Avengers (2012): "Heavy in Your Arms" (1/15) (Clint/Natasha)
Title: Heavy in Your Arms (1/15)
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, Coulson/The Cellist
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, violence, eventually sexual content, dub-con only if you feel that mystical/destiny sorts of compulsions qualify as dubious consent
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 3,231
Summary: For every romantic happily-ever-after there were also horror stories of the pain and torment that awaited those who found and lost their soul mate. A favorite trope was the idea of soul mates who were on opposite sides of a line, who chose to kill one another than betray their beliefs or live without their companion, or stories where one's mate was torn from them by the forces of evil - the list of ways it could go south seemed endless. An AU, in which Clint knows all the stories about how it could go wrong. He never expected it to be real, and staring back at him from the other side of his arrow.
Author's Notes:
ETA: I blame my desperate need of a nap yesterday for my grievous oversight of not thanking my awesome betas!!! Much, much <3 and many thanks to kadollan, lar_laughs, and SidheRa! I totes owe you guys snicker-doodle crusted brownies.
A fill for heartequals's prompt at the be_compromised's awesome Promptathon of Awesomeness:
Have we had a request for soulbonding/imprinting fic yet? And if not, may I request soulbonding/imprinting fic where "making a different call" actually meant "we couldn't let each other go"? It's not even about love, it's about self-preservation. And all that that entails of course -- for civilians it's this happy wonderful thing, finding your other half, but this is SHIELD. Natasha's still programmed to kill everything and Clint's trained to work alone for months on end and on top of that soulbonding tests/paperwork/lifestyle changes/etc. It's so overwhelming that at the end of the day they don't have the energy to actually try to get to know each other, so they just sit in silence and hold each other. (And then later they become sexy master assassins who drop everything when the other is compromised.)
Also inspired by the prompt from workerbee73:
place me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm
for love is as strong as death
Title is from Florence + the Machine's "Heavy in Your Arms"
I'm trying something new, and doing this as a WIP, since it - amazingly - seems to be coming in chronological order. IDEK.
Whispering like it's a secret
Only to condemn the one who hears it
*****
This was not happening.
This was not happening.
Clint stared down the line of his arrow to the vibrant picture she made - the rich colors of her hair that moved through the spectrum of reds from flame to blood, the narrowed eyes that were a vivid green, all on a canvas of pale, perfect skin held in a black silk dress designed to play light and shadow over her curves.
He'd destroyed art before. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was the niggling sense, in the back of his mind, that this was not a shot he wanted to take. That sense was never wrong, though he'd been wrong, the handful of times he'd ignored it. There was always something, some reason even if he couldn't nail it down that he shouldn't do... whatever it was he was about to do. He wasn't a superstitious man generally, didn't consider himself religious, and he knew that more likely than not it was his subconscious picking up on things he couldn't quite get.
It didn't make it any less inconvenient. Only seconds away from taking out the Black fucking Widow, which would have been a career-maker, and he had to go getting that sense. (If the last time he'd ignored it hadn't gone so spectacularly wrong and ended up with his ass in jail on three separate murder charges, he might've ignored it. But it had, so he wouldn't.)
She had seen him, which was impressive in and of itself. He'd gotten a good long look at exactly why she was whispered about, why many thought she was unkillable. Immortal. She was really, really good. And she was staring directly at him, and she watched him as he slowly, almost painfully lowered his bow. He was on a rooftop two buildings over, close enough he didn't have to use any kind of additional sights to get a good look, but far enough away that most marks would never have noticed him.
It was easy to meet her eyes. They were just spots of color from here, but they gave him a gnawing sense of wanting to know more. He wanted to know exactly what they looked like up close before he killed her, as if that made any more sense.
She wasn't moving away. Even as he started creeping across the roof, moving easily from fire escapes to masonry, she didn't so much as flinch, and he didn't take his eyes off of her. There was no way he could get to the bow now slung across his back before she drew down on him, but he had his back-up in his side holster for a quick draw. It would be close, though. Walking up to her without a weapon drawn ought to be the stupid thing, but he couldn't help but feel it was a far righter course of action than shooting her hand been.
