Widow's Walk (PG) Avengers/Stargate (1a/2)
Oh dear lord. I suppose it was inevitable that I'd have to write this - the part of the Avengers/Stargate crossover in which we have the a) hey, it's a Stargate! and b) Asgard, Asgard, Thor and Thor (that bit will be in part 2). I hadn't intended this to end up being over 20,000 words, but there you go.
Chapter 2 will be up tomorrow. I'm having to post each part in two bits on LJ as the posting limit is hit around 6,000 words.
Let me know what you think.
Widow's Walk (1/2)
An Avengers/Stargate story
by mhalachaiswords
At AO3
Summary: Four months after New York, the Avengers are asked to take part in a military briefing at Cheyenne Mountain. It’s perfectly understandable if Natasha has a bad feeling about this...
Rating: PG
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, John Sheppard, the Avengers, SG-1.
Warnings: PTSD, past violence
Words: 10,878 this part
Disclaimer: This is fanfic, I own nothing of the characters/worlds/franchises etc. All recognizable characters belong to their creators etc.
All stories in the Widow's Tales
Bruce stared into the open elevator with something approaching resignation.
"You can take the stairs if you want," Natasha said, slipping into the elevator beside Tony and Maria Hill. "It's only twenty-seven stories down."
With a sigh, Bruce shuffled onto the elevator. "That isn't exactly what I'm worried about," he said.
"Cheer up, Doc," Steve said, two steps behind Bruce. The airman, who had been waiting impatiently for the little scene to play out, swiped his card, keyed in a code which Natasha observed without difficulty (Americans, honestly) and down they went.
Maria Hill, who was rather sanguine about being stuck in a tiny metal box with a potential Hulk, said, "Our meeting with the Air Force should only take a few hours, Dr. Banner."
"What I would love to understand," Tony interrupted from the back of the elevator, "Is why we're even doing this in the first place."
"This meeting was requested by the Pentagon," Steve reminded him.
"And when the Pentagon says 'jump', you say over which building?" Tony asked. He snapped his fingers. "Oh right, you do."
"If you boys don't behave," Natasha said, "I am going to turn this elevator around right now."
Steve didn't get the reference and Tony just made a face, but at least the airman relaxed a bit.
Maria sighed.
After enough of a drop for Natasha's ears to pop, the doors opened into grey cement corridors with exposed piping. This was Cheyenne Mountain, the Air Force's underground base of secrets.
Natasha followed Agent Hill and the airman, Bruce at her side. She'd let Steve corral Tony through the corridors this time.
"You okay?" she asked Bruce, voice pitched for his ears only.
He grimaced. "What do you think?"
She smiled at his tone. "See that air vent there?" she asked, flicking her eyes at a non-descript metal grating as they walked past. "Escape hatch. Rumor has it you can climb twenty-seven stories straight up out to the mountain side."
Bruce frowned at her. "Rumor, huh?"
She kept smiling. "You know how spies talk."
Tony suddenly pushed in between Bruce and Natasha. "What are you kids talking about?" he asked. "Hey, did I tell you Stark Industries built half the monitoring equipment up in NORAD?"
"Four times on the plane," Bruce said, relaxing as Tony's arm bumped against his.
"Did I? Fancy that." Tony elbowed Natasha in the shoulder. "How about--"
"If any part of you touches any part of me again, I will rip it off and sell it on the internet," Natasha said without rancor. Ahead of them, the airman turned a corner, and Natasha frowned slightly. The route they were taking didn't track against what she knew about Cheyenne Mountain. They were headed to the old missile silo, and from her (admittedly outdated) intel about Cheyenne Mountain, there were no meeting rooms in that area.
Tony said something, but Natasha didn't pay attention as her senses went on alert. The deeper they got into the mountain, the more things seemed … off. The American soldiers down here wore different uniforms, black-on-black, interspersed amongst the more traditional Air Force blue and Marine green.
Natasha glanced at the rank patches of a passing group of soldiers. A captain, a major, and a staff-sergeant from various branches of the military, more interested in goggling Captain America than anything.
The ranks were trending too high for this to be a regular military post.
Tony jabbed her arm with a finger. "What's with the spy laser gaze?" he asked.
Natasha made herself relax, tossing her hair over her shoulder and smiling brightly at Tony, distracting the soldiers walking past. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, still smiling.
Tony looked downright perturbed. Bruce sighed. "This was not our best idea," he muttered.
The airman stopped and waited for the group to catch up before opening a door. Deputy Director Hill was first into the room in case of any danger. Natasha followed when she saw Maria flash the all-clear signal. Not that the boys would have understood, but Natasha had spent over ten years in SHIELD and in spite of everything, if she couldn't have Clint Barton at her side, Maria Hill was an acceptable back-up agent. So when Natasha entered the room, she wasn't expecting any danger.
What she got was worse.
"General Jack O'Neill," she said. Of course. She put a bit of sway in her walk, just for old time's sake. "Fancy meeting you here."
The man in question, greyer of hair than the last time she'd seen him in a San Francisco hospital, narrowed his eyes at her. "Natasha." It was more challenge than greeting. "You look… okay."
"You too." And he did, in his Air Force blues. He was aging handsomely, and well, she'd always had a thing for old soldiers.
Jack glared at her for another moment, then turned his gaze to Maria. "Deputy Director Hill."
"General O'Neill," Maria said, standing ramrod straight. "Thank you for arranging this meeting."
"Yeah, well, an alien invasion in New York can open so many doors," Jack said. Natasha hid a smirk. She well remembered that snarky tone of his. "So, who'd you bring?"
Introductions were duly made, hands shaken, and Steve very nearly saluted the General. Then Jack turned to the only other person in the room, a man in spectacles and civilian clothes. "This is Dr. Daniel Jackson. Daniel, everyone."
Dr. Jackson nodded at the group. "Hello." He shook hands with Bruce, then Steve. By this point, Tony had grown bored and wandered over to poke at the large glass divider by the shuttered bay windows.
There was a moment of awkward silence, then Jack said, "Daniel's a linguist." He turned to Daniel. "Natasha's Russian."
Natasha glared at Jack, because really, now? But Daniel lit up, saying to her in flawless Russian, "How are you finding your visit to the Mountain?"
"It has been uneventful, so far," Natasha replied in kind, putting on her best Muscovite accent. "Have you worked with the General for a long time?"
"Long enough to know that he's doing this because he knew it will irritate you and distract me."
Natasha smiled. "You know him so well."
