bakerstreet | Going up?

[ For a long time -- longer than she'd care to admit -- Natasha hates him. Hates the man who pointed his weapon straight between her eyes while she was tired and bleeding and had a dislocated knee and three broken ribs and let her live, because didn't he know -- death clears all debts, and it's not that Natalia Romanova ever thinks that giving up is the answer, but she would have deserved it, for all that red in her ledger.

Then again -- and she knows this, now -- giving up has never been quite her style.

On the field, she trusts Hawkeye almost implicitly. She's had partners before, but not like this; it's effortless, it's limitless, it's like dancing. So no, she doesn't quite hate him anymore, but it would be a stretch to say she thinks of him as a friend.

Natasha only gives him the smallest nod when the doors ping open to let him on. Two floors later and the elevator lights flicker before coming to a strange, grinding halt, and not for the first time Natasha wonders what, exactly, she's doing here at all. Pushing the emergency button on the panel doesn't seem to be helping either. ]

Great.

There were many reasons why Clint hadn’t killed her that day, yet when asked he always simply said that he had seen her worth and decided she could be an asset to S.H.I.E.L.D., better off alive than dead, that it would be a waste to kill her. True, but not entirely; there were much deeper reasons as well.

He had seen it in her eyes then, that she was ready to accept death, that she believed she deserved it, and nobody that believed that was without remorse, without the possibility of redemption. She would have welcomed death so readily he couldn’t help but wonder if she had ever truly lived. From the reports he had read on her her whole life she had been engineered to be a bringer of pain and death. Had she ever truly known pleasure? Happiness? Seemed a shame to die never having felt true kindness.

Above all the other reasons, though, was a much more personal one; when he had looked at her he had seen himself, what he could have become had things been different. Both of them had had terrible childhoods, neither of them knowing the love of family. They had been manipulated, moulded, used. Yes, her situation had been so much worse in some ways but he had still felt that connection, had still felt that overwhelming need to help her.

Clint still hadn’t quite decided if it was a good decision or not. He had gotten in deep shit for defying orders and throwing his assignment but his conscience was clear... at least in this instance. Besides, she had turned out to prove his point about her being an asset, and nobody could deny that they made an exceptional team. Now if only he could shake the feeling that she secretly wanted to gut him for his jokes and commentary while they worked...

“Natasha,” he greeted as he stepped into the lift before moving to stand silently beside her. Soon enough the silence deepened when everything suddenly ground to a screeching halt, killing the lights and the horrible elevator music. “You gotta be kidding me,” he muttered as the backup lights kicked in, but still they didn’t move and Natasha’s pressing the emergency button didn’t seem to be doing any good. “State of the art vehicles and weaponry and they can’t install and elevator that works.”

It was never about the fact that Natasha wanted to die -- that would have been wrong no matter how you pared it down. It was that she was tired, and by all rights it should have been the end, and Clint Barton should have completed his objective as he'd been trained to and let her die. She would have.

And still Natasha couldn't quite decide what it was, why he'd saved her. She could guess and guess right, because that was what she'd been trained to do, but she'd never asked him because what would have been the point? She was sure he wouldn't lie, just as she was sure he'd tell her an answer she'd never accept.

She huffed a sigh, taking advantage of the empty elevator to set her back against the adjacent wall away from him. Once upon a time, a little girl named Natalia had been tested, hidden away in a tiny airvent to see her patience and resolve and if she could withstand muscle aches from crouching for so long. Natasha didn't have a problem with small spaces. She wasn't sure what was more infuriating -- Clint Barton, or the fact that she spent so much of her emotional capacity trying to figure out the why of it all.

"You'd think," she said dryly, sinking down so she was seated. Might as well be comfortable. "I obviously defected to the wrong country."

While Natasha made herself comfortable Clint’s keen eyes searched every aspect of the elevator. There was, of course, the usual maintenance hatch at the top, but he had his suspicions that even though the elevator was malfunctioning that the security in the building wouldn’t be. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried to access another floor by crawling up the elevator shaft. Possibly something to do with lasers. Something painful, at any rate.

“Right, because Russia is the epitome of quality technology,” he replied. Epitome was a great word, he'd looked it up.

Unable to help himself he claimed the space she had recently been occupying and pressed the button she had already pressed a dozen times. You know, just in case.

Unsurprisingly he had no more success than she had.

It was the first thing she did when she was given level seven security clearance, looking at security schematics for SHIELD hq. Natasha's situational awareness was near-perfect, even if her sight wasn't quite like his -- though his comment earned him a dry roll of her eyes along with a long exhale.

"They had enough to brainwash me," she said mildly. It was a little uncharacteristic, volunteering that kind of thing, but maybe she just wanted to make him uncomfortable. It was childish and petty and something Natasha still couldn't quite get a finger on -- maybe that was what infuriated her most of all.

"It's not going to work just because non-Russian fingers touch it."

