Archive of Our Own

Jessica Jones has gone through most of her life with zero interest in broadening her social circle. When she thinks too much about the fact that it happened entirely without her permission, it really pisses her off.

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot else to do but think, not on a line making roughly eighteen stops between Hell’s Kitchen and Bed-Stuy. She glowers out the filthy window of a car that reeks of week-old urine and tries to remind herself that this was her idea. She’s the one who swiped her MetroCard, shoved through the turnstile, and got onboard in the first place.

Nobody invited her to come here.

It’s not like they all took some kind of sacred oath to always be there for each other in times of need like it’s the end of a kids’ movie about an underdog sports team or some shit, but – it was implied, right? They beat the shit out of a bunch of ninjas and saved the city from blowing up along with the rest of Midland Circle, and since they all live within a roughly-twenty mile radius of each other, that means it’s sort of implied that it’s probably okay to –

Do this.

Right?

It’s fucking embarrassing to be a grown ass woman and realize she has no idea how friendship works. If friendship is even the right – fuck, whatever, whatever.

By the time Jessica reaches the place from her subway stop – a squat brown building with a clean-swept front stoop and a front-facing fire escape – she’s talked herself into and back out of following through at least three times.

Their names are printed neatly in the intercom box, which sort of surprises her; she’d have expected at least a little stealth, but then again, what’s the world gonna throw at these two that they can’t take on?

It makes her like them a little more. There’s a certain come at us, motherfuckers implicit in that neatly printed ‘barton/romanoff’.

Jessica presses the buzzer. A few minutes later, a window opens overhead, and when she looks up, a familiar redhead is leaning out from the top floor.

“Thank God,” Natasha says. “You’re taking food home with you.”

Clint and Natasha’s place – at least the first floor of it, anyway, Jess can see stairs leading to a loft – is an eclectic mix of about what she’d have expected and a lot she didn’t. It’s big, for a New York apartment. The living room is a veritable cornucopia of weaponry, mountains of sleek computer equipment, cables, zip-ties and loose arrows. An empty pizza box, crumpled napkins, and a few old beer bottles litter the coffee table, and the huge chunks missing from the walls are obvious bullet holes.

They also have funky red-and-purple striped curtains, hundreds of books filling the built-in shelves, and a couple pieces of professionally framed art hung around the room. There’s a comfortable, squishy couch with a blanket thrown on the back, and a soft, brightly colored rag rug with a one-eyed golden labrador asleep on top of it.

The golden lab is probably the weirdest part. Jess is a fucking PI - a really good one – and she would never have them pegged as dog owners.

It’s a strange mesh of aesthetics, chrome and comfort, organized chaos. It works in a way it shouldn’t.

Natasha brings her a whiskey in a heavy, carved glass tumbler that feels expensive in Jessica’s hands. “I meant what I said about the food,” she says, nodding towards the kitchen. Even from the couch, Jess can see that she’s not kidding – every flat surface is stacked with casserole dishes and pie tins and unidentifiable things in Tupperware containers. “One neighbor – one – found out we were down in Midland Circle, spread the word, and it got the gravy train rolling all over again. I had only just convinced them we wouldn’t starve if they didn’t feed us.”

“You guys bought this building when?” Jessica asks, even though she already knows. She read up on these two the same as she did everyone else.

Their greatest hits were considerably longer than Matt and Danny’s combined.

“Five years back,” Natasha says, “and since then, we’ve bought actual groceries maybe ten times total. The tenants love Clint - he’s over in 12 fixing the lights right now. If he comes back with another plate of pan dulce, I’m taking the dog and moving to Portugal.”

The dog in question lifts his head for a second, as if to argue, then decides it’s not worth it and goes back to sleep.

“God, you guys are like – real people,” Jessica says. It comes out mildly disgusted.

Natasha shrugs, not offended, and this, Jessica knows, is the reason she came here – instead of going to Luke, not Danny or Claire. Natasha lets people be who they are. It’s like she’s never heard of judging as a hobby. She regards everyone around her with the same unflappable acceptance, like no one could ever shock her or surprise her or do something that would get her to even quirk an eyebrow, and for some fucking reason, it makes Jessica want to be a person who holds her respect.

Fucking annoying. But if Jess knows nothing else about herself, she knows she’s clearly somebody who doesn’t want things that come easy. If she wanted easy, she’d aim for Danny’s respect. She could secure that by dangling a box of ice cream sandwiches in front of him, he’s basically a child.

And then there’s the reason that makes this feel ten times more fucking uncomfortable than it has to.

