A/N: I'm really not sure if this is a one-shot, or not. Avengers is not my usual playground (except for reading). But I love Clintasha so much, I couldn't resist. :)
Natasha Romanoff, known and feared the world over as The Black Widow, an assassin with almost no equal, lay in the middle of the lumpy double bed in a Motel 6, staring at the popcorn ceiling. She was waiting. Not for a mark to kill, or to wield her power of persuasion over, but for the opportunity to heal instead.
Waiting had never been her specialty. She was a woman of action. Waiting made her anxious. It made her figit. Waiting was the expertise of her partner, her equal.
Hawkeye, real name Clint Barton, was nothing if not patient. Natasha allowed herself a rare, small smile as she thought back to the time, early in their partnership, when she asked him to show her what he did. He took her up into one of his nests in SHIELD HQ where they proceeded to watch their handler, Agent Phil Coulson, work in his office.
After an hour she had turned to Clint and said, "No, seriously, what do you do?"
He had chuckled at her, she hated that back then, and told her this really was what he did, at least until he was ready to strike his mark.
He turned his eyes to hers as he said "mark" and it caused her to shiver inside. It hadn't been a year, at that point, since she had been his mark. Natasha shook her head and began to climb back down to where real people resided.
She looked back briefly and he smiled at her and raised his eyebrows with just a hint of mischievousness in his eyes. Silently he reached back and pulled an arrow from his quiver. Knocking it into the bow, he aimed at Coulson's office. Natasha, who had yet to learn her partner's, or anyone else's, sense of humor, lunged at him in what she was sure was an effort to save her handler's life. The shot went off just as she reached Hawkeye's side, and she screamed out a warning to Coulson as she pushed The Hawk off his perch. If he hadn't been ready for her, they both would have plummeted to the ground below. But Clint had expected her reaction and grabbed hold of a bar that held the beam he'd been sitting on to the ceiling above. He grabbed onto her with his other hand and they swang around to the other side and landed back on the beam. Still, it was all he could do to hang on. Natasha was scratching at his face and kicking at his shins.
Below, she heard Coulson holler up at them, asking them what the hell was going on.
"This bastard was trying to kill you," she screamed back at him.
"Barton," Coulson yelled. "Get your ass down in my office now."
Natasha was so taken aback by the man's response that she stopped her attack against Hawkeye.
He looked at her with a gleam in his eye and said, "Why don't we go see what Papa Bear wants?"
He set her down on the beam and walked to the other end where he could climb down more easily. She followed, dumbfounded.
In Coulson's office, Natasha learned that Clint had only been trying to scare their handler into spilling his coffee all over himself. He apparently did this often enough that Coulson told them it didn't even phase him anymore. She was nearly as livid about that as she had been when she thought Clint actually was going to take Coulson out.
Stalking out of the office she returned to her quarters where she began to vent her anger on her locker. Her fist was raised for a third hit of the metal door when it was grabbed mid-swing by her partner's, scratch that, she thought, *former* partner's, hand.
"Whoa, Nat," he said. "Calm down."
"Don't call me that!" she screamed at him. "What kind of sick person are you?"
He appeared to think on that a moment then replied, "I suppose it depends on who you ask."
His grin made her even more furious and she punched him in the gut with her free hand. Kneeing him in the face as he doubled over, she heard a satisfying crunch and hoped she'd broken his nose. She hesitated a moment as she waited for him to stand up again and he used that time to throw his body into her midriff and tackle her onto her bed. He pinned her there and she struggled uselessly. Her inability to make a move against him in this position caused her to panic. She changed from screaming obscenities at him in English, to the same in Russian. This apparently stirred something in Clint because the look on his face changed from jocular to something more tinted with fear.
He loosened his grip on her and she threw him off, then went in for the attack. He defended himself only minimally, allowing her to use him as a human punching bag, so to speak, to take out her frustrations. After a few minutes her anger began to abate and she leaned onto his shoulder. Her body shook, but she would let no tears fall.
"Oh, god, Natasha," Clint's voice cracked as he put his arms around her. "I'm so sorry. I'm such an ass. I didn't even think..."
The rest of his words were lost in a strangled sob. Natasha felt thick liquid drops fall onto her arm and looked up to see tears streaming down Clint's face, mixing with the blood flowing from his nose.
She shook her head at him, "Clint, it's not..."
He cut her of with an angry tone, "Yes! Yes, it is my fault."
His voice didn't scare her because she knew he was angry with himself.
He took her head in his hands, holding it gently but firmly so she couldn't look away.
"I swore to you I would never do what they did to you," his eyes were pleading with her for belief and trust. His voice was strong, but tinged with desperation. "I will never, never hurt you like that."
He rested his forehead on hers as they both tried to calm themselves.
That night she sneaked into his room and sat by his bedside for a change, and waited to comfort him from the nightmares that were bound to come.
And now, all these years later, she waited for the same.
Rolling onto her side, she stared at the open doors of their attached motel rooms. They had stopped at several hotels as they made their way up the eastern seaboard, leaving behind them the disaster in New York. Natasha had been looking for something specific, a single story motel, with an end room that had an attached room. His room would be at the end, and hers would be the cushion to protect the other patrons from his screams. She knew there would be screams. People like them, with their ledgers dripping in red, had vicious nightmares. They were the stuff that made horror movies look like Saturday morning cartoons, Clint had told her once. Then he'd forced her to watch Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons until she understood his meaning.
Inhaling deeply, Black Widow lifted herself silently off the bed and even more quietly walked to the open door. In their business they had to be quiet and it served them well in these situations as well. The first night Natasha had been at SHIELD they'd held her in a cell in the medical ward. She awoke from her nightmare in the early morning hours and found Hawkeye, the strange agent who had been sent to kill her but had changed his mind and recruited her instead, sitting in a chair at her bedside, his finger on the switch of the bedside lamp he had just turned on. She was a light sleeper. She'd learned early that if she didn't sleep with one ear open, the trainers in the Red Room would get the upper hand in her sleep. But this man had snuck into her prison room without waking her. She was impressed by his abilities, to say the least.
She walked over to the chair closest to his bed and sat and watched him sleep. Even in the room lit only by the porch light outside flowing in around the sides of the cheap curtains, she could see his brow already furrowed. There were signs of stress on his face. She had watched him sleep hundreds of nights. Sometimes she watched him just to see his boyish features. In sleep his face so often rested in a way it never did on even a good day. The hard years of his life that seemed etched into already deep creases, ceased to exist in his total repose in sleep. But not tonight. And not for many, many more nights to come.