[ Бог дал, Бог и взял ]

[nailsthetarget]

WHO: deadlieststing and nailsthetarget. Part 2.
WHAT: The second stop on Clint's Seattle tour
WHERE: outside of a bar in Seattle
WHEN: Shortly after this log.
WARNINGS: Attempted murder, breaking of things, cursing, shit being flipped
SUMMARY: With Clint, good luck and bad luck look almost the same. He finds the other woman that he's looking for, but he bites off more than

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[deadlieststing]

"You're bleeding," was the first thing she said, hands still in the pockets of her trenchcoat. It didn't matter, but she stood just out of arm's reach. Natasha had always hated being grabbed, and now was no exception. She could slap anything he threw at her out of the air, but she'd prefer not to have to break out of his grip.

He'd gotten into a fight, and Natasha was willing to be good money on it being with her counterpart. It would be a pity if he'd killed her, but if he had, then the woman was much less competant than Natasha had intially thought. She looked down at him, every muscle tensed, waiting.

[nailsthetarget]

His lips pulled back from his teeth in the semblance of a grin. It was more like a snarl.

"Just a little."

Clint debated with himself internally. With his thigh stabbed, he wouldn't be able to sustain any long-distance running---and if this Natasha was anything like his, she was faster than he was. Ducking out of this encounter was not only not his style, it wasn't even an option. Unfortunately, his wounds meant that throwing down with her would be dicey. She'd seemed confident in herself and in the fact that she could take him out on his best day. He didn't totally believe that, because as far as he'd gathered the Clint Barton of her world was a soft, sorry sap. He knew that he was better than that Hawkweye, but was she better than his Black Widow?

The tug of war was quick and silent. His end decision was simple: fuck it.

He wrapped his fingers around the knife in his boot and lunged in one smooth motion.

[deadlieststing]

Knives. He really was a completely different man, wasn't he? She dismissed the thought as quickly as it registered; there would be time to think about that later. Now, however, there was work to be done.

She missed her wristlets. The Bite would have ended this, no matter how stubborn he was. But she'd been brought here in nothing but a men's jacket. She was at a disadvantage, weaponry-wise. She had a gun, something bulkier than she would have picked, and two knives in her pockets, but she wasn't looking to kill him. Just make him be still and listen to her.

"That was stupid, Clint," She hissed, one hand wrapping around his wrist, stopping the knife, and the other fist swinging for his head. He was bigger than her, but he was injured. She would make the best of that.

[nailsthetarget]

He ducked the fist coming from his face, but the hand around his wrist made panic crawl up his spine.

There were very few things that bothered him. He could endure most anything---and had, over the years---but hands on his wrists or fingers made his heart stutter in his chest.

It took five pounds of pressure to break a wrist. Seven pounds to break a thumb. They were weak, small bones. But for Clint, they were everything. Without his wrists and fingers, he was useless as an archer. The fear of losing them was overwhelming. Without the use of his hands, he was useless.

He hit her arm, grabbing for her coat to throw her.

[deadlieststing]

She landed on her feet, already ripping at the buttons. It was a shame. She'd liked this coat, and now she was leaving it in a wadded ball of fabric on the alley floor before taking a step backwards, squaring off and beckong him forward with two fingers.

He was right to be afraid. She'd break his wrists if she had to, to get him to stop and listen to her, to see sense before he forced her to do something she'd regret, even if he didn't. She couldn't kill him, but she could think of a lot of ways to incapacitate him. And they'd all been reserved for enemies; it felt wrong to think of them in reference to someone like Clint. Or rather, someone who was a version of Clint.

[nailsthetarget]

She was agile as a fucking cat, moving with his strength instead of against it. Clint was tired and hurt and his lungs burned like he'd inhaled hot asphalt. He knew that he wasn't going to be walking away with this one, not unless she slipped up and he got one jewel of an opening.

But with the way his injuries were screaming, he probably wouldn't see the opening even if it presented himself. He silenced that timid little voice and went for her again, this time going for her throat.

His earlier frustration clawed at his skin. He wanted to strangle her until he wrung it all out. Maybe seeing her with the dusky imprint of his fingers laced around her neck would set the anger free; maybe he'd feel like he could finally lay down and be done with the world.

Before tonight, he'd never hurt a woman before unless it was in mission parameters. He'd never raised a finger against any girl that he'd dated. He'd always separated himself from punks like Hank because he'd never been that flavor of bad. He'd had a wife and kids that he'd loved.

[deadlieststing]

She kicked him as hard as she could in the stomach. He was being sloppy about this, leaving her too many openings, too many ways to hurt him. Whether or not that was deliberate, she couldn't tell. That look in his eyes she'd seen on the comm, it hadn't spoken to great amounts of self-preservation. He could be doing this all in hopes that she would end this for him.

He had to know that she could. Natasha could kill people so quickly and painlessly they wouldn't even know what had happened. But she wouldn't do that to him. She gets her hands on his wrists again, nails digging half-moons into his skin, keeping him close so she can spit her words into his face, "Stop it. Stop. You're injured and bleeding and you have no chance at all, so stop and let me help you."

[nailsthetarget]

Her boot connected with enough force to knock the wind out of him. His lungs froze and shriveled, his eyes swimming briefly with motes of light. That would never have hit if he hadn't been hurt, he told himself, because he didn't want to acknowledge that such a power gap could exist between them. Natasha had always been stronger and faster thanks to being a supersoldier, but it'd been a point of pride that he, a simple human, had been almost that good. No one had shot him full of serums, and his only implants were the ones that the government had put in his head to remind him that he'd escaped the electric chair (but now it was always with him, a button-press away if he misbehaved).

