Thank you to everyone who's read and reviewed the past week or so, you guys rock my world! I've got some more surprises still in store for you coming up in the next couple of chapters, so stay tuned.
"What the fuck do you mean 'you've got a bomb'?" Fury growled under his breath.
"I mean he's a fucking patsy, boss. There's a bomb wired into this man's chest, countdown started when his heart stopped." She dug through the man's pockets looking for something, anything, that could get her out of this. The only thing she found was a sealed heavy envelope packed full with the initials N.R scrawled in elegant, loping handwriting on the front.
"ебать." Natasha's stomach dropped as she turned the envelope in her hands.
"What?" Fury snapped.
"I'm standing next a bomb, Fury. That's what." She sat back on her heels and rubbed her hands angrily through her hair.
"Can you stop it?" Fury couldn't just disappear from this crowd of people, that would set off too many alarms.
"I'm a spy, not on the fucking bomb squad. You need to get everybody out of here. Now." She ordered, gathering the box and the envelope to make a hasty exit. Natasha was reaching for the handle of the door when it was pushed open and Clint stormed in.
"Give me your comm." He barked, shouldering past her.
"Clint what are -"
"Now, Natasha." He ordered, holding his hand out. Natasha complied quickly, practically shoving the small black piece into his hand. He immediately popped the unit into his ear and walked over to the body.
"Fury, keep everybody where they are. I've got this." He knelt next to the man, his fingers moving quickly and gingerly over the mass of wires and connections.
"Barton, what the hell are you still doing here?"
"Saving your asses. Now, shut up and let me work." Fury gritted his teeth, of course Hawkeye had ignored his orders. Though, turns out his defiance may be their saving grace. "You got a knife, Nat?"
"That even a question?" Strapped to the inside her right thigh was a small dagger, she deftly removed it, spinning it to offer him the hilt. Clint placed the knife between his teeth, his hands intently separating wires until they seemed to retangle around his fingers, but Clint knew exactly what he was doing.
"Tasha." Clint said, his voice muffled by the blade in his mouth. "I need you to the pull this metal plate off to expose the wires beneath it." She knelt across from him on the other side of the body, her hands hesitating slightly as they hovered over the box.
"Nat." She looked up at him, his eyes steady and calm. "Trust me." He ordered and her moment of doubt passed, she quickly pried the small metal plate up to show yet another tangle of wires. He extricated himself from one tangle of wires to get himself mixed up in another, but he found exactly the one he was looking for.
"Okay, now I need you to take the knife." He loosened his jaws as she reached for the blade, letting her take the knife back. He pulled on a wire that he held between his forefinger and his thumb, drawing Natasha's attention to it.
"Cut that one." He instructed. Natasha hesitated again.
"Are you sure?" Clint heard a tremor in her voice, barely noticeable, but there. Even Natasha got scared, especially at the prospect of dying.
"Honestly? No. But, the way I see it, we have two options: cut this wire and maybe we live and maybe we die, or do nothing and definitely die. It's my best guess on what we should do and we're don't have the time to do this any better." Natasha whole body became rigid as he pulled the wire again.
The seconds that passed felt like an eternity as Natasha weighed her options.
"Well," Natasha began when she had made up her mind. "If this doesn't work, I guess I'll see you on the flipside." She slipped the knife under the thin wire and pulled up, the sharp knife cutting through the wire with ease.
They both held their breath and waited. The timer stopped and both of them let out heavy breaths they hadn't known they'd been holding and laughed out of sheer relief. Which, Natasha realised was probably a strange sight, two people in black-tie formal wear sitting on a bathroom floor laughing over a dead body. The thought only made her laugh harder. Their humor was short lived when Natasha remembered the envelope, and Fury. Clint sensed the shift and went back to his strictly-business demeanor, handing Natasha back her comm unit.
"Crisis averted boss." She informed him calmly.
"You two are some damned miracle workers. Let's get out of here ASAP, Romanoff."
"You read my mind, Fury."
"Get anything off the body?" Clint asked, walking over to the door and opening it just a crack. "You're good." He said, indicating Natasha was clear to leave.
