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Clint had little trouble pulling the late shift on the night of the delivery; most of the other guys in the warehouse had families to be home with, so he didn't even have to convince anyone that they had had better things to do that night.
In a strange reversal of roles, she was the one watching and Clint was doing handling the up close and personal undercover work. She could see why he liked working behind the scenes, even if it wasn't her style. She liked to be in the thick of the action, liked pulling the strings and calling the shots, but Clint worked best at a distance. That didn't mean he wasn't good at her job anymore than it meant that she couldn't handle a little surveillance, just that they were both more comfortable elsewhere.
Currently, she was perched high in the rafters of the building, peering down from above on Clint as he moved a few skids. Mark (that slimy fucking creep) was off in one corner, supposedly overseeing the sale as the new head of sales (the previous head had taken over for the boss), but from where she stood, it looked like was just overseeing another game of Angry Birds.
Jackass.
Something set off one of the motion alarms she had rigged at the entrance to the business park, and she tapped a few keys on the laptop beside her to bring up the feed.
"We've got company," she said into her mike, and she saw Clint tip his hat in silent acknowledgment that he'd heard her.
Show time.
She had just managed to get her rifle into position when the warehouse doors slid open. A large, green truck pulled in, and she watched through her scope as four men dressed in inconspicuous jumpsuits got out of the vehicle. After a brief argument about Clint ("Who's the new guy?"), they got down to brass tacks, going over the final details of the sale. It was boring as all hell, but several things were fairly clear from the conversation.
First, the crates that Clint had moved earlier were filled with advanced weaponry, not olives. Second, she could tell that Mark was under no illusions about what he was selling. And third, and this really was the most important part, they were definitely dealing with HYDRA.
She grinned in self-congratulations at the last part; she knew something was weird at this place. It was nice to see that she hadn't lost her touch.
She kept listening to the leader of the little group talking with Mark through her earpiece, and it seemed like everything was going smoothly. Clint would get a tracker on the truck, the two of them would get the hell out of Dodge, and SHIELD would send in a full contingent of operatives to take care of the truck once it was outside a population center. It was clean and simple and they'd be back in New York by morning.
And then the door to the upper office opened, and Sally walked in.
"Oh, hi, Frank! I didn't realize you had a night delivery!" she exclaimed walking down the stairs. Natasha cursed under her breath. She didn't like it when civilians wandered into the line of fire on a regular day. It only made her more nervous that it was Sally, her friend who was wandering blithely into danger.
Well, she thought as she readjusted her scope, maybe Sally was in on it, too. Maybe she kept the books for this particular aspect of the business. Maybe, but even if Natasha wasn't going to discount the possibility outright, she had a hard time believing the same woman who brought her brownies and asked for gossip had any idea that the company she worked for was smuggling illegal weaponry.
"Sally," Clint greeted, walking up to her and putting his hand on her arm as he tried to steer her back toward the entrance. "You shouldn't be here." His voice was low, thick with the suggestion that she get the hell out of there, but Sally had never been good at reading those sorts of signals, and she continued on heedless of the warning.
"Oh, yeah, well, I forgot my purse," she said. "One of the kids needs me to write a check for their basketball team, and I would have put it off, but you know how kids are. She waited until the last minute to tell me . . . "
Natasha was feeling nervous in earnest now. Mark was gesturing more widely as he spoke, and the head HYDRA agent didn't appear too pleased with what he was hearing. If this got ugly, it would happen fast.
"Do something," she hissed lowly, knowing Clint could hear her, hoping that her words would somehow quicken his movements
"Sally, you need to leave," Clint said, peering over his shoulder at where Mark was still talking heatedly with the HYDRA agents. She knew Clint was feeling the same unease that she was up here in the rafters, and she wanted to smack Sally over the head to force her to take his good advice.
"Frank, what . . .?" Sally started to say, and the head agent chose that moment to draw his gun and hold it to Mark's head.
"Shit, shit shit," Natasha said, standing and reaching for her rope. She had to get down there, cover identities be damned. If it were just the two of them and Mark, she would have let it go on longer, would have let Mark try to talk his own way out of the situation (and she wouldn't have cared if he couldn't). Clint could more than handle himself in that situation, but with Sally in the mix, she couldn't in good conscious let this play out.
Clint had already sprung into action, pulling Sally down behind a stack of shipping crates the moment the HYDRA agent drew on Mark. Clint pulled out his own handgun, obviously intent on defending the older woman. Sally panicked though, screaming at the sight of Clint's gun, and she pulled away from him, running out into the open, toward the HYDRA agents.
It was over in a matter of seconds.
Already having handed Mark off to one of his lackeys, the agent who'd been doing all the talking grabbed Sally, holding a gun on her before Natasha could even blink, and then he called out, "I know you're there, so you might as well come out. Unless you don't care what happens to your friend here."
