Cruel Vengeance

SHIELD Headquarters, Washington, D.C., United States

May 2011

Natasha studied the bare bones of the Triskelion. Only its skeleton was in place, but inside a year, if Fury had his way, the whole structure would be finished and SHIELD would begin to move in. It would be a nightmare for her, frankly; she hated towers. It was too easy to get pinned in the top with no way down but falling.

She’d have to stash squirrel suits around the roof and the top half of the building, then. Possibly air cushions in the elevator shafts that would inflate on cue? There’d have to be some kind of trigger mechanism inside each of the shaft doors, or possibly just a proximity chip that she implanted in her ankle or something…

Natasha set aside those ideas for safety-proofing the Triskelion and focused on her report. She never wrote anything down if she could help it, preferring to commit all her missions to memory and give verbal rundowns to Fury.

The helicopter swooped in over the old SHIELD headquarters, a stumpy building across the water from the Triskelion that was a lot bigger under the earth than it was above. It always reminded Natasha of a hand making a hitchhiker’s thumb, the fist buried and only the thumb poking above the earth.

When the helicopter touched down, she hopped out and strode for the rooftop watch, a square structure of bulletproof one-way glass with steel doors set into two sides. A SHIELD guard hauled open the door for her. He couldn’t have known who she was, but there was nervousness in his eyes anyway. Good. Natasha smirked faintly and nodded at him, conscious of the box under her arm.

She bypassed the elevator bank inside the watch and hopped into the stairwell. Natasha took three steps down and stopped. The stairwell was empty. She had forty floors to descend.

What the hell.

Natasha grinned and flexed her shoulders. She pulled a grappling unit off her belt and aimed it carefully at the ceiling of the stairwell. The tiny computer built into the handle scanned the ceiling and carefully chose a target.

With a pop, the hook shot from the disk in her hand and slammed into the ceiling. It punctured through the drywall into a steel support girder and expanded, securing its grip.

Natasha adjusted her grip. The grappling unit consisted of a disc of slender high-strength cable on a reel. There was a handle on one edge and a friction brake near her thumb.

She readjusted her grip on the cardboard box and jumped over the railing.

Natasha resisted the urge to laugh as she free-fell through the heart of the stairwell, whipping past one landing after another.

Twenty-five—thirty—now.

She jammed her thumb onto the friction brake. Heat immediately began to seep through the handle into her palm, but she held on and came to a halt exactly at floor forty-one—the floors were numbered down from the top in this building.

The door opened.

Fury no more than raised his eyebrows at the sight of Natasha dangling in the center of the stairwell. “Care to join me?” he asked sarcastically.

Natasha kicked out and pressed the button that released her grappling cable at the same time, launching in a graceful arc onto the landing. She held the reel button and the cable whirred as the motor fought to suck in all the cable as it fell.

She grinned at Fury.

He rolled his eye. “Come on, I have a new mission for you.”

No.

Natasha hid her reaction and followed him, good mood officially ruined. She was supposed to be taking this week to herself. She had told Fury that before this mission that she was returning from. She had to be in Chita in two days.

She would have to talk him out of this, or this situation was going to go south in a dramatic way.

They were silent until Fury arrived at an office Natasha didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Fury’s normal corner office, but a small closet-like, windowless room with a flimsy desk and two cold metal chairs.

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “New digs?”

Fury sat down and gestured for her to do the same. “My office has been… compromised.”

“What?” Natasha stared at him. “How-”

Fury waved her shock away. “Doesn’t matter. We just can’t use it right now.”

Natasha decided to let it slide for now. “Operation report?”

“Not now,” Fury said. “That operation’s taken a backseat.”

“I was undercover for three weeks,” Natasha protested. “Was that wasted time?”

“It was top priority when I assigned it to you. Something bigger came up.”

Natasha flexed her fists beneath the table. “Sir, I had requested this week off.”

“Agent Romanoff,” Fury snapped, “are you questioning my authority?”

