Chapter 4
Barnes slams the landline telephone down, swearing softly. “That was Rhodes. He said he’s been specifically assigned a detail to cover a region of the Midwest in search of you. He doesn’t believe the news, obviously, but he has to keep up appearances.”
Natasha rubs her temples, sighing deeply. This isn’t the first time she’s been accused of crimes she didn’t actually commit; this won’t be the first time she’s had to lay low in the States. But this is the first time she’s had to do so when a supernatural threat is going on and she has two gods and an ex-assassin with her.
She’s racked her brain, trying to think of someone who would not only benefit from seeing her out of the picture – which is, unfortunately, probably a lot of people – but also have the skills to get her there – a considerably less number of people. There’s no one off the top of her mind who would benefit from seeing her go down, not right now, when she hasn’t done many missions since returning from the alternate universe.
She’s going to have hunt.
That’s a problem – not for her necessarily, but whoever thinks they can bring Natasha Romanoff down without any repercussions.
Thor leans across the kitchen counter, his upper body reaching for Natasha and Barnes in the living room. “Natasha, you wouldn’t happen to have any Heineken hidden in this refrigerator, would you?”
Loki scoffs, entering the living room from the bathroom. He seats himself in the loveseat and frowns at Thor condescendingly. “I thought you were cutting back on that pathetic Midgardian excuse for alcohol.”
“I haven’t had any in three days! I’m thirsty.”
“Clint’s more of a Budweiser guy, so no Heineken,” Natasha answers absentmindedly. “We haven’t been here in awhile. There’s only water.”
She flips through her notebook of contacts that’s kept in this safehouse. It has everything from potential allies to old enemies, spanning dozens of pages and hundreds of names. Not one of them seems like a plausible culprit.
“Did you contact Barton?” Loki questions.
Natasha nods. “He hasn’t been here in years. He offered to go check up on some other locations of ours, see if anything’s amiss there, but I’d rather he stayed with his family. If someone’s good enough to know the location of one of our safehouses, chances are they could figure out where they live.”
Barnes peeks over Natasha’s shoulder to try the next contact in the book. He types the name into Natasha’s laptop, courtesy of Tony, and begins prowling for any potential red flags. They’d alerted Tony to what was going on, and he’d connected Natasha’s tech to a program that allowed for untraceable, encrypted searches.
“Hey, you’ve been up for nearly 24 hours,” Natasha gently chides him. She pats his shoulder with her tablet that she’s been using to look people up on. “Go take a nap in the bedroom.”
“So have you,” Barnes argues, eyes not leaving the screen. “I’m fine, really. Let’s at least finish this column of names.”
He types something else in, sighs, and then looks up to meet her eyes. Natasha gives him a small smile in thanks. She won’t say it out loud, but she knows that Barnes is so keen on helping her is because he’d been in the same situation back in 2016.
A loud slam causes both of them to whip around to see Thor sheepishly holding up a Brita filter pitcher to the sink.
“Sorry,” he expresses, holding his hands up. “Tad heavier than I imagined it to be. Carry on.”
“Do you plan on assisting at all in this endeavor, Thor?” Loki questions, using Clint’s laptop that had been left in the bedroom to watch security footage from outside the building that he’d stolen from the front desk. “Or are you simply going to focus on beverages all day?”
“I was up all night with you all looking for clues! The few minutes I stop looking to get a drink aren’t going to yield any results,” Thor insists, pouring water into a clean cup and chugging half of it.
“Got something,” Loki announces a moment later, raising an eyebrow at his brother.
Barnes gives Thor a pointed look.
Natasha scoots closer to the edge of the couch to try and see what Loki’s caught. “What is it?” She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t nervous.
“Three days ago, this person exited the building,” Loki says, pausing the footage on the laptop and pointing. “But I went back weeks before, and there’s no evidence that they ever entered the building.”
“Maybe they were just cooped up here for a while,” Barnes suggests. “I don’t want to go chasing leads if it ends up being a dead end.”
“It’s not, if you’d let me finish,” Loki snaps. He presses the space bar on the laptop to resume the video, and they all watch as the person steps off the front stoop of the building, walks down the sidewalk for a few seconds, and then vanishes into thin air, as if they were never there in the first place.
