Clint, Janet
Aug. 22nd, 2012 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aa_natashaI didn't think I'd be saying it, but she really did do well. There's something more than fashion and flutter in there, I think.
I'm not surprised, not really. She's SHIELD. But SHIELD doesn't always mean suited for field work. Often doesn't.
It's not even the skills. She's still got a lot of those to learn.
But the attitude. The willingness. The ability to look the world in the face and say 'пошел на хуй' in the face of things that hit hard and shoot straight. To get the job done.
That-- I think she might actually have.
8/22/2012
Janet makes a face and runs her tongue along the inside of her mouth before opening it and pulling an invisible bit of something or other from it. "Air duct cleaning. They seriously need to invest in it. They're all going to die of sick building syndrome in fifty years," she complains in the tone of someone who has voiced the same one several times already. Her leg bends over the arm of the ornate little chair pulled from the desk, and she drops her head backwards over the other arm, eyeing the door to the bathroom longingly. "But they're all there. The terrible trio. Playing well enough together too."
"Their security systems?" Clint questions, not seeming to even blink at the news of their relationship where he takes up an edge of Natasha's bed. His bow sits in his lap, currently being carefully cleaned with a dry rag in his hand, his gaze turned to it instead of Janet.
Natasha sits in a perch on the edge of the bed next to Clint, her hands curled over her knees and her frown dark and thoughtful. The curtains are pulled tight, the room has been swept and reswept and secured, and she has at least four different weapons on her person. Her gaze, unlike her partner's, doesn't focus on Janet. "That's news we didn't need," she mutters in low response.
"Usual tech stuff. Codes, scans, tripped /something/ a couple times. Must be beams. Or something." Janet turns her head and sits up straighter in her chair, freeing her hands to gesture. "In the labs though, there was strange looking stuff. I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a bad movie set. I kept expecting mystical forces to blow the candles out." A pause and she adds, "Not that there were candles. But it looked like there should have been."
There is a certain interest to the news of things in a lab, but Clint focuses again on the security, instead asking, "We give you a piece of paper, would you be able to recreate the inside and put the security measures in where they were? The ones you could see?" His fingers fiddle with the bow, checking the string before deciding to undo it and restring it with a different tension.
"Work on how to describe it," Natasha suggests, dry as her eyes flick up to Janet, then briefly to Clint as he makes the suggestion that hovers on the tip of her tongue (and forces me to delete half my pose). "It's important."
"Probably. Give it to me now." Janet sits up and holds her hands out for paper and pen. "I didn't see the entire place. What's his face-- the creepy one--" So descriptive, Jan. She means Schmidt. "He kept going in and out, but I tripped the alarms once while trying to follow him." Oh, please ask her how she tripped the other one. Please. "Symbols and energy fields and lights. It didn't all look like the Chitauri tech you showed me. Some of it was. Some of it was human design. But some of it-- I don't know. It looked like... like magic," she finishes lamely.
Clint glances to Natasha, a silent question, but he doesn't get up to get the paper, only balancing his bow on his lap as his gaze shifts back to Janet. "What kind of magic? What did it look like they did?" he questions, slowly.
Natasha stirs from the bed for a quick rummage through the desk. It doesn't take her long to produce a pen and tiny notepad, and she slides it across to Janet with a glance shadowed by something dark. "A lot of things look like magic these days," she says lowly, and does not look at Clint.
"Like this." She scratches a few of the symbols plastered around, including vaguely pentagram looking ones and turns the pad to show them before flipping the page and working on the other requested drawing. It is rough, but shows a good grasp of proportions and flow. "Couple of times, there looked to be friction between Doom and Loki, but it never seemed to escalate." She moves beyond the room in her drawing, adding in a rough idea of the castle's layout, or at least what she was privy too. "I couldn't hear what was being said without getting close enough to maybe attract their attention." She glances at Natasha as if for approval. Those lessons seemed to have sunk in a bit.
"How surprising," Clint drawls quietly to Natasha at Janet's news, though his gaze stays fixed on that pad as Janet draws. "Any vulnerabilities you could assess?"
"Friction," Natasha muses, her voice low and thoughtful and perhaps the tiniest bit pleased. She files that tidbit away and takes up one of Janet's drawings to study it with a close eye before she sweeps it back to the desk and digs out a camera.
