4. Well you're a real tough cookie with a long history
"I could tell you about the time a building fell on me and I ended up at Cincinnati Children's Hospital," Clint suggested. "That was a trip."
"Clint, everyone knows that story," Darcy said around a forkful of lemon strudel. He balked, blinking back at her.
"Everyone?"
"Two words pal: YouTube."
"Really?" He wasn't even completely sure why he was surprised except that it always seemed surprising every time he was reminded that he was a celebrity now.
"One kid made a Mocumentary," Darcy nodded, licking her fork.
"I wonder if it was the Aneurysm kid," Clint mused pensively. "She was ballsy. I was going to make her my Secretary of Ice Cream and Foreign Affairs."
"How come you didn't?"
"Eh, Coulson and Nat staged a coup before I could solidify my government," Clint replied, his shoulders sagging in disappointment.
"Dude, I have to tell you," Darcy waved her fork at him. "On behalf of the planet, thank you for trying to break out of medical before they can medicate you."
"Just doing my part to keep the world safer," he replied saluting her with his coffee mug. "Oh! Hey! It's not a super spy story but did I ever tell you about the annual SHIELD team building Tag Tournament?" Darcy stared at him in a way that made him uncomfortable.
"That's not a movie."
"No, it's an article in the Wall Street Journal," She replied, giving him a narrow-eyed look. "They're talking about making a movie of it though." Clint let out a huff, rolling his eyes.
"Everyone's played Tag, Darce, everyone," he insisted.
"Not everyone is still doing it in their thirties," She pointed out with a grin. "I can't believe Natasha would go along with that."
"Are you kidding? Strike Team Delta won every year after she joined SHIELD," he answered smugly.
"How did that happen anyway?" Darcy gave him a considering look. "She told me you were sent out to kill her but you made a different call. She wouldn't tell me anything else."
"It was my first mission where I was Agent in Charge," His brow furrowed in a pained expression. "Yeah, I'm not really sure I should tell you this."
"Why?" she asked. "So you decided to recruit her instead of kill her, how bad a story can that be?"
"It would be a totally awesome story if that's what I'd actually done," he nodded in agreement.
"The Black Widow, aka Irina Zlataryova, aka Tatiana Sokolova, aka half a dozen other things," Fury, the newly minted Director of SHIELD said as photos and snatches of video ticked by on the TV in the corner of the conference room. He hit the pause button on the remote freezing the frame on a still of Zlataryova in three quarter profile her blonde hair obscuring most of her face. "The KGB's deadliest and most successful secret agent in history."
"The boogeyman," Maria Hill muttered half under her breath. Clint very carefully didn't let his smile bleed through as, beside her on the other side of the conference table, Jasper Sitwell barely stifled a snort of amusement. Out of all the recent Junior Agents to make it to the strike division he liked the pair of them the best but he wasn't about to tell them that. Both of them were fast tracking to level five and command of their own missions. He wasn't sure either of them knew that though.
"Pretty eyes," Clint observed, frowning at the photo in the briefing packet. It was a head shot, Irina's crisp blue suit and the partial logo in the corner hinting that the photo had been lifted from a company ID. He held it up to the light, studying her features. "So, has anyone at SHIELD considered telling her the KGB doesn't exist any more?"
"You keep telling yourself that," Phil muttered at him with a smirk. Clint balled up one of the napkins sitting by the box of donuts in the middle of the table and lobbed it at his head but Coulson batted it away without even looking up. On Clint's other side Melinda May jabbed him in the shin with her foot.
"If you two are done," Fury said drily, eyeing the three of them as if they were more trouble than the juniors. Clint looked up with his most innocent smile, relying on Mel and Phil to have matching expressions. It made Fury crazy. "Far as we can tell, Zlataryova's been in play for at least the last fifteen years. Most of her work has been in eastern Europe, a couple of forays into South America to deal with Soviet security threats, nothing directly connected to US or Western European interests, not until recently. She fell off the radar for a few months while the Russians were restructuring their government and then she popped back up, first to deal with domestic drug cartels, a handful of assassinations of what we're pretty sure were corrupt Soviet cronies trying to position themselves in post communist politics. And then two years ago she took out a key SHIELD witness involved with the Ten Rings. We took her out, or so we thought." He unpaused the TV and choppy video from what looked like a tourist's camcorder began to play, a slender, muscular woman in a black dress was in a shootout with a team of SHIELD agents. She took a hit to the chest, tumbling off the docks and into the sea. Fury hit the pause again as she hit the water.
