Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Settling in nicely, I see. Irresponsibly, but nicely."

"You never said that I had to order things specifically from the catalogs if I was aware of other products - you let me buy the TV, what comes of that is your responsibility, Fury."

You said this while chest-deep in the biggest, softest bean bag chair you'd been able to find an advertisement for on late-night television. Partially to give you a place to nap and sleep that would keep Fury guessing, just in case he tried to send in one of his agents while you were asleep, and partially because fuck yeah, bean bag chair. Testing the limits of what you were allowed to purchase was just a secondary bonus.

"I also believe I told you to spend your money responsibly. I fail to see how this contributes anything to you long-term."

"I could get shot in the head at any time of any day; long-term planning isn't really a strong suit of mine right now."

"I thought we were past you thinking I was gonna kill you?"

"I was more thinking of HYDRA breaking in here and executing me," you taunted, raising an eyebrow only half-sarcastically. "Funny you jump to that conclusion immediately, though."

Fury sighed, that look coming across his face that you were all too familiar with. The annoyed glare, the taut jawline, the straightened spine… he was already done with your shit for the day, but he had something he wanted to say. The fact you were so familiar with that look was a little alarming to you, but you appreciated the subtleties in him you were noticing more and more as time passed.

"I can assure you that while this facility could have been compromised like the last one was, that's exactly why I chose it. This base is only an hour by car from Avengers Tower, which means you're no more than a few minutes from some seriously super-powered backup if things go south. Every floor below or above this one has a dozen or more security measures designed to prevent metahuman intrusion, including crowd control, automated turrets, and biometric scanners keyed to every elevator and door. Twenty-four seven security guards, and *that* isn't even including my two best agents being around. The only way they're gettin' through that glass in your little view-room or through one of these reinforced walls is with a dedicated assault using a lot of high-end weaponry that's hard to sneak around in downtown New York. If HYDRA comes knocking here, they're gonna draw a lot of attention, and they'll get intercepted long before they get to you."

"Sounds ominous," you noted, lacing your fingers by your head and leaning back in the cushiony chair. "So what's the deal, Fury? You usually send Clint and Natasha to check in on me, you don't show up for conjugal visits yourself."

"You may recall," Fury said, narrowing his eyes but otherwise blatantly ignoring your remarks, "that I told you a position within SHIELD was in the cards if you proved yourself trustworthy. Despite your personal flaws, both because of and in spite of HYDRA's experiments, you're a valuable asset. I still don't know that I can trust you fully, but you've done enough that I feel comfortable letting Agent Romanov and Agent Barton work with you more closely."

"How closely? I wasn't serious about the conjugal visits, but Clint is pretty damn sexy," you said, grinning wolfishly.

"Don't make me regret a decision I haven't even committed to," Fury said dryly. "There's plenty of time for me to throw your ass out on the street. You may not remember how our government works, but trust me - people with no birth records, no identification, and pretending to have no memories don't do well on the streets."

"Alright, alright, stow the threats," you sighed, holding up your hands. "Look, if you want me to start having therapy sessions or something I'm not interested."

"I was thinking more along the lines of combat training," Fury said, growing suddenly stoic. He had that mood around him again, the strange calm that seemed to come over him when he wanted to keep you from reading too much into his actions. It was like the ultimate poker face, something you weren't all that surprised by considering what you knew of him.

"Wait, you want me to fight my guards? And I won't get shot if I win?"

"If you win, I'll be damn impressed," Fury said, letting a forced half-laugh escape him. "There's a lot of people in this world, and I don't know one that could take my best men down without remembering how to fight, no matter how strong they were. But yeah, I'm alright with you taking a swing at them. Just remember they're going to be swinging back, when they think you can handle it."

"Y'know… Strategic Homeland Intelligence, Enforcement and Logistics Divison… doesn't really sound too much like a military unit," you mused as Fury began to turn away. "Honestly, it sounds like someone just really wanted their initials to spell SHIELD, but more than that, it sounds a mixture of a lot of things that you wouldn't normally group together, at least not in one unit. Intelligence gathering, homeland security, law enforcement, logistics, not to mention your high-level spec-ops crew babysitting me... you've got a lot of tools in that belt. I haven't just been watching infomercials for beanbags, Fury. I know law enforcement, federal intelligence agencies, and the government itself all have given people plenty of reasons not to trust them. Why exactly is SHIELD different? The very first thing you want to teach me is how to fight."

"…"

Fury paused for a long moment, glancing back at you with something that shocked you - a new look, one that you hadn't seen before.

"Ten years ago, I'd have taught you how to go undercover. Taught you how to pretend to be someone you never even imagined until that very moment, and to do it as smoothly as if you were born in that identity, and then I'd have shown you how to cover up every inconsistency in the story you told. I'd teach you how to be every politician's best friend, every mercenary's most reliable contact, and every warlord's favorite hitman. You'd work in a dozen countries under a hundred pseudonyms, and you'd slip between them flawlessly, because if you couldn't, you wouldn't have a place in my agency.

"Today? Today I don't need spies, I need soldiers. New York is still repairing the damage done by an invasion of alien forces that killed thousands of people. We couldn't even begin to predict the scope or size of the attack, much less prepare for it. A rogue AI nearly caused an extinction-level event that could have wiped out humanity in its entirety, and that happened so recently I still send my condolences to funerals by the month. Top that all off with the fact that I have less than a dozen operatives I trust to stop these things from happening, and half of them can't be counted on not to disappear off the face of the Earth for months at a time… things aren't looking good. I need men and women who can fight things that twenty years ago would have gotten you locked up in an asylum just for talking about on the street."

"What the fuck is going on out there?" You asked, genuinely caught off-guard by Fury's severity and the things he was implying. "AI? Rogue forces? You had *maybe a dozen* agents to stop it, not thousands of soldiers? What the fuck-"

"The things I deal with on a daily basis are so far beyond the concerns you have sitting in this air-conditioned and paid-for apartment," Fury said harshly to interrupt your concerned questions, "that it goes without saying you still haven't made the top ten section of my priority list. If you want to make yourself useful, I'm not going to deny you the chance. Otherwise, you can sit here until you or that chair finally win the battle it looks like you're fighting with each other."

"How badly are they gonna kick my ass?" You realized as the question left your lips that it was only half-sarcastic.

"Depends on how fast you wanna learn," Fury said, a similar note of humor entering his own voice.

"Alright, I'll do it. Tell them I'll wear the bruises like badges of honor. Are they going to fight dirty, though?"

Fury just laughed. The lack of even a sarcastic response to that one was… surprisingly scary. Even after everything you had been through.

Chapter Text

You had to admit, after all you had come to know of Natasha and Clint, the last thing you expected was mercy. Yet honestly you couldn't have asked for a set of kinder or more understanding teachers in the first few days of your new life.

The subtle agreement you had given Fury must have been enough for him and his agents to start training you, because only two days after your beanbag-resting conversation with Fury, you were standing across from Natasha with hands raised and adrenaline surging. Thankfully, despite the woman's harsh demeanor, she didn't dive immediately into live sparring sessions - instead, Natasha focused entirely on you. Specifically, your stance, your awareness, and your reactions. That wasn't to say she didn't punish you for your mistakes or ignorance, but she did so in a far gentler method than the repeated skull-punches you were expecting.

"You need to work on your balance and get some consistency to your form," Natasha noted, roughly grabbing your elbows, forearms, and wrists while forcefully kneeing your legs into place. Her voice was firm, but not exasperated or annoyed, even though you were pretty sure this was the third time she'd stopped you from locking your knees in place.

"Sorry. The second you start swinging, I sort of… tense everything, even though I know you're holding back," you mumbled, the explanation not holding much weight now that you had given it so many times.

"Your memories only go back a few weeks, and you've only been in a life-or-death combat situation once," Natasha said in the way of an explanation, never meeting your eyes as she continued to scrutinize your body. "You're not used to thinking through things in the middle of an adrenaline rush, but you have to be to survive the kinds of situations SHIELD can put you in. Your body wants to initiate the fight-or-flight response, and so far it looks like flight is winning. You can't overcome that instinct in the heat of the moment; you'll just freeze up and your body won't react the way you need it to in order to survive. Fight isn't much better; if you're not thinking you become predictable and blunt, anyone fighting at this level needs skill as much as strength."

"I mean, I don't think the Hulk or Thor have that much skill, they seem to handle themselves pretty well."

"You get your hands on some Asgardian physiology or feel like exposing yourself to an unhealthy dosage of gamma radiation, and we'll find you a new trainer. For now? You need to loosen up, think fast, and be ready for pain."

Thankfully that warning was not followed by the punch to the head you were expecting. Instead she continued to instruct you on form, making sure that you were balanced and reactive to her movements. Clint was a bit more abrasive, but that was more due to the nature of what he was teaching you. He had apparently drawn the straw for weapon-based combat, and that included both teaching you how to fight when properly armed, and also how to fight against others who were far more well-armed than you.

It was a strange juxtaposition, but one that somehow actually helped you understand the differences between the most experienced and the most novice of weapon wielders. Every mistake you made burned into your mind almost as brightly as the clear successes Clint had, when he was actually trying. Even though each session was uniquely focused, you rapidly developed the feeling of being on both ends of various confrontations and disarming scenarios, from basic handguns to assault rifles, and even all the way to bows, a weapon he insisted on training you in despite being the only person you knew of to dare use one.

"Look, If I'm crazy enough to use one, you'll probably find someone else crazy enough eventually," Clint assured you as he ran you through a drill on averting a fired arrow from a bow for the thirteenth time, "and whoever you go up against won't be looking to poke you in the chest."

You bristled at the mention of the numerous times his blunt-ended arrows had impacted your ribcage. The downside of a bow was that Clint's sledgehammer arrows were completely non-lethal, but hurt like a motherfucker when they hit, so he felt free to use them regularly during your training. You tended to go home from his sessions with numerous new bruises, all around the size of a fingernail.

"I don't think there is *anyone* as crazy as you, Clint," you reassured him during one of your training sessions, several weeks after the weapons drills had started. He only grinned before continuing the session. No matter how badly his favorite weapon bruised you up, though, he'd inevitably show up the next day with a pump-action shotgun, a semi-automatic AR, or a bolt-action rifle that he was more than happy to instruct you on both firing and disarming, ignoring how badly you were hurt from the previous day and full hands-on training. Sometimes he even loaded them up with rubber bullets, though you got the distinct impression he went a little easier on you when he was using a proper firearm to pepper you with non-lethal rounds.

"So when exactly do I get a night off?" You eventually asked, to both Clint and Natasha in turn, when you felt like you were beginning to lose enthusiasm for the training. Honestly, it took longer than you thought for you to grow weary of training, in spite of both the repetition and pain. After so many days lost to an underground bunker where you weren't even sure you could keep track of the day and night cycle, dealing with a training regimen felt pretty new and invigorating. Even when you were still sore from Clint's weapons drills while Natasha was teaching you how to counter close-quarters disabling techniques.

Both of them gave you different answers. In Clint's case…

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"Seriously? Thought you'd never ask," Clint said, laughing as he walked up to you and clasped you on the shoulder. "When I joined SHIELD they put me through a hell 'week'. Kind of like the marines, except it went on for a month. I told them I was dying after week two, and they just kept pushing me until the end of week three. Most of the class had been dealing with some kind of complication by that point; I passed out during a written examination and they told me that I flatlined. I think they were exaggerating, but honestly? Still not sure. You're a newbie and you still made it through a month with no complaints, so yeah, a break sounds well-earned. How about schwarma?"

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You had to admit, if nothing else, Clint made you wonder exactly what SHIELD was, and how they hired their agents. Clint and Natasha seemed so far apart at times it almost hurt your brain to understand how well they worked together, even though you'd very clearly seen it in person. Because on the opposite end of the spectrum, when you asked Natasha for a break…

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"You want a break? Do you think what you've done qualifies you for SHIELD?"

"Nobody made the job offer formal yet," you pointed out, panting as you leaned against the wall. This was probably the fifth time Natasha had fought you at least somewhat seriously, leaving you battered, exhausted, and feeling like most of your bones were bruised beyond recovery. Although she was acting decently to you these days - even bordering on friendly at some points - you certainly couldn't tell that by her strikes.

"That's not what I asked," she said simply, gazing at you unflinchingly.

"Wha- no I don't think I'm qualified for SHIELD," you said, stuttering a bit as you glanced in disbelief at the unyielding woman before you. "I can't beat you, I can't beat Clint, I probably can't beat Fury, and the dude only has one eye and I've never seen him actually hit anyone. Shit, no, I'm not ready to go out there and fight."

"Then get back out here and keep going."

"What, SHIELD doesn't believe in breaks? What's next, are you gonna tell me you guys don't have a union?"

"Unions, huh? You've learned a lot about the outside world from that TV of yours. But it's time you learned about how the world actually works. SHIELD doesn't get nights off. Sometimes we get a breather, sometimes we can pretend that the world isn't fucked for a little while… then the next call comes in. Then someone gets hurt while we weren't paying attention. So we go back out, and we try to go a little longer before we rest every time."

"Jesus," you mumbled. "That's… pretty heavy."

"If you can't handle the pressure, SHIELD isn't what you want to do."

"No, I… I want to do it."

Despite the aches and pains in your body, you forced yourself away from the wall. You staggered over to the arena and assumed your stance as best as you could, ignoring the stiffness in your limbs.

"I want to join SHIELD, Natasha. I decided to accept the offer."

"No you didn't."

"Err… excuse me?" you asked, a little confused.

"You didn't accept because there is no offer yet. Not an official one, anyway," Natasha explained, then started swinging at you again. Though you hadn't expected her to start up again in the middle of talking, you managed a halfway decent sparring session… for about thirty seconds, until she hooked her foot around your leg and threw you on your back, bringing an elbow down a moment later and stopping it just millimeters from crushing your throat.

"My win."

"What am I doing all this for, then?" You quirked an eyebrow at her as she offered you a hand up from the mat, seeing Natasha smirk just the tiniest bit.

"To get you ready, for when the offer comes," Natasha explained as you locked arms and she pulled you up. "Fury doesn't want you to make the decision because you think it's the only way we'd let you go free, or because you feel like you owe us anything. He wants you to be interested and working for it, if that's what you want to do, but he's not going to offer you a position with SHIELD until you're free. Then you can make the decision whether to join up or walk away."

"Huh, that's… kind of thoughtful, actually."

"You ready for another round?"

"Hell no," you wheezed, lifting up your arms and assuming your stance again. "Let's go."

Chapter Text

"Hey, scooch over," Clint said as he plopped himself onto the couch beside you, forcing you toward the middle.

"Sure, Clint, I'd be glad to sit here and watch some bad late-night programming with you, why don't you take a seat?" you asked, trying to smother Clint to death with sarcasm. He only chuckled, elbowing you playfully as he set a bottle of liquor down on the simple tabletop you'd set beside the cheap furniture. You weren't sure if he had made more than one trip without you noticing or if he was just an adept at carrying things, but there were already two full two-liters of store-brand soda on the floor as mixers.

"You'd better be just as offended when I sit down, or I'm going to think you have a crush," Natasha said, sneaking up from the other side of the couch. Surprisingly she was also holding a bottle; some vodka whose name you couldn't even pronounce, looking far more expensive than Clint's store-brand rum. She had no mixers… and apparently didn't need them, as she had already started to gently sip on it next to you.

"Who wouldn't?" Clint asked, chuckling while he was already popping the cap off of his bottle, pouring a glass faster than you could watch. His glass was topped off before you had even turned back to him, and he was eyeing the remote in your hand. "So what's the show tonight? You know my preferences, but it's offseason on Idol, so hit me with whatever you've got."

"I was just gonna watch some news…" you said, hesitating. "Kind of trying to keep up with the outside world, you know? I don't get to-"

"Oh hell no, we are not watching the news on an anniversary. Here, I'll pick the program," Clint interrupts, gently taking the remote from your hands and beginning to flick through channels at a breakneck pace. He offers you the drink he'd poured for himself, still untouched. "Here, you take this and forget whatever you were about to try to learn. I'll find something we can all enjoy."

"Oh, uh, okay," you mumbled, glancing at the glass. You'd drank with Clint before, but never with Natasha. You thought about handing the glass back over in case this was all some kind of test, but you could smell the vodka from Natasha's glass almost as well as you could smell the rum from the one Clint had just handed you - and she was downing that glass. You hesitantly sipped at it, before you dared voice your next question.

"What exactly is this the anniversary of?"

"Sweet, I love these guys," Clint said off-handedly, landing on what seemed like some kind of sketch comedy show you didn't remember catching before. "Oh, the anniversary? Shit, I guess you're about the only person left who doesn't know… guess that shouldn't surprise me, though. It's the anniversary of Budapest!"

"Budapest? What's that?"

"Something Clint fucked up a long time ago," Natasha says, though there's a certain coyness to her voice.

"You and I remember Budapest very differently," Clint noted, shaking his head as he put the remote down and reached for the alcohol to pour himself a proper glass since he'd given his own away.

"Oh, so… was it like… some kind of mission?" You asked hesitantly, not sure what kind of vague clues were being fed to you.

"See? I told you that you were a fast learner," Natasha noted, smiling coyly at you over her glass as she sipped on the vodka again. You were caught off-guard by the friendly smirk and the strange playfulness you saw in her eyes.

"So do you guys do this every year, then?"

"Pretty much," Clint said as he finished pouring in his mixer, raising up his glass. "As a part of SHIELD you don't really get too much personal time, but that doesn't mean that you don't enjoy the friendships you make along the way. Nat and I… we've been through a lot."

"How did you two meet, exactly?" You ask, entirely innocently. As they both turn to look at you with questioning glances, you wonder if you should've waited until they both had a little more alcohol in their system. You very conspicuously lift your own glass back to your mouth to avoid their stares.

"Remember how you and I met?" Natasha eventually asks, after you've chugged almost your entire glass. "Imagine that, but less friendly."

"What, less friendly? Did you fucking shoot him?" You asked, the words coming out before you even thought about them.

"Hah! All that before a shot… still think you aren't hostile, Nat?" Clint asked, chuckling to himself as Natasha rolled her eyes.

"For your information… Clint was the one who was about to shoot me," Natasha pointed out.

"C'mon, like I'd ever kill a kid."

"I was not a kid, and you know better," Natasha said, a bit of actual annoyance entering her voice. Clint held up his hands defensively, and you decided to break the little tension that had formed.

"You guys weren't kidding when you said everyone has their issues with their past. But I gotta ask, why spend such an important anniversary in here, drinking with me?"

"Well, we can't exactly go out for a night on the town and leave you unprotected," Natasha pointed out between drinks, downing the last of her glass already. "After what happened with HYDRA at our old location, Fury wants at least one of us here at all times… both of us were helping you back then, and it was still touch-and-go sometimes."

"Yeah, by the way, if I go on missions do I get like earplugs or something? I know you guys think the improved senses are impressive and all, but having my ears blown out every time someone fires a gun really sucks…"

"Still impressed you didn't show any decreased hearing after that escape," Natasha noted, reaching for her vodka for another cup.

"Don't worry, SHIELD is pretty much cutting-edge on tech. I actually had to requisition a visor a few weeks back when we went on a mission that involved a lot of time in the arctic at springtime. Catching glare off melting ice with eyes these sharp can get a little rough, makes aiming a royal pain if you've got burned retinas."

"SHIELD already has some countermeasures for high-volume firefights; most SHIELD agents can't deal with hearing impairment as well as our resident sharpshooter."

"That almost sounded like a compliment, Nat. Cheers," Clint offered, tipping back his glass and pouring another to match her.

"Well, that's a relief," you said, smiling softly. "But, uh, back to the matter of the celebration… I could come with you guys, if you wanted? Hell, I could DD for you if that'd help. I guess I don't know how you guys usually celebrate, but I feel kind of bad holding you back."

"If you think Fury would get mad at us going out without you, he'd get even more pissed if we took you out drinking," Clint said while laughing, actually pulling his drink away to keep from spilling it as he let loose at the idea.

"Fury told you he was thinking about letting you have more freedoms, but I don't think he had you being the designated driver for a couple of off-duty SHIELD agents in mind," Natasha said, far more calm than Clint, though she still let an uncharacteristically honest smile spread over her face.

"Well now I just feel like the third wheel," you sighed, shaking your head as you drowned your sorrows in the glass Clint had poured for you.

"Not at all," Natasha said, putting a hand on your arm as you emptied the cup and pulled it away. "Seriously, we could have been drinking off in the security office watching cams. If we didn't want you here, you wouldn't be."

You stuttered a bit, not sure how to really respond to that. Natasha was acting very, very differently than the agent you'd come to know… you were starting to wonder if maybe they had been drinking without you, honestly.

"After everything that happened while you were in our custody, bringing you in on the celebration was probably the least we could do," Clint agreed, taking your glass from you and refilling it. You went silent and tried to focus on the television for a bit, not sure how to return this sudden - and very unexpected - feeling of camaraderie. Clint passed the glass back to you full, and you sipped on it idly to give an excuse for your silence.

"Seriously though," Clint eventually added, when you pulled your cup away to take a breath, "I'm surprised you'd offer to do something like that. Tell you what, when Fury eases up a little bit, the three of us will have a proper night out. Dinner, drinks, maybe catch a movie… I hear there's this new one about a guy in a batsuit-"

"Save the superheroes for the job, Clint," Natasha warned, rolling her eyes.

"Look, it's nice to be a spectator too!" Clint pointed out.

"Clint's rum is nice, but how about a taste of something that wasn't in the bargain bin?" Natasha offered you, pouring a new glass of her vodka and offering it to you. You hadn't quite finished your second glass of Clint's rum, and already it was starting to go to your head… but you took it in your free hand anyway, enjoying actually getting to be pleasant with the two. You weren't a fool - you were pretty sure they were up to something, but you didn't have many secrets from the two to spill while intoxicated.

What the hell, you eventually decided, why worry about it? Fake or real, this could be your only chance to actually be friendly with the two. Better enjoy it while you could.

But damn, that vodka burned like liquid fire.

Chapter Text

Despite Natasha and Clint's best efforts, you managed to survivor your alcohol poisoning, and things went relatively back to normal after that. Training and confinement went back to a routine that was rarely broken, becoming almost boring… or as boring as things could be while actively training with two secret agents, anyway.

Most of what was new came to you in your private hours, spent mulling about the apartment while bored. You were running low on things to do aside from mindlessly watch television, or doing basic exercises on the floor. That hadn't been an issue until recently - one of the many benefits of having no memories was that everything on television was brand new. Even if it was technically a twenty year old rerun.

But lately, ever since you started training, you had started to have a lot more free time on your hands at night…

It had started out small - you woke up an hour or two early one morning, but felt oddly awake. You figured that it was just a fluke, or a nightmare you didn't remember anymore, and tried to go back to sleep. You tried until your alarm went off, but your mind was awake and alert. You groaned when you slammed your hand down on the blaring device, sure your slight loss of sleep was going to catch up to you later… but it never did. Even with Clint and Natasha pushing you to your limits in training, you never felt drowsy or like you were losing awareness.

That happened again only a few days later, only this time you woke up about four hours after going to sleep. It was three in the morning and you felt more awake than you had in days, your mind racing over pretty much anything. What was on TV? What was going on with Clint and Natasha? Were they going to include you in more anniversaries? Were they just trying to get you drunk to spill information? How many sheets of paper did you have left for journaling? How much food did you have left in the refrigerator?

It wasn't an overwhelming stimulation by any means - you were pretty used to your rampant thoughts, it just… wasn't usually at this time of night or while feeling so awake and alert. When Natasha showed up for training that day she actually commented on it, wondering why you were up and roaming so late. You had to remind yourself that they had cameras before you responded.

"Ah, rough night, haven't been sleeping well lately."

"Happens a lot with SHIELD agents, but… not usually before they've been out on a few missions gone wrong," Natasha noted, meeting your gaze. "Do you need sleeping pills? We haven't discusses it much, but if you think you need any kind of medication, Fury can get it for you."

"No, I think I'm okay. I'm not that tired, actually, it's weird," you noted, gritting your teeth as you readied up into your sparring stance again. Natasha squared off against you, cocking an eyebrow as you readied yourself for another round of combat.

"I can tell," she said, seeming almost sarcastic as the two of you exchanged blows. You were starting to get the hang of reacting to her attacks; you watched her chest and abdomen to see how her body was shifting, and you were starting to understand how to block or dodge blows with quick movements instead of seeing a punch coming and immediately throwing your entire body the other way. You still hadn't landed a shot on the agent yet; she ended up landing a palm-strike to your solar plexus that knocked the wind out of you. While you were still recovering she grabbed you by the wrist, threw herself against you, then launched your entire body over her shoulder with a gesture so effortless you barely believed it had happened until you hit the mat… hard.

"You can? I seem to be failing as spectacularly as ever," you wheezed when you had recovered slightly.

"I don't do much teaching, but you're catching on fast," Natasha admitted, offering a hand to help you up. "Plus I have a lot of experience with fighting against opponents with a lot of different levels of training. I would be able to tell if you were slower than usual. How long has this sleep thing been going on?"

"Couple weeks," you admitted, though you weren't honestly sure. It had been easier to wake up even before your alarm actually went off lately; was that a symptom too? How much did you want to let her know? Why would symptoms of your… whatever the fuck HYDRA did to you be popping up now, weeks after you'd been rescued?

"Well, unless you start having some kind of negative effects from this, we'll just keep it in mind as another benefit," Natasha said, shrugging off the new information as if it was nothing. She actually smirked at you slightly, in a very disarming way. "Sure know I could use a few more hours in the day."

"Yeah, guess it isn't that bad," you agreed, before resetting and readying yourself for another exchange.

Clint's reaction was a little more comical - he patted you on the back and said he was sorry for the hangovers he'd given you that you apparently couldn't sleep off. You rolled your eyes but didn't say much - you didn't really have bad hangovers… right? You had nothing to compare them to, but you figured saying that you didn't need sleep and didn't get real hangovers was adding to an invisible list of "things that got fucked up by the treatment", and you didn't want them to think you were even weirder… especially since you kept needing less and less sleep by the week.

That was how, one fateful night, you ended up in the living room of your apartment while trying desperately to find something that wasn't either an infomercial or softcore porn at three in the morning. You'd fallen asleep at midnight, and yet you were already awake and feeling like you'd slept for days. Not unlike the past couple of nights, really, except for the part where you heard a knock on your door.

Opening the door revealed Fury, of all people, striding in with a casual nod. Under his shoulder he had a laptop tucked tightly to him, something he'd never brought with him before.

"No free Wi-Fi here sir, you're going to have to purchase a coffee before you can log in," you offered with a raised eyebrow as he strode over to your kitchen table and began to set up the device.

"You know, I'd be more upset if I didn't know there were three Starbucks in walking distance of this building, and you've never tasted any of them," Fury taunted, quirking his one good eye at you as he tapped at the laptop for a few more seconds. "If you're really that upset though, I can take the laptop back, and tell Clint and Natasha Starbucks is off your shopping list, that way I can keep the sweet taste of a caramel coffee all to myself."

"You drink a caramel-flavored coffee?"

"We all have our weaknesses," Fury said, oddly serious. "I just haven't figured out what most of yours are yet."

"Alright, alright, put the ruler away Fury, I'll try to keep my wit in check for a minute," you offered, rolling your eyes. "What's this about taking the laptop back now?"

"You already have an HD TV hooked up, so you've been pretty exposed to the outside world so far. This is just the first step in expanding that a little," Fury said, gesturing to the computer. You stepped across the room to stand beside him in the middle of the kitchen. Fury had booted the computer up to a mostly blank desktop, only a Recycling Bin and Internet Explorer visible.

"You're seriously letting me have a computer? You told me no phones, no computers, and no tablets. When I asked if I was allowed to have a pager, you told me - and I quote - 'English, mother fucker, do you speak it?'. Didn't really leave much room for debate."

"Your privileges and freedoms are evaluated on an ongoing basis," Fury said, not even reacting to you as he gestured toward the small laptop. "Besides, that was what you are allowed to buy. This is a gift, because I'm just that magnanimous of a mother fucker."

"You swear a lot lately," you noted, leaning in and glancing at the laptop. "So what's the catch?"

"No catch, just a few restrictions. Any form of outgoing communication on this is completely blocked out. Most of it we handled through pretty simple protocols, but don't try anything funny - no message boards, no chat rooms, no 'technical support' links from whatever you broke most recently. If it isn't a URL bar or a note file, it probably won't even let you type anything in."

"Afraid I'll try getting help escaping?"

"More afraid of what you might know that you're hiding from us and trying to report home. Remember - just because I'm starting to trust you doesn’t mean I can afford to actually afford to make that call."

"Fair enough. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if I don't trust that gift horse enough to look up a few particular fetishes," you mumbled, stepping forward and testing out the laptop. Fury hadn't bothered with a mouse, but the trackpad was responsive enough.

"Good choice. I was going to hold off on this as an anniversary gift for you, but Natasha and Clint told me you've been having trouble sleeping. Figure this won't cure the insomnia, but it might keep you from going crazy. You having any other weird symptoms?"

Ah. There it was. Fury was worried about your mental health, or maybe even your physical health. You smiled and shrugged, in a way so practiced it almost felt natural.

"Not really sure what's weird since I don't really know what 'normal' quite is, but yeah, for the most part nothing else has changed. I'll let you know if I start turning green or suddenly grow so much muscle that I burst out of all my clothing except my weirdly purple shorts."

"This is why I said we shouldn't let you have the TV either," Fury pointed out, rolling his eyes at you. "If Romanov didn't stick her neck out for you so much, I'd have you crocheting to pass the time."

"Well tell her I finally owe her for something," you chuckled as Fury turned back toward the door to your apartment. "You know, aside from the whole saving my life, protecting me always, and teaching me how to not punch myself in the head in a real fight."

"Also the twenty missions a year she goes on that basically keeps this entire country running and keeps you from winding up a dead man in a ditch somewhere, but nobody else knows about those, so why would you care?"

You didn't have a witty response on hand for that one, so you let Fury stride his way out of your kitchen in silence. You were left alone with the glowing screen before you, contemplating what you'd just been told. On the one hand, Fury had just gifted you not only a forbidden object, but one which cost several hundred dollars that you couldn't really spare at a moment's notice. On the other hand…

Fury mentioned the note files, and the way he cast his eyes toward you at that point made you wonder how much he knew about your activities. Clint had assured you that there were no cameras in the bedroom, but you weren't quite so certain anymore… you felt a sudden need to make sure that your belongings were in order.

You put the laptop into sleep mode and headed back toward your bedroom, tucking yourself into bed just in case there really were cameras and you needed to be more subtle. In the darkness around you, you let one hand stray to the side of your mattress. There a thin seam, cut by hours of pressure and repeated motion with a couple pens, where the mattress had been severed and you could reach inside. There, amidst springs and stuffing, your fingers lightly brushed against the corners of a few sheets of paper you'd hidden.

As soon as you felt those sheets your mind started to calm itself a bit. They weren't anything incredibly important, honestly, but to you they were the world. Kept as little more than scrap paper from the notebooks you pretended to fill with shopping lists, personal goals, and the occasional short story, you hid away a few pages of each filled notebook to write down your personal thoughts and memories. After losing one lifetime to amnesia, you had decided that if something happened to your mind again, you wanted to have at least one record of this life spent under SHIELD's care.

It was one of the only things you kept secret from Fury and his agents. One of the last private things you had… and just feeling it was enough to set your mind at ease, to the point you were almost able to drift off to sleep…

Almost.

Chapter Text

"We need to have a talk."

"Alright listen, just some suggestions here," you said as Fury strode into your living room, his one eye cast warily around the place, only lingering briefly on your third consecutive hour of HGTV. "How about 'Hey, how's it going?', 'How was your day?', 'I heard some really cool things about you from Clint and Natasha'; hell, I'd take a 'Nice day outside, too bad you don't get to enjoy it, huh bitch?' at this point. It's rude, but at least it's better than walking in so serious."

"I'll keep those suggestions in mind," Fury noted, in a tone that told you exactly how long he'd consider your new ideas. "But I think you're gonna want to hear this. Especially since you're gonna be gloating about it for a while."

"Ooooh, I do love gloating," you noted, flicking the television off immediately. "Hit me with what you got, Fury."

"You know if you want me to act a little more cordial, maybe try acting a little more professional," Fury noted, rolling his eye at you.

"Fair play, fair play! In the spirit of cooperation…" you said, clearing your throat quickly before speaking again. "Mr. Fury, please continue."

"Not bad, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't lighten up much. I came here for a very serious reason. I don't divulge what I'm about to share with you lightly."

"Is this my first SHIELD briefing?" You asked, sitting forward with interest.

"Yes and no. Technically this is highly, highly classified information - information I wouldn't share with anyone but my best agents. Aside from Agents Romanov and Barton, not even the soldiers involved in your recovery know about the things I'm about to tell you, but I think you deserve to know."

"…Wait, this is about me isn't it?" You said, jovial tone gone immediately. "I thought you said that you didn't find any information about who I was?"

"We didn't, not about you personally," Fury admitted, sighing and shaking his head. "The information that we found was more about the experiments going on at that facility. About what *exactly* was done to you."

"…So you know more than you let on about why my vision and hearing are so whacky?" You mumbled, glancing around, suddenly unwilling to meet Fury's eyes. You were starting to get a bad vibe from this, you could already feel the stress building in your chest. It was irrational, really - whatever had been done to you was already done, and not knowing wouldn't magically undo that experimentation… still, you couldn't shut down the worrying.

"It's more than just your vision and hearing. Might even have something to do with that wit you're so proud of," Fury noted, leaning against the wall beside your television. "You've been watching television for a while now, so I know you've seen a few things about the Avengers. We haven't discussed them directly with you, but you probably know about Captain America by now?"

"A bit. Most of the shows seem to assume I already know about him, but I looked up some more stuff on that computer you loaned me. I'm guessing you already know all about my browsing history, though. Anyway, yeah, Captain America. Super-Soldier serum and a badass shield, no exploitable weaknesses other than being a bigger badass than he is."

"Very reductive, but I'll let the over-simplification slide for the moment," Fury said with a roll of his eye. "HYDRA has been trying to recreate that serum for decades, and they've gotten closer over time despite our best efforts to destroy their labs. But for every step closer they get to the soldier aspects, they lose a little bit of the super… and a lot of what makes Captain America who he is. They've produced some pretty strong fighters, some even physically more powerful than Captain America, but never anything resembling a true, intelligent soldier like him who can do what he does."

"Wordplay over exactly what a soldier is aside, what are you getting at, Fury?"

"Something happened a little while ago that gave them the edge they needed to really hammer home these experiments of theirs. They got their hands on some highly advanced materials known as 'Pym Particles'. The quick summary is they let molecules change size; think shrink-rays and growth-rays in one."

"Sounds pretty sci-fi," you said honestly.

"Well this is sci-reality," Fury said simply, striding across the room. "They found a way to do something we didn't even think was possible - they used some pretty fucked up gene splicing methods to try to force human bodies to become natural Pym Particle factories. Usually, making those particles is a highly-advanced science, and even though they were discovered and originally manufactured a few decades ago there are only a handful of individuals who would have the capability to produce them, even with the sample they stole. Controlling the way they interact with the human body is unpredictable. Generate the wrong frequency for the particles, and you either-"

"Shrink something way too small to be useful, or way too big to be practical?" You offered, not sure where Fury was going with this at all.

"Or worse. You go too small, weird things start to happen - interdimensional weird," Fury noted. "You go too big, your body stops functioning the way it should. Oversized lungs don't function as well with regular sized oxygen particles."

"Alright, so they were doing some shit that shouldn't have worked… what did they do to me, then?"

"That's where things get complicated," Fury admitted, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "You see, when I said 'unpredictable', I really meant it. With the right level of technology guiding them these things are so pinpoint precision you could use them to just make yourself a fraction of an inch taller, but if you aren't directly controlling them? If Pym Particles are allowed to run wild while activated it's hard to say just how they'll affect the world. I told you a while back that we found a lot of bodies in the same place we found you… but I never told you how they died."

You didn't say anything as Fury paused, straightening up and looking right into your eyes. There was something within them that was taking on a cold tone. The look of a man who had stared death in the eyes so many times he treated it like an old friend.

"At first we thought the empty cells were just abandoned. Not enough volunteers - or not enough prisoners, whatever they were using. It wasn't until we had the place secure and gave it a full once-over that we found out the truth. Those cells weren't empty… the test subjects were just too small for our agents to notice while they were clearing it."

"Wait, are you- are you telling me everyone in there was some kind of science experiment with shrink rays?"

"Or growth," Fury warned, raising an eyebrow. "Pym Particles go both ways. Those were just the empty cells, there were plenty with bodies, remember? A few of the sights my agents saw in that place… I saw that headcam footage later. There were people in that place who died because their internal organs grew so large they burst out of their chests. Bargain or plead all you want… as long as I'm in charge, you're never gonna see the footage of the raid that rescued you. And that's for your sake, not anyone else's. Even for HYDRA, those were some bad ways to go."

"So… I lived because of some fluke? I mean… I guess you already kind of told me that, but… why me?" you mumbled, your imagination running wild with this new information. Were you the final version of this experiment? The complete edition, just lucky enough to have made it across the finish line? Or were you some kind of genetic anomaly, a winning lottery ticket?

"We don't know," Fury said, shrugging his shoulders. "Most of HYDRA's data was wiped when we were infiltrating their base - that part wasn't a lie. We don't know why you lived when nobody else did. Could've been luck, timing, or you might just have something in your body that interacts with these particles better than the others."

"So… what's the intersection here? How are these particles and the Captain America serum related?" You spat out, fighting back a sudden unease in your stomach.

"The serum that made Cap what he is hit the limit of human capabilities. Perfect, peak human physiology; massively accelerated metabolism, insane healing factor, damn near photographic memory, hell the guy only sleeps about four hours a week, if that. Nothing that Hydra has ever made has been able to come close… so instead of closing the gap, they decided to shrink it instead," Fury said vaguely, glancing into the distance. "See the thing about Pym Particles is they can shrink or grow matter, but the matter continues to function just as well - that's why Ant-Man and Wasp can still fight fully-grown men while they're shrunk. But they always come back to the same size, and they shrink their entire bodies. So HYDRA answered the question Hank Pym was too afraid to test… what happens if you shrink some tissue in the human body, but leave the rest the same, then let their body fill in the gaps through natural regeneration? You end up with an even stronger human, with growths through their entire body, all functioning together."

"I know I've only had access to WebMD for like a week… but that sounds like cancer-ish? Maybe?"

"More than you know," Fury scoffed, nearly chuckling. "Most of those dead bodies we found were either because their bodies shrank too much to function with the rest of their unaffected organs, or because their organs grew too large to function with a normal body. Imagine a stomach shrinking to the size of a thimble, so that you have to choose between splitting your stomach open or starving to death. I'm not sure who were luckier; the ones whose bodies erupted over a few minutes or the ones who died of natural causes because they couldn't function anymore."

"Fucking… what about me, then? Do I just sit around until one day… boom, my bones explode out of me? What am I now, Fury?"

"What are you? You're one lucky motherfucker, that’s what you are. Whatever happened to you, it only happened to you. That's why HYDRA wants you back, dead or alive. Your body is stable, we tested it thoroughly - you're not in danger of cancer, maybe not even from natural causes. You aren't likely to explode, but so far almost everything about you is enhanced. Sight, hearing, smell - hell, you even healed those bruises you got during the HYDRA attack on our base in record time."

"…How many people died for this, Fury?" You mumbled, unsure what else to say.

"At minimum, a few dozen, counting the ones we found in the base and the signs of disposal we found elsewhere." Fury admitted, shaking his head. "At best? No telling how many people they killed and disposed of before we got there, or at other facilities before moving to that one. That's why we never did more than blood tests on you. Whatever hybrid formula they evolved to make you, we'd be lucky if we only had to kill a few hundred to perfect it again, especially without their research. Hell, we have samples of your tissue, and our scientists still aren't sure what kind of gene therapy they had to perform… no organic matter has ever been altered to produce even weak particles like these before."

"And none of this helps you get my memories back, I'm guessing?"

"We're still not even sure why you lost your memories. It's possible that your brain matter has been slightly resized and reshaped like your muscle tissues and the rest of your nervous system; that could make restoring the old neural pathways impossible unless your brain cells eventually even out their growth patterns. Or it could be that you were suffering from brain damage before the procedure, and what they did actually fixed it. In that case the only way to restore your memories would be to undo what they did, which would most likely kill you. On the other hand-"

"Yeah, no, it's probably permanent, I get that. Unless we figure out who I was, I'll never know," you whispered, covering your mouth with one hand while tears started to well up in your eyes. You had thought you were comfortable with the idea of losing who you were a long time ago… but hearing just how fortunate you were to even be breathing at that exact moment was something else. How could you even take one day of your life, knowing that being where you were was just a matter of a scientific or genetic lottery?

"I've seen that look before. Couple times on you, but… a lot out in the field."

Fury strode over to the wall and leaned against it, one shoulder as a base while he looked off into the distance, somewhere beyond you.

"All kinds of situations. Plane or a transport helicopter goes down, two hundred soldiers up in flames, two of 'em walk out unscratched and hike all the way to an LZ. Ambush attack by a group of guerilla fighters takes out seventy-three soldiers… leaves one alone, she survived by hiding under the bodies of her brothers and sisters after she took two rounds to the chest. Sometimes it's a bomb, or just some killer with a knife who takes out your whole family, and misses you hiding in the attic. Sooner or later they all look a lot like you - wondering what it was that made them special. Wondering how they lived, why they deserved to go on while everyone around them died.

"But you ask yourself that question every day, it starts eating you up inside. Because you're looking for an answer that isn't there. Sometimes the universe just smiles on you, sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. It isn't about deserving it, it's just about being lucky. If you feel like you owe the universe or the people who didn't make it a debt, you go out there and you make the world a better place, more power to you. Hell, I'll point you in a good direction to get you started. But don't eat yourself up thinkin' you coulda switched places with one of the others, or that you didn't deserve to live. You got a chance to enjoy your life that some other people didn't, it always ends up being that simple - and the only way you waste that is spending your time wallowing instead of living it."

"That… I dunno if that helps, but I don't know if anything could right now. Thanks, Fury. And thanks for telling me all this. I'll think up some way to gloat about you keeping secrets later."

"Take your time. I'm sure you'll come up with something. You always do."

You laughed as Fury walked out, wondering if it was the first time he'd made you laugh… it definitely made a top five list of the nicest things he'd said to you.

