for i_llbedammned: somewhere outside my life
A Gift From: only_because3
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: somewhere outside my life
A Gift For: i_llbedammned
Rating: T
Warnings: Violence, zombies, blood mention
Summary/Prompt Used: Never spoken often, he always manages to use those three words when she feels at her lowest, covered in blood that is not hers.
Natasha released a sigh, a cloud of air escaping her lips. The mountain lion weighs a little lighter on her body. “I love you too.” (for the prompt: Clint and Natasha try to survive the zombie apocalypse together
Author's Note: I know this is supposed to be a zombie story and while I love zombie stories, I love really introspective zombie fics that deal more with emotions than the undead. This is also not the happiest of stories but I really hope you enjoy!
banner by frea_o
after
Clint comes back into the house, boots covered in dirt and snow and congealed blood, his bow on his back. Steve looks up from the little meat they have left (a fawn Clint killed three weeks ago). His eyes still carry so much hope that Clint is sorry to shake his head. Steve smiles anyway, sadness flowing from his features. “Well, we can finish the meat off today anyway. We’ve got enough canned goods to carry us.” Clint wonders briefly if this is what it was like for Steve growing up during the Depression.
Steve returns his attention to the meat in front of him (adding spices and flavors Clint knows they’re lucky to have) and Clint kicks off his shoes just outside the door.
Clint feels warmer as he goes through the house, the fire Sam’s currently stoking radiating heat so that the ground floor is comfortable enough. He raises a hand in greeting as he goes upstairs but Sam misses the silent gesture. It gets colder the further he goes up. Clint burrows further in his lightly damp coat. He expects to find Natasha crouched over the desk pushed into the corner of their shared room like she is every afternoon. Her maps are alone, the space empty when Clint stands in the doorway.
Her sigh echoes in the absence of all other noises, both on this floor and outside. Their world is so quiet now.
He discards his coat, hangs it over the back of Natasha’s chair before rapping softly on the bathroom door. “Come in.” He finds her standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, her hands grasping the porcelain sink. She doesn’t look at him, her eyes still focused on herself. Her face is now sharp lines, her cheeks having lost all roundness, her chin more prominent, her eyes sinking slowly in. She looks like she did when he first met her. “This face reminds me of before,” she says. Natasha touches her temple. “It reminds me of when I didn’t know what it meant to be human.”
He places his hand between her shoulder blades. She doesn’t feel cold but he thinks it must be because he’s freezing too. “You know what it means to be human now.” His voice is not as soft as he’d like.
Natasha exhales. Clint feels her body shift and sag beneath his fingertips. “If you say so.” She finally looks at him through the mirror and he gives her the best smile he can.
before
Natasha comes in from talking to their neighbors, an elderly couple that is too nice to trust. They’re in the middle of Oklahoma, surrounded by nothing but fields, scoping out the disappearance of several young mutants. Clint’s seen her in a variety of get-ups for undercover work but seeing her in farm attire is odd. Her hair, a more muted red than she prefers it, is French braided to keep it out of her face while she works in the barn. The overalls, his overalls, hang loose on her but the shirt underneath, a green and white checkered button up, follows the shape of her body. “Come look at this before you eat,” he calls from the living room. He hears her boots thump on the floor then nothing until he feels her presence closing in.
He’s not sure why he’s so surprised that this is happening. He’s fought aliens, mutants, gods, and he’s friends with a few of each too. Zombies are something he should have expected.
The news isn’t saying zombies yet though, he notes. It is definitely zombies though. He glances at Natasha. In the doorway she crosses her arms beneath her chest. She does not roll her eyes but Clint hears it in the way she says, “There’s no way this is factual. We would have heard something if an outbreak of this magnitude was happening.”
As if on cue, the SHIELD phone beeps from where it’s hidden beneath a floorboard under the coffee table.
after
She had found a home, had found what it meant to be Natasha, not Black Widow, not any one who belonged to some state organization.
And now she’s travelling across North America with only half the people she’d consider friends, starving and freezing in the same way she did in Russia. As normal as a life she could have had was taken from her again.
She’s angry. But she’s so tired too.
Sinking into bed next to Clint, she curls into his side but does not touch him. “Is this like the house you grew up in?”
Clint throws the thick stack of blankets over her and she tucks the fabric under her chin, glad that he remembered to put the scratchy blanket somewhere in the middle. “You’ve told me about it before but only vaguely.” She presses her feet against his hip. “Tell me about it,” Natasha asks.
His head lolls to look at her. He looks tired too, the bits of grey blooming at his temples. She finds it interesting that this new world has aged him and given her back her youth. She hums low in her throat. She supposes her earlier years were not exactly one in which she was youthful. Maybe this is their middle.
Natasha’s hand breeches the blankets, her fingers touching the grey hairs. His eyes close when he nods. “Our house had three bedrooms,” he says. “Ma and Dad’s, the one Barney and I shared, and Ma’s sewing room.” He wets his lips, rolls onto his side so that his entire body faces her now. Natasha curls her leg around his hips, ignoring the stiffness in her bones. “Originally, we had our own rooms, me and Barn. Mom kept all her sewing stuff in the corner of the living room, like you with your desk. We surprised her one day by moving my stuff into Barney’s room and her stuff into mine.” He locks eyes with her and she cannot offer him a smile but she pulls him closer to her. “I think that was the only time I saw her cry from something good.”
Natasha lets her hand cup his cheek. She is angry and she is tired. She’s lost most of her friends, lost the skin she had grown comfortable in, lost nearly everything just as she gained it.
And she forgets sometimes that Clint is angry too, is tired too. Clint has lost what she has lost. But they still have each other. And Clint Barton is a good man.
before
She agrees to wait one day. One day so that they can stockpile supplies and get enough sleep to last them until they reach Steve and Sam.
