[fic] Adventures on Coney Island, Laser Tag, The Dangers of Being Kibble
Title: Adventures on Coney Island
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Swearing, mentions of bodily fluids
Pairings: Gen, implied Natasha/Clint
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Felicity Smoak, Clint Barton, Oliver Queen
Word Count: 859
Summary: Felicity Smoak knows all about how the Ferris Wheel can kill them. Natasha knows more. (all prompts by the great sabra-n
“Crap, crap, crap,” Natasha’s companion was muttering under her breath over and over again. “Crap, crap, crap. Sh-dammit, crap. Oh, god.”
Natasha sighed to herself and dug in her pocket for the saltwater taffy she’d felt Barton pawn off on her earlier. He always hated the peppermint. She did, too, but that never stopped him from stuffing her pockets with the candy. With an unimpressed look, she offered a piece to the woman in the Ferris Wheel cart with her. “I’m guessing you’re not a fan of heights.”
“Heights are fine, I don’t mind heights. Oh, god.” The words all tumbled over each other. Felicity Smoak didn’t take the candy, but she kept talking and with every word, the hands gripping the guide bar on the front of the seat whitened fractionally from the stress. “Oh, god. It’s not the heights, I swear, I’ve always been fine with heights, except for the time we went to the Downey Tower when I was in fourth grade and I puked all over Sally Jenkins, and I’ve always had a suspicion it was the really rank corndogs we had for lunch that day and-oh, god.”
She impressed Natasha by turning an amazing shade of white.
Natasha waved the hand with the candy in it, hoping to draw the IT tech’s attention. “If it’s not the heights, what is it?”
“My brain.” Felicity made a gurgling sound in the back of her throat.
“Any sign of him, Hawkeye?” Oliver Queen’s voice sounded over the comms.
“Negative.”
“Negative on Black Widow and Smoak as well,” Natasha said, as while Felicity had regurgitated the story about the unfortunate experience with corndogs, she’d been scanning the area under Deno’s Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, looking for Starling City’s escaped police commissioner. SHIELD wanted him, too, for crimes he’d committed in his days in the Navy. They’d agreed to share with the Hood. For now.
“My brain is telling me exactly how many connections are on this ride and how often they’re serviced, and how many parts are going into keeping this Ferris wheel moving. I can tell you precisely how much pressure it would take to snap this wheel and send it spinning down the street and us to our deaths.”
Natasha gave up offering the candy and popped it into her mouth instead, thinking maybe peppermint had been one of those things she’d hated in another life and not this one. Nope, she definitely hated peppermint in this life. “Good thing,” she said after she swallowed, “we didn’t bring the Hulk.”
Felicity gurgled again and turned a shade of green that was oddly fitting for such a comment.
“Do yourself a favor and focus on finding the bad guy,” Natasha said, “and not all the ways we could die.”
“I don’t think I can turn that part of my brain off.”
“That’s too bad.” Natasha stuck her hands in her pockets as the Ferris Wheel lurched a little bit, a mechanical problem. It made Felicity let out an actual squeak-and of course the blonde looked over at her in complete shame. Natasha shrugged. If the Hood vouched for his IT Support, then that was fine by Natasha.
“How do you do it?” Felicity asked. “You’re the Black Widow. You know more ways to die on this infernal contraption of death than I do.”
“I counted them already,” Natasha said, letting boredom sound in her voice.
Felicity goggled.
“Hawkeye and I have a game we play-whoever’s in the most danger during a stakeout wins. Right now he’s probably balanced on a ledge.” Natasha thought about it. “On his toes. Eating cotton candy.”
“Yep,” Clint said over the comms.
She heard a sigh that had to be Oliver Queen, no doubt at their professionalism. But Felicity’s hands suddenly relaxed on the guide bar. “There he is,” she said, forgetting all about her fear of the Ferris wheel. “He’s got a blue jacket with a hood, but I definitely saw his face. That’s him. Over by the-”
Natasha saw the man in question right as she pointed. Queen and Clint were too far away, she saw immediately. Without pausing to think, she yanked her legs up under the guide bar and started to stand.
