The impact came sooner than she'd expected, and yet surprisingly gentle. Nat ran into somethi solid, and then suddenly she was flying through the air. Everything was dark and hot and stank of petroleum, and the sounds around her descended into a chaotic cacophony in which she could not distinguish individual sounds or voices. There was a hard bounce, although something cushioned her from direct impact with the ground, and then... she stopped.
Breathing hard, and her broken wrist on fire, Natasha opened her eyes.
The Hulk was standing on the roof of the Y-shaped terminal building. Spread out below was a mess of wreckage and fire. The broken cargo plane, an immense Antonov 124 Ruslan, was still burning, its cargo spilled across the runway like the guts of a slain dragon. A line of ferocious flames connected it with the rolled fuel truck. Firefighters were shouting at each other in Spanish and Tagalog as they battled to bring it under control.
Natasha was nestled in the crook of the Hulk's giant arm, watching it all unfold.
The Hulk himself was looking down at her as if he wasn't sure what she was. He reached a giant green finger, the size of a genoa salami, to touch her hair,and she shied away, rolling out of his arms to land heavily on her feet on the gravel roof. For a moment, the two locked eyes, neither moving. The Hulk's eyes were electric green, and he smelled of musk and sweat and gunpowder.
Then the fuel truck finally exploded. The Hulk winced at the sound, then ran to the edge of the roof to roar at it – and Nat's heart leaped into her throat. If he decided to go destroy the remains of the truck, he could spread the fire, or hurt the firefighters, medics, and policemen who were arriving to help.
"No!" Natasha stood up straight and waved her good arm. "No! Look at me!"
The Hulk turned towards her again, teeth bared. Her legs trembled... but the civilians needed to be able to do their jobs without any more superheroic interference.
"Look at me," she repeated. "I'm right here. Hey."
The Hulk balled his fists and roared at her. Nat stumbled backwards, but she knew that if she ran, he would chase her. Those who'd handled the Hulk well, like Rogers, had looked him in the eye and talked to him. That was what Natasha had to do now, no matter how terrified she may be. She understood soldiers and airplanes and weapons. The Hulk was unpredictable, unknown.
"Hey, big guy," she said, a little more gently. "Look at me. Thank you." She reached out a shaking right hand. "Thank you. You saved my life. Thank you. Do you understand?"
The Hulk cocked his head. His face was perpetually twisted into an angry sneer, but now Natasha thought she detected a hint of confusion in it, to. He reached out, and her trembling fingers touched one of his. The skin was rough, but only because each tiny wrinkle and pore present in a normal human hand was magnified several times. Veins stood out like ropes, and Nat could see them gently pulsing. His nails were short and striated, rough at the tips, and she realized Banner must bite them.
She raised her head to look him in the eye again. He could grab her – he could grab her and throw her off the roof, even more easily than Madame had thrown Yelena through the window of the hotel. Yet he didn't seem particularly inclined to do so. This was not Bruce Banner, but nor was it an entirely unthinking monster.
And in the moment Natasha realized that, she knew exactly what it was she would do next. She stood up straight, looking the monster in the eye.
"Listen to me, Hulk," she said, her voice now firm and confident even as her knees continued to shake. "You want the white woman. She's the one who made them drive the airplane into you. She's the one who had the soldiers shoot you, and tried to hurt me. Do you understand?"
The Hulk tilted his head the other way. His expression now was of intense concentration. He was trying.
"She must have gotten off the small plane before I got onto it," Natasha went on. "She'll still be here somewhere. I'll help you find her, and you can smash her!"
The Hulk's eyes lit up. Whatever else he did or didn't understand, he understood smash.
He reached for Natasha. It was all she could do not to duck away from his oncoming hand, but she managed to hold her ground. The Hulk scooped her up and leaped off the roof, leaving a crater in the taxiway where he landed, and began charging up the runway towards the burning planes. Nat tried to ignore her rattling bones as she looked around for evidence of where Madame had bailed out. There wasn't much to see... where would the woman have gone, after escaping the plane?
