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“I don’t even wanna know,” said Steve flatly as he unhooked Darcy from where she was hanging by the ankle.
“Sorry, Steve,” she said, laughing as he lifted her down and set her on her feet.
“Just testing out the new arrows Stark gave me,” said Clint, rubbing a hand sheepishly over the back of his neck. “I, uh, didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to get her down.”
“That’s what tall people are for, right, Steve?” said Darcy. “It’s what they do to make up for looming over the rest of us all the time.”
“Y’know,” said Steve, “I was about the same height as you once upon a time.”
“Yeah, but now you’re much more useful,” she said, patting his cheek affectionately. “Clint’s going to teach me how to shoot next, want to help?”
Steve looked positively frightened. “Thanks, Darcy,” he said, backing towards the door, “but I have to…go…leave my oven on.” He was out the door and gone before Darcy could formulate a response to that, so she just turned to Clint and raised her eyebrows.
“He’s like an eel, that man,” said Clint.
“Not very good at lying, though, is he?” she said.
“Of course not,” said Clint, a sparkle creeping into his grey-blue eyes. “That wouldn’t be very patriotic, now, would it?”
He grinned at her, and she couldn’t help grinning back, trying to ignore the low tug in her stomach that told her to wrap her arms around him, to slide her hands into that soft blond hair, to find out how his mouth would feel against hers. Instead she snagged his bow from where he’d dropped it during his initial attempt to rescue her from the trick arrow and jerked her head towards the targets at the far end of the gym. “C’mon, show me how to shoot baddies.”
She could see him trying not to flutter nervously over his bow like a helicopter parent, so she just sighed and wordlessly extended it to him. He rescued it from her inexpert grasp with a sigh of relief, tucked it back into its case, and herded her over to one of the lines marked on the floor in duct tape. She was willing to bet there was not actually supposed to be a makeshift shooting range in this gym. She suspected Clint had “installed” it himself. He grabbed for another bow, sitting in an identical case, and handed it to her. As he carefully placed her hands in the correct places on the bow, she eyed the lines suspiciously. “Don’t you usually stand back there a ways?” she said, jerking her head behind her at one of the other duct tape markers.
“Yes,” he said, stepping back to frown at her stance, “but I can also do this upside down, backwards, and falling off a building, so try not to make comparisons. Spread your feet apart more.”
She obeyed, then raised the bow, mimicking what she’d seen Clint do. He snorted. “Hey,” she protested, “I’m new at this.”
“Sorry,” he said, not looking sorry at all and actually still laughing. “Here, you need this.” He handed her an arrow. She squinted at it. “Just a normal one,” he promised. “Let me show you.”
He slid in behind her, lining his hips up with her hips, using a hand on her waist to adjust her. He slid the other down along her left arm, encouraging her to raise the bow. Then his other hand moved from her waist, wrapped around her, and had her pulling back an imaginary bowstring. When she’d tried to grab the real one, he’d smacked her hand.
“Don’t you shoot from the other side?” she asked, trying not to let herself tremble. It was becoming increasingly difficult, with the hot, masculine weight of him pressed against her back, his calloused hands feather-light and tantalizing on the soft skin of her arms.
He chuckled, and she felt the rumble of it. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re not left-handed.”
She turned in his arms, narrowly missing whacking him with the bow. “You’re left-handed?” she asked. “Why didn’t I know this?”
He grinned at her, his hands settling on her shoulders. He was still standing very close to her. “Because you’re not very observant?” he guessed, and she made a face at him.
She glanced down at the bow. “Then why do you have a right-handed bow?” she asked.
“Well,” he said evasively. “I’m actually pretty ambidextrous.”
A sly smile spread across her face. “You got me a bow, didn’t you?” She cackled with glee, gazing adoringly at the bow in her hand. “Is it my birthday?”
He ruffled her hair, hard, pushing her sideways. When she only laughed harder, he said, “okay, laugh it up, Lewis. I said I’d teach you to shoot. Could hardly do that with a bow you couldn’t fire.”
