[fic: the avengers]
the body in the machine
the avengers. pre-movie. natasha romanoff. clint barton. like recognizes like, and old dogs can learn new tricks ~3780 | r
“somebody went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster”
-Bioshock
He officially meets the Codename: Black Widow for the first time in Tbilisi, holed up in some dump of a motel with a clear view of the Freedom Square, snow piling up along the gutters in slushy heaps. His bed smells like vomit and old, cheap sex and he sits with an arrow notched. In the narrow closest, the target thumps his feet against the wall. Mission parameters stated: keep the target out of the woman’s grasp, and get him out relatively in one piece. But Clint had followed this trailed line with shivering, hollow-eyed girls stuffed into white, nondescript vans and he maybe wasn’t so careful stuffing him into the closest. He maybe wasn’t too careful with gagging him. There may be be a concussion.
Acceptable damage, Clint will report later. Target resisted. He’ll not add that ‘resisted’ meant a blubbering mess of piss and tears on the floor.
“The Black Widow, she comes for me. You will save me, da?”
“Da,” Clint had said and planted his boot on the sniveling face.
She comes with all the righteous fury of her toppled regime, and her creators. She comes particularly bleeding Bolshevik red. The Soviet’s answer to America’s super soldier, except the Cap went MIA and so they put her on ice until further use. She carries the weight of the Berlin Wall on her shoulders, and the shadows of dead princesses in her eyes. A cathartic sort sadness Clint feels uncomfortable in recognizing.
Codename: Black Widow kicks open the door, sends it splintering against the wall and Clint lets lose. She’s done enough damage since the Soviet toppled to put her right at the top of Fury’s shit list. He doesn’t hesitate.
But neither does she.
It slices through her hair, plants on the wall and rattles it with a minor explosion. Clint’s impressed. It’s the first time in memory he’s missed. Black Widow isn’t. She scissors her way across the room, fist planting on his jaw. They tumble to the ground. His hand finds soft, long hair and he yanks until she yelps.
He recognizes a scrapper when he sees one. Black Widow’s no soldier, but she’s deadly good at what she does, and sometimes that involves bloodletting. Her forehead smacks into his, sends him reeling. She pushes passed him, as if already forgotten about him. He’s not her target, just the obstacle to surmount, and once he’s out his importance to her fizzles.
Except he snags her ankle, twists until he hears bones pop and he yanks with a grit of his teeth. Her cheek cracks against the metal foot of the bed and blood blossoms in a red splotch just beneath her unbroken skin. She goes down in a whirl of legs, knees closing around his face, like pressurized steel bands. He’s never come across woman who could really snap a man’s neck with her legs. Black Widow not only can, but he feels his bones strain and whine and knows she will.
There’s the sound of pounding feet on the floor. Fury’s Calvary, balls and bayonet brigade. Clint and the target had been the lure, and the Black Widow had bit. Now it was time to reel her in.
He can see her weigh her options and she quickly flips them, thighs clasping over his hips tightly. He feels the prick of a knife at his siding, digging in until it pierces and leaves him gasping. Blood trickles, warm and syrupy, along his back.
“So you do not forget about me, da?” she drawls in a pointedly exaggerated accent.
He twists, not enough to free himself but enough to rear forward and free the knife at his hip. She’s a second too fast, arching her neck back, he leaves an angry little red nick at her clavicle.
“Same, darling,” he says.
Her fingers card into his shorn hair, almost like a lover’s caress. Black Widow, Clint thinks, understanding.
Then she lifts his head and smashes the back of it against the floor. And again. And again. Until black stars dance where her face had once been and a fuzzy, heavy lethargy settles onto his tongue and then careens along his bloodstream. Somewhere in a distant world, guns cock and lock.
When he comes to, Coulson is shaking him roughly. “She didn’t get the mark,” he explains. His team is half-dragging the limp man out.
“She knows when to cut her loses,” Clint observes. “She’s not your average Soviet bioweapon.”
Coulson nods.
“And I don’t just mean the recent upgrade in packaging.”
Coulson sends him a look.
Clint shrugs, and it feels like his bones grind against each other with the move. Better not do that again. “I’m just saying.”
Coulson helps him sit up, hand moving to prod at the wound at his side. He clicks his teeth, almost approving. “She got you good.”
Clint smiles through blood-stained teeth and blurry vision. “I got her right back,” he says.
It’s almost six months later, in the presidential sector of Belgrade, where lights dance electric over the palace and the ambassadors convene inside. Below him, the people move compact-size, manageable. He likes distances. He likes being able to see the forest and the trees that make it up. The whole is what’s important, and here he can see all the angles. Like a geometric equation that he knows all the variables too. If there’s a pop quiz, he’ll pass.
Codename: Hawkeye.
