scribble_myname

jacedesbff

banner by scribble_myname

Night closes around the beds of the little girls in the Red Room. Natasha stretches her arm above her head so the matron can close the handcuffs and lock them in. It is normal and familiar in the darkness, but as she lies there, Natasha feels the weight of realization sinking in. She cannot get away. Tentative fear curls up in her gut.

She knows that is not right. She has never been able to get away. To get out of bed without permission is dangerous. To stay is safe.

It pushes back against the dread beginning to claw up her throat, but it's not enough to stop it. She finds it hard to breathe.

They discover Natasha's fear of heights when she is still small and has to make her way from one end to the other of a creaky crossbeam in the rafters of a warehouse as part of an exercise. She has practiced ballet, practiced grace, and this should be simple and easy.

She is too experienced to cringe back, but she flinches and her instructors notice.

"Natalia. You cannot have fear."

There is threat behind the voice, so she swallows down her unwillingness and begins to creep across the wood. She goes slow and methodical, breathing to a count inside her head until she finally reaches the other side.

As she grows older, the fear does not go away. Her stomach feels as though it drops whenever she teeters too near an edge., but her instructors keep putting her there to overcome it.

She is standing on the edge when she is almost ten, swallowing down phobia, when a calming sensation falls over the back of her mind. She is safe here.

She cannot shake either feeling. At last, she chooses to act on the calm.

She is safe when she lies still and quiet in the dark, even with her wrist cuffed. There is fear in the back of her mind where that alien calm resides. It never goes away either, but she chooses to ignore it.

Natasha learns to kill when she is still small, still barely old enough to fully understand the concept. Her instructors set her larger and more dangerous tasks, and she fulfills them with the ease of a Black Widow. Eventually, she graduates and enters the field.

She has never felt any resistance from that foreign instinct always in the back of her mind, full of different fears and fearlessness than hers. She is used to feeling comfortable in her own skin and ignoring what discomforts from it do not serve her.

She is a teenager when she's sent in to teach Drakov a lesson. Natasha is an old hand at killing. She takes blood without compunction. It is nothing to take the little girl and coldly do her work in front of the girl's father.

The feeling from the back of her mind overwhelms her, taking her completely and utterly by surprise.

Revulsion. She hates what she has done, sees the blood on her hands, and only her training keeps them from shaking. She finishes the job, finishes the lesson her handlers ordered her to give, then flees.

This is nothing. It will pass, she tells herself. For the first time, she questions just who it is with a soul that bleeds into hers. She has told herself for years that this is nothing, it's not a soulmate, it's nothing that has compromised her or will but for the first time, she hesitates before driving in a knife. If she is not careful, her handlers will notice.

There are little Red Room girls at a children's hospital where their rescuers are certain they will be safe. But each one of those little girls is living evidence of something Mother Russia would rather not say.

They send in Natasha, the best and strongest of the Black Widows. She handles the problem and cannot stop the wave of disgust she feels before she comes one acidic wash away from losing her iron stomach.

She cannot do this again, she realizes. She cannot kill a child.

And so she runs.

Clint is a small child when he hides under the bed, staying still and quiet, holding his breath as long as he can in the hopes that their angry father won't come in and find him. It's safe under there. Staying there, staying still is safe, some instinct in his body reassures.

Harold Barton is yelling, and their mother's voice is starting to rise a little with him. She'll never escalate to yelling. Barney and Clint both know that. Their mother knows the consequences for that.

A beer bottle crashes into the wall. Clint closes his eyes and prays against the heavy tread of his father's boots.

The door to his and Barney's room slams open, then Clint feels his father's heavy grip on his leg before he's dragged out where it isn't safe anymore.

No one has to teach Clint to hide and make himself small. No one has to teach him to be fast, stumbling out of the way of their drunk father until eventually he gains enough skill to avoid getting caught. Clint figures that much out for himself.

