Chapter 7
Natasha wakes, feeling more well-rested than she has in a long time. She glances up at Tony, still asleep in the chair across from her. She lets herself smile, remembering what Tony had said to her several hours before. She automatically ducks her head in embarrassment even though no one is around.
She stretches her arms, still marveling at the enhanced strength they possess. She doesn’t feel incredibly different. But she’s willing to bet she’s faster now, too; she can’t wait to get to Earth and challenge Steve to a race.
“Hey,” Gamora says, entering a few minutes later. She stands above Natasha. “I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to snap at you. We’re on the same side here.”
“I get it,” Natasha answers, standing. “I did what I thought was best at the time; I won’t apologize for that. I am sorry it came across like it did, though.”
Gamora studies Natasha with a calculating expression before stretching her hand out. “I respect that.”
Natasha shakes it. “Good. Feel free to get some rest. I’ll go make sure Loki isn’t trying to steer us in the wrong direction.”
“My team and I, we met Thor,” Gamora tells her. “Before we split ways to try and stop Thanos. He said that his brother was killed by my father, that he died trying to kill him.”
Natasha nods her head slowly. “Thor told us that, too.”
“So maybe Loki isn’t as bad as you’re imagining,” Gamora suggests. “I know what it’s like to have a vicious sibling rivalry. People can change.”
“Thor and Loki aren’t people,” Natasha counters. She owes it to Clint and to Laura and their kids to never forgive Loki. “They’re gods. They’re Asgardians. They had thousands of years to sort their shit out, and Loki still tried to destroy an innocent planet. Whatever redeeming martyr wave he was riding when he died—” She shakes her head. “That was a different Loki. This Loki tried to destroy New York, damn near succeeded, and then used the Space Stone to hide out on Sovereign.”
Gamora nods, setting herself in the chair. “I thought you’d say as much,” she says. “I just wanted to hear it out loud. My sister was just trying to please our father; she would’ve obeyed him even if he was the embodiment of good. She and Loki aren't the same. I think I’d lose some respect for you if you had said anything different.”
Natasha gives her a smirk before turning and walking over to the pilot seats. She sits down in the co-pilot chair and studies the holographic map in front of them.
Loki glances at her curiously. She frowns at him.
“You’re going to have to train and harness your powers,” Loki tells her, uncharacteristically amiable. “Imagine. Do you know what could happen if your powers, your newfound strengths, get out of control?”
Natasha closes her eyes. She knows all too well.
Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict breeds catastrophe.
When she opens her eyes, she gives Loki a tight smile, nodding. The Avengers had been torn apart over disagreement about controlling their strengths, and in the end, she’d ended up on the run, on the opposite side of Tony. She’s determined to not let that happen again.
~
“We’re thirty clicks from the nearest jump to the Orion Arm,” Loki announces.
Natasha taps the keys Loki had shown her earlier. She takes a deep breath. They’re so close.
She immediately chastises herself for being so positive, so arrogant. Success is circumstantial.
Regimes fall every day.
“Twenty,” she reads.
Behind them, Tony and Gamora lean forward in their seats. Natasha wants to tell them they have jobs to do, organizing all the weapons aboard and preparing the ship’s blasters in case they need them, but the anxiety in the ship is so high she can almost feel it. She decides to let them off the hook for now.
“Ten,” Loki says.
It doesn’t escape Natasha’s attention that he, too, is leaning forward anxiously. Natasha considers this and realizes his apprehension is warranted; this Loki was never punished for his crimes against New York. Someone will definitely do something about that.
If no one does, she will.
“Approaching jump,” Natasha says, gripping her seat tightly, “in three, two, one.”
The feeling of jumping in a spaceship is one Natasha does not want to get accustomed to. But if all goes to plan, she reasons, she won’t have to.
The four of them are silent. Loki pulls up an enhanced, closer map of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way and indicates their location on it.
“Just a few minutes and we’ll be looking at your planet,” he interprets.
Natasha looks back at Tony, who has been uncharacteristically silent. He notices her gaze and immediately gives her a smile and thumbs up before looking back out the window. Natasha sympathetically smiles at him. He’s worried and trying to hide it and she can’t blame him. He has no idea if his daughter is alive in this reality.
