Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's a relief, really. Curiosity is satisfied, good times were had, and they both got their rocks off, so to speak. Everything'll be fine. Just give it a few days.

But Clint's spine is curved like his bow, straining under the pressure of the words he doesn't dare say as he perches at the edge of her mattress. Natalia can see everything just fine out of the corner of her eye and doesn't really have to look at him as he stands abruptly and starts digging in the dark for his pants. He's yanking the shirt back over his head when she realizes that she might have handled this poorly.

"Clint--" she tries, but he's always going to be so much faster than he looks and is already gone. He's managed to grab everything--socks, wallet, earpiece and weapons--but as Natalia stands in the tiny kitchen, clutching the sheet around her, she sees the gleam of his keys to her apartment on the counter, and her heart breaks just a little.

Chapter Text

"Is this going to be a problem?" Monday is not a good day to be called into Nick Fury's office. Clint stands at attention and doesn't look at her; Natalia tries the no-eye-contact thing, tries to make it nonchalant, and instead focuses on Fury.

"No, sir," they say in unconscious unison, and Nat is struck with a lash of conflicting emotion: relief that they're still in sync, horror that this might be the last dredges of their valuable bond drifting away in front of her. She and Clint need to talk, and it's all her fault.

"Fine," Fury says. He does not believe them but forges on ahead. "I'm sending you two to Europe. CIA has an asset in Hungary that needs extraction. Apparently everyone tied to the asset is burned, but their spook has kept undercover for the moment. Just a matter of time. So they need some non-spooks to go pull their ass out of the fire. Think you two can handle it?"

"Yes sir," Clint says, and Nat nods. This is not unusual. The differences are glaringly obvious. Fury eyes them both for a full minute before handing Natasha a manila folder.

"Romanov, head down to Mission Support and get started in your travel arrangements. I want you two in the air by sundown."

When the door has closed, Fury sighs and leans on his desk. Clint is still not looking at him.

"So which one of you pulled the trigger?"

Clint swallows, sags, still won't look at him. "She did, sir."

"Happens, you know. Not just with opposite-gender teams, either. You reach a point with your partner that you think, nobody else in the world is gonna ever know me this way--and then they gotta screw it up by reminding you that they're only human." Fury rises, moves around the desk, and perches his butt on the edge so he and Barton are shoulder to shoulder. "This can go one of two ways. You can recognize that you found each other's edges, and you can build out from there and reconnect. Now you know, right? It's one more thing you know about your partner. Or you can put up walls at your edges, and stop the growth of your partnership. You've seen how far you can trust her. Now you know. This is how far you can go."

Barton finally glances at him. Fury holds up a forestalling hand.

"I need you both on this mission," he says, "and I need you together on it. This is Russian mob bullshit, I can smell it from here. I need my best team to pull this CIA spook out of the frying pan, show 'em how it's done. So suck it up and deal, got it?" Fury's tone is not unkind: he can see Barton's jaw clenching as he tries not to cry.

Chapter Text

They fly commercial to Budapest. Clint gives in to misery and shifting time zones halfway through the ten-hour flight and slumps over in his seat, head lolling; Natalia leans in, artificially casual, and fits her head under his cheek, her cheek on his shoulder. A week ago neither of them would have thought anything of it. Now it's like moving around a glass sculpture of her partner: too forceful and she'll be sliced to ribbons, or he'll shatter. She's sorry for this. She hopes he knows that.

°°°

Budapest always reminds Natasha of porcelain, the blue shadows of the city falling in stately patterns across the snow. Despite the bitter cold of the morning she hikes to the hilltop above their little rented flat, breathing as deeply as she dares of the damp, chest-freezing air; for a minute she imagines he lungs filling with snow, exhaling the shrouding mists that fill the streets below. Little fairytale spires peek out of the predawn fog. How many jobs has she done in Hungary? How many times has she stood like this, looking down into another snowglobe city, nothing on her mind but the growled orders that followed her out of the red room?

She shakes her head before that gravelly voice can work up to full volume: instead, she wills forth the velvety burr that is Nick Fury--Nick Fury who does not speak Russian, who will not order her punished and then retrained if the mission doesn't go to plan. Nick Fury wants them to succeed, of course--but on their timeline and their terms. Nick Fury won't ...there are no buckets of ice water, no steel restraints, no floggings or cattle prods in her future. Fury is no less dangerous and certainly no less ruthless than her former handlers, but he is certainly less cruel.

Clint would never have survived her former handlers...and Natalia is struck, forcefully, by the realization that Budapest is the city he rescued her from. A steepled church rooftop in a chilling rain, guns drawn, Clint had holstered one of his weapons and held a hand out to her instead. A five-day hunt and chase across eastern Europe that had exhausted her resources and abilities, and then, when finally facing his quarry (all her contacts burned, her money gone, every last trick shaken out) Clint had taken the chance on the soaked, shivering twenty-year-old aiming her last shots at him.

And now, six years later, she is back where they started.