The door on the other side of the room opened, and out came another general, then, surprisingly, a man whom Natasha had met years before, when she had been in Colorado Springs to visit her son. At the time, John had said the man's name was Murray. Only now she could see the gleaming gold symbol on ‘Murray's' forehead, and she very much doubted that his name was that American.
The man gave her a grave nod. Then he glanced over her shoulder, and like a suggestible child, Natasha turned around.
Her son stood in the doorway.
Natasha's insides turned to ice as she stared at John Sheppard. All those months without contact, in which Natasha had just assumed that John was away on his usual deployments, suddenly turned sinister.
John was wrong and it took her a heartbeat to realize that he looked nearly a decade younger and fifteen pounds lighter than the last time she had seen him.
John took in the room's occupants without reacting and made his way to the far side of the table, setting a folder down and straightening it automatically.
Heart pounding, Natasha walked around the table. HYDRA agents could have popped out of the ceiling and Natasha might not have noticed. As she got closer to John, she could see the toll that had been taken on him; he had dark circles under his eyes, from stress or illness she could not tell, and his cheekbones were sharp. His uniform hung straight, however, and it took Natasha another glance to realize that a small metal eagle was pinned to his shoulder where a silver leaf had once been.
"Colonel Sheppard," Natasha said evenly, folding her hands together to stop herself from touching John, her son, her baby.
"Agent Romanoff," he responded. He pushed the chair out of his way and leaned on the table, deliberately putting his back to the room.
Natasha took in a breath and let it out so she didn't start screaming. "What happened to you?"
John shrugged. "You know what they say," he said, trying to sound casual. "Being held as a guest of the enemy can take ten years off your life."
His voice never wavered as he held her gaze; his eyes weighed down with pain and loss. Natasha wrapped her emotions into a knot, pushing away the urge to kill.
"Who were they?" Natasha asked. Across the room, Tony was staring at her, frowning, while Bruce spoke to him softly. They wouldn't be able to stop her if she wanted to leave, to seek out the people who had hurt her son--
John smiled, and the expression was sharp with comprehension. "Don't worry about it, they're all dead anyway." He shoved his hands into his pockets, ruining the lines of his uniform.
Natasha breathed for a moment, struck by the sudden similarity John had to his father in this moment, and feeling unexpected grief for a man so many years dead. "I see you've been promoted."
John's expression grew dark. "Yeah, how about that?" he said, sarcasm coating his words. "They take away my city and kick me up the chain of command, seems a fair trade."
It took Natasha a moment to realize what he meant. "They took you off your project?" she demanded. "What about Torren? Teyla and your team?"
"Back on the expedition like they should be," John said, and there was danger in every word.
"What are you doing now?" Natasha asked.
John spread his hands wide. "Colonel Sheppard, in charge of the Independent Projects Division. And by ‘division' I mean me and whoever else has pissed off the General that week."
"What does independent projects even mean?"
"It's other duties as required." John tugged his jacket down. "Look, can we talk about something else? Like, what the hell happened in New York?"
"John--"
His jaw clenched. "I saw footage of some crazy lady flying an alien hovercraft, what's up with that?"
Natasha understood the pain of talking about a broken mission, of losing everyone you cared about, and had to push down every maternal instinct she had. They weren't in a place where they could speak freely about anything. Instead, Natasha sat on the table edge beside John, trusting Steve to watch her back for a few minutes, and pulled a knife from her forearm sheath. She whirled the blade around and mimed stabbing it into an alien's body. "You know, trying to catch a ride in Midtown, the usual."
John took the knife and balanced it in his hand. "Nice edge," he said appreciatively. "What's this made of?"
"An experimental alloy," she said. "You want it? I missed your birthday this year."
"Nah, I'm good," John said, handing back the weapon. He hesitated. "Look, I heard about Coulson. I'm sorry about that."
It was Natasha's turn to shrug. "Line of duty," she said in way of explanation, because Phil Coulson had been dead for six months and his absence, after ten years in her life, still hurt in ways she hadn't thought possible. "It happens."
"Yeah," John commiserated. "How's Barton? I thought you guys were still working together?"
"We are," Natasha said, pushing her emotions back behind the walls in her mind. Absently, she noted Bruce was headed in her direction. "Clint begged off this trip. He hates being underground."
"Wait, that was an option?" Bruce interjected.
Natasha slid off the table, placing her hand on John's arm. For all of his slenderness, he was reassuringly solid under her grip. "Colonel John Sheppard, I'd like you to meet Dr. Bruce Banner."
John stood. "Dr. Banner, it's good to meet you," he said. He shook Bruce's hand, obviously making Bruce a little uneasy. "Your paper in ‘eight-seven on transverse dimensional quantum fields was the only reason I survived my thesis."
Bruce eased his shoulders down. "I didn't think anyone actually read that," he said.
"I liked how you dealt with the difficulties around trying to play with particle physics without destroying the accelerator," John said. At Natasha's raised eyebrows, he added, "What?"
"It's just the idiot flyboy facade makes it easy to forget you have a masters' degree in applied physics," Natasha said.
"Shh," John said. "I keep that stuff quiet around here."
"Why?" Bruce asked.
"Managing expectations," Natasha answered. "Make people think you're harmless so they don't expect you to catch on too quickly to what they're up to."
Bruce looked amused. "Does anyone fall for that with you?"
Natasha tilted her head and smiled her most vacuous American smile. "Every day of the week." She caught Steve's eye, and waved him over. "There's someone I want you to meet," she said to John.
He glared down at her. "I hate you."
"I know you do." She turned as Steve loomed. "Captain Steve Rogers, I'd like you to meet Colonel John Sheppard."
Steve, who had been reaching out with his usual bored air of meet-and-greet, checked his outstretched hand and stared at her, surprised. Then he looked at John again in a new light.
Of course, Natasha mused. In a moment of emotional weakness the previous month, she'd made the mistake of telling Steve about John. But there was nothing to be done about that now.
"Colonel Sheppard," Steve said with enthusiasm. "It's good to meet you."
"Likewise," John said, doing his best to appear laid-back and nonchalant.
Natasha ruined that by saying, "John was a big Captain American fan when he was a child--"
John froze, his ears going red in embarrassment. "Okay, stop," he said in a rush. "I will pay you to stop talking."
"What?" Natasha said, noting how Steve also looked embarrassed, while Bruce was trying to hide his smile. "It's true."
John pointed at a corner of the room. "I'm going to go over there and die of humiliation."
Natasha swatted his arm. "Do it quietly, it's a bad idea to bother the Generals with self-immolation."
