Disclaimer: I do not own Iron Man 2, Thor, the Black Widow Strikes comics, or the Avengers, along with the characters, the quotes, and everything else associated with Marvel.
A/N: Shhh... I know some of you are impatient, but Clintasha's not my only focus in this story. Maybe I should change the story's genre. (romance and friendship, maybe? idk) However this section of the story did flesh out more than I had anticipated by about two chapters. Hang in with me if you're agitated, I just want every step/scene to have their weight and worth :)
Apologizing for any spelling/grammar mistakes beforehand.
Hope you all like, review/favorite if you want!
Song Inspiration
"Prideless" - Natasha Kmeto.
Chapter 24
Anticipation took away some of the cold when Natasha leapt overboard. Instead of recovering to the surface, she dove deeper, pushing the water behind her and letting the yacht's roaring and the Black Sea's humming settle into her, calm her. A dark void met her when she opened her eyes. The sting of salt forced them shut and the thinning air in her lungs forced her to resurface.
After her moment of release Natasha synchronized her limbs and swam away.
It didn't take long for her to reach the vast rock piles banding land from sea. She hopped over the rocks on slippery shoes, her arms outstretched to balance. With the wind whipping her wet clothes a sharp chill racked her body over and over, and Natasha resisted folding her arms over her body, and not just because of the cold. Out here in the open, the pitch black closed in on her. The line between sky and ground blurred into one and it was like she hadn't at all left the water. She swept her eyes over the landscape and willed her ears to make out the slightest sounds, trying to search out a living thing as she neared the gritty path at the edge of the rocks.
Yellow city lights dotted the near horizon of buildings once she climbed to the top of the rock piles. The sky lifted with the dim glow, and the pungent sea air gave into the milder city smells of trees and damp sidewalks.
Natasha dove into a small woods and leaned against a tree trunk. Next move was to get out of Sochi and get in touch with Coulson, a seemingly impossible task with her looking like a wet dog, no forms of communication on hand and Klementiev still after her. She dug the microchip that had cost her her troubles from her jeans and held it up to the light. The inevitable tracker inside it meant that her pursuers would catch up with her sooner or later unless she found a way to disable it, or just destroy the whole chip. Wasn't the objective of her mission to interfere its exchange?
Natasha tucked it back into her pocket. If S.H.I.E.L.D fretted over a few brochures in an envelope, what chance did the microchip have against their examination? She could manage fine, tracker or not; a few tails on her track didn't bother her. What did bother her was Sofia. Although Natasha wanted to understand Sofia's strange, sudden shift from persuasion to malice, and most of all, why she had given her the clues to the StarkTech, she had no desire to see her again. She wanted to leave Sochi. Leave Russia. She wanted to return to S.H.I.E.L.D and see where she stood with them. She wanted to sort out all that Sofia had slammed into her perceptions in the past two days and digest it, break it down into something she could accept into her being. She wanted to get rid of her Collar and she wanted Clint. Natasha wanted hundreds of things that she couldn't accomplish while she shivered in the cluster of trees.
She scratched the stringy wet hair from her cheek and emerged from the shadows of the trees, then strode down the middle of the empty road in the most exposed and vulnerable way she could, the street lamps overhead revealing her to anyone who looked, and more importantly, the surveillance cameras. It was a wild gamble, but with every other variable in her life indeterminate, what did one more risk matter? With luck, Coulson would find these cameras' footage first and understand that she's good to go. Without luck, S.H.I.E.L.D members without a liking for her would obtain it and report her. If that happened, it wouldn't be a prospect she could twist and escape out of. Fury would be disappointed. Coulson would be disappointed. Clint would be beyond disappointed. Unless S.H.I.E.L.D decided otherwise she planned to stay. She had burrowed and tangled herself too deep into the earth of this agency to walk away unaffected, unfeeling to the fresh rips in those foolish, settled roots inside her that should have stayed shallow and never settled.
Natasha made it a few miles inland before trouble found her.
Midnight had passed into the lonelier, quieter early morning hours. She had switched to walking along the sidewalk to avoid the occasional cars that ran down the streets in this busier part of the city, where human life made themselves known through lit office windows and the throttle of engines. The soft squelch of her damp shoes, dwindling in volume with the distance she covered, wasn't enough to busy her mind even when added to the constant lookout that ran nonstop in her instincts. What was she doing, strolling around Sochi while three separate parties hunted for her simultaneously? Wasn't there a safer way of contacting Coulson? Not that she could conjure an alternative, Natasha hadn't a clue on nearby S.H.I.E.L.D quarters, or any in Russia at all. Their censorship of the country on her never proved more troublesome than it did now. There were other... alternative places she affiliated with in the past nearby, but no desire of visiting them came to her. Helplessness. No, that wasn't the word. Vulnerability.
