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If you think you're gonna make it through without a scratch on you - if you think the last man standing does not have dirt on him - you've never been in a war.
This is the story about how I lost it all.
xxxxx
It starts easy enough.
Two AM in October in fucking Belarus, and it's raining like the second Flood when Coulson finally calls me down from the tower - a little damp isn't going to kill me, but SHIELD doesn't pay me enough to spend the night at the top of a metal radio tower in the middle of what bids fair to be the first really bad storm of the season. I can feel static crackling along the little hairs on the backs of my arms, back of my neck, and even the simple three-story drop in altitude makes my ears pop from the rising barometric pressure. Job's a piece of piss, really, almost not worth coming down from the height, but the target's not budging in this weather, and glowing in the dark'd really put a damper on my career as a guy who needs to operate in the middle of the night.
Coulson gives me my parole for the night, chides me about my health and safety and directs me in a calm, firm voice to where Natasha's holed up, a shitty little hotel two blocks down from the tower, big fat drops of rain making the surface of the hotel's dark, filthy pool pit and roil and rebel. There's a blue slit of light beaming from under the door when I reach her room (ground floor, corner reservation, nearest the fire escape) and I knock lightly, not for entry, just to let her know I'm there. Tasha does her best work flying by the seat of her pants, always has, but she has a fine appreciation for being warned about things ahead of time.
It's started hailing by the time she opens the door, and lightning limns the world in white as she stands there, catching me with my hands shielding my lighter from the wind, cigarette dangling from my lips.
"You quit, Barton." She's got one brow arched and no idea how much it hurts to see her like this - she's shed the catsuit, clad instead in a long dark nightshirt that reaches her knees, bares one shoulder, casually beautiful and somehow it's worse than the skintight leather. I have no idea where she got it from or why she's wearing it, lost for a second in admiring the arrow-straight lines of her collarbones, the way her legs disappear up under her hem like they might go on forever inside.
I drop my eyes back to my lighter. "Only where Coulson might see me. Shh, don't tattle on me to Daddy." The crackling storm blinds the night again somewhere behind me, for just a moment highlights the curves beneath her nightshirt, smears light like paint along her cheekbones. She's considerate enough to wait, standing half-naked in the cold doorway listening to the answering thunder, while I light up, suck in a breath of smoke. Only once I've got it started does she reach out and snatch the filter from between my teeth.
Natasha smokes like a convict, her small, delicate hands cupped around the cigarette, like she's vaguely afraid of being caught; she takes one long, luxurious drag, eyes closed to relish the pleasure of the sting of it, like the smoke is ambrosia and she's gone far too long without the bitter bite in her chest. She exhales through her nose, twin trails of grey pluming and curling like a dragon, and even that masculine habit just makes her seem more beautiful. Lightning strikes a third time, and this time it feels like it hits my chest. God, this is going to keep me up all night, I can already tell.
She's watching me, lips pursed contemplatively. I make more of an effort to keep my thoughts off my face, direct my eyes anywhere but her own.
I'm dreaming of ways to make her understand my pain when she grabs the front of my tactical vest and leans up on the balls of her bare feet, yanks me down for a kiss. It's cold-lipped and wet and she tastes like cordite and tobacco, but damned if I can muster the energy to care. You'd have to be blind, dead or gay not to respond to Natasha even at her worst, and I've seen her much, much worse than this. Budapest comes to mind, a hysterical throwaway thought as her hand traces up the side of my neck, into my hair, still dripping wet from the storm; my own hands are busy being utterly fucking useless, one still holding my lighter and the other tugging ineffectually at the sleeve of her nightgown.
When she pulls back, the absence of her feels like my life support's just been cut.
"Clint. Come to bed," she says simply, rolling the cigarette between her fingers to make the red ember of the cherry fall to the concrete between her feet.
The universe doesn't exist in which I can imagine telling her no.
xxxxx
Later, a May in New Mexico, then in New York.
Clouds of sulfur fill the air, and Natasha comes for me when no one else can.
For a little while, even with Coulson dead and the nightmares that come after, I'm almost happy.
xxxxx
August in Saudi Arabia, three in the afternoon, surveillance detail in a part of the desert that doesn't really need a whole lot of surveillance. Tasha's laid up at HQ with a rotator cuff injury; I've got a torn ACL from a rough jump out of a helicopter in Riyadh, and it's making me want to hack off my own leg in frustration. Compared to Budapest, it's practically a company retreat.