The room was beginning to fill up, with the Americans taking seats around the large table. Maria was involved in a conversation with Daniel Jackson, and that left Tony Stark standing alone by the wall, hands in his pockets.
Natasha's attention narrowed. Tony on his own was never a good sign. Tony alone in a room full of military personnel with mysterious purpose was a recipe for disaster.
But Tony was watching the Avengers gather around John Sheppard, an odd expression on his face. And maybe it was Natasha's imagination, but John was being very careful to avoid looking at the corner of the room where Tony had perched.
Strange.
The other general in the room cleared his throat. "I'd like to get started," he said, and everyone found a seat around the table. Natasha ended up between Bruce and 'Murray', with John across the table from her. He appeared less than pleased at being seated next to Tony Stark.
Who was now pretending John didn't exist.
Natasha could feel the stabbing pain of a headache start to build.
The general began. "I'm General Landry, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today."
"On behalf of SHIELD," Maria replied, "We are glad this meeting could finally take place."
Natasha settled back to watch the show.
General Landry looked at Jack. "I'll let General O'Neill start."
Jack slouched in his chair. "So. Since you guys started the summer off with aliens in New York, we thought we should have a little chat in case you ever feel like doing it again."
Steve sat up straight. "Since we started the summer off with aliens?" he repeated.
"Yeah," Jack said, unrepentant. "There are some existing programs that you should know about so we don't have a repeat of five guys in spandex running around saving the world by themselves."
"Five guys and a girl," Natasha interjected.
"In spandex," Jack repeated. He turned to Daniel Jackson. "Doc?"
Dr. Jackson straightened up. "Briefly put," he said, "In 1928 in Egypt, an expedition uncovered a large stone ring of unknown origin, the purpose of which was discovered in 1994 by a group of American military scientists and um, myself."
Natasha's eyes widened. The whirling tendrils of memory and deduction pulled together in her head; The talk of aliens; the occurrences in San Francisco and Area 51 in 2009; the incident over the Antarctic plains in 2004. Combined with an archeologist at a military base and the mention of a 1928 expedition and the stone ring in Egypt, which was legend in Soviet intelligence circles long before Natasha was born -- Natasha suspected she knew what was about to happen.
Dr. Jackson pressed a button on his tablet. A glittering gold hologram of a ring appeared over the table, rotating gently in place. "The people who once used it called this the Chappa'ai, which translates to Stargate."
Bruce sat upright, reaching for his glasses. "And things being what they are," he said, interrupting Dr. Jackson's narrative, "That's a literal description?"
Steve frowned at Bruce's tone. "What does that mean, Doc?"
Tony ran his hand through his hair, destroying the perfectly gelled coif. "That means that SHIELD is about eighteen years behind the curve."
Steve's frown deepened.
Natasha cleared her throat. "Gate is sometimes just another word for doorway," she said, and in a moment, understanding dawned in Steve's eyes. Natasha's stomach cramped, memories of the Tesseract dancing in her head, of the portal open over New York, and she was suddenly very glad that Clint wasn't with them on this mission.
"And haven't we had enough of those for the year," Tony muttered. He reached for the hologram, but his fingers slid through the glowing gold light. "This technology is from the dark ages. How do you steer this thing?"
John took the tablet from Dr. Jackson. He tapped at the screen, and the gold hologram expanded to fill the room. Natasha could see the detail on the ring, esoteric shapes etched onto the hard material.
"This is massively unfair," Tony groused, a hand ghosting over one of the symbols. "The US Military has had access to this kind of technology since the nineties and no one ever thought to bring me into this? What the hell kinds of markings are these?" Before anyone could say anything, he snapped his fingers. "Are these constellations?" he asked, jabbing finger through the hologram.
"Why would you say that?" Natasha asked.
The look Tony gave her was condescension overlain with pity. "Because that? Is Orion. How else are you going to map something across space if you're not using a star map?" he asked.
"How does it work?" Bruce asked, pinning Dr. Jackson with a gaze that was too intense for Natasha's comfort. "I assume that this ‘Gate' opens both ways."
Dr. Jackson glanced at Jack O'Neill, who shrugged. "The Stargate operates off the principle of wormhole physics for interstellar travel," Dr. Jackson said.
"Wonderful. More aliens trying to kill us," Tony snarked. "Seriously, why didn't anyone bring Stark Industries into this program back when you first opened it? We've been improving military technology since before I was born."
John rolled his eyes. "Because," he said, addressing Tony for the first time. "There's no ‘K' in Stargate, Stark."
Tony looked at John with the singular expression of a man who had just seen a chimpanzee behind the wheel of an automobile. "I'm sure you can shove one up in there if you push hard enough, Colonel."
Maria leaned forward and cut into the fray before any violence could start. "General O'Neill," Maria said firmly, drawing everyone's attention. "You're reading us in on your project for what I'm sure are concrete reasons."
"Sure are," Jack replied. He glanced at John, who swiped at the tablet, causing the hologram to vanish. "It's less about the Stargate itself, and more about what we found on the other side."
"Aliens," Tony interjected, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. "Why else would we be having this charming conversation so soon after the Chitauri attacked New York?"
"Tony," Natasha murmured. The man fixed her with a glare, but at her expression, he closed his mouth and sat back. "What's the current threat assessment?"
Jack put his hand on the thick folder in front of him. "Currently? We're doing okay."
"How have we done in the past?" Natasha asked.
"We've... kept a lid on things."
Natasha was not reassured. "Any aliens in particular we should know about?"
Jack inclined his head towards the man at Natasha's side. "Teal'c? You want to fill the lady in?"
Teal'c, as ‘Murray' was apparently known, sat up. He was nearly the size of Steve Rogers, but he carried an ominous stillness about him that Steve lacked. "I am Teal'c," he began. "I was once a Jaffa in service to the false god Apophis, and I now serve my people and the Taurii, what we call your people."
Across the table, Steve's eyes grew wide. "You're an alien?" Steve blurted out, which made Tony roll his eyes. "Sorry, it's just- "
"He's new around here," Tony explained.
Teal'c inclined his head. "You should know of the Goa'uld System Lords who once ruled this galaxy. They have been defeated and no longer pose a threat to the Taurii, yet their impact on the people of this galaxy is not insignificant."
"What do they look like?" Maria asked.
"Like us," Jack said. Natasha raised her eyebrows at him. "No, really. See, the Goa'uld are little parasitic alien snakes that get into your head and wrap about your brainstem to control your body. Nasty little bastards."
"They can control people?" Maria demanded. "Is there any outward indication that someone has been infected?"
