Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Red Room doesn’t exactly teach you how to come back from the dead and land on your feet. But as always, Natasha is a quick learner.

Organisation, on the other hand, is something she’s always been good at. Madame had appointed her, as young as thirteen, to keep notes on which girls in the program were dying off and why. Grief might have been trained out of her, but it’s since been shoved down her throat time and again—She’s had her fair share of it since Thanos; since Coulson, really.

So this—the lake cabin—this she can do. Figuring out what goes and what stays, what gets donated or auctioned off and what Pepper will want to keep on the shelves to remind Morgan of the man her father was. Besides, time spent playing superheroes with that star of a kid is never wasted, and Pepper’s offering her a bed, home-cooked food, and a quietly splendid view while she gathers her wits.

Now that there’s no more Compound, Natasha will have to catalogue every safehouse in her network, figure out what’s been compromised by HYDRA, what’s been broken into or demolished during the Blip, where’s liveable and where isn’t. It’s going to take time.

And that’s fine, really, Natasha’s never had a problem with patience, except—

“Oh. Morning.”

Except that Clint Barton, her partner of fifteen years, is something she’s never really gotten good at.

Natasha turns from the cardboard box of items she’s been sorting through. In the dappled morning glow of the house, Clint looks rougher than usual, his voice scratchier, sandy hair rumpled in spots and sky-blue eyes muted by a cloudy tint of surprise.

She wonders, not for the first time, why they’re still spending their nights in separate rooms, when they've known since the SHIELD days that they sleep better in the same bed.

But what are you supposed to say to someone you died for? What do you say to the man you loved so much that you came back?

“Hi,” she eventually answers.

Seems she’ll never know.

Clint tears his eyes away from her and clears his throat as he makes his way to the coffee machine. “Did you sleep well?” he asks with his back turned, pretending to have figured out the machine probably worth more than their SHIELD paycheck, pressing at a random permutation of buttons that’s clearly nothing more than guesswork.

It’s frustratingly endearing—If he weren’t using it as some pathetic tactic to avoid looking at her, she would’ve smiled.

“Yeah,” she lies. “Better.”

Clint steals a glance at her over his shoulder as the stream of dark liquid starts dripping into his mug, as if he knows she isn’t paying the full sum of the truth she owes him. But he hums noncommittally and turns back to the coffee, whose scent has now wafted its way to Natasha’s side of the room.

She doesn’t enjoy lying to him; in fact, she bristles at the mere idea. Natasha lies to her marks and world governments and herself, more often than not, but she doesn’t lie to Clint, an unspoken rule of their partnership that was written in bullet-drawn blood and post-nightmare tears. But she doesn’t want him to worry, and if it mattered to him at all, he would’ve called her out on it.

As it turns out, it doesn’t.

Natasha is well aware it’s only been a few days and there’s got to be a learning curve of some kind, but she hasn’t been sleeping well. She shivers through the night under two thick blankets plus Pepper’s homemade quilt, until the hooded soul reaper on Vormir pays her a visit behind her eyelids, and as she falls she wakes and waits, unmoving, to hear the morning birds start chirping. It doesn’t help that her best friend is avoiding her like the plague, keeping her at arm’s length so that if she disappears again it can’t hurt as much.

Natasha is dwindling, in his eyes, into this hypothetical shadow, this cold ghost.

“Good to know,” Clint remarks indifferently, leaning against the counter to sip from his mug. Instantly, he pulls a face of distaste at whatever concoction the machine buttons have blindly brewed.

Natasha doesn’t have it in her to laugh.

It’s a familiar sight. Clint, framed by golden-brown wood, exhaustion scrawled across his face. For a moment, she pretends it’s just another morning in the Iowan farmhouse, a little pocket of downtime between missions. She pretends he’s about to crack a dumb joke at the expense of the bad guy of the week before sticking her mug under Laura’s machine and making her coffee the way she likes it, without her having to ask.

The Clint Barton she remembers is so different from the man standing ten feet away.

Quietly, she says, “I can leave. If it makes things easier.”

His head snaps up, something frantic finally stirring in his eyes. “Tasha, no—”

“It’s… it’s no hard feelings, I know this is so weird and all—”

“Natasha.” He sets the mug down without looking at it, and walks closer and closer until she bumps backwards into the box of Tony’s things trying not to lean into Clint. “This isn’t… Shit.”

There’s something curious about being near him again, the first time since Vormir. There’s something oceanically magnetic about his gaze and the pair of bow-calloused hands that have saved her life countless times over.

“Is something wrong?” she whispers.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he says determinedly, not breaking eye contact, more honest than he’s been in days. “When I lost you, I… My whole world—just flipped over on its axis. I realised—I realised that…”

Only when it becomes obvious that he isn’t going to finish the thought does it occur to her: Clint might just be lying to her because he, too, is scared shitless of laying his cards bare on the table for himself to read.

Can she fault him for that? Can she really?

“I have to tell you something,” he says, the words skipping off his tongue into the hot intensity they’ve found themselves trapped in.

It’s such a pity that Natasha no longer expects the truth from him.

She watches in real time as this newfound urgency in his eyes is blinked away and he changes his mind again, withholding himself from the only person to ever know him wholly. She tries not to ask why. She tries not to let it sting.

“…I just miss my family,” Clint finishes feebly.

And what’s she gonna do, call his bluff on that?

Steve hadn’t brought her back in time for the funeral, but when she’d landed on that platform, the Bartons were still in New York, packing for their Stark-funded flight back. Clint had run all the way over, stared at her for ten rollercoaster-track seconds, and dropped to his knees at her feet.

It had been out of the question: While Laura and the kids headed back to Iowa, Clint would stay behind, just to make sure everything was alright. So, yeah—in a way, it’s her who’s keeping him from the house and the farm and the barn, the flag on the door and the dartboard on the wall, Cooper and Lila and Nate.

What an asshole thing to imply.

“I didn’t ask you to stay, Clint,” she says, barely stopping the frustration from spiking in her voice.

He recoils.

It had been out of the question.

But he doesn’t get to just pull out of this partnership without hurting the way she is, god damn it. He can turn away and pretend like none of it mattered but she still knows his buttons by heart and half of them spell out her name. This is sacred to them. This is blood.

This is an unmoving stalemate until there’s an urgent rap at the front door. Clint jolts out of his bewildered stupor and Natasha slips away to disable the locks, and—

Yelena wastes no time in hugging her so hard, she’s nearly knocked to the floor by the force of it. Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha watches Clint jolt again, this time readying himself to defend her from an attacker, only to relax, albeit a little confused, when he realises this ardent mess of blonde hair means Natasha no harm.

“Oh my god,” Yelena says into her shoulder, and Natasha feels that familiar affection swell up inside her. “Natasha.”

“Lena,” she whispers, awed, pulling away so she can look at her face. “My God, you look the same.”

“They told me I missed five years,” says Yelena, already crying, “and then they told me you were—They said that you had—”

Natasha shushes her, pulling her in again. “Ya zdes’,” she promises, stroking her back.

“You dyed your hair,” Yelena notes absently.

Natasha hums in confirmation. “Reminder of who I was saving.”

Yelena gives her one last tight squeeze, then releases her. Promptly, her gaze lands somewhere over Natasha’s shoulder.

“Yelena,” says Natasha, “Hawkeye.”

Yelena surveys him for a tense second, the way he’s staring forlornly a few feet away, half-dazed from the argument and the reunion he just witnessed. “Clint Barton,” she eventually says. She doesn’t offer a handshake.

“Hi,” he responds.

Yelena’s attention darts back to the arrow necklace Natasha’s still sporting over her sweater, despite everything, as if it’ll grow a mouth and explain what’s going on.

This is all wrong. Natasha has dreamed of the day Clint and Yelena meet; it was supposed to be over a few glasses of wine and a dinner full of trading stories, is it true you took out two whole military task forces in Budapest without a gun; is it true you jumped onto Dreykov’s jet to kill him; how do you keep up with Natasha’s incessant posing; I can’t believe you two got the safehouse blown up, that furniture was not cheap.

Not this.

Yelena steps slowly into the room, eyes sweeping the length of distance between Natasha and Clint. “Why does this room smell like a fight?”

“Okay.” Natasha guides Yelena back to the door. “Pepper and Morgan are out near the lake, go say hi and thank them for letting you stay, yeah?”

“Would be rude if they didn’t,” Yelena mutters with a wrinkled nose, but opens the door anyway. She reaches out to squeeze Natasha’s hand and leaves with a, “God, you’re freezing.”

Natasha turns back to the sight of Clint fidgeting hesitantly with the hem of his shirt, like he wants to reach out to her but won’t. “Are you cold?” he asks, almost mournfully.

Don’t do that, she wants to say, realising you care won’t fix this. Instead, she shrugs, “It’s probably just the winter chill.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, Natasha,” he tells her, as if desperate for it to mean something to her. “My flight’s in the morning.”

She holds his gaze. “Okay.”

His intensity drops, disappointed at the lacking response. “Just thought you should know.”

“Say hi to the kids for me,” she says, finally something she can be sincere about. “When do I get to see them again?”

Clint won’t meet her eyes, looking around at the room shiftily, and she can predict the evasion before it comes. “Uh, you know, we’ll be kind of busy, settling back in and everything, so… I don’t know, really. But I’ll let you know.”

