Same disclaimers as chapter 1.
AN: Hi guys! Sorry again for the wait, but you all are in for a treat this month. I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo (which is totally cool and you should totally check out if you love to write!), which means I will be under a constant crunch to write all month, and this means more chapters for you guys! I am juggling midterms, though, so please be patient with me.
Again, I'd like to remind you all we have entered the Avengers movie timeline, so if you haven't seen that (or Thor, or Captain America),—first of all, GO WATCH IT, IT'S FANTASTIC!—please be wary that the proceeding chapters will be very spoiler heavy so don't say I didn't warn you.
With that, I'd again like to thank you for all your support! I never get tired of reading your feedback. And... Cheers!
I arrived at base in frenzy. The depth of my anger and panic surprised even me; I didn't know it was possible for a single person to feel so much until I felt it for myself. Even Fury's aggression paled in comparison, and his name was Fury, after all.
I crashed through the doors of the hangar, startling two young male Apprentices that had been assigned desk jobs and were throwing crumpled balls of paper into a trashcan to stifle their boredom. They snapped upright at my appearance. One even blushed.
"W-welcome back, Widow. I'll log your arrival," one said, standing rigidly as I strode over to him. I clutched his collar and felt his Adam's apple quiver beneath my knuckles as he gulped.
"Don't bother, I'll announce my arrival myself. Where's Coulson?" I said through a locked jaw I couldn't seem to unhinge. My nerves seemed permanently wound up and frozen. If I moved too fast, I was afraid I'd splinter like ice.
"He's expecting you in Conference Room 3A with Agent Hill," he replied. I released him without a word and sulked off, my anger growling in my chest like a predator, anxious for its next opportunity to make an attack. I pushed past people and turned heads everywhere in my rush, my eyes blind to everything and my legs carrying me automatically where they knew they should. I crashed into the conference room without formalities, finding Maria sitting at the table bent over papers and Coulson standing at the window with far-away eyes. The animal inside my chest reared back, clawing desperately up my throat to spit its venom.
"What the fuck is going on here?! Where's Clint!?" my voice rang out harshly, making me feel like I'd just vomited knives. Maria snapped up, jumping to her feet when her eyes found me.
"Natasha—" she started with something like a strangled gasp, but I held up a hand reflexively, not unlike a shield, too impatient to deal with her apologies or her sentimentality or, God forbid, her tears. She was my friend, yes. I think I loved her. But I couldn't deal with it, not today. She saw me and somehow, miraculously, her mouth shut. My eyes were locked on Phil's, his expression steely. But he didn't scare me. I pitied him, almost, because if he said the wrong thing today, the animal inside my chest would not be forgiving.
"Natasha, we need you to—"
"No," I said, holding my hand up to him, too. I didn't actually mean to, aware of the enormous disrespect I was paying a senior official, but I was running on instinct and apparently my instinct wasn't having any bullshit today. "No, I asked you a question. Where is Clint?" I asked again icily. Phil's jaw twitched. There was a charged moment of silence, my impatience coiling like a cobra.
"We don't know," he said at the last possible moment, just as the cobra reared back to strike. But at those words, the snake fell slack, all the energy seeping out of my body as I heard the last words on the entire planet I wanted to hear. We don't know. The world's biggest intelligence agency without any knowledge on the one thing that mattered. I suddenly thought vividly of the maps base projected onto enormous screens during important missions in which they kept live feeds on agent positions. Agents would be represented on the maps as little glowing dots, moving around in real time. In my mind, I imagined Clint's dot darkening. MIA. AWOL. He could be anywhere. His glowing light out, lost in the darkness.
I slumped into a chair. Maria looked at me with concern but she suddenly seemed uncertain of how to approach me, like the very first time she'd seen me, wary of handcuffing me.
"How…" I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. "How do you not know?" I said, this time my voice barely above a whisper, exhausted, hopeless. Phil's eyebrows furrowed. He sat in a chair opposite me, his hands folded neatly on the table.
"Natasha, you've just been promoted to a Senior Operating Officer, Class AA," he said. I blinked up at him stupidly, his words making zero sense in the current situation but my sudden exhaustion not letting me think too deeply into it.
In my confusion, the only thing I could think to say was "There is no Class AA."
