AU:
This is my first story. So please feel free to criticize any and all mistakes I made, as I will sorely need it to improve. I will update when I can, if I can, and probably not regularly. So, if you're expecting a story with continuous uploads, I'd suggest you not start reading this one. But, if you have some patience with my newbie mistakes, I hope you'll enjoy…
Chapter 1
When Nick Fury suggested I take down some female assassin, instead of giving the job to a random lower ranking rookie, I laughed in his face.
I thought he was crazy, willing to send S.H.I.E.L.D's only assassin on a mission that should have taken only 2 or 3 normal field agents. Luckily, for me, Phil had the same thoughts as me on it, and convinced Fury otherwise, all with my smirk firmly in place. A few months later though, I had to lose that smirk when those 2 or 3 agents came back in body bags.
Three more weeks, and another three agents in critical later, even I had to confess that yeah, maybe this kill order was up my alley.
When the mission finally landed in my lap, it hadn't been approved by only Fury and Coulson, but the world security council as well, which meant I either take her out, or die trying. And I'm not planning on dying.
So I go through my weapons checks, nervous energy thrumming through my body as I try to calm my thoughts. My bow and arrows have been meticulously chosen and packed, but it's a habit of mine to compulsively check and recheck all of my gear, adding and removing a few things as I decide what could be useful and what classifies as unnecessary weight.
Before leaving the weapons room, I grab a few trick arrow heads I can screw on later. They're a bitch to screw onto an arrow during a shoot-out. But they have saved my live on a number of missions where I got cornered, outnumbered, or both.
Finally satisfied with my weapons array, I leave the main compound in favor of the hangar.
As we take off, I recheck and clean my gear. This isn't so much a nervous tick as ingrained instinct. Before every mission I go over all my back-up weapons, checking for any signs that one could fail me in the field.
I've been in the business long enough to know that, in life-threatening situations, a jammed gun could mean the difference between coming home on crutches or in a body bag. And since my damned job-description is life-threatening situations, I tend to be dramatically obsessive when it comes to my weapons.
Until I joined S.H.I.E.L.D, it didn't matter much to me whether I came back from a hit dead or alive.
I wouldn't scream or beg for my life if someone threatened it. I would probably just laugh at the thug and tell them to pull the damn trigger. I wouldn't end my life, but I wasn't going to prevent my life from ending either.
And then S.H.I.E.L.D. happened. Or more accurately, then Coulson found me. He showed me that life was more than just the next mission, that there were a million reasons to want to live. He told me to go find some of my own.
And if seeing Coulson every day for the rest of my life was my first reason? Well, who could blame me?
Except now I'm kind of having second thoughts on this mission. The Widow had proven herself as someone not to be trifled with. And I've had this unshakeable feeling for the last few weeks now, that this might be the one mission I wouldn't be walking away from.
But if the Widow is probably going to take my ass out, I might as well take a shot at her first. It was my life philosophy at some stage. If you know you're going down, you take as many enemies as you can right along with you.
Phil once said that's why I sucked at chess. He knew I was a brilliant strategist. He also knew I had a tendency to go Kamikaze on his ass when I felt threatened.
Instead of backing out of the danger zone, I took out as many of Phil's chest pieces as I could before finally losing my piece.
Phil said it was a mortal flaw, but I dropped that attitude around the same time I found my reason to actively live again.
Once I land on the roof I'll be staying in, I enter the building from one of the side windows and start setting up.
Right now it's barely more than a warehouse. But once I'm done with it, it will be effectively converted into a safe house/base of operations. First things first: surveillance.
I start roaming the street when I'm happy with my new ground zero. I need to know what the actual area looks like before the Widow arrives. Having read her file I know what kind of hiding spots, alleys, nooks, and crannies to take note of. And I want to sniff out and bug them all before she makes an appearance.
Of course she will easily find and debug every device I place, once she decides to use those spots. But that's my actual trap. Because she would be giving away her position, telling me exactly where I will be most likely to find her.
In the end I go out for two actual reasons: to find places worthy of debugging, and to get a street view of the town. But truthfully? It's just honest excuses to go grab dinner and allow myself the freedom to move around. I hate the waiting period sometimes, even if my patience is one of the skills I'm renowned for.
She doesn't make me wait long though, arriving around the beginning of my second week in town. She seems to fall for my tricks as well, debugging the spots she will be using. Of course, I know it could be some trap of her own, so I keep well out of range; keep her at a distance.
Too bad she seems to know I operate long-range, as she keeps getting too close, playing some kind of cat and mouse game.
Seriously, the nerve she has, blocking out the vision of one of my cameras… with a toy spider!
Of course, it wasn't her that left the spider there. It was been a small boy singing the itsy bitsy spider as he moved around the toy spider, before placing it neatly in front of my device. I hope she compensated the kid with a burger and chips or something.
In the end my curiosity got the better of me, allowing me to make a rookie mistake. I went down to go see the damn spider, and of course it was a Black Widow. But color me surprised when I found an object just outside the range of the ordinary surveillance cameras.
A Starbucks white hot chocolate, still steaming, beckoned me to pick it up. It's my favorite. And I know better than to think she just made a lucky guess. Next to it she had left a note: "Birds aren't the only things that hunt spiders, and snakes aren't partial either,"
Okay, so I'm in deep shit, because one; I actually smile when I see my favorite drink waiting for me, like I'm impressed with her ability to stalk me without my noticing. And two; if her threat is just that, a warning, it means we aren't the only threats in town. Which means that Three; I'm about to come under fire from two different sides, without any back up, whatsoever.
But yeah, I drink the coffee anyway, because why would she poison me if she'd just alerted me to an unperceived threat in a roundabout way? I go over all my tapes again the moment I get back. And there she is; smiling at another camera closest to my spider-bombed bug, holding up my hot-chocolate in cheers before taking a sip, and then walking off camera. I hold up my mug right along with hers before smiling and taking my own first sip.
And now I'm in deep shit, because for the first time in my entire career, I'm entertaining the thought of not killing my target.
I've disobeyed a lot of orders before, walked out on superiors, saluted the higher ups with one finger held proudly in the air… but one thing I've never done? Failed a mission.
It's why they let me get away with the shit I pull, why they allow me to be their daily migraine. Because no matter how many times they thought of killing me, and I know they do, I always got shit done. I have never failed a mission.
And yet here I am, planning on maybe failing my first… But I shake it off, and decide to at least not kill her with her own trademark weapon. If I have to, I'll let her die by mine.