Authors' Note: Hello to all my readers around the world! I love you all! And I'm most sorry for the delay in posting this-I had school but now it's over and I'll have much more time to write. A few brief notes. First, I am so extremely grateful to everyone who reviewed, alerted and favorited the first chapter of this story as well as Uncompromised (which I still recommend reading as there may be a reference to it later on.) I am awed and humbled by the response I have gotten so far. Keep up the good work folks and I'll keep up mine.
Second for the purposes of this story assume the following: the rainbow bridge that allows Thor to travel to Earth has been repaired. And all the avengers are living in the stark towers.
Third the rating of this story will be changing with the net chapter so keep an eye out. In fact if you think because of language it should already be M let me know.
Forth I've never been to Paris, let alone Notre Dame. Any mistakes about the floorplan of the building are just that, mistakes.
Without further ado…..
BlackHawk Down Chapter two:
Forget Paris
What no one knew (or ever said if they did-Coulson) was that Clint and Natasha had changed each other more than anything else. Before they met he was always Agent Barton or Hawkeye and she was always the Black Widow. They had no first names, no affection for others or themselves, no love. What is equally true is that the consequences of that meeting in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris had long reaching effects which rippled through not only their lives, but their very personalities. They became Natasha and Clint instead of only Hawkeye and the Black Widow. Like Pinocchio they became real human beings instead of only cold blooded assassins. Very few people could tell you of these changes because the people involved were as secretive as their profession made them but the changes were very real on a profound level.
Three people used to knows this. Only one person knows about it anymore.
….
There's a hushed silence about the Cathedral that is almost reverent. The few people who are worshiping are quite-mostly silent save for mumbled prayers. Outside it's pouring and the rain echoes off the arched roof in a gentle drone.
According to SHEILDS info the Black Widow will be conducting a hit on an assistant priest tonight who has a long-and wrong- history with the parishes' children. It's not something Barton has the inclination to stop (he thinks even if someone ordered him to he might not do it) so instead he decides to watch having never seen her actually in action.
When no one is watching Barton scrambles up into the choir loft so he can overlook the confessional where he knows the hit is going to go down. That's how he would do it- it's just stereotypical enough to be poetic. A molester being taken out where he offers absolution of other people's sins.
He's quiet and manages to blend seamlessly into the stonework. It's one of his major skills- his ability to blend either into his surrounding or into a crowd. Barton is a handsome guy but when he doesn't want there to be there's nothing distinguishing about him.
He sinks into the shadows in the loft and waits.
She shows up three hours later. Wearing a square necked and pencil skirted gray dress she is the picture of Parisian style and respectability. There's even a tiny little hat in the ridiculous British style which covers only part of her flame bright hair.
He almost starts from his stone like perch when he sees her. He never has before- only a grainy surveillance photo that SHEILD was lucky enough to get. It didn't do her justice.
She's beautiful, he realizes. Purely in an objective fashion, of course.
Beautiful isn't even the right word. He's met women he has considered gorgeous before but to quote his father, her picture should be under the word in the dictionary.
He's fascinated by the way she moves, sinuously and gracefully. She glides from the dark patches in the cathedral into the light spaces. Clint knows from his time in the circus that she moves like a trained dancer.
When the time comes she slinks into the confessional and draws the curtain, waiting like a good catholic to confess her many sins. Barton waits above and watches for any sign of movement. There isn't any, but by the way she walks when she exits the booth he knows the job is done.
Despite himself he's impressed. The hit was times perfectly- confessional isn't over yet but there's no line so it will be at least an hour before the body is discovered. And by then she'll be long gone.
Hawkeye swings himself out of the choir loft and climbs down the balcony legs. He finally has her in his sights and he won't be losing her tonight.
….
The medical room in Stark Tower is cold and sterile and the air is so dry it tickles his throat.
Barton doesn't know what he's still doing here. Banner (who he knows by reputation as the Hulk but it more than slightly awed to meet in person and realize that not only does he work with the man on a daily basis but actually lives with him as well-last he heard the man/monster was busy hiding out in third world countries) hasn't been able to find anything wrong though they've run him through numerous CAT scan, MRI and PET scan machines. His brain is functioning normally and there are no injuries to it.
"Gotta be some kind of Asgardian hoodoo," Stark says. The man hasn't left him alone since they got back to the Avengers tower (what kind of name is Avengers anyway? Lame, that's what it is.) But his supposed partner, the Black Widow, is nowhere to seen.
Partnered with the Black Widow. Sparing the life of the Black Widow. It's too much to believe. Barton wasn't exactly SHEILD's golden boy when it came to following orders but when they told him someone had to die and he took the assignment then the person only had a limited number of days left.
And the Black Widow was one of SHEILD's worst offenders. Though nowhere near in brutality or pure offensiveness to justice as Somali warlords or genocidal dictators, she had a special skill set and used it indiscriminately to kill for whoever paid her. That made her an unknown quantity and thus a threat. He hadn't been exactly pleased when he was asked to kill her because he was never pleased to kill someone-more like stoically resigned that it had to happen- but this was one order he'd taken with a bit of gusto.
