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domarzioneIf I were writing this crossover, this is how it would go...
MCU/Leverage story start [also on: ao3 | tumblr ]
1800 words | PG-ish | Clint Barton, etc.
summary: The aftermath of the story Eliot doesn’t have to tell in ‘The Big Bang Job’ because Parker doesn’t ask. Or, Clint's got questions when his search for the butcher behind a massacre in Sokovia leads him to a familiar face.
Clint showed up to the briefing ten minutes early, armed with a notebook and a cup of coffee because not only had thus summoning cut short his leave – Laura had not been pleased at him abandoning the tiling halfway through – but it had also required getting up at the asscrack of dawn to catch the first of two flights to get here.
“Am I here because I’m needed or because you’re still pissed off about Montevideo?” he asked Hill as he took a seat at the far end of the conference table.
He’d had perfect confidence in his ability to shoot past her as she’d been running toward their target and, when she’d cooled off enough, she’d realize it, too. But until then, she’d have the tiny sonic boom of a large caliber bullet speeding past her ear close enough to singe her hair to hold over his head.
“I’m petty enough to cut short your vacation to assign you a shit job,” Hill replied, not looking up from where she was typing on her laptop. “But fighting HR when you’re already fifty days over the maximum for a required leave is more trouble than you’re worth.”
Fury showed up trailing Coulson and a trio of analysts and Agent May, who looked just as thrilled to be there as he did. Melinda dropped down into the seat next to him with a bemused grin and the languidly hungover look of someone who’d had a really good night last night in anticipation of today being a day off but wasn’t surprised to have her plans changed.
“Rivera, start talking,” Fury ordered when everyone was seated.
Rivera, one of the analysts, popped up and started hitting keys on her laptop, sending the projector whirring to life. The images on the screen were the opposite of life, photographs of a massacre. The faces, those that were intact and not covered in blood and gore and filth, looked Slavic and Clint guessed that this was somewhere in either the former Yugoslavia or Sokovia, the most likely candidates for the site of mass murder these days.
“Plostny, Sokovia,” Rivera began. “Population at the last census: 4500. Population last month, probably around 2900. Population today: zero. These photos are from sixteen days ago, when at least four CBUs were dropped on the town at approximately 0230.”
Sokovia’s post-Soviet history had been a general horror show, lurching between tyrants and short-lived republics. They were betwixt and between now, after a few years of UN-enforced peace, which was why Clint couldn’t muster up even a little surprise that someone there had decided to cluster bomb their own people. The governments had access to both Soviet and American weapons and weren’t shy about using both to maintain power and it wasn’t always the tyrants pulling the triggers.
“Those don’t look like bomb casualties,” Melinda said, gesturing at the photo currently on the screen. It was a picture of what was left of a family, a woman and three children, and while one of the kids’ bodies had clearly been blown apart in the blast, the others looked like they might have died in a far more personal fashion. Clint thought he might see bruising on the woman’s neck, a matching pair that could have been thumbs from manual strangulation.
“They’re not,” Rivera agreed. “And that was the first sign that something else was going on.”
The Sokovian government, currently a military dictatorship, had insisted that they had never bombed Plostny. It was the kind of statement that usually got issued and usually got ignored, Rivera explained, except for two things. First, Plostny was in the north, which was the government’s stronghold.
“They get nothing bombing their own people,” Rivera said. “Plostny was down to mostly women and children because all of the men were fighting for the generals. They’re losing entire regiments of men who have to go home to bury their children.”
“They could be framing the rebels,” Melinda offered, them grimaced. “But they’ve been good to their own people so far. This would be pretty desperate and they’re not at that point yet.”
Clint hadn’t paid a ton of attention to Sokovia – too far out of his AO – but he had a general sense of the shape of the conflict and the government was winning the war, even if they couldn’t put down the rebels cleanly or definitively yet.
The second reason to take the government at its word was a lot easier to quantify: Up until now the Sokovian government had only been using their own supply of Soviet and American weapons, none of which had been acquired in the last ten years. The bombs used on Plostny had been Stark CBU-115s that had only been on the market for two months.
“There are sanctions against selling the Sokovians weapons of mass destruction and even if the Sokovians could afford them – which they can’t – Stane would never risk it,” Hill said, pre-empting Rivera. “Stark Industries would lose billions.”