"Yes, there is. We have a lot of catching up to do."
I was "caught up" over the course of a grueling sleepless week. I was discreetly promoted into a Senior Operating Officer without ceremony, though it was the highest possible rank for working Agents, and was branded Class AA, which I hadn't even known existed. Apparently nobody except AA did. As far as everyone else knew, Class A was the top of the ladder. News flash to me, previously a lowly Class C. And the shit I'd been hearing over the past few days was so confidential, it was even confidential to talk about how confidential it was. All of a sudden, I was drowning in the unknown in the very home I had thought I'd already figured out. Even the saying "barely scratched the surface" was laughable. If SHIELD was the world, and I was trying to dig to its core, I hadn't so much as dug to the bottom of a sandbox.
SHIELD was working on something big. Huge. All very hush-hush, but recent events had thrown all the secrecy into the fucking air, leaving SHIELD scrambling for damage control and very, very, and I mean very, desperate. Somewhere among the endless debriefings Coulson gave me day in and day out, something he said finally rang a bell, tickling a far corner of my mind. "The Avengers Initiative."
"Wait… wait—I've heard that, I—mmm… Stark!" I yelled, cutting off Coulson's spiel. Coulson nodded.
"Our most recent attempted acquisition, yes," Coulson said. I shook my head.
"But… but that idea was scrapped. I remember, I did the write up. There was an incongruity or something. Something concerning Stark being a class A asshole," I said, though I remembered him with something like amused fondness. Though he definitely was an asshole. Maybe even class AA. I managed a smirk at my own joke despite the constant stress I'd been under. Or maybe because of the stress. God knew I was delirious half the time.
Coulson informed me the idea hadn't been scrapped so much as it had been put on the back burner. Constant research going on quietly in the background while it was business as usual for the rest of us. And not just now, but for years. The idea was ancient. Stewing in a pile of other forgotten SHIELD failures. That is, until New Mexico. My head twitched up when the words fell from Coulson's mouth. New Mexico. The last place I was sure Clint had been. My thin fingers curled into tight fists. The last place I was sure I should have been instead of wherever the fuck SHIELD had me wasting my time.
That thought had made me feel sick enough, but I almost choked on the energy drink I'd been constantly guzzling when Coulson said "aliens."
"Aliens?"
"Not just aliens. Legends. Trust me, I don't get paid enough for this, either," he said when he caught my dumbstruck expression, rubbing his temples. I pursed my lips, my stomach coiling at the sudden thought of little green men with big heads and huge black eyes.
"Coulson, how?" I said, scanning a map of the area damaged by the apparent battle royale the so-called aliens had brought with them. "How are you keeping this under wraps? This much damage, there must have been a whole town worth of witnesses. The world would explode if it got out E.T. had a prize fight in New Mexico."
"People are dismissing it as a military experiment gone wrong, that's why. They look just like us."
I glanced at him uncomprehendingly. "'They?' 'They' who?"
"The Asgardians," Coulson said exasperatedly, as if I was being frustratingly slow on the uptake. "The god of goddamn thunder, himself. Guess what? He's blonde and built like a tree."
I let out a noise something like nervous laughter, any possible combination of words escaping me. Phil pushed a few old, leather-bound books toward me. I opened the one on the top of the stack, dust twirling up by the motion and tickling my nose. The book contained scratchy looking illustrations on the left pages, the right side filled with ancient, incomprehensible symbols. Between each page was tucked thin sheets of vellum paper with what I assumed were English translations. Certain words jumped out at me among the tons of scribbles. "God." "Thor." "Asgard." "Frost Giants." Characters in funny hats and epic battles were illustrated on the pages, facing fearsome foes and monsters, but always conquering them in the end, like something out of a fairytale.
"I'll leave you to your homework. See you in the morning," Coulson said, pushing away from the table and rubbing his eyes. My body was so jittery from all the energy drinks I'd been constantly consuming I hardly noticed the passage of time anymore. Day, night, it didn't matter anyway. I always had something to keep me awake.
Early the next morning, Coulson strode in already sipping a new cup of coffee to find me red-eyed and brimming with questions. I held onto his every word desperately, fully aware after what I read that the key to understanding what was happening lay in understanding these outsiders, these Asgardians.
