Avengers: I Wish I Could Buy Back the Woman You Stole
First thing I've written in three weeks! This is the follow-up to fade in on a girl, that other fic I wrote about Natasha after Avengers came out, and it's still gen.
Title: I Wish I Could Buy Back the Woman You Stole
Rating: R for violence
Wordcount: 2860
Notes: Set post-movie but contains no spoilers! You may or may not need to read the previous fic in this series to follow this one. I really couldn't tell you.
Summary: As far as Natasha can tell, normal women have hobbies that they do in their spare time, and they don't include fights to the death.
The sunlight is turning the room from trendy white to soft gold and Natasha is curled up on one corner of the long sofa, humming tunelessly under her breath as she works. It almost feels warm enough to take off her shawl but she likes the heavy drape of it across her arms, the slippery slide of it on her skin when she shifts. The place is starting to feel more like home, less like she's in Tony's living room on Tony's private floor of Stark Tower and sitting on Tony's sofa, and more just like she's in her favourite place to sit around late in the afternoon, around the time when she's starting to consider the merits of dinner. She gets solitude in here, more often than not, and she's starting to enjoy peace and quiet more; the itch on the back of her neck that feels like she's missed something important and will regret it soon is almost a sensation she can't remember anymore.
Clint manages to startle her when he speaks, from off to the left in the kitchen doorway. Clint is the only person she knows who can do that, and he does it a lot, and Natasha is ninety-seven percent sure he does it intentionally every time. "Tash, I--What are you doing?"
She takes a slow, calming breath and blinks at her knitting. "I'm making a scarf," she says, frowning at the six inches she's finished. Something looks wrong. Something recent. She holds it up to the light as Clint comes into the room and there it is, there it fucking is, she dropped a stitch. She can't even blame it on him making her twitch because it's five stitches ago, before she knew he was there. She glares at it but it doesn't fix itself so she leans in, tucking her hair back behind her ear, and starts carefully unpicking stitches back to where the mistake was.
"Since when do you knit?" Clint asks, watching with interest.
"I'm learning," she says, frowning at the yarn and willing it not to slip, holding her hands steady so as not to pull out the delicate, freed loops before she can catch them on the needle again.
"Why?"
God, he sounds like a five-year-old. "Normal people have hobbies. Knitting is relaxing."
"Right," he says, drawing out the word and she knows without looking up at him that he's doing that patronizing nodding thing. "It's relaxing. That's why I can hear your teeth grinding from here."
Natasha triumphantly gets all the loops back on the needles and makes eye contact, feeling superior to everyone in the world in this moment because she can make a ball of yarn into clothing if she wants and that is a skill she can talk about with the hairdresser. "That's not the talk of a man who wants to receive lovingly hand-knit objects at the holidays," she says sweetly.
His gaze flicks between her face and the proto-scarf several times. "Is that where this is heading? Ugly sweaters for Christmas? Is there an opt-out list I can be on?"
"You don't rate a sweater," she says, resettling her shoulders against the back of the sofa and turning her attention back to her knitting. "Socks, maybe."
Clint's quiet for a moment but doesn't move. "Or those mittens with the flap that lets your fingertips out," he says casually.
"If you're really good, I'll have a word with Santa," says Natasha, knitting across the rest of the row. She's getting faster at this. The needles click soothingly and the yarn rasps under her fingers. She's starting to get the appeal.
"Santa and I have an understanding," Clint starts, because he is perpetually deserving of coal and nothing else and he knows it.
"My acceptance of your terms is dependent on the compliments this scarf receives when I finish it."
He huffs out a laugh. "Look, I was going to say, Bruce and I are going out to grab dinner, maybe steak. Wanna come?"
She toys with the idea. "I think I'm good," she says. She feels really... cozy, is the word she might be looking for. "I'll eat later."
"You might," he agrees, and she waves her middle finger at him because she doesn't skip meals intentionally. He gives her earlobe a little tug before he leaves and she sighs deeply, ready to attack purling again.
