Natalia (the_black_widow) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-06-22 21:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, natasha romanoff (black widow), qrow branwen |
If they’re in any kind of danger, you’d better tell me now.
Who: Nat and Qrow
What: Nat checks on one of her contacts
When: Recently
Where: Qrow's office at the University
Status: complete
Rating: PG-13 for Qrow
The spring quarter was finished. Reviews of final exams, term papers and thesis were done. Most students had either graduated and moved on to the next chapters of their lives, or had returned home to enjoy summer break. For the professors, however, Summer didn’t necessarily mean a break. Some had summer courses to teach, prep syllabi for the fall, teach classes at any number of prep schools, volunteer their time as tutors, etc. etc. Qrow Branwen, as a newly tenured professor, was supposed to be starting his research, as was now required of him along with teaching and sitting on various committees. The committees, he wasn’t too wild about, but he was actually looking forward to the research, being able to choose what it was he wanted to write about. He was looking specifically at the direct effects of Norse Mythology not only on the Norse culture that had created it, but the lasting impact on the cultures the Norse came into contact with, particularly in the British isles.
He’d only just started, but already had a number of books at his disposal, several of which were currently open on his desk. He’d gotten lost in one particular book, notes in front of him, but temporarily forgotten.
It wasn’t the first time Natasha had come to UCI. And it wasn’t even the first time she had for Qrow. Of course that time had been a recruitment mission. This time was a little bit of business and a little bit friendly conversation.
Which for Natasha was also usually business.
She knocked on his door and peeked her head in. “Avon calling.”
Qrow glanced up from his book, expecting to see one of his fellow professors sticking their head into his office to remind him of the time and to maybe gently (or not so gently in some cases) remind him that maybe he ought to go home. He was a little surprised to see Natasha Romanov peering in at him. Thoughts of his research left Qrow’s mind nearly in a blink. Seeing Natasha meant business was afoot.
“Avon,” he raised a brow at her. “Right. If you’re selling Avon, then I’m the Tupp-o-Ware guru of Orange County.” So much for starting his research. A glance down at the notebook in front of him indicated that he probably should take a break anyway. “Alright, Avon Lady, come in. You wanna drink?”
“I’m always up for a drink if you’ve got some,” Nat replied, closing the door behind her as she entered. She pulled out one of the chairs in front of his desk and flopped into it, like this was some kind of casual visit between friends. “Though I could use some new tupperware….”
“Sorry,” Qrow said in a tone that was clearly not sorry, “all out.” He reached down to the bottom drawer of his desk where he kept a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses. For visitors. Sure.
He poured each of them a couple of fingers of whiskey and slid Nat her’s. He recapped the bottle and left it out on his desk while he sat back with his own glass. “So, what brings you to my office today?” He took a sip from his glass, “as relaxed as you look, you never just wanna chat.”
“Well…” Natasha caught her glass and lifted it up. Qrow always had the good stuff - and if the good stuff sometimes found its way to his office or his home in plain brown packages, well she had nothing to do with that, honest.
“I was wondering if you’d been hearing anything usual down the grape-vine. Any unusual movements or chatter.”
One of the reasons she’d approached a professor, was that she believed that Hydra was infiltrating the campus.
“This is a college campus, there’s always something ‘unusual’ going on somewhere,” Qrow answered. It was a smart ass thing to say, but he knew what Nat meant, what she wanted to hear. And as long as booze kept magically appearing on his desk or on his doorstep, he was only happy to feed her bits of intel as he came across them. It was just things had been relatively quiet as far as university campuses went lately. He knocked back his drink. “I haven’t heard anything exceptionally weird lately,” he said as he reached for the bottle and then paused a moment. That wasn’t entirely true. “There was something going on earlier this month. I don’t know if it was a flash mob or what, but people were singing at random. Like, legitimately singing. Entire musical numbers right on the quad. Not quite what you had in mind, I’m sure, but,” he shrugged. “It was pretty unusual movement.”
Natasha wasn’t sure how to clarify normal OC shenanigans separate from actually something important, so she just shrugged. “Wasn’t just the mob. Was a county-wide thing. It happens sometimes.”
People bursting into song “just happened” sometimes. Because of course it did.
