“Who Weaves the Widow’s Web?”
Written by Henry Malone
Edited by David Ellis
Barry’s Repair Services
November 16th, 1984
9:00 am
Clint Barton heard a slight splish as he stepped into the pool of blood. He already had his bow drawn and strung, a knock-out arrow notched in the string. The building, officially, belonged to a maintenance firm that helped repair buildings across the island of Manhattan. Unofficially, it was a KGB spy outpost that SHIELD had apparently had their eyes on for quite some time. So they were perfectly aware when gunshots started going off in the building four hours ago resulting in complete silence once the gunfire had died down.
Originally, this was supposed to be an Avengers operation, with SHIELD suspecting that the attack might have a metahuman element to it, considering the fact none of their lookouts had managed to spot someone new sneaking in. Clint, though, had a sneaking suspicion for who it was. An old friend, of a sorts. It took quite a bit of arguing, but he managed to convince Cap and Fury to let him go in solo on this one.
“You’ve got half an hour, Barton,” Fury had told him, “After that, we’re going in.”
And so he was here, slowly walking down a hallway with three men in maintenance uniforms dead in the hallway and the sound of objects being moved around in a room just a few feet away.
“You left quite the mess,” Clint said, “Always took you to be neater with this stuff.”
There was no response to be heard initially, at least, not until Clint turned the corner to see a woman in a black jumpsuit and red hair shifting through various files and supplies. “You changed your hair,” he remarked, stopping in the doorway.
The woman in question, one Clint knew as Natasha Romanoff, stopped and turned around, giving him a raised eyebrow. “It’s always been red,” she said, “I had it dyed when we met.”
“Good to know,” Clint said, slowly walking in but not letting his guard down, “What’s going on here, Natasha?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked as she slowly reached for her holstered gun, “I just killed a bunch of maintenance workers.”
“Yeah, uh, not buying it,” Clint replied, “SHIELD knows this was a KGB cover. Which is quite interesting, because weren’t you working for some covert Russian agency?”
“Yeah, I was,” Natasha admitted.
“What changed?” Clint asked her, not quite sure what to respond with.
“Same thing that happened to everyone else,” Natasha replied, “A crazy Nazi man tried to grant me my heart’s desire. It… put things into perspective for me.”
“So, you’re not with them anymore?” Clint asked.
Natasha shook her head, confirming a negative.
“Then maybe you and SHIELD can make a deal,” Clint said.
SHIELD New York Branch
November 16th, 1984
3:00 p.m.
By the time Nick Fury and Agent Coulson enter the room, Natasha has already determined about fifty different ways to escape the meeting room. Break the window and hop out, down the hall to the elevator, maneuver from the building’s roof to the next few until she can find an alleyway, and many more. Clint’s in the room with her, and she’s determined he’s probably her biggest obstacle should she try to escape. After all, while Nick Fury and Coulson certainly had skill, they weren’t as good as the famous Avenger Hawkeye. And besides, he knew Natasha’s moves far more than the others in the room.
The slap of papers hitting the table drew Diana’s attention as Fury sat down across from her, Coulson remaining by the door. “So, Ms. Romanoff, you’ve certainly got a record,” Fury said, “23 confirmed assassinations, 18 suspected, multiple charges of espionage and threatening democracy, numerous deaths of various American special operatives,…. and at least one suspected account of stalking.”
Clint straightened at that last one, slightly shocked at the accusation. “Stalking?” he asked as he turned towards her, “Who were you stalking?”
“Spider-Man,” Fury and Coulson answer simultaneously. Clint looks at her with an incredulous expression, clearly showing that he does not understand the words that just came out of Fury and Coulson’s mouths.
Natasha just shrugged. “I needed a hobby, and he made a fascinating case study,” she said, “I can knock it off if you want.”
“Please do,” Clint said.
Natasha nodded and made a mental note to stop interrogating Spider-Man’s enemies on their immortal foe.
