Part 2 of the "Hydra took over SHIELD before Steve came out of the ice" concept! This is in the back of my head as one of the concepts that's likely to turn into a full story, but I know better than to make any promises. (Note: I use the 2008 date from the BW deleted scenes for Natasha's defection.)
This sequence immediately follows the previous sequence.
About 5.3K below the break.
*****
Alexander Pierce had come to tell Peggy personally the day after he had forced Nick Fury out of SHIELD. At that point Howard’s son had been dead for six months, killed in an industrial accident that most newspapers had written off as the tragic but natural outcome of Tony Stark’s increasingly erratic behavior. Howard had kept the two halves of his life so separate that Peggy could count on one hand the number of times she had actually met Tony Stark, even considering the years when he had still been in nappies. She hadn’t gone to the elaborate funeral that Obadiah Stane had thrown for his erstwhile employer.
Pierce she had known quite well from his SHIELD days, before he had moved over to the State Department and later to the World Security Council. He had been quiet and apologetic, with barely concealed anger underlying his words and a couple of SHIELD agents posted at the door to keep anyone from overhearing their conversation.
“Nick got away,” he told her after he had given her the Cliff’s Notes of the situation over at SHIELD – much worse than he had given out, Peggy had found out later, since there were still active sieges going on at half a dozen SHIELD stations worldwide even while he had been sitting in her room drinking tea. “We’re doing what we can to find him, but cleaning up SHIELD is going to take priority. Besides, he knows the entire playbook – he wrote the playbook, at least the parts of it that you and Howard Stark didn’t write.”
“You’re absolutely certain?” Peggy had asked. “Turning us against each other is the sort of thing our enemies have tried in the past –”
Pierce had put down his teacup to gesture one-handed at the sling on his left arm. “I got this when he shot me. Personally.” He picked up his teacup again. “I wish I had any doubt at all.”
Peggy nodded slowly. “Will you be all right?”
He smiled a little. “Flesh wound. It will take us months – probably years – to untangle all the damage he and his people have done. We’re not sure yet how deep it goes. I’m sure you can imagine the calls I’m getting right now.”
“Certainly an eventful start to a new administration,” Peggy observed; President Obama had taken office barely a month previously.
Pierce winced. “The White House is responsible for a fair number of those calls.” He glanced over at the door, then said, “I’m going to leave a protective detail here for you. Right now Nick’s acting erratically and there’s a chance that he might come after you. A small chance,” he hastened to assure her, “but a chance nevertheless.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Peggy said.
“You’ll hardly know they’re here,” Pierce said. “Madame Director –”
“It’s been Peggy for years, Alex.”
He smiled again. “Peggy. It’s just until we catch Nick and his people. Better safe than sorry, that’s what you taught me, remember?” He hesitated a little, and Peggy might have passed the better part of her century, but she could still tell when he was acting. Whatever he was going to say next, he had come here expecting to tell her.
“Spit it out,” she instructed him. “It can’t be worse than anything else you’ve just told me.”
Pierce sighed. “Like I said, we’re still digging and will be for a while, but – it looks like Nick might have been involved in the Stark murder. Howard, not Tony, I mean.”
Peggy actually stopped breathing for a moment, then started coughing. Pierce jumped to help her, getting her a glass of water instead of more tea. She waved him off until she had gotten her breath back, then croaked, “You’re sure?”
“No,” Pierce said, watching her. “But it’s looking that way right now. This didn’t start recently and it didn’t start when he became director of SHIELD. He’s been at this a long time. A regular Philby.”
Yes, Peggy had thought later, after Nick Fury had finally gotten in to see her without being shot or arrested. A regular Kim Philby. Only Pierce had been talking about himself, not Nick Fury.
After more than three years she knew her security detail quite well, since Pierce didn’t rotate them. That was probably for Peggy’s benefit more than theirs; the more familiar with them she was the less she would suspect them of anything, like, for instance, being Hydra. She was fairly certain that they were all Hydra; it wasn’t to Nick’s benefit to waste any of his SHIELD loyalists on her, not when every single one of them was needed in the Triskelion or at one of the satellite SHIELD stations.
She waited a full twenty-four hours after Nick had left before she got out her photo albums, trying not think about what he had said in the meantime. There was nothing suspicious about that, she told herself; it was an old woman’s prerogative to dwell on her past if that was what she wanted to do.
