Friendly Fire, 5/6.
Title: Friendly Fire
Series: #16 in Ready For The Siege
(#1 - Look Over Your Shoulder, #2 - Armed Up To The Teeth, #3 - Misery Inspires, #4 - Broken Underneath, #5 - Change Is Coming Soon, #6 - Lick Your Wounds, #7 - Bitter Sparks, #8 - Father's Will, #9 - To Feel Safe Again, #10 - Hit Your Prime, #11 - Open Your Eyes, #12 - Can't Be Ignored, #13 - Make You Ill, #14 - Aim Straight, #15 - Not The First Time)
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: R
Pairing: Loki/Natasha, Natasha/Yelena, Natasha/Winter Soldier
Disclaimer: Not mine! Some comic backstory is incorporated into characterizations, but this is still primarily movieverse.
Spoilers/Warnings: Post-Avengers, AU to the rest of MCU. Read the other stories before this one, because it does refer back to events in them. Additional warning for mindfuckery of various flavors (hello, Red Room!) and detailed descriptions of violence.
Title and series title from "The Royal We" by Silversun Pickups
Special thanks to phoenixrising06/
romanovasledger for plotting and characterization discussion. :)
Summary: The Red Room has returned.
Prior chapters:
One - Set Up
Two - Freedom of Choice
Three - Road to Ruin
Four - Ready To Let You Go
Five - Call Off Your Ghost
Natasha was tired of the groping and stares, the sticky lip gloss and the swish of hair next to her ear. She couldn't stand the idiots that swore up and down that they were hot stuff, that they could make her toes curl and scream in ecstasy. She managed not to roll her eyes and smiled inane smiles at the frat boys and tourists in the club, filling in the spaces that they expected her to fill, being the party girl they were looking for. This was a thin cover, but it didn't need to be a good one, didn't need to take on parts of her soul.
She could feel magic curling around her body; it had been so long since she had felt it that she almost didn't recognize it. Turning rapidly, she batted her eyes at the football player in front of her and asked him breathily for a drink. He hurried off, sure he would score that evening, and she used the time to scan the crowd. Loki had to be somewhere. He was the only magic user she knew that would want to track her down.
Nothing. She was almost disappointed.
Yelena was trawling through a different club, and Natasha would have to meet up with her soon enough. They were haunting two places where Black Spectre had taken their agents from, but Natasha couldn't see anyone that seemed more like an agency's recruiter. Of course, the point was that they wouldn't be recognized or seen, but she knew what recruiters looked like. She knew how to hunt down ghosts.
The trick to belonging everywhere was to belong nowhere. To appear to know everything, she had to know a little bit and intuit the rest.
She smiled at the football player when he returned with a drink and sipped it. No one seemed to be haunting the club this evening. "Hey," she purred over the pulse of music. "Know another place to hang? This doesn't seem that great right now."
"You kidding?" he scoffed. "This place is awesome. It's pumping real good right now."
Natasha lifted a brow. "But maybe we can find a better place."
He took it as a come on and a slow grin spread across his lips. "Oh, I get it." He knocked back the rest of his drink and the lascivious look was cloying. "Oh, yeah, we're good."
Leaving with him gave her a different view of the club. There. Against the wall was her likely ghost, perusing the crowd. Natasha managed to disentangle herself from the football player, claiming to need the bathroom. She went past the probable ghost on the way to the bathroom, and she could see the knife in his pocket and the outline of what was probably a vial and syringe in his pocket. It was easy to feign a drunken ankle turn, crashing into him. Palming the drugs didn't go unnoticed, but he couldn't stab her outright without generating panic. She grinned as she stumbled again, pulling him further into the dark hallway. An elbow to the groin and throat kept him from attacking, and she drew up the entire vial's contents as she struggled to breathe. Natasha smiled, a fierce and frightening thing to behold.
"Now, why don't you tell me where you came from and where you're going next?" she purred, leaning into him. Her hand closed over his knife before his did, and she twisted it in her fist, cutting into his leg. "Maybe if I like what you say, I'll even let you live."
Terror flooded his eyes. They both knew he wouldn't live past this night. It was really only a question of how much pain he would be in first.
He wasn't loyal enough to Black Spectre. He died quickly and relatively painlessly in the alley behind the club less than an hour later.
***
James and the former Spectre agents arrived in San Francisco without incident. There was a flash of memory, something that vaguely felt memory. A little girl with twin braids running ahead of him, her clothes old fashioned and face turned away from him. Another girlish voice called him Bucky, and then the memory skittered away like cockroaches with the flick of a light.
The confused women all had names, though likely none of them were ones they had been born with. Sheila, Raquel, Rebecca, Veronika, Daniela, Sandrine, Dana, Jennifer, Tamsin, Cadence and Gilly all had memories that began with the Agency, no prior memories at all. "We all volunteered for this," Gilly insisted. "I saw video of myself from before the procedure. I agreed to do this. I was tearful at the thought of losing everything I had ever known, but it was for the greater good. It serves a higher purpose." She smiled encouragingly at James. "You don't have to test me, sir. I know my place, and I am committed to it. I know what I chose."
Only, she hadn't chosen. None of them had.
Gilly was tiny, shorter than Natasha. She had a thin, bony frame, paper pale skin that was nearly translucent. Her dirty blonde hair was short, cut to her ears and longer in front than in back. It gave her an almost boyish appearance, and that struck a deep nerve.
You're taking all the stupid with you.
What was that about? What fragment of memory was that?
This was why they wiped him between missions. This was why he had to be cleared out before being put back on ice. His handlers didn't want to risk fragments shaking loose. They didn't want to have him remember, didn't want him to be human. For the longest time they hadn't known about Natasha, hadn't been able to shake her loose. But they would try if he had been foolish enough to let something slip, and all they had to remove was his past.
"Rebecca," he called out after one of the women. One of them had that name, so one of them should have turned around. But none turned, being too far ahead of him in the busy airport, and he stopped himself from yelling Becky! You get back here! Ma left me in charge!
