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I've seen you at your worst.
He's seen her heartbeat stop and the death rattle set in when someone knocked one of her triggers. He held onto her, yelled at her not to die while the doctor yelled at him to shut up, and they tried to save her life while she tried to fight them but couldn't get past his iron grip on her arms.
Clint has seen her at her worst, the rock bottom of the bottle when they managed to save her, and she glared at him mutinously because he'd saved her and that wasn't what she'd wanted.
She didn't cut him with Russian words because it wasn't his tongue, his language, just slitted her eyes and muttered, "You always think you can save me." She didn't need saving, didn't want it.
Clint looked at her calmly, thumbs stuck through his belt loops as he balanced too precariously close to the edge of her roof and said, "I think you can save yourself."
Semantics. She slid the alcohol over her tongue and down her throat because it wasn't about who at all. She didn't want to be saved.
—
She's seen him go down with an arrow seemingly through his heart and caught her breath before it fled her with a strangled gasp. "Barton!"
It gave the shooter pause and that would have given her pause, but she had no room to take it. Her Glocks were firing and the shooter went down hard in a pool of his own blood. He deserved worse. He deserved to die with fire.
Natasha has seen Clint at his worst, when his bloody breath rasped in his throat and she held onto him with her hands slick with his blood and yelled at him not to die.
"Barney?" he rasped out, deathly pale.
"Dead."
And the light went out of his eyes. No matter, if the breath stayed in his body.
—
He's seen her curled up in the corner of her bedroom in a too tiny, too spare apartment she never did get around to turning into a home instead of a glorified hotel suite, sobbing deep, broken, ugly sobs, unwilling or unable to tell him what's wrong. He held her and rocked her because for some reason Natasha allowed him to see her at her worst, and even if she wouldn't talk, she wanted the comfort.
They've been there at the bottom of her tears until she cried herself out and still wouldn't talk, when she curled up in his arms and made herself small and slept.
She woke hours later with a crick in her neck and a headache from dehydration. Clint's entire body ached with the soreness of the unnatural position, but he didn't care. He was her partner. There was nowhere else he'd rather be.
—
She's seen him sitting on the front porch step of his distant farm, away from Fury and the Helicarrier and New York and all but the remotest outpost of SHIELD, thumb on the picture of his brother's face, broken glass in the frame. She looked at him and he looked at her and he went inside without a word. She followed.
Natasha's seen him at his worst, at the bottom of an attic full of a past he doesn't want to own. "I want to burn it," he said, and she helped him gather the detritus of a life that had never been kind to him. She helped him light the match to a smoking bonfire. She held him and described the crackle of the fire, fingers haltingly finding the words.
He stilled her hand by wrapping it up in his. "I never learned sign language all that well."
He never needed to. His previous experience with deafness, when his father punched the hearing out of his ears, was temporary. This wasn't.
"We'll learn together."
—
He's seen Natasha at her worst, and this wasn't it. Clint dropped his duffel in the corner of her new safehouse. Natasha turned off the television and dropped the remote on the coffee table.
"You made it out," she said.
Afghanistan was supposed to have been a milk run, a nice way to ease back into the field on a new hearing aid and see if they worked as promised. Milk runs tend to remain simple if your team doesn't turn out to be HYDRA.
"So did you." Clint dropped to the couch beside her and fiddled with the necklace against her collarbone.
She hesitated then leaned forward and kissed him.
They've seen the worst and loved each other anyway.