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Challenge #17a: Zoom in/Zoom Out - Part 1
Title: Five Times Maria Hill Didn't Understand Natasha Romanoff...And One Time She Did 1/6
Rating: PG-13 for Violence, Language, Sexual Situations
Fandom: The Avengers (Movieverse)
Pairings: Maria & Natasha, Clint/Natasha, Steve/Maria
Summary: Maria’s first mission for SHIELD does not go the way she expected.
Length: 2,915 words.
Her first grouping hit the silhouette dead center, but her second drifted to the left, the cluster a little too widespread for her liking. Maria Hill drew in a deep breath and fired off a series of five shots. The grouping was tighter—this time on the groin of the silhouette—but she could do better. She set the Glock on the shelf in her stall so that she could reload, as she’d used up her last magazine.
When she heard the unmistakable clang of her instructor’s boots on the tile, she snapped to attention, ready to pop off a salute until she remembered that SHIELD did not believe in saluting. She covered her near-gaffe by remaining at attention as Instructor Hogan approached.
“At ease, Agent,” she said, a small smirk in place.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hogan studied the silhouette down-range from Maria’s stall. “Man trouble?” she asked.
“Just needed a memorable area of the target, ma’am.”
“And it seems you found one. Pack it in.”
All of the landsmen—if you were on the aircraft carrier less than six months, they called you a landsman, regardless of your gender—were required to spend a certain number of hours in the gun range. Maria knew she had exceeded hers for the week, but she had gotten the impression that that was encouraged, provided that an agent didn’t neglect his or her other duties, and Maria had definitely not done that. “Ma’am?”
“Relax, Agent, you’re not in trouble. You’re being sent into the field.” Hogan held out a file folder. “Best hustle, too. You’re wanted on the upper deck in forty minutes, and you still have to drop by the Armory and Medical.”
Maria wanted to scowl—landsmen were required to sign out with Medical whether they were injured or not—but the prospect of being sent in the field overpowered any annoyance. She took the file and did not say the thousand things that came to mind, instead choosing to give a curt nod. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, and began to police her brass at double-time, grateful that she hadn’t gone through her full session.
But Hogan laughed and pushed her toward the door, startling Maria. She’d gotten used to living in close quarters, but it was always such a shock to reconcile the command structure in the lower ranks of SHIELD with the way her commanding officers had treated her in the Coast Guard. “I’ll handle this. Hurry, Agent, or the Quinjet will leave without you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t snap off a salute before she left, though it was a near thing. There had been nothing on the feed that morning about any of the active missions in the field, which meant this was either deep-cover—which she doubted, she hadn’t been with SHIELD that long—or it was a new assignment. If they were sending rookies, though, it was probably a cakewalk, but she kept her pace.
They were waiting for her in Medical. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk after all. A couple of her fellow landsmen had had to wait nearly two hours at Medical, but Dr. Stinson had her paperwork signed the minute she walked in.
In the Armory, Patch Gunner took one look at her PT gear and grunted. “Full kit’s in the back. Make sure to change.”
Since he hadn’t even needed to look at the mission loadout in the folder, they really had warned everybody she was coming. Maria wasn’t used to anything going nearly this smoothly; prepping for roll-out generally meant some kind of paperwork SNAFU and gear getting left behind, but there was a uniform and her own combat boots already laid out for her on a bench in the back. She wasted no time scrambling into the clothes and was just pulling on the boots when the door swung open to admit two more agents.
The first one looked at her with a grin. “Well, well, well, they’re givin’ us rookies. Look at that, uniform’s so new it’s practically shining like a copper penny.”
“Greg,” Maria said, nodding at Jones and his partner, Frederickson. “Chester. They sent you two hooligans? They must really be desperate.”
Chester Frederickson, all 6 feet and 7 inches of him, grinned. He’d earned the nickname Monolith among the crew for a reason. “They just want a job done right the first time, is all.”
“Are we the only ones?”
“Yeah, we’ll meet the AIC in the field. Got your gear?”
Maria picked up the kitbag. One of the straps held a piece of masking tape with her name on it. Even with the rush through Medical, they were cutting it close, so she’d just have to trust that Patch knew what he was doing. She wasn’t going to get left behind on her first mission, and she’d survived with less. “Where are we going?”
“Barcelona. Let’s go.”
