Guys, are you as stoked about the secret santa reveals as I am? Well, take a break from answering your comments and hugging each other until you turn blue, and check it out! It's Unfinished Fic Wednesday!

(and this is where the theme song goes... it goes la la la... something about spies... submit to bc.unfinished@gmail.com... sexy spiiiies!)

Today's submission comes to us from ashen_key who says:
As you guys were helpful for cheerleading on my de-aged Nat fic, here is another WiP of mine. It's the obligatory Budapest!fic, and I'm planning on writing it when I'm stuck with the upcoming chapters of de-aged Nat so I actually, uh, get it done. Hopefully. Inspiration is taken from the idea that MCU is totally the kind of world where things involving Mad Science like Jurassic Park would actually take place, and so "you and I remember Budapest very differently" means dinosaurs. But I've been having trouble with audience expectations on the tone (mostly serious-ish with snark and some black humour - much like JP itself, really), and just generally being uninspired and unsure about how interested people would be. So, here is about 1000 from the start to see what people think. Contains POV death of an OC.


By 3am, Oszkár was back at the brightly lit foyer. The only other occupant was Rozsa at the concierge desk, readjusting her red braid.

“Where's Karcsi?” he asked. Rozsa glanced at him, kept one hand on her braid as she pulled the hairpins out of her mouth.

“Escorting a pair of very drunk guests to their room,” she said, voice dry. Arany Rozsa was another jangled note to his shift, which wasn't really her fault. She was efficient, competent, and knew how to sweet-talk the guests. Slightly stand-offish with co-workers. Oszkár had thought 'snob', but after a couple drinks with her American husband, he readjusted his assessment to 'probably shy'. Rozsa's main problem was that she was new, and Oszkár hadn't managed to settle into anything except a correct politeness around her.

She was also a short young woman, and Oszkár disliked leaving her alone at the desk while the air tasted uneasy. Not that he'd say anything, so he just grunted and nodded.

Rozsa's eyes narrowed suddenly, and as he started to turn to face the front doors, a bullet to his shoulder made him spin, crumple to the marble floor. A bullet from the stairs behind him, he thought through the explosion of pain. Then he thought, I knew it.

He heard Rozsa's shoes as she ran for the staff door, and then he heard the dull thud of combat boots. The rest of the world was pain and his own gasping breath as his vision slid in and out of focus.

Oszkár never heard the shot that killed him.

– –

In another part of Budapest, the American married to 'Rozsa' woke with a start as his cell beeped and vibrated on the bedside table. The beep sounded again, loud enough for him to hear even if he hadn't been wearing his hearing-aids, and he fumbled to pick the phone up.

“What,” Clint said, squinting at the message and rereading. He was able to decode most of it without even thinking: Hydra's militia was active, gunfire, tell your team and mine.

Then Nat had added 'creatures – dinosaurs?' which made no goddamn sense. He forwarded the text to Beamon (she and Nat might have been in the same hotel, but no point in assuming), and then called SHIELD's Budapest office as he went to wake his spotter.

“Wha-?” Schmidt said intelligently, but to her credit by the time he was off the phone she was pulling pants on. “Dinosaurs.”

He shrugged at her.

By 4am, SHIELD and the Hungarian police had surrounded the hotel (as much as it could be surrounded, given it was an old converted palace in a row of them) and were squabbling. Fortunately, no one had told the press (who'd swarmed once the reports came in about shots fired) that there was an entire hotel being held hostage by a megalomaniac cult of mad scientists, but that was the only good thing about the situation. Everyone was still armed and standing outside the building, and there'd been no contact established with anyone inside.

Schmidt kicked his foot with her boot, and jerked her head towards the building pointedly.

“Ma'am?” Tolnay, a no-nonsense woman in her early fifties who controlled SHIELD's Hungarian branch, was irritated enough at the cops to actually look at him. “I've got agents inside.” It was the polite version of what he wanted to say.

She smiled faintly, which Clint understood from years of knowing Nat to be a silent 'fuck this'. “Molnár, your team with Barton, take alley entrance,” she said in clear, if heavily-accented, English. “Co-ordinate with Szatmáry.” The rest of her orders were in Hungarian, all steel with a passive-aggressive sweet that made the police captain scowl at her even as he nodded.

“They've got the front door,” Molnár translated, and then jerked his head to the alley. Clint and Schmidt followed with the three other agents. “Barton, you take Schmidt and Vadász, we keep in contact while the police finish democracy outside. Yes?”

Vadász was late twenties, tallish, and holding his rifle with an experienced calmness. Clint nodded. “Works for me.”

Clint took the fire-escape stairs with Schmidt and Vadász following. They made their cautious way through abandoned offices before emerging into a corridor full of numbered doors. All locked; whatever occupants the room might have had were being silent.

There was a scream, not human. The feedback crackled unpleasantly with his hearing-aids.

Clint gestured for them to keep moving, noting that Vadász had kept covering his side instead of pointing his rifle towards the sound. Always nice being able to trust the locals. They'd reached the marble floors now, and it was covered with blood and shell-casings. Schmidt had moved to take point, and so she was the one to yell, “Contact!” just before the firing starting. Clint was stuck out on the landing of a wide staircase, and started to back up while firing. Unable to look down, his boot landed on a shell-casing and he stumbled just enough that his just healed leg buckled, sending him tumbling down the stairs. The gunfire above his head was echoing around the hall, but as he sat up, that wasn't what had his attention.

What has his attention were the three bipedal creatures staring at him inquisitively. There were feathers. There were a number of sharp claws on hands and feet. There were long snouts filled with sharp teeth.

“Barton? Barton, come in,” Schmidt was shouting over his ear-pieces and Clint couldn't reply. Partly, it was just the effect of his fall, but mostly it was because those creatures were holding their heads only slightly taller than he did his and those giant claws on their feet were familiar and they were lowering their heads and sidling closer and, yeah, he'd seen enough nature documentaries to recognise what that meant.

And the only thing he could do was stare.

Ten hours earlier....