fic: palindromes
AU Exchange gift! Are you excited about this week, 'cause I'm excited :D
Title: Palindromes
Author: inkvoices
A Gift For: sandrasfisher
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: [Spoiler (click to open)]sexy times, f-word swearing, mind games and brainwashing, assassins are assassins, (canon) age difference, off-screen in the past children handcuffed and made to shoot people
Prompt used: Natasha is like Hawkeye and Clint is like the Black Widow
Summary: Isn’t it the same story whichever way you spin it? Tell me again, from the beginning.
Natasha Romanoff, born in America in January of 1971, doesn’t kill the kid who at some point came to be known as Clint Barton, born thirteen years after her in Russia. Instead she brings him in to SHIELD.
Author Notes: Here I’ve swapped our assassins ages, their birth places, and parts of their backgrounds to see what that would change and what would stay the same. I hope you enjoy the result.
Thanks to franztastisch for (very speedy) beta reading and encouraging me to meet the Monday posting challenge.
Palindromes
“Tell me again, from the beginning.”
“Let’s start again,” Natasha says.
In her head, her voice sounds like it is on the interview recording, with a touch of static and made strange by electric distance; the memory of the actual event replaced by the memory of repeated listenings of the recorded version throughout the years, because memory is a strange thing.
“Tell me, from the beginning.”
“I have told you. And I’ve told you that I’m probably telling it wrong.”
Clint sounds so young. She forgets sometimes how young he was back then, mostly because she doesn’t care to remember.
“Again. From the beginning.”
There’s the sound of a clink-scrape; Clint shifting the handcuffs attaching him to the safety ring on the table so that they press into his wrists. It took her so long to understand that habit.
Then Clint says, “I think I was in a circus.”
“Not think,” Natasha interrupts, with no inflection in her tone. “You either believed you were or knew you weren’t. Tell it to me as it was.”
“Fine.” Clint takes a deep breath and releases it slowly. “I was trained in a circus school in Moscow, when Russia was still the USSR. It was an honour. Circus performers were treated like celebrities. They were allowed to travel and had some of the best houses when they retired, as good as the high ups in the Party.”
She remembers that he was exhausted. She can hear it in his voice too, slow and careful, but that doesn’t mean anything; Clint only sounds tired when he means to. Just like there’s never any trace of Russian on his tongue unless he wants there to be.
It took years for Natasha to learn to control her own voice to that degree, and even now on the rare occasions she slips up - which is never on the job because she’s a goddamn professional - it’s accidental. If ever Clint slips it’s always, always deliberate.
“Circus schools turned out performers who were well-rounded in circus arts and as part of graduating we had to create and perform our own act. After, we - the boys - had to serve in the army for two years, in a military entertainment group. If there was a mixed act with girls sometimes they would join us, but they didn’t have to.”
“What was your act?”
“Archery. Trick shots. Shooting an apple off a girl’s head. Hitting a small wooden target tied to her back as she cartwheeled around the ring.”
Natasha is sure he never missed; has always been sure.
“They took me aside,” his voice continues, “before the end of my two years. Offered me sniper training and I knew it wasn’t a choice. So I stayed in the army. Received specialist training.”
Clink-scrape.
“I killed people.”
Natasha first meets Clint when she’s Natalie Rushman.
SHIELD has finally gained useful intel on an international criminal organisation specialising in the weapons trade: that they plan to steal the latest Stark designs by stealing the individual patents and licenced parts, rather than a whole weapon, and assembling it themselves afterwards. Quality and precision of the finished product is not a priority, so long as it resembles a Stark model and goes boom. After all, it’s only going to be sold to third world countries and boom is all that matters there.
Natalie Rushman moves to California and becomes Stark Industries newest legal secretary; a woman who has done reasonably well for herself but likes the finer things in life and is always greedy for more. Nine days later she’s approached by a generic-looking middle-aged man in a business suit whilst she’s on her lunch break, who proceeds to use the promise of money to seduce her into working for his employers by photographing certain patents that come through her department and by checking what licences are being filed.
To Natalie’s annoyance they then send a kid to be her partner in crime and, no doubt, to monitor her loyalty. Clint Barton is that kid. As her contact with the organisation apparently his role requires him to sleep in the spare bedroom at her flat - provided by SHIELD - and watch her constantly when she’s not at work. He relays the information she steals back to their criminal employers and accompanies her on a handful of ‘night visits’ to the office when they decide they also want physical items, like early manufactured parts.
It’s not the first time Natasha has needed to constantly maintain a cover identity and when she’s around Clint it helps that Natalie doesn’t care for smartass quips or boys a decade younger than her anymore than Natasha does.
When he watches her though, it feels like he’s doing it for reasons more than because it’s his job.
So she flirts, because there was a point in Natasha’s life when that became automatic, although she doesn’t like to think about how early in her life that was, and because Natalie likes the cruel game of flirting when she has no intention of following through.
There’s a reason, nearly forty years’ worth, why Natasha doesn’t play the seductress card herself so much on missions anymore. It’s flattering, his eyes on her. And maybe something else, that she’s not comfortable acknowledging.
Clint always looks at her like that.
“Agent Romanoff.” He grins, wearing dried-blood in the form of a healing split lip, bruises painted on his skin, and shadows under his eyes. Fresh from interrogation and processing in a shiny new SHIELD uniform and with all the marks of a recent past that one night’s sleep and a shower can’t wash away. “I hear you’re my babysitter.”
It’s the way he looks at her, like he sees her.
Like he sees something in her that he likes.
“He’s just a kid!”
Director Fury stares her down, without moving from his chair or folding his arms, and it makes Natasha angry that often the moments she respects him the most are the moments when they’re in opposition. But then that’s always how she’s gotten the measure of a man.
“It’s not just his age. He’s naive. A liability. He’s saying he might have been brainwashed, but it’s more likely he’s just been played. Hell, I proved how easy that was to do; that’s how he ended up here in the first place.”
“So what do you recommend?”
“Send him to jail or slap him on the wrist, whatever you need to do, and then turn him loose. This isn’t the life for him.”
“You think there aren’t people already lined up to recruit him if we don’t?” Fury raises his eyebrows. “You said yourself how talented he is. It’s in your report.”
“He’s uncomfortable with killing people,” Natasha says flatly.
“So he’ll get comfortable. He’s a valuable commodity. He’s not leaving this life, as you put it, and you know it.” In an obvious sign of dismissal he pulls a stack of paperwork towards him and picks up a pen. “You know that,” he says again, “because otherwise you’d be developing a plan to work around my decision or overturn it rather than going with this half-assed frontal attack that you knew was doomed to fail. Not your style, Romanoff.”
It isn’t, not for getting things that she wants. Or rather things that she believes she can have.
This is registering disapproval.
