Somewhere in LA
Natasha slid her body through a space between yet more boxes and the warehouse shelf above it to the next aisle over and kept moving. She grinned at the curses in Spanish and men yelling in pain and anger, their voices echoing in the large cavernous warehouse around her.
Pepper had told her once that the sound of men's fury makes her calm. That's something coming from a woman who was the CEO of Stark Industries, one of the top technological companies - Tony Stark would say THE top company of course - in the world. She made a day's work out of creating jobs, herding Tony, and making men in suits furious on a daily basis.
Furious men didn't make Natasha Romanoff calm however - it made her happy.
The red head ducked behind a crated refrigerating unit for one of her pursuers to pass before reaching out and zapping him in the neck with stunner built into her armored bracer.
Maria Hill, she mused as she continued on. Maria Hill was an even more entertaining drinking partner than Pepper Potts. They had had drinks the last time Natasha was in town. She'd been a great drunk. Very giggly. She had been surprised Maria had accepted the offer of drinks actually. It had only taken a little over a year. The ex-assassin had asked numerous times - enough that she had started to feel a bit like a stalker - but Hill had always told her that fraternization would unprofessional. And one of the very first things Natasha had learned about Agent Maria Hill and her job at SHIELD was that Hill was very professional about her work relationships. She rarely made friends. Instead, she made... well, underlings. She had soared up the promotional ladder so fast that it didn't pay to get too friendly with a co-worker, because she was soon a higher rank than them in the organizational tree.
Except for Natasha. She refused to not be friends with the woman. Granted it had taken time...
The spy brought her thoughts back to the men chasing after the shadows around her and back to their propensity for crankiness. And the current situation that she had found herself in. Alone in a warehouse full of small time crooks who happened to possess lots of weapons. Crooks that were furious - and shooting at her - who were more than likely to miss and make tactical mistakes. And getting people to make mistakes - ie... furious - was a special ability of hers. Or so she had been told.
Clint Barton had a habit of lying to her to try and get her annoyed though, so she couldn't believe half - OK, less than five percent maybe - of anything he told her. She thought she was a pretty nice person, if she could say so herself.
They were searching for her but she was not about to be spotted by men who hadn't been able to properly put up a security system. Of course, when their boss Felipe Romero had stumbled upon her and she'd had no choice but to take him out - his demise not being as quiet as she's prefer due to his atrocious timing - it had ruffled a feather or two of his guards and now they were... attempting to search for her. The fact that they were spooked and shooting at shadows is what made the operation actually dangerous. And a bit fun.
"Case in point..." she muttered almost silently to herself as an errant gun round hit a metal container above her. Natasha slid around a corner and made for the stairs going back up to the warehouse office. It overlooked the building's once very pristine and organized contents. Half of those contents were now in huge piles as Natasha had arranged for some of the huge warehouse shelves to collapse behind her. Shell casings littered the aisles and bullet holes the cargo on the other half of the shelves still standing, a product of furious South American gangsters who had shot at each other, a shadow or two, and falling containers when they thought they were shooting instead at Romero's phantom killer.
"Plan D," she muttered over the comm system.
"What?! No! Widow you are not... Stick with Plan Alpha!" a voice squeaked in her ear.
She fervently hoped that next time S.H.I.E.L.D. Operations would give her a partner whose voice had passed the prepubescent level. Natasha hated when it was her turn to ride herd and take point on a training mission for raw recruits. It was almost insulting.
"I'm the agent. You're the backup... supposedly. I know what needs to happen on the spot so that, one: I can get out of here without more holes then what I..."
Natasha's left arm went up and she shot a disk out to the man who popped out of the office door before the spy could open it. Blue arcs of electricity danced over him as the stundisk hit him on the chest and he did a satisfying little dance before his eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor. She dove over him and let her eyes do a quick sweep of the room.
Satisfied, she made for the louver windows that looked over the parking lot only thirty feet below and continued her conversation as she lithely made her way out one of the windows. Magnetizing her boots and gloves with a quick press to a button on her belt, the Black Widow started scaling the wall to the roof.
"...as I was saying. I'm the agent. You're not. Plan D. Do it. NOW. Pickup in 4... approximately. And bring me a towel or two." Natasha finished and cut off the comm. Not necessarily proper procedure - especially during an op - but he could still hear her. She just couldn't hear him unless he actually overrode the circuit. And since he was new - or was acting like it - she doubted he knew how.
The sounds of police and fire rescue vehicles could be heard within a minute of her cutting her communications - a minute she'd spent covering the full length of the warehouse's roof and clambering down to the back end and then over the fence.
Of course, the situation she found herself in now was precisely why this plan was Delta and not the Alpha exit plan. Even Beta and Charlie would have been preferable but that was before Romero's rude and fatal disruption.
Nothing like a high water stage L.A. river with the concrete sides of the canal having no natural way to get out at this section. Disgust washed through her, having a good idea about how clean the L.A. river wasn't. She was up on her shots, so really there was no excuse.
Except that it was water.
That much water was unnatural in the redhead's thinking. And cold. Natasha had considered a few times that she must have been a cat in a past life or two.
