clandestinement | Unexpected Aid

Unexpected Aid - for wereperrito

The burning wing of the laboratory facility is just a smudge of smoke on the horizon when the snowmobile dies beneath her. Natasha blinks in confusion for a moment, then tries to restart it. Tries again. Notices, finally, that the fuel gauge rests on empty, which is distantly worrying, but less so than the fact that she no longer feels the cracked ribs, or the roughly bound wound that punches through the meat of her thigh, or the laceration along the side of her head that has turned her hair to a frozen, bloody horror in the alpine wind.

Of course it's empty. She'd had barely enough time to steal a vehicle in the chaos of the explosion she'd set off to cover her escape, let alone find one in ideal condition to make it to her rendezvous point. Just more proof that an op designed for two people is a disaster for just one, even one at the top of her field.

Natasha smacks dash of the snowmobile with one hand in helpless frustration, then slides off the saddle - and keeps sliding, wounded leg going out from under her in the snow. She digs in her pack for a moment until she finds her communicator and - no signal. Of course there isn't. This entire network of valleys is a dead zone, which is what had attracted her attention in the first place.

No choice but to get to her extraction point - which would be difficult enough on foot if she were whole. She estimates it's at least 20 miles off, and that's if her tunnel vision hadn't been bad enough that she veered off course. At least she can't hear the sound of engines approaching. The pursuit had dropped off half an hour ago.

Maybe because they knew her fuel would run out, and expected her to bleed out and be easy enough to find and mop up later.

She bows her head, then snaps upright again when exhaustion tugs at her, forcing herself to her feet. Her leg holds this time, but she should probably find something to use as a walking stick if she wants to stay standing.

She makes it all of a mile from the vehicle, in an increasingly-weaving line, before her leg goes out from under her again, and she falls, clutching the gnarled branch she'd picked up along the way to give her some semblance of control in her descent. Black spots dance at the corners of her vision, and when she shakes her head to try to clear them, they flood inward, and her stomach rolls in protest.

Her last coherent thought is that it's a bitter sort of irony to have survived the death of half the universe only to wind up here, alone in the forest, because the one person she'd been absolutely certain she could count on had decided abruptly that it was more important to chase ghosts than to try to put the rest of a broken world back together.

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Too bad. It would have made life easier on both of them if he could just quietly knock her out for a night. Oh well, it was a long shot to begin with. Jack pockets it with a shrug. "I can bring you a regular painkiller, instead, if you like, but I won't blame you if you don't trust that it's just an over-the-counter thing."

There's a moment's pause in which she actually considers it, then shakes her head, giving him a slightly apologetic smile. "I'll be okay without. And yes, you have permission to remind me I said that if I start whining."

"I will do that," he promises, and leaves her with the tea, to finish putting the soup together in a pot he can hang over the fire, too. He says from the nearby kitchen counter, "You will have to be here a couple of days, probably. I don't think the storm is going to let up to let you leave until then. Will anyone be looking for you?"

She winces a little at that - the storm must have grown well beyond what the meteorological predictions had given her before she landed, if it's going to last that long. One more hitch on a mission made almost entirely of hitches.

"Is there a radio here? I have some friends expecting me."

"Ah, I don't know, maybe?" Jack looks around. He has a receiving radio, for listening to stations on the AM frequencies and also because there's a tape deck attached to it, but it doesn't transmit that he's aware of. He's not sure what all his friend who actually owns the place has tucked away in corners, though, he hasn't sheltered here in a few years. "Let me check once I get the soup cooking, okay?"

"All right," she says. "It's not urgent - if the storm's that bad, they aren't going to come through in a panic."

It occurs to her belatedly that she's just made a dangerous admission, and she grimaces to herself. Blood loss has definitely turned her thoughts to sludge, and she takes a sip of tea in hope that it will jolt her back to form. Jack doesn't seem like a threat, but that doesn't excuse getting sloppy.

If he understands the slip, Jack doesn't give much sign. Honestly, he's already figured out she was doing something either nefarious or law-enforcement related, given that was a bullet hole he patched up, and her outfit is not exactly subtle, so her having friends who might over-react to her disappearance is a thing which has already occurred to him. He's not terribly worried about it.