“Is it really for me?” she asked, clutching the bow to her chest. “Do I get to keep it?”
He cocked his head at her, giving her a small smile. “Sure,” he said, “if you’re not sick of it after a couple of lessons with me. I’m probably a shit teacher.”
She nodded sagely. “Too Much Expertise syndrome. I work with Tony, I’m familiar. Well, give it a shot, Hawkguy. Show me how to stand again.” She reasoned with herself that she really did need to be shown again, and if she enjoyed it just a little too much, well. Sue her. Clint Barton was just about the hottest thing on two legs.
“Okay,” he said, once she was in position. He used his right hand to brush the dark curls of her hair back away from her ear, his lips so close to her skin that she went weak in the knees. “Feel this position. Pay attention to it. Do you feel how you’re standing? How your weight is distributed?” He used one finger to push her right elbow back down. “Where your arms are supposed to be?” he asked, lips actually brushing against her ear as he smiled.
Mostly, she felt Clint. But she gave him a nod that was only a little shaky.
“Okay,” he stepped away from her briskly, leaving her feeling cold and bereft. “Here, put this on.” He handed her an armguard, very much like his. She wiggled it around uncertainly, and he rewarded her with an amused smile and his hands back on her as he slid it into place on her arm. “Let’s try it for real.”
Once Darcy had managed to successfully hit the target with an arrow – which took longer than she was comfortable admitting – Clint gave her a triumphant high five and a promise to teach her more next time they were both free. But that didn’t happen all that often. Between Darcy’s job – managing scientists and liaising with SHIELD about the science, mostly – and Clint’s job – saving the world – they didn’t wind up with a lot of overlapping free time, and when they did, Darcy had to admit she preferred curling up on the couch and watching Netflix with him than embarrassing herself by not being able to hit the broad side of a barn.
Somehow, without either of them really noticing, Clint and Darcy had slipped into a comfortable friendship. From the moment they’d met it had just been… easy, Darcy decided. Clint was so easy to be friends with. Everything about him and everything about her just clicked. They almost always laughed at each other’s jokes and rarely ran out of things to talk about, but when they just sat together silently that was comfortable too. Darcy didn’t feel the awkward, burning pressure to fill the silence with chatter, to prevent any lull in the conversation. With Clint she could just be. She thought he felt the same way, but they didn’t talk about it. In fact, they never really talked about anything of substance. It just never seemed like the right time, the right place. So somehow she’d become friends with someone she knew very little about.
And somehow, even more perplexingly, she’d fallen in love with him.
She tried to tell herself it was just a crush, just a bit of residual fangirling over the amazing Hawkeye. But… if you couldn’t be honest with yourself, and all that…
She loved him. She loved his laugh, and the crinkles around his eyes. She loved his dry wit, the quick mind he tried to hide, his passion for archery and the Avenging that had come with it. She loved his inability to function without coffee and she even loved the times when he seemed to collapse into himself, to fail under the weight of whatever secrets he was carrying, the times when conversation faltered and instead she just brought him a cup of tea in silence and they sat together until he kissed her hair and went to bed.
Unfortunately, Darcy was waiting for her soulmate.
She knew that was a little… old-fashioned. Not everyone met their soulmate, and it wasn’t a guarantee of sunshine and rainbows even if you did. Most people were content – happy, even – with whatever person they’d decided was a good fit for them, even if the pale mark on their skin told them there could have been someone who fit better. Darcy had tried, at first. She’d dated, had even maybe-sorta-almost loved a few people. But her mark was always there to remind her of what she was missing. What these other people – lovely as they were – could never be.
Actually, it might be more accurate to say Darcy had been waiting for her soulmate. She’d waited and hoped and been disappointed for a long while and then she’d looked up some statistics on the number of people who never met their soulmate and counted the amount of time she’d spent craning around to look at the mark settled on the back of her shoulder blade to see if it had changed color and some put-upon, more rational part of Darcy had put its foot down. No more.
