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“I blew all my covers,” Natasha says to Steve, standing next to the grave of a man who’s still alive. Funny, but that’s how she feels, too. Dead but alive. Is Natasha Romanoff dead? Does she have to be? “Time to find a new one.”
Maybe not, though. Maybe she can just finally try to figure out who she is, after all this time.
Steve smiles. She gives him the files that he needs, and wishes him luck, and hopes he doesn't need it; she kisses him on the cheek in lieu of a goodbye, and it feels final, intense, like the end of a chapter in a book.
“Take care of yourself,” she wants to say, but she knows he always does.
She stands in an empty hotel room, staring at her face in the mirror, trying to find pieces of herself in it. She feels rattled, uncertain. Finding out about Hydra has left her twisted and confused, and all she has left is the knowledge that she's alive, that she breathes, that she moves, that her heart is still rattling in her chest. It doesn't feel like enough, not anymore.
She shakes out a breath, hand pressed to the mirror, head bowed. She is alive, and so is the Winter Soldier, and so is Hydra.
She has that one single truth in her own life -- she is alive, she is still alive -- but she has to confront all the lies that come with it, the lies she'd told without realizing.
I thought I knew whose lies I was telling, she remembers saying to Steve, but maybe she never did. God, how many people? How many people has she killed, thinking it was the right thing, people who really didn’t deserve to die at all?
She looks at herself, and she looks like a stranger, like another woman has jumped into the shell of what used to be Natasha Romanoff, what used to be the Black Widow, what used to be a SHIELD agent, a good person, telling the right lies for the right people. Not anymore. Her eyes are too wild, too red around the edges, and she grips the porcelain sink hard enough that she imagines cracking it, imagines watching it crumble into dust under her fingers like so much else.
Stop it, she tells herself. She knows it won’t help her at all, to just sit here and shake. She needs to get somewhere safe.
The only safe place she knows is a day’s drive by car, so she steels herself, and walks away from the mirror. There will be time to shake later. There will be time to mourn what she has done. But she has trained herself to not allow herself any vulnerability until she is safe.
Safe feels like a foreign word on her tongue now, but she reaches out for it anyway—she has always been good at that.
She has to hide.
That is the only thing left now, that feeling; that aching need to hide. She’s already had a press conference. She’s already been far more vulnerable in public than she usually is. Now—
She thinks of Avengers Tower, first. Thinks of the floor she knows is waiting for her there. She would be safe from the press there, presumably. She would be with her own. Hill is there, she knows that.
Avengers Tower is the logical place to go. It’s close. It’s safe. She can stare into the mirror and break down in an empty room and no one will know. She can build herself up again.
She can hide.
(She is so tired. She imagines what would be waiting for her in Avengers Tower: a too-soft bed, a million questions, Pepper Potts' concerned and frantic face. She shudders in spite of herself; she can't picture it, having to shake apart and put herself back together on a bed just as unfamiliar as the one in this hotel room.)
She pulls on a too-big plaid shirt with shaky hands, jeans and sneakers and sharply winged eyeliner and a pair of fake glasses until she looks like a college student. She doesn’t straighten her hair. Her hands won’t stop shaking.
She waits until the middle of the night, takes a car, and drives out of the city.
Avengers Tower glimmers in the skyline behind her, and she thinks someday.
Not today.
She drums nervously on the wheel of the car. She’s been driving all night, and she wants a coffee. She has not been so apprehensive about facing a coffee shop since—
Well. For a long time.
The building sits on the horizon in front of her and her hand hovers over her blinker, ready to signal the turn, to pull in, to get a damn coffee.
Her hand shakes, and she doesn’t turn.
What if they recognize her?
What will she do, then? The coffee shop crowd is teenagers and college students, who spend their lives on the internet; they will see her and remember the files she leaked, the ones that talk about the things she did, the lives she took—she can feel them staring, feel the look of the barista, the double take. The whispers.
The coffee shop fades away in her rearview mirror, and she tells herself it’s for the best.
The farm has a long and winding driveway, and the house is old and broken down and vaguely white. One of the shutters is falling off and she smiles in spite of herself, thinks, looks like something he would love to pieces.