"You mean besides those to tiny sized flying people?" Jan asks, shooting Clint a bright, self-satisfied smile and fluttering her lashes in his direction. "Everything semi-public had like... nothing. Of value, I mean. Patrols, locks, people everywhere." She places the pad on her lap and lifts her hands to strategically place air quotes. "Once you got back into his 'lair,' its all codes and scans and misdirection."
Whatever the news, Clint doesn't seem to be happy with it. He doesn't even smile at the joke that Janet makes, for all that his gaze might linger at fluttering lashes. hi bb. Instead, he mutters something under his breath and then asks, "How often did Schmidt go out on his own? Anything regular to the patterns?" He looks at Natasha as he asks it, question there too.
"The biggest issue is tracking the location of the Chitauri artifacts and ascertaining the security surrounding it," Natasha says quietly. She tips her head toward the pad and then toward the laptop sitting open on the desk. "I want you to sketch and take down absolutely everything you can remember. We should have a fairly good record of your movements for layout, so mark the times you were in locations one of us couldn't follow."
Janet nods and picks the pad back up. "I stayed in the grates for cover, but generally followed people so I didn't get myself lost. So I had to go where they went..." She murmers a few things more as she thinks, though she shakes her head at Clin'ts question and give him an apologetic half-shrug. "Just through this door here. Went out a couple times while I was watching."
"If he's going out on his own, that could be something that we could exploit," Clint replies, though he looks at Natasha as he says it before looking back to Janet.
Natasha glances at Clint, her brows raised just slightly as she nods. "We can get eyes on that area from the outside," she notes, low and thoughtful. "If he's doing more than wandering that bogom zabytom castle."
Janet continues to sketch, though her lines have become less frequent and flowing, her work punctuated by squints and pauses while she tries to remember more details. She looks up at Natasha's russian phrasing and smiles slightly. "I can't think of anything else. Oh. Except Doom really does wear that armor /everywhere/."
Humor finally cracks Clint's expression, his smile offered briefly towards Janet as he reiterates, "Everywhere?"
Natasha lifts her brows at Clint, expression overmild.
Janet's eyes widen and she looks at Clint. "Everywhere," she repeats. "Followed him out once. To the little dictators room. Apparently they have alarms in there too." And now you know how she got alarmed the second time, even if you didn't ask.
"Wonder what his girlfriend thinks of it," is all he says, meeting Natasha's gaze innocently as he stirs to get up and put away his bow.
Natasha does not laugh. Just so everyone knows. She is /not/ laughing. That twitch of her lips means nothing. The swiftness with which she looks away? Also nothing. She clears her throat and says, "All armor has chinks." Except maybe Starks. She makes a mental note to ask him about it. "We just have to find his."
"Uncomfortable ones," Janet opines, flipping the pad of paper away from her and pushing up out of the chair, no longer content to stay in one place. She paces, scratching her fingernails against her scalp vigorously.
Clint notices it regardless, his gaze lingering on Natasha for a moment before he focuses on storing his bow and straightening. It is Janet that he address when he asks, "You alright there?"
Natasha leans into the desk, fingers tapping away at the laptop's keyboard as she pulls SHIELD's satelite images of the castle into view and peers down at them with a frown. She pauses for a moment to check the layout against Janet's drawing before glancing at her. There's a brief moment's silence before she says, "You did well."
"Just filthy. Air duct cleaning. I mean it!" Janet pauses in her good humored complaining to blink at Natasha's praise. "Thank you," she says, a slight blush spreading across her nose. "I'm gonna get cleaned up, okay?"
"I won't complain," Clint answers easily, settling back down at his spot on Natasha's bed as he gives an agreeable nod to his partner's statement.
"Let me clear the hall," Natasha says, straightening from her laptop with a brief glance at Clint before she runs her fingers through her hair and moves for the door. It's only once she's certain that there's no one likely to see Janet slip from this room and back to her own exactly one floor up (security cameras having long since been taken care of) that she waves her on.
O. Good thinking. Janet snags a towel from the bathroom and slings it around her neck before slipping out the door. The black body suit worn for the mission takes on an exercise suit's cast, and staves off any questions about her attire (if not requests for phone numbers) on her way up.
By the time that Natasha has returned from the door, Clint has sprawled out on her bed, his arm slung over his eyes. It isn't all a careless gesture, the familiar concentration showing at the line of his lips as he works through the information from Janet in his head rather than pouring over the drawings again. "It isn't enough," he says when he hears her return. "Any way I play it, we don't have enough to go on. Even taking out Schmidt first is a gamble."
