FIC: Come For The Espionage, Stay For The Sex (for workerbee73) - R
Title: Come For The Espionage, Stay For The Sex
Author:andacus
A Gift For: workerbee73
Rating: R
Warnings: Sex (obviously) and language.
Pairings: Clint/Natasha
Summary/Prompt Used: Come for the espionage, stay for the sex... or maybe that's the other way around. For the prompt - Some might say it was love at first sight. Of course, it took three years before they managed to actually (officially) meet.
Authors Notes: I'm not sure how well I met the prompt, but I hope you like it. :) And thanks to my beta, who shall remain nameless for the time being.
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Clint is not a Spiritual man. He doesn’t chalk much up to faith or fate, but there is something uncanny and almost exquisite about the way this game keeps playing out. There is something just shy of terrifying in how their paths appear to be constantly intersecting.
The first time he sees her, they’re in London in a gentleman’s club so unchanged by time he’s surprised he isn’t forced into a cravat and a top hat upon entry. The clientele is so elite that he isn’t even supposed to know about the place - SHIELD isn’t even supposed to know about the place - and he sure as hell isn’t supposed to be there. She’s serving drinks in some outfit that is somehow too skimpy and too classy at the same time and he knows as soon as he looks at her, she isn’t supposed to be there either.
Clint keeps her in his periphery all night, but the target (a South American chemist with too much power and too little respect for humanity) is all over the damn place and he can only spare so much attention for the enigma with the tray of martinis. But she must suspect him just as much as he suspects her, because when he excuses himself to the bathroom, she’s already there waiting for him.
She fires a warning shot in the form of a knife that sticks in the wall about three inches from his head. He looks at her and raises his eyebrows. She raises one back.
“I always wanted to do that,” he says. When her expression doesn’t change he adds, “Raise just one eyebrow. I can’t do it.” He tries, twists his face comically in all sorts of ways. “Eh, I guess I’m an all or nothing type of guy.”
“Who are you? Why are you here?” She has another knife in hand, but she doesn’t move.
“I had to piss.”
The eyebrow goes down and she looks flat out terrifying. It’s kind of hot.
“Name’s Mark Stahl. I’m here because I was invited.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
He shrugs. “I know.”
They glare at each other for several minutes until finally the woman says, “Okay, you stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.”
“What’s your name, Red?”
She purses her lips. “Natasha,” she says and he thinks she might be lying, but maybe not. There’s an odd tilt to her mouth that gives him the impression she’s playing with him and that’s definitely hot.
He reaches up and tugs the knife out of the wall, launches it at her, smiles when it pins the hem of her skirt to the wall, revealing more leg and more knives.
“Deal,” Clint says. “But keep whatever you’re doing quiet. My target isn’t fond of loud noises.”
*
The second time he sees her, they’re in some annoyingly pretentious tourist trap of a town in California and he’s covered in grape juice and just general squashed grape gunk. Some generic type of bad guy was trying to slip anthrax into bottles of wine, which was pretty good, as far as nefarious, apocalyptic ideas go. Clint had expected to get dirty on this one, what he had not expected was to get shot at. Theodore Himpit (that was the anthrax guy) was supposed to be mousy and angry and emo. Turns out, he had several very large, very armed, very un-mousy friends.
Clint’s ducking behind a huge steel drum, avoiding gunfire as best he can. The juice is causing his arrows to stick on release in a way that’s seriously problematic and he’s forced to use his sidearm. He’s firing on the last two guys when she slides around a corner and crouches next to him.
“Uh, hi.” He manages.
“Need a hand?” She’s smirking and he kind of wants to kiss that look away.
“Nope. I’m good. You?”
“Nah. Funny meeting you here, though.”
He nods and fires a few shots, taking one of the shooters down easily. But something’s off. He looks at Natasha and scowls. “Did you bring more enemy fire?”
She looks almost apologetic and shrugs.
“Why did you do that? I have enough people shooting at me!” He’s not shouting, but he’s certainly not being quiet.
“What’s a little firefight between friends?”
“We are not that good of friends!”
Natasha fires a few rounds and chuckles. It’s a low, shallow sound like drums and he gets the impression she doesn’t do it often. “Honestly? I was here watching your little friend over there because my employers don’t like the competition. But then your clumsy ass ruined that.”
“But where did the extra guys come from?” He fires two rounds in the general direction of the enemy, more to send them for cover than to actually hit anything - they’re all too well hidden where they are anyway.
“They’re trying to kill me,” she says conversationally. “It’s not related to our current situation.”
“Our situation?!” He stares at her, mouth probably agape, not quite sure what to do with any of this. Finally, after a moment’s indecision, he says, “Can you find me some water so I can get this shit off my bow?”
With a nod, she dives around the steel drum and disappears, firing well-placed shots as she darts behind the nearest building.
Half of him doesn’t expect her to come back. But she does, slides in the same way she’d done before and he spares a half a thought as to why no one else is coming at them from that direction, but it’s lost as soon as she hands him some wet cloths and a small bottle of water. Natasha lays down cover fire while he gets to work getting the sticky crap off his bowstring.
Another twenty minutes and it’s over. A titanium arrowhead, an exploding tip, a few well placed bullets and they’ve destroyed most everything around them, but there is no anthrax being shipped to a market near you and there are no longer people shooting at them, so Clint should be perfectly happy, but he isn’t. At all.
“You seriously jeopardized my entire operation,” he tells her, angry and a little too high on the adrenaline still thrumming under his skin.
“Likewise, Hotshot.”
He’s about to ask exactly who she’s working for and why in the hell he should give a crap about her probably illegal operation, when a pair of police cruisers peel around the building, lights and sirens making both Clint and Natasha flinch.
When he looks back over at her, she’s gone.
***
Clint gets to play hero the next time around. He had sort of expected to see her pop up on this op, not that that was why he took the mission... Okay, yes it was. It totally was. The men who had come after her in California were part of a larger group that had been on SHIELD’s radar for awhile and when he saw the name in Coulson’s case file, Clint was first to volunteer. He’s a dumbass, obviously.
