Chapter Text
She’s in Belgium when the rumor first reaches her ears. Some pervert in Brussels is waiting for a special order to be delivered.
The special order being children.
Child slaves to be delivered for a club, a place they’ll likely never leave.
(If, by a miracle, they leave in body, they’ll never leave in mind.)
Such things rarely are just rumors, and that’s the kind of thing that she doesn’t need to even think about before deciding that she’ll act.
Getting more information is easy. The owner of the nightclub, Arthur—some young heir to some dirty fortune—isn’t very smart. He’s too proud of getting to conduct the family business, wants to show off and talk loud about the profit he’s bringing to the clubs his father owns.
All in all, easy prey on her web.
It takes her a week and a couple of visits to the club to get the name Egon from Arthur, and the location Germany. It’s not much, but it’s enough. Staying more might give her better intel, but it will be safer to get to the children before they are separated and sent to different locations in smaller groups; if she’s dealing with a big trafficking ring, that is.
Besides, she’s worked with way worse intel. With no intel at all.
Before leaving, she prepares files with evidence that implicates Arthur and his entire family on child trafficking, rape, drug dealing, murders, among other things. They are the kind of people who are likely to pay a big name law firm and walk away from their crimes with only a shaken reputation. Walk away and keep committing their crimes, that is, which is unacceptable . That’s why the files are a “just in case” option. Killing them now might alert the supplier, so she refrains from it. Still, that isn’t the kind of crime she’s mercyful about.
Arthur and his family are already dead, they just don’t know yet.
*
Despite moving fast, the timeline is still short, so she uses resources from SHIELD to search about who “Egon” might be.
She ends up with three potential leads. Three Egons in Germany who are more likely to be her target: a businessman who’s been recently dabbling in contraband, a drug dealer, and a guy who, for all appearances, is just a medical equipment seller. Except that they’ve got a few bank accounts that are likely linked to him, and the kind of money he’s been moving around is incompatible with ‘medical equipment seller”.
It’s an easy decision to decide the location she’ll check first—and she’d wager a lot that it’s the only one she’ll need to check.
Before leaving for Germany, she lets Bucky know what she’ll be doing—just in case she’s investigating something bigger than it seems on the surface.
*
It’s winter, it’s snowing, and it all brings memories closer to the surface. Her attention is on the road, but her mind drifts to a single moment in a very, very old memory.
She’s learned to deal with such things, after all this time. Names and faces are safe. Events are just facts. The problem is all of those things put together, and the memories of smells, of a ribbon around her finger. The weight of a Kalashnikov in her hands. The snow.
That’s why she stops herself whenever her mind starts to put it all together. Those are memories from another life, and though they still propel her, they are only useful if they are no more than that.
Sometimes Natasha allows them to be more, but never in moments like this. Never when there’s something at stake.
From the place where she landed in Germany, it takes her an hour to get to the compound where it’s likely the children are being kept before she has to ditch the car and follow on foot for another forty-five minutes. She gets to the west side of the property first, but even at a distance she can tell that she’s too late—all she can see is what looks like a warehouse burning to the ground. Orange flames licking at the wood, ending all evidence of the atrocities that were being committed inside…
Too late. She’s too late…
Before that thought takes root inside her mind, before she starts to think and plan and act to intercept the children, two shots are fired, and the sound has her moving to the other side of the property, towards the direction of the sounds.
Natasha moves silently and quickly, using the trees to hide herself until she sees another building ahead… and two men stumbling out of it, fighting.
She crouches down beneath a bush, spying through the spaces between leaves and branches as the men fight, throwing punches and kicks, exchanging insults in German and English. It’s too dark to see their faces, and this Egon guy she’s after is good enough to have had his pictures and connections to his real name removed from the internet—or he just has the right connections for it—so Natasha isn’t sure which one (if any) of the men in front of her are her mark.
“Tell me what you’ve done! Where are they? Where?” one of the men, a blonde one, says in heavily accented English.
“Y’know… your accent gets thicker when you’re pissed. It’s… cute,” the other man, a dark-haired one, replies, gasping a little as the blonde one pushes him against a tree, cutting off his air with a forearm. His accent is American, so unless he’s faking it, Natasha would guess that the blonde one is Egon.