He wondered if he had an idiotic look on his face as he approached her.
Possibly.
She had an expressionless face, it was just a mask currently in repose, waiting for something to react to, to give it shape. It fascinated him. The reasonable part of his brain told him to shape the fuck up and he put it down sharply.
"You haven't shot me yet," she said mildly in Russian, as if she was discussing the weather with someone she'd never met.
"No," he replied in kind, "I haven't."
"Why not?" She hadn't reached for her gun either. He didn't know her body language well enough to know if she was biding her time or literally disinterested in the turn this seemed to be taking.
"Honestly?" he asked, with bitter amusement lacing his voice, "I have no idea. Doesn't feel right," he admitted.
She scoffed at him. "That's no reason."
He shrugged. "It is for me. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, I try to listen to it."
"Snipers are a superstitious lot," was her disdainful reply.
She'd let him get closer while they were talking and he stood within arms reach. His hands were itching, and he realized he was fighting the urge to touch her. What the fuck was wrong with him?
It was then he saw her hand twitch, just slightly, before she curled her fingers tightly into a fist. It telegraphed her movement just a fraction of a second before she swung at him, but it was enough that he was able to shift and catch her arm rather than take the blow.
What should have happened was he should have put his weight behind it, used her momentum to pull her around and hopefully gotten her turned with her arm behind her body.
That's what should have happened.
What actually happened was something entirely different.
The moment his bare hand touched her bare arm, skin on skin, there was a rush like the concussion wave off an explosion and the world went white around the edges. When it returned, seconds later, he was looking into those eyes he'd wanted to badly to see up close, his hand was gripping her arm with bruising force and she had an equally strong grip on the sleeve of his tac jacket.
"What the fucking hell?" he managed, in English, while she echoed similar sentiments in Russian.
His ear-piece crackled to life and Coulson's voice came through the comm. "Barton, report."
Each second that passed was marked with his heartbeat that he could hear echoing in his ears.
"Barton? Barton!"
"We're good here. I'm okay." It was the best he could do.
"What's going on out there, Barton?" Coulson's voice was calm, it was always calm, but he'd learned to read him and could tell he was worried.
"I have no idea," he responded. He didn't look away from her.
"Is the target neutralized?"
"That... would depend entirely on your definition of neutralized, sir," Clint admitted.
She moved her hand, the one that had been on his jacket, slid up until her fingers could press against the uncovered skin of his neck. The contact prickled along his skin and down his spine like brushing a live wire and he felt his breath catch. He felt like he could drown in her if he let himself, and a part of him really wanted to, while the rest of him had alarm bells clanging through his brain. He wanted to tilt his head towards her hand so that she would keep touching him, keep her close, anything to not lose that contact.
"Barton, what is the target's status?"
"Contained," he managed and she started to try to pull away. "You're coming with me."
"And why would I do that?"
"Because the other alternatives are I kill you or you kill me, and I don't think either one of us wants to be doing that right now, do you?"
He watched her mouth tense, the only sign of her displeasure.
*****
During flight back from the burned out industrial complex he kept her close. He chalked the low-level buzz he was feeling up to receding adrenaline and the mission having gone something like sideways. She was sitting stiffly in the seat beside him, and the small space meant they were touching, shoulder to knees. He managed to tell himself that he shouldn't be thinking about putting his hands back on her bare skin. Barely.
When they arrived, several heavily armed agents escorted her out of the hangar bay and he reluctantly watched her go. He was frustrated with himself for wanting to follow them.
"What the hell were you thinking, Barton?" Coulson asked, although he didn't raise his voice.
"I...," and he realized he actually had no idea. There was no explanation for just stopping like he had. Except...
"She looked at me."
Coulson looked up from his paperwork in surprise. "I'm sorry?"
"She looked at me. Right at me, from about 50 yards away. She looked me straight in the eye."
"Disconcerting to be sure, but-"
"It was the wrong thing to do, Coulson. I knew. Just like I knew back in Georgia, when I didn't- it was the wrong thing, to shoot her. She didn't shoot me either," he added as an afterthought. There was a tension building within him, spinning tighter. The general sense of unsettled energy he'd felt on the flight back seemed to be increasing. He felt a little like he wanted to crawl out of his skin.