Gamora pulls up a map in front of herself. Natasha reads it; it’s a map of the surrounding galaxy, not focused just on Earth.
“Once we find our people and acquire the right tech, we’ll find your guy,” Natasha promises her. She’d grown to like Nebula and Rocket over the last five years; they’d played a major part in ensuring any nasty space threats didn’t come too close to Earth, a planet rendered defenseless after Thanos.
Gamora gives her a small smile in thanks.
“Alright, Iceman, any day now,” Tony quips, patting the back of Loki’s chair. “I stay in space any longer my heart’s going to atrophy.”
“There seems to be some sort of barrier,” Loki grumbles, fiddling with the controls.
Natasha looks out the window. Earth appears as it normally does, and if anything, the greens and blues seem more vivid. She takes this as a good sign; the planet at least hasn’t been destroyed. But upon further inspection, she notices a faint red glow around the planet, something that is definitely not the Earth she knows.
“Your planet doesn’t normally have that red, correct?” Gamora asks, pulling up a magnified view of the planet in front of them. “It appears to be some sort of force field. A defense.”
“A shield,” Natasha whispers. She has an idea, a bad idea, of what this could possibly be. She doesn’t want to believe it.
I see a suit of armor around the world.
Peace in our time. Imagine that.
Suddenly, something zooms by. Immediately, Gamora springs out of her chair and to the controls for the ship’s outer blasters, positioning them at the object that is now floating directly in front of the ship.
Natasha looks at the object. It has a humanoid structure, and…
Shit. It’s one of Tony’s Iron Legion droids.
“Stark, that looks like one of your—“ Loki begins, but is cut off by the Iron Legion droid raising its arm, pointing a glowing hand at the ship, which Natasha knows means it could easily blow them up.
“You are operating an unlicensed vessel in the territory of Earth,” the droid says in a metallic, accented voice. “You are being summoned to the Council for inspection and interrogation. This service has been brought to you by the Outer-Space Security Sector of Ultron.” As it speaks, it tosses a small flash drive onto the ship, and immediately the blasters power down and the steering controls lock.
Natasha gives Tony a look that’s part worried and part angry. He gives her an embarrassed grimace in return. “Oops.”
~
“Romanoff, with me.”
Natasha hops to her feet immediately, her posture straight and perfect. “Sir.”
“Cut that bullshit, we both know you didn’t want to stand up,” Nick Fury gripes, waving his hand at her. Natasha stifles a smile. When he blatantly calls out the things his agents are doing, including herself, it makes Natasha respect him more, actually makes her want to stand up when he enters a room.
Standing up for a man. Madame B would have a heart attack if she actually possessed a heart.
“Where are we going, sir?” Natasha asks innocently. She smirks at him when he glares at her.
“Last I checked, you weren’t my thong. Don’t be up my ass,” Fury answers readily, striding past her to a computer. He pulls up a map and prints it out, handing the papers to her. Louisiana. “You know how to fly a Quinjet?”
She doesn’t, but Natasha is nothing if not adaptable. She’s a fast learner. “Yes, sir. What’s in Louisiana?”
“I guess you’ll see when we get there, won’t you?” Fury asks, squinting his eyes at her, his lip twitching.
Natasha follows him out the door. This is one of the many differences between Fury and Madame B, she has come to learn. Fury doesn’t disclose a lot of information to those under him, and everyone rolls with it because they respect him. Madame B used to reveal everything, sometimes too much, about the girls’ missions, and they complied because they would be killed if they made a mistake.
SHIELD doesn’t kill workers who make mistakes. Or if they do, Natasha wouldn’t know. She hasn’t made a mistake yet. She doesn’t plan on it, either.
Fury leads her to one of SHIELD’s new Quinjets. Natasha is given no time to marvel at it before Fury is ushering her aboard and into the pilot seat.
“I’ve got a phone call to make. Put these headphones on; it’s connected to all the nearby airports on our way to Louisiana. We don’t want anybody seeing us.”
“Of course, sir,” Natasha obediently agrees.