Somewhere below, the Black Widow moves among the crowd like a chameleon, as still as a frozen-over river with hot water churning just beneath. There’s a blood-filled ocean between them. She’s racked up the body count in Eurasia, her targets un-patterned, determined only by who was willing to foot the bill. What else is a superfluous super weapon to do?
She wouldn’t be the first Codename: Black Widow SHIELD’s had to terminate, but she’s the first that Clint’s ever known. They’d all been girls, but years ago, when Russia was Soviet and had drawn its iron curtain to block out the world.
The girls, plucked like half-flowered dandelions, always struck Clint sort of like glowsticks, the kind you got as a kid. You’d put them in the freezer so they wouldn’t lose their neon glow, but then you’d take them out, crack them at their middle, and use them until they faded and became just a plastic, white sticks. Useless.
Then you threw them away and got another one.
The reports smuggled out of the USSR were the sort that stayed with a body. Fury used to mull over them in his spare time, when the dirty laundry had been first aired out. They’d even tracked down a few specifically to help them start new lives. Some had accepted, had disappeared into the woodwork and tried to forget.
Some were like dogs that had been kicked too many times. They’d grown up mean, had become feral, lashing out at any hand that got too close. One had taken out Fury’s eye. An animal like that, the humane thing to do was put it down.
Ten, by Clint’s count. It stayed with you.
“What are you, darling?” he murmurs, adjusting the sight on his bow. Somehow, he doesn’t think this particular Codename: Black Widow fits into either category.
It’s two hours in and he catches sight of her, moving through the crowd like silk through water. Her fingers trail up an arm, she laughs. She fits in with them as if she’s never really been anywhere else, as if the men she’s killed aren’t enough to fill up a garbage dump outside Stanton Island. He wonders if it’s just an act. He can do it do, become whatever it is the mission calls for. A pimp, a conman, an executive broker, a bored rich kid. He wonders if she can do that, slip on new skin like it’s a suit.
No, he thinks, fingers idling along the button on his bow. No. He knows that each and every facet she knows-assassin, spy, sleek woman moving through a party-is an inherent part of her. A mismatched jigsaw puzzle stuck together with glue and spit and just enough blood to leave an impression, and that somewhere in the center are the remains of a little girl’s body.
“This is an observe and report mission,” Fury had said. “A one man job but if you see Codename: Black Widow-if you have a clean shot. Take it.” His finger had come up cautiously to his eye-patch, where the skin had still discolored purplish and blue around it.
“This Codename have an actual name, sir?” he had asked. “I like to carve target’s names onto my arrows.”
Fury had not been amused. “Whatever it was, that girl is dead.”
“SHIELD got a policy against levity I don’t know about?” Clint had wondered. Quieter, he had added, “I wonder what she’d say, if you told her that.”
His trigger finger taps lightly against his bow. He doesn’t have a clear shot, but he senses ones, coiled and waiting just behind his ear. He chooses a lethal-tipped arrow, nothing special. SHIELD doesn’t have a specific kill policy, but Clint’s never hesitated when the time came, when Fury gave him that tiny incline of chin that said-we need to do the things they can’t. A hawk was a hunter, and a killer, after all.
Her back comes into his view, long and pale, with tendrils of red hair flowing like blood. Clint pulls the arrow back, feels the taut bowstring against his lips. He kisses it briefly, an old habit that he gets made fun of for every so often. It’s left a tiny little scar, just at the corner of the curve of his lip. But that’s a mark of his own making.
Codename: Black Widow turns, and he can see the white, thin scar from where he’d cut her. She tilts her head and tips her glass at him in a mocking salute. She hadn’t forgotten about him. At his side, his wound throbs in memory. He hasn’t forgotten her either.
Pull, a voice urges, but he does something he hasn’t done since he got picked up by Fury, since they took the wreck of his life and gave it meaning-he pauses.
When Fury had found him he’d been strung out and looking at hard time. You’ve got some talent, so why don’t you use it for something bigger than yourself?
Hell, he had.
SHIELD made a soldier out of him, but maybe he’d always been one, had just waited for the mold to pour himself into. It’s a SHIELD voice that says pull, but it seems as familiar to him as his own hand, as the way the arrow curves along his bowstring. It had been there all along, just waiting.
Pull.
But he hesitates and beneath his feet the world rocks in a fiery explosion, sulfur and ash and burnt flesh. The crowd scrambles, makes a mad rush for freedom. Clint follows the trail of smoke to Codename: Black Widow sliding a knife into the unresisting flesh of her target, an ambassador from Germany.
She leans in close, lets his head fall onto her shoulder, almost tender. Then she twists, kicks his legs out beneath him, and lets him fall.
When she turns back to him, she’s still smiling with blood drip-dripping down the hilt of her knife, to her knuckles. Pull, the voice says. He does this time, but she’s already disappearing into the rush of the crowd, letting them absorb her and cloak her.
