Avengers: Altruism [N. Romanoff]

29. Protocol Philadelphia

CHAPTER 29

Protocol Philadelphia

"You know you could've made it easier for me, right?"
Claire looked up after balancing Clint's arm over her shoulder.
"Excuse me, what?" She asked Natasha to repeat.
"You could've put him to sleep, or unhypnotized him," Natasha dared, shuffling Clint on her own shoulders.
"Well, I-" Claire fumbled on her words, "I guess I didn't really think of that."
The two dragged Clint along while he flopped around, unconscious between the ladies.
"You can do it right?"
"Do what?" she looked to her right to catch Natasha's puppy eyes.
"Bring him back."
"I think so," she didn't want to get Nat's hopes up. She didn't understand what powers Loki had, or what he had used on their agents to hypnotize them so accurately. Well, it wasn't hypnosis, it was pure mind control.
She wasn't sure if she could counteract the cursed trance, but then again, she remembered how Loki's scepter called to her. Like they were two of the same.
"Do you think The Hulk and Bruce are the same person?" Claire blurted out a question that had been running through her head for a long while.
"Where is Doctor Banner anyway?" Natasha furrowed her eyebrows, "Did you get him to hulk-down?"
"He jumped," was all she enlightened on that situation, "I think it's a mutated personality disorder."
"Do you always walk around finding a diagnosis?"
Claire chuckled at that comment. She really did do that, almost all the time, it was a force of nature.
"You know, when I was a child," she groaned as Clint slipped slightly, "I never dreamed I would actually one day work so closely with people."
Natasha thought this over for a little while. She never expected Claire to be a people's person, but she never considered how out of her comfort zone she was in her adult life.
"What did you want to be when you were a child?" She smirked, quickly catching the amber eyes of the doctor as she laughed to herself.
"I was never good at anything. I didn't think there was something out there for me."
"And now look at you," Natasha encouraged.
"And now look at me," Claire smiled at her. They had both slowed down their pace, getting a little lost in the chatter, "What did you want to be?"
"A dancer-"
"All hands to crash stations immediately."
The helicarrier creaked and groaned as it shifted back into a lean.
The girls caught themselves and Clint quickly, their conversation cut very short.
"Are we still falling?" It had slipped Claire's mind that the engines had been deactivated, that the helicarrier was making an unwanted and fast decent towards the ground.
"I thought Stark was-"
Natasha was cut off again when they were thrown to the left. Clint's dead-weight body pushed Claire against a grid that had been torn off the wall by the Hulk, slashing a deep red cut across her shoulder blades.
She hissed in pain and pushed Clint up again.
"Are you okay?" Natasha huffed as she pulled his weight to balance out the heavy lifting between the two of them.
"I'm fine, I'm fine. I've had knee grazes worse than that, and Cat scratches now that I think about it-"
"Anyone have eyes on Loki?" Fury asked over the comms, "Romanoff, Coulson? Did you make contact with Loki?"
"Negative," Agent Romanoff responded for the two of them, "I have Doctor O'Connor with me. We've managed to secure Agent Barton."
"Copy. Coulson?"
"I'm in way over my head, Boss."