Chapter Text
-November 2nd, 2018-
The whirr of the aircraft's propellers churn behind her as she makes her way towards the abandoned HYDRA facility, the harsh Siberian winds whipping her hair across her face. She knows these winters intimately, years in the Red Room have conditioned her so. And yet, there's something undeniably more chilling in the cold here that pierces Natasha's skin as she approaches the thick, rusting doors of the concrete bunker.
The others feel it too, she can tell, despite how trained the SHIELD operatives are there's nothing they can do to hide their tense shoulders and wary eyes, gloved hands automatically drawn down towards their loaded gun holsters.
Natasha glances to where Clint is moving beside her. His bow is already drawn, his expression carefully indifferent, but she doesn't miss the slight pinch between his eyebrows as he stalks forward cautiously towards the entrance. She doesn't pause as she reaches out her hand to grasp the metal latch and pulls. The heavily fortified door opens with ease under her brutal force, despite the fact that it's evidently spent years unused.
Something's off. It's clear HYDRA hasn't returned here since they left, the facility is unlocked and unguarded. It only makes her more uneasy. There are few reasons an organisation like HYDRA would abandon such a well concealed bunker, and none of them are pretty.
The entrance opens into a vast concrete hallway, its uncannily empty, with no sign of prior life except a large splattering of blood in the centre of the floor, so old it's dried a repulsively tar coloured black. Clint visibly shudders as he steps in front of her to inspect the desolate corridor. Somethings wrong. Natasha doesn't quite know how to describe the feeling, but it's there, a sick tugging in her gut that screams instinctively, a warning.
“I don't like this Nat” Clint says in a strained voice. “I don't think HYDRA intentionally abandoned this place, it looks like they were chased away.”
An agent clears his throat from behind her. His face is angled back towards the semi-closed door. Natasha can hear the unmistakable dread in his voice as he begins to speak.
“Thats if your assuming they even made it out”
She follows the agent's eyeline to the scene behind her and lets out an involuntary hiss through clenched teeth. Natasha’s seen a lot of things throughout her life, but despite years of exposure to torture and death, she cant deny the sight before her is enough to make any Red Room agent unnerved.
On the inside of the colossal steel door, are the unmistakable traces of bloody, desperate handprints. If she looks closer, Natasha can even make out the faint fingernail carvings marring its surface, a remnant of somebody's last attempt at escape, and from the large, skull shaped indent located in the centre of the door, she's going to make the assumption that it didn't work out.
Clint’s openly grimacing now, glancing between the dark hallway behind him and Natasha's face. “Let's get this over with, whoever-” Clint turns his head and reluctantly eyes the bloodied door behind them. “...whatever they were keeping down here should be long gone. We find out what kind of sick things those bastards were doing and leave, preferably fast.”
The ‘long gone’ part of Clint's motivational mission speech is said with the reluctant knowledge that they currently have no idea whether the perpetrator chose to stay within the facility, or fled after brutally lodging someone's skull into a reinforced door, and could currently be living in the outside world - which is a problem Natasha refuses to think about.A cruel part of her hopes that whoever they were holding down here is dead, and has been for a long time.
She nods firmly at Clint before turning towards the SHIELD agents surrounding her, there's no more than twenty of them, it's enough to search an average HYDRA base, but Natasha’s starting to doubt whether it's enough to deal with the aftermath of whatever sick torture was happening here.
“We take this room by room, keep comms active at all times, and report directly to me if there are any anomalies”. She doesn't wait for a reply, turning sharply towards the passageway and walking forwards with necessary determination, Clint's silent footsteps at her heels.
“You think this is another supersoldier situation?” he asks carefully.
Natasha thinks back to the dented door and wants so, so badly to agree, to say yes. But the sick, burning feeling in her gut won't let her, and she can't help but think whatever they were keeping down here is something much, much worse than any super-soldier experimentation the Avengers are familiar with.
“We're not looking at another Bucky Barnes. Whatever did…this, it isn't human, Clint, it can't be”
He ducks his head in understanding as they approach a sharp turn in the hallway, drawing his bow and positioning himself behind the corner to clear it. Clint’s body stiffens immediately as he peers round the wall, letting out an alarmed- “fuck”.
