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Nick had seen him before. The boy had come round to the apartment building once, his older brother with a vice-like grip on his upper arm literally, physically dragging him all the way up four flights of stairs to see Mrs. Sarah Rogers in 4b, who was a nurse and gave out free medical care. The kid looked about seven, with spiky blonde hair, and there was an enormous purple bruise covering about half the right side of his face, made by maybe two blows with a fist. Definitely an adult that hit him- Nick Fury knew this things.
The kid had been brave; he remembered that much. He was still crying angry, bitter tears, wiping them away with his spare hand so he could pretend like he wasn't, but he struggled silently against his brother the whole way and very resolutely kept his mouth shut and his head down when first Sarah, and then her teenage son, Steve, tried to talk to him.
Nick Fury knew these things because he was the janitor of the apartment building, as well as the owner, and he had a camera on every stairwell and corridor. He was fairly old, but carried a somewhat ageless air, and people tended to know not to mess with him by the leather coat he wore and the scars radiating out from the eyepatch over his right eye.
He also knew that Drakov's daughter, who lived in 4a, across from the Rogers's, opened the door a tiny crack and watched the boy and his brother through it. Natasha was about six, he thought, but he wasn't sure. Drakov Romanov barely spoke English, and so presumably the linguistic barrier was the reason Natasha rarely left the apartment, other than to go to school.
Her being interested in a little boy her own age was none of anybody's business, though. She was probably just looking for a friend.
But that was three years ago, and Drakov was dead. Everybody knew that: it was impossible not to, since an armed gunman broke into the building, kicked the door down, screamed what could only be curse words at Drakov, and shot him eight times before the police got there and took him out via a bullet to the brain.
The only reason Fury hadn't stopped him was the fact that Natasha, in a huge black t-shirt that was big enough to act as a dress on her slim frame and nothing else, had slipped out of her apartment and hurried like a shadow down to his door on the ground floor, bare feet padding rapidly against the floor, eyes wide and anxious but movement unrushed.
"My papa is going to die." she whispered to Nick, as he raised a curious eyebrow down at her in question. He had never heard her speak before, and while her accent was certainly Russian, it was soft; more of a lilting purr underneath her words than anything. "There is a man coming for him. I heard them, over the phone."
Her voice was urgent, and Nick glanced around for any watchers before going down on one knee, so that their eyes were level. From what he'd seen of Drakov, that someone was going to try and murder him was entirely possible.
"You go back up to your papa," whispered Nick. "I'll call the cops, alright? Quickly."
"Nyet!" She cried out, grabbing his sleeve, some desperation showing through her mask. "No, please. He is a bad man, and you couldn't stop it."
"I bet I could." he muttered, and then focused on her. "What do you want me to do?"
"Hide me." she whispered. "Please."
Without hesitating, he stood up and moved out of her way, and she ran past him and over to his recliner, curling up on it.
She said nothing, and he did nothing but reach for his shotgun and gently click the door closed.
And then two minutes later, he watched on a grainy security screen as the assassin barged into his building and stormed up the stairs, and they both flinched together as they heard the gunshots and the yelled words in Russian.
It turned out that Natasha didn't have a passport, or any other form of identity, but she was allowed to stay solely on the account that someone had literally murdered her father and if she went back to Russia, she would probably be killed too.
Nick hadn't offered to adopt her, but he had been on the verge of it. No one wanted her, apparently, and she was treated like nothing more than a blip in the system.
After about half a year of her running away from children's homes and foster parents all over the city and climbing in through Nick's window, her social worker, Coulson, who lived on the top floor, had somehow managed to gain legal guardianship.
"You pretend you're not," she had whispered, when he found her half-asleep on his armchair again, like a stray cat. "But you're a good dad. Or you would be, if you wanted to."
He reached down to lift her into his arms, trying to ignore the way she instinctively folded herself deeper into his hold, yawning and rubbing one little fist against her eyes.
"I'm not anybody's dad." he objected quietly.
"But you'd look after me," she asked, suddenly shy. "If I really need you to? Right?"
"Hey," he replied softly, rubbing a hand soothingly on her back. She was wearing hand-me-downs now, or donated clothes, but at least they fit her. "What does it look like I'm doing now? What happened this time, anyway?"
"A boy said I was stupid." Nick almost rolled his eyes, hearing the slight smile in her voice. "And I punched him in the nose."
