Open My Eyes: I See Sky (pt 3)

[alwayslera]

Title: Open My Eyes: I See Sky

Disclaimer: Characters are Marvel’s. Story is mind. Headcanon is my crack.

Rating: PG 13

Warnings: Angst. Lots of it.

Author’s Note: I have feels sometimes.

Summary: After shawarma, Clint disappeared. Against her instincts, Natasha has not used her considerable skills, assets, and resources to track him down. She knows he has to level out and leveling out takes time. So why does she feel like she’s the one off balance?



Natasha left her apartment, exhausted and a little jetlagged. She had worked a six week long deep cover assignment in the Stans, as Tony had called them, and arrived back in at 4am. But she couldn’t sleep so she stayed up most of the night catching up on her favorite mediocre American cop shows. She needed to sleep but she knew that she needed a routine to sleep. She wasn’t sure where Steve was but Jarvis told her he wasn’t in the building when she woke so she couldn’t nag him to go for a run with her. She had showered, figuring she wasn’t going for a run, and dried her hair. She pulled on her favorite shirt, a faded black shirt with Archery spelled out in elements from the periodic table. She had bought it for Clint years ago, before they were partners, and stolen it back sometime after their first mission in Budapest. It smelled faintly like him, even after a hundred thousand washes. She slipped into jeans and got in the elevator, leaning against the side and studying the abysmal state of her nails.

The doors opened into the kitchen and she stepped into the room. She stopped dead in her tracks. Clint was sitting quietly at the table, reading the paper, while Tony stared at him, and Steve pretended not to stare at him, and Bruce quietly read his own paper. Bruce was the first to notice her, glancing up and then his lips tightened, slightly, and he glanced sideways at Clint. Steve noticed her next and almost snorted coffee out his nose. His reaction alerted Clint and Tony to her presence.

Clint’s hearing had never been great and a blast in Baghdad at the start of the war when they were the first operatives on the ground had taken out the rest of it. It had been almost ten years since he started wearing hearing aids and no matter what technology was in his ears, he still couldn’t hear her when she wasn’t deliberately making a clatter. She could see the black hearing aids over his ears now. They were new. He hadn’t always had black ones.

Tony said, a little edge to his voice, “Look, Natasha. Bird Boy came home to roost.”

Natasha walked by Tony’s chair, her eyes never leaving Clint. She snapped her fingers and held out her hand. Tony sighed, pulled a wallet from his pocket, and peeled off a crisp $100 bill. Natasha smiled and took it, tucking it into her back pocket. Clint’s eyes were a flinty gray as he watched her and she moved around the far side of the table, avoiding him, to pick up Steve’s empty plate. She took it to the counter and put two more pancakes on it. She put it back in front of Steve.

Natasha was the first to break their eerie silence. “Glad you knew your way home.”

“He’s like a homing pigeon. No matter where you drop him, he knows how to get home,” Tony spat, almost distastefully.

“Tony,” Bruce said quietly.

“This isn’t home to Clint,” Steve added softly. He shrugged at Natasha. “He’s never lived here.”

“She’s home,” Clint said clearly. His eyes were still on Natasha. He repeated again, slower this time. “She is home. To me.”

Natasha turned back to the sink and filled the kettle with water. She put it on top of the stove and started the heat. She kept her back to him. She heard him sigh.

“I leveled out,” he said quietly, and it was like it was only them in the room. She could hear her own heart beating. “You told me I had to level out.”

“But not alone!” she cried out, turning around. She pressed her hand to her mouth, like she could put her outburst back inside of her, regain her hard-fought and well-taught control. She calmed herself and said slowly, her eyes closed. “You never left me alone to level out. You should have let me…”

“You didn’t follow,” he answered simply and it wasn’t an accusation as it was an explanation. “And it took awhile and I’m not sure it would have been easier or shorter with you there.”

Sometimes Natasha wished that he wasn’t the type of person who cut straight to the chase. Sometimes, she wished that he were a verbose person, covered in purple prose and run on sentences and flowery language that disguised his true meaning. Sometimes, she wished he wasn’t the man that she knew and trusted. She trusted him because he never said anything he didn’t mean. But trust like that, it could always hurt her in return. And right now, it was a cold knife in her gut.

