Avengers (2012): "Heavy in Your Arms (10/15)" (Clint/Natasha)
Title: Heavy in Your Arms (10/15)
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, Bobbi/Maria
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, maybe
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 2,595
Summary: The calm in the eye of the storm.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for more notes.
As always, many thanks to kadollan, anuna_81, and sweetwatersong for the beta work and support. :)
Technically, this takes place at the same time as Maria's first day back on the job, leading up to the conversation/planning session that Bobbi, Phil, and Maria have at the end of the last chapter. Apologies for the dodgy order of things.
Previous Chapter
Interlude 4: Fugue
She ended up driving the two hours to Geneva, deeply unsettled by the idea of contacting her handler any closer to her home. She was going to ask for five more days, even though she knew she'd only be able to get three at the most. She was far, far afield from the meeting point in Kiev, and three days seemed a reasonable amount of time to ask for to get there, particularly if she emphasized that she was on the run from SHIELD. They might be angry that she'd attracted that kind of attention, but the punishment would be relatively mild and swift if she judged correctly. Nothing that would take her out of the field, or that would delay the next mission.
She didn't want to go back. She never wanted to go back, hadn't since her first mission outside when she was... how old? Could she even remember that much? Fifteen, maybe.
They had played with her mind so many times, played with her memories and perceptions, even changed her name. Natalia wasn't the name she'd been born with, it wasn't even the name she'd grown up with. She didn't remember what her name had been before, any of them. They were gone along with large chunks of her childhood, most of which she'd decided she was better off without. She was glad she hadn't seen any of Clint's memories in full detail, because she shuddered to think what he would make of hers if she'd had them. (Or what he'd make of the fact that she didn't.)
What the hell was she going to do?
Clint wanted this, whatever they were now, so badly. She could feel it against the surface of her mind. Despite the concerns he'd voiced before they'd bonded, she could feel how much the connection appealed to him. She could tell there had been people he'd cared about in the past and still cared about now. Natasha wasn't even sure she'd ever had a friend, although she could remember a few quiet conversations that were almost friend-like. She remembered talking to another little girl when she was just a child, huddled together in the dark for warmth, but she was hard pressed to term that a dream or a memory. Then there had been Thailand, in another dark room, lying side-by-side in a fancy hotel bed. Even then, Yasha had been a legend in the Red Room and she'd been honored to be working with him - her reward for a particularly successful series of missions in London and Belfast. He wasn't what she'd been expecting from the brief glimpses she'd seen of him prior to their first meeting, he'd been quiet and almost sad instead of confident and to the point like he'd always appeared.
The mission was hands-off, just the two of them without a handler, something about finding out who had been intercepting weapons shipments and dead drops, and one night when they'd been alone in their room, he'd started asking her questions.
At first, she'd thought it was some kind of test, that he was evaluating her for the Red Room. That had happened before. Operatives were constantly under surveillance and evaluation after all. He asked her what she remembered, from her childhood, from her teenaged years, from before. From before the Red Room, and she'd been vague at first. But he'd seemed so... earnest. He was open and raw in a way she wasn't used to. Despite her fear of knowing too much or too little, of being tested and failing, she'd answered him as honestly as she could. When she'd told him what little she knew, he'd seemed taken aback, almost horrified and she hadn't understood that reaction.
She'd taken a chance back then and asked him what he remembered, and he'd looked confused. Nothing, he'd finally answered, just a cold metal table and being woken up and told that he belonged to the Red Room and had to obey them. Then, a mission, a long period of nothingness, more blurry memories (at best) of medical wards and tests and treatments. She'd recognized those memories because they'd done it to her, too, and they'd spent the rest of the night, wordless, side by side in the bed not quite touching but still deriving something she might call comfort from being together.
They'd survived the mission, but she'd been shot and needed a medical evac afterward. By the time her surgery and recovery was over, he was gone. For weeks she'd been even more guarded, more careful, not sure if he was on another assignment or if they'd found out about their conversations and had punished him, or if she'd be next. Then, nothing had happened and life had gone on.
The city loomed before her and shook her out of her memories. Whatever had happened, whatever had come before, she had to focus on the present. That was all she could influence, all she could control. She parked on the outside of the city, then took public transportation until she reached a nondescript little cafe. The lunch crowd had already thinned and it was easy to find a private corner in the back. She'd picked up an extra phone on her way up the street and she activated it, then punched in a number she knew by heart.
"Romanova," Gorgovich's voice slid over the line, a smooth but unpleasant sound. "You are late checking in. And you are not in Kiev."