Chapter Text

Learning about the fates - the real fates - of the others in the cells around you made you nervous, even paranoid about what you were, and what was waiting for you to let your guard down. Just because you hadn't died from what was done to you yet didn't mean you never would. What happened if one day you injured yourself while training, and during your body's attempts to recover, you over-compensated and a broken bone suddenly expanded and eviscerated your entire limb?

Somewhere in your mind you knew the thought was pointless, and also pretty unlikely. Not only would it make no sense for your body to suddenly lose the stability that you had seen so far, and that Fury was so certain of, but even if it was going to suddenly destabilize… how would you know? Better to live your life as you would, take advantage of the gifts you had, and put the consequences like your lost memories and the strange nature of your nearly inhuman physiology aside for the moment. Living in the fear of things that might never happened seemed foolish…

However, putting things aside was hard to do when most of your day was spent relentlessly binging whatever daytime television was on for poor souls like you without work to distract them from the monotony of life. After so many hours of trashy dramas, trashy courtroom shows, and trashy gameshows, you eventually grew tired of the sedentary lifestyle. So you spiced things up by adding in a physical regimen to your everyday lifestyle.

It started as more of a curious thought - you had already seen remarkable improvement on your abilities during training, being a bit sharper witted and faster to respond to Clint and Natasha as they drilled you. How great could you become if you pushed yourself harder? They had always done an excellent job of exhausting your mind and putting you in enough pain to make you feel like you'd finished a hard day's work, but your body wasn't always fully exhausted itself. Without proper weight-lifting equipment stamina was really the only thing you could work on besides basic muscle tone and ability anyway.

So you devoted yourself entirely to basic exercise, which mostly consisted of push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, running in place, and unweighted squats. Probably not the most effective, but it was enough to make you feel a bit tired when you later trained with Clint and Natasha, so it was probably having *some* kind of effect, right? You weren't so sure at first, honestly… but then Clint and Natasha began to react to your efforts…

---------------------------------------------------

"You've been working out, haven't you?" Clint asked as he stood across from you again. You were trying to disarm him using the technique he'd showed you, but unlike most other weeks he was not slowing himself down at all for you… and yet you were still coming closer than you thought possible to matching the highly-trained agent's movements.

"Huh? I mean, I've been keeping myself in shape, but Fury keeps telling me he won't deliver any weights for me to use," you admitted, caught a little off-guard by the odd question. "So not really a 'workout', more just staying active, I guess?"

"We should work out together sometime… with results like these I think we could both learn a thing or-"

Clint cut himself off as you nearly stole the bow from his hands, but he pulled away in time to slap your wrists - literally slap them, bringing one arm of the bow down across your wrists in a quick motion. You winced and pulled away from him, running your hands lightly over your reddened and sore skin.

"-two," he finished, quirking an eyebrow at you. "You sure you're just doing fitness exercises?"

"I did pushups, situps, and I drank plenty of juice, I guess?" You offered, shrugging.

"Damn," Clint said, laughing a bit too loudly, "I need to get me some of that juice. How about we call it here for today? I'll need to think up some better ways to test you."

You agreed, somewhat hesitantly. Clint was always pretty chill with you and the idea that you were closing some kind of gap between the two of you was intense, but his casual acceptance of it put you at ease.

However, only a few days later, you encountered a similar issue with Natasha, flavored in an entirely different way…

---------------------------------------------------

"You seem to be taking care of your physical aspects pretty well," Natasha noted as you climbed up from the floor for the seventeenth time that afternoon - and yes, you were definitely counting.

"Are you sure? You still seem to be kicking my ass just as soundly," you grumbled.

"I'm damn sure. So we're going to shift you to tactical expertise for now. No more sparring… we need to worry about your mind, make sure you're staying sharp for future missions."

"Wait, seriously? But if I'm improving, why are we moving away from what I'm getting good at?"

"Because being good isn't enough," Natasha explained, striding over to her bag. She pulled free some sheets of paper, a very thick pad that seemed daunting if only by the fact that it was crammed full of printed text, and she slammed it down on a nearby table without ceremony. "You need to be able to anticipate and react to any situation. Get over here and tell me how you'd handle these encounters. Retreating and regrouping is always a viable option."

"This is a *very* sudden shift," you noted. Clint's casualness felt like he was trying to re-evaluate how he was going to train you… Natasha's casualness came off as a deliberate distraction from how prepared she was with those papers.

"You have to be prepared to adapt in the field, too. We're keeping your training focused narrowly for now, but in time we'll start running mission simulations, on paper and in a controlled environment."

"Yeah but… why such a sudden shift? Shouldn't we at least do a little sparring so I can stay in shape?"

"Clint is going to take care of your maintenance workouts," Natasha said easily, sliding into a chair by the table that she'd placed the papers on. "We have a lot of experience training up SHIELD recruits, trust us. Your situation is a little different, and we aren't training you full time just yet - we have to focus on one thing at a time."

"You sure you're not just afraid I'm going to beat you?" you prodded, raising an eyebrow. She shot one right back at you.

"Ever stop to think that we're stopping the physical training because you're getting too cocky?"

"Nah, I've always been cocky, this isn't new," you said, fighting the urge to smile back. Despite her words, she was clearly playing along with you - she had a smile on her face that looked more honest than usual… and yet, somehow, less sincere.

"True that. Fury's almost gotten to your wit, but you're lucky - Clint broke him in for you on that front a long time ago. Normally he wouldn't let a prisoner get away with that much lip."

"Think a bald guy with one eye would be used to getting ribbed every now and then," you said, sitting across from Natasha. "Then again most of them probably can't disappear you to a government blacksite."

"Or kick your ass seven ways from Sunday. Don't underestimate Fury; he might look a little older than the average SHIELD agent, but he trained most of the top agents. He's got plenty of fight in him, with or without a weapon. I can probably talk him into a demonstration if you don't buckle down and start focusing on these scenarios."

You were enjoying this, even as you began your adult equivalent to homework. Between her being so friendly and actually bothering to joke around with you the past few days, and the little drinking party between the three of you, you were actually starting to feel like Natasha could… well, maybe like was a strong word, but she was at least tolerating you. Hell, sometimes she was downright friendly. It was pretty much the best thing you could've asked for from the agent after your disagreements in the past…

So why were you having such a hard time relaxing around her? Her demeanor was calm, she was half-smirking, she was sitting in a comfortable position, hardly ill-at-ease… yet you almost felt like prey before a lion. A mouse before a trap. You couldn't even pinpoint what it was, but it was the same feeling you got that made you so angry with her before when she was very clearly playing with your emotions…

You smiled through the discomfort, and focused instead on what you were supposed to do when an enemy agent was holding one of your allies at gunpoint.

Somehow that was easier to deal with than the mysterious Agent Romanov.

Chapter Text

Your door burst open rather unexpectedly one afternoon while you were in the middle of making your first ever homemade chicken nuggets (or at least the first you could remember), revealing a very urgent-looking Clint and Natasha both striding in together, arms laden with sacks. They looked surprisingly worried, and you tightened your grip on the knife in your hand and balanced yourself before you realized that they were carrying in groceries. The urgency still put you on edge, but Natasha actually smiled at you as she saw the way you had turned toward them.

"That training is finally kicking in, but it's not that kind of an emergency," Natasha advised, still smirking as she rushed past you. Were you that obvious? You'd tried to keep yourself from looking too startled.

"Where's the best place to hide stuff in here?" Clint asked, staggering past you with a load nearly as large as Natasha's. "And don't you pretend you haven't thought about it, we don't have much time - Fury is already after us."

"I, uh-" you stumbled over yourself, caught off guard by the question. "Exercise room? Plenty of space to hide small stuff there around the equipment, or in the storage closets, maybe in the folded up towels, or somewhere in the restrooms? I've been filling up the closet with sports and energy drinks, to try to-"

"Sounds perfect," Clint interrupted, heading towards the back of your home quickly. Natasha made herself at home in the kitchen, slowly unloading sacks as if she'd never been worried at all.

"Fury is gonna walk through that door in about thirty seconds," Natasha said. "Time to put your adaptability to the test. If he asks… you sent Clint to use the restroom. Got it?"

"I- what are- yeah, I got it," you mumbled, wanting to ask more questions but seeing from the look in her eyes that there wasn't much time for answers. It was a good thing, too, because you were about five seconds into trying to awkwardly get back to slice up chicken when Fury strode his way into the kitchen.

"So much for restocking the break room," Fury said in a low voice, almost dangerous. "Where, exactly, is Agent Barton?"

"I- what the hell lit a fire under your ass, Fury?" You asked, raising an eyebrow as you struggled to quell your confusion and let your natural snark take over. "I haven't seen you this animated since-"

"If I had the patience to deal with you right now, I might let you finish that sentence without slapping you," Fury interrupted, pointing a finger at your face. He turned to Natasha, growing more annoyed by the moment.

"Now where is Agent Barton?"

"Right here, what's up, Fury?" Clint asked, striding back into the kitchen, empty sacks hanging from one of his fingers. "I didn't want to interrupt dinner prep, so I dropped everything off myself. Something wrong?"

"Well, now that you mentioned it, a couple of my agents got caught - on a camera they damn well knew was there - getting shitfaced with one of our highest priority VIPs."

"Aww, you do think I'm important," you interjected, trying to redirect Fury's heat. You didn't really know what was going on, but if Natasha and Clint were both in on it… well, Fury's side wasn't the one you were inclined to take.

"Important enough to some people to break protocol, go behind my back, and risk the security of this building, apparently," Fury growled, keeping his eyes flickering between Natasha and Clint. "Care to tell me exactly what you were dropping off?"

"Sports drinks, energy drinks, protein bars, about three hundred rounds of .45 ammo and a .50 cal sniper, more sweat towels, just typical training gear, why?" Clint said, smirking with one of the widest grins you'd ever seen on him.

"Laugh all you want, Agent Barton. I don't care what you two do in your spare time outside of this building, but if you continue to endanger my operation - and my other agents - this won't end well for anyone involved."

Fury had a few more choice words for Natasha and Clint, but you tried to tune them out as you turned back to your food, not sure what else you could contribute. Although you wouldn't admit it to Fury, you'd seen some labels in the sacks Clint was carrying that looked a lot like the alcohol they had been drinking the night they stopped by… but Fury never even bothered to turn his eye back toward you again. As you were readying your chicken segments for the fryer he eventually ran out of steam, turning and striding away without bothering with a farewell.

"Well, that could have gone better," Natasha remarked dryly when his footsteps receded so far even you couldn't hear them anymore.

"Really? For Fury being in such a foul mood, I thought that went pretty well."

"Alright, how long until Fury checks the cams, though?" You asked, well aware that even though your eyesight was pretty keen, Fury was surely going to notice Clint not only carrying the sacks in, but check the footage later.

"Looped the footage from the other rooms with the last grocery run… I dropped off some basic supplies in your bathroom a couple weeks ago; if Fury checks the cameras that's all he'll see me doing."

"I wondered where all that extra crap came from. Appreciate the mint-scented shampoo though. Kinda tingly," you noted, shrugging at their apparent thoroughness. "You sure he's not going to come through and tear this place apart?"

"Not really, but what's he going to do if he finds anything? You didn't ask for half the stuff I just dropped off in the training room. I can always tell Fury that I was hiding them away for myself, as a reward for putting up with your bullshit."

"Honestly, Fury might actually buy that, as often as you piss him off," Natasha said, eyeing you with a grin on her face.

"Okay, tell me what's really going on here," you emphasized, eyeing the two of them. "Fury has never had a proper disagreement with you two in front of me, not like that… and what's the big deal about the alcohol thing anyway? I figured you guys wouldn't get in trouble for that. Fury wasn't wrong… we did kind of drink right in front of the cameras."

"That's why we're fighting with Fury," Clint said, shaking his head with an annoyed sigh. "We honestly thought it would be fine. Fury knows how important that was to us - we figured he'd understand wanting to celebrate, since he knows what went down. We thought he was starting to trust you enough to allow it. We even asked other agents to cover our shifts on cams…"

"When he found out what we did," Natasha continued, shaking her head, "he ordered us to cut back on the training, spend less time in here. Said we were getting too attached. I still think he might be looking to replace us."

"Fuck Fury."

Though the words sounded a lot like what you were thinking, they actually came from Clint. You cast your glance over to Natasha in surprise, then both of you glanced over to Clint. He shrugged, looking quite calm despite the heat in his voice.

"What? You're both thinking it," Clint said defensively, offering a shrug. "Look I'm all for being careful around potentially lethal HYDRA experiments, believe me, we've been almost taken out a couple dozen times by them. But if shit was gonna hit the fan… why would it have taken this long?"

"Fury's always been overly cautious. So have we. That’s the reason that we're still here," Natasha said quietly. But even as she was talking her eyes started shifting over to where you were. "But… if you were going to betray us, you had the perfect chance back during the HYDRA raid. If something was going to go wrong with your treatment and it already took this long, it could be weeks, months, maybe years from now. Way longer than we can keep you hanging around here."

"Exactly, so what's the problem here? You know what, I think I've got an idea. How about we keep the cameras on loop, we adjust the feeds for Fury for the whole building… and we head out tonight?"

"Clint, what are you talking about?" Natasha asked, her face actually breaking slightly - just a moment - as Clint's words sunk in.

"I'm talking about going out and having a night on the town! The only reason we all didn't go before was because of Fury's rules, but if he's going to be this much of a jackass about it, I say we go for broke. There's a killer bar down the street, not too many people, we're in and out in a couple hours. Just long enough for a good buzz and for me to show you two how to shoot a real game of pool."

"You can't seriously be suggesting we break containment to spend the night at a dive bar," Natasha said, quirking an eyebrow so hard it nearly broke into her hairline.

"I mean I'm fine with leaving but not if Fury's gonna come in here, burn my beanbag, and keep you two away forever," you interjected, glancing between them urgently. "Seriously, as much as we didn't get along at first… you two have kept me sane the past few weeks. If Fury is the reason that you two already can't train me like normal, then-"

"Then nothing," Clint said, waving his hand. "If Fury wants to get mad, he can get mad at us. We'll be the ones who walked you out, and if he really wants to get angry, he can get angry at us."

"Not the worst idea. I could honestly go with a night to blow off some steam… doing these double shifts doesn't give much down time," Natasha said after a moment, seeming to agree as she shrugged and leaned back against the wall.

"Wait, you're okay with this?" Your voice probably came out a bit harsher than you'd originally intended, but you were genuinely surprised. Natasha smiled and looked at you as in mock offense.

"What, you think I don't know how to have a little fun? I take things a bit more seriously than Clint over here… but that includes letting loose. Local bar, quick trip out, we doctor the camera feeds and the security systems a little bit before Fury gets a chance to check them... it could work. If it doesn't, what's Fury going to do?"

The last words were spoken almost playfully, Natasha cocking an eye at you.

"That's a dangerous question," you said quietly, not sure how to feel. On the one hand… was Natasha loosening up a bit? Even opening up to you? That was great, but why so suddenly?

"We live with danger around here… only thing you can ever ask is how much you're willing to risk."

Clint's words were almost profound - almost. You turned your eyes between the two of them, though your gaze lingered only a little longer on Natasha. What exactly were you risking by leaving with them? If Fury was going to get mad, surely most of his rage would be focused on those two… and even if you were right about Natasha, what would she be trying to take from you? Anything you owned was by SHIELD's graces, and you had no secrets to keep.

"Alright… fuck it, I'm in. Can I go change into something a little nicer?"

You actually were planning on changing into some nicer clothes - you'd gotten a decent set of "going out" clothes a couple weeks ago in the vain hope that you'd have an excuse to wear them. But you were also hoping to secure the diary pages stuffed into the side of your mattress, just in case someone decided to search your room while the three of you were out. Thankfully Clint and Natasha agreed quickly, both smiling. You felt almost guilty as you traipsed back to your bedroom, shutting the door quickly as you disrobed. In no time flat you'd changed outfits and awkwardly stuffed the pages away in the hand-sewn pocket of your clothes, hoping the layers of loose cloth and hobby-store insulation you'd stuffed in with them were enough to keep the crinkles from Clint's keen ears, if he were paying attention.

Then you strode out into the living room, putting on your best smile and a wide-open stance to bring on the world. Clint and Natasha both wrapped an arm around you, and with one last surprising cry of "Fuck Fury!" the three of you were out the door.

"Out the door"… odd how much meaning that phrase still held in your life. How much it nearly overwhelmed you.

How much you were fighting back tears from the simple act of riding an elevator down toward the ground level.

Chapter Text

When your adrenaline and emotions died down you were a bit more aware of the situation that you were in… and in addition to making you appreciate it more, it also made you start to question exactly what was going on. Adrenaline mixed with caution as you found yourself at a backroom table in the corner of a fairly upscale bar, eyes always wandering as you questioned every person around you. This scene - no matter how classy or respectful - didn't really line up with your impressions of your SHIELD babysitters.

Clint you could kind of get - he had basically been laid back the entire time you'd known him, minus the brief period after you first pissed off Natasha. Not that you held that aggression against him; apparently, he and Natasha were even closer than you would've guessed originally. Still, you remembered his early days, and the times that came after you befriended Natasha again. Taking shots in a high-end bar didn't seem at all out of character for him. Natasha, on the other hand…

You'd never really seen or heard her go against Fury in the slightest, even after he hinted at her background when you grew curious and persistent. She never seemed out of step with him before this… yet despite all that, something was scratching at your subconscious as you tipped back glass after glass with both her and Clint. Even if Fury believed your story, even if she herself believed it, she had never let her guard down before - not even around Clint, as best you could tell. Why would she have such interest now? Maybe she really believed you were her antithesis, proof that forgetting one's past didn't necessarily make you more forgiving, or make you appreciate life more… maybe…

But that didn't ease your uncertainties nearly as much as you wanted it to, and no matter how you tried to convince yourself, you couldn't fully let your guard down. Whether it was the subtle crackling noises of the diary pages in your pant leg or the ever-present eyes of the others on you even then, always glancing over at you when you least expected it, you couldn't quite put yourself at rest just yet.

Even as you were pulling up outside some place named "Club 616" you couldn't shake the hesitation and nervousness that still clung to you. Smiling at Clint as he opened your car door, throwing a playful smirk at Natasha as she took you arm-in-arm toward the club entrance, even confidently grinning at the bouncer as you somehow strolled past without being identified… none of it gave you any real confidence in what you were doing. Until the first drinks were poured and you three were alone at a corner table, you didn't feel like you were safe. Even now, after having been inside for almost an hour, you still felt like there was something crawling up your spine.

"You alright? You seem a little on edge. Drink more, it helps," Clint advised, shifting a little in his seat to lean closer to you. He downed his glass almost immediately after, as if trying to set a "good" example.

"In fairness, the last time the three of us went outside together, we were running from HYDRA," Natasha pointed out accurately, still lightly sipping her own glass.

"Do you guys always talk about stuff like that so freely in public? I mean, aren't you… secret agents or something?"

"That's why we come here," Clint said easily, gesturing to the bar and offering his hand. You tipped back the last of your drink and passed the empty glass to him to return.

"What, some kind of SHIELD run bar?"

Clint didn't answer before striding away toward the bar, but he did quirk an eyebrow in a way that seemed almost surprised. Natasha just smirked at the question for a moment, taking a long draft from her glass before speaking.

"Running a nightclub? Not really their expertise, even if we like to let our stress out sometimes," Natasha teased, allowing herself the slightest smirk as she turned her attention back to you. "You're overthinking things."

"In what way?"

"Remember what Fury and Clint told you about me?" Natasha said quietly, raising an eyebrow. You had a feeling what she was referring to, but didn't get a chance to respond before she continued.

"People know everything about my past. Pretty sure Fury still has anything on SHIELD locked out of your ability to read, but anyone else can look up everything SHIELD had on me from my personnel file. That includes just about everything about me - who I was, where I came from, what I've done… everything before and after I joined SHIELD. I released… well, I released everything I tried to keep secret before then. So you're overthinking things, because this bar doesn't need to be SHIELD to know everything about us at a glance. The whole world recognizes me on sight, same with Clint. We don't come here because they know who we are, we come here because they pretend not to."

You let yourself lean backwards in your seat as you tried to let Natasha's words sink in. You tried to imagine what that was like, having to live your entire life knowing everyone else around you probably recognized you on sight, and knew all of the little things that you'd tried to keep secret. You had known about that for a while, of course… but being out and about with other people in the real world made you realize how pervasive it must have been for her, how hard to escape the effects.

She couldn't even go out to the grocery store, to the mall, to the bar without being recognized and judged. Her situation was almost the exact opposite of your own, where not even you yourself knew the details of your past, and yet somehow… the result was shockingly similar. She was locked away from the world in her own way, in her own form of cage, shackled by judgements and impressions she had made before even entering the room.

"A toast to telling people to take their judgement and fuck off with it."

"Shit, I don't know what I missed, but I'll drink to that," Clint agreed, setting down your glass in front of you while taking a long draft from his own. The line of thought you were on was so troublesome you downed a full third of the glass before even realizing you were drinking.

"You'd drink to anything," Natasha teased, smirking wryly at Clint. He didn't bother to respond verbally, only winking as he tipped his glass back a little further and took an extra swig with his eyes locked to hers. Something seemed to pass between the two of them, but you weren't quite sure what it was.

You three spent the next several hours chatting and relaxing. You eased up on the drinking after the first couple hours and just sipped idly while alternating between pool, darts, or just sitting and enjoying the music. You had to admit one nice thing about having no memories was that you more or less never got bored… although sometimes you did have the strange feeling of wondering if you'd done something like this before. Maybe you were even in this bar before, standing where you are now, lining up the same shot…

The feeling of déjà vu that line of thought gave you was pretty disconcerting, and you did your best to put it out of your mind.

But what was bothering you more was that even after a few drinks and a lot of time spent with your friends (or whatever the three of you were), you were still just as nervous as the moment that you walked into the bar. You tried to tell yourself it was social anxiety, or that you were just too stressed out over your first real trip to really relax…

But if that was the case, why did it seem like the bartenders and other patrons were always staring at you? Not at Clint, barely at Natasha.

Just you.

Chapter Text

The next few days went by mostly without notice. Once again you woke up after a night drinking fairly heavily without the slightest hangover… and all that on about three hours' worth of sleep. You had already noticed your need for sleep decreasing a while back, but the fact that it was continuing on long after whatever experiment was done to you had you a bit worried. If things kept going like this, soon you'd barely have closed your eyes and you would already be wide awake.

It made you wonder what was going on, but you weren't sure if you should point it out to anyone else. You weren't going to tell Fury, that much was certain - you were still making sure to stay in your bedroom for a minimum of six hours a night just so he didn't wonder why you were up wandering around so much during the night. But you were starting to wonder if telling Natasha or Clint might be okay. Sure, they were still obviously working for Fury, but they were at least trying to make you feel comfortable around them - something Fury hadn't done in… well, however long it had been since you first woke up in that cell.

But every time you got close to sharing with them, you wondered what would happen if you revealed too much. If you gave away info that wasn't in the samples they took and that you hadn't shared before. They know about your improved hearing an eyesight, and you had no idea about what they might have learned from all those experiments… but if they didn't already know about your sleep cycle and hangover immunity, what happened when you told them about it? Would they send you back into a full lockdown, some new underground facility? Would Fury restart his experiments? You wanted to trust Clint and Natasha…

But how could you when Natasha seemed to be a different person every week?

You had thought she would run out of faces to wear eventually - you figured sarcastic, snarky, and only slightly angry at you would be her new norm. But now she was getting friendly. Almost… too friendly? You didn't think you'd be so unhappy for her to ease up and stop scowling at you quite as much, but you were. Maybe it was because it felt so unnatural. For as much time as you'd spent around her, you still couldn't read her properly… something just felt off.

You were actually contemplating that very fact one night while doing the dishes when you heard a knocking on the door to your apartment. You were halfway caught off-guard by the knock, and it took you a few moments to compose yourself.

"Uh, c-come in?"

Your words were hesitant, and your hands paused their scrubbing of the dish in your hand just in time for the door to slowly creak open. Natasha peeked her head in the open door, looking almost as curious and surprised as you did.

"You sure about that one? You seem pretty nervous, and I even knocked," Natasha teased, her red locks dancing around her face as she smirked at you.

"Ah- yeah, come in," you assured, tweaking your neck toward the living room. "I'm just working on dishes, kind of got lost in thought."

"No problem, you don't need clean dishes tonight anyway," Natasha said, stepping into your apartment more fully and shutting the door behind her. Now that she was inside you saw she was carrying two plastic containers of food, either leftovers or something she'd prepped for this.

"Wait, did you… did you *cook* for me?" You said, actually laughing as you looked at both of the sizeable containers. "I've got to admit, I've been expecting you to do a lot of things - put a gun to my head, pin me to the ground with my arm behind my back, kneecap me… cooking food was *not* something I *ever* imagined you doing."

"What, you think I can't cook?" Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow at you.

"I'm pretty sure you can cook - hell, I'm pretty sure you can do anything at this point," you said, still chuckling.

"Keep talking like that and pinning you to the ground before the end of the night isn't out of the question," Natasha teased… wait, teased? Flirted, almost?

The remark was casual, but it threw you off completely. Natasha was coy, sarcastic, and at best casually friendly to you nowadays, but in the past she'd been everything from comforting to mean to almost spiteful... the one thing she had very much never been was a flirt. Even at her most sympathetic or drunk, that was not her game. Natasha must have seen the shock and hesitation on your face, because she rolled her eyes at you and made herself at home on your kitchen table.

"What, am I not allowed to have some fun with you? You get shy so easily, and I seem to remember Clint offering to remind you how to kiss if you beat him in a game of pool. What, women can't joke around? Or are you just that much more interested in my offer?"

"He was trying to throw off my shot so I *wouldn't* beat him, even though I never stood a chance to begin with. Also, never play a guy named 'Hawkeye' in pool. But I'm guessing you already knew that, and just chose not to tell me ahead of time."

"You don't remember how to play pool or any games you might have played in the past; does it matter how badly you get your ass kicked the first time?"

"I might not have any memories, but as you well know my eyes are *definitely* sharp enough to tell when someone takes a pity shot to give me one turn before they completely annihilate me," you respond, rolling your eyes as you continue to scrub away at your dishes. "And you still didn't bother to warn me that Clint has eyes and a mind so sharp he can basically skewer a literal fly across a football field. I mean I've only ever seen him use that bow for real once, and I was too busy trying not to die to really watch that closely."

Natasha ignored your accusation and made herself at home at your table, leaving the containers of food out and opened on your table. You noticed that one contained what looked like skewered meat chunks while the other looked somewhat remniscent of the frozen calzones you used to eat while imprisoned in the old SHIELD base.

"I figured the sooner you got used to being surprised and shocked by the accomplishments of others, the better," she explained almost effortlessly, meeting your unamused gaze with a degree of humility and humor. "Every time I underestimate someone, I come home with a new scar or bullet hole somewhere on me."

You found yourself wanting to ask where she was hiding all these supposed scars... both in a genuinely interested manner and also in a flirtatious way. That was perhaps the most troubling thing for you. Agent Romanov - you had to remind yourself she was an Agent even now - was so talented at falling into another character or form of expression that even knowing how she had acted around you previously, you still found it hard to tune out her body language and the way her eyes lingered on you. Was she that good at manipulating you...

Or did she actually have a point?

"I have been trying to evaluate everyone around me at first glance... I just have no idea how successful I've been since I only really know three people so far," you deflected, shaking your head. "Guess I already underestimated one of them, but to be fair, I was drunk."

"Best to know your own tolerances and limits as well as anyone else's. Never let your guard down if you can help it, and never put yourself into a situation you're not confident about fighting your way out of," Natasha advised. Despite the seriousness of her words and tone, she didn't even hesitate or pause as she sorted through your cupboards and pulled out plates to set the food she'd brought onto.

"You sound like you have some experience there. Care to share?" You asked, halfway as a joke. To your surprise, although Natasha kept setting the table, she smirked up at you and slowed her words a bit in response.

"...I grew up in an orphanage. It was a Russian one without much supervision, but heavy penalties for the children who misbehaved. In a lot of ways, the people who made it out without any scars were just the ones who didn't get caught. I found myself in a lot of seedy situations growing up. Everyone makes a few mistakes. I got lucky; mine were the small kinds, the ones that leave you with scars, but let you keep moving forward. The kind that let you walk away from them if you're strong enough to piece yourself back together. The kind that make sure you never repeat that mistake, because you know if you do, you'll barely be human again when it's over. I learned my limits because every time I went pas them, someone beat me back into place."

You looked over toward Natasha with an expression you hoped didn't fully reveal how shocked you were. It wasn't much, but it was the most of her past she'd ever bothered to open up to you with.

"You uh... you went through a lot, huh? Guess I already knew that."

"No worse than a lot of others," Natasha said, shrugging. Her eyes seemed focused on you, yet there was a certain distance in them. "I eventually ended up kicked out of the system at eighteen, found myself working for some seedy places. I did well enough - or badly enough - to get SHIELD's attention after a few years, but Fury saw something in me that he liked. He recruited me instead of killing me."

"...I guess maybe he's more trusting than I would've guessed when I first woke up, huh? How many SHIELD recruits are ex-criminals?"

"Not many," Natasha said, her voice a bit harsher than you would have expected. "Fury has his moments, but he's not trusting, he's a good judge of character."

"You'd say that even after he yelled at you two for drinking around me?" You asked curiously. "I like to think I'm a good enough character for him not assume that I'd attack or escape the moment you two let your guards down."

"I said he was a good judge of character, not that he was a fool, or that he wasn't a hardass," Natasha responded, grinning just slightly. Fury trusts you enough not to put a bullet in your head and leave it at that - that's a high bar for a former HYDRA experiment."

"Fair, I guess," you noted, shaking your head at the reminder of what could have happened to you.

"I'm not saying that to put you down... I'm saying that Fury saw something in you worthwhile. Something that made him want to take a risk. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get Fury to take risks? He threatened us for taking you to a SHIELD-friendly bar.”

“That's... actually a really good point,” you admitted, shaking your head as you stepped away from the dishes.

“I make a lot of them. You should listen more often,” Natasha said while she grinned at you.

You finished up the dishes as quickly as you could, and then joined Natasha at the table. You were pretty sure that there was something else to this visit – but for your own sake, you tried to be less suspicious. Whatever they were doing, Natasha and Clint were... well, you'd like to say friends, but that seemed like a mutual thing. At a minimum they were two people in charge of your life that you wanted to be friendlier with. So you did possibly the riskiest thing you could do.

You stopped evaluating Natasha for the afternoon, and started to trust her.

Chapter Text

Honestly, you never would have anticipated your surprise luncheon with Natasha, but you'd be lying if you said it was unwelcome. Though SHIELD itself gave you a lot of pause – particularly Fury – you also had to thank them for your life, in theory. It felt a bit odd to thank anyone, much less a faceless organization, for not murdering you on first contact... but no matter how you tried to think about your first encounter with them, you were ill at ease when trying to picture how you would handle yourself in their situation.

An unknown person, with unknown abilities or potential, kept in the deepest reaches of the base of an enemy known as openly hostile, who – upon their accidental awakening – broke free of their restraints and assaulted several agents to the point of breaking bones and damaging organs... You had to admit, even now, you had a hard time imagining yourself sparing the offender in the same way that Natasha, SHIELD, and Fury had, in about that order.

All that said... if the random lunch was a surprise, the dinner invitation? That was... well...

------------------------

"You, uh... you what, now?"

"I said, I got clearance to treat you to dinner. Nice Italian place not too far from here; Lo Inganno, every pasta they serve is worth dying for. It's actually my favorite restaurant in the city."

"Italian? Wait, we're in New York and you're going to shill out Italian food to me as a top-shelf restaurant? I'll admit I haven't really experienced the city much myself, but I figured there had to be at least one decent Russian restaurant around here," you admitted, staring at her with a strange mixture of confusion and suprirse.

"A girl can't reveal all her secrets the first date," Natasha teased, winking at you. "Just because I'm from Russia doesn't mean I don't enjoy experiencing all the delights the world has to offer. You've been cramped up in a detention bloc apartment-cell combo or a highly guarded loft apartment for basically your entire life – at least all of it that you remember. Your only experience outside of them was to flee a HYDRA attack and a night out at a dive bar. What better way to broaden your horizons and experience the world than some genuine foreign cuisine?"

You found it hard to argue with her logic – but it's not the thought for your sake that bothers you, its the thought of the others. Fury got mad at Natasha and Clint for getting drunk with you on the anniversary of whatever the hell happened in Budapest. Then they snuck you out by putting the cameras on a loop to go to a dive bar. The idea of him giving you clearance to just dine out at some fancy Italian restaurant? Preposterous.

"I see three flaws in your plan here," you said, leaning against the door frame of the living room.

"Oh? Do tell, I love hearing people tell me why I'm wrong," Natasha said, laying on the sarcasm as she grinned at you.

"One, I have no idea what kind of food I like, and I would feel super awkward being on..." you paused briefly, realizing you were about to say 'being on a date'. Judging by the quirk in Natasha's lips, she realized your slip. "...a business dinner with you and not liking the food."

"Nice save," Natasha said, grinning. "But it's not an issue. We're going to have the place to ourselves, after hours, and they're going to prepare every dish in the house. I was serious about broadening your horizons, you know. You're gonna try every dish that my favorite Italian chef can conjure up. Did you think SHIELD would willingly let you walk into an uncontrolled environment?"

You paused for a moment, a little uncertain how to respond. On the one hand... no, you absolutely did not expect SHIELD to allow this, and yet she's posing that as a reason why you should trust her – because the situation she is proposing is somehow less ridiculous?

"That was problem two. I literally don't believe that you actually got Fury to agree to any of this. I just... I don't see Fury approving this come hell or high water," you admitted. "It's throwing me off. Making me think you're not telling me the whole truth."

"You're pretty suspicious... that's good," Natasha said, smiling genuinely at you. "Normally, no, he never would have. But after him blowing up over us sharing our anniversary with you, we decided to start really laying into him."

"Laying into your boss? Sounds like a good way to get fired," you said, rolling your eyes.

"Maybe, if you weren't damn near irreplaceable," Natasha said with a shrug. "Not a brag, just an acknowledgement. We know he's seen the reports, and probably a lot of the footage around here. You're not acting like a threat, and you've shown almost no interest in getting out of here. Back at the old facility you tried to escape out an airduct before even a month had passed."

You considered her words, and you were actually surprised to find how true they were. When you woke up in that HYDRA cell – and then shortly later in the SHIELD cell – you were focused on escape, evasion, and trying to figure out what the hell was going on more than almost anything else. Since you came here... hell, you've actually never even tried the handle on the door.

Shit, have they been leaving it unlocked? They do just seem to barge in without keys...

"Alright let's say I believe you..."

You pause, letting that hang in the air. Natasha quirks an eyebrow when you don't say anything after a second.

"Ah, fuck it, I've got nothing. I'm just... I'm gonna trust you on this one, Nat. And if whatever guard or clerk is watching the door shoots me, my dying words are gonna be 'I fucking knew it'."

"I've heard worse last words," Natasha says with a grin. There's still something there – a moment of... hesitation? Now that was a new one for her. "Pretty sure I'm two for two, what's problem number three?"

"Number three is... I have nothing to wear to a formal dinner," you said, rubbing the back of your head in embarrassment. You actually didn't think you'd get to the third problem, so it was more a joke than anything. Why would you need an outfit if the restaurant was basically going to stay open after hours for a secure dinner?

"Already taken care of. There's going to be a delivery here in one hour – formal suit, already fitted, freshly pressed, the works, hand delivered by one of your guards you haven't met yet. Think that'll help you believe Fury is on board with this?"

"Uh... yeah, actually," you said in shock, not sure what else to say. The fact she'd been prepared for – and actually met – your joking expectation was surprising, even for Natasha who always seemed to have an answer.

"Good. If you think I'm lowering my standards just because there won't be many people around to see, you're sorely mistaken. Dressing up isn't just about impressing others – it's about reminding yourself how much you're worth," Natasha says, offering one final wink before she strides out of your apartment. You stand there for a second, wondering what the hell came over her and Clint in the past few days.

Wondering how in the hell she knows your measurements... and deciding it's better not to ask questions.

----------------

This is too good to be true.

That became your mantra for the evening, one brought on from every single facet of the strange dinner date you found yourself almost forced into. The suit that arrived – on time, just as Natasha insisted – was a perfect fit, right down to having you feeling almost as comfortable in it as you did in the pajamas you ordered a few weeks back. The dinner that was served almost immediately after your arrival, as if the chef and his crew had known your exact arrival time. The perfect environment, the enjoyable music, the dress Natasha was wearing – the perfect mixture of black and red hues that ignited every facet of your imagination...

No, it wasn't just your imagination. You were sure of that. Something was going on, it had to be. Things were too smooth, too perfect, too enjoyable. Since the moment you stepped outside of your apartment for the first time since the dive bar outing, everything had gone not just smoothly... but so without a hitch it had to be almost rehearsed.

"Holy shit, you weren't kidding," you said as one of the waiters approached the table and replaced a dish you'd half-finished with another full spread of elegant pork cutlets marinated and drenched in a thick alfredo and cheese sauce. The spread before you was enormous enough on its own– you'd assumed Natasha's 'every dish in the house' remark was more or less hyperbole, but the table presented to you both was so spread out with appetizers and entrees that you were starting to suspect she wasn't exaggerating at all.

But more than the food – more than the perfect way the night unfolded – what threw you off was Natasha herself. You were enraptured with the food and flavors assaulting your senses, and yet none of them could distract you from her. Her outfit, her behavior, or... just her. She was staring at you nearly as much, and didn't seem to think poorly of your frequent glances over. She ate in that same controlled, well-mannered way as she always did, but there was definitely something new in the air.

She was seated across from you, directly facing you over the thin table – despite the fact that a larger, wider one would have made sense with the massive number of dishes that you were being served. She claimed that the table was small enough that you could both reach every dish, but the table was even smaller than that – so close that more than once you two were brushing against each other, either above or below the table as you shifted to sample more foods. The touches weren't awkward, except when Natasha met your eyes after some of them. It wasn't the flirting that was awkward...

It was Natasha.

You weren't sure if what you were seeing was actually there or just in your head. But sometimes, just for a moment, a single frame of your interactions... you thought you saw something deeper in those eyes. Most of the time you couldn't understand the strange looks she gave you, but something about this one gave you just a glimmer of recognition. Nothing concrete, more like a feeling, passed between two people in just a moment.

Regret? Grief? Sorrow? Guilt? All of those were present, but none sounded more or less right than the others. Whatever it was, it was always gone in a flash... replaced by that same smile, the one that she had more and more when she looked at you lately.

The one you'd wanted to see for so long... and that now made you nothing but uncomfortable. No matter how hard you were trying to trust her.

Chapter Text

In spite of your misgivings, the entire outing with Natasha was relatively uneventful beyond her strange behavior and your own misgivings. In fact, you quite enjoyed the food and the private atmosphere, especially the free and constant refills on wine. Natasha didn't do much beyond the strange staring, seeming to indulge herself at least as much as you did in the extravagant foods and drinks offered to you. Natasha even spent a good portion of the date and time with you explaining the differences between different varieties and colors of wine to you.

"How do you know so much about this kind of stuff?" You had asked, quirking an eyebrow. "Doesn't seem like something a SHIELD Agent would be well versed in for the job... is wine a hobby of yours?"

"No," Natasha said immediately, shaking her head, "I don't mind it, but I'm hardly a sommelier."

"A soma- what?" You asked.

"Oh, finally a word you don't remember," Natasha teased. "Don't worry, lots of people don't know that one, you probably didn't forget it at all. A sommelier is a professional wine taster."

"Huh," you pondered, staring at your own glass. "Say, why do I have no problem with language anyway? How can I have amnesia and forget all the names, places, people... you know, everything, and yet I woke up speaking English just fine? And I seem to be able to function pretty well as a human, more or less."

"Amnesia is a strange thing, and there are different kinds and severities," Natasha explained. "To simplify it a little bit... it's pretty likely that the language section of your brain wasn't affected by what they did to you, at least not badly enough to make you unable to read, write, or talk. But we don't know what you were capable of before the procedure – you could have been a black belt, a scientist, a highly skilled assassin, an engineer, a veteran soldier, a doctor... we have no idea what you've forgotten. Think about driving a car; do any muscle memories come back?"

You thought back to the times you watched Natasha and Clint driving. You sort of understood what they were doing, but seeing their hands work the wheel and their legs the pedals... none of it seemed familiar, so you shook your head.

"Whatever they did to seems to have left language and motor function intact, more or less, but it took away all of your memories; even muscle memory. It might have been intentional... but judging by the way the rest of those experiments turned out, it was probably a happy accident."

"Can't say I'm complaining," you mumbled after her explanation. "It was hard enough dealing with Fury in English. I can't imagine trying to do it without words."

"Maybe it would have been easier," Natasha said, quirking an eyebrow at you. "If it wasn't for the snark, Fury might have actually liked you."

You laughed and finally drank the wine you'd been staring at for far too long.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The rest of the week passed mostly uneventfully, until Saturday. Natasha's strange drop-ins stopped after that, which either meant that you were wrong and she was just being friendly, or you were right and she had noticed your awkwardness. Either way, the next time someone knocked on your door, it wasn't Natasha. In fact, it wasn't even Fury, which was surprising in its own right – it was Clint, with a full case under each arm, greeted you with a two-finger forehead salute as you opened the door.

"Alright, let's get this party started," Clint said, smirking at you while taking a step into your apartment. You stepped out of the way more out of instinct than anything, a bit surprised at his appearance.

"What party, and why are we starting it now?" You asked, though Clint was already halfway into your living room.

"Don't act like you don't know. I've only mentioned it to you like twelve times over the last month," Clint said, settling himself in on your couch while cracking open the first case and pulling out a can of beer. "I mean, I know I didn't actually say I'd be coming over, so I'm kind of inviting myself in here, but I didn't think you'd mind the company. It's probably lonely in here, I figured if I'm gonna be binge drinking and annoying someone, you could probably use the company, right? C'mon, are you that surprised? You're looking at me like I'm a ghost or something."

"That... yeah, you know what, that sounds like something you'd do," you admitted, sort of shrugging off Clint's unexpected entrance. Aside from not inviting himself in before this, his behavior wasn't that out of line with his prior actions. Compared to waiting in a fake air conditioning vent for you to crawl inside, pretty much anything seemed normal for him.

"Hell yeah it does. Sit down, drink up, get down, shut up," Clint said while grinning at you. "Not necessarily in that order, by the way. Just in case you feel like partying or screaming at the TV while you're sober, or prefer getting drunk standing up. I try to be an all-inclusive party animal."

"You are the least professional 'government agent' I can possibly picture," you say, chuckling as you take a seat opposite Clint. "I can't tell if that makes me feel better or worse."

