[fic] The Woman in the Crosshairs 2/2
Title: The Woman in the Crosshairs
Rating: PG-13 for minor violence and some language
Fandom: The Avengers (Movieverse)
Pairings: Clint/Natasha, Thor/Jane, Darcy/OMC
Summary: In which Clint has a new hobby and Natasha isn't curious, until she is. Black Widow and Hawkeye, their partnership-and what it means-throughout the years.
Length: 12,182 words
Part 1
Three months passed while they watched Jane Foster’s theories become a whole hell of a lot less theoretical with every passing day and every machine calibrated. SHIELD, sensing that the bridge was almost completed, stopped sending them on missions. In the event that Jane was successful, they wanted at least one barrier of defense, though what Natasha and Clint could do against an entire legion of alien troops, Natasha had no idea. They were good, but neither of them was the Hulk.
She passed the time by getting her reading done. A lot of reading done.
When Clint went to the range to work with some of the new arrows, Natasha tagged along, though after a couple of rounds, she’d pick up whatever book she’d chosen that week. She read Tolstoy while Clint tested acid arrows, Bukovsky (while wearing earplugs) during the sonic arrow testing week, Pasternak during the new grappling heads testing session. After Dr. Zhivago, she started pulling in some American culture-Stephen King became a genuine favorite-but it mostly stayed Russian.
Clint rolled his eyes and told her she was going to give herself eye problems, squinting at the page like she did.
He didn’t give any sign that the feelings he wrote about in his dedications-Natasha read all seven of them-were at all present. With each passing day, the feeling of wanting him to grew just a little bit stronger. She began noticing things she’d taken for granted: the shape of his hands, for example, and the way he always glanced at her whenever he laughed like he wanted her to always share his joke. How his smile was just a little bit sleepy in the mornings whenever he asked her to go for a run with him.
Natasha read another book to spite him, chatting idly, as she did each time, about inconsistencies she found in plot and character, in story arc. She could practically hear his teeth beginning to grind together.
Clint, of course, disappeared for long stretches during the day. Before, she’d never wondered what he was up to-she valued her privacy, and his-but now she figured he had to be off somewhere, writing in one of those notebooks. Where did he keep those when he finished with them? Did he burn them? Sometimes he wrote in them in front of her, just the two of them relaxing after a day of waiting. She mulled it over while she thumbed through a Grisham work.
“Hey, Tash?”
She looked up, grateful for the interruption. Grisham was far more boring than she’d anticipated. “Yeah?”
Clint tapped his pencil against his notebook. “What’s a good synonym for mysterious?”
Natasha thought about it, even while part of her categorized that Clint was asking for her help with one of his novels, something that never happened before. Was it a challenge? A dare? Did he suspect that she knew something? He didn’t write in the notebook in front of her very often, after all.
“Enigmatic,” she said.
“Thanks.” Clint went back to whatever scene he was writing. She was dying to creep over and get a peek, but then he really would know something was up.
She waited until she knew he was thoroughly bored with waiting for something to happen with Jane’s research, and then she brought out She Took My Left Shoe. Clint came back from a run to find her at the table with a cooling mug of tea and the book open to chapter three.
“Good run?” she asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t see anything inter-” Clint broke off mid-sentence.
Natasha looked up quickly, making a show of going for her gun. “Clint? Is something wrong?”
“N-nothing.” Clint went to the sink and poured a glass of water, which he drank without pausing for breath. “Nothing at all. Good book?”
“It’s okay.” She smiled absently. “Trying out a new author. You heard of him? I thought it was funny, Hawke, Hawkeye, that sort of thing.”
“Uh, no-nope, can’t say I have. But then, I don’t read much.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah,” Clint said. He didn’t head off right away for his shower like he usually did after his run. Instead, he lurked in the doorway, eyeing her and shifting his feet.
“What’s up with you today?” Natasha asked, deliberately giving him an annoyed look.
“Nothing.” Clint vanished down the hall.
The minute she heard the shower running, Natasha allowed herself a small smile and read on. She’d read She Took My Left Shoe before, of course, but she enjoyed it. In fact, she enjoyed most of Clint’s work, which she’d surreptitiously cleaned out of the local bookstore in Los Rocas, always paying cash. The only one she hadn’t liked was Nightingale’s Charm, but then, the main character was kind of a bitch.
Clint came back in, hair dripping, when she was on chapter six. “I gotta ask, Nat,” he said, sticking his finger in his ear to get rid of some of the excess moisture, “what’s up with the reading lately?”
“I spent many years working non-stop missions for SHIELD. I have much to catch up on.”
“But don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?”
“Not particularly. Some authors are better than others.” Natasha picked up the book.
“Like that one?” Clint asked, his voice casual.
“His prose is perfectly fine. I find some of his spy-craft lacking.”
“Is that fair? Not everybody can be the perfect ex-KGB spy, Madam Black Widow.”
“Of course not. The world would be a much more dangerous place if that were true.” Natasha took a sip of tea. “I wonder if this author uses Wikipedia to search for spy terminology.”
“It doesn’t feel like a bit of a busman’s holiday, reading that?”
“I don’t know what that means.” Natasha smiled because she could practically hear Clint grinding his teeth. “Did you have something you wanted to do today?”
“I thought maybe you’d like to come to the gym and spar with me. That is, if you’re not too busy insulting hard-working authors who probably put a lot of thought into their novels.”
“Touchy, touchy,” Natasha said, but she put down the book. She followed him down to the gym in the basement. “Been awhile since we’ve sparred properly. You’re probably rusty.”
Clint gave her an annoyed look. She gave him an angelic smile in return.
“You know, I don’t understand why more authors can’t write like the Russians. They had weight, you know.”
“Yes, a bunch of fat old men.” Clint rolled his eyes. “Let’s all write like them.”
She wondered if he’d just caught his slip. Probably not.
