7 - Partners In Crime

oooooooo

He found her house just on dark, like he'd said he would. Imogen had been half hoping he wouldn't, that he'd just forget the whole thing and never bother her again, but he was determined – whatever trouble she was poking at, he wanted to poke it too, for no known reason other than he was bored and HYDRA had done something to piss him off.

The knock on her door was swift and light but she'd been waiting for him, perched on the couch with the TV turned down to a distant mutter. When she opened the door he was leaning against the wall, watching the flickering light of a bright TV under Simone's door. The kids were having a movie night, she guessed; she could just hear the voices of the character from some cartoon bleeding through the door.

"Are you coming in?" she asked reluctantly, holding the door open.

Pietro jumped in surprise. Apparently he hadn't even noticed she was there. "What is happening in there?" he asked as he came in, glancing back at Simone's door.

"Her kids are watching movies," Imogen explained. "They like to turn off the lights and pretend they're in a cinema."

"Oh." He looked around her apartment, but didn't say anything more.

"You know," she said as she went to the kitchen to brew herself some coffee. "I'm still not convinced I need your help on this."

"Have you found your friend yet?" he asked pointedly, taking at seat at her bench.

"No," she admitted, and then felt compelled to defend herself. "I know where she's been though, and how to find her. I don't need you for that."

"I think you will," he insisted. "Even if you find her on your own, HYDRA will have her, no? You will need someone to help you fight."

She turned to glare at him. "How do you know that?"

He shrugged and offered her an impish smile. "I guess. And you just told me."

Imogen glared at him some more, and then turned back to her coffee. "Alright, so HYDRA have her somewhere. Do you have any other ideas?"

"We go after them. You say you know where they are."

"I said I know where they've been. I haven't found out where else they took her yet."

"So you don't know how to find your friend."

She shot him another annoyed look. "I'll find her," she claimed boldly.

"Not alone," Pietro pressed. "You are just too stubborn to admit it."

"Maybe I just don't want your help."

"I know."

Imogen half expected him to give up, but he stayed where he was. She wasn't going to be able to scare him off, or annoy him until he went away; no, she was more or less stuck with him.

Did that have to be a bad thing though? She found herself reluctantly considering all her options as she poured her coffee and stirred in sugar, including letting him stay. He wouldn't be as much help as Ruby had been in tracking down INTEL and HYDRA and worming their way into their system, but he was surprisingly intuitive. He's read her texts and guessed almost everything she'd been working on from the information there. And he would be useful in a fight, like he'd said. Better than her alone, anyway – watching him fight Clint earlier, she had no doubt that he would be capable of taking out a whole HYDRA cell if they had to.

Really, the only problem was her own reluctance to work with anyone, especially this boy that she barely knew, who she still didn't trust to not go running straight to Clint with everything she was doing in her spare time. She was loath to admit it, but she had a much better chance of saving Ruby with him than if she was alone.

Sighing, she took her coffee and crossed the kitchen to grab yesterday's newspaper, dropping it on the bench in front of him. "It's pretty much all in there," she told him reluctantly, leaning across the bench to flip through it for him. She paused on page five, where some reporter had organised a full page spread on the disappearance of four men from Everett, Pennsylvania, and the subsequent discovery of a network of tunnels beneath their shared workspace. It was a good article; they'd commented on the discovery of living quarters for 40 or 50 people, the well-stocked armoury, and the broken doors and bullet holes that suggested there had been a fight there. And of course, they noted a suspicious lack of bodies and the possible ties to HYDRA.

Pietro took a long time to read through it, even longer than it took her to re-read it twice upside down (which was definitely not her forte). "Are you sure you know how to read?" she asked with a frown after watching him stare at the same paragraph for two minutes straight.

He glanced up, brow furrowed in frustration. "I know how to read," he insisted, just like he had the last time she'd asked.

Imogen shook her head and sipped her coffee. "You're a pretty slow reader then," she said, as casually as she could. "I've read that thing like three times since you started, and I'm not exactly fast."

Pietro huffed in frustration. "Fine. I can read some. Most of this is…" He gestured angrily, but she got the message. "This is why I don't like English. Pārāk grūti. It makes no sense."

"I could say the same about Sokovian," she shot back, and spun the newspaper around to face her.

"Sokovian is not so hard," he argued. "Not like this language."

"Your sister doesn't seem to mind it."

Pietro scoffed. "Wanda? She is just better at it. Went to more school. She does all the talking, when we need things."

