Cruel Vengeance

Avengers Compound, Upstate New York

June 2012

Her knuckles were raw and bleeding.

She’d come back from two weeks spent chasing the typical kinds of sadistic assholes who used catastrophes as ways to take advantage of people in the worst possible ways, from Abu Dhabi to Hong Kong to Vancouver to Reykjavik to Bogota, and she was exhausted and still high on adrenaline, still full of the need to cause damage.

The two-hundred-pound punching bag leapt with every impact.

Thud.

Thud.

Thudthudthud.

“Are you trying to break yourself?”

Natasha blew hair out of her eyes and looked up. “Trying to get to a point where I can fall asleep.”

Clint let out a breath. He didn’t have to tell her he knew the feeling, and she didn’t have to ask. They’d run into each other plenty of nights on missions and in the training rooms of various SHIELD facilities over the last few years to know each other’s rhythms well. And know that both of them got what it meant to need this sometimes.

“You there yet?”

She shook her head, still breathing hard.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Yes,” she deadpanned. “Go away.”

A faint smile flickered across Clint’s face. He joined her, and they traded off on the same punching bag. Clint would move in, hurl a few blows, and barely be out of the way when Natasha lunged in to take his place, and then vice versa. Back and forth. Working with and around each other, calculating the swings of the punching bag, which hung from the ceiling without a floor tether and swung in wild circles, never once stumbling or tripping the other person up. A ritual of sorts.

One-two-three-back.

Then Clint.

Then Natasha again.

Until she couldn’t think. Until the pain in her hands turned to numbness and she was too tired to even lift her arms.

She’d been going at it for an hour before Clint arrived and yet he sat down hard against the wall when she did, just as spent.

Natasha didn’t have to say thank you, either. He understood that too.

“What are you doing next?” she said, the words soft and breathy, escaping on a still-labored exhalation.

Clint didn’t answer for a few minutes. “I told Maria I love her.

“Took you long enough.”

He elbowed her in the ribs, and Natasha let a small smile curve her lips.

“Gonna settle down?”

“Ha,” Clint said. “No. We… training. The kids. Helping them… adjust.”

“You’ll be good at that,” Natasha said. Clint had always been good with people. Better than she was, for certain. He actually cared about them, for one thing, while she… couldn’t find it in herself to truly care about others in anything more than a vague, abstract way until she knew them. And liked them.

Clint watched her carefully. “You could be good for some of them, too, you know. A… disproportionate number of them have… some kind of trauma. Most of them haven’t talked about it yet. A few have. But I can tell.”

“And I know all about trauma,” Natasha said. Here, in the dark, with Clint and no one else, was the only time she’d let herself sound bitter. Even Zima… she loved him, and he her, yet she couldn’t bring herself to let him see exactly how much it hurt, sometimes, to think about what had been taken from her. Another life. A normal life, or as much of a shot at one as she’d have had living in communist Russia in the early twentieth century, which would have been questionable at best but also would’ve spared her the discomfort of looking back and wondering when she’d become a person who killed and killed and couldn’t even feel guilty for not being guilty at all.

Clint shrugged. “You know about moving past it. About putting your broken pieces back together, not how they were before, maybe, but still something strong.”

He was right. She knew he was right. She knew they’d tried to break her, and succeeded, and that it had taken years of fighting demons both in the world and in her mind to rebuild herself.

“But kids,” she said. “Clint, I’m… over ninety years old. Probably going to live for a lot longer, if no one shoots me in the head.” Longer than you, she thought with no small amount of sorrow. She’d accepted that part of who she was, and knew she’d have Zima and Steve and Vision and Loki and possibly Wanda or Pietro with her, but watching Clint get old and die would hurt. “I’m a killer. Most of them aren’t, and a good number of them never will be.”

“You’d be surprised,” Clint said. “Zina? Sweet girl, but vindictive as hell. That kid Peter is as noble as they come, he’ll never kill anyone if he can help it, I don’t think, but damn if he doesn’t want to do something good in this world. The one who goes by Puck—not his real name, but he won’t answer to anything else—now he reminds me of a mix of Loki and Bucky. Prankster. Asshole. Actually has a good heart buried under all the cynicism. I don’t know if I want to know what he’s been through. There’s a guy who can impose his will on the world around him, which is creepy as shit, a girl who never misses what she aims for with any weapon, a kid who can turn any solid substance into water—Did you know about a third of them have already started calling themselves the Young Avengers?”

