2012-09-09 A Ballerina Tail

The Helicarrier is the sort of place that's busy 24/7. It never rests, never sleeps: even on a Sunday night there are crews moving through the corridors, and even personnel who are off-duty for the weekend can get one of the dreaded summonses to the Director's Office.

Inside the office, Fury is dressed shockingly casually: well-worn blue jeans, sport sandals, and a Hawaiian shirt. It's almost as if he stepped straight out of the Age of Aquarius, which is in some sense true. A bottle of Scotch is on his desk and a pair of tumblers are out, and a manila envelope is sitting in front of the guest's chair.

"Tasha," he greets the Widow as she enters. "Thanks for coming up. Hope you'll forgive dropping the 'Agent', given it's the weekend. You interested at all in a drink, or mind if I have one?"

"A drink would be good. I had a run in with Harper's rugrat yesterday," Natasha says with a spastic twitch of one eye. She has issues with kids. No one is quite sure why. She is in jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather jacket as she slides into the other chair. "You know I really don't take days off, Nick."

"Neither of us do. But the Security Council refuses to approve overtime pay unless there's a state of emergency recognized by the U.N., so we're only in uniform forty hours a week." He gives a faint what-can-you-do? gesture and pours out a triple shot the way Tasha prefers it -- presumably something he remembers from their long years of association -- sliding it over towards her before pouring a triple for himself. "Besides. It lets us pretend that we're friends and not co-workers." His tone is completely conversational: he could be telling God's honest truth there, or he could be exercising a wit so dry it belongs in the Sinai.

"Harper's kid. Yeah, well, I figure she's God's vengeance on Roy for playing the field so hard and so often," he muses as he takes a sip of his own whiskey. "Every man's fear is to raise the kind of daughter who likes guys like he was back when he was a younger man. Anyway. I don't want to waste your time, Tasha. I spoke with Winter Soldier down in the infirmary. I don't believe a word of anything he told me, of course. He said you might have some information. Figure I should hear it out before giving you marching orders for him."

Natasha breathes in the aroma of the scotch for a moment with her eyes closed. "I swear, if we shipped Lian Harper to Latveria and told her to cheer up Doom, he would get hugged to the point of surrender." At the question, she opens her eyes, one brow arching. "What sort of information was he referring to. I have lots of information, Nick. No idea if any of it is what you're looking for."

"He made some noise about how he must've been set up, mostly. I didn't give it much credit. They all talk about how they must've been set up." Fury gives a faint shrug. "My reading of things: someone probably did. Someone expected him to get killed, or that their Swiss-cheesing of his memory would hold true even if he didn't get killed. So I figure, the best thing to do then is to release him as soon as he's healthy. There's no possible reason we'd do that unless he was able to give us information as to who was really behind things. They'll see he got released, and they'll have to move on him to apprehend him and interrogate him to find out what he told us. That's how we flush them out. I've told him we're going to implant him with a tracker, but that's just a ruse, really. If he tries to ditch us, let him waste time trying to find a tracker we haven't implanted. Hopefully that will distract him from spotting the tail we've put on him. I'd like you to be the tail, Tasha. The plan is simple: we release Winter Soldier, we see who tries to snatch him up, that puts us on the trail. And if nobody does -- then we know Winter Soldier was working on his own, and you ... do whatever you feel is appropriate to do to someone who tried to assassinate some of our family."

"He was programmed by the Red Room, Nick. It is entirely possible they brainwashed him at multiple levels, making him, and us, think we'd broken their programming then triggering something deeper later. To this day, I have no idea if I was really a ballerina, or if that was something they implanted in my mind." She frowns and tosses back the scotch in a long swallow. "All right. I'll tail him. But if he goes back to /them/ and I get made, they will do everything to either get me back or kill me, Nick. I'll need backup."

"Who do you want for backup?" Although the question may be routine, there's a faint edge to it that denotes the dead seriousness of the thing. "If you think Harper, Wisdom or Ramsey will be good for that, say the word and I'll detail them to you. If you want the heavy firepower I'll pay the Consultant his fees. And if you think there's no school like the old school, Tasha -- then I'll watch your back myself. Personally."

"Ramsey isn't ready for that kind of trouble, and Wisdom isn't either. And after yesterday I don't want to see Harper's kid go father-less. I'd like to take Barton or Coulson with me," Natasha states plainly. One she's worked with so long it's natural, the other is simply Coulson. No explanation necessary.

Fury gives a brief nod. "Coulson. Good man in a storm. I'll cut the orders tonight." He gives a faint gesture towards the manila envelope, appending an, "In there you'll find a brief on Winter Soldier -- what he said to people in the infirmary, things like that. Routine crap. It'll make good bedtime reading if you have insomnia."