“It can’t hurt. There’s a reason their stories persevere when so many of these, what do you call them, pop art writers? When so many of these pop art writers fade into obscurity.”
“You’d be surprised by what sticks,” Clint said between his teeth. “And I think the word you’re looking for is ‘pulp.’“
“As in, I will beat you to one? No, that doesn’t sound right.”
“Just get on the mat, Romanoff.”
Natasha ignored him and began her normal stretching regimen, propping her leg up against the wall so that she could stretch out her hamstring. “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, Barton? Cranky or not, I’ll still kick your ass.”
Clint snorted.
She liked sparring the most of all of the things they did together. He’d learned to hold his own against her, which meant she had to step up her own game in reply, and it felt good. After a couple of moments, she felt Clint relax, some of the anger fading away.
Of course, she chose to go for the jugular.
She let Clint pin her, levered herself up on her elbow and used their weight to shift them so that she held him in a leg-hold. “So,” she said, while Clint struggled. “Are you ready to tell me now or do I have to keep insulting T.C. Hawke? Because I confess, I’m running out of insults.”
Clint froze. “Tell you what?”
Natasha clenched her legs together tighter.
“Ow! Uncle, uncle, dammit, Tash-”
She released him and they rolled apart, each crouching on opposite sides of the mat, regarding the other.
“You know,” Clint said, looking pale. “How long have you known?”
“How long were you going to wait to tell me?” Natasha wasn’t sure what she was talking about, the books or the feelings. They were so intertwined in her head, all part of that confusing side of Clint that she both understood completely and didn’t understand at all, that it didn’t matter.
Clint’s jaw went firm. “I asked first.”
That was fair. She shrugged. “Three months.”
“You’ve known for three-three months?”
“Yes. Answer my question.” Natasha dared him to look away, to back down from this game of chicken they had found themselves playing. “Or were you never going to tell me at all?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather have what pieces of you in my life I can get without you knowing than you knowing and being gone because you can’t handle it.” Clint’s eyes were two bright pinpricks across the mat as he stared at her hard. There was a dare there, as well: he dared her to start running, to prove him right, Natasha realized. “That’s how this works. You make the first move here, not me.”
Her chest felt tight. “Why do I have to be the one to do all of the work?”
“Because I’ll take whatever I can get, and I think you’ve known that for years.” Clint pushed himself to his feet and turned to walk away.
Natasha glared at his back. In a heartbeat, she was on her feet, though she had no idea why, and running across the mat. She launched herself, driving both knees into his back. He went down hard, which she might find odd later because he never dropped his guard like that, not even around her. But he hit the floor, barely catching himself, and instinctively rolled, trying to take her out with a sweep of his arm. Natasha put her weight on her hands to avoid being rolled under Clint and dodged the blow. She plopped herself onto his stomach, pinning him to the floor with nothing more than a glower.
“What the hell?” he asked her.
“The conversation wasn’t over.”
He scowled. “I’ve said all I’m going to say about it.”
“Just let me figure it all out, huh? You never struck me as a coward, Clint.”
“Screw you.” Clint grabbed her hips to shove her off of him.
She grabbed his thumb and twisted, not hard enough to damage but hard enough to cause pain. She was annoyed, at him, at herself, at the fluttery feeling in her stomach she didn’t like. “Stop that.”
“Ow. Dammit, Tasha!”
“You are the most frustrating man I have ever met,” Natasha said. “And trust me, I’ve met many frustrating men, but you, you are the worst. Why did you not tell me about Hawke? Why let me think you were just writing notes for all of those years?”
“That many notes?” Clint rolled his eyes; Natasha twisted his thumb harder. “Tasha, I shoot with that hand!”
“You shoot with both hands. Tell me why.”
“You were supposed to snoop-ow, let go, will you? You were supposed to snoop and find out years ago, but you didn’t, and I thought you didn’t care, so I just…let it go.”
Natasha gave him a baffled look. “I was respecting your privacy,” she said, speaking to him as though he were a slow child. “Why would you ever think I don’t care?”
“You always snoop. You bugged Sanderson’s office when you thought he had a secret girlfriend at SHIELD.”
“Yes, but that’s Sanderson. That was for blackmail to get out of doing patrols. Sanderson is not you, Clint.” Natasha frowned at him. The fluttering hadn’t abated at all, but she let go of his hand. He let it rest on the mat, next to her knee, while she gave the matter some thought. “Let me get this straight: you wanted me to spy on you and find out you were Hawke the entire time? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Clint hit the back of his head into the mat a few times, a frustrated look on his face. “This is a mess. I wanted you to know and I didn’t want you to know because I didn’t know how you’d take it. We can forget all about it, if you want. I’ll stop writing, and we can pretend this never happened.”
“Why would you do that?” Natasha almost wanted to cuff him upside the head. She settled instead for giving him yet another puzzled look. “Your writing is wonderful.”
Clint’s eyes shot open.
“Though your fans are scary. And possibly not right in the head.”
“Wait,” Clint said, grabbing her knee in shock. “You liked the book?”
“Books. And I already said so, didn’t I?”
For a long time, so long that she grew uncomfortable, Clint stared at her, his mouth slightly open, a stunned look on his face. Finally, he broke the gaze to lean his head back against the floor. Laughter shook his torso, reverberating up through her legs. His laughter spilled out until he was beating the floor with his fists and she was smiling, despite herself. She recognized the emotion: relief. He was relieved that she liked the books. It mattered that much to him. How long had he carried that around? She wondered while she waited for him to stop laughing.
Eventually, he did, dashing at the tears of laughter in his eyes. When he looked at her now, the anger was gone, but Natasha could sense it: the next move was hers.
This was where she would croon some meaningless nothing at her mark, if this were an op. But it wasn’t an op, it was her life, and it was important.
So she regarded him, somberly. “I was angry with you when I found about your books, especially The Woman in the Crosshairs.”
“You thought it was Volgograd,” Clint said.
Natasha nodded, once.