He didn't understand unscrupulous killers. He never had. For him each kill was a carefully weighed decision. Barton believed firmly that a person had to deserve to die. The Black Widow clearly believed that the qualification for death was a paycheck at the end of it.
He couldn't believe he hadn't killed her.
But clearly he hadn't because here she was six years later (a video call with Fury had put to rest any lingering doubts Barton had about the strange people around him pulling some sort of elaborate con designed to make him give up SHEILD- innovative interrogation techniques in other words) as alive-and beautiful-as ever.
There was no doubting the Widow's beauty. Blind men could see it. And Clint wasn't any sort of exception. She was perhaps the most beautiful women he had ever seen. But Clint had been all over the world and seen many beautiful sights. They didn't keep him from doing his job.
His last memories were of tracking the black widow for three months straight. She was elusive and tricky- molding and shifting from one identity to the next, frequently changing her hair color along with her name. It made her hard to track. She was a ghost practically, with no bad habits hobbies that called for repeated activities or any kind of normal schedule. She was impossibly skilled in the tradecraft of staying hidden in plain sight. That was ok though, because so was he.
By the time Barton caught up with her in Paris he had learned everything there was to know about the Black Widow from the places she had been to and gone from. He was tracking her but the trail had always grown cold by the time he showed up in the city she was living in and only by tracking deaths of prominent people with prices on their heads was he able to discern that she was still active and alive. Not that the Black Widow had ever publically claimed a kill. But he could tell. He had a feel for her now and knew which targets she'd take and when a seemingly natural cause of death would be been in reality a quick poison or unlucky accident.
Barton knew literally everything about the Black Widow. The way she took her coffee, the one yoga position she couldn't seem to master, the way she cleaned her guns. He was also well aware of-though it puzzled him to no end- of her habit of giving mass amounts of money to homeless beggars.
It was one of the many idosincerities about his target. She was deadly but compassionate. Careful beyond measure but cocky. Beyond beautiful in her person but cold and ugly in her soul.
Or so he assumed. They never met until today.
His firsts meeting with the Black Widow (that he remembered) and she begs him not to kill her. She looked scared actually Barton realized. Though not of him.
Of something else he couldn't place.
Banner interrupts his musings. "Magic" he says with the evident disgust of a man of science. "I hate magic."
"Yeah this isn't even the fun kind" Stark says. Barton doesn't know why the billionaire has been hanging out with him for four hours. "You'd think Loki would be good for a de-aging ray or turning us into animals. Not causing us memory loss."
"Us?" Barton raises his eyebrows angrily. "This is only happening to me, Stark."
He doesn't know why but he feels like he lost something. Something more than the memories. It pulls on him like a phantom limb he can't quite find the shape of.
"You're an Avenger" Banner tells him, "what happens to you happens to us all. We're a team."
"Then why isn't the Widow here?" Barton voices what he's been wondering. She seemed so concerned about him earlier and is now so conspicuously absent. "Aren't we supposed to be partners?"
"Partners. Yeah right" Stark snorts.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Barton asks. He doesn't know why but Stark is rubbing him the wrong way. Probably because he tried to touch his bow. His baby.
"It means the two of you and most likely fuc-"
Stark is cut off abruptly by Banner. "What Tony means to say is that you and Natasha are very close."
Barton is instantly suspicious. And incredulous. Him close with the woman who kills for no more reason than money? He doesn't think so. It's not like he's some great patriot and before he was in the Army he got up to a lot of stuff in the circus but he was never like her.
"Yeah because you're fucking" Stark snorts. At Banner's deeply put upon face he argues, "What? He doesn't remember liking her. It's not like I'm gonna get beat up for it. Blackhawk is down."
"No, but Natasha hurt you when she finds out. And what the hell did you just say?" Banner asks, face a mixture of confused and amused.
"They're Blackhawk-you know- like Brangelina or Beniffer. Black Widow and Hawkeye."
"Tony even for you that is-"
"I refuse to believe this." Barton broke in to the conversation happening between the two scientists, "she's a sociopath-"
"Yeah but so are you" Stark says, smirking.
"Why are you here?" Barton asks, more than genuinely curious. The man is not helping his mood.
"We're friends" Stark says, sounding offended.
"You think I'm a sociopath."
"Only in the very best way."
Rodgers enters the room from behind an imposing looking stack of machines. "Knock it off guys. We need to work on fixing this."
"I'm going to need Thor" Banner says. "If Loki caused this with magic and not a good old fashioned head injury then maybe Thor can fix it."
Barton knows who Thor is from studding the avenger's initiative files while waiting for the test results. Apparently he almost shot him once. And then spent a year guarding some kind of magic cube that Thor took back to his homework with him.
"I got the impression he's not nearly as proficient at magic as Loki is" Stark muses, "we need an expert."
"An expert in Asgardian magic? I think Thor is as good as we're gonna get."
"I thought you had no way of reaching him" Barton interjects- happy to prove he understands what is going on.
