Hey guys! Crazy response from the last chapter and a ton of messages in my PMs, which was absolutely amazing and mind blowing. I love to see reviews and just because I didn't pick yours as the best doesn't mean I didn't see it and thoroughly appreciate it, so firstly, thank you to everyone who already has or is going to leave a review, they really make my day, especially getting positive feedback or constructive criticism. Best review is picked based on what the actual review says and how often you leave an amazing review. If you leave one all the time, you're more likely to win, but sometimes I pick a new reviewer or someone who is new to my story just because.
That said, best reviewer for this chapter goes to thewonderpen.
Blurb: In which Ward kidnaps Zoe and ends up getting f'ed up by the Avengers, Coulson's team, and Fury and Hill. If you like Ward, I don't think you should read. Zoe is Clintasha's daughter, and she has been the feature of four or five other uploads to date. They aren't in chronological order.
Zoe is four in this one, two years younger than she was in the last edition, so obviously not much ninja-know-how. YES I REALIZE I DIDN'T MENTION SAM OR BUCKY BUT I'VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH SEB STAN AND ANTHONY MACKIE LATELY #yourbucky
WARNING: ADORABLY OVER PROTECTIVE UNCLE STEVE MAY CAUSE EXCESS FEELS, ADDICTION TO CHRIS EVANS GIFS, AND HYPERVENTILATION. DO NOT PROGRESS IF EASILY SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE AFORELISTED SYMPTOMS.
"Do you have to go?" a tearful Zoe asked her mother and father, all suited up to go catch the baddies.
Sighing, Natasha knelt down to be eye level with the pouty four-year-old, grabbing one of Zoe's hands. "Yes, pumpkin, I'm sorry, but Uncle Nick needs us to go protect the world, but Aunt Pepper is going to babysit you until we get back, and we won't be gone too long, okay?" she squeezed the hand she was holding.
"Okay," Zoe murmured, nodding softly.
Fury needed all the Avengers including Zoe's Uncle Bucky, apparently HYDRA was experimenting on people in Budapest and they needed to go eliminate the threat and rescue the prisoners. Therefore, no one was left to watch Zoe save for Maria Hill, Coulson's team, Fury, and Pepper. Luckily, Fury was going on retreat, Maria was running SHIELD in his absence, Coulson's team was in New Mexico, and so Pepper didn't have to fight anyone tooth and nail for the chance to babysit Zoe.
"It's alright, darling, we'll be back tomorrow, I promise," Steve said, kneeling down much like Natasha, hugging his niece close. Zoe and her Uncle Steve had always been close, it was one of those things no one questioned. If she wanted to have her favorite uncle be Captain America, who were her parents to complain?
"Bye, Uncle Steve," Zoe whimpered into the blue of Steve's costume, and the genuine sadness in her voice made Steve angry that he had to leave, made him feel like beating the shit out of someone for taking him away from little Zoe, the tiny tot whom he'd do anything to protect.
"See you soon," he murmured, pressing a kiss to the small forehead of his niece who he wanted to always be there to protect. Yes, Zoe loved her Uncle Steve. And he loved his niece Zoe. It was an important bond that Natasha and Clint dutifully appreciated as Steve and Zoe seemed to be able to nearly sense one another, so it could come in handy if, God forbid, something ever happened to either of them.
Clint took his turn saying goodbye as soon as Steve stepped away. Clint's daughter looked exactly like her mother in every way except for her eyes. She had her dad's stormy blue-grey orbs, which, matched with her Natasha-lookalike chin length red curls, full red lips, and milky skin, made for a little girl who was truly a wondrous beauty.
"Daddy, can't you stay? I'll even let you be the princess this time and I can rescue you from the dragon!" Zoe pleaded, and Clint wanted to laugh at the innocence of it. Every time they played dress up, Clint was the prince and Zoe the princess, which caused Clint to (jokingly) whine about how he wanted to be the princess. A fact Natasha liked to bring up at parties whenever he bragged about her, she hated that.
"Listen, I'm only gonna be gone for a tiny bit and I would love to be the princess, but only when I get back. But you being happy makes me happy, so if you want to be princess, you can be princess every single time no matter how much I whine. Just be good for your Aunt Pepper, okay? I love you so much Zozo, and I promise I'll be back before you know it. You'll be fine." Clint said to his daughter, picking her up and hugging her tight.
Zoe tucked her head into the crook of her dad's neck, let one tear finally fall, and blinked away the rest, taking a deep, shaky breath. When she removed herself from Clint's arms, she had dry eyes and a calm expression. Natasha's resilience and ability to calm herself down had clearly somewhat rubbed off on the child, as Zoe maturely hugged each team member in turn, taking care to give her Uncle Bucky an extra big hug.
