Title: Friends Like These Author: HobbitSpaceCase on AO3, though I haven't posted this there; TrashMouse on tumblr Fandom: MCU Peggy Carter and Natasha Romanoff. Yes, those are the main characters, but I am also going to claim they are the fandoms, since it's not really set in Agent Carter, and Natasha doesn't have her own movie yet. Notes: In the spirit of flashfic, this was very quickly written and unbetaed. In the interests of not making it overly long and take forever, it may or may not be continued in a later prompt. I'm also not totally certain that this entirely follows the prompt, since the challenge isn't fully risen to by the end. Still, I'd say Natasha does rise to an emotional challenge. Summary: Natalia Romanova, one of the best spies to come out of the Red Room, meets a pretty foreign Agent while destroying secrets in a mostly abandoned base. A bit of fighting, an explosion, and an injury apiece later, and Natasha finds herself making an important choice.
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The woman had steel in her eyes, and streaks of it in her hair. She had lips as red as fresh blood, turned down in a scowl. She also had strong arms, leading to small hands that were currently wrapped expertly around the grip of a pistol pointed directly at Natalia’s chest.
Natalia’s first thought was, “She’s beautiful.”
Her second thought was a string of Russian curses as she dove behind an open door for cover. Natalia Romanova, of all people, should know not to underestimate a woman.
She barely had time to pull her own rifle off her shoulder and crouch by the door to fire when the building exploded.
A great, rumbling lurch through the foundation of the building knocked Natalia off her feet as dust and the sound of crumbling masonry filled the air. The lights in the room flickered and sparked. Before she could recover, the foreign Agent came tumbling through the doorway and landed right on top of her. The Agent was strong, and the two grappled for several moments, rolling across the floor and making judicious use of both knees and elbows. Unexpectedly, Natalia found herself pinned beneath the Agent; she attempted to free her legs so that she could twist away, but a sharp CRACK and flash of pain in the left leg told her she had only managed to break her tibia near the ankle. She gritted her teeth against the pain and tried to twist her body to the side anyway. The Agent only grabbed her wrists and twisted their upper bodies together.
Both of them froze when a chunk of concrete slammed into the ground right where their heads had been a moment before.
The Agent lay, breathing shallowly through the dusty air, on top of Natalia. Both of her small hands ground Natalia’s equally deceptively small wrists against the gritty floor, and her face was close enough that a few silver strands of shoulder length hair brushed against Natalia’s cheeks. Natalia’s rifle and the Agent’s smaller gun both lay across the room, crushed by falling debris. It was pure luck they’d not been crushed themselves; Natalia did not have a good history with luck. The collapse of the building sounded as though it was coming to a close, but she could spare only a small portion of her senses to anything outside of the woman above her.
“It was risky of you, entering this room when you must have seen me enter it already,” Natalia said, allowing her fluttering curiosity control of her mouth while she wondered how to get at the knife at her back, or the garrote wire against her hip.
“I didn’t have many options,” the Agent replied in a dry British accent. “I didn’t expect the hallway to collapse on top of me.”
Natalia considered her position. A quick glance at the door showed that it had practically disappeared behind broken chunks of concrete too heavy to move.
They were in an inner basement room without windows. If the entire hallway had collapsed, the exit was gone. There was one other way, long and winding and almost certainly also blocked in the explosion, though it went deep underground and was well shielded. If not for her leg, she may still have had a chance of getting herself out, but with the blood loss and the clearly shattered bone, she would never get far. They would both die here today. With that thought, she went suddenly slack against the floor.
Unfortunately, the Agent did not let go of her in surprise, but rather tightened her grip on Natalia’s wrists. “I don’t suppose you know another way out of here?” she asked, and Natalia was reluctantly impressed by the steadiness of her voice. “I’m afraid the corridor has quite disintegrated.”
Natalia looked her enemy in the eye and smiled. “There is no way out,” she lied. She followed with the truth. “We both will die.” She tasted blood on her front teeth and hoped it made her look frightening. The Agent’s face showed nothing, but Natalia could feel the flutter of her pulse where their wrists pressed together.
“How many of your people died just now, I wonder?” Natalia asked, and there, that made the Agent’s lips tighten to a thin line.
“How many of your own people were just sacrificed?” The Agent shot back instead of an answer. Natalia’s grin widened.
“One, at most, besides me,” she said. “Though I suspect he would have been clear away before setting off the charges. You raided an empty base.”
The Agent frowned at Natalia with an odd softness that put an answering scowl on Natalia’s face. “Your partner got himself away before blowing up this base, but didn’t bother getting you away?” she asked.
“Our secrets are more important than the body of one spy,” Natalia replied, but though she tried to infuse the words with appropriate pride, the tightness in her chest and twist of her stomach gave her away. Little Natalia Romanova could lie to anyone except herself.
Of course, the Agent had latched onto a different part of her sentence. “What secrets might those be?” she asked.
