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in the clearing stands a boxer
and a fighter by his trade
and he carries the reminders
of every glove that laid him down
or cut him ‘til he cried out
in his anger and his shame
“i am leaving, i am leaving”
but the fighter still remains
—the boxer, simon & garfunkel
blue. blue, yellow, grey, what do i know? i currently feel like hiding behind total blackness — i desire to give in and purely just stop.
— claude monet
Sitting down after a mission always makes his head spin.
Hill always likes to make a lot of noise about taking proper care of injuries and taking a few days off after particularly taxing missions, but Clint never took care of himself back in Iowa or in the circus and he sure as hell doesn’t plan to start now. The way he grew up you either got fucked or you picked yourself up, and so Clint got good at shaking his head and moving on. Sometimes that’s a little easier and sometimes it’s a little more difficult, but he always manages.
It’s always hardest now. Just after. When his whole body aches and his head buzzes. Nat calls at him from across the room, where she’s talking to Steve. Get out. Meet you. Roof. Her hands always move a little too quick when she signs, a nervousness she never quite shook off. Moving quick is smart when you’re doing simple secret hand signals, but sign isn’t simple or secret, it’s a language, and most of the time he needs it to come slow.
If they were alone, he’d touch a finger to her wrist and say “Give me that one again, Nat.”
(If they were alone, and if he hadn’t just tried to kill her—)
He watches her hands move with the same buzzing that he’s hearing as Bruce and Thor talk to his left. He gets up and tosses them a vague nod and goes, out to Tony’s fucking huge-ass balcony that no human being could ever use or need and sits, letting his legs kick over the edge, beer bottle dangling from his fingers. He tries to feel solid, safe with the height and the distance that keeps him out of the grime of the city. Instead, he looks at his legs as they dangle, and everything feels too-bright and insubstantial.
Nat walks heavier than usual when she joins him, lets the stomp tell him that she’s here. That, and a hand on his shoulder as she sits.
They don’t talk. She’s nursing vodka, he’s got his beer. When he finishes his drink, she hands him the rest of hers without a word.
“Are we good?” he asks, finally, as the sun starts to go down.
Her grin is small, but it cracks her face wide open, so relieved it hurts. “Yeah. We’re good.”
No one could have killed you like me, he thinks. No one could have killed you but me . He knocks back the vodka. There’s a blue film still over his vision, at the edges. It’ll leech out if he could have the silence, and the time. He doesn’t know if he’ll get that.
“Don’t think I’m gonna see you for a while,” he tells her. The vodka makes him gag; he’s always hated liquor.
“The apartment?” she asks. He shrugs.
They watch the sun for a bit longer. It inches down. He itches to take off his sunglasses, to stare into it. The impulse surprises him, and his fingers twitch. She glances down.
“Take all the time you need,” she says. “I’ll vouch for you whenever you want to get back in.”
“You’ll vouch for me?”
“I owe you one.”
“You don’t owe me shit, Nat,” he says, and stands. “Especially now.”
She calls out to him before he can get to the door.
“Clint.”
He turns back. She’s standing, her fingers twitching, too, like she wanted to reach out but couldn’t figure out how, in the end. She’s backlit by the sun, beautiful and so alive. He thinks: I didn’t kill her. He thinks: but I tried. I tried.
“Get some rest,” she says. “I’ll come by.”
He thinks: silence. Time. His hands around her neck. No one could kill her like him. And he wants to, he wants to, he still fucking wants to — itches for the sun in his eyes and his hands around her neck. For things that would hurt him.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t, I—“
“You’re a hero, Clint,” she says, carefully.
He barks a laugh. “Yeah, and you stopped me, so what’s that make you?”
They look at each other, and he detects a flash of hurt across her face, but before he can apologize Tony crashes through the door the way he does everything: loud, flashy, talking so fast it just starts to buzz, and her face turns back to stone.
“Heyyy, lovebirds, whatcha doin’ out here? Party’s inside—”
He thinks it’s the lovebirds that does it, after. Makes him storm past Tony, bile in his throat. That’s half the reason that Loki picked him and kept him, after seeing into his brain. Natasha was written all over it like some ten-year-old’s diary. No one loves her like him, he thinks, because no one knows her like him, and so he’s the only fucking one that could get to her, and he hates that he’s that kind of person to her now. Natasha shouldn’t be held to the earth by some idiot with a bow and a reckless pair of hands. She needs to be able to turn to smoke.
He still remembers the night he met her; his hands on the bow, tight and steady. Her eyes were like glass marbles, clear watery green. He could look right through them, but there was something there — fear, or near enough to it. She could have turned to smoke then, turned tail and ran, but she didn’t, and he’d thought that meant something, thought it meant—
Tony stumbles when he pushes past him, which means he’s drunk. Clint doesn’t care, which is kind of dickish of him, but it was dickish in the first place for Tony to invite them all over here to get wasted after fucking aliens attacked New York. Not his fault Tony doesn’t have any goddamn friends.
“ Clint,” Natasha says, grabs his elbow as he’s halfway to the elevator. The others are looking at them funny. He wants to say — he wants to say —
“I still might kill you,” he says. “I still kinda want to.” He doesn’t look at the rest of them. “Jesus — every fucking — just,” and he moves back, shakes off her hand. “Just, until I — until it goes away.”
“You can’t kill me.” She sounds confident about that.
