Title: Unpayable
Fandom: MCU
Rating: G
Length: 570
Content notes: set during The Avengers.
Author notes: "Keeping score" made me think of Natasha's "I owe him a debt", which lead to this. This portrayal of Natasha probably owes a fair bit to dirgewithoutmusic's version of her.
Summary: "This life is hers to live as she chooses because of the call he made, and she chooses that it includes a debt she can never repay."

“Love is for children, I owe him a debt.”

The best way to fool someone is to tell them the truth. The Red Room taught Natasha that.

Love is for children, but what love was there in Natasha’s childhood? ‘Love is for children’, the Red Room said. These girls were not children, to them. They told them they were soldiers, spies, fighters. Looking back, Natasha thinks, we were weapons. We were tools. We were dolls. Porcelain ballerinas with blood on tiny hands.

Love is just for children - a fairytale, a pretty lie, pink-tinted glasses to shield them from the realities of the world. Little Natalia Alianovna knew that she saw the world clearly, in all its harsh uncaring truth. It took Natasha years to unpick the lies woven into her brain - the distorted reports, the drug-blurred memories, the twisted worldview. (She is still unpicking. Sometimes she wonders if she’s made any difference at all.)

Love is a lie for children, making love is the same lie for adults. Natasha’s body has always been a weapon to her, sex is just another tool in her arsenal. One that hurts less than a punch, a kick, a bullet tearing through her. A way to get what she needs. ‘They say Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything’, some SHIELD rookies once whispered when they thought she couldn’t hear, and Natasha rolled her eyes. Everything she has done - for the KGB, but also for SHIELD - all of it, and this is what they care about? Clint laughed, told her not to bully the baby agents, and made it his mission to be inordinately annoying whenever they were around, “so they can see you’re not really comfortable with everything, Nat. I’m doing everyone a favour!”. She stole the pen he’d been clicking erratically for five minutes straight. It may or may not have been the start of an all-out prank war. He is impossible and she will do anything to get him back.

She owes him a debt. “He made a different call,” she tells Loki, and it’s true. Every word she tells him is true. She doesn’t tell him how often Clint has called that debt cancelled, every time she has stood between him and death. She doesn’t tell him how Clint insists there was never a debt at all.

She will always owe Clint a debt. These hands are hers to fight with because he didn’t pull the trigger. These words are hers to dangle in front of Loki, to lure him in and catch him, because Clint looked at a weapon and saw a person. This life is hers to live as she chooses because of the call he made, and she chooses that it includes a debt she can never repay.

Love is for children, innocent, unquestioning, something she can never be. She owes him a debt, something resting on her shoulders (something warm and familiar like a favourite jacket, something that helps to ease the weight of her guilts), something guiding and pushing her to be who Clint believes she can be, even on her worst days when all she can see in herself is red and black.

She calls it a debt. She calls it owing. Names matter, this is something Natasha (Natalia) (Nat) knows. The words you choose, the names you choose, they matter. But the meaning behind them, that matters too - and she knows what she means.