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They call her the Black Widow.
When she gets up on that high wire, she owns the world. All grace and sharp angles, motions fluid and sudden. She doesn't just walk the wire, she dances across it, light and seductive as her namesake.
But that isn't why they call her the Black Widow.
As she works the center ring, a man gives his brother a slow, sideways glance.
"Don't do it, Clint," he says.
The two of them stand in the shadows on the edge of the tent, hidden from the cheers of the crowd, as well as the all-seeing eyes of Jacques and Mrs. Carson. Both brothers know their policy on skipping work - the real work - and both know Clint's feelings toward the matter.
Clint makes no move to indicate he's listening. He still stares up at the Black Widow as she flies out over their heads, a gymnast ballerina, defiant of the deadly void half a centimeter beneath her feet.
"Clint, I mean it," the man says again, "I know that look. Bobbi... Jess... It never ends well."
But Clint doesn't hear him. He has eyes only for the Black Widow.
Clint Barton is billed as Hawkeye, the circus' other main attraction. He is the crack shot, the Avenging Archer, and it's only a matter of time before they get a joint act. Hawkeye and Black Widow: Bonnie and Clyde inside and outside the ring. The crowd goes wild.
The Black Widow is known as Natasha Romanoff, but that isn't her real name. She joined up one day out of nowhere, and everyone knows she'll leave one day in the same way.
Nobody knows the first thing about her, or why she's here. Some say she's running from an assassin ex-boyfriend in Russia. Some say she was the Russian assassin. Some say she did to her ex what her stage name does to its.
Clint doesn't believe any of it. But then, he's never had the best judgement when it comes to gorgeous women.
"She's bad news, Clint," Barney Barton tells his brother that first night, still hidden in the shadows. "You wanna know why she's called the Black Widow?"
Clint doesn't. He wants to watch as she walks that wire, nice and easy-like, as if she's spent her entire life up there. Fearless. She takes her time with it, teasing the audience with her acrobatics. A leap, a twirl - she does things with that wire that spit in the face of physics - a right wrong step, and the entire crowd stops breathing. Clint clutches at his brother's shoulder, even though he knows the act by heart. But the Black Widow hooks her foot around the tightrope at the last possible second, swings up and around, and lands in a handstand atop the wire.
The crowd's roar is deafening.
As Barney turns back to give Clint another warning, he only needs to see the reflected spotlight glittering in his brother's eyes to know it's too late.
Clint has already fallen victim.
When Clint was twelve, he was nearly eaten by the alligator in the circus' Peter Pan act. He crept up to the cage bars one night on a dare, drawn in by the creature's lithe power. It was fun, and dangerous, and exactly the sort of game young boys like to play, if young boys are brought up in the sort of environment that provides live alligators for entertainment.
Clint managed to pet it twice before it snapped at him, and if it wasn't for Barney dragging him away, he'd have a lot worse than a few scars to show for it.
Now, when Barney catches Clint behind the animal tent with his hand up Natasha's shirt, and her tongue down his throat, no amount of dragging can do him any good.
The circus is an act. No, it isn't comprised of acts, it is in an act itself. The real money doesn't come from ticket sales and overpriced concession stands; it comes from darts too dull to pop balloons, from rings too small to realistically fit around a bottle.
Everyone has a job to do, separate from their official job. For Jacques, the Swordsman, it is burglarizing houses while their owners are away at the circus. For Clint and Barney, it is looting the pockets of unsuspecting audience members too mesmerized by the Black Widow's aerobatics to notice the thieves.
For the Black Widow, it is this: After every show, she heads out to a dive bar in whatever town they've set up the tents and starts drinking with the locals. She picks one lonely, desperate man out of the sea of them as her victim, and by the end of the night she'll have him in a motel room too drunk or drugged to know anymore whether she does what she promises him. With the same grace and agility she displays on the high wire, she relieves him of all his valuables and leaves him with no memory of what happens that night.
This is her real center ring.
This is why they call her the Black Widow.
"I'm telling you, that woman is nothing but trouble," Barney tells Clint one night while they're packing up the tents.
Clint doesn't even acknowledge that he hears him.
Barney scowls at his brother for a moment, then shakes his head in defeat. "Look, just..." he says, "just don't do anything stupid at this next town, alright?"
"Now why would I do that?" Clint asks.
"You know why."
After their first joint show in the new town, Clint decides to go with Natasha to the bar. When she asks him why, he just shrugs.
"If you get jealous," Natasha says, "I get to say 'I told you so.'"
Clint nods at her, but his eyes stare past their table to something in the mirror behind the bar. A muscle in his jaw twitches.