“The ones I destroyed just before running into you in the corridor, of course,” Natalia replied. For a moment, the confusion she’d felt upon looking at the images in the files she’d been sent to burn gusted through her mind like a cloud. She was certain the man in the pictures was familiar, but equally she was certain she would not forget an arm like his, or the look in his eyes. She’d envied those perfectly blank eyes that stared through her as they burned.
The Agent’s shifting weight brought her snapping back to the present. For a moment, she was furious with herself for drifting with an enemy so close at hand. Then she remembered that they were both doomed, and allowed the anger to slip away. To her surprise, the Agent rolled off of her entirely.
“Are you not afraid I will kill you?” she asked, curiosity winning over, for now, the instinct to do just that.
“You seem convinced we are already doomed,” the Agent responded drily, but the steel in her eyes had softened. “So, I was hoping that we might be able to come to a more amicable agreement and try to find a way out together. However I die, I don’t intend it to be through slow suffocation in a collapsed building. If you insist, we may resume trying to kill each other in a more interesting manner afterwards. Besides,” she added with a raise of one perfectly shaped brow, “I am hardly unarmed.” The ‘unlike you’ went unsaid, but not unheard. Natalia would have made a retort about her own hidden knives, until she looked down the length of the Agent’s body, now a few feet away.
For the second time in as many minutes, Natalia could have kicked herself. The Agent had pulled another small pistol out from under her skirt. She held it by her hip, unwaveringly pointed at Natalia’s chest. Already, this felt familiar.
Natalia knew what she should do. She was born and bred to fight, and to die if she must for the good of Russia and the good of her Handlers. There was a dark stain of blood on the woman’s shirt (a stain, Natalia realized, that had transferred to her own shirt as well during their close proximity), and her breathing was still shallower than it should have been. Now that Natalia was free of the distracting weight of the Agent on top of her, she could see that the woman was wounded. There was a chance Natalia could disarm her before she fired, even with a broken leg.
But Natalia did not want to die here, alone in the trembling yellow light of this underground lab. She lost hope of ever living a long time ago, but this Agent, trapped alone but for her rival underground, with no way out and nothing to show for herself but a failed mission and a possibly broken rib, still glared at her and asked for a way out.
She sat up, hissing through her teeth as the motion jostled her leg. “That direction,” she said, indicating with her head the only other door in the room, across a pile of twisted metal and jagged concrete, “will take you deeper into the base.” She thought of the knife at her back, of the fear curling through her stomach, of the Agent with the blood red lips and dangerous eyes across from her, and she made a choice. “Perhaps, if you help me walk, I might just remember that there is another way out.”
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-01-14 06:32 am (UTC)Author: HobbitSpaceCase on AO3, though I haven't posted this there; TrashMouse on tumblr
Fandom: MCU Peggy Carter and Natasha Romanoff. Yes, those are the main characters, but I am also going to claim they are the fandoms, since it's not really set in Agent Carter, and Natasha doesn't have her own movie yet.
Notes: In the spirit of flashfic, this was very quickly written and unbetaed. In the interests of not making it overly long and take forever, it may or may not be continued in a later prompt. I'm also not totally certain that this entirely follows the prompt, since the challenge isn't fully risen to by the end. Still, I'd say Natasha does rise to an emotional challenge.
Summary: Natalia Romanova, one of the best spies to come out of the Red Room, meets a pretty foreign Agent while destroying secrets in a mostly abandoned base. A bit of fighting, an explosion, and an injury apiece later, and Natasha finds herself making an important choice.
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The woman had steel in her eyes, and streaks of it in her hair. She had lips as red as fresh blood, turned down in a scowl. She also had strong arms, leading to small hands that were currently wrapped expertly around the grip of a pistol pointed directly at Natalia’s chest.
Natalia’s first thought was, “She’s beautiful.”
Her second thought was a string of Russian curses as she dove behind an open door for cover. Natalia Romanova, of all people, should know not to underestimate a woman.
She barely had time to pull her own rifle off her shoulder and crouch by the door to fire when the building exploded.
A great, rumbling lurch through the foundation of the building knocked Natalia off her feet as dust and the sound of crumbling masonry filled the air. The lights in the room flickered and sparked. Before she could recover, the foreign Agent came tumbling through the doorway and landed right on top of her. The Agent was strong, and the two grappled for several moments, rolling across the floor and making judicious use of both knees and elbows. Unexpectedly, Natalia found herself pinned beneath the Agent; she attempted to free her legs so that she could twist away, but a sharp CRACK and flash of pain in the left leg told her she had only managed to break her tibia near the ankle. She gritted her teeth against the pain and tried to twist her body to the side anyway. The Agent only grabbed her wrists and twisted their upper bodies together.
Both of them froze when a chunk of concrete slammed into the ground right where their heads had been a moment before.
The Agent lay, breathing shallowly through the dusty air, on top of Natalia. Both of her small hands ground Natalia’s equally deceptively small wrists against the gritty floor, and her face was close enough that a few silver strands of shoulder length hair brushed against Natalia’s cheeks. Natalia’s rifle and the Agent’s smaller gun both lay across the room, crushed by falling debris. It was pure luck they’d not been crushed themselves; Natalia did not have a good history with luck. The collapse of the building sounded as though it was coming to a close, but she could spare only a small portion of her senses to anything outside of the woman above her.
