Spider-Man. The House Of Venom

Six Months Ago

Fury looked at the files in front of him, and he already had a headache.

“So, Agent Rumlow. Care to explain why I have two missing agents? A field report giving me a general location of where they were. However, there is nothing as to why they suddenly decided to go off coms and then mysteriously vanish.”

Brock Rumlow grinned at his boss, “They thought they saw one of those uh freaks and chased her. No idea what happened though,”

Fury rubbed his forehead,

“That's all Agent Rumlow. Please send in Barton and Romanov.”

The tall, handsome muscular agent stood and smirked before he left. Outside, sitting in plastic chairs were two agents. One was a clean-shaven and very bored-looking blonde man, the other was a buxom redhead. She stared at Rumlow as if deciding whether to kill him or ignore him. “Yeah, the boss wants you,” he said to the pair waiting outside.

“So?” Clint Barton asked as he sat down and grabbed the first file, “two missing agents and a stray cat.”

Clint was one of Fury's top men. He was attentive, good with almost any weapons, and loyal.

“I have two cases here. One is a shitshow of one disaster after another, and the other is a milk run to babysit a possible target. Or asset. Depending on how it's handled and what his involvement is.”

“Yeah.” Clint said, “Rock paper scissors?” he asked the woman sitting at attention next to him

“I will take the disaster. You can do the milk run, as you called it.” The stoic redhead leaned over to grab one of the files.

Clint laughed, “Yeah, senior agent Nat. You don’t get to pick. So either, rock paper scissors or you get the milk run.” He snatched the file from her, “no argument.”

Natasha Romanov rolled her eyes and held out a hand. Fury watched unamused as Clint beat her three for three.

“Ha!” he said and handed her the second file.

“Aleksei Systevich. Russian Mafia and local territory holder. Blown up, so what's the big deal?”

“We found enhancement formula in what was left of him.” Fury said deadpan, “and a lot of it. A mix of Banner and super-soldier. Not as bad as a Hulk but still bad enough.”

“Hulk? You think he might be one of the four?” Clint asked, flicking through the pages.

“We do. So, you need to find out if the other three were responsible, and where he got the formula from.”

Clint shrugged, “oh yeah, seems easy.”

“And I get.” Natasha paused, “Peter Parker. Why is this a milk run?”

Fury shook his head. “The son of one of our top agents happens to have a warehouse in the area. He was also at the bar they trashed trying to steal a corporate keycard to get access to Oscorp’s secure facility. We need to know if he was involved. And, we need to eliminate him as a suspect.”

“So why is it called a milk run? Do you want me to milk him?”

Fury raised an eyebrow while Clint burst out laughing,

“Yeah. It's called a milk run because it's something a kid can do.”

Natasha scowled, “I am not a child.”

“We know. This should be an easy assignment but if Parker is involved it might not be. If his mother hid a vial of formula, he may be one of the two costumed vigilantes currently operating in New York.”

“I think his chest is a bit small to be the catgirl, but, You’d know more about that huh Nat.”

Nat was dressed in her usual form-fitting black armour body suit.

“It's an armoured bodysuit, not a catsuit.” but she was engrossed in the file. “Do I apprehend and interrogate or tail and observe?”

Peter Parker was the son of one of her targets. Mary Parker. They might think it was a milk run, but if his childhood was like hers, then he would be a difficult and dangerous target.

“I will leave that to you. But as this is your first assignment after the Budapest incident. Approach and befriend him, talk to him and slowly gain his trust. How you take it from there is up to you.”

Natasha continued to read, and she nodded, “And after?”

“If he’s just a normal kid you let him go.”

“If not?” Natasha asked.

“That is a whole other issue. If he is Powered, you won't go in alone, and if he’s cooperative. We may approach him for the Avengers initiative.”

Clint rolled his eyes, huffing, “Great, another giant monster on the team, just what we need.”

“He might be Spider-Man,” Fury said.

Clint smirked and shook his head, “we’re never that lucky.”

⁂

Natasha had expected this to be boring. Natasha had expected this to be a waste of her time.

She was right.

As far as she could tell, Peter Parker was one of the most boring people she had ever tailed.

He went shopping and bought enough groceries for a family of six at least twice a week. No prescriptions for contraceptives, pills or prophylactic. Her theory he was romantically involved with at least one of his tenants went out the window.

He attended class, but never spoke to anyone, handed in his work and left. Casual but polite greetings were normal, even with the staff.

He went to bed at any hour he felt like it and was a quiet and polite young man. It was in trying to gain a better idea of his home life that Natasha hit a roadblock.

The warehouse was a fortress.

The glass had a coating on it that let in natural light, but her spycam only recorded a grey film. It was on the inside so that killed that angle of approach.

The air vents all had a strange white mesh on them. Thicker than normal they were there to stop insects from entering through the vents. It was normal in a large building but it was so tough that even her cutter couldn’t scratch it.

Then she tried the sewer. There was a manhole at the front entrance but once more there was a white panel across the access. It felt like a hard stone but was glued to the hatch and wouldn't budge. Everything she tried to pry it loose failed. She had more luck taking a chunk of concrete away than removing whatever it was.

Then as the lights went out, she climbed onto the roof, hoping to find an easily accessible hatch. Once more there was that damn white plating and no lock on the hatch. No keyhole. Nothing

It was infuriating. Someone so boring had such high security. Either he wasn't boring and was hiding something, or he was so boring that he didn't know the security was there.