Chapter Text

Setting themselves up is the most comfortable part of the operation. He can do most of of without her around, which is necessary here because she can't exactly be seen out in public. So there are fewer raw edges to rub up against, although the actual fact of being alone is a strange one. They've been partners for five years, after all; even leaving their ill-fated romance out of it, Clint hasn't been alone in an operation for a long time.(He tries to figure out if it feels nice to be alone or not. The decision isn’t an easy one and he’s not sure he reaches one by the time Nat gets back.)

It’s not hard to look at her, exactly; it’s just hard to parse what he sees. They can spend half an hour cleaning weapons and checking equipment and his heart stays out of his throat and beats calmly in his ribs, where it belongs; then one of them will move--a shift in a chair, or get up to make tea--and something snaps painfully below his breastbone as he realizes, no, this isn’t the same. His brain races forward to the coming night--they’ll trade off watches, but won’t awaken the other for their turn with a kiss to the temple, or the neck. And tomorrow--they might not share breakfast, might not make each other toast and coffee, one of them might be in the mood for eggs or pastry and the other one won’t feel the need to adapt or accommodate.

Clint is looking desperately forward to a time when this is normal again.

Chapter Text

He locates the CIA spook on their second day, as planned, and makes contact that evening.

She is a little taller than he expected, but otherwise bears up to the photo in her file: average, although very symmetrical, with box-bleached hair and dark roots, and straight, thick eyebrows. Her eyes are a muddy brown and Clint notices immediately that she’s wearing contact lenses. He’s picked and practiced a Croatian accent and purposefully muddles the Hungarian he uses.

“< Hey, lady, have a light, do you? >”” He gestures helpfully with the cigarette in one hand and keeps a couple careful steps away from her, where she is leaning against the corner of a warehouse, smoking.

She looks him up and down. Her face is a map of frown lines but he doesn’t think she’s much older than he is; she’s been on this assignment for almost three years, undercover with Russians, and that kind of pressure would age anyone prematurely; he knows he’s no prize himself, for much the same reason. Her scowl seems almost permanent, however.

““< My lighter is in my other coat ,>”” she says, her own Hungarian accented with just a little Moscow (how Nat sounds speaking it, he thinks without wanting to, and then hates that part of his brain). She looks back at the sidewalk to take another drag--a clear dismissal.

“< Borrow, please? >” He asks, putting a little whine into his voice. She’s not going to let him get close enough to chain off her smoke, he knows, but he’s got to get a little closer to her at least. The streetcorner is too public to give the sign-countersign from five feet away.

“< Hard day, I have today ,>” he continues, “< and lost my matches >.” He gives her a crooked little hopeful smile.
She sighs, jams the smoke between her lips, and digs in the pockets of her oversized coat. Producing a crumpled paper packet, she draws out another cigarette, uses hers to light it, and holds it out to him.

Clint is impressed. This is an incredibly generous gesture.

< "Thank you, very thank you ",> he babbles, and takes the step forward, offering his original unlit smoke in exchange. She glances at the filter end and shakes her head: not her brand, evidently.

“< Now, I am waiting for a friend. You had better get moving, >” she says as he takes a grateful drag, and jerks her chin at the street.

“< Of course. Thank you very much for the helping, >” he bobs his head, and adds, with less of a Croatian lilt, “< I hope your friend enjoys his coffee. >”

She doesn’t react, back to looking at her boots as she smokes, but when he has gone around the corner she raises her head, looking carefully around. Clint doesn’t linger (he will find her again, later, of course) and so doesn’t see how the lines in her forehead ease and she blows out a long, long stream of smoke into the damp air.

Chapter Text

Nat’s contact is much less auspicious, because there are other Russian mobsters involved, and she knows two of them, and they know her.

The plan is for her to just be in the same marketplace at the same time as their target, and to slip a book of matches into her coat pocket. The matches have three phone numbers written on the flap, and when the spook calls them, she’ll get a longitude from one, a latitude from another, and a time from the third--their first face-to-face meeting with the three of them. Nat’s not even supposed to talk to the woman, much less get in her way enough that her companions take note of her.

Someone has lost control of a dog in the market. It’s not a stray: strays in Budapest are smarter and quieter and sneakier and besides, this one is far too fluffy and clean to not be someone’s pet. Some hundred yards north there is a commotion of high-pitched voices in panic and suddenly something is barrelling into Natalia’s knees, knocking her sideways and making her trip over the long hem of her skirt. Before she knows it, she is on her ass, practically sitting on the spook’s shoes, as the dog sprints away and her target fights to keep her own balance as Nat rolls into her ankles.

“< Shit! I am so very sorry! >” Nat exclaims, her Hungarian much more fluent than Clint’s had been. “< Please forgive--you are not hurt? I am so sorry! >”Friendly concern will get her close enough to drop the matches, despite her original plan.

