Chapter Text
“Egy nagy tejeskávé, kérem.”
Something about the woman’s voice caught Clint’s attention, and he glanced up from his newspaper in time to see a slim, pretty redhead flash a dazzling smile at the barista as she handed over some cash in exchange for a large cup of foam. She turned away, tossing a few red curls out off her forehead, and Clint caught her eye.
She stopped for half an instant. Hesitated an instant more.
And then, slowly, cautiously, she smiled.
Clint tilted his head to the side, nudged the other chair away from the table, and raised an eyebrow in invitation.
The woman set her bag on the floor and sat down across from him, her latte in her hands. “So,” she said in American-accented English, and damn but that voice was like honey dripping off the comb. “You’re American.”
A lesser man might have been surprised. Clint Barton tended to pride himself on being a bigger man, and for keeping the smirk that thought threatened off his face. “I am,” he said. “What gave it away?”
Her smile quirked up at one corner. “I’m very observant,” she said. “Also, I can see your passport.”
Clint glanced down at the travel briefcase at his feet. Sure enough, the cover of his American passport was visible. “Ouch,” he said, tucking it down and zipping the pocket shut. “Guess I should pay more attention to those airport security briefings, huh?”
“The TSA does their best to protect and serve, but we need your help,” she said, her face entirely straight, and then laughed, brushing her hair back again, this time with her (well-manicured, and entirely ring-free) left hand. “I’m Natasha.”
“Clint.” The shook hands across the table, and Clint grinned at her. “So, Natasha,” he said, “what brings you to Budapest?”
***
This is true: When Natasha first meets Clint, she thinks he looks like the sort of rugged, coarse, snarky man who listens to country music and hangs out in seedy, smoky bars, waiting for a girl with the right breast-to-ass ratio to give him a second glance.
This is true: When Clint first meets Natasha, he is the sort of rugged, coarse, snarky man who listens to country music and hangs out in seedy, smoky bars, waiting for a girl with the right breast-to-ass ratio to give him a second glance.
This is true: Though Natasha’s sexual history might imply otherwise, this is exactly the sort of man she likes.
***
Clint had a wicked sense of humor and a smile that crinkled the corner of his eyes. He was not a pretty man, and he did not appear to be a gentle man, either. He laughed easily and spoke Hungarian like a native, and the timbre of his voice as he switched from one language to another sent a shiver up Natasha’s spine.
Natasha liked him immediately, and wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“So,” he said as they left the café, somehow agreeing without words that they would walk in the same direction. Natasha had nowhere to be until midnight, and Clint seemed to be on no schedule but his own. “You’re not American, are you?”
She looked at him, a little surprised. Her English was flawless; the Red Room had made sure that any language she spoke, she spoke with no detectable accent, and the KGB had refined that training further. “What makes you say that?” she asked, careful. She had a Beretta Tomcat in her purse that she could get to in less than a second, and she liked Clint from what she’d seen so far, but she didn’t like him so much she couldn’t put a bullet in his head.
Clint shrugged, not breaking his stride. “You don’t meet a lot of nice American girls named Natasha Romanova,” he said, and he was smarter than she’d thought, used the proper Romanova instead of the Americanized Romanoff she’d given him. “You don’t have an accent, though, only when you say your name. What are you, Russian?”
“Yes,” she said, but she eased her fingers away from her purse and forced herself to relax. “I was born in Volgograd.”
“Any family?”
She tilted her head to the sky, looking up at the buildings around her. She had always loved Budapest; the architecture was beautiful, like something out of a history book or a memory. She watched the clouds for a moment, reminding herself that Clint was a nice man in a strange city, not an interrogator. “Not anymore,” she said.
A warm hand brushed hers and she looked at him, found him gazing at her with something like affection, and it had been so long since she’d seen it in its genuine form that it took her a moment to recognize the book. “Me, too,” he said, and before she could stop herself, she squeezed his hand.
***
This is true: Natasha does not remember her blood family. Sometimes there are snippets: a lullaby, a soft perfume, a piano just slightly out of tune.
This is true: Natasha thinks that once, maybe, she did remember her family—that she had real memories, solid memories, memories she could reach out and touch. But she has been made and unmade and reconstructed so many times that any memories she might have had are gone, far away, there only in the faintest flickers of scent and sound.
