Widow's Walk (PG) Avengers/Stargate (2b/2)
Widow's Walk (2b/2)
An Avengers/Stargate story
by mhalachaiswords
Read Chapter 2, Part 1
"Good weekend with Jane?" Clint asked, hopping up on the low divider wall.
"Indeed," Thor agreed. He shifted Mjolnir to his left hand as he came over to where John stood with Tony. "We have not met," he said to John.
Natasha stepped forward, putting herself at John's side. There had to be some kind of Asgardian protocol on introducing family members, but since their only experience with Thor's family had been Loki, the topic area was generally avoided.
"Thor, I would like to introduce you to my son, John Sheppard," Natasha said.
Thor slowed for a moment, then a bright smile spread across his face. "John Sheppard, Son of Natasha, I greet you," he said formally, holding out his hand.
John smiled back, his expression more open than Natasha had seen in many months. "And I greet you, Thor Odinson." They shook hands. "Did you get caught in the storm over great lakes?" John asked.
"I did," Thor said. "It was to be expected in this season." He gave John an considering look. "Do you fly?"
"A bit," John said modestly. "But, planes and helicopters, not..." He made a hand gesture at Tony. "On my own or anything."
"Jealous?" Tony asked.
"Not so much," John retorted.
Natasha sighed. "How's Jane?" she asked Thor, not wanting to listen to John and Tony get into another argument.
"Jane is well," Thor said. He shook his head, rain drops from his hair landing on every nearby surface. "I did not know of your son."
There was that considering look again. It was so easy to think of Thor as a boisterous frat boy, sometimes people forgot he was a near immortal warrior. Natasha gathered her thoughts, to figure out what Thor really wanted to know. "On this world, someone like me shouldn't have a child," she said quietly. "Not one as old as John. It would draw unwarranted attention."
Thor nodded, seeming to accept this explanation. "I have long suspected that you are more than you appear, Lady Natasha."
"That's putting it mildly," Clint muttered from the side of the room.
"Great!" Tony said, clapping his hands together. "Thor's home, so can we please get to the part of the evening where Sheppard tells us all about what the U.S. military knows about the other aliens on earth?"
"Other aliens?" Thor repeated, frowning.
"Yeah," Tony said. He flicked open a holographic display, and tapping a few times, brought up a near-perfect rendering of the Stargate, nearly as tall as the penthouse ceiling. "Ever see one of these?"
Thor set Mjolnir on the ground before stepping closer to the display. "What is this you bring?" he demanded. "This is a Gate of the Alterans. It allows travel across the stars, in much the same way as the Bifrost. How does it come to be here?"
"You know about the Alterans?" John asked.
"They were once known to the Asgard, before they fell deep into civil war," Thor said. "How are they known to you?"
John shrugged, easing his shoulders into a casual pose, and it suddenly struck Natasha that this wasn't just her son in a room with her teammates; this was the warriors of two worlds facing each other down. "The Alterans came to this galaxy and built a whole hell of a lot of Stargates before hopping to the Pegasus Galaxy and doing it all over again," John said. "Only they were calling themselves the Ancients by that time."
"Where are they now?" Natasha asked, unable to stop herself from interjecting. "You didn't say when we were in Colorado."
"They either died off fighting a war with the Wraith in Pegasus, or they ascended," John said. "Either way, they're no longer my problem."
"Ascended?" Steve asked Bruce in an aside. Bruce shook his head.
"Ascended, like, evolve into a being of pure energy and infinite knowledge, which is basically like having every cheat code in the book," John said. "They've got some sort of non-interference prime directive, they're not the problem here." He focused his attention on Thor. "The whole reason I came here today is because, well, we've got a case of double identity."
"Finally, he spits it out," Tony muttered. John and Thor ignored him.
"I do not understand you," Thor said. "Where is the double identity?"
"Well," John said, "You claim that your people are the Asgard-"
"It is no mere claim!" Thor interrupted heatedly.
