Moscow, 2004. For six days the tail had been watching her. Assessing. They had a mutual agreement; she didn't try to shake him off again, and he didn't come any closer than his odd little perches on the rooftops.
She was tired though. Eventually they would find her, and there would be no assessing period, no agreements or niceties. She couldn't run forever.
On the seventh day, she found an empty office on the eleventh floor and waited. They approached in two teams, one from the roof, one from the streets. Nearly forty soldiers surrounding her and covering each exit, weapons raised and ready.
"I'm here to offer you a deal." The tail was handsome up close, bow sitting on his shoulder and hair mussed from where he had removed the glasses in a hurry.
"кто ты?"
"I'm an agent from a company called SHIELD. You, Natalia, can call me Clint."
-
The Director of SHIELD found himself living up to his name when they first met. Furious. She was a target, a mission, not a victim. She couldn't be saved.
Agent Barton disagreed. He quipped that Fury could only see half the picture. She had escaped. She let herself be taken willingly, even permitted the sedative for the journey. She deserved a chance to prove herself an asset.
"On your head be it."
Carefully but surely Clint did help. Taught her to use her skills to help. Allowed her to fight on the people's side for once. And while this gained her respect in the agency, it didn't gain her trust, nor did it dispel the fear that shrouded people's knowledge of her past.
-
Budapest, 2007. The ground was smeared with blood, bullets embedded in the walls, and down on the street below life carried on soundlessly.
Their intel had been astronomically incorrect. The two of them were sent in with a couple of agents expecting a small group of low ranking techies and scientists, instead finding a small army of well-trained soldiers lurking in the building. While SHIELD's attack was still unexpected, Clint felt like they still had a severe disadvantage in comparison.
Which led them to here: Clint passed out, blood pooling from a side wound that struck between the hems of his suit; Natalia crouching amongst the corpses she'd felled in her rage. There was so much blood, it stained the humanity she had only just regained in the strength of her hands, how it coated her skin, the way their hands had shook, when the gun lurch the first-
"Nat."
It was a groan, barely audible over the deafening rush of blood and the silence, the stench, the
"Nat. Please."
Neither of them remember how they got where they did, and Fury didn't push them for answers. The reports ended in that building full of enemy soldiers, no other questions asked. What they did remember was alcohol and searing pain, Clint's blood washing over Nat's clothes and hands, a motel room miles away from the massacre.
Nat remembered brushing her lips over Clint's when she thought she was going to lose him, and feeling nothing but guilt. If she lost him she'd lose everything they had tried so hard to build for her, but in that moment the architecture seemed so fragile in comparison to the towering prison already erected in the background.
Where was the point in fighting for a future when she was still busy fighting her past?
Weeks after they had returned, she found Clint sitting on the beams of the roof. She liked to think that Fury had made sure they were installed just for him. It was a comforting thought, that someone would still be there to care for him after she was gone.
In the silence as she gathered her words for a goodbye, Clint handed her an envelope and motioned for her to open it.
"ID. And...money." The notes were multi-coloured, ranging from dollars to euros to rubles. The multiple IDs were similar, different nationalities, but the same name emblazoned on each one.
"Natasha Romanova."
"Fury wanted you to be called Rebecca, but I thought that was better. Same roots and all."
Silence continued. Her words laid scattered on the rooftop.
"It's all yours," he whispered. "Whether you leave or not. And if you do...you're always welcome back. We trust you."
She stayed.
-
Malibu, 2010. Clint fell off the bed laughing as she recounted her time as Tony Stark's personal assistant. And for the first time, she joined in, laughing until it felt as though her face might break.
The Avengers Initiative felt like a story Fury would tell them before bed, a fable full of paranoia and far fetched ideals.
They were wrong.
-
New York, 2012.
"I've got red in my ledger."
"Can you wipe out that much red?"
Fury hadn't liked her plan. Natasha understood why as soon as she entered the room. Loki was arrogant, a God cavorting with humans as if they were toys made to be broken. He was also familiar. There was ice in him, she could feel it suffocating the heat of the room. She could feel it curl around her own frozen shards, solace in a world full of fire.
But they were not the same.
Loki surrendered to the cold. He was given a choice and he chose to drown in winter's waters. She had been expelled to the Russian snow, and every day since she had clawed her way back towards the warmth.
And that's why she won.
-
Washington, 2014. Clint called her as soon as the information hit the internet. She laughed him down from the ledge he was prepared to leap off to save her.