They head into town, radio crackling through the old pick up's speakers. Nothing new on how it started but the infection, that's what it's being called, is spreading rapidly. "People's idiocy astounds me," Natasha scoffs. She takes her feet off the dash and turns the radio off, jabbing the power knob with one finger. "Containment is not that difficult."
"Hysteria sets in," Clint says with a shrug. "Makes rational people stupid." He turns into the Walmart parking lot, wholly unsurprised to find it more crowded than usual. "Think it's turned to looting yet?"
Natasha scoots forward on the bench seat, squinting out the windshield. "Looks fairly calm."
Clint would laugh at what happens next if it didn't represent how serious the situation they're in actually is.
Gunshots ring out. Groups of people rush out of the automatic doors that don't look like they're moving anymore, people trampling over one another to get out of the store. He can't see what they're running from but he's got a pretty good guess.
"Idiots," Natasha states, grabbing two extra magazines from the glove compartment.
It is easy enough for them to avoid the chaos at the entrance, side stepping and shouldering people until they can get inside. There's a teenage boy on the ground, trampled and crying, that Natasha blocks from the crowd with her small but strong body. She helps him up, steadies him, then sends him on his way.
"Weapons or necessities first?"
Natasha let him know that was a stupid question with her eyes, grabbing a discarded cart and maneuvering them towards the grocery section.
This proves to be the wrong move. Or the right move. Clint isn't sure.
There, in the middle of the cereal aisle, is a little girl, probably no older than four, screaming from her seat in the cart. On the floor is a woman, the skin of her stomach missing, blood coating the floor. On top of her is another woman, no, a zombie, clawing, tearing, eating the flesh of the one below her. "Use the cart," is all he says.
Just like that, Natasha rushes forward, using the momentum of the cart to push the zombie back, pinning it to the support pole in the middle of the aisle. Clint pulls the little girl out of the cart, holding her close to his chest. He doesn't attempt to calm her, doesn't think it would help with all the noise going on in the store. Natasha grabs him by the arm, steers them down another aisle. "I'm going to go finish it. Cover her ears." She looks at the little girl. He thinks that she sees her hand raise, to do what he's not sure (touch the little girl? Touch him?), but she disappears quickly.
He sits down. The girl stares up at him, tears still streaming down her chubby cheeks, and he's at a loss. He tries to give her a warm smile, unsure of whether or not he succeeded, and cradles her, palms covering her ears just before shots ring out.
Clint bounces the little girl slightly, surprised that she is now silent. When Natasha appears next to him, she steals the words from his mouth. "We need to get out of here."
They leave the store with no food or weapons but with a little girl who quietly tells them in a high pitched voice that her name is Zara.
Clint knows that they could protect her but they are not built for children, let alone in a world like this.
Zara sits curled between the two of them on the truck bench, her head in Natasha's lap and feet pressed firmly against Clint's thighs, as they drive to the police station to drop her off.
after
He is best at camping out, his weapon the best suited now to get them the protein they need to keep their strength up. But Natasha, somehow draws these animals out, tracks them flawlessly even with fresh snow falling.
They have always worked well together and it’s no different now.
She stands, hands coming to press on her lower back, her head still bent. She’s been at her maps since he woke up this morning and, as he shoves his foot into a second sock, he thinks she’s finally done. “You need to go further west,” she states. “I think I’ll talk to Sam about setting traps too.”
His brow furrows. “Do we have stuff to make traps?”
Natasha shrugs with one shoulder. “We can scavenge.”
Once downstairs, they join Sam and Steve in the living room. Sam is taking inventory of the food he and Steve found when they went out this morning. It looks like they've gotten a decent haul of things Clint never liked before but will gratefully eat now. "There was a lot of movement today," Steve says from his spot by the fire.
"I thought it'd gotten too cold for them to move around," Clint says. He picks up his boot, smoothing down the duct tape that keeps it together, and slides it on.
Steve nods. "The snow is trapping the zombies," Steve stumbles over the word, the idea no less hard to grasp than it was a year ago. "Today was just the day to loot."
Natasha hums in the back of her throat. "Good job then, boys." She grabs Clint's quiver and her own set of knives, waiting then for Clint to finish lacing his boots.
Outside, they walk side by side in silence. Natasha is dwarfed in the jacket she found two towns ago and he doesn't doubt that the wind still whips through the empty spaces her body no longer fills. "Why are you staring at me," Natasha asks. Loose curl ends reach out from beneath her beanie and Clint stops.
"Can't I enjoy one of the few good things left in the world," he counters. She rolls her eyes, shaking her head and inadvertently releasing more hair from her beanie. Natasha holds his bow carefully when he hands it to her. "We need to find you a better fitting coat." He lifts the beanie and tucks the red back in then brings the hat down even further, the hem now resting over Natasha's eyebrows.
"You never used to be so sappy." Her voice is almost warm, not unkind. She hands him his bow before starting off westward. "We need to find you new shoes." His feet disappear into the snow with each step he takes. He cannot see the snow seep in but he wiggles stiff toes in damp socks.
"Shopping trip for us next week?"
Natasha releases the closest thing he's heard to a laugh in a while. "If we send those two out to hunt, we'll have to live off nothing but canned goods."
Clint smiles. "A shopping list then."
Silence envelops them and when they are immersed in the forest, they part. He finds a tree and climbs it, perching so that he has a decent position to give Natasha back up. He watches her stand on a rock, turning slowly so that she can take in everything. There's a rustle to his left but the trees that way are so thick, so heavy with snow, that he can't make out what it is. Natasha sways right. "Go on," she says. "I've got tracks and fresh droppings."
He stays high for a few moments longer, assessing the movement (it's staying straight), counting the time between noises (fifteen seconds). Quietly, he descends, crouching at the base of the tree. A man emerges from the thicket, still human based on how well he's moving. Clint stands, bow still in hand. They stare at each other wordlessly until Natasha comes back, a bleeding mountain lion around her neck like a morbid stole. The man reaches for his gun and Clint had an arrow nocked before the man can pull the hammer back. "I've been tracking that cat for two days," the man stutters out. "He's mine."
