Bucky and Natasha Hunt for Thieves in Marvel's Black Widow: Bad Blood

Natasha Romanoff cut through the water in long silent strokes, black suit and black gear on an equally black night, invisible to those above the surface. In the dark beneath the waves, there was no up or down or sense of distance. There was only the rhythmic hiss and gurgle of each inhale-exhale and the pressure of forward movement.

Lake Michigan was its own sensory deprivation chamber in which she trusted her instruments for guidance, and trusted herself for safety. 

An ambient glow alerted her to a systems check.

She brought wrist to face for a look at the ultrasonic sensor readout.

Yards to target had moved into the single digits.

She rotated, ascended.

Mission mindset was its own beast, and she was in that zone now, whittled down to muscle and bone and training. She slowly breached surface, searching for a threat.

Behind, to the west, downtown Chicago’s lights glittered on the horizon. Ahead, silent, looming overhead like a ghost fortress beneath the stars, was the Mitochondrion, the research and exploration vessel to which the hunt had led.

For three hours, Romanoff had sat on a zodiac inflatable, observing the Mitochondrion’s routine through a high-powered scope, and once she’d seen all she needed, had buckled into the gear, dropped over the side, and plunged a knife through its thick rubber skin, letting the craft sink to the bottom of the lake.

Now it was just her, the ship, its crew, its guards, and the secrets it held.

Anchor lights bathed the ship. Romanoff slipped into shadow, as close to the hull as safety allowed, and floated toward the open deck, where research equipment was stored. Here, the ascent would only be half the distance from the waterline to the deck.

She kicked off the fins, unlatched her harness, and let the regulator tank sink. If things went sideways, the backup was the Spare Air emergency breathing system strapped between her shoulder blades. It was her only defense against the dark, deep water of Lake Michigan.

She counted down seconds, timing the patrol, and waited until they reached middeck. Then she fired the grappling hook, snapped onto the line, and sailed to the deck with the softest snick. Rolling beneath the rail, she paused, watching, listening.

The two-man patrol continued on, oblivious.

She retracted the hook, tucked it out of sight, and slunk between equipment, toward the center hatch. She moved in front of the hatch, readying to drop down. Checked her instruments, confirmed the readings. Tossed Chicago one last look.

For two months now, it had been home—or at least, home to Melanie Ardonia, the shy, quirky IT girl who was her cover—while Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, hunted.

But tonight, that all ended.

Feather-light and assassin-silent she followed the companion ladder down into a narrow passageway.     

Outside, there’d been the wind and the water.

Inside, it was silent, eerily so.

There were no footsteps or voices, none of the relaxed laughter of off-duty crew, just the low rumbling hum of the auxiliary generators.

Romanoff oriented to the map in her head and turned toward starboard.

If she was right, she’d find what she wanted somewhere about … here.

And there it was, the high-tech security access pad on a sealed bulkhead door.  

She bit down on a glove, ripped it off with her teeth, and dug into a waterproof pocket for the keycard and its borrowed DNA. Inserted the chip into the sequencing lock.

Seconds ticked on into forever and she braced for an alarm that never came.

Hydraulics hissed. The bulkhead wheel turned on its own accord.

She nudged the door open and stepped into a dark room lit by a thousand flashing pinhead lights. Her gaze tracked up, taking it all in, and she shut the door and stepped inside.

There was row after row of servers, stacked on shelving towering ten, twelve feet up. They whirred in time as they sequenced and synthesized new genomes for the black-market trade. 

She’d known she’d find part of the supply chain here.

But this…

“Kind of you to put them all in one spot,” she whispered.

Strong fans circulated the air, venting out the heat, pulling in the mid-October chill, but the room was still uncomfortably warm. She loosened the suit, slipped behind bracing, clamped a packet sniffer on the nearest exchange box, and moved deeper in.

A shadow passed over the flickering lights.

She smiled.

She hadn’t been able to confirm, but had hoped he’d be here. Jean-Paul Viscose, the French Canadian biosmuggler she’d been chasing. He’d been dumping dangerous super-enhancements on the black market, and had, it seemed, used more than a few of them on himself.

The shadow’s size and shape said it was him.

For two months she’d lived as Melanie Ardonia. Two months of being limited to infiltrate-and-observe mode. It had been too long without a fight. Now, it was the Widow’s turn.

Halogen tubes powered on overhead, transforming the beauty of a thousand colored lights into naked plastic, metal racks, and snaking cables.

