Hello all beautiful readers!
So... I loved the Avengers movies so, SO much, I stopped my other writings to start getting the stories that I've been haunted by since seeing it the first time out on paper. (To any of my Inception readers, I am SO sorry about the space between chapters for story two, but if I don't get this stuff down, I will never be able to clear my head and get on with it. I still promise that I have been working on it!) Anywho, here is my take on the beginning of Natasha and Clint, a relationship which I find endlessly engrossing. I wrote it to stand alone, but if ideas that I've been having begin to flower, it may have companion piece or two. We'll have to see if anyone thinks it worth it first though. As always, to all my readers, I give you all my love.

-BT

P.S. If anyone thinks that I might be harping on a theme in some of my work, believe me it is unintentional.

7/20/12 Edit - Some typos have been corrected. Also, a sequel of sorts has been posted, and it is called "The Trial."

Natasha was having a rough day. She was beginning to believe that Warsaw was a curse for her. Last time she was here her arm had been broken by a man, by a random street thug no less, who had decided to drag her into a dark alley to… well, to put it delicately, he hadn't been looking for her consent. Of course, even with her arm broken she hadn't left him in any shape to be a bother to her, or any woman for that matter, ever again, and it hadn't even been difficult. Still, it had left a bad taste in her mouth.

Today had been… well, today had been unsatisfying, although, if she had admitted it, the feeling was not unique to Warsaw. It had been happening more and more lately, this nagging, uncomfortable feeling that she couldn't quite put a name to. It was like disappointment, with work, with her world, with herself, and lately it had been getting harder and harder to ignore.

What she needed to do was to focus. Like now, she had just finished her mission, and the business secrets had been recovered. Once she reached the safe house, she would grab her pack which was sitting by the door. Then, it would be half an hour to the airport, more than enough time to catch her late night flight to Tokyo. She had to stay focused.

To all appearances, she was walking down the street in the fading light of the summer day with a cold, impassive expression on her face, no emotions to share with the world. No one who saw her would know that deep, deep down there was a tiny part of her that wanted to scream.

Clint found himself sitting on a roof in Warsaw waiting to see the target come around a corner and move into range. It was exceedingly rare that someone got onto SHEILD's radar in such a bad way that the powers that be decide that the world needed to be rid of them, but the Black Widow had done it, and in record time. He had gone through her file so thoroughly, he could recite passages. Less than three years since she hit the scene and her rise had been absolutely meteoric. The period of time leading up to her début, however, remained nearly blank.

The portion of her file that contained background information had been embarrassingly thin for a SHEILD research job. The only record of her birth that was actually part of the documentation included with a death certificate. The death certificate had been for a stillborn baby born to Ekaterina Romanoff. Paperclipped to the certificate was a hospital record detailing how the stillborn child was part of a multiple birth. The twin to the stillborn boy, a baby girl named Natasha, had been born alive and healthy. No record of Natasha Romanoff, or even of Ekaterina Romanoff, the mother, had been found elsewhere.

The rest of her background had been filled with a catalog of the rumors and suspicions of her origins, mostly based on the testimony of an old Russian colonel who had defected who claimed he had known about a project years before that had taken a girl, about twelve years old, yanked straight from her normal life, with the intent to make her into an spy and assassin that could and would do what was asked of her without question. In Clint's opinion, the credibility of the testimony had seemed lacking.

At least, that is what he had thought until he had gotten to the rest of the file. It was thick with her single-minded, emotionless handy-work. Driven efficiency and brutality was described by her every assignment. It almost gave him the chills. As beautiful and hard and soulless as a diamond was the effect painted by the dossier, as clichéd as it was, and it was Clint's job to make the efficient brutality stop.

So, now he was in Warsaw, sitting on a roof that he knew she would pass on the way to her safe house, waiting for her to appear. As he followed her progress through a high-powered scope when she came around the corner down the street from him, he saw nothing in her beautiful face to contradict that damning dossier as she progressed, like a marble statue, an imitation of humanity.

Then, she surprised him. In the middle of her quick and focused stride, she came to a dead stop. Her head tilted to the side for a minute, as though she was listening for something. When she began to glance at the buildings around her, Clint was suddenly struck with the wild idea that she had made him simply by sensing his presence, but that was quickly dismissed when her eyes locked on to the building next to her where the third floor windows were open to receive the summer breeze. From his perch, he could not see into the building, but he could get a sense of movements coming from a brightly lit room but this told him very little. So, when he returned his sights on her and saw her looking up at the windows as a drowning woman would look at a hand being held out to her, offering to pull her from the water, he was so astonished that nearly fell off the roof.

The music was so laughably out of place that it had frozen Natasha in her tracks. She knew the music by heart, of course; it had been her favorite. It was an odd choice, to be sure, and she knew that most would disagree, but she had loved it. To hear it now, in the middle of warm summer, was unusual to say the least, but the familiar notes of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker drifted into the street accompanied by the repeating count of eight and the sound of synchronized footfalls.

Natasha scoured the buildings around her until she focused in on the source of the sounds coming from the open windows just above her. Then, she just stood there and listened as the mournful tones of Pas de Deux washed over her.

When the music came to an end, she leaned against the wall as she heard the dismissal and the rise of chatter as the class ended. She waited for several minutes until a large group of young women with tightly pinned hair spilled out into the mostly deserted street, passing by her without a first look, much less a second. She watched them walk by, a horrible ache twisting her in her stomach as she watched them go. Then, completely on impulse, she ducked into the building and began to climb the stairs.

Clint had moved down the street on the roofs of the buildings opposite the building that had Natasha Romanoff so enthralled. It had been easy as roofs were connected, but it wouldn't have mattered if they hadn't been. What he had seen hadn't gone very far to providing any further insight into the kind of upwelling of emotion that he had seen in a ruthless assassin, especially this one. He had been there in time to see the dance class through the windows, watch its members collect their things, walk down the stairs, and exit out onto the streets. The dancers may not have noticed Natasha, but she definitely saw them, longing and jealousy written clearly across her face.

He could feel his grasp on the situation slipping. When she disappeared through the door to the building, he thought he would lose her, and he was surprised when he felt almost relieved.

It was short-lived. He saw her scaling the stairs through the windows and, when she reached the third floor, she barely spared a glance around her before picking the lock and letting herself in.

Natasha moved into the room like one in a trance. It had been over a decade sense the last time she had gone into a ballet classroom with the cheap wood flooring and completely mirrored walls. She could not believe it had been so long.

After her parents had taken her to see her first ballet at the age of five, she had made it her mission in life to spend as much time in a ballet class as possible, and her parents had not only agreed but reinforced her passion with the pride and joy written all over their faces. Even at the age of five, Natasha's parents had made in abundantly clear that she was there everything; and to Natasha, her mother and father placed the stars in the sky.

She was momentarily transported back to the snowy December night so long ago when her father, carrying her out of the theatre, asked her, "Did you like the ballet, Doushenka?"

If she had known what would happen to them, if she'd had any idea about what would come of it all, she would have lied.

Clint watched her walk over to the stereo system, and fiddle with the dials and buttons until the soft music that he had not heard before he had moved closer began to play. After a moment, she sat and began to remove her boots. When she was barefoot and had tied back her hair and she moved into the middle of the barre running along the wall and began to stretch, Clint was certain the situation could not be more surreal. He was wrong. As she moved, her toes tracing half circles on the floor around her, stiffness and tension disappeared, and the strength and control of a fighter took up the grace and flexibility of a dancer. She moved to the center of the room and started to dance. She moved hesitantly to begin with, first one move, then another, as though she was trying to remember something that she had forgotten, but as she grew more comfortable, the motions began to flow.

For some reason, it surprised him that she was so good, very good, and suddenly a thought had occurred to Clint. In the dossier, the ancient Russian colonel had said that the girl the shady government organization chosen had been "plucked right out of her class," and up until this point he had always envisioned the word to mean books and desks, but by what criteria would a fighter be chosen from a group of school children? Choosing a melee fighter, a killer, one would look for strength, balance, physical control, and the focus to hone these traits, and how often had combat been compared to a dance? Probably, he supposed, sense the time when both had existed upon the earth.

When she came to a sudden stop after several impressive turns, and her feet landed firmly on the ground turned out, and she smiled in satisfaction and contentment, for Clint, it was as though a marble statue had come to life. Then, to his horror, the marble began to crumble.

When Natasha had started dancing, she realized how much of it she had lost, how much she had forgotten, but there was still something there, enough to work with. She hadn't planned on going into the ballet studio, and when she had, she hadn't intended to start dancing, but the truth was that she couldn't have stopped herself if she had tried. The part of her deep down in her that had been ready to scream had taken control, and the internal regime change had begun. The part of her that had her parents had loved and nurtured, the part that shady men had done unspeakable things to her in order to depose and replace it, and that part of her that was still the person who she was supposed be had found a flaw in the defenses and reclaimed its position.

When she landed her final pirouette and she caught sight of herself in the mirror with the unfamiliar smile playing on her lips, it was as though an old spell had been broken. The horrible feeling that she had not been able to name welled up, and she finally recognized shame. For years, she let somebody else - something else - crawl into her skin and walk around in her body, doing terrible things for terrible people who killed her parent, destroyed her future, and remade her into something that no one would recognize. She dropped to her knees and wondered desperately what, if anything, could ever be done to fix the things that she had done, and realized immediately that the answer would always be no. There was too much to ever make right.

By the time Clint reached the third floor, Natasha Romanoff was sitting against a wall with her knees pulled up to her chin, her face down, and her long red curls, freed from the hair tie, spilling out around her. Throwing all conceivable caution to the wind, he sat down beside her and waited silently for her to say something. Several minutes later, without moving she said, "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Clint Barton, and right now, I am actually curious about what it is that you want," he said. At this, her head popped up and she looked at him in surprise.

"Well, Clint Barton, right now, I'm pretty sure that you couldn't give me what I really want," she said sarcastically, but it was obvious that her heart wasn't in it.

"Really, well, what would that be?"

"Another life," she said quietly.

"And what if I told you, Natasha Romanoff, I was here to offer you just that?" Her body tensed, giving him the impression of an arrow that could be released at any moment. That had been wildly reckless, and he knew it before he said it. She was a very talented killer who was having something akin to an emotional crisis, and the last thing he wanted was to scare her off.

"Mind you," he continued in a normal voice, giving no sign that he had noticed any change it her, "the pay isn't exactly stellar, but the benefits package is fantastic. There's even full pension with retirement."

"And who, exactly, would I be working for in this new life to get this wonderful retirement plan?" she asked apprehensively.

"You would be working for Uncle Sam in the good ol' U. S. of A., but more specifically, you would be working with SHEILD."

Natasha gave a very human snort of derision. "Wait, let me get this straight. You are telling me that you are here to offer me a job from, of all the agencies in the world, SHEILD?" she asked.

"Ah, well," he said sheepishly, "Full disclosure: I'm actually here to kill you on their behalf, but I have decided I like my plan better, and I kinda figured that you would too."

"And you just decided to…" She gave a vague wave of her hand to indicate the exceedingly unorthodox conversation that was going on.

"Make a different call," he supplied. "I may not exactly get a hug and handshake for this," he admitted, "but they do tend to trust my judgment."

"And if they don't?" she asked skeptically. "I will just get the chance to walk out of there, will I?"

"I won't let anyone hurt you," he promised.

"Says the man who was supposed to kill me," she said with amusement.

"Well, if you can't trust your assassin then who can you trust?" he asked with a shrug.

"You're right," she conceded. "You stand alone in a list called "People that I Trust," a list that didn't even exist until two minutes ago, although, I'm still not sure how you suddenly ended up on that list."

"I've just got one of those faces," he quipped with a grin.

"Oh, I'm sure that's exactly it," she deadpanned. It was quiet again for a long time before she spoke. "Why?"

"If you are unhappy with what you are doing now, so you should do something else."

"No, why are you offering me this? You know who I am. Surely, you know the terrible things I've done. Why would you offer be a position in an organization like SHEILD? It makes less than no sense. You aren't worried about what I'd do?"

"Not at all. I think you want be something better than you are now," he said with complete certainty. "You want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, see a smile, and feel like you deserve to."

Natasha sprang up from her seat on the floor and began to pace. "What are you, walking around in my head or something? You could not possibly know this! Besides, there is nothing, nothing, I could possibly do to make up for the things that I've done," she shouted at him.

"Well then, don't try," he said simply.

"What?" She was sure that she had not heard him correctly.

"Start over," he said with emphasis on each word. "Brand new account. No red in the ledger. You don't owe anyone a thing."

"It doesn't work like that," she said snapped, but she had hesitated before saying it.

"I say it does," he said brightly, "and don't forget, you can trust me." After she stared at him for another quiet moment as she tried to process this new information, he spoke again, more gently. "You want to start over, and I want to give you the chance."

She sighed and slumped back down next to him. "You're wrong, you know."

"About what?"

"There is already red in the new ledger."

"How?"

"I owe you for the new ledger."