She turned back to the stove. He continued, like she hadn’t dismissed him with her body. “I had to convince myself that I was safe-for others, I mean. That Loki wasn’t in my head. I went everywhere, and nowhere, and I tried to trigger myself. Sometimes I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. And, Tasha--,”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped automatically. “I don’t want you--,”

“-I had to know that of all people, I wouldn’t hurt-“

“-to be here. Go away. I want you to--,”

“-you, not like he said I would, not like I could have.”

“-stay away. You can’t just walk in and out of my life. You can’t just leave.”

They had raised their voices, higher and higher until they had both shut down. No one said anything in the silence, but no one left. Everyone wanted to witness this, or maybe they wanted to stay to protect her, or to protect Clint from her. But no one left. Natasha felt a shudder run through her body, flipping switches in her body. She gripped the countertop. She knew that Clint hated raised voices, hated confrontation. It was as wired into him as it was for her to hate locked doors within the apartment they shared. Every door was open. Every argument was quiet, and they were more likely to storm away from each other then to yell. She almost wanted to apologize to him.

The whistle from the kettle disturbed the silence. She turned off the heat and flipped the kettle open, pouring it into a cup. Her hand shook violently. When was the last time her hand shook? She wiped up the spilled water on the countertop with a sponge. She carefully made her tea, her hands still shaking.

“Natasha, please turn around,” Clint asked softly. She shook her head. She knew it was easier for him to read her lips when she was turned around. He said, “I didn’t think of it as leaving you.”

“Then what was it?” she asked, her hands folding around the hot mug.

“Coming home,” he answered simply, after a long pause. “Coming home to someone I love.”

She flinched and hot tea splashed over her hand. She bit her lip against the pain. She unfolded her hands from the mug and ran her burned right hand under the cold tap water. She turned around and studied him again. He looked older, but calm, and sure, the Clint she remembered, before Loki. There was none of the unsureness she sensed him before they fought for New York. This was a Clint who would not miss a shot with a grappling hook and give her a heart attack. This was a Clint who did not miss.  He had leveled out, and he had done it without her. She felt off-balance, useless, and on the periphery of someone who had always made her his center.

“Chicago,” she demanded from him.

He flinched. “A reminder. That there was someone to come back down for.”

It was the first thing he had said that she could understand. She said quietly, “What happened in Prague?”

Clint watched her. “You needed me.”

She looked at the other guys who were watching her and him with unguarded interest. She looked at her tea. “I needed you more than just then, Clint. We all had to level out. We were all…compromised. Some of us more than others.”

Clint studied her, his gaze narrowed, like he was sighting down an arrow. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” She snapped, frustrated. She covered her face and said through her hands, “I want you to stay. But stay.”

“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” he snapped, equally frustrated.

“I want you to stay,” she cried, opening her hands. She threw her hands to the sky, away from her face. “I want you to stay. I want my partner back. I want to know you have my back and I want to come home to you. I don’t want to worry about whether you were dead or alive or whether you found someone-“

“Someone?” he echoed.

“-new. I want you.” She finished. She took her tea and she poured it out in the sink. “And you can’t do this. You can’t leave without word and then return without word after five months and tell me you love me and expect me to be okay with it. You can’t walk in and out.”

“You didn’t know,” he stated slowly.

She looked her burn, pulling at the skin a bit. It was beginning to blister. “I don’t understand it. It’s different.”

“Natasha,” he said quietly, and his chair pushed back.

She moved away, sliding down the counter. He echoed her motions, his hands open and palms facing her, like he was cornering a skittish horse. She turned away from him, shielding herself from him with her shoulder. He put his hands on either side of her on the counter, boxing her in. She could fight her way out but she knew that he knew that she wouldn’t do that. But he did not touch her. She could smell him now and he smelled familiar, like sky and the resin he used on his bow and grease from his cars and the type they used on the heavy joints of fire escapes. She shivered and turned slightly towards him. Their noses touched and they both froze. She heard, and felt, the shuddering of his breathing.

