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Entry tags:
Avengers - Dreki
Title: Dreki
Genre: Gen, Thor and Natasha friendship
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~5,300 words
Warnings: Mentions of experimentation with human test subjects.
Synopsis: She was more than simply a beast.
Author's Notes: For the "attacked by a creature" square at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
hc_bingo.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available on AO3
It was a dragon. Thor had a very particular name for the very particular type of dragon but, when it came down to it, it was still a dragon.
Small by mythological standards at roughly two meters in length sans tail and with an equal wingspan, each of the four legs ended in sharp yellow talons with the front very slightly slimmer than the rear. It preferred to walk nearly upright on its hind legs the few times it landed, and slashed as much as tried to rip things open with its incredibly sharp teeth.
It had managed a fair sized gash in the Iron Man armor before Stark flew out of range, though it had yet to tear through Thor's Asgardian wardrobe and didn't even put a dent in Rogers' shield. Barton had landed a shot between the layers of scales and it currently dripped dark red blood wherever it roamed, the bolt still buried deep and sticking out at a near perpendicular angle. It was the path from that which Natasha followed now, leaving her teammates to deal with the creature's assorted brethren which ranged from half-human hybrids to the scientists seemingly controlling them all as Thor swore the things did not usually engage in such behavior, for whatever that was supposed to mean.
Needless to say, the creatures really did not seem as though they were from times of old. Maybe it was the tech they were tagged with, or the blurred lines of person and beast, but they definitely did not match the epic mythic legends she had read about so many years ago.
Natasha jumped back as a lab door crashed open, weapons at the ready. It was a hybrid, lines and wires still attached even though it tried to tear them free. It paused and looked at her with far too human eyes, and she had a sinking feeling about the circumstances of the beasts' creation.
Those eyes changed from a dark brown to a shining gold, pupil expanding into a slit running down the center as the hybrid let out a near silent scream. It convulsed and fell to the floor, writhing in pain as bones expanded and reshaped, nails grew and curved, and its wings flapped helplessly beneath it. A hand shot upward, as she was fairly certain that was the original form of that particular body part, and clutched her arm, her suit easily shredding and exposing her skin.
"Help me?" an almost human voice asked, pleaded really.
"How?" she asked. She looked towards the lab and the equipment within, wondered if a solution lay hidden somewhere in its depths.
Instead, the creature took her hand, as gentle as it was able, her own fingers nearly crushed in its grip, and raised her gun to its forehead. "Do it," it begged, voice already more of a screech than actual words.
She fired the killshot and let the body slump to the floor, hopefully at rest. She stood, careful of the pools of blood and various chemicals that still dripped from the lines, and turned to find herself face to face with the very creature she had been hunting.
It looked at her, and she could feel its calculating gaze as it tipped its head ever so slightly to the side to examine her, inhuman eyes changing size and hue as it focused and refocused on what it saw. She raised her gun, barrel a breath away from its heavy skin, and tightened her finger on the trigger. Out of the very corner of her vision, she saw the tail, whipfast and sleek, and then she saw nothing at all.
Her head pounded when she next opened her eyes, but she saw nothing save for a surge of colors against the darkness. She heard voices, seemingly overlapping and contradicting. One was calling her name, demanding a status update, demanding that she answer, pleading that she was alive and well. The other did not have the tinny echo of here ear piece and was far closer as it ordered, "Get me the serum, it might be our last chance to test it!"
There was a hand on her, the prick of a needle, the request for what the voice called the phage. She punched outward, heard the satisfying crunch of broken cartilage, and felt warm wetness drip across her knuckles.
She blinked the clear her vision, found it too sharp and too fast and was nearly dizzy with it, but saw the second man, the one with yet another syringe. "You don't want to do that," she warned. The weight of her gun was gone, but she still wore her gauntlets and she keyed the sequence to ready them both.
The voice in her ear changed to an exasperated, "Oh, thank fuck," and then a demand for her location. The voice beside her sneered, "You've destroyed years of work and expect my pity?"
Her hands were free, having been moved from the hard floor to a cold lab table but not actually restrained. She fired the Widow's Bite and watched the man collapse in almost slow motion beside her. She pushed herself up and fought a wave of nausea as she rolled to her side and off the table, feet unsteady as they tried to hold her in place.
"Barton, do you copy?" she asked, pressing her finger to her ear to right the comm that felt like it was falling out.
"Where the hell are you, Nat?" came the response.
She stumbled to the door to find she was in the same lab the hybrid had escaped from. "Second sub-level, section G, lab four," she replied. "One of the beasts knocked me down and its creator thought I'd make a good lab rat. I think they tried to sedate me. It failed."
Clint promised that they were on their way, but his words were drowned out by the scrape of metal and an inhuman screech. The scientist was on the floor, clawing his way towards her, apparently one of the few at least partially immune to the poison she used. He surged forward and tried to drive the syringe into her calf. She kicked him away but still felt a scrape of fire against her thigh as he scrambled for a hold. She looked up to find one of the beasts there, the same one Clint had shot earlier if the broken off arrow was any indication, its talons now dripping with her blood.
It did not continue the attack against her though, and instead pushed her to the side as it went after the scientist. Natasha ducked instinctively and felt the spatter of the now former enemy being torn to bits. She tried to slink off and escape unnoticed and made it as far as the hallway before she heard the pounding of footsteps and voices that were determinedly not those of her teammates.
"Barton, what's your ETA?" she whispered. She felt slow and sluggish and reevaluated the effects of the sedative.
"Five," he promised. There was a crash, and then the amendment of, "Possibly six."
She found one of her guns on the ground beside the body of the hybrid. She checked the clip and the chamber and hoped there was enough to at least stall, if not take out however many approached. She backed herself against a wall for support, her entire body feeling as though it was about to betray her, and fired a shot at the first tac-suited idiot that tried to approach.
