Chapter 8
It doesn’t take long to realize SHIELD is nothing like the organizations she’s worked for before.
For one, they don’t operate on fear.
The training facilities are strict, the instructors demanding, but there’s no underlying threat of punishment for failure. No conditioning, no psychological torment disguised as motivation. No silent promises of pain lurking beneath every expectation. Instead, there’s structure — measured, controlled, efficient. SHIELD doesn’t break its recruits to make them stronger. It doesn’t strip them down to rebuild them into something unrecognizable.
It unsettles her.
The lack of cruelty feels like an absence of control.
She moves through her new role cautiously, never fully letting her guard down. They place her in training alongside recruits with real-world experience — military personnel, intelligence operatives, people who chose to be here. They’re disciplined, skilled, and conditioned to work as a unit. They fight in sync, move in sync, trust in sync.
Natasha doesn’t work like that.
She’s always half a step removed, navigating between them as an outsider. She controls the way she presents herself — just competent enough to prove she belongs, but not enough to stand out. When she fights, she wins, but not too quickly. When she’s tested on weapons, she lands shots with clinical accuracy, but not perfection. Just another skilled recruit, nothing more.
For now, that’s what she needs to be.
But she watches.
She studies how SHIELD operates — the fluidity of their chain of command, the way information moves, the relationships between agents. There’s a foundation of trust here that she doesn’t understand. Orders are followed, but not blindly. Questions are allowed. Mistakes aren’t punishable offenses.
Phil Coulson is at the center of it all.
He’s always watching, but never in a way that feels intrusive. He’s not waiting for her to fail, not trying to measure her in ways she’s been measured before. He asks questions — not direct, interrogative questions, but things designed to make her think rather than react. It’s careful. Purposeful. She doesn’t know if it’s for her benefit or his.
And then there’s Clint.
He’s different.
The other agents train in teams. They move in and out of missions together, exist within a structure. Clint doesn’t.
He’s never part of the scheduled training sessions. He moves on his own time, sticks to his own space. She’s seen him in the weapons range after hours, recalibrating his bow with a kind of absent familiarity, like it’s a part of him. She’s watched him take a rifle once — just once — adjust the sight with practiced ease, and put three rounds through the same hole on the target before setting it aside like it meant nothing.
Most people who favor a bow have no interest in guns — well, no one uses a bow anymore; Clint Barton and the infamous Hawkeye are the only two people she’s heard that use a bow. Barton doesn’t seem to have any such preference. He’s comfortable with all of it.
He spars alone.
Most agents train against each other. Clint doesn’t. He runs through hand-to-hand routines against the combat dummies, drills techniques with mechanical precision. When he moves, it’s not with the explosive, forceful aggression of a soldier or the sharp-edged discipline of a martial artist. It’s efficient. Direct. There’s no wasted effort, no unnecessary flourishes.
Natasha watches from the upper level of the training facility one evening, unnoticed.
He doesn’t go for disabling strikes.
Most operatives train to neutralize threats — break a limb, disarm an opponent, incapacitate. Clint’s movements are different. His strikes are meant to kill. He moves with a level of certainty that only comes from experience, from muscle memory ingrained through years of repetition. It’s too smooth, too practiced, too natural to be theoretical.
He doesn’t hesitate.
And yet, he doesn’t seem to enjoy it either.
She’s seen killers before. She’s been trained by them, fought beside them, survived them. The Red Room taught her to recognize them instantly — the ones who kill out of necessity, the ones who kill for pleasure, or the ones who kill because it’s all they’ve ever known.
She can’t place Clint into any of those categories.
He’s deadly, but there’s no arrogance to it. He fights like someone who knows exactly what he’s capable of and doesn’t need to prove it. He moves through SHIELD with the same air — apart from the others, distant, neither seeking camaraderie nor rejecting it outright. Agents respect him, but not in the way they respect their superiors. It’s something different.
She doesn’t understand it.
She doesn’t understand him.
He was the one who found her, the one who gave her a second chance.
She wonders what he saw in her that made him think she was worth saving.
She wonders if anyone ever offered him the same.
She doesn’t ask. Not yet.
But she will.
He notices her watching.
Not in a way that most people would catch — Natasha Romanoff is too well-trained for that. She doesn’t linger, doesn’t make it obvious, but Clint’s spent too much time in this line of work not to feel the weight of someone’s attention.