“Okay,” she says again, slower, not caring that her skepticism shows. It’s only weird because Clint would never get in the way of her and the kids—they want to see her as much as she wants to see them, she knows—so she hasn’t got the slightest idea where this tentativeness comes from.

Clint clears his throat. “I think they’re coming back to the house.”

Natasha redirects her attention to the windows, through which she spots Yelena and Morgan skipping jubilantly through the grass hand in hand, Pepper trailing a few steps behind.

When she turns back, Clint has disappeared up the stairs.

❆

The rest of the day flies by in a flurry of catching up with Yelena and helping Pepper with dinner, leaving Natasha thoroughly exhausted by bedtime. Which is why, when she comes downstairs to refill her glass of water, she looks out the window and is taken aback by Clint sitting on the couch on the porch. His silhouette, watching the dark lake, is lit by the dim lanterns at the eaves.

As if sensing her eyes on him, Clint turns and spots her through the glass. For a moment she wonders if he’d be horrible enough to ignore her entirely, but to her staggering relief, the storm in his eyes clears up a little and he raises his hands to sign, Come sit?

Instantly, the weariness crawling in her bones is overridden. One of them calls, the other answers; that’s the way they operate. On the way to the door, she grabs two Milky Way bars from Morgan’s candy bowl—Clint’s favourite—and leaves her coat hanging inside the house.

He’s quick to notice the chocolate when she approaches, flashing a quick smile and already reaching for one of the bars. “Did you ask Pepper if you could take that, or did you just nick it?”

“I just came back from the dead,” Natasha shrugs as she sits, “I deserve to indulge in some light thievery.”

Clint chuckles as he unwraps the chocolate and takes a bite, and only then does he notice the lack of a coat over the T-shirt she sleeps in. “Aren’t you cold?”

Natasha shrugs again, half-mindedly saying around a bite, “It’s fine.” She’s cold, but she’s been cold, so in the end, it doesn’t really make much of a difference.

Slowly, Clint sighs, his eyes somewhere on the still lake surface, reflecting the edges of tonight’s moon peeking out from dark grey clouds. “I’m sorry about this morning—I am.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“C’mon,” says Clint, his mouth twisting sardonically. “Natasha.”

“Go on.” She owes him the dignity of apologising, at least.

“Things… haven’t been great, at the farm,” he tells her, and she sits up straighter, because it’s a piece of code from their SHIELD days: At the farm translates to with Laura, more or less. “Which isn’t an excuse for how terrible I’ve been—and I have been terrible—”

“Clint.” She wants to reach out, cover his hands with hers, but she fears more than anything else that he’ll stop talking.

“It’s alright,” he continues. “I mean, things weren’t great to start out with, ever since… well, the Accords, I guess, my failure to commit to retiring.” He laughs humourlessly. “And, like, I guess I didn’t realise when I was killing all those people that I’d have to confess it to the mother of my three children.”

She pulls one of her legs up and tucks her ankle under her other thigh, just processing.

“And then comes you,” Clint muses. “Natasha.” His eyes are glassy as he looks at her. “Do you know how fucking terrified I am that I’m going to wake up and… find you gone again? Lose you? Go through all that? Again?”

Natasha watches how he shakes, almost imperceptibly, in his vulnerability, and unexpectedly, curiously, she smiles. “You’re being honest again,” she observes.

The tension drops from his shoulders as he laughs. “I owe it to you.”

“Thought we stopped counting our debts.”

He shakes his head. “Natasha, I will always owe it to you.”

Her heart stutters in her chest. “Well, any more burning confessions you want to make in Iowa, just give me a call, yeah?”

“You’ll pick up?”

“You know I will.” And, because she can’t bear to spend one more second with him out here under the moon, “Early flight tomorrow.”

He catches on and stands. “Should probably get some sleep.” He pauses, looking down at her like he’s rewriting a speech in his head. Eventually, he just asks, “Are we okay?”

“Yeah,” Natasha promises.

Clint nods. “That’s good. That’s… all that matters. Get some rest, yeah?”

“Safe flight,” she wishes, and watches him go back into the house.

She waits a few moments, then draws her phone out from her pocket and pulls up her texts with Yelena. She’s trembling slightly, but the blue-white glow of the screen makes the words easy to read.

Natasha types, I think there’s something wrong.

❆

The next morning, the testing begins.

Chapter Text

The call finally comes at night and Natasha all but lunges for her phone on the couch. Yelena makes an indignant sound from the other side of the coffee table, gesturing at the mid-game Scrabble board between them.

“I’ll be right back,” Natasha promises, already heading towards the corridor.

“That’s not fair. We started this game first so I get dibs on you until it ends!” she disagrees.

Natasha cradles her phone, praying the ringing doesn’t cut out. “Look, he’s my best friend,” she tries to reason. “Just… let him say happy birthday, and then you can go back to losing, okay?”

As Yelena gapes at the insult, Natasha ducks into the room she’s claimed in the safehouse. Her back against the door, she takes a steadying breath before accepting the call. “Romanoff.”

“Hey, Nat.” His voice comes grainy over the speaker, but relief floods her veins all the same. “Happy birthday.”

“You did promise you wouldn’t forget,” she teases, so she doesn’t slip and say thank God.

“How could I? One-two-three, December third,” he laughs. “Hope I’m not interrupting any crazy parties.”

Natasha snorts. “I’m upstate, remember? Only thing you’re interrupting is a Scrabble game.”

“Jesus, who’s crazy enough to play against you? I learned my lesson back in ‘09.”

“Toshkent,” Natasha reminisces fondly, reverting so easily to this casual banter of shared places, shared histories. “Nothing like beating your ass with a hole in my shoulder.”

“Never change,” Clint chuckles, only for it to die down. “Hey. I’ve been meaning to ask. Christmas is, um, it’s coming up.”

“…That is a thing that tends to happen in December, yes.”

“Right. And, well… we’d love to have you over at the farm,” he says. “You know, Lila misses you so much, Laura wants to say thank you for everything, Nate is—he can actually talk to you now, and the guest room is much too empty, much too neat—”

“Barton,” she cuts into his rambling. “Of course I’ll come.”

She hears his sigh of relief over the line. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, puzzled—she loves the kids, of course, but it’s weird that he thought he’d need to invoke anyone else for her to accept the invitation. “Well… I’m not the one you’ll have to convince, at least.”

He’s silent for only a moment. “Yelena?”

“Is that okay?” she asks, met with more quiet. “I know things were a bit awkward at the cabin—”

“Of course Yelena can come,” interrupts a voice Natasha takes a second to attribute to Laura. “She’s family.”

She’s been on speaker this whole time. And Clint didn’t tell her.

Natasha recomposes herself. “Laura,” she greets warmly.

“Everyone here misses you so much, and I’m sure Yelena’s going to make a wonderful guest,” says Laura, Midwestern hospitality saturating her voice all the way through like the cerise shirts she wears, the same hospitality Melina had spent months perfecting.

“I’ll make sure she’s on her best behaviour,” says Natasha. “Thank you, Laura.”

When the call ends, Natasha opens the door to find Yelena right outside, leaning against the corridor wall. “I don’t wanna go to Iowa,” she sulks, playing with the end of her braid. Natasha gets it: The Midwest, to her, is synonymous with My dad gaslit me for three years and then sold me to the KGB and I’m not in therapy about it but I probably should be.

Natasha shrugs apologetically: what can you do.

❆

Twenty days later, Natasha stands behind Clint in the open kitchen, waiting for him to finish making her a hot chocolate and trying to ignore Yelena’s scrutiny from where she sits on the couch with the TV on mute. (In a house with three children, quiet is a luxury to savour.)

Clint gives the chocolate a few stirs and hands the mug to her. “Careful, it’s hot.”

When he passes it over, Natasha doesn’t feel the heat at all. She wraps her palms all the way around the ceramic, as if the pressure, the contact, will fix what’s been wrong for months.

“Have you heard from Wanda? She isn’t picking up my calls.” Natasha sips and hums her approval, moving to the other side of Clint to face him and conveniently blocking herself from Yelena’s view.

“She told me she’d be heading to New Jersey, at the funeral,” he supplies. “And that I should… leave her alone for a while. Give her space to mourn.”

Natasha worries at her lip for a moment. She’s heard about Westview in passing, a few mentions on the news, the small town where an Avengers training exercise went wrong—She’s an Avenger. To her knowledge, there’d been no training exercise.

But it’s not like Fury tells her or Clint anything these days. The guy’s in outer space right now, for all she knows.

“Do you believe that?” she asks Clint.

“That she needs to mourn?”

“That she actually wants us to stay away.”

Clint huffs, defeated. “No.” His gaze drops before she can read further into the guilt in his eyes. “I can’t imagine us showing up unannounced will help, though. I mean, here you are, a walking miracle—and, and my family… Got my happy ending and all, and she’s… alone.”

Natasha drinks from the chocolate, briefly wishing he’d spiked it with a little vodka. “God, poor kid.”

“She’s not a kid anymore.”

“And you’re not an Avenger.” She looks up at him, wondering where all the years have slipped to—Feels like just yesterday when they saved a city’s worth of people from suffocating in space. Feels like just yesterday when he lowered his bow, when they blew that building up in Budapest. And here they stand in a farmhouse after the end of the world, with nothing but her cup of hot chocolate between them, and the years, the years.