"You certainly gave her plenty of opportunity. You're a seasoned agent, you know better, and I'm still not sure how to play that in my reports."
Clint shook his head, unable to really help with that, either. They sat there in a not quite comfortable silence while Phil flipped through documents and made the occasional notes, and Clint wrote out the long-hand version of events as he remembered them. He'd been about halfway through the extraction itself when he clenched his hand hard enough the pen snapped and he curled inward on himself.
"Barton?" Coulson's voice was sharp, a command more than a question, asking what was wrong.
He couldn't talk around it though, he was just trying to breathe through the crawling, burning tension he could feel through his whole body.
*****
The pain had eased off by the time he'd reached the medical bay, and he'd found himself momentarily distracted by a flash of red through the nearby curtains as Coulson led him to an exam room. The doctors were stumped. That wasn't exactly reassuring news, but his bloodwork came back clean - they'd tested for every poison known to man (and some known only to SHIELD) but they'd come up with zip. Zilch. Nada. So they'd stuck him in a quarantine cell and told him to stay there for the next 6 hours, just in case, to see if his reaction came back.
It sucked.
Whatever he was reacting to, it had leveled off to a dull hum in his blood stream, still disconcerting but not debilitating. And he was bored. Normally boredom wasn't that big a problem for him. There was a quiet place in his mind he could slip into, and ignore the passage of time. It was one of the things that made him good at his job, but usually? There was a purpose to it. Something he was watching for, waiting on. Something.
This was just waiting. While people watched him, to see if he'd keel over and die.
He kept flexing his fingers, curling his hands into fists and then stretching them out like he wanted to grab onto something that wasn't there.
Someone who wasn't there.
The feel of her skin under his hand was running through his brain on a goddamn loop and he could not find the stop button. It was accompanied by the image of her eyes and the sound of her voice. He was starting to wonder if maybe he was losing his mind.
*****
"You're free to leave," Coulson informed him when he finally came to open the door. "The docs have cleared you and there's no sign of any kind of infection."
"I coulda told you that," he muttered darkly but only once he was outside the door of the holding room.
"I still need you to come and finish the debrief though."
Of course he did, Clint thought.
When they reached a conference room, Coulson gestured him inside and made a point of locking the door behind them.
"Do you have any better idea now why you didn't take the shot?"
"No, sir." Clint responded to the question with honest bewilderment. "Still none."
There was a long, drawn out silence while Coulson frowned. Actually, actively frowned, and that was a new experience for Clint to see.
"There's one... fairly outlandish suggestion."
Clint raised an eyebrow.
"Have you ever heard of the term 'soul mates'?"
Clint's other eyebrow winged up to meet it. "I'm sorry?" He had, of course. Everyone had. The idea saturated popular culture like a drug sometimes. It was an incredibly rare phenomenon, relegated to the land of story books (or movies), with the occasional real-life example just to keep the myth alive. Two people (or if you were a real heretic, more) whose very souls were so completely enmeshed they weren't whole without the other. Where their very lives - heartrate, breathing, metabolic responses, all of it was keyed to one another. For every romantic happily-ever-after there were also horror stories of the pain and torment that awaited those who found and lost their soul mate. A favorite trope was the idea of soul mates who were on opposite sides of a line, who chose to kill one another than betray their beliefs or live without their companion, or stories where one's mate was torn from them by the forces of evil - the list of ways it could go south seemed endless.
No way in hell.
It didn't happen to people like him, people like them. It was too outlandish of a notion to be believed, and Coulson didn't honestly think-
"You weren't the only one who collapsed. She wasn't quite as vocal about it, but she hit the floor right around the same time you nearly did."
Clint realized suddenly that he was rubbing at his throat, over and over again where she'd touched him. It almost hummed, like he was a little too close to a live wire.
"Did she even out too?"
"She was in the room next to yours in quarantine. Once you were within a few yards of one another you both got better."
"She still down there?"
Coulson's jaw tightened.
"So you brought me up here to see if it would happen again?"