“It wasn’t. Mostly. I made sure of that.”
“True. And the parts of it that were, they don’t bother me.” Natasha tilted her head. She’d mused over this for so long and hard that it felt strange to say the words aloud. “I like…that you did not put our story into words.”
“Trust me,” Clint said, grinning. “I’m talented, but not that talented.”
“Your ego, it seems, made it through the transition unharmed.” Natasha rolled her eyes.
Clint propped himself up on his elbows. “Face it, Tash, nobody would believe our story. And that’s okay with me. It’s better that way.”
“Sentimental.”
“Always,” Clint said, and leaned in to kiss her. Or possibly she leaned in to kiss him. She lingered in the feeling, sensing that somehow the missing piece of what made them partners had finally settled into place, while Clint kissed her slowly and almost hesitantly. His fingertips rested, so light she could barely feel them, on her knees, as if he really wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch.
She scooted closer, grabbing a handful of his shirt. And when he finally got the message, wrapping an arm around and pulling her down to him, she picked up his free hand and twisted his thumb.
He broke the kiss. “Ow! What the hell!”
“Your Russian?” Natasha met his eye. “I don’t like the ownership, Barton.”
“It wasn’t-geez, I just didn’t want to use your name. Ow. I’m going to have to southpaw it this week, Tash.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“From now on, you shall remain N. There, happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Natasha said, and let him pull her down to the mat.
* * *
If she was worried things might be weird with Clint by adding this new territory to their partnership, she quickly discovered she had nothing to fear. They knew each other’s rhythm well enough that it was almost a seamless transition. They were still friends and partners first, after all, but now there was a physical side to be explored. As a bonus, New Mexico became a lot less boring. Sure, there wasn’t much to do but to wait for Jane Foster to finish the breakthrough that seemed to come in fits and starts. She didn’t care, though she imagined there was probably a betting pool back at headquarters over which one of them would kill the other first just to get away from scientist babysitting duty. Coulson dropped by regularly to check on the progress. If he noticed a shift in the relationship, he never said.
It did, however, lead Natasha to a question she’d been dying to ask since the first time she’d picked up one of Clint’s books. “Does SHIELD know?” she asked, shifting to find a more comfortable position in the sheets. Or at least a warmer one. New Mexican nights were chilly and she might be Russian by birth, but that didn’t mean she precisely had to like freezing.
“About what?” Clint had a purple notebook this time. She’d picked it up on a trip to Los Rocas for him. He’d given the color a disdainful look, but Natasha noticed the notebook was almost full by now. It lay open on the desk in front of him.
“The books. Duh.”
“Oh. No, as far as I can tell, they don’t. I mean, Phil’s a fan.” Clint tapped the pencil eraser against the margin.
“What?”
“He wrote me-or, well, he wrote T.C. Hawke, I guess you should say-a letter, a few years back, after Rearview Mirror came out. He wanted to know something about Ken Carlton.”
Carlton was one of Clint’s recurring characters. According to his website, which was run by a few rabid Hawkeheads, Carlton was going to star in Clint’s next novel as the titular character for the first time. Natasha was looking forward to that. Carlton made her laugh.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I wrote back, and we’ve exchanged a few letters every year. He gets an advance copy.” Clint smiled when she lifted her head, alarmed. “They never include the dedications.”
“Even so, he knows,” Natasha said.
“You think?”
“You have an entire group of people that speculate about the identity of N on public forums, easily found by Google. They know she is Russian and scary. Coulson knows.”
Clint frowned. “You think he has time to run internet searches on my fans?”
“Better hope not. But if he knows, Fury knows. SHIELD knows.”
“Oh, well.” Clint flipped the notebook closed and, resting his pencil on top of it, put it on the bedside table before he slid under the covers. “If he knows, he hasn’t said anything about it. I’m not going to worry about it. Much.”
“I could distract you,” Natasha said, nudging his calf with her toe.
He winced. “God, your feet are like ice. I should probably help you out with that before you kick me with them.”
“You have the strangest ideas for sweet talk, Barton.”
“As only befits the situation, Romanoff. But I could quote Shakespeare at you, if you like.”
“Why do you assume the only great writers are English?” She tugged once at the hem of his T-shirt; he obliged her by pulling the article of clothing off.
“Because you laugh at my accent whenever I use Russian.”
“Only a little,” Natasha said, and then they were too busy to talk.
* * *
Two days before Clint’s newest book hit shelves, Natasha started awake and looked around their bedroom. She didn’t see any immediate danger, but that didn’t mean anything. She touched Clint’s arm; he woke, eyes already roving. When he looked at her questioningly, she shook her head. She wasn’t sure either.
As one, they climbed out of bed. Clint picked up his bow, she grabbed her Glock from the panel she’d built into Clint’s headboard. She took point, peering out into the hallway. The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, a feeling she had never liked. What had happened?
There was nobody in the hallway or the kitchen. Natasha and Clint exchanged another look.
When they reached the living room, the door was flung open. Natasha spun, about to fire, and cursed instead.
Thor looked at the barrel of the gun and the nocked arrow pointed at him. “Hello, friends,” he said. “It is only I. Lady Darcy assured me I had no need to knock and …oh.”
He looked down quickly, and Natasha saw something very few people in the universe had ever had the pleasure of witnessing: the God of Thunder blushing scarlet like a schoolboy. She gave Clint a confused look, and he cleared his throat.
Only then did she realize that neither of them had stopped to pull on clothes.
“Ahem,” Clint said. “Thor. Good to see you.”
“Friend Barton,” Thor said, not looking at either of them. “Lady Natasha. I feel I must apologize. I had no idea.”
“I’m just going to…” Natasha gestured helplessly toward the hallway and hurried off. When she looked in the mirror as she pulled on clothing, she was annoyed to find that Thor wasn’t the only one flushed red. She scowled at Clint, who was pulling on pants. “We can keep every visiting SHIELD agent from catching us off guard for months, but then one god walks into our living room and it’s all out there in the open?”