The spook catches her waving hands and helps haul her up, but Nat is then seized from behind by the shoulders by someone much larger: she looks up, full into the face of one Grigory Yelchenko--still sporting the eyepatch she made necessary, and the scar across his chin, and the same sour, pig-sucking expression she remembers so sourly from her days behind the Curtain.
“< YOU__! >” He begins, but Nat kicks out, catching him awkwardly in the shin with the heel of her boot, and slams her forehead into his scarred chin (a nice reminder of how the scar got there in the first place), and while her own eyesight is bursting with stars she is spinning out of his grasp and making her escape. She palms the spook heavily, as though fumbling for balance, and at least manages to drop the matchbook where it’s supposed to go before Grigory is lashing out with a roar that brings...yes, that’s Luka, his little brother, overtopping Grigory by a good six inches and reaching out for her with ham-hock hands that Natalia remembers all too well.

It is a chase: the loose dog has begun the commotion but Natalia and her pursuers stir it into a rich frenzy, knocking aside kiosks and displays and stalls as she sprints in her inconvenient heels and skirt towards the alleys around the market. Grigory and Luka are only just far enough behind her to make it possible for her to go up--first a drainpipe, then along a gutter, then onto a balcony. She has barely hit the rooftop when the brothers Yelchenko round the corner. The last time she saw them, both Grigory and Luka were too stupid to look up when pursuing some unlucky bastard--but Grigory, at least, seems to have learned his lesson, because he catches sight of her pulling herself over the edge of the roof. Shouting, he lunges for the same drainpipe and shinnies up (why doesn’t the damned rusty thing pull out from the wall and dump his ass on the cobblestones? Nat wonders, and is sprinting for the other edge of the roof).

She is supposed to report back by 4 pm to their studio. This was supposed to be an easy contact drop. She doesn’t make it back until after 9, red-faced, shivering, still soaked below the knees from an unfortunate trip across someone’s backyard pond. Clint is furious.

“Sitrep,” he bites out, and it’s been, what, two years since he actually seriously pulled rank on her? But she is painfully aware (of a lot of things, most of them cuts and scrapes) that he’s the ranking agent on their team, that she answers to him, and that if he’s still pissed at her in a few minutes, that he can make life incredibly difficult for her after this mission.

Nat opts for honesty as the best policy. “I’m made,” she pants. “No, I wasn’t followed here--” the Yelchenko brothers won’t be following anyone ever again, and she’s mad enough at herself that she didn’t make that call six years ago-- “but she’s your spook now. She saw me get made by her bodyguards and saw them chase me out of there. You might have to pull a backup contact if she decides not to trust the matchbook drop.”

Clint visibly tamps down his temper--for which she’s grateful. It means he still cares enough about a good working relationship, at least, to cut her some slack. “Tell me what happened,” he says finally, pulling one of the chairs out from the tiny kitchen table for her. She drops into it gratefully, eager to get out of her soaked boots. The telling doesn’t take long: of the spook’s three guards, only the Yelchenkos pursued her out of the market square; a few blocks later, there was a train station under construction--and Luka would now forever be part of it’s new foundation. Grigory had been harder to shake, especially once she’d put the bullet between Luka’s eyebrows. Someone would find him, she knew, eventually: even though the Danube was sluggish with ice this time of year, Grigory Yelchenko would at some point come unmoored from beneath the bridge where she’d finally left him and would drift downstream. With any luck, she and Clint and the spook would be back stateside by then.

“She can ID me, face and height and everything, and I’m sure she’s told her other handlers by now.” Nat doesn’t dare look at Clint’s face. She cannot possibly feel more stupid than she does right now, but Clint knows her better than anyone else--he’s certainly got the ammo to try. “I am next to useless on this one. If I stay here, best I can do is make coffee and watch the phones for you. Or I can try to catch a ride back if that’s what you prefer.”

He is quiet for a minute and then, to her surprise, chooses to be kind. “No, I need you here,” he decides. “Fury knew it was a risk sending you back here, but he chose us for this mission anyway. You’re too knowledgeable and too valuable to send home right now. We’ll have to modify a little, but the mission is still our priority. Go get changed, and we’ll figure out our new plan.”

Chapter Text

“Got a light?” Her voice, in English, is less gravelly than it had been the other day speaking Hungarian. Clint lets himself smile a little at her approach, keeping his posture loose, his hands down by his side and out of his pockets: nonthreatening, at least to the casual observer. He needs her to trust him, and that’s not going to be easy, credentials or no.

“No, actually; I don’t smoke,” he replies. She doesn’t hold out a hand for him to shake--that would be too obvious--but she seems to be in a friendly enough mood.

“I didn’t either, before coming here,” she admits. “Now I’m up to half a pack a day, and they still think I’m faking it for their sakes, to seem less like some prissy Muscovite.” She looks him up and down. “You’re not one of mine.”

“Nope,” he says, and flashes the inside of his jacket at her so she can see the insignia. “I’m with another branch. It’s time to bring you home, Agent.”

“Ha.” She pulls the crumpled pack from her coat and a lighter from her pants pocket. “Your timing sucks, Agent. I lost two of my bulldogs today. That’s five of the boss’ dogs in a month. Someone’s gunning for me, and if the boss figures it out before I do, that’s one more bitch put down.”

“Nevertheless, my orders are to dig you out and bring you back.”

