My prompt was: "Write about Clint & Nat as kids" and I just...
"Tony?"
The shrieks dragged her back to consciousness, shrieks high-pitched and manic and utterly undignified.
"The fuck was that, Stark?"
A man, angry, nearby. Closer than the woman.
The air was thick, heavy with dust and acrid smoke, and she couldn't see the others but she could hear them, groaning and shuffling. Natalia cast her eyes around and found a tight space, safe, a shiny chrome lab table overturned and wedged against a slab of fallen concrete. She pulled herself across the tile floor, arm over arm, and slid into the shadows.
Her leg stung, and when she looked back she saw the gleaming trail of blood she'd left behind. No good, it rendered her hiding place ineffective. She contemplated darting back into the open, finding something to disguise the track in the dust, but a sharp crack and a rumbling noise spared her the trouble. Another slab of concrete crashed to the floor, precisely where she'd been lying moments before, and as it shattered on the tile the debris covered her trail. Convenient.
"Tony! Oh, God, Tony…."
"We're fine, Pepper!"
A second man, softer spoken than the first. She scoffed at his tone of forced calm. A wail rang through the space, another child, but it wasn't any of her comrades making that pitiful sound. In fact, none of the voices were familiar at all.
She pushed herself into the very back corner of her hiding spot and listened.
"We're fine, right, J.A.R.V.I.S.?"
"I am detecting only superficial injuries, Dr. Banner."
"Okay, good. That's good. So let's...let's get the air cycling, if the ventilation systems are intact-" a metallic grind and clank and cool air wafted into the gap she'd crawled through, "-and something brighter than the auxiliary lights, and I'll track down the rest of the team."
Something had gone wrong, she could guess as much from the tremble behind the man's words and the way the light flickered through the haze of smoke and dust. There were doctors, and children, and that spelled trouble. She couldn't recall how she'd ended up in the lab, but that happened sometimes when they poked her with needles and attached their monitors.
This, this destruction and panic, had never happened before. Maybe it was her way out.
She brushed careful fingers over the mess on the floor, searching for a weapon. The older girls, they all remembered the same thing, the same pair of parents and the same little house in the countryside and an invitation to study at a ballet academy. That was wrong.
Natalia was only seven, and she remembered a house in Moscow and a mother and grandmother and only sometimes a father, and she remembered how astoundingly boring she found the ballet. She played along, just like the others in her group, endured the training and reprimands and put on a hard expression and let her eyes go dead while she stood in line. It was the doctors who took the memories and replaced them, and the doctors had only just taken an interest in her.
Natalia remembered, and she stayed alert and sharp for opportunities while the other girls fell into routine.
Her hand found a long, jagged piece of glass.
This was an opportunity, and a very good one.
The sleeve of her jacket was torn - a grey hooded jacket far too big for her small frame - so she ripped the bottom half of the sleeve the rest of the way off and wrapped the fabric around the thicker end of the glass shard.
Armed with the makeshift dagger, she lay flat on the floor and scooted forward to peer out of her hiding place again. She watched a man clear debris from the door, then a woman with red hair and a stricken, horrified expression forced her way in.
The three adults - the angry man, the doctor, and the woman - began searching the room, sifting through overturned equipment and tables, calling for Cap and Stark and Tony and Barton and Nat.
She double checked that she was concealed in shadow, and tightened her grip on the broken glass each time one of them shouted Nat.
The children they found were boys, not girls as she had expected. One looked sick and underfed, and his voice cracked with the onset of adolescence as he kept repeating 'Bucky?!' and 'What happened, Buck?' over and over again at the angry man. The red-haired woman fussed incessantly over the second boy, pressing a bandage against a cut on his forehead while he swatted her hand away and gazed around the lab with wide, eager eyes. The last boy only asked 'Where's Barney?' and when the doctor, presumably Dr. Banner, couldn't find an answer, he sat silently and had a bit of shrapnel removed from his shoulder and the wound stitched up.
There was a short stretch, a minute or two, when she was convinced they'd given up looking for her. They hadn't come close to finding her hiding place, and they wouldn't want to stay in the ruined lab any longer than necessary. They would leave, and she would escape.
Then the woman and the angry man sent their charges to sit beside Dr. Banner, and began searching again. At first, she remained confident they wouldn't find her. The man shifted pieces of debris at random, sifted through piles of rubble with his bare hands in a methodical sort of way. Tiring work, and he was on the opposite side of the room. He'd need a break long before he reached her.
The red-haired woman, however, worked smarter instead of harder. Natalia watched her stand in the middle of the lab, hands planted on her hips, and scan the mess for likely hiding places. She honed in on the dark crevice where Natalia waited almost immediately. Natalia drew back again, steeling herself to strike and hating the prospect, as the pretty woman with red hair like hers crouched and looked into the opening.
"I've got Natasha," the woman called over her shoulder, sounding relieved and happy, and her breathless tone set Natalia's nerves on edge. The woman knew her but she didn't know the woman, and that was bad.
"Is she like the others?" The angry man, still sounding angry, but there was an urgency to his words that made her clutch the jagged piece of glass a little tighter. "Because that's not Natasha."
He pushed the woman out of the way, firmly but gently, and narrowed his eyes as he studied her in the shadows.
"Natalia," he said, and fear drew taut in her chest. The sleeve of his jacket slid back and his left arm gleamed in the fluorescent lights, a metal arm, and the concrete slab crumbled a little under his fingers where he grasped it for support.
A glass weapon wouldn't work on that arm. She ran her hand carefully along the side of the lab table, searching for something better.