Natasha grabs the laptop from him and replays the loop. It’s difficult to discern whether the person is young or old, a man or a woman, since they’re wearing a long trench coat and hat. But one thing is for certain: there are some supernatural elements at play here.
This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for.
“If we go to that spot, could you trace the magic? Perhaps we could see its origins and get more details that way,” Thor says to Loki.
“It’s a possibility. It depends on how skilled the wielder is,” Loki muses. “Even if I am able to, doing so might alert whoever cast this that…well, that we’re onto them. Is that what we want? We’re not considering any other options, like laying low?”
“Laying low just wastes time,” Barnes sighs. “Trust me. I spent a couple years doing that in Wakanda, and I still ended up getting caught in the middle of the firefight. I say we go for it.” After a beat, he adds, “That all, of course, depends on what Romanoff wants to do.”
Natasha suddenly misses Clint with such an intense fierceness that she has to clear her throat and stand up. She knows that Clint would come help her if she called; knows that, no matter how much he loves his children and his wife and their animals on the farm, Clint will never be able to resist the fight.
If she’s being honest, she’s never been able to resist it very well, either.
“Trace it,” she says firmly, nodding to Loki. Barnes raises his chin at her, and she nods in confirmation. “I want to know who this son of a bitch is.”
Loki nods agreeably and stands. A second later, his figure shimmers, and he materializes as a teenaged pizza delivery boy.
“I saw him outside the window earlier,” he explains, his voice much higher in pitch than normal.
Barnes stares at him in surprise. “That’s…convenient.”
“Come, brother,” Thor says. “Let’s go trace this magic.”
“What help would you be exactly, Thor?” Loki asks sarcastically. “I don’t need you to accompany me. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“No, he’s right,” Natasha expresses. “If we don’t know who or what this is, you shouldn’t be going alone.” As much as Loki can get on her nerves, she’d rather not have him get kidnapped right now, in addition to everything else that’s going on.
Loki rolls his eyes. “Well, Thor’s not exactly the epitome of stealth. If someone is watching us, we’ll be made before I can even start tracing the magic.”
Natasha juts her chin out at Barnes. “He’s a spy. Go on.”
Neither of the men look too happy about the arrangement, but they wordlessly exit the apartment. Natasha sits back down on the couch and stares at the muted television. It’s still on the news, but there haven’t been any updates on her story.
Thor makes his way into the living room, carrying a newly filled glass of water in one hand and a Pop-Tart in the other.
“If Loki recognizes the magic, we know many people across the Nine Realms that could be of assistance,” Thor tells Natasha.
She gives him a tired smile, appreciating the thought. But she figures if Dr. Strange couldn’t even get everyone to stay on behalf of the whole planet, her individual problem won’t be very convincing.
“It’s alright. I’ve been through worse,” she says honestly. “If we even get in contact with anyone not from here, I want it to be focused on Hela. That’s what’s important.”
Thor chews on his Pop-Tart thoughtfully. “You know,” he says, mouth full, “just because there are big problems out there, it doesn’t make the small ones matter any less.”
Natasha gives him an exaggerated gasp, a smile tugging at her lips. “Is this one-of-a-kind advice from the King of Asgard himself?”
“Former King of Asgard,” Thor corrects, playfully serious, pointing the Pop-Tart at her.
“Well, I’m honored to have a king, former or not, on my side,” Natasha informs him. “I mean, two gods and a former assassin working with me right now. Whoever’s framing me couldn’t have foreseen that.”
“The former assassin does seem very intent on figuring this out,” Thor mentions casually.
Natasha picks up one of the throw pillows on the couch and whacks Thor with it. “What was that tone?”
Thor finishes off the Pop-Tart and gives her a startlingly serious expression before softening into a soft smile. “Natasha, I have witnessed interactions between men and women for thousands of years. You and Barnes have history, do you not? Like you and Banner?”
Natasha’s heart clenches. Bruce. She hadn’t seen him in a while. She wonders if he’s seen the news, if he believes the media or thinks she’s innocent.
What did you dream?
That I was an Avenger. That I was anything more than the assassin they made me.
I think you’re being hard on yourself.