He laughs, and it tears its way out of his throat, strangled. He sways back in, presses a hand to her shoulder. “I don’t wanna wake up and realize I tried, Nat.” Not again, he doesn’t say, but she hears it. Not again, because he can’t, because that’s what Loki knew — it would kill him, too. Two down for the price of one.
She doesn’t look away. He doesn’t know what she wants from him, and he’s too frayed at the edges, too disgusted with himself, to figure it out.
“I got the dog,” he says. “I’ll be fine. I just — I gotta go, I can’t be here.”
His apartment is quiet when he gets back to it, empty. There’s a sticky note stuck to the fridge.
Went to Jersey for the weekend with a friend because of all the destruction and stuff. Took the dog. Didn’t wanna leave him here alone. Call me when you get back in town and I’ll bring him back. —Kate
He reads it three times before he understands what it says, and then he turns and heads for bed, shedding clothes along the way. He doesn’t get out of bed for three days, except to piss and drink water, doglike himself, out of the tap in his bathroom. He could feel disgusted with himself for not even being able to make it to the kitchen — should feel disgusted with himself — but he can’t seem to access it, just a foggy tiredness that doesn’t let him do anything but sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
There’s a banging on his door on day four, and before he can haul himself out of bed there’s a loud bark as Kate lets herself in.
The dog jumps onto his bed, licking his face and panting. She stops in the doorway, arms crossed. Then she uncrosses them, and signs something. He squints at her, willing his focus to come back, and she signs it again, a little slower.
Well, she says, you’re not dead.
“Seems that way,” he says. He sits up, still petting Lucky, who sniffs at his neck and whimpers.
You stink, Kate says. Showered?
He remembers showering, after. Changing into a T-shirt from Stark’s closet. It’s on his floor, now, exchanged for one of his old Springsteen shirts.
“Not since just after the battle,” he says, finally. “I think.”
She wrinkles her nose. Eaten?
“You’re not my mother,” he says.
Someone has to be, Kate says. Since Mister Avenger over here can’t be assed to take care of himself like a grown man—
She has to be a little creative when getting this across. She finger-spells A-V-E-N-G-E-R, which means she’s pissed enough to take the time, and ‘can’t be assed’ is not exactly a phrase in sign language.
He looks away from her and back to Lucky. Lucky beams at him, and Clint smiles back.
“Want pizza, buddy? Pizza from Joey’s?” he asks, and Lucky licks his cheek. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
He looks back at Kate.
“I’ll shower,” he says. “Can you call?”
The idea of doing both makes him weirdly dizzy. Frantic. He can’t possibly do both. One, he can manage one. And he’ll eat a slice of pizza, and he’ll go back to sleep.
Sure, Kate says. You’re paying.
“Duh,” Clint tells her, and then gets out of bed. He sways, a little. His feet feel cold against the floor. Usually that’s the other way around.
He stands there for a little while, and then Kate is standing in front of him again, her phone in her hand and her face more concerned than before. He sees her lips form the word Clint.
“‘M fine,” he says. His bathroom seems far. Is there a towel inside? There might be. He turns and walks toward it.
Kate stops him with a hand on the elbow and presses a clean shirt and jeans into his hands. He watches her mouth and she says here, now [go]. You[‘ll?] feel better.
He nods. “Thanks,” he says, and she whacks him in the arm lightly, before she goes.
He takes too long in the shower, and then it takes even longer to find his hearing aids, because he hasn’t had them in for days. It turns out he’d left them in the kitchen on that first night back, but he has no memory of taking them out and leaving them there. He only finds this out after tearing apart his room in a frantic, desperate hunt for them. He doesn’t need them, not with Kate, but there’s something comforting about having them in, having another line of defense.
Kate gestures towards the box of pizza. “So,” she says. “Catch me up.”
“Aliens invaded New York and I shot at them,” he says. “Nothing more to it than that.”
“Is Natasha okay?”
He thinks of the bruises ringing her neck and flinches. “She’s okay.”
“Why hasn’t she been here?” Kate asks.
“Why would she be?”
“I don’t pretend to understand the weird little thing you guys have going on,” Kate says in that superior way of hers, taking a delicate bite of sausage and pepper. “I prefer to talk to people I’m interested in, like, y’know, a normal person. But she’s usually here when you’re injured, growling at anyone who looks at you.”
“I’m not injured.”
“You were in bed for three days.”
“I needed the sleep,” Clint says. “I — I don’t know, but I’m fine now.” He barely remembers the past few days, which is scary. Just one long blurred day of opening and closing his eyes and thinking, maybe I should get up now, and then not doing it, interspersed with nightmares ringed with blue.
“I needed to know you were alive,” Kate says, quietly, and guilt drips down his spine like an ice cube.
He’s known Kate since she was eighteen and bright-eyed and standing on top of a building with a bow in her hands and a ski mask over her face. Doing her part to make a difference in the world, whatever that meant. To Kate, apparently, it had meant hunting down a molester and getting an arrow in his arm, in an alley just far enough away from everything in South Jersey that a scream wouldn’t be heard. She’d pinned him to the wall, and she’d been taping a note next to him when Clint had gotten there, Coulson in his ear, telling him to apprehend whoever had shot—
His stomach curdles, the pizza turning over. Coulson.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She shakes her head. “It’s okay. You’re alive.”
He feeds the rest of the pizza to Lucky. She sits down on the couch next to him and her head finds his shoulder, and they sit like that for a little while.
