Roaring thunder and angry seas jostled the transport vessel, but Natasha was unfazed as she swept the lower deck as security. Wooden crates stacked at the back in the flickering darkness stood proud and precious, much like the dangerous merchandise it contained. Fury gave them little information message, revealing only that it was a SHIELD data point, and that he needed a pair to safeguard its servers. Natasha hid her gladness when Steve joined her. The hundred-man crew they had to protect was not a problem either, as most of them were either asleep or stationed at their respective posts. Most of all, both her and Steve knew that Fury was not in a chirpy mood to chat. He had grown tenser and more perplexed in these past few weeks, shutting himself off from SHIELD and working more and more within the walls of his office. The team tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate his steely exterior. Natasha nonchalantly shrugged it off, unlike Captain Rogers, who tried to wheedle information about him she did not have.
"C'mon Cap, we've got intel to babysit."
Ambiguity, or selective honesty (as she liked to put it), was not something unfamiliar. She may have shown apathy towards Fury's silence, but that didn't stop her from digging into research. In the silent lower deck, Natasha used a piece of fisherman wire lying around to dig at the lock of the server room. Once inside, she began browsing through the files on the monitor amid a hallway of computers and machines caged behind panels of glass. A jungle of wires crossed behind the machines on each side, making a single hallway lit by neon blue and green dots.
Natasha encrypted all the files that were SHIELD related, but everything in the server was intercepted by a strange signal that caused jagged lines across her screen. Suddenly the lines wiggled and spasmed until random numbers and letters began appearing across the screen. Natasha felt her heart slow with cold fear. Something was not right. None of the files were working. She tried accessing another data network. Nothing. There was something interfering with the entire server room. Natasha immediately searched behind every glass pane, sparing no attention to the smallest detail that could explain the anomaly.
Footsteps pounded downstairs. Distant shouting from the crew members signalled trouble - an intruder. A shadow holding a revolver appeared to be roaming the lower deck. She quickly cracked open the junction box in the corner, following a series of colourful wires towards a heart-dropping revelation. Natasha's heart pounded, but she felt as though the breath was being squeezed out of her.
"Natasha?" Cap's voice buzzed in her earpiece, but she couldn't find the breath to utter a response. Her fingers traced the wires towards a mysterious, deadly black rectangle attached to many wires on both ends reading a certain number that was counting down from what seemed to be fifty nine seconds. "Natasha!"
"Get out," she heard herself say, which she immediately regretted because the silhouette duplicated itself, and began firing shots at her through the glass. Natasha quickly whipped out her gun, instinctively firing shots towards the silhouettes. She inched against the glass, carefully watching their reflection in its gleam as she moved away from the figure. All of a sudden, one of them jumped out from her side and a wall of bullets descended upon her. Shattered glass rained to the floor. Natasha managed to defeat one of the soldiers with a bullet, and finished off the other by ripping out one of the computers and banging it against his head. Thirty. Steve shouted her name again.
"Steve, get out! It's an ambush!" She hollered just as a fresh troop of soldiers poured down the stairs. She pressed herself against the bottom of the staircase and flipped out onto the top once every single one spread out across the lower deck in search of her. Natasha soundlessly raced to the upper deck, where she was met with further resistance at the top of the stairs. Faceless, massive men pushed and punched at her, nearly sending her toppling down the set of stairs. There had to be less than ten seconds left. All of a sudden, an all too familiar flash of silver and red came pummelling across the deck, dishing out the two men just as Natasha swiftly caught the shield. Without hesitating, she threw it back her partner racing towards her and together they leaped off of the deck into the fathomless abyss. Right at that moment, a massive surge of energy exploded behind them, literally tossing them out like a pair of dice.
Massive chunks of metal came piercing through the black water, like a shower of bowling balls that were the size of satellite dishes. Natasha felt a strong arm pull her along by the waist in the suffocating waters. Steve hauled her up, panting, clinging onto the shield like a life raft, and together they desperately pushed away from the wreck.
Natasha was in a shocked daze of panic as flames ruthlessly devoured the ship into an exploding mess louder than the thunder that roared in the clouds above.
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West | ROMANOGERS + BARNES
Fanfiction"We were just dancing puppets in the same show, controlled by the same master. Eventually our strings were pulled apart, and only when the curtains were briefly closed could we ever tell our own stories. And so life became a string of brief intermis...