“Uh, no,” she chuckles dryly, “not like me and Bruce. Barnes and I…” She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “I mean, he didn’t used to be Barnes to me. I only call him that now because I don’t know what else to call him. James seems too informal, and Bucky implies that we’re…”
“Friends?” Thor probes. He seems genuinely curious, not like just wants to know the gossip. “Are you not?”
“He used to be Zima to me,” Natasha says quietly, a faint smile on her lips, memories flickering through her mind. “That’s when I used to be Natalia. After he was separated from Steve and the US Army when he fell off a train, acquaintances of the people who trained me found him and trained him. We, obviously, then trained together. We were both good, and we were both dedicated. Too dedicated, probably. If we’d been less so, we probably would have defected and run away together.” She rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “And then we wouldn’t be stuck in this mess right now.”
Natasha watches Thor cautiously, gauging his reaction. She’s never shared that with anyone besides Clint, and she’d only shared that with him after she realized who she and Steve were chasing in 2014. Everyone else who’s familiar with Barnes wouldn’t understand. She isn’t even sure if Thor will; but he wasn’t on Earth then to see firsthand the damage the Winter Soldier had done and supposedly done in 2016, and he isn’t the most familiar with Steve and Bucky’s relationship, so it’s worth a shot.
Thor looks contemplative. “An old bond, one that words cannot explain. Something so unique that, once broken, it cannot ever be fully replaced.”
“For lack of a better term, yeah,” Natasha sighs. She smirks a bit. “I guess you know what I’m talking about. And who knew you had some Shakespeare in you?”
“I am not familiar with this man, although Stark referenced him to me many years ago, so I assume he is of noble standing.”
There’s a knock at the door. Natasha gets up and checks the peephole. She opens the door to let Barnes and Loki in. Immediately, Loki transforms from the young pizza boy back into himself.
“Were you successful?” Thor asks. “Natasha has decided that she doesn’t want use other resources from the Nine Realms on her case, and to focus them on Hela if they’re willing instead. The bigger picture, one could say.”
“Well, we don’t need to worry about differentiating and splitting that up,” Loki says, his expression serious. “I traced the magic. Its source is powerful, and reminds me of Asgard. The old Asgard, not the one here on Midgard.”
Natasha crosses her arms, not liking what she’s hearing. “What exactly are you saying?”
Loki gives her what could almost be an apologetic look. “I believe the one responsible for the false accusations of you murdering those people is Hela.”
~
Natasha bristles when the bedroom door opens. She’d told the men that she was going to take a nap since they’d been up all through the night trying to figure out who was responsible for framing her, but she felt even more restless now. For some reason, Hela was messing with Earth, and Natasha specifically. Why?
Natasha was good at reading people – but Hela wasn’t exactly a person now, was she? There weren’t any records Natasha could pull to piece together Hela’s life. All she had available to her was Thor and Loki’s stories, and even those were subpar as their only encounters with her involved her trying to kill them.
She sits up in bed and raises an eyebrow at Loki, smirking slightly. “You know, not many men get into a bedroom with me and live to tell the tale.”
Instead of throwing back a joke at her or simply sneering, Loki frowns and seats himself at the bench in front of the bed. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” Natasha questions.
Loki waves his hand in the air, as if searching for the right word. “That. Make jokes during serious situations that are…self-deprecating, some might say.”
“Would they, now?” Natasha muses, studying him. Is he trying to do a character study on her?
Loki doesn’t answer. He stares out the window, seemingly deep in thought.
“Why are you helping me?” Natasha asks suddenly, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She tilts her head to the side. “If Hela thinks you tried to kill her, aren’t you just putting yourself in danger?”
Loki takes a deep breath and turns to face her, a surprisingly earnest expression on his face.
“I am the god of mischief,” he says matter-of-factly. “However, I do not enjoy being lied to. Learning that everything you’ve ever been told is fiction…it hurts.”
Natasha nods in agreement, still not impressed with his answer. “It does. That doesn’t explain why you’re here, helping me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Romanoff. My detestation for Hela far outweighs my partiality for you.” Loki tilts his head at her, something like a smile tugging at his lips. It unnerves Natasha; she’s not sure what game he’s playing here.
But she’s not too proud to refuse help when she needs it. Without Loki and Thor, she knows her chances against Hela are much slimmer.