Trish has a point, is the thing. Kilgrave’s dead. Deeply dead. When Jess has trouble unclenching, she replays the sense memory of his neck snapping under her hands. Sometimes she thinks she could get off on the satisfying crack of his spine.

But now that he’s gone, now that it’s done and over and bloating in the ground, Jessica still hasn’t figured out how to live in the world like a human fucking being. It helped, but it didn’t flip a switch and make her less fucked up. It didn’t undo the last few years.

It didn’t end it.

Closure, as a concept, is a load of shit. Stuff just becomes part of you, and you figure out how to live with it or you don’t. Some days will always be harder than others. That’ll still be what it boils down to, in the end, and it’s taken a couple months, but after everything that went down at Midland Circle, after Trish nudging and Malcolm prodding and Luke’s low voice promising her that she has friends, she finally feels like she might be ready to – try. Or something.

So she’s trying.

But she’s also herself, and herself sort of hates most people.

Jess doesn’t hate Natasha. It would have been really hard to hate Natasha after she’d watched her kill four people with a single plastic chopstick in under two minutes that first night in the Chinese place.

She also likes how mean Natasha can be and how she uses a dry enough voice that it doesn’t occur to her target that she’s been mean until it’s way too late to try for a comeback. She likes the way Natasha and Clint are pretty fucking clearly a couple without being showy or annoying about it; neither one of them had, at any point, been even remotely panicky about the other one’s safety, and there had been some close shaves. She likes how Natasha takes anything, no matter how weird it is, in stride.

Which makes sense; there was a whole fucking lot to cover about both of them, so much that Jess still hasn’t had a chance to go through all of it, but she’s got the highlights: according to the SHIELD records dumped all over the internet, the two of them were on the ground with the crew that went on to become the Avengers during the Incident in 2012.

Maybe after you’ve fought off a literal alien invasion next to a giant angry green guy, there’s not a lot left worth blinking at.

Their files went a little murky after that; Agent Romanoff resigned from SHIELD about a month later, and Agent Barton left alongside her. They dropped off the grid awhile before finally surfacing in Bed-Stuy, where they bought the building they’re still in out from under the mob, assumed landlord duties, and have generally lived like fine upstanding civilians ever since. When they aren’t slaughtering sex-traffickers, or starting shit with the Russian mafia, or disappearing for a couple weeks to presumably do things along those lines; disappearances that always seem to immediately coincide with paparazzi photos catching Tony Stark slumming in Brooklyn a day or so prior.

The point is that Natasha’s the first person Jess has met in a long time who she thinks might –

Who won’t be offended by Jess being Jess. Who is currently alive. Who can understand things. Who isn’t Malcolm or Trish, people she’d cheerfully kill for and who… get it, but can’t entirely get it. Who she could, maybe, relax around.

Not that she could say any of this directly.

Now that she’s there, though, her hypothesis that Natasha is someone who could get her seems like it’s holding up, because she doesn’t ask Jessica what she’s doing here even once. For the better part of a few hours, they just hang on the couch and shoot the shit, like this is a thing Jess has any experience in doing with someone besides Trish. When Nat gets up to grab Jess another whiskey, she even decides to join her, pouring straight vodka into a highball glass for herself.

They talk around Matt, lightly, because it’s still too close, and make fun of Danny because he’s such a fucking easy target. Jessica tells her a little bit about Trish’s show when she asks, and about the time she threw that asshole through the plate-glass window of her office. How Malcolm’s got her taking cases again, but nothing’s out of the ordinary yet – cheating spouses pay the bills that need paying if she’s going to get her business back on its feet.

Natasha’s in the middle of reciprocating with an amazing story about her time undercover as Tony Stark’s personal assistant – it involves the phrase leopard-print panties and there’s Wild Turkey burning Jess’s sinuses with laughter when Clint lets himself in. He’s wearing the world’s most giant tool belt, pulling his jeans low on his hips, and a shirt that probably used to be white at some point.

“Hey, good to see you, Jones,” he says, sounding like he means it. He comes to the couch and bends to kiss Natasha’s cheek; she tilts it up for him in the same movement, smiling. They’re so easy together. It’s like they hatched out of the same pod.

“Nice toolbelt,” Jessica snarks. “Couldn’t find anything just a little bigger?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “He’s very proud of the belt, don’t make him cry,” she says. “No pan dulce?”

“Convinced Gloria to bring it to the roof instead,” Clint says. “We’ve got hamburger buns, right?”

“In what world have we ever bought hamburger buns?”

“We gotta bring something.”

“Are you serious?” Natasha demands. “Barton, look at the backlog in that kitchen. Grab anything in a casserole dish. That’s our contribution.”

“We can’t regift,” he says, he’s talking to a crazy person. “Damn. I was so sure – hey, do we have hot dogs?”

