Fallout Patterns (8/?)
This is an ongoing fic. Typically I don't share anything until it's done. But this one is long and I'm actually not exactly sure where it is going or how long it's going to be. Since it's already seven chapters on AO3, I figured I'd start posting it here too. I'll put it on be_compromised when it's complete just because I'm not sure of all the warnings.
THIS FIC IS TRIGGER HEAVY
Title: Fallout Patterns
Rating: Mature
Warnings:Suicide, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, Self Harm, Dubious Consent Sex, POSSIBLE eating disorder allusions, other warnings may apply
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
"That's life for you. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more." --Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn
Chapter 8: The War Won
Clint knew how to sweep a building, but most buildings weren’t built like helicarriers, and the helicarrier was built to withstand an invasion so the hallways are illogical, there was little to no signage, and newbies were known to be lost for hours when trying to get from their rooms to the training rooms. Clint knew the carrier inside and out. It’s been the closest thing to home for the last ten or so years and even he didn’t assume he knew all of the hidey holes tucked away. He went over the blueprints once and found, by his count, 103 discrepancies and structural impossibilities. His gut told him that Natasha probably didn’t need to see the blueprints to know by instinct where she could hide and not be found. He told himself that she was only hiding and that this could not be as bad as it…no, he couldn’t lie to himself. His hands were clammy with the possibility that she had slipped away over an hour ago and she could easily, easily be dead. She could have jumped off the side of the ship for all he knew. For all he knew. What a stupid phrase. He didn’t know anything. How could he not have walked her to therapy? How could he have not known that she, in her state of mind, and him, clearly being a trigger for her, would have lied? And she was, outside of suicidality, the queen of lies and deception.
He was an idiot and not for the first time in his life, it was going to cost someone their life.
He was an idiot and it was going to cost Natasha her life.
He needed to focus.
If he were Natasha, if he were someone who had flashbacks and lost track of herself-hadn’t she said that she felt like she was bleeding out all of her edges?-where would he go?
The answer came to him as clear as if she had whispered it to him. If it were him, he would go high. But it was Natasha, and she would want to go deep into the ship, somewhere with many layers, somewhere dark, and somewhere where her edges could quite literally be defined for her. Clint ran through the hallways, ignoring his knee, and wove his way closer, and deeper, to the heart of the ship. The heart of the ship was nothing more than endless pipes and machinery that purified water, cooled the air and other equipment, and everything Clint didn’t particularly care about.
He found the heart of the ship, a long thin bridge of metal in the dark with pipes like a labyrinth as far as he could see in any direction. He strained with his ears but knew that if she didn’t want to be found-if she could still hear him-he wouldn’t be able to hear her. It was certainly not his strongest sense, to put it mildly.
“Natasha.” He said quietly, listening to the way his voice reverberated off the pipes and in the hollow space. “Natasha.”
Footsteps behind him and he spun, hopeful, but it was Coulson who had lost his suit jacket along the way. Coulson handed Clint a flashlight wordlessly and they both flicked their lights on and began to move through the maze, shining light into the darkest of corners. Clint’s heart was pounding and he flicked his flashlight wildly, running it in patterns, up over down over down over down over upupupup over down. He moved left to right, his eyes searching for clues. He knew she had to be down there somewhere. It only made sense that she would come there. Natasha was, if she believed in metaphor, going to the heart of the ship to find herself. But she did not believe in metaphor. She believed in nostalgia and of course she would return to the dark like it contained the only things she knew to be true. Of course.
“That went well,” he said, plopping down on the bench next to her as she unwrapped her hands from her first fight at SHIELD against another operative. He was still down on the mats getting medical attention. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stop. She stopped and was the one who had sat him up, tilting his head forward so the blood didn’t go into his lungs. It was that she had played him, like a bored cat with a mouse, for minutes, making him think that he could actually possibly win the fight, before she had become too bored and simply squashed him.
