Chapter 36
Would've Happened Anyway
One minute Emily had been running toward fresh screams caused by a new explosion, the next she was waking up in what felt like the back of a moving vehicle. A bump in the road made her stomach churn, and she groaned.
A deep voice muttered. Another answered. She felt a little poke in her arm and slipped back into darkness.
Sensation rubbed at her senses. She blinked heavy lids, tried to make sense of the blurry fog that greeted her. Her nose woke up first, telling her about the awful place she was in. There was the stink of a cheap nail salon mixed with rotten potatoes. Hot, rotten potatoes. But she was cold; the air too chill, and her thin layer of stretchy, porous workout clothes didn't hold any body heat. She shifted. Tried to. Around her chest, arms, and legs were restraints keeping her aching body fixed in place. They made noise as she started to struggle. Chains. And there was an IV in her arm. Wait. Where was her armor? What the...
"Good morning, little goddess," a male voice, quivery from advanced age, greeted her. "How are you feeling?" Distinctly western Russian.
Eyes that had groggily been dancing around her stale surroundings shot to a plump, hunched figure sitting in a battered armchair not ten feet from her. Petrovich. There wasn't any doubt about the craggy, sagging face. She'd stared at the camera-still captured of him shortly after Natasha had been triggered for days.
"Ah. I see you recognize me." His smile was sickly sweet. "Good. Then I do not have to explain why you are here."
"Natasha will find me."
"It is possible," was his easy reply. "But we are two days and several hundred kilometers from where she last saw you."
Two days? No wonder she felt stiff as old chewing gum.
"The IV has kept you hydrated while you were sedated." He waved at the hanging bag of clear fluid marked saline. "It will be removed after you are sedated again and moved to a proper cell. Your acquirement was a bit hasty, unplanned, but I could not pass up the chance when you threw yourself in my lap. Not only were we in the same place at the same time, but you ran from the Widow's protection and into my arms when that last explosion was triggered. Thank you."
"Fuck you."
Petrovich smiled. His teeth were too perfect. False. There were liver spots on his cheeks and hands and top of his sunburned scalp. What hair was left on his head was solid white. How old was this ancient asshole? "When the trap is ready, I will let the Widow know where you are."
"She'll find me long before that."
"Possibly. She is my greatest creation," was his calm concession.
Natasha wasn't his fucking creation! That twisted old fuck! Snarling, Emily jerked against the chains restraining her. She wanted to see his blood coat the walls.
"And she has found herself a companion whose bloodthirsty soul matches her own." Petrovich observed.
"The only thing you created was the darkness in her." Emily argued. "It didn't come naturally."
He hummed. "She did have a habit of doing as little damage to her opponents as possible until she was ordered to kill them. It took some time to break her of that."
Hatred started to cloud her vision, clog her hearing. How dare he speak so casually about what he'd done to Nat as a child, how...
Petrovich knew about her. He knew about Natasha's past. Emily had to keep him talking about it. "You're proud of what you did to her."
"Of course!"
"You're proud of having stolen a little girl away from her family and torturing away her innocence and dreams."
"The girl would have grown up as a wheat farmer, illiterate, married and pregnant by 14, a miserable waste of such exquisite talent." Petrovich spat on the floor. The phlegm was yellowish. Tobacco or disease?
"You can't know that." Emily argued. "She could have become anything."
"Bah. She would have been nothing. It was sheer chance that I found her. Scrawny, timid thing so covered in mud I couldn't even tell the color of her hair!" A sudden cough took his voice, and it was several minutes before he went on. "My horse nearly trampled her, but a boy ran in front of him, startled the stupid creature and unseated me. It was her eyes that captured me. The cunning behind those frightened green eyes." He smiled in memory. "You have no idea how excited I was to find a pretty thing under the mud."
Heart raging at the terror of Natasha's childhood, Emily barely kept herself focused. "And you just took her? Killed her brother and galloped off?"
Petrovich shrugged. "Of course. I didn't see the younger one until I had tossed the girl into the saddle, and he was running to his parents. The father managed to shoot me with his old rifle." Stuttering, his fingers opened his button-up shirt, displayed a nasty scar in his upper arm. "A good shot. He gave his hunter's eye to his child."
"Did you have them killed too?"