She grimaced and dove into the L.A. river, popping up downstream and then going back under when she spotted one or two figures with guns looking over the edge where they thought she might have gone.
Natasha didn't have to go too far downstream despite her worry about exiting up the sides of the canal before she got a chance to clamber out of the moderate flow and haul herself up the sides of the concrete sides. The sirens were now closer to where she'd gone into the water, covering her escape since she knew they'd been called to the warehouse by an anonymous tip that there had been a mass gang shooting. Chaos made for a decent way to cover her tracks.
And it was fun. Even if she hadn't been able to stay and watch... and had to take a swim.
The red head knew she looked like a drowned cat as she climbed the chain-link fence up and around to the overpass. After a quick scan, she was pleased to see no emergency vehicles and just normal traffic on this street.
"You know, Nat... if you wanted to hit the beach and the water, you're a bit East of the Pacific," the familiar voice said, coming over the comm.
Thank goodness for comm's waterproofing, she thought as her lips twitched in response.
"Hawkeye? Did you come all this way to bring me my bikini?"
A black sedan slipped around the corner and headed towards her on the side of the road. Natasha's hand moved slowly down and prepared to grasp a baton, then found it's way to casually lay on her now cocked hip as she glimpsed the driver through the tinted windows. She smirked at Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, through the lowering passenger side window, then popped open the door and sat down with a squelch.
"You don't wear bikinis, remember?" he replied and pulled away from the curb, checking for any incoming traffic or cars behind him.
"Did you bring me a towel at least? I asked that teenager in disguise as an agent for towels," Natasha quipped as she scanned the side-view mirror to see if they had a tail.
"Be nice. They can't all be as ancient as you. Back seat," Clint muttered as he casually did a u-turn.
Natasha reached back to the duffle bag and found more than just a couple of thick towels had been packed for her.
Raising an eyebrow, Natasha started drying her drenched hair. She seriously considered also removing her tactical suit since her spare had been put in the bag as well, but she didn't want to distract Clint. Her eyes scanned her co-worker's face.
It was highly unusual for Clint to be in on a operation without her knowing ahead of time. Planned? Coincidence? Another mission?
The muscles around Natasha's green eyes twitched minutely.
"What happened?" she demanded suspiciously.
"Nat..."
"No 'Nat', Clint. Tell me," Natasha repeated. "What's going on?"
"Just give me a minute. We're close to the evac point."
Natasha's suspicions grew as she noticed he wouldn't meet her eyes and his strong hands clenched rhythmically on the steering wheel. She glimpsed him running the callous on his right hand, the one that he drew his bowstring with, over again and again in a circle on the wheel.
Clint had a lot of tells, which is why she always won against him at poker, and that rubbing of his callous was one of them.
Natasha kept silent and watched him, idly drying her hair and patting down her uniform, trying to get some of river water out of it. After a few moments, Clint pulled into an underground garage and grabbed the duffle bag before getting out.
Quickly exiting the sedan, she caught up with Clint snagging his arm to bring him to a halt to stop him from opening the sliding van door of the team's black van. She ignored the young operations agent peering out of the passenger window and turned Hawkeye around to look at her.
"Clint..." Something like fear colored the words, something rare and unfeigned. Green eyes pierced his own blue as her fingers dug into the muscle on his biceps.
Hawkeye's gaze lowered momentarily, then after he look an unusually deep breath, he raised it back up and met Natasha's resolutely. "It was last minute. Maria was needed on an op..."
"She just got promoted to Assistant Director. Maria doesn't need to go in the field anymore!" Natasha hissed in disbelief.
"Fury said she was needed, since she had been Ops before on the team that had been tracking... In Eastern Europe, there was a shipment of high powered weapons of a kind S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't seen before and far more dangerous than even Hammertech's military hardware crap. Almost on par with Stark's Ironman tech. Far better than the weapons he built for the Pentagon before he got out of the weapons manufacturing game," Clint stopped himself and focused on what he knew Natasha wanted. "The EAST division had finally tracked a shipment that was being sent by rail on it's way to Russia."
Hawkeye looked his friend in the eye and continued on, with a softer voice. "She wasn't supposed to have to actually get on the train but the Quinjet was spotted... their cover was blown. Hill made the call to evacuate to the train after they used one of the weapons and the Quinjet was going down. She made the call. I don't have all the info after that... but it went wrong. Very wrong."
He turned and visible braced himself in case she hit him.
"I was ordered to come take over your op by Fury. He didn't want you to hear it in a communique while you were here... I told him, I'd come since I was on the West Coast..."
She interrupted him, ignoring the fact that Fury apparently knew about Natasha's feelings towards Hill. He knew. Of course he knew. He was Nick Fury. "Train?! Clint? 'Tchyo za ga`lima! Just tell me!"
"I'm trying, 'Tasha!" Clinton ran a hand through his hair in distress. "She's MIA... They were going over a river... really high up... on a bridge apparently. And she.. she fell... or was pushed. I honestly don't know but Fury insists to not upgrade her from MIA," he continued in what he thought was a reassuring tone. "But the only survivor of the team says she saw what happened and she assumes... Well. No one could handle a fall like that, Natasha. It was over a 700 feet."
