"Are you sure about this?" Nat asks as we walk out of the SHIELD offices together.
"Why not?" I say. "I'm back to field status aren't I?"
Nat shoots me a glance. "That's not an answer, Barton."
"Come on, Nat, what do you want from me?"
"The usual," she says, stopping beside her car to grab her go bag from the back seat. "I want the truth, Barton."
"I thought the truth was flexible, not the same to all people all the time."
"No, Barton, that's what I think. You just think that's a convenient justification for deception," she says, falling back into step with me. "Unfortunately you owe me a hell of a lot more than that."
"So you admit it's me that's in your debt, not the other way around?" I say with a smirk.
Nat glares at me. "I can hurt you," she says with a small twitch of a smile.
"I know you can."
The words come out a little more serious than I meant, probably because it's true. She can hurt me. Easily. So easily it's unnerving since I'm not talking about physical pain, although of course she could hurt me that way, too.
"It's no fun if you're going to take it so seriously," she says. "Do you want to talk about something?"
"Forget it," I say, opening the trunk of the silver Porsche I won from the SHIELD acquisitions department on a bet two years ago. "Missions like this just put me on edge is all."
Nat puts her go bag in the trunk, catching my keys easily as I toss them to her, and slides gracefully into the driver's seat. "Which part?"
"Being undercover when I don't speak the language," I say. "The other part goes without saying. So yeah all of it actually."
"You know you don't have to do this," she says, glancing over to look at me as she starts the engine.
"Well I'm not going to watch you go after that damn scepter alone," I say. "I have a promise to keep, remember?"
Nat smiles a little. "I'm not leaving," she says, repeating the promise I made to her years ago as SHIELD agents swarmed around us to take her into custody. "Of course I remember. You slept against the bars outside my cell every night until they offered me a deal."
"Yeah," I sat, forcing a smile. "That prison hallway was uncomfortable as hell, too. But I didn't leave you then and I won't do it now."
"A spy and a man of his word," Nat says softly, shooting me a glance as she drives. "That's why I…" But of course she doesn't finish the sentence. "You really are one of a kind, Barton."
"So I've been told."