“So, as you can see, the stalking charge excluded, there’s a lot of upper-brass that want you dead for all your crimes, Ms. Romanoff,” Fury said, “So, if you want us to come to the US looking for amnesty, you better have some good info for us.”
Natasha pretended to ponder the question for a moment, considering her options carefully. She figured it’d be something like that. You don’t just hand yourself over to an enemy espionage agency and not expect them to want something sweet out of the deal. Especially after you’ve killed agents of theirs before. Good thing she had plenty of juicy information for them.
Natasha straightened and answered, “I’m part of a covert Soviet spy organization called the Red Room, founded at the end of WWII to train young girls from an early age in the art of assassination. Our leaders are Ivana Petrovitch, an experienced espionage master with over 500 successful operations to her name; Madam B formerly known as The Widow, a spy working for the Soviet military during WWII with an absurdly high kill count; and Doctor Lyudmila Kudrin, one of the foremost experts on human conditioning on the planet. I am one of a group of top agents dubbed “The Widows”, an elite group of the Red Room’s Northern Institute’s top graduates and the best of the best in all the USSR. I can give you names, safe houses, organizational information for the Red Room, undercover agents, and each head’s favorite flavor of tea upon agreeing to assist me in the disassembly of the Red Room. Is that sufficient?”
The men in the room stood there and gawked at the information she just spilled. Allowing herself a chuckled, Natasha couldn’t help but give them a slight smirk. Oh, she was definitely going to get put on the Red Room’s hit list after this, but it was going to be worth it for the faces she was getting right now.
“Yes, well, I think that should do it,” Coulson said.
Red Room Moscow Branch
November 16th, 1984
10:00 pm MSK
“Our top agent has defected,” Ivana Petrovitch, head of Red Room Operations said, “Our top agent has defected.”
“Yes, you were quite clear the first seven times, Ivana,” Lyudmila Kudrin, head of the Red Room interrogation, conditioning, and research division said, “You do not need to repeat it again.”
Ivana smashed the table in front of her. She was a tall woman, large with muscle that took years to hone and perfect. Even among the mostly male world of the Russian hierarchy, everyone was intimidated. Rumor had it, even Stalin had occasionally cowed to her demands, for fear of her wrath. It certainly helped her reputation though, that she’d survived practically every assassination attempt thrown at her. “Harder to kill the Rasputin” was what the members of state who knew of her whispered in their secret rooms where they thought Petrovitch couldn’t hear them. She took a certain amount of joy in the declaration, and wore it like a badge of honor.
When angered, she was a force to be reckoned with. And right now, she was very angry. “Your conditioning broke,” she hissed at Lydumila, an aging woman that was practically all bone and needed a can to walk these days, “What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” Kudrin spat back at her coworker, not the least bit intimidated by the outburst, “If she were here, I would be able to determine the cause and patch up any holes for future endeavors, but she isn’t here, she’s with the Americans. So until we reclaim her, we’re shit out of lu-“
“Skull,” Madame B, the head of training for the Red Room said. It was the first word she’d said all meeting. “Skull must have granted a wish that facilitated her… departure,” she said.
“I thought you wished away the ability of our agents to make a wish,” Ivana asked her.
Madame B, a woman of many years and a veteran of espionage and assassination, nodded. She wore a simple dress, not unlike what one might find someone wearing in some bygone era of decades past. Her face was wrinkled and worn, her hair grayed into a ghostly pale, but every look she gave you spoke of her experience, of her skill. She has been one of the USSR’s top assassins for over 50 years, and she has yet to truly relinquish that title to anyone. “I did,” she replied, “But that Nazi Halloween attraction must have gone for Natasha’s wish before he came to me.”
“Hrmph, if all it took was the Red Skull whispering bullshit in Natalia’s ear to get her to turn from us, then perhaps we should find a new programmer,” Ivana muttered.