“Do you ever wish you’d stayed on Sovereign?” Natasha wonders aloud. “Tony, Gamora, and I sort of screwed up your little hideaway there. But if we hadn’t, how long would you have kept up the act?”
Loki seems somewhat surprised at the mention of Sovereign. “I thought you didn’t care to discuss the fact that alien DNA—”
“I don’t,” Natasha cuts in coolly, squaring her shoulders. “That’s not what I asked.”
“Well, I see no reason to further discuss Sovereign. It was a nice place, a civilized place, but I was there for a mere decade. It didn’t leave much of a lasting impression on me. However, it was certainly more welcoming that Asgard and Odin would have been.”
Natasha sometimes finds it hard to believe that Loki and Thor are thousands of years old. It unnerves her to think that in a thousand years, when she’s long gone and hopefully buried somewhere nice, they’ll likely still be healthy and fighting, the Avengers but a small imprint in their minds.
“You really don’t think about it?” Natasha probes further. “Doesn’t it worry you that they might figure a way to get to our reality and hunt us down?”
“Right now, I believe Hela should be our biggest worry,” Loki sniffs. He narrows his eyes. “Why? Do you think about Sovereign?”
“No,” Natasha answers.
She definitely doesn’t think about her new abilities after she’s run ten miles and sparred with Clint while hardly breaking a sweat. She definitely doesn’t think about the camaraderie she’d felt going on the missions when she goes to sleep alone in her overpriced apartment. She definitely doesn’t think about what it felt like to look out from a ship at the great expanse of space itself when she’s sitting in traffic during rush hour.
No, she definitely doesn’t think about Sovereign.
The two of them sit in silence for awhile before Barnes calls them back out. Natasha exhales. So much for getting any sleep.
They make their way into the living room. It’s decided that sitting around in the apartment isn’t going to get anything done, so Natasha suggests different tasks that need to get done, and proposes that they split up to complete them.
Surprisingly, it isn’t Barnes or Loki protesting Natasha’s plan; it’s Thor.
“Splitting up?” he asks in disbelief, crossing his arms. “The last time I was with you and we split up you died, Natasha. We’re staying together.”
“I need to talk to Clint,” Natasha insists. She silently adds and Phil in her head. “It’s already risky enough me meeting him, but if I bring you three…I mean, no offense, but we’re not going to be the poster children for stealth.”
“We’ve all got things to do,” Barnes reminds him.
He’d volunteered to go to Steve and explain everything that was going on, from the situation with the population, the threat of Hela, and the truth about Natasha’s innocence. She silently hoped that the third objective wouldn’t be necessary, that Steve would know she hadn’t resorted back to her old ways.
But just in case, Barnes was going instead of her.
Loki was going to go with Thor to other planets to try and figure out how Hela had survived Ragnarok. It was unsettling to see Thor, one of the strongest beings Natasha knows, so shaken up at the fact that she was evidently alive.
Thor casts a quick, worried glance at his brother. No one else catches it except for Natasha. She knows that he’s worried, since the last time he and his brother were on a mission, Loki had been killed.
There really wasn’t anything she could do to comfort him now, though.
“Be careful,” she tells the men. “We’ll reconvene later. I can probably find Barnes, but use Strange as a mutual contact if you need to get in touch when you’re off-planet.”
Neither of the gods look too happy about it, but they nod. Loki offers his arm to Thor, murmurs an incantation, and the two of them disappear in a puff of smoke.
“Unnatural,” Barnes mutters.
Natasha smirks at him. “Give Steve my love. If you stay at his place, I can get in contact with you. Tony’s got a secured line set up to his phone. If not, stay in the area, and I’ll figure out a way to find you.”
“Not if I get ahold of you first,” Barnes says.
At first Natasha bristles, not appreciating being talked back to, but then she relaxes as she realizes he just tried to crack a joke with her. She tilts her head at him, smiling. “Unlikely. I’ll know if you’re on me.” Her tone is teasing, but her words are serious.
Looking over your shoulder needs to become second nature.
~
Natasha leans her head down, hiding her face with both sides of the payphone box. She enters the coins from her pocket in and dials a phone number.
“Viola’s Avian Hospital. How can I help ya?” a thick Boston accent drawls on the other end.
“Hi, I was wondering if I could meet someone for a consultation off-site,” Natasha says, using a thick Jersey accent.
