks her to hang out outside of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Tony Stark was holding some kind of gala and if it were not for the new development of some iron costume that went unchecked (which, if you asked her, was their fault for not regulating the weapons-producer genius in the first place anyway, despite her own interest in his creation of guns and ammos), she would have never been asked to a night out by her cyclops boss. The redhead was sifting through her dresses for the night's gala. They were all black. Then she looked through her shoes. Black.
"Barton's going with you," the monops said. Then he proceeded to talk about the specifics of the case, really boring spy stuff.
Sometimes she missed the thrill of the KGB. She would never say it out loud for fear of being misinterpreted as her being a mole, or of the like. It was the zeal of the jobs and flying jets and fighting for a cause, even if it was a bad one. Sometimes being an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. gets confusing when half of the orders her boss gives her are redacted. She does not know why she's doing something and for what reason, but as a soldier, she does so. Natasha would kill herself before going back to Russia and the Leviathan, she just doesn't have a grasp on her purpose anymore. The faith she swore to be a part of an organization that does good, she took maybe because it will make up for all the bad, she doesn't really see as binding as she thought initially, and that's because of all she saw with Fury behind the scenes. There's some secret lab with a glowing blue cube thing that he refuses to explain to her. Her clearance was just below Clint's and even then, he doesn't know anything either. It makes it difficult to fight for something when she doesn't know what side it's on.
"Clint makes missions boring sometimes," she says with a smirk as she clips on an earring, timed perfectly as the agent walks past her to hear. "Imagine going in a mission blind-sided with no watch. That's where the fun is." She smiles and the director's face doesn't change.
"I've saved your ass a lot, kid," Barton spout defensively.
Would it have been so bad if you hadn't? Natasha slips on her black thigh holster, uncoincidentally matching with her black everything. She settles her gun inside and a knife in a corresponding pocket. The dialogue in her head continues, about the many times Barton has been there to get her out of trouble. Especially, that one time he was sent to kill her and he saved her instead, throwing a big middle finger to Fury's orders. That's a trait she enjoys sharing with him, being able to sometimes say "fuck you" with her actions and have the agency to respond differently to missions when the one-eyed-man was deemed wrong. Not that she was always right, but a certain kind of pride is gained if you correct your boss enough.
But, yeah. What if he hadn't been there to save her? She never really fit the trope of a woman needing saving, like the ones who accompany men in stupid superhero movies. She almost hated it sometimes, the Red Room taught her that being subject to vulnerability is a human weakness that the serum cannot fix for her. And so explains her whole life which has been this rigid chain of professional relationships. Countless of them. All with an objective to prevent being unguarded. Even Clint, who she knows deserves some insight on her life because he did spare it, but does she really owe him that? There's no benefit to that. Why can't people just go out and eat ice cream together, talk about their respective jobs, and be qualified as good friends? Why is intimacy a part of it? Maybe she was just jealous that people can create those kinds of relationships and she was stuck in between a place she once belonged to, and a new one that taught her there's more to the people she was forced to kill when she was ten for target practice.
Sometimes it's easier to forget that people have substance to them.
Clint threw a headless arrow at her. "Let's go. You're not usually this slow," he said with a smile that warranted an attack from her, which she refrained from because she's not a fifteen-year-old boy.
A black Rolls Royce was already on the curb of the headquarters waiting for the suited pair, STRIKE Team: Delta, as S.H.I.E.L.D. culture dubbed them. "You talked to Fury, yet?" The woman started conversation as the car drove them through New York traffic. The other agent just shook his head. "I don't know how much I can trust the man if he's not giving me reason to."
Clint looked at her with concerning and caring eyes. "There is so much more that he's done to prove his loyalty to the organization, you know?"
The woman met his eyes, her own rigid and unmoving. "Yes, but one wrong move, despite allegiance to the group, can interfere with your credibility as a whole. You know that." Barton sighs, now understanding why she was so strict on the matter.
