Avengers (2012): "Heavy in Your Arms (9/15)" (Clint/Natasha)
Title: Heavy in Your Arms (9/15)
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie.
Pairing: Clint/Natasha, Coulson/The Cellist, Fury/OFC (past), Maria/Bobbi
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, violence, eventually sexual content, dub-con if you feel that mystical/destiny sorts of compulsions qualify as dubious consent (Natasha might agree with you)
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 2,658
Summary: Clint and Natasha have a little bit of time to regroup, and Maria has some hard decisions to make.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for more notes.
I owe you all a huge apology for how long this had taken. The holidays and all their associated things and stresses took a bigger toll on me (and therefore also on my writing time and energy) than I'd ever anticipated. That was combined with hitting the point in the story where I'm having to write out of order quite a bit, so finishing a single chapter is trickier. The good news is, that means that now it's all coming together and should move more rapidly from here on out. I'm pretty sure it's going to come in at 15 chapters, and I've got plans for two more connected interludes in there as well.
Huge thank yous to SweetWaterSong, Anuna_81, and kadollan for the beta work and support!
Previous Chapter
Natasha woke up when sunlight crossed the bed. She felt heavy and warm, rested - even relaxed, despite the man asleep beside her, and that realization pushed any lingering sleep away. She wasn't a stranger to waking up with another person, but she couldn't remember a time that she'd really slept with someone else so close by. They were tangled together in the middle, she was sprawled across Clint and his hand was caught up in her hair. She remembered, working her way back through the events of the night before, the sex, the nightmare - the bonding.
She wasn't sure if she was disturbed by how completely he'd gotten inside of her, or if she was upset that she wasn't disturbed by it. She tried to tug her head gently away from his grasp and he stirred in his sleep.
"Uhn. What time is it?" he muttered, eyes still closed. She propped her arm on his chest so she could raise up enough to look at his face, because instead of letting her go, his fingers had tightened in an effort to keep her still. He worked his other arm out from under her and rubbed a hand across his face.
"Early," she said blandly, but he opened his eyes in time to return her smile.
"You're a morning person, aren't you?"
Her smile took on a devious edge. "When I decide to be. Night owl?"
"When I can get away with it."
She shifted against him, just a light change to the cant of her hips, but it was enough to make him catch his breath.
"God, woman. You're dangerous."
She hummed approvingly, pulled harder against his grip and this time he let her hair go. She rewarded him by sitting upright, then fully straddling his waist and sliding back until he was pressed up against her. He arched back, and she took advantage of the exposed line of his throat to press her mouth against the pulse there.
Hard hands flew up to dig into her hips and his thumbs pressed against her just right and all her lower abdominal muscles clenched sharply, causing her to gasp.
"That's a good sound," he murmured, and took a minute to test her reaction, changing the pressure of his hold slightly and grinning at the resulting noise she made.
In retaliation, she dropped her hands to his shoulders and twisted her body just enough to arch up and then slide back down onto him so that it was his turn to make inarticulate sounds. Joined together, it was a quick slide from teasing to intense and it didn't take long for them to both go over the edge.
She let him hold her for a long time before she finally, reluctantly, pulled herself away; it was as much a mental action as a physical one. She tried to pull her walls back up against him, suddenly feeling too open and exposed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him frown, but when she left the bed he let her go.
"I need to shower and dress. I'm supposed to be meeting with my handler in Rheims this afternoon and I need to call in and ask for a change of date and venue."
Behind her, she heard him sit up in the bed, could tell from the way the mattress and sheets shifted around him. She deliberately didn't turn around.
"You're going back?"
"I have to. They don't know that anything has happened, and I'm still months," years, she thought to herself, but wouldn't say it out loud, "away from being ready to leave where they won't be able to follow me. I can't just hand in my letter of resignation." It was snappish, and she knew he didn't deserve it, but a nasty feeling was already taking up residence in the pit of her stomach and she was afraid of allowing any hint of uncertainty cloud her resolve.
"Natasha," he tried, but trailed off when she walked away and into the adjoining bathroom.
