II

Tbilisi

It's three years into Clint's job with S.H.I.E.L.D., and he has settled into the place about as much as he'll ever settle into anything. He has pretty well established himself as Fury's go-to guy for tough missions, the one with the highest and cleanest kill ratio in S.H.I.E.L.D. history – a hundred-and-twenty-seven out of a hundred-and-twenty-eight, and no collateral civilian damage. (Ever.)

As for that one miss, it wasn't Clint's fault: The extraction team forgot (forgot!) that Afghanistan is eight point five hours ahead of EDT, not eight, and brought the exfil chopper in half an hour early, allowing Mullah Ahmed to live and plant IEDs another day. Clint spat curses all the way back to Baghram, and told Fury that next time S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to play around in a war zone, they bloody well better have a military liaison at the very least, and fuck inter-agency turf battles. As far as Clint is concerned, war is for soldiers.

Actually, in general Clint doesn't swear nearly as much as he used to; when he does it tends to be more targeted, like he's deploying smart bombs instead of cluster munitions. When he does let fly, it's usually in the direction of people who try to tell him what to think or do, when all the evidence points in another direction. People like Hill, and to a lesser extent the Director.

It helps that the archer and Coulson have a pretty sweet arrangement going to minimize Clint's interaction with his superiors: as long as Hawkeye mostly stays within mission parameters, Coulson mostly lets him get away with slightly nebulous reports how things actually went down.

When Hill complains about the missing bits, Coulson makes something up and Clint swipes her Nespresso capsules until he's clawed back roughly the value of the shit he doesn't give about her bitching. Coulson pretends not to notice those forays into juvenile revenge, and Clint pretends that he believes his handler has no idea he's doing it. Anything that keeps the archer from icing Fury's Deputy, Coulson will take as a win; Clint just likes Nespresso.

All in all, things work pretty well for everybody and Fury is pleased – as pleased as Fury ever gets about anything -with his star asset, including Clint's occasional penchant for unorthodox battle strategy and tactics.

Until Tbilisi.

…..

In the three or four weeks he's been there to set up the mission, Clint has taken a reluctant liking to Georgia. It kind of reminds him of himself: Pretty thoroughly fucked up - thanks to a mixture of catastrophic circumstances, malevolent outside machinations and innate pigheadedness - but trying to make a go of it against the odds.

The country shows off its thousand-plus-year old cathedrals, fortresses and religious icons with as much pride as it does the tacky Stalin rugs you can find in the markets (Georgia's most infamous son just won't go away). Add to that a people capable of heart-stopping warmth and hospitality on one hand and instant, brutal violence on the other, and you get a place that simply refuses to fit into any kind of template. Oh, and the food …

Thanks to simmering conflicts with two separatist republics – both essentially run by Russian organized crime – Georgia is full of guns, and people without qualms about using them. You can still find remnants of the former Soviet arsenal, including Strontium-90 batteries used to power the old missile defence grid (a number of folks have died trying to carry them across the mountains to the black markets in Turkey); rusting ICBMs sweat nitroglycerin on abandoned airfields. If you add to all that the Chechen terrorists and Al Qaeda fighters hiding in the Pankisi Gorge and the ungovernable nature of most of the ethnic groups that have made the Caucasus a battleground since the eleventh century, and what you get is a toxic stew in which three or four diverse interest groups are liable to butt heads with each other in never-ending variations.

For a professional assassin, the place is a veritable smorgasbord, one-stop-shopping and trick-or-treat all rolled into one. His target has been busy harvesting opportunities for weeks.

It's a mild evening in May, and the archer is sitting in the shadows on a crumbling balcony on the second floor of an old abandoned house, rendered uninhabitable since the last earthquake and never fixed up. The only people in Georgia that have money for anything are corrupt politicians and organized crime bosses, and none of them are particularly interested in fixing up infrastructure.

Despite the ominous cracks in the walls and the dusty rubble piled up in front of the house, someone has installed a satellite dish on the balcony; the wire leads into a ground floor apartment across the street. Apparently, there is still electricity to be tapped from the ruin when the power does come on, and some enterprising citizen is getting theirs for free.