"Something like that." To Coulson's credit, he didn't dissemble about it. SHIELD wasn't above using him and Romanov as lab rats if they decided they needed to.
Because there wasn't anything he could really do about it, Clint dropped into the chair in front of the table and propped his feet up, hands laced loosely over his stomach, and waited to see if the pain returned. He certainly wasn't what he would consider "comfortable" with the humming across his skin.
All of it hinged on their soul mate theory being correct, and he thought that was so unlikely it was laughable.
"You don't seriously believe in this crazy theory, do you Phil?"
"It might not be so crazy." There was a look on Coulson's face and Clint knew that look. It was the "I have more information about this than you do and I'm not going to share it" look and normally that was par for the course on a mission, and Clint could accept it and go on. But not this time. Not about something like this.
"What aren't you telling me?" he got out through gritted teeth, because he could feel the low burn in his bloodstream begin to ramp up again.
"It is a rare phenomenon," Coulson began, and it was obvious he was choosing his words very, very carefully. "But it does exist. SHIELD makes it a point to know about this kind of thing just like any other phenomenon that could have an impact."
He didn't look like he was about to explain what that might mean. Of course not.
"This kind of magic is powerful and not something to be played with. It destroys more people than it helps."
"So what aren't you telling me?" Clint asked.
"Barton, you've been compromised. She's still the enemy." There was a sadness in the senior agent's eyes - the only place he'd let any hint of emotion show through. He didn't give Clint a chance to respond, just calmly turned and left. The click of the door relocking behind him was a loud echo in the heavy silence.
*****
Even the conference rooms had observation capabilities, and he watched Barton on one screen with Romanov on the other, waiting to see when they'd start showing signs of discomfort. He didn't let himself think about the concert tickets that sat in a locked safe in his bunk.
She was with an orchestra in Toronto, had been for a year or so. He'd been to see her no less than fifteen times in the ten years since they'd first met while he was undercover with SHIELD, and there wasn't a day that went by in which he didn't say "thank you" to a god he couldn't help but believe in that he'd never touched her. He'd given her a polite smile and nod as his cover identity had been introduced, nothing more.
Just from the eye contact, he couldn't help but go to see her when he could, even if it was from the back of a packed auditorium. He often wondered if she felt a similar pull towards someone she would never be able to find.
"You told him yet?" Fury finally stepped forward from his position in the back of the room. Phil didn't turn around.
"No, sir. Only that he's considered a compromised asset at this time. He's not going to respond well."
"I don't imagine he would," Fury growled. "My question for you is do you think he'll follow through?"
The rumor mill said that Fury had a soul mate once, and that she'd been killed. Reports varied as to how: people suspected everything from an accidental shooting to Fury assassinating her himself. The stories said no one survived that kind of trauma, but if anyone could, people supposed it would be the Director.
"I don't know, sir," Phil finally admited.
"Well, we might as well find out, shouldn't we?"
*****
When the door opened again, Clint had to look up from where he was sitting by the wall, curled in on himself.
"Why the hell would it work this way?" he asked as Phil looks down at him. There wasn't a clock on the wall, but Clint guessed several hours had passed.
"No one knows. Whatever forces are involved are far beyond what our current science understands."
"I knew that. What now? Do they have enough proof? Can I see her again?"
"If I put the two of you together, what happens then? What if you cement the bond? She's still the enemy."
"Maybe she'll turn. You've seen her file too, she'd be a hell of an asset to SHIELD. The intel she has alone-"
"Maybe you will."
Coulson's words were as effective as a bucket of ice water and Clint froze. "What?"
"There's no assurance you won't decide to defect from SHIELD and go back with her. It could just as easily go that way."
Clint was pretty sure that it wasn't Coulson talking, that it was what someone else - probably Fury - told him to say, but the implications were... bad.
"What are you planning to do about that?" he asked evenly. He dropped into the headspace he used on a mission, on a hit, that cold emptiness where everything was cut and dried, black and white, clear edges and decisive action.
"The only way to guarantee that you haven't been irreversibly compromised is to remove her from the equation."
"You're going to kill her?"