* * *
After four years jumping out of helicopters in the worst weather conditions known to mankind, where it was so noisy that you couldn’t hear yourself even try to think, Maria Hill always found SHIELD Quinjets disquieting. There was a gentle hum of the engines, of course, but that was nothing compared to the scream of wind and chop of rotors. In her time in the Guard, she’d learned how to sleep through the worst of it, but she couldn’t drop off now, even if Frederickson’s snores were enough to make most Apache helicopters sit up and take notice.
With a sigh, she pushed out of the safety rigging in the cargo bay and stretched her legs out. Greg looked up from the well-thumbed copy of Cannery Row in his lap. “Should’a brought a book.”
“Didn’t have time.” Maria stretched, taking her time to make sure each muscle was well-limbered before moving on to the next. They’d been briefed via comm right after take-off, but the details had been scarce. The Quinjet would take them to a set of coordinates in Barcelona, where they would disembark and pick up a package from the field contact. Upon retrieving the package, they would return to the Quinjet and remain vigilant until the package was safely delivered to SHIELD aircraft carrier.
They were still two hours out from Barcelona. She wondered what the package was, that it would require three armed agents and a pilot to retrieve it.
“What do you suppose it is?” she asked Greg.
“Probably not a shark.”
“Why would it be a shark?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Greg asked, and Maria gave him a skeptical look. “Work for SHIELD for awhile. You’ll see what I mean. Probably some kind of weapon or device causing Fury trouble, and Coulson’s sending us out to clean up the final part of a mess. It won’t be anything exciting. It never is.”
The package was not a shark.
It was, it could be argued, very exciting, though.
“Gentlemen,” Agent Clint Barton said as he climbed up the ramp into the Quinjet. “Oh—and Hill. Sorry, didn’t see you. So that would make that gentlemen and lady. By the way, you can lower the weapons. Pretty sure she’s not going to bite.”
None of the three SHIELD agents in the hold moved to do so.
Clint Barton sighed. “Stand down,” he said, and again nobody moved. “That’s an order.”
Maria reluctantly holstered the Glock. Frederickson and Greg followed.
“I made her promise she’d play nice,” Clint Barton said, but Maria noticed that he, too, kept a respectable distance from the woman behind him on the ramp. The Black Widow was shorter in person than Maria expected, but that hardly mattered. She’d seen the footage of Sao Paolo. She knew what Natalia Romanova was capable of.
“Pardon the insubordination, sir,” Greg said, “but you do know you’ve got Hostile Number One standing behind you, right?”
“I don’t need my eyes checked, Agent. Sanderson, get us in the air.”
Natalia Romanova did not look like a hardened killer. If anything, she looked like a college student, though Maria knew she was older than she appeared. She wore a form-hugging top under a battered leather jacket and jeans that looked like they had been painted on. There were no visible weapons, but she didn’t precisely need them, especially in such close quarters. Her hair, a shade of red so bright it had to be unnatural, was loose around her shoulders.
She looked at them, completely impassive, very much like Maria imagined the three of them were looking at her now.
“Everybody, this is Natasha,” Barton said, needlessly. “Natasha, this is…better not to tell you their names, actually. One of them’s still a rookie.”
Natasha’s eyes cut to Maria immediately, which Maria felt was more than a little unfair. She’d been in the Coast Guard for nearly four years before Madripoor had put her on SHIELD’s radar.
“Sit,” Barton said, pointing at one of the seats toward the back. “Stay.”
Though Maria supposed the Widow had killed people for less, Natasha gave him a very dry look. With a small bounce of her shoulders, she took a seat. Maria wondered what the hell Barton’s game was, why he thought bringing in Hostile Number One like some kind of houseguest was a good idea. Romanova had a kill record longer than one of Frederickson’s arms, and that was just the hits they knew about.
But the sniper grinned at the three of them. “You three stay here and watch her. I’m going to go take over for Sanderson for a bit. Been awhile since I got to fly one of these things.”
Just like that, he left the three junior agents alone. With the Black Widow.
And SHIELD said it didn’t believe in hazing.
* * *
Clint Barton needed to get his head checked.
That was the long and the short of it. The man had to have gone insane on whatever mission SHIELD had sent him out on, for there was no possible way his reality matched that of any logical person. He was bringing the Black Widow in like a stray puppy to the SHIELD aircraft carrier. He had gone off the deep end.