"-But we also know the Asgard," John went on, talking over Thor. "And you're not them."
That stunned Tor into momentary silence.
"We should have brought some popcorn," Clint whispered to Natasha. She jabbed him in the ribs.
"Who are these, claiming to be of Asgard?" Thor demanded. "By what right do they call themselves thus?"
John opened the small briefcase at his feet and pulled out the white milky stone. He straightened up and tossed the stone across the room to Thor, who caught it mid-air. "You know what that is?" John asked.
Thor turned the stone over in his hand, consternation clear on his face. "This is of Asgardian design," he said. "And yet it is different than any I have seen. Where did you get it?"
"The Asgard we knew used it as a control interface on their ships," John said as he nudged the briefcase aside with his foot. He glanced over his shoulder at Tony. "Can Jarvis access something remotely?"
"Yeah," Tony said. The man was standing behind Sheppard, his arms crossed over his chest, watching the discussion with an uncharacteristic silence.
John pulled a phone out of his pocket and tapped at it. "The thing is," he said, again speaking to Thor, "Our Asgard don't look anything like you. At least, not anymore."
Another holographic interface popped up, overlying the Stargate display. John tapped a folder, and up sprang a myriad of images.
Front and center, was a grey alien with an enlarged head and elongated black-on-black eyes.
"Okay, no!" Clint exclaimed. He jumped off the dividing wall. "This has got to be a joke!"
"Clint-" Natasha tried, but the man brushed her off.
"You're telling us that the little green men are real? This whole Are 51 crap is real?"
"Area 51 has never been used to hold Asgardians," John said with a bland expression.
"For fuck's sake-"
"Clint!" Natasha snapped, drawing everyone's attention. "Would you let him explain?"
Thor frowned at the display. "I have never seen beings such as these," he said to John. "Why would they claim to be of Asgard?"
"It's actually a little more complicated than that," John said reluctantly. "They started out looking like, well, you." He pulled up another image, of a tall muscular man. "Then they started cloning themselves and transferring their consciousness into the next clone when they were about to die."
"That's quite a genetic transition," Bruce said, pushing his glasses up his nose. He tapped at the display, pulling up more images of the Asgard. "How long have they been cloning?"
"Like, thirty thousand years?" John hedged. "Not quite sure."
"Why the degradation?" Tony asked. "Were they working off the source material?"
"Doubtful," Bruce muttered. "If they were replicating from the original genetic material, there wouldn't have been any evolutionary change over the millennia."
"But why would they even cloning start in the first place?" Tony asked. "Buddy over there," he pointed at the hologram of the tall man, "Doesn't look like he needs a little blue pill to get it up for the missus, if we're talking about reproduction."
"We don't know why the Asgard started cloning themselves," John said. "Just that they did." He turned back to Thor. "And is the weird part," he went on, ignoring Clint's muttered swearing. "This guy?" He pointed to the little grey alien hologram. "This is Thor."
"Huh?" Tony frowned at John. "Did you just stutter?"
"This is the Asgard who we knew as Thor," John went on. "He, well, he was a really good friend to the people of this planet. And a lot of other planets in this galaxy."
Thor wrapped his hand around the white stone and stood looking at the hologram-Thor. A look of regret passed over his face. "I believe I understand," he said after a minute.
"Can you spell it out for the rest of us?" Clint asked. "Because I'm missing most of the plot on this."
Thor handed the white stone to John. "It was a very long time ago. It was the end of days," he said, speaking to the room while looking at the hologram. "Ragnarök. The end of everything. It was to be the twilight of the gods, the end of us all, and from the final battle would the world be reborn."
Natasha wrapped her arms around herself, chilled at the bleak cold in Thor's words.
"We knew the time was drawing near, and Odin the Allfather decreed that if this was to be our end, all Asgard should leave an echo of themselves on Yggdrasil, the tree of life." Thor smiled to himself. It was not a pleasant smile. "So stories of our greatness would dance forever amongst the stars."
"What does an 'echo' of yourself mean?" Bruce asked.