There was Thor. God of Thunder. The hero and the expected heir to the throne. Tall, blonde, and had the habit of speaking like a broadcast special of Masterpiece Theatre. Then there was Loki, his adoptive brother and the God of Mischief. Half Frost Giant, full daddy issues. Other Asgardian comrades had made appearances in New Mexico, but those two were the starring performers as far as I was concerned. SHIELD only knew of Loki, in fact, because of Thor's eventual cooperation with questioning. Loki had sent a twelve-foot steel-plated automaton, the Destroyer, to do his bidding. This was the huge riot that leveled the city and was looking like it would leave everyone dead if it hadn't been for Thor bringing the hammer down, literally. As if the story wasn't ridiculous enough already, Thor's main weapon was a "magic hammer" named Mjolnir only he could pick up. SHIELD had been stationed around it for weeks, testing just about everything short of a nuclear bomb to move the damn thing but failing every time. This was where Clint had been sent as part of a group of reinforcements with other higher-ranking agents. This was why I'd been inexplicably left behind. The sensitivity of the situation meant they could only call the most senior Agents under secrecy contracts.
I waited with bated breath as Phil explained what he'd seen in New Mexico, expecting any moment the point of the story when he finally told me Clint went missing and disappeared off the face of the earth. But the moment didn't come and I was left with anxiety bubbling in my throat when Phil switched subjects, evidently finished with his anecdote.
"Wait, that's it? What about—the Asgardians?" I asked suddenly, only barely refraining from asking directly about Clint. The idea of asking specifically for him made me feel uncomfortable. Even so, something in the look Coulson gave me seemed to say he knew what I was really asking about.
"Came and went, just like that. Finished their little scuffle here and disappeared again without a trace. We had minimal losses," he said pointedly, and I understood that to mean Clint had been fine. But if he'd been fine there, where had he disappeared? "But we know they're out there now. And maybe there's others. The United States government is in an uproar about it. We were dispatched immediately to find a way to protect the country should this threat arise again."
"You think they'd come back?"
"They already have. And if they have a way here, we have to assume maybe other, even less friendly populations do, too. We were scrambling to build up some kind of defense when we finally found out how we could use something we'd been saving for a rainy day for years."
My eyebrows crinkled with exhaustion. This would make a great story, but I was having trouble grappling with the fact that this was reality and I was now expected to function in a world where "magic hammers" and "gods" were not just parts of fairytales.
Coulson pushed a picture of a glowing blue cube towards me. I examined it with tired eyes. "And what's this supposed to be? The mystic cube map to Neverland?" Coulson frowned at me, and I quieted. I knew I was supposed to be taking this seriously, but there was only so much I could take seriously at one time.
"This is the Tesseract, our only hope."
The Tesseract cube, Coulson explained, was an extremely powerful force of concentrated energy, ancient and mysterious in nature since it was found by Howark Stark in the mid-1940s. That is, until SHIELD found Captain America.
I spat out the vodka I'd been trying to discreetly mix into my energy drink without Phil seeing. I was Russian, after all, and being slightly inebriated made all the stories easier to take in.
"Excuse me? Captain America? The guy from your flashcards? What do you mean you 'found' Captain America? He's real?"
Phil looked offended by the question. "Of course, he's real! The world's first brand of superhero," he said dreamily, his eyes glazing. "And they're not flashcards, they're trading cards," he muttered quickly. I thought back to the time Maria and I were waiting in Coulson's office for him to come and announce our punishments after a fight. The time I hadn't spent cleaning Maria's cut lip, I'd wiled away staring around his office, particularly the glass-fronted set of shelves where he kept his awards and his set of mint-condition Captain America cards. They depicted a handsome man in a patriotically colored costume, smiling blankly upwards, the cards still perfectly glossy and pristine. I thought he'd been a cartoon character. I couldn't believe someone actually wore that get-up in real life. Americans never ceased to astound me.
"Okay, so you found Captain America…" I said slowly, trying to wrap my head around the thought as I said the words. "And?"
"And he's alive," Phil said, his eyes glittering like he'd just found out Jesus himself was again walking the earth. This time I brazenly took a deep swig straight from the vodka flask I had hidden in my hip strap. Phil didn't object.