She’s studying him. Trying to figure him out.
She won’t.
Not because she isn’t good — she is — but because Clint’s had years of practice being unreadable. People don’t get to see past what he lets them see. It’s what kept him alive before SHIELD, and it’s what makes him dangerous now.
Still, he knows the moment she lets her guard slip.
It happens in the sparring ring.
The floor is full of recruits, running drills under the instructors’ supervision. The atmosphere is standard — grunts of exertion, the rhythmic sounds of combat boots shifting over padded mats, the occasional bark of an instructor correcting form. Clint’s half-listening to Coulson, who’s discussing something about upcoming rotations, but his attention shifts the second he hears the crack of impact — too sharp, too much force.
A body hits the mat.
Hard.
The room goes still.
For a beat, no one moves. No one speaks. Then, almost in sync, the instructors react. One of them rushes forward to check the downed recruit — a younger agent-in-training, groaning as he tries to push himself up. Another instructor turns to Natasha, face tight with barely restrained anger.
“The hell was that?”
Natasha doesn’t answer.
She’s just standing there, looking down at the recruit with something unreadable in her eyes.
She isn’t breathing hard. She doesn’t look flustered or apologetic. If anything, she looks… caught. Like she just remembered something she wasn’t supposed to.
Clint pushes off the wall before anyone else gets the chance to escalate things further. There are murmurs now, a low ripple of tension spreading through the room as the other recruits try to figure out what just happened.
The instructor steps closer to Natasha, voice sharp. “Romanoff, did you hear me?”
She doesn’t acknowledge him.
But Clint does.
“Back off,” He says, even, but firm.
The instructor’s head snaps toward him, already halfway to arguing. But Clint doesn’t slow his pace. He cuts through the space between them, stepping in front of Natasha, blocking her from the others. The instructor doesn’t push it — doesn’t question why Clint Barton, of all people, is stepping in.
Natasha finally looks at him.
Her hands are still curled into fists.
“You forgot where you were,” Clint says, his voice low. Not accusing, not chastising. Just stating a fact.
Something flickers in her expression, just for a second.
She knows.
Clint doesn’t need to tell her what she did wrong. She already knows. This wasn’t just a slip — it was instinct, muscle memory responding before her mind could catch up. He’s seen it before, in himself, in others who have lived the kind of life she’s trying to leave behind.
Around them, the tension still holds. The other recruits are uneasy, shifting, whispering. The instructors don’t know what to do with her — whether to reprimand or remove her.
Clint holds her gaze.
“You’re not there anymore.”
Her throat moves as she swallows. Slowly, her fingers uncurl, her shoulders dropping the smallest fraction.
Clint watches as the moment registers — how her breathing evens out, how she drags herself back into the present. The walls come back up, the sharp, composed control snapping back into place.
But he saw it.
And more importantly, he understood it.
“Romanoff,” One of the instructors says, still stiff with frustration. “I don’t know how you trained before SHIELD, but here, we don’t—”
“She knows,” Clint cuts in.
The instructor whips his head toward Clint, irritation flaring into something sharper. “Excuse me, Barton?”
Clint gives him a flat look, unimpressed. “She knows,” He repeats, slower, more deliberate. “You can keep yapping about it if you want, but it’s not gonna change the fact that she already got the point.”
The instructor bristles. “You don’t get to override protocol whenever you feel like it. She just put a recruit out of commission—”
“—Who’ll be fine in a few hours,” Clint interrupts. His voice is still calm, still measured, but there’s an edge to it now. A warning. “She didn’t break his ribs. Didn’t dislocate anything. You know how I can tell?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because if she had meant to, she wouldn’t have missed.”
The words land with weight.
The instructor tenses, jaw tight.
Clint doesn’t blink.
The silence stretches. Then, with a huff, the instructor looks away, pivoting back toward the recruits. “Get him to the infirmary. The rest of you — resume drills.”
It takes a moment, but slowly, the others start moving again. The murmurs fade. The instructors move on, though the looks they send Natasha aren’t entirely neutral.
Clint doesn’t take his eyes off her.
She still hasn’t said a word.
Eventually, she exhales, something like exhaustion — emotional, not physical — settling behind her eyes. She doesn’t thank him. He doesn’t expect her to.
He just nods once, tilting his head toward the exit.
She follows.