She leaves in a few hours with a tight hug and a promise to come by if he needs anything.
He has an even worse nightmare that night, about blinking himself awake in his own apartment with Lucky and Kate dead at his feet, his hands snapping Natasha’s neck. There’s a silvery laugh, from behind him, and then a scream. His own, maybe. He wakes up before he can make sense of it, drenched in sweat.
Figures.
Two days later he gets a text from Kate, shortly followed by one from Nat. The meat of the message is basically the same — are you okay / are you alive — which are two very different questions. He gets them when he’s throwing up in his kitchen sink after trying to eat some of the leftover pizza that Kate had, thoughtfully, left in his fridge.
Alive, he tells both of them, don’t come over, which of course means that Kate’s there in about twenty minutes, America following her with a wrinkled nose. Maybe from the smell.
“The fuck’d you bring her for,” Clint says. He’s in boxers and a hoodie, the vomit washed down the sink, but he’s light-headed from lack of food and shaky, sitting on the floor of his kitchen. He wants to be out of sight of the windows; this, at the moment, is the only thought that’s making any measure of sense or contains any urgency. Lucky is whining at his feet, paw on his knee.
America lifts an eyebrow and leaves the apartment without saying anything. Kate glares.
“You don’t have to be a bitch. I came here to help.”
“It’s not — I’m alive, ” he says. “I told you not to come.”
“You clearly need help,” she says, and plops down next to him like this is a normal Saturday (Friday? Monday? ) and she’s just messing with him the way she always does. “You’re a mess, your apartment’s a mess, you haven’t shaved in—”
“Excuse me if I don’t want to get a blade too close to my neck right now,” he snaps, and something in her face changes.
“You didn’t tell me what happened,” she says.
“Aliens. New York. Arrows.”
“Besides that,” she says. “It must have been something else. Before.”
He doesn’t answer.
“That’s your job, isn’t it?” she asks. “To stop shit like this before it happens?”
“To try to,” he mumbles. “I did a real fuckin’ bad job this time, Katie.”
She doesn’t tell him to not call her Katie, like she usually would. She just looks at him.
“I’m not gonna ruin your date,” he tells her, suddenly overwhelmed all over again with guilt. “I’ve — I’ve fucked up enough stuff this week. Go have fun. I’ll be okay.”
“Clint—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “I just need sleep.”
“You’ve been doing nothing but sleep.”
“Little more never hurt.”
“Clint—”
“Kate,” he says, and lurches to his feet, heading for the stairs, for his bedroom, “go home.”
He hears her protesting again as he starts climbing, and reaches up to flick the switch on his hearing aid. That always pisses her off.
He feels the door slam. It makes the steps vibrate. He stops there, mid-climb, and takes a long, deep breath.
And then he goes back to bed.
He doesn’t get out of it again for a while.
This is the thing about Clint Barton — that underneath the aim and the practice and the talent that he has, that he knows he has, he’s only a guy, only an idiot in his thirties with no marketable skills except the ability to shoot at people, straight and true. And maybe his mind, if it comes to that. He’s not the brightest bulb in the house, but he’s honest. He tries. His mind lets him be merciful and not murderous.
He remembers going away with the Swordsman, after the circus and before SHIELD. The Swordsman had looked him straight in the eyes, about two weeks in, and told him to stop aiming for the legs and knees and start going for the eyes, for the neck, for the heart.
You hesitate, he had said. You don’t make the call fast enough, and then they get away.
He remembers Natasha on a rooftop, her eyes dead. Everyone else who’d ever seen the Black Widow and lived had told him that her eyes were cold, distant, calculating — lethal. He hadn’t seen that, just that same deadness in the eyes that he’d once felt, that only the Swordsman or his dad had ever been able to bring out of him. She had tilted her chin up at him, her hair a red flash in the night and her eyes so empty. Something in him had ached, for the chance he’d been given and for the many chances she had not received.
He lowered the bow.
“Come with me,” he said.
She didn’t try to kill him, which was the first surprise. He’d honestly sort of expected it, and been okay with it. He could hold his own if she did try, he’d supposed. But she didn’t. She just looked at him like she thought she was hallucinating him, and she nodded.
They got a hotel room and he sat in the window, the door locked six ways to Sunday, and watched the street while she slept, and slept, and slept. Almost a full twenty-four hours had passed before she woke up, and then she just stared at him.
“What do you want from me?”
He had called Coulson while she was out. “I’ve got a job offer,” he said. “If you’re interested.”
“And in exchange?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Pay it forward, I guess. Whatever you want to do.”
She considered that.
“Why?”
“Because I wanna be one of the good guys,” he said. “This seems like something a good person would do.”
“Just what I need,” she said, but there was something in her eyes, something more considering than friendship but something lighter than that deadness. Amusement, maybe. “An American to come in and be a hero.”
He grins at her. “I’m Clint.”
She paused, searching for something, and then nodded, more to herself than to him. “Natasha.”
She shook his hand. She walked beside him on the way back to Coulson, back to home base.
Strike Team Delta, Clint-and-Natasha, that all came later. But then — just that, the amusement in her eyes. That was enough that he believed in her. That was enough that he stood still and quiet and accepted the punishment from Fury for going off script, that was enough that he told psych teams over and over to just give her a chance, she’d surprise them. Everyone deserves a chance, he kept saying, over and over. I got one, and look at me.
Look at me.
He’s always been a little bit of an idiot, he thinks.
