because I like to imagine that Natasha took Wanda under her wing, and that it led to a close friendship.

enjoy.

"Nice jacket," Clint says with a pained smile.

Wanda's lips curl into a weak smile in reply. Pietro had stolen the jacket for her when they suited up against Ultron along with the Avengers, and Natasha had refused to take it back from her after. Wanda had tried to leave it in her room, and then her office, and even went as far as sneaking it into her car. Every time it appeared back in her room the next day with a note.

Keep it. It looks better on you anyway.

Now it was the only thing she had left to remember her friend and mentor by. She had started putting together scrapbooks and albums of photos shortly after joining the Avengers, but she'd been forced to leave them behind when Clint had broken her out of her house arrest after Lagos. Then the Compound was left in ruins after Thanos' attack, and with Stark gone, she wasn't sure about the status of FRIDAY, and whether there were even any of her photos to retrieve on the server.

"She was right. It looks good on you," Clint says with a nod.

"I miss her," Wanda whispers as her weak smile falters. Her accent bleeds through clearly as she loses focus, and all she can think of is how Natasha used to tease her about it in an obnoxiously put on Russian accent of her own. She had made it a point to teach Wanda how to lose her accent, but had also taken the time to learn Sokovian. Wanda had been so grateful to have someone to talk to in her mother tongue.

"Yeah," Clint rasps, voice thick with unshed tears and grief bubbling in his chest. "Me too," he says as he wraps an arm around her.

Wanda takes a moment to lean into his hold before standing up straighter. Natasha would've wanted her to be strong. "Laura mentioned you and she are volunteering?"

Clint nods as he pulls away from her. "Yeah, turns out Nat had been running some kind of organization for kids who'd lost their parents because of the Snap. Laura and I are gonna help out a bit," he explains. "Help Nat finish the job," he adds quietly.

Wanda blinks more tears away. Natasha had always teased Clint that he had a penchant for taking in strays. Wanda always thought that the same could be said about her. She had taken Wanda under her wing, after all.

"Can I join you?" she asks quietly. It was the least she could do to honour her friend.

"Of course, kid," Clint replies instantly, looking slightly sad at the fact that Wanda had felt the need to ask. "Nat would've liked that."

Wanda feels a fresh rush of guilt and crushing sadness from him, and she closes her eyes to try and stem the tide of the overwhelming emotions. It's evident he's in a great deal of pain over Natasha's death, and frankly Wanda isn't surprised. It had been very clear they were close from the moment she had met them and finding out about her role as aunt to Clint's kids had only further solidified that. The two of them shared a tight bond, and losing her had left him without his other half in some respects.

It takes Wanda a moment to get a handle on the swell of emotions, but once she does she opens her eyes and finds him staring mindlessly at the horizon.

"You're in agony," she says sadly, holding in a wince as his emotions flare once more.

Clint stiffens and his gaze shifts to meet hers. She's startled by the fierceness she finds there. "I lost my best friend, my wife lost the woman she thought of as her sister, and my kids lost their aunt. Of course I'm in agony." His words are clipped and defensive, and his tone his curt.

Wanda shakes her head, staying firm. "This is more than that. I can feel it."

"Get out of my head," he growls. Wanda can tell it's purely driven by grief, but nevertheless, hearing that darkness in his voice scares her. She's heard whispered words that say he lost himself in the five years she was gone, and she wonders if he's on the verge of losing himself again now.

"I'm not in your head. It's so strong it's screaming at me."

"Let me go."

"No...please no."

"...it's okay."

"Please..."

Wanda blinks in shock as she sees Natasha's final moments. Tears prick her eyes as she hears the gentle plea and then the reassuring words. Clint's panic and anxiety sweep through her as he remembers Natasha saying goodbye in her own way. Shock ripples through her as he watches his best friend push off the cliff and fall away from him, gazes locked to each other until just before impact when Clint looks away because he can't bear to see it. Crushing sadness spreads when he looks back down at her body sprawled at the base of the cliff, blood pooling around her head.

Wanda can't help the small gasp that escapes. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth as she feels a wave of nausea at the sight of her former mentor and friend dead on the alien planet.

Clint looks up at the soft gasp and he knows immediately what she's seen.

"I'm sorry, Clint," Wanda apologizes quickly. "I can't help it- Your mind is projecting. It happens sometimes when emotions are very strong. I didn't mean to-"

"I'm sorry you saw it," he interrupts, his voice quiet and rough with grief.

She reaches out to grasp his hand tightly in hers. "Let me help," she offers. He frowns, confusion washing over his features. "I can help you find a happier memory to focus on," she elaborates.

