Disclaimer: I do not own Iron Man 2, Thor, or the Avengers, along with the characters, the quotes, and really just everything associated with Marvel.
A/N: I don't reply to reviews enough, usually I just update and go. I'm going to start replying more often because I really do appreciate your feedback and I swear I'm not passive about them (who is, anyway? It's a god damn review.) This is a collective thank you for everyone who's taken time to review so far! :)
Oh and happy New Years (Eve) !
Apologizing for any spelling/grammar mistakes beforehand.
Hope you all like, review/favorite if you want!
"What the hell are you all doing now?"
Natasha continued to search through Selvig's belongings, referencing to the red dots of interest on Clint's tablet that indicated signs of radio activity. So far she had uncovered a flip phone, an iPhone, a notebook computer, and two laptops in Selvig's quarters. Clint had joked that the scientist planned on opening his own shop with the amount of electronics he kept in his seventy square feet space.
"Contact outside the facility is prohibited as long as you're working in P.E.G.A.S.U.S," Clint informed, and took the electronics from Natasha. He stored them in the safe they brought and handed a S.H.I.E.L.D laptop to Selvig. "This should suffice for your research."
"But all my data's in the other laptop, which, by the way, is not even mine." Selvig scrutinized the replacement. "You need to give that back to Jane Foster."
"Nothing's leaving this place. We've already filtered and transferred all necessary information for your work. Relax, doctor."
"Are we all clear?" Natasha asked Clint.
Clint did a final scan of the room. "Yup."
"They always send you in for the big cases, huh, miss Romanoff?" Selvig asked.
"Standing guard over a cube doesn't require my specialties, Dr. Selvig. They made a mistake sending me here. Can't even stretch in this mole run without pumping into the machinery."
"Not just any cube. You pop up all over the place. You're someone big."
Damn right I'm someone big. "I'm here because Coulson is." Natasha leaned against the side of the wall and hoped Selvig would take the hint and quit jabbering.
"Well, your friend there then?" He pointed at Clint. "He here 'cause of Coulson too?"
"If nothing else, doctor, we'll be going."
Selvig didn't reply. They grabbed the chance and took off. After locking away the safe, Coulson called them to "show you S.H.I.E.L.D's babies." He led them through a network of halls lit by dim, fluorescent bulbs. Everything save the tech was bare concrete and steel beams. Fury, or whoever else who school-glued this place together, couldn't have been tighter with the budget and upgrading the decor to compliment the grandeur of the project.
Natasha's life was turning out to be one disappointment after another.
Coulson ushered away the technicians huddled around rows of benches— similar in arrangement to Dunstan's hideout in Crete— and spread his arms out in front of his agents. "The fruit of our efforts, Barton, Romanoff. These are the real deals."
"They're prototypes, Coulson," Natasha said, unimpressed. "This one's still a plastic model. Look— they missed a spot with the paint." She picked up and shook the lightweight imitation at him.
"Put that back down." Coulson tensed.
"Does nothing faze you anymore, Natasha?" Clint inspected one of the bulkier designs. "I think this is all quite brilliant, considering they had what, a month to get this far."
"This far won't get us anywhere in an attack," she said.
"It'll get us somewhere, I'll assure you." Coulson lifted a machine gun from the bench behind them. Jet black with an eerie glow inside the barrel. It looked like genuine material, too. "This is the first of the Ambassador series shipped in from the Helicarrier's Wishbone lab last week. They sent it in for the trial runs, because, well, if the project becomes compromised, there's no chance of it damaging the mother lode."
Natasha shrugged. At least they weren't all like Dunstan's laser toys. Otherwise this entire agency would plunge straight to hell in future extraterrestrial invasions.
"Where's that Revenge gun you kept talking about?" Clint intercepted.
Coulson went off to fetch it, and not without giving Clint a look that told him he knew what he was doing.
"I don't get it. Why are you two tearing each other up?" Clint asked as soon as Coulson turned.
"I'm just speaking my mind as usual." Natasha rolled her eyes up.
"As usual? You don't say a thing unless it did to help your understanding."
"You want that now? Want me to talk for you when you feel like listening and clamp me shut when you get tired?"
"You know that's not what I mean."
They glared at each other. The slow, steady breaths he exhaled skimmed the tip of her nose, then left when he walked away. Clint receive the gun Coulson held out, rotating it while he took in every inch of its gray coating. Then they began pointing and tapping various parts of its body, talking the entire time.
"...Telepathic technology, really." Coulson explained, as she, with qualm, stood beside them. "The fire energy is activated through the user's mind rather than the actual trigger. We've built headgear to communicate with the forces inside, since humans obviously aren't of the same design as Asgardians and transmission errors are prone to occur."
"Basically, it's a living entity," Clint said. He offered her the gun, but she declined with her hands behind her back.
"In a sense, yes," Coulson said.