"No. I'm in Geneva. The itinerary changed and I had to make alternate plans. I may need another week to take care of some additional business. The heraldry society is interested in my research and I may need to deal with them."
"That was not approved for your trip. Do you have the research you came for?"
"I do."
"The organization would like a complete accounting of it, in person and on time. We will send a car to pick you up. Rodzianko is finished in Paris, he can come get you on his way back to the facility."
She felt her stomach clench, and wanted, for the first time, to beg. Just one more day, that was all she would need, but she didn't dare. The initial request would be forgiven, could be seen as an alert operative asking permission to go above and beyond, but if she seemed to invested in it, or too averse to the idea of meeting with Alexei Rodzianko, they would know something was going on.
"Fine. Time and place?" she asked, and Gorgovich rattled off an address and a time, then disconnected the call.
Natasha pushed her coffee aside, untouched. Three and a half hours wasn't even enough time to make it to the safe house and back to explain to Clint in person. Guilt, a feeling she was unaccustomed to noticing, flared. She still had the phone from Amsterdam, she could call him and talk to him at least, and with an almost overwhelming rush she realized she wanted nothing more than to hear his voice. The need to be on her own, to be separate from him had vanished in the wake of Gorgovich's plan and the thought of not seeing him again. That scared her on another level entirely.
If she told him too soon, he might try to come to Geneva. She had the car but there were buses. He might even arrive before Rodzianko, and she couldn't risk Clint being seen. They could not know about him. She would wait until right before her pick up, and call and talk to him then. Just enough time to explain, to tell him she would contact him when she could - surely she could slip away during her next mission and at least call him. She had the number to his phone memorized. A few weeks or a month, and she could talk to him again. One or two more years, and she could finish setting up her exit strategy. He would need additional paperwork, but then... they could just disappear. From the Red Room, from SHIELD, from everyone. If they could just make it that long.
*****
She'd left while he was still in the shower, and Clint was annoyed but was starting to think he understood. He knew himself well enough to know he would've pushed her (again) to let him come along. So she'd known it too, he figured. He didn't like her going off on her own, and it was mostly irrational because he knew she could take care of herself. He just couldn't help but feel like by letting her leave, he was letting her slip out of his life completely (never mind that he was still in her house, and still relatively dependent on her to help get him out of the mess they'd found themselves in). He regretted, not for the first time in the last few days, not having pursued actual espionage training more directly. He'd always been content to be the sniper, the clean-up guy who took out the targets after other agents got done identifying them, but it would've been damn useful to have been able to turn into someone else for awhile or do some of the other things he'd seen her do.
There weren't any men's clothes in the house besides what he'd had on, and the cupboards only had enough food for another day or so. He still had some of the money she'd given him from the bank, and there was a bus schedule on a table in the living room with a stop not far from where they were. She said she'd be gone most of the day and Clint knew he could use both the walk to the bus line and also the time out of the house, moving around under his own power again.
He grabbed the cash and scribbled a note and stuck it on the fridge. Gone to get food and supplies. Back soon. Then he made sure he had keys and the door code memorized, and headed out.
It was a nice walk, a pleasant day, and the bus was on time. Clint made it into Bern easily, and spent about half an hour over coffee and a sandwich before asking the waitress the best place to find clothes and the closest grocer. It was all strangely normal and he wondered when the last time he'd done something this simple had been? Clothes - those were usually a necessary evil, and when he wasn't living in SHIELD issued BDUs and gear he had a hodge podge of things he'd collected over the years. And the last time he'd been to a market for food... probably when he'd had a week's leave and Bobbi had invited him over for Maria's birthday dinner. He remembered that she'd drug him up one street and down another near her apartment in Paris getting just the right things. It had been exhausting, but also a lot of fun, and he wondered what they were doing now? Did she even know that he'd gone AWOL or was Fury keeping that under wraps?
He was on his way back to the bus, bags in hand, when a newsstand caught his eye. One of the papers was German late edition, and the headline described a shooting that had left several dead on a rural stretch of road. He wasn't surprised that it had been newsworthy, but at the edge of the photo that accompanied it, he could see several people in what he knew to be SHIELD gear.
Damn it.
If they were that close, then he and Natasha might not have as much time as they'd hoped.
*****
Natasha walked through the park, then wandered through several of the more tourist-focused areas of the city to pass the time. If she were being brutally honest with herself, she was stalling, waiting until the last minute to try and call because she was afraid of what would happen when she heard Clint's voice.
