for mac409: the war is over and we are beginning
A Gift From: ohmydarlingdear
Type Of Gift: fic
Title: The war is over and we are beginning
A Gift For: mac409
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary/Prompt Used: Soulmates AU (any injury you get shows up on your soulmate's body as well). Five Christmases they spent together.
Author's Note: drawn loosely from both comics and mcu canon.
banner by ohmydarlingdear
1.
They find each other in Budapest.
It’s winter and cold and it reminds Natasha of her youth and running out into the snow to be trained to kill without remorse or mercy. It would be poetic, she thinks, if she were inclined to think that way. It’s been years since she’s been anywhere close to home, but she’s here for work.
Natasha knows that something’s off almost as soon as she touches down in Budapest. There’s a certain weightiness on her shoulders that comes with the fine-tuned sense of knowing what it is to be watched. And part of her knows that this job is a dangerous one to take, that she’s gotten a bit too bold lately, that her reputation is getting a little too loud, but the life of the woman on the run is one that doesn’t quite allow for moments of rest. Part of her knows that she should lay low for a while, and she knows that this may kill her, that it’s a precarious way to live, but her life has always stretched from job to job and running is the only way she’s been taught to live.
They find each other as Natasha’s setting up, crouched low on a rooftop as she assembles her rifle, and she catches him just a moment too late, spotting the faint glint of weak winter sun off the tip of his arrow (and it’s the unusual nature of the weapon that she notices first, rather than the immediacy of the danger, which she later blames for the injury she sustains). She catches his eye as the tip of the arrow pierces her shoulder, sees the way his expression falls open even across the number of rooftops between them. And as the arrow bites through her shoulder, she watches as he stumbles back too, his hand flying to his shoulder as his eyes widen in a sort of chilled recognition, a sort of horror at what he’s just done, what they’ve both just found in each other.
They find each other in the snow and the cold, staring at each other across the yawning canyon between them, two strangers bleeding out in the middle of the winter, wounds mirroring one other like they're supposed to fit. He draws in shaky breaths, pressing a hand to his shoulder and trembling all over like he feels it too, the force of finding something he’s never been taught to expect.
They will survive Budapest, but only just barely, only speaking to exchange names as they sit next to each other, bleeding in the shadowy corner of a rooftop to await extraction from his people, and Natasha wonders what this means for her, wonders if they’ll have her even though she has more blood on her hands than anyone she knows, wonders if this, the twin wounds in their shoulders, will be enough to save her. As careful as she’s been, she’s climbed her way to the top of almost every intelligence agency’s most wanted lists in her years as a killer, and she hasn’t known government agencies to be particularly sympathetic to people like her (Clint doesn’t tell her until much, much later, when they’re closer and the space between them feels less like walking on glass, that he’d been scared too, under the stony expression and hard eyes, because life has only taken from him things that should be, and he’d been terrified of losing something so important so soon).
Years later, Budapest will become a sort of code mapped out in a geographical location (like São Paulo becomes a code, like Shanghai, like New York). Budapest will turn into a sort of reminder - hey remember when we were lost with nowhere to run to? Remember when the entire world felt like it was about to shatter? Remember when it was just the two of us, thrown up against the great wide world, fighting like animals just to survive another day?
But for now, the sun rises over the chilly, snow-covered rooftops over two strangers who know nothing about each other except that to be is to kill. As the pale, winter rays of light begin to seep through the clouds, reminding them that this is the beginning of the day that will probably change everything, Clint leans his head back against the wall they’re huddled against and laughs.
“Merry Christmas,” he says, and his voice is rough and uncertain, like he’s not used to using it to be warm.
And perhaps it’s the mundaneness of what Clint says to her or just that Christmas hasn’t ever once been a part of her life, but it rattles her down to her bones, shaking her in a way that she’s never felt before, and she lets out a breath that might have been a laugh if she ever had any practice with it.
“That today?” she asks, suddenly too aware of how loud her voice sounds in the early morning silence.
Clint shrugs and doesn’t say anything, and when she looks over at him, his eyebrows are furrowed like he can’t quite make sense of this all either, the sudden intimacy of something he’s never been promised, the startling distance between them even though all other convention dictates that falling into one another should be easy (because if you’re soulmates, that’s supposed to be it, right? You’re just supposed to get it and feel it and everything is supposed to sort itself out, right?). Natasha wonders how many Christmases this will last, because love is something that has been conditioned out of her since she was a child. She wonders if the reason why she feels so off balance about this is because the part of her that’s supposed to love has withered away from disuse. She wonders if she’s the only one.
2.
Natasha limps her way down the hall in SHIELD’s medical ward, doing her best to ignore the pain that shoots through her whole body with each step that she takes. She thinks, as she makes her way down the hallway, that maybe, in retrospect, assigning her and Clint to work together on a regular basis wasn’t such a good call on SHIELD’s part after all. Because while sure, the two of them have turned out to have surprisingly compatible fight styles despite their vastly different backgrounds, and okay, yes, Clint is one of the few agents who actually trusts her enough to be willing to run into gunfire with her, as it turns out, being partnered with someone who gets injured whenever you get injured is actually not the smartest idea in the world. It leads to situations in which one of them gets thrown off a building trying to secure the perimeter and the other one of them suddenly feeling one entire side of their body shatter and the kind of sickening panic that comes with being intimately acquainted with death. They’re good enough to make it out alive, of course (god knows Natasha’s been through worse), but there’s still broken arms and legs and cracked ribs and a whole lot of cuts and bruises to deal with and a nice, long stay in medical.
Clint’s asleep in his room when Natasha hobbles in on her crutches, and the slight movement of the bed when Natasha leans on it to catch her balance while trying to drag up a chair wakes him. He blinks his eyes open slowly, eyelids heavy under the stupor of the painkillers medical has given him, and he frowns when he sees Natasha.
“What’re you doing out of bed?” he asks, the words heavy in his mouth.
Natasha shrugs, wincing at the way the movement jostles her (their) fractured collarbone. “Well, technically, you’re the one who actually fell from a building, so I thought I’d check on you,” she says cheerfully.
Clint raises an eyebrow at her. “How can you walk?” he asks. “The second I got here, they loaded me up on so many drugs I could barely even see straight.”
Natasha laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound bitter. Bitter doesn’t become her as much these days as it used to.
“Enhanced biology,” she says. “Soviet super-soldier serum. My body metabolizes drugs too quickly for them to have that much of an effect on me.”
Clint snorts. “Figures,” he laughs. And then after a beat, quiet, concerned like he only gets when the scars on her body are from him, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
Natasha smiles, feels the way it must look soft on her face and wonders if a year ago, she would’ve thought herself capable of this kind of warmth.
“I’ve got a high pain tolerance,” she hedges, carefully edging around admitting that yes, it does hurt and no, this much movement so soon after sustaining so many serious injuries probably isn’t a good idea.
Clint looks like he wants to argue but also like his head is about half a second behind where he’d like it to be.
“I got you something,” Natasha offers, hoping to catch him before the thought makes it to the front of his mouth.
