Chapter Text
He’s been tracking her since Makarska. His mission is simple in theory: take out the Black Widow. In hindsight, he should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Natalia Romanova. She’s Soviet legend. The kind that gives you nightmares. True to her name, she mates and then she kills, using her sex appeal to gain the information she needs before she slits the throats of her victims. She’s lethal and graceful and morbidly fascinating. But just when he thinks he’s learned everything there is to know about her he’ll see her reading Harry Potter books in Italian or feeding stray cats or dancing to Tchaikovsky in a hotel room in Bratislava at 3am. She’s so human. He wonders how many times he’s ignored someone’s humanity simply because they played for the other team.
He’s been in Warsaw for four days now and he knows Fury’s getting impatient. Truth be told, he could have ended it a long time ago if she wasn’t so unsettlingly human. It’s easier to kill people when you can forget that they’re people. He’s been sitting unmoving in a cramped corner of her hotel room for hours telling himself that it has to be tonight. The longer he lets this go on, the less he’s going to be able to stomach the idea of putting an arrow through her heart.
It’s well past midnight when she finally returns. “You’ve been tailing me since Croatia and you really didn’t expect me to notice?” She flips a switch, flooding the hotel room with light. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
He draws and nocks an arrow in one fluid motion, looking into her eyes as he does so. Figures he owes her that much at least. But her eyes are different. For a split second there’s something in them besides the fear that he usually sees in the eyes of his marks. It almost looks like relief.
“Make it quick,” she says calmly, as she stares into the eyes of the archer whose arrow is trained on her heart.
He doesn’t move. He’s been working up to this moment for weeks, but now that he’s here, he’s frozen. She’s not afraid in the way people normally are when they’re staring death in the face. Her eyes are cold, hard, emotionless. There’s no spark left in them, no life. Can you kill what’s already dead?
“You came here to do a job,” she says flatly. “So do it. Shoot me. End this.”
“No,” he says quietly, lowering his bow. He tries to reconcile her with the girl who dances to Tchaikovsky when she thinks no one is watching. Tries to piece together a girl who reads children’s stories with the deadly women in front of him who’s suicidal enough to step in front of his bow without a gun in her hand. Maybe her humanity is the act. Maybe she’s just tired. God knows he’s been there.
“Kill me,” she growls.
“Not until you tell me why you’re so eager to die.”
He can see the weight of it in her eyes. Emotion flickers there for a second before her face goes back to its cool, impassive mask. If he wasn’t trained as a marksman, he doubts he would have been able to see it. But his eyes are taught to notice the things that no one else sees.
“Why don’t you want to live anymore, Natalia?”
For a second, just one brief second, she lets down the walls. The Widow’s mask dissolves and the emotion in her eyes hits him like a tidal wave. For one brief second, she lets him see the pain and fear that has plagued her throughout her entire life. And then, as quickly as she pulled the walls down, she slams them back up. The entry into her soul that he’s been granted was so brief he almost thinks he imagined it. The only thing that gives her away is the slight hitch in her otherwise calm voice as she looks him dead in the eyes and says “I stopped living a long time ago.”
Suddenly he’s looking at her and he sees himself. He hears Coulson’s voice in the back of his mind. I don’t expect you to understand why I’m giving you a second chance. Not right now, at least. But you will. And when that day comes, I hope you remember. They’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him when he shows up and she’s not dead and he starts talking about second chances. But now he definitely can’t let this arrow fly because he’s looking at himself as he was seven years ago when he was standing in a dark alleyway at absolute rock bottom and for some twisted reason, Coulson looked at him and saw something worth saving.
I stopped living a long time ago. The words are on the tip of his tongue and they feel right, so he says them. “Do you want to start again?”
***
A gunshot shatters the window and before he can even think about what’s going on she’s pinning him to the ground, her own body shielding his from the glass and gunfire. She stays on top of him long after the gunshots end and he wonders if she’s waiting for more gunfire or if she can’t move because she’s been shot. When he pushes her off of him and sees the blood, he realizes it’s the latter.
“Asshole missed my heart,” she says weakly, coughing up blood.
“We need to go.”
“You need to go. It’s not you they’re here for.”
“I’m not leaving you like this.”
“Yes you are.”
“You’re going to bleed to death.”
“A minute ago you had an arrow pointing at my heart and you couldn’t finish the job. Someone else just did it for you. Leave me here and let this end the way it was supposed to.”
He doesn’t know why he’s so desperate to save her. He has no reason to care. But she’s so small that she looks like a child bleeding out before him and there’s no fight in her eyes; there probably hasn’t been for a long time. He doesn’t know why he’s so desperate to save her but she’s beautiful in the most tragic way and this world has been so unkind to her and she deserves a second chance and he might be the only one who can ever offer it.
“Goddammit,” she says, staring up at him, blood still flowing freely from her shoulder. “Let me die.”
That’s when he makes his decision. For better or for worse. Fury will have his ass for this but he doesn’t care because she’s bleeding out in front of him and she’s a kid for God’s sake, a kid who never got a chance at living and she’s about to die thinking that the world is cold and cruel and he wants to show her that it doesn’t have to be. And so he looks her dead in the eyes as he defies his orders and sentences her to the life she deserves instead of the death he was supposed to deliver.
“No.”