She whispered, her voice low but knowing at this distance, his hearing aids would pick it up. “I don’t believe you.”

“That I love you?” he asked cautiously.

She opened her eyes and found his gray ones watching her, searching her for clues. She said softly, “You left me.”

He nodded, slowly, his breath warm against her cheek. “I know. I needed to leave. And it was a mistake.”

“How can it be both a mistake and a necessity?” she asked him.

He smiled at her, small and crooked, and Clint all the way through. “Leveling out’s a lot like falling in love, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that,” she told him.

He ducked his head closer to hers and kissed her jaw. She shuddered at the way her body lit up under the contact. They were not the same. He reconnected through contact. She could not, but she could, for him. Only for him. He allowed her to fight her way through everything, and she had allowed him to leave. These were the things that lovers did. She understood the principle, understood the concept, and she lived it, but sometimes she did not know how she did it. She wanted to understand the mechanisms of love, what made him different, what made her different to him. She wanted to turn the concept of them inside out, examine it like the inner workings of a clock, but they were more abstract than even she was, as manufactured and artificial as she was.

He asked her, “What should I call you?”

“Natasha. My name is Natasha Romanov. Natasha Alianova Romanov Barton.” she told him, scrambling for some sense of sanity. She reached up and gripped his shirt front, pressing him back from her body. “You can’t-I need-Clint, stay.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promised her, and he pressed her back against the countertop, kissing her firmly. When they came up for air, he murmured, pressing his lips against the soft skin beneath her ear. “Are they still here?”

Natasha’s eyes fluttered open. Bruce and Steve were discreetly continuing with breakfast like there weren’t two spies making out in the kitchen. Tony was, naturally, watching them less discreetly. She laughed softly. “Yeah. They’re still here.”

“They were pretty fucking pissed at me when they found me here this morning,” he told her, his hands trailing down her hips. His hands slid up against the sliver of skin between her shirt and her pants. “Told me they’d kill me, actually.”

She smiled. “They’ve been good to me.”

“Good,” he said. He kissed her neck. “I’m sorry, Natasha.”

She wanted to tell him she was too but she did not know what she was apologizing for, so she carefully extracted herself from his touch. She ran her fingers across his chest, giving him an apologetic look as she passed. “If you’re going to stay, you’ll need a cup of coffee. I know how you are in the morning without coffee.”

“I liked the Field of Dreams addition in Prague. Finally proof that you did, in fact, not sleep through that movie,” Clint said with a satisfactory smile to her.

She pointed at him, “Careful.”

Steve said, his voice falsely low, from the table, without looking up, “Don’t worry, Natasha. If he goes AWOL on you again, I’ll hunt him down myself.”

“Can you roast a hawk?” asked Tony. He typed something onto his tablet. “It says you can. Just like any other bird. You hear that, Katniss?”

Bruce snorted softly and rolled his eyes at Tony. He met Natasha’s eyes. He mouthed at her, “All okay?”

She nodded, slowly, and watched Clint watching them out of the side of her eye. He looked conflicted about something, but he didn’t hide it from her. In the past, he would have. Now, he watched her with the conflict all over his face. She went back to making his coffee. He meant what he said. He never said anything he didn’t mean. And if leveling out was like falling in love, then maybe that’s what happened to her all those years ago. A knot unraveled in her chest and she carefully started the coffee machine, leaning against the counter and listening to the familiar and satisfactory murmur of the water boiling.

“Tasha,” Clint said quietly. He switched into Romanian abruptly, his rough accent carving around the sloping words like he was slicing into the language instead of letting it surface naturally. “I love you.”

She shook her head, watching the coffee begin to drip down. These were things they did not say. These were things they knew but did not say. She knew what she felt for Clint, knew what these last twelve years had built up inside of her, like a small house she could retreat to within herself, knowing she was never there alone. She knew what he felt for her, but they never said it. Saying it would make it real and they couldn’t afford for it to be real. They were partners who trusted each other above anything else. Partners who slept together. Partners who knew each other. They were partners.

“You know how you read those articles and they tell you that the survivors always call their loved ones and tell them that they love them? Because they ran out of time? And they didn’t realize how precious life was?” He switched into Chinese.

