Fic for emmypenny: Known By Its Flight | Gen | PG-13
Title: Known By Its Flight
Author: tielan
Recipient: emmypenny
Rating: PG-13
Universe: MCU
Pairing/Characters: Natasha, Maria Hill, Clint Barton, Phil Coulson, OMC.
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of Marvel Comics and no infringement is intended. These stories are for entertainment only and no money is being made from them.
Summary: SHIELD does not make weapons of its women - or, as Barton has observed with greater accuracy, SHIELD does not make weapons like Natasha out of their women. That doesn't mean a woman can't choose to make a weapon of herself.
Notes: The original story was "Pepper gets kidnapped and kicks metaphorical arse with three inch heels and the assistance of Natasha, Maria, and Sif", but the logistics of the story proved more than my scrambled brain could handle. I hope this suffices!
Agent Hill has two things to say to Natasha at the initial mission briefing. "We'll do this one neat," she says. "Stick with the plan as long as possible; if we end up in 'here be dragons', we'll navigate off the map. Coulson says you're good at that."
It's not the first time Natasha's been included in the planning stages of a mission; it's the first time she's done it with anyone but Barton and Coulson.
Natasha's surprised. Given Hill's personality, she would have expected to have the plan laid out before her. That she hasn't betokens trust. Whether in Natasha herself or in Coulson's assessment of her remains to be seen.
She's a good agent, Coulson said when he told her she'd be working with Agent Hill. Needs a little polish to her experience, but she's got the potential.
The pronoun is unusual enough. SHIELD does not make weapons of its women - or, as Barton has observed with greater accuracy, SHIELD does not make weapons like Natasha out of their women. Her controllers from the Red Room - an always-present chorus of approval and disapproval that she no longer has to listen to but which she hears all the time - would disapprove of it as an opportunity lost.
Natasha disagrees. There'd be no room for a woman like Agent Hill in the Red Room program - too much steel rod, not enough flexible steel coil.
In the Red Room, you bend or you break.
--
He's an American businessman on the surface; the wealthy son of old money who looked for something exciting and found it in the darker side of business - dabbling with mobsters and politicians, both American and other. Over fifteen years, he's gone from dabbling to full-blown involvement in arms dealing, mostly chemical weaponry.
Natasha tosses back her drink. She's already had one confrontation tonight - a fight with Agent Thorpe, who was playing her date for the evening. Beautiful women in slinky dresses do not drink alone in the bar of the hotel unless they're waiting for a man to turn up - or have sent him packing.
"Drinking alone?"
She gives him a look, feminine and calculating - the look of a woman summing up a man, from the fit of his suit to the width of his wallet. It's a look that Adam Kincaid would be very familiar with - a woman determining whether it's worth casting lures his way.
Natasha has no doubt most women find in his favour. Her assumed persona certainly would.
"I was drinking with someone else," she says. "I sent him on his way."
"His loss. Do you mind...?"
"Knock yourself out."
"All things considered, I'd rather not." His smile is inviting, encouraging her to smile with him and Natasha does. "Adam."
"Elizabeth."
As targets go, Adam Kincaid is surprisingly easy. 'Elizabeth' is a European agent for a corporation seeking residential property in Leipzig. She speaks fluent English, German, and Hungarian, is open to spending a night with a successful businessmen, and doesn't care if he's wearing a wedding ring or not.
Natasha doesn't care if he's wearing a wedding ring or not. She doesn't want him for sex.
"Go as far as you need to," Agent Hill said, and the look that passed between them, woman to woman, made no bones about what that might entail. Oddly, both Coulson and Barton are less easy with Natasha using sex to get the target in position; they usually give her alternatives, options - more risky, but less intimate.
Natasha supposes that just because SHIELD doesn't make weapons out of their women doesn't mean that their women might not choose to become weapons themselves.
--
As Natasha wipes the curved stiletto on Kincaid's shirtsleeve, she reflects that Adam Kincaid might have been a successful businessman, arms dealer, and traitor, but he wasn't very suspicious or very cautious.
There's no blood spatter, there was hardly a struggle.
The curved blade slid into his flesh so easily, and his jerk of surprise only hastened his death.
