Given her job she'd generally been paired with men who liked to think they were chivalrous by telling her to stay back as they took care of things. They had the idea that she was being paired with them, when they were being paired with her. It was a fine line, but there was an important distinction.

Despite what the others might say, Natasha had never let her partner die. Sometimes shit just happened. And sometimes people were just stupid to a point where it was lethal. So, within the first month of her new job she'd lost four partners in four missions. Someone had made a joke and before she knew it her codename was Black Widow.

When she'd found himself across from a still sickly looking Clint in the gym, she realized that she wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but it sure as hell hadn't been him. Then he'd snarked off about her being ex-KGB and of all the partners she'd had he was the only one who hadn't mentioned her looks or some shit that made her want to stick a knife between their ribs and slide it up into their still beating heart so they could see just how beautiful she was was then.

The smirk had sealed the deal. And they'd never looked back.

For Natasha, The Barton Situation started bright and early in the main gym on a Monday morning, and went a little something like this:

"So everyone says you're some crazy ex-KGB agent who keeps letting her partners get killed."

"Everyone says that you're a head case ex-coma patient with no self-preservation instinct."

A grin. "Touché."

She decided she'd keep this one.

If Fury had been smug when he'd first shown Phil Barton's file, he was downright unbearable when the diagnostic results came in after the first week of training.

It'd been a little touch and go for a few weeks even after he'd been deemed fit to begin training and there'd been one incident where Clint had forgotten his morning dose because of early training and scared four junior agents into hysterically crying when he'd suddenly collapsed and begun convulsing.

But with that behind them, and Barton under strict instructions to take his medication without fail no matter what, things were coming along quite well.

"Perfect in marksmanship, and he was only behind Romanov in stealth and hand to hand by a margin of two points."

"He is impressive, sir," Coulson admitted freely, because really, Barton was impressive. At least when he wasn't being a devious, cocky pain in the ass who seemed to enjoy instilling the fear of God in the junior agents who didn't yet understand that, no, Clint wasn't allowed to use them for a 'more realistic' moving target practice just because he out ranked them.

He'd only been permitted to wander the halls without someone from Medical shadowing him -and even then certain key agents had been advised to look out for him in case there was some sort of relapse or he had a fit- for the better part of two weeks and he'd already built himself a reputation that had everyone from the senior agents to the maintenance staff whispering like the insane gossips they all really were. And if no one had ever really heard of Clint Barton, a veteran agent of four years, before well, that was because he'd been mainly based at the London branch until his accident.

Romanov seemed more amused than anything by her new partner in the same way that someone might humour a small child or puppy, but the two got on well enough that Phil doubted Clint would be turning up dead anytime soon. She smirked at his snarky remarks and (dare he say) smiled whenever Barton shot at the junior agents- which happened quite frequently. It figured they'd bond over their violent tendencies. They spent hours playing a perverse game that involved looking at various scars on Clint's body and trying to determine how he'd come by them. He even got away with calling her Tasha, which another agent had recently tried and it'd resulted in him being on the receiving end of a punch to the face rather a smile.

So yes, things were going well aside from some blatant insubordination on Barton's part and Fury tended to literally cackle when reports of it came in because after Phil had told him about the incident with the window he'd almost cracked a rib going on about how he'd just 'created his own worst nightmare'. And sure enough, Barton had latched on to the lies Coulson had told him about his behaviour and his unstable personality had suddenly shifted to the basic profile he'd desperately bit out in an attempt to stop Fury's pet project from jumping and possibly breaking his legs on the cement. So yes, to his contempt and to the Director's endless amusement...he sort of had created his own worst nightmare. But if his worst nightmare was a happy, devious, seemingly normal Clint Francis Barton...well, he could live with that.

Clint had never met anyone like Natasha Romanov- or maybe he had. How the hell was he supposed to know? But in recallable memory, he could honestly say he'd never quite had a friend like her.

