Leaning from a chair onto her lap, Clint snored gently beside Natasha. The sand storm outside was in full swing, and though the room was located deep within the bunker, the sounds of the sand hitting the concrete walls above still rang through the space.
The beeping of machines still pulsed regularly through the thickening air. From inside the room, despite the outer noises, it was impossible to discern whether it was day or night.
A figure dragged her fingernails over the headboards of the beds and the scraping noise trailed behind her as she made her way around to Steve's bed. She crouched, her face distorted, and let her nails rest on his forehead. The tubes running to and from him coursed like rivers on a mountaintop down the sides of his bedding, and they rose slightly on occasion, like the mountain range itself was changing over the years. The figure eased herself closer to the captain's ear, and whispered words that blossomed with strange colour at the base of the tunnel to his brain.
His eyes opened without trial or hesitation.
The figure carefully removed some of the tubing.
"Aren't you the pretty one?" she said when she had cleared any obstructions. Her voice was still as slithery and suspicious as before, and as she lifted his chin with her thumb and forefinger, a glint flitted across her eye. "I don't think I've seen you up close before."
"What am I-" began Steve without emotion.
Sophia scowled and released her grip on his chin.
"Follow her." she commanded. "She probably won't walk and so you'll have to carry her, but the gist of things is the same. She'll know where she's going."
The figure - for it was indiscernible when viewed from behind - turned and smiled at the pale-faced Natasha. Her fingernails scraped along the metal again, her eyes dark and malicious.
"Be a dear and don't let any of those pesky S.H.I.E.L.D. monkeys get her, won't you? Much appreciated, Captain Rogers."
Steve didn't respond. All his vital signs had returned, and there was no evidence of anything wrong apart from his face, which remained eerily emotionless and unwavering.
"Oh, and be discreet." she said, having returned her gaze onto him.
Carefully, the captain threaded the tubes and wires back into position. He settled back into his bedding and promptly shut his eyes.
The figure disappeared.
Clint blinked awake to find little had changed. Yawning, he lifted up from Natasha's lap and headed towards the door. When he came back, coffee in hand, both beds were empty.
Embossed on the storm, the silhouettes of two people, one carrying the other, moved across the desert at a steady pace.
Natasha was still unconscious but was not yet showing any symptoms of death. Steve padded across the sand with diligence, though his actual face remained bereft of awareness and emotion; his eyes were fixated on the horizon, the sand hurling against his skin. The grains that caught in his lashes didn't seem to allow the laws of physics to apply to them, and instead of lodging in the crevices of the man's skin and clothing, they appeared to melt and drain off every surface they touched. It gave Steve, and also Natasha, an eerie glow that lit up the space they walked on.
The sand became harsher as the pair went on, but they did not seem to feel the effects of it. With this and the wind, the surrounding world eventually became so blurred that it was impossible to tell where exactly they were. And yet they kept moving, the one following the other even though neither seemed to lead or even follow. When Steve had carried her far enough, he let Natasha fall onto the sand.
"I'm close." she whispered, urging herself awake. The tiny crystals being hurled at her seemed to flow around her body rather than crash into it. "I'm close now."
Natasha stood and fully opened her eyes. The scene ahead seemed tainted, and not just by the harshness of the storm. The world itself flickered between realities, between a raging sandstorm in an American desert and a pacified ocean gently drifting atop a field of black sediment.
"What is this?" she shouted into the worldly confusion. "What are you doing?"
"Natasha." came the calling. It was different this time, though. The voice seemed more serious than before.
Staggering away from Steve, she searched for Sophia. She stopped when she realised that she was brushing against something as she tried to walk, and she briefly remembered the beach she had encountered. The movement around her legs was unmistakable.
"Can you feel them? Odd, aren't they? Feels like something you can swim around in."
"What are they?" she asked the emptiness.
"Thoughts. Electrical impulses converted into semantics - a smell, a scene, a conversation. Memories and ideas."
"That's it?"
"What were you expecting - magic?"
Natasha paused.
"I thought there'd be more."
"There's never more."
"YOU KNEW WHAT IT WAS BEFORE." said the other voice that spoke from everywhere.
Upon hearing the Question, Natasha suddenly hit with the realisation of its identity.
'That's me,' she epiphanized. 'That's all it is. It's just me.'