What he does not expect, however, is to find her tied up in a tiny, concrete room looking like feral animal, blood and bruises on her face, hair a tangled mess. The look of relief she gives him when he opens the door is even less expected.
“Shit,” he mutters. “They just don’t know how to treat a lady.” It’s a lame attempt to lighten the mood and apparently Natasha thinks so too, because she gives him a look that asks if he is possibly mentally disabled.
He unties her and hefts her to her feet. She is favoring one leg and her hand quickly goes to her ribs when she takes a step, but nothing looks life threatening, which he is grateful for and then wonders why he was grateful for that.
Such a dumbass.
The building is not overly large - maybe five thousand square feet - and there are only four other people with him, all of whom are clearing other hallways, but Natasha’s been here before and he lets her lead him to the end of a corridor and into a large office. There are three men already inside and they all stare a moment, surprised, until Natasha rushes them. Clint has just enough time to drop one of the men, before she’s killed the other two.
But it’s cost her something, because her leg gives out when she tries to cross the room toward where the computer sits in the center of a large glass desk.
“Hey, GI Jane. Maybe let me help you next time,” he says leaning to wrap an arm around her waist and help take some of the weight.
She says nothing, instead she’s typing furiously at the keyboard. Whatever she’s looking for, she finds because there is a triumphant grin across her face. He thinks he might really need to find out what that grin tastes like.
He also thinks he should probably be apprehending her. Or at the very least confiscating the data she’s taken. He does neither.
“Come on,” she says and they backtrack toward the room she was held in, but before they get that deep into the building, Clint’s comms beep in his ear and word gets relayed that the building is clear.
“Command says they’ve picked up Hassen’s trail about ten miles outside of Sao Paulo. They had hours on us.”
“I’ve got three dead lackeys in the office in the south west corner. What’s the plan?” Clint asks, ignoring the way his gut twists at the idea of having to fly to fucking Sao Paulo when she’s leaning into his side, pressed against him and pretending her ribs don’t hurt like hell. He also ignores the way his gut twists at completely failing to mention her existence and how he really should know better than this.
“Fuck if I know,” Ali says.
“What spooked them?” Linman asks.
Coulson’s voice breaks in and the chatter stops. “Get the hell out of here. Everyone report back to base within 48 hours or the shuttle home leaves without you. Consider it the only nice thing I’ll ever do for you.”
Clint shrugs, tells her he’s got time if she needs help and she looks about to refuse, about to say that she doesn’t need anything from anyone and normally he would be first to agree, but for whatever reason, she doesn’t. She nods, winces, and then tells him he better be good at all forms of minor surgery.
The hotel she directs him to is nice; the kind of place he usually just pretends to stay at, but never actually gets to. She has a room already and they draw a few curious glances as they hobble to the elevator and down the hall.
They share a bottle of vodka and he does a decent job sewing up the gash in her leg. He tapes up her ribs, being very careful not to touch, look at, bury his face in or otherwise even notice her breasts. He’s failing mostly, but he does manage not to actually touch them, so he’s really pretty proud of himself.
The problem is not that he has no self control, because he actually has a metric shit ton of self control. The problem is that every time he looks up at her or steps back to make sure the tape is wrapping correctly, she’s looking at him in this way… he doesn’t have words for exactly how she’s looking at him. It’s something like lust, but there’s sadness and confusion and maybe impulsiveness, which… wow. He’d never peg her for impulsive.
There’s a different look on her face when she leans in to kiss him and he thinks maybe it’s defiance and joy, like she’s breaking a rule and loving it and he’s about nine-hundred percent certain that she is.
She tastes like smoke and blood and she doesn’t wince when he slides a hand around her and pulls her into his lap. Mentally, he upgrades himself from dumbass to fucking idiot.
“Hey,” Clint says, leaning back to look at her. “If you’re hurt, we don’t…”
But his offer (And where exactly did that come from?) is cut off when she runs a palm across the front of his pants and all of the blood leaves the part of his brain that controls coherent speech. She leans in again, presses her lips against his jaw, his ear, his throat and he decides that the lady gets whatever the hell the lady wants. She did have a rough day, after all.
Stumbling, they tug off his shirt, her pants, his boots, his pants, her underwear; everything finds a spot somewhere on the floor or the couch or wherever the hell it lands. He stands up, brings her with him, her legs locked around his waist, and lays her out on the bed in front of him. Clint half expects her to protest being supine and naked, braces for a violent reaction, but she smiles at him and stretches languidly, watching him watching her. He kisses every scar, slides his tongue over her nipples and her belly button and it’s finally when he licks a trail to the inside of her thigh that she stops him. Her hands tangle in his hair and she tugs him upward, insistent, eager, but there’s a slight edge to it and he files that away for consideration later.
She wraps a leg around him, shifts her hips and kisses him. One small hand finds his cock and he sucks in a sharp breath when she squeezes (And when the hell had she grabbed a condom?) and then suddenly he’s sinking into her and he spares a brief thought to how stupid he was to think that he had any control over this situation at all. She laughs and he smiles at her, because he’s pretty sure he just said that out loud. She’s still laughing when he kisses her, stealing her breath and turning the mirth into moans and gasps. He juts his hips forward, driving into her, reveling in the way her thrusts meet him halfway every time. It’s a battle almost, ungraceful and reactionary, but it’s perfect. She’s strong, stronger than he would have thought, and Clint’s sure they’ll both have bruises tomorrow, but that’s perfect, too.
When they wake up hours later, naked and sweaty and both surprised to have actually fallen asleep, she rolls over him and sinks down onto him and they have sex in a sleepy haze and he doesn’t think about exactly how he feels about that.
He leaves that night while she’s in the shower, doesn’t leave a note and he knows she wouldn’t expect him to, but somehow it still feels wrong, still feels like he’s deserting her or abandoning something he didn’t have in the first place.