Clint shifts uncomfortably, and Wanda knows that while he trusts her, he will never trust anyone fully when it comes to invasion of his mind. She doesn't blame him.

"As painful as it is seeing it... I don't want to lose it either," Clint explains.

Wanda nods. She understands. As painful as her last memories of Vision are, she wouldn't trade them away for anything. "You want someone to remember her final moments."

He sighs, his gaze having drifted away again. They stay quiet, the evening sounds of the Barton family farm their only soundtrack. Even here, in his safe place, he's unsettled. She supposes having your best friend wrench out of your grasp to her death would do that.

"It was supposed to be me," he whispers, breaking their silence.

Wanda tilts her head sadly. "You know she was never going to let you do that."

"She didn't know if it would work," he says, shaking his head. "She threw herself off that cliff not knowing if we'd get everyone back. If it hadn't worked...she'd have died for nothing, and I would have nothing left."

"She was going to do everything in her power to save her family, and get you back to Laura and the kids, even if it wasn't a sure thing. You know that."

Clint is quiet for a moment as he ponders her words. "She never felt like it was enough," he says finally. "She saved so many people, but all she could remember were all the things they made her do."

Wanda's mind drifts to a conversation from years prior, shortly after she'd joined the Avengers.

"It never goes away, you know."

Wanda looks up, startled by Natasha's voice. She hadn't realized she'd come into the room. "What doesn't go away?"

"The guilt."

Wanda gaze falls to her hands, which have begun to twist in her lap, hints of red swirling around her fingers. She was learning very quickly that Natasha was eerily perceptive. So much so that Wanda often wondered if she had some sort of mind-reading power of her own.

"It doesn't go away, but you find ways of managing it. You find ways to try and even the score."

"Ultron ruined my home, and I helped him do it. All those people…you, Captain Rogers, Dr. Banner, Stark, Thor...I've hurt so many people."

"You're not the only one with a dark past. We all have our demons, and I know that you know that. You were in our heads, after all."

Wanda winces, but Natasha waves it off. "I don't say that to make you feel guilty. I say it because it's true. Think back and I think you'll realize that we all have our demons that we're battling against. Some of us have had more success in quieting them and finding ways of managing it."

"How do I make up for all that hurt?"

"You can't," Natasha says succinctly. Wanda winces again. She was also learning how blunt Natasha could be. "But you're taking steps to find ways to even out the balance. You fought against Ultron, saving the people of Sokovia and saving the team too. And you're here with us now to continue protecting people. Maybe you won't ever feel like it's balanced, but you can know that you're trying, and that you're doing everything you can to try and make it right."

The memory drifts away and Wanda wonders if Natasha felt like she'd done enough to balance her ledger. She wonders if saving trillions was enough in her eyes to make up for the deaths she'd been forced to deal out. She wonders if Natasha had ever felt as comfortable with who she was as she portrayed to everyone. She wonders if she ever thought herself redeemable.

"I just keep reliving it," Clint says, startling Wanda out of her thoughts. "Over and over and over again. I close my eyes and all I can see is her face as she asked me to let her go and reassured me it was okay. She was convincing me to let her die and she was comforting me."

Wanda feels sick as his mind inadvertently projects the scene again, this time focused on her face. She understands what he's saying - the expression on Natasha's face was heart-breaking. It was acceptance and fear and determination and sadness all rolled into one. It was a plea for him to let her do it, and to forgive himself for the guilt she knew he'd feel.

"She was younger than you when I first met her," Clint continues, and Wanda finds herself surprised by the fact that he's sharing so much. He'd never particularly been one to share willingly; provide a shoulder and an ear to listen, absolutely, but it was rare for him to offer feelings and emotions of his own. Wanda always assumed it was a by-product of being a spy and assassin.

"She was just a teenager. I mean, she'd lived a lot of life in her years, and she'd seen more shit than any person should ever see, but she was just a kid. And when she looked up at me, she looked so damn young. Looked the exact damn same as when she was dangling from that goddamned cliff even though it was decades later."

"How did you meet?" she asks gently, hoping the detour into a more pleasant part of their history would help him cope.

She's shocked when he barks out a laugh. "Nat never told you?"

Wanda shakes her head. "You know she was not one to share often. We were close and she told me some things, yes, but this...I always thought this was too personal for her to share with me. It was your story."

"I think she'd want you to know," he says after a thoughtful moment, a small, sad smile curling on his lips. "She was pretty fond of you, and I think she'd trust you with it."

Wanda mirrors his smile and gestures for him to begin.