“In the last month, the only thing you’ve brought home from the bodega is a pack of coffee filters,” Natasha says. “If you tell me to go get something when we have three weeks of meals filling every inch of kitchen space, I will kill you in your sleep.”

“You’re not prepared for your sex life to suffer that kind of fallout,” Clint tells her, grinning. “I’m gonna go shower. Jones – hang around for dinner, yeah?”

He disappears up the stairs, the dog bounding after him. Jessica looks at Natasha. “What’s dinner?”

“Most of the building does a potluck thing on the roof a couple times a week,” Natasha says. “It’s low-key. There’s usually barbecued ribs, if you’re interested.”

“I probably should…” Jessica says, nodding towards the door. This went okay, it did – better than okay, even – but she doesn’t want to push herself too far on the test flight. “With the paper plates, and the small talk, you know, I’m not really very….”

Natasha nods, clearly understanding what’s not being said, and Jess feels a mild wash of relief. “I still meant what I said when you got here – hope you like Jamaican meat pies,” Natasha tells her. “You’re taking six of them home.”

It’s one of those nights when it’s impossible for Natasha to fall asleep.

She gives up after awhile of staring at the ceiling and sits with her back against the headboard, mentally taking stock of the room. A couple books and her laptop on the floor next to the bed, guns under the iron bedframe, knives behind the headboard on a magnetized runner. There’s a framed picture of Clint’s kids at a carnival on the nightstand – Laura and her wife sent it for Christmas. Lucky’s curled up on top of her feet, because Clint never had the heart to train him out of sleeping in their bed.

And then there’s Clint.

He’s asleep on his stomach with his face nestled against her hip and a warm hand tucked under her thigh. He sleeps without a shirt; even with the light off, she can see the bruises left from all their bouts with the Hand are finally yellowing. There’s a smudge of charcoal grime on the side of his neck from the rooftop tonight. She reaches out and rubs at it with her thumb, gently.

She likes to do this when she can’t sleep: take inventory. It’s been years and for all she’s grown used to their life – the shared bed and the rooftop potlucks, a life where her ledger can exist alongside dog ownership and a consistent home base – she doesn’t want to take any of it for granted.

She wants to be someone who knows that she’s happy. She doesn’t want to find herself thinking why didn’t I understand while it was happening? if it ever vanishes.

This was not always a given, this life they’re living. Natasha believes in throwing it some acknowledgment and appreciation from time to time.

Still: she can’t sleep, and finally she leans over to shake him. Gently at first, then with insistence. “Clint. Clint.”

He makes a garbled, unhappy noise and rubs his face against her hip. “Use my body however, just don’t wake me to do it,” he mumbles. Natasha reaches over to snap on the bedside lamp and he whines as though she’s physically stabbed him. He’d probably be much less of a baby about getting stabbed. “Why.”

“Are you up?” she asks. It’s an extremely rhetorical question.

“If the building isn’t actively under attack, this is so fucking mean,” he moans, but he finally squints up at her, mouth slack and brow furrowed.

“I like Jessica,” she announces.

Clint closes his eyes again, this time in defeated acceptance that going back to sleep isn’t in his immediate future, and pulls himself to a sitting position. “I like her, too,” he says around a yawn. “I also like Luke. And Claire. And Misty. Danny, I’d give about a B minus. What’s on your mind here, sweetheart?”

She’s not sure how to articulate it. They’ve been solely a two-person team for years, minus occasionally lending a hand when Tony’s crew has needed a little extra firepower in the wake of SHIELD’s collapse, but she knows that’s never really been something they intended. It was natural fallout that she probably ought to have seen coming.

At the time, though, there was so much to deal with: the Incident. Their loss of faith in the organization they’d given so much to after everything Stark and Rogers discovered on the helicarrier. The debate if they might be better off finally mapping an exit strategy. Clint’s comedown from Loki’s hold and how it had thrown everything in his life into painful perspective. His subsequent divorce from Laura. The lightning-fast speed at which all those things had hit, some of them simultaneously – so she can forgive herself, really, for not realizing at the time that they were binding themselves even more tightly together, to the point of being exclusionary.

They had grabbed hands and leapt off a cliff, and with all of it in the rearview mirror, there is not a single thing she would want them to do differently.

She loves where they’ve ended up, and Natasha was never a person who expected to hold a life she could love. She didn’t think a compromise between domesticity and the world they inhabit was a thing that could exist: it was one or the other, and she’d chosen her way a long time ago.

She was never so glad to be wrong. She doesn’t want the essential things here to change.

