Shoutouts to kamarooka, Maite Sanchez, agentromanoffblackwidow, Zoeff, LittleeOne, Black Betty, and Guest for reviewing!

I hope y'all haven't given up on me yet! With the lack of reviews and my delayed update this week (this time I actually have a good excuse-I just moved into a new house and haven't had wifi connected until now!), I hope you guys are still with me!

Just as a heads up, there's a mild flashback sequence. Any lines that are spoken in Russian are bolded!

Song of the chapter: "Smother" - Daughter.

Please let me know what you think!

Enjoy! =)

Chapter 4

"We're not alone."

Natasha wasn't expecting those words to come from Steve's mouth, but suddenly, there they were, and he was shouting at her to duck. Without waiting for further explanation, she ducked and listened to the familiar sound of his shield whirling through the air as he chucked it towards whatever was in the building with them. She heard the sound of metal on metal and the sound of the shield being thrown again. The darkness was so thick around her that she couldn't quite see where the enemy was, but she had a general idea. She heard what sounded like punches being thrown, a few grunts, and she honed in on those sounds.

Her left hand grabbed one of her taser discs, and she threw it out in the direction of the sounds. Hopefully it wouldn't hit Steve. Please don't hit Steve. Please don't hit Steve, she thought over and over, rolling into a standing position. She put her body in a defensive stance and waited as she heard the disc make contact with something. There was a sharp, strangled cry and an angry grunt. Suddenly, she heard a quick string of words in Russian, and she paused. Russian. It had to be the Winter Soldier—Barnes knew Russian. Barnes had spoken Russian before.

Out of nowhere, the dull pang in her head sharpened until she couldn't see, couldn't hear. All she felt was pain, and then she heard voices shouting. They were Russian voices, and she could tell that they were angry. She heard all kinds of angry voices yelling, but she couldn't figure out if they were angry at her or not. Why were there so many voices? Why were they so angry? Behind her eyes, she got a flash of someone's head jerking to the side in her hands, heard the crack of their spine snap. She heard more shouting and felt a hot fire lash across her back, her legs, her arms. She felt a deep, burning blaze in her torso where she couldn't even reach it to stop it.

And just like that, everything was gone.

She found herself sitting on the floor, her back against the wall and darkness in front of her eyes. In the distance, in the far off distance, she heard someone shout her name, but she couldn't breathe. Everything was too much. The vision might be gone, and the feelings might be gone, but all of this was too much, and she couldn't do anything. Even though she was so cold she was sure she'd freeze to death, sweat dripped down her face, and if she'd been paying attention, she could have found that her tactical suit clung to her wetly with her own sweat.

"Natasha! Natasha, look at me. Nat—Natasha."

There was a bright light in her eyes, and she tried looking towards it, but it hurt her eyes so much.

"C—Cl—C—" She choked out.

"Natasha—Nat—look at me. Look at me, Nat. Can you hear me? Natasha?"

Natasha couldn't respond, could only gasp and breathe frantically. "C—C—"

"Natasha, it's Steve. Steve Rogers. Breathe, Natasha. Nat, look at me. Look at my face."

Steve. Natasha managed to hear that name through the panic, and she looked up at him. Her face felt wet, but neither she nor Steve could tell if the dampness on her cheeks was from tears or sweat. Steve. Her green eyes landed on him, and she tried gasping in a breath of air, but all she got was a small inhale.

"Natasha, look at my face." His voice was gentler now, easier, and Natasha tried to process what he'd just said. Clint. Where was Clint? Out of everything, out of the darkness, the bright light, she couldn't find him, and she wanted him more than everything combined. Shakily, she reached up to her head with her hands. The full force of the headache was gone, but she still felt a dull pain behind her eyes, but it was the dull pain of a feeling fading. It was a gentle decrescendo as the force of it continued to fade. "Nat, come on. I'm going to put my arm around you, so I can help you up. Ok? Alright? I'm going to get you out of here."

Her whole body stiff, as if it didn't even belong to her, she let Steve put his arm around her waist and lift her up. In the back of her mind, she was able to register that they were moving. She saw a light through the darkness without understanding where it was coming from or why, but she knew that they were moving towards it and were trying to reach it. The mission had completely left Natasha's mind—all that was left was the memory, the memory of a life she'd left locked in the back of her brain until Wanda had released it all over again.

Her feet dragged across the ground until they couldn't, and Steve was half-carrying, half-dragging her the rest of the way to the quinjet. She knew they were back, but she couldn't make sense of it—she couldn't make sense of anything other than what had just happened. She looked up at Steve, her green eyes madly searching his face, and she tried to think of words to say to him, words to make him understand what had happened to her back there, but every time he looked at her to check in with her, she just saw concern and worry. No, she thought. No. Don't be worried. Don't…

"Nat, drink this," Steve ordered. He held something out to her, and she took it from him blindly without asking what it was. She trusted him. She couldn't make her mouth move or her brain, but she trusted him. Briefly, she noticed a blanket around her shoulders, and then she was tired. God, she was tired. She couldn't remember when the adrenaline had left her body and when it had been replaced by this exhaustion. She was tired. So tired. She was asleep before she even took a sip of her drink.

