missromanova (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
missromanova) wrote2017-01-02 06:33 pm
missromanova) wrote2017-01-02 06:33 pm
(no subject)
The word 'disadvantage' is just an excuse for those who fail to justify their failure, that's something that Natasha has believed for a very long time.
Her cause now is for the good of the Complex. That's what she tells herself every time she has to do something less-than-kosher, or whenever the guilt of not letting the Boys know what she's up to gets a little too heavy. Telling them, particularly Steve, will only put them in danger, and now that he and Tony are so close letting Tony in on her secret is more dangerous than she'd like. Bucky is certainly a no-go, not because she doesn't trust him but because she would never demand he have to lie to his best friend if the situation ever arose. Things like that are important. She knows that now.
So, for now, it's just her, and that's fine. Free Enterprise is aware of her presence, Natasha managed to slip herself in as a mule to replace the two idiots she had arrested weeks ago, not that anyone else in the Secret Society she's surrounded herself with knows that. She's managed to float beneath the radar while keeping her eyes and ears open, and why is that? Because she's small, and nobody who looks at her would possibly consider her as a threat. Maybe when she ends up sending half of them to lock up they'll talk about how unfair it was, that she had a hidden set of skills they weren't aware of. That they were at a disadvantage.
No such thing.
It took a while - longer than she'd like to admit - for Natasha to finally find out exactly where the Boss is hiding, and she's not talking about her local Capo. She's been searching for the head, the true kingpin of Free Enterprise, and when she found him that's when she had to start coming up with a plan. Taking down an organized crime ring from the inside out isn't something that can be done overnight, and one wrong move can easily lead to death with a group like this. The collapse of the fighting ring, though... that was just pure luck.
The warehouse that she's navigating to is completely off the grid, a smart place to hide the head of a Secret Society if there ever was one. There's only one guard at the door, a rookie mistake to an uneducated eye but smart, in Natasha's opinion. She watches him from around the corner of another building, studying his pattern of walking as she breaks down everything she can gather from seeing him there; not security. This is the head of Free Enterprise that she's trying to get to, his security is inside, probably dozens of men with weapons from a clearance she hasn't even heard of, which makes the one guy outside an alarm. He's simply there to make sure the guys inside know when something is on it's way. She can knock him out when his back is turned, perhaps use the element of surprise to her advantage when she walks in, but in a situation like this that's not helpful. Not when everyone inside is better armed than she is. Sometimes you have to fight your way in, and other times it takes finesse. Lucky for Natasha, she knows how to handle both.
It goes about as well as it can; she starts to approach the man with a bubbly smile that would probably make anyone who actually knows her wince, and a little wave which prompts him to raise his weapon and point the barrel of his blaster square between her eyes. He's grabbing her by the shoulder and dragging her into the warehouse before she can even say that she wants to see Boss, and Natasha doesn't have to act when he tosses her onto the ground on the center of a large room, causing her to wince when her knee collides with the floor.
"Found this one outside." The thugs voice is higher than she had expected.
"Then get out there and see if she brought any friends." That one is lower. Natasha tries to look up but she's being grabbed beneath the arms and dragged to her feet by four more hands; it all went so fast that she couldn't get a decent headcount of the room. Maybe she'll call that a disadvantage in the future if this goes south.
There's only one important person in the room, though, and that's the man sitting before her in a chair that looks like it belongs in a different world. Leather, plush, wingback... to think something like that is a luxury, here. He looks younger than she had expected, perhaps ten years older than her, and he's remarkably average looking when it comes to everything but his eyes. Maybe it's the way that he's looking at her but Natasha can feel that stare down to her core, and for a split second she almost forgets to hide her shock. She knows him; not intimately, but he was definitely one of the men betting on her at the gala. She recognizes that stare, and that sets her on edge. Was he trying to scout her, or was he just interested in a dance? Her uncertainty isn't an act anymore.
"Gentlemen, where are your manners? We have a Special lady in our presence." He smiles at his own pun. "Put her down. You," he snaps his fingers at the man holding her right shoulder, "get her a seat."
They move immediately, letting go of her to back away, and Natasha makes a show of rubbing one of her shoulders before she feels a chair push against the back of her knees.
"Sit."
