fic: Revenant (8/?)
12 Nov 2013 11:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Eight
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
"What the fuck, Tony? You're supposed to be a fucking engineer! Recognize the fucking angles!"
Natasha couldn't see either Clint or Tony to know what might have happened; last she'd had visual on either, Tony had been hovering over Dundas Square and Clint was climbing the trestle on top of the H&M. But that had been at least twenty minutes ago and she'd stopped paying active attention to the fight on Yonge Street once she'd left it behind to concentrate on keeping the battlefield contained indoors.
Arthur Parks, a body-modification freak SHIELD had been keeping an eye on since he'd been discovered while they had been looking for George Tarleton, had turned up at lunchtime with a trolley car full of minions and a bunch of new abilities and was currently making a mess of the otherwise spotless Toronto streets.
Parks was calling himself the Living Laser, which wasn't really that true because he was still at least partially flesh and blood beyond whatever he'd done to himself to be able to shoot laser blasts out of his hands and absorb all kinds of energy, but he was still doing a significant amount of damage to people and property. The minions were all wearing modified HYDRA uniforms that had mirrors attached to them, which had been funny when they had simply looked like disco balls with legs, but significantly less so once Parks had started using them to deflect and reflect his laser blasts for maximum carnage.
A handful of minions had done a runner once the Hulk had gotten involved and Natasha was part of the posse chasing them down inside the Eaton Centre mall area. She was inside the Sears, where three had gone in (that they knew about). She'd found one and dropped him with a kick to the head by housewares, but numbers two and three were playing hide-and-seek inside the store, which had thankfully been evacuated along with the rest of the area before the Avengers had even crossed the border into Canada.
The first mission for the team since Captain America's death was in Toronto; the papers would probably have a field day with that. Especially because Cap's absence was being felt so very acutely and there was going to be no hiding the team's problems and mishaps.
"Still yourself, Hawkeye," Thor was saying, a touch of worry coloring his royal command and Natasha wondered what the hell had happened. "Let me return you to the ground so that you do not worsen the injury."
This wouldn't be the first screw-up of the afternoon that had resulted in damage, personnel or property-wise. The Cap-less Avengers were proving to be chaotic without a tactical commander, each of them ignoring the other's orders, simultaneously stepping on each other's toes and leaving each other vulnerable. Tony had appointed himself leader, which might have worked in a different scenario, but he was having trouble here. He was a better fighter than most people, even within SHIELD, generally gave him credit for being, but he was still used to fighting alone and he was having difficulty being part of the action while still coordinating everyone else's moves. Steve had been brilliant at that, of course, able to see the entire battlefield and anticipate how it would change even while he was down in the trenches. Tony, up on high, had started off well with the initial assignments, but he'd quickly gotten overwhelmed as the fluid nature of the fight took over and things had been falling apart since. Thor was bridling, the Hulk was essentially out of control, and now Clint had gotten hurt badly enough to require an evac from his position and he wasn't even griping about that, which Natasha knew wasn't good.
"Widow, are you still in the Sears?" Corrales asked. His team had been assigned to accompany the Avengers, as per usual, but while they'd originally been told to hang back and let the local law enforcement take lead, the blundering of the Avengers had forced them away from the sidelines.
"Affirmative, Commander," she replied, moving past a horrifying display of tiny pink t-shirts that proclaimed the wearers ready for love. "I'm hunting in the children's section. Two tangos of the mirror-ball kind."
"You will perhaps be unsurprised to know that we have found your quarry in the place where many better men have gotten into trouble," Corrales told her, humor in his voice. "Ladies lingerie. Casimir also found himself a flattering green silk number that really brings out his eyes, by the way."
Natasha smiled, then sobered. "Any idea of what happened to Hawkeye?"
Corrales might not have seen anything, either, but he was carrying more radios than she was and would be in contact with someone who had.
"Negatory on the how," Corrales answered after a moment. "But he was bleeding pretty badly from his left arm when Thor brought him in. He might want to reconsider the sleeveless look."
It took the better part of two hours to finish up; Parks ended up being taken out by an OPP SWAT sniper because none of the Avengers could get an effective shot in, especially with Clint out of the fight. Natasha thought Steve would have handled the final hour far differently -- she would have handled it far differently -- but there would have been little point in saying so at the time because not enough important people would have listened. She thought Steve would have gotten Tony on Hulk containment and left Thor to try his hammer on Parks instead of the other way around; she didn't know if it was because Tony couldn't bear to take himself away from the big fight or because he couldn't see that Mjolnir was the Avengers' last effective weapon against a guy effectively immune to energy-based attacks.
The after-action reports for this were going to be brutal. As it was, the ride back to the Helicarrier was tense and silent. Clint was with them, arm wrapped heavily and protected by a sling; underneath the bandages was a bloody, charred gouge in his forearm that he'd ruefully suggested would finally allow him to take the vacation he should have been on last month.
Corrales took charge of depositing Parks's body in the morgue and his minions in the brig, leaving the Avengers to follow Tapper to Fury's office for what was going to be an ugly sit-down. Natasha accepted it as a necessary consequence of a bad performance, but she still resented being publicly hauled in to the principal's office like an errant schoolchild when there was nothing to be gained but Fury getting his frustration out. For her, embarrassment had always been an excellent corrective and she was well aware of how humiliating this afternoon's activities had been.
"What am I going to do when there's a real threat?" Fury asked, glaring at all of them in turn. He had watched the entire affair on video as it had happened, listening to their comms and following along as things went from bad to worse. "You people would have trouble crossing the street through the Mummers' Parade."