And he absolutely does not take one of her silver throwing knives with him. Except that he totally does.
***
After that, they bump into each other in the most (un)random places: A play in Morocco, a gas station in Texarkana, the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. She’s all soft angles and hard edges, art and efficiency, talent and boldness. There are a million things about her that line up in a perfect row and just as many that jut out at odd angles - nothing about her makes any sense and he just wants to pull it all apart and figure it out.
They have sex in the costume room of the Moroccan playhouse while the audience watches Romeo and Juliet die for some adolescent idea of love. She sucks him off in the dark behind a line of burning buildings on the Texas/Arkansas border and he makes her scream his name in a rented room above a pub, laughing when the man he’s there to kill complains and yells from the room next door.
She never helps him with an op, she never asks for help on her own jobs, but somehow she’s got a bead on his movements and she finds a way to appear as if from thin air. Sometimes he doesn’t see her at all and he has to remind himself he isn’t supposed to see her, that she’s probably an enemy, that there’s probably a file on her in Coulson’s desk. But he can’t help the way his mood falls when he’s on a jet home, the rest of the team chattering around him, and he didn’t once catch sight of her. Granted, there are far more ops where he doesn’t see or have any reason to see her, but he’s lost control of whatever this thing is and he wants… wants to see her, wants to touch her, wants to poke at all those little idiosyncrasies and oddities. Or maybe he just wants to know she’s still alive.
***
If there was a clear reason for why he’s got a black hood over his head, ropes around his wrists and his favorite bow is floating around somewhere in the Atlantic, Clint might feel better about the whole getting captured thing, but there isn’t and he doesn’t. There was no screw up, there was no leak, there was nothing at all to indicate he was sold out and he’s seriously pissed the hell off.
The single silver lining in all of this is that the idiots who took him haven’t bothered to remove his earpiece. Dip shits.
The biggest man, who smells like an outhouse, shoves him out of the car and onto his knees. The gravel bites into his skin (of course he had to get grabbed in his underwear) and he does his best to pay attention to sounds and smells, tries to identify where they are. He’s got a good idea just based on the turns the car took, but he’s not familiar enough with the city to be certain.
They drag him into a building and dump him in a chair, someone says something in Hungarian, but his Hungarian sucks so he doesn’t catch it.
”He called you a pig,” Coulson translates in his ear and Clint barely manages to reign in a rude reply.
And then his shitty day gets even shittier.
They drag the hood off and he winces, eyes adjusting to the bright lights. They’re in a warehouse, empty and cold and Natasha is tied to a chair next to him. She spares him a glance and then looks away, rolling her eyes.
“Well, this is a little melodramatic,” she says and he has to hide a smile at how bold she is, considering she’s tied to a chair.
But the man in the suit, the one clearly running the show, ignores her and looks at Clint. “She gave you up so easily. I knew it was too good to be true. The Black Widow could not be just one person, of course she has a partner.” He pauses a moment, which is good because Clint is having a hard time wrapping his head around what’s being said. “Don’t look so shocked, Steven. She’s going to die right along with you. There’s some justice in that.”
“Hawkeye, confirm Black Widow is on the premises.”
Clint glares at her, asking without words if she’s seriously just fed this asshole some crap story about a partner to drag him here and help her escape, because that’s exactly what he thinks she’s done. Her eyes are narrowed and she’s flaring her nostrils and he huffs. Of course that’s exactly what she’s done.
He’s not addressing the Black Widow thing, because he’s not even certain how to approach that in the best of circumstances, let alone ones such as these. He’s gotten really good at compartmentalizing.
“You are such an asshole,” Clint says, looking her in the eye and cutting a quick look to the men at the door and then back to her.
”You had better not mean me, Agent.” Coulson says, flat as ever.
She shakes her head and turns to look at the three men behind the head honcho. “Oh, I’m the asshole? How about that shit you pulled in Bruges?”
Bruges. Fuck. Bruges was a clusterfuck of a mission that he barely got out of and she knows it. She hadn’t been there, but he’d had a shiny new scar and a story to go along with it the next time he’d seen her. He makes a show of looking away from her to get a better look around the room and decides that, no, he can’t pull that kind of explosion off. Besides, he has no bow.
”Confirm or deny, Agent. Do you have eyes on Black Widow.”
“I’ll deny anything you say to me,” Clint says, looking at the man in the suit.
”Copy. Negative ID on Black Widow.”
Oh, he was so getting court marshalled.
“I love this!” The man in the suit was clapping his hands delightedly. “It is like soap opera. I think I’ll let them fight a little longer. Then we kill them.”
They are left alone in the empty room and Clint immediately turns to look at her and he knows he looks like he could breath fire, but he also knows she doesn’t care.
“Oh, knock it off,” she says to him. “I needed a little help. My backup bailed on me.”
“So you get me kidnapped?”
“I never understood that phrase. You’re not a child.”
”Hawkeye, report.”
“I’m tied to a goddamn chair, there isn’t a lot to report,” Clint grinds out.
Natasha’s eyes widen. “Did they leave your earpiece in? Wow, these guys are idiots.”
He can feel his temperature rise. “They got the best of you, didn’t they?”
She stills and her eyes narrow to slits and he thinks maybe he’s just crossed a line he didn’t know was there. And then his suspicion is confirmed when she flips herself, chair and all, landing on her back and cracking the chair into pieces. Within minutes, her hands are free and she’s brutally ripping at the ropes around his wrists.
“I could get untied, you idiot, what I couldn’t do was get past the hordes of lackeys this guy has stationed all over this place. But now that you’re here…”
Coulson is silent in his ear and that really should be Clint’s first sign of trouble, well, more trouble than he is already in, but he’s so distracted by how fucking turned on he is right then that he just sort of steps close to her and grabs her. She kisses him back, sliding her hands into his hair and then her back is against the wall and she makes the most amazing hissing sound against his mouth and holy fuck.
She breaks away and her hands go straight to his cock, robbing his brain, which happens to be screaming out questions about his sanity, of very important blood flow. And then someone clears his throat.