She didn't think they'd noticed her, so she held back and waited, though it pained her to do so. Her suspicions were confirmed when Clint stood, holding his weapon and hands above his head as he came out into the open.
"Just don't hurt her," he said, walking slowly toward them.
"Stop moving," the leader commanded, his gun still firmly to the head of his hostage. "Put your gun on the ground and kick it over here."
Clint obeyed, as she'd expected. There was no good reason for him to try anything yet, not with all of their attention trained on him. This would be up to her.
Silently, she sent a distress signal to SHIELD and then clipped herself to the repelling rope they'd set up earlier that night, waiting for her chance. If she could take out the leader when she dropped, she could leave it to Clint to take care of the guy who had Sally by the neck. She knew he had his backup in his ankle holster, and he was quick enough to neutralize two of the others before they even realized what was happening.
That said, it made her gut knot to see the remaining two agents hold their weapons on Clint. She wasn't surprised at the feeling, though she was a little unnerved by how it made her feel. They'd been in situations like this before, of course, but the roles had been reversed – she'd been the one surrounded, and he'd provided the distraction. For the first time, she started to understand the look in his eyes after missions like these, the way he stared at her as if he were drinking her in, the way he hung around her for more time than strictly necessary. The idea that he could be ripped from her at any moment . . .
She gritted her teeth. She could think about that later, though, after Clint and Sally were safe.
"Who do you work for?" the lead agent asked Clint.
"Hellenic Imports of . . . " Clint started.
The man laughed coldly. "Don't feed me that line of shit," he said. "We all know the quality of the people who work here. What are you? CIA? FBI?"
"Dude, I just work in the warehouse," Clint repeated, taking one small step closer to Sally.
The man cocked his pistol and pointed it at Clint, and that was the opportunity she'd been waiting for.
Natasha kicked off from the rafter, taking aim for the agents as she dropped, and the sound of her descent drew everyone's gaze upward.
Everyone's gaze, that is, except for Clint's. She saw him take out the man closest to him with one well placed elbow and a punch to the groin, even as she landed on top of the lead agent and brought him to his knees with the force of her weight. Sally was no fool, nor was she the sort of person to make the same mistake twice, so the moment that the agent was down, she ran for cover.
Natasha slid seamlessly into the well-practiced give and take that she and Clint had cultivated over the years, and if she'd been worried that things would be different, that they wouldn't be able to work together as efficiently now that their relationship had changed, all of those notions were well and truly dispelled as they took care of the small contingent of HYDRA agents.
She knocked out the second of the HYDRA agents and whipped her head around, still on guard as she took stock of the situation. Clint had subdued the other two agents and was already busy zip-tying their hands and feet, which just left . . .
"Don't move!" came Mark's voice.
She turned to find him pointing a gun at her face. He didn't look like he'd ever handled such a weapon before, though, and she guessed he'd picked it up off the ground from where it had been knocked aside during the confusion.
She held up her hands and approached Mark slowly, counting on the fact that he wouldn't want to kill someone in cold blood.
Probably.
"We're just here to help," she said calmly, her eyes never leaving Mark's hands where they were clutched around the gun. She widened her eyes, tried to look as harmless as she could in light of the fact that he'd probably seen her take out the two HYDRA agents only moments before. Still, men like Mark never really thought she was capable of half the things she could do, and he'd probably already rationalized that the only reason she'd been able to take care of the two agents was because she'd had the element of surprise on her side.
It wasn't.
"I said stop moving!" he shrieked. "Stand still or I'll blow your head off!"
"You might have an easier time of that," she said, still trying to look demure, "if you didn't have the safety on."
Mark blinked, just like she knew she would, and the second that his attention faltered was the second that she took the last two steps to cover the distance between them, to smack the gun out of his hands and punch him squarely in the face.
Well, that certainly felt awesome. The blood that started flowing from his nose was pretty nice, too.
"You won't get away with this!" Mark shouted, his voice echoing shrilly in the warehouse. She wondered if he even had the slightest clue what was going on here. Probably not. "My employers will . . ."
Rolling her eyes, Natasha hit him over the head with the butt of her glock. He slumped to the ground in a faint.
She turned back around, looking for Sally and expecting that her friend would be panicking or worse. Instead, she was staring at Natasha from the side of the room with an appraising look on her face.
"You know," Sally said thoughtfully. "I have been wanting to do that for years."
Natasha grinned.
By the time she was done with Mark (and maybe, yeah, she tied him up a little tighter than she strictly needed to), she could hear the comforting sound of police sirens approaching, and she knew that SHIELD wasn't far off either.
"You okay?" she asked, crossing the warehouse floor over to Clint. He had the beginnings of a nasty bruise forming on his forehead, but otherwise looked no worse for the wear.
