∆ {3⁷} {METTLE & METAL} ∆
FAR AWAY, THE two enhanced from their Sokovia meeting were meeting the new version of Ultron in a church, and Roxi honestly would've preferred to have been there with the killer robot, rather than doing this. Or, what they were going to be doing. Currently, she was waiting for Clint to finish his call with Laura so they could sit down and talk for a moment.
"That's a negative, I answer to you," he reported, Roxi holding her quarterstaff once again, her hands still trembling slightly as she waited, although she was not too inclined to have the conversation with the man about how she got her powers. She'd managed to avoid having it with everyone except Natasha and Fury, even Sam, Steve and Hill, which was surprising, with everything that had gone down in Washington D.C the year before.
"Yes ma'am," Clint continued as Steve and Hill arrived on the landing from the stairs, the former with a tablet in his hands. Something had happened, and judging by their faces, it wasn't especially good, though it probably wasn't too bad either.
"Barton, Ryder. We might have something," Steve told them, his voice grim, but stern, indicating that whatever was up, was important, and that they needed to focus on it.
"I gotta go," Clint said through the phone, hanging up quickly as he turned to Steve. While Laura was important to him, he was Avenger, so saving the world came first. He shot a quick glance at Roxi, telling her that he still expected an explanation.
"Who was that?" Steve asked, raising a brow. Roxi smirked slightly at Clint as he supplied his answer.
"Girlfriend," He answered with a slight shrug. They followed Steve and Hill back into Tony's lab to figure out their course of action, and Roxi changed her grip on her quarterstaff slightly as she asked quietly
"Should I tell Laura that you called her that?" Clint's face paled slightly and her smirk grew bigger as he murmured an answer
"You wouldn't dare." Steve handed the tablet to Thor, who took in what it showed with a rather grave look on his face.
"What's this? Tony asked, wandering around the table to stand next to Thor, who gently slammed the tablet into Tony's stomach, although it didn't seem to bother him.
"A message. Ultron killed Strucker," Steve supplied as Tony looked at the image, presumably, one of Strucker's body.
"And he did a Banksy at the crime scene, just for us," He joked, Bruce craning his neck to look over the billionaire's shoulder. Roxi took the tablet from Tony's outstretched hand, not really caring if he was done with it, to get a good look at the picture as the conversation continued.
"This is a smoke screen," Natasha stated while Roxi took in the image before her. It was Strucker, slumped against the corner of his small cell, blood seeping through his chest and blue shirt, some left on the wall from the initial shot. Five letters were scrawled on the wall in his blood, dripping slowly down the grey wall. P - E - A - C - E. It was spelled out as if none of them knew the word, as if the concept of peace was completely unknown to the seven people in the room, who all knew it was aimed at them. It was strange, to see it written in such a way, as if it were a word in a foreign language, a concept that none of them could begin to understand, and as if Ultron had a better knowledge of it than any of them did. It was if he was the fisherman taunting the blissfully unaware fish with a lure. The insinuation annoyed Roxi. She wasn't stupid, and the rest of her team certainly weren't. The only one she wasn't sure about was Steve. Sometimes his desire to do the right thing led him to be impulsive and brash, getting him into situations he didn't want to be in.
"Why send a message when you've just given a speech? Natasha inquired, nodding her head slightly towards Steve and Thor, who'd both spoken to Ultron during their encounter.
"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve put together while Roxi handed Natasha the tablet, which she glanced at before going back to searching the computer she was sitting in front of.
"Yeah, I bet he... Yeah," She said as the programs she was running (bio schematics, face recognition, etc.) turned up no records of Baron von Strucker, "Everything we had on Strucker's been erased." Roxi closed her eyes and let out a soft sigh, knowing what was coming. She'd never enjoyed paperwork.
"Not everything," Tony suggested, confirming her suspicions. A few minutes, they'd hauled filing boxes out of Tony's cabinet, and were beginning to sort through them. Roxi began to shift on her feet nervously. These were SHIELD files, and they were old. If Fury had ever removed her paper files, they wouldn't have been removed from here. Thankfully, she knew exactly what her file looked like, having spent quite a lot of time looking over it in her past.
"Known associates," Steve said as if he was starting a list. Thankfully, her file wasn't likely to be in that box, as she'd never met the man, but in the second box, which was crammed with files about associates of associates. Well, she was much more likely to be in there.
"Baron Strucker had a lot of friends," Steve pointed out as he looked at the amount of files crammed into the small box.
"Well, all these people are horrible," Bruce pointed out as Roxi found herself a stack of files to look through, searching for anyone of particular importance.
"Wait, I know that guy," Tony said, pointing to Bruce's open file. Roxi leaned back in her chair as she opened her file to reveal a face she knew all too well.
"Oh, him too," the billionaire noticed, shifting his hand to point at her file.
"Yeah well, you're not gonna get anything out of him," Roxi told him, closing her eyes as she processed who she'd seen.