Lyudmila shot out of her chair in disgust and glared down Ivana. “I will have you know that my methods-“ she began as she launched into a tirade about all her impressive achievements and accolades with Petrovitch retorting with her failures early on in her career and beyond. Madame B simply tuned them out like she always did. She had to think… what the hell could Red Skull have offered B’s pride and joy to make her turn her back on all she knew. A semblance of a normal life? No, that wouldn’t do it. Natalia lived and breathed her life. She wouldn’t want it to be anything else. Perhaps the hand of her former beloved? No, couldn’t have been that, either. They had traces on the Soldier during the entire debacle and he never once disappeared from their view.
“Ivana, did you bring the copies of the Red Skull’s deranged ramblings gathered by our spies?” Madame B asked her cohort. Without so much as breaking a beat with her argument with Lyudmila, Petrovitch reached into a bag she brought with her and tossed a file over to her. B opened it up and, after seeing the contents, shut the folder and slid it to the side. “The German one,” she corrected. She wanted the ramblings to be in the language Skull was using.
Once again, not breaking the argument with Lyudmila, Ivana took out a folder and tossed it to B. She opened it up and lo’ and behold, it was in German. “Thank you,” she replied as she got to work analyzing its contents.
Clint Barton’s Apartment
November 16th, 1984
6:00 p.m. EST
If Natasha were to be honest, she was expecting some rundown shack stuck in a building behind on the health code. Not a high-end apartment in a well-off part of New York City. The apartment Clint owned was actually quite impressive. “How the hell did you afford this?” she asked as she slumped her stuff on the absurdly high-quality couch.
“Avengers money,” Clint said, “The hours are shit, but the pay’s to die for.”
Was Natasha ever paid for her assassination work? She… she didn’t think so. Huh, maybe she should go back and start an assassination union. Oh wait, no, that wouldn’t work in Russia. Too controlling.
“So, this place came with an extra bedroom that I don’t use,” Clint said, pointing towards a door to the side. “Figured you’d want a place to yourself. I promise not to intrude unless it sounds like someone’s trying to kill you.”
Natasha nodded in acknowledgment. “Thanks, I guess,” she said as she inspected the apartment, “So, question.”
“Yeah?” Clint asked as he got himself comfortable in a recliner.
Sitting down on the couch and crossing her right leg over her left as she propped herself up on one of the arms of the couch, she asked, “Why are you helping me?”
“Hm?” he asked, “Why do you want to know?”
“Well, our history is mostly filled with me manipulating you… sad, sorry little crush on me for my own ends,” she said, “Now that you’ve got a life where you’re away from me and pretty happy, why come back to me? Surely it’d be healthier for you to just wipe your hands of me and move on with your life?”
After taking a moment to think, Clint simply shrugged. “I don’t know, why did you trust me back at the hideout?” he asked as he leaned back in the chair.
Huh, a very good question indeed.
Getting up, Natasha grabbed her things and made her way to her new room without a word. Closing the door behind her, she set her belongings next to the bed and moved to the window, staring at her own reflection in it. Well, this was it. If there was any further proof Natasha needed that said she’d gone down a path she could never go back on.
It was… terrifying in its own way. She’d taken a leap of faith, and she hoped to God, if He should exist, that it didn’t backfire horribly. But also, she was thrilled, exhilarated by the new challenge. Whatever was about to happen, it was going to be good.
Her mind, acting of its own accord, flashes back to the wish she made, and what she learned. Skull had overcompensated, honestly. All she had asked for was an answer to that clawing feeling of something… missing in the back of her mind. Something that never quite sat well with her. She asked for an answer. He’d given her a life. Every sensation, breath, and thought entailed within it and… She had to leave after that. There was a debt she owed, and she had to repay it one way or another. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and asked, “Since when did you care about debts and doing right by someone?” She didn’t have an answer for herself.
Natasha closed the blinds.
