A/N: HI EVERYONE,

SORRY FOR THE 9 DAY WAIT FOR THIS CHAPTER. Life got very busy, very quickly. :) Thanks for the reviews and the favs and the follows! It makes my whole day.

I hope the next update will be here by NEXT Wednesday, but it will definitely be by NEXT Friday, if not. :)

MUCH LOVE AND ENJOY!

- Fel :)

P.S. I've been making a playlist in my head of songs to listen to for each chapter, (if you go back probably later this week, I'll have edited each chapter to have a song for it) and this one is a mash up between:

Him & I - G-Eazy

Born Again - Saint Motel

Bonnie and Clyde - Serge Gainsbourg

Stranglehold - Ted Nugent

Marked for Death - Emma Ruth Rundle (especially for the end, you'll see what I mean ;))

A Neoclassical building.

An infinite number of Steves.

A tiny girl with tiny curls.

Blood pouring from his chest.

The tiny girl screaming his name.

Steve awoke in a jolt. He had been dozing against the windowpane of the ship, as they coasted somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. In respect to Barton, he had wanted to make sure he was okay before they even tried to make sense of the information Yelena had given them. It was probably a good thing they didn't, as Steve didn't think any more drama.

Sam had disappeared to some nether reaching corner of the quinjet. He was embarrassed and ashamed, and Steve figured, in some degree, hurt that Natasha hadn't spoken to him yet. But that frustrated Sam, too, because how could you be mad at someone who never asked for this, in the first place? Especially, when said 'person' just ran into their crazy ex-fiancé, found out the person they cared for the most was held hostage—without them even knowing—and, if that wasn't enough, they could never return home…ever again. So, yes, Sam avoided both of them because he knew his anger was irrational, but it still was enough to keep him away deliberately.

And Nat, obviously, had her own problems. Just in the past 36 hours, she had spent 35 and a half of them, by Clint's bedside as he slept. He would imagine the only times she hadn't been by his side were due to bathroom breaks. But even then—the girl could hold it. It was easy to tell, there was nowhere else she would rather be. When Steve would periodically check in on Barton (and her), he would find her staring at his face in unblinking, relentless patience. It was as if she was waiting for the moment his eyes would open, only to reveal that she was there—that she had come for him, that she had saved him. But probably more importantly, she didn't want his first thought to be that he was alone.

He got up out of the captain's seat and made his way into the med room, where Natasha—as he expected—was in the same position he had left her in. Only this time she was now holding Barton's hand between hers with his fingers pressed to her lips. She barely acknowledged he had entered the room.

"How's he doing?" He asked her softly as he came to sit beside her.

At first, she didn't seem to want to respond, but eventually, she dropped his hand from her lips. Steve noticed she had refused to let go of his fingers, as she had unconsciously moved herself closer to his bedside. "The same."

He eyed Barton's face with a small but concerned frown. They had done their best to patch him up. And, in the end, it wasn't as bad as they thought. He had had a broken wrist—that probably meant no archery for the master archer anytime soon—a misaligned jaw bone (Nat had aptly cracked that back into place, which Steve was still trying to accept had actually happened), a misplaced hip bone, and a long stress fracture along his right femur…

It seemed like a lot to handle for the three of them, but when you get an ex-paratrooper, an old guy (with a bit of military experience), and a super assassin together, you end up with pretty good results. They had managed to sew up the cuts, bandage the ones they couldn't, and as for everything else—they knew Barton would want the scars to show off to his kids. He was like that, Steve had come to realize. Clint could take any terrible, egregious thing and make it into a joke. Some would see that as immature, but Clint just saw it as another way to live. Soooo, anybody wanna explain to me why that guy has horns coming out of his head? How many insect guys do we have on the team, now? O.K., so, that girl can move things with her mind? Great. No, it's cool. I'm cool with that. Because, either way, at the end of the day—on any day—Clint Barton would be just fine.

But Steve wasn't Clint Barton—because he definitely wasn't fine with any of this. And as he watched Natasha, he knew her cold, expressionless mask implied she wasn't either. She saw it as a way to get him to leave, but that's what dying animals did—they hissed and screamed and lashed out at anything that came near them. They didn't want to look weak, even as their life was slipping away by the second. The bottom-line was: even if Nat thought she didn't need him here, he would be there if she did. He needed her to know it was okay—that what happened wasn't her fault.