"No. You are."
Chapter 2
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, Coulson/The Cellist
Rating: Adult 17+
Warnings: language, violence, eventually sexual content, dub-con only if you feel that mystical/destiny sorts of compulsions qualify as dubious consent
Spoilers: None
Type: WIP
Word Count: 3,231
Summary: For every romantic happily-ever-after there were also horror stories of the pain and torment that awaited those who found and lost their soul mate. A favorite trope was the idea of soul mates who were on opposite sides of a line, who chose to kill one another than betray their beliefs or live without their companion, or stories where one's mate was torn from them by the forces of evil - the list of ways it could go south seemed endless. An AU, in which Clint knows all the stories about how it could go wrong. He never expected it to be real, and staring back at him from the other side of his arrow.
Author's Notes:
ETA: I blame my desperate need of a nap yesterday for my grievous oversight of not thanking my awesome betas!!! Much, much <3 and many thanks to kadollan, lar_laughs, and SidheRa! I totes owe you guys snicker-doodle crusted brownies.
A fill for heartequals's prompt at the be_compromised's awesome Promptathon of Awesomeness:
Have we had a request for soulbonding/imprinting fic yet? And if not, may I request soulbonding/imprinting fic where "making a different call" actually meant "we couldn't let each other go"? It's not even about love, it's about self-preservation. And all that that entails of course -- for civilians it's this happy wonderful thing, finding your other half, but this is SHIELD. Natasha's still programmed to kill everything and Clint's trained to work alone for months on end and on top of that soulbonding tests/paperwork/lifestyle changes/etc. It's so overwhelming that at the end of the day they don't have the energy to actually try to get to know each other, so they just sit in silence and hold each other. (And then later they become sexy master assassins who drop everything when the other is compromised.)
Also inspired by the prompt from workerbee73:
place me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm
for love is as strong as death
Title is from Florence + the Machine's "Heavy in Your Arms"
I'm trying something new, and doing this as a WIP, since it - amazingly - seems to be coming in chronological order. IDEK.
Whispering like it's a secret
Only to condemn the one who hears it
*****
This was not happening.
This was not happening.
Clint stared down the line of his arrow to the vibrant picture she made - the rich colors of her hair that moved through the spectrum of reds from flame to blood, the narrowed eyes that were a vivid green, all on a canvas of pale, perfect skin held in a black silk dress designed to play light and shadow over her curves.
He'd destroyed art before. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was the niggling sense, in the back of his mind, that this was not a shot he wanted to take. That sense was never wrong, though he'd been wrong, the handful of times he'd ignored it. There was always something, some reason even if he couldn't nail it down that he shouldn't do... whatever it was he was about to do. He wasn't a superstitious man generally, didn't consider himself religious, and he knew that more likely than not it was his subconscious picking up on things he couldn't quite get.
It didn't make it any less inconvenient. Only seconds away from taking out the Black fucking Widow, which would have been a career-maker, and he had to go getting that sense. (If the last time he'd ignored it hadn't gone so spectacularly wrong and ended up with his ass in jail on three separate murder charges, he might've ignored it. But it had, so he wouldn't.)
She had seen him, which was impressive in and of itself. He'd gotten a good long look at exactly why she was whispered about, why many thought she was unkillable. Immortal. She was really, really good. And she was staring directly at him, and she watched him as he slowly, almost painfully lowered his bow. He was on a rooftop two buildings over, close enough he didn't have to use any kind of additional sights to get a good look, but far enough away that most marks would never have noticed him.
It was easy to meet her eyes. They were just spots of color from here, but they gave him a gnawing sense of wanting to know more. He wanted to know exactly what they looked like up close before he killed her, as if that made any more sense.
She wasn't moving away. Even as he started creeping across the roof, moving easily from fire escapes to masonry, she didn't so much as flinch, and he didn't take his eyes off of her. There was no way he could get to the bow now slung across his back before she drew down on him, but he had his back-up in his side holster for a quick draw. It would be close, though. Walking up to her without a weapon drawn ought to be the stupid thing, but he couldn't help but feel it was a far righter course of action than shooting her hand been.