He went down, as did the next, but the third managed to wing her in the arm with a ricochet from the wall and she knew her aim was going to be off as she had been using everything she had to hold it together even before the bullet had grazed her. It turned out not to matter, however, as the beast burst forth from the lab and took out the guards the same way it had the scientist. At least one was smart enough to run and the beast lunged after him for a split second before it changed its mind and turned its attentions back on her as she began to slide down the wall.
It knocked the gun from her hand easily, but made no further move to attack. A clawed foreleg hovered over the gash in her leg before it was lowered slowly to a safe distance away, only to be replaced with a snout that sniffed her once and huffed in almost human-like annoyance.
"You going to play with me like you did the rest of your friends?" Natasha asked. She raised her gauntlet, already lit blue with electricity as she doubted poison would work on the thing, but refused to strike quite yet, something holding her back despite the overwhelming urge to just get away to safety.
The thing cocked its head to the side and she swore it looked as though it shook it, as if it was answering her the only way it knew how. The footsteps were back though, even as she heard Barton and Rogers calling out positions two sections away. The beast whipped around at the sound of the first shot and then it did something entirely unexpected: it covered her.
She felt the weight of the thing shake with the impact of bullets, its scales providing an armor against any actual damage for both she and it simultaneously. "Ready the tranqs," a voice ordered. It was countered by a second the protested, "They haven't worked on her yet. Even the hybrids are growing immune to them." A third sounded panicked as he asked, "Fuck, is that the Source? How did it escape?"
Natasha's mind felt like molasses, cloying and dripping slowly from thought to thought, the hints of one blending into the next before it could even be fully formed. "They didn't create you, did they?" she asked, lips thick and voice unsteady. "But they sure as hell used you."
The beast did the thing where it seemed to look into her very soul again, golden eyes expanding and contracting as it hovered over her when someone was dumb enough to take another shot. It echoed on her comm and, when she heard the reassuring thunk of an arrow and one of the guards scream before Clint shouted, "I see her, one of the things has her!" she knew the calvary had arrived.
She reached a shaking hand up to her comm to turn it off. "Run while you can, my friends will keep me safe," she told the scaled monster that was determined to protect her. She grabbed on to the bolt still sticking from its side and yanked it free, hoped it would be able to heal itself with the cause of the damage removed. "Go," she ordered with as much confidence as she could muster.
The beast touched its side and then, ever so gently, touched her wound, gentle and painful and incredibly careful all at the same time. With what she swore was a nod, it took off. She was left exposed and fighting for consciousness and utterly safe as her team swarmed towards her. Barton wanted to go after the beast, but she reached one hand towards him and he instantly changed gears to crouch at her side. "I might need a little help here," she warned.
He caught her before she could topple to her side, fingers brushing against her pulse and what felt like a decent sized bruise on her forehead. He looked towards the shadows where the beast had disappeared to, and then back to her. "I've got you," he promised, and she didn't doubt him for a second.
She leaned against him and powered down her weapons, subtly switching her comm back on while pretending to push her hair away from her eyes. Clint watched her carefully though, and she honestly couldn't tell if he was fooled or not. Thoughts were coming slower and slower, blackness edging across her vision as pain ebbed and flowed throughout her body. She heard Steve announce that the beast had escaped and Clint call for a med evac and Thor and Tony promise to do a final sweep of the area and the Hulk roar in agreement and finally she gave up the fight and slipped into the darkness, knowing she was as safe as she was going to manage for the near future.
Four days in Medical, a raging fever, and SHIELD's own special cocktail of antibiotics later, and she was released to her quarters at the Tower. She still felt annoyingly weak and she still could not shake the feeling that they were missing something incredibly important.
There was no sign of the beast, and Director Fury did not believe Thor when he said the "dreki" was usually harmless and not to blame in their latest adventure. The director cited the ravaged scientists, the destroyed laboratories, and multiple human bodies found in various states of decay around the facility. Thor countered with thousands of years of history though he admittedly knew no tales of what the beasts would or could do if cornered and tortured the way he believed happened in this instance. Fury was still convinced it wasn't an Asgardian creature at all, simply a science experiment gone wrong. They were at a stalemate, and Natasha was too damned tired to keep tabs on the argument, trusting the others to let her know when a clear victor was declared.
A small part of her rooted for the dreki, hoping it fought its way free and found peace somewhere out there in the wilds of the world. Then again, a small part of her wished it to be contained in case it truly was the evil so many believed it to be. Most of her just wanted answers. She wanted to know why it was there in the first place, why the scientists were creating the strange hybrids, and - possibly most importantly - why it had protected her when it could have so easily destroyed her like the others?
A partial answer came in the form of the video feeds and computerized files Stark hacked of the labs. The first records of the creature appeared shortly after an energy surge that SHIELD had come to associate with small portals that were seemingly randomly created when attempting to recreate the Bifrost. The Avengers themselves had dealt with a great deal of those portals in recent months, with everything from what Thor called "bilgesnipes" to armored warriors prancing through to wreak havoc.
The findings gave credence to Thor's beliefs that the dreki was otherworldly, but gave no clue as to the near immediate creation of the hybrids. A bit more digging, and it was revealed that the dreki was not the first crossbreed the scientists had attempted, just the first with a source not of Midgardian origin. This, of course, meant the tracking of additional laboratories and the wrestling with additional hybrids, all of which Natasha was to be excluded from while she healed.
She read the reports as she was able to stay awake for at least those, and gladly took to the live feed Stark set up so that she could be at least partially involved in the missions. Something still felt wrong about the whole thing though, and not just the lingering weakness or the fact the bullet wound was healing far faster than the gouge to her thigh. A physician visited and promised that the stitches were doing their job and the skin beneath them was healing at they slowly dissolved. She was given a lotion to ease the itching and declared to otherwise be following the prescribe path of recovery.