"I'm going to go with a genetic copy with a full personality back-up," Tony said. "You die, just wake up the copy and keep going."
"What happened at Ragnarök?" Steve asked.
Thor walked over to the window and stared down at the city below them. The buildings still bore marks of the Chitauri battle, scars across the landscape. "It was indeed a great battle, and many of my brethren died," he said. "However, the losses were not as great as foretold."
"So you didn't have to go out and wake up the clones of the dead?" Tony asked. "I guess it would be kind of complicated, having two Thors running around."
"What happened to them?" Steve asked. "After the battle?"
"I do not know," Thor admitted. "It was not a time for such questions; my brother Baldr and my nephews died in the battle. At the time, there was much grief and the necessity to rebuild Valhalla. I never thought to ask."
Natasha looked at the hologram- Thor, his large eyes seeming to stare back at her. "What if they woke up?" she asked, her stomach cramping with a lifetime of waking up on a cold metal table in the Red Room, memories not her own spilling from her head. "Would they have known they weren't real, that they were just copies?"
Even now, Natasha had no way of knowing which memories of those years were her own, and which had been forced into her by men with their blades and their drugs.
"The clones we've met never do," John said, drawing Natasha back.
"Meet a lot of clones in your line of work?" Tony asked.
"A few," John said, giving Tony a cold smile. "And no, you don't get to meet them."
"I have a question," Steve said, forestalling what might have been yet another spat between John and Tony. "Why does Colonel Sheppard keep speaking of these Asgard in the past tense?"
Thor turned from the window, as John let out a sigh. "The cloning process could only hold up for so long," John said, an apology in his voice. "The Asgard knew they were dying, really dying, and they couldn't let their technology fall into the hands of the younger races, that would have made your Ragnarök look like a playground spat. They decided to end things on their terms."
"Suicide?" Bruce asked, but it wasn't a question.
John nodded. "They destroyed all of their technology, one final bang. But they gave us some of their technology and research. From what I hear, they seemed to think that the human race had the potential to do good things."
The room fell silent at John's words. After a minute, Thor stepped forward, and offered his hand once again to John. "I thank you for your tale," Thor said. "I only wish I might have met these other Asgard, and known them for what they had become."
"You should talk to General O'Neill," John said. "He was the first human who Thor got to know from Earth. Thor counted the general as a friend."
"I will do so," Thor promised, letting go of John's hand.
"So," Clint said, breaking into the mood in the room, "If there was an alternate Thor out there, there were other Asgard as well?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"You ever meet another Loki?"
Thor's eyes narrowed at the mention of his brother, but John was looking at Clint and didn't see the reaction. "Yeah, about that."
"What was he like?"
"You know those stories of alien abduction and probing and stuff?"
Clint stared at John. "You're fucking kidding me."
John crinkled his nose. "Not really. You might want to talk to General O'Neill about that one, too."
"Jesus take the wheel," Clint muttered, turning on his heel and going over to the bar.
Thor moved to Natasha's side. "You must be proud of your son, being part of things much bigger than himself," he said to her.
Natasha permitted herself a small smile. "I am."
Thor laid a hand on Natasha's shoulder, then waved John over to the seating area. "Come, Sheppard, you must tell me more of the fate of the Alterans," he said. "What became of their civil war?"
Bruce and Steve exchanged a glance, then both went over to join Thor. That left Tony and Natasha in the middle of the penthouse floor.
"What?" Tony said when he caught Natasha staring at him.
"What's going on between you and John?" she asked.
Tony started to speak, caught himself on the first word, and gave her an insincere smile instead. "Not a damn thing," he said.
"You're a bad liar," Natasha told him.
"Yeah, well, maybe I'll get Sheppard to give me a few lessons." Tony stepped around her and headed towards the seats, hopping down next to Bruce and pulling up a holo display while he listened to Thor and John talk.
Natasha crossed her arms over her chest and wondered what Tony meant.