Clint had the look on his face that was telling her he was trying not to laugh. “Be glad it’s the one person who doesn’t own a camera phone.”
“Yes, precisely what I need, naked pictures of me all over the Internet.” Natasha rolled her shoulders. “If Thor’s back and the bridge is open, it looks like our time in New Mexico is up.”
“I’ll miss it.”
“Me, too. We’d better call Coulson, let him know the bridge is open, and one of us needs to talk to Jane about things like ‘informing the secret agents nearby that a giant vortex between worlds has been opened in a timely manner.’ I need coffee.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll leave the nudity out of the report.”
“My hero,” Natasha said, and headed out to go have the most awkward cup of coffee she’d ever shared with an Asgardian in her life.
* * *
It took two hours for orders to come down the pipeline, telling them to grab the scientists, Darcy, and Thor and get back to headquarters ASAP. As it happened, ASAP turned out to be mid-morning. Jane needed time to double-check her calculations and was understandably wary about letting SHIELD techs anywhere near them, Darcy wanted to say good-bye to the guy Natasha had heard far too many personal and nauseating details about over the past few weeks, and Selvig had to be collected from Albuquerque. Natasha used the downtime wisely; she grabbed Clint and hauled him to the Jeep.
“Where are we going?”
“We have a mission.”
“I didn’t hear anything from SHIELD. You didn’t let me grab my backup. I feel naked.”
“It’s not that kind of mission. You won’t need your bow.”
Clint gave her a measuring look. “So it’s a lame mission?”
“You’ll see.”
She pulled up to the little bookstore right after it opened. “I’m going to distract the clerk,” she said. “Under the counter, there’s a book. The clerk’s name is Daisy.”
“What? What the hell is going on?”
“Just follow my lead, Barton.”
The bell jangled overhead as she stepped in and Daisy-who had sold her T.C. Hawke’s entire collection-came over with a big grin. “We don’t have it yet,” she said. “Well, we do, but I’m not supposed to put it on the shelf until tomorrow.”
“What?” Clint asked.
“He’s not a Hawkehead, huh?” Daisy asked Natasha.
“No, I can safely say he’s not.”
Daisy sighed as though Clint had committed a cardinal sin. It was all Natasha could do not to smirk, especially because Clint was looking between the two of them as though everybody in the room with him had gone mad.
“I keep him around as arm candy,” Natasha said. “But I’m actually on my way out of town. I can’t talk you into selling me an early copy?”
“My boss would kill me.”
“Damn. Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Natasha made a big show of sighing.
It worked. “But I could show you, if you wanted to see them,” Daisy said. “They’re in a box in the back. I mean, you have to promise you won’t steal one or anything, but…oh, you should see it, there’s a new mystery dedication, it’s so neat.”
“I’d love that,” Natasha said, not having to lie at all. Coulson might have gotten an advanced copy of Clint’s latest novel, but the idiot hadn’t said a single word about giving one to her. She felt it was a little unfair. “I won’t steal anything, I promise.”
“Then come with me.” Daisy practically scrambled for the back room in her excitement to show off the newest Hawke novel. Natasha gave Clint a significant look as she followed; he split off, heading for the cash register.
There was a small box of the books, all in hardcover, all glossy and waiting for their spines to be cracked for the first time. Daisy handed her a copy with a reverent look, and it took everything Natasha had, once more, to keep her smile contained. She studied the man in a suit and shades on the cover, done in black and white with a blue gradient background behind him. The title was in silver this time, over tiny white words that declared T.C. Hawke a “New York Times Bestselling Author!”
She flipped to the back, read the synopsis. The story was both familiar and foreign, but the elements of mind control and vigilantism made her blink. Of course, she thought. This must have been the thing he’d worked on during their three months apart after the Chitauri invasion. It all made sense, that this book and this subject would be his catharsis.
“It looks so good,” Daisy said. “Carlton’s one of the best characters ever.”
“Mm, he’s fantastic, yes.” Natasha wasn’t sure if she was talking about the fictional one or the live one, who’d probably already read his advanced copy. She grinned as she flipped open the cover of A G-Man Goes to War to read the dedication. She’d be lying if she said the dedications weren’t her favorite part. It was different this time, but it still made her heart flutter.
“Any idea who P is?” Natasha asked as she handed the book back to Daisy.
“None, but it’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
Clint was waiting for her by the car, smirking. “Mission accomplished, Nat.”
“Good, now let’s get out of here before she discovers it and we actually do get caught out with a camera phone or she chases after my car like a Terminator.”
“I love it when you reference pop culture.” Clint swung into the passenger seat, all ease. Neither of them truly relaxed until they were free of Los Rocas.
* * *
They were given only two hours at headquarters for debriefing about the bridge opening before a situation erupted in Malaysia and the pair of them were kitted out and en route to save the world once again. They left Thor (who had finally stopped blushing when he looked at Natasha) and the others to Coulson and took off in the Quinjet with a team of agents, mostly newbies who had never had the honor of working with the famed Hawkeye and Black Widow.
Natasha spent the trip smirking until Clint looked up from his notebook and said, “Quit that. It’s scaring the plebes.”
“If you insist,” Natasha said.
“Bored?”
“Yes.”
Clint handed over a shopping bag. She gave her patented What have you been putting up your nose, Barton? look and opened it. The blue cover of the book inside made her laugh. “Cute.”
“I hope you like it. I hear the author signed it. Sort of.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what you writing?” Agent Wentworth, who was still so green that the Hulk might have competition, asked Clint, making both senior agents look over.
He grinned over at Natasha before he answered. “Oh, you know. Just some notes.”
Natasha rolled her eyes back at him before she flipped the book open to the dedication page. It hadn’t changed, of course. It still read “Dedicated to P (though you could have let me know you weren’t dead) and N, for being my partner.“
Clint, though, had written in more.
