In the morning she somehow found herself back on her bed, a blanket neatly arranged to cover her. Steve must've carried her back here because she had no memory of ever walking back to her room. It was ten o'clock already and she's mad at him for not waking her up sooner. She went for a quick shower, expertly dressed herself into her tight-fitting Black Widow suit, and put on a thin line of basic make up. When she walked out, it was ten thirty and Falcon was already at the hangar, along with Vision and Rhodey, helping some heavy-lift SHIELD crews load food supplies into a quinjet.
"Natasha. You were missing all morning." Sam Wilson easily quipped.
"Yeah, yeah. Tell me about it."
"We almost left without you." Rhodey added, he was much smaller without his War Machine suit, Natasha thought. She couldn't believe she hadn't thought of that before.
She took a few extra seconds to watch The Vision effortlessly lift up several food boxes to the jet with nothing but a yellow ray of light shooting out of the gem on his forehead. He looked like he was fully concentrated into it.
Then she was off to find Steve.
He was right where he would be; looking down at mission files and reading them carefully, making sure every worst case measure is prepared for and every upcoming hazard is ready to face. Natasha passed Fury's office right to Steve's so-called 'private room'. Private just because no other operative aside from the two of them plus Fury have enough balls to enter the almost always empty room.
"Romanoff." He greeted formally as the doors slid open for her to enter. He was on mission mode already.
"Why didn't you wake me up earlier?"
He looked up from his case files just to give her a very fake cunning smile. "I wanted to be the first at everything, for once."
"Right." She chuckled. Nodding her chin to the files he was reading so intently. "What do we have here?"
"Nothing major. Some scientist just invented a bunch of illegal chemical mixtures."
"Don't forget that some of the worst epidemics came from cases like that."
"Never the one to take anything lightly." He shook his head, his voice distant from the seriousness as he kept reading. Natasha snatched a file that he wasn't delving into and started looking into it. The captain prefers to read from an actual paper rather than from any digital device; she advised him not to do so too often just because it's not that environmentally friendly, but this is one of the things that makes Steve who he is, so after a while she just let it go and got used to it.
"When should we leave?" She asked as she was reading a page of a file. It was types of potions the scientist made−the ones that SHIELD knows of, at least.
"Gimme five and I'll be done."
"Sure thing, captain."
It was a light mission−no need to bring everyone, she tried to convice him. But Steve insisted that if they have greater numbers, they have greater chance of finishing the mission. The objective was clear: bring down the chem lab, take in the professor. Falcon and War Machine, and Vision are air patrols, as always. Their main job is to disable as many guard droids as possible that surrounded the building. Wanda's job is to hypnotize the guards around. Nat's is to hack in and disable the security password and disable the alarm. Steve's was to cover for her while she'd done so. Wanda might have got most guards under her control but God knows how many guards did this scientist hire.
Only the two veteran Avengers were the ones who actually got to break into the actual building. Steve promised to call in the rest of them if they ever needed help.
"Done." Natasha lifted her slender fingers off the password keyboard and shrugged at Steve as he gave her a surprised look. She simply shrugged again.
"Code's easy." She reasoned. She ran with him into the premises as the metal door swiped open.
They soon were presented with the sight of hundreds to thousands of racks of bottled chemicals, all the way to at least two hundred feet across the humongous warehouse.
"Steve." She looked up to him and he nodded, giving her a reassuring smile. They carefully paced down the empty hallways, eyes wide open and ears sharp as ever.
"All units stand guard. We are in." Steve cued the others through his comm piece.
"We need to get to the main control room to disable the alarm. Worst case measure this wacko sets up a self-destruct system to this building."
"With our three boys taking down his bots outside I'm guessing we don't have much time til' he notices something's wrong."
"This way." Natasha pointed to the left when they met a junction. She got eyes on the main control room−most warehouses have the same ins and outs, and she's been to thousands of them, so it's not that hard to figure out which is where.
"Your three o'clock. Balcony. Hundred feet from us. I have eyes on him. The scientist." Steve whispered as quiet as possible.
"Too late. Spot him first." She reached the edge of the room and jumped to climb over the side pillars leading to level two of the warehouse.
"No way." Steve rolled his eyes and decided to follow her lead as he made sure he's still got her six.
"Yes way." She teased, jumping over the metal fence, landing on the hard metal floor. Steve caught up with her not long after.