“Tash—” he starts, and then the front door opens. In walks Laura and the kids, who are vibrantly recounting a game of tag in the park.

It’s a movement so ingrained that she makes it before she even registers it, mirrored the opposite way by Clint himself: In a quick instant, each of them takes a step back, so that there’s a bit more space between them, so that it doesn’t hurt to breathe each other’s air. This is how they’ve always done it, and so Natasha doesn’t think twice until she remembers that Yelena’s watching.

From the couch, her head has cocked almost imperceptibly. Inquisitively.

Aiming to distract, Natasha sets her mug down to welcome the kids home, commiserating with Nate over how Cooper never holds back during tag, then busying herself with helping Laura unload the groceries.

❆

After tucking Lila into bed, Natasha makes her way down the stairs and turns to get to the kitchen, only to almost walk straight into a waiting Yelena with her arms crossed.

“Christ,” Natasha swears. “Scared me, Lena. What’s wrong?”

Yelena stays silent, surveying her with an unimpressed—maybe a little concerned—expression.

Natasha drops the act. “It’s not what you think.”

Yelena’s face twists into one that asks, contemptuously, Really? “I don’t think anything except the two of you mean more to each other than you’re letting her in on,” she says matter-of-factly, and Natasha wants to squeeze her eyes shut and disappear into a hole, wants to drive all the way across two states back to Ohio, where her baby sister used to look at her with nothing but pure adoration. “Am I wrong?”

Natasha can’t say anything.

“Would you lie to me, Natasha?” Yelena asks.

Natasha trains her gaze somewhere around Yelena’s shoulder. “You’re too good of a spy for that.”

“Oh, really,” Yelena muses. “‘Cause remember, you don’t have a great track record of telling me the truth.”

“Yelena,” Natasha manages, shocked she’d go so low, and yet not shocked—because Yelena knows her buttons, because Yelena is ruthless, and because she deserves it. She can apologise to Yelena a hundred times and Yelena can understand that Natasha kept their mission from her partly because she, too, wanted the family to be real, but that doesn’t change that her big sister lied to her for years and it had fucking hurt. That’s not going to go away.

Forgoing a goodbye, Yelena walks past Natasha, down the stairs into the guest room in the basement. Natasha feels like someone’s pressed a button that freezes every nerve in her body; she whispers a curse and marvels at how her coming back to life has somehow managed to fuck things up for everybody.

Eventually, Laura pads down the stairs quietly after putting Cooper to bed, pausing when she spots her, then walking up to Natasha with her brow furrowed. “Nat, what are you doing standing here?” She takes both Natasha’s hands, and though she can’t feel the warmth, the moment solidifies and Natasha feels just a little more real.

Laura inspects her face, which feels hollowed out, and says, “Oh, no. Sweetie, did he not sit you down?”

Natasha frowns, feeling her short-lived control slip away again. “What?”

“Did he tell you?”

Natasha feels like a little kid being coddled in a conversation where the adults are speaking in code. Like when Alexei and Melina would send her out to play with Yelena while they discussed infiltration plans in the house.

Right at this moment, Clint enters the house from the back door, freezing when he sees the women conversing.

“Tell me what?” Natasha asks carefully, stepping back to address the question to the both of them.

Laura sighs, frustrated. “Clint—”

“I was going to tell her—” Clint says defensively, “after the kids were asleep—”

“I was putting them to bed to buy you time,” Laura says exasperatedly.

“How was I supposed to—”

“Hey,” Natasha interrupts. “I’m right here.”

“Nat—”

“Natasha—”

“Tell me what?” she demands, her blood starting to prickle with fear.

The house is silent.

And then a small voice from above says, “Momma and Daddy are getting divorced.” Nate’s inexperienced tongue stumbles over the big word, one certainly not learned from daycare, as he looks out from between the staircase balusters.

Laura’s gaze snaps up to Nate. Natasha’s snaps to Laura. Clint’s to Natasha.

“Honey,” Laura sighs, already gracefully making her way up the stairs. “Did we wake you? Sorry. Momma’s sorry.” She shoots Clint a look as she scoops Nate up before disappearing upstairs to put him to bed, again.

Alone now, Natasha’s neck prickles with the weight of Clint’s stare.

She doesn’t even give him a chance.

Natasha swerves on her heels to stamp out the front door into the biting cold, her socks getting wet from the remnants of last week’s snow as she reaches into her pocket for her car keys while she walks. She unlocks her waiting car and all but throws herself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut and taking a much-needed deep breath, watching the windows fog up as the heating comes on.

She doesn’t need to drive, she just needed to get out of the house. And more than anything, she wants to see what he’s going to do.

It only takes Clint a minute or so to burst through the door after her. Racing down the porch steps, he sweeps the yard for her frantically, until he turns and spots her through the windshield.

Natasha stares him down.

She watches as he debates with himself for a minute, then eventually hangs his head, accepting his fate, and walks over defeatedly to get in the passenger seat.

“Nat,” he starts. The night is still outside the car, just the black sky, the grey snow, and the white stars. In the dark, even the electric blue in Clint’s eyes is stripped away, leaving only something akin to regret, something that stops both of them from saying what they need to say.

“How long?” she asks eventually, staring straight ahead.

“We’re signing the papers soon; we only really decided to go ahead with it last month—”

“How long?” she repeats.

“You know we never saw eye to eye on this farm, this family,” Clint launches into explanation. “I never wanted to hang up the cape, not really, and after those five years? She doesn’t want me near our children,” he snaps. “And I don’t blame her.”

Natasha shakes her head, looking out the window to her left. “Don’t you love her?” She thinks back to the times she’d visited the Bartons, this idyllic, perfect family on a farm, that simple bliss she only ever got a quick taste of in her childhood. All the times Clint kissed Laura on the cheek when he came home, all the massages he gave back when she was still pregnant with Nate.

“I do,” he says slowly, “and I—feel awful about this. But I… I also think you needed me to.”

She turns to glare at him. What is that supposed to mean?

“Don’t ask me what that’s supposed to mean,” he warns, reading her face.

“I’m going to ask again,” she says placidly. “How long?”

“I told you—”

“How long,” says Natasha, “have you loved me?”

It punches the air out of the car; this one unanswerable question has demolished both their defenses, left them with nothing at all, no ground to stand on.

“Jesus,” Clint says eventually, rubbing over his face. Which is not a direct, instant dismissal of the idea as ludicrous, which is different from what a good husband and father is supposed to say. It’s all the confirmation she needs.

Natasha’s stomach feels entirely hollow.

“Don’t do this, Nat.”

Don’t do what? Clint has been cowering from the truth for months now and she’s had to cope with having landed in a parallel universe where their partnership was a mere acquaintanceship. She’s trying not to be a bitch about this, but in all their years together she has never touched his marriage, never meant it any ill will, and when the lines were blurred, they both smudged their hands inky. So he can make her drive all this way just to tell her his marriage is falling apart, and he can call her a woman who lies to herself so she doesn’t want what she can’t have, but if he’s going to do that, it’s well within her rights to make him feel shitty too.

She takes a breath. “Fine. I won’t.” For a few minutes they’re silent, staring out the windshield up at the house, where the light stays on in the main bedroom, where Laura Barton waits for her husband to finish a difficult conversation with his best friend. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Are you happy?”

“Natasha, I’m miserable.” Clint almost snorts. And then a seemingly sharp turn in conversation: “Remember İzmit?”

Natasha bites on her lip to stop herself from the sudden and asinine urge to smile. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to activate my soft spot for you.”

“Nah,” Clint denies, though he’s wearing a small smile on his own face.

Of course Natasha remembers İzmit—this moment, switched: Clint behind the wheel and Natasha bleeding out next to him, the two of them having swerved into a small path off the main road, nothing to cover them while they were being hunted except for their prayers and the clothes on their backs.

But even then, even though it was one of Delta’s first missions together, Natasha had remained oddly calm, because she knew Clint wouldn’t leave her there. Intel had crapped out phenomenally and there was something wrong with the engine, but she knew they were in it together. If they were found, they’d be found together, and if they were killed, they’d be killed together.

She understands what he’s trying to say: When one of them hurts, the other does it too; it’s in their nature, their best interest as a team. It’s what makes them them, it’s the single beating heart of Delta, but it also renders them more predictable than they can afford to be, in this line of work.

It’s what keeps both of them in the car here and now, still sitting next to each other through this rough patch, because they love each other too much to run. It’s why they know it’s just a patch. There’s nothing they won’t forgive. Nothing that’ll ever keep them from coming out the other side together.

He’s playing İzmit. She never had a chance.

“Okay,” she relents. “Okay, Barton—you and me.”

He looks at her, a little surprised. “Yeah?”

“I’m still mad,” she supplies the caveat matter-of-factly. “But yeah, idiot.”

Clint hesitates for a second before he reaches out to brush a stray piece of hair from her forehead.

Natasha freezes.

His hand is warm.

His skin is—it’s—She’d forgotten this sensation entirely, having only dreamt about it since she came back to Earth. Against the frostbitten backdrop of the past months, his touch strikes her alight, makes her remember, turns her into a creature that craves—

He drops his hand, and it’s over, and she can’t say anything, heart still pounding.