There weren’t many photographs from the war – not hers, anyway. She had a few from Bletchley, one from SOE, and a dozen or so from the SSR. None of the SSR photographs in her album had copies in SHIELD’s files or anywhere else; Peggy thought that she was owed the privacy of her own memory, at least for a few more years. After that, it would be up to Sharon to decide what to do with them.
They had all been so young, she thought, turning pages slowly. It had been a lifetime ago, almost three-quarters of a century, and Peggy had buried everyone in those photos except for the ones who had never had graves – and who hadn’t died at all, as it turned out.
Steve’s alive, Peggy told herself, staring at a photograph of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes sharing a bottle of Coke and laughing, both of them looking impossibly young. Nick had told her about Barnes a few years ago and that had been hard enough, even though Peggy had never had much to do with Barnes. Steve’s alive, and Hydra has him. They’ve had him for the last six months.
Peggy wished she didn’t know exactly what Alexander Pierce had done once he had made the decision to use sex with Steve. She had done it herself – sat at her desk with a stack of personnel files, trying to determine which SHIELD agent would have the most appeal for their target. It wasn’t just about looks, though looks helped.
An operator, she thought. Someone physically capable, even if there was no one else who could go toe to toe with Captain America for more than a minute or two. That she would be beautiful went without question. Probably not someone who physically resembled Peggy herself, which meant that it wasn’t Sharon; that was something of a relief to Peggy. Pierce was too subtle to be so heavy-handed. Someone who wasn’t going to be overly-impressed by Captain America; Steve had never had much patience for that. Someone with a sense of humor who could keep up with him intellectually. Maybe a veteran, but maybe not.
And most importantly, someone whom Pierce thought was willing to sleep with Captain America for Hydra.
*
She was still thinking about that a week later when one of Pierce’s agents on her security detail knocked on her door. The woman came in after Peggy had called her agreement, still holding her mobile phone.
“Madame Director, I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said. “There’s been an incident at the Triskelion and Director Pierce would like to take you into protective custody for the time being.”
“What kind of incident?” Peggy asked, startled.
“Agents were killed,” said the Hydra agent. “That’s all I know, ma’am, I’m sorry. Let me help you pack a bag; Sarah’s bringing around the car.”
“Well, that’s dreadful, but I don’t see what it has to do with me,” Peggy said, hoping that her poker face could still hide an adrenaline spike. The only reason she could think of for Pierce to want her moved was that something had happened with Steve. Nick got him out.
“There might be some threat, ma’am,” the agent said apologetically. “Where do you keep your bags, ma’am?”
Since she searched Peggy’s room regularly, she knew perfectly well, but Peggy directed her anyway. She packed up her jewelry and her photographs while the agent packed her clothes; Peggy knew Nick well enough to guess that he had his own agents watching the home and they would be moving in at any moment. Once they took her, she wouldn’t be coming back; better that Hydra do her packing for her than waste time making Nick’s SHIELD loyalists do it.
“I need my pictures,” she told the agent, who nodded in understanding and wrapped the framed photographs carefully in several scarves before closing the suitcase lid on them. She helped Peggy into her coat and turned towards the door, where the man who had just come quietly in promptly tazed her.
“Phil Coulson, Madame Director,” he said, catching the Hydra agent and lowering her to the floor. “Nick sent me; Abe’s boy is out of the hospital and Nick thought it would cheer him up if you came to visit. Is this everything?” he added, looking at her suitcase. “I hate packing.”
“That’s everything,” Peggy said, amused. “Is Abe’s boy all right? Our friend told me there was some trouble with the surgery.”
“He’s sleeping now, but he’ll be all right,” Coulson said, and Peggy felt a knot of unease loosen in her chest. “Not to hurry you, but we’ve only got a fifteen minute window.”
He bundled Peggy and her bags out of the home and into a waiting a car, which was driven by an Asian woman who looked vaguely familiar. At the other end of the block, two identical cars turned out of a shaded driveway and peeled off in opposite directions; through the window Peggy saw that they had the same license plate as the car she was in. She sat quietly in the back with Coulson for another twenty minutes of circuitous driving until the Asian woman said, “I think we’re clear. Melinda May, Madame Director.”
“Pleasure,” Peggy said, then looked at Coulson. “Is Steve – Captain Rogers – really all right? Give me a situation report.” She hesitated. “This is about Captain Rogers, isn’t it?”
