Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Somewhere in the post-adrenaline crash, Clint thinks he hears Fury conferring with Stark and making arrangements for personnel from the helicarrier to bunk out in the shell of Stark Tower, both so they can bring the reactors down for inspection and repair and so SHIELD can offer manpower to the mayor’s office to assist in getting the city back on its feet. When the fleet of SUVs pull up and the team piles in, Clint assumes that's where they're going. He's more tired than he's ever been; the only sleep he's gotten since before it all started is the two hours he was unconscious after Nat had cognitively re-calibrated him. She's right there next to him, and his brain takes that as permission to switch off so he's basically sleepwalking as he gets out of the car after the rest of the team. It takes him until they're inside to realize it's a house, not the Tower; and even then, Nat just points him toward a sweeping staircase, and he stumbles along next to her.

He makes it to the first landing without ending up flat on his face, but after that it's like he half-falls on every other step. Natasha has him around the waist, and he appreciates her determination, but she's not in such great shape herself. He braces himself to at least try to keep from taking her right back down with him, but then Rogers is behind them both, a solid presence that gets them to the top of the stairs and in front of a half-open door.

"Don't drop yet," Natasha is saying. She digs her nails into Clint’s side, jagged pinpricks of a sharper pain in the middle of the dull, throbbing ache that's the rest of his body. "Shower, Clint, come on, two more minutes to get the top layer of dirt off you." Clint wants to tell her to fuck off and leave him alone, but it's their standard process at the end of an op, instituted with good reason, in that it's kept at least a half-dozen nasty infections from getting firmly established over the years. He shuts down that line of thought as quickly as he can because it'd been Coulson who'd insisted they do it, and there's no way Clint can deal with thinking about Phil just yet.

The bathroom is something out of a magazine, with a small lake for a tub and a shower built for an orgy or three. It takes Clint long enough to get his Kevlar and boots off that the steam is like mist drifting through the marble and gilt. He has a long couple of seconds where he can only see the cloud that had kept his stolen Quinjet out of visual range of the helicarrier on the approach to attack, but then Natasha is there again, and he’s back in billionaire-land, every muscle in his body shaking and sore and his brain all but paralyzed from a lethal combination of exhaustion and grief and guilt.

“Clint,” Natasha says quietly, and he kicks himself out of that headspace. It isn’t going to help anything if he shuts down. He repeats that over and over as he drags himself into the shower and groans as the water lives up to the promise of all the steam and all but scalds his skin. His forearms and biceps are cut way the hell up from the window he’d slammed through; every little nick and scrape stings and burns under the spray, but at least none of them feel like they’ve still got glass in them. He braces his forearms against a wall and lets the water beat down on his neck and shoulders, not moving for long enough that he’s not sure he hasn’t fallen asleep.

“If you drown in there, I will make Stark build the tackiest, most maudlin memorial anyone has ever seen,” Natasha calls. “It will be so sickeningly sentimental nobody will be able to look at it without gagging.”

“Good to know you haven’t lost your deep well of compassion,” Clint manages. He’s kind of proud, to tell the truth. He had no idea his brain was functioning well enough for sarcasm, but maybe the snark really is in his DNA.

“I didn’t hunt your brainwashed ass down to lose you in the shower of Tony Stark’s city house.” Natasha hands him a towel and eyes him critically, reaching up to touch the bruise along his hairline, her gift to him. Clint stays still until she steps back. “Did Medical write you a ‘script for anything?”

“I don’t know,” Clint says, fumbling the towel around his waist and moving out of the way so she can take her turn in the shower. “Maybe?”

“Jarvis?”

“Agent Barton does have several options for--”

“Don’t need it.” Clint leans against the door and closes his eyes.

“Barton--”

“Romanoff,” Clint matches her tone. She calls his bluff and lets the silence draw out. In the end, he knows she knows he’s too fucking tired to out-stubborn her, so it only stings his pride a little to concede. “I really fucking don’t need to be fighting through drugs if... you know, my brain cracks wide open on me.” He hears her muttering and adds, “I’m good, Nat. I can barely stand. I’ll sleep.”