So she gave up. It wasn’t as depressing as it sounded, really. It made her happier, more free. She stopped obsessively checking the mark. Eventually, she stopped checking at all. Especially with gods and aliens and who knew what else falling out of the sky. She figured she had more important things to deal with and she got on with her life. But she still knew, a niggly reminder at the back of her head, that she could never really settle for anything less than a soulmate.
She might have reconsidered that stance for a man like Clint Barton… if he’d shown the slightest indication of reciprocating those feelings.
Instead, they were friends. Bros. And she was… mostly okay with that.
“Hey Darce,” Clint mumbled, his mouth pressed against the arm of the couch where he was half-sleeping. “When are you gonna let me teach you how to shoot?”
Darcy hummed. “Dunno. Whenever you want, I guess. I still got my bow.”
“Good,” he said, “tha’s good.” He paused, raising his head slightly to squint at her. “Do you…like archery?”
She smiled at him. “Sure, Clint. I like archery.”
He just said, “hmm,” very quietly, and dropped his head back onto the couch.
The truth – which she wasn’t going to bring up because it teetered uncomfortably close to the kind of serious discussion she and Clint didn’t have – was that Darcy had in fact tried archery before. Her mark, faint as it was, had always resembled arrows to her, so she’d given the sport a go. She hadn’t exactly taken to it. She was clumsy and distractible and she’d let that idea go pretty quickly. She decided the mark was probably something else, and she’d had to firmly remind herself of that when she’d fallen in love with an archer who showed no signs of being interested in her, let alone of being her soulmate.
“You should just tell him,” said Jane, puttering around her lab while Darcy typed up Jane’s chicken scratch notes. “Tell him you’re in love with him. What does it matter if he’s your soulmate? Soulmates,” said Jane, with the bitter tones of one who knows, “do not always work out how you’d hope.”
“I know,” said Darcy, slumping in her desk chair. “I know, I know. But… it still feels like giving up on… y’know… True Love.” She sat back up, pulling herself together crisply.
“Besides,” she muttered, “it’s not like he feels the same way anyway.”
“Ah, but how do you know if you don’t tell him?” said Jane, pulling dramatic eyebrows at Darcy, which she chose to ignore.
“Tell who what?” asked Clint, sauntering into the lab, and the subject was dropped.
She was sitting on the couch with Clint, her cold toes tucked under his thigh, watching the end credits of the movie they’d been watching scroll by, when he said, “Do you think sometimes the universe gets it wrong?”
She became very still. This was new territory for them. “How so?” she asked.
“All this Soulmates shit.” He shrugged. “Do you think sometimes we’re meant to be with someone even though that person isn’t who the universe picked out?”
She bit her lip. Honesty, or the answer that left room for the possibility of her and Clint being… her and Clint. She sighed. Honesty. “I… sort of. I think people can be perfectly happy with someone who isn’t their soulmate. But… for me, I think I’d always… wonder. Always be waiting. A little.”
He heaved a sigh. “Yeah,” he said, sounding unhappy about it. “Yeah, me too.”
“Did you…” she asked, not really wanting to know the answer, “that is, have you…?”
But he just gave her a look that told her he didn’t want to tell her any more than she wanted to know, and she didn’t ask again.
She was in the lab with Jane again – not surprising, considering she spent most of her time there – when Tony wandered in with some weird new device he’d made for Jane’s experiments. She barely gave them a glance, chattering animatedly over the whatever-it-was, but as she was turning back to her work she heard Tony say, “Oh SHI-“ and then the lab exploded.
It was just a small explosion, as far as his particular brand of mad science went, but it set a few things on fire and one of those things included Darcy. Shrieking only as much as her dignity would allow, she stripped out of her gently smouldering blouse and stamped on it while Jane doused the lab with the fire extinguisher. Tony leered gently at Darcy, standing there in her bra, so she shot him a nasty look and turned away, casting her eyes around for a spare lab coat she could throw on.