"So a… soldier from the 40's is… alive?" I said, testing the words out. Evidently saying them slowly did not make them anymore believable, though.
Phil nodded vigorously. "He is! He's coming here! Well, not here, but—just listen," Phil said, evidently struggling to control his glee. I listened while he spoke with the air of explaining something very exciting to someone and waiting for the moment when the other person realized just how exciting it is. If that was the case, he didn't receive exactly the reaction he wanted from me. Something about a man being scientifically engineered into a super-soldier, presumably dying in action, but suddenly being discovered again 70 years later encased in ice with a heartbeat was more terrifying than exciting. Maybe I was old school, but I liked my dead men dead. But the world seemed stubbornly set on making my life as grievous as possible. Always had.
So the Captain, Steve Rogers was his actual name, was awake. I felt a pang of sympathy for the shock he must have received, figuring it wasn't unlike what I was experiencing now. He had explained the little he knew of the Tesseract's power, how a crazy Nazi had been trying to use the use the cube for weapons of mass destruction. This was the tip SHIELD needed, and scientists were immediately recruited to work on it. The cube was moved to a secret base to be worked on and Clint had been moved with it. Work went quietly for months until seemingly out of nowhere, the cube opened a portal and Loki just happened to fall out of it. I listened with impending terror, listening for the part I knew would eventually come in this horror. Coulson told me what Nick had relayed to him: Loki falling out of a spontaneous portal, making scientists infer the cube could be opened from both sides. Loki emerged with a scepter of some kind, seemingly functioning with a similar source of power as the cube, able to be used as a weapon and a method of mind control. He tapped people's chests and they were suddenly at his command. He took the cube and possessed the leading scientist, Dr. Erik Selvig, who happened to be an eyewitness from New Mexico, and several agents, Clint among them.
My stomach clenched and I had to get up and pace around the table to work off the sudden rush of ire that flooded my chest. Ire towards everyone. Towards this villainous Loki, for involving earth in his stupid personal vendetta that we had no stake in. Towards the agents present, for not protecting each other properly like they should have been doing. Towards SHIELD itself, for not letting me be there because watching Clint's back, that was my job. Of course other agents couldn't do it right. Other agents didn't have the same priorities I did.
Immediately proceeding the anger came a wave of nausea and I slumped back into a chair to hold my head between my knees. This nightmare was outside the realm of conceivability of even my own sick imagination. I thought of Clint, always dependably resolute and unfaltering, the single person who reminded me who I was when I got lost in the foggy corners of my own booby-trapped mind. And now he wasn't himself and was nowhere to be found. Lost to me in every possible sense. His laugh from our last phone call followed by his signature "Just relax!" echoed in my head suddenly and my ribs seemed to suddenly squeeze around my chest like a child closing his hand around putty.
"Excuse me," I said in a shaky voice, getting up suddenly and rushing out of the room before Phil could answer, ignoring the sudden spinning of my head from getting up too fast. I ran aimlessly through the empty halls, my eyes stinging. I stopped once I felt I'd gone far enough and leaned against a wall, not worried of being seen. We were deep within quarters, far out of the realm of its usual activity: no risk of being accidentally watched or overheard. As far as I had seen, it was just Phil and I down here, with Maria running in and out depending on where she was needed.
I fumbled clumsily with the pockets at my belt until I finally retrieved the small cell phone I kept with me at all times, my fingers shakily dialing the only number it had programmed. I held it to my ear, my breathing loud and uneven. The line was silent for a few charged moments and then it started ringing. Once. My fingers tightened painfully around the phone. Twice. My heart jumped into my throat. Each millisecond of silence after the second ring seemed to stretch into its own separate infinity. Three times. My eyes closed and I sank down to the floor, no longer able to stop the sting behind my eyes from suddenly spilling down my cheeks, much less keep my legs upright beneath me. Dry sobs echoed down the empty halls, disproportionately loud in the relative silence. I counted seventeen total rings before the line went dead.
The last time I'd seen him replayed over and over in my mind. His hair and his grin and his freckles and his faint smell of steel and leather. How his arms felt around me. How his eyes had seemed bent on memorizing me. How he'd sworn he'd come back to me. My breath caught at the thought. My own voice suddenly rang in my head: "Even if you don't, I will." I had a promise to keep, too. This was my end of the bargain and I had to come through for him. I owed him so much and it was time to start repaying my debt.
