2009. Belgrade.
Clint Barton adjusted the sights on his scope and sat back on his heels, his watchful eyes never leaving the figure walking through the stalls of artisan crafts and food that lined the street. The woman talked to one of the vendors and handed them money in return for a small sewn doll. She brushed her fingers down the rough knitted dress of the toy and then crossed the street towards an alley.
"I've lost sight of her," Clint reported.
Just as quickly as she disappeared, she returned back to the street. The doll in her hands was gone and her hands were shoved into the pockets of her coat. The woman bent her head and tucked her chin into her chest as she walked. She looked like every other tourist in the area.
"She's good," Clint's partner, Natasha Romanoff, murmured beside him. "Really good."
Because the woman they were trailing wasn't a simple tourist.
She was the deadliest known assassin in the world. She was a ghost. Coming and going. Striking and then disappearing. She never failed, never faltered, and never froze.
The Dragon.
But something was wrong. She had been spotted by SHIELD surveillance twice in two weeks. Her usual pattern was to appear every few months, maybe every few years. They tried to catch her, but she vanished off the face of the earth. But now…now they had a chance to put her down once and for all.
The Dragon turned and punched in a keycode into a building and then entered. Natasha nodded to herself and tucked her scope away. "We've got where she's staying. If we strike now, she'll be off her guard."
How wrong they were.
One second Clint is entering silently through a window and the next second, he's being choked out on the floor. He grabbed her wrist and used his weight to his advantage by flipping her with his hips, throwing the Dragon onto the floor. She let out a low, inhuman growl and started to pick herself up as Natasha dropped down from the rafters and forced her back onto the ground with a well-aimed kick to her back.
The Dragon swung her leg around, knocking Natasha back. The assassin rolled, her hand reaching under her couch where she stored a gun. She yanked it out and fired a shot at Clint. He narrowly avoided it and raised his bow to fire an arrow in response when she paused.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice warped by her thick Russian accent.
"Not important," Natasha shot back. The Dragon tilted her head to the side in curiosity.
"Americans. You're Americans. Who do you work for?"
"Why does it matter?" Clint asked steadily, the arrow ready to fly. He knew she would be able to miss it, but it would buy them some time.
"Who do you work for?" she repeated again. She raised her head to meet his stare and he was struck by the fact that she wasn't some aged killer. She was a year or two younger than Natasha. Her big brown eyes blinked up at him with just the hint of gold. His fingers faltered on the string, but he kept it taut.
She's just a kid.
"SHIELD. The Americans," he answered. The Dragon visibly relaxed but jutted out her chin once more.
"Prove it. Or I kill you both."
Clint looked to Natasha. The redhead looked steadily at the Dragon.
"You want out," Natasha answered the unspoken question. "You're asking us because you want us to make sure we're not from your handlers. Are you being hunted?"
"I killed them. They woke me up one day and I didn't want to do this anymore. I killed them." She spoke with an even measure, as if murder was something she did daily. Knowing her track record, it practically was.
How has this kid been active since the 90s?
"You want an out. We can give you one." Clint finally lowered the bow. "But that's going to require trust on both sides."
She considered it for a moment and then nodded slowly. "I know."
Clint Barton now had to explain to SHIELD as to why he had kept not one assassin alive, but two. Coulson would never let him hear the end of this.
He was never going to put her down like SHIELD ordered. He had known that from the beginning and he suspected Natasha felt the same. Because the only reason why she was able to be found in the first place was her choice. She wanted to be found. She wanted to be either killed or recruited.
She wanted to be safe from whoever trained her.
"Would you like anything to drink? Eat?" Coulson asked. He was seated across a table from the dark haired woman. She lifted an eyebrow in response and he nodded. She knew all of the typical interrogation tactics. Buttering them up, easing them in, the works.
Rebecca Blake sat next to Coulson with a thin file in her hands. The tall woman flipped through the papers in the manila folder and hummed to herself. The Dragon's eyes darted between the two and she folded her hands on the table before her.
