[AN: WARNING Angst! In my little world they get over this but interpret as you wish. If I get enough angry reviews I will write and epilogue of happiness.]

{{Disclaimer: My ninja's have failed me and I still don't own the Avengers. Damn!}}

NATASHA ROMANOFF

Gone, gone was the only word to describe the gun wrenching feeling. The feeling of brokenness, worthlessness, lost! She couldn't feel them, she couldn't move, she couldn't make her legs move! They weren't there! They were… Gone! Panic overtook her heart and it pumped so fast, furiously, frantically as if it could take the place of her legs but they were still ghosts, un-moving, gone!

Soft familiar laughter reached her ears.

"What will you do now Tasha?" He asked and came into her view, smirking, laughing, all the pleasure she'd seen him show in her company now brought out by her pain.

"No…" She whispered brokenly, "no, no, NO!" But he knew her greatest fears and casually lit the match. Her nose was filled with the smell of sulfur and gasoline. It made her choke and she fought back bile. I don't' want to die like them! I don't want to DIE LIKE THEM! She wanted to scream but nothing came out because she was looking into his eyes, his blue, ice cold, dead eyes and saw nothing but joy. The fire was everywhere it rose up like an explosion of heat and light that threw the face she knew so well into contrast. A new laugh joined the crackling, roaring flames. Natasha choked and gagged and tired to crawl away. Pull her dead weight torso and the stumps dangling uselessly off it across the ground.

"Tasha!" Clint cried out in anguish. Through the fear, the mortal terror she knew that she didn't suffer alone.

"NO!" He cried out and then a sickening wet crack.

Her eyes flew open to the gray dawn and though her body was heavy with sleep her heart hammered in her chest and her vision was clear. Clint looked back, his face only a foot from hers and deadly calm as he stared back into her wide eyes. They were silent for a long moment, lying in their double bed, five stories above the streets of Venice, breathing in the perfumed air of the hotel. Without a word he rolled away, stood silently, letting the covers fall away from his naked body. He casually dressed himself half way before taking his vigil at the window as he had for the past three days. Three days since New York was attacked, three days since the Avengers went their separate ways, three days together in near silence, three days healing, or trying.

It was fully morning, the shouts of the people below making their way up to the fifth floor room, when Clint broke the silence.

"We should eat," he said simply and that was all they needed. Silently dressed, silently to the café that had become their habitual morning spot, silently nodding to the waitress for what they had yesterday and the day before, silently sipping tea and coffee as if they weren't battle scared and stress weary.

"Are we ever going to talk about it?" Natasha asked, broaching the taboo subject.

"What is there to discuss?" Clint looks away out at the nearby canal and the passing boats. And they lapsed into silence.

Night came, both to quickly and not fast enough. Then the inevitable words that had been held back when imminent threats were more important came up.

"You should have shot me," Clint held his vigil at the window again.

"What?" Natasha looked up from the book she read half heartedly.

"You should have shot me! You had the perfect opportunity on the Helicarrier. It was sloppy."

"Sloppy? I saved your life!"

"But you shouldn't have!"

"Without you we wouldn't have known where Loki would be, what he was planning, or…"

"Cut the crap! You didn't do it for any of those reasons!" Clint turned to her now, eyes filled with cold disappointment and rage, at whom those feelings were directed, she didn't know. Clint, as she well knew, was sometimes easy to misread.

"I don't see the problem," She said going back to her book with a peevish expression, trying to end the conversation.

"You said you wanted to talk!" He shot back.

"I asked if we ever would!" She returned with more venom.

"Well we're talking now," He crossed his arms.

"No, you are reprimanding me for doing my job!"

"Your job was to protect S.H.I.E.L.D. not me!"

Loki's words echoed in her mind "You would bargain for the life of one man?"

"I wasn't…"

"Why didn't you shoot me then?"

"Do you want me to shoot you?" She stood up from the bed now, anger pumping through her veins.

"I want to be able to trust you Tasha!" He said angrily as he advanced toward her, "but I can't do that if your feelings get in the way of your judgment."

"I have my feelings perfectly under control," her voice was low and menacing.

"Yeah," he scoffed, "I can see that. That's why you cry in your sleep like a child…" He didn't get to finish before the floor disappeared from under his feet and Natasha tackled him, her hand pinning his right arm inches away from his back-up knife, his other arm under his body and her hand in his hair. She painfully bashed his head against the carpeted floor and cushioning be damned it hurt.

"Don't you ever" she knocked his head against the floor again for emphasis, "call me a child!" He sounded too much like Loki.

"Agh," he gasped painfully as the Black Widow stood and left him on the floor. His quiet breathy laughter protruded on the tension and grated against Natasha's nerves. How could he always find exactly the wrong time to laugh.

"Who are you so angry with?" He asked her with a rueful smile in his voice. "If it was me I'm sure I would be in a lot more pain." Natasha just kept her back to the man on the floor.

"Shut up," she muttered.

"I kept thinking it was me and you'd crack eventually," he murmured.

"How did you know I wouldn't kill you if it was?" she whispered and wondered if he could even hear her.

"What you said on the ship, about the red in your ledger," he replied, "made me think you wouldn't."

"I'm not mad at you," she replied.

"They why the dreams?"

"It's… what Loki said."

"Loki? Loki is gone!" He said, smile gone. And perhaps he was saying it more for himself than for Natasha.

"But you're still here!" She shot back as he finished. Looking over her shoulder she saw his confusion and explained.

"I told you about… the hospital fire… and…"

"And I told Loki, god Damn," Clint picked up quickly and his fist hit the footboard hard with a resounding crack.

"Loki's plan was to have you kill me, then kill you himself," Natasha went on, "he taunted me while I was interrogating him."

"So the dreams…"

"Just remnants."

Clint stood and approached her cautiously, placing his hands gently on her shoulders.

"Don't touch me," She snapped a pulled away, anger bleeding through her mask of indifference. "You're right, I am angry! I'm angry that I was betrayed, I'm angry that you would put me in that place, that you would leave me so exposed and I didn't kill you not because I cared about you, I didn't kill you because I was angry and a bullet in the back of your head wouldn't be painful enough!" Natasha ranted at him as she grabbed her scattered belongings, clothes from the floor, guns from under the bed, Russian books from the nightstand. They were all packed haphazardly into her suitcase. "I need to leave," was the only explanation she gave.

"Where will you go?" he asked, not moving from where he stood, watching detachedly as she packed. "Back to SHIELD?"

"If SHIELD needs me, they know how to contact me," She muttered. "I can't go back there yet."

"Will I see you again?" He asked. It was always a question when they parted; will our paths cross again? Will we die before then? Do we ever want to see each other again?

"I don't know," Natasha strapped on her twin pistols and pulled a jacket over her nondescript clothing to cover the weapons. "Goodbye Clint."

Before he could find a way to say the same she was gone, the carved door swinging shut in her wake and he still hadn't moved.

[AN: Reviews keep me alive!]