Chapter Text
The first phone call came at 8:47 on a Saturday morning.
Clint was stuck at the kitchen table, trying to wipe down both the high chair and Nate's face as the baby happily burbled and grabbed for anything within reach, from the spoon Clint was using to feed him to Clint's nose whenever it came in range. Applesauce dribbled from his mouth in a trail down his chin, falling onto the bib, the tray of the high chair, and Nate himself as he waved his chubby little fists around. Clint barely jerked the spoon out of the way before his son could (once again) send his breakfast flying, grabbing the rag he was using to try and mitigate some of the mess before it congealed into lumps he'd have to get off with the putty scraper later.
“C'mon Bug, you've gotta work with me here- Crap,” he muttered as the tinny sounds of “Livin' On a Prayer” blared from his phone, stuck on the counter next to the fridge. “Coop! Come grab this for me, okay?”
The couch creaked dangerously as Cooper jumped off (he made a mental note to turn it over and see if the springs were finally falling out completely as Lila kept insisting), barreling into the kitchen to grab the phone. The song cut off as Cooper answered it, holding it up to his ear with all the proper manners that Laura had drilled into the kids and Clint undermined half the time. “This is Cooper, Dad's busy right- Auntie Nat!”
“I wanna talk to her I wanna talk to her!” Lila was off the couch in a shot at hearing the name of her favorite relative, abandoning the rounds of cartoons in favor of something much more interesting. “Gimme the phone Cooper!”
“You can have it when I'm done! Dad asked me to get it and I wanna-”
“It's too early for this, kids!” Clint broke in, taking advantage of Nate's distraction by the noise his older siblings were making to run the towel over his face, wiping away most of the spilled applesauce. How had Laura done it alone for all those years he was constantly out on missions? Maybe it was a little easier with two kids instead of three like there were now, but the fact that Lila had been born when Cooper was barely three and not old enough to be reasoned with probably took away that slim advantage. “You both get four minutes to talk to her, then you give it to me, okay?”
“But Dad-”
“Three minutes and fifty-five seconds! Cooper first!”
Lila shot him a look that was a perfect copy of her aunt's, an expression designed entirely to guilt or shame him into doing what she wanted, but he'd spent far too long around the original source to be taken in by it and just raised his eyebrows at her. Cooper wouldn't want to give up the phone when his time was up, but he'd do it; Lila would have to be pried off when the end of her time came. She stuck her lower lip out and sulked back to the couch, folding her arms across her chest and flopping down into the cushions in a really amazing imitation of a petulant child.
“You better not make the hero worship even worse, Bug,” Clint murmured to Nate as Cooper chattered away behind him about what was happening in school and the model volcano they were building just for kicks. Clint kept an eye on the clock as he managed to get at least some of the remaining applesauce into the baby; when he called time, Cooper wiggled twenty extra seconds in saying goodbye and extracting a promise for Nat to come visit as soon as she could, then handed the phone to his sister as Clint started the process of hosing Nate down. When Lila's allotted time was up, he'd settled his youngest in the playpen in the living room with Cooper to keep an eye on him and managed to wipe up most of the mess baby-feeding had made, and turned to liberating his phone from his daughter chattering away a mile a minute. Some begging and pleading and a “Tell Uncle Steve I said hi!” later, Clint wedged the phone between his shoulder and his ear and returned to cleaning up the kitchen. “You need to call more so this doesn't happen every time.”
Nat's familiar chuckle was good to hear on the other end of the line. “Oh, I don't know, I wouldn't want them to get sick of me.”
“Sick of you? Not happening.” His senses were on alert at her words – something about her voice was just slightly off, more forced casualness than real ease. Probably no one else would be able to tell, but Clint had a level of perception that was higher than pretty much everyone else he'd ever met, as well as Nat being his best friend, partner, and surrogate sister. If anyone could tell when she had something on her mind, it was him, as she well knew. “...So I'm guessing this isn't a social call.” She gave a small sigh, and a tension knot immediately formed in his stomach. “You're not hurt, are you?”
“No, I'm not – a little banged up, but not really hurt. Rumlow tried to blow up an armored truck with me in it.”
“He what? You guys found him?”
“Finally. I'm guessing you haven't looked at the news yet, have you.”
