Seven Ways to Apologize, One Way to Forgive
Title: Seven Ways to Apologize, One Way to Forgive
Disclaimer: Characters are Marvel’s. Story is mind. Headcanon is my crack.
Rating: PG 13
Warnings: none. Minor PTSD. Nothing graphic.
Author’s Note: I have feels sometimes.
Summary: She worries about being compromised. She knows that if it comes to the mission or him, she will choose him, and that is the wrong answer, and the right answer, and things are too complicated now.
Seven Ways to Apologize (And One Way to Forgive)
There are more ways to apologize than there are languages in the world, and more ways to forgive than to apologize. Some people only have one way.
One
The extraction team does not know what to do. They were expecting Hawkeye and Hawkeye alone. When he arrives back to the rendeveous point with a surly, stunningly beautiful redhead woman in handcuffs, they stare at him, then they stare at her. She smiles at them, lowers her eyes, glances up at them again, slows and depends her breath. She knows how to do this, how to distract them, change the path of their bloodflow, and she sees them softening their forearms, their guns lowering, their eyes suddenly confused. It is too easy sometimes and she feels sick to her stomach.
He elbows her. “Knock it off. Sit down.” He switches to English. “Let’s go, guys.”
She glares at him and sits silently. She sits next to him. When they land, a quiet, unassuming man is waiting for them. He stares at her, then looks at Hawkeye. He raises an eyebrow. The Hawk shrugs slightly. “I’m bringing her in.”
“That wasn’t your call, agent,” says the unassuming quiet man.
Hawkeye says shortly, “It’s the call I made.”
She is told by the quiet man and an angry man with an eyepatch that she is a problem, that she cannot be trusted, that she is programmed by an enemy of theirs, and she understands their words. But it is when Hawkeye releases her from the handcuffs, meets her eyes, and tells her this is her chance that she decides she’s not in debt to another nebulous organization. Her ledger just has his name on it.
She follows him down the hallway to the room they’re locking her in (“In some circles, Coulson, they call that a cell,” Hawkeye snapped at his handler a few minutes earlier.). She says in Russian, “Did I get you in trouble?”
He glances at her. “No.” He walks a few more paces. “If I’m in trouble, it was my call, my decision, not yours.”
She nods, but he is wrong. She accepted the hand when he lowered his bow and reached for her. It was her decision too, one she does not understand. She did not know she could make decisions. He gestures her into the room. He hesitates and turns the lock on the door. He doesn’t look at her. “Can we trust you?”
“No,” she says. Honesty is the best thing she can give him right now. It is a gift. She deals in lies, not truth, and this is for him, because he did not kill her, because he offered her another way in the world.
He nods and locks her into the room.
Two
He comes back after months away covering another SHIELD agent in deep cover. He comes back physically unharmed but she can see something has changed. She has been with SHIELD for almost a year and it has been almost the same amount of time since she saw him. She is perched up on the pipes running along the walkway in the lower levels of the helicarrier. She is quieter than a mouse, slipping along above him as he paces back and forth along the walkway.
He pauses and says, “Strange to know your footsteps after all this time.”
That. She did not know that she could be undone by anyone, much less a man. She did not know that anyone knew her. Behind his words, she knew he meant that for months he tracked her in cities with all of the unnerving patience of a sniper and she had only detected him in the last city, in Prague. But at the surface of his words was his own breathless curiosity at her presence, at his memory.
She dropped down in front of him and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re sulking.”
He grins at her. A lazy, cocky grin that doesn’t spread to his eyes which are tired and graceless. He shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “You look less deadlike than you did the last time I saw you.”
“You look more dead,” she shoots back, a little cold, a little harsh, a little unsure. She flinches even when he doesn’t.
He nods, just once, and says, “Yeah.”
She lifts her chin and tosses her hair out of her face. He raises an eyebrow. She says, “Want to spar?”
He hesitates, looks her up and down, and not in the way she is used to being looked at. He shakes his head. “You’d kick my ass right now.”
She smirks. “Every day. Not just now.”
That makes the corners of his mouth twitch upwards genuinely. “Not tonight.”
And she is disappointed. She steps to the side and he keeps pacing. She leaves and goes to the gym to spar with someone. Someone’s always willing to spar with her. They want to touch her, in any way they can, and sometimes they think she’ll let them put their hands on her in her tshirt and her shorts. Sometimes, she can tell by looking at them that they think they’ll get lucky, that they can pin her and straddle her and they can say that they had the Black Widow underneath them. She knows what they want and she knows exactly what they will not get. SHIELD has never asked that of her thusfar and she has found relief in not being asked to seduce and fuck everything that walks by on two legs and with a criminal background. Still, her reputation lingers. No matter how men she disarms, kicks, and slams into the ground without them ever getting a handful, there’s always a line of more challengers. Sometimes, even this gets exhausting.
