Avengers (2012): "Shot in the Dark" (3/6) (Clint/Natasha)
Title: Shot in the Dark (3/6)
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie.
Pairing: Pre- Clint/Natasha (UST)
Rating: R (mostly for violent themes and language)
Warnings: language and some violence
Spoilers: None
Type: Completed
Word Count: 2,096
Summary: In her life there comes a moment. A moment when survival is no longer enough. A moment to say "I choose to live. A moment that changes everything.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for Notes.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Mid-June, 2000 ~ Paris, France
A lucky break got him within about a mile of her in Marrakech around mid-May. By the time he tracked her to Paris in June, he’d decided she wasn’t going to just walk out into an undefended location where he could take the type of shot he preferred. No, she’d had too much training and was too damn paranoid for that (which he supposed was a contributing factor to how successful she was.) Coulson had warned him it was probably going to end up being an up close job, and he was okay with that. Not his first choice maybe, but he could do it.
Her paranoia extended to her living habits, which was why he’d been a frustrating step and a half behind her for three weeks. But complex as it was, there was an underlying pattern to her cover names, and by mid-morning on the second day he’d found a room registered to an Alycia Roberts-Noland that he was sure was her.
Slipping into the hotel and swiping a master key-card had been ridiculously easy after some of the secured facilities he’d broken into. He’d cautiously hoped she would be there when he arrived, but while the room turned out to be empty there were enough clothes still around he figured she’d be coming back.
He settled in to wait, sinking into the same calm, still place he used when he was lining up a shot, his gun sitting easily in his hand.
It took her three hours to come back from what looked like a work out - her now blond hair was still damp and she was wearing workout pants and a tank top along with a well-worn pair of sneakers. He could tell the second she realized he was in the room. There was a hair’s breadth of time that she could’ve turned and moved back into the hallway, probably with a half-decent chance of dodging a bullet from anyone else. Instead, she froze in place, her hand still on the door, staring straight at him despite the gun he held trained directly on her.
Seconds ticked by, stretched out by the tension until they felt like hours. She didn’t look startled for more than a fraction of a moment, didn’t look angry or scared, just… she looked tired. Maybe even pained. Resigned, he decided and realized in that moment, she was going to let him shoot her. Then time seemed to resume, and her eyebrow arched and her hand slowly left the handle. Once released, the door swung shut behind her and it was the sound of the latch clicking home that seemed to break the rest of the spell. Her mouth narrowed and she was in motion again, but instead of coming at him like he’d expected, she headed for the space between the bed and dresser and reached down to pull out a duffel bag.
It hit the bed with a muffled thump and she turned her back on him completely to rummage in the dresser. Curiosity was holding him back by then. He wasn’t afraid of her pulling a weapon; even if she tried, he’d be able to get off a shot first and put her down. The only thing she came up with was some clothing that she turned and shoved into the bag.
“Well?” she asked, and her English was slightly accented, but he couldn’t exactly say with what.
“You put your back to me. I can’t decide if you’re brave or stupid.”
She shrugged slightly, not bothering to turn back around. “You’ll either shoot me, or you won’t. I honestly don’t care which.”
“Really? Nothing in my file indicated that the Black Widow had suicidal tendencies.”
“I don’t.” She finished shifting the contents of the drawer into the duffel bag and zipped it up before moving to the bathroom counter to collect the small handful of toiletries she had there. “You were sent to kill me, correct? By SHIELD, if your accent is any indication.”
“Something like that.”
“Not that it matters. You obviously aren’t man enough to pull the trigger.”
He raised his eyebrows at the taunt. “So, you assume because I’m American I’ll what? Get pissed off by an insult to my masculinity?”
“It often works.” She stepped back into the room and studied him a moment. “No, then? Perhaps you’re just not cold enough to do it. Tell me Agent…”
“Braddock,” he supplied easily.
“Braddock. Not your real name of course, but it will do. Tell me Agent Braddock, is this your first mission?”