Fury wasn't irate because they'd made a mess of things -- at least he wasn't irate about only that. He was angry that they'd adjusted so poorly to Steve's absence in ways he considered to have been avoidable.
"I understood that the first time out without Cap was going to be a goat rodeo," he told them. "That's why I called you in for this when Corrales could have handled it on his own with some extra DAS support. I wanted you to work the kinks out of the new system before it became a matter of life or death. But I apparently was giving you too much credit because there was no new system.
"Moving forward without Cap is going to be a work in progress. But that means you have to actually work at it. And instead of doing that, instead of working together and using what Cap taught you about functioning as a team, you all acted like lone wolves coincidentally in the same place fighting the same bad guy."
Tony started to say something but Fury cut him off. "You want credit for trying to take charge, Stark? Just wait until tomorrow's headlines to see what everyone thinks of that. You consistently made poor tactical choices and then your teammates made it worse by doing whatever the fuck they wanted. This was a shitshow from beginning to end. Nobody gets a gold star for trying."
Fury gestured at the wall of monitors, each one showing video of the battle in Toronto. "I will bring in someone else to run you if I have to. War Machine or someone else with battlefield experience because This. Was. Unacceptable."
"Why don't you just ask Barnes?" Clint, veteran of more than fifteen years of professional soldiering, suggested in an ugly tone. Natasha chalked that up to the painkillers talking because Clint usually filtered better than that.
"Don't think I haven't considered it," Fury bit back and Natasha exhaled quietly in relief because clearly Fury recognized it, too. Clint and Fury had known each other the longest out of anyone at SHIELD, had known each other before Fury had even taken over SHIELD, and they had a respect for each other that bore the depth of having been colleagues. But when they aired it out in public, it got uglier faster than with anyone else, even Tony and his ability to piss people off and then escalate it.
After they were released from Fury's office, Natasha followed Clint down to the team room so that she could shower and change before getting a lift back down to Manhattan. Tony and Thor had flown off on their own without so much as a goodbye and Bruce had muttered something about his lab before, too, going his own way.
"I don't need a babysitter," Clint groused as she got into the elevator with him.
"If you're picking fights with Fury in front of an audience, you absolutely do," Natasha replied easily, reaching over in front of him to hit the button for the proper floor because Clint had apparently forgotten he was supposed to. She gave him a pointed look and he frowned. "But I'm not interested in the job."
Clint ended up needing help getting dressed because his bandages restricted his arm movement so severely; Natasha offered to go get Corrales or Bruce or someone else male, but Clint just rolled his eyes and gave her the 'get on with it' hand gesture.
It was evening by the time they got dropped off at 44th Street, so they ended up getting dinner together in Hell's Kitchen.
"What's the word on our Little House on the Prairie?" Clint asked when they were seated in the corner of their preferred Vietnamese place. "Not that I won't be finding out in person starting this week because I am sure as shit not convalescing here."
Steve was off the respirator as of last week and the latest tests -- the safe house had its own MRI and CT scanners -- had shown excellent improvement on the skull fractures and remarkable progress by the brain itself, although the baseline for that had been so very low because the original damage had been so profound.
"James said that Peggy said that the neurologists are cautiously willing to use the word 'when' instead of 'if' he wakes up," Natasha reported after the waiter had taken their order. "But they won't commit to a time frame or even guess about what we'll get when he opens his eyes."
James spoke to Peggy almost daily after an initial reluctance; Peggy had started leaving rude voicemails when James had dodged the first few calls. Natasha had found out from Fury, however, that James also talked to Steve, Peggy putting the phone on speaker by his ear, because it had been suggested that Steve hearing a familiar voice might help.
"Is Barnes around this weekend?"
"Probably not," Natasha replied. In the three weeks since they'd come back to New York, James had more or less kept to a schedule: he had mandatory days at 44th Street on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but then he would frequently disappear for a few days at a time, never providing details, just promising Natasha (who in turn had passed on that promise to Fury) that he would return and that he was not continuing his personal revenge crusade. He'd gone out to Wyoming by himself last weekend, but otherwise Natasha had no idea where he was going or what he was doing while he was gone. They had very few common contacts outside of the weaponeers and other black market logistics specialists; Natasha's network had been born in her Red Room days, but James's seemed to have been cultivated during his years working for Lukin out of Latveria.
Fury was not happy with James's "lost weekends," but James was apparently returning with useful intelligence product and he was showing up to his therapy appointments -- James had surprised her by not fighting the requirement that he see a shrink twice a week -- and so Fury, ever the pragmatist when it came to choosing his battles, had decided not to choose this one.
James didn't tell her much about what went on in the therapy sessions, not that she'd expected him to or that she even asked, but he seemed to be getting something out of it. He was less fragile and more animated than he'd been when she'd first brought him in, although he was still very reserved and so very weighed down by the guilt of what he'd done as the Winter Soldier. But he was better, by any metric anyone chose to use. He smiled more, showed more emotion in general, and Natasha could see the rough shape of the person James Barnes could eventually be, even if the lines were sometimes still a little blurry. She thought James could see it too, which was more important.
"Gonna have to cancel the trip to Mattituck," Clint sighed, looking at his sling. Clint had taken James out there the past two Wednesdays for long-range shooting since neither of them believed in the virtual reality set-up at 44th Street. James had gotten range privileges after his first therapy session ("I'm apparently the gun-safe kind of crazy"), although he tended to use them at odd hours to minimize the audience. "We were going to play hide-and-seek again."