“Bet Tony fuckin’ Stark wouldn’t’ve been sucked in by that fuckin’ thing,” he tells Lucky, throat dry. Lucky whimpers and shoves at his hand with his cold black nose. “Prob’ly only works on dumbasses.”
Lucky whimpers again, which might mean stop feeling sorry for yourself. Or maybe, I am a dog and I have no idea what you’re saying. Clint presses his hand back against his eyes. Lucky shifts and crawls around a little until he’s got his head pressed mournfully against Clint’s stomach, and Clint moves to look at him again, and Lucky is staring back with big dark eyes. He gets some of Clint’s flannel overshirt in his mouth and worries at it, like he’s trying to tug him out of bed.
Clint doesn’t know if that’s all just wishful thinking. He doesn’t know if Lucky’s smart enough, really, to try something like that. He hauls himself into a sitting position anyway. It’s night from the looks of it, and that means Lucky needs food. He’s been walking him, too, most days, mechanically, because a dog is a dog and a dog needs to go out and this particular dog loves Clint no matter how much he smells or how much he sleeps, so Clint has no choice but to helplessly love him too, to make himself get up and do shit so Lucky can eat.
He keeps having the nightmares, the blue ones.
Lucky keeps waking him up from them with a head on his chest or a nip at his hand, which sometimes works and sometimes scares him more.
Natasha texts him about once a day. Kate, three or four.
He doesn’t respond to Kate’s. To Natasha’s, he fumbles with his phone’s Cyrillic keyboard each time, and writes живой.
It’s not all like that. Not all him feeling like dirt. He catches up on the Bachelorette, and on a couple other shows. He listens as Tony Stark leaves messages on his voicemail. Sometimes feels energized enough to go outside and walk Lucky down to the dog park and let him loose. He watches him run and chase the other dogs and laughs when he bounds back, panting. The laugh tugs itself out of his unused throat, but it doesn’t hurt. Those days he stops for a Coke at the bodega on the way home and buys a bottle of water, helps Lucky lap from it on the side of the road and laughs even more when the dog, goofily, can only get half the water before it falls onto the grass.
But some days he doesn’t eat anything and hardly drinks, and he lays in his bed feeling desperate for sleep and desperate for relief from the dreams and the guilt that eats him up inside, kills him, the guilt of Coulson and the dozens of other people that died and of Nat, of Nat, of Nat.
His hands on her neck. The bruises that night, when she sipped her vodka. The look in her eyes when she told him he was a hero.
He keeps dreaming of it, of her, and in the dreams he doesn’t stop squeezing until she’s dead.
The third straight week of this he tries to shoot at his little range, tries to do something that feels normal, but his aim is so off it’s laughable. He can barely hit the blue, much less the yellow or the red, and he throws his bow across the room in a fit of rage that’s so strong it scares him, and scares Lucky, too, if the whimper and resulting hiding is any indication. He yanks the arrows out of the targets and out of the wall and throws them, too. He was better than this when he was ten. He was better than this right after he was deafened and his balance was shot to shit.
He doesn’t clean it up, just gives into the self-pitying feeling of uselessness and sinks into the couch.
When he wakes up, with a start, after a rare dreamless sleep, there’s a banging at his door.
He doesn’t answer, so Kate opens it.
And then Kate strides across the room and punches him hard in the face, says something that he can’t make out.
She shouts the last word; it’s enough for him to hear the buzz of it even without his hearing aids, which he hasn’t been wearing all day. He fumbles for them, on the side table, putting them in as she glares at him. What is she saying? Dead? Dead.
“I’m not dead,” he says, which only makes her angrier.
“But you said you might try , dickhead,” she says, eyes wet with sudden tears, “don’t you know how much that scared me?”
Her eyes, her scrunched terrified face, they make him sit back. He doesn’t feel anything except exhausted apathy and a tiny bit of extra guilt, and that’s scary. He knows that he should be devastated that he made Kate cry. He knows that he should want to hug her. He thinks if he’s touched he’ll vomit.
“Kate,” he says, “Kate, I—”
“If you say you’re fine,” she says, “I swear to God—”
“I don’t,” he says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
That shuts her up. She takes a step back and looks at him, really looks at him.
“Clint,” she says, “I think maybe you should talk to someone.”
“I’m talking to you,” he says, mulish, “aren’t I?”
“Someone with expertise,” she says. “Someone who’s not twenty-one with her own issues.”
The last bit is pointed, meant, in Kate’s sharp way, to make him feel more guilty. It works, but it still doesn’t make him sad, which is fucked up.
She winces and steps back again, then forward, nervously. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”
He waves her off. “You’re fine,” he says. “I know I’m being—”
“You’re not being anything except fucking traumatized, ” she says. “That’s not — I can’t be mad at you for that, how much of a dick would I be — Clint, what even happened? ”
Her voice twitches in the way it does when she’s really, really about to cry.
He still doesn’t feel sad.
God damn it.
“Loki, uh,” he says. “Took over my body? For a while? With — magic. Something. I don’t know. Like, I was me, but I was inside me, sleeping. And I woke up and I — Coulson was dead, because I gave Loki info about SHIELD, and I—”
“Oh my God,” she says, horrified. “Clint, are you okay? ”
He shrugs.
“I tried to kill Nat,” he says.
“You tried to—”
“I’m not gonna fucking say it again,” he says, which shuts her up. She paces the room for a few minutes, more antsy with the knowledge than anything else, before tentatively sitting down on the couch next to him.