"Just the drive, like you said." She lied, tucking the two objects into her bag with her back turned to him. "I should get back, can you deal with the body?"
"I've got it." He responded shortly, his frustration with her creeping back up.
"Thanks for the assist." She said as she ducked out of the room, not even making eye contact with him.
"Anytime." He muttered to himself as the door banged shut, leaving him alone with a corpse. Clint sighed.
Back at base…
"I want every available agent with clearance on this. I want to know exactly how an auction turned into a terrorist attack." Fury had been barking orders the second the two of them had set foot on base with Clint and a handful of other stationed agents in tow.
"You two, in my office now." He ordered, pointing at Clint and Natasha. They looked at each other and reluctantly followed Fury through his office doors, both wishing to be anywhere else.
Fury briefly went over how things went on his side of the mission. Of course, things went off without a hitch and all their funding had been secured. And while, Natasha had held up her end of the bargain, nobody there would qualify the near disaster a success. They were lucky that they knew Fury wouldn't really blame them for it though, not even he had seen that coming.
"Natasha, tell us what you've got." He meant the drive, she hadn't told Fury about the envelope. She didn't know if she would, but there was something she did know: Clint should be as far away from all this as possible.
"Barton can't be in here if I do, Fury." She told him flatly, crossing her arms.
"What the fuck, Natasha?" Clint felt like she'd just stabbed him.
"You said only agents with clearance, and he doesn't have it." She pointed out. Fury eyed them both. He knew they were on the fritz, they'd caused about $3,000 in damage to one of their training rooms for Christ's sake, but he knew Natasha was this petty. Either she was protecting him, or herself. Maybe both.
"You're dismissed, Barton." He told him, trusting Natasha.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me. I come back, risk my life to save both your assess and save your fucking op and you're just going to throw me out because she has trust issues the size of fucking Jupiter?" Clint nearly shouted at their boss. Natasha said and did nothing.
"I make the calls here, Barton. Not you. Either you can leave or I can have you removed."
"Are you sure she's not the one in charge?" Clint continued. "Because giving a Russian spy who made her career out of working against us clearance way above her pay grade doesn't exactly strike me as a smart business model."
Natasha felt her anger rising, but kept her face blank. She knew Clint was angry, but she still didn't think it gave him any right to say any of this shit.
"If my memory serves, you're the one that worked so hard to convince me to keep her because you saw her as a potential asset. Now I have and I'm making my decision based on her skill and performance. Don't drag your personal shit into my office."
"Well, Nat, it seems you've found your perfect match: a guy who lie to you as much as you lie to everybody else. Have fucking fun." Clint was irate as he stormed out of the office. Desperately needing to shoot something, Clint went down to the range to get Natasha out of his head with every arrow he let loose.
"You know I was really hoping you guys would be over this shit by now, it's been months." Fury rubbed his temples tiredly.
"I'm aware. Speaking of which, since when do you play matchmaker?" She asked, referring to putting Clint in there with her tonight.
"Since you are the best team I ever had and now you can't seem to stand one another."
"You can't win everything, boss." She sat across from him and set the drive down on his desk. "But, back to business. I pulled this off the body. Something tells me that it isn't exactly the information you've been after."
"Something tells me you're right. We need to find out what's on that."
"Don't you dare put that in your computer." She snatched the drive out of his hands. "We were already hacked once, you want a repeat event? Do not put this in SHIELD's network, it's likely encrypted anyways."
Fury shot her an annoyed look, but called in their IT departments head, Emily Harris. She was probably the only tech with the same clearance as either of them, and she was incredibly brilliant. Natasha loved working with her.
"This computer is completely off our network, if someone's watching this they'll be able to track the signal, but they won't have access to any of our files or data." She said, connecting the drive.
"Okay, this is weird." She said, brow furrowing after a few minutes of furious typing. "Like really weird."
"What?" Fury and Natasha asked in unison, crowding around her screen. She pushed them off and broadcasted through the projector so they could all see.
"For one it's not encrypted, whoever put this together really wanted you to see this."
"See what?" Fury asked.