As she ghosted down the streets, aimless and over-thinking, the trees' rustles grew frantic; an oddly shaped shadow of a street light threw across the sidewalk in a thick, dark mass. It was her. Only Sofia could compose in one that degree of uneasiness, eerie with the perfect hint of foreboding to sweat a regular person into dehydration.
She approached from a few houses in front of Natasha, opening and exiting someone's metal gate as if she owned the house and just came out for fresh air. Natasha stared hard and tried to decipher what Sofia wanted. An assassin who had attempted to kill and help her had more layers to her intentions than her surface emotions and gestures suggested. Natasha lowered a hand to her hip and brushed a finger over her jeans' pocket, feeling for the contours of the microchip.
"Impressive," Sofia said. "I thought I finished you."
"Then why bother leaving the envelope?"
"Never mind that. I need the shipment."
"What, you used me to get it for you?"
"I'm not that low." Sofia scoffed. "The ice rink was just a little game. You ought to thank me."
"For what?"
"For the distraction. Otherwise you'd be moving twice your current pace."
Natasha blinked and crossed her arms. "I can't tell if you're trying to kiss my ass or kiss your own."
"I killed Klementiev and eight of his associates who knew about the exchange, dropped them like dominoes one after the other right in the middle of the party; diverged their attention from you to me minutes after you jumped the ship. So yes, I'm actually kissing both our asses."
"Who are you working for, Sofia?"
"Who are you to ask, agent Romanoff?"
Natasha couldn't figure her out.
One moment Sofia's committing attempted murder on her, and the next she acted like her guardian angel, abiding by a truce between them that Natasha never recalled; treated her like a rival yet embraced her as one of her own without pause; and the cycle persisted, switching phases without warning until Sofia's unpredictability skyrocketed to the point where it became urgent for Natasha to rid herself from this hybrid of friend and foe.
"I don't know what the hell you're planning, Sofia, but I damn well want no part of it."
"Too late now."
That was it. Toleration ended here.
"I'm getting real sick of you." Natasha drew a switch blade from her belt. "Let's settle this."
"Settle what?" Sofia crooned, but she, too, slid a knife into her hand; lazily, her relaxed arm swayed the blade so that it glinted white, and she lashed out.
Then they were shadows. Spirits. Ghosts. Whizzing and whipping around each other. When they clashed their bodies seemed to pass through each other like mist. They were silhouettes save the knives they held; silent save the hiss as metal split air. The rhythm of their twists and slashes went together rather than against, the skeleton of their moves identical. The primal fundamentals encoded into their blood and bones were conceived and birthed in the same source, and it became clear that the Red Room's intricate fighting style made victory between their users impossible.
Their moves were basic yet swift, stripped to the simplest strike-and-duck. Hundreds of complex attack shook at Natasha's fingertips yet wouldn't unleash. All the techniques she learned beyond the Red Room froze. The cultural stealth of contract assassination fled; the bigger, bolder advances traditional to S.H.I.E.L.D dissipated. Only the raw basics from the Red Room clung on like a burr that she couldn't shake off.
Natasha's tight frown and plain moves echoed in Sofia. One minute passed, two; neither could bite their knives into more than a wisp of the other's hair. This couldn't last forever. Residential areas were one of the worst places to be out, even less for an open fight. If they kept fighting this way they'd drop exhausted before they nick each other.
Gathering a spurt of force, Natasha caught Sofia's wrist, wrenched it until she dropped the knife, and tripped her feet from beneath her. In a purebred S.H.I.E.L.D move she slammed Sofia onto a wooden fence and locked her in a full-body hold. Sofia's body pulsed and smouldered against hers.
The question that had troubled Natasha since reuniting with Sofia returned.
"Why did you and Valeria split?"
Sofia stared at her, really looked at her for the first time. Pinpricks studded Natasha's skin where Sofia jerked her gaze over; cheeks to eyes to nose to mouth.
"Why did you leave?" Sofia asked.
Natasha could say that S.H.I.E.L.D had dangled hr life before her and made her defect. She could generate uncountable excuses like lottery numbers but would never win. Never succeed in fooling Sofia, who would see past those surface reasons without fail; who had lost a sister; who now trembled, convinced that Natasha had left her old life for the same reason Valeria did. And who knew what Valeria had left for to mutate into the maniac Natasha saw in California.