Right up until Natasha says over Skype, "We can't keep doing this," her face impassive and blank as always, and my blood freezes. Part of me knows what's coming before the rest can scramble to counter it.
"Doing what?" I know exactly what she's talking about, of course - been dreading it since the day I realized I was flying so high when I was with her that there was nowhere for me to go but down. "The webcam calls? C'mon, Nat, give me a little credit here," and even my most charming, impish smile fails to provoke a reaction, not even her usual scoffing indulgence.
This is the moment when I know I'm completely, absolutely fucked.
She starts talking, and bombs are falling everywhere, heartbreak warfare of the most vicious kind. That it isn't me, it's her; that she doesn't feel any connection to me beyond our shared duties; that we're both agents of SHIELD, we can't afford to fraternize or become emotionally entangled or, worst of all, compromised. That we are friends and allies and partners, and she values my support, but that we cannot continue on the path we started. That she seduces men on SHIELD's command, and that she doesn't expect me to be fine with sharing her body with strangers.
That this is the best thing for both of us.
It's a crock of horseshit and she knows I know it, but right from the beginning there's always been a reliable siege-engine against my defenses, and it's that dead, blank look in her dark green eyes. Once, I would have done anything, given anything, to keep that look off of her face, to keep her from feeling like she's just a highly competent piece of meat, like she's disposable, replaceable. But what sticks in my mind as she talks, like a needle shoved into my brain, is the confession that she doesn't feel anything for me, that she never felt anything for me, and my throat locks on the choking need to vomit.
She sits there in front of her camera once she's done, quiet and dead-eyed and absolutely still, and part of me is hoping it's all a lie designed to protect herself, to cut me loose before I can work beneath her skin, because Natasha is smart, she's one of the smartest people I know, how can she not realize that once she starts this, no one ever really wins?
But no, that's not entirely true. We'd never made any sort of agreement, never spoken of it like it was an actual relationship. If I was the only one who'd gotten tangled up in my feelings, there was no one to blame for it but myself.
"Did you really just give me the it's not you, it's me speech?" Deflecting, the psych team calls it, I'm always deflecting, but some things are too painful to attack head-on, and if I know anything it's how to work the angles. "Well, damn, at least you had the decency to do it to my face, in another country, instead of a fucking text or something." Natasha doesn't even blink, adjusting her tactics mid-stride, as usual. It's so seamless I almost miss it, the way her shoulders firm and her chin rises. I used to love watching her work, but right now it just feels like another betrayal, and one I don't deserve.
"Clint," she begins, tone patronizing, but my voice cuts across hers like a knife, sharp, hard, gleaming with purpose.
"Don't. You started this, how can you just -"
"I started it," echoes the redhead in New York, her voice as hollow and disinterested as if we were discussing baseball scores. "And now I'm ending it."
"Do you really not feel anything for me? Anything at all?" She hesitates, the corners of her eyes flinching the tiniest bit, and I snatch at that minute crack in her armor, at that piece of solid truth, like I'm foolish enough to think it will save me. "You do. Tasha, this isn't how it has to go, this isn't -"
"Yes, it is," and the finality in her voice, in the severe frown on her beautiful face, is like razorwire across my bones. "Don't make this any more difficult than it has to be."
"I love you," and the words slip out before I can stop them; we're staring at each other in mortified silence, and when her features assemble into a sneering caricature of pity, I can feel that piece of truth slipping away from me. Her words land like lances in my chest, piercing and perfect. She's trying intentionally to hurt me now, to drive me away with the barbs of her words - I've seen her at her work often enough to know, to dissect finely-crafted splinters from the poisonous whole. The knowledge doesn't make it sting any less.
"You don't love me, Clint. You love the idea of me," and she tilts her head just so, makes the tumble of her curls fall like water around her shoulders. "You've always said you see better from a distance, but all that really means is that you're practically blind, once you get too close. You lose your awareness. You lose control." Her chin rises another fraction, her gaze shuttered against mine. "And you are nothing without awareness and control."
For just a moment, I can't breathe.
"Do I need to remind you about Loki?" she says, soft as velvet, and when she drops his name, the knife is pushed in again, twists hard to crack my ribs and flay me open. I can remember just enough of my time as a thrall that it makes my pulse jump and sweat prickle on my forehead, and I've been clutching the tattered threads of myself so close, weaving the illusion of self-possession, that my instinctual reaction to that mere reminder is enough to prove her point.
