zeegoeshere

Our Deal
By Zee

Avengers, Clint/Natasha.
Summary: Ever since we saved the world, it's felt different between us. 9,655 words.
Rating: Explicit

Notes: References to events that happened in the movie--see end of story notes for details. Huge thanks to joyfulseeker and sinsense for the betas.

Read it here on AO3 or under the cut.

***


Clint knew from sharing countless hotel rooms with her that Natasha slept like clockwork. She got seven hours every night that she possibly could, and when work prevented a full night’s rest, she could will herself to take short naps whenever the opportunity presented itself. She treated her body like a battery, meticulously ensuring that she was always as charged as possible. He’s seen her fight on days without sleep and she’s still terrifying; he thinks that the sleep thing is more about the discipline of it than anything else.

He’s used to staring up at cream-colored, anonymous hotel ceilings for hours as she stays deep in a REM cycle next to him, always on her right side, always nestled beneath the sheets while he lies atop them. During his worst bouts of insomnia, her easy acquisition of sleep seems like a personal affront. He’ll lie there, quietly seething with rage and jealousy, wishing that she would at least snore or toss and turn with nightmares or have to get up and piss or something, anything to indicate something other than perfect restfulness. She falls asleep so quickly that he knows it’s got to be a mental trick that took years to perfect. He imagines her brain with a switch that she turns off effortlessly, turning away from the violence of their daily routine to a cozy nothingness.

When 4am rolls around with her asleep and him awake and miserable, he hates her. But it’s worse when they’re home or assigned to separate missions—when she’s not next to him in bed, it’s like his body forgets that sleep is even a possibility, without her to act as living proof of the concept. After their first long-term mark, an undercover job that required living together in Capetown for six weeks, Clint got home and didn’t sleep for four days straight, at which point he broke his usual rule of not reverting to drugs and knocked himself the fuck out.

If it were something he thought he could possibly learn, he would ask her to teach him. But he’s been through enough guided meditations to learn that his mind doesn’t work that way; the closest he can get to zen is when he’s got a target in his sights, and that sure as hell doesn’t make him sleepy.

Two days after New York, he wakes up to find her watching him. He can’t help but remember the last time he woke up to her like this, the first person he saw when he woke up after Loki. They’d been miles up in the air then and they’re in an underground SHIELD bunker now, and everything’s supposed to be fine. She looks tired.

“What’re you doin’up,” he says, muzzy, and it feels like an effort to push himself up on one elbow and squint at her. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I don’t feel like sleeping,” Natasha says. “I came to bother you because I thought you’d still be awake.”

“Eh. Nope. Sound asleep for once. So go ‘way.” He doesn’t really mean it, he’s just grumbling, which she knows. A strange, sleepy impulse to ask the opposite comes over him, to invite her to stay and sleep here even though they have separate rooms. Because he’s used to the sound of her deep and even breaths at this time of night, and he thinks that she must now be used to falling asleep despite his fidgeting and twisting and turning all night.

She smiles just a little bit. “I’ve been thinking about the funeral tomorrow.”

Phil’s. Once again, Clint tries to reconcile himself to a world without him in it, and finds that he still can’t process the idea. He can’t even picture himself attending the damn funeral, even though the suit is hanging in his closet. “What about the funeral?”

“I’m going to be a sobbing mess. And anyone who sees me there—I’ll have to work twice as hard to make them scared of me again, after that.”

Natasha is a brilliant economist of vulnerability. She always knows exactly what each moment of humanity will cost her, somewhere down the line. “Well, I’ll probably be bawling my eyes out right next to you, if that helps.”

She looks at him again, meeting his eyes. “You’re still blaming yourself.”

He laughs and gets a mental image of himself puking and puking until he just pukes up all his internal organs. “Of fucking course I am. I led the attack that got him killed.”

She reaches out with both arms and pushes at his shoulders, pressing his shoulderblades against the headboard. From where she’s sitting, the angle makes it an odd gesture, but it makes him feel stabilized and his mental retching stops.

Their faces are close. He’s sure that she can smell how bad his breath is. “I haven’t started missing him yet. Too much in shock, I guess.”

Her hands clench on his shoulders, holding him tightly as her face crumples with genuine sorrow. “I have. I miss him. I wasn’t ready for that one.”

Clint knows what she means. Of course they’ve lost agents before, plenty of them, and it’s something they’ve been trained to be ready for. But Phil was Clint’s introduction to S.H.I.E.L.D. and the first person to take his skillset seriously; when Clint decided against killing Natasha, it was Phil who convinced Fury not to just fire Clint and assign someone else to the mark. How could they be ready?

“Yeah, me neither,” is all he says. One of her hands has migrated to the juncture between his neck and shoulder, cupping the muscle there. Her thumb is brushing his jawline and he leans into it, grateful for the intimacy. It turns into something that’s an awful lot like a caress, which Clint stops by pulling her into a hug, safe and fraternal.

She squeezes him back, and for a second he thinks that he’d misinterpreted her hand on his cheek; but then she slides a hand down his back to the side of his thigh, and turns her head so that her lips brush the side of his neck, just slightly. Just this much proximity to her makes his dick stiffen, and he dreads what he has to do next, but does it anyway, taking her wandering hand in his own and pulling away from her.

“’Tasha, I’m sorry,” he says, as gently as he can. “But I think that’s a bad idea.”

She takes back her hand and stands, hurt barely discernible in the set of her jaw. “Suit yourself,” she says, and for a second he’s horribly afraid that now she’s going to leave, but instead she sits in the chair next to his bed, primly crossing her legs.

