Broken Underneath, 5/5. Loki/Natasha. NC-17.
Title: Broken Underneath
Series: #4 in Ready For The Siege
(#1 - Look Over Your Shoulder, #2 - Armed Up To The Teeth, #3 - Misery Inspires)
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Loki/Natasha
Disclaimer: Not mine! Some comic backstory is incorporated into characterizations, but this is still primarily movieverse. Incoprorates a prompt from avengerkink round 7: I'd love to see Loki bring someone right to the edge again and again, but never letting them come. Not even when they're a quivering, whimpering mess, begging him for release. and also a prompt from round 4: Loki knows all of Natasha's secrets, and uses them to break her down completely. I want pyschological torture and Loki being relentless and cruel.
Spoilers/Warnings: Post-movie. Screwed up people doing screwed up things to and with each other, though that might be a draw. ;)
Title and series title from "The Royal We" by Silversun Pickups
Summary: Loki might have had some plans for Natasha, but that didn't mean he didn't intend to have a little fun with her first. It was only too bad that she didn't figure that out until it was far too late.
Previous chapters:
One - Glittering Shards of Ice
Two - Out Of Time
Three - Connections
Four - Shattered Control
Five - Endgame
"I may have been too hasty with my anger," Loki said stiffly, suddenly appearing beside Natasha in a warehouse she had been investigating.
She didn't deign that with a reply, as she was busy going through the warehouse's records. When he didn't move, she placed her finger under the entry she was reading. "That bystander will live, by the way," she told him in a flat tone of voice.
"One of your fabled innocents?"
"They do exist."
"So you've told me," he acknowledged.
"Why are you here now?" she asked, eyebrow lofted at him.
"Are you so unaffected by my display of anger?" he asked, his head tilting to the side as he contemplated her. "I have helped you in the past, and then to turn..."
"You did say you would," Natasha replied slowly.
"Of course I would threaten you," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He straightened his posture and gave her a charming smile. "Do you think this is what I do now?"
"Aren't you?"
Loki laughed, and Natasha waited patiently for it to pass. Her scars seemed to want her to put the ledger aside and touch him, run her fingers through his hair and state that she trusted him. A much more sane part of her knew that for the folly it was.
"Let me make it up to you, little spider. I have information on where your conspirator is currently hiding. It isn't in these storehouses or amongst agents of your ilk."
"Why don't you just find him and hand him over, then?"
"Where is the fun in that? He is no challenge, dear spider. He sits, drowning in his own fear, and there is no pleasure in watching that."
No, Loki liked challenges. Puzzles and convoluted plots were the kind of thing he was drawn to, not the simple open and shut extortion that seemed to be what Meissen was interested in.
***
The office space was wide open, with large plate glass windows to let in light on a good day. Normally this would be a good quality for an accounting firm, letting the poor cubicle jockeys get some natural lighting. In this particular case, the windows had been a liability. There was no way for the accountants to get out of the way or hide from the people that stormed the office, intent on slaughter.
Natasha had doubts that the killers were even human anymore, but kept those thoughts to herself.
The team had arrived too late to save anyone in the office, and all of the servers had been wiped clean with a virus introduced just prior to the slaughter. Techs were hopeful they could recover something, but that wasn't Hydra's way. If they couldn't use a resource, they preferred to destroy it so no one else could.
She gingerly picked her way through the carnage, seeing bloody handprints on the fabric of the cubicle dividers. One accountant had his keyboard embedded in his skull; someone could probably calculate the odds that human hands did that, but Natasha assumed it was very low. Too many dead eyes stared out of frightened expressions, accusing her of not getting there in time.
More red in her ledger, even if she hadn't wielded the knife personally.
Natasha saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, no more than shadows shifting, and turned to look. She saw a figure that was more like a spindly corpse, her chin pointed and lips drawn back in a bitter smile. Her eyes were no more than shadows in her too-pale face, her dark hair a curtain all around her head like a halo. She wore elaborate ceremonial robes with runes in the pattern, and the air behind her shimmered in the same way that Loki's portals did. The figure nodded her head at Natasha in formal greeting, much the way equals on opposing sides would, then she stepped behind her into the portal. It closed around her, vanishing just as Natasha realized there was a resemblance to Loki in the dead woman's features.