But it had been good to work as part of a unit again. Losing Matt threw a somber pall on things in the immediate wake of it, took all the shine out of a hard-fought victory, but – ultimately. Natasha had liked it, the experience of it. Responded to it.

If a job landed in front of her tomorrow that she couldn’t tackle on her own, she’d have no problem calling Jess or Luke to see if they wanted to lend a hand. It would be easy. She knows how to work with people, and she knows how to be with Clint.

It’s the rest of it where she gets tripped up.

“Is it my turn to invite her to do something?” she asks uncertainly.

Clint understands; she can see the moment he gets it, and she relaxes against his chest – comforted that so many years into this, he doesn’t need her to explain what she means. It’s nice to feel safe asking stupid questions. “Okay, yeah. I see your dilemma. You guys aren’t really the get-together-for-a-round-of-racquetball type. Bet she hates brunch, too.”

“She likes drinking and hitting uncooperative people,” Natasha says. “I like those things. Is there a men’s rights activist theme bar we could crash?”

“God, if you find one, promise me you’ll take video of what you do to it,” he says. “Look – start small. Send her a text in a day or so, something funny. See if hanging out again comes up naturally. You’re a good texter.”

“I use too many emojis. Some people hate that. She’s definitely one of them.”

“Well, she should know what’s inside the package before she signs for it,” Clint points out, and kisses her temple.

When they get together again two weeks later after a long – and admittedly fun – series of texts, the first question Jessica asks is “What the fuck is up with all the emojis? You seemed so normal.”

“I don’t have a lot of creative outlets,” Natasha says, scanning the street from behind her binoculars. “If we’re gonna be friends, you’re gonna need to tolerate my one form of artistic expression.”

Jess snorts. “Who says I want to be friends, Romanoff?”

Natasha smiles to herself and lifts a hand to adjust the focus. “Workplace proximity associates?”

“Much better.” Jess is quiet for a minute, knocking the heel of one motorcycle boot against the fire escape. They’re perched a few stories up, a clear eyeline and unobstructed view of the unit they’re here to scope out. Happy coincidence that their cases overlapped, really; the husband came to Jess asking for proof that his wife had been fucking around on him in the same day the wife came to Natasha (sent her way by Aimee in apartment 6, whose bathtub Clint spent a joyful day recaulking a few months back.)

She was a tiny, trembling Russian woman still fumbling towards learning English. Scared out of her mind, brought over as a mail-order bride to a terrifying husband who wasn’t shy about expressing dissatisfaction with his fists when he felt like he wasn’t getting what he’d paid for. Too afraid to go to the police, too afraid to leave when he could so easily come after her.

Jess had smelled something off about the case to begin with and this sort of thing was Natasha’s specialty. It had been a neat intersection of interests.

“I don’t know how I get talked into this shit,” Jess mutters.

Natasha sets the binoculars down; the street below them is pretty quiet, they’ll be able to tell if he approaches the building. “I didn’t think I did a lot of fast talking.”

“You didn’t. Just – say we put the fear of God in this fucker’s heart. What then? Okay, he’s out of her life, obviously that’s better, it’s just. It’s a long road back, that’s all I’m saying. We can’t do anything about the rest of the shit she’s gonna be coming up against.”

“She takes courses at the community college.”

“I did actually do the homework, Romanoff.”

“I didn’t doubt it,” Natasha says, easily. This isn’t about the case, not really; as much as she’s sure Jessica’s read up on herself and Clint, they’d read up on her, too. “I’m saying that her English isn’t great, but she still enrolled in that class. She met Aimee, who clearly cared enough to intervene. She stayed with him longer than she should have because she’s terrified, but even if she can’t do this part on her own, she’s still – clearly – pretty tough. Not afraid of hard work. She’ll do okay on the other side of this. I think it’s fine if sometimes, you need somebody else to do some heavy lifting for you.”

“You’ve got a future in psychotherapy ahead of you if this vigilante stuff doesn’t pan out,” Jessica snarks, but when Natasha turns to look at her, some of the tightness has eased from her face.

“Couldn’t do it. I don’t like waking up before ten.”

“Makes two of us. Trish keeps trying to get me into her six AM spin class, she’s a monster.”

“Our workplace proximity associateship will never involve spinning,” Natasha says. A cab pulls up below them, and a man in a sharply cut black suit steps out, walking towards the building they’ve been scouting. “Looks like our guy’s home.”

Jessica cracks her knuckles and grins. There’s something knifelike in that smile; Natasha recognizes the edge of it in herself. “Let’s go skirt some laws.”