Felicity’s squeak was thankfully too quiet to alert the passengers in the other cars. “What are you doing?”
“It’s not that big of a drop,” Natasha said, and if she weren’t so focused on not letting their target get away, she would have laughed at the whimper Felicity gave as she climbed over the guide bar and swung down. “See you when you get to the bottom,” she said, and dropped off of the Ferris wheel, landing easily and immediately taking off after the target.
Thanks to her enhanced hearing, she clearly heard the other woman say, “I have got to make friends with people who aren’t friggin’ adrenaline junkies,” before the cart creaked again, a signal that somebody else was dropping free.
When she heard Felicity’s boots pounding the pavement after her, she entertained the thought that Felicity had come a long way since corndogs.
And she still hated the taste of peppermint.
Title: Laser Tag
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some language, harassment.
Pairings: Gen.
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Felicity Smoak
Word Count: 878
Summary: Natasha makes a new ally, who may have secrets of her own.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to use her knowledge of tactics and strategy when she was supposed to be deep cover in Queen Consolidated’s legal department, but fair play had gone out of the window the second Stan Gleason from Accounting had grabbed her ass.
Natasha took genuine pleasure in shooting him in the first millisecond of the vests sprang to life. His startled, gaping fish face had been worth almost blowing her cover.
And who knew? Maybe Nadia Rutledge secretly played Call of Duty in her off-time or something. It wasn’t unheard of.
Now, twenty minutes later, the game was still going on. She’d found herself a blind in the fake cave they’d set up, and had taken up the role as a sniper since Clint wasn’t there to cover her back. The plastic, sensor-coated vest not only glowed in the dark, which was an affront to her personal tastes, but it felt clunky and uncomfortable and precisely the opposite of her body armor.
Didn’t mean that was going to stop her.
She was on the Red Team, not that she really believed in working with her teammates. But every time a Green Team member came running by, she sniped them off, one by one. Most of the time, they couldn’t even figure out where their killshots had come from.
Suckers.
She almost didn’t hear her attacker, but at the last second, something in the fake rock floor creaked. Natasha whirled and aimed at the same time as a blonde woman she didn’t recognize. For a long, humming second, the two of them faced each other, guns aimed for killshots, breathing hard. The woman’s vest glowed green, lighting up her glasses with an eerie light.
“I don’t know you,” she said, instead of shooting.
“Nadia,” Natasha said. “Legal. Who are you?”
The woman squinted, suspicious. “Felicity. IT. Are you new?”
“Started last week.”
“You’re the sniper,” Felicity said. “The one that’s been taking out my team.”
Despite herself, Natasha was growing more impressed by the second. It was almost impossible to sneak up on her. “Maybe. How come you haven’t shot me yet?” she asked.
“How come you haven’t shot me?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Natasha said.
“Oh, wait.” Felicity actually dropped her aim a little, her eyes growing wide. “You’re the one that took out Sicko Stan!”
Did the woman not understand that laser tag was life or death stakes? Lowering your gun was an amateur move. “What of it?” Natasha asked. “I play video games. It’s not unheard of.”
Felicity surprised her by shaking her head emphatically. “Thank you. He always stares at my ass. It’s so creepy.”
“Oh. Uh, you’re welcome. But I wouldn’t drop your guard. I could still shoot you-we’re on opposite sides.”
Faster than Natasha would have thought possible, Felicity had her gun up and was pulling the trigger. Natasha clipped her even as her own vest buzzed: a direct hit. “Like that?” Felicity called, ducking behind one of the fake stalagmites.
Dammit, there went her perfect score. Natasha decided she’d had enough of fair play and, out of Felicity’s sight, scrambled up a different stalagmite and fitted herself into as narrow a space near the low ceiling as she could. The vest still glowed, but nobody would think to look up for her.