"I knew him, Nick. When I was in the Red Room. My memory of that time isn't very clear though. But I think his name was James. I'm almost certain of it. Anyway," Natasha plucks up the envelope. "Maybe something in here will jog my memory."

"And one more thing, Tasha." He's quiet for a long moment then, watching her, as if he was judging whether their friendship was enough to support the weight of his next words. "Listen, I understand Red Room did a number on you, a number on your sense of self. Not minimizing that. And yes, I do believe that Red Room's pretty much a world-class outfit when it comes to shaping people and getting their heads all twisted into pretzels. But if you want to know if you really are a ballerina ... considered stepping on to a stage and getting your performance reviewed by a professional art critic? That Red Room could give you the skills, sure. That they could make you believe you're a ballerina, sure. But..."

He's quiet for a few moments, then shrugs. "When I was a kid I grew up in the Church. We all did back then. Haven't been in one for a whole lot of years since. Can't say as how I believe much anymore. But one thing I do believe, Tasha, is that Red Room can't create a /soul/. You either have the soul of an artist, a ballerina, a dancer, or you don't. If you want to find out, well. I'm pretty sure I can call in a marker at the New York Times to get access to their Arts reviewer for an afternoon."

That gives Natasha pause. She doesn't tell people that she rents overnight hours in a dance studio in New York to practice, alone, in the middle of the night a few times a week. Even Clint, her best friend, doesn't know. Ivan does, but that's Ivan. He's the closest thing she has to a father. "I'll think about it, Nick." Part of her is afraid to know the truth though. As if knowing she wasn't really a dancer will somehow strip her of the ability to dance.

He nods and drains some more of his tumbler. "No rush," he says once the tumbler comes back down to the desk. "This isn't a limited-time offer. If you think you want to do that, when you think you want to do that, well. Talk to me and I'll set it up. But otherwise I'm going to just let that be for right now. I'd much rather give you an option than give you a suggestion, you know? What the hell do I know about how to live your life and all that? I can barely live my own."

"You'd think with the number of lives we've lived, we'd have gotten good at it by now," Natasha quips. She stands. "Thanks for the drink and the info. Anything else?"

Having lived almost a century, Nick's gotten to the point where he can recognize when someone's making a hasty exit because someone else has put their finger right on something that might turn out to be painful. Thankfully, he's also lived long enough to know not to show this. "Nope," he answers as he collects the tumblers and rises to his own feet, to take them elsewhere to clean them. "Thanks for coming up, Tasha."

Tash gives a little half-assed salute as they're off duty, and she steps out.

For the next few minutes Fury is in the executive washroom, washing out tumblers and intermittently speaking sentence fragments to himself -- testing out things, rehearsing little half-lines. When speaking to a woman who's functionally immortal, one must be careful when walking into her heart: screw up and she'll hold a grudge against you for centuries. Nick knows this from personal experience: he holds grudges like nobody's business, after all, and not only is the Widow much like him, but she's *Russian* to boot. Russian grudges are almost as bad as their winters.

Finally, after ten minutes or so of trying out different ways of expressing a sentiment, after the tumblers are washed and returned to their drawer in his desk, after he's cleaned up his desk for the night, he finally finds a phrasing that works.

"You wonder if you're really a ballerina, Tasha. And that's just ... crazy. I'm sorry, I know you don't like your sanity being questioned, Red Room head-trickery and all, but the idea you're not a ballerina is /crazy/. The fact you can doubt it is proof of how the Red Room can bend anyone's head in six different ways. Here's what's true, and here's what everyone who's known you for more than a week knows: /nobody else has escaped the Red Room./ Except you. There's something in you, Tasha, that not even the Red Room could break. Something that gives you strength, something that inspires you, something that reminds you of who you are even when the world's telling you that you're someone else. You're not a secret agent who's been brainwashed into thinking she's a ballerina. You're a ballerina who's been brainwashed into believing she's a secret agent. Don't you see, Tasha? You've got it entirely backwards. And you always have. And all of your friends have known this for as long as we've known you."

He says it almost exactly as he would say it to the real woman, testing out the cadence, the rhythms, the speech. After a while, he shakes his head in frustration. "Too long," he tells himself. "Too long by half. The shorter it is, the harder it'll be for the Red Room's programming to tell her I'm saying something else."

He sits down at his desk, then, and watches the door where the Black Widow departed. "Too long. But true." After a moment he gives a shrug, then opens up his desk to pull out a notebook. His dialogue is written down, committed to paper, and then it's a short matter to walk it over towards the wall safe where he keeps the deepest of SHIELD's secrets. Alongside Fury's estimates of Latverian military capabilities and the risk of Annihilus trying to invade the world, Fury places his estimate of the Black Widow's soul.