He takes a couple of deep breaths, willing the beginnings of his erection to subside. The part of him that’s been crazy with lust for her since day one is screaming at the rest of him, which is an internal divide that Clint is used to. “Thanks,” he mutters, feeling dumb, and Natasha snorts.

They don’t say anything for a while, but Clint can feel her annoyance at their continuously chaste relationship subsiding, until the atmosphere in the room feels the same as it did before she made her move. That crackling energy is now absent, and Clint tells himself that he doesn’t miss it.

“My next mission starts six hours after the funeral ends,” Natasha says eventually.

“Lucky you. I’m grounded for now. Recovery from the mind-whammy.”

“Probably for the best.”

“I’d recover better being with you.” That came out wrong, and Clint’s breath hitches as Natasha glances at him. “Working, I mean. Keeping busy.”

She gives him a little half-smile. “I think the peace and quiet will be good for you. Maybe you’ll finally learn to meditate.”

“And pick up yoga. Right. Why bother when I’ve got Johnnie Walker and Ambien?” he says, deadpan. Natasha is actually giggling, very quietly; he loves when he can get her to do that. “Chemical dependency beats inner peace as a sleep aid every time.”

“Sure it does.” Her legs uncross and she slouches, settling into his chair. “Speaking of, I should let you get back to sleep. I can tell that you want to.”

It’s true—now that the arousal’s gone, he’s stifling yawns. “Yeah. Sorry. What about you? Back to bed?“ He hopes not. He wants to ask her to stay and sleep in the bed, but he also doesn’t want to give any wrong ideas.

She shakes her head. “I told you, I don’t feel like sleeping. I’ll just be here. I’ll keep watch.”

“Good,” he murmurs as he lies on his left side, facing her. With anyone else, he’d find it creepy to fall asleep while they sat in a chair just watching him like this, but somehow Natasha makes it comforting. He closes his eyes and drifts off.

***

If Clint tries to step back and objectively analyze why he has repeatedly declined the advances of the smartest, most beautiful woman he’s ever met, it doesn’t make any logical sense. It’s not something he can easily explain. He just knows that whenever she tries to make something happen with him, alarm bells go off in his head.

If Natasha had only made her move when they first met—or when they first had the chance to interact without trying to kill each other, at least—he would have happily acquiesced. Trouble is, she’d waited to make a pass at him until after he’d already figured out just how much he valued her friendship.

Sleep is not the only animal need that Natasha treats mechanically, prioritizing and taking care of like clockwork in order to maintain peak bodily efficiency. Every time he’s seen her finish a mark, she has to have sex as soon as possible afterward. Minutes or hours afterward, it doesn’t seem to matter; she just never looks relaxed, never looks like she’s actually finished a job, until she fucks someone. Often a stranger, someone she’ll never see again, but Clint also knows that she has post-mark-sex relationships with several of their co-workers. Clint’s not even sure you could call those guys her fuckbuddies, because it seems to be more pragmatic than that, as if they’re trusted neighbors that she knows can be relied upon to lend her a cup of sugar when needed.

The first time she came on to him was in Dallas, two years ago. They had stumbled into the hotel room after a long and particularly gruesome day. He remembers going into the room first and calling over his shoulder that she could have the first shower, and then she was right behind him with her hand on his ass. Not squeezing, exactly, but a highly suggestive grip nonetheless.

“Room enough in the stall for two,” she said in his ear. Her voice was lazy and her other hand was trailing over his ribcage.

“Thought you’d never ask,” he said, turning in her arms and kissing her happily. It wasn’t a good kiss: he was sloppy, with an enthusiasm that she didn’t match. As they made out, she shucked off her clothes before he had a chance to say that he wanted to peel them off her. Then her hand was on his dick, finding him through the leather of his uniform and giving him quick, even strokes. Capable was the only word that could describe her hands, and they were getting the job done but it really wasn’t sexy at all.

And when Clint caught the look in her eyes, she looked detached, like she wasn’t even there, and it was so vastly different from the Natasha he’d seen just a few minutes ago, slumped and bleeding on each other in the car on the way to the hotel, that he took an involuntary step back.

“What?” Natasha said, and Clint opened and closed his mouth like a dying fish.

“Are you sure you want to be doing this?” he asked, because he couldn’t tell, it was like she was going through the motions, like he could have been anybody—no, more disturbingly, like she could’ve been anybody.

“Of course. I take it you’re not?”

No, he hadn’t been sure, and at the time he didn’t even know exactly why—he’d known Natasha’s approach to sex before she went for him, it’s not like he’d been expecting an engagement ring only to be presented with something clearly casual. And he’d had sex with friends before, without it turning into a big deal, without losing the friendship.

But that was the thing, the realization he came to hours after Natasha answered his silence with an annoyed shrug and got in the shower by herself, hours after she left for the hotel bar to fuck a stranger and came back to immediately fall asleep next to him on the double bed. The thing was that he’d never actually had a friendship like he had with Natasha. And when he’d stopped kissing her to look her in the eyes, it felt just wrong enough to not be worth the risk.

He'd lain awake all night, debating the question in his head, because god, objectively speaking it seemed like a crazy thing to turn down. But the more time he spent around her, the more he learned about her past and where she came from, the more certain he was that he’d made the right call.

They love each other, with an ease and intensity that he treasures, and he’s pretty sure that in Natasha’s mind, sex and love—sex and any kind of love—never go together.

***

It’s humid as hell at the funeral, a sticky June day at Arlington and a long military funeral to sit through. The media’s there, which Clint fucking hates, but at least the rest of his new little team is right here hating it along with him. Bruce’s head is bowed and his eyes are closed, Tony looks stoic in a very breakable way, Steve looks like someone accepting the latest tragedy in a long string of them. True to her word, Natasha is crying openly; some of the junior agents around them look distinctly unnerved by it, and Clint loves so much that she doesn’t give enough of a shit to be embarrassed.