His arrow lodges into the space where her neck should have been.
“Is this going to be a problem?” Fury asks later.
Clint kicks his feet out and up, rests muddy boots on the pristine table. Story of his life, he thinks with a sardonic tilt of his lips.
“Problem?”
“The woman.”
“Women are always problems,” he points out. “That’s why they’re so damned fun.”
Fury sighs, and rests his palms flat the table. His one good eye is narrowed. “This isn’t time for your particular brand of humor, Agent Barton.”
“My repertoire is timeless, sir,” Clint shoots back.
“Can you do it, Barton? Codename: Black Widow is high risk, and deadly-to herself and others. Can you do it? Can you kill her?”
To be fair to Fury, to be fair to himself, Clint unfolds his feet and gives it a good, long thought. He thinks about the sleek, narrow lines of her body, the glint of her eyes, the prick of a knife in his side.
“Yeah,” he says. “Oh yeah.”
Two weeks later, holed up in Venezuela with a drug cartel two trips from a topple, his eyes pop open. His hand slips beneath his pillow, encircling the thick leather of his knife’s hilt.
“I wouldn’t,” Codename: Black Widow advises, and cool metal lies across his neck like a kiss. She sits cross-legged on his bed, free hand pressed meaningfully down on his chest.
“Well, this is the first time I've been more eager to get a beautiful woman out of my bed, rather than in it,” Clint drawls.
“You had a good shot, in Belgrade. Why didn’t you take it?”
He looks at it her, really looks. Even with a knife between them, this is the closest he’s ever gotten to her. Her skin’s softer than he would think, considering her line of work. Her eyes are clear, unblinking green, like bottled up stained glass. Shouldn’t there be shadows in them? Clint knows there are in his-mean streets and stale alcohol and rotting garbage and ham-sized fists-but in the moonlight, he only sees her eyes looking at him.
“It’s really bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Generally, men in your line of work don’t hesitate.”
“I didn’t, darling,” he says. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“And what did I do?”
“Exactly what I thought you would.”
She doesn’t seem bothered by it, only swings herself out of his reach, places her knife back in its holster at her inner thigh. Cold, biting steel warmed by human flesh, Clint thinks-appropriate.
“You’ve been quiet, of late,” he points out. “Is the great Black Widow getting bored?”
“The thing about not having a superior,” Codename: Black Widow points out, “is that you’re your own boss. I do as I please, I work as I please. And nothing worthy of my time has come up.”
“Then I’m delighted you honor me with your valuable time.”
“Don’t be. I came here to kill you. I don’t like being watched, or followed.”
“So why hesitate?”
The window is open, a stray breeze catches and lifts the curled ends of her red hair from her back. Even in the moonlight Clint can see the hard edges of her smile, hooking at the corners of her lips and hanging there like a heavy cluster of dying stars.
“I didn’t,” she answers. “I want to see what you’ll do.”
She swings her legs over the edge of the window and the night swallows her alive.
St. Petersburg, 3 months later. The silence of Codename: Black Widow is what’s deafening. After nearly a decade of bloodletting and body counting, the silence is almost unnatural, perverse.
Clint tracks her down to St. Petersburg. Except, he wonders if she even thinks of it like that. It was Stalingrad (or was it Leningrad? He could never keep it straight; he wonders if it bothers her, how tenuous her reality has always been, people and streets and cities with foundations so easily turn up, ripped apart, and pieced back together). She woke up and the whole word had changed, had demanded she change with it. But she’s more machine than human now; can she? She was created for a regime that toppled into her eyelashes and clung there like dust.
St. Petersburg-Stalingrad-Leningrad-what’s it matter anyway? The name? There’s still snow, there’s still blood, there’s still lingering memories of girl plucked out of their homes, splayed out and euthanized, put back together and turned into sleek, well-oiled machines-but with timestamps; this body will self-destruct.
Dead girls in the snow, Clint thinks. Really, it’s just about dead girls in the snow.
He finds her in a little hovel fifteen miles outside of town, kneeling in the high, pillowing snow. He draws his arrow taut, and the bowstring only releases the tiniest sighs of pressure. But he knows she hears it. She hears everything.
But she doesn’t turn. Her shoulders stay hunched, her fingers clutch at bright blonde curls, matted together with blood. The girl-and she is a girl, in the way Codename: Black Widow is a girl; they went to sleep girls and woke up women, but this girl is a girl, her body is young, underdeveloped, baby fat clings to her purpling cheeks-stares open-mouthed at the grey, snowy sky with blue-eyed blankness.
Clint steps closer. His arrow now, at her back, won’t miss her heart.
She turns then. Looks at him with clear, green eyes. He waits to see the shadows, hints of what the girl meant to her. There isn’t. Her eyes are like the stained glass of a cathedral, light filters in and through but cannot cling.