She hears a footfall later, she doesn't know how much later but the sun slants through the windows a little differently. It's probably just Tony coming in to change his clothes or something but she turns her head toward the hall where she heard it, her mouth open to call a hello, and the woman standing there is staring at her coldly.
Natasha is on her feet with the sofa between them, with her shawl in a pile on the floor and her knitting clutched in her hand; the woman is blonde and wearing a black kevlar-woven suit and the big bracelets on her wrists are chillingly familiar. Her right hand hangs at her side over a thigh holster containing a silenced SIG P226. Natasha has two twelve-inch plastic knitting needles, eight inches of a scarf and an attached ball of wool yarn. Her stomach is churning; she doesn't know how this woman got past the security of Stark Tower but it doesn't matter how, because this person is in Natasha's space and she doesn't know when she started trusting other people with her personal security but now she remembers why she resisted trust for so long.
Natasha takes a deep breath, staring at the bracelets that contain stun guns and doesn't bother asking who sent this woman. "Who are you?" she asks instead, and her voice comes out a little rough.
"I am the Black Widow," the woman says, her accent thick and central; she's been in Moscow for a long time, or at least she wants Natasha to think that.
"Are you?" Natasha can't help snarking back. "Because I don't know if you know how codenames work, but they're not so effective when you share them." She wonders if she can buy time off this woman's inexperience, or what that would even get her.
"I'm not sharing it. My first assignment is to clear out some old paperwork." The woman smirks.
"The GRU told you that you had to free up the codename and sent you to kill me?" Natasha looks her up and down. "Are you kidding?" She looks twenty, tops, and has that cold, blank look that Natasha used to see in the mirror. Even her nasty smiles don't reach her eyes.
"I was told that Natalia Romanova was a fearsome fighter and her defeat would be my life's triumph," says the woman. Her fingers wiggle suggestively in the air near the grip of her sidearm. "I thought, if I can't sneak up on her I might as well walk in the door and announce myself, accept that it will be bloody but that I will persevere in the end because I have the dedication she lacks." She shakes her head sadly. "Imagine my disgust that I got the drop on you."
"Did you, though?" Natasha asks, her weight shifting. "This is my turf. You think I haven't got tricks up my sleeve?" She has no tricks. There are no guns in the sofa cushions, no knives taped under any shelves. Natasha probably deserves to die right now.
"I am trying to decide if a bullet in the head for the great Natalia Romanova is a coup or a bitter disappointment for me."
This woman's a monologuer. Natasha pushes the advantage. "Bitter disappointment, definitely. You came all this way for a fight, right? So let's have a fight. I can't wait to see the advances in brainwashing Red Room's made since I left."
The blank look is replaced, briefly, by anger, and the woman snarls as she steps forward, unholstering her sidearm and laying it on a glass table by the door. Natasha might live through today.
There's no advantage in a start like this and Natasha has to move fast to gain one; she may have let her situational awareness fall to ruin since joining the Avengers Initiative but if there's one thing she's maintained, it's her blinding speed. She yanks the yarn off of her knitting needles, letting it fall on a sofa cushion, and vaults the arm of the sofa with a needle in each hand. The woman brings her arms up defensively which is perfect, it exposes the parts of the Widow's Bite bracelets she wants to hit, and Natasha drives her plastic, non-conductive needles hard into the mechanisms of the stun guns. It fucks them up irreparably and, like she hoped, gives her attacker a bonus jolt of electricity when they short out against her wrists. The suit she's wearing insulates enough not to kill or totally incapacitate her but her knees buckle and her teeth clench against a moan as she drops to the plush carpet.
Natasha is on her in a second, kneeing her in the chin and bringing an elbow hard across her ear to ruin her balance, but then she has to duck a knitting needle coming at her eye and the other woman is on her feet again, coming at her hard. Natasha puts up a fast defence, circling the glass coffee table and ducking a roundhouse kick that was probably intended to take her head off. This woman's style is intimately familiar, and Natasha realizes that her old tricks aren't going to do any good in a clinch, this new Black Widow knows it all and knows all the weak points, is nearly as fast as she is.