“It's been kind of a zoo around here this morning, I had to bribe them with cartoons to get them to settle down.” Clint glanced at the living room, noting a dark brown and a sandy brown-blond head sitting on the couch and ostensibly watching TV, but obviously trying to listen in on his conversation over the noise it was making. He always caught them in their eavesdropping attempts but they kept trying anyway – something he was actually pretty proud of. They definitely got their stubbornness from him. Dropping the sponge he'd been holding in the sink, he turned on the water to give his hands a quick wash and cover up the sound of his words from his curious children. “Laura's friend needed some help setting up for a baby shower today, so she went over there earlier to give her a hand.”
“Just the hawk and his nestlings, then.”
“You got that right, I owe her apology flowers. A lot of them. Hang on- Coop! Lila! I'm going out on the porch.”
“Okay, Dad!”
“Keep an eye on your brother and no eavesdropping!”
“Awwwww!”
Another chuckle from Nat made him feel a little less apprehensive, though obviously something was still wrong if she'd led with being almost blown up as her starter. He knew there'd been some sort of mission in the works for a couple of weeks, but since he'd hung up his quiver he didn't ask for too many details and they mostly didn't volunteer them. Since he was only an Avenger in an auxiliary, call-me-if-the-world-is-actually-going-to-blow-up capacity now, he wasn't sure how much they were allowed or even wanted to tell him; the team seemed to be trying to preserve the life he'd chosen, and Nat at the minimum knew that if he got word of his closest friends being in danger (well, unusual amounts of danger for them) he'd probably rush off to help.
Well aware that Lila at least would probably try and sneak up to the door so she could overhear her dad and her aunt talking, Clint grabbed one of the rocking chairs Laura had put on the porch and turned it so he could face the kitchen door, giving him a clear line of sight back into the house. “We're about as private as we're going to get now without me hiding in the Quin.”
“They get that from you, you know.”
“And I'm damn proud of it. So what happened?”
She sighed, much more heavily this time, and Clint's heart started to sink; Nat only allowed herself to show that she was worn down when things had truly fucked up. “Rumlow was spotted in Nigeria about a month ago. Once we heard about that, we contacted the Nigerian government, gave them the facts, and asked if we could help them with what looked like a potential terrorist situation. Heavily armed groups of mercenaries were hitting police stations, taking weapons and a few other things they didn't want to talk about, they were worried their task forces wouldn't be up to facing them, sound familiar?”
“Too much. Same pattern as in Guatemala?”
“Almost exactly, which makes sense since he was STRIKE. He knew all those tactics from having to take them apart for years. Steve and Vision took the information they gave us and what we knew, worked out the pattern and the likely next target, and we went in undercover in Lagos. Rhodey was under obligation to the Air Force already and we thought Vision would draw too much attention, so it was Wanda, Sam, Cap, and me. Only it turned out their target wasn't the police station. It was the IFID.”
His already sinking heart plummeted through the wood at his feet. “Shit.”
“Mmm.” She paused, her attention caught by something he couldn't hear, and as she responded to the question the pieces started coming together in his brain. He'd been with S.H.I.E.L.D. far too long to not know the patterns of terrorists, despots, and amoral mercenaries, and there were only a few variations on this theme that were possible. “They broke in, took a biological weapon, but we managed to stop them and recover it. He had about twenty men all together and we subdued most of them, had to kill a couple, but his couriers and Rumlow himself escaped; Steve and Wanda tailed Rumlow while Sam and I chased the other four to get the weapon back. Steve cornered him, but Rumlow had a suicide bomb.”
“He's not-”
“No, he's okay,” she quickly broke in. “Wanda saved him, used her powers to contain the blast, lifted Rumlow off the ground and away...”
“...Nat, just tell me.”
There was another pause, one where she was probably looking around her to make sure she couldn't be overheard, before her voice dropped below the already quiet tone she'd been using to the point where he was glad his hearing implants were as sensitive as they were. “You know she's still learning how to control her powers and what she can do. She saved Steve from being ripped apart, but all that kinetic energy had to go somewhere, and she did her best. But her shield was failing and she panicked a little, and she didn't move it far away enough. It went off next to the building they were at about eight stories up. Right next to it. At least twenty-five people are dead and more are injured, including a group of Wakandans who'd come as part of a humanitarian outreach program.”
