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be_compromised2012-07-30 08:18 am
[FIC] Rituals - Chapter Two
Title:Rituals
Author: CelesteAvonne
Characters/Pairing: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Rating: M, for swearing and sex. This chapter... PG-13
Word Count: Ten chapters with ~17150 words
Disclaimer: For fun and fun alone.
Warnings: Spoilers for the Avengers movie. But, not really spoilers. Just vague nods to things that happened onscreen.
Summary: After defeating Loki with the Avengers, Clint and Natasha spend 24 hours in a hotel suite. Together they begin to work through the trauma inflicted upon them at Loki's hands. As Clint’s memories return, he relives the various encounters with Natasha that lead them to where they are now, beginning with Agent Barton’s failed mission to kill the Black Widow in Cairo.
New York
Present Day
12:14 p.m.
He slots the key card into the lock and pushes the door open. After the last few days, even that seemed like a Herculean feat. But the air inside the suite feels cool and welcome and dark, and once that door shuts, they are cut off from the world, on their own. Finally alone.
They drop their bags behind the door. She grips his arms and they tumble backward. She presses him against the wall. Partly playfulness. Partly exhaustion. He goes with it, pulling her body to his. He buries his face in her hair, which somehow still smells like berry-banana-something despite the metric ton of city dust caking every exposed inch of their skin.
She’s cut her hair recently. He doesn’t remember when, but it’s shoulder length now. He wonders if he should know. They often go months without seeing one another. Maybe he hadn’t seen it yet? He tries to think back to when he last saw her – before – and winces.
“Hey,” she whispers into his neck. “It’s okay. It’s over.”
He runs his fingers through the fringe of her hair. “I know,” he says. “This remembering thing might take some time.”
He tries to think of some way to describe what he feels when he tries to remember. Not exactly pain, but a stretching unpleasantness, like skin snagging on razor wire that’s so sharp you don’t feel it until the damage is done.
“We have time,” she says, bringing her forehead to his. “We’ll figure it out.” She unclasps her belt and lets it slide to the floor. “Shower?
“Hmm.” He brings one hand to the zipper of her suit and slowly draws it down. Strange, he thinks, and not for the first time, that no matter how beaten and bruised they are after a mission, get them behind closed doors, and they’re randy as a pair of wild minks.
“Some things you never forget,” she says, dipping down to nip his neck.
The simultaneous buzz of their cell phones interrupts them.
He snaps it from his belt. “Turning that off,” he groans as he thumbs the off button, but she’s already reading the text on her screen.
“It’s Director Fury,” she says. “Medical screen. Oh-nine-hundred, tomorrow morning.”
“I’m thinking... no,” he says. He tugs the zipper down to her navel, then slips his hands under the suit’s shoulders and shoves, sliding the leather down to free her arms. Then his hands go to work on the laces of her secondary armor.
“Yeah,” she agrees, as he rips the lacing free and tosses the garment aside. “We’re gonna be busy.”
~~~
Port Sa’id, Egypt
2005
One day after failed SHIELD Mission
to take out the Black Widow
Agent Barton lit along the rooftop of an abandoned dockside hotel. In the alley three stories below, a figure dressed in a blue salwar kameez wound between empty crates and bins, her footfalls completely silent in spite of the trash that littered the ground.
At the sound of a faint scraping noise, she whipped around, her hands raised in fists, but too high and too far apart to be effective in defense. From his perch, he could see her expression, the fear in her eyes, the way she turned her head from side to side to determine the direction of the sound. She baited the trap well. They would think her cornered, defenseless.
Barton knew better. He nocked an arrow. He waited.
After a moment, she began to inch backward along the alley, noisily knocking aside bottles and cartons as she went.
Then the men appeared in the open doorway of the hotel. Three of them, two with handguns trained upon her. The third stepped into the alley.
“Well, well, Lady Romanoff,” the man said. South African, Barton noted. “Seems you are trapped.”
