shame, shame, go away
come again some other day
memories keep hunting me
help me chase them all away
hush, hush, settle down
button up, don't make a sound
close your eyes, turn around,
help me burn this to the ground
come now, take the blame
it's ok, i'll play the game
I don't care it's all the same
watch you all go up in flames
use me up, spit me out
let me be your hand-me-down
fame, fame, go away
come again some other day
- Arlandria, Foo Fighters
She opens her eyes three hours and a half later, covered in sweat, but calmly. All of what she saw in those few moments of sleep are a routine since she first stepped foot in the SHIELD headquarters almost a month ago. The nightmares are a bitter and constant reminder that she will never belong there. A way to keep her in contact with who she is. A russian spy, a cold blooded assassin; not an american hero.
She notices that Clint is not under her anymore, and lets out a frustrated sigh. In normal days, the smallest hint of him trying to get out of the bed would wake her instantly, but she slept through it all. She'd been tired, she'd been worn out and she'd been weak.
Natasha sits up in the mattress and runs a hand between her soaked strands of hair. There has to be some other explanation. There's no way that she'd lost his movements, not ones that were so brusque. He'd probably slipped something in her drink before she went to bed.
She needs to question him about that, asap, and beat the crap out of him in case it's true. It probably is; the damn Hawk is always experimenting on new ways to annoy her and piss her off. The moments leading to her falling asleep are a perfect example - she has yet to question herself about that later. Now, she just needs a shower to get rid of that feeling of failure.
Certainly the water would wash away all of the wrong she's been doing, along with all of the unsureness she's been having and the myriad of small mistakes, tiny stupid mistakes that could get her killed at any moment.
She closes her eyes and holds her breath, cursing herself. The Hawkeye. She had to wait for him, he was right. For that one moment, strapped in that chair, Natasha has needed him to save her life. She has been stupid, lately. Immature.
What the hell was happening to her?
She walks in the white corridors. They strange for her. All she'd ever known were the dark-blood painted ones in the Red Room, so she wouldn't expect herself to be able to sleep between walls so white. White sheets. White pillows. White everything. It is annoying, not to say uncomfortable. So she gets out of the room and that's what she finds: white corridors. Everything in that damned place is white.
Natasha hadn't noticed that when she first got there in the night before. Her arrive had been turbulent. There'd been quite a fuss when she appeared in the extraction point alive. Without handcuffs. And by free will. The highest patents were aware of her willingness to work with them, but the common agents were all praying for their lives. Her wicked smile, showing widely while she walked down the main hall to the Director's office wasn't really helping them to feel safe even there, in their own workplace. There'd been rumors, terrible ones. They said she could make a man weep his secrets out in less than ten minutes. Others said that she could do it in seconds. One of the experienced agents said he'd seen the Black Widow in action in a mission in Russia, and that those were the most terrifying moments in his life.
It was said that she had a halo of death, and that she would only be stopped if she was killed.
But she was alive.
After meeting the famous Nick Fury and hearing The Hawkeye's sentence to almost two months of withdrawal, she had been put in that little room, next to his, and her smile melted into uneasiness. She was there, between white walls. Hopelessly searching for something familiar, like a child.
The Widow finally finds solace in another small room, in the basement of the Helicarrier, after wandering around for almost three hours. The walls are grayish, and the floor is covered in a soft black mat. There are florets, sabers, rapiers, axes and even japanese katanas placed in the stand on the other side of the chamber, among other fighting equipments; but she takes a liking to the blades.
She almost smiles at the dummy, standing there in the middle of the room, just waiting for her to punch it, or slice it. She could use the exercise, and the familiarity of it. She steps closer to the fencing swords, remembering how rusty is her sword fighting, but her eyes are immediately attracted to the one weapon that beat her.
The Hawkeye's bow and arrows are resting by a hook in front of her, behind the blades.
There is not a possible way to resist that. Natasha immediately takes the equipment in her own hands. It is light, but feels heavy, and it does't seems so easy to handle as he makes it seem.
There is a never ending list of meanings for that moment, but she ignores them all. All the poetry doesn't matter. Everything that matters is to master this one instrument, whatever it takes. She wants to know it's strong points, it's weakness, it's tricks.
She takes one shaft from the bag and places it in the bow, mimicking the Hawk's way of doing it. She'd seen it only once - and too quickly for her to really get the movement right - it took him only one arrow to make a mess of her.
Natasha adjusts her posture a few times and takes the shot, missing the target wildly. Without a single sound, a single grumble, she takes another arrow, shoots again, misses again. And then repeats it all until her hands are sore from the friction with carbon fibre.
She counts a hundred and thirty six shots before she finally lowers the weapon.
"Who gave you the permission to play with Biancci?" Says a male voice behind her, making her take position with the bow firm in her hands and the arrow ready to make flight again. "Watch it, even being that terrible," he points out to the dummy, "at this range you could really hurt me."
He has a mocking smile in his lips. A certain tone in his voice. It makes her blood boil. But she can't kill him, not after he saved her life.
"The bow has a name?" Natasha asks, with a matching note of arrogance.
"Yes. She has a name."
"She...?"
"Yes, she. And I'll ask again: who gave you permission to fuck around with her? She has only one man in her life - that's me. And, as far as I know, she doesn't like unexperienced women putting her hands on her."
