Chapter Text
The first pulse of mental static that Emma felt was enough to immediately kick her into high gear, her posture straightened in her chair and her senses on the lookout for anything of particular suspicion.
The second pulse of mental static from Peter that Emma felt was enough to have her out of her seat and onto her feet before she’d even realized she had moved. Her action unbeholden to her mind as she looked around for what had caused the second burst of static so soon after the first.
Peter himself was no help; he was just stretching in that annoyingly comfortable looking chair of his. She would have a very, very stern talk with him after this about how his life was worth a lot more than keeping people calm but now wasn’t the time to begin that particular lecture.
Emma felt all of her senses stretch and enhance at what, increasingly, felt like a snail’s pace. Psychic energy, created from the billions upon billions of mutated and specialized neurons found within her brain, surged through her body in a way that she had never even tried before, let alone had experienced. The surge of worried adrenaline and instinctual panic led her energy through her body, enhancing everything that she was just like a light being focused into a singular, focused laser after being pointed through a lens.
‘There!’ Her blue eyes snapped to a tuft of grass that wafted the smallest, thinnest wisp of smoke.
So laser-focused were her senses that the incredulity of the situation never even dawned on her, the young woman incapable of realizing just how small, how faint, a clue it was. The smoke that she had seen, the smoke that led her to seeing the second of the two bullets fired at Peter that morning, wouldn’t have been visible to the average man even if placed right in front of their eye.
‘A gunman, aiming to take Peter out. Steep angle, a rooftop somewhere nearby?’
“Emma? What’s got you up?” Felicia questioned from her own seat, giving a rather worried look at the older woman.
Her irises pulsed an icy blue for a moment and within her mind’s eye she saw a psychic dome of her own energy surround the entirety of the shooting area. Crackling with frigid energy and tethered to her in a way that two other people she knew of could ever even sense, let alone touch or see.
Plik!
Her protective dome buckled and curved under the force of the gunman’s third shot, not unlike rubber, but stayed securely in place and held strong. More importantly, however, due to being made of her own psychic energy its characteristics could be controlled at her leisure, which meant more than just keeping it outside the visible light spectrum or giving it a fair amount of flexibility.
“You’re kidding me…” Felicia’s whispered exclamation might as well have been a full-sent scream with how finely tuned Emma’s senses were at the current moment, but the telekinetic could hardly find it in herself to care.
There, hanging in the air for both of them to see, was the third bullet fired at Peter Parker, its rotational inertia still in play even as it stubbornly refused to move forward as it was meant to.
Things had very, very quickly ramped up in terms of seriousness now that they knew the exact cause behind Peter’s Spider Sense going off, not that Felicia was privy to that particular information yet. Despite that however, she was more than aware of what that bullet meant, and the kind of situation they all now found themselves in.
Quickly, but as quietly as possible to avoid drawing the attention of the news crew, she hopped out of her own chair and traced a rough, vague, mental line between the bullet and the rows upon rows of New York buildings behind it.
“I have a rough direction; can you keep everyone here safe?”
“Of course I can. But it’s not safe for you to go-“ Emma snapped back, looking over and blinking owlishly as she saw that Felicia was already out of her position and making a break for the tree line heading in the rough direction of the shooter.
‘Dammit Felicia! They have a gun, and you have no powers! You’re going to get yourself shot!’
XXXxxxXXX
The first shot, comparatively muffled as it may have been by a high-grade suppressor, was still ringing in the air by the time Sonia began to sprint across the densely packed and cluttered rooftops of New York.
The second shot rang through the air as she grabbed a small spool of plastic wire from her side, attached to a small handheld garden rake, and adjusted the direction of her mad sprint.
The third shot echoed through the alleyways and backstreets of the city right as she was vaulting from one rooftop to the rooftop of the building that she knew to be the one currently housing her target.
A sideways sweep of the rooftop from left to right confirmed to the redhead that there was no one situated atop the building, not that she expected there to be.
There was a rooftop fire exit to her left and behind her, she ignored it.
Not only was time of the utmost essence but trapping such a blatant entrance into the building was Red Room 101 and she was far from a green-nosed initiate.
The clang of metal on metal was the only sound that she made as she approached the edge of the rooftop, her makeshift grapple caught around the sturdiest bit of railing that she could find with the time she had and tied into a knot of plastic wire with a finessed flick of her wrist.
The noise of her grapple was sure to be unheard through whatever hearing protection her target was using and even without it, the echo of the gunshot was still fresh. She was a bit less sure about the capability of the railing to hold her weight, but it didn’t have to do so for long, so the odds were in her favour.