People had always had power over her. When she was small, they were bigger, she was dependent on them for food, for shelter, for everything she had. When she got bigger, they neatly held the specter of death over her head like a guillotine - obey or die. Simple. In order to live, she did what they said, regardless of whether or not she wanted to do them. Natasha didn't even think about things like whether or not she wanted.
Clint had power over her, in a new and frightening way. He could ask her to do things, and she would do them for him. Because of him. She wasn't sure, couldn't tell if he would be able to convince her not to go, convince her to turn and run away even though she knew it was the wrong time and the wrong way to do it with the best chance of success. If he asked her to come back... she just might.
So she'd put off calling him as long as she could, but when only about a half an hour remained before Alexei's arrival, she finally pulled out the phone. With each ring her chest got tighter. The voicemail prompt - nicely anonymous - picked up and she couldn't decide if she was disappointed or relieved. She wouldn't hear his voice again for weeks, maybe even months. Maybe never, a dark corner of her mind reminded her. Survival was about as far from guaranteed as you could get in their line of work on a good day. And these weren't good days.
"They weren't willing to reschedule, they're sending a car to pick me up. I'll be offline while I'm in meetings this week, but I'll try and give you a call when I get some downtime. Take... be careful? Stay put, if you can, that would be safer." And I'll be able to find you, she refrained from saying, hoping he would understand her meaning despite the casual language. She felt ridiculous, and a little lost and more than slightly confused by the emotions pinging around in her head. Feeling them as other people was different than feeling them for herself. At a loss for anything else to say, she disconnected the call, then wiped the history and discarded the phone.
The car, as nondescript as the man inside it, arrived ten minutes later.
"Natalia," Alexei said curtly when she opened the door and slid inside. She didn't grit her teeth even though the sound of that name slid down her spine unpleasantly.
"Alexei," she acknowledged with cool disdain. He knew she didn't like him, and it was mutual, although they'd been partnered together many, many times before. His black hair and blue eyes worked quite well with her coloring, they made a stunning picture on one another's arms when undercover missions required it. Underneath that, he had a cruel streak that she knew she lacked, and he enjoyed leveraging against her.
"You had trouble with SHIELD?" he asked as they pulled out into traffic.
She kept her voice even and calm. "A bit. They took me into custody just after the dinner, but I was able to get away. There were no physical copies of the information, so they have no idea what I was there for, or what I found out. Other than a brief detour, everything is as it should be."
Chapter 11
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, Bobbi/Maria
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, maybe
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 2,595
Summary: The calm in the eye of the storm.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for more notes.
As always, many thanks to kadollan, anuna_81, and sweetwatersong for the beta work and support. :)
Technically, this takes place at the same time as Maria's first day back on the job, leading up to the conversation/planning session that Bobbi, Phil, and Maria have at the end of the last chapter. Apologies for the dodgy order of things.
Previous Chapter
Interlude 4: Fugue
She ended up driving the two hours to Geneva, deeply unsettled by the idea of contacting her handler any closer to her home. She was going to ask for five more days, even though she knew she'd only be able to get three at the most. She was far, far afield from the meeting point in Kiev, and three days seemed a reasonable amount of time to ask for to get there, particularly if she emphasized that she was on the run from SHIELD. They might be angry that she'd attracted that kind of attention, but the punishment would be relatively mild and swift if she judged correctly. Nothing that would take her out of the field, or that would delay the next mission.
She didn't want to go back. She never wanted to go back, hadn't since her first mission outside when she was... how old? Could she even remember that much? Fifteen, maybe.
They had played with her mind so many times, played with her memories and perceptions, even changed her name. Natalia wasn't the name she'd been born with, it wasn't even the name she'd grown up with. She didn't remember what her name had been before, any of them. They were gone along with large chunks of her childhood, most of which she'd decided she was better off without. She was glad she hadn't seen any of Clint's memories in full detail, because she shuddered to think what he would make of hers if she'd had them. (Or what he'd make of the fact that she didn't.)
What the hell was she going to do?
Clint wanted this, whatever they were now, so badly. She could feel it against the surface of her mind. Despite the concerns he'd voiced before they'd bonded, she could feel how much the connection appealed to him. She could tell there had been people he'd cared about in the past and still cared about now. Natasha wasn't even sure she'd ever had a friend, although she could remember a few quiet conversations that were almost friend-like. She remembered talking to another little girl when she was just a child, huddled together in the dark for warmth, but she was hard pressed to term that a dream or a memory. Then there had been Thailand, in another dark room, lying side-by-side in a fancy hotel bed. Even then, Yasha had been a legend in the Red Room and she'd been honored to be working with him - her reward for a particularly successful series of missions in London and Belfast. He wasn't what she'd been expecting from the brief glimpses she'd seen of him prior to their first meeting, he'd been quiet and almost sad instead of confident and to the point like he'd always appeared.