“Lewis,” said Tony, a humorous edge to his voice. “You sly dog. I see congratulations are in order.”
She found the lab coat and pounced on it, pulling it on over her bare flesh. “Tony,” she sighed, turning to face him, “I’m pretty sure congratulating me on my rack counts as workplace harassment.”
He handwaved that away. “It’s a nice rack, and all, but I was talking about your mark. Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl, whatever.”
She felt frozen to the spot. “I… what?”
“Your mark?” he said, gesturing to her now-covered shoulder. “You’ve met them. Congrats.”
She locked eyes with Jane, who looked equally baffled, and then rapidly stripped back out of the lab coat to get a second opinion. She ignored Tony’s wolf whistle entirely.
“Oh my god,” said Jane, creeping closer to get a look. “It’s there.”
“What is it?” asked Darcy breathlessly, though she was pretty sure she already knew.
“It looks like two arrows, crossed,” said Jane, and Darcy whirled back around with wide eyes. “Darcy,” said Jane, her voice cautioning and low, “Darcy, please don’t jump to any conclusions.”
“Clint,” Darcy said, not really thinking about it. Who else could it be? Her heart was pounding a mile a minute, and every cell in her body told her it was Clint, it had to be Clint. He was and always had been the only one for her. He was hers.
“Well, my congratulations to him, too,” said Tony.
“Tony,” said Jane, sounding pained. “Can you give us a minute?” Darcy didn’t see it, exactly, but she could feel Jane pulling faces at Tony and Tony pulling them back. Then he huffed in disappointment and turned to go. “And please don’t mention this to anyone!” Jane called after him.
“Jane,” said Darcy, a feeling of calm and rightness settling over her whole body. “Jane, it has to be Clint. I know it’s him. I don’t know how I know, I just… it’s Clint.”
“Darcy, please,” Jane begged, “please don’t get your hopes up too far. It might be Clint, but it might be anyone. How long has it been since you checked your mark? Years? If it’s Clint, why hasn’t he said anything?”
“No,” said Darcy resolutely. “It’s Clint. I have to go find him.” She pressed a kiss to Jane’s cheek. “Be back soon.”
She darted out of the room before Jane could stop her. “Hey, JARVIS,” she called to the ceiling as she half-ran towards the elevator. “Can you tell me where Clint is right now?”
“Agent Barton is currently in the main gym, Miss Lewis,” said JARVIS crisply. “I believe he was just about to invite you for another archery lesson.”
“Thanks, babe,” she said, stabbing at the button for the gym floor.
“My pleasure, Miss Lewis,” said the AI.
When Darcy arrived on the floor, she found Clint striding towards her down the hallway, and her heart thudded painfully in her chest. “Clint,” she said, stumbling towards him, certain that somehow he knew that she knew and now he would kiss her and it would all be alright because she didn’t have to pick between Clint and her soulmate, didn’t have to agonize anymore, now she would be given exactly what she’d given up on so long ago. But he just gave her a cheery grin and a wave.
“Hey, Darce,” he said. “I was just wondering if you wanted to shoot a little.” He jerked his head in the direction of the gym. “JARVIS said you were already on your way down.”
Darcy hesitated. This was not how it was supposed to go. “We could do that,” she said cautiously. “Clint. What you were saying before, about soulmates-”
His face shuttered. He jerked one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Yeah?”
“I need…” She didn’t know what to say, didn’t have the right words. She couldn’t just ask him, couldn’t bring herself to pose the question. She was too afraid, deeply afraid, in a way she hadn’t been when she had confidently told Jane there was no way it wasn’t him. Jane had been right. He didn’t act like they were soulmates, didn’t act like he’d even considered the possibility. “Your soulmate… do you know who it is?”
His face was very blank. She didn’t see him like this often. Usually he was open and expressive, laughing at something she’d said, or something he’d said, his easy smile lighting up the whole room. But sometimes he retreated into himself, and she was reminded that before he was an Avenger he was an assassin, and he had more in common with Natasha than it usually appeared. He seemed to be having trouble getting the words out, but finally, after an agonizing moment, he said, “Yes.”
