Work Text:
It's Saturday, and this month Clint's based out of DC, running prep, update and maintenance courses rather than anything else. It means that when word comes through that Natasha's current op is successfully closed and she's signed off, he plays a brief game of guess-the-bolthole.
They both have a lot. Honestly, they both probably have too many, but if nothing else keeping them up counts as something to do when things are slow. Tasha has three in DC that Clint knows of, and he turns them over in his head, gauging probability. And in the end, he comes down on the side of the shitty little bachelor apartment in a complex called Magnolia, because Nat's been Anita for almost four months now.
Anita Crane is cold, brittle, bitter, resentful and lethal as hell. She's not straight out of a noir film or a deeply introspective Oscar-bait movie, if only because even the latter rarely deal with the prosaic, mundane and ugly side of being cold, brittle, bitter, resentful and lethal - but she looks like it, with blonder-than-blond hair and ivory-and-porcelain makeup. She has ill-advised affairs with wealthy, messed up men and lacerates their souls when they eventually (and selfishly and cruelly, no argument there) get bored or find her inconvenient, or refuse to leave their wives for her. Meanwhile, she's cost them a hell of a lot of money, and sometimes leaves them a great big mess, and yet there's always someone prepared to pick her up at the other end of it.
Even if they just literally watched her rip through the life of someone they know.
Anita's not quite Clint's least favourite of the personae Natasha can pull on at a whim, because that honour will always belong to any and all of the just-barely-not-jailbait girls she uses on the real pieces of shit. But she's close. She's had some other names, although the nature of Anita means it's not actually a drawback for her to pop up all over the map, have a trail of mess behind her that someone might mention or notice. Her history ends up being an advantage, not a risk.
Mostly, though, Anita's miserable as hell, and the best way to describe Natasha's technique to anyone he's not going to get into fine detail with (which is basically everyone) would be "Method". So while she's Anita, Natasha's miserable as hell, too. On top of that, Anita also takes a while to fade, because her walls of self-poisoning self-protection are just that thick, and that means for a while after coming back from her, Nat's still got her shadow, which. . .
Basically, it makes Nat's passage through things that would normally make her happy perfunctory as fuck, and shallow and distant, sucking the joy and comfort out of everything. It also ups the risk Tasha won't notice she's still carrying an unwelcome shadow on her mood and in her head, especially if undercover work goes into something else without a break.
Or if the next undercover assignment means staying blonde.
So it's kind of a relief when he unlocks the door to the apartment, pizza and beer in hand, that he finds her in the bathroom dyeing her hair back to red with a drugstore kit, with her PPK on the side of the tub.
There aren't that many ops that Nat keeps her hair red for, and most of those, the entire point is for the mark to "figure out" she's the Black Widow and go from there. Her hair had been black when he met her. Red is for home, inasmuch as either of them has one, and for work where she doesn't need to hide. Unusual, deep, bright red, the kind that makes her stand out in any crowd, that makes an impression on anyone who sees it, and means that later on if her face isn't surrounded by that red, they have a much harder time recognizing it.
She's mostly done working the dye into her hair as he comes in and sits down.
"Wardrobe's going to shit a brick," Clint notes, twisting the top off a beer. She's in a pair of shredded jeans and a black t-shirt, sitting in the tub because nowhere else is lined with tile. She's being quick and - for Tasha - messy, although the dye spatters are only ever on the tile and her clothes, and never on her face. Some days he teases her about not being able to do things wrong, but he skips it tonight.
"Wardrobe can kiss my ass," Nat retorts, flatly. "I bend over backward making Wardrobe happy they can fucking well deal with me fixing my fucking hair."
Clint feels his eyebrows raise. “That good, huh?" he remarks, mildly, and leaves it. Because it's true and to be honest, while Wardrobe might shit a brick, they won't shit a brick at Natasha, they'll just have kittens in their offices and then come out and fix everything. Wardrobe loves Natasha almost as much as they despair of him, and he knows she's done a lot of work to cultivate that. Even joking about telling Wardrobe to kiss her ass means there are some frayed nerves right near the surface.
He flips open a pizza box and balances it on the wide tub edge, hands her the open beer and grabs another for himself. Natasha finishes working the dye through her hair, twists it back with an alligator clip and then pulls the glove off one hand to take the beer. She's sitting cross-legged and balances the beer in the middle of the knot; then she takes a piece of pizza.
"You know what I hate about the men Anita works?" she says, in Russian, and goes on without really waiting for even an expression in response. "At least the real scum know they're pieces of shit and just don't care. These ones still think they're decent human beings."
There are some things Nat only does in Russian. Harsh moral judgements are generally among them.
"Ah," Clint says, and then repeats, "That good."
"Yeah," Natasha replies, in English. "That good." She takes a swig of the beer and then stares at it, halfway between irritated and horrified. "Clint, this is awful."
"I'm keeping us in character," he says, blandly. "This is definitely the calibre of beer that someone who lived in this apartment would drink."
She gives him a long, level look, so he adds, "Besides, Anita wouldn't."
And after a second Nat acknowledges, "Point," and then downs half the bottle. Clint leans over the edge of the bathtub and mockingly kisses her temple, so that she ducks away and narrows her eyes, says, "I hope you got a mouthful of hair-dye."
"Your hope is in vain," Clint replies, "and I also have a bottle of microbrew in the thing you're calling a fridge, but drinking that with this pizza would be alcohol abuse."
"It is pretty terrible pizza," Nat says, making half her slice disappear in one bite.
"See," Clint says cheerfully, leaning back against the wall and crossing his ankles out in front of him. "You can always rely on me. Cheap beer and bad pizza, delivered right to your door."
Tasha flicks hair-dye at him with the hand still in the glove, half smiling, and he adds, "It's grounding, though."
"You know," she says, finishing her pizza slice and picking up her beer, wrapping her other arm around her now-bent knees, "you," and she swings the bottom of the bottle at him, gently, "don't actually need to drink cheap beer and eat bad pizza."
Clint deflects the vague stretch towards self-consciousness or guilt with a wave of his hand. "That's why there's good beer in your so-called fridge," he replies, blithely. "Besides, it's nostalgia. Or, like nostalgia, except inverted. Is there a word for 'wistfully remembering the past and contemplating how fucking glad you are that you will never actually be there again'?"
"Probably in German," Nat replies, and lets it drop.
By the time the pizza's gone she's ready to wash out her hair, and Clint lounges on the hopefully non-en-bed-bugged couch with a glass of the good beer in his hand, and another on the battered cheap side table until she wanders out, hair still wrapped in a towel, and drops herself down beside him. "You have cable here?" he asks, as she leans her head against the back of the couch and then rolls it side to side in denial.
"But I pirate off an upstairs neighbour," she says, "assuming he didn't get thrown out since I was here last. I think the remote's somewhere in this couch."
"I'm surprised the TV's still here," Clint says honestly, digging around until he finds plastic with one hand and pulling the remote out.
"Last kid who tried to break in got a face full of hallucinogenic powder," Tasha replies, shrugging. "Guess the scare hasn't worn off the building yet."