Romanoff turned to face her adversary. She knew Viscose from photos and video, had heard him describe his body modifications that melded man with Mother Nature’s greatest predators. But it was a whole different thing to see this three-hundred-pound beast in person. 

Viscose’s shaved head was a meaty dome, the scalp tattooed in swirling circuit designs, and his eyes were inky darkness, the result of chemical injections that granted him night vision. Bioluminescent strips under his skin picked up electromagnetic radiation, giving him a sixth sense of sorts to navigate without sight or sound.

Her contacts had called him the Shark.

They hadn’t mentioned whether the sharply filed teeth offered any practical advantage, but they certainly added to the look.

Viscose threaded between the racks, maneuvering closer. His voice was bizarrely soft and human. He said, “I wondered when S.H.I.E.L.D. would show up.”

She stepped wide, keeping space between them. “You know how it goes,” she said. “Run an illegal biohacking scam, you tend to make new friends along the way.”

He charged her, moving from zero to impact with a speed she hadn’t expected.

She sidestepped, flipped into a crouch, swept a leg out, and caught him at the ankle as he barreled past. 

He lost balance and slammed shoulder first into the wall.

The impact set the server shelves rattling.

Viscose righted himself with ease.

She grabbed the nearest rack for leverage and hurled herself onto him, looping carbon fiber grappling wire around his neck, attempting to cut off his air supply.

His arms twisted backward, shoulders rotating at unnatural angles, and his hands gripped her wrists with viselike force. A searing like white phosphorus burned up her skin, into her head, demanding she let go to make it stop.

But pain was temporary. Pain was familiar.

As her old instructors drilled into her—pain meant she was still alive.

She held on, fighting against strength much greater than her own.

He pried her loose, flung her upward, and followed with a backhand strike that connected with her torso like bat to ball. Romanoff went crashing into a server array, her body lodged between shelves eight feet up off the floor.

He came for her again.

Each heavy footstep reverberated through the shelving and into her head.

She crawled to her knees, measuring the room for advantage, sizing him for weakness.

His neck was bleeding.

She still held the grappling wire.

His hand shot toward her throat with snakelike speed.

She rolled, narrowly avoiding that windpipe-crushing grip, and in that same beat, whipped the wire back into his face. In slow motion, she watched it coil around his head, and then she jumped, taking the wire with her, letting gravity do the hardest work.

He staggered and bellowed, tore the wire free, and slowly turned to face her.

Blood trickled from forehead to chin, and gashes created grooves where circuit tattoos had been. His black eyes, unreadable, stared her down while his right hand grabbed the arm of a nearby instrument and, in a sickening crack of plastic and metal, tore it from its mooring. Viscose advanced on her, arm in hand, swinging it with the practiced control of a weapon.

She activated the Widow’s Bite wristlets.

The hum and snap of electricity filled her senses, and she backed against the wall, timing, calculating for an opening.

Punching above her weight class came with the territory, all part of working with superpowered individuals and facing off against the shady sort who went after them. The power disparity kept her nimble, clever, forced her to think a dozen moves ahead, and she lived for these moments when the only way to stay alive was to put full faith in herself, her training, and her instincts.

She bounded up, shelf to shelf, using the racks as a ladder for height advantage, and dove over him, slamming wristlets against his arm, delivering a precise, brutal shock.

Electricity hissed and arced across his veiny skin.

She never tired of that burst of blue.

Viscose’s muscles seized.

His legs gave out.

He dropped to his knees and the robotic arm thudded to the floor.

She moved forward cautiously, ready to secure him, but the arcs smoothed into a satin film, and absorbed into his skin.

Viscose flashed a jagged grin.

He was on his feet and halfway to her before she could respond, and swung. Connected.

His punch served an equal shock to the Widow’s Bite. Her body rose high and fell fast.

She could breathe, couldn’t react.

Romanoff hit an upper rack hard and bounced, shoulder, torso, head, and landed at the foot of the bulkhead door. Electric pulses worked through her limbs.

She struggled to get to her feet.

He snagged her ankle, lifted her by the leg, opened the door, and with a burst of enhanced muscle, flung her out into the dark passageway. Romanoff groaned and rolled to her side.

Viscose’s silhouette filled the doorway. He shook his head, disappointed. “I thought the Widow would have more bite,” he said, and turned, vanishing from view.

From inside the room came a soft beep.

He’d found the packet sniffer, had ripped it off.

Romanoff lifted wrist to face.

Vision blurry, she fumbled for the failsafe on her watch and clamped down hard.

The ship shuddered and silence fell like the vacuous shutdown of an old cathode monitor going dead. The fans and ventilation system and auxiliary generators stopped.

The servers went out mid-blink. 

The lights shut off. 

More importantly, a resounding metallic thunk filled the server room: three hundred pounds of man-meets-metal tech incapacitated by the electromagnetic pulse that had emanated from the device in his hand.

Romanoff ripped a penlight from inside her suit, pulled herself to her feet, and hobbled back the way she’d been thrown.

She found him on the floor, limp, malleable and moveable, all systems still offline.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Your enhancements on the fritz?”

His jaw rippled, likely in an attempt to form words.

The EMP would have caused excruciating pain to his subdermal sensors.

She leaned down, grabbed his wrist, shoved his one arm against his body, and lashed the grappling wire around him, tightening until she was sure he wouldn’t be going anywhere, even after his systems came back online.

The first whisper escaped his lips, more air than syllable.

She leaned in closer.

“You haven’t won,” he said.

She stuffed a glove in his mouth. “Save it for S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she said, and went to make the call.

Romanoff stood at the railing, facing east, watching the last of the deep night fade from blue to red to orange. Another few minutes and the sun would crest Lake Michigan’s horizon. Behind her, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s bustle of taking inventory and offloading went on as crates brimming with Viscose’s equipment transferred from ship to waiting helicopter.

A few minutes later, it was Viscose himself.

She only half paid attention.

Her job here was done.

A familiar form filled her peripheral vision. Arms leaned onto the railing, joining hers. “Two months,” Colonel Fury said. “Not bad for starting this case from scratch and keeping it quiet. I do miss having that kind of efficiency around S.H.I.E.L.D., even if we could’ve done it faster the ugly way.”

Romanoff smirked. “That sounds like a failure on behalf of management.”

Fury rolled his one eye.

A young man approached, tablet in hand.

Fury leaned over to glance at the screen. “There’s talent,” he said, “and then there’s talent.” He sighed and turned back. “If you want my opinion—”

“Which I don’t—”

“—Which I’m gonna give you anyway. Your talents are wasted playing shy IT girl over at big pharma.” 

“Well, it was that shy IT girl who tracked Viscose to his inside supplier and traced the payments and shipments from Chicago to Kuala Lumpur,” she said. “All without tripping a single network sensor.” Romanoff jutted her chin toward a cluster of agents crossing the deck. “Your brute force might have gotten the job done faster, but you’d have sent that CFO Hoffman pulling his golden parachute cord long before you got to the money trail.”

“Carl Hoffman,” Fury said. “Who’d have thought?” 

She shook her head.

No one, really. The guy was a senior board member at the pharmaceuticals company in which Romanoff had gone undercover—quiet, steady, ethical—and he was clean, maybe a little too clean, a little too honorable. But it’d been Hoffman who, through an elaborate knot of shell companies and subsidiary payments, had fed Viscose money, data, and unpublished research to fuel their black-market bonanza.

It’d taken a lot of tedious paper-pushing as Melanie Ardonia to untangle that web.

She said, “Sometimes, slower can be better.”

Fury smiled, all lip. “And willingness to question my methods,” he said. “I do miss that about you.”

“Then you’re welcome to keep sending the contract work, so long as we’re clear that I take it, or not, at my leisure.”

He chuckled. Shook his head. “Romanoff,” he said, “you don’t know the first thing about leisure.”

“No. Maybe not.”

She returned to leaning against the rail and let the slap of waves against the hull stand in for conversation. Fury was right about leisure insofar as Natasha Romanoff, Widow and spy, was concerned. But as Melanie, as her cover, it was different. Melanie had friendships and free time. There’d been happy hours, baby showers, Bachelorette marathons, and inside jokes as they closed ranks against meddling middle managers.

Romanoff had genuinely liked them, these friends Melanie had made. She’d even liked how it almost felt like taking time for herself.

Leaving would be bittersweet, but a girl like Melanie would always say goodbye. Something Romanoff rarely did for herself.

She said, “It’s gonna take me a week for extraction, minimum. Melanie can’t vanish right as Viscose’s buddy on the board gets perp-walked. After that we can talk new jobs. Freelance only.”

Fury glanced at her, inscrutable.

Finally, he rested a hand on her shoulder and gave her an awkward pat—sweet, in a Fury kind of way. “Whatever you say, Romanoff.”

She smiled despite herself.

He said, “Anything else I need to know before I close the case out?”

She ran her palms along the railing, mentally retracing each investigatory step.

Every labyrinth had both dead ends and branching paths. Her method was to find the most direct route to the end. She couldn’t worry about the coulda-beens and mighta-shouldas.