Natasha had given him a sidelong eye. In the days before she smiled even a little, the muscles on either side of her mouth would simply clench for a microsecond and disappear. “You should fight me.”
Clint had grinned at her. “No, thank you. I have actually read your file.”
She had frozen then and Clint had frown at it. He rolled his eyes. “You know, the one that anyone here has access too. I’m not stupid, Romanov. Coulson would kill me dead.”
“Yes,” she replied primly, balling up the bloody tape from her hands. “He told me that you had orders not to die and that’s why you changed your mind when you made the call.”
He snorted. “Is that what he said?”
“You go out with him to bars and call him by his given name,” she told him. It was not as much of a statement of fact as it was a question disguised as a statement of fact. Like Clint didn’t know what he did every Thursday night that he didn’t have a mission.
Clint raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”
She looked confused. “Why?”
“Because Coulson and I are friends first, before we’re handler and agent,” Clint replied. He shrugged. “I mean, it’s a little weird, but Phil’s a good guy and we like to catch up.”
“You are friends,” she said flatly.
“Is that hard to believe?” he teased lightly, opening his hand.
She handed him the bloody tape without asking what he was asking for, though she was right. She replied calmly, “A little bit. I thought you and I were alike. I don’t do friends.”
“What do you call this then?” he asked, closing his fingers around the tape. He reminded her, “You and I do lunch every day that I’m here and I tell you insane stories from my missions and teach you about baseball.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted softly, her eyes running all over her face. “I hadn’t thought about what to call it before.”
“It’s friendship, Romanov,” he told her and stood up. “Come on. Let’s go grab something to eat.”
“I don’t know that I do friends.”
“Friends are like brussel sprouts, woman. You don’t know you like them until you try them. For the most part.”
“Barton,” called Coulson.
Clint moved as gracefully and calmly as he could manage. Coulson hadn’t used that tone of voice that suggested Clint needed to stay away, or to go get medical personnel. When Clint followed his voice and turned the corner, Coulson was helping Natasha out from underneath the pathway and onto the bridge. She wore his sweatshirt and her red hair was matted and knotted around her face. She glared at them.
Clint was shoving her backwards against the metal railings, his hands around her throat before he could realize what he was doing. She fought back, kicking his legs out from under him and he yanked her ankle. She flew to the ground and scissor kicked at him and he rolled away and onto his feet.
“Enough,” said Coulson, stepping between them. He glared at Clint. “You know better.”
“Fuck you, Natasha,” spat Clint, his hands in fists and his breathing coming harsh and hard out of his chest. He slammed his fist into his sternum, pounding it as he screamed at her. “Fuck you! I’m on your fucking side. I was on your fucking side, and you fucking lied to me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she told him and she looked at Coulson. “I just wanted to be alone for a little bit and no one was letting me be alone.”
“Wow, Tash, I can’t imagine why that is!” laughed Clint bitterly, pushing past Coulson to get in her face again. “It couldn’t possibly be because you tried to kill yourself a few weeks ago. I thought you were getting better. I fucking vouched for you. I came back for you. And this is it? You think you can lie to me so you can disappear. You can’t fucking disappear! You aren’t the only one any more, Natasha, that’s the difference. That’s the difference when you’re on our side.”
“Clint--,” she began, her eyes wide.
“I’m your fucking partner,” he snarled at her, shoving her shoulders. “Go on. Kick me. Punch me. Kill me, Natasha. You might as well fucking get it down now. Just kill me. Because that’s what you’re going to do if you kill yourself and I can’t handle that right now, you fucking disappearing like no one fucking cares like no one fucking has your goddamn six. I have it. You’re such a selfish fucking bitch.”
“Yes, because this is all about you, Barton,” she snapped back, slapping his hand away from her. He reveled in the contact. Her eyes had gone from wide, confused, and hurt to sharp, flinty, and cruel. “Right, I’m sorry, let me just make sure that your feelings aren’t hurt every time I do something.”