"I need you to stay here, I need... time," she finally answered, pitching her voice so he could hear her through the doorway. "Just a little time alone, anyway, and I'll call from the other side of the city. Once I have a new place and time I'll come back and we can make a plan." It was so much more complicated now, with so much more than just herself to worry about. "I'm going to shower," she finished, as she turned on the water and shut the door, effectively cutting off any further conversation.
*****
By the time everyone was preparing for the evening shift change, Maria had read the files on Barton's situation three times. She'd replay the surveillance footage again tonight, alone in her home office, her personal space, so she could make her decision. A big part of her was insisting, screaming really, that Coulson couldn't be right about this and there had to be some other explanation. She'd seen the desolation on his face when the ballistics had come back from the crime scene, proving that whoever had been on the other side of that shoot out had been using SHIELD issue guns, one registered to the missing Agent Barton and the other to one of the guards he'd incapacitated during his escape. SHIELD had a solid trail on them now, and it was only a matter of time.
The reports though... she had to admit that Coulson had a point. The hostile asset hadn't offered any resistance, either to being brought in or being held. It was obvious from both the medical reports and the security footage that Barton had initiated a bond with the other operative, but she hadn't seen anything to indicate any change in Barton's loyalties or any kind of treason at that point. Yes, he was supposed to kill her, and he hadn't, but their agents had the wherewithal to make decisions in the heat of the moment if they needed to, and this was certainly an abnormal enough situation to have warranted some caution.
No one had attempted to interrogate her. Fury's decision had been swift and final. His filed report had been slim on any actual detail about why he felt she must be terminated with extreme prejudice (by Barton himself, no less, and yes, he'd been very specific in his orders to consider Barton a hostile unless and until he complied.) And that frankly turned her stomach. She had no problem, none, doing what needed to be done in the heat of battle. She'd ordered soldiers into no-win scenarios before and had lost people that way. But she had no stomach for casual cruelty, and this felt awfully close to it.
So if Coulson was right, if Fury was moving into the territory of making irrational decisions, was her first loyalty to her commanding officer? To the man who'd believed in her, had hand-picked her and raised her through the ranks because he saw her potential and capabilities. Or was her first loyalty to SHIELD, to the people of the world she'd taken an oath to protect? Right now, his potentially irrational behaviour was just affecting people under his direct command, but tomorrow... who knew?
*****
The water running in the other room was effective at drowning out Clint's growl of frustration. Everything she'd said had made sense, but he could tell how uneasy she was about it. He'd also caught her hesitation over the word "months" and at a guess figured her original plan had been a good deal longer.
She'd been so open, even happy when they'd first woken up, right up until the real world had come crashing down and she'd sunk back into her professional shell.
Who was he kidding? It wasn't a shell, it was a fucking fortress.
But he actually had the keys.
Clint smiled in spite of himself, in spite of his worry and frustration. Whether she liked it or not - and the jury was still really, really out about that one - he could read her like a goddamn billboard with flashing lights. It didn't even bother him to know that she could read him just as easily. If you'd asked him a week ago? He'd've said it was a terrible idea, that no one needed to know him that well, that completely. Now?
It was a relief, like a weight had been lifted and he could finally breathe.
The sex was good, too.
The sex was amazing, he corrected himself.
She'd probably be a few minutes, she seemed to like long showers if the past few days were anything to judge by, so he rolled back over in the bed and let himself drift off to sleep with the feel of her still echoing over his skin.
*****
There was no way to meet on base or on the carrier without being seen, but he knew where they kept their private apartment, knew they were there because he'd seen Maria leave a few hours earlier.
Bobbi answered the door, her eyes widening when she saw him.
"Phil. Has something happened?"
He shook his head quickly. "No. Nothing yet, they're still trying to locate camera footage to try and identify the other cars. Is Maria home? I have something I need her to look at."
Their eyes met, and he held up a memory card.
"I- yes, she is. Come in and I'll get her." She let the door open even as she turned around and called down the hall for Maria.
"Phil," she said as she came out of her office. "I wondered if you'd be by."
"I have something I need you to see." He pressed the memory card into her hand and she looked at it for a few seconds before going and getting her personal laptop from the coffee table.
It took a few minutes for everything to boot up and load, and for Maria to sift through the material. She looked up, once, with warning in her eyes at Phil, but he just stood by, waiting.