There was a pause from Felicity’s hiding place. “Hello?” the IT woman called. “Did you leave?”
Natasha stayed quiet.
It took a few seconds, but Felicity poked her head around the corner, searching the corridor. She did a visual sweep that would make a SEAL team proud and then her eyes landed on Natasha. Instead of shooting, though, she rocked back on her heels. “How did you do that?”
Natasha thought about her options. She could shoot Felicity, cut her losses, and run. Her instincts were screaming that she might not want to do that, though. She didn’t know why, but she knew not to ignore them. Maybe it was time to make a new ally. “It’s not hard,” she said, and flipped out of the hiding space. “I’m flexible.”
“No kidding. You’re like Stretch Armstrong, but you know, a person, a female person, and not a toy from the nineties and wow-I really don’t talk this much all the time, I promise. Sicko Stan just pissed me off and I have to be on the same team as him and yuck.” Felicity made the greatest disgusted face that Natasha had seen on somebody not named Jessica Drew.
“You’ve got good aim,” Natasha said, since she didn’t want to really talk about ‘Sicko Stan.’ She was more curious why an IT tech knew to handle herself so well.
Felicity grinned, but something about it seemed nervous. “I happen to have kicked the entire Merlyn Global IT Department’s ass at Gears of War.”
No, Natasha thought. This woman had training. It was time to make a new friend.
“Works for me. What do you say to an alliance? I’ll go shoot Sicko Stan in the back a few times for you.”
“Sold.” Felicity grinned. “Any teammates of yours you want me to take out?”
“Kelly from Accounts Payable. I think she stole my sandwich.”
“Done.”
Which was how Nadia Rutledge made her first friend at Queen Consolidated.
Title: The Dangers of Being Kibble
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Tigers, implied gore.
Pairings: Gen
Characters: Felicity Smoak, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 1098
Summary: Felicity wakes up to find out there’s more to her new coworker than previously thought. But they’ve got other problems. Large, striped problems. With teeth. Same universe as Laser Tag.
Felicity came to, feeling somebody had stomped on her head several times, which unfortunately wasn’t an uncommon feeling in her life these days. Ever since she had agreed to help Oliver and Diggle find Walter, waking up either tied up or concussed was a distressingly regular habit of hers. She’d gotten to know the darker side of Web MD in the past couple of years.
The growling, however, was new.
“Felicity?”
She recognized the voice as one belonging to Nadia, one of her few friends outside of Oliver Queen’s Secret Cave of Secrets. That was strange. When she woke up with her head feeling like this, it usually meant capers and the Hood, but Nadia was a work friend.
Something touched her face: fingers. Those fingers drifted to her neck, to her pulse point there. “’Liver?” she managed to asked. There was a tic, like the fingers twitching.
Slowly, she forced her eyes open. It wasn’t Oliver or Diggle, but Nadia leaning over her, and she looked far more serious than Felicity had ever seen her at their lunches or movie nights. Felicity blinked, but she didn’t come into focus. She flinched when Nadia shone a penlight in her eyes.
“Wh-where am I?”
“Can you sit up?”
“What’s making that noise?”
Nadia paused, or Felicity thought she maybe did. It was hard to read her face with everything so blurry. Slowly, she reached up to adjust her glasses, and winced.
“Probably better if you don’t know,” Nadia said, and helped Felicity sit up. “Don’t touch your forehead-you’ve got a goose-egg there.”
“Ow,” was all Felicity could say to that. “What happened? Where are we? What’s going on?”
“Those are all things we can sort out after.” Nadia sounded calm.
“After what?” It took Felicity a few seconds to piece things together: she wasn’t dressed for work or one of her honeypot missions because she was wearing her panda flats and jeans. Nadia, on the other hand, was wearing all black-cargo pants, a long-sleeved black sleeved shirt, and some kind of vest over it. It looked like the outfit Diggle preferred when he wasn’t dressed as the Hood. “What-what are you wearing?”