“Sure thing, sure thing. Tomorrow sound good?”
Natasha purposefully waits seven seconds before answering. “Yes, sir, perfect. That’ll give me just enough time to get some breakfast at Taco Bell beforehand. Would you mind confirming this with my insurance guy, too, please?”
“Yes, ma’am. See you then.”
Natasha hangs up and lets out a breath, mentally repeating the meet in her head. Clint will know to tell Coulson they’re meeting in New Jersey at seven in the morning at their safehouse across from a Taco Bell. Hopefully, if anyone was listening in on that call, they won’t know that.
She walks for a few blocks, her hair concealed in a hat with a sweatshirt hood pulled over top. When she reaches a large grocery store, she crosses the parking lot, careful to avoid any cameras, until she reaches an old Subaru that has seen better days. For some reason, there are always abandoned cars in the furthest sections of parking lots. She’s never bothered to find out why, but she does know that it’s worked in her favor before, and it apparently will now.
Looking around to ensure no one has seen her, Natasha nonchalantly pulls part of a wired hanger she’d gotten from the safehouse and slides it down the window until the car door unlocks. She breathes a sigh of relief and quickly gets into the car, looking around. There’s some rumpled clothes in the backseat and a lighter in the passenger seat, and the Little Trees air freshener that’s hanging from the window definitely isn’t working, but it’s not a bad ride.
She rummages around the glove compartment. Fury had once told her that if someone was careless enough to leave their car somewhere, changes are, they could leave a spare key inside the car too.
Sure enough, Natasha finds a spare key fob, and after two tries, the car reluctantly starts up. There’s less than half a tank of gas left, but Natasha figures it will be enough to get her to Jersey, so she puts the car in drive and pulls out of the lot. She fiddles around with the radio until it lands on a news station in case they say anything about her or update the information about the murders.
She grips the steering wheel tightly as she begins her drive. She almost wishes she’d gone with Barnes to see Steve; she hasn’t seen him in awhile, and his optimism and confidence would be highly welcome right now.
This is gonna work, Steve.
I know it is. Because I don’t know what I’m gonna do if it doesn’t.
~
Natasha’s a couple of hours early when she arrives at the Jersey safehouse. She parks the car about ten blocks away and walks to the house. It’s in a small, suburban neighborhood by the beach with neighbors who are friendly enough to not be hostile whenever they’re in town and using the house, but not so friendly to be inquisitive as to why they’re not there year round. Phil’s cover story had always been that he, Clint, and Natasha are siblings and their parents bought them this house as a vacation getaway before they’d died. Clint and Natasha found the story lame and just generally tried to avoid contact with people.
She checks around the outside of the house to ensure no one’s recently been in before heading inside. She checks for any bugs, and after not finding any, pads over to the sofa in the living room and collapses on it, exhaustion setting in. She hasn’t slept in nearly two days, and her mind has been occupied with trying to figure out not only how to stop Hela, but also why Hela is framing her. She falls asleep almost instantly.
A few hours later, she’s woken up by Clint shaking her shoulder, a sympathetic smile on his face. “Hey, killer.”
Natasha buries her head in the arm of the sofa, groaning. “Fuck you, Barton.”
“Language, children,” Coulson chides, entering the living room, carrying a big paper bag from Taco Bell. He divides up an assortment of tacos and burritos out to each of the three of them before seating himself besides Natasha on the sofa.
She sits up, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She grabs a burrito and hungrily eats half of it before pausing to look at Coulson. “I’m only eating this because I’m starving. I hate Taco Bell; you know that.”
He shrugs sheepishly. “It was the closest thing.”
The three of them eat in silence, the only noise an occasional crunch from a taco shell or a slurp of Clint’s Baja Blast. Natasha can’t remember the last time the three of them all sat down, just them, together like this. It had to be before Coulson’s “death” in 2012.
It’s been too long.
When they’re all finished eating, Coulson gathers up what’s ready to be trash and takes it to the kitchen. Clint lays down on the carpeted floor, resting his head on his arms, and raises an eyebrow at Natasha. “Are we gonna acknowledge how weird this is?”
“Once we clear my name, we can draw straws on who gets to punch Coulson first for not telling us he was alive right after he woke up,” Natasha replies, closing her eyes. “But he did tell me first.”