”Are you busy, Agent?”
“A little.” Clint steps back and then steps back again, leaving her looking annoyed and so fucking rumpled that he could…
“ETA three minutes on evac. Approaching from the north. I don’t have to tell you that she’s coming with us, do I?”
Clint looks at her and sighs. He pulls his earpiece out and switches it off. “Okay, you’ve got three minutes to tell me the truth before they get here and I have to arrest you.”
“Like you could.” She’s evasive suddenly and he can tell she’s antsy at having her back to the wall.
“Natasha.”
“I…” She stalls, bites her lip, looks for all the world like a conflicted victim and he’s buying exactly none of it.
“Don’t even,” Clint says, stepping forward, crowding her. “Make a run for it and I have to stop you. I really, really don’t want to stop you. Just tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“No? Or is it that you won’t?”
“Clint…”
He’ll never know exactly why he did it, he’ll never really understand what it was that made him make that decision, but with a long sigh, he stepped back and said: “Go. They’ll fire on the building to draw them to it. Don’t go the opposite direction, that’s where the ground units will approach. Find an exit to the west or east.”
Natasha stares at him long and hard and then, without warning, she hugs him. He’s thrown for a half a second, because it’s such a simple, chaste, affectionate action and she has never been any of those things. His arms slide around her and he presses his lips to her hair and then she’s gone.
***
He’s sitting in her hotel room, cursing her and himself and Coulson and Fury and just about anyone and everyone he can think to curse. It’s no one’s fault but his own, he knows that, but cursing them makes him feel marginally better.
Natasha was in the bathroom and Clint was naked, exhausted and boneless, on the bed, which was when his phone beeped and alerted him to his next mission, who is still in the bathroom.
“Fuck.”
“If you insist,” she says, crawling across the bed, pressing her lips to his chest and sliding up his body.
“Fuck,” Clint says again, this time around a hiss, because oh god, oh god, she can do the most amazing things with her tongue.
“Wait,” he says, completely unable to keep going and completely unable to actually reach for his sidearm and do what SHIELD wants him to do.
“What?”
He ducks away, climbing out of bed, the phone still clutched in his hand. He can’t kill her, he won’t. But he can’t ignore it, this thing that he’s been suspecting for months and choosing to ignore.
“Rumor has it you didn’t start that fire in the orphanage.”
She stills, her eyes gone cold and he can see her hand twitch, wanting to grab her gun off the table. “Oh, I started it,” she says.
“And dragged most of the kids out, too.”
“My intel was wrong.”
They stare at eachother for a long, long time and she starts to soften, her eyes lose the cutting glare and he knows his posture has sagged. They are neither of them armed, save their own hands, but that’s little consolation.
“SHIELD wants me to kill you. I’m not going to.”
“Why not? I’d kill me.”
He scowls. “Natasha.”
“Natalia, actually.”
“Nat,” he amends, because he needs to call her something familiar, something he knows, something that ties her to the woman he’s been falling in something that probably isn’t love with for three years. Or maybe it is.
“Okay,” Nat says, not going for a gun or clothes or anything at all. “If it’s confession time, I have one of my own. I keep coming here, to you, wherever I can find you, hoping you’ll kill me. I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.”
“And here I was thinking that you just wanted me for my body,” he drones, feeling secretly horrible, hoping he’s not revealing just how hurt he suddenly is.
“Well, not just for your body.”
“I’m not going to kill you. If you want to die so bad, you’ll have to do it yourself.” He snatches his clothes off the floor, frustrated, hurt, angry. He’s only got so far as pulling his boxers on, when she’s standing in front of him, gun in hand.
“What’re you going to do? Shoot me?” He’s glaring at her and he knows her answer as soon as he asks the stupid question.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
She throws the first punch and he just barely manages to block it, wedging his arm between her fist and his face. She ducks and comes up, her fist landing squarely under his jaw, snapping his head back. She’s on him before he can recover, her arm around his neck. He flips her over him, depositing her on her back on the floor with a thud and presses a foot to her windpipe.
“Stop it,” Clint says, licking blood from his lip.
Nat responds with a painful jab to the side of his knee and he just manages to switch his weight to the other leg and stay upright. She rolls away, crouches and lunges, catching him around the middle. The land together, hard, taking the lamp and desk chair with them. She’s got a hand at his jugular and her knee wedged between his legs and then she’s kissing him.
Clint wraps a hand around her wrist and squeezes and she makes this sound against his mouth that sounds like pain but isn’t. She runs her tongue across his lips, deepens the kiss, but doesn’t loosen the hold on his neck.
Her free hand drags down his torso, nails biting into his skin, to pull his dick from his boxers and he can’t help when his hips jerk against her hand, her knee still wedged painfully against him. He does it again, because it hurts.
She groans into his mouth, biting his lip and he tangles a hand in her hair, yanking her head away, reveling in the way her eyes narrow and darken and her thighs tighten. He tugs harder and she growls, and moves her knee to the other side of his hips, sinking herself down on him in one fast movement.
They fuck, hard and stilted and his hand doesn’t leave her hair, dragging her head back with every thrust of his hips. She drives herself down onto him, one hand solid around his throat and the other twined in his. She shifts, angels her hips and whimpers when his cock keeps bottoming out inside her, striking her painfully with every thrust and then she’s coming, fast and hard around him and he’s dragging her down to kiss her, dirty and sloppy and he loses all control, coming right along with her.
They lay still for several minutes, bleeding a little, bruised and completely exhausted.
“Still not going to kill you,” Clint says.
“I know.”
***
Years and miles and lifetimes later, Clint will say I love you first, but he’ll think she’s sleeping and Nat will refuse to ever admit she heard him. She’ll say it back months after that, but she will be drugged out of her gourd and won’t remember that she said it and he will refuse to ever tell her that she did. They’ll fight and they’ll laugh and they’ll try being apart and they will try being together and they will come to one inevitable conclusion: It’s never clean and it’s rarely pretty, but it’s theirs and they were never really in control of it anyway.
