A/N: Consequences, consequences. It ain't pretty when master assassins get selfish. Thanks for all the follows, guys, I really appreciate it, along with the kind review. Trust me, they are read more than once, those otherwise pesky notifications. Makes my heart sing.

Disclaimer: If I have previously made claims to own any recognizable characters, I apologize, because I own nothing. Well, nothing Avengers related, anyway.

Silent Spider: Chapter 6

Vienna, Austria

It was a very peculiar sensation that strayed Clint's thoughts the moment he awoke. His mind, having sprung into alert sooner than his body, had taken in the environment and assessed it without his consent as it so often did and made its assessment by the time he could even stop it. When regret filled him, he cursed himself utterly without voice, and could only be thankful that it wasn't entirely due to the shape beside him.

The Volga hadn't released him from her grip and the repercussions of the near-drowning still affected him despite his will for it not to. As he rolled off the bed, he couldn't even think of the assassin accompanying him in it, just the goddamn cold. It felt as if it had settled in his bones, within his flesh and in every muscle and joint. The nightmare had been accurate. He tried to calm his breaths as he rubbed his hands together as if trying to banish the cold that threatened to settle—a cold that was the phantom villain of his nightmares. He tried to shake the feeling and get back into bed, but by now his mind had also awoken and spread its tendons of doubt and reassessment.

Clint only needed to look around in the dark room to recognize it (which was more than he could say most days). He was in Vienna. On the outskirts, really, but he knew where he was, and he knew the person sleeping next to him. He froze when he realized he wasn't alone, but by then she'd noticed his fuss and was staring at him, green eyes piercing the darkness with unspoken question. His heart sank when he remembered she was without a voice to question his peculiar behavior. He hadn't told her about Volga—why should he?—because they hadn't exactly made conversation a priority. His body still ached from her less-than-tender touch, but he wasn't complaining. They were both people of violent impression, no wonder they were both rough. He'd been surprised to find it tender at the same time, though.

By the time he'd gotten his breaths under control, she'd risen, wrapped in the sheets like an Egyptian queen. She had made a point out of keeping him from seeing the scar and now didn't even entrust him to lay his eyes there in the cover of the night. "S-sorry," he murmured, trying to shake the feeling of cold water promising him an early demise.

His body tensed when she put her hand on his forehead, brows furrowing. He noticed the glove at her proximity. She hadn't removed it, even as she'd allowed him to remove all other clothing a few hours ago. Only then did he realize his own nudity and blushed, luckily in the cover of darkness. He smiled sheepishly—or, tried to, but a cough sent him staggering. He attempted an apology, but her fingers grabbed his jaw volatilely and brought his eyes to hers. He knew the look. Oh-oh.

What did you do. He didn't need a notepad for the frustration in her eyes, the almost maternal branch of concern she'd associated with caring for him when he was stupid enough to hurt himself in what she'd liked to call foolishly thoughtless mission spontaneity. He had to be exhausting to be around when he did that, because Alejo was starting to get the same look in his eyes. He'd put Tasha through enough stunts as it was. Alejo was in for some shitty bouts of nursing.

"Turns out the Volga is not a place for skinny-dipping," he joked, brushing her hands off him. She didn't have a right to know, did she? All he could think about was her allegiances to the Leonum Tarpeius, and while he had chosen to (try to) not judge her for it, the agent in him knew better than to share mission intelligence and compromise it. He couldn't blame alcohol or remnants of hallucinogens on last night's events. He didn't regret them. He'd booked the plane ticket with a destination in mind, but hadn't known what to expect until he'd been at her door.

She frowned, recognition flashing across her face. She opened her mouth to, well, mouth, but he looked away and walked back to the bed. "I don't want to talk about it." I almost died, and if you were my partner, you would have known. He shouldn't have blamed her for something she had been unable to prevent, but yet he did.

Clint saw the jerk move for what it was. Instead of being offended, however, Nat nodded and accepted his words without further prodding—something that sadly reminded him all too well of their newfound distrust. If they had been closer, as they'd once been, she would have demanded an explanation and an admission of foolhardiness to state a point. Enough trust to bed one another, but not tell the truth, Clint thought bitterly as he slipped back unto the bed.

However he tried, he couldn't fall asleep. He wound up staring hard at the ceiling as if waiting for it all to make sense. It felt surreal and comforting to have her back, but also unsettling because he was too damn worldly not to see the ever-increasing list of reasons he should stop this—whatever it was—while they were ahead. Fraternization with the enemy had always been frowned upon, however vague the label enemy was in Clint's mind. It wasn't just frowned upon, he knew that, but telling S.I.D.—or worse, being discovered by S.I.D.—could have terrible and possibly fatal consequence.

