AN: Trigger warning - strangulation.
A Difficult Mission
Natasha's greeting call was met with silence, and she let slip a relieved sigh. She didn't think she could handle dealing with Clint that night, forcing herself to smile and laugh so he wouldn't ask her if she was okay for the ten thousandth time. Dropping her bag in the corner beside the door, she closed and locked it behind her before kicking her boots off as well. She tossed her keys into the bowl on the end table a couple feet away and then headed straight for the kitchen.
Her wrist cartridges clattered across the kitchen counter, followed by her gloves and then, not as wisely, her gun, still tucked into her thigh holster. She made for the refrigerator and leaned down to look inside, shifting a couple of things around before withdrawing a bottle of Guinness. One swift movement brought the neck of the bottle down onto the edge of the counter and sent the cap spinning off into the sink. It was a bad habit to have, Natasha knew, since there was a pronounced half-moon dent in the wood after months of her abuse, but she didn't care.
She'd had a hard mission, and she needed a drink.
A dying fluorescent light flickered overhead, making the shadows along the long, concrete hallway dance across the floor. Natasha paid them no mind as she straightened up, three incapacitated guards left in her wake. One was dead. Broken neck. One was unconscious. Broken nose. Three broken ribs. Possible internal bleeding. One would lose the use of his left arm. Broken clavicle. Crushed brachial plexus.
The Black Widow stalked down the hallway, her tread silent as the grave as she approached the thick steel door set into the corridor's dead end. It had been difficult descending through all three layers of the underground compound to get here; most of the guards and research personnel she had been able to slip past unseen, but she had done plenty of fighting, plenty of dragging bodies out of sight to buy herself time. She didn't know how she would find her way back out of the compound, but as long as she accomplished her objective she had nothing to worry about.
Her ledger may have been written in red, but it was flawless.
She extracted a small device from her utility belt and found the end of the set of wires protruding from it. After briefly inspecting the security panel beside the door, she pried it off the wall with a small screwdriver and carefully connected the device's output wires in the proper places. Six seconds later, the passcode had been generated, entered, and the door's lock released with a click followed by a satisfying hiss.
Natasha whirled to the side and pressed her back against the cold steel, carefully counting to three in her head before she pulled the door around. A long burst of machine gun fire promptly exploded through the doorway, bullets embedding themselves in the walls of the hallway. Bullet spray. Panic. Fear. She could practically smell it from her position on the other side of the door.
She waited. Another burst. The clatter of a magazine dropping to the concrete floor.
Natasha spun around the edge of the door and dropped to her knees, sliding easily over the smooth ground. She circled her weight, turning herself over as she slipped between the final guard's legs while he fumbled to reload his weapon. One quick blow to the back of his ankle saw him falling to his knees in front of her. The flick of a finger released the garrote cable from her wrist cartridge, and before the guard could so much as cry out it wrapped around his neck and cut off his air supply.
She gave a rough yank, pulling the guard's back against her chest and holding him firmly to her, giving him no room to get his hands between them or attempt to break her grip. His black hair tossed into her mouth and she spat it out, turning a glare onto the side of his face for the inconvenience. He was pale, sweating, his high cheekbone a sharp ridge framing a bulging, reddening green eye.
Natasha could have sworn she saw the corner of his lips turn upward as he struggled against her.
Her grip on the cable slackened.
He choked in a shuddering breath.
She wrenched her arm and snapped his neck.
Natasha's head hung low, almost resting on her chest as her gaze lost itself in the drain at the bottom of the sink. One of her hands gripped the edge of the dark kitchen counter. The other wrapped itself around the base of her beer bottle. Her shoulders shook slightly.
The War for Earth, as Thor so eloquently dubbed it, ended nearly eight months ago. The planet had already seen another invasion, by Dark Elves, no less, and come away mostly unscathed. Natasha enjoyed her recovery time from the war, pulled off countless missions since then, laughed, smiled, even managed to bond to a certain extent with the rest of the Avengers. Well, that might be pushing it. She and Steve had grown pretty close and Tony started to hate her a little less for what she did to him all those years ago, but at the very least nobody openly worried about her burying a knife in somebody's back anymore. On the surface, everything was going well.
Under the surface was a different story.
She told Clint that day on the helicarrier that she was compromised, but he hadn't understood what she meant, not really. He simply thought that Loki had made her stake in the war personal, had said something that made her want to kill him just as badly as the rest of the team did. The truth was that it went much deeper than that. Loki was always nothing more than an assignment, a threat that needed to be contained and, preferably, neutralized. Until that interrogation, although she applied the term loosely in this case, he was just one more mission upon which the fate of the world depended. She was used to those.
After that interrogation, he wasn't a mission at all.
Natasha hadn't wanted to kill Loki because he found a way to bury himself under her skin. She didn't want to kill him because he proved that he was one of the few people who had ever frightened her. She didn't even want to kill him because of what he promised he would make her lover do to her.
Natasha wanted to kill Loki because he had read her ledger, had understood what was etched into the flesh of the pages, and that was far more frightening to her than whatever tortures he could possibly inflict upon her.
Eight months later, sometimes she could still see his emerald eyes, bright with such horrible comprehension, staring back at her out of the darkness. Out of the bathroom mirror. Out of the snow falling on the other side of the window. Out of the concerned depths of Clint's grey eyes. Out of the drain at the bottom of the sink.
Eight months later, sometimes she could still hear his silky voice coiling in her ears, biting into her like a twisted, malevolent serpent.
"You lie and kill, in the service of liars and killers...
"You pretend to be separate, to have your own code...Something that makes up for the horrors...
"But they are a part of you...and the will never...go...away!"
"Good evening, Agent Romanoff."