What did Sofia see in her that she had seen in her own sister?
Perhaps there existed a subconscious motive that Natasha was blind to but Sofia saw all along. It wouldn't be a surprise at this point. Seemed like everyone knew more about Natasha than she did herself.
She didn't know what to say to Sofia.
Sofia's eyes glistened, reddened from her stubborn staring. A rim of wetness wobbled on her bottom lash line, and she held her chin higher.
"You fight the same." She tried a shaky smile.
"You too," Natasha said.
There was no clean way to end this now.
"Come back, Nell. Please." Sofia's voice cracked.
"No."
"Valeria left. You can't leave too."
"I've been gone for four years."
"And now you're going again."
"Yes."
Sofia quieted as if she was waiting for something.
Then it occurred to Natasha that she would never be able to leave the Red Room. For though she dressed herself with new names and titles and allies, she remained the same inside. The Room had seeped and soaked every bone in her body. In geographically leaving them behind she had but transported her identity across the Pacific; planted a foreign seedling in new soil and though her growth was the work of S.H.I.E.L.D, that growth was constrained, limited, shaped by the coding inside her. She hadn't shed her old self but only sprouted new personalities to match the climate. No matter how hard she tried and convinced herself that she had changed some part of her would always be the same.
"It's too late for my sister, but not for you," Sophia whispered. "I know it."
"No, you don't."
Keeping the siblings together bred attachment over time that could doom any operative, but twins were rare in the academy, and the advantages of delusion from two identical faces outweighed the consequences. So here Sofia stood today, clawing for companionship that no decent Red Room agent would want.
Not to say that Natasha herself was any better. She hadn't kept herself distanced and aloof either after joining S.H.I.E.L.D.
The longer they stood there, the faster the definition of enemy faded from Sofia. Bad. This was bad. Making further contact with her was the exact kind of thing Natasha should avoid.
Natasha removed her gun while still securing Sofia against the fence. She had two options. The safer, wiser one that she should take as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent was to rid herself of Sofia with bullets once and for all. The other was to fight it out and convince Sofia that she wanted nothing to do with her.
Sofia's watery stare widened when Natasha ground the gun muzzle into her stomach. The pulse on her wrist fluttered beneath Natasha's hand where she secured them above their heads against the fence. "Natalia..." Sofia thawed into a struggle, writhing to slip out of Natasha's hold.
"I warned you to leave me alone," Natasha said.
"I helped you on your mission!"
"You used me to finish yours, and now you're using that lie as a leverage to turn me against S.H.I.E.L.D."
"You really like them that much? They really mean that much to you?"
Sofia wilted. Her struggling subsided. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, as if to tentatively test her own reactions.
Natasha couldn't kill her.
Instead she lowered her gun from Sofia's stomach and aimed for her knee, the transition so swift that Sofia had no time to react before Natasha pulled the trigger.
Sofia buckled, letting out a gasp, and her weight began tugging where Natasha held her in place as her leg gave. Natasha released Sofia's hand from above her head and let her fall. Sofia's shot knee was forced to bend as she crumpled. She shuddered, but made no sound, staring at the darkening, growing patch on her pants.
Natasha returned her gun to its holster and brushed past Sofia, continuing her path down the street. Twice now she had met again a Vasilieva. For the first time she had shot one. Something inside her regretted that she had not done the same to Valeria; reverse the twins' positions so she wouldn't have had to do that to Sofia.
"Natasha..." Sofia called.
Natasha walked faster and turned at the next corner. From that point on she clung to shadows, moving more cautiously than before. When she had settled into a steady pace, her mind began to roam, and crippling Sofia seemed the worst decision she'd ever made. Knowing that there would be no sister to come for Sofia, what would happen if Klementiev's thugs found her immobile, bleeding away on a street? What were the chances of the Red Room collecting her before someone else did?
After what seemed like forever, a suited figure appeared a block ahead, unmoving for a few seconds, then disappeared into the car it had emerged from on the side of the road.
Natasha breathed out a pent-up breath and approached the car.
Swinging the car door open, she uttered a reluctant greeting and sank down next to the driver, her muscles loosening for the first time in hours. She turned off the AC and switched on the heater.
"You have it?" Coulson asked.
Natasha dug out the microchip and dropped it into his hand.
"That's all?" He asked.
She nodded.
Coulson started the engine and backed the car into the street. "There's granola bars and water at the back."
"Just water?"
"No caffeine. No stimulants for you."