She gracefully moved, almost look like she's swiftly dancing across the floor, and Steve just followed her as she entered the control room. Two guards were dazed in their place with red glints to their eyes. Steve smirked proudly.
"The Scarlet Witch she is." He complimented. "Good job Wanda."
Nat got right into it, messing around with the major computer panel in the control room, her fingers dancing on top of the keyboard like she knows exactly what she's doing, and Steve just watched as she disabled all the main security lock-downs and alarms. It took her about a couple minutes and she was done.
Steve opened the door to leave the room,
And that's when everything started going south.
Two men ran to his direction and he easily blocked their attacks, knocking them out, and Natasha covered for him as two other guards attacked them from another direction. But more, and more, and more started coming, and they were left with no choice but to:
"JUMP!" Steve pulled her to his arms, his shield aimed down to the floor to absorb the impact of their hard fall. Nat reacted and shot dead five people with firearms who almost shot them. When they finally landed, they quickly got into their feet and Steve trusted her to cover for his back while he got hers, and he screamed into his comms in the middle of the heavy fire-combat.
"ALL UNITS IN! I REPEAT, ALL UNITS IN!"
There were static noises− which was unusual, given Stark's hi-tech gears, but there was.
"CAP! WE ARE A BIT OVERWHELMED HERE" He heard Rhodey said on top of the static buzzes.
"WANDA!"Steve called. There was no answer. WANDA! He ran to the army of guards and easily knocked about seven of them within seconds. He ran back to Natasha's side, throwing his shield and knocking down a tall rack on the maze-like warehouse. There were shrieks and screams and unpleasant sounds of human bodies squashed to their deaths, and the knock down of a rack apparently triggered other racks to collapse also, like giant dominos, falling and breaking and setting lose colorful fogs and intoxicating smells into the air.
In the midst of the fog, Natasha squinted her eyes and quickly ran to the mist.
"Widow!" Steve called. "Darn it!" He swore and had no choice but to follow her. He hated when things get out of his control.
The fogs filled the air, making his head go dizzy and his stomach crumple up to an urge to vomit but he held it down inside him and kept himself together as he chased the Black Widow down the middle of the clouding chemical mist.
He finally reached and caught her arm, making her turn to him with an angry look.
"DO NOT DO THAT EVER AGAIN." His tone was rigid, straight up pissed. "It's dangerous."
"I almost had him, Rogers! Before you fucking stopped me!"
"Forget about the mission! This is dangerous. We're going home." He growled, anger suddenly getting into the best of him, just out of nowhere.
Natasha ignored him, and was about to run away when a blow knocked both of them off their feet. Blue mist fogged up the already colorful air, but this time, lying down on the ground, the captain and the spider knew they were up to a real challenge. Both quickly got up, coughing off the toxic air, their lungs feeling as if they were using the last supply of oxygen. They got ready into battle position, staring at the masked figure in front of them, just a few feet away, in the midst of the thickening fog.
The widow reached for her pistol to shoot, but another strike of fog bomb was thrown at her. She and the captain moved jointly to take the masked man down together. Their eyes are now watery and their minds hazy. Steve threw his shield at the man but he dodged it, resulting the shield to fly back to Steve's grip. Natasha snuck up behind the man and aimed a series of physical attacks, most of them failed miserably, others hit him but barely. He punched her in the face and threw her back, but it only made her angrier. Steve ran to him as Natasha jumped out of the way to let Steve bash his shield to the bastard's head, knocking the mask off him. He coughed as his pure air supply was replaced with the actual, toxic one that the two Avengers are inhaling−, when the man was cornered, maskless, he was already on the ground, Captain America and Black Widow towering over him. Fear was evident on his face,
And that was it.
That last resort attack that changed everything.
Steve was fast enough so that when the explosion hit them he had Natasha and himself under the cover of his shield, but the two of them were certainly flown far enough out of the place that they were standing on, knocked off to hit one of a few remaining upright shelf, breaking several bottles of liquid that sucked itself into their skin so fast it terrifies them; the pain was the worst. They landed on the ground, Steve with his heroic personality still managing to attempt to get them out of there, although after that liquid hit them it was obvious his brain went hazier than before, too hazy. Too hazy to think.
And they were suffocating too.
"Natasha..." He caressed her face, her pupils as dilated as his and her legs wobbly when she tried to stand up, their faces dirty from the explosion residue. "We...need...to...get...out..."
Natasha fell to the ground unconcious.
He fell right next to her,
But still manages to hold her hand in his before he fell unconcious, too.