"He can go on his own if he wants," she pointed out, cutting the summer rolls in half because while Clint could use his chopsticks one-handed, other tasks were going to be beyond him. "Or would that be cheating on you?"
"He has his own fan club out there already," Clint scoffed, dipping his summer roll in sauce. "If the sniper thing wasn't enough, they've just discovered how much he likes knives."
James's knife skills were extraordinary, moreso even than his marksmanship because while there were many skilled fighters for whom a knife at close range was better than a gun, Clint and Natasha (and Steve) included, the list of people for whom a knife was sufficient outside that small radius was very short indeed. Natasha had trained with him twice since he'd come to New York and she'd been a little surprised -- and a lot humbled -- at how much better he was at hand-to-hand than she remembered him being. Better than her, she knew, but it was the degree of superiority that had been remarkable. Instead of the grueling workout she'd expected, the way it had been with Steve once she'd goaded him enough to stop holding back, it had almost immediately turned into something akin to what they'd looked like once upon a time, when she'd been a Red Room trainee and he her tutor. Something he'd noticed, too, and she'd seen in his eyes that he was thinking about where that had led, a good memory matched up with the present moment of her pinned beneath him and breathing hard. Until the movie in his mind had gotten to the point when they'd been discovered and she had watched the expression on his face, inches above hers, shutter and close and he'd rolled away suddenly and sat up and not looked at her at all.
Clint was looking at her expectantly and she must have missed what he'd said. "I'm the one who's supposed to be spacing," he said. "You got something you wanna talk about?"
She shook her head no and Clint frowned, not backing down. "You two okay?"
"We're fine," she quickly assured, which got her an even more incredulous look from Clint. "No, really. We're fine. He's still figuring out who he is and that's what he's supposed to be doing. It's what Steve wanted for him, it's what Fury and Peggy wanted me to set him up to do, and, most importantly, it's what he wants."
"You sure that's all he wants?" Clint asked and she narrowed her eyes at him for being vulgar. "A friend, Natochka. He might want a friend."
Natasha took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. "I think we might have too much history for me to be that for him."
James was never unhappy to see her, would initiate contact without it being because he needed something from her, but it was very obvious, at least to her, that their past was a complication to his present and maybe his future. He was James Barnes first to everyone else but her and they both knew that she would always see the Winter Soldier in him.
Clint shook his head and sighed. "You're a little ridiculous, you know? I still have the scars from our history and we get on just fine."
Natasha had stabbed him in the thigh the first time they'd met. "You shot me with an arrow in the same spot," she reminded him. "We were even before we ever began."
This earned her an eyeroll. "He came to you, Nat. He could have found anyone. He could have been a walk-in at 44th Street. That's not nothing and you, of all people, know that."
Once upon a time, when Natasha had chosen to defect, she'd gone to Clint when she could have shown up anywhere and presented herself to anyone. She could have rung Fury's doorbell at his apartment in DC, but instead she had gone for shakshuka with Clint in Tel Aviv and let him finally bring her in.
"It's not nothing," she agreed. "But I'm not sure what it is."
The following morning, Clint began his medical leave, which meant that Natasha was the only one dragged in on a Saturday to sit with the Russia Desk and watch the press conference by the Moscow police explaining how hard they were going to work to bring the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice. The terrible crime in question was a half-dozen murder victims left in front of police stations with notes attached to them saying that they were Chinese spies. One of the ultra-nationalist groups was already taking credit, but coming after three weeks of high tension between Russia and China, that might not be sufficient to stave off further escalation.
Russia had thus far been unable to convince anyone that they had had nothing to do with the bombings in China (the embassy and consulate were technically Chinese soil despite the Russian postal addresses) and that had been before the footage had gotten out. The videos, of generally good quality, had shown clearly Russian-looking men and women -- not Uighers or Tibetans or any other aggrieved non-Han Chinese minority, as the Russians had suggested -- with what might very well have been the bomb materials, which in turn had been proven to be Russian military-issue. The emplacement methods were all professional, as were the bomb designs. The Kremlin was running out of alternate explanations and then Beijing revealed that they had recently turned down a Russian proposal for joint efforts on several sensitive foreign policy fronts, from Sea of Japan control to the monitoring of their restive Muslim populations.
If this was Lukin's doing, it was turning into a masterstroke. There were protests in the streets of Vladivostok, which had been living under a curfew along with most of the larger cities in Primorye, and smaller demonstrations in Moscow. The Chinese revelations of the Russian proposals had required international responses from governments and NGOs alike. Putin was scrambling.
There was no evidence of Lukin's hand in anything, however, although that did not discredit Natasha's suggestion. To a cynic, this looked exactly like the frame-up the Russians were insisting it was, which meant that the question was not what the Russians thought they were up to, but who was the one really pulling the strings.
James called her on Monday evening; he didn't say where he'd been, just asked about the adventure in Toronto and if she was okay. She told him the sordid details, right down to Clint's sarcastic suggestion of him as the new leader of the Avengers.
James's response was a hilariously blasphemous Russian expression. "What does he want me to do, wear Steve's uniform and call myself Sergeant America?"
"I wouldn't repeat that in Fury's earshot," she told him. "Another screw-up on our part and he'll be getting the shield flown in from Wyoming and asking you about your throwing arm."
Steve's shield was currently hanging on a hook over his bed; a model was on display at the Smithsonian, although it was being billed as the real thing.
