Chapter Nineteen: A Web Unravelled
"An eye for an eye / is a blind man's rule / I wasn't born to follow / I'm nobody's fool." -Unloved
January 21, 2013 - US-101 South
With Natasha on a Quinjet with Oksana, Audrey felt surprisingly alone in San Francisco. This was a business trip, not a girls' weekend, but she was used to working in teams by now—first Tac Team Q, then the Avengers—and investigating on her own felt strange and unnatural.
So far, they had a solid amount of leads, but without piecing them together, it was just an incoherent jumble of facts. Claudia assured her that she could hold down the fort at the theater, so Audrey spent the car ride down to the San Jose base trying to map out what they knew so far.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s investigation of Briony Byrne had been compromised—possibly irreversibly—but there was still a chance of them using Briony to get to Tatiana, who could lead them to the Red Room. In order for that to work, though, they needed to find her before she inevitably tried to flee. Granting her immunity wasn't an option that Audrey was particularly fond of, but she'd been around this bend enough times to know what S.H.I.E.L.D. would order her to do.
Biting the inside of her cheek, Audrey glanced down at her watch and then at the sun rising over the mountains. They were almost to the Network, but she wanted to get settled before the rush of seven-to-five workers arrived. She considered asking the driver to hurry up, but then weighed her options. California Highway Patrol would be bored and looking for people to pull over at this time of day, and even if they could flash their badges to get out of an arrest, it would delay them further. So instead, she sat back and used the time to consider.
They knew Oksana was from the Red Room. Colette could know something, but based on the attitude she gave off, it seemed unlikely that she paid much attention to anybody but herself, or would be willing to share what she knew with them. Oksana had said the Red Room was trying to kill her, which lined up with the message they'd received from the burner phone. That little swan better be careful before somebody wrings her neck.
The burner phone still wasn't making sense to Audrey. Why would they want to deliver a message to S.H.I.E.L.D.? And why wouldn't they spend more time masking their phone number? It didn't take Tony-level technological aptitude to hide your area code, and with the tech they had, it was surprising they'd make it that obvious.
She tabled that. If Claudia managed to pull prints from the phone, they could figure out who had planted it. If they didn't, they had about a thousand other leads, all pointing in different directions.
The bomb. The phone. Briony. The ballet. None of it was fitting together.
As she watched the sun pull itself over the horizon, Audrey rolled down her window. The air was salty and cool, fresh in a way New York never was. She inhaled it in gulps, knowing well enough that once she arrived at the Network, she wouldn't have the opportunity to rest for a long while.
January 21, 2013 - North American Airspace
"They did a lot of looking for you," Natasha remarked, glancing down at the list of missing person's reports that had been made for Oksana. Thirty countries—all of Eastern Europe, most of the Mediterranean, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and the U.S. A dozen different aliases. Oksana had managed to evade them all. "How'd you get out?"
Across from her in the Quinjet, Oksana was wringing her hands nervously. Without the Black Swan makeup, it became clear how young she was—eyes wide but sunken deep into her face, which was still rounded by a bit of remaining baby fat. "Deserted a mission," she answered, her voice trembling and quiet.
"What was it?" Natasha asked, shutting the computer and setting it aside.
Oksana avoided her eyes. "I had to kill my handler. He sold intelligence to MI6, and they wanted him out. Told him he was taking me to London to take out an MP. I couldn't do it."
"Why not?"
"He was like a father to me," she admitted. "I just...I loved him. He was good to me, even when the others were not."
Natasha leaned forward and raised an eyebrow. "Love is for children."
She flinched. "I know," Oksana said quietly. "But I'm still a child."
It was a fair enough point at the surface, but Natasha still found herself arching an eyebrow at it. There were no children in the Red Room. Just tools to be used. The house Natasha grew up in had power as its axis, and the church she attended preached death as its God. She had never been young. Not really. And so love had never been for her. "How old were you when you joined?"
"Five," said Oksana. "My parents were traders in Sochi. They couldn't take care of me anymore. The Madame helped them."
"Coastal girl, huh? I bet Moscow was a change of pace."
"I don't remember them much." She reached up to her bun and pulled the rubber band from her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders like a dark veil. "Just—dreams of my mother, sometimes."
"Did you ever go looking for them?"
Shaking her head, Oksana said, "I didn't want them to be caught up in it when the Red Room came for me."
"They left you," Natasha reminded her. "You don't owe them anything."