“Oh, God.” Collateral damage was unfortunately a common occurrence of their field of work – villains usually didn't care what they destroyed in the pursuit of their goals – but it was so very different when you were the one who had caused it. He and Nat were more used to it, with their espionage backgrounds and plenty of missions they'd been sent on not going as cleanly as they'd all hoped they would, and even Cap, Sam, and Rhodey knew the dangers with their experience in the military. That didn't mean you stopped hoping that it wouldn't happen this time, that you didn't regret it if something went wrong. And for a young woman who'd already been through so much in her life, had been the victim of collateral damage herself multiple times, having her good deed go so incredibly wrong had to be ripping her to shreds. “How is she?”
“She's wrecked. We're still about four hours out of base in the Quin, and she's spent the last several hours in a ball in the chair Bruce used to use. It's all so familiar in a way that no one wanted.”
“I bet.” While Banner had eventually come to some sort of acceptance of what he could do and occasionally had to do, he'd never stopped regretting having to do it in the first place. Clint was grateful for it: that regret meant Banner retained his humanity, more so than the doctor probably realized he did. Wanda sharing that tendency was at least reassuring that she wasn't heading down the darker paths that her abilities opened up for her, but the fact that it had happened at all tore him apart. She was just a kid... “Do I need to come out there?”
“I hate to pull you away, but it'd probably be for the best. She's getting better with me and Steve, but you're still the one she turns to first. It might be good for her to spend some time at the farm, too.”
“Okay. Laura's due home between two and three, let me talk to her about it and get the kids settled before I fly out. I should be there around seven.”
“Thanks, Clint. Tell the kids I'll see them as soon as I can.”
“You got it. See you later, Nat.” He listened for the beep of the call disconnecting, then sighed heavily and leaned his head back against the chair, staring at the roof of the porch above them. Nat was definitely tired, Sam was probably frustrated, Steve was likely blaming himself, and Wanda was a wreck. It was too late to fix what had happened in Lagos, but he could at least help the team get themselves back together. Maybe he was retired, but they were still his mess.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
After Laura had returned home and he'd briefed her on what had happened that morning, she'd practically thrown him out of the house herself and tossed his go bag after him, telling him to go take care of his protege and that she'd get the guest room ready for Wanda. After Nat, Wanda was the most frequent visitor they'd hosted since Novi Grad, and Laura had unilaterally declared, without input from her husband, that the Barton farm was the young woman's home as long as she wanted it to be. Cooper and Lila were fascinated with her, and she seemed to adore Nate, so overall the situation worked to everyone's advantage. Clint simply considered himself lucky that another stray that followed him home was so warmly accepted by his family, since a stable place with quiet, steady life and no potentially deadly conflict was something the young woman hadn't had since the age of ten and was desperately needed.
It also meant that when Wanda needed him he had three (soon to be four) pairs of hands shoving him out the door.
Years before, Clint had hollowed out a hidden “room” in the trees on the farm where he could stash any unusual vehicles he showed up in, mostly using it for air transport. After the Avengers were reformed following HYDRA's exposure, Tony had “found” and modified a S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet for him to “keep an eye on” so he could get to and from Avengers Tower as fast as possible. When he'd stepped back from the team, it had been made very clear to him that as far as anyone else was concerned, the Quinjet was his to keep, even if Tony had threatened to take away his oversized Micro Machine more than once. Clint in return kept his hand at least vaguely in the game by making trips to the new facility at least once a month or as requested to help out with training, adapting the new members to the odd dynamics of working as part of such a disparate group, or purely for social visits. “Retired” meant he was no longer chasing arms dealers around the globe five days a week, after all, not that he'd completely abandoned his friends.
He set the autopilot for the only location he used the Quin for nowadays – the compound – activated stealth mode so he wouldn't give any air controllers watching a heart attack, set an alarm to tell him when he was ten miles out from his target, and settled back in the pilot's chair to study the news reports and footage from the Lagos incident on the built-in projection computer. There wasn't much of the second since it had been a covert op, at least in theory, and the news cameras hadn't had time to descend before everything was over, but some people had activated cameras on smartphones and all the major networks were showing as much of that as they could get away with. There were a lot of shots of bodies flying past, probably Nat and Sam chasing the runaway mercenaries, and more of Cap's distinctive uniform speeding past so quickly he was little more than a blue blur. A man clad in what looked like a horrible ripoff of Rhodey's War Machine armor was visible for a few frames that the news networks helpfully paused on to explain that this was indeed Brock Rumlow, HYDRA mole and all-around grade-A asshole that had tried to kill Nat and Steve on multiple occasions two years previously. Clint once again felt his blood beginning to boil at the thought of how long he'd worked alongside Rumlow, not particularly friendly with him but not enemies either, and how easily he'd turned on them all when he'd had the chance. Whatever else had happened that morning, there was no way he'd deny himself the feeling of satisfaction that that traitor was dead.