So Natasha puts away the GRU agent and all of her tactics and starts thinking like an Avenger, and clubs her across the face with the hardback copy of Game of Thrones Steve left in one of the armchairs, following it up with a punch combination Tony taught her last month in the boxing ring and then body-checking her into the coffee table. The glass cracks and then shatters under the weight of a person hitting it so hard, and Natasha's erstwhile assassin bucks and struggles where she's tangled up in the steel frame, surrounded by glittering chunks of glass.
She's got three throwing knives on her person, it turns out, and they all end up in the ceiling in the corner of the room as Natasha twists and turns away from their sharp glinting. The other woman kicks back up to her feet again and hefts the coffee table frame, swinging it with her whole body mass; Natasha does a back-bend that puts her fingertips on the floor behind her head to avoid it and doesn't hear it hit the wall hard enough to break the drywall, she's already using her momentum to swing her legs up and over, landing back on her feet in a neat backflip and watching in satisfaction as her assailant backs off out of the kicking range of her legs. Natasha looks up through the fall of her hair, her heart pounding and adrenaline lighting up every nerve ending, and the woman three feet away wipes blood off of her lower lip and then comes at her again, unrelenting. Natasha evades with a tight turn and gets a handful of ponytail that she wraps around her hand, yanking back, planting a foot in the small of the other woman's back that sends her down onto her knees with a cry. Natasha pushes her sock-clad foot into the base of the woman's spine and pulls her hair until her body arches back in a tight curve and her gaze settles on Natasha's face with glassy-eyed panic.
"What's your name?" Natasha barks in Russian, giving her hair an extra yank for punctuation.
The woman flinches. "Y-Yelena."
"Yelena what."
"Belova."
"Yelena Belova who wants to be the Black Widow. She thinks she's the best of the best because they took everything else out of her head and filled the space with lies about the motherland and her great destiny. How's Uncle Ivan these days? He still around?"
"They killed him," Yelena hisses through her teeth.
"Who did?" Not that Natasha really cares; dead is dead.
"I don't know yet. Syrians, I think."
"Are you sure it wasn't the GRU?" Natasha taunts.
"They would never," gasps Yelena, reaching for her scalp. There are tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. Natasha's grip doesn't relax.
"They'd kill me. They'd send some kid who doesn't know what the fuck she's into to kill me. You think a sniper wouldn't take care of Ivan?"
"You're a traitor."
"I'm not a traitor," says Natasha, "I'm an American."
"You're a dead woman," Yelena sobs. "If I don't succeed then someone else will come."
Natasha files that truth away to panic over later, and then she does something she's never done before. "They call me the Black Widow because I ruthlessly kill all of my enemies, you know," she says, and then she takes a little of her weight off of the foot in Yelena's back. "If you don't return, they'll assume I killed you. I bet they won't look for you, either, because I'm very good at disposal when it's warranted."
Yelena seems to stop breathing, staring up at Natasha. She looks like a terrified woodland creature.
"So maybe I let go of your hair," Natasha continues carefully, "and you get the hell out of here, and Yelena Belova ceases to exist, and you move to Cuba or Rio or something and get hobbies and a real job and have babies or whatever you feel like doing, and the GRU never has to know any different."
"You'd do that?" Yelena asks faintly.
Natasha looks in her scared eyes and lets go of Yelena's hair, backing away. Yelena curls forward into herself for a second before moving, heaving herself back onto her feet. Natasha is between her and the passage to the elevator and watches her straighten up slowly, painfully, rolling her shoulders back. When Yelena turns on the ball of her foot Natasha sees only a flash of silver before she's cocking the sidearm Yelena left on the table by the door--probably forgot about that, that Natasha was positioned close enough to reach it--and the bullet pierces Yelena's throat with a blossom of red. Yelena jerks, her last throwing knife falling out of her slack fingers and landing on the stained carpet while her free hand clutches at her throat, red rivulets running down between her fingers. She gapes at Natasha like a fish and Natasha shoots her again, in the forehead.