He climbs out the window and up onto the roof, not unbalanced but dizzy with the feeling that he's supposed to be afraid at the height. He isn't. He lies quiet and looks over the edge to see his father rampaging on a quest for either of his sons. Barney has always been good at hiding or leaving and Clint doesn't worry about his brother.

Harold looks, but he does not find. Clint discovers for the first time that people tend not to look up, even when they know you must be somewhere nearby. He feels safe for the first time in his life.

Clint has cold. He doesn't flinch the first time he kills a spider when he's small or the first time he and Barney go fishing or the first time he kills something large and furry as a rat. He doesn't know where the calm that settles over him comes from, but it never crosses his mind to question it.

Then they get older. Their parents die, they run away, and Barney starts moving them toward working as lookouts and muscle for their circus mentors. It's something to do, a way to make money, and with Clint's vision and aim, he makes a fantastic lookout.

The first time he has to shoot someone to keep his own side safe, he doesn't hesitate, that calm that sometimes lies filtering into his consciousness as he draws the bow and lets an arrow fly. He has cold.

Clint misses Barney, he realizes every single time he's taking lookout and lining up a shot. They split ways over a disagreement about Jacques and Buck and now Clint is without the solid comfort of his brother beside him, with him. Snipers are supposed to work in pairs and it feels like working without an arm.

He doesn't see anything amiss in the warehouse where they're making the trade, but that instinct inside him is pricking under his skin. It may lie, it may be too fearless, too reckless, finding safety in the most dangerous of situations, but it knows danger, so Clint keeps his eyes open and his arrow ready.

Down below where no one is looking at him, the muscle on the other side shift their stances and Clint sees the double cross before his bosses do. The guns come out and Clint is shooting before they can raise them, one arrow after another on instinct before he even has to think. He takes out the muscle, takes down the opposite boss when those guns come out, watches the last cower under Chisholm's gun, never looking up to see the bowman in the wings.

Clint stares below, watching the bodies to make sure they don't become a problem when he recognizes one.

No.

He backs up and swallows down the rising bile. Barney.

That's the last job. Clint has always had the cold to take a life and survive no matter what the world threw at him, but when he lines up an arrow or a gun now, whether for military or eventually SHIELD, he knows who is on the other end of his aim and decides every time whether to make the shot.

He hates himself a little more every single time he does.

Natasha has been compromised for a long time now. Every death she deals out makes her a little more sick inside, and she has no other skills, knows no other trade than spying and assassinating for whoever will pay her to do it. Even stealing secrets often means leaving bodies, but she's finding herself more drawn to the ones she can sleep her way into, if only to keep the blood off her hands.

She'll name this problem now. It's her soulmate, the one she shouldn't have. She's a Widow and the Black Widows do not do anything about the souls bleeding into theirs. They take the strengths and ignore the weaknesses. They don't let hatred for taking innocent lives fester in their souls.

But there is nothing she can do to silence this person inside her, so she defects and she bears with it. Every day, every mission, her despair grows a little deeper. She's looking for a way out and she doesn't know if one even exists.

It does exist, a door yawning open before her when she's faced with an arrow aimed at her heart, and she looks up at him with a quiet sigh of what feels like relief. She is on the street and he is on a perch high above her, but Natasha is the Black Widow and she knows he is here for her.

"Give me a way out," she says too softly for him to hear from so far away, but he stares at her a long, long moment, this agent. Too long. He is giving her room to escape.

She steps closer. He lowers his bow, then raises it again and shoots.

It's a tranq.

When Natasha wakes up, he has her tightly bound and restrained. She struggles briefly, just long enough to test the cuffs and ties and know she isn't going anywhere.

The agent is in the back of the jet with her. He leans over her, visibly checks her for injuries. His skin is all covered down to the gloves on his hands so he won't touch her in any way that matters.

"It's a way out," he says softly.

She stares at him. He shouldn't have been able to hear that. Even if he could lip read, he shouldn't have been able to see it. "Hawkeye," she says, realizing there is only one name in the business with such legendary vision.

He grins at her, and it shocks her a little, her involuntary reaction to the way it makes his face light up.