“Then you should probably get your ass into the bed, because I’m not much better shape. You’re spending the night where you fall.”

Clint grunts a wordless agreement but doesn’t move away from where he’s propping up the wall until the water stops. He doesn’t know what good he’d be if she were the one who went down, but, well. Partners. He figures he could at least get Stark’s AI involved, and he hasn’t forgotten the long, ranting texts from when Natalie Rushman was keeping an eye on Stark and there’d been more than one mention of the robots who kept popping up unexpectedly. Clint figures they could pitch in, if necessary.

Natasha doesn’t say anything when she sees Clint still standing there--which actually says a lot, since she’s not shy about voicing her opinion of what she sees as his stupidity--only nods to the pile of clothes on one of the sweeping marble counters, the one Clint honestly hasn’t noticed until now.

Clint expects basic SHIELD issue, sweats and a t-shirt, the cotton new and stiff, but instead the material is soft and rich. Expensive, even just going off the feel.

“All part of the standard Stark hospitality package,” Natasha says, reading Clint’s mind like usual. She pulls on her own variation on the same stack and rubs a towel over her hair. There are circles dark enough to be bruises under her eyes, and the cut on her bottom lip looks like it could use some ice, but Clint doesn’t see anything else in his automatic once-over. She’s moving slowly--which, yeah, so is he--and is favoring one leg, but Clint’s seen her function through much much worse. Of course, it’s been a hell of a long time since Clint himself was responsible for any of it--

“Bed.” Natasha shoves him out of the doorway and he lets the momentum carry him across the cool hardwoods and into the biggest bed he’s seen outside of Vegas. Natasha crawls under the layers of sheets and comforters, on the right side like always. She curls on her side to face him, and one side of her mouth curves up in the smallest of smiles when he does the same. They've slept in the same bed more times than he can remember: back-to-back when they're expecting trouble but have to rest; wrapped around each other when they're likely to freeze before the sun comes back up, whoever's hurt worst having to be the little spoon; face-to-face when they need to connect. If it’s never been more than that, Clint has long since come to terms with how very good what he has is.

“Thanks,” Clint says, his voice catching hard in his throat. He’s said it already, but he doesn’t think it’ll hurt anything if he says it again. He mostly expects her to tell him to shut up again, or at least roll her eyes at him; it's how they are, how they deal with all the shit that rightfully should bury them. He's caught flat-footed, completely off his game, when she reaches out instead, fingertips tracing his cheekbone before she fits her hands to his jaw. Clint closes his eyes and tries to focus; there's more he wants to say, more than he needs to say, because he's not talking so much about whatever she did to get him back, but more that she came after him in the first place, but he… can't.

"I knew you were there," Natasha says, her voice worn. Clint’s been on her side of the equation before, when the situation’s shot to hell and nobody has any idea of what they’re going to find when they start poking. It’s when everyone finds out if they really can walk the talk, and Clint knows how goddamn lucky he was to have the team he had. “Thanks for not proving me wrong.”

Clint turns his head enough that he can press a kiss to her palm. “I’d say ‘anytime,’” he finally manages, even if it doesn’t come out as much more than a whisper, “but I’m really fucking hoping that never happens again, so.”

“No argument there,” Natasha murmurs, and Clint’s asleep before he can even see if she’s smiling.

* * *

This isn’t Natasha’s first go-round with this situation; she isn’t surprised when she comes awake already reaching for where Clint is fighting his way out of the hold his nightmares have on him. He fights her, too, mindless and desperate and silent until he jolts himself awake. She sees recognition flicker in his eyes, but then he throws himself away from her and off the bed.

“Easy,” Natasha croons at him. “Easy, соколёнок.”