The dish makes a perfect screen. Clint would like to be higher up, but here in Tbilisi's Old Town two or three stories is about as high as you get. Many of the top floors are rickety and barely level; building higher would be lunacy in a place where the earth shakes as often and as violently as the political landscape.

Clint sits on a pile of loose bricks from what used to be a wall, his flak jacket tossed beside him. His bow sits on top of the jacket – wouldn't want to get that dusty, now. He is absently chewing on a hunk of khachapuri, oblivious to the bits of crumbly cheese filling that dots the black leather of his vest. (The Hawk has decided that next to the alabaster-skinned women with their angelically arched black eyebrows, the food is definitely the best thing about Georgia.)

He knows he's in for the long haul and doesn't expect anything to happen until after dark, if the chatter Coulson has picked up on the internet and the wires is on the level; and so he sits in his nest and watches as dusk falls. He represses his longing after the best grilled meat on the planet (the smells wafting up from the restaurant down the street are torture) and focuses on the sights and sounds below. An enthusiastic soccer game has been ranging up and down the street for hours now, with stubby-kneed kids rotating in and out as they get hauled off for a dinner break. There's electricity tonight; the streetlights allow the game to continue past dark as the haunting melody of an ancient song falls from an open window down the block.

Clint wonders briefly what it's like for the people who live here, carving moments like this out of a world too often shattered by men for whom peace means business lost.

Clint's target, according to information picked up by an informant on the Black Sea coast, has apparently been hired by one of the Abkhaz crime bosses to off a local contact. Probably a deal gone sour, or the guy's gotten too close to a rival – who knows. His target is presently entertaining her mark in one of the restaurants down the street; his place of business is further up the hill behind him, and he expects them to head this way shortly.

Coulson is in Clint's ear, but has no eyes on him; he's in the car, a couple of blocks away. Fury had been pretty clear about one thing: the target is too dangerous, too lethal, too … Too everything, basically.

She's a killing machine, the file said. Ruthless, efficient and effective, built for one purpose only. No point risking two agents, or to let anyone get close – that's playing on her turf. Minimum distance twenty feet, is what the threat assessment says. Precisely where Hawkeye and his silent bow come in, and why Coulson is now in a car several blocks east.

"Take her down as soon as you get the chance," Fury had said. "You won't get another. Trust me on this, Barton."

And so Clint waits. Waits to get his sightline, calculates trajectories, wind direction. Throat would be best from this angle, he figures. She's trying to seduce her mark, so she'll probably wear something low cut.

His eyes are trained on the door of the restaurant, the khachapouri long gone. Soon, he figures – even the fabled Georgian hospitality can only last so long. Besides, if she's as beautiful as that grainy picture he saw, Mr. Local Gunrunner will be getting both impatient and frisky.

Shadows move behind the front window. The door opens, and light from inside the restaurant spills out on the cobbled street. Several figures emerge, most of them hulking and tall – one slight and short.

The bow glides into his hand; Clint reaches over his head with a fluid motion and draws an arrow, nocks it.

His target and her mark walk towards Clint's position, arm in arm, three thuggish looking types close behind. Body guards probably, judging by the way they hold their beefy hands slightly away from their thighs. Hip holsters. How … quaint.

She moves with the grace of a cat, despite her heels and the cobblestone; the streetlight – still on after nine, a rare miracle – catches her hair, which flames red against the blue of the night. She leans into her companion – he's half a head taller than she is – and opens her mouth for him, her tongue wetting her lips until they glisten. He bares his teeth, and Clint imagines the predatory smile creeping across the guy's face as he anticipates the delights the evening will yet provide.

Just at the moment when he pulls the string, a round object bounces down the street - a soccer ball, followed in very short order by three young boys, tumbling down the street for one last round of fun before bedtime, while there's still street light to be had. One of them shrieks in glee when the ball takes a sudden seventy-degree turn, having hit an oddly shaped cobble stone; apparently odd bounces have their own rules and he's just scored a point. The two others run out and in between Clint's target, her date and the accompanying thugs, while the ball shoots into the dark passageway between two houses.