Barton drew a steadying breath, took aim, watched.
She glanced wildly about. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “Things went wrong in Cairo. There was another team. The Americans—”
“Yes, we heard,” the man said, stepping closer. “We also learned that you completed your objective. You have Urbanov’s command drive.”
“No, you’re mistaken,” she said. She took a faltering step backward, and the armed men flanking their leader each sighted their guns on her. “Urbanov was clean.” She raised her hands in surrender. “Please. He didn’t have it, he—”
“You lie!” the man shouted. “We saw the surveillance. You took the drive after killing the American. Now give it to us, and we’ll part friends.”
“Please,” she said again, her voice hoarse and imploring. “I’m unarmed. I don’t have the drive. I failed! I’m here to find passage to Amman, that’s all.”
“Amman?” the man said. He and one of his men exchanged a look. The armed men moved forward once more. This time, Romanoff held her ground. “Tell me, what’s in Amman?”
“M-my contact,” she said. “He knows something went wrong. He’ll be looking for me if I don’t arrive at the designated time, and I don’t need to tell you, he’s a very, very powerful man.”
“Zimsky,” Barton whispered. His fingers tightened on the bowstring.
“We wouldn’t want to anger Arnault Zimsky,” the man said, a bitter laugh lacing his words. “So you’ll arrive at the designated time. Not all in one piece...”
That’s when it happened. One of the flunkies stepped within range, and Romanoff whipped the beaded tail of her scarf around his neck. She yanked it hard, and as he stumbled, she turned his gun on his partner, fired twice, and then sprang back, pulling the stunned gunman to the ground. She twisted the scarf tight around his throat, and he began to flail, shots firing wild, ricocheting off the bricks, sending the leader bolting for cover.
With a final twist of the scarf, she crushed the man’s larynx. She plucked the gun from his still twitching fingers and trained it on the leader.
“Who do you work for?” she ordered.
He got slowly to his feet, hands splayed in surrender. “Unarmed indeed,” he said, shaken, but visibly impressed.
She fired a shot off the rim of a crate, sending splinters into his face.
“Give me his name!”
The man gave her a sad smile. “To give his name would mean my long and tortured demise. You may have that honor now, save me the pain.”
She fired again, into his thigh. He crumpled, screaming. Romanoff stood over him, gun pointed at his other leg. “I’m not going to kill you,” she bit out. “Not til I get a name.”
The man wrenched his body upright and leaned against the crate to stare at her. After a moment, he regained some composure. This time, when he raised his hands, they were coated with blood.
“It’s Turgen,” he told her.
Turgen? Barton didn’t recognize the name, but by the way Romanoff’s head snapped up, he could tell that she knew it quite well.
“So you see,” the man said. “We each have our demons. Wouldn’t you agree, Lady Romanoff?”
And Lady Romanoff shot him in the face.
Barton loosed his arrow then. It struck where he intended, in a crate an inch above her shoulder. She spun and found him in less than a blink. She started for the doorway, and he let another arrow fly – this one an incendiary tip that sliced through the hem of her kameez as she dived inside. The tip exploded on contact with the jamb, rocking the building and, as Barton planned, sealing the doorway behind her.
He leapt from his rooftop onto the fire escape of the abandoned hotel. He gave half a moment’s consideration to the state of his sanity and the fact that he was leaping into a burning building, before he vaulted the banister, slid to the first floor landing, then dived into a gaping balcony overlooking the ballroom below.
From here, he had full view of the ballroom and plenty of cover in the balcony. Five similar balconies ringed the empty dance floor. She would guess he’d take the high ground, but which balcony?
Light lanced in dust-choked rays from the wrecked rooftop above. He smelled smoke and something like burning cloth. He dialed a specific arrow into his quiver, set it, and paused.
She walked straight into the ballroom, not like an agent in stealth mode, not like a fearful girl on the run, but with all the poise and purpose of a queen surveying her subjects.
