02:21 26-AUG-09, SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN RUSSIAN MOUNTAINS

It took them a taxi, train and a helicopter to get close to where the Red Room was located. Keeping as low of a profile as they could, the assassins had gotten a ride to the train station, took a train as far as they could, then flew a helicopter. Natasha couldn't help but feel a nervous feeling in her stomach as they got off the helicopter. She and Clint were ready with a new stock of weapons -courtesy of the minimal-security pawn shops- and even had a few new gadgets that they had yet to try out.

Clint had his bow and arrows stashed in a bag which he put right by his side as he steered the helicopter. Fiddling with a circular mechanism, Natasha stared out the window and saw the scenery of snowy mountaintops and dark skies. She thought back to the memory she had had on the plane; she'd been on the run but found refuge in an elderly couple's home. Leaning a bit closer to the glass, she tried to see if the village could be found, but it was hopeless.

"Nat, are we almos-" *POP* "Fuck!" Clint keeled over, letting go of the controls and holding his hands against his face instead.

Natasha glanced down at the gadget in her hands to see that it had gone off. Cursing as the helicopter began to fall from the sky she whipped off her headset and then scrambled to Clint's seat.

After leveling the copter, she shouted, having to make herself heard over the wind, "Clint, are you okay?"

"Hell, that device just launched something sharp at my face!"

"Can you take them out?"

"No," he responded, shouting into her ear. "It damn hurts! Whatever those were are pretty much lodged into my face!"

"Hold on, I'll find somewhere to land."

Steering the helicopter lower to the ground, Natasha found some flat land near a riverbed. Once she safely touched down and powered off the rotors, she slid off of Clint's lap. Prying his hands away, Natasha cringed as she saw three darts that had been impaled into his skin, right into his veins. There was one in his right cheek and two stuck into the side of his neck both having some blood dribbling from them. She noticed that beneath the skin around the darts, there was something round and thin like a tiny plate.

Grabbing her pack, she pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses that she knew had something like x-ray vision and put them on. She pressed the button on the side, she could see through Clint's skin. What she saw disturbed her.

Apparently, once the darts had been shot and hit a target, the points had expanded into thin disks that were lodged beneath the skin. Natasha could sense that there was something else. Changing the setting of the glasses, she was able to see the air itself and the names of the gases and fumes popped up on her lenses. She turned her gaze back to Clint and leaned closer to his wounds.

On her glasses, a label showed that there was indeed some gas emitting from the darts. It was an extremely long name, but the description told Natasha what she feared.

It was poison.

"God, Clint, I'm sorry," she said, removing the glasses and tossing them to the ground. Running her hands through her hair, she tried to think of a solution, but she came up blank. SHIELD had courses on first aid, but she never learned anything about how to save a friend from poisonous gas that was slowly leaking through their body.

"What?" Clint mumbled. "Am I going to die?" He squeezed his eyes shut as if it would help the pain go away. "Well, tell me when it's over."

Natasha ignored the attempt at lightheartedness. "Poison is seeping through your body. I- I'm not sure what to do."

"Can you take the darts out?"

"They're basically lodged into your skin. If I tried taking them out, I'd probably take off a whole layer of skin." Picturing it made her feel a bit uneasy. She'd killed many people before, in ways crueler than what she just suggested, but since Clint was her friend, she couldn't bear to see him hurt.

The two assassins sat in silence for a moment. When Natasha was about to get up to get the first aid kit, in case there was something in there that might help, Clint grasped her hand. She could see the pain his blue-grey eyes.

"Call SHIELD," he said, squeezing her hand lightly.

Natasha desperately wanted to go on and return to the Red Room. They were so close, only to return back to SHIELD two days later. Thinking to herself, she wasn't even sure why she wanted to go back there. All that was left was bad memories. Not only that, but she wasn't even sure if the Red Room Academy was still open.

Closing her eyes, she took a breath, and decided that it wasn't worth Clint's life. She needed him. As much as she didn't want to, she knew that he would always need to be in her life. They'd gone through too much to separate.

She squeezed Clint's hand back. "Alright."

03:14 26-AUG-09, SHIELD QUINJET, OVER ATLANTIC OCEAN

"Hostages retrieved, one in need of medical attention."

Five SHIELD agents, including Coulson, had arrived less than an hour after Natasha had hacked into their communication and told them of her whereabouts. Natasha was roughly grabbed by black-clad soldiers and put onto the quinjet, strapped into a seat. Clint was being attended to by medical from the seat across her.

The jet took off and then they were being flown back to wherever Fury had ordered them to be taken. The quinjet coasted less than ten feet above sea level, the wind blowing water onto the windows. The dark skies made it hard to see anything outside. Coulson was standing in front of Natasha, partially blocking her view of Clint. She considered moving him aside so that she could check on Clint, rather than staring out the black windows.

"Natasha Romanoff," Coulson said, putting his hands in his pockets, "I need to know where you were headed. I don't want to have you killed, and neither does Director Fury. So unless you cooperate, which I'm sure you will because you called us here, you will have to be detained."

Natasha slowly lifted her eyes to Coulson's kind face. "I was going to the Red Room." She found no harm telling him her plans now; before, it had seemed like a much bigger deal when she and Clint had first gone rogue. She told him where they'd stopped and almost everything that had happened. The only thing she didn't tell him was about her blackouts.