"She cropped up again about three months later, very much not dead," Phil said nodding. "Art theft recovery, wasn't it?" Fury nodded in reply and Clint let out an impressed whistle, flipping through the pages in the briefing packet.
"More political assassinations," Fury continued. "All Russian domestic so we stayed out of it, a few trafficking rings, some contract work for petty crime lords, and then last year Industrial espionage at Hammer Tech."
"Ooo, bet that blew up the skirts at the Pentagon," Clint said with a grin, flipping back to the blue suit photo. "SHIELD isn't in the business of dealing with this kind of thing, why isn't the FBI doing their job?"
"Because of what happened next," Fury replied, pressing the remote again. This video was much more crisp and clear but in black and white. It was SHIELD safe house surveillance, one of the boltholes in Germany if Clint wasn't very much mistaken. He remembered being there vaguely. The five man team wasn't one Clint readily recognized, not until a woman, tying her long golden hair up in a ponytail, flopped onto the sofa, grinning at one of the other agents. Mary Anne Lewis. Clint felt his stomach sink and he quickly tracked the men in the room until he saw Roy Breemer. Well shit.
It happened so fast he barely had time to register what he was seeing. The window at the back of the house shattered, a figure barreling through it, lithe and too quick to see. Throwing knives left both her hands, killing the two agents neared the window. The intruder snapped the neck of the third agent and fired a gun, a head shot to Breemer, before taking on Lewis in hand to hand. It was over in seconds. The figure took two slow deep breaths, scanned the room, keeping her chin tilted down so her hair partially obscured her face from the cameras then she straightened her shoulders and marched purposely through the house to the kitchen and out the back door.
"Okay, I think I peed a little bit," Clint grimaced at the TV. Across the table Hill and Sitwell were both looking a little pale. Clint didn't even have to glance at Phil to know he wasn't looking at the screen at all.
"You're all here," Fury said, leaning into the table on his palms with his most steely-eyed expression. "Because last night an undercover agent on an active op slipped us some intel. Zlataryova is meeting with Bruno Gueist, in Bremerhaven in five days. You people are the most out of the box thinkers I have, you're going to put together a plan to take her out."
Clint didn't twitch, he wasn't particularly surprised by that declaration but he couldn't help sneaking a look at Hill and Sitwell who were sitting across from him with wide eyes, both of their postures unnaturally straight.
"Kids," he muttered to Phil who only hummed softly in agreement.
"Just to be clear, we can't just blow up Bremerhaven, right?" May asked drolly. Clint held up his fist to her and she bumped it without turning her head.
"Despite the fact that that would probably lead to less collateral damage, no," Fury answered drily. "The Council frowns on that kind of thing."
"Gueist is adjacently crooked more than actually criminal, his public image is pretty clean," Sitwell observed thoughtfully. "Most of what we have on him is barely illegal, why's he getting tangled up with the best assassin on the planet?"
"Brokering, we think," Coulson supplied. "Whoever Gueist is working for it looks as if he's meant to vet the Widow and then set up a meeting between her and the actual client."
"At least Gueist won't see a need for a ton of personal security," May shrugged, Clint nodded in agreement.
"I think whatever we plan, we need to have some kind of idea why our team got made in the first place," Hill said, her expression pinched as she stared up at the frozen image on the tv. "Alpha strike was our best covert team."
"I was starting to like her," Clint complained, turning to Phil with a sad pout and dialing up the whine at the end of the phrase. Across the table Hill's cheeks turned pink and Sitwell stifled his bark of a laugh in his fist.
"Don't get attached to your coworkers," Phil replied emotionlessly, still studying the intel. "I keep telling you, it makes it harder to shoot them when they go rogue." Clint heaved the most dramatic sigh he could muster, slumping down in his chair.
"You shoot one agent in the knee and all of a sudden you're a useless pacifist," Clint grumbled, darting a look across the table at Hill and Sitwell who were failing spectacularly to hide their horrified expressions.
"Do we know for certain that Alpha's communication was secure?" May asked as Fury's eyes narrowed in disapproval.