"This is treason. Having these files at all is tantamount to treason," she finally said, and this time she didn't look at Phil, she looked at Bobbi.
"You pulled these, didn't you? Phil's good with computers, but not that good."
Bobbi took a deep breath and nodded.
"What were you thinking? He's not even in your chain of command. You have no protection here in a court martial! And that is exactly where this is headed. I know how important Clint is to you, but we're talking about your life."
"This is not just about Clint. It's Fury, too. We're talking about a man who has his finger on how many nuclear triggers, Maria? How many? He is the Director of one of the most powerful covert operations in the world. If he's unstable, do you know how bad that could be? He effectively ordered him to commit suicide, wanted him to destroy potentially valuable enemy intel without even investigating it, and he threatened to have a woman kidnapped and relocated in retaliation for Phil even thinking about questioning his orders. He's coming unhinged, Mar. He's losing it."
"What relocation?" Maria asked, zeroing in on the piece of the puzzle she hadn't heard about yet.
"There's a woman who's important to me," Phil explained. "The Director knows about her, and after I didn't act to stop Barton and the Black Widow from escaping, he told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn't bring them back in, he would have her relocated somewhere I wouldn't be able to find her."
Bobbi pulled the laptop closer and clicked open a folder. "This was in the classified files. Sixteen years ago, the Director killed a fellow Agent, Jin Mae, who was later shown to be a North Korean operative under a long term cover. She'd come to the US on a South Korean student visa in her late teens, gone to an American University and specialized in Mathematics and Asian Linguistics. She got an internship with SHIELD, rose through the ranks, and was partnered with Fury several years later. They still haven't been able to pinpoint when she started transmitting information back to the North Korean government, but ultimately, Fury found out and killed her rather than letting her leave with sensitive information.
"There's no mention of her in his personnel file, at least not that hasn't been redacted. But there was a lot of redaction to it. So I pulled up the Carrier manifests during the time they would've been serving aboard as agents, and they were assigned the same quarters. Their mission logs were almost identical. And you know what the agency scuttlebutt has always said about how Fury lost his eye..."
"So you're thinking, what? That the Director was bonded to this other agent, and when he found out she was betraying SHIELD, he killed her?"
"The medical files following the incident show that the angle of the gunshot wound to his head indicated that it was self-inflicted," Bobbi added. "She wasn't just betraying SHIELD - he must've thought she was betraying him, too."
"'I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more,'" Maria quoted softly as she looked at the photo of the young woman's body. The bullet wound didn't show up against the dark fabric of her jacket, the photo didn't even really show the blood she imagined was pooling on the floor beneath her. "How did she get away with lying to him all that time if they were bonded?"
"Not all bonds come with full-blown telepathy," Phil offered. "In fact, telepathy is exceedingly rare. She'd probably been trained from childhood to lie about her actions and motivations. She'd lived over fifteen years here in the US being the ideal SHIELD agent. That aside, would it occur to you that your soul mate was lying to you on that level? About something as important as this?"
"No, of course not." Maria's voice was still slightly distant, her mind more in the past and the story unfolding than at the dining room table.
"There's more there. Things SHIELD found out afterward. There were pictures in her possession of a woman. They did facial matching, and surmised the woman was probably related - closely related - to Agent Jin. Possibly even a sister. And a little girl they'd killed, possibly a niece or cousin. I don't think it was just that she was trained to be a foreign operative. The agents that investigated surmised that the people she worked for were holding her family hostage so she'd continue to feed them information."
"They never told Fury?"
Bobbi shook her head. "His psychological files are all blacked out, so there's no indication what their reasoning was. But these files are pass-coded against even his security level." She flinched slightly as she said it, because she knew what that said about her own actions. Maria's mouth drew into a tight line but she didn't comment on it.
"So all this time, he's assumed that she chose her country over their bond, over him," Phil summed it up neatly, as if the whole situation was that simple.
"Meanwhile, he chose his country... well, his organization anyway, over her," Bobbi added.
"And losing his soul mate broke him, in some intrinsic way? That's what you're thinking?"
Phil frowned. "I think that the potential situation developing between Barton and the Black Widow is one that he can't see objectively. And that it may have been enough of a final step to put him on the edge, if not over it."
