[1] Take the Shot | Leo Fitz

41

"Orientation?" Nina asked confused as Coulson directed her into a cold room with concrete walls and a large metal chair. He'd found her in one of Providence's training rooms a few minutes ago and brought her to join everyone else.

"Good, we're all here," Koenig clapped before placing a hand on the metal chair with a smile. Nina tensed, immediately uncomfortable. The chair had a strap and wires connected to it, although this chair didn't mirror the metal one with the chains and handcuffs that she'd lived on for 2 months Nina still felt her breath quicken at the sight of it, "all right. Just gonna need you guys to answer a few questions. A few psychoanalytic, no sequitur questions."

Nina's narrowed her eyes at Koenig as he spoke, she didn't like people trying to get in her head.

"A lie detector," Coulson stated and Koenig pointed to the chair with a proud grin.

"The lie detector, Agent Coulson," he responded, no one noticing Ward take a deep, worried breath. If Nina thought she was restrained enough to look at him, she would have seen the concern on his face, "this baby measures Galvanic skin responses, oxygen consumption, micro-expressions, biofeedback brain waves, pupil dilation, voice biometrics. 96 variables in all. Fury designed this himself. He wanted a lie detector Romanoff couldn't beat."

A lie detector. Nina tried to remind herself as she looked at the chair. A lie detector. She wasn't going to get tortured if she sat in the chair and Koenig wasn't going to kill her team in front of her. A lie detector. Nina reminded herself that she was safe, Nina convinced herself that she was safe because she needed to believe that.

A lie detector... that's all it was. She wasn't going to watch Fitz die like she had Tobias.

"Did she?" Ward asked Koenig and he laughed loudly.

"Like Fury would tell!"

"She did," Nina answered Ward's question, her voice was stable despite the terror setting in her body. Koenig just looked at her, surprised by the revelation.

"What! How?"

"She lied in her baseline test," Nina answered as she recalled the moment Natasha had broke into her room at the academy to tell her about the lie detector Fury had tested on her and so the two could spend a few hours together before a mission prevented it, "they asked her what her name was, she said Natasha Romanoff."

Everyone looked at Nina in shared confusion in how that answer had lead to the avenger beating the polygraph, so Nina sighed and elaborated.

"Her name is Natalia Alianovna Romanova."

Nina slipped into a Russian accent as she said the widow's name, the accent had been taught to her years ago but the assassin herself on a job and hearing it caught the team off guard.

"I have all your files," Koenig said after the surprise of Nina's flawless impersonation wore off, "only birth names will be accepted."

"Okay. The sooner we get this done the sooner we can get to work," Coulson turned to look at his team before sheepishly asking, "so who wants to go first?"

A lie detector.

Nina slowly rose her hand after no one else moved. She needed to get it over with before her mind managed to talk her out of seeing the chair as just a lie detector and finding herself back in the dark, cold room in Cambodia where she'd lost her will to live and everybody who made life worth living.

*

The concept of a lie detector on its own didn't freak Nina out. She'd undergone numerous lie detectors in her SHIELD career and living with Tony meant that he had very creative ways of finding out where she'd been after sneaking out of the tower. Nina could beat the usual lie detector, she had multiple times when the point of the test was to check her emotional wellbeing but she knew beating this one wasn't an option.