The Avengers (2012): "Compromised" (Clint/Natasha)
Title: Compromised
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie. But Marvel has owned my loyalty since I was about 3, so...
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language
Spoilers: The Avengers (Movie)
Type: Stand-Alone
Word Count: 3.639
Summary: Contains spoilers for the movie. Natasha and Clint have to get out of New York. They have some processing to do.
It had taken him a while to get his head back together - first because of shaking off Loki, then because there was the battle and he’d had to sink into the fighting and the angles and the shots, and if he’d learned nothing else in the twelve-plus years they’d been working together, it was how to save the personal “stuff” for later when their lives weren’t on the line. That was yet another reason why what Loki had done was so - wrong, he decided. It had brought down those heavily built lines between the job and each other, between work and relationship that they’d so carefully crafted.
So the words she’d said to him in that moment they’d taken for themselves, those hadn’t filtered all the way through his mind until some point much later, after dinner, during the long drive to nowhere they’d indulged themselves in because Tony had handed over the keys to one of his fast, expensive cars with an absent, “bring it back someday.”
Clint always thought better while driving, when he wasn’t having to watch so many things quite so intensely. So after replaying what he could remember about the time the world had been tinged blue, which he would only allow while Tasha was awake beside him, he’d finally brought himself back around to their conversation once she’d drifted off to sleep. They were both trained far too well in reading body language, and it felt almost like an invasion of some twisted kind of privacy to ruminate on his feelings for her when she could see him and could read the few microscopic tells he had left. Because to her, they weren’t microscopic at all, and were as loud as a billboard screaming over Times Square.
“I’ve been compromised,” she’d said softly, and at the time he’d been too messed up to really think about what she’d meant. Then the others had come in, and they’d had to go, and it was work mode, not time for deep thinking.
Streetlights became fewer and farther between as he moved away from the city and into the unknown. Clint knew she hadn’t been subjected to the same kind of “spell”, or whatever it was they would call it in the reports. He knew that Loki had pulled everything out of his brain and rifled through it, and that meant he had all of the dark secrets Tasha had ever told him, but somehow, he didn’t think that was what she meant, either. She’d gone back to the ledger, and he understood what that meant to her as well as anyone else could. So something had happened that had added to her account, and from her tone and how… shaken, she’d seemed, he had to reckon it wasn’t in her favor.
“Compromise” was a tricky word in their business. It had different shades of meaning for different people, but there was a central core of truth that said “I am no longer loyal” in some way, shape, form, or fashion.
He had no doubts about her loyalty to him.
The stars were brighter now, and the moon loomed large above them. The car Tony had lent them was a convertible, and they’d put the top down hours ago. He could see her features in the moonlight when he glanced at her, expressionless and relaxed now that she was asleep. He couldn’t hear her breathing over the wind and the radio but he could see that the rise and fall of her chest was even. The shadows were too deep to see the flicker of movement behind her eyelids, so he couldn’t judge if she was dreaming yet. He hoped not, because he knew they would both have nightmares for weeks to come from this.
The only other loyalty she had to compromise was her loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D., which was a tricky bitch of a thing. If that was how she felt compromised, well then.
What had she offered Loki?
Steve had pulled him aside after their bizarre dinner and confided in him that Tasha had gone to see Loki while he was missing. No one seemed to know what had been said, and it would probably be days before anyone could pull the files off the Helicarrier’s drive so that he could review them. That was assuming they’d even let him see them. His status as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent was currently unknown and he wasn’t in any mood to try talking to Hill or Fury right now to find out.
Ice gripped his chest as he contemplated just how far Tasha might’ve been willing to go. Had she offered up S.H.I.E.L.D. in exchange for his life? For his freedom? She probably had enough access and information to sink them if she wanted - or needed - to.
He had to admit it was a likely scenario. Clint felt things shift and settle in his chest around this information. It didn’t surprise him, not really. Hell, as soon as that idea had occurred to him, it had been accompanied with the realization that he’d have turned over S.H.I.E.L.D. in a fucking heart beat if it had been her on the other end of that mess, if that had been the only way to save her life (and more importantly her mind.)
