Chapter Text
Natasha had never been good at waiting.
She had been trained to be patient, to assess, to calculate, but when it came to Maria—her Maria—every second without her felt like an eternity.
The mission had been routine. Standard recon. Nothing Maria couldn’t handle. Nothing Natasha should have been worried about. But she was.
She fucking hated this. Sitting back at SHIELD headquarters, waiting for the call that Maria was coming home, forcing herself not to check the clock every five seconds.
Then she heard it.
The chatter in the ops center shifted from routine updates to frantic shouting. Natasha barely processed the words before her stomach dropped.
“Explosion confirmed at target site—agents unaccounted for.”
Her hands went cold.
She shoved past the nearest agent, grabbing the comm from the nearest desk. “Who’s missing?” she snapped, her voice sharp, commanding, desperate.
Silence.
Then—
“We don’t have Hill.”
Her entire world tilted.
The air in the room became suffocating, her pulse a deafening roar in her ears. “What the fuck do you mean you don’t have Hill?” she barked.
No one had an answer. Just static, chaos, voices talking over each other.
Natasha didn’t wait. She grabbed her gear and ran.
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The explosion site was a fucking warzone.
Smoke choked the air, thick clouds of dust swirling under the glow of emergency lights. Rubble and debris littered the ground, flames still flickering from the impact. The scent of burning metal and scorched earth filled Natasha’s lungs as she pushed through the wreckage, ignoring the agents trying to hold her back.
“She’s here,” she muttered to herself, her breath ragged. “She has to be here.”
They were pulling bodies from the wreckage—some alive, some not. But none of them were Maria.
Natasha’s hands were shaking.
“She was last seen near the northwest sector,” an agent reported, his voice hesitant, unsure if he should even be speaking to her right now. “We’re searching, but—”
Natasha didn’t let him finish. She took off toward the northwest sector, scanning the destruction, her mind racing. Maria is fine. She has to be fine. She’s probably just trapped under debris or—
Her throat tightened.
“Hill!” she shouted, her voice raw, desperate. “Maria, where the fuck are you?!”
Silence.
She sucked in a sharp breath, her chest tightening, her vision blurring.
No. No, she couldn’t—she wouldn’t—lose her. Not like this.
Natasha felt her knees buckle, her hands gripping at the dirt, the broken ground beneath her. She was trembling. She had never felt this helpless before—not even when she had watched Maria fight for her life in that goddamn hospital bed.
Someone touched her shoulder, but she shoved them off violently, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
“Romanoff, we’re looking—”
“Not fucking hard enough!” she snarled, her voice cracking as she whipped around. “Find her! Dig through every piece of this fucking place if you have to—just find my wife!”
Her vision was spinning, her breath shallow.
Maria was gone.
For the first time in a long, long time, Natasha Romanoff broke.
She dropped to her knees in the middle of the destruction and let out a sound that was not a scream, not a sob, but something worse. A hollow, broken noise that made even the battle-hardened agents around her hesitate.
She was going to kill someone.
She was going to burn the world down if Maria didn’t come back to her.
And God help the motherfucker responsible for this.