But after she is done showering in the locker rooms, there is a note on her clothes. It just says, east end. Ladder. At the bottom of the note, there is a small sketched arrow. She tucks the note into her bra, yanks her shirt over her head and pulls back on her jeans, and slips away to the eastern most ladder in the helicarrier. She climbs until the ladder ends in a very small room encased entirely in glass.
He is sitting there, his arms looped around his knees easily. He doesn’t even acknowledge her presence except there’s a cup of coffee in front of him and next to him, hot water and a tea bag. For her.
She takes a seat next to him and dunks the tea bag into the water. She watches the sky pass in silence.
Three
He should have known that on their first mission, Natasha would fuck up. He growls low under his breath, listening intently through the comm. for her voice, and hears nothing. He suspects she’s torn it out of her ear and thrown it down a Parisian gutter and if that’s true, when he finds her, he’s throwing her down a goddamn gutter too. He wants to tell her that she can’t just do what she wants just because she can but arguing with Natasha was pointless. He is more likely to win an argument with a brick wall. She shuts off, tunes out, stares blankly at him, or walks out of the room. He doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t think she’s playing him. She genuinely refuses to engage him.
But now, somewhere in Paris, Natasha had just let a cult leader lead her down an alley that was not on their map and not in their plan. Clint made a list of the ways he was going to kill her as he calls into Coulson and asks for a location on Natasha’s tracker. Coulson gives him the coordinates and Clint makes his way across the city, skimming over rooftops and running along the edges of bridge tresses. He hates touching the ground. He hates the rain. He hates being cold. And right now, he really hates Natasha.
He touches his ear again. “Hawkeye to Black Widow.”
Nothing.
He could throw her off the helicarrier. Even she couldn’t live through that.
He has to touch the ground, cross a busy street, and go back up into the sky. He grimaces as he compacts his bow, covers his quiver, checks his knives, and trots down a fire escape. He murmurs in French as he slides through the late evening crowd, waits impatiently for the light to change-he does not want to draw attention by crossing against the light-and crosses. He goes down an alley, finds another fire escape, coughs into his sleeve and wipes the rain from his forehead.
“Hawkeye to Black Widow.”
He could lock her in a cell with the Hulk.
“Black Widow to the Hawk, I can see you. Target is neutralized. Let’s head out of here.” Her voice is smooth and calm.
He spots her a few blocks away in the shadows behind a restaurant. She looks fine, smoothing her dress and tying her scarf over her hair. He wonders if Banner would hate him forever if he got the Other Guy to kill this beautiful stupid brainless crazy girl. He thinks he can live with the guilt if Banner can.
He scales down the side of the building and jumps the last fifteen feet. He lands with a splash and resists the urge to throw her against the wall. She looks up at him and her eyes flicker with confusion. She is reading him and she does not understand his anger and his fear. He grunts and stalks away from her towards their extraction point. They walk together in the rain, looking like a pair of lovers who just had a squabble, and it isn’t until they slip into their taxi by the restaurant with a black dog on the sign, safe with Coulson at the wheel, that he turns to her.
“Why did you deviate?”
She waves a hand in the air. “It worked out.”
He grabs her hand and squeezes it until she is gritting her teeth against the pain. Her eyes are green daggers. He growls, “It may have gone wrong.”
She huffs slightly. “You act like I have never done this before. I’ve done plenty, and all by myself. I don’t need you.”
The words lit a fire within him and he cannot even find words to reply that. He leans his head back against the seat and orders himself to sleep until they get to somewhere secure for the debriefing. The ride is silent. She is silent. Coulson is silent. Coulson specifically asks about what happened during debriefing and Clint is honest. Afterwards, he stalks up to his nest, grabbing a sweatshirt on his way up. It gets cold up there with all the glass and the height. He is drinking coffee and trying to forget the day while playing Words with Friends (fuck you, Coulson, he thinks, not for the first time in the game) when he hears her footsteps. She’s catlike. Not nearly as stealthy as she thinks she is, but then again, he’s a sniper and he’s trained to hear and see things that most aren’t. It isn’t her fault.