With all the confidence of a woman not flinging herself over the edge of a building, Sonia leapt over the railing. With a speed, flexibility and grace far beyond that of a regular human she spun and flipped in the air to face the side of the building and put her feet out in front of her as her eyes blurred in her skull from window to window.
‘No, no, no, no, no, n- barrel.’
Her feet met the side of the building and left it again with just as much speed, dropping three floors in an instant as she rappelled the side of the building with nothing but plastic wire and her own superhuman abilities.
One last, small, hop got her down to the level of the gunwoman, her hair framing her face almost demonically as it followed her in slight lag-step. This was it, her first active combat against another Black Widow since the early training exercises within the Red Room.
‘Hope I still have that spark.’
The window to the room was one that slid open from bottom to top and currently sat about two-thirds open, no doubt to vent the room of the obnoxiously powerful smell of ignited gunpowder. To not only perfectly rappel down to be level with the opening without even taking half a second to adjust, but to fling yourself inside without so much as snagging some clothing on the window or gun was the kind of manoeuvre that only the most insane of madmen saw in their dreams.
To Sonia it was inconsequential, utterly looked over in favour of what was to come after.
The sole of her sneaker struck her target in the clavicle and threw both her and her rifle back with a grunt of pain and surprise.
For a brief moment, time seemed to slow down as the opposing woman stumbled back with a grimace and she seemed to hang in midair as if frozen there by God himself.
“Twenty-Three…!”
“My name is Sonia.”
Her left hand, instinctually placed beneath her to break her fall, finally touched the ground and her heel met 76’s jaw in a dull thud that seemed to echo off the walls of the abandoned apartment.
XXXxxxXXX
Felicia may not have had any of her usual gear on her at the moment, a mistake that she would be sure to rectify going forward, but moving through the concrete jungle that was New York was almost as easy as breathing for her by this stage.
It was a matter of seconds for her to kick off an alleyway bin and start scaling a fire escape from the outside. Her leap from the railing of one was perfectly timed and executed to bring her halfway up to the next one so that she could pull herself up and jump from that one too with as little cooldown as possible.
Upon reaching the rooftop she was off like a rocket once more, running with everything that she had in the vague direction of where she believed the gunman to have been. There was a part of her, that had very quickly and very violently come to like Peter, that wished to run in guns blazing to fight the gunman, but she knew better than to let herself be that hot-headed.
Her job wasn’t to fight the would-be assassin but rather to find out who they were and make it impossible for them to safely go back into hiding. If she could steal something off of them to identify them too, then that was just a nice bonus.
A strong gust of wind crested the edge of the building behind her and made her stumble forward. A small curse left her mouth, and she picked the pace back up, jumping to land atop a safety railing at the edge of the building and leaping forward to grab the storm drain on the side of the taller building in front of her.
When it then, subsequently, snapped off the side of the building and began to creak ominously to the side, her eyes widened in fear and alarm. Her body curled inwards, and her feet were brought up in preparation as she found her landing spot, another fire escape on the side of the new building.
With a small push of her arms and a mumbled ‘hyup!’ she flung herself off the piping as it crashed into the stairs and railing above. She allowed herself no time to think as her feet hit the grated platform of the fifth-storey fire escape and instantly buckled her legs. The young woman rolled once to bleed off some of her momentum and twisted amidst her roll to land in a low crouch with the cold, hard feeling of railing against her backside.
The window in front of her, which opened directly onto the fire escape to act as –you guessed it– a fire escape, cracked and shattered in a near-deafening cacophony of sound and razor-sharp debris.
Blonde and Red were the first things that registered in her mind, the hair colours of the two individuals that came flying out of the window, poised to go over the edge of the railing in its entirety from their momentum.
The next thing to register was the weapons in their hands, specifically, the blonde’s right hand. A large, sharp-looking knife that Felicia wouldn’t have put out of place within a fisherman’s tackle box but one that most certainly looked out of place in everyday life.
The third thing that registered was their clothing, not that either of them wore anything particularly interesting, in fact it was about as plain and drab as one could possibly get. Which, she mused as she took a step forward and reached a hand out on instinct, was probably the entire point behind the both of them wearing such things, to not stand out.
The leg of the blonde, whose back had been used to shatter the window, curled inwards and struck at the redhead’s stomach, lifting her up and leaving her unable to counter as the blonde grabbed the railing to avoid falling the five storeys that lay beneath them. Felicia’s hand grabbed the wide, stabilizing arm of the redhead before she even had a moment to begin panicking and her foot dug into the grate beneath her to anchor herself.