"The hell, Tash?" Clint asked, coming up behind her. He was disturbed by the sight they had walked into, and she wasn't sure if he had seen the ghostly figure standing over the dead that she had just seen. Hel, if she recalled her Norse mythology correctly. Sif had said that the residents of Helheim claimed to be kinfolk to Loki. Some of the old tales had a basis in fact, after all.
"This wasn't supposed to be like this," she told him in a low voice. "We were supposed to have access to the servers." Her jaw tightened. "I'm sure we'll hear lovely lies to explain this."
"The Council's going to find an excuse to blame this on you."
"Yeah," Natasha agreed, feeling her stomach plummet to her toes. "It's my op."
"You weren't trained for this..." Clint protested, ever the loyal friend.
"I should have anticipated this." Because really, Red Room operatives were skilled in all manner of death and seduction. She wasn't troubled by the death surrounding her, only by the fact that it hadn't been planned.
"Natasha..."
"Fury left this on me a long time ago. I had to make the call."
Clint was visibly disturbed by the flat, fatalistic tone she took with him. She so rarely got this way; this meant she didn't feel able to get out of this quandary on her own, and she was entering survival mode. Natasha would never ask him to offer up his services to help her, as that would introduce too much risk for him. If he tried to do anything else she didn't plan for, she wouldn't accept it.
"Don't give up," he began in a low voice, aware that the other agents were still cataloguing the dead and taking photos to piece events back together later.
"Loki has something to answer for," she told him, voice still flat.
"Will you even get an answer?"
"There's only one way to find out."
Before he could stop her, she seized the amulet around her neck and yanked it off. She let go of it in the same movement, dashing it to the ground. The crystal smashed open on the linoleum floor, releasing a thick, almost gaseous substance. It coated Natasha and pulled her between, back toward Loki in his hidden hideaway.
Natasha was angry. She had been played for a fool, as if she was simply a pawn in some kind of cosmic game. It was one thing to expect treachery and find it, and a completely different situation when she had actually started to trust the trickster and find out just how thoroughly she had been played. Her reputation was on the line, rather like Clint's had been when she had been brought in. The difference was, she respected and liked Clint, valuing his friendship and opinion. This made it clear that Loki didn't respect hers.
Loki was lounging on a fur-covered chair, reading a scroll covered in runes that looked like they were written in blood. Amused at whatever he was reading, he didn't even look up when Natasha appeared in his domain. "So soon?" he asked, the drawl grating against her ears.
She ripped the parchment from his hands, tossing it aside. "They were all dead."
"Mortals are terribly fragile." There was no concern in his voice at all, and his eyes were flat and emotionless when they looked at her.
Natasha recognized that look. It was her own expression from her Red Room days. This was how she had appeared to others back then.
"The point was to keep those mortals alive, Loki."
He shrugged. "There are more of them. Billions of them. What was the dozen or so of them to you? You didn't know their names, did you? There was no personal relationship." Loki's expression was bland, but Natasha's insides roiled. "They were nothing. Pawns. Nameless, faceless sacks of flesh."
She thought of the man with the keyboard embedded in his face, the terrorized looks and the gaping mouths. They had been terrified, out of their depth. None of them had been Hydra agents, just a group of accountants that had been the unwitting cover story for an information repository. Hydra didn't care either. They were no more than collateral damage, numbers on a sheet of paper if Hydra considered them at all.
She might not have cared about the deaths she had left in her wake in her prior lifetime, but at least those deaths had been more personal.
"They were people. There were families and lives that were just eliminated because it was inconvenient to keep them alive."
"They were nothing," Loki repeated in a bored tone. He rose and went to a bookcase to retrieve a different scroll. "They don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Your superiors don't even care that they're dead."
But she wanted them to. They had to be better than that. How else could she wipe her ledger clean? How else could she undo all the damage she had done?