"It's what we have," Natasha says, her voice level as she pauses to take him in with a gaze that starts at booted feet and works its way slowly upward. Her arms fold tight across her chest. "We'll take a few days. Let her flesh out her cover. See if we can see anything else."
"A few days, and hopefully we get more than this," Clint exhales, nodding slowly and giving up as he shifts only to look up at Natasha under the fan of lashes. Dark eyes do not trail over her like hers did his, only unerringly finding hers.
Natasha looks away, and for a very brief moment she looks almost tired. She rubs her thumb along the side of her nose, her fingers against her eyes, and then she exhales. "We could just get Banner real mad and air drop him into the castle," she says, but it doesn't sound serious and it doesn't quite manage to sound like a joke.
Clint says slowly, "Might come down to that. He could always prove to be a useful distraction, too." He stretches to his feet, finally, abandoning her bed or giving it back to her, or doing both at once as he catches that look. "Maybe Thor had it right. Maybe we just declare war and bring the army in. They are harboring potentially weapons of mass destruction."
Natasha glances toward the satelite image spread across her laptop screen again, then turns a frown toward Clint. "Even war needs a plan," she says. Her eyes seek his. "And we aren't soldiers."'
"Wouldn't be our plan, then. We could go to Sicily," Clint answers, the line of his brows raising slightly when she meets his gaze again. His doesn't seem to have left hers since she glanced away.
"What?" Natasha says, her tone dry and dark-edged. "Slip away from SHIELD, leave the world to cope with the monsters on their own?" She holds his gaze for a moment, then lets a sigh trickle out as she moves to settle on the edge of the bed. She lets her voice go just slightly wistful as she adds, "I do like Sicily."
"I know." Clint isn't in any rush to clarify which part he addresses, a quietness to his words as well before he moves to the door of the hotel room. "Want a wakeup call in the morning?"
Natasha's brows quirk, and the look she gives Clint is quietly amused. "Do you?" she returns (retorts), tucking her feet beneath her on the edge of the bed.
"Who would say no to a wakeup call from you?" Clint even offers her a smile, a quick quirk of his lips as he turns the knob on the door and steps into the hall.
Natasha follows Clint out with a dry snort and a roll of her eyes. When the door closes behind him, she rises to retrieve her laptop and curls up in bed with it for company, staring at satelite images and maps until her vision goes a little blurry and she finally slips into sleep.
I'm not surprised, not really. She's SHIELD. But SHIELD doesn't always mean suited for field work. Often doesn't.
It's not even the skills. She's still got a lot of those to learn.
But the attitude. The willingness. The ability to look the world in the face and say 'пошел на хуй' in the face of things that hit hard and shoot straight. To get the job done.
That-- I think she might actually have.
8/22/2012
Janet makes a face and runs her tongue along the inside of her mouth before opening it and pulling an invisible bit of something or other from it. "Air duct cleaning. They seriously need to invest in it. They're all going to die of sick building syndrome in fifty years," she complains in the tone of someone who has voiced the same one several times already. Her leg bends over the arm of the ornate little chair pulled from the desk, and she drops her head backwards over the other arm, eyeing the door to the bathroom longingly. "But they're all there. The terrible trio. Playing well enough together too."
"Their security systems?" Clint questions, not seeming to even blink at the news of their relationship where he takes up an edge of Natasha's bed. His bow sits in his lap, currently being carefully cleaned with a dry rag in his hand, his gaze turned to it instead of Janet.
Natasha sits in a perch on the edge of the bed next to Clint, her hands curled over her knees and her frown dark and thoughtful. The curtains are pulled tight, the room has been swept and reswept and secured, and she has at least four different weapons on her person. Her gaze, unlike her partner's, doesn't focus on Janet. "That's news we didn't need," she mutters in low response.
"Usual tech stuff. Codes, scans, tripped /something/ a couple times. Must be beams. Or something." Janet turns her head and sits up straighter in her chair, freeing her hands to gesture. "In the labs though, there was strange looking stuff. I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a bad movie set. I kept expecting mystical forces to blow the candles out." A pause and she adds, "Not that there were candles. But it looked like there should have been."
There is a certain interest to the news of things in a lab, but Clint focuses again on the security, instead asking, "We give you a piece of paper, would you be able to recreate the inside and put the security measures in where they were? The ones you could see?" His fingers fiddle with the bow, checking the string before deciding to undo it and restring it with a different tension.
"Work on how to describe it," Natasha suggests, dry as her eyes flick up to Janet, then briefly to Clint as he makes the suggestion that hovers on the tip of her tongue (and forces me to delete half my pose). "It's important."
