moved to iwillnotbow

As of 31 July 2023, this blog has moved to @iwillnotbow, in order to make life easier for me. I will be making a post tagging people I am currently threading with/owe replies to so they know where to expect further posts from.

Hope to see you there!

As of 31 July 2023, this blog has moved to @iwillnotbow, in order to make life easier for me. I will be making a post tagging people I am currently threading with/owe replies to so they know where to expect further posts from.

Hope to see you there!

a starter for @jbbarnes107

Her retirement had been a difficult transition at first, but as weeks turned into months, she was finding the subtle joy in playing house. There were occasions she got the call from Fury to gear up, but he respected her choice to stay off the active roster. After a lifetime of blood and pain and death, this was a welcome change.

Bucky needed to work, according to him. To keep Sam out of trouble, to solve the problems he had the skills for. Nat knew he still felt guilt over his decades as the Winter Soldier, and that he needed to repay the world for what he had done. On the surface, he understood that it had been HYDRA’s programming, but Bucky had grown up in an era were men took responsibility. He inched closer and closer to the man he had been before the war, and Nat was more than happy to support that. He was waking up with night terrors less nowadays, but all it took was a bad day for the doubts to re-emerge.

It was Valentine’s Day, and she’d been planning something special for him for a few weeks now. The forecast for the evening had cooperated - chilly, but clear skies. He would be back later after a debriefing, which gave her plenty of time to get everything together. The scene was set, and she took painstaking care with her hair and dress, making sure they were just right.

   While she sat down, Mallory preferred to stand. Arms akimbo, hands placed on his hips, he stood in front of her and listened. Frankly, he hadn’t properly looked at the files she had sent him yet. He had Q’s okay to open them, but this unexpected meeting had kept him from actually doing so. The move he was shocked about what she was revealing to him; and yet his features didn’t give away what he was thinking.

Still, he had to act carefully. This could be a trick, after all, no matter how believable she sounded.

Mallory lifted his head and glanced around for a moment, let his gaze wander across the square. No one looked suspicious or as though they were listening in on their conversation. “If what you’re telling me is true,” his attention shifted back to the woman, “we’ll have quite a problem.” To put it mildly.

“All the evidence is in that file you sent me? How do I know if I can…believe you? You could make this up, try to gain my trust. Why coming to me? Why not…the Americans?” Or any other Intelligence Service for that matter.

“You can have your analysts check it out. I have no doubt that with a little digging, MI6 can ferret out enough to prove I’m legitimate.” She fiddled with her cell phone a bit more.

   He was wary now and although he really wanted to eat that sandwich he hadn’t even started yet, Mallory grabbed it along with the tea and tossed them into the nearby bin. His back had turned towards the woman for a while, she could have done anything with his breakfast. Her surprise that could be easily feigned - in his line of business he’d had dealt with all kinds of people.

Mallory sent his quartermaster and Tanner messages, telling them about the plans, then glanced up at the woman again - whose name he still didn’t know. Then again, he didn’t quite trust her to tell him her real name, anyway. Still, gentleman he was, he opened the door and held it open for her. Perhaps also to be behind her and not turn his back on her once again, just in case.

As expected, Trafalgar Square was rather empty yet, the concrete blocks around the fountain unoccupied. The perfect place to talk.

Natasha resisted the urge to scan the rooftops for snipers, but the agitation of the unknown was present in the way she clenched her jaw. Anyone could be watching them, waiting for the right moment to act.

To keep herself from pacing, she sat on the edge of the fountain and tucked her bags behind her legs. She looked up at Mallory, trying to organize what she was going to say. She had to get through a lot to get to the meat of her situation, but the more she talked the longer they stayed in the open.

“My name is Natasha,” she started, turning her cellphone around between her hands. “I’m an agent of a group that calls itself the Red Room, an off-shoot of the KGB that never folded into the FSB. It is run by artefacts of the Cold War that feel Russia capitulated to the West too easily. We have been responsible for many acts of sabotage, espionage, and assassination over the past few decades.”

She took a breath. “Agents are exposed to mental and physical conditioning from the moment they are brought in. They are fond of taking orphaned girls, as they carry the old fashioned misogyny of females being seen as the weaker sex.” She smiled faintly at that. “But as a consequence, they get few defections.”

Natasha turns her phone around and taps the screen, pulling up the file she had emailed to MI6. “I had begun questioning things months ago, but they had ways of misdirecting me. But when I found this information, I knew I needed to do something. I will summarize as best as I can.

   There was no sign of the previous friendliness displayed on his face; features firm now as he glared at the woman. Had this been her plan all along, or was this really just a coincidence? The thing was, in his line of work he didn’t believe in such things as coincidences. Nothing happened just like that, everything had a reason.

“Trafalgar Square.” It was wide and open, not too crowded at this time of day, but there were already enough people to not give her any stupid ideas. “It’s not far from here, five-minute-walk.” His gaze was locked with hers, blue eyes like steel. “We can talk there without anyone listening in on us.”

“Sounds fair. To the Square, then.” Natasha tapped her phone off and stood, collecting her laptop to put into its bad. She slung that bag over her chest, then picked up a small backpack. She nodded to give Mallory indication she was ready to follow.

So this was the infamous M. The intelligence community wasn’t wrong about his being formidable; his gaze would have made lesser spies dissolve and spill all their secrets. This was a man who did the cold calculus of war in his sleep. And she was on his home turf. He’d probably have at least one sniper marking her once they got there.

   Mallory wanted to answer, but for a moment he was taken aback. Not only was he surprised to hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line - but moreso to hear something else. Something in the background. The strange thing here was, that he heard it twice. Once by his side, in his ear that wasn’t on the phone - and in the other ear. Muffled there, though.

Frowning, he slowly turned around and glanced back at the woman whose table he had sat down at just minutes earlier. “Well, I think it’s too soon to come to a verdict yet,” he replied dryly. “We should meet. Don’t you think?”

Natasha continued staring ahead, even as her brain kicked into overdrive. She was adding everything together, wondering how she should react. The sheer irony -- the odds of it happening -- it was all frightening and hilarious at the same time. There was no explanation for this.

Her eyes slid over to Mallory and she offered him a faint smile, leaning back in her chair, for all the world at ease and calm. Her head, her instincts, were screaming at her, but to be fair, they had been since she’d set foot in England.

   “Nothing new, then.” Though they did have their eyes on the ‘financial institutions’, as she called it. Still there were more pressing matters recently they had to turn to first. His gaze shifted over to the woman again for a moment – and perhaps a moment too long. Did he really look like a superior in his job, was it that obvious?

He just wanted to finally pick up the sandwich when his phone vibrated. A glance at the screen told him that he got green light; Q had thoroughly checked the message and number. Mallory picked up the phone and finally opened the message. Frowning deeply when he read it. “Excuse me,” he offered the woman a small, apologetic smile, then stood up and turned his back on her, dialling the number in the e-mail.

She nodded as he excused himself, attention back on her laptop screen. The buzzing in her pocket prompted the change in her mien; her polite neutrality was gone from her eyes. Cold green, they were the only indication there was something else going on behind her face.