Dark eyes stare emptily up at her as she draws away from the cooling corpse. She's killed too many men to feel anything so soft as regret. Most of them even deserved it.
Natasha slides the stiletto back into its sheath in the underwire bra, and she slides the dress back over her shoulders and eases the zip back up. Her make-up needs only the barest touch-up before she picks up her purse and heads for the door of the suite. Now she just has to be out of the city by dawn - long before Kincaid is due to be found at eight by his personal aide.
Two floors down is an empty room with a bag in it - a change of clothes and a new disguise, a new identity - a student backpacking her way through this part of Europe, catching the Eurostar back to Paris.
Small details, carefully kept.
She calls in the kill and receives the confirmation to exit - a job well done.
Natasha exhales as she slips off her heels and ties them into the strap of her clutch. It's not the relief Coulson feels when kingpins are taken out of the equation, nor the pride Barton takes in the clean precision of his work, but something else - perhaps the closest she can come to synonymising it in English is satisfaction.
Satisfaction wasn't a part of the job in the Red Room - merely the completion of the mission. She was a tool to her instructors, not a person, and as such didn't need to enjoy her work so long as she completed it.
She's just heading for the window when the door of the hotel room bursts open.
--
Going into damage mode is second nature to Natasha.
The first thug is down with a smashed windpipe before he even realises there's anyone else in the room. The second throws a wild swing and earns a header into the wall.
By then, the third and fourth men have their weapons out and pointed at her. Natasha could take them easily enough, but it will leave more mess than SHIELD wants. She lifts her hands in a gesture of surrender, and steps back when they gesture her back into the room, letting uncertainty creep into her posture as she does so.
The thugs move neatly enough, although not entirely in sync. The one Natasha mentally names Thug Four - or 'Chetyri' - closes the door behind him, and steps over his comrades as he crosses the room - keeping well clear of Natasha - and checks Kincaid. Thug Three - or 'Tri' - keeps his gun trained on her, his eyes looking her over, stripping her as the eyes of men usually do.
"He's dead."
"That simplifies things." They speak in Catalan, and Natasha gives no sign that she understands them. Tri's eyes - a muddy green - fix upon her suspiciously. He switches from Catalan to English as he demands, "Who employed you?"
"We don't have time for this." Chetyri strides across the room and he's in her space. Natasha sees the blow coming and flinches. It hurts about as much as she expects, but pain can be rejected or embraced. She embraces it now.
She doesn't have the leeway to shake it off anyway.
"You come with us. And you will talk. If you don't..." His eyes smear her skin like an oily hand, the threat clear enough.
Their cohorts are left lying where they fell as she's escorted out of the room without even the pretence of courtesy. Chetyri has a good grip on her arm - which she could easily shake off, but she wants open space before she attacks, and Tri has the gun which is more chancy and always messy.
She has hours before dawn - if things go very bad, then she can come back and clean up later.
Let's keep this one neat, Agent Hill says in her head.
So Natasha goes where Chetyri and Tri prompt her, trusting to her instincts - and her value to the organisation that's taken her in.
--
It's colder in the stairwell, and goosebumps rise on her arms. They go up, rather than down, four flights, five flights, six flights, seven... One floor down from the top of the stairwell, Tri calls someone, informs them that Kincaid is dead, and asks for a pickup at the hotel.
The plain speak is almost amusing. Natasha's grown accustomed to Barton's somewhat whimsical choices of code - the last time he wanted a pickup, it was all about his grandmother's cannoli. Coulson didn't say anything when they debriefed, but there was cannoli in the safehouse refrigerator when they got back.
It was good cannoli, too.
Somehow Natasha doubts there'll be cannoli at the end of this journey, whether or not she gets away from these idiots or not. Agent Hill doesn't exactly seem like the cannoli sort.
The wind catches her hair as they step out into the windy night, and she tilts her head back so the wind can tug at her curls. The chopper is incoming, the whop-whop-whop of the blades faint in the night but growing closer. The pilot weaves through the skyscrapers with a skill that Natasha can admire. Whoever the Catalans work for, they may be amateurs at intelligence work, but they have good people in operations.
SHIELD has better.