The car rattles when she stops it and the sudden silence falls in on her. She looks in the rearview mirror, and she’s met only with bloodshot eyes and exhaustion after a day’s drive. She still doesn’t look like herself.
I blew all my covers, I have to find a new one, she said to Steve, but what if it backfires? What if she can’t ever look like herself again? She doesn’t even know who she is anymore and she’s never much cared about losing Natasha before but it feels like a fragile thread, stretched too thin, and if it breaks under the strain of Natalie Rushman and all the others it will not repair itself. She cares about losing herself now. Too many more covers and she will break under the weight. It will not last. Not like this, not anymore.
She knows that.
She takes a deep breath and gets out of the car.
He’s not there.
(His dog is there, though, one-eyed and yellow and panting at her from the porch, halfway out of the dog door. So he can’t be far.)
She doesn’t like waiting, but she can make an exception; it will be nice to have to not think for a while.
The dog barks at her and blinks its eye.
She smiles. “Okay, dog, do you need something to eat?”
It just barks again and pads into the kitchen.
It occurs to her later that if she’d wanted a familiar bed all she would have had to do is go home to her place in the city, with the little cat that pretends Natasha is her owner, with the men and women with stiff accents that she can talk to in her old language. And if she had wanted safety, all she would have had to do is go to the Tower. Instead she drove a day and a night to get here. It means something, she just doesn't want to examine exactly what.
“Did you come here to be safe, too?” she asks the dog, and the dog barks and continues to eat its food. She’d given it leftover chicken she’d found in the fridge, not knowing what to feed a dog. The cat, back in the city, is usually fine with scraps.
She looks at the sun setting outside and leans against the wall, waiting.
When she feels the dog leaning against her legs, sniffing her jeans at the ankles, she kneels down and takes its head in her hands to scratch under its chin like it seems to want.
“You’re just like him, dog,” she says finally. The dog whines.
“I’m going to have to learn your name,” she adds, and gives him a final scratch on the chin before standing and walking away.
She shuts the door of the bedroom behind her and starts to tug off her clothes, ready to collapse into bed. It smells like grass, the windows open, the bed messy just like the rest of the house. It’s a small room, oddly quaint, with a quilt and a bed carved from rough wood like all the pictures of farmhouse bedrooms.
She’s still wearing the plaid shirt from two days ago and she falls into bed, presses her body against the mattress; breathes deep.
The dog whines and scratches at the door.
She closes her eyes. It scratches again. Whimpers.
It sounds afraid, she thinks. She tries to ignore it; the dog will get tired eventually. She needs rest, and so does the dog, and the dog will fall asleep.
The dog stops scratching, but it doesn’t stop whimpering, and she listens to the whimpers grow progressively more pitiful before sighing and standing up.
“You have a bed in the living room,” she says, slipping out and closing the door behind her. “I saw it. Come with me.”
Maybe the dog has forgotten where its bed is, she reasons. He did say the dog wasn’t the smartest.
The dog follows her to the living room, tail wagging, and she waits until it lies down on the bed near the dark fireplace.
“There you go,” she tells it, and it wags its tail.
She goes back to the bedroom, leaving it behind, and falls back into bed, closing her eyes—only to hear another whimper.
She sighs, and stands up again.
“Come on, dog, you need some rest,” she chastises it, opening the door again and leading the dog down to its bed. It looks at her with big eyes and lets out a big sigh, putting its head on its paws and closing its eyes.
She goes back to the bedroom and goes to sleep.
She wakes up again a few hours later to more whimpering, quiet and scared, and she groans into her pillow.
The dog eagerly greets her, wagging its tail, but when she tries to lead it down to the living room again, the tail stops wagging.
“You have to sleep in your bed,” she says, “it’s where you belong, dog.”
The dog whines. She sighs, and retreats to the bedroom, sitting down on the bed and looking at the dog in the hallway.
Carefully, the dog walks into the bedroom, letting its head rest on her knee.
She looks at it, and it looks back.
“Dog,” she says. “You can’t sleep with me.”
It whines again, low and sad in the back of its throat, and looks longingly at the messy bed.
She sighs.
“All right.”
The moment she says it, the expects the dog will bound up onto the bed and lick her cheek over and over, wagging its tail. She’s ready to deal with a wiggling dog the whole night, if it means she might get a little sleep.