Both scenarios were plausible. After finding nothing on Peter, she moved to his houseguests.

She struck Gwen Stacy off the list immediately. She was almost as boring as Parker, and with her father's job, it made her a low-risk target.

Mary Jane Waston got an interesting hit. From Stark of all people. She took one look at the gorgeous  aspiring actress and filled that under ‘Tony Stark is a creep.’

Her last search, of Felicia Hardy, proved the most interesting. She had gotten several hits from the Hand, an organisation that mainly operated in Asia. A few from Electra Nachios, the reclusive daughter who had gone on a mad rampage to find her father's killer. If anyone was hiding something it was probably her. She had the means and the contacts to beef up the security to that degree.

Parker was a bust. Felicia Hardy wasn’t her target, and therefore not her problem. If Fury wanted her to investigate further he would let her know.

Sighing as she finished her report and emailed it to Fury she yawned and stretched. This was a waste of time.

⁂

Clint looked over the mess that was Aleksei’s office. He could see where the cops had been in. The office was still a mess. Cops collected evidence, they didn't clean up after themselves.

The problem was, that he also saw the more careful and professional crew that came in after. The one that looked at the explosion, and then the safe. The one that took samples and the one that emptied the hidden room the cops missed.

He just didn’t know who it was. Shield had no official team here, but the work definitely looked like theirs. There were a few minor discrepancies. Enough to point to maybe an ex-Shield agent, but he paused as he picked up the sound of talking. Nobody should be here. The place was on lockdown for another week. To avoid detection, he vaulted up one of the walls and slid into the shadow of a ruined window above.

“Dah. I see. No, there is no sign of the vials. Dah, I will be back.”

Clint didn’t want to move. Whoever was below him would have a good view if they looked up, and in Clint's experience, they always looked up.

He heard a whumph noise and the sounds below him shifted to the hidden room,

What the hell?

He slid back, higher along the wall, gripping it with his fingertips. The same whumph noise went off and he heard the person behind him, in the ruined room. It was junk items, and phones and looked like a repair shop. He had given it a cursory glance. With nothing on the chemical sniffer he ran over the tables, he ignored it.

“There is nothing.” He heard the man speak again. He sounded Russian,

Yeah, Russian isn’t good.

The whumph noise sounded once more, and whoever it was was now downstairs again.

“No vials, and no paperwork.” Clint heard a pause, “Dah, I will head back now.”

The whumph noise sounded once more, and after a minute CLint carefully leant his head out.

Well, that was weird.

As he surveyed the three areas the man had been in, there were no extra footprints. One set. A high-heeled pointed-toe footprint was all he found. Expensive and not an investigator.

A teleporter? Nah.

He had watched the Shield archive footage of Rogers, and the very recent Hulk footage. He knew that Super-Soldier and Gamma formulas both existed and they were bad. He shivered at the thought of a teleporter.

Just my job to report, not my job to care.

Clint looked forwards to putting that little nugget of information into his report. He would let someone with a much higher security clearance deal with the headache.

⁂

Present Day

Shield Director, Nicholas Fury, was not happy.

It had been over six months since the Sytsevich incident and he was no nearer finding the truth than before. He had Clint's report. He had Natasha’s and neither of them were promising.

Then there was the interference of the Russian agent. Natasha had heard the recording and shrugged. If he was Red Room it wasn't anyone Natasha had met.

Her report was just as boring. Peter Parker was a normal, if smart, kid. He went to college. He went grocery shopping, and he did all the things that made this investigation useless.

Fury leant back in his chair and lay his hands on top of his head.

He had a choice. He knew Peter was mixed up with Aleksei. He knew that he was friends with Harry Osborn. There was a string connecting him to everyone and everything but that was about it. A string. No evidence, nothing more than a hunch Fury had.

He huffed and picked up his phone,

‘Agent Romanov. The milk run just became an interrogation. No holds barred.’

⁂

Natasha Romanov looked at her phone as the message came through,

No holds barred meant she was free to get the information any way she wanted. Simply grabbing him and torturing him would be the easiest, but if he was like his mother, that could be bad. Instead, she sat on the couch in her sparsely decorated studio apartment and meditated on it.

Peter Parker, age nineteen.

Three roommates, all young, all female

No indication of romantic involvement with housemates

No indication of outside romantic involvement

Attends college online and with minimum class time

No friendships discovered

Conclusion

Socially stunted individual with an introverted personality

Low probability of additional friendships

Low probability of romantic and sexual experience

Her course of action to get what she wanted was simple.

Seduction then honey trap.

She looked at his file again, and at the pictures she had taken. He was only three years younger than her. Clint had rescued her during one of her first missions from the Red Room. Rather than eliminating her, she had been taken and deprogrammed.

It had been months of slow and difficult therapy, a lot of different drugs, and a lot of physical and emotional pain. In the end, she had been taken under Clint’s wing and was now working for Shield. She had to ignore the looks the other agents gave her. The Widow program wasn’t as secret as she thought, or at least the rumours weren't. The exploits of an army of attractive and dangerous young women had spread to Shield.

Right now though, Natasha didn’t care. Seducing a naive young man would be one of the easiest assignments she would ever have.

She just hated the stubble when her pubic hair grew back.