Chapter Text
Tasha knows everything about Clint. She knows why a pen on his skin relaxes him, she knows where the scars come from if it weren't enough. She didn't know him back then, but he told her about it. He told her everything just like she shared everything with her. The team knows that they are close but they still think Natasha has her secrets but not with Clint.
He knows about her training, about every single little detail she remembered, her time working for the red room; everything until the day they met. When you’re not sure if you or your partner will survive the night, you start talking. Like that hellish night in Budapest. Tasha talked while she patched him up, and sat by the couch waiting to see if he'd survive it. He did of course.
They used to talk about everything, but it's been a year and he hadn't said a word about Loki. SHIELD went down because of HYDRA and Natasha had been shot. He has to tell her everything before she gets in trouble again without him.
That's why they are sitting here now, in Clint's room on his couch. Tasha sits across from him legs folded, his right arm on her thigh and a pen in her hand. Before he even can start to talk she draws the first pattern on his arm. Not many people know that Natasha is as good as an artist as Steve, but while the Captain's drawing look like reality banned on paper, her drawings were much more abstract; mostly patterns, geometrical figures and such things.
The archer had just told her about memories of working with Loki, and how bad the part of his brain that still was his had felt, when he looked on his arm and there was the Avengers logo together with his own target. Tony had put it on one of his uniforms as a joke, but the media had seen it and now it was on all his merchandise. He complains a lot about it to Tony, but Tasha of course knew he secretly loves it. While he continued, the spaces between the logo became filled more and more.
Hundreds of miles away in a safe house, the Winter Soldier keeps starring on his right arm while it fills with this amazing drawings again. Drawings from his soulmate, as he now knows.
For the longest time he had no idea what it was. His handler couldn't hide it from him because sometimes they were everywhere- on his arms, his thighs, his stomach. No chance to hide it. But they never told him what it was. In this new century with the internet and computers, it wasn't too hard to sneak into an internet café and find out what it meant. Soulmate.
He wonders who this person was, who's soul was bound to him. How can he still have a soul after all that he’s done? And that's only the things he remembers. Would they still like him? Would they still even think he exists even if he never wrote anything. He really wanted to write them something, anything, but how can he when he don't know who he really is, what else he has done, who this Steve Rogers from the museum is.
So he doesn’t write. But he enjoys the patterns on his skin. It's the pretty ones again. Not the messy scribbles he got so used to over the years. For as long as he remember them, they were messy and never really showed any sense. Though often it looks like someone starts drawing the veins on the inner side of the wrist. Than from one day to another, the scribbles stopped for almost three years.
He felt lost. He still hadn’t known what they meant back then, but they had become part of him. So when finally again ink appeared on his skin he felt almost happy. But it wasn't anything as the old ones. These drawings had patterns and sense, like real artwork. Since then, the messy scribble came back only once. He was in Asia at that time, and the news were still filled with some attack on New York that had happened shortly before.
The Soldier keeps starring on the ink of his arm. This A in a circle, he has seen it somewhere before. And there are more circles. Thought they look more like a -- like a target. He has seen this A on kids toys when he grabbed some groceries from a store. One of the toys had a target on them too, he's sure of it.
He's back in the safe house with an action figure in his hands. A blonde guy in a black uniform, with a purple target on his shoulder, a bow in his hands and a quiver over his shoulder. "Hawkeye" says the package. The A means "Avengers", who or whatever that is. Time to use Google again.