Archive of Our Own ^beta

Natasha's favorite English idioms are the violent ones. The ones people use every day, even people who are not violent themselves (Natasha doesn't know very many people like that, personally, but she knows they exist), without thinking about what they really mean. She collects them. She was once at a gas station in Wisconsin, and a man who Natasha was quite certain had never done any such thing said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." He was talking about the various routes another customer could take, since the road the man wanted was closed.

Natasha's never skinned a cat either, though she would if she had to. She tried counting the various ways you could do it, but really there's pretty much just the one right way.

English is funny like that.

She paid for her gas, and a candy bar, and smiled at the man when he told her to be careful driving by herself at night, and thought about how he had no idea she had a meth kingpin tied up in the trunk of her rented Corolla.

-----

In Dallas, she's at a nightclub and she's wearing an uncomfortable dress that limits the number of weapons she can carry, and the bartender keeps trying to chat her up and she's trying to make eyes at an arms dealer across the room, trying to will him to buy her a drink while looking like she couldn't care less. Finally, she has to tell the bartender flat out that no, she doesn't want to hear about his plans to go back to school, and he gets pissy at her, and says she's shooting herself in the foot. He's totally interested in her, and here she is waiting for a guy across the room to notice her, and he isn't going to, so she should take the sure thing and quit looking so bored.

Natasha has never shot herself in the foot, and she's never been shot in the foot, though she has been shot. Her refusal of him is nothing like being shot. And she doesn't think that's what that saying really means, anyway, but this is her first solo op for SHIELD, and she's still adjusting to using and hearing English as her everyday language.

(Later, the arms dealer invites her back to his hotel, and she smothers him with a pillow.)

Natasha doesn't think of herself as American and probably never will. She's Russian, or she's a person with a unique skill set but without a country. She can find her way anywhere, and that is sometimes her only comfort; she can survive. She has and she will.

She thinks in English now, most of the time. She dreams in English, usually, when her dreams aren't of the past. She speaks English, Russian, French, Italian, and Latin, she can insult your mother in at least ten more languages, and she's confident she could learn anything else if she needed to, and quickly.

Natasha's lived in the United States for over ten years at this point. She's not sure if she'll ever live in Russia again. She's not sure she wants to. She can get excellent Russian food in Brighton Beach, or make it herself. She likes summer far more than she expected to.

And over time, SHIELD has come to be her home. More home than any she's known. She remembers her childhood, a little -- and she is pretty confident her memories are her own -- but she remembers only pieces. Baking Easter bread with an older woman (probably her grandmother). Sitting in front of a fire. A set of matryoshka dolls, so old the paint had worn away.

(And she remembers the Red Room, but that was not really a home. Certainly no one there thought of it as such.)

But in New York, she has quarters that are like a real apartment (at 500 square feet, it's not even that small, as actual apartments go in this city). She's even decorated them, a bit, visiting thrift stores and consignment shops to find out what her tastes really are when she decides for herself, with her own money she earned. (She left behind every single account she had when she switched sides, even the ones she was sure nobody knew about, and though her SHIELD salary is generous, she doesn't have the kind of money she used to pretend to have when she was seducing and killing rich men.) She's dropped some money at Target, too -- woman cannot live on flea markets alone.

Natasha has a favorite movie theater, and knows which are the best Duane Reades in her neighborhood, and the man who runs the bodega she frequents knows that when she nods hello but doesn't speak, she is being friendly. She gets annoyed about tourists on the subway, and believes fervently in "walk left, stand right." TV says that makes her a real New Yorker now.

She even has coworkers she would call friends. She has people she trusts, and whose trust in her she values, and they're annoying less often than they aren't. That's the best definition of a friend Natasha knows.

-----

When Natasha realizes the man stalking her across Madripoor is Hawkeye, the assassin with a bow and arrow, she feels both a thrill of anticipation and a shiver of fear. He is good. He is very, very good at his job. His weapon of choice is silly, of course (Natasha doesn't believe in preferring any one weapon over any other -- other than her Widow's Bite bracelets, which are never the only weapon on her person, she purposely doesn't rely on any one thing. Flexibility is the key to thriving in her profession), but he's devastating with it.

From what she's heard, he's the most reliable assassin working right now. After her.

So, this should be good.

He catches up with her on a rooftop, at two a.m. She's there to break into a lab, and he's already waiting in the shadows when she lands. She can't believe she didn't know he was there.

