A/N: I kind of wanted to do my own take on how Clint and Natasha's relationship might have progressed since he "made a different call" and thought about what if Natasha had acted like she hated him for awhile? This is just one of the possibilities in my mind of how their relationship might have changed over the years.

From This Very Moment

None of the Avengers knew who had fallen for who first. It wasn't something any of them thought about when the saw Clint and Natasha together, whether she was sitting on the couch reading while he laid across her playing MarioKart DS, they were having a silent conversation from opposite sides of a room, or they were in a firefight, every second focused on keeping each other alive. And maybe the only thing they didn't know about each other was exactly which one of them had fallen first.

Except Clint knew.

Because it had been him.

Possibly the moment he had set eyes on her, he had been in love. Only, in that strange way one seems to have when falling in love, he didn't realise it then. The moment he did was another story entirely. But he's still pretty sure he was in love with Natasha from the start.

It had been seven years ago when he'd found her. He'd been assigned a fairly simple mission; noting terribly unusual. His target was a fiery twenty year old girl who happened to be somewhat good at killing people- if good got you into the infamous elite master assassin club, of course. She'd made a name for herself, alright. And she was a threat. One that had Nick Fury demanding Clint Barton take her out.

He hadn't been on his own. He'd had spotters watching his back, other SHIELD agents to make sure he didn't get himself killed... or reign hell and get out if he did. But he was in charge, he made the calls. And when he recalled the mission, he didn't even remember the other agents. It was his mission, and everyone knew that in the future. No one thought about the others because they hadn't even been inside the building. And no one besides him really knew what had happened there.

In the name of irony, Clint happened to be tracking her while she was after a job of her own. She'd just stuck the knife through the arms dealer's back, Clint watched as she grabbed him in order to place him on the ground silently. Skillfully. Perfectly.

He'd hesitated, not even swearing at himself for it like he usually did. In the blink of an eye, he'd processed everything he'd ever seen of her up to that point- her grace, admittedly her style, the firefight behind her eyes, her flawless technique, the way the two perfect orbs told how much deeper she really went, deeper than even SHIELD could know. And in that second he made the decision that somebody was going to have to get him a shovel because he wanted desperately to start digging. Not intrusively, not for his own benefit or SHIELD's, but for hers.

And he didn't know how that made sense, but it did. And he'd loosed the arrow, which had whizzed by so close to her skull, rattling the flyaways in her hair, thunking into the wall. She'd whipped around and he'd seen her fear if only for a second, the way his target's eyes lit up with the way they knew they were done for. And before he even knew he was going to, he'd put his next arrow back in his quiver and lowered his bow to his side.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

And she had hated him the first month or so, even though he had saved her life. She'd loathed SHIELD and most everything about it. But she had done her job, and in the process slowly started to realise what they could mean for her. The arrow that had almost pierced her neck had made her realise that she wasn't invincible. She wasn't unstoppable, as she had let herself illusion. She trained tirelessly, bettering her skills and bettering herself. But she never talked to Clint.

It drove him nuts for the longest time. Finally, he'd had to speak to her. It hadn't even been on one of the missions they'd been assigned together. It had been in the middle of the night on a two-day vacation. They'd sat on a rooftop after he'd found her there and she, surprisingly, hadn't run. And the truth had been revealed.

"Why do you hate me so much?"

"...You didn't kill me."

Whether she'd meant to say it or not, she had. And she'd told him she wished he'd shot her in that room, put an arrow through the back of her head, because it would have been better for everyone if she had. And for the first time he had called her Nat.

That was where it all began.

They never brought up that conversation anymore. They both remembered it, oh of course they did, but it hadn't even been one of the more important landmarks in their relationship. And neither of them liked to think about a time when the other didn't have their back, wouldn't throw themselves in front of a bullet aimed for their head. It had all blended into a mix of names and faces and locations and death at their hands. And their unbreakable bond, and that first kiss in the rain, and all the kisses since, and their partnership, and how Clint was the only one allowed to call her Nat.

To this day, all that remained and more. Their friends never really understood them; they were, well, perfect really in every way. They were the perfect partners, fitting together like clockwork, like puzzle pieces. They hadn't been looking for each other; that other person to fill their lives, but they had been thrown together and forced to make the best of it. And the best of it, they had made. The important thing, though, was that they understood each other.

They didn't need words, not at all. Just being in the same room was always enough for them to communicated their thoughts and feelings and actions. They chased each other's nightmares away, knowing they were having the exact same ones.

Because in that second it took Natasha to turn around, that precise moment their eyes met, Clint Barton fell in love. And they never talk about it; they don't need to, it doesn't matter because from now until forever they will be together and that's all that's important... But he likes to imagine maybe that's when Natasha Romanov did too.