Unbelievably, they do actually end up going spinning with Trish, who somehow talked them both into submission in her relentless Trish way. She promised she would schedule it at a normal hour and insisted on paying for all three of them. Which is ultimately a good thing, because when Jess was informed that there would be additional charges for a locker rental and the stupid clip-in shoes – which it is apparently actually impossible to attend a class without, which makes it highway robbery – she might have otherwise destroyed the entire reception area on principle.

Plus, she needed the locker. Where else was she supposed to leave her post-workout flask?

There are a dozen silver bowls of lilies all over the place, presumably there to join forces with the heavy orange-scented cleaning products in combined effort to dilute the thick smell of sweat. Everyone around her is lithe and athletic and well-hydrated and blonde. Even if they’re not actual blondes; this place just has an intrinsic aura of blondeness.

She’s hungover as shit and definitely didn’t get enough sleep. Her pores feel boozy, her skin greasy. The elastic is peeling out of her ancient sports bra under her holey shirt, her mouth tastes like a skunk died in it even after two hits of complimentary cucumber water, and when she slinks into the dark, frigid room with all the stationary bikes, the instructor announces that the theme of today’s ride (Christ, these things have themes?) is The Hamilton Mixtape and he has a box of glowstick necklaces for anyone who wants one.

Jess stares at Trish with complete betrayal.

“It was really hard to reserve three bikes together for this,” Trish says defensively. “The Hamilton classes are their most popular booking.”

“I honestly wish you were dead,” Jess tells her. Trish rolls her eyes as she climbs onto her bike and clips in. Her bright purple sports bra doesn’t have so much as a single fraying thread.

Natasha is on Trish’s other side, pulling her hair into a high, tight bun with an expression that exactly mirrors the way she looked when they rode the elevator beneath Midland Circle to square off against the Hand, Matt’s old flame, and a fuckload of explosives all at the same time.

“What are you worried about?” Jess says. “You’re in great shape. You could crack a watermelon open with your thighs.”

“I’m not a battery-powered murderbot, you know,” Natasha says. “I am actually very capable of suffering.”

“Ladies!” the instructor calls out, clapping his hands. “One minute to go! Unlike Aaron Burr, Sir, you all know I’m not gonna Wait For It! We’re digging in Non-Stop until those leg muscles Burn!”

The class lets out a deafening “WOOOOO!!!!” in affirmation.

Trish refuses to turn her head even one inch to the side. She must be able to physically feel the way Jess is scowling at her as she gets on the fucking bike.

At the very least, Trish has the decency to spring for lunch after an hour of torture.

“For the last time,” she insists, “they didn’t specify how many puns the instructor would make when I was booking the class.”

“Ignorance doesn’t absolve you in a court of law,” Jessica informs her. “I can call Hogarth to back me up on that one.”

She takes an enormous, defiant bite of her burger. For twenty-six dollars, she was expecting this to be the best goddamn burger she’s ever had in her life. It’s not bad; there’s a fried egg with a gooey, runny yolk on it, and some kind of tangy cheese. Shake Shack, however, is also exactly this good, and cheap, and they’ve even got a liquor license now.

Trish sluices more champagne into her mimosa glass, then refills Natasha’s as an afterthought. “Did you hate it as much as Jess did or are you slightly more polite?”

Natasha dabs at her mouth with her white cloth napkin, very ladylike; Jess has the sneaking suspicion that she’s trying to hide a smile. “I’m not taking sides. I’m Switzerland.”

“That means she hates you in ways the English language can’t express,” Jess informs Trish, who heaves an enormous sigh.

“Do you have any siblings?” Trish asks Natasha. “I hope you don’t, for your sake. You see what I have to put up with.”

“No siblings,” Natasha says. “No other family, just the dog and the husband. The dog’s only slightly less argumentative than the husband.”

“Jess didn’t mention you were married!” Trish says, sounding deeply fascinated with a totally mundane fact; it’s her radio voice, when she’s trying to warm up a guest reluctant to spill the goods. When she wants a juicy, exclusive interview and wants it bad. “I wouldn’t have guessed. I didn’t see a ring, so – ”

“Jess didn’t think it was relevant, so Jess never asked for a full marital status briefing,” Jessica interjects, trying to telegraph to Trish with her eyes - she’s private. Don’t pry. Don’t TrishTalk her into submission.

Natasha doesn’t seem like she minds, though. She takes a sip of her coffee and holds out her hand for inspection. There’s a tiny black arrow tattooed on the side of her fourth finger, beneath the knuckle and easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. “Rings would have been a pain in our line of work,” she says. “But it was important to Clint that we both get something. He’s got an hourglass in the same spot.”

“Not as important to you, though?” Trish asks. “Why is that?”