"Pleasure to meet you," he replies. "Hope you'll stick around."

She doesn't know what he means then, but she learns when Fury sits across from her and strikes a deal. He holds all the advantages and all the cards, but it's a way out. She takes it.

Clint isn't like anyone else. He treats her like a human being and quickly becomes her friend, whether she likes it or not. He cares about her and about helping her make choices and figure out what she wants from life. She doesn't tell him that with every time he makes her laugh, every time he goes to bat for her, every time he wraps his body around hers when they keep each other warm on a mission, she realizes that what she really wants is him.

She studies this man sometimes, his confident motion, the way he smiles at her openly and even sincerely, the way something hot burns inside her when she sees him pull up the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face and shows off way too much skin she'd like to touch.

He's never touched her. He's kept his hands to himself, his skin to himself, respectful of their need to be partners and not know. His choosing to save her couldn't be because they might be soulmates. But she wonders.

She wonders because when she asks him once, incredulous, "You enjoy it up here?" when they are cold and staked out in a high perch where the wind cuts too keenly, Clint shrugs and says absently, "It's safe up high."

She never thought she would hear the sentiment voiced, never thought someone would put words to the certainty behind her heart beating too fast near the edge of the heights that it was safe. She stares at him, and he doesn't even notice, sitting stock still and silent as his eyes intently scan the area below.

And so she wonders.

"Do you have a soulmate?" Natasha asks at last in the safehouse where she's changing from party clothes into her standard gear and equipment and Clint is pulling on his own gear for sniping duty to cover her.

They have a mission to do and this isn't the time for personal questions, for her to run her gaze over every bit of bare skin he shows as he changes, but there is no better time to do it without him guessing she has personal reasons to do it beyond evaluating his health or shooting the breeze.

"You were allowed to believe in them?" Clint asks, absent and surprised in the same breath. He's gotten used to the limits her history admits. She certainly wasn't permitted to have a soulmate, regardless of whether she believed in them.

"I have soul bleed," Natasha states succinctly.

"Hmm." Clint's done changing and moving to double-checking his quiver. "She's afraid of heights."

Natasha looks up from reloading her belt. It is one more thing that fits.

But then "You're not afraid of anything," he says, all soft-eyed admiration and that friendly grin that makes her ache because it isn't love.

She cocks her head and flattens her lips into a tight line, displeased but determined not to show it. "I just act like I'm fearless," she says at last.

He shrugs, but his smile doesn't slip and she knows he doesn't really believe her.

Natasha drops her gaze back to her gear belt. She acts like it requires more focus than it does. "He's afraid of being trapped."

Clint hums acknowledgement as if the words don't strike a chord.

It has probably never even occurred to him that Natasha might love him. She wants to touch him, to know if what's under his skin is the same as what's under hers. She wishes her own soulmate would die or not exist if he isn't Clint.

What kind of a monster would want that?

He doesn't know what it is about Natasha, but from the moment he sees her begging for salvation in her own words, her own way, he knows they are alike in ways he'll probably never explain to her.

Clint hasn't had family for a long time, not since his brother went down with an arrow that hadn't been intended not to kill. Coulson has been more than just a handler since he recruited Clint from the military. He's been a friend. But Clint isn't hungry for only friendship.

There's a lonely place inside where family used to armor over the cracks, blocking out their father's fists and the fears that found him in the dark. Natasha looks at him with eyes dark from memories she'll probably never explain to him. She's seen the same abyss that he has, longing to be anything but the killer she's become. Natasha is family. Natasha changes everything.

Contrary to popular belief, batted about the SHIELD cafeterias and betting pool, Natasha never asks Clint why he spared her. She simply settles in beside him at lunch after she's been cleared to his faint surprise and states matter-of-factly that Fury has assigned them to work together.

"We're to report to Coulson in an hour."

Clint just looks at her and grins.

Natasha is considered unreadable by everyone at SHIELD.