"We've all done bad things," Oksana shrugged. "I'm tired of playing god." Natasha didn't say anything to that, instead steepling her fingers and resting her chin atop them to peer at Oksana quizzically. The girl cleared her throat, her shoulders hunched over, like she didn't like being watched. "If it weren't for seeing you on the TVs from New York, I wouldn't have ever tried it. But they recognized you. When we knew you weren't dead, and it gave me hope."
"They've known about me for a long time," Natasha promised, sitting up straight again. "They came for me, like they came for you."
She tugged on the ends of her hair, and then blurted out, "You were always the best." Flinching at herself, she hurried to add, "We all thought you were a god, until you left. I was young then, but I heard the stories."
"Don't trust everything you hear."
"Right. Of course. I'm sorry. Just—back home—or, not home anymore, I guess." She took a deep breath. "They may have tried to come for you, but they mourned you. In Russia. Nobody killed like you. We all wanted to become the way you used to be."
"I'm no role model, no matter which side you're looking at it from," Natasha said.
"Do the Americans not like you?"
"They like me plenty, but they don't trust me."
"You gave up everything for them, though," Oksana said, her eyes narrowing the slightest bit. "Your family and your friends and your home. You gave up your life. Wasn't that enough for them?"
Natasha leaned back and shrugged. "It wasn't much of a life to give up."
"And now?"
"What about it?"
"What kind of life do you have now?"
For a moment, Natasha considered it. She wasn't sure what she had expected when she left the Red Room. If it weren't for S.H.I.E.L.D. catching up to her, she probably would've tried to go freelance. There was a lot of money in freelance. But if she could've chosen what to do with herself, Natasha would've just tried everything she'd never been able to have before. School. Shopping. Dating. Painting. All the things the Red Room would never let her do. Realistically, she knew that she wouldn't have gotten very far if she hadn't been taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, but she always wanted her life to be more than an endless road of death and more death. At least now, she had something like that. "It's a nicer life," she said finally.
"Are you happy?" asked Oksana.
"No," Natasha answered honestly. "But I'm the closest to it I've ever been."
January 21, 2013 - The Network - San Jose, CA
"Did you know they filmed a movie here recently?" Lindsey asked, almost as soon as Audrey had pulled the door open to the lab. That was Lindsey's style—no wasting time with How have you been in the last six months? or Good morning. She was directly off-topic, bright and kind against the cold, federal backdrop.
"What?" Audrey asked, caught off-guard. "At the top-secret government base?"
"No, like, in Silicon Valley," Lindsey clarified. She stood up straight from the table and lifted up the massive pair of goggles she'd been donning, resting them on top of her head. "About Google."
"Like, about the company?"
"Yeah. About internships."
"Huh," Audrey said. She wondered what that would even look like, but she didn't even know what storyline could be harvested from that premise, and running on this little sleep, she wasn't going to try. "What do you have so far?"
Lindsey slid her goggles back down, leaning in close to the pile of shrapnel and metal she'd begun piecing together. "Not much. I'm trying to work on the external shell and the internal machinery at the same time, but what I'm finding for the interior doesn't match the exterior."
More nothing. Audrey frowned and leaned against the table. The bomb had been set off by the Red Room; that much she was sure of. But they needed to find out who, how they'd managed to place it without being caught, and where they were now.
It was an unfortunate truth to confront, but Audrey knew that capturing Tatiana, or whatever other Red Room agents had arrived in pursuit of Oksana, would make her safe. As long as the Red Room was around, it would keep hunting her. In S.H.I.E.L.D.'s almost 70-year-long history, they hadn't managed to take the Red Room down. Audrey was doubtful that that had changed now.
"Where's Caroline?" Audrey asked.
Lindsey didn't move from where she was using tweezers to dig through the pile of shrapnel. "I think that's classified. Need to know, or whatever phrase they're using these days."
Audrey frowned. "Dammit." She hated when S.H.I.E.L.D. insisted on compartmentalization for investigative projects. How was she supposed to figure it out without access to all the information available to her? "I'll be right back," she told Lindsey, who raised a hand to wave at her.
Until Caroline or Natasha returned, Audrey figured she would go look for what she did have. She hopped off the lab bench and headed to her bag, where she retrieved her badge. It was time for her to head to the archives.
The Network was famed among S.H.I.E.L.D. for its partnerships with Google and Facebook. Through a contract that had been designed around five years ago, S.H.I.E.L.D. bought any and all user data that ran through either companies' Silicon Valley servers, and stored them here. Their archives were entirely digital, kept in an underground room about a mile long that was bracketed by rows and rows of servers.