This is true: Clint remembers his family too well.
***
“You did not grow up in the circus,” Natasha said, laughing around the rim of her glass. She had a gorgeous laugh, and Clint had been thinking that all day. She laughed like someone who didn’t laugh very often, someone who needed to laugh more often, and it sent a warm feeling into the bottom of Clint’s gut.
Clint grinned. “I did."
“Prove it.”
He held up one finger and she laughed, settling back in her chair and arching one perfectly shaped eyebrow at him. Clint winked at her, climbing to his feet and plucking three dinner rolls from the basket in the center of the table. He tossed one up in the air, then another, and then the third, bringing them all into easy motion. Juggling was never his specialty, and he’d never found it particularly entertaining—not enough explosions, not enough action, not enough flips and spins and tumbles. But it was just about the only circus skill he had that was appropriate for the public sphere, and he managed to get five rolls spinning through the air before he caught them all and finished with a flourishing bow, earning a laugh from Natasha and scattered applause from the surrounding tables. Clint took his seat again. “Satisfied?”
Natasha shrugged, but there was a smile tugging at her lips. “It’s not that hard to learn to juggle.”
Clint spread his hands in defeat. “Well, find me an elephant and some tightropes and I’ll show you some real tricks.”
“I’ll get my elephant dealer on the phone.” Her eyes sparkled in the restaurant’s low, romantic lighting. She laced her fingers together, resting her chin on them. “So, Clint Barton of the circus. Do you often come to strange cities and spend an entire day sightseeing with a strangeer?”
“Only when an exceptional woman comes along.” Clint saluted her with his glass of wine.
“And what makes me exceptional?”
Clint paused, his lips to his glass, and looked at her. Natasha regarded him with sparkling green eyes, but there was something guarded behind them. “I don’t know,” he said. “Something about you intrigues me.”
“Intrigues?” Natasha raised her eyebrows, curling one finger around the stem of her wine glass and leaning forward. The motion pressed her breasts forward, but Clint kept his eyes on hers. “I intrigue you, Mr. Barton?”
“Why the sudden formality, Miss Romanova?” Clint waggled his eyebrows and Natasha laughed, her posture relaxing, and Clint leaned back in his chair. “You’re very beautiful,” he said honestly.
“I am,” Natasha said.
“And you’re bold.”
Natasha smiled. “I’m that, too.”
Clint put his glass down and leaned forward. “In my line of work,” he said, “I don’t meet a lot of women like you.”
“In your line of work?” Natasha tilted her head to one side. A few curls slipped free from her ponytail and dangled over her shoulder, the restaurant’s lighting sending flickers of gold dancing across the red strands. “I might not know what you do, Clint, but I’m willing to bet that you have no shortage of bold, beautiful women.”
“I do.” Clint took Natasha’s wine glass and set it aside. “Scores of them,” he said, climbing to his feet and holding out a hand for hers. Natasha uncrossed her legs and took his hand, allowing him to pull her to her feet. “But very few who manage to be bold, beautiful, and absolutely unconcerned with both.”
“You think I’m unconcerned?” Natasha looked up at him through her lashes. It was almost laughably flirtatious, but it made Clint’s chest tingle. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, tossing the requisite bills for their wine onto the table.
“I think you’re concerned that I think you’re unconcerned,” Clint said.
She laughed, more quietly now. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sometimes I don’t make any sense,” Clint admitted, resting his hands on her waist. He stepped closer to her, just a fraction, and felt her tense, pupils darkening. He’d called her beautiful, but it was more than that. “Is that okay with you?”
“That’s okay with me,” she said, and Clint wasn’t entirely sure who kissed who first.
***
This is true: Clint is an artist in bed. He plays her body like a harp until it sings and Natasha, for the first time in her life, gives herself over to pure, mindless pleasure, lets him take control and coax orgasm after orgasm from her until she clings to him, gasping, his name tumbling from her lips.
This is true: When he slides into her, Natasha curses in his ear, filthy Russian that he pretends not to understand. Her fingernails leave red lines down his shoulders as he thrusts, and when he catches her ear between her teeth she cries out his name and it pushes him right over the edge.
