(no subject)
hawk and hydra
rating: g
characters: Natasha Romanoff, James "Bucky" Barnes, Pepper Potts, Tony Stark
warnings: none
summary: As the dust settles in D.C., the world turns to hunting down HYDRA while Steve chases after the Winter Soldier. Natasha, meanwhile, has her own search to make for a missing archer - and the three things may be more connected than anyone else realizes.
author's note: This is a purposefully incomplete story. The two scenes below came from a prompt by inkvoices:
"No one hears from Clint during the events of Cap 2, or after. Then there's a rumour, or some 'evidence' that he's dead. But Fury, Coulson, Bucky... there's a lot of this 'supposedly dead' going around.
In which Natasha doesn't help Steve and Sam chase Bucky because she's got her own 'dead' guy to find. In which Steve, Sam, and Bucky may eventually join Natasha's manhunt. In which so might the rest of the Avengers. In which everyone becomes pretty convinced that sometimes people do actually die. Everyone except Natasha."
What if Clint had been captured by HYDRA? After all, if you're going to imitate or use the staff, what better subject to study than someone it has been used on before? These scenes are all that came of the prompt, but I like them nonetheless. Enjoy a glimpse of the Barton Manhunt 2014!
Day 2 of this year's 12 Days of Winter hard drive clean-out.
He finds her in a diner outside of Cleveland, lost among the winds of the Great Lakes and the souls of two million people.
“You remembered me.” She watches him, her hands motionless where they lie against her thigh or on the table. The gun tucked into the small of her back and the knives in her boots are both warm against her skin. “The same way you remembered him.”
He doesn’t have to ask who she’s referring to much the same as he doesn’t need to ask what she means. There is intelligence in his blue eyes, comprehension in his square shoulders.
Natasha wonders if the predatory carriage is something James Buchanan Barnes has always had, or if the military and its unkind successors beat it into him.
“They spoke of a Hawk,” the Winter Soldier says, the words formed carefully by cracked lips that move only to speak. His gaze is intent, seeking, holds a force of its own. She tenses only fractionally before years of training take over, but it’s enough.
“I don’t suppose they mentioned what they did with him.” The offhand tone of her comment is all that keeps the waitress on the late shift from making good on her worried glances and approaching, coffee pot still clutched in one hand.
“It will be better if you don’t find him.”
Natasha shakes her head.
“Unacceptable.”
For the first time, a gleam of gallows humor touches the Winter Soldier’s veneer.
“Failure is too.”
She watches him, this man who makes the bullet wounds in her shoulder and abdomen ache, this weapon trained as carefully as a surgeon’s hand to excise and remove, and wonders if more surgeries still lie ahead.
“He’s coming,” the once-Sergeant says with unnerving keenness, with an impossible knowing. Natasha lifts a shoulder in the barest hint of a shrug, the cellphone with texts sent one-handed and by feel lying heavily on her thigh.
“It depends on whether the Quinjet can make it here before you leave. After the incident at the Triskelion most of them were unusable.”
There are several responses the Winter Soldier can make to that, several things she expects him to say. Instead he settles back into the booth and lifts his human hand to call the waitress over.
He doesn’t look away from Natasha’s unblinking gaze while he asks for a cup of coffee, black, for here.
When the waitress has skittered off again, taking refuge behind the counter as if the curly-haired chef and his spatula can protect her from the machine of war sitting in the white booth, Natasha lets her lips slide into a disapproving flat line.
“As long as you’re only going to terrify them instead of actually murdering someone, I suppose I can leave you here to wait.”
The Winter Soldier doesn’t look down when he picks up his cup, the metal fingers curving around the clunky porcelain.
“What happens if the Hawk has flown too far down.”
It’s a statement, not a question, and she suppresses a shiver. The memory of neon blue is still too close to the surface even after all this time. Is that what love is, she used to wonder, to feel someone else’s agony as if it were your own? Maybe that was why love was for children; they could afford to bear more pain than their own.
“He won’t.”
What she means is, I won’t let him come unraveled like you and I, and the Winter Soldier knows it.
He holds her gaze, pale blue washed out with the ice of the tundra and the permafrost, and Natasha wonders what will happen when that ice begins to melt.
