Yes. Another chapter. Oh yeah. Sorry it's taken a couple of days.
When the Black Widow wakes, she is in a padded cell. Alone. She assesses her situation carefully; they took her weapons, all of them, and her belts, too. There are no accessories in the room, and she is lying on the floor. She stands up, bare feet moving silently (they took her boots, too) and clears the room of every bug they tried to hide. She sets the bugs onto the floors, drops cross legged next to them, and speaks into the listening tools.
"I am awake. Thank you for the warm welcome."
She loves the freedom of being able to use sarcasm without being punished for it. It's not her style. Yet.
Exactly 36 seconds after she had said hello, 24 armed S.H.I.E.L.D. guards arrive at her door, all holding her at gunpoint. It's a bit boring. "Let me explain something to you," she says, rising from her sitting position with catlike grace. "The only reason you are not dead right now is that the infamous Hawkeye, Clint Barton of S.H.I.E.L.D, invited me to join you. So take me to your leader."
The leader of the agents, a trim, fit woman whose brown hair is pulled up into a practical bun (the Widow likes her already) speaks. "You should not be making threats in your position, Widow," she says.
The redhead shrugs. "Have it your way. However this goes, though, I was promised an audience with Director Fury. I hope I am correct in assuming Americans do not go back on their word," (a lie, of course. She has been betrayed by too many Americans to trust them on sight).
The woman - her tag reads "Maria Hill"- reaches forward and unlocks the door. Another agent steps in and holds handcuffs out to the Widow. Sighing, the assassin turns, letting her hands be cuffed behind her back.
The guards walk her all the way to a nice, glass-windowed office. Then they frogmarch her in and set her down on a chair, handcuffing her ankles to to the legs. They all walk out, save Hill. "The Director will be with you in a moment," the agent says. Then she, too, leaves the Black Widow.
The killer can't help but shake her head at their idiocy. Fury is pulling a power tactic, a dominance play that says 'I can make you wait for me.' She easily rotates her arms over her head and retracts her wrist muscles, pulling out of her cuffs. Then she fashions a lockpick out of a paperclip resting on the desk in front of her and picks the locks on her ankle cuffs.
When Nick Fury walks in, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top priority target is sitting in his chair, at his desk, legs crossed and fingers typing. He curses like a sailor when he sees that she has hacked the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. database and is flipping through agent profiles. She stops on one Agent Barton, leans back, and studies the screen.
"Hello, Director," she says softly, going back to typing. The next file she pulls up is a target profile. Her own.
The Black Widow. It says. Level 10 priority. Eliminate on sight. The words are joined by a blurry picture of a woman with red hair. It's hard to tell whether it is even the woman who sits in front of Fury.
She chuckles. "That's the best you can do? Then again, it's me."
Fury ignores the jab. He comes back with a lame attempt at authority. "Get out of my seat."
She chuckles again, but obeys, pulling herself off of the leather and stretching luxuriously. She jumps, uses her hands to flip over Fury's desk, and lands on the opposite seat, arms and legs folding neatly into place. Fury watches her, furious, and takes his seat. In a tone sharper than usual, he calls out to the man whose fault this haughty assassin is. "Clint."
The archer opens the door and slides in like a wounded puppy. Apparently, he'd already been reprimanded.
"Normally, I would have you terminated on sight," Fury tells her. "But this is not a normal circumstance."
He hesitates, and she reads it in his eyes. Instantly, she is up from her seat and shoving Clint in the chest, yelling at him in Russian. "Вы показали ему бухгалтерскую книгу ! Идиот!" (You showed him my ledger! Idiot!) Clint holds his hands up, backing away.
"I had to, Widow! You gotta understand, otherwise they were gonna kill you," he begs. Still furious, she plops down onto the chair facing Fury's desk.
Clint can't help but notice her mood swings and how out of character they are for the assassin he first met. He reaches out to her, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder.
Instantly, she flips him over her shoulder onto Fury's desk and leaps on top of him, knocking the air out of his lungs. She plants her elbow into his throat. He can't help but notice, as he gasps for breath, that her eyes are hard and merciless. Two seconds later, however, she releases him, recoiling like she's afraid of herself.
Fury is yelling into a phone.
Her eyes harden, but this time, into the face that Clint remembers, and she falls back into a corner of Fury's office. Then her eyes go wild. She grasps her head, rocking back and forth. "Они у меня в голове . Получить их. Получить их, Клинт !" (They are in my head. Get them out. Get them out, Clint!) she says.
He comes closer to her, watching her carefully. She hisses at him through her teeth, then gets her message across, more calmly than he would have thought possible.
"Clint," she says, "they are hacking into my mind."
He understands and starts running, knowing exactly where he's going. He dashes through doorways and hallways until he reaches the armory. He sprints full throttle into the room, slamming to a halt, and shuffles through a drawer until he finds what he wants. He races back, pushing himself.
By the time he gets back, she is yelling incoherently in Russian, grasping her head between her hands, keeled over on the floor. Not wasting any time, he sets off the tiny EMP, not sure if it will do good or harm.
She shakes uncontrollably for a few more seconds before her body starts to stop moving. She slowly stabilizes, her face taking on the cold demeanor of an assassin once more. Soon she is standing up, hands behind her back. "I'm sorry you had to see that," she says quietly.
"Widow? What was that?" Clint asks, moving towards her. She pushes him away, closes her eyes, and appears to focus intensely. Clint shrugs and moves to stand by Fury, who has stopped talking into his phone and is now watching the Black Widow intensely.
In about a minute, she opens her eyes, regaining her regal composition. "Agent Barton, Director Fury," she says. "I'm afraid you just witnessed the Red Room discovering I have switched sides. I believe I have neutralized the chip they implanted into my head for this reason. If I was behaving erratically, it was because the chip was attempting to override my control of my body. It would be wise to remove the chip within five hours."
Both of the men stare at the woman.
"And Clint?" the Black Widow adds, "call me Natasha."
Good? Bad? Constructive criticism is welcome. I'll be getting to more exciting stuff soon.