This is true: Afterwards she turns her head into the crook of his neck and shakes. He thinks maybe she’s crying and he strokes her hair, and she gives a great shudder and says “thank you,” but when he says “for what?” she only pulls him closer.
This is true: Natasha has never, ever chosen before.
***
“Stay,” Clint said.
Natasha pulled up the strap of her bra, twisting around to look at him. Clint lay on his side, still naked, the blankets pooled around his hips, his hair mussed and tousled, sweat still glistening on his skin. “I can’t,” she said, and the regret in her voice was genuine, but she had a man to kill at midnight and that was a date she had to keep. She turned more fully, reaching out to brush her fingertips over his cheek. “I wish I could.”
He turned his cheek against her hand. “Then why don’t you?”
“There’s something I have to do.” She found her skirt and wormed her way into it.
“I thought you were on vacation.”
“I am on vacation,” she said, and the lie felt heavy in her mouth as she pulled her shirt over her head. She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “But I have an appointment.”
Clint gazed at her for a moment. “Okay,” he said, and he reached over to the bedside table, opening an envelope emblazoned with the hotel name, Gerlóczy. It was a nice hotel—not fancy, but nice, authentic. He slipped his hand inside and pulled out a card key. “Here.”
Natasha looked at it. “What’s this?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s the spare key to my room.”
“I know it’s the spare key to your room, idiot,” she said, the words slipping out of her mouth before she could stop them, and he snorted as if to say you’re the one who just spent the last three hours in my bed, who’s the idiot here? “Why are you giving me your spare key?”
Clint sat up a little straighter, and Natasha watched him, appreciating the lines of his body, and took a moment to acknowledge the fact that he was clearly the most dignified naked man she’d ever seen. “You’ve got somewhere to be,” he said. “That’s cool. But if you want to come back, y’know.” He waved the card at her. “I’d like it.”
Natasha took the card, ran her fingers over the smooth plastic. “You do this a lot? Bring strange women back to your hotel rooms for hours of passionate sex?”
“You think I’m passionate?” Clint asked, waggling his eyebrows, and Natasha felt her lips twitch. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I bring strange women back to my hotel rooms for hours of sex.” She started to stand and he caught her wrist. “But,” he said, quieter now, “I’ve never given a woman a key before.”
Natasha curled her fingers around his, squeezed once, and got to her feet, stepping into her shoes and slipping the key into her purse. “Go to sleep, Clint.”
Clint leaned back against the pillows. “Are you going to come back?”
She leaned over and brushed her lips over his. “Go to sleep,” she breathed into his mouth, and felt his smile.
When the door clicked shut behind her, she stepped down into the stairwell and leaned against the wall. She closed her eyes and took in a gasp of air, then another, and then she squared her shoulders and headed down the stairs to kill a KGB defector.
***
This is true: When Clint wakes in the middle of the night, Natasha is curled naked against his back. He realizes that she somehow made it into his room, into his bed, and against his body without waking him and is briefly alarmed. But she is warm and soft and her hair, slightly damp, smells like hotel shampoo and fresh perfume, so he credits his concerns to too much sex and not enough sleep, and he closes his eyes again.
This is true: In the morning, Clint wakes Natasha with a tray of fruit and pastries and coffee, and she thinks he got up without waking me and then he remembered my coffee order and then God, that smells incredible, and then Clint is putting the tray down on the table and she is rolling into his arms.
This is true: By the time they get around to breakfast, Natasha’s coffee is cold, but she drinks it anyway, pastry crumbs in her hair and Clint’s chest warm against her back.
***
“I met a girl,” Clint told Coulson at the end of his debrief.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he said it. Natasha wasn’t the first woman he’d met in a foreign city. But there was something different about her, something special, and Coulson must have heard that in his voice because he raised his eyebrows. “Did you, now?”
Clint leaned back in his chair. “She was smart,” he said honestly. “She was funny and beautiful and we slept together—like, slept together, and it’s very possible that I gave her a key to my hotel room and we spent a week mostly not leaving the room.”
Coulson stared at him for a moment. Very carefully, he put down the pen he’d been using to write the debrief notes and folded his hands into a steeple. “And what was this mystery woman’s name?”