"We know neither the hardware nor the scrambling protocols were tampered with," Fury replied.
"But that doesn't discount descrambling we don't know about," Phil said as Fury nodded in agreement.
"Doesn't preclude them just getting made on the op either," Clint added, wincing a little, he glanced out of the corner of his eye at Phil.
"Say it," May prompted flatly. Clint heaved a real sigh this time.
"Lewis was perfect undercover," Clint began, picking out his words carefully. "She was really flawless, completely Method. I found it damn unnerving, she never dropped character, not until she handed in her after action. But Breemer, he was a good guy, I hate saying anything bad about him, but there were cracks. He didn't always play the part perfectly. I always knew where he was in the room because he looked like a fed. I don't know how else to explain it, but when I was an independent you learned to pick up on these things, your life depended on it. If the Widow is even half as good as we think then there's no way she wouldn't have caught on too."
"So there's no way of knowing where the weak link was?" Sitwell asked, his brow furrowing. Phil let out a huff of a breath, shaking his head slowly. "Could we take her out with the new drone tech?"
"In theory," Melinda nodded slowly. "They're pretty quiet and the range is longer than most snipers can shoot." She glanced at Clint and he gave her a conceding nod. The range on the drones was pretty far out.
"I don't know if they're quiet enough," Hill said. "In an urban area like this where do we launch from?"
"Well about the only way we have a chance of taking her down is hiding from very far away and praying she doesn't see us," Sitwell observed. "Can we get SI to build us Skynet in under 4 days?"
"You know, that's a thought," Phil admitted. "Stark Industries has been pushing some new strike tech, experimental, do we know how precise it's supposed to be? Maybe we could offer to field test."
"About as precise as a propane truck driving through a glass factory," Fury replied.
"And we're back to blowing up part of Germany," May observed.
"Let me go after her." Clint said, frowning down at the photo of Zlataryova, her soft, warm eyes and the delicate sweep of her honey brown curls. He looked up, ignoring the way Phil tensed beside him and instead fixed his gaze on Fury.
"I need Coulson on the Jacksonville op," Fury replied with a frown.
"Coulson doesn't need a sniper for that," Clint said, which was absolutely true but before he could say anything more Coulson cut him off.
"Will you please stop acting like that's your only skill set," Phil huffed in frustration, glaring at him darkly.
"Playing the dumb carney who learned targeting on the midway is the only defense mechanism I have around here," Clint replied, which was also true. He was probably going to regret letting Hill and Sitwell in on that at some later point.
"You're insulting the intelligence of the out of the box thinkers," Phil said drolly, his hand waving at the two juniors on the other side of the table. Ah, there was that moment of regret.
"I'm teaching them the value of dishonesty and not to blindly trust their senior officers," Clint insisted pompously. "I'm doing them a service." Phil looked distinctly unimpressed. Clint gave him up as a lost cause and turned back to the Director.
"I can get close enough to take her out without getting close enough to let her get me," Clint continued as if the exchange had never happened. "We might not get another shot at this. We owe it to Alpha and every active field agent we have to make sure she's out of play."
"If Barton says he can do it, I'll back him up," Phil added. Clint tried not to smile but it was a close thing.
"Sure you will," Fury shot back with his most disapproving frown before narrowing his eyes at Clint. "I don't like sending anyone out solo on a kill op."
"Send Hill with me," Clint said with a shrug. "She's ready." He very carefully only glanced at Hill out of the corner of his eye, she was sitting ramrod straight, her eyes unnaturally wide and her lips parted as if in shock. Of all the recent intakes to make it to this level she was far and away the youngest and, as far as Clint was concerned, the best. He was counting on calling her ma'am some day and doing it with just enough underlying snark that no one but her would notice. It was going to be great.
"Kids," Melinda muttered softly. Clint bit the inside of his mouth to keep from laughing.
"You feel up to babysitting this idiot, Hill?" Fury asked drily.
"Absolutely sir!" she replied, siting up even straighter. Damn that had to be painful.
"Put together a plan," Fury said with a decisive nod as he turned to Clint. "Whatever resources you need, Barton, make this the top priority."
"Yes sir," Clint replied.
"Do not get killed," Phil muttered half under his breath as Fury spewed a ream of instructions at Hill who was, wonder of wonder, furiously taking notes. The kid must have really wanted this promotion badly.