"Why not?" Tony asked curiously as he took the file and glanced through it before his eyes landed back on Roxi.
"Because he's dead."
"And you know that.. how?" Tony asked as he glanced back at the file, which very much said that this man was alive.
"Because I killed him in Spain three years ago," Roxi said shortly, not really in the mood to discuss how she killed people for a living. She opened her eyes and let them land on Tony, who let out a short
"Ah," before quickly putting James Davis' file down and moving back onto the other one.
"From back in the day, he operates off the African Coast, Black Market Arms," Tony told them. Steve gave him such a disapproving look that he might as well have been Tony's teacher or parent.
"There are conventions, all right, you meet people," Tony excused himself quickly after seeing Cap's face.
"I didn't sell him anything," he continued to reason. "He was talking about finding something new, a game changer. It was all very Ahab." He handed Roxi the sheet, which she glanced at enough to get the important information. Ulysses Klaue. That was his name, and there were a few pictures of him. He had short, greying hair and tattoos reaching up his neck.
"This?" Thor asked, pointing to one of the black marks on the man's neck.
"Ah, it's a tattoo, I don't think he had it," Tony replied, and Roxi had a feeling that for once in his life, other than when he tried to guess her name, that he was wrong.
"Those are tattoos, this is a brand," Thor explained, moving his finger over the sheet that Roxi had given back to Tony.
"Oh yeah. It's a word in an African dialect meaning 'thief'," Bruce, who had moved over to a computer, told them, "In a much less friendly way."
"What dialect?" Steve asked as Roxi stood up from her chair and began to put the files away, knowing that the conversation was coming to an end.
"Wakanada," Bruce began before realising that he'd said it wrong, and trying again. But even the stumbled word was enough for Roxi to freeze in her actions. She'd never been to the country, but she had heard plenty about it, and she knew what came out of it. This wasn't good.
"Wa-wa-Wakanda." That set it in stone. There was no way that this was turning out well. Clearly, Tony and Steve had the same sentiment.
"If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods.." Tony trailed off.
"I thought your father said he got the last of it." Steve said back.
"I don't follow. What comes out of Wakanda?" Bruce asked, walking back towards the group.
"The strongest metal on earth," Roxi said breathily, her eyes flickering to Steve's SHIELD.
"Where is this guy now?" Steve asked intently, but all that Roxi could focus on was the file that Tony had just picked up out of the second box. Her breath caught in her throat as she recognised it.
"Stark, could you pass that file, please?" She asked, trying to seem as nonchalant as possible.
"Why?" he asked, glancing down at it, back up at her, and then doing a double take and immediately setting his gaze on the file again. Everyone's eyes were on them as Roxi leaned forwards in her seat and Stark smirked slightly.
"Well, this meeting just got interesting," he said smugly. Most of the others looked confused, but Natasha cottoned on a second later as her lips parted slightly and her forest green eyes landed on the file as well, so that now, three people were watching it intensely.
"Stark," Roxi said so coldly that her tone matched her eyes, "give me the file." The tension in the room was palpable, and even Natasha didn't want to move in case she caused Roxi to do something rash. The redhead herself didn't like talking about her past, but the other woman's was invisible. Nobody in the room even knew her first name.
"Or... what?" Everyone else knew that now was not a good time to mess with Roxi, what with her tense form and cold voice, but Stark seemed determined to push his luck.
"Or I crush all your tin cans," Roxi threatened icily, and Tony's face dropped, knowing she might well carry out on her threat. All of them knew Roxi's past was important and very private to her, but Natasha was beginning to feel as if the woman was going too far. Yes, she had her secrets, and yes, Tony could be an asshole, but there were other ways that Roxi could deal with this. Tony put the file in Roxi's outstretched hand, some colour coming back into his face as he realised that his suits were safe. Probably. Roxi opened the file and read for a few moments, before something flashed behind her eyes and she closed it again. Natasha, who thought it was safe to move more that the majority of the tension had been diffused, walked over to Roxi and put her hands on the other woman's shoulders, feeling the blue-eyed agent relax immediately.
Roxi was cursing herself when she realised how extremely she'd reacted. It scared her, the possibility of anybody finding out her past. Especially if she didn't tell them it herself. She found the scar on her left forearm from New York and began tracing it slowly as the room began to move again, some going to put files away, a couple with their eyes fixed warily on Roxi. She reached her hand out, and her quarterstaff flew into it, the silver handle glinting slightly as she strapped it back into its spot on her belt. Everyone's eyes followed it's progression through the air, before Clint's voice filled the quiet air.
"And then there's that."
{A/N:} You guys I'm sorry this chapter's so late and such bad quality. I still don't know if I'm going to kill Pietro or not, you've got to let me know. This chapter is quite short so sorry about that as well but let me know what I can do better next time I'm the comments. Thanks,
JabberJay_011
2100 Words
Written: 22 / 11 / 2020
Published: 22 / 11 / 2020