author's note: For franztastich, who asked for more from rare the fruit of victory. This is one of the many possible futures!

and seeds shall sprout from fire (the guard variation)

It takes something as simple as this to make their world, shape their world, break their world: Natasha sees Clint in handcuffs, flanked by four guards who tower above him, and catches his eye in the dust of the street.

He hunches his shoulders, relaxing the thief-marked fingers that are curled into fists and flicking them outwards, sending them away.

She turns her head - and keeps walking.

—-

"They want me to work for them," Clint tells her, hands moving restlessly over the tattooed X's on his skin. The confines of her old bolthole are cramped and bitter with the scent of disuse, but this place is expendable, is acceptable for the Ascair's guards to find.

Natasha swallows the embers in her chest and watches his fingers dance, scarred and marred and nervous, newly blistered from a bow.

—-

She skids across the roof, tiles tearing through the black fabric at the skin of her calves, her knees, unable to catch herself as the deep shadows of an alleyway yawn open below her.

"Natasha!"

Their human hands stretch, dark crosses reaching for each other in the hot night air, straining across years and stations and the cages of the law, and -

—-

"Mage Romanoff, reporting for duty," she says, a faintly sardonic smile on the crimson lips that match her new uniform. He straightens from where he's been leaning in a hidden niche behind one of the pale yellow pillars and uncrosses his arms, nodding to Staff Master Hill.

"I've got it from here," he tells the unimpressed guard before he tips his head towards the long hallway. "Want to get familiar with the Watch House?"

The red-haired woman studies him for a long moment, her mouth quirking with amusement and something else that flashes across too quickly to be studied, then nods.

Her fingers tangle with his, just for a moment, as they walk out the door into the clean bright halls of their new lives, fire and relief and a partnership all in one.

—-

To catch a thief, some say, it takes a thief. Here, it takes an archer with uncanny aim and a fire mage with merciless moves.

They relegate "Stop in the name of the Ascair!" to an afterthought, eventually.

fin