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: Who saw The Winter Soldier? I have to admit I felt kinda shaky after seeing it and returning to this story is just not the same. Now there's that constant awareness of betrayal (this doesn't count as a spoiler right) that I will never shrug off when I watch/read anything from the movies before.
Speaking of TWS, I wrote up a oneshot between Nat and Fury, grant me a read if you like? Early update this week too. Spring break miracles!
Review/Fave/Follow if you want :)
Song Inspiration
"Harlem" - New Politics.
Chapter 26
Natasha slowed the water running out of the faucet and scrubbed the plate with a gentler hand. It helped, somewhat, in focusing the amplifier in her ear. Behind her, in the next room, Luchkov and a few others were murmuring through a cracked door. It had been half an hour now with her washing their breakfast silverware and them conversing with the breathlessness of a big meal lugging them down.
"Magadan? Already?" Luchkov's voice huffed.
"I'd consider them slow, General. With what's been happening these few days we needed all our loads moved long before today," another man said.
"What about the tanks?" Luchkov asked.
Tanks? Natasha reduced the water to a trickle.
"Still in Kaliningrad. We've had... difficulties negotiating with the parties there."
"Hmmff. Tell Belinsky to keep pressing, then. Lermentov's planning something. Either he open those damn gates for us or we'll open his throat."
A dragging of chairs over the wood floor. Luchkov and his two men emerged from their room. The water. Right. Natasha spun the faucet handle so that the stream splashed onto the dishes loudly. Scrub. Soap. Rinse. Set it on the rack. Repeat. No, Maya Ivana, you didn't hear a single thing they said.
Luchkov's presence behind her was like a wall closing in. "Maya, hurry up with that. Do the windows, clean the living room."
"Yes, sir," Natasha replied.
"General, are you sure leaving the maid here is safe?" The shorter of Luchkov's thugs, a scraggy man with skin so pale he looked translucent, asked.
Luchkov snorted and pulled at Natasha's black dress. "Unless you want to vacuum the carpets for her, Gavril, you shut the fuck up." His fingers rubbed over her waist. "I like her. I might consider replacing Tamara with her permanently."
"Where'd you find one like that, anyway?" Yet another man spoke up.
A palm mashed against Natasha's hip to spin her around. She wiped her hands on a towel and complied, meeting Luchkov's dried up, bark-like face, where the only thing that seemed to contain some life was the glint in his eyes. He and his men began looking over her like a mannequin, and she held still like one for them while her insides boiled with disgust.
"Tamara put her down as her fill-in, said so on her employment forms," Luchkov explained. "You a friend of Tamara's, Maya?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, dear, say hi to her for me, and tell her I'm considering holding her off this job." Luchkov smiled and waved his men towards the door.
Gavril, the ghostly white one, squinted and frowned at Natasha before his companions herded him out. Luchkov, oblivious or choosing to ignore him, leaned forth and whispered to her, "Stay until we come back from dinner."
He didn't wait for an answer and swaggered off with that satisfied smile pulling his tree-bark skin.
After Luchkov left she abandoned the dishes and disabled all the cameras and detectors in his house. She sat down on a couch in the living room and turned on her comm. "Coulson?"
"Did you find what we need?"
"No, but I'm getting there." Natasha drew her knees to her chest. "Run me a scan for hidden cavities in the building."
Half a minute of silence later, Coulson replied, "Go into his study, find the big red flower vase next to the bookshelf. Spin that, tell me what you get."
Natasha went into the study and did as he told. The vase reached up to her chest, and when she spun it until she heard a click, and a section of the carpeted floor nearby contracted into itself, opening up a hole in the floor. Natasha opened the flashlight on her phone and shone it at the hole. It was about a ten feet drop.
"Looks like I'm at the right place," she told Coulson.
He didn't reply, making clear for her to continue. Natasha jumped. Her feet dropped onto the concrete below with an echoing ring. She flicked her flashlight around the room until she located a light switch against the far wall, and turning it on, revealed the dim space to be a room around the same size of the study above it. On one end a system of storage boxes stacked high to the ceiling, and on the other, a display of various sized screens covered the wall. A long counter stretched over the middle, on which rested a flurry of paperwork and a world map dotted and labeled with colored pens. Japan. Madagascar. Afghanistan. A few spread out in Russia. Kaliningrad. Locations for all the trades Luchkov made around the globe. At least two dozen scattered over the map.
She skimmed over the other loose papers on the counter, and though they revealed plans and shipments they were not for the bomb she was after. Natasha moved on to the storage boxes against the wall and pulled out a few random ones, flipped through their contents and tried to find an order to which the files were categorized. At first there seemed no correlation, and crawling around here for hours until she'd found what she wanted was risky and tedious.
She took a step back to look at the compartmentalized wall as a whole and identified the locations of several files she had pulled out. Near the center-bottom were the three hundred recoilless rifles from Kenya, and to its left, ammo from Suriname. If she went left another compartment, Ecuador.
They were organized by location in the shape of the globe.
Natasha searched the box above Ecuador. Mexico. No, the one above. She rolled the swivel chair from behind the counter against the wall of compartments and climbed to reach the one she was after.
