Here we go - the last story in the Strength In Numbers Trilogy! Enjoy!


November, 1982

Melinda hated trying to get from class to class in the SHIELD academy. There were too many people going too many places at once, and considering that she was just a lowly freshman in her first week of classes, most everyone ignored her. Given her 5'4" stature, her fellow classmen even had an incredibly aggravating habit of plowing right into her.

"Oh!" she yelped as exactly that happened as she attempted to leave the lecture hall in a swell of students.

The young man who'd run in to her whipped around and she saw the cell phone pressed to his ear as her lecture notes fluttered to the floor all around her. "Excuse me," he apologized absentmindedly, but obviously his phone call was the most important thing to him at the moment, so Melinda waved him on and crouched down to retrieve her notes, not giving the handsome sophomore another thought as she continued to gripe to herself.


January 31, 1998

Clint Barton didn't have what one might call the greatest luck in the soulmark department. He hadn't even had a soulmark until he was eleven, and even then the words that appeared on the sole of his left foot were strange enough in their own right. Olive green words asked him "Don't you know you'd do best to give an angry agent space?" The next year, a set of sea-foam green words emblazoned themselves on his right foot: "Both of you are ours, then?"

Because the implication that he had a third soulmark coming didn't freak a twelve year old out!

In trying to think positively, he'd decided that at least that meant that he knew to expect a third mark. But there was nothing that could've prepared him for the scarlet-colored words that had bloomed over his heart: "One of us has to die, you know that."

He'd nearly died of a panic attack right then and there!

And now, fourteen years later… now he was an agent for SHIELD, where death was a daily possibility. Or, per today's mission, being the one to take out the threat at orders from Fury. Unfortunately, even the fact that he was freezing cold – this time in Russia – wasn't rare.

Even as the disgruntled thought crawled through his mind, he saw his mark finally approach where he'd been instructed to wait for her. And he saw something that was unusual about this situation. She was only a child! The pretty, petite little redhead he was watching through his scope couldn't be old enough to be in high school, and yet she'd been branded a threat worthy of a SHIELD takedown!

He jerked away from his scope, away from the sight of the innocent looking girl, and took a deep breath, trying to steel himself to do what was necessary. Child or no, Red Room people weren't to be messed with, and he had to do his job. So he swallowed and looked back through his scope… but she had disappeared.

He looked around for her, confident that his rooftop vantage point was a good one – until he felt more than heard someone land behind him on the roof. He whipped around, withdrawing a butterfly knife from where he kept it in his belt only to find a much larger dagger pressed to his carotid artery. Where does she keep that?! He didn't dare ask, though, and a long, tense minute of silence passed instead.

Eventually the girl, the Black Widow, Natalia Romanova, spoke, saying simply, with the eerie calm of a seasoned killer, "One of us has to die, you know that."

Clint froze. Oh, no! If he'd had any reservations before, he knew he wasn't going to kill her now! So he answered quietly, "Then you'd better get on with it… or you could give a chance to me and the right side of the law."

Her eyes blew wide and he knew that he'd just discovered the first of his soulmates. At twenty-seven to her fourteen, he felt like a dirty old man just thinking the word in relation to this kid, but still their age difference might be a good thing. It meant that he could help her, and she was young enough that it would be easier to get her to see things SHIELD's way, the right way.

There were protocols about this sort of thing; if he brought her into SHIELD and admitted that she was his soulmate, then SHIELD would give her a chance to renounce the Red Room, and if she did so, they would forget about putting a target on her back. But she had to be willing to go with him.

He went down on one knee, hoping that he would seem like less of a threat if she could look him in the eye, and before he could speak, she whispered, eyes wide with terror, "I'm supposed to kill you. I'm supposed to kill all my soulmates when I find them."

Clint took a deep breath, her words hitting him like a punch to the stomach, and he said, "But you don't have to, Natalia. I can get you to safety, I promise. You can be a kid, finish school, have a good life where the Red Room won't find you."

She swallowed harshly, looking at him worriedly, no longer an agent of the Red Room but just a scared teenager. "Are you sure?"

"I'm positive."

Clint dared to hold out his hand to her, wordlessly asking her to hand over her weapon. But she did him one better. She dropped the knife onto the ground and placed her trembling hand in his. He smiled at her and stood, guiding her towards the stairwell, not speaking until he was flying one of SHIELD's little two-seater jets back to the base with her in his copilot chair.

Then she asked, barely loud enough to be heard beyond their headphones and over the drone of the jet, "Do you know Bob or Coulson?"