Her hand was lying against her thigh, and impulsively he reached over and picked it up, lacing their fingers together as he brought them up to his mouth and pressed a kiss against her knuckles. She stirred, of course, but it floored him that she remained under even with him touching her. It had taken eight years of working together, three of them as lovers, before she’d been able sleep against him or stay asleep through him touching her. In that time they’d had countless tests of their trust and loyalty played out on the stage of stake-outs and missions and undercover scenarios. He’d absolutely expected that if they survived, he’d have to rebuild that particular type of trust, if he ever could again. Blurred details of their fight on the ship played through his mind’s eye. He found he wasn’t willing to let her hand go, and adjusted his grip on the wheel to compensate.
Sometime after midnight he started taking stock of where they where. Upstate New York, and based on the mile-markers they were still well away from anything resembling civilization. He found a deserted rest stop and pulled the car over, untangling their hands before speaking.
“Tash?”
She went instantly from sleep to waking and he watched her take a moment to evaluate their new surroundings. His tone of voice hadn’t indicated any danger, so she sat up and stretched leisurely as she looked around.
“How long?”
“Five hours, give or take.”
She nodded.
“You slept,” he ventured. If she was surprised by the hesitancy in his voice, she didn’t show it.
“Of course I did,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Do you need me to drive for awhile?”
“No. Just wanted a chance to stretch my legs, figured you might, too.”
His response was hollow because they both knew he could’ve kept driving another hour or more easily - but she was willing to play along, and availed herself of the rudimentary bathrooms the state government had constructed out in the middle of nowhere. When she came back to the car, he’d already finished with the facilities himself and was leaning against the hood of the car, waiting for her.
“What did you offer him?”
She stopped a few steps away and cocked her head to the side. Then, deliberately, she closed the remaining distance and reached up. He froze as she cupped his face in her hands and ran her thumbs over his forehead, then his eyes and finally his cheekbones.
“What didn’t I offer him?” she admitted, seemingly unsurprised that he’d come back around to this.
“Tasha,” he began, but she stopped him with a finger over his lips. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched him this much when they weren’t actually having sex or working an undercover op that required it.
“What didn’t I offer him is the better question.”
He reached up and wrapped his hand around her wrist, but didn’t move her fingers away from his face. “You were gathering intel for Fury,” he offered as an out, because Natasha never had a problem telling a mark what he or she wanted to hear.
“He’s called the God of Lies. So I didn’t lie to him. And I wasn’t in there for Fury.”
“You would’ve given over S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
Her eyes shuttered and he realized he was off the mark. She closed off something that had been wide open just a second before and the full truth of the matter nearly brought him to his knees. It might’ve actually done so, if he hadn’t still had the solid metal of the car behind him.
“Tasha…”
“Everything. I would have traded him the world for you. And he knew it.”
The Red.
To her mind, she had just taken the ledger and drowned it in blood, nevermind that she hadn’t needed to follow through. There was nothing that could ever be enough to clean it now.
Which might actually be enough, in her mind, to make them even.
******
The car was too flashy and expensive for either of them to be comfortable stopping at a cheap motel. It would draw attention like a neon sign, and attention was the last thing they needed. By the same token, they didn’t want to go into a major city and run the risk of being recognized from the news feeds, so Clint drove until they found one of the small, sleepy vacation towns that was mostly off the grid but catered to the rich weekend-warriors who wanted a taste of the great outdoors. He had enough cash in his pockets to pay through the weekend, and the old man behind the desk at the cabin office didn’t even so much as look twice at him.
It was another half hour up the mountain to the cabin itself, then a good fifteen minutes scouting out the location and making sure it was safe. Finally, they let themselves in and collapsed side by side on the small couch sitting in the den.
Clint let himself relax into the cushions, and felt the corners of his mouth tip up slightly when Natasha actually curled into his side, even if it did jostle his still-sore back in an unfortunate way. At least until the shaking started and he frowned. It was the only warning sign he’d ever found to indicate that she was about to fall apart. It had only happened a few times before - he could count them on one hand - and every time he’d felt at a loss. How did you handle it when the strongest thing you knew started to break?
Not to mention he was always a little bit afraid this would be the time he wouldn’t get her back.