But the problem was, Steve had no idea how to start this conversation. You really have no idea how to talk to women, do you? No, Peg, I don't—thanks for the reminder. He snapped at her in his head as he cleared his throat; why did it have to be him? Start with something simple—maybe? State the obvious? "This wasn't your fault."

Natasha chuckled bitterly. "Okay. Thanks, Rogers." She had dismissed him. She had shooed him away like a damn housefly off of a fresh-baked pie.

Ouch. Okay, maybe something not that obvious.

"How could you have possibly known, Natasha?"

How could you have possibly known…

And suddenly, she wasn't sitting beside Steve Rogers, Natasha was standing, nearly a decade earlier, in the ruins of a Taliban base camp. The American Army, with the help of the SHIELD special forces team, had blown up the supposed 'headquarters' of the terrorist organization, but standing in the chaos of that old world, Natasha wasn't sure what they had destroyed. As ash covered her entirely, her ears were ringing, and her eyes were watering—tears were pouring down her cheeks from the mustard gas the assailants had thrown into the camp. She was blind, she was deaf, and for the first time—in a very long time—Natasha was afraid.

BARTON. She was screaming wildly into the rubble, trying to reach him through her coms. She could feel her lungs bursting with pain from the amount of toxic air she consumed to yell his name—it felt like knives scraping against the muscular tissue of her lungs. But with so much pain, you would think there had to be an actual result; and the funny thing was, she couldn't hear her own screams. She dropped to her knees as darkness began to lick around the edges of her vision. BARTONNNN.

He was dead. What if he was dead? Crushed under a building. Demolished with the explosion. His neck cut through by an assailant.

And it was her fault…

Before she could literally collapse into the tragedy she had been the cause of, Clint—who was, in fact, not dead—was there, grabbing her arm and diving with her into the deadly clouds of yellow gas. He ripped off his gas mask and handed it to her, shoving it against her lips. Deep breath. He ordered her. Natasha, he spoke her newly patented name like it was a prayer, breathe.

She did as he asked—taking a fleshy, deep, and remarkable breath—before she handed it back to him—forcing him to do the same. As soon as he did, he threw it back to her. They went on like that for the entirety of the dangerous run through the mustard-colored hurricane clouds.

The only thing was, they were getting tired. She could feel Clint's feet beginning to drag. She grabbed him around the waist and pulled, pulled with all her strength, pulled with all of her will—she pulled with everything she had left. She could see the outline of the SHIELD aircraft waiting for them on the other side of the gas clouds. If they could just get through this last stretch of gas and debris… She went to take another deep breath from the mask, balancing Barton in one arm and holding the mask with the other, but there must have been a stone, a pebble… It had to have been a pebble. Because if it had been her own feet, she would never have forgiven herself.

Because suddenly, without warning, she tripped, and the mask fell from her hand. The glass broke, and their only way out of there was rendered entirely ineffective in a mere second.

Clint gripped hold of her, and she knew, the moment he did, what he was going to do—and she wasn't about to let that happen. She grabbed his forearm and lifted her knee, and with one powerful shove, she kicked him straight out of the clouds and into safety. She fell to the ground, conscious for seconds, before the gas took over and nearly killed her.

Had it not been for Clint fucking Barton.

She woke to him, fuming and thundering. Clint could hide his emotions, if he wanted, but most of the time, he wanted everyone to know how he felt. So, when her eyes came into focus and she saw his face—his features steely, his teeth clenched behind his lips, and his eyes locked on hers—she could only smile. No one had ever been so pissed at the possibility of her death before.

Well, if it ain't my lucky day—waking up to such a handsome face in the morning. Natasha had teased, but Clint had looked ready to shoot her with one of his explosive arrows.

What the hell were you thinking? He snapped at her, not even allowing her to finish drinking down the glass of water she had been offered.

What a second ago? Nothing. I was sleeping, silly.

Natasha, cut the shit—back there, in the gas.