Outside, the night is the same. The snow hasn’t moved, Tony and Viz are still gone, Clint’s marriage is failing. Yet there’s been a spark, of—something.

Maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe whatever’s wrong isn’t past saving.

“You okay?” Clint’s asking, completely unaffected.

Natasha finds herself nodding, for once half-believing it.

“Okay,” Clint breathes, settling back into his seat. “Yeah. We’ll be okay.”

A few more minutes later, she asks him, “Where are you gonna go?”

His eyes are soft when he looks at her.

Chapter Text

Natasha’s in her room when something hard thuds against the wall outside. “Jesus Christ,” somebody curses, and Nat wrenches her earphones out, pushing away from her desk, grabs the gun underneath her pillow, rushes down the hallway to find—

“Clint?”

There’s a knife sticking right out of the wall, perpendicular to the floor, only a few inches away from where Clint stands at the door.

Clint groans. “Are you kidding me? We own this flat; do you know how much it’s gonna take to fix that?” he asks Yelena, who’s standing in the open kitchen right in front of the knife block.

Natasha turns to Yelena. “Seriously?” she demands.

Yelena is, somehow, affronted. “How was I supposed to know is him?” she shoots back to Natasha, then turns to Clint. “Next time you should knock on door of safehouse you’re about to break into.”

“How was I supposed to know you were here?” Clint yells. “Also, I’m not breaking in, I have the keys to this place legally—”

“Technically, Christoph and Milena Novotný do,” Natasha reminds quietly.

“Who happen to be us,” says Clint, his attention landing, finally, on her. “Hi, Nat.”

Natasha surveys the duffle he dropped on the floor when he dodged the knife, then looks back up to inspect his tired posture, his lack of wedding ring. I’m sorry, she signs, and then, Promise you didn’t know I was here?

Yelena throws her hands up, frustrated they’re taking advantage of a language she doesn’t know.

Promise, Clint responds. I was exhausted, I wasn’t thinking—I wasn’t exactly weighing up the odds. Got other shit on my mind.

“Sorry,” Natasha repeats, and tries not to think about how that’s exactly what happened to her a month back: He’s just had to end his marriage, she’s had to reevaluate a years-long partnership after that night in the car and come to terms with truths that have been wriggling under the surface for far too long. Both of them have had their worlds and beliefs tossed around, and still they both defaulted to this apartment here in Prague, in which years ago they had bled, cried, and sung to each other.

Clint shakes his head, dismissing her sorry. “I’ll sleep on the couch and be gone by Thursday. I really don’t want to be a bother.”

Natasha turns to look at Yelena, who rolls her eyes.

“Fine. Fine, he can stay,” she relents, and looks Clint dead-on. “But I better not get shit for having a perfectly reasonable reaction to the front door opening on a random Monday.”

“It’s fine,” he shrugs, “I’d have done the same thing. Good aim.”

Yelena nods. “Good reflexes.” She resumes her action of getting a drink from the fridge before she was interrupted, then disappears back into her room.

This will be fun.

Natasha reminds herself to breathe.

❆

It takes Yelena two weeks to snap.

It’s not that I don’t like him, she’d told Natasha a while before. It’s the fighting I can’t stand.

We’re not fighting, Natasha had frowned.

You fought in the Cold War and you don’t recognise it? Yelena had questioned, sharp and cutting.

That’s not what this is, Natasha had insisted.

Ten minutes into their fifth silent dinner of the week, Yelena receives a text at the table, throws her spoon onto the tablecloth and stands, her chair scraping the floorboards under their feet noisily.

Clint and Natasha look up in shock. “Where are you going?” Natasha asks as Yelena heads for the door and throws her coat on, leaving half her meal untouched. “Hey, it’s dark out.”

“Someone sent for me, at the city centre,” Yelena replies, undeterred. “But honestly I’m eager to go anywhere where the only other people in the room don’t want to kill each other.”

Natasha opens her mouth to protest.

“Save it, Natasha,” Yelena snaps, stuffing her feet into the nearest pair of shoes. “Just be grownups and sort it out.” She’s gone before the door clicks shut.

In the fresh quiet, Natasha sets her chopsticks down.

“She has a point, you know,” Clint admits after a while. “What are we doing?”

Natasha doesn’t have an answer for him.

“We’re supposed to be best friends,” he tries again. “Hawkeye and Black Widow, a team, partners—”

Abruptly she stands, tipping Yelena’s leftovers into a tupperware and making for the fridge. When she closes the door, Clint is right there behind her, inevitable as the sun in the east.

“I hurt you,” he says simply. “The past three months, I… I’ve been keeping things from you. I’ve been downplaying us. God, Natasha, I know that. And I’m fucking sorry, okay? If we could just… go back to the way…”

Natasha shakes her head, sidestepping to walk back out to the living room. “You’re not the only one who’s been having a hard time—I’d like to feel less alone after coming back from the dead, damn it.”

Clint stands in the same spot near the fridge. “I didn’t want to intrude. You had Yelena.” His face twists. “Who hates me, by the way.”

“She’s only hostile because she’s seen—she’s had to watch how I got, every day that you didn’t call.” Natasha chokes a little towards the end of her sentence. A confession, of sorts. “And she wasn’t on Vormir with me. She doesn’t know what it was like. You, on the other hand—”

“Maybe I don’t want to relive it, Natasha,” rebukes Clint.

“Are you calling me selfish?” She takes a step towards him, laughing in disbelief. “I died, Clint. And you think you’re the one who got dealt the shittier cards here?”

His eyes darken with anger. “I didn’t say—”

“Did you really think we could ignore Vormir and it would go away?” she questions, taking another step and watching him shiver, again, at the mention of that funereal planet. “Did you think it wouldn’t come back to bite us in the ass?” She just sounds hurt now, betrayed.

It’s one of the first lessons you learn in the Red Room: The harder you trust, the closer to the heart it hits. And Clint, the natural that he is, never misses.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, okay, Natasha, I didn’t count on my life falling apart when we saved the world.”

The apartment falls quiet, and then Natasha retrieves the dishes from the table and starts running the tap.

“I can help,” Clint offers, as if doing the fucking dishes is going to fix everything.

“I don’t want your help.” Natasha looks at him as the water continues to rinse over the plates. “If you have nothing to add, just go.”

Clint watches forlornly as she starts scrubbing the plates. A few minutes later, finally having thought of something to say, he turns so he leans against the counter, facing the opposite direction Natasha is. “The first night you were gone, I dreamed that I went over the edge.” He bows his head. “I was so upset when I woke, in over my head. Laura found me on the roof, just before dawn.”

Natasha stiffens, turning to look at his profile.

“I mean, I wasn’t gonna…” he shakes his head, chuckles. “No. I never would’ve. But just for a moment there—” his grip on the counter tightens— “the thought of seeing your face again was…” He turns to meet her eyes, looking now at the real thing right in front of him. “Was magnificent, Tasha.”

He always knows just what to say, to elicit some sort of magical forgiveness, and she hates him for it, for knowing so well what makes her soften. She hates him.

“I hate you,” she breathes, turning back towards the sink as the tears start leaking.

“I deserve it,” he says.

“I was so scared, you asshole.” Her voice shakes. “I’ve been right here, and you can’t even stand to look at me.”

“I’m looking now,” he swears, and she turns to check and he is, their faces so close she’s heady with the warmth of his breath. Whatever she’s been looking for over the past three months… he possesses in droves.

“I missed you,” she admits.

His hand comes up to cup her face and she gasps at the contact, his full palm on her skin, scorching like fire, warm like his voice. In an instant she forgets the nightmares, the frost, every hour she’s been cold; he thaws her cell by cell and she presses herself closer and closer and—

And she realises Yelena was wrong: they haven’t been fighting a war. They’ve been keeping their distance, because if they’re not careful, they’ll rub up against each other so hard the sparks from the friction will make them go blind.

The water is still running when she kisses him, chasing the heat of his mouth, body overriding brain for more. He doesn’t resist in the slightest, instead fully opening up to her, pressing his lips against her neck and tangling his hands in her hair until her vision turns scarlet and she feels herself flush all the way down to her toes.

As they stumble their way into her room, Natasha’s hands creep up under Clint’s shirt, fingertips finally making contact with hot, solid skin. “Nat,” he whispers like a trail of smoke, and she gasps, “Shut up,” and then he’s on top of her and his heat washes all over her as she breathes in his ever-familiar scent of coffee and firewood. “Shit,” she says, and his mouth closes over hers again, and she doesn’t ever want to stop; she is so, so warm, for a red-hot moment she swears she glows.

❆

Yelena finally returns a little after midnight, when Clint is already asleep in Natasha’s sheets. Natasha, having walked out her room a while ago to turn off the tap, sits on the living room rug waiting up for her sister, fruitlessly trying to quiet her buzzing thoughts with the novel in her hands.

Yelena closes the door quietly. “Where’s Barton?” she asks, noting his absence from his usual sleeping spot on the couch.

For a moment Natasha considers lying, but she’s ruined enough the past few months and she can’t have this blowing up in her face, too. Slowly, she sets her book aside. “He’s inside.”

Yelena processes this with nothing more than a slow nod.

“Yelena…”

“It’s none of my business,” she says indifferently.

