For a moment, her face burned hot with shame. Integrity. She felt reasonably sure that was something she'd forfeited, but more than that, Clint had called it wrong. Because he had asked for her help, once. He'd asked, and it would have been easier, even, because a big, showy wedding - the Capitol would have dined out on that for months, it would have consumed everything, it would have been the most epic distraction possible. And it might have even been a good thing for her, too, with some time and distance from it; if she was married, publicly, ostentatiously, flamboyantly married, where it was plastered all over magazines and television screens and any other surface, she would have been done with the rest of it.
Unsafe in other ways, maybe, but her body would have belonged solely to her again.
And she'd been snippy with James, then. She hadn't even considered it, it had been a knee-jerk 'no', a favor that was no less enormous than the one she'd asked him for. He had been desperate to save his best friend.
She'd been desperate to save herself.
"There you go, Barton, believing the best in me all over again," Natasha said, with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. She reached for her fork again, swirled it through the rice and brought it up to her mouth, more for something to do than actual hunger. Even rice wasn't just rice here, he'd seasoned it with something incredible, impossible not to notice.