Obviously, the parking lot. Nat pounded on the Hulk's arm to get his attention.
"Other side of the building!" she shouted.
He came to a screeching halt and bared his teeth at her. Did he think she was trying to trick him? Natasha winced in expectation of fetid breath, but it actually wasn't all that bad. The Hulk hadn't eaten anything since transforming, and Banner had probably brushed his teeth only hours earlier.
"She'll be trying to steal a car and escape," Nat said. "We have to stop her. Trust me!"
But why should the Hulk trust her? The first time he'd seen her, she'd been running away from him, and it was easy to imagine that he would know from sharing his brain with Banner that Natasha Romanov was one of the least trustworthy people alive. After all, their first meeting hadn't gone well, either.
Then again, the second time the Hulk had seen Natasha, she'd been fighting by his side. He hesitated a moment, and then took a running start before taking a flying leap over the building. A moment ago Nat had been terrified to touch the Hulk – now she clung to his arm and hoped he knew what he was doing as they sailed through the air for what seemed like an awfully long time. On the other side of the terminal he landed directly on top of a parked news van, crushing it flat.
The reporters who'd been covering the airport fire stared up at him in horror. The cameraman screamed, dropped his equipment, and ran with his colleagues close behind him. Nat knew it was up to her to keep the Hulk from following them.
"White woman! White woman!" she urged him. "She's here somewhere... she has no scent!" Smell was something she was fairly sure was important to the Hulk. Maybe he could identify her by her lack of it.
The reporters were running towards the road – where a black Grand Cherokee was pulling out of the lot. Could that be Madame? Nat was still trying to figure out how to tell when the Hulk snorted and bounded after it. In a few flying leaps, he was in its path. The reporters realized the monster was now in front of them and scattered like mice. Nat caught a glimpse of Madame in the driver's seat – her ice-blue eyes went wide as she realized what was in front of her, but then she set her jaw and sped up, determined to run the Hulk down.
She should have known better. The Hulk had stopped an airplane twenty minutes ago. A four-year-old SUV wasn't going to touch him. He set Natasha gently down on the road, then widened his stance and let the vehicle hit him. The front end of it crumpled like an accordion. Airbags inflated, alarms went off, and the car stopped dead while the Hulk remained as immovable as a brick wall.
Natasha breathed out. She knew Madame had survived that, because she could have. Now would come the hard part, which would be convincing the Hulk to let SHIELD take care of Madame instead of dismembering her himself. He was already raising a fist to pummel the SUV into oblivion with the woman still inside it.
"Wait," Natasha said firmly. "Don't do that!"
The Hulk turned and snarled at her. A moment ago she'd promised to let him smash this woman.
"Wait until Nick Fury gets here," said Nat. "You know who Nick Fury is, right?" She still wanted Madame to have to live with her failure.
But the Hulk was not remotely interested. He grabbed the car in both hands and lifted it, apparently intending to slam it against the ground again, but then a white shape wriggled out of the broken passenger-side window and landed on its feet on the ground. It took a lot to shock Natasha, but that did it – she was confident she would have survived that crash, but Madame didn't appear to have so much as a scratch. Could she really be that tough?
Maybe she could. Natasha had been given eight annual doses of the Soviet serum. Madame, if even half the rumors about her were true, must have had at least thirty. The Hulk's own invulnerability came from a treatment based on the same principles. Maybe she really was made of marble.
The Hulk, too, had noticed she was up, and he knew exactly what to do about it. He brought the car back down to squash her with it like an inset.
Madame dashed aside as the car hit the pavement. Metal screamed and glass smashed, but Madame was on her feet and running towards the road. Furious, the Hulk threw the car aside and tried to grab her with his bare hands. She did a backflip, pushed off his arm, and spun over his head. Hulk whirled around to backhand her, knocking her into the side of a semi truck. Madame landed in a heap on the pavement, but managed to be up and roll between his legs as he came at her.