I struggled to control my breathing as my eyes dried, slowly getting to my feet. I leaned heavily on the walls while I tried to find my way back to the conference room I'd left Phil in. I paused outside when I finally found it; inside, I heard Phil shuffling through papers. I allowed myself a few more deep breaths before entering. My chest still felt as if it was being squeezed tight, but more as if I was being held together rather than being crushed. For Clint's sake, I had to keep it together, lest all my broken pieces suddenly crumble and I become useless again. I walked into the room, immediately making Phil look up.
"What's next?"
He eyed me for a moment, seeming to size me up before finally saying, "It's time for a field trip."
As a Class AA agent, my new home base was something I'd only ever heard legends about: the Helicarrier. As with everything else, Phil and I were secretly flown to its location, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't gape out the window like a child as we approached it. It truly was a sight to behold, an enormous aircraft carrier impossibly suspended in the middle of the sky, only just visible through the clouds.
Maria was on the landing floor to welcome us but she only had enough time to show me to my room before having to run off again, and I only had enough time to unpack my few things before I was expected with Phil to explain my newest mission.
The new room was tiny, with a single bed and an even more miniscule bathroom. I threw my things in their respectively places quickly, eager to receive my mission and finally feel like I was actually achieving something. When Coulson had called me out of Russia, he'd mentioned something about getting "the big guy." Since Tony Stark had come out as a self-proclaimed hero, SHIELD called upon him from time to time, so I thought Coulson meant him, but he'd quickly corrected me. Phil was in charge of getting Stark. And if that was the case, then the only other person I could think of was someone I had only heard stories about. And the stories didn't usually have happy endings.
I showed up at the Helicarrier's main atrium late, trying to find my way through its labyrinthine innards by following confusing directional signs. I burst into the atrium and gasped despite myself, suddenly faced with a yawning glass opening facing clear skies and an ocean of clouds. The floor was filled with rows of agents at computers, all of our most senior ranks, all the faces I'd grown up with since arriving at SHIELD. Several I even recognized from my own graduating class. There was something slightly comforting about only being around people I already knew; no young Apprentices were running around here to stop and gape at me. Fury was standing on a raised platform, his back to me, examining several computer screens of his own. Behind him was a large circular table with the SHIELD eagle sigil printed upon it. Maria was standing over it on the side closest to Fury, shuffling papers and folders. She looked up when I approached the table.
"Welcome to the team," she said. I cracked a smile at her, trying to communicate a silent apology to her through it, aware of how rude I'd been last time I'd seen her. She only nodded before turning to hand a folder to Fury and I knew that was the end of that. Across the table from her sat Coulson, tapping away at a tablet in his hand, a fat manila envelope that I assumed was my mission file sitting on the tabletop beside him. I took the seat next to him, still having some trouble trying to absorb all that had happened that had brought me to this current moment.
"I assume you've heard of Bruce Banner," Coulson said when I sat down, putting his tablet down to look at me. I swallowed. So my guess had been right.
"Sort of… I've heard of… incidents," I said, not exactly sure how to phrase the fact I had in fact heard of Dr. Bruce Banner, a brilliant gamma radiation specialist, that turned into an incensed green behemoth on occasion. They called him "the Hulk."
Phil suddenly sprang a holographic screen seemingly out the table with a few taps on his tablet. The projection readily showed a fuzzy clip showing an enormous green body in the distance, wearing nothing but a ripped set of shorts, easily picking up a tank and splitting it over a tree before the screen going black.
"He seems charming," I muttered as the screen shifted to an informational page on Bruce Banner with his face on the side. He wasn't what I expected him to look like. He had a soft face with large, kind brown eyes, and a full head of dark curls.
"He's a genius, the best in his field. He was exposed to levels of radiation that should have been fatal while trying to recreate the serum that was used on Captain America," Phil said, pausing over the Captain's name with some sort of dreamy reverence. "Of course, it didn't work but it didn't kill him either and he turned into that. He think he's lost us and has been keeping a low profile in Calcutta, presumably trying to control his power. He's been doing a good job about it. But we need him to try to track the Tesseract. We need you act as mission leader and go get him."
