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Clint dreams that he’s falling.
It’s nothing uncommon, just one of those weird dreams people usually have when they’re restless, or something like that, but it does startle him awake at around two in the morning when he has an early shift tomorrow at Tony’s.
There’s a moment of unawareness, as he is caught between being awake and being asleep, and he pats the space next to him. He’s looking for the body of heat that’s normally waiting for him when he wakes up at unusual hours in the morning—when they’re nightmares and even when they’re not—but he finds it empty, the covers pulled to the top as the left side remains untouched. Clint’s brain tries its best to catch up with what he’s seeing and whatever habit he’s developed over the last couple of months.
It hits him like a train, and Clint’s dream of falling seems real now.
He blinks a couple of stray tears away, turning away from the left side, reaching over to click the lamp next to the bed on so he can see through the darkness. His hearing aids are sitting there by his phone, but he doesn’t want to put them on.
He rolls into a sitting position slowly, looking straight ahead at the way the lamp’s light bounces off the dent in the wall that he and Natasha made when they were first moving in. He remembers trying to get a shelf up there, but finding out that the walls were too thick for his drill to pierce through—and Nat’s laughter coming from her place on the floor, where they still had their mattress without a proper bed base, covered with old sheets their friends had donated to their cause.
He makes it two hours late to his shift at the hotel, but Tony takes one look at him and tells him to take the day off, either way.
//
Oliver’s moved back in with him temporarily.
The man has a perfectly good house back in Star City with his wife, but Clint doesn’t try to argue with him when, one day, Oliver Queen is standing right outside his door, a huge suit case by his side, and the flimsy excuse that Dinah had kicked him out.
The excuse falls through rather easily—because Clint is not stupid thank you very much—and Barton asks his friend about Dinah and how the pregnancy is going. Ollie is happy to talk to him as much as he wants about whatever the hell it is that he wants to hear about, and Clint is happy to have this friend around to him company now that the apartment feels too big only for him
Oliver will sign for him when Clint isn’t feeling like wearing his hearing aids, and he cooks regular meals for the two of them despite the fact that Clint remembers Oliver’s cooking skills being quite pathetic. The arrangement reminds him of their time in college, when the two of them had survived on boxed soups and Tony’s famous omelets every Saturday, in a smaller apartment that they shared with Hal and Tony.
Ollie manages to get him to talk a couple of times, as well, despite Clint’s refusal at first, and it feels nice to hear his own voice again, even if he doesn’t quite recognize it sometimes.
//
He goes back to work at the hotel a week after Oliver comes to bunk with him, and Clint winces every time Tony is kind to him during his shifts at the hotel office.
It does him good to talk to other people, except Clint is painfully aware of how Tony will go above and beyond to keep any wedding events out of his office. Stark has never been great at compassion or comfort, and Clint admires his efforts, but he doesn’t really like how his friend has begun treating him like he could break at any moment. He’d take a Snarky Stark over a Pitying Stark any day.
He realizes he can’t really take anything more than a Pitying Stark when, after confronting his friend about the whole couples ban in his office, he gets to coordinate a wedding event for a woman whose eyes are too green and he ends up crying in the ballroom’s bathroom for around twenty minutes after the couple is gone.
Hal comes to get him eventually, and takes him back home. Clint doesn’t talk or wear his hearing aids throughout the whole day, and Hal tries his best with his butchered signing, but it doesn’t make Clint feel any better.
//
Steve takes Oliver’s place at some point in his apartment, and Clint doesn’t fight it either.
He knows Dinah’s pregnancy got more difficult these past few weeks, with the due date coming up so soon, and he’s glad to see Oliver go back to his family after monopolizing his time for so long. Steve is a good companion, and his food is a hundred times better than what Oliver knows how to prepare, even if his signing is not quite as good as Ollie’s, and Clint feels good enough to talk to him more often than he did with Queen.
Steve is Nat’s friend too. He was Nat’s friend first, and Clint doesn’t know why he’s the one getting the comfort when Tasha was probably just as sad as he was.