“What? No way. He’s known me longer. He told me first,” Clint insists. He moves to sit up but then decides against it. He only makes the effort to grab his unfinished Baja Blast. “I found out before SHIELD was revealed to be Hydra.”
“Did you forget who released all of that to the world? I already knew so that I could keep certain things hidden,” Natasha says, nodding her head toward the kitchen to reference Coulson.
Clint sputters for a second before closing his mouth in defeat. Then he gives her a confused smile and furrows his eyebrows. “So he’s ‘Coulson’ now. Not ‘Phil?’”
Natasha shrugs. “I never said he was fully forgiven.”
The man in question enters the living room a minute later, a manila folder in one hand and laptop in the other. He lays out multiple documents on the coffee table, and this is enough to pique Clint’s interest to make him sit up and scoot closer to the table.
Natasha leans forward, studying the papers. As she scans them, she realizes they’re all information about the ten murder victims that she’s being blamed for.
“No patterns, in neither methodology or victim type,” Coulson supplies, already knowing what she was going to ask. “One of them was a single college professor from Canada in her sixties with no kids. Another was a recently married guy who worked at a department store in South Korea. They all happened on different days, different times. There’s no method to the madness.”
“Loki believes Hela is responsible for these deaths,” Natasha responds, flipping through another one of the victim’s files. “This woman died, GSW to the chest, in the Dominican Republic. I’m wondering, can Hela make it seem like someone died from a certain cause, or did she do these things herself, or did she get someone to do them for her?”
She’s met with silence. When she looks up, she finds Coulson sipping his coffee, expectantly looking back at her. Clint has the same expression.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, backtracking. “He used magic to determine that. We’re, like, ninety percent sure it’s her.”
“That would’ve been helpful information to know before we talked on the phone,” Clint grumbles. “I did so much illegal Internet snooping to try and narrow down the real murderer.” He sighs. “How did that meeting you told me about at, uh…Dr. Strange? Yeah, how did that go?”
Natasha sighs. She recounts the events of the last few days, knowing she’d left a lot of it out when Clint had called her after the warrant for the Black Widow had aired.
Coulson folds his hands thoughtfully. “Well, this complicates things.”
Clint shrugs good-naturedly, obviously downplaying the magnitude of the situation for Natasha’s sake. She appreciates the gesture, even if it does nothing to actually help her.
“Hey, we haven’t faced anything we can’t handle yet,” he points out, grinning. “Strike Team Delta, for the win.”
Natasha and Coulson simultaneously roll their eyes at him. Natasha knows Clint is just joking around about their old tactical unit that hasn’t officially been on assignment since 2011, but she also knows that deep down, he misses it – the camaraderie between a small team that doesn’t need words to communicate, people who know what the others are going to do before they’ve even decided themselves, the accountability for having a specific, clear-cut mission to complete and check off.
She knows because she misses it too.
She also knows, though, that Clint hasn’t been on a mission of any type or in the field since going rogue and killing those people in Japan where she’d found him. She doesn’t know if he’s agreed to help her because she’s his friend, or because he’s been itching to get back into a fight for the good guys, or because he wants to make up for what he did during those five years.
Either way, she’s not entirely sure that he’s ready for this.
Before she can tell him so, an odd, high-pitched rumble causes the house to vibrate. Clint’s Baja Blast shakes and falls off the coffee table, spilling onto the cream-colored carpet.
“Oh, come on! Laura just sold our steam cleaner. I don’t know how that’s going to come out,” Clint groans.
“Do we still have vinegar in the pantry? Mix it with some dish soap and water,” Coulson suggests, not looking up from the folder in his hands.
“‘Do we still have vinegar?’ What are we, Neanderthals? Yes, we have vinegar,” Clint mocks, standing up. “Be right back.”
“Guys,” Natasha snaps. She nods at the sky through the large bay window. It’s suddenly become dark and gray, whereas moments before it was cloudless and blue. “Was it supposed to storm today?”
The three of them cautiously step toward the window. Natasha moves her hand to her back, where her gun is securely resting in her belt, and she can see from her peripheral that Coulson is doing the same and Clint is now gripping his quiver.