She knew her body though, knew how fast she usually bounced back and knew this was outside the norm for her even if it was fine for those who had not undergone the treatments of the Red Room. She had dealt with worse in the past and was certain she would do so in the future as well, and so she pushed past the lethargy and attempted to resume her normal routine.
She was cleared for light exercises as soon as the fever faded, mainly because they had only tried to stop her once in the past and it had not gone well for anyone involved. Her definition of light was starkly different than the physician's, but she saw no need to correct his assumptions.
It was after she had finished a three mile run on the indoor track and an admittedly light sparring match with Clint as he tended to baby her until she well and truly kicked his ass that she felt it. Either she didn't hide her wince well enough or he simply knew her too well, as he stopped mid-swing and guessed, "Stitches?"
She looked down the the thin line of wetness staining her SHIELD-standard track pants and lied easily, "They're due out soon anyway," despite the fact there was several more days before they should have fully dissolved.
He let her go with a promise to at least bandage it as well as a request to let him know if she needed help that they both knew she would ignore. It was back in the safety and solitude of her own bathroom that she realized the injury was perhaps more than a simple tear.
Two stitches had stretched and, beneath them, was not the pink-red of healing skin, but a strange grey-green instead. A grey-green that she recognized as being an exact match to the shade of hide of the dreki that had granted her her life.
She carefully snipped away the remaining stitches to reveal that the coloration stretched the entirety of the nearly three inch wound. Despite the thinness of the line, she swore she saw gradations that were troubling in their regularity. Especially since that regularity best approximated the appearance of scales.
SHIELD Medical would have a field day with her and likely lock her in a decontamination suite despite the fact she had been in open contact with others for a week. Before she would chance that, she decided to review the footage of her time in the lab and then to go directly to the source of all things dreki-related.
"What do you make of it?" she asked after explaining that no, she was not there for Pantless Thursdays.
"You have been given a gift," Thor replied. "She has marked you as one of her own, but for what reason I do not know."
"She spared me when she could have killed me," Natasha pointed out. "I thought it was because I had been contaminated, but the hybrid effects would have shown by now per everything we've discovered."
Thor nodded and even stroked his beard for a moment, a sign he was deep in thought. Some felt the Asgardian was on the lower end of intelligence, but Natasha had learned to see him as a formidable tactician and an incredibly quick learner. Not to mention that anyone from the upper caste of a race that had learned to traverse the stars themselves was likely not stupid. So when he asked that she leave him with the footage of the attack, she did so readily and awaited what he, or possibly his Asgardian contacts, would find.
He came through as expected, but at a less than convenient time.
She had just finished loading her plate with the pasta Rogers and Banner had collaborated to create when Thor announced in his usual larger than life voice, "Lady Natasha, I believe I have found what you seek with regards to the dreki's gift. If you wish to retire to my chambers after our meal, I would be pleased to present you with these findings."
The room grew expectedly quiet, save for of course Stark, who paused to smirk and she could practically hear every double entendre fighting to be the first out of his mouth. A look made his jaw snap shut, but still wasn't enough to stop him from asking, "Dreki? Like those dragon things?"
She ignored him and focused instead on Clint, who raised his eyebrows and asked, "Nat, is there something you would like to share with the rest of the class?"
She sat down and laid her napkin carefully across her lap before she replied, "I have been attempting to figure out why I was spared given what we know of the animal's behaviors. Thor has dealt with these beasts before, and I thought he may be able to shed some light on the subject."
Thor once again proved himself both worthy of her trust and her belief that he was not an idiot when he completely passed over any mention of her injury and instead nodded and said, "It is possible that the dreki felt she was protecting it and its kind. Such protection was rewarded in kind."
Natasha had a lot of questions about that, not the least was the fact the purebred had seen her shoot the hybrid, even if it was at the hybrid's behest, but decided to keep quiet on the matter until it could be discussed in a move private setting. The others seemed to accept their truncated version of the truth as enough, or at least enough for now. Clint still looked at her like he knew she was hiding something, but also as though he was willing to let it go for the time being barring anything obvious and debilitating happening in the near future. She suspected he would be watching her a little more closely than usual for a while but, all things considered, it was exactly what she would do for him if the circumstances were reversed.
Thor did not disappoint, and later that evening presented her with his reasonings and with evidence that she herself had missed. Long before her arrival, enough so that she had not felt the need to review that far back, the scientists had just barely opened a small panel in the wall she later found herself against. They had manipulated what appeared to be some sort of controls, and then locked the area down again. Then, in a more recent update that hopefully SHIELD had not gotten their hands on yet, after her med evac the beast had returned to that exact same area, pawed and scraped at the unmoving metal, and left looking for all the world dejected.
It was enough to mount a clandestine mission. Thor provided transport and she provided the hack past the security protocols and cameras to prevent SHIELD and even her inquisitive teammates from discovering their joint curiosity. They arrived under the cover of darkness and the long shadows and limited lighting reminded her eerily of the last time she had stood in this place.
They avoided the upper levels and headed directly for their target. The hybrid's body had been removed, as had the scientists' and the guards', but the bloodstains and bullet holes from the attack still remained. She felt the need to verify that there were no lurking dangers within the lab itself, silently grateful when Thor placed himself at the door as both shield and sentinel while she crouched down beside the scraped and battered panel.
A tug didn't open it, at least not one of human capabilities. Thor offered his services in that as well, but she feared that any delicate equipment inside could be damaged should they go the brute force route. Instead, she found the tiny catch that released what appeared to be the cover to the control panel and, from there, found dials and screens and all sorts of technical relays that told her precisely nothing.