He’s crying, too. He hopes that it looks appropriately manly, but he’s pretty sure that his eyes are getting puffy. He hasn’t let go of Natasha’s hand since they sat down.

Remembering his actions under Loki’s control is like remembering a particularly vivid dream, the kind where you need the whole morning before you can shake it. Clint wants to shake it off, to separate himself from it so much that it might as well have never happened, but people fucking died and one of those people was Phil. Natasha was right, it was nothing Clint had been trained for and nothing that he could have prevented, but if his anger isn’t directed inward than it has to go outward. And lately it seems like every single god damn train of thought he has inevitably leads to the same conclusion, the same impotent rage that starts with Loki and then expands to encompass everything.

It’s only been a few days, but Clint is already beyond sick of the single track his mind is stuck on: he thinks about Loki and thinks about how much he hates Loki and how badly he wants to kill Loki 100 times a minute. Like right now, for instance: here he is at the funeral of one of his best friends, and instead of thinking about all the times Phil has saved his ass, he’s dwelling in Loki-hatred. Truthfully, he doesn’t know if he’s crying for Phil or for himself or for the people Loki made him kill or just for all of it. He feels like the past few days have caught up to him, at last. He’s got no resources left to cope, no more ability to save face. It’s a good thing that he’s got the funeral as an excuse, really, because he thinks he might still be a weeping mess without it.

The service ends, the coffin is lowered into the ground, and there’s no reception afterward. Nick Fury holds a mini-press conference, but informs the reporters that the rest of the team is not open for questions, thank god. Tony shepherds them all into a limousine and directs the driver to take them to a bar without waiting for anyone else to agree to the plan. Clint takes advantage of the car’s liquor cabinet in transit. No one says much. When he glances at Natasha, he can see that her eyelashes are still a little bit wet.

Clint is one scotch on the rocks ahead of the rest of the team when they arrive at their destination, a random-ass watering hole in the Bronx where no reporter would think to find the Avengers drinking in the middle of a Sunday. The place is empty when they walk in. The bartender’s eyes widen in recognition, but he restrains himself to respectfully mumbling, “Just wanna thank you guys for what you did,” after he takes their drink orders.

Natasha surprises them all by being the first to break the silence. “He taught himself Russian once. We had a week and a half off together after some mission in Moscow, and by the time we flew back home, he was conversational. He didn’t care how much I laughed at his bad accent, he still practiced speaking it with every single person we met.”

“That’s right, he was such a nerd about languages.” Clint smiles, remembering. “I think he spoke five or six. Once, when he was drunk, he gave me this speech about how beautiful Latin is and how everyone should learn at least one dead language in their lifetime.”

That gets a murmured laugh from Tony and Bruce, but Steve looks pained, grimacing down at his club soda. “I should have gotten to know him better. It seems so wrong, he had cards with my face on them, and I didn’t make an effort to know him at all. I was too wrapped up in all of my own... my own stuff to try.”

“Well if we’re ponying up for that pity party, I knew him ages before you did and only got on a first-name basis with him last week,” Tony says. “And I’m sure I win the prize here for the number of times I blew him off without listening.”

“It’s pretty pointless to beat ourselves up for not knowing we wouldn’t have more time with him,” Bruce points out. He turns to Clint, says “Tell us another story about him?” And it’s a kind thing to say, but the suggestion makes Clint want to bolt from the room. He suppresses the reaction, because he knows that he probably needs this, they all do, and he has plenty of stories about Phil.

“Well, there was that one time in Buenos Aires, with the toddlers,” he says, mostly to Natasha. She laughs and bumps his shoulder with her own, and they tell the story together, trading off lines and giving as many details as they can.

***

Natasha has to all-but-carry him back to his room. He’s swaying, drunker than shit, and the tiny part of him that’s sober is horrified to notice that he’s crying, again. He doesn’t remember when that started up—he can only hope after the rest of the team left and it was just him and Natasha.

“He can’t just be dead! We’ve gotta do something, we can’t just let him—he can’t just be fucking dead, that’s fucking crazy,” he raves into Natasha’s shoulder.

“You’re not wrong,” she says. Her arm is around his side and he can feel her palm at his back, steadying him.

“Loki’s fault. Fucking Loki, Nat, I gotta find him, gotta kill him. I can’t—you have no idea how much I—” He’s reduced to tearful babbling now, coherent speech all but gone, and the world goes completely swirly and dizzy for a second before Natasha shoves him against a wall, her body pressing against him to keep him from falling over and then probably puking.

“Hey. Hey. You hate him. I know. You’ve got every right to.” She’s meeting his eyes, god, she has fucking beautiful eyes, and he’s not prepared for how much it strains his heart when those eyes turn sad, her expression twisting into grief. “I want to kill him, too. For what he did to Phil. To you.”

“That’s sweet. You wanna avenge my violated mind?” He tries to make it a joke, but the words come spitting out his mouth, choking him and making him swallow hard.

“Of course.” There’s a look on Natasha’s face that Clint can’t even begin to understand. He touches her hair, and now it’s her turn to swallow. “Clint...”

“’Tasha.”

“You’re the only thing that turned me into a soldier. Did you know that?”

He feels vaguely aware that he should really be more sober for whatever is happening here. “Nah. Didn’t know, only guessed. ‘m flattered, though.”

“You’re drunk,” she says, smiling at him, and it’s such a pretty smile that Clint can’t stop his first impulse: he leans forward, kissing her. He has one beat, two to enjoy the feel of her full lips against his before she pulls away.

