A Gift From: geckoholic
Type Of Gift: fic
Title: Stay Away From The Sun
A Gift For: meatball42
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: They stand and stare at each other from across the room, and they know, recognition bouncing between them like a stray bullet. (Soulmates AU)
Author's Note: n/a


banner by geckoholic


Natasha has been in the Red Room for almost six months. She can't be entirely sure, time passes differently when the sun is something she only gets to see for the walk in the yard in the afternoon, the hours she dreads as much as she yearns for them. Not all the girls who get sent outside come back in. Natasha's nine, and she already has blood on her hands.

At night, she still dreams about her parents. The tiny apartment in the city, the way her father smelled when he came home: motor oil on his clothes, his shoulders hunched from exhaustion, but his face lighting up when she ran into his arms. The laugh of her mother, chiding them both for getting Natasha's clothes dirty, telling them to clean up before dinner. Her handlers tell her these dreams are a weakness. For Natasha, they're what's keeping her alive.

Tonight, she's dreaming about another place entirely. She's in the country, a small farm house surrounded by fields of grass and dying, badly attended crops. At the sight, she remembers how they looked when she was little, her grandparents still around to care for the land, large green plants swaying in a gentle breeze. His father doesn't care for the farm; her mother can't till it all on her own, and he and his brother are too young to be of much help.

She... no, he's standing in the barn, having fled from the vicious anger that permeates the house whenever his father's home, and he's setting up empty bottles as targets. Last week, Barney showed him how to flip a coin a way that makes a bottle shatter into pieces, and he's practiced every second he had to himself ever since.

The noise of the glass breaking doesn't quite cover up the yelling and the crying from the house, and he flinches when he recognizes Barney's voice among the shouted insults. Unlike him, Barney never involves himself in an argument on purpose. Between the two of them, his brother's the calmer one, more reasonable, less of a temper. It doesn't always save him.

He puts his hands over his ears and slides down one wooden wall, settling in the hay-covered dirt on the ground, and closes his eyes, wishing himself away, eyes widening when suddenly the barn blurs and dormitory comes back into focus. There's another conscience touching hers, very briefly, like an electric current shooting through her nervous system, and then the moment's gone.

Little as she is, Natasha is no stranger to violence nor fear. But right now, she's confused and frightened in a way that's new and alien, and yet she wants to commit this moment to memory in a way that her handlers won't be able to touch. She shudders, curls up with her legs to her chest, and spends the rest of the night staring at the metal door of her prison. Thinks about stories her mother told her when she was still alive, about people who are blessed with glimpses of the one they're fated to meet. It was like that for her grandparents, she'd said, and they'd loved each other until the day they died.

But that's just what they are: stories. And if she is to survive in this world, she'd better forget them before it's too late.


***


For all that she went through, Clint's mother was an incurable romantic. Even when she'd cried herself to sleep every night, loud enough that Clint could sometimes hear her through the thin walls, she still clung to the belief that destiny had a plan for her, and if she'd only followed it, everything would be okay.

She believed in that, right until her death.

His parents were fated. From early childhood on, they'd dreamed about each other, shared memories and nightmares. They met when they were barely twenty, got married in the space of weeks, and before the year was out, his mother was pregnant with Barney. She never told Clint when the drinking and the beatings and the yelling started, but he himself doesn't remember anything else.

Now she's dead, and so is his father, and Barney's fucking off to god-knows-where every other night, will soon leave him behind, he's sure. And Clint, he's dreaming.

He sits on his bed in the orphanage, catalogs the water stains and the patters of peeling paint on the walls, throws a small ball he stole from the playground in the yard against the wall and catches it, again and again, until the dull, rhythmic noises it makes volleying back and forth numbs his mind.

Almost daily, Clint dreams of a red-haired girl. He saw her fight. He saw her kill. He watched her blood seep into the snow of a faraway country, her pain and fear lingering in his mind long until after he woke. She's Russian, he thinks; the language she speaks sounds like the cardboard Russian villains from the movies they play in the common room every other Friday.

He doesn't believe in fate, and if she ever crosses his path, he'll run the other way as fast as he possibly can.

Barney's voice in the hallway makes him perk up, catch his ball the next time it volleys back. He quells the surprise that always floods him lately when he finds he's not alone yet, the last of his family sticking around another day.

When he enters their room, Barney's grinning big. “Pack your bags,” he says. “We're leaving, little brother. Tonight. Be ready.”

Then he's gone without saying a word about where they're going, and Clint considers being contrary, staying behind, trying his luck alone. But Bartons aren't lucky, not his mother, not him, and if they're going to drown they might as well do it together.


***


At eighteen, Natasha's become the Red Room's finest. The prodigy, the shining example a new set of girls whispers about when they're supposed to be asleep in their beds. She's deadly and efficient. She doesn't harbor regrets. She follows her orders and she always, always succeeds. Her body and mind belong to her country, her handlers, her superiors.

Except for when she's asleep. Then she watches her American boy shoot and leap in front of a small but cheering crowd, watches him slip away later to steal together the difference between what they earn and what they need. She knows he doesn't like that, but he's a survivor, like her. Natasha tries not to wonder when they'll meet. Once or twice, she was sent to his home country, her heart beating out of her chest each time she got the assignment. But she can wait; they'll find each other eventually.