The dog carefully climbs to the other side of the bed and lays down, looking at her.
She looks back.
It makes a soft, huffing sigh noise, and closes its eyes.
(She wakes up with a mass of warmth and fur pressed snugly against her back, snoring gently, and she scratches the dog’s ears thank you. For what, she isn’t sure.)
She remembers everything that has gone wrong when she walks down the stairs for breakfast and then remembers that she forgot and then wonders how on earth she could. The dog nudges her leg, as if telling her to sit, and she rests her hand on its head.
“Where is he?” she wonders out loud, and the dog sneezes. He was away, a long mission. He missed everything, and probably came back to SHIELD destroyed, everyone on the run. But he should have been back here by now. That’s why she came here, isn’t it? Not for safety, not for familiarity. Just—
The dog nudges her leg again.
“Sorry, dog,” she says. “Let’s eat.”
The only thing she knows how to cook is scrambled eggs, but luckily there are always plenty of eggs lying around on a farm like this. She only realizes when she’s sitting at the table, already eating, and the dog is watching her patiently, that she doesn’t know where the dog food is, if he even has any.
So she gives the dog some scrambled eggs and hopes for the best.
“I heard what happened to you,” she says to the dog. “You used to be in a tracksuit mafia, or something. And you’ve been to L.A. You’re well traveled, for a dog.”
The dog makes a soft wuff noise from where its head rests on her leg. They’re sitting on the couch of the living room, and she’s holding a cup of her favorite green tea, breathing it in. The dog climbed on the couch next to her and curled up; apparently after a night in a bed with her it considers her a great friend.
She’s never been a dog person, really. But she likes this dog. His dog.
“I know,” she says, in response to the wuff. “I’ve been wondering where he is, too.”
She can’t help but wonder. The one thing she came here for, and he hasn’t come back yet. He would never leave his dog, though, and so she has confidence that he will come back, even if only to see the dog again.
“There’s a cat, where I live,” she says after a long silence. “I call her Liho. She’s not very much like you.”
The dog looks at her.
“She listens, though,” she tells the dog. “You both listen.”
The dog yawns.
When he finally does come home, it’s raining, and the thunder is making the dog shake under the bed. She’s kneeling nearby, trying to coax him out from under, when she hears off-key whistling and footsteps from downstairs. For a moment she is tense, but then she listens, and it’s him, of course it is him.
The dog whines and tries to crawl out from under the bed, but then another clap of thunder hits and it darts back under again.
“Lucky?” he calls from downstairs. “‘M home, Lucky.”
Lucky, she thinks. It must be the dog’s name. Funny.
“Lucky,” she says softly, and it blinks at her with big, wet eyes.
“Come here,” she implores, and it tries again, like it did when it heard him call. But just as the dog is close enough to touch, the thunder cracks again. And then the dog vanishes.
She sighs and sits back on her heels.
“I’ll go get him for you,” she tries, but when she tries to stand it whines, so terrified and so desperate it reminds her of the first night, two days ago, with the dog scratching and whining at the door, desperate for someone to watch over.
“You’re here,” Clint’s voice says from the doorway, and she turns around to see him standing there, smiling uncertainly.
“I came here,” she says. “After. I knew you were away, but.”
He laughs then, shaking his head. “It’s fine. It’s just that I went to your apartment the minute I got back, to see if you needed anything, and when you weren’t there I figured I wasn’t gonna see you for a while.”
She chuckles, and he kneels next to her.
“Oh, and I fed your cat,” he says.
“It’s not my cat.”
“It lives in your house, Nat, you feed it, it’s your cat.”
The dog whines. His attention shifts.
“Hey, buddy,” he says. “Did Nat take care of you?”
“He slept on the bed,” she says. “I couldn’t stop him.”
Clint laughs, and reaches under the bed to pet the dog like this is all entirely normal, and she thinks about the month they spent after New York on leave that he was offered and she demanded. How he kept waking up in the middle of the night shaking with sweat. How she stayed and helped him put himself back together again.
Is it too selfish to want another month? So she can figure out who Natasha Romanoff has to be now that she has no more secrets?