He stares at her, his pupils so large she can see them even in the small slice of light let in by the separation in the blackout curtains. She knows that terror, the utter confusion as to which set of memories are real, the hideous gut punch when you realize you can't tell. She holds herself still and composed, matching her breath to his painful gasps, and then slows her rhythm as imperceptibly as she can. To her relief--she doesn't know how much energy she has herself or whether it will be enough to take the appropriate actions--Clint's breath slows with hers.

"Nat," he finally says, his voice rough and uneven, but solid and real, and she sags back against the mattress, all but swamped with relief that he’s back with her. “I-- Fuck, this sucks.”

“It does,” Natasha agrees, still flat on her back. Clint pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his head down, and they breathe together for a bit. “Come back to bed,” she finally says. “Even if you don’t sleep, it’s better than the floor.”

“Yeah.” Clint keeps his head down for a long few seconds, but then, like the stubborn son-of-a-bitch she knows he is, he looks up and drags himself off the floor. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

He settles heavily on the mattress next to her, so unlike his usual controlled grace, but he doesn’t flinch away when she reaches for him, only sighs out as she wraps her hand around his biceps. She strokes along the curve of muscle with her thumb, a small, rhythmic path between the cuts and bruises. She thinks she’s trying to reassure herself as much as she is him. The thought bothers her less than it should.

“He wanted me to kill you,” Clint says into the darkness. Natasha hates the way he sounds, worn down and flat, none of the sarcastic humor that has seen them through so many fucked-up scenarios.

“Too bad he missed the part about how well you follow orders.” Natasha makes herself answer lightly. His arm is still tense under her hand, but he chokes out something that’s close to a laugh, and she knows she’s hit the right note. “You even gave him a personal demonstration when you didn’t take the headshot with Fury.”

“He didn’t like that,” Clint mumbles. Natasha knows he has to still be exhausted; if she can get him down just a tiny bit more, he’ll be able to sleep without the drugs. She'll think about why that’s so important to her later. “Gave me shit about missing.”

“Good thing he didn’t know you as well as we do, or he’d have done more than give you shit,” Natasha murmurs. “I think Fury’s counting it as a love tap.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” Clint slurs, asleep almost before he gets the last word out, and Natasha lets herself follow.

* * *

Clint doesn’t expect much from watching Thor disappear with Loki, but once they’re gone and light from the Cube fades, something in his chest eases up. It’s not all gone, not by a long shot, but Loki being in a different dimension makes it a little easier to breathe. The team--which has somehow become Clint’s team and he’s really not sure how that happened, except he guesses that’s what happens when you end up fighting honest-to-God aliens together--splits apart soon after, but it’s the kind of split that bodes well for reunion, easy and familiar. Stark gets Banner into his car with no hassle that Clint can see; Rogers has a sweet bike and an itinerary that doesn’t seem to include anything but seeing how far he can ride. Clint gets it. That’s always been his default, but not this time.

Natasha watches him with that particular look that says there is A Plan, but she gives in gracefully when Clint starts walking instead of getting in her car. He doesn’t have anyplace particular in mind; he just knows he’s not ready to be closed in. It’s warm but not hot, and the sun is bright enough that he’s glad he has his sunglasses. From where they are now, there’s no sign that the city had nearly been torn apart by aliens, but Clint knows that a few blocks south tells an entirely different story. It’s weird, a distorted sense of reality, like an AR filter laid over his eyes. Clint finds himself wondering if it was normal, if Londoners felt like this during the Blitz, waking up to find their neighborhood fine but knowing the bombs they’d heard dropping during the night had taken their toll elsewhere. He stops thinking about that, because the only reason he had any idea about British history died on Clint’s watch, and he still can’t think about it for more than a second without feeling like he might start screaming and never stop.

“Fury wants us gone,” Natasha says quietly, and Clint realizes he’s been standing on the sidewalk, staring down toward Grand Central and where he knows the worst of the destruction is for long enough that she’s feeling the need to check in with him.

