I woke up one morning at 4AM and got a little bit of inspiration. That's the entire story behind this strange little oneshot.
Is anyone else enjoying their AvengersDVD or Blu-Ray discs? I know I am! I own the entire connected series right now~ :)

Writing in the margins

It was not a front. Being ruled by emotion (the metaphorical 'heart') was a one way ticket to injury or death. There was no form of childish rebellion that fueled the ice in her eyes or the many doors, shields and walls that guarded her mind; they guarded her mind. Her mind, for the heart was useless.

Even pulled out of the blurry darkness that was her early life, there was little to change her mind, to change her view on the world around her. Even with her memories suppressed (erased) to where she could function without flashbacks and triggers reminding her, distracting her, they lingered. They lingered, remained at the back of her mind, taunted her, haunted her; they stayed at the edge of her awareness, seen but not seen, felt, always there yet never able to be done away with. Like a flickering light at the end of a hall, there was no avoiding the thoughts- or ignoring them.

Artists drew forth images of light and color, homes and people and animals with nothing to do but remain eternally locked in their aesthetic poses on some museum or public wall. There were others, as well, artists who recorded images of vile and gire, pieces normally hidden from the public eyes unless the artist was of some ungodly famous name. That second tier of images were more accurate to the world around her more accurate to what she saw.

As a child, had she wished to see the Kinkade-like world? The overabundance of color that could leave no one unimpressed? If she had any sort of mundane memories, any sort of normal childhood days, those, too, were suppressed, or perhaps absolutely forgotten. Made and unmade so many times, her memories were wiped, replaced and made all over again only to all be confused with one another so often that history books were her one solace. Books, for a good while, she believed could never lie; but she was Russian (or at least she was) and soon learned that books could be altered to tell the wrong story, the wrong history. Events were retold, photos were doctored, names were spelled wrong- or erased. History became fiction. The realization was so sharp that she had thrown her cherished (yes, cherished) volumes into the next room of the one-floor flat and reduced herself to sitting in an armchair, her legs curled to her chest, her head down. Her breathing was rough, fast, furious- she'd never felt tears of anger before. Pain, yes. Tears of pain were uncontrollable, they came when a wound sent up those sharp pangs that seemed to penetrate every fiber of the body; the tears were a reaction, a useless one but a reaction nevertheless. Like how she could only hold her breath in water under a bridge for so long, those tears could only be pushed back; eventually they built up and poured over. Anger, apparently, worked the same; inevitable, it could only be held back for so long.
The books had remained in a scattered heap for days on end.

Taken out of the literal and metaphorical darkness of her past, there was little she could grab onto... little to hold onto and claim it gave her that strange sensation called hope. In fact, under SHIELD's extensive wing, there may have been even less. In the world of shadows she had once tread, with some false memories and some true, that was all she knew- that world, what she had done, what she had been forced to do, what she had analyzed, what she had realized was true and what was false. Under SHIELD's wing, she was a part of it all- suddenly, she knew everything. She was in an intelligence agency whose members had to be as crafty and well-read as their superiors, where there were no secrets, only reports, plans, missions. Her previous position became a small corner of the world, a small green dot on the radar that listed all of SHIELD's problems.

Ignorance was not bliss. However, neither was knowledge. Ignorance brought forth fear and uncertainty of the unknown and the potential for being unprepared. Knowledge was a burden, every problem became her's to fix; and there was no finding a middle ground.
It made her wonder why she had been spared. Was it some sort of punishment, some sort of roundabout way of beating the humanity intp of her? She could almost picture it, picture some man in a black, black suit with a smirk snarling, look here, Natasha Romanoff, look.

This is what you have helped cause.

If that was the case, well, it worked. It damn well worked. Assignment after assignment, report after report, she came back to headquarters (and another flat she tentatively called 'home') with a tight feeling in her chest, a weight that both tore apart her muscles and pushed them down at the same time. Along with gashes, wounds, concussions, among other things, she felt more of that strange emotion, a surge that seemed to make those wounds hurt more than they ever had.

Eventually she learned the name for that emotion- guilt. It was guilt. It was the knowledge that somehow, some way, there was going to be something that trailed back to her by however many degrees of separation, one or six; it was the knowledge that her action or lack of action before becoming a member of SHIELD was the cause for misfortune for so many- there was no chance that she had touched only a few. While she was given the grace of obscurity, that her face was in the files of the underground with no hope of becoming public, there was no relief. She was a dirty secret being put to work on cleanup in a small effort to put some light to her name. The thing was, how she got the name to that emotion was something she wished she remembered, something she wished the emotion of the moment hadn't pushed back, blurred.

"We should have gotten there sooner."

"There was no chance. I hate to say it, but we did what we could, all that we could."

"If we had gotten there faster, that woman would have lived."

"Or perhaps she would have died in our arms. Would that have made you feel any better?"

