a woman's job | ocean's eleven au (part three)
“So this all looks… horrible.” Banner commented mildly, wincing as the steel-reinforced door slammed behind him. Ten other heads stared back at him, all with varying expressions of disgruntlement and anger.
“How’d they grab you?” Rogers asked quietly from the floor. Barnes sat beside him, flipping a knife the security guards didn’t manage to find in his right hand, his left hand shaking.
Banner just smiled. “Temper got the best of me,” he said simply, surveying the rest of the room. Wilson, Rhodes, and Barton sat in the corner, commanding the only four chairs in the small room – one for each of them, the last for the game of War they were playing halfheartedly. Romanoff stood still and silent, nary a wrinkle in sight or a hair out of place, while Hill was scowling darkly, her split lip still bleeding as she paced the length of the room like a caged lioness. Banner took one look at Stark, sprawled out on the floor, and settled next to Odinson, who looked calm despite a black eye and bruises mottling one side of his face.
They fell into silence, nobody wanting to say it, until Barton finally sighed and asked, “So, now what?”
Stark was clutching a bottle of scotch that was a quarter full, looking very much like he’d drunk the other three-fourths, and he laughed a little, the sound hollow and angry. “We’re fucked, obviously,” he said, taking a swig. “Once they catch Lewis, we go to jail and we spend the rest of our sorry lives there.”
“She’s not the type to go quietly,” Barton murmured, his words a little garbled from the punch he sustained to his mouth.
“Aye, she will try to fight.” Odinson said softly, nodding gravely in agreement. His eyes betrayed his worry as he stared at the door.
Rogers’s eyes went hard. “If they even touch her…” Barnes growled, his fingers flexing around the knife, and Romanoff shot them an unimpressed look.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said sharply, rolling her eyes. “What do you think you’re going to do, fight your way out – ”
“It’s that or prison!” Rogers snarled, pinning Romanoff with a glare. “How can you be so fucking calm – ?!”
“Because while you’re a decent point man, Rogers,” Romanoff said coolly, meeting his gaze unflinchingly, “There’s a reason I’m the janitor of this job.”
Rhodes looked up, his eyes widening. “You planned for this?”
“I anticipated it,” Romanoff corrected, ignoring Wilson’s admiring glance. “As a potential… roadblock.”
“Roadblock, she says,” Stark scoffed, waving the bottle at her. “What, we’re depending on Lewis to magically save the day? She’s a grifter – a damn good one, I’ll give her that – but there’s no fucking way she can talk her way past an army of hired muscle and through a double reinforced steel door. So unless you have some miracle your can pull out of your pretty little ass, Romanoff – ”
He stopped abruptly, stilling – and not because of the icy glare being thrown his way. “Do you hear that?”
Everyone fell silent, and after a moment there was a faint beeping sound, sluggish and slow. Rogers, Wilson, Rhodes, and Barnes were up on their feet in an instant, pressing their ears to the walls.
When the beeping started to increase in speed and volume, coming one of the sidewalls of room, and all eyes swiveled towards the sound. “Better hold on, boys,” Romanoff said smugly, casually reaching down and grabbing a fistful of Stark’s suit jacket to haul him over to the door, wrapping her free hand around one of the steel bars protruding from the lock dial.
Rhodes looked at Romanoff incredulously. “Are you fucking ki – !”
A deafening explosion cut him off, sending nearly everyone sprawling across the floor. Romanoff and Hill were the only ones who remained standing, looking entirely unsurprised, though Odinson had also managed to stay upright.
There was no smoke or dust, just the violent tremor and the sound, and Stark looked up, his eyes widening as he came to a realization. “We’re not in a room – ”
“ – we’re in a vault,” Rogers breathed, and through the walls they could hear faintly muffled voices.
Romanoff banged her fist on the steel door three times, then two, and before anyone could verbalize the question four thumps answered. She nodded at Hill, who reached into her shirt and pulled out two small, puck-sized disks.
Barton looked floored. “What the actual fuck, Hill.”
“It’s called a bra,” Hill snapped back, as she firmly stuck the disks on the steel door, on center above and below the vault dial.
Romanoff hit the door once, this time getting two thumps in answer. She and Hill both calmly moved to the other side of the room, with only the tiniest smile betraying her amusement as the other men scrambled to follow.
“Wait, aren’t those…” Stark, who looked a lot more sober, squinted at the little disks. “Oh, you sneaky little – I take everything back, Romanoff. You are a goddamn lifesaver.” He grinned, wild-eyed and eager as another high-pitched beep sounded twice; moments later there were two tiny explosions of sparks and smoke.
Nobody moved. “Is that it?” Banner asked doubtfully.
Stark furrowed his eyebrows. “The prototyping tests were a lot more – ”
BOOM.
“… like that,” he finished hoarsely, coughing as he tried blinking the soot out of his eyes.
There was a deep groan of the door being pushed open, and Hill called out, “Took you long enough, Lewis!”
“Keep your goddamn pants on,” Lewis shouted back, emerging from the smoke like a ghost from an old wives’ tale. Her dress from earlier was ripped at the knee and in tatters, while she held a detonator in one hand and an AK-47 in the other.
She tossed the gun at Barnes. “Sorry, it was this or a pistol,” she said, and he just barely caught it, too busy gaping at the sight of her. “So, uh, things didn’t work out the way you planned,” Lewis said a matter of factly.
Romanoff frowned. “… and?”
“I called in an old favor with the girls.” Lewis grinned, white and sharp and all teeth, and Romanoff slowly mirrored the expression, albeit looking a bit more terrifying.
“Johnson and Morse?” Hill asked, her expression brightening.
“Yeah, and guess who just happened to be available – the motherfucking Cavalry.” Lewis was legitimately beaming. “Between the four of us we secured the reactor and drained Hammer’s bank accounts, offshore ones included. Everything’s cleared up and the reactor’s on the jet, so all that’s left is you guys.”
Romanoff was practically emitting smugness. “Thank god,” she said, brushing the ash from her shoulders. “Now we can finally end this shitshow.”
Besides Odinson, who was grinning at Lewis in pride, the rest of the men looked floored – Stark especially, as he croaked, “Lewis say what?”
Romanoff smiled sweetly. “Where I come from, there’s something the old babushkas like to say.” In front of them, Lewis laughed, gesturing for them to follow her as she disappeared back into the smoke, and Romanoff gave Stark a sly smile as she sauntered past him. “ ‘Never send a man to do a woman’s job.’ ”