“And?” she asked breathlessly.
“And…” He cracked his neck, a bitter expression settling onto his face. “And it’s not…” He shook his head. “Let’s just say things don’t always work out like we want them to.” He sighed. “I think maybe I’m not in the mood to practice today. Some other time.”
She was completely still as he brushed past her to the elevator and pressed the button for his floor, as the door slid closed behind him, as the elevator rose out of hearing. Then she crumpled onto the floor.
And it’s not you, she thought. That’s what he was going to say. He’d known, all along, what she felt for him. He’d seen it in her eyes, felt it in the casual touches she could never resist, brushing her hand over his hair or linking her arm with his. He’d guessed, when she came to him babbling about soulmates, he’d guessed what she was hoping and he had been trying to turn her down gently.
When she returned to Jane’s lab weeping, Jane just wrapped an arm around her shoulders and let her cry.
Things were strained between Clint and Darcy after that. They tried to return to their usual routine, the snarky banter and movie watching sessions on the couch. But there was a distance between them, and Darcy wasn’t quite sure if he’d put it there or she had. She couldn’t bring herself to touch him, anymore, flinching when his leg brushed against hers on the couch. Before she… before, she would have leaned into it, relished the contact, but now it just brought pain and the renewed reminder that he wasn’t hers after all and that he probably pitied her for thinking he was. On his part, his smile didn’t come as easily, and she thought she’d caught him staring at her a time or two, his expression unreadable. He didn’t bring up archery lessons again, so neither did she.
Eventually, after a week or two of awkward encounters and nobody knowing what to do with their hands, Clint joined her in the common room with that blank expression on his face again, his posture tense.
“Darcy,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
She slowly reached for the remote, paused her movie. “What are you sorry for?” she asked, trying to insert a note of cheerfulness into her strained voice.
“I talked to Tony,” he said.
She blanched. “Oh, yeah?” she said, still trying to keep it light. “What did our Supreme Overlord have to say?”
“He told me about your mark,” said Clint, hands fisted at his sides. “When you came down that day… you were trying to tell me, weren’t you?”
Tell might have been the wrong word. Ask, more like. But she shrugged. “I suppose I was.”
“I was an ass,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Oh god, please don’t apologize to me, she thought desperately. I don’t think I can stop myself crying if you apologize to me. But instead she said, “Hardly. I think you reacted… the way I’d expect someone in your situation to react.” Good. Polite. She wanted to choke on the words.
He looked like he wanted to be sick. “So you know, then?”
She blinked. “Know?”
He gave her a wry smile. “Don’t play dumb, Darcy. Better to get it all out in the open, right?”
She disagreed. Vehemently. She would prefer to never speak of it again. But she said, “If you think it would be… helpful. Then sure.”
“Darcy,” he said, and he collapsed onto the couch next to her like his strings were cut. “I want you to be happy. I genuinely do. You know that, right?”
“Of course I do,” she said, biting back tears. Oh, god, she couldn’t cry in front of him, not like this.
“So whoever they are, your soulmate,” he seemed to have trouble forcing the words past his teeth, “I want the best for you two and I don’t want things to be… uncomfortable. Between us.” He met her dark eyes with his blue ones, and they seemed to be pleading with her when he said, “Can we just be friends again, Darce? Like before? The last thing I want is for my feelings to get in the way of us being friends.”
Feelings or lack thereof, she thought bitterly. “Of course we can be friends,” she said, and mostly believed it. Then her brain caught on something he’d said. “But I think Tony might have gotten something wrong. I don’t know who my soulmate is.”
Which… wasn’t that the kicker? That part stung almost as much as losing Clint. She had, in fact, met her soulmate. Not everyone could say that. She’d met the person she’d been waiting for all her life. And she’d missed them, because she was too busy being bitter and lusting after Clint Barton. She might never find them now.