Oh. That. Well, hon, that's what we—in the business—like to call: 'saving your life.' She paused for a minute to smirk at him. She didn't understand the fire and intensity in his eyes—they had both made it out, what was the big deal? What? That doesn't get me my brownie points for the day?

No, it doesn't, because what you did was selfish.

Natasha could only scoff at his reasoning. And why is that exactly?

Because you were trying to be a fucking martyr. Clint's fingers gripped the edge of the medical bed, tensed and white-knuckled. You and every other self-sacrificing asshole, on this side of the Mississippi, tend to have this stupid idea that you don't need a 'partner.'

Wasn't that the point? The mission? To sacrifice everything for 'the mission'? Well, no one else is going to save the day, if I don't.

No—see!—see, Natasha, that's it; this is what I'm talking about. You think your blood is so important, that you think your death would have made a difference. But all that tells me is that you barely value my life, if you're willing to save mine, only to sacrifice yours.

That's not fair, Clint. I don't—

This is Ground Zero, out here, in a war that's been going on for ten years. Ten fucking years, Natasha. You know how many people have died? Your life—a single body lost in the thousands—won't make a difference, I promise. They probably won't even remember your name. But me? I'll regret losing you every waking second for the rest of my life, so unfortunately, all you and I can do—the only option we have—is to stick together.

"I just should have known, Rogers. That's it. There's nothing more to it than that."

Natasha felt the sensation of bed sheets up against her naked thighs, she could taste the cool, after-rain moisture hanging within the air of Clint's bedroom, and her eyes—burning and breathing pieces of chipped emeralds—were drilling straight into his.

Barton's hands were grasping her hips, his fingernails were digging deep into her flesh. She felt his lips gracing themselves against her collarbone, as she curled over against him. She wanted them closer. She wanted him to become a part of her body—curled into one another like ying-and-yang.

Tash… His lips whispering her name out into the unbracing, frightened world; into a room that had no soul before he had given it one just by saying her name. Natasha…

"Natasha." Her eyes flew open to see Clint staring at her with startled trepidation.

A small, wry, yet exuberant smile bloomed across her face like sunshine rising above a grey horizon. "Barton." His name was knocked from her lips like a punch to the gut, and not, necessarily, in a bad way. She felt everything when she looked at Clint Barton. She felt emotions that were undefinable in the terms and tongues of man, she felt things move within her chest that must have made wild horses run—so much so, that she could barely breathe through all of it. She gave him a tight, but terse hug—not wanting to tire him out with her emotional breakdown.

"You wanna explain to me why my head feels worse than it did after my 21st birthday?" He croaked out with a raspy voice due to lack of use, but it seemed like that hardly made a difference to him, with his good-humored smile that came to rest on his lips.

"Alexi." She said softly. It was all he needed to know what had happened.

"That guy is actually the worst." He was drugged and not entirely lucid. He sighed and tried to remember what happened as he brought a hand up to the un-bandaged side of his face. "I was in Sekovia… Fury sent me there to watch this special cleanup process from Ultron… I guess…"

"Did Fury actually tell you?" The KGB knew how to impersonate messages, they knew how to hack into federal agencies records and emails—they could have easily reached Clint through a SHIELD address, if needed.

"It was a message sent from him, I figured… Damn it. This has gotta be what Wile E. Coyote feels every time Roadrunner runs off a fucking canyon."

"Don't beat yourself up about it, Barton." She smirked at his bludgeoned face, kind of attempting to make a pun. But it felt acidic in her throat to even be joking about what had happened to him.

Clint chuckled loosely at her quip, but then winced slightly when his ribs ached. "God dammit," he gingerly touched his aching area, "Boy, if I didn't have a kink for being taken prisoner and almost beaten to death, I'd say this sucked pretty bad." He said with a smirk. "Guess I still can't party with Russians, can I?"

She swallowed hard. He was making a joke about all of this. He was doing what he always did and trying to make light of the situation, but this time—it wasn't okay. It wasn't okay because she would have left him to die, and she wouldn't have even known until long after he was gone. She tried to laugh. "You know we don't have limits..." She whispered giving him a weak, half-wilted smile.