And the night explodes.

There's the rapid fire of something Clint recognizes as a Glock, and his target's date is on his knees, red blooming from his shirt. The man falls over gracelessly, like a puppet whose strings have been cut – clearly an unpopular guy, with more than one enemy. The woman dives and rolls, getting back on her feet in a crouch and reaching under her dress.

Date Night's goons answer the gunfire; one of the kids shrieks like he's been hit but he may just be scared. There is an answering scream from inside one of the houses – a parent, realizing. A bullet ricochets mere inches away from Clint's right shoulder, spraying him with concrete splinters and dust. Despite the distractions, the archer keeps his eyes on his mark.

That doesn't stop him from firing a couple of arrows into Date Night's buddies, who were taking aim against the Ambush Gang right through the small clump of terrified kids who are now basically frozen in terror, too frantic to even think about getting down on the ground. Clint's shots are clean and through the throat, the way he prefers it, giving the kids a momentary reprieve from the cross fire and the guy in the alley something less to shoot at.

Clint expects his mark to melt into the shadows; her work is done, her target eliminated. She'll still get paid regardless of who fired the bullet - dead is dead. At least that's how Clint's contracts used to work, before he joined the side of the notional angels. Always good to let someone else do the wet work for you.

He waits for a second to see whether she'll get taken out by the alley guys, whom he doesn't have a bead on from where he is, before he lets fly. There's an element of professional courtesy involved here – the no, after you approach. Clint has taken this route a couple times before; last time was in some hick town in Tennessee, where the locals had a feud going that went back to Confederation and was starting to affect the local economy. It came to a shootout (the definitely-not-OK Corral, he called it), and he'd allowed a few of them off each other before taking out the head honchos he'd been sent after. It's the one thing Coulson and Clint really don't see eye to eye on, mostly because Phil finds it a bitch to sanitize the mission report.

Clint pulls his bow string taut, almost to a kiss. Top of her neck, in case she wears something like Kevlar under that … Nah. Not likely.

Shit. A couple more of Date Night's buddies pour out of the restaurant. A door to one of the houses opens, a frantic mother waving at her kids to get the hell inside.

But then he sees it: Red hair flaming in the street light, his targetputs herself between the kids and the attackers in the alleyway, and unleashes the knives she had under her dress into the dark, all the while shouting something at the boys in Russian. They unfreeze and run for the open door; it slams shut behind them. No one will emerge from the house for hours – the people in this neighbourhood know when to keep their heads down.

Three children are safe, and something goes off inside Clint's head.

Now some people have questioned whether Hawkeye has a conscience, given what he does for a living. He does. He does. But he usually engages it in advance, when he puts all the info together that he's given, and decides whether or not to take a job, and how he'll carry it out. That way, when he does it, conscience doesn't get in the way of speed and efficiency. It's part of what makes him so good at what he does; some people call it ruthlessness.

But right now, something down there doesn't compute, just doesn't fit in the picture he was given, and so he needs to recalculate.

The Black Widow is the product of a ruthless brainwashing program, he was told – childhood and adolescence more fucked up than his own, if that's even possible. But it is, because the betrayals in hers had the weight and the money and deliberation of state power behind it, and she never stood a chance. Turned her inside out, until there was nothing left - until she turned on them.

She's a killing machine, the files say. Slaughters everything in her path, no quarter ever. Any sympathy she deserves for how she got that way, she undid years ago.

Except … those kids.

The flash of recognition sears. He knows, because … kids.

They're wrong. This is wrong.

Clint vaults over the balcony. Second story drops are nothing to him; he re-nocks his arrow on the way down and lands about twenty feet away from her on sure feet, bent knees absorbing the shock. From his new vantage point he can see very clearly the remaining thug in the alley; knowing her knife is en route he focuses on the two newcomers, dispatching them, one-two, in a fluid motion before training a third arrow on her.