“Gone?” Clint asks, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head and letting her see his eyes. Natasha arches an eyebrow at him, just enough to let him know the gesture is unnecessary. He answers with an equally small shrug because she might not have needed it, but he’s not sure he didn’t. “Or just off the grid?”

“He was surprisingly open to all possibilities,” Natasha says, falling into step with Clint as he turns around to back toward the car. Clint slants a disbelieving look at her, and she smiles. “It tends to happen after prolonged exposure to Stark. Anything close to your mission objective starts to sound good.”

“It’s only been, what? A couple--” Clint tries like hell to keep his voice light, but halfway through he realizes he doesn’t actually know, that there’s nothing in his head from the time when Loki had him that cared about mundane details like time or place. He swallows hard and pushes the words out. “Three? Four days?”

“Six,” Natasha says, quiet and matter-of-fact. “Four between Loki taking the Tesseract and... everything here.” She touches him on the elbow and gets them moving again. “The other two we slept through, but Stark apparently was very busy being...well, Stark.”

“Is it bad that I kinda enjoy the thought of somebody out-Fury-ing the man himself?”

“For what it’s worth,” Natasha says with one of her best arch looks, “I suppose it is good to know you still have your issues with authority figures.”

“Oh, Nat,” Clint says, not sure whether he can laugh through the sudden tightness in his chest, but willing to try just about anything for her. “You have no idea.”

“Come on, Barton.” Natasha flips the locks on the car. “Whatever we’re doing, we need to be doing it somewhere that is not here.”

Clint nods slowly, because he can’t argue with that, no matter how much he wants to, but then freezes when Natasha holds out the the keys to him. He looks at her, quick and sharp, and she shrugs. He closes his eyes for a second, because yeah, it’s not really a surprise that she knew before he did that he’s at some kind of a breaking point even if he isn’t exactly sure why. Or, well, he knows why he can’t push past not being in control, and she does, too. They both know why, and they both know it goes back way before Loki. Clint just doesn’t know why it’s this exact second, and he tries to let that show, because she’s the one person left that he can trust, and he needs her to know that’s still true.

Whatever she sees in his eyes is enough; she nods once and physically puts the keys in his hand, folding it around them, and then gets in the passenger seat.

“Thanks,” Clint says. It’s pretty inadequate, and he’s repeating himself, but it’s the best he’s got.

“Whatever you need,” Natasha replies.

Driving is good, even in Manhattan. It’s not a bow in his hand, and there’s way too much stop-and-go to really find that zone, but the car Natasha has is a beauty under its bland exterior, and Clint enjoys getting to know it. Natasha watches him tweak the settings, adjust the seat, play with the customizable read-outs on the dash, all with a satisfied smile around her eyes; Clint thinks he might get as much ease from noticing that as he does fiddling with the car itself. He’s about to say something, but then they’re coming up on the area around Stark Tower, where all the worst of the damage is, and he doesn’t feel like making conversation.

Natasha is silent, too. They don’t often revisit the places most deeply burned into their memories; Clint isn’t sure if that’s good or not, but it is what it is. He has memories of people working around them as they ate shawarma, everything hazy and blurred from the exhaustion that had been dragging him under; clearly, that get-it-done attitude hasn’t flagged, even if there’s still serious damage remaining. There are ConEd crews on every block and orange construction netting draped over everything. Most of the people out dealing with the mess are civilians, though Clint sees a couple big groups with people in suits and hardhats, like delegations from the mayor’s office out on official/PR business.

“Wait,” Natasha says. “Pull over here.”

Clint knows better than to argue with that tone of voice even if one of New York’s finest is bearing down on them, looking none too happy about them not following his master traffic plan. Natasha is out of the car almost before Clint gets stopped, waving a badge at the cop that has him shrugging and walking off. Clint follows more slowly; he can see where she’s headed, and he figures she can probably handle Stark’s girlfriend/CEO and her entourage without actual back-up from Clint.