"She," Natasha corrects.
"Is ours," Clint finishes. "Should've gotten here sooner."
The man scoffs. "You think your bow will stop my bullet?"
"If you were going to shoot, you'd have already done it."
Natasha grins, teeth gleaming. "If you shot him, I could fix him up. Dig out the bullet and stitch him closed."
The man laughs. "You could fix a head shot? A shot to the heart?"
"You can aim for that, but you'd miss," Clint states. "You're too shaky. The way you hold your gun isn't correct so you’re probably imitating what you saw in movies."
"Besides," Natasha sighs, "You manage to kill him, I'll kill you and still leave with the meat." Natasha pulls a knife, still streaked red, from the holder on her thigh. "Unless you think you can heal from stab wound."
The man rolls his eyes, holding his gun even more carelessly now. "A knife? You think you could get me from over there with a knife? What'd you do before?"
A low chuckle leaks from her mouth. "Before, I was a monster."
before
This may be the first time they’ve danced when not on a mission.
Sure, they’re kind of working, showing their faces at a Stark Industries fundraiser, but they are not tense, guarded, waiting for something to happen.
Tonight they dance freely. The band, all horns and spirit, fills the room, fills the empty spaces between their bones. Natasha’s smile takes up her entire face, her cheeks fill with the shadow of dimples in her cheeks. She laughs as she spins back into his arm. “I think Tony would have a heart attack if he knew that you were the most suggestive member of the Avengers,” she quips. Her eyes are bright and his fingers curls at her waist as he smiles back at her. Dipping his head, he leaves a chaste kiss on her lips, the most either of them allow in public, and she laughs again when they part, her hand palming the back of his neck.
When he offered her a chance to join SHIELD, he never imagined she could look this happy.
Clint notices Steve standing uncomfortably on the edge of the event, drink sweating in his hand. He twirls Natasha once more, her dress fanning out around her. “Wallflower alert,” he murmurs once she’s near him again. Natasha follows his gaze before quirking an eyebrow.
“Would you mind?” He shakes his head and she guides them off the dance floor, stalking towards Steve whose shoulders sag when he sees them.
“I’m having a fine time,” Steve says when they reach him.
Natasha grabs the beer from his hand and takes a swing, then passes it to Clint. “You saw her, Steve. She loves to dance but I need a breather,” Clint says, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder.
Natasha’s curls bounce when she nods firmly. “Have to live a little, Steve.” He could easily stay rooted in his spot but Steve relents, going out to dance with Natasha.
Clint snorts around the lip of the bottle, watching Natasha get Steve into position. Such a fluid fighter but proving to be a stiff dancer. Natasha seemingly explains the lively movements to match the music before glancing back at Clint briefly. He catches the movement of her hand. Middle and ring finger bent against her palm, her thumb and other fingers still raises. It’s brief, her sign to him, her hand unfolding and taking Steve’s hand so they can dance.
Clint sighs, the corners of his lips curling into a smile that he will wear all night. The next time she looks at him, he signs back I love you.
after
It’s not the presence of zombies that makes now harder. She’s lived her entire life killing people and those pieces of rotting flesh stumbling around in the snow are no longer people, just things, their only instinct left to eat, eat, eat. Natasha’s not sure that it’s the threat of losing those she’s close to either. She is sad that her world has dwindled down to Clint, Steve, and Sam but death was always just around the corner for them. They were protectors of the Earth and near death experiences happened all the time.
What makes living now harder is watching humanity slip away. The survivors, who Natasha imagines were nice people before, are now like her. They bare their teeth, weapons eagerly waved, their hands itching to kill so that they may survive one day more. There is no more kindness, no more sense of community.
Like it was in the Red Room, it is every man for himself.
Natasha does not want to lose her humanity. She worked so hard for it, fought for it, and she feels it slipping away.
She knows she could have disarmed that man in the forest. But it is cold and her body, which is always thirsty, always hungry, always aching and tired, doesn’t move like it used to. She tells herself that she did him a service, throwing her knife at his throat instead of letting him bleed out slowly. It still wasn’t a pleasant death and she knows he did suffer, choking on his own blood, but she was not the one with the gun. She could not have made it any quicker.
Clint is staring at her again but before she can say anything, he tells her earnestly, “I love you.”
Never spoken often, he always manages to use those three words when she feels at her lowest, covered in blood that is not hers.
Natasha released a sigh, a cloud of air escaping her lips. The mountain lion weighs a little lighter on her body. “I love you too.”
before
Clint’s eyes ease open, finally, and Natasha dog ears the page of her book as she stands. “You’re an idiot,” she says. Natasha wipes the sleep from his eyes, raises his bed so that he can drink from the cup of water she offers. “You’ve been knocked out for an entire day.” She watches him try and push himself up further but fail. “You broke both legs.”
He looks down, seemingly just discovering that the weight on his legs is from two casts that go from the tops of his thighs to the tips of his toes. “Did I stick the landing at least?”
She rolls her eyes. “Do you know how much physical therapy you’re going to have? Which means now I’m teaming up with Rogers and Rumlow.”
Clint cracks a smile. “I know you’ll still find the time to help get me food and walk Lucky.”
Natasha wrinkles her nose. “Please. Your SHIELD insurance will pay for in-house help.” She busies her hands by shoving another pillow behind Clint’s back since he can’t sit up on his own. “I’m being relocated to DC anyway.”
“Oh,” Clint says simply. Natasha watches as he tries to keep that goofy grin off his face, watches his lips twitch, and his eyes dim.
“We’ve taken long missions apart before,” she points out. “You won’t even miss me. You just don’t want to be left alone.”
He looks almost offended. “I’ve been alone a lot in my life.”
She sits on the edge of his bed, careful not to jostle his casted legs. “That doesn’t mean that you like to be.”