If she’d been given more time to stew on what she’s doing, she might even be disgusted that she so willingly agrees with the man in charge of the organization that tried to assassinate her two years prior. But Fury wastes no time.
Natasha figures out how to fly the Quinjet easily enough. It’s not too different from a plane, but it is much faster and has additional features that aren’t on normal planes, like guns and a camouflage option.
The headphones Fury has given her cancel out a lot of the background noise from the Quinjet, so Natasha can’t hear what Fury is saying on the phone next to her. But she was taught to read lips when she was six, so she could tell if Madame B was ever speaking to someone else about her.
“–the ten year anniversary. Time really is a bitch, isn’t it?” Fury chuckles into the phone.
Natasha silently wonders what he’s talking about. Fury isn’t married, at least not that she’s heard of.
“Felt like the best time to stop by to take some of that stuff,” he continues. “I still have the pager she gave me, too. Wonder if this would constitute being an emergency so she could come down.”
Natasha continues flying to the destination as Fury hangs up the phone. It sounds like a simple collection mission, picking up some supplies. Natasha silently hopes it won’t take long. Laura is pregnant, due any day now, and she wants to be by her side.
She’s surprised that she wants to. She tries not to think about it too much.
“So,” she says after a few minutes of silence. “Why me?” She’s never been on a mission with Fury alone before; not many agents have.
“I may only have one working eye, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see things,” Fury answers. Natasha thinks this is maybe the most honest he’s ever been to her in the two years she’s been at SHIELD. “Ever since you got here two years ago, people haven’t stopped talking about you. Even when they’re saying nothing…from their posture, their decisions, all make it clear you are someone they respect.”
“Or fear,” Natasha counters. She could count on her hand the number of colleagues of hers she actually felt respected by.
“Respect, fear. Same thing.”
Natasha thinks of Fury and then Madame B. She shakes her head slightly. “It’s not.”
Fury curiously eyes her but says nothing. Natasha appreciates it.
She lands the Quinjet in the spacious backyard of a house in Louisiana in a small neighborhood. She studies the house and can faintly see a woman, probably in her forties, and her college-age looking daughter.
“Your family?” Natasha asks, appearing aloof, although her heart is clenching. It’s October of 2005, and Laura is due any day now to have her and Clint’s first child. They’d asked Natasha to be the godmother, which had triggered emotions in Natasha she didn’t realize she was capable of having.
“Nope,” Fury answers vaguely, smirking.
He grabs his briefcase and stands up. Natasha unbuckles and prepares to follow him, but he stops her. “This one’s just me. I’ll be quick. Stay here, keep watch.”
Natasha waits patiently. She debates calling Laura to see how she and the baby doing and tell her she gets to go on a solo mission with Fury, but Laura’s parents had flown in and were staying at the farm for a couple of weeks, and she doesn’t want to add to the chaos.
Fury returns several minutes later with pieces of alien-looking technology. Natasha leans forward to inspect them, but Fury throws them in a box and closes the lid before she can get any closer.
“Not time to open this can of worms just yet,” he explains. “This was just a pit stop. Now we’re going to South America.” He enters new coordinates into the Quinjet’s GPS, and Natasha takes off.
They land in a secluded field on the outskirts of a small village. Natasha follows Fury outside as he begins walking.
“There’s a black ops team here trying to take down a terrorist base,” Fury tells her, pointing to the remains of what was once a building. Natasha looks around; there’s not any people around, which is strange. They must be hiding from something.
“So the black ops took out the cartel, and we’re looking for the ones who escaped?” Natasha surmises.
“Not exactly,” Fury replies. He points to a group of men walking into their view near the destroyed base. “We need to stall them from finding the base. “
“Stall them?” Natasha confirms. She’s careful about not showing her confusion. Stalling an operation meant to find terrorists is the type of mission the Red Room might have given her; she doesn’t expect this sort of thing from SHIELD.
“Do you trust me, Agent Romanoff?” Fury asks, facing her. His one good eye stares hard at her, and she’s surprised to feel that she does trust him.
“Lead the way, sir.”