“Last I heard,” Coulson said. “I don’t know much; Director Fury can tell you more when we reach headquarters.”
“Tell me what you do know,” Peggy ordered.
Coulson exchanged a look with May in the rearview mirror, then said, “Sometime in the last five hours, Captain Rogers killed the scientist Hydra’s had working on – on him, along with some STRIKE agents. The agent Pierce and Sitwell have had handling him is one of ours; she was meeting with Fury today while Captain Rogers was supposed to be in the lab. Captain Rogers broke out of the Triskelion and trailed her to the meet, where he disabled another half-dozen SHIELD agents – ours, this time. He apparently had a nice conversation with Fury before Hydra realized he was gone and activated his governor implant. That was about half an hour ago. Last I heard he was going into emergency surgery to remove the implant.”
“Pierce put a governor implant in Steve?” Peggy said, shocked and then annoyed with herself for being shocked. Of course Alexander Pierce would have put a governor implant in Steve Rogers. “Of course he did. Steve – Captain Rogers – broke himself out? What’s been happening in there? What have they been doing to him?”
Coulson just shook his head.
*
Nick told her more once they had arrived at the SHIELD black site. Peggy had no idea where he and his SHIELD loyalists had been hiding out for the past three years, but since they were still running around, apparently Pierce didn’t know either.
“Rogers wiped the computers in the lab, stole the data, and set a time-delayed explosive on his way out,” he informed her. “The Triskelion’s on high alert right now, so none of our people still inside have been able to tell us exactly how much Hydra knows or if they managed to save any of the data or biological samples. We have to assume they’ve got some of it stored off-site. A good kill on Nagel,” he added. “Rogers is still under and can’t tell us what sent him over the edge today, but from everything I know about Nagel he’s a nasty piece of work. Romanoff says he did a number on Rogers while they were at the Triskelion; he’s been working on him ever since he came out of the ice.”
“Wilfred Nagel?” Peggy said. “I recognize that name –”
“Yeah, he’s a son of a bitch. When Romanoff – my agent – found out what he was doing to Rogers she told us we had to exfil him first chance we got. That was a couple weeks ago.”
Peggy took a deep breath. “What was he doing to Captain Rogers?”
“Testing his enhanced healing, among other things. Romanoff said Rogers was terrified of him.”
“Steve’s not afraid of anything,” Peggy said reflexively, but she knew from Nick’s expression and the gentle tone in his voice that it was the truth. She also knew that “testing his enhanced healing” was a polite way to say “torture,” though from what she knew about Dr. Nagel he probably hadn’t even thought about that. He would have been one of Arnim Zola’s protegees if Zola had lived longer. She shut her eyes, breathing hard, before she looked at Nick again and said, “Where is he now?”
“Just came out of surgery.”
“I want to see him.”
Nick nodded. He took her down several hallways to a makeshift but very clean series of rooms being used as a medical bay, stopping her in a room with a large window into a second room. Beyond it, Peggy could see a woman sitting by a hospital bed. She was young and very pretty, currently engaged in braiding her curling red hair into a thick plait. Most of her attention seemed to be fixed on the man sleeping beside her.
It was Steve.
He looked like Steve, Peggy thought with a shock. He looked like the Steve Rogers who lived only in her memory and her photographs, like he hadn’t aged a day in sixty-seven years of Sleeping Beauty slumber. The shield was propped up at the foot of the bed.
Peggy took a deep breath, her heart hammering. She pressed her hand to her chest in an attempt to calm herself down, then made herself ask, “Is that her?”
“Natasha Romanoff,” Nick said. “Alexander Pierce’s handpicked choice to handle Captain America and fortunately one of our agents; she would have been my choice too.” He hesitated for an instant, then went on, “You’re not going to like this part. She’s ex-SVR, Red Room-trained; defected in ’08, the same week that the fiasco at Stark went down.”
He was right; Peggy didn’t like it. She was a little shocked that Steve evidently had. “Red Room?” she repeated, focusing on that. “I thought the program had been shut down in 1993, 1994, not long after the Soviet Union met its ignominious end. That girl’s, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-seven, same age as Rogers, give or take seven decades and a few years.” Nick shook his head. “The Red Room just went underground. Romanoff killed the guy running it when she left.” The corner of his mouth quirked a little. “So she and Rogers have got that in common.”
