Disclaimer: The Avengers, its characters and The Marvel Cinematic Universe belong to Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company, among many others. I'm only a fan, writing this for love of this film franchise and personal pleasure.
A.N.: This happens during Captain America: The Winter Soldier, right after the mission on the Lemurian Star and before Natasha arrives at the hospital following the attack on Fury at Steve's apartment.
To Build a Home
3. Partners
It was late evening when Natasha finally got back to her apartment in Washington D.C. As she walked in, she couldn't help but slam the door behind her and the scowl she had on her face as she glared at her living room. She felt very frustrated and she wasn't used to feeling this way.
Damn Steve Rogers. Actually, damn Nick Fury, when she thought about it. It wasn't her fault the Director had set her out with a different assignment inside their mission and that he hadn't felt the need to share that with Rogers. Why was the Captain getting all mad at her for following orders? He'd been in the Army, he should understand that better than anyone.
The flight back from the Lemurian Star had been a tense one, as Steve had refused to talk to her any further about what had happened until they were back at the Triskelion. She could appreciate that, as even if they would usually run their missions with STRIKE Team, the partnership the two of them had was on another level and she didn't need them going into that with the whole team hearing about it. But it still didn't make the tension between them any easier. When they were finally back at HQ, she offered to take care of the mission report as an olive branch of sorts, and he'd sighed, thanked her and said he wasn't mad at her. Then he'd stalked out towards Fury's office to have it out with the Director.
Even if he hadn't said the words, she'd heard them loud and clear: he wasn't mad, but he was disappointed. Honestly, having him mad at her would've been preferable. She could understand anger, it was one of the most basic human emotions. Now disappointment was something else. And having Steve being disappointed in her was causing an anguished stirring in her chest that she couldn't quite understand. Hence her frustration.
Maybe this partnership hadn't been such a good idea, after all. It wasn't the first time Steve had complained about Fury keeping things from him and that she'd been caught in the backlash. She'd never had such problems with Clint before. He understood the intricacies of the job and how Fury would at times need them to compartmentalize in order to achieve their goals. After fixing herself a quick dinner, she opened up her personal pad, ran the security inscriptions for a secure line and dialed her best friend. Even if it was late, he was on a time zone an hour earlier than her and he never slept early anyway.
Clint answered on the second ring, his face coming up as he looked at her with a smile. "Hey, Nat." He seemed to be walking inside his house, probably going from the living room into his office.
"So when are you coming back?" Natasha asked without preamble, raising an eyebrow at him.
He raised an eyebrow back as he sat down on a chair and put his own pad down on a table. "What, no 'hello, how are you'? Miss me that much?"
"Seriously, isn't there like a time limit for these things?" She asked with a roll of the eyes, ignoring his question and keeping to her own topic of discussion. "I doubt SHIELD enjoys paying your salary just to keep you in your house."
"Don't worry, I've been taking a few solo missions here and there," he answered with an easy smile. "I haven't been out of work all this time."
She raised both eyebrows at him at hearing this. "Oh so then it's just me you don't want to work with anymore?"
"No, I just didn't see the need to break up your current team, especially since you were so happy about how things were going," he clarified, furrowing his brow slightly at her tone.
"I wasn't that happy," she sat back on her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. "Besides, I miss working with you." She added with a small smile.
"Uh-oh, trouble in paradise?" Clint asked with a chuckle. Trust him to see right through her to what was actually bothering her. "What's going on with you and Cap? I thought it was working out great."
"It was, until it wasn't," she mumbled in reply, uncrossing her arms and leaning forward to support her elbows on the surface of her kitchen counter, placing her chin on her hands. "I'm starting to rethink this whole situation."
"What happened?" Clint asked with a cross between amusement and concern at her predicament.
"Nothing. I was following orders, of all things for him to get mad at me," she explained, rolling her eyes once more. "Maybe he's not as cut out to work at SHIELD as I had thought." She added as she furrowed her brow in thought.
"Uh you're gonna have to give me more here, Nat," he raised an eyebrow at her once more. "I still don't follow."
"I can't, it's classified," she said with a rueful smile. "Let's just say that Fury had me doing something during the mission that Cap wasn't aware of─"
"As usual." Clint added with an understanding nod.
"─then he found out, we almost got killed and now he hates me." Natasha summarized the situation, leaning back on her chair with a sigh as she looked out into her living room.