When she doesn't immediately move on his command a large hand lands on her shoulder and pushes her down in the chair until her legs buckle; another show, another wince. Her fear is real, and it only helps her sell the performance she knows she needs to put on.
"I just wanted to see you in person, I wanted to bring you something-" she moves to reach into a pocket when she hears at least four blasters powering on, causing her to freeze in place with eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. She looks back at the Boss, milking that fearful uncertainty, and she wets her lips nervously before she continues. "It's just a plasticred disk, I swear."
He eyes her closely, as if trying to see through her, but after a few moments he gestures for the men around her to lower their weapons before he puts his hand out.
She takes her cue, reaching into her pocket and pulling out the disk to place in his palm. "Everything is on there," she begins quickly, adding a breathy rush for effect. "Everything that we lost when the fighting ring went down, all of the credits that were taken, it's all there. It took me a while to get it, but it's untraceable, I swear. I checked it myself-"
"Because you know how to identify a bugged plasticred?"
"I know how to access the financial record system to see that they still think they have that money."
It's a bluff but she holds eye contact, and the seconds feel like hours as they tick by before he gives a satisfied facial shrug and hands the disk off to a man to his right. "I didn't ask you to retrieve our losses-"
"I know. I wanted to."
"You wanted to."
"Because they took it from us." There's silence in the room and Natasha looks around nervously; an excuse to finally get a headcount. Fourteen, and that's only what she can see. "That's - that's what we're working against, right? The Computer taking anything else from us? It's already making it hard enough for us to move product, we're just going to let it take everything we earned? Waste all of that effort?"
He's staring at her again, eyes holding the same intensity, and Natasha nervously chews the corner of her lip as she waits for him to respond. "I had top men working on getting those credits back into our pocket and you managed to do it in a matter of days. What makes you so capable?"
She shrugs, and the words come out on a false waver. "Maybe they're just incapable." She gets a snort of laughter somewhere in the room that's immediately halted from, what sounds like, an elbow to the gut. Tough crowd.
Her response catches his attention though, and he finally looks away from her to glance at the man at his right, the one holding the disk. "Why's it taking Borg so long when we have a mule walking in here with a plasticard holding almost six digits?"
"We don't know that the money is on there, Boss-"
"Don't talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot!" The last words come out so explosively that Natasha actually startles in her seat, fingers curling around the metal edge. "You think that she came in here with a fake disk? We could kill her on the spot, you think I didn't consider that it's fake? It's obviously not a fake, she found us. If she was tryin' to do anything don't you think she would have just reported our location, you moron? What was taking him so long?"
"He's only been at it for - for a couple of days, he was getting close-"
"I want him in here. I want him in here now." A beat. "NOW!" Natasha's head is down but she can hear the shuffle of at least four men hurrying out of the building, and when the silence takes over she looks back up at the man before her with hesitance. He's smiling at her again. "It's so hard to get good help these days, isn't that what they say?" He leans back, crossing his legs widely to let an ankle rest on his knee, and he lets his fingers press together in a steeple before him as his eyes close. "He better have a good excuse."
The man to his right, who's now looking much less confident than he was when Natasha first arrived, seems unsure of himself before he speaks again. "Getting that deep into the Complex is hard, Boss. Especially with Rogers running around playing boyscout, everybody knows he's Computer's guard dog, getting past him is impossible."
Calmer, now. "Isn't our friend #27 in the medical ward?"
"He's already awake, our contact saw him just this morning..."
His voice is starting to waver again with impatience. "Then knock him out again, why do I have to spell everything out for you?"
For the first time the underling looks at his Boss as if he's insane. "...You want us 'ta put a hit out on Goals?"
Natasha would laugh if the context wasn't so terrifying. She speaks before he can answer, barreling forward before anyone can shut her up. "You can't. They'd catch you before you even breathed in his direction, the amount of security they've got on Do Right is almost as intense as Teela, it's impossible to get that close to him. The person who shot him is already being interrogated and it's just going to get worse now... You need someone who's already on the inside to be able to do this sort of thing for you." Without hesitation, "I can do it."
The Boss is looking at her as if he had forgotten that she was even there, lips slightly parted over his arched fingers, and the room is quiet again as he seems to size her up. He can either decide that she's too dangerous, or he can mistaken her for a simple opportunist, a 5'3" woman who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. He can assume that she's exactly what she looks like, and then he can call that a disadvantage down the line. She chances a smile. "I like to consider myself a lady of opportunity. Not a mule." Seconds tick by.