“My feelings? You haven’t given a damn about my fucking feelings. Not all of us are cold and soulless creatures.”
“You’ve changed your tune from all, “we’ll get through this together, Natasha,” haven’t you.”
“Fuck you,” he snapped. His hands curled tighter. “This was deliberate. You lied to me. You chose me as your target. I refuse to be your fucking collateral damage. Not after I told you things that, fuck, Natasha.”
“It’s not my fault you’re so trusting.”
“You’re such a goddamn bitch,” he hissed. He started to walk away and then he spun on his heel and stormed back towards her. He said coldly, “You want to know why I stopped looking for death everywhere? Stopped throwing myself into fucking missions I shouldn’t have been taking? You want to know what I said you weren’t ready to hear? You, Natasha. You changed everything. I couldn’t kill you because I looked at you and I just couldn’t kill someone who wanted to die. You didn’t deserve it. You changed everything.”
Her expression was unreadable. He shook his head and turned. To Coulson he said, “I want off.”
Coulson said quietly, “Are you coming back?”
Clint studied Coulson’s expression and understood what he was asking. His shoulders slouched slightly and his fists unfurled. He said, “I’ll be back in two weeks.”
“You understand what this means,” Coulson stated.
Clint knew. He nodded once and Coulson shrugged. “Go. Make sure I have a way to contact you.”
“So you’re leaving me. After swearing you wouldn’t.” Her voice was cold, layers of ice over layers of ice.
Clint saw the two paths in front of him. One of them postulated that she had been testing him and testing his willingness to stay with her. The other said that she was manipulative and cunning and cruel and if she was hellbent on destruction, he needed to get out of her way. He slipped down the second path, closed his mind, and kept his feet moving. He made his choice.
Bombs are indiscriminate. When they are dropped on a target, everyone in the blast radius is a victim. They do not pick and choose. Bombs do not worry about trivial human concerns like guilt and innocence. They do not take into account ledgers and people and feelings and morals. Bombs do not concern themselves with that. Their job is destruction only and they do it well. He was no longer certain whether the bomb was in Natasha’s mind, or if she was the bomb and he was the target.
THIS FIC IS TRIGGER HEAVY
Title: Fallout Patterns
Rating: Mature
Warnings:Suicide, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, Self Harm, Dubious Consent Sex, POSSIBLE eating disorder allusions, other warnings may apply
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
"That's life for you. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more." --Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn
Chapter 8: The War Won
Clint knew how to sweep a building, but most buildings weren’t built like helicarriers, and the helicarrier was built to withstand an invasion so the hallways are illogical, there was little to no signage, and newbies were known to be lost for hours when trying to get from their rooms to the training rooms. Clint knew the carrier inside and out. It’s been the closest thing to home for the last ten or so years and even he didn’t assume he knew all of the hidey holes tucked away. He went over the blueprints once and found, by his count, 103 discrepancies and structural impossibilities. His gut told him that Natasha probably didn’t need to see the blueprints to know by instinct where she could hide and not be found. He told himself that she was only hiding and that this could not be as bad as it…no, he couldn’t lie to himself. His hands were clammy with the possibility that she had slipped away over an hour ago and she could easily, easily be dead. She could have jumped off the side of the ship for all he knew. For all he knew. What a stupid phrase. He didn’t know anything. How could he not have walked her to therapy? How could he have not known that she, in her state of mind, and him, clearly being a trigger for her, would have lied? And she was, outside of suicidality, the queen of lies and deception.
He was an idiot and not for the first time in his life, it was going to cost someone their life.
He was an idiot and it was going to cost Natasha her life.
He needed to focus.
If he were Natasha, if he were someone who had flashbacks and lost track of herself-hadn’t she said that she felt like she was bleeding out all of her edges?-where would he go?