“Maybe Thor and Loki are back from space?” Clint suggests in a hopeful tone.
“I didn’t tell him where the safehouse is,” Natasha says quietly. It would definitely work in their favor if this was just Thor, but deep down in her gut, she knows it’s not.
The three of them subconsciously stand back-to-back in a triangle, ready to fend off the potential threat.
Suddenly, a black cloud appears inside the living room, with specks of green light flying around. Natasha slips her Widow’s Bites onto her wrists, not liking this.
Clint shoots an arrow at the cloud. It disappears inside for a moment before being thrust back out onto the carpeted floor, shattered into multiple pieces.
Clint stares at it, dumbfounded. “That had Vibranium in it.”
Natasha inhales sharply, remembering a story Thor had told her, about Mjölnir, about—
“Hela,” Natasha says coolly, when the woman emerges from the cloud.
The goddess of death grins sharply at her. “Natalia. How nice to finally meet you.”
“I go by Natasha now,” Natasha replies. She can’t tell if Hela is about to attack or is going to keep talking. “But I’m guessing you know that, seeing as you have me framed for murder right now.”
“Mmm, yes. Necessary, I felt, to get your attention,” Hela replies casually. She places her hands on her hips and looks around. “Gods, are all Midgardian homes this drab?” She finally looks at Clint and Coulson. “I’m guessing you two are responsible for the interior here. Why white floors?”
“To really bring out the color of your blood on it,” Clint growls, firing another arrow at her.
Hela easily catches it in her right hand while covering a yawn with her left. She snaps the bow in half and tosses it on the ground before snapping her fingers.
From the black cloud, suddenly multiple figures fall through, a horrid mix of beings that look halfway between human and skeleton. Their skin is pale and gray, they all have glowing green eyes, and the sounds emitting from their mouths are akin to animal growls.
Natasha manages to count fifteen of them before she has to stop to start fighting them. They’re vicious in their attacks, no method to their fighting at all; they just seem to want to attack them. Natasha tries to shoot the first one that lunges at her, but the bullet simply pierces its chest, not rendering any major damage.
She curses to herself and dives behind the side table adjacent to the sofa, fumbling below it for the old machete kept there. Once she grabs it, she thrusts it up at the monster towering over her, and pulls the sword out quickly. It staggers for a second before continuing to advance on her, so she slices across its torso, effectively separating its upper body from its legs. The light in its eyes goes out as it falls to the ground, motionless.
Shit. So these things don’t kill easy.
She rolls backward and up onto her feet. Another one charges at her, and she takes two running steps before leaping onto the side table and using the height to get on the monster’s back, wrapping her legs around its neck. She raises the sword up in the air and brings it down onto the skull, and hops off as the monster collapses.
Natasha takes a second to see how Clint and Coulson are doing. Coulson quickly fires three rounds into the head of one of the monsters, and the light goes out in its eyes as it tumbles onto the coffee table. Clint, meanwhile, has pulled out his samurai-style sword, and is putting it to good use on the monsters.
The black cloud is gone now, but there’s still at least a dozen monsters in the living room. Natasha joins the fight again, putting all of her effort into dismembering the skeletons, stabbing their heads, and covering Clint and Coulson when they need it.
Finally, finally, they’ve defeated all of the monsters. Natasha rests her hands on her hips, breathing heavy, and kneels down beside one of them. She’d been referring to them as ‘monsters’ in her mind, but upon further inspection, they don’t just look like skeletons; they are skeletons.
Which means they were once people.
When she looks up, she can see that Clint and Coulson have made the same conclusion. Clint has a gash on his bicep, and Coulson looks more tousled than Natasha has ever seen him, but they all seem to be in fairly good conditions, all things considering.
“What the hell do we do with these things?” Clint asks, kicking one with his boot.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Coulson responds, looking around. “Were they supposed to kill us?”
“I don’t think so,” Natasha says. “Why would Hela go through all that trouble to bring some of the dead back to life and frame me for murder to just kill us? There’s something more going on.” She looks around. “Did either of you see where she went?”
Clint opens his mouth to answer when suddenly Hela appears in a flash behind him, holding his neck tightly with one hand and a foreign-looking black blade with multiple edges on it.