It has been at least six years of the two of them working together. Part of what made it difficult for Natasha to acquaint herself with the organization was that no one trusted her, Fury being the most stubborn one. She hadn't known him that well and Clint knew that if Eyepatch took her in despite having ordered to kill her in the first place, he saw something in her. He was very hard on her for the first few months, overworking her with training and legal codes. It was more physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding than they put the new recruits through (though she got through it because nothing was harder than the environment she grew up in). Everyone else in the enforcement agency took his back those months he pushed her. She noticed the side eyes and narrow conversations. It also contributed to the everlasting distance she has kept with everyone else up to this point, why her relationships have been strictly professional. Three years later, everyone warmed up to her. It was better than she could imagine, people greeting her in the hallways despite her always intimidating demeanor, her superiors giving her leeway to do more things and not under Clint's supervision, and basically being treated like any other agent. There was a sense of freedom she had never felt before, it wasn't an attachment to an organization, but an allegiance to doing something good with her life. And then someone tried to frame her and heads turned like the last three years never happened. Why was it so easy to lose trust in me?, she would always think the days after the commotion passed. The rumor was that a terrorist had infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D., and someone was quick to point at her (even though there were many newcomers, those subordinate to her), and Natasha felt all that she had worked for disintegrated in that moment. Clint was the only one to save her (yet again; there seems to be a pattern, she's noticed), introducing her to his family and keeping her with them for awhile until he straightened things out with Fury and the whole agency.
She gained their trust again. It has been another three years, and now the target is on Fury. A part of her feels like she should give way because of the way she felt when people pointed fingers at her despite her innocence. The issue was that she didn't actually do anything and was never caught doing anything that could jeopardize her position with the agency, but she found Fury actively doing something.
"I just care for him, is all," she whispers, looking out the window, then back at him. "I just don't want whatever it was to happen again." She was emotionless. The black car parked in front of a massive stack of stairs leading to a building with Greek columns. It was grand, as expected from a billionaire arms-extraordinaire.
"It won't," Clint assured her as he stepped out of the car with her. They walked up the stairs, Natasha tapping onto the hidden transmitter and mic in her ear. And as the guards approached, the night was suddenly met with Natalie Rushman, and no other personality.
The two worked in sync, as they always have. The moment they entered the greek colosseum, they separated silently, working timely with each other, the art of nospeak tandem, which is something STRIKE Team: Delta was notoriously known for; in-and-out, no fuss and no extraction needed.
"I don't understand why there are no guards up here," Natalia said as she made her way across one side of the building. "I mean there are-" she noted, referring to the cameras "-but not people guards."
"I guess Stark can handle himself just fine," he spoke over their intercom. "He's a weapons-dealer after all. He's probably carrying."
"How much do you want to bet that someone who makes guns and ArmaLite rifles and explosives doesn't actually carry them?" She smirks as she enters a vent, crawling through like a spider. Her Widow's Line, essentially a grappling hook that attaches and electrocutes whatever it lands on, shoots her up a chute and lifts her to another opening in a vent.
"Ten bucks," she heard him grunt on their comm, hearing a muffled bang afterwards. He was prying open a door. The act was too common, she could tell just from the kind of grunt he makes—he possesses distinct types. There's the type where he gets shot, the kind when he gets cut, and the kind when he throws something.
"You're cheap," she responds with a contesting tone. She was crawling through the vents, still.
"I need to feed my kids," he says followed by another grunt. That was the kind where he needed to jump and launch himself off something, probably a pipe on the ceiling.
"Ten bucks, it is. You're going to-" she stops mid-sentence, alarming Barton.
"Widow, you there?" He pauses his rummaging through the building. She hears her breathing from the comm, and didn't hear any other racket so she couldn't possibly be in danger. Therefore, he continues his search.
"Yeah, just—" she stammers again. "I found it—them."
"What?"