Steve had given her a very, very sugarcoated, watered down version of HYDRA getting their hands on Bucky, literally just telling the child that some bad people had given Bucky boo-boos and therefore Zoe always had to be nice to him. She automatically took that into account, like how her mother always told her never to make Uncle Bruce mad, and if he ever got mad to run and hide. Zoe was extra nice to Uncle Bruce, she didn't see any reason why she couldn't be extra-extra nice to Uncle Bucky.
Zoe waved goodbye to the Avengers from her place beside Pepper as the doors slid shut.
"Auntie Pepper, can we play hide and seek?" Zoe asked. Pepper laughed, nodded, and covered her eyes, beginning to count.
Meanwhile, Grant Ward tore his eyes from his binoculars, where he could see Stark's blonde bimbo and the little mistake that was Zoe Romanoff-Barton playing hide and seek. "Okay, gentlemen, the time is now, the Avengers have left the tower!" he addressed the HYDRA agents assembled around him.
"If I may, sir, why couldn't we just invade the tower when they were all in there, if the plan was to kill them all anyways?" One idiotic agent asked.
Ward sighed. "This way, we get the Avengers, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, and Phil Coulson's lovely team of misfits," he explained. And Skye can be mine, he thought, but he didn't dare say it out loud for fear that the HYDRA agents would lose interest in him as their leader if they knew he loved a SHIELD agent. And Captain America's new First Lady, he mused, remembering his initial anger when he had found out that Skye was dating the phony captain.
It had taken him a few weeks, but finally he'd realized that Skye was just confused, didn't realize that she was meant for him, not some goody-two-shoes like Steve Rogers. She'd probably been away from him for so long that she'd forgotten how much she loved him, and had used the Captain as a replacement until Ward came back for her, like he'd promised her he would. She'd see. Everything he did, all of it was for Skye. His Skye. No one else's.
"And when they show up, you are under direct orders NOT to kill Skye, this girl here," Ward started up again, causing the chatter that had arisen while he was emmersed in his thoughts to cease. He showed the agents a more recent photo of Skye, one that he had taken when she had been on a mission, looking so beautiful in her tactical gear.
The same stupid agent's hand went up. "May we ask why?" he inquired, and Ward whipped out his pistol and shot the agent point blank between the eyes, ignoring the gasps of the others as his body slumped to the floor.
"No," said Ward, "you may not."
With the help of Jarvis, Pepper tracked Zoe down to the sub-basement levels of the Avengers towers. They'd set the rules a few rounds ago, no peeking, but Jarvis was perfectly fine. Entering the basement with caution, she peeked around. Zoe was a master pranker and she wouldn't put anything past the girl.
What Pepper made her gasp and want to vomit. Grant Ward, slinging an unconscious Zoe over his shoulder. "NO!" Pepper screamed. Ward shot her with an ICER he'd stolen from Coulson's team and Pepper dropped.
Natasha was deep in thought on the plane ride, only two hours into the eighteen hour plane ride, when her phone buzzed. Checking it, she noticed it was Jarvis.
"Sup, Jarvie?" she asked. Long ago, she had adopted the nickname Zoe had for Stark's AI.
"It appears Grant Ward has shot Ms. Potts and taken little Zoe Romanoff-Barton hostage." Jarvis's voice was strained, as if the AI was struggling to put his bubbling emotions into the announcement, but failing, because he was, after all, a computer.
Natasha's blood froze, but instead of breaking completely, she went into mission mode and put her phone on speaker, signaling for the other Avengers to gather around her, even calling Clint from the cockpit, forcing him to put the quinjet on autopilot. "Say it again, Jarvis, you've got all of us listening." she informed the AI.
Jarvis relayed the same information to the rest of the Avengers, causing Clint to make a mad dash back to the cockpit to turn the quinjet around and Tony to immediately ask if Pepper was alright. "It was just what Dr. Simmons and Dr. Fitz call an ICER, sir, meaning that it is virtually harmless, only delivering a dose of dendrotoxin hardly large enough to temporarily incapacitate a person. Ms. Potts should be awake in about an half hour."
"Is she still at the tower?" Bruce asked, only looking slightly green, which was impressive.
"Yes, sir, she is in the sub-basement, where Zoe had been hiding, as the two had been engaged in what is referred to as hide-and-seek," Natasha almost smiled at Jarvis's mention of Zoe's favorite game, something so familiar it almost made her forget the impending crisis.
"And what about Zoe?" Steve asks, knuckles white against the blue and red outer rings of the paint on his shield. "Did Ward... did he have to shoot her too? Is she hurt? Is she at the tower? Do you know where she is?" Steve wanted to curl up in a ball and cry and just break, but also he wanted to find Zoe and protect her and shield her and keep the little girl who was a daughter to him safe, always safe. But also he wanted to find Ward and make him hurt, make him wish he'd never touched a hair on Zoe's head, and Steve Rogers had never wanted to kill anyone more than he had wanted to kill Ward right in that moment.