“O-kay, time for bed,” she says, deadpan again, pulling him away from the wall to continue down the hallway to his room.

“No, wait, hey,” he protests weakly as she drags him.

“I have a mission briefing in an hour and then I’m on a plane to somewhere, and you need to sleep this off.” She’s all business now, and gets him efficiently inside his door and lying facedown on his bed in the space of about two seconds.

“’Tasha,” he says, mostly into his pillow. He wants to tell her that he meant the kiss, that it’s something he wants to do all the time and not just when he’s drunk, but all that comes out is, “Be safe.”

He can hear her rolling her eyes. “I’ll see you in a few days, Barton.”

And then she’s gone, and Clint rolls to the other side of his bed to puke into the wastebasket next to it, and falls asleep with his shoes on.

***

He wakes up at 5am, after a gloriously technicolor nightmare featuring Loki at the reins again, forcing Clint to kill Phil himself. He’s drenched in sweat and takes a long shower so cold that his teeth are chattering when he finally comes out. He takes care of the hangover as methodically as he knows how, puking again in the toilet and drinking more water than he thinks he needs and munching on toast.

By the time six rolls around, he’s at least functional, although mentally and emotionally he feels like his soul is getting rolled over by a tractor. His mind keeps alternating between impotent rage at Loki and horror at himself for kissing Natasha last night, both subjects awful enough that he’s tempted to just start drinking again. He opts for the basement gym instead.

Steve is the only one there. He looks surprised to see Clint—maybe he didn’t think of Clint as the early-to-rise type? —But thankfully doesn’t make any real effort to talk beyond a brief hello. Then he goes back to his punching bag, and Clint allows himself a few moments of impressed staring at the sheer force of it. Then he makes his way to the shooting range, and everything turns off for a while.

When he comes back to himself, he notices that their roles have switched, and Steve is now watching Clint at work. Clint grins at him, sweaty and as zen as he ever gets. “Not super soldier stuff, but I try.”

“No one could create that kind of skill from a test tube,” Steve says seriously. Clint can’t help but preen a little bit. “Where did you learn that? Does S.H.I.E.L.D. train all of its spies to work with a bow and arrow?”

Clint looks away. “Not exactly.”

Steve waits for Clint to say more, and when he doesn’t elaborate, the silence gets awkward. Steve coughs and waves vaguely in the direction of the punching bags, saying, “Well, I’ll just...”

Clint feels a little guilty for turning down Steve’s innocent attempt at friendly conversation. “Yeah,” he says, and then lets a dummy arrow fly at Steve’s heart.

Not expecting it, Steve dodges just a little slow, and the arrow grazes his arm. “Hey, what the—“ He looks at Clint, pissed as hell, and as Clint stares back expectantly, Steve gets the idea. He grins and moves too fast for Clint to see, tackling him and taking them both to the floor. Clint brings a knee up to his chest and shoves Steve off before rolling to his feet, and then they circle each other.

It’s a good fight. Steve’s holding back, of course, but Clint can tell he’s still working. And in this day and age, Clint really needs as much practice as he can get fighting superhumans who are many times more powerful than him. It’s not about being trying to be faster and more powerful than they are; it’s about learning better ways to cheat.

Clint loses as gracefully as he can, but he still keeps the fight going long after he should’ve ended it for his own well-being. Steve’s the one who finishes, pinning Clint and then rolling off him and standing easily. He laughs, says, “That was fun!” and offers Clint a hand up; Clint comforts himself with the fact that Steve at least seems to be out-of-breath and sweaty.

Clint takes the hand he’s offered, but has to stay half-hunched over, hands on his knees and sucking in breaths. “We’ll have to do it again sometime,” he manages to get out. And he’s not sure if Steve knows him well enough yet to know that he’s not being sarcastic, so he adds, “I’m serious.”

“Yeah?” Steve says. He sounds surprised and a little boyish, and Clint stands the rest of the way up to look him in the eye.

“Sure. I’m just not gonna be hungover next time.”

They eat lunch together in the HQ cafeteria, Steve pounding down about three times as much pasta as Clint’s able to. They eat in silence at first, both of them ravenous and single-minded, but after a while Steve pauses between bites to say, “So, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s done a pretty decent job of getting me up to date on the big global events of the last decade or so, but outside of most things involving the Middle East and North Korea, I still--well.” Steve frowns into his water glass, looking for words. “They summarized a lot of other things for me. And it’s not that I think that they’re lying, but it was vague, and after Fury held back about the Tesseract and the weapons program--”

“You’re wondering how much you can trust their summary.” Steve nods. And Clint wants to help him out, to provide him with all the answers, and for a second he feels his allegiance to S.H.I.E.L.D. grappling with the rest of him. “Uh, well,” he says, uncomfortable. “I’m happy to talk to you about anything, but you should know, some of it’s kinda ugly, and if you decide after that you don’t want to work for Uncle Sam anymore, Fury’s gonna be kinda pissed at me.”

“Yeah, I realize why I only got the summary.” Steve is rolling his eyes, but Clint can tell that the annoyance isn’t directed at him. “I’ve made up my mind to stick with S.H.I.E.L.D. for the time being, and a history lesson isn’t going to change that.”

“Okay. So what is it you want to know?”

Steve hesitates--maybe he wasn’t really expecting Clint to agree. Or maybe he’s just trying to decide where to start first. “Central America, in the 80’s,” he says eventually. “I don’t really understand--well, any of it.”

