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At the end of the day, Clint's an optimist. Has to be, really; pessimists have no place in this job. If you're convinced that you'll die, then die, you will. That's why, as he runs down an ancient street made of rough cobblestones and lined by huge, barren trees, he doesn't entertain the idea of dying. He's still got a mission, a target, and if he gives up and folds, he might as well lay down and stop breathing.
There's gunfire in the distance – close enough to be generally concerning, but far enough that he's not worried anyone's aiming for him – and the night sky is lit by burning buildings at the other end of town. SHIELD thought it would improve his odds to get to her, the Black Widow, accomplish what three other teams have failed to do before him, if they sent him after her in this burning hellhole, torn by civil war, baptized in chaos and death. Latveria is one of these countries where, at this point, half the people fighting for either side may have forgotten why they picked up their weapons in the first place. He's seen children roaming these streets who are at the age to start first grade, but there's no school system anymore, there isn't much of anything, and all they know is war.
And well, SHIELD isn't always right. Somewhere in this worn-down mess of a city, his target has gone underground. They're playing cat and mouse; he knows she's here, he's seen her scurry through streets in the dark, out of his reach, he's pretty sure she's seen him, but neither of them has gotten anywhere near doing something about that. This is her turf; he's the outsider, the foreign intruder no one wants in their middle, and all she needs to do to blend in is adjust her accent slightly and keep her head down. And she's done just that, making his job infinitely harder.
He's not sure where he's running, or what he's running from. Someone spotted him on his rooftop, assumed him to be a sniper. Well – a real one, their enemy. Fair assumption around here. They chased him down but they let off after a while, apparently satisfied that he wasn't going to return, was going to be someone else's problem. But Clint's still running. Somewhere along the way, he's lost track of where he went. His sense of direction is as shitty as his aim is stellar, always has been, and in a city that consists mainly of ruins, after dark, he's not very likely to find his way back to his hideout. He was ordered to keep radio silence unless it's an emergency, and his pride forbids calling base for something as simple and embarrassing as having lost his way. And so he keeps running, figuratively speaking. He's slowed down to a walk, taking in the ruins, illuminated by camp fires and burning crates at the side of the road, to see if there's anything he recognizes. It'll be easier come morning. He'll find some landmarks, triangulate his position. A few hours left until sunrise. All he's got to do is stay out of the combat zones, not raise any suspicions, and keep walking.
***
Natasha has a great many talents, most of them lethal. A lot of of the time, it requires her to hoard and orchestrate the attention of her targets, but she also knows how to appear demure when the occasion calls for it, how to avoid the kind of attention her work usually relies on. Down here, her fragile safety depends on blending into the shadows, becoming background noise. The cell she’s joined has occupied the whole street. Their camps are in basements and back yards. There's no command structure to speak of, and her target doesn't exist to most of these people in anything else than propaganda posters and hushed orders. He’s the rumored leader of the rebels that command this cell, an old military general that switched sites before the war started. It's going to be strenuous work, getting close enough to deliver the hit. But governments, especially corrupt ones that want nothing more than to gain back the power that was ripped from them almost a decade ago, tend to pay well. She'll be rewarded accordingly. She's on the run from the Red Room, leaving her former handlers none too pleased, and she's got to take the jobs as they come. There’s someone on her trail right now, though she doubts he’s Russian; another player, another reason to keep herself well-hidden.
Her superior down here is a man in his fifties who's seen too much death and pulled too many triggers to still care about any of his subordinates' lives. Not like she can't relate, but she despises the recklessness. He doesn't try to avoid losses. That's part of the reason why she ignores him when he marches into the room she shares with three other women, all three of them at work sewing and repairing uniforms with bullet holes in them, and calls her name. He sent the people who wore those to their death. He won't think twice about doing the same to her. The other reason is her cover; the woman she's being right now has never been singled out, isn't used to special attention. She lets him say her name again, looks up, points at herself with raised eyebrows, trying to convey the question her cover wouldn't dare ask out loud. Me? You really want me?
“Yes, you.” He comes closer and glares at her with obvious disdain, or just practiced indifference. He grabs her wrist and yanks her into a stand. “I've got a job for you. A delivery.”