She didn’t cry or make any noise, just shivered in his arms as if she was freezing and couldn’t stop herself. Except that he’d never actually seen her shiver from real cold. A few minutes in, he braced himself and pulled her completely onto his lap so he could wrap around her more thoroughly. After about half an hour he decided to risk his back and ribs and stood up with her still in his arms, carrying her into the bedroom and setting her down on the bed. As quickly as he could he stripped them both down and pulled her under the covers with him, hoping that the body heat would soothe her.
He couldn’t see her eyes the way they were curled, but he knew what they would look like. They would be blank, staring off at something he couldn’t comprehend. Maybe that was why this had started happening, maybe it came part and parcel with the trust it took for her to fall asleep with him. Because she finally had someone she could trust enough to keep her alive, for just a little while she could let go and let that iron control falter. Again, it was further proof that she still trusted him.
He kept his hands moving lightly over her: hair, shoulder, arm, hip, then back up again, sometimes long strokes, sometimes in gentle circles. She made no indication that she could feel him. He slipped into the space he found when he was tracking a target, and time stopped making sense. They might’ve lay there for minutes, hours - he didn’t know and didn’t care, just waiting until, finally, the shivering subsidded and she started to stir. First her legs, then her arms - she systematically reacquainted herself with all her major muscle groups before turning over in his arms to look at him.
“How long?” she asked softly.
“I haven’t checked yet. The sun’s still up.”
She nodded, and he ran his fingers gently through her hair. “It was better than the last one,” he told her. “You didn’t scream this time.”
“That’s good,” she conceded, and sat up. She pushed the covers away and slipped into the small bathroom. He heard the toilet flush and the water come on and decided he might as well drag himself out of the bed, too.
They’d stopped several exits before the cabins and bought some rudimentary supplies, again in keeping with the weekend warrior theme. Tea, instead of coffee because it was easier to make out in the woods, energy bars, trail mix, as well as a cheap Styrofoam cooler and some sandwich supplies. He’d grabbed a pint of milk and some sugar because he knew that while she liked her coffee black, she preferred to doctor her tea. By the time she was done with her shower, he had a mug steeping next to a plate laden with dried fruit and a ham sandwich and was blowing on his own cup trying to get it to cool down.
“Thank you,” she said evenly, indicating the food with a tilt of her head. She wouldn’t thank him for earlier, and he didn’t expect her to.
“No problem. I’m gonna grab a quick shower myself, then join you.” He set his untouched mug down and headed into the small closet of a bathroom. The toilet was crowded between the sink and a small cubby of a shower, but he’d seen smaller in military facilities. He made quick work of cleaning up because he wasn’t quite ready to leave her alone just yet.
He walked back out into the kitchen with a towel slung around his hips and found a second sandwich set out on another plate. After changing into sweats and a t-shirt, he sat down across from her.
“So what do you think about this whole Avengers thing?”
“Honestly?”
He nodded and started in on his sandwich.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“We’ve known about the Initiative for a long time now.”
She nodded. “We’ve known about what Fury wanted it to be. But this won’t stay under S.H.I.E.L.D. for long, if at all.”
“You think it’ll last?”
“Don’t you?” She wiped her hands on a paper towel and started to clean up the dishes, even though that only meant throwing the disposables away.
“Point,” he conceded, remembering the odd rightness they’d come to, there at the end. “So the next question is, are we in?”
“You mean do we leave S.H.I.E.L.D., if it comes to that?”
“I do.”
She actually snickered and shook her head and he was so thrilled just to see her smile again that it took him a minute to ask her what was so funny.
“Our choices are the most advanced intelligence organization in the world, or a bizarre collection of traumatized ‘freaks and geeks’ with too much power for their own good.”
When she put it that way, he had to smile, too. “Tired of taking orders, Romanov?”
The glint in her eye matched his, and he knew they were on the same wavelength again. “You know they’re going to need us. They might be better at blasting and smashing things, but none of them have a subtle bone in their body. Someone will have to help them figure out what needs destroying in the first place.”
Silence stretched between them for awhile, but it was a comfortable silence. He found the bottle of ibuprofen they’d bought and choked down several, then shook out a dose for her to take. “Do you think you can work with them?”
