Hi everyone! Sorry for the longer wait than usual, I've been doing some major edits to the last two chapters and wanted to make sure I had that finished up before I went any further. Now that that's about settled I should be posting twice a week now! Hooray!...? I do hope you're all enjoying the story, as I haven't been getting as much feedback on this as the other two, and I really rely on your judgment. Anyway, I hope this longer chapter makes up for the delay to anyone who was waiting.

2012

Something very bad happened in Sarajevo.

Clint and Natasha were silent went they crawled into the SUV. Phil hadn't had his coffee yet and was irritated with them for being ten minutes late, but as soon as he saw Tasha's pale face and the hunted look in Clint's eyes, he knew. He knew his assets like the back of his hand, and they were hurting. "Who broke what, and how much do I owe the hotel?" he asked in his usual fashion.

"A mattress, set of sheets, deep-cleansing the carpet, and possibly therapy for the cleaning staff," Natasha listed before Clint could try lying for them. Good girl, but there was something so familiar about what she said. Even though he and Clint both set her with a look she remained unaware.

The worry in his chest, though, only tightened and grew worse when he glanced into the rearview mirror minutes later and watched Natasha lay across the back seat with her head in Clint's lap. "Okay, whatever, don't tell me," he sighed deploringly. "But you know that if something's up Fury's going to be breathing down your necks." A lie, which they both knew and didn't bother to call him out on. He sighed again and returned to facing front, shaking his head at them.

"Do you want to talk to him together?" Clint whispered.

"You do it."

And he did, later. Instead of debriefing with Hill he and Coulson met in his office. "So, are you actually going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to submit an inquiry form to my own assets?" he asked.

Sinking into the chair across the desk, the younger agent's face fell into his hands, and he sat that way for several long minutes before finding the strength to speak up. Phil had never seen him like this, so tired and concerned and frightfully, painfully sad.

"Natasha had a miscarriage," he finally said to the floor.

That...hadn't been the explanation Phil was expecting. He sank into the chair beside Clint's as something wild and dark tried to rip its way free of his chest. "Tasha was pregnant?"

The thing in his chest only became more agitated and ferocious when Clint raised his head and revealed red eyes. "We didn't know until it happened" he miserably said. "I woke up, heard water running in the bathroom, and when I looked and saw her, blood all over the place, shaking so bad...you remember Geneva, Coulson?"

"How could I forget?" he instantly replied, feeling sick at the very thought of the disastrous mission.

"Well," Clint swallowed and stared down at his hands again. "Even after that shitstorm, I've never seen Tash so shaken up. She was crying, and so, so scared, and she cried in her sleep all night after that. It..." He shook his head, "it kinda makes you wonder if it wasn't bringing up old memories or something, you know? Something the Russians did to her, or-or if she ever..."

A muscle jumped in the archer's jaw as he painfully swallowed. "Will you take care of her while I'm in Vancouver?" he asked. "I doubt Carter's gonna let her go now." His hands rubbed together, rough, calloused, world-weary, and Phil fought back a sigh. He felt too much for his assets, he knew that, but they were such small broken things. What could Phil do if he'd been drawn to their brokenness, saw the raw and aching places between their insincere smiles, and wished more than anything that he could piece them back together? He treated them like his children because no one else ever had, because they needed someone to show them that they were worth more than the bodies lying in their wake.

Phil reached into the space between them and put a hand on Clint's shoulder. "You know she can look after herself," he reminded him, "but I'll keep her updated on the job every few days."

"Okay. Thanks."

He sent Barton off on his way to Vancouver, and a week later did good on his promise to keep Natasha up to date on how the case was going. The moment he saw her it felt like being staked through the heart - this wasn't Natasha Romanov. This wasn't the woman he had swallowed down a shiver to regard when reading her case file. This wasn't even the woman he had looked on with pity when Barton dragged her in nine years ago. This was something wild, trapped in a cage of skin and screaming out to be free, to know something other than hands that stroked and fed and whipped and lashed and bruised. She leaned against the window with her forehead and fingers tap-tap-tapping the glass in a frenetic rhythm as she watched people pass on the street.

Frankly, she looked like she could use a hug, a cup of tea, and a warm blanket. She looked like she could use a parent. But Phil knew that she would never allow it, never allow another soul to see her soft underbelly, and yet in a way she already had. She let Clint in, didn't she? Let him see the vast and wild hurt sitting poised in the cleft of her ribs. It was like being allowed an all-access pass to some exclusive club, and Phil wanted nothing more than to be a part of it, to fill in those dark and empty places with something brighter, something light and buoyant that could hold her up when he and Clint weren't there, because whether she liked it or not Natasha Romanov was fragile. Not in the swooning damsel kind of way. Not in the way that made her weak. In the way that allowed her to be weak. That allowed her to let other lost broken creatures like him and Clint into the gaps between her ribs and make her happy.