"If you start thinking being more professional is better, let me know," Clint says, grinning at you. "I know a certain Agent who can make you regret thinking that."

"Not a fan of professional government agents? Let me guess, something about beaurocracy?" You ask, grinning. Despite the banter, Clint's expression suddenly turns sour.

"Don't get me started on beaurocracy. The informality and the underground nature of things is probably the one good thing that came around after the whole..." Clint sighed, shaking his head and cutting himself off mid-sentence. "Doesn't matter, this is no time for moping over the past, this is about drinking for what's happening right here in the present!"

"So... uh... are you ever gonna actually tell me what you're here for tonight?"

"Holy hell, you really did forget, didn't you?" Clint asked, laughing as he tossed you a can of beer. "It's the American Idol season finale tonight! I've been hyping it up for weeks! Do you even listen to me?"

You chuckled, but didn't answer. Because in spite of Clint's insistence that he'd told you before... well, memories were very precious to you. You had so few of them, and you'd lost so many. You didn't know a lot of things about this base, or SHIELD, or even the world at large.

But you knew he hadn't mentioned anything about a season finale. So why was he insisting he had? It was hard to say; perhaps he genuinely thought he'd mentioned it, or had confused his conversations with you and another. The worst part was that none of this even seemed that out of character for Clint; he'd done almost identical things in the past, and usually with alcohol in hand like now.

So what was bothering you? What had felt so wrong the past few weeks? Were you just paranoid, was the shock of all this finally settled and your real fears kicking in?

You tried to drown the thoughts, but Clint hadn't brought nearly enough beer for you to forget.

Chapter Text

A few days after Clint's intrusion and your unusual dinner with Natasha, you thought things were sort of starting to fall back into a rhythm. Natasha and Clint actually picked up your training again on a more hands-on basis; Clint even went so far as to let you fire his bow a few times, and Natasha went through so many sparring matches with you that you almost started to wish they'd just kept acting strange and continued the break from your training.

Almost. No matter how hard Natasha kicked your ass, you were grateful to be doing something more meaningful than sitting around and surfing the web while desperately trying to find any new sites Fury hadn't already cut off.

You couldn't even use most of the news sites because half of them had comments sections, and apparently Fury thought that someone would believe a random internet comment saying something like "help, a top-secret deepstate government agency has kidnapped me!" That was why you were still stuck watching late-night cable news any time you wanted a real update on the world.

But your isolation from meaningful news about the world was hardly your biggest motivator. Having something to actually work toward and take your mind off of things was way more important. You'd experimented with a few hobbies, everything from more artistic hobbies to cooking and gardening. You definitely enjoyed them, but you couldn't really compare yourself to much. With your access to the outside world so limited, you had virtually no frame of reference for your own skill. It was liberating in one sense – you weren't constantly comparing yourself to others – but in another way it sucked to not be able to gauge your own progress.

Fighting, lifting, stretching, reacting... those were things with a clear-cut and simple measurement for improvement. You'd stopped counting days back in the original facility when the lack of sunlight and your own unstable sleep schedule left you uncertain as to how long had passed. The uncertainty was almost a blessing. Every day spent in captivity was a day wasted, one that you'd never be able to spend on something more meaningful.

In many ways, even when you still could, counting days was more depressing than hopeful. Training made time itself irrelevant, but made progress and improvement simple. You were good enough to win, or you weren't. You could lift more than the day before, stretch farther, react faster... or you couldn't. It was that simple, and usually, enough effort let you push yourself to the other side of the scale.

Well, except for the winning part. No matter how hard you tried, no matter how fast you moved, Natasha always seemed just far enough ahead of you to kick your ass thoroughly. But you tried not to let that bother you too much. Though, it did make you jump sometimes when you heard her voice.

"Hey, don't tell me I'm interrupting dinner prep again?"

Like just now. Thankfully you didn't accidentally break the fridge from slamming it shut as Natasha strolled in... you didn't want to find out if Fury would have taken that out of your allowance.

"Uh, kind of... do you count staring blankly into the refrigerator, starving but not able to find a single thing that sounds edible as 'dinner prep'?" You asked, grimacing as you looked over your options.

"Kind of. Should I come back later? Probably shouldn't have this on an empty stomach."

You glanced over, already having a hint as to what you were about to see. Sure enough, Natasha was holding a bottle... but it wasn't vodka, this time. It was actually a bottle of wine, one you didn't recognize even after her tutoring during your late night Italian dinner.

"Depends, why the fancy bottle this time?" You asked, half joking. "If there's something to celebrate, I'm down."

"You... don't know?" Natasha asked, seeming actually surprised.

"I... guess not?" You answered, just as uncertain. "I'm guessing it's not the anniversary of Budapest or Clint would be here. Aside from that, I'm lost."

Something like sadness crossed Natasha's face, a look of genuine empathy, but it faded into her always confident and unfeeling self in no time.

"It's an anniversary, but it's not Budapest. It's your anniversary. One year since the raid... one year since we recovered you from that HYDRA base."

"...Oh..." you let fall from your lips, unsure what else to say. Even though your sense of time was thrown off long ago, having such an important date thrust upon you so suddenly kind of left you speechless. "I um... I didn't even realize. I lost track of the days a long time ago, back when we were still in the old facility. I tried keeping track of them for a while, but..."

"Fury didn't really like you doodling on the walls?" Natasha guessed.

"More or less. I thought about carving it somewhere on my body, but that seemed morbid... and a good way to convince you all I really was crazy," you admitted with a chuckle.

"I've seen saner prisoners do worse. Isolation like that... it's not easy. It's not exactly the most righteous thing to do, either; solitary confinement is basically hell on Earth. That was one of the reasons that Fury insisted we spend so much time inside the living space you were provided, why we didn't just monitor you through cameras in a cell."

Something about the way she said that made it sound like she was familiar with it... maybe they'd done it before.

"Anyway... I appreciate you letting me know. I'll mark it on the calendar in the bedroom. It... is kind of a big date, I guess."

"Kind of like a second birthday," Natasha said, smiling softly.

"Yeah, kind of..." you agreed slowly. "Hey, where's Clint anyway? He never misses a chance to celebrate, especially if it involves alcohol."

"Clint's off on a mission for the next few days," Natasha explained. "Couldn't be postponed, or he'd have given Fury hell about it until he relented."

"Be honest with me here," you said with a shake of your head, "how many times have you guys saved the world?"

"The world? Only a couple times. The free world? Maybe a few more than that."

"I can't tell if you're joking or not. Both options terrify me. You can go ahead and make yourself at home; give me a few minutes and I'll adjust my dinner plans... any chance your refined palate could deal with 'baby's first quesadillas'?"

"Sounds delicious," Natasha said with a laugh as she headed into the living room. Though she walked out of sight, you could hear her moving things around, but you tried not to focus too much on what she was doing. After all, your cooking job just got a whole lot more complicated. Your frozen dinners weren't going to cut it tonight...

"Please, late night Food Network binges, let me have learned something."

Though you'd only cooked meat with these spices once before, and never actually made a quesadilla, you managed four of them that looked at least halfway edible... though it did take quite a while. But you never heard Natasha complain about the delay; whatever she was doing in there took quite a while, and when she finally settled down, she was more than happy to talk to you while you cooked.

It was one of the most innocent conversations you'd ever had with her; rather than talk about SHIELD she seemed oddly interested in the things that you had been doing to pass the time in your new home. You told her a little bit about the hobbies you had experimented with... and she told you about ballet. You were glad that she was in the living room, because if she had line of sight on you, she'd certainly have noticed your jaw drop.

"So... ballet, huh? Why that in particular?" You asked, hoping your voice was as casual as you were trying to sound at the moment.

"Practical training," she said, her voice oddly harsh. "I spent so much time learning to survive and learning to kill, even my hobbies needed to be practical. Ballet teaches agility, dexterity, balance, fluid movement... I need all of those things. I just found a way to train them that I also enjoy."

"Alright, no more about you, back to me," you said, chuckling.

"Sorry, did I make you uncomfortable?"

"No, I just..." you sighed, unsure how to word yourself to avoid awkwardness. You used plating the last of the quesadillas and preparing everything to carry into the living room as an excuse to go silent, while you contemplated how best to word what you were thinking.

"I was making a joke about it because I wasn't sure how to react, honestly. You don't tell me much about yourself, and I'm kind of used to that. Hearing you open up a little about your thought process is... new. But definitely welcome."

There was a long pause. The silence made you turn your words over in your head, wondering if you had crossed a line. But Natasha's eventual response alleviated those concerns... though it set off a few alarms in your head all the same.

"Well, I've spent the last year trying to pry every secret you have out of you, willing or otherwise. Only seems fair that I spill a few of my own. So... any big curiosities you want answered?"

"Uh... let me think on it for a minute," you stammered out.

Her offering to answer questions like that – when a few weeks or months ago she would have put you into an arm-bar for just asking her where she was the night before – put you on an alert level you weren't really expecting. It was as if your whole body reacted to her shift in tone. The hair on the back of your neck stood on end, and your eyes narrowed in a concern and agitation that felt almost foreign. You tried to get your shock under control as you scooped up the plates for yourself and Natasha, but honestly, you weren't sure how successful you were as you strolled into the living room.

Not that it likely mattered. The surprise on your face was genuine when you saw what Natasha had prepared for you. Apparently in addition to the bottle she had smuggled in a pair of wine glasses; by the time you arrived there were already two glasses poured and ready, each with a wine so crimson it might well have been blood.

"Thought I heard you finishing up in there," Natasha said with a smile as you walked in. "Not sure how well this wine pairs with your cooking, but we'll call the drinks a celebratory success, even if it doesn't end up being a culinary one."

"If you manage to get through the amnesiac, newbie cook's plate without gagging I'll call it a culinary success," you replied as you set Natasha's food down in front of her.

"What a pleasant visual for such a pleasant meal," Natasha replied dryly, as she reached down and took the first sip out of her wineglass before you were even seated beside her.

You didn't bother to reply except with a wry smirk as the two of you began to dig in. The meal was... shockingly tolerable, and that was probably the nicest thing you could say. The tortillas were only slightly overdone, the meat was only a little off flavor, and the wine... well, the wine was easily the best part, though it didn't really pair well with your food.

You weren't sure that anything paired well with your food, though.

"That was actually pretty good for your first try," Natasha said, smiling at you. You turned toward her, and... and-

Was she sitting that close before?

You blinked at the realization and turned back to your wine. You faked a smirk and took a drink while you gave yourself time to process. You were barely a glass and a half in, so you knew you weren't intoxicated to the point that you'd just miss her sliding over... but you were sure you'd sat farther away on the couch. Natasha was almost touching you now; her hand actually brushed your thigh as she adjusted slightly. And the way she was smiling at you was cute, flirty, almost seductive...

It was everything that Natasha had never been to you, and more.

"I, um, let me go put our plates away," you said, taking the opportunity to escape as you stood up from the couch and made your way toward the kitchen.

"Alright, but hurry back – or I'll finish this bottle myself," Natasha teased as you walked away into the kitchen. You waited until you were fully out of sight before you let yourself release the breath you barely knew you were holding.

Your mind, heart, and body all felt like they were pulling you in three separate directions. Physically, the intimacy with Natasha felt amazing, in more than just an immediate way. You had felt along for so long that even the accidental brush with her hand was like a lightning bolt of stimulation up your entire arm. Honestly... aside from sparring, the most time you'd ever spent touching another human being was when Natasha guided you out of your old facility while it was under attack. Your hands were shaking now, and some part of you wanted to run back in there and sit even closer to her than before to see how she reacted.

Somewhere deep in your mind, you already knew that her actions were probably something different than they appeared, some form of lie or deception. Despite how hard you had been trying to trust SHIELD and its operatives, something about their behavior lately had you so on edge that you could barely contain yourself in the face of such a strange turnabout. Your mind wanted you to run back in there and scream at her, to tell her you were onto her, that your nice new apartment and the fancy packaging hadn't made you forget how you were treated when you woke up.

But that wouldn't be fair. It wasn't as if this was the first sign of trust or friendship she had shown you. Besides that, you weren't even sure how well you were reading her. She was always so inscrutable, wearing so many different masks of personality and mood that it was difficult to tell what she was actually thinking no matter how hard you watched her.

You couldn't convince yourself that she was being genuine, though. You had broken the mask she wore at least a few times before. Not often, to be sure, and not always in a meaningful way. Actually, the closest you'd come to seeing a sliver of the person underneath in the past, Natasha had given you the cold shoulder for weeks. Then Clint had nearly broken several of your bones to really drive the point home. In comparison to what you felt from her back then, that raw emotion, that anger... seeing her like this didn't feel like she was lifting the mask, it felt like she had put a new one on while you weren't looking.

You weren't even sure why you felt that way... and you wished you could remain that ignorant. That was really the core of what your heart said about the situation. You wanted to believe she was being genuine, wanted to let yourself indulge in that fantasy... even if it was only for a little while. You wanted to believe that she could have those kind of reactions and feelings, could do such a drastic turnabout regarding you, and that she could really see the things in you that she seemed to be playfully suggesting...

But even your naïve heart couldn't believe that it was true.

You scraped off the last of the food from her plate and into the sink, shaking your head to clear your thoughts. There was no point in worrying about things like this – either you'd figure out what was up, or you wouldn't. Worst case, they might keep acting awkward around you for a few more weeks before things went back to normal. Best case... well, in your whole life you couldn't remember any scenario that turned out to be the best case, so you didn't bother to think about that too much.

You trailed back into the living room with a soft smile, one that Natasha eagerly matched when she saw you. It looked like while you were gone she took the liberty of refilling both of your glasses with the last of the bottle, and she was already halfway through her own.

"I thought you weren't going to come back there for a minute," Natasha said with a soft smile. "Didn't anyone ever tell you not to keep a girl waiting?"

"Not that I can remember," you said dryly, raising and eyebrow at her. She offered you a smirk in reply, shaking her head.

"Guess I had that one coming," she said, not even hesitating as you sat down beside her so closely that your thighs were touching. If anything, as you dared to push yourself against her - if only to test her reaction - she pushed her leg back against yours.

"After everything I've been through you're lucky if a bit of sarcasm is all you have coming," you replied to her with a grin that felt fake. Despite the meal being over and the bottle being empty, Natasha didn't show any signs of leaving or backing away from you as she slowly sipped her final glass. You stared awkwardly at the glass of wine in front of you, still full from its latest refill, as you debated with yourself on how to approach things.

"...You're right."

The words were simple, and they left you waiting for a follow-up that never quite came. When Natasha remained silent for a few seconds too long, you finally glanced over, and noticed her staring reflectively into her wine.

"You've been through a lot... and we do have a lot coming to us in return. But more importantly, you're still holding it all together. That's pretty incredible, you know that, right?" She says, sighing. "I've been working with SHIELD since I was barely out of my teen years. I've seen agents broken by half of what you've had to deal with... this isn't a career most people can hold for as long as Clint and I have, much less Fury."

"What are you, uh..." you begin, trailing off as you start to contemplate the unusual tone of her voice. "...I feel like you're trying to give me a compliment, but I'm not sure how to read it."

"I just..." Natasha slid closer to you just then, until your thighs weren't the only thing pressing against each other – until her face was only inches from yours. "You've told me before you didn't know where I was coming from, that I wore too many faces to understand, so... I really hope you understand what I'm saying right now."

Natasha paused for a moment, staring into your eyes. The chills running down your spine intensified as her pupils locked with yours. Something sintimate passed betwee the two of you then. Something your body understood more than your mind. You wanted to ask what that meant, what she was saying that was so important, but before you could, she wrapped an arm around your neck and pulled you toward her, closing her eyes and puckering her lips. It shocked you to your core to see her move like that, so much that you barely understood what was happening... but your body seemed to recognize something your mind didn't.

Which is why you placed your hand on Natasha's shoulder and pushed her away gently as she closed the gap. As you halted her advance her eyes opened again, and the two of you met each other's eyes again. There was something different about the exchange... but that same understanding passed between you again.

"I... I'm sorry," you whispered, uncertain of why you were apologizing. "This isn't right."

"...No," Natasha agreed, after a moment of pause, "it isn't."

She glanced away from you for a moment. She idly passed her hand through her hair, and brushed away some of her curls from her face. In an instant her expression returned to its usual, neutral tones... but there was something else. Something almost... happy?

"I'm sorry... you're an assignment for SHIELD. I should never have tried something like that," Natasha said, shaking her head. "I won't do it again."

"No, it's more than that, I-" you tried to say, but Natasha cut you off again. She smiled at you openly now, the corners of her eyes creased slightly as she shushed you even as she reached for her glass.

"Tell you what, how about a proper toast, and then we forget this happened?" Natasha proposed, before she raised up her glass. You were still a bit lost for words, uncertain what had just happened. You wanted to ask her so many things, but your body reacted almost of its own will, as you raised up your own wine glass to break the awkward silence.

"What are we toasting to?" You asked, as some part of you remained very uncertain.

"Second chances. Something you know better than anyone," Natasha proposed. Unsure of how to react to the strange gleam in her eyes, the sorrowful smirk she now wore, you clinked your glass together with hers and downed it in a quick fashion. Before the last drops of wine had passed your lips, though, something occurred to you. Something you'd been too shocked by her actions to take notice of.

"If Fury wasn't okay with you drinking around me," you began, just moments before your head began to spin, "why... why would he be okay with this?"

"With celebrating your anniversary?" Natasha asked in reply... but you could see the tinge of worry at the corners of her lips. You frowned before continuing.

"You just... you got me drunk and confessed your feelings... and then you tree- you trow- you tried to kiss me... in front of the same camel- camaro- cameras he... saw you..."

Words failed you in those moments, and your body too. You wanted to panic, wanted to freak out as you began to slump off of the couch, as your body fell toward the rough carpet.

But the only one there to save you was Natasha. And all you read on her face before the darkness consumed you was resolution...

...and... was that, even for a moment...

...regret?

Chapter Text

Panic ran in your veins before you even fully finished waking up. Not because of any conscious thought, but rather an intimate, very much unconscious familiarity with your situation. Your mind was hazy, your instincts uncertain, and your memories failed you as you tried desperately to right yourself. Anxiety, stress, and sheer terror maliciously echoed through your body and soul as you struggled to remember something – anything – about who and where you were.

"No... it's not the same."

That thought was comforting, but only for a moment. It came as you realized that all of your memories were intact, all of your feelings were there, they were only subdued. This was completely unlike the day you'd awoken in that cell, the day that Natasha had subdued you and delievered you to SHIELD. It was far more like the days after waking up from Clint and Natasha's late night outings, complete with the headache and body fatigue. You'd never been so happy to realize how intimately you could recognize the difference between an amnesiac and a sedative...

Nor had you ever been so furious about having one used on you.

You forced yourself up even as you fought to maintain your balance, using the coffee table to struggle upward. You ignored the remnants of quesadillas that showered the carpet as you shook the table with your unsteady weight, and the wine glass that shattered on the floor as you struggled to your feet. You focused your entire mind on righting yourself and standing up... because every part of your brain that wasn't focused on that started replaying your memories from last night over again.

"Of course it wasn't genuine," you told yourself as you found your way up to your knees. "Why would it be? She's better than me, and I've always known that. That's why I stopped her. I knew... I knew she could never..."

That train of thought hurt too much so you forced yourself to focus on the effort required to push yourself up further, until you had one foot underneath of you and managed to raise your head above the coffee table.

"Fury would never have approved of any of this. I was a fool to think otherwise, to even believe they'd defy him for me. Of course they were waiting, of course they were hoping I'd let my guard down, so that she could..."

Tears formed at the corner of your eyes, and you forced yourself to stop that train of thought. You wouldn't cry. Not here, not now. There would be time to mourn your ignorance and innocence... but later, after you had assessed the full extent of the damage done by your trust.

The living room was the first and most obvious casualty. You hadn't had much in your budget for furniture over the last several weeks, but the few pieces you had managed to acquire were thoroughly ransacked. Both of the drawers of your coffee table were fully pulled out and turned over on the carpet, the table itself was upside down, and even your TV stand had been clearly moved from where it was, shelves removed and the television itself unplugged and set aside.

Stumbling through the rest of your "home" showed you similar scenes across the rest of the rooms. Your storage closet was opened and the contents spilled out across the floor, including several of the shelves fully broken and ripped free. The basket of your dirty clothes had been overturned and spread out. Fury's laptop was gone from its spot on your desk, and it seemed to have been one of the only things that was outright taken. The worst, though, was when you stumbled into your bedroom.

Your dresser was overturned, one door completely broken free and laying uselessly on the ground a full foot away from its main body. Your few clothes were strewn about the floor haphazardly where they had landed after being ripped from the drawers. Your pillow had been slashed open and turned nearly inside out, your blankets were strewn around the room, the curtains had been pulled down, and

But the worst casualty was your mattress itself, which had been pulled from the bedframe and cast onto the floor. There were at least a dozen open cuts on it in varying places, and most of the matress' interior had been pulled free to reveal the innards of it. Not only was the mattress itself now borderline useless for actually sleeping upon, but you didn't even have to check to know immediately that your most treasured possession had surely been taken.

It was the only logical reason to assume Fury and his cronies would finally blow their cover, the only thing they could be seeking so desperately that they would give up all subtlety and literally tear your apartment to find. They didn't trust you enough to even let you have the privacy of a diary, they had to know every last one of your secrets. You still didn't know why they would be so desperate...

But you didn't need to. And you had a sinking feeling you would soon find out anyway.

"Five minutes," you said, your voice low and dangerous. "That's how long you fucking assholes have until I find out just how good your security is. I know you can hear me. I know you're probably watching me right now – I bet you had cameras in here the whole time. Well, the game's fucking over, you hear me?! You have five minutes to explain yourselves, otherwise I'm heading to that sunroom and I'm going out the windows – I don't give a fuck if the fall kills me, it's better than spending one more second in here with you liars and traitors!"

There never was an answer. You weren't really expecting one, to be fair – though you no longer trusted them not to have cameras in here, actually having speakers to talk to you directly seemed a little excessive. But you had a clock on the wall, and that was all you really needed. Your threat wasn't an idle one – you were intending to test their security.

But fuck the window. You were going out the front door. And let hell fall upon anyone who stood in your way. You might still die, but you were taking as many people with you as you could.

Thankfully your test of the building's integrity never became quite necessary. You didn't even have to wait five minutes – only around half of your generous offer of time had passed when you heard the soft click of the front door, and at least two sets of feet walked inside your "home". You stood still, remaining in the bedroom as the sounds of their approach moved into the living room... and stopped there.

"Making me come to you, then?" You thought with a bitter sigh. "Couldn't even give me the dignity of waiting for you to arrive..."

Reluctantly you ventured out of your bedroom, what had once been your safe space from prying eyes. You strode out with your head held as high as you could bear, your mind already running over what you were about to go through. You tried to consider every possible outcome, and prepare for combat... just like they taught you, you realized with a sneer.

"Clint and Natasha? Fury and Natasha? Fury and Clint? A couple random guards?" You wondered, not sure exactly who you were about to face. The short distance between your bedroom and the hallway meant you didn't have to wait long to find out that the answer was in fact Nick Fury and Agent Barton, both waiting for you at the far end of the living room...

And Clint had already nocked an arrow to his bowstring before you even walked in.

"I believe that there may be some explanations in order," Fury said, his voice as calm as ever. Somehow his stoic demeanor and his lack of concern pissed you off even more than it normally did.

"Don't tell me you're going to stand there and pretend like this was all part of the fucking deal," you growled, voice low and dangerous. Neither Fury or Clint seem to react to your tone. "Dont stand there and act like this is all normal. Don't pretend you're lecturing me about drinking, or about not submitting to your fucking medical tests, or just me being a mouthy prick. This is fucked up beyond recognition. You knew I had those diary pages hidden, you probably searched the fucking room when I was out with Natasha and Clint. When you didn't find them you knew I was smart enough to take them with me."

"We didn't know you had any kind of records," Fury said, not even flinching at your accusations. His one eye remained steadily leveled at you. "We suspected, but we didn't know. That's why we had to take such drastic measures."

"Bullshit," you replied without hesitation. "You've been watching me this whole fucking time. How else would you even know I was onto you? How would you know I was threatening to jump out the window if you weren't already listening?"

"We watched the living room cameras to see when you woke up... as for the shouting, you aren't exactly being quiet. Or subtle," Fury deadpanned.

"Oh, bull-fucking-shit," you emphasized, gritting your teeth so hard you thought your molars were about to crack. "You spent all this time talking about trust, and convincing me to believe for one second that you had my best interests in mind... and now this? You drugged me. You violated the very little privacy I ever even started to believe that I had. And now you walk in here with someone I had actually started to respect ready to put an arrow through my chest if I even twitch at you."

"...I'm not going to shoot you," Clint said. His voice was low, and dangerous... but you didn't miss his eyes flicking to Fury with annoyance.

"Clint's only here because I asked him to be," Fury said. He frowned deeply, although his eye didn't leave your face.

"What's the matter, Fury?" You ask, putting your hands out in a taunting gesture. "You told me once you could handle me on your own. Suddenly changed your mind?"

"Is that a threat?" Fury asked, staring you down. There was a long pause, where even Clint didn't dare to interject with one of his quips.

"That depends," you said at last. "Are you gonna stop me if I try to go for the door?"

Your entire body was tensed, ready for the slightest movement – from either of them. Your eyes flicked back and forth, adrenaline coursing through your veins, ready for the surely inevitable answer. Whether it was with words or with violence, you were sure they were about to-

"No, we're not," Fury finally said, some of the tension leaving his body. "If you want, we'll even leave the door open for you on our way out. I didn't ask Clint here to protect me... I asked him because I thought you deserved to face the people that have been lying to you."

"Well, last I checked, you're still missing at least one," you spat at him. "So that's another lie right there."

"...Things don't always work out the way we want them to," Fury said coldly. "Natasha didn't lie to you. She was just a messenger for me."

"Don't give me your fucking riddles and doublespeak right now, Fury," you warned.

"Fine. You want honesty? Real honesty?"

"Yeah, I do," you said, snarling. "But why in the living fuck would I ever believe anything you say again, ever?"

"...If you're smart, you won't," Fury said after a brief pause. "The shit I do? The things I deal with on a daily basis, the things I've seen? I don't trust my own men. I let Clint and Natasha think I was dead for days, because I wasn't sure one of them wasn't involved. I kept a secret profile on SHIELD servers with full top-level security clearance using the whites of the eye I went blind in years ago, because I didn't trust the men I worked with. You know what happened? It helped save the country. Maybe the whole damn planet. This world doesn't have room for blind trust."

"Uplifting speech," you spat, shaking your head.

"There's a time for heroism, and there's a time for realism," Fury said, his voice rising slightly. "And from the moment we found you in that cell, shit got real. So if you want honesty, here it is – in writing."

Fury reached into his black trenchcoat and pulled free a substantial wad of papers, tossing them onto the living room table – which was thankfully still upright. You were hesitant to examine them, but you figured if Clint or Fury wanted you dead they would have shot you already. Still, when you finally did reach down and pick up the papers, you weren't much better off than before.

"These are... 'Genetic Analysis of Subject 117-A', 'Preservation of Living Tissue from Subject 117-A', 'Analysis by Dr. Pym of Altered Mitochondrial Structure'..." you mumbled, glancing over the papers. Most of it was written in such complex language it may as well have been an entirely different tongue altogether. The only thing you could figure out was...

"I'm Subject 117-A. That's what you're saying?" You mumbled as you looked back to Fury, still furious. "This doesn't help me at all. I don't have the background or education to understand most of this, and if I did, I still wouldn't trust that any of it is real."

"Good, you finally took my advice on something then," Fury said, smirking as if he was actually proud of your unwillingness to trust him. "But I'll break it down for you all the same. For the record, I never lied to you about the things that HYDRA did to you. I never deceived you about the treatments that were done to your body... I just never told you the full truth of what we understood about it."

"Goddammit Fury, not this bullshit again," you swore, shaking your head in disbelief.

"I'm afraid it's exactly that bullshit again. Same shit I've been dealing with for just over a year now," Fury said, mirroring your annoyance. "I told you about what they did to you. They mixed old and new, experimental with proven. They gave you the closest thing they've managed to create to a super-soldier serum after over seventy years of development. Then they combined it with the most radical genetic therapy we've ever seen. Something so fucked up it killed every single one of their test subjects... every last one, except for you."

"Yeah, I remmeber," you said tersely. It wasn't easy to forget the nightmares that Fury's words had instilled in you – visions of other people, other human beings, crushed under the weight of their own organs or shrunken into nonexistence piece by piece. Bloody messes left by contorted bodies of inconsistent size... you shuddered just thinking about what could have been.

"What I never told you was just how perfect they made you," Fury said quietly. "We still don't know if you had the perfect gene sequence needed to complete their treatment, if they were experimenting with an entirely new method, or if you're just a one-in-a-million success for a flawed experiment. Whatever the case is, your body synchronized perfectly. Your cells are nearly flawless, the absolute peak of human potential. Hell, if I had to guess, the only reason you aren't even stronger is because of how long you spent chained up in a HYDRA base, and then sitting around in our cells without any exercise."

"Natasha and Clint are still kicking my ass on a daily basis. I don't feel that perfect," you replied, some of the anger gone from your voice. Not because you weren't still infuriated – but because Fury still seemed hesitant about something.

"You're unskilled, to be sure. You don't have the combat prowess or the muscle memory of a trained soldier; Clint and Natasha both agreed on that. It's hard to suppress survival instincts and combat reflexes, but they landed blows on you anyone with experience would've at least tried to counter. That was one of the reasons I started to believe your amnesia."

"Fuckin' glad all those blows to he head counted for something," you grumbled.

"But you improved faster than we expected – and not just because you were learning how to get out of the way of a fist. You were getting faster, stronger, and even your reflexes were improving. What HYDRA did to you pushed you just shy of the peak of human potential... and then they used their imperfect Pym Particles to push you even further. To let you grow – literally – beyond what a human should be able to do. At least, that's our theory. We didn't let you train long enough to test it."

"What the hell are you saying, Fury?" you asked in frustration.

"Easiest example is your muscle tissues. Human muscles get stronger by tearing themselves apart and rebuilding. Every time you use your muscle fibers they get damaged, and when they repair themselves, they're bigger – stronger. But everyone has a set amount of muscle tissue; the only thing that changes is how big it gets, based on how often they use it and how far they push their own limits. You? You're different.

"When use your muscles, they get damaged just like ours. But when your body is repairing itself, that's when their little experiment kicks in. Your body generates these particles in just the right alignment and number to shrink the cells that are repairing themselves. That leaves little micro-tears in your muscle tissue, empty holes where cells should be. Thanks to the serum they developed trying to emulate Captain America, your body has an advanced ability to heal. Nothing crazy... but enough to make your body fill in the hole with even more muscle cells."

"But... if the cells shrink and then more fill it in, shouldn't I just be stuck at the same level?" You asked.

"Pym Particles shrink tissue, but the shrunken tissue functions at the same strength and durability as it had at its original size," Fury said, shaking his head. "If you think that sounds crazy, you'd think half the shit in those papers was downright insane if you could understand it. Once we understood the full extent of the effects this shit had on your body, it got a lot easier to believe your memory would be wiped.

"Every single one of your body's systems has been overhauled because of the way your healing factor interacts with the Pym Particles. Your nervous system, sensory organs, respiratory and circulatory systems are all completely revamped. Hell, you take enough punches and your skin will be so thick you could tank a bullet. You'll probably hit a point eventually where you can't improve – some kind of caloric limit maybe, where you can't eat enough - even with your body's enhanced efficiency - to add more muscle mass and still meet your BMR. Best guess by our scientists is that eventually you'll hit a peak where your body mass is too much to improve further, since the Pym Particles leave that intact. But we have no idea where that line is, or how you'll reach it."

"I... you can't be serious, I- you'd never let me go if you thought that was true," you whispered, unwilling to believe Fury but unable to escape the gravitas of what he was implying. "I'd be unstoppable."

"Unstoppable?"

Clint was actually the one to interject then – and he did so with that single word, and then laughed. Genuinely laughed, looking almost shocked at your words.

"Listen kid, you might have potential there, but Natasha and I still kicked your ass every time we sparred. You might be able to grow faster than us, go farther than us... but we're the lowest part of the totem pole," Clint warned. "I work on a regular basis with people who can break buildings like they're styrofoam. Who tank bombs like they're a stiff breeze. Whatever you're capable of, whatever you might become one day... you have no idea what you'd still be up against."

"Clint's right," Fury said calmly. "You're building muscle mass and improving your reflexes at human levels. Peak human, but still human. Even at the lowest end of our best estimates of your potential... you won't reach it until decades after I'm gone, and you're no longer my problem. To be quite frank, you aren't the threat we're worried about."

"Then why all the secrecy?" You asked, utterly confused. Either this was all some massive ruse, the purpose of which you weren't totally sure of yet, or he was telling you the truth, and you weren't much more dangerous than the average street thug – at least, not yet. Maybe not for years.

"Because the real threat is what you represent," Fury said, his voice deadly serious again. "You're a sign they're getting closer. HYDRA has been trying for seventy years to create a treatment that can create a new supersoldier, something as strong – or stronger – than Captain America, or any of the other Avengers. If they figure out what made you a success, if they learn how to reliably make soldiers like you? It'll be one of the single biggest threats to international security that came from within our own solar system. Because there won't just be one of you – there will be thousands."

"So what's the point of telling me this?" You finally asked, unsure of what else to say. "You know I can't afford to believe any of it. Even if it's the truth, this is the third... fourth? Fuck, I've actually lost track. Let's just say that even if I thought this was the truth, I have no reason to think it's the whole truth."

"I'm telling you because this might be my last chance," Fury said after a long pause. He gave a sigh and shifted his glance away from you, toward Clint. Only for a moment. "I already told you I never trust anything completely. Even if I did, we know HYDRA will be looking for you. Let me be perfectly clear – no matter what city, state, country, or continent you go to for the rest of your life... SHIELD will be watching."

"You sound like I have a choice where to go," you said, angry but... almost hopeful.

"...You have two choices," Fury said simply, meeting your gaze. "Move past this. Know and understand that everything we've done was because the alternatives were a thousand times worse. Accept it, move on... and work for SHIELD."

"Fuck you," you said, mostly out of reflex.

"The second option is... to keep being the you that we've known for so long. You can walk out that door right now. I won't stop you, Clint won't stop you, and Natasha isn't even in the building."

"But you'll still be watching me. Monitoring me. Following my every move," you said, all as statements, not questions.

"We will. Just as closely as if you were working for us," Fury promised, his eye never leaving your own gaze. "Because I don't take chances."

"Neither do I. Not anymore," you replied, striding forward until you were so close to Fury that your nose nearly brushed his own.

"And one more time... Fuck you," you said, this one entirely intentional.

You strode for the door, half-expecting an arrow in your back before you cleared the threshold, while the other half expected a fiery redhead to be holding a gun to your temple the moment you opened the door.

Neither happened. Nothing stopped you from the front door of your apartment to the doors of the complex itself. No one stood in your way, no one begged you to stay.

And what hurt the most was that despite your anger and hatred, there was one person – just one – you wished would have been there to stop you.

Chapter Text

Although it pained you to admit it, nothing had ever terrified you quite like that first night out on your own.

Walking around the streets of an unfamiliar city, seeing faces that could've been SHIELD, HYDRA, or something worse than both... it was a nightmare of anxiety and stress that had you literally jumping at shadows. You didn't know where you were going to sleep, didn't know who would be watching you sleep... didn't know who might interrupt that sleep...

The only reasonable answer you ended up finding was not to sleep at all. Not that first night. You couldn't decide if you felt better in crowded areas, where anyone could be a threat, or in secluded areas, where you were less likely to be noticed, but more likely to be ambushed even in the middle of the street. You stuck to the shadows in the areas with just enough traffic to feel safe, and you tried not to let anyone get close enough to put a needle or a knife in your neck.

But you knew that you couldn't go on for long like that. Although your need for sleep had decreased a lot, it hadn't really disappeared. By the time the morning sun was up, you could feel the first pulls of late night tiredness tugging at your mental acuity. You wanted to find somewhere you felt comfortable enough to close your eyes, but doing so wasn't easy. You were lacking in one critical tool – money.

As you had left Fury's secured facility, an agent had been waiting outside – not to stop you, as you had originally feared, but instead to thrust into your hands a folder stuffed with papers. You managed to resist the urge to instinctively throw it back in their face long enough to actually read what some of the papers said. They were identification... legal papers, birth certificate, social security card... even fake documents asserting a father and mother that you were sure didn't exist. You didn't bother to thank the SHIELD agent. Frankly, a proper identity was the least they could do... and as far as you were concerned that didn't even cover their debt to you.

But they hadn't included a single dollar with their documentation. Probably Fury's attempt to get you to come crawling back... but the joke was on him. You'd rather stay awake for a week than go back there. No matter how much you-

"No. Don't think about it. Just keep moving."

You didn't know much about the world at large, so you couldn't afford to wait around. The moment the sun was up you were looking for accommodations... and by the time noon came around, you'd had absolutely no luck. Every place you went to wanted money in advance. Hotel fees, rent, deposits, proof of work... some of them went away as you went to the seedier areas of town, but the worse the conditions and the less identification they asked for, the more cold, hard cash they wanted up front. Lots of people just straight up refused your business, either when you walked in or after they saw you pulling ID out of a folder.

"Fucking hell, this is unending," you mumbled as your search met another road block early in the evening. You were leaned against a wall in an alleyway outside of a run-down motel, after yet another front desk worker had demanded money you didn't have for a room you probably wouldn't have felt safe sleeping in anyway once you got inside. The grimy brick wall was a reminder of how shitty your situation was. Not for the first time you reconsidered the amenities of the SHIELD facility, the knowledge that your next meal was guaranteed and the comforts of a familiar bed.

As with every time before, you angrily rejected it.

"No, I can't give in. Nobody said this was gonna be easy. I'll give it a half an hour to decompress, then I'll look around and see if anyone is willing to pay for some quick night work. Worst case, I can stay awake for one more night without being too out of it. There has to be someone that-"

"Give me the fucking folder, your wallet, and anything else worth a damn, or I'll swipe it off your corpse!"

The words came from a man with a gun, who came around the corner of the dumpster to your right as you were lost in thought. You cursed yourself for being so distracted; by the time you noticed the movement he was already pivoting around the near corner, his pistol aimed at your head and moving toward your face. But as you shifted your gaze toward him, something in your memory triggered. Something about the movement, something about the way he was approaching you, the sight of that loaded barrel moving to press against your forehead...

"One day you'll be able to keep up with the pace of a battle, to be aware of your surroundings, to stay ahead of your opponent and control the fight as it happens. But that's gonna take a lot of training, and some real world experience. Until then, if HYDRA or anyone else attacks you again? You need to be able to react before you think, you need to move the second someone comes at you. You need to stop them, before they hurt you or someone you care about."

By the time the memory of Natasha's words during training finished echoing through your head, you were already in motion as your instincts and muscle memory kicked in. The gun the man held glistened and flashed in the afternoon sun as you grabbed it by the barrel and pulled it to the right. The sound of a gunshot echoed through the air as a bullet lodged itself into the bricks beside your head, but before the pain of the sound ringing in your ears had even registered, your other hand had wrapped around the man's wrist and pulled in the opposite direction you'd tugged the gun. His grip on the weapon was lost, and you pulled it out of his hand as if snatching a toy from the hand of a toddler.

Your heart pounded and your brain seemed to finally catch up with the rest of your body as you pulled the weapon free; you realized what you had done – what you were still doing - and for an instant you paused. You'd reacted without thinking, before the fear and the shock had even hit you. Now that it had, you had no idea what to do...

Except to finish the move. Which was exactly what your body did.

You passed the weapon into your other hand, gaining a proper grip on it. The man's eyes had barely begun to widen with the realization of what had happened when you started to retaliate. Compared to your sparring matches with Natasha and Clint, it was as though this man was moving in slow motion. He was unrefined, unprepared, and despite catching you by surprise he surrendered that advantage at your first response. By the time he understood just how fucked he was, the bottom of his own handgun was being crammed into his skull, and the man dropped limply to the concrete below.

You took a half-step back as the man crumpled to the ground, unconscious and likely concussed. Though he was dealt with, the ramifications of your actions were not lost on you. This man had just tried to rob you, then to kill you... and now you'd probably damn near killed him. Adrenaline, shock, and confusion battled for control in your mind, and your body alternated between waves of panic, adrenaline, and clarity.

"Everyone heard that gunshot. Even in this neighborhood you've got maybe five minutes before the cops show up. Take what you can. Fight. Survive."

Clint's voice was just as clear as Natasha's in your mind, although you were quite certain that unlike her words, he'd never actually said that to you. You didn't have time to debate whether you were crazy or just high-strung and sleep deprived, though. You focused up and did what you had to.

Searching the man's pockets yielded a wallet and some loose cash – no more than a couple hundred in total, probably whatever he'd scraped off another target before coming to you. You jammed the cash into your pockets and threw the wallet and gun back on top of the man's unconscious body – although not before removing the magazine and sliding out every bullet onto the concrete, just to be safe.

You weren't worried about fingerprints. The only people with a record of your prints would be SHIELD, and the local police wouldn't exactly have access to those databases. Besides, if SHIELD wanted to haul you back into custody, they'd find a way to do it whether you actually did anything illegal or not.

The cash you took from the man provided you with two things. The first was a home, temporary as it was. You found a nearby hotel, one cheap enough for you to afford a couple nights at from your first payday, so that you didn't have to worry about where to sleep for a while. When you finally felt the overly firm comfort of that mattress under your butt, it was like sitting on a cloud to your tired body.

"I need to find work somehow. It's not safe out on the street, and I need to get enough money to defend myself. SHIELD, HYDRA, muggers, killers..."

Your hands were shaking now. You had held it together while the adrenaline was coursing through you, but now the shock of what had happened was kicking in. The only reason you were alive right now was because of all the lessons and training SHIELD had drilled into you...

A part of you was thankful. A part of you hated being in their debt, even a little.

"I need to train. Next time... next time I need to be prepared. I need to be stronger."

------------------------------------------------------------------

The hunt for a job didn't go as well as you'd hoped... not the next day, not the next week, not the next month. Every time you filled out a job application, you were reminded of all the things that you lacked. An address, a phone number, a bank account... a work history. Fury's documents provided you with the bare minimum identification required to exist, legally, as a human being. It did nothing to endear employers - or anyone else – to you.