Glass sparkled in the lunchtime sun as it bounced and danced across the railing and down into the empty alleyway below, the three women coming to a stop to try and regain their breaths and take in all the new variables of the situation.
In Felicia’s case, it was to try and figure out what was happening between these two and whether it had anything to do with why she was here. If it did have something to do with that, then which one was she supposed to go after? She’d saved the red-haired woman on instinct to avoid her plummeting head-first into the ground but that didn’t mean that she wanted to dive right into the middle of whatever altercation they were having.
In Sonia’s case, there was quite a mild panic at having to be so close to the personal assistant of the man that she was trying to keep safe without him finding out about her but losing her cool over that was only going to lead to her fighting sloppily and she couldn’t afford to do that. Not against another Black Widow, even a less combat-oriented one like 76. She’d just have to ensure that she finished things with 76 quickly and didn’t leave anything behind, a simple task for one with her abilities.
In 76’s, Maria’s, case it was with nothing short of vein-popping fury that she realized that her already lopsided one-on-one fight with 23 had been found, and by the assistant of Peter Parker, nonetheless. Actually, she could use this. So long as she was able to dispatch 23, she could kidnap the silver-haired young woman in front of her and take any number of options stemming from there. She could copy her looks and take her place to get close, use her as a bargaining chip, torture her for information or any number of other things. This may have just been a blessing in disguise for her, now all she had to do was make sure that the reality played out to her imagination.
“I don’t suppose that either of you ladies happen to be proficient with firearms and have a grudge against Peter Parker, would you?” Felicia opened up, inching away from Sonia subtly while trying to keep as much distance from Maria as possible.
Once more, she didn’t want to get into some kind of brawl with the assassin of her employer, but if either of these two ladies had something to do about it then she was fairly certain that a brawl was going to be all but impossible to avoid.
Especially considering the flashy and rather dangerous way that she had been introduced to them.
“She’s the one you’re looking for.” Sonia was quick to rat Maria out, only getting a scowl from the blonde in question.
“Pulling a secretary into your work, 23? How very weak of you. Have you atrophied in old age?” Maria taunted, readjusting her grip on her knife and stubbornly refusing to let her gaze move towards her next target.
She refused to give either of them any kind of opening, she would be the one to control the flow and pace of this fight, not the other way around.
“I’m feeling a bit left out here, ladies. I don’t suppose that either of you would be willing to sit down, have a nice coffee and explain the details while we wait for the police?”
“Pah! Police, jokes. The lot of them.” Maria scoffed.
“They aren’t exactly going to be able to help here, not with her.” Sonia informed the silver-haired young woman, her gaze wavering for only a fraction of a second.
That was all the time that Maria needed.
The blonde lunged forward in a blur of colours and just barely avoided hitting Sonia as the other woman lurched to the side and grabbed her lower forearm as it passed on pure reflex. The grip on her knife reversed as she stepped in close and leveraged her elbow up while pulling her hand back, leaving Sonia’s grip not quite on the verge of breaking but weakened. Bucking her hips back to prevent the fishing knife from gutting her was the final straw to allow the operative to free her arm from the other woman’s grip.
However, Sonia had not survived the Red Room as well as she had without being effective in all scenarios that they were expected to find themselves in, combat chief among them.
With a quick shove, she pushed Felicia away from the two enhanced operatives with a small yelp from the woman and used the natural push-back from the action to transition into a spinning kick that just barely clipped the blonde’s jaw.
As she stumbled back, closer to Felicia, Sonia took a step forward and hopped over a small, fumbled, sweeping kick at her ankles. Only for the soles of Maria’s other foot to dig into her stomach and slam her into the bottom of the next floor of the fire escape, making the entire structure wobble dangerously.
No sound left her lips, as much as her instincts demanded that she should yell out in pain, as her back struck the grated metal above her. Instead, she used the pain to force her mind to focus and grabbed the grate with a strength that belied her appearance.
The strange angle of attack, and the speed and force behind Sonia’s kick, were more than enough to catch Maria off guard as she straightened back up in preparation to stab Sonia as she fell back to the floor; something which never came to be. The force of Sonia’s shoe to her chin threw her back, her backside hitting the railing of the fire escape and her sheer velocity forcing her to continue moving backwards, now just flipping backwards as she did.
