Chapter Text
Natasha doesn’t drink coffee when she’s not on a mission. It’s a disagreement they’ve always had: Clint trying to wordlessly push her coffee in the mornings before he’s fully functioning, trying to argue with lazy gestures and even lazier sign language that it’s just better than tea. It’s not that she doesn’t understand the gestures or the sign language (she understands both, no matter how lazy or poorly executed), but it’s a stance she apparently refuses to give on. Which is fine, but it also means that Clint feels obligated to make her tea whenever she comes over in the mornings. Because he is a good host and she is a good friend. If she were to switch to coffee, it’d be easy -- job already done, because he almost always has coffee, even if it needs a quick trip to the microwave.
But no, Nat has to be complicated. Like every other woman in his life. No, scratch that. Like -- every other person in his life, actually, gender notwithstanding. It’s apparently just a prerequisite to knowing him.
❏ complicated
❏ out to make clint barton’s life way weirder than it already is
❏ bonus if complications are inconsistent and untrackable
“Earl Grey, chamomile, or mint?” He can feel the vibrations of his own voice echo around him in the cabinet, his face all the way inside the wooden box. It smells like pine and mint -- which is pretty great, but coffee is still better. Apparently, Natasha had, at some point, reclaimed one of the cupboards in his kitchen as her own, and that’s what he’s currently exploring.
She doesn’t even look up from her perusing of her magazine. “Orange ginger green. It’s in the back.”
“Oh, the back.” He grumbles, stacking boxes and pushing stray tea tins and boxes aside to dig for orange ginger green.
“In the back, she says,” like it’s her kitchen and not his. But that doesn’t stop him from finding it and making her a damn fine cup of tea, if he does say so himself. Once they’re both sitting on the couch, hands around their respective warm beverages, he wedges his toes under her thigh. Because his feet are cold and not because he needs the human-contact.
Natasha, because she doesn’t believe in sugar coating anything or softening blows, just levels him with a look. “I had lunch with Kate yesterday.”
“Neat. Where’d you go?” He knows where Natasha is heading, but he delays it anyway. Because he always prefers to slowly inch band-aids off opposed to just tearing them, except when it comes to actual bandages. Those, he’d prefer to just rip clean off with no preamble.
“Saraghina.” Romanoff’s tongue can make any word in any accent sound fluent and beautiful, even a mouthful of curses. Clint has no idea if the name of the restaurant is even a word, much less what language it’s in, but it sounds like a place he wants to go when she says it.. “The garden in the back is lovely, I recommend their paninis.”
“Yeah? That’s neat. Their pizza good? I heard it was.”
She just smiles, a small and perfect tilt to the corner of her mouth, when he wriggles his toes deeper under her thigh. Indulges him the littlest bit. “Very.”
The ominous weight dangles above his head, precariously, no matter how little he has to lose at this point --
(he has nothing -- nothing left to lose).
“Oh?” He can feel the coffee getting more bitter in his mouth as the seconds tick down. He swallows. Takes another sip.
Natasha just hums into her coffee as Lucky forces his way between the two of them. The dog settles between Clint’s legs and the couch, a reassuring warmth and a steady pressure. His de-railing conversation with Kate echoes in his head, even left as unfinished as it had been. He had been ignoring it. It was a particular talent of Clint’s to ignore problems until they went away (it worked, sometimes). And his solution, honestly, had been the exact same with this -- whole thing. He had been planning to simply ignore everything until it went away. Perfect.
Unfortunately, Natasha knows him better than that. “She seemed to think you were planning on forgetting the wedding.” Well. That’s -- ugh. Evidently, Natasha and Kate both know him better than that.
A groan. “Can’t I?”
Natasha runs a hand carefully over Lucky’s head, once. The movement is precise and gentle, and with it it would be easy to tell that she is a cat owner, if Clint wasn’t already well aware. After all, he gets to cat-sit when she’s away.
“Not really, no.” She finishes her tea and stretches fluidly to set the mug on the coffee-table where it can sit amongst empty beer-bottles. He isn’t sure when he last ate, but he definitely had enough calories in beer last night to make up for any missed-meals. That was how that worked, right? Natasha just levels him with a look: “He’s your best friend. You can’t forget his wedding.”
Clint frowns. “Okay, no. That’s not fair. You’re my best friend.” But, Natasha’s glare gets him to keep talking, to elaborate, “Fine. I mean, he was. I guess. But he -- I -- we don’t talk that much anymore, really. He’s been busy with his whole,” he waves his hand in the air, trying to encompass the rebuilding of SHIELD with one singular gesture, “-- thing. And I’ve been busy too. With...life.” He pats Lucky, and adds, for good measure, “And a dog.”
“There was a time he would have asked you to be best man.”
And that, right there -- that stings. Because while Clint was acutely aware of that as a possibility, it had never particularly solidified as fact in his head. Sure, Coulson could have chosen him to be best man at his hypothetical wedding, but he also could have chosen Fury. Or Hill. Or Sitwell. But -- two of those people are dead and one of them is currently pushing papers for Stark (or something probably much more deadly -- Clint doesn’t keep up), so --.
“Who is his best man?” The question slips from his mouth before he can really think about it. Futz.
Natasha probably feels like she won something from that, knowing her. And she did, kinda. “I think they’re ‘forgoing tradition’, from what he’s said. Just the two of them and an officiant. The important people will be in attendance.” He gets another look, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be there. Natasha and Kate and anyone else, including Coulson himself, can pester him all he likes, but he’s pretty sure that he has no real plans of attending.
the thought,
of standing there
watching coulson and audrey hold hands and connect
& promise their lives, their everything, to one another --
--
yeah, no.