"Did they search..." Natasha started to ask, clutching at him harder. She knew Fury wouldn't leave his Right Hand behind. "Of course they did. Of course. But... was there a river? Please, Clint..."
Clint nodded. "Plus it's spring thaw in Europe, which means deeper waters. It's possible, Nat. But it's 700 feet... boulders... freezing temperatures..."
"No! No... she's strong! No!"
The Black Widow was a legend in every intelligence organization on the planet and in the S.H.I.E.L.D. community. Ice cold. A killer. An assassin. A mystery.
Those few of her fellow agents that found out who she was when she was on S.H.I.E.L.D. base or with a team always joked that she didn't have feelings except the manufactured kind. They laughed about it in locker rooms and the mess hall. They said she'd slept with so many men and women, even during her time at S.H.I.E.L.D. that Mata Hari would be jealous.
They didn't think of the Black Widow as human. That she heard the talk, she relied on it. She fed it and let them think she didn't know.
Because she knew the truth. She knew she had been compromised but not in the way that anyone knew.
Well anyone but Clint Barton and Fury. But not how deeply compromised.
Only Maria Hill knew how far down that rabbit hole she might have gone.
Natasha slumped down onto the cement with Clinton's arms automatically reaching out to catch her. She weighed nothing, as if within the last few seconds all of the bone and muscle inside her body had just disappeared. All of her strength gone. In reality the Black Widow was not a legend. Not a myth. She was nothing but a woman who believed she had just lost everything.
Clint opened an eye just far enough to sweep over the living room of the safe house, ignoring the snoring of the rookie agent that Natasha had had the misfortune to be paired with, and looked intently at the bedroom door his friend had sequestered herself behind. The plan was to stay in L.A. overnight and catch the scheduled S.H.I.E.L.D. flight out to New York in the morning. Natasha had not approved, but Clint had argued that the Operations Center at the Triskelion would be the best place right now. The fact was that all the information about the Op and the subsequent search and rescue would be at that centralized location.
Plus Fury would be there for Natasha to yell at. Or attempt to kill. Clint was betting on at least one half-hearted attempt. Natasha liked Nick Fury too much to really make a go of it.
Maria wouldn't have approved. Clint was sure of that.
He knew about Natasha and Maria Hill. The way they had danced around each other ever since the day he'd brought in a newly recruited ex-KGB assassin and the S.H.I.E.L.D. analyst who had wrote the book on the Black Widow - as much as one could write a book on a ghost - had been set together in a room for a legendary debrief. Legendary because Natasha had gone through five agents before Hill and sent them back packing out of the room with nothing for the hours and hours of questioning to show for it. The then just Agent Maria Hill had gone in an after ten minutes of innocuous conversation before finally asking the question Natasha had been waiting for.
"What is it that you want? Not what you think I want to hear or what anyone behind that glass wants to hear... but you."
Clint had looked over the footage of that first meeting between the two and he had seen the minut signs - almost invisible - signs of surprise on the red-head's face. Of course, they were probably faked but she had answered. Not smirked or ignored Hill like the other agents had been. He could see the sincerity on Hill's face and perhaps... perhaps that was the reason why the Black Widow had finally answered a question.
And that had been the beginning. Hill had piqued Natasha's interest. It might have been like a spider with a meal, at first... but days of debriefing, weeks of de-programming, more weeks of training with Clint, and then months of Hawkeye and Black Widow partnering on missions and becoming close as only agents can - all platonic thank you very much. Clint had gotten to know Black Widow pretty well he thought, and he knew that whenever the two women saw each other, that Natasha wasn't playing with her food. That was for other people. Agents. Marks. It didn't matter. They got the Black Widow. Maria got... somebody else.
And Maria... well, Hill was a fortress to all the other agents but she wasn't as good at hiding her physical ticks as Natasha was and Clint was pretty good at spotting them after watching the two in close proximity. He looked forward to seeing Hill's cheeks color with just the faintest of blushes when Natasha came into the room. And his lips always twitched reflexively in sudden amusement whenever he saw the brunette's nostrils flare when the spy walked by her. Clint even had to repress a snort even when Hill had uncharacteristically stumbled over a word or two when Natasha had leaned in far too closer than what would be normal to ask a question.
Natasha hid it much better, of course. But oddly enough the Black Widow's training still seemed to go out the window when it came to associating with Maria Hill. Granted, the two rarely spoke much outside of professional conversations, but the clues were there for Clint to see whenever the two interacted in more personal moments. If he could call her reaction to Maria anything he would call it... smitten.
And no he would never had told Natasha that. He had just kept it all to himself with amusement.
Clint also knew that two of them hadn't moved too far...
He stopped his internal line-of-thought and frowned. Something had changed.
Silently getting from the couch, he made his way over to Natasha's bedroom door. Praying the doorknob wasn't one to squeak Clint turned the handle and then opened it just enough to peek through. Heart clenching at what he found, he still proceeded to press open the wood paneled door fully and take a more thorough but futile search around.
Natasha was gone. AWOL.
Fury was going to kill him.