The Widow actually smiles and the man's stupidity. What the hell of a comparison is that? Out of spite, she brings the arch up and slide a shaft through it, at the point of almost letting it go.
"Well, I slept with woman before, she'll like me."
The concentration to, at least this time, make it right is so big she misses him moving around her. She only realizes that he's still in the room when she feels his chest in her back. She hesitates a reaction for a second and his figure fits perfectly upon hers.
"If you really want to do it with her, at least do it right."
He makes his own body a mold for hers, and adjusts the hight in which her arms are positioned, the distance between her legs, the way her hips are, to make the perfect angle. He talks while he do it, trying to get some of the knowledge he has into her head:
"It's really just like having sex, dear. The foreplay starts from the top." He says, taking an arrow from the saddlebag in her back and putting it in her hands. "Then you go down", with his hands around hers, he helps her put the arrow in the bow while it's still pointing to the ground. "You use your mouth, it is a reference to what you need to do later." She feels the tip of his fingers touch her lips, along with the polyethylene strings. "Lower your elbows, please, honey, you're not going to be able to so anything right like this; bring your legs apart a little more, you need a solid base- I said apart, man must have a really hard time trying to get inside you, don't they? Straighten you spine, for christ's sake, or you'll have it in pieces when you're done. Keep your eyes on your target, you want to see what the hell is happening, after all, dear."
"You call me dear one more time and-"
"Do you talk like that while you're being fucked? Shut up, don't get distracted." He grunts. She ignores the comment and focuses on learning. "Now keep it steady. Yes, like this. Take your time, dear, enjoy this one moment of perfect balance." The Hawk slowly creates a distance between the two of them. His hands are not in contact with her anymore, they hover almost imperceptibly above her skin. Their bodies are not even an inch apart, but doesn't have her in his control anymore. "And when you're going to a climax..." It is only her fingers holding the string, now. "Do it gently." He whispers in her ear, and she releases the arrow.
The metal tip hits the dummy's head. A perfect aim.
She loses his quick smirk at the result because she's amazed herself. He moves away, leaving her with his bow, not without a twinge of regret. That girl is going to be a pain in his ass. She could cause a dominos fall they all won't be prepared to deal with.
Little does he knows that, a week later, but in the exact same time, he's possibly going to be at the bridge, waiting for instructions for a departure. The mission's folder is going to be in his hands. And he's going to hate to look at it.
"Who was the idiot that gave her this mark?", he's going to think. It's not his mission in his hands. It's hers. A kill, simple enough when you look at it this way. But this mark haves a name, a recognizable one. It is this one man's head, Dimitri Mihailov's, that has an absurd bounty. The one same head that the Widow's bullet missed eight days before, when his arrow gazed her skin for the first time.
And he'll be thinking of that the plane arrives. He is going to depart to Prague and find her trapped in a chair, with one of Dimitri's psychotic killers sliding a blade through her flesh. This man will face death, but Dimitri is going to stay alive.
But all of that only happens with a decision. Now, looking to her shoot another perfect arrow in the doll's head, he has no idea what his next step - towards the door - is going to cause.
The killer draws the air trapped in her lungs and scans the room surrounding her. Barton is nowhere to be seen. The bathroom door is open, and he's not there, either. She's all alone again.
Again? Had he really been there, the night before? Hadn't she done the bandages by herself and gone asleep? That would explain why she couldn't hear him leaving the bed. Or why there was not a single of his belongings there.
"Uzhe skhozhu s uma, Romanova?" She talks to herself. Going crazy, already?
Barton or not, she still haves a main problem in her life. She's a murderer, so being crazyis not it. The problem is that she failed. And there's no such a word in her vocabulary.
Natasha jumps out of the mattress and checks the status of her main bruises - the cuts are all closed, no open wounds, no bleeding, her white shirt remained white. The white room remained white.
She's ready to walk toward the restroom and try to wash the blood out of her clothes when she catches something is the corner of her eyes. There's a manilla envelope by the nightstand, with SHIELD's seal closing it to confidentiality.
There are no names in it. And she's a SHIELD agent now, isn't she? Whatever. Screw confidentiality.
She rips the seal of and takes the paperwork out. Inside there is a name, yes, and it's a Russian name, but it's not hers. Her blood turns to ice.
Mihailov's last whereabouts is printed in black letters, as a simple and unimportant information about him.
Natasha puts the sheets back in the envelope, carefully thinking of the easiest route. Her blood starts warming up again, more than it should. There's no other decision to make. She's going after him. He's not even that far away - maybe six hours by car. She's going to have to cross Slovakia, that could be troublesome, but she knows a guy that knows a guy she can trust.
It was a hit, yes, but it is personal, now. No one has escaped the Black Widow before, and that was not happening that soon. It is called a kill because it only ends when someone is dead.
And they were both alive.
She tosses the envelope in the nightstand and walks to the bathroom.
Natasha does't even know what to think when she spots Barton's bow - Biancci - carelessly resting in a corner near the shower. That could explain the information about her mark - up to date and just waiting for her to wake up.
But it would imply that she missed his careless moves.
She decides that she prefer's craziness over another failure and takes the bow from the floor.
This time she's going to appreciate the morbid symbolism of having that weapon in her hands, because Dimitri was going to die by her arrow.