He wondered if he had an idiotic look on his face as he approached her.
Possibly.
She had an expressionless face, it was just a mask currently in repose, waiting for something to react to, to give it shape. It fascinated him. The reasonable part of his brain told him to shape the fuck up and he put it down sharply.
"You haven't shot me yet," she said mildly in Russian, as if she was discussing the weather with someone she'd never met.
"No," he replied in kind, "I haven't."
"Why not?" She hadn't reached for her gun either. He didn't know her body language well enough to know if she was biding her time or literally disinterested in the turn this seemed to be taking.
"Honestly?" he asked, with bitter amusement lacing his voice, "I have no idea. Doesn't feel right," he admitted.
She scoffed at him. "That's no reason."
He shrugged. "It is for me. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, I try to listen to it."
"Snipers are a superstitious lot," was her disdainful reply.
She'd let him get closer while they were talking and he stood within arms reach. His hands were itching, and he realized he was fighting the urge to touch her. What the fuck was wrong with him?
It was then he saw her hand twitch, just slightly, before she curled her fingers tightly into a fist. It telegraphed her movement just a fraction of a second before she swung at him, but it was enough that he was able to shift and catch her arm rather than take the blow.
What should have happened was he should have put his weight behind it, used her momentum to pull her around and hopefully gotten her turned with her arm behind her body.
That's what should have happened.
What actually happened was something entirely different.
The moment his bare hand touched her bare arm, skin on skin, there was a rush like the concussion wave off an explosion and the world went white around the edges. When it returned, seconds later, he was looking into those eyes he'd wanted to badly to see up close, his hand was gripping her arm with bruising force and she had an equally strong grip on the sleeve of his tac jacket.
"What the fucking hell?" he managed, in English, while she echoed similar sentiments in Russian.
His ear-piece crackled to life and Coulson's voice came through the comm. "Barton, report."
Each second that passed was marked with his heartbeat that he could hear echoing in his ears.
"Barton? Barton!"
"We're good here. I'm okay." It was the best he could do.
"What's going on out there, Barton?" Coulson's voice was calm, it was always calm, but he'd learned to read him and could tell he was worried.
"I have no idea," he responded. He didn't look away from her.
"Is the target neutralized?"
"That... would depend entirely on your definition of neutralized, sir," Clint admitted.
She moved her hand, the one that had been on his jacket, slid up until her fingers could press against the uncovered skin of his neck. The contact prickled along his skin and down his spine like brushing a live wire and he felt his breath catch. He felt like he could drown in her if he let himself, and a part of him really wanted to, while the rest of him had alarm bells clanging through his brain. He wanted to tilt his head towards her hand so that she would keep touching him, keep her close, anything to not lose that contact.
"Barton, what is the target's status?"
"Contained," he managed and she started to try to pull away. "You're coming with me."
"And why would I do that?"
"Because the other alternatives are I kill you or you kill me, and I don't think either one of us wants to be doing that right now, do you?"
He watched her mouth tense, the only sign of her displeasure.
*****
During flight back from the burned out industrial complex he kept her close. He chalked the low-level buzz he was feeling up to receding adrenaline and the mission having gone something like sideways. She was sitting stiffly in the seat beside him, and the small space meant they were touching, shoulder to knees. He managed to tell himself that he shouldn't be thinking about putting his hands back on her bare skin. Barely.
When they arrived, several heavily armed agents escorted her out of the hangar bay and he reluctantly watched her go. He was frustrated with himself for wanting to follow them.
"What the hell were you thinking, Barton?" Coulson asked, although he didn't raise his voice.
"I...," and he realized he actually had no idea. There was no explanation for just stopping like he had. Except...
"She looked at me."
Coulson looked up from his paperwork in surprise. "I'm sorry?"
"She looked at me. Right at me, from about 50 yards away. She looked me straight in the eye."
"Disconcerting to be sure, but-"
"It was the wrong thing to do, Coulson. I knew. Just like I knew back in Georgia, when I didn't- it was the wrong thing, to shoot her. She didn't shoot me either," he added as an afterthought. There was a tension building within him, spinning tighter. The general sense of unsettled energy he'd felt on the flight back seemed to be increasing. He felt a little like he wanted to crawl out of his skin.