That's what she gets for trying to be magnanimous. Natasha fumbles the safety back on the SIG and lets it fall onto the rug. Her hands are shaking and the unnatural sound of that last, silenced gunshot keeps playing on a loop in her head. She looks up and takes in the wreckage of the living room for the first time--blood on the carpet, blood spray on the back of the white sofa, broken glass all over the floor near the window that's picking up the orange sparkle of sunset while the mangled coffee table frame sits half inside the wall near the kitchen. There's a snapped knitting needle on the floor near Natasha's foot and she walks over to the sofa in a daze, reaching out for the scarf she'd ripped off the needles maybe ten minutes ago. Most of the loops are salvageable but if she looks closely she can see blood flecks marring the soft green of her yarn. She drops it back on the sofa, steps over the body and goes to the kitchen, where she finds the phone and dials Maria Hill from memory.
"I need a cleanup crew," she says, sounding steadier than she feels. "At the Tower, in the apartment." She glances around. "Call Tony, too, I guess."
"Natasha?" Maria asks, sounding incredulous. She's probably still at work, she's always at work, but Natasha's still caught her off-guard somehow. "Are you okay?"
Natasha looks down at herself for the first time. She's got a shallow cut on her arm, a few tender spots in her middle that'll bruise soon. Her knee is protesting an old injury. She suspects she's got a split lip. "I'm fine," she says. "Cleanup crew. A good one. There's a lot of..." she trails off for a moment, "white stuff."
"Ten minutes," says Maria, and Natasha hangs up, dropping the phone on the granite countertop.
Her own phone is in her bedroom. She's going to go clean herself up and then she's going to go find Clint and Bruce and eat a steak and maybe the protein will make her stop feeling like she's going to shake apart.
When Tony gets the living room fixed, she's going to tape knives under all of the shelves and hide guns in the sofa, because the next person to come for her won't be an untested amateur.
And she needs to buy some new knitting needles.
THE END
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/60623.html. (
comments)
Title: I Wish I Could Buy Back the Woman You Stole
Rating: R for violence
Wordcount: 2860
Notes: Set post-movie but contains no spoilers! You may or may not need to read the previous fic in this series to follow this one. I really couldn't tell you.
Summary: As far as Natasha can tell, normal women have hobbies that they do in their spare time, and they don't include fights to the death.
The sunlight is turning the room from trendy white to soft gold and Natasha is curled up on one corner of the long sofa, humming tunelessly under her breath as she works. It almost feels warm enough to take off her shawl but she likes the heavy drape of it across her arms, the slippery slide of it on her skin when she shifts. The place is starting to feel more like home, less like she's in Tony's living room on Tony's private floor of Stark Tower and sitting on Tony's sofa, and more just like she's in her favourite place to sit around late in the afternoon, around the time when she's starting to consider the merits of dinner. She gets solitude in here, more often than not, and she's starting to enjoy peace and quiet more; the itch on the back of her neck that feels like she's missed something important and will regret it soon is almost a sensation she can't remember anymore.
Clint manages to startle her when he speaks, from off to the left in the kitchen doorway. Clint is the only person she knows who can do that, and he does it a lot, and Natasha is ninety-seven percent sure he does it intentionally every time. "Tash, I--What are you doing?"
She takes a slow, calming breath and blinks at her knitting. "I'm making a scarf," she says, frowning at the six inches she's finished. Something looks wrong. Something recent. She holds it up to the light as Clint comes into the room and there it is, there it fucking is, she dropped a stitch. She can't even blame it on him making her twitch because it's five stitches ago, before she knew he was there. She glares at it but it doesn't fix itself so she leans in, tucking her hair back behind her ear, and starts carefully unpicking stitches back to where the mistake was.
"Since when do you knit?" Clint asks, watching with interest.
