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Anyone else might not have picked up the signs - the crease in Clint’s brow that’s hardly ever there, the self-deprecating twist of his lips - but Natasha has known Clint long enough to know when something isn’t right with her partner.
She pushes open the door to the range for the fifth time in a week, stepping in quietly to see Clint standing in front of a target that has far too many holes, bow in hand. His fingers are cracked - Phil would have had his head for not wearing his gloves again - a pale tinge of red that usually precedes broken skin that would have sent anyone else to the infirmary.
“I’m not questioning myself over my actions, Nat.”
Clint lets the last arrow fly, placing it right where an eye would be. Natasha crosses her arms, leaning against the wall behind her friend and partner. She doesn’t have to speak, they’ve gotten past the point of actually needing words to communicate; instead Natasha watches Clint fold the bow back into the case at his feet.
The quiver is empty, shafts sticking out of the wall behind the ragged paper that had been a target, and Clint slings it over his shoulder, picking up his bow-case. Someone from R&D will undoubtedly retrieve the shafts, but right now Clint doesn’t have the patience to do it.
Natasha’s hand closes over Clint’s shoulder. It’s almost like touching a live wire; Clint bristles at the contact but at least this time he doesn’t try to shrug her off.
They haven’t had tension like this between them since Budapest.
Then Clint’s phone goes off, the sound breaking the tense silence. Natasha steps back, hand slipping off Clint’s shoulder, and it’s as if something has snapped.
There’s a hardness in the blue-grey of her partner’s eyes, a tension in the way he stands and the tightness of his grip around the case handle.
“I see. I’ll be there.”
Clint turns to leave, shoving his phone into his pocket. He catches her eyes just as he turns, and the hollowness of shadowed blue is something that manages to startle her. They had fought each other and then fought together when the Chitauri had arrived, but she’s never seen this look in her partner’s eyes before, not in all the time they’ve been on missions. It’s as if a part of him has been ripped out, and the Widow knows why. She delivered the news herself.
The archer stalks out, knuckles white around the carrying case.
This time, Natasha doesn’t follow.
--
Fury hands him a file when he gets to the hangar.
Clint doesn’t ask, doesn’t make any of his usual wisecracks.
Natasha watches from the bridge, and she worries.
--
For two weeks, it’s been nothing but silence from Clint. She can still read his actions as a fellow agent, but it’s almost as if that’s the only thing Clint has been these past fourteen days.
Not a partner, not a friend.
She doesn’t blame him, doesn’t blame the tamped down bitterness that’s haunted his eyes for the past weeks. He had withdrawn from even her, clamming up in a way that she’d never seen.
Then there was the time where she had spied Stark’s driver picking up an exhausted looking Clint from a downtown pub. (Natasha had asked Pepper after that, and the CEO of Stark Industries quietly told her that she had found the man curled up and asleep on a couch in one of the still-undamaged penthouses in the tower, a half-empty bottle of beer beside him on the floor.)
Clint has stopped telling her anything, and it hurts.
The roar of engines snap her out of her thoughts. It sounds like the engines of the remaining Quinjet, and Natasha looks up.
She’s just in time to see the vehicle lift off, Clint belted into the pilot seat with a shaken expression on his features. Clint might be a reckless and cocky ass sometimes, but she’s never known him to up and leave with one of SHIELD’s jets, not when he’s got an assignment and never without (her) a co-pilot.
The twinge in her chest hurts just a little more.
--
Her phone goes off two hours later, and the voice that issues over the crackling static is one she never thought she’d hear again. Natasha manages to - completely accidentally, she swears - snap the pencil she’d been writing with, recovering only when a second, equally familiar voice comes down the line, tentative and a little shaky like it had been when she watched him wake up in the infirmary.
She takes a deep breath.
“You idiots,” and her words are calm and deceptively soft and carrying the unmistakable Russian accent from her past. The two men she’s talking to both know her well and Natasha doesn’t need any more words to convey the emotions that are threatening to spill over into her voice.
Over the phone, Clint’s rapid-fire babbling falters, but Phil picks up right where Clint had left off, albeit much calmer.
It’s as if the only stable point of both their lives has finally returned.
Natasha closes her eyes, leaning back into the familiar sag of Phil’s old and worn office couch that had somehow managed to migrate from his office to the Helicarrier and listens to the familiar voices of the people she’s come to think of as family. There is so much else that she wants to say, but they can wait.
Phil’s voice is a soft whisper. “I’m sorry.”
Natasha manages a half-smile. “Then come home.”