Still, “I believe it’s in my file that kids are a trigger for me,” she says, biting off the words, which is both true and a way of saying that if he tries to take disciplinary action over this conversation she’ll ignore it. Because freedom to be herself when she isn’t wearing someone else’s skin is something SHIELD promised her a long time ago.
Fury doesn’t look up from the file in front of him.
“You brought the kid in; you get to babysit.”
“Again. From the beginning.”
It doesn’t take long for Natasha to realise why a kid has been trusted with shadowing and assisting Natalie Rushman on the Stark job.
Clint Barton is far too good for his age at almost everything. His aim is uncanny, his ability to see the long game matches, if not exceeds, that of most strategic SHIELD teams Natasha has worked with, and he’s remarkably disciplined. After seeing him in action once she finds that she trusts him to watch her back on the job without a second thought, which is terrifying.
Outside of the job he talks too much, is loose-limbed sprawls and bandaged mistakes, and she’d like to say that it’s just youth but Natasha remembers her early days in SHIELD. Remembers what it was like to be given freedom; of expression, of self. Remembers letting things outside of the job slide, just because. Just to see.
She makes a few discreet enquiries whilst he’s busy talking with their employers. Files a report with SHIELD when he’s in the bathroom. Comes to realise that Clint is Keaton is Kliment is Koldan is Kolmogrorov is Kolya is the infamous Hawkeye.
And is given a termination order.
Which she fails to execute.
“Do you expect SHIELD to believe your story?”
“I can’t change the truth.”
“The truth isn’t all things to all people all of the time,” Natasha hears herself say.
“Spoken like the real spy in the room,” Clint replies, showing honest amusement.
Over time, the more Natasha hears that line the fonder and less irritated she feels.
“So you’re not a spy?”
“You think I’m working for someone else? Who sent me to work undercover with arms dealers and then let me get caught? I’m on my own.”
She remembers how he went to spread his arms wide to illustrate the sentiment and didn’t flinch when the movement was aborted by the embrace of the handcuffs.
“You don’t think we’re good enough to catch you without your employers ‘letting us’? But you were caught so easily this time,” she taunts him. “Tell me, how did you manage to escape from the people you say were your previous captors?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even though they were so successful at this brainwashing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe… I took a knock to the head.”
“That simple?” She sounds cruel to her own ears. “Suddenly everything just became clear?”
“They said I was part of one of the programmes to make a perfect solider. Because America had made a Captain and we were always fighting to keep up, another kind of arms race. There was training in ways to kill and blending in. Extracting information. How to be still. And I thought that was just how the army was, but… And then there were other things.”
Clink-scape of the cuffs.
“I don’t know,” he says, yet again. “I started seeing things that didn’t fit. I remembered killing a man with a gun, but when I wasn’t old enough to have been in the army yet and I never touched a gun before that. I remember waking up in a dormitory and maybe the faces are the same as they were in school, but I’m handcuffed to the bed. All of us are. Why would anyone do that?”
He never sounds like he knows the answer to his own questions. Which is unfortunately why there are so many of these recordings and why they last so long, although Natasha only interrogated Clint the once. The rest of the time she was busy making up for bringing him in in the first place.
“So you ran away. To America, the land of opportunity.” A pause. “To kill for a different criminal group, who could pay you better.”
“No.” He’d clenched his hands into fists and Natasha had thought she was finally getting somewhere. “It wasn’t like that. I was… Someone asked me to help.”
“See, we know things, Hawkeye. We know your reputation. And you say that you did what you did because someone played with your head?”
The first time she takes him down on the mats is satisfying.
So is every time after.
He’s always smiling when he gets to his feet, even bruised and bleeding. Always coming back for more.
Cocky little fuck.
There’s the time he shows up on her doorstep bleeding, which is admittedly like lots of other times, but this time he has a kid with him. Kate Bishop is even younger than Clint Barton, a rich kid with do-good intentions and a history of excelling in an archery club at some posh school, and Natasha honestly cannot work out what she’s doing on Natasha’s sofa sipping a coke and picking at the edges of the Band-Aids Natasha has doctored her arms with.
“What the hell, Clint?” she hisses, dragging him to the relative privacy of the kitchen area, for once hating that she has an open plan apartment where the only enclosed space large enough for the two of them to talk would be the bedroom.
She’s not taking this into the bedroom. The bedroom would be an exceedingly bad plan.
“She needed help,” says Clint.
There’s a pattern to it. Later he rescues a dog from the fucking Russian mob and that’s a riot of fun and laughter.
At least he doesn’t teach the dog how to shoot and team up with it for crazy do-good adventures.
Natasha gets it. She does. Back in the day she’d gone at it alone, trying to wipe the red from her ledger, but she’s grown past that, seen the futility of it. It’s all well and good to do good where you can, to solve problems where you come across them, but actively seek them out and there’ll never be an end to it. You drown or burn up, and then what use are you?
She’d have thought Clint would understand that, what with the Russian Communist pull-together-comrades thing, but he’s too used to pushing his own limits, further and better. The circus mentality was one of striving for perfection and Soviet propaganda preached the impossible was do-able.
The USSR, Natasha points out, collapsed. And housed such delights as the Red Room.
“I don’t like handcuffs.”
“Really?”
It’s after one of those missions where they pretend to be captured to infiltrate a facility and the way Clint handles being in handcuffs makes Natasha sceptical of this statement.
“I can’t help how I am when I’m wearing them,” Clint tells her, “but that’s not the same thing.”
Things she learns about Clint Barton:
Clint always puts other people’s safety and wellbeing before his own. Natasha thinks that’s why it didn’t work out between him and Bobbi, because Clint never let Bobbi look after him in return. Natasha, on the other hand, is the one who’s apartment he turns up at when he’s falling apart.
He hates hospitals and medical care. Once she forced him to go to a SHIELD triage centre, went with him, joked about holding his hand and then actually did, and god, the look on his face and how he couldn’t keep still. He hates it. They struck a deal after: Natasha will only force him to seek professional care when he really, absolutely needs it as long as the rest of the time he comes to her to be patched up and tells her when it really is bad. Because she needs to know he’s okay.
(She might have refreshed her basic First Aid training and signed up for a few advanced courses. She likes to have extra things on her file, to contribute to future promotions and pay rises.)
Whatever was done to him, from what Clint has said and from her own research, Natasha has come to suspect it was done by someone associated with, or at least very familiar with the psychological methods of, something called the Red Room.
Whatever was done messed with how he deals with pain, because no matter how injured Clint is he keeps going. Either he doesn’t feel it as much as other people or has been trained at some point not to care.