"And what? Bring him here?" I asked pointedly, discomfort gnawing at my stomach just at the thought of him bursting into the monster from the video in the Helicarrier's tight quarters.
Coulson sighed. "We know the risks, but finding the Tesseract is more important. We've outfitted the Helicarrier with appropriate accommodations," he said, flicking through screens to show me the schematics for something like a huge cylindrical glass cage, designed to drop straight out of the carrier if excessive force was used on it, presumably by the Hulk's fists. I pursed my lips unhappily but nodded, taking the mission file under my arm.
"Ready to go at your command, sir," I said as I stood.
Phil nodded to me. "Good luck, Agent."
Being a mission leader was definitely out of my comfort zone. I had always worked alone, with Clint as my only partner at the very most. Now that I was entrusted with such important missions, not only was I not alone, I was charged with a small army. A whole jet was dispatched for our mission. I eagerly took the seat of copilot to get away from the tight crowd in the main body of the jet. The Agent piloting seemed capable enough, so I took the flight time to sketch out a plan. Someone sensitive to anger would not take well to being ambushed. I'd have to approach him alone. I pored over the mission file, trying to figure a way of hiding my troop without actually ditching them somewhere. I had actually contemplated the idea, but I knew Coulson would never forgive me. I didn't want to antagonize him after being given a chance to really help. I could have been kept in the dark and frantically searched for answers that no one would have been able to give me once I realized Clint had disappeared. But Coulson had included me and I was grateful. Part of me also felt he, too, realized that if anyone was going to bring Clint back, it was going to be me.
We landed on the outskirts of a particularly slummy part of Calcutta. As far as places I'd visited went, it definitely wasn't my favorite. But at least our poor neighbors seemed too engrossed with their own survival to give us a second look. We stayed in our jet most of the time after properly hiding it, agents going out in shifts with me to track Banner. My assistants tried to get me to sit a few rounds out but I went on every single one. Not because I wasn't tired, because I was. I was fucking exhausted. But because even with agents on rounds, there were still at least fifteen at our tiny base camp and being around so many people I didn't particularly trust made me restless and put me on edge. And I no longer had the luxury of calling my only lifeline for a moment of peace. All I had was my copilot seat in the jet that had somehow turned into my desk and constant chatter in the earpiece we were all required to wear at all times.
We found Bruce Banner quickly enough. He seemed confident enough of his anonymity to stop actively trying to conceal himself. He seemed to be trying to make the best of his shitty circumstance by serving as a makeshift doctor to the population. In these conditions, sick people weren't hard to find. And neither were poor children desperate enough to do you just about any favor for a quick buck. Under normal circumstances, I would have liked to survey him longer and create a sturdier plan—maybe even a back-up plan, or two, or five—but "normal" circumstances were obviously not somewhere I operated in anymore, if I ever had at all. So it boiled down to paying a little girl to lure him to our location with some sob story and praying for the best, a single gun strapped to the underside of a table my only form of "back-up plan."
I changed into a long skirt and red shawl I'd bought in the market that day, trying to make myself seem as unthreatening as possible. I even threw on a cheap ruby necklace: I was a perfect embodiment of delicate, harmless femininity. I was quite certain he wouldn't readily welcome into his arms a government Agent hanging with weapons. I had two blades strapped to my thighs anyway, but he didn't need to know that.
I tugged anxiously at the ends of my shawl as I finally spotted the little girl running with Banner in hand through the poorly lit street. I clenched my fists to stop the nervous tugging, shifting my body from anxious planning to smooth performance. I heard the girl lead Banner through the door then dash through a window on the opposite end of the house, presumably running through the trees to receive her payment from the agents outside. All 27 agents had the place surrounded. I could still hear their whispers in my earpiece; they seemed even more anxious than me at the situation.
"Should have got paid up front, Banner," I heard him mutter to himself as he saw the girl jump through the window and noticed the empty shack, conspicuously empty of the sick family she promised he'd find. I took a deep breath and walked out of my corner. Show time.
"You know, for a man who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle," I said lightly, stepping from behind a moth-eaten curtain. I took a few delicate steps forward. His file had said he'd been more than a year without an incident, but that didn't mean I was certain what it was that would set him off.
