To Go Unseen (A Natasha Romanoff Story)

52 [St. Petersburg]

Natalia Romanova had not seen Ivan in years. After she had become the Black Widow, he had spoken with her less and less and she knew it was mostly because she had started to remove him from her life. She found it hard at first to stop loving Ivan Petrovitch, because it was complicated and unloving someone is hard and sometimes she was made to feel guilty about it, as though his mistakes had been her fault, but she knew she never wanted to see him again and she was adamant. Cutting him out was one of the most painful things Natalia Romanova had done to date and sometimes, the pain grew so unbearable that she’d have trouble trying to hide her tears in public when he was mentioned in conversation.

And Natalia stopped thinking about and wishing for happiness. It was silly. It was for children. It was a fairytale. And she didn’t believe in it anymore. So she stopped asking herself if she was happy, until one night in St Petersburg when she met Clint Barton.

It was a mission. An assassination. She didn’t remember who she was killing. It didn’t matter. He was some high-class aristocrat that had made someone angry and she hardly bothered to remember his name, even then. After all, she didn’t really like knowing who she killed. It was something of a weakness of hers, a quirk, but she worked around it well. She did what she had to do. She got the job done, and very, very well.

Which was why she was so surprised when she was caught, and not even by a man with a gun. But by one with arrows.

The first one hit her in the leg from behind, thankfully above her knee, and she didn’t know when she fell whether that was because the archer was unskillful or because he didn’t want to hurt her too badly. But regardless, she hit the ground and the arrow snapped and she looked down at her thigh, stunned. She was the Black Widow. She needed her thighs. Her combat revolved around the strength in her legs! She began to scoot herself behind her target’s bed, hiding herself from where she’d seen the arrow come from, and she ripped out the end. She could hear her target stirring and seethed. The mission might be compromised. She could potentially fail if she didn’t find this second agent soon.

Then, from behind her again, another arrow. She felt it pierce her other leg and sink in and she gasped. “No,” she breathed, both stunned and devastated and sucked in a desperate, pained breath.

“Ricochet arrows!” Someone cried. “I can get you from anywhere if I can bounce the arrows off something.” A man’s voice. She looked up and around and the target started to sit up, started to yell. A man came out of the shadows, Natalia’s mysterious archer, and he approached the screaming target. “Hop up,” he told him. “There’s a car out front, get in it.”

“What?” Natalia cried. But the target was already fleeing. Desperate, Natalia pulled herself painfully to her knees and drew a gun and pointed-and found the barrel pointed at the torso of the archer. She looked up to see an arrow being drawn directly at her forehead. The archer stared at her for a second, and she at him.

“Looks like we’re at an impasse,” he said calmly while the target escaped behind him, and Natalia watched, dismayed. She watched him disappear into the dark and she collapsed back onto her butt, relieving the pressure on the wounds and arrow bits sticking out of her legs, and looked up hatefully at the archer. She kept her gun cocked and pointed.

“You ruined my mission,” she hissed. “You came here to save him?” The archer smiled a little and then shook his head. Natalia frowned. “What?” She said. “Then why are you here?”

“I’m actually here to kill you,” the archer replied and Natalia stared. “Don’t know so much about the other guy, ‘cept that you probably shouldn’t be killing him. I’m just here to dispatch the Black Widow.”