"Better now that I don't have a gun shoved in my face," he said. "Nice shooting, by the way."
"Got a few pointers from this marksman I know a while back," she teased. "Annoying jackass, but his aim wasn't bad."
He winced as he carefully stretched, twisting in one direction than the other. "Annoying, you say? Because I heard he was charming and erudite."
She snorted. "Don't tell me they taught you words like erudite in the circus."
"I do read, you know," he said.
"Skin mags don't count."
"Spoilsport."
They were talking with the cops, giving the agent in charge a run down of events and their official contact information when she caught sight of Sally, sitting on a bench with a blanket draped loosely across her shoulders. Natasha touched Clint on the shoulder and excused herself.
"Hey," she said, sitting down on the bench beside her friend.
There were a lot of things Sally could have said in response to her greeting, and the majority of them were harsh (if completely warranted). Instead, Sally went with, "I'm guessing your real name isn't Rose."
"Natasha."
"Well, Natasha, what the hell am I supposed to do now?"
She didn't have an answer for her, not really, because what are you supposed to say to someone who has witnessed firsthand the violent downfall of the company they work for? There was no way Hellenic Imports would stay in business, not after something like this. Even if the cops didn't care, SHIELD would make sure of it.
Not for the first time, Natasha felt bad for the innocent bystanders in all of this, Sally included.
Her friend sighed into the night air. "I don't suppose I can tell anybody about this?"
It wasn't really a question, but Natasha said, "No. I mean, I guess you could but . . ."
"Then you'd have to kill me?" Sally finished with half a grin.
She smiled. "Uh, no, actually, I was going to say, you could but who would believe you?" she said, then added, "Killing works, too, though."
"Good. I always wanted to be threatened by a secret government agency." Sally turned a curious eye toward Natasha. "You do work for a secret government agency, right?"
"I'm afraid that is classified information," she said, then lowered her voice to add, "We're the good guys. Don't worry."
Sally smiled. "I wasn't. You're good people, Ro . . . Natasha."
She didn't think anyone had ever said anything like that about her before, or if they had, they hadn't known who Natasha really was. Sally knew, though, and the feeling that her words created was warm somewhere deep in her chest, a pleasant, happy feeling quite unlike anything she'd felt before.
"And Frank over there, he's not really Frank either, is he?" Sally asked, and Natasha couldn't help but thinking that she'd be a good fit for SHIELD. Most people didn't ask the kinds of questions Sally did. Most people would be freaking out right now. Sally, obviously, wasn't most people.
"No, he's not," Natasha confirmed.
Sally nodded. "So, do you two work together, or . . ."
Natasha ducked her head, feeling strangely shy about the turn in conversation. She wasn't really ready to talk about her relationship with Clint, not the real one, not yet. She admired him, cared for him, sure, but that other . . . thing was getting mixed up with the sex and hormones, and it was hard to put her finger precisely on what she did and did not think about Clint Barton.
Sally was expecting an answer though, not for Natasha to pine silently for the man standing less than one hundred yards away.
"He's my partner," she said because it was true, or at least as close to the truth as she could come up with.
Sally laughed heartily. "Is that what they're calling it these days?"
Clint called her name then, made a wide motion with his hand, and headed toward her car. They were done here, then.
"Well, Sally, I don't know if I'll see you again, but it was good to work with you. You going to be okay to get home?" Natasha asked as she stood.
"Yeah," she said. "Beth is coming by in a few to take me."
Natasha hated leaving things like this, always had, but that was the job. She went in, did her thing, and if she made friends, they never lasted.
"Be seeing you," Natasha said, smiling and hoping that her words weren't a lie. Maybe she could talk to Fury about Sally. There were always openings in the lower echelons of SHIELD.
Still, Natasha was never one for drawn out goodbyes, particularly when she'd already said her piece, so she turned and started walking toward Clint.
"Hey, Natasha?" Sally called after her. "For what it's worth? Whatever kind of partners you say you are, that man is in love with you."
She crooked half a smile over her shoulder. "Yeah, Sal. I know."
Natasha slid into the passenger's side of the car, happy to let Clint drive. She was feeling pretty strung out physically and emotionally, not really ready for all of this to be over. They would head back to their respective abodes now to gather up their personal belongings and any eyes only material. A SHIELD team would be through within the hour to scrub their places down, leaving no trace of the two agents.
Idly, she wondered if she could convince Clint to drive back to New York with her. They had a lot to talk about, and after an assignment like this one, she was fairly sure she could get Coulson to buy them a few days off before their next assignment. Judging from the tone of his hesitance when she'd slid into the car, she had a feeling Clint wouldn't be hard to convince.
"So what did Sally have to say?" he asked, adjusting the mirrors for his height and putting the car into gear.
Natasha smirked, thinking of her friend.
"Well," she replied, "if I told you that, I'd have to kill you."