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Thirty minutes later, give or take, he finds her down along the riverbank.
She is kneeling to wash her hands in the black, gliding water, sleeves turned up primly at their cuffs. The two dead men lie on either side of her, right and left.
When she does not turn around in acknowledgement – although of course she’s heard him coming, of course she knows he’s there – Bruce swallows to wet his dry throat.
“Natasha?” But that final vowel carries too far, so he shortens it. “Nat?”
“Yes.” She stands and raises a damp, clean right hand in greeting. Her left hand, meanwhile, stays down, hanging in a loose fist. “Here.”
It is past dusk now, and he can’t see the ground in front of him very well, but using that flashlight in his back pocket seems ill-advised. Instead Bruce picks his way towards her through a patch of blossoming sweet briar, whose flowers fill the blue evening air with a scent like cut apples. Paired with the river and its lush smells of damp wood and mud and roots, the gunpowder is hardly noticeable.
Loose stones and dirt clods scatter underfoot, but he manages. Natasha steps aside, as though he is a latecomer being admitted into some a private conversation, and Bruce stands next to her without comment. Her hair, up close, looks damp as well.
She keeps her gaze trained on the river’s opposite shore. “How’re you feeling?”
“Fine, fine.” Bruce checks his hands to make sure they’re steady, not that she’d be fooled by a lie anyway. “It took a few minutes for the Other Guy to agree, but I guess being shot at just isn’t the novel experience it used to be.”
(Serves him right for leaving the quinjet, Bruce supposes, even with the static of a lost radio signal fizzing in his ear: interference caused by the mountains around them, apparently.
But between the unfurling, expansive pain of the transformation and the stiff, screwed-tight pain of waiting, he’s decided the waiting is somehow worse.)
“That’s good,” Natasha says. Her face twists in immediate regret. “About the de-escalation techniques, I mean. It’s good to hear they’re working better. I don’t know how you should feel about the acclimation part – did you happen to get that slug, by the way?”
Bruce searches through both coat pockets until his fingers close around something small and solid. He drops a used, remarkably heavy bullet into her expectant palm.
Natasha holds it up for examination with a watchmaker’s discerning scrutiny.
The shape is blunt, flat-nosed as the head of a claw hammer. He’d cut it from the tree trunk – not the tree he’d been standing next to, naturally, the one behind it – with a jack-knife, levering it free of the splintered bark while its metal was still hot, but not before estimating how far above his head it had passed: four or five inches, maybe. At most.
(There are many different types of bullet, Bruce has learned. For example, the kind with plastic tips are designed so that the projectile will be able to expand inside its target, blooming open through the soft tissue, without being deterred by heavy vests or jackets.
It’s all very logical, very precise. It inspires in him a certain scientific admiration for predictable outcomes.)
Natasha tosses the bullet up – heads or tails? – and catches it again lightly. Her left hand remains out of sight.
“Seven hundred and fifty grain, monolithic copper-zinc alloy. They’ve upgraded.” She throws it into the river with an underhand pitch. It makes an oblong, innocuous sound as it goes in, like a coin dropped down a well. “And brass casing, too. That’s not army-issue.”
Bruce swipes away a cloud of gnats. “Should I be flattered?”
“Probably. Army ammunition is all steel-case. Brass shells are reloadable, but they’re more expensive to buy. ”
“Then what’s the caliber supposed to be for, if the military doesn’t use it? Bears?”
“Elephants, actually. Or dinosaurs. I’m amazed the shot didn’t knock them unconscious, honestly. I hear the recoil is enough to dislocate a shoulder.”
(A shadow wings across his thoughts – imagine if he’d known about that sort of thing several years ago, that sort of privately obtainable and scientifically reliable and reassuringly destructive power, although pulling the trigger might have presented a technical challenge – before it vanishes into nothing.)
Natasha keeps her eyes forward.
Bruce, in turn, looks at the line of her profile, shadowed by a birch tree that bows itself out over the steep riverbank. Fog has started to lift off the water.
“Where were they positioned?” he asks.
“In one of the trees up there.” She turns towards a stand of pines on the ridge behind them. “I don’t think they originally planned to cross the river here as an escape route, though. The current’s too strong.”
“So they panicked?”
“Most likely.”
Bruce looks down at the two dead HYDRA soldiers, who have been waiting there so mute and patient this whole time.
The sniper – based on that large-bore rifle clutched in his hand, at least – is a young man. He has been shot three times in the back. The wounds are all between his shoulder blades, clean as pin-pricks, no more than a few centimeters apart. His face is long and hollow-cheeked beneath its greasepaint, turned to one side against the wet stones. His mouth is slightly open to reveal a crooked set of teeth.
