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There between the land of the dead and the living lies a city wherein the monsters abide. There walk the killers, the liars, the thieves, and the lost in that ancient city where they must repay their debt to the world before they can go on into peace. There walks a soul as ancient as the old motherland of Russia, fear and trembling in the shadow of her wake. There perches on the heights a soul crusted with the bitterness of lost things who still prefers the ancient weapons to the new.
They are not dead to the world yet. They can still step out into the shadowed places and wreak their havoc upon it.
They call him the Hawk. They call her the Widow. They mean that he prefers to save the innocent souls he can from death and hardship and blot out the sins marked in red upon his ledger. They mean that she began with but a little red, but now her ledger bleeds with the blood of the monsters she slaughters in the world beyond the city. Few in this old city dare to walk against either. Few consider the city anything but theirs until their debts have been paid.
—
“Widow.”
She whirls around in the dust at the bottom of the street, her red hair like a flame of fire. Unerringly, she stares upward to where the soul called Hawkeye perches at the corner of a high building. His bow is pulled taut, his arrow pointed straight at her heart.
The Black Widow laughs. “You cannot kill the already dead, Hawkeye.”
His head shrugs to one side. His arrow does not waver. “I can stop you from killing that man.”
She scowls. “He deserves death,” she replies viciously, her boot tightening against the man’s chest as he writhes on the ground beneath her. She looks up between the narrow buildings at the height and the soul above her. She has known of this fellow soul a very long time. He came when she had been decades in this land, but he has been here for fifteen years himself before deciding to show himself to her.
“Where were you when I burned down the hospital?” she asks him. She had earned a great many comforts for that job, and she heard that many in the city, striving to do good and earn their peace, had been displeased. “Shouldn’t you have stopped me then?”
“You’d never killed children before,” he comments wryly in that rough voice she finds she is coming to like.
Then he shoots and she gasps when the arrow hits her arm. She stumbles and releases the man as she’s pinned to the wall behind her. She stares at the feathered shaft as she feels its strangeness within her. She glares at the Hawk. “You made them of yourself,” she accuses.
He shrugs. He has another arrow nocked and pointed, again, at her heart. “Others save men from men. I save children from souls.”
You had never killed children before.
The Black Widow pulls on the arrow and hisses at the ragged wound it leaves behind. She drops it. She walks away.
—
Hawkeye had a name once. Clint Barton. Young and impressionable, he’d been caught up in pleasing his mentors and his brother as he learned the arrows and the art of performance. The show is what kept them alive. The show is what Clint grew up knowing.
Barney wanted them to go on to better things than the circus they had made their home, but Clint ached for the approval he received letting arrow after arrow loose into a bullseye. He practiced until his fingers bled, until a part of himself had found a home in his arrows, until he never missed.
But mentors ask for a return on their investment, and his mentors were crooks and thieves, not above killing. They brought him on jobs where the marks were crooks and thieves themselves, criminals who deserved to die. Clint shot his arrows to protect his own until he shot a man he had not recognized as his brother.
—
The Black Widow had a name once, but she had been a little child when the men came for her and took her to a place at the edge of the city, a place called the Red Room. There they taught her to kill or be killed, to fight for her right to survive. They took her name and gave her new memories and skills. They taught her to dance.
When she was perfect, when she had enough blood on her hands to taint her soul and keep her from crossing into peace, they wrested her soul from her body and made her their killer. For years, she was willing to step into the shadowed times and places of the world to do their bidding, but when she realized they could not kill the dead, she burned them and their Red Room to the earth and salted the land behind her. Still she was willing to do the bidding of others, but now she commanded what comforts a soul could enjoy, the sweetness of good memories, the tokens made of emotions and dreams she wanted—bits of other souls.
—
He was lost and a thief and a killer. She was lost and a liar and a killer.
But somehow, Clint Barton had found a purpose and become found.
—
The Black Widow threaded her way through the crowded, narrow streets, past tall buildings and the scents of tokens upon the marketplace. She fought the shivering in her soul as the taste of Hawkeye became part of herself. She had not asked for his token. She had not wanted his soul.
She saw the city with new eyes, saw the innocence of what mortal children were bought and sold here, saw the darkness swirling in the men who brought them, and saw the shining light in the heroes who came sometimes to ease the pain of lost souls or to free them.
Her eyes narrowed on the bulky form of one handsome hero. She knew him. She had taken a lover once who always promised her he would be rescued by such a man. She had left James when they purged her soul from his and there was no recognition in his eyes.