Imogen turned her eyes back to the paper, not sure what to say. She could mention that they are both school drop-outs, or take another jibe at his reading, but she didn't feel like it now. Pietro saved her from having to think of anything anyway. "What does this say?" he asked, and reached out to tap the paper with one finger.

She cleared her throat and straightened the pages self-consciously. "It's about a HYDRA base in Pennsylvania," she explained, grateful for something else to talk about. "About four hours from here. Some people when through and killed everyone stationed there a few weeks ago. The police found out about it because four of the HYDRA agents were living in the town as part of the base's cover story, and they're officially missing now. Probably dead, like all the others."

"Is this where they took your friend?" Pietro asked, leaning over to take a better look at the picture that accompanied the article. It was an old one, of the four missing men standing in front of their newly built workplace.

"It's where FRIDAY thinks they went," Imogen replied. "But it's empty now." She shrugged.

"And you have been to see it? To look?"

Imogen hesitated. "Once," she admitted. "But I didn't get very far."

"Because you were scared?"

She scowled at him. "Because I picked the night some random group of people decided to kill everyone inside and I didn't feel like getting caught in the crossfire."

He sat up straighter. "There is someone else killing HYDRA?"

She nodded. "They killed two hundred people at a company in Manhattan just before they went to this base. Don't you know that?"

"We should find them," he said, ignoring the jibe.

"Good luck," she told him dryly. "They don't exist. Ruby tried for weeks, but there's no way to track them – they just appear, kill a bunch of people, and disappear again." She'd given up on chasing that lead several months ago. Between the lack of information on their operation and their singlemindedness towards HYDRA, she and Ruby both had decided they would be no help in finding INTEL and weren't worth chasing.

Pietro was frowning at her. "If they are after HYDRA, then they will be where HYDRA is, no?"

Imogen paused, and realised he was right. "I guess," she allowed carefully. "So what?"

"So, if you find another HYDRA base, sometime they will show up. And then we can follow them."

"Wait." She held up a hand to stop him from continuing. "Are you saying you want to just hang around near some HYDRA base until someone attacks it, and then try to follow them without getting killed as well?"

"Yes!" His face lit up, and then dropped again when she shook her head.

"We're not just going after random people who can kill us. We're just looking for Ruby," she told him. "I don't want to get into fights if we don't have to."

"And what will you do when you find her and they come looking for her again?" Pietro asked. "Tell the Avengers so that they will help you? I thought you said you did not want the old man to know."

"I don't know yet!" she replied hotly, mostly because she knew he was right. "I'll figure it out once I find her."

"You will end up fighting them anyway," Pietro predicted. "Because you don't want to tell Clint."

Imogen slammed her mug down on the bench, hard enough to spill the coffee everywhere, and walked away. She sat down on the couch instead, trying to pretend she was watching TV and not silently fuming over his ability to always be right. He wasn't just right about Ruby, or her rescue mission; he also knew that she was scared of fighting HYDRA, even if he hadn't said it yet. That was the worst part. She didn't like it when other people knew her limitations.

Pietro followed her across the room, moving twice as fast as she had. He stopped between her and the TV, blocking her view, and crossed his arms, waiting for something.

"Get out of the way," she grumbled, and tried to see around him.

He moved a step closer, making himself even more of an obstacle. "If you want to find your friend, you will have to fight them eventually."

"Doesn't mean I have to go looking for a fight now though," she replied coldly.

He huffed in frustration. "Why not? You know how to fight, and I will help you. I have fought worse men than them before."

"You've fought robots," she added dryly.

"See? HYDRA is nothing after robots."

"You realise you still sound crazy, right?" Imogen sat up straighter, and wished he would stop smiling.

"Why?" he asked.

"Two people against a whole army of HYDRA agents? Those aren't exactly good odds."

He scoffed loudly. "They will never see me coming," he claimed. "The odds are better than you think. They are not an army anymore. And I am worth more than just one person."

She stared at him until she was sure he was serious, and then shook her head. "Do you at least have a plan?" she asked, well aware she was fighting a losing battle.

He shrugged. "Find more HYDRA bases, like I was saying before. Maybe find those people who have been killing them to help. It is simple."

"You really aren't selling this whole idea."

His face screwed up in frustration. "What else is there to plan? We go, we look for your friend, and we come back." His eyes fell on the newspaper they'd abandoned over on the bench. He zoomed across the apartment to retrieve it. "We should go there," he continued as he reappeared in front of her, and dropped the paper in her lap. It was the page with the article about the HYDRA base and the four missing men.

"That place is empty," she reminded him, but she was staring at the building in the background of the picture and wondering what she had missed, in the side of the base she hadn't explored.

