Title: Extraction Point

Author: AutumnEnnui

Chapter Two: No Matter the Cost

Natasha wondered if all men really did hit the same, because it seemed no matter how many times a man backhanded her across her face it always just felt like she'd been there and done that. There was the crack of their hand on her face, usually splitting her lip, sometimes just whacking the shit out of her cheekbone. Once some dumbass thug had tried to backhand her and caught her temple for some weird reason. She kicked him in the balls. And here she was, in a very similar situation to all those others, save that she wasn't going to kick her way out of this one.

Usually she wasn't dumb enough to fall for taking a drink from anyone, and she was extremely keen at detecting poisons and toxins in food or drinks. Also, she had a high tolerance for anything that might impair her… abilities in any way. Something she didn't count on when she went on this mission, though, was ventilation: more specifically, ventilation systems. The club had been busy, smoke had filled the air, the music was as loud as a club usually is; so when the air around her became peppered with a very lightly-fragranced concoction that she had concluded had impaired her better judgment, she didn't think twice when the bartender offered her a colorful cocktail. Of course, at that point she was impaired enough to drink the whole, chemical-laden thing.

That's how you end up dead, Natasha, she thought to herself. She could only thank goodness she wasn't fucking dead: although at the rate they were hitting her she didn't know exactly how long that state of being would last. They'd get frustrated with the fact that she wasn't giving up any information from hitting, and then they'd simply move on to bigger and more horrific torture methods. And since she was trained for this, since she had survived all this and more in the past, she knew she wouldn't give anything up. Surrender wasn't in her vocabulary.

She did wonder how long the extraction team would take. She wondered who they'd send. Not Coulson, because he was still on leave. Not Hill, because that woman rarely left Fury's side. Sure as shit wouldn't be Clint, because no one had heard from him or seen him in three months or so.

"Agent Romanov, this will just go easier if you tell us where you hid the drive."

Natasha sighed and looked at the large minion in front of her. She wished that the boss men would stop sending out thugs to do an assassin's job. "Then you'll just have to make it harder, because I'm sure as shit not telling you where that drive is."

Another backhand. Another blade drawn across her bared thigh. More blood. It would get worse before it got better, she was sure of it.

She fucking hated the sturdy, single-piece metal chair that was bolted heavily to the concrete floor. She also hated the black leather restraints that were padded with tire rubber, tightened down enough to hurt and no amount of sweat would allow her to slip out of them. She hated that they knew her skill level enough to put a metal collar that was attached to the chair around her neck – no head-butting for her. Ankles? Locked down like her wrists. There was even a belt restraint around her waist. She had woken up like this! No fucking wiggle room. She found it unacceptable enough that she decided that there would need to be more intensive training on escape methods, poison and toxin detection, and resistance… just as soon as she got out of this mess… if she got out of this mess. It wasn't looking too good, but she knew that she had missed her check-in with SHIELD twice by now, so someone was on the way. Whether they could find her or not (since her captors had cut out the tracking device behind her right ear) was a different story.

What she hated more than all of that was this fucking feeling of being a damsel in distress. She was really and truly stuck. She might as well be shouting, "Save me! Save me!" for all the good it would do her at this point.

"Let's bleed her out some," the minion remarked, "weaken her before we break out the waterboarding shit."

Sharp knives on her bare thighs. Slice after slice after slice. At least the assholes knew how to avoid her femoral artery. She wouldn't last long enough for waterboarding should they open that fucker. She kind of wished she could move enough to make them accidentally do it, but that was a fruitless endeavor if there ever was one. One of the men ripped the few buttons she had on her blouse off, exposing her chest.

"Just for fun," he sneered before using his knife to carve a line straight down her sternum and around her breasts. Superficial cuts that would bleed but not drain her, but awful in their own way because she knew they would leave scars. If she got out of this intact she was surely going to need some plastic surgery to give her skin a clean slate once more.

She hated down time, and she didn't appreciate being left to stew and bleed in a cold room while her captors contemplated waterboarding her. She could resist it, sure, but it wasn't exactly her idea of fun. Going to a so-called "happy-place", or trying to find some sense of zen while shivering and bleeding wasn't likely, but Natasha had her thoughts, feelings, and wishes. She didn't like anyone to know that, but she did. She was a human being, no matter what had been done to her in the past, and the more she moved away from that past and toward clearing the ledger she considered her greatest cross to bear the more she felt human, and the more she felt like she had permission to want things for herself.

Just like everyone else, she had felt like a vacation after New York was in order. She only took two weeks because the idleness killed her, but she took the time to go to the coast of Northern California, where she rented a seaside cottage under an alias. For two weeks she sat on the porch, on the beach, on the rocks, and on random trees in the deep redwood forests not far from the coastline. She thought about aliens, magic, gods, newfound alliances, new trainings awaiting her, her past, her present, and Clint.

She knew she wasn't fooling anyone anymore: from the call she got from Coulson telling her the news of Clint becoming compromised it was evident as hell that only half of her mind was on stopping Loki: the other half was solidly on getting her partner back no matter the cost. A personal factor had settled in, almost a personal panicked mission to save Clint before he was completely lost. But it wasn't the fear of losing her partner, or of losing one of SHIELD's essential and top agents that panicked her: it was losing him. Only him. Losing his smile, his laugh, his serious and weighted attitude toward the most daunting of missions, the goofiness he only displayed in front of her during late night training sessions or rare down time – she didn't want to lose Clint Barton. He wasn't only her partner: he was the solid rock that always had her back, patched her wounds, held her down when the night terrors came and threatened to consume her, gave her a reason to laugh when things got rough, and so much more. She would be lying if she said that she only saw him as a friend. She didn't know what to make of any of it anymore. And now… well, she'd be lucky if she got a chance to work it all out inside of her head, especially as she watched her blood snake a trail to the drain in the cement floor.

He didn't know. Agent Romanov was trying to make sure he wouldn't find out until she knew for sure what she was feeling and what she wanted to do about it. Losing him as a partner was not an option, but she had no clue how Director Fury would take it, or think about it. Partnerships were about loyalty, respect, trust, watching each other's backs, caring for each other's general welfare, and knowing that your partner won't flinch and will keep to the mission no matter the cost. She hadn't been kidding when she told Clint she was compromised after he started to come to his senses in a sick room inside the helicarrier. She knew there was mutual trust and respect between them, but whatever else she was feeling was what she was unsure of. Her feelings were skewed now, even biased, but as she sat on the beach watching ten-foot swells on the shoreline she worked out that she would still always stick to her core belief that their missions were of the utmost importance, and that it would be doing Clint an injustice as her partner to think that saving the world was even one centimeter less important than saving him simply because she had feelings for him.

Natasha wondered how long those foot soldiers were going to be gone. If they didn't show up again soon she might pass out, because even someone as well-trained as her can't function without a decent amount of blood in her system.

The Black Widow had been surprised when Hawkeye hadn't come back to join her in their work after the month everyone else took off. He had done a damn good job hiding, too. They all had tracking chips, but they had to be accessed. That was a level of access she didn't possess. She tried every alias she knew of, and nothing. When they hit the two-month mark she started to wonder if something had gone wrong. To distract herself from this curiosity, she had taken this undercover mission. A fat lot of good it did her, considering her vision was starting to get blurry, it had become too hard to keep her head up, and she was slump down enough that the metal collar on the chair was leaving a nice indent in her skin.

Natasha heard commotion outside, although it sounded very far away. Everything sounded far away, and she only had time enough to see a familiar figure dressed all in black force the door open and rush toward her before things started to go completely dark.

"'Bout time," was the only thing she could get out before everything was black.