One year after the St. Petersburg mission

After a year of psych analysis, testing, training, and briefings, Natasha had her first mission as an agent of SHIELD. Nothing complicated, just removing a target from the world. She could probably complete it with her eyes shut, but Agent Barton had just shook his head.

Agent Clint Barton, her partner. The spy didn't know if she could ever get use to the idea of having someone watching her back and making a call on the situation from a distance. She had always operated alone; having a partner just meant she had one more thing to keep track of in the middle of an op.

"Here he comes, you ready?" the sniper's voice in her ear actually startled her for a moment.

She slipped her discrete pistol out from the waistband of her jeans, previously hidden by her jacket. "Just be ready with that extraction you promised me."

He chuckled humorously. "I'm not going to leave you out to dry, just focus on your target."

Natasha casually made her way closer to the group of people in the Milan plaza. "I have a line of sight."

"Can you take it?"

"Yes, there's a civilian in front of him, but that shouldn't stop the shot from taking Mieter out."

Barton's breath caught, she could hear it. "There's a civy in the way?"

"Not for long."

"Don't take the shot. Wait for it to clear."

The spy continued to walk and watch as the target started moving to a car, the girl still in the way. "He gets in that car, I lose my shot."

"Taking out an unarmed pedestrian is not under acceptable losses for this mission. This guy isn't that vital," Barton stressed.

"If I'm going to complete this mission, I have to take the shot," she leveled her gun, somehow not attracting the attention of the crowd. For the first time in years, the cold feeling of dread started to creep into her gut. In her line of work, she knew she had to kill or take the place as the target. "Are you trying to make me fail?"

It took a moment for the sniper to respond, and she figured he had switched to a different comm channel. When he came back on the line, his voice was firm. "Abort mission. The handler says on no terms are the civilians in the target's party to be harmed."

"I won't get another chance at this," she tried to keep the rising panic out of her voice.

Barton's voice didn't waiver. "Fall back to the extraction point for pick up, and pack up the piece, we don't want to start a riot."


On the taxi ride back to their hotel, Natasha tried to remain calm while she watched Barton. He had tried to start some conversation with her that related to their cover, but she had snapped at him. She hated to admit it, but it impressed her that he just chuckled and said something to the amused driver about sleeping on the sofa for rest of the trip.

When they reached their destination, she shoved past her partner and quickly strode to the elevator. It took longer to open on the lobby then she thought, as the sniper walked in behind her. Once it started moving up, she heard him sigh.

"I'm not trying to make you fail, by the way. I'm trying to keep you from failing," he said softly.

Natasha refused to look at him. "Then why did you stop me? For that matter why did you bring me in at all if you were just going to make me fail and let them find a reason to remove me?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he looked at her as if he seeing if the puzzle pieces in his head all fit together. When the elevator dinged, he nodded slowly and took her by the arm. Steering her to the shared room required for their cover, he carded them inside without letting her go. He checked the room before he sighed again and sat her on the sofa.

"We don't punish failure with death here, Nat. I thought you knew that by now. So the mission was a bust, it happens."

"Not to me it doesn't!" she snarled, "And don't call me Nat, I hate that."

Barton ignored her. "You need to learn that there are more important things besides just completing a mission! SHIELD isn't out there to be the faceless secret police. Yes, we eliminate targets, but we're not going to take out a teenage princess who happens to be in the way to do so!"

That made her pause. "I didn't have that info."

"Neither did I until I ran it back to Coulson. That's what happens in these missions, things change! You're in a different world now, Natasha! We have to be accountable for the things we do! The sudden death of a human trafficker is deniable; no one's going to go looking for the marksman, but a princess? Yeah, someone's going to want answers and if they don't get an answer they like, they'll find someone to pin it on and that is how wars get started and SHIELD isn't in that business!" the sniper took a breath to calm himself.

"Why didn't you tell me?" the redhead asked.

"Because you need to learn to trust me," he sat down heavily beside her, "and you need to really know that you can do you're job and do it right not because you'll die if you don't, but because you are the best in this business." He looked away from her before speaking again, his voice quiet. "I didn't save you just to bury you," he looked up at her and met her eyes, "remember that."

She just stared at him for a long moment until he finally stood up. "I'm turning in," he said, "just remember you're now in a world where people want to help you overcome weakness, and not punish you for them."

"What's my weakness, Barton?" she asked as he walked away.

"It's been a year and you still call me 'Barton', and not 'Clint'," he said, not stopping, "What do you think? You need to trust some people, at least, just a little." He paused beside the bed, "Some of us already trust you."


Natasha woke suddenly to the sound of a shower starting. It took her a moment to remember the situation before she relaxed enough to sit up. The room's other bed looked like Barton had tried to make up the tangled sheets by tossing them in the direction of the headboard. Shaking her head, the spy swung her feet to the floor and took stock of the room, looking for any thing different or out of place.