Natasha sees all of this, and one eyebrow raises in a silent question. She casually picks a knife off the table and examines it, watching the bar through its reflection.
"Who's the guy?" she asks, following Clint's gaze.
Clint shrugs, uncomfortable. "Ex's husband."
Natasha stares Clint down with a look that sends shivers all up his spine. "That your ex, next to him? The blond lady?"
"Yeah."
Clint won't look her in the eye, but Natasha looks at him for a few seconds more with that same, inscrutable expression. Then, just when he thinks she's going to shout at him for using her to one-up his ex girlfriend, a slow smile spreads across her face. It's fun. It's dangerous. It's exactly the sort of thing Clint should know not to play around with.
"Watch this," she says.
Clint blinks in surprise. Natasha scrapes her chair back to get up, but he grabs her by the wrist before she can take a single step.
"Wait," he says, remembering his brother's warning, "Don't cause any trouble."
"Now why would I do that?" she purrs.
"You're the Black Widow. When it comes to trouble, your name means the same thing," Clint says. But he's already caught in her web.
He lets go of her wrist.
Natasha stands up, trailing one blood-red nail down his open palm, and saunters up to the bar. She sits down next to the husband, a one seat buffer between her and the ex girlfriend. She orders a vodka.
Clint stares as she works her magic, torn between acute jealousy and equally acute attraction. She turns on the charm with a glance here, a smile there. And over the next few minutes, she slowly insinuates herself into the husband's interest, playing him just as smoothly as she plays the crowds on opening day.
His wife watches her dangerously out of the corner of her eye, but makes no move to stop her. Yet.
Natasha gets up, walks around behind the husband, surefooted on her high wire. She trails her fingers down his arm, and Clint's hand tingles where she did the same to him.
The wife can't ignore this any longer, and she spins around with murder in her eyes. "Hey!" she says. Her hand snaps out, closes around Natasha's arm, but her glare is for her husband. "What's going on here?"
"Aw, nothin,' Bob," the husband claims. Clint nearly snorts into his beer.
"Don't 'aw, nothin,' Bob' me," the wife sneers. She shoves Natasha away from her, then gets right up in her face. "Back. Off," she growls in a voice that, even years after it was last aimed at Clint, is still enough to give him chills.
Natasha just laughs, soft and low, and leans in toward the husband. Steps wrong in exactly the right way. Whispers in his ear, all red lips and alluring smile.
And now there's something in the wife's hand, something long and cylindrical and deadly, and her bar stool flies backward. Clint leaps up, and the motion draws the husband's attention.
"You!" he yells. And now his stool flies backward as well, and now he's lunging at Clint.
And now it's an all-out brawl. Chairs being thrown, glasses shattering, drunks yelling. Someone's egging on Natasha and the wife, but the Black Widow simply takes a step back and smiles as it all goes to hell.
When Sheriff Rogers shows up to break up the fight, she doesn't need telling twice to be out of town long before morning.
"Brother, I told you," Barney says the next day. He's standing next to Clint's hospital bed, ignoring the chair standing on his other side. "I told you she was bad news."
Clint has the decency to look sheepish.
"I mean, what the hell were you thinking?" Barney continues, close to shouting now, "I specifically told you, 'don't do anything stupid,' and what's the first thing you do? You go and start a damn bar fight! Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in with Jacques and Mrs. Carson?"
Clint mumbles something around his puffy lip and swollen stitches.
"What was that?"
"Said 't wasn't me," Clint says, "'s her idea. 'Tasha."
Barney stares at him.
"I just wanted to show her off a little," Clint mutters, "You know, get back at Bobbi some, while we're in town."
Barney blinks once. Twice. Takes a deep breath, and doesn't shout.
"Clint," he says, "You are all kinds a' messed up. You know that?"
A week after the fight, Barney comes back to check his brother out of the hospital, and Hawkeye is nowhere to be found. Instead, in his place on the mattress, rests a small scrap of blood-red paper that folds out into an hourglass shape. On the paper is a crudely drawn illustration of an arrow, and below it, the message: "check your pockets."
Barney just stands there at the foot of the bed, holding the scrap of paper, and he's still standing there when, a second later, his phone begins to ring. The ringtone is something in French that Barney can't understand a word of. Jacques.
He doesn't need to answer it to know what the call is about. Jacques only calls for two reasons: Clint or cash. And Clint is supposed to be here.
Hawkeye and Black Widow, the archer and the acrobat, have robbed the robbers blind and made off with all their money.
Barney knows when he answers that call he'll have hell to pay. But right now, in this moment, he can't think of anything he'd rather do than sink down onto the hospital bed, throw his head back, and laugh.