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*If Natasha were a painting she’d be Woman with a Tragic Past. Woman with a Secret.Her hair is shoulder length and brown. It looks natural; logistics always does such a nice job. She wears no makeup, tilts her head down just so, looks out under her eyelashes. She looks fragile, pensive. Pretty, but not too pretty. Not pretty enough to scare him off. *They meet when he helps her change a flat tire.He has no idea she put the nail there herself. *Cody asks, “How about you move in with Houston and I?”Houston and me, Natasha thinks. Her English grammar is perfect and always has been. Better than most Americans. A thousand times better than Clint’s. Better even than Coulson’s, who had the tendency to slip when he was tired or too comfortable. That was the difference, perhaps. Natasha never lets herself get comfortable anywhere.See if you can get into the house, Coulson said to her, like it was a hope or unlikely goal, as if she couldn’t get in anywhere she wanted. Still, it should have been harder. The mark has a young son and he’s only known Natasha for a month, but he’s already asking her to move in. There are so many reasons to hate Cody Harvey, but this is the one she hates him for most—that he’s stupid enough to invite a stranger into his home and bed.She doesn’t call him stupid. She doesn’t correct his grammar.“I would love that,” Natasha says instead, happy but not too happy—she supposedly has a tragic past, after all, something that makes her just damaged enough to trust quickly—and kisses him. *Cody’s well off; he could have a maid if he wanted, or a nanny for his brat. Or he could look online and find someone willing to do both at a low cost, some person desperate for a job. But it’s so much more convenient to move in Natasha and have her fulfill every role—mother, maid, cook, whore.She checks the mailbox faithfully. There’s an ad for a craft store, notice of a clothing drive, an electricity bill. It will be high; Cody and Houston leave lights on all over the house and Natasha never turns them off, lets the meter run and all his Hydra money be wasted. There’s no makeup circular that indicates a message from SHIELD. It’s been weeks without contact and Natasha wonders what the hell is going on, what that silence means.An anemic hello wafts over, and Natasha shifts the mail to one hand to wave at neighbor Patty, busily scraping fallen leaves out of her mums. Patty waves back with a wide smile; a sweet fool who knows nothing of the monster that lives next door.Monsters, Natasha corrects herself. She’s far more dangerous than Cody Harvey could ever be. *There’s a piano, and Natasha is careful to never let on that she can play, or she’ll be expected to do that, too. It was the wife’s. Helen Harvey. Helen, who played piano and gave birth and did all the perfect, wifely things. From the way Cody goes on one would think she’d died in some beautiful and lingering way, all pale skin and blood red lips on a satin bed, but she actually died of an aneurysm while driving home from the gym.Natasha can think of many worse ways to go. She trails her fingers along the piano keys as she passes by.She planted the bugs the first day, searched the entire house the second and third. Now there’s nothing to do but wait for new information to come in, and that’s only at the end of the day, when Cody limps home and she can inquire sweetly after his day. The rest of the hours are empty and endless, bullying Houston through daily tasks or lost to the monotony of cooking and cleaning. Natasha’s scoured the house a few more times purely out of boredom, resorting to searches in the most unlikely of places—opening every DVD case, snaking her hand up under the entertainment center, pulling the pan drawer out of the stove.That’s where she finds pictures of Helen Harvey, in that area under the stove, amongst cracker crumbs and chocolate chips and wafts of human hair. Natasha keeps an ear out for Houston—though the endless beeps from his computer game are promise enough that he won't appear suddenly—and stays on the floor, leans against the kitchen cabinets, brushes the crumbs off the photos. From all Cody’s rhapsodizing about his late wife Natasha had pictured a dark-haired woman with soulful eyes, looking fraught and tragic, like someone from a poem—the lost Lenore, perhaps, or Evangeline. Instead Helen Harvey had a face full of freckles and wore her hair in two braids like a little girl, incongruous with her woman’s body in a crop top and shorts, toddler Houston slung across one jutted hip.Natasha puts the pictures back. It isn’t her business. Cody hides lots of things, none of them very well, and none of them useful to her. Another wasted day; she’s learned nothing about his role in Hydra. *“Lina, look at me!” the little boy cries, and Natasha waves at him from the ground.