Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes of A Different Call

Completed August 18th, 2022

Book one of the STRIKE Team: Delta series is complete! I had so much fun writing it and I'm so happy I got the chance to tell the story of how I think Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff met. Their friendship is one of the best in the MCU. They have a rich, vast history that we've barely scratched the surface on in canon. Hopefully, Marvel will make a show or movie or book series to tell us how it all really went down. For now, we can satisfy ourselves with fanfiction, which is the purpose of this series.

I breezed through writing the first couple chapters, updating consistently once per week. Then I hit the writer's block by the time the action scenes began. Action is one of my favorite things to include in a story (otherwise it would be boring), but one of the hardest things for me to write. I started this story when I was seventeen and finished it a couple weeks after my nineteenth birthday.

Most of my inspiration for this story came from The Avengers. This is the first time we see Clint and Natasha together with their dynamic and friendship. They are clearly very close to the point Natasha would drop her mission for him and Clint knows all of her secrets. The plot and the title of the story comes from Natasha's description of how she met Barton.

"Before I worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., I... well, I made a name for myself. I have a very specific skill set. I didn't care who I used it for... or on. I got on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar in a bad way. Agent Barton was sent to kill me. He made a different call."

Ergo, we know Clint was sent by S.H.I.E.L.D. to kill Black Widow, but Clint saw something in her that caused him to change his mind and bring her in. In Avengers: Endgame, when Clint says that Natasha should start judging people by their worst mistakes, she responds with "You didn't", referencing their first meeting.

After that, there's not much to go off of. I discerned that their Budapest mission was an entirely separate assignment, so I had Clint go to Nat's home country: Russia.

The plot is fairly simple. I wanted this to be a short origin story. The books following will be much longer and more complex. A Different Call is very much a trust story. We are not yet at the Clint and Natasha we know and love. Nat goes by her real name Natalia and she does what she is told without question. However, she's had a taste of a normal life on the infiltration mission in America (Black Widow film) and she's looking for an opportunity to get out. Clint unknowingly provides that opportunity. First, they need to know the other is genuine. Nat needs to know this isn't a trap and Clint needs to know she won't use him to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. for the Red Room. Natalia provides a test by working together to take down the Red Room Academy in Belarus. Clint and Nat have a lot of baggage to work through before they become the heroes and Avengers see in the films.

Since I started this before Black Widow came out, I didn't know about her origins or her relationship with Yelena Belova. I made some educated guesses, but you may have noticed the changes since the movie came out. Same thing with Hawkeye. The changes I had to make also fed into my writer's block and I had to edit the entire story for it to make cohesive sense.

Barton's origins were a bit more tricky since we don't have a confirmed origin in canon (*cries*). I love his comic origin, so I stuck with that. Even if the MCU changes it, I'm sticking with the comic origin. I want Clint to have some similarities with Natasha in order for them to bond and relate to each other, such as child abuse, a missing sibling, and dead parents. We'll explore more of his backstory later, but I did hint at it in A Different Call. By this time, Clint is already married and has two of his three children: Cooper and Baby Lila.

This story takes place late 2007. In a deleted scene in Black Widow, Natasha tells Yelena the last time she was in Budapest was eight years ago. Since the film takes place in 2016, this means the Budapest Operation was in 2008. I wanted Natasha to have at least six months of S.H.I.E.L.D. training before her initiation.