"I'm learning," she says, frowning at the yarn and willing it not to slip, holding her hands steady so as not to pull out the delicate, freed loops before she can catch them on the needle again.
"Why?"
God, he sounds like a five-year-old. "Normal people have hobbies. Knitting is relaxing."
"Right," he says, drawing out the word and she knows without looking up at him that he's doing that patronizing nodding thing. "It's relaxing. That's why I can hear your teeth grinding from here."
Natasha triumphantly gets all the loops back on the needles and makes eye contact, feeling superior to everyone in the world in this moment because she can make a ball of yarn into clothing if she wants and that is a skill she can talk about with the hairdresser. "That's not the talk of a man who wants to receive lovingly hand-knit objects at the holidays," she says sweetly.
His gaze flicks between her face and the proto-scarf several times. "Is that where this is heading? Ugly sweaters for Christmas? Is there an opt-out list I can be on?"
"You don't rate a sweater," she says, resettling her shoulders against the back of the sofa and turning her attention back to her knitting. "Socks, maybe."
Clint's quiet for a moment but doesn't move. "Or those mittens with the flap that lets your fingertips out," he says casually.
"If you're really good, I'll have a word with Santa," says Natasha, knitting across the rest of the row. She's getting faster at this. The needles click soothingly and the yarn rasps under her fingers. She's starting to get the appeal.
"Santa and I have an understanding," Clint starts, because he is perpetually deserving of coal and nothing else and he knows it.
"My acceptance of your terms is dependent on the compliments this scarf receives when I finish it."
He huffs out a laugh. "Look, I was going to say, Bruce and I are going out to grab dinner, maybe steak. Wanna come?"
She toys with the idea. "I think I'm good," she says. She feels really... cozy, is the word she might be looking for. "I'll eat later."
"You might," he agrees, and she waves her middle finger at him because she doesn't skip meals intentionally. He gives her earlobe a little tug before he leaves and she sighs deeply, ready to attack purling again.
She hears a footfall later, she doesn't know how much later but the sun slants through the windows a little differently. It's probably just Tony coming in to change his clothes or something but she turns her head toward the hall where she heard it, her mouth open to call a hello, and the woman standing there is staring at her coldly.
Natasha is on her feet with the sofa between them, with her shawl in a pile on the floor and her knitting clutched in her hand; the woman is blonde and wearing a black kevlar-woven suit and the big bracelets on her wrists are chillingly familiar. Her right hand hangs at her side over a thigh holster containing a silenced SIG P226. Natasha has two twelve-inch plastic knitting needles, eight inches of a scarf and an attached ball of wool yarn. Her stomach is churning; she doesn't know how this woman got past the security of Stark Tower but it doesn't matter how, because this person is in Natasha's space and she doesn't know when she started trusting other people with her personal security but now she remembers why she resisted trust for so long.
Natasha takes a deep breath, staring at the bracelets that contain stun guns and doesn't bother asking who sent this woman. "Who are you?" she asks instead, and her voice comes out a little rough.
"I am the Black Widow," the woman says, her accent thick and central; she's been in Moscow for a long time, or at least she wants Natasha to think that.
"Are you?" Natasha can't help snarking back. "Because I don't know if you know how codenames work, but they're not so effective when you share them." She wonders if she can buy time off this woman's inexperience, or what that would even get her.
"I'm not sharing it. My first assignment is to clear out some old paperwork." The woman smirks.
"The GRU told you that you had to free up the codename and sent you to kill me?" Natasha looks her up and down. "Are you kidding?" She looks twenty, tops, and has that cold, blank look that Natasha used to see in the mirror. Even her nasty smiles don't reach her eyes.
"I was told that Natalia Romanova was a fearsome fighter and her defeat would be my life's triumph," says the woman. Her fingers wiggle suggestively in the air near the grip of her sidearm. "I thought, if I can't sneak up on her I might as well walk in the door and announce myself, accept that it will be bloody but that I will persevere in the end because I have the dedication she lacks." She shakes her head sadly. "Imagine my disgust that I got the drop on you."