Clint nodded. "This one's tested and good to go?"
"They're getting to the trials. We move all qualified equipment back to the Helicarrier."
"Good thing, too. This place looks like it's gonna blow anytime," Natasha grumbled. Consciousness of what she had just said immediately hit. What did Sheerin do, loosen her jaw muscles?
Clint pretended to not hear her. Coulson gave her a long, hard look, then took Revenge from Clint, who couldn't even look at her now.
Coulson handed Revenge to the engineers still waiting outside, and led his group through the tunnels, where they emerged on a suspended walkway that protruded from the top of an immense, domed chamber. A spiral of stairs wound down from where they stood to the floor of the room, eighty feet down. Coulson descended, shoes clicking a hollow sound against the steps. Natasha bit back a remark on S.H.I.E.L.D's inability to install elevators for the place.
The closer they came to the bottom, the more prominent a mechanical buzz became at the back of her skull. It wasn't like the hum of a jet, loud and invasive against her eardrums, it felt like it came from inside of her. Another load for her already hurting head.
Coulson pivoted towards the far end of the chamber, where a small circular machine glowed blue in the center. Compared to the liveliness of the rest of the facility, this room had a population of under twenty. He led them to the centerpiece machine—a blue cube, the Tesseract, as she had predicted and confirmed upon a closer look, was fitted into its heart. Her ears rang louder.
"This thing—the machine around the Tesseract—that's not just for harvesting energy, is it?" She asked Coulson.
"That's its only job. It records energy readings, provides-"
"I'm not talking about that. That amount of energy, released at such speeds and amounts and fueling so many parts of a massive operation 'round the clock. All from that little cube? You're not tapping the cube's energy."
"No, we're not," Coulson echoed, somewhat reluctantly.
"And it's not exactly hard figuring out where you're tapping the energy from. What's the catch, Coulson? What's happening on the other side that allures S.H.I.E.L.D so much to keep thousands here despite the risks you mentioned?"
"Romanoff, it's not what you think," Coulson said. "Yes, the power's not directly from the Tesseract itself. It's from outer s—"
"I hope this project stays true to its blueprints."
"Listen, listen. What we can unlock with the Tesseract—it does extend beyond energy. But from what we've gathered, any tinkering in that direction will destabilize the energy balance between both dimensions. The entire facility would sink."
Was that S.H.I.E.L.D's only hinderance for not taking advantage and going farther? Surely they wouldn't think of nosing into the very thing that had trampled New Mexico bare weeks ago. Natasha eyed the Tesseract.
"Good. 'Cause if I find out Fury's planning something risky I'll sink this place before what he does can."
"We record all conversations, Romanoff."
"What does it matter?"
"Task lists are back in your quarters, you'll refer to those everyday until we set up your permanent hours." Coulson's abrupt dismissal was cold and sharp. The word "permanent" made Natasha's head roar, and she just about opened her mouth again when Clint yanked her away.
"Don't ever do that again." Once back on top, he backed her against the stairs and jammed his fist against the railing. Natasha felt the steel pressed into her back vibrate through her suit. His severity disintegrated what little twisted satisfaction she reaped from her outburst and she managed a faint shake of her head.
"Don't ever go against Coulson like that. Don't even think about it." Clint jerked the railing and made it squeak, but her attention was slipping. The buzzing in that chamber scrambled her thoughts.
"Can't you hear that noise?" She resisted rubbing her temples with her hand and asked.
Clint's expression changed so fast she wondered if she'd slapped him right then and forgot. He stopped snapping at her and prodded her into the elevator, then somehow got her into a sickroom in record time despite this being his first day on the premises.
He insisted on a cold compress over her forehead and stayed with her as she tried to figure out if she did slap him or not, then went away for a while before fetching her to the loading dock, where they watched the parties of sedans and trucks unload and reload shipments from a suspended supervision platform.
"You know I didn't mean anything I told Coulson," she said, and locked his fingers in hers.
"You did. And that's ok." Clint brushed his thumb against the heel of her palm. "Just keep them to yourself, Natasha."
She fell silent, disliking the way he poked through her lies like plastic wrap.
"He's trying to make up to you," Clint said.
Natasha'd figured as much. But the idea of Coulson gushing S.H.I.E.L.D's secrets in a burst of sentimentality still sounded surreal. "I don't need him telling me things because he pities my ignorance," she said. Her hand was getting clammy, but Clint held on tighter when she tried to pull away.
"You asked him, remember? You asked him what S.H.I.E.L.D's hiding."
"That didn't mean he had to tell me. He's not supposed to."
"You're a hypocrite, Natasha."
Again, he was right.
"Well, I don't care anymore." She shrugged. "He can keep his preaching to himself. Fury's a fool for spreading S.H.I.E.L.D's efforts so thin over a mile of problems."
She felt Clint's nails dig into the back of her hand for that tiny sting in her remark.