“Here I am, darling,” Hela says, looking around at the damage they’d done to the skeletons with something like admiration in her eyes. “You know, the witch said you were impressive, Natalia, but that was still much more entertaining than I thought it would be. I was worried beforehand I would have to intervene to save you.”
“I don’t need saving,” Natasha grits out, pointing her gun at Hela’s head. “Let Clint go.”
“You won’t shoot me,” Hela teases confidently. “I—”
Natasha fires a single round at Hela’s leg. The goddess buckles and staggers back, giving Clint enough leeway to roll forward and pivot back to Hela, pointing his sword at her neck.
Hela laughs. She curiously fingers the bullet in her thigh before shoving her pointer and middle fingers inside the wound, forcefully pulling it out.
Coulson glances at Natasha with a horrified expression. To someone who doesn’t know him, that might merely look like a simple raise of his eyebrows and a frown on his lips, but Natasha can read him well.
“I was told you were more curious than that, my dear,” Hela sighs, flicking the bullet to the ground. “I thought I would merely be able to talk to you here, but perhaps you need a more interactive presentation. You’ll be coming with me.”
“Thor was right,” Natasha replies evenly, her gun still pointed at Hela. “You are crazy. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
She briefly wonders what would happen if Hela were to kill them right now. No one knows where they are exactly; Clint refrained from disclosing most of the safehouse locations to Laura so as to not implicate her in anything, and Natasha doubts Thor and Loki would know where New Jersey was. Her best bet right now is probably Barnes, but he isn’t expecting contact from her for at least a day.
In other words, no one would know they were dead.
So there must be a reason Hela is keeping them alive so far; the skeletons were a test of some sort. Natasha figures they passed, but she isn’t too keen on moving on to the next level.
Hela chuckles, but there’s no humor behind it. “My dear, I wasn’t giving you a choice. I was simply letting you know what’s about to happen. Your friends can come, don’t worry.” She snaps her fingers, and the black cloud appears again.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’ve had enough of the magic bullshit for a lifetime,” Clint spits, inching forward with his sword.
“But I’ve been wanting to speak with you as well, darling,” Hela chides, tilting her head. Her eyes twinkle mischievously. “You, too, have granted me such wonderful gifts. You call yourself Clinton, correct? Or…is it Ronin?”
Clint swallows but keeps his sword steady. “That was before. That was when Thanos—”
“Yes, yes, he killed half of humanity. It’s been years!” Hela interrupts, rolling her eyes. “Life goes on. I helped to make it so.”
Natasha furrows her eyebrows at Hela’s words. She figured that Hela would have been very appreciative of Thanos killing half of humanity, but evidently not; if anything, Hela’s words imply that she wanted people to move on after it. Why?
“I think they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to go,” Coulson says, in his diplomatic, friendly, innocent-sounding tone. “So why don’t you pack it up and get out of here before we make you regret crossing us?”
Natasha almost smiles. She’d missed Coulson.
Hela sighs. “I tried to make this easy on everyone. I really did.”
More skeletons march out of the cloud, this time with huge axes and spears and celestial-looking weapons that make Natasha falter. They march out by the dozens, and Natasha loses count after forty of them enter the living room. The space is crammed with them, and more keep coming out; only now, actual humans are exiting the cloud, looking like anyone on Earth, except for the fact that their eyes are glowing bright green.
Coulson takes a step back closer to Natasha. Clint lowers his sword. They may be strong, but they’re not stupid; they know when they’re outnumbered and outgunned.
Natasha’s head snaps to Clint when he makes a strangled sound. She can’t clearly see him with the dozens of skeletons and undead humans all around them, but she can see part of his face; he looks shocked.
She follows his gaze and swallows thickly when she sees who Clint looking at. The person is wearing a familiar black and gray workout suit, with six holes in the material where bullets had once torn through in the process of protecting Clint in Sokovia.
“Isn’t that the Maximoff brother?” Coulson whispers to Natasha. “Died in 2015?”
Natasha manages to nod shakily as she stares at Pietro Maximoff, looking exactly the same as the day he died – the only difference is he now has glowing green eyes.
“Well, this was all a bit dramatic, but I hope this makes you reconsider your position,” Hela says proudly. She gestures to the cloud, which Natasha now realizes is a portal. “I won’t tell you again. You’re coming with me."