“I see you!” she responds obediently. “Be careful, now.”She doesn’t much care if he falls—he's not very high up and the playground is covered with rubber mulch—but if he falls he’ll cry whether he’s hurt or not. Then they’ll have to leave the park and she can’t bear going back to the house, can’t imagine what she’s going to do if SHIELD leaves her in this op much longer. One season has passed into another; it’s chilly enough that she and Houston had to wear jackets. He has a cold and his nose keeps running, dripping down to his upper lip, which he licks whenever he thinks she isn’t looking. Natasha leans back into the bench and scans the park out of habit. She doesn’t know why she bothers; she hasn’t spotted Clint even once. “Lina, look!” Houston jumps off the last rung of the ladder and lands with a heavy-footed flourish, gives his lip a surreptitious lick. It’s already red and going to be chapped if he keeps it up.Natasha smiles and coos something admiring. *Cody shuts the door that night when they go to bed. That means sex. It’s left open otherwise, so they can hear if Houston calls out in the night—he does that sometimes, wanting a cup of water, wanting to talk about bad dreams. But tonight the door shuts and Natasha paints a look of expectation on her face, as if she’s excited and wants it too, curls in toward Cody when he lumbers into the bed.“So soft.”He trails a hand over her hip, and then awkwardly, hesitantly, to her inner thigh. He has no finesse, his fingers blunt and stiff as if they feel no sensation; his could be a puppet hand attached to a doll’s arm.“So warm.”Natasha puts her hand on his shoulder, kneading him like dough. It’s encouragement enough; he doesn't need much.“So…tight.”He says this almost fearfully, maybe expecting her to laugh, because he must know on some level how terrible he is at this. Natasha imagines herself stuffing the comforter in his fumbling mouth, shoving it into his throat, followed by her hand, followed by her arm. At least he’s nearly silent when he finally gets down to business, his only sounds some bitten back groans as he pumps comically away.But while he gets to be quiet he likes her vocal. Soft moans. Little appreciative mmms as he thrusts. She'll throw in an occasional God or yes because it excites him, wanting to hurry things along. It’s dark enough that he can’t see her face, so she keeps it impassive and fixes her eyes on a spot past the hulking darker shadow that is his body. She puts her hands on his hips, winds them around his neck, drifts them over his back.Natasha could break him with those hands, but she doesn’t. *Cody uses all the hot water in the morning; it’s past ten before the water heater catches up enough for her own shower. Natasha hands Houston a tablet and spends too long under the water. Afterward she stands in front of the fogged up mirror, a ghostly form with too-dark hair. She looks like a stranger. A wraith. She rakes the brush through her hair, pulling too hard, strands loosening from her scalp to lay in threads against her shoulders.It would feel so good to cut it. The scissors in her makeup bag are too small, but they could do the job with enough time and determination. It wouldn’t be her first impulsive haircut. She drags her palm across the steam on the mirror and takes the tiny scissors in one hand, a lock of hair in the other.There is nothing compared to how satisfying that first snip always feels. The way the hair springs up to bounce against the line of her jaw, untethered by the weight of longer length. Freed.She tells herself to stop here. She's never bothered stopping herself before, cutting and hacking at her hair. Sometimes she does it after a bad mission, sometimes for no reason at all, just a wild notion that comes upon her, wanting to change and control on a whim.The last time had been a year ago. She woke up and cut it all off, hair filling the sink, crisscrossing itself in long red layers. She pressed her hand into it, relishing the soft way it gave under her fingers, the cool hardness of the sink beneath. She left it there for Clint to find and mourn the long curls he loved so much. She started the coffee, knowing the smell would wake him, watching with anticipation as he rose on cue, stumbling from the bedroom to the bathroom.There was a long silence before “So that’s how it is”, his voice pitched just enough to carry out to her. He came out to stand in the hall, weaving a lock of hair through his knuckles like a bandage, and Natasha shrugged at him, not bothering to hide the twitch of her lips.“You know, most girls just eat a bunch of ice cream or cake or something when they have a bad day.” His voice grew faint as he disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a pair of scissors and a dish towel, the hair disappeared from his fingers. Maybe he threw it away. Maybe he kept it.“I’m not most girls.” “Don’t I know it.” He ran his fingers through her hair, and snipped at the areas that had been difficult for her to reach. It’s hard to cut curly hair well, but he had lots of occasions to practice.