"There's more than one suit, Clint," Natalia stares at the rows of iron costumes, painted in variations of silver, gold, and red. "I count seven."
"Holy shit," she hears the agent whisper on the other side. "He's in big trouble."
"Very big." She slips out of the vent and into the room, staring at each one of Stark's inventions. "He has to be releasing this at the gala. There's no way he'd bring all of this here, it's not his venue or his office. This isn't just a storage room."
"That's not gonna happen," Clint says.
"These aren't so bad," Natalia said. Admiring them before getting back to the task at hand. She was about to head to the computer when someone enters the room and she finds herself hiding behind one of the suits.
"It's unexpected but, I think you should cover your eyes for this one," she heard the familiar voice of a Stark, distinct with its tinge of pride and confidence.
"Tony, you didn't," it was followed by a woman's. "That's a lot."
"I know. I was thinking: hand these over to the government, then set up a protocol to who can use them. And I'll be the one in charge of assigning that based on who the people are and how they are." She looked around the corner and saw the man presenting his robots to a blonde woman. She turned back and listened instead of watching.
"They're not going to let you do this, you know?"
"Yeah, but I'm very persuasive," he says, and the spy can only hear the smirk forming on his face.
"I know, but this is the government," the woman said, and Natalia just had to nod in agreement despite the two not knowing her presence.
"I'm gonna show it tonight," he said as their voices faded and the door closes again.
She heads over to the computer to replicate the files and then she hears ruckus in her and Clint's telecom. Natalia unplugs the serial bus from the computer and, without a word, heads to where the other agent is fighting someone.
That someone turned to be some-others. He had subdued three men and a few others followed. He was in the middle of a fight with someone, and though she knows he could handle five more, she came to help for the fun of it. She ricochets off one guard to kick another in the face, then chokes one to unconsciousness. The next guy gets elbowed and another she locked with a scissor choke between her legs. To make it easier, she zaps one with a Widow's Bite from her wrist, coming from a cuff that delivered electroshocks when touched or when deployed.
Her and Hawkeye walk out of the scene, and passing a mirror, he says, "I can't believe I still look this good after that one."
She rolled her eyes and laid her palm, face up, in front of his face, as they walked out of the building. "He didn't have a weapon."
His eyes narrow at her. "How do I know you're not lying?"
"When do I ever?" She says with a smile, as he steps in the waiting Rolls Royce with her, grabbing his wallet from the door compartment o the car and giving her a ten-dollar bill.
Fury got ahold of everything on the Iron Man files from Tony Stark's hard drive, taking the USB from Natasha. He debriefed team Delta on their mission and asked them to meet him at a classified room in the building. He gave them their clearance codes and left. The duo looked at each other, confused, before separating to get out of their gala attire.
"What's this all about?" The archer asks as they took the stairs five flights down.
She stared at the code, baffled, though hearing Clint, but failing to respond. He just sighs as they take the steps in silence.
They are met with a dark hallway that led to double doors, giant ones made of rock. When coded for the doors, they were met with another pair. This went on three times until what looked like an underground, unkept secret facility turned into a technological hub. There were no more stone doors, but panels of lights across glass walls separating even more rooms in the room itself. Everything goes noticed, you can look at whatever anyone was doing, and it looks like a ground for biotechnology. Someone was working on a bionic arm that replicates Tony Stark's weapons. Another was working on some sort of artificially intelligent drone. All can be seen through their glass walls. People wore white lab coats, and those that did not carried heavy ammo with them, guarding each project. The pair was distracted with all the experiments that were going around them that they didn't realize the one room not divided in glass, and was placed in the center of all those glass partitions. There was a man on the table. When Natasha took notice she was distracted again by seeing scientists working on the blue cube that she had caught Fury with awhile ago. She made her way to that room, peering inside even though the guards weren't en garde. They were allowing the Black Widow access but she remained on the outside.