She spins around to confront this new menace that has dropped down from somewhere. She has no gun; the sultry seductress outfit she's wearing doesn't allow many spots for concealment, and she's just thrown her last knife. She stops in her tracks, her fingers splaying outward in what looks like surrender but more likely is the first step towards weaponizing her hands.

Clint recognizes the slight recalibration of her stance and makes a show of lifting the point of his arrow to point out the direct trajectory to her throat. He watches her in silence as her eyes dart around the scene, taking stock, weighing options.

This is what she sees: Four men down, with arrows protruding from, variously, a larynx, a carotid artery and two eye sockets. One arrow each, all lethal. A man in black leather, bow held horizontally so as not to interfere with his vision of her as he takes her measure, strong arms taut and obviously capable of holding that posture for hours. Her future, focused in a point of black metal.

She is looking at her death, and she knows it. But it is not yet; she is still here.

Clint watches her relax into the situation, waiting for him to make the next move; he beat himself over the head mentally a little for not having thought that far ahead. What should that move be? At this point, it either involves words or letting go of that string.

Unfortunately, when it comes to picking the right thing to say and saying it well, Clint Barton isn't exactly Shakespeare. Sure, he's read the guy's stuff on stakeouts, in hotel rooms - mostly to shut up Hill when she gets into her he's-just-an-uneducated-carnie mode. He loves the language, the richness and the cadence of it. Can't reproduce it worth shit, though, when he talks.

The best he can manage, staring at those curiously deep green eyes before him, is a single word, cast as a question.

"Live?"

This throws her a little, and her brows contract in the tiniest of frowns. She replies with the obvious, in English.

"Why?"

He could say something about the joys of living, the beauty of a summer's day, or the laughter of children. Or he could try sarcasm, 'because it beats the alternative.'But he's been where she has, and he knows that there aren't that many summer days, that they've never been children, and that sometimes the alternative doesn't look so bad.

"Because … you're not them," he offers instead, his chin indicating the bodies on the street.

"What am I, then?"

Well, shit. Just his luck, she's into asking questions of her own. He'd kind of stopped thinking at they gave me the wrong reasons to kill you. But then it hits him, and now he knows just what it was that he recognized when she made the choice, there, with those kids.

"I have no idea what you are now," he replies. "But you could be me."

"And you are….?" She's inching forward a bit, and he shakes his head with a small, grim smile. Stay. Won't work.

"Codename's Hawkeye, I work for an outfit that deals in … covert security. My agency sorts out people like them, when others can't."

"And people like me?" She immediately assumes that he knows who she is. Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow.

"Yeah. And people like you."

"Who are you talking to, Barton?" Coulson, in his earpiece.

Clint ignores him, which he knows has a dual impact: First, he can't get talked out of going where he thinks this is headed, and second, it'll make Coulson bring the car around to pull him out.

"Hawkeye, do you copy? Respond!" Clint would pull the ear bud out, but his hands are full.

"Then why am I still here?" She sounds like she genuinely wants to know, and her green eyes hold his grey ones in a sort of challenge. "I assume you were sent to kill me."

"Yeah," he says again. "I was. Still can, you know. Based on what I saw, you can cross the twenty feet between us in about 1.5 seconds. Problem is, my arrow here can do that in a lot less time than that. Even faster, if you meet it in the middle."

She almost smiles at that.

"And based on what I've seen, you don't miss." Her English is flawless.

"Nope." Just stating a fact. "I don't."

"So where does that leave us, then?"

He was afraid she was going to ask that, but he's now had a minute or so to think it through and actually has an answer ready.

"You should come work for us," he says. "For S.H.I.E.L.D. You have skills we can use. You'd eliminate security risks, rather than be one. Of course, pay's a lot less than freelance, but more regular. Pension plan, medical, dental. Plus, and here's the good part - you … usually only get asked to kill people who have it coming."

Clint Francis Barton, king of recruitment pitches.

"You make it sound … irresistible."

Her voice is husky, and there's something almost like a smile dancing behind her eyes. He has the feeling she doesn't smile very often, and feels irrationally pleased.