“That there is Emil Blonsky,” he says, pointing to a blond man at the front of the group giving orders. “He’s good. Smart. Veteran soldier. Once they find this base they’re going to contact General Ross. That’s inevitable; we just need to delay them a bit longer.”
Natasha’s mind whirls. General Thaddeus Ross works for the military; she read something recently about him being appointed to head a project trying to recreate the serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America.
She wants to scoff. Many people tried to recreate the serum, the KGB included. None of their projects ever quite turned out like Captain America.
Despite her confusion, Natasha agrees. She takes point on Blonsky while Fury takes the alien-looking tech with him to take on the other three men there.
Blonsky’s back is to her when she silently creeps up behind him and leaps onto his shoulders, wrapping her thighs around his neck and squeezing tightly. As he gasps for air, she reaches down and disarms him, taking his weapon into her own hands. She hits him in the back of the head, hard, enough to knock him unconscious but not hard enough to kill him. She runs over to the cars the unit had come in on and slashes three of each vehicle’s tires. She’s about to begin rummaging through them for their contents before she hears a pained grunt coming from Fury.
Natasha sprints over to him. Two of the men are laying on the ground, but a third has one of the weapons Fury had picked up from Louisiana, pointing it at Fury, who’s kneeling on the ground, bleeding. It’s the first time Natasha has ever seen him look scared. What the hell can that weapon do?
Fury catches her eyes with his one and gives her a subtle shake of the head. Whatever it can do, it’s bad. Natasha ignores his warning; she’s not going to let her superior die, especially not on her watch, and also because she’s grown to like the man. She steps forward, making the man spin around and point the weapon at her.
She cocks her head innocently. She may be wearing a SHIELD tactical suit while holding an M-16, but one of the lessons Madame B taught her that will always stick with her is that men will underestimate her because she’s a woman. Natasha takes full advantage of that. He lowers the weapon just a fraction for a second, but that’s all she needs. She runs forward, kicking the weapon out of his hands and towards Fury. She tackles him to the ground, swinging her legs up to straddle his chest and point the assault rifle at his face.
Natasha takes a second to look up to check on Fury. He’s slowly getting to his feet, the alien weapon firmly secure in his grip. He looks over at her and gives her an approving nod, an almost proud smile on his face that makes Natasha’s stomach turn. In the Red Room, when she had done a good job, usually someone had to die because of it. Now with SHIELD, if she does a good job, it’s just because she’s good.
Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything.
~
Over the last few years, Natasha had rid her life as much as possible of SHIELD once it had revealed itself to be Hydra. Any shirt or jacket with the logo was ripped up and burned, and paper documents had their logos scribbled out with a black Sharpie, courtesy of Cooper Barton. She’d felt betrayed, and she didn’t want to see the damn bird with the stripes ever again.
She was in for a rude awakening on this Earth.
Everywhere they walk, the SHIELD logo is visible. Everything dons it, from posters on streetlamps, to windows of business buildings, even stickers on cars that drove by. It’s eerie.
Natasha can sense her companions’ discomfort. Even Gamora, who has never been to Earth, looks around with caution. Although Natasha’s not sure if this stems from the SHIELD logo everywhere, like it does for herself, or the fact that Iron Legion droids fly overhead continuously, obviously monitoring everyone.
The droid that had spoken to them and powered down their ship walks ahead of them, leading them inside a large, official-looking building that definitely does not exist in Natasha and Tony’s reality. Natasha can see the outline of New York City from where they are, so she assumes they’re somewhere in New York or New Jersey.
Inside the building, they are quickly ushered into a small conference room. The droid tells them someone will be with them momentarily and then exits the room, closing and locking the door behind it.
“What the hell is going on?” Gamora asks, pointing at the door. “You made that thing?”
“No!” Tony exclaims. After a beat, he backtracks. “Well, okay, yes, technically, I made that thing. I made many of those…things. But I destroyed them all. And a lot of them were destroyed in…our battle with Ultron. It was an AI program our friend and I made to try and anticipate any extra-terrestrial attacks like the one that Greased Lightning over here caused.” He jerks his thumb toward Loki, who raises an eyebrow. “But he…”
“The plan failed,” Natasha deadpans, taking a seat at one of the chairs around the table in the center of the room. “They used code from the Mind Stone to create Ultron. He used Tony’s suits as hosts and decided that humans were the greatest threat to Earth and tried to get rid of us all.”