"There's some sort of magic guy on Asgard who's all seeing" Stark says with an expressive wave of his hands.
"His name is Heimdall" Rodgers says, "he's their gatekeeper. He keeps a watch on events on Earth and lets Thor know when he's needed."
"So Thunderpants should be showing up any minute now" Stark says, "Let's just hope he doesn't land on the helipad again. Those weird ass runes still won't come out."
…
"I was going to tell Clint today." He would have been ecstatically happy. She wasn't sure herself how she felt about the baby but Clint always wanted a family and she wanted Clint. Forever.
Pepper now looks well and truly shocked out of her mind. "I didn't even know the two of you were together much less trying to have a baby…"
"We weren't trying." Natasha almost snorts at the notion. The very idea of two highly trained SHEILD operatives thinking it was a good idea to have a baby when every bad guy on the planet knew who they were and would use it as leverage against them. "This was an accident. A good one but still…"
There were a couple of days on a mission in Peru last month when it hadn't been feasible to take her birth control pill- seeing as she was being purposely held captive in order to let SHEILD find a chemical weapons manufacture. When she'd been found after three days by Clint and a small SHEILD team and the place had been taken apart (she'd been especially happy to go after a couple of the more touchy feely guards) she'd been in the mood to celebrate and hadn't even thought about the potential consequences. They'd found a four star hotel that overlooked the port of Lima and used a condom that clearly hadn't worked and the rest was history.
Pepper clearly has no idea what to say and now Natasha feels guilty for confiding in her and putting her in this position. After a moment of awkward silence Pepper finally asks somewhat timidly, "Have you been to the doctor?"
"No, but I'm sure. I took three of those tests…" her voice trails off remembering the way she'd gone about buying and taking the test like it was a covert op. Wigs and fake credit cards had been involved. The whole charade carefully concocted so if there was nothing to tell she wouldn't get Clint's hopes up (she'd always known he wanted a family) and if there was it could be a surprise.
Well it looked like the surprise was on her.
"How about" Pepper spoke slowly, clearly not wanting to startle Natasha anymore, "We go down to medical and have you checked out. " Natasha started to protest but Pepper continued, "That way you can see Agent Barton also."
Natasha perked up at the idea of seeing Clint, who'd been locked away from her for four hours now but she couldn't allow a physical." I can't get checked out Pepper, the moment they know about the baby I won't be let back out in the field."
She had a feeling she was going to need field work to keep her sane.
"Should you be going out into the field? Risking something like that?"
"I can handle myself" Natasha felt herself going cold and feeling patronized.
"I know that" Pepper sounded amazingly steady. "You're more competent in a fight then anyone I know. But could you live with yourself if something happened to the baby?"
"I…" the mere thought of something happening to her child made Natasha clench her hands over her stomach to keep it safe. This may not have been planned but it was Clint's baby and at the moment all she had left of her husband. "No. I couldn't. That's why I didn't go with the guys yesterday. Maybe if I had…"
"No." Pepper said firmly, holding up one hand in a stop motion. "You can't blame yourself for this. Tony said Loki came out of nowhere and bashed Agent Barton in the head before anyone could do anything. In fact if you were there you might be injured now as well."
She couldn't decide if she was a horrible person for not knowing what would be worse- losing the baby or losing Clint.
"I know that" she says, because deep down somewhere she is aware of that what Pepper is saying is basically true, "rationally I know that. It doesn't make me feel any less guilty. I'm supposed to have Clint's back."
"When it was just you" Pepper says gently, carefully putting her hand on Natasha's shoulder. It didn't pay to physically touch an assassin against their will so all of the Avenger's and co (baring Tony) were very careful about casual contact between themselves and the SHEILD agents. "It's not anymore. There are six of you. And me. And we all have Clint's back."
"Yes but not the way I have it. He's my…" she actually stops before saying the word husband. They've been keeping this secret for so long she doesn't know how to be open about it.
Pepper seems to understand. "Your everything" she says, voice quiet. It reminds Natasha how long Pepper and Tony had spent locked in a romantic no man's land.
"Yes." Her everything indeed.
"How about we go down to medical and the two you just talk- no examination."
"You don't understand" Natasha nearly starts to cry again, "Clint despised me before we met. Absolutely hated me. I can't just walk up to him and say 'hi, I'm your wife!'"
"Well you have to tell him eventually. He has a right to know. Especially about the baby."
"I know" silent tears start to trickle down Natasha's face. "But I have no idea how to tell him."
…..
A/N: All right! Man it was hard writing dark Barton (as I've come to think of him) he has all these opinions and so few feelings. It made for a big switch up with how I usually see Blackhawk with Clint as the emotional one and Natasha being more grounded.
Stay tuned for these exciting developments in the next chapter: Natasha and Clint's first meeting, Thor's arrival and Natasha and Clint's first conversation since the memory loss!
I was totally overwhelmed with receiving thirty one reviews for the first chapter alone. Let's see if we can match that number for chapter two and I'll be writing even faster!
Hit that blue button!
