Characters/Pairing: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Rating: M, for swearing and sex
Word Count: Ten chapters total at ~17150 words (Completed)
Disclaimer: For fun and fun alone. All hail the great and mighty Joss and the venerable Stan Lee.
Warnings: Spoilers for the Avengers movie; not really spoilers, just vague nods at stuff that happened.
Summary: After defeating Loki with the Avengers, Clint and Natasha spend 24 hours in a hotel suite. Together they recover from the trauma inflicted on each of them by Loki. As Clint’s memories return, he relives the various encounters with Natasha that lead them to where they are now, beginning with Agent Barton’s failed mission to kill the Black Widow in Cairo.

In this chapter, Clint remembers Coulson. Cameo appearance from Tony Stark.






New York
Present day
09:16

A phone blasts Heavy Metal at full volume, and they scramble up from dead sleep, startled and disoriented. Clint snatches it from the bedside table and reads the caller ID.

“Stark,” he grumbles. “I thought I turned this off.”

Natasha’s shaking her head. “Stark’s got an override.”

Clint’s jaw tightens as he thumbs the answer button. “This is Barton.”

Natasha sits up, pulling the sheets to her throat.

Tony says, “’Mornin’ Locksley. Hey, so, we’re ready to move forward with the plan to re-locate Loki, thought you might want to come bid adieu with the rest of us. Not every day you get to mean that literally. You in?”

Clint glances at Natasha. “When and where?”

“Two p.m. Bethesda Fountain,” Tony says.

“And the plan?”

“Remanding him to the custody of his brother,” Stark says. “Thor’s taking him back to Asgard via the evening Tesseract. Also, logistics: You’re in the same hotel as Dr. Banner. Mind if he rides with you to the site? His bike got crushed – like soda can crushed. No way he’s ridin’ that thing. Be a pal, d’ya mind?”

“No, it’s fine,” Clint says.

“Great, so...” Stark pauses. “Agent Romanoff’s next on my list.” Another pause, this one weighty. “You wanna, or shall I?”

Clint answers through gritted teeth. “I got it.”

“Sure thing, big guy,” Stark says. Clint can hear the grin in his voice. “As you were.”

Clint skips the phone onto the table.

“Loki?” Natasha asks.

Clint’s eye twitches. “Yep.”

“When?”

“Two.”

“What time is it now?”

“It’s after 9.”

“Oh dear,” she says in singsong. “Missed our med screen.”

“Coulson knows we don’t do med screens, right?” Then he remembers. Coulson. He brings a hand to his head. “Fuck.”

“Clint—”

“No.” Clint shakes his head. “No. Loki does not just get to fly back to fucking Valhalla,” he shouts. “Not when –” He turns. He paces. “He should pay. He should pay, and we should get to do it. We should kill him.”

“How?” Natasha says. “He’s a demigod. He’s basically immortal.”

This reels him in. A little. “We could dismember him,” Clint suggests.

“Sweetie, that’s not how we work,” she says.

He knows. She knows he knows. He folds his arms. He’s struggling to keep himself together. It’s not working. He says, “Coulson was—” The words lodge in his throat.

Natasha crawls to the end of the bed and wraps her arms around him. “Coulson was a good man,” she says. “A first class agent.” She brushes Clint’s hair back from his forehead. “He was our friend.”

“I’m responsible,” Clint says. Again his throat seizes around the words.

“No,” she says. “Don’t do that—”

“I led Loki’s men to our ship, I nearly took it out of the sky—” his eyes widen “—with you in it.”

“Stop it. Clint. Stop. You were in it, too. That’s how Loki works.” Her voice is quiet. Soothing. She says, “Dr. Selvig said he thought he might have known what was going on. That’s how he built in the failsafe switch—”

“—But I—”

She puts a finger to his lips. “—Director Fury says you shot him point blank back at the research facility.”

Clint arches his brows.

“You can hit a tree frog in the eye at three hundred yards, Clint. But you shot Fury square in the chest,” she says, splaying her hand over his heart. “Right in the Kevlar.”

He nods. Swallows. Tucks her head under his chin.

“There are limits to what people can be made to do,” she whispers.

“You believe that,” he says. It’s not a question.