Clint sighs and nods. Natasha runs a hand through his hair, fluffing the part that flattened during his 24 hour coma. She makes sure to finger the two gray strands that try to camouflage into his blonde hair. Her eyes always find them first. “Did they bring my pack in,” he asks.
“It’s in the cabinet.” He stupidly tries to reach but fails, legs weighing him down and wires tangling around his arm. “What do you need?”
“The baggy from my wallet.”
She unearths his wallet from beneath dirty clothes and so many sticky food wrappers that if she didn’t know him better, would think that he had been starving on their mission. The velcro is loud as she separates it. She runs her tongue over her teeth at the offending sound as she holds the wallet open for Clint. He plucks the foggy plastic from between crumpled bills and tosses it to her. Wordlessly, she unfolds the worn plastic and lets its contents fall into her waiting palm. She uses her thumb to flatten the pile of interlinked silver to reveal a necklace with a simple clasp and an arrow pendant. Her eyebrows begin to knit together before she relaxes her face, eyes finding his. “For you,” he says. “If you want.”
Sighing, she secures the jewelry around her neck. The metal does not weigh heavy against her collarbone but she clearly feels the presence of Clint’s arrow. “Thanks,” she whispers, index finger tapping the arrow. His smile, shy and proud, has Natasha sinking into the bed next to him, her own lips quirking into a grin of her own.
after
Sam comes up from the basement, hand rubbing the back of his neck worriedly. “They’re still not back?” Natasha shakes her head and pushes herself further into the couch. Sam crouches down in front of the fire. He stirs the pot they have over the flame, stirring it for a moment, then joining Natasha on the couch. “Want to play another round?”
Natasha picks up the deck of cards, shuffling twice before handing it to Sam. “You’ve taught me more card games than I thought existed.” She picks up the three cards she’s dealt. “I’m starting to think you’re making them up now.”
Sam laughs hollowly, air still whistling through the gap between his teeth. “I haven’t made any of them up… But I may have left out some rules.”
Natasha notices how tightly Sam holds his cards and is surprised to find her own hands shaking.
Clint and Steve have been gone for five hours. They had left to go look for more blankets, more wood, more medicine to combat Sam's cold. They were only supposed to be gone two hours tops.
Neither of them are paying much attention to their cards, going through the motions of picking up and putting down. She takes a deep breath and holds it until she feels like her head is swelling. "I should go look for them."
Sam throws down his cards, no longer willing to put up the facade. "You can't go alone."
"You can't go out sick."
Sam crosses his arms over his chest and lets his head fall to the back of the couch. "I used to worry when my ma would be late coming home from work, especially after what happened with my dad." Even after all this time they've spent together, time that slides along at a glacial pace, Natasha still hasn't heard the entire story of what happened to Sam's dad. She wonders briefly if Steve has. If it was shared between the two at the darkest point in the night, with the cold saturating their bodies, faces so close that they almost touch the same way that she has told Clint all of her secrets. "But my ma would always make it home safe. Would tell me I worry too much." He turns to look at her. "Do we worry too much?"
Natasha gathers the cards up into a neat pile and sets them on the coffee table. Uncurling from her spot, she stretches out, her head falling into Sam's lap. "I don't think I worry... I never used to anyway." Sam's fingers run through Natasha's hair hesitantly. "You really think they're okay?"
His fingers press against her scalp. "I don't know."
Natasha knows she shouldn’t leave Sam. They all agreed early on that they must always stay in pairs. It keeps them safe and it always helps in protecting wherever they’re holed up in. This house hasn’t been threatened for a while now but Sam is too sick to fend off others by himself in case someone has been watching them, someone like the group that the man she killed belonged to.
But Clint is out there, Steve is out there, and she can not sit back and wait. She doesn’t know how.
“The soup is probably done.” Sam pulls his hand from her hair and she goes to kneel in front of the fire. Natasha makes sure to spoon a lot of the broth into Sam’s bowl. She tells him that she's going to get him another blanket to bundle in but she leans against the back door, shoving her feet into her boots quickly and quietly. Next comes the jacket, her beanie, her knives. She's just about to write a note for Sam when he yells from the living room.
Natasha meets him in the doorway. Sam doesn't even look surprised to see her dressed to go out. He puts a finger to his lips then tries his best to muffle his own coughing. There's a noise coming from outside, a loud groaning. Sam goes to grab his bat, nails embedded into the wood but Natasha stops him. "Sam, no."
He shakes his head. "I didn't have to tell you about this. I could've let you sneak out the back and gone out the front myself. But we're in this together, right?"
Natasha puts a smile on her face and, thought she knows it wont help, puts her beanie on his head. "Then let's go do what we do best."
They open the front door and find Clint and Steve at the bottom of the porch, red snow surrounding the both of them. "Go get the medkit," Sam tells her but Natasha ignores him, reaching for Clint.
before
Clint finds her in a sketchy coffee shop, blood still oozing from where his arrow pierced her thigh. She broke off most of it but he can see that she left the arrowhead in. He slides in the booth opposite her, dirty hands picking up the menu. "You order anything yet?" She glares at him and he smirks. "You should. Need to keep your blood sugar up."
"You don't strike me as the type to murder me in front of such an intimate crowd."
Clint shakes his head. "I'm not going to murder you."
Natasha arches a brow. "Isnt that what your mission is?"
Shrugging, Clint leans back against the ripped seat. "I could kill you but I dunno."
The waitress comes over. Natasha orders a coffee and, in broken Czech, orders a bowl of fruit and some bread. "To keep your blood sugar up," he reiterates. He motions for her cup that she's left untouched and after a small nod, he downs half of it. "I can clean you up if you need it. After you eat."
Natasha stares. Her fingers, thin and pink from blood, roll the straw paper back and forth. "Why are you doing all this?"
Clint smiles and lets out a breath. "I got a good feeling about you." He taps his boot against hers and smiles a little wider when he notices her cheeks barely twitch with reaction before she covers the action by draining the rest of the water.