“You were around them more before the aliens arrived, you tell me.” The couch really was terrible, but the wrenched muscles in his back demanded that he get horizontal, so he complied.
She curled up at on the other end, and their legs tangled together. “If you’d asked me, based on previous experience and their files? No.”
“But…”
“Maybe.”
He let that run around in his head awhile. From her that was tantamount to high praise.
“I could work with them. Rogers in particular, but I could deal with the other three. How do you think it’s gonna play? Do you think they’ll play along with Fury for awhile or go ahead and cut him off at the knees on this one?”
“Depends on how badly he pisses off Stark. He’s the real fulcrum because he’s got the resources to back us and equip us once we’re free of S.H.I.E.L.D. Rogers will balk at it - at first - but he wasn’t to thrilled with the pseudo-Hydra weaponry he found on the carrier.”
“Do you think Coulson’s really dead? Or was that more of Fury’s manipulations?”
Natasha frowned. “I’m not sure. But that’s top of the to-do list when we get back to civilization.”
“Along with cleaning out our bunks?”
“I figured we’d at least wait until Stark invites us over. Or rather, until he invites you over. Me, he still doesn’t trust. But he’ll let you bring me along because I’m pretty, and he knows I’ll be useful.”
“You could be underestimating him, you know.”
“Hardly. I’ve already played him once. He’s not easy to fool twice, he’s got too much history for that.”
“But this time you’re not fooling him, are you?”
“No. But he’ll be cautious.”
“What about Banner? And Thor?”
“Thor considers us comrades in arms, he’ll welcome us, assuming he can ever make it back from Asgard. His default is to trust everyone. Banner…,” her mouth thinned. “I think Banner would follow Stark’s lead, but he doesn’t trust me either. I brought him into this, and he blames me for that. He doesn’t know you that well. And his alter ego is a crap shoot no matter what.”
“He was certainly impressive, that’s for sure. And I have to say I’m damn glad he was on our side.”
“He nearly killed me in the helicarrier.”
“So did I,” Clint said softly.
“Not… no. No, you didn’t. We’re right on the cusp of an even match on our best days, but you were… not on your best form. You were fighting it, fighting him, and that made it harder for you to fight me.”
“I’m not sure I-”
“No.” She cut him off abruptly. “I saw the footage from the New Mexico facility. When was the last time that you missed with a pistol, Clint? At close to medium range?”
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes to think.
“When I was nine?” he ventured. It was a guess, but he knew that it had been when he was a kid.
“You hit Fury in the body armor. You could’ve easily made it a head shot. You fired at several other agents, and missed them. You missed Agent Hill when she was chasing you out of the facility, and she was closer than Fury had been. You were fighting him off, Clint, the best you were able to. Especially at first. I think he got a deeper hold on you the more time went on, but even by the time you got to me you were off. Just a little bit, but it was enough.”
“Is that why you knocked me out instead of killing me?” Doubts were starting to claw at his chest again, and he couldn’t help asking the question even though he didn’t think he wanted to hear the answer.
“I was never trying to kill you. I would have, if I hadn’t had a choice, if you’d really been ‘gone,’ but I was going to try to get you back first. Killing you then wasn’t an option, not for me. That’s why I had to get to you, why it had to be me to take you down. I was pinned down because Banner… the Hulk was chasing me through the ship. Then Thor distracted him, and Fury was radioing that you were aboard, and I pulled it together, because it had to be me.”
He nodded, because he understood. They both knew, because they had discussed it after a particularly bad mission, that if she ever went back, or if he ever went rogue, it would be the other one at the end of the gun, or knife, or bow. It was a different kind of intimacy, perhaps a deeper one than sex could ever offer, and it was just one more of the threads that held them together. Their loyalty wasn't, and would never be, to S.H.I.E.L.D. or to any other government or agency. It was to each other - first, last, always.
Additional Notes: It has been bugging me to no end trying to figure out why Natasha feels compromised and tells Clint as much. I can tell it's Important (and have been watching Whedonesque stuff long enough to see some of his "tells" as it were) but what she's getting at eludes me. This is one possible interpretation. I'll probably have a new one two weeks from now after I see it for a fourth (fifth?) time.
