Work Text:
Rain by Shel Silverstein
I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain
And it dripped into my head
And flowed into my brain
So pardon this wild crazy thing I just said
I'm just not the same since there's rain in my head.
I step very softly
I walk very slow
I can't do a hand-stand
Or I might overflow.
And all I can hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.
Clint was not okay. He didn’t realize until after, with the city falling down around him, and the team back on firm ground when the whole world trembled, blue shooting through the corners of his eyes. Fighting was one thing that his body could do without him.
Had done without him.
His body, the only thing he had ever fucking trusted, had given itself over to the hands of another - willingly, wantingly. It had done the things Clint had spent years training it do (to fight, to run, to escape, to destroy, because how else could he get far away enough from the fuckers who tormented him).
Somehow he ended up back in his SHIELD quarters. He felt shuttered and shattered, like little glass pieces were running through his veins and every time he breathed they pierced him again. His body felt different, like it had been changed in his absence and it no longer fit.
And then there was Phil, which was a gasping black hole of a hurt that Clint couldn’t bear to even find the edges of. He stripped to his underwear, collapsed on his bunk, and slept.
He dreamed of blue rain, of the wary peace of being drugged, of coming to, not knowing where or who you were, like everything that you had ever known about yourself had been unwritten and unravelled.
He woke up wet and gasping to a knock on the door. He sat up, head swimming, the smell of piss in his nose and tears clouding his vision. He wanted, more than he’d ever wanted it, to be small and held, for someone to take this and make it make sense, to make it okay. To make the world okay again. But no one would ever do that for him, because it was fucking gross and weird and destructive and selfish. And not even Phil, who had loved him (why had he loved him) had wanted to do it, because it was a shard of glass inside him, just one more thing that hurt people when they got close.
“Clint. It’s Natasha.”
Natasha was the last person he wanted to see in that moment, soaked in piss and sweat, broken and tiny, and she could not ever see him like this, because she would regret saving him (probably already did), because he was a fucking broken piece of shit, a no good back country boy who had been worth nothing all his fucking life, and why would anyone carry that with them.
“Go away.” He said, voice still and cold with fear and anger and terrible, gaping loneliness. A moment passed and he heard her turn and walk away. If she stayed he would only poison her and torment her and destroy her, because that was all this body was good for - killing and hurting, the things Loki had used him for.
Loki had looked inside and that was all he found and it was all Clint was or ever would be. There was nothing else to him.
The days passed slowly and quickly all at once. Sometimes the blue got him again and he woke up and didn’t know where he was or who he was. He woke up nightly to wet beds and sheets, like it hadn’t been since he was a child.
(A real child, not the dirty secret that hid in his soul, not the aching need for someone to give to him. Because he was a selfish fuck up who ruined and took and couldn’t give to anyone.)
His body felt far away and foreign, the way words and letters had always seemed, constantly changing and jumbled and like something that should probably make sense, that everyone else in the world could do, but he just couldn’t. For the first time ever, Clint would forget to eat (sometimes for days at a time). He’d forget to pee and find himself suddenly wet, or the urge would come too late and he’d take two steps and piss himself like a child. He’d forget to drink or shower or sleep, and find himself a shell of a person that held nothing.
He felt ashamed and broken and worthless in a world that was bright and sharp and full of unexpected shards of glass, that cut and broke and swirled.
Over the course of two weeks the others moved to Stark’s tower, one by one. Natasha’s last move was force him there, though Clint feared the closeness and the contact, feared what they might see if they got too close. Or maybe, what they wouldn’t see.
Natasha tried once, twice, three times to help but Clint couldn’t let her. She was the only one who’d see, who’d look and see the cracks that ran so deep that Clint was no longer Clint anymore. She stopped knocking on his door. She stopped asking him to the range. She stopped.
They didn’t argue or fight, there was no falling out. Clint just said no until she stopped asking.
He felt different and removed and he wasn’t fucking worth her, he just wasn’t. He wasn’t worth anyone.
Everything fell away.
Clint was utterly and unfailingly alone.
It was the only thing that felt familiar.
fin.