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: somewhere outside my life
A Gift For: i_llbedammned
Rating: T
Warnings: Violence, zombies, blood mention
Summary/Prompt Used: Never spoken often, he always manages to use those three words when she feels at her lowest, covered in blood that is not hers.
Natasha released a sigh, a cloud of air escaping her lips. The mountain lion weighs a little lighter on her body. “I love you too.” (for the prompt: Clint and Natasha try to survive the zombie apocalypse together
Author's Note: I know this is supposed to be a zombie story and while I love zombie stories, I love really introspective zombie fics that deal more with emotions than the undead. This is also not the happiest of stories but I really hope you enjoy!
banner by frea_o
after
Clint comes back into the house, boots covered in dirt and snow and congealed blood, his bow on his back. Steve looks up from the little meat they have left (a fawn Clint killed three weeks ago). His eyes still carry so much hope that Clint is sorry to shake his head. Steve smiles anyway, sadness flowing from his features. “Well, we can finish the meat off today anyway. We’ve got enough canned goods to carry us.” Clint wonders briefly if this is what it was like for Steve growing up during the Depression.
Steve returns his attention to the meat in front of him (adding spices and flavors Clint knows they’re lucky to have) and Clint kicks off his shoes just outside the door.
Clint feels warmer as he goes through the house, the fire Sam’s currently stoking radiating heat so that the ground floor is comfortable enough. He raises a hand in greeting as he goes upstairs but Sam misses the silent gesture. It gets colder the further he goes up. Clint burrows further in his lightly damp coat. He expects to find Natasha crouched over the desk pushed into the corner of their shared room like she is every afternoon. Her maps are alone, the space empty when Clint stands in the doorway.
Her sigh echoes in the absence of all other noises, both on this floor and outside. Their world is so quiet now.
He discards his coat, hangs it over the back of Natasha’s chair before rapping softly on the bathroom door. “Come in.” He finds her standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, her hands grasping the porcelain sink. She doesn’t look at him, her eyes still focused on herself. Her face is now sharp lines, her cheeks having lost all roundness, her chin more prominent, her eyes sinking slowly in. She looks like she did when he first met her. “This face reminds me of before,” she says. Natasha touches her temple. “It reminds me of when I didn’t know what it meant to be human.”
He places his hand between her shoulder blades. She doesn’t feel cold but he thinks it must be because he’s freezing too. “You know what it means to be human now.” His voice is not as soft as he’d like.
Natasha exhales. Clint feels her body shift and sag beneath his fingertips. “If you say so.” She finally looks at him through the mirror and he gives her the best smile he can.
before
Natasha comes in from talking to their neighbors, an elderly couple that is too nice to trust. They’re in the middle of Oklahoma, surrounded by nothing but fields, scoping out the disappearance of several young mutants. Clint’s seen her in a variety of get-ups for undercover work but seeing her in farm attire is odd. Her hair, a more muted red than she prefers it, is French braided to keep it out of her face while she works in the barn. The overalls, his overalls, hang loose on her but the shirt underneath, a green and white checkered button up, follows the shape of her body. “Come look at this before you eat,” he calls from the living room. He hears her boots thump on the floor then nothing until he feels her presence closing in.
He’s not sure why he’s so surprised that this is happening. He’s fought aliens, mutants, gods, and he’s friends with a few of each too. Zombies are something he should have expected.
The news isn’t saying zombies yet though, he notes. It is definitely zombies though. He glances at Natasha. In the doorway she crosses her arms beneath her chest. She does not roll her eyes but Clint hears it in the way she says, “There’s no way this is factual. We would have heard something if an outbreak of this magnitude was happening.”
As if on cue, the SHIELD phone beeps from where it’s hidden beneath a floorboard under the coffee table.
after
She had found a home, had found what it meant to be Natasha, not Black Widow, not any one who belonged to some state organization.
And now she’s travelling across North America with only half the people she’d consider friends, starving and freezing in the same way she did in Russia. As normal as a life she could have had was taken from her again.
She’s angry. But she’s so tired too.
Sinking into bed next to Clint, she curls into his side but does not touch him. “Is this like the house you grew up in?”
Clint throws the thick stack of blankets over her and she tucks the fabric under her chin, glad that he remembered to put the scratchy blanket somewhere in the middle. “You’ve told me about it before but only vaguely.” She presses her feet against his hip. “Tell me about it,” Natasha asks.
His head lolls to look at her. He looks tired too, the bits of grey blooming at his temples. She finds it interesting that this new world has aged him and given her back her youth. She hums low in her throat. She supposes her earlier years were not exactly one in which she was youthful. Maybe this is their middle.
Natasha’s hand breeches the blankets, her fingers touching the grey hairs. His eyes close when he nods. “Our house had three bedrooms,” he says. “Ma and Dad’s, the one Barney and I shared, and Ma’s sewing room.” He wets his lips, rolls onto his side so that his entire body faces her now. Natasha curls her leg around his hips, ignoring the stiffness in her bones. “Originally, we had our own rooms, me and Barn. Mom kept all her sewing stuff in the corner of the living room, like you with your desk. We surprised her one day by moving my stuff into Barney’s room and her stuff into mine.” He locks eyes with her and she cannot offer him a smile but she pulls him closer to her. “I think that was the only time I saw her cry from something good.”
Natasha lets her hand cup his cheek. She is angry and she is tired. She’s lost most of her friends, lost the skin she had grown comfortable in, lost nearly everything just as she gained it.
And she forgets sometimes that Clint is angry too, is tired too. Clint has lost what she has lost. But they still have each other. And Clint Barton is a good man.
before
She agrees to wait one day. One day so that they can stockpile supplies and get enough sleep to last them until they reach Steve and Sam.
They head into town, radio crackling through the old pick up's speakers. Nothing new on how it started but the infection, that's what it's being called, is spreading rapidly. "People's idiocy astounds me," Natasha scoffs. She takes her feet off the dash and turns the radio off, jabbing the power knob with one finger. "Containment is not that difficult."