The man had that blonde hair and chiseled all-American look James had always told her about, the blue eyes, the sweet smile as he helped the soul of a woman who had died old cross the street.
The Black Widow had no mercy, no compassion. She hesitated, then gave in and walked over to slide up beside him, one hand on the crook of his free arm.
He started. He was mortal, she was not, and her masked expression was not reassuring.
“Are you Steve Rogers?” she asked.
The hero stared at her as though he had never seen a naked soul before.
She rolled her eyes at him and repeated her question slowly, as though her were a child. “Are you Steve Rogers?”
“Yes.” His voice was calmer than his eyes. He studied her with a politely suspicious air.
“Good.” She nodded curtly and gestured northward. “There is a man called the Winter Soldier waiting for you among the HYDRA. If you have not heard of them, they are dangerous and they steal memories from their assassins before selling them on the open market. He will not remember you.” She began to step away but paused at the weight of his arm passing through her. Souls were not immaterial, but they were not substantial either.
“Wait. Who is this man?”
She tilted her head at him, wondering if he would recognize it. “James. He will try to kill you.” She turned and slipped back into the city. Let the hero keep himself alive.
—
It was a kindness, Hawkeye knew, as he looked down from the spire of the south cathedral. The Black Widow was not known for her kindnesses.
He had watched her struggle briefly with the decision, then approach a hero without a knife in her hand. She had been trained how to handle mortal weapons without the weight of flesh. Hawkeye preferred weapons made of his own substance, but he had never seen an assassin hold his token without having it purged.
He had been right to not attempt to wound her, only pierce. He had been right and Coulson had been wrong.
“You don’t know that,” the mildly exasperated voice echoed through his glove.
Hawkeye wore several tokens from those he was affiliated with. They called themselves SHIELD and strove to protect and guard who they could. Coulson, though, was the only one Hawkeye was close to, not close enough to share lives or souls with, but close enough to trust when they decided how to take on a rogue or affiliated assassin.
Beneath them, the redheaded soul known as the Black Widow shuddered and looked up into the faint swirl of snow just starting to fall. Her bundled coat thickened and her red curls lengthened over her shoulders as she willed them to. Her eyes looked softer than he had ever imagined them being. She looked up, straight at him. He saw her fingers flex toward the knife she kept at her hip, then relax again before she walked on.
“I know, Coulson,” he said softly. “I know.”
—
She had a name once.
The Black Widow slipped inside her apartment and settled into a cup of tea and indoor clothes. The tea was made of her own memories, a drink of a little redheaded girl named Natasha. She had forgotten that girl, forgot her regularly. There was no point in remembering what might have been had the Red Room not found her.
She shivered in the heat of the small fire and wondered why suddenly it seemed there was a point, why she wanted something so desperately that she had never wanted before. She wanted to be whoever that little girl might have grown up into. She wanted the innocence that had been stolen from her.
It was a long time as the shadows faded that permitted the walking among the living before finally she stood and banked the fire, changed her clothes for bed, and slid between the covers.
—
She needed no guide to find him. He was sitting at an open café, drinking something that could be nothing but his own.
She sat down across from him, this archer with the storm-colored eyes and the rough hands. “The Snow Queen from ages past used to put slivers of her soul in ice and slide them into people’s hearts,” she began.
He looked at her and nodded, unbothered.
“Your arrow…” She frowned. “It’s part of you.”
He looked considering for a moment, then shrugged. “Yes.”
It was goodness and longing for something more and better. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever felt, but she didn’t want to give it up, and she didn’t know why. “What are you?” she demanded.
He blinked at her for a moment. “A soul.” His hand hesitated bringing the cup to his mouth. He set it down. “We help people, protect them. We clean out our ledgers.”
She brought her brows together and settled for ordering a cup. She didn’t want a memory though, just pure undiluted sunshine. “You and what others?”
“SHIELD.”
She had heard of them, heard that not all heroes in the city had flesh. She looked at this Hawkeye with the gentleness and fierce danger equally in his eyes and considered how long he had been making amends. He would not be long for this city. She would not know him long.
I can never be clean, she wanted to say, but she didn’t. The Black Widow had no weaknesses to spill her words and secrets.
But he saw her anyway with those keen eyes that saw beneath the city’s surface to what lay within each heart. He lay his hand on hers, carefully, as though knowing she might reject the gesture. “I’ll wait for you,” he said softly.
She sipped her sunshine. She stared out on the city she had pillaged and painted with blood as her own. “My name is Natasha,” she told him.
He smiled and told her what even Coulson had not known. “My name is Clint.”