***
Time passes in the weirdest way when one really, really needs it to pass quickly. Clint could swear he's been wandering around these streets for hours, but it's still pitch dark out, no signs for approaching sunup. He contemplates turning around, walking back and forth as to not get too far away from his hideout and become irrevocably lost. Anywhere else, he'd also attempt to get away from more-or-less crowded streets, but in this city, someone with armory of some sort might actually be less suspicious than someone who doesn't carry any obvious weapons. At least that's a threat people are used to, know what to make of. He pauses to look around himself, still not seeing anything he recognizes, and turns to walk back the way he came.
That's when the world dissolves into a ball of fire, and subsequently fades to black.
***
Natasha doesn't see the explosion, still lost in the innards of the building above their underground headquarters, but she hears it, feels the old stone walls around her shift and rattle. It can't have been too far away. Her first instinct is to go back downstairs. She doesn't know what's going to be waiting for her out on the street, what exactly happened. She braces one hand against a wall of the stone staircase she was climbing, pauses for a second to get her bearings, literally take a breath and assess the situation. People are screaming and yelling and crying, and she realizes that not all of it is coming from outside. There are gunshots, and the way they echo off the walls means they're from below here, inside this building.
Her cell is under attack. No matter what she does – go back to reveal that she's not as new to fighting as she pretended to be, or flee out onto the chaos on the street – her cover is going to be rendered useless. And given the choice between potentially getting trapped in a labyrinth of their underground headquarters or being able to flee out into the open... well, it's really not much of a choice at all. She bends down to produce a knife from her boot and takes the last few remaining stairs two at a time.
Upon throwing open the door, she is greeted by fire and brimstone. Burning debris fills the street for as far as she can see, thick smoke making it hard to breathe. People are running around like terrified cattle, some of them aflame or maimed, most of them bleeding. As far as escape routes go, it's an ugly one. But it's the only one available, so Natasha pushes her way past the mass of injured and screaming people. She wasn't aware just how many of them were still hiding out in the abandoned houses in this part of the city. That can't be her concern now, though. There's no help coming, and she doesn't have the time or the means to think of anyone but herself. She can't care. It's a liability.
Then she sees him, on the ground, motionless, a little way off the center of the explosion – the same guy that's been chasing her for the past week or two. They've come close enough that she recognizes his face, and if she had any doubt that it's him, there's the ridiculous bow and quiver he uses instead of a gun. At first she assumes he's dead – which, good, problem solved – and she's about to just keep moving when she remembers her training. Even under circumstances like this, it's essential to make sure. Until an opponent is confirmed to be out, he's still a threat. So she kneels down, knife at his throat just in case, and feels his wrist for a pulse; it's weak, but it's there. He's alive. Natasha leans back and takes stock, surveys his injuries.
There are burns on his left arm and the side of his neck, not too severe but an ugly, angry shade of red, having singed away some of his clothing as well. Blood is trickling down from a head wound, and as she pats him down, she finds his shirt wet and sticky as well. Further inspection reveals a piece of debris – wooden, probably from a fence or a crate – sticking out of his side as the cause of that injury.
Maybe she should slit his throat and be done with it. No one would care, no one would notice, not in this cacophony of the dead and wounded. But he's the third tail she's been sent in the last six months, and she's been assuming that they're working for one of the big players for a while now. If she knows who they're working for, she's got a better change of outrunning them in the future. She curses, pinches him hard once to make sure he's out good and proper, and, when he doesn't react, heaves his limp body off the ground.
***
He floats back to consciousness on a wave of agony. His head his throbbing, the whole left side of his body stings and tingles and burns, and there's a sharp pain radiating from his right lower torso.
“Oh, there you are,” comes a female voice from somewhere above him, and he pries his eyes open, blinks her into focus. Upon identifying his company, sitting a few feet away from him and watching him intently, he presses himself against the wall he's been propped up to, feels around for his bow, his gun, something, and comes up empty. The sudden movement jars... well, just about everything. He groans, feeling himself drifting away again.
A chair is pushed back, footsteps approaching him, and he scrambles. His foggy mind can't quite make sense of what's happening – if she wanted to kill him, she'd had plenty of opportunity while he was out, and why wouldn't she want him dead? He doesn't question the fact that she knows who he is, and what the reasons for his presence in the city might be. She's too good not to know.
She curses in Russian – he could probably translate the bare bones of it if his brain was functioning properly, but right now that's not the case – and kneels down next to him. He shifts away, swallowing down another groan, not sure what to expect; there’s a possibility she took him alive to play before she kills him.