"Nope," Jack said. "Not if they want to blend in. They can access a person's memory and pretend to be them, while the parasite is in charge."
Natasha laid her hands flat on the table. "Parasitic aliens can infect people and not give any indication, and you don't consider this to be a threat?" she demanded.
"Relax, we got most of them."
"Most isn't all." Natasha's brain whirled with the possibilities. An agent who could infiltrate the enemy camp by infiltrating the enemy was a truly terrifying thought. "Are there any physical indications?"
"There can be a metallic voice thing going on when they're in egomaniac mode," Jack said. "There's also a glowing eye thing, that's a bit of a give-away."
Glowing eyes. Natasha's breath caught in her throat, memory of trauma wrapped in brutality crashing over her, but Jack was still talking and she needed to pay attention, she had to pay attention.
"The good news is that the Goa'uld are usually too much into their own power trip to hide themselves. They masqueraded as gods for a reason."
Maria held up her hand. "Are you aware of any of these aliens currently operating on Earth?" she asked. "Is there any reason to think of this species as a domestic threat?"
"It is unlikely," Teal'c said. "The Stargate remains the main method of travel across this galaxy, and satellites monitoring your planet would be able to detect any ship approaching the Earth."
"For the last eighteen years," Natasha said. Everyone looked at her. "If you've only known what the Stargate can do for the last eighteen years, some of these aliens could have come here before, right?"
In her head, emotion and memory were causing her body to pump adrenaline into her bloodstream, a physical reaction to the visceral memory of glowing eyes and a metallic voice, of a knife and pain and searing cold.
Yet she kept her face expressionless as Jack acknowledged the possibility, as Tony fidgeted in his seat and Steve looked confused, as John stared at her with his father's eyes and saw nothing.
"It could happen, but it's not likely," Dr. Jackson said.
"But you'd only need to infect the right person," Tony said. "Take me, for instance."
Steve cleared his throat. "Stark- "
"He's right," John said, surprising Natasha. "A Goa'uld infects Tony Stark, who has access to the Iron Man suit, let alone the backing of Stark Industries, and you've got a perfect storm of one person literally being able to take over the world."
"Excuse me, we don't manufacture weapons anymore," Tony interrupted.
"You make arc reactors and pharmaceuticals, you could swap that back to weapons in less than a week," John snapped back. "Let alone the part of the equation where you weaponized yourself."
Tony turned in his chair to glare at John. "You spend a lot of time thinking about how I can take over the world, Sheppard?"
"No, just about how it's extremely difficult for a weapons maker to change his spots," John shot back.
Tony's eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to retort, but Natasha was officially done with this conversation. She stood, walked over to the side of the room where there was a coffee carafe and china mugs, using the interruption to breathe around the fight-or-flight reaction to the conversation.
Decades had passed, but she remembered the man with glowing eyes and the metallic voice as if it was yesterday, remembered how he manipulated people into sacrificing their own lives for his whim.
She remembered how she had pretended to be taken in by him, remembered how he had reacted when she'd been found out.
She remembered the fury with which he had fallen upon her, beating her with his fists and then with the handle of her own pistol before he reached for his knife.
Hands steady as she poured a cup of coffee, she almost gagged at the memory of blood in her mouth choking her, as he pulled back her head to slit her throat, how he hesitated just for a moment, eyes going gold as he-
The door to the room opened and in walked a female Air Force Colonel, tall and blonde. Natasha didn't react in time, stuttering in the Colonel's path with her coffee cup and her flashback, making the Colonel need to step around her, a hand brushing Natasha's wrist when Natasha moved the wrong way.
"Excuse me," the woman said with a smile, and Natasha's heart rate exploded at the touch of the woman's skin on hers (eyes gold but no this woman had blue eyes and her voice held no knife's edge but the touch had been the same, the same).
And the woman was gone, moving around the table like she belonged there, and no one was acting as if anything was wrong, and how would they know? Jack himself had said there was no way to determine if a person was infected with a parasitical alien if the alien didn't want to be found out.
(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son.)
Heart racing, muscles cramping with adrenaline, Natasha returned to her seat, hands steady as she placed her coffee cup on the table and lowered herself into the chair.
(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son, and Tony Stark was the only thing between them and he wasn't in the suit and was thus defenseless.)
Beside her, Bruce coughed and shifted in his chair.
Natasha had her knives. She could jump across the table and decapitate the woman without anyone being quick enough to stop her, if the woman made a move towards John or Tony or Steve. The Hulk could take care of Bruce and Maria was on the far side.
(The woman shifted in her seat and was now seven feet and one inch from Natasha's son.)
Jack O'Neill was talking and Tony kept interrupting and Bruce had clenched his fist in his lap and that wasn't right but there was a woman in the room whose touch had been electric, like the touch of a man decades before with golden eyes and a voice like a knife's blade, a man who had turned on her with an animal fury.
(The woman was speaking and her voice held no sharpness but she was too close to Tony and)
"Nat," John said sharply into the room. Natasha's attention snapped to her son before she could stop herself, a potentially fatal mistake with a woman in the room whose touch had been electric. "Sam's not a threat."
On the last word, everyone reacted. Tony swung around to stare at the woman at his side, Steve straightened up in his chair, Maria looked around, and Bruce-
Letting out a breath, Natasha put her hand on Bruce's forearm, feeling the muscles and tendons in his arm solid with tension.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Natasha said, keeping her voice light and slightly puzzled, even as she slid her hand down to Bruce's wrist. His skin was hot and dry but there was no tint of green, not now, not yet.
"Colonel Carter is not a Goa'uld," John went on, his hands flat on the table, unthreatening.
"What?" the woman said, looking at Natasha with wide eyes. "Sheppard, what are you talking about?"
"I think Agent Romanoff has encountered a Goa'uld before," John said, never taking his eyes off Natasha.
Natasha raised a warning eyebrow at John. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"I think you do," John shot back.
"Sheppard, what's going on?" Jack asked quietly.
"Just that I think Agent Romanoff has a bit more experience with Goa'uld than we'd have thought, sir."
Tony rolled his chair away from the woman Sam. "So if the Colonel here isn't one of these alien people," he said, "Why does Romanoff thinks she is?"
The undercurrents in the room were loud enough to make Natasha's head ache, tendrils and hints, and it may have been something in John's eyes that made Natasha pull it all together into a singular, horrifying picture. "She was," Natasha said, unable to stop herself from tightening her grip on Bruce's wrist. "That's why you said she isn't a Goa'uld. You mean she isn't one now."