A sane man would have cursed the day he met Natasha Romanov. Clint, having tenured the title as field agent for well past a decade now, knew better than to consider himself sane. He wouldn't have been shipped off to S.I.D. if he'd even been likably insane. No, he went all the way. One couldn't function as swiftly and adeptly as an assassin—like Nat, he'd learnt to be honest, least of all to himself, about what he was and what function he carried out—and proclaim sanity. No-uh. Things rarely went the way the rulebook described it. He only had to look left to see exhibit A (the alphabet didn't have enough letters to why this was doomed before it had even started).

Yet he found himself reluctant to pull back. He was sane enough to realize what was happening. He was being selfish for the both of them. He wanted to revive something that could never be reenacted. First of all, she was the enemy—his enemy—by association and probably, as much as he didn't want to consider it, by act. She'd always been indifferent towards laws, only vaguely trying to follow protocol. He'd never understood how such rebelliousness had attracted the positive attention of Fury for black ops fieldwork. In the end, they'd been like peas in a pie, scarily so. They might have been able to read each other mission-wise and strategically, Clint mused, but nobody knew her like he did.

He was falling hard. To be fair, so was she. Or at least he hoped that. Even that felt selfish. They were bound to be discovered eventually. Inevitably. He liked the odds better at eventually. Still, the odds were good—as good as one could be, opposing S.I.D. and its motherfucker of a sister agency, S.H.I.E.L.D.—they were trained to be the very best, the elite of S.H.I.E.L.D. albeit not trained solely by S.H.I.E.L.D. Look where they'd ended up, his brain pointed out wistfully, yet felt somehow justified as his finger traced the hem of the pillow.

Clint felt as if he needed to explain himself. And, given his lack of a mental filter, he was unsurprised when he started speaking, explaining himself and thus breaking the awkward silence that had settled between them. "My handler pulled me out of the Volga in… Tver, I think. I made a stupid move. Got myself beat up by a bunch of guys that were a whole lot less prettier than you are."

At first, he didn't know if the joking had helped melt her icy, unforgiving heart (she was always furious when he made her worry—furious at him and herself), but then he felt the tussle of sheets and realized, with relief, that she was moving closer, expressing her acceptance of the shitty apology the only way she could in the darkness.

Clint felt as if his odds had just improved remarkably. He knew he shouldn't be able to make her worry like this, because he knew he had. She knew him better than that. He could have easily lied but chose not to. It was dangerous and foreboding.

He felt her hand move tenderly—an act not often experienced at the hand of an assassin as notoriously numb as the Black Widow—across a bruise that she must've spotted during their lovemaking. It was a weird term, he decided, but he couldn't just say they had sex. It sounded so brash and like it didn't mean anything. It did, but he wasn't sure love was involved in the process. He hadn't thought she'd noticed and thought himself a fool for the notion. Of course she'd noticed. And he wanted to believe it was due to her attentive mind and not a search for possible weaknesses.

He winced but didn't remove her hand from the bruise. He recalled the brute who'd been starring as his bully during the 'interrogation'. If Alejo had seen it, he wouldn't have let him run off. Well, at least not immediately, Clint mused, thinking of how truly infuriating he could get when cooped up in recovery too long. Rosario would have kicked him out after an hour, figuring the headache he was getting due to Barton would overrule the nuisance it'd be to track him down when he, inevitably, got himself into trouble again.

Rosario would be right, of course. But did Natasha have such privilege, and was it even a privilege to worry for someone as goddamn insane as he was at this point? You've ruined me for others, Tasha, his mind concluded as he dozed off into sleep.

Dawn came as one of the few leftover things Natasha could still count on. Well, she thought wryly, she could still count on Clint being devoted, but since she had no idea how deep his devotion was rooted, she didn't count it for its potential worth. One should only count on the things one was sure of, and Clint had always been a gray zone of unpredictability and irrationality.

It had been nice—nice (and so much more, if she had to be honest, but she rarely was)—but wrong to allow herself to drown in the illusions of their past partnership, even if it had been only for a few hours and nobody had walked away dead. Perhaps an inadequate analogy, but it was all she could think of. However, death was not the only finite, unpreventable thing after last night's events.

Like an awkward teenage couple the morning after a one-night-stand (or adults for that matter, but surely not spies), they slipped out of bed and proceeded to avoid each other with various routines that irked her with how easy she melted into it. Their shower and bathroom routines were still perfectly timed, something that bothered her. As she had nothing edible in her fridge, however, the bliss of the avoidance soon came to a halt as both their stomachs demanded food with sullen grumbles. While a need easily ignored, it had always been hard to shake Clint's worry and incessant need to care for her and mother her.

She found it annoying that it didn't truly irritate her. Still, she appreciated his acuity when it came to reading her and found that he, still, was a far better interpreter than half the men she usually dealt with. She'd been startled to compare him to the men she worked with, ashamed even, but quickly pushed the thought away.