Clint, as drugged as he was, started to laugh with her. After all, it had been a long running joke between the two of them—tested and proven, too—that Clint could not hold his liquor when it came to Natasha. None of them could, not even Steve. When the Avengers got 'turnt'—as his son started saying recently—Natasha and Thor were really the only ones who could hold out the longest. But the joke wasn't as funny when he realized that Natasha wasn't laughing. She was crying. Hysterically.

But Natasha thought she was holding it together pretty well—all things considered. However, her laughter, which could have passed as maybe normal, turned into shocking, choking, and angry little things that rattled her chest and cut her deep inside.

He regarded her with a glazed, yet very aware expression. Somewhere in the five minutes he had been conscious (if you could consider the glossy, drugged consciousness actual wakefulness), he had managed to upset her because they definitely weren't talking about alcohol anymore. Were they? "Tash?" He sleepily asked her, his tongue tripping over the 's' in her name, but he managed to summon up a tiny, but sloppy grin. "Hey…" He was reaching for her. "Hey, c'mere…" He managed to grab one of her shaking wrists and—despite having one of his own wrists broken, didn't lack the strength to pull her up onto the bed with him.

She was shaking in his arms. Actually shaking, like not in the "frightened, kicked puppy" kind of way, but in a grownass-woman-convulsively shaking. This was the most shaken he had ever seen her—not to say that Natasha Romanoff was someone who was 'shaken' easily (obviously, anyone who had seen her drive an alien space ship into the side of skyscraper back in the Battle of New York, knew she wasn't). But this is what her old life did to her—it tore her in two impractical and different directions. One side of her was the beatingheart of Natasha Romanoff: the girl who cared more than she let on, and the other side of her was heart-eating 'Black Widow.' And it was a basic understanding between the two sides of herself, that the Black Widow couldn't devour Natasha's heart, not when they both needed it; not when one felt, while the other merely survived.

They stood on the edge of a rooftop in the middle of February. The air was ice-cold and the world beneath their feet, seemed frozen underneath the ice that that winter had blown in.

There was a heavy silence between the two of them, a broken and terrible solemnity that could only have been compared to that of a funeral. A funeral for someone that actually mattered, not someone you felt obligated to attend.

'So, that's it?' He whispered to her with a look of shattering disbelief clinging to his features.

And he knew, from experience, it wasn't about him. He wasn't the one who could reach in and pull out the girl with the beating heart. He wasn't the one who could save her. He had only ever been the guy who could stand being in between the two of sides of her and manage to make sense of both.

"Tasha—" he moved her chin to meet his eyes. "I'm okay." He said to her with the same firmness as one addresses a hysterical child. His eyes were looking into hers, refusing to be moved. He leaned his forehead against hers and watched as long and rabid tears escaped from her eyes, before he brought his lips to her forehead and held them there.

'What do you want me to say?' She hissed at him with tears overwhelmingly coming to her eyes. 'I can't give you what you want.'

'Who the fuck says you know what I 'want,' Natasha?!' He half screeched, half cried at her. He wanted her, above God and world peace and kids; above everything… This… No, this wasn't what he wanted.

"What would I have told Laura, Clint?" She gasped out in between the body-shaking sobs. "What would I have told her?" Her eyes weren't focused on his, or on anything in particular. They were looking at Laura Barton, standing in the doorway of a farmhouse, screaming into oblivion over the man she loved who would never come home.

She was silent for a long time. She didn't know what to say, he didn't know what to say, either.

She took her hand out of the pocket of her trench coat and removed the suede glove that protected her fingers against the frigid air. And there, on her fingers was a simple, yet stunning ring. Whoever had picked it out, knew her well. It was a statement with its impressive golden band that twirled and dipped and wrapped around her finger like a great water serpent, but the jewel itself—the thing that caught the eye—was wondrously small, but extremely rare. It was a type of ruby, only found in certain parts of the caves of Israel, that had a genetic mutation to not be bright and ostentatiously red, but rather, permeated to a pale, antique rose coloring.

It fit her beautifully. And as she slid it off her finger, holding it out to him, her hand suddenly looked deprived. She felt naked without it. But she would ignore the discomfort, if only for his sake.

'Take it, Clint.' She could only hold it out to him, before she felt the heavy and achy resistance against her chest like when you're trying to hold in a sob for too long.