“Not yet,” she tells him.
“Not yet,” he agrees, and lowers his bow.
She leads him to an abandoned warehouse, in the center of St. Petersburg-Leningrad-Stalingrad like a stuttered heart, and gets to work.
Clint admits that Codename: Black Widow does her work well.
He lets loose an arrow without thinking, even as she turns to deal with the threat to her flank. Blood sprays in an arch over her boots. She looks at him with one raised eyebrow.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he says. “I got your six.”
So she doesn’t. As simple as that.
He recognizes the remnants of far-flung communist factions in their exaggerating use of red. It’s tacky mostly, Clint finds, and until recently he used to deck himself out in purple so that’s saying something. He wonders if that they picked out whatever girl this Black Widow had been because of her hair, because her body had been an unwilling chattel of Bolshevik symbols.
She lays into the last man slowly, with bright, metal stars pinned to his suit jacket. He doesn’t recognize Codename: Black Widow, not in a familiar way, an intimate way, like a creator should. But his grandfather might have whispered nightmares and grotesque nursery rhythms that sounded like her name against his ears-Jack was a lost cause, but Jill came back stronger.
He begs with the first cut, only just enough to draw blood. He begs Clint, when he catches sight of the SHIELD emblem on his shoulder pad.
Clint thinks of dead girls in the snow and blonde-curls matted with blood, and only taps his finger against the metal frame of his bow. A nervous tick.
Codename: Black Widow presses his neck back, back, until the bones must strain and grind and whine with the unnatural pressure. Her knife presses through, slowly, slowly, and the blood comes slowly as she saws her way through bone and muscle and gristle.
The Black Widow can kill you quickly. So quickly you don’t even know you’re dead. But she can kill you slowly too, take her time, make each little dig matter as much as the big ones.
If you ever meet her, pray it’s quick.
When it’s over and done, Codename: Black Widow kneels in the wreckage she has wrought. Blood winds its way down her back, across her neck, pools at her knees. She does not revel in it, but merely accepts it as her due. There’s little room for sympathy for Codename: Black Widow, but there might be something to admire.
She stands, and Clint takes a sure-fire aim at the spot where her heart beats like the centerpiece to the finest machine man and science could create.
“Go ahead,” she says.
Clint takes a breath, feels the world wrap around him and narrow down to the point of his arrow.
He makes a decision.
In the little hotel in London, five hours before their flight stateside, Codename: Black Widow comes to him, crawls on top of him, and he lets her. Hell, they’ve both been thinking about it, but more than that, there’s a connection. Twisted, and macabre, but there. She’s been wrapped around him tight since she dug her knife into his side, and it’s gratifying to know that maybe he left a similar stain on her.
There’s a bridge connecting their countries now. It’s lined with the corpses of dead girls in the snow.
She’s a woman who needs control, who likes to be in control, but sometimes doesn’t. When he flips her, she lets him, only observes him through slitted eyes. Calling her kittenish, or even catlike, is wrong-though she could be, if you needed her to be. Instead, Clint imagines the long, dark lines of a panther, poised to leap. He can feel the bunched muscles at her thighs, at her stomach. He buries his teeth at her neck, and buries himself inside her, and she leaves long little red claw marks down his side.
Later, she balls away from him and cries. A man might take an offense, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even think it’s about him, really, or about the fact that he’s there. She would have done it, alone if she had been, but had chosen to do it beside him. What does he feel? Almost honored, perhaps. He doesn’t know what she cries about-the dead girl, or herself, or waking up to a world that turned upside down and being told adjust to it-but he feels honored.
And it's real, these tears, this vulnerability. It’s true and real and she feels it right down to her bones, but he knows she’d turn around and use it like a weapon if she had to. Each part of her is detachable from the whole, can operate on its own. She is more than the sum of her parts, but when she needs to-she can be less than it too.
There’s admiration there.
Quietly, she says, “Natalia Alianovna Romanova. My name.”
Levity or heaviness? He makes a quick decision. “And I thought Codename: Black Widow was a mouthful.”
“Natasha Romanoff,” she says.
Clint shifts, turns, looks at the curve of her back. “Suits you,” he says. And since they’re sharing adds, “Clint Barton.”
She shrugs. “I know.”
He only smiles.
Natasha Romanoff suits up, slides herself into black leather like she’s done it all her life. That’s part of her archaic charm, how she can make herself fit into every little niche you might throw at her. And how quickly she can slip out of it when it pleases her.
Black Widow.
Fury watches, good eye narrowed. The skin around his destroyed one pinches, and then smoothes out. He looks over at Clint. “You’ll vouch for her, then?”
She does an impressive cartwheel across the matt, legs winding around the closest man’s neck, bringing him face first into the ground. She’s smiling. From his corner of observation, Coulson gives her a low whistle of appreciation.