His hand finds the small of her back and she can’t remember hoping for anything as much as she hopes he will want her to stay.
They coax the dog out from under the bed in silence, the thunder dull in the distance. The dog refuses to leave the bedroom and whines when they try to go, but at least on top of the bed is a little better than underneath it, and they are both tired anyway.
He drove all day, she sees it in a glance. He drove all day and all night just like she did. There’s the beginnings of a beard on his chin and an exhaustion in his eyes as he closes them, tugging off his shirt, flopping back onto a stray pillow and staring at the ceiling. She says nothing, just picks up the discarded shirt and exchanges it for her own, wanting to sleep.
A quick glance at the clock shows it’s nearing two in the morning—not so late by their standards, but her sleeping has been remarkably normal here; waking in the morning from the sounds of the rooster like every horrible cliche about farms.
When she lays down on the other pillow, his hand shifts a little, but remains on her back. He does not try to hold her. She isn’t sure if she wants him to.
“Hill called,” he says, watching her, half his face buried in the pillow. She almost wants to laugh, the way he looks. “Asked if I knew where you were.”
She closes her eyes. She doesn’t say not yet, but he feels it.
She has a feeling yet is going to take a while, maybe months.
“I said I didn’t know,” he adds.
She smiles, faintly, and the dog inches closer to them. “Liar.”
“Not at the time,” he says, smiles back. “I had a pretty good idea, but I didn’t know.”
She can feel his hand heavy like a weight, like something grounding her. His arm is flung just slightly around her waist, not enough to make her feel trapped, not enough to make her feel held, but it’s there, undeniable as anything else in the room. The dog shifts but does not move much, just yawns and lays down its head, looking tired after its ordeal. The rain has calmed, the thunder has stopped, and the silence hangs heavy around them.
“Thank you,” she says finally, and she feels his eyes on her, sharp and blue and she knows that he knows that it means more than thank you. “For feeding the cat.”
“Sure thing, Nat,” he says, eyes catching in a sudden grin, and his hand stays at the small of her back, and she knows she can stay.
She dreams that night of Russia; of the cold stone walls and cold fishy eyes of the other girls, the other ballerinas; dreams of dancing en pointe with blood seeping from her feet, a mess of blood, an ocean. The sharp tugs of bullets as they hit her skin. They way she died doing their work and they brought her back to do it again and she was just so tired, so tired, so tired, so tired. Let me die, she remembers thinking, if you could only let me die.
She dreams of her nights spent awake, fingers squeezing too tight on her own skin, trying to remember her name. She had thought she would not be another number in their ranks. She had thought she would be different. She would remember. But then again, they always thought that, in the beginning.
She dreams of seeing Hydra in the database and letting the sick dread wash over her, unblinking, unbreathing. She was never out. She was always still their weapon, still their ballerina, dancing in an endless circle. Still red on her ledger.
She’d thought she was wiping it out, but no; she had only ever been adding to her collection.
She jerks awake, breathing hard; her forehead beaded with sweat.
Clint wraps his hand around her wrist, watching her with concern. His eyes are alert, the bags under them heavy and dark.
“You okay, Tasha?”
She tries to nod, lays back down, lets out a long breath.
“Get some rest,” she says, closes her eyes, tries to will herself into sleep. Tries to follow her own advice.
He slides his hand down her wrist until their fingers are wrapped together, and she opens her eyes again, looks at him. He’s half smiling in the darkness, and the sight is reassuring, just like he means it to be.
Slowly, deliberately, he squeezes her hand, amidst the slight shaking of her body.
“We’re partners,” he says, quietly, but it seems loud and booming in the dark of the night. “This is what we do.”
She sucks in a breath, tries to nod again; succeeding, this time.
“Just like last time,” he says, and she smiles through the shaking of her mouth.
The last time they did this, it wasn’t here.
He has a cabin in the woods that no one knows about, somewhere away from everything, a mile’s walk from a lake. The trees are ridden with holes from where arrows have notched in them, and the fireplace is always smoking when he tries to start it.
The last time they did this, it was after New York, and he was shaking himself apart in his sleep, waking up with her name on his lips, reaching out for her, trying to assure himself she was still there. She doesn’t know what went on to his mind when Loki had him under control—she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t think he wants her to either. She hates remembering that month, the forced isolation, the way he shook. She remembers pressing signs into his palms on the days he wouldn’t wear his aids, wouldn’t open his eyes. Remembers tracing letters into his skin. Trying, trying, trying.