She crawls up into his nest like she was fucking invited and she sits on the other side, casting him wary looks, but her gaze is stubborn, and her chin is up, and her lips are pressed together, and everything about her says, “I think you might try and kill me but I fucking dare you”. He likes that about her.
She says quietly, “I hate being up here.”
He startles, turning to look at her again. Her eyes are closed now. That alone is a level of trust that he didn’t expect from her. She opens them again and says in an even quieter voice so he strains to hear her. “I don’t know how you stand it. Being so exposed.”
And he thinks she’s talking about more than the nest, the glass around them, and the height. He fetches an extra cup, pours half of his coffee into it, and hands it to her. She takes it and wraps her hands around it, holding it to her mouth. He falls asleep with her up there.
Four
She never gets hurt but fuck, getting shot hurt like a bitch and she curses in as many languages as she could pull from her mind when she wakes up in the hospital wing. She knows, though it takes some rummaging in her memory, that the last time she hurt this much was from a Red Room punishment for a fuck she had, for the lack of a better term, fucked up. They designed her to heal well, obstenibly for missions, but it made it easier for them to punish too. But she had never before woken up in a hospital. She doesn’t like it. The air tastes stale and artifical, pumped full of chemicals and goddammit, she wants a list of them and she wants her computer and she wants to know exactly what this is doing to her. The sheets are shitty quality and they itch and scratch and she knows that a hospital gown means that someone touched her while she was unconscious. One of her rules is that consciouness has no bearing on consent. Someone might have to have their fingers broken for this.
“You’re awake,” he says hoarsely from the corner where he’s perched-he really is a bird, she realizes-and she thinks he’s been sitting there awhile. His movements are stiff and the coffee in his hand has stained the outside of the cup. Hours. His eyes are bloodshot and there’s blood streaked across his arms, shirt, face.
She stiffens and stretches her legs, then arms, and turns her head in both directions. “Yes. And everything seems to work.”
His head lowers at that and she watches his shoulders rise and fall, once, twice, and he regains control of his breath. He unfolds himself slowly and steps down onto the floor. He puts the cup on the windowsill and drags the chair to her bedside. He flips it around and sits down, a barrier between them. He watches her with those sky gray eyes, intent and worried.
She says, “You’re covered in blood.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
She says, “You should get cleaned up.”
He cracks a smile. “Yeah.”
She says, “Whose blood?”
His face closes off. “Yours.”
She flinches. “I’m fine now. Go clean up.”
He nods, but doesn’t move. He reaches out a hand and brushes her hair out of her face. She stills but does not make any move to knock his hand away. She could break his fingers, his wrists, his arm, tear his arm from his shoulder, and she knew that right now, even in her shape, she had the advantage. His mind was somewhere else, somewhere darker and lonelier than he was letting her know. So she lay there and he traced a cut down her face, touched the bandage at her throat, watches her for a long time without saying anything. And after a few minutes, Natasha lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. He gives her a faint smile and then pulls back his hand and stands up.
He’s going out the door and Natasha calls after him, “When are they letting me out?”
He pauses and says, without looking at her. “I’ll make you a deal.”
She frowns. “What’s the deal?”
“I’ll get you out tonight.”
“What’s the flip side of that?”
“Next time, I’m the one who takes a bullet for you.”
Five
He wakes up in a hospital and he hates hospitals. He hates them for reasons only Coulson and Fury knows because it’s in the highest level of his file at SHIELD and he doesn’t tell anyone about the things he saw and heard and knew from experience as a kid. The only thing he jokes about is joining the circus and even then, the humor covers up his pain. Hospitals are on that list of things he does not talk about.
The worst part of waking up in this hospital is that it’s SHIELD’s hospital wing and everything is quiet. Stunning quiet. He should hear motors. He should hear footsteps and voices. He should hear the beep of machinery. But there’s nothing but stillness around him. He reaches to rip the IV from his hand and a hand settles on him. He jerks his head, sighing in relief because he thinks it’s Natasha but it’s Coulson and he’s Clint's oldest friend but he is not what Clint wanted at that moment. Phil gives him a sympathetic look and does something strange and stupid with his hands.
Clint tries to say, “What the fuck,” and it comes out warbled and he can feel it but he can’t hear it and his eyes go wide and his hands reach for his throat. But the problem isn’t with his voice, it’s his ears. It’s his goddamn ears.
Coulson holds up a piece of paper that says, “Calm down, Barton. You were too close to the explosion. It damaged your hearing. We’re working on some hearing aids for you.”
