A/N: Hello people of the internet! This is just a little story I've had on my laptop for a while and since I'm still in denial about Clint and Laura, I decided to share it. Please leave a review; feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Natasha Romanoff knew she wasn't a good person. She had done horrific things in her past, gotten red in her ledger, and had never thought she needed redemption. Until Clint Barton came along at Budapest, saved her life, and showed her down the path of redeeming herself from her past. She owed him a debt.
She thought she could never repay that debt. It was too huge. When she asked him about it, he told her that someone had once done the same for him and it didn't need repaying. That was the moment she began to fall in love. She didn't realize he was already in love with her.
A few years after Budapest, Natasha was still secure in the thought that she was Clint's one and only and she thought he felt the same about her, despite her lack of advancement on him. She thought she was respecting his privacy and she had been trained to be emotionless, after all.
Clint mistook her bridled passion as none and a lack of desire for him. It was the opposite. But once Laura came along, that didn't matter. What mattered was that Clint, good old I'll-always-be-there-for-you Clint Barton, was in love with another woman.
Love is for children, she told herself. I am far from the naivete of a child. I am the black widow, I am the one woman who would never be taken. I am a spy, and assassin. So why do I still feel this way towards him? Because true love doesn't always work out. Because unlike in the movies, the guy doesn't always get the girl, the girl doesn't always get the man of her dreams, and neither always end up married happily ever after.
And that was what happened. Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow of SHIELD, was in love with a man who was already married. She could seduce him to her, she knew that. She could use her most passionate charms and convince him to come back with her, to run away. That was what she told herself.
And then she tried, and realized that he knew her tricks, and no, he really wanted to stay, and no, he really loved this woman, Laura. Even though he still had a smidgeon of love left for Natasha Romanoff. So after that she kept her distance and respected his.
She had been, oh what did they call it, friend-zoned. She was a friend, albeit a very close one, of Clint's, and at first that was awkward for her and Laura's relationship. Because what woman wants her husband's old girl around when she feels vulnerable and less sure of herself with the other woman around? But once Laura realized that Natasha respected Clint's decision and wasn't trying to take him back, they became close. As close as anyone the Black Widow ever let anyone be.
She owed him a debt. And she was repaying it by not flirting and lingering, by not staying alone with him for too long lest she forget herself and grab a kiss, by staying away from him as much as possible but yet enjoying his kids. She owed him a debt. And even if Clint Barton didn't know it, she was repaying that debt every time she came to the farm, his little oasis of domesticity, and being greeted as "Aunt Natasha", nothing more.