"Did you, though?" Natasha asks, her weight shifting. "This is my turf. You think I haven't got tricks up my sleeve?" She has no tricks. There are no guns in the sofa cushions, no knives taped under any shelves. Natasha probably deserves to die right now.
"I am trying to decide if a bullet in the head for the great Natalia Romanova is a coup or a bitter disappointment for me."
This woman's a monologuer. Natasha pushes the advantage. "Bitter disappointment, definitely. You came all this way for a fight, right? So let's have a fight. I can't wait to see the advances in brainwashing Red Room's made since I left."
The blank look is replaced, briefly, by anger, and the woman snarls as she steps forward, unholstering her sidearm and laying it on a glass table by the door. Natasha might live through today.
There's no advantage in a start like this and Natasha has to move fast to gain one; she may have let her situational awareness fall to ruin since joining the Avengers Initiative but if there's one thing she's maintained, it's her blinding speed. She yanks the yarn off of her knitting needles, letting it fall on a sofa cushion, and vaults the arm of the sofa with a needle in each hand. The woman brings her arms up defensively which is perfect, it exposes the parts of the Widow's Bite bracelets she wants to hit, and Natasha drives her plastic, non-conductive needles hard into the mechanisms of the stun guns. It fucks them up irreparably and, like she hoped, gives her attacker a bonus jolt of electricity when they short out against her wrists. The suit she's wearing insulates enough not to kill or totally incapacitate her but her knees buckle and her teeth clench against a moan as she drops to the plush carpet.
Natasha is on her in a second, kneeing her in the chin and bringing an elbow hard across her ear to ruin her balance, but then she has to duck a knitting needle coming at her eye and the other woman is on her feet again, coming at her hard. Natasha puts up a fast defence, circling the glass coffee table and ducking a roundhouse kick that was probably intended to take her head off. This woman's style is intimately familiar, and Natasha realizes that her old tricks aren't going to do any good in a clinch, this new Black Widow knows it all and knows all the weak points, is nearly as fast as she is.
So Natasha puts away the GRU agent and all of her tactics and starts thinking like an Avenger, and clubs her across the face with the hardback copy of Game of Thrones Steve left in one of the armchairs, following it up with a punch combination Tony taught her last month in the boxing ring and then body-checking her into the coffee table. The glass cracks and then shatters under the weight of a person hitting it so hard, and Natasha's erstwhile assassin bucks and struggles where she's tangled up in the steel frame, surrounded by glittering chunks of glass.
She's got three throwing knives on her person, it turns out, and they all end up in the ceiling in the corner of the room as Natasha twists and turns away from their sharp glinting. The other woman kicks back up to her feet again and hefts the coffee table frame, swinging it with her whole body mass; Natasha does a back-bend that puts her fingertips on the floor behind her head to avoid it and doesn't hear it hit the wall hard enough to break the drywall, she's already using her momentum to swing her legs up and over, landing back on her feet in a neat backflip and watching in satisfaction as her assailant backs off out of the kicking range of her legs. Natasha looks up through the fall of her hair, her heart pounding and adrenaline lighting up every nerve ending, and the woman three feet away wipes blood off of her lower lip and then comes at her again, unrelenting. Natasha evades with a tight turn and gets a handful of ponytail that she wraps around her hand, yanking back, planting a foot in the small of the other woman's back that sends her down onto her knees with a cry. Natasha pushes her sock-clad foot into the base of the woman's spine and pulls her hair until her body arches back in a tight curve and her gaze settles on Natasha's face with glassy-eyed panic.
"What's your name?" Natasha barks in Russian, giving her hair an extra yank for punctuation.
The woman flinches. "Y-Yelena."
"Yelena what."
"Belova."
"Yelena Belova who wants to be the Black Widow. She thinks she's the best of the best because they took everything else out of her head and filled the space with lies about the motherland and her great destiny. How's Uncle Ivan these days? He still around?"
"They killed him," Yelena hisses through her teeth.
