"No, absolutely not, I've had enough of dealing with this shit for two lifetimes."
"This is not a friendly request," said agent whatever-the-hell-his-name-was, making another attempt at giving his plump face serious look and failing miserably, "but a direct order, agent Romanoff. Which is, to reiterate yet again, very well within the scope of my authority as your new commanding officer to issue."
"I want to speak with director Fury," she demanded. "He is the immediate superior over the Avengers initiative after Coulson… was killed in action"
Saying it out loud made it more real somehow. She clenched her fists and focused on not smashing her apparent new boss' perfect white teeth back into his skull.
"The initiative's operations have been suspended indefinitely after the utter failure in New York," he explained in a dismissive tone, "and Director Fury is preoccupied with other important matters at the moment. I have been granted the charge over the remaining agents of the former Coulson's team. At least for the time being, until a proper chain of command is reestablished."
An utter failure? Has she been watching some different news than this guy?
"You still should be talking to Banner, not to me," she said, "if you want the little prince to behave, the Hulk has a sure-fire method."
"The task is to be handled without an involvement of unauthorized parties."
Okay, so SHIELD lost Banner again. Great. "What about Stark?"
"Mr. Stark is just a consultant and it's been decided that his expertise is not required at this moment."
Just a consultant, with a massive hangover to nurse and a city to clean up, thank you very much. Because it was a given they've asked him; it was just his freshly-grown ethical backbone that didn't allow him to stoop so low.
"Decided by who?!" she yelled, standing up and smashing her hands on the desk.
"Agent Romanoff," he said in a measured, calm tone, even if his hand hovered over the area of his desktop where the hidden emergency button was located, "do I really need to remind you of the consequences for a failure to follow a direct command?"
She sat down and smiled sweetly. He was absolutely terrified of her, which was exactly what she wanted.
"Of course not, sir, we are just discussing the technical details of the mission, aren't we?" she said with a slight rise of her eyebrows. She batted her eyelashes at him and bit her lower lip, confusing him even further.
He shook his head and moved his hand back to the stack of papers in front of him. "Of course."
"What about the good Captain?"
"Captain Rogers has been assigned a different objective," he said, "I'm not authorized to share any more details."
So, Rogers was handling the cube. Because that worked out just so peachy the last time.
"And Thor?"
"Thor will accompany you and your unit on the mission. He volunteered and his request has been exceptionally granted."
Natasha imagined that quivering piece of meat saying "no" to the god of thunder and almost burst into laughter. "Who do I get besides the stormy boy?"
"Agents Rowlett and Simmons and eight remaining guys from the former Strike Team Delta," he listed, "including Barton."
"What?! Who the hell thought this is a good idea?!" she raised her voice again and took joy in watching her higher-up twitch nervously. "Barton hasn't been cleared for active duty yet."
Not to mention that putting Clint anywhere close to Loki was an astonishingly dumb concept that could not result in anything good for any party involved.
"Agent Barton's isn't under any official evaluation at the moment and his presence has been requested by the Council. Is that all, agent Romanoff?" he asked dryly and, after she nodded, he added, "the debriefing starts at fourteen hundred."
Natasha left the office, closing the door a bit too eagerly behind her.
But of course, this is exactly how the Council did things when they wrestled a bit of control from Director Fury. Assign a person who was mind controlled by a space alien to an escort of said space alien to see if they snaps. Saves a lot of paperwork.
Or it could've been Pierce's idea to test Fury's team loyalty.
There was even a more obvious answer. Pierce needed something to happen, something to justify Council's armed forces stepping in and Pierce getting his hands back on the steering wheel.
Politics were only fun if she was the one moving the pawns.
She should've known this is how it's going to play out. The original plan was too convenient and too straightforward, and they couldn't have that, oh no, that would be just too easy.
Thor's wish was to ship the wannabe Earth conqueror, along with the Tesseract, to Asgard, hopefully never to be seen again, ever. Fury begrudgingly accepted, presumably reasoning that he had enough of aliens throwing tantrums on his planet for the day. He even agreed to surrender the cube just to get Loki off his lawn.
Getting rid of two problems in one swing sounded like a decent deal for Natasha and she was willing to overlook the personal issues she had with just letting Loki go for the whole humdrum to be done and over with. She managed to convince herself it's for the best, the sooner they can solve this, the sooner they can start dealing with the fallout. People deserved their lives to be back to normal. And sure, American public would appreciate the culprit being branded, set out on a display, and punished harshly, just to send out a message, but sometimes you just couldn't have your cake and eat it too.
It was not a sentiment everyone shared. For example, World Security Council's Secretary Pierce had that peculiar notion that Fury's acceptance of Thor's solution was premature and that their captive should be interrogated, put on trial as a war criminal and locked up. Not necessarily in that order.