She's not sure when realisation hits her. Maybe when a gust of wind hits the craft on its approach and its trajectory barely adjusts. Certainly when the chopper swings around so the nose is facing away and the pilot is flying sideways towards them.
There are only a handful of people capable of flying a chopper like that, and Natasha knows most of them.
Chetyri realises it's not his people a split second before the passenger door slides open over a forty-four story drop, and a pale oval face tilts to sight along a scope. "That's not-"
Natasha steps wide of the kill zone and drops to the ground, both in self-preservation and to give the sniper a clear shot.
It's doubtful Tri realises what hit him, but Chetyri half turns, trying to bring up his gun before the first slug tears through his shoulder and he staggers back before two more find him and fell him.
As the helicopter touches down, four 'cleaners' from SHIELD's European branch climb out and head for the two dead men. Dressed as various members of the hotel staff, they'll blend into the hotel routine before taking themselves out sometime tomorrow morning with no-one the wiser.
Natasha crosses over to the helicopter door, where Agent Hill and Agent Thorpe are waiting for the report. Hill is still wearing the harness and putting the sniper rifle away with a too-careful precision.
Thorpe has changed out of his business suit, and iis also in the garb of hotel staff.
"Two more of those in the room," Natasha reports. "They spoke Catalonian and English, and wanted Kincaid dead, too. Not well-trained - not a unit."
"New players." Hill's voice is rock steady, even if her hands aren't as they close the box. She looks to Thorpe, her face pale but composed, her mouth tilting at the corner with a faint mockery. "Fun times ahead for you."
"I'll be sure to save some of the shit for you, Hill," he says, just as lightly before he turns to Natasha, "Anything else?"
"My bag is in 4718, and I have a ticket for the Eurostar to Paris."
"It's the little things," he says, climbing out of the chopper and waiting for Natasha to climb in. "Au revoir, ladies."
And he joins his clean-up team as Barton lifts them off the hotel helipad and out through the dark city.
--
They sit in silence until they're out of Leipzig and into the countryside, headed for a safehouse somewhere in the Slovakian hills.
Natasha watches Barton pilot them out, but her thoughts are on the woman sitting beside her - the woman whose hands are folded in her lap with careful precision.
She's read Agent Hill's history - the one she's not supposed to be able to access. While Maria Hill's background is nowhere near the intensity of Natasha's own history, there are certain resonant echoes - an emotionally abusive childhood, a childhood and adolescence of hard physical discipline and focus, a non-traditional career for a woman, and then recruitment by an agent.
Or, at least, an agent of SHIELD's predecessor.
The history didn't say whether Hill had been in on a termination mission before. Personal and professional details before SHIELD are one thing; SHIELD operations are quite another level of security.
Still, Agent Hill's careful stillness suggests this isn't familiar territory.
Natasha shifts in her seat, drawing the other woman's eye. Then she nods, ever so slightly. "Good shooting."
"It could have been neater."
"Did you take sniper training?"
"I had lessons." The flick of her eyes to the pilot's chair leaves no doubt who gave them. And explains why Hill took the shot while Barton did the flying. "It was a good move, drawing them up to the roof."
"I was more led than leading." Natasha sits back. "But it is easier to escape outside. And easier for others to pick them off."
"If someone happens to be watching." Hill turns her head and her gaze holds Natasha's, veiled and measuring.
"That would be the part Agent Coulson is always trying to explain about trusting your colleagues." Not that Natasha needed that lesson; one had to rely on one's partner in the Red Room or risk failure to meet the objectives, and the corresponding punishment.
A smile tugs at the corner of the young agent's mouth. "That sounds like Coulson."
"In any case, I appreciate the rescue."
And she appreciates that Agent Hill got her hands dirty for her and the mission.
In her time with the Red Room, Natasha worked with too many handlers who treated her as nothing more than a tool. There are a few of them in SHIELD, Barton said, but Coulson isn't one of them. Neither, it seems, is Agent Hill.
Needs a little polish, but has potential.
She studies the graceful lines of the other woman's face and thinks Coulson was right in ways he didn't realise.
And Natasha wonders if Agent Hill likes cannoli.
Vidna ptitsa po polyotu.