But he doesn't lower the bow, and he notices her noticing. She asks another question.

"Why?"

What she means is, why me? You know who and what I am.

"Because you've been fucked over. Like I have. And you're doing … this," he gestures to her erstwhile date, "… because it's all you've got."

He shrugs. "Except it doesn't have to be. You can be … you can do … better. Find something to work for, not someone. Worked for me. So far, anyway. I can look in the mirror sometimes now, and not cringe. And that's worth something to me. Might be to you."

He really doesn't know why he just spilled his guts like that to a total stranger, but there's something … something …

She studies him carefully; he knows her eyes are missing nothing. His body sculpted to be a weapon as lethal as hers, the scars, the focus, the intensity. He lets his eyes burn into hers, waiting for her answer.

"And if I say no? Will you kill me?"

Shit. She would ask that.

"Only if you make a move on me," he answers. Because, truthfully, he's already decided that this is one calculated kill he won't make, orders be damned.

"You mean you'd let me go, even if I said no?"

She's not exactly incredulous, she moved past that at "come work for us," but she wants to make sure. Besides, that bow is still trained on her larynx; it hasn't wavered.

"Not much point inviting someone to change their life at arrow point, is there? That won't be any better than the crap you've already been through. Won't work unless there's a choice."

He knows she's waiting for more, and he decides to be honest. Again. Why, he has no idea. Maybe he'll figure it out eventually.

"But no, I won't kill you. I'd stick an arrow into you so you can't run after me, though. Let the Georgians try and figure whether you're a perp or a victim in this clusterfuck. Not my problem."

"I assume I will be your problem if I say yes?"

He can't suppress a grin at that. He can just see Hill: "Barton did what?"

"Oh, yeah. You could say that."

She smiles back a little, mostly with her eyes, so he knows its real. Somehow, they understand each other, on a level he's not had before, not with anyone. It's a little unnerving. But his bow still has not wavered. Understanding is one thing; trust quite another.

"Tempting, just for that."

Somewhere in the background, a siren has started to pierce the silence of the night. The Georgian police may not be as efficient or fast as their counterparts in other bits of Europe – there's that minor problem of shitty equipment and endemic corruption – but even they can't ignore a gunfight on a public street forever, even if it's in a neighbourhood known to house a number of criminal kingpins.

"So what's the verdict?"

Natasha Romanoff stares at him, then shrugs. It's a curiously ambiguous gesture for one usually so deliberate. That in itself is new.

"I'll give it a shot," she says.

…..

Getting her to the car … well, talk about trust.

"To the wall, hands up against."

"Why?"

"My handler will freak if we walk up to the car together. I need to knock you out so he feels safe. He's gonna give me enough grief as it is."

"And how do you propose to do that, knock me out?"

"Meds."

She considers, weighs the options, nods, and moves to the wall.

"How does that English saying go, in for a penny…?"

The sirens are getting closer, as are the sounds of another car coming up the cobblestoned road. Phil.

"Do you trust me?" Clint asks, softly.

She turns around, arches an eyebrow at him.

"You mean, apart from the fact that you could have killed me at any time over the last few minutes but didn't? No."

He smiles grimly, speed-drops the arrow he has and dials up another setting on his quiver, reaches over his back and draws. The whole thing takes less than two seconds, and her eyes widen a little.

"Good. It's mutual then."

But he doesn't nock the new arrow. Instead, cursing the stupid instincts that brought him past the point that Fury had said was pretty much certain death for any operative, he walks right up to the Black Widow with it poised in his fingers.

"Hold out your hand."

She turns and faces him, and he steps even closer. He can see her nostrils flare a little as she takes in his scent – leather and sweat from the hours in the stakeout, remnants of the aftershave he likes. Her pupils dilate a little, in a reaction that can't be faked, and he feels his own body respond.

Not that, a voice screams in his head, you're in for it already, Barton … He grates out the next words.

"Your hand?"

She holds it palm up, fingers splayed, her eyes never wavering from his.