"Hysteria sets in," Clint says with a shrug. "Makes rational people stupid." He turns into the Walmart parking lot, wholly unsurprised to find it more crowded than usual. "Think it's turned to looting yet?"
Natasha scoots forward on the bench seat, squinting out the windshield. "Looks fairly calm."
Clint would laugh at what happens next if it didn't represent how serious the situation they're in actually is.
Gunshots ring out. Groups of people rush out of the automatic doors that don't look like they're moving anymore, people trampling over one another to get out of the store. He can't see what they're running from but he's got a pretty good guess.
"Idiots," Natasha states, grabbing two extra magazines from the glove compartment.
It is easy enough for them to avoid the chaos at the entrance, side stepping and shouldering people until they can get inside. There's a teenage boy on the ground, trampled and crying, that Natasha blocks from the crowd with her small but strong body. She helps him up, steadies him, then sends him on his way.
"Weapons or necessities first?"
Natasha let him know that was a stupid question with her eyes, grabbing a discarded cart and maneuvering them towards the grocery section.
This proves to be the wrong move. Or the right move. Clint isn't sure.
There, in the middle of the cereal aisle, is a little girl, probably no older than four, screaming from her seat in the cart. On the floor is a woman, the skin of her stomach missing, blood coating the floor. On top of her is another woman, no, a zombie, clawing, tearing, eating the flesh of the one below her. "Use the cart," is all he says.
Just like that, Natasha rushes forward, using the momentum of the cart to push the zombie back, pinning it to the support pole in the middle of the aisle. Clint pulls the little girl out of the cart, holding her close to his chest. He doesn't attempt to calm her, doesn't think it would help with all the noise going on in the store. Natasha grabs him by the arm, steers them down another aisle. "I'm going to go finish it. Cover her ears." She looks at the little girl. He thinks that she sees her hand raise, to do what he's not sure (touch the little girl? Touch him?), but she disappears quickly.
He sits down. The girl stares up at him, tears still streaming down her chubby cheeks, and he's at a loss. He tries to give her a warm smile, unsure of whether or not he succeeded, and cradles her, palms covering her ears just before shots ring out.
Clint bounces the little girl slightly, surprised that she is now silent. When Natasha appears next to him, she steals the words from his mouth. "We need to get out of here."
They leave the store with no food or weapons but with a little girl who quietly tells them in a high pitched voice that her name is Zara.
Clint knows that they could protect her but they are not built for children, let alone in a world like this.
Zara sits curled between the two of them on the truck bench, her head in Natasha's lap and feet pressed firmly against Clint's thighs, as they drive to the police station to drop her off.
after
He is best at camping out, his weapon the best suited now to get them the protein they need to keep their strength up. But Natasha, somehow draws these animals out, tracks them flawlessly even with fresh snow falling.
They have always worked well together and it’s no different now.
She stands, hands coming to press on her lower back, her head still bent. She’s been at her maps since he woke up this morning and, as he shoves his foot into a second sock, he thinks she’s finally done. “You need to go further west,” she states. “I think I’ll talk to Sam about setting traps too.”
His brow furrows. “Do we have stuff to make traps?”
Natasha shrugs with one shoulder. “We can scavenge.”
Once downstairs, they join Sam and Steve in the living room. Sam is taking inventory of the food he and Steve found when they went out this morning. It looks like they've gotten a decent haul of things Clint never liked before but will gratefully eat now. "There was a lot of movement today," Steve says from his spot by the fire.
"I thought it'd gotten too cold for them to move around," Clint says. He picks up his boot, smoothing down the duct tape that keeps it together, and slides it on.
Steve nods. "The snow is trapping the zombies," Steve stumbles over the word, the idea no less hard to grasp than it was a year ago. "Today was just the day to loot."
Natasha hums in the back of her throat. "Good job then, boys." She grabs Clint's quiver and her own set of knives, waiting then for Clint to finish lacing his boots.
Outside, they walk side by side in silence. Natasha is dwarfed in the jacket she found two towns ago and he doesn't doubt that the wind still whips through the empty spaces her body no longer fills. "Why are you staring at me," Natasha asks. Loose curl ends reach out from beneath her beanie and Clint stops.
"Can't I enjoy one of the few good things left in the world," he counters. She rolls her eyes, shaking her head and inadvertently releasing more hair from her beanie. Natasha holds his bow carefully when he hands it to her. "We need to find you a better fitting coat." He lifts the beanie and tucks the red back in then brings the hat down even further, the hem now resting over Natasha's eyebrows.
"You never used to be so sappy." Her voice is almost warm, not unkind. She hands him his bow before starting off westward. "We need to find you new shoes." His feet disappear into the snow with each step he takes. He cannot see the snow seep in but he wiggles stiff toes in damp socks.
"Shopping trip for us next week?"
Natasha releases the closest thing he's heard to a laugh in a while. "If we send those two out to hunt, we'll have to live off nothing but canned goods."
Clint smiles. "A shopping list then."
Silence envelops them and when they are immersed in the forest, they part. He finds a tree and climbs it, perching so that he has a decent position to give Natasha back up. He watches her stand on a rock, turning slowly so that she can take in everything. There's a rustle to his left but the trees that way are so thick, so heavy with snow, that he can't make out what it is. Natasha sways right. "Go on," she says. "I've got tracks and fresh droppings."
He stays high for a few moments longer, assessing the movement (it's staying straight), counting the time between noises (fifteen seconds). Quietly, he descends, crouching at the base of the tree. A man emerges from the thicket, still human based on how well he's moving. Clint stands, bow still in hand. They stare at each other wordlessly until Natasha comes back, a bleeding mountain lion around her neck like a morbid stole. The man reaches for his gun and Clint had an arrow nocked before the man can pull the hammer back. "I've been tracking that cat for two days," the man stutters out. "He's mine."