Memory, not reality. A fragment coming to the surface, even though that Rebecca wasn't here, and none of these women looked like the girl he had been chasing in his memory. He'd had a sister once. At least one sister, though his gut told him there had been more than one.
James shook his head, as if he could shake the fragments of memory loose, and continued on his way. The women knew the rendezvous point. They weren't wiped so clean that they couldn't find their way without being tailed. Procedural memory was always kept, after all. It was only the autobiographical memory that was erased. That was the only memory that would pose a threat to the handlers, to the Agency. It really didn't matter which Agency; none of them wanted active assets to develop personalities and motives of their own, especially if those motives didn't include the Agency's directives.
Moving through San Francisco was a blur. Bernal Heights was the location for the San Franciscan entry point into the Black Spectre base. It was a relatively laid back area within the city, perched on a hill with little mass transit access. She had said that Holly Park's renovations in 2004 had indeed cleaned up the drug culture reputation, it had also been a good cover for Black Spectre moving in. Bernal Hill was approximately forty acres, and a massive complex beneath it needed various access points. Daniela remembered that time period, though she doubted how accurate her memories were. "How else do you hide our agents, but by putting them in the neighborhood known for lesbians?" she had said before they left Texas. It made sense, so it was only a question of finding an appropriate access point.
He knew himself and his role in these missions well. The Winter Soldier could move silently in the shadows if need be, but often it wasn't necessary to do so. In a residential neighborhood, however, it was going to be necessary.
The city was gorgeous. Once this madness was through, when Natasha inevitably walked away from Yelena, James would bring her to visit. They could stroll through the tourist traps, laugh at the idiots that invariably insulted the locals, try to forget that they were deadly assassins with holes in their memories a mile wide. He could pretend he had something to offer her, that he could be a real person and wasn't merely a shell. With her, he could almost hope to be more than a ghost ready to fade away. With her, he wanted to be whole.
Though the twelve of them were scattered in different hotels, they did meet in Holly Park to get a better look at where an access point might be. Daniela looked around, unimpressed by the families and walkers. That was the surface world, after all. People like them had no business even wanting that kind of life. They simply weren't built for it.
Tamsin was the one that lit up as they sat in the park on blankets, pretending to be at a picnic of some kind. She was another pale, fragile looking woman, a splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose and tops of her cheeks. She had strawberry blonde hair and bright green eyes, looking every inch a stereotypical Irishwoman. She grinned, looking around the area, and her casual hipster clothing made her seem like a college freshman on summer break.
"I've been here before."
James' eyes sharpened, and a number of the girls perked up. "You have?"
"I remember being a transfer to the Austin base," Tamsin replied. "I hadn't been there long before it was compromised and we had to be moved again."
It was a plausible story, one Yelena had been absolutely tickled to tell. James merely nodded, pushing away any unease he might have had. "And?"
"The entry point is in a house not too far from here. The doors are carved into the basement, with entry codes that only the handlers use. But it's definitely an easier entry to compromise than some of the other ones."
"Then that's likely how they got in," James said, sticking to Yelena's story. They were reclaiming the other women, they were saving them from whatever horrors and experimentation that was going to happen. He wasn't sure if Yelena blamed Hydra or Beecham directly, and it really didn't matter. The women were on board to save their sisters, and that was all that mattered.
"So where's the house?" Daniela asked, frowning.
"Are we going to go in daytime, then?" Tamsin asked James.
It surprised him, until he remembered. Oh, that was right. He was their handler for this job. He was the one they would answer to.
"It'll be big and loud and flashy," he warned them as he nodded. "But this is San Francisco. They'll think it was an earthquake."
"We'll get our gear and get started," Sheila replied, dark eyes glittering with anticipation. Her hair was in cornrows, flat to her head. She patted it down, even though there was nothing to move, likely a nervous habit even though she didn't visibly appear nervous. "I'll take the lead once we get there." She had the darkest skin tones, and that would only give her an edge if the hallways were shadowed.
Still, initiative should be rewarded. James nodded and stood. "Let's get to work."
***
Exploring the Underground in Atlanta was actually kind of fun. Natasha hadn't had too many jobs like this for SHIELD in recent years. She could have worked it into some of her covers, but she usually had to find particular information, so the skills to blend in didn't always get used. It had been years since she had to visit Atlanta, and she certainly hadn't gone sight seeing during her last visit.
Nestled between the shops and eateries were the entry and exit points for the Atlanta base into Black Spectre. As with the Austin base, Black Spectre wanted to fly under the radar and not be noticed. Natasha went in first, waiting until the late afternoon at the handlers' shift change to slip into the complex. Yelena stayed above ground at first, garroting or stabbing the handlers as they tried to pass into the tourist crowds.
Natasha tapped into the security feeds first, shunting the live camera feed to a loop from the day before. It was easy to do even with the current security agent bleeding out on the floor, breath gurgling through blood and a hand at his throat as if it would keep him from dying. That never worked, but it never stopped the victims from trying it. She supposed she should feel something about this. It likely hadn't been necessary, perhaps only knocking him out and tying him up. But at the time, she hadn't even thought of that possibility.
She pushed aside the guilt. She couldn't deal with that now. There wasn't time for that, not while she was working, not while so much was riding on her success. Yelena knew she wanted to walk away after this, and she could try to repent then.
Assuming Yelena let her go.
It was like a sharp pain in her chest, and distantly she knew that Yelena wouldn't want her to leave. The quiet on her part was possibly just planning something, trying to come up with a way to keep her close. Natasha didn't want to think of the fallout if she did manage to walk away and return to the Avengers and SHIELD. If she had a place to return to, if they still wanted her.
There. Controls for the labs and the offices, the dormitories and the various amenities that the ladies needed to stay in shape and practice their skills.
Commandeering the security tech in the room, Natasha quickly determined which frequencies that the Black Spectre guards were using. No sign yet that she or Yelena were identified. This was good, and she quickly texted Yelena to have her meet in the command room.