Sonia, having let go of the grate above her, and Felicia both dove for the falling woman, albeit for entirely different reasons. Which became clear a moment later as Sonia just barely missed grabbing the woman’s ankle and hopped up onto the railing. As she fell, Maria’s foot snagged on the lip of the grate above them and levered her entire body like a pendulum to force her momentum upwards, and not into the dubiously lethal fall beneath them.
Which meant that she had a head-start on both Sonia and Felicia in ascending the fire escape to try and make some room, something that Sonia was more than willing to try and catch up with but left Felicia floundering for just a moment.
The silver-haired thief wasn’t slow by any means, not mentally nor physically. Still, the speed and grace that these two women moved with left her utterly unable to keep up, especially with the suddenness and mystery behind everything fogging up her thoughts. She was trying to keep up with a fight above her physical boundaries without any of her regular gear and trying to figure out who both of these women were and what their comments to each other could possibly mean. It was like trying to compete in a foot race when not only were both the people you were competing with faster than you, but you also had hurdles to jump where they had a free, open track.
Quickly she climbed on top of the railing to start scaling the fire escape as she had been beforehand, catching moments and glimpses of the fight above her as they climbed higher faster than she could hope to catch up with currently. One of them tried to throw the other over the edge, the occasional glint of a swung knife in the afternoon sun, flashes and blurs of red and blonde hair.
These weren’t the movements of regular people, no matter how well-trained they were. She had seen footage of Black Widow fighting before, and even with how far away and grainy that footage had been, she could tell that everything was still within the realms of human possibility. These two women on the other hand were above that, so firmly in the lands of superhumans that she was certain only Captain America and Peter could ever hope to match or exceed them.
Not for the first time was she happy that she had firmly set her mission to herself as a reconnaissance one because, quite frankly, she had no hope of stepping into a fight between the two of them right now. She was more likely to get instantly shanked and dropped off the edge of the building if she tried than be of any real help.
Which was why, when she heard the sound of a gunshot from the rooftop –when the hell had they gotten that far ahead of her– she tried her best to hurry up and get to the rooftop as fast as she possibly could.
With each leap that she made, the fire escape wobbled and creaked dangerously, a few sounds of rusted metal snapping making her flinch on instinct but still she continued onwards. Her gaze unwavering and her body burning from the exertion even as she continued her ascendance.
‘Come on luck. Come on luck. Lead me to where I’m meant to go.’ She repeated in her mind, the mantra practically all that went through her head as she climbed.
The railing above her was a bit more rusted and worn away than the lower levels, it’d be too dangerous to place her hands anywhere near that if she wanted to stay safe. Recognizing that fact, she took a second to crouch down and push off with even more force than usual, her hands grabbing the top of the railing and her legs flailing out slightly behind her from the force of her jump.
Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, tuck her legs in, climb to the top of the railing and leap to the next level, simple. However, this was not a normal situation, and with a horrifying SNAP! The entire top half of the fire escape began to lean back from the building.
Faster than she’d ever moved in her life she swung her legs down without curling them in and let go of the railing that she was holding. Flinging herself down from level to level, the top of the fire escape crashed against the building next to it and began to crumple against itself. The sound of scraping metal and chipping bricks was all that she could hear for a few, gut-wrenching seconds amidst her rapid and –honestly very panicked– descent of the ‘safety’ feature.
With one final leap down, she curled up and hunkered down beneath a section that looked at least vaguely structurally sound and let the chaos above her take its course. Only when it was finally over did she open her eyes and look around, seeing the damage to the building beside her –surprisingly superficial given the cause– and what had once been the fire escape in the alleyway below.
A small sigh left her lips as she stood back up and stared up at the lip of the roof, something that she certainly wouldn’t be reaching quickly now, even if she took the internal stairway up.
Speaking of which…
“Oh, there’s no way.” She muttered to herself, recognizing the broken window as the one that the two women had exploded out of just a scant few minutes earlier.
Perhaps it was fate, perhaps pure dumb luck, or perhaps sheer coincidence, but Felicia found herself right back where this had all started, and where they most likely had started their scuffle. She may not know how their fight will/already has ended, but if they had both come from this floor then maybe there were some clues as to who they were and what their goals were.
Beyond, obviously, just trying to kill Peter.
And just when she had thought that the only thing exciting about being Peter’s secretary was getting to tease him and see his reactions, really, he was the gift that just kept on giving.
She soundlessly hopped through the broken window without cutting herself, the only sound she made was the slight crinkle of glass beneath her feet.
‘Now then, if I was an assassin, where would I have set up in this lovely building, hm?’