Clint raises his eyebrows at her and frowns like he can’t remember what day it is, can’t figure out why she would say that. Natasha reaches into the bag she brought with her and pulls out a small white box.
“Merry Christmas,” Natasha says, holding it out towards him with the arm that isn’t bound up in a cast.
Clint stares at her hand like he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, and Natasha fears, for one terrifying moment, that she’s done something wrong, that she’s overstepped in some way. It’s been a year since they first met, and life has found them back almost where they started. It’s been a year, and they’re close, maybe even something like friends on a good day, but even so, there’s been a careful distance between them this whole time because they’re cautious people at the heart of it all and neither of them are used to stepping into someone else’s space like this yet.
But then Clint offers a small smile, tentative but warm in a way that she rarely sees from him, and extends the arm that isn’t broken and takes the box from her, tugging gently at the ribbon until it falls away.
“I didn’t get you anything,” he says almost sheepishly as he tips the box open.
Natasha shrugs with her uninjured shoulder and says quietly, “Last year you gave me my life back. It’s my turn to give you something.”
A black arrowhead tumbles out of the box. He blinks at it for a long moment before picking it up gingerly and peering at it with wide eyes.
“Did you-Is this a trick arrow?” he asks in disbelief.
Natasha feels the wide smile that used to be so foreign fighting it’s way onto her face and ducks her chin.
“You said, uh, you liked my wrist cuffs,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound as embarrassed as she feels because she’s gone through so much to get this made and she doesn’t think she’s ever spent this much energy on anything, ever, and she’s not sure if she likes the way it makes her feel like her insides are twisting. “I, um, talked to some guys in weapons development about getting a version made for you.”
Clint’s expression breaks into one of awe as she speaks, something soft and significant in his eyes that Natasha doesn’t know if she’s equipped to deal with. He flips the arrowhead around in his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, not looking up, and the quiet care in his voice makes something seize in Natasha’s chest.
Natasha shrugs and leans back in her chair, unsure of what she’s supposed to do now. She hadn’t quite thought about getting this far and she hasn’t had enough experience with this sort of thing to know what to say. Luckily, the nurses come rushing in then and start fussing over Natasha and scolding her for being out of bed, and Clint laughs at her as they manhandle her back into an empty cot in the room.
“This fucking sucks, spending Christmas in medical,” Clint gripes once the nurses leave. He’s still turning the arrowhead over and over in his fingers, but he doesn’t say anything about it like he somehow knows that Natasha wouldn’t know what to do if he made a thing out of it.
“Yeah, well neither of us are going home till you’re better, so suck it up,” Natasha shoots back, which makes Clint laugh, and Natasha supposes that’ll have to do for now.
3.
Natasha has always lived a transient life. Even after SHIELD took her in, she went where she was needed, staying in temporary SHIELD housing for months at a time, everything she owns packed up into two duffle bags that she carries with her everywhere she goes. And it’s always worked for her because she’s never left anywhere she had any reason to return to. Until now. Until SHIELD sends her off on a very generous paid vacation in return for her months spent undercover, babysitting Tony Stark, and Natasha realizes that she has nowhere to go.
Which is how she finds herself on the subway headed to Bed-Stuy in the dead of winter with her bags slung over her shoulder and her cat, Liho, stuffed in her sweater. The cat technically isn’t hers and she has a couple boxes put away in storage from when she went undercover but she realizes as the train bumps along the tracks towards Brooklyn that she basically has her entire life on her back and she can’t help feeling like this somehow makes her less of a whole person. From within her sweater, Liho shifts and pokes her head out to bump her nose against Natasha’s chin like she can tell that Natasha’s feeling particularly untethered, crammed into a subway car filled with people headed home (she found Liho, or rather Liho found her, several months ago in the last building that SHIELD placed her in before she went undercover and she hasn’t left Natasha alone since, not even after Natasha left her in the care of a neighbor before heading out to Los Angeles, and Natasha supposes it’s something that she’s found someone who wants to stay).
Clint doesn’t answer when Natasha knocks on his door, politely at first and then loudly when she gets no answer. She just wondering if he’s even home and if she should’ve called first, if that’s the normal thing to do, when a girl’s voice off to her left asks:
“Can I help you with something?”
Natasha glances over, and there’s a young, twenty-something girl with a dog by her side peering at Natasha with curious eyes. She’s wearing a heavy, purple winter coat and sunglasses, even though it’s the middle of the winter, and she arches an eyebrow at Natasha when she takes a beat too long to respond.
“Um, yeah,” Natasha says too quickly, hating how uncharacteristically frazzled she sounds. “Yeah, I’m Natasha. I’m Clint’s, um, friend.”
A flash of something like recognition passes across the girl’s face even though Natasha is certain they’ve never met before. “Oh,” the girl says significantly, like this means something weighty and important. She grins and shoves her sunglasses up on her head. “Yeah, Clint’s probably in. Just try the door; he has this bad habit of not locking it, like ever.”
She doesn’t wait for Natasha to make a move towards the door and instead steps past her and, sure enough, easily throws the door open. The dog runs past her into the apartment and barks happily, disappearing up the stairs off to Natasha’s right as she steps into the apartment.
“I’m Kate, by the way,” the girl says cheerfully as she slips off her coat and tosses it over the back of the couch in the living room like she belongs here. Natasha wonders what it feels like to know your place in such an instinctive way. Kate smiles at Natasha and says in a way that sounds like it means more than she lets on, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
And Natasha knows that she’s supposed to say something like ‘yeah, you too’ at a time like this, that that’s the response that social custom dictates, except that she’s never heard of Kate at all, except that saying so would imply that she and Clint have a relationship that they don’t, not really, not at the core of it. Because they’re close, friends even, but this is the first time Natasha has ever breached the work-versus-personal-life divide and she’s not sure if she’s even welcome here.
“Katie, is that you?” Clint’s voice comes from the stairs, thankfully saving Natasha from having to think of something appropriate to say.
The dog comes running back down the stairs, and then Clint appears a moment later carrying boxes of odds and ends and almost tripping on a couple steps. Liho pokes her head out of Natasha’s sweater when the dog runs by and wiggles her way out of Natasha’s arms, slinking off to investigate this new space. When Clint’s feet touch down at the bottom of the stairs and he peers up, his eyes flick from Kate to Natasha and he frowns, his eyebrows pulling together, confused.
“Tasha?” he asks, bewildered.
Natasha waves uncertainly and then immediately hates herself for being so lame. “Hey,” she says.
Clint blinks, like he’s not entirely sure if he’s just making this up, and then turns to Kate and mouths something that looks like how long did I keep you waiting, to which Kate responds by gesturing in what Natasha realizes after a beat is American Sign Language, which she’s encountered enough in her very long career in espionage to recognize even if she isn’t fluent. Kate must tell him that they weren’t waiting long, because an obvious look of relief washes over Clint’s face and when he turns back to Natasha, he’s smiling.