"Worse." That argument, that spat that had started after a successful assignment. It had left her with her arms crossed on the windowsill of a passenger train. Her eyes had been out the window, on the scenery, and she had done her best to push away the words of the man near her. Guilt, still nameless, had clawed at her throat, perhaps causing her to be twice as frustrated as she may have been. Death happened; through her short life that had become a constant. There was no changing that. There was no worth in thinking about it, bothering herself with the inevitable. But if something could be stopped then, dammit all, she was going to grab the reigns and control it. She did not take kindly to the backlash, the opposition, the man playing devil's advocate in the adjacent seat.

What was worse was, in a moment of silence, she had realized that he was right.

She couldn't control everything.

"Worse," she had repeated. "I would have felt worse."

"So there's no need to feel guilty, then."

He had sounded so sure. He had gone quiet. He had gone to sleep as the train rushed away from the setting sun, had left her alone in the night with nothing but her thoughts. Emotion always muddled the issue. Anger messed with her mind and guilt messed with her sense of time. To be logical, to take every situation by the facts, it was the only way to get it done her way. The right way. SHIELD's way. However, how could she do so, how could she be logical if she could not be sure what she knew was real or fake? Which lessons in life and literature were genuine and which were doctored in one of many ways? Could she be rational in a paradigm that was filled with fallacy?

With her chin on her folded arms on the train, she could not help the occasional glance out of the corners of her eyes over at the sleeping SHIELD man. Those glances were bitter. At that moment the guilt, like so many other memories, had been suppressed; she had to learn to so do or risk another mental breakdown like the day she had thrown those books across the room. Even so, her eyes were narrowed, her gaze bitter as she stared at the sleeping man. Small decisions snowballed into larger consequences. Him, that man in the seat next to her, had thrown that snowball that had her sitting in that seat, thinking over the logic and lack of logic in guilt and her blur of a life. He had spared her; he had been sent to kill her and instead made a different call.

She could blame him. Doubtful that anyone would care if she did. She could sit there and grit and grind her teeth and say it was all his fault, that he dragged her not from darkness into light but from darkness into dimly lit turmoil. She would not. She could not. She was misplaced but she was not weak. Assigning blame to lessen some imagined mental load was a sign of insecurity. It was weakness that she would never be associated with. Because he had dropped the knife and stepped back did not make her confliction his fault. He was a part of it, yes, but not the reason. She had been stunned into silence when she could have taken the opening and fought back. She could have killed him while she had the chance. But, no- she had been too stunned to move.

Too surprised.

Confused.

Emotion really did mess everything up.

It was everywhere, despair and violence and every sort of situation that no normal person would want a part of. (Deep down in that locked up, metaphorical heart, she wondered how much of it was her fault.) Then again, she wasn't normal. She had no choice. She was sent into situations, often times alongside that archer who had spared her, and told to fix what she could with as little collateral damage as possible. It became a goal of her's, to reach a point where she was so skilled, so in control of every part of herself that there was no collateral damage; No civilian deaths, no need for an additional cover news story, no need for her to hide her face for months because she was seen. None of it. She would have none of it.

At the same time, what she saw did not change. Blood and death and gore and unspeakable crime that she would never revisit showed themselves on video and newspaper and any other way possible. She controlled what she could but the world spun on. The rest of the universe did not take cues from her. A bird may have landed on her front porch and sang to its heart's content but that did not mean somewhere else a gun's clip wasn't being unloaded into someone's chest; a city may have been bright from lights and decorations from a holiday's celebration but elsewhere there was a town less fortunate, a town in a suffering country where celebrations were wasteful. Life was neither good nor bad. Life was whichever positive or negative feeling was more prominent on any given day. The negative did its best to tilt the table, to skew her perception into seeing nothing but the darkness she had become so used to. Perhaps, in a way, she clung to that darkness. It and the pain that came along with it were sickeningly familiar, something she knew how to handle, how to fight. The disappointment, the down that came from being upbeat for a period of time before a reality check knocked her right back down- that was what she fought. That let down, that sudden drop of all of her energy, hit her like a baseball bat to the head; hard, fast, relentless.

There had to be a way to fight it.

Something, anything.

Inspiration came one night after yet another long-term piece of work. She had opened the door and slipped inside of her home like a big cat in new territory, with her body language tense and adrenaline surging for no real reason. There had been no threat at hand; there had been no reason to worry. Yet she had been on alter, and had scoffed at herself for how wary she appeared inside what was her own home; one floor, connected rooms, plenty of space. Once inside, she had left every light off save for the television which she turned on and set on low. Words carried from the speakers to her ears in a steady stream. Glowing images on a high definition screen showed anchors who told stories from all corners of the world. Slowly, her attention was grabbed, transfixed on the words that scrolled across the bottom of the screen in a ticker akin to what she was used to seeing on occasional sports networks. Some of those small, white words corresponded with what the anchor said while others hinted at stories yet to be covered. Where she had once sat with her chin on her palm, her head began to lift until she was upright, her elbows on her knees, her eyes on the screen and her body leaning ever closer.

