Grin and Bear It

Before you could blink you were pressed up against the wall, Natasha's arm digging into your windpipe with a ferocity that left room for only two outcomes: death or getting the fuck away. She ripped off the balaclava still covering your head, digging her arm even deeper into your exposed throat. An involuntary choking sound left your mouth and you knew it was now or never.

You pooled all your quickly fading strength and threw her body against the glass case, empty now that Louis and Seb had absconded with the vials. Glass exploded across the room and you knew you'd be pulling micro-shards from your hair for weeks to come, but it was better than the alternative.

You didn't stick around to see if Natasha was conscious but did make a concerted effort to avoid stepping on her fallen teammate still bleeding out in the doorway. You felt a twinge of guilt; she looked young. Your age maybe, or even younger. Why was she here at all?

"Hey!" An angry male voice yelled at you down the hallway. You looked up into the pained eyes of Bruce Banner, medical bag slung over a rumpled button-down, looking much more like a sleep-deprived trial attorney than the human version of the Hulk. But before he could say anything else, you were sprinting in the opposite direction.

As soon as you hit the lobby you froze. Two bodies lay sprawled on the floor and you recognized them instantly –– Louis and Seb. Felled side by side, you crouched between them and felt for a pulse you already knew was gone. You searched Seb's body first but there was nothing except his lock-picking kit, which you shoved into your back pocket as a subconscious momento. Next, you checked Louis, your hand wrapping around three miraculously intact vials tucked into a concealed waist pack. You unclipped the bag and secured it tightly around your torso before giving the closest thing you'd ever had to brothers one last glance.

You heard him before you saw him –– Captain America, frogmarching a trembling Kilroy onto the back of the Avengers jet. Huh. The threat you'd made to Natasha had been completely empty but you gave yourself a pat on the back for nailing the most important detail and the split-second of time that it had bought you. Clearly, Kilroy hadn't been so lucky.

"Louis! Seb!" Kilroy cried out as Steve Rogers pushed him inside the sleek black fuselage. So he hadn't seen the bodies, didn't know he was crying out in vain. It stung more than it should and you wondered if the real deprogramming you had to look forward to wasn't from your years in prison but from years living under Kilroy's thumb. But there wasn't time to think about that now, not if you wanted the opportunity to think about it at all. While Steve was distracted getting Kilroy on the jet, you took off running into the woods, forgoing the van (likely already bugged or at least spotted) and relying on your feet to get you safely away from the Avengers. Though if you were being honest with yourself, you knew that you'd just painted a target on your back big enough to see from space.

Natasha barged into the dimly lit basement hallway, still drenched in Wanda's blood. She halted next to Steve's side and followed his gaze into Kilroy's small cell, not missing how Steve searched her face for any update on their youngest teammate's condition.

"Still in surgery," was all Natasha said as she stared daggers at Kilroy's hunched form sitting on the edge of his cot. If Natasha was in charge, he wouldn't even have a blanket, much less a bed. But Steve had given her one too many lectures about the Geneva Convention that she'd stopped making suggestions, preferring to feign ignorance instead.

She looked at Steve. "He say anything yet?"

Steve shook his head. He was as desperate to get answers as Natasha. "No."

Natasha raised an eyebrow, an unspoken request to take over. Steve stepped out of the way. "Be my guest."

Natasha wasted no time pressing a button on the wall that opened the intercom into Kilroy's cell. "This will be a lot easier for you if you tell me what I want to know."

Steve winced slightly at the implied torture but knew it was all for show. And that, no matter how much it made him uncomfortable, Natasha's methods got results.

Kilroy slowly raised his eyes and met the former assassin's gaze. For all her efforts to obscure her identity, Natasha Romanoff was now a known quantity, recognized the world over for her affiliation with the Avengers. Hell, there were action figures. And at least one blow-up sex doll that Clint had bought her as a gag birthday gift but had actually ended up being quite useful at fooling Jarvis anytime Natasha needed to sneak out of the compound.

"Is she dead?" Kilroy asked, eyeing the blood covering Natasha's uniform. "It only seems fair, seeing as your witch killed my boys."

