'There's red on my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out.'
They were in the holding room in which Clint had shook off the last of Loki's mind control just minutes ago. Clint did not respond to Natasha's statement, as they allowed everything unsaid to fill up the silence between the two of them. I was so worried about you. I'm sorry for having to fight you. It wasn't your fault, Clint, it was all Loki. Natasha could still remember the phone call she had received from Coulson a couple days ago, the chill that ran down her spine as she was informed that 'Barton's been compromised. She could still remember the fight in the helicarrier just hours ago,when he had detected her presence and turned around, as a nauseating sense of deja vu filled her as she stared into his emotionless blue eyes the shade of ice.
She was halfway through her trip down memory lane when Clint brought her back to reality by wrapping his arms around her, pulling her close. She let him. He had been her anchor for so long, she was more than willing to be his for as long as he needed her to be. She buried her face in his chest, breathed him in. After some time she pulled herself away from him then and looked up, their eyes met and instinctively she leaned forward to close the distance between their lips.
'I was so scared that you weren't going to come back,' she told him when they finally parted, as he gently placed his forehead against hers.
A jolt ran through him at that, a dark shadow flitted across his eyes as he turned away from her, eyes fixated at the wall at the other end of the room. 'What, like James?' he spat out bitterly. She knew why he asked that question- it was meant to hurt her- it reminded her a bit too much of how she used to treat him when she first joined SHIELD, how she pushed him away, distanced herself from him in every way he could, for fear that he would get too close, for fear that one day she would end up having to hurt him, the same way she had been made to hurt so many others of her friends before him.
'Clint,' she stated firmly, 'Don't do this to yourself. Don't do this to us. Please.'
He looks at her and could see his pain mirrored in her eyes. Regret plunged into him like a knife. It was wrong for him to bring it up. He buried his face in his hands, 'I am so sorry, Tasha.' He could still remember how that name 'James' had made its way into their lives. Natasha had been wheeled in on a gurney after a mission, a gunshot wound clean through her stomach, murmuring 'James James James' over and over as she was wheeled into the operating room, barely conscious, her eyes rolling about in her head as she seeked for something that only she could see. Clint had asked her about it later, when he came by to check on her after the operation which she had barely managed to survive. She had thrown a lethal glare at him and refused to talk to him for the rest of his visit.
'I met James back in the Red Room. He was the one who trained me and made me the Black Widow.' Natasha's willingness to respond took Clint by surprise.
He had been introduced to Natasha as the Winter Soldier, as her new mentor. He was firm but not cruel, unlike the many others before him. She could not remember how old she was then- it had been brought to her attention that the Treatments provided by the Red Room (the original one may have burned down, yet the superiors had still chosen to name the secret division within the Bolshoi the exact same thing) warped her growth, slowed it down, made the concept of 'age' mean nothing to her. She had been told that she could be eighty and still look not a day beyond twenty, if she wanted to. Because of that, she had stopped keeping track after she aged past 18. After all, age meant nothing in the Red Room.
There was something different about the Winter Soldier. That was the justification she had given herself when a sparring session had resulted in her being pinned to the floor and them looking into each other's eyes a bit too long, when she'd feel this flutter in her chest whenever they were together. One day they passed by each other in an empty corridor and he had gripped her arm tightly and whispered to her, a lost, a frightened look in his eyes (in the most unraveled state she had ever seen him in), 'Call me James,' (she had figured then that his name was not something he was supposed to know, that he had initially placed his life in her hands for if she were to tell any of her superiors they would almost definitely punish him). She had done so every single time they were sure that noone was listening. At some point, he gifted her with a kitten. It was a stray, with sleek black fur and an affinity to nudge against her and purr fondly whenever she scratched its underbelly. That was another one of their many little secrets (of course keeping pets in the Red Room was forbidden). Their relationship continued to grow after that. They'd hold hands under the table, kiss in the hidden corners of the training compund.
Yet despite their discretion, the Red Room found out. They always did.
She met James in the corridor one day. He was followed by two security guards, the hostility in their posture making it a bit too prominent that James was in trouble. A sense of foreboding filled her as she looked away from them. From the corner of her eye, she saw James restlessly tap his fingers against his leg. the rhythm was familiar. It was Morse code. She stiffened. 'Run'. He paused for three seconds. He tapped it again, this time more urgently. She nodded imperceptibly. The look in his eyes was enough for her to know that he had saw it. And all of a sudden he slammed his elbow into the nose of the guard behind him, kicking the other one right in the gut. And Natasha ran, as the alarm bells began to go off, as a steady stream of guards began to fill the corridors, running towards James's direction. Run. His message throbbed in her head. Run. She slipped into a medical room nearby to grab some Treatment pills, just in case (she was still young, still fearful of the rumours that the lack of Treatment pills meant death). She left the compound with minimal resistance. It appeared that all the security resources had been reallocated to James. A wave of concern and sadness ran through her as she thought of him. She knew full well that he had meant to act as a distraction so that she could leave and avoid whatever punishment that was meant for her. Of course, she chastised herself, of course they knew. She should have known better.
She folded herself in a nook of a building nearby to throw them off her trail, just in case they noticed that she was missing. She could see right into her bedroom window from this corner. It was where she was supposed to be, where all of them were supposed to be, at the time of the day. It was then that she noticed the black lump of fur on her bed from which a steady stream of blood was gushing from, staining her bedsheets with a blinding shade of crimson. Kitty.
Pulling a knife out from her boots, she dug it into her arm and pulled her Red Room tracker out. Just in time. It began to blip and she could feel bile rise up her throat as she decoded the message. 'Love is for children, Miss Romanoff. You should have known better.' It was then that purple, thick liquid began to leak out of her tracker. Poison. she recognized it. It was one of the most lethal ones, only activated when an agent had been defected. Of course. They had to eliminate her to get James to focus, to not be hindered in any way. She should have known. She turned around and ran and ran, the way James had told her to.
The Red Room had sent agents after her, and after she killed all of those who were sent after her, they stopped. Instead, they chose to reach a simple compromise with her. She would finish up the missions she was supposed to, and they would leave her alone, allow her to become a freelance agent, as long as she did not directly interfere with the KGB. She had continued with that compromise until the day she met Clint.
'James and I were close,' Natasha continued to tell Clint, choosing her words carefully. 'We dated until our superiors found out and tried to kill me.'
The next time she saw him was during the mission which had ultimately ended up with her on a hospital gurney, being wheeled into the SHIELD medical room. She was transporting this old professor of some sort on her motorcycle when he appeared from nowhere, a gun in his hands. She had allowed his name to slip out of her lips. Yet he turned around, his eyes devoid of any form of recognition, and it was then that she realised what it was that the KGB had done to punish him. It was then that he shot her.
'He was the one who shot me on that mission, but that wasn't him. The Red Room had done things with him-' her voice broke then, and Clint placed a hand gently on her shoulder. 'And then all that happened to you and I was so frightened that that would happen to you too.'
Clint held her close, running his hands through her hair, his heart aching as she completed her story. He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead and said, 'Tasha, your life sucks and every time I hear about your past I feel like stabbing everyone who had ever hurt you in the eye. I'd also be happy to continue talking to you about this whole Avengers thing but right now, I've just realised that Loki had not been very lenient with giving me pee breaks so I really need to go to the toilet right now.'
They never got around to talking about 'the whole Avengers thing'. By the time Clint was done, Cap had barged in and told them that there was work to do. And so they went off to save the world.