Another years passes, then two, and it's starting to become clearer how their paths will cross. He leaves the circus, becomes a fighter, becomes an agent. They're on opposing sides of a shadow war that has been fought for centuries and will likely continue long after they're dead. He becomes a legend all of his own.

They meet in an abandoned warehouse in Budapest, surrounded by police who have been scouring the city for her, not looking to take her prisoner. She figures he's here for much the same reason. They stand and stare at each other from across the room, and they know, recognition bouncing between them like a stray bullet.

He doesn't lower his bow, keeps his arrow nocked. Her gun doesn't waver either.

“I've been sent here to kill you,” he says, sounding almost defensive. Natasha knows how kill missions work, that he's gotten a photo and a description, a dossier, enough information to piece together it's her. He came here with every intention to carry out that order.

“I figured,” she replies, nodding at his bow. The muscles in his arms stand out in stark relief, trembling with exertion. “Then why haven't you yet?”

Natasha closes her eyes. Accepts that they this might be what fate planned for them all along, for her: he'll be her match. He'll be the one who kills her. Frees her from the clutches of the Red Room in the only way possible.

The bow clatters to the floor, and Natasha blinks her eyes open again. He's staring at her, but it's got a different quality now, defeated, resigned. All these years he's given her hope purely by existing, and here he is, looking for all the world like his worst nightmare just came true.

“There might be another way,” he tells her, the words pressed out like they're hurting him, torturous, the fallout of a battle he fought and lost.


***


He's made it through debriefings and meetings and yelling and disciplinary hearings, and none of it really matters. He sits in the gym afterwards, watching her train, watching hear body weave itself around volunteer after volunteer, lining up to play-fight the Black Widow now that she's defanged and can't hurt them even if that was what she wanted.

Clint's not sure if she wants that or not, actually. She followed him home readily, and he's still trying to figure out if she's here because of him – what they are – or because she was looking for a way out anyway. Meanwhile, there's a plethora of feelings pumping through his veins, uninvited and alien, and they spike whenever he sees her, talks to her, touches her.

Masochist that he is, he hardly leaves her side.

She beats up every agent that climbs into the ring with her, neither of them having any chance at all, but returns them with little more than bruises and split lips. Their eyes meet whenever she waves in the next combatant. Every fiber of his being aches with the need to be near her, even if it's like that, the claustrophobic, brutal intimacy of a fight in close quarters.

He's never been a patient man, surging temper and hotheadedness part of his father's legacy, and so he shoulders his way into the ring past the next agent lined up for a workout. Watches Natasha's lips curl up with delight as she holds up the wire so he can duck in underneath, sees the sweat glistening on her brows and across her shoulders, sole sign that she's been fighting for hours. She hasn't got a single scrape, not one bruise. They circle each other and the rest of the room disappears. He goes in for the first hit, she evades, swings back, and it's like dancing. Like muscle memory, almost, only it's not their bodies doing the remembering. It's their minds, the space where they always intersected. Neither of them pulls their punches, and in the end she's got him pressed to the mattress in a stronghold, but only just so, a fight that could've easily have ended the other way.

Natasha climbs out of the ring after him, through a tunnel of stunned agents, staring and blinking and gaping. He heads straight for his quarters, closes the door in her face.


***


Meant to be isn't what Natasha expected. Clint refuses to talk to her outside of meetings and mission briefings, for all that he hovers; he's constantly around, but he's closed off, carefully detached, there but not there. Her mother's stories never went like this.

After a mission in Seoul, she sits down next to him in the quinjet, feels the instinctive flinch within him as much as she sees it; as if he's torn, wants to stay and run away, wants both and the same time and can't figure out which he wants more.

“What am I doing wrong?” she asks without preamble, and he turns, blinks.

“You're not doing anything wrong.”

Natasha cocks her head. “Then why are you... like you are. Distant. Shutting me out when you should yearn to let me in.”

“Fate doesn't always choose well,” he says and stands up, walking a few steps to take another seat, away from her.

She follows, ignores the full-body sigh he gives at the renewed proximity. Turmoil comes off him in waves. There are more things to be said, questions to be asked, but Natasha's done talking. Instead she inches closer and puts her head on his shoulder, keeps even as he tenses, muscles locking up with fight or flight. But he stays where he is, and so does she, and by the time they land in New York he's relaxed considerably, allowing instead of tolerating, and Natasha concludes there may be a chance for them yet.


***


Natasha's persistent, he has to give her that. Not pushy, quite; her faith in the bond they were born with is unwavering and she pursues it with single-minded devotion, but no force.

Months pass, then years. They become friends. His resolve doesn't so much crumble as slowly dissolve; she sticks around even though he doesn't give her everything she wanted, and that has meaning with him.

In Dubai, during a mission that put them both in fancy clothes and polished shoes, they watch the stars. Oriental music floats through the air, surprisingly cold now the sun has set over the dunes. She's curled in close, the satin dress she's wearing not doing much to keep her warm. Her face is resting against his neck, her breath tickling his skin on every exhale.

The impulse comes out of nowhere – well, not really, it's been there since they first met, he just never acted on it – and he finds he's done resisting. Tilts her heads up, hand wrapping around her neck, and Natasha knows what he's about to do, of course she does, her eyes falling closed as he leans in. That final leap of faith is easier than he imagined, but then again, this is what they were supposed to be from the start. Fate may not always choose well, but it doesn't always choose wrong either – it picked him a heart that won't leave, would never hurt him, remained content with whatever lines he drew.

It just took him a while to see that.