A/N: Shoutout to Bree Colbern for reviewing! Thank you so much mah dear; I really hope you enjoy this chapter! And the same to all my other readers 3

Chapter 2

In the brief time that Clint and Laura were busy gazing into each other's eyes, the girls managed to get into a bit of trouble, as usual. Of course there were tracksuits that just happened to be wandering about, and they just happened to have taken a little boy, with a set of very rich parents, hostage, and Kate's purple Volkswagen Bug turned out to be an easy-to-spot target when they tried to covertly sneak up on the group.

This resulted in a very large fist-and-arrow fight, two tracksuits getting away with the boy in KATE'S car, Kate's remote security system malfunctioning at just the right time so that it rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof but didn't actually stop the car.

Kate took a dive through the sunroof using a grappling arrow and a makeshift kite that Nat swore would do the trick, made out of their camping tarp, and flew with not a small number of subsequent bruises through the sunroof, down into the vehicle, onto the tracksuits, and into traffic where they lost Nat and barely avoided a nasty collision that nearly sent the little boy out through the now-wide-opened windows. Tracksuits apparently didn't think their hostage valuable enough to reconcile the atrocity of making him wear a seatbelt, and the poor kid was too scared to remember.

This all resulted in several dozen tracksuits chasing them into the belly of New York as Kate devised a plan to return the kid without getting him shot. They finally picked up Nat and the girl pulled out all the stops in the wildest car-chase driving sequence that ever did make her mentor proud, the boy was smuggled into his own house, Kate dove out a window and Nat scooped her up and barreled away, round enough turns to completely lose sight of the tracksuits, and back around to Clint's apartment in less than half an hour.

Kate let out a whoop as she descended back through the window, plopping down on the seat with a sigh of satisfaction. Natalia gunned the gas and grinned as they pummeled down the streets.

"Sweetheart, I think we must be the most deadly women on the planet," Kate gave her a friendly sock in the shoulder, grabbing her water bottle and taking a swig.

Natalia grinned shyly at the praise, continuing to keep steady hands on the wheel.

"I think we need a better code name than 'Hawks'," Katie was continuing. "You and me make a great team. You pull 'em in, I arrest 'em. I don't know about how you feel, but for me, this has been the best time of my life," she leaned back in the seat. Lucky woofed his second opinion from the back seat.

(He had been along for the entire ride, too. He just was there to offer moral support, and didn't mind diving through windows to offer it. Especially when it involved sad little boys with salty, yummy tears on their faces he wanted to lick and lick until they were all gone)

Natasha chewed her lip thoughtfully, nodding her agreement. "I love this," she admitted freely.

"Sweeeet," Katie grinned. "You and me, Natalia and Kate. Okay, it has a bad ring to it," she groaned, "but we're sisters from other mothers, you know?"

All of a sudden, Nat froze. Hands still on the wheel, she turned and glared confusedly at Kate. "Don't—" she started, still driving. The traffic wasn't too bad considering they were in New York, so Kate wasn't all that concerned. "Don't call us that."

Kate's face softened from her utter bewilderment. "What—what? Wait, Nat, honey, don't call us what?"

Natalia pulled into a small roadway and stopped, meticulously setting the parking brake before she spoke. "We called each other that back then," she said in a small voice, staring down between the loops in the steering wheel toward her feet. "They used that word—told us we were all 'sisters'," her voice was bitter. "Then they made us kill each other."

Wordlessly, Kate leaned back, stunned. After a long moment, she swallowed and shook her head. "All right," she said slowly. "'BFF''s works all right for me," she shrugged.

She expected Natalia to shake it off, pretend nothing had bothered her, and get right back on the road but it didn't happen. Instead the girl's brow furrowed for a while, her face showing her to be deep in thought. After a while, she spoke again. "What is a sister, really?" Natalia asked Kate, genuinely puzzled.

Kate put her feet up on the dash. "Being a sister," she began slowly, "can mean you're blood-related, but it doesn't have to. It means that you're family. That no matter what happens, you never give up on each other. Even if one of you does give up and decides to do something awful, or ruins her life or makes a rotten decision, the other will always go back and try everything they can to help them. Those Red Room ****es—" anger seeped into her voice. "They wanted to break you so you'd do anything for them, and never care about anyone else. That's why they made you and the girls call each other 'sisters', because they're sick and twisted, and they wanted to ruin your idea of what being a sister was, so you'd never try to have a real one."

"So—" Natalia had her hands on the wheel still, gears in her head turning with every moment. "You're angry at them for doing that to me, so that makes you my sister?"

Kate smiled lopsidedly, proud of her for figuring that out so quickly, and proud to be called the sister of the coolest Russian kick-ass chick on the East Coast. "Yep. That's pretty much exactly what it means."

Natalia's openness faded as quickly as it had appeared as she gunned the gas, having flipped off the brake when Kate wasn't looking, and rocketed back out onto the dusty road. "Or BFF," she finalized, in a voice that wasn't to be argued with.

"Uh," Kate was confused, but decided to roll with whatever she could get. "Ok. Yeah, sure. We can totally just be BFF's."

"I like that," Natalia said with finality. She pulled up in front of Clint's apartment, only to see that the doorway was still empty of their would-be camping companions.

"We could always go pick up a new tarp," Kate pointed out dryly, realizing suddenly that Clint had probably packed it for himself to sleep in, so the girls could share a tent. She hoped he wouldn't be too mad that she had made a totally awesome parachute, like a flying squirrel, while wearing half of it on her back.

"There they are," Natalia pointed at last, as the couple appeared at the doorway, talking quietly back and forth as they locked the door and headed forward to meet them. The two were holding hands, so apparently, they hadn't fought. Or they'd fought and made up.

"We're not taking your car," Clint griped as they opened the backseat, staring at her posh grey leather interior, custom-designed by Kate's ever generous father's contributions to the Volkswagen Company.

Kate stared pointedly at Clint's beat up old—bicycle. Yep, bicycle. With a tiny motor on it, but that was basically all it was worthy of being referred to as.

"Told you you shouldn't have let me wreck your hot-rod-red," she shrugged unconcernedly.

"Wasn't my fault. Was Penny's. She made me wreck it. Move, dog," Clint muttered, shoving Lucky aside.

"Yeah, while she was tied up in her underwear in the back seat with duct tape over her mouth," Kate responded sarcastically.

Laura and Natalia merely grinned at each other in the rear-view mirror. They were used to these two's bickering by now. It was all meant in fun, anyway.

Well, most of it.

Two hours of Kate's famous radio karaoke later, they finally arrived at the national park and set about pulling out the tents. Lucky, characteristically, set about pulling them back down after they were partially set up, and in the end Clint had to literally hold him down while everyone else set it up.

"See, now?" Clint gestured to it, staring at the dog's eyes as if he could understand everything he was saying. "That's what it looks like without all the teeth marks in it. Now go inside, see what it looks like. It's gonna be your house for tonight, so you'd better be nice to it."

Natalia crawled inside the tent, grinning as she gazed up at the low, cozy ceiling and around at all the closely-surrounding walls. "Come, Lucky! Come in! Come see how nice this tent is!"

Lucky slurped up a bunch of slobber he'd panted all over the place in the mild spring heat and bounded happily through the doors into the birthday girl's waiting arms.

"Isn't it great?" Natalia whispered in his ear, so the others couldn't hear her. "Now we'll be all so close together, we won't be alone at all."