He turned towards me, his eyes registering shock but nothing else. He was obviously very practiced in keeping his calm. He swung his bag of his shoulder, facing me slowly. In person, the overall sense of geniality about him was overwhelming, even more so than his pictures. His large eyes were guarded but absent of hostility. Standing there in his patchy jacket and overgrown curls, it was impossible to imagine him hurting so much as a fly.
"Avoiding stress isn't the secret," he said slowly. I cocked my head at him.
"Then what is it? Yoga?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. He shifted uncomfortably, wringing his hands.
"You brought me to the edge of the city… smart. I, uh, assume the whole place is surrounded," he said, casting a suspicious glance outside through a grimy window. My face remained a perfect mask, but my chest gave an uncomfortable squeeze at his entirely correct assumptions. I moved forward and tossed my shawl on the table, feigning complete comfort though I was pretty sure my heart rate had jumped up a few paces. The nervous chatter in my ear at his words wasn't helping.
"Just you and me," I said softly, exuding my most trustworthy smile.
"And your actress buddy—is she a spy too?" he asked, motioning towards the window the girl had disappeared through. "Do they start that young?"
I did my best to stop my lips from pursing. "I did," I said without preamble, meeting his eyes directly.
He raised an eyebrow, seeming to finally take the significance of my presence into account. He studied me for a moment before asking "Who are you?"
"Natasha Romanoff," I answered simply. He turned away for a moment, his hands continuing to circle each other and his eyes showing he seemed to be working through a lot of information.
"You here to kill me, Miss Romanoff? Because that's not gonna work out. For everyone," he said, his voice empty of threat. Merely stating facts. Merely telling me what I already knew: if I played my cards wrong, the only dead one here was me.
"No, no, of course not," I said with my best earnest voice. "I'm here on behalf of SHIELD." It was strange actually stating my purpose for once instead of just swinging in for a kill like he obviously thought I was here to do. I'd never been sent as a "representative."
"SHIELD," he said slowly, testing, casting wary glances at me. His eyes betrayed sudden disappointment I couldn't quite understand. "How'd they find me?"
Ah, there it was. That's right. He thought he was totally off the grid. I shook my head softly. "We never lost you, doctor. We've kept our distance. Even helped keep some other interested parties off your scent," I told him, trying for a tone of camaraderie. People tended to want to trust fellow accomplices.
He wasn't buying. "Why?" he immediately countered. I tried to hide my displeasure at his stubbornness. He was obviously clever. Not easily tricked. Normally, I'd relish a challenge. Today, I was just trying to do whatever got me to Clint the fastest.
"Nick Fury seems to trust you…" I began, which immediately seemed like the wrong thing to say. It was the first bold-faced lie I'd said since he arrived and something about him made me feel like he could detect bullshit. I changed tracks. "But now we need you to come in."
"What if I say no?" he asked, still maintaining his calm, though something within him seemed suddenly shaky. I inwardly groaned. He wasn't going to make my job easy at all.
I shot him a coy smile. "I'll persuade you." This also felt wrong once I said it. He wasn't an idiot, unsusceptible to my usual tricks. He gave me a strange look before seeming to dismiss my statement.
"And what if… the other guy says no?"
My stomach flipped uncomfortably. "You've been more than a year without an incident," I said, continuing to fake my calm, though at this point, I couldn't tell if it was more for his benefit or my own. "I don't think you wanna break that streak." I moved a few paces away, turning my back to try to better regain myself. Every move was important and I was being sloppy.
"Well, I don't every time get what I want," I heard him whisper behind me. I went to fetch my agent cell phone. Small talk obviously wasn't going to get my anywhere with him; being straightforward might be more effective.
"Doctor, we're facing a potential global catastrophe," I said plainly, clicking through settings to the single photo the phone had of the Tesseract.
Banner laughed without humor, giving me a disbelieving look. "Oh, those I actively try to avoid," he said pointedly. I ignored him.
"This," I continued, showing him the phone, "is the Tesseract. It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet." I pushed the phone across the table to him and waited. He hesitated slightly before coming towards the table, pulling his glasses from a jacket pocket. I grinned to myself. Curiosity had to be a good sign.