"Speaking of, I wonder if I should hold off on calling Stark about the arm," James mused. "I'm supposed to go over there tomorrow after I'm done getting my head shrunk. But I'll hold off if he's still sore."
Tony had been working on a prototype for a new arm for James since the dinner party. James -- and Clint -- had started making jokes about what the new one would do, especially after Tony hadn't realized James had been kidding about an EMP pulse and actually incorporated one. Tony had thankfully realized what they were doing before the sex toy phase began, although Natasha didn't think the magic fingers cracks were ever actually going to go away.
"Is it ready?" she asked, surprised. "And no, don't hold off. Tony's happier when he's tinkering and he's historically been pretty unbothered by Fury pointing out his inadequacies."
Which was absolutely the truth, but she did wonder about now, when Fury pointing out Tony's failures could be interpreted as Tony letting Steve down. If Tony went down that path, then even the thrill of a new toy would not be enough to dull that blow.
"It's not ready," James answered. "It's more of a fitting, I guess you'd say. The socket in my shoulder isn't anything like how Stark Industries' prosthetics interface, apparently, so he's improvising."
The arm was further along than either of them thought; the following week, Tony sent her a photo of James, naked from the waist up with two arms of matching color and appearance. She ignored the lascivious note attached to it and replied that it was looking good.
"But what about the arm?" was Tony's reply.
Natasha very carefully took a photo of her raised middle finger and sent it back to him. Which in turn was just an invite for magic fingers jokes. She quit while she was behind.
James asked her to come along on his first test drive of the arm outside the lab. She agreed, then asked what he had in mind. Coney Island was the answer, which surprised her a little because James hadn't been all that interested in exploring anything too closely tied to his past life, his "first stint" as Bucky Barnes. He hadn't gone back to his old neighborhood as far as she knew, even though it was a short distance away from Steve's apartment, and had thrown away the picture someone had given him of the James Barnes School (which went by PS 328, much to his relief; the Steve Rogers School was closer to Red Hook but still nowhere either of them would have attended; their actual schools hadn't changed names since they'd been pupils).
Nonetheless, she showed up at the apartment Saturday morning and away they went. James was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers short-sleeved t-shirt and cargo shorts and sunglasses and sneakers and he looked so very American in a way he perhaps hadn't before. It had nothing to do with the arm per se, just that he was no longer working so hard to hide himself in plain sight and the openness changed everything. This was Bucky Barnes, she realized, or as close to it as he could get.
James was a little wary of the Cyclone -- "have they changed the wood planks since 1943?" -- and utterly stupefied at the $9 price tag, but made them ride it anyway. It was Natasha's first roller coaster, she admitted, which would have surprised anyone but James, who'd simply replied that it was the only one he'd ever been on, either.
Most of the rest of Coney Island's amusements were a disappointment to him; they were new, something called Luna Park, and while a great deal of effort had been made to make it look traditional and organic with what had come before, it felt a little fake.
They ended up walking on the boardwalk toward Brighton Beach, which she warned him was now nicknamed Little Odessa, passing the baseball park and the aquarium, both of which were new to James, although he said that he'd gone to the aquarium when it had still been in Manhattan.
The arm, the actual reason for the trip, had thus far performed reasonably well. Up close, it really did look real. It matched the rest of his skin tone -- Tony had said that it would even tan a little -- and it had hair and felt, when Natasha touched it, like real skin, albeit skin that needed some moisturizer. James twitched when she touched it, when anything touched it, because he wasn't used to getting sensory input from his left arm.
"It's really weird," he admitted when she asked him what it felt like. "I guess it feels like it's supposed to, but... I get phantom pains, sometimes. Phantom feedback, like the real thing's still there. And it doesn't feel like that."
There were glitches, of course, because this was still a work in progress. Mostly it was James not being able to do what he wanted with the arm, like when he'd dropped the soda he'd been holding when they'd gotten fries at Nathan's, his only other nostalgia-fueled requirement. But there were also moments of real pain, bad enough to make his eyes water and Natasha suggest that they take the arm off, at least for a while. He refused and she didn't press, but she did get a little more vigilant about keeping them out of crowds because at least twice it had been from incidental contact.
Despite that, they ended up at Netcost, where they were going to get bumped because Russians were no better driving shopping carts than cars. She picked up a basket on the way in and James did not, saying that he didn't think he really wanted anything. But then he co-opted a corner of her basket and then the pile got high enough to topple over on to her selections, so she sent him back to get his own. He got one of the wheeled kind so that he didn't have to hold it in his left hand.
Natasha wasn't often nostalgic for Russian life, but there was something to be said for comfort food. In her earliest memories, before the worst of Department X and the Red Room's training began, there had been babushka-clad women with hot food and warm smiles and as much as she loved her bibimbap now, there would always be a place for veal pelmeni and smoked fish and colorfully-wrapped chocolates with silly names. James's purchases were presumably more straightforwardly about preferences than past history, but she didn't ask because she didn't want to spoil what had turned out to be a fun day and instead restricted her comments to joking about the large container of cornichons. She bought a bag of barberry caramels and a couple of packets of wafer cookies to send to Clint.
They parted on the subway, James surprising her with a kiss on the cheek after thanking her for the day. There was an email from Sonia when she checked her messages after getting home, inviting her to visit for a few days of sun and sea and freedom from the city. It wasn't an idle offer and Natasha only hesitated for a moment before replying back in the affirmative and asking if she could bring a friend.