"Aw sir," Clint murmured back, "It's so nice you care."
"The paperwork is appalling and Melinda's spent a lot of time and energy on Hill," Phil replied.
"And here I thought we were BFFs," Clint said, turning his most innocent, wide eyed expression on Coulson.
"Care to share with the class, Barton?" Fury asked drily.
"Just can't wait to go hunt down the mean lady, sir," Clint answered smoothly, his grin excited as he met the Director's dark glower.
"Get to work," Fury ordered menacingly. May stood, leaning over the table as Hill and Sitwell spread out the latest satellite images. Phil sloughed off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves as he moved to the computer in the corner and Clint ambled to his feet, following him.
"Sorry for what I said about Breemer," Clint gave an awkward shrug, keeping his voice low as he settled on the edge of the workstation. "He was your friend."
"We were in advanced undercover training together," Phil replied, resigned as he meticulously tabbed through files on the screen. "It's not like I didn't know."
"He was a good guy," Clint added, because he felt he had to. Breemer had been a good guy, and a good agent. He'd even been good undercover, but not great, never great, and in the end sometimes being good wasn't good enough.
"Clint, don't let her take out any more good people," Phil pleaded, a wince pinching his expression as he shot a look out of the corner of his eye. "Including yourself."
"Do my best," Clint shrugged back, feeling awkward. Phil gave him a small smile.
"What are you doing tonight?" he asked, clearly finding the file he wanted.
"Eh, I thought I'd go out to Bed Stuy," Clint said with another lazy shrug, following him toward the printer in the corner. "Troll for muggers, test the new trank arrows from R&D."
"Oh," Phil's expression brightened as he collected his paperwork. "I could play the Patsy."
"Hell yeah!" Clint grinned back at him.
"I liked you two assholes better when you hated each other," Fury observed, glaring at them as he stormed past, heading out the door.
"I just need a minute to visualize Wide-Eyed Baby Agent Maria Hill," Darcy insisted, pressing her fingers to her temples with a starry-eyed expression.
"Everyone starts somewhere," Clint reminded philosophically.
"There's hope yet that I could one day be a bad ass," she said
"You tased a god, kid, I think your street cred is safe," Clint chuckled.
"I never thought of it that way," Darcy admitted. "So you didn't blow up Germany?" Clint shook his head.
"We spent the next two days putting together a plan," Clint continued. "We couldn't be sure our communications were secure, so we decided to go really old school with coded messages on an open channel, hoping that we'd go unnoticed if we were using civilian communications. We had a half dozen safe houses that only Coulson, Hill, and I new the locations for. I set up camp in the shipping district and Hill was at the first of the safe houses keeping an eye on our surveillance for me.
"Hey, sis, where are ya?" Clint murmured into the earpiece. They were connecting over cell towers, using the chatter of people meeting up on a Friday night to mask them from discovery. Through the scope of his rifle he could see Bruno Gueist and his henchmen milling in the shipping yard,
"Heading up to the club now," Hill replied, her voice cheerful. Clint couldn't decide if it was because it was her first mission as a handler or if she was throwing herself into the role. If this mission went well, meaning if they both lived, she'd probably be handling her own team soon. "How's the action?"
"It's crowded and the drinks here are terrible," Clint said with a frown. Gueist must have hired some extra muscle just for this meeting, Clint didn't think he actually had six bodyguards.
"That's weird," Hill replied. "I thought Jazz said it was a choice spot." Clint's frown deepened. He gave Gueist a careful once-over then switched to his nearest bodyguard, one he was fairly sure he recognized from the briefing material. The man was sticking to Gueist like glue, way too close to be effective. Clint turned his attention the the second bodyguard.
"Dad called earlier," Hill said, doing a good job of making it sound off-hand. Clint grinned to himself. Phil was going to be royally pissed when he read that codename in the after-action. "He says not to let you get me into trouble."
"I'll bet he did," Clint replied. "I already got the lecture from Mom."
Not as pissed as Fury, but Clint lived dangerously. The third bodyguard successfully checked, he moved on to the fourth who was looking to be just as nondescript and questionably competent as the rest of his knuckle-dragging pals.
