This started as a challenge fic for one of the boards (favorite superhero/villain). I had always wanted to do a Hawkeye/Black Widow story about Budapest, but the muse gave me this one instead. Although not comic book canon, it might fit within the context of the movie storyline. Natalie never struck me as a waif who needed saving, and Clint isn't a knight in shining armor. So their relationship seemed to me to be one of a mutually beneficial affection, and one that started under unusual circumstances. Let me know what you think...if it's worth continuing, I might take a stab at making it a proper story and not just a little drabble. Thanks to my wonderful beta Rabid who gave it a once over on short notice.
SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS
She was too young. Too young by about ten years and a million miles, because even twenty years on that pretty face wouldn't match the mileage. He watched her from across the bar, the lilting tones of Portuguese like static around him. Brazil. He hated it. Over crowded, underfed, oversexed. And in a country of swarthy Latinos it was almost impossible to blend in with his fair coloring. He slouched in his booth like a jet lagged businessman and watched her flip long red hair over a pale shoulder. He needed to get out more. He could almost taste her as she ducked her head and stirred her drink, lips pursed over the straw and doe eyes batting at Vladimir Whateverthefuckhisnameisovich. What a waste, he thought. It was going to physically hurt him to have to mar such an absolutely perfect breast with a kill shot.
"I don't do kids," he said when he flipped through the dossier. Natasha Romanova. Blonde. Brunette. Redhead. Age 16. Fresh from the steppes of Stalingrad. As he flips through the pages, her age is as variable as her hair color, and, apparently, her moral compass. He can let that go. His own moral compass is a little south of true north these days, too. Along with the usual passport photos are the expected candids, always in the presence of powerful men of varying nationality. The candids are paired with crime scene photos. Some of the men are identifiable only by the rank and insignia on their uniforms. All are equally dead. None makes a fetching corpse.
"So how old is she, really," he asks, flipping back and forth between each page that lists her age somewhere between twelve and twenty eight. He's pretty sure the little girl with the old soul in the tutu practicing at the barre is an old photo, but her diminutive size is belied by eyes that are ancient and far away. She has a unique skill set, and he knows they put them on that path young because the shelf life is short. He just wants to be sure whatever he's being pointed at doesn't have a chance at being anything else but what she is.
"Does it matter?" The voice from the shadow is like velvet over gravel. A low rumble that demands authority, but doesn't inspire fear unless you already have something to be scared of.
"I don't do kids," Clint responds again. "I doubt she's twelve," he waggles the ballet photo at Fury, "but even sixteen seems a little young for such a permanent solution."
"She's not a child, I can guarantee that." His irritation is evident in clipped syllables and precise diction. "She's a liability, no matter what her age is. She needs to be removed from the playing field."
Barton sat back in his chair, drummed his fingers on the table. "Don't these guys ever get a clue that loose zippers sink ships?"
"She's more than that. She has a way of getting into places she doesn't belong, getting her hands on things she has no business touching, and leaving a pile of upper management bodies as her calling card." Fury leaned into the table, dangerously close to entering Barton's personal air space. Barton blinked at him, non plussed. He respected the authority, but refused to be intimidated by it. His fingers changing tempo was the only indication that he even acknowledged the closing distance between himself and his boss. "I want you to do this, Barton. I can get someone else, but no one's as clean and precise as you are. Don't overthink it."
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. An archer knows that better than anyone. So between point A and point B, he had tucked everything but the job away until there was just him and his target and the arrow that would connect the two points.
Until he walked into this high end bar in a high end hotel in in his rented suit and got lost somewhere between point A and point B. There was something in her that the surveillance photos hadn't picked up. Some vulnerability behind the devastating body language and the red hair. The hair suited her, and he suspected it was her natural color. And Fury was right, it didn't matter if she was sixteen or twenty eight, he could tell from the way she worked this guy that she had already clocked a lot of air time.
The waitress brought him his check and he paid cash, mentally shaking his head to clear it. He knew how this was going to go down: he'd go back to his room and suit up. She would take her target back to her room and dress down. And sometime in the next 6 hours she would do her job and he would do his.
Men plan and God laughs. There really was no other reasonable explanation for a fuck up of such epic proportions. Natalia was alternately hissing at him in English and trying to placate what sounded like half the Soviet Secret Service on the other side of the door in Russian. She did it so seamlessly he almost felt like there were two of her in the room. Next to him, leaking a variety of bodily fluids into the expensive hotel carpet was her date for the evening, and a few feet beyond him slumped another operative in the bathroom doorway. The unlucky gentleman in the doorway still had all his clothes on, including a diamond pinky ring that glinted in the overhead light. All Clint could think about was how the hell he was going to get his arrow out of the guy's chest if Natalia wouldn't unwrap her thighs from around his head. Because that was the coup de grace of this masterpiece. He was supine on the floor with long, lovely and lethal above him, her thighs wrapped so tightly around his head they almost muted the sound of his own heart beating, while she held his own goddamned arrow to the hollow of his throat. He thought, for a moment, he was in love.