She doesn’t like to think about what he would have done if she had not been there, at the end.
There is a lot she doesn’t like to think about.
The last time she did this, he left after the battle and did not come back for three months, refused to come back. The last time they did this she came to him, told him he was not going to do this alone.
We’re partners, she’d said. This is what we do.
A strangled laugh had burst from his throat, wild and hoarse (like it was the funniest goddamned thing he’d ever heard) and he’d opened the door.
He always was shit at admitting when he needed help.
(I almost killed you, he says later, his head bent over a toilet bowl, his sweat soaking the sheets in the other room. God, every time it’s like I’m doing it again, Nat, every fucking time I almost kill you.
She watches him. She says nothing. This is detoxing, this is letting it out, letting the poison go. This will get him better, this has to get him better, she can’t fucking live with herself if she can’t get him better—
And I would have done it, too, he adds. I would have fucking done it.
He retches, and she looks away, feeling bile rise in her own throat, feeling tears prick her eyes.)
She wakes up again when she can see dawn breaking over the grass outside, and he is asleep, still gripping her hand. She pulls their joined hands up and lets his knuckles brush her cheek.
We’re partners, he’d said. Like an absolute certainty.
She shifts closer to him and closes her eyes again.
She’s never doubted it.
When they finally eat the next morning, they are both still a little worse for wear, and the phone is buzzing.
Clint picks it up and leans against the wall, his eyes closed.
“Hey,” he says, and then there’s silence—she can hear a faint buzzing from the phone that means someone is talking very quickly and very loudly. The only person she knows who talks like that is Stark, and she knows it can’t be him—no one has the number for this place expect for him, and for her.
The dog makes a tiny whuff noise from where it is eating bacon and eggs on the floor.
“Yeah,” Clint says, yawning, scrubbing at his hair. “Got someone here with me, but. Be there soon.”
She looks over at him, raising her eyebrows in question. Neighbors, he mouths.
“Nah, it’s no trouble,” he adds, and she takes another sip of her tea, turning to look at the dog. “Mhmm. Okay.”
He hangs up.
“Neighbors,” she says, and he sighs.
“Comes with the territory,” he explains. “Invited me over for a casserole the night I moved in, if you can believe it.”
She smiles, and drains her teacup, standing to put it in the sink.
“Is this what you do out here?” she asks. “Pretend to be a civilian?”
He chuckles. “Nat, out here, I am a civilian. A civilian that’s a damn good shot, sure, but still a civilian.”
She stands, and the dog pants at them cheerfully, not understanding a word.
“Must be nice,” she says thoughtfully.
He shrugs. “Sometimes.”
Sometimes the nights catch up with you, when you take too much time off. Sometimes you get itchy, uncomfortable. Or at least, that’s how it is for her. Nights in Little Ukraine trying to feel like a normal person for a little while always just make her nervous and jumpy, leave her calling in and asking for a mission, just to get out of there.
Out here, it’s far too quiet. It’s too open and empty. She should hate it out here.
She doesn’t, though. There is too much of him out here for her to hate it.
The dog stays, when he leaves to go the the neighbor’s, and she thinks about how oddly and quietly domestic it is, and then tries not to.
The dog huffs a sigh and lays down next to her on the couch, head resting on her legs.
“You take up a lot more space than the cat,” she tells it, and it barks softly in assent, and keeps looking at her.
Carefully, she reaches out with one hand to stroke its ears.
“Will it be okay?” she asks. “The cat?”
She’s been away longer, before. She’s been away for months on end, and the cat has always been fine. There’s really no need to worry, and yet she always does; calls a neighbor to make sure the cat gets some scraps when she knows a mission will take longer than a few days, talks to the cat when she gets home. There is no need to worry, and yet.
The dog makes a soft boof noise and presses its warm, hairy body closer to her side.
“Yes,” she says, “I think so too.”
The dog rests its head on her knee and lets out a great big sigh.
