Secret Santa: The Road to Nowhere
banner by enigma731
A Gift From: enigma731
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: The Road to Nowhere
A Gift For: sandrasfisher
Rating: Adult
Warnings: canon-compliant violence, canon-compliant sexual violence
Summary/Prompt Used: There’s a strange sense of something wrong, something terrible about to happen, or maybe something that already has. Before the words were drifting by her, like waves with her mind submerged below the quiet of the surface. Now they’re pinging around like tiny grenades -- Stark, helicopter, explosion, twelve dead.
Author's Note: Happy holidays/happy 2017, b_c!
1.
The room smells of gunpowder, and beneath that, the slightly putrid scent of blood that’s dried and oxidized, of the ghosts of all the kills that have taken place here.
The air is cool enough to raise goosebumps on Natasha’s arms, though she doesn’t react or even acknowledge them.
The place feels almost sterile, in a way: cinder block walls unadorned but for a collection of stray bullet holes (like craters on the moon, she thought when she was small), concrete floor that's been bleached so many times it’s forgotten its own identity.
The gun is smooth and solid in her hand; it feels like an extension of her own body. She’s silent and still as she waits, but all of her nerve endings are singing with anticipation, muscles taut like coiled springs, hungry for another task, another chance to prove herself.
The man doesn’t struggle as he’s brought in, moves with a surprising grace despite the fact that he’s all but being dragged by the guard. He kneels without being forced, waits resignedly as the hood is pulled roughly from his head.
Natasha studies his face for a moment, as she often does before taking her shot: short brown hair, standing up at odd angles, skin just beginning to be lined by cruelty of the world, blue eyes that pin her to the spot, that seem somehow to know her better than she does herself. A prickle of familiarity comes into her mind unbidden, though she can’t say how or why. She is seventeen and she knows that she has never met this man before. Now she will kill him, so it doesn’t matter.
“Nat?” he asks, an odd note of hope in his voice, though she doesn’t think it’s for himself. “Nat, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”
She has the brief sensation of wind whipping her hair, her face, a violent full-force gale that knocks her backward, steals her breath.
Natasha looks up, sees that the ceiling is gone, sunlight pouring down into the compound, edged by the gaping edges of the roof, like rotted teeth. She blinks, tries to clear her vision, and the room dissolves into flames.
2.
Clint is wearing a suit.
Not a tac suit, or one of the rumpled, ill-fitting things that he sometimes puts on when their cover calls for it, but an actual tailored tuxedo jacket. With a bow tie.
He looks up and smiles as the hostess leads her to the table where he’s already been studying the menu.
The floor is unusually slick under her feet as she moves to follow, and she glances down, realizing suddenly that it’s made entirely of glass, so clear that it might as well be absent. There’s water underneath, an aquarium, or perhaps an entire ocean, complete with a brightly colored coral reef and fish.
Natasha swallows, feeling oddly dizzy, like she might spontaneously begin to drown at any given moment. Still, she does her best to keep her eyes off the floor, to focus on her destination at the table and keep her gait even. Clint stands when she finally arrives, pulls out the chair for her to sit down.
She raises an eyebrow when he gets back to his own seat, settles nervously. “This is--You said you wanted to get sushi. I figured you meant the usual.”
He shrugs, tugs at his collar, an instant of discomfort showing through the polished facade he’s trying to show her. “I dunno, tonight just seemed like a good time for something new. A new tradition, I guess?”
Natasha glances down at her hands, realizes that the tabletop is also clear, and she can see straight through to the water below them, where a large pink anemone is gently undulating with the current. She shakes herself, looks back up. “Is this a date?”
Clint laughs, a jagged, pressured sound. “Why would you think that?”
She furrows her brow, struggling to read him. She can’t recall ever feeling quite so lost around him, quite so uncomfortable. Which is impressive, considering. “Well, your suit for one. This place. ‘A new tradition’? If this isn’t a date, then what kind of tradition are we starting?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, fucking one another and then never saying another word about it? That’s what you’d prefer, right? That would be way more your style than a date.”