Which was why Stark Industries had sent investigators over to Sokovia to figure out who had fired their weapons into a farming community. And why SHIELD had sent Coulson to Stark Industries to interview Stane and Stark.
“The buyer list of the 115s is short because the weapons are so new,” Coulson began. “It makes them pretty easy to track, although without any kind of legal enforcement, there are a handful of cases where SI had to take the buyer’s word that they were still in possession. Stane was convinced it was corporate sabotage – someone trying to get SI caught up in the sanctions – until he saw these pictures.”
Clint didn’t need Coulson to explain the rest. If the missiles had been launched to make SI the villain, there would have been no need for a follow-up massacre because it wouldn’t matter if there had been survivors. Survivors would have made it even worse for SI, probably, living on to remind the world of what kind of horror had been perpetuated while Tony Stark was off getting drunk in Monte Carlo or wherever he did his thing. The optics of Stark’s debauchery held up against the weeping and bloodied survivors would have been fatal for the company.
“We have means and methods to hand that SI does not,” Fury said. “We are going to get the head count of those bombs and find out whose are missing and why.”
Which was how Clint found himself on a three-week tour of Eastern Europe, using his serviceable Russian and a lot of charades because he had none of the local languages and English only got him so far. In the end, however, it was Melinda who came home with the magic words, which was the name of the man who’d ultimately been responsible for the bombing: Damien Moreau.
“He’s the preeminent venture capitalist of war and destruction,” Hill explained after passing him a too-thin folder full of speculation and very little verifiable detail. It was just the two of them plus Coulson in her office, Melinda off doing whatever and the analysts back at their desks. “He buys governments instead of companies. And this was his sales pitch to General Marskovic.”
Clint handed the folder back with a whistle. “It explains the target and the follow-up.”
Brutal, but effective. This is what you can have if you accept my offer… or this is what your opponents can have if you say no.
Hill grunted agreement as she reached over to the pile of folders and took the next one off the top, looking it over to make sure it was the one she wanted.
“The missiles were a shoot-and-scoot from the back of a technical,” Coulson said. “May’s tracking the team that launched them. We think they’re Russians, although whether they’re Russian by paycheck or merely by parentage, we’re still not sure.”
Clint turned to him. “Why is May doing that? Out of the two of us, I’m the Russian expert.”
For fairly small values of expert, but he had better contacts in Moscow than she did and she could play charades in lieu of Serbian fluency as well as he could.
“Because we need you on this instead,” Hill answered, holding out the folder. “The follow-up slaughter of the survivors was led by Moreau’s pet assassin. Him we want, one way or the other.”
Clint accepted the folder and opened it., unsurprised to see that the top page was green, which was the color used for a capture/kill order. The text on the page was merely the order in words, the bureaucratic version of “wanted: dead or alive,” and Clint skipped over it and flipped to the next page, which was a photograph.
And froze. The service portrait of Sergeant Eliot Spencer looked back at him, the familiar smile and twinkle in his eyes making Clint’s stomach churn.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, looking up at Hill. “Are you sure?”
Eliot hadn’t quite been a protege, but he’d been close to it. When Eliot had first come into SF, he’d been assigned to Clint’s ODA as the junior 18B and Clint had had the raising of him because passing Q School simply meant that you could do the job, not that you knew how. Clint had filled that gap, at work and off-base. Laura had fed him a hundred dinners and Clint spared a thought for how she was going to take the news; he didn’t often tell her the specifics of what he did for SHIELD, but there was no way he survived hunting down a friend without her. And Eliot had been a friend. They’d only worked together for a year and change before Eliot had been bounced over to be the lead 18B on another team and then Clint had swapped his Alpha for a Delta and they’d lost touch in the way that happened in the Army, the soft parting that assumed a future reprise because that was Army life.
Neither of them would have ever expected the reunion to go this way, with a green sheet.
“We’re sure,” Hill said soberly.
The kill order was capture-or, but if Fury had really wanted Eliot alive, there wouldn’t have been an ‘or.’ They’d accept him alive, but it wasn’t a requirement. Eliot was apparently so much trouble that stopping him was more important than finding out what he knew.
“What the hell happened to you?” Clint asked the photograph.
Eliot had no reply.
[Clint chases Eliot, May chases Russians, they all encounter Natasha, who is still with the SVR and also chasing Moreau’s people. Eliot gets away because Moreau is that powerful, but hindsight will say that it was for the best and sowing the seeds of Natasha’s recruitment is not the worst consolation prize.]