“One question at a time,” Nadia said.
“Why? It’s not like you’re answering any of the ones I ask in the first place!” Gingerly, Felicity managed to move into a crouch, like Nadia beside her. They were in some kind of tiny room, which smelled of earth and a sort of musk she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t even large enough for them to stand, and neither of them was very tall. Light filtered in through grates near the low ceiling. She gazed around in bewilderment, her head pounding.
The growling noise sounded again, and this time she saw something large and dark bat against the grate on the far side of the room. Her heart stopped.
“Nadia,” she said, her voice strangely flat and emotionless. “Where are we?”
“Starling City Zoo,” Nadia said, sounding disgusted. Felicity didn’t know if the disgust was aimed at her, at the ideas of zoo in general, or the fact that they were in a room very obviously not meant for zoo patrons to visit. “And yes. Those are tigers.”
“Tigers?” It came out as a squeak.
“Yes. Look.” Nadia pointed over Felicity’s shoulder. Slowly, warily, she turned. There was an exit behind her that she hadn’t noticed before, which all in all was a good thing. It was a glass door and standing on the other side of it, licking its chops, was probably the most magnificent tiger Felicity had ever seen. It was a beautiful beast, its fur bright orange and crisply striped, and the eyes were clear and stunning.
It was also looking at her like she was dinner. Felicity gulped.
“Keep calm. They smell fear,” Nadia said.
“I really don’t think my deodorant’s going to mask that smell. Oh, god, oh god, I’m about to get eaten by a tiger.”
“Or three,” Nadia said, sounding almost bored.
Felicity started to count to twenty in Mandarin in her head, but the need to hyperventilate outweighed that. She sucked in a deep breath and thought vaguely about losing her lunch all over the ground. Maybe it was the knock to the head, maybe it was the fear. It didn’t seem to matter. “How are you so calm right now?”
Nadia never took her eyes off of the door and the tiger staring at them beyond it. For a brief split-second, Felicity thought that it was almost like a mirror. Nadia was one of the most beautiful people in the office, but her beauty had always had a distant set to it, like she wasn’t really inhabiting the face she wore.
“Because the Hood never takes long to find you,” Nadia said.
Felicity’s pause could write volumes, she knew, but she’d had no idea that Nadia had even so much as suspected that she had a connection to Oliver. “Wh-what are you talking about?” she stammered, hoping she sounded suitably shocked.
“Don’t worry. You’re not the only one with secrets here.”
The tiger outside the room-which must have been part of the new tiger enclosure they’d built in the zoo, Felicity realized-batted at the vent once more. It let out a frustrated roar that shook Felicity to her core.
Oh, for the love of little green arrows, she was going to die as tiger kibble.
To distract herself from the many, many flashes of being eaten alive that were playing like a looped gif in her mind, she focused on her companion. “Your name’s not Nadia, is it?” she asked. Nadia’s right eyebrow lifted a quarter inch. “And you’re not really from Legal.”
“Natasha,” the redhead said, holding out a hand. “And no, I’m not really from Legal.”
Felicity shook the hand. “Uh, still Felicity. And really still from IT. Though maybe I know the Hood. Or I did, before I became tiger bait. Oh, god, we’re going to die horribly. We’re going to get mauled by tigers. That was not a way I saw myself going.”
“Relax, Felicity,” Natasha-Not-Really-From-Legal said, and the smile on her face was slightly manic and tinged with grimness and pretty much the exact same look Oliver got whenever he was about to unleash a crazy idea on Felicity and Diggle. “We’re not going to die today. I’ve got a plan.”
“Does it involve us getting eaten?”
“Not today.”
“Good. That’s good.” But even as the redhead outlined her plan, Felicity couldn’t help but wonder what Web MD had to say being disemboweled by a tiger.