Clint nods. “I’ll vouch for her, sir.”
the avengers. pre-movie. natasha romanoff. clint barton. like recognizes like, and old dogs can learn new tricks ~3780 | r
“somebody went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster”
-Bioshock
He officially meets the Codename: Black Widow for the first time in Tbilisi, holed up in some dump of a motel with a clear view of the Freedom Square, snow piling up along the gutters in slushy heaps. His bed smells like vomit and old, cheap sex and he sits with an arrow notched. In the narrow closest, the target thumps his feet against the wall. Mission parameters stated: keep the target out of the woman’s grasp, and get him out relatively in one piece. But Clint had followed this trailed line with shivering, hollow-eyed girls stuffed into white, nondescript vans and he maybe wasn’t so careful stuffing him into the closest. He maybe wasn’t too careful with gagging him. There may be be a concussion.
Acceptable damage, Clint will report later. Target resisted. He’ll not add that ‘resisted’ meant a blubbering mess of piss and tears on the floor.
“The Black Widow, she comes for me. You will save me, da?”
“Da,” Clint had said and planted his boot on the sniveling face.
She comes with all the righteous fury of her toppled regime, and her creators. She comes particularly bleeding Bolshevik red. The Soviet’s answer to America’s super soldier, except the Cap went MIA and so they put her on ice until further use. She carries the weight of the Berlin Wall on her shoulders, and the shadows of dead princesses in her eyes. A cathartic sort sadness Clint feels uncomfortable in recognizing.
Codename: Black Widow kicks open the door, sends it splintering against the wall and Clint lets lose. She’s done enough damage since the Soviet toppled to put her right at the top of Fury’s shit list. He doesn’t hesitate.
But neither does she.
It slices through her hair, plants on the wall and rattles it with a minor explosion. Clint’s impressed. It’s the first time in memory he’s missed. Black Widow isn’t. She scissors her way across the room, fist planting on his jaw. They tumble to the ground. His hand finds soft, long hair and he yanks until she yelps.
He recognizes a scrapper when he sees one. Black Widow’s no soldier, but she’s deadly good at what she does, and sometimes that involves bloodletting. Her forehead smacks into his, sends him reeling. She pushes passed him, as if already forgotten about him. He’s not her target, just the obstacle to surmount, and once he’s out his importance to her fizzles.
Except he snags her ankle, twists until he hears bones pop and he yanks with a grit of his teeth. Her cheek cracks against the metal foot of the bed and blood blossoms in a red splotch just beneath her unbroken skin. She goes down in a whirl of legs, knees closing around his face, like pressurized steel bands. He’s never come across woman who could really snap a man’s neck with her legs. Black Widow not only can, but he feels his bones strain and whine and knows she will.
There’s the sound of pounding feet on the floor. Fury’s Calvary, balls and bayonet brigade. Clint and the target had been the lure, and the Black Widow had bit. Now it was time to reel her in.
He can see her weigh her options and she quickly flips them, thighs clasping over his hips tightly. He feels the prick of a knife at his siding, digging in until it pierces and leaves him gasping. Blood trickles, warm and syrupy, along his back.
“So you do not forget about me, da?” she drawls in a pointedly exaggerated accent.
He twists, not enough to free himself but enough to rear forward and free the knife at his hip. She’s a second too fast, arching her neck back, he leaves an angry little red nick at her clavicle.
“Same, darling,” he says.
Her fingers card into his shorn hair, almost like a lover’s caress. Black Widow, Clint thinks, understanding.
Then she lifts his head and smashes the back of it against the floor. And again. And again. Until black stars dance where her face had once been and a fuzzy, heavy lethargy settles onto his tongue and then careens along his bloodstream. Somewhere in a distant world, guns cock and lock.
When he comes to, Coulson is shaking him roughly. “She didn’t get the mark,” he explains. His team is half-dragging the limp man out.
“She knows when to cut her loses,” Clint observes. “She’s not your average Soviet bioweapon.”
Coulson nods.
“And I don’t just mean the recent upgrade in packaging.”
Coulson sends him a look.
Clint shrugs, and it feels like his bones grind against each other with the move. Better not do that again. “I’m just saying.”
Coulson helps him sit up, hand moving to prod at the wound at his side. He clicks his teeth, almost approving. “She got you good.”
Clint smiles through blood-stained teeth and blurry vision. “I got her right back,” he says.
It’s almost six months later, in the presidential sector of Belgrade, where lights dance electric over the palace and the ambassadors convene inside. Below him, the people move compact-size, manageable. He likes distances. He likes being able to see the forest and the trees that make it up. The whole is what’s important, and here he can see all the angles. Like a geometric equation that he knows all the variables too. If there’s a pop quiz, he’ll pass.
Codename: Hawkeye.