The base, by now, was filled with regular office workers in suits, pushing paper and analyzing data. The mask of mundanity that S.H.I.E.L.D. wore had always seemed necessary to Audrey in the past. Few people were aware of their presence or operations, and that information was still largely kept secret. But as the months since New York drew out, it felt almost insidious to act with so little transparency. Audrey knew that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s job—and her job, as a part of it—was to be the line. Keep normal people from knowing what they don't need to know. As the threat of intergalactic peril increased, though, she was starting to wonder if the line's existence was doing more harm than good.
Down in the server room, there were no windows. A few dozen analysts milled about, pushing carts full of harddrives and typing rapidly at their desks. This wasn't what Audrey was used to. Every other base's archives were composed of file cabinets stuffed full of physical files in folders, and more importantly, they were quiet. She didn't like the way the others in the room could watch her as she searched.
"I need to take a look at some files," Audrey said to the receptionist, flashing her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge.
He took a sip from an iced coffee and nodded. "User database or general S.H.I. . intelligence?"
"Both."
"Okay, but which one do you want to go to first?" He quirked up an eyebrow, like she was taking all day and he was late to a funeral. Something about him made her feel extremely small and unimportant.
"Um," said Audrey, scrambling to make a decision even though it didn't matter either way. "General, please."
"Great." He pulled open a door from the desk and selected a keycard. "This is for room 6B, down the hall. You use it to open the door and turn on the computer. It'll lock behind you."
Audrey accepted the keycard, grimacing in the receptionist's direction. "Thank you," she said, wondering if it was obvious how inept she felt. Without looking back for his reaction, she strolled down the hallway and scanned the key over the lock. It clicked, and she pushed the door open.
Inside the room, there was nothing but a desk and a computer. It looked more like a library at a study room than a high-tech S.H.I.E.L.D. base. Audrey sat down and went to log into the computer, but found that it had no keyboard.
"Scan your keycard."
She jumped, spinning around in her chair. There was nobody there. If she was being honest, her immediate thought was ghosts, though she should've figured out by now that S.H.I.E.L.D. was using artificial intelligence and voice commands increasingly more. When she did as the computer had instructed, she was greeted with a bright white screen.
"Look at me, please," the computer said. Audrey complied, feeling stupid for letting a machine tell her what to do. The computer scanned her retina and unlocked, opening up the familiar S.H.I.E.L.D. database layout.
"Files on the Red Room," Audrey commanded. There was a tinny beeping noise as the computer sifted through the information they had on file for what she was looking for. After a moment, it presented her with a full list of Red Room articles. "Subsearch: Executioner." Audrey waited again as the computer continued sorting, before it finally arrived on a landing page with only seven files. Now that she had the information, she wasn't sure how to access it. Normally, she would...click. What was she supposed to say? "Open file?" she tried.
The computer beeped unhappily. "Which file?" it asked.
"The first one…?" Audrey answered, unsure of herself.
The file expanded onto a blank white box. For a second, Audrey thought that the information was just loading, but then the computer pinged with an error message. "404: file recently deleted," the AI's voice came back.
She scrunched up her eyebrows. "Deleted when? And by who?"
"File deleted on December 14, 2012. Executive action ordered and approved by Margaret Carter."
What the hell?
"Access deleted file," Audrey commanded.
"File deleted and destroyed," the computer replied, still sounding chipper. "No recovery options are available for this file."
"Let me see the next file," Audrey commanded. The computer closed out of the white window and selected the second file on the list, expanding it into another square.
"404: file recently deleted," the A.I. repeated.
"Deleted by who?" Audrey asked, even though she could feel the dread gathering in her stomach as she anticipated the answer.
"Executive action ordered and approved by Margaret Carter."
Goddammit.
After Moscow, Audrey knew better than to eliminate her mother as a suspect so quickly. But even thinking about it with any detachment, she couldn't come up with any reason for Peggy to delete these files. Or even how she had managed to delete them from an assisted care facility in London whose computers' greatest capacity was email and virtual solitaire.
The Executioner's job was to tie up loose ends. What loose ends would Peggy need to hide if she wasn't working with the Red Room? Audrey had enough faith in her relationship with her mother to confidently assume that she was not working with the organization that had kidnapped and held her hostage not once, but twice. So, more likely than not, it was someone disguised as Peggy who had ordered and approved the file's deletion. But that introduced a whole new set of questions. And more honestly, one glaring problem: S.H.I. . had a mole.