The Hulk was brute strength, but Madame was faster and more agile, and Natasha could already see that this was going to end in her escaping while he destroyed half the airport in rage. This was Nat's fault – she'd been an idiot to think she could control the Hulk, but she'd been so determined to bring Madame in and the Hulk was the only thing she'd met today that was more powerful. She would have to get him out of the way to deal with Madame herself, but how? In a contest of strength, Madame could beat Natasha easily and already had. There had to be something else. She had to be vulnerable somewhere.
Nat's mind raced back over the events of the day, and found it – electricity.
A taser disc had taken Yelena down on the plane, rendering her unconscious long enough for Nat and Triinu to make their failed agreement. An ordinary taser had knocked Eglė out on the Tugarin Zmeyevich. Clint had taken Natasha herself down in Budapest with an electrified arrow. Whatever was in that serum, it did not protect the widows' nervous systems from electrocution, and hopefully that would be as true of Madame as it was of any of the others.
What could she use? The airport would obviously have its own generator, but Natasha didn't want to damage property or hurt herself by overloading that. She needed something else. Something small. Something she could wield like a weapon.
There was a fire truck parked not far away, its lights still flashing – the firemen had abandoned it in a panic when the Hulk had jumped down from the roof. Nat climbed in and found the CB radio.
"Fury!" she said, tuning it to a SHIELD frequency. "Fury, I need something!"
"Oh, my god!" a woman's voice exclaimed, sharp in Natasha's ears. There was a clattering sound, and the same voice called out, more muffled this time, "Director! I've got her! I've got her!"
A scrape of metal on metal represented the microphone being snatched up. "Natasha!" Fury exclaimed, his voice crackling over – the radio reception was not good. "Are you all right?"
"Mostly," she replied. "I've got a couple more broken bits but I'll recover. I need a set of widow bites. Now."
"There's a hole in the side of the Vanguard," Fury said. That must have been where the widows had rescued the Hu Xian, but when Nat thought about it, even if the ship had been in one piece it would have taken hours to reach Manila. Helicarriers were very much like their water-based counterparts in that they were armed to the teeth but terribly slow. "That's why Banner offered to go on ahead."
Nat would have to thank him for that, if not for scaring her half to death. "I don't care how you get them to me, just do it, preferably within the next few minutes," she ordered. She had to take care of this before Madame escaped or the Hulk hurt anyone. "I'm at Ninoy Aquino, outside terminal One. If you need my exact coordinates..." she glanced up at the window. The Hulk was throwing cars aside in the effort to get to Madame, who was weaving between them. "I won't be hard to find."
She hung up the radio receiver and paused for a moment. After all she'd been through today, here was Nat, calling for help. She was doing exactly what Madame had belittled her for during their helicopter ride, depending on other people instead of on herself alone. Even if this all worked out, would it really be her victory with the Hulk as her muscle and Fury as her errand boy?
Natasha wasn't quite finished with that thought when she was broken out of it by the sight of Madame's body, flying through the air to smash through the windows in the curved front of the terminal building. The Hulk bellowed in triumph and ran after her, charging right through a separate, unbroken section of the glass wall. Nat thought that was rather unnecessary.
She climbed down out of the fire truck, hoping as she did that everyone in the airport had already been evacuated. Nat didn't want to have to worry about civilians – keeping Madame and the Hulk from destroying the entire building was going to be enough of a challenge without screaming people running around getting hurt. She ran for the door, wishing she'd had some shoes to put on. Getting broken glass out of her feet was never any fun.
Inside, the building was empty but the power, provided by the airport's generator, was still on, and the vast terminal space was lit by hundreds of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Madame and the Hulk were squaring off over masses of broken glass and abandoned luggage. Madame seemed to have decided she needed to keep her distance, and was trying to fend off the Hulk by throwing things at him – shards of glass that he swatted away like insects, suitcases and luggage carts that he caught and threw back, or tore to pieces in his increasing fury and frustration.
In the sunshine on the deck of the Zmeyevich, Madame's skin had looked pale. Under the wan glow of the fluorescent lighting, she looked almost transparent. Nat could have sworn she saw veins and organs under the woman's skin, as if Madame were a cave fish or a glass frog. Would Natasha herself look like that someday, or would she have had to keep taking the serum every year?