Author:andacus
A Gift For: workerbee73
Rating: R
Warnings: Sex (obviously) and language.
Pairings: Clint/Natasha
Summary/Prompt Used: Come for the espionage, stay for the sex... or maybe that's the other way around. For the prompt - Some might say it was love at first sight. Of course, it took three years before they managed to actually (officially) meet.
Authors Notes: I'm not sure how well I met the prompt, but I hope you like it. :) And thanks to my beta, who shall remain nameless for the time being.
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Clint is not a Spiritual man. He doesn’t chalk much up to faith or fate, but there is something uncanny and almost exquisite about the way this game keeps playing out. There is something just shy of terrifying in how their paths appear to be constantly intersecting.
The first time he sees her, they’re in London in a gentleman’s club so unchanged by time he’s surprised he isn’t forced into a cravat and a top hat upon entry. The clientele is so elite that he isn’t even supposed to know about the place - SHIELD isn’t even supposed to know about the place - and he sure as hell isn’t supposed to be there. She’s serving drinks in some outfit that is somehow too skimpy and too classy at the same time and he knows as soon as he looks at her, she isn’t supposed to be there either.
Clint keeps her in his periphery all night, but the target (a South American chemist with too much power and too little respect for humanity) is all over the damn place and he can only spare so much attention for the enigma with the tray of martinis. But she must suspect him just as much as he suspects her, because when he excuses himself to the bathroom, she’s already there waiting for him.
She fires a warning shot in the form of a knife that sticks in the wall about three inches from his head. He looks at her and raises his eyebrows. She raises one back.
“I always wanted to do that,” he says. When her expression doesn’t change he adds, “Raise just one eyebrow. I can’t do it.” He tries, twists his face comically in all sorts of ways. “Eh, I guess I’m an all or nothing type of guy.”
“Who are you? Why are you here?” She has another knife in hand, but she doesn’t move.
“I had to piss.”
The eyebrow goes down and she looks flat out terrifying. It’s kind of hot.
“Name’s Mark Stahl. I’m here because I was invited.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
He shrugs. “I know.”
They glare at each other for several minutes until finally the woman says, “Okay, you stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.”
“What’s your name, Red?”
She purses her lips. “Natasha,” she says and he thinks she might be lying, but maybe not. There’s an odd tilt to her mouth that gives him the impression she’s playing with him and that’s definitely hot.
He reaches up and tugs the knife out of the wall, launches it at her, smiles when it pins the hem of her skirt to the wall, revealing more leg and more knives.
“Deal,” Clint says. “But keep whatever you’re doing quiet. My target isn’t fond of loud noises.”
*
The second time he sees her, they’re in some annoyingly pretentious tourist trap of a town in California and he’s covered in grape juice and just general squashed grape gunk. Some generic type of bad guy was trying to slip anthrax into bottles of wine, which was pretty good, as far as nefarious, apocalyptic ideas go. Clint had expected to get dirty on this one, what he had not expected was to get shot at. Theodore Himpit (that was the anthrax guy) was supposed to be mousy and angry and emo. Turns out, he had several very large, very armed, very un-mousy friends.
Clint’s ducking behind a huge steel drum, avoiding gunfire as best he can. The juice is causing his arrows to stick on release in a way that’s seriously problematic and he’s forced to use his sidearm. He’s firing on the last two guys when she slides around a corner and crouches next to him.
“Uh, hi.” He manages.
“Need a hand?” She’s smirking and he kind of wants to kiss that look away.
“Nope. I’m good. You?”
“Nah. Funny meeting you here, though.”
He nods and fires a few shots, taking one of the shooters down easily. But something’s off. He looks at Natasha and scowls. “Did you bring more enemy fire?”
She looks almost apologetic and shrugs.
“Why did you do that? I have enough people shooting at me!” He’s not shouting, but he’s certainly not being quiet.
“What’s a little firefight between friends?”
“We are not that good of friends!”
Natasha fires a few rounds and chuckles. It’s a low, shallow sound like drums and he gets the impression she doesn’t do it often. “Honestly? I was here watching your little friend over there because my employers don’t like the competition. But then your clumsy ass ruined that.”
“But where did the extra guys come from?” He fires two rounds in the general direction of the enemy, more to send them for cover than to actually hit anything - they’re all too well hidden where they are anyway.
“They’re trying to kill me,” she says conversationally. “It’s not related to our current situation.”
“Our situation?!” He stares at her, mouth probably agape, not quite sure what to do with any of this. Finally, after a moment’s indecision, he says, “Can you find me some water so I can get this shit off my bow?”
With a nod, she dives around the steel drum and disappears, firing well-placed shots as she darts behind the nearest building.
Half of him doesn’t expect her to come back. But she does, slides in the same way she’d done before and he spares a half a thought as to why no one else is coming at them from that direction, but it’s lost as soon as she hands him some wet cloths and a small bottle of water. Natasha lays down cover fire while he gets to work getting the sticky crap off his bowstring.
Another twenty minutes and it’s over. A titanium arrowhead, an exploding tip, a few well placed bullets and they’ve destroyed most everything around them, but there is no anthrax being shipped to a market near you and there are no longer people shooting at them, so Clint should be perfectly happy, but he isn’t. At all.
“You seriously jeopardized my entire operation,” he tells her, angry and a little too high on the adrenaline still thrumming under his skin.
“Likewise, Hotshot.”
He’s about to ask exactly who she’s working for and why in the hell he should give a crap about her probably illegal operation, when a pair of police cruisers peel around the building, lights and sirens making both Clint and Natasha flinch.
When he looks back over at her, she’s gone.
***
Clint gets to play hero the next time around. He had sort of expected to see her pop up on this op, not that that was why he took the mission... Okay, yes it was. It totally was. The men who had come after her in California were part of a larger group that had been on SHIELD’s radar for awhile and when he saw the name in Coulson’s case file, Clint was first to volunteer. He’s a dumbass, obviously.