“Pierce isn’t dead, is he?” Peggy said, startled.
“Not that I’ve heard, but I doubt he’s going to last much longer,” Nick said. His fingers flexed a little, like he was thinking about wrapping them around Alexander Pierce’s neck. “This is it, Peggy, I can feel it. This is how they lose and we win.”
*
“I’m sorry about this, Nat.”
Natasha finished tying off the end of her braid and looked up at Clint, frowning. “About what?”
“Getting you into this.” He pushed away from where he had been slouching by the door and came over to her, pulling up another chair next to Steve’s bed but angling it so he wasn’t looking at Steve. “I made you some promises four years ago and six months later you were dumped into Hydra.”
Natasha shrugged. “I knew what I was doing. You and Fury and Hill made it pretty clear to me what I was getting myself into when I decided to stay. Besides, it’s nothing I’ve never done before.”
Clint tipped his head towards Steve and said, “Not this.”
Natasha glanced up at him, frowning. “What you think I did? I’ve done it before. Besides, this wasn’t that.”
“They made you sleep with him.”
“No, they wanted me to sleep with him,” Natasha corrected. “I slept with him because I wanted to. There’s a difference.”
His mouth worked briefly. “You should never have been in a position where we ended up having this conversation.”
“I had plenty of chances to get out, Clint,” Natasha reminded him, flicking a glance at the two-way mirror that took up most of one wall. She was pretty sure that there was someone behind it, keeping an eye on them; whoever it happened to be was certainly getting an earful. “It was my choice to stay under, not yours.”
“But you shouldn’t have –”
“Four years ago you said I had the right to be able to make my own choices,” Natasha cut him off. “That means all of my choices, Clint, even the ones that you wouldn’t make. Even the ones that you wouldn’t have to make.”
He winced. Clint was more of a soldier than a spy; he could flirt with the best of them, but like Americans Natasha had known he didn’t have the temperament for the kind of work she had been trained for. Even if he hadn’t already been too closely associated with Fury to pull it off, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a year undercover with Hydra. Natasha had no idea who the other loyalists at the Triskelion were and had forced herself not to speculate; it was safer for all of them if no one knew who the others were.
“Sitwell and Pierce couldn’t have made me sleep with him,” Natasha added. “They knew that. If they had wanted someone who would try to jump into bed with him immediately, there are other people they could have chosen. It wouldn’t have worked, anyway. He’s not that kind of guy.”
“And I’ve got no idea what kind of guy he is, Nat,” Clint said. “Everything I know about him comes out of reports and History Channel documentaries.”
“Didn’t one of those say he was abducted by aliens?”
“Yeah, but according to the alien I know, that one’s not true.”
Natasha’s eyebrows went up. “What alien?”
Clint waved that aside. “That’s not important. What is important is that I don’t know anything about this guy except that Hydra’s had its fingers in his brain for the past six months and he didn’t even notice.”
“He noticed,” Natasha said pointedly, “or he wouldn’t be here right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Convenient,” Clint said suspiciously. “So what the hell were they doing to him in that lab today that finally made him snap?”
“Does it matter?” There was a scratchy note but no emotion in Steve’s voice.
Clint and Natasha both jumped; Natasha hadn’t realized he was awake and Clint clearly hadn’t either. Steve flinched when she bent over him, his mouth trembling a little and tears leaking slowly from the corners of his eyes, and Natasha knew immediately that he had been awake for a lot longer than he had let on.
“It’s just me,” she assured him. “It’s just me. Ignore Barton, he’s being an idiot.”
Clint had already gotten up to pour some water from the pitcher on a nearby table, his expression suggesting that he knew he had fucked up by having this conversation where Steve could overhear it.
“They took the implant out,” Natasha assured Steve before he could bring himself to ask about it. “Mine too.” She turned her head and held her braid out of the way so that he could see the bandage on the back of her neck. “Mine was easy to take out, yours not so much, but it’s gone. How do you feel?”
He moved one shoulder in a shrug and didn’t say anything, but he let Natasha help him sit up. He looked suspiciously at the cup Clint brought over and didn’t make any move to take it; Natasha finally took the cup out of Clint’s hand and took a sip to prove to Steve that it was just water. His hands were shaking, but he took it from her, and she closed her hands over his and held it steady until he could drink without spilling water all over himself.