"Probably. Give it to me now." Janet sits up and holds her hands out for paper and pen. "I didn't see the entire place. What's his face-- the creepy one--" So descriptive, Jan. She means Schmidt. "He kept going in and out, but I tripped the alarms once while trying to follow him." Oh, please ask her how she tripped the other one. Please. "Symbols and energy fields and lights. It didn't all look like the Chitauri tech you showed me. Some of it was. Some of it was human design. But some of it-- I don't know. It looked like... like magic," she finishes lamely.
Clint glances to Natasha, a silent question, but he doesn't get up to get the paper, only balancing his bow on his lap as his gaze shifts back to Janet. "What kind of magic? What did it look like they did?" he questions, slowly.
Natasha stirs from the bed for a quick rummage through the desk. It doesn't take her long to produce a pen and tiny notepad, and she slides it across to Janet with a glance shadowed by something dark. "A lot of things look like magic these days," she says lowly, and does not look at Clint.
"Like this." She scratches a few of the symbols plastered around, including vaguely pentagram looking ones and turns the pad to show them before flipping the page and working on the other requested drawing. It is rough, but shows a good grasp of proportions and flow. "Couple of times, there looked to be friction between Doom and Loki, but it never seemed to escalate." She moves beyond the room in her drawing, adding in a rough idea of the castle's layout, or at least what she was privy too. "I couldn't hear what was being said without getting close enough to maybe attract their attention." She glances at Natasha as if for approval. Those lessons seemed to have sunk in a bit.
"How surprising," Clint drawls quietly to Natasha at Janet's news, though his gaze stays fixed on that pad as Janet draws. "Any vulnerabilities you could assess?"
"Friction," Natasha muses, her voice low and thoughtful and perhaps the tiniest bit pleased. She files that tidbit away and takes up one of Janet's drawings to study it with a close eye before she sweeps it back to the desk and digs out a camera.
"You mean besides those to tiny sized flying people?" Jan asks, shooting Clint a bright, self-satisfied smile and fluttering her lashes in his direction. "Everything semi-public had like... nothing. Of value, I mean. Patrols, locks, people everywhere." She places the pad on her lap and lifts her hands to strategically place air quotes. "Once you got back into his 'lair,' its all codes and scans and misdirection."
Whatever the news, Clint doesn't seem to be happy with it. He doesn't even smile at the joke that Janet makes, for all that his gaze might linger at fluttering lashes. hi bb. Instead, he mutters something under his breath and then asks, "How often did Schmidt go out on his own? Anything regular to the patterns?" He looks at Natasha as he asks it, question there too.
"The biggest issue is tracking the location of the Chitauri artifacts and ascertaining the security surrounding it," Natasha says quietly. She tips her head toward the pad and then toward the laptop sitting open on the desk. "I want you to sketch and take down absolutely everything you can remember. We should have a fairly good record of your movements for layout, so mark the times you were in locations one of us couldn't follow."
Janet nods and picks the pad back up. "I stayed in the grates for cover, but generally followed people so I didn't get myself lost. So I had to go where they went..." She murmers a few things more as she thinks, though she shakes her head at Clin'ts question and give him an apologetic half-shrug. "Just through this door here. Went out a couple times while I was watching."
"If he's going out on his own, that could be something that we could exploit," Clint replies, though he looks at Natasha as he says it before looking back to Janet.
Natasha glances at Clint, her brows raised just slightly as she nods. "We can get eyes on that area from the outside," she notes, low and thoughtful. "If he's doing more than wandering that bogom zabytom castle."
Janet continues to sketch, though her lines have become less frequent and flowing, her work punctuated by squints and pauses while she tries to remember more details. She looks up at Natasha's russian phrasing and smiles slightly. "I can't think of anything else. Oh. Except Doom really does wear that armor /everywhere/."
Humor finally cracks Clint's expression, his smile offered briefly towards Janet as he reiterates, "Everywhere?"
Natasha lifts her brows at Clint, expression overmild.
Janet's eyes widen and she looks at Clint. "Everywhere," she repeats. "Followed him out once. To the little dictators room. Apparently they have alarms in there too." And now you know how she got alarmed the second time, even if you didn't ask.
"Wonder what his girlfriend thinks of it," is all he says, meeting Natasha's gaze innocently as he stirs to get up and put away his bow.
