Disclaimer—Characters belong to Marvel. Any similarity to events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No copyright infringement intended.

Author's Notes—Because I keep coming back to them. And because Cindy Ryan is epic. :D This is dedicated to you, my friend. Thank you for everything!

Remnants—Black Widow vanishes and SHIELD sends the one who found her in the first place to get her back. This follows "Opportunities" and "Adjustments."

She knew her window of opportunity was tiny— minuscule if she was being honest. It was a perfect storm of conditions. No one would look for her, not for five, six days at the most. She didn't have time to come up with a better, more thoughtful plan. It was time to go.

She sighed when she looked at her suitcase. Instead of flying on one of SHIELD's vehicles, she had to take to the air commercially and that meant no weapons. No guns. No throwing knives. Nothing. She felt completely naked if the truth were told.

In near agony, she removed everything that could be confiscated or would prevent her from boarding. Instead, she packed cash—lots of it. She'd need to restock when she landed, a prospect that wasn't her favorite, but she would just have to deal.

Her apartment, normally spotless, looked like a hurricane had blown through. Clothes were strewn about, her weapons abandoned on the coffee table and floor. She could only imagine what the reaction would be, if she wasn't able to complete what she needed to do quickly. She needed to be in and out and back before Clint was up and moving, before Fury returned from his conference, and before Coulson went looking for her for something.

Taking a slow breath, she shouldered her bag. Natasha Romanoff wouldn't accept failure. She owed a debt, and she paid those, with interest as necessary. No matter what good she did with SHIELD, deep down, she knew it would never be enough for what she'd done before. Her only hope was to do what she could in between official missions, in the hope that one day, she'd wash all that red away, that she'd be in the black once more, living up to at least part of her code name.

He sighed, looking at the off-white walls that surrounded him. He knew it was meant to be somehow warm, maybe to remind him of home. The problem was he'd grown up without one. A traveling circus wasn't all that much different from SHIELD. He went from one city to the next, told what to do and when to complete it by. What was new, however, was the pain.

The worst that had happened while on the road with the circus was the occasional singe from the fire breather, maybe a rope burn from trying to set up the tents. If anything, it was a minor annoyance rather than a major layup.

Having fallen from his precarious perch and landing with a crunch on his left leg had been excruciating to say the least. If it hadn't been for his partner, he wouldn't have made it out. If she hadn't covered him, helped him get to his one good leg… he'd be dead. He knew that for certain.

While they wound up succeeding, it hadn't been the prettiest win in their book. So long as they were both breathing at the end of the day, however, he'd take it. What he hated was the time spent wasted in a SHIELD medical facility. The doctors were fine, maybe a little chilly on the bedside manner. The nurses weren't much to look at but they were somewhat friendlier.

Coulson had been in, had brought him a few magazines to read while recuperating. It beat work documentation. He'd had to leave shortly after the visit, though, on a search of some peculiar relic. He'd been pretty mum on the details. The pain meds made Clint's head a little fuzzy anyway and so he was pretty sure if he had been told, he wouldn't have wanted to know.

Fury had been by briefly before jetting off to some meeting with the President. The director didn't stop in to visit every wounded agent. Clint wasn't sure if he should be proud he ranked a visit or concerned that the Director was checking up on his progress to make the decision if he would keep the archer on or not.

He hadn't seen Natasha, not since the day they'd arrived back stateside. She'd flown with him, watched as the orderlies loaded him onto a gurney, and whisked him to an exam room. He'd kept his eyes on her as long as he was able, which wasn't terribly long, not with an oxygen mask soon affixed to his face and being ordered to lie still.

She'd looked so pale.

The memory hung with him, haunting his hours of mindless waiting. He couldn't imagine she was scared—particularly not for him. The SHIELD extraction team had told them repeatedly that he'd be fine as they were flown to safety. It was something else, but he couldn't place what that might be.

The fact that she hadn't been by to see him, hadn't called or, at the very least, texted, frustrated him. It wasn't like he was in isolation. She could've come by anytime she wanted to; she just didn't. He tried to rationalize that it was her Russian upbringing—the distance. But, in the years that they'd worked together, he felt like they were getting closer, that he was helping her bridge that gap where she wanted to linger back, in the shadows, and he reassured her that it was okay to rely on others, to be part of the group.

As he lay there by himself, he wondered if he'd only been fooling himself.

Stay tuned…