A moment's stillness, in which Natasha realized she was right. The woman had once been a Goa'uld, and was no longer.
Natasha hadn't been wrong.
Go to Chapter 1, Part 2
Chapter 2 will be up tomorrow. I'm having to post each part in two bits on LJ as the posting limit is hit around 6,000 words.
Let me know what you think.
Widow's Walk (1/2)
An Avengers/Stargate story
by mhalachaiswords
At AO3
Summary: Four months after New York, the Avengers are asked to take part in a military briefing at Cheyenne Mountain. It’s perfectly understandable if Natasha has a bad feeling about this...
Rating: PG
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, John Sheppard, the Avengers, SG-1.
Warnings: PTSD, past violence
Words: 10,878 this part
Disclaimer: This is fanfic, I own nothing of the characters/worlds/franchises etc. All recognizable characters belong to their creators etc.
All stories in the Widow's Tales
Bruce stared into the open elevator with something approaching resignation.
"You can take the stairs if you want," Natasha said, slipping into the elevator beside Tony and Maria Hill. "It's only twenty-seven stories down."
With a sigh, Bruce shuffled onto the elevator. "That isn't exactly what I'm worried about," he said.
"Cheer up, Doc," Steve said, two steps behind Bruce. The airman, who had been waiting impatiently for the little scene to play out, swiped his card, keyed in a code which Natasha observed without difficulty (Americans, honestly) and down they went.
Maria Hill, who was rather sanguine about being stuck in a tiny metal box with a potential Hulk, said, "Our meeting with the Air Force should only take a few hours, Dr. Banner."
"What I would love to understand," Tony interrupted from the back of the elevator, "Is why we're even doing this in the first place."
"This meeting was requested by the Pentagon," Steve reminded him.
"And when the Pentagon says 'jump', you say over which building?" Tony asked. He snapped his fingers. "Oh right, you do."
"If you boys don't behave," Natasha said, "I am going to turn this elevator around right now."
Steve didn't get the reference and Tony just made a face, but at least the airman relaxed a bit.
Maria sighed.
After enough of a drop for Natasha's ears to pop, the doors opened into grey cement corridors with exposed piping. This was Cheyenne Mountain, the Air Force's underground base of secrets.
Natasha followed Agent Hill and the airman, Bruce at her side. She'd let Steve corral Tony through the corridors this time.
"You okay?" she asked Bruce, voice pitched for his ears only.
He grimaced. "What do you think?"
She smiled at his tone. "See that air vent there?" she asked, flicking her eyes at a non-descript metal grating as they walked past. "Escape hatch. Rumor has it you can climb twenty-seven stories straight up out to the mountain side."
Bruce frowned at her. "Rumor, huh?"
She kept smiling. "You know how spies talk."
Tony suddenly pushed in between Bruce and Natasha. "What are you kids talking about?" he asked. "Hey, did I tell you Stark Industries built half the monitoring equipment up in NORAD?"
"Four times on the plane," Bruce said, relaxing as Tony's arm bumped against his.
"Did I? Fancy that." Tony elbowed Natasha in the shoulder. "How about--"
"If any part of you touches any part of me again, I will rip it off and sell it on the internet," Natasha said without rancor. Ahead of them, the airman turned a corner, and Natasha frowned slightly. The route they were taking didn't track against what she knew about Cheyenne Mountain. They were headed to the old missile silo, and from her (admittedly outdated) intel about Cheyenne Mountain, there were no meeting rooms in that area.
Tony said something, but Natasha didn't pay attention as her senses went on alert. The deeper they got into the mountain, the more things seemed … off. The American soldiers down here wore different uniforms, black-on-black, interspersed amongst the more traditional Air Force blue and Marine green.
Natasha glanced at the rank patches of a passing group of soldiers. A captain, a major, and a staff-sergeant from various branches of the military, more interested in goggling Captain America than anything.
The ranks were trending too high for this to be a regular military post.
Tony jabbed her arm with a finger. "What's with the spy laser gaze?" he asked.
Natasha made herself relax, tossing her hair over her shoulder and smiling brightly at Tony, distracting the soldiers walking past. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, still smiling.
Tony looked downright perturbed. Bruce sighed. "This was not our best idea," he muttered.
The airman stopped and waited for the group to catch up before opening a door. Deputy Director Hill was first into the room in case of any danger. Natasha followed when she saw Maria flash the all-clear signal. Not that the boys would have understood, but Natasha had spent over ten years in SHIELD and in spite of everything, if she couldn't have Clint Barton at her side, Maria Hill was an acceptable back-up agent. So when Natasha entered the room, she wasn't expecting any danger.
What she got was worse.
"General Jack O'Neill," she said. Of course. She put a bit of sway in her walk, just for old time's sake. "Fancy meeting you here."
The man in question, greyer of hair than the last time she'd seen him in a San Francisco hospital, narrowed his eyes at her. "Natasha." It was more challenge than greeting. "You look… okay."
"You too." And he did, in his Air Force blues. He was aging handsomely, and well, she'd always had a thing for old soldiers.
Jack glared at her for another moment, then turned his gaze to Maria. "Deputy Director Hill."
"General O'Neill," Maria said, standing ramrod straight. "Thank you for arranging this meeting."
"Yeah, well, an alien invasion in New York can open so many doors," Jack said. Natasha hid a smirk. She well remembered that snarky tone of his. "So, who'd you bring?"
Introductions were duly made, hands shaken, and Steve very nearly saluted the General. Then Jack turned to the only other person in the room, a man in spectacles and civilian clothes. "This is Dr. Daniel Jackson. Daniel, everyone."
Dr. Jackson nodded at the group. "Hello." He shook hands with Bruce, then Steve. By this point, Tony had grown bored and wandered over to poke at the large glass divider by the shuttered bay windows.
There was a moment of awkward silence, then Jack said, "Daniel's a linguist." He turned to Daniel. "Natasha's Russian."
Natasha glared at Jack, because really, now? But Daniel lit up, saying to her in flawless Russian, "How are you finding your visit to the Mountain?"
"It has been uneventful, so far," Natasha replied in kind, putting on her best Muscovite accent. "Have you worked with the General for a long time?"
"Long enough to know that he's doing this because he knew it will irritate you and distract me."
Natasha smiled. "You know him so well."
The door on the other side of the room opened, and out came another general, then, surprisingly, a man whom Natasha had met years before, when she had been in Colorado Springs to visit her son. At the time, John had said the man's name was Murray. Only now she could see the gleaming gold symbol on ‘Murray's' forehead, and she very much doubted that his name was that American.