What he does not expect, however, is to find her tied up in a tiny, concrete room looking like feral animal, blood and bruises on her face, hair a tangled mess. The look of relief she gives him when he opens the door is even less expected.
“Shit,” he mutters. “They just don’t know how to treat a lady.” It’s a lame attempt to lighten the mood and apparently Natasha thinks so too, because she gives him a look that asks if he is possibly mentally disabled.
He unties her and hefts her to her feet. She is favoring one leg and her hand quickly goes to her ribs when she takes a step, but nothing looks life threatening, which he is grateful for and then wonders why he was grateful for that.
Such a dumbass.
The building is not overly large - maybe five thousand square feet - and there are only four other people with him, all of whom are clearing other hallways, but Natasha’s been here before and he lets her lead him to the end of a corridor and into a large office. There are three men already inside and they all stare a moment, surprised, until Natasha rushes them. Clint has just enough time to drop one of the men, before she’s killed the other two.
But it’s cost her something, because her leg gives out when she tries to cross the room toward where the computer sits in the center of a large glass desk.
“Hey, GI Jane. Maybe let me help you next time,” he says leaning to wrap an arm around her waist and help take some of the weight.
She says nothing, instead she’s typing furiously at the keyboard. Whatever she’s looking for, she finds because there is a triumphant grin across her face. He thinks he might really need to find out what that grin tastes like.
He also thinks he should probably be apprehending her. Or at the very least confiscating the data she’s taken. He does neither.
“Come on,” she says and they backtrack toward the room she was held in, but before they get that deep into the building, Clint’s comms beep in his ear and word gets relayed that the building is clear.
“Command says they’ve picked up Hassen’s trail about ten miles outside of Sao Paulo. They had hours on us.”
“I’ve got three dead lackeys in the office in the south west corner. What’s the plan?” Clint asks, ignoring the way his gut twists at the idea of having to fly to fucking Sao Paulo when she’s leaning into his side, pressed against him and pretending her ribs don’t hurt like hell. He also ignores the way his gut twists at completely failing to mention her existence and how he really should know better than this.
“Fuck if I know,” Ali says.
“What spooked them?” Linman asks.
Coulson’s voice breaks in and the chatter stops. “Get the hell out of here. Everyone report back to base within 48 hours or the shuttle home leaves without you. Consider it the only nice thing I’ll ever do for you.”
Clint shrugs, tells her he’s got time if she needs help and she looks about to refuse, about to say that she doesn’t need anything from anyone and normally he would be first to agree, but for whatever reason, she doesn’t. She nods, winces, and then tells him he better be good at all forms of minor surgery.
The hotel she directs him to is nice; the kind of place he usually just pretends to stay at, but never actually gets to. She has a room already and they draw a few curious glances as they hobble to the elevator and down the hall.
They share a bottle of vodka and he does a decent job sewing up the gash in her leg. He tapes up her ribs, being very careful not to touch, look at, bury his face in or otherwise even notice her breasts. He’s failing mostly, but he does manage not to actually touch them, so he’s really pretty proud of himself.
The problem is not that he has no self control, because he actually has a metric shit ton of self control. The problem is that every time he looks up at her or steps back to make sure the tape is wrapping correctly, she’s looking at him in this way… he doesn’t have words for exactly how she’s looking at him. It’s something like lust, but there’s sadness and confusion and maybe impulsiveness, which… wow. He’d never peg her for impulsive.
There’s a different look on her face when she leans in to kiss him and he thinks maybe it’s defiance and joy, like she’s breaking a rule and loving it and he’s about nine-hundred percent certain that she is.
She tastes like smoke and blood and she doesn’t wince when he slides a hand around her and pulls her into his lap. Mentally, he upgrades himself from dumbass to fucking idiot.
“Hey,” Clint says, leaning back to look at her. “If you’re hurt, we don’t…”
But his offer (And where exactly did that come from?) is cut off when she runs a palm across the front of his pants and all of the blood leaves the part of his brain that controls coherent speech. She leans in again, presses her lips against his jaw, his ear, his throat and he decides that the lady gets whatever the hell the lady wants. She did have a rough day, after all.
Stumbling, they tug off his shirt, her pants, his boots, his pants, her underwear; everything finds a spot somewhere on the floor or the couch or wherever the hell it lands. He stands up, brings her with him, her legs locked around his waist, and lays her out on the bed in front of him. Clint half expects her to protest being supine and naked, braces for a violent reaction, but she smiles at him and stretches languidly, watching him watching her. He kisses every scar, slides his tongue over her nipples and her belly button and it’s finally when he licks a trail to the inside of her thigh that she stops him. Her hands tangle in his hair and she tugs him upward, insistent, eager, but there’s a slight edge to it and he files that away for consideration later.
She wraps a leg around him, shifts her hips and kisses him. One small hand finds his cock and he sucks in a sharp breath when she squeezes (And when the hell had she grabbed a condom?) and then suddenly he’s sinking into her and he spares a brief thought to how stupid he was to think that he had any control over this situation at all. She laughs and he smiles at her, because he’s pretty sure he just said that out loud. She’s still laughing when he kisses her, stealing her breath and turning the mirth into moans and gasps. He juts his hips forward, driving into her, reveling in the way her thrusts meet him halfway every time. It’s a battle almost, ungraceful and reactionary, but it’s perfect. She’s strong, stronger than he would have thought, and Clint’s sure they’ll both have bruises tomorrow, but that’s perfect, too.
When they wake up hours later, naked and sweaty and both surprised to have actually fallen asleep, she rolls over him and sinks down onto him and they have sex in a sleepy haze and he doesn’t think about exactly how he feels about that.
He leaves that night while she’s in the shower, doesn’t leave a note and he knows she wouldn’t expect him to, but somehow it still feels wrong, still feels like he’s deserting her or abandoning something he didn’t have in the first place.
And he absolutely does not take one of her silver throwing knives with him. Except that he totally does.
