Disclaimer: I own nothing at all. So no worries.
Author's Note: As advertised, the rest of the Avengers are gonna show up later, actually next chapter. This one is just the spies because it's set prior to the movie and because I just love those two.
Chapter 1
He asks her to confirm her location over the com. What he hears instead is her screaming and the precise noise (just how he knows this particular sound is another lifetime) of a terrified woman hurling herself at a sturdy wooden door. He knows all of this to be impossible: SHIELD has not yet produced the door that can keep her out of where she wants to be, and things that don't make her scream include bones that rupture flesh, scorpions, light to moderate torture, and, well, everything.
They are there for a flash drive. (It's always a lot more than that, but neither of them have the clearance to know whether this is someone's death warrant or salvation). He should be covering her retreat through an alley, they should be leaving together, strolling so as not to gather attention but...
He doesn't count or think as he does what he has to and moves in, she is silent only to draw breath, is easily found. He is not followed, for the moment, walks with a wake of bodies behind him (Possibly a metaphor for his life but...He strangles the thought).
"Back away from the door." He tells her but she doesn't and he blows the lock off anyway.
She stumbles (yes, her, with all her eerie dancer grace stumbling, only one indicator of many of something gone badly wrong) out of the closet, wide-eyed, trembling, eyes empty, knuckles, wrists and fingertips raw. By the end of a first step one of her ruined hands has formed a fist, by the genesis of the second she slams it into his ribs, abdomen and...
He grabs her wrists, tries not to hurt her, wishes she would reciprocate. If she's decided to slay him eighteen months in there is really and truly no force that can prevent it. But if she were going to, it would be slick, unnoticed, clever...If that's coming, this isn't it, not now. Which leaves...What, exactly?
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He bellows into her face, since their covers were blown a while ago.
Finally, she manages to recognize his face and sways and looks down at her own hands. "My blood?"
He nods. She does the same, nearly collapses. He catches her as she doubles over and her mouth against his shoulder and then his shoulder is damp. Gross, but really and truly the least of it. "Did you get it?"
Shakes her swollen head gingerly and then she's back. "I lost consciousness briefly in the process of being apprehended and restrained. It's in the middle drawer."
Thirty seconds later, they stroll away, the small flash drive gripped in his damp hand.
The plane ride home (if home is the word) is tense, short. She has said not one personal thing to him in half a year and now...He knows that she loses it when someone locks her in a closet. She won't say why, doesn't really matter, could have been a hundred things. Maybe that was Draykov's version of time out, maybe someone ripped out a few of her nails in one; probably a closet was the sight of whatever happens to make you a killer at age 10. As if things weren't already uneven between them, "debt" easily being one of the fifty words she uses most frequently...then she also broke some of his ribs and then threw up on him. She stares him down, to all appearances trying to make him forget what he knows about her through sheer force of willpower, trying to foresee how he will employ this to destroy her.
Her mind is a thing that can just barely fathom another possibility, that he will do her no harm, ever, with this or anything else.
He roots around in his satchel, she tenses.
"Gum?"
She stares at it, seriously if momentarily considering the possibility that it's poisoned. He sighs, breaks it in half, and puts one in his own mouth and bites down. Then and only then does she take the other and chew.
Fury reads the report and for a second the cousin of pity in his eyes (back then it was indeed eyes). She is not the first, twentieth, or last SHIELD agent to have a trigger. The next moment it's gone and he orders desensitization to commence the next morning. Only when she has control again will she be allowed on any more missions. It's Clint that winces, Natasha nods serenely and goes briskly in search of a shower.
It is later that same night and she is pacing. She must know this is his room, must know that a single one of her footsteps is enough to awaken him.
He finally opens a door in front of her for the second time in twelve hours. "Nat? Come on in." Clint ensures that his tone makes that directive optional. Giving her orders, even casual domestic ones, yields results that are extreme. Though that too is fading, the longer that she's with them. He never thought that he would learn to view SHIELD as the softer option.
She does come in. She sits on the very edge of the bed and he flops back down on the rest of it. She should be irate...Nat? Sounds like gnat and is cloyingly familiar. Yet...They sit in silence because neither of them know how to start this or indeed most conversations and...
"I'll wash your shirt."
"What?" It's also 3 am. If she was going to be something short of baffling to him, it would be after a cup or eight of coffee.
"The one that I...I'll wash it." There is the same something that made him spare her in her face right now and he lightly touches her shoulder. She allows it for a second before shifting away, but one second is not zero seconds and he is really not accustomed to being the most normal one in the room.
"It's already clean."
"Oh."
Much later he is going to realize that saying "I'll wash your shirt" was her way of communicating the following: gratitude for coming to get her, for not asking one question about the closet thing, for the piece of gum that was just a piece of gum and finally that she is trying very hard to maintain some kind of balance with him that doesn't involve friendship and it isn't working.
"Then I'll do something else instead."
"Well, you stabbed someone who was trying to shoot me last week. Let's both call that something else."
The silence between them stretches and then wanes. "I'm starting desensitization tomorrow."
"I heard." He will spend the whole day convincing himself that he can't hear her screaming.
"Today...that won't happen again."
"How are your hands?" This line of questioning is growing more familiar to her. She shows him the bandages.
"Perfect." Maybe it's a Russian thing, he thinks uncharitably, any hands that still have bones in them are perfect.
"Right. Sleep well, Nat."
"...Good night."
With those words but without her exit, he burrows back under those blankets and to all appearances go to sleep, because trust has to start somewhere.
Natasha weighs his recklessness for the hours she sits there waiting for an unpleasant morning and finds that...She cannot rationally consider whether or not to murder him. She tries, tries to decide whether shooting or stabbing would be best, how she would hide the body, how she would flee...But the images of him still, frozen, bleeding...All unacceptable.
She would die before killing him. If that wasn't bad enough, she would do anything to help him and ask for not one thing in return. That shiny new knowledge has her spewing Russian curses into the dark.
Another note: If you could review to let me know that I'm not writing into a void, that'd be lovely. Even if you don't I plan to finish, because this is just too fun.