“Yeah, neither do the rest of us. But, sure--let’s start with what they probably didn’t tell you.” Clint’s not a history buff by any means, but he gives the best explanation of the Iran Contra scandal that he can. He’s glad to be able to help Steve out, to make conversation about something that’s not small talk but also not touching on anything particularly painful for either of them. Clint still feels a little embarrassed and guilty about completely stonewalling Steve’s question about where he learned archery, earlier, and tries to make up for it by giving him as much info about Central America and the Cold War as he can.

***

It’s afternoon by the time Clint gets around to sending the necessary conciliatory text. sorry you had to babysit my drunk ass last night.

It’s a half hour before Natasha texts back, it was your BFF’s funeral, you’re allowed.

Clint tries to picture Natasha saying ‘BFF’ out loud and can’t, which makes him smile. Then he thinks that Phil really had been his best friend outside of Natasha, and it had been nice to have a friend that he didn’t also have maddening sexual tension with, and it had been nice to have Phil, specifically, as a friend, and fuck.

He hesitates over his reply, making faces at his cell screen until he thinks of something to say. It’s awkward, but whatever. but still i shouldnt have kissed you. i didnt mean to be confusing.

Her reply doesn’t come immediately. After several hours, it becomes apparent that it’s not going to come at all, and Clint tries to keep busy with debriefing paperwork to prevent himself from vomiting out more apologies to her. He turns his phone off and leaves it under his bed.

He’s sorely tempted to spend tonight drinking himself into unconsciousness again, but he knows that he shouldn’t be making a habit of that right now. Instead he goes back to the gym, finds Steve there again, and Tony finds them both a few minutes later. Before Clint can either agree or object to Tony’s proposal, he finds himself carted off for a dinner at Stark Tower.

It’s amiable enough. Bruce and Pepper are there, too, but Natasha’s absence next to him makes Clint realize just how little he’s interacted with these people outside of combat scenarios. He doesn’t know what to say to any of them.

Thinking of Phil, he supposes it’s good that these guys have more-or-less accepted their roles as team-members. They’re all still plenty awkward around each other, and throughout the dinner no one mentions anything about working together in the future, but Clint can tell that they all like the idea of not having to fight alone from now on.

Which is great. Clint’s always been supportive of the Avengers Initiative, even if it looks like the reality won’t necessarily conform to Coulson and Fury’s original vision. But he doubts if it’s for him in the long run, for a whole host of reasons, and tonight Clint feels like he’s just waiting around until he’s spent enough time here that it’s not impolite to leave.

Tony turns to him halfway through the meal. “So Robin Hood, where’s your Maid Marian? Is she off killing and eating her mates?”

“Um.” It takes Clint a second to realize that Tony means Natasha. “Don’t ever call her that to her face. You don’t want your last words to be a lame nickname. And she’s on a mission.”

“Of course she is, such a good little worker bee.” Tony shoots him a brilliant and disconcerting grin, and gestures in the air with his forkful of arugula. “So what’s the deal with that, anyway? Are you guys, you know...” More arugula gestures. “Are you awaiting a death sentence, or does her nickname not go that far?”

Clint blinks at him.

“Tony...” Pepper says, a warning.

“What?” He’s still got the fork as he raises both hands defensively in front of his chest. “He’s like, the only person she makes facial expressions for, it’s a valid question.”

He wonders if they can make it a rule to only ever have meals together after an alien invasion, because he badly misses the exhausted, famished silence of that shawarma restaurant. “Oh. You mean are Natasha and I--? No, no, we’re just friends. Partners. We work together. It’s nothing like that.” Clint grits his teeth to shut himself up as Tony finally, finally eats his fucking arugula.

And then speaks with his mouth full. “Right, you know, that whole ‘we work together’ line, that’s what Pepper said about me for years and years? And it was so obvious she was concealing her burning passion for me.” He ignores Pepper’s elbow in his side. “So you know, I’m just saying, it might be something to look into. Although if you’re scared off by the whole Black Widow thing, well, I really can’t blame you.”

Clint gives up on the idea of sobriety and grabs his untouched beer. “We’re just friends.”

“Yeah, I know, you already said that.” Tony is now using a voice like he’s trying to explain something to a third grader. “And I’m saying that it’s clear to all of us, just from knowing you guys for five minutes, that the only reason you’re ‘just friends’ is because S.H.I.E.L.D. wants all of its operatives to be emotionally repressed robots.”

“Just because she didn’t want to sleep with you doesn’t mean she’s a robot,” Pepper says.

“Did I say that? I did not say that. Please, let’s stick to the problem at hand, which is that Errol Flynn here and his Bond villain girlfriend are clearly being oppressed under the yoke of the mutual friend zone.”

“You know, eventually you’re going to run out of bow-and-arrow nicknames for me. There aren’t that many,” Clint says, drinking more.

“No I won’t, that’s what wikipedia is for. Look, here’s what you do: when she gets back from killing people on her mission, you have a gift basket waiting for her, like maybe some of her favorite lethal toys plus a bouquet of—“

“What are you, my yenta?”

“No, just nosy,” Tony says cheerfully. Clint looks around the table for someone, anyone to get him out of this—Pepper is now involved in conversation with Steve about the term ‘drinking the kool-aid,’ but Bruce catches his eye.

“Hey Tony, did you still want me to come by to test out that new spec tomorrow?”

And thank god, thank god, Tony’s like a cat chasing a laser pen, forgetting Clint completely to engross himself in science babble with Bruce. Clint finishes his beer and serves himself more salad, trying very hard to think solely about how much he hates arugula and not about anything else.

***

Natasha still hasn’t texted him by the next day. Clint goes to Fury and begs to be given a job, any job, or at least be allowed to go back home to his apartment and live outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance. Fury refuses all his requests and sends him to therapy instead, an hour-long session that Clint spends literally climbing up the walls until the nice doctor sends him away.

