Wednesday dawned bright and clear, with the typical coolness of a late spring morning that would warm up as the day progressed. Alex had rented a car to get him to the address he had been provided, which was in a rural area of New Jersey. Ever since the accident had hadn't driven very much. He still had his license and wasn't opposed to driving when necessary, he just didn't enjoy it like he used to and didn't own a car anymore. He'd looked up the address and learned that it was a little over an hour drive from his hotel with no traffic. Given the typical New York traffic snarls, he figured it would be closer to two hours.

Remy had returned to the Institute the day before, saying something vague about the team needing him for a mission. Alex had trained with them on using his powers in combat, but he wasn't part of said team. The drawbacks to his powers were too severe. He still tended to pass out if he pushed himself too hard, and that made him a liability in long fights. He had seen what some of the others could do and was in awe of them, especially Jean. She had helped him refine his telekinesis on his infrequent visits to the Institute, and the things she could do blew his mind. Things he struggled with, she did with no apparent effort. If Alex was the kind of guy to get jealous he definitely would be.

With his mind wandering like it was the time passed quickly and he found himself approaching his destination sooner than he anticipated. He didn't know what he was expecting, and was a little taken aback when he saw that the facility he'd been directed to resembled a community college campus more than anything else. Only the aircraft hangars he could see in the distance dispelled the illusion. It made sense once he thought about it for a minute. If SHIELD was a clandestine organization they probably wouldn't want to advertise their existence with an obvious military base. Looking around, Alex realized that it actually was a repurposed college campus. He didn't know where SHIELD's headquarters was, but it stood to reason that they would have their training facilities in a separate location.

Once he pulled onto the campus it occurred to Alex that Agent Coulson hadn't given him any directions other than providing him with the street address, so he had no idea where he was supposed to be going. He parked his rented car in a parking lot that contained a number of other civilian vehicles, including a red 1962 Corvette with California plates. It was a beautiful car that looked a little out of place among the collection of nondescript sedans and SUVs, and Alex idly wondered who it belonged to. As he walked through the lot towards the buildings he heard the rumble of a powerful engine and turned around to see a purple 1970 Challenger pulling into the space next to where he'd left his rental. He paused for a moment to admire the car and was mildly surprised when he saw a flash of red hair emerging from the passenger side. That gave him his first clue, so he was not at all surprised when Hawkeye opened the drivers door and climbed out.

"Nice car." Alex called out, "Not exactly inconspicuous though."

Clint just shrugged at him with a slight smirk, "I'm not undercover, and I don't get to drive my personal car very often. I like to take advantage of the few opportunities I get."

"Original or resto-mod?" Alex asked the archer.

"She's all original spec now, except the stereo." Clint explained with a grin, "Should have seen her when I first bought her. Some idiot covered the original Plum Crazy with a god-awful red paintjob. It looked terrible. Spent five years restoring her on my downtime."

"He's very proud of it." Natasha put in dryly while slinging a bag over her shoulder.

"Do you have any idea how few 1970 440 Six-Pack RTs they made?" Clint said indignantly, "Not many people have one anymore."

"It's just a car." the redhead said with a shrug.

"Just a car?" the archer said, affronted, "It's a work of art. You're just downplaying it because you're still mad that I won't let you drive it."

Natasha just smirked. But Alex noticed she didn't dispute her partner's assertion.

"We figured we'd meet you here." Clint said by way of explanation, "Phil didn't tell you where you were supposed to go, and wandering around aimlessly is a good way to get shot around here. They take security pretty seriously."

Alex filed away the information that Agent Coulson's first name was Phil. He had guessed that Coulson was probably their handler based on the dynamic he'd observed, and hearing Hawkeye refer to him by his first name was as good as confirming that for him. Alex took a moment to read their emotions while they walked. Clint felt pretty calm, with maybe a little bit of excitement that he was keeping under wraps. He got almost nothing from Natasha. There was no sign of the nervousness he'd detected at the meeting a few days ago, and if it wasn't for the brief flares of emotion that were gone too quickly to identify he wouldn't even be able to tell she was there if he wasn't looking at her. He'd never met anyone who could control their emotions as completely as she did, and he still found it just as fascinating as he did when they'd first met the week before.

