It ends like this.
An arrow shoots, nicking her ear and she frowns from her hiding place above him.
A second later, Agent Hawk-eye winces, clutching his arm.
What a waste of knife, she mused idly.
She considered her options.
She couldn't jump down, just yet. The fall would kill her.
Her position was precarious.
What she could do was swing her body forward with the wires to bounce her feet off the wall. Using that momentum to push herself closer towards the exit and escape through the window.
His voice, however, gave her a pause.
She was incredulous.
Was he trying to stall for reinforcements?
"I can shoot, but I won't," he admits, deliberately lowering his bow.
He looks up at her.
She cocks her head to the side from where she towered over him, knowing that she had daggers in her combat boots. She had to be careful, balancing herself in the wires with one hand, but she could make the shot.
"Join Shield?" he asks, but what he really means is Trust Me.
His entreaty set her teeth on edge.
"You won't have to run anymore."
He's was lying now. People like them never stopped running.
Just because she can't get into his physical range didn't mean she couldn't kill him.
"Poor choice of words," he says, wincing as if she had telegraphed her intentions, which she had not.
It was just that their time together had given him enough insight to read her.
It frightened her because right now they no longer depended on one another for survival.
She should kill him.
Those big blue eyes were full of hope, "You can leave now, tired and exhausted, forever looking over your shoulder or you can find someone to watch your six. You did it once before. You had trusted me. The reasonwhy neither of us is dead is that there is still trust between us."
She hears sirens and checks her escape routes, but doesn't move either.
She's curious. She's desperate.
She feels mocking. She feels hopeful.
She's amused. She's tired, so very tired of this life, of running, of everything, but she didn't know how to be anything more than what she was, what they had made her.
"You can spend your whole life running or you can take a shot in the dark and start trusting people, starting with me."
He was such an overgrown idealistic child that's going to wind up with a knife to his back one of these days, but she's the greater fool.
This isn't the first time he's come after her and if she doesn't kill him, it won't be the last.
She could kill him.
She won't.
"You were sent to kill me," she voices aloud.
He shrugs, a sheepishly, boyish grin lighting up his face, "I made a different call." He spoke confidently as if he defied the rules all the time, as if his choices took priority over the mission. He would have made a terrible Red Room recruit. He would of been broken or killed. Looking into his stubborn eyes, she knew he would have been killed. He was everything the Red Room had tried to break her of. If she could not trust this man, then she could at least trust in that.
Natasha deliberates and makes a choice.
After all, no one had offered choices before.
He had favored giving her illusions of choice.
It was new, interesting, and touched a part of her that had died a long time ago.
She falls head first.
Was there ever any doubt that he'd catch her?