The news people on the op-ed shows were giving their own opinions of the carnage that had resulted from the op, and nearly everything he heard left a sour taste in his mouth. While none of them were outright blaming Wanda for the explosion, over half of them danced so close to the subject he expected them to trip over their own toes. It was clear that most of that set did put the blame entirely on her and not the lunatic that had strapped a suicide bomb to himself, and only the potential of getting sued for defamation by the Avengers as a whole and Tony in particular were keeping them from saying it outright. The rest of them were probably leaning on her guilt as a way to generate interest for their shows and networks, or draw attention through controversy. Of the rest, most of them admitted she'd had to react quickly to a terrible situation – enough phones had caught the final confrontation that it was obvious that a bomb would have killed not only Cap and Wanda but probably at least thirty other people who'd decided to stay to watch the spectacle instead of getting the hell out of there when superheroes showed up – but only a few were saying she'd done the best she could under the circumstances. There was a lot of vague suggesting that she had too much power to be trusted in the field and that it would probably escape from her at the least opportune moment, and Clint briefly descended into a string of cussing before muting the reports and inspecting the various videos himself. These people who were so quick to pass judgment – how in the hell could they know what it was like to be in a life-or-death situation like that, having to take the best option you could find even if it wasn't perfect? It was lucky for them that none of them were on the Quin with him, as he wouldn't have hesitated to take out his anger on them.
But there – he paused playback on a shot of Wanda after the explosion, and there it was, sheer horror on her face, her eyes wide like a frightened deer, clearly shaking and collapsing in on herself even in a still shot. Anyone who couldn't see just how much she was suffering was driving spikes through their own eyeballs. And there – a messy edit later, there she was again, even worse, as Cap carried her away from the scene. She'd shrunk in on herself so much that she was completely dwarfed by Cap's large frame, appearing the child she hadn't been for years in her shock and grief. Texts from Nat had filled in some of the blanks: with Rumlow gone, they'd turned over his mooks to Nigerian Special Forces before meeting with the president and his advisers for a debriefing. Wanda had barely been able to speak but she'd apologized for what had happened, apparently begging forgiveness for what she'd caused. The president had let them go (it'd been really obvious he wanted to see the back of them), and the team had loaded into their Quin and flown back to New York as soon as they could break away. Wanda had locked herself into self-imposed quarantine as soon as they'd gotten back to the facility, and no one was yet willing to force her to come out. It hadn't been a good day for any of them.
When the proximity alarm went off, Clint sent Nat a text to warn her he was on approach and turned off the cloaking, retaking manual control of the craft to bring it to a landing in the row next to the other aircraft housed at the facility. As he settled smoothly onto the strip, he could see two figures standing in the doorway: Steve and Nat, who waited for the wind of the quintuple jets to die down before making their way out to meet him. He grabbed his bag and phone and lowered the bay door, locking it up as they finished crossing the grass.
“Good to see you,” Nat said, reaching out to give him a hug which he returned a little tighter than he normally would have. She moved more carefully than he was used to, an obvious clue that her exertions several hours before had left more of an impact on her than she wanted to admit; but since he couldn't spot any bloody wounds or bandages under her clothing, he decided to let it be unless she gave him an ideal opening.
“Hi, Clint,” Steve said with a friendly but very tired smile, looking more weary than Clint had seen him since Sokovia. “Sorry to pull you out here.”
“I wouldn't have come if I didn't want to,” he responded – it was self-evident, but it still deserved repeating. “And that doesn't even get started on Laura's orders when I told her about it.”
Nat gave a tired smile of her own. “Let me guess – bring her home for tea, cookies, coloring books, and playtime?”
“If she wants to come, yeah, Laura's getting the bed ready. Unless something ridiculous comes up you guys should have about a week before things get weird again, and that'd hopefully be enough time for her to get her feet back under herself. She pulled together pretty well in Sokovia, but...” Clint shrugged as the group headed for the door, hiking his pack over his shoulder.
“Life or death situations tend to do that to you.” Steve sounded more weary than resigned, and Clint's attention shifted to watching the details of his movement, the squint in his eye. Something else was bothering the super soldier, something big, and probably something that he didn't want to talk about. They'd just have to see about that later.
