"Just like Budapest all over again, huh?"
Clint smirked as he sent an arrow straight through the cracks of an alien's armor.
"You and I remember Budapest very differently."
Budapest, November 2005.
"I got a clear shot. Bring in a clean-up team ETA 10 minutes."
Clint strung an arrow into his bow and aimed for the flash of red hair through the half-cracked window of the abandoned factory. This would be a quick mission, he thought, and maybe he could get Phil to convince Fury to give him a few days off before he left for the next mission in Rio.
"Nice and easy, Clint," came Coulson's voice through his comm link. "Clean-up is on the way."
His target had her back turned towards him, and seemed to be negotiating with Alexei Shostakov, an infamous Russian arms dealer. Clint had chosen a simple arrow for his target. Sexy, but one without any special abilities. Just a smooth, sharp tip for a clean shot through her neck, which would knock her out for the next few hours so he could get her to the helicarrier for questioning. Fury told Clint to kill Shostakov, but he wanted the notorious Black Widow alive.
Clint took a deep breath and aimed…
…just as Natasha Romanoff reached for her gun.
"Shit," Clint cursed, as Romanoff shot Shostakov right in the middle of his forehead. Twenty of his bodyguards immediately began shooting at her, but she was two steps ahead, already pouncing on one of the guards and knocking him to the ground with a thigh choke. From his perch on top of a building two blocks away, Clint could hear the ceaseless gunfire.
"Coulson!" Clint yelled through his comm link, "Forget clean-up! I'm going in."
He ignored Coulson's protests and shot a grappling hook straight for the room, where his target was currently taking on seven guards at once. As he slid towards the room, Romanoff saw him, her eyes ablaze as they made eye contact for one split second. A few of Shostakov's guards yelped and began shouting in Russian, frantically pointing at Barton as he crashed through the window, showering the room in broken glass. A few of the guards began shooting at Clint, but with a lazy flick of his bow, he had twelve guards down in a second with one of his trick arrows.
Meanwhile, Romanoff had just finished off the last guard, flipping him on his back and sending two bullets into his chest. She looked up at Clint, panting slightly, a look of focus and passion on her face. This is what she was trained to do. This is what she lived for.
Clint already had an arrow pointed at her forehead.
Romanoff gave him one look and smirked.
"You think I'm pretty?" she spat in Russian, standing up and wiping off the blood from a deep gash on the side of her face. "Take a picture. It'll last longer."
Clint hesitated.
"I've seen worse," he growled.
The Black Widow smirked.
"Good," she purred. "Because it's about to get a lot worse."
And she pulled the pin the grenade she was holding, throwing it at the lifeless body of Alexei Shostakov.
Clint mentally punched himself as his target sprinted behind him and jumped out the broken window. In half a second, he was following her, and in five seconds, the factory went down in a fireball of smoke and rubble as he swung back to the building he was perched on minutes before the mission FUBAR'd. He landed smoothly, got up, and saw that his target was sprinting down the street five stories below him. Cracking his knuckles, he ran after her, jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
"Barton?! Barton!" Phil Coulson yelled through his ear. "What the hell? What just happened over there? You've got fifteen minutes before Fury sends a backup team after your ass…"
Clint ignored him and jumped ten feet from a building, still chasing after his target, who had just made a hard left into an abandoned alleyway.
She was still running, but Clint was faster. He had her cornered in two minutes as he tackled her to the ground.
The Widow snarled and aimed a punch for his face, which Clint dodged. He was surprised that her eyes were still ablaze with the same passion and concentration, even though it was obvious that she was exhausted and close to collapsing. It was a pretty even match, and she even managed to kick him hard enough to break a few ribs after he nicked her in the arm pretty deeply with a knife. But after a few minutes and much effort, Clint had pinned her to the ground, holding a knife to her throat.
They were both panting. The Black Widow looked beaten and exhausted, but there was no fear in her eyes at all as she glared at Clint with the same ferocity as when she first made eye contact with him. Something had been done to her, Clint realized, to completely erase all human reflexes of fear and death. She was no longer a person. She was a machine set to kill.
"Do it," she hissed.
He was still breathing hard.
"I thought you worked for Shostakov," he panted. "Why did you kill him?"
The Widow chuckled.
"Shostakov? That mongrel," she spat. "Does this mean we're on the same side, archer?"
For the second time that day, Clint hesitated.
"Who do you work for?" he demanded.
She finally broke eye contact with him, looking away and closing her eyes.
"I don't know," she whispered after a while.
From his years working at the circus and with SHIELD, Clint could tell when someone was lying.
She wasn't.
He put away his knife. The Widow winced as he got off of her, looking up at him in confusion.
"I don't work for anyone…" she repeated slowly, "so I'll have no problem killing you. You know that right?"
Clint smiled.
"I know what it's like," he said quietly as he placed his knife back in its sheath.
"What what's like?" the Widow snapped.
"What it's like to have nothing to live for. To have people betray you, torture you… change you until you don't know who you are anymore."
The Widow looked away.
"Natasha Romanoff," Clint continued. "The Black Widow. I read your file. Trained as an assassin since you were four – I know what that's like."
"You know nothing," Natasha hissed, in English this time.
"Well I'm making a different call," he said, and offered her a hand up.
She looked back up at him, and for the first time, Clint saw a flash of fear and pain in her eyes. After a whole minute of staring at each other, she took his hand, wincing as he pulled her up.
"Arterial bleed," he muttered, examining her arm.
"What?"
"Your arm. Where I cut you. That's an arterial bleed, might even have nicked the bone. Sorry," he added, not quite sure if he meant it, as his side throbbed from where she had kicked him. "You'll go into shock unless the bleeding stops. They can fix it in the med bay."
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, wincing as he put pressure on her injury.
Clint pressed his comm link.
"Coulson, tell Fury to forget back-up. I'm bringing back a souvenir."
Phil didn't say anything as his best agent arrived back at base with his target still quite conscious and not even in handcuffs. He noticed that Clint had torn off a piece of his shirt to bandage the Black Widow's arm, and that he immediately began making orders to get Romanoff to the medical bay of the helicarrier.
"You want to explain this to me, Coulson?" came a stern voice from behind him.
Phil turned to face his furious boss. Fury asked him the same question, in the same severe tone of voice, after practically every mission.
"Barton made a different call, sir," he said simply, as Nick Fury looked into the medical bay, where Clint was watching Natasha steadily as a nurse began examining her am. "He said she wasn't working for Shostakov, so there wasn't a point to shoot her. Video surveillance shows that she killed Shostakov herself."
Fury grunted.
"He never goes against orders," Phil pointed out. "So she must be something special."
"You trust the Widow?" Fury asked.
"Barton seems to."
Fury glared with his good eye. Phil was used to it.
"Send them together to Rio next week," he suggested, as his boss turned to glower at the agency's best marksman once more. "See what happens. Maybe it'll work out."
In Rio, Barton and Romanoff completed the mission, as partners, in record time. In just twenty minutes, all of AIM's incognito agents in the city were knocked out and being dragged into SHIELD's prison on the helicarrier. Barton and Romanoff left the mission with barely a scratch. Fury was pleased, but of course he didn't show it – especially when Coulson gave him a pointed I told you so look as they passed in the hall before debriefing.
"Barton," Fury snapped as he stepped into Clint's office, where Clint and Natasha were finishing up paperwork from the spectacular mission.
Barton and Romanoff looked up.
"Yes sir?"
"Get Romanoff a proper SHIELD uniform."
Clint smiled.
"Yes sir."
A.N.: Once again, not a weapons/fighting expert hahaha