The spook looks at him, hard. “What, ‘I’m Luke Skywalker and I’m here to rescue you’? Are you fucking kidding me?” She drags hard on the cigarette, blows smoke out hard. “Do you have a plan?”

Clint shrugs. “A couple. I’m flexible.”

“What about a timeline?”

“Depends on you, but a week, maybe.”

“Make it ten days.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because fuck you, that’s why. My boss is paranoid at the best of times--the two guys I came over with are already dead. Now two more are probably gonna get dragged out of the river, which means if I try to leave inside of this week I’ll get caught at the airport, my throat cut in the bathroom, and sent through a jet engine to make a point. I don’t think he suspects me yet, but as soon as he does, I’m dead. I gotta finesse this.”

“Who killed your partners?”

“Double hit. Old Sovietslavs, I think. Rival organization. Looked like one of ‘em was trying to call a hit on the boss and the other got caught out with him, wrong place, wrong time. < Bad planning and worse execution, >”, she adds in Hungarian.

“But you’re not under suspicion?”

“For that, no. Not any more than anyone else. The two dogs today, though? Yeah, I’m gonna get put under the microscope for sure. So whatever your plan ends up being,” she stubs the cigarette out on the sole of her boot, and faces him, “you make sure it’s a clean cut. No poison, no fiery car crash, nothing suspicious. I’m not out from under the gun even if they think I’m dead.”

Chapter Text

Natalia uses her idle, house-bound time to make sure Clint’s ID is airtight, watertight, and fireproof: that is, that his assumed ID is as boring as possible. She researches their spook, maps out hiding places and safehouses and areas where the spook’s bodyguards won’t be likely to follow her. Clint’s gonna have to do a lot of heavy lifting on this performance, but she knows he’s capable.

“Nat, we’re rescuing this girl, not wooing her,” he says, picking up the printout on top of the pile on the table.

“What?”

“Restaurants, coffee houses, museums…” Clint flicks the sheet. “All your safe meeting places are--”

“--public, popular, well-lit, with a lot of accessible escape routes and tourist traffic,” Nat argues. “Her guards aren’t going to execute either of you with the riverboat-tour crowds staring at them from the next table over. These are safe places.”

“Yeah, but--”

“Look, it’s not a bad story, ok? If she’s allowed to have contacts outside the organization--which your shared smoking would suggest she is--then her meeting a new guy for drinks is going to be less suspicious than her running into the same stranger all over town. There’s a lot you can do with a fake mustache, Clint, but you make the same mistakes in Russian and Hungarian and that’s going to get you noticed.”

“My Hungarian is flawless.”

“Your Hungarian is not flawless. And if you keep stressing your long vowels that way they’re going to know you’re a native english speaker first, which means we have to keep you in one language and not speaking Russian. Please trust me on this,” she added, seeing his dubious look, and he sighed and nodded.

“Okay,” she said, and gathered up the sheaf of papers from the tabletop. “You’re going to pursue this woman for the next couple days, then force her to kill you when she finds out you’re an American spy. Sound good?”

Chapter Text

“< Who is this? Your new boyfriend? >” Yasha growls, jerking his chin at the security camera, and she looks up to squint through her over-thick glasses at the grainy figure on the screen. Sure enough, it’s him, and she allows herself a little sliver of a smile--enough so that Yasha notices her smothering it behind her hand, more than the smile itself.

“< Not exactly. Not yet. But he is nice so...who knows? >” she deadpans. Deadpan delivery is so easy in Hungarian; so, too, is expressive, explosive emotion. If all goes well she’s going to be able to miss the lyrical ease that Hungarian has and English does not--especially American English.

“< Where did you dig him up? Looks like a scarecrow. Needs a haircut, for sure. He some pretty streetcorner boy? >” Yasha sneers. He told her to call him Iosif.

“< I don’t need to hire streetcorner boys, >.” she sniffs haughtily, and adds, “< and he’s not a scarecrow. Just tall. I like tall boys. >” Yasha is, himself, almost six and a half feet from boots to crown, but in a wholly different weight class than the slender Iosif: Yasha easily makes three of the other man, and is almost as wide as he was tall.

“< Ha. Did you clear him with the boss yet? >”

“< We are just going for coffee, >” she shrugs, sliding a few pencils into her desk drawer and tidying up around her work area. The boss hates to see a messy workstation at the end of the day, and if she wants things to go smoothly when she did end up introducing Iosif around, she needs to make it look like she still cared about what she is doing.

Yasha sighs. “< Please be careful, ZsuZsu, >” he rumbles. “< All this upset and now we’re understaffed again, with Grigory and Luka ...just please be careful with your little scarecrow. >” He looks at her with genuine concern, and for a moment she feels a pang of real guilt: what would happen to old campaigners like Yasha, and Nikor, and Istvan when she pulled her little vanishing act? (The fact that they were the boss’ kneebreakers and enforcers didn’t mitigate the guilt at all: she’d been working with them for three years now, and Yasha had, more than once, been the one to pick her up or bring her a gallon of petrol or oil when her piece of shit Russian knock-off car wouldn’t work in the damp cold. Of all the hired muscle she’d encountered in Eastern Europe, she would always think of Yasha, Istvan and Nikor as the nicest rib-crackers she’d ever known.)

