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Mr and Mrs Barton Part 7

Clint:

The first thing on his list to clear his wife's name was to check out the address. There might be other groups that would explain away the why behind the address was in the file. He's starting at the root to travel further into the web. Web. Ha! That's actually pretty funny considering that he's hunting a potential next of Black Widows.

Okay, maybe not so funny since it involves his wife of five years.

He goes into the building before heading straight to the rectory. Clint is actually grateful for how exact SHIELD personnel could be in reports, even though he liked to keep his vague when he can. While exactness is fine and dandy, sometimes just giving the barebones of something should work just as well. Also, it helps with his image of being irresponsible.

The less people that wanted to work with him, or 'handle' him in that one guy's case (that reminds him...he hasn't put itching powder in that man's training clothes for a while), the happier Clint is. He likes working with people that will listen to his input. He's not all pranks and fun times.

Though he likes the workers at SHIELD to think that.

He looks at the directory with a critical eye, and feels disappointment consume him. This isn't how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to come here and find that there was another group that was working on the same floor as his wife's work.

Oh well. That just means onto the second part of his plan. The blunter portion of it.

He dials the number he knows from memory and waits for it to ring in.

"Bronson's Trading Partners, how may I help you?" The female voice on the line shouldn't have surprised him, but he had kind of been hoping to go straight to the source instead of having to go around the bush a bit more.

"Yeah..." Clint realizes that the question wasn't really a yes or no right after he said that and winced. "Um, is Natalie Barton free to take a call?"

Clicking over the line, and Clint was coming up with some nice sounding music that would be better than the clicking, when the woman answered, "Not at the moment."

His eyes are already going around the building, taking note of every security camera in sight. Too many at the moment for a maybe. "Can you ask her what time supper is?"

"May I ask who this is?" The woman whose name that Clint never could catch asks.

It's actually kind of annoying how straight lace everyone can be at times. "Her husband." Though it can be useful at times. Like when someone landed a plane and flashed credentials that weren't real (that actually wasn't his fault) and started shooting up a safe house (maybe his fault...maybe, because he'd been the only one to question the dude).

"Mrs. Barton?" Clint can hear the woman over the phone call to his wife. "Your husband wants to know what time dinner is?"

Dinner...crap. Wrong time zone. Or culture. Whichever. There's a reason why undercover work wasn't his forte. Or maybe it was because everyone underestimated him? He'll ask Phil later.

"Seven tonight, as usual." The woman told him, "Anything else?"

"Yeah." Clint looked around, already a bad feeling about this path he had chosen to go on. Something tells him that this is going to be very messy before the cleanup. "Tell her I love her." He hangs up his cell phone before heading on back outside.

A ringing that he recognizes as work comes from his phone and despairs of the fact he put it in his file as a way for Phil to get ahold of him. "Barton here." Phil only. Oh, and maybe Fury. Definitely not May, though.

"Clint, we have a situation." Coulson tells him over the secure line, and Clint loves the dramatics. Really not.

He's already moving towards his car. It's a nice car with good gas mileage and all that. "What is it?"

"The grapevine is active." Phil explains to him, "Black Widow is coming after Hawkeye."

Clint has to chuckle at that. Or at least mentally. "This is going to be fun."

Natasha:

She's been staring at the file ever since she came back, but nothing jumps out at her to tell her the identity of the man behind the purple mask. Yes, purple. Hawkeye seems to like purple nearly as much as her husband.

Husband. Clint.

She catches herself fiddling with the arrow necklace he gave her for their first year anniversary as her mind goes over the facts in the case, and the few fuzzy photos they have been able to get of the elusive assassin. Most likely, Hawkeye had a file just as mix match on herself. Even though the Red Room was very good at keeping things a secret, there were always pieces of information that got out.

For it's not always plausible to kill the other person involved in the secret, and like most things the Red Room is a bureaucracy. Which means a lot of paperwork for even the most mundane.

Pictures. "Chloe!" Natasha calls out to one of the few people assigned to help her in hunting down Hawkeye. "Can this be enhanced even further?" She waves the photo towards the other woman, but Chloe shakes her head. Certain things can only be enhanced so far before it was just guess work.

The photos though...

Hawkeye came onto the scene as a mercenary for hire. There were reports that Hydra was going to approach him before hearing word that he joined SHIELD. A few notes spoke of disappointment at losing the asset, but nothing concrete about how they were going to approach the archer. He was almost a ghost, but not quite.

Natasha had been trained by a ghost, but she can appreciate someone who was coming to look to be nearly as elusive.

"Mrs. Barton?" Katrina, the one in charge of incoming calls is the one to call for her. She sounded amused, but she always did sound a bit like that. "Your husband wants to know what time dinner is?" Katrina seemed to think that Natasha's cover was a joke for her personal amusement. It wasn't.

"Seven." Natasha answered offhandedly. Her husband. Arrows. Purple.

Clint used to be in an archery club. He loves purple. Like, seriously loves purple. He insisted on at least one room in the house being painted that color.

Once the idea took root, it wouldn't go away. She faintly heard the others working around her, but her eyes were on known dates of activity for him.

Dates.

That lines up perfectly with the times her husband went on his business trips. Not for all of his business trips, but enough to make a pattern.

"He says to tell you that he loves you." Katrina's tone was slightly mocking, but Natasha wasn't hearing it. All she heard was the voice inside of her head making connections and coming to a conclusion that's impossible.

Clint is an idiot. Her adorable idiot.

He's not capable of being the cold blooded assassin in the file in front of her. Impossible.

She uses all of her training to keep her voice mild. "That's sweet of him." Inside, her mind is screaming at her to run. To confront. To find the truth for herself.

Archer. Purple. Dates.

She looks closer at the clearest photograph they had, and even that couldn't calm her racing thoughts. His body was the same shape as the one in the photograph.

Impossible.