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
"What the fuck, Tony? You're supposed to be a fucking engineer! Recognize the fucking angles!"
Natasha couldn't see either Clint or Tony to know what might have happened; last she'd had visual on either, Tony had been hovering over Dundas Square and Clint was climbing the trestle on top of the H&M. But that had been at least twenty minutes ago and she'd stopped paying active attention to the fight on Yonge Street once she'd left it behind to concentrate on keeping the battlefield contained indoors.
Arthur Parks, a body-modification freak SHIELD had been keeping an eye on since he'd been discovered while they had been looking for George Tarleton, had turned up at lunchtime with a trolley car full of minions and a bunch of new abilities and was currently making a mess of the otherwise spotless Toronto streets.
Parks was calling himself the Living Laser, which wasn't really that true because he was still at least partially flesh and blood beyond whatever he'd done to himself to be able to shoot laser blasts out of his hands and absorb all kinds of energy, but he was still doing a significant amount of damage to people and property. The minions were all wearing modified HYDRA uniforms that had mirrors attached to them, which had been funny when they had simply looked like disco balls with legs, but significantly less so once Parks had started using them to deflect and reflect his laser blasts for maximum carnage.
A handful of minions had done a runner once the Hulk had gotten involved and Natasha was part of the posse chasing them down inside the Eaton Centre mall area. She was inside the Sears, where three had gone in (that they knew about). She'd found one and dropped him with a kick to the head by housewares, but numbers two and three were playing hide-and-seek inside the store, which had thankfully been evacuated along with the rest of the area before the Avengers had even crossed the border into Canada.
The first mission for the team since Captain America's death was in Toronto; the papers would probably have a field day with that. Especially because Cap's absence was being felt so very acutely and there was going to be no hiding the team's problems and mishaps.
"Still yourself, Hawkeye," Thor was saying, a touch of worry coloring his royal command and Natasha wondered what the hell had happened. "Let me return you to the ground so that you do not worsen the injury."
This wouldn't be the first screw-up of the afternoon that had resulted in damage, personnel or property-wise. The Cap-less Avengers were proving to be chaotic without a tactical commander, each of them ignoring the other's orders, simultaneously stepping on each other's toes and leaving each other vulnerable. Tony had appointed himself leader, which might have worked in a different scenario, but he was having trouble here. He was a better fighter than most people, even within SHIELD, generally gave him credit for being, but he was still used to fighting alone and he was having difficulty being part of the action while still coordinating everyone else's moves. Steve had been brilliant at that, of course, able to see the entire battlefield and anticipate how it would change even while he was down in the trenches. Tony, up on high, had started off well with the initial assignments, but he'd quickly gotten overwhelmed as the fluid nature of the fight took over and things had been falling apart since. Thor was bridling, the Hulk was essentially out of control, and now Clint had gotten hurt badly enough to require an evac from his position and he wasn't even griping about that, which Natasha knew wasn't good.
"Widow, are you still in the Sears?" Corrales asked. His team had been assigned to accompany the Avengers, as per usual, but while they'd originally been told to hang back and let the local law enforcement take lead, the blundering of the Avengers had forced them away from the sidelines.
"Affirmative, Commander," she replied, moving past a horrifying display of tiny pink t-shirts that proclaimed the wearers ready for love. "I'm hunting in the children's section. Two tangos of the mirror-ball kind."
"You will perhaps be unsurprised to know that we have found your quarry in the place where many better men have gotten into trouble," Corrales told her, humor in his voice. "Ladies lingerie. Casimir also found himself a flattering green silk number that really brings out his eyes, by the way."
Natasha smiled, then sobered. "Any idea of what happened to Hawkeye?"
Corrales might not have seen anything, either, but he was carrying more radios than she was and would be in contact with someone who had.
"Negatory on the how," Corrales answered after a moment. "But he was bleeding pretty badly from his left arm when Thor brought him in. He might want to reconsider the sleeveless look."
It took the better part of two hours to finish up; Parks ended up being taken out by an OPP SWAT sniper because none of the Avengers could get an effective shot in, especially with Clint out of the fight. Natasha thought Steve would have handled the final hour far differently -- she would have handled it far differently -- but there would have been little point in saying so at the time because not enough important people would have listened. She thought Steve would have gotten Tony on Hulk containment and left Thor to try his hammer on Parks instead of the other way around; she didn't know if it was because Tony couldn't bear to take himself away from the big fight or because he couldn't see that Mjolnir was the Avengers' last effective weapon against a guy effectively immune to energy-based attacks.
The after-action reports for this were going to be brutal. As it was, the ride back to the Helicarrier was tense and silent. Clint was with them, arm wrapped heavily and protected by a sling; underneath the bandages was a bloody, charred gouge in his forearm that he'd ruefully suggested would finally allow him to take the vacation he should have been on last month.
Corrales took charge of depositing Parks's body in the morgue and his minions in the brig, leaving the Avengers to follow Tapper to Fury's office for what was going to be an ugly sit-down. Natasha accepted it as a necessary consequence of a bad performance, but she still resented being publicly hauled in to the principal's office like an errant schoolchild when there was nothing to be gained but Fury getting his frustration out. For her, embarrassment had always been an excellent corrective and she was well aware of how humiliating this afternoon's activities had been.
"What am I going to do when there's a real threat?" Fury asked, glaring at all of them in turn. He had watched the entire affair on video as it had happened, listening to their comms and following along as things went from bad to worse. "You people would have trouble crossing the street through the Mummers' Parade."