On her way out the door, she stops to plant a swift kiss on Yasha’s cheek. “< I am always careful, Yasha Angyalka, >” she said, and gives him a happy little smile before swinging her coat over her shoulders and going out to meet Iosif.

Chapter Text

So far this is the best mission Clint’s ever been on.

Sure, there are things that could be better--Budapest is damp all the time, and cold all the time, and he’s got a significant collection of old scars that are interested in making him aware of the damp and the cold all the time--but as far as duties go, he could do--has done--a lot worse than letting a pretty woman show him around a pretty city.

The first afternoon is just coffee--but they trade little truths and bigger lies across the shabby cafe table, and after the first hour Clint can tell that Zsuzsanna is starting to relax a little around him--around Iosif. Maybe him, after all. Her shoulders come down a bit from their perpetual hunch around her ears, and even though her hair remains pinned up in a businesslike bun, she touches it more and more as they talk. Hard as it is to believe, she might even be enjoying her coffee.

Clint knows Nat is watching him--them--from somewhere. Normally he’d have spotted her by now, deliberately, to know what direction to expect help from. Today, on a date (even a fake one), he has decided to ignore her, to just be young Iosif and to not care if the girl who broke his heart is watching him have a laugh with another woman. He dials up the charm a little more, even so. He wants just a little satisfaction from Nat having to eat her heart out and he is getting very good at pretending that the knife isn't twisting in his own guts, too.

He walks Zsuzsanna to the corner of her building--not where she lives, but where she works, so her boss or her watchdogs can see how harmless he is. How he bumbles the approach for the farewell kiss, changes his mind from lips to cheek at the last second, makes her laugh a little. Zsuzsanna fiddles with a loose lock of hair as she walks slowly to the door, looking back twice, the very picture of a woman smitten in spite of herself. He can almost believe the pretty flush to her cheeks is real, and not Natasha-- or, expert-level acting.

Natasha isn't home when he gets there: he has twenty-ish minutes to put the kettle on and hunt up a pack of instant noodles before she slinks in, dressed very convincingly as a boy. Her wig is even a close approximation of his own dishwater-blond crew cut, if necessarily longer, and she's done something with tape and latex to hood her eyes. The overall effect is unsettling, but in almost any light she might pass for his much younger brother, or more likely a cousin. It's a good cover; better, at least, than a recognizable ex-KGB operative who's recently killed some locals.

She delivers her report in Hungarian, and he answers in kind: Iosif is being watched now that he's been in public with Zsuzsanna, and breaking characte, even if they think they're alone, would be monumentally stupid. Her name is Carlo now, and in the droning, teenagery delivery, he gets her coded intel: she lurked around the city, discovered several likely cels of this particular mobster's business--money laundering and gambling--and made inquiries about some of the more disparate parts of the whole "get killed as a means of escape" plan.

Clint--Iosif--lectures Carlo about wasting the day when he should be finding a job. Translation: time isn't on our side. Make the actual arrangements to get us out. Carlo pouts, grumbles an argument, then retreats to his room and slams the door, a teenager to the last.

This is, somehow, easier.

Chapter Text

Clint doesn’t know he’s being followed.
Natasha does.

They’re casual tails; most likely interested in Zsuzsanna’s whereabouts than her date, a pair of incredibly nondescript men in their middle years. Neither of them is exceptionally tall or short--one is just taller than the other, in the natural way of most men. Standard slightly grown-out haircuts; not enough facial hair to say definitively that one or the other of them has a moustache or beard. Nat’s always been more than a little fascinated at how easy it is for a man to become part of a crowd; maybe it’s the ever-present assumption that men are the default. No matter the reason, Nat has to keep an eye out for them and keep an eye on Clint--Iosif at the same time, andZsuZsanna, and by the end of their 2nd date she feels her neck vertebrae pop every time she has to whip her head around to follow someone else.

She tails the tails back to one of the gang’s office buildings and hangs outside the painted-shut window where they come to ground, listening to their smoke-gravel voices mutter at each other over who’s going to make the report to Yasha--Yakov, an old knee-buster who is now the den-leader for their little group. THere is nothing in their conversation to suggest to Nat that they’re suspicious of anything besides Iosif’s ability to break ZsuZsu’s heart.

On the way home she steals an apple from a greengrocer’s cart and bites into it with something like spite or anger, although she wouldn’t admit to feeling either emotion. She throws the half-eaten apple into the gutter a couple blocks later, and is almost instantly ashamed of the waste--but not enough to go back and pick it up. When she glances back, casually, as though checking traffic to cross the street, there is already a dog running away with the partly-chewed fruit in its mouth.

Nat feels prickly all over, like sharkskin, like she’s dehydrated or overtired. Her eyelids feel like sandpaper and her neck keeps cracking. As far as jobs go, she’s had so much worse: padding around the city, tailing washed-up spies for her ex-boyfriend shouldn’t be this irritating. Her pin-curled hair itches beneath the short wig and there isn’t a good way to ease it in public; instead she hunches deeper into her threadbare coat and scowls at the ground. Did she ever want to come back to Hungary? To Budapest? Probably not. Likely a bad idea, if she couldn’t already tell that by having had to kill two men already.