"Oh, hey I think I see your type heading down your way," Hill said, perking up. "Pretty eyes, blue dress, nice hair." Clint dropped his closer look at thug number five and swept his scope toward the north side of the shipping yard. Sure enough, there was the Widow, moving in from between the shipping containers in an actual navy blue dress that hugged her body like a glove. Clint blinked twice, desperately trying to rewire his brain. How did she fight in that thing?
"Yeah, nicely spotted," Clint replied, trying to sound mildly lecherous. He checked the Widow's approach then zoomed back to Guiest and his men, all of them oblivious to the oncoming danger.
All but one.
"Oh," he whispered involuntarily, his eyes growing wide in alarm. The Black Widow slunk out of the shadows like an enchantress materializing out of thin air, her golden hair curling around her shoulders. The sixth bodyguard had been on alert before she even made her move and Clint tensed as Guiest offered his hand in smarmy, charismatic greeting and the Widow failed to take it.
"Aw shit," he said
"What?" Hill asked, a hint of panic in her tone. They hadn't planned for this, he hadn't given her a code word for this, he could only hope she was as smart as he thought she was.
"Party crashers," He said quickly. The Widow was still standing three feet from Guiest, his hand still outstretched.
"Wait," Hill paused a moment, and he could hear her understanding in the squeak of her voice. "For real?"
"No, no, no, no, no," Clint murmured as Guiest offered up his most charming smile, extending his hand just a fraction farther. The Widow reached out this time to take it.
"Bro, what's going on?" Hill demanded, the moment of panic pushed aside. She really was good, he was going to tell Phil that if there was anything left of this mission to salvage. He barely had time for that thought as the Widow's hand closed around Guiest's and then all hell broke loose. She yanked on his arm so hard that Guiest went flying across the shipping yard, his body slamming head first into a shipping container and crumpling to the ground in a heap. The first bodyguard met a not dissimilar fate almost at the same time she garrotted the second, pulling him in front of her as the remaining guards opened fire. She kicked the now dead man into the fourth guard, stealing the gun of the third and opening fire on the fifth as she took a run up, landing on the final man who Clint was absolutely certain was a Russian Federal Security agent.
"Oh no," he whispered as he watched the fight, his eyes wide like saucers.
"Bro?" Hill prompted, her tone probably more stern than believable for their covers.
"Abort." he said quickly as the Widow faked a punch and used the distraction to grab the Russian FSB agent by the chin, snapping his neck.
"What the hell?"
Well it was too late to worry about covers now.
"Maria," He said, returning the arrow he'd drawn to the quiver and drawing three different ones in the time it took to say her name. "I am about to do something incredibly dangerous and irretrievably stupid, cut the line, tell Coulson I ordered you to evac to Magenta, do not come looking for me, I'll reestablish contact within 8 hours. Do exactly as I say."
"What about the Widow?" she demanded, though Clint could hear her frantically packing up surveillance in the background as he set the first arrow to the string.
"We've lost her, I'm going to try to salvage the mission," he replied, staring at the lone figure standing in the pile of bodies in the middle of the shipping yard.
"That wasn't in the plan!"
"Cut the line! Evac now! Go!" Clint released his bow as he heard the call disconnect, the soft brush of the bowstring the only sound. He caught the woman square in the chest as she turned, no doubt looking for other threats. She staggered staring down at the dart head lodged in her shoulder and raised her gun.
"Shit!" Clint let a second arrow fly, this one sending her to her knees and then a third. The woman let out an angry feral sound and tipped face first into the pavement.
"Oh my god, I'm going to die," Clint whispered, grabbing his bag and leaping over the wall, his feet pounding the pavement as he ran toward the prone form of the Black Widow.
"I'm confused," Darcy said, blinking at him.
"Not as confused as I was," Clint admitted.
"Why-"
"I'm getting to that," he said.
"How are you not dead?" she demanded.
"I'm getting to that part too."
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Clint muttered under his breath as he stared at the woman handcuffed to the bed, one wrist at each of the bedposts and each hand wrapped in duck tape, the thumbs angled out like a mitten. Her ankles and knees were also duck taped. He'd briefly considered taping her torso to the bed frame as well but he'd run out of tape. Clearly if he was going to be level five his go bag was going to need some readjustment.