"So what does this assessment consist of?" he asked as they approached one of the buildings.

"Well, you're an Enhanced." Natasha explained, "So, like Coulson said, you won't be going through basic training with the rest of the recruits. The assessment is to determine what your level of skill is in the things a SHIELD agent needs to be proficient in."

"Such as?"

"Marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, surveillance techniques." the redhead rattled off, "And a few other things. Spy movies get most of the details wrong, but the general idea isn't too far off."

"The job is pretty boring most of the time." Clint added, "Except for those times you wish it was boring."

"Don't listen to Clint." Natasha advised Alex, "He's only saying that because he gets stuck sitting on rooftops for hours at a time. You probably won't be doing that unless you show an aptitude for being a sniper, which seems unlikely."

"Nat gets the exciting jobs." Clint said with a chuckle, "She goes undercover a lot. I'm usually her backup on those ops."

"Francis here is typically the primary on kill orders that have to be done from a distance." the spy told Alex with a casual shrug, "I'm better with pistols than I am rifles, and his bow is silent."

Alex didn't miss the dirty look the archer shot at his partner when she called him Francis. He guessed that it was probably his middle name and he wasn't fond of it. He didn't say anything though, and he caught just a tiny bit of disappointment coming from the redhead. She'd been trying to get more of a reaction from him and was disappointed when he didn't oblige her.

"So what's first?" Alex asked the pair.

"Marksmanship." Clint answered him with a devilish grin, "I'll be doing your assessment personally."

"Clint holds the only perfect score recorded on the new range so far." Natasha offered, "He's a little cocky about it, but he backs it up. And he's almost as good with a gun."

"Well this will be interesting." Alex muttered. This was the part of the assessment he was looking forward to the least.

"What was that?" Natasha asked with an arched eyebrow.

"Nothing."

Clint led them into a building that looked like it was once a fieldhouse and Alex was intrigued to see that it only appeared that way from the outside. The interior had been completely gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art firing range that looked like it extended for at least a couple hundred feet. There were twenty stations lined up near one end, and it appeared to be empty. Well, empty except for the suited form of Agent Coulson standing near the station on the far end.

"Any particular preference in sidearms?" Clint asked as they were approaching the station Coulson was at, "We have a pretty wide assortment, so you can use whatever you're most comfortable with. We don't really have 'standard' equipment. SHIELD figured out a long time ago that agents are more effective when they use the weapons they're used to. Most of the agents that don't go in the field very often stick with the P30, but you can use anything you want. As long as the gun you pick is chambered for the 9x19 Parabellum cartridge, ammunition is provided for you. Anything else you'll have to buy your own ammo."

"I don't really have a preference." Alex admitted. And was a little dismayed to note that Natasha had apparently picked up on something that she wasn't sharing with her partner and handler. The subtle smirk gave it away, and he was pretty sure she meant for him to see it.

"Okay, we'll go with a P30 then." Clint told him. He did not, however, tell him which of the five handguns arrayed on the table he was referring to, "It's fairly easy to use, so the learning curve isn't too bad for beginners."

Shit. Either Natasha had clued him in with a signal he didn't spot or Clint had also picked up on his reluctance and deduced what it meant for himself. Clint took pity on him and picked up the gun he was talking about to hand to him with a barely restrained smile. Then he handed him the magazine that Coulson had been loading while he talked and waited to see how quickly he figured it out. It was fairly obvious how the magazine was meant to be put in and Alex slid it home with a click. He was starting to turn towards the archer to ask a question when Clint abruptly reached out and put a hand on the gun he was holding to keep it pointed away from him.

"Always keep it pointed downrange." he explained patiently, "Never point a gun at something you're not prepared to kill. Especially if that something is me."

"I'll keep that in mind." Alex muttered.