Clint visibly winced at her words before quickly covering his discomfort. He’d had a shit childhood with everyone he cared about and trusted betraying him and leaving him, but he’d still still had his own mind, his ability to make his own choices. Natasha hadn’t had that luxury, and though he wouldn’t admit it aloud he admired her strength, the fact that she could go through everything she had been put through and still function. He wouldn’t say ‘normally’ because he was pretty sure there was some deep rooted trauma that would prevent her from ever being what society deemed as ‘normal’, but she was here, she was working with and agency, as part of a team, and that had to count for something. It counted for a lot.

“I just thought...” he started in defense, but wisely cut himself off before stating that she might not have been pushing the button correctly. Heaving a sigh, much as she had, he returned to his previous spot and mimicked her actions. Sliding down the wall to sit on the floor, he kept his legs bent and rested his forearms on his knees.

“So... this is fun,” he commented lamely. “If we had any drinks I’d suggest some ‘I Never’ but we might be stuck with Twenty Questions instead. Or I Spy.”

It was a good thing Clint never did. Admiration, for Natasha, held no sway or weight; admiration was nothing, second only to love. Useless. Loyalty, determiation, reliability — these things were better. These things meant more than all of that ever could.

Natasha fixed him with a look, her face not quite that blank mask of neutrality she usually reserved for strangers, but getting there.

She quirked a brow at him at his offer. "I thought they were children's games." Natasha somehow made it sound like she had no problem believing he was good at those games, considering the incessant chatter over the comms he could blabber on with when left to his own devices, but her question was why he wanted her to play along.

"We could play the silent game instead."

Loyalty, determination, reliability - these were all traits that Clinton Barton valued in others as well, and also traits that were very much a part of his makeup. The thing about admiration, though, was that it was easy to give; loyalty, like trust, needed to be earned.

“Hey, I can be silent,” Clint protested. Crossing his arms he leaned his head back against the wall behind him. It was true, he could be silent for hours, even days, if the job called for it. Surveillance details were one of his strong points, and he certainly exercised discretion there. The problem was that he still had a lot of lingering showmanship from his time living at the circus, and when he had an audience it was hard to control himself sometimes. Also, though he could handle dead silence easily when on his own, he found it incredibly awkward when he wasn’t. So yes, he could be silent, and even managed it now, stuck in the elevator.

For about two minutes.

“Silent game is boring,” he said, opening his eyes to peer over at Natasha. “Come on, admit it, if you had gotten stuck with someone like Jones as your partner instead of me you’d find the missions boring as hell. He wouldn’t know a joke if it bit him.”

It was a good two minutes. Natasha knew he wouldn't try and finish off the job, which was maybe the main reason why she let her eyes close, leaning her head against the adjacent wall in the corner where she sat. Maybe part of that had to do with trust. Or maybe it just had to do with the fact that Natasha had seen him on the field enough to know how he'd strike. She didn't think he'd kill her, not after being in the proverbial career doghouse.

"Jones," she started simply, arching her brow again. "Has a worse sense of humor than you do."

Which isn't quite a yeah, you're right, but it's obviously not a no.

Clint liked to play it aloof, but while he gave every appearance of being relaxed and paying little attention to anything, he was actually being quite keenly observant. He noted that Natasha had let her eyes go closed, and while the thought had never crossed his mind to attack her, or that she could be expecting it, he still couldn’t help but think of it as a show of trust, even if it was in the most minor way possible.

“If by ‘worse’ you mean ‘none’, then yeah, that sounds about right,” he said. Keeping his head tilted back, he rolled it to the side slightly so he could look at her better. “What do you know about humour, anyway? Do you eve know any jokes?” He’d certainly never heard her tell one. In fact, Clint was pretty sure he’d never actually heard her laugh either, not a real laugh. It was kind of a sad thought.

Later, she'd look back on it and know that that was when she'd started to stop trying to figure him out. The why and how of it all. Why he'd saved her; how he'd known.

Exhaling low and long, Natasha leaned back a little further against the elevator wall. What did it matter? Sometimes it was more important to have the energy left to fight than waste it on facial expressions, or banter, or whatever Clint Barton insisted on. Her eyes closed again as she let her shoulders relax. No knowing how long this elevator entrapment would be, and if a joke was what he wanted in exchange for twenty more seconds of silence, she could afford that.

"Once, I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." And yeah, that wasn't exactly a joke, but maybe that would count in some small minor way.

Clint raised his eyebrows at her words and simply stared at her for a long moment in silence before he broke out into a wide grin.

“Really, Romanoff, I’m impressed! I never woulda pegged you for a Johnny Cash fan,” he said, sounding positively delighted at the idea. He had read her file, knew all the details of her past and her career that SHIELD could dig up (though he was certain there was a lot they didn’t know), but despite all that he felt that he really knew nothing about her. He wanted to know, though; if they were going to be partners he wanted to know her and he was determined to crack that hard exterior of hers that so many others were petrified of, so any little tidbit she offered about herself was a great victory, and he filed it greedily away.

Rolling his head back to stare up at the ceiling again he gave her another few seconds of the silence she claimed to value so much before...

“When I hear that whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.” She may have spoken her line, but there was a definite tune in his.

Going up?

Clint Barton/Hawkeye | MCU

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