When she had finished, Coulson shifted and crossed his arms. "You risked your lives, jobs and pretty much everything else because you were afraid that you wouldn't be given straight-up permission to go to Russia." A beat of silence. "We found Barnes, by the way," Coulson said. "He was still lying on a patient bed in the hospital in Zurich: broken leg and unshaven. He looked worn-out."

"What did he say?"

"He wouldn't tell us where you and Barton were off to, so Fury took him back to SHIELD to question more… persistently. Barnes didn't tell us where you went, but he did tell us what had happened to him. His whole life story, basically. Fury was- er- furious because he'd wasted a whole two hours of his time."

Natasha smiled a little to herself. That was the James Barnes that she knew from before. He was a joker, at times, and made Natasha laugh, despite her cold persona.

"So where is Barnes now?" Natasha asked.

"The last time I saw him he was in an interrogation room on the Helicarrier."

"Did they…?"

Coulson shook his head, answering her unspoken question. "They didn't hurt him. Fury got some agents to find some more information on Barnes, and then realized that it wouldn't be his best idea to incense him."

A shout from across the quinjet snapped Natasha's attention back to Clint. She couldn't see what was happening to him because the physician was there, leaning over him. Instinctively, she leaped up, pulling off the seatbelt. Coulson and a couple other agents made to grab her, but she dodged them, sending a glare their way and knelt next to Clint.

She gasped as she saw what happened to his neck and cheek: there were three circular holes where the darts previously were. All of them were bleeding profusely, even though the cuts looked shallow enough. The skin around the holes, though, was tinged with green and black from the poison. As the doctor began to stitch the skin back together, Clint gripped the edges of his seat tightly, his forehead shiny with sweat.

There was a needle in his arm which was drawing out some blood; Natasha leaned closer to her partner and gripped the hand that wasn't connected to that arm. The moment she grabbed his hand, he squeezed it tightly, making it feel like her bones were being crushed. She knew that he was in more pain than her, so she let him hold onto her.

"Done," the physician finally said, after what seemed like a long time. He stood up, and then took the needle out of Clint's arm. "The poison's been drawn from his body, so he should be fine."

Natasha breathed a sigh of relief. It had been her fault that Clint was hurt, and she wouldn't want to add yet another person to her already red ledger.

"Tasha," Clint murmured. "I feel like shit."

She laughed softly. "You look like shit." Her expression turned serious. "But really, Clint, I'm sorry. If I wasn't fiddling with that thing-"

Clint hushed her, placing a hand on her shoulder. "I'm fine now, alright? Don't beat yourself up about it. I'm perfectly normal."

"I wouldn't say normal…"

"Ah, you know what I mean. But, you know, we're going to be in a lot of trouble with SHIELD now." He glanced around them at the many agents who were only lightly armed. "It's not like we can escape."

Natasha raised a thin eyebrow. They were the best agents at SHIELD that they knew of. With her and Clint's assassin-skills, could it be possible for them to continue on their mission?

"Do you trust me?" Natasha whispered to Clint, leaning closer to him so that her lips were almost touching his ear.

He creased his forehead. "Of course."

"They didn't take all my weapons."

Clint smiled wryly. "Your thighs don't count as one, Nat."

She held up one of her wrists. Around both of them were her "widow's bite" bracelets which discharged electrostatic volts (capable of stunning even super humans). She also had a few mini-grenades stuffed down her knee-high boots. Black Widow was ready for action.

But before she could change her mind, she placed her lips firmly against Clint's, catching him by surprise. On missions before, when they had to act as husband and wife, they had kissed, but it wasn't the same. They kept themselves wrapped around each other until a SHIELD agent went up to them and cleared his throat. They broke apart, Clint with a smug grin on his face, which Natasha would have to ask him about later.

The SHIELD agent frowned. "Romanoff, you are to be seated again."

"About that…" she trailed off, getting up slowly. She dusted the dirt off her legs and stood, staring defiantly up to the man. "We won't be going to SHIELD with you guys. I have a job to finish, and unless any of you are going to help us, we can't stay here." Natasha glanced at Coulson who was looking at her intently. "Are you going to help us?"

Coulson sighed. "I don't know. Fury was adamant on bringing you two back." Placing a hand on his ear where his comm. was, Coulson repeated Natasha's demand. With a few more nods and 'yes, sir's, he turned back to Natasha. "He says that you'll, 'have to get your sorry asses back to SHIELD' and explain about your rash behaviour before he can make any more decisions."

"That's not good enough." With that, she held out her wrists, sending electric shocks through two agents' bodies. They dropped down to the ground, writhing. The other three agents leaped into action, holding out their handguns. Natasha electrocuted one of them, but the other two dodged her shots.

As the two agents were about to open fire, Clint leaped into action, knocking one of them out with a well-placed blow to the head. The other agent swiveled around just to be knocked out as well. He looked to Coulson.

"Are you going to let us go? Or are we going to have to knock you out as well?" Clint said as Natasha held her wrists out threateningly.

Coulson hesitated. "I'll give you two days to call SHIELD back."

With a curt nod, Natasha and Clint opened the exit, the wind and water blowing onto them. They leaped off the back of the jet and plunged into the dark depths of the waters. Sputtering, they resurfaced to see the quinjet just as a dot in the distance, and then it was gone.

"Wet," Clint muttered. "Wet again."

.

A/N: Sorry for the long wait! Thank you to my patient readers and lovely reviewers, followers, "favouriters", etc. Please continue to R&R! Oh!And I just found out Mr. Jeremy Renner now has a baby girl! Congrats to him and his partner (even though he would never read shit like this, lol).