Part I: She's Been Everybody Else's Girl, Maybe Someday She'll Be Her Own

Well, I'm Not Seventeen, But I've Cuts On My Knees

Natasha took her time getting the drinks, chatting with the staff to keep herself occupied. After she'd delayed as long as she reasonably could, she returned to the table with Nick and Clint. It was strange to be together again – it had been a long time. Well, there was that time at the Barton's, but that all seemed like a dream. She felt a pang of homesickness at the thought of working for SHIELD. It had been the one thing she thought she'd done well.

"All settled?" she asked lightly as she sat down.

"Yeah," Clint replied in a way that made her think he was less than thrilled with what he had to do. Maybe he would share it with her later, if she asked the right way.

"Can't stay long," Nick muttered pointedly as he took a swig of his drink.

Natasha smiled. "I am very curious about how you've spent your time being dead," she told him teasingly.

"I'm sure it's similar to what you've been doing lately. You find a job, you finish it, you find another," he said dismissively.

Clint snorted and Natasha laughed. Nick looked slightly affronted. "I'm sure you're not doing little mercenary jobs like I do," Natasha told him.

"Yeah? What do you think I do, then?" Nick wanted to know, sounding amused despite himself.

The two spies exchanged glances before Natasha answered. "You are probably gathering assets and saving them for a rainy day, while doing what good you can – protecting people when you can – along the way."

"I'm retired," Nick deflected with a brief grin.

"I thought you were dead," Clint replied, sounding convincingly confused.

"That too," the former director of SHIELD stated with a shrug, then held up his glass. "To who we used to be," he said solemnly.

The gravity of the toast was not lost on them, and introspective silence followed it. Natasha thought about how she'd give anything to go back to that, to working for SHIELD. Maybe before the Avengers Initiative. She'd liked her job better before becoming well-known, though she might have been wiping more red from her ledger once she became a "hero."

Nick cleared his throat and Clint and Natasha looked up at him. "Trouble always comes around. They'll need us again. They'll need you again before too long. And then this will just seem like a bad dream."

Nodding slowly, Natasha returned her gaze to the table in front of her, vaguely aware of Clint and Nick exchanging looks.

"Nat is thinking that maybe she doesn't want to be needed again," Clint stated. He always did have a good read on her.

"Now, why is that?" Nick asked gently, concerned.

She considered her words carefully before answering. "Maybe I'm not cut out for it. It wasn't what I was raised to be. I'm a spy and an assassin, Nick. I know I've done some good using those skills, but they don't fit that well with a team of superheroes."

"Hey, I'm in the same boat," Clint offered.

Smiling grimly, she shook her head. "No, you're not. You... you chose to become a spy. They made me into one."

Natasha was relieved that neither of them attempted to correct her, though both looked unhappy with her self-assessment.

"You've broken through that programming long ago. Our best people looked into it. So you don't need to be worried about regressing." Nick paused, watching her. "But you're free to do whatever you want now."