The few jobs you did find were short, low-paying, and generally under-the-table day jobs. They didn't give you what you needed to get your feet under you; hell, they barely kept you rolling from hotel room to hotel room, trying to convince yourself you weren't probably the easiest person in the world to keep track of for an agency like SHIELD or HYDRA. Yet still, you found yourself slowly growing a small nest egg over time... it just wasn't through legitimate means.

Your stash had started innocently enough. A few weeks ago, on the way home from a thirteen-hour shift that would have had most ready to collapse, you were feeling oddly alert and energetic. You'd managed an entire five hours of sleep the night before, a personal best, and you had just received an offer for a seasonal job... altogether, it was more luck and fortune than you'd been blessed with since the moment you set foot outside of the SHIELD facility.

Which was why you probably should have expected the turn of luck as you headed back home that night.

To be fair, it wasn't really your luck that got you into the situation. It was some poor schmuck, a man whose face you never really saw clearly. He was sitting at an empty intersection, stuck at a red light that was taking far too long to turn for such an empty road at night. You were near the outskirts of the suburban exterior of the city, and not in one of the nicer neighborhoods at that; it didn't get a lot of car traffic past sunset, even in the "city that never sleeps".

The man was fiddling at a phone, not only distracting him but likely contributing to his night blindness that caused him to miss the man approaching the car. The man wearing a jacket that was ragged, but a bit too nice to be homeless – the man with a glistening tool in his right hand.

"Shit," you mumbled as you tried to pick up your pace. You prayed that the man would leave in time – the light was already turning yellow for the cross-traffic... but the man was so busy texting that he missed when it did finally flip over to green. You clenched your teeth as the man pulled up his weapon – a handgun, you now realized – and adjusted your path off the sidewalk.

"Hands up, out of the car! I said out of the fucking-"

The man never got the chance to finish his sentence. He was so hyped on the adrenaline in his system he missed the sound of your footsteps coming up behind him. You didn't give him a chance to react to your touch, either; you planted your hand in his short hair, grabbed the back of his skull, and slammed it down onto the sedan's roof so hard you left a dent in the metal. You'd actually hit the man a little too hard – you felt something cracking in the side of his head as it rebounded off the car's exterior, and the man fell limply to the ground, alive but definitely with a longer-term injury than you'd intended.

The man in the car let out a frightened yelp at the impact. He'd probably wet himself, thinking he'd just been shot, but when he saw you standing there it didn't seem to ease his tension much at first.

"It's your lucky day. Get the fuck out of here and pay more attention when you're driving; I won't be around next time," you warned gruffly, trying to stay back far enough that he wouldn't be able to see your face, if he was even coherent enough to remember anything about this encounter. The man nodded frantically, already slamming his foot on the gas and burning rubber as he tried to flee as quickly as possible.

You took a moment after the innocent man fled, and grimaced down at the unconscious assailant; he was bleeding from his nose and mouth, a sign you'd probably done more damage than you were aware of. You had no idea how to treat him, though, and you didn't have the desire to stick around even if you did. You emptied the chamber and magazine from the gun, then rifled through the man's pockets. You found a wallet with almost three hundred in twenties and small bills, and a cell phone in his front pocket. It was locked, but after some fiddling you were able to activate the emergency call and dial 911. As soon as you pressed the dial button you tossed the phone onto the man's back and started quickly walking away. Whatever happened after that was his problem.

That was how it had begun, anyway... you never meant to intervene in the situation, but you couldn't stand idly by as a man was robbed – or worse. You took the money from that night and invested in a set of dumbbells and cardio gear. It wasn't much, but it gave you something to do during the long hours spent in your cheap motel rooms, either after a night at work or during the hungry days when you couldn't find anyone looking for short term work. The more you exercised, the more you pushed yourself, the more you felt your body improving. Just like when you were under SHIELD's protection, training and pushing yourself seemed to accelerate whatever was happening with your body.

You slept less, ate a bit more, and at times felt like the world around you was slowing down. It was subtle, easy to ignore at first... but over time, the changes became more and more overt. After the first few weeks, you were actually forcing yourself to move and work slower, lift less weight, act more exhausted than you felt. Compared to SHIELD agents your progress had felt like a slow crawl, but now that you were out among the general populace, you were starting to feel just how accelerated your growth was.

And over time, forced to more or less reside only in the slummiest of motels... you were exposed to more and more of the seedy underbelly of the city. Some of it you could ignore quite easily; there was no moral imperative to interrupt a drug sale or a back-alley transaction. Other pedestrians seemed quite happy to block out or blatantly ignore the crimes around them, but when you witnessed something truly abhorrent, you couldn't stomach the thought of walking on as something atrocious occurred.

It hadn't started as an attempt to earn more money. The first few incidents mostly played out like the carjacking – wrong time, wrong place, unable to look away in the face of violent or unethical behavior by some nefarious individual. A man pulling a woman by her wrist into a back alley? You broke his arm, shattered his elbow, and left his empty wallet behind for the authorities to properly identify the unconscious man before they got him to a hospital. A young woman shimmying her way into a car that clearly wasn't hers, and then actually trying to hotwire it? You left her tied up with a pair of jumper cables you found in the back seat, unconscious and awaiting law enforcement's arrival. The set of three adolescents all gathered around a window, passing various electronics – first a TV, then a stereo set, then a full desktop computer and monitor – between themselves to stuff into a trunk? You left them all bloodied and bruised, tied up and locked inside their own car with a quick call to 911 to make sure the police got to them. You walked away with a busted lip after one of them caught you with a lucky sucker punch... and about five hundred dollars more in your wallet than when you started.

You weren't really sure when you started to actively look for those kinds of encounters, when you became confident (or foolish) enough to seek out criminals and take advantage of the thin veneer of justification that let you swipe countless bills without feeling guilty. It started with taking the long way home from any job you happened to luck into, wandering across blocks of the city you had no reason to linger in as if you were actually hoping to witness a mugging, or a purse-snatcher, or a carjacker. In time you started to learn which neighborhoods were the most likely to host such events, and started to almost subconsciously look for work in those areas.

At some point, you dropped the thin layer of pretense and admitted to yourself what you were doing. There was still some layer of morality to it all – you never acted until you were absolutely sure that someone was committing a crime, and you never went farther than you thought they deserved – but it eventually became impossible to deny that you weren't benefitting from the arrangement, no matter what justifications you tried to use. That didn't stop you from doing it, though. If anything, it encouraged you; having a nest egg of a few hundred dollars let you book a room at an extended-stay hotel, stop worrying about food day-to-day, and was building to the point that soon, you might be able to afford a cheap apartment. With a permanent address you'd finally be able to apply for real jobs, and things would be looking up for you.

Indeed, despite your misgivings about the morality of it, the benefits of your actions were too nice to give up. What actually stopped you was the night you were almost murdered in your own hotel room... and when you were saved by perhaps one of the last people you'd been expecting to see.

Chapter Text

The night air was cold when it filtered in through the window that didn't properly seal. You could have afforded a nicer hotel room by now, but dealing with a slight breeze in your room in order to save a few bucks every night added up pretty quickly. Honestly, things were looking a lot less bleak for you than they had just a few short weeks ago.

With a prepaid smartphone you'd done some basic research on building up credit from nothing... not only did hearing the stories of others teach you about secured credit cards and ways to start your financial life over, but they gave you good excuses for why you needed them. Things you could tell people that didn't involve SHIELD, HYDRA, or amnesia... since then, you had worked your way up to where you were now. Shitty hotels, sure – but you'd had a handful of job interviews over the past week, and you were set to view a few apartments just barely within your price range. Things had been looking up for a little while now.

Which was why you probably should have been on alert – even before you heard the voices approaching. Good things never lasted long.

Picking out voices had been one of your pasttimes when you were particularly bored, but you never stayed around any given hotel long enough to learn your neighbors, and the few times that you did, your neighbors usually changed on a nightly basis. Still, it was hard to miss the voices outside.

"Dillon, you're up front. You two, you're in next. Mitch is covering. Move fast, we don't want the cops in on this."

At first, you thought maybe it was a robbery, or a turf war of some kind. You wouldn't put it past the kinds of people that chose rooms like this to be involved in some pretty nasty shit. Honestly, given how many people you'd hurt over the past several weeks, you couldn't really say you were the most innocent person there, no matter how much they deserved it.

But even after the voices went quiet, you could hear the footsteps as they moved through the hotel parking lot. You'd been able to hear whispers – just bits and pieces really – even back in a SHIELD facility that was supposed to be soundproofed; listening in on conversations a few yards outside the door was nothing, and even judging distance and positioning from footsteps had become child's play over time.

So you knew before they were even at your threshold that they were almost certainly walking right toward you.

For a normal person, firearms would have been far too expensive to afford in your situation, especially in New York of all places. Heavily restricted to begin with, overpriced, too much identification and too thorough a background check required in most legitimate sales... a lot of obstacles.

For someone who didn't deal with the criminal elements of the city on a nightly basis.

You reached into your dresser for the miniature Glock you'd picked off of the unconscious body of a man who had very nearly finished rifling through the cash registers at a local grocery store when you stumbled upon the broken window he'd made his entrance through. It was the only gun you'd ever found small enough you could conceal it in your shoe without drawing attention to it, though it only held four rounds in the magazine.You quietly used your other hand to reach under your pillow and pull free the full-sized handgun you'd snatched off a would-be gas station robber. It didn't fit as a concealed carry... but it provided you the firepower you were now concerned that you would need.

There was a light rattling at the door, only the very quietest of plastic and metal jingling around. They had a key, probably a master keycard they'd either stolen or duplicated from the hotel's minimum wage staff – not that it would do them any good. The door's electronic lock slid open easily enough, but the wardrobe you'd slid over and laid against the door frame was far too heavily to move so easily. You heard them try once, then twice to press it open after they figured out the lock. When they realized there was another obstacle at work besides the hotel's cheap old-fashioned locks, they gave up on subtlety. You heard the lock release once more as a card was swiped.

Then the door burst open, kicked with so much force the dresser itself was damaged as it was thrown to the ground at an angle. There were multiple figures in the doorway – at least four by a quick glance, but before you had time to make a proper count you were already pulling the trigger on your gun.

Your ears felt like they were exploding from within as you unloaded the entire clip of the mini Glock plus the round in the chamber, five bullets finding their way into the mass of bodies standing in your newly opened doorway. Your hearing had become a little more resilient since it was first assaulted by a HYDRA flashbang so many weeks ago – not by much, but by enough for you to maintain focus as you tossed the newly emptied gun aside and gripped your remaining weapon with both hands, pointed toward the door with the intent of making every single bullet count.

After the shadowy figures crowding your doorway thinned out following your opening salvo, you counted two bodies that fell where they were, and heard at least one more crying out in pain. You had no idea how many there actually were, but you hoped that losing two members to the initial door penetration would dissuade them.

Hope was not something you'd been rewarded for often.

The glass of the window leading to the walkway outside your room shattered as a series of semi-automatic rounds were sent through it blindly, tearing through the curtains you kept fastidiously closed. You ducked down to protect yourself; even though they couldn't see exactly where they were firing, they were close enough that you could hear the sound of bullets on the wall just behind you as you frantically dove to the ground behind the mattress.

Though your ears were ringing, you could just barely make out the sounds of feet intruding on your room. You took a frantic breath to steady yourself as you pivoted over the mattress again, pointing your weapon toward the doorway. You saw two moving shadows and fired at both in sequence. The first fell in short order, making a disturbing noise as he fell to the floor, firing his gun twice into the roof of your hotel room in his death flails. You fired three rounds at the second person, who you only had a moment to notice was a heavily-tatted woman with a mohawk.

All three of them bounced off of her.

Sparks flew in the spots where your bullets connected with her skin – those sparks and the new holes in her outfit were the only way you could even properly tell that you'd hit her, because your bullets didn't hurt her. Hell, they didn't even seem to slow her down. As she came closer you dropped your weapon in desperation and reeled back to slam your fist into her face.

It worked about as well as you expected. Better, actually – this time there was some damage, in the form of what you suspected were at least two broken fingers.

"You're a hard one to track down, you know that?" The woman said, just a moment before she slammed her palm into your throat and pinned you against the wall. You nearly passed out from the impact to your throat alone – struggling for breath after she pinned you was almost fruitless. "Tell me who the fuck you work for, and who's been telling you about my operations, and I might make your death quick."

"Who... the fuck... are you?" You asked, grimacing as she tightened her grip.

"Don't fuck with me," she grunted, pinching your throat until you were gasping for even the slightest air. "You've been taking out my men for weeks. I wanna know who the fuck you think you are, and what made you wanna fuck with us."

"Seriously... I just fucked with scummy criminals... I didn't even know there was a gang running them," you wheezed, wondering if she would believe you. Wondering if she'd care, even if she did.

"You put half my haulers in prison and the other half in the hospital, damn near put my chop out of business," the woman said angrily. She pulled a knife out of her belt and brought it up to your stomach, beginning to slowly press the point into you. "If you expect me to believe that you weren't targeting us, I'm not fuckin' buying it. Why are you movin' in on my turf?"

"Well, 'cause... fuck you, that's why," you groaned out. There was no answer this woman was going to accept, and you apparently had no way to be able to injure her. You were done being walked on, even if she was going to threaten and intimidate you with pain and violence. If you had to die... at least you'd had the chance to die free.

"Brave... but a fuckin' idiot. Shame I didn't find you sooner," the woman said, smirking and tilting her blue mohawk to the side as she gripped your throat even tighter. "You seem like just the kind of dumbass I like to recruit."

You felt as if your throat was about to collapse when you heard it. The sound of something whirring through the air, almost silent – like a bullet, but slower. You couldn't see it, particularly since your vision was starting to darken around the edges. Then there was a loud noise, somewhere between a metallic clank and a fleshy thunk, and the woman's head impacted the wall, and you saw the briefest flash of red, white, and blue on the back of her head before the whirring receded.

The hand around your throat loosened in an instant, restoring your full blood- and airflows. You fell to your knees by the wall, gasping as you struggled to understand what was happening and the oxygen flowed back into your system. Your bullets had done nothing, and yet this woman had been so easily dealt with? You expected to see a great many things when you raised your head again, all of them terrifying.

None of them were a man wearing a bright blue suit with red and white highlights as he refitted a star-spangled shield onto his harm.

“Holy fucking shit,” you half-whispered. “Captain America?”

“I'll let the language slide, since you were almost unconscious a second ago,” Captain America said, offering his hand to help you. “I'm here to help you, but we need to keep moving in case they had anyone else as a lookout nearby. Can you walk?”

“Uh, probably,” you said hoarsely, trying your hardest not to cough all over his hand despite how raspy your throat was. “Y-yeah, actually, I think I'm good.”

“Heard you were a tough one,” he said, smiling warmly at you as you grabbed his hand. He tossed your arm over his right shoulder while using his left to keep the shield out in front of him while you made your way across the room.

“Hang on, my papers, they're in the bedside table. All my info-”

“I've got them,” Steve said, jostling you a little as he leaned down to open up the drawer and pull the folder SHIELD had given you out of it. Then he helped you out the door and into the street. You stepped over the corpses of the men you had shot, and even more bodies – unconscious or dead, you weren't totally sure – that were obviously the Captain's handiwork.

“Mr, uh, Captain A-”

“Name's Steve Rogers, but you can call me Cap if you prefer,” he said, as he helped you toward a car sitting by the roadside. You were getting steadier by the moment, and at this point you were pretty much holding up your own weight – but that only freed up your mind to think about things other than putting one foot in front of the other.

“Cap, who told you about me? And why are you here in the first place?” You asked, as the doors to the car opened automatically.

“We've been keeping an eye on this area of the city for a while. High crime rate, suspicion of a powered individual running the local street gangs. Thanks for drawing her out, by the way,” Steve said, as he helped you into the backseat.

“Pleasure... and pain... were all mine,” you said, breathing a sigh of relief as you were assisted into the vehicle. It was only a moment later that the good Captain was getting in from the other side, seated across from you. A moment later the car kicked itself into gear and started driving, making you curious who was up front. There was a divider separating the compartments.

“Are you doing okay?” Cap said, glancing over at you. “I didn't see any blood. Did anything besides your throat get hurt?”

“Couple broken fingers... bit of a stab wound actually, some wounded pride... you never answered my question, so my feelings are a little hurt too,” you said, eyeing him up. “Who told you about me?”

“The same people who told us you'd gotten the attention of some pretty bad people,” Steve said, offering you a wry shrug. “I was told you were pretty smart, so I'm guessing you already figured out who. If you wanted a name... Clint made the call. He stopped by Avengers Tower earlier today.”

“Fuck. Drop me off at the next gas station and give me directions to the closest extended stay motel, I'll be fine on my own,” you mumbled, your hand absently fingering the handle for the door. “I'll take my chances out on the street. No offense Cap, but I want as little as possible to do with SHIELD or anyone they're willing to share that kind of intel with as possible.”

“I get that,” Steve said, sighing deeply. “SHIELD has always been a long way from perfect, and most people knew that even before their records went public. I don't blame you for getting out from under their thumb at the first possible chance.”

“If you're so sympathetic, then why do you work so closely with them?” You growled, eyeing the door. There was no visible mechanism for unlocking it... if you wanted to get out of the car, you were going to have to either find one, or break the window and go out that way. You weren't eager to add even more lacerations to your body.

“Because unfortunately, they're good at what they do,” Cap admitted. “But that doesn't mean I don't know how awful they can be. The first time I worked with Fury on something major was when the Avengers first got together. He lied about why SHIELD wanted the Tesseract, and tried to cover up an entire WMD program. A couple years later and I found out that after the second World War while I was still locked in ice, Operation Paperclip brought over so many Nazi scientists that HYDRA ended up infiltrating SHIELD, my best friend Bucky was brainwashed into operating as an assassin for HYDRA, and both organizations ended up getting exposed and collapsing shortly afterward after Natasha and Fury published every single confidential SHIELD file online. But the organizations that rose up to take SHIELD's place, and the government agencies that overreached without SHIELD to check their power? ...They've been even worse, as hard as that is to believe.”

“Wait, wh- I don't- holy shit,” you whispered. Fury, Natasha, Clint... they'd all mentioned various aspects of SHIELD's current status, especially after you left the original bunker. You still remembered Fury's speech about how he needed you for SHIELD because the times for subtlety and subterfuge were gone, and he needed warriors. Still, hearing Captain America – a living legend if ever there was one – telling you that SHIELD was awful, but better than the alternatives... that was a lot to take in.

“Look, I'm not going to pretend SHIELD hasn't done some good for us; I'm not going to pretend they're angels either. To be honest, none of that matters. I'm here because SHIELD gave us some intel... but I'm not here to talk to you about SHIELD,” Steve said, meeting your gaze again.

“...Then why are you here?” You asked hesitantly.

“Because you're in a hell of a strange place in life,” Steve admitted, offering you an understanding half-shrug. “And I don't just mean with your memories. SHIELD only gave us most of our intel recently, Tony is still going over the full sets of-”

“Tony? Wait, as in Tony Stark? Iron Man?” You interrupted, eyes going a little wide. “H-how many people know about me? Is Iron Man really going over my profile right now?!”

“SHIELD played your existence pretty close to their chest for a while,” Steve admitted, nodding sadly. “We didn't find out about you until a few weeks ago, after you were moved from their original facility to the guarded penthouse they were keeping you in. Once SHIELD's best researchers ran into dead ends, Fury forwarded your profile to the Avengers for study, in case there was anything he needed to know - and so we'd know what was happening now that you're in our backyard.”

“Just trying to keep the neighborhood safe,” you growled. "Apparently Clint thought that was worth forwarding to you. Guess he was worried what would happen once I was free."

“Yes, but he was worried for you, not about you,” Steve said, an honest smile coming to his face. “Actually, both of them were. Natasha said that it wouldn't be long before you got yourself into harm's way. Said you were too stubborn to stay out of trouble.”

“Yeah, right,” you snorted. “I made the mistake of thinking she cared about me when I was in their custody, I'm not buying that one again.”

“Something happen between you two?” Steve asked. He seemed genuinely surprised at that one – you quickly realized that the diary incident had not made it into whatever report they received.

“...Nothing important,” you said quietly. “Not anymore.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Steve said, deliberately not prying although you could read a certain curiosity in his eyes.

“No need to be. Like I said, I'm out here now, none of it matters. Drop me off wherever, I'll find my way to somewhere safe.”

“Now it may not be my place to pry into whatever happened between you and SHIELD,” Steve said, a soft smile touching his face, “but the issue of somewhere safe is something I was hoping we could discuss.”

“I don't do cages anymore,” you spat back, mostly out of reflex. “I don't do chains, blood tests, tissue samples, gene experiments, swabs anywhere on my body, or- fuck, how did I just realize Fury still has that fucking GPS chip in my arm?! Bastard didn't even need to track me, he's got me on goddamn satellite...”

Your outburst seemed to actually shock the good Captain into silence for a few moments; he blinked a couple times and then almost absentmindedly pointed at your arm.

“Fury put a tracker in you?”

“Yeah, back when we were on speaking terms, believe it or not,” you grumbled. “When we were first moving out of the secured facility I woke up in, however many weeks later that was. Back then he told me it was so that I could have some more freedom, be allowed to go out into the real world, and if HYDRA captured me or something else happened they'd be able to find me and keep track of me. Its been so long I fucking forgot... god, I'm gonna have to go after this chip with a steak knife if I want any chance of falling off the radar.”

“Why don't we hold off on that for now,” Steve said, holding his hand up as if he thought you might pull a knife out and go to work right then and there. “After all... sounds like another good reason to consider what I'm offering. Tony loves sticking it to Fury; he'd be more than happy to have a medical team retrieve whatever tracker they stuck in you.”

“That... doesn't sound so bad,” you admitted, “but I don't exactly like the idea of going under again. When I pass out... bad things happen. A lot.”

“...They really did a number on you, huh kid?”

“...Yeah,” you admitted, voice going soft for a minute as you stopped being so aggressively defensive. “HYDRA did all this to me – the experiments, the genetic changes, the biological torture... but at least they had the decency to wipe my memories, left my mind untouched. SHIELD are the ones who left that scarred. Fuckin' year of my life I'll never get back.”

You saw a look come across Steve's face, like he was thinking about something more deeply. You got the impression he wanted to ask more about what had happened to you, but he seemed to have decided against it.

“Seems like you've been getting yanked around a lot,” Steve finally said, staring directly at you. “SHIELD tend to do that. Everything's need to know, and if you aren't Fury, you usually don't. So I'll put my cards on the table – there's a room at Avengers Tower for you, if you want it.”

“Wh- what?” You asked, actually shocked. You felt your jaw drop before you continued “I got my ass kicked by a street thug you laid flat in two seconds, what are you-”

“Easy, easy,” Steve said, laughing. Your face must have been priceless, because it took him a few seconds to compose himself fully as he continued talking. “Joining the team isn't a requirement to stay at the tower. But for whatever it's worth, you wouldn't be the first person on the team with powers based off of the serum they used to make me.”

“Wait, really? But there aren't any armies of superheroes running around; how much of that serum have they made? How many different versions?”

“That's... probably a longer story than we have time for tonight,” Steve admitted, shaking his head as if clearing out some unpleasant thoughts. “But for now, the room is just an offer. A safe place, one where you don't have to get your next meal by working hard labor and taking cash off of criminals every night. You'll have food, a roof over your head, no unexpected visitors, and Tony can take that tracker out of your arm if you decide to trust him with it. No chains, and no forced experiments. Promise.”

“This is either a trick, or it's charity,” you grumbled. “Why would you take that risk? No way you're offering me a bed for no reason. You're working with SHIELD, aren't you? Fury didn't even trust me completely after a year, and that was after he had to have his two best agents get me drunk a dozen times, trick me, toy with my trust and feelings, and then drug me so they could steal my diary of all things. And I'm pretty sure he still didn't trust me, even after reading the only private thing I had left in this world.”

“We'd take that risk because it's the right thing to do,” Steve said, his voice deadly serious. “We're not SHIELD. It's not about weighing risks, or taking chances. It's about doing what's right. We take the risks... so people like you don't have to. We'll get that chip out of your arm. If you want us to train you, help you understand your new abilities and how powerful they are, we'll do that. If you want Tony and Bruce to help you analyze your body and figure out more about what they did, we'll do that too. But I want to make one thing clear – we're not SHIELD. You're free to leave when you want, and nobody touches you without your permission."

”Phrasing,” you thought wryly, almost smirking before something occurred to you. Something that had only just clicked about what Steve said.

“...You said Fury gave you guys the intel on me a few weeks ago, didn't you?” You asked, voice quiet. You couldn't bring yourself to look Steve in the eye anymore, so you stared out the window, watching the streets roll by. “I haven't been out on my own that long, so you definitely got it at least a little while before I left their facility...Why didn't you come help me? Why didn't you rescue me? If you're all about doing the right thing, why didn't you break down Fury's door?”

“We thought about it,” Steve said honestly, not a hint of humor in his voice. “Wanda and Vision both voted for it when we put it up to the team. Tony said we should do it just to break some of Fury's toys on our way in. Most of the rest of the team was a bit more conflicted.”

“But you decided not to.”

“Fury provided us with months of footage, showing that you were being kept in nicer conditions than a lot of us at the Tower grew up in, with one rich exception. Even told us where you were being kept... Tony made sure to confirm it before the vote, in case we did decide to rescue you. Still, fancy apartment aside... the real reason was because Fury said he was going to be releasing you soon. By the time he told us about you, he said there were only about two weeks left before you were going free. Since we knew where you were, Tony took the liberty of breaking into SHIELD's camera system and ensuring you weren't moved unexpectedly. If Fury tried moving you, or didn't set you free the day he said he would? We would've been breaking down the door.”

“...Guess that means Stark knows what happened. Great,” you mumbled. You turned your head back over your shoulder and sighed when you met Steve's eyes. “Sorry, that's not fair. He wasn't trying to spy, he was keeping tabs on me and making sure I didn't disappear, right? I appreciate you looking out for me, I do. I just... don't like being reminded about what she- what they did. The worst part is, if he told you guys that I'd be going free that day, he knew how I'd react. He knew I wouldn't forgive any of them for it, and he knew I'd walk out that day. But he did it anyway.”

You glanced over at Steve and saw that curiosity on his face. When he wasn't playing hero the man had the strangest ability to look something like a blonde puppy... perhaps that was why you gave in, just a little.

“Look, I don't wanna go into it much... you'd think the time Fury had me chained to a cell wall and slapped me around would be what made me hate him. Or the time they installed a fake air vent into a base to see if I'd try to escape, to test how far I'd go. But no, it wasn't that. It wasn't even getting damn near forcibly drugged and waking up with a hangover, and finding my 'home' torn to shreds... it was having the veil lifted, and realizing how much of it all was fake. Looking back on every interaction I had with them, wondering how much of it was real - probably none of it. It's just... just... not being able to trust a damn thing again.”

“...I think I'm starting to get an inkling of what was going on,” Steve finally said, after a long pause. “For whatever it's worth... I know SHIELD. Ransacked apartments aren't their style. If they left it that way, they wanted you to find it.”

“Great, the knife was plunged into my back intentionally,” you growled. “That makes it hurt a lot less.”

“It won't, and it shouldn't,” Steve said, adding a sigh. “But ransacked apartments aren't their style. Fury isn't one to give you a reason not to trust him, either – if he thought that he could keep you believing they were being honest with you, he would have. Whoever searched your apartment, they wanted you to know they were there. My guess? They wanted you to stop trusting them. Maybe they knew how much it would hurt. Maybe they didn't want you finding out even later than you did, when it might hurt even more.”

“...I don't care why they did it. Can't trust a damn thing anymore. It's all bullshit,” you mumbled. You actually agreed with Steve; they'd tricked you too many times and proved themselves far too skilled for you to think they couldn't have rummaged through your apartment and left you none the wiser. But you didn't want to admit it, so you glanced away from Steve and turned your eyes out the window again. The car remained silent for a long while, until you finally felt like speaking again.

“I'll go with you. But I've got two conditions,” you finally said.

“I'm all ears.”

“One, you keep your word about everything you just said – I'm on edge enough as it is. If I even think something is off, I'm gonna ask to leave. If you say no, I'm going to fight my way out, even if it ends up with me as a smear on a giant green fist, or crushed under a bullshit magical hammer.”

“I think keeping our word is a pretty reasonable condition,” Steve said, and judging by his smile he was actually fighting back a chuckle at your choice of wording.

“Two... no SHIELD. I don't know if Natasha and Clint are official members, or if they just work with you guys a lot. Whatever the case is, I don't want to deal with either of them. I don't even want to walk by them in the hallways if I can avoid it.”

“Not sure how often they'll be swinging by after all this... but we'll do what we can,” Steve said, nodding his head. “We'll have JARVIS notify you any time either of them is in the tower.”

“Who is JARVIS?”

Steve grinned, nodding up toward the front of the car.

“He's the one driving. Speaking of which... JARVIS, I think we're ready to head back to the Tower.”

“Diverting course.” The robotic, vaguely metallic voice came from everywhere – it was as if the car itself was speaking.

“Woah, woah, wait a minute – is this... is a computer driving us? Because that sounded like Siri or something,” you said, eyes wide and incredulous. "Is there seriously nobody in the driver's seat right now?"

“Don't compare JARVIS to a smartphone around Tony. You might actually give him an aneurysm,” Steve said, chuckling. “Besides, trust me...”

“...that is not the weirdest thing you're going to see at the tower.”

Chapter Text

"Holy shit... this place is crazy," you muttered as you stepped into your room.

"Stark loves to show off, but this is just a guest room... what's blowing your mind in here, if you don't mind me asking?"

Steve was leaning against the doorframe to the new room he had introduced you to, looking both amused and very much serious as he spoke. You mostly ignored his quirked eyebrow and the concerned tone in his voice, tuning them out in favor of taking in what you considered an impossibly nice room.

"What doesn't?" You asked, half rhetorically as you bounced idly on the mattress set atop the expansive, probably expensive wooden bedframe. "This bed is cushier and more comfortable than the one I bought back at SHIELD's facility, and a hell of a lot more than the one they provided for me on their own dime. The dresser seems sturdier, and all of the drawers actually work. There's a television, a bedside table, a set of sheet and comforters for me to swap out at will in this drawer, looks like at least half a dozen outfits in this one..."

You trailed off, uncertain where to go from there. You didn't dare mention the fact that even the bedisde lamp, the alarm clock, and the desk and chair combo in the corner were all things that you'd had to buy yourself in SHIELD's facility. Or how close you were to crying at the idea you finally had a room to not only call your own, but one that you could walk out of at any time. And one that you weren't being charged by the night for like so many of your more recent 'homes'.

"I take it SHIELD didn't exactly put you up in five-star accomodations. Can't say they've been known to show much hospitality in the face of the unknown," Steve noted.

"Hospitality? Fury doesn't even know how to smile, what kind of hospitality would you expect out of them?"

The voice was one you'd only just met today, but it was impossible to forget. Tony Stark, the actual owner of this tower and your apparent benefactor – along with most of the other Avengers – strode into view just beside Steve, his eyes flickering between the two of you.

"You sound like you're pretty familiar with their tactics. More than just what Clint and Natasha might do, sounds like you know Fury pretty well too," you noted, meeting Tony's eyes. You'd had a brief meeting with most of the Avengers – all of the ones that weren't actively out on missions or dealing with their own issues – so you recognized him, but you'd yet to speak in a more private setting.

"You tend to get familiar with organizations like that after one of their agents poses as your secretary for a week. Damn good at filing and research though," Tony noted, offering you a quick upward nod before he turned a teasing look toward Steve.

"Personally I think Agent Romanov's time in our organization significantly improved our protocols," JARVIS chimed in, his slightly robotic voice almost humming with pride.

"What, did she reorganize your files while she was copying them to SHIELD's database?" You asked dryly, looking at Tony for an explanation.

"I like the way you think," Tony said, smirking. "But it's not even that helpful. After a SHIELD agent managed to work their way through the hiring process and have access to some fairly controlled information and databases, I got a little paranoid about someone infiltrating Stark Tower physically, either by an all-out assault or a more subtle intrusion. Our cyber defenses are top-notch, but after Obadiah, Coulson, Romanov, and Loki all took advantage of my trust and security flaws... I initiated a full offline backup of all major system elements, including my lovely assistant, JARVIS. Thanks to that, after Ultron did a number on JARVIS' code, I was able to repair him fully... and I was able to use the damaged code to make Vision. Took a while to get used to hearing JARVIS in surround sound at every meeting, though."

"Not to worry sir; I've nearly perfected a voice module based off of your own speech, so you can finally hear yourself twice as often," JARVIS said. You giggled at the words, caught off guard by that level of snark from a virtual assistant.

Tony raised an eyebrow at the ceiling, as if to challenge the AI to continue his remarks, but said nothing. Then he returned his eyes to you again. "But seriously, Steve wasn't kidding. I mean, this guy over here qualifies for senior citizen discounts and even he's not that impressed by the room. You must not be used to much hospitality. SHIELD really didn't give you a great first impression of the world you woke up into, huh?"

"It wasn't... all bad," you mumbled. "They were nice, at times. I even liked some of it. But everything that was good turned out to be fake, so I guess maybe it kind of was all bad."

"We'll give you some time to adjust. Don't worry about anything for the next day or two, just get settled in," Steve said kindly. "Think about what you want to do. If you decide that you're up for it, let us know."

"Up for 'it'? For what?" You asked.

"We took bets on who'd win in an arm wrestling competition – the geriatric or the rookie," Tony said, grinning widely.

"What Tony means," Steve chided, "is that we need to get an understanding of your abilities so we can design a training schedule for you, if that's what you want to do. You did a lot of good out on those streets for someone who could barely keep themselves afloat. You could do even more with the Avengers, if that's what you'd want to do. But it's not gonna be easy, and we won't put you in over your head. We want to get you up to speed before you ever set foot in the field, but the last data SHIELD sent us is almost three months old, and you spent nearly half of that out on the streets. Whatever they gave you was based off an altered version of the super-soldier serum that made me, but you seem to have a lot of extra side effects. You sleep even less than I do, I hear."

"I know a thing or two about not being able to sleep late at night," Tony said. His usually bright tone dipped to a lower note as he spoke, and for perhaps the first time since you'd been in his presence the light in his eyes dimmed a bit. "Me, I head down to the lab and tinker until I pass out or Pepper bribes me with breakfast. Considering you sleep, what, four hours on a good night?"

"I think I'm about down to two," you admitted.

"Yeah, unless you picked up some major hobbies, I'm guessing that translates into a lot of free time for exercise. Or tinkering. You any good with repulsors and arc reactors? I could always use a spare set of hands."

You ignored the teasing invitation. He wasn't wrong about how much time there was in a day when you didn't need to sleep... especially after you started more actively seeking out confrontations. You wanted to make sure you were ready for anything. Even if you mostly relied on the element of surprise and the training SHIELD had given you, knowing you had a clear upper hand in strength and speed helped too. A quick blitz could usually fix a botched sneak attack.

"I... might have done a few push-ups and sit-ups here and there," you admitted.

"Hear that Cap? Looks like you're about to lose your first arm-wrestling match since I took you on at the last Halloween party."

"Doesn't count when you're wearing the suit, you know," Steve said, as both men turned and began to exit your room. As they turned, though, you remembered a thought from earlier – one you'd had several times since arriving here.

"Hey, by the way... I just... thanks. And I didn't get a chance to say this in the group meeting, but I'm sorry," you said quietly. Both men seemed to hear you easily; Steve kept a more stoic look on his face, but Tony didn't even try to hide his curiosity.

"I'm always open to hearing a good 'thanks' or ten, but they don't usually come bundled with an apology. Is this a two-for-one special I didn't hear about?" Tony asked, gesturing between himself and you.

"No, it's just- well, Steve was talking about how you guys work with Natasha and Clint, and I know that even though they're officially SHIELD they're also Avengers. Steve mentioned you guys were even voting on whether to break me out, so... I'm guessing there were a lot of secrets and maybe some bad feelings going around. I'm sorry you guys had all that tension because of me, when I hadn't even met any of you yet."

"You don't need to worry about any of that," Steve said, a smile breaking across his face. "There wouldn't have been any bad blood even if they were around. We've had disagreements with each other before, and this wouldn't have been the first one we've had with SHIELD. Besides, the two of them have only swung through the tower for a couple days at a time over the last year, and a lot less lately. We didn't know why until we realized they were looking after you."

"Ah... that makes sense I guess," you admitted sheepishly. "Can't be in two places at once."

"If it makes you feel any better, they both voted for us to break you out, before Fury announced your release date. Pretty sure it still would've been a landslide, but the thought counts too," Tony added.

Tony's words confused you. If the two of them were barely around, how did they vote?

"I thought you said-"

"Well, not really a vote," Tony interrupted, rolling his eyes as he corrected his own choice of words. "They're never direct enough for that, especially Romanov. After we knew about you being held in their facility, Barton made sure to mention how much he wished his drinking buddy could get freed up on the weekends every single time he stopped by the tower. Romanov slipped the blueprints to the facility you were being held in to us in a secure package about two weeks ago."

"Wait... they did that? Natasha actually slipped you a file?"

"Well, either her or someone else with impeccable Russian and great handwriting," Tony mused, smirking.

"What was the point of being 'subtle' if you guys both know exactly what they wanted?" You asked, confused.

"Remember what I told you in the car?" Steve said, chuckling. "They know how to be secret, and they know how to send a message. The blueprints Natasha sent us were the originals, not copies or detailed photos. Fury probably knows they wanted you out of there – but if he starts finding missing schematics, and his two top agents are hanging around the Tower more than usual... it might encourage him to speed up the process, if only to avoid the headache. It's their way of letting Fury know when he really fucks up, without actually going against him. As far as I know, Fury has yet to screw up badly enough to make them ever turn directly against his orders."

"Hell, they're probably part of the reason Fury gave us a firm exit date for you at all. SHIELD isn't even quite an 'official' organization like it used to be, but I bet there's still plenty of paperwork if the Hulk smashes his way into the top floor of your building in downtown New York," Tony noted, smiling at the idea. "Can we send you back? Just for five minutes. I'd love to see the look on his face when the Green Giant comes through the ceiling. Think he'd be pissed first, or just exasperated?"

You weren't sure what to say to the idea. The idea of those two actually being in some way responsible for your freedom really didn't mesh with the blatant violation of your trust... how the hell did you still not understand them at all most of the time?

Well, no, it wasn't quite that way. Actually, you had a pretty good understanding of Fury, and a bit of an insight into Clint, at least to some degree. Fury had always been an ass, an "ends justify the means" kind of ass at that. Clint hadn't really had a hand in the events that led to your departure, and he always seemed at least somewhat upfront with you, so learning he had tried to get you freed wasn't exactly world-shattering to your beliefs. No, it was definitely Natasha's behavior that had put you on edge more often than not – and learning that she'd taken such a direct action against Fury, all for your sake?

No, it couldn't be. It didn't reconcile with the way she'd acted until now. She'd been friendly at times, but you had no idea when the acting started or ended, and she was always acting quite loyal to Fury and SHIELD, right up until the end when both she and Clint had started behaving oddly. Admittedly you were bad at reading Natasha, but she couldn't really have been wanting to help you, right? Not after what she did.

"Thanks, guys. I'll uh... I'll get a good night's sleep, see how I feel then. It'll be kind of nice not having to sleep with an ear open for the door getting kicked in. Or a window bashed open. Or... well, you know how it is."

"Sorry, afraid I don't. You might not have heard this, didn't get much press time, but I am Iron Man," Tony said, offering you a grin as he turned toward the door. "Sleep well!"

"Take all the time you need. You've been through a lot," Steve said, nodding one last time and offering you a friendly wave as he followed Tony out of your room.

...Yeah. You really had been, hadn't you?

--------------------------------------------

Training with Clint and Natasha had been hard at the time. You had nothing else to compare it to, so it seemed incredibly difficult to get through their instructions to their high standards. They pushed you to the point of exhaustion, they taught you new moves and constantly drilled you on them until you could repeat them perfectly, and they always kept you on your toes with what kind of training you'd be doing. At the time it was the hardest thing you could ever remember going through.

But now you realized just how much they were holding back. How they were testing you, prodding you. How everything that they were doing was just to test your limits, to see how powerful you really were, how powerful you could really become. You didn't know what real training was until the first day that you stood across from Steve in the Avengers gym. You didn't know what tiredness was until you were exhausted, sweating from every inch of skin, and you finally looked at him and asked him the question that had been on your mind for the last two hours.

"Aren't you tired yet?"

When his answer finally came, after a smile that was far too confident, it nearly broke you. You felt defeat, surrender, even hopelessness against such an unbreakable man. You'd thought you'd known those things before too, but never had you felt them more strongly until the moment that Steve looked at you when you asked him that question, his eyes alight with joy and confidence as he spoke those words.

"I could do this all day."

Those words were so casual they felt almost out of place, as Steve pummeled you with blow after blow every time you let your guard slip for even a second. At first you thought his words were a taunt, a threat, or a playful tease about your own skill. That he was telling you were weak, or that he was saying you weren't challenging him enough. It took a few more rotations against him, a few more weeks of constant sparring and training, for you to realize what he was really saying.

He was tired too. He'd probably been every bit as tired as you felt right then every time they went on a mission, every time he was pushed to his own limits. But he kept going, he never let his shield falter... he fought. He'd been through pain, suffering, loss, and he kept going. And he'd keep going, because that's what it meant to be a hero.

The idea didn't mean much at first. A few weeks ago you would have fought and died for the people you believed were your friends, too. Determination, dedication... those things could be tricked and falsely drawn out of people, made to believe in causes and people that weren't who they claimed to be. But as you talked to the Avengers – all of them, not just Steve and Tony – you learned how much they'd lost. How many times they'd been betrayed. By SHIELD, by the World Security Council, by Ultron when Tony and Bruce had intended to create only a protector of the world. At times, they'd even been at each other's throats, however briefly...

Somehow, knowing that helped a lot more than you thought it would. In spite of how many times the Avengers had been betrayed, they kept going. Steve had lost his entire timeline and was facing many of the same obstacles you were now. Though your origins were different, you both were still dealing with the aftereffects of acclimating to a new world. Tony had lost everyone important to him except for Pepper due to deaths and betrayal, before eventually finding his home with the Avengers. Bruce had been labeled a monster and cast aside by almost everyone in society until he found people willing to accept him and trust him again. All of those things gave you comfort in your own place within the world... but they didn't fuel you, not as much as a rather unexpected revelation of your own.