Natasha moves behind him, stepping out into the second hallway and observing her surroundings. More tar-like bloodstains coat the concrete, floor to ceiling. Remnants of evidently brutal deaths despite the complete lack of bodies to prove it. She signals for attention, moving the SHIELD operatives into the second corridor beside her and Clint. Despite their deep frowns, they say nothing, waiting for her orders obediently.
Natasha doesn't need to connect to her comms to speak, the hall echos her commands like bad omen.
“Follow command protocol, any anomalies or bodies found relay directly to me, understood.”
With that, she nods curtly to Clint and heads alone to the first metal door, waving her hand briefly once more to start the procedure.
Even the sound of padded boots is not enough to drown out the uncanny silence within the bunker. The satisfying click of the unlocked door beneath her fingers brings her mind to attention, she opens it fully with one steady kick, raising her pistol in a guarded motion.
It's a supply room, stocked with seemingly untouched weapons, canned food and empty filing equipment. Natasha runs her gloved hands steadily over the weapon casings, tracking the numerous date codes imprinted on them. The models were produced in the late 90s, and by the state of the blood shes assuming the facility has been abandoned for at least half a decade. Its more recent then she would have liked. The knowledge that HYDRA has been continuing human experimentation with modern technology, is more than unsettling.
Natasha grits her teeth and moves to continue searching the shelves when she's alerted by an abrupt connection to her comms. The operative's voice is shaky, her words spoken with distress that should be unheard of from a heavily trained soldier.
“Agent Romanov, the bodies have been located.”
Bodies. Is the first thing that alarms her, the agent's horrified words echo in her ears. She expected bodies, almost definitely. The blood was a testimony to that. And yet the disturbed strain in the agent's voice tells Natasha that it's much more complicated.
She's already made it halfway down the corridor before The agent sends her the location within the bunker. The buzzing comms leading her towards a door located at the end of the hall, its metal frame singed deeply around the outside by a thick layer of charred ash. The agent stands with her hand flat against the door, pressing against it much too forcefully. Natasha can't make out her expression through the military headgear, but the disgusted look in her eyes is more than enough.
“Agent Romanov it’s… I think it's best if you see it for yourself ma’am.”
She moves away from the door to make room for Natasha before speaking again, pointing towards carvings that Natasha has first assumed were uncoordinated indents on the door's surface.
“It's some kind of…tally, I'm assuming the words are in German, possibly Dutch.”
Natasha nods her head and leans towards the engravings, inspecting them closely. The agent is right, long chiseled lines forming the shape of a tally are covering the face of the door. There's at least twenty of them, grim symbols that tell Natasha exactly what she's going to find when she opens it. She moves her eyes down to the German etchings to decipher them and freezes.
Carved deeply into the burnt metal is the cruel, unmistakable etchings of ‘mother and father’.
A wave of cold realisation hits her as she backs away from the door in disgust.
child experimentation.
She looks closer, running her hands along the grim words. The depth and frequency of the etchings matches those from the tally. The sickening understanding that a child had sat here and carved each corpse into existence sends a chill down her spine. In one unflinching movement, Natasha reaches forwards and opens the door, recoiling slightly as a cloud of ash escapes the now open entrance.
It’s as bad as she expected it. Burnt skeletons entangled together, each positioned carefully against the walls like some kind of cruel seance. Any remnants of identity are unrecognisable, each corpse cremated down to raw bone. The only anomalies being the two, intertwined skeletons stationed at the centre of the room.
Natasha carefully walks forward, covering her lower face with a gloved hand to prevent herself from inhaling the leftover ashes. Each carcass is mauled differently, no recognisable patterns to their demise. It's animalistic- broken bones and cracked skulls that could have only been caused by supernatural strength.
She’s moving on the grim assumption that the bodies placed in the centre of the room are Mother and father. Natasha is looking down on the pair entwined together with a cold gaze, analysing their wounds, when she sees it- the purple, rot like cavities covering their fleshless bones. It’s unnatural, not a result of the family cremation. It’s not visible on any of the other skeletons either.