Hours later, Natasha and John walked arm in arm down Fifth Avenue.
"That went a whole lot better than I expected," John said as they waited for a street light to change.
"What were you anticipating?" Natasha asked.
"More pushback from your Thor about my Thor, for starters," John said. "Barton's reaction about the Asgard was more in line with what I expected."
Natasha hummed in agreement, stepping off the curb when the light changed to green. "Clint's not exactly a big fan of aliens," she said. "But you can't blame him." She hadn't explained Clint's role in Loki's master plan, rather letting John believe that Clint had been fighting at the Avengers' side during the entire battle. She was sure that John would have understood; but it was Clint's story, and she would not tell it without his permission.
"No, I get it. If my first encounter with aliens had been the Chitauri, I'd probably have been in the same boat." John shrugged. "Of course, I got the Wraith instead, which was worse."
"That's the second time you've mentioned the Wraith," Natasha said. She let John steer her into a busy coffee shop.
"We'll talk about it later," John promised. He set his briefcase on the counter as he ordered, never letting it out of his sight.
Natasha leaned against the counter and casually scanned the coffee shop. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary for New York. Natasha absently identified a few individuals who warranted further observation, and let John guide them to a table at the back of the shop, removed slightly from the others by a pillar.
Natasha took the chair that gave her the best view of room. John sat beside her, rather than across, which would let them speak confidentially. "Was there anything you wanted to ask?" John asked. Natasha supposed he meant questions about aliens and Stargates, but that wasn't what interested Natasha.
Instead, Natasha and leaned closer to John so no one could overhear as she asked, "What's going on between you and Tony?"
John glanced around the room, at the bar, anywhere but Natasha. "It's nothing."
Natasha let the silence sit between them, waiting as the waitress brought over two tiny cups of espresso and a small pitcher of steamed milk. The woman gave John a shy smile and went back to the coffee bar.
Natasha sipped at her coffee, let the bitter liquid flow over her tongue, and waited.
"We go back," John finally said. He poured enough milk into his cup to turn the coffee a pale tan. "I knew Tony at Stanford. No big deal."
"The way you two fight, makes me think that it is a big deal."
"What did Tony tell you?" John asked, taking a sip from his cup.
"That he knew you when you were at Stanford when you were nineteen," Natasha said. "But I can guess what he left out."
John met Natasha's gaze and held it. "What do you want to hear?"
"Whatever you want to tell me."
John looked back at his cup, tapped the porcelain handle as he tried to decide. Natasha sat and waited.
After a few minutes, John cleared his throat. "I, uh... Me and Tony, we were… together." He never looked up. "For a few months." John's fingers pressed on the porcelain saucer, almost masking the trembling. "But you know Tony. Something else caught his attention and it was over."
Natasha put her hand over John's, wondering if there was anything she could do about something that had happened twenty-three years before.
Part of her wasn't surprised by John's confession. She'd suspected as much since she'd seen Tony and John interact in the break-out room in Cheyenne Mountain. She'd known Tony was interested in men as well as women; anyone who could read knew about Tony's exploits from the tabloids.
Natasha hadn't known her son was that way; after all, he had been married to Nancy for several years, but the revelation did not surprise Natasha.
John held his shoulders with a tension that Natasha didn't understand. "It wouldn't have mattered. Like, we were discrete, mostly, but I guess someone found out and told Dad that summer."
"Oh," Natasha whispered. Given what she remembered about Patrick's opinions on non-traditional sexual orientation, she doubted he took the news well.
"Yeah, Dad was really pissed," John said. He was still staring at the table as if the surface held some sort of answer. "He totally lost it, said that I wasn't his son, that he didn't want any fucking faggot living under his room. Threw me out right then and there."
Ice and anger swept through Natasha's head. "He said what?"
John mistook her fury. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I got my stuff and drove back to Palo Alto, got a job for the summer and went back to school in the fall. Stepmother Amanda invited me back for Thanksgiving in November like nothing had happened and me and Dad never talked about it again."