And he smiles back.
Her cause now is for the good of the Complex. That's what she tells herself every time she has to do something less-than-kosher, or whenever the guilt of not letting the Boys know what she's up to gets a little too heavy. Telling them, particularly Steve, will only put them in danger, and now that he and Tony are so close letting Tony in on her secret is more dangerous than she'd like. Bucky is certainly a no-go, not because she doesn't trust him but because she would never demand he have to lie to his best friend if the situation ever arose. Things like that are important. She knows that now.
So, for now, it's just her, and that's fine. Free Enterprise is aware of her presence, Natasha managed to slip herself in as a mule to replace the two idiots she had arrested weeks ago, not that anyone else in the Secret Society she's surrounded herself with knows that. She's managed to float beneath the radar while keeping her eyes and ears open, and why is that? Because she's small, and nobody who looks at her would possibly consider her as a threat. Maybe when she ends up sending half of them to lock up they'll talk about how unfair it was, that she had a hidden set of skills they weren't aware of. That they were at a disadvantage.
No such thing.
It took a while - longer than she'd like to admit - for Natasha to finally find out exactly where the Boss is hiding, and she's not talking about her local Capo. She's been searching for the head, the true kingpin of Free Enterprise, and when she found him that's when she had to start coming up with a plan. Taking down an organized crime ring from the inside out isn't something that can be done overnight, and one wrong move can easily lead to death with a group like this. The collapse of the fighting ring, though... that was just pure luck.
The warehouse that she's navigating to is completely off the grid, a smart place to hide the head of a Secret Society if there ever was one. There's only one guard at the door, a rookie mistake to an uneducated eye but smart, in Natasha's opinion. She watches him from around the corner of another building, studying his pattern of walking as she breaks down everything she can gather from seeing him there; not security. This is the head of Free Enterprise that she's trying to get to, his security is inside, probably dozens of men with weapons from a clearance she hasn't even heard of, which makes the one guy outside an alarm. He's simply there to make sure the guys inside know when something is on it's way. She can knock him out when his back is turned, perhaps use the element of surprise to her advantage when she walks in, but in a situation like this that's not helpful. Not when everyone inside is better armed than she is. Sometimes you have to fight your way in, and other times it takes finesse. Lucky for Natasha, she knows how to handle both.
It goes about as well as it can; she starts to approach the man with a bubbly smile that would probably make anyone who actually knows her wince, and a little wave which prompts him to raise his weapon and point the barrel of his blaster square between her eyes. He's grabbing her by the shoulder and dragging her into the warehouse before she can even say that she wants to see Boss, and Natasha doesn't have to act when he tosses her onto the ground on the center of a large room, causing her to wince when her knee collides with the floor.
"Found this one outside." The thugs voice is higher than she had expected.
"Then get out there and see if she brought any friends." That one is lower. Natasha tries to look up but she's being grabbed beneath the arms and dragged to her feet by four more hands; it all went so fast that she couldn't get a decent headcount of the room. Maybe she'll call that a disadvantage in the future if this goes south.
There's only one important person in the room, though, and that's the man sitting before her in a chair that looks like it belongs in a different world. Leather, plush, wingback... to think something like that is a luxury, here. He looks younger than she had expected, perhaps ten years older than her, and he's remarkably average looking when it comes to everything but his eyes. Maybe it's the way that he's looking at her but Natasha can feel that stare down to her core, and for a split second she almost forgets to hide her shock. She knows him; not intimately, but he was definitely one of the men betting on her at the gala. She recognizes that stare, and that sets her on edge. Was he trying to scout her, or was he just interested in a dance? Her uncertainty isn't an act anymore.
"Gentlemen, where are your manners? We have a Special lady in our presence." He smiles at his own pun. "Put her down. You," he snaps his fingers at the man holding her right shoulder, "get her a seat."
They move immediately, letting go of her to back away, and Natasha makes a show of rubbing one of her shoulders before she feels a chair push against the back of her knees.
"Sit."
When she doesn't immediately move on his command a large hand lands on her shoulder and pushes her down in the chair until her legs buckle; another show, another wince. Her fear is real, and it only helps her sell the performance she knows she needs to put on.