"Is it possible this is but a secondary control station? Something to be used should the primary be damaged in some way?" Thor asked while she tried to sort it out. She looked up to find his attention not on her, or even on the panel she had revealed, but on something within the lab itself.
She peered around him to find one of the many stations lining the walls of the room had lit up and was now flickering fitfully, an accomplishment in and of itself considering the large gashes across the screens and keypads, gashes that seemed to correspond with the size and shape of a certain dreki's talons if her memory served her correctly. She compared the larger model with the smaller and saw a definite similarity between the graphics and layout. The larger station had the benefit of the majority of the functions being labeled, and she used that and Thor to sort the functions of the smaller. There were temperature and humidity readouts as well as what appeared to be lighting and even visual information.
She pulled up the last and had an answer to at least one of her questions. The screens attempted to light and, after a quick reassignment, the ones on the station beside them were successful. They showed what appeared to be the inside of an incubation unit, and the unit itself appeared to hold oblong and rounded shapes of a pearlescent green that could only be eggs. Given the readings, it was impossible to be exact through a video feed, but she suspected each was roughly the size of her hand. One was clearly damaged, but three were sound and whole.
"You wished to protect your young," Thor pronounced.
Natasha turned, about to question the choice of pronoun in his usually rather precise speech until she saw the shadow that lurked in the doorway. The dreki stood there, as unthreatening as a clawed and fanged beast could be, but made no move to either enter nor attack.
Several more pieces slid into place within Natasha's mind. The need to protect, the need to save, the need to stop what was likely seen as or was in actuality torture to her young, those created in her image, and herself. She rolled her shoulders and felt every fading bruise and healing wound flare briefly before she pushed the pain aside. "Let's see what we can do to get you to them," she said, and swore she saw the beast relax.
She traced the signal and then the functionality and protocols allowed by the controls she had at hand. Given those, she overrode several systems and hacked several security measures and then only had to once again convince Thor that finesse was needed over brute force and, soon enough, a hidden access panel pulled back and a compartment in the floor rose to present their prize.
The dreki approached almost hesitantly, as though afraid it was a trick or a ruse of some sort. Natasha stepped back, hand out and empty, giving the dreki room while also showing she was making no further movement towards the controls. From her newfound perspective, she watched the mother nuzzle her future children, one razor-sharp talon hovered almost uncertainly above the damaged egg.
Natasha opened her mouth to defend herself verbally and hopefully prevent the need to do so physically by insisting the damage was not due to her nor Thor's efforts, but found it unnecessary. The beast scratched lightly at the surface of the egg, along the largest fissure. Instead of the room filling with the smell of sulfur and rot, it was filled with the sound most closely approximating the crinkle of aluminum foil and the melodic tinkle of glass. Large sections of the shell fell away to reveal a clearly lethargic yet clearly living and breathing infant lizard, its scales a dull black and brown and just barely tinged with green along the edges.
The dreki reached forward to assumingly pick up her child, but instead picked up two pieces of the shell and laid them carefully at the feet of her children's rescuers.
"You honor us," Thor told her, which was apparently the right thing to say so Natasha nodded beside him.
The dreki lowered her head slightly in an approximation of Natasha's movement before she turned to scoop up her child and children to be. She left nearly as quietly as she arrived, save for the faint almost bird-like chirp that may have been the mother and may have been the child and was quite possibly both.
Natasha erased any potential feed of the room and covered their tracks the best she could while Thor set a spark that slowly grew and set fire to the lab as a whole, leaving it nothing but ashes by the time SHIELD security arrived and they were both safely back at the tower, cover stories in place.
Later, as she soaked her aching muscles, she could not help but trace the tiny line of gray-green that had become a part of her. She had been marked, something most spies and assassins tried to avoid as it meant certain death. But she was more than that now, had been for some time if she wished to be honest with herself. Her ledger wasn't clean yet - her memories reminded her that she had taken far more lives and caused far more damage than she had saved or protected. This mark though, this odd green against the red, would serve as proof that she was at least making progress.
She dried off and wrapped herself in a soft robe, padded barefoot to the kitchen of her suite and opened the freezer to reveal more than a single clear bottle. She smiled when she saw the most recent addition, a gift from Stark because he understood her sense of humor as well she understood his own. Stripes of red circled the top and a blue dragon twined around the bottom. She didn't always like the infusions added to her vodka, much preferring the pure, unadulterated taste, but decided she would make an exception given the circumstances.
She opened the bottle and poured a shot into the cracked porcelain cup Barton had gifted her with years ago. She raised it in the direction of the huge windows that lined the far wall and looked to the clouds and sky and the twinkling lights of the city below. Her eyes drifted to the small teak box on the shelf that she knew held a certain bit of pearlescent green, and she silently offered a toast to it and everything it represented. A burst of cool rose hit her tongue and she spared a moment to wish the dreki well, and hope that she and her children would find a place to survive and thrive.
Many months later, when a much larger and much less docile dragon-like creature attacked with a horde of other various and supposedly mythological creatures, the winged menace bore down upon her position while she attempted to get a busload of commuters out of the attack zone. Her comm screamed in warning that another five were approaching her position. She looked up to find the dreki, scar shining silver along her side, and four slightly smaller versions of the same, one with scales of black trimmed in green. They stood before her, chirped and screeched in turn, and the beast stood down.
"Thank you," she said, head dipped in respect.
Almost as one, her new allies nodded in kind.
The tide of the battle turned after that and, at the end of the day, she invited Thor up for a celebratory drink. He smiled at the bottle she offered him, and the small box that lay open upon the shelf. They told tales into the night and toasted to life, happiness, and the very many forms of victory. Somewhere in the city below, their allies flew free.
End.
Note: Vodka in reference is Dragon Bleu Rose Blossom.