Three scientists hovered around the glowing thing. Five minutes after watching them, she took notice of the fact that no one was touching it. They were all observing it, but realized that they were trying to form an extraction of something inside it. The conversation was isolated inside the glass box, but she could make out that they often repeated "I don't know"s and "energy" quite often through lip reading.
Natasha was taken aback by Clint's call to her name. She left the box alone and walked over to where most of the attention was, a man on a table. They weren't operating on him, but they weren't doing anything to him either. "He's in equilibrium with it, if we destabilize what's around him he could go into shock," someone said. She acted ore like a doctor more than a scientist, though there's varying professions to go around in the hub, she's sure. It took her awhile to realize that the man was in ice, dressed in an american flag?
"How do we take him out of it? He's still alive," another said. The spy watched all of this unfold, going into a shock of her own and gaining a concept of who this man was.
They began by chiseling the greater ice around him, careful not to thaw the living inside it, and wary about breaking it too thin, or shattering it altogether for that matter. Her and her partner stood in awe until a figure stood next to her. "We found him just a couple of days ago," Fury's voice resounded. "We found that a couple of weeks before and when I sent out a group to survey area to get some clues into what it was, he was right next to it all along" he said as he pointed to the glass bubble that held the blue cube Natasha was just observing. She nodded in understanding, focusing her attention back to the frozen soldier. "He's been there no less than seventy years. We don't even know how his body didn't age or how he's surviving."
And then they put piles of blankets on top of him, except they were releasing steam. She was sure that it was made to thaw the remaining sheet of ice around him. Suddenly, the whole building grew cold. She heard one of the doctors say: "lower the thermostat. We're altering his environment and if we don't try to stabilize the room with how his body's been thermoregulating in the ice, it won't maintain homeostasis. Because he's been trapped and accustomed to this temperature, we need to ease him into increasing it or we will lose him."
"I can't believe he's alive," she heard Clint whisper after awhile of silence in awe of the spectacle before them. Water dripped all over the table as heat left the blankets, melting the ice and vaporizing with the hot and cold contact. The doctors were just waiting now. And once his forearms were visible, the head doctor (she suspected "head" partly because she was the only one talking and telling everyone what to do) kept her fingers on his wrist to check for a pulse. She said it was weak, but that it will do. Next thing the pair knew, needles were being stuck into him and his red, white and blue uniform was being cut to pieces.
Five minutes after they hooked him up to equipment, they were met with a gush of wind. "Stand back," Fury said. They stepped back to see that the center hub was being enclosed by glass, creating its own room like the others around them. It's become an operating room now. And before the glass settles together to close into a room, the three heard one continuous beep, a resonating flatline indication. Then the room closes and noise was eliminated, the agents and the director standing as if watching a silent movie. The man was dying.
The defibrillator comes out but before a doctor could use it, the head puts her arm out to stop him. She starts shouting at him. So no shock was delivered. Nothing was happening other than the fact that everyone was still, staring at the heart monitor.
"W-what are they doing? Why aren't they doing anything?" Natasha said, remaining as calm as she could. She has seen dying men before. She's killed men before. Her newfound allegiance to an institution that does good does not erase the fact that she can still kill. She has definitely grown in her own empathy, but she still has no attachments. No one has attachments to that man on the table, but seeing the doctors, the one who control lives, standing idle when something could or should be done, was unnerving to her.
"I don't know," Fury says, though not as alarmed as her. Clint knows that the man has full faith in all of the doctors working on the patriot.
It was not until ten minutes have passed when the defibrillator was used. It didn't work. The doctor upped the voltage. And, again, nothing.
Natasha sighs. Clint stares, his eyes the only part of him showing desperation. They watched the whole thing unfold, and when Clint was about turn back the other spy held his arm. "Look," she said. Another shock was delivered and the monitor spikes at an alarmingly high heart rate. The blonde man sits up on the table, gasps, then falls back unconscious.
Fury let out a sigh of relief.
Steve Rogers is invincible, after all, Natasha thought.