There were several responses that Natasha could give. In a heartbeat, she made a choice. She was close, she was slipping off her chains and she was days away from the closet lead she’d had in decades.

So she looked Nick Fury in the eye and said, “Yes.”

His lips tightened. “Agent Romanoff, I know you are not as ideologically bound to this organization as some, but you made a decision to join us rather than be hunted, and I should warn you that if you regress, you will jump straight to the top of my list.”

Like I wasn’t at the top of his watch list already. “Yes, sir.” She’d pushed him as far as she could. If Fury realized she was about to break with SHIELD, she’d have a hard time leaving this building alive.

So Natasha would have to play along, get out of here alive, and then dump the SHIELD tails.

“Apologies,” she continued. “I - there was a human trafficking ring in Brazil—remember the operation a year ago? Coulson assigned it. I went undercover as one of their… wares… for a month. I am going to go back there and tear that place to the ground. I had hoped to do so this week. Their business swells every spring.”

Fury rubbed his forehead. “Really? You’re turning into a philanthropist now?”

“I have never been actively cruel,” Natasha said stiffly.

“But you’re not known for kindness, either.”

“I do not have to defend my morality or lack thereof to you,” Natasha said, drawing herself up and fixing him with her coldest glare. “You know full well there are SHIELD agents who use this job to satisfy sick and violent inclinations. Your holier-than-thou act is dripping hypocrisy.”

Fury blinked. “Hypocrisy?”

“Never mind,” Natasha muttered. “What’s the new operation?”

Fury handed her a file. “Standard infiltration op, nonstandard target. Everything’s in there.”

Natasha flipped open the file and started scanning the pages within. She kept her face carefully blank, but - just like the last operation - this felt flimsy. Silly. Beneath her talents. She could think of six agents who were easily capable of handling this; she’d been involved in the training of each one, and they were all highly skilled.

Fury was trying to keep her busy.

Natasha snapped the folder shut. “Got it. Anything else?”

“A coffee would be nice,” Fury muttered.

Natasha grinned. “That’s what you have Balik for.”

Fury nodded at her package. “What’s in the box?”

Natasha picked it up and plunked the box on the table. “A hat, a framed embroidered quote, a pair of pants, a stack of paper, a book, a purse, and a rubber pigeon.”

“What?”

She smirked at Fury’s expression. “For Rogers, Stark, Banner, Foster, Lewis, and Barton, respectively.” Natasha just wished she could be there to see their faces when they opened the box. Steve and Tony were going to laugh. Bruce probably would too. Jane was going to be shocked. Lewis and Maria had been harder, but in the end Natasha was sure she’d chosen well. You could find just about anything in Hong Kong, where her last operation had been, if you tried.

“And you want me to deliver the box?” Fury asked.

“Or just hang onto it. Clint’s been shuttling between here and the tower, I believe.”

Fury shook his head. “How you keep your finger on my pulse when you’re halfway around the world is a little bit creepy.”

“Like you’re not just as bad,” Natasha said. “If that’s all, I’ll be going now. I need to restock on ammo before I take off.” She tapped the folder.

“Break a leg,” Fury said.

Natasha dipped her head, left the closet, and made her way back towards the stairwell.

As soon as she was inside the concrete column, she stepped up three stairs until she was in the tiny blind spot of the stairwell. The second the cameras no longer had eyes on her, she reached into her belt and pulled out a jammer. With a press of the button, it began to emit a signal that would scramble any cameras and erase her from digital sight.

Natasha jogged down eleven levels and stepped out into the Level 51 hall.

Fortunately, it was empty. She slipped into the first office she saw, locked the door behind herself, and used her grappling line to hang next to a ceiling vent for as long as it took her to pull the vent cover away. Natasha reached up inside with a diamond-edged handheld cutter from her boot and sawed away at the aluminum until the air vent had a large chunk taken out of the side.