This resulted in a long – and quite turbulent, judging from all the shouting – negotiations held behind closed doors between Fury and Pierce.
Natasha could tell, just from her and Fury's shared history, that he was playing the devil's advocate arguing for Thor's side and under any other circumstances he would support Pierce's solution all the way. Hell, he would add some shady experiments to the mix, in the name of the scientific progress; their guest was just too perfect of an opportunity to miss out on. But Thor was an alien and a royal to boot with an entire race of fucking space Norse gods behind him and assuring that didn't come back to bite them in the ass was far more important than holding on to one prisoner and a magical box that was already studied back and forth by multiple generations of scientists.
Thor was not too happy even with the fact that it was being decided without his involvement. Especially after he was stopped – on two separate occasions – from storming the room and demanding an immediate release of his brother. Or half-brother. Or adopted brother. Or however it went. Hill's remarkably levelled explanations that this is Earth, which is currently not – to her best knowledge – under Asgard's jurisdiction and that his brother is responsible for multiple casualties did not exactly click either. It turned out Thor's respect for human life was not that much higher than Loki's, unless it was someone he personally cared about.
In the end, the potentially sticky situation was, yet again, defused by Stark, who insisted they should celebrate their victory, by going out for shawarma then getting completely shitfaced on Stark Tower's impressive arsenal of overpriced booze. It must've spoken to some long-standing Space Vikings' tradition, because Thor immediately agreed, the entire Loki situation seemingly forgotten.
She knew better than to leave a literal god, an eccentric billionaire, a rage monster in disguise, a WWII supersoldier and an archer with a grudge to drink themselves to death while celebrating the victory, order, or no order. So, there was eating and drinking and an obscenely high amount of singing (mostly by Thor, mostly of completely uncomprehensive Asgardian folk ballads. It turned out that whatever space magic bullshit mumbo jumbo caused Thor to speak English, it didn't extend to ancient sung poetry. She could tell it was poetry. It rhymed.).
Shawarma turned out to be just a fancy name for poultry kebab.
To be fair, Captain Rogers did excuse himself early. So did Doctor Banner, making solidly sounding evasions about healthy lifestyle and waking up early. She didn't find proper to point out how obvious it was that he was quite shaken with the damage Hulk dealt to the invading force and public property. Still, it looked like he used the situation wisely and disappeared from the face of Earth by the morning.
Stark and Thor, alone in the evacuated tower while high on adrenaline (or whatever it was for space aliens) and drunk as all hell (or tipsy, when it came to Thor), meant trouble. She stayed. And her head didn't exactly feel better for it now.
Clint stayed too. Under normal circumstances he wouldn't be able to leave the SHIELD's compound for months at the very best, being questioned, tested and retested before he could be cleared for active duty again. But the upper echelons of the agency were running in circles like chickens with their heads lopped off, trying to perform anything resembling damage control and it looked like that particular issue slipped everyone's attention; or so she thought, then. Now, she wasn't so sure. But whatever SHIELD's executives decided to do – or not do – with Barton, it was pretty clear it will take some time for him to recover, especially considering how he apparently decided that getting drunk was as good of a therapy as, well, actual therapy.
She wished she could help, do something to make him better, but his injuries were that of mind and not of body and those took the longest to heal. And, as much as she hated the idea of Clint being dragged back into this mess, she was glad she could at least keep an eye on him when he needed her to have his six.
And, even with that few extra steps, it should be over soon enough. The compromise that have been reached while they were celebrating indeed looked like a win-win one, at least on the drafting table. Her new boss decided to not clue her in fully, he probably didn't know more than he needed to do his job at least semi-competently. But from what he did share she got that SHIELD was granted forty-eight hours for wrapping up all the ongoing Tesseract research and for little prince's questioning, after which both will be handed to Thor and shipped to the magical city in the sky, to be dealt with according to whatever laws and customs Asgard upheld. It pushed the timeline two days forward, but on a global scale it didn't change much, and Thor might have just about enough patience to not grow restless and go on a head-smashing rampage in the meantime. Probably.
It didn't mean she had to be happy to be a part of it.
What else is new?
The screens on the wall of the debriefing room displayed live broadcasts from various tv stations, both local and national, every single one showing either street level reports and interviews or replays from the New York battle, the screen crawls screaming in bold letters about estimated numbers of dead, injured, and monetary damages.
It was a cheap psychological trick to get them all riled up, to remind them that – no matter what followed – they were in the right, Natasha knew. But damn it to hell if it wasn't effective.
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine," said Clint in a low voice when she sat next to him at the table, ignoring all the other agents. She should probably interact with her new team, but it was clearly a temporary situation, more of a rag-tag group of survivors than an actual unit. All of them were experienced agents, so they should be able to handle themselves even without a meaningless pep talk.
