Chaos, Control, and the Color Red 2/?

[frea_o]

Title: Chaos, Control, and the Color Red, 2/?
Rating: PG-13 for Violence, Language, Possible Sexual Situations
Fandom: The Avengers (Movieverse), Chuck
Pairings: Carina & Natasha, Natasha/Clint
Summary: It’s a partnership that shouldn’t work and yet somehow does. Mostly. Sometimes. Okay, not usually, but it’s so much fun that Carina Miller doesn't give a damn.
Complete: In progress.
Length: 1,571 words.

Read the first part here.

She’d meant to cause chaos. She hadn’t meant to cause that much chaos, which is honestly something Carina never thought she would ever feel.

Carina stands on the second level, which opens out into the grand ballroom, and surveys the swath of destruction below on the first floor. A normal person might feel bad about the bullet scars in the priceless artwork, but Carina’s never been an admirer. Besides, it’ll just be some commission for an art restoration type that could probably use the cash. Carina is, if nothing else, a die-hard capitalist, which is another reason she and the Black Widow should probably never work together again.

Plus, they’re just downright volatile, if all of the rubble and debris cluttering the floor of this ballroom are any indication. Like bleach and potassium chloride, they’re a combination that should never be mixed.

Below, teams from SHIELD and DEA pick through the crime scene, somehow managing to catalogue evidence and give each other the side-eye simultaneously. Natasha hadn’t been lying when she’d mentioned the need for inter-agency cooperation, Carina sees. There’s a SHIELD team looking for their operative, who, thanks to Carina’s ill-timed betrayal, kind of received a brutal clubbing to the temple with an AK-47. They’d whisked Natasha through the back door while Carina had been holding off eight thugs with Uzis, and now the Black Widow is being held captive, probably somewhere in Zagreb. The plan had been that Carina would be able to follow her and keep tabs in case she needed backup.

Natasha Romanova isn’t exactly the type to need backup, but even so: Carina’s managed to screw up screwing up a mission. That’s a first for her.

She fiddles with her earpiece, but the SHIELD team searching for Natasha hasn’t checked in. They likely won’t, Carina knows. Once they find their agent, the partnership is over. This whole incident is probably going to go down in the black books of two separate agencies as a complete failure. Carina’s not overly bothered by that part, at least.

Down below, an undercurrent of tension ripples through the SHIELD workers, making the DEA clean-up team tense in reply. An instant later, a man strides through the door. He’s not overly large or imposing—he’s maybe Carina’s height, dressed in cargo pants and a SHIELD jacket. The odd thing is that he’s wearing sunglasses indoors, which makes Carina think of that terrible song from the 80s, as it’s approaching three in the morning.

He looks up and even though she can’t see his eyes, she gets the feeling that he’s just looked right at her. Carina cocks an eyebrow; the man looks away to address one of the SHIELD agents. The conversation’s too quiet for her to track and reading lips requires too much energy, so she returns to her thoughts. Every agent knows that the subconscious catches more than the conscious, and maybe there’s something buried in her mind that’ll lead to where they’re keeping Natasha Romanova.

Given, of course, that Romanova hasn’t busted out, killed them all, and headed back to wherever her true loyalty lies with a laugh on her lips. It’s always a possibility with the other redhead.

But no matter how Carina shakes it, nothing about their opponent, drug lord Vasily Markovich, strikes a chord as to where he might be holed up. If the SHIELD team hasn’t had any luck come morning, she’ll start hitting up her meager list of contacts in Croatia, which will be a pain in the ass because none of them speak English and there’s a reason she’s avoided this godforsaken, miserable country in the first place.

A noise to her left makes her look over and there’s Sunglasses, climbing the stairs and heading her direction. “You Miller?” he asks.

Ex-military, Carina notes. Haircut’s a smidgen long for it, but he’s a guy that looks like he never got out of the habit, and his carriage is soldier, through and through. The stillness about him indicates something solitary and patient: sniper, or EOD.

“Yep,” she says. “How’s it going, Corey?”

He shoots her a confused look.

“Sunglasses,” Carina says, nodding at them, and then receives the surprise of her life when he smiles, actually understanding the reference. Lord, she’s been spending too much time around Sarah and Zondra, who wouldn’t get pop culture even if it danced naked in front of them with a sign.

“Clint, actually,” he says, holding out a hand. “Clint Barton, SHIELD.”

