Title: Is This Love
Author: Shaneequa
Disclaimer: I don't own any rights to the Avengers, characters or actors. They are Disney property. This is simply a fan work.
Summary: Based on the prompt at be_compromised at livejournal. People telling Natasha that she loves Clint and the one time Natasha realizes it. (Or something like that)
Author's Note: This is my first Avengers/Clintasha fic that I would admit to. It's NOT BETA-ed, so I hope you guys bare with me with the grammar mistakes etc. If you would like to be my beta for this fandom, send me a PM! Still working on the last two installments of this but I'll try to update everyday. With that said, I hope you enjoy the story.

1 - Loki : "Is this Love Agent Romanoff?"

It was interesting, Loki thought, this notion of love that would exist beyond time and reason. Humans, to him, were foolish creatures who thought that the galaxy was theirs with their technology and wisdom. They knew nothing of what actually as out there, only theories. Only hope.

Agent Barton had heart. After seeing all that his life was, Loki was surprised that the man he had taken as a puppet wasn't more destructive – wasn't more like him. He was a man who was also deprived of love, hiding behind his brother's shadow who had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to kill him. Barton was a loner, he was what Loki thought he would have been if he was human, but with more anger and rage. It surprised him that the human didn't really have those emotions towards his brother, towards his parents and everyone else who did him wrong. After a few more dreams, he knew why.

Natalia Alianova Romanova.

Loki wished to finally meet the woman and see what was inside of her. From what he knew from tapping into Barton's mind, she also had a lot of obstacles to deal with, a lot of innocent blood on her hands. She was an assassin, a trickster. Someone who wasn't worthy of the love that Barton seemed to show her. A part of him sympathized with Barton, who always seem to draw the short end of the stick, with few friends and fewer people who expressed and showed their love to him. He liked this human, as like for humans go.

Loki was happy when the redhead assassin was down in the chambers they had "locked" him into to talk to him. He was hoping for more time. To see more of her from Barton's view in order to shake her.

"Your world on the balance and you bargain for one man," Loki stated. It wasn't a question. He didn't have magic for nothing. He could read her mind as well as she had been trained to read his. Her eyes were begging to have her partner back, the one person in the world that she truly trusted.

"Is this love Agent Romanoff?"

It was sarcastic. Loki had known that it was love, at least on Barton's side of the deal. But Romanoff's?

"Love is for children, I owe him a debt," Natasha stated no emotion in her words. She had often wondered whether or not she had feelings for the other agent. Especially when she would notice herself doing something she wouldn't usually do. The Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff, or whoever she was at the moment was calculating in every move she made. Every smile, every twitch, every movement was done on purpose she had no accidents, until Clint.

She would find herself gravitating to him whether they would be sitting on a rooftop colleting intel on a mark, or on the rare times they would have time off, on a couch watching a movie as he filled in her on the American culture, a task he had been given by Coulson early on in their partnership. (She was simply too Russian to pass as a real American.) She would lean in close, often using Clint as some sort of support while he threw an arm behind her and pulling her towards him.

Natasha didn't know what it was exactly, but it wasn't love. She refused to acknowledge it as such. It wasn't the Red Room, it wasn't any training that had taught her that, but experience. Her parents. Bucky. Alexei. She had loved them as childish notions thinking that they would be there for her forever, with her forever.

She was wrong.

She knew that what she and Clint had couldn't last forever. They were spies, assassins who had enemies and ledgers that were dripping red. They put their lives on the line every time they were out in the field. Natasha Romanoff was an adult, she knew the dangers and the risks they signed up for as SHEILD agents. She was no longer the child who though forever existed.

To her, the notion of love was closely tied in with the word forever.

Forever was a child's prayer, and Natasha Romanoff was no child.

Reviews please (: