Author's note: Here's where I have to state the usual bit about how I don't own Marvel or the Avengers or the characters or anything else that could get me sued…like anyone who does own any of that stuff would be sitting around reading fan fiction anyway. I hope you enjoy!

I never thought it would come to this. She was too quick, too smart, too good for this to be able to happen. It just isn't possible. There isn't a man alive that can best the Black Widow. I should know; I was sent to kill her once. Even when I had the clear shot I couldn't, not after I had one real look at her. The Red Room might have messed with her as a child. They may have broke her down and brainwashed her and built her up for their own purposes, but even they couldn't best her in the end. After all, she was the Black Widow. The spy assassin who liked to get herself caught on purpose so that she could fool her targets into a reverse interrogation while getting tortured. She's lethal. She can handle anything.

I reach my hand forward, slowly. I'm not sure how to deal with this trembling wounded redhead. I'm not sure whether she'll calm down or literally cut off my hand...or if she'll recognize me at all in the state she's in.

"Nat. Hey. It's me."

I gently put my hand on her shoulder, ready to recoil it in an instant if she goes on the attack. I don't know what's wrong with her and I can't even begin to imagine what could have put her into this state.

She freezes up at the touch. Its something else that Black Widow never does. She doesn't freeze up. Well, that's it. Someone has either hijacked her mind Loki style and has her playing me (I've learned not to put anything beyond her acting abilities) or else she's probably dying. I can't wait any longer for my own sanity and decide to risk it, crouching forward and reaching down under her scrunched up legs and her back, lifting her little body to my chest. She is tense until I lift her and then finally she manages to focus her uneven pupils on me for a moment, after which she instantly goes as limp as a rag doll. I'm not sure if it's a good sign that means she recognizes me and just relaxed or if she's literally in the process of dying right then and there. That's when I start to sprint towards the pick up point.

By the time we get there I don't know if she's dead or alive. I'm running too fast to look down. I can't look. It would slow me down by that one millisecond that may make a difference when the medics get her. Honestly, I'm afraid to look down to check anyway because I can't even begin to process what her being dead would mean to me. It simply isn't an option. It must be a drug; I tell myself. Being drugged on some weird trip is the only rational explanation for all this. That means that the medics need to get her on something to get it out of her system. Now.

I focus my every thought, every muscle, every fiber of myself into the running. I don't allow myself to consider how cold or wet or scarcely dressed she is. I can't allow myself to think of anything except running to get her to the damn extraction point.

About twenty minutes and 5 miles later and I see finally see the damn helicopter. They are at least smart enough to know something is wrong and send someone to meet me as I approach. I'm in shape and a good runner, but I'm also pretty sure I just broke a world record for a 5 mile run and I barely hand her over to the two operatives, one of which I am grateful to see is a medic, before my legs turn to jello and I fall to my knees. The first opportunity my lungs give me to speak I yell out "She needs help! I think she's been drugged or something." Then I do my best to make it to the helicopter so they can take off. I don't want to waste any time. She probably needs drugs they might not carry in the standard kit.

I climb in, exhausted and collapse into the nearest seat, watching anxiously as the medics cut the ridiculously tiny excuse for a dress off my partner's cold, sweaty body. The phone rings and my fingers go to answer it automatically. Fury.

His eye patched face comes onto the screen and he stares at me as usual. "Agent report."

I'm still trying to finish catching my breath and I don't take my eyes off Natasha even for a moment as the medic frantically works on her, hooking in an IV and shining a light into her eyes, one at a time as she uses her fingers to open them.

"Agent down. I repeat, agent down."

"Romanoff?" Fury more states than questions, surprised by still calm.

I nod, though I'm not even sure if I'm holding the screen so that he can see me. "I don't know happened to her sir. I think she's drugged though and she has a concussion." I watch so tensed that my body physically hurts as the medic injects her with a shot of something and Nat wakes up a little. She opens her eyes and they seem to be wild, certainly not right. At first I think she might be okay. Then she goes ape shit crazy on the medic, slaps together her knees against the woman's neck who had just gave her the shot and twists. The whole thing is over before I can even blink and the only medic on board is on the floor dead. The Widow always did have lethal thighs. Fury says something, but I hang up the phone. If he finds out how unbalanced she is he might have her shot as soon as the plane lands simply to avoid more carnage. Agent Romanoff is deadly and if she is out of her mind and violent for any reason, it could easily mean the death of dozens before she either escapes or is put down. My money would be on escape, which is why it is with utmost caution that I even get near her.

"Nat. Nat. Natasha. Tasha. It's me. It's Barton. Calm down, okay? It's me." I reach out to her carefully as she remains lying on the stretcher cot thing that all these plans come with for when we get hurt, which is almost assured in our line of work. She doesn't respond, but she does watch me carefully, as if assessing whether or not to kill me too. My hand simply goes down to hers. I know better than to attempt to strap her down to anything. She'd have me dead long before I even had one wrist secure.

I take her hand gently and hold it, trying to communicate to her that I'm a friend. "Do you know what happened to you?" I ask as she continues to stare at me as if she might decide to kill me at any moment. She doesn't answer my question.

"Nat." I repeat, hoping that the nickname that only I use for her stirs some sort of recognition. I reach my other hand to her face, running the tips of my fingers down her cold dirty cheek. She allows it and I notice once again the obvious signs of her head injury in her pupils. "It's going to be okay Nat. I got you."

"Clint?" She finally asks, as if she doesn't really believe it could be me.

I nod. "Yeah. You're gonna be okay. You just need to tell me what they dosed you with." I say, trying to make the best out of this more lucid moment incase she falls unconscious again or tries to kill me.

"I don't know." She answers quietly, her eyes beginning to roll back into her lids and I take a firmer hold of her face.

"Nat. Nat! Do not go to sleep on me! You have to stay awake." I shake her forcefully, but it doesn't help. She's out. I can only hope that she wakes up once she's in a proper hospital.

It takes three hours for us to get her to a French hospital. She is rushed back, of course, but I don't have much to tell the team of doctors SHIELD had meet us here. Still, it takes another four and a half hours before they have her stabilized. Even then, they still don't know what exactly happened to her. Apparently, she was injected with some sort of hallucinogen and tortured. The news doesn't surprise or even particularly disturb me, honestly. There isn't much out there to be done to a person that the Red Room hadn't done to her anyway and she survived all that. I'm just relieved that she isn't dead.

I am a bit surprised to find the Captain here as he makes his way towards me. "I was on a mission a few hours out from here and heard. Is she okay?"

I nod absentmindedly, though I still feel a little disturbed at the memory of her curled up and scared the corner I found her in earlier. "Are you okay Barton? You look upset."

I shake my head. "No, it's just I found her in a mess earlier. Hallucinogens or a concussion or something."

"She was hallucinating?"

"Yeah. She killed the medic on the extraction plane. I just don't like seeing her so afraid. It reminds me of how I found her the first time." I say without thinking and then immediately regret it. How I found Nat is no one else's business.

"Well, I know that the Widow can handle herself, but its natural you would worry about her." Steve says without a second thought, as if my deeper concern for my fellow assassin is a given. I raise my eyebrows at him.

"That obvious, huh?" I let out with a breath, sitting down for the first time since the medic had been killed. Well, that does it. If Steve the boy scout can see through me like that then I can't have been fooling anyone.

Steve smiled softly, sitting down beside me and leaning forward towards the door to Natasha's room, his hands on his knees. "I might not catch on to a lot nowadays, but some things don't change. I don't know whether anyone else knows."

We sit in amicable silence for a while, his presence comforting to me, though I am anxious to see Natasha. As the minutes creep by, I get more and more impatient, which is strange; being a sniper I usually have patience in spades. Finally, Steve turns to talk to me again, probably trying to distract me during the wait. "You said Miss Romanoff was afraid the first you met her?"

It was an attempt at a conversation that I'm not at all sure I should have. He doesn't realize it, couldn't realize it, but what he was asking is actually very personal. I grimace and debate how much I should say.

"Agent Romanoff" I use her last name to try to add as much professional distance as I can "used to be in the hands of an organization known as the Red Room. When I first met her, she was my target to eliminate."

This obviously peaks Steve's interest. He sits up more and turns toward me, wanting the whole story, I'm sure. He won't get it, of course. It's too personal for me and even more so for Natasha. The truth is that she was a contract killer for an organization that didn't care about how many were killed in the process of getting what they wanted or what Natasha had to do to get it. It wasn't an accident that they picked such a beautiful girl to train, and they used her looks to their full advantage. Often, this meant sending her have sex with a mark in order to gain information and killing him afterward. After all, she didn't earn the title Black Widow for nothing. When I met her she had just finished doing her job in a very clandestine building full of politicians. She had succeeded as always, but apparently the men she needed intel from were real perverted creeps. Unbeknownst to her, I had been watching all evening, waiting with my usual patience for my clean shot.