"See that you do." Clint said, not ruffled in the slightest, "It's important. You shoot someone by accident on the range and you'll be immediately dismissed from SHIELD with no second chance. And you'll be prosecuted if they die."

Alex did a quick surface scan of the emotions around him and noted that all three of them were calm, with just a hint of amusement coming from Clint and Natasha.

Clint spent a few minutes explaining the ins and outs of how the pistol he was holding worked before handing Alex what looked like a set of expensive headphones. He glanced over to see that Coulson and Natasha had already put similar ones on.

"Put these on." he said, "You won't be able to wear them in the field, but there's no reason to damage your hearing during target practice. They're designed so you can hear more or less normally, but they deaden any sounds above a certain decibel level."

Once he was set, Alex pulled the slide back to cock the pistol like Clint had showed him and aimed it at the the target that suddenly seemed a lot farther away. He pulled the trigger and was momentarily confused when it didn't move and the gun failed to fire. He heard a quiet snicker behind him and felt his face heating up.

"Be nice, Nat." Clint chided his partner, "Not everyone started shooting at six like you. Cut him some slack, he's new at this."

"Sorry." she said. But she didn't sound particularly sorry and her amusement hadn't faded at all.

"See that little lever by your right thumb?" Clint asked, and then continued before Alex could reply, "That's the safety. It keeps it from firing when you don't want it to. Slide it over until you see the little red dot. Once you see the dot it's ready to fire. Try again."

This time when Alex aimed and pulled the trigger the gun fired with a bang that he was sure probably would have hurt his ears if Clint hadn't insisted he wear hearing protection. He looked at the target and was chagrined to see there wasn't a mark on it. He'd missed it completely. Alex felt the amusement coming from Natasha and noticed her walking away briskly with her bag out of the corner of his eye. Clint noticed too and said something about it.

"Nat's not great about positive reinforcement." he explained, "Her training was pretty harsh, so she doesn't have a lot of patience with newbies. She's walking away because she knows laughing at you would be counterproductive. She doesn't mean anything by it, so don't take it personally. It's a product of how she grew up."

"Which was?" Alex inquired.

"You'll have to ask her." Clint told him, "That's not my story to tell. I doubt she'll tell you much of anything though, so I wouldn't even bother to ask until she knows you a little better. She doesn't like you much, just so you know. You make her uncomfortable."

"Why?"

"No one can read her if she doesn't want them to." Clint explained briefly, "So the fact that you can tell what she's hiding bothers her. She'll get over herself eventually, but she's probably going to avoid you as much as she can for a while."

"You know her story?" Alex asked as he lined up his next shot.

"I know some." the archer replied, "Enough to know her life really sucked before she came here. She doesn't like to talk about it."

Alex fired again and was gratified to see that he had at least hit the target this time. It was in the bottom left corner of the paper, but there was a plainly visible hole in it now.

"How did she come to be here?" Alex asked his instructor, "Remy told me she used to be KGB. How's that work?"

"Loosen up some." Clint told him, not even trying to disguise his deflection. He wasn't being rude about it, but he was tacitly making it very clear he had no intention of answering that question, "If you're too tense when you fire it will throw off your aim because your muscles are working against each other. And don't close your eyes when you pull the trigger, it's not gonna hurt you."

Clint walked around him to see his stance from different angles. When Alex settled himself in to aim at the target again he felt Clint's boot lightly tapping the inside of his left heel.

"Widen your stance a little." he instructed, "You can't always take a perfect shooting stance in the field. But you need to learn how to do it right before you start winging it. Better to get in the habit now so you don't have to unlearn bad ones later."

He followed Clint's instructions after taking a second to run through them again and fired his third round. A little better. It was still nowhere close to the center, but he had at least clipped the black section.

"Would you believe I've never fired a gun before?" Alex asked wryly.

Clint raised his eyebrows and glanced at the target before looking back at him.

"I would absolutely believe that." he said dryly.

Coulson suddenly spoke up from where he had been observing farther back.

"With your abilities you won't be required to carry a sidearm if you don't want to." he said mildly, "But you are still required to qualify with one before you'll be cleared for field duty."