"She," Natasha corrects.
"Is ours," Clint finishes. "Should've gotten here sooner."
The man scoffs. "You think your bow will stop my bullet?"
"If you were going to shoot, you'd have already done it."
Natasha grins, teeth gleaming. "If you shot him, I could fix him up. Dig out the bullet and stitch him closed."
The man laughs. "You could fix a head shot? A shot to the heart?"
"You can aim for that, but you'd miss," Clint states. "You're too shaky. The way you hold your gun isn't correct so you’re probably imitating what you saw in movies."
"Besides," Natasha sighs, "You manage to kill him, I'll kill you and still leave with the meat." Natasha pulls a knife, still streaked red, from the holder on her thigh. "Unless you think you can heal from stab wound."
The man rolls his eyes, holding his gun even more carelessly now. "A knife? You think you could get me from over there with a knife? What'd you do before?"
A low chuckle leaks from her mouth. "Before, I was a monster."
before
This may be the first time they’ve danced when not on a mission.
Sure, they’re kind of working, showing their faces at a Stark Industries fundraiser, but they are not tense, guarded, waiting for something to happen.
Tonight they dance freely. The band, all horns and spirit, fills the room, fills the empty spaces between their bones. Natasha’s smile takes up her entire face, her cheeks fill with the shadow of dimples in her cheeks. She laughs as she spins back into his arm. “I think Tony would have a heart attack if he knew that you were the most suggestive member of the Avengers,” she quips. Her eyes are bright and his fingers curls at her waist as he smiles back at her. Dipping his head, he leaves a chaste kiss on her lips, the most either of them allow in public, and she laughs again when they part, her hand palming the back of his neck.
When he offered her a chance to join SHIELD, he never imagined she could look this happy.
Clint notices Steve standing uncomfortably on the edge of the event, drink sweating in his hand. He twirls Natasha once more, her dress fanning out around her. “Wallflower alert,” he murmurs once she’s near him again. Natasha follows his gaze before quirking an eyebrow.
“Would you mind?” He shakes his head and she guides them off the dance floor, stalking towards Steve whose shoulders sag when he sees them.
“I’m having a fine time,” Steve says when they reach him.
Natasha grabs the beer from his hand and takes a swing, then passes it to Clint. “You saw her, Steve. She loves to dance but I need a breather,” Clint says, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder.
Natasha’s curls bounce when she nods firmly. “Have to live a little, Steve.” He could easily stay rooted in his spot but Steve relents, going out to dance with Natasha.
Clint snorts around the lip of the bottle, watching Natasha get Steve into position. Such a fluid fighter but proving to be a stiff dancer. Natasha seemingly explains the lively movements to match the music before glancing back at Clint briefly. He catches the movement of her hand. Middle and ring finger bent against her palm, her thumb and other fingers still raises. It’s brief, her sign to him, her hand unfolding and taking Steve’s hand so they can dance.
Clint sighs, the corners of his lips curling into a smile that he will wear all night. The next time she looks at him, he signs back I love you.
after
It’s not the presence of zombies that makes now harder. She’s lived her entire life killing people and those pieces of rotting flesh stumbling around in the snow are no longer people, just things, their only instinct left to eat, eat, eat. Natasha’s not sure that it’s the threat of losing those she’s close to either. She is sad that her world has dwindled down to Clint, Steve, and Sam but death was always just around the corner for them. They were protectors of the Earth and near death experiences happened all the time.
What makes living now harder is watching humanity slip away. The survivors, who Natasha imagines were nice people before, are now like her. They bare their teeth, weapons eagerly waved, their hands itching to kill so that they may survive one day more. There is no more kindness, no more sense of community.
Like it was in the Red Room, it is every man for himself.
Natasha does not want to lose her humanity. She worked so hard for it, fought for it, and she feels it slipping away.
She knows she could have disarmed that man in the forest. But it is cold and her body, which is always thirsty, always hungry, always aching and tired, doesn’t move like it used to. She tells herself that she did him a service, throwing her knife at his throat instead of letting him bleed out slowly. It still wasn’t a pleasant death and she knows he did suffer, choking on his own blood, but she was not the one with the gun. She could not have made it any quicker.
Clint is staring at her again but before she can say anything, he tells her earnestly, “I love you.”
Never spoken often, he always manages to use those three words when she feels at her lowest, covered in blood that is not hers.
Natasha released a sigh, a cloud of air escaping her lips. The mountain lion weighs a little lighter on her body. “I love you too.”
before
Clint’s eyes ease open, finally, and Natasha dog ears the page of her book as she stands. “You’re an idiot,” she says. Natasha wipes the sleep from his eyes, raises his bed so that he can drink from the cup of water she offers. “You’ve been knocked out for an entire day.” She watches him try and push himself up further but fail. “You broke both legs.”
He looks down, seemingly just discovering that the weight on his legs is from two casts that go from the tops of his thighs to the tips of his toes. “Did I stick the landing at least?”
She rolls her eyes. “Do you know how much physical therapy you’re going to have? Which means now I’m teaming up with Rogers and Rumlow.”
Clint cracks a smile. “I know you’ll still find the time to help get me food and walk Lucky.”
Natasha wrinkles her nose. “Please. Your SHIELD insurance will pay for in-house help.” She busies her hands by shoving another pillow behind Clint’s back since he can’t sit up on his own. “I’m being relocated to DC anyway.”
“Oh,” Clint says simply. Natasha watches as he tries to keep that goofy grin off his face, watches his lips twitch, and his eyes dim.
“We’ve taken long missions apart before,” she points out. “You won’t even miss me. You just don’t want to be left alone.”
He looks almost offended. “I’ve been alone a lot in my life.”
She sits on the edge of his bed, careful not to jostle his casted legs. “That doesn’t mean that you like to be.”