They keep fighting, and the blonde one—maybe Egon—seems to have the advantage, grabbing the other man by his neck and throwing him against the snowed floor. ‘You think you are clever? You think this is some game? Rich American punk! Now the tail wags the dog? The student unseats the master!” He says between punches and kicks to the other man’s back.
There is something about the scene that bothers Natasha—something about the man lying on the snow and getting punched… somehow it all seems… unnatural, fake, a bit like playing possum. Natasha wonders that maybe he has a hidden gun or knife, or maybe he’s waiting for someone else…
The blond man gives a couple of punches to the other man’s back and keeps talking, while the man on the ground just gasps with the blows but makes no movement to rise. “I teach you how to throw a few punches, and you think you can actually strike at me? Do you?!”
For a moment Natasha considers interfering. She knows that she could take the two men in a fight, and she needs to know where the children are, so ideally neither of them should die, at least not before giving her information about the location of the children…
It takes a few seconds, and the man lying on the snow raises his head, blood dripping on the snow from a cut above his left eye, and then says, “No. That’s why I poisoned your energy drink.”
Natasha raises her eyebrows, unconcerned with hiding her surprise since there is no one to see it. She hadn’t considered poison, even if she had wondered that the dark haired man was not losing the fight as bad as it seemed before. She’d thought more likely he’d been preparing to use a hidden weapon.
Interfering had never been an option, after all. The blonde guy had been fighting a losing fight since the start.
Those last words have excellent timing, because a few seconds later, the blonde man stumbles a couple steps back and falls to his knees, foaming at the mouth and gasping as he tries to breathe. Natasha runs through her head a list of likely poisons, trying to use that to guess whoever trained the dark haired man—because there are no doubts that he has had training—and to ascertain how dangerous he might be… but that is not sufficient information…
No matter, she’ll have a lot of time to find out about that, and more importantly, to find out about where the children are. Dangerous or not, the man has the disadvantage of not knowing that Natasha Romanov is behind him.
He never hears the sound of the tranquilizing dart being fired at his neck, and when he turns to stare in the direction of the bush Natasha is hiding behind, his movements are already uncoordinated and slow, and he falls to the ground a few seconds later, but not before Natasha moves from her hiding place, covering the distance between them quickly and holding his body—better not to start an interrogation with a concussed prisoner, after all.
She takes a good look at the face of the man in her arms, and despite his height and bulk, calling him a man is almost pushing. Sure, after all these years, everyone seems too young, but even accounting for her maybe skewed perception, there’s no denying that the guy is barely out of his teens.
Too damn young to be involved in human trafficking—in whatever capacity he is—and to know how to fight, or how to effectively use poisons…
And too young to be her mark, since Egon has been acting for more than fifteen years.
“Who the hell are you?” Natasha mutters, dragging the man to the edges of the forest.
The sedative she used should wear off soon, and she’s not keen on using another dose so soon—one will already make him too loopy to be interrogated, and—
Her phone starts vibrating.
“Yes?” Natasha says, standing for a moment and stopping dragging the man.
“Heard your mission to free those kids was a success, Nat,” Bucky says. “A journalist already got word of it.”
“What? I—I didn’t find the kids,” she replies.
“Well, someone at the British embassy in Germany forty-two kids who were being trafficked—”
“It wasn’t me, James,” Natasha says, cutting him off.
“Well, someone did—if it wasn’t you, do you have any idea of who it was?”
Natasha swallows and looks at the unconscious man on the ground.
“I’ve got an idea, yeah,” she replies, reminding the fight she just watched, the words tell me what you’ve done! Where are they? Where?
Things just got… interesting, and there is something that feels like relief in her heart. She hadn’t considered that one of the two men might have been trying to free the kids, that any of them might not be traffickers, and she hadn’t interfered in the fight based on that assumption. But now that this unconscious man was actually doing something right is a possibility, she’s relieved that he survived the fight…
Still, there is something about his training—the way he manipulated the fight and the poison usage are the evidence of training, but she’s willing to bet that even if that wasn’t the case, she would have seen indicators of physical training as well…
Old memories flash in her mind again, and Natasha’s self-aware enough to acknowledge that there’s something about the man that reminds her of herself. Except that at the age he seems to be now, Natasha was doing very different things from freeing trafficking victims.
“Who the hell are you?” she repeats the earlier question.