Jess sets her burger down, hard enough to make the plate clatter. “Jesus, Trish – ”

“These are perfectly normal questions, Jess – ”

“You make her sit through sixty minutes of rap battling icy biker hell and then start an interrogation about her marriage – ”

“This is how people get to know each other, which you would understand, if you ever – ”

“Did you also run a full credit check on her? Any red-flag purchases? Just curious, because – ”

Natasha puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles, one sharp blast that turns every head in the restaurant their way.

“Better,” she says. “Should we try to run that play again?”

Trish’s cheeks flush pink. “I’m sorry, Natasha,” she apologizes. “Really. It’s just – Jess doesn’t do this that often, you know, bring people into the fold, and – ”

“Wow, Mom,” Jess interrupts, embarrassment with an edge of mild humiliation surging through her. “I’m supposed to clear my playdates with you first?”

“I mean it,” Trish says fiercely. “I’m sorry if I’m being overprotective, but you don’t do this all that often and I wanted to get to know Natasha for myself. For my own peace of mind. Okay? God, you are such a pain in the ass about accepting normal human affection sometimes.”

Jess looks at Natasha, mortified. “If you want to start running – please go for it. I’ll cover your whole fucking meal.”

Unbelievably - unbelievably, though, Natasha actually smiles.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Honestly – I think it’s kind of nice.”

Matt is dead, but his final request was very explicit. In his absence, Natasha knows that the rest of them have taken it seriously.

Luke was the first one to lay out the big problem in his matter-of-fact Luke way; with Matt gone, they’re down a serious contender, and while Luke is big, strong, unbreakable, and can certainly hold his own in a fight, he still knows where his knowledge gaps are. He relies on his strength too much, and it’s nothing to sneeze on, but brute force isn’t always going to be helpful.

He asked if Natasha and Clint would be willing to show him a few things, and they agreed. It had sounded – fun, even, in a way. They converted their building’s basement into a pretty excellent training space a few years ago; inaccessible to the rest of the tenants and not quite what Stark’s tempted them with for years, but more than enough to suit their personal needs.

The upshot of it is that Luke and Clint have spent the entire day going over basics, bonding, and generally having a blast until they had a minor mishap that ended with Luke accidentally punching Clint into a wall.

Neither one of them has been able to explain how it happened in a manner that’s satisfied Claire.

She is pissed as she shines a penlight into Clint’s eyes, checking for signs of concussion. He’s sitting on the couch with brick dust in his hair, trying to look at least a little contrite. He’s not doing a great job. “One of these days, I’m not going to do this,” she informs all of them darkly. “One of these days, you’re all gonna ask me to fix you up and I’m gonna tell you that you can take your ass to Urgent Care and sit in the waiting room where all your stupid selves belong.”

“We don’t deserve you,” Clint agrees.

“I know I don’t,” Luke echoes earnestly.

“No, you don’t. You don’t deserve me,” she snaps. “Natasha, hand me the bandages.”

Natasha mutely hands over the box of butterfly bandages. One of Clint’s eyes has swelled up shiny and purple, and there are cuts across his forehead and the bridge of his nose that had better not drip onto their couch. She has the cushions exactly the way she wants them, she’s not swapping them out.

“I wanted to go to the movies,” Claire continues, eyes still focused on Clint as she applies antiseptic to his cuts. “This is the world’s simplest dream. Do you all realize what a simple-ass, achievable dream this was? I wanted to go to a goddamn movie with my goddamn boyfriend who would buy me some goddamn Red Vines on my first goddamn day off in two weeks – ”

“We might have Red Vines in a cabinet somewhere,” Natasha offers.

Claire swivels her head in Natasha’s direction. She does not need words to make her point.

“I know that’s not what you meant,” she adds weakly. Natasha Romanoff is afraid of only three things in the world entire. ‘Claire Temple at the end of her rope’ is the third.

“If any of the rest of you go the way of Matthew, I will drag you back from death just so I can kill you myself,” Claire says, once she’s finished fixing Clint up, once she’s scrubbed her hands with soap and hot water and changed into one of Natasha’s old tanks after getting Clint’s blood speckled all over her pretty date-night top. “I’m not going through that again. Not with anyone else I care about. No more avoidable messes. Are we all clear?”

“Yes m’am,” Luke says, grinning.

His grin sets her off all over again. “You know what, everybody get out. I’m gonna sit here and pet this dog until I’m calmed down.”

“She kicked us out of our own apartment,” Clint says in bafflement, once all three of them are, somehow, standing on the other side of the door. “I don’t – I don’t understand how that just happened.”

“I’ve got this,” Natasha assures him. “Why don’t the two of you… go get hot dogs or something. Kill some time.”