"This was not what we agreed upon. This wasn't supposed to happen!" Natasha cried, pulling this scroll out of his hands as well. Something was breaking inside of her, some nameless hope she shouldn't have allowed herself to have dying an agonized death.
"Did you really think I would help you?" Loki asked, eyebrow raised.
She was upset, throwing things and tearing apart his scrolls as if she was a child. Her temper had never broken like this, not since she was a child before the Red Room caught hold of her. She couldn't even really remember that, not as anything more than the shadow of a memory, a vague and fragile thing recovered through months of hard work piecing her life back together from the fragments on record. Too much of her memory was emptiness, gaps where she filled in the blanks with educated guesses rather than actual memory.
"You're nothing," Loki said in measured tones when her rage burned itself out. "You're no better than those fools were, just a tool to be used." He leaned in, aware of her growing ire and grinning in the face of it. "And possibly a broken one, at that."
"What is the point of doing this?" Natasha raged, gritting her teeth as she scowled at him.
"The point?" Loki scoffed. "Who said there had to be a point?" His eyes glittered dangerously as he stepped closer and grasped her jaw. Natasha couldn't help but feel that she was poised over a knife's edge, just waiting to fall.
"There's always a point," she snapped, frustrated. "You don't operate without one, even if I don't know what it is."
"There are so many things you don't know, little spider," he murmured, pushing her so hard that she actually fell to the floor. "I've told you this so many times. You are just another broken, useless thing. I've done what I could, of course. The spells and suggestions did the job they were intended, but when there isn't enough to work with..." His voice trailed off as he contemplated her, lip curling slightly in disgust and disappointment. "I don't have the time to fix things properly, there's far too much to do."
Natasha struggled to her feet, but suddenly she felt weighted down. Had he cast some kind of spell while she had been having a reckless tantrum? Had he really layered her with spells and suggestions to change her? No, she would have felt that, wouldn't she? Though she hadn't known it when the Red Room made her and remade her. Years of that, and there had been no whisper of wrongness until the very end, when their programming didn't take well enough. Was Loki's spell work much the same way? Her breath stuttered in her chest, and she looked at him, unable to do any more than seethe.
Loki nodded as if she had said something. "I don't think there's any use for you here."
Finally there was breath enough in her chest to speak. "Then I'll go back..."
"Who said any of your colleagues can trust you now?"
There it was, the slice in her chest that was almost as sharp as the blades he carried. That was the point, then. That was what this was about. She had deceived him, flayed his plans and used his prejudices against him. What else could he do but repay her in kind? It was a long game, she had to give him that, but he was patient when he had to be, and his lifespan was best measured in centuries, not years. He could afford to wait until her guard was down, until he could worm his way into SHIELD defenses properly.
"So that's your play," she murmured, eyes locked to his.
His grin was painful to look at. "So that's my play." He leaned in close and whispered right next to her ear. "I told you what I was after from the very beginning. I want you to know I've bested you. That I am a god you cannot defeat."
Natasha had no reply. He was right, he had told that the first time they had fought, when he had attacked her at her safe house. He had never lied, she just hadn't believed him. He had used her prejudices about him against her.
"They already call you the 'Black Widow problem' in meetings. No one trusts you any longer, if they ever truly did. That dripping body count they never forgave you for, I believe. They were just waiting for you to betray them, and now you have. There's a holding cell waiting for you when you get back." He leaned back, a smug expression on his face as he observed her. "Which will be soon."
He laughed as the horror dawned in her eyes, and the manic laughter continued as he clutched her unresisting arm and pulled her between. The void of his portal gave way to a conference room on the Helicarrier. Natasha didn't resist as Loki threw her onto the floor beside Fury and Hill. She didn't look up to see who else was seated around the table. All she could see were dress shoes and dress pant legs, and it occurred to her that perhaps the World Council was now telling Fury "I told you so." She was dangerous. She had always been dangerous, but that was what had made her useful before.
Before Loki, at least.
"I've solved your problem, Director," Loki chortled as he stepped backward through his rip in the fabric of space and time. "Enjoy her well. I know I did."