"She'd been active for a bit by the time SHIELD pieced together her winding path of death and destruction. Details on her were sketchy at best and her kills were all over the place, but there was enough intel to piece something together. They gave me a folder of everything they knew about her, which was pretty damn thin by the way, and told me to take her out."

Wanda eyes widen. "They sent you to kill her?!"

Clint nods, a fond smile spreading that has Wanda trying to keep her jaw from dropping in surprise. That was far from the reaction she'd expected. "You have to understand, by the time I started tracking her, she'd racked up over seventy confirmed kills."

Wanda's eyes widen further. She knew Natasha's past was dark, and that she'd been forced to do many horrendous things, but she hadn't imagined that level of darkness. And at so young an age...

"I tracked her for months. I knew I had to be careful. If she caught the slightest whiff of me following her I knew I'd be dead before I even had the chance to try and take her out.

"Finally, after six, maybe seven months of following her around in the distant shadows, I had a chance to get the drop on her. She'd been getting sloppy, and I figured she was arrogant enough to think she didn't have to worry about anyone going after her. Her reputation had been enough to keep the small players far away, and even held off most of the bigger players too. But she hadn't counted on SHIELD's willingness to be patient."

Wanda blinks as she processes his words. She turns her attention to him, trying to determine if the escape away from Natasha's final moments was doing any good. She can see that he seems less burdened than he had before, but she knows from experience these moments of respite can be fleeting. And she certainly wasn't naive enough to believe he had come to terms with losing Natasha after just a few minutes of conversation.

"She'd been out doing recon for a hit she was set to do later in the week and I broke into her place, set things up, and then got the hell outta dodge to wait for her to get back."

"Surely she would've noticed someone had been in there," Wanda says, unable to believe that the Black Widow, who looked over her shoulder constantly and was right on that razor thin edge of being paranoid, wouldn't notice someone had been in her place.

"I watched her set up all her booby traps so I could get past them and get them back up before leaving. I told you, she hadn't counted on someone being patient enough to stay far enough away for so long."

Wanda nods, but is still unconvinced.

"So when I get the notification that she's on her way back, I go back in and hide, making sure to keep all her defences intact. She comes back in and I get the drop on her. We fight brutally, and eventually she gets my weapons out of my hands and is pointing a gun at my face."

Wanda's eyes are wide. She knows that they both survive and end up as best friends, and yet somehow she's still nervous to hear his next words.

"But she didn't know I had access to her place earlier, when I'd hidden a small, remote crossbow controlled by a ring on my finger. One squeeze and she's hit with a dart. It's enough to get her to drop the gun, and then the tables have turned.

"So I'm standing there, staring down the Black Widow while pointing a gun at her head. And somehow I hadn't realized until that exact moment just how young she was. I knew she was petite because I'd seen her from a distance, but I never imagined that she was still just a kid. I remember thinking that she couldn't be more than 13, maybe 14 years old. It was startling to see such hardened eyes on such a young face."

Wanda's mind brings forward a blur of images that she'd seen when she had sent Natasha spiraling into the darkest parts of her mind for Ultron. But before she can delve too deeply into them, Clint is grabbing her hand and placing it on his temple.

"Go ahead," he says softly. Wanda eyes him warily. "I want you to," he adds with a reassuring nod of his head.

She reaches out tentatively with her powers and finds the memory right on the surface.

Natasha is on the ground, pressing her hand to the bleeding wound in her shoulder from the bolt that had gone right through and embedded in the door frame behind her. She's staring up at him, utter exhaustion and defeat in her eyes. But Clint doesn't understand, because he knows that she doesn't give up. He's certain that the word defeat isn't even in her vocabulary.

"Do it," she says.

Tired, dead eyes stare back at him as he distantly marvels at how perfect the American accent she'd used on an op was, given the distinctly Russian lilt to her actual speech. His hand is steady, but his mind is whirling as he tries to piece it all together.

"DO IT," she says louder, with enough conviction to actually make him believe that she wants him to kill her.

"Why?"

Her brow arches. "Why not?" she counters. "It is your mission, yes?"

"You didn't answer my question."

She swallows and winces as she takes her hand off the wound. "I don't have to. I know you've been watching me for months. I know you know why."

Clint blinks. She'd known he had been tracking her. She'd known and she hadn't done a damn thing about it. She hadn't been getting sloppy...she'd been inviting him in. He thinks of all the opportunities she'd had to take him out and his stomach drops.

But then he thinks of the small, ever so brief moments that had caused him to question her loyalty - saving a child from being the one to discover her father's brutally massacred body, fighting a would-be thief away from a woman with young children, buying a meal for a couple of homeless kids. After each one she'd gone on to complete a brutal act of violence, and Clint had been left to try and make sense of the motivations.

