The Conceptual Deck

Natasha Romanoff was used to having time alone with her thoughts. Stakeouts, waiting for a target to arrive in her sights, information gathering, protection missions, and surveillance details, all of them usually included a whole lot of quiet sitting and waiting.

Though she had to admit it wasn't usually such a unique view.

The forward view screen of the Void Skipper was a wash with thousands of stars. She had even dimmed the interior lights to get a better view. It was incredible.

Here she was, a spy, raised from childhood to kill, lie, murder, and cheat, to do horrible things at the command of her superiors, sitting on the bridge of a spaceship, flying through space. A ship built a man who, without a second thought, trusted her alone on the bridge of his ship, with full control over it.

The fact that he trusted her wasn't the insane part either. Plenty of people had trusted her throughout her life, usually right before she stole something from them, killed them, or extracted information from them. They had no idea what she was capable of when they gave her their trust. Not Carson though.

Carson knew exactly what she was capable of, knew she was a spy, knew the kind of shit she had to do, even if he didn't know everything. She could tell by the way he looked at her, that he knew what she was capable of. And he still just handed her the proverbial keys to his ship. Like it was no big deal. Like he trusted her.

Natasha shook her head and looked down at the control panel in front of her, still enthralled by the fact that she knew what almost every single button did. She turned her chair slightly and reached along the side of the control panel, finding a button she somehow knew would be there. After a single press, the floor next to her chair shifted, flowing like sand into a small table. She knew that if she pressed the button again it would disappear. She focused on the screen set into the console, tapping a few prompts before dragging a gauge up, the lights slowly returning to full brightness.

Still shaking her head she clicked her fingers against the almost invisible buttons on her rings, both of them shifting into her personalized pistols. She took one and pressed it into the top corner of the table, holding it for a second to engage the safer grip function of the table's surface. She would have to physically pull it away from the table to release it.

She repeated the process with the second pistol, before pulling an emergency gun cleaning kit from her belt and locking that to the table as well. She took a long deep breath, holding it for a moment before releasing it.

Slowly, meticulously she disassembled the first pistol, making sure to secure each piece to the table in an organized fashion before starting to inspect and clean each piece.

It was a ritual that had started as a way to compile her thoughts and go over mission results but had shifted into a meditative process when she stopped having to worry that poor mission results would end with her being killed to tie up loose ends.

As she slowly cleaned the carbon buildup on one of the internal pieces of her first pistol, her mind wandered a bit. It had only been four or five months since Carson had appeared on Shields radar, and since then her entire world had been shifted. At first, he had been nothing but a footnote, something she should keep her eye on, that she should be read up on in case her mission changed, but not her own personal problem.

Now, as she was essentially lost in space with him, he was most definitely her problem.

One worth the trouble he caused though. The idea that Hydra had existed inside Shield for so long, that they had sent her on missions that benefited their twisted views was more than they had benefited Shield or anyone… She had killed for them. And even for the missions that hadn't been Hydra plots in disguise, how different would her orders have been if they weren't being influenced by a parasitic Nazi organization? How many assassinations would have been blackmail, how many acceptable casualties would have been-

Natasha took another long breath, picked up the barrel of her first pistol, and slowly cleaned any build-up, focusing on the cleaning for a while. Eventually, she rebuilt her pistol and checked the slide and trigger before setting it on the table, letting the surface hold it as she grabbed the magazine, turning it over in her hand. Eventually, she decided that it wasn't worth pulling out every bullet just to know how many were left, it would be much easier to get a few boxes of ammo from Carson and find out how many were missing… assuming he had any.

With the first pistol done, she leaned over and checked the scanners on one of the control console's screens. When nothing showed up on the sensors she picked up her second pistol and fell into the same pattern as before, slowly letting her anger go.

Rooting out what Hydra had been doing with Shield resources, a label which she belonged under, had been a series of horrifying revelations, one after the other. She had almost quit, afraid she had just traded one power-hungry, warmongering organization for another.

Eventually, though, she had been able to move past it, instead focusing on helping Shield become what it always should have been. An organization that was about the betterment and protection of all mankind.