Clint doesn’t know what to do. He wants to cry but he does not have it in him. He curls up on his side and pulls the blanket up over himself, ashamed at once for his hearing and for his actions, but he can’t even bring himself to try and cope at the moment. He knows Coulson’s still there but he doesn’t want Coulson. He wants Natasha. He feels Coulson’s footsteps and he feels the door open and shut. He is alone. He deserves this, he tells himself, and he stays in bed.
Hours, or days, he isn’t sure, pass and they fit him with hearing aids which is a series of trial and error, mostly error. He yells and throws the wretched things across the room and they bother him. They make him feel trapped. They make him feel like he is constantly on a mission, like he has a comm. unit in his ear, and he doesn’t like that feeling. He wants to get away from it. He refuses to wear them. Coulson and he write back and forth on a pad of paper.
Where’s Natasha?
She’s still coping.
Is she okay?
It is clear Coulson doesn’t know how to answer this. Clint doesn’t know what’s making him feel this way but nothing seems right without her. He was there when she woke up in the hospital wing after taking a bullet for him. He expects her to be there when he wakes up but he keeps waking up alone.
Until he doesn’t.
He wakes up and sits up, instinctively conscious of someone else in the room. She is sitting in the corner, staring at a book in her lap. She looks up, meets his gaze, and her mouth tightens. She gets to her feet and walks over to his bed. She sits, hard, slumped, utterly unlike the Natasha he knows. She looks defeated. He sits up, pushing himself into a better position to reach out, hesitating and then running the back of one finger down her bare arm. She opens the book, flips to a page, and then points to it and the graphic accompanying it, and then she mimics the sign.
She flips to the second word, signs it, and then repeats it again, and again. “My fault. My fault.”
He shakes his head. “No.”
She gives him a tiny sad smile and signs, “So much red.”
And he knows she means her ledger. He flips through the book and it takes him an absurdly long time and she has to correct his fingers, her long thin fingers wrapping around his and helping him find the shapes, but then he manages to sign, “We’re both alive. That’s something.”
She nods. She stares at her hands for awhile and he takes her wrist and tugs it. She does, to his surprise, allow him to tug her back down on the bed next to him. She lays next to him cautiously, not touching him at all, her eyes wide and worried, her breathing shallow. And when she speaks to him, he can’t hear her, but his hand on her cheek can feel the vibrations and that’s all he needs right now.
Six
They take more missions apart than together these days. Being good at their jobs mean they get to choose their missions and for the most part, it is easier to work apart than together. There’s something increasingly vulnerable about what is building between them, like a bridge made out of twigs (Cards, says Clint in disbelief, Tasha, the phrase is a house of cards. No one says house of twigs. Christ, what kind of country is Russia?). She worries about being compromised. She knows that if it comes to the mission or him, she will choose him, and that is the wrong answer, and the right answer, and things are too complicated now. They didn’t talk about it, but he took it in stride the first time she told him she was leaving for awhile on a deep cover mission.
After the latest mission, she comes home in the dead of the night and after Coulson debriefs her, she finds herself standing outside Clint's door and she almost knocks but she remembers that he takes out his hearing aids at night now because they drive him crazy. She knows that he can shoot straight and true in the dark, so when she opens the door, she gives him a heartbeat before she hits the floor. The arrow embeds itself in the door above her head and she exhales slowly against his rug. He notices her though and she can hear his sluggish, slurred voice murmuring her name. She climbs into bed with him then, lays there in the dark. He reaches for the light so they could sign, but she shakes her head. He reaches for his hearing aids and slips them in. Guilt hits her again and again that he put them in for her because she doesn’t want him to see her at that moment.
He gave her a moment and then ran his fingers down the side of her face and cupped her face in one constant, still hand. It is their only point of contact. “What happened?”
Her mind says, nothing.
But a long time ago, she had decided that honesty was the only way she could have anything with Clint. So she says, “I hate it, sometimes. What I have to do. And I guess, a part of me hoped I didn’t ever have to do this again when I came here.”
The air rushes from his lungs and brushes against her lips. She closes her eyes. He rests his forehead against hers and kisses her softly before replying, “You don’t have to.”
She smiles a bit at that. He always says that. She said, “Turns out bad guys give up information for pretty girls.”
“Yeah, but you’re more than a pretty girl,” he said, and then slides an arm underneath her and pulls her against him. She allows it because in that moment, she needs his comfort, his touch. He never asks anything of her and sometimes, she wishes he would. She didn’t understand their footing but she could accept this, in this moment. “I could have made a different call.”
