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.

I like to hide references and Easter eggs in my stories for people to find. Some of them are obscure to the point only I would understand them. Since there are so many, I'm compiling a list by chapter for your viewing pleasure.

~References~

Chapter 1. The Itsy-Bitsy Spider: This chapter is more like a prologue. Natasha is humming a familiar childhood nursery rhyme, but her reputation as a Black Widow makes it creepy. Madame B makes her first appearance as mission handler to the Black Widows who graduated from the Belarus Academy. She was first seen in Natasha's vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Chapter 2. Sent to Kill Her: The title is a reference to how Natasha phrased Clint's mission to eliminate her. In Agent Carter, Leviathan works with a Russian organization training girls to be assassins. This later became the Red Room Program. We learn that they cuffed the girls to their beds, which led to a habit difficult to break. I kept the practice going and decided that if Dottie Underwood couldn't break the habit, Natalia couldn't either.

Chapter 3. His Mission: The chapter titles "His Mission" and "Her Mission" is a slight reference to my other fanfic Broken Survivor where I titled Ahsoka and Anakin's different parts as "His Fight" and "Her Fight". It shows that both characters are doing the same thing, but are separate and have different perspectives. I don't know why Nat keeps eating raspberry filled pastries. It's one of those things where the character takes over the writing for you. Yuri Zaikin is a real MCU character from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I guess I was feeling lazy that day and didn't want to make up a KGB agent. Aleksandr Miroslav, however, is a made up character, heavily inspired by that rich guy in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Hawkeye's clearance code is H for Hawkeye, three for three kids, A for Avengers, six for six original Avengers, delta for STRIKE Team: Delta, E for my real name, two for two members of Team: Delta, and seventeen for my age when I started writing this story.

Chapter 4. Her Mission: The ballet Natalia preforms mirrors the dance in her Age of Ultron vision. Since a pair of ballet shoes can be found in the Avengers Compound in Avengers: Endgame, that led me to believe Nat still practices ballet. The line "No. I have no place in the world" is another link to Age of Ultron. You may find many similarities in the gala scene to the party scene in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. I was very inspired by that film. Clint's "Let's talk like grown ups" is a reference to Natasha's comment to Yelena in Black Widow.

Chapter 5. A Different Call: At the end of the fight scene, I tried to describe Nat's finisher move in The Avengers where she summersaults over Clint's arm, then slams his head into the metal railing. Only this time, she slams him into the wall and this accidentally works to his advantage. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s limited knowledge on the Red Room comes from Peggy Carter, who encountered Dottie Underwood and infiltrated the Academy in Belarus in Agent Carter.

Chapter 6. A Lot Like You: Clint is 100% doing a James Bond impression at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 8. The Flight to Byelorussia: First thing Natasha does is remove the tracker chip in her leg. This is the same thing Yelena has to do when she is freed from the mind control. They do it the same way. "I don't normally make the plans" was a tidbit of information we got from Hawkeye. Even though Belarus is its own country at this point, I feel like the Red Room would brainwash the girls in calling it Byelorussia still.

Chapter 9. Storming the Red Room: Clint's winter uniform is the exact same as the one he wears in Age of Ultron. Makarov PM is a Russian gun. Walther PPK/S is a gun Natasha most commonly uses. I showed this switch to symbolize Natalia's defection from her old life. The "quick exit over an easy entrance" and the polydimethylsiloxane are references to the Hawkeye show. Not the 2012 headcanons coming to play with Clint traveling through the vents and Coulson being his handler! I did my best to describe the Academy according to Natasha's vision in Age of Ultron and what we see in Agent Carter. Because, yes, I'm using the same location as the one in Agent Carter (I love this show).

Chapter 10. Escaping the Red Room: Clint remembers reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Lila. It was one of my favorites as a kid.

Chapter 12. Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D.: This chapter is meant to be more of an epilogue, but I didn't want to break the chapter theme. It was fun to write Director Fury's perspective at the end. He's thinking about the Avengers Initiative, but recognizes that the world needs spies in the shadows and not superheroes right now. He produces a file titled "Project Delta". This is his plan to build an elite team of his best agents to take on international missions that don't just involve terrorist threats like what STRIKE deals with. Obviously, this will become STRIKE Team: Delta.

I loved creating this story and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I was pleasantly surprised how natural the character development and relationship between the characters felt. Realistic and natural is what I strive for. I hope you guys enjoyed it! Stay tuned for Budapest coming soon!