Nearly an hour into the flight, Maria had finally taken a seat. It wasn’t directly across from the Black Widow, but she was the nearest, as both Greg and Frederickson had visibly paled at the thought of being anywhere near her. Every single one of Maria’s muscles was tensed. She didn’t even bother to try and look casual. She wasn’t fooling anybody.
Natasha Romanova hadn’t moved. She didn’t have her safety rigging done up (which meant the rest of them didn’t, either). Her arms were folded across her chest, her feet flat on the floor. She took her time staring at each of them in turn. Frederickson and Greg looked down at the Quinjet floor.
Maria stared back.
“Having fun yet?” Barton asked over the comm. Maria’s hand twitched toward her gun in surprise; Natasha’s eyes cut down to the movement and back up before she leaned back with another one of those minuscule shrugs. “Seriously, are you guys all still alive back there?”
None of the agents moved to answer.
“Bueller?” Barton asked. “Bueller?”
“No issues back here, sir,” Greg finally said.
“Excellent. Anybody bring anything good to read?” When there was no answer again, he made a disgusted noise. “She’s not actually going to kill you, you know. I had her swear on the grave of some dead Russians that she wouldn’t harm any SHIELD agents.”
Again, none of them answered.
“Oh, fine.” She could practically hear Barton rolling his eyes in the cockpit. “Let’s play a game, then. Let’s play ‘How many things on the Quinjet can Romanoff use to kill the three of you.’ We’ll call it a training exercise. Winner gets to swap out with Sanderson for copilot duties.”
“Sir?” Sanderson asked, sounding very worried.
She could see Frederickson’s eyes scanning the ceiling, methodically counting each and every thing that wasn’t bolted down (and very likely some of the things that were). Greg was a little more subtle about it.
“Well?” Barton asked.
“Thirty-seven, sir,” Frederickson said.
“Wrong, you forgot about the buckle by her right hand.”
As one, the three agents looked at Natasha’s right hand. She stared back for a second before she rolled her eyes, glared toward the cockpit, and rested the back of her head against the headrest, eyeing the ceiling.
“But that’s a very nice try, Chester. Doesn’t help you when you’re dead, of course, but props for effort.”
“You’re a twisted bastard, Barton,” Maria said.
“Thank you, Agent Hill. I notice you didn’t hazard a guess.”
“I don’t need to. She wouldn’t require anything on the Quinjet. She would simply take Frederickson down with a jab to the throat, a kick to the side of the knee to incapacitate him. Provided she could get enough leverage, she’d snap his neck before she took Agent Jones down, possibly with one of her thigh-holds. She would try to finish the job with me using the stiletto in her left boot she thinks we don’t know about.”
There was silence throughout the cabin. Natasha, still staring at the ceiling, began to smile.
“Try?” Barton asked.
“She’d have to be fast, sir, to beat my Glock.” Maria doesn’t take her eyes off of Natasha.
“I really object to being first to die,” Frederickson said.
“Yeah, how come she doesn’t just take you out with the knife first and then the pair of us?”
“Shock value,” Maria said with a shrug. “Everybody expects her to go for the other woman first. Frederickson’s the bigger trophy.”
Natasha finally looked away from the ceiling. Her eyes were amused as she looked Maria up and down, but eventually she tilted her head slightly. Slowly, holding one hand up in caution, she leaned forward.
Maria’s hand tensed on the hilt of her gun. When Natasha pulled a stiletto from her right boot, Maria actually drew her gun. But the redhead just tossed the knife onto the seat next to Maria.
“Wrong boot,” was all she said, and curled up on the seat, hugging her legs to her chest and, by all appearances, falling asleep.
Maria looked at the stiletto on the seat next to her and tried very hard not to blanch. She’d been bluffing.
* * *
Natasha didn’t say a single word for the rest of the flight. When the Quinjet touched down on the carrier deck, there was an armed escort waiting for her, all of the guns trained on her. They didn’t put her in restraints—which would have been silly—as they led her away, the mission crew trailing behind them. Maria felt vaguely hungover and exhausted, like she’d been on a long dive in 50-knot winds with no way of getting back to shore. She held her head high, no matter that she knew the deck crews were gaping as the processional moved inside and toward the prisoner cells.