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie. But Marvel has owned my loyalty since I was about 3, so...
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language
Spoilers: The Avengers (Movie)
Type: Stand-Alone
Word Count: 3.639
Summary: Contains spoilers for the movie. Natasha and Clint have to get out of New York. They have some processing to do.
It had taken him a while to get his head back together - first because of shaking off Loki, then because there was the battle and he’d had to sink into the fighting and the angles and the shots, and if he’d learned nothing else in the twelve-plus years they’d been working together, it was how to save the personal “stuff” for later when their lives weren’t on the line. That was yet another reason why what Loki had done was so - wrong, he decided. It had brought down those heavily built lines between the job and each other, between work and relationship that they’d so carefully crafted.
So the words she’d said to him in that moment they’d taken for themselves, those hadn’t filtered all the way through his mind until some point much later, after dinner, during the long drive to nowhere they’d indulged themselves in because Tony had handed over the keys to one of his fast, expensive cars with an absent, “bring it back someday.”
Clint always thought better while driving, when he wasn’t having to watch so many things quite so intensely. So after replaying what he could remember about the time the world had been tinged blue, which he would only allow while Tasha was awake beside him, he’d finally brought himself back around to their conversation once she’d drifted off to sleep. They were both trained far too well in reading body language, and it felt almost like an invasion of some twisted kind of privacy to ruminate on his feelings for her when she could see him and could read the few microscopic tells he had left. Because to her, they weren’t microscopic at all, and were as loud as a billboard screaming over Times Square.
“I’ve been compromised,” she’d said softly, and at the time he’d been too messed up to really think about what she’d meant. Then the others had come in, and they’d had to go, and it was work mode, not time for deep thinking.
Streetlights became fewer and farther between as he moved away from the city and into the unknown. Clint knew she hadn’t been subjected to the same kind of “spell”, or whatever it was they would call it in the reports. He knew that Loki had pulled everything out of his brain and rifled through it, and that meant he had all of the dark secrets Tasha had ever told him, but somehow, he didn’t think that was what she meant, either. She’d gone back to the ledger, and he understood what that meant to her as well as anyone else could. So something had happened that had added to her account, and from her tone and how… shaken, she’d seemed, he had to reckon it wasn’t in her favor.
“Compromise” was a tricky word in their business. It had different shades of meaning for different people, but there was a central core of truth that said “I am no longer loyal” in some way, shape, form, or fashion.
He had no doubts about her loyalty to him.
The stars were brighter now, and the moon loomed large above them. The car Tony had lent them was a convertible, and they’d put the top down hours ago. He could see her features in the moonlight when he glanced at her, expressionless and relaxed now that she was asleep. He couldn’t hear her breathing over the wind and the radio but he could see that the rise and fall of her chest was even. The shadows were too deep to see the flicker of movement behind her eyelids, so he couldn’t judge if she was dreaming yet. He hoped not, because he knew they would both have nightmares for weeks to come from this.
The only other loyalty she had to compromise was her loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D., which was a tricky bitch of a thing. If that was how she felt compromised, well then.
What had she offered Loki?
Steve had pulled him aside after their bizarre dinner and confided in him that Tasha had gone to see Loki while he was missing. No one seemed to know what had been said, and it would probably be days before anyone could pull the files off the Helicarrier’s drive so that he could review them. That was assuming they’d even let him see them. His status as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent was currently unknown and he wasn’t in any mood to try talking to Hill or Fury right now to find out.
Ice gripped his chest as he contemplated just how far Tasha might’ve been willing to go. Had she offered up S.H.I.E.L.D. in exchange for his life? For his freedom? She probably had enough access and information to sink them if she wanted - or needed - to.
He had to admit it was a likely scenario. Clint felt things shift and settle in his chest around this information. It didn’t surprise him, not really. Hell, as soon as that idea had occurred to him, it had been accompanied with the realization that he’d have turned over S.H.I.E.L.D. in a fucking heart beat if it had been her on the other end of that mess, if that had been the only way to save her life (and more importantly her mind.)