Red Room Moscow Branch
November 17th, 1984
1:00 a.m. MSK
Her compatriots had moved on to arguing about budget expenditures this year. This is usually the part where someone in B’s position would remark how nothing would get done if they weren’t around, but despite the unnecessary volume, B knew from experience that they would reach a conclusion on the issue without her. That left her to analyze the Skull’s ramblings about the wishes he granted. Now, she had managed to identify Natalia, Lyumdila, and her own name among the ramblings through sheer luck, so she had a jumping off point to work from. It appeared the ramblings were divided into three different parts. The name of the person who made the wish, what they wished for, and what they got. They were all promptly mismatched accordingly.
Using the names as reference, B found that the wish she made was 12 sentences down and the result was four up. So, she tried to see if it applied to Lyudmila’s wish for people to shut up, which resulted in her going deaf. No such luck. The wish was 5 up and the result 14 down. There appeared to be no correlation between the mismatching. Which… didn’t sit right with B. Near as she can tell, this madness was induced by the Cosmic Cube, some magical star-powered bullshit produced by the order of the universe or whatever. Something like that, as erratic as it may be to humans, had to have some kind of order to its madness. Erraticism went against its very nature.
Shit, she didn’t have time to pull out the calculator and pull Lyudmila over to do bullshit comic-inspired calculations. Gah, fine, she was going to do this the old fashioned way. Personal profile based off of what she knew about Natasha. So, she saw the name and started to go down the list of wishes, marking out the ones that didn’t seem to fit Natasha. Things like wishing to be straight, or wanting alone time, or wishing powers away. None of those really applied to who she was. That left her with five options:
-someone who wished for a mission to be completed
-someone who wished for someone to die
-someone who wished for a beer (she had been on leave at the time)
-someone who wished for a name
-someone who wished to know James’s secret
Thinking on the circumstances, she decided to cross out the first two as she would have been on break, and as such, would not have needed any oth those objectives completed. After consideration, B also crossed out the beer. Natalia would never have been that careless with such an opportunity. That left her with two options: the desire for the name, and James’s secret.
For a while, she hovered on that last one, after all, Natasha’s old flame had the name James, and maybe there was something he’d never told her during their time together that had been itching at the back of her mind. But… no, wait. When they reconditioned her after that debacle, she admitted to not knowing his name. Only knowing him by his codename, “Winter Soldier” and some asinine nickname. So that’s what she wanted… someone’s name. But who? Who was it? What name could have possibly pushed her to leave the Red Room?
James? Was she pushed away because she learned the true identity of hi- No, of course not. Natalia was not predisposed to romantic flights of fancy. Even before the relationship began or during it. So, not him.
What other names? Perhaps someone she killed, but why would that effect her? Jobs were just jobs to her. Nothing she ever felt emotionally attached to or particularly cared about. She pulled the trigger with as much care as an accountant clacking on their keyboard.
Perhaps one of the heads… No, she already knew their names. It wouldn’t effect her all that much.
She gritted her teeth to see what the replies were, did any of them fit the request for a name?
-gave her a migraine
-gave her a monster
-replaced his best friend
Damn! Nothing that worked was on the page! But what could it have been? Did he give more than a name? Perhaps a life experience, or an identity, maybe a new life? That was assuming that “asked for a name” was even her wish to begin with. If the answer wasn’t on here, then- Her eyes fell on one. Oh. Oh of course. How could she be so blind? It was right there.
She closed the folder carefully and looked up at the two arguing fellow heads of the Red Room. “I know what Natalia’s wish was,” she said.
The two immediately stopped and returned to their more professional personas, their attention drawn to B. “Well, what was it?” Lyudmila asked.
“She wished for a name, Skull forced her through that person’s life experiences,” B said.
They nodded in understanding. “I see,” Lyudmila said.
Turning her full attention towards B, Ivana asked, “And what was the name?”
“Adrian,” B replied.
There’s a pause as the two blink, though before long Lyudmila slinks back in the chair, groaning in defeat. “Fuck,” she said.
“I told you two it would come back to bite us,” B said, “I told you.”
Black Widow
Titles
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