The abandoned apartment building on the edge of the shipping district was littered with trash and drug paraphernalia, he'd spotted it as he'd set up his sniper's nest and had quickly discounted it because of the debris and lack of quick egress. He wasn't happy about being here but he didn't dare risk dragging the limp form of the woman any farther, not because it would attract attention as much as he'd been worried this particular woman was probably going to wake up and kill him any second now before he could get her secured. Even now he wasn't real confident in the state of things but just fifteen minutes into sedation that should have killed your average elephant she'd let out a soft huff of a breath that sent him twitching back to the other side of the room where he'd been ever since.
He was fairly sure the woman had been awake for at least ten minutes now, probably longer. It was hard to tell. She was doing a fairly decent impersonation of REM sleep but the problem with faking being asleep was that even watching hours of videos of yourself sleeping wasn't nearly enough to really sell the roll flawlessly. If she'd been awake longer than twenty he was already in trouble, but he wasn't nearly stupid enough to get any closer to her at this point in order to check.
"Okay, I know you're awake and you know I'm watching," Clint said finally. "If you're just waiting for me to break, I'm happy to do that. I'm not a big fan of dick measuring contests, especially not when I'm going to lose." There was no reply. Clint drew in a slow steady breath.
"Also, you should probably know that I put chewing gum in the locks." There was another two full seconds of silence and the woman's eyes opened, staring at him with a cold, calculated reserve.
"Bit of overkill?" she asked, her words soft, almost soothing.
"Oh no, not at all," Clint shook his head minutely, his handgun trained steadily on her. "And I don't think for a moment that you can't get out of there, might take you a couple minutes, ten tops. The wolves who raised me didn't bring up any idiots." The woman didn't reply, her gentle emerald eyes watching him.
"I'm Hawkeye," he said. "You got a name you're partial to or should I just call you Widow?"
"Tasha," she replied, her tone almost amused. Almost, but not quite. He checked the cuffs.
"Okay, Tasha," he said, keeping his tone as polite as possible. "I'm looking for some information and I was hoping we could work something out."
"You seem to have me at a disadvantage," She replied, her hands twitching ever so slightly. "You could force the information out of me."
"Ah, no. And no," He replied. "I think I'll just mind the manners I don't actually have and stay over here in my little chair with my little gun well out of reach of your grabby, stabby little hands until you decide to be helpful."
"And if I tell you what you want to know you'll do what? Let me go?" She asked, now clearly amused.
"Oh, hell no," Clint said. "I was thinking I would go and pray to whatever pantheon that'll listen that I'm very, very far away by the time you get free."
"Will you take the gum out of the locks before you go?" she questioned. Her eyes were soft and warm and Clint had the sudden feeling that he was a mouse being stared down by a rattlesnake.
"I'll throw you the key while I run out the door," He offered. Tasha frowned, studying him. Finally she let out a sigh.
"Fair," she conceded, though she didn't seem pleased about it. "How do you know I won't lie to you?"
"I don't," Clint shrugged, his pistol still aimed at her chest. "But I wasn't planning on asking you anything that you'd have a reason to lie about. Probably." She gave him a tiny nod. Clint drew in a slow breath, checking the cuffs, the duck tape, the position of her hands. She hadn't moved that he could tell but it was like a race, his eyes against the most deadly assassin in the world.
"Okay, Tasha," he said. "What I'm curious about today is why my boss sent me here to kill a woman who looks like you, and was trained the same as you, and is definitely not you."
"How do you know it's not me?" she asked, demure.
"Because you're left handed," Clint replied. There was a hitch in her expression, a slow blink and then her mask was back in place.
"You're mistaken."
"No, you're left handed. You might not think you are, but you are," he replied, waving his left hand at her, the right one still clutching his gun. "Funny thing about being left handed. We're only about ten percent of the population and for years it was seen as a sign of weakness, schools, government institutions, religions all tried to train out left-handedness in childhood. Mixed success, but they put in the effort. Cultures all over the world vilified lefties."
"Fascinating," Tasha replied. She did not sound the least bit fascinated.
"It is," Clint agreed, his eyes checking her cuffs, the tape on her ankles. "It's also how I know that while you are definitely the woman who infiltrated Hammer Tech in April, you are absolutely not the woman who killed five of our best agents in Minsk last fall." There was the faintest shift in her expression, just a flicker, anyone else might have missed it. Clint tensed, his face going blank as he lined up the gun with her head.