Her hand was lying against her thigh, and impulsively he reached over and picked it up, lacing their fingers together as he brought them up to his mouth and pressed a kiss against her knuckles. She stirred, of course, but it floored him that she remained under even with him touching her. It had taken eight years of working together, three of them as lovers, before she’d been able sleep against him or stay asleep through him touching her. In that time they’d had countless tests of their trust and loyalty played out on the stage of stake-outs and missions and undercover scenarios. He’d absolutely expected that if they survived, he’d have to rebuild that particular type of trust, if he ever could again. Blurred details of their fight on the ship played through his mind’s eye. He found he wasn’t willing to let her hand go, and adjusted his grip on the wheel to compensate.
Sometime after midnight he started taking stock of where they where. Upstate New York, and based on the mile-markers they were still well away from anything resembling civilization. He found a deserted rest stop and pulled the car over, untangling their hands before speaking.
“Tash?”
She went instantly from sleep to waking and he watched her take a moment to evaluate their new surroundings. His tone of voice hadn’t indicated any danger, so she sat up and stretched leisurely as she looked around.
“How long?”
“Five hours, give or take.”
She nodded.
“You slept,” he ventured. If she was surprised by the hesitancy in his voice, she didn’t show it.
“Of course I did,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Do you need me to drive for awhile?”
“No. Just wanted a chance to stretch my legs, figured you might, too.”
His response was hollow because they both knew he could’ve kept driving another hour or more easily - but she was willing to play along, and availed herself of the rudimentary bathrooms the state government had constructed out in the middle of nowhere. When she came back to the car, he’d already finished with the facilities himself and was leaning against the hood of the car, waiting for her.
“What did you offer him?”
She stopped a few steps away and cocked her head to the side. Then, deliberately, she closed the remaining distance and reached up. He froze as she cupped his face in her hands and ran her thumbs over his forehead, then his eyes and finally his cheekbones.
“What didn’t I offer him?” she admitted, seemingly unsurprised that he’d come back around to this.
“Tasha,” he began, but she stopped him with a finger over his lips. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched him this much when they weren’t actually having sex or working an undercover op that required it.
“What didn’t I offer him is the better question.”
He reached up and wrapped his hand around her wrist, but didn’t move her fingers away from his face. “You were gathering intel for Fury,” he offered as an out, because Natasha never had a problem telling a mark what he or she wanted to hear.
“He’s called the God of Lies. So I didn’t lie to him. And I wasn’t in there for Fury.”
“You would’ve given over S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
Her eyes shuttered and he realized he was off the mark. She closed off something that had been wide open just a second before and the full truth of the matter nearly brought him to his knees. It might’ve actually done so, if he hadn’t still had the solid metal of the car behind him.
“Tasha…”
“Everything. I would have traded him the world for you. And he knew it.”
The Red.
To her mind, she had just taken the ledger and drowned it in blood, nevermind that she hadn’t needed to follow through. There was nothing that could ever be enough to clean it now.
Which might actually be enough, in her mind, to make them even.
******
The car was too flashy and expensive for either of them to be comfortable stopping at a cheap motel. It would draw attention like a neon sign, and attention was the last thing they needed. By the same token, they didn’t want to go into a major city and run the risk of being recognized from the news feeds, so Clint drove until they found one of the small, sleepy vacation towns that was mostly off the grid but catered to the rich weekend-warriors who wanted a taste of the great outdoors. He had enough cash in his pockets to pay through the weekend, and the old man behind the desk at the cabin office didn’t even so much as look twice at him.
It was another half hour up the mountain to the cabin itself, then a good fifteen minutes scouting out the location and making sure it was safe. Finally, they let themselves in and collapsed side by side on the small couch sitting in the den.
Clint let himself relax into the cushions, and felt the corners of his mouth tip up slightly when Natasha actually curled into his side, even if it did jostle his still-sore back in an unfortunate way. At least until the shaking started and he frowned. It was the only warning sign he’d ever found to indicate that she was about to fall apart. It had only happened a few times before - he could count them on one hand - and every time he’d felt at a loss. How did you handle it when the strongest thing you knew started to break?
Not to mention he was always a little bit afraid this would be the time he wouldn’t get her back.
