The girls in the Red Room are always taught to distrust anything male. Including parts of themselves.

So Natasha isn't nervous when they tell her she's ready for her graduation. They take her and Phyrelas into a part of the compound she's never seen before, strap them both into peculiar hard beds that makes her feel like they're being prepared for dissection and put on strange ambered goggles. She's excited as they pull the pair further apart, measuring something in the air between them before cutting with something that looks nothing like the scalpel she'd been expecting. She thinks of the freedom she's been promised.

She tells herself the emptiness that floods into her as the blade cuts what should only be air is not pain. Because how could it be when it's just… nothingness.

---

The first time they give her a false daemon as a cover-- a delicate butterfly trapped in a necklace-- she almost screams as its silken wing brushes her neck. It's not cool scales and a sullen color and wrong wrongwrong. She swallows the scream and when she comes back, fresh blood under her fingernails, she crushes the butterfly for even trying to pretend.

---

The SHIELD archer falters when he should have killed her.

"You… you have no…"

He wavers on his perch and Natasha grins all the way back for escaping him so easily. She has no idea how anyone in the field could be so squeamish about a simple daemon separation.

---

The next time they meet-- well, face to face, anyway-- he keeps his bow up, even if he does still look queasy from just looking at her.

"I've seen you with a bird, a cat, a praying mantis, which… that one was a bit on the nose, don't you think?" He takes a breath. "So which one is it?"

He's off kilter not knowing her daemon and she can't fathom why. Surely another assassin doesn't need to know their target's soul to kill them. Not a good one, anyway.

"Isn't it obvious?" Natasha laughs, genuinely amused. "None of them."

---

The time after that, it's at a party. A ball, technically. He eyes the bat clinging to her bar necklace with the same derision she feels somewhere deep, deep inside.

"Why does it bother you so much?" she asks in an undertone.

"It's just not right to…" he gestures vaguely, something that hints at moving two things apart. "Like that."

Natasha blinks. "You're just meant to kill me. Why do you care?"

She doesn't miss the way his opossum daemon bares its teeth. A defense mechanism, she knows.

---

The alley is rainy and miserable (or maybe that's just her). And she's cornered.

She can hear the bowstring straining, a creak just above the dull drone of rain hitting the pavement. Vibrating with how much effort he's put into not killing her.

She's not sure she's worth it.

"You could come with me," he says.

She trembles, bares her teeth. "They'd kill me."

His eyes dart to her side. Which is ridiculous because that's where his daemon would be, not hers. But he can't know that. His daemon whispers something to him.

"What if we can help?"

Natasha wants to laugh. It's a completely mad idea. And the glimmer of hope it gives her makes her want to cry. She thinks she hates this SHIELD agent for making her feel that again.

"They would slaughter you," she replies.

"Well… I was thinking you might give me a fair shot." He pauses. "Ha. Shot. Sniper pun."

Natasha's lip curls in distaste. But… he is here, having not killed her several times and offering to not only not kill her but maybe even give her a shot at freedom. Real freedom, that is.

"Shoot me, then," she says, only half joking.

"What?!"

"Shoot me, I have a plan," she tries again.

Clint goggles at her. But after a moment he adjusts the aim of his bow and looses it.

She curses, grabbing onto her should to try and stem some of the pain and bleeding.

"Hey, you said to shoot you…"

"I wasn't expecting it to hurt more than a gunshot," she hisses.

"It's the shaft." Clint grimaces in sympathy.

Natasha flexes her injured arm experimentally. "Well. Your turn."

"Wait wha--"

Natasha slashes along Clint's hairline. The blood coats one side of his face almost immediately.

"You could've avoided getting that in my eye, at least," he grouses.

"My other idea was to give you a black eye. Work with it."

"I'm seeing your point, now. What next?"

"How well can you play injured?" she asks.

Clint looks at her. Then he and his daemon look at each other pointedly. It's then that she notices Clint fighting hard against a grin, "You want me… to play possum…"

He finally succumbs to the laughter, doubling over.