“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” Loki mumbles.
“He was, actually, and it doesn’t matter what he thought, anyway, because he lost,” Tony snaps. “Or he did, in our universe.”
Gamora nods, absorbing all of the information just thrown at her. “Okay. So Ultron exists here, and it’s clearly a large part of—”
Before she can answer, the Iron Legion droid opens the door again, this time accompanied by an elderly man. The droid waits until the man enters the room before leaving again, shutting and locking the door.
Natasha studies the man. His posture is straight and strong, rare for someone of his age, and he’s dressed in an impeccable blue dress shirt tucked into khaki pants. He’s tall and was obviously once very muscular. His physique could still possibly prove to be a threat, so Natasha doesn’t let her guard down, even though she can see Gamora, Tony, and Loki already have.
Old men used to run the Red Room, used to run Madame B. She knows how dangerous they can be.
But when her eyes move up to his face, Natasha’s breath catches in her throat. The man has bright blue eyes and a defined jaw, giving way to a friendly smile, a familiar smile…
“The man out of time,” she whispers, struggling to not let her voice waver. “It’s been a minute.”
“Hey, Nat,” Steve Rogers says, opening his arms for a hug.
Natasha doesn’t hesitate to step forward and wrap her arms around his waist tenderly, burying her face in the crook of his arm. He squeezes back, chuckling. “I’m not going to break, you know. I was once a super soldier.”
Tony inhales sharply. “That’s…Cap? What happened?” Even as he says this, he’s crossing the room, standing next to Natasha and joining their hug.
Natasha doesn’t even try to stop her eyes from watering now. She knew when she was climbing up the mountain with Clint that she was going to die. She never thought she’d see anyone ever again, let alone be wrapped up in a bear hug in between Captain America and Iron Man in an alternate reality.
After they finish hugging, Natasha gestures to Gamora and Loki. “Steve, this is Gamora. And you already know—”
“Loki,” Steve says, a sad smile on his face. “Although I don’t think the Loki I know, correct?”
“You would be correct, Captain,” Loki replies, giving an approving smile to Steve. “I see your time here has made you wiser.”
Steve’s small smile fades. “Right. About that…” He gestures to the table, indicating for everyone to sit down. “I have a lot to tell you.”
Natasha sits and rests her elbows on the table, biting her lip. She glances around at everyone else. Steve sits patiently, clearly waiting for someone to ask the questions they all know they have. Natasha decides to go first and ask broader, big-picture questions. She’ll ask personal ones in private. She doesn’t need everyone knowing what’s on her mind.
“SHIELD’s everywhere. Why?”
“Instead of jumping back to 2023 after returning the Stones, I jumped back to be with Peggy,” Steve says, smiling fondly. His expression sobers. “At the time, Hydra wasn’t as big within SHIELD, so we were able to keep SHIELD...well, SHIELD. So, SHIELD always stayed standing. Tony—" He waves his hand at Tony. “Not you, this reality’s Tony, became the de facto leader of the Avengers since I was an old man. I even got some of the people we met after New York in our reality onto the Avengers before New York here in this reality. I made sure SHIELD never found this reality’s Steve in the ice. But a lot of stuff is similar to what we know—Loki attacked New York, didn’t succeed, went back to Asgard. But Tony still created Ultron, a little differently so he doesn’t see humanity as a threat, but Ultron and SHIELD have become a sort of…omnipresent system. Worldwide, too—the UN signed off on Ultron protecting the whole planet.”
Natasha shivers. Steve talks about it so casually, probably because he’s been living it for over seventy years, but the idea that SHIELD has such a public presence when in her reality they used to operate more in the dark seems so uncanny. By the way Steve avoids their eyes, it’s obvious he’s hiding something else from them too, but Natasha will weasel it out of him eventually. He’s always been a terrible liar.
“So, if it’s 2023 now—“ Tony pauses for Steve’s nod of confirmation, “—you should be about 114 years old. Why are you so…spry?”