She gestured for him to dress—although her eyes lingered in shallow appreciation—as she decided he'd aged well. Nobody aged graciously or gracefully, but the years had been kind to Clint, even if the missions hadn't. His spark was gone, as much as he tried to relight it with comments and mischief. She couldn't decide if it was for the better or just tragic.

"Natasha, we need to talk," he said softly but firmly and she could have roared in laughter. Talk? It was too late for that. He must have seen it on her face—she damned herself for not concealing the bitterness better—because he scowled and looked down apologetically. "That's not what I meant."

She forgave him for the momentary slip, knowing that if she hadn't had the irrational sensation to trust him, the mistake would have cost him gravely. She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to put a term to what they were doing although there were plenty of them—treason, mistake, attraction, poor judgment, hell, trusting someone they obviously shouldn't (neither of them had track records with that ending well)—and she didn't want to see his devotion, or something deeper than that, less tangible, in his eyes. Most of all, she didn't want to abandon him again, and she knew that if he continued this heedlessly, she'd have to, for his sake.

If she wasn't an asset, she was a potential enemy to S.H.I.E.L.D.; she knew that better than anyone. Having bailed on them once, they'd undoubtedly think an enemy of her, and her current allegiances would do nothing to convince them otherwise. If they found out what she'd been hiding from them, she'd be lucky to be killed on sight and not contained indefinitely in one of their facilities, never to see the face of anyone she knew again. Not even Clint. Hell, if Clint continued sending her these looks, he'd be sharing a cell with her.

She respected Clint, cared for Clint, too much to let that happen. She wouldn't let him face charges of treason because of her. If she was caught, she could still think of ways to convince them she'd manipulated him into bedding her. It'd break his heart, and it'd be untrue, and she hoped she wouldn't have to resort to it, but it was nevertheless an option. She wasn't planning on getting caught. Too much depended on her to allow herself to get caught. The Black Widow hadn't gotten caught, and whoever she was now—Lioness, Nikolaevna, it didn't matter as much as anonymity did—wanted to adopt that trait into her legacy.

However, the Black Widow and Nikolaevna were two very different people. The Black Widow hadn't shown her face, or blade for that matter, in years, dying as Nikolaevna was born in the shade of her former self and a man who lacked no conviction by the name of Desta, if that was even his name. They had a lot in common, but the world didn't whisper in the corners of Nikolaevna's sins and tragedies. No, Natasha was happy to be a nobody in the sense that few knew her name. The Black Widow had seen too much to function properly in a world of today and she'd been mostly happy to watch the skintight suit burn. The grave of the Widow fed hope to the person she was behind the horrors. It was easier to live up to the reputation of a mute mercenary whose loyalties weren't questioned. Not until she'd seen the face of an old partner—who was she kidding, the only partner that had mattered—and faced all those doubts and questions that she'd thought buried with the Widow.

Frankly, the ease at which she trusted Clint scared her, frightened everything she'd ever learnt or known about treachery. The man she'd fallen into bed with—overruled by temporary but overwhelming passion—was not the man she'd abandoned, but the partner who still trusted her and would be willing, she suspected, to drag her ass out of the fire. The kind of unwavering trust should be enough to upset anyone who'd ever performed the job they did, regardless of what side they were on.

He would have done well to simply forget about her and, if feeling particularly forgiving (although she saw no reason to be after having ditched him so carelessly), left her out of his official report. She felt terribly glad that he hadn't and equally puzzled with her own extended stay in Vienna. Logically, staying had been foolish. She had a job to do and a list to compile, but unreasonably, she'd remained in the hopes that he'd return. She hadn't realized it, of course, not until he'd showed up and relief had flooded her—he hadn't, even out of ignorance, made a fool of her. However, the dark shadow of reality, regulations, protocols and, god forbid, laws lingered like a pest, even in the cover of night.

They still had enough sense to know what they were doing was wrong. It could, very well, destroy both of their careers and lives. Nobody should be allowed to be this catastrophically selfish. Nobody should hold that power, least of all over her.

And yet she looked at the man and couldn't muster the anger to scare him off. In any event, it'd probably just convince him all the more to stay. Clint was like that—without sense of survival when equipped, incredibly so, with a sense of her. It was infuriating—hell, there'd been times at S.H.I.E.L.D. when she'd almost requested permission to shoot him with just cause—it was maddening. It was, simply put, Clint. And the reason it irritated her was that the sensation had rubbed off in the course of their partnership (a word that was always so much safer than the alternatives she often refused to consider, much to his chagrin) and made her just as relentlessly devoted. She might not have been willing to give her heart to Clint five years ago, but she had been willing to hand him her gun and weapons and sleep naked—in the sense of armor, anyway—next to him. Which was almost as hard and unfeasible. The prospect of having that back tempted her.

