Mr. and Mrs. Barton

Natasha:

After ditching the nearly destroyed minivan and stealing yet another vehicle, Clint gave voice to his plan. It’s a stupid a plan.

“Nat, come on. I trust Phil with my life.” He was trying to convince her that his plan wasn’t a complete idiocy. It still was.

It doesn’t matter what he was thinking, but going to a handler is one of the worst ideas he could possibly come up. “And that is what he’ll take if you show up with an enemy agent.” Clint really can be a child at the best times.

The looks on his face was resolute, and five years of marriage told her he could be stubborn when he wanted to be. “He won’t.” He touched his ear, and she’s confused for a moment. “Hey, Phil. Meet me at the coffee shop.” Then she isn’t. She’s pissed.

“You have a communicator???” She’s been angry at him since she learned about him being married before. Natasha isn’t about to touch on why that makes her so angry.

Might be because it’s something he kept from her. Which is a bit hypocritical since hardly anything she’s told him about her past is truth.

Or the biggest reason could be jealousy. Maybe.

“Yep.” He looks smug when he answers her question, which just makes her all the more annoyed. He’s like a puppy that just returned his owner their chewed up house shoe. It’s like he’s completely oblivious to how close he is to having something slid between his ribs.

“How do you know they aren’t tracking you through that?!” Her voice is still low enough to be considered conversational, but the edge to it is as though she is yelling at him. And she is. How could he be so foolish.

“I know Phil.” Clint’s look is a little less smug now, but he’s still not apologetic. “Anyway, they’re a part of my hearing aids.”

He wears hearing aids? How hadn’t she noticed?

“You don’t have to come with me to the meeting site.” Clint tells her, but she can see the disappointment. He wants her to meet his handler.

She knows she’s going to regret this. “Five minutes.” His smile is back to radiant as he walks a down and across the street to a little coffee shop.

That was five minutes ago, and she had a choice to make.

A choice to go into the shop after him, or to take off and leave him behind.

It really isn’t a choice in her mind.

Natasha finds herself pushing open the coffee shop door and looking to Clint waving his hands in the air as if explaining something that he can’t quite keep all the way in, and a bland looking man in a suit sitting across from him. The slight bulging of his suit tells her he is carrying some kind of weapon.

The man in the suit notices her before Clint, but Clint is the one she walks up behind and places her hands on his shoulders. “Natasha Romanoff. You must be Phil Coulson?”

She is very much impressed when he doesn’t flinch, even though she knows recognition shines in his eyes.

Clint:

“Wait.” Clint held up a hand to Nat, not at all surprised that she had been able to sneak up on him from behind. “Natasha Romanoff? You’re not a Black Widow, but The Black Widow?” Okay, he probably shouldn’t be as surprised as he is, but he is. Nat removes her hands from his shoulders, and he can feel the loss.

She pulls up a chair from the neighboring table and smiles at Phil. “Does that change any of your plans, Coulson?”

“Absolutely not, Mrs. Barton.” Phil unfolds a napkin without showing any of the emotions Clint knows must be going on underneath the surface. “You are still the wife of a Class 7 SHIELD Agent.”

Clint stops fiddling with the bagel at that point. “Seven? I thought I was eight.” He actually takes great pride in seeing how far up he can go, and how low a single prank can pull him back.

“You were demoted after putting shaving cream in the director’s coffee.” Phil takes a sip of his own, gently cooling it beforehand.

Clint had forgotten about doing that the last time he was at headquarters. He didn’t think it was actually Fury’s coffee cup, though. He was aiming for May’s. “Oops.” Nat, Natasha, was looking at him strangely.

“The plan?” Nat gently prodded, and Clint was having fun watching the two of them interact. It was like they were each waiting for the other to break from some sort of mask. It’s hilarious.

“Ah, yes.” Phil passed a phone to her, and Clint knew he was slightly pouting. “I called the director earlier. He’s reprimanded the agent that put the price on your head.” Phil never misses anything, and his voice slightly dropped into what Clint would call droll. “And I have a gift for you, Agent.”

Phil pointedly glances down at a case beside their table, and he can’t help the smile that covers his face. “I love you.” Clint knows what is in that case, and he loves the fact that Phil knows him so well.

“There were three agencies that put prices on your heads.” Phil stands, as though the conversation is done, and to him it probably was. “Now there are two. Your job, Agent Barton and Ms. Romanoff, is to either make it seem to be too much trouble, or to stop them.” He leaves a three-dollar tip on the table and led the way out.

Nat takes Phil’s seat in front of him, and he replays how Phil called her Ms. Romanoff instead of Mrs. Barton. A slight stub, but it was still there. “So, three?”

“The Red Room will leave us mostly alone.” Natasha went ahead and started talking, her watching his back the entire time. “The price is mostly for show, at least until they learn I’ve really changed sides.”

He felt hope bloom in him, and Clint knows his face was sporting large smile. “You’ve changed sides?” Her words are something that he’ll be sure to remember.

“Clint.” Her voice is reprimanding, but like all the times when his superior’s tried to call him back in, he ignored it. “We have to find the third group. But where do we look?”

Clint moved around the pieces inside of his mind, and only one piece didn’t quite fit. “To our most recent failure.” He smiled when she nodded, because he knows she got it.

They have to get to their original target, because the reason that was in the SHIELD file feels a bit fishy to him.

Natasha:

They left the coffee shop a few hours ago and pulled up next to the place Natasha had tracked the target to. The phone had been a handy gift. Untraceable. She had been able to call in contacts without worry of being traced. The case though, had been a bit of a surprise.

It held a bow, at least it had folded out to one, some arrows (though not Clint’s favorite he had complained), and a key to a security locker. The security locker held surveillance equipment, suits, body armor, weapons, and fake identities. She had her own stashes, but it had been nice to get into someone else’s without having to bother any of her own.