"You said you did not see everything," he pressed. "Maybe there is a clue here." Her eyes never left the picture. She'd been very deliberately avoiding the thought of going back there after the fright that man had given her. If he or HYDRA were watching the place, she would not go there alone; but she was running out of leads to chase elsewhere, and she wouldn't be alone now if Pietro came with her. And she'd promised to free Ruby if they caught her.

Like he'd said, she was going to have to face up to HYDRA at some point. She could at least start with the base that was supposed to be abandoned.

"Okay," she agreed slowly. "It's not a terrible idea to go back and look."

"Good!" Pietro was at the door already. "Then we should go. It is not far, is it?"

She blinked at him. "What, now?" she replied when she registered exactly what he was saying. "You want to go right now?"

"Why not?" he shot back. "Ruby, we should find her soon, no? HYDRA are not good people to be a prisoner with."

"Oh." It slipped out as she rose from the couch. She'd like nothing more than to stay there and go searching another day when she'd had time to mentally prepare herself to face the HYDRA base again, but he was right. It had been too long already, and she did really want to find Ruby alive and well enough to continue the search for INTEL. Once again, she found herself agreeing with him. "I guess you're right," she allowed.

"I am always right," he replied. "So? We will go now?"

"Yes," she sighed. "I have a car on the street. We can be there by like, midnight."

He was out the door before she was even finished talking.

oooooooo

The base was dark and abandoned, the complete opposite of how it had been last time she'd been here. The gates weren't even locked, just clumsily pulled shut with a line of police tape pulled across them, fluttering in the cool night breeze. She parked just down the street – no point playing the spy game when there was nobody here to care about their arrival – and for a moment they sat in silence and listened to the engine tick over as it cooled.

When she could take it no more, she unclipped her seatbelt. The sharp snap as the buckle released sounded uncomfortably loud in the quiet that had fallen over them. "You still want to do this?" she asked an unusually quiet Pietro, pausing with one hand on the door handle.

"Do you?" he replied abruptly, and got out of the car before she could even respond.

Rolling her eyes, Imogen followed suit, climbing out into a night that was just a few degrees short of a mild temperature. Shivering slightly, she pulled her coat tighter and touched the gun at her hip to reassure herself that it was still there. Pietro, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, didn't even seem to have noticed the cold, too busy staring at the relatively small building that hid HYDRA's underground base.

She couldn't take the inaction, not this close to possible danger. Better to get it over and done with than to stand here all day looking at it. "We should go," she said pointedly, and resisted the urge to hide her hands in her pockets.

"This is HYDRA?" Pietro asked dubiously, but followed her across the road all the same.

"What were you expecting, a castle?" She'd meant it as a joke, but for a minute he looked like he thought she was being serious.

"No," he said finally, way too defensive. "I just thought it is bigger than…this." He gestured at the base, and Imogen had to admit that he had a point. The building above ground wasn't more than a big concrete box, one storey high and flat-roofed. It was surrounded by a yard of scrap metal and timber posts and other building materials that kept up the façade of the business that was supposed to run there. It wasn't the sort of place you would think to come when looking for a shady operation and its base.

Then again, that was probably what shadowy organisations looked for in a base. So this was exactly the kind of place they should be looking.

"Can we just hurry up and do this?" was all she said to Pietro though. "The longer we stand out here, the more likely someone is to realise we're here."

"Fine," he said, a little perturbed that she had cut him off so abruptly. Imogen ignored him, already shoving the gate open just wide enough for them to slip through and ducking under the battered police tape. Pietro was right on her heels and she was secretly grateful - this place was open and exposed and under no circumstances would she ever be a welcome visitor here.

The doors to the fake cover business were all firmly locked and boarded up, unlike the gate. She led the way around to the back door she'd used last time, grateful of the shadow of the building and the cover of darkness to hide them from any watching eyes. The previously broken lock on that door had been fixed since the night it had been attacked and was sealed shut. Pietro made short work of breaking it all over again, even though that meant people would know they had been here. Apparently the speedster didn't know how to be discreet, or care enough to cover his tracks.

Inside was dark; Imogen stopped to pull her phone out to use its torch as light. The beam fell on the trail of blood that had been left to dry on the floor, just a dark stain now. The body of the guard that had been here was gone at least. She silently prayed that all the other bodies had been taken away too – she wasn't ready to face that kind of scene just yet.

She skirted around the bloodstain, taking her time to get across the room to the stairs but Pietro was undaunted, stepping over it with barely a second glance to acknowledge that someone had died here. She grudgingly let him take the lead then, admitting to herself that if she didn't, she might not have the guts to descend all the way into that dark hole.