***
After that, they bump into each other in the most (un)random places: A play in Morocco, a gas station in Texarkana, the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. She’s all soft angles and hard edges, art and efficiency, talent and boldness. There are a million things about her that line up in a perfect row and just as many that jut out at odd angles - nothing about her makes any sense and he just wants to pull it all apart and figure it out.
They have sex in the costume room of the Moroccan playhouse while the audience watches Romeo and Juliet die for some adolescent idea of love. She sucks him off in the dark behind a line of burning buildings on the Texas/Arkansas border and he makes her scream his name in a rented room above a pub, laughing when the man he’s there to kill complains and yells from the room next door.
She never helps him with an op, she never asks for help on her own jobs, but somehow she’s got a bead on his movements and she finds a way to appear as if from thin air. Sometimes he doesn’t see her at all and he has to remind himself he isn’t supposed to see her, that she’s probably an enemy, that there’s probably a file on her in Coulson’s desk. But he can’t help the way his mood falls when he’s on a jet home, the rest of the team chattering around him, and he didn’t once catch sight of her. Granted, there are far more ops where he doesn’t see or have any reason to see her, but he’s lost control of whatever this thing is and he wants… wants to see her, wants to touch her, wants to poke at all those little idiosyncrasies and oddities. Or maybe he just wants to know she’s still alive.
***
If there was a clear reason for why he’s got a black hood over his head, ropes around his wrists and his favorite bow is floating around somewhere in the Atlantic, Clint might feel better about the whole getting captured thing, but there isn’t and he doesn’t. There was no screw up, there was no leak, there was nothing at all to indicate he was sold out and he’s seriously pissed the hell off.
The single silver lining in all of this is that the idiots who took him haven’t bothered to remove his earpiece. Dip shits.
The biggest man, who smells like an outhouse, shoves him out of the car and onto his knees. The gravel bites into his skin (of course he had to get grabbed in his underwear) and he does his best to pay attention to sounds and smells, tries to identify where they are. He’s got a good idea just based on the turns the car took, but he’s not familiar enough with the city to be certain.
They drag him into a building and dump him in a chair, someone says something in Hungarian, but his Hungarian sucks so he doesn’t catch it.
”He called you a pig,” Coulson translates in his ear and Clint barely manages to reign in a rude reply.
And then his shitty day gets even shittier.
They drag the hood off and he winces, eyes adjusting to the bright lights. They’re in a warehouse, empty and cold and Natasha is tied to a chair next to him. She spares him a glance and then looks away, rolling her eyes.
“Well, this is a little melodramatic,” she says and he has to hide a smile at how bold she is, considering she’s tied to a chair.
But the man in the suit, the one clearly running the show, ignores her and looks at Clint. “She gave you up so easily. I knew it was too good to be true. The Black Widow could not be just one person, of course she has a partner.” He pauses a moment, which is good because Clint is having a hard time wrapping his head around what’s being said. “Don’t look so shocked, Steven. She’s going to die right along with you. There’s some justice in that.”
“Hawkeye, confirm Black Widow is on the premises.”
Clint glares at her, asking without words if she’s seriously just fed this asshole some crap story about a partner to drag him here and help her escape, because that’s exactly what he thinks she’s done. Her eyes are narrowed and she’s flaring her nostrils and he huffs. Of course that’s exactly what she’s done.
He’s not addressing the Black Widow thing, because he’s not even certain how to approach that in the best of circumstances, let alone ones such as these. He’s gotten really good at compartmentalizing.
“You are such an asshole,” Clint says, looking her in the eye and cutting a quick look to the men at the door and then back to her.
”You had better not mean me, Agent.” Coulson says, flat as ever.
She shakes her head and turns to look at the three men behind the head honcho. “Oh, I’m the asshole? How about that shit you pulled in Bruges?”
Bruges. Fuck. Bruges was a clusterfuck of a mission that he barely got out of and she knows it. She hadn’t been there, but he’d had a shiny new scar and a story to go along with it the next time he’d seen her. He makes a show of looking away from her to get a better look around the room and decides that, no, he can’t pull that kind of explosion off. Besides, he has no bow.
”Confirm or deny, Agent. Do you have eyes on Black Widow.”
“I’ll deny anything you say to me,” Clint says, looking at the man in the suit.
”Copy. Negative ID on Black Widow.”
Oh, he was so getting court marshalled.
“I love this!” The man in the suit was clapping his hands delightedly. “It is like soap opera. I think I’ll let them fight a little longer. Then we kill them.”
They are left alone in the empty room and Clint immediately turns to look at her and he knows he looks like he could breath fire, but he also knows she doesn’t care.
“Oh, knock it off,” she says to him. “I needed a little help. My backup bailed on me.”
“So you get me kidnapped?”
“I never understood that phrase. You’re not a child.”
”Hawkeye, report.”
“I’m tied to a goddamn chair, there isn’t a lot to report,” Clint grinds out.
Natasha’s eyes widen. “Did they leave your earpiece in? Wow, these guys are idiots.”
He can feel his temperature rise. “They got the best of you, didn’t they?”
She stills and her eyes narrow to slits and he thinks maybe he’s just crossed a line he didn’t know was there. And then his suspicion is confirmed when she flips herself, chair and all, landing on her back and cracking the chair into pieces. Within minutes, her hands are free and she’s brutally ripping at the ropes around his wrists.
“I could get untied, you idiot, what I couldn’t do was get past the hordes of lackeys this guy has stationed all over this place. But now that you’re here…”
Coulson is silent in his ear and that really should be Clint’s first sign of trouble, well, more trouble than he is already in, but he’s so distracted by how fucking turned on he is right then that he just sort of steps close to her and grabs her. She kisses him back, sliding her hands into his hair and then her back is against the wall and she makes the most amazing hissing sound against his mouth and holy fuck.
She breaks away and her hands go straight to his cock, robbing his brain, which happens to be screaming out questions about his sanity, of very important blood flow. And then someone clears his throat.
”Are you busy, Agent?”