The man gave her a grave nod. Then he glanced over her shoulder, and like a suggestible child, Natasha turned around.
Her son stood in the doorway.
Natasha's insides turned to ice as she stared at John Sheppard. All those months without contact, in which Natasha had just assumed that John was away on his usual deployments, suddenly turned sinister.
John was wrong and it took her a heartbeat to realize that he looked nearly a decade younger and fifteen pounds lighter than the last time she had seen him.
John took in the room's occupants without reacting and made his way to the far side of the table, setting a folder down and straightening it automatically.
Heart pounding, Natasha walked around the table. HYDRA agents could have popped out of the ceiling and Natasha might not have noticed. As she got closer to John, she could see the toll that had been taken on him; he had dark circles under his eyes, from stress or illness she could not tell, and his cheekbones were sharp. His uniform hung straight, however, and it took Natasha another glance to realize that a small metal eagle was pinned to his shoulder where a silver leaf had once been.
"Colonel Sheppard," Natasha said evenly, folding her hands together to stop herself from touching John, her son, her baby.
"Agent Romanoff," he responded. He pushed the chair out of his way and leaned on the table, deliberately putting his back to the room.
Natasha took in a breath and let it out so she didn't start screaming. "What happened to you?"
John shrugged. "You know what they say," he said, trying to sound casual. "Being held as a guest of the enemy can take ten years off your life."
His voice never wavered as he held her gaze; his eyes weighed down with pain and loss. Natasha wrapped her emotions into a knot, pushing away the urge to kill.
"Who were they?" Natasha asked. Across the room, Tony was staring at her, frowning, while Bruce spoke to him softly. They wouldn't be able to stop her if she wanted to leave, to seek out the people who had hurt her son--
John smiled, and the expression was sharp with comprehension. "Don't worry about it, they're all dead anyway." He shoved his hands into his pockets, ruining the lines of his uniform.
Natasha breathed for a moment, struck by the sudden similarity John had to his father in this moment, and feeling unexpected grief for a man so many years dead. "I see you've been promoted."
John's expression grew dark. "Yeah, how about that?" he said, sarcasm coating his words. "They take away my city and kick me up the chain of command, seems a fair trade."
It took Natasha a moment to realize what he meant. "They took you off your project?" she demanded. "What about Torren? Teyla and your team?"
"Back on the expedition like they should be," John said, and there was danger in every word.
"What are you doing now?" Natasha asked.
John spread his hands wide. "Colonel Sheppard, in charge of the Independent Projects Division. And by ‘division' I mean me and whoever else has pissed off the General that week."
"What does independent projects even mean?"
"It's other duties as required." John tugged his jacket down. "Look, can we talk about something else? Like, what the hell happened in New York?"
"John--"
His jaw clenched. "I saw footage of some crazy lady flying an alien hovercraft, what's up with that?"
Natasha understood the pain of talking about a broken mission, of losing everyone you cared about, and had to push down every maternal instinct she had. They weren't in a place where they could speak freely about anything. Instead, Natasha sat on the table edge beside John, trusting Steve to watch her back for a few minutes, and pulled a knife from her forearm sheath. She whirled the blade around and mimed stabbing it into an alien's body. "You know, trying to catch a ride in Midtown, the usual."
John took the knife and balanced it in his hand. "Nice edge," he said appreciatively. "What's this made of?"
"An experimental alloy," she said. "You want it? I missed your birthday this year."
"Nah, I'm good," John said, handing back the weapon. He hesitated. "Look, I heard about Coulson. I'm sorry about that."
It was Natasha's turn to shrug. "Line of duty," she said in way of explanation, because Phil Coulson had been dead for six months and his absence, after ten years in her life, still hurt in ways she hadn't thought possible. "It happens."
"Yeah," John commiserated. "How's Barton? I thought you guys were still working together?"
"We are," Natasha said, pushing her emotions back behind the walls in her mind. Absently, she noted Bruce was headed in her direction. "Clint begged off this trip. He hates being underground."
"Wait, that was an option?" Bruce interjected.
Natasha slid off the table, placing her hand on John's arm. For all of his slenderness, he was reassuringly solid under her grip. "Colonel John Sheppard, I'd like you to meet Dr. Bruce Banner."
John stood. "Dr. Banner, it's good to meet you," he said. He shook Bruce's hand, obviously making Bruce a little uneasy. "Your paper in ‘eight-seven on transverse dimensional quantum fields was the only reason I survived my thesis."
Bruce eased his shoulders down. "I didn't think anyone actually read that," he said.
"I liked how you dealt with the difficulties around trying to play with particle physics without destroying the accelerator," John said. At Natasha's raised eyebrows, he added, "What?"
"It's just the idiot flyboy facade makes it easy to forget you have a masters' degree in applied physics," Natasha said.
"Shh," John said. "I keep that stuff quiet around here."
"Why?" Bruce asked.
"Managing expectations," Natasha answered. "Make people think you're harmless so they don't expect you to catch on too quickly to what they're up to."
Bruce looked amused. "Does anyone fall for that with you?"
Natasha tilted her head and smiled her most vacuous American smile. "Every day of the week." She caught Steve's eye, and waved him over. "There's someone I want you to meet," she said to John.
He glared down at her. "I hate you."
"I know you do." She turned as Steve loomed. "Captain Steve Rogers, I'd like you to meet Colonel John Sheppard."
Steve, who had been reaching out with his usual bored air of meet-and-greet, checked his outstretched hand and stared at her, surprised. Then he looked at John again in a new light.
Of course, Natasha mused. In a moment of emotional weakness the previous month, she'd made the mistake of telling Steve about John. But there was nothing to be done about that now.
"Colonel Sheppard," Steve said with enthusiasm. "It's good to meet you."
"Likewise," John said, doing his best to appear laid-back and nonchalant.
Natasha ruined that by saying, "John was a big Captain American fan when he was a child--"
John froze, his ears going red in embarrassment. "Okay, stop," he said in a rush. "I will pay you to stop talking."
"What?" Natasha said, noting how Steve also looked embarrassed, while Bruce was trying to hide his smile. "It's true."
John pointed at a corner of the room. "I'm going to go over there and die of humiliation."
Natasha swatted his arm. "Do it quietly, it's a bad idea to bother the Generals with self-immolation."
The room was beginning to fill up, with the Americans taking seats around the large table. Maria was involved in a conversation with Daniel Jackson, and that left Tony Stark standing alone by the wall, hands in his pockets.