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Swearing, mentions of bodily fluids
Pairings: Gen, implied Natasha/Clint
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Felicity Smoak, Clint Barton, Oliver Queen
Word Count: 859
Summary: Felicity Smoak knows all about how the Ferris Wheel can kill them. Natasha knows more. (all prompts by the great sabra-n
“Crap, crap, crap,” Natasha’s companion was muttering under her breath over and over again. “Crap, crap, crap. Sh-dammit, crap. Oh, god.”
Natasha sighed to herself and dug in her pocket for the saltwater taffy she’d felt Barton pawn off on her earlier. He always hated the peppermint. She did, too, but that never stopped him from stuffing her pockets with the candy. With an unimpressed look, she offered a piece to the woman in the Ferris Wheel cart with her. “I’m guessing you’re not a fan of heights.”
“Heights are fine, I don’t mind heights. Oh, god.” The words all tumbled over each other. Felicity Smoak didn’t take the candy, but she kept talking and with every word, the hands gripping the guide bar on the front of the seat whitened fractionally from the stress. “Oh, god. It’s not the heights, I swear, I’ve always been fine with heights, except for the time we went to the Downey Tower when I was in fourth grade and I puked all over Sally Jenkins, and I’ve always had a suspicion it was the really rank corndogs we had for lunch that day and-oh, god.”
She impressed Natasha by turning an amazing shade of white.
Natasha waved the hand with the candy in it, hoping to draw the IT tech’s attention. “If it’s not the heights, what is it?”
“My brain.” Felicity made a gurgling sound in the back of her throat.
“Any sign of him, Hawkeye?” Oliver Queen’s voice sounded over the comms.
“Negative.”
“Negative on Black Widow and Smoak as well,” Natasha said, as while Felicity had regurgitated the story about the unfortunate experience with corndogs, she’d been scanning the area under Deno’s Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, looking for Starling City’s escaped police commissioner. SHIELD wanted him, too, for crimes he’d committed in his days in the Navy. They’d agreed to share with the Hood. For now.
“My brain is telling me exactly how many connections are on this ride and how often they’re serviced, and how many parts are going into keeping this Ferris wheel moving. I can tell you precisely how much pressure it would take to snap this wheel and send it spinning down the street and us to our deaths.”
Natasha gave up offering the candy and popped it into her mouth instead, thinking maybe peppermint had been one of those things she’d hated in another life and not this one. Nope, she definitely hated peppermint in this life. “Good thing,” she said after she swallowed, “we didn’t bring the Hulk.”
Felicity gurgled again and turned a shade of green that was oddly fitting for such a comment.
“Do yourself a favor and focus on finding the bad guy,” Natasha said, “and not all the ways we could die.”
“I don’t think I can turn that part of my brain off.”
“That’s too bad.” Natasha stuck her hands in her pockets as the Ferris Wheel lurched a little bit, a mechanical problem. It made Felicity let out an actual squeak-and of course the blonde looked over at her in complete shame. Natasha shrugged. If the Hood vouched for his IT Support, then that was fine by Natasha.
“How do you do it?” Felicity asked. “You’re the Black Widow. You know more ways to die on this infernal contraption of death than I do.”
“I counted them already,” Natasha said, letting boredom sound in her voice.
Felicity goggled.
“Hawkeye and I have a game we play-whoever’s in the most danger during a stakeout wins. Right now he’s probably balanced on a ledge.” Natasha thought about it. “On his toes. Eating cotton candy.”
“Yep,” Clint said over the comms.
She heard a sigh that had to be Oliver Queen, no doubt at their professionalism. But Felicity’s hands suddenly relaxed on the guide bar. “There he is,” she said, forgetting all about her fear of the Ferris wheel. “He’s got a blue jacket with a hood, but I definitely saw his face. That’s him. Over by the-”
Natasha saw the man in question right as she pointed. Queen and Clint were too far away, she saw immediately. Without pausing to think, she yanked her legs up under the guide bar and started to stand.