Feedback is always welcomed.
Genre: Gen, Thor and Natasha friendship
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~5,300 words
Warnings: Mentions of experimentation with human test subjects.
Synopsis: She was more than simply a beast.
Author's Notes: For the "attacked by a creature" square at
hc_bingo.Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available on AO3
It was a dragon. Thor had a very particular name for the very particular type of dragon but, when it came down to it, it was still a dragon.
Small by mythological standards at roughly two meters in length sans tail and with an equal wingspan, each of the four legs ended in sharp yellow talons with the front very slightly slimmer than the rear. It preferred to walk nearly upright on its hind legs the few times it landed, and slashed as much as tried to rip things open with its incredibly sharp teeth.
It had managed a fair sized gash in the Iron Man armor before Stark flew out of range, though it had yet to tear through Thor's Asgardian wardrobe and didn't even put a dent in Rogers' shield. Barton had landed a shot between the layers of scales and it currently dripped dark red blood wherever it roamed, the bolt still buried deep and sticking out at a near perpendicular angle. It was the path from that which Natasha followed now, leaving her teammates to deal with the creature's assorted brethren which ranged from half-human hybrids to the scientists seemingly controlling them all as Thor swore the things did not usually engage in such behavior, for whatever that was supposed to mean.
Needless to say, the creatures really did not seem as though they were from times of old. Maybe it was the tech they were tagged with, or the blurred lines of person and beast, but they definitely did not match the epic mythic legends she had read about so many years ago.
Natasha jumped back as a lab door crashed open, weapons at the ready. It was a hybrid, lines and wires still attached even though it tried to tear them free. It paused and looked at her with far too human eyes, and she had a sinking feeling about the circumstances of the beasts' creation.
Those eyes changed from a dark brown to a shining gold, pupil expanding into a slit running down the center as the hybrid let out a near silent scream. It convulsed and fell to the floor, writhing in pain as bones expanded and reshaped, nails grew and curved, and its wings flapped helplessly beneath it. A hand shot upward, as she was fairly certain that was the original form of that particular body part, and clutched her arm, her suit easily shredding and exposing her skin.
"Help me?" an almost human voice asked, pleaded really.
"How?" she asked. She looked towards the lab and the equipment within, wondered if a solution lay hidden somewhere in its depths.
Instead, the creature took her hand, as gentle as it was able, her own fingers nearly crushed in its grip, and raised her gun to its forehead. "Do it," it begged, voice already more of a screech than actual words.
She fired the killshot and let the body slump to the floor, hopefully at rest. She stood, careful of the pools of blood and various chemicals that still dripped from the lines, and turned to find herself face to face with the very creature she had been hunting.
It looked at her, and she could feel its calculating gaze as it tipped its head ever so slightly to the side to examine her, inhuman eyes changing size and hue as it focused and refocused on what it saw. She raised her gun, barrel a breath away from its heavy skin, and tightened her finger on the trigger. Out of the very corner of her vision, she saw the tail, whipfast and sleek, and then she saw nothing at all.
Her head pounded when she next opened her eyes, but she saw nothing save for a surge of colors against the darkness. She heard voices, seemingly overlapping and contradicting. One was calling her name, demanding a status update, demanding that she answer, pleading that she was alive and well. The other did not have the tinny echo of here ear piece and was far closer as it ordered, "Get me the serum, it might be our last chance to test it!"
There was a hand on her, the prick of a needle, the request for what the voice called the phage. She punched outward, heard the satisfying crunch of broken cartilage, and felt warm wetness drip across her knuckles.
She blinked the clear her vision, found it too sharp and too fast and was nearly dizzy with it, but saw the second man, the one with yet another syringe. "You don't want to do that," she warned. The weight of her gun was gone, but she still wore her gauntlets and she keyed the sequence to ready them both.
The voice in her ear changed to an exasperated, "Oh, thank fuck," and then a demand for her location. The voice beside her sneered, "You've destroyed years of work and expect my pity?"
Her hands were free, having been moved from the hard floor to a cold lab table but not actually restrained. She fired the Widow's Bite and watched the man collapse in almost slow motion beside her. She pushed herself up and fought a wave of nausea as she rolled to her side and off the table, feet unsteady as they tried to hold her in place.
"Barton, do you copy?" she asked, pressing her finger to her ear to right the comm that felt like it was falling out.
"Where the hell are you, Nat?" came the response.
She stumbled to the door to find she was in the same lab the hybrid had escaped from. "Second sub-level, section G, lab four," she replied. "One of the beasts knocked me down and its creator thought I'd make a good lab rat. I think they tried to sedate me. It failed."
Clint promised that they were on their way, but his words were drowned out by the scrape of metal and an inhuman screech. The scientist was on the floor, clawing his way towards her, apparently one of the few at least partially immune to the poison she used. He surged forward and tried to drive the syringe into her calf. She kicked him away but still felt a scrape of fire against her thigh as he scrambled for a hold. She looked up to find one of the beasts there, the same one Clint had shot earlier if the broken off arrow was any indication, its talons now dripping with her blood.
It did not continue the attack against her though, and instead pushed her to the side as it went after the scientist. Natasha ducked instinctively and felt the spatter of the now former enemy being torn to bits. She tried to slink off and escape unnoticed and made it as far as the hallway before she heard the pounding of footsteps and voices that were determinedly not those of her teammates.
"Barton, what's your ETA?" she whispered. She felt slow and sluggish and reevaluated the effects of the sedative.
"Five," he promised. There was a crash, and then the amendment of, "Possibly six."
She found one of her guns on the ground beside the body of the hybrid. She checked the clip and the chamber and hoped there was enough to at least stall, if not take out however many approached. She backed herself against a wall for support, her entire body feeling as though it was about to betray her, and fired a shot at the first tac-suited idiot that tried to approach.