The voice, the one that Sophia hadn't known - it was just her jet-lagged conscious trying to investigate the environment. That was what the 'flashbacks' had been - an attempt to wake herself up. The boldness and arrogance, the schoolmaster voice - it was her. A part she didn't like, maybe, but it was her. The thought was instantly confirmed in her head, as if she had been subconsciously aware of this fact all along.
She sighed, somewhat relieved. One less thing to worry about.
"Are you sick of being asleep yet?"
Natasha redirected her attention to the bodiless voice. Steve stood just behind her, masked by the sand.
"What?"
"It's something I get a lot. 'Oh I'm so tired and you make me sleep so much it stops helping' blah blah."
The woman materialised and beckoned Natasha closer. The spy ambled forward, the crosshatched reality that lay before her making it difficult to see where she was going.
For a brief moment, she let her eyes sweep across the scene.
The storm had cleared. Or, rather, a radius of about 10 metres had emptied around them, leaving a strange, invisible cylindrical wall that towered into the sky from the circumference. The flickering worlds had settled, and it seemed that Natasha was now fully in reality, with the sand a standard beige under her feet. Or, maybe, a new world had appeared altogether.
Natasha kept moving, gradually getting faster. Sophia stood proud and smug in front of her, as human as she could muster herself up to be. She was calm, collected and authoritive - until Natasha pulled up a fist and landed it on her nose.
"I can't - the suit wouldn't survive the storm."
Clint paced around the first room of the bunker. Tony was leant against a wall, arms folded, and was sighing occassionally to voice his slight annoyance.
"You've flown over deserts before!"
"Barton, if I go out there in that sandstorm, I won't be coming back in. This model of the suit has some older components that will get blocked by that much sand - I can't risk it breaking down mid flight."
"You could at least try!"
"Really? You'll have 3 avengers missing in that desert, I mean, if that's what you want then I'll go right ahead but I'm sure Pepper would -"
"Tony I really need you to do this for me."
Tony lifted up from the wall and rested a hand on Clint's shoulder.
"She's doing this on purpose, you know." he said. "She likes the chaos it's creating. We have to wait this out, and we have to stay calm."
Clint pulled away and rubbed his cheeks with his hands.
"I told her I'd keep her alive." he said after a little while.
"Then she knew that it was an empty promise."
Sophia wiped a line of blood from her nose and examined the red stain on her finger.
"That's new." she said.
Steve was pulling Natasha away from Sophia by her waist, the spy kicking at his legs and pulling at his hands. He flung her back onto the sand so that she skidded slightly before reaching the barrier and she came to a stop with a groan. As Steve walked obediently back to Sophia, Natasha launched her self up and twisted her legs around his neck. He caught her ankle as he fell, bringing her back down onto the ground with him. Using her free leg she pushed her foot into his face, so that he released the hand on her ankle and she could crawl free. His fist chased her and landed on the right side of her lip.
"Steve!" she shouted at him, dodging another blow.
Steve drew in the commands Sophia was silently giving him and continued trying to hit the spy. Spotting a pattern in his movements, Natasha picked her moment and caught his hand just as it was about to land on her eye. She held it for long enough to wriggle away and pull it backwards, forcing an unexpected scream from Steve. As soon as he was distracted, and without any hesitation, Natasha scrunched up her hand and knocked him down.
She looked up from the unconscious captain to the woman a few feet away.
"I should really invest in keeping some popcorn to hand."
Natasha exhaled heavily and tried to ground herself. Her lip was slit and blood slowly trickled down her neck, and she still wore the hospital-like gown that the others had put her and Steve in after they became unresponsive.
"Why'd you do that?" she asked, without much expectation of a sincere answer.
"The same reason why I do any of this."
"And what's that then?"
"Because it's fun!" screamed Sophia. She had drawn herself into more height than should have been possible, and her face had contorted into that of a soot-black, monsterous creature. It was designed to shock her audience, to be impulsive and fear inducing.
"Is any part of you human at all?" Natasha asked calmly. "You assimilated into some person - must have, you can't have been here since the start - and you took her memories. But is anything actually in there? Anything real?"
Sophia looked offended that Natasha hadn't paid much attention to her exaggerated form. She shrunk down and pouted.
"It's a prison - right? The place where that other 'part' of you is mysteriously camping out in. Maybe it's a more real version of the other world you insist on bringing me to -"
"Why are you not scared of me?