She shook her head as she finished disassembling her other pistol, driving out her over-idealistic thoughts. Clearing out Hydra from Shield had obviously been a massive step in the right direction, but there was still plenty wrong with it, still plenty of room for improvement for the global policing organization. The WSC was one of those places that needed improvements at the moment. After Hydra was exposed and excised, they seemed to frequently get stuck in indecisive loops. It looked as though most of their decisiveness had been born from a carefully tuned balance, controlled by Hydra. Hopefully, if anything good came from this whole fiasco, it would be them getting it together and actually getting stuff done.

Natasha finished cleaning the slide, laying it back on the table and moving on to the barrel, working her wire brush through to scrape up any carbon deposits. In truth, there wasn't much there. She took care of her tools after all, with frequent cleaning and oiling.

On top of the fact that the WSC was getting more and more mired down in indecision, they had been growing warier and warier of what Carson was capable of. It really started once the Hydra clean-up was done, when they had some time to consider the implications of a device that could track people down by an ideal anywhere on the planet, down to a few feet. Such a loose, abstract, and powerful concept, and Carson had just dropped a tablet in their lap as if it was something simple. The fact that she was sitting in a massive spaceship, keeping watch over advanced sensors and traveling at ridiculous speeds through the void showed that, in the grand scheme of things, a tracking tablet was no big deal.

Their wariness had only gotten worse after what had happened in Dover. Personally, she had been shocked that he had put his life on the line like that, flying towards an exotic bomb with so little room for error. She had been so desperate, a large part of her hadn't expected him to fly directly to her like that. But he had, saved who knows how many lives. And yet all the WSC could focus on was just how dangerous his carding ability could be. As if they needed the fact that each card could be stuffed full of explosives pointed out to them. Carson had barely left the Helicarrier before they had dragged into a several-hour-long debrief, asking over and over again just what Carson was capable of carrying in his cards.

She needed to ask how he had recovered from that experience. She herself had more than a few nightmare-filled nights where he had just been a few seconds too late. Without her training, and her desensitization towards high-stress situations there was no telling how poorly he might have handled it.

Despite the fact that it was obvious he didn't have any military or combat training, Carson clearly represented a growing power block, even if he was only a team of two. His growing friendship with Tony showed he was capable of working with other people, while this ship proved his power was scaling up. He was clearly making more and more powerful things.

The WSC dedicated whole groups of Shield analysts to study and predict what he would do, and what he wanted. They kept a close eye on every tool that he bought or at least every tool he bought while in his Maker persona. Even an organization like Shield struggled to keep track of a man who could change his face in a few seconds and frequently did so.

Then, out of nowhere, Carson went almost completely off the grid. Occasionally he would be spotted buying this or that, or flying around Malibu, but for a long while he was out of contact. Fury was sure he would pop up again eventually, but even he wasn't sure when. The WSC had all but thrown multiple fits, desperate for any sort of news that might hint at what he was doing. It had only been a few steps away from a paranoid obsession. They had been worryingly close to demanding that Fury turn over his location so that they could "check-up" on him.

Surprisingly his return hadn't really helped their growing paranoia. He waltzed into the Triskelion, wearing new and impressive armor that had a suspiciously high resemblance to the Destroyer armor, with Emerald and a floating box in tow. She was pretty sure that that had been an intentional spectacle.

He walked right up to Fury and made him a mind-boggling offer. Natasha would have been concerned that her earlier analysis of him had been wrong if the palm healers he had offered didn't come with a massive stipulation. Perfect healing, as long as you were good? A decent solution that had potential… if Shield hadn't been nervous about the societal repercussions.

Of course, at that point, she was way too busy having her literal prayers answered to care.

Carson had offered her healing. He took his time explaining how it would work, and what his creation was made out of. He had let her scan herself, stayed out of her way, and not demanded anything, just promised to help. It was funny, he had offered her something she had wanted for her entire adult life, a piece of herself back that she thought she had lost forever. For most people that would have been the primary reason why they liked a person. Why they enjoyed the idea of being around them? Instead, his help fixing the damage that the Red Room had done to her was the primary reason why she was determined to take things slow, to think everything through.

He had come from nowhere, swooped in, and offered her something she had only dreamed about. Where most women might see a savior, a knight in shining armor, all she could see was someone with leverage over her. She had shown a considerable amount of weakness in front of him, and every ingrained instinct she had built up over her lifetime, both by choice and by force, screamed at her that she was making a mistake for letting someone see that.