“Stop moving, you idiot. It'll only make you bleed out faster.” Her hand comes up feel his forehead, his cheek, and then she jerks his head around so he's forced to look straight at her. “There's a piece of debris in your side, and I need to get it out. I wasn't going to do that while you were unconscious, can't risk you flailing around when I don't know how close it got to something essential.”
“Why?” he bites out, and she cocks her head. “Why not just kill me?”
With a shrug, she lets go of him and rummages around for something on the table behind her. “Because whoever your employer is, they're getting to be a pain in my ass. And you can't answer questions when you're dead. Therefore, it's in my best interest to make sure you don't die, at least for now.”
She holds up what he recognizes as his own leather belt and raises her eyebrows, and it takes him a second to catch on to what she means. He's bleeding out. She'll have to get the piece of debris out and then stitch the wound, and without anesthetics... Yeah, he's going to need the belt. He opens his mouth for her to push it between his teeth and screws his eyes shut.
***
The sounds he makes, belt or no belt, make her ache in sympathy. His face loses what color it had left, eyes rolling back into his head, and somewhere between the third and the fourth stitch he passes back out. She finishes anyway; there's not much more blood he can lose before he'll get critical, and with the piece of debris removed, the wound oozes steadily. Dumb luck that she's been posing as a seamstress of all things, kept her tools with her when she left.
Afterwards, Natasha sits back down, facing him. His weapon of choice his behind her on the table, and she had taken the two guns and three knives he had hidden in his gear, and anyway, he's in no shape to get up and fight her. Still, she can't tear her eyes away. He's intriguing. Whether he's a hired gun or a soldier, government agent of some sort, he's peculiar enough to do this kind of job with an ancient, impractical weapon, and apparently works it so well that it earns him a living. He's not much to look at, compared with most of the mercenaries she's run into – lean and athletic, sure, but not very bulky. He doesn't look brute. Then again, she hasn't met a lot of snipers, never mind the unusual weapon. Maybe they're all like that.
Above them, it must be day now. Chaos still reigns out on the street, she can hear the commotion of people trying to put out the fires and tend to the wounded. She spares no thought to what happened to her cell; either they made it or they're dead, there's nothing she can do about that. After she found him and took him, she ran into the nearest unmonitored house entrance she found and booked it into the basement. It seems actually abandoned, but she's barricaded the door just in case. For the time being, they're as safe as they can be given the circumstances.
She watches his chest rise and fall, listens closely to the noises outside, and waits for him to wake up.
***
The next time Clint comes to, the world is a little less frayed around the edges, but if anything, his head is pounding harder. Everything else is also still aching, and he's still got an enemy spy staring him down with a perfectly unreadable expression. But he's still breathing, so he's willing to record that point in her favor.
He licks dry lips, makes a face at the foul taste in his mouth, remembering how she shoved his belt in there to keep him from screaming. That's not the only bad unsavory note he detects though, he also tastes bile, and it rather effectively alerts him to the fact that he's sort of nauseous. Concussion, then. Not too much of a surprise.
“Do you have...” Clint swallows around a throat that feels like it's made of dry dish rags. “Water? Do you have some water?”
No answer is forthcoming, but she stands up, walks around the table to a sink he didn't think was still working and, after she's proven him wrong, comes back with a brazen mug full of water and holds it to his lips. He chugs it down too fast, almost makes himself gag. The expression on her face as she pulls the mug back leaves no doubt as to how pathetic she thinks him to be.
“So,” she says after she's sat back down. “Talk.”
And ah, they've reached twenty questions. He briefly weighs his options – shut up and stonewall won't get him very far in this case, he supposes, he's pretty sure she won't think twice about killing him after all if he doesn't prove at least a little bit useful, and he is allowed to give away who he works for and what his mission parameters are if the situation calls for that. “Ever heard of SHIELD?”
Her eyes narrow. Of course she has. They're big enough of a player that not knowing who they are would be the kind of oversight that just doesn't happen to someone like her.
“So yeah,” he continues, shrugging. “ID card is in a hidden pocket in the lining of my jacket. You can check it, if you want. Name, clearance, handler, it's all there. They think you're a rather huge annoyance, and they want you gone.”
“And they sent Robin Hood to do it.” Briefly, her gaze flits to his bow and arrow, then back to him. She looks at him like she wants to dissect him, cut him open, find out how he works on the inside.
