Chapter 10: To Keep the Goddess on my Side, She Demands a Sacrifice

Clint wanted to curl into a little ball and try to die quietly. He was willing to settle for how far his restraints would let him fold in on himself, but the constant sound of running water grabbed Barton from his blissful blackness. It was painful to move his head, his face looking more like a map of Romania than anything human. His one eye was swollen completely shut now and the other wasn't exactly offering a great view either. He managed to lift his head enough without whimpering to see what was going on.

Natalia was methodically washing her hands, the water running red down the drain. The knife she had wandered away with earlier was discarded on the table, slightly used and for the first time, Barton felt that they were alone. He wasn't sure if that had been of Mikhail's choosing or if it was a ploy to try and lure him into a false sense of security. He decided that the bruises around her neck were a little far to take any kind of rouse.

It took a few attempts but the archer managed to croak out, "You look like you could use a friend."

She paused in washing her hands, going completely rigid at the sink before turning to face him. It was brief, but for a second she looked like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. "You should look in the mirror. I'm not the one that needs a friend right now." She grabbed the knife and began twirling it between her fingers as she had before.

"Ah, but you didn't say you didn't need one." An awkward pause filled the room in the absence of her correction. Really it was more realistic that she was playing him for everything he was worth, but he was betting on that all too familiar broken look he'd seen through his scope. Clint had nothing to lose so he decided to wager on the better part of honesty and go for broke. "My handler, Coulson, he's probably really pissed at me right now, but you see, he likes to collect strays. Probably some Boy Scout training from his white picket fence childhood. You know, rescue the poor little bird with the damaged wing and nurse it back to health so it can fly again, regular Captain America bullshit. Which is good for me, cause the guy decided to do it as an adult for a more figurative bird and I'd bet he'd be willing to find a spider a good home too." The handprint on her face was even more dominant than earlier and combined with the bruises on her neck and Mekhail's absence, painted a pretty dark picture of exactly what had been happening. "At the very least, it'd probably be a smidge better than this place."

She stared at him for a long time, not saying a word and Barton tried to convey his sincerity as best as his broken body would allow him. He was starting to think his point had fallen on deaf ears when she spoke. "If it was as easy as just walking out of here, don't you think I could have handled that by now?"

"You could untie me and we could walk out of here. It could be that simple."

Natalia huffed out a small laugh. "Walking away from your life isn't simple."

"This doesn't have to be your life. You can make a different choice."

"Like you did in Turkey? Or Germany? If you were any kind of agent, you would have pulled that trigger. Now I'm supposed to listen to one of SHIELD's incompetent operatives when he says to run away. Run where and to whom? You have no idea how far a reach these people have," she lectured, her amusement from his earlier statement slipping away.

"Coulson could use someone with your skills or at the very least get you somewhere safe," promised Clint. He tactfully left out the part where he wasn't going to be particularly welcome within SHIELD anymore, but he'd make sure Natalia was safe, he would see that through and then take what was coming to him.

"If this Coulson is so good, then why didn't SHIELD send him to give this recruitment speech?"

"Because those weren't exactly my orders."

"So you failed your mission and now in some desperate attempt to prove your worth, you're going to offer me to them as a sacrificial lamb? You have a lot to learn about trying to play people Agent." She slipped her weapon into her pocket and walked away, leaving the archer to contemplate just how screwed he was.

Natasha sat rigidly on the hard wooden chair. The ramblings of the misguided boy in the basement did nothing to set her at ease. Neither did the body in the corner staring accusingly at her with his lifeless eyes. There'd be hell to pay for gutting Mikhail, though Natasha already knew that. There was no getting out alive, she was just forcing their hand early.

She'd made peace with the idea long ago but now reservation was creeping in. Worse than that, she didn't want the moron in the basement to share her fate like so many of her victims before him.

She wasn't cut out for this life after all. One word of concern from an inconsequential bug and she was doubting, doubting her plan, doubting her resolve. She couldn't let that happen. The Red Room hadn't completely broken her, she'd be damned if some degenerate would.

It was the sound of footsteps coming down the concrete stairs forced Clint to open his eyes. It wasn't the rhythmic pattern of an assault team descending to his rescue which only left one of his new friends, and really that word was fitting considering all the actual friends he had in his life, coming to torture him some more. Not something he wanted to open his eyes for but Barton never made things easy on himself; the fact that he was still alive after all these years was proof enough of that.

So far his pitiful attempts at escape had proved useless. Trying to convert his redheaded friend was like talking to a brick wall and selling out SHIELD to buy himself a little mercy was tasteless at best and a complete betrayal of who he was at worst. Perhaps it was time to bait them into finishing what they'd delightfully take days to do.

"Natalia?" he croaked, surprised to see her standing before him. Uri seemed more interested in using a heavy hand to torment the archer, instead of his young feminine charge, leaving Natalia to satisfy her intrigue of their guest when no one was around.

