girlwithout | underneath the skin: part four

There’s no way to tell where she’s going – this was the Widow’s operation, she didn’t share things like building blueprints – but Rikki has to keep moving. Not just cause a moving target is harder to find than a stationary one, but because if she lets herself go off her guard for even a second, the adrenaline’s going to run out and she won’t be able to keep going. She comes to a stop when she spots the room with extra security in front of the doors, figuring that, if it’s not where they’re keeping the Black Widow, it’s at least got to have something important.

The guards are armed. They have weapons, armor. She has broken thumbs, a pounding headache, and barely any protection. She stops around the corner and flattens herself against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. There’s no time for doubts. Even if Rikki thought she could get herself out of the facility on her own, she couldn’t leave the Widow behind, couldn’t blow the mission.

“C’mon, Rikki. You can do this. You made it this far. Stay strong.” She barely puts air behind the words, let alone voice, but it feels good to say, anyway.

Just as she peeks around the corner to start planning what she can do, she hears the sounds of fighting from inside the room, and the guards take off running inside. Rikki follows carefully, trying not to draw attention to herself, and by the time she peeks inside the door, the Widow’s already knocked everyone out.

She glances at Rikki. “Nomad. You’re free.” She thinks the Widow gives the slightest jerk of her head, like a nod of approval. “I’m impressed.”

Without giving either of them a chance to recover, the Widow swiftly leaves the room and takes off down the corridor. Rikki follows, figuring she knows where to go. “We need to recover the asset and ensure the data servers are purged. Then we destroy the bioweapon. Stay behind me and keep an eye on our six.” After a moment of silence, she adds: “I miscalculated the extent and sophistication of their security measures. That’s why we got caught.”

Rikki breathes in, out, focuses on the beat of her feet against the floor. “You don’t need to apologize – “

“I wasn’t planning on it. Just making sure you know the facts.”

Of course. She huffs out a breath. “Oh. Um, speaking of facts… They’re not a doomsday cult in the strictest sense. The guy in my cell, he said – “

It may just be her imagination, but she thinks that maybe the Widow’s voice softens a touch. “He lied to you. Tried to trick you. That’s what interrogators do, when they’re not being sadists.” She slips into a computer room, and Rikki follows. “Now keep quiet and stay alert. We’re likely to encounter more resistance.”

A scientist with a gun slips in after them, and the Black Widow kicks it out of her hands with barely a look. “Charity! The passcode is charity!”

Almost immediately, the Widow goes from fight to a more cordial demeanor. “Agent Fowler.”

“Romanoff. It’s good to meet you. Very good.”

The name catches Rikki’s attention, because holy shit. That really is Agent Fowler. Shorter hair, maybe a harder look to her, but still. Wow. “You’re Agent Erica Fowler! You were my muay thai instructor on the helicarrier.”

Erica frowns at her and glances at Romanoff, clearly asking what is this girl doing here? “Uh… considering SHIELD sent me here to pretend to drink the Kool-Aid five years ago? I don’t think so.”

The Widow chooses this time to interject. “Nomad is not from this reality.”

“Oh. Well, of course she isn’t.” Erica lets out a harsh laugh. “Gotta love SHIELD, may it rest in peace…” She leads them into a concrete room, and Rikki stops cold.

“Oh my gosh.” The room is filled with nuclear shadows. She lets her unbroken fingers brush over one of the walls lightly. “How many people died testing this thing…?”

Erica and Romanoff keep going, leaving her in the room to keep an eye on the door they came through while they talk.

“What is it?” Romanoff sounds… concerned.

“The code’s been changed. No problem, though – I can use the admin override sequence. Just takes longer.” There’s a moment of silence. Rikki gently presses a finger against another shadow on her way to the doorway to peek out at the corridor outside. “That girl out there… Not that I doubt you. But was a teenager really the best you could get?”

“Perhaps you noticed the state of her thumbs.”

Rikki loses track of the conversation when she spots some movement down the hall. There’s not much she can do to hide their presence aside from duck away from the door and hope whoever it is moves on.

No such luck. One of the crazy brigade comes closer, and Rikki presses herself up against the wall. Okay, for real this time. She has to do this. Once the guy’s close enough, she plans to lunge out, but she gets a look at his face and it’s… him. Hunt. Her interrogator. She freezes, just long enough for him to turn his weapon on her, but instead of a bullet, she’s hit by something smaller, like a dart. Rikki kicks the gun out of his hand in a decent approximation of the Widow’s earlier move. “You will die, girl! You will all die!” He strikes out, but she blocks it, letting some of her rage and pain leak out into her body and fuel the flurry of vicious kicks she deals out to him. It hurts like hell, but damn is the crack of his jaw under the force of her foot satisfying.