MCU/Leverage story start [also on: ao3 | tumblr ]
1800 words | PG-ish | Clint Barton, etc.
summary: The aftermath of the story Eliot doesn’t have to tell in ‘The Big Bang Job’ because Parker doesn’t ask. Or, Clint's got questions when his search for the butcher behind a massacre in Sokovia leads him to a familiar face.
Clint showed up to the briefing ten minutes early, armed with a notebook and a cup of coffee because not only had thus summoning cut short his leave – Laura had not been pleased at him abandoning the tiling halfway through – but it had also required getting up at the asscrack of dawn to catch the first of two flights to get here.
“Am I here because I’m needed or because you’re still pissed off about Montevideo?” he asked Hill as he took a seat at the far end of the conference table.
He’d had perfect confidence in his ability to shoot past her as she’d been running toward their target and, when she’d cooled off enough, she’d realize it, too. But until then, she’d have the tiny sonic boom of a large caliber bullet speeding past her ear close enough to singe her hair to hold over his head.
“I’m petty enough to cut short your vacation to assign you a shit job,” Hill replied, not looking up from where she was typing on her laptop. “But fighting HR when you’re already fifty days over the maximum for a required leave is more trouble than you’re worth.”
Fury showed up trailing Coulson and a trio of analysts and Agent May, who looked just as thrilled to be there as he did. Melinda dropped down into the seat next to him with a bemused grin and the languidly hungover look of someone who’d had a really good night last night in anticipation of today being a day off but wasn’t surprised to have her plans changed.
“Rivera, start talking,” Fury ordered when everyone was seated.
Rivera, one of the analysts, popped up and started hitting keys on her laptop, sending the projector whirring to life. The images on the screen were the opposite of life, photographs of a massacre. The faces, those that were intact and not covered in blood and gore and filth, looked Slavic and Clint guessed that this was somewhere in either the former Yugoslavia or Sokovia, the most likely candidates for the site of mass murder these days.
“Plostny, Sokovia,” Rivera began. “Population at the last census: 4500. Population last month, probably around 2900. Population today: zero. These photos are from sixteen days ago, when at least four CBUs were dropped on the town at approximately 0230.”
Sokovia’s post-Soviet history had been a general horror show, lurching between tyrants and short-lived republics. They were betwixt and between now, after a few years of UN-enforced peace, which was why Clint couldn’t muster up even a little surprise that someone there had decided to cluster bomb their own people. The governments had access to both Soviet and American weapons and weren’t shy about using both to maintain power and it wasn’t always the tyrants pulling the triggers.
“Those don’t look like bomb casualties,” Melinda said, gesturing at the photo currently on the screen. It was a picture of what was left of a family, a woman and three children, and while one of the kids’ bodies had clearly been blown apart in the blast, the others looked like they might have died in a far more personal fashion. Clint thought he might see bruising on the woman’s neck, a matching pair that could have been thumbs from manual strangulation.
“They’re not,” Rivera agreed. “And that was the first sign that something else was going on.”
The Sokovian government, currently a military dictatorship, had insisted that they had never bombed Plostny. It was the kind of statement that usually got issued and usually got ignored, Rivera explained, except for two things. First, Plostny was in the north, which was the government’s stronghold.
“They get nothing bombing their own people,” Rivera said. “Plostny was down to mostly women and children because all of the men were fighting for the generals. They’re losing entire regiments of men who have to go home to bury their children.”
“They could be framing the rebels,” Melinda offered, them grimaced. “But they’ve been good to their own people so far. This would be pretty desperate and they’re not at that point yet.”
Clint hadn’t paid a ton of attention to Sokovia – too far out of his AO – but he had a general sense of the shape of the conflict and the government was winning the war, even if they couldn’t put down the rebels cleanly or definitively yet.
The second reason to take the government at its word was a lot easier to quantify: Up until now the Sokovian government had only been using their own supply of Soviet and American weapons, none of which had been acquired in the last ten years. The bombs used on Plostny had been Stark CBU-115s that had only been on the market for two months.
“There are sanctions against selling the Sokovians weapons of mass destruction and even if the Sokovians could afford them – which they can’t – Stane would never risk it,” Hill said, pre-empting Rivera. “Stark Industries would lose billions.”
Which was why Stark Industries had sent investigators over to Sokovia to figure out who had fired their weapons into a farming community. And why SHIELD had sent Coulson to Stark Industries to interview Stane and Stark.