His age-paled eyes narrowed at her for a moment before rasping guffaws came out. Again, he dissolved into coughs that brought up discolored phlegm. "You are interrogating me! I expected as much, but not about the Widow's childhood. You are quite taken with her, aren't you, little goddess?"
For once in her life, Emily didn't insist on being called by name. She didn't like the idea of it sliding off his disgusting tongue.
"Go ahead, ask your questions. You will never give the answers to her."
She should be probing for ways to escape, but...
"Come. Ask."
"Does she have any living family?"
"I did not have the family killed in hopes that they would make more daughters, but they never did. It is possible the younger boy survived. Not likely," his hand waved dismissively, "But possible."
It didn't matter if he was telling the truth or not. Every lie had a grain of truth in it. "What were their names? Her parents?"
"I don't remember." Another shrug. "Someone was assigned to watch them and deflect the investigations they tried to start."
"What year did you steal her? How old was she?" Emily asked breathlessly.
He stared at her. "Heal the sickness in my lungs, and I will tell you."
Mirthlessly, she laughed and made her chains rattle. "You'll have to free my hands for that."
A motion of his left hand later, and a khaki-covered brute of a man with a scarred, accessorized tactical rifle stepped into the room. Under his buzz-short blond hair, a wicked sunburn glowed.
"Osvobodit' odnu iz svoikh ruk." Petrovich gestured at Emily.
The brute nodded sharply, stepped just as sharply to Emily and loosed the chains around her left hand. He stepped back, gun muzzle pointed at her skull.
"Nyet. Ne golova. Ona slishkom tsenno."
The gun was slid back to his shoulder. Knuckles cracked menacingly.
"That's right. Without my head, I'm useless." Emily showed the brute her teeth.
Petrovich eyed her. "You speak the mother tongue?"
"Konechno, ya govoryu, mudak."
"Good," his vowels went low and long with his pleasure. They made Emily shiver.
Slowly, the rickety old man rose from his chair to get close enough to touch Emily's restrained hand. "Heal me." He demanded.
His ancient body was trying to fight prostate cancer and a bacterial infection in his lungs. Neither of which she could do much about. "I'm a healer, not the fountain of youth or a fucking antibiotic." He didn't need to know that she could bolster his immune system or coax his body to do a million other things to ease his problem, to help an antibiotic fight the infection, to relieve the symptoms of osteoarthritis, to...
"Your gift has been wasted on your civilian life." Petrovich's lip curled. "I would have pushed you past any boundaries. I have read reports from the doctors watching you in D.C. You should be able to do much more." His fist curled and abruptly punched the air. "You could have been more feared than the Black Widow! A wondrous lady of terror."
She tried to sink back into her chair. She knew what he was talking about. Torture. Manipulation of the body's chemistry. Things she'd tried, succeeded at, was terrified by.
"It is such a shame I didn't know of you when you were a child. I would have enjoyed turning you into an assassin. Oh, to have had you and my Widow working together for Mother Russia. We would have been unstoppable." He sighed as Emily bit her lip so hard it bled. "But we will see if HYDRA's conditioning techniques will work on you. Did you know that they're based on what we started in the Red Room? I am curious to try what HYDRA has improved."
Three days. Emily had been in Petrovich's hands for three days, and Natasha was officially out of leads on their whereabouts. With the combined forces of the wealthy-elite, brilliant soldiers, world-class spies, and loyal friends she was out of leads. The only thing they hadn't tried was going public with the media that was already wondering why Sekhmet had vanished from Egypt right after a fresh explosion.
Natasha was officially desperate enough to consider it. Lizzie wanted her to, wanted the whole damn world searching for her best friend, had yelled at Natasha about her opinion for a good half hour yesterday. Emily's brothers felt similarly. No one else had Natasha's number, and she refused to answer Emily's constantly ringing phone.
"Hey." Clint said as he plopped beside her and stared out at the Caspian Sea, watching the sunrise bleed across its wind-chopped waters.
The fruit truck had been a decoy. Petrovich's small yacht hadn't been touched. He'd slipped out of Africa completely, headed toward home, somewhere in current or former Russia. There'd been a confirmed sighting by a traffic camera in Baghdad that had led the team east, then another at the airport that showed him, several thugs, and a box that probably had Emily in it taking off in a small plane headed northeast. Satellite tracking had lost him somewhere in the current region.