The possibility that ‘mother’ and ‘father’ may have been experimenting on themselves is unsettling, and despite Natasha not being a scientist, she has seen enough here to have a chilling idea of the nature of experiments that were conducted within these halls.
She turns back towards the door and leaves the room briskly, facing the agent, who has yet to move from her position backed against the far wall of the bloody corridor.
“Send request for additional support, all remains are being transported to the Hub for further examination.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Natasha closes the door behind her and nods once in affirmation before continuing down the hall, noting the other agents movements as they search each room thoroughly. She reaches Clint within seconds, the facility is far too confined for it to take any longer. Clint has positioned himself within the final room at the edge of the bunker, standing motionless over a large metal desk, transfixed on something in front of him. Natasha has moved to his side before he begins to speak, too focused on the photograph he's holding to acknowledge her presence.
“Look.”
He passes her the crinkled image with shaking hands, refusing to take his eyes off the child's face even after he's handed it to Natasha.
The boy is sitting in between two adults with a pair of big, innocent brown eyes and a head full of chestnut curls, identical to the woman on his left, who he's gazing at with a look of pure admiration. Her hand is placed carefully onto his small, bony shoulders in an act of tenderness, but any ounce of motherly affection is drowned out by her sharp, predatory smile as she stares directly into the camera. The man's face, however, is angled towards the boy with eyes that look almost pitiful, His lips contorted into an uncomfortable frown.
He's dressed in small, white garments so similar to the ones from her own nightmares... Its horrific. The boy’s looking at this woman, this monster, with such a look of sheer love and admiration that Natasha feels sick.
Clint makes a hurt sound from beside her, talking manically in his disturbed state.
“He's little boy Nat- God he'd be the same age as Cooper”
“I know Clint”
“It’s fucking sick, it’s just one kid, i’ve looked, its just one little boy”
“I know”
“Oh my god this is so fucked” Clint hisses, more to himself then Natasha, running his hands down his face in a exhausted gesture that makes him look much older then he is.
“He killed them all.” She didn't intentionally say the words out loud, and regrets it instantly the second Clint turns his head towards her in outrage and spits out, “You don't know that Natasha, how do you know that”
“Clint I'm not saying it was his fault, it wasn't, but…”
“I would have killed them too, every last one Nat, they trapped their own child down here. Look at them they're fucking identical, He's their son!”
Natasha can't find it within herself to argue with that. Her usually steady hands shake slightly as she places the photograph back down on the desks surface, and she can only wish that she could've been the one to put a bullet through every last one of these sick bastard’s heads and make them scream. No matter if it makes her the lesser of two evils.
It's only by coincidence that Natasha sees it. Her hand jerks slightly as she places the polaroid back down on the cluttered desk, revealing a sheet of paper tucked hastily below another, depicting a large, unmistakable emblem that Natasha has seen so many times before that it takes her a second to register what she's actually looking at, and where shes seeing it.
The obnoxious, jet black spider stares at her with a cruel intensity. Her eyes widen in shock.
“Clint…”
“Yes?”
“Look.”
She hears the rustling of material behind her as Clint moves before the sound abruptly stops as he freezes suddenly, emitting a quiet choking sound as he makes eye contact with the paper arachnid.
“Oh”
“Mhm"
“Spider-Man"
“Spider-Man” , she confirms. Clint's jaw is clenched so hard it makes an audible crunch.
“No-kill rule, looking out for the little guy, friendly neighbourhood Spider-man?”
“Thats our guy."
Clint lets out a startled laugh, filled with anything but humour. The evidence is undeniable, and the evidence makes sense. Super-humans don't grow on trees, Spider-man had to have come from somewhere, it's just incredibly unfortunate that that somewhere couldn't have been anywhere else other than here.
Natasha knows, undeniably, that this is going to be a mess. Spider-man may be a good person, but to men like Ross, the boy behind the mask is nothing more then a dangerous wildcard, better rotting away on The Raft at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean rather then saving innocent civilians on New Yorks streets.
Clint understands this too, he knows that the second their findings are reported to the council, Spider-man becomes a risk in the eyes of the government. Something inhuman and unstable, an asset. No better than Wanda and Bucky- or even herself.
"this is really, really bad." Clint says.
Natasha is in agreement.