When Clint gets back, the dog is snoring softly on her side and Natasha is watching it, her hand still moving absently to pet it as it snores. Clint plops down hard on the couch, rattling it.
“Don’t,” she says, “you’re going to wake up the dog,” but the dog sleeps on, undeterred.
He grins at her. “Wake up the dog?” he says, teasingly.
She looks away to hide her smile. “Be quiet.”
He smiles at the ceiling aimlessly for a moment, studying the cracks and bumps, and she watches him, and lets her cheek rest against the back of the couch, her hand still petting the dog as it snores endlessly on.
“Nat,” he says, finally, and his head turns so he’s looking her in the eyes. She doesn’t say anything, just raises her eyebrows. The room is not quiet, not with the dog, but it feels enclosed, isolated. She doesn’t know how to explain it better than that.
They come here because there is nothing. No cameras, no hidden mikes, nothing but a warm bed and her and him, and she has come to associate isolation with safety somehow, and she thinks that’s something she needs to unlearn, needs to learn how to trust someone fully when she has not spent a week with them in a quiet house.
It’s more than that, deeper than that, but that’s the core of it; that she trusts him with her life and her everything and if they are meant to be a team—meant to be Avengers—she has to learn how to trust them all like she trusts him. And she didn’t go to the Tower. She came here. She came here because it was him, him and his stupid dog and the way he laughs and drinks coffee out of the coffee maker and keeps his hand steady on her back like he knows how much she needs a goddamned lifeline, like he knows how hard it is for her to admit that.
“What made you do it?” he says, and she shakes her head.
“It was the only thing left to do,” and it’s hoarse and too quiet amid the dog’s snuffling snores, and her hand stops moving, stops petting. “There was nothing else.”
“Natasha,” he starts, and she laughs softly, cutting him off.
“Don’t,” she says. “It’s okay.”
It will be. Someday.
She knows he thinks he should have been here, should have been helping them, and maybe it would have been better if he had been, but maybe he would have just been hurt somehow in the crossfire, hurt worse; she has given away his identity and his enemies, but it could have been worse. She thinks about it, thinks about him being hurt, and she is—well, not grateful, she could never be grateful for all of this—but she thinks, at least there is this, at least this time we’re okay.
“We’re okay,” she says.
He grins, or tries to anyway; it’s grim. Too grim, and she sighs, closes her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be,” is all he says, and the dog keeps snoring, and her eyes are closed, and she feels the couch shift as he stands, hears the floorboards creak as he walks away.
And then they pause, and she feels lips warm on her temple, and she smiles.
They are okay.
The first time they went to his cabin was just after Budapest; after a mission she still can’t quite remember all the tiny details of. She was concussed and he had broken ribs and it was a blur of being undercover and fighting people off; pretending to be on their honeymoon and seeing him get hurt like a punch to the stomach, kissing his cheek at the check-in desk at the hotel. All she remembers is fighting and the way he smiled at her and not being sure what was pretend and what was real.
The cabin was clean and the dishes were piled haphazardly in the cabinets, and they dropped their bags by the door and she looked at him, holding her breath, unsure and aching. He reached up with one hand, pressing his fingertips just barely to her cheek. They both took deep breaths--it was unfamiliar territory but at the same time it felt like they’d been doing it forever, like it was the only thing that still made sense. And then everything broke loose like a goddamn tidal wave and then they were falling into each other, her heartbeat loud in her ears; his hands on her, his mouth on her, and it was a mess of hands and teeth and bruises and trembling like they were both afraid this was only the once, like they were both trying to catch hold of everything they could and keep it forever. She stopped him with her hands on his cheeks, with her lips on his; I’m not leaving.
He breathed out something that sounded desperate, sounded worshipping, against her shoulder, and it terrified her. She didn’t know when missions and pretending and flirting had turned into this. Into something raw, something real; something that made them shake. Maybe it had always been real. Maybe from the start, from that first moment where his arrow had swerved, where he had not killed her even though they’d told him to. Maybe it had always been leading to this. Maybe it had always been drawing a path for them to walk, a path that led to this moment in his bed with her love for him curling up in her chest like it finally belonged there.
(“I’m not leaving either,” he said later, arm around her waist.
“Good,” she said.
She needed him, and it terrified her.)