It was enough time that Coulson had ordered May back from base where she'd dropped off their explosive criminal and sent her into the field along with his entire team. Natasha's gaze drifted to where Skye was sharing a pot of coffee with Bucky. Emily's strays. Steve hadn't woken up yet. He and Sam had passed out around midnight over a map of Kazakhstan, arguing about possible hiding spots.
"What if I'd never gone looking for her?" Natasha whispered.
Sand shifted under Clint. "She'd tell you that something like this would have happened anyway and that then she wouldn't have the world's best spies looking for her, wanting to bring her home safe."
Through painfully dry eyes, she took in Clint's half-smiling, serious expression. She visually traced the deepening lines of his forty years of life, the crows feet and myriad scars, the wisdom behind his irritating grin. He was right. Emily would say something like that. And it would be true. The idiot would have made a mistake at some point, trusted the wrong person, gotten her soft ass kidnapped and exploited. Lizzie might have been able to scrounge a decent search team, but if the kidnapper was of Petrovich's expertise...
"What if we find her too late?" She hissed.
"What if Banner loses control and crushes entire countries under his green wrath?" Clint returned.
What ifs wouldn't help. Dwelling was a useless, dangerous waste of energy and imagination. She'd be better off closing off her emotions and focusing on the task. She knew that. Every fiber of the Black Widow knew that. The problem was, "I don't want to be the Black Widow again."
The creases of his brow deepened. He gently laid a scarred arm across her shoulders. "I know." He shifted until she was tucked against his side, comforted by his wiry frame and familiar scent. "But the Widow will always be part of you. It's okay to pull her out and use her when you need to."
"Even when she thinks the best plan is to kill and maim anything in her path?"
Slight chuckles rippled across him. "Maybe not then."
Her eyelids drooped, then shot back open. She couldn't search for Em if she was asleep.
"You should grab a couple hours of sleep, Nat. Exhaustion dulls the mind and slows the body. You know that." His spy-sense merged with his dad-sense to scold and comfort her. "Another twelve hours, and you'll be useless. There's nothing to do right now except wait. Use your time better."
The weight of her eyelids seemed to quadruple as her mind grudgingly agreed with her fellow spy. His lips cocked as he saw his argument win.
"Fine," she muttered.
Clint nodded, rose with her and tucked her away in a shadowy corner of the quinjet's interior. "I'll wake you if there's any news."
Reassured, she allowed her eyelids to stay closed.
The stink of rotten potatoes hadn't changed, though her surroundings had. Slightly. She was no longer hooked up to an IV or chained to a chair. Her confinement was a windowless room with the pervasive chill of a deep cave, much like an old silver mine that she'd explored with Leslie several years back. It'd gone deep. Really deep. Emily hadn't wanted to keep going once they'd passed the second old cave-in, but Leslie had, so they'd continued down the tunnels kept open by rotting timber and sheer luck.
Leslie had heard that there was still silver to be found in the belly of the mine. She wanted to pry some out for herself. Her daypack even had a mineral guidebook, rock pick, and hammer to help with her ill-planned venture. The tiny lanterns strapped to their heads lit the black depths only enough to scare Emily even more. What if there was an earthquake? This was California. Even a little quake could be enough to shatter the old supports and trap the two women deep underground to become food for rats. Or whatever was unfortunate enough to live down there.
There had been an earthquake. There was a cave-in. And they were trapped underground for a full day. Only chance led the two of them up a half-blocked shaft back into daylight. That was one of the last times that Emily had allowed Leslie's belligerence to override her own good sense. It had definitely been a turning point in their relationship, one that led Emily to take a step away from Leslie's controlling, abusive personality.
Fuck. Emily was glad that she'd never trusted Leslie with the secret of her gift.
She scowled at the bare concrete walls of her cage and wrapped herself tighter in the mass of blankets that she'd been given. They stank, but not like most espionage or kidnapping stories had led her to think they would. Not of other people or animals or piss or mold, but of manufacturing, of dye and the plastic they'd been packaged in. Her blankets were new. As were the futon mattress and simple cotton clothes she was in.