Natasha blinked. She hadn’t known that. She’d been avoiding them all.

“Maria’s already running and training the paramilitary arm of Stark Industries. It’s growing fast. Tony’s already got basically a miniature SHIELD working for him,” Clint said. “Working out of the Tower, mostly, and I’ve been up here.”

“So Maria went from Fury’s right hand to doing basically the same thing for Tony.”

Clint shrugged. “I mean. There was some stuff in between.”

Natasha laughed; she couldn’t help it. Only Clint would call fighting an army of self-modifying parasitic aliens led by a psychotic monster from space, including in a floating city somewhere else in the universe, ‘some stuff’.

“How’s Bucky?” Clint asked.

“You won’t ask him?”

Clint gave her a look. “There’s a reason you two get each other, Tasha. You’re both more guarded than the Kremlin. I like the guy. I think we’re friends. But I’m also not sure he wouldn’t hit me into next week if I asked him about his feelings.”

“That’s reasonable.”

Clint waited.

“Keep Avenging,” she said after a minute. “I’m an assassin and a spy. And I like what I do with my skill set now. I’m not about to stop. Steve and Tony, Maria, Sharon, Sam… they can be the Avengers’ public face.”

“Mm.”

“How’s Prescott?”

Clint laughed. “A hardass. Everyone likes her. Darcy especially. She called us three times since she woke up last week and every time, at some point, she mentioned how impressed she is with the way Prescott keeps the new UN in li—oh.”

“Oh what?”

Clint popped to his feet, grinning down at her. “Come on.”

Natasha scowled at him. “I don’t trust that expression.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not putting Nair in Loki’s shampoo,” Clint said. “Right now. Seeing as he lives in DC. Although I have a bottle that’s been treated that might find its way into the shower next time he comes up for a few days, but that’s not the point, we have a different guest who I would definitely not want to prank—”

“Coulson.”

“Bingo.” Clint was jogging through the hallways; Natasha mustered enough energy to match his pace.

“He’s here?”

“That’s what guest usually means, yeah.”

Natasha scowled at his back.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

He hadn’t turned around.

Natasha let herself be led—dragged, really—into one of four guest suites that had been added to a building slightly separate from the central one.

And stopped short, already mostly hidden behind a mask of her own creation. She wasn’t as guarded as she could be around Coulson, and she’d been expecting him, but these other people were unfamiliar—

“Natasha,” Coulson said with a small smile. “I didn’t know you were back.”

She stepped forward, making sure every movement was lined with lethal grace despite her exhaustion, and eyed the strangers as she responded. “Just got in a few hours ago.”

“I brought her down to say hello,” Clint said with a grin.

“Otherwise you’d just show up through the air vents and case the place?” one of the other women, a young dark-haired one, said sarcastically. “Maybe, I don’t know, slit our throats if something seemed off?”

Natasha sized her up more carefully. This one had bite. “Of course not. Air vents are predictable and throat slitting makes a hell of a mess.”

“That’s the Black Widow, Skye,” the younger man muttered into the woman’s—Skye’s—ear. “You probably shouldn’t antagonize her—”

 “You should listen to him,” Natasha said with a smile devoid of humor, keeping her eyes locked on Skye’s.

The man stepped back. Narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously. His accent had thickened when he spoke again. “How did you hear me?”

Natasha smirked. “I read lips.”

He glared.

“No need to pick a fight,” Coulson said; to whom, Natasha wasn’t sure. A faint trace of a smile hovered at the corners of his eyes. “We’re all allies in this room.”

“I don’t know here but the stories say enough,” Skye snapped.

There was an odd dynamic there. Natasha watched Coulson look at Skye, the way Skye met his eyes and glanced away, the rebellious set to her mouth—

It was almost parental.

But Coulson didn’t have kids.

“I’m Jenna,” the third woman said, stepping forward and sticking out her hand with a charming, if uncertain, smile. “Well, Jenna Simmons, everyone just calls me Simmons—that’s my colleague, ah, friend, Fitz—I know who you are, of course —”

“What ‘of course’ is there about it?” Natasha said evenly.

Simmons blinked. “Just that you’re, you know, something of a black ops legend, and of course from the biological side, I’ve seen some of the files on you, heavily censored of course but I would kill to take a sample of your—”

“That’s SHIELD clearance level seven intel,” Natasha said. She looked at Coulson, eyes narrowed. “I thought you said your team all died.”