She swung her feet up and shimmied feet first up into the vent—it was barely large enough—disengaged the grappler, and wound it in. The vent cover was pulled back into place the second she cable snapped back into place. Natasha stowed the grappler and the diamond cutter before she shoved the piece of aluminum out of the way and made her way into the ceiling crawlspace.

It was hot, dark, dusty, and cramped. Natasha had barely a foot of vertical space to work with. She shredded a bit of cloth from her undershirt and tied it around her nose and mouth, then placed a pair of sunglasses outfitted with night vision over her eyes. The world reappeared in shades of green.  

It was a long way from the vent to Nick Fury’s office.

Natasha was sweaty and disgusting by the time she arrived, absolutely covered in dust and dead insects. She probably looked a horror. Natasha had to grin behind her improvised mask. She would scare the living shit out of Clint if she could drop in front of him right now. Too bad he was still at Avengers Tower.

Natasha wished she didn’t have to leave him, but her window was narrow and she didn’t dare try to contact him. The risk that Fury would intercept it was too high, and she would not endanger her path to her Soldier. It’d be nice to have Clint as backup, but she was the Black Widow. She worked best alone.

Natasha switched the goggles off when the vent for the corner office under Fury’s came into view. Fury’s office was on the third underground level, so “corner office” didn’t really mean much, but most of the aboveground levels were clerical.

She cut her way into the vent and craned it up, unable to turn onto her back in the small space.

Perfect. There was a straight line through the ventilation system up through a small rectangular grate in the floor of Fury’s office.

Natasha had a small kit of tools that she had cleverly packed like Tetris into several small pouches on her suit. They were attached to the belt slung around her hips and she had mastered the art of concealing all of it under a plain black mid-thigh-length jacket and boots. With those two pieces of attire, she transformed herself from a special operative to a city-chic young woman. Summer months were harder, but in May, she still had a bit of leeway, and her usual baseline set of supplies was where she always kept it. Including the periscope.

The little device wasn’t a real periscope; it was mostly just a camera and directional microphone on a flexible rod. Natasha could view and listen in real time through the sunglasses, which she turned back on as soon as the camera came online. A chip in the bottom of the rod easily held the feed for evidence. Natasha hesitated, then switched it to ‘record’.

The pinhole camera poked up above the grate.

The image on her glasses was poor, and the audio feed that played from the microphones in the glasses’ arms was scratchy, but Natasha could tell easily that the office was absolutely wrecked, and also empty.

Interesting.

She examined the grate, debating whether she could fit through it. Most floor grates were far too small for a human body, but underground facilities like this were different; ventilation systems had to be much larger in order to keep the air tolerably fresh.

She was slender. It should work.

Natasha waited another minute to make sure the office really was empty before she tucked the glasses and the periscope back into her belt. She drew out a tiny can of lubricant and aimed it up into the vent. The straw for the can’s contents nestled nicely under the bottom edge of the grate. Natasha carefully sprayed a small amount of the WD-40 around the grate’s edges and then cut her way farther into the pipe until she could reach up with both arms and silently lift the grate free.

She carefully slid it to the side of the vent and wriggled her way up and out of the air piping.

Natasha paused with just her eyes above the vent, peering around carefully. The office looked even worse than it had through the pinhole camera. There were papers strewn everywhere - that in itself was odd, since Fury hated writing things down and avoided it if at all possible.

She glanced over the papers. Plans and designs for - strange technology. Things she didn’t recognize. Natasha pulled out her black phone and began photographing the papers without disturbing any; Stark or someone could analyze them later.

Of course, she’d have to figure out an anonymous way to get them to him. After what she was about to do, it was doubtful that Natasha would be welcome in Avengers Tower anymore.

Something caught her eye. Strangely-colored something in a jar on the desk, the only intact section of the office. Natasha crept closer. It was-

Footsteps outside the door.

She was back down the vent feetfirst in a flash, sliding the grate back into place a half second before the door opened.

“-can’t understand your reticence, Doctor,” Fury’s voice said.

“Good gracious, you weren’t joking about the mess.”