“I’ll tell Fury you’re awake,” Clint said, beating a hasty retreat.
“I knew you were under orders,” Steve said eventually. “I’m not – I knew.”
“You shouldn’t listen to anything Brock Rumlow says, either,” Natasha told him, which got the corner of his mouth to turn up briefly before he went back to frowning.
“If I hurt you –”
“You didn’t hurt me.” Natasha put her hand to his cheek to make certain he was looking at her and said, “You never laid a hand on me I didn’t want you to.”
Steve stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.
“Do you hate me?” Natasha asked him softly. “For lying to you?”
He shook his head. “You didn’t lie to me. You didn’t tell me everything, but you didn’t lie to me, either.”
Natasha took the empty cup from him and set it aside, returning to her seat on the bed next to him. “I am so sorry that this happened to you,” she said when his gaze flickered up to hers. “I wish I’d been able to get you out earlier.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I still should have tried,” Natasha said, and was a little surprised to realize that she meant it. She had weighed the chances of an exfil early on and discarded the option as unviable in those first few months; Steve was watched too closely. Even the ops they had had been on had always been in company with STRIKE and had been in isolated areas that made it nearly impossible to run.
“It would have gotten both of us killed,” Steve said bleakly, his mouth working silently.
Natasha wondered if he had been running the same math that she had and when he had started doing so. “Probably not killed.”
He grimaced and made a gesture of acknowledgment, knowing as well as she did that the two of them together were too valuable to Alexander Pierce to risk that.
“Nat,” he said hesitantly. “The ops we ran for Pierce –”
He didn’t have to finish the question. “I don’t know for sure,” Natasha told him. “I can find out. But for what it’s worth, most of what they’ve been doing at the Triskelion is what SHIELD – the real SHIELD – was doing four years ago. I think the ops we were on were like that. They’d – Sitwell and Pierce would have wanted to have you on softballs first, and push it up from there to see how far you’d go. Not that they talked about it with me at all.” She bit her lip. Rumlow had said a few things that in retrospect made her think that he had known very well what Pierce was doing, whether or not Sitwell had ever told him.
Steve shut his eyes, breathing hard, and put his head in his hands. Natasha had known what she was doing; Steve had just found out he had been running missions for Hydra since he had first gone into the field three months ago.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, not sure whether or not to reach for him. She would have known what to do back at the Triskelion, when she knew they were under surveillance and that Steve had no idea what had been done to him, but now he did and Natasha didn’t know what to do.
Steve’s gaze cut sideways, then went up as the door opened and Nick Fury came in. Natasha sat back, feeling self-conscious and obscurely guilty.
Fury considered her for a moment, then turned his attention to Steve. “How are you feeling, Captain Rogers?”
“Like I’ve had a chunk of metal pried out of my spinal column,” Steve said, hesitating before he added, “Thank you.”
Fury nodded acknowledgment. “I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you.”
Steve looked wary, then his eyes widened as Fury stepped back so that Coulson could wheel in an elderly woman in a wheelchair. She smiled a little tremulously and said, “Hello, Steve.”
“Peggy?” He stood up like he meant to go to her, and then stopped, his expression uncertain.
“It’s all right,” Peggy Carter said. “I don’t bite.” She held out a hand to him, smiling.
Despite the thinness of her face and the mass of wrinkles, her bones were still elegant; Natasha could see the beauty of the woman she had been seven decades earlier. She had seen pictures of Peggy Carter before, some video footage from later in her life – there was none from the Second World War – but none of it compared to the woman herself. There was a blazing aliveness to her despite the fact that she had to be, at Natasha’s quick estimation, ninety-six or ninety-seven.
Natasha eyed her a little warily. She knew perfectly both who Peggy Carter was and who she was to Steve; she also knew that her great-niece Sharon was back at the Triskelion. To the best of her knowledge, Sharon was part of Pierce’s inner circle, Sitwell’s second in command. There was always the chance that she was another one of Fury’s loyalists, but Natasha wasn’t willing to bet money on it.
Steve went hesitantly to Peggy, his bare-footed passage near-silent. He only touched her fingertips at first, like he was afraid she would vanish, then went slowly to his knees in front of her. “Hi.”
“You’re late,” she told him, reaching down to turn his face up to her.