On his last mission for the Russians his hearing was damaged, meaning these days he needs an aid for his left ear to be mission worthy. He tells her one time, in a quiet confessional, that however much he’d started thinking that what he doing was wrong - that he was being used, that things weren’t right - it was the fear of being less than the perfect solider and, as such, disposable that finally made him run. As if wanting to survive is something to be guilty about.
He tells her one time that he used to have a brother.
“Tell me.”
Budapest.
They don’t talk about Budapest.
Natasha’s not sure what words would escape from between her lips if she ever tried to. There are days when she feels like she took the worst kind of advantage, fucking a kid who she was meant to be training; a baby Agent, who SHIELD wasn’t even sure had gotten over whatever was done to him before.
Then there are the days where she can’t bring herself to care.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps at him once.
“Are you waiting for me to grow up?”
He’s tossing a tennis ball back and forth, then bouncing it off a tree trunk, the back of the park bench where she’s sitting, throwing it high into the air. Lucky, wise to Clint’s tricks, is patiently waiting for the ball to go somewhere he can actually chase it.
“Because how old will be old enough, Natasha? I know what I’m doing, I know what I want, and I don’t see what age has to do with that. But if that’s not enough for you, I’m not waiting around here. There’s no point in surviving if you don’t get on with living.”
He throws the ball. High and arching towards the sky.
Lucky races after it.
“But I’m always going to look at you like that.”
Things Natasha tells Clint:
She used to have ballet lessons when she was little.
Her life went to hell when her parents died in a car crash. Because her father was drunk. Again.
There were one too many foster homes that were like home had been. Or worse. And in the end she ran away from the orphanage.
No one came looking for her. No one likes the little monster girls. Except the people who do.
She was used and abused, but she learned things. Enough that was recruited by an alphabet agency before she was legally old enough for a paycheck.
And eventually she ended up in SHIELD.
Natasha doesn’t talk much about her past, but she’s never able to be less than conscious of it. Her present has been built on those foundations, brick by careful brick until she constructed a solid place to stand.
Clint doesn’t talk much about his past because he’s always moving towards the future. He’s running away from and running away to and always, always trying to be better.
Natasha researches the Russian super solider programmes and military experiments, the Red Room and the Winter Solider, the history books and the SHIELD files and the black books. She checks who SHIELD has killed, recommends further terminations, volunteers. Never tells Clint.
She researches the history of the circus in Russia and the Soviet investment in it, spends hours hunting down old photographs and watching archival footage, all to show Clint one frozen image on a computer screen from a fifteen second video clip.
He reaches out to trace it with the tips of his fingers; two small boys in white t-shirts and black shorts, wide smiles and bruised knees, arms around shoulders.
“That’s you,” says Natasha, unnecessary but it breaks the silence. “In the Moscow Circus School.”
“And my brother,” says Clint quietly. He lowers his hand but doesn’t look away, his eyes drinking it in. “Where did you find this? Is it in my SHIELD file?”
“No. I just.” Natasha clears her throat. “Went looking for you.”
“I’m thirteen years older than you,” she says, the words sharp like they’ve been formed by her teeth instead of lips and tongue. “I’m physically not going to be able to run around doing this for as long as you will. And the seductress role? Not really one I can play anymore.”
“You’re more than that,” he protests.
“Yes,” says Natasha, cutting him off, “I am, but it’s another thing I have to consider, because this is the world we live in.”
“You’d hate a desk job.”
She would.
Bobbi Morse is closer to Clint’s age than Natasha’s, smart and skilled, not entirely settled in her own skin yet but confident in how she wears it, and she has this way of watching Clint’s rear as her walks by that Natasha can appreciate.
If Natasha doesn’t encourage anything she doesn’t discourage anything either.
“Tell me about Agent Barton.”
“The meeting with Polinski is at zero seven hundred for handover.” Agent Stoppard is Natasha’s SHIELD contact for the Stark mission, a calm presence at the other end of the comms. “You deliver the real design plans. Agents Lang and Morris will follow him from the meeting point, Chevrolet with licence plate six tango sierra whisky one one five. The meeting between Polinski and the second-tier members of the organisation is set for ten hundred hours. Command wants them to have the actual design plans there when they raid at ten fifteen.”
“Copy.”
She’s heard it before, but this is the last check in before mission completion and it’s standard to have a refresh.
“Terminate window for codename Hawkeye begins once Polinski has exited the meeting with the documents. Method and timing at your discretion, but if possible don’t be the last person seen with codename Hawkeye before removal and Op Support requests as neat as possible.”
“As always.”
“Extraction required?”
“Negative.”
Natasha doesn’t need a one-person extraction because she plans to walk away from this mission with Clint beside her rather than encased in a body bag. Not that SHIELD or Clint are aware of this yet.
At least Op Support will be pleased; no dead bodies means far easier clean up for them.
“Why?”
It’s towards the end of the interrogation when Clint asks.
“I’m pretty sure once SHIELD figured out who I am they ordered you to kill me. So why didn’t you?”
“I’m the one asking the questions,” Natasha reminds him firmly.
She was younger herself back then, with limited experience in these kinds of sessions. Usually when she was trying to get answers from a subject she was undercover and they had no idea of the game going on. With the benefit of hindsight and more years behind her, Natasha can see how this response was a mistake.
“What, I don’t get a turn?”
“We were talking about your time in America.”
She’d tried to get him back on track, but Clint had looked her in the eyes and grinned, bright and carefree and nothing to lose.
“You know how difficult it is to find someone who doesn’t kill in our profession? Why didn’t you kill me?” he repeats, and then keeps going, aim and rapid fire. “Why did you bring me to SHIELD? Why didn’t you ask me if I even wanted to be turned over to SHIELD? Did you ask them? What kind of a recruitment pitch is this? Is this really your way of doing things, Natalie? Is that even your real name?”
The scrape of a chair moving back as someone - Natasha - stands.
“You lost your right to ask questions.”
“Actually,” Clint says, “I recently discovered an ability to ask them and I’ve been trying to develop it.”
They arrive at the safe house high on adrenalin. Natasha can feel it thrumming through her veins, stopping her from feeling anything else. Like the through-and-through bullet wound in her leg wrapped tightly with torn clothing, the bruises she can see on her bare arms and the cuts through her torn tank top, the tourist disguise having offered little in the way of protection.
The safe house isn’t the worst she’s been in, but it’s basic. It’s a concrete floor one room with a shower and toilet behind a plastic curtain, a bookcase filled with tins, cereal, and other sealed food stuffs, and a plastic storage box with such exciting items as a tin opener, cheap toiletries, a more expensive and well-stocked first aid kit, towels, and a sleeping bag.
Clint grabs the first aid kit and slings his arm around her waist to help her to the shower, which is as much to support her as it is to steady him when he’s still somewhat dizzy and uncoordinated from the explosion.
One of the explosions.