"What the hell happened?" Sam asked, casting one last worried glance over his shoulder at Natasha's unconscious form while Steve took the co-pilot seat.

"He got away. He attacked me, but then Nat…something happened to Nat, and I let him go," Steve replied. Sam re-directed his gaze towards Steve, and he looked at him with a mild frown.

"But what happened to her?"

"Honestly? I don't know," Steve admitted, his voice frank. "I don't know. We were fine. She was acting perfectly normal, like Natasha on a mission. Then we got inside the building, and something happened, and she wasn't herself. By the time I realized something was wrong with her and let Bucky go, she was curled up on the floor with her back against the wall. Couldn't even speak to tell me what was wrong with her."

Sam glanced over his shoulder again to look at her, and he and Steve both eased the quinjet off the field. "We going after Barnes?"

"No. We're getting Nat back to HQ. Whatever happened to her will have rattled her up. She should be back with the rest of the team. Maybe it was too early to send her out. Too soon after what happened to her with all of that Ultron mess," Steve replied, making it clear that this was an order and not necessarily a matter open for discussion. Sam accepted it and began steering the quinjet with Steve's help back in the direction of HQ.

"I know something happened to her on the mission. You referenced something about the Maximoff girl doing something to you…the whole team. Is that what happened with Nat?" he asked.

"That's my guess." Steve fought the urge to look worriedly into the back where Natasha was sleeping. "I don't know. We all went through a lot with Ultron, but Natasha…she always hides everything so well."

"Super secret spy training," Sam said, and Steve nodded.

"Super secret spy training."

"What are you going to do about Barnes?"

"I guess just wait for the next lead. I could have gone after him…probably should have. But I couldn't leave Nat. And from what I know about Bucky, he would have been long gone by the time I'd gotten her safe and back here. He's probably all the way across the world now," Steve remarked, his tone dry and somewhat humorous.

"You going to radio in about Nat?"

"No. She'll be ok. She's shaky right now, but I've seen her go through tough stuff before. We both have. No sense getting everyone all worked up."

"Mainly Barton, right?"

"Mainly Barton."

"Sorry the mission was a bust."

"Wasn't a bust for me." Despite himself, Steve looked back at Natasha, at the small figure curled up beneath a blanket with the bottle of water he'd given her lying flat beside her. "I came out pretty ok."

"Plié, Natalia. Keep your toes over your knees, and for the love of God, stop rolling your ankles in. Your body is one straight line made up of many lines."

"Keep your toes over your knees when you land, Natalia. It absorbs the shock better before you go into the roll. Your mission should be like a line—directly from you to your target."

"One quick snap of the head, Natalia. Quick and easy just like that. Spotting keeps you from getting dizzy."

"All it takes to break a neck is one quick snap of the head, Natalia. Quick and easy, and you're done."

Faces blurred in and out of Natasha's dreams. Were these even dreams, she asked herself. This odd mixture of memory and nightmare was too much for her, and she couldn't even find a way to describe it. All she knew was that she remembered more about her past than she'd ever remembered outside of hypnosis, outside of someone else's guided help. She remembered the smell of resin on her pointe shoes, the feeling of her tights as they stuck to her sore toes as the wet blood from her feet formed a glue inside her tights…she could remember being a dancer. But she could also remember the Red Room in its entirety. She remembered the faces of the girls she'd trained beside, the faces of the girls she'd defeated. She even remembered the faces of the girls who had almost defeated her.

Almost.

And yet despite all of these memories, both false and real, Natasha felt pain. It started low in her belly and spread down to her legs, up through her torso. She felt so much pain she couldn't understand how she'd been able to manage it in the first place, but then she knew why she'd been forced to forget it—the pain had been too much. The pain of the graduation ceremony was always too much, and so the Red Room had hidden it deep within her mind so that no one could touch it.

"You leap so gracefully, Natalia. You were born to fly."

"You perform so beautifully, Natalia. You never disappoint. You were born to be a Black Widow."

Suddenly, Clint's face flashed past her unconscious eyes. Clint, on his knees and bleeding in Russia. Clint, looking up with her and shouting something to her. She clearly saw the gun in her hand, trained at his head; she heard the familiar voice in her ear of her old handler telling her to shoot Clint.

"I trust you," Clint had said. "I trust you."