In the meantime, Natasha dug into the mainframe and started weeding out the account names, passwords and prompts that the handlers used. Maybe she would wind up using it, maybe SHIELD would; she wasn't even sure why she was doing this, aside from maybe force of habit. She was a spy, after all, she couldn't help but collect secrets and lock them away to see if she could find an angle for its use later. It was an automatic reaction, more or less, something as natural to her as breathing. Steve had once asked if she ever stopped lying after their first undercover op for SHIELD together, and she had merely lofted an eyebrow at him and asked if he would even believe her answer.
It had hurt. It shouldn't have, but it had hurt.
He trusted her, she knew that, and they had grown to be close friends. Clint was her best friend, her family, and Steve was a close second. The rest of the Avengers mattered to her, a handful of SHIELD agents she had the pleasure of knowing. Her heart constricted in her chest at the thought of them not trusting her, not believing that she cared about them or their interests, that they would see the surface and think that was all there was to her. She had hidden true herself so deeply, but they had seen enough glimpses of her true self to understand her, hadn't they? Clint and Steve couldn't be the only ones out of the Avengers, Melinda couldn't be the only SHIELD agent that trusted her.
Her musings were interrupted by Yelena strolling in through the door. There were splashes of blood on her clothes, a slick wet smudge against the black of her clothing. Her hair was pulled back, and only a few wisps of blonde had fallen out in her tussles so far.
"Ready?"
Natasha found a few jump drives and copied over the data she collected. In addition, she sent it all to upload to the secure server that she had sent messages to Clint with.
Backup. Redundancies. The information was the mission as much as the girls were. Women. As much as the women were.
Rising up in a pirouette like a ballerina, Natasha pocketed the jump drives and nodded briskly at the blonde. "Let's do it."
It was a dance that Natasha knew well, and it was easy to fall back into the steps she knew so well. She and Yelena had always been good, the best of the Red Room, the flawless practice team that others were measured against. They had been broken up several times for just that reason, to see how well they worked against each other and apart, to show them time and again that the Red Room was in control of their destinies.
Here was the mission, here were the Black Widows. It was like a ghost slithering beneath her skin, directing her where to go.
Handlers tumbled and died too easily, some of them not even trained how to combat an incoming threat. Had they relied on their deadly ladies for protection? Natasha didn't even bother to question it, because some of the handlers didn't even seem altogether present. That kind of glassy eyed stare was difficult to replicate; some of these handlers were wiped clean themselves. Who was at the top, then? Who was the one that pulled all these marionettes' strings?
The data would tell them who. The data was the important part of the mission. She could hunt them down later if it wasn't Beecham himself. If it was, then that would be easy; James would simply kill him and be done with it.
The thought really should have bothered her more than it did.
Natasha favored quiet, neat kills. She moved with ruthless efficiency through the offices in this part of the complex. Yelena laughed and taunted, tortured with words and gestures if she was allowed the time to. This was not one of those times, so that impulse was tamped down tight and she simply moved from one kill to the next. Her grin was playful and infectious, as if she was dancing at a party and not initiating the deadly dance of death.
Something in her eyes seemed to shift as she killed, however. The closer they came to the dorms, the closer Yelena seemed to be like the crazed woman injecting her with mage-derived serums in backwater motel rooms and fucking her into submission. Fear wound itself along her spine, clutching her heart in its icy claws. When the girls game, the ones whose minds were already broken and tampered with, trying to defend their handlers, Yelena cut them down as ruthlessly and as efficiently as she had the security staffers and handlers. "Submit to me to die," she snarled, and it didn't seem like the same girl Natasha had known.
Whoever she was, she was exceedingly dangerous. Natasha wasn't sure if she was exempt from that danger, either.
Yelena reached the dormitories first. These women weren't primed for attack, so Natasha didn't think of them as mindless girls or wind up dolls. They were training or lounging, waiting for their next target. Natasha had already found the evacuation code phrases, so as soon as Yelena barked for them to line up in formation, she was issuing the commands to evacuate for the abandoned house in Texas. That was their fallback for now, and they would have to find a longer term solution for their organization.
No, wait, Yelena would have to find a long term solution. Natasha was calling it quits once Black Spectre was wiped off the map. She felt too fractured, too used, too worn thin. She was a frayed thread ready to snap.
None of the women questioned their authority. They were used to a rotating roster of handlers, depending on the mission at hand. Quickly and efficiently, she got their names, ages, rankings, fieldwork designations and access codes to the Spectre mainframe. Not one second guessed her taking this down on a cell phone; perhaps other handlers had done this before, or they were assuming this was the emergency protocol in emptying an entire base.
The women would be safe enough as they moved anonymously from Atlanta to Texas. Now it was time to exit the Underground and head back themselves.
Natasha tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. She wasn't looking forward to it at all.
***
Tony's quinjet arrived in San Francisco with little fuss. While in transit, he had JARVIS use multiple concurrent scanning and facial recognition software programs to find the Winter Soldier. There was no point to do that for Atlanta, given how Natasha and Yelena had extensive training to mask their appearance; Loki would be able to track Natasha down using the new magical bond anyway. The Winter Soldier never bothered to mask his appearance, however, and they had a clear photo for reference.
Sif looked at Steve in concern as the plane touched down. "You remain tense."
"What if he doesn't recognize me?" Steve murmured, fiddling with the chin strap of his helmet.
"You fear having to harm him. Or kill him," Sif said, leaning into his arm a little.
Steve looked up at her and nodded, grateful for the support. "Yeah. I thought I lost him years ago. I didn't think he could have survived that kind of fall, and I feel like I should've. For him to still be alive after all this time, that I never knew... And what would it make me if I put him down like some rabid dog, not like the friend I'd lay my life down for?"
She rested a hand on his, stilling his frenetic movement. "Steve. You are a good man. You are a good soldier, a good friend. You don't do this to kill or destroy. You are here to save what you can, to protect who you can. Hold onto that."
