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The first time Clint sees Natasha, he’s positively starstruck. Sure, she looks exactly like the woman he’s been sent to Hungary with the intent of killing, but the first thing that goes through his mind isn’t a list of weaponry or tactics or anything remotely like that. The first thing he thinks when he sees her is, I think I’ve found my soulmate, because surely that’s what anyone sane would think seeing a woman with eyes like ice and a sharp smile who looks as though she could take down everyone in this bar (him excepted) within a minute flat. She doesn’t hold herself like she could, but he reads it in the way her lips are tilted, in the way she observes the room.
She’s subtle. Definitively a spy, he thinks as she catches his eyes through the fog of the bar, and he gives her a grin. She walks over like she has an ulterior purpose, but when he smiles and asks her to drink she doesn't seem upset.
She orders a scotch on his tab, and he’s momentarily surprised it’s not vodka, but then his surprise recedes almost immediately when realizing that if she were a Russian spy, she wouldn’t give herself away by being so stereotypical. He smiles at her and it doesn't even feel false. She sips her drink just a tad bit slower than him. He drinks his faster, because he knows he can hold his alcohol and because it usually puts people at ease to believe they have an advantage.
When she’s about to leave, he stands up so fast he nearly knocks the chair over, thinking nonsensically, I need to know. He introduces himself as Clint Barton -which is dumb, but he’s kind of out of it, thinking about every story he’s ever heard about fate and destiny and love and thinking just this once that they might be true. She says, Nadyeshka Romanoff , which is a horrible cover because that’s not even a real name, and when their hands meet nothing happens. She walks away, and he checks his wrist. It’s blank.
He stares after her anyways.
.
He’s supposed to kill her. The long story is: he’s believed in second chances since forever, and he sees in her eyes the glimpses of pain, regret, and other thinks he knows she will always pretend not to feel. The long story is she tells him her name and he thinks about tattooing it on his wrist anyway, that she nearly kills him once but when she has the blade to his neck she hesitates, just for a second, and he grabs her wrist and pins her down and says, “I don’t want to kill you,” and she just looks at him, and he says, “Come with me,” not harshly, not like a command. Like a request. And she says, “I have a choice?” Like that’s something that’s never happened before. And he nods, and she says, “Yes.”
The long story is longer than that, actually. The long story has dark alleyways and spyware and sly smiles and manipulation and espionage and purposefully misfired arrows.
The short story is much simpler. The short story is: he’s supposed to kill her. He doesn’t.
.
He meets Laura Miller at a restaurant. She’s surrounded by friends. He’s...not, he’s taking consecutive shots because he’s pretty sure Nat already found her soulmate, or something along those lines, the actual reason got blurry after the fifth or sixth drink.
He sees, somewhere in the background of the haze in his mind, a friend prodding her, probably to go get more drinks, he thinks at first, but no, she comes near him, blushing up to her ears and saying “Hi, hello, what’s your name,” and he’s very proud that he strung the cohesive sentence of, “Barton. Clint.” together. She smiles at him, he possibly smiles back, her hand brushes his and ow, did someone stab him under that table? But there’s no one nearby when he looks up, and he nearly forgets about it in the morning.
Nearly. Because in the morning the name Laura Miller is scrawled onto his wrist. At first he looks to see if there’s a number attached. It takes him a whole other five minutes to figure out, holy shit, that’s my soulmate. It takes him another twenty minutes to throw together a breakfast of Cheetos dipped in milk with a side of coffee grounds, yank on his shoes, and head out to the nearest store to purchase just about every long sleeved shirt they have. He doesn’t want a bracelet, that would be too obvious.
He tries not to think of what the implications of his words are.
.
Sometimes, he thinks fate got it all wrong. Or destiny. Or whatever force it is that writes people’s names on their wrists when they meet their supposed One and Only. Because he doesn’t feel in love, just hungover and still miserable about Natasha. He’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to be in love with someone other than his soulmate. Most people marry theirs within two months of meeting.
He sees Laura another four or five times, and the worst part is, nothing changes. He still doesn’t want to date her (although she’s actually a pretty fantastic drinking buddy), he still has her name on his wrist, and worst of all, he’s still in love with Natasha.
Fuck. He’s in love with Natasha.
The sixth time is when Laura gets all weird, asking him why he never wears short sleeves, especially since it’s the middle of summer. She has short sleeves, and no bracelet to speak of. It takes him no time to spot the name on her wrist.
Clint Barton.
His drink tastes bitter. She leaves to go say hi to one of her friends, and by the time she gets back he's left, and he doesn't come back.
.
Soulmates can be reciprocal. Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not, but the odds of falling in love with your reciprocal bond are almost one hundred percent.
Clint has a reciprocal bond.
Clint isn't in love.
Or rather, Clint is distinctly in love with another person.
Either destiny fucked up, or him.
He’s putting his money on the former, because, really, there was no way destiny could put a woman like Natasha in his path and expect him not to fall in love with her.
.
He tries to keep quiet, because really, it’s best left in the dirt. He’ll date and then marry Laura, and eventually his crush- because that’s what it is- on Natasha will go away. It’ll have to. And Nat probably has someone else, if the way she hides the mark on her wrist is any indication. (He’d asked her about the bracelet once, but she’d told him it was filled with different poisons and frankly he has no desire to touch that.)
But he fucks it up, because, well, he’s dying, and he counts that as a good enough excuse for confessing his love, soulmate bonds and destiny be damned. He tells Natasha he loves her, and she tells him, shut up, stop making deathbed confessions, you’re going to live, and he falls in love with her all over again. Looking into her eyes as she talks, trying to keep him awake, he’s pretty sure she loves him back. But that might just be the near-death hallucinations.
But then she kisses him, and, well, it’s difficult to misconstrue that.
.
He always thinks he's lucky to have her: he doesn't know why she'd choose him over her soulmate, over and over again. She tells him her soulmate's dead, that she loves him (and he knows what she means is no one but him ) all the same.
He reads it in her actions, because words are easily played games for them: her gaze will wander to his, sometimes, and he thinks he'll see just the slightest flicker of a smile on her lips; how she brushes her fingertips over his wrist when she thinks he isn't paying attention; how she'll take a bullet for him as easily as he'll do so for her.
He can always pick her out in a crowd.
.
When she dies, it doesn’t matter that she’s not his soulmate, she takes a piece of him with her. She grabs his hands and touches his forehead to hers, and he thinks, her or the world, and for one selfish second he just wants to say her. She refuses to let him die for her, but he doesn’t know what he even is in her absence.
“Nat,” He says, knowing he sounds nothing short of completely broken, “Will you-”
“Clint, shut up,” She says. She kisses him, her nails digging into his shoulder hard enough to cut skin, and when he looks back he remembers it all- from that women he first saw through a smokescreen in Budapest to the person in front of him right now, brave and beautiful and about to throw away her life for him.
“I love you,” he says, as she turns away from him.
She looks back. “Me too, Clint. Me too.”
He thinks he could have saved himself a lot of pain and confusion and heartbreak, had he not loved her.
He thinks there’s no other person he would have rather fallen in love with.