She didn’t cry or make any noise, just shivered in his arms as if she was freezing and couldn’t stop herself. Except that he’d never actually seen her shiver from real cold. A few minutes in, he braced himself and pulled her completely onto his lap so he could wrap around her more thoroughly. After about half an hour he decided to risk his back and ribs and stood up with her still in his arms, carrying her into the bedroom and setting her down on the bed. As quickly as he could he stripped them both down and pulled her under the covers with him, hoping that the body heat would soothe her.
He couldn’t see her eyes the way they were curled, but he knew what they would look like. They would be blank, staring off at something he couldn’t comprehend. Maybe that was why this had started happening, maybe it came part and parcel with the trust it took for her to fall asleep with him. Because she finally had someone she could trust enough to keep her alive, for just a little while she could let go and let that iron control falter. Again, it was further proof that she still trusted him.
He kept his hands moving lightly over her: hair, shoulder, arm, hip, then back up again, sometimes long strokes, sometimes in gentle circles. She made no indication that she could feel him. He slipped into the space he found when he was tracking a target, and time stopped making sense. They might’ve lay there for minutes, hours - he didn’t know and didn’t care, just waiting until, finally, the shivering subsidded and she started to stir. First her legs, then her arms - she systematically reacquainted herself with all her major muscle groups before turning over in his arms to look at him.
“How long?” she asked softly.
“I haven’t checked yet. The sun’s still up.”
She nodded, and he ran his fingers gently through her hair. “It was better than the last one,” he told her. “You didn’t scream this time.”
“That’s good,” she conceded, and sat up. She pushed the covers away and slipped into the small bathroom. He heard the toilet flush and the water come on and decided he might as well drag himself out of the bed, too.
They’d stopped several exits before the cabins and bought some rudimentary supplies, again in keeping with the weekend warrior theme. Tea, instead of coffee because it was easier to make out in the woods, energy bars, trail mix, as well as a cheap Styrofoam cooler and some sandwich supplies. He’d grabbed a pint of milk and some sugar because he knew that while she liked her coffee black, she preferred to doctor her tea. By the time she was done with her shower, he had a mug steeping next to a plate laden with dried fruit and a ham sandwich and was blowing on his own cup trying to get it to cool down.
“Thank you,” she said evenly, indicating the food with a tilt of her head. She wouldn’t thank him for earlier, and he didn’t expect her to.
“No problem. I’m gonna grab a quick shower myself, then join you.” He set his untouched mug down and headed into the small closet of a bathroom. The toilet was crowded between the sink and a small cubby of a shower, but he’d seen smaller in military facilities. He made quick work of cleaning up because he wasn’t quite ready to leave her alone just yet.
He walked back out into the kitchen with a towel slung around his hips and found a second sandwich set out on another plate. After changing into sweats and a t-shirt, he sat down across from her.
“So what do you think about this whole Avengers thing?”
“Honestly?”
He nodded and started in on his sandwich.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“We’ve known about the Initiative for a long time now.”
She nodded. “We’ve known about what Fury wanted it to be. But this won’t stay under S.H.I.E.L.D. for long, if at all.”
“You think it’ll last?”
“Don’t you?” She wiped her hands on a paper towel and started to clean up the dishes, even though that only meant throwing the disposables away.
“Point,” he conceded, remembering the odd rightness they’d come to, there at the end. “So the next question is, are we in?”
“You mean do we leave S.H.I.E.L.D., if it comes to that?”
“I do.”
She actually snickered and shook her head and he was so thrilled just to see her smile again that it took him a minute to ask her what was so funny.
“Our choices are the most advanced intelligence organization in the world, or a bizarre collection of traumatized ‘freaks and geeks’ with too much power for their own good.”
When she put it that way, he had to smile, too. “Tired of taking orders, Romanov?”
The glint in her eye matched his, and he knew they were on the same wavelength again. “You know they’re going to need us. They might be better at blasting and smashing things, but none of them have a subtle bone in their body. Someone will have to help them figure out what needs destroying in the first place.”
Silence stretched between them for awhile, but it was a comfortable silence. He found the bottle of ibuprofen they’d bought and choked down several, then shook out a dose for her to take. “Do you think you can work with them?”