Natasha let her eyes slide closed. Footsteps approached, and she didn't resist as they picked her up, cuffed her and led her to the waiting cell for processing, just as Loki had promised.
She had fallen for his plays, she was compromised. There was nowhere else she belonged.
***
It wasn't a huge surprise to see Clint at the door to her cell, key to her cuffs in hand. "Hey," he murmured, stepping inside. Guards swung the door shut behind him, and they were no doubt on alert with assault weapons. She was dangerous, after all, and nanomesh armor wouldn't stop large caliber bullets for long.
Natasha stared at Clint. He didn't show any fear as he approached her, just as she hadn't when he had been the one under Loki's spell. "Hey," she said after a moment, eyes dropping to the floor. She let him uncuff her, but otherwise didn't move.
"He did a number on you, didn't he?"
It was on the tip of her tongue to say You know what that's like, but she couldn't do that to Clint. All she did was nod, eyes still on the floor. "I'm compromised."
"You know, I'm not thinking you are."
Her head shot up at the quiet words. "Of course I am. I can't be trusted."
"I'm sure that was his point, but look at who you're talking to."
She didn't move as he sat down beside her, not quite touching. It would have been too much to bear at the moment, and he understood that. "There are ways to get around it, you know that. You've been made and unmade and reprogrammed..."
Natasha glared at Clint. "I can't go through that again. I won't."
"Which means he didn't do it to you," Clint replied evenly. "Because if he had, I'm sure you wouldn't react so badly right now to the idea. You wouldn't have let us take you in. You would have taken out everyone in that conference room and you'd be frisking my dead body for possible weapons to get out of here." He sighed at the stubborn tilt of her mouth. "Think, Natasha. Think. He's a master manipulator. He didn't have to get into your head. All he has to do is make you think he did." He clasped her hand in his, feeling her cold fingers. "I still trust you."
"You shouldn't."
"I took a chance years ago. I'm willing to do it again."
"More fool you," she said bitterly, eyes sliding away from their linked hands.
"Don't do that to yourself," Clint murmured, squeezing her fingers tightly. "We know what Loki's capable of, and we know what you're capable of."
"Deception. Betrayal."
"Maybe, but not for us. Not to me. The rest of us that count, we're with you. We're not falling for this trick. If he wanted to break up the team, this won't do it." He paused slightly. "He's making you want to walk away. You can't give up on yourself, not like this."
Natasha turned over their linked hands and showed her wrists. "He sliced them open and put them back together. He carved into me. He fucked with me and fucked me. What if he left something behind? Just a sliver, just enough to make me doubt..."
"I know how that feels," Clint admitted softly. "They're going to send you to the same shrink I worked with, probably." Her eyes jerked up to his and he shrugged. "It feels different. Like it's not your thought in your head, not your intention, not your action. It feels like you've been given a shove in a different direction, and you're watching yourself move."
"I don't feel that," Natasha murmured. "But it didn't feel like that when the Red Room made me over a thousand times. I was whoever they meant me to be."
"Right now, you're who you're meant to be. Cautious and loyal. If you betray someone, it's part of the job, for a higher purpose. It's part of being a spy."
"Maybe I shouldn't be one anymore."
Clint gave her a crooked grin and let go of her hand to slide his arm around her shoulders. "There's plenty of other things for you to do than be other people and skulk around in the shadows. Someone has to keep Stark in line. You know how he constantly needles everyone in sight. Pepper needs help shutting him up."
Natasha laughed and leaned into his embrace. She let her eyes slide shut, feeling hollow and worn thin. At least being an Avenger was easy. There was no need to take on another skin and wear a personality like a coat. Point her in the right direction, and there she went. The others would help her through this, if she let them.
And right now, she wanted that so badly. She needed that support, as much as she didn't want to take it.
"I've learned how to handle Stark when I was Natalie Rushman," Natasha said finally, the syllables feeling strange in her mouth.
"There we go. All kinds of weapons, all kinds of skills. Loki didn't change that about you. He can't. Even magic has its limitations."
She would keep it in mind for next time. Because undoubtedly, there would be a next time. And next time, she would really be ready.
