Title:All Quiet on the Northern Front
Author:
Rating: G-13
Word Count: 700
Pairings: atasha/Clint
Summary Some assignments are ... less exciting than others
Authors Notes: nspired b dictator_duck's prompt to write a story incorporating our hometown.  I lived in London/Ontario for a number of years, when I first moved to Canada, so I consider it my Canadian home town.  And yes, the University of Western Ontario is where I got most of my far-too-many degrees.  But I also lived in the *real* London for three years and believe me -- the two Londons could not be more different.  But lest anyone could doubt my fondness for the lesser one, I do like it, really.  It's pretty.  And nice.  And ... quiet.  Really really quiet.  (Especially when the students are gone ...)  I don't live there anymore.

“I didn’t know people actually lived in places like this.”

“They don’t.  They come to go to university and as soon as they’re done, they get the fuck out.”

“No Clint, someone must live here.  Just not, maybe, on Sundays?  Or in the summer?”

Natasha looked down the empty street with its pretty boutiques and restaurants, the dark theatre and the carefully manicured park.  The only place where there was any discernible life – apart from the road, where well-washed cars proceeded in a mannerly way – was in the Starbucks they had just left.

It had been a surprise, rather, to find that the assignment in London – the one that had Clint practically drooling with delight (Daunt’s books on the Marylebone High Street!) and Natasha checking her bank account (July sales!) – was actually in London, Ontario, Canada.  Not quite the same thing, as had become obvious when they stepped off the plane and stood in front of the single luggage carousel at the airport.  Heathrow it wasn’t.

But there was a major university here, and it did have a professor whose writings on genetic mutations had started to acquire an, as their S.H.I.E.L.D. briefing notes put it, ominous quality.  So here they were, on the banks of the River Thames (the other Thames), trying to get the adrenaline going for their assignment.

“Maybe there won’t be anyone on campus, either.”

Clint held open the door of their rental car for Natasha, manfully ignoring her scornful snort at the unaccustomed chivalry.

“Hey, we’re in Canada.  Just being polite, eh?”

She snorted again and buckled up her seatbelt.

“See?  It’s definitely catching.”

Clint drove the way the GPS told him to go, at a sedate pace, along a pleasant road that was lined with more and more impressive houses as they approached the university.  Natasha tried to giggle at the ambitiously named cross streets (“Seriously.  Regent Street?  Oxford Street?  Pall fucking Mall?”) but could not suppress a nostalgic sigh.  Where was Selfridge’s, when you needed a good designer fix?  Where were the ... people?

They found the lab easily; not only was the campus of Western University leafy, pretty and well-manicured, it was also exceedingly well signed.  And, this being Sunday, there was parking.  The street leading up to the Biological and Geological Sciences Building and its adjuncts were … deserted.

“Exactly what does a grad student act like, I wonder?” Clint asked conversationally as they walked towards their target, shifting the duffle with his bow and the explosives from one shoulder to the other.  Fuck, it was hot.  Wasn’t Canada supposed to be, like, covered in snow at all times?

The truth was that while Clint could more than hold his own when discussing the relationship between wind speed, gravitational pull and the trajectory of a projectile, the history of strategy, or points of structural vulnerabilities in architecture, military hardware or the human body, to him universities and colleges always had the whiff of an alternate universe.  He had no idea just what kind of an image he was supposed to project.

“On Sundays?  Most students would be pissed off to have to go in the lab and checking on experiments, I should think,” Natasha answered.  “Just use your resting face.”

It was Clint’s turn to snort.

Professor Elton-Smythe’s office, after he’d been disposed of -- truth be told, even during -- as deadly quiet too.  His genetic blueprint for a mosquito that could carry a variety of lethal diseases at the same time appeared to have been almost complete; pictures of the DNA helix were littering his desk.  (“Why are transmissions limited to West Nile, or Malaria?” his latest paper had asked, not unreasonably.  “What is it that prevents mosquitoes from effecting greater lethality in the human species?”)  

Clint shook his head.  Whatever happened to finding a cure for the common cold?

No one bothered them while Natasha wiped the hard drive.  Or while Clint methodically set the explosives that would ensure the utter destruction of the misguided professor's work, while permitting the post-doc next door to continue working on the migration patterns of the Monarch butterfly.

“We should get assignments in Canada more often,” Natasha observed a couple of hours later, while they were lounging in the jaccuzzi at the Armouries Hotel.  “No muss, no fuss.”

Clint’s response was a quiet snore.