There were folders, actual, honest-to-gods paper folders, on the table in front of each seat. It's been a while since SHIELD used those, but it looked like having their server mainframe hacked by a civilian AI and then partially fried with a well-aimed arrow, all within a span of two hours, forced them to make amendments with the traditional media in no time.
Barton's file wasn't even opened.
"You okay?" she asked.
He nodded. "My head hurts and it feels like I could sleep for the next twenty hours if I got to lie down, but other than that I'm doing great."
"It isn't exactly how I planned my evening to go either," she snarked. "I was envisioning something more in line of taking a long shower, reading a book, or watching a movie. Or whatever else you regular, boring people do to pass your time. I was completely prepared to burn the Brooklyn safehouse for that."
"Did you really? I wouldn't suspect you're capable of such extravagances," he teased, "all the taxpayers' money it cost to set up and you were going to use it just to take a bath?"
"Give me a break," she said, "besides, I said 'a shower', there's no bathtub in that apartment."
"You need to file an official complaint, this is inexcusable."
"Oh yes, I'm sure our new blobfish of a boss would love to hear about that."
"You've met him?" he asked, surprise sneaking into his voice, "all I got was a text."
"Yeah," she admitted, wondering whether she was singled out for a personal conversation and for what reason. "You haven't lost much." Was Clint not fully aware of the mission's objective?
She had no opportunity to ask, as at this moment the door opened, and Agent Blobfish stepped into the room. He eyed her warily, she noticed not without a certain degree of satisfaction. So, she was the only one he spoke to thus far. This is going to be interesting.
"Good afternoon," he started and readjusted his tie. "My name's Lemaire. Some of you may already know me, some might not, but we have no time for pleasantries as our new assignment is a time sensitive one. All you need to know is that, from now on and until further notice, you'll be answering directly to me, and only to me."
The room took his words in strides, too much weird shit went down since yesterday for the people to be fazed by a new figurehead stepping in and taking command. Even Clint's face stayed carefully neutral. She was sure he was just as disgusted with someone taking Coulson's place so unceremoniously as she was, but he was too experienced to think that his feelings mattered when it came to the agency's operations.
"You will be securing a convoy," Blobfish went on, without beating around the bush, "for the course of the next thirty-six hours."
"What's in the convoy?" asked one of the agents, a robust, black guy. Natasha met him before, but they've never worked together. His name was Davis, or something generic like that.
Natasha sat back. Here we go.
The scenes of destruction and mayhem disappeared from the screens with a press of a button, replaced with a tilled nighttime image of a gathering of people on a city plaza. Blobfish fumbled with the remote and all but one images disappeared then a video started playing. It was a CCTV recording from Stuttgart, she realized, the opening night of Loki's short-lived world domination tour.
Loki's incomprehensive vernacular might have taken the edge off his words, but it didn't make him any less threatening.
She heard the later part of the speech relayed live to the Quinjet, and she could clearly remember hearing it in English. And, even as they've already figured out that the thingy that made Asgardians being understood by all didn't work over recordings, only live, it was still a surreal experience to hear it as it was actually spoken. It was the same language Thor was using while he was… performing, and, just like then, she couldn't understand a word of it, but its melody already sounded somewhat familiar. The syntax and accentuation didn't resemble any human language that she could recognize, but it was nonetheless not completely alien either. She was sure there were droves of linguists and gigaflops of SHIELD servers' computational power poring over various recordings and the transcripts provided by witnesses. Stark's super advanced AI was probably doing the exact same thing. She gave it a couple of days at most before they'd have a working translation tool.
For now, though, they had to rely on subtitles.
On the screen, Captain America entered the fold and Blobfish paused the video. That got a few discontented grunts out of the gathered men. Natasha smiled. While the events in New York went way beyond the threshold of something that could be kept hidden, were widely televised and considered general knowledge, Loki's war declaration in Germany was not. A couple of videos recorded by onlookers that popped up on the internet were thoroughly scrubbed off by SHIELD's algorithms, within seconds of uploading. They still hoped they could keep it low profile, then.
"Uhm, so… are we transporting the staff?" asked Davis, "I've heard it was taken by the guys from R&D division, what do you need us for?"
A little bit of internal unrest was enough for SHIELD's strict secrecy protocols to start leaking at the seams. Davis was not supposed to know that. She wasn't supposed to know that, even if she was the one holding the glowstick when it was secured.
Instead of answering, Blobfish pressed some buttons again. Come on, just tell them already, you'll run out of videos before they guess correctly.
Another recording started playing. Okay, maybe not. There was no sound, but it wasn't needed. It showed a top-down view of a concrete cell, empty, bare for a lonely figure, sitting by one of the walls and staring fiercely into the lens of the camera with an expression that screamed bloody murder, unmistakable even from the distance.