He just isn't aware they're superheroes yet. Of course, he might be even less worried then, since superheroes usually don't shoot first and ask questions of the bodies later.

He comes back around the couch lugging a heavy pot, which he hangs over the fire where the tea kettle had been a moment before. "There's no real stove in here," he explains apologetically. "And the oven is part of the fireplace, too. Really, we're pretty lucky that there is power at all."

It isn't revealing the fact that she has dangerous friends that concerns her - given how she arrived in his care, she's already discarded any notion of playing the harmless citizen. Rather, it's revealing the fact that any such dangerous friends are cool-headed enough that she is effectively on her own for the duration of the storm. If he meant her harm, that would be confirmation of a window in which to inflict it.

She watches him hang the pot, and smiles faintly in response to his explanation. "This far out from any towns, I can imagine. Your friend must be handy, if they're able to keep a generator running."

"I had to bring my own gasoline for it," Jack says, wrinkling his nose. Before the storm kicked in, he could smell it. Now the snow has thankfully masked the scent. "I know how to run it, but we'll both have to hope it doesn't break. I definitely cannot fix it myself."

He picks himself up. "I know there's a radio that receives things in the other room. I used it this morning when I was cleaning up. I don't think you can use that to contact your friends, though. Can you?"

"I can do basic repairs," Natasha says, then is forced to add, "if I can get to it. Hopefully it isn't necessary, though. And I'm afraid not."

She takes another small sip of tea, eyes briefly flickering shut in enjoyment of the warmth. "If they were close by, maybe, depending on how the radio's put together, but it'd be more like a walkie-talkie than an emergency broadcast."

Tony, she thinks, could probably put something together from a walkman and a teacup, but Tony isn't here. He'd left even before Clint had, before Bruce had. There are so few of them left trying to hold things together.

"Probably not very useful, then, unless your friends are already close by," Jack agrees, and brings the radio over to set on the side table, before starting to rummage around in cupboards, looking for anything more useful. "I won't ask what you were doing," he adds. "It's none of my business. But if you expect people to be chasing you who are not your friends, that might be a good thing to know."

They might not manage very well in the storm, but they might have planes. Or magic. Or teleporters, for all he knows.

Edited 2022-12-07 08:18 (UTC)

"Smart man," she says, one corner of her mouth twitching up into something that can probably pass for a smile. "I'm pretty sure I lost any pursuers before my ride stalled out. It's possible they might come out looking for a body, but probably not until after the storm."

"And by then, we can be on our way. I do have a car, parked in a shed behind the cabin, so I can drive you wherever," he offers, head stuck in a cupboard as he stands on tip-toe to try and see into the back. "Might have to dig it out first, but it's there. The car radio wouldn't help you, would it? It's, uh, not a new car, though." So there's no bluetooth or onstar or anything.

"No," Natasha says, a little ruefully. "Not with my engineering skills. But the ride will be appreciated. It's a long hike."

There's a flicker of humour in the last sentence - long would be more accurately translated as impossible in her current condition.

"A very long, very cold hike," Jack agrees, and closes the cupboards up again. "I think we may be out of luck for radios. You will just have to put up with me for a couple of days." He comes back to the fireplace and gives the soup a stir. "I can be entertaining, or be very quiet. Just let me know."

He... will not actually be very good at being very quiet, Jack is by nature a chatterer, but he will try if she finds him annoying!

"I don't mind conversation," she says. It's true enough, but more importantly, he gives her the impression of being the gregarious sort. Asking him to keep quiet for days while they wait for the storm to blow itself out would probably just make the situation more uncomfortable.

"Or entertainment. Do you have a deck of cards?"

"I do have cards! A few kinds of cards. There's something called Uno, which is not actually as Spanish as it sounds. But the last time I was here, I played a lot of Solitaire. I mean, a lot." Ironically, he's used to spending storms in this dumb little cabin. Both times he's been here before, he got snowed in. The first time he'd had pleasant company in the form of the actual cabin's owner, but the second time it was just him, and it was very boring.