This sort of thing wasn't uncommon in intelligence, not at the lower levels. Agents defected to and from S.H.I.E.L.D. all the time. Level Ones were notorious for being barely trustworthy, even though 99% of them were loyal. But an infiltration at the executive level? That was almost unheard of. And Audrey had been around as long as S.H.I.E.L.D. had; in her life, this kind of breach had never happened before.
She glanced around the room, realizing that this put her in an extremely awkward position. Who could she trust? At this base, nobody except Lindsey. Natasha was on a plane to New York, Clint was in Los Angeles with Kate, and her father was barely a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, definitely not one with the knowledge, proximity, or espionage abilities that this sort of thing required.
For now, she just needed to lie low and act as if she hadn't noticed. "Pull files on Project Rebirth," Audrey said, naming the first S.H.I.E.L.D. mission she could come up with off the top of her head. She needed to bury her search history. Immediately, images of her father filled the screen. She skimmed through them, in case it was tracking her timing, and then ordered, "Pull files on the Avengers Initiative."
Pictures of the Chitauri and New York, information on Loki and the Tesseract, video footage of the fight on the Helicarrier. It all made Audrey's stomach churn. She didn't miss that feeling—like the world was going to end if she didn't personally stop it.
For good measure, she ordered, "Pull files on Operation Requiem." Her body camera footage from the warehouse flashed up, a grainy video of the Soldier, the room of bloodied guards, the transcripts of their comms conversation at the parties. Looking back, it always felt like it happened over the span of a year, even though she knew factually that the mission only lasted a few days.
Now, if anyone pulled her access history, they would assume she was an egomaniac, and not onto a potential mole. It was good enough. Audrey exited out of the computer, returned the key, and headed back upstairs to try and figure out the task at hand: finding Tatiana.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out. Claudia. "Hello?" she answered.
"Good news," Claudia announced. Audrey let out a breath of relief. Finally. "We found Briony. She was still in San Francisco, though she looked like she'd been packing."
"Send me the address," Audrey ordered, picking up her pace as she jogged back to Lindsey's lab to retrieve her things. "I'll be there as soon as I can."
"Well, there's bad news too," Claudia admitted. Audrey punched in the key code to unlock the lab door and pushed it open. If Lindsey weren't so enthralled by the bomb she was dissecting, Audrey would've felt bad for ignoring her.
"What's the bad news?" she asked, slipping her jacket on.
"Well, she's dead."
Audrey stopped, one arm in the jacket, the rest of it hanging limply behind her. "Seriously?"
"No, I decided to make a cool and funny joke about murder," Claudia drawled. Audrey blew out a breath.
"So we know it was a homicide?"
"We haven't moved her body, but unless she stabbed herself in the neck with a knitting needle, I'm leaning in that direction."
Audrey reeled back. "Knitting needle?"
"Yeah," Claudia replied. "Very bloody."
She had a lot of questions, but they could wait until she got there. "I'm on my way."
January 21, 2013 - Avengers Tower - Manhattan, NY
"Hey, Doc," Tony asked, grabbing the stress ball on Bruce's desk and tossing it up and down in the air. "Does Romanoff have a secret sister I don't know about?"
Bruce glanced up from his beaker setup. He was never really in the mood for Tony's antics, but especially not now. He'd burned his hand on acid that morning, and Audrey had been ignoring him for three weeks, and the peer reviews of his report had gotten stalled by a lab in Switzerland. "Why would I know?"
"I don't know, you guys are close."
"We are not."
"Closer than she and I are."
"That's not much of a bar to leap over."
Tony smacked the foam ball down on the lab table. Bruce grabbed it before it rolled off the edge and threw it back at him without looking up. Catching the ball, Tony scoffed. "Why are you so grouchy? Hulk problems?"
"Hulk is fine, thanks for asking."
"Okay, well, how's Bruce then?"
"Dandy," he mumbled, tightening the screw on the apparatus. It still wasn't lined up properly, even though he'd ordered a whole new set of glassware to rearrange it with.
Tony sat down on one of the lab stools. "See, now I know you're lying. The Bruce I know would never say 'dandy.' Hulk, maybe. But not Bruce." He leaned forward. "What's up?"
Bruce rolled his eyes. "Can I help you with something?"
"Are you going to ask about Romanoff's secret sister?"
"Will you go away if I do?"
Tony pursed his lips, as if he was seriously doing the math. After a moment of deliberation, he responded, "Maybe."
Those odds were good enough. Bruce sighed. "Fine. Why are you asking if Romanoff has a secret sister?"