It simply said “Always.”
Rating: PG-13 for minor violence and some language
Fandom: The Avengers (Movieverse)
Pairings: Clint/Natasha, Thor/Jane, Darcy/OMC
Summary: In which Clint has a new hobby and Natasha isn't curious, until she is. Black Widow and Hawkeye, their partnership-and what it means-throughout the years.
Length: 12,182 words
Part 1
Three months passed while they watched Jane Foster’s theories become a whole hell of a lot less theoretical with every passing day and every machine calibrated. SHIELD, sensing that the bridge was almost completed, stopped sending them on missions. In the event that Jane was successful, they wanted at least one barrier of defense, though what Natasha and Clint could do against an entire legion of alien troops, Natasha had no idea. They were good, but neither of them was the Hulk.
She passed the time by getting her reading done. A lot of reading done.
When Clint went to the range to work with some of the new arrows, Natasha tagged along, though after a couple of rounds, she’d pick up whatever book she’d chosen that week. She read Tolstoy while Clint tested acid arrows, Bukovsky (while wearing earplugs) during the sonic arrow testing week, Pasternak during the new grappling heads testing session. After Dr. Zhivago, she started pulling in some American culture-Stephen King became a genuine favorite-but it mostly stayed Russian.
Clint rolled his eyes and told her she was going to give herself eye problems, squinting at the page like she did.
He didn’t give any sign that the feelings he wrote about in his dedications-Natasha read all seven of them-were at all present. With each passing day, the feeling of wanting him to grew just a little bit stronger. She began noticing things she’d taken for granted: the shape of his hands, for example, and the way he always glanced at her whenever he laughed like he wanted her to always share his joke. How his smile was just a little bit sleepy in the mornings whenever he asked her to go for a run with him.
Natasha read another book to spite him, chatting idly, as she did each time, about inconsistencies she found in plot and character, in story arc. She could practically hear his teeth beginning to grind together.
Clint, of course, disappeared for long stretches during the day. Before, she’d never wondered what he was up to-she valued her privacy, and his-but now she figured he had to be off somewhere, writing in one of those notebooks. Where did he keep those when he finished with them? Did he burn them? Sometimes he wrote in them in front of her, just the two of them relaxing after a day of waiting. She mulled it over while she thumbed through a Grisham work.
“Hey, Tash?”
She looked up, grateful for the interruption. Grisham was far more boring than she’d anticipated. “Yeah?”
Clint tapped his pencil against his notebook. “What’s a good synonym for mysterious?”
Natasha thought about it, even while part of her categorized that Clint was asking for her help with one of his novels, something that never happened before. Was it a challenge? A dare? Did he suspect that she knew something? He didn’t write in the notebook in front of her very often, after all.
“Enigmatic,” she said.
“Thanks.” Clint went back to whatever scene he was writing. She was dying to creep over and get a peek, but then he really would know something was up.
She waited until she knew he was thoroughly bored with waiting for something to happen with Jane’s research, and then she brought out She Took My Left Shoe. Clint came back from a run to find her at the table with a cooling mug of tea and the book open to chapter three.
“Good run?” she asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t see anything inter-” Clint broke off mid-sentence.
Natasha looked up quickly, making a show of going for her gun. “Clint? Is something wrong?”
“N-nothing.” Clint went to the sink and poured a glass of water, which he drank without pausing for breath. “Nothing at all. Good book?”
“It’s okay.” She smiled absently. “Trying out a new author. You heard of him? I thought it was funny, Hawke, Hawkeye, that sort of thing.”
“Uh, no-nope, can’t say I have. But then, I don’t read much.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah,” Clint said. He didn’t head off right away for his shower like he usually did after his run. Instead, he lurked in the doorway, eyeing her and shifting his feet.
“What’s up with you today?” Natasha asked, deliberately giving him an annoyed look.
“Nothing.” Clint vanished down the hall.
The minute she heard the shower running, Natasha allowed herself a small smile and read on. She’d read She Took My Left Shoe before, of course, but she enjoyed it. In fact, she enjoyed most of Clint’s work, which she’d surreptitiously cleaned out of the local bookstore in Los Rocas, always paying cash. The only one she hadn’t liked was Nightingale’s Charm, but then, the main character was kind of a bitch.
Clint came back in, hair dripping, when she was on chapter six. “I gotta ask, Nat,” he said, sticking his finger in his ear to get rid of some of the excess moisture, “what’s up with the reading lately?”
“I spent many years working non-stop missions for SHIELD. I have much to catch up on.”
“But don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?”
“Not particularly. Some authors are better than others.” Natasha picked up the book.
“Like that one?” Clint asked, his voice casual.
“His prose is perfectly fine. I find some of his spy-craft lacking.”
“Is that fair? Not everybody can be the perfect ex-KGB spy, Madam Black Widow.”
“Of course not. The world would be a much more dangerous place if that were true.” Natasha took a sip of tea. “I wonder if this author uses Wikipedia to search for spy terminology.”
“It doesn’t feel like a bit of a busman’s holiday, reading that?”
“I don’t know what that means.” Natasha smiled because she could practically hear Clint grinding his teeth. “Did you have something you wanted to do today?”
“I thought maybe you’d like to come to the gym and spar with me. That is, if you’re not too busy insulting hard-working authors who probably put a lot of thought into their novels.”
“Touchy, touchy,” Natasha said, but she put down the book. She followed him down to the gym in the basement. “Been awhile since we’ve sparred properly. You’re probably rusty.”
Clint gave her an annoyed look. She gave him an angelic smile in return.
“You know, I don’t understand why more authors can’t write like the Russians. They had weight, you know.”
“Yes, a bunch of fat old men.” Clint rolled his eyes. “Let’s all write like them.”
She wondered if he’d just caught his slip. Probably not.
“It can’t hurt. There’s a reason their stories persevere when so many of these, what do you call them, pop art writers? When so many of these pop art writers fade into obscurity.”