Natasha flinches, then chastises herself for making such a public display of emotion. It isn’t like they’re working, but vulnerability is vulnerability. “Why would you think that?”
The wall behind him is made of glass too, giving a disconcertingly full view of the street outside, and somehow she’s just now managed to notice.
He snorts. “Pretty obvious, isn’t it? The Black Widow doesn’t date. She just sleeps with you and then eats your corpse.”
A hot surge of anger sends her to her feet, one palm coming down hard enough on the tabletop to make the rest of the diners stare. “Okay, so it’s not a date. What is it, an interrogation? You invited me here to publicly call me a monster? Well guess what, you’re wasting my time telling me what I already know.”
“Where is here?” asks Clint, and suddenly his voice is difficult to hear, muffled beneath a rhythmic roar she recognizes but can’t quite place. “Natasha, tell me where you are.”
And then the glass shatters, all of it, shards raining down around her like a swarm of tiny angry bees. The wall is gone, the floor is gone, but there is no water now.
There is only air, and she is in freefall.
3.
“Stop!” yells the scarecrow, appearing in her path practically out of nowhere.
Revision: he actually staggers--that’s the only word she can possibly use to describe the ungainly, boneless, limb-swaying lope of the thing--down from the hillside next to the road. He’s been still up until the moment of her approach, though, and Natasha’s been moving along at such a good pace that she’s barely managed to register his existence in her peripheral vision.
She draws up short, because it’s that or run into the thing, and she isn’t about to have her race time wrecked by an injury on account of some dumbass sentient lawn decoration that doesn’t have the sense to stay out of her lane. Thank god she’s at least three minutes ahead of her competition, by her mental calculations. Still, she’ll have to handle this quickly.
“What?” she snaps, attempting to dodge around the thing, only to have it block her with an impossible ease.
“Stop!” it repeats, holding up both hands. (Revision: sleeves, with a rather pathetic assortment of hay poking out like that might somehow make a functional substitute for fingers.)
“I appear to be stopped,” says Natasha. “Thanks to you. Want to tell me why I’m stopping?”
“You can’t run all the way to the Emerald City,” the scarecrow insists, then backpedals for no apparent reason. “I mean--I mean, technically the Yellow Brick Road will take you there, but you can’t run all the way.”
She crosses her arms. “In case you didn’t get the memo, this is a race. I, along with a lot of other people, am going to run there. And I’m going to get there first, so you’d better get out of the way before you cause a pileup.”
“Nope,” says the scarecrow, shaking his head so hard that for a moment it looks as if his threadbare hat might flop all the way off. “Nope. Maybe the rest, but not you.”
Natasha feels a stab of rage burn through her chest. Not a side stitch, surely. She’s trained far too well for that. Just anger at this unexpected inconvenience. “Why the hell not?”
“Because,” says the scarecrow. “Don’t need a brain to see that you’re wearing the wrong shoes! Can’t run a race in heels.” He taps the side of his head, which somehow manages to make an audible clang despite being made entirely of straw.
Natasha looks down, and only then does she see the ruby slippers on her feet, which have begun to bleed. She becomes aware of the pain instantaneously, internally curses the scarecrow for bringing it to her attention. She was in a groove before this, riding the high of running.
“Well,” she says after a moment, “simple solution for that.”
“What?” asks the scarecrow.
But that’s the only word he has a chance to say, because a moment later she’s gotten the shoes off, and launched them directly at him. His head comes clean off on impact, straw body slumping to the ground and a shrill cry of disbelief emanating from his mouth, now rolling down the road with the force of the collision.
Natasha shrugs and takes off at a sprint, the yellow bricks hot under her bare feet. The others will be coming any moment now.
“Wait!” calls the scarecrow, or probably just his decapitated head. “Natasha, come back! Come back to me!”