'"What does Fury want me to do, swallow it?" he asked, and I had to bite my tongue to hold back a laugh. At least he had a sense of humor about it. He examined the picture for a moment before turning his eyes up to me.
"He wants you to find it. It's been taken," I said, instinctively leaning forward. Because I was also invested in his answer. If his help meant finding the Tesseract, then his help meant finding Clint. I could give less of a damn about the stupid cube or Loki and his wild quest for power. If I managed to get Clint out of this alive, I was taking him as far from all this as I could, where I could keep him safe. If I didn't, I would die trying.
"It emits a gamma signature that's too weak for us to trace. There's no one that knows gamma radiation like you do," I continued. He rolled his eyes, every feature of his expression screaming "Tell me about it." "If there was, that's where I'd be," I shrugged, hoping logic would be enough to convince him. He took off his glasses, studying me hard.
"So Fury isn't after the monster?"
I had to stop myself from flinching at the word. "Not that's he's told me," I said, somewhat tightly.
Banner's eyebrows rose comically. "And he tells you everything?" he said incredulously, the slightest bite beneath his words.
"Dr. Fury, he needs you unless—"
"He needs me in a cage?"
I bit back my impatience. "No one's gonna—"
"STOP LYING TO ME!" he yelled, suddenly slamming both hands on the rickety table so hard I was surprised it didn't fall apart. My hand readily reached for the gun beneath the table and trained it on him, my legs jumping up beneath me as if of their own accord. I was up before I even fully registered what happened. My pulse had spiked and was now pumping loudly in my ears. Through my earpiece I could hear my troop immediately jumping into action, commands being hissed here and there. I continued to feel my heart beating against my throat, my pointed gun the only steady part of me, while he stood back and blinked as if also surprised at himself. "I'm sorry… that was mean," he whispered apologetically, his eyebrows turned up like a child caught in wrongdoing. "I just wanted to see what you'd do."
I continued to stare at him, my pulse thrumming in my temples and my breath coming fast. For reasons I couldn't quite explain to myself, my eyes suddenly stung. All I did know was that I was as desperate as SHIELD was, maybe more so, and I was pointing my gun at possibly my only chance of finding Clint. If he forced me to kill him, I'd be no better off. Banner raised his hands toward me, eyeing the gun carefully. "Why don't we do this the easy way? Where you don't use that… and the other guy doesn't make a mess."
This time, I studied him carefully while my breathing quieted, wary of him wasting my time further. If he had really wanted to do this the easy way, he would have just let me seduce him and called it a day. But no.
"Okay? Natasha?" he said carefully. I blinked, my name seeming to call me back. I lowered my gun slowly, my nerves still wound tight. I turned my head down after a moment, touching my earpiece delicately.
"Stand down," I said, finally quieting all the movement on my wire. "We're good here." Banner's eyes flicked from me to outside then back again. He raised an eyebrow, sighing softly.
"'Just you and me.'"
I frowned at him. I retracted my hand from my ear almost sheepishly, but given his recent behavior, I couldn't very well say the reinforcements were totally unneeded. And that was saying something, because they annoyed the shit out of me more than half the time. I met his eyes, all pretexts aside, imploring him personally.
"Look, you can say no and stay here and pretend you're doing the world a favor by hiding yourself away. Or you can choose to help and actually make a difference, help people—"
"I help people here," he said, turning away, his eyes guarded.
"Help the world… You can't imagine how important this is… We really need you," I stressed again, leaning forward over the table, trying to make him silently understand just how much this meant, not just for the world, but for me personally. It was the selfish, I realized, but the world had never given a damn about me. So I was trained not to care. Not a lot mattered in my life. I had to protect the one thing that did. "Please," I whispered finally, desperately, clinging to any last hope. We stood in silence for a long moment, even my troop outside seeming to hold their breath. Banner still faced away from me, his hands once again wringing each other. He ran them through his messy hair several times, and with his face turned away, I couldn't possibly guess what he was thinking. My heart seemed to climb higher and higher in my throat as I became more and more certain what he was contemplating was his best method of escape and how best to kill us all.
When he finally turned to face me, my knees almost buckled with relief. I recognized his decision immediately in his candid, unreserved eyes, and I knew this wasn't an evil man, not even remotely malicious or ill-wishing. And I now owed him immensely.
"Fine… I'll go."