“You’d be surprised by what sticks,” Clint said between his teeth. “And I think the word you’re looking for is ‘pulp.’“
“As in, I will beat you to one? No, that doesn’t sound right.”
“Just get on the mat, Romanoff.”
Natasha ignored him and began her normal stretching regimen, propping her leg up against the wall so that she could stretch out her hamstring. “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, Barton? Cranky or not, I’ll still kick your ass.”
Clint snorted.
She liked sparring the most of all of the things they did together. He’d learned to hold his own against her, which meant she had to step up her own game in reply, and it felt good. After a couple of moments, she felt Clint relax, some of the anger fading away.
Of course, she chose to go for the jugular.
She let Clint pin her, levered herself up on her elbow and used their weight to shift them so that she held him in a leg-hold. “So,” she said, while Clint struggled. “Are you ready to tell me now or do I have to keep insulting T.C. Hawke? Because I confess, I’m running out of insults.”
Clint froze. “Tell you what?”
Natasha clenched her legs together tighter.
“Ow! Uncle, uncle, dammit, Tash-”
She released him and they rolled apart, each crouching on opposite sides of the mat, regarding the other.
“You know,” Clint said, looking pale. “How long have you known?”
“How long were you going to wait to tell me?” Natasha wasn’t sure what she was talking about, the books or the feelings. They were so intertwined in her head, all part of that confusing side of Clint that she both understood completely and didn’t understand at all, that it didn’t matter.
Clint’s jaw went firm. “I asked first.”
That was fair. She shrugged. “Three months.”
“You’ve known for three-three months?”
“Yes. Answer my question.” Natasha dared him to look away, to back down from this game of chicken they had found themselves playing. “Or were you never going to tell me at all?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather have what pieces of you in my life I can get without you knowing than you knowing and being gone because you can’t handle it.” Clint’s eyes were two bright pinpricks across the mat as he stared at her hard. There was a dare there, as well: he dared her to start running, to prove him right, Natasha realized. “That’s how this works. You make the first move here, not me.”
Her chest felt tight. “Why do I have to be the one to do all of the work?”
“Because I’ll take whatever I can get, and I think you’ve known that for years.” Clint pushed himself to his feet and turned to walk away.
Natasha glared at his back. In a heartbeat, she was on her feet, though she had no idea why, and running across the mat. She launched herself, driving both knees into his back. He went down hard, which she might find odd later because he never dropped his guard like that, not even around her. But he hit the floor, barely catching himself, and instinctively rolled, trying to take her out with a sweep of his arm. Natasha put her weight on her hands to avoid being rolled under Clint and dodged the blow. She plopped herself onto his stomach, pinning him to the floor with nothing more than a glower.
“What the hell?” he asked her.
“The conversation wasn’t over.”
He scowled. “I’ve said all I’m going to say about it.”
“Just let me figure it all out, huh? You never struck me as a coward, Clint.”
“Screw you.” Clint grabbed her hips to shove her off of him.
She grabbed his thumb and twisted, not hard enough to damage but hard enough to cause pain. She was annoyed, at him, at herself, at the fluttery feeling in her stomach she didn’t like. “Stop that.”
“Ow. Dammit, Tasha!”
“You are the most frustrating man I have ever met,” Natasha said. “And trust me, I’ve met many frustrating men, but you, you are the worst. Why did you not tell me about Hawke? Why let me think you were just writing notes for all of those years?”
“That many notes?” Clint rolled his eyes; Natasha twisted his thumb harder. “Tasha, I shoot with that hand!”
“You shoot with both hands. Tell me why.”
“You were supposed to snoop-ow, let go, will you? You were supposed to snoop and find out years ago, but you didn’t, and I thought you didn’t care, so I just…let it go.”
Natasha gave him a baffled look. “I was respecting your privacy,” she said, speaking to him as though he were a slow child. “Why would you ever think I don’t care?”
“You always snoop. You bugged Sanderson’s office when you thought he had a secret girlfriend at SHIELD.”
“Yes, but that’s Sanderson. That was for blackmail to get out of doing patrols. Sanderson is not you, Clint.” Natasha frowned at him. The fluttering hadn’t abated at all, but she let go of his hand. He let it rest on the mat, next to her knee, while she gave the matter some thought. “Let me get this straight: you wanted me to spy on you and find out you were Hawke the entire time? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Clint hit the back of his head into the mat a few times, a frustrated look on his face. “This is a mess. I wanted you to know and I didn’t want you to know because I didn’t know how you’d take it. We can forget all about it, if you want. I’ll stop writing, and we can pretend this never happened.”
“Why would you do that?” Natasha almost wanted to cuff him upside the head. She settled instead for giving him yet another puzzled look. “Your writing is wonderful.”
Clint’s eyes shot open.
“Though your fans are scary. And possibly not right in the head.”
“Wait,” Clint said, grabbing her knee in shock. “You liked the book?”
“Books. And I already said so, didn’t I?”
For a long time, so long that she grew uncomfortable, Clint stared at her, his mouth slightly open, a stunned look on his face. Finally, he broke the gaze to lean his head back against the floor. Laughter shook his torso, reverberating up through her legs. His laughter spilled out until he was beating the floor with his fists and she was smiling, despite herself. She recognized the emotion: relief. He was relieved that she liked the books. It mattered that much to him. How long had he carried that around? She wondered while she waited for him to stop laughing.
Eventually, he did, dashing at the tears of laughter in his eyes. When he looked at her now, the anger was gone, but Natasha could sense it: the next move was hers.
This was where she would croon some meaningless nothing at her mark, if this were an op. But it wasn’t an op, it was her life, and it was important.
So she regarded him, somberly. “I was angry with you when I found about your books, especially The Woman in the Crosshairs.”
“You thought it was Volgograd,” Clint said.
Natasha nodded, once.
“It wasn’t. Mostly. I made sure of that.”