The man was so calm Alex had actually forgotten he was there. He'd been too focused on what Clint was telling him to notice he was still observing. They spent the next fifteen minutes or so working with Alex, with Coulson offering a few tips as well now.

After he had gone through three magazines and not managed to hit the center or really even achieve any consistency, Alex's frustration was starting to get to him. He popped a bullet out of the fourth and final magazine Coulson had prepared for him and tossed it up in the air a couple times. With an annoyed sound, he flicked the bullet directly forward before grabbing it with his power and propelling it through the dead center of the target as hard as he could. The silence that fell over Clint and Coulson was only broken by the sound of the bullet bouncing off the far wall two hundred feet away.

"Yeah, I think we're done for today." Clint said, looking a little pale as he did.

"Agreed." Coulson said, before exchanging a glance with his agent.

"We can work on it more later." the archer said, "It takes some practice before you're going to be any good at it."

"So what's next?" Alex asked the two men.

"Hand-to-hand assessment." Coulson told him dryly, "Agent Romanoff will be the one doing that. It's not ideal because her methods aren't exactly SHIELD standard, but the only other agents we have on her level are on assignment. She's the most qualified person on base to assess your ability right now."

"And between you and me?" Clint put in, "She hasn't said anything, but I think she's been looking forward to kicking your ass."

"You think she's going to?"

"Yes."

Both men said it simultaneously and with zero hesitation. Alex started feeling a little apprehensive hearing that. If these clearly skilled professionals though that highly of her ability, there was probably a very good reason for it.

Coulson led them out the door and down a short hall leading to the other half of the former fieldhouse. Alex wasn't surprised to see that the other half had been converted into a gym. There were exercise machines lined up against the wall, some of which Alex didn't even recognize. The center of the space was given over to a forty by forty mat that didn't look like it had a lot of cushion to it. Towards one corner of it Alex spotted Natasha going through a series a stretches that made his tendons ache to see. She had her back to them and had just folded herself completely in half at the waist before dropping down into a full split.

"She's doing that on purpose." Clint said quietly next to him, "None of us are that flexible and she knows we cringe watching her do it. I guarantee you she wasn't doing that before we walked into the room. She also knows you just looked at her ass. My recommendation? Don't lie to her if she says something. She'll let it slide if you admit it, but if you try to lie about it she's going to be pissed."

Alex noted that the outfit she had on left very little to the imagination, consisting of yoga pants and a tight tank top. Both black. When she turned around he noticed that she wasn't wearing a bra.

"That's mean, Nat." Clint muttered. He had noticed too.

"What is?"

"The way she's dressed." Clint explained, "She usually spars in looser clothes. Don't let her looks distract you. She's gorgeous and she knows it, and uses it to her advantage all the time when she's dealing with men. If she catches you staring she'll hit you harder, and she's probably going to try to bait you into it. Don't fall for it. She wants to know how well you can keep your wits about you in a fight, and bouncing tits are distracting."

Having noticed they'd arrived, or rather letting them know she'd noticed, Natasha started heading in their direction. She was putting a lot more bounce into her steps than usual and Alex had to make an effort to keep his eyes off her chest, which was doing some very interesting things right then.

"Told ya." Clint said quietly, "Good luck, you're gonna need it. She's not going to go easy on you. I don't think she knows how."

When Natasha reached them she silently held her arms out to Clint, who started wrapping her hands and wrists with white tape he'd acquired from somewhere. While he was taping her hands she turned to stare directly at Alex with a neutral expression.

"Enjoy the view, Myers?"

"Yes, ma'am." he replied with a short nod. The only reaction of any kind to his admission was a twitch at the corner of her mouth.

"Tape his too." she instructed her partner, "He probably won't need it, but he might get lucky."

Alex was tempted to call it arrogance, but that wasn't what he felt in the brief flare he got from her. She was just that confident that he wouldn't be able to touch her unless she allowed it. In his experience, if someone was that calmly confident about something it usually meant they had earned it. Oddly enough, she reminded him of Logan more than anyone else right then.