But she's watching my face, so I pretend to feel no pain. It's the only defense I have.
"Is that what this is about?" I have no idea how I get the words out past the lump of terror in my throat, an amalgamated knot of fear of losing control and fear of being left behind. No matter how prettily she phrases it, this is abandonment, and even though she came for me once, I suddenly have no guarantee that she will ever do so again. "What do you want from me, Natasha?"
"I want you to level out, Clint," and when she says it, whisper-soft and terrible, it's my first true glimpse of how much this pains her to do - the lines of her body are tense, her lips pressed together in a thin white line. "You can't, with me. The way you are now, all I can have are pieces of you." Because Natasha doesn't know the meaning of stability, doesn't know how to guide the broken shards of another person back into alignment until they sit true; I did it once for her, endless nights as she screamed and was slowly unmade from the feral creature the Red Room had created of her, but she can't do the same for me.
Even as I'm shrinking back in horror from the concept of being left alone to lick my wounds, a treacherous part of me wonders if it's because she's unable, or because she's unwilling.
"If you want more, love," I choke out, hands white on the edge of my computer desk, "why don't you say so?"
I've been privy to her sudden transformations before, but this one is flawless and heartless and quick. Her wounds vanish, the shifting facets of the Black Widow hidden as quick and easy as changing a pair of socks; in the space between one breath and the next, she is once again smooth and perfect, distant, uncaring. An unparalleled predator, beautiful and lethal and horrible, and it hurts like nothing else that she does this to me, closes me off because she feels she has no other choice.
Natasha levels her dead green gaze at me and says only, "Love is for children, Clint," before she shuts her laptop.
xxxxx
September in Berlin; October in Chile; November in Japan.
Natasha doesn't call, and all her numbers, even the secret disposables she keeps for emergencies, are disconnected.
I stop sleeping for a while. It seems like the prudent thing to do.
When the psych team tests me for stability, I smile and lie extravagantly through my teeth, bury my pain a little further down, like if I hide it deeply enough I can line it with scar tissue and it'll stop aching. They write me a prescription, and the pills help, but not enough; I'm fucking suffocating, living like a dead man, but with Phil gone, nobody around me seems to notice, much less care. As long as I'm useful, as long as I am a weapon in SHIELD's hands, nobody gives the first damn what I do with the rest of my time.
Not that much different than before, really. But I do even out, despite myself.
Just a little.
xxxxx
December, and I'm called back to New York.
The others are already in residence at the Tower. There's something in my orders about team-building exercises and boosting morale, but it's not until I set my duffel on the floor of my quarters that Stark's computer system reminds me of the date, and I realize it's almost Christmas.
For the first time in years (the first time since St. Petersburg and Natasha, actually) I consider giving SHIELD the finger and openly defying my orders. Escape'd be simple enough - the building has not been imagined, much less constructed, that I can't worm my way out of eventually - but I am so goddamn tired that it doesn't seem like it'd be worth the effort involved. Of course, if the rest of the Avengers have been assembled in this fucking monstrosity of a building, big enough that there's an entire empty, echoing floor marked Barton on the elevator buttons, then Natasha has to be here as well - and it's a sign of how pathetic I've become that I cringe away from the very idea.
I need to center, take the edge off. It's late enough at night that chances are I won't encounter a soul.
"There a range somewhere around here?" I'm scowling down at my sad little duffel, every bit of my personal baggage stuffed into a nylon sack, and am pleasantly surprised to hear the computer answer in the affirmative.
The crack it takes at my expense, though, suggesting that sir might find the elevator more comfortable than the air vents, thank you, is just enough to make me flip the ceiling the finger. Can't let Stark's overgrown Tamagotchi think it's gotten the better of me or anything.
Six floors down into what appears to be an enormous communal gym, and I gotta admit, even I'm starting to be impressed. The fact that Stark's crammed every bit of equipment a barely-functional team of quasi-heroes might possibly need into a few hundred square feet, with vaulted ceilings and room to spare, makes me question just how long the Iron Man's been harboring intentions of getting all of us under one roof. The promised range is all the way at the back of the floor, set up like a shooting range with a handful of separated lanes and stalls, and the facilities are dark and deserted. I hit all the lightswitches as I go, even the ones for parts of the gym I don't plan to use, just to be contrary.
