Natalia (the_black_widow) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-09-01 03:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, natasha romanoff (black widow), qrow branwen |
What is the Agency?
Who: Natasha and Qrow
What: Talking about dreams and other things
When: Before the demons
Where: Nat's office
Status: complete
Whenever Natasha Romanoff wanted to speak with Qrow, she usually sought him out. He was used to her walking into his office at the university or appearing at his home. The latter was usually reserved for the extra “incentives” Nat was known to provide him, which usually consisted of really nice bottles of alcohol. She knew him so well.
Qrow could count on one hand the number of times he’d been to her office, and probably have fingers left over. The building it was located in was non-descript. The kind that people walked by every day and gave no thought about what the building housed or what was going on inside. Qrow himself probably passed it several times in his travels and had never given it a single thought. He was starting to think that maybe that was the point.
He’d let Nat know he was coming in advance. It may have been ok for her to show up at his place of employment unannounced, but he doubted the reverse was true.
The exterior, and first floor, of the building was a standard office building. It was the numerous stories above and the sprawling complex that spread underground that distinguished it for those in the know.
He was directed to an elevator, which took him up to the top floor. Nat’s office resembled that of just about any CEO’s office, which told visitors absolutely nothing about the occupant. There was nothing personal or quintessentially Natasha Romanoff within.
And that was exactly how she liked it. She looked up from her computer. “Welcome to the Agency.”
“The Agency,” he repeated. The name was both generic sounding and yet still somehow screamed Men in Black. He glanced around her office as he stepped up to her desk. It was at least twice the size of his office at the university and even without any personal effects, definitely had the look and feel of belonging to someone high up on the corporate food chain…or maybe just food chain in this instance.
Qrow had worked for Nat as a member of her network for a little while now, but this was the first he’d ever heard of any agency or her being a part of one. He’d always kind of assumed she worked for some kind of clandestine operation, but had never out-right asked. There was a certain level of plausible deniability that went both ways without him knowing exactly who Natasha really was. It had worked well for them. Until now.
“What is the Agency?” He asked as he came to a stop in front of her desk. “Who are you?”
“I told you that part. Weird things happen, we cover it up so the rest of the world doesn’t decide to come down on us.” Best case scenario were watchlist, worst case? Trying to turn people into weapons.
“I'm Natasha Romanoff. Natalia Romanova. Nadine Roman. Oktober. Black Widow. Many others.” Some of her old Russian accent creeped into her voice the longer she spoke, before disappearing abruptly when she spoke next. “I used to run HR. The spooks and recruitment. Now I run everything. I still prefer the clandestine though.”
She smiled, leaning back in her chair. “I thought I should get the office if I was going to run everything.”
“Makes sense,” Qrow murmured. He noted that subtle slip of an accent, but didn’t comment on it. He got the impression he wasn’t supposed to know that about her. He hadn’t come here to get dirt on her anyway. “I talked with my niece,” he said. “She told me about the Dreams she’d been having.” His eyes narrowed and his voice took on a darker quality. “She also told me what really happened to her arm and where she got the prosthetic.” He wondered if Natasha already knew. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she did, annoyed and angry, maybe, but not surprised.
“She also told me what I can expect to happen,” he went on. “And she made me promise not to say anything to Ruby or the other girls who’ve popped up recently. Which I agreed to do, but there’s some heavy shit that happens. I figure maybe I should tell you, just in case any of this...bleeds through, as you call it.”
Natasha nodded as Qrow spoke. She hadn’t known the details but it had been obvious to her it had been a dream gift. Yang’s so-called accident hadn’t had any records, after all. She’d checked after Qrow has spoken to her.
“I think that’s a good idea. If we have some warning we can make preparations for a response. In my experience it’s not a matter of if someone’s dreams bleed over, but when.”
“Right,” Qrow answered. Finally he took a seat in front of Nat’s desk. The next several minutes were spent first explaining what the grimm were, followed by the White Fang, and finally the invasion of Vale during the Vityl Festival and the fall of Beacon Academy. He was careful to avoid talking specifically about how Yang was tricked and the details she’d shared with him about losing her arm and who specifically had taken it. If any that bled over, he’d deal with it himself. Personally.
“An invasion of grimm is what bothers me,” he said. “You said no one knows exactly how these things work, but given the fact that not only are Yang and Ruby here and Dreaming, but the rest of their team, plus a member of another team and the headmaster of Beacon all showed up at about the same time, it feels to me as though something is coming.”
Natasha listened carefully, taking the occasional notes. While she’d remember everything he said, it would make composing a memo for others in the agency a lot easier. Shepard would need to be read in on this, as well as a few others. The ‘military’ branch would respond. Anything involving terrorists or dream monsters required it.
She desperately hoped that the White Fang didn’t become as big a headache as Cerberus had been, or how Hydra currently was.
“You’re right. Eventually dreams start coming true. The invasions from my own already happened. And the more Dreamers there are who share dreams, the more likely we’ll see some kind of event. Either these Grimm, the White Fang, or both.”
She leaned back, pinching her nose. “The people I had you looking into, they’re from my dreams. Hydra.”