The real turn in your attitude finally came in the hours spent between sparring sessions, cardio exercises, and supervised weightlifting. It came when you had grown just comfortable enough training with the Avengers to let your old and unwelcome thoughts seep in. Having unfiltered access to the internet gave you the opportunity to research a lot of things about the superhero world. It would have been lying to say you hadn't had an immediate urge to dive into Clint and Natasha's files, the ones that had been released to the public during SHIELD's internal conflict... but when you finally had the opportunity, you found yourself hesitating. You spent nearly an hour going back and forth with yourself, wondering if there was anything worth knowing.

On one side of the argument were multiple voices telling you all the reasons you should finally take a peek inside of those folders. Natasha and Clint already knew everything about you that could be known – maybe even more than they let on. You'd finally have some leverage over them, finally have cards you could play they weren't already aware of. It was all public information anyway, so it wasn't really spying.

But in spite of all that, something bothered you about the idea of sinking that low. This was information released in what you now knew – thanks mostly to first-hand tales from Captain America – was a last-ditch effort to stop HYDRA from overtaking all of SHIELD, and likely a large part of the civilized world. It wasn't something they wanted people to know, it was something they had pried away from them. They had no privacy anymore, they were always being watched, and their past was on full display...

Somehow, after all you had been through, you couldn't bring yourself to cross that line. It was too hypocritical, too self-righteous. Even after all that they had done to you, you couldn't find it in you to do the same things they seemed to have done to you. Maybe it was a sense of honor that you hadn't yet lost. Maybe Steve and Tony's voices were still echoing in your head from when you first arrived at the Tower, trying to convince you they were pawns to Fury and what was left of SHIELD. Whatever it was... you couldn't bring yourself to ever inspect any article on SHIELD beyond a headline.

You could've violated Fury's privacy without much guilt. Hell, you could have gone round-for-round with him in a sparring session and would still have some pent-up aggression to take out on him after all the time Fury had spent lying to you. Clint was a bit more troublesome; he was complicit in Fury's deeds, but he genuinely seemed to be looking out for you, in ways that even some of the Avengers didn't. Still, after seeing him nock an arrow and draw it back when they finally confronted you, you could've powered through your apprehension and guilt to read his file. He wasn't the problem...

No, despite your annoyance to admit it, it was Natasha who you had the hardest time checking in on. Fury and Clint had spent hours upon hours painting her past as a horrific thing, something only she deserved to tell you. Natasha herself had been so careful never to reveal a single thing about her past, save for the time she lied to you about it to gain your trust. All that in spite of the fact that it was public knowledge – knowledge that they had to all have known you'd have access to the first time you got a computer without their filters on it. Unlike most of the other things they lied about, it didn't seem like they kept her past a secret to manipulate you.

They lied because the truth must have truly hurt her that much.You saw it in the way she grew angry the first time you poked at her past, tried to guess what she'd done. You saw it in her mastery of deflection and subject-changing.

More than that, in spite of all of the betrayal, all of the lies, all of the secrets... some part of you believed what Steve had said, no matter how much you tried to beat it down. Natasha was one of the most skillful people you'd ever met in terms of subterfuge and manipulation – not that you had met many people, but her skill was still leagues above the rest.

So why did she make it so obvious? Why did she not even bother to conceal your drugging, much less the rummaging she did after you fell unconscious? Did she really feel guilty deceiving you for some reason, and instead wanted to warn you of what was happening? Was it an act of rebellion against Fury? Was she intentionally trying to anger you, to chase you away, or did she just want you to be out of her hair and convince Fury that she wasn't a good choice for a caretaker?

Those questions didn't have easy answers, certainly none you could find on your own. And that was so similar to the stories of the other Avengers – their problems had no easy answers, no simple solution. All you could do was forge your own path in the world and find your place among others like you. And that was why you never bothered to look into SHIELD's leaked files, why you never clicked those tantalizing headlines.

"I'm going to be better than them."

You didn't need to know about their pasts, their secrets, or whatever SHIELD had been up to besides your own captivitiy. Progress and success didn't need to come at the expense of others, whether their freedom or their privacy. One day you would make sure that nobody ever suffered the way you had. You would protect others... and you would do it without deceit, lies, or pretending to be something you weren't.

But to do that, you had to be strong.

So you took punch after punch, blow after blow. Like Captain America whose serum your experiment was inspired by, your body healed itself faster than a normal human's did – not quite as well as the man himself, but well enough that you could take a hell of a bruising. Something that came in handy whether you were getting hit with a shield, an iron fist, an Asgardian hammer, or even... was it magic? Whatever Wanda used, it hit shockingly hard for something semi-corporeal.

Your bruises faded and left tougher, stronger skin and muscles. Your fatigue and soreness slowly receded, leaving you able to endure more and more by the day. When your body started to catch up with the rigors of their training, they started to work on your mind. You ran scenarios late into the night, some theoretical and some acted out in the sparring room of the Avengers Tower. Hostage situations, invasions of the Avengers Tower itself, hostile military actions, invasions by interdimensional cybernetic warrior-tribes, hostile robotic uprisings, shapeshifting infiltrators... you wished that any of them were as ridiculous as they sounded, but they made a point of relating how each and every scenario had unfolded for them at some point in their history.

But none of that – not a single moment of it – matched the adrenaline and the intensity of the moment that Cap himself walked into your bedroom.

--------------------------------------------------

You'd heard the call for a meeting; JARVIS always alerted you when the Avengers were due to meet, if only so you'd understand why you suddenly felt so alone in the tower. But it was another thing entirely to have Captain America walk into your room, meeting your gaze with a look of questioning approval.

"You must have missed the announcement. JARVIS just intercepted a communication from HYDRA – it came out of a base in southwestern Anatolia. We're holding a quick meeting and then heading out before they realize we're onto them."

"Yeah, I heard," you said casually, not glancing away from the computer screen for more than a moment. "I was gonna suggest we have a game night with take-out to make up for missing training, but I'm guessing that's off the table... unless you think you can get across the Atlantic and back in time for dinner?"

A wry smirk almost touched on Steve's lips – almost. The look he always had when the team cracked jokes during a heated moment.

"We can still get take-out," Steve said, his voice shockingly serious. "You're gonna have to eat it on the go, though. Flight leaves in twenty-five minutes."

The words hung in the air, heavy and meaningful. Your hand stopped the mouse dead in its tracks, completely forgetting the timer on your game of chess as you slowly turned your desk chair until your eyes met Steve's.

"That... almost sounds like you're expecting me to leave the Tower," you said slowly, breath catching in your throat. "And not to go across the street for a midnight snack."

"It doesn't just almost sound like that," Steve said, gaze unflinching. "I think you're ready. The team thinks you're ready. The question is, do you think you're ready?"

You hesitated for a moment, and in a way, you hated yourself for it. Doubt and paranoia had been ingrained in you for over a year; the first year of your life that you could remember. Casting all that aside was... difficult, to say the least. You steadied your breath, forced a smile on your face, and nodded resolutely.

"I'm ready to make a difference."

"That's the spirit," Steve said, finally smiling as he swiveled out of your doorway. "Check your locker in the sparring room. Uniform's washed and ready."

A uniform? Your heart raced a little at the thought. Going out into the field, fighting HYDRA... it felt like revenge, it felt like justice, it felt like... like...

Like you were finally choosing your own path in life. It was violent, bloody, painful, and it would probably come with some heartache, one day.

But it was yours.

Chapter Text

Honestly, you had imagined a moment like this a lot of times in the past. Ever since you started officially calling the Avengers Tower your new home, the more optimistic parts of your mind had dared to dream of a day you'd be formally welcomed into the team, and a uniform was a pretty big obsession of yours, for what were probably silly and superficial reasons compared to the rest of them.

A "uniform" wasn't standard across the Avengers, and it could have been anything from a weapons kit, to star-spangled spandex, to a pair of purple shorts with an incredible ability to resist being shredded.

The gift that you received was even more impressive than you had dared to dream.

There was a box inside the locker, one so big it must have been perfectly measured for your storage unit because it only just barely fit through the door. You had to fight for a few seconds just to wiggle it into position to pull it over the rim of the locker's opening. While you were fighting, you noticed the tag on the top of the box – and the card that was taped up right next to it.

A part of you wondered if they expected you to read the card right then or not. After all, the flight was still over twenty minutes away... but you were supposed to be at the meeting too, right? Then again, would they really give you the card with the gift if they didn't want you to open it?

Curiosity won out over caution, and you found yourself quickly tearing the card open with the package itself still half-trapped within the locker. What you found wasn't surprising... but it was certainly emotional. Almost every single one of the other Avengers had written a note inside of it for you – or at least the ones you had gotten a chance to meet.

I think you're going to find this outfit almost as impressive as I do. Just don't go thinking this will make you the next Iron Man; this suit is nowhere near that advanced. I did shell out for some of the latest developments in shock absorption and lightweight armor, though – don't worry about putting it all on the table while you're out there. The materials in this suit aren't quite up to the level of mine, but it's still STARK tech. It can handle a beating."

I hope that we have all made you feel welcome since your arrival, yes? I felt uncertain when I joined this team myself. Often I wondered whether I really belonged here – or if I ever could... now this place is like my home. Very different from Sokovia, though. I understand what it's like not to fit in, to try to fit in somewhere totally new. If you ever need to talk, come find me!"

Warrior of Midgard, your struggles have not been in vain! It has carried you here, to your new homeland, and I foresee many great battles and feasts in our future! Let this card carry our blessings and good tidings for your future in battle!

Hey, whatever happens out there, I uh... I apologize if the big guy gets a little out of control, but I think even he's excited to see what you can do out there. That's what he'd say, anyway, if he was here. And if he could write. Or read. Uh, I'm rambling again, shouldn't have used a pen. Can't erase pen...

The nature of human relationships is still a bit foreign to me, but I understand that you've never felt quite at home before. I hope this uniform and all of our words can help you to finally feel as if you have a place to belong, for as long as you wish to stay. My own entrance into this world was rather... unorthodox, and I assure you, no matter how out of place you may feel at the moment, all of us will welcome you with open arms.

Wearing this uniform will come with a lot of pressure, and a lot of responsibilities. You don't have to put it on, but if you do... always remember we all thought you deserved it. All of us."

It only took one read and a few glances to be sure who wrote each part (well, a few of them – some were more obvious than others), but even if you'd been wrong about every single author, the words still held a lot of meaning and emotions for you. You smiled softly, letting yourself take just a few moments to soak it all in...

Just enough time for your eyes to notice the glint of white pressed against the roof of your locker.

When you first noticed it, you paused but didn't think much of it. The letter could've gotten stuck while they were jamming the gift in there in the first place, a separate greeting that ended up getting stuck on its own. It could have been a welcome letter from some time ago meant for someone else, one you'd never noticed – you didn't make a habit out of checking your locker's contents since you didn't have much to steal in the first place. It might have even been a leftover from some previous owner of the locker – were there any ex-Avengers now? None of them had ever mentioned any former team members that were no longer welcome at the Tower. The only ex-Avengers you knew of were dead

There was a heavy feeling in your stomach as you took the letter into your hands. Although you knew it was surely impossible, one particular potential author found herself stuck in the forefront of your mind as you stared at the sealed envelope. One person you would've hated to hear from, but somehow found yourself unable to let go. Someone you were desperate to have some closure on, yet couldn't bring yourself to imagine even a hand-scrawled napkin's worth of intel from.

The thought seemed impossible, yet as you tore open the envelope you became more and more certain with each piece of the letter you uncovered. The plain paper that was folded so immaculately, the handwriting that was flawless yet pragmatic... there was no name on it, nor did it have a proper greeting, but by the time you'd read the scant few sentences on the page, there was no doubt in your mind who had sent it.

"Heard you're fitting in well over there. Glad Steve saw the same potential in you that we did. You don't have to worry about Fury anymore, if you still had any doubts there. You've got a place to call home, and you'll never make better friends. But don't throw it away chasing ghosts.

"Stay away from HYDRA. It's for your own good."

The first part of the letter was shockingly friendly and casual, especially from someone you'd not spoken to in weeks and parted from on rather combative terms. The second part reminded you who you were dealing with... either Natasha or SHIELD didn't want you around Hydra.

"Does she seriously not still trust me?" You growled, crumpling the paper in your hands. Tony and Steve were wrong; they were too close to her, that had to be it. After all she put you through, after all that, she still didn't want you anywhere near HYDRA. Either she didn't think you could take care of yourself... or she thought it was dangerous to let you be around them. Either way, after all they'd put you through, to still think so little of you...

You slammed your fist into the lockers without thinking, and you hissed in shock and anxiety as you realized you'd placed a very large dent into the reasonably thick metal of the locker next to yours – Thor's, if you remembered the order right. You thought that you'd gotten past your annoyance and feelings about your treatment by SHIELD under control during your extended training, but all it had taken was one note for you to start throwing blows... you'd have to apologize to Thor at some point. You made a mental note to put some of Tony's (in his words) "allowance" for you to work buying Thor an expensive apology keg.

"That disappointed? Wouldn't be the first time a gift I've given fell flat, but I think that reflects more poorly on the recipients, really."

Though he didn't seem to be making an effort to remain silent, Tony's voice did cause you to jolt slightly, especially when he walked up beside you and began to inspect the dent that you'd left in Thor's locker.

"Thor isn't... going to want to fight me over this, is he? Some kind of honor thing, or an insult?"

"Thor? You mean the guy who thought shattering a mug on the floor of a diner was how you asked for seconds?" Tony asked, sarcasm thick enough to smother your nerves. "No, I think you'll be fine. JARVIS, roll back the tapes and find the last thing that Thor was drinking – order the biggest container of it you can find."

"I'm sure his liver will thank you, sir."

The soft voice of JARVIS was comforting for a moment – until a thought occurred to you, one that you hadn't had time to consider yet. Specifically about the ever-present AI and surveillance of the tower...

"JARVIS, how did this note get here?" You asked, holding up the paper and glancing up toward the ceiling. "I was never alerted to any SHIELD agents inside the tower."

"That was delivered... I apologize, it would appear that my surveillance over the storage unit is incomplete. Several of my cameras and security systems were briefly brought offline a short while ago, not long after the uniform was delivered."

Alarm bells were flaring up in your head, but as you turned your eyes back to Tony, you saw only a mildly bemused look on the billionaire's face. Though to his credit, Tony at least quirked an eyebrow up as he saw the anxiety and alertness on your face.

"Looks like Romanov found another security flaw. JARVIS, create a backup of all surveillance data for the last seventy-two hours and store it away for review later."

"Already done, sir." Tony saw the disbelief on your face even before JARVIS was done speaking. The smirk on his face only grew wider as he continued.

"Romanov and I have a little game going, ever since she was an employee here," Tony explained, shrugging slightly. "She's like the white-hat hacker for STARK security. Usually, she sticks around long enough to try to scare me – hanging out on the couch with all the lights turned off, standing behind the refrigerator door while I'm grabbing a midnight snack, all the classics. I think she's been hanging around Fury too much."

Memories flared in your mind, late nights spent with your appetite guided by a certain femme fatale, learning all about the wonders of foreign snack foods. You pushed them back down, gesturing resignedly with the note and rolling your eyes.

"Well, looks like this time she just came to deliver a message," you grumbled. "No jumpscares, I hope."

"Lot of work to go through just to deliver a message, but she never makes things simple," Tony noted, staring at the paper in your hands. "What does it say?"

"Just some bullshit about how I'm either not good enough or not trustworthy enough to go on the mission," you said, sighing. "I know you guys kept trying to say she was looking out for me, that she actually gave a damn about what Fury was doing, but... I just don't see it, after all this."

"Mind if I take a quick look?" Tony asked, holding his hand out. Despite your anger at the letter, you found yourself hesitating, eyeing the paper. Ingrained fear of sharing information stymied your hand for a moment before you forced yourself to offer Tony the note.

His eyes scanned over the paper so quickly you weren't sure if he was reading or just pretending to. About halfway through, his lips curled upwards into a bemused grin.

"You must really be something special," Tony mused as he re-folded the paper and handed it back to you. "I haven't seen something that obvious from Romanov since she stuck a needle in my neck."

"H-hang on, I have a lot of questions," you said, blinking a bit as you tried to process what you'd just heard. "What are you saying? Is there some message here I'm missing?"

"If you think she's saying that you're not to be trusted, or that you're not ready for this mission, then yeah... you're missing a lot," Tony said, quirking an eyebrow upward as he stared at you. "I thought you said the whole reason you left was they broke in and read your diary? Do you think Romanov still doesn't trust you?"

"I... no, I don't think anyone at SHIELD knows how to trust anyone," you said, crossing your arms defensively. You knew by what Steve had said that Tony had the surveillance footage from the room – he knew the exact set of circumstances that had ended with you angrily leaving the SHIELD facility... but you were silently thankful that he offered you the dignity of pretending otherwise.

"Not the worst impression to have," Tony admitted, smirking and shrugging slightly. "But let's put the reason aside. Whether she doesn't think you're ready, or she doesn't think you're to be trusted... do you actually think that she'd write this to stop you?"

"Well," you mumbled, feeling oddly chastised by Tony's words, "the message is warning me not to go on the mission, and says I'm not ready..."

"Yeah, no. Listen, I know you spent a lot of time around her while you were locked up under SHIELD supervision, but our team has been around SHIELD a lot longer. Even if Romanov thought that you weren't ready, or if she genuinely thought you were a threat, she wouldn't be asking you to voluntarily step down," Tony explained, smiling in the way a professor might to an eager but ignorant student. "In fact, you'd never even know she spoke against you. She'd be in every meeting, every exchange, telling us how wrong we were for including you – then she'd smile at you on the mission, tell you how she had your back. Maybe even save your life a time or two, just to make sure you didn't catch on to how little she trusted you."

You paused for a moment, eyes drifting between the note and Tony. What he was saying made complete sense, and yet the implication left in the wake of his assertion was unthinkable.

"Honestly, I can't believe she took the time to do all this," Tony finally said, his quirked brow and almost impressed tone conveying more surprise than the billionaire usually admitted to. "I mean, she burned a lot to do this."

"Burned? Are you angry at her? I thought you just said this was like a little game between you two," you said, trying to hide the note of worry in your voice.

"Oh, it is," Tony said, the confident grin returning, surprise vanishing from his face. "But those little scares she gives me, the times she lurks around the tower? She was always looking for something. It's hard to tell what, since she disables or loops the cameras, but seems like it's usually something big. Something like contacting one of the other Avengers at Fury's request, like this – or inspecting something I've got locked up in the vault from one of our missions. She doesn't just do this kind of thing because it's fun, or to prove a point. I don't make it a point to leave vulnerabilities in Stark Tower; when I find one, I patch it. No telling how long she was holding onto this one, but it'll be fixed inside of a week."

Tony stared at you, the silence hanging in the air for a moment as you contemplated his words. The implication was obvious – Natasha cared enough about getting that message through to you that she was willing to show her hand, giving up a key vulnerability in Tony's security that could've been used for something potentially life- or even world-threatening. Or at least something Fury ordered her to go after...

"But hey, your love life is your own business. We've got more important things to do right now, like checking out your new uniform. Pretty much everyone else's gear has been off-limits, but you? You're the first person I've had a chance to get creative with."

"That sounds terrifying," you replied, your eyebrows shooting up at Tony's words. The genius inventor smiled at your words, offering a shrug that wasn't all that comforting.

"Hey, everyone else on the team already had their gear set in stone by the time they joined. Thor only uses Asgardian materials, Steve had a set of SHIELD spandex, Wanda and Vision barely need clothes, and Banner has a closet full of purple shorts he insists on calling his 'wardrobe'. You? You're a blank slate, and that means I got to have a little fun with the design process."

"Please tell me there's no hot rod red," you groaned.

"Of course not. There's only one Iron Man," Tony scoffed. "But I think it speaks for itself anyway."

Other than a coy grin, Tony offered no other explanation, leaving you to open the box in silence at last. The contents weren't particularly surprising... but they were certainly impressive.

Not that you'd ever admit that to Tony.

Since the day you woke up in a SHIELD facility in literal chains, you had worn plenty of outfits. From the clothes you'd woken up in back in that HYDRA cells, to the SHIELD-provided uniforms given to you, and up until the moment Fury gave you your first "allowance" to buy your own clothes. Since you'd started training in earnest – first with SHIELD, then alone, and now with the Avengers – only one thing had remained consistent about your various outfits... they all broke down too quickly.

Stray threads became torn seams became gaping holes, often so quickly that an outfit could transition from "business casual" to "punk rock attire" in the span of a week if you weren't careful. You'd learned over time to extend the life of your outfits by not stretching so much, not turning so quickly, not lifting so much weight... but the outfit you were holding now was something entirely different.

It came in two pieces, what you guessed was an inner layer that was more form-fitting, and an outer layer that was closer to a layer of armor over the inner suit. Both felt incredibly durable, above and beyond anything you'd gotten ahold of yet outside of the other Avengers gear. The hard plates you could feel embedded in the design, the thickness and sturdiness of the synthetic fibers of the material, the sheer resistance you felt when pulling and stretching even the tiniest section of it...

"I have to admit I normally work with a lot more metal in my designs, but I think this turned out great. Fits right over your sparring uniform too; no need to strip down to the bare essentials just to get mission-ready. I took the best of SHIELD combat uniforms and added in some personal touches."

"Such as?" You asked while continuing to examine your reflection.

"The SHIELD uniforms lean toward mobility over protection. Given your familiarity with Romanov and Barton, I'm sure you can guess why. With your abilities, I had a little more freedom in how much resistance I could implement for the wearer. The fibers of the outer layer of the suit are double-dipped in a gold-titanium alloy to add durability, at the cost of being more difficult to maneuver. The fibers are wrapped around hardened kevlar discs that have the toughness and flexibility to deflect most indirect hits from projectiles and reduce the impact of anything they can't fully redirect. The inner layer is a reinforced Nomex bodysuit that should hold up against anything that gets through the outer layer, at least well enough to ensure you stagger home at the end of the day."

"So you made me into some kind of a bulletproof walking tank?"

"Look, I do good work, but you're not invincible," Tony said, quirking an eyebrow at you. "This armor should keep you safe from blades and small arms fire, even on a direct hit. Higher-caliber firearms can still glance off at an angle, but the suit won't hold up against direct impacts from something like an anti-tank rifle, or concentrated armor-piercing rounds. You're going to have to be smart, not just tough. Not to mention how expensive that suit is to repair – not that I can't afford it."

"At that point, why not just make me a full suit like you wear?" You asked, casting an eyebrow over the suit. "I mean, this is all really awesome stuff, but wouldn't it have been easier and faster for you to make something like your own suit?"

"First of all, and I can't stress this enough," Tony said, offering you that same half-smirk he always seemed to wear, "I am Iron Man. I don't just go around handing out STARK-tech enhanced powersuits to everyone who tries to join the Avengers."

"Fair enough," you admitted, laying the outfit you'd been given out as best as you could. You took a few more seconds to admire it before you began to slip on the inner portion of the suit, feeling the sleek but stiff Nomex glide over your body as you pulled it on. It fit perfectly – not that you'd expected any less from Tony's handiwork.

"And secondly, this suit has a serious learning curve. The property damage that went into developing and mastering the Mk II and III Iron Man suits had Pepper side-eyeing me for weeks. Throw in all the extraneous factors – getting used to JARVIS advising you mid-combat, learning all the ins and outs of the weaponry, dealing with the suit's limited mobility... it's not suited to your style."

"Wait, wait, wait," you said, chuckling as you finished donning the inner suit and started working on figuring out the best way to fit into the outer armor. "What exactly is my style? I pretty much just punch things until they stop moving."

"Exactly. You don't need an Iron Man suit for that; you need something tough enough to protect you, and flexible enough to stay out of your way. This outfit accomplishes both of those... well, for you it does. Anyone else would be so tired from the effort it takes to move in it they'd be running out of steam in under an hour – and that's out of combat."

"Really? It doesn't feel that crazy," you murmured. You'd just gotten your right arm into the second layer of the suit, and took the opportunity to stretch your arm around a little to see how it felt. It did have a bit of a restriction on your movement, but it wasn't crippling. You could certainly feel the resistance of the suit as it moved, but it wasn't enough to slow you down in a way that would throw you off your game – it was more like turning the resistance up a notch on one of the bikes at the gym. Different, but easy to adapt to.

"You really don't realize how much stronger you've gotten, do you?" Tony mused, smirking. "Guess that's to be expected. With your memories the way they are, you don't remember what it's like to be a normal human."

"Judging by how you act around the rest of us, I'd say you don't remember what it's like to be a normal human either," you mused, tossing Tony a smirk right back at his own.

"Hey, look at that, you're fitting in already," Tony chuckled. "Come on, finish suiting up - flight leaves the second we're onboard."

"I can't wait," you smiled, honestly eager as you continued donning your new battle outfit.

"Enjoy the enthusiasm while it lasts," Tony said as he turned toward the door. "Things are going to get a lot less exciting soon."

"S-sorry, you're right," you mumbled. "This is life-or-death. I should take things more seriously."

"Oh, no, never let a good fight put a damper on your mood," Tony said, his voice only half-sarcastic. "I was talking about the flight out there. Don't worry, I bet the passengers you got seated next to won't be very happy about the arrangements either."

"Wait, what does that-" you paused with one leg halfway into the heavily armored exterior of your suit, looking up toward the door – but Tony was already gone. You heard the sound of his footsteps walking away, mixed in with a low laugh.

"Tony, what does that mean?! Get back here right now!"

Chapter Text

To your complete and immediate relief, Tony had been bluffing on the seating arrangements. That, or someone else had decided to make a last minute change – given how much Tony liked prodding you (and everyone else), either was a possibility.

The Avengers' plane was laid out in sets of three seats, not unlike a normal plane – apparently they used to be individual seats before the team got to the size it was now. Then, Stark had to upgrade as more members got recruited, compromising style for efficiency. Apparently they'd all had to talk him out of some kind of aerial monstrosity that would've been just short of a full sized passenger plane, complete with individual compartments. Bruce mentioned something about Tony being quite upset that Fury got a Helicarrier and he didn't.

You ended up in a middle seat, what would've been a fate worse than death if Tony's taunts had held weight, but fortunately you were seated next to two of your favorite people on the team. Steve sat on your left and Wanda on your right, leaving you with quite the grin through most of the flight. Steve was one of the kindest and most patient people you'd had the pleasure of knowing – and that was just in general; he went above and beyond as a trainer, even when you were despising him for pushing you so hard.

Wanda on the other hand was compassionate, empathetic, and frankly as different as your abilities were to her own, you'd always felt something of a kinship to her. Both of you were ordinary humans with powers you didn't ask for thrust upon you, and unlike Banner, neither of you particularly minded them. They made your lives... "interesting" was a nice way to put it... but they weren't a burden in themselves. They were just something you had to live with. That might have been why you were partnered up with her for this mission, and for so many training sessions in general.

"You remember the plan?" Steve said, his voice kind but stern – his leader voice, one you were only somewhat familiar with. "What's the layout?"

"Seven-tier Hydra base under the peaks of a mountain somewhere in the Rockies above the snowline, limited entrances and exits, not sure what they're researching but they've been putting off a hellacious heat signature for almost a month, too big to hide anymore in that kind of climate," you said dryly. Despite your relatively dull tone, your brain was rapid-firing as you made sure to hit all the major notes of Steve's briefing. You fought back the slightest smirk as you idly wondered if this was what it had been like getting called on in school... assuming you had, in fact, gone to a school at some point. There was always the possibility you were some kind of test tube experiment...

"And what's your role in it?"

"Storage and manufacturing sector, chemical and otherwise. Keep the fireworks to a minimum, subdue any threats, clear our area. Three points of intersection with other floors to guard once ours is dealt with, watch our backs until the facility is totally clear."

"And?"

"Get out alive," you added with a half-smirk finally breaking through.

"More than I would have remembered my first time. I was shaking like a leaf in the wind," Wanda said, giggling slightly as she rolled her eyes at Steve. "We can handle this, Steve. You worry too much."

"Seriously, I'd worry more about Hydra than I would those two. One of them's got crazy magic powers, and the other one isn't getting put down by less than a tank shell. And is that Stark tech I see branded on that shoulderpad? Seriously, what could possibly-"

Clint's words had sent a perhaps excessive jolt of heat through your veins, but that heat was chilled quickly. Not by rationality or thought, no, but by the surprise you had when he cut himself off suddenly. He made a slight grunt, and if you were anyone else, that might have been the end of it.

But it wasn't the end of it. You noticed every bit of what happened at the tail end of that sentence. Not just the uncomfortable look Wanda was giving the back of Clint's head, or the way that Steve's eyebrows knit together in the manner of a concerned father. You also noticed the slight jerk of the seats, the way he flinched, hiss that escaped between his teeth that was so quiet it was almost lost among the background noise – and for all her subtleties, you noticed the jerk of Natasha's body, and with your enhanced vision, even the tension in her neck as he spoke.

She'd elbowed him. Of that, you were sure.

"No one is invincible," Steve said after a long delay, breaking the silence that had momentarily fallen. "And it's my job to worry about everyone."

"Alright, alright... I was just trying to spare the newbie some of your coddling. My bad," Clint said. You tried to tune out the way his head flicked slightly to the right as he spoke, but you couldn't. The same way you couldn't ignore the tension slowly leaving Natasha as she adjusted her seating.

"Fifteen minutes to landing. We're going to be coming in hot with a low-fall landing; no way I can hide our approach. No decent cover within fifteen miles of the base," Tony said from the pilot's seat.

"Hang on everyone. This might get bumpy," Bruce called back from the co-pilot chair. He grimaced slightly as he turned his eyes forward once more. In the dark of night you couldn't properly make out anything beyond the Avengers Jet's windshield, but somewhere out there was a Hydra base you were readily approaching.

For the first time since Steve told you that you were going to be accompanying them on the mission, you found yourself looking forward to that conflict. Guns, bullets, knives, explosions, violence... those were things you had become unfortunately comfortable dealing with. Fighting, pain, exhaustion, and exertion were things you had been trained to handle and even overcome.

People and relationships, the intricacies of social interactions, and the feelings – negative and positive – that welled up in your chest at the mere sight of Clint and Natasha... those were things that no amount of training could help you handle. Things that over a year after you first woke up in that chamber, you were still dealing with as blindly as if it were your first day waking up in that cell all over again.

Honestly, as the flak fire began to erupt outside the plane, the distractions and adrenaline that it caused were almost welcome. The shaking of the hull disrupted conversation and made thinking about complex matters almost impossible. You weren't sure how things had come to the point that having guns pointed at you was easier to deal with... but here it was.

"Everyone, hang on!"

An impact came, one that rocked the aircraft even more violently than all the gunfire it had endured to that point. You were shaken and struggled to maintain your seat; almost everyone else in the cabin was thrown violently against their restraints, unable to even attempt to hold themselves steady as the entire plane crash-landed against the mountainside in its rapid dive to avoid a hail of anti-aircraft fire.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have condluded our descent into the mountainside. Please turn off all portable electronic devices and stow them until-"

"This is as close as we're getting to a landing, everyone out! Stick together and secure your areas," Steve called out, voice drowning out Tony's sarcastic monologue as he threw open the door to the plane, drowning out whatever anyone else said in the furious whipping of the wind and snow that found its way through the new entrance. You struggled out of your seat before most of the rest of the crew was even halfway to regaining their equilibrium, even while securing your helmet, but you were startled when a hand gripped your wrist.

"Follow me, I can find the nearest entrance to our sector!" Wanda's voice was broadcast both in your mind and through the speakers inside your helmet, confident and reassuring.

Wanda's hand was gripping you tightly, but far more impressive was the crimson glow surrounding her. Even as the aircraft was still settling she navigated her way to the open door flawlessly, her body moving as if unaffected by the shifting of the metal below her feet – and very likely, it was. You didn't resist her grip, and instead let her pull you all the way to and out the opened door. Her fingers didn't release yours until she fell beyond your reach, her face disappearing briefly amidst the wind and snow.

Your gaze travelled across the land below you and the aircraft itself in equal measure. The metal craft was grinding to a halt already, but you were a little more hesitant to drop freely than Wanda seemed to be. Possibly in part because you were pretty sure that – if push came to shove – she would have been able to lift the entire plane up with her abilities, even if it were about to roll over her. Despite what Fury had told you, you weren't convinced you'd ever be able to do something like that, and you had no desire to test it out now of all times.

Once the plane had slowed to a crawl, its wheels awkwardly fumbling across the uneven rocks, you threw yourself forward and fell into a tucked roll, one that failed miserably when the snowy terrain gave way on your impact. Your armor and joints managed to absorb most of the impact, thankfully, leaving you to right yourself in the middle of a shallow snow bank with a blush on your cheeks that shone even through the chills of the wintery air. Whatever materials were used for your suit's outer coating, the snow seemed to slip right off of your suit as you took your first few steps.

Wanda appeared at your side a few moments after you regained your feet, her look serious but with enough of a wry smile that you were sure she had seen how you landed. She gestured to a distant metal bay door with one hand, a few hundred feet up the mountain, while using her other hand to create a barrier in front of the team that blocked the majority of the gunfire coming your way. "Come, it's this way!"

Those words sent you into action, scurrying up the snowy mountainside just behind Wanda. Though Tony had claimed your suit was capable of standing up to some gunfire, you were sincerely grateful for the crimson shield in front of you both so that you didn't have to test it out so soon. With Wanda hovering over the snow and you wading your way through it as quickly as you could, the two of you made a rapid dash for the massive metal doors. Your hand instinctively went to your side, double-checking the pistol holstered at your side for reassurance.

The suit didn't exactly have pockets for backup ammunition, but you had a double-stack clip of fifteen rounds plus one already chambered. Given that you were going onto the battlefield with a Norse god and a living green rage monster who happened to be an extremely polite man, a firearm shouldn't have felt as reassuring as it did – but hell, Cap got by with a shield and some flashy punches, so maybe you'd be alright.

You didn't bother asking how you were going to make your way in – though this was your first mission, you'd seen news reels of Wanda in action. You were more than confident she'd get you inside... but even you were impressed by how she did it. Wanda disabled two soldiers guarding the exterior with quick bursts of energy, exploded a turret, and then turned her shield into a spear. The wall condensed and then exploded outward, first piercing through the metal and then expanding to peel the metal back until it blossomed like a flower. She tossed enough of the petals out of the way to make a clean entrance for you both, then reconstituted the shield ahead of her as the first bullets came from inside the building.

"Come on, quickly," Wanda's voice carried over your headset again, but this time it was mostly unneeded. You were already behind her, adrenaline pumping as you barreled through the doorway, eyes already moving. You did what you'd been trained to do, and what you'd learned to do on your own before that – you stayed alert, you moved fast, and you hit hard. There was a perimeter around the doors that was set up to stop your intrusion, probably hastily erected around the time that their defenses started firing at the jet. But all they had was a firing line setup with two lightly armored vehicles and two-dozen men armed with rifles, some on the ground floor behind cover, and others positioned above in suspended walkways. The walkways hung nearly twenty feet in the air, suspended above storage containers and some kind of chemical vats. They were too far away for you to strike.

But that was fine. They were well within reach of Wanda, and you two had already done enough training to work together at least mostly competently. As the first crimson blasts were flying overhead and one of the vehicles suddenly flattened, you were already behind the lines of cover, striking out with a fist before your feet had even touched down. Even without a point to push off of, the force of your momentum and speed of your strike sent the armored man to the floor – a follow-up guillotine kick to the helmet dealt with the rest.

"Credit where credit is due... I barely even felt that through this suit," you murmured as you looked down at where your kick had connected, the reinforced material of the HYDRA soldier's helmet actually cracked and dented inwards. That quick glance was all you had time for – already there were barrels swiveling toward you, and off you went tghrough the ranks of the enemy.

Explosions and gunfire that would've half-deafened you and left you a quivering mess a year ago were like background noise now. Stark's helmet did wonders at sound dampening, but it was more than that – you were more familiar with your body, more conditioned to working in these kind of situations. The noises barely phased you now, nor the feeling of impact as blow after blow landed. Even as your hand found its way to the back of your beltline and pulled free the firearm stored there, even as you unloaded a half-dozen rounds into three HYDRA agents aiming at Wanda, you barely slowed.

You twisted under a backhand that was thrown at you out of desperation, as you approached a soldier still aiming at Wanda. While you were righting yourself, you sent an open palm into his chest, throwing him off balance. The spray of bullets meant for your chest instead ricocheting off the ground when the soldier doubled over with a grunt of pain. The few bullets that bounced back up to connect with you barely registered as they flicked off of your reinforced armor, and by the time the HYDRA soldier had his recoil under control you had thrown three more punches, the third of which sent the man into a complete 180-degree spin. He landed on the floor unconscious, letting out a quiet groan while you were busy finding your next target.

Just as you were bursting forward to cross a gap in the line of cover and catch the next HYDRA agent mid-reload, a crimson glow blossomed to your right and the remaining armored vehicle began to levitate into the air. Wanda was simultaneously holding her kinetic barrier, blasting a soldier off of a distant walkway, and lifting the car into the air only to flip it and crash it back to the ground so hard it crumpled most of the frame. You'd never seen her wield her abilities outside of training scenarios, never seen the way they could obliterate a living being, much less several of them at the same time. You were impressed, awed, and slightly fearful all at the same time.

Though you tried to keep your focus on what you were doing, you couldn't help a knee-jerk reaction to the shock of what you were seeing. The surprise of it caused you to stumble a bit, missing your footing on your second step and causing you to awkwardly flounder into a metal panel hastily bolted to the ground for cover. Before you could right yourself fully, the HYDRA soldier finished his reload and took aim.

The sound was louder this time, as you heard not only the loud reverberations of the bullets firing, but the sounds of them impacting which carried across your body and felt like it was shaking your skeleton. Nearly two dozen of them, almost a full mag-dump, some of which missed but that left plenty to score hits on the left side of your chest and upper abdomen. One fell wide, catching your right wrist and throwing the handgun free of your grip, sending it scattering across the ground.

The impact of those bullets, even through your reinforced armor, felt like one massive punch – and a good one at that. You saw sparks flying and shrapnel flinging away from you where the impact occurred. You were sure that it would leave a bruise and a lingering ache, but in the throes of adrenaline the stinging sensation was gone in an instant, leaving you a chance to respond as the HYDRA soldier's magazine came up empty with a final burst.

With your heartbeat pounding in your ear like war drums, you grabbed the metal plate you were leaning against and, with a considerable yank, tore it free of the floor. Metal screeched as bolts gave way, and then the soldier gave his own as you tossed the plate at him so hard that parts of his arm and the barrel of his gun were shaped into the metal as it flew into him. You rushed forward and slid low, clearing the man's legs out from under him as you passed by. Before he had even hit the ground you lifted yourself up and followed him down, your elbow coming down on his throat so hard you heard something crunch, a sound that would've haunted you if the sound of your own racing heart hadn't mostly drowned it out.

When you stood, there was no one left conscious except you and Wanda. The entire area was covered with shrapnel and bullet holes, both vehicles were completely totaled, and several unconscious people were unconscious or dead on the floor. Most were surrounding the entrance, though you didn't miss those Wanda had knocked from their perches on the walkways above.

"Are you alright?! I saw sparks fly when those rounds hit!"

This time Wanda's voice came not only through your headset, but also through your helmet – she had rushed up to you, grabbing one of your arms as she looked over you in concern. You didn't respond immediately, glancing down to where you'd seen the bullets land earlier. To your surprise and relief, there were no signs of penetration through your armor – not even through the outer layers. There were some light scratches and scuffs, a few other signs of cosmetic deterioration, and one spot where you thought some real damage might have happened, but even that was questionable given that you didn't know the limits of this armor yet.

"I'm... I'm fine, actually. Holy shit, I'm fine," you breathed. "I mean, Tony said that the suit would hold up, but that's one thing in a lab and another when... holy shit."

"Stark's suit has taken tank rounds before, you shouldn't be so surprised... but that doesn't mean you should get caught off guard, either," Wanda noted, looking at you with concern. "Are you sure you're alright? You never stumbled like that in training."

"I... yeah, I'm okay."

That was all you could really come up with. How did you explain to Wanda the differences between seeing the way someone's powers could work in a controlled environment and watching them actually use them? She'd grown up with her powers just like you had, only hers seemed far more impressive – at least to you. More than that, you felt a little guilty. How could you tell someone you looked up to so much that, even for just a moment, you'd been almost afraid of her? Especially when you knew just how much that might hurt her.

The part about hurting her was the worst... particularly when you could already see it. The suspicion, the pain, the guilt. Twitches and subtle changes in expression no one else would notice, not only because of your enhanced senses, but because you were so familiar with trying to read people quite literally trained to hide their emotions that seeing Wanda's reactions couldn't have felt more obvious. She may as well have been holding up a giant neon sign.

Without thinking, you clasped a hand on Wanda's shoulder, grinning as widely as you could manage while feeling genuine. "That was insane! I'm really sorry I screwed up there, I'm so glad it didn't get you hurt, but like... I know we trained together a lot, but actually seeing you do all that at once was crazy! You were throwing those energy balls around like it was nothing, you were taking way more bullets than this armor could, and you still managed to flip an entire car in the air?! I got kind of awestruck, and the next thing I knew I was running into a stack of crates. I'm really sorry, that's totally on me."

Wanda's expression changed immediately, to a far less reserved smile complete with a deep blush, though she tried in vain to hide it. "Oh, I'm... well, I'm sorry I caught you by surprise. I didn't mean to throw you off like that. I'll try to be more careful. And next time we're partnered up for training scenarios, I'll show you what I can really do."

You smiled warmly, a genuine one. If nothing else, the feeling of alleviating her fears and doubts about herself washed away all the negative emotions that came with thinking about why you could read people so well. "I look forward to it. That aside... it seems like we dispatched with the welcoming party. That looks to have been all of them, should we move deeper and secure the rest of the manufacturing area?"

"That was all of them waiting here for us," Wanda halfway agreed. "But there may be more lurking around in hidden areas, waiting for us to let our guard down. We should clear this area before moving on to secure the rest of the floor."

"Right," you agreed, pausing only momentarily as you strode toward where your gun had fallen. "I see a staircase leading up over there; I should take the walkways. If I get into trouble up there, you can hover up and help me no problem, and if you're in trouble, I can always jump down. If anything happens up there and I'm on the ground floor though, it's gonna be hard to do anything."

"Fair enough. Stay on alert though," Wanda noted. You took a brief moment to recover your fallen sidearm, relieved to find it in one piece and unharmed by any stray rounds. You checked the magazine before stowing it away – three rounds left, plus one in the chamber. After a quick, reaffirming glance exchanged with Wanda, the two of you exchanged quick nods and traced a path through the room. You stuck together with Wanda as long as you could manage, right up until you set your first foot on the stairs upward.