“I believe you fought him in whatever ways you could. And if you’d tried to fight Loki directly, you’d be dead.” She brings her lips to his. She enfolds him in her arms, and there's this razor's edge of desperation beneath the surface. It surprises him, but he only has seconds to question it before she's pulling him down, crawling backward into the bed, her mouth hungry and feverish on his.

He dips to trail kisses from her neck to the delicate skin above her collarbone – one of her favorite spots – and chills spring out across her flesh. She scrapes her nails through his hair and over his shoulders. He takes her breast into his mouth, tracing a wide circle with his tongue. She curves into him, her breath quickening. He nips gently at the erect nipple; she brings her legs around him, her sharp heels digging into his thighs.

He's falling into the muzzy half-conscious state where the blood in his body absents his brain when he feels that wild insistence in her.

“Nat--”

She crushes her mouth to his. Her hands knot into fists behind his neck. Her body tremors beneath his. He breaks their kiss and stares down into her eyes.

“Don't,” she says.

He brushes her nose with his. “Tasha.”

She swallows. Tears pool in her eyes, but she keeps them. “There are limits. Humans have limits.”

He kisses the corner of her eye. Tastes the salt on his tongue. Memories flood him, all of them jostling like winged things in his mind. Breakfasts and crosswords and secrets whispered across pillows. Their memories: All those small human moments.

“Nat, what did he say to you?”

She shifts and they lie facing each other. She draws the sheet around them. He encircles her in his arms, and he waits, a long time, he waits, because he knows her. She’s wounded and afraid. She’s vulnerable, and it's not an easy place for her to be.

She says, “He said he'd have you kill me, in every way you know I fear...” but the words fail her and she buries her head against his chest.

He goes cold at the idea; he knows what she fears.

Then she shakes her head. “No, but he's wrong,” she says. “He couldn't make you kill Fury. You wouldn't have killed me.”

Clint utters a soft laugh. “He underestimates us,” he says. “That's how he lost.”

“And 'cause of the Hulk,” Natasha says.

“Well, but the rest of us, too. We were a team of total bad-assery. That should be our logo. We should get shirts.”

And she's smiling again. Her hand strays to his neck, and for a moment, her expression leads him to think she's going to say something – possibly something profoundly important and long overdue about the state of their relationship. Instead, she kisses him, and though the recklessness has faded, he still feels the underpinning of need.

With his thumb, he traces her eyebrows and down the cusp of her jaw.

“He definitely underestimated us,” she says. Then she adds, “Maybe I did, too.”

Aboard the SHIELD Helicarrier
15 miles offshore from Sao Paolo
2007

“Here is the situation,” Director Fury said as the lumi-screen filled with 3D schematics of the Estadio do Morumbi. “Arnault Zimsky is making another grab for power. This time, he wants a spectacle.”

Barton perked up at the mention of Zimsky. On either side of him, Agents Hill and Coulson studied the rotating image of the stadium as Fury tapped the screen to enlarge the lower decks and the soccer pitch.

“Brazil versus Argentina,” Fury explained. “Seventy-two thousand futbol fanatics all wielding vuvuzelas. Game begins at fourteen-hundred, and our pal Arnault will be there.”

“That gives us four hours,” Agent Hill said. “What’s his play?”

Barton could guess. He’d been surreptitiously gathering intel on Zimsky since Cairo, enough to know that in addition to arms dealing and the testing of illegal chemical compounds, Zimsky was an expert in bio-mutative genetic enhancement.

Fury said, “We know that in the last two years, Zimsky’s power has inexplicably waned—”

Again, Barton could guess.

“—This makes him extremely dangerous,” Fury went on. “He wants to reassert his dominance. He wants to show the world he still has power. Holding seventy thousand people hostage is one way to do that.”

Fury waited for that to sink in before swiping the stadium image off screen. “Here is what we know,” the Director said. He placed his gloved fists on the table top. “Almost nothing. Our intel is from a trusted source who tells us that Zimsky has some type of weapon – bomb or biochemical, we’re not sure – but here’s the kicker...”

Fury tapped the menu at the bottom of the screen and a series of six small devices scrolled into view. “The weapon is not planted within the stadium,” he said.

Coulson frowned. “If it’s not in the stadium, then—?”