“Sorry I didn’t come to the door,” he says, setting the boxes he’s carrying down and pulling out what appears to be various Christmas decorations. “I, uh, don’t like to wear my hearing aids at home. More comfortable this way, y’know?”
And Natasha nods even though she’s thrown off-balance by this new information, because she and Clint have been partners for years now but Clint’s been so stingy with his personal life around her, because Natasha has read over Clint’s SHIELD file several times and she’s never once seen his deafness mentioned anywhere.
Clint grins at Natasha like he can tell what she’s thinking and winks, “Don’t worry. You’re not slipping. That’s classified information.”
And Natasha finds herself laughing because she can’t think of anything better to do, and it makes Clint smile like he’s got the sun trapped under his skin and Natasha’s the only reason it’s there. It gives Natasha a sort of rare burst of confidence even though she’s treading on such foreign territory and pushes her to ask what she came here for.
“Listen, I don’t-SHIELD’s giving me a vacation and I’ve never had a vacation before,” Natasha says, and all of her words coming out in a rush, and she wonders if this is what being nervous feels like. She presses her lips together and then says after a breath to steady herself, “I need a place to stay.”
There’s the briefest pause and Natasha fears for a wild moment that he’s going to send her away, but then Clint smiles, something warm and soft that she’s still trying to learn from him, even years after coming back to something like real life, like personhood.
“Yeah, no problem,” he says, and there’s something almost tender in his voice like he thinks she’s something precious, and Natasha isn’t sure anyone’s ever thought that about her before. “I’ve got a spare room. I’ll make it up for you. You’ll have your own bathroom and everything. Let me just finish up with this real quick, okay?”
Natasha smiles in return, relief washing over her in waves, a sort of comfort in knowing that even if the rest of the world comes crashing down around her, she’ll at least have one person at her back. Clint turns to yank a bunch of Christmas decorations out of the boxes by his feet, tangled string lights and bunched up garlands, the odd tree ornament tumbling out and rolling across the floor in the process. Clint’s dog barks excitedly and Kate raises her eyebrows at the two of them.
“I thought you two were soulmates or whatever,” she says skeptically. “What’s with this whole separate bedrooms deal?”
“I-We’re not-” Natasha starts and then catches herself and says, smoother, in the way she’s rehearsed to herself over and over and over again, “We’re friends. We’ve only known each other for a few years. The way soulmates work out isn’t always simple.”
Kate frowns and looks like she wants to say something else, but Clint comes over and shoves an armful of lights into her arms before she can get any of the words out.
“You get to decorate outside,” he announces pointedly. When Kate tries to protest, Clint just grins cheekily and says, “You know the rules, Katie. No leaving the deaf guy out of conversations in his own home. Now scoot.”
Kate makes a face at him and Clint just smiles serenely, and Natasha is suddenly struck by the notion that she’s never known that it’s like to have family.
“Sorry about that,” Clint says to Natasha once Kate’s left. “Katie likes to think these things are like fairytales sometimes.”
And there’s something in the quietness of the way Clint’s voice wraps around his words that makes Natasha wonder, only for a second, if maybe Clint isn’t so opposed to making the two of them a little closer to a fairytale after all.
4.
Several months after what the popular press has begun calling the Battle of New York finds Natasha back at Clint’s apartment, settled in as if this is where their entire world starts and ends. The hardwood flooring is cool beneath Natasha’s feet as she creeps up the stairs to Clint’s room, coffee in hand, quiet across the creaky floorboards. Liho trails up the stairs behind Natasha and almost trips her as she slips into Clint’s bedroom. Natasha lets out a little yelp and narrowly avoids spilling coffee all over herself, and Liho just jumps up onto the bed, untroubled, and curls up by Clint’s feet. Clint blinks his eyes open, lazy and unfocused, and smiles, shoving his hands up under his pillow and pressing his face into it. He peeks up at her sleepily.
“Scoot,” Natasha says, poking him with her knee, because Clint does this thing where he spreads out across the entire bed in his sleep the moment she gets up, as if his body has a real, physical need to take up that much space.
Clint makes a sort of unintelligible mumbling sound but dutifully rolls back over to his side of the bed. It’s been several months since what the popular press has begun calling the Battle of New York, several months since Natasha stayed behind while the others ran off to the corners of the world, stayed to help Clint pick up the pieces because he’s been the closest thing she’s had to something to call hers since they found each other in the winter in Budapest. It’s been several months since he began to resettle into a shape that resembled Clint again, and Natasha still can’t quite believe that he wants her to stay (“For a real, real long time,” he’d murmured at her one night, drunk and half-broken and more earnest than she’d ever seen him. “Forever even, I don’t know. A long time. Please.”), can’t believe that this is her life, waking up to catch him with the wrinkles from the bed sheets still pressed into his cheeks.
“’S that coffee?” Clint asks, voice low and rough from sleep.
He reaches for his chipped purple mug and smiles, and it makes something warm settle in Natasha’s chest. Outside, snow drifts gently down, covering the street in a blanket of white, and Natasha wonders if this means there’ll be a snowball fight in the future. Tony has invited them all over later for dinner and drinks and maybe a game of white elephant, and it’s the team’s first Christmas together. Natasha wouldn’t be surprised if things got a bit rowdier than planned.
Clint makes a surprised humming sound and stares at his coffee for a long moment. “Did you put peppermint in my coffee?” he asks, his words making it to his mouth probably five seconds after he thought it.
Merry Christmas, she signs to him and takes a sip of her own coffee.
Clint’s expression softens into something warm that Natasha would never have thought she’d be on the receiving end of just a few years ago, and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her, better than running away from Russia, better than being found in the middle of winter in Budapest, better than being spared an early death. And Natasha has always been cynical because she had the love trained out of her at such an early age, because she’s been taught since she can remember that waiting for your soulmate is pointless, that the system doesn’t work, but now here’s Clint, leaning his head on her shoulder and drawing aimless circles on her thigh with a careless finger. And Natasha thinks she’s been waiting for this her whole life, because she’s always been enough for herself alone but now she feels so settled, so comfortable in her own skin in a way that’s brand new and old like it’s something hidden inside of her that she’s been waiting to find, and maybe the system’s not so broken after all, maybe she just hadn’t thought about it.
“I got you something,” Clint murmurs into Natasha’s shoulder.
Natasha laughs and pulls away from him. He looks up at her and his eyes are wide and sleepy and earnest.
I thought we agreed no presents, she signs.
Just a little one, he signs back to her and hops off the bed. I’ll be right back.
Natasha lets out a breath that’s trying to be a laugh and leans back against the headboard of the bed. Lucky slips in the bedroom door that Clint left open and climbs up onto the bed to take the warm spot where Clint was sitting. Natasha smiles and reaches out to scratch Lucky between his ears. Clint makes a sort of indignant spluttering sound when he comes back and finds his spot taken but sits at the foot of the bed when Natasha crosses her legs and makes room for him. Liho lifts her head and after a moment’s consideration, climbs into his lap. He holds out a thin square box to her, smiling a little anxiously, like he’s suddenly worried that there’s anything between them that’s anything but certain.