“It was risky of you, entering this room when you must have seen me enter it already,” Natalia said, allowing her fluttering curiosity control of her mouth while she wondered how to get at the knife at her back, or the garrote wire against her hip.
“I didn’t have many options,” the Agent replied in a dry British accent. “I didn’t expect the hallway to collapse on top of me.”
Natalia considered her position. A quick glance at the door showed that it had practically disappeared behind broken chunks of concrete too heavy to move.
They were in an inner basement room without windows. If the entire hallway had collapsed, the exit was gone. There was one other way, long and winding and almost certainly also blocked in the explosion, though it went deep underground and was well shielded. If not for her leg, she may still have had a chance of getting herself out, but with the blood loss and the clearly shattered bone, she would never get far. They would both die here today. With that thought, she went suddenly slack against the floor.
Unfortunately, the Agent did not let go of her in surprise, but rather tightened her grip on Natalia’s wrists. “I don’t suppose you know another way out of here?” she asked, and Natalia was reluctantly impressed by the steadiness of her voice. “I’m afraid the corridor has quite disintegrated.”
Natalia looked her enemy in the eye and smiled. “There is no way out,” she lied. She followed with the truth. “We both will die.” She tasted blood on her front teeth and hoped it made her look frightening. The Agent’s face showed nothing, but Natalia could feel the flutter of her pulse where their wrists pressed together.
“How many of your people died just now, I wonder?” Natalia asked, and there, that made the Agent’s lips tighten to a thin line.
“How many of your own people were just sacrificed?” The Agent shot back instead of an answer. Natalia’s grin widened.
“One, at most, besides me,” she said. “Though I suspect he would have been clear away before setting off the charges. You raided an empty base.”
The Agent frowned at Natalia with an odd softness that put an answering scowl on Natalia’s face. “Your partner got himself away before blowing up this base, but didn’t bother getting you away?” she asked.
“Our secrets are more important than the body of one spy,” Natalia replied, but though she tried to infuse the words with appropriate pride, the tightness in her chest and twist of her stomach gave her away. Little Natalia Romanova could lie to anyone except herself.
Of course, the Agent had latched onto a different part of her sentence. “What secrets might those be?” she asked.
“The ones I destroyed just before running into you in the corridor, of course,” Natalia replied. For a moment, the confusion she’d felt upon looking at the images in the files she’d been sent to burn gusted through her mind like a cloud. She was certain the man in the pictures was familiar, but equally she was certain she would not forget an arm like his, or the look in his eyes. She’d envied those perfectly blank eyes that stared through her as they burned.
The Agent’s shifting weight brought her snapping back to the present. For a moment, she was furious with herself for drifting with an enemy so close at hand. Then she remembered that they were both doomed, and allowed the anger to slip away. To her surprise, the Agent rolled off of her entirely.
“Are you not afraid I will kill you?” she asked, curiosity winning over, for now, the instinct to do just that.
“You seem convinced we are already doomed,” the Agent responded drily, but the steel in her eyes had softened. “So, I was hoping that we might be able to come to a more amicable agreement and try to find a way out together. However I die, I don’t intend it to be through slow suffocation in a collapsed building. If you insist, we may resume trying to kill each other in a more interesting manner afterwards. Besides,” she added with a raise of one perfectly shaped brow, “I am hardly unarmed.” The ‘unlike you’ went unsaid, but not unheard. Natalia would have made a retort about her own hidden knives, until she looked down the length of the Agent’s body, now a few feet away.
For the second time in as many minutes, Natalia could have kicked herself. The Agent had pulled another small pistol out from under her skirt. She held it by her hip, unwaveringly pointed at Natalia’s chest. Already, this felt familiar.
Natalia knew what she should do. She was born and bred to fight, and to die if she must for the good of Russia and the good of her Handlers. There was a dark stain of blood on the woman’s shirt (a stain, Natalia realized, that had transferred to her own shirt as well during their close proximity), and her breathing was still shallower than it should have been. Now that Natalia was free of the distracting weight of the Agent on top of her, she could see that the woman was wounded. There was a chance Natalia could disarm her before she fired, even with a broken leg.
But Natalia did not want to die here, alone in the trembling yellow light of this underground lab. She lost hope of ever living a long time ago, but this Agent, trapped alone but for her rival underground, with no way out and nothing to show for herself but a failed mission and a possibly broken rib, still glared at her and asked for a way out.
She sat up, hissing through her teeth as the motion jostled her leg. “That direction,” she said, indicating with her head the only other door in the room, across a pile of twisted metal and jagged concrete, “will take you deeper into the base.” She thought of the knife at her back, of the fear curling through her stomach, of the Agent with the blood red lips and dangerous eyes across from her, and she made a choice. “Perhaps, if you help me walk, I might just remember that there is another way out.”