"Now, why am I not surprised? Let me see your knuckles." he ordered, voice dry. She just lifted her curly, red head off his shoulder and proudly presented them, a little bruised and scraped but mostly fine.
"Eh, you'll be ok." he surmised, and she pouted.
"Kiss them better?"
He arched one eyebrow over his eyepatch. Nick Fury did his best to live up to his name and reputation, and he most certainly did not kiss little girls' knuckles. "No."
Her eyes narrowed and her expression hardened. "Do it."
On the other hand, there was no disobeying Natasha.
He kissed the knuckles, and then awkwardly patted them. "All better?"
She nodded, satisfied. "All better."
Coulson seemed a little cold, maybe, but he meant well, and then again so was Natasha. She was happy enough to be left to her own devices anyway, and Fury was only downstairs.
All that was two years ago, then, and she had moved around from the apartment opposite Steve Rogers and his Ma, to Fury's rooms five floors below it, to Phil Coulson's apartment, which was precisely above it. And, incidentally, in that time, Sarah Rogers's son had turned from a tiny fifteen year old with a worrying lack of meat on him and a proclivity for getting sick, to a tall, beefy seventeen year old with abs the size of a small continent.
How it had happened had been almost completely beyond Fury, since one day he had just checked the security cams and seen a kid that was maybe a foot and half taller than Steve, and about three times more muscular, only with Steve's face.
The way that Sarah had beamed at him, though, had been worth the general confusion and those few days of wondering if little Stevie had suddenly got addicted to steroids or something.
"Oh, isn't it wonderful?" she had asked him, clutching her groceries happily to her chest. "When he was born the doctors didn't think he'd even live, he was that small, and Joseph died before he was born. And I was always so worried about him, what with the asthma and the deafness and his eyesight and the pneumonia and his bones not being right and all those things with his immune system and his metabolism, and he was always so small! But one of the doctors at my hospital, a Doctor Erksine, he developed a new medicine to help him, and we finally managed to collect enough money for the operations he needed on his vision and his hearing. And he's been going to the gym and- isn't it just wonderful?!"
Nick had eventually caved and just nodded at her and agreed that 'Yeah, good for you, ma'am'. It was good, though, because Steve's favourite hobby was, apparently, picking fights with bullies. That had gone down just great with the bullies when he was essentially a blonde toothpick, as is easily imagined. Now, however, people seemed to think twice before making any nasty comments within range of his augmented hearing.
Steve's main accomplice in these heroic endeavours seemed to be some kid called Bucky, who Fury knew lived across the road in a house with at least ninety percent of his extended family. He knew this because when Steve was ten he'd found him crying uncontrollably on the stairs, sobbing that he'd killed Bucky and it was all his fault and Bucky was dead, and Nick had stayed with him until he eventually choked out that he had run out in the road and Bucky had followed him, and been mowed down by a car. They had let Steve's mom in the ambulance, since Bucky's was still working and she was a nurse, but not him.
Bucky, it had eventually come to light, was not, in fact, dead, but had lost an arm and was currently in a medically induced coma. Two weeks later, he was let out of hospital, and showed a teary-eyed Steve his brand new metal arm, grinning shakily.
"See?" he said, concentrating really hard and getting the fingers to wiggle, slowly. "This really rich kid was in the bed next to me, and his dad owns this huge weapons company, and the guy saw me and felt bad and built me this arm! Look how cool it is."
And that was that. Anyone laughing at the kid with the metal arm either got promptly punched with said metal arm or a face full of Steve Rogers and his righteous fury, which had been a thing to contend with even before he had grown into it.
Also, Fury had seen them kissing in the stairwell once or twice. Not that it was any of his business.
In the time that it took Steve Rogers to grow from a scrawny dandelion into a sunflower, the apartment that had been Drakov and Natasha's was sold to a Norwegian family who had promised very earnestly that they weren't any trouble, or in any trouble, and the reason they had decided to move to America was solely business.
"Better for finances." barked the father, a large man with a white beard and disturbingly golden yellow eyes. Or rather, one of them.
"Shrapnel." he explained briefly, gesturing to the eyepatch that both he and Fury wore. "You?"
"A guy with a grudge and a knife. He's dead now, though."