He catches Natasha’s eye as he gets up closer, and she gives him a look that says he can join her or not. He takes her at face value, trusting that if she wanted him there, she would have made it clear, and lets himself fade into the general background. He’s not quite sure how fit for executive office contact he is right now--he’s never really good with that, even at his best, which is so not where he is at the moment. It seems better to not interfere with whatever Nat’s got working and just be a part of the regular world.

There are a half-dozen people milling around the wreckage near where he’s standing. Nobody looks to be in officially in charge, but there’s a surprising amount of work happening. They’re clearing out a small restaurant and what looks like the remnants of an electronics store. Clint watches for a few minutes, until a couple of the younger guys start trying to climb up toward where the sign for the small restaurant is hanging on by what seems to be a single bolt, and it’s plain to see they don’t really know what they’re doing.

“Hey,” Clint calls, stripping off his hoodie and tossing it on the hood of the car. “Let me do that.”

They look at him and shrug, backing off while he tests how much weight various footholds can take. There’s some shaky stuff, but the overall structure is okay. Clint’s climbed up worse and hey, at least right now, nobody’s shooting at him. He makes it up to where he can reach the bolt that’s holding up the sign and works it loose while the rest of them hold the sagging edges steady. He’s barely back on the ground when there’s a shout from a group on the other side of the street wanting to know if he can run a line up to the third floor so they can haul their equipment up from the outside and bypass where the stairs inside are shaky and unstable.

Clint glances over, but Natasha is still deep in conversation with the Stark group. Standing around and talking has never been his strong suit, so he makes sure the sign is stable and jogs across the street to see if he can do what the next group is asking for.

* * *

To Natasha’s eyes, Pepper is on edge, with the sheerest veneer of her usual competent self over something brittle and vulnerable. She’s perfectly pulled together, as always, even with a hard hat and heavy boots instead of her Louboutins, but she holds on to Natasha’s hands much longer than normal, and her voice isn’t quite composed. She introduces Natasha as Natalie, a former assistant in town with another position, which is close enough to reality that Natasha can’t help smiling. Pepper returns it, but hesitantly, as though she can’t quite process the reality of that position. Natasha doesn’t blame her in the slightest. She’s not sure she’s processed it herself, and she was the one standing on the street, back-to-back with the rest of the Avengers.

In typical form, though, Pepper is dealing with it by already being on the ground and working with municipal offices on how best to coordinate short-term clean-up and long-term rebuilding. To Natasha’s always-assessing eye, the SI team is the most organized group she’s seen so far, and she knows that the credit for that goes to the woman in front of her. Natasha gets the need to make things better, but there’s so much, and she’s not entirely sure Pepper can accept that she won’t be able to fix everything.

Natasha starts to say something along those lines, but Pepper is eyeing Natasha with the look she generally brings to bear on Tony at his most recalcitrant and clearly is not buying a second of Natasha’s no-I’m-fine-really, so it’s entirely possible that they have each other’s number and will not be put off by even the best BS. It’s been... a very long time since someone who was not Clint or Coulson has looked at Natasha that way.

Before either of them can push any further, Pepper’s group needs to move on. She scribbles a number on the back of a card for Natasha--“No electronics, and no, I know you can’t give me a number”--and is gone in a swirl of her black Burberry trench. Natasha tucks the card away carefully and then turns to find Clint. She finally locates him halfway up the front of an older office building, which really isn’t a surprise, but at least he’s wearing a harness. The building he’s climbing doesn’t look particularly stable to Natasha’s eyes, but there’s a building inspector’s certificate on one of the boarded-over windows and a group on the ground watching him climb, so she doesn’t think he’s indulging in a deathwish. Or not any more than usual, even if the facade is crumbling before he can get over it and is forcing him into alternate routes. At the very least, no one is shooting at him, Natasha thinks.