He starts undressing her with gentle hands under the spray, bare-chested, his t-shirt in strips around her leg and his own wounds reopening thanks to the water.
“Is this okay?” he asks, arms around her, pausing at the clasp of her bra, and Natasha leans forward just enough to press her lips against his, because fuck it. She’s not a saint.
The bra falls to the wet floor, but he pulls back. Ghosts his hands down her sides. Slips his fingers just beneath the elastic of her last item of clothing. Looking at her the way he always looks at her.
“Is this okay?” he asks again and she loves that he asks.
He fucks her with open-mouthed kisses and eager hands, eyes open and smile wide, with here? and is this good? and tell me what you like. He fucks her with fingers first, because now is not the time for soft however much she wants to test his tongue. Then he fucks her against the wall, blood and water circling the drain at their feet.
Budapest.
They don’t talk about it.
Apart from the one time a few weeks later, when Medical has declared them all healed up and they have takeout to celebrate. They curl up on the sofa with empty cardboard containers on the floor and the television a soft buzz in the background. Natasha lets her head drift onto Clint’s shoulder, warm with the reassuring rise and fall of his breathing.
He places a hand high on her thigh, deliberate, his thumb sketching small circles she can feel through her sweatpants, and asks, “Is this okay?”
And Natasha tells him, “No.”
Sometimes she imagines laying him out on her bed. On the duvet cover that’s in his favourite colour and she pretends she doesn’t own, with strips of moonlight shining onto his skin through the slats of the almost closed blinds. On rumpled sheets in the morning with breakfast and he could get as many crumbs in her bed as he liked, who cares, they’d need to wash the sheets anyway.
It’s a harmless fantasy.
She’s a professional. She’s not going to fuck up on the job because she daydreams about making love to her partner.
“Tell me about Agent Barton.”
She does.
Then she removes a man’s eyeball in Germany.
Then she infiltrates the Helicarrier.
She becomes someone else. Walks through security. Sets a timed detonation near one engine. Heads to the control room to sabotage the rest whilst distracted Agents flock to the damaged engine.
She’s always excelled at breaking things.
“Tasha,” Clint says, “you’re going to be alright.”
Because it’s him saying it she almost believes it.
“You know that? Is that what you know?”
There’s the taste of blood in her mouth and restraints holding her down. She feels like she’s been screwed up small for a long, long time and now she’s free to unfurl but she doesn’t know how far is safe, can’t remember her limits or find her own edges.
“You’ve got to level out. It’s going to take time.”
She watches him pour a glass of water to give himself something to do, his eyes constantly darting back to the padded cuffs around her wrists.
“Really? Just like that.” Natasha swallows down a laugh that could be the start of breaking but she won’t let it be. “He took out my brain and played. Poured something else in. Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”
Clint turns to look at her, one side of his mouth curving up into a self-mocking smirk.
“You know that I do.”
She stops pulling against the restraints and stills.
There. There’s an edge.
“I know,” she tells him quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? For not believing me?” He starts undoing the handcuffs like he’s hardly been able to wait to get them off her. “Hell, brainwashing, who would? It doesn’t matter. The fact you took a chance on me when you thought I hadn’t had my head messed with, that it was all me, that more than makes up for it.”
Clint watches as she sits up, hands her the glass of water, and perches on the medical bed next to her, thigh warm where it presses against hers.
She drains half the glass before asking, “How did you get him out?”
Clint smirks again, all of his mouth in on it this time.
“Concussive arrow.”
He hates those, she knows. That’s how he damaged his hearing, detonating one too close to help someone else even though that meant hurting himself.
“Thank you,” is all she can say. She sips at the water. “He’s got to be stopped. I need to… I can stop him.”
“Well, I for one would sleep better if I put an arrow through Loki’s eye socket,” he says, leaning back against the wall.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Natasha tightens her grip on the glass, cool against her palms.
“Joke about killing Loki when what you mean is that you want to stop him killing other people.”
“Hey.” He nudges her gently with his elbow. “Sometimes stopping and killing have to be the same thing.”
Natasha turns her head to glare at him.
“I did believe you.”
“What?”
Clint’s face develops the blank look that he gets those times he’s uncertain what expression he should be wearing and so wears none at all.
“I didn’t know if it was brainwashing or psychological mind games or just manipulation, the way people can turn others into things to be used, especially kids. I know how that works. But I did believe you.”
“Then what are you sorry for?”
She lets her eyes slide away from his and feels him tense up.
“You know how difficult it is to find someone who finds killing uncomfortable in our profession? I’m sorry for thinking that not wanting to kill people, and wanting to help people, and putting yourself at risk for that, was you being young and naive and not just part of you. For thinking there were things you would grow out of. For all the times I ever treated you like I was your babysitter instead of your partner.”
“Tasha.”
“No.” She gets to her feet and deposits the glass by the water jug, still not looking at him. “Loki. We’ve got to stop him.”
“Okay.”
Natasha hears him getting up and finally turns to face him, folding her arms and letting determination straighten her spine.
“And then after. You want to get a coffee?”
“Coffee,” Clint repeats, blinking.
“Coffee, alcohol, food, whatever,” she bites out impatiently. “With me.”
“Yeah?”
The corners of his mouth curve upwards into a smile and then Clint is looking at her like he always has.
Natasha knows that look on his face and what it means, something she’s never been able to describe because she’s never been able to acknowledge it. She wants to learn how to be comfortable with being looked at like that, without ever taking it for granted. She wants him to feel like he can look at her however he likes, whenever he likes. She wants to look back. She wants to fuck him against a wall right now and every day if he’ll let her, and after spread him out on her sheets.
She lets her arms fall to her sides and steps closer, close enough that she has to tilt her head back slightly to still meet Clint’s eyes. Close enough that when he inhales she can feel it.
He doesn’t back away.
“Ask me if this is okay,” she says. “Ask me again.”
Further Author Notes, for those interested:
I have, for the MCU, Clint’s birthday the same as Renner’s (January 7th 1971) and Natasha’s the same as Johansson’s (November 22nd 1984).
I picked alias names for Clint based on their meanings (which were gleaned off the internet and so are hopefully correct), Clint of course being an American alias itself in this story:
Clinton - settlement near the headland (English)
Keaton - where hawks fly (English)
Kliment - gentle and merciful (Russian)
Koldan - sting (Russian)
Kolmogorov - hill (Russian)
Kolya - pet form of Nickolai meaning victor of the people (Russian)
It’s possible that a Clint born in 1984 could still be in circus school before the USSR collapsed - they started young - but I admit I may be pushing it a bit.