They waited until after dark to go for the next part of the plan. Originally, she was going to go in with Clint playing the eyes in the sky, but he told her not to worry. (His exact wording was “I knew I was going to end up in the sewers some point this month, ugh.”) So, he was infiltrating with her as the guide.

It wasn’t going as well as planned.

“I said to go left.”  Usually she was the one in the field, even if she did appreciate him taking the smelly entrance instead of her.

She watches through the skin that he hits the wall to his left. “No left. No right. I can go forward or backward.” She could tell she hit a nerve by his tone, but that didn’t make any sense.

Not him being annoyed, but more about the why behind the blue prints being wrong. “Then come back.” She glanced back at the screen that gave her the same view as he had. Seriously? The idiot was going forward. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Going forward.” Clint answered her, but that wasn’t the answer that she wanted.

“I can see that.” She looked between the different pages on the screen in annoyance. Annoyed at both him and things not going according to plan. “I told you to come back.”

“No time.” He answered, and he didn’t answer any more.

She watched as he pushed up the sewer cover withheld breath. The entrance could be the most dangerous because they couldn’t tell how many were in there, nor where they were at. She’s able to make out flashes of light and shadows as people shot at him.

She had to decide whether to go in after him or to wait for him to come out. She’s able to make out that the camera is still moving as the targets drop.

Then the camera fuzzes out.

Ten minutes after the camera cuts out is what they came up with before he entered.

Ten minutes until she took off, with or without him, to the rendezvous point.

Ten minutes.

Clint:

He knew he was going to end up sewers way before any of this started. He knew it, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. Nat seemed ready to go, but even he knows that between the two of them he has more experience with infiltration this way. (She’s more wine, dine, and then kill. At least according to the file he may or may not have memorized. He has a reputation to uphold.) Which is why he pushed the laptop back into her hands and grumbled about alligators.

He has met an alligator going the sewer route before. Though that was in some country in Africa. Or maybe Asia. Meh, one of them. He does know that there are rats and turtles in the sewers in New York City (They like pizza nearly as much as he and Lucky does.).

Nat is yelling in the com about turning left. But there is NO left. Really, this is like the fourth time her blueprint has been wrong. At this point it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is wrong. He basically ignores her order for him to come back. They really do not have the time to come up with a new plan.

He hops out of the sewers. Takes out a few guards. Finds the vents, climbs through them for a while before dropping down into the cell to inject the target with some sleeping medicine (fine, a tranquilizer) and shove the dude back into the vents.

He’s over a minute late getting back to the van but still waves at Nat with the target thrown over his shoulder in a fire man lift. Luckily for them, the target is a small man.

No communication is needed, and she’s burning rubber to get them to the place they picked out earlier. A simple motel on the outskirts of town known for turning the other way. He’s been there before, on an assignment with a different name, but he remembered how the place worked.

“I told you to come back.” Nat glared his way as she shoved the vehicle into park. Yeah, she may be just a little bit angry with him.

He opens the back to get out the package. “No time.” She opens the door, already ready with duct tape and zip ties. He puts the target in the chair, a glance going over how she’s binding him the chair. He definitely won’t be getting out of that. “If I had gone back, they may have moved him.”

She stands from where she just finished binding his foot and her glare is still firmly in place. “If the blueprint was wrong, how many other pieces of information could have been wrong? Did you think about that? It could have been a trap. The target may not have been in there. There could have been more guards…”

“Only three more.” Clint shrugged. Really, three more guards wasn’t that big of a deal. Neither was having the wrong blue prints. He’s been sent in with less information. She probably has, too. “We got out. Anyway, I had you for backup.”

She suddenly slapped the guy, as though trying to wake him up. “I was going to leave you.” The man in the chair may be slowly waking up. Maybe. Or he could still be moving from that hit.

His smile is goofy, and Clint didn’t care. He knew better. If she had been going to leave, she would have left at ten minutes on the dot, and not waited a minute more.

The guy must have been waking up, because his eyes flutter open, and Clint is in awe watching her work. Interrogation isn’t his strong suit (he feels bad for the bad guy, don’t judge), and it’s nice letting someone else do it instead of himself.

They learn that the man was sent by The World Council (Clint is definitely calling Fury to yell at him for not telling him about that), with the goal of having the two of them kill each other off. “Two agents from opposing sides? They don’t like that kind of thing.” The target had explained, and the information about the retrieval experts not being able to be called off also wasn’t a surprise.

Though an annoyance. They couldn’t just tell the council to buzz off. Instead, they had to tell all of the people coming after them to buzz off. Nearly an impossible task.

One moment, though, really had him freeze. Nat was about to end the target right then and there. “Wait.” He called to her. “There’s no reason to kill him.”

He saw what looked like an eye roll from her, but she still pulled the knife away. “We have the information that we need. There’s no reason to leave him alive.” No emotion in her voice, and he could tell this was the Widow in front of him. The professional worker willing to do whatever it took to get to the end goal.

He reaches for the knife, just a tinsy bit surprised that she let him take it. “He knows nothing on us.” She already took the photo the target had of them and they weren’t about to leave that behind. “And his people will be looking for him.” Yeah, her and Phil must have gone to the same class in how to show so much expression in what looks nearly blank. “So, why not leave him behind for them to deal with? He obviously failed his assignment.” Let them fill in the blanks there.

The man in the chair looks scared now that Clint has said the thought out loud. Nat is calculating, a look similar to Phil or Fury whenever they were hatching up a plan and didn’t know he was there. “Fine.”

They were going to need a new plan, though. The plan of just sending the message back through the original target was a bust.