Qrow raised a brow at her as he poured himself another two fingers worth of whiskey. It happens sometimes. He’d been living in and around Irvine for over ten years and, yeah, he’d heard some pretty weird shit in his day. Had seen some pretty weird shit. There was always an explanation for it. Some polished and shined anchor person on the news telling everyone it was all “ok” and not to worry. It was just the weather, or some kind of publicity stunt or something had gotten into the water, etc. etc, blah blah blah. At the time they had all seemed like reasonable explanations, but the more one actually thought about it, the more none of it made any fucking sense.
“Right,” he eyed Nat carefully before leaning back with his drink.
“Something in the water,” Natasha said, a sly smile on her face. Being part of the agency meant making those excuses. To be fair, at first they’d been pretty clever at times. But as events kept stacking up it got harder and harder to make it believable. But non-dreamers always fell for it. It had to be a part of whatever magic ripped the county apart.
He didn’t realize it just yet, but Qrow was a Dreamer now. He’d even had his first. He’d tried to shrug it off. Funny thing about that, though. Normally it’d been a simple “Huh, that was a weird one” and then not another thought wasted on it. But this dream lingered like a bad itch in the middle of the back. The kind you couldn’t quite reach. Those creatures and his nieces as little girls lost in the woods… It’d had almost been like a fairytale – a very strange version of Goldilocks, to be specific, with Yang in the titular role.
He also had no idea that this was the reason he was starting to question those lines fed to Orange County residents regarding the weird shit that occasionally happened. He had no idea that was the reason why Natasha’s sly little smirk sent the hair on the back of his neck on end. His eyes narrowed slightly at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Nat remembered the first time that had happened. The fire, where Logan and Rogers had saved her when she was just a little girl in 1940s Russia. The itch never really went away, and sometimes when one’s eyes were open it felt as though the ‘real’ world was the dream.
“Have any unusual dreams lately? Something that makes being awake feel wrong?”
Qrow frowned in response. Natasha was good at what she did, but how would she know about that. Qrow hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. He sat back in his seat, a little guarded. “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
Natasha leaned back in her seat, and pulled up the left side of her shirt to show a bullet scar. “Lets just say I have personal experience with Dreams that translate into reality.”
Ok, Qrow wasn’t expecting that. He leaned forward to get a look at the scar, brows raised and then looked back up at Natasha. He’d heard about strange dreams from this random forum he’d signed himself on to while drunk one night. But no one had gone into any detail, no one had explained to him what they actually were: glimpses into another life. He’d had no real reason to assume the network was anything more than a social networking platform, one where people just happened to talk about what they dreamed of. A little odd, maybe, but no big deal. Natasha showing off a scar was the first time anyone had said that this shit was real.
Qrow’s eyes flickered from the scar in Natasha’s side to her face. “I don’t understand. You were shot in your dreams and you were shot in real life? Like, what? Like it was some kind of premonition or something?” And he still didn’t know what that had to do with the other weird shit that happened here periodically.
“Like I woke up and needed new sheets,” Natasha clarified. “And that’s not the worse injury I’ve ever heard of happening. One woman dreamed she was impaled on rebar and had to be rushed to the hospital. Burns, head injuries, the works. These aren’t just glimpses into another life, they’re other lives that actually cross the barriers between reality. The LSD excuse only goes so far.”
Qrow looked at Natasha for a long few minutes, just blinking. Had she just said that she dreamed of another life and not only had she been shot in that life, but that she had woken up with that same injury here in reality. Qrow had heard a lot of strange things in his life. His childhood had been wrought with superstition, superstition that was constantly thrown in his face by the people who “raised” him. But he had never heard anything like what Natasha was telling him now. “What are you talking about?”
“Everyone on that network you stumbled into shares one thing in common. Dreams. Dreams of another world, sometimes multiple worlds. Even gifts from these worlds, ranging from weapons to trinkets to old photographs that don’t exist otherwise. Or powers.” Natasha finished her drink. “And if you don’t believe me, one of my teams is led by a woman who can walk through walls.”
“How did you…?” He started and then shook his head. That was a stupid question not even worth asking. Nat had known his favorite alcohol without him ever having said so, even sent it to his house without him ever telling her his address, of course she’d know about his drunk joining a random internet forum. Besides, that was the least strange thing out of what she’d just said.
He was frowning again and reaching for the bottle on his desk. It all sounded like horseshit. But that dream about Yang and Ruby. Qrow couldn’t quite figure out why, but it just hadn’t seemed like just a dream. It was as if it had really happened. All he had to do was think about it and there it was. Like a memory.