Even the bucket in the corner where she relieved herself was new. The door to her cage looked old, yet the iron reinforcing it was freshly soldered. This was why she'd been chained to a chair for a day. Petrovich's men had been working on her cage. When it'd been finished, she'd been dragged to a shower, stripped, scrubbed, and thoroughly searched for anything that she could use as a weapon or communications device. Scanning devices and hands had poked her everywhere.
Her ass and vagina still ached from the probing. So did her nose and mouth. She had bruising all over from where she'd been prodded for hidden pockets under her skin. It made sense. She knew a guy who kept little nuggets of gold under the skin of his thigh. Just in case the economy went up in smoke or he got caught in a bad business deal and needed extra money or something else equally as unlikely, but possible. Emily had considered similar strategies when she thought about her gift becoming public knowledge and being kidnapped for it. Having lockpicks hidden in the flesh of her ass might've been useful if someone not as thorough and knowledgeable as Petrovich had taken her. But he had. Moot point now.
She had to be content with reminding herself that Natasha would be searching for her. And probably Bobbi. She seemed like the type to blame herself and keep going long past when it was obvious to stop. Steve and Clint would be looking too if Natasha had called them. Lizzie would find a way to put her family's wealth to use hunting for Emily if Nat let her know. Tony, Bucky, even Bruce would help look for a while. They were a team.
If Nat wasn't being prideful or unwilling to admit she'd lost Emily and ask for help. If Coulson thought Emily was valuable enough, he'd help, maybe lend out an agent or two. The same could be said for government help. If they saw enough value in Sekhmet's continued free existence or saw her retrieval as a way to rope her into employment -indentured servitude- then aid would be given.
If. So much if.
And that didn't even include the fact that Petrovich was one of the Black Widow's trainers. He'd taught the best spy about her craft. He wouldn't be easy to track.
They could be under Siberia somewhere or the middle of the fucking Congo. Hell, this cage could be in the bowels of a Nashville skyscraper for all she knew. She didn't even know exactly how long she'd been down there. Her only sense of time were the three meals brought to her, and the daily emptying of her bucket by a guard in a black outfit and black mask. She didn't know how many days without a shower she'd missed, but she stank, and she itched. And she really missed toilet paper.
Why was she being isolated? What was the purpose? To kill hope? The single yellow light protected by a locked iron grill got a moment of attention. Petrovich planned to mess with her head while keeping her body healthy. He could let her muscles atrophy for a while which was why he didn't have her on a treadmill or at a punching bag all day. Muscles could be strengthened again. Enforced confinement with nothing to keep her mind occupied would start to break her in a way that hours of beatings couldn't, especially since she was an extrovert who thrived on interaction with people.
"Where are you, little fox?" her dry throat made her voice raspy. She coughed and swallowed spit. "What would you tell me if you were here?"
Find a way to keep herself sharp. Don't let the mind dwell on what it couldn't control. Prepare. Okay. That settled that. Emily dropped the blankets and rose, threw herself into jumping jacks, then jogged in place, then sidesteps, lunges, squats, more jumping jacks. She didn't stop until she heard footsteps outside her door.
"Vedro," one of the thugs droned. The view-port high on the door slid back and eyes peered at her through the iron bars. She glared back from where she stood with her shoulders, thighs, and backs of her hands pressed to the wall.
The door opened. One thug stepped in, taser pointed at her while a second strode behind him to the bucket, dropped an empty one and took her sloppy one away. A moment later, her meal was dropped on the ground. Both thugs left silently. She ate the boring mush with determination and drank half the water. She wouldn't get more for six hours. It had to last. Nodding, she began to plan her workout routine.
"I know what it is that Fury is looking for." The informant slash fence slash middleman slash black market job purveyor known as the Poodle spoke confidently.
Natasha didn't respond. A week of hunting fruitlessly for Emily had her patience as frayed as her nerves.
"And I know where to find it," smirked at her.
She inwardly swore.
"I also know what it's being used for."
"Yea. We asked about something else though." Clint replied irritably.
The Poodle slowly blinked at him then Natasha, smile staying smug and sure. "I know the answer to that too."
Natasha's heart skipped a beat.
"And I'm willing to sell the intel for that as well, but I don't think you can afford both."