He went down, as did the next, but the third managed to wing her in the arm with a ricochet from the wall and she knew her aim was going to be off as she had been using everything she had to hold it together even before the bullet had grazed her. It turned out not to matter, however, as the beast burst forth from the lab and took out the guards the same way it had the scientist. At least one was smart enough to run and the beast lunged after him for a split second before it changed its mind and turned its attentions back on her as she began to slide down the wall.
It knocked the gun from her hand easily, but made no further move to attack. A clawed foreleg hovered over the gash in her leg before it was lowered slowly to a safe distance away, only to be replaced with a snout that sniffed her once and huffed in almost human-like annoyance.
"You going to play with me like you did the rest of your friends?" Natasha asked. She raised her gauntlet, already lit blue with electricity as she doubted poison would work on the thing, but refused to strike quite yet, something holding her back despite the overwhelming urge to just get away to safety.
The thing cocked its head to the side and she swore it looked as though it shook it, as if it was answering her the only way it knew how. The footsteps were back though, even as she heard Barton and Rogers calling out positions two sections away. The beast whipped around at the sound of the first shot and then it did something entirely unexpected: it covered her.
She felt the weight of the thing shake with the impact of bullets, its scales providing an armor against any actual damage for both she and it simultaneously. "Ready the tranqs," a voice ordered. It was countered by a second the protested, "They haven't worked on her yet. Even the hybrids are growing immune to them." A third sounded panicked as he asked, "Fuck, is that the Source? How did it escape?"
Natasha's mind felt like molasses, cloying and dripping slowly from thought to thought, the hints of one blending into the next before it could even be fully formed. "They didn't create you, did they?" she asked, lips thick and voice unsteady. "But they sure as hell used you."
The beast did the thing where it seemed to look into her very soul again, golden eyes expanding and contracting as it hovered over her when someone was dumb enough to take another shot. It echoed on her comm and, when she heard the reassuring thunk of an arrow and one of the guards scream before Clint shouted, "I see her, one of the things has her!" she knew the calvary had arrived.
She reached a shaking hand up to her comm to turn it off. "Run while you can, my friends will keep me safe," she told the scaled monster that was determined to protect her. She grabbed on to the bolt still sticking from its side and yanked it free, hoped it would be able to heal itself with the cause of the damage removed. "Go," she ordered with as much confidence as she could muster.
The beast touched its side and then, ever so gently, touched her wound, gentle and painful and incredibly careful all at the same time. With what she swore was a nod, it took off. She was left exposed and fighting for consciousness and utterly safe as her team swarmed towards her. Barton wanted to go after the beast, but she reached one hand towards him and he instantly changed gears to crouch at her side. "I might need a little help here," she warned.
He caught her before she could topple to her side, fingers brushing against her pulse and what felt like a decent sized bruise on her forehead. He looked towards the shadows where the beast had disappeared to, and then back to her. "I've got you," he promised, and she didn't doubt him for a second.
She leaned against him and powered down her weapons, subtly switching her comm back on while pretending to push her hair away from her eyes. Clint watched her carefully though, and she honestly couldn't tell if he was fooled or not. Thoughts were coming slower and slower, blackness edging across her vision as pain ebbed and flowed throughout her body. She heard Steve announce that the beast had escaped and Clint call for a med evac and Thor and Tony promise to do a final sweep of the area and the Hulk roar in agreement and finally she gave up the fight and slipped into the darkness, knowing she was as safe as she was going to manage for the near future.
Four days in Medical, a raging fever, and SHIELD's own special cocktail of antibiotics later, and she was released to her quarters at the Tower. She still felt annoyingly weak and she still could not shake the feeling that they were missing something incredibly important.
There was no sign of the beast, and Director Fury did not believe Thor when he said the "dreki" was usually harmless and not to blame in their latest adventure. The director cited the ravaged scientists, the destroyed laboratories, and multiple human bodies found in various states of decay around the facility. Thor countered with thousands of years of history though he admittedly knew no tales of what the beasts would or could do if cornered and tortured the way he believed happened in this instance. Fury was still convinced it wasn't an Asgardian creature at all, simply a science experiment gone wrong. They were at a stalemate, and Natasha was too damned tired to keep tabs on the argument, trusting the others to let her know when a clear victor was declared.
A small part of her rooted for the dreki, hoping it fought its way free and found peace somewhere out there in the wilds of the world. Then again, a small part of her wished it to be contained in case it truly was the evil so many believed it to be. Most of her just wanted answers. She wanted to know why it was there in the first place, why the scientists were creating the strange hybrids, and - possibly most importantly - why it had protected her when it could have so easily destroyed her like the others?
A partial answer came in the form of the video feeds and computerized files Stark hacked of the labs. The first records of the creature appeared shortly after an energy surge that SHIELD had come to associate with small portals that were seemingly randomly created when attempting to recreate the Bifrost. The Avengers themselves had dealt with a great deal of those portals in recent months, with everything from what Thor called "bilgesnipes" to armored warriors prancing through to wreak havoc.
The findings gave credence to Thor's beliefs that the dreki was otherworldly, but gave no clue as to the near immediate creation of the hybrids. A bit more digging, and it was revealed that the dreki was not the first crossbreed the scientists had attempted, just the first with a source not of Midgardian origin. This, of course, meant the tracking of additional laboratories and the wrestling with additional hybrids, all of which Natasha was to be excluded from while she healed.
She read the reports as she was able to stay awake for at least those, and gladly took to the live feed Stark set up so that she could be at least partially involved in the missions. Something still felt wrong about the whole thing though, and not just the lingering weakness or the fact the bullet wound was healing far faster than the gouge to her thigh. A physician visited and promised that the stitches were doing their job and the skin beneath them was healing at they slowly dissolved. She was given a lotion to ease the itching and declared to otherwise be following the prescribe path of recovery.