They went to a café that Natasha had been guested before, enough so that the staff—a cook with a friendly smile, big whiskers, and bright eyes that were subtler than his humor, and his nephew who worked as a waiter, presumably during the summer to earn cash for some prize at the local car dealership—knew of her disability, and luckily, her order. Clint spotted her smiles to the two as they sat down in a booth overlooking the small plaza. He frowned as the nephew eagerly nodded and soon made his way to them. She dined and lunched her too often in the past week, finding Alfredo's company, even if Elias were to be found, worse than anything she'd ever encounter in the cozy café.

"What can I do for you?" the cook's nephew asked in German although his pronunciation betrayed him to be Turkish, coupled with his looks. He sent a knowing glance in Natasha's direction. "The usual?"

She nodded as Clint frowned. She knew it to be unwise to befriend locals, especially to make routines that could be discovered by unfriendlies, but she'd been too lonely to listen to the voice of wisdom in her head, or simply too careless. As the nephew looked at him awaitingly, Clint stuttered the first thing he skimmed in the menu's breakfast section in plain German. His American accent was untraceable, and this time it was her that looked impressed.

"What?" he said upon seeing her expression, smirking. "I brush up. It's not that uncommon."

Of course it wasn't uncommon. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—of any agency—had to keep sharp and keep expanding their skillsets. Before she went mute, she had been capable of comprehending more than two dozen languages, fluent in at least a third of them. The education had been forced upon her, but she'd always been the more linguistically skilled of the two. Rubbish, the voice in her head told her, no use dwelling at the past. You're mute and useless and that's it. It was true, though. No matter how worse Clint's linguistic training got (she doubted it), it'd always be better than the linguistic capability of a mute. Sure, she could eavesdrop, and oftentimes it was a gift, but it was a burden when it came to unloading her secrets, as she had little patience for typing everything she knew on a topic down. She was still a spy, but only half the spy she had once been, perhaps only a third.

She saw that the waiter had left his pen with them and grabbed for a napkin in the holder. For once, Clint was silent while she scribbled down her message. Sighing, she pushed it towards him, across the table.

How long. A question mark was unnecessary. He had come back, hoping to see her, and even though they both knew it shouldn't have happened—if another pair of partners had met five years after the stunt she'd pulled, they wouldn't have run back to each other like they'd done—they had, remarkably so, known (or at least hoped, irrationally so) that the other would be there, feeling the same need. He'd been to Russia after he'd left Vienna—god, she'd told him to go do his job, not get himself killed, although she supposed she owed his handler a thank-you (like that would ever happen)—and she had enough of an imagination to see how that had gone.

"A week."

It wasn't long. Yet, as today had proved, it seemed like half a lifetime. A week that, if ever found out by S.H.I.E.L.D. or Desta, could be the end of them. Yet it was alluring, tempting to play pretend as they had done last night and the night two weeks ago. Rapidly, she scribbled a new message. This time he read it aloud as if either agreeing or in disbelief.

"We shouldn't do this. I know, Tasha. Trust me, I know." He sounded as desperate as she felt, as if he knew all these horrible truths and still wanted to attempt the impossible. He composed himself and stared at her with that piercing, helpless look that had gotten people killed. She had to search his eyes for the sincerity, unsure of how to read him five years after having been fluent.

With shaking fingers, she finally wrote something on the corner of the napkin. But you want to. She made no question mark or period. It could have been both a statement, but also a desperate question. If he say no, it'd hurt her, but not as much as a yes inevitably would. She cursed the day she'd started to care about Clint Barton, regardless of whose side he was on. She cursed the day he'd started to care about her, regardless of what side she was on.

Natasha was no fool. Sooner or later, if they were to continue this dangerous dalliance, the question would arise. She would decline, more reasons unmentioned than admitted (and he'd be frustrated, that he would). He wouldn't understand why, or worse, he would. She didn't know which would be worse and hoped, foolishly, never to see the outcome.

"Yeah." The look in his eyes was unbearable. She didn't want that much attention or emotion aimed at her. It wasn't right when she'd ended so many people in what seemed like a lifetime ago for doing the exact same.

It isn't right, she wrote, trying to control the tremor of her hand. She looked away to wipe away tears. When she looked up, she felt treacherous for smiling and feeling the happiness at seeing him not in flight. If he'd been normal or, god forbid, sane, he'd be running out the door.

And when he spoke, she could see the lie, the beautiful lie, the lie he perhaps hadn't even realized, beneath the determination and the devotion. "I don't care."

Because he would, inevitably so, care that it wasn't right.

Leave a review and grab a tissue on your way out. We're in for an angsty ride.

Clint wants to talk and Natasha wants to run. Wonder how that'll work out. Can anyone guess why she's reluctant to remove the glove?

- L.