The mission was hands-off, just the two of them without a handler, something about finding out who had been intercepting weapons shipments and dead drops, and one night when they'd been alone in their room, he'd started asking her questions.
At first, she'd thought it was some kind of test, that he was evaluating her for the Red Room. That had happened before. Operatives were constantly under surveillance and evaluation after all. He asked her what she remembered, from her childhood, from her teenaged years, from before. From before the Red Room, and she'd been vague at first. But he'd seemed so... earnest. He was open and raw in a way she wasn't used to. Despite her fear of knowing too much or too little, of being tested and failing, she'd answered him as honestly as she could. When she'd told him what little she knew, he'd seemed taken aback, almost horrified and she hadn't understood that reaction.
She'd taken a chance back then and asked him what he remembered, and he'd looked confused. Nothing, he'd finally answered, just a cold metal table and being woken up and told that he belonged to the Red Room and had to obey them. Then, a mission, a long period of nothingness, more blurry memories (at best) of medical wards and tests and treatments. She'd recognized those memories because they'd done it to her, too, and they'd spent the rest of the night, wordless, side by side in the bed not quite touching but still deriving something she might call comfort from being together.
They'd survived the mission, but she'd been shot and needed a medical evac afterward. By the time her surgery and recovery was over, he was gone. For weeks she'd been even more guarded, more careful, not sure if he was on another assignment or if they'd found out about their conversations and had punished him, or if she'd be next. Then, nothing had happened and life had gone on.
The city loomed before her and shook her out of her memories. Whatever had happened, whatever had come before, she had to focus on the present. That was all she could influence, all she could control. She parked on the outside of the city, then took public transportation until she reached a nondescript little cafe. The lunch crowd had already thinned and it was easy to find a private corner in the back. She'd picked up an extra phone on her way up the street and she activated it, then punched in a number she knew by heart.
"Romanova," Gorgovich's voice slid over the line, a smooth but unpleasant sound. "You are late checking in. And you are not in Kiev."
"No. I'm in Geneva. The itinerary changed and I had to make alternate plans. I may need another week to take care of some additional business. The heraldry society is interested in my research and I may need to deal with them."
"That was not approved for your trip. Do you have the research you came for?"
"I do."
"The organization would like a complete accounting of it, in person and on time. We will send a car to pick you up. Rodzianko is finished in Paris, he can come get you on his way back to the facility."
She felt her stomach clench, and wanted, for the first time, to beg. Just one more day, that was all she would need, but she didn't dare. The initial request would be forgiven, could be seen as an alert operative asking permission to go above and beyond, but if she seemed to invested in it, or too averse to the idea of meeting with Alexei Rodzianko, they would know something was going on.
"Fine. Time and place?" she asked, and Gorgovich rattled off an address and a time, then disconnected the call.
Natasha pushed her coffee aside, untouched. Three and a half hours wasn't even enough time to make it to the safe house and back to explain to Clint in person. Guilt, a feeling she was unaccustomed to noticing, flared. She still had the phone from Amsterdam, she could call him and talk to him at least, and with an almost overwhelming rush she realized she wanted nothing more than to hear his voice. The need to be on her own, to be separate from him had vanished in the wake of Gorgovich's plan and the thought of not seeing him again. That scared her on another level entirely.
If she told him too soon, he might try to come to Geneva. She had the car but there were buses. He might even arrive before Rodzianko, and she couldn't risk Clint being seen. They could not know about him. She would wait until right before her pick up, and call and talk to him then. Just enough time to explain, to tell him she would contact him when she could - surely she could slip away during her next mission and at least call him. She had the number to his phone memorized. A few weeks or a month, and she could talk to him again. One or two more years, and she could finish setting up her exit strategy. He would need additional paperwork, but then... they could just disappear. From the Red Room, from SHIELD, from everyone. If they could just make it that long.
*****
She'd left while he was still in the shower, and Clint was annoyed but was starting to think he understood. He knew himself well enough to know he would've pushed her (again) to let him come along. So she'd known it too, he figured. He didn't like her going off on her own, and it was mostly irrational because he knew she could take care of herself. He just couldn't help but feel like by letting her leave, he was letting her slip out of his life completely (never mind that he was still in her house, and still relatively dependent on her to help get him out of the mess they'd found themselves in). He regretted, not for the first time in the last few days, not having pursued actual espionage training more directly. He'd always been content to be the sniper, the clean-up guy who took out the targets after other agents got done identifying them, but it would've been damn useful to have been able to turn into someone else for awhile or do some of the other things he'd seen her do.