"I might want to revisit the head trauma idea…" she says to herself.

She carries him into the Red Room. The front guards don't give her a second look. The interrogation rooms are at the center of the facility. They're heavily fortified but not heavily guarded. Turns out most of the guards can only stand the screaming for a few hours at a time. Weak.

The guards there now are strapping Clint onto a table. They don't notice Natasha stepping silently behind them. She knocks two of them out at once, smashing their heads together. The third draws his gun but she's slightly faster. She dives under the table as the bullet hits the wall behind where she was just standing. She uses her momentum to drive her full weight into the last guard's heavy mastiff daemon. She can't be sure she hears the telltale snap of breaking bone but he goes down just the same and Natasha rolls up to sit on his chest. A well-placed punch knocks him out cold.

She ducks on instinct when the gun goes off again. But it's a guard's body that falls.

"Aw c'mon, my aim isn't that bad is it?"

He grins at her from the other side of the room. She blinks at him. Her heart is beating wildly in her chest. She looks at the SHIELD agent's lopsided grin. Then blames the erratic rhythm on being closer to her daemon than she'd been in months.

Natasha searches the guards for the keycard she needs, lifting a few spare clips off the guards as she goes. When she looks up, Clint is edging closer and closer to the door, his eyes fixed on the guards. Or, if she knows him (which… she tries not to dwell on), the lack of a part of the guards. She decides to take pity on him and leads them both out of the room.

"So they're all…" he mimes the same thing he'd done before-- two things being pulled apart.

Or maybe, she thinks now that she's seeing it again, it's one thing being pulled into two.

Natasha nods. "They say it's so we're less vulnerable in the field. But then they always have a piece of us. They control us that way. We always have to come back."

Clint nods sharply and swallows. He's not quite looking at anything.

The guard's keycard opens the daemon collection. The animal-shaped souls stare at Natasha impassively as she walks down the alphabetized cages and containers. She finds Phyr, filed under 'Romanova', waiting at the back of his cage for her. He's hard to spot, blending into the shadows where the harsh fluorescent lights can't reach. She elbows through the glass and reaches in with her injured arm for him to use to avoid the glass. He hesitates for a long moment. He stares, unblinking, at her. Finally, he seems to make up his mind and coils his way up her arm.

Clint is staring at Phyr when she emerges and she feels so exposed-- her soul literally on display-- that she almost wishes she could put him back. Sensing her discomfort, he winds tighter around her neck, hiding his red underbelly and much of his head under her hair. This seems to snap Clint's attention back to her.

"Alright," he says, "Let's get you out of here."

This is amazing and I love it!!! The bland/insidious horror of being 'promised freedom' and 'graduation' and 'nothingness', and then the way she treats the butterfly. And how that's closely followed by her casual dismisal of Clint being 'squeamish' about separation; that way she treated a reaplacement/cover showing she does have feelings about this, but how they're... misdirected. Then the way the guards 'can't stand the screaming'. And the slowly realising: Or maybe, she thinks now that she's seeing it again, it's one thing being pulled into two. The 'we always have to come back' and how sluggish Natasha's deamon responds. Argh, you've got her viewpoint where all of this is normal and how the horror seeps through is just so well done.

Also I liked 'playing possum', ha.

oh whoah I don't know why I never responded to this but I was just going through old prompt posts to post them to AO3 and saw your comment again!

I'm very glad you liked it :D reading it again.... I also maybe laughed at my own possum joke 😂

(also it's possible I have way more of this in me and am finally planning on actually writing it >_> )

What an amazing fill. Clint spotting the absence of daemons is a lovely twist on his penchant for picking up lost souls. Loved it!

Hehe thank you!!

That was totally not my intent but... it works and I'm running with it 😂

(what I was literally thinking of was this picture of a mom possum carrying around all her babies and for some reason that just screamed "Clint" to me 😂😂😂)