Fury wasn't irate because they'd made a mess of things -- at least he wasn't irate about only that. He was angry that they'd adjusted so poorly to Steve's absence in ways he considered to have been avoidable.
"I understood that the first time out without Cap was going to be a goat rodeo," he told them. "That's why I called you in for this when Corrales could have handled it on his own with some extra DAS support. I wanted you to work the kinks out of the new system before it became a matter of life or death. But I apparently was giving you too much credit because there was no new system.
"Moving forward without Cap is going to be a work in progress. But that means you have to actually work at it. And instead of doing that, instead of working together and using what Cap taught you about functioning as a team, you all acted like lone wolves coincidentally in the same place fighting the same bad guy."
Tony started to say something but Fury cut him off. "You want credit for trying to take charge, Stark? Just wait until tomorrow's headlines to see what everyone thinks of that. You consistently made poor tactical choices and then your teammates made it worse by doing whatever the fuck they wanted. This was a shitshow from beginning to end. Nobody gets a gold star for trying."
Fury gestured at the wall of monitors, each one showing video of the battle in Toronto. "I will bring in someone else to run you if I have to. War Machine or someone else with battlefield experience because This. Was. Unacceptable."
"Why don't you just ask Barnes?" Clint, veteran of more than fifteen years of professional soldiering, suggested in an ugly tone. Natasha chalked that up to the painkillers talking because Clint usually filtered better than that.
"Don't think I haven't considered it," Fury bit back and Natasha exhaled quietly in relief because clearly Fury recognized it, too. Clint and Fury had known each other the longest out of anyone at SHIELD, had known each other before Fury had even taken over SHIELD, and they had a respect for each other that bore the depth of having been colleagues. But when they aired it out in public, it got uglier faster than with anyone else, even Tony and his ability to piss people off and then escalate it.
After they were released from Fury's office, Natasha followed Clint down to the team room so that she could shower and change before getting a lift back down to Manhattan. Tony and Thor had flown off on their own without so much as a goodbye and Bruce had muttered something about his lab before, too, going his own way.
"I don't need a babysitter," Clint groused as she got into the elevator with him.
"If you're picking fights with Fury in front of an audience, you absolutely do," Natasha replied easily, reaching over in front of him to hit the button for the proper floor because Clint had apparently forgotten he was supposed to. She gave him a pointed look and he frowned. "But I'm not interested in the job."
Clint ended up needing help getting dressed because his bandages restricted his arm movement so severely; Natasha offered to go get Corrales or Bruce or someone else male, but Clint just rolled his eyes and gave her the 'get on with it' hand gesture.
It was evening by the time they got dropped off at 44th Street, so they ended up getting dinner together in Hell's Kitchen.
"What's the word on our Little House on the Prairie?" Clint asked when they were seated in the corner of their preferred Vietnamese place. "Not that I won't be finding out in person starting this week because I am sure as shit not convalescing here."
Steve was off the respirator as of last week and the latest tests -- the safe house had its own MRI and CT scanners -- had shown excellent improvement on the skull fractures and remarkable progress by the brain itself, although the baseline for that had been so very low because the original damage had been so profound.
"James said that Peggy said that the neurologists are cautiously willing to use the word 'when' instead of 'if' he wakes up," Natasha reported after the waiter had taken their order. "But they won't commit to a time frame or even guess about what we'll get when he opens his eyes."
James spoke to Peggy almost daily after an initial reluctance; Peggy had started leaving rude voicemails when James had dodged the first few calls. Natasha had found out from Fury, however, that James also talked to Steve, Peggy putting the phone on speaker by his ear, because it had been suggested that Steve hearing a familiar voice might help.
"Is Barnes around this weekend?"
"Probably not," Natasha replied. In the three weeks since they'd come back to New York, James had more or less kept to a schedule: he had mandatory days at 44th Street on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but then he would frequently disappear for a few days at a time, never providing details, just promising Natasha (who in turn had passed on that promise to Fury) that he would return and that he was not continuing his personal revenge crusade. He'd gone out to Wyoming by himself last weekend, but otherwise Natasha had no idea where he was going or what he was doing while he was gone. They had very few common contacts outside of the weaponeers and other black market logistics specialists; Natasha's network had been born in her Red Room days, but James's seemed to have been cultivated during his years working for Lukin out of Latveria.
Fury was not happy with James's "lost weekends," but James was apparently returning with useful intelligence product and he was showing up to his therapy appointments -- James had surprised her by not fighting the requirement that he see a shrink twice a week -- and so Fury, ever the pragmatist when it came to choosing his battles, had decided not to choose this one.
James didn't tell her much about what went on in the therapy sessions, not that she'd expected him to or that she even asked, but he seemed to be getting something out of it. He was less fragile and more animated than he'd been when she'd first brought him in, although he was still very reserved and so very weighed down by the guilt of what he'd done as the Winter Soldier. But he was better, by any metric anyone chose to use. He smiled more, showed more emotion in general, and Natasha could see the rough shape of the person James Barnes could eventually be, even if the lines were sometimes still a little blurry. She thought James could see it too, which was more important.
"Gonna have to cancel the trip to Mattituck," Clint sighed, looking at his sling. Clint had taken James out there the past two Wednesdays for long-range shooting since neither of them believed in the virtual reality set-up at 44th Street. James had gotten range privileges after his first therapy session ("I'm apparently the gun-safe kind of crazy"), although he tended to use them at odd hours to minimize the audience. "We were going to play hide-and-seek again."