Interlude 4: Fugue
Chapter 10
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie.
Pairing: Clint/Natasha, Coulson/The Cellist, Fury/OFC (past), Maria/Bobbi
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, violence, eventually sexual content, dub-con if you feel that mystical/destiny sorts of compulsions qualify as dubious consent (Natasha might agree with you)
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 2,658
Summary: Clint and Natasha have a little bit of time to regroup, and Maria has some hard decisions to make.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for more notes.
I owe you all a huge apology for how long this had taken. The holidays and all their associated things and stresses took a bigger toll on me (and therefore also on my writing time and energy) than I'd ever anticipated. That was combined with hitting the point in the story where I'm having to write out of order quite a bit, so finishing a single chapter is trickier. The good news is, that means that now it's all coming together and should move more rapidly from here on out. I'm pretty sure it's going to come in at 15 chapters, and I've got plans for two more connected interludes in there as well.
Huge thank yous to SweetWaterSong, Anuna_81, and kadollan for the beta work and support!
Previous Chapter
Natasha woke up when sunlight crossed the bed. She felt heavy and warm, rested - even relaxed, despite the man asleep beside her, and that realization pushed any lingering sleep away. She wasn't a stranger to waking up with another person, but she couldn't remember a time that she'd really slept with someone else so close by. They were tangled together in the middle, she was sprawled across Clint and his hand was caught up in her hair. She remembered, working her way back through the events of the night before, the sex, the nightmare - the bonding.
She wasn't sure if she was disturbed by how completely he'd gotten inside of her, or if she was upset that she wasn't disturbed by it. She tried to tug her head gently away from his grasp and he stirred in his sleep.
"Uhn. What time is it?" he muttered, eyes still closed. She propped her arm on his chest so she could raise up enough to look at his face, because instead of letting her go, his fingers had tightened in an effort to keep her still. He worked his other arm out from under her and rubbed a hand across his face.
"Early," she said blandly, but he opened his eyes in time to return her smile.
"You're a morning person, aren't you?"
Her smile took on a devious edge. "When I decide to be. Night owl?"
"When I can get away with it."
She shifted against him, just a light change to the cant of her hips, but it was enough to make him catch his breath.
"God, woman. You're dangerous."
She hummed approvingly, pulled harder against his grip and this time he let her hair go. She rewarded him by sitting upright, then fully straddling his waist and sliding back until he was pressed up against her. He arched back, and she took advantage of the exposed line of his throat to press her mouth against the pulse there.
Hard hands flew up to dig into her hips and his thumbs pressed against her just right and all her lower abdominal muscles clenched sharply, causing her to gasp.
"That's a good sound," he murmured, and took a minute to test her reaction, changing the pressure of his hold slightly and grinning at the resulting noise she made.
In retaliation, she dropped her hands to his shoulders and twisted her body just enough to arch up and then slide back down onto him so that it was his turn to make inarticulate sounds. Joined together, it was a quick slide from teasing to intense and it didn't take long for them to both go over the edge.
She let him hold her for a long time before she finally, reluctantly, pulled herself away; it was as much a mental action as a physical one. She tried to pull her walls back up against him, suddenly feeling too open and exposed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him frown, but when she left the bed he let her go.
"I need to shower and dress. I'm supposed to be meeting with my handler in Rheims this afternoon and I need to call in and ask for a change of date and venue."
Behind her, she heard him sit up in the bed, could tell from the way the mattress and sheets shifted around him. She deliberately didn't turn around.
"You're going back?"
"I have to. They don't know that anything has happened, and I'm still months," years, she thought to herself, but wouldn't say it out loud, "away from being ready to leave where they won't be able to follow me. I can't just hand in my letter of resignation." It was snappish, and she knew he didn't deserve it, but a nasty feeling was already taking up residence in the pit of her stomach and she was afraid of allowing any hint of uncertainty cloud her resolve.
"Natasha," he tried, but trailed off when she walked away and into the adjoining bathroom.
"I need you to stay here, I need... time," she finally answered, pitching her voice so he could hear her through the doorway. "Just a little time alone, anyway, and I'll call from the other side of the city. Once I have a new place and time I'll come back and we can make a plan." It was so much more complicated now, with so much more than just herself to worry about. "I'm going to shower," she finished, as she turned on the water and shut the door, effectively cutting off any further conversation.