The Hulk ripped a currency exchange kiosk off its bolts and threw it at Madame. She scrambled onto a counter to avoid it, and the Hulk bounded over to grab her by the legs. She, however, managed to slip out of his grip and ran up his arm to his shoulders, where she put her legs around his neck and began trying to choke him.
Nat had studied Banner's file very thoroughly before going to Calcutta to fetch him. If the Hulk lost consciousness, he would revert to Banner, and Natasha had not the slightest doubt that Madame would snap Bruce Banner in half without a second thought. Banner was a civilian as much as any of the emergency personnel fighting the fires out back. His alter ego might have been an indestructible monster, but Banner himself was just a lonely man who wished he could destroy himself. Nat knew that, because he'd told them all so.
So as weird as it was, Natasha was going to have to save the Hulk.
She should have brought the fire truck – the hoses would have been a good way to break up the fight, but getting the vehicle indoors would have meant driving it through another part of the wall, and there was enough stuff broken in here. What she could use, however, was the airport's own firefighting equipment. A multilingual sign directed her to a glass door over a small inset cabinet, containing a coiled hose and spigot. She broke the glass, pulled the hose out, and turned the handle. Water came gushing out, clear and cold.
And hard. Nat needed both hands to control it, which was hell on her broken wrist. She turned in a circle, wrapping the hose around her waist to help her hang on, and aimed at Madame and the Hulk. The Hulk was on his knees now, pawing at her in the attempt to get her off as she continued to tighten her hold. Nat was familiar with the technique: tighten the grip a little bit after each exhalation, like a python. Every time the victim breathed in, a little less air would make it into the lungs and eventually the oxygen-starved brain would simply give way. Tendons were standing out in the Hulk's neck, and his eyes were bulging.
The torrent of water hit the Hulk in the chest. He was too tough to be moved by it, but when Natasha raised the spray it hit Madame in the face. Perhaps she was just as strong as the Hulk, but she did not have the same amount of inertia. She wasn't prepared for the force of the water, and it blasted her torso backwards, forcing her to let go of the Hulk's neck. He turned around and immediately brought a giant fist down on top of her, shattering tiles for several feet around.
Nat turned off the hose and waited. Was that it? It must be, she thought... even Madame couldn't survive a direct hit from the Hulk. So far she'd kept dodging. She must be dead this time, and despite her original intentions Nat wasn't about to lose sleep over it.
But then the tiles moved, and Madame began to get slowly to her feet. Her clothing was torn and now Nat thought the flesh beneath it really was getting more transparent, as if the blow had robbed her of some opacity. She was not broken, though. Merely soaking wet – and enraged.
"Monster!" she spat.
The Hulk widened his stance. The two of them were about to resume their battle.
Nat had an idea.
"Hulk!" she called, and ran out into his path. She winced as her feet moved over broken glass, but kept going, waving her good arm. "Lift me up!"
The Hulk was not interested. He made for Madame, who steeled herself to meet him.
Nat ran and climbed up his back, which made him stop and roar. He didn't want anyone trying to strangle him again. From this height, Nat pulled herself up to the ledge of windows around the upper level of the room, where there were offices and administrative facilities on the second floor, above the security checkpoints. The furious Hulk jumped up after her. She then swung herself up to kick out a ceiling panel and get into the crawl space above, where the utilities ran – power, water, and telephones. A giant green fist came up after her, ripping out a handful of piping. Water poured down onto the floor.
"Good!" Natasha told him. "Now drop that cable!" As the Hulk's face appeared in the hole he'd made, she pointed to one particularly fat bundle of power lines. "Do it!"
For a moment she was quite sure he was going to grab her and snap her like a matchstick, but then, to her astonishment, he obeyed. The Hulk ripped the cable down and dropped it, sparking, into the growing pool of water below. The lights in the terminal flickered, fuses blew, and there was a nasty electrical smell not unlike the one in the cockpit when the bomb went off but much, much worse.