He shot her a wry smile. "I knew a guy that said that. Forget being a good soldier, just remember how to be a good man."
"Too many lose sight of themselves when they see warfare," Sif reminded him gently. "I wouldn't want the same for you. If you lose yourself, there would be nothing left for your friend to come back to."
"Makes sense," he acknowledged.
Thor cleared his throat from his position seated across from them. "If he cannot be saved, and you cannot perform the final graces, I will for you." He seemed uncomfortable with the offer, but made it just the same. "I do hope it doesn't come to that."
"Let's not be a downer," Tony replied from his seat closer to the pilot. He was poring over two separate tablet screens, and didn't even look up. "Looks like we've got a hit at the airport, taxi services and baggage claim. Trying to access social media and local security feeds now. He doesn't look like some kind of crazed killer right now, just like he could use a good power nap and a shower."
Steve suppressed a sigh at that, wondering when was the last time Bucky would've gotten any sleep, when he would have eaten last. That was the kind of stuff that he used to worry about with Steve, back when he was a little guy. Odd how it was his turn to worry about that now, when Bucky was a lethal assassin and obviously able to survive no matter what the odds.
"Where is he now?" Steve asked, swallowing and looking up.
"Some residential neighborhood, it looks like. Can't scan for metal in all of that mess, but we're circling in. Looks like the last Instagram photo that has him in the background for sure was at a park." Tony looked up at Steve, no amusement or sarcastic glee in his eyes. "We'll find him, figure this all out. If he got mind wiped, we can probably flush that shit out."
"And if we can't?" Steve asked, almost dreading what he would hear.
"We figure out what to do when we get there." Tony's voice was firm, an edge of kindness in his tone. "No sense worrying about it until we see what kind of damage we're dealing with."
Nodding, Steve put on his helmet and squeezed Sif's hand. "I'm glad you're here," he murmured.
Her smile was gentle and understanding. "I am, too."
***
It was almost too easy to destroy the entrance to the San Francisco base. The only lives that had to be saved were the agents, so that made things that much easier. James and the eleven new Red Room recruits could filter down into the base and start hacking and slashing their way into the dormitories. They were all for saving their "sisters" from the menace taking over, and would send them to the abandoned house in Texas for now. Eventually, they would have to build a base of operations of their own. James didn't think that Yelena had thought that far ahead, and he didn't think Natasha would choose to stay. She might have balked when he had suggested the thought, but it seemed to be likely. She had changed, not unpleasantly so, but the indiscriminate killing bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
He liked moving forward and shooting, hitting and punching his way through when the bullets ran out. Then there were the knives, fluid elegance in meting out death to those that would take free will away. Oh, he enjoyed those deaths, even if he couldn't eliminate Hydra the way he really wanted to.
Everything went the way it was supposed to, the walls rocking with the force of the blasts and getting splashed with blood or bullets. James could almost count this as a success.
Almost, because he saw a number of the Avengers in the park as he was trying to exit the base with the Red Room recruits.
"Get your sisters to Texas," he commanded Tamsin and Sheila, the closest of the recruits. "I'll take care of them to give you time to escape."
"You need our help," Daniela offered.
"Touching, but unnecessary. You are the priority. All agents are the priority. Escape and await orders when Yelena and Natasha return to Texas."
Clearly unhappy, they did as they were told. There were a number of routes they could take to the airport, or they could simply steal a number of vans and start driving out of the city before going on a plane with fake ID's. Either way, they would never fall into SHEILD hands.
James stalked forward, inwardly pleased by the double take a number of the Avengers. He could afford to be bold here, and it didn't matter what happened to him. It was upsetting that he would never see Natasha again, but he had the sinking sensation earlier that it might be the case. She was pulling away again, Yelena was going off the rails, his role would soon be superfluous. He wasn't going back to Hydra control, not after getting this taste of freedom, and there were likely other agencies in need of a good mercenary.
He went on the offensive, and wanted to laugh at how quickly they moved in response to his attacks. They clearly didn't want to harm him, while he had no such qualms.
"Bucky!" one of the masked men called out, anguish in his tone. A shapely armored brunette fought beside him, her small shield taking the brunt of the punches he delivered with his metal arm. She was good, countering with punches of her own. Apparently, she didn't mind throwing down or knocking him out.
"Who-the-hell-is-Bucky?" he said, aware that this was repeated from the time he last saw Natasha's friends. Oh. This had to be the blond one.
"Take off the mask," the brunette told him, giving a sweeping kick that nearly knocked James off of his feet. He staggered but righted himself, just in time to see the mask come off.
The tall blond man had blue eyes and a square jaw. This time, James felt a ping of recognition, something like pain in his chest, something like cold along his spine. "You..." he began, voice faltering slightly. He tightened his grip on his gun. "You used to be smaller."
"Yeah," he said, a relieved smile on his face. "Yeah, I did. Do you remember, Buck? You're my friend," he insisted, stepping closer.
Instinct kicked in, and James raised the gun despite his wavering intentions. Danger. "I have my mission," he snarled.
"Well, I have mine," the brunette said suddenly, swinging the shield at him. It connected with his jaw, and his head snapped back painfully. Memory shivered-Zola was standing there, clipboard in hand, eyes staring at him without mercy or pity, chemicals burning through his veins, cold so deep it seemed to get into his bones.
James staggered, unable to breathe. He started to murmur something almost by instinct, just outside of his conscious awareness, a name and title and identification number, the kind of thing that men recited when they were seized as prisoners of war. Welcome back, Zola said, a satisfied grin on his face. I was so eager to see how this worked...
"Bucky," the blond man said. Steve.
He took an unsteady step back, vision weaving in and out, but he couldn't give in to weakness, not now, not in front of the enemy. He raised his gun, not even sure how many bullets were left in it, how fast the Avengers were going to be.
But then the other blond threw his hammer, and it connected with his temple. James fell like a sack of bricks, consciousness gone.