“Thanks, Tony,” Steve says dryly, huffing out a breathy laugh. “The serum, I guess. It took me quite a long time for my hair to even start graying.”
“Why were you the one to come explain this to us?” Loki asks suddenly. “Do they know we’re from an alternate reality?” He sounds worried. This Loki was never punished for his crimes, and now that they’re back on Earth with a worldwide security system, punishment is definitely a possibility. Natasha hopes it becomes a reality.
She also doesn’t miss how he uses the word “they,” already unconsciously establishing a dichotomy between them and SHIELD. That can’t be good.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so,” Steve answers, and by Loki’s eye roll it’s clear he regrets his comment about becoming wiser. “After Peggy passed a few years ago, I just started volunteering here more, working as a visitors’ guide. I saw you guys on the monitors and knew you must be from my reality.” He gives them a watery smile, turning to Natasha and Tony. “It is so good to see you guys. I still can’t thank you enough for what you did.”
“Why would you thank us?” Tony suddenly demands, standing up, waving his arms around. “You didn’t even stick around long enough to see if what we died for worked! You got the opportunity to leave everyone behind, and you just left.” He shakes his head. “Every time we need you, you just leave!”
His chest is heaving by the time he’s finished speaking. Natasha places a hand around his wrist, meant to be a comfort, but doubling as a warning.
Steve frowns. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Tony. I am. But I was already in the wrong time, technically. This was something I needed to do for myself.”
Gamora clears her throat to speak as Tony sits back down in his chair, crossing his arms. “So where we do we go now? Our plan when we all found each other was to get everyone home. Will they be allowed to stay here? And where are any ships? I need to get back into space and try and find my family.”
Steve contemplates this. “Well, you'll need to eventually speak to the Council because you got caught trespassing. But I worked here for a long time and they listen to me, so I can delay your meeting by a couple days until we can figure out what to say.”
“We’ll figure that out later, Steve. Thanks for all your answers,” Natasha agrees, recognizing the growing tension in the room. “Do you think you could sign us out now so that droid doesn’t come looking for us and let us crash at your place?”
“Of course,” Steve answers. “My shift just ended, anyway. You can follow me to my car.”
The four of them file out behind Steve to the parking lot behind the building. Loki, Gamora, and Tony slowly trail behind him, obviously weary about going to his house, but Natasha stays right behind Steve on his left, like Sam had always done to him, like she had always done to Clint. Old habits die hard.
And sometimes they die and come to another reality.
When they reach Steve’s car, Tony scrambles for the passenger seat, and Gamora and Loki climb into the backseat. Steve is about to start walking toward the driver’s side when Natasha grabs his arm, stopping him. She needs to ask the question that’s been on her mind, the main reason she had been so intent on getting home.
“How are the Barton’s here? Can you take me to see them?”
Steve pauses and gives her an apologetic shake of the head. “Nat, I don’t think is the time for that…”
“Tell me. Please,” she grits out. “I need to know they’re okay.”
“They’re good. They’re okay. Clint works for SHIELD,” Steve says slowly. “But I don’t think he’d want to see you.”
A weight Natasha didn’t know had been on her shoulders is lifted at the affirmation that they’re okay. “Good. Why wouldn’t he want to see me? Did I beat him up too badly sparring?” She jokingly smirks.
“Not exactly,” Steve warns. “Because Hydra never really grew inside SHIELD here, they went even deeper underground. SHIELD is global, so everything affiliated with Hydra and anti-Ultron groups have to be even more secretive and selective with everyone working for them. Peggy and I worked hard to stop some of them, but I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get them all. And between the government, Ultron, and SHIELD—”
“Steve,” Natasha interrupts. “Just tell me. What happened?”
“It’s what didn’t happen,” Steve says, looking at her with sad, almost pitiful eyes before pausing again. Natasha considers punching him in the face, even if he is an old man now.
“And what didn’t happen?” she presses impatiently.
“Clint wasn’t able to convince you to leave the Red Room, to go straight,” Steve blurts. “In this reality, the Black Widow is one of the best assassins in the world, one of the only true internal threats against SHIELD.”
And just like that, the weight is back on Natasha’s shoulders, heavier than ever.