He doesn't ask her about her history, and he doesn't look her up. He knows enough from the channels he frequents exactly how dangerous she is and exactly how vague her history is.
Coulson has warned him repeatedly that she shouldn't be trusted; she's a liar, a manipulator. For all he knows, she could be playing them. Clint knows this, he's been told this several times, yet the look in her eyes when she saw the red dot on her chest wasn't an act.
She had been ready to die.
He visits her in the hospital wing the day after he lowered his bow. Remarkably, she is sitting up. The gashes on her arms are neatly scabbed over, and her broken leg is in a cast. Despite the injuries, her eyes are clear and alert.
When he sits in the chair by the foot of her bed, those eyes flick to him. They scan him, taking in his cuts and scratches and bruises. Analyzing him. For a fight? Clint has no doubt that she could take him right now, broken leg at all, if she wanted to.
He supposes that he should be glad that she doesn't want to.
He is intrigued by her. Not by her backstory or her morals or her favorite choice of weapon, (no matter how interesting the electrical bracelets are,) but by the why.
Why did she give up?
She could have easily dodged behind the dumpster two feet away to avoid his arrow, and disappeared into the darkness.
She could have easily sent a wave of bullets in his direction, and fled while he was temporarily distracted.
She could have easily raised the tiny gun to her head, and escaped her past as a slave and her almost guaranteed future as a prisoner.
But instead she had let the gun slip from her hand, raised her eyes to look at his silhouette, and simply blinked.
Why?
He first speaks to her a week after he didn't kill her.
"Hi," he says awkwardly.
"Hi," she says warily.
"I'm-"
"Clint Barton. I know," she interrupts.
He nods. The doctors and nurses and assistants and interns never can keep their mouths shut here. No doubt everyone is talking about how Clint Barton went crazy and didn't kill the infamous Black Widow when he had the chance.
They look at each other in silence for several minutes.
They speak at the same time.
"Why didn't you-"
"-run?"
"-shoot?"
At this, her face becomes blank, her emotions draining away like water down a sink. She says nothing and rolls onto her side, facing the wall.
Clint takes this as a signal to leave.
It's been a week and five days since Clint made the decision to preserve a human life, and right now, he almost regrets it. Almost.
Fury's railing and Coulson's sighing and Hill's glares-these things, he can take. But sitting in front of holograms of a bunch of suits with blurred out faces and explaining, for the fifth time, that she was just a kid, unarmed and ready to die, can turn anyone into a frustrated mess.
Finally, when one of the idiots asks him again if he has any connections in Russia, Clint snaps.
"And here I was thinking I was the deaf one," he says, beyond frustrated, and turns his back on the Council. "Assholes," he throws over his shoulder, just loud enough that the suits can hear him.
As he exits the room, he sees her, sitting on a bench, dressed neatly in a blouse and skirt. Three agents guard her (or are they protecting her?) but he's glad to see that she isn't in cuffs.
He looks at her and she cracks a smile.
He runs to her room the second he hears the news.
It's awful-blood all over the floor, furniture snapped and broken and scattered on the floor, holes in the walls, most likely from stray bullet fire.
She's crouched on the remains of an armchair, her eyes dark and flashing, with a blood stained stick of wood in her hand. The bodies of three SHIELD agents lie before her on the ground.
She looks up as agents swarm the room, her face cold and emotionless, but as her eyes sweep the room, they make contact with Clint's, and he detects a twinge of terror in them.
Calmly, she drops the stick to the ground and raises her hands above her head as agents tackle her to the ground, pinning her small frame, as more agents point weapons and yell loudly.
Clint is at a loss for words.
"Kay, MacKinder, and Nguyen," Fury says to him slowly. "Those are the agents she killed."
"Sir," Clint begins, but he is cut off.
"Don't 'sir' me, Barton!" the director rages suddenly. "With all due respect, it was an idiot idea to save her! You're a damn fine agent but bringing her here is not one of the smarter things you've done!"
"Sir," Clint tries again, "is this being investigated?"
Fury rubs his temples and sighs, his momentary rage forgotten.
"Officially, yes," he begins. "But don't get your hopes up, son. Most people here don't trust her, and more than a few want her dead. She's killed a lot of fine people."