She finally turned to face him with that feral, raw pain in her eyes, and it was like looking into the sun.

2015

Natasha led the way through the Red Room facility's catacombs, steadier on her feet than she'd been after coming out of the lake but still not operating at her full potential. At Coulson's silent instruction Morris and Sterling rushed to flank her while he watched over them from the rear. They quietly took down any Department agent they could, but if the agents didn't go down quietly they were shot. It was inelegant, but they were in a hurry. Natasha's insides shivered at the thought of how close they were. Or it was just a fever from dehydration.

At a recognizable junction - not much renovation had gone into rebuilding the facility - she ordered, "Stop here," and used the butt of her gun to break the lock on a supply closet. She slid quickly in, ignoring the others' looks, and rifled around the shelves of syringes and drugs. Bottles upon bottles of the red drug sat innocently waiting in rows. Natasha passed them by and instead found another familiar drug. Without further ado she filled a syringe and plunged it into the meat of her thigh. At Coulson's concerned look she replied, "Just a stimulant. It's fine."

"Are you familiar with all of the drugs in that closet?" asked Coulson. "Anything useful?"

She shrugged and looked over her shoulder into the supply closet. More like a medicine cabinet. Weapons would be somewhere else. "Sure, yeah, but they all require getting within close range. We don't have time to take down every agent. Bullets would be of more..." Suddenly blackness filled her eyes and she went slack, coming to on the floor moments later with her old handler holding her against his chest. "More use."

"Just a stimulant, huh?"

Releasing what she realized had been an iron grip on Coulson's hand, Natasha pushed away from him to pick herself up with the wall for support. A faint unconvinced smile was playing on his face when she looked at him again. Thinking hard, she figured it was a combination of her concussion, the red drug made to push sleepers into compliance, and the stimulant wreaking havoc on her system. She was already feeling stronger, more alert. "We make sure Shoskatov and any sleepers who might take his place are dead," she instructed rather than replying to Coulson's question, "then we burn this place to the ground." She left no room for negotiation in her voice.

Then they forced another door and found a row of cells. The guards armed with nothing more than sticks were incapacitated and the cells peered into. Most of them were empty, except...

"Doctor Pym?"

The bedraggled man in the cell, who hadn't been heard from in five years and was long since thought to be dead, looked up at the sound of his name.

Sterling was given the task of keeping guard over Pym until they found a way out of the facility that didn't involve scuba-diving again. There was a most colorful smattering of disappointment splashed across his face as he watched them go. Natasha would have been amused if she weren't so focused on the task at hand. Poor boy, eager little hero stuck on babysitting duty while his female partner dove into the fray without him.

"Who in particular are we looking for?" Morris asked.

A lance of doubt shot through Natasha's chest. "Alexei Shoskatov," she said. Obvious. "Anyone else...I'll know when I see them."

Coulson rolled his eyes at her. "Looking for a translucent needle in a haystack, then," he sighed, "my favorite."

They crawled through the air ducts like a bad adventure film cliche, but unlike in those awful pictures they knew how to move silently, knew how to disperse their weight so the ducts didn't collapse. Natasha peered through the vents down into each room, watching for any sign of Alexei. Even with the stimulant picking up her energy, her limbs were still clumsy with exhaustion, and more than once she almost exposed them. This was taking too long.

She stopped when she looked down and saw a security surveillance room, full of screens monitoring every room of the facility, and slipped quietly down behind the guards there.

«Miss me?» she asked.

The guards turned, saw her standing there, and screamed for mercy. She didn't grant it.

Minutes later, after their bodies stopped shuddering, Coulson and Morris slipped through after her. Natasha took the microphone used for announcements and alerts. «Mister Shoskatov, you're needed in the training rooms immediately,» she announced in a poisonously pleasant voice.

"WHERE IS STARK!?"

Junior agents scattered like leaves at Hill's yell as she tramped down the corridor with her earpiece flashing in place. The Deputy Director had been trying to reach Stark ever since Barton shower up with his kid, Banner, and Rogers hours ago. So far there was only radio silence, which was never a good sign. He would have at least mouthed off to her once by now if he were up to anything SHIELD would approve of.

Ducking into the lab just to make sure he hadn't flown in with the Iron Man suit, Maria was just in time to spot Doctor Banner trying to take off his glasses and accidentally flinging them halfway across the room. "Doctor Banner, is everything all right?" she asked, fighting the urge to skeptically narrow her eyes. The physicist had only worked a few projects in direct affiliation with SHIELD since the Chitauri invasion three years back; it wasn't news that he didn't trust them, and even if Maria didn't have anything personally against him she sometimes wondered.