Then darkness fell as the power went out.
It took Natasha about half a second to realize she was now in a small space with the Hulk right next to her, and claustrophobia took over. She couldn't stay there, where she could be easily squashed. She dropped through one of the torn-out panels and landed on the ledge again, from which she could survey the scene.
The terminal was in ruins and partially flooded, with water still cascading down from the ceiling. That probably wasn't a bad thing, since there were now several fires, started by the short circuit, burning in various parts of the room. In the center of it all, Madame was face-down in the crater where the Hulk had hit her, half-naked and still.
Nat climbed down from the roof of another kiosk, from there to the floor, and went to sling the unconscious woman over her shoulders.
Hulk landed in front of her with a thump, and reached for Madame.
"No." Natasha held up her left hand. The wrist felt like it had been ground into paste, and she was probably going to need a cast to help it heal, which would be a first for her... and almost kind of a privilege, really. Not many black widows every managed to damage themselves badly enough to need normal medical care – and those who did, as several of them had demonstrated that day, often didn't live long enough to receive it.
The Hulk looked affronted, snorting like a bull. He wanted to destroy the woman who'd hurt him.
"No," Natasha repeated. "We've got her. It's done now. You can turn back into Banner."
But that seemed to make the Hulk very angry indeed. He stood up straight and puffed out his chest, gave a roar and raised his fists together as if to slam them down on Natasha.
She stood her ground, keeping her gaze locked to his. If she'd done this on the Helicarrier before the Battle of New York, would it have ended differently? Would he have backed down, or would she merely have been killed? Which of those things were going to happen now?
Before either could, a bright light swept the room, making Natasha and the Hulk both look up. Nat realized that over the sounds of collapsing masonry and blaring sirens, she could also hear jet engines. A quinjet was hovering over the parking lot outside, searching for them. The Hulk didn't like that. He turned around and burst out the glass wall in yet a third place, and disappeared into the night.
Nat climbed over the wreckage with Madame still on her back, and got outside to see the quinjet landing in the parking lot. The ramp came down, and she carried her prisoner on board. At first she assumed it would be either Fury or Chiba in the pilot's seat, but the person she actually found was Clint. He turned around, offering her a bag that must've had her widow bites in it.
"Let me guess," he said, watching her put Madame in a seat. "I missed the party."
"As usual." Nat nodded. "Don't worry, there'll be another one." She sat down and sighed. "Take me home."
He nodded and raised the ramp. "Home-home, or the Vanguard."
Home-home would mean the farm... and she suspected if that's what she chose, he would do it, only stopping in Laoag to pick up Laura and the kids on the way. That sounded nice, but Natasha knew her job still wasn't quite over. "Better be the Vanguard," she said. "Fury's gonna want me to file a report."
There was no discussion over whether Nat would be present when Madame came to, because there was nothing to discuss. She fully intended to be there, even with her wrist in a cast, to look her nemesis in the eye and tell her she'd lost. And she would do it in her black tacsuit with her emblem on her belt and all her gear in place – not because she thought she was going to need any of it, but because that was who Natasha Romanov was. She wasn't a cringing little girl frightened of her mistress, and she wasn't the tool and puppet of some monolithic and unfeeling State. She was the Black Widow.
They'd put Madame in the Vanguard's HCC – its Hulk Containment Chamber. There was no furniture, and the whole place had been scrubbed clean of any protruding piece or speck of dust that might be useful as a weapon. This was no deteriorating Soviet aircraft carrier. The lock was on the other side of the room, controlled by a fingerprint scanner. The walls were three inches of Trivex. A container like this one had held Loki, and nearly held Thor. It could hold Madame.
"Have a nice nap?" asked Fury as she raised her head. They'd dressed her in a white coverall, with no pockets or zippers, after carefully searching her for any and all hidden weapons or tools. Including several places where Natasha would much rather not have had to look.
Madame sat up, cross-legged, and didn't reply.