Natasha's attention narrowed. Tony on his own was never a good sign. Tony alone in a room full of military personnel with mysterious purpose was a recipe for disaster.
But Tony was watching the Avengers gather around John Sheppard, an odd expression on his face. And maybe it was Natasha's imagination, but John was being very careful to avoid looking at the corner of the room where Tony had perched.
Strange.
The other general in the room cleared his throat. "I'd like to get started," he said, and everyone found a seat around the table. Natasha ended up between Bruce and 'Murray', with John across the table from her. He appeared less than pleased at being seated next to Tony Stark.
Who was now pretending John didn't exist.
Natasha could feel the stabbing pain of a headache start to build.
The general began. "I'm General Landry, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today."
"On behalf of SHIELD," Maria replied, "We are glad this meeting could finally take place."
Natasha settled back to watch the show.
General Landry looked at Jack. "I'll let General O'Neill start."
Jack slouched in his chair. "So. Since you guys started the summer off with aliens in New York, we thought we should have a little chat in case you ever feel like doing it again."
Steve sat up straight. "Since we started the summer off with aliens?" he repeated.
"Yeah," Jack said, unrepentant. "There are some existing programs that you should know about so we don't have a repeat of five guys in spandex running around saving the world by themselves."
"Five guys and a girl," Natasha interjected.
"In spandex," Jack repeated. He turned to Daniel Jackson. "Doc?"
Dr. Jackson straightened up. "Briefly put," he said, "In 1928 in Egypt, an expedition uncovered a large stone ring of unknown origin, the purpose of which was discovered in 1994 by a group of American military scientists and um, myself."
Natasha's eyes widened. The whirling tendrils of memory and deduction pulled together in her head; The talk of aliens; the occurrences in San Francisco and Area 51 in 2009; the incident over the Antarctic plains in 2004. Combined with an archeologist at a military base and the mention of a 1928 expedition and the stone ring in Egypt, which was legend in Soviet intelligence circles long before Natasha was born -- Natasha suspected she knew what was about to happen.
Dr. Jackson pressed a button on his tablet. A glittering gold hologram of a ring appeared over the table, rotating gently in place. "The people who once used it called this the Chappa'ai, which translates to Stargate."
Bruce sat upright, reaching for his glasses. "And things being what they are," he said, interrupting Dr. Jackson's narrative, "That's a literal description?"
Steve frowned at Bruce's tone. "What does that mean, Doc?"
Tony ran his hand through his hair, destroying the perfectly gelled coif. "That means that SHIELD is about eighteen years behind the curve."
Steve's frown deepened.
Natasha cleared her throat. "Gate is sometimes just another word for doorway," she said, and in a moment, understanding dawned in Steve's eyes. Natasha's stomach cramped, memories of the Tesseract dancing in her head, of the portal open over New York, and she was suddenly very glad that Clint wasn't with them on this mission.
"And haven't we had enough of those for the year," Tony muttered. He reached for the hologram, but his fingers slid through the glowing gold light. "This technology is from the dark ages. How do you steer this thing?"
John took the tablet from Dr. Jackson. He tapped at the screen, and the gold hologram expanded to fill the room. Natasha could see the detail on the ring, esoteric shapes etched onto the hard material.
"This is massively unfair," Tony groused, a hand ghosting over one of the symbols. "The US Military has had access to this kind of technology since the nineties and no one ever thought to bring me into this? What the hell kinds of markings are these?" Before anyone could say anything, he snapped his fingers. "Are these constellations?" he asked, jabbing finger through the hologram.
"Why would you say that?" Natasha asked.
The look Tony gave her was condescension overlain with pity. "Because that? Is Orion. How else are you going to map something across space if you're not using a star map?" he asked.
"How does it work?" Bruce asked, pinning Dr. Jackson with a gaze that was too intense for Natasha's comfort. "I assume that this ‘Gate' opens both ways."
Dr. Jackson glanced at Jack O'Neill, who shrugged. "The Stargate operates off the principle of wormhole physics for interstellar travel," Dr. Jackson said.
"Wonderful. More aliens trying to kill us," Tony snarked. "Seriously, why didn't anyone bring Stark Industries into this program back when you first opened it? We've been improving military technology since before I was born."
John rolled his eyes. "Because," he said, addressing Tony for the first time. "There's no ‘K' in Stargate, Stark."
Tony looked at John with the singular expression of a man who had just seen a chimpanzee behind the wheel of an automobile. "I'm sure you can shove one up in there if you push hard enough, Colonel."
Maria leaned forward and cut into the fray before any violence could start. "General O'Neill," Maria said firmly, drawing everyone's attention. "You're reading us in on your project for what I'm sure are concrete reasons."
"Sure are," Jack replied. He glanced at John, who swiped at the tablet, causing the hologram to vanish. "It's less about the Stargate itself, and more about what we found on the other side."
"Aliens," Tony interjected, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. "Why else would we be having this charming conversation so soon after the Chitauri attacked New York?"
"Tony," Natasha murmured. The man fixed her with a glare, but at her expression, he closed his mouth and sat back. "What's the current threat assessment?"
Jack put his hand on the thick folder in front of him. "Currently? We're doing okay."
"How have we done in the past?" Natasha asked.
"We've... kept a lid on things."
Natasha was not reassured. "Any aliens in particular we should know about?"
Jack inclined his head towards the man at Natasha's side. "Teal'c? You want to fill the lady in?"
Teal'c, as ‘Murray' was apparently known, sat up. He was nearly the size of Steve Rogers, but he carried an ominous stillness about him that Steve lacked. "I am Teal'c," he began. "I was once a Jaffa in service to the false god Apophis, and I now serve my people and the Taurii, what we call your people."
Across the table, Steve's eyes grew wide. "You're an alien?" Steve blurted out, which made Tony roll his eyes. "Sorry, it's just- "
"He's new around here," Tony explained.
Teal'c inclined his head. "You should know of the Goa'uld System Lords who once ruled this galaxy. They have been defeated and no longer pose a threat to the Taurii, yet their impact on the people of this galaxy is not insignificant."
"What do they look like?" Maria asked.
"Like us," Jack said. Natasha raised her eyebrows at him. "No, really. See, the Goa'uld are little parasitic alien snakes that get into your head and wrap about your brainstem to control your body. Nasty little bastards."
"They can control people?" Maria demanded. "Is there any outward indication that someone has been infected?"
"Nope," Jack said. "Not if they want to blend in. They can access a person's memory and pretend to be them, while the parasite is in charge."