"Fine, I'm...fine," Banner murmured distractedly, staring down at his hands. When he moved to retrieve the fallen spectacles Maria noticed one of his feet were dragging slightly behind him, but he either didn't notice or didn't care, so she made the executive decision not to mention it. "And I haven't seen Tony. I, uh...heard you yelling down the hall." He sheepishly smiled before trying to tuck his glasses into his breast pocket and only succeeding on the third attempt. "If you'd like, I can call Pepper, she might know where he's gone if she hasn't been working."

A fizzling headache started to creep up her neck and into her eyes, and she pinched the bridge of her nose to stave it off. "No, that's fine, Doctor Banner; I'm sure he'll turn up when he gets hungry," she sighed.

Banner grinned and nodded his agreement. Things were a little stiff and awkward between them, especially considering she shared a name with his, Stark, and Potts' toddler daughter, but he was a good man.

"No word from the rescue team yet?" Banner asked, polite as ever.

She shook her head. "None. Though I'm pretty sure no news is considered good news on an op like this." Looking up at all the screens and instruments in the lab, wondering what Banner was doing in there to keep himself busy but not curious enough to ask, Maria allowed her mind to once again settle on the enigmatic Agent X. She hadn't been allowed to see him; only Fury had the clearance. There were very few things she didn't have the clearance to know as Deputy Director, and it grated on her nerves that this was one of them.

"I'll have someone let you know when there's news," she told Banner after a long moment of silence, turning on her heel to flee.

Two juniors passed with smiles on their faces. She glared until they sobered up. If she was going to be miserable, then everyone else could be as well.

2004, January

Whether they liked it or not, SHIELD couldn't technically keep the Black Widow - Natasha - against her will. They couldn't try or convict her, not really, not with the number of governments she and her past doppelgängers pissed off over the years. Just trying to figure out which continent to try her on would probably cause enough international incidents to last them all a good, long time. Secondly, since all the Widows looked alike there was no knowing of which crimes to convict this one.

That was why SHIELD insisted it would have been cleaner if Clint had just taken the damn shot and killed her, nice and quiet, no muss, no fuss. All those dead people avenged with one small, sick body.

When she was well enough to survive on her own, when the drugs were purged from her system and her mind clear (Psych had had a field day with her; Agent Maas was halfway through a new doctorate thesis already), Clint caught her breaking into a helicopter in the middle of the night. He didn't even want to know how she got the key.

"Where you gonna go?" he asked as if they were discussing her next vacation and he hadn't just caught her in the act.

Natasha slid back to the ground with arms tightly crossed, watching him with dark unease in her eyes. "I have unfinished business back in Budapest."

"That so?"

"It is."

They stared one another down for a long time. The sun started to creep over the treetops and pink light bled into her poisonous eyes. They were just too pretty to be real, those eyes of hers. Then he thought about all the fucked up medical procedures done to make her stronger and more beautiful, the ones Carter had found written in Natasha's skeletal structure, and he swallowed back a shudder.

"Are you going to stop me, Agent Barton?" she asked with the hint of a mean smile curling her lip. Even if she was still recovering, still too thin to be considered really healthy, Natasha had proven herself to be a pretty fierce opponent. Hell, she'd been fierce when she was knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door. Clint wouldn't put it past her to be able to use her pinkie nail to impale him without breaking a sweat.

Still. No time for that now. Clint tucked his hands into his pockets and shrugged. "Way I see it, Miss Romanov, you got two options," he said. "First option: you take that helicopter and you get the hell outta Dodge. You go back to your old ways, keep on killing innocent people, and SHIELD will be on your tail again before you can count to ten. I won't be there to save you next time, either."

An early morning breeze rushing through the trees swallowed the sound of her attempt at laughter. "You didn't save me, Barton. You failed, and are trying to make yourself into a hero regardless," she scornfully dismissed.

"Option two," he continued as if she never interrupted. "You stay here." And yeah, if that didn't make her unaffected façade slip a little then he was a monkey's uncle. "You come on to SHIELD. Start a new life. The pay's a helluva lot better, I'll tell you what."

Then, because it looked like she was going to protest or roll her eyes again, he blurted out, "You know what I saw in that alleyway, Natasha? I saw that that bastard had it coming, sure, because he was the one who had you killing babies and old women in their beds at night for enough money to last, what, three days? A week, tops? The guy who made you so sick with grief that you couldn't eat or sleep? But I saw something else, too, 'cuz I see a lot better from a distance.