Nick Fury himself was waiting for the team. He stood, arms crossed over the chest of his massive black leather coat as Natasha Romanova was locked into a cell. If he looked more annoyed than usual at this development, Maria couldn’t tell. He dismissed the escort, though Barton and his team remained behind.
“You were sent to kill her, not to collect her,” Fury said to Barton.
Barton did not shrug like he had with the junior agents. He wasn’t precisely standing at attention, but it was close. “I figured a job offer would go over better.”
“And?”
“And it did. Besides, it’s more efficient not to let something that good go to waste.”
“And when she kills us all in our beds, Barton?”
Now Barton did shrug. “Send Hill after her. She seems to have her figured out.”
Maria wondered exactly what kind of drugs he had discovered in Barcelona. She looked over her shoulder at the holding cell, where Natasha was sitting on the cot, legs folded into the lotus position. The same inscrutable smirk from earlier was still in place.
“That so, Hill?” Fury asked.
“I don’t think anybody truly has the Black Widow figured out.” Maria eyed the team leader, threw caution to the wind and said, “Except Barton. And that’s perhaps because he’s a lunatic, sir.”
Barton’s shoulders shook with silent laughter; Fury did not seem amused, which was okay with Maria. She hadn’t been kidding.
“Very well. Jones, Frederickson? Anything to report?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir.”
“Dismissed, then. Good work.”
They hadn’t really done anything, Maria wanted to point out, but surviving a flight with the Black Widow was a new accomplishment for SHIELD agents, so perhaps they shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She turned to follow her teammates from the room, but as she did so, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. When Maria looked at her, though, Natasha’s face was once again blank. She gave Maria a small nod, which Maria found herself returning before she left.
It was only when she was outside in the corridor that she finally let herself relax. Natasha had been studying her, eyes narrowed as though there was something about Maria she didn’t get.
The feeling, Maria thought as she walked away to go get a few hours of shuteye before her shift on the bridge began, was definitely mutual.
Rating: PG-13 for Violence, Language, Sexual Situations
Fandom: The Avengers (Movieverse)
Pairings: Maria & Natasha, Clint/Natasha, Steve/Maria
Summary: Maria’s first mission for SHIELD does not go the way she expected.
Length: 2,915 words.
Her first grouping hit the silhouette dead center, but her second drifted to the left, the cluster a little too widespread for her liking. Maria Hill drew in a deep breath and fired off a series of five shots. The grouping was tighter—this time on the groin of the silhouette—but she could do better. She set the Glock on the shelf in her stall so that she could reload, as she’d used up her last magazine.
When she heard the unmistakable clang of her instructor’s boots on the tile, she snapped to attention, ready to pop off a salute until she remembered that SHIELD did not believe in saluting. She covered her near-gaffe by remaining at attention as Instructor Hogan approached.
“At ease, Agent,” she said, a small smirk in place.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hogan studied the silhouette down-range from Maria’s stall. “Man trouble?” she asked.
“Just needed a memorable area of the target, ma’am.”
“And it seems you found one. Pack it in.”
All of the landsmen—if you were on the aircraft carrier less than six months, they called you a landsman, regardless of your gender—were required to spend a certain number of hours in the gun range. Maria knew she had exceeded hers for the week, but she had gotten the impression that that was encouraged, provided that an agent didn’t neglect his or her other duties, and Maria had definitely not done that. “Ma’am?”
“Relax, Agent, you’re not in trouble. You’re being sent into the field.” Hogan held out a file folder. “Best hustle, too. You’re wanted on the upper deck in forty minutes, and you still have to drop by the Armory and Medical.”
Maria wanted to scowl—landsmen were required to sign out with Medical whether they were injured or not—but the prospect of being sent in the field overpowered any annoyance. She took the file and did not say the thousand things that came to mind, instead choosing to give a curt nod. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, and began to police her brass at double-time, grateful that she hadn’t gone through her full session.
But Hogan laughed and pushed her toward the door, startling Maria. She’d gotten used to living in close quarters, but it was always such a shock to reconcile the command structure in the lower ranks of SHIELD with the way her commanding officers had treated her in the Coast Guard. “I’ll handle this. Hurry, Agent, or the Quinjet will leave without you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t snap off a salute before she left, though it was a near thing. There had been nothing on the feed that morning about any of the active missions in the field, which meant this was either deep-cover—which she doubted, she hadn’t been with SHIELD that long—or it was a new assignment. If they were sending rookies, though, it was probably a cakewalk, but she kept her pace.