"You certainly gave her plenty of opportunity. You're a seasoned agent, you know better, and I'm still not sure how to play that in my reports."
Clint shook his head, unable to really help with that, either. They sat there in a not quite comfortable silence while Phil flipped through documents and made the occasional notes, and Clint wrote out the long-hand version of events as he remembered them. He'd been about halfway through the extraction itself when he clenched his hand hard enough the pen snapped and he curled inward on himself.
"Barton?" Coulson's voice was sharp, a command more than a question, asking what was wrong.
He couldn't talk around it though, he was just trying to breathe through the crawling, burning tension he could feel through his whole body.
*****
The pain had eased off by the time he'd reached the medical bay, and he'd found himself momentarily distracted by a flash of red through the nearby curtains as Coulson led him to an exam room. The doctors were stumped. That wasn't exactly reassuring news, but his bloodwork came back clean - they'd tested for every poison known to man (and some known only to SHIELD) but they'd come up with zip. Zilch. Nada. So they'd stuck him in a quarantine cell and told him to stay there for the next 6 hours, just in case, to see if his reaction came back.
It sucked.
Whatever he was reacting to, it had leveled off to a dull hum in his blood stream, still disconcerting but not debilitating. And he was bored. Normally boredom wasn't that big a problem for him. There was a quiet place in his mind he could slip into, and ignore the passage of time. It was one of the things that made him good at his job, but usually? There was a purpose to it. Something he was watching for, waiting on. Something.
This was just waiting. While people watched him, to see if he'd keel over and die.
He kept flexing his fingers, curling his hands into fists and then stretching them out like he wanted to grab onto something that wasn't there.
Someone who wasn't there.
The feel of her skin under his hand was running through his brain on a goddamn loop and he could not find the stop button. It was accompanied by the image of her eyes and the sound of her voice. He was starting to wonder if maybe he was losing his mind.
*****
"You're free to leave," Coulson informed him when he finally came to open the door. "The docs have cleared you and there's no sign of any kind of infection."
"I coulda told you that," he muttered darkly but only once he was outside the door of the holding room.
"I still need you to come and finish the debrief though."
Of course he did, Clint thought.
When they reached a conference room, Coulson gestured him inside and made a point of locking the door behind them.
"Do you have any better idea now why you didn't take the shot?"
"No, sir." Clint responded to the question with honest bewilderment. "Still none."
There was a long, drawn out silence while Coulson frowned. Actually, actively frowned, and that was a new experience for Clint to see.
"There's one... fairly outlandish suggestion."
Clint raised an eyebrow.
"Have you ever heard of the term 'soul mates'?"
Clint's other eyebrow winged up to meet it. "I'm sorry?" He had, of course. Everyone had. The idea saturated popular culture like a drug sometimes. It was an incredibly rare phenomenon, relegated to the land of story books (or movies), with the occasional real-life example just to keep the myth alive. Two people (or if you were a real heretic, more) whose very souls were so completely enmeshed they weren't whole without the other. Where their very lives - heartrate, breathing, metabolic responses, all of it was keyed to one another. For every romantic happily-ever-after there were also horror stories of the pain and torment that awaited those who found and lost their soul mate. A favorite trope was the idea of soul mates who were on opposite sides of a line, who chose to kill one another than betray their beliefs or live without their companion, or stories where one's mate was torn from them by the forces of evil - the list of ways it could go south seemed endless.
No way in hell.
It didn't happen to people like him, people like them. It was too outlandish of a notion to be believed, and Coulson didn't honestly think-
"You weren't the only one who collapsed. She wasn't quite as vocal about it, but she hit the floor right around the same time you nearly did."
Clint realized suddenly that he was rubbing at his throat, over and over again where she'd touched him. It almost hummed, like he was a little too close to a live wire.
"Did she even out too?"
"She was in the room next to yours in quarantine. Once you were within a few yards of one another you both got better."
"She still down there?"
Coulson's jaw tightened.
"So you brought me up here to see if it would happen again?"
