Road to War Part II: Yes, Anastasia

And gathered them all, but my feet are slipping

There had been times she was over her head before.  Times when it was mostly luck that she had survived.  How odd that Clint was usually around when that happened.  Except for the most recent iteration.  But maybe she just hadn't been self-aware enough before to notice or care when the odds were stacked against her.

When she arrived on the helicarrier, she met Steve Rogers for the first time.  She'd read his file, of course, but it wasn't as informative as more recent files.  Fury had been clever, when they'd unfrozen him, to test his capabilities.  And Rogers did not disappoint, immediately picking up on the slightly off recreation of the forties they had put together.  They hadn't quite expected him to take off sprinting into Times Square, but it wasn't like it was that much of a surprise.

He still dressed like it was the forties, she noticed.  It made him look older than he, at least physically, actually was.  He was polite to her and to Banner, seeming legitimately interested in the man himself and not in the firepower he might be bringing to the team.  Fury talked to their newly captured enemy, who baited them.  Unsurprisingly.  He was clever; mythology had remembered him as a trickster god, after all.  So Fury had sent her in, since who knew if Thor had the (mental) capability to interrogate his own brother.

She moved silently into the room where his cell was located, and waited for him to notice her.  He was impressed by her stealth, seeming pleased.  As she suspected, he was surprised to see her rather than a more violent interrogator.  It was foolish of him, but she'd played on the assumptions of men for years.  When he asked, she willingly explained her past.  As with Banner, a little bit of truth went a long way.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that he knew about her, about what she'd done.  He'd gotten to Clint, after all.  How they found the time to discuss her sins was a mystery, since she couldn't see Loki knowing he could use it against her.  But maybe he questioned Clint about everyone and everything.  Of the Avengers, she was certainly the most well-known to Clint.  So she was only thrown for a moment, but she played it up deftly.  The god ate it up, as he was supposed to, and she got him to tip his hand.

She hadn't known she would be able to best him, not in a battle of wits.  It touched her that Fury thought she could, that he put his trust in her.  And maybe that's why it had seemed so easy.  Not that it ended up mattering, of course.  Clint and his men had attacked at just the right moment, before she could get Bruce to a secure location, and she had been trapped with him.  The fall hadn't injured either of them, but apparently it didn't need to.  She spoke soothingly, as soothingly as she could, trying to convince him, earnestly vowing on her life that he would be fine, that they would get out of this.

"Your life?!" Bruce had snarled, making it clear just what he thought of her promises.  She had only been frightened a few times in her life, truly frightened that she might not make it out of this.  That wasn't the first, but it had been a long time, perhaps since she was a child, since she'd felt the pure terror of facing off against something so far above her.  Not when she'd faced enemy agents, powerful men, without an extraction plan.  Not until more recently, when she'd fought a ghost.

It was Clint who brought her back, back from that precipice of fear, though it was hardly intentional on his part.  Someone reported into her comm that he was there, and she knew that was why she'd come, why she'd left her op in Russia.  She knew what she had to do.  Finding him was not difficult, he wasn't hiding.  They fought, and she thought about all the other times they had fought in less deadly circumstances.  Still, she had always been able to beat him, and a head injury served to somehow interfere with what Loki had done to him.  So she knocked him out, and he returned to her.  She had to strap him down for a while first, sure, but he made it.