***
***
To Chapter Six - Breakdown
Series: #16 in Ready For The Siege
(#1 - Look Over Your Shoulder, #2 - Armed Up To The Teeth, #3 - Misery Inspires, #4 - Broken Underneath, #5 - Change Is Coming Soon, #6 - Lick Your Wounds, #7 - Bitter Sparks, #8 - Father's Will, #9 - To Feel Safe Again, #10 - Hit Your Prime, #11 - Open Your Eyes, #12 - Can't Be Ignored, #13 - Make You Ill, #14 - Aim Straight, #15 - Not The First Time)
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: R
Pairing: Loki/Natasha, Natasha/Yelena, Natasha/Winter Soldier
Disclaimer: Not mine! Some comic backstory is incorporated into characterizations, but this is still primarily movieverse.
Spoilers/Warnings: Post-Avengers, AU to the rest of MCU. Read the other stories before this one, because it does refer back to events in them. Additional warning for mindfuckery of various flavors (hello, Red Room!) and detailed descriptions of violence.
Title and series title from "The Royal We" by Silversun Pickups
Special thanks to phoenixrising06/
romanovasledger for plotting and characterization discussion. :)
Summary: The Red Room has returned.
Prior chapters:
One - Set Up
Two - Freedom of Choice
Three - Road to Ruin
Four - Ready To Let You Go
Five - Call Off Your Ghost
Natasha was tired of the groping and stares, the sticky lip gloss and the swish of hair next to her ear. She couldn't stand the idiots that swore up and down that they were hot stuff, that they could make her toes curl and scream in ecstasy. She managed not to roll her eyes and smiled inane smiles at the frat boys and tourists in the club, filling in the spaces that they expected her to fill, being the party girl they were looking for. This was a thin cover, but it didn't need to be a good one, didn't need to take on parts of her soul.
She could feel magic curling around her body; it had been so long since she had felt it that she almost didn't recognize it. Turning rapidly, she batted her eyes at the football player in front of her and asked him breathily for a drink. He hurried off, sure he would score that evening, and she used the time to scan the crowd. Loki had to be somewhere. He was the only magic user she knew that would want to track her down.
Nothing. She was almost disappointed.
Yelena was trawling through a different club, and Natasha would have to meet up with her soon enough. They were haunting two places where Black Spectre had taken their agents from, but Natasha couldn't see anyone that seemed more like an agency's recruiter. Of course, the point was that they wouldn't be recognized or seen, but she knew what recruiters looked like. She knew how to hunt down ghosts.
The trick to belonging everywhere was to belong nowhere. To appear to know everything, she had to know a little bit and intuit the rest.
She smiled at the football player when he returned with a drink and sipped it. No one seemed to be haunting the club this evening. "Hey," she purred over the pulse of music. "Know another place to hang? This doesn't seem that great right now."
"You kidding?" he scoffed. "This place is awesome. It's pumping real good right now."
Natasha lifted a brow. "But maybe we can find a better place."
He took it as a come on and a slow grin spread across his lips. "Oh, I get it." He knocked back the rest of his drink and the lascivious look was cloying. "Oh, yeah, we're good."
Leaving with him gave her a different view of the club. There. Against the wall was her likely ghost, perusing the crowd. Natasha managed to disentangle herself from the football player, claiming to need the bathroom. She went past the probable ghost on the way to the bathroom, and she could see the knife in his pocket and the outline of what was probably a vial and syringe in his pocket. It was easy to feign a drunken ankle turn, crashing into him. Palming the drugs didn't go unnoticed, but he couldn't stab her outright without generating panic. She grinned as she stumbled again, pulling him further into the dark hallway. An elbow to the groin and throat kept him from attacking, and she drew up the entire vial's contents as she struggled to breathe. Natasha smiled, a fierce and frightening thing to behold.
"Now, why don't you tell me where you came from and where you're going next?" she purred, leaning into him. Her hand closed over his knife before his did, and she twisted it in her fist, cutting into his leg. "Maybe if I like what you say, I'll even let you live."
Terror flooded his eyes. They both knew he wouldn't live past this night. It was really only a question of how much pain he would be in first.
He wasn't loyal enough to Black Spectre. He died quickly and relatively painlessly in the alley behind the club less than an hour later.
***
James and the former Spectre agents arrived in San Francisco without incident. There was a flash of memory, something that vaguely felt memory. A little girl with twin braids running ahead of him, her clothes old fashioned and face turned away from him. Another girlish voice called him Bucky, and then the memory skittered away like cockroaches with the flick of a light.
The confused women all had names, though likely none of them were ones they had been born with. Sheila, Raquel, Rebecca, Veronika, Daniela, Sandrine, Dana, Jennifer, Tamsin, Cadence and Gilly all had memories that began with the Agency, no prior memories at all. "We all volunteered for this," Gilly insisted. "I saw video of myself from before the procedure. I agreed to do this. I was tearful at the thought of losing everything I had ever known, but it was for the greater good. It serves a higher purpose." She smiled encouragingly at James. "You don't have to test me, sir. I know my place, and I am committed to it. I know what I chose."
Only, she hadn't chosen. None of them had.
Gilly was tiny, shorter than Natasha. She had a thin, bony frame, paper pale skin that was nearly translucent. Her dirty blonde hair was short, cut to her ears and longer in front than in back. It gave her an almost boyish appearance, and that struck a deep nerve.
You're taking all the stupid with you.
What was that about? What fragment of memory was that?
This was why they wiped him between missions. This was why he had to be cleared out before being put back on ice. His handlers didn't want to risk fragments shaking loose. They didn't want to have him remember, didn't want him to be human. For the longest time they hadn't known about Natasha, hadn't been able to shake her loose. But they would try if he had been foolish enough to let something slip, and all they had to remove was his past.
"Rebecca," he called out after one of the women. One of them had that name, so one of them should have turned around. But none turned, being too far ahead of him in the busy airport, and he stopped himself from yelling Becky! You get back here! Ma left me in charge!
