You Don't Have to Leave to Arrive (6/9)
Title: You Don’t Have To Leave To Arrive (6/9)
Disclaimer: Characters are Marvel’s. Story is mind. Headcanon is my crack.
Rating: PG 13
Warnings: Cursing, violence, possible mentions of rape/abuse, PTSD.
Author’s Note: I love Andrea Gibson, a very talented poet and spoken word artist. You should totally check her out. These lines worked for me. That’s all.
Summary: And she tells him, “They write stories about people like us. Damaged and rough around the edges and in love.” And he says, “Is that what this is? Love?”
Either way, this world
has picked me enough times for the madness vase
for me to know sanity is not
running from the window
when the lightning comes.
It’s turning the thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.
Sometimes it’s the place
where the music comes through. - Andrea Gibson
It isn’t. Budapest papers would call it gang violence and they aren’t be incorrect, it’s just these are different gangs than they expected. Two shootouts in a two night period in the same neighborhood and one car explosion. They say it was a homemade bomb, and they aren’t wrong. It is Natasha’s homemade bomb flung at the car following them as they race to a private airfield. She is a Russian after all and she made her first Molotov cocktail when she was nine. She doesn’t let go of Clint’s hand the whole time.
He doesn’t wake up. Not in the day they are in the safe house, not on the ride to the plane, not on the plane ride. Major brain injury as a result of head trauma, say the doctors. Fuck you, Natasha screams at them. Fucking fix him. They say, there’s not much we can do. He’ll wake up when he wants to.
So she turns to Clint in the bed and screams at him, Fuck you. Wake up and fucking yell at me like a goddamn man. Don’t just lay there. I know you can hear me. Fuck you, Clint, fuck you.
And they try to sedate her and she puts a nurse in the hospital for that. Instead, it is Coulson who coaxes her out of the room and then, to everyone’s surprise, the Black Widow says to him hollowly, “This is like the first mission all over again.”
No, this is like Budapest all over again, quips Coulson and he gives her a small smile. That’s what Clint always says when shit goes south, Natasha. Look, he never gets out of there without something. The city’s cursed.
“Or I am,” she says.
He shakes his head. No, it’s Budapest.
She says, “I’m not leaving him.”
You can’t scream at the doctors or the nurses or him.
She considers this. She accepts his terms. They give her a bed in his room and she sleeps, not well, on the other side of the room. She spends a lot of time reading to him, perched on a chair on the side of his bed. She demands to know why he isn’t awake. The doctors tell her that he is not like her (they mean: he cannot heal the way you can. He is only human and he wasn’t fucked up like you) (she tells them: you are lying. He and I, we are the same, he understands why all the doors are open and all the windows are locked and why my gun faces east beneath my pillow). There was blood on the brain, they tell her, and she imagines his mind, blood splattered over his crystal clear beautiful thoughts and the way they brighten those eyes. She wonders if his eyes are bloodshot beneath his eyelids, beneath his eyelashes, but she doesn’t peel back the tape to check. She sits next to him, perched and small and broken herself.
She reads him Tolstoy. She reads him mission briefs. She reads him Anna Karenina and if her voices breaks on that opening line, he doesn’t laugh at her. He doesn’t move. But she thinks, in some tiny corner of her mind, or her heart, that he breathes easier when she is reading to him. She reads him the New York Times. She reads him the gossip columns. She tells him that that pop singer broke up with another boyfriend, wrote another song, died her hair. She tells him that the President denied again Area 51 (“I can’t,” she tells him, “believe that you keep asking about that. When will people start changing the number and really fucking with him?” And she realizes his sense of humor has rubbed off on her.)
She insists that Coulson sit with him when she goes to shower, and after a few days, Coulson insists that she goes and punches someone so she wouldn’t explode. She goes three rounds in the gym and runs a few miles before showering, and returning, and feeling a deep ache in her gut settle in relief when she sees he remains stable.
Her wrist was broken in Budapest and theoretically, she needs surgery, but she refuses it. Coulson tells her that she needs to accept the surgery and she tells him to fuck off. He shrugs nonchalantly and drops the subject. When Fury comes down to check on Clint and Natasha, he argues for the surgery too, and she tells him that if he, like the people who came before him, insists on things beyond her consent, she will leave.
He looks at the man on the bed with the monitors and say, I doubt that.
She bares her teeth in a smile and says, I’ll take him with me. Don’t challenge me.
And for whatever Fury thinks, he drops the topic. So her wrist begins to heal, a little wrong, a little less perfect than it was before, and a part of her loves that. The Red Room would have forced the surgery. They would have put her under, made her perfect again, and reprogrammed her while they were at it, and she wanted nothing to do with that. She wants to be imperfect. She wants a memento of imperfection.