"What's your real name?" Rebecca asked. "Or do you just always go by Dragon?"
"Yes. They would not call me anything else." Her answers were succinct and direct. She didn't skirt around the question or feign ignorance. In her eyes, she had nothing to hide. In their eyes, she had everything to hide. They needed to be sure that she wasn't trying to infiltrate or doublecross them.
"So you won't tell us your real name?"
"I would if I could. I do not know."
Rebecca pursed her lips and scanned her dark eyes over the few pieces of information they did have on her.
"And the organization you worked for?"
"I do not know."
Rebecca looked up at her, an unamused expression on her face. She closed the folder and set it back on the table. "Date of birth."
"I do not know."
"Where were you trained?"
"I do not know."
"Why should we believe you?"
The Dragon leveled her with a blank stare with those eerie brown eyes that Coulson swore he'd seen them glow gold once or twice.
"I do not know," she repeated.
Rebecca let out a bark of a laugh and began to stand, her hands raising to beckon forth the armed guards who would escort the assassin seated before her to the cage they had in the basement of the Triskelion.
"They would wake me up from a sleep they put me in." The Dragon's voice stopped her. Coulson looked up from the notes he was scribbling down to find the woman's eyes transfixed on the cool metal of the table before her. "I do not remember ever falling asleep, but I remember waking up. They would tell me that I was the Dragon. An asset. I was needed. They would give me an assignment and tell me that if I tried to run or if I failed, then they would kill him. I do not know who he is or was. But I know I cared about him."
Rebecca carefully sat back down in her discarded chair. "What changed this time?"
"They woke me up, prepared me for the mission, and then they told me to go. There was no mention of him. I realized that they had been lying to me. I do not know for how long. I did not want to go back to sleep. They showed me the target and I knew I could not do it. I would not do it."
"Who was your target?" Coulson asked.
"I believe you call him Iron Man."
The air in the room seemed thin from how sharply everyone sucked in a breath. Stark might have the suits, but would he be able to stop the Dragon if she was on a warpath? He was still new to the game. She was a veteran.
"And why didn't you?" Phil continued.
"They showed me a video. He saved a child. Multiple children." A tight, wan smiled flitted across her lips and she shrugged. "I refuse to hurt children. Those who protect them are not my enemies."
"And are these people still going after Stark?"
"I do not think that they are able to do so."
"Meaning?"
"I ripped their throats out."
Coulson nodded in what he hoped appeared to be understanding. "And you don't know your name?"
"I do not."
"Would you like to?"
The Dragon finally raised her gaze to meet his. For the first time in a long time, she met kindness in someone's eyes. She hesitantly nodded and he smiled.
Behind the two way glass, Alexander Pierce watched the interaction with Clint, Natasha, and Nicholas Fury standing next to him. He pushed away from the wall and began to walk out.
"I don't like it," he admitted before he left. "I don't like it one bit. If she proves to be trustworthy, then we keep her on retainer but I don't trust her for one bit being put in the field. You can keep her, Nick, but I want a contingency plan on my desk in two hours on how you're going to put her down when she goes rogue."
The door shut behind him and Natasha let a grunt of disgust tear from the back of her throat. The other two men looked towards the normally quiet and reserved redhead.
"She's not a dog," she answered their unspoken question.
The Dragon might not be a dog, but they did bring in another set of hands to control her. Christine Murakami. A former Air Force engineer, Murakami brought a certain levity and understanding to the Dragon's life. Natasha, Clint, Coulson, and Blake kept a track of her psych evaluations and physical exams, but Christine became her friend. If one could consider an assassin a friend.
The Dragon kept them all at arms length and appeared to possess no ability to convey emotion. She would simply stare at them with those big brown eyes and then turn back to whatever she was reading or working on. Christine often found herself working in a SHIELD lab on some trinket here or there with a very quiet, very still assassin seated on a stool next to her reading anything from Charlotte's Web to Crime and Punishment. It wasn't until the Dragon primly clambered up onto the stool one day with a copy of Doctor Zhivago that Christine finally remarked on it.