“Hardly. It'd have to be a piss-poor agency to send a rookie after someone like you.”
“So you’ve killed.” Statement, not question, he noticed, and nodded.
“I have. I don’t mind doing it again.”
“But you’ve been sitting here for three minutes, forty seconds, give or take, with the perfect opportunity, a kill that would net you any number of bounties and international acclaim, and you’ve hesitated. Why? Do you have some misplaced sense of chivalry? You have to know I wouldn’t hesitate to kill you.”
He watched her movements, coordinated and designed to look effortless, but there was an almost imperceptible tension around her eyes.
“I’ve killed women. I don’t have a problem with that, either.”
“Hoping I’ll sleep with you first? I suppose that could be arranged. Many men seem to enjoy the danger of trying to bed someone like me.”
He made sure to take an appreciative look up and down her body, but shook his head. “A tempting offer, but I’ll pass, thanks.”
The first, tiniest flash of annoyance passed over her face, and it amused the hell out of him. He doubted she’d often run across someone who would turn her down. In other circumstances, he certainly wouldn’t have. She was beautiful without even trying to be. When she put her mind to it, he knew she’d be an absolute knock-out. He also figured she wasn’t used to someone who could keep her even the least bit off-balance; she had control freak written all over her. He kind of liked keeping her on her toes, even as part of his mind was reminding him he worked for SHIELD and that he was supposed to be killing her right now.
“So where are you gonna go, this time?”
“You don’t really believe I’m going to tell you where I’m going. If there’s nothing else, Agent Braddo-”
The floor shifted beneath them, sending her to her knees and knocking him sideways.
He heard her cursing in Russian around the ringing in his ears and the screams he could hear coming from the hallway where the bomb had apparently gone off.
“Friends of yours?” she asked, even as she was shifting around to the side of the bed away from the door and pulling out a gun she’d stashed there. The ringing was fading quickly and he could already make out angry shouting and gunfire from outside.
“Not my side,” he muttered, checking his clip, then training his gun on the door. “And I doubt they’d know I’m here.”
“No one’s supposed to know I’m here, either,” she pointed out, and he gave her an incredulous look.
“I did. I’ve been keeping tabs on you since Marrakesh.”
If he’d blinked, he’d have missed the brief widening of her eyes. “That's… most impressive, Agent Braddock.”
“Hell, call me Barton,” he threw out. “Might as well.”
There was a repetitive thudding sound that told them someone was systematically breaking down the doors to each room going up and down the hall, sometimes followed by gunfire, sometimes not. As it grew closer, they glanced back and forth at one another.
“What are the other escape routes?” he asked. He’d already picked out three.
“Window, hall, ceiling,” she named off quickly, the same ones he’d found. “But the window doesn’t have a ledge outside, and we’re four stories up. We won’t get very far if we break something on the way down, and at that height it’s virtually guaranteed.”
“If there’s fire on this floor or the one above it from the explosion, the ceiling ducts will be a death trap. I’d give us seventy-thirty odds of making it to a stairwell.”
“That leaves the hall.” Where there was still more gunfire, they both knew, but it was more likely they could shoot their way out in the chaos than either of their other options.
Another door banged open, this time one only a room or so away. “Or, we could let them come to us, then make a break for it,” he amended, and she nodded. They had more than enough firepower between the two of them. She reached under the bed and tossed a semi-automatic to him before pulling out another pistol to tuck into her waistband at the small of her back.
“How many guns have you got in here?” he muttered, but it was mostly a rhetorical question. He heard gunfire ricochet off the door knob outside just before the door came crashing inward.
Two men in black balaclavas and what looked to Clint like spec ops gear came through the door first, both had replaced the hand guns they'd been hearing and were armed with nasty looking machine guns. He dove for the floor behind the bed just in time to miss getting cut in half by the spray of bullets they opened with. She didn't bother to spare him a look, just started firing back, catching one of the invaders in the mid-section and shoulder and the other one in the head. He came up just as quickly as he'd gone down beside her, and nailed the first goon dead-center between the eyes.