Felicity’s squeak was thankfully too quiet to alert the passengers in the other cars. “What are you doing?”
“It’s not that big of a drop,” Natasha said, and if she weren’t so focused on not letting their target get away, she would have laughed at the whimper Felicity gave as she climbed over the guide bar and swung down. “See you when you get to the bottom,” she said, and dropped off of the Ferris wheel, landing easily and immediately taking off after the target.
Thanks to her enhanced hearing, she clearly heard the other woman say, “I have got to make friends with people who aren’t friggin’ adrenaline junkies,” before the cart creaked again, a signal that somebody else was dropping free.
When she heard Felicity’s boots pounding the pavement after her, she entertained the thought that Felicity had come a long way since corndogs.
And she still hated the taste of peppermint.
Title: Laser Tag
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some language, harassment.
Pairings: Gen.
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Felicity Smoak
Word Count: 878
Summary: Natasha makes a new ally, who may have secrets of her own.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to use her knowledge of tactics and strategy when she was supposed to be deep cover in Queen Consolidated’s legal department, but fair play had gone out of the window the second Stan Gleason from Accounting had grabbed her ass.
Natasha took genuine pleasure in shooting him in the first millisecond of the vests sprang to life. His startled, gaping fish face had been worth almost blowing her cover.
And who knew? Maybe Nadia Rutledge secretly played Call of Duty in her off-time or something. It wasn’t unheard of.
Now, twenty minutes later, the game was still going on. She’d found herself a blind in the fake cave they’d set up, and had taken up the role as a sniper since Clint wasn’t there to cover her back. The plastic, sensor-coated vest not only glowed in the dark, which was an affront to her personal tastes, but it felt clunky and uncomfortable and precisely the opposite of her body armor.
Didn’t mean that was going to stop her.
She was on the Red Team, not that she really believed in working with her teammates. But every time a Green Team member came running by, she sniped them off, one by one. Most of the time, they couldn’t even figure out where their killshots had come from.
Suckers.
She almost didn’t hear her attacker, but at the last second, something in the fake rock floor creaked. Natasha whirled and aimed at the same time as a blonde woman she didn’t recognize. For a long, humming second, the two of them faced each other, guns aimed for killshots, breathing hard. The woman’s vest glowed green, lighting up her glasses with an eerie light.
“I don’t know you,” she said, instead of shooting.
“Nadia,” Natasha said. “Legal. Who are you?”
The woman squinted, suspicious. “Felicity. IT. Are you new?”
“Started last week.”
“You’re the sniper,” Felicity said. “The one that’s been taking out my team.”
Despite herself, Natasha was growing more impressed by the second. It was almost impossible to sneak up on her. “Maybe. How come you haven’t shot me yet?” she asked.
“How come you haven’t shot me?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Natasha said.
“Oh, wait.” Felicity actually dropped her aim a little, her eyes growing wide. “You’re the one that took out Sicko Stan!”
Did the woman not understand that laser tag was life or death stakes? Lowering your gun was an amateur move. “What of it?” Natasha asked. “I play video games. It’s not unheard of.”
Felicity surprised her by shaking her head emphatically. “Thank you. He always stares at my ass. It’s so creepy.”
“Oh. Uh, you’re welcome. But I wouldn’t drop your guard. I could still shoot you-we’re on opposite sides.”
Faster than Natasha would have thought possible, Felicity had her gun up and was pulling the trigger. Natasha clipped her even as her own vest buzzed: a direct hit. “Like that?” Felicity called, ducking behind one of the fake stalagmites.
Dammit, there went her perfect score. Natasha decided she’d had enough of fair play and, out of Felicity’s sight, scrambled up a different stalagmite and fitted herself into as narrow a space near the low ceiling as she could. The vest still glowed, but nobody would think to look up for her.