“Human hair grows an inch a month,” she pointed out in conciliation, her voice rusty, like gears grinding. “In half a year’s time it’ll be just like it was this morning.”Now Natasha looks at the lock of her hair in the sink, brown instead of red, wet and lank and lying there like an accusation. It’s still a mission, no matter how long and unpleasant it has been, and she’s never failed a mission, and she certainly won’t ever do so on purpose, not for any wild impulse. She won’t cut any more and Cody will never even notice. This will become just a lock of hair that won’t fit into a ponytail, that will flop around annoyingly until it grows back out again. If Clint were here he’d see it for what it was.But Clint isn’t here. He isn’t anywhere. *“I love you,” Cody says.He’s only known her four months. That isn’t long enough to love anyone. He's an idiot; he's moved an assassin from an enemy agency into his home without realizing it. He lets a stranger bathe his child and prepare his meals while he hid his dead wife’s picture under the stove.“I love you, too,” Natasha says. *“Lina, look!”Houston says that probably fifty times a day, demanding that she look at him, talk to him, think about him. Some part of Natasha likes him a little, and all of her feels sorry for him; he’ll be an orphan when his father is arrested. Maybe there are relatives somewhere, some disinterested grandparents that Natasha has never heard about. An estranged aunt. A second cousin with a spare room. Hopefully there’s someone that can be bullied into taking the child.“That’s really colorful.” It’s easiest to make an observation that can pass as a kind of praise. The kid never notices; the fact that she answers at all is more important than what she says. Cody hardly ever answers his son.“That’s you,” Houston points. “And that’s me.”Natasha hums, and can see it now—she’s the large blob and Houston the smaller, separated by two lines and a circle that she realizes must be their clasped hands. “Well, it’s just wonderful.”He’s five, and that’s older than she likes, because he’ll remember her after this is all over. Remember that she lived in the house, and maybe when he's older he'll realize she's the reason his father went to jail. She’d rather he forgot her. *The kid is napping and Natasha sets the ironing board up in front of the television, people scream over paternity tests while she steams and starches.He’s good, better than most, one of the few people anywhere that can ever sneak up on the Black Widow and take her by surprise. Still, he doesn’t know about the creaky board in the hallway, and Natasha has yanked the cord from the wall and almost scorched Clint Barton’s face before she realizes that it's him.“Jesus.” He's laughing, his hands raised in surrender. “I come in peace.”She drops the iron and has her arms around him before she can think better of it, nose in the area between his jaw and shoulder, breathing him in. But it isn’t right, he doesn’t smell like Clint; he smells like the person he’s pretending to be. There’s a chemical odor clinging to his hospital scrubs. They’re utilitarian—janitorial, maintenance, housekeeping. Low status, but something with lots of access all over the building. He'd make sure he could go anywhere, see everything.Clint hugs her back, good humor fading immediately. Maybe she smells different, too. “How are you?”"Fine". She's always fine. No matter how he smells Clint still feels the same under her fingers, solid, something she could dash herself against if she ever felt other than fine, if she felt like breaking instead. “There’s a kid. A little boy. I hate when there are kids.”He hums in agreement and Natasha pushes away from him as suddenly as she drew him in. He might think he knows what it’s like, but he hasn’t dealt with a pseudo family for months. He probably lives alone in an apartment. Maybe he has friends over sometimes, all of them being men together, watching football, burping, scratching.Clint studies her in his sharp way, with eyes that always see more than she wants them to. He opens his mouth and Natasha cuts him off with “Have you heard from anyone?”Cody isn’t smart enough to bug his own house, but she’ll never say the word SHIELD aloud while the mission is in progress. Neither does she let her shoulders sag when Clint shakes his head. She’d felt less abandoned when they’ve been left in warzones with no rations or weapons or word for weeks—this life feels more suffocating somehow, more encompassing. As if the boredom and uselessness were seeping into soft places, through her eyes as she fluttered coquettish lashes, through her mouth as she trilled endearments.Clint studies the paintings on the wall, touching the frame of the nearest with one finger and sending it crooked. “I might be getting a new job. A guy I know recommended me for a position in an outside lab; he says the pay is good. I think I’ll like it.”A Hydra lab, then. “That sounds nice.”