The next afternoon, Steve announces that he needs to go off by himself for a while, and politely declines Fury’s offers to send an operative with him to help him navigate modernity. He does accept a S.H.I.E.L.D. motorcycle, though, and watching him drive away, Clint feels jealous that Steve’s getting away by himself, and maybe also a little sad, because meeting Steve in the gym had become a comforting habit. Sparring aside, it had been nice to know that someone else was down there with him, beating up inanimate objects to avoid thinking.

Bruce and Tony leave, too, road-tripping to Chicago for some kind of mad scientist get-together. Tony sends Clint a goodbye text that says, Seriously, greet her with nun-chuks and a poison collection, it will work better than chocolate and roses.

Clint ignores it; two hours later, he receives a second missive: Whatever Men In Tights, if you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore the obvious, it’s your call. But I can tell she likes you.

Going against his better judgment, Clint responds. Calling me Men In Tights is just a variation on Robin Hood. You’ve run out.

You defile the good name of Mel Brooks by saying that. And when you avoid the subject you make your crush even more obvious, by the way, just for future reference.

Clint stops responding.

***

The next time he’s called to Fury’s office, Natasha’s already in there, perched on Fury’s conference table and wearing battered jeans and a t-shirt. Clint’s face splits into a grin and he’s talking before he’s had a chance to think about what he should say.

“Long time no see, did your phone fall down a well or something?”

Natasha hops off the table and walks out of the room without so much as a glance.

Well, shit. Clint ignores Fury barking at him and rushes after her. “Hey, ‘Tasha, wait—“ He grabs for her elbow, but she twists out of his grip, making him stumble into the wall in the process.

“I really don’t feel like talking to you right now.” Which, he supposes, is not really something he can argue with. He stares dumbly after her as she stalks off.

“Barton, get your ass in here.” Clint tears his eyes away from Natasha’s retreating form to go be berated by Fury, who—not shockingly—is assigning Clint to a different therapist.

Once he’s free of the meeting, he looks for Natasha in her room, but there’s no sign of her. He’s about to give up and go hide from his life somewhere when his cell buzzes.

“She’s on the roof, and the time to act is now,” Tony says by way of introduction.

“She—what? How did you--?”

“Don’t worry, they’re not programmed to do you any harm. She looked like she was pissed enough to do some serious assassin-y damage, but she also didn’t leave the premises, which leads me to believe that she wants you to find her. My advice is to go in apologizing.”

“You are a creepy fuck who needs a hobby.”

“Go get ‘er, Girl On Fire,” Tony says, and hangs up before Clint can ask him where the hell that reference is even from.

The possibility of Stark robots hidden in the HQ, the explanation for which is probably just that Tony got bored, is disturbing enough to warrant telling Fury right away. But also, he was right, and if Natasha really is on the roof than Clint is pretty sure that she’s waiting for him.

He finds her there, balancing on her toes in a crouch, looking deceptively small. Her back is to him, but she says, “Go away, Barton” without needing to check to see who it is.

“Look, I really am sorry about the kiss, okay? It was over the line and I feel really shitty about it, can we just pretend it never happened?”

“That’s what you think I’m mad about?” She stands, and he recognizes the shirt she’s wearing: it’s faded black with a few small holes in the sleeves, a Men’s XL, and he was there when she bought it for 50 cents at goodwill because their hotel room had gotten blown up with all their clothes inside it. “I’m not pissed because you got trashed and kissed me, I’m pissed because afterward you got passive-aggressive as hell.”

Clint frowns. “How—um. I don’t know what I did.”

“Then let me spell it out for you.” She gets up in his space and jabs her finger at his chest, appearing so agitated that Clint sees a flash of the other Natasha, the one whose every emotion is deployed with more accuracy than a heat-seeking missile. He wonders what she wants him to reveal. “You know me well enough to know that a drunk kiss from you wouldn’t phase me, and you know you could’ve just let it go. Instead you bring it up and give me some condescending bullshit line about not wanting to confuse me?”

“I just felt like I needed to apologize!” Clint holds his hands up in surrender, wincing away from her. “Jesus Nat, you’re my friend, I was just trying to—I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

He can tell from the way her eyes gleam that of all the words he just said, not a single one was right for this situation. “What feelings do you think I have, exactly?”

Oh, hell. “I don’t know! That’s why I’ve been saying stupid things, because I don’t know what you feel, or what I feel, or—or anything!” He’s heading into dangerous territory, he knows it, but he blusters on regardless. “Ever since we saved the world it’s just felt different.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Clint, the whole world is different—“

“With us. I meant different, just between the two of us.”

Natasha is quiet at that. She just stands there, studying him, and Clint can see the moment when her walls come down and she decides not to engage with anything he just said.

“If you’ve changed your mind and would like to have sex with me after all, you could have just said so.”

“That’s not what I meant!” He hates that she does this, that she can’t approach sex in any way that’s not totally matter-of-fact, cold and emotionless—and he knows that that’s not her fault, which he hates even more.

“Of course it’s not! Because you’ve never wanted to sleep with me, you don’t think I know that?” She grabs her elbows, hunching in on herself and looking away from him. It tears at his heart a little bit, and he reaches out, catches her shoulder.

“Hey, no, it’s not that, you’ve got to know that, I’m—I’m very attracted to you.”

“Gee, thanks mister,” she snaps at him, pulling her shoulder away from him. “Now you’re just treating me like some high school girl you’ve got to let down easy.”

“I wanted to! I’ve always wanted to sleep with you, you have no idea how much, but I didn’t think I could without ruining our friendship, and that’s way more important to me than anything else.”

“And so you’ve been rejecting me. For years.” She bites her lip, giving him a look that’s so vulnerable and uncertain that Clint can’t let this continue.