Wonders if he remembers when she meant similar unspoken words about him, half a lifetime ago.
“Utah.”
It’s a peace offering, it is a trap, it is anything but the answer to the question still hanging in the air between them.
It’s a single word that narrows her focus from an entire country to a pinpoint on her prey.
“Thank you.” She pulls her wallet out and counts out the folded dollar bills, leaving a ten dollar tip and change for the waitress. The Winter Soldier watches her, coffee cup held as yet untasted in an unnatural hand. But then again, who is she to say what is natural or not?
“He’ll be here in twenty minutes,” Natasha says, keeping the fifties tucked away as she puts her wallet back. “He’s going to call you by your name.”
“Bucky,” he suggests in a voice that is suddenly rough. It’s as if he is testing out an idea, probing a wound to assess its depth.
They’ve both done that enough to be familiar with the process.
James, she thinks, but nods.
Natasha leaves him sitting alone in the booth, steam from his coffee curling over her shoulder as she pushes out the diner door and heads to her Mustang.
She has eighteen hundred miles to go before the week’s end.
-
“Why in the world does Peoria have an airport?”
Natasha ignores the cellphone that has independently decided to answer a phone call and come to life in her passenger seat.
“O’Hare might be more insane than my head chef in Malibu, but you’d expect a thriving metropolis like Chicago to have airports. International ones, even. Peoria is the little town everyone only mentions to show that you’re in the middle of Nowhereville, USA. It’s the armpit of the country.”
“Tony, just because O’Hare banned you from landing there, and specifically included your suit in the lawsuit-” Pepper cuts in on another line, a sigh on the words.
“It’s unjustified discrimination, Pepper, unreasonable, against a successful businessman who may happen to need to land in Chicago, imagine that.”
“You nearly caused three airliners to collide.”
“Point of order, that wasn’t me, that was a flock of geese that I may or may not have startled during a technical malfunction with the suit. The jury’s still out on that one. And besides, Natasha, the point of this is, you’re making me fly into Peoria.”
“I’m not making you do anything,” Natasha tells the squawking cellphone, hands light on the steering wheel.
“If you think I believe that for even a moment, Romanoff, you’re clearly fooling no one but yourself. I mean, first you set off on the Barton Manhunt 2014 without telling anyone. Then you skip out on what I heard was the most touching and heartfelt reunion possible for a cold-blooded assassin, leaving the Winter Soldier unsupervised in a Cleveland diner until Cap and Wilson showed up. Let me repeat: the Winter Soldier. And now you’re trying to drive to Utah, of all things, meaning I have to fly out there and pick you up in Peoria. Remind me again how this isn’t your fault?”
“Do I need to remind you that she didn’t ask for your help?”
“And yet, I think we can all agree that she needs it. We can’t have one Avenger wandering around on a personal quest. Haven’t you ever heard of the buddy system? Even Rogers figured that one out after that whole Arctic ice thing. He’s got Wilson tagging along for safety now. Probably for patching up too, it’s nice to have a twofer that way. It’s amazing how much Steve gets injured, actually.”
“Does this conversation have a point?” The highway rolls out in front of her like a landing strip, the lights from small towns dotting the edges of the road as if to guide her on.
“Have you even been listening? Peoria. Jet. Meet me there.”
“I’m fine, Stark,” she says, although the idea of having back-up against the unknown is sounding more and more appealing. What detachment carried her through the Congressional meeting and out of the wreckage of Washington has begun to fade around the edges.
“That’s what we thought you’d say.” A stretch of pavement half a mile ahead darkens almost imperceptibly before it catches the white beacons of a descending Quinjet and lights up in a single . “So we figured we’d come to you.”
Natasha eases up on the gas and coasts to a stop ten yards before the nose of the airplane, car and driver swallowed up by the stillness of the pre-dawn hour.
“Peoria, Tony?” Pepper asks on the phone, half-amused and definitely exasperated.
“Never been. Never plan to go. I prefer not to break solid records like that.”
She stares at the two men clearly outlined in the cockpit. Then, one hand twisting the steering wheel, she guides the Mustang to the shoulder until it crunches onto gravel a car-length from the lane.
“If my car gets towed, Stark, you’re flying it back to D.C.,” she warns him, and hangs up on the phone call with a swipe of her thumb.