The End
Series: #4 in Ready For The Siege
(#1 - Look Over Your Shoulder, #2 - Armed Up To The Teeth, #3 - Misery Inspires)
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Loki/Natasha
Disclaimer: Not mine! Some comic backstory is incorporated into characterizations, but this is still primarily movieverse. Incoprorates a prompt from avengerkink round 7: I'd love to see Loki bring someone right to the edge again and again, but never letting them come. Not even when they're a quivering, whimpering mess, begging him for release. and also a prompt from round 4: Loki knows all of Natasha's secrets, and uses them to break her down completely. I want pyschological torture and Loki being relentless and cruel.
Spoilers/Warnings: Post-movie. Screwed up people doing screwed up things to and with each other, though that might be a draw. ;)
Title and series title from "The Royal We" by Silversun Pickups
Summary: Loki might have had some plans for Natasha, but that didn't mean he didn't intend to have a little fun with her first. It was only too bad that she didn't figure that out until it was far too late.
Previous chapters:
One - Glittering Shards of Ice
Two - Out Of Time
Three - Connections
Four - Shattered Control
Five - Endgame
"I may have been too hasty with my anger," Loki said stiffly, suddenly appearing beside Natasha in a warehouse she had been investigating.
She didn't deign that with a reply, as she was busy going through the warehouse's records. When he didn't move, she placed her finger under the entry she was reading. "That bystander will live, by the way," she told him in a flat tone of voice.
"One of your fabled innocents?"
"They do exist."
"So you've told me," he acknowledged.
"Why are you here now?" she asked, eyebrow lofted at him.
"Are you so unaffected by my display of anger?" he asked, his head tilting to the side as he contemplated her. "I have helped you in the past, and then to turn..."
"You did say you would," Natasha replied slowly.
"Of course I would threaten you," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He straightened his posture and gave her a charming smile. "Do you think this is what I do now?"
"Aren't you?"
Loki laughed, and Natasha waited patiently for it to pass. Her scars seemed to want her to put the ledger aside and touch him, run her fingers through his hair and state that she trusted him. A much more sane part of her knew that for the folly it was.
"Let me make it up to you, little spider. I have information on where your conspirator is currently hiding. It isn't in these storehouses or amongst agents of your ilk."
"Why don't you just find him and hand him over, then?"
"Where is the fun in that? He is no challenge, dear spider. He sits, drowning in his own fear, and there is no pleasure in watching that."
No, Loki liked challenges. Puzzles and convoluted plots were the kind of thing he was drawn to, not the simple open and shut extortion that seemed to be what Meissen was interested in.
***
The office space was wide open, with large plate glass windows to let in light on a good day. Normally this would be a good quality for an accounting firm, letting the poor cubicle jockeys get some natural lighting. In this particular case, the windows had been a liability. There was no way for the accountants to get out of the way or hide from the people that stormed the office, intent on slaughter.
Natasha had doubts that the killers were even human anymore, but kept those thoughts to herself.
The team had arrived too late to save anyone in the office, and all of the servers had been wiped clean with a virus introduced just prior to the slaughter. Techs were hopeful they could recover something, but that wasn't Hydra's way. If they couldn't use a resource, they preferred to destroy it so no one else could.
She gingerly picked her way through the carnage, seeing bloody handprints on the fabric of the cubicle dividers. One accountant had his keyboard embedded in his skull; someone could probably calculate the odds that human hands did that, but Natasha assumed it was very low. Too many dead eyes stared out of frightened expressions, accusing her of not getting there in time.
More red in her ledger, even if she hadn't wielded the knife personally.
Natasha saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, no more than shadows shifting, and turned to look. She saw a figure that was more like a spindly corpse, her chin pointed and lips drawn back in a bitter smile. Her eyes were no more than shadows in her too-pale face, her dark hair a curtain all around her head like a halo. She wore elaborate ceremonial robes with runes in the pattern, and the air behind her shimmered in the same way that Loki's portals did. The figure nodded her head at Natasha in formal greeting, much the way equals on opposing sides would, then she stepped behind her into the portal. It closed around her, vanishing just as Natasha realized there was a resemblance to Loki in the dead woman's features.