In the center of the room, she stopped and lifted her head. She said, “I know you’re here.”
She still faced forward, into the balcony directly ahead. Barton was on her right, concealed, but for a moment, he was tempted to just throw up his hands and say, “Yep. You got me. Here I am!”
He didn’t, but he did hesitate. He stretched his bowstring tight. His heart pounded. He couldn’t move.
Smoke filtered in, stirring into the slanting sunlight. She looked small and vulnerable in the checkerboard of bright and dark beneath him. He’d seen her fake helpless with the men she’d just killed, but this time, she looked... afraid.
“Look, you win, all right,” she said. “Shoot me and get it over with.”
He watched her, then, as she turned a slow circle, taking the whole place in, gauging distances, noting details. Searching. At last, she raised her gun, aiming at a spot twenty feet from his hiding place.
“You’re CIA, right?” she said. “You’re the one from Club Melange. The Hawk.”
Barton tensed. Only a handful of SHIELD agents ever called him that. His mind reeled back to the nightclub in Cairo, to the conversation on the com, to the suspicion that they had been compromised. Varella had called him the Hawk. But if she knew their nicknames, she would know they weren’t CIA...
It was a trick. She was playing him. And he’d fallen into the snare. Absurd, he thought, that he’d set this trap, yet he was the one hiding.
“Enough,” he said, pulling to full height, leveling the arrow on her. She took aim as well, squeezed the trigger, and... nothing. She was empty.
She tossed the gun aside. “Do it,” she said. “Before the fire catches and burns us both down.”
The tension burned his arms as he held the shot, and she looked up at him, her blue eyes at once fierce and frightened.
“Too late for that,” he muttered and let the arrow fly.
It struck her full in the chest. The round head exploded in tensile cords that spun around her arms and legs and face, pinning her struggling body to the ground. He leaped the balcony rail, rolled, then darted to her side. Flames ribboned up the far wall and into the ceiling. The place was catching quicker than he’d bargained for. She was screaming at him, her eyes bulging and wild. He bundled her over his shoulder and charged toward the furthest balcony.
“Now,” he said, setting her back against the wall. “There’s only one way outta here.” He dialed in another arrow shaft, fitting it with a specialized tip. “It’s up over that ledge. You wanna get out, you’re gonna have to help me.”
She glared at him. He grinned.
“Okay then.” He fired the arrow. A nylon cord looped from it, disappearing over the balcony’s edge. The arrowhead struck with a wooden thunk and Barton pulled the cord to test it. Then he pulled her to her feet, lashed the cord around their waists, and using carabiners from his belt, he made a friction knot to heave them up.
They ascended the rope, but the fire spread faster, and by the time they hoisted over the balcony rail, the whole place was ablaze. Agent Barton cut the lash that bound them, then sliced through the cords around Romanoff’s legs.
Panic flickered in her eyes as she looked from him to the flames.
“It’s a straight shot,” he assured her. Behind them, one of the balconies sheered off and tumbled into the fire that engulfed the ballroom. “Stay close. I’ll get us out.”
She nodded. He ran down the dark corridor with her on his heels. As they reached the window that led out onto the fire escape, flames burst through the outer wall, scattering burning hunks of timber and plaster, knocking Romanoff to her knees. She rolled sideways and the floor crumbled beneath her, but Barton caught the beaded nape of her kameez.
There was a moment, then; one that would haunt his memory, a moment when he thought he couldn’t hold her, before he braced against the old brick of the hotel. She swung at his arm’s length, her torso bound, her mouth gagged, her eyes blazing up at him. He heard her breathing, heard his own heartbeat, felt the mortar of old bricks crumbling under his weight.
But he did hold on.
He managed to shift his weight and swing them onto the fire escape. Then they dropped to the street and became lost in the crowd as people ran toward the building with urns and casks and buckets of water.
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