He poured the whiskey into his glass, but didn’t drink just yet. He looked at Nat carefully. “I had a dream the other night,” he told her. “It was about my nieces, only they were little kids wandering around in the woods. I saved them from these monsters,” Grimm. He knew what they were without even having to think about it. “Is that one of these ‘Dreams’ you’re talking about?”
“It might be. The first time it happened to me, I was rescued from a fire as a girl. Decades ago, before the second World War.” Natasha lifted her glass, staring at the contents. “And it only got stranger after that. Monsters don’t surprise me. But the dreams often…you just know, on an instinctive level, that it’s real. And then you start to realize that maybe that person is who you’re supposed to be, and that this life might be the lie.”
Qrow didn’t like that. There were many aspects about his history he’d prefer hadn’t happened, a lot of things he’d done that he wasn’t especially proud of, and plenty more that he wouldn’t mind at all if they turned out to be untrue. His “curse” for example, a walking bad luck charm. But the last fifteen years and the family he managed to gain despite all odds being against him? He’d rather that not be a lie, thank you.
“Both Yang and Ruby are on that network too,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Is this happening to them too? If they’re in any kind of danger, you’d better tell me now.”
“No more or less danger than you.” Nat shook her head. “If they’re on the network, they’re dreamers. I know Yang has posted about it before. Probably wouldn’t be hard to back track.”
Of course she tended to have files of most everyone but he didn’t need to know that. And some things should come from the horse’s mouth.
The question was did Qrow want to go through the forum’s archives to find what Yang had been posting about? What sorts of things she’d been dreaming. Somehow, though, that seemed like a kind of invasion of privacy. Technically the posts were public -- at least to those on the forum. It should have been easy enough to just sign on and check. Then again, Qrow thought (or would have liked to believe, anyway) that if there had been any real trouble, Yang would have come to him. He liked to be the “cool uncle” the one that wasn’t up in his niece’s business.
“Yeah, I get it,” he said just before taking that drink. “I take it all the weird stuff that happens around here has something to do with all this Dreaming.”
“It’s all related. I’ve seen a dozen theories. Multiple universes, magic bleedthrough, and some wackier ones. My dreams have had issues with multiple universes crossing over in them, and I’ve dreamed of two different versions of myself. Some people have dreamed even more.” Natasha shook her head. “That’s not too common, but I’ve been noticing a slight uptick.”
“So basically what you’re telling me is that no one has a fucking clue what’s going on,” Qrow said. He sat back in his chair and rubbed at his eyes. He wasn’t sure what was crazier, what Natasha was telling him, or the fact that he actually believed her. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the entire county that would make this any easier to swallow.
Natasha just shrugged. “Sometimes you have to stop asking why and just play the recovery game. Record of events goes back to spring of 2012, and they’ve only become more frequent. Several alien invasions, usually stopped by people who’ve dreamed of fantastic powers. Giant killer robots, an alien version of Godzilla. A spider the size of an office building. And then there’s the singing. People inexplicably tied to one another by an invisible string for a week. Body swaps. Reality broke and became twisted and it’s all we can do to keep the wider public from noticing, let alone governments and corporations.”
She could imagine what the US or Russian governments could do with super powers and robots.
“Record of events?” Qrow raised a brow. “So someone’s keeping tabs.” And he could guess who that someone was if it wasn’t the government. He could understand the secrecy, not wanting any Men in Black poking their noses where they weren’t wanted, locking innocent people up to poke and prod at or use for their own agendas.
“The place I.. well I suppose I run it now.” She ought to make an announcement to that effect, but she was effectively the highest ranking person left. “Someone has to keep things secret. And I’m really good at secrets.”
Qrow grunted. Wasn’t that the damn truth. “Yeah, I should have known that.” His glass had been emptied and refilled at least once as they spoke further. He sort of felt a little better with the knowledge that Natasha was keeping an eye on all this weirdness. He sort of wished she had told him about it before now. He understood why she hadn’t. Before now there was no way he would have believed her.
Natasha just gave him a smile, then reached over to take his bottle and pour herself a shot’s worth into her glass. As if to answer him, she knocked back the shot, and set the glass back on the desk. “Let me read you in on Hydra. You’re going to want another drink.”