"I had a choice."
He never said he understood, because he never could. She never made him promise not to read it all, because she knew he should.
"I don't need the world to trust me, because you trust me, and I trust you."
He steps down from the ledge but stays on the line. Opposite sides of the world. Silence. They breathe.
-
Slovakia, 2015. Banner was unusual, and she was borderline suicidal according to Clint. It was in Rome when it first happened, her, Bruce and Tony defeating another enemy. Only once the enemy was gone, it was just her. Natasha, and the Hulk.
The beast remembered her. Remembered 2012, on the helicarriers. The way she'd fought, capable of killing but intent on just hindering at the time. She was a threat.
Natasha breathed, relaxing her shoulders and stance. One hand held out, fingers loose, the other splayed to show it was empty. Harmless.
"солнце становится очень низким."
The phrase was an old one, heavy on her tongue. It worked. When Tony landed next to them a short minute later, it was Natasha and Bruce waiting, the Hulk subdued in the sun's shadows.
Neither of them mentioned it in their reports, but Fury still knew somehow, and their names were rattled off together more often than her and Clint's.
"He doesn't want to be a fighter."
See, the thing is, she thought they could understand each other. Neither of them had much of a choice in their corruption, but both did what they could with what they gained.
She didn't hate the Red Room for what they did, because on some level she understood. And after all she had done since fleeing them, she no longer had a reason to fear. She was better. That didn't mean it was over though.
"I'm a monster."
Maybe it was the fact that, to a certain degree, there had been some sort of option on her behalf. The alternative wasn't pleasing but it had existed. She could have said no. She could have fought. She could have walked away earlier. She still could, walk away, no strings attached.
In the end, that was what severed their brief connection. Because she still stayed, and he still ran.
-
"Did you love him?"
Tony installed beams all over the new building. No one brought it up, but Natasha saw how Stark smiled whenever he saw Clint leaping from one to another, or when he watched Steve try to beat JARVIS and his obstacle course to no avail.
"I barely knew him in the end."
"But did you want to love him?" Clint sighed.
Natasha thought about Bruce, and his rambles on science and culture, the way he retreated into the Hulk's shadow in a manner that made her want to spend her days coaxing him back out into the light. She thought about the weapon designs Tony sent her asking for suggestions, the way she was Steve's first call no matter what (whether it was a confusing addition to technology or a 70 year old nightmare), how Wanda had come to her room at 4am asking for strength her magic couldn't provide her with.
She thought about Clint's farmhouse, the one he had told her all about on a rooftop eight years ago when her fighting instinct had all but abandoned her. Where his sister baked brownies and taught his niece and nephew martial arts because they wanted to grow up and save the world, just like Uncle Clint and Auntie Tash. She thought about how, no matter how full her heart seemed to be these days, some parts of her remained dormant and cold through it all, like she was irrevocably broken.
"Want doesn't matter when you can't."
-
It's a hotel room. Mission gone wrong. Again. A Widow, young twenties, red hair, red splattered across her face to match. Bait.
Clint's talking. Quietly. So quietly she can't hear him. But he's okay. It's not Budapest. The only blood donors donned the recent scarring of the Red Room upon their backs. Spiders crawling from their slaughtered mother, a tidal wave following the hurricane HYDRA had produced.
Some days she felt like, with everything she had given them, they had never given it all back. It was the only explanation. Every part of her had been broken and melted down into a new shaped, the perfect weapon. She wasn't supposed to feel.
"But you do."
Oh she does. She feels. She feels everything. She feels guilt and shame, remorse and hatred, greed and envy. She feels the winter curling around her core.
"You feel more than that."
She feels happy and broken, saved and weakened, loved and needed. But she doesn't want.
"You don't need to want if you have all you need."
"It's not enough. It's not human, to be so distant. I should want, want life, not just want to take it. I should-"
"You should nothing. You are not broken. I have spent over a decade watching you try to fix yourself and I wish I had spent every day of that time telling you this. You are not broken."
The room stilled. The girl's blood splattered face stopped resembling her own, becoming just another threat eliminated before it could do more damage than it was worth.
"Do you love me?"
He smiled, bow abandoned on the floor and hair still mussed up.
"Every part of you."
It was a mutual agreement; she still tried to fix what was not broken, and he spent every day telling her that what she felt was enough. It was real and it was good and it was worth fighting for.