There was a pause from Felicity’s hiding place. “Hello?” the IT woman called. “Did you leave?”
Natasha stayed quiet.
It took a few seconds, but Felicity poked her head around the corner, searching the corridor. She did a visual sweep that would make a SEAL team proud and then her eyes landed on Natasha. Instead of shooting, though, she rocked back on her heels. “How did you do that?”
Natasha thought about her options. She could shoot Felicity, cut her losses, and run. Her instincts were screaming that she might not want to do that, though. She didn’t know why, but she knew not to ignore them. Maybe it was time to make a new ally. “It’s not hard,” she said, and flipped out of the hiding space. “I’m flexible.”
“No kidding. You’re like Stretch Armstrong, but you know, a person, a female person, and not a toy from the nineties and wow-I really don’t talk this much all the time, I promise. Sicko Stan just pissed me off and I have to be on the same team as him and yuck.” Felicity made the greatest disgusted face that Natasha had seen on somebody not named Jessica Drew.
“You’ve got good aim,” Natasha said, since she didn’t want to really talk about ‘Sicko Stan.’ She was more curious why an IT tech knew to handle herself so well.
Felicity grinned, but something about it seemed nervous. “I happen to have kicked the entire Merlyn Global IT Department’s ass at Gears of War.”
No, Natasha thought. This woman had training. It was time to make a new friend.
“Works for me. What do you say to an alliance? I’ll go shoot Sicko Stan in the back a few times for you.”
“Sold.” Felicity grinned. “Any teammates of yours you want me to take out?”
“Kelly from Accounts Payable. I think she stole my sandwich.”
“Done.”
Which was how Nadia Rutledge made her first friend at Queen Consolidated.
Title: The Dangers of Being Kibble
Fandom: Avengers MCU/Arrow
Rating: PG
Warnings: Tigers, implied gore.
Pairings: Gen
Characters: Felicity Smoak, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 1098
Summary: Felicity wakes up to find out there’s more to her new coworker than previously thought. But they’ve got other problems. Large, striped problems. With teeth. Same universe as Laser Tag.
Felicity came to, feeling somebody had stomped on her head several times, which unfortunately wasn’t an uncommon feeling in her life these days. Ever since she had agreed to help Oliver and Diggle find Walter, waking up either tied up or concussed was a distressingly regular habit of hers. She’d gotten to know the darker side of Web MD in the past couple of years.
The growling, however, was new.
“Felicity?”
She recognized the voice as one belonging to Nadia, one of her few friends outside of Oliver Queen’s Secret Cave of Secrets. That was strange. When she woke up with her head feeling like this, it usually meant capers and the Hood, but Nadia was a work friend.
Something touched her face: fingers. Those fingers drifted to her neck, to her pulse point there. “’Liver?” she managed to asked. There was a tic, like the fingers twitching.
Slowly, she forced her eyes open. It wasn’t Oliver or Diggle, but Nadia leaning over her, and she looked far more serious than Felicity had ever seen her at their lunches or movie nights. Felicity blinked, but she didn’t come into focus. She flinched when Nadia shone a penlight in her eyes.
“Wh-where am I?”
“Can you sit up?”
“What’s making that noise?”
Nadia paused, or Felicity thought she maybe did. It was hard to read her face with everything so blurry. Slowly, she reached up to adjust her glasses, and winced.
“Probably better if you don’t know,” Nadia said, and helped Felicity sit up. “Don’t touch your forehead-you’ve got a goose-egg there.”
“Ow,” was all Felicity could say to that. “What happened? Where are we? What’s going on?”
“Those are all things we can sort out after.” Nadia sounded calm.
“After what?” It took Felicity a few seconds to piece things together: she wasn’t dressed for work or one of her honeypot missions because she was wearing her panda flats and jeans. Nadia, on the other hand, was wearing all black-cargo pants, a long-sleeved black sleeved shirt, and some kind of vest over it. It looked like the outfit Diggle preferred when he wasn’t dressed as the Hood. “What-what are you wearing?”
