AN
Another chapter. Because I'm awesome. Kinda
Previously:
"You know, up until the point you decided to kill it, my arrow was still reusable." She lifts an eyebrow, her eyes sparkling in mischief as she fires another round across the room. Her bullet splits what was left of the arrow down the middle, leaving a mess of splinters and metal behind. "If you wanted it back, you shouldn't have left it." She tells me sardonically. I try not to smile at her antics.
Chapter 6"You want to join me for lunch?" I ask timidly. "Naah. I think I'm just going to go find a sparring partner. That Rumlow guy seems like he can take a hit," I chuckle. "Yeah, I guess he can. Just don't break anything… important." I'm only half joking.
She nods, and then redirects her attention at my bow. "You know Hawkeye. You should probably look into better ways to assemble trick arrows. They're gonna cost you something valuable in the field, if you have to keep screwing them on manually." I shrug.
I know her advice is sound, but I haven't found anything close to a solution yet. "I'll look into it. It's agent Barton by the way. It's stupid to keep addressing each other with codenames." She nods her head, cocking it a little side-ways, "Then you may call me Romanoff. Agent Romanoff. Call me recruit and I'll cut your dick off." I almost swallow. Almost.
"Deal," I answer instead, leaving for lunch.
I run into Fury on my way back from the cafeteria. He, in no uncertain terms, tells me that he is still running the show until further notice, meaning Romanoff will be staying with the recruits until he says so. I guess he's in a worse mood than Phil suspected.
So Agent Romanoff's sleeping quarters are officially alongside the recruits. Unofficially though… We quickly fall into an uneasy routine as the days pass. She keeps sneaking away after light's out and breaking into my apartment to use the guest room.
The second night she nearly gives me a heart attack. But, after a while, I just accept it. What helps is the readily brewed coffee waiting for me as I wake up in the morning, the only sign of her ever being there. Sometimes I think it's that same coffee, which allows her to break my lock, without me complaining.
Sometimes I think she breaks it on purpose. And after the fifth or sixth replacement, I just give her my spare keys. Of course Natasha either can't or won't hide her absence from her room every night and the other recruits catch on quickly. A few whispered words in the right ears a few days later, has Fury throwing his hands in the air and giving her the empty apartment next to mine.
Of course he tells me any shit she pulls is on me. I can't get myself to really care either way, as I'm doing my utter best to hold in my laugh. She has us all wrapped around her every whim, and we haven't even noticed it.
It's around the third month after Romanoff arrived, that Fury decides she's trustworthy enough to be allowed official status as shield agent. Of course, she still has to go through the final evaluation.
The night before the week all her evaluations will be held in, she arrives at my door. Again. She's been using her own apartment up until now, only opting for my guest room if she suffered a particularly bad nightmare. Of course I never ask her why she still shows up sometimes, and she never brings it up. But we both know not to ask questions we already have answers to. It's just a waste of time.
So it's not too abnormal for her to be at my door, but it is unusual for her to knock before entering. I open the door; "Yeah?" I ask her when just keeps standing there, instead of entering.
Finally she moves, wrapping her arms around my waste for a second, before releasing me. "I don't understand why you gave me a chance. But I wanted to thank you," she tells me, looking me straight in the eye. Then the tension seems to leave her as she heads straight for my kitchen.
When I don't follow immediately, she turns her head slightly, "We need to talk. Are you coming or not?"
When I've made us both a mug of coffee, her wrinkling her nose at the first sip, even though I know I made it exactly the way I know she would've, I sit down and wait for her to start. Whatever it is, something has her tensing up subconsciously.
"Remember the agents we fought in Budapest?" she finally asks. I nod my head, "Yeah, they were Hydra impersonators, right? S.H.I.E.L.D's been following a group like theirs for a while now. They operate remarkably similar to the original Nazi division," I remember her desperate look when she basically begged me to shoot her and not give them the satisfaction of killing the Black Widow.
"That's because they are the original Nazi division," I snort my coffee through my nose, spluttering as I try to breathe through my surprise. "Excuse me?" no way. Hydra's been a dead operation since, well, since before I joined S.H.I.E.L.D. "Hydra is not dead. They operate from the shadows now, but they are by no means… dead. They switched alliances from Germany to Russia, working mainly for the KGB now," she informs me.
"I told Fury that I would help take down Red Room for him. But I need you to know, I'm going to take down more than just the Red Room. I didn't tell Fury about Hydra, because he's not ready to hear his first mission had been a semi-failure. But if you're gonna be my partner, you need to know exactly what kind of shit-show were gonna be walking into come next week."
I rub over my eyes with my hands, trying to think through the oncoming headache. "If you don't want any part in this, I can drop you off somewhere after we dealt with the Red Room, and I'll come find you after… if I made it out alive," she goes on when I still don't say anything. That draws a reaction from me.
"No! Nonononono. If you're going on some suicide mission, you're going to need back up. And I'm the best back up you're going to get. We'll go on together. But can I at least tell Phil? If we don't make it, S.H.I.E.L.D needs to know one of their greatest threats is still alive, and Phil will know how to break it to Fury. But Widow, if you ever withhold information like that again, from me or Phil or Fury…" she cuts into my threat.
"…You won't do anything. I am a spy and an assassin. I'll always be withholding information. But I promise to share info that could lead to you or S.H.I.E.L.D getting hurt if I kept it a secret. And if you can't deal with that, then I'm sorry, but this partnership will never work out." I'm about five breaths from pissed, when my brain kicks in.
She's being honest enough to tell me that she won't always be honest. She's not making any false promises or skirting around the truth. Right now is probably the most brutally honest she'll ever be. So if she says she'll share if we need to know, I'll trust her to know when to share. I nod my head.
She still stares me down for a few extra seconds, making sure I understand. "You can tell agent Coulson," I nod again, and stand up from the table. I need to tell Phil now. He's always been my best bet when it came to altering the mission enough to add in an errand or two, without catching the suspicion of the higher ups.
As I pass through the doorway though, a knife goes flying past my head, lodging itself into the wall behind me. I stop walking, staring at it, then her. My eyebrows rise incredulously as I try not to show my surprise. "Only agent Coulson," her tone is unapologetic.
As it turns out, Phil is okay with it. "But Barton… you have to realize that if anything goes sideways while you guys are on your… other errands, I can't send a team in after you. You'll have no back-up," he says it in his mildly worried way. I nod my head, "Duly noted," and leave.