Some of the other agents had a way of either being terrified of him (it was warranted) or looking at him with a sort of pity in their eyes that turned his mouth sour. Although he found pity could be easily turned into fear and annoyance with a well placed arrow. Speaking of which, he wasn't sure if he'd used a bow when working for SHIELD before but Natasha had handed him a compound bow one day after he'd told her about his life at the circus (small talk tended to stray towards his childhood because frankly, he still hadn't caught up on most of the pop culture he'd missed in the past four years, and apparently a lot could happen in that time. He was still trying to figure out if a Snooki was a chocolate bar or what) and since then he'd barely been able to put it down.

It was like an extension of his arm that helped to fill the void that still existed in him. The shrinks all said that using weaponry to emotionally sooth yourself wasn't healthy, but he'd just told them all to shove it. Besides, Natasha did it with her knives and guns and she passed all her psych evals with flying colours.

He still practiced with guns of course and he'd always loved to work with swords, no matter how impractical everyone told him they were and he regularly got his ass handed to him in the ring with Tasha as she scolded him for his mistakes in Russian- apparently he was fluent. Who knew?

Over all, he thought he was fitting in pretty well all things considered. He even got invited out to the bar after work with all the other agents and they seemed nice enough when they weren't screaming in terror as he jumped out of the drop ceiling, but Tasha was definitely his favourite and rightly so seeing as she was his partner. And probably his best friend.

He said probably because Tasha didn't like to label things and he'd never right out asked if she evenwanted to be his best friend... But in his head that was what he called her.

His therapist said having a friend would help him become well adjusted but when he'd told her that he'd befriended Natasha Romanov she'd said something along the lines of thinking that Natasha might not be the type of friend he needed right now. Seeing as this was the same woman who'd told him his tendency of practicing with his bow to calm himself wasn't healthy, he hadn't hesitated in telling her what he actually thought of her advice and where she could put it. Naturally Phil hadn't been pleased, and despite Clint's assurances that he was just fine without any kind of therapy he insisted that he continue to attend twice weekly sessions (which was actually an improvement. There'd been a time when he'd been seeing his therapist every six hours). But he hadn't been all that angry either.

If Natasha was his favourite, Phil Coulson was definitely a close second. Clint wouldn't admit to it under pain of torture, but he found Phil's steadiness and unending calm to be rather comforting and he'd find little reasons to camp out on the couch in his office even if it was just to nap for a few hours. And when a blanket had eventually appeared folded up on the one of the arms, neither of them ever mentioned it, but that didn't stop the soft smile that had spread across his face and Clint had wrapped himself in it.

If he was feeling particularly charitable Clint would even offer to give Phil a hand with the huge stacks of paperwork littering every flat surface in the room. He was actually quite efficient with it and found that he could fly through whole stacks of it in next to no time. He could generally remember incidents without fail and didn't have to look up various codes and call signs more than once. That was something he'd decided to keep to himself for now.

The doctors had all told him his eidetic memory was gone, but if he didn't know better he'd say he was slowly recovering it little by little. Time would tell if he ever really got back up to par. But, that didn't make doing paperwork any less boring.

Luckily enough Phil tended to reward him with coffee and a cookie if he helped. A part of him kind of resented being rewarded like some stupid little kid...but the cookies were apparently from this great bakery downtown and they were seriously to die for.

So as Winter bled into Spring and Spring into Summer, Clint slowly made a niche for himself within SHIELD and soon enough, he rarely stewed over the four years he'd lost. As a child, in school he'd been the circus freak and in the military he'd been the ex-circus freak who could remember everything, but here he belonged. He had real friends who would come by just to say hi instead of only coming around when they needed his help. He had Tasha who told him hilarious jokes and hid in the ceiling with him chatting about random things until they spotted their next victim. He had Phil who shared midnight dinners with him, just the two of them, over piles of paperwork and agent Woo and everyone else who dragged him out to bar nights, movie nights and everything in between. He went on missions and knew that Tasha had his back and him hers and when he came back he knew that Phil would be waiting for him with a cookie and a stack of TR-34s to fill out.

And even if on some nights as he lay in bed that lonely feeling, that feeling of knowing that something- someone- was missing, would sometimes rise up again and constrict his chest until he couldn't even imagine working up the will to actually get up in the morning, until the thought of smiling for everyone who thought he was okay made his heart ache, he still wouldn't have had it any other way.

He might not know what he was missing, but he sure as hell knew what he did have. And he wouldn't give it up for the world.