“If I get the job, of course,” Clint amends, shrugging, but he will. Of course he will; he’s just as skilled at worming his way into people’s lives as Natasha.There isn't much else to talk about and Clint can’t stay, the kid won’t sleep long enough. He hugs her again before he leaves, promises to come see her again.Natasha can smell him on her clothes, that smell of not-Clint. She dumps them in the washer and takes a shower. *She colors her hair the next morning; her roots are starting to show again. *She draws a mustache on Houston’s face with one of his markers and declares him the most fearsome pirate she’s ever seen. She’d spent all day cobbling together his outfit and in the end it doesn’t matter because it’s so cold he has to wear a coat. She shrugs and hands him the plastic bucket. Cody promised he’d be home in time for trick or treating, but he hadn’t showed. He’s been late more and more often, and Natasha feels hopeful for the first time in weeks. Maybe Hydra is finally up to something.Halloween is just like she’s seen in movies, although she’d always imagined herself as the child, dressed like a princess or a fairy, chirping a breathless trick or treat in exchange for candy. Instead she’s the adult, lingering back on the sidewalk while Houston runs up to houses, pulling her cardigan tightly across her chest, wishing she’d worn a hat. They meander up the whole street and hit all the houses, a slew of now familiar faces that she knows only by first name and paired with vague descriptors.Patty-From-Next-Door.Sarah-From-Up-the-Street.Joe-Sarah’s-Husband.Amy-That-Sells-Plexus.A group of children runs by, laughing, and the one dressed like Captain America pushes the Houston to the ground, maybe on accident, maybe on purpose. Natasha barely resists the impulse to grab his arm and screech in his face.“Come on,” she says instead, holding her hand out to Houston, who’s sniffling. “Don’t let anyone ruin your good time.” *Cody is late getting home again. Natasha puts dinner into plastic containers; he can feed himself from them later.She sits on the edge of Houston’s bed, reads a story with looping rhymes and grating alliterations. She pauses halfway through, narrowing her eyes. “Did you brush your teeth?”“Yes.” His own eyes are wide with faux innocence.Natasha tells herself that she doesn’t care if the kid’s teeth are caked with plaque, if germs bore holes into the enamel, if he is an old man with porcelain teeth because all his natural ones rotted right out of his head. It’s not her business, not her problem. But she says “If I check your toothbrush right now will it be wet?”“Uhhh….”The kid is a terrible liar, just like his father. Maybe that sort of thing runs in families. Maybe Natasha’s mother and father were excellent liars. Maybe they could fool anyone about anything but didn’t do so to survive, did it only to amuse themselves.“Go brush your teeth.” Her voice is heavy with motherly disappointment, but when Houston smiles at her she smiles back. *She goes to the mailbox, bracing against the wind. She needs a warmer coat but buying one feels like acknowledging that she’ll still be here in the winter. It would be too much like giving up.Patty-From-Next-Door waves. Her mums are all dead.Natasha smiles and waves back. There’s an electric bill. A cable bill. A pamphlet for a hip new church, full of promises of a rock band and young membership. A woodworking magazine. And at the bottom of the stack, there it is. A makeup circular.Fucking finally.The model on the front has red curly hair and too much eyeliner—keep your eyes open, keep watch. For all their triumphs SHIELD can also be amazingly unsubtle. She can expect SHIELD to arrive during that timeframe of the purported sale, Tuesday through Friday. Natasha sighs happily and folds the ad against her chest.She’s hoping for Tuesday. *She’s mildly surprised when Cody launches his body in front of hers, protecting her from the armed men that burst suddenly into their darkened bedroom. Maybe he actually had liked her, or even loved her a little. Natasha weaves her arms through his and locks them at the elbow , wraps her legs around his waist, holding him still. She shields her eyes behind his shoulder when someone flips the overhead lights on.“What is this?” Cody keeps saying as they drag him off the bed. He tries to sound indignant but voice trembles; he’s afraid. “Who are you? What is this?”Natasha meets his eyes as they cuff him, shrugs a little and pulls the blankets up against the sudden chill of losing her bedmate.“Hail Hydra,” she says sweetly, and his face crumples from confusion to realization, then settles into a look of bright dislike. Natasha grins back, liking him better that way.Her smile fades at the sound of other cries, Houston calling out for his father, calling out for her. Natasha doesn’t go to him. Better that there be a clean break; it’ll help him forget her faster. SHIELD will already have someone in the room comforting and murmuring at him, agents that specialize in that very thing.Clint’s here, familiar and comfortable in black tac gear, and Natasha lets herself be irritated that SHIELD got him first, let him be part of the main assault while leaving her to languish and keep tabs on Cody Harvey. Clint sits on the edge of the bed and has her robe in his hands, which are still red and rough from months of working with chemicals.“Let’s get the hell out of here." He turns his head politely away as she takes the robe and lets the covers fall away.Natasha listens to a little boy cry and a cuffed man protest and thinks that maybe she’ll cut her hair when she gets home.