Have a link to part one of a documentary from 1988 called Inside The Soviet State Circus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl_Nt2vMAo4
And a clip of kids in circus school in Moscow 1968, perhaps similar to the clip Natasha found Clint in: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/circus-school-in-moscow
Title: Palindromes
Author: inkvoices
A Gift For: sandrasfisher
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: [Spoiler (click to open)]sexy times, f-word swearing, mind games and brainwashing, assassins are assassins, (canon) age difference, off-screen in the past children handcuffed and made to shoot people
Prompt used: Natasha is like Hawkeye and Clint is like the Black Widow
Summary: Isn’t it the same story whichever way you spin it? Tell me again, from the beginning.
Natasha Romanoff, born in America in January of 1971, doesn’t kill the kid who at some point came to be known as Clint Barton, born thirteen years after her in Russia. Instead she brings him in to SHIELD.
Author Notes: Here I’ve swapped our assassins ages, their birth places, and parts of their backgrounds to see what that would change and what would stay the same. I hope you enjoy the result.
Thanks to franztastisch for (very speedy) beta reading and encouraging me to meet the Monday posting challenge.
Palindromes
“Tell me again, from the beginning.”
“Let’s start again,” Natasha says.
In her head, her voice sounds like it is on the interview recording, with a touch of static and made strange by electric distance; the memory of the actual event replaced by the memory of repeated listenings of the recorded version throughout the years, because memory is a strange thing.
“Tell me, from the beginning.”
“I have told you. And I’ve told you that I’m probably telling it wrong.”
Clint sounds so young. She forgets sometimes how young he was back then, mostly because she doesn’t care to remember.
“Again. From the beginning.”
There’s the sound of a clink-scrape; Clint shifting the handcuffs attaching him to the safety ring on the table so that they press into his wrists. It took her so long to understand that habit.
Then Clint says, “I think I was in a circus.”
“Not think,” Natasha interrupts, with no inflection in her tone. “You either believed you were or knew you weren’t. Tell it to me as it was.”
“Fine.” Clint takes a deep breath and releases it slowly. “I was trained in a circus school in Moscow, when Russia was still the USSR. It was an honour. Circus performers were treated like celebrities. They were allowed to travel and had some of the best houses when they retired, as good as the high ups in the Party.”
She remembers that he was exhausted. She can hear it in his voice too, slow and careful, but that doesn’t mean anything; Clint only sounds tired when he means to. Just like there’s never any trace of Russian on his tongue unless he wants there to be.
It took years for Natasha to learn to control her own voice to that degree, and even now on the rare occasions she slips up - which is never on the job because she’s a goddamn professional - it’s accidental. If ever Clint slips it’s always, always deliberate.
“Circus schools turned out performers who were well-rounded in circus arts and as part of graduating we had to create and perform our own act. After, we - the boys - had to serve in the army for two years, in a military entertainment group. If there was a mixed act with girls sometimes they would join us, but they didn’t have to.”
“What was your act?”
“Archery. Trick shots. Shooting an apple off a girl’s head. Hitting a small wooden target tied to her back as she cartwheeled around the ring.”
Natasha is sure he never missed; has always been sure.
“They took me aside,” his voice continues, “before the end of my two years. Offered me sniper training and I knew it wasn’t a choice. So I stayed in the army. Received specialist training.”
Clink-scrape.
“I killed people.”
Natasha first meets Clint when she’s Natalie Rushman.
SHIELD has finally gained useful intel on an international criminal organisation specialising in the weapons trade: that they plan to steal the latest Stark designs by stealing the individual patents and licenced parts, rather than a whole weapon, and assembling it themselves afterwards. Quality and precision of the finished product is not a priority, so long as it resembles a Stark model and goes boom. After all, it’s only going to be sold to third world countries and boom is all that matters there.
Natalie Rushman moves to California and becomes Stark Industries newest legal secretary; a woman who has done reasonably well for herself but likes the finer things in life and is always greedy for more. Nine days later she’s approached by a generic-looking middle-aged man in a business suit whilst she’s on her lunch break, who proceeds to use the promise of money to seduce her into working for his employers by photographing certain patents that come through her department and by checking what licences are being filed.
To Natalie’s annoyance they then send a kid to be her partner in crime and, no doubt, to monitor her loyalty. Clint Barton is that kid. As her contact with the organisation apparently his role requires him to sleep in the spare bedroom at her flat - provided by SHIELD - and watch her constantly when she’s not at work. He relays the information she steals back to their criminal employers and accompanies her on a handful of ‘night visits’ to the office when they decide they also want physical items, like early manufactured parts.
It’s not the first time Natasha has needed to constantly maintain a cover identity and when she’s around Clint it helps that Natalie doesn’t care for smartass quips or boys a decade younger than her anymore than Natasha does.
When he watches her though, it feels like he’s doing it for reasons more than because it’s his job.
So she flirts, because there was a point in Natasha’s life when that became automatic, although she doesn’t like to think about how early in her life that was, and because Natalie likes the cruel game of flirting when she has no intention of following through.
There’s a reason, nearly forty years’ worth, why Natasha doesn’t play the seductress card herself so much on missions anymore. It’s flattering, his eyes on her. And maybe something else, that she’s not comfortable acknowledging.
Clint always looks at her like that.
“Agent Romanoff.” He grins, wearing dried-blood in the form of a healing split lip, bruises painted on his skin, and shadows under his eyes. Fresh from interrogation and processing in a shiny new SHIELD uniform and with all the marks of a recent past that one night’s sleep and a shower can’t wash away. “I hear you’re my babysitter.”
It’s the way he looks at her, like he sees her.
Like he sees something in her that he likes.
“He’s just a kid!”
Director Fury stares her down, without moving from his chair or folding his arms, and it makes Natasha angry that often the moments she respects him the most are the moments when they’re in opposition. But then that’s always how she’s gotten the measure of a man.
“It’s not just his age. He’s naive. A liability. He’s saying he might have been brainwashed, but it’s more likely he’s just been played. Hell, I proved how easy that was to do; that’s how he ended up here in the first place.”
“So what do you recommend?”
“Send him to jail or slap him on the wrist, whatever you need to do, and then turn him loose. This isn’t the life for him.”
“You think there aren’t people already lined up to recruit him if we don’t?” Fury raises his eyebrows. “You said yourself how talented he is. It’s in your report.”
“He’s uncomfortable with killing people,” Natasha says flatly.
“So he’ll get comfortable. He’s a valuable commodity. He’s not leaving this life, as you put it, and you know it.” In an obvious sign of dismissal he pulls a stack of paperwork towards him and picks up a pen. “You know that,” he says again, “because otherwise you’d be developing a plan to work around my decision or overturn it rather than going with this half-assed frontal attack that you knew was doomed to fail. Not your style, Romanoff.”
It isn’t, not for getting things that she wants. Or rather things that she believes she can have.
This is registering disapproval.