Natasha does not laugh. Just so everyone knows. She is /not/ laughing. That twitch of her lips means nothing. The swiftness with which she looks away? Also nothing. She clears her throat and says, "All armor has chinks." Except maybe Starks. She makes a mental note to ask him about it. "We just have to find his."
"Uncomfortable ones," Janet opines, flipping the pad of paper away from her and pushing up out of the chair, no longer content to stay in one place. She paces, scratching her fingernails against her scalp vigorously.
Clint notices it regardless, his gaze lingering on Natasha for a moment before he focuses on storing his bow and straightening. It is Janet that he address when he asks, "You alright there?"
Natasha leans into the desk, fingers tapping away at the laptop's keyboard as she pulls SHIELD's satelite images of the castle into view and peers down at them with a frown. She pauses for a moment to check the layout against Janet's drawing before glancing at her. There's a brief moment's silence before she says, "You did well."
"Just filthy. Air duct cleaning. I mean it!" Janet pauses in her good humored complaining to blink at Natasha's praise. "Thank you," she says, a slight blush spreading across her nose. "I'm gonna get cleaned up, okay?"
"I won't complain," Clint answers easily, settling back down at his spot on Natasha's bed as he gives an agreeable nod to his partner's statement.
"Let me clear the hall," Natasha says, straightening from her laptop with a brief glance at Clint before she runs her fingers through her hair and moves for the door. It's only once she's certain that there's no one likely to see Janet slip from this room and back to her own exactly one floor up (security cameras having long since been taken care of) that she waves her on.
O. Good thinking. Janet snags a towel from the bathroom and slings it around her neck before slipping out the door. The black body suit worn for the mission takes on an exercise suit's cast, and staves off any questions about her attire (if not requests for phone numbers) on her way up.
By the time that Natasha has returned from the door, Clint has sprawled out on her bed, his arm slung over his eyes. It isn't all a careless gesture, the familiar concentration showing at the line of his lips as he works through the information from Janet in his head rather than pouring over the drawings again. "It isn't enough," he says when he hears her return. "Any way I play it, we don't have enough to go on. Even taking out Schmidt first is a gamble."
"It's what we have," Natasha says, her voice level as she pauses to take him in with a gaze that starts at booted feet and works its way slowly upward. Her arms fold tight across her chest. "We'll take a few days. Let her flesh out her cover. See if we can see anything else."
"A few days, and hopefully we get more than this," Clint exhales, nodding slowly and giving up as he shifts only to look up at Natasha under the fan of lashes. Dark eyes do not trail over her like hers did his, only unerringly finding hers.
Natasha looks away, and for a very brief moment she looks almost tired. She rubs her thumb along the side of her nose, her fingers against her eyes, and then she exhales. "We could just get Banner real mad and air drop him into the castle," she says, but it doesn't sound serious and it doesn't quite manage to sound like a joke.
Clint says slowly, "Might come down to that. He could always prove to be a useful distraction, too." He stretches to his feet, finally, abandoning her bed or giving it back to her, or doing both at once as he catches that look. "Maybe Thor had it right. Maybe we just declare war and bring the army in. They are harboring potentially weapons of mass destruction."
Natasha glances toward the satelite image spread across her laptop screen again, then turns a frown toward Clint. "Even war needs a plan," she says. Her eyes seek his. "And we aren't soldiers."'
"Wouldn't be our plan, then. We could go to Sicily," Clint answers, the line of his brows raising slightly when she meets his gaze again. His doesn't seem to have left hers since she glanced away.
"What?" Natasha says, her tone dry and dark-edged. "Slip away from SHIELD, leave the world to cope with the monsters on their own?" She holds his gaze for a moment, then lets a sigh trickle out as she moves to settle on the edge of the bed. She lets her voice go just slightly wistful as she adds, "I do like Sicily."
"I know." Clint isn't in any rush to clarify which part he addresses, a quietness to his words as well before he moves to the door of the hotel room. "Want a wakeup call in the morning?"
Natasha's brows quirk, and the look she gives Clint is quietly amused. "Do you?" she returns (retorts), tucking her feet beneath her on the edge of the bed.
"Who would say no to a wakeup call from you?" Clint even offers her a smile, a quick quirk of his lips as he turns the knob on the door and steps into the hall.
Natasha follows Clint out with a dry snort and a roll of her eyes. When the door closes behind him, she rises to retrieve her laptop and curls up in bed with it for company, staring at satelite images and maps until her vision goes a little blurry and she finally slips into sleep.