"He can go on his own if he wants," she pointed out, cutting the summer rolls in half because while Clint could use his chopsticks one-handed, other tasks were going to be beyond him. "Or would that be cheating on you?"
"He has his own fan club out there already," Clint scoffed, dipping his summer roll in sauce. "If the sniper thing wasn't enough, they've just discovered how much he likes knives."
James's knife skills were extraordinary, moreso even than his marksmanship because while there were many skilled fighters for whom a knife at close range was better than a gun, Clint and Natasha (and Steve) included, the list of people for whom a knife was sufficient outside that small radius was very short indeed. Natasha had trained with him twice since he'd come to New York and she'd been a little surprised -- and a lot humbled -- at how much better he was at hand-to-hand than she remembered him being. Better than her, she knew, but it was the degree of superiority that had been remarkable. Instead of the grueling workout she'd expected, the way it had been with Steve once she'd goaded him enough to stop holding back, it had almost immediately turned into something akin to what they'd looked like once upon a time, when she'd been a Red Room trainee and he her tutor. Something he'd noticed, too, and she'd seen in his eyes that he was thinking about where that had led, a good memory matched up with the present moment of her pinned beneath him and breathing hard. Until the movie in his mind had gotten to the point when they'd been discovered and she had watched the expression on his face, inches above hers, shutter and close and he'd rolled away suddenly and sat up and not looked at her at all.
Clint was looking at her expectantly and she must have missed what he'd said. "I'm the one who's supposed to be spacing," he said. "You got something you wanna talk about?"
She shook her head no and Clint frowned, not backing down. "You two okay?"
"We're fine," she quickly assured, which got her an even more incredulous look from Clint. "No, really. We're fine. He's still figuring out who he is and that's what he's supposed to be doing. It's what Steve wanted for him, it's what Fury and Peggy wanted me to set him up to do, and, most importantly, it's what he wants."
"You sure that's all he wants?" Clint asked and she narrowed her eyes at him for being vulgar. "A friend, Natochka. He might want a friend."
Natasha took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. "I think we might have too much history for me to be that for him."
James was never unhappy to see her, would initiate contact without it being because he needed something from her, but it was very obvious, at least to her, that their past was a complication to his present and maybe his future. He was James Barnes first to everyone else but her and they both knew that she would always see the Winter Soldier in him.
Clint shook his head and sighed. "You're a little ridiculous, you know? I still have the scars from our history and we get on just fine."
Natasha had stabbed him in the thigh the first time they'd met. "You shot me with an arrow in the same spot," she reminded him. "We were even before we ever began."
This earned her an eyeroll. "He came to you, Nat. He could have found anyone. He could have been a walk-in at 44th Street. That's not nothing and you, of all people, know that."
Once upon a time, when Natasha had chosen to defect, she'd gone to Clint when she could have shown up anywhere and presented herself to anyone. She could have rung Fury's doorbell at his apartment in DC, but instead she had gone for shakshuka with Clint in Tel Aviv and let him finally bring her in.
"It's not nothing," she agreed. "But I'm not sure what it is."
The following morning, Clint began his medical leave, which meant that Natasha was the only one dragged in on a Saturday to sit with the Russia Desk and watch the press conference by the Moscow police explaining how hard they were going to work to bring the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice. The terrible crime in question was a half-dozen murder victims left in front of police stations with notes attached to them saying that they were Chinese spies. One of the ultra-nationalist groups was already taking credit, but coming after three weeks of high tension between Russia and China, that might not be sufficient to stave off further escalation.
Russia had thus far been unable to convince anyone that they had had nothing to do with the bombings in China (the embassy and consulate were technically Chinese soil despite the Russian postal addresses) and that had been before the footage had gotten out. The videos, of generally good quality, had shown clearly Russian-looking men and women -- not Uighers or Tibetans or any other aggrieved non-Han Chinese minority, as the Russians had suggested -- with what might very well have been the bomb materials, which in turn had been proven to be Russian military-issue. The emplacement methods were all professional, as were the bomb designs. The Kremlin was running out of alternate explanations and then Beijing revealed that they had recently turned down a Russian proposal for joint efforts on several sensitive foreign policy fronts, from Sea of Japan control to the monitoring of their restive Muslim populations.
If this was Lukin's doing, it was turning into a masterstroke. There were protests in the streets of Vladivostok, which had been living under a curfew along with most of the larger cities in Primorye, and smaller demonstrations in Moscow. The Chinese revelations of the Russian proposals had required international responses from governments and NGOs alike. Putin was scrambling.
There was no evidence of Lukin's hand in anything, however, although that did not discredit Natasha's suggestion. To a cynic, this looked exactly like the frame-up the Russians were insisting it was, which meant that the question was not what the Russians thought they were up to, but who was the one really pulling the strings.
James called her on Monday evening; he didn't say where he'd been, just asked about the adventure in Toronto and if she was okay. She told him the sordid details, right down to Clint's sarcastic suggestion of him as the new leader of the Avengers.
James's response was a hilariously blasphemous Russian expression. "What does he want me to do, wear Steve's uniform and call myself Sergeant America?"
"I wouldn't repeat that in Fury's earshot," she told him. "Another screw-up on our part and he'll be getting the shield flown in from Wyoming and asking you about your throwing arm."
Steve's shield was currently hanging on a hook over his bed; a model was on display at the Smithsonian, although it was being billed as the real thing.