The box is a little worn at the corners like it’s traveled far to get here, and Natasha tips it open gently, as if she’s expecting something infinitely precious. Carefully nestled inside is a delicate silver necklace, the pendant crafted in the shape of a tiny arrow. Natasha thinks that maybe, a handful of years ago, she would have just rolled her eyes at the sentimentality Clint is pushing her way, but Clint has taught her what it means to be soft without sacrificing strength, and instead, Natasha just smiles.
“You know I don’t wear jewelry,” she says, teasing more than anything, and Clint shoots her a look that Natasha thinks is trying to be indignant but comes out looking fond instead.
“I saw it when I was on assignment in Texas, okay?” Clint says, and Natasha doesn’t miss the way his mouth twitches up into a smile, because as much as he’s tried to downplay this mission, even though all it amounted to was a small domestic drug bust, nothing on the scale of the sort of international crime that he’s made a name for himself fighting, it’s his first real mission since New York and Clint’s been quietly proud of himself ever since he got back.
“I saw it in a shop and I thought of you,” he mumbles, ducking his chin and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It’s whatever. It’s not a big deal.”
Natasha smiles and nudges his knee with her foot so he’ll look at her. I like it, she signs to him and leans in to press a kiss to his mouth, her hand coming up to cup his jaw. She rubs a thumb over the stubble on his chin and laughs, leaning back and saying, “Now go get dressed. We’re having brunch with the others in two hours and we have to go all the way to Manhattan.”
Clint makes a face at her and grumbles under his breath, but dutifully sets Liho aside and goes to shower. As the water starts up in the bathroom, Liho pads over to Natasha and curls up on her lap, purring contently. Natasha looks at the box in her hand with the necklace and smiles softly, something warm settling under her skin. She puts the necklace on as she gets dressed that morning, and when Clint sees her wearing it, he smiles like she’s the answer to every question he’s ever had and it makes Natasha want to steal the entire world for him.
“You look nice,” he says quietly to her later as they walk down the street to get to the subway. Lucky runs on ahead of them, looking back every so often to make sure they don’t get lost, and Liho pokes her head out of Natasha’s coat curiously, sniffing at the snow drifting down from the sky.
Natasha laughs and slips her hand into his. Even in the winter, the palm of his hand is warm against hers, and there’s something grounding about the familiar weight of him by her side.
“Thanks,” she says, and there’s something heavy in her chest that makes her feel like maybe she should be saying something more like I love you instead.
Clint glances over at her and smiles at her and Natasha thinks for one terrifying moment that he might want to say it too.
5.
Dirt crunches beneath Natasha’s boots as she walks across the empty field towards Clint’s worn down looking house. Natasha’s been here before and the two of them have used this place as a sort of safehouse on and off throughout the years, but Natasha’s still amazed at how quiet it gets out here in the winter. The ground is hard beneath her feet and the blanket of clouds presses in on her shoulders, and the only thing Natasha can hear except the wind whipping up the ends of her hair is the sound of Clint’s chickens clucking in the distance.
When Natasha knocks on the door to the house, it’s silent for a long moment, and Natasha wonders if she guessed wrong, if this isn’t where Clint ran to after all when she released all of SHIELD’s secrets. But then she hears the soft thudding of unhurried footsteps, and the door swings open, and there Clint is, looking ragged and tired to all hell, but in one piece. He’s got a beer in one hand and he’s dressed down to a raggedy pair of jeans and a t-shirt with holes in the sleeves and his hair is sticking up in every direction and Natasha feels the breath rush out of her.
“Hey,” she says.
He huffs out a laugh. “Hi,” he says, leaning a little on the door.
Natasha rocks back on her heels, her hands in her pockets, and asks, “You get out of Ukraine okay?”
Clint smiles and looks down. “I should be asking you that,” he says, and then glances up again, something like concern furrowing his brow. “You got shot in the chest, didn’t you?”
Natasha smiles. “I’m okay,” she says gently.
“I know,” Clint says, and there’s something in his voice that’s almost painfully tender. “That’s just not something I want to wake up to in the middle of the night, that’s all.”
Natasha laughs. “Yeah,” she says, and maybe she sounds a lot softer than she means to let on, but she’s had a long few months sorting out a new identity for herself and it’s been the loneliest work Natasha has had to do in years. “Yeah, okay.”
There’s a beat and Clint stares at Natasha like he never expected to see her again, and Natasha’s chest feels so full she could burst.
“Can I come in?” she asks, trying to get Clint to look a little less like he thinks this is some wild, desperate dream, trying to say I’m here, I’m real, I’m here.
Clint nods and steps back into the house, his sock feet quiet against the wood flooring. Natasha kicks off her muddy boots by the door and feels the warm air begin to thaw her frozen cheeks. Clint has Christmas carols playing quietly from his stereo and there are Christmas decorations strewn across the living room around a tree, as if Clint got part way through decorating it before getting distracted.
“Where are the pets?” Natasha asks, because they’ve both been out of the country and hiding for months now, and the neighbor Clint had asked to look after Liho and Lucky for a few days couldn’t possibly have been taking care of them for this long.
“Kate’s holding down the fort,” Clint says as they step into the kitchen.
Natasha is suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of something warm and sweet and spicy like cinnamon. She smiles and lifts herself up to sit on the kitchen counter, peering curiously at the oven and wondering if whatever he’s making is going to turn out blackened and inedible like most of the things he tries to cook.
“Clint Barton,” she teases, “Are you actually baking?”
He shrugs and comes to stand between her legs, leaning in to brush a kiss over her lips and toy with the ends of her newly cut hair.
“Gingerbread cookies. It’s Christmas,” he says, as if that’s an explanation for everything.
Natasha laughs just as the timer on the oven starts to go off and Clint presses another kiss to her mouth that Natasha feels all the way down to her toes before he goes to get the cookies out of the oven.
“I’ve never actually had gingerbread before,” Natasha admits, eyeing the cookies with interest. She reaches out to grab one off the cookie sheet. The cookie is still hot when her fingers touch it, and she jerks her hand back, hissing softly.
Clint almost drops the sheet of cookies. He shakes his hand against the burn and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
“Hey,” he says, trying to be indignant. “You get burned, I get burned, remember that, jerk?”
Natasha grins wickedly at him and reaches out to touch just the tip of her finger to the cookies again, laughing when he yelps and all but tackles her off the counter. She laughs so hard her cheeks ache and he’s mostly laughing too, even though he’s got her all but pinned to the floor, and here, this is what Natasha missed most, she thinks to herself, this is what she’s found herself dreaming of all those months on her own, rebuilding herself, and there’s a softness in Clint’s eyes that makes Natasha think that maybe he felt it too.
“You’re an asshole,” Clint says to her, the laughter in his voice undercutting the sharpness that he’s trying to inject into his voice.
Natasha grins, and it’s been several years and more scars than she can count and she knows where and when they both got every mark on their bodies, and Natasha finally feels it in her bones.