"This should go without saying." Natasha addressed him in a terse tone, "But no powers. We need to know where you're at without them. If you ever need to go undercover you won't be able to use them without giving yourself away."

When Alex nodded his understanding she spun on her heel and walked to the center of the mat.

"Alright, let's go." she said, "Attack me."

With a little apprehension, Alex approached her and tried a feint with his left hand before striking with his right. His opponent totally ignored the feint and just flowed around his punch. The next thing he knew, Alex was on his face on the mat with only the vaguest idea how he'd gotten there. When his punch didn't connect he extended himself too far and she used his own momentum against him to put him on the mat. Which confirmed his earlier suspicion. It didn't have much cushion.

"Try again." she instructed and stepped back to let him get up.

He tried a kick next, with almost identical results. He ended up on the mat again, this time on his back. At least he saw what she did this time. Not that he could do anything about it, but he saw it. At the same time he threw his kick Natasha dropped into a low spin and hooked his supporting leg out from underneath him with her foot.

It was honestly a little humbling. Alex had thought he was pretty good at fighting. He'd certainly gotten his ass kicked enough times that he'd learned quite a bit over the years. Right now he was getting a firsthand lesson in the difference between holding your own in a brawl and being truly skilled at fighting. And it was a big difference.

They continued for another few minutes and it occurred to Alex that Natasha hadn't thrown a single strike at him yet. She was just evading his attempts to hit her and putting him on the mat in increasingly more complicated ways. She was also moving her body in ways that would have been extremely distracting if Clint hadn't warned him beforehand. After one such movement he didn't react to she took her eyes off him for a split second to shoot a suspicious glance at her partner.

Alex took advantage of the lapse in concentration and threw a jab, not willing to commit to more if she was trying to bait him. Which she had done a couple times. Natasha turned back to face him at the same time he swung and was just as surprised as he was when he actually connected and punched her in the mouth.

"Not bad." she said, holding up one finger and stepping back, "Caught me napping. That stung a bit."

She pressed a hand against her mouth before pulling it away to look at it. Satisfied that he hadn't split her lip open, Natasha stepped forward again. Her face had taken on a curiously blank expression that had Clint and Coulson glancing at each other in concern.

"Nat...don't break him on his first day." Clint called out. She just snorted quietly in response and moved.

The flurry of strikes that came at him was as unexpected as it was vicious. She hit Alex six or seven times before he could even react in any meaningful way. He honestly lost count, it could have been more. He could tell she was pulling her punches, but it still hurt enough to make her point. The point being that she had been toying with him up until now. Finally, she kicked him in the chest to force him backwards and create space between them. Then she launched herself in the air and wrapped her thighs around his head. Once her legs were locked she jerked her torso backwards and sideways, rolling him into something like the triangle choke that he'd seen MMA fighters do. He wasn't entirely sure how she had gotten his arm threaded between her legs, but she had it locked in by the time they came to a stop on the mat. Natasha flexed her thighs to put pressure on his neck, and he immediately understood that if this was a real fight she would have just broken it. There was no need to tap out. It was over, and everyone in the room knew it.

"You're dead." she told him before releasing him. Then she was rolling to her feet and walking off the mat.

"So?" Coulson asked mildly.

"He needs work, but he's got a good foundation." she replied, "A few bad habits he needs to break, but he's better than probably eighty percent of the new recruits. Plus, he actually managed to hit me. Only a few of them have ever pulled that off in the first match. It was a sucker punch, but his timing was pretty good. Oh, and Clint? Don't undermine me next time."

Natasha never stopped walking while she was answering Coulson. Her last few words carried to them through the slowly closing door of the women's locker room. Clint hadn't been kidding about her avoiding him. Once her assigned task was done she removed herself from Alex's presence as soon as she possibly could.

"Don't take it personally." Clint told him again, shaking his head, "She'll never admit it, but I think you freak her out a little bit."

"You're right." Alex replied, "Not sure why though."