"Something like that." To Coulson's credit, he didn't dissemble about it. SHIELD wasn't above using him and Romanov as lab rats if they decided they needed to.
Because there wasn't anything he could really do about it, Clint dropped into the chair in front of the table and propped his feet up, hands laced loosely over his stomach, and waited to see if the pain returned. He certainly wasn't what he would consider "comfortable" with the humming across his skin.
All of it hinged on their soul mate theory being correct, and he thought that was so unlikely it was laughable.
"You don't seriously believe in this crazy theory, do you Phil?"
"It might not be so crazy." There was a look on Coulson's face and Clint knew that look. It was the "I have more information about this than you do and I'm not going to share it" look and normally that was par for the course on a mission, and Clint could accept it and go on. But not this time. Not about something like this.
"What aren't you telling me?" he got out through gritted teeth, because he could feel the low burn in his bloodstream begin to ramp up again.
"It is a rare phenomenon," Coulson began, and it was obvious he was choosing his words very, very carefully. "But it does exist. SHIELD makes it a point to know about this kind of thing just like any other phenomenon that could have an impact."
He didn't look like he was about to explain what that might mean. Of course not.
"This kind of magic is powerful and not something to be played with. It destroys more people than it helps."
"So what aren't you telling me?" Clint asked.
"Barton, you've been compromised. She's still the enemy." There was a sadness in the senior agent's eyes - the only place he'd let any hint of emotion show through. He didn't give Clint a chance to respond, just calmly turned and left. The click of the door relocking behind him was a loud echo in the heavy silence.
*****
Even the conference rooms had observation capabilities, and he watched Barton on one screen with Romanov on the other, waiting to see when they'd start showing signs of discomfort. He didn't let himself think about the concert tickets that sat in a locked safe in his bunk.
She was with an orchestra in Toronto, had been for a year or so. He'd been to see her no less than fifteen times in the ten years since they'd first met while he was undercover with SHIELD, and there wasn't a day that went by in which he didn't say "thank you" to a god he couldn't help but believe in that he'd never touched her. He'd given her a polite smile and nod as his cover identity had been introduced, nothing more.
Just from the eye contact, he couldn't help but go to see her when he could, even if it was from the back of a packed auditorium. He often wondered if she felt a similar pull towards someone she would never be able to find.
"You told him yet?" Fury finally stepped forward from his position in the back of the room. Phil didn't turn around.
"No, sir. Only that he's considered a compromised asset at this time. He's not going to respond well."
"I don't imagine he would," Fury growled. "My question for you is do you think he'll follow through?"
The rumor mill said that Fury had a soul mate once, and that she'd been killed. Reports varied as to how: people suspected everything from an accidental shooting to Fury assassinating her himself. The stories said no one survived that kind of trauma, but if anyone could, people supposed it would be the Director.
"I don't know, sir," Phil finally admited.
"Well, we might as well find out, shouldn't we?"
*****
When the door opened again, Clint had to look up from where he was sitting by the wall, curled in on himself.
"Why the hell would it work this way?" he asked as Phil looks down at him. There wasn't a clock on the wall, but Clint guessed several hours had passed.
"No one knows. Whatever forces are involved are far beyond what our current science understands."
"I knew that. What now? Do they have enough proof? Can I see her again?"
"If I put the two of you together, what happens then? What if you cement the bond? She's still the enemy."
"Maybe she'll turn. You've seen her file too, she'd be a hell of an asset to SHIELD. The intel she has alone-"
"Maybe you will."
Coulson's words were as effective as a bucket of ice water and Clint froze. "What?"
"There's no assurance you won't decide to defect from SHIELD and go back with her. It could just as easily go that way."
Clint was pretty sure that it wasn't Coulson talking, that it was what someone else - probably Fury - told him to say, but the implications were... bad.
"What are you planning to do about that?" he asked evenly. He dropped into the headspace he used on a mission, on a hit, that cold emptiness where everything was cut and dried, black and white, clear edges and decisive action.
"The only way to guarantee that you haven't been irreversibly compromised is to remove her from the equation."
"You're going to kill her?"
"No. You are."
Chapter 2