hiya everybody! i know it's already thursday in some places, sorry this is so late. i'm pinch hitting for _salamander today and yeesh, life is BUSY nowadays, eh? anyway, we could always use more material for our creative support group on Unfinished Fic Wednesdays! send stuff from 500 - 1000 words to bc.unfinished.gmail.com

alright, let's get down to business to defeat the huuuunnnnnnnn today's submission comes from cybermathwitch who said...

And... then there was this one. Which is at about 7000 words right now, may end up with two different endings, and is probably fairly close to done? It's at the stage of all those fiddly changes/rewrites/etc. and I just can't seem to work up the oomph to do them.

Angsty fic is angsty. And for once not actually some kind of universe-meshing AU. (Though for certain values it *is* still technically AU from the main movie timeline. Maybe. We don't know.)

*****

She was already in Fury's office the next morning when he arrived.


She turned slightly when the door opened, and his eyes locked on hers for a long moment. It was the closest they’d been to one another since their fight in the conference room and it was almost physically painful for him to not reach out and touch her. Her eyes were flat, empty and cold, and that scared the shit out of him.


“Agents, take a seat,” Fury cleared his throat and stared at them until they obeyed.


“I know I don’t have to tell you, Agent Romanov, just how precarious a situation you’ve just put yourself in.”


“No, sir,” she agreed and Clint looked at them both.


“Is there something else going on you haven’t told me about?” he directed it mostly at Natasha, then realized it was the first time he’d spoken to her in over a month.


“You know about the Red Room.”


He nodded. He probably knew more than SHIELD did, officially or unofficially.


“Among other things, they injected several of us with a modified version of a super soldier serum. It was the same kind of thing that the US and Britain, as well as Germany, were working on during World War II. There were only a small handful of us that it worked on. And a smaller handful yet that excelled at their training and maximized its potential.”


“As I’m sure you’re aware, the Red Room wasn't exactly pleased that Agent Romanov defected.” Fury added for his benefit. “She’s far too expensive and successful of an experiment for them to just let her go.”


Pieces were falling into place around him very quickly.


“They’d want her even more if they knew about this, wouldn’t they.” He didn’t make it a question.


“Yes,” she answered softly. “As soon as they know, they will redouble their efforts to try and take both me and the child. They would be very interested to see if the effects of the serum are transmitted from the mother.”


“Because that would mean they could breed super soldiers.”


Natasha nodded. “Did you ever wonder why they didn’t just render us unable to have children?”


He shook his head, slowly, because the full horror of it all was starting to dawn on him. “I just didn’t - it never occurred to me.”


She smiled then, but it wasn’t a nice smile. It was bitter and angry. “They hoped that even once we’d outlived our usefulness as field agents, that we would pass on our strengths and traits that made us such successful operatives to the next generation so that they could make more of us. Of course it was also useful for certain deep cover situations.”


Remaining impassive was taking every last bit of his acting abilities. That kind of long con was exactly what they’d created the Black Widows for, but the thought of Natasha doing it made his blood run cold.


"Is there a plan, sir?"


Fury arched an eyebrow at him. "That depends on what you two plan to do at this juncture. I'm assuming, based on your request, that you intend to go through with the pregnancy?"


Natasha's hands clenched up into fists, but she finally nodded, a slightly jerky motion he wasn't used to seeing from her.


"What then?" Fury asked.


"We'll need to find a suitable home for the child. Assuming we can keep it off of the Red Room's radar long enough to do so."


"They won't be the only ones intrigued by the possibility," Fury pointed out. "Even the U.S. government has still does research on the Super Soldier serum."


"We go into hiding," Clint said flatly. "Not just undercover, but really the fuck deep hiding. Not even on SHIELD's radar. Once the baby's born... we can find someone to adopt her. Him. Whichever. But I don't want it anywhere on the records here that this ever happened."


"No one knows where we'll be, when we'll be back, anything," Natasha continued, switching into planning mode, which was a familiar second skin. "We disappear."


"And then just waltz back in?" Fury asks. "That'll be suspcious timing, right there."


"No, we'll have to stay away... maybe a year?" She's doing calculations in her head.


"So I just happily give up my two best agents for a year?" Fury asked, and it was bitter, but Clint knew he'd already signed off on the papers in his head. "This is why we have fucking regulations," he continued, and if that was their trade off for getting out of SHIELD unscathed and without being followed, he'd take it. Fury spent the next fifteen minutes lecturing them about personal conduct and fraternization. Clint just tuned him out while he started to make concrete plans.


*****