Qrow frowned, “Marguerite and I have been following a few leads in the theater community-” which had required Qrow to go to a few opening nights. Finding a place to sit where he could observe and not influence anything having to do with what was happening on stage, or the theater goers themselves had been an interesting task. “-but nothing has panned out yet.” He tilted his head. “Doesn’t help that we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.” At least the White Fang seemed less cloak-and-dagger and more in-your-face-ripping-it-to-shreds. They would be a lot easier to spot, should they decide to make an appearance. Not that Qrow relished the possibility.
“How long have you,” he made a vague gesture around the office as if to indicate not just Natasha, but the agency as a whole, “been dealing with Hydra? Did they just manifest out of your Dreams or are they actively recruiting?”
“It will be easier to read you in now,” Natasha assured him. “Maybe you’ll even get a tour of my submarine.”
She was proud of that mission. Stealing a prototype Russian submarine had been hard work and a lot of fun.
“Three years now. They formed out of another group we were dealing with before that. Every time we blow up or shut down a cell, another one crops up. From what I’ve gathered, they’re mostly dream related.”
Qrow blinked. “You have a submarine?”
Before he could get an answer, Nat had moved on to reading him in and Qrow’s curiosity about the sub was put on temporary hold. This was the kind of thing he lived for, had possibly even been made for. He listened carefully, brows creasing slightly. Hydra was a scarily appropriate name: for every head cut off, two more grew in its place. It was almost impossible to fight a creature like that. And if these cells were coming straight out of the Dreams? Nat might never be finished with them. Was she even aware of that, he wondered. “Can you defeat them?” He asked. “Permanently?”
“I don’t know. Contain them, sure, end them? I don’t know. We thought we ended it when we took down Cerberus. But after we cut off the head…” Natasha made a throat slitting motion. “Hydra rose from the ashes. It’s been a party ever since.”
“Fun,” Qrow said in a voice that clearly showed the opposite. It came as no wonder now that Nat didn’t always have all the necessary details when she asked him to look into something for her. Her random requests for information seemed …well they were still random, but at least he had a better understanding of why they seemed that way.
“Do your Dreams help, like, at all?” He asked.
It was like painting by numbers when you didn’t always have all the numbers, or know what color went to them. A lot of guess work, and sometimes it was wrong.
“I’ve literally decades of training and experience,” Natasha revealed. “It helps. It’s not always perfect, it doesn’t always apply, and sometimes I miss the good old days when I was just a regular spy and not a super one. But I’d say overall they’ve been positive. Even with the bad things.”
Qrow was beginning to think that maybe defeating Hydra once and for all was an option at all. Who was to say that the Dreams wouldn’t just come up with something else to throw at Nat to occupy her time. The more he heard about the Dreams the less he liked.
He shook his head and sat back in his seat, arms folded. “So the best we can do is prepare and hope for the best.” He didn’t much like that, but at this point there didn’t seem like much could be done otherwise.
Nat was positive the dreams would find something new. They’d beat Hydra like they beat Cerberus, and something new would come. There was AIM, after all, or this White Fang or any number of other dream organizations.
Still, she’d like to put Hydra down once and for all. She’d take a run of the mill terrorist group over Nazis with demon soldiers.
“Are you much of a fighter in your dreams?”
Qrow raised a brow and had to swallow down a snort. Literally the fifth Dream he’d had centered around him not only calling out one of Atlas’s agents, but engaging in an all-out fight with her right in the middle of one of Beacon’s courtyards, which had, of course, resulted in quite a bit of property damage.
“I told you Huntsmen and Huntresses fight the grimm,” he said with a casual shrug. “I’m a Huntsman. So, yeah, I’m a fighter. And a pretty damn good one, if I say so myself.”
“Some of the Hydra soldiers were juiced up. We had a minor demon invasion a few years back, and they got ahold of some of the corpses before we could toast them. A few months later, we ran into one of their teams. They were ungodly strong and fast, and it was like fighting a shadow.”
“Demon invasion,” Qrow repeated, brows arching again. He wasn’t sure what that had to do with whether or not he was a fighter in the Dreams. He was. He was also a fighter in this life as well. He wasn’t a prized MMA fighter like Tai or like his sister had been, but he wasn’t bad.
“Demon invasion,” Natasha repeated to him. She reached into her drawer, took out a flask and took a swig, before sliding it across the surface to him. “We’ve had aliens too. Big invasion out in the desert four years back. Maybe three years. It all kind of runs together.”
Qrow didn’t even hesitate before picking up the flask and helping himself. Qrow wasn’t a picky drinker, but Natasha had always had great taste in alcohol.
Demon invasions. Alien invasions. Again Qrow thought of all the cover-ups spewed by Orange County’s talking heads. At least now he could breathe a little easier knowing Nat and her Agency were on hand should the grimm or the White Fang (or both) decided they weren’t content just being Dreamed about. He took another pull from the flask. “My biggest concern is my nieces,” he said, swirling the liquid around in the flask. “Yang’s a big girl. She’s been doing this for a while now.” And not to take anything away from Yang, but Qrow was her uncle. Her well being was his top priority. As was Ruby’s, who had a lot less experience than her sister when it came to this kind of shitstorm.
Reddish eyes looked up from the flask. “I’ll do anything to keep them safe.”
“She shouldn’t have to do it alone,” Natasha agreed. People like Qrow’s nieces deserved to be young and have fun and start their lives. Let them live, while people like her and Qrow did what needed to be done. They’d already put in the blood.
Natasha suddenly felt every one of the 90 years she’d dreamed she was. “You’re in good company, Qrow.”