“Are you feeling up for that?” Luke asks Clint, concerned. “You took a pretty hard hit.”

Clint scoffs. “I don’t have unbreakable skin, but I’ve got a cast-iron stomach. I’m gonna show you something incredible.”

As he swaggers down the hall, Natasha stuffs two twenties into Luke’s hand. “When he pukes, and he will, you have my permission to let him do it in the gutter. Don’t concern yourself too much with his dignity,” she says in a low, voice.

Luke grins his wide, guileless grin at her. He really does have an incredible smile. “Can’t believe Taylor Swift never wrote a song about that,” he says.

“LUKE!” Clint bellows from down the hall. “Come on, man, they always run out of the bacon-wrapped-chili-guacamole ones on Saturdays!”

Luke disappears down the hall after him. Once they’re out of sight, Natasha retrieves her phone from the inside of her boot and opens the group chat with herself, Jess, and Trish.

Claire’s at my place. Rough night. Come ASAP. She thinks about it for a second, then adds, With Red Vines. The tub, not the pack.

There isn’t a way to talk directly about what it is that’s upsetting Claire; it’s the existential crisis that comes for most civilians who end up tangentially involved in this line of work.

Claire was never really given a chance to think about this sometimes filthy-business: it was an immediate opt in or out. Matt peeled the curtain back for her abruptly, without letting her know the full extent of what he was about to reveal, and she had a split second to decide if she could either look it in the eye or pretend there was nothing to see. And really, the decision made itself; Claire’s not the type who can look away from a place she’s needed.

But she’s allowed to hit a wall of exhaustion with it. She watched Misty lose an arm and Matt lose his life and not one of them can promise her that it’ll be the last time.

There are things Natasha wishes she knew how to say to Claire, half-formed in her mind. She wants to tell her that this is something Clint’s ex-wife dealt with, too, this was a struggle that pulled her in every direction. Tell her that there’s no shame in evaluating what your life looks like and deciding you need it to be quieter, gentler, safer.

That story ends in divorce, though, and for a while there, it was a bitter one, so it doesn’t seem like it’d be that comforting.

Laura couldn’t be around Natasha for a long time after the fallout, which she has always understood and accepted. She also knows that when Clint asked for the divorce, it was the first easy, relieved breath Laura had drawn since the day she married him, and that those two opposing things are equally true at the same time.

Instead of doing a deep-dig into therapy once Jess arrives, trying to dig out the roots of the problem for which there will never be a real solution, the three of them watch old episodes of Top Chef while Claire eats her way through half the tub of licorice. By the time they’re on the third elimination challenge, the tension has bled out of her body and she’s slumped against the back of the couch.

“I’m sorry,” Jessica tells Claire, suddenly. It surprises Natasha – Jess, carving right to the heart of the matter, abrupt and out of the blue.

“Oh, Jess – hey,” Claire says, sitting up. “Come on.”

“I am,” Jess says firmly. “We’ve all asked a lot. Too much, probably. None of us would blame you if you told us to lose your number and you fucking meant it.”

“I don’t want that,” Claire says. She directs it to both of them that time. “I don’t. Sometimes, it’s just – ”

“I know,” Natasha says. She does. “It’s okay.”

“Neither of you get like this,” she says, sounding frustrated with herself. “You’re not spinning anxiety spirals and having meltdowns over a quick concussion check.”

Jess shoots Natasha a look. “A concussion check?”

“Luke put Clint into a wall,” she explains. “It was an accident.”

“How far into the wall?” Jess asks, sounding mildly impressed. “Did he leave a dent?”

Claire throws up her hands. “See!” she says. “This is what I fucking mean. This makes me feel like I can’t just be normal about – ”

“Claire,” Jessica interrupts, sounding like she’s newly on the verge of laughter. “You’re the most normal person in this entire fucking apartment. No offense, Nat.”

“None taken,” Natasha says. “It’s still new, Claire. You’re doing fine. And if there ever comes a day when you’re truly, deeply not fine – then Jess is right. You’re allowed to tell us to lose your number.”

It helps. Somehow.

It helps have people on either side of you silently announcing that yes, things are hard and shitty and painful, and they’re still here to help shoulder some of the hard, shitty, painful weight with a pointless show on in the background. It’s the gesture of the thing; the reminder that you aren’t always in a thing alone, and if she and Jess are sometimes people who feel as though they can run short on things to offer…

They can offer this.

And it helps.

Luke half-carries a vaguely green-faced Clint back to the apartment a little while later. Natasha excuses herself from the impromptu gathering to get him up the stairs and into bed, with a glass of water, a couple painkillers, and Lucky curled up on top of his feet.

