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The Black Widow goes down with an arrow through her leg. It wrenches a pained cry out of her as her hunter stalks forward, another arrow nocked, expression grim. She doesn't go down without a fight, ever, and she lashes out at him, but she's losing blood fast and he can more than handle her.
In minutes, she's pinned on the ground and Hawkeye is staring down at her intently. "You going to play nice?" he asks.
The Widow glares at him, and that's answer enough.
He rams a tranq into her side.
When she wakes up later—hours? days?—she's lying on her back in a hotel room bed and Hawkeye is moving around quietly. She feels the bed shift with his weight as he leans against it and changes the dressing on her wound. She feels a brief flare of gratitude that he kept her unconscious when he removed the arrow from her flesh.
She stares at him, but he's not looking at her. He's entirely focused on his work, cleaning her wound and rewrapping it. He pauses afterward for a long moment, brushes his thumb over the bandage.
Her breath hitches.
He leans down and kisses her softly on her skin just above the spot. It's too close to the top of her thigh, and his hand tightens slightly on her leg.
She mutters at him in Russian, and he chuckles against her skin before pulling his head up to kiss her mouth instead.
"SHIELD," he says simply.
That's the rule. He caught her. She has to join his side.
"SHIELD," she agrees grudgingly.
They don't bother to explain the rule to Fury.
She first picked him up when he was making a name for himself as a carnival attraction and nothing better. It didn't pay enough. He went along with the gigs of petty crime his brother got him into and honed his aim on other targets than circus implements and on other weapons than a bow.
But he was too good, too earnest, and too much of an innocent kid who deserved better, and he kept trying to play the hero.
Natasha wasn't especially pleased with the way he rescued her from the very people she'd deliberately allowed to capture her, but she worked him into her plan, pinned him to a wall with her body, and offered him a deal. She caught him, so he had to join her side.
He became hers, her Hawkeye, her partner, even if he didn't realize she was KGB and perfectly willing to betray the country he told her he wouldn't.
She left him hanging out to dry when SHIELD came and bagged him, and he asked her only once, "Come with me."
"Only if you catch me," she replied coolly. "That's the rule."
Whose rule?
There was a little girl training hard as a ballerina. Her adoptive father worked for the government on programs she knew nothing about, and he told her often not to ask too many questions.
She knew how to keep her eyes and ears open and her mouth shut.
Men came to her father, told him things he did not like, looked at her and pointed with hard mouths. They went away and her father told her not to ask any questions. But he wasn't with her every moment, and there was a man who liked to watch her performances and come by afterward. It wasn't romance then, and that was fine.
"You could do greater things than this, Natalia," he said simply.
She looked at him with solemn eyes and said words she should have come to regret by now, but she hasn't. Not yet. "Only if you catch me."
The Winter Soldier caught himself a young girl and turned her over to be made into a Black Widow. That was the rule. He caught her, so she had to join his side.
She hunts down the Winter Soldier after Odessa. Hawkeye doesn't like it, but he lets her and guards her back every step of the way. She calls in all her favors, she works all her networks, and she comes up empty.
The Black Widow stands in her snowy homeland and turns with smarting eyes to her partner. He waits, listening ears, intent gaze, and warm arms waiting to hold her.
"I didn't catch him."
Hawkeye reaches for her then, wrapping a gloved hand in her hair and dragging her close to kiss her forehead gently then lean his against it. "You okay?"
She shudders, nods. She'll be fine. She always is.
But one day, she will hunt him down and he will join her side.
Hawkeye tenses beside the Black Widow when they review the security footage available from the day of the attack. It wasn't too hard for him to acquire it even after SHIELD went down, and it wasn't unhelpful to have a brother in the FBI.
"That's him," he says.
Both of them know who 'him' refers to.
The Black Widow looks over and arches one eyebrow delicately in question.
Hawkeye shoots her back a grin and reaches for his quiver. "Let's go catch ourselves a ghost."
Steve Rogers is looking for Bucky Barnes. He's searching for his friend. Hawkeye and the Black Widow are hunting down the Winter Soldier, and they don't forget that they play this far more seriously than they ever would as civilians.
They are not civilians. They are blood and weapons and shadows, the hunter and hunted. They call in every favor they have. They work every network. They track down every broken trail and hint of the hunter he has become, leaving to Steve the man he had once been.
They corner him in a bunker in Kiev, not the first place anyone would have thought to look, not with his programming breaking down and so much of the American soldier showing from underneath. He doesn't go down without a fight. It is the Winter Soldier that lashes out and nearly rams his metal fist through the Widow's injured shoulder.
She brings him down with her bites, electricity over his arm, because this is the rule, this is how it is done. Hawkeye releases an arrow and pins the Soldier to the ground.
She holds down one arm. He holds down the other. She looks into the Soldier's eyes and the recognition flickering within them.
"Caught you," she says.
They wash his wounds and bandage him up. They repair the damage done to his arm from this encounter and the last time he and the Widow tangled with each other in the street.
The Black Widow waits until he sits calmly beneath their touch to lean over and kiss him softly. "The Avengers," she says, murmuring close against him. She looks up at him through her lashes.
His metal fingers come up to gently brace her jaw as Hawkeye watches, hand tense on the Soldier's arm. Hawkeye relaxes after a moment, but not his grip.
"The Avengers," the Soldier agrees.
This is the rule.
They are bound one to the other until the next war that will break them apart. They will separate eventually perhaps, but it doesn't bother them to bury their weapons in each other's flesh, for they know it is only ever temporary.
"Come with me," the breathless request.
"Only if you catch me."