Memory, not reality. A fragment coming to the surface, even though that Rebecca wasn't here, and none of these women looked like the girl he had been chasing in his memory. He'd had a sister once. At least one sister, though his gut told him there had been more than one.
James shook his head, as if he could shake the fragments of memory loose, and continued on his way. The women knew the rendezvous point. They weren't wiped so clean that they couldn't find their way without being tailed. Procedural memory was always kept, after all. It was only the autobiographical memory that was erased. That was the only memory that would pose a threat to the handlers, to the Agency. It really didn't matter which Agency; none of them wanted active assets to develop personalities and motives of their own, especially if those motives didn't include the Agency's directives.
Moving through San Francisco was a blur. Bernal Heights was the location for the San Franciscan entry point into the Black Spectre base. It was a relatively laid back area within the city, perched on a hill with little mass transit access. She had said that Holly Park's renovations in 2004 had indeed cleaned up the drug culture reputation, it had also been a good cover for Black Spectre moving in. Bernal Hill was approximately forty acres, and a massive complex beneath it needed various access points. Daniela remembered that time period, though she doubted how accurate her memories were. "How else do you hide our agents, but by putting them in the neighborhood known for lesbians?" she had said before they left Texas. It made sense, so it was only a question of finding an appropriate access point.
He knew himself and his role in these missions well. The Winter Soldier could move silently in the shadows if need be, but often it wasn't necessary to do so. In a residential neighborhood, however, it was going to be necessary.
The city was gorgeous. Once this madness was through, when Natasha inevitably walked away from Yelena, James would bring her to visit. They could stroll through the tourist traps, laugh at the idiots that invariably insulted the locals, try to forget that they were deadly assassins with holes in their memories a mile wide. He could pretend he had something to offer her, that he could be a real person and wasn't merely a shell. With her, he could almost hope to be more than a ghost ready to fade away. With her, he wanted to be whole.
Though the twelve of them were scattered in different hotels, they did meet in Holly Park to get a better look at where an access point might be. Daniela looked around, unimpressed by the families and walkers. That was the surface world, after all. People like them had no business even wanting that kind of life. They simply weren't built for it.
Tamsin was the one that lit up as they sat in the park on blankets, pretending to be at a picnic of some kind. She was another pale, fragile looking woman, a splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose and tops of her cheeks. She had strawberry blonde hair and bright green eyes, looking every inch a stereotypical Irishwoman. She grinned, looking around the area, and her casual hipster clothing made her seem like a college freshman on summer break.
"I've been here before."
James' eyes sharpened, and a number of the girls perked up. "You have?"
"I remember being a transfer to the Austin base," Tamsin replied. "I hadn't been there long before it was compromised and we had to be moved again."
It was a plausible story, one Yelena had been absolutely tickled to tell. James merely nodded, pushing away any unease he might have had. "And?"
"The entry point is in a house not too far from here. The doors are carved into the basement, with entry codes that only the handlers use. But it's definitely an easier entry to compromise than some of the other ones."
"Then that's likely how they got in," James said, sticking to Yelena's story. They were reclaiming the other women, they were saving them from whatever horrors and experimentation that was going to happen. He wasn't sure if Yelena blamed Hydra or Beecham directly, and it really didn't matter. The women were on board to save their sisters, and that was all that mattered.
"So where's the house?" Daniela asked, frowning.
"Are we going to go in daytime, then?" Tamsin asked James.
It surprised him, until he remembered. Oh, that was right. He was their handler for this job. He was the one they would answer to.
"It'll be big and loud and flashy," he warned them as he nodded. "But this is San Francisco. They'll think it was an earthquake."
"We'll get our gear and get started," Sheila replied, dark eyes glittering with anticipation. Her hair was in cornrows, flat to her head. She patted it down, even though there was nothing to move, likely a nervous habit even though she didn't visibly appear nervous. "I'll take the lead once we get there." She had the darkest skin tones, and that would only give her an edge if the hallways were shadowed.
Still, initiative should be rewarded. James nodded and stood. "Let's get to work."
***
Exploring the Underground in Atlanta was actually kind of fun. Natasha hadn't had too many jobs like this for SHIELD in recent years. She could have worked it into some of her covers, but she usually had to find particular information, so the skills to blend in didn't always get used. It had been years since she had to visit Atlanta, and she certainly hadn't gone sight seeing during her last visit.
Nestled between the shops and eateries were the entry and exit points for the Atlanta base into Black Spectre. As with the Austin base, Black Spectre wanted to fly under the radar and not be noticed. Natasha went in first, waiting until the late afternoon at the handlers' shift change to slip into the complex. Yelena stayed above ground at first, garroting or stabbing the handlers as they tried to pass into the tourist crowds.
Natasha tapped into the security feeds first, shunting the live camera feed to a loop from the day before. It was easy to do even with the current security agent bleeding out on the floor, breath gurgling through blood and a hand at his throat as if it would keep him from dying. That never worked, but it never stopped the victims from trying it. She supposed she should feel something about this. It likely hadn't been necessary, perhaps only knocking him out and tying him up. But at the time, she hadn't even thought of that possibility.
She pushed aside the guilt. She couldn't deal with that now. There wasn't time for that, not while she was working, not while so much was riding on her success. Yelena knew she wanted to walk away after this, and she could try to repent then.
Assuming Yelena let her go.
It was like a sharp pain in her chest, and distantly she knew that Yelena wouldn't want her to leave. The quiet on her part was possibly just planning something, trying to come up with a way to keep her close. Natasha didn't want to think of the fallout if she did manage to walk away and return to the Avengers and SHIELD. If she had a place to return to, if they still wanted her.
There. Controls for the labs and the offices, the dormitories and the various amenities that the ladies needed to stay in shape and practice their skills.
Commandeering the security tech in the room, Natasha quickly determined which frequencies that the Black Spectre guards were using. No sign yet that she or Yelena were identified. This was good, and she quickly texted Yelena to have her meet in the command room.