She turns and looks over one shoulder, just in time to see him engulfed by a rapidly-advancing wall of fire.
4.
The mark is spread naked before her, limbs bound to the posts of the bed. The sheets are already soaked through with sweat and desperation, veins standing out on his arms as he strains against the bonds, his cock painfully hard despite the fact that he has to know how much danger he’s in.
“Why are you here?” Natasha purrs. She’s crouched above him, on all fours like a deadly semblance of a lover. He wants her, has wanted her all evening, she knows, has thrown caution to the wind and ended up here, a moth slowly turning to ash in her flame.
“Can’t tell you,” he responds, the same answer he’s given her a half-dozen times already.
She runs a cruel finger along the underside of his cock, watching his hips jump, despite everything. “I wonder what will happen first?” she muses. “You talk or you come? I’m going to kill you when you do, by the way. Either one. Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Not gonna talk,” he pants. “Not gonna come.”
“Really?” she simpers, leaning over and pinching his earlobe in her teeth. “That’s not what you said when you were getting me into bed. When you were telling me all the different ways you wanted to please me. When you practically begged for me to own you.”
“I wanted--” he starts, voice breaking, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. His face is familiar, she realizes, stirs something inside of her that she can’t quite place. “I wanted--”
“Tell me what you’re here for,” she growls again, because she is far too deep into this to deviate now, doesn’t know how to correct her course or do anything besides finishing what she’s started. She grabs her knife from the bedside table, holds it up where he can see it, though she doesn’t touch him with it yet.
“You,” he sobs, his chest heaving, his head rolling back, throat bared to her. “Just you, Natasha.”
“Clint?” she whispers, freezing as the recognition rocks through her, turns her blood to icy horror.
He opens his mouth to respond again, but all he can do is cough, thick black smoke spilling over his lips as his eyes roll back into his head, the skin of his face turning mottled blue.
5.
“On the bright side,” says Natasha, taking a swing at Clint’s left side, knowing instinctively that he’s going to block her before he does, “I get to see you in a Speedo.”
Clint brings his guard up, then side steps neatly, out of her reach long enough to pause and arch an eyebrow. “That an item on your bucket list, Nat?”
She grins. “I’ll never tell.” She doesn’t make another move toward him yet, knows that building the tension can sometimes throw him off, though they’ve been sparring long enough now that he’s good at anticipating even her attempts at unpredictability.
“If it were,” says Clint, trying to look casual as he circles to her left, “it still wouldn’t be enough of a pro to make that much running not suck.”
“Really?” Natasha lets him get close, makes a half-hearted attempt to sweep his legs, knowing he’ll avoid the kick, too. Their training sessions lately have been nothing more than a strenuous stalemate. If she wants to get back on top, she’s going to have to start getting really creative. “My admiration isn’t enough to buy your investment in cardiovascular fitness?”
Clint snorts, catches her arm as she makes her next strike, and attempts to twist. “Nothing is enough to buy my investment in running.”
Natasha turns with him, using the momentum and his weight against him, landing a kick to his knees and taking him to the mat. She drops down to all fours, straddling him playfully. “Not even this?”
He laughs. “That supposed to be a bribe or a threat?”
She shrugs, suddenly acutely aware of the way that he’s looking at her, the way things are shifting between them, or maybe just becoming more clear. “Both?”
Clint takes advantage of her momentary distraction, gets a leg up around her hip and rolls so that now she’s the one pinned to the ground. “You would reward torture with more torture.”
“Oh,” says Natasha, reaching up and running a finger along the side of his face, feeling the way that makes his whole body shudder, the way he wants all of this--wants her--far more than he will ever allow himself to admit aloud. “So what is your price, then? I mean, if you didn’t already have to run a race on orders. If you could have whatever you wanted.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “I don’t know.” A painfully obvious lie.