She knew her body though, knew how fast she usually bounced back and knew this was outside the norm for her even if it was fine for those who had not undergone the treatments of the Red Room. She had dealt with worse in the past and was certain she would do so in the future as well, and so she pushed past the lethargy and attempted to resume her normal routine.
She was cleared for light exercises as soon as the fever faded, mainly because they had only tried to stop her once in the past and it had not gone well for anyone involved. Her definition of light was starkly different than the physician's, but she saw no need to correct his assumptions.
It was after she had finished a three mile run on the indoor track and an admittedly light sparring match with Clint as he tended to baby her until she well and truly kicked his ass that she felt it. Either she didn't hide her wince well enough or he simply knew her too well, as he stopped mid-swing and guessed, "Stitches?"
She looked down the the thin line of wetness staining her SHIELD-standard track pants and lied easily, "They're due out soon anyway," despite the fact there was several more days before they should have fully dissolved.
He let her go with a promise to at least bandage it as well as a request to let him know if she needed help that they both knew she would ignore. It was back in the safety and solitude of her own bathroom that she realized the injury was perhaps more than a simple tear.
Two stitches had stretched and, beneath them, was not the pink-red of healing skin, but a strange grey-green instead. A grey-green that she recognized as being an exact match to the shade of hide of the dreki that had granted her her life.
She carefully snipped away the remaining stitches to reveal that the coloration stretched the entirety of the nearly three inch wound. Despite the thinness of the line, she swore she saw gradations that were troubling in their regularity. Especially since that regularity best approximated the appearance of scales.
SHIELD Medical would have a field day with her and likely lock her in a decontamination suite despite the fact she had been in open contact with others for a week. Before she would chance that, she decided to review the footage of her time in the lab and then to go directly to the source of all things dreki-related.
"What do you make of it?" she asked after explaining that no, she was not there for Pantless Thursdays.
"You have been given a gift," Thor replied. "She has marked you as one of her own, but for what reason I do not know."
"She spared me when she could have killed me," Natasha pointed out. "I thought it was because I had been contaminated, but the hybrid effects would have shown by now per everything we've discovered."
Thor nodded and even stroked his beard for a moment, a sign he was deep in thought. Some felt the Asgardian was on the lower end of intelligence, but Natasha had learned to see him as a formidable tactician and an incredibly quick learner. Not to mention that anyone from the upper caste of a race that had learned to traverse the stars themselves was likely not stupid. So when he asked that she leave him with the footage of the attack, she did so readily and awaited what he, or possibly his Asgardian contacts, would find.
He came through as expected, but at a less than convenient time.
She had just finished loading her plate with the pasta Rogers and Banner had collaborated to create when Thor announced in his usual larger than life voice, "Lady Natasha, I believe I have found what you seek with regards to the dreki's gift. If you wish to retire to my chambers after our meal, I would be pleased to present you with these findings."
The room grew expectedly quiet, save for of course Stark, who paused to smirk and she could practically hear every double entendre fighting to be the first out of his mouth. A look made his jaw snap shut, but still wasn't enough to stop him from asking, "Dreki? Like those dragon things?"
She ignored him and focused instead on Clint, who raised his eyebrows and asked, "Nat, is there something you would like to share with the rest of the class?"
She sat down and laid her napkin carefully across her lap before she replied, "I have been attempting to figure out why I was spared given what we know of the animal's behaviors. Thor has dealt with these beasts before, and I thought he may be able to shed some light on the subject."
Thor once again proved himself both worthy of her trust and her belief that he was not an idiot when he completely passed over any mention of her injury and instead nodded and said, "It is possible that the dreki felt she was protecting it and its kind. Such protection was rewarded in kind."
Natasha had a lot of questions about that, not the least was the fact the purebred had seen her shoot the hybrid, even if it was at the hybrid's behest, but decided to keep quiet on the matter until it could be discussed in a move private setting. The others seemed to accept their truncated version of the truth as enough, or at least enough for now. Clint still looked at her like he knew she was hiding something, but also as though he was willing to let it go for the time being barring anything obvious and debilitating happening in the near future. She suspected he would be watching her a little more closely than usual for a while but, all things considered, it was exactly what she would do for him if the circumstances were reversed.
Thor did not disappoint, and later that evening presented her with his reasonings and with evidence that she herself had missed. Long before her arrival, enough so that she had not felt the need to review that far back, the scientists had just barely opened a small panel in the wall she later found herself against. They had manipulated what appeared to be some sort of controls, and then locked the area down again. Then, in a more recent update that hopefully SHIELD had not gotten their hands on yet, after her med evac the beast had returned to that exact same area, pawed and scraped at the unmoving metal, and left looking for all the world dejected.
It was enough to mount a clandestine mission. Thor provided transport and she provided the hack past the security protocols and cameras to prevent SHIELD and even her inquisitive teammates from discovering their joint curiosity. They arrived under the cover of darkness and the long shadows and limited lighting reminded her eerily of the last time she had stood in this place.
They avoided the upper levels and headed directly for their target. The hybrid's body had been removed, as had the scientists' and the guards', but the bloodstains and bullet holes from the attack still remained. She felt the need to verify that there were no lurking dangers within the lab itself, silently grateful when Thor placed himself at the door as both shield and sentinel while she crouched down beside the scraped and battered panel.
A tug didn't open it, at least not one of human capabilities. Thor offered his services in that as well, but she feared that any delicate equipment inside could be damaged should they go the brute force route. Instead, she found the tiny catch that released what appeared to be the cover to the control panel and, from there, found dials and screens and all sorts of technical relays that told her precisely nothing.