"Not you. Her." Emily looked at Natasha with a mixture of pity and fear. Natasha looked up at the screen to see a picture of herself from when she'd been undercover on. Then the picture changed to a face neither Emily nor Fury would recognize, but Natasha did. It changed again, face after face after face of people only Natasha could know. She'd killed all of them.
"This wasn't an attack against SHIELD." It wasn't a realization, she just didn't want to admit it until now. "It was an attack against me."
"Who are these people?" Emily asked, Natasha suspected that Fury already knew.
"People that I've killed." She said flatly, ignoring Emily's blatant shock.
"There are hundred of images here." She couldn't believe one person could do this.
"1106, if they were thorough." Even Fury was stunned into silence by that number. "To be fair, I am counting all the collateral too." She amended. No, she hadn't killed every person on that list herself, but chaos that followed her often claimed more lives than the one she was charged with taking. Still, she counted them. Every one.
Nobody said anything but the pictures still rolled. And rolled. And rolled. All the same, all marks, all except the last. The last picture was taken from the same mission as the first except it wasn't her in the frame this time, but Clint. Natasha thought her heart might stop.
"Get Barton into protective custody. Now." She snapped at Fury. He understood as quickly as she had what that picture meant, it was a threat.
"He's in the range." Fury told her, easing some of her anxiety. He was still at SHIELD and if he was here, he was safe. At least, she hoped so.
"He's not going to like this." Fury told her as he sent security to confine Clint to a cell.
"Better safe than sorry, yeah?" She watched the monitors intently to see Clint's reaction. It was, as they predicted, not a good one and two of the security guards ended up in medical before they managed to sedate him and drag into the cellblock. Natasha probably should have felt at least a little bad about the whole thing, but she only felt relieved.
"Natasha, I hate to ask, but do you have any idea about who is behind this?"
"I've got over 300 ideas, and they're all looking at us." She muttered.
"I'm going to run a program that'll look for any embedded software and coding. It should work through all the files by about ten tomorrow." Emily told them. "There's not a whole lot else I can do right now."
"You're dismissed." Fury waved her off. "And Harris, this does not leave my office."
"Of course." She shot Natasha one last apologetic look as she left, her bright pink heels clicking loudly all the way down the hallway. Fury grabbed his jacket to follow her, it was nearing one in the morning now.
"You should get going too, Natasha. There's nothing you can do here."
"There's even less I can do at home." She insisted, she couldn't leave. Not yet, not now. Fury shrugged and left, knowing there was nothing he could say to dissuade Natasha because, not matter how calm and collected she appeared, this had struck a nerve in Natasha that he'd never seen. This was something she needed to do, so he left her to it. They could deal with the consequences of it later.
He said nothing more, leaving Natasha to her own devices in the privacy of his own office.
She must have watched that stupid video 20 times by the time Fury rolled back into his office sometime after eight.
"That's it Romanoff, go home." He ordered, kicking her out of his chair. She looked exhausted, but could not tear her eyes away from the screen and the faces looking down at her.
"I thought maybe there'd be something here, something that could tell me who or why. I can't see anything." She dropped her head into her hands and pulled had on her hair out of frustration. Clint's life was being dangled like a carrot in front of her and she couldn't see who was on the other side of the line. She hated the unknown.
"Get a few hours and we'll take another run at it when we've both got fresh eyes and Harris's program finished it's work." She reluctantly followed the directors advice, but at home she found she was too restless for sleep. She tossed and she turned until she couldn't stand it anymore and she fished around in her nightstand drawer. Pulling out a small orange bottle, Natasha downed a mouthful of little pills and lay still, until sleep not so much as washed over her, but hit her like a truck.
She woke up to the ringing of her phone next to her.
"Harris has got something for us" It was Fury. Natasha practically jackknifed out of bed and was out her door in minutes, ignoring the hunger pains in her stomach, she was at SHIELD in no time.
"So there's nothing here but this video, but I found something within the video itself. In every picture, there is one pixel that doesn't match the rest." She looked so proud, even though neither Fury nor Natasha knew what that really meant.
"But all the mismatched pixels match each other. It's kind of like whoever created this hid a picture within all these pictures. I'm running a new program now to piece them all together, should be done in a few hours."