In the meantime, Natasha dug into the mainframe and started weeding out the account names, passwords and prompts that the handlers used. Maybe she would wind up using it, maybe SHIELD would; she wasn't even sure why she was doing this, aside from maybe force of habit. She was a spy, after all, she couldn't help but collect secrets and lock them away to see if she could find an angle for its use later. It was an automatic reaction, more or less, something as natural to her as breathing. Steve had once asked if she ever stopped lying after their first undercover op for SHIELD together, and she had merely lofted an eyebrow at him and asked if he would even believe her answer.
It had hurt. It shouldn't have, but it had hurt.
He trusted her, she knew that, and they had grown to be close friends. Clint was her best friend, her family, and Steve was a close second. The rest of the Avengers mattered to her, a handful of SHIELD agents she had the pleasure of knowing. Her heart constricted in her chest at the thought of them not trusting her, not believing that she cared about them or their interests, that they would see the surface and think that was all there was to her. She had hidden true herself so deeply, but they had seen enough glimpses of her true self to understand her, hadn't they? Clint and Steve couldn't be the only ones out of the Avengers, Melinda couldn't be the only SHIELD agent that trusted her.
Her musings were interrupted by Yelena strolling in through the door. There were splashes of blood on her clothes, a slick wet smudge against the black of her clothing. Her hair was pulled back, and only a few wisps of blonde had fallen out in her tussles so far.
"Ready?"
Natasha found a few jump drives and copied over the data she collected. In addition, she sent it all to upload to the secure server that she had sent messages to Clint with.
Backup. Redundancies. The information was the mission as much as the girls were. Women. As much as the women were.
Rising up in a pirouette like a ballerina, Natasha pocketed the jump drives and nodded briskly at the blonde. "Let's do it."
It was a dance that Natasha knew well, and it was easy to fall back into the steps she knew so well. She and Yelena had always been good, the best of the Red Room, the flawless practice team that others were measured against. They had been broken up several times for just that reason, to see how well they worked against each other and apart, to show them time and again that the Red Room was in control of their destinies.
Here was the mission, here were the Black Widows. It was like a ghost slithering beneath her skin, directing her where to go.
Handlers tumbled and died too easily, some of them not even trained how to combat an incoming threat. Had they relied on their deadly ladies for protection? Natasha didn't even bother to question it, because some of the handlers didn't even seem altogether present. That kind of glassy eyed stare was difficult to replicate; some of these handlers were wiped clean themselves. Who was at the top, then? Who was the one that pulled all these marionettes' strings?
The data would tell them who. The data was the important part of the mission. She could hunt them down later if it wasn't Beecham himself. If it was, then that would be easy; James would simply kill him and be done with it.
The thought really should have bothered her more than it did.
Natasha favored quiet, neat kills. She moved with ruthless efficiency through the offices in this part of the complex. Yelena laughed and taunted, tortured with words and gestures if she was allowed the time to. This was not one of those times, so that impulse was tamped down tight and she simply moved from one kill to the next. Her grin was playful and infectious, as if she was dancing at a party and not initiating the deadly dance of death.
Something in her eyes seemed to shift as she killed, however. The closer they came to the dorms, the closer Yelena seemed to be like the crazed woman injecting her with mage-derived serums in backwater motel rooms and fucking her into submission. Fear wound itself along her spine, clutching her heart in its icy claws. When the girls game, the ones whose minds were already broken and tampered with, trying to defend their handlers, Yelena cut them down as ruthlessly and as efficiently as she had the security staffers and handlers. "Submit to me to die," she snarled, and it didn't seem like the same girl Natasha had known.
Whoever she was, she was exceedingly dangerous. Natasha wasn't sure if she was exempt from that danger, either.
Yelena reached the dormitories first. These women weren't primed for attack, so Natasha didn't think of them as mindless girls or wind up dolls. They were training or lounging, waiting for their next target. Natasha had already found the evacuation code phrases, so as soon as Yelena barked for them to line up in formation, she was issuing the commands to evacuate for the abandoned house in Texas. That was their fallback for now, and they would have to find a longer term solution for their organization.
No, wait, Yelena would have to find a long term solution. Natasha was calling it quits once Black Spectre was wiped off the map. She felt too fractured, too used, too worn thin. She was a frayed thread ready to snap.
None of the women questioned their authority. They were used to a rotating roster of handlers, depending on the mission at hand. Quickly and efficiently, she got their names, ages, rankings, fieldwork designations and access codes to the Spectre mainframe. Not one second guessed her taking this down on a cell phone; perhaps other handlers had done this before, or they were assuming this was the emergency protocol in emptying an entire base.
The women would be safe enough as they moved anonymously from Atlanta to Texas. Now it was time to exit the Underground and head back themselves.
Natasha tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. She wasn't looking forward to it at all.
***
Tony's quinjet arrived in San Francisco with little fuss. While in transit, he had JARVIS use multiple concurrent scanning and facial recognition software programs to find the Winter Soldier. There was no point to do that for Atlanta, given how Natasha and Yelena had extensive training to mask their appearance; Loki would be able to track Natasha down using the new magical bond anyway. The Winter Soldier never bothered to mask his appearance, however, and they had a clear photo for reference.
Sif looked at Steve in concern as the plane touched down. "You remain tense."
"What if he doesn't recognize me?" Steve murmured, fiddling with the chin strap of his helmet.
"You fear having to harm him. Or kill him," Sif said, leaning into his arm a little.
Steve looked up at her and nodded, grateful for the support. "Yeah. I thought I lost him years ago. I didn't think he could have survived that kind of fall, and I feel like I should've. For him to still be alive after all this time, that I never knew... And what would it make me if I put him down like some rabid dog, not like the friend I'd lay my life down for?"
She rested a hand on his, stilling his frenetic movement. "Steve. You are a good man. You are a good soldier, a good friend. You don't do this to kill or destroy. You are here to save what you can, to protect who you can. Hold onto that."