“All right. Did you get the info you came for?”

She blinksat him, startled. “What?”

He spreads his hands and steps away from her, exasperated. “You’re playing me, Nat, it’s obvious. So did I give away whatever information you were interrogating me for?”

Natasha straightens and drops her hands to her sides, her wounded animal expression gone in an instant. “I wasn’t—“

“Yes you were,” he says. He can’t help but feel a little annoyed. “Come on, drop it. We’re friends, you can ask me anything and I’ll tell you.”

She looks a little guilty at that. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to manipulate you. It was just... instinctual.”

Any anger he had drains away at that. He sighs. “It’s fine. I’m an open book, it’s not like you’re gonna get state secrets.”

She laughs, and looks a little more like herself. “All right then. Tell me what you meant, when you said that things between us felt different.”

“Right.” Clint scrubs a hand through his hair and walks toward the edge of the roof. He doesn’t want to fumble through trying to find the words to explain what he’s barely allowed himself to think about, he wants to run away instead, but Natasha hasn’t run away yet, so. So. “I didn’t want to ruin our friendship by sleeping with you.”

Natasha follows him to the edge, her shoulder brushing his. “You know that I’m perfectly capable of keeping sex separate from our personal and professional lives.”

“Yeah, I do know that. It wasn’t your emotions I was worried about.”

“Oh.” Clint turns around to face her, and she looks deeply uncomfortable. He waits for her to leave, or change the subject, or something, but she doesn’t move. He lets out a breath that he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

“Yeah. And I guess that since Loki... I don’t know, ‘Tasha, tell me if I’m completely off-base here, but what you did for me—I just started thinking that maybe I’d been wrong.”


“Wrong about what? And I don’t understand how a kick in the head is making you get all sentimental. I was just doing my job.”

Clint smiles. “I know that. But you also said that you were compromised.”

She tenses up. “That wasn’t—“

“And I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at me since.”

Natasha grabs two fistfuls of his shirt. For a second they don’t move, frozen in a tableau that might look romantic to any outsider watching, or violent to anyone who actually knows Natasha.

And then she yanks him toward her and her mouth is crashing into his, her teeth hitting his lips hard enough to hurt. Clint tries to match it as much as he possibly can, his hands on the back of her head and the back of her t-shirt and his mouth wide open.

This time, there is nothing whatsoever ‘capable’ about the way she’s touching him. She kisses his chin, his jaw, biting hard at his neck before coming back to his mouth. One of her hands has found his ass, groping him and pulling his crotch tight against hers. Clint feels like he’s caught in a stampede.

He feels her ankle at the back of his knees, sweeping his legs out from under him and sending them both down. Clint doesn’t let go of her, doesn’t catch himself, and lands hard on his back on the gravel.

“Ah, fuck,” he gasps out, because that fucking hurt. Natasha sits up and straddles him, her hands pinning his shoulders to the ground. The angle makes him notice the wind whipping through her hair more than he did when they were both standing. If he were to reach out with his right hand, he would feel open air—he could roll them right off the edge, if he wanted to. The height and the edge makes him feel hot all over, and he lets her hold him down while she stares at him.

He opens his mouth to say something—ask if she’s all right, tell her it’s okay, or maybe just repeat her name over and over like a babbling idiot—but the pressure on his shoulders lifts and she’s gone. Clint hears the door to the stairs bang shut, and all he can do is catch his breath and blink up at the space where she used to be.

He goes back to his room to take a shower. Tony helpfully texts him saying that Natasha’s left the building, and does this mean that the mission was not successful? Which means that he must not have robots or cameras or whatever on the roof, which is at least slightly comforting.

He heads down to the gym, and instead of going for the weights or his bow he just runs. Sprints, actually, for as long as his body can take it, doing his very best to exhaust himself to the point of falling forward. It helps, a little. He lingers in his second shower, vaguely registering how much water he’s wasting today.

He’s itching to go find her. But this is different from when she ran away from him the first time today—she’s not asking him to come after her. She needs her space.

By the time she finally knocks on his door, Clint has had hours to think through exactly what he wants to say. He puts his book to the side and sits up on the bed, and she stands in his doorway, her thumbs hooked in the belt loops of her jeans and her shoulders a rigid, uncertain line.

“Sorry I freaked out,” she says.

He shakes his head. “You don’t have to be sorry. Look, I just—you wanna sit down?”

She goes to the same chair from which she watched him sleep the other night. Clint takes a breath, and realizes that he’s been flexing and clenching his hands. He shakes them out.

“Yeah, I’m nervous,” he says when he sees Natasha noticing his tic.

“You don’t have to be,” she says, even though she looks plenty nervous herself. He meets her eyes and she smiles a little bit; he remembers that she’s the best friend he has.

“Okay. Then here’s the thing: I know how you are about—about sex, and relationships, and love, and all that. I know that it’s a very... non-emotional thing, for you. And I would never dream of asking you to change, okay? I don’t want to be that guy. I always said no, before, whenever you asked, because I was pretty sure that if we had sex, you’d start shutting me out and I would fall for you.”

He stops to swallow and breathe, because this is all scary stuff to say, but what’s coming is the scariest. “But I miscalculated,” he says, as carefully as he knows how. “Because I think that I’ve fallen for you anyway.”

Natasha looks away from him as soon as he says that. The silence stretches out between them, and Clint has to bite his lip to keep himself from filling it with meaningless words, or from taking back what he just said.

Finally, Natasha says, “I was married once. He turned out to be sent by the KGB to keep me loyal to my country. The relationship before that—neither of our minds were our own.”