"I think hate might be a strong word to use there when it comes to Steve Rogers," Clint said in a light tone, "unless you're a Nazi. Or maybe Loki."
"I mean it," she told him earnestly as she focused her eyes back on the screen and his face. "You didn't see the way he looked at me, Clint." She could still picture the look on his face after Batroc had nearly blown them up with that grenade. Once more she could feel something twisting painfully inside her chest at the memory.
"Why is this bothering you so much?" He countered with a question, making a gesture with his hand at her. "It's not like you to care what other people think about you."
"I don't." She denied his accusation at once and crossed her arms defensively over her chest.
"It's because it's Cap, isn't it?" Clint said with a knowing smile.
Natasha merely rolled her eyes at him once more and refused to answer him. "Anyway, any chance Laura is gonna let me have my partner back anytime soon on a permanent basis?"
"Well, I hate to break it to you like this, but…" One of his eyebrows flickered up momentarily as he seemed to hesitate in what he wanted to say.
"Clint?" She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward once more, peering closer into the screen as if she could read what he was trying to tell her just by looking at his face.
"You might want to work things out with Steve," he said, heaving a rather heavy sigh. "We've put the possibility of retirement on the table."
"Really?" Both her eyebrows shot up on her forehead in surprise at his words.
"It's not final yet," Clint was quick to reassure her. "Fury and Hill don't even know about it, though I think they might suspect something with the amount of time I've taken off work. It's just that with everything that's happened, Laura and I have been considering our options. I've managed to invest a great amount of the money I got so far from working at SHIELD, so we could keep living comfortably at the farm and I could help out more with the kids. I've also been doing some remodeling around the house."
She was nodding along at his explanation. "So, retirement," she said, and tried to give him a smile in return.
"You did say a while ago that Cap was great to work with," he said with a casual shrug of the shoulders. "I didn't think you would mind so much."
"Well, I'm always going to miss my partner," she said and this time she did manage to give him a genuine smile.
"You got a new partner now," he countered easily with a smile of his own. "Work it out with him."
"It's different," she said, her eyebrows furrowed in concern once more. "He doesn't trust me," she added in a small voice. She didn't know why, but that was a notion that really bothered her.
Aside from these instances when Fury would give her secret side missions, Natasha didn't feel like she'd ever done anything to warrant Steve's mistrust. She could understand Tony mistrusting her, for example, as they had first met while she was undercover shadowing him. Or Bruce, who had a hard time trusting anyone for his own reasons. But she'd met Steve just as who she was and for the past two years, they had been partners and she'd even put an effort to try to be his friend yet there was always this weird tension between the two of them. It was true that she didn't typically open up to people, but that was a byproduct of her past and something she had difficulty changing. She was afraid the root cause that Steve wasn't able to trust her was exactly because of who she was: The Black Widow and her tainted past.
"Then make him," Clint countered once more with a shrug, bringing her out of her inner thoughts and back to their conversation.
"It's not that simple." Natasha couldn't help but roll her eyes at him.
"Of course, it is," he insisted on it. "I got you to trust me, remember?"
"I almost killed you," she pointed out, raising an eyebrow at him at the memory of their first encounter.
The fact that Clint had trusted her even before she'd ever given him any reason to was always something that baffled her. After they'd battled each other and she'd almost killed him before he managed to say he didn't want to kill her but recruit her instead, she'd asked him why the hell he'd even wanted to give her a chance in the first place and he'd said she'd been going off the reservation to take out human trafficking rings on her own, so he knew she had a good heart and he'd wanted to give her a chance, like he'd been given when he first joined SHIELD. From then on, she'd pledged her loyalty to him and Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, who'd backed them up and accepted her allegiance, even when most at SHIELD had thought it was a bad idea to bring her on board.
"Then this should be way easier for you, because Cap would never try to kill you," he grinned cheekily back at her.
She smiled ruefully back at him. Maybe there was some truth to what Clint was telling her. But before she could think further about that a new message pinged on her cell phone and she saw it was from Steve. "Speak of the devil," she noted with a smile at Clint as she unlocked her phone, then her face grew somber as she read the short message. "Shit."
"What happened?" Clint asked in concern, noting at once the change in her tone.
"I gotta go," she said, looking up at him as she locked her phone and put it back in her pocket. "Fury's been shot."