The answer came to him as clear as if she had whispered it to him. If it were him, he would go high. But it was Natasha, and she would want to go deep into the ship, somewhere with many layers, somewhere dark, and somewhere where her edges could quite literally be defined for her. Clint ran through the hallways, ignoring his knee, and wove his way closer, and deeper, to the heart of the ship. The heart of the ship was nothing more than endless pipes and machinery that purified water, cooled the air and other equipment, and everything Clint didn’t particularly care about.
He found the heart of the ship, a long thin bridge of metal in the dark with pipes like a labyrinth as far as he could see in any direction. He strained with his ears but knew that if she didn’t want to be found-if she could still hear him-he wouldn’t be able to hear her. It was certainly not his strongest sense, to put it mildly.
“Natasha.” He said quietly, listening to the way his voice reverberated off the pipes and in the hollow space. “Natasha.”
Footsteps behind him and he spun, hopeful, but it was Coulson who had lost his suit jacket along the way. Coulson handed Clint a flashlight wordlessly and they both flicked their lights on and began to move through the maze, shining light into the darkest of corners. Clint’s heart was pounding and he flicked his flashlight wildly, running it in patterns, up over down over down over down over upupupup over down. He moved left to right, his eyes searching for clues. He knew she had to be down there somewhere. It only made sense that she would come there. Natasha was, if she believed in metaphor, going to the heart of the ship to find herself. But she did not believe in metaphor. She believed in nostalgia and of course she would return to the dark like it contained the only things she knew to be true. Of course.
“That went well,” he said, plopping down on the bench next to her as she unwrapped her hands from her first fight at SHIELD against another operative. He was still down on the mats getting medical attention. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stop. She stopped and was the one who had sat him up, tilting his head forward so the blood didn’t go into his lungs. It was that she had played him, like a bored cat with a mouse, for minutes, making him think that he could actually possibly win the fight, before she had become too bored and simply squashed him.
Natasha had given him a sidelong eye. In the days before she smiled even a little, the muscles on either side of her mouth would simply clench for a microsecond and disappear. “You should fight me.”
Clint had grinned at her. “No, thank you. I have actually read your file.”
She had frozen then and Clint had frown at it. He rolled his eyes. “You know, the one that anyone here has access too. I’m not stupid, Romanov. Coulson would kill me dead.”
“Yes,” she replied primly, balling up the bloody tape from her hands. “He told me that you had orders not to die and that’s why you changed your mind when you made the call.”
He snorted. “Is that what he said?”
“You go out with him to bars and call him by his given name,” she told him. It was not as much of a statement of fact as it was a question disguised as a statement of fact. Like Clint didn’t know what he did every Thursday night that he didn’t have a mission.
Clint raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”
She looked confused. “Why?”
“Because Coulson and I are friends first, before we’re handler and agent,” Clint replied. He shrugged. “I mean, it’s a little weird, but Phil’s a good guy and we like to catch up.”
“You are friends,” she said flatly.
“Is that hard to believe?” he teased lightly, opening his hand.
She handed him the bloody tape without asking what he was asking for, though she was right. She replied calmly, “A little bit. I thought you and I were alike. I don’t do friends.”
“What do you call this then?” he asked, closing his fingers around the tape. He reminded her, “You and I do lunch every day that I’m here and I tell you insane stories from my missions and teach you about baseball.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted softly, her eyes running all over her face. “I hadn’t thought about what to call it before.”
“It’s friendship, Romanov,” he told her and stood up. “Come on. Let’s go grab something to eat.”
“I don’t know that I do friends.”
“Friends are like brussel sprouts, woman. You don’t know you like them until you try them. For the most part.”
“Barton,” called Coulson.
Clint moved as gracefully and calmly as he could manage. Coulson hadn’t used that tone of voice that suggested Clint needed to stay away, or to go get medical personnel. When Clint followed his voice and turned the corner, Coulson was helping Natasha out from underneath the pathway and onto the bridge. She wore his sweatshirt and her red hair was matted and knotted around her face. She glared at them.