Still, “I believe it’s in my file that kids are a trigger for me,” she says, biting off the words, which is both true and a way of saying that if he tries to take disciplinary action over this conversation she’ll ignore it. Because freedom to be herself when she isn’t wearing someone else’s skin is something SHIELD promised her a long time ago.
Fury doesn’t look up from the file in front of him.
“You brought the kid in; you get to babysit.”
“Again. From the beginning.”
It doesn’t take long for Natasha to realise why a kid has been trusted with shadowing and assisting Natalie Rushman on the Stark job.
Clint Barton is far too good for his age at almost everything. His aim is uncanny, his ability to see the long game matches, if not exceeds, that of most strategic SHIELD teams Natasha has worked with, and he’s remarkably disciplined. After seeing him in action once she finds that she trusts him to watch her back on the job without a second thought, which is terrifying.
Outside of the job he talks too much, is loose-limbed sprawls and bandaged mistakes, and she’d like to say that it’s just youth but Natasha remembers her early days in SHIELD. Remembers what it was like to be given freedom; of expression, of self. Remembers letting things outside of the job slide, just because. Just to see.
She makes a few discreet enquiries whilst he’s busy talking with their employers. Files a report with SHIELD when he’s in the bathroom. Comes to realise that Clint is Keaton is Kliment is Koldan is Kolmogrorov is Kolya is the infamous Hawkeye.
And is given a termination order.
Which she fails to execute.
“Do you expect SHIELD to believe your story?”
“I can’t change the truth.”
“The truth isn’t all things to all people all of the time,” Natasha hears herself say.
“Spoken like the real spy in the room,” Clint replies, showing honest amusement.
Over time, the more Natasha hears that line the fonder and less irritated she feels.
“So you’re not a spy?”
“You think I’m working for someone else? Who sent me to work undercover with arms dealers and then let me get caught? I’m on my own.”
She remembers how he went to spread his arms wide to illustrate the sentiment and didn’t flinch when the movement was aborted by the embrace of the handcuffs.
“You don’t think we’re good enough to catch you without your employers ‘letting us’? But you were caught so easily this time,” she taunts him. “Tell me, how did you manage to escape from the people you say were your previous captors?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even though they were so successful at this brainwashing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe… I took a knock to the head.”
“That simple?” She sounds cruel to her own ears. “Suddenly everything just became clear?”
“They said I was part of one of the programmes to make a perfect solider. Because America had made a Captain and we were always fighting to keep up, another kind of arms race. There was training in ways to kill and blending in. Extracting information. How to be still. And I thought that was just how the army was, but… And then there were other things.”
Clink-scape of the cuffs.
“I don’t know,” he says, yet again. “I started seeing things that didn’t fit. I remembered killing a man with a gun, but when I wasn’t old enough to have been in the army yet and I never touched a gun before that. I remember waking up in a dormitory and maybe the faces are the same as they were in school, but I’m handcuffed to the bed. All of us are. Why would anyone do that?”
He never sounds like he knows the answer to his own questions. Which is unfortunately why there are so many of these recordings and why they last so long, although Natasha only interrogated Clint the once. The rest of the time she was busy making up for bringing him in in the first place.
“So you ran away. To America, the land of opportunity.” A pause. “To kill for a different criminal group, who could pay you better.”
“No.” He’d clenched his hands into fists and Natasha had thought she was finally getting somewhere. “It wasn’t like that. I was… Someone asked me to help.”
“See, we know things, Hawkeye. We know your reputation. And you say that you did what you did because someone played with your head?”
The first time she takes him down on the mats is satisfying.
So is every time after.
He’s always smiling when he gets to his feet, even bruised and bleeding. Always coming back for more.
Cocky little fuck.
There’s the time he shows up on her doorstep bleeding, which is admittedly like lots of other times, but this time he has a kid with him. Kate Bishop is even younger than Clint Barton, a rich kid with do-good intentions and a history of excelling in an archery club at some posh school, and Natasha honestly cannot work out what she’s doing on Natasha’s sofa sipping a coke and picking at the edges of the Band-Aids Natasha has doctored her arms with.
“What the hell, Clint?” she hisses, dragging him to the relative privacy of the kitchen area, for once hating that she has an open plan apartment where the only enclosed space large enough for the two of them to talk would be the bedroom.
She’s not taking this into the bedroom. The bedroom would be an exceedingly bad plan.
“She needed help,” says Clint.
There’s a pattern to it. Later he rescues a dog from the fucking Russian mob and that’s a riot of fun and laughter.
At least he doesn’t teach the dog how to shoot and team up with it for crazy do-good adventures.
Natasha gets it. She does. Back in the day she’d gone at it alone, trying to wipe the red from her ledger, but she’s grown past that, seen the futility of it. It’s all well and good to do good where you can, to solve problems where you come across them, but actively seek them out and there’ll never be an end to it. You drown or burn up, and then what use are you?
She’d have thought Clint would understand that, what with the Russian Communist pull-together-comrades thing, but he’s too used to pushing his own limits, further and better. The circus mentality was one of striving for perfection and Soviet propaganda preached the impossible was do-able.
The USSR, Natasha points out, collapsed. And housed such delights as the Red Room.
“I don’t like handcuffs.”
“Really?”
It’s after one of those missions where they pretend to be captured to infiltrate a facility and the way Clint handles being in handcuffs makes Natasha sceptical of this statement.
“I can’t help how I am when I’m wearing them,” Clint tells her, “but that’s not the same thing.”
Things she learns about Clint Barton:
Clint always puts other people’s safety and wellbeing before his own. Natasha thinks that’s why it didn’t work out between him and Bobbi, because Clint never let Bobbi look after him in return. Natasha, on the other hand, is the one who’s apartment he turns up at when he’s falling apart.
He hates hospitals and medical care. Once she forced him to go to a SHIELD triage centre, went with him, joked about holding his hand and then actually did, and god, the look on his face and how he couldn’t keep still. He hates it. They struck a deal after: Natasha will only force him to seek professional care when he really, absolutely needs it as long as the rest of the time he comes to her to be patched up and tells her when it really is bad. Because she needs to know he’s okay.
(She might have refreshed her basic First Aid training and signed up for a few advanced courses. She likes to have extra things on her file, to contribute to future promotions and pay rises.)
Whatever was done to him, from what Clint has said and from her own research, Natasha has come to suspect it was done by someone associated with, or at least very familiar with the psychological methods of, something called the Red Room.
Whatever was done messed with how he deals with pain, because no matter how injured Clint is he keeps going. Either he doesn’t feel it as much as other people or has been trained at some point not to care.
On his last mission for the Russians his hearing was damaged, meaning these days he needs an aid for his left ear to be mission worthy. He tells her one time, in a quiet confessional, that however much he’d started thinking that what he doing was wrong - that he was being used, that things weren’t right - it was the fear of being less than the perfect solider and, as such, disposable that finally made him run. As if wanting to survive is something to be guilty about.