“Love you too,” she says softly, and reaches up to yank Clint down to kiss her.
Type Of Gift: fic
Title: The war is over and we are beginning
A Gift For: mac409
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary/Prompt Used: Soulmates AU (any injury you get shows up on your soulmate's body as well). Five Christmases they spent together.
Author's Note: drawn loosely from both comics and mcu canon.
banner by ohmydarlingdear
1.
They find each other in Budapest.
It’s winter and cold and it reminds Natasha of her youth and running out into the snow to be trained to kill without remorse or mercy. It would be poetic, she thinks, if she were inclined to think that way. It’s been years since she’s been anywhere close to home, but she’s here for work.
Natasha knows that something’s off almost as soon as she touches down in Budapest. There’s a certain weightiness on her shoulders that comes with the fine-tuned sense of knowing what it is to be watched. And part of her knows that this job is a dangerous one to take, that she’s gotten a bit too bold lately, that her reputation is getting a little too loud, but the life of the woman on the run is one that doesn’t quite allow for moments of rest. Part of her knows that she should lay low for a while, and she knows that this may kill her, that it’s a precarious way to live, but her life has always stretched from job to job and running is the only way she’s been taught to live.
They find each other as Natasha’s setting up, crouched low on a rooftop as she assembles her rifle, and she catches him just a moment too late, spotting the faint glint of weak winter sun off the tip of his arrow (and it’s the unusual nature of the weapon that she notices first, rather than the immediacy of the danger, which she later blames for the injury she sustains). She catches his eye as the tip of the arrow pierces her shoulder, sees the way his expression falls open even across the number of rooftops between them. And as the arrow bites through her shoulder, she watches as he stumbles back too, his hand flying to his shoulder as his eyes widen in a sort of chilled recognition, a sort of horror at what he’s just done, what they’ve both just found in each other.
They find each other in the snow and the cold, staring at each other across the yawning canyon between them, two strangers bleeding out in the middle of the winter, wounds mirroring one other like they're supposed to fit. He draws in shaky breaths, pressing a hand to his shoulder and trembling all over like he feels it too, the force of finding something he’s never been taught to expect.
They will survive Budapest, but only just barely, only speaking to exchange names as they sit next to each other, bleeding in the shadowy corner of a rooftop to await extraction from his people, and Natasha wonders what this means for her, wonders if they’ll have her even though she has more blood on her hands than anyone she knows, wonders if this, the twin wounds in their shoulders, will be enough to save her. As careful as she’s been, she’s climbed her way to the top of almost every intelligence agency’s most wanted lists in her years as a killer, and she hasn’t known government agencies to be particularly sympathetic to people like her (Clint doesn’t tell her until much, much later, when they’re closer and the space between them feels less like walking on glass, that he’d been scared too, under the stony expression and hard eyes, because life has only taken from him things that should be, and he’d been terrified of losing something so important so soon).
Years later, Budapest will become a sort of code mapped out in a geographical location (like São Paulo becomes a code, like Shanghai, like New York). Budapest will turn into a sort of reminder - hey remember when we were lost with nowhere to run to? Remember when the entire world felt like it was about to shatter? Remember when it was just the two of us, thrown up against the great wide world, fighting like animals just to survive another day?
But for now, the sun rises over the chilly, snow-covered rooftops over two strangers who know nothing about each other except that to be is to kill. As the pale, winter rays of light begin to seep through the clouds, reminding them that this is the beginning of the day that will probably change everything, Clint leans his head back against the wall they’re huddled against and laughs.
“Merry Christmas,” he says, and his voice is rough and uncertain, like he’s not used to using it to be warm.
And perhaps it’s the mundaneness of what Clint says to her or just that Christmas hasn’t ever once been a part of her life, but it rattles her down to her bones, shaking her in a way that she’s never felt before, and she lets out a breath that might have been a laugh if she ever had any practice with it.
“That today?” she asks, suddenly too aware of how loud her voice sounds in the early morning silence.
Clint shrugs and doesn’t say anything, and when she looks over at him, his eyebrows are furrowed like he can’t quite make sense of this all either, the sudden intimacy of something he’s never been promised, the startling distance between them even though all other convention dictates that falling into one another should be easy (because if you’re soulmates, that’s supposed to be it, right? You’re just supposed to get it and feel it and everything is supposed to sort itself out, right?). Natasha wonders how many Christmases this will last, because love is something that has been conditioned out of her since she was a child. She wonders if the reason why she feels so off balance about this is because the part of her that’s supposed to love has withered away from disuse. She wonders if she’s the only one.
2.
Natasha limps her way down the hall in SHIELD’s medical ward, doing her best to ignore the pain that shoots through her whole body with each step that she takes. She thinks, as she makes her way down the hallway, that maybe, in retrospect, assigning her and Clint to work together on a regular basis wasn’t such a good call on SHIELD’s part after all. Because while sure, the two of them have turned out to have surprisingly compatible fight styles despite their vastly different backgrounds, and okay, yes, Clint is one of the few agents who actually trusts her enough to be willing to run into gunfire with her, as it turns out, being partnered with someone who gets injured whenever you get injured is actually not the smartest idea in the world. It leads to situations in which one of them gets thrown off a building trying to secure the perimeter and the other one of them suddenly feeling one entire side of their body shatter and the kind of sickening panic that comes with being intimately acquainted with death. They’re good enough to make it out alive, of course (god knows Natasha’s been through worse), but there’s still broken arms and legs and cracked ribs and a whole lot of cuts and bruises to deal with and a nice, long stay in medical.
Clint’s asleep in his room when Natasha hobbles in on her crutches, and the slight movement of the bed when Natasha leans on it to catch her balance while trying to drag up a chair wakes him. He blinks his eyes open slowly, eyelids heavy under the stupor of the painkillers medical has given him, and he frowns when he sees Natasha.
“What’re you doing out of bed?” he asks, the words heavy in his mouth.
Natasha shrugs, wincing at the way the movement jostles her (their) fractured collarbone. “Well, technically, you’re the one who actually fell from a building, so I thought I’d check on you,” she says cheerfully.
Clint raises an eyebrow at her. “How can you walk?” he asks. “The second I got here, they loaded me up on so many drugs I could barely even see straight.”
Natasha laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound bitter. Bitter doesn’t become her as much these days as it used to.
“Enhanced biology,” she says. “Soviet super-soldier serum. My body metabolizes drugs too quickly for them to have that much of an effect on me.”
Clint snorts. “Figures,” he laughs. And then after a beat, quiet, concerned like he only gets when the scars on her body are from him, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
Natasha smiles, feels the way it must look soft on her face and wonders if a year ago, she would’ve thought herself capable of this kind of warmth.
“I’ve got a high pain tolerance,” she hedges, carefully edging around admitting that yes, it does hurt and no, this much movement so soon after sustaining so many serious injuries probably isn’t a good idea.
Clint looks like he wants to argue but also like his head is about half a second behind where he’d like it to be.
“I got you something,” Natasha offers, hoping to catch him before the thought makes it to the front of his mouth.