(A bird is known by its flight.)
~ Russian Proverb ~
Author: tielan
Recipient: emmypenny
Rating: PG-13
Universe: MCU
Pairing/Characters: Natasha, Maria Hill, Clint Barton, Phil Coulson, OMC.
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of Marvel Comics and no infringement is intended. These stories are for entertainment only and no money is being made from them.
Summary: SHIELD does not make weapons of its women - or, as Barton has observed with greater accuracy, SHIELD does not make weapons like Natasha out of their women. That doesn't mean a woman can't choose to make a weapon of herself.
Notes: The original story was "Pepper gets kidnapped and kicks metaphorical arse with three inch heels and the assistance of Natasha, Maria, and Sif", but the logistics of the story proved more than my scrambled brain could handle. I hope this suffices!
Agent Hill has two things to say to Natasha at the initial mission briefing. "We'll do this one neat," she says. "Stick with the plan as long as possible; if we end up in 'here be dragons', we'll navigate off the map. Coulson says you're good at that."
It's not the first time Natasha's been included in the planning stages of a mission; it's the first time she's done it with anyone but Barton and Coulson.
Natasha's surprised. Given Hill's personality, she would have expected to have the plan laid out before her. That she hasn't betokens trust. Whether in Natasha herself or in Coulson's assessment of her remains to be seen.
She's a good agent, Coulson said when he told her she'd be working with Agent Hill. Needs a little polish to her experience, but she's got the potential.
The pronoun is unusual enough. SHIELD does not make weapons of its women - or, as Barton has observed with greater accuracy, SHIELD does not make weapons like Natasha out of their women. Her controllers from the Red Room - an always-present chorus of approval and disapproval that she no longer has to listen to but which she hears all the time - would disapprove of it as an opportunity lost.
Natasha disagrees. There'd be no room for a woman like Agent Hill in the Red Room program - too much steel rod, not enough flexible steel coil.
In the Red Room, you bend or you break.
--
He's an American businessman on the surface; the wealthy son of old money who looked for something exciting and found it in the darker side of business - dabbling with mobsters and politicians, both American and other. Over fifteen years, he's gone from dabbling to full-blown involvement in arms dealing, mostly chemical weaponry.
Natasha tosses back her drink. She's already had one confrontation tonight - a fight with Agent Thorpe, who was playing her date for the evening. Beautiful women in slinky dresses do not drink alone in the bar of the hotel unless they're waiting for a man to turn up - or have sent him packing.
"Drinking alone?"
She gives him a look, feminine and calculating - the look of a woman summing up a man, from the fit of his suit to the width of his wallet. It's a look that Adam Kincaid would be very familiar with - a woman determining whether it's worth casting lures his way.
Natasha has no doubt most women find in his favour. Her assumed persona certainly would.
"I was drinking with someone else," she says. "I sent him on his way."
"His loss. Do you mind...?"
"Knock yourself out."
"All things considered, I'd rather not." His smile is inviting, encouraging her to smile with him and Natasha does. "Adam."
"Elizabeth."
As targets go, Adam Kincaid is surprisingly easy. 'Elizabeth' is a European agent for a corporation seeking residential property in Leipzig. She speaks fluent English, German, and Hungarian, is open to spending a night with a successful businessmen, and doesn't care if he's wearing a wedding ring or not.
Natasha doesn't care if he's wearing a wedding ring or not. She doesn't want him for sex.
"Go as far as you need to," Agent Hill said, and the look that passed between them, woman to woman, made no bones about what that might entail. Oddly, both Coulson and Barton are less easy with Natasha using sex to get the target in position; they usually give her alternatives, options - more risky, but less intimate.
Natasha supposes that just because SHIELD doesn't make weapons out of their women doesn't mean that their women might not choose to become weapons themselves.
--
As Natasha wipes the curved stiletto on Kincaid's shirtsleeve, she reflects that Adam Kincaid might have been a successful businessman, arms dealer, and traitor, but he wasn't very suspicious or very cautious.
There's no blood spatter, there was hardly a struggle.
The curved blade slid into his flesh so easily, and his jerk of surprise only hastened his death.