"And we should still be able to get the AM stations on the radio," he adds, "the storm won't interfere with those. There's a Russian radio station that I could get last time, if you like Russian music. And a Spanish one, for some reason, I have no idea why that one is playing out here in the middle of nowhere."

Yes, Natasha, you guessed right. He is very much the gregarious sort.

"That is strange," Natasha agrees. "But at least it gives us some options. I'm fine with Russian music, but I have to admit, I'm curious about the mystery station. --I don't think I've ever played Uno, but learning seems like a good distraction."

She pauses a moment, then smiles a little wryly. "And it's the perfect excuse to lose horribly."

"We both might lose horribly, I definitely did last time I tried it," Jack grins, and gives the soup another stir before going to hunt down the cards. "Can two people both lose when they're the only people playing the game?" he wonders from the other room.

He comes back with the Uno cards, a pack of regular cards, and two bowls and spoons for the soup. "I don't know if you actually feel hungry, but you should eat even if you don't."

"I don't think so," Natasha says. "Unless the cards are rigged to explode, but I think I would've heard about it if that was part of the game."

She carefully eases herself up a little bit straighter, and takes another sip of tea, only freeing one child hand to sketch a playful salute when he returns. "Yes, sir."

She doesn't feel hungry. She feels, in fact, a little nauseous, though she has enough familiarity with blood loss to realize that it's almost certainly the culprit there. Which means as awful as it will probably feel, eating will help in the long run.

"No, they don't explode. Thank goodness." He tends to not do so great with things that explode. Usually they explode at the exact wrong time.

That's about what he expected, but food will help. He ladles soup out of the pot and into one of the bowls, offering it to her. "I can take the tea," he says, making to trade her. "And you don't have to eat all of it, but it would be better if you could. You were unconscious for most of the night and all morning, you know."

She relinquishes the mug with only a little reluctance, taking the soup and blowing on a spoonful to cool it before taking a cautious sip. Her stomach rolls in warning, but doesn't rebel any further, and his comment proves a good distraction.

"I didn't know that. The storm's hell on my sense of time." Between the cloud cover and the snow, it's dark enough that she'd assumed it was still night, or daybreak at the earliest. If it's been that long, it does at least bode well for their chances of making it through the weather unmolested - if anyone was inclined to brave the storm to search for her body, they wouldn't have waited this long.

Jack intimately knows the feel of sundown and sunup, even if he can't see it. But he's a bit... unusual that way. "And there isn't a clock in this room," he agrees sympathetically. He pulls out an old-fashioned pocket-watch to show her the time: 1:15. Ish. It's a nice little watch, quite likely an antique, but not an expensive one for whatever time it was made in. The cover is fairly plain, a little scratched up.

"There is one in the bedroom," Jack adds, "but it's actually an hour and a half off. I hadn't gotten around to fixing it."

He tucks the watch away again, in a jacket pocket-- he's not dressed to his usual standard, but then, he hadn't actually expected to have company. It's just nice jeans, a simple button-down, and a sweater. Then he sets about getting some soup for himself, too. "So we are playing Uno once you've eaten, yes? Apparently the goal is to get down to one card and call uno when you do. If you don't call it, someone else can call it for you and make you draw more cards."

She notes the pocket watch absently - the wear on it suggests something passed down through a family, rather than purchased as an affectation.

(The idea that he might have owned it since it was new doesn't cross her mind. She might have had an Asgardian as a friend and teammate, once upon a time, but most people's lifespans run nowhere near that scale.)

"Sounds like it can get a little cut-throat, she says, quashing the urge to laugh in favour of a small, playful smile that doesn't hurt nearly as much.

"Ah, I kept forgetting to call it," Jack chuckles. "I'm afraid my friend playing it with me was much more ruthless."

He blows on his soup a moment before having a bite. "And there are cards for reversing something done to you. And making the other person draw cards. Which you can then reverse on them if you're very lucky. It's a complicated game!" Which is really a joke, as it's easier than a lot of card games Jack knows. He's just not very lucky with draws, and tends to forget to pay attention to things.

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