Clint was shoving her backwards against the metal railings, his hands around her throat before he could realize what he was doing. She fought back, kicking his legs out from under him and he yanked her ankle. She flew to the ground and scissor kicked at him and he rolled away and onto his feet.
“Enough,” said Coulson, stepping between them. He glared at Clint. “You know better.”
“Fuck you, Natasha,” spat Clint, his hands in fists and his breathing coming harsh and hard out of his chest. He slammed his fist into his sternum, pounding it as he screamed at her. “Fuck you! I’m on your fucking side. I was on your fucking side, and you fucking lied to me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she told him and she looked at Coulson. “I just wanted to be alone for a little bit and no one was letting me be alone.”
“Wow, Tash, I can’t imagine why that is!” laughed Clint bitterly, pushing past Coulson to get in her face again. “It couldn’t possibly be because you tried to kill yourself a few weeks ago. I thought you were getting better. I fucking vouched for you. I came back for you. And this is it? You think you can lie to me so you can disappear. You can’t fucking disappear! You aren’t the only one any more, Natasha, that’s the difference. That’s the difference when you’re on our side.”
“Clint--,” she began, her eyes wide.
“I’m your fucking partner,” he snarled at her, shoving her shoulders. “Go on. Kick me. Punch me. Kill me, Natasha. You might as well fucking get it down now. Just kill me. Because that’s what you’re going to do if you kill yourself and I can’t handle that right now, you fucking disappearing like no one fucking cares like no one fucking has your goddamn six. I have it. You’re such a selfish fucking bitch.”
“Yes, because this is all about you, Barton,” she snapped back, slapping his hand away from her. He reveled in the contact. Her eyes had gone from wide, confused, and hurt to sharp, flinty, and cruel. “Right, I’m sorry, let me just make sure that your feelings aren’t hurt every time I do something.”
“My feelings? You haven’t given a damn about my fucking feelings. Not all of us are cold and soulless creatures.”
“You’ve changed your tune from all, “we’ll get through this together, Natasha,” haven’t you.”
“Fuck you,” he snapped. His hands curled tighter. “This was deliberate. You lied to me. You chose me as your target. I refuse to be your fucking collateral damage. Not after I told you things that, fuck, Natasha.”
“It’s not my fault you’re so trusting.”
“You’re such a goddamn bitch,” he hissed. He started to walk away and then he spun on his heel and stormed back towards her. He said coldly, “You want to know why I stopped looking for death everywhere? Stopped throwing myself into fucking missions I shouldn’t have been taking? You want to know what I said you weren’t ready to hear? You, Natasha. You changed everything. I couldn’t kill you because I looked at you and I just couldn’t kill someone who wanted to die. You didn’t deserve it. You changed everything.”
Her expression was unreadable. He shook his head and turned. To Coulson he said, “I want off.”
Coulson said quietly, “Are you coming back?”
Clint studied Coulson’s expression and understood what he was asking. His shoulders slouched slightly and his fists unfurled. He said, “I’ll be back in two weeks.”
“You understand what this means,” Coulson stated.
Clint knew. He nodded once and Coulson shrugged. “Go. Make sure I have a way to contact you.”
“So you’re leaving me. After swearing you wouldn’t.” Her voice was cold, layers of ice over layers of ice.
Clint saw the two paths in front of him. One of them postulated that she had been testing him and testing his willingness to stay with her. The other said that she was manipulative and cunning and cruel and if she was hellbent on destruction, he needed to get out of her way. He slipped down the second path, closed his mind, and kept his feet moving. He made his choice.
Bombs are indiscriminate. When they are dropped on a target, everyone in the blast radius is a victim. They do not pick and choose. Bombs do not worry about trivial human concerns like guilt and innocence. They do not take into account ledgers and people and feelings and morals. Bombs do not concern themselves with that. Their job is destruction only and they do it well. He was no longer certain whether the bomb was in Natasha’s mind, or if she was the bomb and he was the target.