It was all Kyria's fault.
Whatever complicated naming scheme she chose to use, it was the bloody Morningstar’s fault.
Because, if not for the Original Ninja, Bela probably wouldn't be alive to be in this situation, and while she was undeniably grateful to have avoided the unpleasant and inevitable expiration of her contract, that made this mess no less Kyria's fault.
Prior to making her alternate deal with the half-human Morningstar, she put herself first. Always. No matter who or what else happened. She came first, whatever job she was doing might be second. But then Bela crossed paths with the Winchesters, and they crossed paths with the Morningstar, and neither crossing ever untangled.
On the upside, a botched attempt to procure an item she might have been able to turn into an extension ended up rewriting the entire contract. Sure the capture was embarrassing, the gun stand-off was insulting, and the Morningstar name freaked her out more than she would ever admit to, but she got a clean slate, a legit job, and her deadline vanished in a ritual smelling vaguely of ash and ozone. Rather better than an extension.
Plus, she got to terrorize hapless little office drones who wouldn't last five minutes against any of the things she covered up SHIELD's knowledge of. And she well on her way to successfully emailing a hex bag. Definitely fringe benefits.
On the other hand, Agent Williams had some irritatingly helpful, altruistic tendencies. The kind that had Bela staring at her office door in horror as the automated door locks locked because Morningstar and her merry band of do-gooders threatened a decades old secret organization, who in turn activated their army of sleeper agents, and as SHIELD crashed and burned someone triggered Morningstar’s Hub lockdown systems. Whether it was the zombie Nazis or genuine SHIELD agents didn't matter as much as the fact that Bela was locked in a building falling into (semi-controlled) civil war instead of hightailing it far, far away from the inevitable chaos like a reasonable pre-Kyria Bela would have.
Her computer wasn't working. Her phone, a gift from Morningstar herself, did, but calling for help wouldn't exactly do her any good. The entire ninja network knew about this particular, non-supernatural, threat. And the fact that she even gave serious consideration to warning anyone before saving her own skin told her just how deep Morningstar and her friends' insidious caring had gotten. If this new, formerly foreign lifestyle wasn't (generally) so much less stressful, she might have shuddered.
Just because Kyria speculated that the altered contract may allow Bela to survive otherwise fatal occurrences didn’t mean she wanted to test that particular theory! Although the witchcraft clearly indicated there were effects of the contract other than not running from hellhounds.
Still. It was Kyria’s fault she was in a position to have to test the limits of her new contract.
She certainly couldn’t unlock the door. Even if she could, she had no particular desire to walk into a firefight without any way to distinguish the sides. Nor could she sneak out through Barton's "roadways." She could try hacking into Hub security, but while her skills were nothing to sneeze at, she wasn’t at the level of Ash or Charlie or even their minions. She could out-hack Lewis, but the former-intern’s only interest in hacking SHIELD was to leave agents with “appropriate mood music.” Not particularly helpful right now.
That left Bela with keeping her gun close at hand while she tried to work out the kinks in her email hexes (because trapped or not, she had a vindictive streak) and waited for whoever controlled the Hub to put in an appearance.
***
She heard the footsteps before the down unlocked and swung open. In the various scenarios she imagined, Bela never envisioned aiming her gun at Victoria Hand's head as the level 8 agent entered the office, flanked by two guards. Didn't mean she was dropping her gun until she knew which side her visitors supported.
"Who won?" she asked before the command agent could say anything. Elizabeth Isabelle Williams was personal assistant to an Avenger; desk jockey or not, Bela refused to be a pushover. If the not very well hidden surprise was any indicator, Hand hadn’t figured that out yet.
"Won what?" Hand asked, also failing – possibly deliberately – to hide genuine confusion.
"The battle for the Hub, obviously," Bela retorted, gun steady. "The war is a bit too large scale to be over yet, even for the remarkable tenacity of Cap and Co. HYDRA's just got too many heads."
Hand needed more or better practice at hiding her reactions because Bela could read her surprise and increased wariness like an open book. "You know about HYDRA?"
"Who do you think helped handle the legwork involved in declassifying every SHIELD file ever? Kyria didn't give me a fancy-ass upgraded StarkPhone so I could sit on my ass during the biggest shitstorm SHIELD's ever seen."
It was like the senior agent wasn't even trying. Eh. Maybe that's what happened when a former con artist got lessons in disguise and acting from the Black Widow. Senior agent training just couldn’t compare.
"I thought Agent Lux was on Asgard."
"Like that would stop her?" Bela asked rhetorically. Hand had no idea who she was dealing with. “She got Dawn involved.”
"Agent Morrow? What makes you think either she or Agent Lux isn't HYDRA?"
Black Widow training or not, Bela couldn't help herself – she laughed. "That's a good one. Tell me another."
Hand did not appear to be impressed.
"In all seriousness, if Kyria was HYDRA, we would all be doomed. The entire damn planet would be doomed, whether or not it kept spinning."
If the raised eyebrow was any indication, Hand considered that more hyperbole than truth.