Clint raises his eyebrows at her and frowns like he can’t remember what day it is, can’t figure out why she would say that. Natasha reaches into the bag she brought with her and pulls out a small white box.
“Merry Christmas,” Natasha says, holding it out towards him with the arm that isn’t bound up in a cast.
Clint stares at her hand like he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, and Natasha fears, for one terrifying moment, that she’s done something wrong, that she’s overstepped in some way. It’s been a year since they first met, and life has found them back almost where they started. It’s been a year, and they’re close, maybe even something like friends on a good day, but even so, there’s been a careful distance between them this whole time because they’re cautious people at the heart of it all and neither of them are used to stepping into someone else’s space like this yet.
But then Clint offers a small smile, tentative but warm in a way that she rarely sees from him, and extends the arm that isn’t broken and takes the box from her, tugging gently at the ribbon until it falls away.
“I didn’t get you anything,” he says almost sheepishly as he tips the box open.
Natasha shrugs with her uninjured shoulder and says quietly, “Last year you gave me my life back. It’s my turn to give you something.”
A black arrowhead tumbles out of the box. He blinks at it for a long moment before picking it up gingerly and peering at it with wide eyes.
“Did you-Is this a trick arrow?” he asks in disbelief.
Natasha feels the wide smile that used to be so foreign fighting it’s way onto her face and ducks her chin.
“You said, uh, you liked my wrist cuffs,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound as embarrassed as she feels because she’s gone through so much to get this made and she doesn’t think she’s ever spent this much energy on anything, ever, and she’s not sure if she likes the way it makes her feel like her insides are twisting. “I, um, talked to some guys in weapons development about getting a version made for you.”
Clint’s expression breaks into one of awe as she speaks, something soft and significant in his eyes that Natasha doesn’t know if she’s equipped to deal with. He flips the arrowhead around in his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, not looking up, and the quiet care in his voice makes something seize in Natasha’s chest.
Natasha shrugs and leans back in her chair, unsure of what she’s supposed to do now. She hadn’t quite thought about getting this far and she hasn’t had enough experience with this sort of thing to know what to say. Luckily, the nurses come rushing in then and start fussing over Natasha and scolding her for being out of bed, and Clint laughs at her as they manhandle her back into an empty cot in the room.
“This fucking sucks, spending Christmas in medical,” Clint gripes once the nurses leave. He’s still turning the arrowhead over and over in his fingers, but he doesn’t say anything about it like he somehow knows that Natasha wouldn’t know what to do if he made a thing out of it.
“Yeah, well neither of us are going home till you’re better, so suck it up,” Natasha shoots back, which makes Clint laugh, and Natasha supposes that’ll have to do for now.
3.
Natasha has always lived a transient life. Even after SHIELD took her in, she went where she was needed, staying in temporary SHIELD housing for months at a time, everything she owns packed up into two duffle bags that she carries with her everywhere she goes. And it’s always worked for her because she’s never left anywhere she had any reason to return to. Until now. Until SHIELD sends her off on a very generous paid vacation in return for her months spent undercover, babysitting Tony Stark, and Natasha realizes that she has nowhere to go.
Which is how she finds herself on the subway headed to Bed-Stuy in the dead of winter with her bags slung over her shoulder and her cat, Liho, stuffed in her sweater. The cat technically isn’t hers and she has a couple boxes put away in storage from when she went undercover but she realizes as the train bumps along the tracks towards Brooklyn that she basically has her entire life on her back and she can’t help feeling like this somehow makes her less of a whole person. From within her sweater, Liho shifts and pokes her head out to bump her nose against Natasha’s chin like she can tell that Natasha’s feeling particularly untethered, crammed into a subway car filled with people headed home (she found Liho, or rather Liho found her, several months ago in the last building that SHIELD placed her in before she went undercover and she hasn’t left Natasha alone since, not even after Natasha left her in the care of a neighbor before heading out to Los Angeles, and Natasha supposes it’s something that she’s found someone who wants to stay).
Clint doesn’t answer when Natasha knocks on his door, politely at first and then loudly when she gets no answer. She just wondering if he’s even home and if she should’ve called first, if that’s the normal thing to do, when a girl’s voice off to her left asks:
“Can I help you with something?”
Natasha glances over, and there’s a young, twenty-something girl with a dog by her side peering at Natasha with curious eyes. She’s wearing a heavy, purple winter coat and sunglasses, even though it’s the middle of the winter, and she arches an eyebrow at Natasha when she takes a beat too long to respond.
“Um, yeah,” Natasha says too quickly, hating how uncharacteristically frazzled she sounds. “Yeah, I’m Natasha. I’m Clint’s, um, friend.”
A flash of something like recognition passes across the girl’s face even though Natasha is certain they’ve never met before. “Oh,” the girl says significantly, like this means something weighty and important. She grins and shoves her sunglasses up on her head. “Yeah, Clint’s probably in. Just try the door; he has this bad habit of not locking it, like ever.”
She doesn’t wait for Natasha to make a move towards the door and instead steps past her and, sure enough, easily throws the door open. The dog runs past her into the apartment and barks happily, disappearing up the stairs off to Natasha’s right as she steps into the apartment.
“I’m Kate, by the way,” the girl says cheerfully as she slips off her coat and tosses it over the back of the couch in the living room like she belongs here. Natasha wonders what it feels like to know your place in such an instinctive way. Kate smiles at Natasha and says in a way that sounds like it means more than she lets on, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
And Natasha knows that she’s supposed to say something like ‘yeah, you too’ at a time like this, that that’s the response that social custom dictates, except that she’s never heard of Kate at all, except that saying so would imply that she and Clint have a relationship that they don’t, not really, not at the core of it. Because they’re close, friends even, but this is the first time Natasha has ever breached the work-versus-personal-life divide and she’s not sure if she’s even welcome here.
“Katie, is that you?” Clint’s voice comes from the stairs, thankfully saving Natasha from having to think of something appropriate to say.
The dog comes running back down the stairs, and then Clint appears a moment later carrying boxes of odds and ends and almost tripping on a couple steps. Liho pokes her head out of Natasha’s sweater when the dog runs by and wiggles her way out of Natasha’s arms, slinking off to investigate this new space. When Clint’s feet touch down at the bottom of the stairs and he peers up, his eyes flick from Kate to Natasha and he frowns, his eyebrows pulling together, confused.
“Tasha?” he asks, bewildered.
Natasha waves uncertainly and then immediately hates herself for being so lame. “Hey,” she says.
Clint blinks, like he’s not entirely sure if he’s just making this up, and then turns to Kate and mouths something that looks like how long did I keep you waiting, to which Kate responds by gesturing in what Natasha realizes after a beat is American Sign Language, which she’s encountered enough in her very long career in espionage to recognize even if she isn’t fluent. Kate must tell him that they weren’t waiting long, because an obvious look of relief washes over Clint’s face and when he turns back to Natasha, he’s smiling.