"After the Belavezha Accords the KGB ended, all of its projects were terminated," Tasha said. "All but four." Clint stared at her a long moment.
"You're telling me there was more than one Black Widow?" he asked.
"I'm telling you that there were dozens," she replied, dispassionate. "How many no one knows, not any more. We were grouped by physical appearance, trained together until we were indiscernible one from another. Surgeries to correct any obvious defining characteristics. On the day the Red Room project was terminated some of the agents were retired, some were taken for reeducation. Some were reassigned to other organizations. Four escaped. One I didn't know, she disappeared. I haven't seen a trace of her since. One died two years ago in Perth."
"We got that one," Clint nodded. "I'm sorry."
"You're not," she replied. "It doesn't matter, if it did we wouldn't be talking now."
"Do you know where I can find the last one?" He asked.
"If you think you can avenge the death of your friends, you're mistaken," She said.
"They weren't my friends," Clint replied with a faint shrug. "But they were good people. I don't want to see any other good people end up the same way."
"You're a hero then," Tasha said.
"No," he let his lips twitch up in the faintest smirk, he could see her, trying to work it out, trying to make sense of it all. Coulson would tell him to give less away, to talk without saying anything but she was too smart for that, smarter than anyone he'd ever faced down before. "Look, you want intel about this op I'll give it. I've done some terrible things, things I can never take back. I didn't want to do them, I just got in a place where I couldn't do anything else. But I can now, I have that choice. The guys I work for, that sent me here, they gave me that choice, they gave a dumb kid with no future a chance to make something better of himself. A chance to use my skills for something that matters. And I can't make up for what I did, but I can try to balance the books a little. Do some good, be proud of what I'm doing. I got lucky someone gave me that chance, I don't plan on wasting it. And those guys that died, they might not have been my friends, but my boss is a good guy, and they were his friends. I don't want to let him down."
"You're not going to shoot me." Tasha said, a flutter of confusion in her eyes.
"Not unless you make me," Clint agreed. "Where do I find the woman I'm actually looking for? Come on, Tasha, from what you've told me she's just competition making trouble for you, let me do you a solid."
"You'll never take her."
"I could have shot you," Clint reminded with a shrug. "Where is she?"
"Alion Vans, you'll find her in Larissa," Tasha replied. "Along the river near the amphitheater."
"Thank you," he said as sincerely as he could. He pulled the key from his pocket as he stood to his feet, backing slowly toward the door. "Just one more thing; How old are you, Tasha?"
"Twenty-two," she replied, the word almost automatic as if it were rehearsed. Clint nodded.
"You've been Twenty-two a while then?" She blinked back at him, the only indication that the question surprised her. "Yep, that's what I thought. Nice meeting ya, Tasha." he flung the key toward the foot of the bed, barreling through the door and running down the corridor at full speed, taking the stairs three and four at a time. He was barely to the back door of the building when he heard the snap of breaking wood and he charged out into the alley, ducking down as he rounded the corner, his feet flying over the uneven cobble as fast as they could carry him.
"You are so stupid," Darcy said in wonder. "How are you not dead?"
"Oh she wasn't going to kill me, probably," Clint replied with a shrug. "It was all there in the briefing, I just didn't have the whole picture to see it. Nat was the one taking out the traffickers and criminals, Alion was the political assassin. I caught up with Hill and a couple of hours later we were in Greece. I actually had less trouble tracking down and taking out Alion than I'd had with Tasha, she wasn't as careful, probably didn't think she needed to be."
"Phil must have had kittens."
"He wasn't happy."
"Fury's going to kill me," Clint said, staring into his vanilla milkshake with a hangdog expression.
"No, no he won't kill you," Phil sounded resigned as he carved into his eggs and hashbrowns with less enthusiasm than the quality of their breakfast warranted. "He'll erase both our memories and we'll spend the rest of our lives in exciting careers asking 'Do you want fries with that?' while old people count out their pennies to us." Clint let out a tiny whimper, taking a slurp of his milkshake.
"I'm really sorry, Phil," he said miserably. The twenty-four hour diner steps from SHIELD HQ New York was completely empty at this hour of the morning. SHIELD itself was always open and the owners of the diner had learned to capitalize on that quickly. That had been in the fifties. The original sign over the counter sill said 'Automat', whatever that was. Clint was pretty sure they hadn't changed their milkshake recipe in all that time but today his wasn't nearly as delicious as it normally seemed.