"Valeria Boyko," said Fury formally. "That's your name, isn't it? Our sources say you're a Ukrainian peasant's daughter – your parents were sent to the gulags in 1931 a part of the dekulakization, and you were placed with the Red Room."
Madame still didn't answer.
"You are under arrest for kidnapping, destruction of public property, and child abuse," Fury went on. "Our lawyers are looking into your other crimes to see what we can make stick. You have the right to remain silent, although it may damage your defense if you fail to mention something you later rely on in court. And you have the right to an attorney – if you can't afford an attorney the court will appoint one for you. After all," he added, "this is a democracy."
Silence.
"Have a nice day," Fury finished, and turned to stalk out of the room.
Natasha stood there, waiting for Madame to speak first. She was prepared to wait all day if necessary, but in fact it was only a couple of minutes.
"Look at you," said Madame. "Standing at attention beside him like a good doggy. You were made to be better than that."
"No," Nat said. "I was made to be somebody's good doggy. You're just angry that I wasn't yours." She stepped closer. "My mother left a letter with me when she dropped me off at the State Home for Girls in Volgograd." Baba Galina had promised to read it to her when she was old enough to understand it. "What did it say?"
"I don't know." Madame smirked. "I never read it. I ordered it burned."
Nat had expected that answer, but she was still a little disappointed – that was the only clue she might have ever had to who her family was, and it was gone forever. She would just have to live with that.
"I figure this will be the part where you make fun of me because I asked for help," said Nat. "So I want you to know I'm not ashamed of that. You taught us to hate one another because you knew that if we worked together we'd be stronger than you. I overcame it. That's why you'll never be anything but a black widow. I'm the Black Widow," she said proudly. "I'm an Avenger." She turned to walk away.
"You really think you're serving some higher purpose by being a part of SHIELD?" asked Madame. "Because if you do you're even stupider than I thought! Oh, the things I could tell you about SHIELD!"
Nat paused. What if Madame did know something Nat didn't? But even if she did, Natasha knew it wouldn't be information she could trust. It would be lies and half-truths, designed to raise suspicion but not give her anything concrete she could confirm or refute. "You have nothing to say that I want to hear," she said, without turning around.
"This won't hold me," Madame said. "You have no idea what I'm capable of. You don't even know what you're capable of – or what you could be, with just a little more time."
Natasha thought about the serum, and about the fact that this woman had been almost a match for the Hulk, but she shook herself out of that, too. "Maybe I don't want to know," she said, and this time she really did walk away.
Fury hadn't gone far – he was waiting for her just outside.
"What do the results show?" Natasha asked. What had the Soviet scientists done to Madame in the over seventy years they'd had to work on her body, mind, and genetic code – and by extension, what had they don't to Natasha herself, in far less time but with far more experience?
"They're still working on them," said Fury. The two walked together back towards the Helicarrier's sick bay. "But her body's properties seem... malleable."
"She's... what, a shape-shifter?" asked Natasha. That was absurd, but no more so than an army of aliens led by a disgruntled god.
"Not exactly," said Fury. "More like she can borrow powers from anyone around her. Put her in a contest with the Hulk and she becomes as strong as she is. We'll avoid testing it," he added. An implicit promise to keep people with powers away from her cell.
Nat nodded slowly. "So... that stuff they gave us might not have been super-soldier serum after all." What did that mean for her?
"Well, she's also almost as old as Rogers and didn't spend any of it frozen," Fury reminded her. "So she's had a hell of a lot more of if than you ever did." He put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think you need to worry too much. You're no monster, Natasha. You're just damned good at what you do."
"Am I," said Natasha quietly. Whatever else had been done to her and the others, Madame had raised them to be monsters. In some cases, like Yelena, she'd succeeded. Who was to say Natasha herself was any better? Nobody would deny that the Hulk was a monster, no matter whose side he was on. "Are we heading right back to the States now?" she asked.
"Almost. We're making a stop in Sulawesi first," Fury said.
"What's in Sulawesi?" Natasha frowned. Sulawesi was at the other end of the island chain, over a thousand miles from Manila.
"What do you think?" Fury asked.