“Sorry I didn’t come to the door,” he says, setting the boxes he’s carrying down and pulling out what appears to be various Christmas decorations. “I, uh, don’t like to wear my hearing aids at home. More comfortable this way, y’know?”
And Natasha nods even though she’s thrown off-balance by this new information, because she and Clint have been partners for years now but Clint’s been so stingy with his personal life around her, because Natasha has read over Clint’s SHIELD file several times and she’s never once seen his deafness mentioned anywhere.
Clint grins at Natasha like he can tell what she’s thinking and winks, “Don’t worry. You’re not slipping. That’s classified information.”
And Natasha finds herself laughing because she can’t think of anything better to do, and it makes Clint smile like he’s got the sun trapped under his skin and Natasha’s the only reason it’s there. It gives Natasha a sort of rare burst of confidence even though she’s treading on such foreign territory and pushes her to ask what she came here for.
“Listen, I don’t-SHIELD’s giving me a vacation and I’ve never had a vacation before,” Natasha says, and all of her words coming out in a rush, and she wonders if this is what being nervous feels like. She presses her lips together and then says after a breath to steady herself, “I need a place to stay.”
There’s the briefest pause and Natasha fears for a wild moment that he’s going to send her away, but then Clint smiles, something warm and soft that she’s still trying to learn from him, even years after coming back to something like real life, like personhood.
“Yeah, no problem,” he says, and there’s something almost tender in his voice like he thinks she’s something precious, and Natasha isn’t sure anyone’s ever thought that about her before. “I’ve got a spare room. I’ll make it up for you. You’ll have your own bathroom and everything. Let me just finish up with this real quick, okay?”
Natasha smiles in return, relief washing over her in waves, a sort of comfort in knowing that even if the rest of the world comes crashing down around her, she’ll at least have one person at her back. Clint turns to yank a bunch of Christmas decorations out of the boxes by his feet, tangled string lights and bunched up garlands, the odd tree ornament tumbling out and rolling across the floor in the process. Clint’s dog barks excitedly and Kate raises her eyebrows at the two of them.
“I thought you two were soulmates or whatever,” she says skeptically. “What’s with this whole separate bedrooms deal?”
“I-We’re not-” Natasha starts and then catches herself and says, smoother, in the way she’s rehearsed to herself over and over and over again, “We’re friends. We’ve only known each other for a few years. The way soulmates work out isn’t always simple.”
Kate frowns and looks like she wants to say something else, but Clint comes over and shoves an armful of lights into her arms before she can get any of the words out.
“You get to decorate outside,” he announces pointedly. When Kate tries to protest, Clint just grins cheekily and says, “You know the rules, Katie. No leaving the deaf guy out of conversations in his own home. Now scoot.”
Kate makes a face at him and Clint just smiles serenely, and Natasha is suddenly struck by the notion that she’s never known that it’s like to have family.
“Sorry about that,” Clint says to Natasha once Kate’s left. “Katie likes to think these things are like fairytales sometimes.”
And there’s something in the quietness of the way Clint’s voice wraps around his words that makes Natasha wonder, only for a second, if maybe Clint isn’t so opposed to making the two of them a little closer to a fairytale after all.
4.
Several months after what the popular press has begun calling the Battle of New York finds Natasha back at Clint’s apartment, settled in as if this is where their entire world starts and ends. The hardwood flooring is cool beneath Natasha’s feet as she creeps up the stairs to Clint’s room, coffee in hand, quiet across the creaky floorboards. Liho trails up the stairs behind Natasha and almost trips her as she slips into Clint’s bedroom. Natasha lets out a little yelp and narrowly avoids spilling coffee all over herself, and Liho just jumps up onto the bed, untroubled, and curls up by Clint’s feet. Clint blinks his eyes open, lazy and unfocused, and smiles, shoving his hands up under his pillow and pressing his face into it. He peeks up at her sleepily.
“Scoot,” Natasha says, poking him with her knee, because Clint does this thing where he spreads out across the entire bed in his sleep the moment she gets up, as if his body has a real, physical need to take up that much space.
Clint makes a sort of unintelligible mumbling sound but dutifully rolls back over to his side of the bed. It’s been several months since what the popular press has begun calling the Battle of New York, several months since Natasha stayed behind while the others ran off to the corners of the world, stayed to help Clint pick up the pieces because he’s been the closest thing she’s had to something to call hers since they found each other in the winter in Budapest. It’s been several months since he began to resettle into a shape that resembled Clint again, and Natasha still can’t quite believe that he wants her to stay (“For a real, real long time,” he’d murmured at her one night, drunk and half-broken and more earnest than she’d ever seen him. “Forever even, I don’t know. A long time. Please.”), can’t believe that this is her life, waking up to catch him with the wrinkles from the bed sheets still pressed into his cheeks.
“’S that coffee?” Clint asks, voice low and rough from sleep.
He reaches for his chipped purple mug and smiles, and it makes something warm settle in Natasha’s chest. Outside, snow drifts gently down, covering the street in a blanket of white, and Natasha wonders if this means there’ll be a snowball fight in the future. Tony has invited them all over later for dinner and drinks and maybe a game of white elephant, and it’s the team’s first Christmas together. Natasha wouldn’t be surprised if things got a bit rowdier than planned.
Clint makes a surprised humming sound and stares at his coffee for a long moment. “Did you put peppermint in my coffee?” he asks, his words making it to his mouth probably five seconds after he thought it.
Merry Christmas, she signs to him and takes a sip of her own coffee.
Clint’s expression softens into something warm that Natasha would never have thought she’d be on the receiving end of just a few years ago, and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her, better than running away from Russia, better than being found in the middle of winter in Budapest, better than being spared an early death. And Natasha has always been cynical because she had the love trained out of her at such an early age, because she’s been taught since she can remember that waiting for your soulmate is pointless, that the system doesn’t work, but now here’s Clint, leaning his head on her shoulder and drawing aimless circles on her thigh with a careless finger. And Natasha thinks she’s been waiting for this her whole life, because she’s always been enough for herself alone but now she feels so settled, so comfortable in her own skin in a way that’s brand new and old like it’s something hidden inside of her that she’s been waiting to find, and maybe the system’s not so broken after all, maybe she just hadn’t thought about it.
“I got you something,” Clint murmurs into Natasha’s shoulder.
Natasha laughs and pulls away from him. He looks up at her and his eyes are wide and sleepy and earnest.
I thought we agreed no presents, she signs.
Just a little one, he signs back to her and hops off the bed. I’ll be right back.
Natasha lets out a breath that’s trying to be a laugh and leans back against the headboard of the bed. Lucky slips in the bedroom door that Clint left open and climbs up onto the bed to take the warm spot where Clint was sitting. Natasha smiles and reaches out to scratch Lucky between his ears. Clint makes a sort of indignant spluttering sound when he comes back and finds his spot taken but sits at the foot of the bed when Natasha crosses her legs and makes room for him. Liho lifts her head and after a moment’s consideration, climbs into his lap. He holds out a thin square box to her, smiling a little anxiously, like he’s suddenly worried that there’s anything between them that’s anything but certain.