For a while the only sounds were the crackling of plastic as Natasha tore into the granola bars Coulson bought and the faint hum of his music. He didn't ask her anything. Didn't yap and complain about the dozens of protocols she had broken in the course of what, two, three days? He left her alone so she did, too.
The moon trickled weak beams that illuminated the blue-black bruises marring his knuckles as they rested on top of the steering wheel. Natasha asked where he'd got them from. Coulson told her it was the surveillance room guards.
He drove for hours, until rural trees and grasses replaced the concrete and stones of the city. By the time the sky began to tint morning at the edge, Natasha's eyes were threatening to snap shut. The rocking of the car over dirt roused a yawn that pushed at the roof of her mouth.
Coulson drove to the middle of a sandy clearing surrounded by vegetation, where a landed Quinjet rested, buzzing and whirring. An agent came out of the jet, and after a brisk nod to Natasha and Coulson, drove the car away. Coulson prompted her to board.
The jet was one of the new Phase Two models. Passenger seating had decreased to four parked against one side, with a hologram projector on the other. Once the jet leveled in the air, Coulson turned on the projector.
"Two things can happen on this jet," Coulson started. "You can fly back to P.E.G.A.S.U.S, or you can finish the last stretch of this assignment."
"What last stretch? I thought you already marked me on extraction."
"Intel tells us that the microchip you retrieved was on its way to Khosta when you intercepted." Coulson flicked his finger over the hologram to summon a map of Russia. "The next carrier, Georgi Luchkov, got his temporary quarters set up there. Luchkov's carting it to the last stop as we know it, and not much more. Now that his microchip got stolen he's going to avoid those parts, wherever that is, for a while. We need the entirety of the Jericho bomb in our possession. If we'd known Fjodorov's carrying just a microchip we would've sent you after the actual bomb. Initiation software is too easy to replicate, and your interference will at best delay whatever schemes Luchkov have in mind."
"When do I start?"
"So you're in?"
"Obviously. Question, Coulson."
"Yes?"
"You can't be the only one snuffing out Klementiev and Luchkov and that whole bunch. If what you're doing with me is in the dark, S.H.I.E.L.D would have already sent someone after Jericho. How am I going to investigate?"
"Because I know the agent they sent will fail."
"You confidence is questionable and backwards."
"Five thousand active agents. Two thousand deployed to Phase Two, five hundred training for extraterrestrial defense. That's half our operatives stripped from regular duty. At least one-fifth of the remainders are fresh out of training and ineligible for fatality levels beyond 15%. Out of the fourth-fifths we chop down to, how many Black Widows do we have?"
"You don't need someone on my level for this job, Coulson, and you know it."
Coulson stood silent, arms crossed, then uncrossed and, with a few taps in the air, brought up an agent's profile. Ella-Claire Carranza. 27. Combat Specialist. Chunky black curls held back with a headband to bring forth her small face and wide eyes.
"Do you see the problem?" Coulson asked.
No, she didn't.
"This mission is all espionage and no combat. Slip in, get the information, slip out. Leave a full intervention unit to take care of the rest. There is no positive outcome in this where the undercover agent leaves with bullets flying. None. Luchkov's shown up on S.H.I.E.L.D's radar enough for us to know that he would risk nothing to get himself caught, and we want him alive. Carranza's about as patient as a time bomb and that's the last thing we need."
"I go in, get Jericho's location before Carranza, and get out without trouble from both Luchkov's and S.H.I.E.L.D's side; correct?"
"Correct."
"And who are you rounding up for the intervention? More from your secret Black Widow club? Your plan is full of holes, Coulson, and if this further destabilizes my terms with S.H.I.E.L.D, then I'd rather you take me back to P.E.G.A.S.U.S. If you know Carranza is a bad choice for this op, then tell the authorities. Don't make me tip-toe around with you when not a day ago you had practically tried to stick me in a box and bury me in a hole where S.H.I.E.L.D can't trace a hair of me."
Coulson looked away and down at the ground. After a moment he turned and said to the pilot, "Swing us around for the Adirondacks."
"Thank you," Natasha said.
"No, no." Coulson shook his head, and turned off the hologram projections. "I gave you a choice. I respect that. My persuasion was contradicting and inconsiderate."
"I assume my retrieval of the microchip remains unknown?"
"For now, yes."
"But there's no way to cover that up."
Coulson faked a brittle laugh. "You didn't prepare for this before your decision to disobey me?"
"Well I-"
"It's ok. I'll sort it out with Fury." The taut, downward pull of his mouth, however, made it clear that "sort it out" was an extreme understatement.
Thanks for reading!