Clint wakes, slowly, two weeks after they get home, while she is not in the room. She is running when her cell goes off and she checks it, slams to a halt, spins, and runs back, faster than she was running around the helicarrier, bolts through hallways making people scatter, and down to the medical ward where he is upright and talking to Coulson.
She stops in the doorway. She stares at him, at his open, bloodshot eyes, at his cracked lips and his small smile, at Coulson backing up. She says to Coulson, he needs water. He’s parched. You’re supposed to give him water. And chapstick. Look at him. I leave him for an hour and this is what-
“Tasha,” Clint says hoarsely, and lifts a hand.
She plows forward because if she stops, if she stops and thinks about the way her heart is pounding or the tightness in her throat, she thinks she may cry. She says, I trusted you, and she isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Coulson or Clint but both men watch her warily.
Coulson says, He has to stay in bed. He can get up tomorrow.
“See? My brain recovers. Head injury schmed injury,” Clint says, putting both of his arms straight out to his sides and touching his nose with a forefinger. He grins at her from this pose. “Relax.”
“And since when did I become Tasha,” she snaps, fishing chapstick out of her pocket and tossing it to him. He catches it in midair and raises his eyebrow at her. She obligingly but grudgingly mutters, “Not bad.”
I’ll be back later with the doctor’s PT plan, Barton, says Coulson and then adds, Natasha.
Thanks, she tells him on the way out.
She sits in her chair and Clint studies her for a moment. He says, “So now you know why I hate Budapest.”
She rolls her eyes at him. “It was my fault. There’s no such thing as a cursed city and you’re not cursed with anything other than a partner with a bad case of hubris.”
He snorts. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me in an entire sentence in three years.”
“That’s not true,” she says, but pauses, smiles a little bit and shrugs. “Maybe it is.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Tash,” he says yawning and closing his eyes. He murmurs, “Your hair’s almost red again.”
She had forgotten she dyed it for Budapest. She touches the ends of her curls, a little fascinated by what he said, by the observation, and then he is asleep again.
When he wakes again, the room is dark, and she is quiet, but awake, flipping the pages slowly of a book. For the first time in awhile, his vision feels crystal clear and she appears sharp around the edges, like she should, because there’s little that is soft about her. He watches her quietly for a moment, not wanting her to know that he is awake, and he watches the stiffness in her right wrist, the way her left arm grips her right forearm absentmindedly, watches her eyes scan over the words. The book rests in the crease created by her crossed legs. She looks young and quiet and sad in the dim light.
“You’re awake,” he sees her lips say.
And there it is. His vision is sharp, but his hearing is not. His hearing was always off, “wonky” Bucky used to call it, but then again, it should be after getting kicked by a horse in the circus. But it was never like this. She sounds like she’s far away, underwater. It makes him feel nauseous to hear her speak. He winces, despite himself.
He shrugs and is careful with his words. “How’d you know?”
“Your breathing changed,” she replies, like he was asking her a stupid question. He guesses he was. She hasn’t looked up. He watches her for a moment longer and then she loops up, her eyes tired, and says, “Done staring yet?”
Something in her changed, he realizes, when he was comatose. She looks older, and younger, and sadder, and wiser, and like a thousand confessions had tumbled out of her mind and onto her shoulders and she doesn’t know what to do with all that weight. She stands, letting the book slide off her lap. She stretches her fingers and he frowns a bit.
“What happened to your hand?” he asks.
She says, “Nothing.”
And he knows he isn’t telling her about his hearing. She says to him, “Come on. Get up. They said you could start walking and lifting weights.”
He doesn’t remember this directive, but he trusts her so he slides his feet out of bed and waits for the dizziness to fade. He stands up, and she reaches out, catches him. Her hands are cool, small, and familiar, but he doesn’t remember her touching him before. He looks up, dizzy now from standing close to her, and she says something about getting him dressed. He lets her help him pull pants over his boxers, a shirt over his head, and he steps away. He shakes his head.
“I want to walk on my own.” He pauses and frowns. “But not alone.”
She nods and goes to open the door. He waits for her and then she turns and frowns at him, her head tilted quizzically. He says, “What?”
And she says, “Nothing,” but he is sure there was something. She gestures and he walks out in front of her.
It was the longest he had spent in the SHIELD medical bay since he arrived there ten years prior, and his body is weak. His body feels alien. He had never gone this long without shooting something or someone or running or climbing, not since he was too small to do any of those things and Clint spent a large part of his life avoiding that piece of his own personal history. He thinks this is why he understands Natasha. They’re avoiders who don’t avoid. They’re avoiders who avoid by overcompensating with confrontation in every other part of their life. He gets her.