Clint frowned, face creasing. “But… your mark…?”
“That part was right,” she admitted. “But… I missed it, Clint. I don’t know how long it had been dark before Tony noticed.”
“You don’t know,” he repeated, head tilting slightly.
“It could have been minutes,” she said, “or it could have been years.”
“It could have been… years,” he repeated again.
“Yeah, that’s what I just said.” She wrapped her arms around herself, willing the ball of agony that was her heart to calm down for two seconds, just long enough for her to get out of there without looking like an idiot. “I stopped checking it a long time ago.”
Clint’s eyes were wide as they met hers, and he seemed to be breathing a little fast. “Darcy,” he choked out, his voice strangled. “Darcy, what is it?”
“What’s what?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“Your mark,” he said. His hand stretched out, brushing against the fabric of her sweater then gently grasping her shoulder. His fingertips almost reached the place where her mark was. “Please, will you tell me what it is?”
She hesitated. People didn’t often share info about their marks, but Jane knew, and Clint was her friend, wasn’t he, so maybe she could tell him. But then, telling him what her mark was might be a confirmation that she had believed him to be her soulmate. He was a smart guy. He would make the obvious connection. She let out a shuddery breath. “It’s two arrows,” she told him, her voice quiet. “Crossed. On my shoulder blade.”
His hand clutched at her arm, shifted spasmodically to her face and cupped her cheek. She thought for one brief, wild moment that he was going to kiss her, but instead he jerked back, scrabbled at the bottom of his shirt, and stripped it off over his head.
“What the hell, Clint?” she asked, even as her brain fuzzed out at the sight of Clint shirtless, all those planes and curves of defined muscle and smooth skin making her mouth dry.
But he just took a deep, bracing, breath, turned his back to her, and said, “Like this?”
After her mark had appeared – or rather, after Tony had called her attention to the fact that it had appeared – she had traced the lines of it in the mirror a thousand times. Even before then she had dragged her fingers along the faint silver beginnings of it for years, craning her neck around trying to get a good look at it. She knew it perfectly, recognized it instantly. The same mark. A small sound, halfway between a laugh and sob, escaped from her throat, and she clapped her hands over her mouth. Burning tears welled up in her eyes, and it was all she could do to give him a jerky nod.
He was wrapped around her before she could blink, his arms pulling her against his bare chest while he buried his face in her hair, in the crook of her shoulder. His fingers clutched desperately at her, and slowly, tentatively, she brought her own arms up to cling to his broad back.
“I thought,” he mumbled into her hair, “I thought it was just me, I thought… I thought you were my soulmate but I wasn’t yours, somehow, I… I thought I’d lost you before I ever…”
She laughed through the tears, pulled back to meet his eyes, her hands clinging to the sides of his face. “Clint Barton, I’ve been stupid in love with you from day one. I went to meet you that day to ask you if you were my soulmate. I knew – I knew – it couldn’t be anyone but you.” She made a face. “But then… then you’d never acted like I was your soulmate, and then it seemed like… like you didn’t feel the same way about me, like you were trying to-”
Before she could finish her sentence, his hand tightened in her hair, eyes glittering with challenge. He pulled her close to him and pressed his mouth against hers, and she was lost. His lips were unbelievably soft, and although he was almost unbearably gentle, the hand cradling her head was like iron, his grip firm and unyielding. He brushed his lips over hers, once, then twice, then he deepened the kiss, his tongue flicking out to taste her bottom lip as his thumb rubbed circles against her shoulder blade – against her mark. He nipped at her lip with his teeth, grazing them over the sensitive skin. She finally managed to get her brain online just enough to kiss him back, and a quick intake of breath was all the warning she had before he pressed her back into the couch and devoured her. Her brain only seemed to be functioning in short bursts. His mouth was a burning brand against her lips, moving frantically, like he’d never get the chance again and he had to kiss every corner of her mouth while he still could. His hands drifted along her neck, her waist, her hips, his thumbs digging into her hipbones as his tongue moved against hers. When he finally pulled away from her, like a drowning man coming up for air, Darcy heaved a shuddering breath. He pressed his forehead against hers, their noses brushing.