Clint's eyes, his face, his voice. Natasha saw him. She saw him, and she heard him, and she felt him. But there was pain. There was so much pain, and she didn't understand why because memories of Clint weren't supposed to bring pain. Out of everything Clint Barton had brought into her life, pain was the last thing. But why was she feeling pain? Why was she remembering pain? Hell, she thought to herself, knowing she was shouting out to the void of her unconscious self, knowing all the while that she wouldn't remember her own thoughts when she woke up—hell, why was she remembering at all?

"You were born to be a Black Widow."

"I trust you."

Clint finished towel drying his hair, and he tossed the towel onto the floor, pausing he watched Noelle the cat stare at it. "What are you staring at? Huh? You've had an attitude all evening, and I have no idea where you're taking it out on me."

Noelle stared back at him with her judgmental eyes, and Clint sighed. He was talking to a cat who didn't really seem all that interested in listening to what he had to say. And yet he was going to keep talking to her. "You miss Mom? I know. I miss her, too. But she'll be back. She had to go do some grown up stuff. Want dinner? I can get you dinner. Food? You want food?"

At the mention of food, the small cat meowed and ran off to the kitchen, knowing Clint would follow her. Shaking his head, Clint snorted and walked out behind her. "Yeah. That's what I thought. Say food, and you get all excited. Annoying little asshole. Don't tell Mom I called you an asshole. I didn't mean it."

It was by pure chance that Clint walked into the kitchen where he'd last left his phone because he wouldn't have heard it ringing otherwise. He took a moment to turn up the volume on his hearing aids and check the Caller ID. When he saw Rogers flash across the screen, he took another moment and frowned. Steve was calling him, which wasn't all that out of place, but Steve was supposed to be out on a mission with Natasha. It wasn't out of character for Natasha to use Steve's phone to call him if her phone had died, but between calling and texting, Natasha was a fan of texting, especially since she knew Clint struggled on the phone with his hearing.

"Barton," he said, putting the phone up to his ear and answering in his clipped agent voice, the voice he used when he was Hawkeye.

"It's Rogers. We need you at HQ."

"Do I need my tactical suit?"

"Leave it. Your civvies should be fine."

"You do know that it's close to midnight, right?"

"The night's young."

"Give me a hint at least so I'll know why I'm being dragged out of my nice clean apartment at close to midnight."

"Natasha."

Clint stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes glued to the large clock on the wall by the fridge straight in front of him. "I'll be there in 10."

True to his word, Clint was at HQ in 10 minutes. The new apartment wasn't that far from Headquarters; both he and Natasha had discussed the pros and cons of having an apartment in close proximity to their place of work. Being close meant sleeping later and a shorter commute. However, being close also meant that they were close to their work. At first, Natasha had been the one to protest being so close—out of everywhere in the world they could have lived, why choose to live 10 minutes closer to work than that nice apartment a little farther out? Why did they want to be so wrapped up in their work, she'd asked. But it had hit her one day during a mission that her work was her life. Putting five extra miles or even 500 miles wouldn't be able to separate her work life from her home life. That was just fact, and so she'd finally agreed to take the apartment Clint had wanted.

As Clint stalked through the doors, his back straight and tall, his stride even, clean, he betrayed nothing of what he felt inside. Anyone looking at him couldn't have been able to notice the concern bubbling in his chest, the worry making his stomach turn. No one could had detected it. Just by looking at Clint, anyone would have thought that he was there for another day of training. But inside, Clint couldn't get there fast enough. Steve had said to meet him in the Infirmary, which meant that Natasha was injured. Natasha couldn't be dead, Clint figured, because Steve would have been much more urgent. But Natasha couldn't have gotten simply another broken bone. After everything they'd both been through in their lives, another broken bone was just laughable.

The archer made his way to the Infirmary without looking at or acknowledging anyone else around him. He had only one thing on his mind, and it wasn't whether or not the junior agents who'd been assigned filing jobs for the Avengers thought that Hawkeye was nice to them or not. Natasha, he thought. Natasha.

He saw Steve before Steve saw him, but the second that the captain saw Clint approach, he began striding towards him. "Barton."

"What happened?" Clint asked, his voice not betraying him. He wanted to know how she was, but he needed to know what had happened first. If Steve said she wasn't ok, he wasn't sure he could handle it without some kind of warning first, and asking what had happened to her was enough of a warning for him to prepare himself. His blue eyes scanned over Steve's face for any sign of lying or trying to go easy on him.

"Honestly, I'm still trying to figure that out myself," Steve replied without hesitation. "We found Barnes on Camp Lehigh, but when we tried to engage, I'm guessing she panicked. I found her curled up on the floor shaking and seemingly unresponsive."

Clint frowned, trying to process the second most un-Natasha-like statement he'd received that day. "Panicked?"

"I think so." Steve glanced over Clint's shoulder as if he were waiting for someone, and then he looked back at him. "I don't know. She was fine, and then she wasn't. She wasn't injured, though, and she's awake. Doctors took her vitals, and she appears to be ok."