Natasha laid her hands flat on the table. "Parasitic aliens can infect people and not give any indication, and you don't consider this to be a threat?" she demanded.
"Relax, we got most of them."
"Most isn't all." Natasha's brain whirled with the possibilities. An agent who could infiltrate the enemy camp by infiltrating the enemy was a truly terrifying thought. "Are there any physical indications?"
"There can be a metallic voice thing going on when they're in egomaniac mode," Jack said. "There's also a glowing eye thing, that's a bit of a give-away."
Glowing eyes. Natasha's breath caught in her throat, memory of trauma wrapped in brutality crashing over her, but Jack was still talking and she needed to pay attention, she had to pay attention.
"The good news is that the Goa'uld are usually too much into their own power trip to hide themselves. They masqueraded as gods for a reason."
Maria held up her hand. "Are you aware of any of these aliens currently operating on Earth?" she asked. "Is there any reason to think of this species as a domestic threat?"
"It is unlikely," Teal'c said. "The Stargate remains the main method of travel across this galaxy, and satellites monitoring your planet would be able to detect any ship approaching the Earth."
"For the last eighteen years," Natasha said. Everyone looked at her. "If you've only known what the Stargate can do for the last eighteen years, some of these aliens could have come here before, right?"
In her head, emotion and memory were causing her body to pump adrenaline into her bloodstream, a physical reaction to the visceral memory of glowing eyes and a metallic voice, of a knife and pain and searing cold.
Yet she kept her face expressionless as Jack acknowledged the possibility, as Tony fidgeted in his seat and Steve looked confused, as John stared at her with his father's eyes and saw nothing.
"It could happen, but it's not likely," Dr. Jackson said.
"But you'd only need to infect the right person," Tony said. "Take me, for instance."
Steve cleared his throat. "Stark- "
"He's right," John said, surprising Natasha. "A Goa'uld infects Tony Stark, who has access to the Iron Man suit, let alone the backing of Stark Industries, and you've got a perfect storm of one person literally being able to take over the world."
"Excuse me, we don't manufacture weapons anymore," Tony interrupted.
"You make arc reactors and pharmaceuticals, you could swap that back to weapons in less than a week," John snapped back. "Let alone the part of the equation where you weaponized yourself."
Tony turned in his chair to glare at John. "You spend a lot of time thinking about how I can take over the world, Sheppard?"
"No, just about how it's extremely difficult for a weapons maker to change his spots," John shot back.
Tony's eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to retort, but Natasha was officially done with this conversation. She stood, walked over to the side of the room where there was a coffee carafe and china mugs, using the interruption to breathe around the fight-or-flight reaction to the conversation.
Decades had passed, but she remembered the man with glowing eyes and the metallic voice as if it was yesterday, remembered how he manipulated people into sacrificing their own lives for his whim.
She remembered how she had pretended to be taken in by him, remembered how he had reacted when she'd been found out.
She remembered the fury with which he had fallen upon her, beating her with his fists and then with the handle of her own pistol before he reached for his knife.
Hands steady as she poured a cup of coffee, she almost gagged at the memory of blood in her mouth choking her, as he pulled back her head to slit her throat, how he hesitated just for a moment, eyes going gold as he-
The door to the room opened and in walked a female Air Force Colonel, tall and blonde. Natasha didn't react in time, stuttering in the Colonel's path with her coffee cup and her flashback, making the Colonel need to step around her, a hand brushing Natasha's wrist when Natasha moved the wrong way.
"Excuse me," the woman said with a smile, and Natasha's heart rate exploded at the touch of the woman's skin on hers (eyes gold but no this woman had blue eyes and her voice held no knife's edge but the touch had been the same, the same).
And the woman was gone, moving around the table like she belonged there, and no one was acting as if anything was wrong, and how would they know? Jack himself had said there was no way to determine if a person was infected with a parasitical alien if the alien didn't want to be found out.
(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son.)
Heart racing, muscles cramping with adrenaline, Natasha returned to her seat, hands steady as she placed her coffee cup on the table and lowered herself into the chair.
(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son, and Tony Stark was the only thing between them and he wasn't in the suit and was thus defenseless.)
Beside her, Bruce coughed and shifted in his chair.
Natasha had her knives. She could jump across the table and decapitate the woman without anyone being quick enough to stop her, if the woman made a move towards John or Tony or Steve. The Hulk could take care of Bruce and Maria was on the far side.
(The woman shifted in her seat and was now seven feet and one inch from Natasha's son.)
Jack O'Neill was talking and Tony kept interrupting and Bruce had clenched his fist in his lap and that wasn't right but there was a woman in the room whose touch had been electric, like the touch of a man decades before with golden eyes and a voice like a knife's blade, a man who had turned on her with an animal fury.
(The woman was speaking and her voice held no sharpness but she was too close to Tony and)
"Nat," John said sharply into the room. Natasha's attention snapped to her son before she could stop herself, a potentially fatal mistake with a woman in the room whose touch had been electric. "Sam's not a threat."
On the last word, everyone reacted. Tony swung around to stare at the woman at his side, Steve straightened up in his chair, Maria looked around, and Bruce-
Letting out a breath, Natasha put her hand on Bruce's forearm, feeling the muscles and tendons in his arm solid with tension.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Natasha said, keeping her voice light and slightly puzzled, even as she slid her hand down to Bruce's wrist. His skin was hot and dry but there was no tint of green, not now, not yet.
"Colonel Carter is not a Goa'uld," John went on, his hands flat on the table, unthreatening.
"What?" the woman said, looking at Natasha with wide eyes. "Sheppard, what are you talking about?"
"I think Agent Romanoff has encountered a Goa'uld before," John said, never taking his eyes off Natasha.
Natasha raised a warning eyebrow at John. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"I think you do," John shot back.
"Sheppard, what's going on?" Jack asked quietly.
"Just that I think Agent Romanoff has a bit more experience with Goa'uld than we'd have thought, sir."
Tony rolled his chair away from the woman Sam. "So if the Colonel here isn't one of these alien people," he said, "Why does Romanoff thinks she is?"
The undercurrents in the room were loud enough to make Natasha's head ache, tendrils and hints, and it may have been something in John's eyes that made Natasha pull it all together into a singular, horrifying picture. "She was," Natasha said, unable to stop herself from tightening her grip on Bruce's wrist. "That's why you said she isn't a Goa'uld. You mean she isn't one now."
A moment's stillness, in which Natasha realized she was right. The woman had once been a Goa'uld, and was no longer.
Natasha hadn't been wrong.
Go to Chapter 1, Part 2