He thinks that’s just his heart trying to be hopeful, and Clint doesn’t wear his hearing aids or go to work the next two days. Steve doesn’t ask.
Clint is thankful Steve is here.
//
They have a boy’s night out.
Tony, Oliver and Hal come to his apartment sometime a week after Steve has taken camp in his living room, and they demand that he put on his best outfit. Steve looks at Tony like he wants to throttle him, but doesn’t say anything when Clint is around and allows the three of them to take Barton out as long as he’s back before two in the morning.
Hal thinks Steve is being a mother-hen, and he tells him so. Steve only narrows his eyes at Jordan and retaliates by saying he’ll tell Barry he’s being irresponsible with Clint, which shuts Hal right up.
They’re out, but they’re not drinking, and Tony signs to Clint that he should come live with him in the hotel’s pent-house. Tony worries about him—they all do—and he wants to be able to be there for Clint if something happens. He knows it’s not like having Oliver around, but he knows his fair share of breakups, and Tony wants to help.
Clint agrees, even though it took him a little bit to figure out what Tony was trying to sign to him, and the four of them curl up in Clint’s too big of a bed together way before the clock strikes two in the morning. Steve doesn’t interrupt them, and Barton cries himself to sleep because he’s surrounded by love but not that one he’s aching for.
//
He moves in with Tony with Barry’s and Steve’s help. The two blondes are very chatty, and Barry barely knows any sign language, so he wears his hearing aids out of courtesy. He wonders why Tony and Hal couldn’t be here instead—because he knows Ollie’s taking care of his very pregnant wife—but doesn’t complain much once he finds out Steve can lift twice his body weight in boxes.
Barry is a good organizer, and he leaves Clint’s closet so perfect that Clint realizes he hadn’t really lost that purple shirt Kate had gifted him a couple of years back. The three of them strike up a conversation around take-out dinner later that night, and Tony walks in on them laughing about something or another.
Clint takes his hearing aids off as soon as Barry and Steve say goodbye, and lays his head down on Tony’s lap once they’ve both taken a shower each. Tony doesn’t make attempts to communicate, but he does pet his hair every now and then.
They both fall asleep in front of a turned off TV, and Clint tries not to think about how much he misses his own bed.
//
His works gets so much easier when green-eyed lady’s wedding is finally over, and Clint feels like a weight has been lifted off his chest.
Tony moves his office up to the pent-house temporarily for renovations, but Clint knows there’s some other motive hidden underneath.
He doesn’t say anything about it, and starts using his hearing aid more often around the pent-house so he can receive calls and attend meetings when he needs to. He starts enjoying his job once again, and gets just as excited as the brides in his office every time something gets checked off right in an event planner.
//
Dinah’s baby is born the next month, and all of their friends are at the hospital to give Connor Queen a proper welcoming.
Clint hasn’t felt very happy in a long time, but it feels his heart with warmth when he enters the hospital room where Dinah is resting, and catches his old time friend holding Connor close to his chest. Queen is rocking slightly back and forth, singing an old song Clint barely recognizes from their younger years, when their mothers had been friends too, and Barton steps into the room as quietly as possible.
He gets to hold Connor for a while too, and he makes cooing noises at the baby.
He doesn’t once get rid of his hearing aids while he’s at the hospital, not even when he dozes off in the hospital chair he’s commandeered to stand vigil next to Dinah, because he wants to hear Connor’s life forever and at least no one’s said her name.
He does wonder, however, when Steve wakes him up and invites him for lunch, why Natasha hasn’t been seen around the hospital. He wonders if Dinah made sure the two of them didn’t see each other.
//
Oliver is busy at work, so Clint offers to ride Dinah and Connor back home when they are discharged from the hospital.
Dinah prepares him a quick meal while he’s trying to get Connor to sleep in the baby room, and they share quick talk over the dinner table—two old friends catching up after not talking to each other in a long time. He wants to ask about Nat, because Dinah is her best friend, but he doesn’t have the courage to do it.