Clint's eyes narrowed to slits and his hands curled into fists under the table, but he didn't say a word or looked away from the screen.
Davis leaned to the agent who sat next to him. "Is that… the same guy?"
She couldn't blame Davis for asking. Stripped off his armor, with marks from suddenly meeting Stark's floor multiple times still visible on exposed parts of his skin, wrapped in a set of high security SHIELD restraints and with the freaky Asgardian muzzle covering the lower half of his face Loki looked more like a sadist's early Christmas present than the world conquering supervillain from the previous recording.
Simmons nodded. He was one of three people in the room who had the questionable pleasure of meeting Loki up close.
"But… Stark said he has been taken… off world, or something," Davis said under his breath, "in that press conference last night."
"Dude, Stark saying shit on tv doesn't make it true," Simmons whispered back. "Remember when he declared he is stopping with making weapons only to break out that fancy flying suit of his a week later?"
A wave of agitated murmurs rose around the room.
"Gentlemen!" Blobfish slammed his fist on the table, "and ladies," he added, looking at Natasha. "Are you a bunch of gossiping fishwives? Or the cream of the crop of the most experienced agents I've been promised?"
Natasha needed to employ all her will to not roll her eyes. They were not the chosen ones. They were the leftovers. Yet, that that still did it for the rest and there was silence again.
At least until Clint spoke up. "So… Loki," he said in an empty tone, "that's who we are escorting."
"Yes, agent Barton," came a reply. "Do you wish to voice any objections?"
"No, sir," Clint grounded through clenched teeth and gave Natasha his best you-have-to-be-kidding-me sideway glare. She shrugged one shoulder slightly.
"I have one, actually" interjected Davis and stood up, "didn't it take a bunch of superpowered folk to put him down yesterday? What use are we going to be when something happens? To my best knowledge none of us can fly or shoot laser beams from our fingertips. And us getting the least awesome duo of the so-called Avengers isn't gonna change that! No offence, agent Romanoff, agent Barton."
"None taken," Natasha murmured. Clint just shook his head. It wasn't anything they haven't heard whispered behind their backs before. And it was a valid point.
"I was assured the prisoner is properly pacificated and his powers are contained," Blobfish said, like he was reading a prepared statement, "and this is nothing more than a standard transfer operation. You should expect no complications."
"Why do you need a dozen men for that standard operation then?" chipped in Simmons. "Just stash him in a black van and drop him off wherever you want him to go."
That was also a valid point.
Blobfish took a breath, clearly annoyed that his new subordinates dare to voice their concerns. He was obviously not used to working with agents who were given a free hand at planning their own movements after being presented with an objective. "It's been decided that the prisoner is to be relocated offshore, due to security reasons."
Security reasons my ass, Natasha thought.
"There have been reports of other, third-party contingents, that could be interested with the… intelligence the detainee might provide," he explained in a tone as if he was speaking to a group of unruly preschoolers. "There's no confirmation to those rumors, but it is the matter of an utmost importance to assure the safety and secrecy of the mission."
It sounded like a stock standard bullshit, but it made some basic sense, even if assuming Loki would give them – or anyone – anything useful even under duress was like splitting hide on a living bear. US government lacked no enemies, both internal and external, and a strike against the weakened giant, the day after a goddamned alien invasion, would probably look like an enticing plan to some of them, with a potential, powerful ally with a raging hate boner against Uncle Sam coming as a bonus. But that would also mean that they had much bigger problems than this; a mole somewhere up in the hierarchy, as the fact that Loki was still on Earth was definitely not well known amongst the general public.
Or that was just an easy excuse. She had quite a few ideas why they would want Loki out of sight – and the area of jurisdiction – of whichever agency might even be concerned with his wellbeing. Or the legality of the due process. The Helicarrier was usually the ideal solution for the more… clandestine stuff, as it could be moved anywhere without attracting unwanted scrutiny, but it was down in the docks in DC for repairs and would be out of service at least for a couple more weeks, the time they didn't have. No, they would use one of the floating bases on the Pacific, of which existence she had absolutely no idea, of course. Or the fucking Gitmo, because why should it go to waste after it was officially decommissioned by the president? It sure matched the profile of the whole operation nicely.
And why was even SHIELD still in on that, isn't that what CIA is for? It is sitting much cozier in the Council's grasp too; no rogue agents, no self-ruling units, just a bunch of jobsworths following orders.
"So there could be complications," Davis stated bleakly. "Is that what you're saying?"
"Not of the nature a group of well-trained men couldn't handle," said Blobfish, "also, your role is mainly to act as support. Thor Odinson will be on board with you and I've been told he is well capable of controlling the prisoner on his own."
"Thor, like the big blond dude with the flying hammer?" asked Simmons.
"Yes."
"You should have started with that," said Davis and the room erupted into laughter.