Apparently even senior agents underestimated the Avengers. How they got to be senior agents with that attitude, Bela didn’t know, but, well, the Avengers were still pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Maybe Hand got her shiny Level 8 Promotion before aliens flew out of a hole in the sky above New York.
“And Agent Morrow?”
“Dawn and Kyria are two sides of the same coin,” she replied, idly wondering how long her boss would be able to keep that particular charade up. “But where Kyria was willing to be dragged into the privacy-nightmare that was New York, Dawn managed to keep her head down. Mostly,” Bela added, remembering that Dawn was officially Coulson’s doctor for that and had recently been dodging mercenaries as a result.
“So Morrow follows where Lux leads?” Hand attempted to translate.
“Something like that.” It was a fair translation for anyone who didn’t know the whole dual-identities thing.
“And you don’t believe Lux to be HYDRA, Agent Williams?”
Bela gave a very unladylike snort. “Kyria is more than capable of taking over the world, certainly better than HYDRA ever managed.”
Hand raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
Bela just grinned. "Kyria rarely showed anything past the surface of what she was capable of. And when she did, Fury had it covered up."
"Director Fury is dead," Hand countered, "in addition to having been involved in suspicious activity immediately preceding that state."
"Fury put himself on HYDRA's hit list by investigating their suspicious activity," Bela retorted. Her vindictive bitch side poked its head up again. "Besides, Pierce is the HYDRA bigwig, although it might be 'was' by this point."
"Fury was hand-picked by Pierce," Hand reminded her, taking remarkably little time to adjust to that little revelation. SHIELD training had to be good for something. "Much like Lux is all but Fury's protégé."
"Yes, and Lux owns me. Doesn't change a damn thing."
Hand raised her eyebrows, steadfastly ignoring the gun still aimed between them. "She owns you?" She shook her head. "Any contract can be broken."
Bela shrugged, aim not wavering with the motion. Sometimes-student of Black Widow and Hawkeye. Obviously superior to senior agent training. (Especially when HYDRA had both the trainers and the agents.) "This was as far as we could bend it the first time. Besides, severely misplaced do-gooding aside, Kyria is the clear choice. It's not even a contest."
Her gaze briefly darted from Hand to each of the armed support agents. Then she abruptly flicked the safety on and tucked the gun into her waistband.
"What?" Bela said in response to Hand's somewhat incredulous expression. "I probably should have done that five minutes ago. You do the ambiguous act well, but you don't have the right body language for fanatics. I've met more than a few. And if you're not HYDRA, you should be worrying more about them and less about Agent Lux."
Especially since Agent Lux wasn't the face showing at the moment. Kyria was currently ping-ponging between Agent Morrow and Morningstar.
***
Hand came fully equipped with a no-nonsense attitude that made her surprisingly smart, if a little (justifiably) heavy-handed, about the whole HYDRA surprise. Not so smart about interpreting Phil Coulson’s enthusiastically-bending-the-rulebook attitude as being HYDRA, but then she didn't know Phil the way Bela did. Granted, Bela hadn't seen Agent Garrett as the problem either, but she hadn't been looking.
By the time the last of the HYDRA agents were cleared from the Hub, the entire fiasco was headlining on all the major news networks. Bela couldn’t help but grimace.
That's what happened when three SHIELD helicarriers turned on each other and crashed into the Potomac, smashing into the Triskelion on the way down. Not to mention the wealth of formerly classified information trending all across the internet. This would be the leading story for weeks.
Hand was feeling the pressure already, seeing how she and Phil were officially the highest ranking SHIELD agents not HYDRA or dead. (Unofficially was always another story. Like, say, a certain one-eyed director. And she gave Hill good odds on getting out of the Triskelion alive with Captain Rogers calling the shots.) Since whatever the fuck Kyria (Dawn) was doing now she would probably want to keep an eye on how SHIELD was coping, Bela attached herself to Hand.
"I spent the past five years as personal assistant to Fury's protégé turned celebrity Avenger," Bela said dryly. "I think I'm more than qualified to help you juggle the flaming remnants of SHIELD."
Hand couldn't argue with that.
***
With the plane on course to the Fridge, Bela found herself a nice, out of the way room to work on a suitable curse for "the Clairvoyant." It was all well and good that she thought she’d worked the kinks out of her electronic curse, but Garrett wasn’t ever going to pick up his phone again, much less check his email. It was more about intent than ingredients, though, so she was trying to rig up something that would activate when someone else received it.
Needless to say, Kyria – Dawn, whatever – would be the guinea pig recipient. Not that Kyria had to do much of anything. The hex just needed to be sent somewhere. But Bela figured that since Kyria was the source of her witchcraft, nothing she did with it would hurt Kyria.
(She could test that another time. Preferably with permission.)
Trying to decide if boils were too dark ages, she heard the gunshot. The second convinced her something had gone wrong.
Buggering fuck, she thought, hearing a third and rapidly altering the hex code and willing it to do something as the fourth and fifth shots rang out. She barely had time to send Kyria the hex and vanish her Morningstar-disappearing-phone before Agent Ward – Ward?! – appeared in the doorway and used the sixth on her.
