Budapest

Natasha - What Happens in Budapest, Stays in Budapest

A/N: This is it. This is the chapter. The seed that started the whole story. The ONE SCENE that I've been wanting to write for over THREE YEARS. Don't. screw. it. up.

She shouldn't have kissed him, Natasha knew that.

It wasn't a matter of trust. She'd thrown trust to the wind years ago, sent it scattering like so much ash and dust that crumbled in her palm and left her bleeding. She never wanted to trust anyone again, not after Ivan, not after Alexei, not after this hellscape she'd been through.

Then if it wasn't about trust...what was it?

She shouldn't have kissed him because it wasn't part of this...not a game, but it wasn't the job either. It was a push and pull, back and forth, chase and be chased, that they'd developed since their first meeting.

Natasha had become all too familiar with the taste and feel of seduction, the power play of lust and aggression, lies and half-truths. Secrets grew black and rotten and turned every kiss, every touch into a wrestling match for the upper hand.

This wasn't like that.

This was soft. This was as slow and reverent as a dream she never wanted to wake up from to face the nightmare that her life had become. There were none of the sharp edges and hidden traps of everything she'd ever known since she was a little girl, a young recruit in the Red Room, one of the first Black Widow spiderlings to have her heart carved from her chest and transformed into a world class killer.

This was everything that should have been, everything she'd missed, everything she still craved with an ache so deep in her chest, sometimes she couldn't breathe. This was sweetness and gentleness and a different kind of loyalty that didn't have anything to do her job.

She couldn't file Clint away into a box. She'd tried, over and over, but he kept slipping right out again, continually surprising her with his predictable unexpectedness and his talk of second chances, looking so damn sincere.

And it terrified her.

Training had never failed her before. Natasha knew how to handle the unknown, the variable factors of foreign territory that her training may not have covered in depth, but she always found a way out. She worked things through and she moved on.

Clint was like a bad penny, a ghost coming back to haunt her, sliding right past her defenses, every single one of them. She wanted to believe him and his ridiculously naïve thinking that anyone could have a second chance, even the likes of her, with blood dripping from her hands and so many red stains in her ledger. She wanted to have his optimism, foolish though it was, that people wouldn't disappoint you, some of them at least, the right ones, as if it was so easy to find them.

Despite her better judgment, time and time again, she gravitated back to him, enemies or allies, it made no difference. His normalcy turned her jealous, made her hurt with hunger for a life she'd dreamed of and thought she could never have.

And she kissed him over and over. With the salt of tears and bitter regret on first her lips then his, knowing it wouldn't last.

If he was good, if he was pure, if this wasn't some trick up his sleeve that she had been so idiotically blind to for all this time, then he would die too. The good ones always did. Pure hearts became targets, the soft parts of their kindness bleeding at the slightest pressure, the faintest nick of a blade or a bullet.

If this was a set up...?

Then she'd claim his death for this alone. For seeing her cry. For seeing the mess of vulnerability she had become at his words that she found herself clinging to instead of brushing away. Clinging and clinging until her fingers turned bone white with desperation.