"John-"
"And I joined the Air Force and married Nancy and that was real, no matter how much I fucked things up with her later on," John continued in a rush. "The thing with Tony was just kids stuff, but then he had to go make bigger and better weapons and he enjoyed it, and all the time I'm having to go in to rescue my men from friendly fire, and you know what name was always on those weapons?"
"Stark," Natasha said quietly.
"Yeah. And every time they sent me in after yet another solider whose life was at risk from state-of-the-art armament that Tony created, it was just another dig at what had happened," John said.
"That you'd lost him?"
John's head snapped up at her words. "No," he said in disgust, "That I was ever involved with someone like that to begin with."
His bereft expression belied his angry words, and Natasha held her tongue as John put his head in his hands. While she had no doubt that John was being honest about how much he detested the devastating effects of Stark weaponry, his reactions to Tony and their easy familiarity between episodes of bitter animosity, told Natasha that John's feelings for Tony had once been far deeper than he was letting on.
She was also very glad that John seemed to have brushed off Patrick Sheppard's words from so long ago.
"So yeah, that's the sad sordid history with me and Tony," John said. "Can we never talk about it again?"
"Of course," Natasha said, sitting back and taking another sip from her cup. By this time, the coffee had gone cold, but she drank it anyway.
John coughed. "So I guess this is the part where I ask if you and Tony ever..."
"Never," Natasha said quickly.
"Good," John said, relieved. "That would have been... weird."
He smiled at Natasha, eyes tired in his too-young face, and she had to smile back.
"So where do we go from here?" John asked. "You know what I do, now, and I know what you do. Do we like call? Email?"
"I expect that our lives will cross frequently," Natasha said honestly. "SHIELD will be interested to know what your people are doing, and I would not be surprised if the reciprocal is true as well."
"Yeah, no doubt," John said. "Look, you want another coffee?"
Natasha demurred, and she waited while John went back up to the counter. She was amused to note that he carried his briefcase of secrets with him, instead of leaving it at the table with her.
Smart boy, Natasha thought.
He retuned soon enough, briefcase in one hand and coffee in the other. "You're going to vibrate out of here if you keep that up," Natasha noted.
John shrugged. "They had me off coffee until just last week," he said around a slurp. "Still can't drink alcohol, doctor's orders." He caught the expression on Natasha's face, and tried to smile. "Don't worry about it, it's okay. Doc says I'm nearly at a hundred percent."
"Is that why the committee thought you had been compromised?" Natasha asked.
John set his cup down with a clatter. "What-" He stopped himself and breathed in, sudden anger dissipating. "You were talking to General O'Neill, he told you."
"He did," Natasha said evenly.
"Did he also tell you exactly what happened?"
"No. He suggested that I ask you."
John sat back in his chair. "Is that what this is? You're asking?"
Natasha leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. "If you want to tell me , then yes."
She waited, watching the emotions cross John's face. Another person might not have seen anything, but she had been watching for reactions in men like him for a very long time.
After a minute, John rubbed his hand over his eyes. "What happened to me... let's just say that most people don't come back. And since I did, it must have been because of something I'd done, right?"
Natasha didn't offer platitudes. She could tell from his posture that John would not welcome them. Instead, she said, "Why did you make it out alive?"
John had gone pale. "I'd taken out a lot of the enemy since 2004," he said. "After all that, when she got hold of me... it was about power. After all I'd done, this time she had me."
Natasha's pre-conceived notions of what had happened to John turned upside down, all in the gender of his captor. "What was her name?" Natasha demanded.
John smiled, a razor-sharp expression. "They don't have names. And after a while I didn't want to keep making things up to call her."
Natasha's mind made the connections that had been lying in front of her all afternoon. "Was she one of the Wraith you spoke of?"
John just looked at Natasha.
"How did you survive?" Natasha asked. She did not ask, what did she do to you, because Natasha needed no help in imagining what a sentient being could do to torture another.
She had been on both sides of that coin.