He wouldn't take it. He wouldn't fucking let her have this victory for herself, only to feel like shit later. He wouldn't let her burn herself like this. 'Natasha, will you—'

'TAKE IT.' She screamed at him, throwing the ring at his face with deadly aim. It plunked against his cheek and fell to the ground with a little ping.

He could only stare at it—a little golden glint in the icy snow beneath his feet. He bent down to pick it up, only to realize, once he was on his knees, picking up the ring that was to be the one that sealed his entire life to one woman—the woman—he knew standing back up would be a sign it was over. He was stuck on his knees before her, unable to move, and could only look at her. 'Why are you doin' this?'

Her bottom lip quivered and she shrugged, turning her face away from his eyes. She didn't want him to see her cry. 'Because if anyone deserves that life—the chance to be happy—outside of all this… It's you.'

'You're the only one that would make that kind of life worth anything, Nat.' He thundered, as a tear fell down his cheek in silent and graceful agony. The tears of Clint Barton were not shed for the meek and mortal things of the everyday. He only ever cried at the mountains of emotional disruption. He figured—his fiancé deciding it was over—could count as one of them.

'Then I'm the one who has to do this.' She sniffed hard, wiping away the tears that were on her cheeks, before making her way over to Barton. He still kneeled before her, unable to find the strength to stand up. Her face looked like a very old, very beautiful temple that was beginning to collapse in on itself. She bent down to his level and took his face in her trembling hands, placing a gentle, tender kiss on his lips. Their breath came out in white, jerky little puffs. They were both crying, but the two of them had just become very effective at learning how to silence their emotion.

His palms came up and grasped her caving cheeks, while his fingers tucked themselves behind her ears, swallowing her face in between his two hands. "Natasha, this is real. I'm here, I'm alive, and none of this bullshit is your fault." His words, while quiet, shook with a powerful vibrato that got her attention. It seemed to sew up the two sides of her, collapsing them back into one another. Her eyes hung on his, tears still sitting there on the edges of her eyelashes like raindrops on grass, but she was done losing herself in 'what could have been.'

She stared at him with measures and measures of doubt; she didn't believe him. Because when she looked at him, she saw the scars and the cuts and the bandages as her own. She saw herself as the one who snapped his wrist, the one who took a fucking knife to his calf—she saw herself as the one who did it all. And he couldn't stop her from doing that. He had tried countless times to make her believe in something outside of regret, but he couldn't. Nothing could.

'You don't have to be a martyr.' He managed to gasp out as she began to walk away.

She froze in her tracks and turned to look at him. 'I'm not—this is the only way I know how to protect you.'

But, for once, she didn't argue. Instead, she settled her head against his chest with her hand coming to rest over his heart. "I would probably lose it, if I ever really lost you. I mean, just to be clear as to where we stand."

Clint let out a loose, easy snicker. "That's a little clingy of you, Natasha." He wrapped his arm around the back of her and leaned back against the mountain of pillows behind his head.

"You're the only person I care about." She casually shrugged her shoulders. "Of course, I have to be clingy."

DECEMBER 2010

"What is it Pierce wants to know?"

Emi threw the file down in front of M16's face, gesturing to it with a nod of her chin. "Infinity Stones."

16 raised an inquisitive, dubious brow as she raised the file up to her face. Stamped across the front, in large and ostentatious red ink—as if she couldn't read—was written: TOP SECRET. Well, it must have been, if it was written in colossal fucking lettering. She flipped it open and began to sort through the pieces of information inside. And however emboldened the presentation of the file was—the things inside were, at least,mildly interesting. There were articles written across the span of decades. You could flip from one that was dating back to a man in 1879 and the next was another written just earlier that year. All of it was seemingly written on the idea of these theoretical 'power sources' that had the potential to shape life within the universe. Physicists, philosophers, theologians, mad men, and the sane all had opinions—all of them believed, whether divinely created or not, these 'sources' crafted how we existed within ourselves, within time and reality—how anything that had ever happened, actually happened.