"The hell, Tash?" Clint asked, coming up behind her. He was disturbed by the sight they had walked into, and she wasn't sure if he had seen the ghostly figure standing over the dead that she had just seen. Hel, if she recalled her Norse mythology correctly. Sif had said that the residents of Helheim claimed to be kinfolk to Loki. Some of the old tales had a basis in fact, after all.
"This wasn't supposed to be like this," she told him in a low voice. "We were supposed to have access to the servers." Her jaw tightened. "I'm sure we'll hear lovely lies to explain this."
"The Council's going to find an excuse to blame this on you."
"Yeah," Natasha agreed, feeling her stomach plummet to her toes. "It's my op."
"You weren't trained for this..." Clint protested, ever the loyal friend.
"I should have anticipated this." Because really, Red Room operatives were skilled in all manner of death and seduction. She wasn't troubled by the death surrounding her, only by the fact that it hadn't been planned.
"Natasha..."
"Fury left this on me a long time ago. I had to make the call."
Clint was visibly disturbed by the flat, fatalistic tone she took with him. She so rarely got this way; this meant she didn't feel able to get out of this quandary on her own, and she was entering survival mode. Natasha would never ask him to offer up his services to help her, as that would introduce too much risk for him. If he tried to do anything else she didn't plan for, she wouldn't accept it.
"Don't give up," he began in a low voice, aware that the other agents were still cataloguing the dead and taking photos to piece events back together later.
"Loki has something to answer for," she told him, voice still flat.
"Will you even get an answer?"
"There's only one way to find out."
Before he could stop her, she seized the amulet around her neck and yanked it off. She let go of it in the same movement, dashing it to the ground. The crystal smashed open on the linoleum floor, releasing a thick, almost gaseous substance. It coated Natasha and pulled her between, back toward Loki in his hidden hideaway.
Natasha was angry. She had been played for a fool, as if she was simply a pawn in some kind of cosmic game. It was one thing to expect treachery and find it, and a completely different situation when she had actually started to trust the trickster and find out just how thoroughly she had been played. Her reputation was on the line, rather like Clint's had been when she had been brought in. The difference was, she respected and liked Clint, valuing his friendship and opinion. This made it clear that Loki didn't respect hers.
Loki was lounging on a fur-covered chair, reading a scroll covered in runes that looked like they were written in blood. Amused at whatever he was reading, he didn't even look up when Natasha appeared in his domain. "So soon?" he asked, the drawl grating against her ears.
She ripped the parchment from his hands, tossing it aside. "They were all dead."
"Mortals are terribly fragile." There was no concern in his voice at all, and his eyes were flat and emotionless when they looked at her.
Natasha recognized that look. It was her own expression from her Red Room days. This was how she had appeared to others back then.
"The point was to keep those mortals alive, Loki."
He shrugged. "There are more of them. Billions of them. What was the dozen or so of them to you? You didn't know their names, did you? There was no personal relationship." Loki's expression was bland, but Natasha's insides roiled. "They were nothing. Pawns. Nameless, faceless sacks of flesh."
She thought of the man with the keyboard embedded in his face, the terrorized looks and the gaping mouths. They had been terrified, out of their depth. None of them had been Hydra agents, just a group of accountants that had been the unwitting cover story for an information repository. Hydra didn't care either. They were no more than collateral damage, numbers on a sheet of paper if Hydra considered them at all.
She might not have cared about the deaths she had left in her wake in her prior lifetime, but at least those deaths had been more personal.
"They were people. There were families and lives that were just eliminated because it was inconvenient to keep them alive."
"They were nothing," Loki repeated in a bored tone. He rose and went to a bookcase to retrieve a different scroll. "They don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Your superiors don't even care that they're dead."
But she wanted them to. They had to be better than that. How else could she wipe her ledger clean? How else could she undo all the damage she had done?