Somewhere below, the Black Widow moves among the crowd like a chameleon, as still as a frozen-over river with hot water churning just beneath. There’s a blood-filled ocean between them. She’s racked up the body count in Eurasia, her targets un-patterned, determined only by who was willing to foot the bill. What else is a superfluous super weapon to do?
She wouldn’t be the first Codename: Black Widow SHIELD’s had to terminate, but she’s the first that Clint’s ever known. They’d all been girls, but years ago, when Russia was Soviet and had drawn its iron curtain to block out the world.
The girls, plucked like half-flowered dandelions, always struck Clint sort of like glowsticks, the kind you got as a kid. You’d put them in the freezer so they wouldn’t lose their neon glow, but then you’d take them out, crack them at their middle, and use them until they faded and became just a plastic, white sticks. Useless.
Then you threw them away and got another one.
The reports smuggled out of the USSR were the sort that stayed with a body. Fury used to mull over them in his spare time, when the dirty laundry had been first aired out. They’d even tracked down a few specifically to help them start new lives. Some had accepted, had disappeared into the woodwork and tried to forget.
Some were like dogs that had been kicked too many times. They’d grown up mean, had become feral, lashing out at any hand that got too close. One had taken out Fury’s eye. An animal like that, the humane thing to do was put it down.
Ten, by Clint’s count. It stayed with you.
“What are you, darling?” he murmurs, adjusting the sight on his bow. Somehow, he doesn’t think this particular Codename: Black Widow fits into either category.
It’s two hours in and he catches sight of her, moving through the crowd like silk through water. Her fingers trail up an arm, she laughs. She fits in with them as if she’s never really been anywhere else, as if the men she’s killed aren’t enough to fill up a garbage dump outside Stanton Island. He wonders if it’s just an act. He can do it do, become whatever it is the mission calls for. A pimp, a conman, an executive broker, a bored rich kid. He wonders if she can do that, slip on new skin like it’s a suit.
No, he thinks, fingers idling along the button on his bow. No. He knows that each and every facet she knows-assassin, spy, sleek woman moving through a party-is an inherent part of her. A mismatched jigsaw puzzle stuck together with glue and spit and just enough blood to leave an impression, and that somewhere in the center are the remains of a little girl’s body.
“This is an observe and report mission,” Fury had said. “A one man job but if you see Codename: Black Widow-if you have a clean shot. Take it.” His finger had come up cautiously to his eye-patch, where the skin had still discolored purplish and blue around it.
“This Codename have an actual name, sir?” he had asked. “I like to carve target’s names onto my arrows.”
Fury had not been amused. “Whatever it was, that girl is dead.”
“SHIELD got a policy against levity I don’t know about?” Clint had wondered. Quieter, he had added, “I wonder what she’d say, if you told her that.”
His trigger finger taps lightly against his bow. He doesn’t have a clear shot, but he senses ones, coiled and waiting just behind his ear. He chooses a lethal-tipped arrow, nothing special. SHIELD doesn’t have a specific kill policy, but Clint’s never hesitated when the time came, when Fury gave him that tiny incline of chin that said-we need to do the things they can’t. A hawk was a hunter, and a killer, after all.
Her back comes into his view, long and pale, with tendrils of red hair flowing like blood. Clint pulls the arrow back, feels the taut bowstring against his lips. He kisses it briefly, an old habit that he gets made fun of for every so often. It’s left a tiny little scar, just at the corner of the curve of his lip. But that’s a mark of his own making.
Codename: Black Widow turns, and he can see the white, thin scar from where he’d cut her. She tilts her head and tips her glass at him in a mocking salute. She hadn’t forgotten about him. At his side, his wound throbs in memory. He hasn’t forgotten her either.
Pull, a voice urges, but he does something he hasn’t done since he got picked up by Fury, since they took the wreck of his life and gave it meaning-he pauses.
When Fury had found him he’d been strung out and looking at hard time. You’ve got some talent, so why don’t you use it for something bigger than yourself?
Hell, he had.
SHIELD made a soldier out of him, but maybe he’d always been one, had just waited for the mold to pour himself into. It’s a SHIELD voice that says pull, but it seems as familiar to him as his own hand, as the way the arrow curves along his bowstring. It had been there all along, just waiting.
Pull.
But he hesitates and beneath his feet the world rocks in a fiery explosion, sulfur and ash and burnt flesh. The crowd scrambles, makes a mad rush for freedom. Clint follows the trail of smoke to Codename: Black Widow sliding a knife into the unresisting flesh of her target, an ambassador from Germany.
She leans in close, lets his head fall onto her shoulder, almost tender. Then she twists, kicks his legs out beneath him, and lets him fall.
When she turns back to him, she’s still smiling with blood drip-dripping down the hilt of her knife, to her knuckles. Pull, the voice says. He does this time, but she’s already disappearing into the rush of the crowd, letting them absorb her and cloak her.