“These,” Fury said, jabbing a finger at the display, “Are Hammer Industries’ X1-D5 miniature deployment devices.”

Barton swore at the mention of Hammer. Hell, they all did. Hammer was a prick.

Fury continued with a nod of shared displeasure. “Each canister is smaller than three inches in length, made of non-conductive aluminum, is shock absorbent, and weighs less than thirty grams. In short, they are cheap, portable, and untraceable. We know that Zimsky purchased an undisclosed number of these devices one week ago, so we can assume they’ve been weaponized. Possibly a liquid or aerosol nerve toxin set to remotely detonate.”

“So he’ll bring them in at game time,” Barton said.

“Thirty grams,” Coulson said. “That’s the weight of, what, a dozen pennies?”

“They could be anywhere,” Hill pointed out. “Disguised as anything.”

“Which is why we have to get in there and stop Zimsky before he can make a great big mess,” Director Fury said.

Coulson raised his hand. “Sir, the file mentions that Zimsky will most likely be working with a team?”

“Correct. Our contact told us that Zimsky has eight highly trained members in his employ. We’ve compiled photos of possible marks in the file,” Fury said.

Barton’s fingers itched as he opened his folder and flipped through the photos. With each one, he had to steady himself, to keep from racing to the next to see if she would be among them. The Black Widow. Natasha.

She wasn’t.

Relief washed over him. He skimmed the rest of the file documents, in part to hide his nerves, but also to acquaint himself with what Fury had gathered on Zimsky, to see if it matched with what he’d discovered on his own.

The files detailed Zimsky’s early work in biogenetics. Barton already knew that part, and that Zimsky and a team of Austrian scientists attempted to do what the U. S. government had during World War II when they created Captain America, the world’s first super-soldier.

After various failures of super soldier projects, including Doctor Banner’s devastating tragedy with gamma radiation, Zimsky and his team re-focused their efforts to engineering an anti-aging, performance-augmenting serum. But Zimsky didn’t stop with bio-sciences; he dabbled in socio-political sciences as well. Using a list of explicit criteria, Zimsky selected a group of highly intelligent and especially talented children.

In many cases, he used hypnosis and various propaganda tools to erase or alter the memories of these children. Then Zimsky either trained them to become assassins or spies in specialized training programs, or he placed them in the homes of extremely powerful world leaders. This part, Barton had learned from Natasha. What he hadn’t known was that the children, now grown, occupied influential seats in the upper ranks of government around the world.

Some remained loyal to Zimsky, who maintained that his students’ placement in power was but the first step in his plan to “re-structure” the world. One student, Evgeny Turgenev, turned on Zimsky and spent two decades gathering information that would take Zimsky down.

Then the report leapt to the past two years, the time following the failed SHIELD mission to bring in the Black Widow. Since Zimsky’s power had slipped in recent years, he began to get sloppy. The report used words like “risky” and “egregious” to describe Zimsky’s successive grasps at dominance.

So the man was desperate. Desperate enough to hold seventy-two thousand innocent people hostage as a show of political strength.

But the absence of Natasha’s presence in the report was what really struck Barton. She was mentioned only twice: once as Natasha Romanoff, the orphan-turned-assassin who worked as Zimsky’s Hand of Death, and a second time as the Black Widow who slipped SHIELD custody four times in 2005, only to disappear completely afterward.

“...which leads us to you, Agent Barton,” Director Fury was saying.

Clint inclined his head. “Sir?”

“Your job is to take out Zimsky before he can give the deployment signal. We’re thinking it’ll happen at half time, because Zimsky will want to make a show of it. He wants to claim this act, publicly. That gives you a shot.”

“Yes sir,” Barton said. “That I can do.”

“Good. We’ll keep this quick and clean,” Fury said. “No one will ever know we were there. We know well what happens when futbol fans panic. Last thing we want is a riot.”

Fury shut down the computer display. “We disembark at eleven hundred. Agent Hill, I need you to brief the ground team. Agent Coulson, with me, please.”

Barton itched to ask who their contact was, because whoever could provide such detailed intel so late in the game had to be close to Zimsky. That left a very narrow playing field. The idea that she might be near burned in him, and he knew just how dangerous those feelings could be.