“Right. We all know it, she knows it, but she's been doing this a lot less time than we have. Those reactions aren't locked in yet, especially since that ended the threat and she probably had a massive adrenaline crash. If she wants to get away from here for awhile, we're isolated as hell out there, no one'd expect her to be in Iowa of all places, and I can unplug the TV so she can't see any of the news footage.”
“If she wants to go, she's got clearance. We know you'll watch out for her.” Steve's phone chose that moment to beep at him and vibrate with a message. Pulling it from his pocket, he shook his head at the screen. “Sorry, I have to go take care of this. Your room's ready, and we told Wanda you were coming. See if you can get her to eat something, all right?” he called over his shoulder as he split off from Clint and Nat at the elevator doors, and Clint called an affirmation in his wake as they boarded the car to take them to the fifth floor.
“We told her you were coming, but I'm not sure she heard it.” Nat's voice was pitched slightly lower than necessary, but given some of the residents of the facility, the precaution was probably a good idea if they didn't want anyone to snoop. “She didn't say anything when I told her, but she didn't give any other kind of reaction, either. She's really taking this hard.”
“In her shoes, wouldn't you?”
“I can't say. You know they trained that out of me a long time ago.”
“Yeah, and I know you didn't lose it all, or I wouldn't trust you around my kids as far as I could throw Stark in full armor.” Clint paused as the elevator reached the levels housing the living quarters and offices and the doors opened, glancing at the stairs that would take them to Wanda's room as well as his own on the sixth floor. If she had her mental feelers out, this was probably the closest they could get without her overhearing everything on accident. “Do you think this is the best idea?”
Nat could only shrug slightly, wincing just a bit as she did. She reached across to her left shoulder, rubbing it in a display of vulnerability she would usually only show in front of him. “I'm not sure, but I think it's the best we're going to get. She needs comfort right now, she needs normal. We're a team, but normal's not something she's going to get around here. Changing diapers, star gazing, and getting stuffed full of brownies will help a lot more. And there's the press to consider.”
“Press- fuck, you've gotta be kidding me,” he groaned.
“Afraid not. That's what Steve went to take care of.” She made a very pointed face at the thought; being in front of the cameras didn't come naturally to either of them given all their training in staying unknown and their dedication to keeping their lives and pasts secret, but after HYDRA's fall Nat had chosen to throw herself into the spotlight. Clint heartily wished her luck with that, refusing multiple times to trade places with her. “We're going to have to run a press conference tomorrow about what happened; some of Tony's people are arriving tonight to get everything set up. We may need Wanda to make a statement, so if she wants to leave you probably won't get out until mid-afternoon.” Another sigh. “Some of them are already trying to chew us up and spit us out over this, so we need to do some damage control. Another glorious day in the life of a superhero.”
“Better you than me.” He glanced at the stairs again, then shrugged his bag off his shoulder and held it out to her. “Throw this in my room for me? I'm gonna go see if she'll let me in. If she hasn't put anything in her system in twelve hours she'll be passing out soon and that's the last thing she needs on top of emotional trauma.”
She gave him a smile as she took the bag, looping it over her shoulder and starting to head in the direction of her own room – like he'd expected. “Think I'll hold this ransom instead. Come find me before you go to sleep and give me an update.”
“Aye-aye, Romanoff,” he said with a mocking salute, starting up the stairs to the next floor.
Wanda's room was the first one at the top of the stairs; she'd said the noise people made as they went up and down and the elevators rose and fell was less of a problem for her than what her mental powers could detect, so she might as well have the place with the most traffic and spare the rest of them. Normally that made it very easy to tell if she was in her room, as a glance up the stairs would show if she'd left the door open for visitors, but at the moment the door was tightly shut even though he knew she was in there. Probably locked, too, but he wouldn't pick it unless there was a dire emergency and the situation hadn't reached that level yet. Clint paused before knocking on her door, closing his eyes to listen as hard as he could for any other sounds of people around or anything coming from Wanda's room itself, but aside from the faint clink of Nat closing her own door on the floor below nothing reached his ears.
Taking a deep breath, he raised a fist and knocked. “Wanda, it's Clint. Can you open your door?”
Nothing answered him. He knocked again, waited twenty seconds, then tried a third time, but for all he knew the room behind that door was completely empty and he was just making a fool of himself. He sighed, letting his head rest against the door and placing both hands palm-flat on it.
“God I hate doing this.”