They were waiting for her in Medical. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk after all. A couple of her fellow landsmen had had to wait nearly two hours at Medical, but Dr. Stinson had her paperwork signed the minute she walked in.
In the Armory, Patch Gunner took one look at her PT gear and grunted. “Full kit’s in the back. Make sure to change.”
Since he hadn’t even needed to look at the mission loadout in the folder, they really had warned everybody she was coming. Maria wasn’t used to anything going nearly this smoothly; prepping for roll-out generally meant some kind of paperwork SNAFU and gear getting left behind, but there was a uniform and her own combat boots already laid out for her on a bench in the back. She wasted no time scrambling into the clothes and was just pulling on the boots when the door swung open to admit two more agents.
The first one looked at her with a grin. “Well, well, well, they’re givin’ us rookies. Look at that, uniform’s so new it’s practically shining like a copper penny.”
“Greg,” Maria said, nodding at Jones and his partner, Frederickson. “Chester. They sent you two hooligans? They must really be desperate.”
Chester Frederickson, all 6 feet and 7 inches of him, grinned. He’d earned the nickname Monolith among the crew for a reason. “They just want a job done right the first time, is all.”
“Are we the only ones?”
“Yeah, we’ll meet the AIC in the field. Got your gear?”
Maria picked up the kitbag. One of the straps held a piece of masking tape with her name on it. Even with the rush through Medical, they were cutting it close, so she’d just have to trust that Patch knew what he was doing. She wasn’t going to get left behind on her first mission, and she’d survived with less. “Where are we going?”
“Barcelona. Let’s go.”
After four years jumping out of helicopters in the worst weather conditions known to mankind, where it was so noisy that you couldn’t hear yourself even try to think, Maria Hill always found SHIELD Quinjets disquieting. There was a gentle hum of the engines, of course, but that was nothing compared to the scream of wind and chop of rotors. In her time in the Guard, she’d learned how to sleep through the worst of it, but she couldn’t drop off now, even if Frederickson’s snores were enough to make most Apache helicopters sit up and take notice.
With a sigh, she pushed out of the safety rigging in the cargo bay and stretched her legs out. Greg looked up from the well-thumbed copy of Cannery Row in his lap. “Should’a brought a book.”
“Didn’t have time.” Maria stretched, taking her time to make sure each muscle was well-limbered before moving on to the next. They’d been briefed via comm right after take-off, but the details had been scarce. The Quinjet would take them to a set of coordinates in Barcelona, where they would disembark and pick up a package from the field contact. Upon retrieving the package, they would return to the Quinjet and remain vigilant until the package was safely delivered to SHIELD aircraft carrier.
They were still two hours out from Barcelona. She wondered what the package was, that it would require three armed agents and a pilot to retrieve it.
“What do you suppose it is?” she asked Greg.
“Probably not a shark.”
“Why would it be a shark?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Greg asked, and Maria gave him a skeptical look. “Work for SHIELD for awhile. You’ll see what I mean. Probably some kind of weapon or device causing Fury trouble, and Coulson’s sending us out to clean up the final part of a mess. It won’t be anything exciting. It never is.”
The package was not a shark.
It was, it could be argued, very exciting, though.
“Gentlemen,” Agent Clint Barton said as he climbed up the ramp into the Quinjet. “Oh—and Hill. Sorry, didn’t see you. So that would make that gentlemen and lady. By the way, you can lower the weapons. Pretty sure she’s not going to bite.”
None of the three SHIELD agents in the hold moved to do so.
Clint Barton sighed. “Stand down,” he said, and again nobody moved. “That’s an order.”
Maria reluctantly holstered the Glock. Frederickson and Greg followed.
“I made her promise she’d play nice,” Clint Barton said, but Maria noticed that he, too, kept a respectable distance from the woman behind him on the ramp. The Black Widow was shorter in person than Maria expected, but that hardly mattered. She’d seen the footage of Sao Paolo. She knew what Natalia Romanova was capable of.
“Pardon the insubordination, sir,” Greg said, “but you do know you’ve got Hostile Number One standing behind you, right?”
“I don’t need my eyes checked, Agent. Sanderson, get us in the air.”