"Who did?" Not that Natasha really cares; dead is dead.
"I don't know yet. Syrians, I think."
"Are you sure it wasn't the GRU?" Natasha taunts.
"They would never," gasps Yelena, reaching for her scalp. There are tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. Natasha's grip doesn't relax.
"They'd kill me. They'd send some kid who doesn't know what the fuck she's into to kill me. You think a sniper wouldn't take care of Ivan?"
"You're a traitor."
"I'm not a traitor," says Natasha, "I'm an American."
"You're a dead woman," Yelena sobs. "If I don't succeed then someone else will come."
Natasha files that truth away to panic over later, and then she does something she's never done before. "They call me the Black Widow because I ruthlessly kill all of my enemies, you know," she says, and then she takes a little of her weight off of the foot in Yelena's back. "If you don't return, they'll assume I killed you. I bet they won't look for you, either, because I'm very good at disposal when it's warranted."
Yelena seems to stop breathing, staring up at Natasha. She looks like a terrified woodland creature.
"So maybe I let go of your hair," Natasha continues carefully, "and you get the hell out of here, and Yelena Belova ceases to exist, and you move to Cuba or Rio or something and get hobbies and a real job and have babies or whatever you feel like doing, and the GRU never has to know any different."
"You'd do that?" Yelena asks faintly.
Natasha looks in her scared eyes and lets go of Yelena's hair, backing away. Yelena curls forward into herself for a second before moving, heaving herself back onto her feet. Natasha is between her and the passage to the elevator and watches her straighten up slowly, painfully, rolling her shoulders back. When Yelena turns on the ball of her foot Natasha sees only a flash of silver before she's cocking the sidearm Yelena left on the table by the door--probably forgot about that, that Natasha was positioned close enough to reach it--and the bullet pierces Yelena's throat with a blossom of red. Yelena jerks, her last throwing knife falling out of her slack fingers and landing on the stained carpet while her free hand clutches at her throat, red rivulets running down between her fingers. She gapes at Natasha like a fish and Natasha shoots her again, in the forehead.
That's what she gets for trying to be magnanimous. Natasha fumbles the safety back on the SIG and lets it fall onto the rug. Her hands are shaking and the unnatural sound of that last, silenced gunshot keeps playing on a loop in her head. She looks up and takes in the wreckage of the living room for the first time--blood on the carpet, blood spray on the back of the white sofa, broken glass all over the floor near the window that's picking up the orange sparkle of sunset while the mangled coffee table frame sits half inside the wall near the kitchen. There's a snapped knitting needle on the floor near Natasha's foot and she walks over to the sofa in a daze, reaching out for the scarf she'd ripped off the needles maybe ten minutes ago. Most of the loops are salvageable but if she looks closely she can see blood flecks marring the soft green of her yarn. She drops it back on the sofa, steps over the body and goes to the kitchen, where she finds the phone and dials Maria Hill from memory.
"I need a cleanup crew," she says, sounding steadier than she feels. "At the Tower, in the apartment." She glances around. "Call Tony, too, I guess."
"Natasha?" Maria asks, sounding incredulous. She's probably still at work, she's always at work, but Natasha's still caught her off-guard somehow. "Are you okay?"
Natasha looks down at herself for the first time. She's got a shallow cut on her arm, a few tender spots in her middle that'll bruise soon. Her knee is protesting an old injury. She suspects she's got a split lip. "I'm fine," she says. "Cleanup crew. A good one. There's a lot of..." she trails off for a moment, "white stuff."
"Ten minutes," says Maria, and Natasha hangs up, dropping the phone on the granite countertop.
Her own phone is in her bedroom. She's going to go clean herself up and then she's going to go find Clint and Bruce and eat a steak and maybe the protein will make her stop feeling like she's going to shake apart.
When Tony gets the living room fixed, she's going to tape knives under all of the shelves and hide guns in the sofa, because the next person to come for her won't be an untested amateur.
And she needs to buy some new knitting needles.
THE END
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/60623.html. (
comments)