He reaches for it with the tip of his arrow, and catches her as she falls.

…..

"You can still kill her, you know." Coulson says mildly, as the Quinjet approaches the helicarrier. "The Director did not specify a location or a method. Just throw her out of the jet. We're still over the Atlantic."

Sometimes, it's hard to remember that underneath that bland accountant exterior, Coulson has as much ice in his veins as the next S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. His time in the field was spent mostly in white-collar crime, but he does have his share of kills under that Alfred Dunhill belt and will do whatever it takes to complete a mission.

"Just in case you don't understand. I can't fix this for you, Clint. This is so far beyond your usual fanciful paperwork origami, it's not funny."

"Phil, shut up. I made the call. I'll always make the call on when a mission is good to go. Take it or leave it."

Clint doesn't really want to listen to reason right now. He looks back, where reason lies sprawled across the backseat, carefully cuffed and still tranqued. The line of her jaw is exquisite, her skin like porcelain, and sleeping she looks like she's about fifteen. He hopes fervently that this isn't why he had that sudden impulse not to make the kill.

Fact is, Phil's concern has made him begin to wonder himself whether he hasn't come slightly unhinged. Clint trusts Coulson, more than anyone he's ever met in the general wasteland of his life, and his handler's opinion matters to him.

But then he thinks of those children, the mother at the door and the other parents and siblings he never saw, and he knows what he knows. And that is, if Clint Barton can turn things around and become a good man, or at the very least, a not so very good man doing mostly good things, by however questionable methods – then that's something. And maybe this girl deserves a shot at that too.

…..

As predicted, neither Fury nor Hill is terribly amused. In fact, they are rather pissed off, and Clint is looking at PPO detail for the next few weeks, if not outright dismissal. Phil repeats his suggestion, not looking at Barton.

Hill is offended, but not for the reasons Clint would have expected.

"Kill her now? Here? In S.H.I.E.L.D.'s headquarters?"

Something in that short statement sticks in Clint's craw. As in, he stops feeling defensive and gets seriously pissed off. He turns on Hill with a snarl.

"So, are you telling me you sit in this nice cozy fucking office, full of shiny monitors and expensive toys and wall-to-wall carpeting, and decide who needs to be killed – but only provided it happens out of earshot? Is that it? You don't want to see what it is you're ordering people like me to do, or heaven forbid, get blood under your own nails?"

Phil tries to stop him by putting a hand on Clint's arm, but the archer is on a tear now and shakes him off. Truth be told, it's probably a good thing he doesn't have any of his knives on him right now.

"And if that's how you prefer things, what does that make me – your garbage man? The slightly disgusting cousin who shovels all the shit that you don't want to smell, and who you don't want to introduce to the neighbours because what might they think?"

Fury has heard enough. His good eye fixes on Clint with something close to understanding – it'd be a stretch to call it more. But he does make it clear that this is a discussion the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. does not wish to have in his office. Or anywhere, really. And maybe that even includes Hill, who knows.

"That's enough, Barton. You've left us with a god-awful mess, and we'll have to figure out how to deal with it. But let's be clear about one thing. Next time you ignore kill orders will be your last, understood?"

"Oh, of that I have absolutely no doubt, sir," Clint fires back. "But you better make sure then that I don't get many orders based on half-assed intel."

He turns on his heel and leaves.

Coulson whistles soundlessly and stares at Fury.

"So, what next, Director Fury?"

"Give her the tests," Fury growls.

"Excuse me, sir? You're not seriously considering …"

"Seriously, Hill? No. But I am considering it. Way I see it, let's see if we can make a silk purse out of this here shit. Barton may be a pain in the ass and hard to control, but he's got good instincts. And personally I'll take a single novel idea over a hundred recitals of protocol. So get it done, and get out."

An hour later Coulson shows up in the coffee room. He meticulously attaches a label in his best imitation of Hill's handwriting to a brand new box of Nespresso capsules, and sticks them near where Clint keeps his mug, where he'll see them.

Phil figures a month's supply should do. Until Romanoff's test scores come in.