Natalia Romanova did not look like a hardened killer. If anything, she looked like a college student, though Maria knew she was older than she appeared. She wore a form-hugging top under a battered leather jacket and jeans that looked like they had been painted on. There were no visible weapons, but she didn’t precisely need them, especially in such close quarters. Her hair, a shade of red so bright it had to be unnatural, was loose around her shoulders.
She looked at them, completely impassive, very much like Maria imagined the three of them were looking at her now.
“Everybody, this is Natasha,” Barton said, needlessly. “Natasha, this is…better not to tell you their names, actually. One of them’s still a rookie.”
Natasha’s eyes cut to Maria immediately, which Maria felt was more than a little unfair. She’d been in the Coast Guard for nearly four years before Madripoor had put her on SHIELD’s radar.
“Sit,” Barton said, pointing at one of the seats toward the back. “Stay.”
Though Maria supposed the Widow had killed people for less, Natasha gave him a very dry look. With a small bounce of her shoulders, she took a seat. Maria wondered what the hell Barton’s game was, why he thought bringing in Hostile Number One like some kind of houseguest was a good idea. Romanova had a kill record longer than one of Frederickson’s arms, and that was just the hits they knew about.
But the sniper grinned at the three of them. “You three stay here and watch her. I’m going to go take over for Sanderson for a bit. Been awhile since I got to fly one of these things.”
Just like that, he left the three junior agents alone. With the Black Widow.
And SHIELD said it didn’t believe in hazing.
Clint Barton needed to get his head checked.
That was the long and the short of it. The man had to have gone insane on whatever mission SHIELD had sent him out on, for there was no possible way his reality matched that of any logical person. He was bringing the Black Widow in like a stray puppy to the SHIELD aircraft carrier. He had gone off the deep end.
Nearly an hour into the flight, Maria had finally taken a seat. It wasn’t directly across from the Black Widow, but she was the nearest, as both Greg and Frederickson had visibly paled at the thought of being anywhere near her. Every single one of Maria’s muscles was tensed. She didn’t even bother to try and look casual. She wasn’t fooling anybody.
Natasha Romanova hadn’t moved. She didn’t have her safety rigging done up (which meant the rest of them didn’t, either). Her arms were folded across her chest, her feet flat on the floor. She took her time staring at each of them in turn. Frederickson and Greg looked down at the Quinjet floor.
Maria stared back.
“Having fun yet?” Barton asked over the comm. Maria’s hand twitched toward her gun in surprise; Natasha’s eyes cut down to the movement and back up before she leaned back with another one of those minuscule shrugs. “Seriously, are you guys all still alive back there?”
None of the agents moved to answer.
“Bueller?” Barton asked. “Bueller?”
“No issues back here, sir,” Greg finally said.
“Excellent. Anybody bring anything good to read?” When there was no answer again, he made a disgusted noise. “She’s not actually going to kill you, you know. I had her swear on the grave of some dead Russians that she wouldn’t harm any SHIELD agents.”
Again, none of them answered.
“Oh, fine.” She could practically hear Barton rolling his eyes in the cockpit. “Let’s play a game, then. Let’s play ‘How many things on the Quinjet can Romanoff use to kill the three of you.’ We’ll call it a training exercise. Winner gets to swap out with Sanderson for copilot duties.”
“Sir?” Sanderson asked, sounding very worried.
She could see Frederickson’s eyes scanning the ceiling, methodically counting each and every thing that wasn’t bolted down (and very likely some of the things that were). Greg was a little more subtle about it.
“Well?” Barton asked.
“Thirty-seven, sir,” Frederickson said.
“Wrong, you forgot about the buckle by her right hand.”
As one, the three agents looked at Natasha’s right hand. She stared back for a second before she rolled her eyes, glared toward the cockpit, and rested the back of her head against the headrest, eyeing the ceiling.
“But that’s a very nice try, Chester. Doesn’t help you when you’re dead, of course, but props for effort.”
“You’re a twisted bastard, Barton,” Maria said.
“Thank you, Agent Hill. I notice you didn’t hazard a guess.”
“I don’t need to. She wouldn’t require anything on the Quinjet. She would simply take Frederickson down with a jab to the throat, a kick to the side of the knee to incapacitate him. Provided she could get enough leverage, she’d snap his neck before she took Agent Jones down, possibly with one of her thigh-holds. She would try to finish the job with me using the stiletto in her left boot she thinks we don’t know about.”
