Flipping Legacies, pt. 4 (unedited)
pt. 1 (edited)
pt. 2 (edited)
pt. 3 (unedited)
Parts of pt. 3 are included in this, simply because I ended pt. 3 in a weird spot because that was where I’d stopped writing.
For those who are new and following me from ao3--no, there’s not yet four chapters to this. On tumblr, you people get to have the dubious honor of seeing my writing process, so you guys get stuff as I’ve written it. Or as I have time to carouse tumblr and post. Mostly the former so far. The latter for this time.
~~~~~
“He goes by the name of Ra’s al Ghul—R-A-apostrophe-S, lowercase A-L, then capital G-H-U-L,” she says, letting the potatoes boil and grabbing the flour she’d set aside on the counter and the yogurt and eggs out of the fridge. “He’s apparently immortal—Hood didn’t tell me how or why—and he’s also, evidently, pervy and borderline sociopathic, which is just what everyone wants in their terrorist organization.”
She’s on speaker. She can tell because she can hear Clint snort and Steve let out a noise that is probably a mostly-strangled laugh.
“I did some digging,” she says. She leaves out the part that she’s made acquaintances with the street workers, who are wary of her, but apparently all know that she’s gotten a mostly-all-clear from Red Hood. New Yorkers’ gossip mill is only trumped by the Gothamites’. “The League is mostly based out of the Middle East, but Batman pissed them off however many years ago and have made regular forays into the city since then--just to stir up trouble.” There’s a produce vendor that got really snippy and went on a three-minute rant about how he’s supposed to make money when he’s got Batman and the League playing real-life Fruit Ninja that Natasha had to actually use her training to keep a sympathetic face on and not bust a gust laughing at.
There is also the accompanying YouTube video that she’d pulled up out of curiosity and got the magnificent image of weapons-grade steel forged with loving precision into a tool of clean death being used to slice an actual watermelon that had been chucked at the assassin by one of the Robins. The video is too grainy to get a pin on which Robin, but she would bet just about anything that it was the second Robin. The second Robin enjoyed pulling weird shit out of nowhere and throwing whatever-it-was at unsuspecting enemies before launching himself.
The three-pronged attack—with Batman as the formidable third prong—worked about ninety-five percent of the time, and Natasha almost always gets a laugh out of whatever had been used as a distraction this time.
“Half-baked assassinating nuisances, in other words,” Tony snarked.
It’s not a video call, but Natasha can see Steve’s eye-roll.
“In other news, I had to beat Hood over the head with the knowledge that he is a Kingpin,” she says casually, grinning outright in the privacy of her apartment.
Clint immediately bursts into laughter, while silence radiates from Steve and Tony.
“He tried arguing with me,” she continues, her grin leaking into her voice. “He defined a Kingpin, and then tried to define himself as something else. I watched him mentally flip through various adjectives and come up with synonyms to the definition he’d just read me about Kingpins.”
There’s a muted thud, and Tony finally joins Clint in laughter. Steve’s not one for boisterous laughter like the rest of the boys, but she can imagine him resting his head against the nearest flat surface and grinning helplessly at the very idea of having to be told that you’re a kingpin.
“’You’re a wizard, Harry,’” Tony chokes out, and then resumes laughing.
Clint wheezes a little.
“Very much so,” she agrees. “He’s stupidly impressive in his criminal activities, so I did not anticipate having to argue with him about the definition of them. It’s one thing if I have to argue with someone over whether viewing a copyrighted video posted online somewhere that’s not sanctioned by the company is illegal. Its an entirely different thing if I have to argue with someone over whether their systematic takeover of power of the various mafias defines them as a Kingpin.”
Natasha folds the yogurt, flour, and eggs together to make the dough needed as she talks.
“Natasha,” Steve says. His grin is bright in his voice. “You’re breaking Clint.”
Yes, she is quite capable of hearing Clint wheeze.
“I need both hands for my perogies now, so I’m hanging up and giving Clint a chance to catch his breath,” Natasha says.
Tony shouts something to JARVIS—something mathematical that she hasn’t bothered looking up yet—and Steve says, “Clint’s flapping a hand in the phone’s direction, so I’m assuming that he’s saying goodbye.”
“Bye, Clint,” she says affectionately.
“Bye, Natasha,” Steve says.
“Bye Steve, go wrestle Tony into eating something not blended by a robot with questionable tastes and sleeping sometime before I come back to the Tower,” she says, and hangs up before she hears Tony say something lewd about wrestling.
~~~~~
She realizes something as soon as she starts trying to dig into Ra’s al Ghul’s past: Hood was not lying or exaggerating about the immortal part of the immortal asshole description. She can’t decide if she’s disgusted or impressed by the fact that he’s anywhere from two hundred to seven hundred years old, depending on what trail she follows. His actual name has long been lost to the annals of history, much like her own—though whether it was on purpose or by accident would only be known by Ra’s. His new name directly translates to Head of the Demon, or, more American-ized, Demon’s Head.
On the plus side, the word ghul—demon—has been around for many more hundreds of years before Ra’s has, so she doesn’t have to wonder if he named himself after it or if they named it after him.