“But it wasn’t your fault,” she tries.
“I woke up from it,” he says, “and her neck was covered in bruises. Shaped like hands. Her voice was all fucked up, she — I know he made me do it but I still did it, all right? I still hurt her. I promised her I would never do that. I promised her.”
That promise had been made a year after he’d recruited her, on a mission. The details of it have left his mind, now, but the promise never has. She’d said something offhand about her handlers in the Red Room, and looked at him in that curiously blank, dead-eyed way that she still gets sometimes. He hadn’t known how to get her out of it. All he’d thought to do was touch her shoulder, and say something sentimental and stupid that might as well have been announcing how gone he was, even then. I’ve got your back, now. I’m not gonna let anyone get to you.
That had made her laugh. You’re protecting me? My big powerful American man?
That old joke. He’d grinned and tapped her shoulder with his. We’re partners. We protect each other. Always.
Always. And he’d, unsurprisingly, been the first to fuck up and break the promise.
He buries his face in his hands and takes a deep breath, then looks back at Kate.
“I need to, like, flush him out,” he says, remembering Nat next to him while he shook in a hospital bed, what she said. It’s gonna take time. She’s usually right, and it’s something he can grab onto, something he can use to try, desperately to get better. He wants to be better. Before, that’s always been enough. “I don’t know. It’s just — it’s still in me, and I can’t feel anything or do anything until it’s not.”
Kate absorbs that in silence. Then she looks up at the mess of his arrows and bow on the floor, where he threw them.
“You’re lucky nothing broke,” she says, finally. “Come on, let’s clean it up. We can clean the whole place up.”
She stands, and holds out her hand. After a moment, he takes it.
What helped you, he asks her, two days later. When you didn’t want to leave the house.
He watches the three little dots as she thinks about how to respond.
leaving it, she says, eventually. and not just walking around the neighborhood, actually leaving it.
So he does.
The SHIELD gym is just like he remembers it, which is unsettling in a way he can’t put words to. Maybe he just thinks the rest of the world should have changed, too, and the fact that it hasn’t means he’s either overreacting or holding on too much. People keep looking at him, but not at him, at his shoulder, and then blinking in surprise when his bow isn’t there. But he doesn’t want to shoot it, not when he’s so bad at it right now.
He feels weird. It’s weird to be back. That’s all, he tells himself, trying to calm his suddenly racing heartbeat. There are high ceilings in this room, which is good, and there are no windows except high on the walls, which is also good. There are a lot of people, and a lot of corners. That’s not as good.
“It’s just a fucking treadmill, Barton,” he tells himself, staring ahead. A couple people he doesn’t recognize are running next to each other, slow enough that they can chat.
“Agent Barton?”
He whirls around on his heel. He blinks.
“Captain,” he says, and offers a clumsy salute, which probably reads as him being a jackass. Rogers winces.
“Uh, just Steve is okay,” he says, as if Clint could ever look at Captain fucking America and then call him by his first name. “Are you back on duty?”
“No,” he says. “I’m, uh—”
He’s saved from explaining when Natasha emerges from the sparring room, rubbing at the back of her neck with a towel. Her eyes only widen a little. He sways on his feet. Her neck is all healed up, he realizes, which sends something calm through him, settled; the image of her, now, hale and healthy, replacing the one of her with bruises.
“Barton,” she says.
He manages a weird little wave. “Hey,” he says.
“You didn’t say you were coming,” she says.
“I didn’t — I figured you’d, y’know,” he says, then doesn’t know. Rogers looks between the two of them and then sort of nods to himself.
“I’ll see you later, then,” he says to Nat, and she nods and gives him one of her smaller, more friendly smiles.
“Rogers,” she says in goodbye. The side of his mouth quirks up a little, and he heads for the lockers.
Clint looks at him as he leaves. Are they friends now? Does this mean he has an in to be friends with Captain America? Friends friends, and not just coworkers? Maybe leaving his house does have a few pluses. He looks back at Natasha.
She nods to the doorway she just exited. “Wanna spar?”
Sparring, he thinks, suddenly feeling a little hysterical. As in fighting. As in fighting her. He used to do that all the time without a thought. He used to leave bruises on her and they didn’t mean anything awful. She used to leave bruises on him, too. Is that all this is to her? Sparring? Is it possible she didn’t think anything of it at all?
“I was gonna, uh,” he says, and nods vaguely in the direction of the treadmills. “Run.”
“And fuck up your feet on that thing?” she says, unimpressed. “You’ve never run indoors in your life.”
He knows that. But — sparring. Alone with her in a room, on a mat, fighting her.
“I dunno, Nat,” he says. “I’m not in great shape right now. I haven’t done anything in weeks—”
“Then you definitely shouldn’t run right off the bat,” she points out. He can’t really think of a rebuttal for that. “Come on. We can figure out where you’re at.”
“Maybe just like, dummies and punching bags,” he says. She shrugs, which is not a yes or no, and turns. He follows her in.
The room is enclosed and open, with no corners for things to hide in. He takes a deep breath, in and out. He can do this. He can still do this.
She’s evidently just finished punching some things herself, but she stretches with him the way they always used to, silent and efficient, not wasting any time. She looks him over critically as he moves, but it’s only when he’s done that she tells him, eyebrows raised, “You weren’t kidding.”