Natasha can feel the moment on the brink of slipping away, like it has so many times in the past few weeks. He’ll roll off of her, get to his feet, tell her that he’s finished sparring, needs to go do target practice and definitely not train for his newly-assigned triathlete cover. He’ll go back to being her partner, her friend, safely on one side of the line they’ve both been toeing recently. It’s happened before, and it’s not what she wants.
“What about this?” she asks, then moves on a whim, craning her neck up to kiss him, even as he keeps her pinned.
He makes a noise in the back of his throat, returns the kiss roughly, a little bit desperately. It’s exactly what she’s hoped for, has considered doing half a dozen times already, until she breaks away for air and finds him utterly frozen.
“Clint?” she whispers, her heart pounding in her throat as she reaches up to touch his cheek again. “Is this--I want--”
His body falls to ash in her hands.
+1
She wakes in what feels like the cycle of a dream, the sounds and smells of the room coming to her in snatches, interspersed with periods of dark oblivion. The scent of disinfectant is overpowering, almost caustic, and there’s the sound of people’s voices -- talking about the weather, about Coca-Cola, about cars on year-end sale. She listens to a story about a cat that’s saved a boy’s life, and one about how the local school district is considering banning the teaching of science. There’s another story about an explosion, a helicopter that fell out of the clear blue sky, and the Stark Industries Triathlon. The name tugs at something in the back of her mind, but she can’t quite place it, can’t quite surface enough to hold on. And then the voice goes quiet, replaced by the sound of footsteps somewhere near her ear, and a sensation of cool washing over her body.
Natasha loses track of time again after that, can’t say how much of it passes before she becomes aware of the pain, of her own breathing, and the way it feels like there’s a weight sitting on her chest. Her throat is raw, and her mouth is dry in a way she doesn’t think she’s ever felt before. There’s a strange sense of something wrong, too, something terrible about to happen, or maybe something that already has. Before the words were drifting by her, like waves with her mind submerged below the quiet of the surface. Now they’re pinging around like tiny grenades -- Stark, helicopter, explosion, twelve dead.
Her heart is pounding when she opens her eyes, grimacing against the stab of the light. Panic explodes through her at the sensation; she’s been unconscious enough times to recognize the
way it feels when you finally come around. The way her limbs feel stiff, her muscles not quite wanting to cooperate. She’s in the hospital, she knows with sudden certainty, and it’s definitely too late to prevent the awful thing she was sensing earlier. That’s got to be what’s landed her here.
“Natasha?” asks Clint--she recognizes his voice immediately, though she hasn’t focused enough yet to actually see him. “Natasha, do you know where you are?”
She can’t quite manage to find words to answer, her throat still dry, her tongue and lips feeling heavy and sluggish. Instead she shakes her head, which makes her realize that it aches.
“Good,” he breathes, sounding unreasonably relieved. “Good, that’s good.”
“Why?” she manages, frowning when she finally finds him, takes in the expression on his face. He looks thrilled, if exhausted, his hair greasy and his cheek marked by what she thinks must be the imprint of the loosely-woven blanket covering her bed here.
“Because,” says Clint. “The last time I asked you that, you told me you were in Oz.”
She thinks for a moment, remembering the scarecrow, the decapitated head she’d sent flying, the way the yellow bricks had felt beneath the raw skin of her feet. “I was dreaming.”
“Not dreaming,” he says quickly, still sounding a little breathless. He’s standing beside the bed now, one hand laced through the other, like he doesn’t quite know what to do with them as he bounces anxiously on the balls of his feet. “Delirious. Or--or that’s what the nurse said.”
The word makes her stomach twist, and Natasha shakes her head. “Water?”
“Yeah,” he answers, moving so quickly to the bedside table that it makes her a bit dizzy. “Yeah, of course. Sorry. I didn’t think--”
“Clint.” She summons all her energy, manages to lift a hand and touch his arm, which makes him freeze. “Just--Slow down.”
He nods, actually pauses, takes three audible, deep breaths. “Sorry. I just--Let me help you sit up, okay?”