He shot her a wry smile. "I knew a guy that said that. Forget being a good soldier, just remember how to be a good man."
"Too many lose sight of themselves when they see warfare," Sif reminded him gently. "I wouldn't want the same for you. If you lose yourself, there would be nothing left for your friend to come back to."
"Makes sense," he acknowledged.
Thor cleared his throat from his position seated across from them. "If he cannot be saved, and you cannot perform the final graces, I will for you." He seemed uncomfortable with the offer, but made it just the same. "I do hope it doesn't come to that."
"Let's not be a downer," Tony replied from his seat closer to the pilot. He was poring over two separate tablet screens, and didn't even look up. "Looks like we've got a hit at the airport, taxi services and baggage claim. Trying to access social media and local security feeds now. He doesn't look like some kind of crazed killer right now, just like he could use a good power nap and a shower."
Steve suppressed a sigh at that, wondering when was the last time Bucky would've gotten any sleep, when he would have eaten last. That was the kind of stuff that he used to worry about with Steve, back when he was a little guy. Odd how it was his turn to worry about that now, when Bucky was a lethal assassin and obviously able to survive no matter what the odds.
"Where is he now?" Steve asked, swallowing and looking up.
"Some residential neighborhood, it looks like. Can't scan for metal in all of that mess, but we're circling in. Looks like the last Instagram photo that has him in the background for sure was at a park." Tony looked up at Steve, no amusement or sarcastic glee in his eyes. "We'll find him, figure this all out. If he got mind wiped, we can probably flush that shit out."
"And if we can't?" Steve asked, almost dreading what he would hear.
"We figure out what to do when we get there." Tony's voice was firm, an edge of kindness in his tone. "No sense worrying about it until we see what kind of damage we're dealing with."
Nodding, Steve put on his helmet and squeezed Sif's hand. "I'm glad you're here," he murmured.
Her smile was gentle and understanding. "I am, too."
***
It was almost too easy to destroy the entrance to the San Francisco base. The only lives that had to be saved were the agents, so that made things that much easier. James and the eleven new Red Room recruits could filter down into the base and start hacking and slashing their way into the dormitories. They were all for saving their "sisters" from the menace taking over, and would send them to the abandoned house in Texas for now. Eventually, they would have to build a base of operations of their own. James didn't think that Yelena had thought that far ahead, and he didn't think Natasha would choose to stay. She might have balked when he had suggested the thought, but it seemed to be likely. She had changed, not unpleasantly so, but the indiscriminate killing bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
He liked moving forward and shooting, hitting and punching his way through when the bullets ran out. Then there were the knives, fluid elegance in meting out death to those that would take free will away. Oh, he enjoyed those deaths, even if he couldn't eliminate Hydra the way he really wanted to.
Everything went the way it was supposed to, the walls rocking with the force of the blasts and getting splashed with blood or bullets. James could almost count this as a success.
Almost, because he saw a number of the Avengers in the park as he was trying to exit the base with the Red Room recruits.
"Get your sisters to Texas," he commanded Tamsin and Sheila, the closest of the recruits. "I'll take care of them to give you time to escape."
"You need our help," Daniela offered.
"Touching, but unnecessary. You are the priority. All agents are the priority. Escape and await orders when Yelena and Natasha return to Texas."
Clearly unhappy, they did as they were told. There were a number of routes they could take to the airport, or they could simply steal a number of vans and start driving out of the city before going on a plane with fake ID's. Either way, they would never fall into SHEILD hands.
James stalked forward, inwardly pleased by the double take a number of the Avengers. He could afford to be bold here, and it didn't matter what happened to him. It was upsetting that he would never see Natasha again, but he had the sinking sensation earlier that it might be the case. She was pulling away again, Yelena was going off the rails, his role would soon be superfluous. He wasn't going back to Hydra control, not after getting this taste of freedom, and there were likely other agencies in need of a good mercenary.
He went on the offensive, and wanted to laugh at how quickly they moved in response to his attacks. They clearly didn't want to harm him, while he had no such qualms.
"Bucky!" one of the masked men called out, anguish in his tone. A shapely armored brunette fought beside him, her small shield taking the brunt of the punches he delivered with his metal arm. She was good, countering with punches of her own. Apparently, she didn't mind throwing down or knocking him out.
"Who-the-hell-is-Bucky?" he said, aware that this was repeated from the time he last saw Natasha's friends. Oh. This had to be the blond one.
"Take off the mask," the brunette told him, giving a sweeping kick that nearly knocked James off of his feet. He staggered but righted himself, just in time to see the mask come off.
The tall blond man had blue eyes and a square jaw. This time, James felt a ping of recognition, something like pain in his chest, something like cold along his spine. "You..." he began, voice faltering slightly. He tightened his grip on his gun. "You used to be smaller."
"Yeah," he said, a relieved smile on his face. "Yeah, I did. Do you remember, Buck? You're my friend," he insisted, stepping closer.
Instinct kicked in, and James raised the gun despite his wavering intentions. Danger. "I have my mission," he snarled.
"Well, I have mine," the brunette said suddenly, swinging the shield at him. It connected with his jaw, and his head snapped back painfully. Memory shivered-Zola was standing there, clipboard in hand, eyes staring at him without mercy or pity, chemicals burning through his veins, cold so deep it seemed to get into his bones.
James staggered, unable to breathe. He started to murmur something almost by instinct, just outside of his conscious awareness, a name and title and identification number, the kind of thing that men recited when they were seized as prisoners of war. Welcome back, Zola said, a satisfied grin on his face. I was so eager to see how this worked...
"Bucky," the blond man said. Steve.
He took an unsteady step back, vision weaving in and out, but he couldn't give in to weakness, not now, not in front of the enemy. He raised his gun, not even sure how many bullets were left in it, how fast the Avengers were going to be.
But then the other blond threw his hammer, and it connected with his temple. James fell like a sack of bricks, consciousness gone.
***
***
To Chapter Six - Breakdown