“Fuck off,” he says, feeling a little better about the whole thing. “I was on leave.”
“Leave, sure,” she says. “Let me guess, you watched the Bachelorette the whole time?”
“It was a very interesting season,” he tells her, and she smiles, in the faint way that means her amusement is present but not at the forefront of her mind. She sits down against the wall and gestures toward the punching bag.
“I’ll keep an eye on your form,” she says, and it’s so normal that he relaxes a little bit more. He can make fists without wanting to leave the room.
So he punches, and kicks, and she sits there and tells him when he’s fucking up. When he’s exhausted, which comes sooner than he’d expected, she stays sitting there and just sort of looks at him.
“Are you gonna be back on Wednesday?” she asks. He looks back. There’s a silent question in there, about old routines, about their Monday/Wednesday/Friday sparring sessions, about whether he’s back for good or just back for the day.
“Yeah,” he says, and she nods.
“All right,” she says, “then on Wednesday you’re actually gonna spar with me.”
It’s an easy thing to agree to, at the time, because he’s there with her and her neck is uninjured and the room feels enclosed and safe. She smiles again, careful and small, when he nods. He is greeted at his apartment door by a wriggling Lucky. It’s a good day.
The next day is, well.
Less good.
That night, the dreams come back. They’re always vivid, more like real life than dreams — this one feeling so much like a memory that it’s horrifying, especially because it starts out with something that he knows for a fact he did. Nat is standing across from him on that walkway in the Helicarrier, and he’s got an arrow pointed at her, and then they fight, jumping from ledge to ledge, and he has a knife drawn on her — there’s a sick sense of satisfaction in his stomach, satisfaction that doesn’t wholly belong to him, you bested her, finally, you beat her — and then she’s biting hard into his arm and making him drop the knife. There’s blood, somewhere. One of them drew blood. He smells it, sharp in the air. He kicks her in the legs, knocking her down to one knee and making her lose her balance. His hands find her throat. Good. You’re winning. You’re winning. She gasps for air underneath him, her eyes lock with his, she kicks out with one leg—
She misses. She goes cold in his hands. And then he’s standing, and moving forward, and whatever it is in his chest is singing. The bow is on his back, where it belongs, and there’s nothing to hold him back, not now.
He wakes up sweating, his limbs aching. The aching limbs aren’t in themselves a bad thing — it’s what he expected after not leaving the house for three weeks and then trying to work out — but they give credence to the nightmare he just had. For a long, terrifying moment he thrashes in bed, drenched in sweat and convinced that the last three weeks have been some sort of fever dream and that Loki’s back and he’s been out there doing things for him, running ragged, killing all the people he loves—
Lucky whimpers from the side of the bed. That’s enough to snap him out of it — a living presence, proof that these last few weeks have happened. God, he owes Lucky so many pizzas for everything that dog has done for him.
All he can do, though, is roll over and press his face into his pillow, shaking from horror and frustration and feeling close to tears, unwilling to look up for more than a second. They always feel so real, the dreams. He’s never had nightmares that vivid, or that cruel. He’s never been able to see the blood, to smell it—
He stumbles out of bed and into the bathroom to hurl. Then swears, loudly. Then rinses out his mouth. Then goes back to bed.
That’s what it is, on days like this — his life becoming a stream of five-word sentences, of actions that take minimum brain-power or energy. His life becoming something small and pathetic, something he’s ashamed to call his.
And it always ends the same way — in giving up, or giving in, whatever you want to call it. Or, in simpler words: he always goes back to bed.
But he promised to go in on Wednesday, so he does.
He tells himself he’ll tell her he’s too sore to spar, but she sees through that, of course, like she sees through all the rest of his bullshit.
She paces the edges of the mat, barefoot, cracking her neck. “C’mon,” she says, coaxingly, the way she talks to marks at bars, telling them to just stay for one more drink, “just a couple rounds. You haven’t fought me in so long, I’m getting rusty.”
“Practice with Rogers,” he says.
“He tries too hard not to hurt me,” she says. “C’mon, Barton.”
So he kicks off his shoes and thinks just one round, just one try, then she’ll leave him alone, then she’ll let him go back to his home and his dog and his welcoming bed. “Sure,” he says. Anything for her, really. It makes him shake his head, the way his body leans toward hers. Starved of her presence, the steady measure of her walk.
They square up at opposite sides of the ring. Somewhere else in the gym, music is playing, poppy and swift, and Clint lets the beat give him a little bit of pep. It’s hard to match his body to a rhythm these days, when the only thing that seems to cling to him is foggy tiredness. He used to go out running every morning, because he had to, to keep himself in shape for work, then come home and fry eggs. He remembers Nat in his kitchen at least once or twice, smiling as he whistled along to the radio. Nowadays it’s a good morning if he gets up before noon to see it.
“Don’t hold back,” she reminds him, and then goes toward him. He sways, drunken, out of her way, but it’s not a good block or even a good dodge, nothing like what he used to do. He’s distracted by the flash of her hair and the sickening worry in his gut, the memory of his hands around her neck and his knee on her stomach. She doesn’t hold back, but he doesn’t even have much to give.