“Carina Miller, DEA,” Carina says, and shakes his hand. “Any news on your partner?”

Clint takes off the sunglasses to squint at her. “How’d you know?”

“She mentioned you.”

“Huh. And no, no news. But then, it’s early yet.” Clint mimicks Carina’s pose, leaning with his elbows on the railing so that they overlook the teams below in perfect solidarity. After a moment, Clint breaks the silence. “She ask you to blow the mission and things go to hell worse than you expect?”

“Maybe I planned for them to go that badly.”

It’s obvious that Clint is taking in the destroyed chandelier and blown-out front entrance, which had nearly taken Carina’s head off. “Then you’ve got big brass ones, and I salute you,” he says, his voice wry. “But I don’t think that’s the case.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A fake blown mission turning into a real blown mission is kind of Nat’s M.O.”

“Happened to you before, huh?” Carina asks.

“Ask her about Budapest sometime, but, you know, make sure there’s a blast radius first. C’mon.”

“Where’re we going?” But Carina’s game to go anywhere. She’s tired of staring at this ballroom and the dead bodies of Vasily Markovich’s henchmen that she and Natasha took out before the plan went horribly, horribly awry. So she trots along beside Clint as they head down the stairs.

“Well, the fight went down at, what, twenty hundred hours?”

“More or less.”

“Nat’s healing capability means that a hit as bad as the one surveillance shows she took means she’d have been unconscious for about forty, forty-five minutes.” Clint ticks points off on his fingers as they work their way across the room and to the exit. “They’ll have started the interrogation right away—they fear SHIELD enough to know that there’s no way they can hide for long, so there’s a narrow window. Group like that, Nat likes to take her time, but even so, that’s probably two hours max before she’s done with her interrogation.”

“Her interrogation?”

“Oh, come now, you don’t really think they’re actually in charge, do you?” They hit the night air, and it’s chilly, making Carina grateful she changed from the servant’s uniform into a nondescript jacket and jeans. “If Markovich has child endangerment in his file—”

“He doesn’t,” Carina says.

“Then it’ll take her thirty minutes to knock them all unconscious and escape. She won’t kill him unless he’s hurt kids. Anyway, she’ll be crossing Zagreb now and be wanting a pick-up. I think you and I can arrange that.”

They climb into a muscle car parked among the other SHIELD vehicles, Clint automatically sliding behind the driver’s seat. “And you know where she’s going?” Carina asks, raising an eyebrow. She’s impressed.

“Well, yeah. She started a fight before she took off.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

Clint smirks as he shifts into reverse, hitting the gas so hard that the tires peel out against the asphalt. “Did you know there’s a museum in Zagreb called the Museum of Broken Relationships?”

“You know, I used to think that the Black Widow was one of the scariest things in the intelligence business—though don’t tell her I said so,” Carina says after she’s done processing everything Clint has said. She’s a little offended that Natasha meant for the plan to go that badly the whole time, but maybe it’s karma for all of the times she made the other CAT Squad members’ lives difficult.

“And now?” Clint asks.

“I think understanding her is even scarier.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You do that.”

“Stick around, though, and you’ll learn, too. Nat must really like you.”

Carina highly doubts that. “Yeah, right,” she says with a snort.

“You’re conscious and alive, aren’t you?” Clint asks, and Carina narrows her eyes at him. “Most of Nat’s ‘partners’ in this little exercise—not nearly so fortunate.”

“Lucky me,” Carina says.

When they pull up in front of the Museum of Broken Relationships twenty minutes later, Carina is absolutely not surprised at all when a woman slips out of the shadows and climbs into the backseat of Clint’s car. Natasha is still wearing her cocktail dress, which has not survived the evening well, and there’s a contusion just above her temple, but she looks eerily calm. “Took you long enough,” she says in that mildly-amused, mildly-sarcastic voice Carina remembers well from Sarajevo.

“Sorry. Had to initiate the rookie,” Clint says, and puts the car into gear.

Overall, Carina’s really not sure what has happened, other than two things: she has just been initiated into some scary circle of trust that she’s not sure she wants to be a part of, and she really, really hates being called a rookie. But Natasha Romanova, in the backseat, smiles at Carina like she’s an equal, and despite the hell of the evening, Carina can’t help but feel that, the rookie thing aside, maybe this weird partnership will work after all.