With grace that she never called grace but skill, she was on her feet. She distributed her weight so her steps were silent; she did not want to overshadow what she was listening to with her own noise. (The ambience of the house, neighborhood noises and creaks of metal and wood, were already bothersome enough.) Through one doorway into a hallway, and then another into a pseudo-study, Natasha had her hand on the spine of one of those older, abused history volumes that had made her so angry so long ago. At once she had it in her hands along with a blue pen from the desk in the same room. Pen in hand and book in another, Natasha's eyes went back to the television. Her keen ears listened to the stories, to details; she paid less attention to the current news and more to the historical background given along with the areas in question. When key words, locations and world leaders, registered in her mind, she quickly turned on a sideboard light and went skimming through the history volume like a college student at study. Pages still creased from that day long ago revealed to her something she found comfort in; truth.

The books were not as flawed as she thought.

Her memory was not as flawed as she thought.

Her fingers flicked through pages, her pen trailed various paragraphs word for word. When there was an error in the text, an error she discovered from background information on the program in front of her, or what she had learned from her days at SHIELD, she circled the error and drew a line to the margins at the edge of the book, to the inch or so that separated the text from the edges of the pages. At the end of that line she wrote a note, a correction, something she knew was right.

She stayed there, in the armchair in front of that television, deep into the night. Only when she found herself blinking awake, the pen still clicked open in her hand and the book still in her lap, did she realize just how long she had been there. Sunlight came in through windows and the shadows of various bird species danced across her floors. In front of her, updated news and new anchors started their daily routines. Local news was the topic right then so Natasha closed that old book and put it on the small table next to the chair. Despite herself, she may have given the worn, brown cover a friendly pat-pat as she got up to get herself ready for that day. It was the day after an assignment, after a damn long one, so this day would be free at the very least. Whether the same could be said for the next day or the rest of that same week, she could not be certain. Nor, for the first time in her SHIELD days, did she care. The future did not matter; that particular day was her's and her's alone.

It became habit, routine, even, to grab one of the various books and peruse it. The old encyclopedia series was sorted through one letter at a time in random order; Monday she may have worked on the Ts and Thursday may have seen her filing through Ma-Mo. Inside the front cover of each book she had already gone through, she would put a small check. A quick glimpse in the front, like a school kid looking to see if a textbook was theirs, she would put a checked book back and take a blank book out. Words, written records became fascinating. The news on the screens in her home or elsewhere became less paramount. When summoned to headquarters and forced to wait for an unknown amount of time before Director Fury could meet with her, she made it a point to go through the records, to use her powerful clearance to finger through records just like she did those books. Without the ability to put a check in the corner, however, she simply went alphabetically; it was simple enough to remember where she left off. The files were normally categorized by the name of a person or place. Remember the name of that person or city and, bingo, she had a bookmark in the back of her mind.

A knock on the front door - which caused her to start and make a sharp line across the B volume - had Natasha turning her head to glare at the offending door. After a breath to calm herself from irrational irritation, she clicked the pen closed, put the B volume down, and used that skill - again, not grace, grace was for innocents - to swing herself cleanly over the chair so she could answer the damn door. After that first knock there hadn't been any others but she could almost feel the person behind the door, how their stare worked to force her ever closer and grant them entry.

She purposely paused a few strides away and counted to a random number before continuing.

"It's my day off," she had said. It was true; once more she was on that day in between assignments, that day was supposed to have been her's and her's alone. "If you're here with a summons then I may shoot the messenger." It was a sick pun, a terrible one, seeing as how this man had spared her (and that very day she had unloaded a few rounds aimed for his head, that she still could not believe had missed).

"Mine was yesterday. I thought coming here would give me a day off Fury's radar."

Because why would he look for you here? It was a credible notion. Experience with this man had said he was one to trust; him, Director Fury, agents Coulson and Hill, they were a rare breed; time with them was the only time other than that spent working with her books that she felt at ease, domestic, not at all tied to the records of her own. Along with that growing level of trust and comfort, if Natasha had learned one thing over the years, and she had learned many, it was that he, Barton, was one of the quickest men in the organization. Sometimes quiet, other times shockingly jovial, it had been hard to tell at first if he was as clever as he seemed or it he was just well informed and a brilliant actor. With the latter image in her mind, she had thought lower of the archer- for quite a long time. Only when work experience (that had her forcefully paired with him) had put them in fight-or-flight situation had his wit come through and saved their necks. (She now owed him twice over.) That show of skill had sparked something in her; once more he had surprised her, proving himself a tactician. One glance at a group of attackers and he had surmised where they were from and what their plan of action may be- his hypothesis had saved them both. Instead of taking a roundabout backway that she had suggested, a path through the shadows to escape, they had, quite literally, walked through an open door, no disguise needed.