"What do you want for one?" Clint asked.
Scarred lips curved pleasantly. "I want the Widow to take the job."
Clint's face creased. "What job?"
Cool brown eyes met Natasha's. "The one I managed to get hand delivered by the magnificent Pepper Potts, now Stark, yet was tossed aside."
The one she hadn't told anyone about. Clint glanced at her, saw that she understood, and waited for her to take the floor. "I'm not assassinating Queen Elizabeth."
Surprise twitched across Clint.
Poodle sighed. "Why not? Neither you, nor your girlfriend, nor even your SHIELD friends are particularly attached to her. She's not technically in control of the UK. Her death won't change the global atmosphere much. She's just a thorn in my side that I can't seem to be rid of."
"No," was her simple, firm response.
"What do you want for both?" Clint asked.
Sharp eyes flit between them. "A high-yield nuclear warhead."
Rage trembling through her, Natasha whirled and stormed away. It was time to do something truly unorthodox and desperate. Time to go pay Rocio a visit.
"Take the job, Widow!" called after her.
Sweat dripped from Emily's chin as she went through her third set of pushups. Nat would be proud of her. She'd been pushing herself as hard as Nat ever had. Emily's arms and chest burned from her efforts. Only two more and...
Without warning, the door opened. Twin lines of fire caught her shoulder, sent electricity sizzling through her, making her twitch and scream and bite her tongue. Holding a taser was one of the thugs, faceless and frightening behind the mask. He released the trigger, and her body stopped screaming though a few residual twitches went through her. A second thug picked her up, tossed her over a shoulder, and carried her up several levels to a waiting Petrovich.
"I think it is time to start." He smiled at her.
Through her night scope, Natasha watched Clint sliding through the shadows, his bow held high and ready until he paused and let an arrow fly. There was a parade of tiny lightning bolts as his EMP arrowhead went off, shutting down all unprotected electronics within the compound. Yells erupted from within. She saw the muzzle flash of Bucky's silenced rifle before she burst into a run, leaping, pushing off a wall, and catching a tall, beefy guard between her thighs. Using her core, she twisted, snapping his neck, rolling off his shoulders as he fell to catch another guard left-footed, slicing through their hamstring then throat as they crumpled.
Bobbi met her at the front entrance to the building, a trail of bodies behind them both. The other spy nodded at her. Together, they burst in, taking opposite sides of the entryway to kill their way through the lavish mansion until they met Steve in the middle. As a silent group, they went down to the lower levels.
A door opened and Natasha's knife found the eye socket of another guard. Six doors down, and they stopped, the women taking flank positions, and Steve coiling his body before kicking the solid steel door in front of them. Three roaring kicks later, the door caved inward and admitted the lethal trio.
Stealth abandoned, their guns howled through the rooms, downing anything in their path until they made it to their target. The middle-aged woman didn't get up from her chair, didn't look frightened or alarmed, only a little annoyed. She simply met Natasha's gaze with her own steady gaze and greeted her mildly in Spanish. "It's been a long time, Widow."
Emily cried as her eyelids were forced open, cold metal inserted under her lids to keep them open. "No. Please, no," moaned pathetically, uselessly from her.
"Oh, but yes, little goddess. We have so many wonderful hours ahead of us." Petrovich cooed.
In front of her, the giant video screen was turned on. Blue shifted to video as the session began, random, horrible images flitting across it at the same time a voice whispered in her ears through the headphones they forced on her head. Emily yanked at her restraints. Like they had for the past dozen sessions -had it only been a dozen? no. it was definitely more. right? how many days was it now?- the restraints held firm. Her eyelids struggled against their own restraints twitching and sore. Every once in a while, cool liquid drops were dripped onto her open eyes all while she tried to look anywhere but at the screen, think of anything besides the voice trying to rewrite her mind.
"Natasha," she whimpered. "Little fox, I can't take it anymore." She tried to gather an image of Natasha for her mind to help blot out the images. A smirking redhead flashed through her mind's eye before the parade of images in front of her blotted Natasha away. "Natasha!"
"No."
"I don't think you understand." Natasha smiled pleasantly at her target. Rocio Gutierez, lady -empress- of one of the more prominent drug cartels in South America. "I'm not threatening your life."