"This was not what we agreed upon. This wasn't supposed to happen!" Natasha cried, pulling this scroll out of his hands as well. Something was breaking inside of her, some nameless hope she shouldn't have allowed herself to have dying an agonized death.
"Did you really think I would help you?" Loki asked, eyebrow raised.
She was upset, throwing things and tearing apart his scrolls as if she was a child. Her temper had never broken like this, not since she was a child before the Red Room caught hold of her. She couldn't even really remember that, not as anything more than the shadow of a memory, a vague and fragile thing recovered through months of hard work piecing her life back together from the fragments on record. Too much of her memory was emptiness, gaps where she filled in the blanks with educated guesses rather than actual memory.
"You're nothing," Loki said in measured tones when her rage burned itself out. "You're no better than those fools were, just a tool to be used." He leaned in, aware of her growing ire and grinning in the face of it. "And possibly a broken one, at that."
"What is the point of doing this?" Natasha raged, gritting her teeth as she scowled at him.
"The point?" Loki scoffed. "Who said there had to be a point?" His eyes glittered dangerously as he stepped closer and grasped her jaw. Natasha couldn't help but feel that she was poised over a knife's edge, just waiting to fall.
"There's always a point," she snapped, frustrated. "You don't operate without one, even if I don't know what it is."
"There are so many things you don't know, little spider," he murmured, pushing her so hard that she actually fell to the floor. "I've told you this so many times. You are just another broken, useless thing. I've done what I could, of course. The spells and suggestions did the job they were intended, but when there isn't enough to work with..." His voice trailed off as he contemplated her, lip curling slightly in disgust and disappointment. "I don't have the time to fix things properly, there's far too much to do."
Natasha struggled to her feet, but suddenly she felt weighted down. Had he cast some kind of spell while she had been having a reckless tantrum? Had he really layered her with spells and suggestions to change her? No, she would have felt that, wouldn't she? Though she hadn't known it when the Red Room made her and remade her. Years of that, and there had been no whisper of wrongness until the very end, when their programming didn't take well enough. Was Loki's spell work much the same way? Her breath stuttered in her chest, and she looked at him, unable to do any more than seethe.
Loki nodded as if she had said something. "I don't think there's any use for you here."
Finally there was breath enough in her chest to speak. "Then I'll go back..."
"Who said any of your colleagues can trust you now?"
There it was, the slice in her chest that was almost as sharp as the blades he carried. That was the point, then. That was what this was about. She had deceived him, flayed his plans and used his prejudices against him. What else could he do but repay her in kind? It was a long game, she had to give him that, but he was patient when he had to be, and his lifespan was best measured in centuries, not years. He could afford to wait until her guard was down, until he could worm his way into SHIELD defenses properly.
"So that's your play," she murmured, eyes locked to his.
His grin was painful to look at. "So that's my play." He leaned in close and whispered right next to her ear. "I told you what I was after from the very beginning. I want you to know I've bested you. That I am a god you cannot defeat."
Natasha had no reply. He was right, he had told that the first time they had fought, when he had attacked her at her safe house. He had never lied, she just hadn't believed him. He had used her prejudices about him against her.
"They already call you the 'Black Widow problem' in meetings. No one trusts you any longer, if they ever truly did. That dripping body count they never forgave you for, I believe. They were just waiting for you to betray them, and now you have. There's a holding cell waiting for you when you get back." He leaned back, a smug expression on his face as he observed her. "Which will be soon."
He laughed as the horror dawned in her eyes, and the manic laughter continued as he clutched her unresisting arm and pulled her between. The void of his portal gave way to a conference room on the Helicarrier. Natasha didn't resist as Loki threw her onto the floor beside Fury and Hill. She didn't look up to see who else was seated around the table. All she could see were dress shoes and dress pant legs, and it occurred to her that perhaps the World Council was now telling Fury "I told you so." She was dangerous. She had always been dangerous, but that was what had made her useful before.
Before Loki, at least.
"I've solved your problem, Director," Loki chortled as he stepped backward through his rip in the fabric of space and time. "Enjoy her well. I know I did."