“What if I want it to be?” asks Natasha. “You’re one of the most important people in… You’re family,” she emphasises, hoping the underlying help me is just loud enough for her to hear. “I don’t know. It just happened, and everything is so fresh, all the hurts, and…” Natasha watches for Yelena’s reaction, feeling the guilt hit her in waves and bowing her head. “It wasn’t a good idea. Hey, we should just go—There’s tons of other great cities in Europe. Paris. Barcelona. We could go sightsee, somewhere far away from the aftermath of… whatever this is.” She’s desperate when she looks up.

Yelena shakes her head. “I’ve killed too many people in both those places to actually enjoy either. Maybe Stockholm.” She smiles quietly, then looks down. “Natasha, I have to leave.”

Natasha’s stomach sinks, even as she stands to walk up to Yelena.

“Widow business. They found some girls in Portugal who were blipped; they were still under the chemicals’ control when they came back,” Yelena explains, looking right at her as she approaches. “So I’ll be gone. I’ll find you as soon as it’s over, but… you want my advice?”

“Won’t hurt,” Natasha says, even though she knows it might sting just a little.

Yelena smiles a half-smile. “I’m not above admitting to jealousy,” she says. “I mean, I die for five years, and then you’re like, Uno Reverse, and when you come back you’re obsessed with a carnie guy from Iowa?” She shakes her head. “You stopped Scrabble to take a call.”

Natasha chuckles. “He taught me to play.”

“I know he means a lot to you,” says Yelena. “Even in Budapest, you wouldn’t shut up about him. I just… don’t really trust you two together. Like, I specifically instructed you to sort it out like grownups, and you went and did the most un-grownup thing.”

Natasha blushes. “If it’s any consolation, I trust him. Have for years.” She sighs at the cliché before it leaves her mouth. “It’s like breathing.”

“I know. That’s the problem,” Yelena clarifies, voice low. “I know he is a good killer, that you worked well together. And I believe him to be a good man. But for as long as I’ve known him, he has not been a good partner.”

Natasha opens her mouth to defend him, an instinct carved into her muscle memory, but she doesn’t need to.

“But from what I’ve pieced together, he’s been wracked with guilt for the children,” continues Yelena, “and you—” Yelena takes her hand, knowing full well all she feels from the contact is smooth, cold skin. “You haven’t been telling him everything either.”

“Careful, that’s getting close to calling me a liar,” Natasha parries.

“Aren’t you?” she teases back, completely unaware that, at this moment, Natasha is withholding something from her, too: the pure warmth that had blossomed across her skin at Clint’s touch.

She’d hit the nail on the head years ago, when she condemned Natasha for being too scared and too selfish to look for her after defecting to SHIELD, and she hits it now, calling Natasha out for shying away from the entirety of the truth, fencing areas off with DO NOT CROSS tape for fear that things will get messy, that hearts will bleed.

What was the word Alexei used to describe Yelena again?

Ruthless.

“What if,” Yelena suggests, “instead of pushing him all the way to the edge of your world, you give him the chance to try to make it up to you?”

Natasha sighs, fond. “I’m supposed to be the one giving you wise advice, and all that.”

Yelena chuckles. “I guess coming back from the dead teaches you a thing or two.”

“I guess it does,” Natasha agrees, and pulls her into a hug. Yelena smiles against the side of her neck and holds onto her tight, so that even when the warmth is physically absent, Natasha can tell herself she feels it. She feels it all. “Be careful,” she tells Yelena.

“I don’t need to be,” Yelena dismisses. “You, on the other hand…”

For over a decade, Natasha has risked her life for Clint over and over, placed her unwavering trust in him perennially. She’s only just realising that somewhere down the line, she’d handed her heart over too, plopped it in his calloused palms for him to keep safe.

If she doesn’t run from this—and Yelena doesn’t seem to think it’d be a good idea—it means falling, completely, wholly, with no safety net beneath. It means her heart could drop and shatter, that she could lose what she holds dearest.

Natasha nods. “I know.”

Chapter Text

Here in Prague, the snow on the sidewalk melts before it can see the light of day. The city is beautiful, but far from its tourist season—no facades, which is how Natasha usually likes it, but with Yelena gone, winter just feels despondent. It feels cold.

But she’s hardly a stranger to the cold.

Natasha spends weeks staying in the apartment, people-watching on the balcony when she feels like it, but only after she’s checked the surrounding rooftops for snipers. In a world of super-soldiers and aliens snapping half the population away, ex-spies are almost certainly no longer at the top of anyone’s list of targets. Still, it never hurts to be careful.

The hours and days and weeks flow together into something amorphous, and Natasha forgets the date until Clint comes back one day holding a bouquet of flowers.

Instead of handing it to her, though, his brow furrows once he steps foot inside, and he sets the bouquet on the dining table—Clearly, there’s something more pressing on his mind.

“Hey,” says Natasha, clicking off the TV, “what’s wrong?”

“Nat, it’s freezing in here,” Clint frowns.

“Oh.” Her heart skips a beat even as she realises. “I… think I maybe forgot to turn the heating on.”

“How do you… how do you just forget?” Clint asks, walking over to the radiator and turning it all the way up. “It’s… holy hell, it’s so cold,” he mutters.

“I was thinking we’d save up on electricity,” Natasha says, immediately wincing at how unconvincing the lie is—Maybe she’s losing her touch from being isolated too long. But that’s besides the point: The truth is, she’d only forgotten to turn it on because ever since Vormir, the cold is all she’s felt. She’s gotten used to it now, but the way Clint had clutched his coat tighter when he came in reminds her a little of how hard the first few weeks had been.

Clint. He’s the only reason she’s still pretending, and now he’s going to figure her out, and…

“Nat, we’re Avengers,” he says slowly, squinting quizzically. “We’re in Tony’s will, God’s sake. We don’t have to worry about electricity bills, of all things.”

“Um, save the planet,” Natasha blurts, flushing and immediately moving on. “But whatever. What are those?”

Clint follows her gaze to the dining table, where the pink and white tulips lie. As the room thaws gradually, he takes off his coat and brings the flowers over to her.

“Uh, happy Valentine’s Day, Nat.” His voice is bashful, but his sky-blue eyes don’t shy away from hers.

For a moment, he just holds the flowers between them, Natasha at a loss for what to do. The two of them have been going slow: A few hand brushes here and there that remind her of what sitting at a fireplace used to feel like, that accelerate her heart rate for reasons unattributable to his physical warmth alone, but they haven’t gone beyond that, haven’t kissed since last month. Which is probably for the best, she reminds herself at the sight of him so earnest, so open, flowers in February, hope in his hands.

The separation was just so recent. Neither of them wants to mess something so new up because they accidentally fell into the rebound role for each other—Clint from Laura, Natasha from… death, she supposes.

Natasha takes the flowers, and Clint’s shoulders relax by a fraction. “Thank you.”

Tentatively, Clint sits down on the couch beside her and nods to the flowers. “You know what they mean?”

Natasha surveys the bouquet once more: Pink for love and friendship, white for… “Forgiveness,” she smiles softly at the flowers.

Clint watches her, gaze tinted with sadness. “I can’t believe I ever pushed you away, Natasha,” he starts, and God, no, he can’t be apologising for this now, not when she’s keeping something so big from him. “I was going through a tough time, but… you’re still my best friend, no matter what, and when you were gone I prayed every night for you to come back, and when you did, I didn’t value it enough. I wasn’t—I mean, I wasn’t looking at you.” He exhales. “You were right there.”

Natasha shakes his head. “Clint, you don’t have to—”

“And I know it looks bad, like I’m only saying sorry because I actually need you now that the family’s gone, but…” His gaze alights on one of the white tulips. “Natasha, I’ve always needed you. I always will.” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear.”

Maybe it’s the heating incident, maybe it’s the flowers and apology, maybe it’s just the magic of the day. But in that instant, Natasha decides to tell him, to level the playing field. She reaches out to take his hand, the warmth flaring up under her skin a comforting witness to the truth.

“I have something to tell you,” she admits, voice low.

Clint looks up in surprise, clearly not having expected anything apart from a response to his apology.

“You remember when I first came back, and I… told you about how I was cold?”

Clint nods, waiting attentively for elaboration. “You told me they fixed it, after all those tests.”

“They didn’t.” She squeezes his hand. “They never found out what was wrong.”

Shocked, Clint moves to withdraw his hand, but Natasha holds on, a wordless request that he grants. As their hands settle back between them, he urges, “So you’ve been cold this whole time? That’s why you didn’t realise the heating was off? It’s just… always been this cold?”

Natasha tries to say something and finds that she can’t.

“Months, Natasha,” he mutters, and sighs. “Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“If something is wrong, you tell me,” Clint dismisses, letting go of her hand to hold her face between his hands. Natasha grows dizzy with the warmth, with the realisation that he’s only mad because he cares, that he wants to help. “STRIKE Team Delta 101: If you’re hit, you tell me, before you slow the both of us down.”

“That’s what this is, huh?” Natasha teases. “A mission.”

“Not quite,” he replies, hands sliding down to hers once more. “So, you’re just… cold? Is there anything that helps, at all? Blankets? Tea?”

“Neither,” she refutes. “There is one thing.”

Clint waits.

“I realised that night, in Iowa,” she tells him. “When you’re close, really close… or when you touch me…” She affixes her gaze on their entwined hands. “I feel the warmth. All of it.”