"They took me, too" he said in Russian, and he didn't sound angry anymore, only a little sad. She watched him warily. "We made it out, Natalia, both of us. This is a safe place. You don't have to hurt anyone."
Her fingers closed around something cold and smooth, an instrument she couldn't quite identify in the dark. The metal arm reached for her.
She shifted and crouched and coiled all her muscles tight, and when his hand brushed the torn sleeve of her too-big jacket, she lunged and drove the lab instrument between two of the metal scales in the crook of his elbow.
He scowled and she sneered, and he retreated with a huff of exasperation, rocking back on his heels.
"Not Natasha," he muttered dubiously, and wrenched the lab instrument from his arm.
"Ohmygod," softly, from the woman. She sounded appropriately terrified, and Natalia discounted her as a threat. Metal Arm was the one to worry about. He could force her to submit to the doctor, and if the doctor got his needles in her, she'd never escape. "Let's try Clint-"
"She'll tear him apart," Metal Arm scoffed. " I'll drag her out, and she'll have to be restrained until we're-"
"She is a child, James," the woman hissed. "She's scared. And she's my friend. You're not restraining her."
Natalia found herself surprised by the disgust and finality coloring the woman's words. She had obviously misjudged which of the two adults were in charge.
The woman stomped away to the cluster of boys in the middle of the room and Metal Arm bent down to study her again. She stuck her tongue out, then drew one finger slowly across her throat.
"Come out and try it, pipsqueak," he challenged.
She was too smart for that. She looked past Metal Arm, watched the woman choose the boy with the shrapnel injury. He chattered the entire way over.
"Is this a group home? Barney always said we'd end up in a group home. They separated us, huh? He said that would happen, too."
Natalia watched curiously as a brief flicker of anguish swept over the woman's expression.
"I'm afraid so, Clint," the woman said gently. "We've...um...had an accident. I think Natasha's too scared to come out. Can you help?"
The boy peered in at her, slightly older but scrawny, blood staining the ripped sleeve of his t-shirt and drying in tracks down his arm. He didn't seem to mind, and she recalled the stoic way he'd sat for his stitches. Maybe he was better than her. She pressed her back into the corner rather than lashing out.
"I know that look," he said solemnly, and stood straight again, so she saw only his bare feet. "She thinks you're gonna smack her. That's why she won't come out. You won't, right? She's just little, she didn't do this-"
"No, sweetie. We're not going to...no. I promise, but I need you to help me get her out of there, it isn't safe."
"Sure, yeah," the boy agreed, "but you need to stand way over there." He waited until the woman crossed the room and Metal Arm stalked away, then dropped to his knees and thrust a hand into her hiding spot, palm open. "Hi," he said, and wiggled his fingers. "I'm Clint. You can come out if you want, the grown-ups won't smack you around."
Her first instinct was not to believe him, but he was so earnest she found herself wanting to.
"Beat the shit out of you?" he tried, when she didn't reply. "Hit you? That's why you're hiding, right?"
She chewed her lip and shrugged one shoulder. Being struck was nothing new - she'd learned how to take a hit and keep her mouth shut about it - but it felt easier to let the boy think that was why she was hiding than to explain about the doctors and their needles and the tests.
Clint lay flat on his stomach and propped his chin on folded arms.
"You've got a good spot, but it could be better. You're cornered in there. You're always supposed to hide with a back exit, so they can't pin you down and grab you."
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, but couldn't quite find her voice to ask what sort of backwards training he'd received. If she hid well enough in the first place, nobody would find her. And why would she ever need a second way out of her hiding place, when she could fight her way out? A second entrance only meant someone could sneak up on her.
"Everyone here's real nice, I think. Maybe...maybe you want to watch me first? That's what Barney does sometimes. He goes out first and checks it's safe, and he lets me hide until I feel better. Yeah, so I'll be Barney and you can be me for a while, and when you decide to stop being afraid you can come out."
She bristled, mostly because Clint's assessment was true, but she lifted her chin and searched quickly for the English she wanted, focused and tried to make her accent disappear the way they showed her in training.
"I am not afraid," she told him, and while she tried for smug and haughty, there was still a slight betraying waver to the words, and her accent bled through, and she wished she'd kept her mouth shut. Tears pricked her eyes.
Clint frowned for a moment, brow furrowed, then brightened and gave her another grin.
"Cautious. That's what Barney calls it. Dad says we're chickenshit but Barney says we're cautious. It's different from scared, it means you're smart. You're that."
Cautious and smart were acceptable traits, and she found herself warming to the boy with the easy smiles and bright grey eyes. She sucked a deep breath through her nose - absolutely not a sniffle - and forced the tears away.
"Da," she agreed, and nodded once.
"Okay," he said, and nodded back. He scrambled up on his hands and knees. "So I'll go over there and talk to the other kids, and you can watch the grown-ups not hit me, and then you can come out. Deal?"
He shoved his hand at her again, and she gave in and brushed her fingers against his.
A pleasant warmth blossomed in her chest, and a not-so-pleasant shock of electricity started in the tips of her fingers and rippled up her arm.
Clint's eyes went wide and he jerked his hand back, flicked his gaze from her to his fingers and back again.
"It wasn't me," she said carefully, and examined her own fingers.
"Me either," he said. He lay flat on his stomach again, slid his head and shoulders into her hiding spot, reached for her. When he spoke, it was in a hushed whisper. "You can come out now. I think that meant we're supposed to be friends. I won't let anything bad happen."
And without quite knowing why, she took his hand and let him pull her from the shadows.