There were no lights on underground, not even the emergency lighting that had showed her the way last time, just the thin beam from her phone fighting a hard battle against the looming darkness. It was quiet too – so quiet that they could have heard a pin drop from anywhere in the base. Their breaths sounded like roars in the eerie silence and Imogen was sure her heartbeat had become audible, it was beating so fast and so hard. For a moment, they just stood at the bottom of the stairs, torchlight flashing back and forth, and listened for any sign that they were not alone. All that came back was silence.

Pietro broke it first. "Which way?" he asked in a voice so quiet he was almost whispering. The sound still carried down the empty hall, making them both cringe.

Imogen looked left, and then right. She'd turned that was last time and had come up with nothing; labs and dormitories weren't what they were looking for. "Left," she decided, and shone the torch down their long, lonely path. A trail of blood began just where the light ended, leading them into the depths of the place, and she swallowed hard and decided not to think about it.

Pietro led again. She was learning quickly that he did not like to be still for too long in anything he did, even if they were walking into a put of darkness where anything could be hiding just around a corner. He didn't even seem to have realised the kind of danger that had filled this place for as long as it had existed, or care if they came back. She almost envied him that kind of bold stupidity – in any old street brawl, she would jump right in without hesitation, and even one or two trained enemies wouldn't cause her a second of doubt, but this? An underground base with one exit, owned by the people who would kill her the moment they got their hands on her? She hated that it made her feel fear, but she just couldn't shake the feeling, no matter how hard she tried.

And then there was the man that had almost shot her last time she was here, and whoever he worked for. Just another reason to stay away from this place in case someone unfriendly came back.

The trail of blood took them to a room that looked like the headquarters of the base. It was filled with banks of computers, most of them smashed beyond repair, and more than a few ominous stains in the carpet. The room looked like it had been swept clean; not a sheet of paper anywhere and broken computers shoved together in the sort of organised pile that HYDRA wouldn't have had time to arrange the night they all died. Imogen only lingered at the door a minute before pulling Pietro away and leaving the room to its dark slumber.

"You don't think there will be anything useful there?" he asked as they continued onwards.

"HYDRA have cleaned the place out," she replied. "And anyway, we have to find where they had Ruby first. If you really want to look in there, we can come back later."

He made a noise that sounded dissatisfied but didn't say anything more. They walked side by side now; the conversation had calmed her nerves, or maybe they'd become so frayed that she had overcome them. Either way, she found the courage now to peer through windows and open doors to see what lay behind them, until finally they came across one with bars on the window instead of glass, and she knew immediately that this was what they had come for.

Behind the door were more stairs, leading them even deeper into the earth. Her stomach lurched at the thought of just how far from the surface they actually were, how far back they had to go before they could escape.

"Are you going to go down?" Pietro asked, shaking her free of her thoughts. She realised with a jolt that she'd been frozen at the top of the stairs for a while now, and shook herself for being so absurd.

"Of course," she replied hotly and forced herself down the first step, and then the next one. It got easier after that, just one step after another, twenty in all, and Pietro right at her back forcing her onwards lest he run into her.

At the bottom, they came face to face with what looked like a crime scene in a jail. HYDRA had set this room up not unlike the holding cells at any old police station; three little boxes of steel bars and concrete with a bed, a sink, and a toilet each. The one to the left was a mess; the sink was broken, leaking water slowly all over the floor, some of the bars were twisted and bent, and the door to the cell had been blown right off its hinges. It was lying in the other side of the room, just about embedded in the wall. A small pile of rubble surrounded it. And then of course, there was an ominously large pool of blood next to it, complete with a decorative patch high up on the wall.

"What is this?" Pietro breathed, surveying the scene with open-mouthed confusion.

"Probably exactly what we're looking for," Imogen said and, galvanised by the chance to talk while they worked, crossed the room to examine the gap where the door was supposed to be.

"Your friend?" She didn't bother turning to witness the disbelief on his face. "If she was here, I don't think we will find her now."

Imogen ignored him, leaning over to examine the hinges – or what was left of them. Something had made the door tear itself off of them, and she could only think of one explanation that didn't involve a bomb that there was no other evidence of.

"Ruby was here," she confirmed, straightening. "And I think she escaped too."

"How do you know that?" Pietro asked.

"Yeah, Imogen," a familiar voice echoed from the stairs, somewhere in the darkness behind them. "How do you know that?"

Her blood ran cold.