So. I'm very sorry that this isn't an update to Tug. It's just... ASDFGHJKL SO HARD WRITING STRAIGHT FROM MOVIES WHAT IF I HURT MY DVD ASDFGHJKL

*clears throat* Moving on! This fic is something that's been bouncing around inside my brainpan for a while now, and I really wanted to get it out there, now that I have a copy of Hanna of my very own. Thankfully, I will not be writing from the movie because everything takes place after canon. So. HA HA HA HA!

I hope you all enjoy this crossover, because there shall be chapters upon chapters. Maybe. Agh. AAAAGGGGHHHH!

Rated M for: References to murder, lesbians, war crimes from the early 1900's, genetic modification, oil-painted breasts in artwork, smoking, and spying.

S.H.I.E.L.D. had its ubiquitous fingers in, apparently, every potentially lethal pot.

Natasha learned this because, apparently, even the CIA had been working on one. It spanned most of Europe, with bases in Germany, Morocco, Siberia - even dear old Stalingrad.

Natasha learned this because, apparently, one of their test subjects survived their extermination protocol in 1996, and had come aboveground in 2011, taking out every standard G.I. put on her tail.

Natasha learned this because she was not standard government issue.

The girl's name was Hanna Heller. She was now nineteen years old and invisible to most intelligence agencies and agents. Her father - and it was a struggle not to call Erik Heller her SO, because he trained her, he made her into what she was - had taught her well.

Natasha had been keeping tabs on Hanna Heller for almost three years. Immediately after the death of Agent Wiegler, she'd managed to find herself a camper van and started her trek across the continent. She was very careful of CCTV, of observance. She used gas stations with uninterested workers and avoided those who watched their clientele like hawks; she never used the same alias twice within a hundred mile span.

She started in Berlin, paying a visit to the Wall with her blonde hair pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her neck so the grey hood of a sweatshirt two sizes too big fit more comfortably, covered her face. Still, from the right angle, one could see a smiling pink mouth reciting the Wall's history, the pads of slender deft fingers hovering in front of the gaping, raw edges left by Mauerspechte.

From there, she drove to Poland, and made stops at every major ex-Nazi footprint - Auschwitz, KZ Majdanek, the Krakow Ghetto. She stopped at the Cloth Hall in Krakow, again reciting the history of the place.

Then it was off to Athens, to Bucharest, to Odesa, to Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, Minsk, Tallinn, St. Petersburg. She sometimes drove days out of her way to find some obscure spot, to sit down with knees drawn up to her chest and recite its history.

She made her way to Finland, left her RV out about two thousand kilometers from the cabin she'd lived in for thirteen years. With a telescope and a nest on a little peak with a clear view, she watched the empty little shack, watched as the last few agents returned to base, watched as snow fell through an unrepaired hole in the roof in the midst of a blizzard.

Watched as her once-loved home died of loneliness.

After two weeks in sub-zero temperatures, surviving off of raw meat and fistfuls of snow, she ran through the woods under the cover of darkness and made it to the cabin by dawn.

Natasha didn't have eyes inside; nor did any other agent or agency. She still does not know exactly what happened in that cabin, or why.

After thirty minutes, Heller stole out of the house, white-blonde hair barely blending in with the glinting snow.

When she made it back to her camper van, she reached under her coat and retrieved a homing beacon - CIA circa 1990's - and flipped a switch.

Two thousand kilometers away, the shack crumbled into dust with a puff of heat and smoke.

It was the eleventh of March, 2012. It had taken Heller exactly one year to make it that far, and from there, she began another encyclopedic pub crawl. She drove to Helsinki and the Hietaniemi Cemetery, island-hopped to Stockholm and stood in the mathematical center of Norrmalmstorg, drove Göteborg and spent a week watching all their ballets, to Oslo.

She packed a small, watertight knapsack and sold her RV. Swam to Denmark, bought a poorly-maintained '50 Nimbus Bomber and repaired it and rode to Hamburg. Bought a burger in every restaurant she saw.

Went to Belgium and did the same with waffles.

To Milan, Rome, Turin, Marseille, Paris.

Everywhere she went, she took pictures of beautiful and ugly things, filling up rolls and rolls of film. A small leather camera bag around her neck, pockets bulging with film canisters, each one bleeding snapshots of supermodels breathing smoke like dragons and gum spat on cobblestones and hunched throngs of people blustering through traffic.

This took her another year. In Paris, under the name Trudy, she stayed at a hotel for three weeks and developed every single photograph twice. She made four neat stacks - first year, second year, for myself, for Sophie.

Natasha watched her lips move as she said that, watched her slip one first year stack into a lavender envelope from the hotel lobby and address it in silver gel pen - childish and silly and the colour that made Sophie's blue eyes gleam - watched her do the same with a second year stack.

The rest of the photos were stuffed into a well-worn, water- and blood-stained copy of Grimm's Faerie Tales and, in turn, stuffed into her knapsack.

The photos were fed into a thick manilla envelope, and Hanna filled the rest of the orange paper packet with a very, very, very long letter.

Hanna spent another three months biking around France, sleeping in parks and hotels and the occasional patch of wildlands, if only for one night, parking outside post offices and very nearly mailing the package.

She finally mailed it to one Sophie Fox, aged nineteen, on the first of June, 2013; on the third, it arrived in the mail.

Hidden in the middle of a stack of university acceptance letters, that manilla envelope brooked the widest smile.