I had seen a lot before then, but I had never watched anything quite like that. She had played her part well. No one would suspect she wasn't completely into three men on her at one time. Thirty minutes into it she had gotten more information from them than I would have thought possible. The Red Room had their intel alright and probably more than they had even needed at that. All three men were dead- killed almost at the exact same time; one with her powerful thighs around his neck, one with a knife through the throat and the third one's neck snapped with her free hand. All of them were gone in less than five seconds, naked and scattered on the large bed. Natasha was naked too and covered in all manner of filth before hastily pulling her slinky dress back over her chest and down to just under her bottom. Without a word or any sign of regret or discomfort, she slides off the bed and finds her shoes. The sight had intrigued me, but it had disgusted me even more.

As she exited the building into the back alleyway, with no one any the wiser that she was gone and the three politicians dead, I poised my bow. I waited for the perfect moment. The shot was clear and I almost send the kill shot when I saw her face for the first time she could be sure she was alone without any cameras watching.

For a second, her facade dropped. She doesn't cry, or do anything to voluntarily show weakness, even though for all she knows she's alone, but in that moment I still see her for real. I see through the act, however skilled an actress she was, and manage a glimpse at the small, too skinny teenage girl she was, who was standing alone in a darkened alleyway with blood running down her bare thighs that the ridiculous whore's dress she donned did nothing to hide. With no way to rationalize the action verbally to anyone, I found myself switching my arrow to a tranquilizer dart. Instead of shooting her into an early grave as instructed, I ended up climbing down to take the little killer back with me to my crap hotel room.

I bound her, stripped her of the one tiny knife she carried in an...interesting place, and I waited. When she woke up tied up in the corner of the room, for a second, and only a split second at that, she had that expression I saw on her today. Even back then, under all those circumstances, she hadn't been as afraid as I saw her today. What the hell had happened to her?

"I didn't." I end up saying simply, leaving it at that. Steve doesn't press; if nothing else, he is a true to God gentleman and polite no matter the situation.

It takes another two hours before the doctor comes out and asks in French if we're immediate family. "I'm her husband." I state plainly in English even though I understood them perfectly well. "This is her brother." I motion to the Captain. When the doctor looks confused, I roll my eyes and over enunciate "mari" as I tap my chest and then point over to Steve "frère." Steve is obviously confused; perhaps he doesn't know modern hippa privacy laws in first world countries. Still, the doctor glares at me and leads me to the correct room with the Captain following shortly behind.

"Elle est été droguée avec des hallucinogènes. Nous avons réussi à les nettoyer son système, mais elle va se sentir malade pendant plusieurs jours. Elle a été aussi sexuellement agressée. Nous avons couru un kit."

I nod, just managing to keep my facial features unfazed for Steve's sake.

"What did he say?"

"They flushed out some drugs from her system. She'll live." I leave out the part where the doctor told me she had been raped. Natasha wouldn't want anyone to know about that and it would only upset Steve. Still, it makes me sick and enraged inside. I file the information away for later when I find out the who to take it out on, if Natasha didn't already kill him, that is. She can handle herself, I think over and over in my head, followed by the grim thought that it sure wasn't the first time it's happened to her.

The room is small and standard and, from the looks of things, they haven't done much to clean her up except remove her dirty clothes and wipe her face. She is cuffed down to the bed with the restraints usually reserved for the mental patients and out cold. I suppose I can't blame the staff. She did, after all, just kill an innocent medic trying to work on her in the plane. Steve moves to remove them, horrified that they would dare strap down a lady, but I block his hand and shake my head. If there's one thing I know about Natasha, it's that she is capable of killing anyone. Me. Captain. Probably even the demi-god if the Asgaurdian ticked her off enough. It's better to wait for her to wake up and see that she's got a clear head before taking any chances. Of course, she could probably still escape the cuffs if she really set her mind to it.

I settle for simply pulling up a chair next to her bed and waiting. It's easier now that I can see her and can watch her breathing. The Captain remains standing nearby, silent for a long time before leaving to retrieve coffee.