The lowering clouds on the horizon are foretelling rain, maybe freezing rain or snow; Nat glowers at them and trudges home.

As soon as she’s through the door Iosif demands to know where she’s been all day. She replies, sullenly, as Carlo, that she’s been out doing what he told her to do, but there’s nothing different from yesterday. Iosif takes that as the invitation he’d obviously been waiting for to tell her all about his day, including how sweet and clever ZsuZsu is, and how she’s agreed to go to dinner with him on the weekend. Carlo rolls his eyes and glowers over Iosif’s obvious infatuation, but Natasha’s resentment is there, too.

Dinner on the weekend gives her three days to vet places and plot access routes: more skulking around the city as a teenaged boy. Not the worst assignment she’s ever had, but still: Nat resents having to do all the work while Clint--Iosif--gets to do all the wooing.

Chapter Text

There is a ratty paper envelope on the table when he comes in; Natasha--Carlo--is elsewhere. It’s torn open at the top, so he rifles through, pulling out a piece of notebook paper with the name of a nearby tailor that does suit and tuxedo rentals; folded in this are a pair of tickets to a play for Friday night. He is taking Zsuzsanna to see a local production of Twelfth Night, apparently. The notebook paper also mentions a florist on the same square--he is going all out, according to Carlo, and that means that the escape is happening Friday, and Natasha has everything arranged.

Clint feels a little bit of guilt at the uneven division of labor on this job. He’s been playing Iosif, doing the day-to-day with his pretend dry-cleaner-delivery job in his piece of crap little car, using his tips and the one payout the dry cleaners gave him so he can take Zsuzsanna out on cheap little dates. He’s been building their story, laying the groundwork for the tragedy that is to come. It’s no diufferent from what Nat would normally do on a mission like this, he tells himself; she’s just been doing what he usually does, finding exits and escape routes and watching their tails. He ignores the rest of the thought: that Nat usually does both sides, as a face character and a background operative; she’s just...better, at all of it. Catching her that night six years ago hadn’t been all his doing: she was wanted by more than one of the big gangs in the city, and had burned all her resources trying to get out--and then SHIELD had sent him to come calling. As a lone operator, he’d just been able to move faster than the other thugs that wanted her dead, and instead of pushing her off that roof he’d pulled her to safety.

It dawns on Clint that he doesn’t actually know the plan for Friday. Maybe this is one where he doesn’t need to know, just needs to go where Nat tells him to go and not watch what’s going on around him. Still, she usually would tell him if it were that type of plan, and not leave him with his ass hanging out like this.

Or she might still intend to tell him, and she’s just not here right now. Clint sighs, dropping Iosif’s gangly, rigid posture in order to slump over the sink for a moment. He’s done more talking in Hungarian over the last week than he normally does in English over two months. Iosif’s sense of humor is a little more crude than his own, and he laughs in a way that even Clint finds annoying, a kind of choked braying--but Zsuszanna is genuinely funny (or maybe not genuinely--she is also a spy, after all) and he has to use the laugh a lot. She also likes to walk with her arm linked in his, both of her hands in her coat pocket, which means Iosif needs to let his arms gangle just a little bit. Save himself the backache and he might miss out on some very cute cuddling.

It’s only a couple more days; Clint decides that he can make it work.

(Carlo drops off a thicker envelope of papers--travel papers--sometime between now and his leaving for his date with ZsuZsu. Clint hears the door open and close, and the flop of the envelope onto the table, but by the time he saunters into the kitchen, Natasha is gone again.)

Chapter Text

People have, in the past, expressed surprise at how easily Natasha can acquire cadavers. The process is no more or less easy in Budapest than it is in Los Angeles or New York or even, say, Albuquerque. The main issues are always payment and transport, and Natasha knows to secure these quickly, or her suppliers will get cold feet.

She has a few hours Thursday night to work on the cadavers--hours she could be spending sleeping, but she hasn’t been able to do that a lot anyways in this city so why bother? Iosif and Zsuzsanna’s shadows were growing less and less concerned with what they did on their dates: Nat had tailed her to work one day and found a convenient place to loiter in the building across the street, listening in on the bug she’d placed in Zsuzsanna’s handbag. Nat had to give credit where it was due: the woman was doing her best to ease the suspicion of her office-thugs, and her girlish infatuation seemed to be convincing at least some of the rib-crackers she worked with that Iosif was simply a very dreamy man she happened to have met on the corner.

Maybe normal people--or normalish people--were more willing to believe the greeting-card-goodness of meet-cute stories like the one Clint was making up with ZsuZsu; Nat would be the first to admit that she’d lost her taste for sticky-sweet romance a long time ago, if she’d ever had one. She knows the Eastern European heart, thick-skinned as it is, is still as susceptible as any to the idea of love at first sight--and there was probably a little more room in that heart to hope for things like ‘happily ever after’ after existing in a place as cold, dangerous, and otherwise heartless as the gangster-ridden backalleys of Budapest.