*****
By the time everyone was preparing for the evening shift change, Maria had read the files on Barton's situation three times. She'd replay the surveillance footage again tonight, alone in her home office, her personal space, so she could make her decision. A big part of her was insisting, screaming really, that Coulson couldn't be right about this and there had to be some other explanation. She'd seen the desolation on his face when the ballistics had come back from the crime scene, proving that whoever had been on the other side of that shoot out had been using SHIELD issue guns, one registered to the missing Agent Barton and the other to one of the guards he'd incapacitated during his escape. SHIELD had a solid trail on them now, and it was only a matter of time.
The reports though... she had to admit that Coulson had a point. The hostile asset hadn't offered any resistance, either to being brought in or being held. It was obvious from both the medical reports and the security footage that Barton had initiated a bond with the other operative, but she hadn't seen anything to indicate any change in Barton's loyalties or any kind of treason at that point. Yes, he was supposed to kill her, and he hadn't, but their agents had the wherewithal to make decisions in the heat of the moment if they needed to, and this was certainly an abnormal enough situation to have warranted some caution.
No one had attempted to interrogate her. Fury's decision had been swift and final. His filed report had been slim on any actual detail about why he felt she must be terminated with extreme prejudice (by Barton himself, no less, and yes, he'd been very specific in his orders to consider Barton a hostile unless and until he complied.) And that frankly turned her stomach. She had no problem, none, doing what needed to be done in the heat of battle. She'd ordered soldiers into no-win scenarios before and had lost people that way. But she had no stomach for casual cruelty, and this felt awfully close to it.
So if Coulson was right, if Fury was moving into the territory of making irrational decisions, was her first loyalty to her commanding officer? To the man who'd believed in her, had hand-picked her and raised her through the ranks because he saw her potential and capabilities. Or was her first loyalty to SHIELD, to the people of the world she'd taken an oath to protect? Right now, his potentially irrational behaviour was just affecting people under his direct command, but tomorrow... who knew?
*****
The water running in the other room was effective at drowning out Clint's growl of frustration. Everything she'd said had made sense, but he could tell how uneasy she was about it. He'd also caught her hesitation over the word "months" and at a guess figured her original plan had been a good deal longer.
She'd been so open, even happy when they'd first woken up, right up until the real world had come crashing down and she'd sunk back into her professional shell.
Who was he kidding? It wasn't a shell, it was a fucking fortress.
But he actually had the keys.
Clint smiled in spite of himself, in spite of his worry and frustration. Whether she liked it or not - and the jury was still really, really out about that one - he could read her like a goddamn billboard with flashing lights. It didn't even bother him to know that she could read him just as easily. If you'd asked him a week ago? He'd've said it was a terrible idea, that no one needed to know him that well, that completely. Now?
It was a relief, like a weight had been lifted and he could finally breathe.
The sex was good, too.
The sex was amazing, he corrected himself.
She'd probably be a few minutes, she seemed to like long showers if the past few days were anything to judge by, so he rolled back over in the bed and let himself drift off to sleep with the feel of her still echoing over his skin.
*****
There was no way to meet on base or on the carrier without being seen, but he knew where they kept their private apartment, knew they were there because he'd seen Maria leave a few hours earlier.
Bobbi answered the door, her eyes widening when she saw him.
"Phil. Has something happened?"
He shook his head quickly. "No. Nothing yet, they're still trying to locate camera footage to try and identify the other cars. Is Maria home? I have something I need her to look at."
Their eyes met, and he held up a memory card.
"I- yes, she is. Come in and I'll get her." She let the door open even as she turned around and called down the hall for Maria.
"Phil," she said as she came out of her office. "I wondered if you'd be by."
"I have something I need you to see." He pressed the memory card into her hand and she looked at it for a few seconds before going and getting her personal laptop from the coffee table.
It took a few minutes for everything to boot up and load, and for Maria to sift through the material. She looked up, once, with warning in her eyes at Phil, but he just stood by, waiting.
"This is treason. Having these files at all is tantamount to treason," she finally said, and this time she didn't look at Phil, she looked at Bobbi.
