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The first time Clint actually says "I love you", they're holed up in a shitty room in Kiev, their cover intact and their bodies kind of not, accidentally having a serious competition for the title of worst injury. Clint wins, but only because he crossed the line into "surgery that should have happened in a hospital but isn't going to."
By that point they've already fucked twice, but that's got very little to do with anything. They both sort of ended up broken in the same way, if for different reasons, and the mechanics of sex are as, well, mechanical as those of eating, drinking or pissing. Both times had been a mess of wired up we-just-survived-something-we-shouldn't-have adrenaline and intensity and other post-mission crazy and not much more. And that's still true, and as a number of people across a couple of continents could tell you, that doesn't even have much to do with real lust, let alone anything else.
It has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with everything else.
They're seriously low on morphine, so Clint's using alcohol as the ancient and honourable pain reliever, which is probably responsible for letting it out. For this mission her hair is black, straight and long, and they both have fake tattoos they have to reapply for one another on a more or less daily basis. She's got steri-strips in different places on her face and real bandages across her abdomen and back, along with what are starting to be truly amazing bruises. Clint doesn't even want to know what he looks like: SHIELD owes him another replaced tooth when he gets back, for starters.
He's rambling the way he does when he's drunk, and Nat hasn't told him to shut up yet; she's sharpening knives and they're both more or less hoping Hill decides to trust that they're still on-game when they totally fail to check in, and doesn't send anyone to rescue them. Because their cover is still intact, and they can still pull the rest of this mess around - they just can't contact anyone without sending it all to hell.
"And I love you," he says, at the end of some kind of analysis of their current situation, and then kind of chokes. He opens his mouth to pass it off as a joke and then manages to sit on that, because there's no way Tasha wouldn't know he's lying and it'd just make everything worse. Then he's at a loss.
Nat gives him a long, hard and totally expressionless look. Her hands pause in their work and for a minute her eyes narrow. "You shouldn't," she says, and he thinks he's cutting her off when he offers his apology.
"No," he says, "I shouldn't've said that - "
"I mean you shouldn't," she says flatly, over his attempt to smooth it away. It stops him, and she lifts both eyebrows just slightly. "Love is for children," she says, and it might sound defensive and faux-jaded from anyone other than Natasha. And from her it just sounds a little bit tired and a lot matter-of-fact when she adds, "It makes you vulnerable; it gives people someone to use against you. We can't afford that."
She has a point, and Clint considers it for a while before pointing out, "If someone manages to use you against me, I think we're in deep enough shit that that much will kind of be like a bucket in a fucking shit ocean, Tasha."
" . . . point," she acknowledges, and starts sharpening her knives again. After long enough for Clint to pour himself more to drink, on the basis that he has now spilled his deepest secrets so short of alcohol poisoning, who the fuck cares, she gives him a look that's almost amused and says, "And I can be invulnerable enough for the both of us."
Clint settles back against his hopefully-bedbug-free pillows and smiles slightly to himself. "Of course you can."
(Later he'll be sober enough, and in less pain, and he'll almost wish he could come to any conclusion on the existence of a god so he'd have someone to thank that it just . . . went like that. That she heard what he meant, instead of what just about anyone else in the fucking world would hear, and knew what it meant and what it didn't, and could handle that and move on.)
(Still later, after alcohol becomes the pseudo-painkiller of choice again, Tasha will look at him and say, "You know you're pretty fucking lucky it takes so much to get you drunk, or you'd be fucking blowing every second mission by your fifth shot."
"S'why all my drunks are surly fuckers," Clint'll say, knowing he's slurring a little. "S'not a problem if I hate everyone. S'just a problem with you because you're the good thing in my life so I forget to hate everyone."
She'll murmur something he can't catch while covering her face with both hands and then says, "Go to sleep, Barton."
"Just wait till you see me on morphine," he'll say. But then he'll give up and go to sleep.)