***
It was all Kyria's fault.
Bela winced as the light blinded her – and promptly regretted it because there was a hole in her chest.
A bullet to the chest fucking hurt.
On the upside – not dead. Or not staying dead. Glad to see the new and improved contract worked to Kyria’s guesstimations regardless of Bela’s (dis)inclination to test it.
Ow.
Fucking Ward. Fucking guns. Fucking HYDRA. Forget Garrett, she was cursing Ward. Although, actually, Garrett was likely the one to recruit Ward for HYDRA. So the original plan of cursing Garrett was definitely the way to go. Maybe both of them. Both sounded good. As soon as she past being shot.
Trying to breathe around the wound wasn't exactly peachy either.
“Bloody fuck! Thanks be to Kyria I’m not dead, but would it kill you for the damnable contract to heal me, too?!”
Belatedly, she looked around, but no one was in view. Well, no one alive anyway. Apparently the HYDRA sleepers had dumped all the bodies off the plane together. But that didn't mean no one was going to notice a "dead body" was moving.
Bela determinedly pushed herself to her knees, but that was as far as she was getting. So, standing was clearly out, maybe crawling? She wasn't too proud to crawl. Especially if it took her away from the dead bodies she was sitting on.
And she wasn't too oblivious to miss the moving eyes on another supposedly dead body. She winced again.
"Yeah, sorry. This wasn't exactly what I was aiming for."
She wasn’t entirely sure what her spell was supposed to do, considering her panic and frantic additions, but, Bela appeared to have bound Victoria Hand to life in some way. Considering the senior agent was suffering from three gunshots, that was not pretty. And also not in any way certain.
"Fuck this."
Bela pulled out her Morningstar phone and hit the first speed dial.
"Hello."
"Getting shot hurts like shit."
Kyria (Dawn wherever she was) gave a strained laugh. "I know. I got shot again a couple days ago. Then I had to get right back up and tell the computerized Nazi I was wearing a vest. He upgraded to missiles."
"Fun," Bela remarked. "So I finally managed an electronic hex bag. I seem to have erred a bit, though. By all rights Hand should be dead. I've got a contract keeping me here – she doesn't."
"Witchcraft doesn't come with a manual, especially the non-demonic version, but I don't think it was ever meant to keep someone alive."
"I don't suppose you could fix it?"
A groan sounded on the other side of the line. "The database hasn't settled in my head yet and you're asking me to invent something else new?"
"Yes? Considering the overtime I’ve put in for this this and the bullet hole that hasn’t closed yet, it’s only fair you not let Hand linger in whatever fucked up state I accidentally put her into. You know, with the witchcraft I got from you." Apparently, getting shot made her testy. But it had been a busy couple of days and she was entitled to the occasional fuck-up. Especially since her fuck-up had saved a life. Which, yeah, felt maybe sort of good.
Fucking do-gooders and their contagious mindsets.
A sigh. "Fine. Stay on the line and I'll see what I can do. Do you have a copy of the hex?"
"I sent it to you.”
"Of course you did,” Kyria muttered.
“It’s not like Garrett was ever to check his email,” Bela retorted, knowing damn well she sounded whiney.
“I’m not even going to ask,” she said absently. “Now, this might feel a little odd."
"Odder than a not-healing-quickly-enough gunshot?"
Kyria ignored her.
Pursing her lips, Bela waited. Nope, not feeling anythi –
Okay, definitely a little odd. It felt like something was pulling on her, stretching her from far away, tighter and tighter until her ears popped –
And then she snapped back. An angelic sword dropped to the ground in front of her.
"You meant to send a sword?"
"No, I was going for a drumstick," came the snarky response. "Fold the sword around her neck."
"Fold the sword?" she repeated in disbelief.
"It's more flexible than you think. Just do it."
Having gotten far too used to weird things that came from working with (for) the daughter of a fallen archangel, Bela complied. The sword bent like wire, which, admittedly, came in rather low on the list of Morningstar/ninja weirdness.
Victoria promptly gasped for breath.
"That worked."
"You're welcome."
"The shooter was Grant Ward."
"Fuck."
"Garrett's the Clairvoyant," she added.
"Of course he is," Kyria replied in frustrated dismay.
"And there's a video of you on the highway that went viral."
Kyria made a strangled noise. "Lovely. I'll figure something out. Try not to get shot again."
"Not planning on it. It hurts like fuck."
"It does that."
Making a face, Bela hung up the phone. Victoria was clutching at the (now healing) holes and her new necklace and staring at her with wide eyes.
"It's a long story," Bela said preemptively. There had been enough double-edged do-gooding already that she wanted away from here before she did anything else.
"I was shot."
"So was I." Testing her strength, Bela climbed to her feet. It worked this time. She pulled Victoria up. "I'm pretty sure you're an honorary ninja now. Congratulations. But we should get out of here before someone realizes we aren't dead and tries to remedy that."