The walkways you found yourself on at the top of the stairs were open, but also incredibly dark. They were hung well above the fluorescent lamps that illuminated the lower levels, which left even your enhanced vision struggling to discern the railings from shifting shadows. Thankfully they also weren't particularly expansive; there were three large sections which didn't have many interconnections, leading outward from a single entrance to some second-floor rooms at the perimeter which you assumed were offices with a view of the storage and manufacturing area. Only two of them had staircases down, so you only had to keep an eye on one other section to the best of your ability to make sure that nothing got behind Wanda.

That left a decent bit of your attention to focus on the warehouse below, something you thought unimportant at first – right until you spotted the glisten of a gun barrel. There was a man hiding behind a cart of what you guessed was cleaning equipment, holding absolutely still as Wanda rounded the corner nearest them.

"Wanda, on your right! Shields up, they're behind that supply cart," you shouted, forgetting in the heat of the moment that you were live on comms. Wanda thankfully didn't complain about your volume – in fact, she didn't make a verbal response at all, instead simply pivoting on one heel to cast a red bolt toward the cart.

The HYDRA agent realized a little too late that they had been seen; whether your words were loud enough for them to hear through your helmet, or if they had simply seen the incoming blast coming, you weren't totally sure. Either way they avoided a rupturing burst of disinfectants and chemicals with a quick roll as Wanda's blast detonated the cart. The HYDRA agent was on their feet quickly, pulling their gun up to fire – just in time for it to glisten with a ruby glow and be ripped out of their hands, only a couple of stray rounds finding their way into the ceiling. A moment later a second burst of energy hit the HYDRA soldier's chest, sending them careening into a wall, after which they lay disturbingly still.

"Nice work, I-"

You fell silent as you noticed the first real movement on the upper levels. A blur of shadows and darkness, but clear enough for you to discern. The semi-distant door of the upper-floor offices burst open, and the red glow of some kind of targeting system filled your eyes. Reacting mostly on instinct, you reached back and drew your sidearm once more, firing all four remaining rounds toward the glistening glow. At least one found its mark – you could tell by the way that the shadowed figure recoiled and the crimson glow shifted in the dark – but you hadn't struck quite quickly enough. Three streaks of red blasted through the night. One found its way near Wanda, another into the dark distance behind you, and a third landed directly beside you.

You looked down at it in alarm, not sure what had been fired. That alarm escalated into full-blown panic as you saw not a bullet or some form of impact projectile, but rather a metal clump coated in adhesive fluid that had stuck to the bars of the walkway. It was almost certainly a bomb, of what sort you weren't sure, but it likely didn't matter at this distance. There was little time after that for the feelings of panic to evolve further, but by pure training and reflex, you managed to raise your arms up and jump up, curling into a ball mid-air just a moment before a red LED ignited and the device itself detonated.

Fire blossomed around you in a furious inferno, accompanied by a blast wave. Explosive force sent you hurtling off of the suspended walkway, across a considerable expanse of space, and then through a glass bay window. Your head spun and your senses were busy reorienting themselves as you found your way to your feet awkwardly, finding yourself in a largely empty room. The floor was covered in scattered papers and metal shrapnel, the desk and wall you had partially eviscerated finding their new home at your feet. Flames surrounded you, most of the front portion of the room near the window you'd crashed through now engulfed by the blaze.

"Shit, shit, are they-"

You started to move toward the broken window, empty pistol still gripped firmly, when a siren blared from above. Red lights shined and klaxons blared as reinforced metal sheets slammed down over the window you had been thrown through as well as every other entrance save the one that led further into the facility. Vents opened up above and several streams of what you assumed was a chemical fire suppressant began to spray into the room. A robotic voice blared warnings you ignored as you poured your attentions into your communications system.

"Wanda, are you okay?" You asked, hoping your helmet dulled enough of the noise surrounding you for her to hear you clearly. "Wanda, I got thrown through a window. I'm going to try to make my way back to you! Are you-"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Wanda's voice came over your speaker set slightly distorted, blurred by background noise of flames and secondary detonations. "Thank you for giving me a heads up; I almost missed that one. Are you doing alright?"

"I'm fine, I just... I need to get through this barrier. Can you just tear down the metal shielding on the second floor?" You asked. You gave one solid punch to the steel barring you from exiting the way you came in, but not only did your blow make only a tiny dent, but your hand already burned from the heat from the other side.

"Negative. These chemicals burn hot, and they sprung a leak across this whole floor," Wanda noted, sounding frustrated. "It's all I can do to keep the fire from spreading further. If these chemical containers go up, no telling how much damage it could cause. Try to find a way back down, we'll reunite then. Don't worry about me, no way an ordinary HYDRA soldier is just going to shrug off this heat! I can barely stand it myself."

"Got it. I'll be back soon!"

You tried to sound more confident than you felt as you ended the transmission, turning toward the door, eager to leave. There must have been some kind of filtration system on the helmet but it wasn't strong enough to filter out the strong chemical odors that were causing your eyes to water heavily, and the fire had used so much oxygen that you were starting to wheeze for breath.

You stumbled out into the halls, fighting the urge to cough. You mentally ran over the layout of the room you'd been in, trying to pinpoint where you were now based on where you'd been when you got tossed through the air. You had an idea of which way to go, but you weren't sure where the interior stairs led out, so you still ended up wandering a bit, hoping to either find the stairs or a window that hadn't been sealed off because of the fire so you could drop back out. You mostly ended up wandering through long rooms of barely-sectioned cubicles, most of your effort focused on making sure you kept the right heading. The last thing you needed was to get turned around and end up back where you started.

Tracking time when you were on high alert like this was still a bit difficult; your sense of time seemed warped compared to others. By your best guess it was after nearly two minutes of fruitless searching that you heard the first footsteps, so light and airy you weren't even sure they were really there. It wasn't until they were nearly on top of you, around the corner of the next junction in the cubicles, that you knew you weren't imagining things. Tensing yourself as you approached the sound, you coiled up like a tensed snake, nearly throwing yourself around the corner, fist already drawn back.

You froze the moment you turned the corner, for two reasons. The first was the flash of red and black and the slight glisten of blue around the wrists that gave away the identity of your target. Those colors in that pattern were unmistakable, and despite the queasiness in your gut they instilled, you were at least a little relieved to see them – not that you'd ever admit it.

The second reason was, of course, the gun pointed at your forehead, helmet be damned.

"Oh," you murmured, fighting back a tinge of annoyance and anger as you watched Natasha's brow quirk at you, the rest of her face as immobile as stone.

"It's you."

Chapter Text

"Yeah, it's me. Heard you got a little lost," Natasha said, face even as she holstered her weapon. She eyed you up and down as she took a step back, putting a bit more distance between you.

"Got thrown a little off course," you replied tersely. "Nothing that I can't handle. As a matter of fact, I'm headed back right now."

"Really? Going this way?" Natasha mused, quirking an eyebrow at you.

"Well, there's a bit of a lockdown because of the fire, but... it's in this direction. I'll find my way there," you replied tersely, her tone making you feel rather defensive. You stepped through the doorway and gave her as much space as you could as you started to walk past her.

"You will? Did you memorize the blueprints?" Natasha asked, managing to make it sound like a genuine question despite already knowing the answer. You barely knew you were going on the mission until the last minute; you hadn't had time to do more than a quick glance over the blueprints, which was why you were supposed to be in the warehouse area in the first place. "Because if not, I think you should know that you're heading for a dead end that only has doors to a storage closet, a server room, and a bathroom."

"...Which way?" You finally asked, sighing as you stopped in your tracks, still avoiding eye contact with her.

"Come on, I'll show you," Natasha said, gesturing for you to follow her as she turned away – probably trying not to give you a chance to object, but that certainly wouldn't stop you from complaining.

"Oh? I thought we were barely on speaking terms, and you're volunteering as a tour guide? That's very mature of you. Assuming this isn't some kind of trick, I mean."

"You don't trust me?"

The borderline taunt wasn't subtle – not for Natasha, not even for a normal person. She layered on the fake innocence and hurt so thick it nearly made you gag.

"No."

She paused at the single-word response, seeming more pleased than surprised, something that made the retch caught in your throat grow just a little stronger. Her lips twitched, something you had learned to recognize as the closest Natasha ever came to a smile while on the job, but it wasn't matched by the dull gloss that came over her eyes.

"Good."

That was all she said before she set off again. You weren't sure what to make of the interaction, but you also had more important things to focus on.

"Don't try to read her. Don't try to figure her out. That's what got you into this mess."

You tried repeating that over and over in your head, and it worked for a while. Reading Natasha was always a guessing game, one you couldn't afford to play right now.

Distractions weren't hard to find, thankfully. The two of you could only traipse through the abandoned office space for so long before you ran into someone else. Several others, actually; an entire squadron of HYDRA soldiers was combing through an office, though combing was perhaps a bit too gentle of a word. In addition to checking every corner of the room for intruders, the armed goons were smashing every computer they passed by, going so far as to drop small devices into the cases that must have contained thermite, judging by the flames and bright light that immediately flared out of the vents after they were dropped in.

Thankfully, they hadn't noticed the two of you – the sounds of their destruction had given them away while you and Natasha were several rooms away. Together the two of you had made your way closer to the noise until you were positioned just on the other side of the doorway leading into the room, tensed for action on either side of the doorframe.

For all your discomfort, you never considered leaving her to handle things on her own, even knowing that she was more than capable of it. At the moment your shoulder gently rested on the wall beside the door frame, your only thought was on your next move. Looking over at Natasha, the same thoughts were obviously going through her own mind – thoughts she signalled to you through a quick set of hand signals.

A moment of nostalgia was followed by a bittersweet, almost metallic taste in your mouth as memories of training flashed through your head – not the training with the Avengers, but the training you had done with SHIELD. Days of sparring and studying with both Clint and Natasha, now tainted by the way you'd departed. The worst part wasn't the memories, though. Those were sour, but bearable. The part that you really hated was the brief moment where you let yourself think that, maybe if the tactics and signals they taught you were real, maybe it wasn't all fake after all.

"No. They're not some secret language you shared. They're just stupid fucking hand signals. And that one means go."

It all came in a burst. The sound of shouts, gunfire, feet pounding on the tiled floors, and metal on metal as your body flew across the room like a well-targeted missile. The first HYDRA agent went down in a three-hit combo you'd practiced a thousand times. You batted his rifle aside, careful to position yourself so you were swatting it away from Natasha when the inevitable burst of fire erupted from its barrel. Then two hits, one fast and one strong, took away his balance and his consciousness in short order. His rifle was secured to his body with a strap that looped around his back and under his arms – too much work to free it in the middle of a firefight, but his sidearm was simple enough to slip out before his body even hit the floor.

From there, your reflexes and sight carried the rest. Four HYDRA agents went down in a hail of gunfire, some from you and some from Natasha as she finished body-slamming the one that had been guarding the door, crumpling the man under his own weight. By that point the remaining three guards had started to take aim. You crouched and went into a slide, well ahead of the sound of bullets ricocheting behind you. As you went you grabbed one of the PCs that had been ignited, grateful for the protection of your armor as you yanked it out from underneath the desk and hurled it directly at the nearest HYDRA soldier.

The weight of the case and components combined with the explosion of flames that burst free as the already partially melted case burst open brought an immediate stop to the gunfire as the guard you hit erupted into flames, while the other two scrambled away out of instinct.

"Confirmed encounter, Tech Lab 3-B! We-"

The words of one HYDRA soldier were abruptly cut off as both slumped to the ground. One to a final salvo of bullets, the second to a small pair of gadgets that latched onto his chest armor and filled the room with the unmistakable sound of extreme high-voltage surging its way through his body. Natasha kept her weapon raised until she was certain both men were down for the count, then lowered it smoothly.

The battle couldn't have lasted much more than thirty seconds, though it felt somehow both longer and shorter as you reflected on it while stepping over the unconscious and dead soldiers. You grimaced as you looked around the room, briefly observing the carnage and destruction. Natasha was already finished combing through the wreckage, apparently – she was standing by the doors and gave you a quick nod as you met her gaze, then gestured for you to join her and leave.

"You alright?" Natasha asked, eyeing up your suit.

"Yeah, not a scratch," you replied, glancing down to confirm that you hadn't missed any scuffs or scrapes on the armor that you hadn't felt in the heat of the moment.

"You did good work there," Natasha said. She walked over and patted you on the shoulder in what seemed like an exaggerated gesture, seemingly finding a way to ooze sarcasm through touch alone. "Looks like your comms took a hit, though."

"Huh? But I didn't- fuck!"

You flinched as she reached up toward the side of your head. Not because of the touch – but because as she tapped on your helmet, you saw sparks in the corner of your vision, right by where she'd touched. Some kind of short-circuit maybe, judging by how quickly it burnt itself out, and how it stopped once she pulled away.

"I didn't even feel that one," you admitted with a grimace. "How bad is it?"

"Not bad. Just a lucky shot," Natasha murmured. "Comms might be damaged, but your helmet integrity is fine. Could've happened to anyone. Like I said, you did good."

"Yeah, and you didn't check to see if I was gonna shoot you in the back even once," you replied, words sharp but voice a little distant, your mind still lingering on the soldiers' actions before your ambush. What were they trying to destroy so badly that they'd torch their entire setup? And what had they been radioing in at the last moment? "We've both made a lot of progress."

"What, you think I'm worried about you getting some payback? You're not that kind of person," Natasha said, shrugging as if the analysis was self-evident.

"If you believed that, I doubt you'd have gone to all the trouble of sneaking into Avengers Tower and leaving me a note just to get me to stay away," you grumbled in response, wishing there were somewhere else to look in this narrow hallway, something to stare at without seeing her in your peripheral that wasn't turning your gaze directly into the wall like a petulant child.

"Do you think I left you that note because I was worried you were going to betray us? Try to kill one of us?"

You glanced over with a reply half-formed on your lips, but let it drift away into silence when you saw her face. Sarcasm had become something of a default for you, but you could tell there was-

"I said stop it, damn it! Every time you think you know her, you find a new side."

"...Well, I don't suppose you've got a better explanation?" You prompted, continuing on before she could reply either way. "Probably a lie if you do, but it's not like I have a good track record of reading you right, so go ahead. Up until today, I haven't even seen you since I left the SHIELD facility, and the first thing you do is tell me I shouldn't go on the mission."

"And I told you not to throw everything you had away," Natasha pointed out, words slightly sharp. She sounded almost genuinely offended. "You've got a good thing going at the tower. No sense dying now that you've finally found people worth trusting."

"That's what-" You were halfway to a jab at how you thought you could trust her before, but then actually processed what she said. The words that seemed so deliberately chosen. "Worth trusting?"

The slightest twitch of her eyes gave it away. You weren't nearly confident enough to guess at what was responsible for that slip, or what lay underneath the stony mask that rose to cover it, but-

"No. What if she's faking it? What if she's just that good at controlling her reactions? Stop seeing things that aren't real!"

But you were entering your old habits, your subconscious survival instincts of reading your former prison guards returning in full, no matter how hard your active mind screamed that it was pointless. You could tell yourself over and over that what you were seeing were fake tells, but you couldn't stop seeing them. Especially since your elevated senses were the one thing you'd thought could get her right.

"Never heard you put yourself down before," you finally continued. "Feeling guilty?"

"I don't feel guilty about what I do. It's part of the job description – I have to put the mission above everything. If I couldn't handle that, I would've broken a long time before this," Natasha replied. Her voice was like a wall – hard, cold, unfeeling. But you were all too familiar with that wall now, especially when it erected itself so quickly.

"I thought so too," you mused, turning away slightly, letting your eyes wander further along the hallway again. You weren't sure if you could keep your face as steady as your voice. Natasha didn't say anything immediately, and you couldn't see how she was looking at you, so you just kept going.

"I said as much when I told them all what happened. Well, a version of it, anyway. I said you either didn't trust me, or thought I wasn't ready, even after everything. Steve and Tony... they were the ones who said you were too good at what you do for it to not have been on purpose. They were the ones who told me that if you left my apartment like that, you wanted me to know you did it. That if you left that note in my locker, you were doing it because you were worried about me. I told them they were wrong – but were they? I'm not so sure now."

"I already said I did it because you finally had a place to be happy. No sense in throwing all that away."

"I've been running it through my head. Not that I want to, I just can't stop. And the more I think , the more none of it makes sense," you persisted, brushing past her response. "If you didn't think I was ready, or especially if you thought I was dangerous, you'd have kept an eye on me during that fight. I've seen the way you handle yourself – not just in combat, but out in public. You watch every corner of every room like you're expecting something to jump out of the shadows. Not that you're afraid of it, you just want to make damn sure you jump first."

"You're giving quite the lecture on my behavior for someone who says they don't 'have a good track record' of reading me right. Nice to see you showing some confidence for once, though," Natasha replied tersely.

"It's bait. She's goading you to get angry so you stop trying to figure her out."

"It doesn't matter, it's all fake anyway!"

A grimace played across your face as the warring emotions in you reached a peak, your conscious and subconscious feelings conflicting violently, but you forced yourself to focus. She was fake... but her reactions – the little ones, anyway - were the one part that at least seemed honest, even if you didn't always understand them.

"Maybe I don't have the best record," you admitted. "But you seem like I was pretty close to the mark there. So if I wasn't right about you not trusting me, and they weren't right about you worrying about me... maybe it really was guilt. Like you said, all part of the mission, right? But that means it wasn't your choice. Distrusting or being worried about me, those could explain making things so obvious – chase me away from SHIELD, chase me away from HYDRA, don't have to worry about me being on the front lines... but guilt? That would explain why you barely look at me, even in the middle of a firefight."

"And what's that little psychoanalysis make your next move?" Natasha asked, a hint of her playful tone returning – but in a strangely dangerous way. It felt like she was raising up so many walls now that you could barely see her standing beside you. "What's that mean for you?"

"I have no idea. Continue working with the Avengers, I guess. I have no clue what you expect from me beyond that; obviously, it isn't being friendly again. Because even if you feel guilty, you aren't exactly apologetic," you said truthfully, offering a shrug despite the weight you felt at saying those words. "You've done nothing but put more distance between us, so frankly, I'm not even sure why you feel guilty about it. Seems like you couldn't be happier to have done it, seeing how well it's kept me away."

Natasha stopped, staring at you with a look almost like stupified awe – her eyes were narrowed, and for just a moment her mouth cracked open, like she couldn't believe what she was seeing in front of her.

"You are so incredibly frustrating."

The thought occurred to you that it seemed like one of the most genuine things she'd ever said – not necessarily the most honest, but certainly the least guarded – and that might have made you burst out laughing in different circumstances.

Here, it only made you angry.

"What? Frustrating that someone still bothers to try to understand you? To maybe try to understand the real human that's underneath all that ice?" You huffed in disbelief. "You're right, my mistake."

"You are so annoyingly perceptive about all the smallest details. You have been since the first time we met," Natasha said, sounding every bit as frustrated, "yet you're so confidently wrong about the big ones. It's actually impressive in a way."

"You know what? Fine, I don't need this," you finally said, throwing your hands up. "I'm supposed to be getting back to help Wanda anyway."

You tapped on your earpiece, but a burst of static erupted from the device instead of a clear channel coming through. The noise was so loud it made you want to curl up into a ball and die – thanks to your training, you managed to stay steady on your feet, but judging by Natasha's grimace, the look on your face must have been something truly miserable.

"That's what I was saying about your comms being scrambled," Natasha warned, sounding genuinely concerned.

"Whatever, I don't need my headset right now, I can just relay things through Wanda once I'm back there. Hurry up and get me to the quickest-."

"You're in luck. Right down that way," Natasha said. The two of you were approaching a T-section in the hall, and she gave a grand flourish down the left-hand turn as you reached it. "Stairs to the lower level are going to be about a quarter mile down the hall."

"Thanks," you grumbled, too annoyed to even point out the fact that you had very little precision with distances. Tended to happen when almost your entire life's worth of memories were spent inside confined spaces.

"Happy to help," Natasha said, but you had already made it several steps into the turn by that point, and you didn't bother to look at her, much less respond.

"Should have listened to myself sooner... she's as vague and infuriating as ever."

You were so frustrated – both with the situation and yourself – that you didn't even think to count your steps as you went to get a vague idea of how far you had gone. Eventually you stopped caring, assuming you would either see the staircase or run into a wall. It wasn't the smartest mindset, or the healthiest, but thankfully it didn't end up mattering.

You were about two minutes down the hall when you heard footsteps coming around the corner, closer than you should have let them get. You were so lost in thought you only had a few seconds to react; you raised the sidearm you'd plucked off of one of the HYDRA soldiers, ready to fire. It wasn't until the moment before they rounded the corner that you finally processed the sound of their movement enough to realize they were alone, and moving a bit too cautiously to be hunting you.

It was Clint who finally rounded the corner, eyes whipping about as he caught sight of the gun pointed at him – when he saw who was on the other end of the barrel, he not only relaxed, but broke into a smile.

"Geez, scared me half to death. You wound up all the way over here, huh?" Clint asked.

"Almost out of your hair, just headed for the stairs," you growled in reply. You lowered your gun again, and immediately made to walk past him.

"Been that bad up here? Usually I only look that sour when- hey, did you say you're heading for the stairs?"

"Yeah, gotta regroup with Wanda and finish our section of the facility," you affirmed. "I need to get moving, she's been on her own a while already, so if you don't mind-"

"No, I don't, but that's the thing... there's no stairs in this part of the base," Clint responded. "I've been over here clearing this floor out. I thought you were over here to regroup with me for safety?"

You froze in your tracks. Surprise chilled the anger that was starting to seep through your veins, but it didn't take long before that fiery fury started to melt its way through the shock. "The fuck did you just say?"

"Regroup for safety. There's-"

"Not that part, there's no stairs over here?!" You exclaimed, eyes alight with fury.

"No, none. Nearest way back down to the next level below is in the opposite direction – there's a crew quarters back there with an access stairway nearby that leads to the warehouse you were in before."

"Fucking- what game is she playing?!" You couldn't help the outburst, and couldn't ignore Clint's raised eyebrow. "I ran into Natasha back there. We dealt with a squadron of HYDRA goons burning their own computers, then came this way. She pointed me in this direction, said that there was supposed to be a stairway that would get me back to Wanda."

You expected to see understanding come over Clint's face, maybe a smirk that would signal he was in on the game, or at least understood what she was up to. But Clint's frown only deepened when you said that. "This doesn't make sense. You were supposed to regroup with us, that's why I thought you came over here to find me. Didn't you hear what Cap said?"

"No, my comms are fried, I think." You tapped the side of your helmet for emphasis.

"They're after you. Capture squads in specialized gear showed up in the bay shortly after you left, and they've been spotted on this floor. Probably around the time that you two met up with the other squadron..." Clint eyed your helmet suspiciously, and he didn't have to speak for you to guess what he was thinking.

"Natasha didn't say a thing," you growled. "And I never heard her respond on the radio. Did she even let you know she ran into me?"

"Goddamnit Nat, you're gonna get yourself killed one of these days." Clint started down the hallway without answering your question, a grim look on his face. He was running, but not at quite a full sprint – he was keeping his eyes forward, searching for any sign of movement, any sign of trouble. You saw the way his fingers tightened on the grip of his bow, the tension he added to the string even in mid-stride, ready to let a shot fly in sync with his heavy footfalls against the metal flooring.

"Natasha, what's your location? Any sightings of the hunter squadron?"

"Hey, what's going on?!" Your shout was probably unnecessarily loud, considering that you were already running after him – and that it was Clint – but letting loose some of the frustration boiling up inside of you helped you feel a little better.

"She was worried something like this would happen. The intel we got on this base was off, the job was clean. Too easy, almost. Nat said it smelled like a trap, and she was going to try to convince you not to come," Clint explained between heavy breaths, still going as fast as his legs would carry him. "She sent you this way to-"

"To keep me out of the way while she dealt with these 'capture squads' you mentioned?" Your tone made it sound like a question, but you grunted in frustration without waiting for an answer. "You two frustrate the hell out of me! She must have sabotaged my comms to keep me from finding out; she knew I wouldn't want to just sit back and risk everyone else taking care of the problem. Why didn't she just tell the rest of the Avengers about it?"

"She did. We both did, actually. When they told us they were planning on making this your first mission, we tried to warn them."

"You... did?" Your instinct was to not believe him, but there was nothing in Clint's words - or what little you could glean from his body language as he ran – to tell you he was lying. "They didn't say anything to me."

"They didn't want to worry you or throw you off. Said you were going to be getting chased by HYDRA your whole life, might as well get used to it on your first mission. And they said you were ready, that you could handle it. Can't say I disagree on either count," Clint looked away from the long hall you were both sprinting down long enough to throw you a cocky grin. "If I had to guess, I'd say that's why Tony went all-out on that outfit for you too. You might not know him all that well yet, but he doesn't exactly go around outfitting us all for fun. A new toy or two every now and then is the most we get."

"You really think they'll be after me forever?" You weren't surprised, but hearing it spoken so plainly made your stomach drop.

"This little faction of them? Definitely," Clint said with almost absolute certainty. "At least until we track the last of them down and take them out. Whatever is special about you, they want to figure it out. We already had to move you from the first safehouse after they tracked it down. That's why we moved you to downtown New York City afterward. We knew we couldn't rely on secrecy anymore, so we chose blunt security instead, a place right down the street from Avengers Tower. We had to make them hesitate, to buy enough time for us to figure out a more permanent home for you."

"Is that why you tipped off Cap and the others to where I was? I mean, the tracking thing was a given, but I never expected you to send in the Avengers," you admitted. "You weren't just trying to protect me from a few street thugs that I pissed off, were you?"

"Sharp as ever. We knew Avengers Tower was the one place that HYDRA wouldn't be able to get you, even if they were dumb enough to try. And after a few weeks training under the Avengers... well, I can't exactly see under that suit, but I'm guessing you can hold your own if you can move this well in that thing."

"Seems like Natasha disagrees."

"She's protective of you. Always has been. I used to think it was just because of the way you both have issues and obsessions with your pasts, or because she understands some of what you're going through with the whole serum and experimentation thing, but now I'm not so sure."

"Serum? Experiments? She... did she come from a HYDRA facility too? She never..."

"What? No, she-" Clint paused, shock evident in his face – he actually had to collect himself for a moment, and when he finally did, he let out a genuine laugh. "You really didn't look any of it up, did you? All those files, all of SHIELD's dirty secrets... you even knew her past was on there. After all we did, you didn't feel like digging any of that up?"

Clint must have seen the indignation, the anger, on your face. His amusement vanished, and he turned his eyes forward once again before continuing.

"Shit, that's my bad, then. It's her story to tell. Who knows, after this maybe she'll tell you some of it. I'll say this - no, she's not from a HYDRA facility, but she knows how terrifying getting dragged back to a place like that would be. And she knows you're still trying to figure out what your past is – and if HYDRA's figured that part out, they'll use that to try to draw you into a trap."

"Seems like every time Natasha does something stupid like this, everyone tries to convince me that she's doing it for my own good, to protect me," you growled.

"You know her." Clint didn't clarify further, just letting that thought hang in the air for a moment, giving it space. "If you think something she's doing is stupid, it's probably for a damn good reason."

"And what the hell is the good reason for going off to take on a whole squad prepared to capture me alone? What's important enough to do something that stupid?"

"You."

Anger and denial wrenched across your face, but you said nothing. So many threads of thought on her were getting tangled up, so many uncertainties in everything she did that made even analyzing basic interactions like solving a puzzle. And trying to figure out her thoughts, her motivations, her real feelings... that was like trying to paint in the missing pieces by hand, having never seen what the completed picture was even supposed to look like.

"Besides, it's not as stupid as you think," Clint said, sounding as if that were supposed to be more of a reassurance than it felt like. "You know she can handle herself."

You did, but you weren't going to give her the satisfaction of saying it out loud. And you weren't going to point out that he was the one who went running after her, that he was the one who'd said she was going to 'get herself killed one of these days'.

"Let's stay focused," you finally responded tersely, lips tight and eyes forward. "Any idea where she is?"

"She's still not responding. But there's only one way they could've come onto this floor, and it's not far ahead. If they're still on this level, they're nearby, and Nat won't be far away."

As unhappy as you'd been to run into Clint, you couldn't deny how much you appreciated having him with you, at least at that moment. He knew more about the situation than you, he had more combat experience... and he had the reflexes of a cat, which came in handy when he grabbed you by the back of your neck and pulled you hard enough to topple you mid-stride. The stumbling collision you made with the ground hurt your pride.

The shock baton, though, would've been worse.

A sound like the world's largest, angriest hornet reverberated around the hallway as Clint threw you to the ground. Even after all your training and all the gunshots you'd already been subjected to that day, the sound sent a reverberating chill down your spine as you watched the arc of electricity that danced between the prongs where your torso had been moments earlier. You were so caught off-guard by the attack that before you could recover enough to strike back, Clint had already whipped the lower limb of his bow across the HYDRA agent's helmet with enough force to send him staggering, then put an arrow in the man's back to make sure he stayed down.

"You alright?"

"Yeah..."

Clint offered you an arm, but you were already scrambling to your feet, senses more alert and eyes now scanning the hallway ahead, only lingering briefly on the fallen HYDRA soldier. He'd been hiding on the other side of an open doorway to ambush you, which explained why you hadn't heard any footsteps or sounds before the attack, but not why his strike felt so much faster than the others.

"This guy is definitely from one of the capture squads we were talking about," Clint confirmed, moving to pull the arrow free of the fallen enemy. "Juiced up on whatever supersoldier cocktail they've been working on lately, and armed to the teeth with less lethal weaponry."

"Less lethal?" You couldn't help the quirk of an eyebrow as you glanced at him.

"Anything can be lethal in the right hands. I could take a few HYDRA goons down with a toothpick, but at that point, just use your hands," Clint said, smirking as if he were proud of himself. "Besides, these batons they're carrying? Those are amped up way beyond normal. Might knock you on your ass for a few minutes, but to a normal person, it'd be like getting hooked up to a power line."

"Well... thanks," you finally said, voice still a little annoyed, even if you weren't entirely sure who to direct it at anymore. "I owe you one. I see why Natasha was worried about me coming along, I guess... but if they're all hyped up on some makeshift cocktail, we better find Natasha, fast. These guys have an edge on us."

"Don't worry about her too much. She's tough, and she's got a few edges of her own."

Clint didn't waste any time to elaborate further, though – and the confidence his tone had didn't keep him from matching pace with you as the two of you started through the halls again. This time, you were both a little slower, a little quieter, and a little more alert, always ready for another ambush. But the next HYDRA soldier that came into the hallway was far from a threat, judging by the way his body impacted the wall... and crumpled to the ground immediately after.

It was no great surprise to see the figure that strolled around the corner shortly after, though it was at least something of a relief. Natasha's rose-colored hair bounced lightly as she twisted her head around, first checking the HYDRA soldier, then eyeing the two of you. From this distance, her expression was even colder than usual, and her eyes seemed to pierce through you as she stared the two of you down.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to show up," Natasha said, throwing you a coy, flat grin, as if nothing had happened. As detached and unshakable as ever. You wanted to shout at her for toying with you so much, but although you hated to admit it, you were glad to see she was alright. You settled on the best imitation of her deadpan expression you could give, though you could tell some of your anger was still seeping through as you strode up to her.

"Look, I don't know if you think you're protecting me for my own good, if it's so you don't have to look after me, or just because I was right about you not trusting me. Whatever the case is, this crosses a line," you said, voice severe. "Frying my comms and sending me on a goose chase like that? That's beyond-"

"I didn't fry your comms," she interrupted, clicking a button on one of her devices. A scrambled blast of static burst over your earpiece, causing you to wince. While you were glaring at her and recovering from the shock, she pressed another button and sparks flew a section of her gauntlet, her usual electrical arsenal, only this time it fired off without a target.

"You just faked it?"

"Jammed them too... until we separated," Natasha explained. Beneath the smugness, there was something genuine that threatened to unbury itself. "I wouldn't actually send you off on a goose chase with no way to get ahold of anyone. Figured by the time you figured out what was happening or heard radio traffic directed your way, I'd have had plenty of time to deal with this group."

"Looks like you did at that," you muttered reluctantly. Now that you'd walked up to her, you could see that it wasn't just the one HYDRA agent – the entire hallway behind her, around the corner she'd emerged from, was filled with bodies – all of them either dead or unconscious. She smirked as you admired her handiwork.

"I don't expect a thanks."

"You damn well better not, because-"

You bit your tongue before it could finish the reflexive, angry reply. There was no point – things were settled. You knew what was going on, you were finally on the right track to getting back to the warehouse you were supposed to be in, and Natasha was safe. Between your frustration and confusion, all you wanted right then was to be away from her. And Clint, if to a slightly lesser extent.

Well, lesser until he clasped a hand onto your armored shoulder and smirked up at you as if you were still the drinking buddies he'd once claimed.

"See? All works out in the end. Everyone's safe, you owe me a beer, and-"

Whatever Clint said next was lost in the ringing and echoing of klaxons, the room suddenly bathed in only the most stunning of crimson as emergency lights began to flash. Clint reacted first, an arrow drawn and his bowstring pressed against his cheek in an instant, flickering the lethal tip down both hallways leading from the junction you were in, his eyes scanning every door for a possible threat. You and Natasha did likewise with your own arsenals, three guns alternating between the two paths. No immediate threat came, but in the moments that it took you to realize that, blast doors partway down both halls began to lower.

"They're trying to cage us in!" You shouted, fingers tensing around the grip of your gun. Just thinking the word cage sent whatever reserves of adrenaline you still had in you surging through your veins, and you were prepared to run before Clint and Natasha had even loosened their posture.

"They must have another group of hunters on the way. They're probably locking the facility down to keep us separated, but how are they planning on doing an extraction even if they get the best of us?" Clint grumbled.

The sound of a hundred hissing vipers filled the hall as the fire suppression system began to spew forth a thick, heavy cloud of green gas. You couldn't smell it through the filters on your helmet, but you caught the looks of concern and mild disgust as Clint and Natasha both holstered their weapons for long enough to retrieve and don their gas masks, just before their expressions disappeared behind the thick filters.

"Looks like they're hoping none of us are conscious enough to stop them," Natasha responded once she had hers on securely. "Let's blow one of these doors and get the hell out of here."

"Facility's going into a full lockdown. Everyone, give me a status report. Tony?"

"Yeah, working on it as we speak. Believe it or not, their network security isn't the issue – looks like they've torched about half the network on this place already anyway. But they've started doing the same to the security system's private network now that they've activated the lockdown. I might have to do some manual repairs to lift the full thing."

"They're trying to make it as hard as possible for us to regroup," Natasha noted as the others checked in one by one. Her voice and expression were even harder than usual to read through the mask, but there was a touch of the same concern you could hear in Clint's voice as he updated Cap on where the three of you were, and what you suspected was happening.

"We should head for the stairs, blast our way down to Wanda's level," you suggested. "If Tony doesn't get the system fully released, she's the best shot at tearing through anything standing between us and the rest of the team."

"Well, I did forget to pack my duffel bag full of C4, so I guess we can let her show off a little," Clint grunted, a sarcastic agreement, but an agreement nonetheless. "Let's keep it slow. They might have back ways around these halls, and I don't like the visibility here. Hey Wanda, can you-"

A burst of static came over your comms, then nothing. From the look on their faces, this time it wasn't just yours.

"You're not just fucking with me, right?" You said, still holding out some hope. That was quashed the second they both shook their heads in unison.

"We should get moving, and fast. There's a stairway not far from here – no heavy doors on the way, according to our blueprints, however accurate they were. Didn't mention any gas lines running to the sprinkler system either though," Clint said, giving a sideways nod of his head, as if to say 'win some lose some', then his eyes turned to you. "It's our best shot. We make it to the stairway and there's only two blast doors between us and the garage. All we have to do is make it through the first one - even without comms, we can make enough racket to get Wanda's attention through the second one if she hasn't already started heading this way."

There was no argument from either you or Natasha – the gas that was filling the room was thick, and it was still pouring in rapidly. Already, you had lost sight of the heavy doors that had descended in either direction, and it wasn't long before your visibility was reduced to just a few feet in front of you. Clint watched your backs while Natasha covered the front, her posture low to the ground and her body tensed up, ready for a burst of movement.

Natasha led the way until you reached a closed door that you assumed was the crew quarters Clint had been talking about earlier. The door wasn't a blast door, but it was still sealed, and although Clint made a good effort at it, there wasn't enough room to wedge something between the door and the frame to get leverage.

"You want me to try kicking it in?" You offered. Clint threw you an amused look at the proposal, one that made your cheeks flush slightly. You shrugged, trying to play off your embarrassment. "Can't tell how thick it is, figured it might be worth a shot."

"You might be able to, but she's faster," he explained. You turned your gaze over to her and realized she had already pried the panel to the door off and was working at it with a small set of tools she'd pulled from somewhere. Clint hadn't even glanced over at Natasha, but he was completely confident as he spoke – and his confidence was rewarded when the door slid partway open a moment later. Natasha immediately went to work, prying one of her batons in between the door and beginning to slide it along, the metal making a slight grating noise as its mechanisms were forced into motion.

"Alright, I got the lock disengaged at least. We just need to get in here, and the stairs are on the left. Once we're there, if the door is sealed, we-"

The sound that came was subtle, but you caught it as surely as if it were a siren. It was a subtle sliding, the gentle sound of air passing from one sealed area to another, identical to the one by the door Natasha had just opened.

Clint's bow and Natasha's pistol were raised in an instant alongside yours. With the poor visibility due to the gas, none of you dared fire blindly, but your eyes were scanning for the slightest movement.

"Get the door open and get inside. If they've got thermals, we might as well paint targets on ourselves. We can-"

Clint didn't get to finish sharing his plan. Before he could, the same sound came again – this time, from the other end of the hallway. A moment behind it, in the instant that the three of you hesitated in deciding which way to focus on, a louder noise came. Like the world's loudest air cannon, quickly followed by a second, third, then fourth all within the time it took you to process the first. By the time you finished spinning around, you could see something through the gas... and hear it, too. Bright blue, spinning like crazy, and flickering like-

"Get down!" You shouted, buckling your knees and collapsing yourself just in time to slip below a strange device that was flying through the air. It was a bola of sorts, something you'd seen Natasha and Clint use in various forms, but this one was sparking and glistening with the arc of high voltage. Three more followed, covering the width of the entire hallway – Natasha had wedged the door open just enough to cram her slender frame through and avoid the barrage.

Clint was too wide to follow her through, but his reflexes and aim were unparalleled. Before the first electrified bola was even over your body, Clint had dropped the arrow he was holding, pulled another, and fired it down the hall. The arrow burst as it traveled, releasing a wide net that entangled itself with the weighted, electrified cord. The air filled with the horrendous sound of electricity shorting itself out as the metallic net encapsulated the electrified projectile, carrying it to the ground.

A second and third arrow followed quickly after, disappearing into the cloud of green gas. You couldn't tell if they found their marks, and neither you nor Clint stayed long enough to find out regardless. Another salvo sounded out from somewhere in the cloud of gas, and the both of you scrambled for cover in the only place available – through the door that Natasha had already disappeared behind. She'd manage to pry it further open while the two of you were dodging, and she was gesturing furiously for you both to follow her. The pair of you slipped through, and you immediately turned and grabbed the door and yanked, using your entire body to force it to the side in its track, slamming it shut the instant Clint was clear.

You took the time to place a few strategic kicks into the door, bending it slightly outward, bulging the metal and causing it to become even more stuck in its track than it already was during the lockdown. Once you'd taken care of that, you turned to the matter of the room itself. This room was mostly empty save for a few lockers and benches, but you could see a small staircase in the corner, just past Natasha, who was already halfway there and gesturing for the two of you to follow her - a gesture she stopped abruptly as her eyes locked on Clint.

"Clint, your mask!"

Your head whipped toward the archer, who was grimacing beneath his gas mask, a tear visible across its surface. He absently touched the large crack, through which you could already see the green gas beginning to flood his mask.

"Shit. One of the fragments must have caught me at just the right angle," Clint said, coughing. "I'm... I'm not, uh..."

Natasha was at his side in an instant, and you were right behind her, both of you catching him just as he slumped forward, unconscious.

"Damnit," Natasha growled. She was already working, pulling a tool from one of the compartments in her suit. It was a vial of a thick, clear substance - Natasha slapped a plastic sheet against the crack in Clint's mask, then spread the gel over the surface, sealing the tear. You could see her expression harden as the substance dried, though, and she moved to tap her comm link.

"Anyone on the line? We're in the crew quarters, but Clint's down, and his mask is compromised. I've patched it for now, but the seal is bad, and we're moving into the stairway."

Natasha's voice was calm but clipped, her words efficient and calculated. Even now, with Clint unconscious and the toxic gas thickening by the second, she maintained her composure. She gave you a sharp glance as she waited for a response from the comms, the static that returned tightening her jaw.

"Nothing," she muttered, turning to you. "Jammers must be on an isolated network Tony hasn't gotten into yet, or they're disconnected completely. We're on our own - and we move now. Get Clint to the stairs."

The sounds coming from outside the door sent a shiver up your spine, louder now, more purposeful. Natasha seemed to catch it too, her body tensing, hand already on the grip of her pistol. Without missing a beat, she shifted Clint's weight toward you, her eyes locked on the door.

"You take him," you said, stepping in front of her. "Get to the hangar. I'll hold them off."

She didn’t hesitate to respond, but her voice carried an edge. "That's not the plan. You can’t—"

"The plan changed," you interrupted, keeping your voice steady. "You’re the only one who can hack those doors or use the explosives to clear them in time. I’m just—" You stopped yourself. "Even if you showed me how to use them, I'd be slow, or I'd find a way to fuck it up. You're fast, you're way more efficient, and we both know you're strong enough to carry Clint on your own. I’ll buy you time here."

The flash of frustration in her eyes was immediate. "You don’t stand a chance against this many," she said, her words precise but brimming with restrained anger. "They’re coming for you. And those hunter squadrons they have to come after you... they're not like the others. They're almost as strong as you, and they've been training a lot longer. They're after you above all the rest of us, they won't stop until they catch you, and there are too many for you to handle alone. This is exactly why I tried to stop you from coming in the first place. Do the smart thing – get out of here."

Your grip tightened on your weapon, and for a moment, it was tempting to just go with her plan. You'd spent all day trying to avoid her, or to get away from her as quickly as you could once that failed. But her gaze, hard as it was, wasn’t accusing. She was calculating, weighing options she didn’t like, but couldn’t deny.

"I trust you," you said, the words slipping out before you could second-guess them. Her eyes flickered, just for a fraction of a second, the briefest crack in her unshakable demeanor. You pressed hard on the side of her that you knew was the loudest - the cold side, the calculating side, the one that knew the odds no matter how much she hated them. "Get Clint out of here and get Wanda. You can come back for me once he's safe and once we have a way past these sealed doors. You know this is the play. It's the only chance of all three of us getting out of this alive."