"Miss Zoe was incapacitated by a cloth covered in chloroform, but not before she bit Agent Ward hard enough on the forearm to break the skin quite badly," Jarvis informed them, and Steve muttered a soft "Atta girl," under his breath. "She is not injured save for a small bruise on her face and is no longer at the tower, but the tracker in her watch informs me that Ward took her to a warehouse in Brooklyn, sending you the coordinates now," Sure enough, their phones beeped, and Natasha could feel the jet slightly adjusting its flight path, probably Clint finding the shortest way to get to the warehouse.
"Is it just Ward and Zoe in the warehouse?" Bucky asked. His metal arm was clenched tightly in a threatening fist, probably something that would be meeting Grant Ward's face soon.
"No, from the heat signatures coming from the satellite surveillance line I hacked, it's a four level warehouse with the smallest of the heat signatures coming from the top level, I assume that is Miss Zoe, and there appear to be at least four hundred other heat signatures. I hacked the warehouse's security camera stream as well, and they are Hydra due to the symbols on the vests and the audio feed."
Bucky growled loudly at the mention of Hydra, but Natasha ignored it for the time being. "Is that all, Jarvis?" she asked the AI.
"Yes, Ms. Romanoff," Jarvis was still programmed to call her Ms. Romanoff, upon her request, even though she and Clint were married and her name was officially Natasha Romanoff-Barton.
"What do we do now?" Steve asked, face pale.
"We call in some real backup," Was Natasha's only answer.
Nick Fury had just returned from his last go of playing dead, and he was counting on Maria saying that everything was under control, and would he like to go out for a celebratory yay-you're-not-actually-dead dinner date. And he was counting on doing just that.
A knock on his office door was all he got before it opened to reveal the very same small, dark-haired, blue-eyed woman he'd been thinking of. But she looked worried, and very, very pissed off. "Natasha just called. Grant Ward and Hydra have taken Zoe hostage." He certainly hadn't counted on Maria saying that.
Phil Coulson was cleaning Lola when his phone rang. He debated whether or not to answer it, but when he saw it was Nick Fury, he answered immediately.
Skye, Bobbi, Jemma, Hunter, Mack, Fitz, and May were all in the common room of their current base, drinking beer even though it was hardly 3pm. Skye had been planning on a nice afternoon of laughter and a drunk Hunter, but they were still sober. She certainly had not counted on AC busting in to tell everyone that, quote, "Motherfucking Ward motherfucking took motherfucking Zoe and Lola still isn't motherfucking clean!"
Also, Skye really hadn't counted on May standing, sympathetically placing her hand on Phil's shoulder, looking into his eyes, and not-so-gently saying, "Phil, you have been spending way too much god damn time with Nicholas Fury. Now, who's ready to kick some ass?"
Sam Wilson tended to like VA meetings. Except for when he didn't. And he didn't like this VA meeting, but he supposed that might just be because Nat and Steve had just called him to tell him that his favorite god damn niece had been kidnapped. How the hell did being friends with Steve automatically mean he was doomed to a life of kicking serious Hydra ass? Oh well, he'd fly with it for now. (AN: wth is wrong w/ meeee... SORRY SAM ILY)
The quinjet landed four and a half blocks away from the warehouse, where Nat had told Fury and Sam to meet her, and she suspected at least one of them had called Phil Coulson as well, or rather she was counting on it.
Sure enough, fourteen minutes and thirty three seconds after the quinjet had arrived, two SUVs pulled up. Out of the first climbed Maria, Fury, Phil, Bobbi, and Hunter, and out of the second, Skye, FitzSimmons, Mack, and May.
Sam swooped in at nearly the same time, and by this time they had been aware of Zoe's kidnapping for just over two hours.
As soon as everyone was assembled, Tony cleared his throat. "Ok, from what Jarvis has been able to give us, there are at least four hundred Hydra agents, plus Grant Ward and Zoe. The warehouse is shockingly complex, which probably means it was changed, making it less of a warehouse and more of a secret Hydra base. There are four levels, not counting the basement. Zoe is on the top layer, and nearly all of the agents are on that floor or the one directly below, with minimal scouting on the ones below it, only three or four agents per floor and two guarding outside, one for each entrance. The plan is to break us up into six groups of three, and one group goes in and takes out the scouts, and once that group is finished, the rest of us flood in, each team going down a different corridor, and blow shit up on the first floor, but careful, we don't want to bring down the building, just enough to draw away the agents, get them away from Zoe and hopefully keep the mass of the fighting away from her, although I doubt Grant Ward will leave her. We don't go up until we've stopped every agent that comes down to us. We clear?" Tony asks. They all nod, and Tony goes on to explain the teams.
I'm just gonna leave off here, the rest will follow at some point next week.
-Leah xx