“True. And the parts of it that were, they don’t bother me.” Natasha tilted her head. She’d mused over this for so long and hard that it felt strange to say the words aloud. “I like…that you did not put our story into words.”
“Trust me,” Clint said, grinning. “I’m talented, but not that talented.”
“Your ego, it seems, made it through the transition unharmed.” Natasha rolled her eyes.
Clint propped himself up on his elbows. “Face it, Tash, nobody would believe our story. And that’s okay with me. It’s better that way.”
“Sentimental.”
“Always,” Clint said, and leaned in to kiss her. Or possibly she leaned in to kiss him. She lingered in the feeling, sensing that somehow the missing piece of what made them partners had finally settled into place, while Clint kissed her slowly and almost hesitantly. His fingertips rested, so light she could barely feel them, on her knees, as if he really wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch.
She scooted closer, grabbing a handful of his shirt. And when he finally got the message, wrapping an arm around and pulling her down to him, she picked up his free hand and twisted his thumb.
He broke the kiss. “Ow! What the hell!”
“Your Russian?” Natasha met his eye. “I don’t like the ownership, Barton.”
“It wasn’t-geez, I just didn’t want to use your name. Ow. I’m going to have to southpaw it this week, Tash.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“From now on, you shall remain N. There, happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Natasha said, and let him pull her down to the mat.
* * *
If she was worried things might be weird with Clint by adding this new territory to their partnership, she quickly discovered she had nothing to fear. They knew each other’s rhythm well enough that it was almost a seamless transition. They were still friends and partners first, after all, but now there was a physical side to be explored. As a bonus, New Mexico became a lot less boring. Sure, there wasn’t much to do but to wait for Jane Foster to finish the breakthrough that seemed to come in fits and starts. She didn’t care, though she imagined there was probably a betting pool back at headquarters over which one of them would kill the other first just to get away from scientist babysitting duty. Coulson dropped by regularly to check on the progress. If he noticed a shift in the relationship, he never said.
It did, however, lead Natasha to a question she’d been dying to ask since the first time she’d picked up one of Clint’s books. “Does SHIELD know?” she asked, shifting to find a more comfortable position in the sheets. Or at least a warmer one. New Mexican nights were chilly and she might be Russian by birth, but that didn’t mean she precisely had to like freezing.
“About what?” Clint had a purple notebook this time. She’d picked it up on a trip to Los Rocas for him. He’d given the color a disdainful look, but Natasha noticed the notebook was almost full by now. It lay open on the desk in front of him.
“The books. Duh.”
“Oh. No, as far as I can tell, they don’t. I mean, Phil’s a fan.” Clint tapped the pencil eraser against the margin.
“What?”
“He wrote me-or, well, he wrote T.C. Hawke, I guess you should say-a letter, a few years back, after Rearview Mirror came out. He wanted to know something about Ken Carlton.”
Carlton was one of Clint’s recurring characters. According to his website, which was run by a few rabid Hawkeheads, Carlton was going to star in Clint’s next novel as the titular character for the first time. Natasha was looking forward to that. Carlton made her laugh.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I wrote back, and we’ve exchanged a few letters every year. He gets an advance copy.” Clint smiled when she lifted her head, alarmed. “They never include the dedications.”
“Even so, he knows,” Natasha said.
“You think?”
“You have an entire group of people that speculate about the identity of N on public forums, easily found by Google. They know she is Russian and scary. Coulson knows.”
Clint frowned. “You think he has time to run internet searches on my fans?”
“Better hope not. But if he knows, Fury knows. SHIELD knows.”
“Oh, well.” Clint flipped the notebook closed and, resting his pencil on top of it, put it on the bedside table before he slid under the covers. “If he knows, he hasn’t said anything about it. I’m not going to worry about it. Much.”
“I could distract you,” Natasha said, nudging his calf with her toe.
He winced. “God, your feet are like ice. I should probably help you out with that before you kick me with them.”
“You have the strangest ideas for sweet talk, Barton.”
“As only befits the situation, Romanoff. But I could quote Shakespeare at you, if you like.”
“Why do you assume the only great writers are English?” She tugged once at the hem of his T-shirt; he obliged her by pulling the article of clothing off.
“Because you laugh at my accent whenever I use Russian.”
“Only a little,” Natasha said, and then they were too busy to talk.
* * *
Two days before Clint’s newest book hit shelves, Natasha started awake and looked around their bedroom. She didn’t see any immediate danger, but that didn’t mean anything. She touched Clint’s arm; he woke, eyes already roving. When he looked at her questioningly, she shook her head. She wasn’t sure either.
As one, they climbed out of bed. Clint picked up his bow, she grabbed her Glock from the panel she’d built into Clint’s headboard. She took point, peering out into the hallway. The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, a feeling she had never liked. What had happened?
There was nobody in the hallway or the kitchen. Natasha and Clint exchanged another look.
When they reached the living room, the door was flung open. Natasha spun, about to fire, and cursed instead.
Thor looked at the barrel of the gun and the nocked arrow pointed at him. “Hello, friends,” he said. “It is only I. Lady Darcy assured me I had no need to knock and …oh.”
He looked down quickly, and Natasha saw something very few people in the universe had ever had the pleasure of witnessing: the God of Thunder blushing scarlet like a schoolboy. She gave Clint a confused look, and he cleared his throat.
Only then did she realize that neither of them had stopped to pull on clothes.
“Ahem,” Clint said. “Thor. Good to see you.”
“Friend Barton,” Thor said, not looking at either of them. “Lady Natasha. I feel I must apologize. I had no idea.”
“I’m just going to…” Natasha gestured helplessly toward the hallway and hurried off. When she looked in the mirror as she pulled on clothing, she was annoyed to find that Thor wasn’t the only one flushed red. She scowled at Clint, who was pulling on pants. “We can keep every visiting SHIELD agent from catching us off guard for months, but then one god walks into our living room and it’s all out there in the open?”