His arrow lodges into the space where her neck should have been.
“Is this going to be a problem?” Fury asks later.
Clint kicks his feet out and up, rests muddy boots on the pristine table. Story of his life, he thinks with a sardonic tilt of his lips.
“Problem?”
“The woman.”
“Women are always problems,” he points out. “That’s why they’re so damned fun.”
Fury sighs, and rests his palms flat the table. His one good eye is narrowed. “This isn’t time for your particular brand of humor, Agent Barton.”
“My repertoire is timeless, sir,” Clint shoots back.
“Can you do it, Barton? Codename: Black Widow is high risk, and deadly-to herself and others. Can you do it? Can you kill her?”
To be fair to Fury, to be fair to himself, Clint unfolds his feet and gives it a good, long thought. He thinks about the sleek, narrow lines of her body, the glint of her eyes, the prick of a knife in his side.
“Yeah,” he says. “Oh yeah.”
Two weeks later, holed up in Venezuela with a drug cartel two trips from a topple, his eyes pop open. His hand slips beneath his pillow, encircling the thick leather of his knife’s hilt.
“I wouldn’t,” Codename: Black Widow advises, and cool metal lies across his neck like a kiss. She sits cross-legged on his bed, free hand pressed meaningfully down on his chest.
“Well, this is the first time I've been more eager to get a beautiful woman out of my bed, rather than in it,” Clint drawls.
“You had a good shot, in Belgrade. Why didn’t you take it?”
He looks at it her, really looks. Even with a knife between them, this is the closest he’s ever gotten to her. Her skin’s softer than he would think, considering her line of work. Her eyes are clear, unblinking green, like bottled up stained glass. Shouldn’t there be shadows in them? Clint knows there are in his-mean streets and stale alcohol and rotting garbage and ham-sized fists-but in the moonlight, he only sees her eyes looking at him.
“It’s really bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Generally, men in your line of work don’t hesitate.”
“I didn’t, darling,” he says. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“And what did I do?”
“Exactly what I thought you would.”
She doesn’t seem bothered by it, only swings herself out of his reach, places her knife back in its holster at her inner thigh. Cold, biting steel warmed by human flesh, Clint thinks-appropriate.
“You’ve been quiet, of late,” he points out. “Is the great Black Widow getting bored?”
“The thing about not having a superior,” Codename: Black Widow points out, “is that you’re your own boss. I do as I please, I work as I please. And nothing worthy of my time has come up.”
“Then I’m delighted you honor me with your valuable time.”
“Don’t be. I came here to kill you. I don’t like being watched, or followed.”
“So why hesitate?”
The window is open, a stray breeze catches and lifts the curled ends of her red hair from her back. Even in the moonlight Clint can see the hard edges of her smile, hooking at the corners of her lips and hanging there like a heavy cluster of dying stars.
“I didn’t,” she answers. “I want to see what you’ll do.”
She swings her legs over the edge of the window and the night swallows her alive.
St. Petersburg, 3 months later. The silence of Codename: Black Widow is what’s deafening. After nearly a decade of bloodletting and body counting, the silence is almost unnatural, perverse.
Clint tracks her down to St. Petersburg. Except, he wonders if she even thinks of it like that. It was Stalingrad (or was it Leningrad? He could never keep it straight; he wonders if it bothers her, how tenuous her reality has always been, people and streets and cities with foundations so easily turn up, ripped apart, and pieced back together). She woke up and the whole word had changed, had demanded she change with it. But she’s more machine than human now; can she? She was created for a regime that toppled into her eyelashes and clung there like dust.
St. Petersburg-Stalingrad-Leningrad-what’s it matter anyway? The name? There’s still snow, there’s still blood, there’s still lingering memories of girl plucked out of their homes, splayed out and euthanized, put back together and turned into sleek, well-oiled machines-but with timestamps; this body will self-destruct.
Dead girls in the snow, Clint thinks. Really, it’s just about dead girls in the snow.
He finds her in a little hovel fifteen miles outside of town, kneeling in the high, pillowing snow. He draws his arrow taut, and the bowstring only releases the tiniest sighs of pressure. But he knows she hears it. She hears everything.
But she doesn’t turn. Her shoulders stay hunched, her fingers clutch at bright blonde curls, matted together with blood. The girl-and she is a girl, in the way Codename: Black Widow is a girl; they went to sleep girls and woke up women, but this girl is a girl, her body is young, underdeveloped, baby fat clings to her purpling cheeks-stares open-mouthed at the grey, snowy sky with blue-eyed blankness.
Clint steps closer. His arrow now, at her back, won’t miss her heart.
She turns then. Looks at him with clear, green eyes. He waits to see the shadows, hints of what the girl meant to her. There isn’t. Her eyes are like the stained glass of a cathedral, light filters in and through but cannot cling.
“Not yet,” she tells him.