There weren't any men's clothes in the house besides what he'd had on, and the cupboards only had enough food for another day or so. He still had some of the money she'd given him from the bank, and there was a bus schedule on a table in the living room with a stop not far from where they were. She said she'd be gone most of the day and Clint knew he could use both the walk to the bus line and also the time out of the house, moving around under his own power again.
He grabbed the cash and scribbled a note and stuck it on the fridge. Gone to get food and supplies. Back soon. Then he made sure he had keys and the door code memorized, and headed out.
It was a nice walk, a pleasant day, and the bus was on time. Clint made it into Bern easily, and spent about half an hour over coffee and a sandwich before asking the waitress the best place to find clothes and the closest grocer. It was all strangely normal and he wondered when the last time he'd done something this simple had been? Clothes - those were usually a necessary evil, and when he wasn't living in SHIELD issued BDUs and gear he had a hodge podge of things he'd collected over the years. And the last time he'd been to a market for food... probably when he'd had a week's leave and Bobbi had invited him over for Maria's birthday dinner. He remembered that she'd drug him up one street and down another near her apartment in Paris getting just the right things. It had been exhausting, but also a lot of fun, and he wondered what they were doing now? Did she even know that he'd gone AWOL or was Fury keeping that under wraps?
He was on his way back to the bus, bags in hand, when a newsstand caught his eye. One of the papers was German late edition, and the headline described a shooting that had left several dead on a rural stretch of road. He wasn't surprised that it had been newsworthy, but at the edge of the photo that accompanied it, he could see several people in what he knew to be SHIELD gear.
Damn it.
If they were that close, then he and Natasha might not have as much time as they'd hoped.
*****
Natasha walked through the park, then wandered through several of the more tourist-focused areas of the city to pass the time. If she were being brutally honest with herself, she was stalling, waiting until the last minute to try and call because she was afraid of what would happen when she heard Clint's voice.
People had always had power over her. When she was small, they were bigger, she was dependent on them for food, for shelter, for everything she had. When she got bigger, they neatly held the specter of death over her head like a guillotine - obey or die. Simple. In order to live, she did what they said, regardless of whether or not she wanted to do them. Natasha didn't even think about things like whether or not she wanted.
Clint had power over her, in a new and frightening way. He could ask her to do things, and she would do them for him. Because of him. She wasn't sure, couldn't tell if he would be able to convince her not to go, convince her to turn and run away even though she knew it was the wrong time and the wrong way to do it with the best chance of success. If he asked her to come back... she just might.
So she'd put off calling him as long as she could, but when only about a half an hour remained before Alexei's arrival, she finally pulled out the phone. With each ring her chest got tighter. The voicemail prompt - nicely anonymous - picked up and she couldn't decide if she was disappointed or relieved. She wouldn't hear his voice again for weeks, maybe even months. Maybe never, a dark corner of her mind reminded her. Survival was about as far from guaranteed as you could get in their line of work on a good day. And these weren't good days.
"They weren't willing to reschedule, they're sending a car to pick me up. I'll be offline while I'm in meetings this week, but I'll try and give you a call when I get some downtime. Take... be careful? Stay put, if you can, that would be safer." And I'll be able to find you, she refrained from saying, hoping he would understand her meaning despite the casual language. She felt ridiculous, and a little lost and more than slightly confused by the emotions pinging around in her head. Feeling them as other people was different than feeling them for herself. At a loss for anything else to say, she disconnected the call, then wiped the history and discarded the phone.
The car, as nondescript as the man inside it, arrived ten minutes later.
"Natalia," Alexei said curtly when she opened the door and slid inside. She didn't grit her teeth even though the sound of that name slid down her spine unpleasantly.
"Alexei," she acknowledged with cool disdain. He knew she didn't like him, and it was mutual, although they'd been partnered together many, many times before. His black hair and blue eyes worked quite well with her coloring, they made a stunning picture on one another's arms when undercover missions required it. Underneath that, he had a cruel streak that she knew she lacked, and he enjoyed leveraging against her.
"You had trouble with SHIELD?" he asked as they pulled out into traffic.
She kept her voice even and calm. "A bit. They took me into custody just after the dinner, but I was able to get away. There were no physical copies of the information, so they have no idea what I was there for, or what I found out. Other than a brief detour, everything is as it should be."
Chapter 11