Double-Edged Sword ─ age of ultron ✓

thirteen

This has absolutely nothing to do with this story, but I can't stop thinking about Sasha and Yelena being friends and the chaos it would be. Like, I imagine them actually staying connected post-BW and Yelena just spontaneously appearing out of the shadows, and they just chill together on occasion, and Yelena sometimes drags Sasha on jobs because Sasha's pure chaos and more fun on missions than Natasha. Okay, moving on.

★★★

CONSIDERING the fact that Ultron was less than a week old, it was moderately impressive how built-up this weird, possibly underground lair was. It was essentially a factory mass-producing Ultron's minions, and it looked extremely high-tech. Although granted, cordless landlines were high-tech to Alex, so maybe her opinion meant nothing. Maybe you could buy it all on Amazon. She didn't know.

Ultron managed to knock both her and Natasha out, so neither of them was conscious when he brought them here. Alex recovered quickly, coming to as he dumped them on the ground and cuffed them. It took all of ten seconds for her to realize that she definitely couldn't get both of them out of here. If it was just her, maybe she could pull it off, but not with another person who was recovering from being knocked out by a metal monster.

"Do you like it?" Ultron asked, scaring the living hell out of Alex. She narrowed her eyes.

"Like what?"

"This." He gestured to their surroundings. "Don't you love the sound of this? The sound of everything coming together?"

"I prefer silence." Alex glared at him. "We're going to stop you."

"And how's that?"

"I have no idea," she admitted, "but we've got people much smarter than you on our team. We're not going to let you win."

"I doubt that."

Next to Alex, Natasha stirred. She looked around, realizing she was very much not with the Avengers. Ultron noticed immediately.

"I wasn't sure you would wake up," he said. "I hoped you would. I wanted to show you. I don't have anyone else."

"Hey!" Alex felt genuinely offended. Natasha attempted to pick herself up.

"I think a lot about meteors," Ultron went on. "The purity in them. Boom! The end. Start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild. I was meant to be new. I was meant to be beautiful. The world would have looked to the sky and seen hope, seen mercy. Instead, they'll look up in horror because of you." He started coming towards them. "You've wounded me."

"Not hard enough, apparently," Alex muttered.

"I give you full marks for that. But, like the man said, what doesn't kill me—" Ultron was cut off as something came up behind him and ripped him to shreds. For a moment, Alex had a shred of hope that it was someone coming to save them, but alas, it was just another version of Ultron. "Just makes me stronger."

He was mass-producing himself, Alex realized. All of this was him. Or, in any event, it could be, if one of him was destroyed. A lot like Hydra: cut off one head, two more grow in its place.

Natasha jolted upright and inched backwards into the cell behind them until a wooden crate kept her from moving further. She seemed scared. Alex didn't know that the Natasha Romanoff got scared. She'd never seen it before.

Ultron used his foot to shove Alex into the cell too. He shut the bars, locking them inside. As if today couldn't get any better.

Once Ultron was well across the giant room, Natasha turned to Alex.

"We need to find something in here to help us send a signal," she whispered. "They'll be able to track it and find our coordinates."

The only words in that sentence that meant anything to Alex were "signal" and "coordinates." She didn't know how the hell you could just scrounge up some random parts to send a message and get it to the right place, and she certainly didn't know how someone could track it. Her confusion must have been obvious, because Natasha then suggested she keep watch instead and make sure Ultron didn't catch on.

"I think that's a good idea." Alex nodded, leaving Natasha to her 21st century sorcery.

Keeping her composure was more than a little hard for Natasha at the moment. There was the whole impending robot apocalypse thing going on, which didn't help, but her mind was really on Sasha. Natasha had been held captive many times before, because it was par for the course in this business, but not since she and Sasha entered each other's lives.Worrying about Sasha wasn't like worrying about the average mentally stable, not traumatized for life teenager. Sasha was volatile, a hazard to herself. Although she'd come incredibly far since her arrhythmia, she still struggled plenty. She had good days, when it was easy for her to eat normally and keep her spirits up, and then she had bad days, when her overthinking destroyed her and made it hard to take a bite of anything. And when it was a really bad day, it often led to a spiral into depression. What that depression looked like varied. Sometimes it came out as frustration at even the smallest things. Other times, it manifested as a lack of motivation to get out of bed and do things besides listening to sad music in the dark. A few times, it ended in Sasha taking it out on herself. Nobody else knew how to handle her when she got like that, to talk her down and keep her from going too far. Hell, almost no one besides Nat had even seen that side of Sasha in the light of day.

Knowing Sasha, Natasha figured her absence probably triggered some of that. Without an organization sending Nat on covert missions all across the world on a whim, she spent more time at home than she ever did before. She and Sasha were practically glued together at this point. She was Sasha's greatest constant, one that, unlike the shallow roots they put down in their current life that could be torn out in an instant, wasn't supposed to disappear. Ripping a constant away from someone as vulnerable as Sasha was a recipe for disaster. Natasha had to get back to her as soon as possible.

★★★

If you celebrate Christmas, merry Christmas!! If you don't, have a good weekend!