“Holy crap.”

Rikki glances over at the door, where Agent Fowler and even Romanoff look genuinely kind of stunned.

She slumps to the ground, giving herself a second to breathe. “I knew all those dance classes would pay off someday. And the muay thai.”

The Widow kneels down next to her and rests a hand on her shoulder. “Good work, Nomad.”

“Yeah, well.” She sighs out a breath. “Kinda too little, too late….” She glances over at the gun. “The bioweapon. Hunt stuck me. We’ve got less than five minutes before I explode.”

After that, things go fast. Erica pulls her to her feet. “There’s a freezer on this floor. If we induce hypothermia, it might buy us some time.” In a moment, Rikki’s got her arms around Erica’s neck in a piggyback carry and they’re off running down the hall. She barely gets a glimpse, looking backwards, of the Widow closing in on Hunt, looking like a lioness that’s about to completely destroy her prey.

It’s so weird. She should be panicking or something, but instead she just feels kind of numb. Hurting, but… normal. Not like she’s about to explode. Erica sets her down next to a door, propped up against the wall before twisting the door valve.

“Agent Fowler, you didn’t have to carry me.”

Erica shakes her head briskly. “Can’t risk raising your body temperature, Nomad.” The door opens with a creak. “We only have a limited amount of time to freeze you to death.”

Over the next minute or so, she lays Rikki down on the floor and covers her with frozen packs of whatever doomsday cults keep in their freezers. Blood packs? Drugs? Freezer dinners? She doesn’t really pay attention to the designs on the packages, just the fact that they’re friggin’ cold. It’s like being covered in a reverse blanket. She starts shivering immediately. The clothes she was wearing hadn’t quite dried out from when Hunt woke her up with a bucket of water, and they start to freeze, along with what feels like every part of her skin.

Erica leans back. “How’s that?”

Rikki tucks her hands under her head, like sleeping on a pillow. It doesn’t do much good for softness. She’s already starting to go a little numb in her fingers and toes, but the rest of her body hurts, like a burn. “Y-you’re kidding, right?”

“Sorry about this. But if your metabolism slows enough, it should counteract the accelerant.”

Rikki can’t help but parrot that one important word. “Sh-should.”

“Without an antidote, this is the only chance we have.”

There’s another silence. Rikki spends it shivering violently, trying to remember that she’s subjecting herself to this willingly, because it’s the only chance they have. She has.

“I was all about boys and concealer at your age. The biggest danger to my person was having my heart broken.” Erica’s words come out in puffs of air that dissipate quickly. “I wish I had been your martial arts instructor, Nomad. I bet that would’ve been quite something.”

“Y-you… you should g-go. H-help Black Widow.” Get out of the cold. Leave her here to freeze alone. (She wonders, vaguely, if this is sort of how Steve felt when he froze. This all-over, weird mixture of numbness where the cold’s set in and the continued burning where she can still feel ice against her skin. Or maybe he passed out from lack of oxygen first, falling into the English Channel.)

“Someone needs to pull you out of here the instant the danger’s passed.”

“B-but if it doesn’t…?”

Agent Fowler doesn’t answer. There is no answer for that. That’s okay. Rikki’s already starting to get tired, and she almost welcomes the comfortable sleepiness. With any luck, even if they don’t get the antidote, the bioweapon won’t be able to do its thing in a frozen body. There’s worse ways to die. Maybe it’s not as glamorous as when she saved her entire reality, but she helped the Widow do something good. Aside from her, their formula is never going to be used on another person. That’s a nice thing to think about. All those people, the nuclear shadows on the wall, they’d probably be more at peace, knowing that.

Her eyes slip shut for a moment. She’d thought really bad hypothermia was supposed to take longer to set in, but then, she guesses usually people are trying to stop it from happening, not enable it.

If she dies here, is it going to be for real? Or is she just going to wake up somewhere new but not completely unfamiliar and start over again?

She’s slipping away fast now, barely able to pay attention to what’s going on. She could swear that she sees the Black Widow (did she come in for real? Or is it just a hallucination?) watching over her in place of Agent Fowler, saying something. Her eyes slide shut again. They don’t open.

(Later – she doesn’t know how much later – she opens them again to a bed hooked up to a bunch of medical equipment, a familiar room - the Night Nurse’s set-up.)