A/N this is my first fan fiction and I hope it turns out to be as good as it is in my head. The characters are probably a little darker that most people write them. This will probably end up being a multi chapter and I hope to update fast but you know, college. Please let me know of any possible OOC's.
"Barton, you're being assigned to track down and kill the Black Widow," Fury stated in the debriefing room, "She herself is a lethal weapon with a higher kill count than you could imagine. She's been deemed most wanted in SHEILD's radar and must be taken out."
"Yes sir." Clint replied. He was always up for the challenge, but this mission seemed more dangerous than the others, and he couldn't believe he'd be sent there alone.
"We don't know much about this Black Widow," Fury continued, "There are no pictures of her, but we do know roughly how many people she's killed and not all of them were guilty. She's usually assigned to male targets and uses her sex appeal to get them to tell her what she needs to know, then kills them. Most of the time she uses a weapon stashed somewhere on her person, but she will occasionally kiss them with a lipstick that's been laced with cyanide to kill them slowly and painfully." The more Fury described his target, the more Clint was intrigued by her methods of taking people out.
After Fury had given Clint all the information that SHEILD had gathered on the infamous Black Widow, he finally said, "Be careful out there Hawkeye, you can usually tell if something's up with a target, but this one's different. This one's stronger, smarter, more advanced and focused than anything we've seen before. Kill the Black Widow and get out of there, understand?"
"Yes sir. I'll go get my go-bag and be on the jet in two hours." He proceeded to his private room in SHEILD headquarters, something that no one else had, but he was their best assassin so he usually got his way.
On the plane to Moscow, Russia later that day, he read through her file one last time before he would be out in the field, watching her every move, deciding the best time to strike and take her out. He knew that if he succeeded in this mission he would be praised by everyone at SHEILD, even though he was never one for dealing with a lot of attention from others. Glancing over the information that he had been given about the Black Widow's childhood, he started to think about his own childhood and how he came to be Hawkeye.
He has always been by himself. His mother ran out on him, his brother, and their dad when he was just four years old. A short time later his father became an alcoholic and started to beat Clint and his brother, so they ran away. His brother, Barney, was 13 and Clint was 8. They lived on the streets for a while with a man they had met on their way away from their small town and to the big city. The man had been homeless for some time and didn't want these two boys to go through what he did so he taught them different ways of defending themselves from the thugs that so enjoyed taking advantage of those less fortunate. Barney excelled in persuading his way out of potentially harmful situations. He was always the more conniving one of the two. Clint himself was never one for many words so the man had to teach him how to fight. He was good in hand to hand combat, and knew his way around a gun, but what he really shined in was archery. He was left handed so that presented a challenge for the man trying to teach him but Clint caught on fast nonetheless. Countless days were spent with an old rickety bow and arrows fashioned out of whatever they could find on the streets. When Clint turned 16 the man who had saved his life passed away from some unknown illness. Barney couldn't take Clint shutting him out so he left. Clint was all alone, so he decided to do something heroic for the people he called his family for 8 years. He broke into a fish and game store, where he laid eyes on the most beautiful bow he had ever seen in his life. It was made of a sleek, hard black plastic, the quiver being made of the same. He tested them out quickly in the store before taking almost 50 arrows in his large duffel bag. He began to take out low level gang members, working his way up to the highest ranking man in the group. Eventually, SHEILD caught on to the record of the left handed archer and decided to give him a chance to turn his life around. Reluctant at first, he finally decided that there was nothing for him in his current state so he became a SHEILD agent, and out-shone even high level agents. He earned the alias Hawkeye because of his sniper-like accuracy with his bow and arrow from distances farther than 1000 yards. He was usually on single missions that didn't require information to be extracted from the target before take-down, most of the time because the target was too dangerous to take to the SHEILD headquarters. This was no exception.
Phil Coulson, Clint's handler, was stationed at a safe-house in Moscow so that he could keep close tabs on the progression of the mission. He had pinpointed the location of the Black Widow. Clint was sent there to gather intel on her habits and follow her until he found the right time to strike, and also to get a picture of her for the files so that everyone would know what the Black Widow looked like.
Luckily, the first night of the stake-out proved to be successful. Agent Barton managed to slip into the main building of the Red Room, whom the Black Widow worked for. There she was, the only woman in a room full of men, most of them keeping a safe distance from the assassin, knowing what she could do if they made a wrong move. Clint didn't understand much Russian, but he did catch the information he needed. She was being sent to Vasilievsky Island, just across the river, to take out the president of the college. There would be about 15,000 students on the island at the time so using a firearm would be too conspicuous. She was told instead to use her cyanide laced lipstick, the venom of the Black Widow. Hawkeye couldn't manage to get a picture of her because there were too many people and he didn't want to risk getting caught. He decided to get out of the building before he would be seen by one of the guards keeping watch on these meetings between the top assassin, and the leader of the Red Room, Ivan Petrovitch. He got back to the safe-house where Coulson was waiting for him and the information he got on the Black Widow's whereabouts. He needed to take her out before she was able to get her hands on the president of the college on Vasilievsky Island, who had somehow gotten on the top of the Red Room's to-kill list.
