It turns out not to matter what she wants. Fury's solution to the problem of his wayward Russian assassin is to saddle her with the agent that brought her in. The email stating that she has been partnered with Barton burns in front of her eyes for a long while before the news actually sinks in.

—

They are expected to train together, so she does, but in her own way. Her marks on the shooting range are still exemplary, her workouts still push her limits, but she’s ceased to be the aggressor when it comes to sparring with her new teammate. Purely defensive, she dodges and slips out of Hawkeye's holds. Her flexibility and agility quickly become the bane of Barton’s existence and she can see the confusion in his eyes, as well as the resolve. He starts getting creative, pulling stunts that he could’ve only picked up in the circus. Unfortunately, the Red Room had much more… motivating ways of getting her to adapt and think outside the box. Her fists remain loose and her thighs stay away from his neck even with his best efforts and despite the burning in her muscles at the end of the day, the whole exercise is rather unsatisfying. And it continues, until days turn into weeks. She’s waiting for the day that Fury calls her in to yell at her; it wouldn’t really matter because Barton stays alive and that’s all she’s really going for at this point.

—

He becomes Clint in Brussels, where everything goes to shit in such spectacular fashion that she'd be amused at the way they have to dodge mercenaries and foreign agencies if it were any other time. Any other time she wouldn’t have a bullet lodged up against her tibia that no amount of determination or pain tolerance would get her walking on. It makes it mildly hard to get a laugh in edgewise.

They have the documents they came for but they have to make a final stand with Natasha’s movement severely limited, and it’s a lifetime before the bodies stop pouring into the house that they’ve hunkered down into. The smell of gunpowder and ozone hangs in the air like acrid incense and Clint calls for extraction, sizing up the pool of blood leaking down past her boot as he passes off their coordinates.

He himself is bleeding from numerous bullet grazes and a bloody laceration across the side of his head that she doesn’t quite recall him getting, but his eyes still ask for permission before he wraps up her leg in a compression bandage and again before he hoists her over his shoulder. He's never forgotten her boundaries, not once, and it shows her the depth of the man beneath the terrible jokes and incessant radio chatter.

Hazily, she thinks as blood loss makes her head light and the beat of the helicopter rotors echoes in her ears, is that it's his eyes. He watches and understands, even if he doesn’t know why.