"Speaking of, I wonder if I should hold off on calling Stark about the arm," James mused. "I'm supposed to go over there tomorrow after I'm done getting my head shrunk. But I'll hold off if he's still sore."
Tony had been working on a prototype for a new arm for James since the dinner party. James -- and Clint -- had started making jokes about what the new one would do, especially after Tony hadn't realized James had been kidding about an EMP pulse and actually incorporated one. Tony had thankfully realized what they were doing before the sex toy phase began, although Natasha didn't think the magic fingers cracks were ever actually going to go away.
"Is it ready?" she asked, surprised. "And no, don't hold off. Tony's happier when he's tinkering and he's historically been pretty unbothered by Fury pointing out his inadequacies."
Which was absolutely the truth, but she did wonder about now, when Fury pointing out Tony's failures could be interpreted as Tony letting Steve down. If Tony went down that path, then even the thrill of a new toy would not be enough to dull that blow.
"It's not ready," James answered. "It's more of a fitting, I guess you'd say. The socket in my shoulder isn't anything like how Stark Industries' prosthetics interface, apparently, so he's improvising."
The arm was further along than either of them thought; the following week, Tony sent her a photo of James, naked from the waist up with two arms of matching color and appearance. She ignored the lascivious note attached to it and replied that it was looking good.
"But what about the arm?" was Tony's reply.
Natasha very carefully took a photo of her raised middle finger and sent it back to him. Which in turn was just an invite for magic fingers jokes. She quit while she was behind.
James asked her to come along on his first test drive of the arm outside the lab. She agreed, then asked what he had in mind. Coney Island was the answer, which surprised her a little because James hadn't been all that interested in exploring anything too closely tied to his past life, his "first stint" as Bucky Barnes. He hadn't gone back to his old neighborhood as far as she knew, even though it was a short distance away from Steve's apartment, and had thrown away the picture someone had given him of the James Barnes School (which went by PS 328, much to his relief; the Steve Rogers School was closer to Red Hook but still nowhere either of them would have attended; their actual schools hadn't changed names since they'd been pupils).
Nonetheless, she showed up at the apartment Saturday morning and away they went. James was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers short-sleeved t-shirt and cargo shorts and sunglasses and sneakers and he looked so very American in a way he perhaps hadn't before. It had nothing to do with the arm per se, just that he was no longer working so hard to hide himself in plain sight and the openness changed everything. This was Bucky Barnes, she realized, or as close to it as he could get.
James was a little wary of the Cyclone -- "have they changed the wood planks since 1943?" -- and utterly stupefied at the $9 price tag, but made them ride it anyway. It was Natasha's first roller coaster, she admitted, which would have surprised anyone but James, who'd simply replied that it was the only one he'd ever been on, either.
Most of the rest of Coney Island's amusements were a disappointment to him; they were new, something called Luna Park, and while a great deal of effort had been made to make it look traditional and organic with what had come before, it felt a little fake.
They ended up walking on the boardwalk toward Brighton Beach, which she warned him was now nicknamed Little Odessa, passing the baseball park and the aquarium, both of which were new to James, although he said that he'd gone to the aquarium when it had still been in Manhattan.
The arm, the actual reason for the trip, had thus far performed reasonably well. Up close, it really did look real. It matched the rest of his skin tone -- Tony had said that it would even tan a little -- and it had hair and felt, when Natasha touched it, like real skin, albeit skin that needed some moisturizer. James twitched when she touched it, when anything touched it, because he wasn't used to getting sensory input from his left arm.
"It's really weird," he admitted when she asked him what it felt like. "I guess it feels like it's supposed to, but... I get phantom pains, sometimes. Phantom feedback, like the real thing's still there. And it doesn't feel like that."
There were glitches, of course, because this was still a work in progress. Mostly it was James not being able to do what he wanted with the arm, like when he'd dropped the soda he'd been holding when they'd gotten fries at Nathan's, his only other nostalgia-fueled requirement. But there were also moments of real pain, bad enough to make his eyes water and Natasha suggest that they take the arm off, at least for a while. He refused and she didn't press, but she did get a little more vigilant about keeping them out of crowds because at least twice it had been from incidental contact.
Despite that, they ended up at Netcost, where they were going to get bumped because Russians were no better driving shopping carts than cars. She picked up a basket on the way in and James did not, saying that he didn't think he really wanted anything. But then he co-opted a corner of her basket and then the pile got high enough to topple over on to her selections, so she sent him back to get his own. He got one of the wheeled kind so that he didn't have to hold it in his left hand.
Natasha wasn't often nostalgic for Russian life, but there was something to be said for comfort food. In her earliest memories, before the worst of Department X and the Red Room's training began, there had been babushka-clad women with hot food and warm smiles and as much as she loved her bibimbap now, there would always be a place for veal pelmeni and smoked fish and colorfully-wrapped chocolates with silly names. James's purchases were presumably more straightforwardly about preferences than past history, but she didn't ask because she didn't want to spoil what had turned out to be a fun day and instead restricted her comments to joking about the large container of cornichons. She bought a bag of barberry caramels and a couple of packets of wafer cookies to send to Clint.
They parted on the subway, James surprising her with a kiss on the cheek after thanking her for the day. There was an email from Sonia when she checked her messages after getting home, inviting her to visit for a few days of sun and sea and freedom from the city. It wasn't an idle offer and Natasha only hesitated for a moment before replying back in the affirmative and asking if she could bring a friend.
