Chapter 10-Clint
He heaved a sigh of relief. Last item, then I can see what on earth she wrote about me, he smiled. He knew exactly what he wanted to write. It was something he'd been wanting to tell her, for ages, something that changed inside him.
'You're the only one who can make me want to be better than what I am.'
[8 years back, Budapest]
He gripped the bow, tense and ready to let the arrow fly at the slightest movement. The Black Widow, they called her. They had no idea how old she was, but they estimated she was about his age.
He was a trained killer. No mercy, no forgiveness. No sentiment. All he did, and all he was destined to do, was to plant arrow after arrow in his targets' skulls. He questioned the morality of his occupation occasionally, but he never let it affect anything. Mercy is bad for the vision, he often told himself.
He rounded a corner in the darken shophouse, occasionally stealing glances at the sparkling Danube River through open windows.
Then he saw her.
She was standing at a window. He didn't see her face, but it didn't take a genius to know that the Black Widow was a thing of deadly beauty.
But he knew beauty was deceptive. Under the flowing, scarlet curls and the porcelain white skin hid a hardened, tenacious assassin that'd been in SHIELD's bad books for one year too long.
He poised the arrow tip just behind her head.
"Hands up, Black Widow," he ordered. She whipped around, and what he saw made a prickling feeling prickle up his ears. Her face, it was something different entirely. She looked like the work of the most skilled stonemason, perfectly chiselled and delicate.
Their eyes met.
Her eyes, they were green. Green like the sea, ever-changing. Hiding all the hurt, all the pain, under its violent waves. All the battle scars, buried deep in its depths.
In a moment, he knew he couldn't.
He couldn't. In her eyes, he saw himself. He was no better than she was. Both were young, both killed people in order to bury the unspeakable pain of their past.
"Just do it," her voice came in clear as water.
He couldn't kill her. He wasn't going to murder another injured soul just because his was equally injured. In a moment, something burrowed it's way right deep down in his stony heart.
His hand shook, and the arrow flew-
It pinned itself to the wall, half a metre away from her head.
She stared at him with an expression of disbelief.
"Tell you what; why don't you come work for us instead?" he found himself saying.
[Present day]
Budapest. The first time he realised that things didn't have to be that way, that the hurt he'd experienced didn't have to be transferred to others.
He folded the completed list in half, and leaned his head back on Natasha's.