Dark eyes stare emptily up at her as she draws away from the cooling corpse. She's killed too many men to feel anything so soft as regret. Most of them even deserved it.
Natasha slides the stiletto back into its sheath in the underwire bra, and she slides the dress back over her shoulders and eases the zip back up. Her make-up needs only the barest touch-up before she picks up her purse and heads for the door of the suite. Now she just has to be out of the city by dawn - long before Kincaid is due to be found at eight by his personal aide.
Two floors down is an empty room with a bag in it - a change of clothes and a new disguise, a new identity - a student backpacking her way through this part of Europe, catching the Eurostar back to Paris.
Small details, carefully kept.
She calls in the kill and receives the confirmation to exit - a job well done.
Natasha exhales as she slips off her heels and ties them into the strap of her clutch. It's not the relief Coulson feels when kingpins are taken out of the equation, nor the pride Barton takes in the clean precision of his work, but something else - perhaps the closest she can come to synonymising it in English is satisfaction.
Satisfaction wasn't a part of the job in the Red Room - merely the completion of the mission. She was a tool to her instructors, not a person, and as such didn't need to enjoy her work so long as she completed it.
She's just heading for the window when the door of the hotel room bursts open.
--
Going into damage mode is second nature to Natasha.
The first thug is down with a smashed windpipe before he even realises there's anyone else in the room. The second throws a wild swing and earns a header into the wall.
By then, the third and fourth men have their weapons out and pointed at her. Natasha could take them easily enough, but it will leave more mess than SHIELD wants. She lifts her hands in a gesture of surrender, and steps back when they gesture her back into the room, letting uncertainty creep into her posture as she does so.
The thugs move neatly enough, although not entirely in sync. The one Natasha mentally names Thug Four - or 'Chetyri' - closes the door behind him, and steps over his comrades as he crosses the room - keeping well clear of Natasha - and checks Kincaid. Thug Three - or 'Tri' - keeps his gun trained on her, his eyes looking her over, stripping her as the eyes of men usually do.
"He's dead."
"That simplifies things." They speak in Catalan, and Natasha gives no sign that she understands them. Tri's eyes - a muddy green - fix upon her suspiciously. He switches from Catalan to English as he demands, "Who employed you?"
"We don't have time for this." Chetyri strides across the room and he's in her space. Natasha sees the blow coming and flinches. It hurts about as much as she expects, but pain can be rejected or embraced. She embraces it now.
She doesn't have the leeway to shake it off anyway.
"You come with us. And you will talk. If you don't..." His eyes smear her skin like an oily hand, the threat clear enough.
Their cohorts are left lying where they fell as she's escorted out of the room without even the pretence of courtesy. Chetyri has a good grip on her arm - which she could easily shake off, but she wants open space before she attacks, and Tri has the gun which is more chancy and always messy.
She has hours before dawn - if things go very bad, then she can come back and clean up later.
Let's keep this one neat, Agent Hill says in her head.
So Natasha goes where Chetyri and Tri prompt her, trusting to her instincts - and her value to the organisation that's taken her in.
--
It's colder in the stairwell, and goosebumps rise on her arms. They go up, rather than down, four flights, five flights, six flights, seven... One floor down from the top of the stairwell, Tri calls someone, informs them that Kincaid is dead, and asks for a pickup at the hotel.
The plain speak is almost amusing. Natasha's grown accustomed to Barton's somewhat whimsical choices of code - the last time he wanted a pickup, it was all about his grandmother's cannoli. Coulson didn't say anything when they debriefed, but there was cannoli in the safehouse refrigerator when they got back.
It was good cannoli, too.
Somehow Natasha doubts there'll be cannoli at the end of this journey, whether or not she gets away from these idiots or not. Agent Hill doesn't exactly seem like the cannoli sort.
The wind catches her hair as they step out into the windy night, and she tilts her head back so the wind can tug at her curls. The chopper is incoming, the whop-whop-whop of the blades faint in the night but growing closer. The pilot weaves through the skyscrapers with a skill that Natasha can admire. Whoever the Catalans work for, they may be amateurs at intelligence work, but they have good people in operations.
SHIELD has better.