He’s definitely not attending.
Natasha lets it drop, if only because Clint probably looks more pained than he should by any right. This isn’t his tragedy. It was just a stupid crush that escalated, that turned from infatuation to something far more damaging and debilitating. It was childish and wrong -- he knew that from the very beginning. Coulson was never anything but good to Barton, and this was how Clint repaid him? Yeah, no. He was going to ignore it and it was going to go away and then, maybe sometime after Coulson and Audrey got married, he’d stop by for coffee and wish them the very best.
But now? He couldn’t face Coulson. Not like this.
Natasha leaves after depositing some sort of food in front of him. Stew, maybe. Or goulash. He doesn’t actually know what goulash is, but he’s also sure it’s the kind of thing Nat could probably pull out of thin air.Still, he has no idea where it came from -- he could’ve sworn his cupboards were empty save for coffee, tea (apparently lots of it), and dog food. Comfortingly enough, it smells nothing like any of those things. Once he’s done (he does eat it, if only because it’s something to do, and Natasha unspokenly told him to), he goes to put the bowl in the sink. Under it, is a little scrap of paper.
All it says, in Natasha’s perfect handwriting, is:
Consider it.
When Clint comes in from walking Lucky around the neighborhood the next day, there is a Russian sitting on his couch casually reading Cosmopolitan -- and it’s not Natasha.
“Uh, hi?”
Lucky has zero of the same reservations as Clint, and instead of offering an awkward greeting, he: bounds over to the couch, enthusiastically throws himself onto the ex-assassin’s lap, and slobbers all over his face. Clint can only mumble an,“Aw, dog --” in response.
Barnes just smiles, or probably tries to. He still looks a little pained and like he’s trying too hard, but it’s a work in progress. They all are, anyway, so it’s nothing Clint would ever hold against him. “No, no it’s fine. He’s a good dog.” And James is occupied with greeting a dog for a while, so Clint makes coffee, because that’s what he’s good at and he has no idea what else to do. Barton has normalized to a lot of strange things --
- bi-weekly alien attacks on manhattan island
- the ability to borrow tony stark’s various and sundry expensive cars
- free-falling off national monuments with faith that he will be caught by a flying norse god
- having small children and grown adults ask him for autographs everytime he buys groceries
- running (sometimes literally) into versions of himself every halloween
-- but there are apparently still some things that take him by surprise. One of those is coming into his apartment and finding the Winter Soldier relaxing on his couch with not a Natasha Romanoff in sight.
Clint feels thrown for a loop.
Barnes just smiles.
The goddamn Winter Soldier procures a treat (is that one of Clint’s doggie treats??) from his pocket and Lucky happily goes to town on his fist, all gentle teeth and playful slobber. “Morning, Barton.” And the stare of another sniper should never be so off-putting.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” They’re not really friends -- not like that, anyway. They’re friends-by-association. They’re both close to Natasha and they get along because of it, but the Black Widow has always been the buffer between them. In the field they work just fine -- two snipers on opposite sides of a situation, working for a common goal. They coordinate on the comms, occasionally bicker back and forth, but once they’re out of the situation, they’re back to people who share a good friend and that’s it. And honestly, that relationship had been working just fine for Clint up until now.
It’s not exactly a smirk that Barnes gives him, but it’s close enough for government work. “I dropped by to see the dog. You were out.”
And that’s -- even if it’s a lie, it’s more comforting than thinking that Natasha or Kate has Barnes spying on him covertly. Or overtly, he’s not even sure, considering the man is curled up on the couch with Clint’s dog. He doesn’t know what to say, but a quick visual inventory of the situation has him talking anyway, “Are you wearing an Iron Man shirt?” The blue symbol in the middle of the shirt is less garish than some of the gold and red versions he’s seen, but it’s still pretty obvious.
The Russian cringes, looking down and making a face at his own wardrobe choices. “It’s Stark’s idea of a joke, apparently. It was either this or a Captain America shirt, and --” He makes another face and then just shrugs. “Lesser of two evils.”
Lesser of two evils isn’t exactly the first thing Clint thought would come out of James Barnes mouth in relation to Tony Stark vs. Steve Rogers, but who is he to read too much into that? He finds himself settling into a chair adjacent to Barnes, curling his legs over the side, coffee balanced precariously (but expertly) on his knee. “You need to go shopping.” It’s probably the most obvious thing Clint’s ever said, and also the most useless. He can practically hear Katie Kate in his head: yes, the man obviously needs to go shopping, thanks Hawkeye. Well spotted.
That sparks a bark of a laugh out of Barnes, and from the look on the man’s face, he expected it about as much as Barton -- which is to say: not at all. “Every time I try, the shirts I order end up with something stupid on them. Last time, they said, ‘If lost, please return to Steve Rogers,’ punctuated with a shield. That was ten shirts, all with the same thing.” He just shrugs, “Honestly, I prefer the touristy fan shirts over that.” Barnes thumbs at the fake glow of the arc reactor on his shirt before he continues again. “And this glows in the dark.”
“I can’t argue glow in the dark anything.” It’s easy, surprisingly so, just sitting there curled up in a chair and half-talking to a man he doesn’t really know. The pauses between words are also surprisingly easy. Comforting, almost. He waits for a few minutes before breaking the silence again: “There’s coffee if you want it. In the kitchen.”
Clint watches as Barnes puts his forehead against Lucky’s head and breathes for a couple seconds. It’s the most relaxed he’s seen the other man since he walked in. “Yeah, alright. In a little while.”
Simple.
Easy.