She has the cadavers dragged into place only shortly after midnight on Friday morning, and then heads across the city to secure her other supply drops: one outside the theater that Clint and Zsuzsanna will be going for their date, as well as several others. She’s planned the game as much as she could but there are other humans involved, which means her plan won’t survive that effervescent first contact with the enemy. She is tired, and sore from hauling, climbing, digging across the city. The smudges of dust and dirt on her face and clothing only make Carlo look more authentic; she is across the river and miles away from their apartment on foot. She scrubs her nose on her sleeve and goes in search of an open coffee house as the rest of the city begins coming to life around her: she will sleep later, when the plan is complete, and either because they’re safely out of the city, or she is dead, or both.

Chapter Text

Clint has gotten a few instructions: Carlo slunk back to the apartment just before he left this morning. He needs to go pick up his rental suit, and make a few deliveries this morning, but he pauses long enough to confer with Natasha, who looks...awful, and it’s hard to tell if that’s by artifice or by design. Her instructions confirm that this is a plan that needs him almost not at all: she will be running a shell game, with two other people as the ball and herself as the three cups.

Watch carefully.

Iosif and Zsuzsanna leave Twelfth Night with the rest of the crowd, snuggling arm-in-arm and laughing over the show’s twists and turns. Iosif is very focused on the love triangle and the idea of Olivia and Viola moving much further in their romantic relationship than was shown onstage. Zsuzsanna swats him across the chest when he turns his bouncing, suggestive eyebrows to her, and they stroll towards a cafe down the street from the theater.

(Another couple is among the crowd as well; of similar height and age, he is wearing the same suit as Iosif and she has the same outer coat as Zsuzsanna. He is stunned that such a gorgeous woman would find him interesting after sitting next to him for the whole nigh-incomprehensible two hour performance, but she’d been eager enough to take his arm at the intermission and now she is hugging his elbow to her breasts like a puppy. He wonders if she is a prostitute or a plant. He might not care in a little while.

Natasha pulls her new friend into an alley and a quick glance behind shows that Zsuzsanna’s guards have been fooled at least a little: one of them the slightly taller, waves the other away and moves to follow Nat and her escort, while the other moves off to tail the real Iosif and Zsuzsanna. Nat, giggling and paying attention to every turn, leads her new friend--her increasingly interested new friend--and the shadow down three blocks of twisting alleys until the mugger finally notices them. When her new friend finally pushes Nat against a wall for a kiss, another man is there with a knife. Pitching her voice expertly, Nat screams like ZsuZsu; her new friend decides to play the hero, and she slips away as the two men fight. )

(The mugger didn’t know he was going to be part of Natasha’s plan any more than the other theatregoer did. ZsuZsu’s tail breaks up the fight, punching the mugger across the face and knocking him out cold, before he realizes that Natasha’s companion is not Iosif. There is a brief, bewildering shouted argument before the tail gives up and knocks this man out, too. Natasha is already racing away towards the second phase of her plan.)

Iosif and Zsuzsanna get a half-hour to enjoy a cup of chocolate at the cafe’s outdoor tables before deciding to take a stroll to a nearby footbridge and the long way back to Iosif’s car. Their tail meanders along behind, giving the couple their space: both are rather more handsy than they have been on past dates and he wonders if he’s going to have to interrupt at some point to protect Zsuzsu’s honor. HIs own piece of crap car is almost a block behind Iosif’s, so he sees them turn the corner ahead and makes a mental note of their possible routes: there are dinner reservations waiting, he thinks.

(Rather, there is a four-car pileup waiting almost a mile away. Onlookers and helpers are milling around, trying to pull drivers and passengers out of their vehicles, but with a sinking shock he realizes that the car in the center of the mess (or rather, at the bottom of the pile) is Iosif’s. He slams the parking brake on in the middle of the street and dashes towards the scene, yelling and waving his arms: Zsuzanna! He dives towards the massed wreckage and hands pull him back: there is a petrol leak and the chance for explosion is high. He manages to escape the hands and crawls on his own hands and knees to peer into the center car.

It is empty. There is blood on the steering wheel but no Zsuzsanna, no Iosif. He leaps to his feet, scanning the crowd and the injured people around him as the flashing lights and wailing ambulance sirens approach.)

(Natasha spends a few precious moments to bandage her forehead and stop her nosebleed after she limps away from the “accident”. She will need to become almost immaculate by the end of the plan, but for right now she will settle for not actively bleeding. Her head is pounding. A concussion would be a giant inconvenience tonight. )

Iosif and Zsuzsanna have drinks and an appetizer, but this is all he can afford for tonight, after the tickets and the suit rental. Zsuzsu makes every sign of gracious forgiveness, stroking his cheek and kissing him lovingly as they exit the restaurant; despite the chill air, they decide to stroll a little further along the block before returning to his car.