"Who are you? What are you doing here? Who sent you?" Her questions rattled at him in perfect English, with no hint of an accent. As the commotion on the other side of the door grew louder, she turned her head, pressing the tip of the arrow just a little deeper to warn him not to try anything while she was distracted. He doubted she was ever really distracted. In equally perfect Russian she called "Wait, we're not decent. Wait, wait, let me get a robe."
"I thought you were in trouble?" He tried to smile sheepishly, but those eyes narrowed at him and he thought for a moment she was just going to drive the arrow home without further ado.
"Do I look like a damsel in distress?"
"Not exactly. No." But he had heard her scream. The loud, frantic screams that only a woman in a certain kind of trouble pulls out of her very core. Assassination was one thing, but rape was something else entirely. So he had, in an oddly timed moment of chivalry, barged in with the intent of saving her from one kind of assault just so he could assassinate her with a clear conscience.
He was hardly subtle, but it couldn't be helped. The first arrow wasn't even a thought. Muscle memory had the second notched even before he had taken another breath (the guy in the bathroom was a surprise but he dealt with it). Before he could loose the third she was on him, the door closed and locked and he was wondering how the hell this had all gone sideways.
"We're both here for the same reason, I think," he said. Maybe he could bluff her into thinking he was just working a job. Someone had doubled down on old Vladimir the Bear over there. Her eyes narrowed, she didn't miss a beat, and he felt a sliver of blood pool and trickle down his throat. How did he actually think that she could be convinced she wasn't the job?
"It was a character assassination," she whispered between clenched teeth. "No one would want him dead until after he gave up everything he knew to keep this out of the papers, away from his superiors, and buried."
The pounding on the door became more frantic and she hesitated, torn between leaving him there drowning in his own blood or using him as an asset.
"I can get us out of here," he said. He shifted his eyes toward his bow, just out of reach of his fingertips.
"I can get me out of here on my own two feet," she clarified. "You can get me out of here in a body bag."
"If you try to get past those men, the best you can hope for is a quick fall down a long flight of stairs. You won't make it back to Moscow." Quite frankly, he thought, a compromised asset like her would be lucky if she didn't end up the barracks entertainment somewhere the sun only rose a third of the year.
Her eyes narrowed again. "How do you know I'm going to Moscow?"
They both heard the door jam start to crunch under the assault. He risked lifting his head to get a better view. They had a minute, tops. Mostly likely 45 seconds. 30 seconds if his day was going on the same trajectory it started on.
"I can get us out of here and we don't even have to use the front door. I can get us out of the country. I can find you a new line of employment, but it's now or never."
She threw the arrow to the side and shoved off him, standing up in one fluid motion.
"Put some clothes on," he said, grabbing the bow off the floor and notching an arrow. She grabbed the dead mans shirt and flung it around her shoulders, stuffing her arms in the sleeves and ignoring the grapefruit sized bloodstain that slicked the hem.
Clint regarded her for a moment as she buttoned hastily, then motioned her back into the bathroom. She stepped over the body and ducked behind the wall just as his arrow impacted and sprayed glass in all directions. The next arrow hit home in the building beyond, creating a zipline between the two. He motioned for her to grab on to him but instead she grabbed her chaperone's leather belt from the floor.
"I brought my own," she said.
He smiled, a flick of the lips that brought humor to his eyes. "I love a woman who can accessorize," he said, anchoring the line and motioning her forward. Without hesitation she lashed the belt over the cable and jumped, careening toward the next building just as the door collapsed in a shower of splinters and a flood of angry Russians.
He flipped his bow over his shoulder and followed, oddly gratified she was standing on the roof of the building in her blood stained shirt, waiting for him. He had just as well expected her to haul ass across the pebbly tarmac until she was little more than shirt tails flapping in the breeze, and he would have had to take her down like an elegant bird struggling to take flight. But here she was waiting for him, a small knife flicking against the line to secure their escape almost before he landed, the warm South American breeze shifting the curls around her face. This was going to take some explaining, but if SHIELD wanted her out of the way, maybe the shortest distance between these two points was a step to the left. Besides, he could always kill her later.