Glancing at the bedside table between the beds, she noticed a small open box that hadn't sat there the night before. The redhead picked up the container and examined the contents with a troubled expression. The two small devices sitting inside looked like the earpiece SHIELD had provided to her but these items seemed slightly bigger and paired.

"What's up?" Clint asked, coming out of the bathroom.

"Barton," she started, still staring at the box, "what are these?"

He sighed. "Natasha, look at me."

"I just want to know what they are," the spy didn't look away.

The archer chuckled softly as he crossed the room and gently took her face in his hands, turning her head gently towards him. "Seriously, I need you to look at me. I can't read your lips when you're looking the other way."

Sliding one hand down to cradle her neck, he carefully picked up one of the little objects with the other and held it up between them. "I guess there's no sense hiding it from you now. Natasha, I'm deaf," he smiled crookedly at the redhead's shocked expression, "rather, I'm eighty-something percent deaf. Or so they tell me, anyway. These are my hearing aids; the SHIELD guys developed them to be smaller then normal ones and have the comm transmitter built in."

"You're…deaf?" she said incredulously, having a hard time wrapping her mind around the idea that this superior assassin had a limitation of any kind. In her experience, abnormalities or defects were a death sentence to any Red Room trainee. Her masters had no interest in devoting time or resources to find a less-then-perfect specimen's hidden talent.

"Yeah," the sniper's voice brought her back to the present, "courtesy of my old man. He boxed my ears one night he was drunk and ruptured my eardrums. I think I was seven, maybe eight at the time." He shrugged, "It wasn't so bad at first, but it went downhill in a hurry when I was a teenager. The good news is the docs don't think it'll get much worse. They also have a theory it's why my eye sight is so good, the brain compensating and all that."

"It hasn't stopped you?" over her initial shock, Natasha had become more curious.

"Never," he tilted his head to one side and put the first one in, "Back in my circus days it actually helped me, in a way. I was having a hard time and this group of deaf and nearly deaf kids came in on a tour while we were rehearsing. I don't know why, but I told them I was going deaf but I still did what I wanted to do and they looked at me like I was a hero or something." He laughed, "That kept me going for a long time."

"Can you communicate with that hand language?"

"What? Sign language?" he angled his head in the other direction and set the second one in place. "Nah never learned it. I never told anyone except those kids and because it happened relatively slowly, I just started watching people when they talked. I'd miss things on occasion, but ever since I got the aids it hasn't been an issue."

He took the empty box from her hand and set it aside, before cupping her face in his hands again. "It's like I tried to tell you last night, it's about over coming limitations, not being punished for them." The sniper stepped away and started sorting through his luggage.

She pondered his words for a minute before she took a deep breath. "Clint?"

His head shot up like someone had hit him with lightening. He looked at her with an expression that mixed surprise, confusion, and more than a little hope. "Yes?"

"You can call me 'Nat'," she looked away, her cheeks burning ever so slightly. "It's okay if it's you," she said, daring to look back up.

His smile, gentle but only because he fought to keep it so, told her so much. "Okay," he nodded and pulled her into a hug, "thank you, Nat."


That day, they succeeded in their mission. They freed the world from one more human trafficking scumbag when he went off to collect drinks for the princess and her entourage. Natasha had distracted Mieter and convinced him to follow her into an alley where she quietly put a round through his chest.

Clint had watched from his position on top of a building across the square, bow ready just in case. When his partner gave the signal for mission complete, he already had the extraction team standing by at the next intersection. Back at base, they had both received congratulations on a job well done.

Natasha finally felt that the SHIELD agents regarded her as an equal, still the new girl, but one of them. She had to wonder if the successful mission caused the sensation or because she stopped looking at them as people trying to find fault with her. She didn't trust them, not for all the diamonds in Africa, but she didn't keep a hand on her gun during polite conversations in the halls.

Clint, however, she trusted from that day forward. It took time at first, but she started to trust him to have her back. When the spy realized he wouldn't let her fall no matter what, she stared to think the emotion he stirred in her went beyond just trust. She never said anything to him, honestly she didn't know how, but when she looked at him over the briefing table some weeks later and he smiled at her, she couldn't help smiling back.


A/N: This is my longest Clintasha piece to date! Thanks to my OtherHalf for his proofing. An important note about this one: this is not how Clint lost his hearing. He lost it when he used a sonic arrow on a mission with Mockingbird, but I decided, as movie!verse is a alternative to the regular comic line, I could tweak it a little for my own selfish purposes. Taking a look now at some of the earlier times of the couple, before they were a couple.

EDIT: forgot to take out a line after making some changes and my beta didn't catch it LOL