The next day Agent Clint Barton, not being called the best for nothing, quickly found the location of the Black Widow, he hated calling her that but he didn't know her name so he didn't have a choice. He watched her for a while, observing her movements, body language, facial expressions, all of it. He didn't usually do this with his targets but this one made him wonder. He had heard what SHEILD knew about her childhood, but it wasn't much information because she was a secretive person at heart, all assassins are. Not to mention she worked for the Red Room that made up most of their assassins' histories. He knew how incredibly different he and the Black Widow were, but he couldn't help but sympathize with her when he saw the way she let down her wall, even if just a small bit, after everyone in the Red Room left her current location, just waiting for her to take down her target. Except Hawkeye was there to stop it.
He sat up in the rafters of the basement of the Red Room's main building, still wondering how he managed to get in there twice without being noticed. His arrow was trained to her heart when she looked up. At him. How could she know he was there? He was surrounded in complete darkness and had not made a noise in the three hours he had been there. She was good, he guessed; she was aware of all of her surroundings at all times, knowing that sooner or later someone would be after her head.
"Стреляй в меня" was all she said. (Shoot me)
He kept his aim locked on her heart and said nothing in return. He looked at her standing with her body square towards him as if she wanted her killer to have the best shot possible, as if she welcomed death to her doorstep with a smile on her face. Except there was no smile in reality. Her expression was austere, hard, calculating. They both stayed like that for what seemed to be hours. Neither of them saying anything or moving at all.
He saw something flash in her hard, green eyes ever so briefly. He couldn't put a finger on it; rage?, hatred?, fear? No, it couldn't be fear, she was the Black Widow, nothing scared her, not even death. There it was again, definitely fear. But of what? He had just made his decision on what he had to do when she broke the silence.
"You must be an American. You certainly are not Russian or you would have killed me the first chance you got." She eventually said in perfect English. She was taunting him, wanting him to shoot her, to end her life that she secretly hated. She hated everything that she was, what she had become.
Surprised and slightly offended by the sneering tone she used, Clint aimed again to make sure he wouldn't miss and within seconds his arrow was flying through the air towards her body. She fell to the ground as blood started slowly seeping out of her chest. 'Wait, this is not enough blood for someone who was just shot in the heart,' she thought. Yet there was the arrow, sticking out of her chest, causing her breathing to become shallow. She was still awake when she saw her killer jump down from the rafters and lean over her body to pick her up. 'Hawkeye.' she though, 'He never misses a shot and yet here I am, alive.'
Agent Barton spoke aloud to the receiver in his ear to address his handler, "Coulson, there's been a change of plans."
The safe-house was fully equipped with all of the medical supplies needed to patch up the wound that inflicted on his 'enemy'. He picked her up suddenly without caring to think about the arrow sticking our of her body. She hated being touched by anyone, let alone handled like a child. She lost consciousness after trying to put up a fight when he was carrying her out of the Red Room through the tunnel that he had discovered. She would have killed him had she not been compromised with his arrow. When they got to the safe-house Phil Coulson was surprised, for lack of a better word. "W-WHAT THE HELL BARTON! YOU CAN'T JUST BRING THE MOST DANGEROUS RUSSIAN ASSASSIN INTO OUR SAFE-HOUSE!" Coulson managed to get out after the initial shock of seeing the red-headed assassin unconscious in Clint's arms.
"What did you think when I said there was a change of plans?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe that you'd be holding off your attack for now?!" Coulson replied. He was always the one who thought logically in this pair.
"Right." Clint said, realizing the double meaning of his words. "Well we need to get her cleaned up and get this arrow out of her before it does any more damage."
"You missed her heart." Coulson stated.
Clint simply scoffed and smiled slightly at his handler's observation.
The next thing she knows, she's strapped down to a hospital bed in a stark white room with fluorescent lights bright enough to make the sun envious. This reminded her of her childhood in the testing labs of the Red Room. Needles, drugs, mind-numbing serums, performance enhancers, countless surgeries. The Red Room prodded and tested, all the while brainwashing her to think she was someone she wasn't, making her forget memories of childhood, family, love. She hated hospital beds and if it weren't for the sedative and the straps that were tied too tight around her wrists and ankles, she would be defending herself against everyone that tried to step foot near her, well, not so much defending as attacking and killing. That's all she was, a killing machine. She was taught to kill mercilessly since age 5 and has done so ever since. She wondered why this American had chosen to save her life, she's never done anything good in her short 21 years, and did not expect to live very long in this line of work.
She knew there were cameras watching her every move, but she couldn't help trying to free herself from the ties that held her to this goddamned bed. Suddenly, seven doctors came rushing into the room with needles, scalpels, and every other medical supply she could think of. She tried not to let her austere attitude fall but her instincts took over without her permission, which just made her even more mad.
"Нет! Отойди от меня вы больны ублюдки! Я бы скорее умереть, прежде чем вы кладете руку на меня!" (No! Get away from me you sick bastards! I would rather die before you lay a hand on me!) She loudly hissed in Russian, making everyone in the room stop what they were doing immediately, even though none of them understood what she had said. One of the more courageous doctors silently took out a syringe containing a heavy sedative and stuck it into her arm while she screamed, trashed, kicked, anything that might free her of this hell she's been brought into.
She looked to her left as the sedative started to take affect, still moving uncontrollably, and through the window her eyes locked with ones that were a dark, enticing, almost comforting shade of gray. Those eyes were the last thing she saw before the sedative knocked her out.