Outside mission scope, her old trainers would say.

But sometimes tangents had a way of appearing irrelevant until they suddenly weren’t. “Still haven’t been able to track Viscose’s secondary funding source for the Eritrea setup,” she said. “That’s the only outlier. Everything else trails back to Hoffman.”

“Could be Hoffman had another source of funds.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

She cast Fury a sideways glance. “Worth keeping an eye on,” she said. “Or you could try asking Viscose.”

Fury chuckled. “After the number you did on his implants, I don’t think he’ll be saying much for a long time.”

With a wry smile, she backed away from the railing. “Then I did my job.”

ONE WEEK LATER

Romanoff made her way along West Hubbard, past the colorful signage of restaurants and bars and groups of raucous tourists who blithely clogged the sidewalk, counting down street numbers and getting closer, finally, to her destination.

She was late already.

Frustratingly so.

She moved slowly, far more slowly than she was used to.

She was tired in a way she hadn’t been since … honestly, she couldn’t remember. A gust of October cold blew through her purposely dowdy jacket.

That taste of coming winter should have sunk its teeth into her skin.

Instead it arrived as a welcome relief.

She’d felt off since early morning—unable to get comfortable—senses raw and frayed enough that she would have called off tonight’s foray if not for the fact that she’d stayed this extra week to protect her cover.

Best she could figure, this was the aftermath of the Viscose fight, a delayed response to the electric charge he’d blasted through her, nothing that a little rest couldn’t fix.

All she had to do was wear Melanie’s persona one last night. Get through a few more hours and she’d be done, and so Romanoff pushed on.

The nightclub came into view.

Not their usual type of haunt, but Melanie’s friends had insisted on doing something different, special.

For some operatives, nightclubs were a nightmare of bad lighting, thick crowds, and headache-inducing noise that made eavesdropping and intelligence gathering difficult, if not impossible. To her, they’d always been closer to a dream—so many dark shadows to slip between, and pounding beats to swallow the thud of fists into flesh.

But tonight wasn’t for reconnaissance or confrontation, which was just as well, because the strobe lights left her dizzy, and the music drummed against her insides, and all she wanted was to sit and be still.

Romanoff shrugged out of the jacket and wove through the undulating crowd, following text directions toward the back.

All three of Melanie’s core group had already arrived.

She found them in a roped-off section where a pair of couches allowed them to mingle and dance without catching elbows in the face.

Keisha was the first to spot her.

She waved Melanie over with the same ebullient charm that so effortlessly enraptured anyone who was drawn into her orbit. Voluptuous, effervescent, and shrewd, this short Black woman with box braids was the group’s social glue.

Keisha grabbed Melanie’s hand, pulled her close, and made space for her next to Maria Gonzalez, mother of the group—metaphorically and literally, considering that when Melanie had first started with the company, Maria was only a few weeks back from maternity leave. She was sardonic, insightful, quick with the comebacks, and always seemed to have an eyebrow cocked.

Maria touched Melanie’s arm and her welcome smile faded.

“Feeling okay?” she said, using her signature eyebrow raise.Romanoff nodded. “Just tired.”

Sora Fletcher, the group’s wry and rebellious protector, leaned over and offered Melanie a half-empty glass. “It’s mostly ice now,” they said.

Romanoff accepted and Sora, who’d been dancing alone, eyes closed, plopped down beside her. Half-Korean, half-white, non-binary, their outfit today included a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up to show off forearm tattoos. Sora pointed to a cluster of hearts, roses, and skulls—more specifically, to a star among them that hadn’t been there a few days ago—and Romanoff understood.

To be memorialized like that after so brief a friendship was the highest form of compliment. “Thank you,” Romanoff said, and genuinely meant it.

Maria, taking the conversation back to where it’d been before Melanie’s arrival, said, “I wonder what Hoffman’s arrest is gonna mean for the rest of the C-suite.”

Sora leaned forward, eyes glinting conspiratorially. “Actually, I bet Keisha knows.”

Keisha laughed. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“But you’re like some kind of super-spy,” Maria said. “You get everyone to tell you everything.”

“Well, I don’t know that.”

Sora said, “You probably do know, you just don’t know it yet.”

The three of them laughed the uproarious laughter of light booze and a good time.

Romanoff smiled.

