Helsinki, Finland (08/05/2007)
Natasha frowned at Clint, backing away from the tray of makeup and bag of dirt he was holding, and wondered why he had such a gleeful smile on his face.
“Clint, I thought one of the little SHIELD kids was going to make me look dirty.” She had backed away as far as she could, and she hit the chair behind her, instinctively sitting down. “You are a field agent - you’re a sniper, Clint, dirt isn’t going to look authentic coming from someone who’s not a specialist and it really needs to look authentic, you know how big this is-”
“I worked in a circus, Natty.” Clint’s smile had gone, and he put his materials on the coffee table and put his hands on his hips, a reproachful look on his face. “I know how to do convincing makeup. Especially dirt.”
Natasha eyed the dirt warily, waving a hand for Clint to sit down and start almost absentmindedly. She was going undercover in Helsinki, to a hotel they suspected was a cover for a human trafficking ring, and she had to look like the kind of mark they were looking for. Small suitcase, looking for shelter, a little dirty, a little pathetic - someone who probably didn’t have anyone who would miss them.
The irony was, barely three years earlier, no one would have missed Natasha. She had steeled herself into accepting the mission because she knew that if something went wrong, she had Clint, Maria, Phil - even Bobbi and Fury - people who would care if she disappeared.
Human trafficking was always a big deal - it hit closer to home for her more than any of the others - but they had reason to believe that the traffickers were selling their captives to illicit operations including genetic experimentation labs and a shell company Natasha had reason to believe was linked to the Red Room, which meant that this operation was bigger than usual.
The ringleaders owned dozens of hotels, motels and shelters across Scandinavia, but Natasha and Clint had tracked the base of operations to the Tähden Hotelli in Helsinki. They couldn’t just go in, guns blasting, and torch the place as they did occasionally, because the owner of the hotel chain was a big hotshot, and had friends in very high places. Natasha was going in, to see how far she could get undiscovered, and once she had sufficient video evidence that there was a human trafficking ring that was selling their captives, she would get out as fast as possible.
It was incredibly risky. Natasha needed to keep as low a profile as she could, which meant no guns, not even a pistol, and no fighting either. She needed to get all the way to being sold, which could mean weeks, maybe months in captivity, and complete radio silence with SHIELD.
“Done.” Clint’s voice was gentle, and he set down his equipment to pick up a mirror. “Want to see?”
Natasha examined his handiwork, forcing a small smile. She looked perfectly pitiful, and she told him so.
“Oh goodie. I tried my hardest to combat your natural beauty - it was difficult, but I think I pulled it off.” Clint’s soft smile was enough to make Natasha laugh weakly, and when he slung an arm around her she gladly leaned into his touch. “There’s a tracker under your skin so it can’t be removed if you have to change, and the camera is going in this pair of glasses, which you should be allowed to keep.” He tucked a strand of her hair - dyed mousy brown - behind her ear, and stood.
“Clint, if things do go wrong-” Natasha started, but she was cut off.
“They won’t. Don’t worry, Charlotte A. Cavatica - we gotcha.” It was Clint’s turn to force a smile, and he handed her the prop glasses with a heavy heart. “But still. You stay safe out there.”
Natasha nodded grimly, and pulled up the handle of her suitcase. She took a moment to steel herself - memorising Clint’s familiar face and the comfort of the safehouse - before chancing a glance in Clint’s makeup mirror as she walked out.
She barely recognised the face reflected back at her.
The journey on the bus was long, and she stayed hunched into herself to avoid eye contact. She had to fork out some euros for a taxi to the ‘nearest hotel’, and the whole ride she wondered to herself if the fear and panic she was presenting was her acting or what she was really feeling.
Natasha entered the lobby of the hotel, glancing about with a wary gaze. Her knuckles were white, her hands clenched around the handle of her dirty suitcase, and she ached to hold the Beretta or her Makarov instead of the cheap plastic. She walked to the front desk on light feet, shoulders tense and a flush high on her cheeks.
“I don’t have much - I only have a couple hundred euros on me - I need somewhere to stay the night. Is there a cheap room I can sleep in?” Natasha asked in stilted, trembling Finnish. The receptionist seemed torn, and called someone, holding up a finger to tell her to wait. He spoke too fast for Natasha to understand, though she managed to pick out some words - girl, poor, room were some among the few she heard before the man turned to her with a smile, putting down the receiver.
“The owner says that you may stay the night,” he said, in heavily accented English. “Keep your money for food, he says.” The key he handed her was pristine, and looked out of place in her hands, the dirt under her fingernails contrasting sharply with the clear white of the key card.
After thanking him - profusely, but in English - Natasha made her way to her room, depositing the ratty suitcase on the floor and curling up on the bed. The room was small, and clearly not kept to the same standards that the rest of the hotel was, if the photos on the booking website were anything to go by. Regardless, Natasha slipped under the duvet, and fell into a fitful sleep.