She presses her face into his shoulder. She has to lift her head because she knows that he can’t hear her if her voice is muffled. “You made the one I wanted you to make.”
And against his bare chest, she traces the words, I love you, because that is the only way she knows how to say it, because she never thought she would say, because she isn’t sure if that’s the word she wants but it is the word she needs and he needs and it’s the closest thing they have to expressing anything between them. And he draws her to him in a way that erases any touch of any man that came before him, that reminds her that she’s more than her curves and her lips and her ability to seduce someone. He reminds her that she never has to seduce him.
Seven
She tells him about Coulson before they get into the helicopter. She pulls him into a hallway and in that quiet way that he thinks she reserves just for him and maybe Pepper Potts, she tells him it is not his fault. He doesn’t believe her, but he reaches for her and she holds him against her and repeats herself again and again. She signs it, and she writes it on him, and she says it again and again. She presses her mouth to his neck so he can’t understand the words but he can feel them and they vibrate down his entire body and get lost in his silent sobs. She hides him from the others. Gives him time to pull himself together and he is stone when he gets into the helicopter.
And every shot he takes during the battle for New York is for Phil. Every shot he takes is for a man who believed in a very fucked up drunk archer. Every shot he takes, he thinks, this is for someone who didn’t fire me when I fucked up. This is for the man who told me that he would back me when it came to Natasha. This is for the man who believed that there were lost, talented, fucked up people and when you put them together, you could create something magical. This is for a man who believed that coffee was the most important element in the world. This is for the man who fought valiantly. This is for the man who saved me. This is for a man who saved Stark even though Stark’s an ass but at least he’s a useful ass. This is for a man who kept me apprised of Natasha’s whereabouts when Fury told me they were classified. This is for a man who truly believed in superheroes. This is for…
He fires until he runs out of arrows and then he kills as many of those fucking aliens as he could find. He stands back to back with Natasha on the streets and when he looks up at the sky, he thinks to himself, Phil, you’d be proud of us. And that seems to be enough for awhile. It holds him together until Natasha takes his hand on the walk home from the shawarma bar.
She says quietly, “Fury says Hill will debrief us.”
He snaps, “I’m not talking to her.”
Natasha takes her hand from hers to sign at him, it isn’t her fault,Clint.
He takes her hand again and doesn’t say anything for awhile. She says as they begin to walk over the bridge back home, “I miss him too.”
It is the wrong thing to say. He knows, he isn’t the only one Coulson saved. He isn’t the only one who held Coulson up on a pedestal in his mind. He swallows hard and says aloud, “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” she says and signs at the same time. She stops him on the bridge and presses her palms both into his chest. She looks at him fiercily. “Clint. This is not your fault.”
He can’t breathe and he doesn’t want to move so he moves to the railing. Natasha watches him warily as he climbs up onto the railing but she makes no move to stop him.
It strikes him hard, then, glancing back at her, and watching her stand there, bloodied and bruised and dusty, watching him. She trusts him to stay. She trusts him not to jump. She trusts that whatever he is doing he needs to do. She trusts him. She is confident enough that he will do what he needs to do without leaving her. And that makes Clint shiver to the core. He sits on the railing, letting his legs dangle for a long time, and eventually she comes over and leans against the railing with him. They look over the river, over the burning downtown, and they are quiet for a long time.
Forgiveness
He wakes from nightmares often. She is there every time. She holds him against her, his face to her stomach, and she murmurs to him, and sings to him, sometimes, in Russian. He doesn’t know what she’s saying but he can feel her songs against him and he calms down. He breathes, and he relaxes, and slips back into sleep.
She lies to him for the first time. Just once. A little white lie about being fine when she wasn’t. And she freezes as soon as it is out of her mouth. She turns around, wide eyed, her coffee in her hand and she sets it down. She signs at him, that was a lie. And he nods and that is enough. They move on, even though she is rattled. She tells him that a long time ago, she thought the best way to apologize for the mess she caused at SHIELD was by never lying to him. She tells him that somewhere along the line, apologies and thank-yous became intertwined. He tells her that he should be the one thanking her. She laughs.
The color blue sets him off, so when he is at the Stark/Avenger Tower one day, she repaints all the blue in the house and she replaces the blue mugs with green ones. He comes home, walks around in silence for a long time, and then he pulls her down to the new grey rug and he thanks her, or forgives her, or she forgives him. Those things get twisted sometimes.