As soon as he steps out of the shadows, opening his mouth to speak, she punches him. It's mostly reflex. He lets her punch him -- doesn't even try to duck -- and grins at her. There's blood at the corner of his mouth, now.

"So it's gonna be like that," he says, and then he takes a swing at her.

They're well matched. He's bigger, of course, but she's faster and more agile. (Not as much more agile as she expected, though.) They fight hard, all out, cheap dirty tricks. She wants to stay close, inside bow range, because distance gives him the advantage.

Natasha's flipping over him when he gets her. She kicks him in the stomach, and jumps up to circle him so she can punch him in the kidneys before he can catch his breath. She's tumbling over him when he reaches up -- how did he recover that fast? -- and grabs her out of the air, throwing her to the ground. She's struggling up when he hits her in the temple. Everything goes dark.

When she wakes up, she's in a shack. Always a shack. No one ever ties her up anywhere nice. She's tied to a chair (tied well, arms and legs, by someone who knew what he was doing). She has a bandage on her face, and on her arm where he'd gotten her with his knife. Someone tied her up, and tended to her wounds. Hmm.

Hawkeye is sitting in front of her, inspecting arrows.

"Mornin'," he says, cheerfully. "Well, afternoon, really."

Natasha says nothing. Silence makes people uncomfortable, and a beautiful woman who keeps silent makes men very uncomfortable. It's one of her best weapons.

Hawkeye continues to inspect his arrows. He appears deeply unperturbed by her silence.

The minutes stretch on. It becomes an hour, by Natasha's count. Hawkeye finishes checking his arrows and sets about taking care of the bow.

His phone buzzes, and he says, "Excuse me," like they're at dinner together, getting up to take the call. He actually steps out to take it, letting her out of his sight. That would normally be the end of the line for him, but damn, she really can't get out of this chair. She could roll, or hop, but there's just the one door, he's on the other side, and she hasn't figured out another escape plan yet.

After just a minute, he's strolling back in, smiling at her, but from his expression she doesn't think the call went well.

"So," he says, sitting across from her. "I'm here to offer you a job."

-----

It's been fourteen hours, and Hawkeye -- Barton, he tells her his real name is Clint Barton, she can't believe he's giving that information up so freely -- is finally starting to crack. Natasha doesn't want his job, doesn't want to work for SHIELD, for America. She's not a Red Room soldier anymore, but old habits die hard, and her distrust of Americans goes very deep. Even Barton telling her that she's not getting out of the room alive any other way isn't having much effect.

"Widow," he says, "I could have killed you on that roof. That's what I was there to do. But I didn't. I offered you this chance -- at no small risk to myself, I might add." He goes on and on, about second chances and her valuable skills and Natasha almost starts to wish he would just kill her already, instead of appealing to her conscience or whatever. This is boring. But he's starting to lose his patience with her, and that's good. Angry people are careless people. And careless people get killed by Natasha because they're not paying enough attention.

"You are cutting off your nose to spite your face!" he snaps.

Natasha actually blinks at that.

"You are so determined to be a good comrade, but God, lady, the Cold War is over. Has been for a while, don't know if you've noticed."

Natasha says nothing. Several minutes go by, with Hawkeye just watching her. She looks back, smoothing her face into a blank mask so he can read whatever he wants on it.

"You are like the goddamn Sphinx, lady," Hawkeye says. "Look, am I wasting my time? I saved your damn life, I went against orders to do so -- because I think it'd be a shame to waste all that talent. I think you and I, we have some stuff in common. And you could have a new chance. Make a different call."

Natasha has never told Clint this, but it was the phrase "cut off your nose to spite your face" that made her actually listen to him, and consider his proposal seriously. She'd spent fourteen hours ignoring him, trying to figure out a way to escape, not really considering that walking out that door a SHIELD agent was a form of escape.

It's such an ugly phrase. A stupid phrase. It almost makes her want to giggle. It -- well, it surprises her. Clint Barton has surprised her twice in their very brief acquaintance, and that makes him worth considering. She can't remember the last time someone surprised her twice.

So she makes the call. In the beginning, it's just about self-preservation. It's about surviving. She's not really sure when she actually comes to believe, and trust, in the missions she's doing. It happens gradually, and it comes after she comes to believe, and trust, in the people she works most closely with.