…
Dismissed from guard duty for a twenty-minute break, they claimed one of the vacant cars in the dock and drove out into the open grounds. The facility sank into the depths of a plateau, with the above-ground divisions perching on top. The tunnel they drove through brought them out to the base of the plateau, where cargo jets ran errands dropping off supplies by parachute before resuming their route to their final destinations.
The land here had suffered something like anger. Tire tracks from trucks the size of small apartments raked the earth like a fork scored across a table. The dirt, gray and yellow and dotted with black where gasoline had dripped, distanced this man-made island from the green relief a mere half a mile away more so than if it was concrete or asphalt. The bare, ravaged earth discouraged elation.
Natasha gave up the right to the steering wheel without conflict. She had noticed Clint's lingering gaze on it when she checked out the car keys, and plus, he had more conscience than two of her combined with her "minor side effect" acting up in galling waves.
An electric perimeter penned in the compound. Clint drove up to its edge and got out, looking past the fence and into the trees. He's had his scrunched up, thinking face on for several hours now. The entirety of their watch over the loading dock they had not talked. Natasha had spent that time figuring out a pattern to her headaches and he had just stood there.
She went around the car to him and wrapped her arm along the length of his. The surprised stiffening of his muscles under her clutch made her reevaluate her action, but she dismissed the risk of extra security along the perimeter in a rash surge of abandon. Who would care if they saw, anyway? And if Coulson got away with it, why couldn't they? She doubted there was a rule against this in the first place.
Natasha felt herself rock on her heels, side to side, shifting her weight from foot to foot and that told her they'd stood here for much more than twenty minutes. Or maybe she just felt restless. Maybe a small part of her expected something more from him while they were out here alone, or enough so, with both her arms around his now and his favorite kind of weather overhead. Blue underlay with the same pattern of tire tracks reflected in the clouds; like the ground underfoot except better. Clint told her once they were called cirrocumulus clouds or some other name that she never bothered to remember.
Natasha wondered if he saw the clouds yet from the way he trained his eyes on the trees instead. His inattentiveness began to rouse impatience in her touch, and she tightened her loop around his arm, turned so she came between him and the electric fence and pushed him backward a little.
Clint diverged his attention to her. "Tasha," he said. Not a question but mere acknowledgment.
She dropped her arms to hang by her side, then, on second thought, returned one of them to the curve of his jaw. Somehow the need to speak turned against her with a clatter of her teeth and she bit the inside of her lip by accident. Hard enough that when she skipped her tongue over the swelling rip a few seconds later she could taste it.
Natasha skidded her thumb over his chapped bottom lip. A bit of flaking skin raked across her finger as she did so and she licked her own lips to assess their condition, her mental exhaustion too oppressive for her to flag that action as ill-timed and uncalled for.
Clint must have had a gear loose in his head, too, because instead of settling for an embrace, he lunged into her and clutched her face in his hands, swatting her own from his cheek in the process, and kissed the corner of her mouth. All Natasha thought about was how he could have pushed her into the electric fence with the force he had rammed into her body. He followed through and pressed his lips flush against hers, warm and softening to the moisture in her mouth. Slow. Something told her that the cameras would open their eyes as she closed hers, and she'd see what she felt now on film sooner or later.
Clint pulled back a little when he tasted blood. Natasha seized his bottom lip to keep him on her, sacrificing an embarrassing sound that made her hope they didn't record audio. She knew she was thinking too much. After skimming her vacant hands over his sides, she settled them on his hips. Her thoughts refocused, she became aware of the pounding in her chest; her heart like two slabs of rock grinding in opposite directions and catching, jerking a pang through her body every time the friction gave. She lifted her chest from his so he wouldn't feel the thrashing there, but it only spurred the ache on.
Years upon years worth of billionaires and politicians, alley boys and arms dealers, she had kissed with nothing more than calculation as an incentive. This one was for herself. The only kind of currency she would get paid for this kiss was his air cutting into her lungs and his heat bleeding into her skin. The only payment she could claim as her own without certification.
The languid pace they maintained broke into fragmented, feathery touches, and the taste of him became but a memory as their attention migrated to cheekbones, jaws, anywhere their lips could get to. Clint lowered his hands to around her waist and kissed his body to hers.
Natasha lifted her lips from his skin. "Why did you do that?"
He cocked his head and squinted. She gave him a quick peck on the mouth to restate the question.
Clint took a long time to answer. Sharing her wariness about potential electrocution if they took an unlucky step in her direction, he backed them the other way and leaned against the bumper of the car, holding onto her the entire time. He dipped down to rest his cheek on her chest, on the beating place she had tried to hide from him earlier. Natasha moved her hands up to cradle his head and run her fingers through his hair, all thorns and bristles and brand-new.
"Why do you keep jeopardizing your place in S.H.I.E.L.D?" Clint asked.