Her mind raced to keep up with the language shift, and with what he was saying. She said in Tagalog, “We have been in life threatening situations every single moment we’ve known each other. You have known and seen how precious life is.”

He shrugged, lowering his gaze to her hands on the counter. “We never say it, though.”

She looked at him. He had spoken in English. She said, gently, in Russian. “We have never left before.”

He didn’t take his eyes off her hands. His voice was, for the first time, accusatory, and using her mother tongue. “Haven’t we?”

She knew what he meant by the way he said it. He meant, we fought, we fought about leaving the job, about being compromised, about stupid shit like whose turn it was to wash the dishes and you took an assignment in California babysitting Stark so I went to New Mexico. You didn’t even come to say goodbye before you went to Russia. I found out from Hill that you had gone to the place that sent you backwards in your mind. It was my job to be there for you, it was my job to ground you, and you didn’t let me do it. And I stayed in New Mexico as penance for the things you did and the things I did and the things we never say. And then there was the Chitauri. He meant, even when you didn’t leave, sometimes we left each other. Sleepless nights, nightmares we don’t talk about, victims we couldn’t save but we never forget, the doors slamming and echoing, the silence when we make love. He meant, it is the way I take on and off my hearing when I don’t want to hear you and the way I don’t drink but sometimes, you do. It is the way you scream at me and use that as a weapon. It’s the way I yell at you in Russian, the way I let myself watch you get dressed for a job. It’s the way we use each other. He meant, it is who we are. We are always leaving. We are never coming home.

He meant, maybe this time could be different.

She echoed his words aloud, choosing French. “Cette foi-ci, nous pourrions etre different.” This time, we could be different.

Clint tipped his head. He signed in ASL, “I love you.” He didn’t use the slang sign. He signed every word.

She watched his fingers bending around the shape of the words, marveling that hands could also be a language. She looked at the coffee which was full. She reached into the cabinet for a mug for him, found one that said, “My archer can do it in the dark,” that Tony had gotten her not long after moving to the Tower, before they knew Clint was actually gone. No one had used it. She set it on the counter and poured him a cup of coffee. He would, if necessary, drink it black, but if he had access to cream and sugar, Clint liked both in heavy amounts. She moved around Clint to the fridge, took out the half and half, and poured a shot into the mug. She added two tablespoons of sugar and stirred it slowly.

She handed it to him and he accepted it. She rubbed her damaged nails against the edge of the counter. She glanced at the table. Jarvis wouldn’t translate anything she said for Tony, they had an understanding, but Tony spoke almost fluent French and Chinese. His Russian was passable for business conversations. Bruce spoke French, Chinese, and strangely, Bulgarian. She never understood that one. Steve spoke French and German. His Russian was coming along. Clint’s languages were almost as good as Natasha’s. Most thought he couldn’t hold a candle to her, but they liked to cultivated that belief. It allowed him to overhear much more than she was allowed to overhear. It was, as they said, a useful rumor.

She chose Finnish. “I hear you. I…I know what I know, Clint. What I feel is harder for me.”

His brow furrowed. He used Finnish less often than she did. “I know.”

She picked at a cuticle. “You are not asking me to say it in return.”

“No,” he said simply. He found Finnish in his mind, his cadence and accent perfecting as he went along. “I know you love me. We’ve always loved each other. This is my epiphany to say it. I’m not asking you to carry the epiphany, just to hold the results of it.”

She looked at him through her lashes. He was completely serious. She said quietly, “I have never deserved you, Clint Barton.”

His laugh was dry, short, and sad, a lifetime held in a burst of air. He shook his head and sipped his coffee. “You waited for me, Natasha. You hate waiting.”

“I do.”

He looked at her, and it took her breath away, everything he wasn’t saying, everything those three words didn’t carry with them, didn’t explain. He put down his cup of coffee and reached out, brushing a stray curl out of her face. It fell back exactly where it had been. He gave her a smile, a real one. “That’s enough for me.”

She gave him her own small smile, one that made his eyes light up with happiness. She said in English, “You found the word for epiphany in Finnish.”

“For you, darling,” he promised her.

She shook her head. “Don’t call me that.”