Clint just made a humming sound and raised an eyebrow at him, giving Alex the sense that he knew why but wasn't going to share it.

"You want to explain why you kept looking at Nat like that when you thought no one was looking?" Clint asked shrewdly, "I doubt it's because you think she's hot, even though an idiot could tell you do. It's something else. Wanna share?"

"Not really." Alex flatly told the way-too-perceptive-for-his-liking archer. There were two distinct reasons he might have been caught looking at her in some kind of way, and he wasn't keen on discussing either one of them.

"Just as long as it isn't a problem." Clint said deceptively softly, "She's my partner and my best friend. If you're any kind of threat to her, you won't be for long."

Alex scanned the archer's emotional state briefly and found that he was still completely calm. He wasn't even trying to be intimidating, he was just making a simple statement of fact. And that was honestly scarier than if he'd been trying to scare him. He didn't come right out and say it, but the meaning behind what he did say was crystal clear: Fuck with her and I'll kill you. And Alex found himself completely believing him.

He was starting to understand why Remy hadn't wanted to come up against this pair. They were both scary in completely different ways. Natasha had just conclusively proven that she could probably kill him in dozens of different ways with her bare hands, most of them involving fractured vertebrae. And Clint? He disguised it with an affable personality and was a genuinely likable guy. And then he said or did something that reminded you just how dangerous he really was. Like right now.

"I have no intention of doing anything to hurt her." Alex told the suddenly-much-scarier guy standing in front of him, making a point of meeting his gaze in the process, "I give you my word."

Clint gave him a long, appraising look, and Alex suddenly understood how he had gotten his callsign. It felt like he was looking right through him and seeing everything he was trying to hide, and it wasn't fun.

"Okay." he said quietly with a serious nod. Alex got the impression that Clint had accepted that he wasn't a threat to his partner now, but wasn't entirely convinced that he wouldn't be in the future. Natasha was clearly not the only one here with trust issues. Clint just hid his better.

"Well, it looks like it's just you and me now." Clint said, back to being the same likable guy he'd been a couple minutes prior. Alex glanced around and realized he was right. At some point in the last couple minutes Coulson had vanished, and he hadn't noticed.

The archer noted his confusion and chuckled.

"I'm not sure how he does it either." he told Alex, "He shouldn't be able to be that quiet in those shoes, but he can be sneaky as hell when he wants to be. He even got Nat a couple times, and she's paranoid. It's almost impossible to sneak up on her."

"So now what?" Alex asked curiously. So far what they were doing didn't feel very much like spy training. It almost felt more like they were training him to be a soldier.

"Surveillance." Clint said with a grin, "My specialty."

"I thought you were a sniper?" Alex wondered.

"That too." his instructor admitted, "But I get way more surveillance missions than I do kill orders. Believe it or not, we don't actually get kill orders all that often. It just seems like a lot because those missions are handed out to Specialists and STRIKE Team Delta, which is a pretty small group of people."

Clint walked out of the room with a 'follow me' gesture and led Alex to the next building over. Once they were inside, he saw that this building was a depressingly normal classroom building. Alex followed Clint to a conference room down a side hallway and his guide shut the door behind them. There was a TV on the table, which Clint turned on.

"This is two minutes of security camera footage from a bombing a year and a half ago in downtown Cairo." he explained, "The man who set the bomb is on this tape. I want you to tell me who it was. You can watch it as many times as you need to in order to give me the correct answer. Future lessons will have time limits."

After his explanation Clint pressed play on the remote and sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table with his feet kicked up on it. He tossed Alex the remote and leaned back in the chair, making himself comfortable for what could be a long wait.

Alex watched the entire two minutes and saw...nothing. He had no clue who the culprit was. He played it three more times and was no closer to an answer than he was after the first time. It was a street scene filmed from the corner of what was likely a bank. There was a huge throng of people milling around on the street during a busy time of day, and the person he was looking for could have been any one of them. The footage ended with an explosion just to the right of the frame that apparently took out the camera, because the scene disappeared into static. He had just pressed play again when Clint's voice broke the silence.