For a moment, you thought she might argue, but Natasha reluctantly gave a curt nod, tight and bitter. She adjusted Clint over her shoulder, her movements efficient but heavier than usual, like the decision itself was a weight she hadn't planned on carrying. "Remember your training," she said, her voice lower now, almost too soft to catch. "And don’t do anything stupid."

"Me? Never," you replied with a faint smirk, trying to mask the pit of dread forming in your stomach. The look she gave you in return was unreadable, but the flicker of emotion that passed through her eyes lingered longer than usual. There was a flicker to you both, like a missed frame in an old reel of film - you both seemed to stutter in time for just an instant, your eyes flickering back toward each other, catching the same look in each other's eyes. You couldn't see her face beneath the mask, but somehow, it felt like it was mirroring your own.

But there was no time for anything more than that last glance. Natasha was already halfway to the stairs, and the door was being forced open wide enough now that limbs were beginning to press their way through. One soldier brought a weapon rather than a tool, taking aim at you through the gap, and you fired a round straight into the HYDRA agent's hand as he did so. The gun fell to the floor, skittering away into the room while the wounded soldier cried out and pulled his bloodied hand back through the opening. The door continued to slide open the whole time, his allies still forcing it open despite his mistake, and the door was almost open enough for them to storm through now.

"Come on. Come on. You can do this, you can do this!" You screamed inside your own head as you tensed every muscle in your body, psyching yourself up. In a sense, the urgency of the situation made it easier. There was no time for doubt, no time for panic. No time for ruminating on the exchange that had just happened. Even as the first chills were settling in, you were already in motion.

Letting loose the wildest, loudest scream your lungs could conjure, you sprinted forward at full speed and sent a flying kick into the door as it reached the halfway mark. Metal caved in and then tore completely free, an entire panel of the wall wrenching off and adding to the mass of metal you sent hurtling into the first wave of HYDRA soldiers gathered on the other side of the door.

Then you were among them. Punching, shooting...

And doing just a little bit of praying.

Chapter Text

Punch. Kick. Sweep the leg, strike the throat. Bullets ricocheting everywhere—off of your helmet, your torso, the walls, the ceiling, and even some of the enemy agents. If these fools had come to take you alive, they weren't being as kind about it as the others. They weren't a powerful enough caliber to penetrate through the multiple layers of protection Tony's high-end armored bodysuit afforded you, but you could see a disconcerting amount of material jutting up where the bullets had torn and stripped away at the outer layers.

"Not a hunter squad. Too slow, too weak, too lethally armed. And their uniforms don't match."

You realized that by the third or fourth blow you'd landed, a crunching open-palm strike to the chest of one of the enemy soldiers. A feminine cry escaped her as she was tossed to the wall, her legs heaving with a futile attempt to hold her weight and keep her on her feet, before a softer grunt that signaled the end of her fight—and consciousness—as she crumpled to the ground. The other HYDRA soldiers didn't have any better luck; a few seconds later, the hallway was cleared of any remaining threats.

The gas was getting thicker, though, and the visibility was growing worse all the time. You were having trouble seeing even to the end of your own arm, let alone down the hall. But you could still hear everything, muffled only slightly by the dense fog in the air. You could hear the sound of more footsteps, more boots pounding against the facility's metal floors in the distance at one end of the hall. This wasn't over, not by a long shot.

"If they've got thermals, we might as well paint targets on ourselves."

You remembered Clint's words and considered making a break for it, going on the run, but dismissed the idea just as quickly as it crossed your mind. With visibility down like it was, the enemy would have an even bigger edge over you if you went on the move. You could walk into an ambush and not realize it until a dozen hands reached out of the mist to grab you. More importantly, Natasha was clearing a path through the facility's defenses, which meant any doorways that now lie between you and her had been hacked or blown open. If you left this doorway by more than a few dozen feet, there would be nothing stopping the enemy from just waltzing by you and heading for your friends. Even if she insisted they'd prioritize you over all else, that wasn't a chance you were comfortable taking.

"Come on, you fuckers! I didn't spend all this time training for nothing!"

To your overly-sensitive hearing, the sound of your own heartbeat might as well have been war drums, echoing just as loudly as the heavy clanging of boots against steel that came from your right. Both sounds grew louder and louder, until they drowned out even your own thoughts, leaving you with nothing but a rhythm of battle and blood in your head when the next group arrived and the first salvo came.

This time, there were no bullets, nor did any soldiers approach you directly. Electricity crackled and sparked, a terrifying and threatening symphony accompanied by the bursting sound of compressed air firing. The fog was so thick that even the blue glow of the arcing electricity was muted, but the projectiles were still visible as they soared through the gas.

The onslaught of projectiles only came from one direction, likely to prevent them from firing at each other during the sustained barrage, which was the only reason that you could just barely stay ahead of the incoming fire. It was easy enough to dodge them, to twist and turn, letting them sail by, even in the dense, blinding fog... but there was no end to the barrage this time.

You could feel the sweat soaking you as the deadly dance continued for minutes on end, your lungs and muscles straining with exertion. At some point you felt a rumble, a distant shock wave that rippled through the facility. You prayed that it was the work of Natasha, but you couldn't dwell on that prayer for long. They were trying to tire you, to wear you down and force you into a mistake. Worse, you could tell that they weren't firing them at random—the pattern was too precise. If it wasn't thermals, then they had some other way of pinpointing your location.

"If I keep going like this, they'll just go until I slip up, or until they're finally out of bolas and I'm half-dead of exhaustion," you thought to yourself, grimacing as a spinning band of cord and lightning soared so closely that a blue jolt arced off of one end and trailed down your suit, sending an uncomfortable cramp pulsing down your leg. "Gotta give myself some cover. But if I duck back into the room, I'll have even less room to maneuver."

Thinking about the room gave you a touch of inspiration. Though you could hardly see the floor at your own feet, you knew roughly where you were, and it only took a few seconds of ducking and weaving around before you slid your foot against what you were looking for—the door, and the chunk of wall that had come with it when you'd launched it off of its hinges. Gripping the thick metal with both hands, you raised it up high and slammed it into the flooring, driving one corner of it into the thick metal below.

The sound was horrendous, and you were sure you did more damage to the door than the floor, but the resulting abomination of twisted metal and sparks culminated in the door being firmly stuck. It jutted out of the floor like a monolith, providing you the first real bit of cover you'd had in the hallway since this mess started. Sure enough, only a few seconds later the first bola hit it, sparking and spitting wildly as the electrified cord wrapped around the metal obstruction and shorted itself out shortly after.

For a moment, everything went quiet. You were practically dancing on the balls of your feet, fully expecting another barrage to start up from the other direction, but none was forthcoming. The whole place went deadly silent for a moment—then you finally heard something, but not what you were expecting. A clanging thud, followed by another, then another, too far apart and with too much time between them to be footsteps surely, yet-

One more thud, accompanied by the screech of metal, as a blur moved in the gas-misted air and sent the door that you'd jammed into the floor rocketing toward you at a breakneck pace. You moved more out of reflex than active thought, twisting your body low to the ground as the metal shrapnel that had once been a sliding door tumbled over you. It had been sent into such a spin that it still scraped over you, a mangled section of what used to be the frame slamming into your back and grazing over your protective suit.

The impact had more force than even the bullets you'd taken earlier, something that set your heart racing—the door had been launched like it was hit with an explosion... but the thing standing there in the mist was just a HYDRA agent, one in a slightly different uniform than the others. It took you a moment to recognize the markings on the sleeves of their uniform, but only a moment.

The same uniform that the soldiers Natasha had taken out on her own were wearing. Only these ones were in full sets of body armor, not all that dissimilar to your own, if vastly less impressive. None of them were carrying guns, either. One had a baton gripped in their hand, but they were otherwise armed only with their bare hands and what you guessed were the launchers they'd been firing the less-lethal bolas from, now emptied.

*"The hunter squads are here after all. No, these aren't the same. These ones are-"*

That was all you had time to process before the first blow was struck. The HYDRA soldier took one stride, and that one step held enough force to carry him to your position almost a dozen feet away. If that or his feat of strength earlier left any doubt in your mind, the feeling of his punch impacting on your forearm when you slightly misjudged the block certainly confirmed your worries.

It was like getting hit by a kick from Natasha during training, back before you had built up muscle, and that was with the added protection of the bodysuit. Without it, you were certain the blow would've shattered one or both bones in your lower arm on impact—as it was, you just heard a rather nauseating grinding noise from your own body, and felt your muscles and tendons twist uncomfortably in the instant before you were sent careening backwards. Your reflexes and a lucky fumble were all that let you keep your footing without rolling an ankle.

There came a second blow, this one aimed for your head, while you were still trying to get your footing under you. You were ready this time, though. You corrected your mistake from earlier, adjusted for the speed, and caught the man's arm just behind the wrist, pulling on it to halt your backward momentum while letting him fall off balance instead. But as he passed you, two more shapes appeared in the mist where he had come from, both moving toward you at a speed just as startling as their ally had managed.

There was no room for hesitation, not a moment to even consider giving any blow you struck your absolute maximum strength as you started to exchange blows with the two, and the third shortly after, once he'd regained his footing. It felt like every neuron in your brain was on fire as you danced down the hallway, putting everything you had on overdrive just to keep up with these new threats. Hitting them felt like punching solid rock, and they worked together well enough to keep you from being able to strike either of them without the other giving you a good shot in return.

The difference between the hunter squads and the rest of the agents you'd been dealing with was unsettling. It felt like the difference between fighting muggers back when you were living on the streets and sparring with Clint or Natasha. The gap in strength, speed, and skill brought some of those same feelings back—the deeper flood of adrenaline, the deep-settled chill, the way every nerve in your body was suddenly as tense and strained as the tightrope you were walking between life and death.

"But it's not like sparring with them. They're not that good. Neither am I... but I'm better than this."

Maybe it was arrogance, maybe an adrenaline-fueled sense of euphoria that fueled your ego as those words rang in your mind. Whatever it was felt cocky, vain, beyond conceited. But it was right. These capture teams, these hunter squads, they were good.

But you were trained by the best.

The blows that rained down on you never made you flinch, no matter how unnerving it was to feel so much pain, such strong impacts through the layers of a bodysuit that had held up through explosions and gunfire. Any hesitation, any fear, had been beaten out of you by the very same agents you owed your freedom to, and the Avengers had only continued to build on that foundation. And every time one of them made a misstep, every time they got in each others' way, you were there, throwing blow after blow until your window closed. Hitting them may have felt like pummeling rock, but you were strong enough to break stone. You were strong enough to break them.

The first went down to a lack of coordination. As you ducked and weaved away from one blow after another, the three of them had a hard time matching their footwork at your pace. Perhaps they hadn't spent much time fighting as a group at this speed; whatever the case, two tried to jostle for position behind the third, only to end up stumbling backward as you landed a well-placed kick to the front soldier's chest to send him staggering backward. The three collided when the two in back failed to sidestep their oncoming ally in time, and all of them became a writhing tangle of limbs for just an instant.

That instant was enough for you to plant your raised foot and step forward, a near-mimicry of the first soldier's earlier move. One of the three had fallen down completely, landing firmly on his ass and clinging to the wall as he tried to hastily return to his feet. Your punch became a downward strike that met his neck as he was trying to rise; the combined momentum elicited a sickening "crunch" sound, and he crumpled on the spot.

The other two were moving again, disentangled and ready for a second round. With only two of them there were less missteps to be made, less clutter in the brawl that your battle became, but there were also less blows for you to constantly be evading. You had more time, longer windows between strikes to react without worrying about having your flow disrupted by a stray fist caving in your skull.

The second fell to gullibility. He was shorter than his ally, and he had to get noticeably closer to you each time that he took a swing. The two of them were better about rotating in and out than they had been when all three were darting into range, but it only took a minute—albeit a minute that stretched on to feel like an hour—before they made a mistake in the heat of the battle.

You feinted a stumble, a twist of your ankle that you allowed to catch on one of the fallen bolas that still cluttered the hallway. In the moment that your knee "buckled" and you started to tilt backward, both fighters moved on what they thought was an opening in unison. The short man dashed in with a bit more speed, a little too hastily, thinking he could make it in time to strike the finishing blow.

He didn't have time to react as your faltering knee stabilized in an instant, holding your weight well enough to bring your other leg up and slam it into the side of his head. Your timing was perfect, and a thrill raced through you as your kick wailed his head hard enough to send it right into his companion's arm. Her blow was deflected into the wall, while the scrawnier man went down and made no attempt to get back up. You smirked at the woman in her glistening gas mask and her specially marked uniform, squaring up against her in the hallway.

You went down to fatigue.

You weren't thinking clearly enough to feel anything beyond pure instinct, so you couldn't exactly call the lapse overconfidence. If you'd been fresh, rested, and not so wearily out of breath, you'd likely have reacted in time. But with your breath sounding like a wounded animal wheezing its last in your ears, with your eyes only focused on the woman still standing in front of you, you didn't register the footsteps behind you until a hand slammed into the back of your head.

A paradoxical flash of black blended with the white that exploded in your vision. As you slammed into the wall, that monochrome display exploded red in such a vivid way that for a moment you might have died. But you hadn't, as the incredible pain that ripped through you confirmed. It was simply your brain shorting out as it tried to process the trauma of such high-speed impacts.

*"It hurts when you get hit like that, doesn't it? Believe me, I know. You're gonna want to stay down. You're gonna want to lie there and try to put yourself back together. The last thing in the world you wanna do after a hit like the one I just landed is get up and move. But if you don't, it's gonna get a hell of a lot worse."*

Someone's words—you didn't have the time or the capacity to remember whose they were at the moment. Not even sure which direction you were facing, or where you'd been slammed into the wall, you couldn't possibly know the best way to react to the blow. But you knew that staying still was the worst possible choice, and so you twisted as hard as you could to the left. A moment later a fist the size of your thigh slammed into the wall and crumpled it inward, the thick metal giving leeway to the over-sized brute of a man that had just arrived.

You swiveled on your feet to take in your surroundings, and fate smiled on you as the two figures behind you stopped their approach, cautious of your quick recovery. The woman had been joined by two more fighters wearing the same uniforms, the same emblems emblazoned on their shoulders. Another man and woman, their eyes determined, their stances aggressive, and their breath even and controlled, a far cry from your own.

"Must have come from another group. Or they got separated, or these are the ones that were firing the bolas, or- fuck, it doesn't matter!"

A hiss escaped you as your scalp throbbed, the entire front of your skull feeling as if it were about to either burst open or shatter into dust. Your pained exclamation quieted after a moment, but the hissing sound remained. It took you a few moments to realize that it wasn't you, but rather your suit. More specifically... your helmet.

Your eyes widened as you saw the faint stream of thicker, heavier air leaking into your suit. You started to panic, even more so when the three hunters came after you in unison. Winded and wounded, you could barely stay ahead of their blows now, even with the hallway limiting the ways they could approach you together. You weren't even sure what the gas now slowly filling your helmet was, whether a knockout gas or something more lethal, but Clint's hadn't been cracked much more severely than your own, and he had lasted a minute at most before he passed out.

"Gotta abandon the endurance plan. Go for broke."

With that thought you sucked in a deep breath, filling your lungs one last time and hoping that not too much of the toxic agent had seeped into your air supply by that point. You raised your fists and pivoted on your heel as the two fresh HYDRA goons approached together, shifting from defense to offense in an instant.

"Doesn't matter if I get hurt now. Fight's on a timer whether I'm in good condition or not. But if I'm going down, I'm taking these fuckers with me."

A kick from the left.

You didn't see it coming in time for a proper counter, but you raised your knee and slammed it forward all the same. Your suits and kneecaps met in quick succession, a blitzkrieg of pain shooting up your leg as the sound of the impact rang out in the hall like a gunshot. The man wasn't unaffected either; his head tilted back, and though you couldn't see the look on his face, you were sure he must have been biting back a scream in that helmet.

A punch from the right.

With your knee raised, you couldn't get it down and swivel in time for a more elegant response. You had to snap your foot forward, planting it on the metal wall and praying it wouldn't slide under pressure as you used it as a point of leverage to launch your own left hook across your body. The blow was awkward and improvised, and the two of you were moving at such a high speed you barely had time to aim, but somehow, you managed a passable accuracy. Two of your knuckles met three of hers, and the combined momentum of the punches, off-balance as yours was, sent a ripple of crunches through every joint in your arm that nearly stole the held breath from your lips.

She didn't fare any better, her arm crumpling and giving way after a moment of struggle between the two of you. Judging by the sound that erupted during the impact, something had shattered—something important, and something painful. She didn't feel it for long; the knee you brought up as she bent over in pain shattered the plexiglass of her gas mask and sent her to the ground. If you hadn't just knocked her out, the gas would finish the job, one way or another.

A knee from the-

You'd hardly seen the motion, too busy recovering from your last blow. The third fighter—the woman still standing from the first round—had circled around, darting to your side while you were knocking her comrade out, and she was bringing a knee up to catch you while you were still balanced on on leg. You didn't have time to do more than try vainly to twist away, and the hit came fast and hard. The breath you'd been holding was torn from your lips in an instant, along with a spattering of spit that blurred your vision through the visor of your helmet. You somehow maintained the willpower not to suck that breath back in, to instead clench your throat shut as best you could against the spasming muscles of your chest and focus on the fight.

Your arms wrapped around the leg instinctively, forming an iron grip around her muscled thigh. She tried briefly to pull her leg free, but even while winded, you had the advantage. By the time she reared back to punch you, you'd gotten your second foot back on the ground and planted firmly—firmly enough to hold both your weights as every muscle in your back screamed with the effort of pulling her off the ground, arcing her over your head, and slamming her into the wall behind you.

You didn't catch more than a glimpse of her impact, not enough to tell if you'd put her out of the fight. Your heart was racing, pounding in your ears, making it hard to focus on anything. Punches came at you one after the other, lighter than the heavy blows you'd been dealing with, but twice as fast. You raised up your arms and ducked back from them as best as you could, trying to minimize the impacts. It was hard to focus, so hard. Your body was aching, your lungs were burning, your mind was starting to grow sluggish and unresponsive.

A glancing blow that sent your head bouncing against the inside of your helmet finally made you snap. Your body's instincts and primal need overpowered your better judgment, and you finally sucked in a long breath. The relief was instant, but short-lived. Just as quickly as the burning faded, a newer sensation set in, something like a full-body chill. Your fingertips started to tingle no more than a second or two after you'd full drawn the breath, and you felt a strange sense of weightlessness as you bounced on the balls of your feet.

"No, I... not long now..."

You held your breath, lungs filled again. It wasn't much, but maybe enough. Maybe pointless. Thoughts already foggy. No tactics. No plan. Skill, strength... practice. So much practice. All for what?

No, you knew what. All for this.

One-two, easy combo, muscle memory. Block left, strike right. Block right, strike low. Hit where their body is, where their brain isn't. Dodge and change the field. Control the field. Kick low, miss. Swivel right, he's off balance. Hard recovery, chase him down. Know where he's going before he does. Be there first.

Facility is shaking. Not them—something else. Doesn't matter. Here matters, here and now. Scrambling from behind you, metal and fiber. The girl, not down yet. Eyes wild, brain slowing, fists raised, you stepped forward. Can't think. Body moving on its own.

Blow, block, deflect, spin, block, kick, spin, grab, throw, spin, dodge, counter. World spinning. You spinning. Parry, grab, hold, strike. World spinning. No, you were spinning. Spinning to face-

Nothing.

You spun again.

Nothing.

You spun a third time, not comprehending what you were seeing. Not comprehending much of anything, your mind too hazy to even count the five figures now crumpled at your feet.

"Did I..." The word "win" felt wrong. This didn't feel like a win.

But you were alive.

Head still clouded, you tried to figure out where you were, where the doorway was. Your hand instinctively clamped over the hole in your helmet now that you could spare one, even though you knew it was pointless after so long leaving it exposed. You didn't get far in your attempts to shamble down the hallway. A few steps and your legs gave way, sending you tumbling to the ground. You didn't even feel the impact at that point, your body and mind too numb to process the collision with the floor in any meaningful way.

"Have to... have to get to them. Make sure..."

Your hand scrabbled feebly on the smooth floor, trying to pull yourself along, but you lacked the strength to even grip properly on the slick metal floor. Just as the black clouds ringing your vision started to circle in closer, the facility shook again, even more powerfully than it had during your fight with the elite hunter squadron. The vibrations were strong enough to startle your fading mind into a state of semi-clarity, if only for an instant.

Then a terrible sound, one that might've sent you into a ball of fear and anxiety if you were even capable of moving at that point, ripped through the hall. The screech of metal-on-metal sang like a banshee's wail as a whole section of the hallway's wall was ripped off just a few feet away, small fragments of metal and dust and dirt clattering to the ground as a woman clad in bright red—both in terms of wardrobe and in aura—hovered through the open gap.

"Wanda!"

You were meant to call the name out, but it only sounded in your mind. It still didn't take long for her to notice you, even as prone as you were. Wanda waved her hands and crimson energy washed over the hall, passing over you and dispelling what remained of the gases as they went.

"Pash'zotin!" Wanda called out when the fog had cleared, lowering herself to the ground and quickly dashing over to you. She knelt at your side, rolling you tenderly onto your back. "Let me help you."

You couldn't have objected even if you'd had any desire to, of course, but you still tried to vaguely nod as Wanda brought her hand closer. Scarlet magic touched your helmet, inside and out, and the remnants of the gas that had been pumped into the hallway that remained inside your once-airtight helmet were quickly sucked out into the open and dispersed as easily as the rest had been. The absence didn't bring you any immediate relief, to your disappointment, but it made each breath feel a little less heavy.

"You look... a little rough," Wanda said, failing spectacularly at hiding her worries behind a very forced smile. By the way her lips were trembling and the knit of her brow, you must have looked even worse than you felt. She still tried to smile while she cradled your armored head in her lap. "I let you go off for five minutes on your own, and this is what happens to you? Steve is never going to forgive me for this one, you know."

What might have been a decent chuckle came out as a pained wheeze, even the muscles to work your lungs barely responding to conscious thought anymore. Whatever retort you might have had about her blaming herself for you getting blasted through a wall would have to wait for later; just speaking a few words took all the energy you could muster.

"Where... Clint?"

"He's fine. The others are on their way," Wanda explained, her expression growing a bit warmer. "Save your energy. The facility is almost completely secured now. All that's left is getting the systems under our control, and they didn't make it easy for Tony this time, not after how quickly he shut things down last time. They set up multiple jammers, and physically destroyed the relays for-"

Wanda's voice started to become a monotone sound that was hard to focus on, a droning part of the background that blurred away like everything else. Your eyes were having a hard time even staying focused on her face. You saw the worry lines on her face deepening as your head began to roll backward, and the last thing you noticed was movement in the corner of your eye, a blurry shape appearing from the doorway you'd been guarding as your conscious mind finally slipped away completely.

Chapter Text

Nyctophobia. Fear of the darkness. Such a strange concept for someone like you, who spent every waking moment pondering a past you no longer had, regretting choices you didn't get to make for yourself, and trying to avoid thinking too much about how much time the people around you spent lying to you. Someone like that had no business fearing the dark.

Darkness was rest. Darkness was solitude, peace and quiet. Darkness was ignorance, and in a short life where people had hurt you with truth as much as with lies, ignorance and solitude were the only true reprieves.

And as you slowly came to, as the light begrudgingly returned, it brought with it all of that pain once again. Memories blurred with the information coming to you from your senses, and you could no longer tell which of them were real, and how many were simply dreams. Were you free, or were you about to wake up back in chains, with all of this some hallucination that would only fade with time?

Light flashed. A cell materialized, then dissolved. The cold metal of restraints bit into your wrists, then vanished. The monotonous beeping of medical equipment pulsed in rhythm with your heart. A woman's voice—hauntingly familiar—sang words you understood without comprehending. And surrounding you, echoing from every direction, your own voice screaming back at you in a terrible chorus.

"Fuck!"

Wordless screams burst into a crude, vulgar exclamation in much the same way as your peaceful form burst into a startled, upright position. Your body tensed, ready for action, and the abrupt motion combined with the adrenaline spiking through your veins rocketed your nausea from a two to a nine in a heartbeat.

"Shit, oh- fuck me," you groaned, gripping for support and finding a convenient rail at the side of your bed. Your hospital bed, you realized. You wanted to examine the room more closely, but the churning of your stomach and the headache you could feel coming on made it difficult to keep your eyes open. The dizziness alone was enough to make you feel like you were about to pass out again.

"Even breaths, deep and slow. Count to ten. Feel the world around you, ground yourself on something nearby, don't disconnect."

Your fingers tightened a little harder on the railing, and you heard a screech of plastic and metal in response. You began to count up from one while gradually cracking your eyes open, forcing yourself to stay conscious, to stay alert. You were rounding the corner to ten when the door slid open, taking your mind off the hamster wheel your stomach was flailing around on just in time to subdue some of it.

"Hey, sunshine," a familiar, sweeping voice boomed out. "About time you decided to wake up. You slept past the first three alarms we set for you, you know. Gonna have JARVIS disable the snooze button in your room if you can't be trusted to use it responsibly."

Tony gave you what you were used to by now as his default, cocky grin, but you didn't miss the genuine relief on his face. The lines that had been ever so subtly worn into his features, now resting and slowly fading as the last tension left him. There were similar markings on the others—those who bothered to try hiding their worries at all. Wanda wore her glee at your awakening on her sleeve, practically dancing between Tony and Steve as she hurried to the side of your bed, taking the guest chair and laying her arm over your own.

"You had us worried sick!" Wanda's tone was caught between delight and chastisement, her brows furrowed in a way that was ruined by how obviously she couldn't keep the smile off her face. "You're never allowed to go off on your own again, you little minx! We're, what does Tony say? 'Battle buddies'? No more solo work!"

"I promise not to get exploded through anymore windows," you managed to groan out. Your fingers were wrapped tightly around the railings on the side of the hospital bed you now realized you were laying in, but the longer you stayed sitting up, the worse your dizziness got. You lowered yourself back down slowly before it could become too strong to manage, and you didn't miss the way your pillow glistened red for a moment and seemed to fluff itself before you touched back down.

"Careful. That can be a hard promise to keep on this team," Bruce said with a gentle smile, taking up a spot in the corner of the room only after he grabbed your medical chart. By the way his eyes glazed over the page, you were guessing that he'd already read over it at least a half-dozen times while you were under, which...

"How bad was it? How long was I out?"

"Just shy of a day and a half. Not surprising, honestly," Tony said, huddling with Bruce over your chart. "They weren't exactly being precise with the anesthetics they were pumping into the place. And unlike Legolas, you didn't get your helmet field-patched to wash that junk out with fresh O2."

"Oh, shit, that's right," you groaned, instinctively moving to sit up. Wanda stopped you with a hand on your chest, but the vertigo and stomach cramps would've done the job a moment later anyway. "Eugh. H-how's, ugh, how's Clint doing?"

"He's fine. Only out for half an hour, tops. There's always a chance of a complication when it comes to anesthesia, even in controlled settings, but he didn't get much more than a few breaths before you two had his helmet fixed." Bruce gave you a reassuring smile, with a touch less awkwardness than usual, as he returned your chart with a few final notations added. "Not like you. Lucky you woke up when you did. Best we could tell from what we saw when we showed up, plus the tests we ran, you were taking in whole lungfuls of the stuff at a time."

"Wasn't intentional. One of those hunter squads showed up, only…"

You went quiet, searching through the memories of what had happened. They were still there, but fuzzy, a little bit out of place, and that caused them to jumble in with all the other bits and pieces of dreams and half-forgotten flashes of awareness. Your heart started to pound a little more strongly in your chest as you tried to comb the hazy recollections. You were unable to tune out the little voices of fear in your head that whispered how your memory was failing you yet again, even knowing the cause.

"Shit. Shit, I... I can't even-"

"Hey, it's alright. I'm surprised you remember as much as you do. I mean, the minimum alveolar concentration of halothane is under one percent, and the atmosphere readings Tony took during the incident put it a full magnitude higher at one point. Even accounting for the catecholamine surge and your hyperdynamic state, you should have probably-"

"Huh?" You asked, realizing that you'd lost track of what Bruce was saying a full sentence prior to where he was now.

"You're incredibly lucky, and pretty damn impressive," Steve said, giving you a knowing look. His eyes drifted over to the corner of the room. Bruce was holding up one hand in a confused manner; Tony smiled at the other scientist and offered him a consoling shrug.

"Guess so," you reluctantly agreed, shrugging limply into the pillow. "Not sure being the only one to come back wounded really counts as lucky, though."

"Don't forget, this isn't practice sparring anymore," Steve said, his voice returning to its usual calm, almost fatherly tone. "Coming back wounded is always a win. Not everyone gets so lucky, not every time."

"Verily. And you fought more bravely than most, young warrior," Thor said, smiling at you with all the warmth that could only come from that level of blunt honesty. "All who stood against you fell, even those whose sole purpose was to best you. Your prowess is of the highest acclaim, and you are indeed worthy."

"You know, it's amazing," Tony remarked with a disbelieving look, "how do your eyes not glaze over when he talks like that? Leif Erikkson just crawled out of his grave to give you those compliments, and you're smiling about it! But Banner goes into basic anesthesiology, and all of a sudden everyone acts like we're the ones speaking Old Norse."

"Sorry Tony. Guess you and Bruce will just have to keep your little secret language between the two of you," Wanda offered, keeping her eyes firmly focused on you... though a wicked grin crept across her face as Tony's eyes blew open.

"Secret language? It's medical terminology, not the password to our treehouse," Tony scoffed, huffing indignantly as he glanced around the room. "That's it, I'm re-instituting book club. Mandatory participation, doctorate level reading. And I pick the subject material."

"Denied." The word came from several mouths at once—your own very much included—but the most startling one was that of the new arrival.

Clint stood in the doorway with a properly admonished look, only the faintest of smiles visible as he strode inside. There was a long beat of silence as he took his first steps inside; eyes in the room turned toward you, to Clint, and back again. Each gaze held a different accent to it; Tony seemed to be yearning for a popcorn to go with the show about to unfold, Steve and Banner held a protective indignity, and Wanda's only empathy, a look of caution as she turned to check on your own demeanor.

"You all, uh, mind if I thank the person who helped save my life?"

Clint gave a shrug. For all the reproach that was evident in his posture, he was still the same as he ever was. Unshakable, freewheeling, ready to play right on through as if nothing had ever changed from the days he called you his drinking buddy.

"You doing alright?" Wanda asked, though the words didn't match the question that she was really asking.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll be okay."

With that, the crosshairs on Clint seemed to fade at least a little. He walked into the room with a cautious smirk, approaching the end of the bed, situating himself between Thor and Bruce. You tried not to smirk at the slightest changes in his expression, the mental debate you could see him waging on who it was safer to stand closest to. He settled for a reckless confidence, nearly elbowing both of them as he planted his hands on the plastic railing at the end of your bed and leaned forward slightly.

"Hey, kiddo."

"You don't even know how old I am," you groaned, rolling your eyes.

"Yeah, well, neither do you." Clint gave a tilt of his head, but seemed to regret the snark almost immediately. "But hey, I didn't come here to pick fights. So, y'know, thanks for letting me in, and not having these two turn me into a smear on the wall. And thanks for helping keep me safe after things got a little crazy at the party. Mom always said inhaling stuff without asking what it was would get me in trouble one day; guess she's gonna get to tell me 'I told you so' again. Hasn't done that since, oh, last week."

"This has got to be one of the most insincere 'thank yous' I've ever heard." Tony gave Clint a fixed stare, only to find six sets of eyes pointed back in his direction. "What?"

"You're not allowed to say that again. To anyone. Ever."

Tony's protests and the melody of chuckles and bickering went on for long enough that the tension almost started to fade out of the room. While Wanda was lecturing Tony on his professionalism, and Tony was jabbing Steve for being an overgrown boy scout, Clint caught your gaze.

His smile was still there, as untouchable as ever, but it was a little deeper this time. It reached a little more of the real him underneath, as did the nod he gave you. He lifted up four fingers to his chin, touching it lightly for just a moment, then swung it forward in a graceful arc until his hand was pointed toward you before he dropped it to his side once more.

Your eyes tightened a little, and a tight smile spread before you could stop it. Perhaps time had dulled your anger more than you'd thought, or maybe you were just still too tranquilized to be angry, but at the moment, you were tired of grudges. You were just glad that everyone had made it back.

You returned Clint's, and though you didn't know enough to respond to the gesture properly, you mouthed the words 'you're welcome', and saw the recognition there. Clint let a beat pass before he clapped his hands, interrupting the banter that had been getting shot back and forth over your bed the entire time.

"Right. Mom, Dad, you know it's not polite to fight in front of the kids. How about those of us who aren't stuck in bed all hit up the cafeteria? If this turns into a fistfight, I'm gonna need popcorn and beer to really enjoy it."

"Fine. But I'm telling Chef Kenichi that you called his three Michelin star private restaurant a cafeteria," Tony warned, pointing a finger accusingly at Clint while he strode for the door. "You know how much he hates that."

"Don't you dare," Clint warned. "That Engawa Nagiri he made almost had me in tears. If he cuts me off from that, I swear I'll take a spray can to your suits, tin boy."

"Oooh, birdie's got bite today. Let's see if the sushi's as spicy as you are."

"Hear, hear! I could use a proper meal," Thor boomed, falling in behind them, though he didn't fail to give you a glance as he went. "Fear not. No true Asgardian could feast knowing any fellow warrior was going hungry; a parade of dishes will be sent up!"

"Hang on, shouldn't we be running tests? Last I checked, having your eyes open for five minutes wasn't a medically acceptable substitute for a clean bill of health, we-"

"Come on, Banner," Tony said, clasping his hand tightly over Bruce's shoulder and showing no hesitation in practically dragging the Hulk toward the door. "It's on me, buddy. I mean, I'm paying for everything here, but I still get to brag about it sometimes."

Something about the way everyone got moving so quickly, the way only Banner hesitated in making for the door, really set off alarm bells in your head. But you didn't have time to figure out why before they were gone, with Clint trailing behind the rest of them... despite it being his idea. The tilt of his head and the smirk that danced on his lips as he turned around in the door frame only made that awareness sharpen further.

"Hey, uh, you want me to leave the door open, or you prefer it locked?" Clint gestured toward the doorknob. The complete lack of a physical lock on the door to your medical room didn't seem to faze him in the slightest. "Figure you're obviously pretty brave, but you never know who's roaming around the halls this time of night."

Your eyes narrowed fleetingly, your mouth catching on thoughts without form. Yes, indeed, you never knew who might be wandering around the medical ward... which happened to be on the forty-seventh floor of a highly secured building. All the same, for a spell his peculiar wording's real meaning eluded you, even knowing there was something to catch onto. Clint smiled the whole time, waiting patiently the few breaths it took you to finally respond.

"...You can leave it unlocked. I can handle myself."

"Should've figured. Go get 'em, tiger."

Clint stepped away from the door, his footsteps hurried yet deliberate as he joined the others. The sound faded gradually, never quite disappearing until the elevator doors slid shut with a soft hiss. Even then, with your enhanced senses, you could detect the distant mechanical whirr as it descended.

You'd learned to tune out these heightened perceptions to preserve your sanity. The constant barrage of sounds, smells, and sensations had nearly driven you mad during those first months at SHIELD. But when needed, your senses remained as sharp as ever—untarnished by the constant background noise that filled your world. Sometimes, if you held your breath, closed your eyes, and remained perfectly still, you could even hear the gentle chime of the elevator arriving at an entirely different floor.

...Which, honestly, made it all the more intimidating that she could still always manage to sneak up on you. You only heard the final three steps before a familiar figure swung into the doorway.

Soft red curls bounced lightly as she pivoted into view, framing a tight expression that barely qualified as a smile. One hand wrapped casually around the doorframe, supporting her weight in a way that seemed relaxed but allowed for immediate movement if needed. The other hung at her side loosely—no, not loosely, never loosely. Her fingers maintained precise distance from her holster, her eyes performing a rapid, practiced scan of the room's exits and potential threats before settling on you. Even in a secure facility, even visiting someone she knew, Natasha remained perpetually combat-ready.

"Even her posture feels like it never trusts anyone," filled the emptiness in your mind.

"Didn't think you were going to come visit me," you said, leaving the harsh scrutiny unspoken. But she didn't miss the drop of your eyes, the hesitation before you spoke. She didn't visibly react to it...though somehow, you knew she had noticed.

"Didn't think you were going to let me."

"Fair enough."

A beat, a breath, a moment of silence that was anything but empty. You gestured toward the now-empty chairs beside your bed with a dismissive wave.

"Well, come on. If we're going to do this, at least come closer. I don't want to have to shout across the room the whole time."

"Sometimes things work better at a distance. You always seem to disagree, though. Maybe you're onto something." The words were spoken almost like a rejection, yet her body straightened, and she approached your bedside—on her terms, not yours.

As it had always been.

"Why are you here?" You asked, the only question you could find to ask after sifting through your mind for one that didn't set your jaw rigid with anger.

"I've heard that in some cultures, it's considered polite to visit people after they get sent to the hospital." Natasha gave a quirk of her eyebrow, an exaggerated gesture for her, one that overshadowed any other reaction she had to your sharp comment.

"Saving the world is a good excuse for poor bedside manners. Besides, since when does Clint care about being polite?"

A wider smirk. Another intentionally overplayed one, a hint of amusement that would've looked natural on anyone else's face, but seemed more like a gaudy display on hers. Every attempt you made to find the little details, the things you at least thought might hint at what she was really thinking, was drowned out by the one thing you weren't familiar with reading on her – emotion.

"She's doing it on purpose."

"I suppose you've got me there. I'm sure everyone was glad to see you're finally awake. You had them all worried, you know," Natasha began, her words carefully placing herself outside that circle of concern. "What you did was pretty brave, though. Impressive, too. You've come a long way since leaving SHIELD's facility."

"Prison," you corrected, the word falling between you like a gauntlet. She acknowledged it with nothing more than a slight tilt of her head. "And as for being impressive... you're not going to tell me it was stupid? Suicidal? That I'm gonna get myself killed someday?"

"I said it was brave, didn't I?" Natasha's lips curved up at that, a real smile, even if it was reserved for her own coy comments.

"You wrote a whole letter to convince me not to go, worried I'd get myself killed, or worse, captured by HYDRA... and now you're not even going to lecture me?" A disbelieving scoff escaped as you shook your head ruefully. "After I got myself into pretty much the exact situation you were probably trying to prevent, too. Not even a scolding for almost helping HYDRA recreate their little experiment with the aid of my corpse?"

"Depends. Are you going to scold me for not telling you what we suspected was going on?" Natasha countered, crossing her arms. "I could've warned you about what we thought would happen. Even though we didn't realize just how much progress some of their new experiments had made, we could have told you we thought the whole place was set up as a trap for you."

"...No. No, I'm not," you conceded, sighing as you looked away. "You already basically did, with that letter. Tony and Steve didn't deny it or keep it a secret, either; they told me all about your suspicions during the little briefing they gave me.. And it's not like I haven't been told a thousand times that HYDRA would always be after me for what I am to them."

"One more couldn't hurt. I could have given you that chance."

"Well, obviously I'm too damn stubborn to learn."

"Now there's something we can agree on."

The thought of smiling crossed your mind, but it never made it as far as your lips. Too much going on in your head for smiling; the best you could muster was a half-snort and a roll of your eyes.

"No, I didn't come here to scold you, either," Natasha continued eventually, when you didn't come up with a retort to her little tease. "I want to ask you something, now that you're awake. Clint and I have been talking since he came to. He told me you two spoke before we met up. And he also told me you didn't know about the Black Widow program."

"The Black Widow program?" You hesitated, more out of how intense the name always sounded than anything. "I didn't know there was a program. I didn't even know there was a Black Widow until I started looking at news articles and saw them referring to you all by your superhero names. I've never heard you call yourself that."

"Not exactly a name I'm proud of. Black Widow isn't a superhero name, it's the title given to a successful graduate of a very special, very horrifying little program dreamed up by the Soviets in the thirties," Natasha explained. "What I told you about my past before, the Russian orphanage thing? That was fake."

"Shocker." You buried the guilt you felt at the fall in her features, the coolness that plastered itself over her real reaction.

"But it wasn't far off the truth. It wasn't an orphanage, it was a program called the Red Room. They took children, trained them to be Widows. Assassins, trained to become living weapons for the Soviet government under the KGB. Their methods and the results only got worse as their technology and methodology improved. By the time I was inducted in the eighties, the Red Room used everything their scientists could come up with, from mind-control pheromones to-"

"Mind-control pheromones?" The words escaped you before you could stop them, your eyes widening.

"-to a variant of the super-soldier serum," Natasha finished pointedly, ignoring your interruption.

Your fingers tightened around the blanket, but you refused to look down at them, to even let yourself think for too long about the mystery concoction that wasn't so much pumping through your veins as it was a permanent part of your physiology now. Clint's little slip was another fragment of memory that had nearly dissolved in the chemical haze that shrouded your mind.

"There's a lot I don't know about you," you murmured, voice deliberately even. "What's the big deal about not looking up this one?"

"Nothing, by itself. It's you choosing not to look it up that's got my attention, not the intel," Natasha corrected. "I violated your privacy, your trust. I betrayed you."

The heart monitor beside you pulsed out of rhythm for a beat. "Yeah, but we're 'friends', right?"

"You can be as sarcastic as you want. But you still refuse to look up information everyone else already knows." Something in her voice had changed—not vulnerability, exactly, but something adjacent to it. "Information that has been public for years now. It wouldn't even be a violation, like what I did. It's just... out there."

"It's none of my business," you responded, your tone almost defensive, even though you were explaining why you hadn't pried into someone's history.

"You have every right," Natasha crooned with the compassion of a mother, the understanding of a therapist, but her face was like iron. You were reminded of the first time that you woke up in SHIELD's facility, the time she'd played good cop to Fury's bad cop, and the memory sent a contradictory twist through your body, timid chills and heated ire in near-equal measure.

"And you have every right to your privacy, even if you're the one who put it out there."

"No one would blame you, even if it was still private information. After what I did, it's only fair. Besides, I work for SHIELD. Knowing more about me would make you safer." She leaned forward slightly, her posture shifting from defensive to something more deliberate. "You know Fury is interested in what they did to you, you know he's worried about you falling into HYDRA's hands again someday. What if he ordered me to come after you? To put you back in a cell?"

"Why are you acting like this?" You huffed, more annoyed than upset. "I know you wouldn't do that to me."

