Author's Note: I seem to be getting some interest for this take on Natasha's talk with Loki, so I am going to keep at it. Basically, I like picking things apart. Thus...

"She could see the inaudible scoff in his shrug, as he turned toward the bench in his cell, gesturing with mock interest and magnanimity, "Tell me," he offered."

Chapter 3: The lies we believe

The dance was changing again, Natasha felt, the hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention with his strange demeanor. It was unnerving, to see him smiling congenially, while she knew that he was plotting the deaths of so many. Rarely had someone shaken her like this.

All of these thoughts were fleeting, and she covered them by finding her own seat, sitting and spreading her arms in an attempt to show that she was being open, "...I have a specific skill set. I didn't care who I used it for. Or on..."

This was all true. This was the truth of her splayed before him.

She sat in the back seat of the car, her posture relaxed, as the man next to her listed the number of things that he would like to do her. She smiled and laughed and purred at his words, and he went on about his thoughts without a care in the world.

Less than an hour later, he was sitting much more stiffly in an uncomfortable metal chair, and Natalia was counting for him.

"Looks like about a half a liter so far."

She gave him a grave, knowing look, "And with your height and build, I'm thinking you could stand to lose about 2 liters. Before you need medical attention. Maybe before you die."

He watched her the way an animal watches a predator, as she slid around him, bending over to look him in the eyes. He didn't bother looking at her cleavage now, she noted with some air of amusement; it seemed there were more pressing concerns for him.

"Luckily, I have medical training. It's part of what they teach us in our training, but you wouldn't know about that. All you need to know is that I," here she used a pairing knife to indicate herself, "have been sent to find you," she poked the man's cheek with the tip of blade, "to learn where you have hidden the access codes for the Dorofeyev plaza."

The man's lips trembled.

She nodded, "I realize that you are thinking at this point that you are just a security guard, and you are right. But I happen to know that you check on the safe every single night, and I also happen to know," she had started to pace, her heels creating a hypnotic rhythm on the concrete floor, "that there is not money in that safe. That's not what my employers are after, so let's cut to the chase."

She eyed the knife in her hand, which she had been tapping on her arm to the tune of her heels, "No pun intended."

His mouth opened, "I...I..."

She turned to him, then, "Listen. We both know how this is going to end. You can make it easy, or you can make it hard, but I will get the information I need because I always do..."

He talked. They always talked, one way or another. Some of them were lucky, when she felt it would be most appropriate to seduce – at least, when she was able to stomach it. Others had taken on the brunt of her unanswered rage and loss. For those, she should have felt sorrow.

It would catch up with her one day.

"Agent Barton was sent to kill me. He made a different call."

There are some lies that, if told enough times, become truth. And when working for SHIELD, those lies are the easiest to create. It's simply a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's, and then you have a bonafide story that no one can find a hole in. It becomes so accepted that even the people who were there, who knew it was different, would sometimes forget that it was fake.

Except that it didn't happen that way – not on the ground, not in real life.

Natalia, codename Black Widow, was familiar with the agent who had been dubbed "Hawkeye." Everyone who was anyone in the business of spies and assassins knew about him in the same way that they knew about her. They knew that you didn't cross them, and if you were sent on a competing mission, you simply sat it out.

No one expected Black Widow and Hawkeye to ever be assigned the same target, much less for one of them to choose on her own accord this one in particular.

Natalia was defecting, but she was playing it close the chest. No one knew. No one. And part of her plan was to kill the sonofabitch in charge of the Red Room, make it look like an inside job, and then run under the ruse of escaping for her life. Or die trying.

She wanted out, had wanted out for a long time. She also thought that the Red Room was completely under wraps – no one outside of Russia would know about it. But she was wrong; SHIELD knew about it, and they were displeased. Hawkeye was their answer to this particular type of displeasure.

It didn't take either one of them long to figure out that someone else was sniffing the same trail, but it took them a bit of time to learn who it was on the other side of the track. And then came the game of cat and mouse – hawk and spider if you wanted to be that kind of obvious – that no one could follow for long without becoming unclear on which was which.

They came to a head within a mile of Clint's safe house, in an alley littered with newspapers and bottles. She had the upper hand, and with a knife to his throat, she dragged him out into the open, where any watchers could see, and she took him to her own choice of location.

"You didn't kill me."

"Not yet."

"Are you going to?"

"Depends on your employer. I want immunity. I'm willing to exchange."

The man chuckled, and she was slightly annoyed by his blase attitude, "The Black Widow doesn't negotiate or exchange..." he trailed off, looking at her face, long and hard, "or could it be that the infamous Widow is desperate?"

With nothing left to lose, she just shrugged, "I am desperate to get out."

He had no reason to believe her. Even though every physical sign she was giving would mean honesty in any other person, she was so adept at lying that he knew better than to trust the signs. Still, Clint had always been a little reckless and a sucker for a pretty face, "You know they'll come when I don't check in."

Her body stiffened slightly, maybe preparing for a fight, but then her shoulders caved minutely, "I'm counting on it."

He pushed further, "They might just kill you. Not give you a chance to negotiate."

She hadn't responded. She looked away and said nothing. Her lack of response triggered something in Clint, and he realized how desperate she was, "What did they do to you," he asked softly.

She found herself unable to speak for a moment. He waited.

"I just...I don't have...there are only reminders here. I have a debt to repay to society...I took out my anger in the wrong places..."

Her thoughts were jumbled with memories of Alexei, the feeling of manipulation. She had no idea that one day this man tied to the chair before her would be the only person who knew the whole story. She could have rambled on, incoherent words strung together into something resembling communication, and he would have listened. But she stopped.

"How big a debt," was his only response.

"I don't know. I won't know until I've paid it."

"And you think defecting will help?"

She simply nodded, feeling oddly like a child being probed by a parent for information on a broken glass.

"Okay," he sighed, "then let's make a call."

Clint Barton had never been sent to kill her. He had been sent to kill what made her. And then he had saved her.

"And what will you do if I spare him?"

It was working, she realized.