Stark's taken the liberty of setting up the first target at the range long before my arrival, though - a life-sized cardboard standee of Loki taken from Stuttgart footage, with a big red bow around his neck and the smile that haunts my dreams smeared across his face. It takes longer than it really should for me to decide if I ought to thank Stark for the catharsis, or just punch him in the mouth for being a dick.
By the time I've had an hour christening the range, the standee is reduced to confetti and I'm really getting into the swing of things. There's a certain meditative rhythm to the bow that, in the heat of a mission, I rarely get the chance to appreciate, and the simple mechanics of causing complicated physics lets me lose some time in a pleasant haze of activity. I empty the quiver and fetch the arrows with the automated gantry a dozen times before I break a sweat; fundamentals give way to more intricate exercises in the near-silence of the range, nothing but the whisking of the arrows and my own breathing to break the quiet. I'm closer to content than I've been in a long time, and mentally cross 'deck Stark' off of my to-do list. This is going better than I thought it would.
This is, of course, until I become aware that the stall on my left, between me and the elevator, is no longer empty.
For a while, neither of us address it. I keep going through the motions (stance, nock and grip, focus, draw, release and follow through) because the smooth repetitiveness of it is calming, something familiar in alien surroundings. Even when Loki took everything else, he couldn't take this away from me - the flex of muscles in my back and shoulders, the pressure of the string against the insides of my fingers, the puff and warp of the arrow directly after a release. There's a beauty to it you don't have to be an archer to appreciate, but damned if it doesn't help. I could lose myself in it, if I wanted.
When Natasha starts throwing knives at the target one lane over from mine, however, that idea flies pretty much out the fucking window, because the bottom drops out of my stomach, and the rest of me sneers in derision at my own weakness.
"How come," I say into the quiet, sighting down the lane at my own target, set much further back than Natasha's, "the only way to know how high I get -" Draw, release, follow through, and the arrow sails downrange to plunk neatly next to its brethren in the target, "is to see how far I fall?"
"I thought you liked high places, Barton." I don't flinch, precisely, but I glance in her direction anyway. The walls separating the shooting lanes are steel panels; all I can see of her is her shadow on the floor, and glimpses of her bare fingers as she extends for her throws.
"So, we're back to a last-name basis, then." A shrug, and I pull another arrow from the quiver, brushing over the fletchings with my pinkie. Five arrows left before another round of collection is necessary. "Fine by me, Agent Romanoff. I'm good at playing pretend, though obviously not as good as you are."
The steady thump of her throwing knives in the wooden target falters, just for a second, before she's back to her usual pattern.
"I lied, you know."
"About what?" I've got my glove to my cheek, the full five hundred-pound draw of the bow pulled to its farthest extent. Nobody these days much knows the real effort it takes to pull a bow to a complete draw, except maybe the kids in the back woods who still hunt deer with them, and even then they're not trying that shit with the kind of tactical bow built for discretion and assassinations. "My awareness? Or how about my control?" The arrow leaves the bow with an audible snap of the string against my armguard - bad form, enough to tank a mission on the wrong kind of deployment - but the arrow shears into one of its predecessors, a classic Robin Hood shot that I would have been proud of, it if hadn't been completely accidental. It serves pretty well to underscore my point, though.
"No." Another volley of silver against the wood, and she calls the gantry to bring them back to her, to set up for another round. Her groupings are tight, precise, the overlapping blades like the scales of a fish, but she plucks them from the wood as easily as picking flowers. "When I said I felt no connection to you. I wished it were true, but it wasn't. It isn't."
I'm staring at my target, but I'm not seeing it, not really; I feel my own weight shifting, powerless to stop it, and my bare arm makes contact with the steel of the stall side just softly enough that I can believe she hasn't heard it over the grinding moan of the gantry. Even now I'm drawn to her like a moth to an open flame. I refuse to allow hope to claw its way into my chest, but the ragged holes are starting to bleed fresh, and it's an effort to keep my voice level. "Then why say it?"
She has a brief reprieve when she sends the target back to its prescribed distance, doesn't answer until the first knife has flashed out of her hands and across the distance, thunking home with a hollow sound. "You needed time to grieve. I believed that our.... relationship -"
"Entanglement," I hiss quietly, more sharply than I intend, because what we had was never anything approaching a normal relationship, and whether she wants to believe it or not, we are entangled. Knotted up in each other like strings in a magpie's nest.