Natasha let her eyes slide closed. Footsteps approached, and she didn't resist as they picked her up, cuffed her and led her to the waiting cell for processing, just as Loki had promised.
She had fallen for his plays, she was compromised. There was nowhere else she belonged.
***
It wasn't a huge surprise to see Clint at the door to her cell, key to her cuffs in hand. "Hey," he murmured, stepping inside. Guards swung the door shut behind him, and they were no doubt on alert with assault weapons. She was dangerous, after all, and nanomesh armor wouldn't stop large caliber bullets for long.
Natasha stared at Clint. He didn't show any fear as he approached her, just as she hadn't when he had been the one under Loki's spell. "Hey," she said after a moment, eyes dropping to the floor. She let him uncuff her, but otherwise didn't move.
"He did a number on you, didn't he?"
It was on the tip of her tongue to say You know what that's like, but she couldn't do that to Clint. All she did was nod, eyes still on the floor. "I'm compromised."
"You know, I'm not thinking you are."
Her head shot up at the quiet words. "Of course I am. I can't be trusted."
"I'm sure that was his point, but look at who you're talking to."
She didn't move as he sat down beside her, not quite touching. It would have been too much to bear at the moment, and he understood that. "There are ways to get around it, you know that. You've been made and unmade and reprogrammed..."
Natasha glared at Clint. "I can't go through that again. I won't."
"Which means he didn't do it to you," Clint replied evenly. "Because if he had, I'm sure you wouldn't react so badly right now to the idea. You wouldn't have let us take you in. You would have taken out everyone in that conference room and you'd be frisking my dead body for possible weapons to get out of here." He sighed at the stubborn tilt of her mouth. "Think, Natasha. Think. He's a master manipulator. He didn't have to get into your head. All he has to do is make you think he did." He clasped her hand in his, feeling her cold fingers. "I still trust you."
"You shouldn't."
"I took a chance years ago. I'm willing to do it again."
"More fool you," she said bitterly, eyes sliding away from their linked hands.
"Don't do that to yourself," Clint murmured, squeezing her fingers tightly. "We know what Loki's capable of, and we know what you're capable of."
"Deception. Betrayal."
"Maybe, but not for us. Not to me. The rest of us that count, we're with you. We're not falling for this trick. If he wanted to break up the team, this won't do it." He paused slightly. "He's making you want to walk away. You can't give up on yourself, not like this."
Natasha turned over their linked hands and showed her wrists. "He sliced them open and put them back together. He carved into me. He fucked with me and fucked me. What if he left something behind? Just a sliver, just enough to make me doubt..."
"I know how that feels," Clint admitted softly. "They're going to send you to the same shrink I worked with, probably." Her eyes jerked up to his and he shrugged. "It feels different. Like it's not your thought in your head, not your intention, not your action. It feels like you've been given a shove in a different direction, and you're watching yourself move."
"I don't feel that," Natasha murmured. "But it didn't feel like that when the Red Room made me over a thousand times. I was whoever they meant me to be."
"Right now, you're who you're meant to be. Cautious and loyal. If you betray someone, it's part of the job, for a higher purpose. It's part of being a spy."
"Maybe I shouldn't be one anymore."
Clint gave her a crooked grin and let go of her hand to slide his arm around her shoulders. "There's plenty of other things for you to do than be other people and skulk around in the shadows. Someone has to keep Stark in line. You know how he constantly needles everyone in sight. Pepper needs help shutting him up."
Natasha laughed and leaned into his embrace. She let her eyes slide shut, feeling hollow and worn thin. At least being an Avenger was easy. There was no need to take on another skin and wear a personality like a coat. Point her in the right direction, and there she went. The others would help her through this, if she let them.
And right now, she wanted that so badly. She needed that support, as much as she didn't want to take it.
"I've learned how to handle Stark when I was Natalie Rushman," Natasha said finally, the syllables feeling strange in her mouth.
"There we go. All kinds of weapons, all kinds of skills. Loki didn't change that about you. He can't. Even magic has its limitations."
She would keep it in mind for next time. Because undoubtedly, there would be a next time. And next time, she would really be ready.
The End