And then he thinks of her reactions to receiving new orders in those unmarked envelopes, and he understands the look in her eyes.

"You're tired," he concludes. "Why keep doing their bidding?"

She is quiet for a moment before answering. "Not all chains are physical."

He blinks and reads between the lines. "What do they have on you?"

She shakes her head. "They have me."

He frowns. "You have no permanent on-site handler. You're skilled enough to have slipped away and disappeared months ago. You're smart enough to be able to stay off their radar indefinitely."

Another shake of her head. "Not all chains are physical," she repeats, this time tapping her head.

His eyes widen. Shit. She didn't mean...brainwashing? His minds cycles back to those loose reports of the Red Room. They'd suspected her training had been similar, but SHIELD had thought it defunct after the fall of the USSR. Apparently it was still running...or at least, had been for her childhood...if you could even call it that. He'd heard stories of their methods - they made his shitty childhood look idyllic by comparison. Suddenly those brief moments of wavering loyalty followed by brutally violent returns to her regular behaviour make sense. She's been trying to fight off some sort of conditioning for god knows how long.

"What do you want?" he asks.

Her brow furrows, as though puzzled by the very notion of being asked such a question. She doesn't answer and he scrutinizes her face. He understands the specific kind of exhaustion in her eyes. He'd once upon a time been a victim of it before Coulson and Fury had pulled him out of it.

"You want out?"

"That is not up to me," she answers with a shake of her head. He thinks maybe she actually looks sad about that answer.

"It is if I'm granting it to you," he counters. "And the way I see it, there's no way you go back to your old life after this, because I either put a bullet in your brain, or I put down my gun and you come with me."

"The only difference is where I die. Here, or the SHIELD facility you take me to."

He shakes his head. "I'm making a call. They respect me enough to trust that."

"Are you sure about that? You know what I have done. You know who I am."

He ignores her words. "What's it gonna be?"

She holds his gaze and blinks twice before exhaling heavily. "There are handcuffs in that drawer," she says quietly, nodding toward the desk behind him.

He reaches into his pocket and tosses some of SHIELD's reinforced zip ties over to her. "Handcuffs are too easy for you," he counters with a cheeky grin. "Put 'em on and tighten them," he says while gesturing with the gun.

She nods and does as he asked, pulling the ends with her teeth before holding her hands out to him to further tighten the ties. He does, and it's then that he notices the scars on her wrists. He swallows to banish the lump in his throat growing with the darkening thoughts in his mind about how those scars got there…

"You got a first aid kit here?"

"In kitchen, second drawer by fridge."

He tilts his head slightly as her accented words rattle around his mind before he nods and gestures again with the gun. "Go ahead." But he can see the pain she's trying to conceal and decides to go for broke. "Actually, I'll get it," he says, striding over to the kitchen before he can change his mind. When he turns around again, he's relieved that she hasn't moved. "Let's get you cleaned up, yeah? Can't have you bleeding out before I give my superiors the heart attack of the century," he quips.

The memory fades away and Wanda eases out of his mind. She meets his gaze and finds a haunted expression on his face. "Clint…" Wanda tries gently

"She didn't get to live," he says brokenly with a sad shake of his head. "She spent years under their control, and then she got out and fought so hard to be her own person. And then it turned out she was just working for Hydra all along," he spits bitterly.

"But she did live, Clint. All that time she spent with you, and Laura, and the kids...that was Natasha. Not the Black Widow. Not Agent Romanoff. Not the Avenger. It was Natasha."

Another shake of his head. "It wasn't enough."

"It never is," Wanda replies gently, thinking of Pietro and of Vision and everyone else stolen away too soon. "But we have what we have when we have it," she adds, hearing Natasha's voice echoing in her mind from years before telling her the same thing.

A beat of silence. "When did you get so wise?" he asks then, as a small smile creeps onto his face.

"Well, you learn a thing or two when you have great mentors," she answers, holding his gaze pointedly. She'd learned a lot from both of them in their short time together, and she knows that a lot of what Natasha had taught her she'd once learned from Clint.

He smiles and holds out his arms for a hug. She obliges and holds him tightly. "I miss her," he says quietly.

"Me too," Wanda agrees. "Me too."

this one changed a bunch from its first iteration. seemed like once I started it, different ideas and offshoots just kept popping up in my mind. I'm sure if I kept it sitting in my drafts for another week it would've changed again...

as always, your thoughts, feedback, and comments are welcomed and encouraged.

more to come...