That's one of the nicknames he really, really hates – people throwing historic archers at him by the way of an insult stopped being funny a long time ago – but the quip he wants to make in reply gets choked off by a loud pounding on the door. Whoever's outside seems pissed off and determined, and the old wooden door doesn't have much to set against the assault. Barely a minute passes before they've pushed it off its hinges and the room explodes with gunfire. Clint manages to dive behind a crate a few feet away from him, sadly positioned in the opposite direction of his own weapons, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her firing back out of two handguns at once and moving to duck behind the table. Pain shoots up from various parts of his body with a lag of a few seconds, making his vision swim. He blinks just in time to see the handle of a shotgun come down towards his face, hitting him over the head.
***
Natasha doesn't recognize the three men breaking into the basement. An opposing cell, she suspects – their clothes are just as threadbare, their faces just as sunken in, the same as the ones of every rebel she met. No way they're soldiers. But it doesn't particularly matter who they are. They're shooting at her, and as long as they're doing that, she's going shot back and not ask any questions. Her position is far from ideal, she's got to aim past the table legs and her low angle doesn't make that any easier, but it quickly becomes clear that they're terrible shots. Definitely not soldiers. The first goes down only a few steps past the door. The second almost makes it to the table, but that only gives her a better angle; he doesn't stand a chance either. The third, possibly and wrongly assuming that an attempt at her captive would somehow impress her, goes for the SHIELD sniper. He does get a jab in, but not much more, and it causes him to show Natasha his back. She shoots him in the head, and he collapses on top of the wildly trashing agent.
It's instinct more than anything that causes her to run over to the sniper and help him throw off the dead body of his attacker. He doesn't stop thrashing once the weight is gone and she grabs his wrists, pins them over his head. He freezes and goes still in her grip almost immediately, but it's not surrender. His pupils widen, eyes going blank. His chest heaves once, and then he basically stops breathing.
The blow to his head. It's not unreasonable to assume he came away from the explosions with a concussion, and the second hit... her medical training has been kept cursory and mission-oriented, but she does know the possible effects of repeated blows to an already injured brain. He doesn't have much time. That shouldn't matter to her; he told her what she needed to know, supplied a name for the new threat in her life.
But that's just the thing. Maybe it isn't a threat. Maybe it's a chance. Working on her own and scrambling for jobs while trying to stay off the grid, while better than being a puppet, isn't the life she wants in the long run. She's been looking for a way to break out of the bottleneck that fleeing the Red Room left her in for a while. This could be her escape route. She lowers his body to the ground, pats him down for the wire he must surely be wearing and the hidden pocket he mentioned, tearing away at his clothes until she's found both. Getting the wire active isn't difficult, at least not for her.
“This is the Black Widow. I have the agent you sent after me.” She squints at his ID card, rattles down name and identification number. “He was caught in an explosion, he has a concussion, and he just got another jab to the head. He's unresponsive, and I'm assuming his brain is swelling up in his skull as we speak. I'll give you our position, and I'll have an offer to make, but there's something I want in return.”
She's met with silence for mere seconds before a male voice crackles through the earpiece. “And what would that be?”
Natasha sends another glance to the now once again prone body next to her on the floor, nods to herself, and lists her demands.
***
He's in medical for almost a month, and in recovery for an additional couple of weeks. The burn scars on his left side will stay with him for life, and so will the marks from the row of messy stitches on his lower abdomen.
Apparently, though, those aren’t the only souvenirs he got to take home.
The Black Widow – or Natasha Romanoff, as she calls herself around here – visits his bedside almost every day. She still stares at him like he's a particularly fascinating puzzle. She doesn't talk to him, and he doesn't see any reason why he should strike up a conversation with her. So maybe she saved his life. Maybe he owes her for that. But she didn't do it out of the goodness of her heart, and if it's gratitude she wants, she can wait for that until she's gray and old.
When he's finally released back into active duty, his first order is to show up to Fury's office. Clint assumes he's not going to get a handshake and flower bouquet to welcome him back into the field, not SHIELD's style, but what he doesn't expect is Romanoff sitting opposite the director and grinning like Christmas morning. Which, on her face, looks slightly terrifying.
“Agent Barton,” Fury says before Clint's even sat down himself, “meet your new partner.”