“You were around them more before the aliens arrived, you tell me.” The couch really was terrible, but the wrenched muscles in his back demanded that he get horizontal, so he complied.
She curled up at on the other end, and their legs tangled together. “If you’d asked me, based on previous experience and their files? No.”
“But…”
“Maybe.”
He let that run around in his head awhile. From her that was tantamount to high praise.
“I could work with them. Rogers in particular, but I could deal with the other three. How do you think it’s gonna play? Do you think they’ll play along with Fury for awhile or go ahead and cut him off at the knees on this one?”
“Depends on how badly he pisses off Stark. He’s the real fulcrum because he’s got the resources to back us and equip us once we’re free of S.H.I.E.L.D. Rogers will balk at it - at first - but he wasn’t to thrilled with the pseudo-Hydra weaponry he found on the carrier.”
“Do you think Coulson’s really dead? Or was that more of Fury’s manipulations?”
Natasha frowned. “I’m not sure. But that’s top of the to-do list when we get back to civilization.”
“Along with cleaning out our bunks?”
“I figured we’d at least wait until Stark invites us over. Or rather, until he invites you over. Me, he still doesn’t trust. But he’ll let you bring me along because I’m pretty, and he knows I’ll be useful.”
“You could be underestimating him, you know.”
“Hardly. I’ve already played him once. He’s not easy to fool twice, he’s got too much history for that.”
“But this time you’re not fooling him, are you?”
“No. But he’ll be cautious.”
“What about Banner? And Thor?”
“Thor considers us comrades in arms, he’ll welcome us, assuming he can ever make it back from Asgard. His default is to trust everyone. Banner…,” her mouth thinned. “I think Banner would follow Stark’s lead, but he doesn’t trust me either. I brought him into this, and he blames me for that. He doesn’t know you that well. And his alter ego is a crap shoot no matter what.”
“He was certainly impressive, that’s for sure. And I have to say I’m damn glad he was on our side.”
“He nearly killed me in the helicarrier.”
“So did I,” Clint said softly.
“Not… no. No, you didn’t. We’re right on the cusp of an even match on our best days, but you were… not on your best form. You were fighting it, fighting him, and that made it harder for you to fight me.”
“I’m not sure I-”
“No.” She cut him off abruptly. “I saw the footage from the New Mexico facility. When was the last time that you missed with a pistol, Clint? At close to medium range?”
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes to think.
“When I was nine?” he ventured. It was a guess, but he knew that it had been when he was a kid.
“You hit Fury in the body armor. You could’ve easily made it a head shot. You fired at several other agents, and missed them. You missed Agent Hill when she was chasing you out of the facility, and she was closer than Fury had been. You were fighting him off, Clint, the best you were able to. Especially at first. I think he got a deeper hold on you the more time went on, but even by the time you got to me you were off. Just a little bit, but it was enough.”
“Is that why you knocked me out instead of killing me?” Doubts were starting to claw at his chest again, and he couldn’t help asking the question even though he didn’t think he wanted to hear the answer.
“I was never trying to kill you. I would have, if I hadn’t had a choice, if you’d really been ‘gone,’ but I was going to try to get you back first. Killing you then wasn’t an option, not for me. That’s why I had to get to you, why it had to be me to take you down. I was pinned down because Banner… the Hulk was chasing me through the ship. Then Thor distracted him, and Fury was radioing that you were aboard, and I pulled it together, because it had to be me.”
He nodded, because he understood. They both knew, because they had discussed it after a particularly bad mission, that if she ever went back, or if he ever went rogue, it would be the other one at the end of the gun, or knife, or bow. It was a different kind of intimacy, perhaps a deeper one than sex could ever offer, and it was just one more of the threads that held them together. Their loyalty wasn't, and would never be, to S.H.I.E.L.D. or to any other government or agency. It was to each other - first, last, always.
Additional Notes: It has been bugging me to no end trying to figure out why Natasha feels compromised and tells Clint as much. I can tell it's Important (and have been watching Whedonesque stuff long enough to see some of his "tells" as it were) but what she's getting at eludes me. This is one possible interpretation. I'll probably have a new one two weeks from now after I see it for a fourth (fifth?) time.