"You pulled these, didn't you? Phil's good with computers, but not that good."
Bobbi took a deep breath and nodded.
"What were you thinking? He's not even in your chain of command. You have no protection here in a court martial! And that is exactly where this is headed. I know how important Clint is to you, but we're talking about your life."
"This is not just about Clint. It's Fury, too. We're talking about a man who has his finger on how many nuclear triggers, Maria? How many? He is the Director of one of the most powerful covert operations in the world. If he's unstable, do you know how bad that could be? He effectively ordered him to commit suicide, wanted him to destroy potentially valuable enemy intel without even investigating it, and he threatened to have a woman kidnapped and relocated in retaliation for Phil even thinking about questioning his orders. He's coming unhinged, Mar. He's losing it."
"What relocation?" Maria asked, zeroing in on the piece of the puzzle she hadn't heard about yet.
"There's a woman who's important to me," Phil explained. "The Director knows about her, and after I didn't act to stop Barton and the Black Widow from escaping, he told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn't bring them back in, he would have her relocated somewhere I wouldn't be able to find her."
Bobbi pulled the laptop closer and clicked open a folder. "This was in the classified files. Sixteen years ago, the Director killed a fellow Agent, Jin Mae, who was later shown to be a North Korean operative under a long term cover. She'd come to the US on a South Korean student visa in her late teens, gone to an American University and specialized in Mathematics and Asian Linguistics. She got an internship with SHIELD, rose through the ranks, and was partnered with Fury several years later. They still haven't been able to pinpoint when she started transmitting information back to the North Korean government, but ultimately, Fury found out and killed her rather than letting her leave with sensitive information.
"There's no mention of her in his personnel file, at least not that hasn't been redacted. But there was a lot of redaction to it. So I pulled up the Carrier manifests during the time they would've been serving aboard as agents, and they were assigned the same quarters. Their mission logs were almost identical. And you know what the agency scuttlebutt has always said about how Fury lost his eye..."
"So you're thinking, what? That the Director was bonded to this other agent, and when he found out she was betraying SHIELD, he killed her?"
"The medical files following the incident show that the angle of the gunshot wound to his head indicated that it was self-inflicted," Bobbi added. "She wasn't just betraying SHIELD - he must've thought she was betraying him, too."
"'I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more,'" Maria quoted softly as she looked at the photo of the young woman's body. The bullet wound didn't show up against the dark fabric of her jacket, the photo didn't even really show the blood she imagined was pooling on the floor beneath her. "How did she get away with lying to him all that time if they were bonded?"
"Not all bonds come with full-blown telepathy," Phil offered. "In fact, telepathy is exceedingly rare. She'd probably been trained from childhood to lie about her actions and motivations. She'd lived over fifteen years here in the US being the ideal SHIELD agent. That aside, would it occur to you that your soul mate was lying to you on that level? About something as important as this?"
"No, of course not." Maria's voice was still slightly distant, her mind more in the past and the story unfolding than at the dining room table.
"There's more there. Things SHIELD found out afterward. There were pictures in her possession of a woman. They did facial matching, and surmised the woman was probably related - closely related - to Agent Jin. Possibly even a sister. And a little girl they'd killed, possibly a niece or cousin. I don't think it was just that she was trained to be a foreign operative. The agents that investigated surmised that the people she worked for were holding her family hostage so she'd continue to feed them information."
"They never told Fury?"
Bobbi shook her head. "His psychological files are all blacked out, so there's no indication what their reasoning was. But these files are pass-coded against even his security level." She flinched slightly as she said it, because she knew what that said about her own actions. Maria's mouth drew into a tight line but she didn't comment on it.
"So all this time, he's assumed that she chose her country over their bond, over him," Phil summed it up neatly, as if the whole situation was that simple.
"Meanwhile, he chose his country... well, his organization anyway, over her," Bobbi added.
"And losing his soul mate broke him, in some intrinsic way? That's what you're thinking?"
Phil frowned. "I think that the potential situation developing between Barton and the Black Widow is one that he can't see objectively. And that it may have been enough of a final step to put him on the edge, if not over it."
Interlude 4: Fugue
Chapter 10