Nat was smiling for the first time in a while. Why? Because this infiltrate mission she was being sent on was with her favorite coworker and "work hubby" James "Bucky" Barnes. They'd not been put together for awhile after someone (Steve) spread a rumor they'd been banging in a conference room. They hadn't, they'd been sequestered there for a very private briefing for a mission. And now they were finally allowed to go on assignment together again, and she was excited. So, when Bucky walked into the briefing room, the smile between them could melt ice caps. Fury sat them both down and told them their assignment. An AIM installation had popped up seemingly overnight: a whole complex just sat there. Fury didn't care about the how for this, he had others working on that. He wants them to get in there and shut it down
Based on how he said "by any means necessary", they both smiled, cause that meant they got to do what they were best at: kill scumbags with high violence and prejudice.
They hardly recognized the time had passed between the briefing and now they're only a couple minutes off the drop.
The pair of them are just exchanging glances, and now its time. The pair stand up, walk out to the drop, and as they'd done dozens of times before, jumped out of a perfectly good aircraft. On purpose.
On the ground, it took them all of ten seconds to figure out there were a lot more enemies than the briefing said. Which was pretty normal, at this point. A couple smashed robots later, they're met up at a clearing they designated. They moved together towards the site, and found once they arrived that the site was.. well.. gone. In its place an AIM assault squad, headed by one of their infamous Adaptoids. The pair sighed, and got to work. The Adaptoid caused a bit of an issue, but since there was only a few others, it wasn't much of an issue. The site was gone, and the squad was clearly left to stall anyone that came along. Either they had a leak, or they were set up. Go figure. They looked around to find any ideas as to where the place went, and found a PDA that Nat could hack, and found out it wasn't even that far. Maybe a half mile away. Smoke rose from that direction, so off they went.
It was maybe fifteen minutes later, and they were at the site as planned, if not where they planned. There were a bunch of soldiers, a bunch of bots, and a massive building hovering on colossal engines. Nat went one way, and Bucky did Bucky things by creeping through them in plain sight, ripping out power cores and throats alike without ever being seen. Nat took care of her share too of course, but something about watching his ex-assassin type of efficient, ruthless brutality got her feeling a bit of butterflies. She could see how someone would think they'd been sleeping together with how she caught herself looking at him as she would pop another goons melon. They both arrived atop the building, and got out their provided explosives: a pound and a half each of the collective six pounds of plastic explosive that had been placed at important parts of the rig, engines and other sort of load bearing places. They drop the last of it down the exhaust of the rig, then booked it the way they came. The smoke that'd risen from them burning a clearing away compounded by ten when they pulled their triggers, on the run from the alerted perimeter guards, an insane KABOOM signaling the end of their mobile research rig, and the surviving guards and bots. They had to get a good distance clear, but did, boarding their evac chopper and rising out of the remote, burning woods through a layer of smoke, both of them covered in AIM goon blood, and finally, finally, Nat got the courage she'd been missing for years. She leaned over, and when Bucky turned to look, she kissed him. And he kissed her back too! The five second kiss felt like an eternity, and they both silently agreed to not say anything about it to anyone. Their pilot, however, would never let them forget he knew. He started laughing when they both saw the shield in the other seat and realized who was taking them back to base, Nat is red as a tomato, Buck white as a sheet. His laugh echoes in the comms with no context for HQ as the aircraft rose into the smoky midnight sky.