A few storefronts down from the one Clint’s scaling, there’s a rainbow striped umbrella set up in front of the shattered front window, with a couple of teenagers manning some coolers. Natasha picks her way through the shattered glass and buckled pavement and waits her turn in the small line that's formed. The kids have sandwiches in one cooler and bottled water in the other, basic but welcome; especially the sandwiches, which are oversized even by the American standards to which Natasha still hasn't quite accustomed herself.

"Everything's going to go bad pretty soon," one of the boys says. "Might as well just make 'em big and sell out before that happens."

After a second or two of deliberation, Natasha takes four. Neither she nor Clint have been enthusiastic about food since Stark dragged them out for shawarma, but if it's there in front of them force of habit will take over. She lived on protein shakes during the whole mess; she's not sure if Clint even ate while Loki had him. Selvig hadn't--in his words, the Cube had sustained him--but Natasha is hoping Clint retained enough control to get something into his system. It's not something he'll want to talk about, and she's not his therapist in any case, but if she doesn't make a big deal out of it she thinks he'll probably eat without noticing.

By the time Natasha gets everything back to the car and settles herself on the hood, Clint has gotten the line he's carrying up to a third-floor window and--idiot that he is--has decided to ignore what she can see from a block away are the shakes that come from overworking already-compromised muscles and is coming back down the front of the building. Natasha makes herself sit and watch; he'll shut down if she even says anything about it, much less if she’s right there under him as he comes down. It's also possible that she's over-reacting; she knows he's made worse climbs with far more significant injuries. Plus, there’s the harness, which means that he might be ignoring the reality of overworked muscles but he prepared for the eventuality.

Natasha breathes deliberately and picks a random sandwich, so that once Clint reaches the ground--after a bone-jarring drop of the last ten feet, the idiot, she can see his spine compress with the jolt from where she’s sitting--she’s calmly eating when he straightens up and turns slowly to look for her. Once he sees her, she picks up her phone and cycles aimlessly through messages that don’t have any relevance in this new world of aliens and demi-gods. It helps keep her from glaring at her stupid, stupid partner as he walks up to her, peeling completely inadequate climbing gloves off his hands and surreptitiously scrubbing his palms against his jeans to clean away the blood from the split blisters.

“Eat,” Natasha says, pushing the bag of sandwiches toward him. In lieu of preemptively yelling at him for not taking care of himself, she bites somewhat savagely into her own pastrami-on-rye. He notices, of course, but takes the hint and doesn’t argue with her. The pastrami is excellent, far too good for the methodical, mechanical way they’re both eating, but they are eating, and Natasha is going to be satisfied with that for the moment.

“Thanks,” Clint mumbles as he shoves the last third of the sandwich in his mouth and reaches for a bottle of water. He downs it in three long swallows and reaches for another. Natasha adds ‘dehydration’ to her list of things to watch out for. They’d had him on IV saline in Medical, but not for long enough. He downs the second bottle at a more normal pace and then starts in on the next sandwich. Natasha manages not to smile approvingly at him, because that’ll only make him conscious of just how closely she’s watching him, but she does smile internally.

For sitting on the hood of a car in the middle of a bombed out street, it’s a surprisingly peaceful break. Clint ends up leaning back against the windshield and stretching his legs out; Natasha is tempted to lie back flat on the hood, but it’s probably better if one of them stays on alert, and Clint’s got his eyes closed.

“I know we’re supposed to be getting gone,” he says, “but...”

“You want to stay,” Natasha says.

“Yeah.” Clint doesn’t open his eyes, but Natasha knows she’s under scrutiny. “It felt good to help.”

“You’ve already helped,” she points out. “We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.”

“I can do more,” he says. His jaw is set, and Natasha doesn’t have the energy to fight him. If she’s being honest, she doesn’t really have the inclination either. They can go to ground here in the city almost as effectively as they can anywhere else.

“Fine.” She gives in to temptation and lies back, the sun warm on her face. “But we are not staying in that hellhole you call an apartment.”

“You don’t have to stay with--”

“Yes,” Natasha says, not bothering to look at him. Where does the idiot think she’d go? “I do.”