"Because you trust me?"

"Shit. Why couldn't she have been the one to get hit with the anesthetics..."

You'd nearly forgotten the comment, especially amid the rest of your jumbled memories, but you didn't miss the pleased twitch of her jaw as she crooned out the word. The memory was back in a flash, and your best efforts couldn't keep the slightest of pinks from burning on your cheeks.

"I don't trust you," you hissed out through clenched teeth. "I just know you wouldn't do that to an innocent person."

"I find when honesty comes out in a life-or-death situation, it's usually more meaningful than whatever comes out of your mouth after." Natasha shifted, leaning forward in a slow, almost hypnotic way.

Her voice grew quieter, yet sharper, the same tone you'd heard from her countless times in training sessions, and in the field. The one that told you she'd caught the target's scent. The chill in the air spread to your spine, and you tightened your back muscles to suppress the urge to shiver.

"So why do you still trust me?"

You could only stare, jaw clenched. There were a hundred ways you could've tried to deflect, to avoid the question, but all of them would be as transparent as the one that came to your tongue first.

"Maybe I'm just stupid," you muttered.

"You aren't, or you would have died months ago."

"Then it's because I knew you were looking out for me, okay?" You groaned, exasperated. "You've been trying to protect me this whole time—the letter, confronting the hunter squadrons alone, jamming my comms. I'm not blind to that."

"Mmm. Was wondering how much of that you really knew about," Natasha noted. There was an undisguised note of pride in her voice. "But wrong, again. You'd already put all that together before you let it slip, and you still looked shocked when you said it. There's something more."

"Is there a reason why you're so dead set on figuring this out?" Your voice came out sharp and cutting,, but Natasha didn't flinch. She leaned forward even further, so far you swore you could have felt the breath on her lips brush against yours if she'd taken the next one.

You couldn't turn away from the way her eyes bore into your own, nor did you miss how much of a genuine question there seemed to be, buried deep inside those icy green eyes. No matter how hard she tried to cover it up with her usual walls, that layer of cold aloofness that blocked out all sunlight from what lay below, some spark was glimmering through.

"I've known you for a little over a year." Natasha's posture shifted subtly, her body language adjusting from interrogator to something harder to categorize. "And somehow, in that time, you've figured out how to read me better than anyone except Clint. Maybe it's your enhanced senses, but I don't think that's all it is."

In spite of her words, she was making herself nigh unreadable as she spoke. The calculated openness vanished, replaced by a stillness so complete that even your enhanced perception could detect nothing beyond the careful movement of her lips forming each word.

"Maybe I want to find out what it is you see. What you still trust after all that I did."

"I don't trust you."

Natasha's eyes fixed on yours with unnerving precision. "I didn't buy that the first time." Her smile held no warmth, merely function—a tool deployed with expert timing. "I commend the persistence, but let's stop wasting time."

"I trust you as far as saving my life." Your lips pursed, eyes angling down to stare at your own crossed arms. "Is that what you want to hear? Fine. I see in you someone that isn't actually awful enough to let me die. Congratulations."

"There's more to it." Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with quiet certainty.

"What's it going to take to get you to leave me alone?" The question emerged as barely more than a whisper, the fight draining from your voice.

"If you wanted me to leave you alone, you'd have told Clint to lock the door on his way out." Natasha remained perfectly still, only her eyes moving as they studied your face. There was a keenness to the curve of her smile, a razor-sharp edge that drew blood as her gaze focused on you. She was playing this conversation like chess.

"Is this just some kind of game to you?" Your words came out as a croak, a weakness redoubled when you winced at the crack in your voice.

Natasha's gaze softened—not with warmth, but with calculation giving way to something less rehearsed. The absolute stillness left her, giving way to her usual guarded state. Her posture loosened by a millimeter, her shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch. Not even enough for the plastic chair underneath her to creak... but enough for you to notice, even before she made a point of finally leaning back in her chair, returning the distance between you back to a more comfortable length.

"No." Something shifted in Natasha's voice—a subtle change that years of training couldn't fully extinguish. "It's something that's been bothering me since I left you behind back there. I just want an answer. The real one. After that, if you ask me to leave, I will. I promise."

"A promise…"

The bitter laugh you intended never materialized, dying somewhere between thought and voice. Not from mercy or concern for her feelings, but because the weight of everything between you suddenly seemed too heavy for such petty displays. The exhaustion of maintaining your defenses against her pressed down on you like a physical force.

"That's the thing, Natasha." Your voice emerged with unexpected steadiness despite the constriction in your throat. "I trust you to save my life. Not because we're a team, not because it's your job. Because it's the right thing to do."

The admission cost you more than you'd expected. Your mouth felt like shattered glass, each word cutting as it formed. You blinked rapidly against the tears threatening the corners of your eyes.

"And that's what you do. You do the right thing. Or... what you think is the right thing. You're practical, pragmatic, and efficient. That's how I knew you'd take Clint and the explosives instead of staying behind. The odds told you that if I stayed, one person might die, but if you stayed, we all might. You're too pragmatic to accept those odds. You don't take chances. You don't let people die. But... you also don't care if they get hurt, if it's for the 'right' reasons."

Your grip tightened on the bed rail as the conflict that had been churning inside you for months finally crystallized into words.

"So yes, I trust your calculation, your efficiency. I trust you to make the hard choice when it needs to be made, to save my life if it's in danger. But I don't—can't—trust you to be a friend, to respect boundaries, or even to keep a goddamn promise."

A shudder escaped you as the last of the truth came out, as you basked in the unsatisfying catharsis of surrender.

"And, please. Reading you? You don't really believe that," you added after a moment in a bitter mumble. "I've never been able to read you. Any time I think I've figured some part of you out, you prove me wrong."

"I said better than anyone else, I didn't say perfectly." The words came without hesitation, the even keel of her eyes telling you the response was already formed in her mind, her thoughts steps ahead of yours in this little dance of words. "You read me on your anniversary. Saw right through me."

"What, when you tried to seduce me?" You couldn't help the bitterness in your laugh. Even after all this time, the memory left a taste like bile in your mouth. The sight of her face looking down at you as the darkness overtook you, as the spiked wine seeped into your veins. "You were acting like a completely different person, of course I noticed. And you had to push it that far before I did. The random visits, the drinks, the bar, the Italian dinner... I never really thought it was fake. Doubted, maybe, but always let myself believe anyway. One moment of clarity, after being beaten over the head with it, after playing the fool for weeks."

The words left you bitterly, filled with resentment at your own naivety. You'd thought your guilt and anger had lessened a little, but talking about it like this was proving how wrong that had been. A breath passed after you fell silent, the room as still as if time had crawled to a stop altogether. The quiet beep of the heart monitor and the omnipresent thrum of the air conditioning were the only sounds, and Natasha could well have been replaced by a statue as her green eyes bored into your soul.

"Or, maybe, you didn't notice because it wasn't all fake."

Your lips twitched and a snort erupted from you, but that was all the sound you made. Words formed, but were bitten off early. They were too reflexive, too bitter; they wouldn't help either of you, only hurt. Perhaps pain was justified, perhaps it was even earned, after all that had been done to you—but something stayed your tongue.

"Why even bother? You know that's one of the things I can't trust you on," you spat, the bedsheets suddenly finding themselves the target of your ire once more. "Why would I-"

"Because you've been trying everything you could since day one to get me to slip up, to get a chance to see the 'real' me. Whether that was by pissing me off, tricking me, being friendly, or just being your usual irritating self." The words were drolled out with all the energy of reading off a shopping list, but her volume raised to silence you, and there was a tilt to her gaze, a sharp point to her emerald irises. "This is it. No SHIELD orders, no mission objectives. I'm not here to manipulate you, and if I don't want to tell you something, all I have to do is sit here quietly or walk right out the door."

An instinctive scream of rejection echoed in your mind, a denial of the things you must have imagined you saw on her features as she spoke. Things beneath the cool mask, the anger at your rejection, the unwavering confidence. A fanciful thought, that's all it could've been, certainly—for what you dared to imagine you saw there, what she claimed to be saying, was impossible. Had she in fact been replaced by a statue, it would've been more likely for the marble to crease and crack around the lips, for the statue itself to begin speaking those words, than to ever believe them from her.

"How can I ever possibly believe that?" Your words, when they finally came, were as defeated as they were skeptical, resigned to the facts they conveyed, but not proud of them. "You've always been manipulating me. Always. I've thought over everything that happened since I first woke up in that cell; every minute of it, over and over, day in and day out, even when all I wanted was to shut it all out.

"And no matter how many times I play things back, I can't tell for even the smallest details what they really meant! I never know what angle you're working. I can't tell the difference between you being guarded, you genuinely not trusting me, or you straight-up lying to me. I think of every time you walked through that door, and I can't name a single time when I'm completely sure you came because you were worried, or you cared. Actually, fuck all that, I can't even name one time I'm sure you came because you wanted to! So how? How do I possibly trust you telling me that any of it was real?!"

You didn't realize how loud you had gotten, how you were hurling the words at her, until you stopped. You were propped against the edge of the bed, knuckles white, lifted up against the railing and leaning toward her as you shouted. Mollified a bit at the realization, you slowly shifted yourself back down, settling in once more on the soft bedding. The sound of your own breathing, ragged and inflamed with righteous fury, was disturbingly loud now that the quiet had returned.

Whatever anger had been in her gaze, if you'd even read it properly to begin with, was gone now. Glittering peridots shimmered with something familiar enough to strike a chord with your mind, but too inscrutable on her well-trained features to truly understand.

"You don't." The tone, though, that one you were familiar with. The harsh truths, the quick lessons. The tone used when there was no alternative but the terrible option she presented. "You already know that, and nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise. Trust your own instincts, not me. First question: do you even want to believe me in the first place? And if the answer is yes... do you?"

"Y-you can't just expect me to-"

"I lied." The abrupt turn made your mind sputter, half-formed thoughts tumbling away into nothingness as Natasha allowed herself a soft smile, one just slightly twisted with a playfulness the likes of which you hadn't seen in a very, very long time. "This isn't the first time I've been open with you. Do you remember the last thing I said to you before I tried to kiss you?"

"Wha-?" You were sure she was doing it intentionally. She was jumping back and forth, keeping you too off-balance to settle on rejection. But it was hard enough to shut these memories out on dark and lonely nights. Doing it when she was drawing them out, intentionally prodding at the things you'd tried to forget, was like ignoring a burning coal in your head.

"You've told me before you didn't know where I was coming from, that I wore too many faces to understand, so... I really hope you understand what I'm saying right now."

"Yeah. Yeah, I remember."

"I wanted you to understand me. I didn't actually think you would, but you surprised me."

You made a disgruntled noise, a primal release of irritation that did little to quell the frustration that had every tendon in your upper body pulled taut. "And you expect me to believe you went through all that, instead of just telling me what was going on?"

"I had my reasons. And I didn't have a choice in going after your diary. Fury gave the orders. Told me to search your room and find any records you were keeping, at any cost."

"Not a chance. He would've just had you pretend to sneak me out again. Let me think I was getting special treatment, and had a whole team search the place while we were out," you objected. "If they were half-ass smart about it, I'd never even know they were there."

"Fury didn't just want it done. He wanted us to do it. He said that we were getting too close to you, that we were violating protocols. He approved most of our little outings... but we really did sneak you out of there the first time. Clint's idea, and Fury did not take it well." Natasha's lips curled up into a bitter smile at the memory.

"He was furious. When the building's layout and your files got 'leaked' to the Avengers, that was just about the last straw for him. He told us that one of us had to find and secure whatever diary you had, at any cost. Didn't matter who, as long as it was one of us. Punishment, atonement, and a show of fealty, all at once." It was Natasha's turn for her gaze to fade away. She still looked at you, never let her eyes waver for a moment, but there were memories playing behind those green pools.

"And you just went along with it?"

"Yes." No hesitation in her eyes. Regret, maybe. But not anything resembling an apology.

"Why?"

"I owe a lot of debts to a lot of innocent people; my ledger is covered in red, top to bottom. I might not call Fury innocent, but before the Avengers, SHIELD was the only shot I ever had at making some small atonement for the things I did. More than that, I owe Clint and Fury my life, and everything good I've ever done since escaping the Red Room. If it weren't for them, the last red on that ledger would've been a splatter of my own blood."

The weight of the words settled on your chest, leaving you silent as the seconds ticked by. She'd lied to you about her past, but something was different about this time. It made it real, made it believable. And that made it impossible to find any words worthy of a reply.

"So, Fury orders you to, what, seduce me as a punishment? Get into my bedroom and dig up the diary after…" A trail of sounds not quite formed into words scattered behind your train of thought, feeling a sour taste in your mouth at the implication of Fury ordering such a thing.

"No. Fury just ordered me to get the diary. He didn't care how, he just wanted it done. In his mind, either you found out and got furious with all of us, or you didn't, and he had all the info he could get on you while you still trusted SHIELD." Her voice was clinical, analytical, as if she were a third party debriefing the situation. "He'd put an end to us getting too personal, or he'd have a better shot at recruiting you afterward, and we'd have to live with the guilt either way. Win-win."

"Then why the wine, why the pageantry?" You made no attempt to hide the exasperation oozing through every cell in your body. "Why try seduction first, if you didn't even want it to work? Why not drug me from the start?"

"I was always going to drug you. I would never let something like that happen between us as a manipulation, as part of a mission," Natasha stated plainly. Her gaze intensified as she spoke, emphasizing her own words.

"Then why? What are these 'reasons' you supposedly had?"

"To make it hurt more. I needed you to let your guard down," she said, her voice dropping to something just above a whisper. The fingers of her left hand pressed together for a moment, the tendons near her neck tightened as she finished the words. Then she blinked, and in doing so, seemed to reset herself.

"I needed you to feel it completely—to accept the possibility—before I betrayed you."

You let out a harsh laugh, the sound scraping against your throat. "So what, you wanted to maximize the damage? Make sure it hurt as much as possible?"

"Yes."

The raw honesty stung worse than any lie. A cold weight settled in your chest, pressing against your lungs until each breath became a conscious effort.

"I wanted it to cut deep," Natasha continued, her eyes never leaving yours. "Deep enough that you'd leave. Deep enough that you wouldn't look back."

"Congratulations," you said, voice a bitter mockery of celebration. "Mission accomplished."

A moment of uncertainty passed over her features—not regret exactly, but something adjacent to it. "Fury's goal was the diary. Mine was getting you away from me. Away from SHIELD. Away from people who would never stop using you."

Your breath slowed to a still. The room suddenly felt too warm, too close. Memories played in your head, ones you couldn't silence, no matter how hard you strangled the sound.

"My guess? They wanted you to stop trusting them."

"You were becoming too... integrated with us," she said, choosing her words with surgical precision. "Fury was never going to let you go. Choosing to stay with SHIELD would have meant putting you up against HYDRA, given them even more chances to capture you. And I—" She paused, swallowing something back. "I would have kept following orders. That's what I do. That's who I am."

You studied her face, searching for tells, some micro-expressions that would betray a lie. But there was only that strange, unsettling openness—like someone had stripped away layers of armor to reveal raw skin underneath.

"People around me get hurt," Natasha said, and for the first time, her gaze drifted away, focusing on some unseen point beyond your shoulder. "Usually by me. It was better for you to hate me than for me to keep manipulating you. Because I would have. You said it yourself, I do what's right. Even if that means hurting people."

Your fiddling with the blanket, your angry quivers, all of it fell still. The marble had cracked, the statue had spoken, and as impossible as it was, there had been a woman underneath that stone veneer all along. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel possible. Your eyes roved over her angrily, as if rage alone would find the tell you were so sure you were missing.

"So hurting me was what? Your version of mercy?" Your voice came out low, steadier than you felt. "Saving me from SHIELD, from you?"

Natasha's eyes returned to yours, something raw and unfamiliar in them. Not calculation, not evaluation, but something that looked disturbingly like vulnerability.

"Yes. I knew exactly how to make you leave. I noticed things—little ones. The way your eyes lingered on me. The glances you'd steal when you thought you were being subtle. And the dinner... I could tell you were smart. Could tell you knew something was off every time we 'snuck' you out of there. But when it was just you and me, you did something you never did at the bar, never did when you were out with Clint. You... let yourself believe it was real. I mean really believe it. Just for a few seconds, now and then. You wanted it to be."

The heat of shame crawled up your cheeks despite your anger. You'd always known she could read you—it was what she was trained for—but hearing her catalog the evidence of your feelings made you want to disappear. The humiliation of it twisted in your chest, that she'd seen everything and used it against you.

"And that's how I knew it would hurt you." Natasha's voice remained steady, but her fingers tensed, the fabric of her bodysuit giving way so subtly the shadows of her fingertips barely shifted. "Hurt you badly enough to make you want to get away from us, as far away as you could."

She paused, her breathing pattern shifting imperceptibly. When she continued, the words came with deliberate, almost clinical precision.

"I knew, because at some point, I started to feel the same way. I wanted it to be real, too."

The words hung in the air between you, impossible and incongruous. The heart monitor beeped erratically as your chest tightened and your mind reeled. For several seconds, neither of you moved or spoke, the alleged confession too unexpected to process immediately.

Finally, you shook your head, a reflexive denial. "No. No, that's not—" You took a step back. "You're still doing it. Still manipulating. This is just another... another layer."

Natasha's expression turned empathetic, but not in the practiced way you'd seen her deploy a hundred times before. This looked painful, like muscles unused to the movement.

"When you first arrived, you were just an asset. A potential resource. A problem to solve." She spoke methodically, as if cataloging items. "Then you became a responsibility, something I had to take care of. And at some point, I actually wanted to. I felt protective of you. You were in our custody against your will, and you deserved better than what Fury had planned for you."

You remained silent, afraid that any interruption might cause whatever anomaly you were witnessing to end prematurely.

"I started intervening in the testing schedules. Arguing against the more... invasive protocols." A muscle in her jaw twitched out of place. "I realized I was protecting you. Not because it was my job, but because I wanted to."

The memory of small kindnesses surfaced in your mind—the assistance with your late night snack runs, the moments between you and Fury where someone had obviously been advocating on your behalf. All the things that others had been telling you that you hadn't allowed yourself to believe, too; the reason for the note, the way she put herself in the line of fire to keep HYDRA away from you, even the files she'd slipped to the Avengers to pressure Fury into releasing you. A smile flashed in your mind, partially obscured behind the nock of an arrow.

"She's protective of you. Always has been."

"And then I started to admire you," she said, the admission seemingly difficult for her.

"Admire me? What is there to admire?" You blurted out reflexively, eyes cracking open a little wider.

"I've spent my entire life running from my past. Burying it. But you—" Her eyes traced your face with a new intensity. "No matter how frightening the possibilities, you insisted on knowing. You demanded your memories, your history, even when we warned you it might destroy you."

A bitter smile touched her lips as she continued on.

"I disagreed with your goal. I still think some things are better left buried. But your strength, how you never wavered in that goal, it's impressive. You stood up to everything Hydra and SHIELD threw at you, and it never broke you. After all we did, the isolation, the manipulation, the betrayal—the fact that you didn't look into all that information on us? Didn't look up our files, respected what little privacy any of us have after I destroyed what was left of yours?" She shook her head slightly. "That's more impressive than you think, to still be that principled. To still be yourself. Even after everything."

"You must really be something special."

"That's a nice story," you finally managed, your voice strained with the effort of maintaining control. "Very touching. Almost believable."

Something flickered in her eyes—disappointment, maybe, or resignation.

"Because it's true. You impress me more than you realize. And for all that... you still trust me."

"I don't-" The response was like a reflex now, though you bit your tongue to cut them off before the hollow words could be finished. Your fingers wrapped around the railing to your bed, squeezing tightly enough to make the plastic coating the metal crack and deform. "Look, Natasha, you've said... you've said a lot. Some of it even makes sense. But you haven't given me a reason to actually believe any of it. A real reason to think this would be any different."

"I answered your question. You just never answered mine."

"Your- your question?" You were having a hard time tracing your way back through the conversation. Your mind was still hazy, and you'd been talking for so long. Before you could bring to mind what she was referring to, she started to lean forward. Her arm lifted, her fingers trailing up the side of the hospital bed before they tentatively slid over yours. Your heart sputtered in your chest, unable to decide whether it should race or stop altogether.

"Do you want to believe it?"

Your eyes drifted away from her hand, the fingers brushing your own so gently, and meandered their way to her eyes. She met your gaze with the same intensity as always, but there wasn't the same certainty you were used to seeing. Something tentative was there, or so you might have thought, if such a thing were possible. You didn't think it was, and yet you asked yourself if it might be anyway, hoping to find a different answer

"I... I do." Your vision grew hazy as your eyes started to fill. You felt weak, you felt stupid. You hated yourself for admitting it out loud, but even more for feeling it in the first place. "I want to believe it."

"And do you?"

"...I don't know."

The admission slipped free like a knife, tearing you open anew. Your hand tightened all the more in an attempt to ground yourself. You tried to draw on your anger, your bitterness, the jaded attitude that had kept you moving at the worst of times. But in your admission, you'd strayed too far, and they had fallen out of reach. You felt exposed, and the gentle caress of fingers against the back of your palm somehow made it better, and so much worse.

"I can work with that." Her thumb danced against the taut tendons in your hand, tracing the lines of your tensed body in a way that sent a chilly heat spiraling through you. "If you let me. I've had a lot of second chances in my life. I won't ask for another one."

Your vision blurred from the tears you refused to let fall, transforming Natasha into a watercolor silhouette against the stark hospital lighting. Her thumb continued its gentle exploration of your hand, each careful stroke like a question mark against your skin.

"Or you can tell me to leave," she said, her voice gentler than you'd ever heard it. "I promised after I heard your answer, I would, remember? Say the word, and I'm gone."

You swallowed hard, feeling the conflict twist within you—the desperate longing to believe her warring with endless months of cultivated distrust. In her expression you saw apprehension, a steeliness protecting her from whatever came next, blended with a forced openness, walls brought down in an act of tremendous effort. It was as if you could see both sides at once, as though two versions of Natasha Romanoff were superimposed: the calculated operative and the person underneath, both equally real and unreal at once.

"What exactly are you offering here?" you asked, your voice barely above a whisper.

The corner of her mouth lifted in a ghost of a smile.

"You're not the only one who wants to believe. Or the only one who never let yourself. I thought pushing you away was the right thing to do, but that clearly didn't protect you the way I thought it would. So I'm offering the chance to take the other path this time. To see where we end up if we let ourselves believe." Her expression remained carefully controlled, but something in her eyes suggested the cost of these words. "No guarantees. Just... possibility."

A delicate silence stretched between you, filled with unspoken possibilities. You loosened your grip on the railing, the indentations from your fingers leaving permanent marks in the plastic. Slowly, tentatively, you turned your hand over beneath hers, your palm facing upward—not quite an acceptance, but an acknowledgment. Your thumb traced small circles against her hand, a mirror to her own touch, each of you reaching across a chasm of distrust that seemed both narrower and wider than it had moments before. The silence between you stretched, elastic and fragile.

"I can't promise I'll ever fully trust you," you said at last, watching her face for any flicker of the familiar masks sliding into place. "I don't know if I can."

Natasha nodded, the movement slight but deliberate. The harsh fluorescent lights caught the copper in her hair, turning it to flame around a face that remained still as water.

"Trust isn't binary," she replied, her voice carrying a quality you'd never heard before—something unvarnished. "It's earned in pieces."

"Pieces," you echoed, tasting the word. "I think I can manage pieces."

The corner of her mouth lifted—not the practiced smile you'd seen her deploy a hundred times before, but something smaller, less steady. In that uncertainty, you found a strange comfort. The Black Widow without her choreography was someone new—someone you might, someday, come to know.

She withdrew her hand slowly, fingertips lingering against yours. "Get some rest," she said, rising from her chair with fluid grace. "We can talk about pieces tomorrow."

As she moved toward the door, her silhouette outlined against the sterile hallway light, you realized you weren't watching for signs of deception anymore. Instead, you were simply watching her—this woman of infinite personas who, for the first time, might be showing you one that wasn't crafted for a purpose. The first one she'd ever had, the last one she'd ever willingly show.

Whether it was real or not, who could say? Not you. Maybe not even her. But as the door closed softly behind her, as the lights began to dim automatically, you found yourself—against all better judgment—looking forward to tomorrow.

Chapter Text

"I'm serious! He caught it, gave me this smug little grin, and then—boom! Blew him right off his little flying scooter."

Clint laughed loudly enough to be heard around the bar. You were having a hard time imagining that anyone with a personality like that had ever qualified as a "secret" agent, but you kept that thought to yourself as you smirked at his retelling. You couldn't quite keep the skepticism out of your voice when you spoke, though.

"That's way too ridiculous to be true. I mean, how would you even see him smile from that far?"

"Why don't you take a look out that window and tell me?" Clint challenged, gesturing toward the streets outside. You didn't bother to turn your eyes away from him, already aware of how far away you could make out disturbingly small details. You had no idea how good 'normal' eyesight was, but you'd seen enough people leaning in to read that you had a clue as to just how insane your vision really was.

"I meant you, specifically," you clarified. "I'm a freak of nature. How do you see so far?"

"Hey, plenty of freak to go around. You don't make it to where we are without being a little out there," Clint countered, taking a moment to tip his glass back and finish off the last of the foamy beer within. "I just happen to be all-natural. I've been mostly deaf my whole life. With SHIELD-tech hearing aids I can almost get it back to about average. But even before SHIELD, I've always had this eyesight to compensate."

"Too bad you didn't get anything to compensate for your sense of humor." Natasha leaned in with the tease, giving Clint a smile that dared him to fire back.

"Sure I did. Dashing good looks, overflowing charisma, and an excellent sense of taste."

"And so humble, too."

"Of course." Clint gave a little grin and shifted slightly on his stool, his gaze flicking between both of you before settling on the door. "And that sense of taste tells me that a reunion celebration like this calls for a proper drink, one that's a little more special. Next round's on me. I'm gonna go grab us three Frisco Stings, keep my seat warm."

Natasha didn't say anything in response, her eyes following Clint all the way to the door. Her amusement held all the way until the door to the bar clicked shut behind him. Then she gave a quirk of her brow that was about as subtle as a full roll of the eyes for anyone else.

"Is he up to something?" You only had to think about what you'd just asked for a moment before realizing your mistake. "Is he up to something worse than usual?"

"No. Nothing worse than usual," Natasha remarked, turning her focus back to you. "Just that he's being intentionally blatant about it."

"Uh," You hesitated, aware that something was off about what had happened, but not sure which part of it to point to.

"You wouldn't have any reason to know, but believe me, he might as well be wearing a flashing red light." Natasha's lips curled to strengthen the reassurance. "We're in New York. There's only one place that serves a 'Frisco Sting' here and hasn't at least renamed it to fit the state."

"And... that 'one' place has some kind of significance?" You guessed.

"Nope. But it's about twelve blocks away," Natasha explained, slowing her words to let the emphasis sink in.

"Ah." The uncertainty left your voice as the understanding finally sank in. "Well, can't say he isn't considerate, I guess. Not sure it matters when we're in the middle of a public bar like this, but it's a nice thought."

Natasha's smirk grew a little more genuine, a little more properly amused. "You've still got a lot to learn about being discreet. Better a crowded bar than a private room, if you haven't bothered to secure it. You might be able to hear other people's conversations, but trust me, nobody else can, as long as you aren't screaming it to the world."

"Actually, it's even hard for me to pick much out," you admitted, glancing around the room. Your eyes wandered between the other tables briefly, and you could catch a few words if you focused, but not much more. "Most of the time in places like this I'm tuning everything out."

"You've adapted really well," Natasha noted, following your gaze to the rowdier tables. "I remember when we first got you out of that HYDRA base. You were complaining that we were 'so damn loud', and all we were doing was talking. And that flashbang HYDRA threw in when they attacked…"

"Oh, god, don't remind me," you groaned. "Seriously felt like my eyes were on fire. Still better than when I first woke up. I couldn't see anything in that dark room, but just the rattling of the chains when I moved my arms around sounded like someone was shaking them around inside my damn skull."

"What about pain? I seem to recall you shouting at Fury the first time he drew blood."

"Hey, needles still suck," you objected, pointing faux-angrily at your elbow. "But yeah. A lot better. Judging by how other people react to the same kind of hits, I don't think my pain sensitivity was enhanced as much as my other senses, but it was still awful back then. If it was as bad as when I first woke up, I don't think I'd have made it through that last mission. I was breathing in lungfuls of anesthetics by the end of it, and I still felt like shit."

"Good incentive not to let it happen again." Natasha lifted the straw to her lips as she teased you. Something flickered in her eyes, and with it, there was a shift in the atmosphere. The playfulness of her teasing remained, but it was tempered with something more real. "Besides, can't have you dying on me while we're still sorting all this out."

"Mmm." You nodded, eyeing your empty glass, trying to wish it fuller, if only to buy yourself a few seconds to think. "Well, I seem to have a habit of putting myself in the worst situations I can find. We should probably get started before I end up wandering into the only HYDRA-run bar in New York."

"You say that like you couldn't find a way to pull it off," Natasha retorted, giving you a challenging look.

"Touche."

Words ebbed away for a breath, the background noise keeping the silence from becoming too daunting. You shifted a little on your stool and turned your body, shifting so that you were as close to across from her as could be managed without awkwardly scraping your stool over the rough floor.

"You know this is going to be awkward as hell, right?" You gave a little sigh, setting your glass down at last and drumming the fingers of your hand lightly against your other arm.

"What, you think the rest of the time we've spent together has been smooth sailing?" For a moment, the sarcastic reply almost irritated you. Since her comment about sorting things out, you were starting to get a familiar feeling from her—the feeling of battering against unbreakable walls. Yet even with that familiarity, there was something... less hostile about the feeling, though you couldn't quite say why.

"Maybe not smooth," you acknowledged with a slight nod. "But I don't just mean in the usual ways. I'm still getting the hang of so much stuff that people consider basic. Tech, slang, society…"

"Getting you up to speed has been pretty interesting. Almost like having Cap thawed out all over again." Natasha's smile told stories of the history of the Avengers that you were still just beginning to learn yourself.

"Alright, the guy might have been a little out of his era when he woke up, but at least he still had his memories of the way the world worked back then. Even though I wasn't around, I'm pretty sure they still had relationships back in the nineteen-forties." Whatever you said must have been funny, judging by the way her lips tightened as they curled back, but she didn't comment on it. "If I've ever had a relationship, I obviously don't remember it. I don't even really know how to... do any of this. I don't know what's normal."

"None of it." Natasha's statement couldn't have been simpler, and she gave the barest of shrugs to further add to the brevity. "Nothing about us, any of us, is normal. That doesn't have to be a bad thing."

"No, it doesn't, but it also doesn't tell me much about how to handle all this. And the others have been... less than helpful."

"Oh no." Her tone was overly dire, but she didn't bother to conceal the curiosity on her face—or the amusement. "Who did you talk to? Please tell me it wasn't Clint. Or Tony."

"N-no, I didn't, uh, I didn't exactly talk to any of them about it," you said reluctantly. "I did ask a few questions about their relationships, past or present. Mostly I've just been watching people, though. Tony and Pepper are always somewhere around the tower. Clint thinks he's being subtle when he goes off to make calls, but I don't think he realizes just how far I can hear; I overheard him talking to Laura before I was even out of the infimary. Thor talks about Jane all the time, too, but I'm not sure if I should really try to model anything after an Asgardian..."

"You don't need to 'model' after anything." Natasha leaned a little further over the table, bringing herself closer to you. "I hope you didn't go off reading cheesy romance novels to brush up on your style."

"No, no, nothing like that." Well... not technically a lie, though the twist of your smile might have hinted at the truth. She hadn't said anything about romance movies, and Tony had certainly taught you about the wonders of streaming.

Most of Natasha's face remained stone-still, but the purposeful tilt of a brow told you that there were going to be further questions on that matter later. "You don't need to get hung up on that sort of thing. I know who you are. I know your issues. I'm even thinking about starting to share a few of mine. Wherever this ends up going, it's not going to look like some fairy tale along the way. This is going to be something new... to both of us."

The allusion in her voice eased your anxieties, if only a tad. "Problem is, it's all new to me. There's exploring uncharted territory, then there's being lost in the middle of the ocean when you're not even sure how to sail a boat."

"Hey, you're already figuring out analogies, I'd say you're picking up social cues pretty fast." Your eyes did a half-roll to match her half-jest, and that seemed to soften her a bit. "I mean it. You're overthinking this. We don't have to follow a script, or live up to someone else's standards. We figure out what works, and what makes us happy, and if we're lucky, maybe that's each other."

A thought about how that sounded a lot like something you'd hear in a 'fairy tale' died as the last words left her lips. Little subtleties in the way she spoke ground your mind to a halt. The walls were still up, still keeping her safe and protected inside, but something had definitely changed. There was a window now. Maybe it was small, maybe she'd pull the curtains shut on you at times, but it was there. And for once, she wasn't hurrying to seal it again.

"Alright, but maybe you could at least point me in the right direction?" you said in a hushed tone, afraid to ruin the moment. "Nothing has even changed yet, but... it kind of feels like everything has. It's different than before, even different from when you and Clint were 'sneaking' me out."

"Mmm." Natasha gave a thoughtful sound, and her eyes slid away from you in a smooth scan of the room. She lingered on the bar a few moments before her stare snapped back to you. Her grip around your own fingers tightened, and she leaned a little closer, until there were only a few inches between the two of you across the quaint little bar table. "Well, do you remember what I said when you asked me what I was offering?"

It only took you a breath to be sure you were both thinking of the same moment. Once you were, the words were easy enough to recall; they were practically burned into your mind. "Possibility. The chance to take the other path, to go back and see where we might have ended up if we let ourselves believe."

"Why not start there?" Natasha proposed, as innocently as if she were suggesting a good book. "Things might seem different now, but you handled yourself pretty well during our little outings. We can't go back and fix the things we've done, no matter how much we wish we could. But... we can pretend. For a little while, at least. So pretend it's that night again. If you let yourself believe, and if you knew that I was doing the same, where do we end up?"

The proposition left you silent for a moment, the idea dancing around in your head. Even thinking about that night again still tightened your chest with the feeling of scars untended. Just as your lips started to tighten, Natasha began to reach her arm across the table slowly, almost tenderly. You watched it approach for just a beat or two, then stretched out to meet her halfway. The anxiety and pain dulled a little bit at the contact, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the fact that you were locking fingers with the cause, it relaxed you enough to let your mind return to her question.

When your eyes swayed up once more, you saw something there that you understood intuitively more than by any active thought. All it took was a moment of meeting those green irises to hear the words echo in your mind as if they'd been beckoned.

"I really hope you understand what I'm saying right now."

The nervousness shooting through you seemed absurd. In that moment, you felt as frightened as you were during the raid on HYDRA. But your headstrong attitude prevailed, as it always seemed to.

And just this once, you didn't regret it.

Your nervous hesitation made the movement unsteady and irregular, a far cry from any fairy tale. She never showed the slightest bit of amusement, though... nor did she back away. As you leaned over the short distance that still separated you both, she remained perfectly still, right up until the very moment before you made contact. Then she closed her eyes and moved to meet you, tilting her head just before you met.

There was a moment that you expected a trick, a trap of some kind, or simply for her to pull away at the last moment. The little anxieties tried to swell together, but that fear ebbed the moment you felt the pressure of her lips against yours. It was gentle, perhaps as gentle as the two of you had ever been to one another. And the sensations...

The signals jolting your mind were as intense as any sensory overload you'd ever experienced in your early days. It was different to any other form of touch you'd experienced, hardly even a tingle at first, but as the kiss lingered and she started to press against you more firmly, that thrill expanded, as if the sensation were bursting through you. Her warmth, her softness, the sheer intimacy of it set off neurons that had never been fired before, parts of your mind that had never adapted to their new sensitivity. It left you reeling, torn between pulling away out of shock or pressing closer and losing yourself to the madness and ecstasy.

Your heart rate had skyrocketed so quickly, and sent so much adrenaline pumping through you, that you could hardly tell if the kiss had lasted two seconds or two hours. You didn't notice she'd pulled away for a breath, your lips—no, your whole face tingling too much to be sure of the moment she broke contact. When you opened your eyes and saw the glimmer in her eyes, subdued as it may have been, the pounding of your heart only grew louder.

"Well," Natasha said simply, "That's a pretty good answer, I'd say." Her expression was as cool as ever, even the gentle pulse of her veins hardly showing any sign of excitement. But she held your gaze in a new way, and the squeeze of her fingers around your own seemed quite deliberate.

"I think so," you agreed.

"Well, I helped you out, now you get to return the favor." Natasha let a second pass in silence, only continuing when you made no quick response. "We've still got one thing to talk about. Those pieces?"

"...Right." The tension returned, although perhaps because of how stunned you still felt, it didn't seem so pervasive this time.

"I don't expect much. I know as well as anyone how hard it is to start trusting someone. And that's before they've even hurt you." She let the words hang, no sign of their impact on her face, but meaning enough found in silence. "But if there's anything I can do to make this easier, get things started on the right foot…"

"I did think about it. That night in the tower's infirmary," you explained, a plaintive sigh escaping you. "Kind of had a hard time getting rest after that talk. Not that I sleep much anymore anyway..."

Now it was her turn to stay silent, watching your face without comment, managing to convey a measure of patience despite her stillness.

"I couldn't really figure out what to ask. Everything I thought of you'd either have to deny, or if you did accept, it'd be a promise you'd break." Tension in the air, tightness in her features, her fingers almost seeming to harden in place. "Not like that. More of a... I was still emotional when I was thinking about this stuff. Thought the first thing I should ask you to do was promise never to lie to me. But that's not a promise you can keep. I don't need an explanation, or a justification to know why that just doesn't work for us. If it meant saving my life or anyone else's, if you were trying to keep me out of danger, or…"

"Pragmatic." She called back the word indifferently, but judgment rang in the syllables, one aimed in both directions.

"And I don't intend to change that." Not necessarily a favorable attitude toward that part of her, but it eased some of the pressure that had built. "And I went over the same things with asking you not to keep secrets, not to disappear without warning, not to do a hundred other things. Even if we weren't heroes, if there were no missions, we still have a lot to sort through before we even get close to a point like that."

"Yet you're still here," she pointed out, as if the fact should surprise you. "You could spend the whole rest of your life trying to figure me out, you know. Some people have."

"If things work out that way, I wouldn't mind trying."

The shifting of her eyes, the oscillation of her pupils, the tiny little reactions were so sudden that you couldn't tell which of them were real and which were trying to cover the others. She hardly moved, but you saw more in that brief response from her than you had in a long time.

Too long, you suddenly realized.

"Smooth," she finally commented, voice already as level as expected.

"There was one thing, though. One that I think even I have to insist on."

"I'm listening."

"I-" The words lingered on your lips for a moment, sounding silly, or perhaps even arrogant now that they were ready to emerge at last. "I never want you to lie to me about actually liking me."

Natasha seemed ready to reply, but what she saw in your eyes made her hold back. She gave you the mildest of nods, leaving you the space to continue.

"You can lie about a lot of things. You can lie about hating me, if you really have to. If something crazy happens and you want to start a fight, maybe because you think I'll get hurt by staying close to you? I can handle that. Hell, if you fake a break-up, I'll probably be fine once you explain." You weren't quite as certain as you tried to sound, but you tried not to let that doubt shine through. "But after what we've been through? I need to trust you when you say it. No matter how small it might be. If you say you like me, I need to know you mean it. And if you say more than that one day? I need to believe that too. That? That, I couldn't handle again."

You had been too focused on getting the words out to notice the wetness in your eyes. Far from tears, still, but more intense of a feeling than you'd expected. You moved to wipe at them, but stayed your hand when another rested on your cheek. Natasha's free hand laid on your cheek gingerly, soothing you with easy strokes of her thumb.

"Okay," she agreed without ceremony, "I can do that."

She didn't promise. She didn't need to.

"Then I think we can do... whatever this is." The words came out so quietly you were afraid you'd have to repeat them, but the little smile she allowed herself told you all you needed to know.

"Alright, party people!" Clint sat down at the table with every bit of the spirit he'd left with, arms loaded with a full salvo of drinks, far more than the three he'd said he was going to fetch. "I got a couple of dirty looks as I was heading for the door, but I think I left a big enough tip for them to not come chasing me down over a few glasses."

"Pretty sure you carrying enough alcohol to knock out a frat boy through the streets of Manhattan is more of the issue there," Natasha remarked dryly. Clint managed to settle the glasses down without spilling any of them, a feat nearly as impressive as carrying the dozen-ish drinks in the first place.

"Hey, I can get a good buzz going with a couple softies, but we're not all so lucky." Clint turned his eyes to you, but you didn't miss the way they flickered down to where your hand was still entwined with Natasha's, or the way it made his smile grow both wider and sharper. "And I refuse to be the only one getting drunk at this celebration, so I told them to keep pouring until I thought it was enough to overpower a healing factor."

"This is a celebration?" You considered pulling your hand away from Natasha, figuring Clint was about to start poking at the little display. The squeeze of her fingers against yours quashed that idea quickly, though.

"Of course! You know how long it's been since we've been able to walk around the tower freely? I mean, without sneaking past Stark security," Clint added, earning himself a particularly overt roll Natasha's eyes. "Sure, we came for a mission here and there, but they always kept us out of the fun places."

"Fun places?"

"He means the dining room," Natasha interjected, without missing a beat.

"Seriously, have you tried the Nagiri?" Clint asked, in a tone so over the top it circled back around to being serious. He didn't break eye contact with you even as he passed the first glasses around. "Oh my god, I might actually cry a little if Tony ever fires him."

With that, the three of you were back in form, banter and all. The afternoon passed in a blur, the bar's quaint atmosphere a pleasant background noise to the uneasy familiarity of it all. It was almost like you really had gone back, really had fixed the things all of you had done. But not quite. Maybe nothing had changed. Maybe everything had changed.

Either way, as the night wore on and your thoughts turned back to the tower, you noticed a new feeling rising in your chest. One almost unrelated to what had happened, but inextricably bound to it all the same. The warmth was so easy to confuse with the burn of the alcohol and the flutter of your heart, and so blindingly unfamiliar to you, that it left you dazed for a moment when you finally pieced it together.

You weren't sure any place that you'd ever stayed before could've been called a home. The few that you'd known were tainted now, if you'd ever started to think of them as such in the first place. But with the sun setting and your mind wandering back to your little guest suite, you finally managed to put words to the feeling. When you did, the thought that danced through your mind, tinged bittersweet as it was, filled you with an unfamiliar warmth.

"I'm not even sure I know what a home is supposed to feel like. But... I think this might be it."