Instead, he signs it out, shakily and a little hesitant, but Dinah complies.
She signs back that Nat’s moved back in with Pepper after their break up, and that she hasn’t been doing very well, despite her stubborn insistence that she’s doing fine. Peggy and Iris are with her most of the time, too, since Dinah hasn’t been able to be there for her with the whole pregnancy thing going on, and if Steve and Barry had been helping Clint it was because Nat had basically chased them out of Pepper’s apartment when they tried to be there for her instead.
Dinah has the best signing out of all of his friends, so he’s sure she wasn’t getting it wrong, but he still finds it very odd.
//
When Bucky knocks on his door, Clint is very confused, but at least he’s wearing his hearing aid.
Bucky’s signing is terrible. He’s never really learnt the language entirely, instead having picked up certain things here and there from what he’s been around Clint and his bunch of friends, and his prosthetic arm—that Tony is still trying to upgrade constantly—makes it a little bit hard for signing to come out smoothly.
And, Bucky isn’t even trying to sign, so Clint really is glad.
“And honestly, the two of you should just stop moping around and feeling sorry for yourselves because it’s getting a little bit exhausting for the rest of us to attend to you both while your stupid breakup is going on! You guys obviously didn’t mean to breakup, if your way of acting is telling me anything, so why don’t you just grab some lunch together, say your sorrys, and go back to each other before I go mad?”
Not the most sensitive way to put it, but it does ring loud and clear in Clint’s ears.
//
He calls Nat because Darcy pressures him into doing it.
He’s supposed to be working, if he’s being honest, but Thor came to visit, which meant Jane and Darcy were both there to annoy the hell out of him too. They had been having a really nice chat, but obviously Darcy and Bucky had been talking to each other, because twenty minutes into their conversation, the younger woman suddenly interrupts Thor mid-sentence and tells him to get his head out of his ass and talk to Natasha.
He calls Nat, doesn’t really know what to say, and asks her for lunch like it hadn’t been two months since they broke up.
Natasha agrees after a short pause, and Clint thanks his past self for wearing his aids today because he missed hearing her voice.
//
They grab lunch at the hotel’s restaurant, because Clint’s schedule is busy—he has three brides to see that day, and then two business meetings to oversee later—and Natasha really shouldn’t be taking time off work to come talk to her ex of all people.
The air is thick around them, and Clint wants to take off his hearing aids just to stop listening to all the other noise around him. He wants his full attention on her—and it’s been a while since he’s been out in public with his hearing aids, so all the noise is really putting him on edge—but he thinks it would be rude since they’re supposed to be here to talk about what happened between them.
Nat smiles at him softly and leans over the table to take off his hearing aids for him. The familiarity with which she does it—and the fact that she knew just what he needed—is enough to make him lose his breath. Clint gapes at her a couple of moments, mouth opening and closing like a fish under the water, but she just brings her hands up and begins singing.
She’s apologizing. Her signing is smooth, but maybe a little bit rehearsed, and Clint remembers that he had been in the middle of teaching her the hardest parts of the language when they broke up two months ago, so there’s no way she would be able to tell him all this with what she knew. He realizes she must’ve been practicing just so she could do this for him, and it warms his heart better than anything else ever did, tears welling up in his eyes.
He stops her suddenly, and she’s saying something, except she still has his hearing aids so he has to read her lips to understand.
“You’re such an emotional sap,” he manages to get out, and then “I love you, Clint”
He laughs because she has tears in her eyes too, and she’s not even trying to hide it. He takes his aids away from her, plucks one in and turns it on so he can listen to her laugh along with him, and he mumbles the words against her skin where he’s hiding in the crook of her neck. She tells him something else, something that he doesn’t quite make out, and he wonders if his hearing aids are failing him.
He realizes he doesn’t care, because now she’s here, and she’s going to stay.
She’s here, and he has a reason to wear his aids every day now.