Clint had the look on his face that was telling her he was trying not to laugh. “Be glad it’s the one person who doesn’t own a camera phone.”
“Yes, precisely what I need, naked pictures of me all over the Internet.” Natasha rolled her shoulders. “If Thor’s back and the bridge is open, it looks like our time in New Mexico is up.”
“I’ll miss it.”
“Me, too. We’d better call Coulson, let him know the bridge is open, and one of us needs to talk to Jane about things like ‘informing the secret agents nearby that a giant vortex between worlds has been opened in a timely manner.’ I need coffee.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll leave the nudity out of the report.”
“My hero,” Natasha said, and headed out to go have the most awkward cup of coffee she’d ever shared with an Asgardian in her life.
* * *
It took two hours for orders to come down the pipeline, telling them to grab the scientists, Darcy, and Thor and get back to headquarters ASAP. As it happened, ASAP turned out to be mid-morning. Jane needed time to double-check her calculations and was understandably wary about letting SHIELD techs anywhere near them, Darcy wanted to say good-bye to the guy Natasha had heard far too many personal and nauseating details about over the past few weeks, and Selvig had to be collected from Albuquerque. Natasha used the downtime wisely; she grabbed Clint and hauled him to the Jeep.
“Where are we going?”
“We have a mission.”
“I didn’t hear anything from SHIELD. You didn’t let me grab my backup. I feel naked.”
“It’s not that kind of mission. You won’t need your bow.”
Clint gave her a measuring look. “So it’s a lame mission?”
“You’ll see.”
She pulled up to the little bookstore right after it opened. “I’m going to distract the clerk,” she said. “Under the counter, there’s a book. The clerk’s name is Daisy.”
“What? What the hell is going on?”
“Just follow my lead, Barton.”
The bell jangled overhead as she stepped in and Daisy-who had sold her T.C. Hawke’s entire collection-came over with a big grin. “We don’t have it yet,” she said. “Well, we do, but I’m not supposed to put it on the shelf until tomorrow.”
“What?” Clint asked.
“He’s not a Hawkehead, huh?” Daisy asked Natasha.
“No, I can safely say he’s not.”
Daisy sighed as though Clint had committed a cardinal sin. It was all Natasha could do not to smirk, especially because Clint was looking between the two of them as though everybody in the room with him had gone mad.
“I keep him around as arm candy,” Natasha said. “But I’m actually on my way out of town. I can’t talk you into selling me an early copy?”
“My boss would kill me.”
“Damn. Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Natasha made a big show of sighing.
It worked. “But I could show you, if you wanted to see them,” Daisy said. “They’re in a box in the back. I mean, you have to promise you won’t steal one or anything, but…oh, you should see it, there’s a new mystery dedication, it’s so neat.”
“I’d love that,” Natasha said, not having to lie at all. Coulson might have gotten an advanced copy of Clint’s latest novel, but the idiot hadn’t said a single word about giving one to her. She felt it was a little unfair. “I won’t steal anything, I promise.”
“Then come with me.” Daisy practically scrambled for the back room in her excitement to show off the newest Hawke novel. Natasha gave Clint a significant look as she followed; he split off, heading for the cash register.
There was a small box of the books, all in hardcover, all glossy and waiting for their spines to be cracked for the first time. Daisy handed her a copy with a reverent look, and it took everything Natasha had, once more, to keep her smile contained. She studied the man in a suit and shades on the cover, done in black and white with a blue gradient background behind him. The title was in silver this time, over tiny white words that declared T.C. Hawke a “New York Times Bestselling Author!”
She flipped to the back, read the synopsis. The story was both familiar and foreign, but the elements of mind control and vigilantism made her blink. Of course, she thought. This must have been the thing he’d worked on during their three months apart after the Chitauri invasion. It all made sense, that this book and this subject would be his catharsis.
“It looks so good,” Daisy said. “Carlton’s one of the best characters ever.”
“Mm, he’s fantastic, yes.” Natasha wasn’t sure if she was talking about the fictional one or the live one, who’d probably already read his advanced copy. She grinned as she flipped open the cover of A G-Man Goes to War to read the dedication. She’d be lying if she said the dedications weren’t her favorite part. It was different this time, but it still made her heart flutter.
“Any idea who P is?” Natasha asked as she handed the book back to Daisy.
“None, but it’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
Clint was waiting for her by the car, smirking. “Mission accomplished, Nat.”
“Good, now let’s get out of here before she discovers it and we actually do get caught out with a camera phone or she chases after my car like a Terminator.”
“I love it when you reference pop culture.” Clint swung into the passenger seat, all ease. Neither of them truly relaxed until they were free of Los Rocas.
* * *
They were given only two hours at headquarters for debriefing about the bridge opening before a situation erupted in Malaysia and the pair of them were kitted out and en route to save the world once again. They left Thor (who had finally stopped blushing when he looked at Natasha) and the others to Coulson and took off in the Quinjet with a team of agents, mostly newbies who had never had the honor of working with the famed Hawkeye and Black Widow.
Natasha spent the trip smirking until Clint looked up from his notebook and said, “Quit that. It’s scaring the plebes.”
“If you insist,” Natasha said.
“Bored?”
“Yes.”
Clint handed over a shopping bag. She gave her patented What have you been putting up your nose, Barton? look and opened it. The blue cover of the book inside made her laugh. “Cute.”
“I hope you like it. I hear the author signed it. Sort of.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what you writing?” Agent Wentworth, who was still so green that the Hulk might have competition, asked Clint, making both senior agents look over.
He grinned over at Natasha before he answered. “Oh, you know. Just some notes.”
Natasha rolled her eyes back at him before she flipped the book open to the dedication page. It hadn’t changed, of course. It still read “Dedicated to P (though you could have let me know you weren’t dead) and N, for being my partner.“
Clint, though, had written in more.
It simply said “Always.”