He waits for her to nod permission before he raises the head of the bed carefully, moves the tray table into her reach and gingerly hands her a tiny cup of ice water.
“How bad is it?” she asks, when she’s had a few sips and talking feels slightly less like swallowing gravel. She looks down at her body and attempts to take stock, though a part of her still feels oddly detached, like she might be examining somebody else, like whatever’s got Clint so damn shaky is far more important than anything going on with her. No broken bones, she
thinks, though there are some bandages scattered over her body, especially on her left arm and shoulder. Mostly it’s the pain in her chest and head, the heaviness every time she tries to take a breath. Plus the fact that she doesn’t remember how she got here, of course.
“It’s--” He sighs, finds a chair and pulls it up to the side of her bed, sitting in it and resting his hands in his lap, though he still looks like he needs something to do with them. “You got really lucky, considering, okay? You remember being in the helicopter?”
She searches her memory, comes up blank, though she remembers the words that she heard earlier, on what she can only assume now was some sort of news broadcast. She remembers the wind, too. And falling. “No. No, I don’t think so.”
Clint bites his lip, then nods. “Okay. The race? Do you remember that there was a race?”
“You were training for it,” says Natasha, though she’s not certain of how she remembers, can’t quite picture all of the details. Her memory is like looking through a fog, trying to make out vague shapes she can’t quite identify. “Coulson assigned it as a cover because you’d been failing your cardio certs. Right?”
He smiles thinly. “Right. How come you remember the part where I was in trouble?”
She takes another sip of water, tries to return his smile. “What can I say? Your screw-ups are memorable.”
Clint snorts, a tiny huff of air. “Well. We were at the race. I was competing, you were doing backup, in the helicopter. It--It went down. Exploded, actually. They still don’t know exactly what happened, but Fury thinks it was a sabotage job.”
“And what happened to me?” asks Natasha, fear crawling up the back of her neck again.
“You managed to get one of the emergency ‘chutes,” says Clint, swallowing visibly. “You got out, but--You got burned. Most of it’s superficial but the heat burned your airway and your lungs. You stopped breathing twice. You were on a ventilator for a while.”
The memories come in a deluge this time--the rush of hot air, of flames, the sound of the helicopter’s blades chopping futilely at the air and the seasick sensation of the floor blowing out beneath her feet, the ruined windows spewing shards of glass, warping in the heat.
“Natasha?” comes Clint’s voice after what feels like an eternity, and she shakes herself, realizes that her own breath is coming in short, panicky gasps again, lungs struggling to keep up with the strain she’s putting on them.
“Fuck,” she manages, after a moment. “The pilot was--He was right there, and then he burned. And then he was you.”
“Shit,” says Clint, taking her hand and then looking at it as though he doesn’t exactly know what to do next. “That’s--The pilot died. But I wasn’t--I was fine. Just--stuck watching the chopper go down. Not a damn thing I could do.”
“Clint,” she says softly, as more memories emerge--the gym, his laughter, the heat of his body against hers. “When we were training, did we--”
“Fuck in the gym?” he finishes, his hand shaking almost imperceptibly. “Yeah. Yeah, that happened. You remember that too?”
She nods, though her mind is still filled with smoke and ash, glass floors waiting to drown her. “I wanted--I want this. I mean, not just sex. You.”
He blinks. “I--had kind of assumed as much? Not that I’m not happy to hear you say it.”
“Okay,” says Natasha, though it still doesn’t feel like enough. “I didn’t want you to think I was just--using you? Sleep with you and then eat your corpse--or something? I’m not--I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
Clint smiles sadly, pulling her hand to his lips and pressing a careful kiss to the back of it. “Natasha. You never have been. Not to me.”
“Come here,” she says softly, tugging at his hand.
He hesitates for a moment, but doesn’t make her ask twice, climbing onto the bed and wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I am here. As long as you want me.”
She nods, shifting to rest her head against his chest. For a long while she doesn’t say anything else, just breathes in the warmth of his body, solid and safe.