His grip is pretty weak; when he tries to pull her down onto the mattress alongside him, it’s more a gentle tug than anything else, but she drops willingly and smooths his hair back with both hands. “Exactly how many did you eat?” she murmurs.

“You gave him forty bucks, were we supposed to bring back change like a couple of suckers?” Clint asks. His eyes are half-lidded; his bruised one has swollen up worse than it was a couple hours ago, and she makes a mental note to bring up an icepack when she comes to bed. “I probably don’t look as triumphant as I feel.”

Natasha considers for a moment, then kisses the corner of his mouth, lightly – it’s the one spot that looks safe. “Still very pretty,” she promises.

He smiles at her, a lazy sleepy sort of smile, and something low in her stomach flutters happily. He can still do that to her. They are as worn-in and comfortable as it’s possible for a relationship to be; it’s coffee cups in the sink and who-walked-the-dog, loads of laundry and unopened bills clipped to the refrigerator and there are still certain smiles Clint Barton turns on her that take her back to the same way she felt when she was finally allowed to kiss him any goddamn time she pleased. “Love you very much, Mrs. Barton.”

“I fucking hate it when you call me that,” she says, but she kisses him once more and turns the light out before she heads back down the stairs.

Luke and Claire have cleared out by now, but Jessica’s hung around; it makes Natasha happy to see how comfortable she looks. She’s helped herself to one of Clint’s beers from the fridge and her legs are draped over the arm of the couch; one of her socks has a hole in it, showing the chipped dark-purple polish on her toenails. She’s washed in the blue light of the TV, where one of the contestants is furiously dicing his way through a pile of unidentifiable ingredients.

“I would be the worst judge on this show,” Jess says. “They’d hand me a plate of anything and my whole critique would be ‘why the fuck is there foam on this plate? Why couldn’t you just make some fucking buffalo wings?’”

Natasha drops down onto the couch beside her. “I hate buffalo wings. Too many little bones.”

“Well, friendship over. We had a good run,” Jess deadpans, lifting her bottle in a toast.

They watch two more episodes and Jess has switched from the beer to her flask when Natasha brings up the elephant in the room. “So Luke and Claire.”

“Yeah,” Jessica says, after a minute. It’s a slightly wistful single syllable.

“Clint was married to somebody else, once,” Natasha says; it rolls out so easily it surprises her. It’s nothing either of them has ever mentioned to any of Stark’s guys, to anyone else they know. “She’s nice. She’s a very hard person to dislike. Sometimes, though – ”

“Sometimes you hated her fucking guts so much that you freaked yourself out a little bit?” Jessica says, bluntly.

“That. Yes.”

Jessica doesn’t say anything for awhile, her eyes on the tv, but her fingertips play with the cap of her flask, spinning it in little circles. “Claire’s not the reason Luke and I aren’t gonna get it together,” she finally says. “Not the biggest one, anyway. I do think about him sometimes. Not enough to let it get in the way of me and Claire. You know?”

“I think so,” Natasha says; she can understand, at least. Jess and Luke are hardly a rerun of herself and Clint even in their earliest days, but she can still understand.

“If I do need to bitch about it, though. Sometimes. Maybe once every couple of months….” Jess floats, a little tentatively, and Natasha smiles.

“Hey,” she says. “Luke asked Clint to teach him how to fight a little more efficiently. That was how he ended up in the wall, earlier today.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And you’re crap in a fight, too. Unless you’re throwing a truck at somebody,” Natasha says.

Jessica sits up, plunking both feet on the floor with a glimmer in her eye. “You know, some people would say truck-throwing is more impressive than dainty little whip-kicks, Romanoff.”

“Some people,” Natasha says airily, “would be full of shit. You want to head down to the basement? I could show you a couple things.”

“You think you’ve got something you can show me?” Jess says, but she’s full-on grinning now. “All right, bitch. Let’s go dance.”

Natasha nods at the TV, even as she gets to her feet. “Sure you don’t want to watch one more episode?”

“It’ll be fine,” Jess says dismissively. “I like your couch. I’ve got big plans to hang out on it tomorrow afternoon – we can finish then.”

“If you’re still in one piece after we get done,” Natasha tells her. Jess’s grin is contagious; it’s spread onto Natasha’s face now, too.

This series of small promises and casual liberties; friendship, it turns out, is a thing that suits her.

Both of them, she thinks, mentally correcting herself. Really, what she means is that it suits both of them, the world slightly bigger and slightly brighter for it. Less lonely.

“Last one to the basement covers the next six bar tabs,” Jess says, and even though it’s futile to race against somebody who can run a three-minute-mile, Natasha takes off as quickly as she can, laughter ringing all the way down the stairwell.

.end.