“I believed they had.” Coulson couldn’t quite keep his genuine, and clearly still painful, relief hidden. It shone through his skin from beneath. “We found them in a Hydra basement. Fury was trying to… break me with their ‘deaths’.”

“He was going to drag us out,” Skye said, crossing her arms. Natasha wasn’t sure exactly why this woman seemed so defensive. “Psychological effects of having us come back from the dead, and then get tortured again in front of Phil—”

“I’m well aware of the nuances of psychological warfare,” Natasha said. “But thanks for the lecture. I’m sure someone will give you a gold star.”

Skye’s eyes narrowed. “Where did you find her?” she asked Coulson.

“You hacked the files even before SHIELD fell, you know perfectly well where she came from,” Coulson said blandly.

Natasha blinked. This—Skye knew her past, what she’d done, where she grew up—

“It was rhetorical,” Skye said, rolling her eyes.

Fitz and Simmons both looked like they were about to faint. Clint was expressionless, but Natasha could feel his amusement, and Coulson—he was somewhere between worried and entertained.

“She’s a charmer,” she said to Coulson. Slowly. Fighting the urge to go on the offensive, to frighten Skye, to protect her secrets—it wasn’t like Natasha’s past was a secret now, anyway. Mostly. She’d voluntarily dumped SHIELD’s intel on the Internet. Including her own data. Pretty much anyone could find it.

But her instincts didn’t listen to that logic, and they were screaming at her.

“She grows on you,” Coulson said with a small grin. “I thought you should know—we’re the official task force for hunting rogue enhanced now. Superhuman threats. We’ll be bringing you people to rehabilitate, or to imprison. As the case may be.”

Natasha looked them over. “You four?”

“A Wakandan woman is supervising us,” Coulson said.  “Astur Mahad, their foreign minister. As one of the most functional governments, Wakanda has taken on a number of responsibilities that aren’t directly related to their own domestic and foreign concerns. Darcy seems to have a favorable opinion of Mahad, and thus far it seems she and I will work well together. Steve and Sharon are going I believe Mr. Wilson, the Maximoff twins, and Bruce have expressed interest in joining us at times as well. But the four of us will be the core of the team, yes.”

Natasha nodded slowly. Skye had uncrossed her arms but there was still iron in her eyes; Fitz and Simmons, for all their nervousness, had matching glints of curiosity and determination in their eyes. Those two were a pair, she could see already. Platonic, romantic, some combination of the two, it didn’t matter. Some fundamental part of them was the same. And they were scientists, yeah, but also good people.

“Good to see some of your team made it,” she said, nodding to Coulson. “I look forward to working with you.”

“We have to work with her?” she heard Skye mutter as she turned to leave.

“Other way around,” Natasha called over her shoulder, and left the suite.

Clint followed a second later, clearly biting back laughter. “That went better than expected.”

“Who’s the Skye girl?”

“Hacker. Used to be obnoxiously anti-SHIELD. I don’t know the details but she’s on our side now.” Clint steered Natasha back down the hallway. She’d barely spent any time in this facility and didn’t know her way around well yet, so she let him guide.

Natasha shook her head. “Where does Coulson even find these people…”

“I hope you’re including yourself in that category.”

“Coulson didn’t find me, that was Fury. And you.”

Clint elbowed her. Natasha bumped her shoulder into his hard enough to knock him aside a step.

“Where’s the kitchen in this place?”

Clint shook his head. “You read my mind, that’s where we’re heading. In fact… Friday, are Jane and Helen and Sam and Bucky still in the kitchen?”

“They are, Agent Barton. Would you like me to inform them that you will be joining them?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Clint said. He raised his eyebrows at Natasha. “I have Pop Its in my room, let’s grab some and throw them into the room from the ceiling tiles.”

Natasha frowned at him. “Pop Its? You mean the little bags of explosive powder they sell to eight-year-olds on Fourth of July?”

“Duh.”

“Why do you have those?”

“I’m an eight-year-old at heart, and also they are fantastic for making some chaos without actually damaging anything.”

Natasha hid her smile. “You do realize Zima and probably Jane are going to damage things when we throw Pop Its at them.”

“That’s their fault, not mine.”

“Sounds better than trying to sleep.” Natasha glanced down at her still-bloody knuckles, then back up at her friend, no longer able to keep the smile off her face. “Lead the way.”