Alcohol Dulls the Memory
Clint:
“Phil!” After crawling out of the burning vehicle, Clint ran to the one person he could trust with everything. Yes, the car somehow caught on fire after going over the embankment. Just his luck. “Come on…Please answer. Please answer.”
It took a few moments, and hopefully nobody sane was out at this late hour, but Phil finally answered his door wearing a robe. This may be the first time Clint ever saw the stoic agent in anything besides a suit. “Clint? What are you going here?” If he was such an emotional mess, he probably would have brought a camera to commemorate this moment.
He’s just glad Phil didn’t ask the how he knew. “She’s the target.” Phil is already opening the door and pulling Clint into his nondescript house. “I don’t…I can’t believe it. She hit me with a car.”
“What?” Clint was always difficult to follow at times, but sometimes even it took Phil a few moments to catch up. “Start from the beginning, Barton.”
“Technically I shot at her first.” Clint started rambling, going around in circles in his handler’s kitchen. It is what you would expect out of a basic kitchen: refrigerator, stove, microwave, cabinets, drawers, and a sink. All of the appliances in an off-white color. A plain exterior to hide a colorful interior.
Phil looked over at his coffee machine with a bit of longing, and the time lit up by the stove. “And you missed??” Hawkeye never misses, but Hawkeye has never been in love with a target before.
“Bullet proof glass, and I wasn’t aiming.” Clint waved off his comment, while randomly going through drawers. Barton was definitely not getting any caffeine at this time of night. Even though not aiming is never an excuse for Clint. Something about him had everything he either shot, thrown, etc. go exactly where he wanted it to go.
Phil thinks he may be one of the gifted that pops up every so often, but he’ll never send his agent in for testing. “So, Natalie is the Black Widow?” He can’t imagine what pain his agent was going through, but he can sympathize.
Clint finds whatever he’s looking for in the fridge. Phil isn’t surprised that it’s a six-pack of beer. “Yeah. My wife of five years is a KGB spy.”
“Red Room operative.” Phil goes ahead and corrects the younger man before grabbing a beer of his own. “What are we going to do?” We sounds so much better the obligatory you, even though Clint would be the one doing most of the work.
“I can’t kill her without giving her a chance.” Clint is pleading for Phil to understand. “You know that, right Phil?”
Phil looks at the clock on the stove again, before going ahead and starting a pot of coffee. “I can give you till 1500 tomorrow.” After that, though, he’ll have to report in that Black Widow is still alive and active.
Clint just nods, and Phil knows the archer will end up on his couch at some point this night.
Natasha:
She ran for a few blocks before catching a cab back to her work. There, she pores over the file she got of Clint Barton back when she first starting seeing him regularly. At first it had been a way to blow off steam after a mission by stopping off in the city. Then, it had seemed like the beginning of a perfect cover, and her handler had agreed.
Did her handler know that Clint was Hawkeye way back then? Or at least suspected? It would be just like Ivan to do that. To put things into place so that everything would be in right place for an attack.
How about Clint? Did he marry her just because she was the Black Widow? Had it been a game the entire time to see how long it took the enemy to notice?
But Natasha reads people to get into their trust. Could Clint really be that much better than her? Or maybe he was just as surprised? He seemed to be. He also seemed to love her completely. Even earlier with the flowers…
The sweet idiot.
She pulls open the drawer and grabs the files in front of her with a finality. She will put in the report to clean out the house of everything in the morning.
Not now. Now she is going to incinerate these files and drink the rest of her bottle of vodka she left in the drawer from an earlier mission that went bad that her handler let her keep the memory of.
Vodka. Sleep. Cleaning. Kill her husband.
A to do list she planned on starting right now. Starting with good old Russian vodka.