When she looks back up, Clint is staring off darkly, quietly, one of the ways she knows he disguises fear. And without explanation, she understands: the rules of her condition don't follow logic, or science, which means it comes straight from Vormir. Things like these that pertain to the soul instead of the flesh, things that veer a little too close to magic—that was way out of their league when they flew to outer space for a glowing stone, and it’s out of their league now. It’s not SHIELD, not espionage or assassination. There’s no instruction manual printed and ready to go.

They’re on their own.

“So,” Clint eventually says, “if I do this…”

He pulls her in using their joined hands, and it’s entirely too easy for Natasha to fall into his waiting arms. She breathes in the air that comes alive and crackles like a hearth around him, nestles her face into the firm curve of his neck, and wonders stupidly how she ever made it this long without his touch, his embrace, his warmth all around her. She wonders how she ever thought the two of them together could be anything but right.

“Yes,” she sighs into his shirt, answering his unfinished question. “Yes,” and she burrows in further to get closer, and Clint—benevolent, always there—lets her.

❆

“Where I am? Sweetheart… you know I can’t say.”

From where she stands reorganising the kitchen cupboards, Natasha steals a glance over her shoulder at Clint on the phone with the kids. She plays a mental game of guessing who asked: Nate is still full of his natural childhood curiosity, Cooper likes to relay as many details to Laura as he can, and Lila has always had a drive to just know, to make sure her dad and Auntie Nat are safe from the bad guys.

“No, I’m not actively Avenging, but it never hurts to be safe,” Clint hedges, and Natasha can tell from the sad pull of his face that he, too, is tired of always feeling hunted. “All you need to know is I wish you guys were here with me. Wherever he goes in the world, your dad misses you, yeah?” He waits for a second, sighing when he’s—presumably—met with silence. “How’s your crafts project coming along, honey?”

So it was Lila, that little detective. And it suddenly washes over Natasha how much she misses her voice—all their voices, even Laura’s—how much she wishes she could just say hi without the disproportionate fallout. But all she can do in this moment is turn back towards their mugs and plates and remind herself of all the reasons she can’t ask Clint to put the call on speaker.

“That’s great, Lila, I’m sure your teacher’s gonna love it,” says Clint as Natasha closes the cupboard door and moves toward the fridge for a snack. “Tash, could you pass me a beer?”

Natasha whirls around right as the horror dawns on Clint’s face.

The instantaneous squabble that buzzes through the phone is so loud that even she can hear a little of it. Auntie Nat? Are you with Auntie Nat? Can you put her on the phone please? We miss her so much, please, Dad, please?

“No—no, I’m not with Auntie Nat, it’s—” Clint looks at her with panic in his eyes, but Natasha can’t help him out of the hole he’s dug himself into. “Kids, I’m sorry, I can’t put her on, she’s not—Look, Daddy has to go now, okay? Okay? We’ll talk next week!” With that, he practically smashes the button to hang up.

The moment stays frozen in shocked silence.

And then Natasha says, “Shit.”

Clint pushes away from the table forcefully, getting up to pace the length of the living room.

They both know how it looks. The kids will go running to Laura about how Daddy wouldn’t let them talk to Auntie Nat, and that will be how Laura finds out Auntie Nat is even part of the equation at all, and with that in mind it’s completely out of the question to have Natasha talk to the kids without Laura’s prior consent.

Slowly, Natasha walks over to sit at the table, waiting for Clint to join her after he’s paced out the agony. Once he sits, he covers his face with both hands.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he mumbles into his own skin.

“It was the right choice,” she reassures. “Look, she was going to find out sooner or—”

“Yes, but I hate having to… to hide you away like that, like…” Clint’s hands fall from his face to grip Natasha’s hands tightly over the table, the feel of the polished wood grounding them both. “I mean, you helped raise these kids. They love you, so much. I don’t want to think of you as the… other woman, or…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “God, that makes me sick.”

Natasha thinks, for a long moment, of what to say next. “Look,” she starts quietly, “okay. Fine. You screwed that part of your life up. Couldn’t stay away from the field when your kids needed you.”

Clint exhales slowly, eyes still closed with what Natasha can only assume is the guilt Yelena was talking about that night.

“But this?” Natasha gestures between the two of them. “This is new, but it’s also all we’ve known for a long time.” Her hand settles back on top of his. “Don’t let the leftover regret from the farm bleed into this.” Which means: I’ll never forgive ourselves if we ruin this because we’re being too impulsive to step back and look at what we’re doing. We’re world-class assassins, we’re trained professionals; please don’t make us rookies at matters of the heart.

Obviously, this unsaid prayer doesn’t quite seem to land, because the next thing Clint does is sigh, “You’d know all about compartmentalising.”

Natasha stiffens, but doesn’t withdraw her hands.

Clint senses it anyway, eyes snapping open. “No, Nat, I didn’t mean it like that,” he backpedals. “It just slipped out. I’m sorry.” He squeezes her hands gently. “You know I don’t think of you like that.”

Like that, like she’s heartless, like she’s a chronic double agent, like deception runs in her blood. Like the accusations Tony threw at her all those years ago that had struck closer to home than she’d liked.

“I know,” Natasha accepts, because she does, and because she needs to keep a clear head now more than ever. Clint is not and will never be the enemy; he wasn’t when his eyes were washed arctic blue, he wasn’t when he was standing on the opposite side of that airfield in Saxony, Germany. She returns to the matter at hand. “We might be catastrophizing, anyway. This isn’t a mission; we shouldn’t have to read her mind and guess at her next steps.”

“Shouldn’t I?” Clint questions. “I mean… it’s never been a problem with us.”

Natasha swallows down the lurch in her chest. “So you’re saying this is you paying the price for loving me.”

“No,” Clint refutes hurriedly. “Loving you isn’t a debt, it’s like breathing.” The feel of his skin on hers grows more intense, his warmth pulsing like it’s something alive. “It’s like… flowers, blooming in the spring. I couldn’t stop it if I tried.”

His casual, unfiltered devotion is almost too much. “Don’t go writing letters on me now, Barton—”

“That night, last month,” says Clint, bringing with it a rush of memories of adrenaline and desperation and a longing that had burned to the end of its fuse. Natasha’s face grows hot. “It didn’t mean nothing.”

Up until now, they’ve been pretending January never happened, so in some way they could shed the blame of that burning night. But… “It meant something to me too,” Natasha confesses. “I’m sorry if I acted like it didn’t, if I kept things from you. I thought you needed space to think, after…”

Clint stands and walks around the table to get closer to her, still holding her hands. “Natasha Romanoff, I have never, and nor will I ever, need space away from you,” he says like it’s a vow. “In fact, I’d really like you close by.”

“Is that so?”

“If it’s what you want,” he answers with a solid smile, sparkling blue waves in his eyes, and Natasha knows for sure that they’re fucked.

❆

Natasha is just starting to get used to warm nights again, though every once in a while she’ll wake up from a nightmare, shivering with fear of her dying on Vormir or Clint dying on Vormir or just Vormir itself, its presence chilling her to the bone. But tonight she’s safe yet, with Clint’s arms around her like an electric blanket that lives and breathes and loves her, his face mere centimetres from hers as they wait for the embrace of sleep. Her hands rove across his soft, fine hair, settling at his ears, and she’s just about to help take out his hearing aids when—

“Tasha,” he whispers. “I have a question.”

Natasha blinks her eyes open, cataloguing the lines and slopes of his face. “Hmm?”

He hesitates, almost shy. “Why haven’t you kissed me again?” His small frown might be one of the most endearing things she’s ever seen. “You don’t have to, of course. But…”

“I do want to,” Natasha tells him, her hand coming up to trace his mouth with her thumb, closing her eyes, briefly, to imagine it. “I don’t know, I don’t want you to think I’m, like… using you, for your warmth.”

She watches him mull this over and nod. “Okay,” he says, “I kinda get that. But… even if you were, though. I’d let you burn me up.”

Natasha’s pulse quickens and she shifts to kiss his forehead. The next best thing.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Clint mumbles into her neck.

Wish for fire and you get fire: Natasha had learned that the hard way, early on in the Red Room. She falls asleep next to the man she loves, in this city right in between all the places she’s called home, and waits for disaster to strike.

Chapter Text

Lena
online

We’re going back to NY. Regroup there? >

< OMG!!!!!!
< THIS time will u take me to statue of liberty
< we couldn’t even go see the christmas tree in december((((

Yeah I know, Yelena >

< becuz we were in STUPID IOWA
< nothing against the kids. i think they were great
< lila gave me one of her stuffed deers

THAT’S where Mr. Antlers went??? >

< ohh is that his name! i’ve been calling him greg
< i thought it was very american

How’s Lisbon >

< mission is all wrapped up and i went around the city with the newly freed widows 😎
< their seafood is like… chef’s kiss

Nice!! >

< sooo???? shostakova sisters nyc tour????

That depends on how things go. >
We’re starting another round of testing >

< be there in 3 days.

❆

“Interesting,” says Dr Helen Cho, squinting at the images on her screen that Natasha probably couldn’t dream of understanding.

She squirms in her seat. Her arm is outstretched, palm placed under Helen’s machine, currently scanning the lines of her skin. Though there isn’t the smallest tingle, it still feels too vulnerable, like Helen will somehow deduce her darkest traumas by lifting her fingerprints.