-----

Natasha is taking the subway. She doesn't have to -- Stark will lend her a car (and driver; he doesn't trust her to drive any of his cars, more's the pity), or she could get a cab. SHIELD doesn't really like for their agents to take public transportation, but she likes it. It's a good way to practice being anonymous, invisible.

And ever since the battle of New York (that's really what they're calling it in the papers; Natasha thinks it's silly), she likes to hear what people think of what happened. Though she defended SHIELD to Stark and Banner and Rogers, she was shaken by some of Stark's findings. A lot of things are in flux at SHIELD right now, and Natasha is being asked for her opinion on them. She doesn't have a lot of experience being asked for her opinion on matters of policy, so she's doing some informal polling of the public as part of her decision-making.

Four teenage boys are hugging a pole on the train, talking about their classmates. One of them is telling a story about how much he dislikes another boy on his soccer team.

"Dude, no, Eric's not like that, I promise you," another boy insists. "We were really good friends when we were little -- we lived in the same building back then. We go way back. He's cool. I'm not gonna talk shit about him, he knows where the bodies are buried."

Natasha feels a sharp stab of pain in her chest at that, an ache of grief for Phil Coulson. This boy almost certainly does not mean that Eric literally knows where any bodies are buried. These boys in their carefully faded fake vintage T-shirts and carefully distressed jeans and too much Axe have not had to deal with that kind of thing, she is sure. He just means that Eric is a good friend, and a good keeper of secrets. She likes that, that he rates secret keeping highly in a friend.

Coulson literally knew where the bodies were buried. On more than one occasion, he helped her bury them. He was a good friend -- a better friend than she appreciated when he was alive. He was a good coworker, in a line of work where you really do put your life in the hands of the people you work with. He knew exactly how she took her coffee, and what brand of shampoo she preferred, and he'd try to have both available on every mission.

Even though her work has world-changing consequences, Natasha's world is small. She goes very few places, outside of work. She doesn't really have much in the way of hobbies. She interacts with a limited number of people, and she trusts even fewer. And that is how she likes it. But that small world got smaller without her consent this week, and Natasha finds that this kind of grief is new to her, and hard to handle. She's lost agents and handlers before, of course, but not friends.

Natasha decides to remember that phrase, as a tribute to Coulson. He was a good friend, and a good keeper of secrets. He knew where the bodies were buried.

-----

Once, on a mission, Barton and Coulson are arguing about... something. Natasha doesn't even remember, exactly. Barton wants to do something stupid, and Coulson is trying to reel him back in. It's a fight she's heard them have before. Finally, Coulson says no, it isn't happening, end of discussion.

Barton waits exactly twenty-two seconds before he says, "But if you just let me --"

"Agent Barton, you are beating a dead horse. Drop it."

Barton mumbles, "Your face is a dead horse," but quiet enough that Coulson could ignore it.

Natasha is just starting to feel comfortable with SHIELD on that mission -- starting to believe they are not planning to kill her after all. While Coulson and Barton argue, she's sitting at the table, painting her nails for the party she's working, listening but also focusing on doing a neat job. Her heartrate is staying low without much effort on her part -- she's heard this argument before, more than once, and has come to believe, not just know, that this fight they have won't end with someone throwing a punch or a knife, that it is really good natured, that it's just how two very different men express their fondness for one another.

But Natasha has never heard the phrase "beat a dead horse" before. She can't parse it. (She can't parse "Your face is a dead horse," either, but she's learned by now that that phrase isn't supposed to make sense, it's just Barton being Barton. English is hard enough, and he goes and mutilates it all the time.) And she feels comfortable enough to say, after having thought it over for a minute, "Why would anyone want to beat a dead horse?"

Coulson sighs, a deep sigh that conveys exactly how long-suffering he feels himself to be. "Exactly, Ms. Romanoff. Exactly."

Clint laughs and laughs, and it takes several excruciating moments for Natasha to realize he isn't laughing at her. Well, he is, but not with malice. He's laughing because her question made him happy. Because she made him happy. Even Coulson, after holding onto his non-expression valiantly, gives in and laughs too, laughs hard enough to wipe tears away from his eyes.

She kicks Clint and Coulson both, under the table. Hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to do any damage. Because they are, against all odds, her friends.

(A couple years later, in Budapest, their cover gets blown and the very convoluted plan they hatch to fix it does, in fact, involve beating a dead horse. It is not fun at all.)