Music Note: To hear the music for this scene, go to YouTube and search for "Diana Damrau as Queen of the Night II" (the singing starts at about 2:10).


"Are you sure we're not listening to a couple cats humping in the alley?" Hawk whispered with a small smirk.

Widow kept her eyes focused on the stage, not letting them rise to the upper-tier box where Hawkeye had resettled himself. The main floor was ringed by several tiers of balcony seats and private boxes. One had been reserved by S.H.I.E.L.D., so the unappreciative wretch had one of the best spots in the house. Her 'date' had initially proposed something similar for them, but she'd persuaded the ignorant man that the acoustics (and the sightlines, which she was more interested in) were better on the main floor. Eager to please, or more likely eager to get into her panties, he'd complied. People might be surprised to learn that she actually enjoyed opera. The art went hand in hand with her ballet training and reminded her of things that were good about her homeland - there were a few things she remembered fondly, assuming they were true memories. Even if they weren't real, maybe the fact that they were happy was enough. Tonight she was having a tougher time.

Tony was bored, but he knew if he pulled out his handheld, Pepper would burn him dead with a single laser-stare, then berate his smoking corpse all the way back to the hotel. He'd made a promise, which he had to keep after breaking so many others. She deserved it. And yet, he felt a thread of resentment and irritation growing in him, especially as the woman on the stage hit the kind of note that only dogs should be able to hear. What was that? He fidgeted and Pepper shot him a side-eye glance. Burn! But that noise... it almost felt like a tickle at the back of his throat. Who was she to tell him what to do? Even if she was the CEO, he was the Stark in Stark Enterprises, right?

The crowd was getting edgy; Widow could feel it. There was a faint hum in her earpiece now, some kind of electronic interference. S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued coms were supposed to be insulated against that. She wanted to ask Coulson what the hell was wrong with their gear, and to tell Hawkeye to keep his smartassery to himself. Her job was difficult enough without his juvenile, testosterone-fueled commentary. Bottom line, she was tired of his mouth tonight. Why did she even need him anyway?

Pepper shot Tony another annoyed look. His foot was tapping the floor, but not in time to the music, and his fingers were drumming their shared armrest. "Stop it," she hissed, resentment from every past incident of inconsiderate selfishness snowballing into a sizable ball of rage. Was one evening of normal life really so much to ask?

The short hairs along the back of Hawkeye's neck were standing up, like someone was running nails down a chalkboard. He felt it in his teeth and in his gut. It made his skin itch, whatever it was. He was no stranger to discomfort, but this was something more. She was a perfect target, the woman on the stage. One arrow, quickly and quietly, and it would all stop. He fingered the taut string of his bow. No one would thank him; no one ever thanked him for what he did. They all thought he was their bitch, their trained monkey, didn't they?

The breast pocket of Tony's jacket vibrated insistently, the bzz-bzz-bzz drawing his attention, and his movement drawing Pepper's. The man inside the jacket was nearly vibrating with his need to see what was causing it. Finally, he just had to. The transparent screen of his handheld was filled with a complex, multicolored spectrogram, which shifted almost hypnotically as he watched. He pressed a flashing virtual button at the bottom of the screen and held the device to his ear.

"Sir," intoned JARVIS, with the subtle intensity that signaled something of priority happening in the AI's point of view. "I have detected unusual wavefront frequencies at your location, in the range from twenty to one hundred kilohertz as well as twenty to one-hundred megahertz. The patterns appear to be of a nonrandom nature. I am analyzing them now, but I anticipate they will take some time-"

The rest of JARVIS's message went unheard as Pepper literally slapped the handheld out of Tony's grasp. It bounced off his thigh and onto the floor. He gaped at her open-mouthed in his astonishment, finding himself at a complete loss for words for one of the few times in his life.

Black Widow missed this unusual interaction between Tony Stark and his girlfriend because, at the same time, her attention was drawn by a woman across the aisle to her left. The elegant, forty-something matron, dressed in meticulously-draped red velvet and diamonds, rose to her feet and walked several rows back. When she arrived, she reached into her beaded evening bag and withdrew a tiny pistol, which she used to shoot a middle-aged gentleman and the blonde seated beside him.

After that, as if the gunshot had come from a starter's pistol, all hell broke loose...