This was exactly why she’d chosen this group of friends—well, technically they’d chosen her, rescuing the shy girl in frumpy bargain suits who’d been shut out of the white-girl cliques. Keisha was especially fascinating to watch, what with the way she naively and innocently wielded her extroverted nature like a precision weapon. The company’s custodians and cleaning crew, interns and assistants and mailroom staff all knew and loved her, and happily pulled favors for her if she ever needed them. Keisha brought barbecue to the night guards so often, they never batted an eye when she and Melanie—and then only Melanie—worked late, away from suspicious gazes. Keisha was an operative in her own way, but too sweet to realize it.

She wandered off now and returned with a round of drinks.

Romanoff paced herself.

Tiredness became exhaustion. She didn’t feel like dancing, but this was her one chance at a proper goodbye and she didn’t want to disappoint these friends. It wouldn’t do her cover any favors, she told herself, for Melanie to suddenly blow them off.

The lights swirled, a little too unpredictable, a little too sharp.

And Romanoff was aware, so very aware, that when she stopped moving, the room kept going. Whatever was going on was not right.

Laughing became an effort.

She struggled to think, to figure it out. Something she drank? No—it had started far earlier. She was getting worse. The nightclub made it rougher. She wanted to stay, to finish out the night, but couldn’t.

She was a stitch holding fabric together, about to rip.

“I’m sorry, I’m so exhausted,” she told them. Even that took so much more of her than it should have.

There were hugs, tears, promises to keep in touch and show up for kids’ birthdays. 

Outside, the night was riper, the shadows deeper, tangible, terrifying fingers raking through her hair and coiling around her legs. Every rattle was a collision, a threat unfolding.

Her head pounded. The streetlights spun. Partygoers morphed and stretched in a strange form of hallucination. She had to get home, to Melanie’s home, Melanie’s home where it was safe.

She couldn’t take the train. Didn’t have the energy to summon a ride share.

A taxi.

She meant to lift her hand, but it was so heavy, and her head was heavy, and the world went dark—

Romanoff came to, disoriented. A bone-rattling, teeth-shattering jostle and then a sway, side to side.

Clatter. Movement.

Voices swirled around her. Hands gripped her.

Arms locked hers behind her back—far more arms than she had.

She twisted, thrashing, her only urge to get out, to get away. Her training coming into play.

Shadows blotted everything.

She could sense them out there, faceless faces, unseen eyes, studying her, examining her.

Their voices reached into the fog.

“—Quick—coming back,” they said.

And awareness collapsed again.

Pain brought her to, pain like liquid fire burrowing into the soft crook of her arm.

They strapped her down, held her fast.

Something sharp penetrated her skin.

She struggled to think, couldn’t think, didn’t know her own body.

She was weak and the weakness was new and frightening.

…But she knew this sensation.

She was being injected.

Sodium pentathol, cyanide, air bubble. Could be anything.

Victor. A name—Victor.

Romanoff drifted in and out of time, caught between past and present and fighting against the dark, unsure if this was real or the past or the past become real again. The Red Room. Tests. Injections. Make you stronger. (Make you obey.) Captured, once. (Intentional, but didn’t stop the torture.) Just a fat dossier of endless missions blending together.

But Romanoff didn’t need to aim; she had power enough to compensate.

She thrashed, kicked.

In the fog, out beyond the reach of hearing and sight, she sensed the shadows, shouting, scattering, hitting asphalt, screeching tires, and then they were gone, and when she next opened her eyes she was on the ground in an alley beside a dumpster, alone.

She had no memory of how she’d got there, wherever there was.

Her clothes were torn. Her glasses missing. Her purse across the alley.

Her hands hurt like she’d hit someone hard.

Her eyes shut and she drifted under, and woke again.

She couldn’t stay out in the open like this, had to get somewhere safe.

She pushed herself to her feet, braced shoulder against the brick and, joints aching, muscles hurting, followed the wall to the end of the alley.

Romanoff reached the corner.

Her eyes closed and she could feel herself going under again.

She forced them open, forced them to see until storefronts and traffic lights took shape. She knew this place, knew she wasn’t far, and stumbled onward, pushing past nausea for the stairwell. In the blur beyond her senses, voices spoke to her and hands touched her and she swung blindly until they retreated. She dragged her way to the first floor and, with effort, got key into lock.

The door opened to a small living room where streetlights, bleeding past the shades, created furniture outlines. Her brain burning up. She inched past the thrift store sofa and the dinged coffee table for the window and, with the last energy she could muster, got a panel open far enough to let in a draft of cold night air.

A wave of nausea welled up and her knees buckled.

The room tilted. The floor rose, smacked hard into her shoulder, cradled her head, and the world went dark again.

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