Closing his eyes, Clint pulled his focus inward in a controlled exercise of the precise focus that came over him in combat situations or on the archery range. He thought about himself, what made him who he was, that core of truth of his being, and when he had that set in mind he pushed out with it in front of him. Some of the people he'd worked with over the course of his S.H.I.E.L.D. career had talked about being able to sense auras, and that was pretty much the only description he had for what he occasionally did to get Wanda's attention: projecting his own aura for anyone who could read it to pick up. The feeling of surety with a bow in his hand, the memory of Nate dribbling his breakfast down his chin from that morning, the feel of Laura's hair against his cheek, running for his life through a back alley in Montreal, laughing with the other Avengers at the party before Ultron's birth, so many more times and places in his life beyond that – he took all of that and tried to shove it through the door, tried to reach the girl he could detect was there through his trained awareness of occupied space. After experiencing Loki's control, giving up so much of himself felt invasive and wrong, but occasionally it was needed.
The lock disengaged.
Pushing the door open, Clint stepped in and crossed to where Wanda was sitting on her bed, propped up by pillows against the headboard and holding one of them in her arms exactly like Lila did with some of her stuffed animals. She didn't look up when he entered, but neither did she throw him back out the door in a blazing streak of red like she once had Sam when he had the bad luck to open her door at a very rotten time. He nudged the door shut with his boot and walked over to stand next to the bed. “Hey, kid.”
For several moments Wanda didn't really react to his presence. She wasn't locked away inside herself, catatonic and unresponsive, but she didn't raise her eyes to meet his and she pulled her feet a little closer to herself, assuming a more defensive, closed-off posture. When she did speak, her voice was a little creaky from not having been used in half a day after a severe crying jag.
“Natasha called you.”
“Course she did. She's gotta keep me updated on you guys.” It was no use pretending that she didn't know that he knew exactly what happened, and he'd found out in Sokovia that Wanda took well to being direct – which was a good thing, everything else considered, since it was him she'd latched onto after her brother had died and even before. Reaching over, he grabbed the chair from her desk, spinning it to face the bed and taking a seat. “She told me what happened, and I looked at the news reports on the way over.”
Her head dipped forward a little more, the pillow clutched to her chest. “Then you saw. You know that I killed so many people, after I promised I wouldn't do any such thing again after Ultron.”
“And I know you saved a lot of people, including yourself, your team leader, and by my count based on very fuzzy cell phone footage taken by someone who seemed to be putting it through a cheese grater, about thirty civilians who thought it was a spectator sport.” There was no huge response to his stupid quip, but at least she didn't roll in on herself anymore. Not having her fall into the hole of self-doubt was a good start. “I've been around this circus too long to not know that sometimes things go wrong. We're never able to save everyone.”
“I know,” she said quietly, her head moving just enough to tell him that her eyes had gone to the memorial she kept for her brother – the few personal items she'd been able to salvage, photos of him Vision had helped her locate through scouring the web. Clint's own heart tightened as it always did at that reminder of what they'd lost to make it this far; he'd give almost anything to hear that cocky, annoying voice again, and he knew Wanda would give so much more than that.
“Yeah. I know.” He reached forward, being careful to broadcast his moments, and when Wanda didn't object he set his hand on her head, giving her some human contact without overwhelming her. “When you get into this life, you're mostly never told about what you're risking. You just kind of have to figure it out as you go along and decide if the risk is worth it. You've got powers that no one else in this world has, and you don't even know everything you can do yet. Of course not everything's gonna go perfectly.”
“But it was not supposed to go this wrong.” She moved at last, lifting her head up to meet his gaze, and he dropped his hand to her shoulder to make it easier for her. “I cannot just ignore what I've done, and there's no way to take it back. Those people did not have to die.”
“No, they didn't. But you didn't have to, either. You don't ignore it. Ignoring it means you didn't do it, that you don't have any responsibility for it. But you take it, you use it, you work to get better. Blame the asshole that strapped a bomb to his chest – I guarantee you he deserves it and I would've put an arrow through him given half a chance – and take what you're feeling and use it to improve yourself and your control.”
Her eyes met his, green and so full of regrets that he could almost feel her powers pulling him in to drown in his on remorse over past actions. “You say that like it's easy.”
“Of course it's not easy. But you chose what you wanted to do, you chose to use your gifts to help people instead of hurt them. If you let this defeat you, then those people will have died for nothing. And after all the hell you've been through to get where you are, I don't think that's what you want.”