“What were you saying,” he managed, “about me not having feelings for you?”
“You love me,” she said wonderingly, running her hands along the planes of his back. She brushed her fingers against where she knew the mark would be. Her mark. Her mark on Clint. Who was also hers. A dopey smile was spreading itself across her face. “You really love me.”
“I’m pretty sure I was supposed to say it myself,” he said drily.
“You just did,” she told him, pressing her mouth back against his.
She’d managed – barely – to get him back to her rooms before he expressed his love in more creative ways, but Tony still wasn’t happy.
“You have defiled my couch,” he said. “That’s it. You’re both kicked out. Go be disgusting somewhere else.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jane to Darcy, both of whom were ignoring Tony. “I mean, I’m happy for you, obviously, but… how did this happen?”
“Well, I didn’t notice the mark until Tony pointed it out-”
“You’re welcome, by the way,” said Tony, who was in the process of ordering a new couch.
“But Clint did. He noticed, and he says he knew it was me. Just like I knew it was him.”
“I’m sorry for doubting you,” said Jane seriously. “I mean…”
“No, that’s the thing,” said Darcy. “I doubted me, too. I overthought it and I decided I got it wrong, that it wasn’t Clint. But Clint never did. Even when I didn’t act like we were soulmates – because I hadn’t noticed – he still believed it was me. He just thought it wasn’t reciprocated.”
“Is that a thing?” said Jane, wide-eyed.
“No,” said Tony.
“I don’t know,” said Darcy, “but regardless, we both thought the other one knew we were in love with them but was trying to be nice about it.” She laughed. “We’re both kind of morons, I guess.”
“Yes,” said Tony. “You’re very well matched.”
“Hey,” said Darcy, levelling a finger at him, “don’t think I’ve forgotten who told Clint about my mark, and conveniently left out the part where I was in love with him.”
“You’re welcome,” Tony muttered, “wouldn’t have done it if I knew you two were going to deflower my couch.”
“We just made out!” she protested.
“He was shirtless,” said Tony flatly. “I’m appalled.”
“Bet you’d be less appalled if it had been Darcy who was shirtless,” said Clint, propping his arm on the doorframe and giving Darcy a slow, lazy grin. She smiled back. “Ready?” he asked.
“Ready.”
He held her hand as they walked to the range. Darcy liked that. She liked that he was just easily, comfortably… well. Hers. He let go of her hand to pop open the bow case that rested nearby and handed her her compound bow. She took up her stance, and only got it wrong on purpose a tiny bit. True to form, Clint stepped in behind her, hands maneuvring her hips, pushing down that pesky elbow. He nipped gently at her ear, and she melted into him.
“Focus,” he whispered, stepping away from her.
She was getting into the rhythm of it – arrow, draw, breathe, release – when a thought occurred to her. She paused. Lowered the bow.
“You knew our mark was two arrows,” she said, eyeing him.
He had the decency to look slightly guilty. “Yes.”
“So this,” she said, wiggling the bow. “The archery lessons. Were you trying to… force the universe to bend to your will?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
She cracked up laughing, laughed so hard she almost dropped the bow and Clint had to nervously take it away from her. “You must have been so pissed that I’m a terrible shot.”
“You’re not terrible,” Clint protested. She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, you’re terrible,” he admitted.
She smiled at him, eyes crinkling. “You asked me if I thought the universe ever got it wrong,” she said slowly.
“Yeah,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Do you?”
She smiled. Honesty. “Yeah,” she said. “I think sometimes it gets it wrong.” Clint just raised an eyebrow. “But luckily,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck, “I’ve got you to bully it into getting it right.”
“I love you,” he said simply, and he lowered his mouth to hers.
This made it a little difficult to say it back, but. Well.
He knew.