Clint sighs and nods. Natasha runs a hand through his hair, fluffing the part that flattened during his 24 hour coma. She makes sure to finger the two gray strands that try to camouflage into his blonde hair. Her eyes always find them first. “Did they bring my pack in,” he asks.
“It’s in the cabinet.” He stupidly tries to reach but fails, legs weighing him down and wires tangling around his arm. “What do you need?”
“The baggy from my wallet.”
She unearths his wallet from beneath dirty clothes and so many sticky food wrappers that if she didn’t know him better, would think that he had been starving on their mission. The velcro is loud as she separates it. She runs her tongue over her teeth at the offending sound as she holds the wallet open for Clint. He plucks the foggy plastic from between crumpled bills and tosses it to her. Wordlessly, she unfolds the worn plastic and lets its contents fall into her waiting palm. She uses her thumb to flatten the pile of interlinked silver to reveal a necklace with a simple clasp and an arrow pendant. Her eyebrows begin to knit together before she relaxes her face, eyes finding his. “For you,” he says. “If you want.”
Sighing, she secures the jewelry around her neck. The metal does not weigh heavy against her collarbone but she clearly feels the presence of Clint’s arrow. “Thanks,” she whispers, index finger tapping the arrow. His smile, shy and proud, has Natasha sinking into the bed next to him, her own lips quirking into a grin of her own.
after
Sam comes up from the basement, hand rubbing the back of his neck worriedly. “They’re still not back?” Natasha shakes her head and pushes herself further into the couch. Sam crouches down in front of the fire. He stirs the pot they have over the flame, stirring it for a moment, then joining Natasha on the couch. “Want to play another round?”
Natasha picks up the deck of cards, shuffling twice before handing it to Sam. “You’ve taught me more card games than I thought existed.” She picks up the three cards she’s dealt. “I’m starting to think you’re making them up now.”
Sam laughs hollowly, air still whistling through the gap between his teeth. “I haven’t made any of them up… But I may have left out some rules.”
Natasha notices how tightly Sam holds his cards and is surprised to find her own hands shaking.
Clint and Steve have been gone for five hours. They had left to go look for more blankets, more wood, more medicine to combat Sam's cold. They were only supposed to be gone two hours tops.
Neither of them are paying much attention to their cards, going through the motions of picking up and putting down. She takes a deep breath and holds it until she feels like her head is swelling. "I should go look for them."
Sam throws down his cards, no longer willing to put up the facade. "You can't go alone."
"You can't go out sick."
Sam crosses his arms over his chest and lets his head fall to the back of the couch. "I used to worry when my ma would be late coming home from work, especially after what happened with my dad." Even after all this time they've spent together, time that slides along at a glacial pace, Natasha still hasn't heard the entire story of what happened to Sam's dad. She wonders briefly if Steve has. If it was shared between the two at the darkest point in the night, with the cold saturating their bodies, faces so close that they almost touch the same way that she has told Clint all of her secrets. "But my ma would always make it home safe. Would tell me I worry too much." He turns to look at her. "Do we worry too much?"
Natasha gathers the cards up into a neat pile and sets them on the coffee table. Uncurling from her spot, she stretches out, her head falling into Sam's lap. "I don't think I worry... I never used to anyway." Sam's fingers run through Natasha's hair hesitantly. "You really think they're okay?"
His fingers press against her scalp. "I don't know."
Natasha knows she shouldn’t leave Sam. They all agreed early on that they must always stay in pairs. It keeps them safe and it always helps in protecting wherever they’re holed up in. This house hasn’t been threatened for a while now but Sam is too sick to fend off others by himself in case someone has been watching them, someone like the group that the man she killed belonged to.
But Clint is out there, Steve is out there, and she can not sit back and wait. She doesn’t know how.
“The soup is probably done.” Sam pulls his hand from her hair and she goes to kneel in front of the fire. Natasha makes sure to spoon a lot of the broth into Sam’s bowl. She tells him that she's going to get him another blanket to bundle in but she leans against the back door, shoving her feet into her boots quickly and quietly. Next comes the jacket, her beanie, her knives. She's just about to write a note for Sam when he yells from the living room.
Natasha meets him in the doorway. Sam doesn't even look surprised to see her dressed to go out. He puts a finger to his lips then tries his best to muffle his own coughing. There's a noise coming from outside, a loud groaning. Sam goes to grab his bat, nails embedded into the wood but Natasha stops him. "Sam, no."
He shakes his head. "I didn't have to tell you about this. I could've let you sneak out the back and gone out the front myself. But we're in this together, right?"
Natasha puts a smile on her face and, thought she knows it wont help, puts her beanie on his head. "Then let's go do what we do best."
They open the front door and find Clint and Steve at the bottom of the porch, red snow surrounding the both of them. "Go get the medkit," Sam tells her but Natasha ignores him, reaching for Clint.
before
Clint finds her in a sketchy coffee shop, blood still oozing from where his arrow pierced her thigh. She broke off most of it but he can see that she left the arrowhead in. He slides in the booth opposite her, dirty hands picking up the menu. "You order anything yet?" She glares at him and he smirks. "You should. Need to keep your blood sugar up."
"You don't strike me as the type to murder me in front of such an intimate crowd."
Clint shakes his head. "I'm not going to murder you."
Natasha arches a brow. "Isnt that what your mission is?"
Shrugging, Clint leans back against the ripped seat. "I could kill you but I dunno."
The waitress comes over. Natasha orders a coffee and, in broken Czech, orders a bowl of fruit and some bread. "To keep your blood sugar up," he reiterates. He motions for her cup that she's left untouched and after a small nod, he downs half of it. "I can clean you up if you need it. After you eat."
Natasha stares. Her fingers, thin and pink from blood, roll the straw paper back and forth. "Why are you doing all this?"
Clint smiles and lets out a breath. "I got a good feeling about you." He taps his boot against hers and smiles a little wider when he notices her cheeks barely twitch with reaction before she covers the action by draining the rest of the water.