She left the duffel, tossed him a spare magazine, and took out the third guy who started to step into the room with a shot through the throat, brutal and efficient.
"Let's not wait to find out how many more there are."
He nodded, and together they made their way into the hallway where the emergency lights were flashing through the smoke, and the fire alarms were going off. No one else was left on the floor, at least not alive. Clint checked the stairwell and nodded that it was clear. The reached the bottom and he glanced through the small window in the door to the lobby. Fire and security were attempting to get people out of the hotel and onto the street as quickly and calmly as they could.
"Here, hang on," he wiped down the semi-automatic and stowed it under the stairs, then tucked the hand gun at the small of his back and held out his hand for her gun. "You can't hide a gun in those pants, flattering as they are."
Despite having run down several flights of stairs after a shoot out, she wasn't even winded, but seemed completely calm and collected. Reluctantly, she handed over her gun and he tucked it in next to his, then made sure his shirt and jacket covered them. "C'mon," he reached for her elbow and the door handle at same time, ushering her into the lobby and taking on the guise of a concerned, bewildered guest.
She had no trouble playing along. He exchanged a few words with one of the security guards in French that sounded native, if not precisely Parisian, and managed to glean that an armed terrorist cell had attacked the hotel, but they were securing the premises and would they please step outside where someone would, eventually, be by to take their statement?
She stayed quiet, and if he hadn't known better, he'd have absolutely believed she was just a shell-shocked young woman who'd been vacationing with her boyfriend and woken up to some kind of nightmare. She was even shaking ever so slightly, not enough to draw the attention of anyone, but enough to have anyone who did happen to notice her tag her as "victim" rather than "cool and poised spy".
The street was a madhouse, of course, and he made sure to hug the building in case the entire point had been to draw them out into the open. He used the crowd to their advantage, and it wasn't hard to move with an entire group until they were skirting around the barricade at the corner and slipping down an alley that would lead them away from the location.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie.
Pairing: Pre- Clint/Natasha (UST)
Rating: R (mostly for violent themes and language)
Warnings: language and some violence
Spoilers: None
Type: Completed
Word Count: 2,096
Summary: In her life there comes a moment. A moment when survival is no longer enough. A moment to say "I choose to live. A moment that changes everything.
Author's Notes: See Chapter 1 for Notes.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Mid-June, 2000 ~ Paris, France
A lucky break got him within about a mile of her in Marrakech around mid-May. By the time he tracked her to Paris in June, he’d decided she wasn’t going to just walk out into an undefended location where he could take the type of shot he preferred. No, she’d had too much training and was too damn paranoid for that (which he supposed was a contributing factor to how successful she was.) Coulson had warned him it was probably going to end up being an up close job, and he was okay with that. Not his first choice maybe, but he could do it.
Her paranoia extended to her living habits, which was why he’d been a frustrating step and a half behind her for three weeks. But complex as it was, there was an underlying pattern to her cover names, and by mid-morning on the second day he’d found a room registered to an Alycia Roberts-Noland that he was sure was her.
Slipping into the hotel and swiping a master key-card had been ridiculously easy after some of the secured facilities he’d broken into. He’d cautiously hoped she would be there when he arrived, but while the room turned out to be empty there were enough clothes still around he figured she’d be coming back.
He settled in to wait, sinking into the same calm, still place he used when he was lining up a shot, his gun sitting easily in his hand.
It took her three hours to come back from what looked like a work out - her now blond hair was still damp and she was wearing workout pants and a tank top along with a well-worn pair of sneakers. He could tell the second she realized he was in the room. There was a hair’s breadth of time that she could’ve turned and moved back into the hallway, probably with a half-decent chance of dodging a bullet from anyone else. Instead, she froze in place, her hand still on the door, staring straight at him despite the gun he held trained directly on her.