"Because she just landed on the roof with a teenage girl who looks exactly like her."
Bruce looked up, actually tuning into what Tony was saying. "She what?"
"Her name is Oksana. She's former Red Room too, apparently. We're supposed to look out for her, while Natasha and Audrey work on investigating in San Francisco." He reached over to Bruce's apparatus and unscrewed one of his beakers, moving it over. Bruce would've protested, but as he watched him reconfigure the tubes, he realized that Tony had fixed the problem with the setup. "Natasha told us to behave. No weapons, no bad words. That type of thing."
Red Room. Bruce thought about Audrey, against his better judgment, and the nights she'd spent combing through Red Room files in his lab. It had all seemed so abstract then, when all he knew was the most obscure details about Natasha's past and Audrey's quite nonplussed explanation of her mission-gone-wrong in September. Even if they had been the ones to make her into the Black Widow, Bruce always thought of her as more S.H.I.E.L.D. than Red Room.
But now it felt real. Another Black Widow would be in the Tower. Bruce ran a hand through his hair and tried not to make any faces that would invite more questions from Tony. "I think that may have been directed less at us and more at you," Bruce responded.
"Maybe so. Figured I'd share, just in case."
"How long is she going to be here?" Bruce asked.
Tony shrugged. "Not sure. Until Aud and Natasha kill the people chasing her, if I had to guess."
Bruce flinched at Audrey's name, but swallowed and started nodding. "Okay."
"Doctor Banner, Mr. Stark," JARVIS interrupted. "Miss Godunova and Agent Romanoff have arrived outside the lab. Shall I let them in?"
Tony looked at Bruce, who blew out a breath. Today was a lost cause, it seemed. He shrugged.
"Let 'em in, Jeeves."
The lab door slid open, and Bruce found himself face to face with the two widows. He didn't know why Tony had asked if they were sisters–aside from their pale skin, they looked nothing alike. Aside from their appearances, though, Bruce did have to admit that Oksana looked...haunted in the same way that Natasha did. Deep eyes, a pale face framed by dark hair. But while Natasha carried herself with confidence and welcomed attention, Oksana hunched over like she was trying to appear invisible.
"Gentlemen," Natasha greeted simply. She held the door open for Oksana, who skittered inside. "This is Oksana Godunova."
"Hi," Tony greeted. "Welcome to America."
"I've actually been here for six months," she corrected.
Bruce snorted, and Tony kicked him under the table. Raising a hand in greeting, he said, "I'm Bruce, nice to meet you."
"Thank you for letting me say here," Oksana said quietly. "I am extremely grateful for your hospitality."
Tony waved her away. "It's my thing. Happy to help. You have a room squared away or do you need me to set you up with one?"
"We've got a place," Natasha answered. "I'm gonna get her some food and then I have to get back to San Francisco. Audrey's waiting for me." She sent a cautious glance in Bruce's direction, which he pointedly ignored. His mouth flattened into a line. "Is Lewis around? I have to ask someone to make sure she eats while I'm gone."
"Lewis is in her office, but we're perfectly capable of feeding her," Tony reminded Natasha.
"You don't even feed yourself," Natasha retorted. "But thanks anyway." She waved at the two of them and then gestured for Oksana to follow her out of the lab. The door slid shut behind them.
"So," Tony said, once he and Bruce were alone again. "What do you think? Secret sister?"
Bruce shook his head. "Get out of here, Tony. I'm trying to work."
"Alright, alright," Tony said, standing up from the stool. "But for the record, I think you're only kicking me out to avoid admitting that I'm right."
"Out," Bruce demanded simply. "And for the record, they look nothing alike."
"Can't hear you!" Tony called from the hallway, already walking away. "But I'm definitely right!"
A/N: so sorry for the delay and sorry this chapter is a bit short! i hope you are all doing well and thank you for reading :) let me know what you think!
Chapter 20: Guilty of Love
"It's nice to see you," Natasha said.
Yelena rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Next time you need something, pick somewhere tropical for us to meet."
Review Replies:
ally: thank you! it's only the beginning of the drama
Guest: thank you for the review! i hope i live up to the expectations lol
Emilia Christine: queen don't worry at all! i hope you're doing well and thank you for the review. i'm hoping to explore the red room more as well! this isn't from the comics but in my Opinion natasha deserved a movie before two thousand and twenty so …. retroactive fanfiction justice lol. colette kinda sucks i'm not gonna lie! but natasha and audrey are on the case and they will be unearthing answers soon.