"I just wanted to see you in person, I wanted to bring you something-" she moves to reach into a pocket when she hears at least four blasters powering on, causing her to freeze in place with eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. She looks back at the Boss, milking that fearful uncertainty, and she wets her lips nervously before she continues. "It's just a plasticred disk, I swear."
He eyes her closely, as if trying to see through her, but after a few moments he gestures for the men around her to lower their weapons before he puts his hand out.
She takes her cue, reaching into her pocket and pulling out the disk to place in his palm. "Everything is on there," she begins quickly, adding a breathy rush for effect. "Everything that we lost when the fighting ring went down, all of the credits that were taken, it's all there. It took me a while to get it, but it's untraceable, I swear. I checked it myself-"
"Because you know how to identify a bugged plasticred?"
"I know how to access the financial record system to see that they still think they have that money."
It's a bluff but she holds eye contact, and the seconds feel like hours as they tick by before he gives a satisfied facial shrug and hands the disk off to a man to his right. "I didn't ask you to retrieve our losses-"
"I know. I wanted to."
"You wanted to."
"Because they took it from us." There's silence in the room and Natasha looks around nervously; an excuse to finally get a headcount. Fourteen, and that's only what she can see. "That's - that's what we're working against, right? The Computer taking anything else from us? It's already making it hard enough for us to move product, we're just going to let it take everything we earned? Waste all of that effort?"
He's staring at her again, eyes holding the same intensity, and Natasha nervously chews the corner of her lip as she waits for him to respond. "I had top men working on getting those credits back into our pocket and you managed to do it in a matter of days. What makes you so capable?"
She shrugs, and the words come out on a false waver. "Maybe they're just incapable." She gets a snort of laughter somewhere in the room that's immediately halted from, what sounds like, an elbow to the gut. Tough crowd.
Her response catches his attention though, and he finally looks away from her to glance at the man at his right, the one holding the disk. "Why's it taking Borg so long when we have a mule walking in here with a plasticard holding almost six digits?"
"We don't know that the money is on there, Boss-"
"Don't talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot!" The last words come out so explosively that Natasha actually startles in her seat, fingers curling around the metal edge. "You think that she came in here with a fake disk? We could kill her on the spot, you think I didn't consider that it's fake? It's obviously not a fake, she found us. If she was tryin' to do anything don't you think she would have just reported our location, you moron? What was taking him so long?"
"He's only been at it for - for a couple of days, he was getting close-"
"I want him in here. I want him in here now." A beat. "NOW!" Natasha's head is down but she can hear the shuffle of at least four men hurrying out of the building, and when the silence takes over she looks back up at the man before her with hesitance. He's smiling at her again. "It's so hard to get good help these days, isn't that what they say?" He leans back, crossing his legs widely to let an ankle rest on his knee, and he lets his fingers press together in a steeple before him as his eyes close. "He better have a good excuse."
The man to his right, who's now looking much less confident than he was when Natasha first arrived, seems unsure of himself before he speaks again. "Getting that deep into the Complex is hard, Boss. Especially with Rogers running around playing boyscout, everybody knows he's Computer's guard dog, getting past him is impossible."
Calmer, now. "Isn't our friend #27 in the medical ward?"
"He's already awake, our contact saw him just this morning..."
His voice is starting to waver again with impatience. "Then knock him out again, why do I have to spell everything out for you?"
For the first time the underling looks at his Boss as if he's insane. "...You want us 'ta put a hit out on Goals?"
Natasha would laugh if the context wasn't so terrifying. She speaks before he can answer, barreling forward before anyone can shut her up. "You can't. They'd catch you before you even breathed in his direction, the amount of security they've got on Do Right is almost as intense as Teela, it's impossible to get that close to him. The person who shot him is already being interrogated and it's just going to get worse now... You need someone who's already on the inside to be able to do this sort of thing for you." Without hesitation, "I can do it."
The Boss is looking at her as if he had forgotten that she was even there, lips slightly parted over his arched fingers, and the room is quiet again as he seems to size her up. He can either decide that she's too dangerous, or he can mistaken her for a simple opportunist, a 5'3" woman who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. He can assume that she's exactly what she looks like, and then he can call that a disadvantage down the line. She chances a smile. "I like to consider myself a lady of opportunity. Not a mule." Seconds tick by.
And he smiles back.