She was frowned at.
"I'm threatening your empire."
"We had a deal, Widow."
Natasha canted her head, looking the old woman over. "The world has changed a lot in the last thirty years."
After a moment, the woman snorted. "It's ironic that your changes are all on the inside. You look as young and beautiful as the last time we met." Her gaze was keen. "But your eyes are different. The pain behind them is no longer that of a lost child, but fierce and dangerous. You love this woman that the old bear has stolen from you, don't you, little spider?"
The sound of the air handling system kicked in, hushing the silence of the room.
"You'll do almost anything to get her back. Almost." She stroked her chin, thinking. "But you wouldn't kill the English queen or spill Fury's secrets. And now you're here to use me to trade for something else that the Poodle wants to find out where your precious love has been taken."
"No. I want something else."
"What do you want, Widow?"
"Oscar."
Rocio's shoulders went rigid. "I see."
In her periphery, she saw Bobbi frown. This wasn't the plan that Natasha had peddled. She hadn't explained Rocio didn't have anything that Poodle wanted badly enough to trade with a desperate Natasha. Rocio had something else. She had custody of Oscar. A gifted man who could find anyone, anywhere.
"Age hasn't made his riddles easier to solve." The only problem was solving his nearly-impossible riddles. No decent spy would want to use him, which was why she'd lied to Coulson's team.
Oscar was gifted. And severely autistic. When he explained and painted art of his visions, he did so in the way his mind saw them, which wasn't necessarily how someone average would. When he didn't understand what he was experiencing such as details that his pampered existence didn't understand, such as the smell of diesel engines or the sound of a volcano erupting or the feel of snow underfoot. He'd never been outside of Bolivia, not in all his fifty years, and likely never would.
"I'm willing to try." Natasha replied.
"And if I let you speak with him, what will you give me?" She peered at her dead guards. "Aside from the headache of replacing my security staff?"
"I heard that your granddaughter was crippled last summer. Paralyzed from the waist down in a car crash, right?"
Rocio narrowed her eyes. "Yes."
"I bet she'd love to meet Emily."
"I've heard that your Emily is a gentle creature, prone to foolish acts of heroism. Is that what drew you to her? Is Sekhmet a name for the both of you, the assassin and the healer? Or are the other rumors also true, that she's as capable of death and torture as you? The circumstances of her father's death are strange. I wonder what those rumors laid to the open would do to her golden reputation."
Lifting an eyebrow, "Rumors, Rocio? She's a controversial celebrity. The rumors already out there are worse than a little patricide."
At that, Rocio chuckled. "Fair enough. My security chief was getting lazy anyway. I have a cousin who's been showing promise. This is a good time to try her out." She brushed silver hair from her eyes. "My granddaughter would love to meet your Emily."
Bonelessly, Emily stared at the concrete wall. Why was this Natasha person supposed to be coming after her?
Natasha.
The name sounded funny in her head.
"Natasha."
She blinked.
"Natasha?" she questioned the sound of the name. It made something in her chest squeeze. "Natasha."
Red filled her vision. Or was it orange? Gold? Umber?
"Depends on the lighting," slipped from her. Natasha's hair changed under fluorescent to firelight to midday to twilight. Like her eyes. Her sharp, wild, dangerous green eyes. The eyes of a predator. Of a fox.
A little red fox.
Emily's little red foxwho held her and kissed her and made her feel happy and safe and loved. Emily's petit renard rouge.
The something in her chest burst open and true memory filled her again.
"Oh," she gasped. "Oh. Oh, fuck." Tears tracked her cheeks. Everything Natasha came flooding back. Kevin and Alan. Lizzie. The Avengers. Skye and Bucky. No. Daisy and Bucky. Damn her changing names. Even the awareness of Emily's childhood, of her awful parents, were a relief to have again. How quickly could Petrovich make them disappear forever? How long until Emily's normal, not serum-enhanced brain, stopped retrieving her precious memories? How fast could Emily Fortune be erased?
Translations:
Osvobodit' odnu iz svoikh ruk – liberate one of her hands
Nyet. Ne golova. Ona slishkom tsenno – no. not the the head. She is too valuable
Konechno, ya govoryu, mudak – of course I speak it, asshole
vedro – bucket