“Not yet,” he agrees, and lowers his bow.
She leads him to an abandoned warehouse, in the center of St. Petersburg-Leningrad-Stalingrad like a stuttered heart, and gets to work.
Clint admits that Codename: Black Widow does her work well.
He lets loose an arrow without thinking, even as she turns to deal with the threat to her flank. Blood sprays in an arch over her boots. She looks at him with one raised eyebrow.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he says. “I got your six.”
So she doesn’t. As simple as that.
He recognizes the remnants of far-flung communist factions in their exaggerating use of red. It’s tacky mostly, Clint finds, and until recently he used to deck himself out in purple so that’s saying something. He wonders if that they picked out whatever girl this Black Widow had been because of her hair, because her body had been an unwilling chattel of Bolshevik symbols.
She lays into the last man slowly, with bright, metal stars pinned to his suit jacket. He doesn’t recognize Codename: Black Widow, not in a familiar way, an intimate way, like a creator should. But his grandfather might have whispered nightmares and grotesque nursery rhythms that sounded like her name against his ears-Jack was a lost cause, but Jill came back stronger.
He begs with the first cut, only just enough to draw blood. He begs Clint, when he catches sight of the SHIELD emblem on his shoulder pad.
Clint thinks of dead girls in the snow and blonde-curls matted with blood, and only taps his finger against the metal frame of his bow. A nervous tick.
Codename: Black Widow presses his neck back, back, until the bones must strain and grind and whine with the unnatural pressure. Her knife presses through, slowly, slowly, and the blood comes slowly as she saws her way through bone and muscle and gristle.
The Black Widow can kill you quickly. So quickly you don’t even know you’re dead. But she can kill you slowly too, take her time, make each little dig matter as much as the big ones.
If you ever meet her, pray it’s quick.
When it’s over and done, Codename: Black Widow kneels in the wreckage she has wrought. Blood winds its way down her back, across her neck, pools at her knees. She does not revel in it, but merely accepts it as her due. There’s little room for sympathy for Codename: Black Widow, but there might be something to admire.
She stands, and Clint takes a sure-fire aim at the spot where her heart beats like the centerpiece to the finest machine man and science could create.
“Go ahead,” she says.
Clint takes a breath, feels the world wrap around him and narrow down to the point of his arrow.
He makes a decision.
In the little hotel in London, five hours before their flight stateside, Codename: Black Widow comes to him, crawls on top of him, and he lets her. Hell, they’ve both been thinking about it, but more than that, there’s a connection. Twisted, and macabre, but there. She’s been wrapped around him tight since she dug her knife into his side, and it’s gratifying to know that maybe he left a similar stain on her.
There’s a bridge connecting their countries now. It’s lined with the corpses of dead girls in the snow.
She’s a woman who needs control, who likes to be in control, but sometimes doesn’t. When he flips her, she lets him, only observes him through slitted eyes. Calling her kittenish, or even catlike, is wrong-though she could be, if you needed her to be. Instead, Clint imagines the long, dark lines of a panther, poised to leap. He can feel the bunched muscles at her thighs, at her stomach. He buries his teeth at her neck, and buries himself inside her, and she leaves long little red claw marks down his side.
Later, she balls away from him and cries. A man might take an offense, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even think it’s about him, really, or about the fact that he’s there. She would have done it, alone if she had been, but had chosen to do it beside him. What does he feel? Almost honored, perhaps. He doesn’t know what she cries about-the dead girl, or herself, or waking up to a world that turned upside down and being told adjust to it-but he feels honored.
And it's real, these tears, this vulnerability. It’s true and real and she feels it right down to her bones, but he knows she’d turn around and use it like a weapon if she had to. Each part of her is detachable from the whole, can operate on its own. She is more than the sum of her parts, but when she needs to-she can be less than it too.
There’s admiration there.
Quietly, she says, “Natalia Alianovna Romanova. My name.”
Levity or heaviness? He makes a quick decision. “And I thought Codename: Black Widow was a mouthful.”
“Natasha Romanoff,” she says.
Clint shifts, turns, looks at the curve of her back. “Suits you,” he says. And since they’re sharing adds, “Clint Barton.”
She shrugs. “I know.”
He only smiles.
Natasha Romanoff suits up, slides herself into black leather like she’s done it all her life. That’s part of her archaic charm, how she can make herself fit into every little niche you might throw at her. And how quickly she can slip out of it when it pleases her.
Black Widow.
Fury watches, good eye narrowed. The skin around his destroyed one pinches, and then smoothes out. He looks over at Clint. “You’ll vouch for her, then?”
She does an impressive cartwheel across the matt, legs winding around the closest man’s neck, bringing him face first into the ground. She’s smiling. From his corner of observation, Coulson gives her a low whistle of appreciation.
Clint nods. “I’ll vouch for her, sir.”