"We should introduce you to the poker games post-mission," Clint tells her when she's sitting on his bunk reviewing the paperwork he has yet to turn in. It's a popular pastime among the agents before everyone is cleared to leave. Natasha's poker face would beat out even May's.

"You like poker?" Natasha asks as she glances up with a slight toss of her red hair.

He thinks there wasn't even a twitch of an expression, just that mild possibly interest in her eyes, though she's probably just humoring him. He's careful not to touch her skin when he tugs on the tips of her hair and comments, "It'll be fun. You'll win."

She smiles. Slightly. "Of course."

It takes him off guard and hits him like a solid truck. He's never seen a sincere smile on her face in the months he has known her. He wants to make her smile again.

Of course, she wins. Of course, she lets him gloat about it. Of course, they become partners off the field and not just on.

They become more than friends. They're family in a way he hasn't had in far too long. She settles into his apartment on downtime when neither of them are on call and there is no excuse besides companionship and indulges him in showing her entertainment she would never watch on her own and feeding her more varieties of pizza than she insists could possibly be healthy. He lets her insult his jokes and teach him card games and mahjong and somehow they just fit.

He never pokes too closely at why or how because that way lies losing things. But Clint's best memory since his brother died is when he and Natasha are half holding each other up in the infirmary and she tells the nurse, "He's my best friend."

Natasha pokes him with one finger against his sleeve after they've eaten way too much Chinese takeout. It's been almost a year since she came and it's the first she's ever reached out and touched him.

"You should be much more malnourished than this," she comments, that faint smile curving up her lips. "No one should eat so much takeout."

Clint just laughs at her. "See how much homemade you make after being SHIELD for a few years."

She just hums noncommittally and rolls over to lay her head against his knee. She presses a few buttons on the remote and he lets her pick the movie. It's a romantic comedy he's pretty sure she wouldn't be watching if she weren't going undercover soon as someone who would.

It's comfortable and warm, and he finds himself hoping to himself that it lasts.

It lasts.

Natasha stitches him up in the field, her mouth a grim line, as he pants beneath her gloved hands against the pain radiating from multiple injuries over his body. This is usually the part where other agents decide they can't work with him. He's too reckless, too unconventional, and too likely to throw himself into the face of danger instead of finding a way around it.

But she looks down at him and says, "You act fearless too."

It gives him just a moment's pause to wonder if she can see inside his head, that there's bleed from a soul that never hesitates even emotionally in the face of everything going terribly wrong.

When they first met, Clint didn't touch her skin because he didn't want to know if she was his soulmate. It was a line that SHIELD wouldn't cross for a target recruitment, and she only asked him for one thing, a way out. After that though, it becomes habit. They both wear gloves for giving each other first aid and they haven't had reason as yet to play a couple undercover.

He doesn't think about it until he does, when she's stripping bloody gloves from her fingers, soaked in his blood, and this isn't a SHIELD safehouse outfitted with all the supplies they usually keep for field dressing.

She holds up the vodka, but Clint shakes his head, wanting a clear mind if he needs to get back up.

"Can I touch you?" she asks, and that's when he thinks about it, when she's staring at him with fresh washed hands and a needle and thread that makes him realize they never actually have.

"'Course," he says, almost without thinking.

She hesitates for only a moment before she lightly brushes fingers over skin.

In that moment, he feels fear, her fear for her partner, for him, and he stares at her in shock at what else he feels. She may not know what to call this intense, fierce emotion she feels for him, may claim she doesn't know how to love, but he knows that now for a lie.

He swears and not about the pain of the needle she's pushing deftly in and out of his side.

Natasha changes everything.

Clint has been there for her from the beginning, from the moment he changed his arrowhead from a lethal one to a tranquilizer, from the moment he leaned over her and offered her a way out. Natasha feels herself slammed with his real emotions, not just the way he feels in general to underlie her own, and the absolute surprise she has given him with a touch. He probably never once even considered loving her, and now she's afraid she might lose him.

She forces herself to focus on the needle and thread and sewing shut the wounds that need it. She's wanted this, wanted to touch him and know whether he was hers, but she never thought that he might not want her if he was.