When she awoke, she was no longer in the bed she had fallen asleep in. Her wrists were cuffed to a radiator, and she quashed the sudden panic that rose up. They had left the glasses, and she angled her neck to feel the back of her neck - there was a slight bump, which reassured her that the tracker was still there.
Footsteps echoed in the small room, and Natasha snapped alert, taking a rapid inventory of the room before whoever it was that was approaching came in. There was the radiator she was cuffed to, a fragile bed with dirty sheets, a bucket in the corner and a heavy-duty door that looked incredibly out of place. Natasha was working herself into a panic trying to locate a weapon before she remembered she was supposed to be keeping a low profile, and switched her expression into ‘terrified out of her mind’ without much effort.
The creaking of the door attracted her panicked gaze, and she curled into herself, pressing herself to the weak heat of the radiator. A tall woman entered the room, and Natasha’s heart nearly stopped before she realised that she wasn’t Madame B. She walked purposefully towards Natasha, and lifted her chin with a finger, tutting softly.
“You will need cleaning up.” The disapproval in her voice shook Natasha, and she trembled under her touch. She had never been captured before - well, she had, but she had always had an exit strategy, always fought her way out with ferocity, and now she could do nothing but go with her captors, subject herself to whatever they planned on doing to her, until she had sufficient evidence and could fight her way out. “Has she been screened?” Her demands were increasingly loud. Natasha had no idea who she was talking to before a burly, heavy-set man appeared, lurking, in the doorway.
“No ma’am.” Every aspect of him - his face, his clothes, even his voice - was gruff. He entered the room, and yanked Natasha up, ignoring her pathetic little hiss of pain when the handcuffs cut into her wrists. “I’ll screen her, then take her to medical. Then you can clean her up.” He damn near bowed, bending his head and shoulders towards the stiff woman. Natasha couldn’t suppress her sigh of relief when the handcuffs unclicked, but at the woman’s frosty glare, she stopped herself from rubbing the angry red lines across her wrists.
Natasha was dragged along by the gruff man to an even smaller room. Pride of place in the middle of it was a metal detector, and Natasha’s heart started pounding like a jackhammer. They would find the camera and the tracker, she wouldn’t get the evidence, the mission would be over. She swallowed, steeling herself, and opened her mouth.
“Please - please - why are you doing this?” She was praying her status as a helpless girl who wouldn’t dare talk would lead him into telling her what was happening. It was a long shot but it was the only one she had.
“Andrea pays well. She’s on some president’s payroll, or something.” He tossed Natasha into the metal detector, face impossibly bored, when the machine’s panicked beeping elicited an actual expression in him - and a string of expletives. “Andrea! The kid has somethin’ under her skin!”
He grasped her neck, and Natasha forgot how to breathe for a hot second. When his probing fingers found the bump of the tracker under her skin, he growled, and plucked the glasses off her nose, crumpling them in his massive fist. He swung his other hand at her face, and she crumpled, black spots eventually taking over her vision.
When she awoke for the second time, she was cuffed to the bed. Memories started flooding in and she began to hyperventilate, trying to curl up in a ball and nearly pulling her arm out of its socket. She forced herself to calm down, and used her free hand to feel her face. Her glasses were gone, and she had a sinking feeling in her stomach. There was a stinging at the back of her neck, and she held it, trying to formulate a plan. She could probably pick the lock and try to make her escape, but to where? There was no indication where she was, if she was even still in Finland, and she had no way of knowing if Clint knew where she was, either.
After a few moments of struggling against her cuffs with no real effort, she lay down on the bed and wiped at her face. There was a horrible wet feeling, and she pulled her hands away to inspect them. The hand she had been holding the back of her neck with was covered in blood - red, and fresh - and now it was smeared on her face. She screamed, screwing her eyes shut and sobbing. She was the Black Widow - the Red Death - but she didn’t have an exit strategy, she didn’t have a weapon, and she was cuffed to a bed in exactly the same way she had been in the Red Room. She wasn’t the Black Widow or a SHIELD operative - she was Clint’s itsy bitsy or his Charlotte, and she was 23, and scared, and she was filled with memories of missions gone wrong.
How long she lay, apathetic, on the bed, Natasha did not know. Andrea and the gruff man could be heard arguing outside the room, and once or twice they tried to make her talk - but as tired as Natasha was, she still had her training.
It was hours later when she heard something other than Andrea and Onni. Footsteps - someone light-footed, but deliberately walking loudly - and then screams, then silence.
Natasha turned over on the bed, resigned to the fact that she’d been laying in a pool of her own blood for hours, and blinked at the person entering her room.
He was blonde, and seemed familiar, and he came over to stroke her hair and rub some blood off her face.
Thinking about him put her into mission mode, and she started up, before Clint gently pushed her back down, soothing her.
“Hey, Natty, I’m here to take you home.”