"Wait." Clint folded his arms over his chest and stared harder at Steve. "I've never known Nat to panic during a mission like that. You said she was curled up on the floor shaking?"

"She wasn't fetal positioning if that's what you're asking, but she had her back against the wall and didn't really respond to any questions. In fact, she hasn't said a word since we brought her back here," Steve answered. Clint was quiet for a few seconds, and he tried to understand what exactly Steve had just told him. Earlier that day, Maria had brought him new about Natasha's psych eval skip, and now Steve had dropped this bomb on him, too.

Clint had been worried about Natasha since everything with Ultron had happened. He'd been worried about her the second Wanda had messed with her mind, and he'd been worried about her since he'd brought up the suggestion of taking people to the farm in Iowa. He was used to worrying about her well being on a day to day basis, but this kind of worrying was different. For once, he'd actually felt concern for Natasha in a way that went beyond all the other types of concern he'd shown her. Wanda had picked at the seams, and now Natasha seemed to be unraveling a little more quickly than anyone had been able to pick up on. And he hated himself for not having said anything sooner.

"Jesus," Clint mumbles.

"I was just in there with her, but she wasn't really talking to me," Steve offered. "I don't think I'm the person she wants to see right now."

Clint came back to Earth, and he stared at Steve one last time. "Thanks. For bringing her back. For taking care of her."

Steve shrugged and shook his head at the same time, his face unapologetic. "She's a good teammate, but she's an even better friend, Barton."

Lifting a hand, Clint dragged it over his face, the first sign of worry starting to physically appear in his body. "Yeah…yeah, she is." He paused for a second now that he knew Natasha was technically ok, now that he knew she wasn't going to die. "So you found Barnes? Did you manage to take him into custody?"

Steve pressed his lips together and shook his head. "No. We engaged, and he engaged back, but…guess there's always next time."

"Yeah…" Clint's voice trailed off, again thinking about the implications of Steve's words. "Next time."

"I can take you to Natasha's room. She probably wants to see you. Out of everyone in the world, I think you'd be the one person she'd feel happiest about seeing," Steve offered. He expected Clint to pass over everything in his statement aside from the offer to go see Natasha, but Clint looked at him, his eyes conveying that he'd heard what Steve had told him, and he'd actually listened.

"Yeah…yeah, I want to see her."

Without saying anything else, Steve turned and started down the hall. Clint walked directly by his side, his heart pounding and his mind turning over and over with all kinds of thoughts and questions, and then he was at Natasha's door. He saw her red hair first—he always focused on what part of her he saw first in situations like these. Sometimes it was her eyes, but most of the time, he caught sight of her hair first. Always with that bright red hair.

Her gaze was fixed in front of her, as if she were looking at something but staring straight through it. In a way, she reminded him of how she'd looked when he'd discovered her post-Wanda. She wasn't there with him, but she seemed to be somewhat aware of what was going on around her. Clint took it as a good sign that she didn't have restraints on—she at least knew she was somewhere safe, somewhere she didn't feel the need to fight the people trying to help her for fear of them being enemies.

Even though Clint's first instinct was to dash towards her side, he waited until she noticed him. He stood in the doorway, and he held his breath, and he made sure to take up more space than he usually did so he could catch her eye. And he did. When she looked over at him, her green eyes were large and confused, but she saw him. He knew that much.

"Nat," he said softly. He didn't know that in her head, she could still hear him telling her he trusted her when she'd been given the choice of killing him or being killed herself. He didn't know that that was all she'd been able to focus on every time she'd thought about him since she'd woken up. He only saw Natasha, looking more exhausted and sick than he'd seen her look in a long time.

"Clint," she said back, her voice every bit as soft. "Clint."

All it took was one word, and Clint was at her side. One word, and he was there beside her without either of them needing to say anything else. Clint knew she'd talk when she wanted to; he knew she'd tell him about what had happened to her when she'd reached some level of being ok again, and at that moment, she wasn't very ok. Not at all. So he could wait. He could wait, and he conveyed that in the way he grabbed her hand and looked down at her, silent and steady as he always was.

As Steve stood in the doorway and watched this, he knew that this was his cue to leave. Neither Natasha nor Clint seemed to be all that aware of the fact that he was still there, and honestly, Steve was all right with that. This reunion was for them, and he was intruding. Silently, he backed away and shut the door behind him. There were papers to fill out now, and he had to take care of them. Starting down the hall, he thought about all the accident reports Natasha had made so many copies of earlier. Ironic, he noted, that now he would have to fill one out about her.

And then suddenly, without any warning at all, it hit him. What Natasha had been trying to say when he'd tried to get through to her back at Camp Lehigh, when she'd retreated to some place in her mind that only she could access. He knew.

Natasha had been trying to say Clint's name.