He tells her one time that he used to have a brother.
“Tell me.”
Budapest.
They don’t talk about Budapest.
Natasha’s not sure what words would escape from between her lips if she ever tried to. There are days when she feels like she took the worst kind of advantage, fucking a kid who she was meant to be training; a baby Agent, who SHIELD wasn’t even sure had gotten over whatever was done to him before.
Then there are the days where she can’t bring herself to care.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps at him once.
“Are you waiting for me to grow up?”
He’s tossing a tennis ball back and forth, then bouncing it off a tree trunk, the back of the park bench where she’s sitting, throwing it high into the air. Lucky, wise to Clint’s tricks, is patiently waiting for the ball to go somewhere he can actually chase it.
“Because how old will be old enough, Natasha? I know what I’m doing, I know what I want, and I don’t see what age has to do with that. But if that’s not enough for you, I’m not waiting around here. There’s no point in surviving if you don’t get on with living.”
He throws the ball. High and arching towards the sky.
Lucky races after it.
“But I’m always going to look at you like that.”
Things Natasha tells Clint:
She used to have ballet lessons when she was little.
Her life went to hell when her parents died in a car crash. Because her father was drunk. Again.
There were one too many foster homes that were like home had been. Or worse. And in the end she ran away from the orphanage.
No one came looking for her. No one likes the little monster girls. Except the people who do.
She was used and abused, but she learned things. Enough that was recruited by an alphabet agency before she was legally old enough for a paycheck.
And eventually she ended up in SHIELD.
Natasha doesn’t talk much about her past, but she’s never able to be less than conscious of it. Her present has been built on those foundations, brick by careful brick until she constructed a solid place to stand.
Clint doesn’t talk much about his past because he’s always moving towards the future. He’s running away from and running away to and always, always trying to be better.
Natasha researches the Russian super solider programmes and military experiments, the Red Room and the Winter Solider, the history books and the SHIELD files and the black books. She checks who SHIELD has killed, recommends further terminations, volunteers. Never tells Clint.
She researches the history of the circus in Russia and the Soviet investment in it, spends hours hunting down old photographs and watching archival footage, all to show Clint one frozen image on a computer screen from a fifteen second video clip.
He reaches out to trace it with the tips of his fingers; two small boys in white t-shirts and black shorts, wide smiles and bruised knees, arms around shoulders.
“That’s you,” says Natasha, unnecessary but it breaks the silence. “In the Moscow Circus School.”
“And my brother,” says Clint quietly. He lowers his hand but doesn’t look away, his eyes drinking it in. “Where did you find this? Is it in my SHIELD file?”
“No. I just.” Natasha clears her throat. “Went looking for you.”
“I’m thirteen years older than you,” she says, the words sharp like they’ve been formed by her teeth instead of lips and tongue. “I’m physically not going to be able to run around doing this for as long as you will. And the seductress role? Not really one I can play anymore.”
“You’re more than that,” he protests.
“Yes,” says Natasha, cutting him off, “I am, but it’s another thing I have to consider, because this is the world we live in.”
“You’d hate a desk job.”
She would.
Bobbi Morse is closer to Clint’s age than Natasha’s, smart and skilled, not entirely settled in her own skin yet but confident in how she wears it, and she has this way of watching Clint’s rear as her walks by that Natasha can appreciate.
If Natasha doesn’t encourage anything she doesn’t discourage anything either.
“Tell me about Agent Barton.”
“The meeting with Polinski is at zero seven hundred for handover.” Agent Stoppard is Natasha’s SHIELD contact for the Stark mission, a calm presence at the other end of the comms. “You deliver the real design plans. Agents Lang and Morris will follow him from the meeting point, Chevrolet with licence plate six tango sierra whisky one one five. The meeting between Polinski and the second-tier members of the organisation is set for ten hundred hours. Command wants them to have the actual design plans there when they raid at ten fifteen.”
“Copy.”
She’s heard it before, but this is the last check in before mission completion and it’s standard to have a refresh.
“Terminate window for codename Hawkeye begins once Polinski has exited the meeting with the documents. Method and timing at your discretion, but if possible don’t be the last person seen with codename Hawkeye before removal and Op Support requests as neat as possible.”
“As always.”
“Extraction required?”
“Negative.”
Natasha doesn’t need a one-person extraction because she plans to walk away from this mission with Clint beside her rather than encased in a body bag. Not that SHIELD or Clint are aware of this yet.
At least Op Support will be pleased; no dead bodies means far easier clean up for them.
“Why?”
It’s towards the end of the interrogation when Clint asks.
“I’m pretty sure once SHIELD figured out who I am they ordered you to kill me. So why didn’t you?”
“I’m the one asking the questions,” Natasha reminds him firmly.
She was younger herself back then, with limited experience in these kinds of sessions. Usually when she was trying to get answers from a subject she was undercover and they had no idea of the game going on. With the benefit of hindsight and more years behind her, Natasha can see how this response was a mistake.
“What, I don’t get a turn?”
“We were talking about your time in America.”
She’d tried to get him back on track, but Clint had looked her in the eyes and grinned, bright and carefree and nothing to lose.
“You know how difficult it is to find someone who doesn’t kill in our profession? Why didn’t you kill me?” he repeats, and then keeps going, aim and rapid fire. “Why did you bring me to SHIELD? Why didn’t you ask me if I even wanted to be turned over to SHIELD? Did you ask them? What kind of a recruitment pitch is this? Is this really your way of doing things, Natalie? Is that even your real name?”
The scrape of a chair moving back as someone - Natasha - stands.
“You lost your right to ask questions.”
“Actually,” Clint says, “I recently discovered an ability to ask them and I’ve been trying to develop it.”
They arrive at the safe house high on adrenalin. Natasha can feel it thrumming through her veins, stopping her from feeling anything else. Like the through-and-through bullet wound in her leg wrapped tightly with torn clothing, the bruises she can see on her bare arms and the cuts through her torn tank top, the tourist disguise having offered little in the way of protection.
The safe house isn’t the worst she’s been in, but it’s basic. It’s a concrete floor one room with a shower and toilet behind a plastic curtain, a bookcase filled with tins, cereal, and other sealed food stuffs, and a plastic storage box with such exciting items as a tin opener, cheap toiletries, a more expensive and well-stocked first aid kit, towels, and a sleeping bag.
Clint grabs the first aid kit and slings his arm around her waist to help her to the shower, which is as much to support her as it is to steady him when he’s still somewhat dizzy and uncoordinated from the explosion.
One of the explosions.