“One question at a time,” Nadia said.
“Why? It’s not like you’re answering any of the ones I ask in the first place!” Gingerly, Felicity managed to move into a crouch, like Nadia beside her. They were in some kind of tiny room, which smelled of earth and a sort of musk she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t even large enough for them to stand, and neither of them was very tall. Light filtered in through grates near the low ceiling. She gazed around in bewilderment, her head pounding.
The growling noise sounded again, and this time she saw something large and dark bat against the grate on the far side of the room. Her heart stopped.
“Nadia,” she said, her voice strangely flat and emotionless. “Where are we?”
“Starling City Zoo,” Nadia said, sounding disgusted. Felicity didn’t know if the disgust was aimed at her, at the ideas of zoo in general, or the fact that they were in a room very obviously not meant for zoo patrons to visit. “And yes. Those are tigers.”
“Tigers?” It came out as a squeak.
“Yes. Look.” Nadia pointed over Felicity’s shoulder. Slowly, warily, she turned. There was an exit behind her that she hadn’t noticed before, which all in all was a good thing. It was a glass door and standing on the other side of it, licking its chops, was probably the most magnificent tiger Felicity had ever seen. It was a beautiful beast, its fur bright orange and crisply striped, and the eyes were clear and stunning.
It was also looking at her like she was dinner. Felicity gulped.
“Keep calm. They smell fear,” Nadia said.
“I really don’t think my deodorant’s going to mask that smell. Oh, god, oh god, I’m about to get eaten by a tiger.”
“Or three,” Nadia said, sounding almost bored.
Felicity started to count to twenty in Mandarin in her head, but the need to hyperventilate outweighed that. She sucked in a deep breath and thought vaguely about losing her lunch all over the ground. Maybe it was the knock to the head, maybe it was the fear. It didn’t seem to matter. “How are you so calm right now?”
Nadia never took her eyes off of the door and the tiger staring at them beyond it. For a brief split-second, Felicity thought that it was almost like a mirror. Nadia was one of the most beautiful people in the office, but her beauty had always had a distant set to it, like she wasn’t really inhabiting the face she wore.
“Because the Hood never takes long to find you,” Nadia said.
Felicity’s pause could write volumes, she knew, but she’d had no idea that Nadia had even so much as suspected that she had a connection to Oliver. “Wh-what are you talking about?” she stammered, hoping she sounded suitably shocked.
“Don’t worry. You’re not the only one with secrets here.”
The tiger outside the room-which must have been part of the new tiger enclosure they’d built in the zoo, Felicity realized-batted at the vent once more. It let out a frustrated roar that shook Felicity to her core.
Oh, for the love of little green arrows, she was going to die as tiger kibble.
To distract herself from the many, many flashes of being eaten alive that were playing like a looped gif in her mind, she focused on her companion. “Your name’s not Nadia, is it?” she asked. Nadia’s right eyebrow lifted a quarter inch. “And you’re not really from Legal.”
“Natasha,” the redhead said, holding out a hand. “And no, I’m not really from Legal.”
Felicity shook the hand. “Uh, still Felicity. And really still from IT. Though maybe I know the Hood. Or I did, before I became tiger bait. Oh, god, we’re going to die horribly. We’re going to get mauled by tigers. That was not a way I saw myself going.”
“Relax, Felicity,” Natasha-Not-Really-From-Legal said, and the smile on her face was slightly manic and tinged with grimness and pretty much the exact same look Oliver got whenever he was about to unleash a crazy idea on Felicity and Diggle. “We’re not going to die today. I’ve got a plan.”
“Does it involve us getting eaten?”
“Not today.”
“Good. That’s good.” But even as the redhead outlined her plan, Felicity couldn’t help but wonder what Web MD had to say being disemboweled by a tiger.