“Traffic,” he said, trying to sound light, but his voice was trembling on the syllables. Then he put his head down against her knee and started to cry.
Fury caught Natasha’s eye and moved his chin slightly in the direction of the door; Natasha nodded and got to her feet. As Natasha passed her, Peggy reached out to touch her sleeve. Natasha paused and looked down at her.
“Thank you,” Peggy said.
Natasha nodded in response and followed Fury and Coulson out.
“How’s he doing?” Fury asked after he had closed the door behind them. Clint was waiting in the corridor; he nodded to Coulson as the other man left, presumably for the observation room that looked in on the hospital room.
Natasha thought the answer to that was fairly obvious, but said, “He’s scared. He just found out about Hydra a few hours ago, remember? He doesn’t know anyone here except for me – and Peggy Carter,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder at the door, “– and he doesn’t have any reason to believe that we’re any different than them.”
Clint scowled. “We didn’t put a fucking chip in his head.”
“You know he has no way of knowing that,” Natasha said. “It’s not the first time he’s woken up in a hospital bed after emergency surgency. Though the last time it wasn’t to a stranger standing over him accusing him of rape.”
“That’s not –”
“That’s what he heard,” Natasha said, a little surprised at how angry she was. “You had no right to say that about him. Or about me.”
Clint shot a slightly panicked look at Fury, whose expression suggested that since he had gotten himself into this mess he was perfectly capable of getting himself out. “You two need a minute?”
Natasha nodded, her mouth tight.
“Get this cleared up fast,” Fury advised. “Pierce isn’t going to give us much time. Even if he doesn’t know for sure, by now he has to guess that we’ve got Rogers.”
He was already reaching for his earpiece as he left.
“You have no idea what it’s like there,” Natasha told Clint. “You’ve been here for the past three and a half years. You don’t know.”
Clint took a deep breath, then said, “So what’s it like?”
Natasha thought for a moment before she said, “Everyone’s watching each other all the time, telling on each other to Sitwell or Carter or Rumlow. They’re always looking for loyalists, people who didn’t buy Pierce’s story about Fury but weren’t involved in the sieges. Sometimes people just disappear. If you know about Hydra, then it’s worse. You’d think it means they trust you, but it doesn’t; it just means they have more to lose if they’re wrong about you, so they watch. All the time. I know every inch of that apartment Steve and I had in the Triskelion was wired. I’m pretty sure he did too, but we never talked about it. You don’t talk about it. No one does. Everyone knows, but no one talks about it. You go on ops, you don’t know why, you don’t ask; you just hope they’re one of the ones that SHIELD would have run anyway and not one of Pierce’s pet projects. Steve and I weren’t the only ones with governor implants there; everyone has them, even Sitwell and Rumlow.”
“Nat…”
“I grew up like that, Clint,” Natasha said bluntly. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Even the six months I was at SHIELD, I know Fury had me under surveillance; I know you were reporting to him about me.”
“Nat –”
“Do you know the difference between being in the Red Room and being in Hydra?” Natasha asked him.
Clint shook his head.
“When I joined SHIELD, I thought I was going straight,” Natasha said. “But I just traded in the SVR for Hydra. The difference is that I knew whose lies I was telling and why I was telling them. All that time I was under it was a chance to make up for all the pain and suffering I’d caused.” She raised one shoulder. “That I was still causing. That maybe I could wipe out some of the red in my ledger even while I was adding new lines. I didn’t do it for SHIELD or for Fury or even for you.” She swallowed hard, surprised to find her hands were shaking a little. “You had no right to say that to me.”
Clint took a deep breath, clearly fighting back an assortment of automatic responses, then finally said, “You know I never liked the idea of you staying in. I just want you to be safe.”
“What’s safe?” Natasha said, shaking her head. They had been working together closely the six months she had been with SHIELD, but since Hydra had forced Fury out she had seen him perhaps a dozen times. “You and I, we’re not the kind of people who get to have that. I owe you for getting me out of the Red Room, but I don’t owe you that.”
“You got yourself out of the Red Room,” Clint said. “I just threw you a rope, that’s all.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” Natasha said. She wasn’t sure if he actually meant it, but it was probably the best she was going to get.
Clint ran a hand back through his hair, looking tired. “Are you in love with him?”
Natasha glanced up at him, startled by the blunt question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
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