"Entanglement," she corrects, making a conscious choice not to argue with my terminology, "was harmful to you. That you would be better off with distance, without complications."
"And without you?" The bottom of my fist makes contact with the stall wall before I can stop it, a thunderous noise that makes her next throw wobble, the knife dropping several inches in its flight to her target. "Dammit, Tasha, you can't just up and leave me and still expect me to be fine afterwards. It doesn't work like that, you were all I had left, after -" After Phil, and I still can't bring myself to say Coulson's name aloud, as if by speaking it that would make it more real, make him more dead.
Nat had sat next to me with her hand in mine when I'd watched the security footage, terrified to the last moment that I'd been the one to put an arrow through his heart.
"I believed it was for the best." Her voice is just above a whisper, and the chorus of the knives singing through the air stops entirely.
I can't help when my breath hitches in my throat.
"And what do you believe now?"
"That I was wrong." Soft noise of movement, hair over the collar of her shirt and fabric moving against itself. I can't see her, but in my mind's eye I know she's leaning up against the other side of the steel panel, practically an olive branch from the quiet, intense Widow. I touch my temple to the wall of the stall, allow my eyes to slide shut.
"God only knows how much I'd love you if you'd let me, Tasha," I whisper into the silence of the range, but if the steel between us is impenetrable, then so is the wall around her heart; it's something I can't break through at all, something that can only be subverted, undermined, leapt over or gone around. It takes patience, and cunning, and a good sense of how to play the angles.
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
"You have problems, Clint."
The shift in address is a good sign, and I wish I had more control over the quirking of my mouth than I do when I answer back without hesitation, "So do you, Nat."
She scoffs, quietly, but she straightens from the wall and the rhythm of the knives begins again. I can't quite tell if it's a resurgence of her confidence or a method to measure the distance between us. Impulsively, I fold my bow back in upon itself and set it on the counter that opens onto the lanes, slip around the panel to stand in the back of her stall. She's in plainclothes, dark-washed denim and a cobalt tee that clings to her curves and makes her hair look red as fire. Her form is perfect now, not even a wobble in the arc of the blades as they leave her fingers. God, she's beautiful - not in the way she is when she's on mission, all sharp lines and dangerous curves, but absently lovely, hair loose and her face bare, unmade in a very specific, raw way that makes my pulse race. Nat uses makeup like a mask, and right now she isn't wearing any; I can read every freckle, every line of her face, even half-hidden from the angle at which she is turned away from me.
She's uncertain, considering her plan of attack before she commits. The thought is strangely encouraging.
When she's down to one knife, her palm flat on the counter and the pads her fingers stroking the smooth metal, I can see the hesitation in the lines of her shoulders, in the way she tips her head down to just barely expose the back of her neck as a distraction; she has always been loath to rid herself of the last dagger, the last line of her defenses. Before I can stop myself, I close the gap between us, mold my front to her back and lay a hand over her own - not heavily enough to trap her because God knows she could have me bent backwards over the stall counter with hardly any effort if she wanted. But if I see better from a distance, then it's equally true that getting close, especially unarmed, is an exercise in trust for me. To willingly be blind, to surrender awareness and give up control. It's harder than you'd think, after Loki.
But Natasha knows me and she knows what this means; she's trembling when I lower my mouth to whisper into her ear. "I don't care if we don't sleep at all tonight. Let's just fix this," and my hand curls around her smaller one, the closest I've come to a prayer since I was a little boy and stopped believing in higher powers. I could learn to believe again, if it meant I could have Natasha back. "I swear we're gonna get it right, but only if you lay your weapons down." I'm not talking about the knives, and we both know it, but there's her opening, her escape - a loophole for her to jump through, if she wants it.
When she slips her hand loose from mine, I am prepared for it, already braced to be thrown or pushed away; when she turns under my shoulder and loops her arms around my torso, face pressed to my chest, I'm left staring stupidly down at her in shock.
"I'm sorry," she mumbles into my tac vest, and she means for hurting you and for not coming for you sooner and for everything I've done and for a thousand other debts in her ledger that she tracks like a poor man with his pennies.
I leave the knife on the counter, cross my arms over her back. "Me too," and I mean I love you and I forgive you and we'll make it work and a million other things that I want to say to her and can almost never bring myself to speak.
And just like that, it's ceasefire on our heartbreak warfare.
It's not perfect, but it's a start.