“A little.” Clint steps back and then steps back again, leaving her looking annoyed and so fucking rumpled that he could…
“ETA three minutes on evac. Approaching from the north. I don’t have to tell you that she’s coming with us, do I?”
Clint looks at her and sighs. He pulls his earpiece out and switches it off. “Okay, you’ve got three minutes to tell me the truth before they get here and I have to arrest you.”
“Like you could.” She’s evasive suddenly and he can tell she’s antsy at having her back to the wall.
“Natasha.”
“I…” She stalls, bites her lip, looks for all the world like a conflicted victim and he’s buying exactly none of it.
“Don’t even,” Clint says, stepping forward, crowding her. “Make a run for it and I have to stop you. I really, really don’t want to stop you. Just tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“No? Or is it that you won’t?”
“Clint…”
He’ll never know exactly why he did it, he’ll never really understand what it was that made him make that decision, but with a long sigh, he stepped back and said: “Go. They’ll fire on the building to draw them to it. Don’t go the opposite direction, that’s where the ground units will approach. Find an exit to the west or east.”
Natasha stares at him long and hard and then, without warning, she hugs him. He’s thrown for a half a second, because it’s such a simple, chaste, affectionate action and she has never been any of those things. His arms slide around her and he presses his lips to her hair and then she’s gone.
***
He’s sitting in her hotel room, cursing her and himself and Coulson and Fury and just about anyone and everyone he can think to curse. It’s no one’s fault but his own, he knows that, but cursing them makes him feel marginally better.
Natasha was in the bathroom and Clint was naked, exhausted and boneless, on the bed, which was when his phone beeped and alerted him to his next mission, who is still in the bathroom.
“Fuck.”
“If you insist,” she says, crawling across the bed, pressing her lips to his chest and sliding up his body.
“Fuck,” Clint says again, this time around a hiss, because oh god, oh god, she can do the most amazing things with her tongue.
“Wait,” he says, completely unable to keep going and completely unable to actually reach for his sidearm and do what SHIELD wants him to do.
“What?”
He ducks away, climbing out of bed, the phone still clutched in his hand. He can’t kill her, he won’t. But he can’t ignore it, this thing that he’s been suspecting for months and choosing to ignore.
“Rumor has it you didn’t start that fire in the orphanage.”
She stills, her eyes gone cold and he can see her hand twitch, wanting to grab her gun off the table. “Oh, I started it,” she says.
“And dragged most of the kids out, too.”
“My intel was wrong.”
They stare at eachother for a long, long time and she starts to soften, her eyes lose the cutting glare and he knows his posture has sagged. They are neither of them armed, save their own hands, but that’s little consolation.
“SHIELD wants me to kill you. I’m not going to.”
“Why not? I’d kill me.”
He scowls. “Natasha.”
“Natalia, actually.”
“Nat,” he amends, because he needs to call her something familiar, something he knows, something that ties her to the woman he’s been falling in something that probably isn’t love with for three years. Or maybe it is.
“Okay,” Nat says, not going for a gun or clothes or anything at all. “If it’s confession time, I have one of my own. I keep coming here, to you, wherever I can find you, hoping you’ll kill me. I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.”
“And here I was thinking that you just wanted me for my body,” he drones, feeling secretly horrible, hoping he’s not revealing just how hurt he suddenly is.
“Well, not just for your body.”
“I’m not going to kill you. If you want to die so bad, you’ll have to do it yourself.” He snatches his clothes off the floor, frustrated, hurt, angry. He’s only got so far as pulling his boxers on, when she’s standing in front of him, gun in hand.
“What’re you going to do? Shoot me?” He’s glaring at her and he knows her answer as soon as he asks the stupid question.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
She throws the first punch and he just barely manages to block it, wedging his arm between her fist and his face. She ducks and comes up, her fist landing squarely under his jaw, snapping his head back. She’s on him before he can recover, her arm around his neck. He flips her over him, depositing her on her back on the floor with a thud and presses a foot to her windpipe.
“Stop it,” Clint says, licking blood from his lip.
Nat responds with a painful jab to the side of his knee and he just manages to switch his weight to the other leg and stay upright. She rolls away, crouches and lunges, catching him around the middle. The land together, hard, taking the lamp and desk chair with them. She’s got a hand at his jugular and her knee wedged between his legs and then she’s kissing him.
Clint wraps a hand around her wrist and squeezes and she makes this sound against his mouth that sounds like pain but isn’t. She runs her tongue across his lips, deepens the kiss, but doesn’t loosen the hold on his neck.
Her free hand drags down his torso, nails biting into his skin, to pull his dick from his boxers and he can’t help when his hips jerk against her hand, her knee still wedged painfully against him. He does it again, because it hurts.
She groans into his mouth, biting his lip and he tangles a hand in her hair, yanking her head away, reveling in the way her eyes narrow and darken and her thighs tighten. He tugs harder and she growls, and moves her knee to the other side of his hips, sinking herself down on him in one fast movement.
They fuck, hard and stilted and his hand doesn’t leave her hair, dragging her head back with every thrust of his hips. She drives herself down onto him, one hand solid around his throat and the other twined in his. She shifts, angels her hips and whimpers when his cock keeps bottoming out inside her, striking her painfully with every thrust and then she’s coming, fast and hard around him and he’s dragging her down to kiss her, dirty and sloppy and he loses all control, coming right along with her.
They lay still for several minutes, bleeding a little, bruised and completely exhausted.
“Still not going to kill you,” Clint says.
“I know.”
***
Years and miles and lifetimes later, Clint will say I love you first, but he’ll think she’s sleeping and Nat will refuse to ever admit she heard him. She’ll say it back months after that, but she will be drugged out of her gourd and won’t remember that she said it and he will refuse to ever tell her that she did. They’ll fight and they’ll laugh and they’ll try being apart and they will try being together and they will come to one inevitable conclusion: It’s never clean and it’s rarely pretty, but it’s theirs and they were never really in control of it anyway.