She pulled back the pistol's slide and pulled the trigger for the second pistol, checking the smoothness of the trigger pull and slide. Satisfied that everything was in order she slid the magazine back into place before turning both pistols back into their ring form, studying the simple gold bands. After a moment she turned back to her console, and checked the scanners again before activating her bracelet and looking over her P90. This had seen the most action during the battle on the Helicarriers flight deck, enough that she had been forced to switch to her pistols at the end when it ran out of ammo.

That was something she would need to work at. Somehow having such deep reserves for ammo made it easier to waste.

Natasha started disassembling her submachine gun, the larger weapon surprisingly much easier to clean. It broke up into chunks, but the trigger pack wasn't something you took apart in the field, and everything was big parts that were easy to clean. Unlike her Glock 34s, which had quite a few smaller parts that she needed to take out and inspect. She finished disassembling the submachine gun, laying out the parts, and starting to clean them, wiping down the trigger pack first.

For all her instincts telling her to be wary, to watch out for him taking advantage, she wanted to fight it. Carson hadn't tried to hold anything over her head and did not deserve her suspicion or distrust. The fact that he had revealed his real name, as well as what he looked like was proof enough that he really did trust her. Not to mention the controls of the ship she was sitting next to. He clearly trusted her, and she wanted to return that trust.

Not that she thought he was above suspicion of course. She may want to change but she refused to be willfully blind. While Carson's inexperience often shone through, usually when he failed to understand an aspect of her work, or why something was such a big deal, he clearly knew things, things he really probably shouldn't.

She had noticed almost immediately after meeting him. He had reacted to her as if he knew she was dangerous as if he knew what she was capable of, despite the fact that recognizing her on sight like that was something very few people could do. She had intended to gauge what he was like, taking advantage of her being an anonymous agent. Instead, he was wary, doubling down when she had said her name.

Moments like that popped up a few more times when she was around. One of the more recent ones had been when he was re-introduced to Betsy and Bruce Banner. She wasn't sure what his reaction meant, but something was there.

And that was ignoring the obvious one. Carson was clearly terrified of the Infinity Stones. He also knew a lot about them, going as far as knowing that the Mind Stone was supposed to be yellow. Sure he had scanners and things to help him eke out some extra information but his fear showed he had knowledge that was much deeper than a short description.

Natasha wasn't sure what these little reactions were, but she was going to find out. And for once, she wasn't going to trick, torture, blackmail, bribe, or falsely seduce the secrets from him. She was going to do it the old-fashioned way, by earning his trust properly.

She clicked the last part of her P90 into place, double-checking that everything worked before storing it back into her bracelet. She considered cleaning her AWM as well, but since she hadn't used it in the last fight there wasn't really a point beyond unnecessary thoroughness.

Carson was an interesting person, one she could rely on and trust. He was attractive, kind, and clearly even more powerful than Shield had originally thought, which in and of itself was shocking. He didn't fuck around, wasn't disgusted by what was necessary, and didn't look at her like… a cut of beef or a potential asset.

Perhaps the most shocking part was how easily he could make her smile. Not her usual teasing smile either, which was carefully learned and improved to show she was just a pretty face, or her saucy smirk, which she knew could make someone's knees weak, but her actual, genuine smile. It was… refreshing, being around him, in a way she had never really felt before. The man was full of surprises.

And apparently, she was as well, even to herself. When she had asked what his relationship with Ema was like, she had not anticipated her own reaction. She was already pretty sure what his answer was before she asked, but getting confirmation… She hadn't expected to be that happy that they weren't together. It caught her off guard.

The spy leaned over and pressed the same button she had earlier, the small table flowing down back into the floor. She turned her chair back until she was facing forward again, doing a quick check of the sensors before leaning back in her chair. Carson would probably be a while, but she was confident he would figure it out and get them home.

She couldn't help but wonder what would happen next.

Hello everyone! Just a reminder that I have a Pa_tre_on! In fact, this interludes focus was chosen by my Board Members, one of the three tiers of support. They also enjoy four early chapters of The Conceptual Deck, two early chapters of Mettle, Metal, Meddled, and five chapters of my original book on the first of every month! If you are interested in showing your support, stop by! Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed the chapter!