There was silence throughout the cabin. Natasha, still staring at the ceiling, began to smile.
“Try?” Barton asked.
“She’d have to be fast, sir, to beat my Glock.” Maria doesn’t take her eyes off of Natasha.
“I really object to being first to die,” Frederickson said.
“Yeah, how come she doesn’t just take you out with the knife first and then the pair of us?”
“Shock value,” Maria said with a shrug. “Everybody expects her to go for the other woman first. Frederickson’s the bigger trophy.”
Natasha finally looked away from the ceiling. Her eyes were amused as she looked Maria up and down, but eventually she tilted her head slightly. Slowly, holding one hand up in caution, she leaned forward.
Maria’s hand tensed on the hilt of her gun. When Natasha pulled a stiletto from her right boot, Maria actually drew her gun. But the redhead just tossed the knife onto the seat next to Maria.
“Wrong boot,” was all she said, and curled up on the seat, hugging her legs to her chest and, by all appearances, falling asleep.
Maria looked at the stiletto on the seat next to her and tried very hard not to blanch. She’d been bluffing.
Natasha didn’t say a single word for the rest of the flight. When the Quinjet touched down on the carrier deck, there was an armed escort waiting for her, all of the guns trained on her. They didn’t put her in restraints—which would have been silly—as they led her away, the mission crew trailing behind them. Maria felt vaguely hungover and exhausted, like she’d been on a long dive in 50-knot winds with no way of getting back to shore. She held her head high, no matter that she knew the deck crews were gaping as the processional moved inside and toward the prisoner cells.
Nick Fury himself was waiting for the team. He stood, arms crossed over the chest of his massive black leather coat as Natasha Romanova was locked into a cell. If he looked more annoyed than usual at this development, Maria couldn’t tell. He dismissed the escort, though Barton and his team remained behind.
“You were sent to kill her, not to collect her,” Fury said to Barton.
Barton did not shrug like he had with the junior agents. He wasn’t precisely standing at attention, but it was close. “I figured a job offer would go over better.”
“And?”
“And it did. Besides, it’s more efficient not to let something that good go to waste.”
“And when she kills us all in our beds, Barton?”
Now Barton did shrug. “Send Hill after her. She seems to have her figured out.”
Maria wondered exactly what kind of drugs he had discovered in Barcelona. She looked over her shoulder at the holding cell, where Natasha was sitting on the cot, legs folded into the lotus position. The same inscrutable smirk from earlier was still in place.
“That so, Hill?” Fury asked.
“I don’t think anybody truly has the Black Widow figured out.” Maria eyed the team leader, threw caution to the wind and said, “Except Barton. And that’s perhaps because he’s a lunatic, sir.”
Barton’s shoulders shook with silent laughter; Fury did not seem amused, which was okay with Maria. She hadn’t been kidding.
“Very well. Jones, Frederickson? Anything to report?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir.”
“Dismissed, then. Good work.”
They hadn’t really done anything, Maria wanted to point out, but surviving a flight with the Black Widow was a new accomplishment for SHIELD agents, so perhaps they shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She turned to follow her teammates from the room, but as she did so, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. When Maria looked at her, though, Natasha’s face was once again blank. She gave Maria a small nod, which Maria found herself returning before she left.
It was only when she was outside in the corridor that she finally let herself relax. Natasha had been studying her, eyes narrowed as though there was something about Maria she didn’t get.
The feeling, Maria thought as she walked away to go get a few hours of shuteye before her shift on the bridge began, was definitely mutual.
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For some reason I looked at the characters but not the title, so when I scrolled back up to see if I'd been mistaken about a pairing list I noticed this was part one of six. (Clearly not the most observant reader. *g*) I like that this both stands on its own and works as a lead in to more interactions between Maria and Natasha.
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I am SO EXCITED about this and will wait eagerly for the next part! :D
Lots of thins to love about this - the way you frame the setting and let the characters speak for themselves. Maria and her defensiveness and her watchfulness. The guys and Natasha. Clint. I won't read Part 2 right off because I'm in my lunch break, but I am EXCITEMENT SQUARED for the rest of this story!
*glees like a small gleeful thing*
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