"Did you mean what you said?" she asked, hurried by the next set of footsteps starting to descend the stairs.

Blood loss was making his head swim. He wanted to say yes. He wanted to ask what part of his ongoing monologue she was referring to but all he could do was hold a bewildered look on his face.

"I have an escape plan in mind," she started, pulling a knife out of her coat. Her eyes darted towards the stairs as she coated the blade with a bluish grease. Placing her hand on his shoulder for leverage she pulled back the hand holding the knife. "You're not going to like it though."

"Mmmm. Don't do that," slurred the archer as the knife pierced his flesh, burying itself deep in his side. There was a moment of sharp pain, that quickly drowned in the sea of wounds he was already sporting; the next moment stole his breath. Unlike most of the stab wounds he's experienced in his life, and sadly wasn't that a long list, this one exploded in a fiery pain that washed over his skin beyond the injury burning every inch of his skin like spreading lava until lungs ceased working and everything went black.

It was quiet except for a soft hum of a machine in the background. Clint let the noise pull him along through the darkness. He wasn't tied to a chair anymore, his loose, lax muscles no longer stiff and strained by confinement. He felt like his was floating in the darkness but somehow still too heavy to pull himself to the light. It just seemed like too much effort to try and move.

Muffled giggles and clunky footsteps broke the silence. The carefree and drunken tones were enough to coax Barton from his self-imposed unawareness and he fought the heaviness to crack open an eye, the other still unwilling to cooperate around the swelling. The cartoon fish staring back at him was enough to fry his brain. Of all the things he expected to find, he just couldn't comprehend what he was looking at. Even as hallucinations, desperate cries to escape his current imprisonment went, this had no place. "I don't even like fish."

"What does that matter?"

Clint flinched, realizing both that he wasn't alone and had spoken his jumbled thoughts out loud. His head lulled towards the semi familiar voice. The fish motif continued throughout the dilapidated room, his gaze settling on the redhead sitting rigidly on a chair in front of a TV that was probably older than both of them combined.

The missing piece of his jumbled thought process snapped violently snapped into place, his hand flying to his side. Shirt gone, his uncoordinated limb found easy access to the wound his tormenting vixen had graciously imparted to him. Instead of bloody carnage, he felt smooth stitches holding his insides firmly in place. He braced himself against the pain as he tried to sit up to get a better look, falling just short of getting his head off the pillow.

"Don't," cautioned Natalia. "You have seventeen stitches in your side, wouldn't want to tear them out after all the trouble I went to putting them in."

This had to be some kind of ploy; his captors hadn't seemed all that interested in his wellbeing before, in fact they delighted in his misery. He ran his tongue around his painfully dry mouth before clamping down on a groan as he scooted himself a little higher on the bed. "If I remember correctly, you were the one putting the knife in my side to begin with."

"I figured you'd prefer me doing it over them. If they did it, we wouldn't be having this conversation now." She stared at him blankly, giving nothing away as to the sudden change in tactic.

"What? I'd be having it with them?" snapped Clint, tenderly poking at his various injuries that had all been tended to, and somewhat skillfully he might add.

An amused twinkle appeared in Natalia's eye. "Hardly."

Clint slipped his game face on. He wasn't about to face whatever she had planed lying down. Gingerly the archer pushed himself into a sitting position. He bit down on his tongue until the latest wave of pain finished crashing over him. "I had them right where I wanted them you know. You didn't have to go to such lengths to get us out of there."

Natalia leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as she scrutinized him like an ant through a magnifying glass before it burst into flames. "And what was your plan?"

"First, I was going to wear down their fists with my face..."

"Well, you had that part going for you."

"Second..."

"There was no second," she countered coldly.

"You don't know that," mumbled Clint petulantly. He had the suspicious feeling this is what it felt like getting caught taking the car out for a midnight romp as a teenager.

Natalia stared at him long and hard, like she could unearth his deepest darkest secrets. "In Turkey you took off after me, even though I assume your team told you not to, and you did so without back up and any real knowledge of the area, placing you at a disadvantage. You have no part two to any of your plans."

He flashed an award winning smile. "Any yet, here we are. You followed me out."

She gave a snort of derision. "I didn't follow anything. I dragged you unconscious ass out of there on the assumption that at the very least you'd offer an amusing way to get us killed."

Barton shrugged, immediately regretting it as his stitches pulled uncomfortably. "Semantics."

The archer extended his hand. "Clint Barton."

She cautiously accepted the gesture, letting her fingers settle in his grasp. "Natasha." She tipped her head as though thinking before offering , "Romanoff."

An uneasy silence fell over the room. Neither was sure of the terms of their uneasy truce but neither dumb enough to believe they were out of the woods or able to escape the jungle on their own. After taking her up on her offer of some mild pain pills, both opted to get some sleep before moving on in the morning. As the dark of night settles over them, both lay awake in their beds, no quite trusting the soul they had tethered themselves to.