No one had looked for them there.

He had been right.

Door open, door closed. Natasha went on with her day as if Barton was not there. The television screen in front of that chair she lounged in rapidly changed channels before Barton found whatever it was he was looking for. As Natasha skimmed the inner workings of the volume, working her way through any and everything that began with the second letter of the Roman alphabet, the sound of early NFL kickoffs floated around the room.

Perhaps it was proof that she was not a sports fan (she understood them, unlike some more airheaded women, but the games themselves weren't visually appealing to her) but she found herself once more dozing with book in hand and herself in that chair. Instead of the early kickoffs, always around 1:05 in the afternoon, she heard various announcers setting the stage and listing statistics for the late night game. The teams immediately were lost on her when she fully woke up and realized that the book was no longer on her person. She looked down at her lap, where it should have been; she leaned to look over either arm of the chair in case it had fallen down; she looked behind the chair and on the side table- that last search proved fruitful. The book and pen were both there, placed under the lamp in fashion too clean for her to have done so in her sleep.

The pen was also placed inside the book.

A quick glance around and a quick listen told her that Barton had possibly gone through the one floor home, out the back door, and seated himself on the sloping piece of room that hung over the enclosed back porch. It wouldn't be the first time she had seen him sitting somewhere elevated; perhaps he was on his back, maybe he stared up at stars, birds, plane trails or whatever it was about the sky that so captured his interest.

Natasha opened the volume to where the pen acted as a bookmark. Near the end of the volume, it was hard to miss or misjudge which page it was. A quick read later and her eyes found and stared at one word in particular, one that had a blue line under it and one headed toward the margins, for sure. (The SHIELD file for that place had been one of the first ones she had read in her "studies.") However, there was a second note, a correction not written in her own handwriting, but the more fluid script she knew as Barton's.

This time, she put the book down herself. Book and pen down, light off, she made her way toward the back door. The back porch was an enclosed area, with screen windows giving her a view and feel of the outside world and its temperature. It wasn't until her feet touched grass and she could look up at her home before Natasha could see that she was right; there he was, the archer, on his back on the shingles. How he got up there had been a mystery the first time until she saw how the railing of the porch stairs along with the outward windowsills made a decent ladder; more than decent, in fact. With her feet on the railing, she stepped over so she stood on her toes on the windowsill before she hauled herself upward onto the roof.

It seemed so easy. Hours were spent filing through those books the night before until she had fallen asleep that afternoon. So domestic, so uneventful- it was still so foreign feeling to her. Life couldn't be so simple... could it?

"You must have a bad memory," Natasha murmured as she positioned herself a yard or so away from the archer. (A yard or so? The football must have played the entire time she was asleep.) "if you didn't remember how that turned out."

"Hmm?" Barton had turned his head to glance at her; his arms, folded behind his head, and one knee bent, did not move.

"Your note on Budapest."

"It wasn't wrong, per say," Barton murmured at full volume. "Just a different interpretation than what I had. That thing's also quite old, the book, and the set it's from. You'd be better off getting a new set so a hint at our influence might be in there, among other places."

"You think I want to remember that?"

He laughed, a sound that was strange, deep and somehow instinctually relaxing. "If it's so negative that you don't want to, then you and I really do remember Budapest very differently." After that laugh had faded, Barton had looked away from her and returned to a resting position, with his head on his hands, which were behind his head. Those sunglasses of his were set down beside him, with one earpiece threaded through a belt loop so they could no fall.

While there would have normally been a point to argue, a moment to murmur about how she wanted to forget one of many firefights that had nearly left her a corpse on the floor, that laugh had put her in such a strange sensation of ease that she couldn't muster the argument from her throat. Her eyes had remained on Barton for a moment after that, her eyes taking in details that she normally reserved for targets; features, colors, distinctive marks or scars, anything about the face that could be committed to memory. Perhaps the most distinctive detail was the color of his eyes, that stormy grey-green that she had no words for in any of the languages she spoke. She stayed where she was, on the roof, a few feet away from the one who had spared her. (No longer was there that urge to give him blame. It was behind her. It was behind her.)

"If you're so curious about that note," She retorted at last. She made a move to lay down, herself. Unlike him, she kept her arms in front of her, folded on her stomach. Her feet just touched the edge of the roof; she could curl her toes around the cool metal of the gutter. "then buy me a new set that has the information you're looking for."

"Alright. I will."

"And you'll just cross out my comments once again."

"Oh Budapest, yep. On the rest, you do what you want. Your books, after all."

"Shut up and watch the stars, or whatever it is you do."

"Yes ma'am."