Natasha held back the bile in her throat at the way Kilroy sneered the word "witch." Hate it though she might, it was moments like this that made her grateful for the Red Room training that rendered her face an unreadable mask. "I'm not here to talk about them," Natasha said, her voice quiet but level. "I'm here to talk about her. Where is she?"

It didn't take a trained spy to realize that Kilroy's poker face was nonexistent. His eyes fluttered closed and his mouth pinched. Natasha had hit a nerve. His gaze shifted to Steve, arms crossed as he leaned against the wall. "She's strong, like him."

Natasha rubbed the back of her head where she'd collided with the glass case. "I said tell me what I want to know, not what I already figured out."

Kilroy smiled, a bit of his gusto returning. "You don't understand. She would be nothing without me. I gave her a purpose, a family. And most importantly, I made her strong. She'll come for me, you'll see."

Nat and Steve exchanged worried looks as Bruce poked his head through the door. "Hey, guys. Can we chat?"

The team gathered around Wanda's hospital bed, though what was Wanda and what were the tubes and wires keeping her alive were hard to tell apart. Bruce cleared his throat. "So, good news first. She's alive. And, I think she has a chance of making a full recovery -- "

"A chance?" Natasha blurted out from the side of the bed where she rubbed circles into Wanda's limp hand.

"A good chance," Bruce continued. "It's gonna take a while, but Tony's team is the best in the world and her vitals look surprisingly strong for someone who was..."

"Shot. Twice." Natasha finished for him. "By a super soldier knock-off who didn't even have to look at her target to know she was going to hit her mark."

The team exchanged awkward glances. They knew how Natasha could be when she fixated on something or someone, especially when that someone was a direct threat to the team.

Clint trailed Natasha down the hallway as she cut across the compound to Tony's lab. "Nat..." he started. "She's going to be okay."

Nat turned to face him, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. She might let Steve past the first layer of defenses, but Clint was the only person Natasha had ever been truly vulnerable with. "When we brought her back from Sokovia, we told her we'd protect her. I told her I'd protect her. This was her first mission, Clint. And she gets shot on my watch. I'm supposed to be clearing the red from my ledger, not adding to it."

Clint took a hesitant step forward. "Nat, it's not your fault. You said it yourself, Wanda wasn't being careful."

Natasha clenched her jaw. "I could've stopped her. But she played me. I let her get into my head."

"She said she had a bomb! That would've made any of us pause."

"You don't get it, Clint. You have your bow. Steve and Bucky have their strength. Tony has his suit. But what do I have? All I have is my training. And dammit if I shouldn't have seen straight through her from the moment she walked into that room."

Natasha turned on her heel and continued down the hallway, leaving Clint to stare after her, a worried crease forming between his eyes.

"Anything?" Natasha strode into Tony's lab, eyes glued to the large screens running through photo after photo of people who resembled the woman who'd shot Wanda.

Tony's head popped out from behind a beaker, clad in a white lab coat and goggles. "It's good to see you too, Ms. Rushman."

But the look on Natasha's face wasn't amused. Tony pulled off the goggles and struck a more thoughtful tone. "I left Aspen as soon as I heard. Those conferences are always such a snooze fest. Who wants to know who's behind the latest coup anyway?"

Tony typed a command into the computer, pulling up a composite image of the woman's face. "This is the best Jarvis could do with the details Bruce remembered. Anything to adjust?"

Natasha stared at the rendering, forcing her mind back to the moment she had you pinned against the wall. "The eye color's wrong. It should be y/e/c."

"Jarvis?"

The AI adjusted the eye color and Natasha felt chills run down her spine. "That's good," she said, nodding to Tony. Tony hit a few more keys and the program resumed its search. But he couldn't help noticing Natasha's hundred-yard stare.

"At least we got the serum, right?" Tony asked, replacing the goggles and beckoning Natasha to join him. Three vials sat on his workstation as another computer synthesized the serum's composition. "So far it looks like it's not as strong as Steve's but much more stable than Bruce's. I'll just run a couple more tests before I flush it down the toilet."

"So it would be effective?" Natasha asked, arching a brow.

Tony shrugged. "Hypothetically, sure. But we wouldn't know if there were any side effects until it was properly tested."

Natasha turned her attention back to the screens. "Thanks, Tony. Let me know as soon as you get a hit. I owe it to Wanda to figure out who did this to her."