She lets him rest a hand on her shoulder while he practices walking, and he stretches in the gym, watching her out of the corner of his eye. There is a silence to the helicarrier but it ends when it comes to her. The ship is eery quiet, and people are talking, their voices muffled, and then he looks at her, and all he can hear is the roar of his own body, his own heart, his own instincts. She moves like water and silk and fire, barely looking at him but always watching him. It takes him a few throws of the knife to get into the rhythm but when he hits the target, he sees her let out a breath she was holding and her eyes lift slightly. He asks for his bow and she gives him a look and shakes her head.
“You aren’t strong enough yet,” she says, and he lets her, even though no one gets to decide what Clint Barton does or does not do, and when he does or does not get access to his bow.
Coulson arrives, dismisses her, and she glares at him, and they have a low, heated discussion. Coulson is well, Coulson, and he remains serene and pleasant and Natasha storms off, her half dyed hair flouncing around her ears and she doesn’t even turn to say goodbye, or maybe she calls it, and he doesn’t hear it. He watches her leave.
Coulson says, “Walk with me,”
And Clint is relieved because he can watch Coulson speak and still understand him. Here is another person whose rhythms have matched Clint’s own.
They walk outside and Clint finds every step is a little easier, but he is a little more tired. They rest against the side of a plane, looking over the ocean. When did they land? Clint doesn’t know. He didn’t know they weren’t the air. Is he supposed to know this? He isn’t sure.
Coulson touches his elbow and Clint looks at him. Coulson says, “Do you remember Budapest?”
Clint snorts. “I always remember it. Yeah. I assume you debriefed Natasha though? She caught a tail right around Anna St and Diszter-that should have been a fucking sign. We should never do ops on streets called Diszter” and she ducked down an alley at my request. I took out both tails pretty easily, and she went back to check them for identifiers. I don’t think she found any-“
“She did,” interrupts Coulson quietly. “That’s what she hasn’t told you yet. They are operatives of the Red Room, or rather, the organization that ran the Red Room. They took men. Red Room was largely women. They weren’t there because of the art and those formulas. They were there for her.”
Clint nods, watching the ocean rise and fall and disappear as far as he could see. He says quietly, “So what are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just be aware. They’re looking for her.” Coulson says. He says even lower, “What aren’t you telling me?”
Clint glances at him. “I can still feel the effects of the concussion.”
Coulson nods. “Fair enough.”
Clint hates lying to Coulson. But he needs to, for now. They won’t let him train if they think he’s still feeling the effects of getting his head slammed into concrete.
Coulson says, “We may send her into the field before you’re cleared again. She’s starting to scare the shit out of everyone again.”
Clint smiles faintly. “Yeah.”
Coulson says, “Don’t say it like you’re proud.”
Clint laughs. “I am, though. What’s wrong with her hand?”
“She wouldn’t let us do surgery,” says Coulson bitterly.
Clint nods. “Sounds about right.”
He does not see her for the rest of the day, wherever she is, but he gets to go back to his apartment and he falls asleep in his own bed, dreamless and steady and his hand under a pillow on a knife and his bow within reach, so things begin to feel more normal even if his head still pounds and he still can’t hear. He dreams. He dreams of oceans and planes and fires and ponies and the smell of sawdust and the smell of smoke and someone crying and he wakes, wakes, wakes, with a start, his hand around the knife, his breath short in his breath.
Natasha is curled up in the chair by his window, her eyes open and bright but her hair is tangled with sleep still and she has a fleece blanket wrapped around her. She says something in the dark and he thanks whatever higher powers might exist in the world for his eyesight. “It’s me.”
He sits up and rubs his eyes and sighs. “I can see that.”
She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “I got worried.”
He studies her for a minute. She hadn’t left his side for two weeks that he was in the medical bay. Of course the first night he was back in his apartment she would worry and of course she came in undetected. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she should look vulnerable or defiant and they definitely would be choices. The real Natasha, the one underneath the mask and the one with sleep-knotted hair, she was simply tired and wanted to rest. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t asking for what he is about to offer, but he’s offering it anyways. He offers it because he knows she would offer it to him.
“C’mere,” he says, and he knows his voice is slurred, and he knows that he feels sluggish, but he slides back on the bed, makes room for another person, and watches her. She flinches. He says, “When was the last time you just slept through the night?”
Her lips quirk in her strange little smile. “Twenty some odd years.”
He says, “Lately.”
She says, “Before we went to Budapest.”
He says, “Yeah.”
She gets up and the fleece blanket slides off her lap. She’s wearing a tshirt and sweatpants and she looks startlingly normal. The Black Widow, he thinks as she sits cautiously at the edge of the bed, watching him over her shoulder. He says, “Hold on,” and pulls the knife out from under the pillow and slides it under his. She takes the gun out of her sweatpants and slides it under the pillow with a strange stillness to her face. She takes a knife out of her pocket and puts it on the bedside stand. She slides her feet under the covers and tightens herself into a ball. He doesn’t dare touch her. He just gives her as much room as he can give her, and he rolls over, sighs, and slips back to sleep. Somehow, it is dreamless.