"The prison - it's the reason you aren't all together. The piece of you that causes havoc, the one with the destructive streak - it's not just separated by chance. Someone locked it up, didn't they? Someone shoved you in a prison, and put you under lock and key."
"Are you confident or just stupid?"
"And then you escaped - or, rather, a little part of you did. And you remembered what the key looked like and sort of how to get it - but you needed someone human to really be able to do anything with it."
"And you've been wonderfully helpful."
"Not to mention entertaining, right?" Natasha scoffed.
Sophia inhaled sharply and tipped her head to the sky.
"It's close." she mumbled. She smiled.
Natasha stared at her but was caught off guard by another voice, unheard by the figure before her.
"THE SPIDER DRAWS THE FLY INTO THE WEB AND PLAYS WITH IT UNTIL IT DIES."
Now that she knew what it was, the Question seemed far less impressive than it did before. Natasha tried to ignore it - it was much better left in the dark of her mind, she decided. Although...
"Can you see it?" Sophia enquired with open, purple specked eyes. "Tell me where it is."
"Why should I?"
"You don't have to be like this, Natasha. This could be good for you if you let it."
"This could never be good for me."
"I can help you."
"How?"
"There's only so much that I can see when I'm in someone's head. I don't become them, you see, and there's only so much information you can access if you're not the person in the first place... But I have seen some of your memories." she recited this like a B-list actor, with false sweetness that could be peeled off from the skin. And yet Natasha seemed capitulated by this. She continued in desperation. "Despite what you think, I do have emotions Agent Romanoff. The dance hall. I felt it. The fear. And the business with Clint. The adrenaline and the thrill of being hunted down by someone you are to become so close to. It's all... horrible."
Natasha just stared, frozen in anticipation.
"I only saw what I did because you were strong enough to break free for a moment. There's no-one I know that is that strong without some kind of event in their life that made them stronger. I know there's more. I can give you power, Natasha." she paused for a moment, and adjusted her voice so that bore true conviction. "I can give you revenge."
"Power - how so?" asked Natasha in a quiet voice.
"When my sister part is reunited with me here, the complex of my body will be strong enough to destroy worlds. My existence will transcend out of your time and space again - don't you see? I can take you with me. We can change things. Right what has been wronged and be protected under the shield of our own minds - whole eras, tiny fractions of space-time, deleted in an instant."
"How do I -?"
"Is it here? Can you see it?"
"What do I do?"
"All you have to do is touch it. It'll materialise for you."
"Will it hurt me?"
"Not if you're quick. Just reach out and grab it, and then I can take it."
Apprehensive at first, Natasha reached forth a hand into the oddly textured space. Her fingers traced the edges of the stone suspended there, the roughness strange against her skin.
"Have you got it?" Sophia said excitedly. "That's it - bring it out."
Natasha slowly curled her fingers around the object.
"Come on, you're almost there."
Feeling the weight of what she was holding, Natasha smiled. More than smiled - smirked - no - grinned - then let her lips press together again before she could not resist the urge to laugh any longer.
"What are you doing?" asked Sophia.
The spy's hand retracted, the stone hidden in her hand.
"It's powerful, right?"
"What?"
"The stone itself. It's got power, no?"
Sophia glared at her, betrayed, desperate.
"What are you talking about? How are you holding it for so long?"
"No, you don't know what it can do. You don't know, do you?"
"Just give it to me." she demanded, confused.
Natasha smiled again, a wide, tired smile that stretched across her face. She examined the object that now lay rested on her palm.
"Didn't you think it was strange how you couldn't touch it? Sure, it stops the prisoner from unlocking her own cell. But why else? Why would you not be able to touch it?"
"Give me the stone!"
"Because it can hurt you."
"Well of course it can."
"But think how it can hurt you, Sophia!"
"What does that matter?"
"You still don't know."
"Just give it to me!"
Sophia's eyes were wide, confused and desperate. Being so close to what she wanted was the only thing that kept her listening.
"There's probably a few perks to holding this, you know. In fact," Natasha started, locking onto the forefront of Sophia's mind and glowering. Her eyes glowed under a red glaze of fury.
"I'm willing to bet that I can do this:"
Ugh I'm awful at writing fight scenes...
Last chapter next week, I think!