Interestingly, the lot of them all had different last names. Odin, their father, went by Allfather - Means more or less the same thing as my Scandinavian name, he had explained dismissively, and it's easier to spell - and his wife Freya had taken his name too.
"I am Thor." an excitable-looking young man with a deep, booming voice had introduced himself. "Thor Odinson."
It was easy enough to guess where that name had come from, and his easy good looks and long blonde hair very clearly matched those of his parents, even if he did look like he spent a copious amount of time in the gym.
His brother, not so much. The boy was about twelve, with shoulder length black hair and a perpetually sarcastic expression. His face was pale and he was, apparently, determined to wear only black.
"My name's Loki." he said quickly, his English far clearer and less strained than the rest of his family's, even if it was spoken quietly. "Loki Laufeyson."
"He's adopted." explained Freya, with a simpering little smile, and Nick had just raised an eyebrow and handed them the keys to their apartment.
Sometimes it was best not to ask, even if Loki's constant getting arrested and he and his brother's arguments kept the rest of the building up from time to time.
It was on one of those nights, when Thor and Loki's screaming at each other in Norwegian - or whatever goddamn language they spoke - was keeping Fury awake, that he saw the kid again, the one whose brother had dragged him to see Sarah Rogers.
Natasha was eight now, Steve was seventeen, Thor was sixteen, Loki was thirteen and the kid had to be... nine? If Fury's math was correct, anyway.
He appeared just outside the building, barely visible on the camera in the dark, and glanced around anxiously. There was no audio, and so Nick didn't actually hear anything, but the boy startled violently as though he had seen or heard something and looked frantically for somewhere to hide, settling eventually on just below the empty dumpster in the alley next to the apartment building.
Nick winced in sympathy for him as he ran under a streetlight and the old man could properly see his face as it was illuminated; just as badly beat up as last time he came around, if not worse.
For a moment, he wondered if he should do something. It was early December, and it was cold, and the kid was only wearing a hoodie.
But he didn't know the kid, or what he was running from, and Loki and Thor had stopped yelling, and so he fell asleep quickly in his chair.
He woke up a few hours later, and gazed with a bleary eye at the screens. Why were they all white and blurry?
Oh shit. It was snowing, and he could still faintly see the outline of the kid, in that same purple hoodie, still huddled in a ball outside.
Nick swore under his breath and shrugged on his coat, hurrying outside.
"Kid!" he yelled, eyes narrowed against the wind and the snow. "Little kid! Can you hear me?"
There was no reply and he forged forwards, focusing on the little dark blur against the white until it resolved itself into a boy, folded tightly in on himself and shuddering with his eyes screwed shut.
Fury hesitated, and then reached down to scoop him up. It was lucky he did, too, because the kid was so far gone that he didn't actually respond. He carried him inside and wondered if he should call Sarah and get her to have a look at him, but after a few minutes of being warm and dry, the boy woke up. He looked around quickly and focused on Nick, but stayed silent.
"It's ok." said Nick reassuringly. "I just didn't want you getting hurt out there."
Something twitched unhappily in the corner of the boy's mouth, and he swallowed hard.
"M'Clint." He had a slight accent, from considerably further south than New York, but his words were unsteady and he glanced anxiously at Fury as he said them, only continuing once he got a little nod as confirmation that he had been heard. "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm deaf."
Oh. That made a lot of sense, really, explaining why he hadn't reacted to being asked questions, his uncertainty with speaking, the way he had stayed silent when Sarah and Steve tried to talk to him.
Fury paused, and then pointed to his own cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, where on the boy's own face there were cuts and bruises.
"My brother Barney beat me up." admitted Clint shyly, the volume of his voice still rising and falling. "I ran away."
Nick couldn't think of a sign for 'parents?', and he didn't speak any forms of sign language - and there were so many that who the hell knew which sort this kid spoke - and so he wrote the word quickly on his hand with a biro, unable to find a piece of paper.
Clint, who had huddled into the exact same corner as Natasha did, knees tucked under his chin, shook his head.
"Haven't got none. Barney looks after me."
An impulse decision occurred to Nick, and he almost brushed it aside. But then all the last couple of years of watching Steve, hiding and looking after Natasha, wishing he could help Loki flashed before his eyes, and if by the last time Clint had come by was anything to go by he couldn't just stay with Barney, and he sighed, writing those fateful words across his arm for the kid to see.
You can stay with me.