The machine’s robotic movements also remind her, just a little, of what it was like living in the Tower with Tony and his (mechanical) children.

“You know,” says Natasha, watching the light settle over and map her hand, “if I’d had an affair with James instead, we could be in Wakanda.”

Clint scowls from a chair a few feet away. “That’s funny—if. And it’s not an affair, quit calling it that.”

Natasha throws the candy wrapper she’s been toying with for the past fifteen minutes at him, which he catches, unimpressed. “First of all, if I don’t get to weaponise your marriage, whatever happens in the KGB stays in the KGB. Second, affair just sounds more dramatic.”

Keeping her eyes on the screen, Helen raises her eyebrows at their banter, clearly feeling a little like a fish out of water.

“Don’t listen to her, Helen,” Clint bids. “I know it’s been a couple of really weird months for everyone, and we still owe you for all those times you stitched us back up, but… we’re really grateful you could help us. There’s no one else we’d trust.”

Natasha offers her a small smile to show her agreement.

“Nonsense,” Helen parries, “if anything, I owe your team for saving my life and giving me my labs. Though…” Her face falls: her laboratories were, of course, destroyed by Thanos’ forces along with the Compound.

“But really, you’re doing us a favour,” she continues to insist. “A human being, exchanged for the stone she died for, coming back to life from a planet in outer space with a mysterious thermodysregulation condition?” Her eyes glitter with enthusiasm. “Unprecedented. Think of all the experimentation possibilities! The research opportunities, the new journal articles that’ll be published… This could save our entire division.”

Natasha nods along, dazed.

“Sorry,” says Helen sheepishly. “Don’t mean to make you feel like a lab rat.”

“I was on the same team as Tony Stark,” she dismisses. “You kind of get used to it.”

Helen returns her attention to the screen. “So, you said that you’d gone through one round of testing before this?”

“Right after I got back,” she confirms.

Helen looks at her now, confused. “So why did they never think to test the two of you together? Who was in charge of all this?”

“Well, we didn’t know that it was—” Natasha starts.

“Bruce Banner,” Clint answers concisely.

“Ah,” Helen smiles knowingly. “As accomplished as Dr Banner is, this really isn’t his area of expertise. And… correct me, please, but wasn’t he severely injured undoing the Blip, and all?”

Clint raises a reproachful eyebrow at Natasha and she sighs. “I wasn’t thinking straight,” she defends, “and he and I had sort of had a thing…” She closes her eyes, admitting defeat. “I needed all the help I could get.”

“You’re here now,” Helen reassures. “Okay, Clint, could I get your hand under the scanner? —Don’t move, Nat, I need you two to be touching.”

Clint walks over to lace his fingers through hers, and Natasha feels the corners of her mouth automatically tug upwards. These few months have been full of new experiences and surprises, not all of them good, but no matter where she walks, she’ll always have Clint right beside her, eager to be the fireplace she rests at. This miracle of his skin on hers, this flower of heat blooming where they meet.

Helen sucks in a breath at whatever she’s seeing on her screen.

“What is it?” Clint asks, alarmed.

“Okay,” says Helen, “I have a theory about… why this is happening. Would I be right in guessing that Clint—his hand, in particular—was the last living thing you touched before you…”

Natasha shudders even as she recalls that moment of tenderness on Vormir, when they both agreed they knew who it had to be, and Natasha had grasped onto his hand, seeking comfort before the fall. Stupid of them, to think they could ever let the other die. “Yeah.”

Helen nods. “I think you left a little part of your soul in him. And—stay with me, I don’t know everything about how Infinity Stones work, either, but—there was never supposed to be an issue, because you weren’t supposed to come back.”

“But I did,” says Natasha quietly.

“And the part of you I took is still in me,” Clint realises.

“And hence is missing from me,” Natasha finishes.

“I think I can fix this,” Helen ventures. “No guarantees, but I have a few ideas. Well, one idea. I don’t really see how else it’d work.” She bites at her lower lip.

Clint and Natasha stare. “Well?” Clint asks. Through their entwined hands, Natasha can feel his heartbeat pick up.

“It won’t be pleasant,” says Helen.

❆

“Of course Empire is the best one,” Clint says fervently, putting an arm around Natasha as they duck out of the Italian restaurant and onto the city streets, illuminated every few seconds by the cars going by. “First time you watched it—Remember how we were late for a briefing ‘cause you wanted to finish it no matter what?”

He laughs a laugh that makes her heart constrict, the same laugh from years ago when he’d watched her pack her things in panic while the credits rolled, and she’d all but dragged him out the door with her.

“For what it’s worth, I still don’t think they’re doing Dog Cops reruns is a good enough reason for being five minutes late to our first date,” says Natasha, knocking her shoulder up against him playfully.

“This is not our first date,” Clint argues, wrinkling his eyes.

“Ah, so it’s a platonic dinner that both of us dressed up for?” She takes the chance to give him another once-over: Looking that good in formalwear shouldn’t be legal. It should be her thing.

“You dressed up? I didn’t notice,” Clint jokes, as if he didn’t choke a little when he first saw her earlier this evening. “Anyways—we’ve dined out in Prague.”

“You were in jeans—and sometimes Yelena was there.”

“What kind of guy packs a tuxedo for a safehouse hideout right after getting divorced?” he counters. “And you’re still wrong, because our first date was, of course, at the opera in Belarus.”

Natasha laughs, surprised. “Where you tried to kill me?”

“Where I planned to kill you,” Clint corrects. “But I didn’t, and we watched it from the same box, and we were both dressed up.”

Natasha finds herself smiling as she realises he’s right. “That was sixteen whole years ago.”

“We’re making up for lost time,” he says gently.

Natasha tries her hardest to fight off a blush. “I had a good time tonight.”

Clint nods. “It’s good to be back.” He looks over at her with a fond smile. “I mean, Prague was great, but pizza date in New York with the girl of my dreams?” He squeezes her shoulder. “I can die happy.”

Natasha stiffens and stops walking. “…Is that what this is about?”

Clint steps up in front of her and turns. “No, Nat. Come on,” he sighs, “we agreed not to—”

“No, no, Clint, are you optimising the time we have together—”

“Can we please not do this tonight?”

“This is why you suggested date night, isn’t it?” A bout of cold dread sweeps through her body.

Clint sighs again, and then, catching sight of another couple coming out of the restaurant behind them, leads Natasha sideways into the alley so they won’t be blocking the way. “Nat,” he says once he’s facing her again, “you have to understand that this is my choice—”

“Like hell,” she says immediately.

“It is, okay, this is something they’re going to do to me, not you—”

“But you’re doing it for me, so I should have a say—”

“I am taking your opinion into consideration,” says Clint, infuriatingly calm, “and I want to go ahead anyway. What’s so wrong with that, really?”

“What’s wrong?” she yells back, grateful now that they’re cordoned off from the rest of the world in this pocket of darkness. “Clint. They want to sear off the skin of your hand.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Clint groans, “It’ll be like ten minutes, tops—”

“And you’ll pay for it for a year,” she interjects. “You won’t be able to use it until it fully heals—”

“I don’t care,” Clint counters. “A year is nothing—”

“Clint!” Natasha cuts in, frustrated because how could he not get it, how could he not see what’s going on. “This means no guns, no knives, no bow, which means you’re… walking right into another version of retirement.” She blinks away the water suddenly welling in her eyes. “Last time that happened, you ran, and you didn’t stop running. This can’t be what you want.”

Clint’s frown dissipates in quiet shock. “No,” he says quietly, “what I want is you.” He reaches out for her hands, but she draws herself away, not quite ready. “You’re scared I’m gonna get spooked and run, is that it?”

Embarrassingly, she’s shaking. Neither confirming nor denying, she says, “I’d rather just stay cold, really. You’re hurting yourself for an unnecessary cause; I can’t allow you to do this.”

Clint raises an incredulous eyebrow. “Allow? Did you have my permission to jump after me that day on Vormir?”

That stuns her into silence.

“Natasha, you died for me,” he pleads. “We’ll never be even.”

His voice echoes in the alley like a siren song as she searches his darkened eyes, until it’s all she can do to step forward and push him up against the wall to kiss him hard. Matching her enthusiasm, his mouth burns her from the inside out; his hand settles on the waist of the red dress she’d picked out for tonight, and she breaks apart to shudder from the warmth that snakes through to her skin.

“We’re doing this,” Clint breathes, eyes still trained on her lips. “And I’m not going to run.”

“I know,” Natasha sighs fondly, absentmindedly playing with the hair on the back of his head. “And Barton?”

“Hmm?” He’s slightly dazed, scarlet lipstick stains all over his mouth.

She smirks, a little smug. “This is the part of the date where you take me home.”

❆

A week later, Clint pulls the car into the parking lot of the lab. Hands still on the steering wheel, he takes a minute to steady himself.

Natasha reaches over to place her hand over his. “We can still turn back.”

“No,” Clint shakes his head, before falling into silence again.

“Oh, come on already,” says Yelena from the back seat. “I get us ice cream after this, okay? It’s what Dad always did after I went to the dentist.”

Clint chuckles and nods at her through the rearview. “Thank you, Yelena.”

“Is nothing scary,” she maintains, shrugging. “In Red Room if you can’t assemble a gun fast enough, they hit your hands with whip. Make it even harder for next time. Vicious cycle.” She sighs at the memory, brightens back up with a cheerful smile, then opens the car door to leave.

