Revamped!


Chapter 30: The Secret World of Espionage Part Five

Present Day - Location Classified - 23:49 PM

Merida sighs. "To be honest - which I have to be since I'm under oath - I didn't catch on to the whole spy language when my mom said it to me over the phone. It was months since we established the whole antique shop motif. I started to be suspicious when the sniper's reflection flashed in my eyes and that's when it all started making sense. I knew my parents got themselves in trouble. Then I made my plan: have a rookie SHIELD sharpshooter take care of the real sniper on my back while I got a SHIELD rookie to masquerade as me, both seeming real and giving them some field training. My SO handled that. I went into a brief period of hiding to find my parents and used the opportunity of Ivory's escape to disguise like her when I found my parents. Pretty smart, huh?"

Agent Tapper doesn't respond. Merida feels proud of herself and she would like to believe that he's so impressed with her plan that he's speechless, but that's not the case since Merida knows he couldn't care less. He's a man of rules and ethics while Merida doesn't know what those words mean.

"Now, I know how James feels about his quantum crap," Merida mumbles bitterly.

Agent Mike Tapper: So, you faked the news about Ivory's escape just so you could use her as a disguise to rescue your parents?

"No, she actually escaped. It's just great that it happened when I needed it to."

Agent Tapper glares at her.

Agent Mike Tapper: Did you at least get permission from Agent Rogers?

Merida scoffs. "You think I need Xavier's permission?"

Agent Mike Tapper: I meant his superiors.

"Captain Rogers and Agent Carter are my godparents as well. They would've let me."

Merida hides her grin when she sees Agent Tapper about to snap.

-o-

Two Days Ago - Somewhere in the Baltic - Time Unknown

As Clint and Natasha verify that Sergei is unconscious and restrained to a drainpipe, Merida pulls out a blueprint of the submarine and holds it up. She makes a trail with her eyes as she follows the dotted lines on the blueprint. Her parents look over her shoulders, unsure of their daughter's plan.

"I told you that tattoo would be useful," Merida tells her parents. "How else would you have known it was me and not Ivory?"

Mentioning the antique shop rang a bell in their minds but they couldn't be so sure. Merida's arrow tattoo on the back of her neck is what Clint and Natasha found as strange when Ivory shifted her hair. Then applying the spy language to her words is what sealed the deal that Merida was actually Ivory in disguise. Her quiver and bow were hiding in her real hair, all underneath the wig.

"Do you have a plan?" Natasha asks Merida.

"Dressing up as Ivory was my plan," Merida replies. "Then I was hoping just to walk out. As for what happens now, I'll wing something."

"Do you have a ride out of here?"

"Nope. I literally swam down here myself."

"An extraction team?"

"I didn't even tell my own team that I was leaving. They knew I was hiding and I was doing so in our quinjet since nobody would check there with my duplicate running around as me. I found your location in the middle of the night so I left my friends the coordinates on a sticky note that I stuck on our quinjet's coffee machine because waking them all up is just a waste of precious time. Hopefully, if my timing is right, someone will wake up three hours after I left and decide that they need their morning coffee on their way to pick us up."

Clint facepalms, Natasha mutters disgracefully in Russian, and Merida folds her blueprints to start leading the way. With weapons ready to shoot, they end up entering a corridor full of guards and start fighting.

Natasha flips over Clint and shoots her two guns at them all at once. Clint grabs one guard by his arm and swings him around to collide with another. Merida feels one guard pounce on her back. She grunts as she stumbles forwards. Merida quickly regains her balance and rams him into a wall. Natasha lunges, using her signature thigh choke to send two of them down at once.

Clint gets grabbed in a chokehold as another charges at him. He leaps in the air to kick over the oncoming one. Once his feet plant on the ground, he pulls an arrow out of his quiver and stabs it behind him. Merida grabs a guard with and uses the edge of her crossbow to slit his throat. (She didn't have her standard bow because she couldn't risk having Ivory be seen with a quiver full of arrows, and crossbows were easier to carry on her person.)

Merida glances at a nearby window and sees the ocean on the other side. That gives her an idea.

"Mom, Dad, hold your breath!" Merida exclaims.

Merida fires an arrow at the window, shattering it. The guards all look in surprise and Merida and her parents use this distraction of the rushing water pouring in to run out. Knowing the value of the submarine, Merida knew that the window would self-seal, which it did.

Merida rushes her parents into a certain room and locks the door behind them. Their eyes fall on the torpedoes which they know will be their way out. Merida opens the torpedo as Natasha sets a timer off for it to launch. The three of them enter the torpedo and the moment Clint seals it shut, it launches. They hold on tightly as they speed through the water but then, the resistance lightens and they relax.

"We're in the air," Natasha says.

The controls in the torpedo start flashing, implementing a self-destruct that was ordered from Sergei's submarine.

"Oh, god…" Merida mutters.

Natasha starts pushing all the buttons she could to get the controls to silence themselves and override the order, but nothing is working. She slams her fists down in defeat.

"As if this day couldn't get any worse," Clint grumbles.

"There are no parachutes in this stupid thing," Merida says. "I'm pretty sure it's just for decoration or that idiot Sergei thought he'd never need them. Stupid blueprints didn't mention that."

"Never mind."

Instead of a gigantic explosion which is what they were expecting, it begins falling apart piece by piece in a matter of seconds. In the spur of the moment, Clint pulls out a grappling hook arrow and passes it to Natasha. Before she got the chance to pass it to Merida, the floor of the torpedo breaks beneath them and the three of them are suddenly free-falling, but at least Clint and Natasha are attached to each other. Merida continues to fall faster than her parents, grateful that at least she'll land in torpedo-debris filled water instead of concrete.

Clint suddenly feels someone above him grab his free hand in a tight grip. He looks up in surprise and sees Xavier holding him and Natasha up as a quinjet reveals its true appearance underneath the reflective panels. They all look down at Merida who manages to fire her crossbow. She fires a grappling hook arrow upwards and it securely stabs the quinjet so she calls herself up.

"Aye, you found my note!" Merida exclaims gratefully.

"I almost drank it," Xavier replies, laughing as he pulls them all in the quinjet.

-o-

Location Classified - Present Day - 23:55 PM

Agent Mike Tapper: What you did was reckless and irresponsible. You put two of our newest recruits at risk on a mission that you didn't inform your superiors about!

Merida rolls her eyes, not caring about her teenage-like attitude in an adult situation. Did he not hear her mention her SO? She finds debriefing agents to be extremely dense and thick-skinned when it comes to their job. No wonder agents hate doing them.

"I'm at that point where I literally don't care about what you call protocol for what classifies as a proper mission since it was a success," Merida starts. "Would you rather have me dead at the hand of a sniper while my parents stay submerged in the Baltic Sea for who knows how long?"

He's silent. Merida knows that if he was to respond without a filter, he would say yes to the idea of her being dead. He wouldn't be the only agent to do so.

"They're my parents," Merida continues with a lighter tone. "They have been protecting me since I was conceived and in return, I consider myself to be saving them. I'm not talking about missions but their relationship. My parents were married after I was born. There's the chance that if I was never born, they might not be together today."