On the other hand, the only Demon’s Head that comes up during cursory google searches is some punk clubs and the occasional BDSM place. Ra’s al Ghul, as a name of a person, shows up nowhere. There is a lady named Talia al Ghul that flits in and out of Gotham elite as she ferries back and forth between her home in the Middle East and Gotham, but she’s so high profile that her secretly being part of a terrorist organization is a stretch.
Natasha has done it. She still works undercover and she is still highly successful. It’s possible. With whatever immortality source (or possibly a gene?) that Ra’s al Ghul has, he could have theoretically passed it onto his daughter, and therefore Talia is much older than she looks. Natasha’s first instinct says that she’s spinning this yarn for far too long and it’s implausible in the extreme, but. Well. She passed her own centennial three years ago, and she still looks twenty-six. And she lives with a frozen super-soldier from 1945, who is rapidly nearing his own centennial and looks twenty-three. Plus—well. Talia al Ghul has ties with Gotham, and anyone that she would even think twice about and has ties with Gotham is probably worthy of some digging. Gotham was highly suspect long before Batman and the various Rogues showed up on the scene.
She’s beginning to suspect that she’ll get nothing from google, and only vicious, overblown rumors from the locals when she starts heading towards the most likely area where the League of Shadows is.
But Talia. Talia might be the key.
She digs a little deeper, using her old SHIELD access paths at times (slightly illegal) and outright hacking other things (blatantly illegal) and manages to access TSA and FAA for the last few years. Talia has travelled a lot more than the tabloids have tracked—all of the countries on the Arabian Peninsula, which makes sense. Some other Middle East countries—Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—as well as Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, and Morocco.
The interesting thing?
The only time Talia travels alone is when she goes to the States. All other times, she is accompanied by people that are clearly bodyguards, or one other male that fits the description of Hood, or a child.
Her phone pings and lights up next to her. She unlocks it swiftly.
ras al ghul has a daughter, Tony texts.
let me guess, her name is Talia? Natasha sends back.
her names talia al ghul and is somehow high society socialite? how does that work?
Carefully. Natasha responds snarkily.
wait what did YOU find on her?
likely the location of los and a few pieces of confirmation that hood was probably under her care for several years, but not in the last year. it fits the information i was given. hood is probably about nineteen or twenty
It’s a grim thought, but it looks like the League of Shadows are not completely to blame for Hood’s proficiency. This will be a long mission. Dismantling the child soldier/assassin organizations tend to take a while.
~~~~~
Natasha had strayed from the path laid out for her in late November of 1989. In a blatant display of correlation does not equal causation, it was also the last time she had seen Drakov—aka the Winter Soldier, aka “Bucky” Barnes. Their last time together was a traumatic one, and ended with Drakov being forcibly wiped and Natasha extracted and sent across the world.
Perhaps an outside observer would immediately jump to the Hollywood-esque conclusion: she was so distraught over what happened to him that she broke away to do good in the world. On the contrary—it was not his treatment that had bothered her. Being wiped was normal for Drakov. He became unstable rapidly, unable to do his job.
No, what had bothered her was he, himself, who named her Romanova.
“You hold the power of the states in your hand,” he’d said affectionately. “A queen among women, always.”
She was number twenty-eight among the Red Room. Her name was whatever her handlers wanted it to be for the mission.
A name. A name. A name. Strange how powerful something so simple as a name can be.
And then she had gone looking. For her name. For her sisters’ names. For the names of those that she had slaughtered and killed while training to become Chernaya Vodva.
By 1991, the Soviet Union fell at her feet, and the Americans started realizing that there were some outside influences on how it had fallen.
By 1998, she’d been safely ensconced in SHIELD, under the protection of Coulson and the wing of Barton.
Twenty-five years had passed, and the shock of seeing Drakov in Gotham was like Clint managing to rig one of his pranks successfully. Shocking at first, and hilarious after a few seconds had passed.
Of all the places that Drakov could have gone to. He had all of New York City, all of the US, all of the world that he could have gone to, and he chose Gotham.
“Natalia,” he says.
“Drakov,” she says.
He looks...surprisingly good, actually, for a man set free of his captors and little idea of the state of the world. If he’s who Steve says he is—which he probably is—then Natasha has little doubt that the combination of Steve Rogers Wrangler and Winter Soldier both served him in good stead in this brave new world.
“You look good,” she offers.
“You look like trouble,” he responds dryly.
She can’t help the smirk. “My specialty,” she says.
“Are you and Steve still running headfirst into the stupidest shit?” he asks.
“Even worse: we plan on running headfirst into the stupidest shit,” she says.
“Oh, no, not the plan,” he says flatly.
She grins, sidles up to him, links their arms together. “I have missed you,” she says fondly. “And more to the point, so has Steve. How dare you not teach me how to withstand his particular brand of puppy dog eyes.”
They walk, falling into step like they had so many times before. “You overestimate my teaching abilities if you think that I can teach you that through anything but throwing you at it repeatedly.”
Remembering the times that he had actually thrown her at something, she sighs. “Bozhe moy. No. That is not an effective teaching strategy, Drakov.”
“Maybe not, but it’s highly entertaining anyways,” he says.