Seconds ticked by, stretched out by the tension until they felt like hours. She didn’t look startled for more than a fraction of a moment, didn’t look angry or scared, just… she looked tired. Maybe even pained. Resigned, he decided and realized in that moment, she was going to let him shoot her. Then time seemed to resume, and her eyebrow arched and her hand slowly left the handle. Once released, the door swung shut behind her and it was the sound of the latch clicking home that seemed to break the rest of the spell. Her mouth narrowed and she was in motion again, but instead of coming at him like he’d expected, she headed for the space between the bed and dresser and reached down to pull out a duffel bag.
It hit the bed with a muffled thump and she turned her back on him completely to rummage in the dresser. Curiosity was holding him back by then. He wasn’t afraid of her pulling a weapon; even if she tried, he’d be able to get off a shot first and put her down. The only thing she came up with was some clothing that she turned and shoved into the bag.
“Well?” she asked, and her English was slightly accented, but he couldn’t exactly say with what.
“You put your back to me. I can’t decide if you’re brave or stupid.”
She shrugged slightly, not bothering to turn back around. “You’ll either shoot me, or you won’t. I honestly don’t care which.”
“Really? Nothing in my file indicated that the Black Widow had suicidal tendencies.”
“I don’t.” She finished shifting the contents of the drawer into the duffel bag and zipped it up before moving to the bathroom counter to collect the small handful of toiletries she had there. “You were sent to kill me, correct? By SHIELD, if your accent is any indication.”
“Something like that.”
“Not that it matters. You obviously aren’t man enough to pull the trigger.”
He raised his eyebrows at the taunt. “So, you assume because I’m American I’ll what? Get pissed off by an insult to my masculinity?”
“It often works.” She stepped back into the room and studied him a moment. “No, then? Perhaps you’re just not cold enough to do it. Tell me Agent…”
“Braddock,” he supplied easily.
“Braddock. Not your real name of course, but it will do. Tell me Agent Braddock, is this your first mission?”
“Hardly. It'd have to be a piss-poor agency to send a rookie after someone like you.”
“So you’ve killed.” Statement, not question, he noticed, and nodded.
“I have. I don’t mind doing it again.”
“But you’ve been sitting here for three minutes, forty seconds, give or take, with the perfect opportunity, a kill that would net you any number of bounties and international acclaim, and you’ve hesitated. Why? Do you have some misplaced sense of chivalry? You have to know I wouldn’t hesitate to kill you.”
He watched her movements, coordinated and designed to look effortless, but there was an almost imperceptible tension around her eyes.
“I’ve killed women. I don’t have a problem with that, either.”
“Hoping I’ll sleep with you first? I suppose that could be arranged. Many men seem to enjoy the danger of trying to bed someone like me.”
He made sure to take an appreciative look up and down her body, but shook his head. “A tempting offer, but I’ll pass, thanks.”
The first, tiniest flash of annoyance passed over her face, and it amused the hell out of him. He doubted she’d often run across someone who would turn her down. In other circumstances, he certainly wouldn’t have. She was beautiful without even trying to be. When she put her mind to it, he knew she’d be an absolute knock-out. He also figured she wasn’t used to someone who could keep her even the least bit off-balance; she had control freak written all over her. He kind of liked keeping her on her toes, even as part of his mind was reminding him he worked for SHIELD and that he was supposed to be killing her right now.
“So where are you gonna go, this time?”
“You don’t really believe I’m going to tell you where I’m going. If there’s nothing else, Agent Braddo-”
The floor shifted beneath them, sending her to her knees and knocking him sideways.
He heard her cursing in Russian around the ringing in his ears and the screams he could hear coming from the hallway where the bomb had apparently gone off.
“Friends of yours?” she asked, even as she was shifting around to the side of the bed away from the door and pulling out a gun she’d stashed there. The ringing was fading quickly and he could already make out angry shouting and gunfire from outside.
“Not my side,” he muttered, checking his clip, then training his gun on the door. “And I doubt they’d know I’m here.”
