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.

—

It's the hanging time between end of day and beginning when she comes to find Clint, the rings around his eyes saying that he hasn’t gotten to bed yet either. She's in leggings and a fitted SHIELD shirt, an outfit he's seen a thousand times, but it's her wrapped hands that tell him their destination. He doesn’t ask if she’s sure, knows that she took her physical therapy seriously even if she hated being injured in the first place and if there’s anyone aware of their limits, it’s Natasha. He also knows that asking the question was likely to put him in physical therapy, and that’s a section of medical that he thoroughly tries to avoid. Pulling on training gear, he follows her dutifully, accepting it when they pass the main training room and descend into the bowels of the old SHIELD building. There are old private sparring rooms, mostly unused with the advanced equipment upstairs to be taken advantage of, and it's there that she leads him. The space is musty and small, not at all conducive to the style of dodging that she's been employing against him. If he needed anything else to tip him off that this is not going to be a regular session between them, the tape she tosses him certainly spells it out.

It's a good thing too, considering she still hasn't said a word since she showed up at his door.

Her gaze is pointed, like being the ant under the microscope, and he gets the impression that every fight of hers that he's seen has been muted, some part of her holding back for the sake of not scaring off her new employer. Taping up his fists, Clint rolls out his neck and shoulders. By rights, he should stretch, but something in his gut says that no amount of stretching would help him in this fight. Instead, he takes a deep breath and stands.

It's the last comfortable breath he gets for a while.

She's on him in a blink, her fist swinging to connect with his chest faster than he would've thought possible and it feels like sheer luck that he manages to push it away, following up with a jab of his own. Except she's not there, using her changed momentum to propel a roundhouse at his head that he has to drop down to his knees to avoid. Clint knows it’s a mistake as soon as he makes it, but there’s nothing he can do but commit. The kick’s a feint, and in the brief moment that her thighs lock around his neck and tighten, he’s in complete awe of how fast she can move …then she twists her torso over and it’s just pain, a hot ache exploding through his side as she throws him to the ground.

Natasha Romanoff is a little too harsh, unabashedly confident in her skills and her ability to take him apart at her leisure. Without a mask on, even the polite and cooperative one that she’s worn since she became a full-fledged member of SHIELD, there’s no mistaking she’s as dangerous as her namesake. Terrifying, even, with edges that are just as likely to cut her as him. Staring up at her from the floor, Clint’s not afraid.

Trust stretches between them like a fine string and she has to see something she approves of, because she reaches out to take his hand and help him to his feet. He grins when she does, an unrestrained and challenging thing, his head tilted towards the center of the mats.

Again?

This might be my most favorite section of this altogether AWESOME piece!! I love getting Clint's perspective and seeing Nat finally stop holding back! Seriously tremendous :)

Oh wow, this whole thing is absolutely amazing. A little chilling, a little hopeful, and just... wow.

This is just perfect. Thank you for writing 3 and 4 of 2! :-) And now, post the whole thing on AO3 so you may be showered with kudos.

Fantastic continuation!

I adore this:

Trust stretches between them like a fine string and she has to see something she approves of, because she reaches out to take his hand and help him to his feet. He grins when she does, an unrestrained and challenging thing, his head tilted towards the center of the mats.

<3