Whereas the previous ones she had opened held but a thin stack of papers, a thick white slab filled this one to the edge. Extracting a random sheet, Natasha found the United States as the seller origin, and she let out a breath. Thumbing through the pages, she located the ones for Jericho and slipped them out.
"I have them, Coulson."
"Great. Where's Jericho headed?"
"...Yangsan, South Korea," she read off the paper.
A pause on Coulson's end. "Scan me all the pages you have."
Natasha took out her phone and projected a blue beam from the camera flash over each of the papers. A few clicks and seconds later the images were transferred to Coulson.
"Do you want me to do anything with the other files here? Luchkov is very busy with his trades," she said, sizing up and estimating the contents in all the compartments together.
"No, leave them."
"Well, ok, another thing: Luchkov's working with big names. Lermentov is one of them. I understand he's a regular run-in with S.H.I.E.L.D?"
Another stretch of silence. "Getting you out is the priority."
"Coulson." She raised her voice, and the sound echoed off the walls. "Don't count on another time. Maybe there won't be another time. I can risk a day or two longer here if I can uproot another on S.H.I.E.L.D's hitlist." She raised her voice, and the sound echoed off the walls.
"Well..."
"Did you even talk to Fury?"
"I did!"
"Get Fury on the line."
"I did tell him. I told him you're doing this!"
"Then it won't be a trouble to get him on, right?"
"Fine. Fine. I'll go."
Natasha hopped down from the chair and sat on it, waiting on the static on Coulson's end. Despite the spurt of force she had put into her words, her hands began sweating, and even when she crossed her legs together they still quavered. She rolled the Jericho documents in her hands into a cylinder and tapped it repeatedly against her knee.
"Problem, Romanoff?"
Natasha twitched in her seat. "Uh, yes, Director. I'd like your professional opinion on a matter at hand."
Fury snorted and laughed. "Coulson's ain't a professional opinion? I like this. Go on."
"I've met the objective of the miss-"
"Then get out of there."
"No, no. I've discovered in the process that Lermentov's muddling in the same business as Luchkov, and I know that S.H.I.E.L.D has a few scores with him from the past. He was involved in another arms trafficking case from two years ago in Egypt. And-"
"You want to snuff him out?"
"Yes. He seems to be in disagreement with Luchkov about a load of tanks in Kalinigrad; violence between them almost inevitable from what I've heard."
"Huh. Can't let that happen, I need them both alive."
"I'd like permission to branch out my mission, since it's-"
"Branch out? You've been branching out this mission since you left Moscow. You remember our talk on this? On what this assignment means? About what kind of footing you're under with S.H.I.E.L.D? You already fell, Romanoff. The only difference you can make right now is how gracefully you pick yourself up; score a few kudos that way. Ice cracks, but ice can freeze over again. Pick yourself up and stomp on that motherfucker."
Natasha's jaw slackened.
"Questions?"
"No, Director." She bit back a smile.
"Good. I'll give it back to Coulson now. Try and listen to him."
Natasha returned the documents she had pulled out to their compartments and began to plan how to get back up to the study when a rifle's snout nosed into the hole, eclipsing the light source from above.
"You vacuuming down there?" Gavril's voice jeered. "Need some help?"
Well, that wasn't in her agenda. In her head a decision formed, and she knew which game she had to play.
"I thought you looked familiar. The Red Room's most lethal Black Widow; vanished for almost half a decade from the trade, yet here you are now. I'd love to know what Department X's been doing with you."
Just as she thought. They didn't even know she was in the U.S. And lucky he didn't hear her conversation with S.H.I.E.L.D. Natasha glared at his silhouette. "I've been active this whole time, just that my connections know better than to expose me."
"Well, that's a thing of the past. I'm parading you around after Luchkov and I are through with you."
The shape of the rifle moved over to fit the smaller, compact shape of a tranquilizer. Gavril might have had brains, but he had no guts. All that he was willing to commit to was to shoot her like an animal in a pen from ten feet above.
She took out her gun and fired at Gavril's directions to spur his nerves on. He yelped. The rifle disappeared from his grip altogether and he fired the tranquilizer like a machine gun. As one of the darts dug into her chest, accomplishment sped through her veins before the drugs did. It was the first time she felt satisfied at being brought down.
A numbness tugged at her spine, creeping up her neck and stiffening her joints. Natasha let herself collapse dramatically. Gavril's booted weight pounding onto the concrete rang in her ears as her consciousness faded.
Sheerin's Booster had processed and smoothed the drugs' effects faster by at least an hour earlier. When Natasha woke her teeth were rattling to the rumble of a vehicle. High-tech, blocky handcuffs had strangled her wrists together, and what felt like tiny pins on the inside of the metal-ware ground into the skin there. Sandpaper. Or something similar. Luchkov, or Gavril, the bastards, had made sure they issued her the most hellish handcuffs she had ever experienced. Her legs endured similar treatment, locked together with inflexible metal plating from the knees down. Iron Mermaid. Stark should make that a thing. She smiled to herself.