"Natasha," he says softly.

She draws her hands away, ties off the thread, and does not answer. The emptiness left in the wake of that connection makes her insides want to shake. She looks at him because to not look would be weakness.

She can't read his face. He's studying her intently, faint frown lines from the pain.

"NSAIDs?" she offers. It's what they have on hand.

Clint leans back against the couch and shakes his head. "No."

She thinks for a moment they aren't going to talk about it, that they'll simply move on as if it never happened, but then Clint's eyes are open again and tracking her. He reaches out to wrap his hand behind her head and tug her closer and...

Kiss her.

His mouth is warm. The gentle wonder flooding between them makes her bring her hand up to his face and press as close as she can into the sensation of his discovery and he does want her.

"Clint," she murmurs when they draw a breath, then she kisses him again and this kiss is not gentle or slow or brief.

They hold on, tasting each other, pressing closer, until the oxygen is completely gone in her lungs and it's starting to burn. She presses her face into his neck and breathes in their mutual desire and contentment through the contact of their skin. They don't have time to stay. They need to extract.

"We should probably get going," she says quietly.

"Yeah." Clint forces himself to his feet.

Natasha helps him up, hand under the arm covered by his tac suit. They do not touch again.

They don't say anything about it for a while. Natasha doesn't mind because they fall back into their own normal pattern as they get out of the city and back to SHIELD. They're partners. This doesn't change anything.

The medical officer on duty when they arrive at the SHIELD infirmary after debrief looks resigned and displeased when she sees their injuries, though she gives a short, approving nod at the quality of the stitches.

Natasha holds her breath for a moment when she sits down for the exam. Soul touch leaves its marks, and SHIELD has strict frat regs, always has. Clint watches her with tired, absent interest, as if he hasn't even noticed she's tense or what it might be about.

Soul bleed is involuntary and pretty much there from the time you're born. Soul touch is different and Natasha knows it changes various medical readings as her body will reflect some of Clint's until it has a chance to fade. Soulmates in a relationship may have a permanent adjustment stated in their medical file if they've stabilized and are close enough to not experience fade.

The doctor takes her time and only glances up sharply once, a look between Clint and Natasha underscored by a slight frown before she writes something down on the charts.

"They're splitting us up," Clint says quietly. He keeps his eyes on the target, doesn't even look at Natasha, as he continues archery practice as usual.

Natasha studies his form, the arrows hitting their mark. "Yes," is all she can find it in her to say.

He lowers the bow then, and she's not entirely sure if she wants him to. The uneasiness she feels at dealing with relationships was never one that Clint shared in general, but it seems to break that pattern when it comes to a situation like this. She can't see discomfort in his face, but there is mirrored discomfort in that feeling at the back of her mind.

"New Mexico," he says, never drawing his gaze from hers.

"Stark," she replies.

Separate missions and she doesn't like it one bit.

But Clint drops his head almost sheepishly and rubs the back of his neck in the one gesture of discomfort she's always been able to read on him. "Maybe we could..."

"We could what, Clint?" Natasha asks quietly. She realizes that she doesn't want to be apart from him, not for missions when no one else has ever watched her back so well.

He shrugs. "We could try this." He doesn't elaborate, doesn't explain, just looks at her intently as she stares back.

She takes a long breath, but she can't find words for this complicated feeling bubbling up inside her, wondering if he means exactly what she wants him to mean.

"I mean, if you don't want to," he starts in because he does that, starts rambling when the silence is too uncomfortable and he's not on a job, "we could go talk to Coulson about keeping Delta together. It's not fraternizing unless—"

She kisses him. It cuts off his words, but this is Clint, and he doesn't really care. He gets with the program in seconds, pulling her close and kissing her back with an intensity that takes her breath away.

She smooths her hands up over his shoulders and neck, revels in his heart beating into her fingers through the touch, and murmurs directly against his mouth, "Yes."

He clutches her a little closer and swallows the word in another kiss.