It seemed like a right round load of bollocks. She was about to close the file and send Emi back to Pierce with an earful for wasting her time, but she saw a glossy corner of something sticking out in the back of the folder. She frowned and stuck her fingernail underneath the thick pile of articles and opened it to a black-and-white photo of the Tesserac. Near the top of the photo was a yellowed and worn clipping from an informative briefing, a very old informative briefing. The watermark behind it was the familiar mechanical eagle and emblem of the SSR. Written in scribbled, yet elegant cursive was: UNKNOWN, YET VOLATILE ENTITY, DANGEROUS, CONTAINED IN HYDROGENIC, NITROGEN-LOCKED CARBON CONTAINER AT 100 KELVIN. SUSPECTED TO BE ALTERNATIVE 'POWER SOURCE.' She had written that briefing—years ago, before any of this had even happened.

She remembered when she wrote that. Howard Stark had dropped the protective case, containing the Tesserac, on her desk, not caring a wit if she had had been doing anything else. I think we're gonna have to move card night, Peg. They had both gotten blitzed that night. It was the downfall of "Plan Z"—find the Tesserac and you find Steve. They had lost. They would have to move on—the both of them. How impossible it had seemed, at the time, to move on from Steve Rogers.

But that was before M16 was captured, before everything changed. And in her experience, you move on a lot quicker, when you have nothing to move on from.

She flipped to the next photo: KAMAR-TAJ, KATHMANDU, NEPAL. Kamar-Taj, as far as the photograph was concerned, was truly an architectural feat—and M16 was sure the aerial shot didn't do it justice—as it seemed to be a clash of three different cultures. She could see Hindu in the use of multiple symmetrical towers, all of which depicted geometric shapes spinning up and around, Chinese due to the extravagant stone dragon-like creatures that guarded the courtyards (the Song Dynasty, if she remembered correctly, was big on its dragons), and at least a splash of Buddhism—but, then again, it wasn't as if she, a 90-year-old woman who had studied a vast amount of cultures and their architectural style, languages, and ideologies—knew anything.

"Mmm no." M16 closed the file and slid it back over to Emi, who had been silently waiting for her to finish.

Emi offered her one of those rare, yet amused smiles. She had probably only seen three of them in all their years together. "You and I both know that's not an option, Carter."

"I'm not going after a goose." She crossed her arms and lifted her face to meet Emi's gaze. When Emi only gave her that annoying deadpan of hers, M16 stood to her full height and walked over to her, leaning against the desk with half of her hip. "Emilie, we're too old for this sort of thing, as it is. And anyway, reality, time – all that bibbity-boppety nonsense – is not what HYDRA's wants."

At that, Emi's smile was gone, without a trace, without a word, without a sound. Her despondent, technicolored eyes moved to meet 16's. "It's exactly what they want." She picked up the file from the desk and flipped it open to reveal the photograph of the Tesserac. "Or is that not what HYDRA wanted?"

"This was different."

"How was that different?"

M16 let out a frustrated sigh as she settled an exasperated gaze onto the other girl. "The Tesserac was about Schmidt, and that man was bloody unhinged."

"The Tesserac was a power source – it could have been used to power weapons, engines, for Christ's sake, your fucking toaster oven, for all we know. The bottom line is: it could have been what HYDRA needed it to be. And they think they've found another one." She flipped to the next photo—the one of Kamar-Taj. "It's called the Eye of Agamotto and, if we're right, it can manipulate Time."

M16 raised an interested brow but revealed nothing across her face. "And why would HYDRA want to change anything about Time?"

"Well, for starters, we wouldn't have to hide behind SHIELD."

16 chuckled dryly, but she scarcely found it funny. "That's it? HYDRA wants to rewrite the entirety of history, just so that world domination happens the way they wanted?"

Emi was silent for a long moment. There was something she was chewing on, some harsh and terrible piece of information that would make anyone's skin crawl. She knew it. She had no doubt in her mind. "If your boyfriend would have lived, Carter, that is to say, had he landed the Valkyrie safely—HYDRA wouldn't have needed a cover."

"Are you saying that if Captain Rogers—"

"Yes. If Captain America had lived and skipped the ice bath altogether, the whole world would have been different."

"And just why is that?" Her face, like a fresh block of clay, revealed nothing.

"Because HYDRA would have won."