"Figured you would have read all of the Russian greats years ago," Murakami commented.
"That would require the Motherland to acknowledge its history and allow its citizens to know the truth." The quip was light and it startled Christine. She had never heard such a long sentence come out of the Dragon's mouth. Her hand slips on the wire she's tightening and she lets out a hiss thanks to the shock it sent through her. The Dragon doesn't even look up from the book as she tsked at her friend's pain.
"You need to be more careful."
"And you need to be less of a pain in my ass."
"Hmm, I thought that is what SHIELD is paying you for."
Christine let out a laugh and shook her head. "Brat."
Her loyalty test came sooner than anyone thought. There were no plans of putting her in the field. The optics of recruiting a Widow was already a PR nightmare, but the Dragon? That would be putting Maria Hill into an early grave.
But then a report came in from Barton and Romanoff's location in Madrid. Compromised. Romanoff poisoned. Barton can't extract them both. Taken by Trujilo's gang.
She found them bent over a table with tablets and holo screens expanded before them, whispering to each other as they tried to plan out a way to get them out safely and soon. The Dragon stood there for a moment. Two. She inhaled deeply and shoved her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket.
"Send me in," she said. Fury, Blake, Coulson, and Murakami all looked up to find her staring back at them with sharp eyes. "I can get them out. Send me in."
The Quinjet departed twenty minutes later.
All Clint remembered was the burning in his side from the bullet graze he sustained in their initial run and how limp Natasha's body felt leaning up against next to him. They were chained to a pole in the middle of this warehouse with at least thirty of Trujilo's men seated around them. The men were playing cards, laughing and chatting, and shooting the shit as Natasha Romanoff's breathing slowly and incrementally began to become more and more shallow as time passed.
The roof of the building groaned. No one paid it any mind. The wind here was vicious.
That's exactly why she picked it.
The ceiling shattered over one side of the warehouse, taking out four men with falling debris. A figure clad in black dropped from the hole, their fall cushioned by the rope in their hands and the swift way their legs wound around a man's throat and he was soon dead on the ground with his head twisted at a gruesome angle.
The Dragon fired off five shots in quick succession and turned, catching the fist aimed for her. She twisted the man's arm until his humerus broke through skin and he screamed. The rush, the burn, it exhilarated her. This is what she was trained for. This is who she was.
Clint shut his eyes just in time to avoid seeing the worst of it. He could hear the screams, the snaps, the last dying breaths. It was nothing new to him, but it was the way she did it that made it all the more cruel. All the more terrifying.
The screams stopped and then footsteps approached. He opened his eyes and raised his head to find bright golden eyes staring down at him. He was chained up, weak from blood loss, and worried about his partner. She could easily take them both out and disappear into the shadows.
"You look like shit," was her greeting. He grinned at her, lazy and tired, and she bent down to release them. The Dragon scooped up Natasha as if she weighed nothing and threw her over her shoulder in a fireman carry. He stepped over one of the bodies, careful to ignore the look on the man's face. Or lack of a face, that is. She led him to a Quinject tucked in the forest right by the warehouse.
As they leaned back against the walls of the jet, Natasha's head resting in her lap, Clint finally asked the question he'd been holding in since the moment he saw her all those months ago.
"Why the Americans?"
The Dragon looked up at him in surprise, something rarely ever seen on her face. "Hmm?"
"You could have waited for MI6. You could have waited for anyone. Why the Americans?"
"Felt safe." Her answer, short as it was, satisfied them both.
She earned her place in SHIELD.
She set her own rules. Her own boundaries.
She excelled in the field.
She saved lives.
And then, she slipped up. She snapped. She couldn't control it.
Six agents died by her hand.