"Excellent work, Harris."
"Thanks, Emily." Natasha said, maybe, just maybe, they were one step closer to finding what this guy was really after.
But now, Natasha had more time to kill again. She busied herself with getting food and she went for a run to distract herself, the music in her ears drowning out all hopes of thinking. But, soon she found herself wandering down to the cellblock: it was time to face Clint.
"You know, I think you're the first girl to break up with me then have me thrown in jail." Clint muttered bitterly as she stopped in front of his cell, leaning against the cold metal bars.
"You're definitely not the first guy I've put behind bars."
"I guess it wasn't hard to convince Fury that this was necessary since you guys are practically joined at the hip now." The accusation in his tone made Natasha tense.
"No, it wasn't hard. We agreed that this was the best place for you." She shrugged like it was out of her control.
"My how the tables have turned. I remember when they brought you here, to this same cellblock even. You were 19, and quite possibly the most stubborn and most irritating person I had ever met." He said airily, remembering the girl Natasha had been almost six years ago. "Some things never change, I guess." He finished.
Natasha would never admit that Clint's words were hurting her, she refused to show it either.
"So, you going to tell me why I'm here or are you here to gloat?" He asked, leaning against the other side of the bars to face her.
"I can't." She told him simply with a mocking smile.
"Of fucking course. Then why the fuck are you here Natasha?"
"I shouldn't be, but for some reason I wanted you to know that I didn't put you here to punish you."
"No, I bet you put me here to 'protect' me. It's the same fucking reason you use to justify everything else you do, but Nat, that's bullshit. I don't need your protection, I need you." Natasha was taken aback by his sudden admission and Clint shifted awkwardly on his feet as he waited for her response. When she didn't speak, he did. "And whether or not you meant it as such, this is still a punishment."
"You've punished me plenty." She muttered, thinking of all their fights.
"So what, this is your revenge?"
"No." She told him quietly, shaking her head. "It's not."
"Natasha, what is going on with you?" Clint always had a way of making Natasha feel even worse about the things she'd done. She'd treated him like shit for months, he should hate her, but he doesn't. He's still worried, he still cares.
"Don't." She warned, asking him to stop.
"Don't what?"
"Care, Clint. Don't make this harder on either of us." She felt defeated, like this whole thing between them had just been too much.
"Fuck you, Natasha." Clint practically spit the words at her. "You have been by my side for half a decade, you always had my back, always picked me up off the ground, sat by my bed whenever I was injured. You were there every second when I lost my hearing through all the doctors and all the test and all the shit you were there and you made it bearable. And you made me think there could ever be something between us then you turn tail and run? What the fuck is that? Do you just get off on hurting every single person that chances upon you, or was I a special fucking treat?"
Natasha wanted to apologize, wanted to make things right, to tell him he was wrong, that she didn't like hurting him, not like this. But, she didn't. She remembered all too well when Clint lost his hearing, how it tortured both of them both, how she'd voluntarily spent an obscene amount of time with all those doctors when she hated doctors.
Doctors.
"What?" Clint asked. Had she said that out loud, Natasha didn't know. Her brain had begun an instant replay of everything that had happened since Clint returned from overseas, still in critical condition and she suddenly knew.
"Doctors, Clint." She repeated, feeling a sudden weight lift off her chest. "I know who did it."
"Did what?" Clint asked, but she had taken off in an all out sprint away from him. "Natasha!" He called after her, but she was gone.
Natasha ran, ignoring Clint's calls for her, she ran as fast as she could, bursting through Fury's office. Harris was there, her program had run its course to reveal the hidden truth, one Natasha had discovered for herself just moments ago.
Staring down at them was the angelic face of a little girl, a little girl Natasha had wished she could forget and hoped she never would.
"Aliana." She breathed, it seemed like an eternity since Aliana. Fury didn't speak, neither did Emily. All of the faces, they were dead, killed at Natasha's hands. Now, the face was child. Could her face be the same as all the others? Fury feared the answer.
"I know." Natasha told them, not surprised by the image before her. Clint had told her everything without even realizing it.
"Fury, where's Dr. Drakov?"