The box is a little worn at the corners like it’s traveled far to get here, and Natasha tips it open gently, as if she’s expecting something infinitely precious. Carefully nestled inside is a delicate silver necklace, the pendant crafted in the shape of a tiny arrow. Natasha thinks that maybe, a handful of years ago, she would have just rolled her eyes at the sentimentality Clint is pushing her way, but Clint has taught her what it means to be soft without sacrificing strength, and instead, Natasha just smiles.
“You know I don’t wear jewelry,” she says, teasing more than anything, and Clint shoots her a look that Natasha thinks is trying to be indignant but comes out looking fond instead.
“I saw it when I was on assignment in Texas, okay?” Clint says, and Natasha doesn’t miss the way his mouth twitches up into a smile, because as much as he’s tried to downplay this mission, even though all it amounted to was a small domestic drug bust, nothing on the scale of the sort of international crime that he’s made a name for himself fighting, it’s his first real mission since New York and Clint’s been quietly proud of himself ever since he got back.
“I saw it in a shop and I thought of you,” he mumbles, ducking his chin and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It’s whatever. It’s not a big deal.”
Natasha smiles and nudges his knee with her foot so he’ll look at her. I like it, she signs to him and leans in to press a kiss to his mouth, her hand coming up to cup his jaw. She rubs a thumb over the stubble on his chin and laughs, leaning back and saying, “Now go get dressed. We’re having brunch with the others in two hours and we have to go all the way to Manhattan.”
Clint makes a face at her and grumbles under his breath, but dutifully sets Liho aside and goes to shower. As the water starts up in the bathroom, Liho pads over to Natasha and curls up on her lap, purring contently. Natasha looks at the box in her hand with the necklace and smiles softly, something warm settling under her skin. She puts the necklace on as she gets dressed that morning, and when Clint sees her wearing it, he smiles like she’s the answer to every question he’s ever had and it makes Natasha want to steal the entire world for him.
“You look nice,” he says quietly to her later as they walk down the street to get to the subway. Lucky runs on ahead of them, looking back every so often to make sure they don’t get lost, and Liho pokes her head out of Natasha’s coat curiously, sniffing at the snow drifting down from the sky.
Natasha laughs and slips her hand into his. Even in the winter, the palm of his hand is warm against hers, and there’s something grounding about the familiar weight of him by her side.
“Thanks,” she says, and there’s something heavy in her chest that makes her feel like maybe she should be saying something more like I love you instead.
Clint glances over at her and smiles at her and Natasha thinks for one terrifying moment that he might want to say it too.
5.
Dirt crunches beneath Natasha’s boots as she walks across the empty field towards Clint’s worn down looking house. Natasha’s been here before and the two of them have used this place as a sort of safehouse on and off throughout the years, but Natasha’s still amazed at how quiet it gets out here in the winter. The ground is hard beneath her feet and the blanket of clouds presses in on her shoulders, and the only thing Natasha can hear except the wind whipping up the ends of her hair is the sound of Clint’s chickens clucking in the distance.
When Natasha knocks on the door to the house, it’s silent for a long moment, and Natasha wonders if she guessed wrong, if this isn’t where Clint ran to after all when she released all of SHIELD’s secrets. But then she hears the soft thudding of unhurried footsteps, and the door swings open, and there Clint is, looking ragged and tired to all hell, but in one piece. He’s got a beer in one hand and he’s dressed down to a raggedy pair of jeans and a t-shirt with holes in the sleeves and his hair is sticking up in every direction and Natasha feels the breath rush out of her.
“Hey,” she says.
He huffs out a laugh. “Hi,” he says, leaning a little on the door.
Natasha rocks back on her heels, her hands in her pockets, and asks, “You get out of Ukraine okay?”
Clint smiles and looks down. “I should be asking you that,” he says, and then glances up again, something like concern furrowing his brow. “You got shot in the chest, didn’t you?”
Natasha smiles. “I’m okay,” she says gently.
“I know,” Clint says, and there’s something in his voice that’s almost painfully tender. “That’s just not something I want to wake up to in the middle of the night, that’s all.”
Natasha laughs. “Yeah,” she says, and maybe she sounds a lot softer than she means to let on, but she’s had a long few months sorting out a new identity for herself and it’s been the loneliest work Natasha has had to do in years. “Yeah, okay.”
There’s a beat and Clint stares at Natasha like he never expected to see her again, and Natasha’s chest feels so full she could burst.
“Can I come in?” she asks, trying to get Clint to look a little less like he thinks this is some wild, desperate dream, trying to say I’m here, I’m real, I’m here.
Clint nods and steps back into the house, his sock feet quiet against the wood flooring. Natasha kicks off her muddy boots by the door and feels the warm air begin to thaw her frozen cheeks. Clint has Christmas carols playing quietly from his stereo and there are Christmas decorations strewn across the living room around a tree, as if Clint got part way through decorating it before getting distracted.
“Where are the pets?” Natasha asks, because they’ve both been out of the country and hiding for months now, and the neighbor Clint had asked to look after Liho and Lucky for a few days couldn’t possibly have been taking care of them for this long.
“Kate’s holding down the fort,” Clint says as they step into the kitchen.
Natasha is suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of something warm and sweet and spicy like cinnamon. She smiles and lifts herself up to sit on the kitchen counter, peering curiously at the oven and wondering if whatever he’s making is going to turn out blackened and inedible like most of the things he tries to cook.
“Clint Barton,” she teases, “Are you actually baking?”
He shrugs and comes to stand between her legs, leaning in to brush a kiss over her lips and toy with the ends of her newly cut hair.
“Gingerbread cookies. It’s Christmas,” he says, as if that’s an explanation for everything.
Natasha laughs just as the timer on the oven starts to go off and Clint presses another kiss to her mouth that Natasha feels all the way down to her toes before he goes to get the cookies out of the oven.
“I’ve never actually had gingerbread before,” Natasha admits, eyeing the cookies with interest. She reaches out to grab one off the cookie sheet. The cookie is still hot when her fingers touch it, and she jerks her hand back, hissing softly.
Clint almost drops the sheet of cookies. He shakes his hand against the burn and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
“Hey,” he says, trying to be indignant. “You get burned, I get burned, remember that, jerk?”
Natasha grins wickedly at him and reaches out to touch just the tip of her finger to the cookies again, laughing when he yelps and all but tackles her off the counter. She laughs so hard her cheeks ache and he’s mostly laughing too, even though he’s got her all but pinned to the floor, and here, this is what Natasha missed most, she thinks to herself, this is what she’s found herself dreaming of all those months on her own, rebuilding herself, and there’s a softness in Clint’s eyes that makes Natasha think that maybe he felt it too.
“You’re an asshole,” Clint says to her, the laughter in his voice undercutting the sharpness that he’s trying to inject into his voice.
Natasha grins, and it’s been several years and more scars than she can count and she knows where and when they both got every mark on their bodies, and Natasha finally feels it in her bones.
“Love you too,” she says softly, and reaches up to yank Clint down to kiss her.