He makes her dinner, which is really just soup—she knows all he can really cook is soup and mashed potatoes (only from boxes)—but she eats it and smiles at him over the bowl, and the dog falls asleep again on her feet under the table, determined to stay near her.
They fall into bed next to each other and she tries to close her eyes, but she can’t get her mind to turn off, can’t stop thinking about everything that is out there now, everything that the world is seeing—every mistake she ever made and every life she ever took written like a book for whoever wants to read it. She has managed to forget for a while, but the more she tries to push it away the bigger and more horrible it grows inside her head.
She feels his arms slide around her waist and his nose touch the back of her neck, and she reaches down and grasps one of his hands so hard it must hurt, but he doesn’t complain.
“I’m not leaving, Nat,” he says, whispered into the back of her neck, and she would think the whole thing was horribly cliche if it didn’t make her feel so much better.
It’s light enough to see in the room, with the light coming in the window, and she rolls around to face him so he can read her lips. “Yeah?”
“No matter what. You’re stuck with me.”
“What did I do to deserve that?” she says, trying to be sarcastic, trying to lighten it, but it comes out honest, comes out sounding nothing like she meant it to, and she tries to smile and pass it off as a joke; she meant it as a joke, but God, now that she’s said it it feels like she means it, and his eyes are sad.
“Nat,” he says, “don’t say that.” She knows he wants to say something more than that, can see in his eyes that he wants to defend her to herself, but when he tries it always sounds wrong to list the good things she’s done like it can make up for the bad things, like life is a continual list of checks and balances, like you can save one person and have some of the blood wiped clean. You never forget. Life is not fair like that.
She does not know if she is a good person but she knows that he thinks so, and most of the time that is enough for her to hold onto. Most of the time it is enough to be doing something that will save people instead of hurt them. Taking out the bad guys, instead of being one.
And now, she doesn’t have that. She was always a bad guy. She has not been thinking about it for three days but that is as long as she can go trying to feel better, to feel blameless. And she is not and has never been blameless.
“This isn’t your fault,” he says. “You couldn’t have known. No one did. Hell, if Fury didn’t know—”
“I know,” she says, cutting him off. “It’s just—I was trying to do something good. And it wasn’t.”
“It was,” he says. “You’ve saved a lot of people, Nat. I’ve seen it.”
She doesn’t answer.
“None of us are clean,” he says finally, after she stays silent. “I mean it. You think anyone in this world is clean? Rogers killed a lot of people in the war. Banner hurt people, before. Stark made weapons of mass destruction, for Christ's sake.” He pauses, searching for words. “Just—cut yourself some slack, Nat. And I’m not gonna tell you you’re clean, 'cause none of us are ever gonna be clean. But maybe if we can keep other people from getting into this mess, keep them clean, then it’s worth it. That’s what you’ve been doing since you joined up. Keeping people safe.”
“Clint,” she says, then can’t find the words to say anything else. He reaches out and touches her cheek, and she thinks about the first night after Budapest, in his cabin, his hand on her cheek.
“After New York,” he says. “I felt like shit. I felt like I shouldn’t be allowed to be near you again. I’d killed all those agents and I tried to kill you, and I swore I would never even touch you if it was to hurt you, never. And I hated myself for that.”
“That wasn’t—”
“Nat,” he says, gently. “You came in and you kept telling me every day that it wasn’t my fault, even when I was being a stubborn jackass about it. I couldn’t control what happened because I wasn’t in control. You weren’t in control either. You have to believe that.”
She signs, and he presses a kiss to her forehead, the rough brush of stubble centering her for a moment, reminding her where she is.
“And I’m gonna keep telling you until you believe it,” he adds. “Least I can do, you know?”
She doesn’t know what to say, except that she thinks she might be starting to believe it, that maybe she could believe it, eventually.
And the next morning, she wakes up with his arms still around her waist and a text from Steve on her phone saying that he’s in New York City with Sam, looking for Bucky. And then a second text asking if she is okay.
She types a quick yes, fine.
There’s another beep within five minutes, and she looks at it.
Where are you?
Then, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Considerate.
She thinks about it, and then looks at Clint, still asleep, hair mussed and mouth open.
Home, she answers. The dog sneezes from its spot on the bed.