“The buyer list of the 115s is short because the weapons are so new,” Coulson began. “It makes them pretty easy to track, although without any kind of legal enforcement, there are a handful of cases where SI had to take the buyer’s word that they were still in possession. Stane was convinced it was corporate sabotage – someone trying to get SI caught up in the sanctions – until he saw these pictures.”
Clint didn’t need Coulson to explain the rest. If the missiles had been launched to make SI the villain, there would have been no need for a follow-up massacre because it wouldn’t matter if there had been survivors. Survivors would have made it even worse for SI, probably, living on to remind the world of what kind of horror had been perpetuated while Tony Stark was off getting drunk in Monte Carlo or wherever he did his thing. The optics of Stark’s debauchery held up against the weeping and bloodied survivors would have been fatal for the company.
“We have means and methods to hand that SI does not,” Fury said. “We are going to get the head count of those bombs and find out whose are missing and why.”
Which was how Clint found himself on a three-week tour of Eastern Europe, using his serviceable Russian and a lot of charades because he had none of the local languages and English only got him so far. In the end, however, it was Melinda who came home with the magic words, which was the name of the man who’d ultimately been responsible for the bombing: Damien Moreau.
“He’s the preeminent venture capitalist of war and destruction,” Hill explained after passing him a too-thin folder full of speculation and very little verifiable detail. It was just the two of them plus Coulson in her office, Melinda off doing whatever and the analysts back at their desks. “He buys governments instead of companies. And this was his sales pitch to General Marskovic.”
Clint handed the folder back with a whistle. “It explains the target and the follow-up.”
Brutal, but effective. This is what you can have if you accept my offer… or this is what your opponents can have if you say no.
Hill grunted agreement as she reached over to the pile of folders and took the next one off the top, looking it over to make sure it was the one she wanted.
“The missiles were a shoot-and-scoot from the back of a technical,” Coulson said. “May’s tracking the team that launched them. We think they’re Russians, although whether they’re Russian by paycheck or merely by parentage, we’re still not sure.”
Clint turned to him. “Why is May doing that? Out of the two of us, I’m the Russian expert.”
For fairly small values of expert, but he had better contacts in Moscow than she did and she could play charades in lieu of Serbian fluency as well as he could.
“Because we need you on this instead,” Hill answered, holding out the folder. “The follow-up slaughter of the survivors was led by Moreau’s pet assassin. Him we want, one way or the other.”
Clint accepted the folder and opened it., unsurprised to see that the top page was green, which was the color used for a capture/kill order. The text on the page was merely the order in words, the bureaucratic version of “wanted: dead or alive,” and Clint skipped over it and flipped to the next page, which was a photograph.
And froze. The service portrait of Sergeant Eliot Spencer looked back at him, the familiar smile and twinkle in his eyes making Clint’s stomach churn.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, looking up at Hill. “Are you sure?”
Eliot hadn’t quite been a protege, but he’d been close to it. When Eliot had first come into SF, he’d been assigned to Clint’s ODA as the junior 18B and Clint had had the raising of him because passing Q School simply meant that you could do the job, not that you knew how. Clint had filled that gap, at work and off-base. Laura had fed him a hundred dinners and Clint spared a thought for how she was going to take the news; he didn’t often tell her the specifics of what he did for SHIELD, but there was no way he survived hunting down a friend without her. And Eliot had been a friend. They’d only worked together for a year and change before Eliot had been bounced over to be the lead 18B on another team and then Clint had swapped his Alpha for a Delta and they’d lost touch in the way that happened in the Army, the soft parting that assumed a future reprise because that was Army life.
Neither of them would have ever expected the reunion to go this way, with a green sheet.
“We’re sure,” Hill said soberly.
The kill order was capture-or, but if Fury had really wanted Eliot alive, there wouldn’t have been an ‘or.’ They’d accept him alive, but it wasn’t a requirement. Eliot was apparently so much trouble that stopping him was more important than finding out what he knew.
“What the hell happened to you?” Clint asked the photograph.
Eliot had no reply.
[Clint chases Eliot, May chases Russians, they all encounter Natasha, who is still with the SVR and also chasing Moreau’s people. Eliot gets away because Moreau is that powerful, but hindsight will say that it was for the best and sowing the seeds of Natasha’s recruitment is not the worst consolation prize.]