She’s got him pinned to the mat after a few messy punches. He wants to vomit. He’s so tired, foggy and hungry. He can’t remember the last time he ate but he also doesn’t feel like he can stomach anything. He wants to sleep, tucked away in his bed, Lucky at his feet, a place to rot where no one can find him—
Fucking useless. He can’t fight, he can’t shoot, he couldn’t even keep himself from trying to kill her—
“I said, ” she says, rolling off him, “don’t hold back. I’m not—”
“I don’t want to fight you,” he tells her, exhausted, “I don’t want to — I can’t—”
“Can’t or won’t?” she asks, getting in his face. “What, because Loki’s still in your brain? Kick him out! You’re stronger than—”
He punches her across the face, suddenly so angry he wants to throw up again. She massages her jaw and glares back at him.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says. “Aren’t you mad at me? Just be mad at me, just tell me what’s wrong.”
He throws another punch, shrugs her off when she blocks it. It takes a little while, a couple tries where she tosses him back onto the mat or he shoves her into the wall, but they fall into their old choreography, punching and kicking and blocking and dodging and jumping all over each other. Anger still stabs at him, though, howling and sharp and blue over the edges of his vision. He might not be worth the time right now but she doesn’t have to keep dragging him here, a useless piece of shit who can’t even—
Blue. His hands at her neck. He’s crouched over her, knee on her stomach, hands at her throat, and her eyes are fixed on him, calm and green.
He freezes, not tightening his grip, not letting go, either.
“You’re not gonna kill me, Clint,” she says. It’s the first time she’s called him Clint since that night at Stark’s house, when she gave him her vodka. Her hands come up to wrap around his wrists. “You’re not gonna kill me.”
He rolls off her, scrambles back, and heaves. Doesn’t throw up, because there’s nothing to come up. His arms and legs are shaking.
Her hand falls on his back, careful and tentative. “It’s not me, is it.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she says. “We’re partners, right? How can I help you through this?”
“I just,” he says, and then stops, and sits up and looks at her. “I just.”
She looks back.
“I think I can live through a lot,” he says, finally. “But this, I don’t — it’s taking so long to get out of me.”
“When’s the last time you ate?”
His stomach turns over at the thought of eating. “Two days ago? Maybe?” He might’ve had some crackers this morning, left on his counter by Kate in an attempt at helpfulness.
“Drank?”
“Coffee,” he says, “this — this morning,” almost stumbling and saying afternoon, because that’s when he got up. Either way, he can tell it’s the wrong answer by the way her eyes darken. She gets up and leaves, returns with a glass of water, and watches until he drinks the whole thing. It doesn’t make him feel any better.
“Now get up,” she says, “we’re gonna go eat,” and at even the mention of food his stomach clenches.
“No,” he says.
“ Clint. ”
“Nat, I’m just gonna throw it up,” he says, exhausted. “I’ve tried, all right?”
Something complicated and frustrated and sorrowful runs over her face, replaced just as quick by her trademark steely determination. “Then what can I do?”
He stays quiet for a long time, eyes closed and thinking, his head tilted back against the wall and his arms around his knees.
“Sometimes I dream of you,” he says. “That’s the worst thing. I dream you’re dead and I did it and I didn’t wake up in time.”
“Then I’ll come with you,” she says, and her tone brokers no argument. “And I’ll be there when you wake up and you can see that I’m alive.”
Funny, he thinks, that’s the first suggestion from anywhere, including his own mind, that seems like it might help. He remembers wrapping his arms around Lucky, being comforted by the heartbeat of a living thing. He imagines pressing his thumb to her wrist and closing his eyes like that, holding tight to her pulse. And then he reaches out and does it, takes her hand as gently as possible and moving his thumb on the pale underside of her wrist until he can feel it. His own heart slows to match it, somehow finally soothed.
When he looks up, she’s looking back with such understanding it makes his bones ache.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I haven’t been sleeping well either.”
He presses a kiss there, to her pulse, before he can think too hard about it. She watches him in the careful way she always does, the set of her eyebrows determined, the line of her mouth soft. He lets go, and he stands.
“Okay,” he says, “then let’s try it.”
He watches her scan his apartment with her brows furrowed. He wonders if it seems wildly different from all the other times she’s been here, and if it does, what it is that’s changed. She doesn’t say anything, though, just moves to his kitchen and gets out a pot, filling it with water, and then, as he stands in the doorway and watches, gets two coffee-stained mugs down from the cabinet.
Jesus Christ, he thinks. The Black Widow, in his kitchen, making tea.
She gestures at the counter and he closes the door, locking both his locks, and sits on one of his barstools. He watches as she hunts through his cabinets for tea that he doesn’t have, but he doesn’t flinch when she whips around and scowls at him. Concern is interesting on Natasha. It’s not that he’s never seen it before, but never this simply. Usually she is concerned in a sharper, biting way, like a lion, biting a stray cub in the neck to drag it back. Not that he thinks of himself as a cub in their relationship, but—
He gives up on the metaphor. “I’m sorry,” he says. “No tea. I can go get some.”
“No,” she says, frowning at the cabinets, like it’s their fault. Not a lion, right now, he thinks, not a cornered animal. Just simple human concern. He’s been under the umbrella of her stubborn protectiveness for a while now, but it never stops being surprising that she cares about him, somehow, like it never stops being surprising that Lucky doesn’t run away in the night or that Kate doesn’t get tired of getting lunch with an old man. “Maybe it’ll be better. Just something warm, no flavor.”
His still-roiling stomach agrees. She leans back against the opposite counter and crosses her arms, and looks at him.
“I want you to explain something to me,” she says. “Why you didn’t bring your bow.”