Silence fell for several moments as she looked down at her knees and the pillow she was clutching, her fingers twisting around themselves a little as she thought over his words. Clint wasn't dumb, he knew he hadn't said anything any other member of the team wouldn't have told her, but for some reason she was more willing to listen to him than to the others, though she was trusting Steve more and more as the weeks passed. No big surprise there; Steve was the most honest and genuinely good person they knew, aside from Laura, and he inspired confidence and trust in everyone around him. It was kind of more surprising that Wanda wasn't warming up to him faster.
Since there weren't murderous robots waiting outside the door to rip them limb from limb this time, he let her take her time to think about what she wanted to say, what she wanted to do. Clint let his hand drop from her shoulder, lacing his fingers loosely together and bracing his arms on his knees as he waited, watching every movement she made and mentally translating them into thoughts. Doubt, guilt, fear – the usual smorgasbord after an agent's first bad op. He could remember so many times in S.H.I.E.L.D. history when he'd seen that same set of reactions in other agents after something went wrong – most recently when HYDRA had fallen, and he'd had to defend his own life by ending others.
“I do not want to be afraid,” she began slowly, and he waited, still watching her as she sorted through her confused feelings. “I do not want this to happen again, and the easy solution to that would be to not use my powers any more.”
“But can you not use them?” Clint didn't even fight the compulsion to ask, and from the lack of surprise on her face, Wanda was thinking the same thing. “You've had them for over two years now, and you've gotten used to having them. You unlocked the door that way to let me in just now. It's a part of you now, whatever anyone else thinks about them, and you can't just cut out part of yourself. I may be retired now but I can't just stop shooting a bow. Ask my kids.”
The corner of her mouth twitched, probably an involuntary almost-smile that he decided to count as a point in his favor. “I'm sure, I've seen you.”
“Well you can see it more and ask them yourself. Everyone's waiting for you to come out and stay with us, and Steve's given you clearance to get out of here for a few days.”
“They want me to come? Even knowing what happened, they want me there?”
Clint shrugged, raising a hand to scratch at the back of his head. “Nate obviously doesn't know, and we kept the details kind of fuzzy for Lila but she knows a bad accident happened and people were hurt and Laura'll fill in the rest before we get there. Coop and Laura both know the whole story and want you to come. We broke out the glitter supply so the kids could make you a banner, so I'm blaming you for when I keep finding it in my socks for the next six months.”
There was no maybe this time; Wanda definitely smiled at that joke, a small one, but definitely a smile. Clint knew immediately she'd start pulling together at that. “I suppose if you're going to blame me, I might as well do something to earn that blame.”
“You got that right. Come on.” He pushed up off the chair and Wanda instinctively knew what he wanted, shifting on her bed to give him room to sit in the space she cleared for him. He reached out and drew her into a hug as she tucked herself into his chest, one of her hands resting over his heart as his nose got buried in her hair. “It'll be okay, kid. There's nothing wrong with you, and you're not a monster. You just need more practice.”
“I can't let that happen again. I won't let that happen again.”
“That's what the practice is for. We'll work on that at the farm. Tony never did get around to fixing the tractor so we can use that as a test subject.”
She didn't respond, just clutched tighter to his jacket, taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly. Clint let her steady herself, holding on to her until he felt her fingers loosening from his clothing a little, then nodded and started pushing himself to his feet. It went more awkwardly than normal since Wanda initially didn't want to let go, but he took her hand in his and pulled her to her feet after him, checking her pulse in her fingertips and wrist surreptitiously and watching the flit of emotions across her face. Not all the way together yet, not by a long shot. But the first steps were there, and that was good enough for the moment. The television would definitely be unplugged when they got to the farm; at least the kids were used to going long periods without watching it, since neither of their parents liked it all that much.
“Let's go get some toast and water into you. Maybe an apple if your stomach can take it.”
“I think I can handle tea.”
Clint made an exaggerated face. “I don't know how you and Laura can stand that stuff. It's no substitute for even shit coffee.”
“Not everyone drinks enough coffee to put a Starbucks out of business, Clint,” she said with a small smile, and he smiled back, happy to hear some humor in her voice again and wanting it to remain there.
“I wouldn't drink that crap without six shots of espresso in it. But if you want tea, we'll make it along with the coffee.”
“Good enough,” she replied, her eyes glowing slightly red as the door swung open behind them. “There's no one in the kitchen now. Let's go.”