"I dunno where it all went wrong for you, Natasha, but you musta been pretty desperate. Freelance work isn't as easy to get as it used to be so you took what you could. Killing Kozakov wasn't just killing a sick bastard; he was your last shot, and you killed him anyway, because he wanted you to needlessly take down another civilian. You got a lot of red in your ledger, sweetheart. SHIELD can help you wipe it out."

Storm clouds formed in her eyes as she regarded him, her hair floating like bloody strands of spider's silk in the breeze. Her face was pinched, withdrawn and hardened, yet Clint knew he struck a nerve because of that shadow in her poisonous eyes. Probably she was clever enough to evade SHIELD for another decade if she did decide to go back to her old ways. Probably she was remorseless enough not to care about all the red in her ledger. Clint could have gone home weeks ago, left her to Carter and the Bratislava base's mercy, but he felt like he wasn't quite finished with Natasha Romanov yet. Maybe he'd regret sticking around for the rest of his life, maybe he'd just made an enemy...but maybe not.

"Whether I accept or not, I still have unfinished business in Budapest," she scowled with a strange sort of softness hiding in her eyes.

A grin tugged back Clint's lips, and he stepped up to the chopper. "By all means, then, let's get you sorted."

From almost the moment the helicopter landed they were being pursued by endless throes of people Natasha had managed to piss off in the past four months. There were four firefights in only 14 hours, and when Clint dared look at Natasha he found a woman changed. Gone was the sickly, pitiful creature he'd so easily been able to cradle in his arms and fear for the last time they met in Budapest, the woman whose hazy hate-filled stare would live in his memories forever. In that creature's place was Natasha, looking truly alert for the first time since Clint started tailing her all those months back, a sort of savage joy buried deep in her expressionless face. It was the kind of inanimate joy he imagined his bow might feel being picked up after a long mission with longer-range weapons. It was the joy of a tool being used for its real purpose, not needless destruction.

Finally, early on the second day and with Clint's earpiece battery dead, they found Kozakov's apartment. Natasha vanished inside and left Clint to stand guard for over an hour. Just as he began to wonder if she'd been hit by a booby trap she reappeared, seemingly unladen but looking satisfied.

"All set?" he asked, eyeing her.

She nodded. "All set."

Honestly, she was having so much fun Clint was surprised she didn't shoot him in the back of the head and jump ship.

There were two more firefights on the way back to the chopper, and outside the thing they had to wrestle another handful of free agents, all thirsty for the Black Widow's blood. "Christ, but you got a lotta fingers in a lotta pies," he grumbled, and she threw her head back and laughed. To watch her fight was like watching a dance, savage and wistfully beautiful, red hair flying like splashes of blood. If he wasn't so annoyed he might have fallen in love with her. She had one agent on the leg-up into the chopper while he took on the other one on the ground.

"How you feeling, sugar?" he called over his shoulder, only to hit his belly on the ground when Natasha threw her guy onto his back.

"Call me 'sugar' again and you'll find out," she grinned through bloodied teeth. "Stop wheezing and get in the bird, you baby."

It was the longest Clint had ever been chewed out in his entire life, the talking-to he got when they arrived back in Bratislava. Even the army had been more forgiving, and that was the army. It was the first time he'd seen Coulson mad. He was sure the handler was gonna pop that one vein in his forehead at long last, until Natasha showed up in the door - Carter nagging at her heels about infections and sprains - and announced her surrender to SHIELD's mercy and plea for asylum among their ranks.

"Mind-bogglingly irresponsi-what?" Blinking, still red in the face but cutting himself off mid-stride, Coulson turned to her in muted shock.

Natasha crossed her arms, bright hair falling in a ropey braid over one shoulder, and in that moment looked almost alarmingly young. Even 22 seemed generous. "I want to...I need to start over, turn a new leaf," she said, looking at the floor. "According to Agent Barton, you can help with that. I got a lot of red in my ledger. No more needless killing."

Her mouth twitched and Carter tugged on her elbow. "Come on, you've said your bit, now back to bed; let them at it, I'm sure the measuring tape's gonna come out any second," she muttered.

"Why would they need a measuring tape to argue...?" Clint heard Natasha ask, voice fading down the hall, and swallowed back a grin at the look on Coulson's face. Natasha knew exactly how to plant a thought in someone's head, and this was no exception. That poor girl, innocent violated child soldier, so deprived of human contact she didn't comprehend even a simple joke most people half her age understood. Black Widow had the handler wrapped around her little finger.

Later that night, watching Natasha regard the parchment envelope she'd taken from Kozakov's apartment - Remember, Natalia, it said - and without opening it burned it, Clint couldn't help wondering if she had him, too.