(It takes their reunited escorts more than an hour to determine where they have gone and they reach the restaurant in time to clearly see Iosif and Zsuzsu pulling away in Iosif’s piece of crap little car. The valet parking is blocking their approach and they both wait, nerves frayed and impatient, for the street to clear before creeping along after the lovebirds. This gives Iosif’s car a good five-minute lead, but they know he is heading back to Zsuszanna’s apartment to close out their date. )

(Rounding a corner almost a mile from her apartment, they are just in time to see a short man point a gun into the open driver’s door of Iosif’s stopped car and fire into the faces of the passenger and the driver. The shadow stomps on the gas pedal, tires squealing as he strives to get there in time: but the carjacker is yanking Iosif out of the front seat, leaping in and racing away in his stolen car while Zsuzsanna’s ruined head lolls against the passenger seat. The shadow slams on the breaks just in time to avoid running over Iosif; his partner leaps out of the car and flings himself down next to the body, yelling wordlessly: Iosif’s head and face are almost completely gone, unrecognizable from the massive bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Together the shadows drag Iosif’s body to the side of the road; one of them agrees to stay, and is already calling the boss as his partner lays rubber on the road and takes off after the carjacked Zsuzsanna.

The car is already burning by the time he finds the abandoned jetty on the Danube. Zsuzsanna’s corpse is nearly gone, her pretty face ruined by the bullet and the fire. He holds back his tears and pulls out his phone, knowing that calling this news in to Yasha is likely to start another gang war. Yasha is going to want to kill a lot of people for this.)

Iosif and Zsuzsanna drive right past her apartment and directly to the airport. He parks his car and changes his blazer for the heavier coat in the backseat; she pulls a pair of sweatpants on under her pretty dress, shrugs into a hooded sweatshirt, and leaves the dress in the backseat as well. They both change their shoes and leave them in the trunk when they retrieve the duffle bags with their belongings. Zsuzsanna’s portable phone is ringing almost constantly as they change, and she resolutely powers it down and hides it under the passenger seat. Clint locks the keys in the car.

Carlo’s travel papers are good: they are on a commercial flight to Reykjavik, then New York. Neither of them is flying as either a SHIELD agent or a CIA spook; they are flying economy-class the whole way. There is no sign of Natasha as their flight is called and they board the plane, and when no one Zsuzsanna recognizes boards before they take off, she starts to relax, a little. It is eight hours to Reykjavik. Neither of them sleeps, or talks very much. As they land, Clint pulls out their next set of travel documents and hands half of them to Zsuzsanna. She looks at the name listed and laughs a little.

“What?” it is the first thing Clint’s said in almost two hours, and he speaks English. She smiles a little, relaxing just a fraction: if he feels safe enough to speak English, he trusts their surroundings and isnt’ on guard.

“The last tickets were for Zsuzsu, but I guess I get another new name for this leg,” she says, and shows him her boarding pass and new passport: American, and made up for a woman named Elizabeth.

“Good old Nat,” Clint grumbles, then smiles. If no one tries to kill them in Reykjavik, he will sleep on the flight to New York. “Did she get it right?”

“Oh, no.” Zsuzsu--Elizabeth--answers. “No, but it’s a nice name, and it’ll work for now. Is yours right?” She peers at his boarding pass.

“No,” he says: this is one of his established aliases, not one that he’s had to use in Europe before.

“So at some point we’re going to have to tell each other our real names,” Elizabeth says, snuggling into his arm a little as the fasten-seat-belt sign dings off. Around them, the plane erupts with jet-lagged passengers whose desire to disembark is not going to make the boarding doors open any faster.

The layover is only an hour: long enough to grab water and snacks and hit the bathroom before they’re boarding the flight to New York. They pass through the first class cabin, and Elizabeth doesn’t see Clint nod in relieved recognition to a redheaded woman reading a thick paperback romance. She is already finishing her first drink--a vodka martini, Clint knows--as they pass her, and Clint can see a bandage hidden carefully under the sweep of her bangs and the slouch of her beanie cap. Her knuckles are also raw and scabbing over...but she is there, alive, and does not signal ‘followed’ or ‘danger’ as Elizabeth pulls him by the hand back to their seats.

He sleeps, hard, with Elizabeth’s head pillowed on his shoulder, for most of the trip. Nat curls up with as many first-class pillows as she can wheedle out of the stewardess and after another vodka martini, closes her eyes as well, but wakes periodically, scanning the plane for thugs or air marshals or anything that would crimp the tail end of the mission.

She fills out the customs claim card for them as they are making the final approach, and hands it to the stewardess. She’s put “Elizabeth” at the top of hers, Clint notes. Once she’s finished, she wraps his hand in hers once more, as they’d done for almost the entire flight. He runs his thumb over the tops of her first knuckles and smiles a little. Even if it was show, or pretend, this has been nice. “So,” he says, casually, “what is your real name, if I can ask?”

She smiles somewhat mischievously. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” she answers, searching his face with smiling eyes.

He grins back at her. “Agent Clint Barton, of SHIELD,” he says quietly. The plane touches down, a bump and a rolling rumble, before she replies.

“My name is Laura,” she says.

“Laura,” he repeats. “For real?”

“For real,” she confirms.

“Laura,” he says again. “...I like that.”

...fin...