Fury chuckled. “No, I was not.”

“My reticence remains because I am concerned about the origin of the materials of which you speak.”

“The information is all here,” Fury said, and Natasha heard him rustling about on the floor.

“What happened exactly?”

Fury’s rustling paused, then resumed. “A source made something of a mess in here.”

No kidding. Natasha was intensely curious. This secret seemed to be of a larger magnitude than Fury’s usual clandestine activities. The tissue in the jar had been blue.

“How did you get this?”

The unfamiliar voice was trembling with something. Shock, perhaps, or amazement. Natasha hoped the audio being recorded by the pinhole camera would be good enough for voice recognition later; she couldn’t get video. It was too risky that Fury would notice the camera.

“I’ll show you later. For now-” Natasha heard Fury cross the floor to the door. “Agent Balik, show the good doctor to the laboratory.”

“Yes, sir,” Balik said, and the door closed. Fury was alone in his office.

Moving unbearably slowly to minimize her noise, Natasha folded herself bit by bit out of the vent. She was on her back, which was unfortunate, but she’d been in such a hurry to get out of sight that she hadn’t had a chance to turn over how she wanted.

She slipped her sunglasses back on, set them to night vision, and set off, inching her way through the crawl space on her back. It was tiring and tedious work, but it didn’t require much concentration, leaving her to her spinning thoughts.

What was that tissue sample? Why did Fury have it? Where had he gotten it? Was the ‘source’ who’d made a mess of his office the person he’d gotten the tissue from? Could it be Chitauri tissue? No, that wouldn’t be so groundbreaking - there’d been plenty of dead Chitauri for Fury to collect and study. This had to be something else.

She would have to find a way to get the pictures, audio, and video from today to Stark. Hopefully he could make something of it. But not now. It would jeopardize her mission to retrieve her Soldier, and Natasha would not allow anything else to come between her and Zima again.

When at last she crawled out of the vents, Natasha was a disaster. Her hair was covered in dust, along with every inch of her body.

She poked the periscope out into the corridor and watched until it emptied, then slipped down four doors to the cleaning closet by the elevators. Natasha stepped inside the closet, pulled the door shut, and reached in the dark for a camouflaged thumbprint panel near the ceiling. It scanned her thumb, beeped twice, and the wall slid aside, revealing a small compartment that concealed cash, a handgun, four passports, and a bundle of fabric. Natasha had similar caches all throughout HQ and she’d set up three in Avengers Tower just in case.

She pulled a rag out of the cleaning supplies and scrubbed at her face, neck, and hands. Her hair she tucked up in a green hat and she pulled the long black jacket on over her tactical suit, neatly hiding the evidence of her climb through the ceiling. It would somewhat odd to wear a hat and a long coat in May, but less strange than being covered in dust and cobwebs.

Natasha carefully cleaned her boots and the visible calves of her tac suit until there was nothing but faint traces of the dust and grime in the seams.

She stepped out of the closet and took the staircase the entire way to the top floor.

Barely out of breath, Natasha strode to the helicopter that waited for her and climbed aboard. “Dulles Airport,” she told the pilot, and he nodded and fired up the rotors.

Natasha did a quick, habitual check of the passenger compartment and settled in. There was one pilot and one passenger; the rest of the copter was empty.

When she landed, there’d doubtless be SHIELD agents waiting to tail her wherever she went and a tracker on the vehicle she’d taken there. That was all right. She would be leaving via an entirely different mode of transportation.

Natasha compulsively stroked the long scar on her arm. It was a reminder: she had covered her Soldier’s six, and taken a cut in return that went down to the bone. He repaid her by slaughtering three dozen of their enemies and coming to her, hands bloody and face worse, to apologize for his lapse. He would apologize to no one in this world but her. She had saved his life that night. He had saved hers as well.

I’m coming, my Soldier. My Zima.

Natasha Romanoff, born Natalia Romanova, smiled without a trace of mercy or kindness as the spires of Dulles International Airport came into view.