“No one’s supposed to know I’m here, either,” she pointed out, and he gave her an incredulous look.
“I did. I’ve been keeping tabs on you since Marrakesh.”
If he’d blinked, he’d have missed the brief widening of her eyes. “That's… most impressive, Agent Braddock.”
“Hell, call me Barton,” he threw out. “Might as well.”
There was a repetitive thudding sound that told them someone was systematically breaking down the doors to each room going up and down the hall, sometimes followed by gunfire, sometimes not. As it grew closer, they glanced back and forth at one another.
“What are the other escape routes?” he asked. He’d already picked out three.
“Window, hall, ceiling,” she named off quickly, the same ones he’d found. “But the window doesn’t have a ledge outside, and we’re four stories up. We won’t get very far if we break something on the way down, and at that height it’s virtually guaranteed.”
“If there’s fire on this floor or the one above it from the explosion, the ceiling ducts will be a death trap. I’d give us seventy-thirty odds of making it to a stairwell.”
“That leaves the hall.” Where there was still more gunfire, they both knew, but it was more likely they could shoot their way out in the chaos than either of their other options.
Another door banged open, this time one only a room or so away. “Or, we could let them come to us, then make a break for it,” he amended, and she nodded. They had more than enough firepower between the two of them. She reached under the bed and tossed a semi-automatic to him before pulling out another pistol to tuck into her waistband at the small of her back.
“How many guns have you got in here?” he muttered, but it was mostly a rhetorical question. He heard gunfire ricochet off the door knob outside just before the door came crashing inward.
Two men in black balaclavas and what looked to Clint like spec ops gear came through the door first, both had replaced the hand guns they'd been hearing and were armed with nasty looking machine guns. He dove for the floor behind the bed just in time to miss getting cut in half by the spray of bullets they opened with. She didn't bother to spare him a look, just started firing back, catching one of the invaders in the mid-section and shoulder and the other one in the head. He came up just as quickly as he'd gone down beside her, and nailed the first goon dead-center between the eyes.
She left the duffel, tossed him a spare magazine, and took out the third guy who started to step into the room with a shot through the throat, brutal and efficient.
"Let's not wait to find out how many more there are."
He nodded, and together they made their way into the hallway where the emergency lights were flashing through the smoke, and the fire alarms were going off. No one else was left on the floor, at least not alive. Clint checked the stairwell and nodded that it was clear. The reached the bottom and he glanced through the small window in the door to the lobby. Fire and security were attempting to get people out of the hotel and onto the street as quickly and calmly as they could.
"Here, hang on," he wiped down the semi-automatic and stowed it under the stairs, then tucked the hand gun at the small of his back and held out his hand for her gun. "You can't hide a gun in those pants, flattering as they are."
Despite having run down several flights of stairs after a shoot out, she wasn't even winded, but seemed completely calm and collected. Reluctantly, she handed over her gun and he tucked it in next to his, then made sure his shirt and jacket covered them. "C'mon," he reached for her elbow and the door handle at same time, ushering her into the lobby and taking on the guise of a concerned, bewildered guest.
She had no trouble playing along. He exchanged a few words with one of the security guards in French that sounded native, if not precisely Parisian, and managed to glean that an armed terrorist cell had attacked the hotel, but they were securing the premises and would they please step outside where someone would, eventually, be by to take their statement?
She stayed quiet, and if he hadn't known better, he'd have absolutely believed she was just a shell-shocked young woman who'd been vacationing with her boyfriend and woken up to some kind of nightmare. She was even shaking ever so slightly, not enough to draw the attention of anyone, but enough to have anyone who did happen to notice her tag her as "victim" rather than "cool and poised spy".
The street was a madhouse, of course, and he made sure to hug the building in case the entire point had been to draw them out into the open. He used the crowd to their advantage, and it wasn't hard to move with an entire group until they were skirting around the barricade at the corner and slipping down an alley that would lead them away from the location.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6