"Help me?" he echoed with that slice of a smile that held too many teeth to be happy. "You can help me by putting a fucking bullet between your eyes, comrade."

[deadlieststing]

Her lips flattened into a straight line, and she tightened her grip on his wrists. This wasn't a fight. He was injured, bleeding into his bandages worse with ever movement. She had him outclassed, and they both knew it. And yet here he was, still struggling. He had no sense of self preservation at all. And if he did, he was simply ignoring it. She didn't like any of this. He was better than this. He had to be.

"Stop it. I'm not going to kill myself, or you." Her voice was like steel. "And you're being sloppy."

[nailsthetarget]

"Not gonna kill me, huh?" Clint asked, hands balling into fists. Her grip was strong and the arm that had been shot was quaking. His fingertips were rapidly numbing and his glasses had slipped off the bridge of his nose, only hooked over one ear. In all, he looked manic. He was nose-diving, engine rattling as he prepared to crash.

She would kill him. Natasha was too smart to leave someone like him alive.

"I'll come back," he hissed. "Next time, you won't see me coming. I won't stop. I will never stop. Got it? End this now or be prepared to sleep with one eye open."

He was just so tired.

[deadlieststing]

"No, I'm not."

She wasn't going to let him bait her into helping him kill himself. If that was what he was looking for, he wouldn't find it with her. And he wasn't saying anything she wasn't already aware of. He'd keep coming and coming, because he was a stubborn idiot.

"You know I'm not her. You know that. You are not this man, Clint."

The problem with all of this was that she felt sorry for him, losing everything like that. She wanted to let go of his hands and put his glasses back on and recheck the dressing on his wounds. But she couldn't. Not yet, at least.

[nailsthetarget]

"Is that a fact? You know me so well that you can say who I am, can predict what I'm going to do," he rumbled, no longer resisting her hold. He could have broken it---fairly easily, even---but it'd mean twisting his injured arm at an angle that made him ache just to contemplate. What a goddamn stupid situation this had become.

That's all it was anymore to him: stupid. He'd spent so long overwhelmed, furious and sick with the sheer force of his loss, but he'd suddenly hit a wall. Clint breathed out and finally, finally felt nothing at all. He looked at Natasha unblinkingly, watching her features blur and migrate in his vision, and then spit in her face.

He didn't care if she hurt him. He didn't care if the low kick he he attempted swept her legs out from under her or not. Didn't care if it screwed up his arm. Didn't care if he got away. Just didn't care.He hadn't gotten what he wanted, and now he was losing. But this job had never meant anything, had it? Natasha's blood wouldn't bring his children back, not even if he wrung out

[deadlieststing]

Oh, that was an expression Natasha had seen before. Men in the war, men on battlefields, men waiting for death, running head long into open fire because it was simply a means to their end. It was never an expression she'd expected to see on Clint's face, no matter which version of him she was looking at.

And then he spat at her, and anything she would have said vanished.

She was abruptly furious. There were limits to everything, everyone, and there was only so much Natasha could bear. What sort of man was he, punishing her for what he'd lost, as if she were responsible, as if by killing her it would change anything? She was snarling something utterly vicious at him in Russian, calling him seven different types of blockhead when his leg knocked against her ankles.

Immediately, she grabbed onto him. If she was falling he would come down with her. And she would smash him face first into the pavement if she had to, because she wasn't dying for this. Not for some suicidal shadow of Clint Barton in this reality that wasn't her own.

[nailsthetarget]

His weak leg buckled and the world went topsy-turvy. He could feel the gush of warmth from the wound, soaking his bandages and leaking through the slit in his suit. When she pulled, he went down with her and landed hard. Clint's cheek and jaw cracked against the cement, briefly blinding. She was hissing in his ear and it took him a painful couple of seconds to realize that it was in Russian; he half-wished that he wasn't fluent, if only because he wouldn't have been able to catch all the names she was calling him. She was so much more expressive in the mother tongue.

Clint tasted blood. His glasses were broken.

"No, tell me how you really feel," he wheezed in Russian. He twisted, trying to use his weight to roll into a dominant position.

[deadlieststing]

He spoke Russian. She could almost laugh, except she was on the floor of a filthy alley, and Clint was grappling for the dominant position, and every fiber of her being screamed out against letting him have it. If this turned into a contest of sheer bulk, then she would be at a disadvantage, and she couldn't afford it. She refused to allow even the possibility of him pinning her.

She refused to die here, in this filthy, filthy alley in a reality that wasn't even here, killed by this shadow of her former alley. She wouldn't allow it to happen. She'd lived through too much to even entertain the idea of it.

So she lashed out, striking hard at his injuries. It was a cheap, cheap move, and she would have preferred not to have done it all, but it was a necessity. And she cursed at him, all the inventive curses she'd learned when she was a girl trailing after Ivan, spitting out all her anger and frustration and hurt as she shoved at him, arching and twisting her body away from his grasp.

[nailsthetarget]

For all that he hadn't known about his Natasha, what he had known could fill a volume. They'd been partners. They'd trained together, sparred together, worked together---hell, there'd been a time where he'd seen more of her than his wife and kids. She'd studied him, but he'd studied back. He knew at least a few of her buttons. The difference between them, in the end, was that she'd known all of his.

He got her angry enough, desperate enough, to hit him hard. He grunted, though he wanted to scream. Agony radiated from where her fist had connected with the bullet wound below his clavicle; his hand spasmed, numb.

Clint only half-heard most of her curses. They were garbled in his ears, like she was talking underwater. Drowning, numb, cold, and picked at by a litany of Russian swear words. It was an ugly sensation, but he'd goaded her to it.