The spotter may have also been a young man, and may have also died wearing that same expression of mild consternation, but this is difficult to determine because most of his face is missing.
He lies on his back, with his head – what remains of it – in the shallow water, having apparently turned towards his pursuer as she came down the embankment. He has been kneecapped in his left leg, which is likely what stopped him from rushing her, while the blasted right hand explains why he had not drawn the pistol in his belt.
Bruce looks away again.
(It’s not the sight that bothers him, no. Why should it? He has waved blow flies off septic wounds in need of disinfection; he has been called to examine children dying of diphtheria, of schistosomiasis, of hemorrhagic fever; he has woken as if from an unquiet dream and looked around at the work of his own hands.
But he does have just enough time to think about how she must’ve done it: at point-blank range, with the muzzle of her gun jammed beneath the man’s chin. It would’ve made a mess.)
And as he is pondering this, studying damp strands of short hair that cling to her neck, Bruce sees something glint inside her closed left hand.
“Natasha.”
“Yes.”
“What’re you holding?”
“Oh.” Crickets and chorus frogs fill the next gap of silence. Her hand, which looks pale in the darkness, clenches as though in reflex. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
“You know, I’ve had a lot of bad luck with things I purportedly didn’t need to worry about - or know about, I guess. I think they amount to the same thing.”
“No disagreement there.”
But she hesitates a moment longer, anyway.
There is a distant sound of whirring machinery as Tony finishes repairs to the quinjet’s engine. A lightning strike follows, shortly thereafter, an impromptu jump-start courtesy of Thor. Pieces of debris from the HYDRA base a half-mile upriver float past, swirling with the fast current.
“Natasha,” he says again. “Please.”
Something in her expression pulls inward, like a drawstring, and then Natasha raises her left hand.
She opens it to reveal two small glass vials.
“The spotter dropped these on his way here,” she says. “There’s forty or fifty more in his bag, but about half of them are crushed so it’s hard to be exact.”
One of the vials is broken at its end and has a yellow plastic cap, while the other is intact and has a cap that is either purple or royal blue. Each one has been made to hold ten milliliters of fluid, based on the markings, and is partially covered with a blank white label.
Vacutainer tubes, Bruce realizes. For collecting blood specimens.
“Ah,” he says. “Right.”
“SHIELD’s forensic decontamination team destroyed everything from Doctor Sterns’ lab, after the incident in Harlem. Nobody else had time to get their hands on the samples you’d sent him – you probably already know that.” Natasha nods towards the man whose face she has shot off. “They must have been under orders to take as much as they could.”
He forces a smile. “Waste not, want not.”
“Seems like that was the general idea, huh?” She smiles, too, showing her teeth, and takes three calculated steps back. “Hey, do me a favor and cover your ears.”
Unquestioning, Bruce does.
Then Natasha draws her gun in one clean hand, flings the two blown-glass tubes high out over the water, and as they pinwheel through the fading twilight she fires two shots in quick, vicious succession. Even muted, the sound of it is enormous, winding, blows to the chest, and the glass vials as they shatter to pieces are like silver sparklers against the dark.
Bruce listens to the thrum of a pulse inside his cupped palms before lowering his hands again. Natasha releases the empty magazine and reloads.
She stands there, breathing deeply. He does not say anything, although he chances another look at the two dead men.
Eight bullets, then. Wasteful, by her standards, because it is six more than she should have needed, and cruel by those same standards because she had used them anyway.
(But he considers the vials again, with their meticulous coded colors: yellow for diagnostic testing and royal blue for trace-element determination, or else purple for blood donor screening.
So he stops considering, after that.)
“Okay,” Natasha says, brusquely. “We shouldn’t keep everyone waiting. Did you happen to bring a flashlight? Being shot by Clint isn’t something I want to try living through twice.”
He fumbles for a button and turns it on. The beam opens a path of thin light through the bushes with their tangled and white-flowering briars. Blood flecks the leaves in several places, which means she must have kneecapped the spotter some time earlier than previously assumed.
(Another swift-passing thought, then – that he should reach over, through the shadows and in the presence of these two men she has killed, and take up one of her hands in his own, because it is likely still cold from its washing in the river – before he determines how ridiculous this would be.)
Wordlessly, Natasha turns to leave.
Bruce starts to walk beside her, an uncertain half-step forward, but then realizes she is waiting for him to go first.
He does.
And she follows several steps behind, gun drawn, her presence laid over his shoulders like a mantle, and in this manner they make their way back through the dark together.
…