"With all due respect, sir," says Clint, "so have I."
The agents guarding her cell refuse to let him in to see her, but Clint knows his way around the facility well enough that he's able to get to her cell-sorry, her room-without disturbing anyone.
As he silently slides the grate over and slips down into darkness, he wonders if she's asleep right now or if she's laying in the dark just thinking, like he so often does.
Faster than lightning, he finds that the answer is neither of the above. With only a swish, thighs are wrapped around his neck, bodies are twisting, and he's on the floor. Her hands are around his neck, small but strong, and he tries and fails to breathe.
Dimly, he realizes that his hearing aids must have been damaged, because there's a ringing in his ears that isn't stopping. It's so dark that he can't see anything, but yellow is pooling in his eyes and rolling across his eyelids as his legs kick weakly.
"Shit," he manages to choke out, and instantly slaps himself in the forehead mentally, because, really, Barton? That's going to be your last word? when the pressure on his throat disappears and a hand instead clamps over his mouth.
"Barton?" she barely whispers.
He lets out a horrible rasping sound around her fingers in confirmation.
"What the hell-" she begins, but stops suddenly, grabs him by the arm, and yanks with all the force she can muster. His side erupts in pain as he slides across the tile and hits his head against the wall. He tries to sit up, but his face hits the springs of a bed.
He's under her bed.
Barely breathing, unable to hear and unable to see, he nonetheless feels the bed shake as she climbs in. Everything is still, and the door opens. Lights flicker to life and Clint is temporarily blinded by the brightness.
He holds his breath for twelve seconds, but it feels like twelve hours. He has no idea what's going on. He doesn't know what the guards are saying about Natasha, he doesn't know what Natasha's doing, and worst of all, he doesn't know if they can see him.
After twelve seconds of brutal apprehension, the lights flicker out again and the door closes. Once again, Clint finds his arm being pulled out of its socket and grunts with pain.
"Can you not do that?" he hisses, as she drags him over the threshold onto more tile. A door bumps against his legs as she closes it, then the lights click on.
He winces. "This cannot be good for my eyes."
She perches on the closed toilet and passes him his left hearing aid.
He takes it, adjusts the wire and slips it into his ear, but the ringing in his head continues.
"Shit," he says again, pulling a ruined aid from his right ear.
"I'm…sorry," she says quietly. "For…" She gestures at his throat. "I just thought…"
"That I was another MacKinder, right? Some SHIELD agent with a vendetta come to take my revenge for the murder of my girlfriend's second cousin's dog twice removed?" She shrugs, and he glances up to her.
"How do you know I'm not here to kill you?"
She rolls her eyes slightly.
"Why would you save me only to kill me?" she asks lightly, rocking on her toes.
Clint rubs his head awkwardly where it hit the wall. "Yeah, I guess that doesn't make much sense. Sorry."
"Why are you here, then, and why didn't you just walk through the door like a regular person?" Her eyes harden a little, and she folds her arms across her chest.
"Because…well…because…because I brought you here to be safe. I didn't shoot you for a reason, and you didn't run for a reason. You were supposed to be safe here, but Kay, MacKinder, and Nguyen had to be idiots and mess that up. And according to Fury, the formal investigation isn't going to turn up anything on them. You'll just be the woman a stupid agent trusted who turned on his organization the second she was inside."
He's a bit out of breath by the time he's finished speaking. He normally doesn't like to say so many words, not to mention thar he came within inches of death by strangulation not four minutes ago.
"Why, Clint Barton," she says, a smile on her face and mischief in her eyes. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you're going to bust me out."
They stand together on a mesa. The sun is setting, and the scarlet sky matches her scarlet hair and the scarlet blood on their sleeves.
No killing, Clint had said. He hadn't said anything about broken bones or bloody gashes.
The purple clouds match the purple on his arrows and the purple blossoming around her eye. Clint remembers the look on Coulson's face as he aimed an arrow then lowered it.
The orange sun matches the flames that are even now licking the sides of the building a mile away.
The two look at each other. They don't know where they're going. They don't know who will be looking for them. They don't know what the future holds.
All they know is that they don't plan to die today, or tomorrow, or the day after that.
"So, Mister Barton, why didn't you shoot?"
"So, Miss Romanoff, why didn't you run?"
end