"I really want to be pissed at you," Coulson admitted, staring at his breakfast. "But I can't decide what else you should have done besides handcuff the Black Widow to your bed."
"It wasn't my bed," Clint protested. He let out another sigh. He still had his after action to write but Alion Vans, the Black Widow who had murdered Strike Team Alpha, was dead, he'd brought his trainee handler back without a scratch, and Bruno Guiest, slime ball extraordinaire, would be spending the rest of his life eating through a straw. For a highly successful mission it felt like a total clusterfuck. "I should have had Hill call in our change of plans. Or tried to bring her in or something."
"No, that could have compromised you," Phil shook his head. "Or killed you. Or both."
"I should have shot her?"
"No," Phil sighed, stabbing at his eggs. "that'd be unethical, particularly if you're right about her."
"If I'm not right about her she's going to hunt me down and eat me," Clint said, making a horrified face.
"Don't be silly, look at you," The calm female voice made every muscle in Clint's frame lock up and his eyes bulge as she slid into the bench beside him. "You're all sinew, you'd be like chewing shoe leather."
"Oh god," he whispered. Phil's sidearm was in his hand, the barrel trained at her head even before Clint could finish the words.
"Steady hands," She said kindly, tossing her ruby curls over her shoulder as she smiled in Phil's direction. "I admire that in a man."
"Hello Tasha," Clint's voice made a wheezing sound he couldn't help. Across the diner the lone waitress looked up from where she was filling the coffee machine, gave Phil's gun a hard glare as if to say 'don't get blood on my table,' and then returned her attention to her task. New Yorkers.
"We haven't been introduced," The Black Widow said to Phil, completely ignoring the gun pointed at her head. "Natasha Romanov."
"Charmed," Phil replied drily. "How may I help you this morning Ms. Romanov?"
"I'd heard recently that SHIELD was a good place for exceptional people to make good use of their skills," she replied without a hint of hesitation.
"I never mentioned SHIELD," Clint declared, panicked.
"You never said the word SHIELD," Tasha corrected.
"Oh god, Fury's going to kill me." Clint's head fell face first into the tabletop with a thumb and a sound like a drowning cat. Coulson stared at Natasha Romanov for a solid ten seconds
"I can't shoot her from this distance, can I?" Phil asked, his tone resigned. Clint didn't lift his head but he wobbled it 'no' anyway. Coulson let out a slow breath before carefully returning his gun to its holster.
"Why are you trusting me?" Tasha asked with a hint of curiosity.
"Because you could have already killed us both," Phil replied with a put upon frown, reclaiming his fork from his plate.
"I still might," she pointed out.
"Please do!" Clint's muffled voice rose from behind his arms. "It's better than what the director will do to me!"
"Please don't," Phil added, cutting into his hashbrowns. "I've invested a great deal of my department budget and personal resources on him." Clint let out a pained groan that both of them ignored.
"I take it you're the Agent responsible for recruiting Hawkeye." It wasn't a question. She stared back at Phil as if she had already pried him open and sifted though all the parts of him, sussing out his every secret.
"You were very graciously helpful on Hawkeye's most recent mission," Phil said by way of acknowledgement. "If there's something we can do to repay your generosity I'd certainly be glad to consider it." the faintest twitch of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
"I have a ledger with a lot of red in it," she said. "I'd like to balance the books."
"Nat was really cool about the whole thing," Clint said with a fond smile. "When Fury walked into the diner half an hour later and I panicked and said 'she followed me home, can I keep her?' she didn't break my hands or anything."
"You have a death wish," Darcy observed. Clint only shrugged.
"She handed him a thumb drive and spent the next hour outlining all her intel over steak and eggs, it was the most surreal experience of my life," he added.
"The Black Widow recruited herself," Darcy said with a slow nod.
"I got the recruiting bonus," he said.
"Interesting things for your reputation?" she asked with a grin.
"So many interesting things."
You come on with it, come on
You don't fight fair
That's okay, see if I care
Knock me down, it's all in vain
I get right back on my feet again
Edward Schwartz - Hit Me With Your Best Shot