It started before Natasha had realized it. First, they were all parked outside the old clubhouse of the Lost Disciples—now currently inhabited by Damon and the Los Diablos. Griffin had groaned in disappointment when he saw, and Natasha felt for him. In fact ,the idea of these traitorous assholes hanging out in the same place her father used to enjoy spending his time made her feel sick. At first, they really thought that they had the jump on everything, until a great crack rang out and she heard someone make a sound of pain.

 

Turning, she could see one of Flores’s guys slump over and fall off of his bike. Immediately, she saw a flash of an eye in the top left corner of a window.

 

She ripped her own gun out of its holster, aimed, and fired. The glass of the window shattered, and the sniper slumped against the window, alive but incapacitated.

 

“Nice shot,” Flores murmured from beside her.

 

She was about to thank him when all hell broke loose. At first, she thought there would be tension, that someone would come out and say something. Instead, gunfire immediately filled the air. It felt as though it was everywhere, and very quickly Natasha noticed that this was a lot different than the situations she had faced before. She thought it wasn’t going to be much different than the situation at the funeral, but instead, it seemed as though the violence was everywhere.

 

She ducked down, panic racing in her veins. She was completely out of her element even if she had fired the first shot for her side, but as she stayed ducked and felt the bullets whiz by her, she realized that she was nothing more than a coward. That snapped her out of it quickly.

 

She glanced up, saw a Los Diablos rush out of the clubhouse, aimed her gun, and fired. She watched as he crumpled to the ground and felt good about it. It served him right, didn’t it?

 

This went on for what felt like forever, and it seemed as though they were making a decent amount of kills, but it wasn’t until she looked around her that she realized they were taking losses as well.

 

Brendan lay on the ground, staring up at the sky with quickly emptying eyes. Natasha wanted to go to him to see if there was anything that she could do, but what could she? One of the members of his charter stopped to see if he was okay and came away devastated. It gave Natasha chills. Did her father ever have to do this? Had he been as scared as she was? If he hadn’t, what did that make her?

 

Someone grabbed her sleeve and pulled her down behind a fallen motorcycle, for a moment she struggled until she realized that none of the so-called “bad guys” were outside the house, having instead opted to stay inside and go on the defensive. She turned to see Flores, the leader of the Vallejo Disciples grinning back at her.

 

“First firefight?” he asked with a bit of humor in his voice. Natasha gawked at him, shocked that he could keep such good spirits when the entire world seemed to be crumbling down around them. There was something reassuring in his voice though, and she couldn’t help but laugh a little.

 

“Yeah, how could you tell?” she said in an attempt to match his tone.

 

“It’s okay. Everyone has to have a first time.”

 

“Well, they could just not have this time at all,” Natasha said helpfully, peering over her cover and taking a shot. She heard a Los Diablos curse as she hit him in the leg.

 

“But what’s the fun in that?”

 

“Well, do you have any suggestions?” she asked him. He smiled in a way that made him seem like a fighter pilot in a plane that was going down.

 

“Only one. Don’t get shot.”

 

Natasha laughed, warming up to Flores in the way that she imagined people on the battlefield became friends. She knew that they would probably never go shopping together, would probably never go for coffee or watch movies or do whatever it is that normal friends did, but she could imagine her buying him a beer at a bar if they both happened to be in at the same time, and that in and of itself was powerful.

 

Suddenly, out of nowhere, she heard a crack, and turned to Flores. He looked back at her quizzically for a moment before reaching down and touching his chest. A flower of blood looked as though it had bloomed there, and before he could say anything else, he fell over and lay still. Natasha stared down at his body in dumb horror. She looked back up and saw a familiar clean cut face through the window.

 

It was Damon.

 

Meanwhile, Griffin had taken up residence in the back of the ray, definitely not stupid enough to be near the front where he knew he would make an easy target. He hadn’t seen Damon yet, but he could hear him, calling orders to the men inside the house. It was a tricky situation, ideally the men inside could stay there indefinitely. This wasn’t the old days in Medieval England where castle sieges could take months. They weren’t going to be able to starve them out, because Griffin knew that even if the police didn’t come soon, they were going to come eventually, and the police were the last thing he really wanted to face down.

 

He caught a glimpse of Natasha’s blonde hair in the crowd and called out to her. Upon hearing her name, she whipped wildly around, and it was then that he realized she had been sitting next to the still, most likely dead body of Flores. Goddamn it, he thought. Not Flores too. Brendan was already dead, which meant that two charter leaders were off the board. Griffin knew that they shouldn’t have come, but he wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to deny them. Hopefully they went down with guns blazing.

 

Natasha’s wide amber eyes bore into his, and he made a gesture to have her come to his side. Watching out for any flying bullets, Natasha ran as fast as she could to him, and he gave her a quick squeeze on her arm in order to keep her calm. For a person who had been a civilian a mere few days ago, she was holding up remarkably well, although he could see a little tremor in her hands as she worked to reload her pistol.

 

“Have you seen Damon yet?” he asked her. She nodded.

 

“Yeah, I’m probably going to go for him soon,” she replied. “I just want to end this before more people get hurt.”

 

So…she had actually noticed what had happened to Flores; Griffin had been hoping that she didn’t. It didn’t matter now. He’d plan those funerals later. All he knew was that he didn’t want to plan hers.

 

“We need to come up with a decent plan first,” he told her. “We can’t just go in there with guns blazing now can we?”

 

If she was listening to him, she didn’t show any indication of it, and Griffin wanted to remind her about her quiet past in order to keep her from being a hero.

 

“Listen, I’m going to pick out a handful of guys that are still standing, then we’re going to go around the house and order his surrender, does that sound okay to you?”

 

The fire was back in Natasha’s eyes, and she shook her head. “No, I don’t want to give him any time to escape. He can see us better than we can see him, and I don’t want him to realize what we’re doing. I need to do an ambush.”

 

“What?”

 

It was then that another great spray of bullets roared overhead, causing everyone to duck. Griffin rolled to the side, propped himself up, and began shooting, turning to find Natasha and to see what she might be doing.

 

Natasha wasn’t there anymore.

 

Frantically, he looked around in the hopes that she had just moved position and didn’t do the very goddamn dumb thing he had been terrified that she would do.

 

His heart sank as he saw a flash of her blonde ponytail as she disappeared around the house. God, no. Keeping low to the ground, he made his way to the back of the house, knowing that she was moving too fast for him to stop her before entering, but hoping he could at least be there to back her up. He had two guns, more feelings for her than he would have ever liked to admit, and was fully ready to kill for her if given half the chance. As he looked at the carnage this shoot out was doing, he couldn’t help but realize that those were really decent odds.