He starts undressing her with gentle hands under the spray, bare-chested, his t-shirt in strips around her leg and his own wounds reopening thanks to the water.
“Is this okay?” he asks, arms around her, pausing at the clasp of her bra, and Natasha leans forward just enough to press her lips against his, because fuck it. She’s not a saint.
The bra falls to the wet floor, but he pulls back. Ghosts his hands down her sides. Slips his fingers just beneath the elastic of her last item of clothing. Looking at her the way he always looks at her.
“Is this okay?” he asks again and she loves that he asks.
He fucks her with open-mouthed kisses and eager hands, eyes open and smile wide, with here? and is this good? and tell me what you like. He fucks her with fingers first, because now is not the time for soft however much she wants to test his tongue. Then he fucks her against the wall, blood and water circling the drain at their feet.
Budapest.
They don’t talk about it.
Apart from the one time a few weeks later, when Medical has declared them all healed up and they have takeout to celebrate. They curl up on the sofa with empty cardboard containers on the floor and the television a soft buzz in the background. Natasha lets her head drift onto Clint’s shoulder, warm with the reassuring rise and fall of his breathing.
He places a hand high on her thigh, deliberate, his thumb sketching small circles she can feel through her sweatpants, and asks, “Is this okay?”
And Natasha tells him, “No.”
Sometimes she imagines laying him out on her bed. On the duvet cover that’s in his favourite colour and she pretends she doesn’t own, with strips of moonlight shining onto his skin through the slats of the almost closed blinds. On rumpled sheets in the morning with breakfast and he could get as many crumbs in her bed as he liked, who cares, they’d need to wash the sheets anyway.
It’s a harmless fantasy.
She’s a professional. She’s not going to fuck up on the job because she daydreams about making love to her partner.
“Tell me about Agent Barton.”
She does.
Then she removes a man’s eyeball in Germany.
Then she infiltrates the Helicarrier.
She becomes someone else. Walks through security. Sets a timed detonation near one engine. Heads to the control room to sabotage the rest whilst distracted Agents flock to the damaged engine.
She’s always excelled at breaking things.
“Tasha,” Clint says, “you’re going to be alright.”
Because it’s him saying it she almost believes it.
“You know that? Is that what you know?”
There’s the taste of blood in her mouth and restraints holding her down. She feels like she’s been screwed up small for a long, long time and now she’s free to unfurl but she doesn’t know how far is safe, can’t remember her limits or find her own edges.
“You’ve got to level out. It’s going to take time.”
She watches him pour a glass of water to give himself something to do, his eyes constantly darting back to the padded cuffs around her wrists.
“Really? Just like that.” Natasha swallows down a laugh that could be the start of breaking but she won’t let it be. “He took out my brain and played. Poured something else in. Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”
Clint turns to look at her, one side of his mouth curving up into a self-mocking smirk.
“You know that I do.”
She stops pulling against the restraints and stills.
There. There’s an edge.
“I know,” she tells him quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? For not believing me?” He starts undoing the handcuffs like he’s hardly been able to wait to get them off her. “Hell, brainwashing, who would? It doesn’t matter. The fact you took a chance on me when you thought I hadn’t had my head messed with, that it was all me, that more than makes up for it.”
Clint watches as she sits up, hands her the glass of water, and perches on the medical bed next to her, thigh warm where it presses against hers.
She drains half the glass before asking, “How did you get him out?”
Clint smirks again, all of his mouth in on it this time.
“Concussive arrow.”
He hates those, she knows. That’s how he damaged his hearing, detonating one too close to help someone else even though that meant hurting himself.
“Thank you,” is all she can say. She sips at the water. “He’s got to be stopped. I need to… I can stop him.”
“Well, I for one would sleep better if I put an arrow through Loki’s eye socket,” he says, leaning back against the wall.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Natasha tightens her grip on the glass, cool against her palms.
“Joke about killing Loki when what you mean is that you want to stop him killing other people.”
“Hey.” He nudges her gently with his elbow. “Sometimes stopping and killing have to be the same thing.”
Natasha turns her head to glare at him.
“I did believe you.”
“What?”
Clint’s face develops the blank look that he gets those times he’s uncertain what expression he should be wearing and so wears none at all.
“I didn’t know if it was brainwashing or psychological mind games or just manipulation, the way people can turn others into things to be used, especially kids. I know how that works. But I did believe you.”
“Then what are you sorry for?”
She lets her eyes slide away from his and feels him tense up.
“You know how difficult it is to find someone who finds killing uncomfortable in our profession? I’m sorry for thinking that not wanting to kill people, and wanting to help people, and putting yourself at risk for that, was you being young and naive and not just part of you. For thinking there were things you would grow out of. For all the times I ever treated you like I was your babysitter instead of your partner.”
“Tasha.”
“No.” She gets to her feet and deposits the glass by the water jug, still not looking at him. “Loki. We’ve got to stop him.”
“Okay.”
Natasha hears him getting up and finally turns to face him, folding her arms and letting determination straighten her spine.
“And then after. You want to get a coffee?”
“Coffee,” Clint repeats, blinking.
“Coffee, alcohol, food, whatever,” she bites out impatiently. “With me.”
“Yeah?”
The corners of his mouth curve upwards into a smile and then Clint is looking at her like he always has.
Natasha knows that look on his face and what it means, something she’s never been able to describe because she’s never been able to acknowledge it. She wants to learn how to be comfortable with being looked at like that, without ever taking it for granted. She wants him to feel like he can look at her however he likes, whenever he likes. She wants to look back. She wants to fuck him against a wall right now and every day if he’ll let her, and after spread him out on her sheets.
She lets her arms fall to her sides and steps closer, close enough that she has to tilt her head back slightly to still meet Clint’s eyes. Close enough that when he inhales she can feel it.
He doesn’t back away.
“Ask me if this is okay,” she says. “Ask me again.”
Further Author Notes, for those interested:
I have, for the MCU, Clint’s birthday the same as Renner’s (January 7th 1971) and Natasha’s the same as Johansson’s (November 22nd 1984).
I picked alias names for Clint based on their meanings (which were gleaned off the internet and so are hopefully correct), Clint of course being an American alias itself in this story:
Clinton - settlement near the headland (English)
Keaton - where hawks fly (English)
Kliment - gentle and merciful (Russian)
Koldan - sting (Russian)
Kolmogorov - hill (Russian)
Kolya - pet form of Nickolai meaning victor of the people (Russian)
It’s possible that a Clint born in 1984 could still be in circus school before the USSR collapsed - they started young - but I admit I may be pushing it a bit.
Have a link to part one of a documentary from 1988 called Inside The Soviet State Circus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl_Nt2vMAo4
And a clip of kids in circus school in Moscow 1968, perhaps similar to the clip Natasha found Clint in: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/circus-school-in-moscow