She's not sure when realisation hits her. Maybe when a gust of wind hits the craft on its approach and its trajectory barely adjusts. Certainly when the chopper swings around so the nose is facing away and the pilot is flying sideways towards them.
There are only a handful of people capable of flying a chopper like that, and Natasha knows most of them.
Chetyri realises it's not his people a split second before the passenger door slides open over a forty-four story drop, and a pale oval face tilts to sight along a scope. "That's not-"
Natasha steps wide of the kill zone and drops to the ground, both in self-preservation and to give the sniper a clear shot.
It's doubtful Tri realises what hit him, but Chetyri half turns, trying to bring up his gun before the first slug tears through his shoulder and he staggers back before two more find him and fell him.
As the helicopter touches down, four 'cleaners' from SHIELD's European branch climb out and head for the two dead men. Dressed as various members of the hotel staff, they'll blend into the hotel routine before taking themselves out sometime tomorrow morning with no-one the wiser.
Natasha crosses over to the helicopter door, where Agent Hill and Agent Thorpe are waiting for the report. Hill is still wearing the harness and putting the sniper rifle away with a too-careful precision.
Thorpe has changed out of his business suit, and iis also in the garb of hotel staff.
"Two more of those in the room," Natasha reports. "They spoke Catalonian and English, and wanted Kincaid dead, too. Not well-trained - not a unit."
"New players." Hill's voice is rock steady, even if her hands aren't as they close the box. She looks to Thorpe, her face pale but composed, her mouth tilting at the corner with a faint mockery. "Fun times ahead for you."
"I'll be sure to save some of the shit for you, Hill," he says, just as lightly before he turns to Natasha, "Anything else?"
"My bag is in 4718, and I have a ticket for the Eurostar to Paris."
"It's the little things," he says, climbing out of the chopper and waiting for Natasha to climb in. "Au revoir, ladies."
And he joins his clean-up team as Barton lifts them off the hotel helipad and out through the dark city.
--
They sit in silence until they're out of Leipzig and into the countryside, headed for a safehouse somewhere in the Slovakian hills.
Natasha watches Barton pilot them out, but her thoughts are on the woman sitting beside her - the woman whose hands are folded in her lap with careful precision.
She's read Agent Hill's history - the one she's not supposed to be able to access. While Maria Hill's background is nowhere near the intensity of Natasha's own history, there are certain resonant echoes - an emotionally abusive childhood, a childhood and adolescence of hard physical discipline and focus, a non-traditional career for a woman, and then recruitment by an agent.
Or, at least, an agent of SHIELD's predecessor.
The history didn't say whether Hill had been in on a termination mission before. Personal and professional details before SHIELD are one thing; SHIELD operations are quite another level of security.
Still, Agent Hill's careful stillness suggests this isn't familiar territory.
Natasha shifts in her seat, drawing the other woman's eye. Then she nods, ever so slightly. "Good shooting."
"It could have been neater."
"Did you take sniper training?"
"I had lessons." The flick of her eyes to the pilot's chair leaves no doubt who gave them. And explains why Hill took the shot while Barton did the flying. "It was a good move, drawing them up to the roof."
"I was more led than leading." Natasha sits back. "But it is easier to escape outside. And easier for others to pick them off."
"If someone happens to be watching." Hill turns her head and her gaze holds Natasha's, veiled and measuring.
"That would be the part Agent Coulson is always trying to explain about trusting your colleagues." Not that Natasha needed that lesson; one had to rely on one's partner in the Red Room or risk failure to meet the objectives, and the corresponding punishment.
A smile tugs at the corner of the young agent's mouth. "That sounds like Coulson."
"In any case, I appreciate the rescue."
And she appreciates that Agent Hill got her hands dirty for her and the mission.
In her time with the Red Room, Natasha worked with too many handlers who treated her as nothing more than a tool. There are a few of them in SHIELD, Barton said, but Coulson isn't one of them. Neither, it seems, is Agent Hill.
Needs a little polish, but has potential.
She studies the graceful lines of the other woman's face and thinks Coulson was right in ways he didn't realise.
And Natasha wonders if Agent Hill likes cannoli.
Vidna ptitsa po polyotu.
(A bird is known by its flight.)
~ Russian Proverb ~