"Don't focus so hard on individual people." he said, "Relax your eyes and look at the whole picture, and then focus on what looks out of place. It'll come to you."

Alex pressed play again and tried to take Clint's advice. The first time through he saw even less than before. The second time through trying it that way he thought he saw...something. He played it twice more to be sure, this time focusing on the man in the video that had jumped out at him.

"This guy." he said, pausing the video and pointing at the screen.

"What makes you think it's him?" Clint asked.

"He spent almost the whole time just looking around like he was waiting for something." Alex explained, "And about thirty seconds before the bomb went off he started walking away. He also seemed to know where the camera was, because he didn't look directly at it once. There isn't a single good look at his face in the entire two minutes."

"Correct." Clint told him with a nod, "That man was a freelancer paid to blow up a building as a statement. He had a trigger in his pocket, so he was standing there waiting for the maximum number of people in the blast zone. He took forty-one innocent lives and injured dozens more. We terminated him a week after that video was filmed. When Nat put a bullet in his head he was planning another bombing that would have taken more lives. That's why we do what we do. We couldn't save those forty-one people, but we made sure he'd never kill anyone else. And he would have if we hadn't stopped him."

"So, anything else?" Alex asked him.

"Not for today." Clint answered with a head shake, "There's some boring classroom stuff, but I think Coulson was planning on doing that tomorrow or Friday. There's also undercover work, which you're not going to start on for a while. Nat is going to work with you on that, it's her specialty. Coulson asked her and she said she'd do it, but she's not happy about it. She really doesn't like you."

Alex was well aware of that, and it posed a problem for him. Xavier had assigned him the task of trying to determine if she was a sleeper agent, but it was hard to make any progress on that when she refused to be in the same room with him if she didn't absolutely have to be.

"I didn't do anything to her, though." he explained.

"I know." Clint said, "If it makes you feel any better I don't think she dislikes you as a person. She'd be bitchier to you if that was the case, but she's staying professional. She just doesn't like that you can tell what emotions she's hiding."

"If I ask you why am I going to get an answer?" Alex wondered.

Clint just shrugged in response.

"Okay...why?"

"There's two reasons." Clint replied, "I'll give you one of them."

"Fair enough." Alex said with a nod.

"It's a matter of professional pride." the archer explained, "Her job involves making people believe she's someone she's not, and she's the best at it I've ever seen. She does that by only letting them see what she wants them to see. You know when she's lying and can tell the emotions she isn't showing. She considers you a threat to her specifically and hates that her usual methods don't work on you. And she hasn't figured out how to deal with you yet, so she's going to avoid you until she does. The other reason is personal and I won't betray her trust like that."

"She sounds complicated."

"Very." Clint agreed, "She's also pissed at me right now for warning you what she was going to do. She figured it out when you didn't react to her practically shoving her boobs in your face. That usually works."

"Not gonna lie, Clint." Alex admitted, "It almost worked anyway. Why'd you warn me?"

"I wanted it to be a fair fight so we could actually get an accurate idea of your skill level." he explained with a shrug, "If her distractions had worked it would have made you look worse than you really are."

"Makes sense."

"Yeah, I thought so." Clint said, "I gotta go now. Coulson is supposed to brief me and Nat on a mission we've got in a few days. The dorms are in the big building at the east end of campus. Go give them your name and they'll get you set up. Your temporary badge should be waiting for you in your room. Don't go anywhere else before you have it."

With that said Clint got up and left the room. Alex thought about their interactions through the course of the day and was left with the impression that Clint had learned a lot more about him than he was letting on. He left the building and started walking to where he'd been directed.

He did not notice Natasha watching him from the roof of the building across the courtyard.

A/N:

Only one more chapter before we finally get to some action and see what Alex can do in a real fight.

I figured a triangle choke would be the best way to describe what Natasha does with her legs in a fight when she jumps on someone. What she did at the beginning of Avengers when Coulson called her in was a WWE move that would never work for real, but what she did to Happy in Iron Man 2 was legit. They portray that move very inconsistently across the movies.