Alone now, Clint turns to stare at Natasha.

“I’d forgotten they did that,” she mutters in defense.

Clint is shell-shocked. “Christ. That is… something I hope you talked to your SHIELD psychologist about.”

Natasha breaks into a smile. “Stalling only makes it worse, Barton.”

“I’m not stalling. You’re stalling. I want to do this.”

She nods for a few seconds. “Then let’s do this.”

“Procedure, ice cream…” Clint lists. “And then what? What next?”

“We’ll figure it out,” says Natasha, Through the windshield, she watches Yelena kick a pebble around on the ground while waiting. “Empire Strikes Back, maybe.”

The last of the tension bleeds away from Clint’s face. She leans in for a quick kiss and reassures, “We got this.”

Chapter Text

It’s hard for Natasha to tell the time when she blinks her eyes open. The days have been growing longer, the sunrises shifting earlier, and she’s getting more shuteye than she’d been months ago by a long shot. Clint, the reason she no longer startles awake shivering in the night, is still sound asleep next to her, but that doesn’t narrow it down by much; it’s not infrequent that he stays in bed until noon.

Her phone buzzes on the bedside table and she stretches over, trying not to displace herself so much that she loses Clint’s body heat she’s stealing. Phone in hand, she resettles into his warmth to read her new messages, and Clint hums, jostled to semi-consciousness.

Morning, Natasha signs without turning around as he reaches for his hearing aids.

He falls back into position after putting them in, wrapping his arms around her properly and pressing his face into the crook of her neck. “S’too early,” he mumbles.

Natasha checks the upper corner of her phone screen: It’s well past 10 AM. She chuckles, “If you don’t get up soon, we’ll have to skip breakfast.”

“Aww, breakfast, no.”

“You’re not making sense,” giggles Natasha, setting her phone aside somewhere in Clint’s labyrinthine nest of blankets and turning in his arms.

“I haven’t had coffee,” he defends sleepily. “I can’t words.”

She scrunches her face up at the sight of his mussed-up hair, half-closed eyes, and wonders how she’s still dreaming after waking up. “You’re adorable when you haven’t had coffee.”

“And you’re—you’re…” He presses his lips together, flustered even in his groggy state. “I can’t think of something smart to say. You’re really distracting.”

“I haven’t done anything,” Natasha says, amused, starting to sit up even as Clint makes a noise of protest. “C’mon, up; coffee and painkillers and then we’re going to the lab.”

Right away, Clint’s attention is piqued. “It’s ready?”

“Just got word from Helen. She says to drop by anytime today.”

Clint’s face breaks into a smile so radiant, Natasha almost has to shield her eyes from it. He tackles her with a big hug, pulling her back into bed as she laughs.

“Mind your hand,” she reminds him. The bandages have recently come off, but even the slightest pressure makes him wince sometimes, and if they’re not careful—

“It’s fine,” he dismisses. “And you’ll be fine. We’ll be… Natasha, this is…” He pulls back to regard her, something new and bittersweet mixed in his smile.

“What is it?” She thinks she might know.

“Well… this means you’ll feel warmth on your own again,” he says sheepishly. “It means you won’t need me anymore.”

Natasha rolls her eyes, using the flat of her palm to playfully push his head back, a gesture that translates to idiot. “You’re abstaining from archery for me and this is when you have second thoughts, Hawkguy?”

“Not what I’m called,” he banters, smiling as he bats her hand away.

“My condition isn’t why I stuck around,” Natasha reassures gently. “It’s probably not even in the top five reasons.”

Clint’s face grows mischievous. “What are the top five reasons?” He bends down to kiss her, slow and delicious.

“That,” she sighs in satisfaction after he pulls back, “that takes up all five.”

“Maybe we should do it again,” he breathes, leaning in, only to be stopped by her hand on his chest.

“The sixth reason is your ability to cook pancakes just the way I like them,” she hints.

Clint snorts into her hair, half-matted from sleep, and finally rolls off of her. “Fine. Gimme ten minutes.”

❆

Natasha starts the car and reverses right into the curb outside Helen’s lab.

“Bozhe moi,” Yelena judges loudly from the backseat. “Just like in Budapest.”

“Shut up,” Natasha shoots back half-heartedly, going the right direction this time. “I have a valid license, okay, I’m just excited.”

“Do you mishandle cars every time you’re in Budapest?” Clint asks off-handedly from the passenger seat.

“Not helping,” grumbles Natasha.

“She had genius plan of driving us away from the danger,” Yelena recounts. “When it didn’t work, we got blown up and our car fell into metro station.”

“It wasn’t our car, you stole it from a poor man on the road.”

“This doesn’t make me feel better about your driving ability,” Clint quips, watching the view out the window.

“Too bad,” she says. “Until your hand heals, you’re all stuck with me.”

The antidote Helen’s team had fashioned from the DNA they took from Clint is taking effect rapidly. At a red light, Natasha switches the AC off in favour of rolling her window down, appreciating the spring breeze that glides past. On the road, she nods along to Clint’s ABBA CD and gasps when she spots the park up ahead, swaddled vibrantly in pink.

“We’re pulling over,” she announces.

“Cherry blossoms,” marvels Yelena, who hops out of the car before Natasha finishes parking—where she gets her inexhaustible energy from, Natasha will never understand. She’s already taking delighted selfies when Nat turns the engine off.

“They have these in Moscow, too,” Yelena tells an alighting Clint, and Natasha pauses, surprised at her willingness to share. “I wasn’t allowed to stop and admire on my missions. But I wanted to.”

Clint nods. “There are no rules like that here, Yelena. I remember having to teach that to Nat, too. Here, you can stop to look at as many pretty things as you want. You could even…” With his good hand, he reaches towards a branch and plucks a flower clean off, pushing the pink blossom behind her ear into her hair. “You can enjoy things just for yourself.”

Yelena looks lost in thought for a moment, then plasters on her trademark haughtiness. “I already know that, Clint Barton,” she sniffs. “You’re mansplaining. No good.” She walks off to explore the park, one hand holding onto the flower so it doesn’t fall off.

“She grows on you,” Clint comments as Natasha walks up.

Smiling, Natasha hooks her arm through his as they stroll along in Yelena’s general direction.

“You feeling okay?” Clint asks softly.

“Yeah.” Helen had warned of a couple side effects—her metabolism might need some time to catch up with the change—but all Natasha feels right now is a cosy kind of afternoon semi-sleepiness, the urge to just fall into Clint’s arms and slip in and out of consciousness.

The flowers here are truly gorgeous. The trees over their heads are blooming, but so is the ground underneath their feet, covered in a layer of petals so thick that the green grass is almost impossible to glimpse. Natasha breathes it all in: the faint smell of pollen, the Hudson River, how the flowers under her boots have wilted and fallen to become part of something bigger, beautiful and picturesque.

Nature takes and gives indiscriminately—the two of them had needed that reminder. The same way that this city is a breathing reminder of the Avengers’ first battle, and today they’re back again—or still here, never left. Because it’s one thing to recognise what it looks like when the stars align, to take the moment and twist it into yours, but Clint and Natasha have never needed The Right Moment; they’ve just always been there, steadily operating as one in the background, just as how the stars have always pulsed in the sky. They only ever needed to look up.

Adrift in pondering, both of them have stalled their footsteps, coming to a gentle falter somewhere in the park. “If you had told me,” Clint eventually muses, “half a year ago, this is where we’d end up…” he chuckles. “I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Natasha looks up at him, and all she sees is the constant effort he’s put into making up for past mistakes—his and hers both—the amount of work he’s done to keep them together, the sacrifices he’s made to make this work. This is the Clint Barton she knows: always making a few missteps along the way, yet relentless in his determination to love.

“Really?” she asks. “I would’ve.”

As if reading her thoughts, Clint shrugs with a helpless smile. “Loving you is easy,” he says, “you know that. I’ve told you that. I did it for years and I didn’t even realise it.” He shakes his head. “I just still can’t believe my luck, that you want this too. Natasha,” he says before she can protest, taking both her hands in his, “I have everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m not used to it.”

“Neither am I.” Natasha squeezes his hands, mindful of the one still healing. “What do you say we start learning?”

Eyes shining, Clint leans down to kiss her and she is swept away by it; the world narrows down to his hands on her skin and the natural warmth of the sun smiling down at her for the first time in months, until she forgets what it was ever like to be cold, until she forgets where she is until Yelena’s voice calls, “Don’t move, you two.”

They pull apart to find her with her phone aimed right at them as she snaps a photo, then reviews it. “So romantic,” she fawns in approval, walking up to them. “You should frame this in your living room, Barton.”

“That’s a perfect idea. I absolutely will.”

Yelena peers over at him as Natasha puts an arm around each of them, slowly making their way back to the car. “Maybe I was wrong about you, Clint Barton,” she admits. “Maybe you are good partner. Well, I’m happy you got your shit together.”

“So am I,” he laughs. “And you can call me Clint.”

Yelena nods, grateful, then returns to the bigger question. “So, with Barton—Clint—temporarily out of commission, we can’t save the world or anything.” She looks to Natasha. “Where will we go?”

Natasha hums. “I’m thinking somewhere tropical,” she says. “Warm beaches, gorgeous sunsets, and my favourite people.”