Clint remembers when he first met her, only a month after her husband’s death, full of rage and the beginnings of a dawning understanding that she needed to get out. He remembers aching for her then, before he’d even discovered the extent to which she’d been fucked over. He aches for her now, too. “Yeah. I know. And you’ve already seen that I can be compromised, too. I’m not saying it’s not a stupid risk, I’m not gonna tell you that you’ve been wrong to protect yourself.”

She pulls her feet up on the chair, hugging her knees. She’s still not looking him in the eye. “I thought that I was protecting myself. But when Loki got you—when I learned what had happened to you. I was... surprised by my own reaction. Because I don’t think I protected myself enough.”

That would not be romantic coming from anyone else, but coming from Natasha it makes his breath catch. He reaches out to touch her, curving his hand around her ankle, and she doesn’t pull away. “Do you want to go back? To not trusting me, or caring about me?”

“No.” The immediacy of her answer is the first thing to give him real hope about this all evening. Finally, finally she looks at him, the lines in her face tense with fear and her eyes full of something Clint’s never seen before.

“So then—if we’re both already fucked—“ Clint stands up from the bed, leaning down to cup the back of her neck. She lifts her face up to meet him, and the kiss is different from before—cautious, hesitant, both of their mouths closed at first. And then Natasha slides her feet back down to the floor and pulls him in to straddle her lap. The kiss opens, gets wet and a little dirty as their tongues snake against each other. Clint’s groin is pressed against the general area of her navel, and he knows that she can feel it when he starts getting hard.

Natasha makes a hot growling sound into his mouth, and before Clint can register what’s happening, she’s standing up and lifting him up with her, one arm under his knees and one under his back, sweeping him off his feet like some kind of Disney prince with a princess. Clint barely has a second to marvel at how fucking strong she is before she unceremoniously dumps him on the bed and pounces on top of him.

Straddling him with her hands on his shoulders again, and this time Clint doesn’t let her just sit there staring at him. He grabs her wrists, pulls her hands off him then pulls her down to his level, kissing her and tugging her body tight against his. He gets his hands under that t-shirt and almost comes just from the feel of her bare breasts against his fingertips. She moans when he pinches her nipples, and brings her arms up to help him yank off her shirt.

He’s seen her naked before, but never like this. He fumbles at the fly of her jeans, pressing his cheek against her ribcage and feeling one of her scars brush his jaw. He finally gets her jeans open and tugs them down, hurriedly peeling her underwear down as fast as he can after. She gasps as he slips a finger inside her, then makes an even better sounds as he pulls her down to suck her nipple into his mouth. He moves his finger in deep and then slips it out to circle her clit, and she’s so wet, and it’s for him, which makes Clint want to weep a little bit.

Her hands push at his shoulders and he hears her say, “Here, here,” breathless and fumbling at him. He lies back down obediently, tugging his own shirt off while she works on his pants. She’s got him naked in record time, and then—oh fuck, then she straddles him, grinding the length of his dick against herself. He can feel the warm wet slide of her vulva and her clitoris is rubbing up against him, and it’s almost better than actually being inside her. Clint grabs her ass and she groans and works her hips even harder.

“Could you—could you come just from this?” Clint grunts, trying to match her rhythm with his own.

“Yeah, oh, yeah,” she says, half-laughing into his shoulder. She bites the muscle between his shoulder and his neck, a bright spark of pain that makes Clint feel a little crazy.

“More,” he manages to say, and she keeps going, biting and sucking his skin hard enough that he knows he’ll have plenty of marks there tomorrow. She sinks her teeth into the skin of his neck as her hips start to convulse, and Clint tightens his grip on her so hard that he might be hurting her a little. But she’s hurting him, too, and he never wants her to stop.

She comes with several choked-off, guttural noises that get muffled against his neck. Clint holds her through it, and then pumps his hips against her until he feels it building in himself, and he gasps out something completely incoherent before spilling all over both their stomachs.

Natasha slumps on top of him. He has a few seconds to feel the thump of her heartbeat against his chest before she rolls off of him to lie on her back. Her panting mimics his own. Clint’s blood is still pounding in his ears, and his skin feels damp with sweat and tingly all over. He realizes dimly that his pants are still tangled around his ankles, as are Natasha’s. He kicks them off, and when Natasha doesn’t move, he sits up to slide her pants off her feet for her. He lies back down on his side to face her, resting his cheek on his bicep.

“Hey. You okay?”

Natasha looks at him. She’s sweaty, her eyes are bright and half-lidded and her cheeks are red. It’s so close to how she looks after a fight, but different enough to make Clint feel like the luckiest man alive. She smiles, but there’s a trace of worry there.

“I can’t promise anything, you know.”

He nods. “I’m not asking you too.” He reaches out to brush a lock of hair away from her forehead, half-expecting her to flinch away, but she lets him do it. “I’m not going to just forget who you are, Natasha. And I won’t be taking anything for granted.”

She pushes herself up on her elbow, looking him in the eye. “And if I still want to sleep with other people?”

He meets her gaze and shrugs. “Like I said. I’m not going to forget who you are.”

“Okay. Maybe I won’t, though.” She smiles at him, a flushed grin that actually shows her teeth. “Just as long as you’re prepared.”

“For you? Always.”

She leans down and kisses him, her lips briefly nuzzling his before she lies back down. She surprises him by resting her head on his arm and curling her body in close to his. He reaches out to squeeze her hip, his touch lingering there before he lets his hand drop to rest between them.

He closes his eyes, and lets himself drift towards sleep. At some point, he feels her move away from him and stand, near-silent footfalls walking away from the bed and the door clicking shut behind her as she leaves. He smiles, because he knows that when she wants to, she’ll be back.