From what she could see out the crack at the bottom of the van's trunk, it was dark outside. They had been moving all day, then. Natasha rested her back against the side of the van and closed her eyes.
Some minutes later—she couldn't believe the timing—the vehicle lurched to a stop, and the dry sound of shoes walking on grit crunched toward her. The trunk opened with a breeze of fresh air and only then did Natasha notice the stale stink of alcohol that she had been breathing in. She kept her eyes closed. A body's weight sank the van as it clambered on, and after some rough treatment to her cuffed hands, her wrist loosened and began to sting as the tiny wounds met the wind. Her legs were next, and she resisted stretching them around.
The same man yanked her out of the trunk and threw her over his shoulder. Her hair dangled over her face and made it safe for her to open her eyes. Train tracks. Gravel. When she eased her head up a bit an abandoned warehouse, washed white-gray in the moonlight, slouched over the flat landscape some twenty yards away.
They ascended to the second level of the warehouse, then poked and prodded her into a chair, and before she knew it ropes coiled around her wrists, corroding the rawness that her handcuffs had instilled. Something jabbed into her thigh, and a tingling, stinging sensation ebbed from it to the rest of her body like a strong dose of caffeine. Drugs to wake her up, no doubt. But with her already awake her body did not process them, and instead they lurked beneath her skin, her modified, trained cells holding and storing their effects for her to unleash at will.
Natasha shook her head like they'd expect her to do, blinking slowly and registering her surroundings. The man tossed a used syringe to the side of the vast room. She looked beyond him at Gavril and Luchkov talking to each other, at the stacks of crates and boxes piled around the place. A few of the crates had tumbled over, spilling firearms and ammunition; and propped onto the right wall was a rectangular mass with a piece of cloth thrown over, carelessly exposing a corner of an intricate wood frame to a painting. Natasha glanced behind her to follow the man who had gave her the injection. He pulled out a lighter and lighted the candles on a fallen chandelier. The golden flames led her sight downward, and a gaping hole exposing the ground floor greeted her, infested with bits of rotten wood planks and spilled oil, discarded draperies and plastic packaging.
Luchkov broke off his conversation with Gavril and approached her. "You could've at least finished the dishes."
"You could've used one plate to butter your bread instead than three." Natasha tipped her chin up in dismissal.
He frowned at her, then motioned to the man who had lit the chandelier. The man smirked, ambled to her, then lashed with a hand cold and hard as iron across her face. Natasha forced her breath out in a low cry, and the technical, professional part of her necessary for what she had planned activated.
"This is not how I wanted this evening to go."
"I know how you wanted this evening to go. Believe me, this is better."
Luchkov chuckled. "Who are you working for? Lermentov, yes?" Another tilt of his head to the tall, unnamed man, who stepped forth again and, with a hand gripping the back of her chair, pushed it on its two back legs so that her weight was directly above the hole below. "Does he think we have to go through him to move our cargo?"
"I thought General Solohob is in charge of the export business," Natasha stammered, making her breathing loud and unsteady and not meeting his eyes. The man settled her chair back to the floor.
"Soholob? A bagman, a front? Your outdated information betrays you." Luchkov stepped closer. "The famous Black Widow and she turns out to be simply another pretty face.
A smug smile pulled on Gavril's face, and he crossed his arms in front of his chest.
"You really think I'm pretty?" She twitched her eyebrows at Luchkov.
Triumph flashed over his face, as if he had just figured out some scheme of hers, and he turned away from her to the far end of the warehouse. His ego began to flourish, nurtured by Natasha's careful feedings of timid gestures and tones. The silent sidekick pried her mouth open with a hand.
"Tell Lermentov we don't need him to move the tanks." Luchkov picked something up from a table. "Tell him he is out. Well..." He turned and snapped the tool in his hand. A pair of pliers. "You might need to write it down.
So the bastard wanted to pull her teeth out. How unpleasant. Natasha writhed a bit in her seat, fixing her gaze on the man in front of her. She had no intention of getting dentistry treatment from this bunch, yet Luchkov was on the brink of blabbing about his plans and Lermentov's whereabouts.
Gavril's ringing phone made the decision for her, or rather for them all. He held it to his ear with a grunt, and after a moment, frowned and gave it to Luchkov, who set the pliers down and grumbled into the phone, "Who the hell is this?"
As he listened to the other end his eyes began to flicker over the warehouse, then settled onto Natasha, squinting and open-mouthed. He lumbered to her with reluctance and held the phone out to her. She tucked it between her cheek and shoulder. Before she could say anything the other end spoke:
"We need you to come in."
Coulson? "Are you kidding? I'm working." Did Fury not make it clear to him that she had clearance to stay?
"This takes precedence."
"I'm in the middle of an interrogation, and this moron is giving me everything." Not exactly true, but as long as those pliers didn't come near her mouth she had intended to keep milking information from Luchkov.
Luchkov looked to the tall man. "I don't... give everything?"
Natasha gave him an indifferent look and refocused on Coulson. "Look, you can't pull me out of this right now-"
"Natasha."
She held her tongue still.
"Barton's been compromised."
And... Assemble.
Thanks for reading!