"Is it possible this is but a secondary control station? Something to be used should the primary be damaged in some way?" Thor asked while she tried to sort it out. She looked up to find his attention not on her, or even on the panel she had revealed, but on something within the lab itself.
She peered around him to find one of the many stations lining the walls of the room had lit up and was now flickering fitfully, an accomplishment in and of itself considering the large gashes across the screens and keypads, gashes that seemed to correspond with the size and shape of a certain dreki's talons if her memory served her correctly. She compared the larger model with the smaller and saw a definite similarity between the graphics and layout. The larger station had the benefit of the majority of the functions being labeled, and she used that and Thor to sort the functions of the smaller. There were temperature and humidity readouts as well as what appeared to be lighting and even visual information.
She pulled up the last and had an answer to at least one of her questions. The screens attempted to light and, after a quick reassignment, the ones on the station beside them were successful. They showed what appeared to be the inside of an incubation unit, and the unit itself appeared to hold oblong and rounded shapes of a pearlescent green that could only be eggs. Given the readings, it was impossible to be exact through a video feed, but she suspected each was roughly the size of her hand. One was clearly damaged, but three were sound and whole.
"You wished to protect your young," Thor pronounced.
Natasha turned, about to question the choice of pronoun in his usually rather precise speech until she saw the shadow that lurked in the doorway. The dreki stood there, as unthreatening as a clawed and fanged beast could be, but made no move to either enter nor attack.
Several more pieces slid into place within Natasha's mind. The need to protect, the need to save, the need to stop what was likely seen as or was in actuality torture to her young, those created in her image, and herself. She rolled her shoulders and felt every fading bruise and healing wound flare briefly before she pushed the pain aside. "Let's see what we can do to get you to them," she said, and swore she saw the beast relax.
She traced the signal and then the functionality and protocols allowed by the controls she had at hand. Given those, she overrode several systems and hacked several security measures and then only had to once again convince Thor that finesse was needed over brute force and, soon enough, a hidden access panel pulled back and a compartment in the floor rose to present their prize.
The dreki approached almost hesitantly, as though afraid it was a trick or a ruse of some sort. Natasha stepped back, hand out and empty, giving the dreki room while also showing she was making no further movement towards the controls. From her newfound perspective, she watched the mother nuzzle her future children, one razor-sharp talon hovered almost uncertainly above the damaged egg.
Natasha opened her mouth to defend herself verbally and hopefully prevent the need to do so physically by insisting the damage was not due to her nor Thor's efforts, but found it unnecessary. The beast scratched lightly at the surface of the egg, along the largest fissure. Instead of the room filling with the smell of sulfur and rot, it was filled with the sound most closely approximating the crinkle of aluminum foil and the melodic tinkle of glass. Large sections of the shell fell away to reveal a clearly lethargic yet clearly living and breathing infant lizard, its scales a dull black and brown and just barely tinged with green along the edges.
The dreki reached forward to assumingly pick up her child, but instead picked up two pieces of the shell and laid them carefully at the feet of her children's rescuers.
"You honor us," Thor told her, which was apparently the right thing to say so Natasha nodded beside him.
The dreki lowered her head slightly in an approximation of Natasha's movement before she turned to scoop up her child and children to be. She left nearly as quietly as she arrived, save for the faint almost bird-like chirp that may have been the mother and may have been the child and was quite possibly both.
Natasha erased any potential feed of the room and covered their tracks the best she could while Thor set a spark that slowly grew and set fire to the lab as a whole, leaving it nothing but ashes by the time SHIELD security arrived and they were both safely back at the tower, cover stories in place.
Later, as she soaked her aching muscles, she could not help but trace the tiny line of gray-green that had become a part of her. She had been marked, something most spies and assassins tried to avoid as it meant certain death. But she was more than that now, had been for some time if she wished to be honest with herself. Her ledger wasn't clean yet - her memories reminded her that she had taken far more lives and caused far more damage than she had saved or protected. This mark though, this odd green against the red, would serve as proof that she was at least making progress.
She dried off and wrapped herself in a soft robe, padded barefoot to the kitchen of her suite and opened the freezer to reveal more than a single clear bottle. She smiled when she saw the most recent addition, a gift from Stark because he understood her sense of humor as well she understood his own. Stripes of red circled the top and a blue dragon twined around the bottom. She didn't always like the infusions added to her vodka, much preferring the pure, unadulterated taste, but decided she would make an exception given the circumstances.
She opened the bottle and poured a shot into the cracked porcelain cup Barton had gifted her with years ago. She raised it in the direction of the huge windows that lined the far wall and looked to the clouds and sky and the twinkling lights of the city below. Her eyes drifted to the small teak box on the shelf that she knew held a certain bit of pearlescent green, and she silently offered a toast to it and everything it represented. A burst of cool rose hit her tongue and she spared a moment to wish the dreki well, and hope that she and her children would find a place to survive and thrive.
Many months later, when a much larger and much less docile dragon-like creature attacked with a horde of other various and supposedly mythological creatures, the winged menace bore down upon her position while she attempted to get a busload of commuters out of the attack zone. Her comm screamed in warning that another five were approaching her position. She looked up to find the dreki, scar shining silver along her side, and four slightly smaller versions of the same, one with scales of black trimmed in green. They stood before her, chirped and screeched in turn, and the beast stood down.
"Thank you," she said, head dipped in respect.
Almost as one, her new allies nodded in kind.
The tide of the battle turned after that and, at the end of the day, she invited Thor up for a celebratory drink. He smiled at the bottle she offered him, and the small box that lay open upon the shelf. They told tales into the night and toasted to life, happiness, and the very many forms of victory. Somewhere in the city below, their allies flew free.
End.
Note: Vodka in reference is Dragon Bleu Rose Blossom.
Feedback is always welcomed.