“Oh, no,” Clint said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Coulson, you’re not doing a background check on this girl.”
“It’s standard protocol, Agent Barton,” Coulson said, and it was his you know how this works, Barton, why are you arguing with me voice, but Clint frowned stonily at him until Coulson sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I will not do a background check on her. Yet.”
Clint allowed himself a moment of victory and then sighed. “Honestly, it probably doesn’t matter. I gave her my number, but she doesn’t seem—I don’t know if I’ll ever even see her again.”
***
This is true: They see each other again. Natasha calls him in Paris; he calls her in London. There are other cities: Sydney, Tokyo, Chicago, Tel Aviv, Beijing. They fuck in beds and in Jacuzzis, on soft carpet and hardwood floors, against dressers and under waterfalls. It is indulgent and luxurious and amazing, and Clint has never been happier.
This is true: Natasha doesn’t know how to handle this, how to handle making her own choices. The Red Room had rules and the KGB has even more and she breaks them: she sleeps with a man who is not a mark; she indulges in pleasure for pleasure’s sake. She gets her marks, but when they’re down, she goes back to Clint’s bed.
This is true: Love is for children, but when Clint pulls her into his arms, when she falls asleep to the scent of his skin and his breath soft against her neck, she feels her heart pound. She does not feel like a child, but she feels something.
***
They were in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, surrounded by art, so close to the paintings that Natasha wanted to reach out and touch them, brush her fingers over the oil paint. She knew she could do it without setting off a single alarm.
Clint had connections in Rio, someone at the museum, and he’d gotten them into the museum after hours. The lighting in the gallery was dim and soft and Clint called it mood lighting with a laugh. His fingers had brushed over the small of her back, the skin left bare by a cutout in her dress, and it had taken more of her training to suppress a pleasant shudder than she cared to admit.
“You listened,” Natasha murmured, stopping in front of one painting, an Edgar Devas, Two Dancers in Yellow and Pink.
Beside her, looking more interested in the frame than the painting, Clint said, “To what?”
“When I said I liked art.” It had been her escape, in the Red Room. Ivan would not permit her movies or magazines, but books, oh, books he gave her; literature in all the languages they taught her, Russian and English and French and Italian, all of the classics; books of art prints in fine, glossy paper. She’d run her fingers over the pictures and thought, someday I’ll see you in person, someday I’ll touch you for real, and when she slept, on the good nights, she’d dreamed of oil and pigment, spread on canvas in delicate swirls and heavy strokes. “You listened to me.”
“I always listen to you, Tash,” he said, and his voice made her shiver, just a bit, because no one had ever given her a nickname before. There was something in his tone, though, something hesitant, and as she turned he took her hand. “If you’ll let me,” he said, slowly, “I’ll always listen to you.”
“Clint,” she said, and her voice sounded very far away to her ears, and she could hear her pulse pounding. He held onto her hand and her gaze and sank, very slowly, to one knee. “Clint,” she said again, because men had proposed to her and it had always, always ended in blood, and they called her the Black Widow, and she knew her sting was deadly and she did not want this man to die.
But he did not let go of her hand, and he kept his eyes on hers, and his face was earnest and beautiful in its imperfections and he said, “Natasha,” and then, “Natalia, Natalia Alianova Romanova, will you—”
And before he could even pull out the ring, Natasha knelt in front of him, cupped his face in her hands, and whispered, “yes.”
***
This is true: They get married on a beach in Tobago, just the two of them and an officiate who speaks English with a heavy French-Creole accent. They sign no papers and there are no witnesses, just Natasha’s hands in Clint’s, soft and smooth as he slides the slim platinum band onto her finger.
This is true: They write their own vows. Clint tells her she has put the light back in his life; he does not tell her that because of her, he no longer finds reasons to get himself into the line of fire. Natasha tells him that he has taught her how to feel again; she does not tell him that before him, there was nothing but cold winter and colder hands and that he put warmth into her body and reminded her how to breathe. They do not say, until death do us part. They do say, I do.
This is true: The roads behind them are long and winding; they weave across the world; sometimes, they overlap; both roads are paved and cobbled with blood, deep and dripping.
This is true: On their wedding day, they both wear white.