He stares at his hands, for lack of a better place to look. “I can’t shoot.” It doesn’t occur to him to lie, not to her. To Kate, he might’ve. “I didn’t want anyone to see.”
“Why not?”
“My hands are shaking.”
“That,” she says, neutrally, “might be from lack of food.”
“Probaby,” he says. It makes as much sense as anything. “But until I can eat. . .”
“Clint,” she says, “I don’t know how you’re so okay with all this.”
He laughs. “I seem okay?”
“Maybe that’s not a good word,” she allows. “Resigned, maybe.”
“I’m sure I’ll be angry later,” he says. “I just, I don’t know. I can’t feel it right now.”
He doesn’t have to explain it any more than that. Her eyes soften. You know that I do echoes through his mind; it’s a sudden, tender memory, and it sticks itself to him. She knows.
She does find the crackers in the cabinet, and she makes him eat them with the hot water. As meals go, it’s pitiful, but she seems satisfied to see him eat at all.
They don’t go up to his bedroom — he probably hasn’t changed the sheets since all this started, so they’re sweaty and covered in dog hair, at best, rank at worst. She wouldn’t stand for that, no matter how much she wanted to help him, and he doesn’t want to put her through it. So he sits on the couch and watches her pull the blinds down over the windows, watches her fiddle with the TV remote and select some channel with old movies from the 50s, which Nat likes, but will never admit to his face. She sits next to him, no-nonsense, and slings her legs across his lap, turning into him, and holding out her hand.
He takes it. He takes the other, too, when she offers it. He thinks about sitting here on the couch with her and sitting there on the balcony with her and crouching over her in the sparring room. He thinks about how different she is from the person he met all those years ago, whose body was always a moment from running, always perched on the balls of her feet.
If you ran, he doesn’t say, has never said, I would, too. He’s spent so much time trying to be a good person and it terrifies him how quick he would run out in the night and start committing crimes again if it was to try and keep her safe. Or just to keep with her, in general. He would follow her, if she was running out to do bad things again or if she was running out on her responsibility to do good; he would follow her to a five-star hotel or an old crumbling apartment or something comfortably in the middle. Sometimes, embarrassingly, he even longs for it.
But he knows that one of the many things they share is a drive to do something good, to make up for the bad; he knows that this shared drive is the only reason they both stay.
He takes her hands in his and presses a kiss to each palm, because there’s something he needs to say but he wants to blanket it with kindness, if he can. “I would’ve been dead,” he says. “In five minutes. If he’d managed to get me to do it.” If she had actually died. If he had been the one to make it happen.
She narrows her eyes and considers him. “After all this,” she says, finally, “you were willing to let me be the death of you? You didn’t let that happen the first time.”
“Jesus,” he says, because it’s too difficult when she puts it like that, when she brings back a gun and a bow in the dark and the way he lowered his and convinced her to lower hers. When she reminds him how vividly he wanted to cling to life then.
“Clint,” she says, and it’s tender and honest, classic Natasha. “You’ve gotta be stronger than that.”
“I try,” he tells her, because he does.
“No, I mean it,” she says, and pulls one of her hands free and reaches up to touch his cheek. “Look, I can’t — you’re the only thing I couldn’t lose. So you have to be stronger than that.” Her thumb moves against him. “I’m not dead. And even if I was, there’s always something worth living for.”
“I swore I’d never touch you,” he tells her. He thinks she can hear it, how heavy it feels, betraying her. “That I’d never hurt you.”
She brushes her nose down his cheek until she’s got her head resting against his shoulder, her nose just touching the side of his neck.
She sighs, there, and closes her eyes.
“That wasn’t you,” she says. “You know how I know?”
He shakes his head.
“Because of this,” she says, and gestures between them. “Because I trust you.”
He closes his eyes too, moves so he can still feel it, her pulse under his thumb. The proof of her life, against him. Her living, breathing body.
“I guess I don’t get how you still can,” he admits.
“Is Loki still in your brain?” she asks.
He shakes his head, knows she can feel it.
“Well, then,” she says. “There’s that question answered.”
She lets that hang, and he does, too. Eventually, her breathing evens out.
But he doesn’t sleep, he’s had enough of sleeping. He feels her sleep, instead, and for now it’s not there, the fear, the self-loathing. She’s alive, and all he can do now is be alive with her. She falls asleep in front of him, untense, unafraid.
He turns so he can rest his nose at the crown of her head, smells her shampoo.
She trusts him.
It’s easy, he thinks, to say you’ll run if someone else does. Running is easy. It’s just leaving. It’s hard to stay, hard to trust, whether it’s yourself or others. And if she trusts him—
Then maybe things, in this moment, can be uncomplicated. She’s alive. So is he. He takes a deep breath and keeps his eyes closed, nose in her hair, and lets that be enough.
The next morning — when she’s scowling at the pot over the stove again, her favorite tea sitting in the cabinet and coffee brewing for him, and there’s a bag of bagels with a purple sticky note on it, on the counter, and he thinks it must have come from Kate, because Lucky’s back, too, begging for scraps that don’t exist yet at Natasha’s feet — when he’s still got a fog over him, pulling on his limbs, but there’s a sunlight peeking through it that he hasn’t felt in weeks — he stretches on the couch and still thinks, for a second, about his exhaustion and his shaking hands and going back to bed.
Then, he puts a hand on his stomach, and he realizes he’s hungry. Not nauseous, not shaking. Just simple, honest hunger.
So he gets up.