John folded his hands together in his lap. "I just kept thinking, I had to stay alive. If I was alive, I still had a chance to beat her and get back home. Then everything would be all right again, you know?"
"What happened?" Natasha asked.
John let out a breath. He sounded so tired. "I got a chance to beat her, and I took it."
"I understand," Natasha said, and she did. She understood all the things that a person would do to survive, to beat the enemy, to utterly destroy them so that they could never hurt you again.
John nodded. "I guessed you would."
"How long did she have you?" Natasha asked.
"Five months," John said. He tapped his thumb against the tabletop. "Felt like a lifetime." He sat up. "Whatever. Now I get to go back to Colorado and wait for the General to find something else to keep me busy until they kick me to the curb again."
"Don't think like that," Natasha said. "This posting, it's temporary."
"So what if it is?" John asked. "It's not like I'm ever getting my city back. What the hell else am I supposed to do?"
It broke Natasha's heart to see her son so defeated. "John, you have to get up every day and do what you have to, until it doesn't hurt so much."
"What the hell would you know about it?" John demanded, and now his anger was aimed at her.
Natasha didn't respond. Her head was crowded with memories of everything she'd lost in her life. She thought about Coulson, but that wound was still so raw that even in her thoughts, she shied away. Instead, she remembered what it had been like to lose her son to the mission when he was just three year old, and only getting him back twenty-nine years later.
And for all that she had John back, it didn't change the fact that everything she had worked for so many years, her life's mission, everything she'd trained for, had been created for, had fallen to pieces when the Soviet Union collapsed, taking Department X and the Red Room down with it.
But she held on.
Until, eight years later, the only person binding her to the land of the living had been killed. The Winter Soldier had been her lover, her mentor, her friend. He'd trained her to hunt, to kill, but most importantly of all, the Winter Solider had taught Natasha how to survive the harsh world they lived in.
In the years after his death, Natasha fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, into death and destruction and annihilation, until finally she went too far and SHIELD sent Clint Barton to stop her. Clint found her and he should have killed her in that rainy alley, should have fired his gun directly into her heart.
Instead Clint gave her a chance to find her way back from the hell she'd created for herself, bringing her into SHIELD and saving her life. His choice gave Natasha back her son.
Natasha harbored no illusions about herself. She knew what she was, what she had done, and what she deserved.
She wasn't going to let this second chance pass her by.
"I've lost a lot over the years," was all she said to John. "But I'm still here, and that has to be enough."
John looked at Natasha for a moment before taking her hand. His fingers were ice-cold. "You've got me, for what it's worth," he said.
Sudden tears came to Natasha's eyes. "That is worth everything," she told her son, meaning it with every fibre of her being.
John stood, and together they left the coffee shop, heading back to where John's car was parked at Stark Tower. As they walked, Natasha thought about her life and what she'd lost. In spite of the fact that Department X had made her into the Black Widow, she was glad they were gone. She had outlived the men who created her, and that was the only revenge she cared about.
Maybe it was the forcible reminder of Department X and the events in Seth's compound in Belarus, but Natasha hadn't been able to get the Winter Soldier from her waking thoughts, nor from her dreams.
He had been the most deadly operative Department X ever produced. Once the Winter Solider was pointed at a target, there was no escape. He had been ruthless, efficient... inevitable.
He had trained Natasha as no other had, gave her the skills she needed to survive, to outwit every enemy. She would never say it aloud to anyone, but even after thirteen years, Natasha missed him terribly.
But it did not matter.
The Winter Solider was dead, and nothing could bring the dead back to the land of the living.
Natasha slipped her hand through John's arm, and walked on.
the end
The thing is, if you look at the Stargate canon, the Asgard really did clone themselves. And all the other clones in the SG-verse (like the teen clone of Jack O'Neill, and the clone of Carson Beckett) never knew they were clones until someone pointed it out to them.
Stop looking at me like that, it could legit happen like this.
Anyway this sets up everything to do with the sequel. See you in a bit.