S.H.I.E.L.D. never got a copy of the letter. It was not deemed a priority at the time, and Sophie burned it with a vanilla bean candle after reading it.

She burned every envelope, too, and dumped the ashes into her mother's compost bin. She kept the photos, however, bound tight with a fluorescent pink rubber band that once held organic asparagus stalks and tucked under her pillow.

Hanna Heller disassembled her '50 Nimbus and mailed it, swam to Kinsale, Ireland, where she put it back together and rode to Cork, to Killarney, to Limerick, to Galway, to Castlebar, to Sligo, to Dublin. Once a week, she sent Sophie a postcard with no return address. Sophie replied every time, mailing it to the coordinates written in lieu of a closing line.

Drogheda.

Dundalk.

Londonderry.

Bangor.

Disassembly, shipping, swimming, reassembly.

Heller spent a fortnight on the Isle of Man for the IMTT, racing. She did not win the Single Cylinder race, though she had been riding at a 75mph; instead, she'd stopped and ferried two crash victims to the nearest hospital. She made the news.

What made it more than an inch-long local human interest piece was the fact that she carried two fully-grown, rather large men over her shoulders as she ran from the Hairpin to Noble's Hospital.

S.H.I.E.L.D. decided then that Hanna Heller needed to be contained. She was making herself noticed, making herself too big. None of it was intentional, either; she ran that distance as casually as if she were jogging half a block to get some milk. She hid from agents, from reporters, from public officials, but she never hid from normal people. She played with children and dogs, helped people carry their groceries and move into new houses, fetched cats out of eighty-foot-tall trees.

Sophie wrote letters with newspaper clippings paperclipped in.

On the first of July, she mentioned in one that she thought someone was watching her house.

Hanna wrote back, told her that she'd stop writing for a while, that she'd be nearby.

She sold her motorcycle, packed her knapsack, and swam to Blackpool. She bought a fourth-hand black sedan, waxed it to a glossy government issue finish, and drove to Swindon.

...

The Swindon Art Gallery, with its classically Grecian columns, was inviting despite the CCTV, because Hanna knew Sophie was inside. She parked on Clicklade Street and made her way through the scant crowd to the back of the building.

It was summer, now, and nearing three years since they'd first met, but it still surprised Hanna how different Sophie looked. Her long, soft legs were mostly bared by fawn-coloured twill shorts, and a soft-looking white cardigan covered her midriff more thoroughly than her vacation clothes had. The girl who lived in Hanna's memories was always so very visible, so tangible; the curve of her waist and of her belly and of her ribs was something she could not have helped being aware of, but in this air conditioned museum, the flesh of her was concealed and she was anomalous.

At least to Hanna. This was not the babbling sixteen-year-old who kissed and laughed and shared and danced. This was the eighteen-year-old who clacked across blond wood floors that shone like snow and smiled at canvas like it was telling her the secret of a lifetime.

On silent rubber-soled feet, she crept up beside her very first friend and tapped her cashmere shoulder.

Sophie's narrow blue eyes flicked over to Hanna, observed her, recognised her; one soft hand dropped to cradle Hanna's callused one like a nest cradles a fledgeling.

Very quietly, Hanna remarked, "The woman on the left has three breasts."

Sophie's entire face exploded, a dimpled supernova, as she smiled. "And only one eye. Loads of his stuff is almost photographic - very serious - but this one? I always wonder if Walter Poole was spliffed up."

A raspy, warm little giggle, and Hanna laughed too, even though she didn't understand what was funny. She kept her head down, careful of every camera, and twisted her fingers into Sophie's like a figure-eight knot - unbreakable.

They snuck out the back and waited in a loading dock, in a blind spot between cameras. Hanna slid her hood down, pushed up her sleeves, sighed. This was not her weather, and she was not thriving. She was a marshland tree in the desert. She was drowning in heat.

Sophie pulled out a cigarette, lit it. The click of the lighter igniting made Hanna's heart bruise itself on her ribs, made her fingers tremble, but she ground the unnecessary adrenaline into the concrete beneath her shoes like ash.

"Your photos are lovely," Sophie said, at long last.

"I wanted to show you something about myself," Hanna replied, lilting little snowflake, Finnish forest faerie. "Something true. It only seemed fair. I knew all of your truths, and the only one you knew of me was ugly."

"You saved my life."

"You had nothing to do with Wiegler. You were brought in because of me; I put you in danger, so I took you out of it."

Sophie sighed then, smoke curling through the air, and kicked off her rust-coloured sandals, sinking down to her natural height. She was small, but broad-boned, built to box. Hanna liked that; she was made for something violent and instead she surrounded herself with peace, with beauty. With three-breasted Cyclopes.

"The world isn't like that. It's not so direct."

"Why isn't it? I protected you. You are my friend. This is what friends do." Hanna fingered the woven bracelet she'd fought tooth and nail to preserve for nigh unto three years. "Isn't it?"

Sophie sighed again, but this sigh was lighter. Lemongrass and rain rather than grease and sea water. "Yes, Hanna. Friends take care of each other."

Silence. Feet scooting over pavement, fingers rasping through hair. Lips touching - dry at first, then wet, open, hungry.

"If someone is watching you, I will make them stop."

Sophie did not ask, and Hanna did not tell.

By the end of the week, the agents who had been watching the Foxes for any sign of Hanna Heller were all in hiding.

...

Fury decided then that he wanted her on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s payroll.

Please read and review, especially if you'd like this to continue.