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Everyone has stuff they trip over. Even Fury. Especially Fury, to be honest: at least half the reason anyone ever cultivates that kind of persona, that kind of cranky growling snarling way of being, is so that when they inevitably hit something that makes them stumble nobody can tell, because it looks like every other damn time they're annoyed. Phil Coulson's got a whole lifetime of Repression to work with and Clint . . . well Clint just sort of lets himself trip. And then gets up and goes and does something else.
Learning what someone trips over is always an exciting process.
Natasha is very, very good at taking the moment she trips over something and either recovering before you even know she stumbled, or outright turning that stumble into a dive and a roll that puts her in a better position than before. To torture a metaphor. Which means nine times out of ten, she's fine. Absolutely fine.
Nine times out of ten, Nat is the most grounded, unflappable, composed and cool-headed person Clint's ever met. And that's including Phil Coulson, and even when they're in the middle of the worst clusterfuck Clint's ever experienced.
Which is a pretty high bar. He's been more or less doing this shit for over a decade, and the first five years at least could probably just be thought of as stumbling from one continuous clusterfuck to the next.
So nine times out of ten, no problem. And of that one time out of ten something really does hit her off her centre, ninety-nine times out of a hundred (of that one time out of ten), she just gets pissed off. Now, a pissed off Natasha is bad news for pretty much anything she encounters, but since she's usually pissed off because something's gone wrong, that's not really a problem. Go ye and be free, avenging Nemesis, all that shit.
But that one time out of a hundred of those one-times-out-of-ten, something hits her brain just the wrong way. Just the wrong way. So it's a flat out crash, a wipeout instead of a recovery. Everyone's got them and honestly she should have a lot more than she does, for what she's been through, but that doesn't change the fact that sometimes it gets her.
Those moments are always . . . special. Even if she manages to shove it all down after just a glimpse and put on a mask of herself and get the job done. Shove it back in. Which isn't really good for you in the long-term, but figuring out that balance is something she's gotta do for herself. Nat can pretty much do it all the time, whenever she needs to. It's useful and it's pretty horrific all at the same time, but what she does with the shit that knocks her off her mental feet is up to her. Has to be up to her.
The first time she doesn't shove it all back in (kinda like you'd to for a gut wound where your intestines fall out) is also the moment Clint realizes she actually trusts him. Like actually does, on some deep level believes he's just not a threat. And this is hugely gratifying and heart-warming and totally, utterly fucking terrifying, because he finds her standing in front of a mirror she apparently smashed with her hand (which is bleeding), staring at the fractured reflection like it's got the secrets of the universe or has seriously pissed her off recently.
(These can be remarkably similar expressions, in Tasha.)
Clint starts to say something like that, something about that, ask her which one it is. Then he sees the blood. Then he sees the broken mirror - sees it and understands it's broken. Then, finally, he catches the thing he didn't quite get at first, which is how her eyes are actually wider than either contemplation or seething anger, and that means what's actually underneath it all is fear.
So Clint doesn't lead with that. Instead he makes sure he's in at least her peripheral vision and says, " . . . Natasha?" in a careful voice.
Natasha keeps staring at the mirror, which is not a good sign. So then he searches for something to say that isn't going to set off Mount Vesuvius and settles on, "You're bleeding all over the tiles." It is, after all, true. And it isn't a question. And he makes sure it doesn't sound like an accusation. And he waits for that to snap her out of it, to make her realize what she's doing and how he can actually see her and shove everything back under the mask of calm control.
Instead, Natasha frowns. She turns her head to look at him like she's having to translate what he said inside her skull, except he said it in Russian so that's not something that should be a problem. Then she looks down and stares at her hand like she's not sure she's ever seen it before or like someone redecorated it while she wasn't paying attention.
"How do you know?" she asks, in a weird and distant voice.
Right in this moment, as it happens, Clint can't decide what's the more terrifying option: that in about ten minutes or so when she does get a handle on this she's going to realize that he saw all this and that's going to be a problem, or that it's not, because she's decided that's okay.
"How do I know what?" he asks, because he's not the one who gets to pick which one of those options plays out, so no matter how it goes, what he does is the same. And that's get over this moment. The bad one, the one that's stuck.
Now Natasha turns her stare on him and he fights the urge to take a step back, because that . . . well, he hasn't seen that stare since before he decided not to kill her, and it's still fucking scary, even when he's pretty sure she's not going to kill him. The focus and the stripped down razor-blade intellect behind it - there's no way for that not to be fucking terrifying. He doesn't take the step back, though, because that's just a moment's passing thing. That's not how he really feels. Just what hits him right in that second.
"How do you know I'm bleeding?" she asks. Clint takes a careful breath.
"Well for starters, Tasha, you're right here in front of me and I can see you," he tells her, mildly, which is apparently the wrong answer: her head tilts downward, her mouth twists a little and she keeps the stare on him.
"How do you know?" she demands, and there's an edge there. Clint finds he has to wonder how long she's been sitting on whatever it is that's gotten to her, and how long she was staring at the mirror before she broke it. "How do you know it's me? How can you know? What is - how do you even know what the question means? And don't say you can see, Barton," she goes on, turning that edge right at him, "seeing means nothing, you . . .see what I - it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything. What we see isn't real."
This is really the kind of thing that needs Amanda Czajkowski, because it's kind of her job. She's the brain expert, she's the one who went to school for fuck knows how long and then went and did the specialization with traumatized population and also she's the one with the careful confidentiality rules and who you don't have to interact with any other place but in her office which makes her a lot safer for this, and finally there is absolutely no way Clint can turn this over to her right now so it really doesn't matter. There's probably some way she'd handle it, though, and that way would probably be right.
After a minute, Clint gives up on figuring out what it is. He just shrugs and says, "Well. Right now I'm standing in the same bathroom as an incredibly deadly fucking person who just cut herself open punching a mirror and seems to be questioning the basic fundamentals of reality, and I think if that person were anyone but you I'd definitely be dead by now, for seeing that. As it happens," he adds, "I'm not dead, so I'd call that pretty conclusive."
It's got the benefit of being true, anyway.
A lot of different expressions go across Natasha's face, that scrunch it up in different shapes, until she looks back down at her bleeding hand and seems to actually see it and how bad it is; she frowns a little in concern.
"Here," Clint says, ducking the rest of the way into the bathroom and opening one of the cabinets. He holds up some gauze and a bandage. He is perfectly happy to jut move right past that moment. One hundred percent happy.
Natasha lets him clean it out, make sure there aren't any fragments of glass hiding in the blood. But takes the gauze and bandages her own hand, and Clint doesn't even try to interfere. When she's done she sighs, and looks up, looking a bit more steady. If really damn tired.
"Sorry," she says, short and grudging, like she hates having to say it but thinks it absolutely needs to be said. There's a tension behind it. She might be more or less in the clear, but Clint doesn't think he could call the situation "safe".
On the basis that a little obnoxious is always more welcome than pity, Clint puts a mocking arm around her shoulder. "Don't worry about it," he says, and decides to totally break the mood by dropping a kiss on the side-top of her head. A really over the top one.
The world pauses for a second, and then Tasha says, " . . . did you just give me a patronizing kiss on the head?" and really sounds a lot more like the woman she seems to want to be, and a lot less like a fractured, splintering ghost of a girl. Clint himself breathe again.
"Yeah," he replies, and then adds, "And now I really know it's you, because I'm still not dead."
She's trying not to laugh as she shoves him away. Clint'll count that a win.