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Tasha peeled the roof of the convertible back near Arlington, in the middle of a rainstorm; Clint didn’t stop her. They ate at a diner in Raleigh and the car seats filled with rainwater and wilted magnolia petals and other crap dropped from the trees. Clint didn’t much care for having a wet ass all day, but Tasha seemed happy, so he didn’t complain. She didn’t try to climb in bed with him in the hotel that night, and that was weird; they always had before. Well, before Phil. But they also never talked about the things they did, so he let her crash on the floor between him and the door without objection, at least until he woke up around two A.M. and it was just too weird, he couldn’t handle having Phil dead and Tasha acting like a St. Bernard instead of acting like Tasha. So he got out of bed and stamped over to her, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her roughly to her feet, said, “Come on, we’re going to bed,” and threw her into the sheets ahead of him, flipping her over by the hips and jamming it in half-hard; she groaned in ready, sleep-roughened enthusiasm and came too fast for him. He pumped away, fingers digging into creamy soft hip-skin, and it was by far the worst sex he’d ever had with Tasha, and possibly the worst sex he’d ever had in his life, but he managed to finish, a miserable victory in a week full of them. Afterwards, Tasha had the decency not to highlight his mistake by returning to the floor; she slept on the edge of the bed, not making a big point of not touching him but not touching him all the same. Good old Tasha. She always had known how to act.
They didn’t talk to each other the whole drive down, not making a big point of it but not talking all the same, until they finally got to Key West and something in Clint gave way. They were sitting in a bar, bathed in orange light, and the television showed a fight between soccer hooligans, and Clint laughed, he guffawed really, and so did Natasha, and then they were both laughing, and then he was crying on the bar and she had him in her arms and was rocking him like a child, and that was the end of the standoff. They slept in the same bed that night, like old times, Clint naked and Natasha wearing his underwear, heads at the putative foot of the bed and weapons at hand, hugging tight as siblings in an orphanage: Tasha liked to tease Clint that the only way she could tell which limbs were hers was because he was so damn hairy. “I’m not really that hairy, you shoulda seen Phil,” he said before thinking, and God bless her, Tasha just grinned and said, “Oh yeah? Was he really hairy?” and then they were talking about Phil, the soft golden fuzz that covered his arms and his legs and his belly, and it was weird but okay, and when he cried, the tears and laughter were all commingled and kind of snotty, but Tasha didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t have sex, not that night or any other; it wasn’t till the end of the summer, when they came back and moved into Avengers Tower, that Clint even thought about fucking her, and that was just because he thought he’d seen something in Stark’s gaze and wanted everyone to know that Tasha was his. Thankfully, she picked up on his adolescent fit of jealousy and took preemptive action, grabbing Clint by the collar after movie night in the living room and tugging him off to bed, making sure everyone saw her do it. Clint knew he wasn’t imagining the envious looks that time; Banner nearly hulked out trying not to stare. Once inside his room, Clint moved to kiss her, but she stopped him with a hand across his lips. “No,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend with me.”
Clint thought. Around her firm fingers he mumbled a lie: “Pretty sure it wouldn’t be pretending.” He let his eyes flare a promise at her, popped her fingers in his mouth and sucked, let his hands drift downward, tried to be game. If Tasha needed sex, then sex Clint Barton would provide, and Clint Barton didn’t do anything halfway. It was a point of honor.
Natasha was having none of it. She yanked her fingers from his mouth, relocated his hands further north to her waist and pushed him up against the door, getting right up in his face. He was so surprised he almost laughed, but then he saw the murderous look in her eyes.
“Now you listen here to me, Clinton Francis Barton. If you think we are going to have some sort of pitiful sadass consolation fuck after the way Phil loved you, if you think I’m going to dishonor that good, good man, then you have another think coming. I let you fuck me that night in the hotel room because it was late and I was tired, Clint, I was nearly fucking ASLEEP, and I was in mourning, did it ever occur to you that I was sad too? I didn’t think so, but the point is I was tired, Clint, so goddamn tired, and I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I made a mistake.” And now Tasha’s lips were shaking, and that undid him. He went sliding down the door, knees wobbly. He blubbered out something about rape, I didn’t mean too, Tasha, were you really asleep, I didn’t mean to, and she pulled him into her arms and, while he sobbed, said no, baby, no, you didn’t rape me, you would never, you’re not like that, I didn’t mean it like that baby.
“I can’t lose you, Tasha. You’re my only friend. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
“No, baby, no. Shhh. You’re my only friend. too. What would I do without you?” And she kissed his head, right at the crown, through his hair. The way his mother had, before she died.
“Now, you listen to me, Clint Barton,” she said, and her voice wavered but it was strong, it was the only real thing left, and he wrapped his arms around her just as tight as they would go. “You are my brother, and my sister and my father and my friend and my love, forever and ever. We are each other’s family. We just can’t fuck any more, baby. It’s too much, after Phil, and it feels like a lie and it does bad things to my head and to yours too. We can’t be that to each other any more.”
He nodded in mute, wrecked agreement, and snugged his hold on her even more. They held each other, freezing on the floor in their leathers and jeans (why did Tony keep the whole Tower at sixty-two degrees? Did Thor really need it that goddamn cold to sleep?), until Natasha shifted and cleared her throat.
“Uhh, Barton?”
“Yes, Tasha?”
“Have we had enough cry time?”
Clint giggled, wet and choked. “Yeah, I’d say so.”
“Then take off your pants and get in bed. I’m exhausted and you give good cuddle.”
He nearly came apart with the relief of it. He would have done anything for her at that point, anything; he went on his knees and buried his face in her warm belly, murmuring all the family words she’d taught him in Russian: Mother. Sister. Friend. Little darling. And, for the first time since all of this had happened, he felt Natasha’s tears, splashing on top of his head as she held him.
In the morning, when he woke up, she was gone. It was okay. They’d gotten a bit over-emotional, even for them, and she was getting prickly and restless. She wouldn’t have to go far to get relief; in fact, she wouldn’t even need to leave the building. He paused to listen to the sound of wet flesh hitting flesh in the boxing ring; he didn’t strictly need to know, but all the same he peeked around the edge of the doorframe and verified that indeed, it was Stark. Good old Tasha. She always did pick the very best tool for a job. She and Tony’d dance around each other for a while, and then it’d be over and Pepper would never need to know, they’d both make sure of that. And if Tasha had asked Clint to play dumb, he would have, he would have let Stark have this one up on him, but she didn’t. In fact, Stark came to him the very same day, which surprised Clint. He’d never figured Tony for having the integrity. Or the balls.
“So, Natasha came to see me in the gym this morning,” Stark said, a wariness in his eyes that told Clint he was worried about getting hit.
“Yeah?” said Clint, giving nothing away. No reason not to let Stark be a little afraid.
“Uh, yeah. So she seems, um, interested. Um. And I don’t want to, er, tread on your territory, and I want to make sure I’m reading the signs right, because I find her very hard to read sometimes? And it could just be a cultural barrier? And I know I put off these vibes, they’re like, reflexive or projective or something, I’m a clinical narcissist, I know it’s very difficult to tell but I’m told--”
Clint let out a bark of laughter. He couldn’t help it, he kind of liked this guy. “Lemme ask you something. Did Natasha hit you hard?”
Tony’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? I’ll be pissing blood for a week, that girl doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘no hits below the belt’—”
Clint reach out, clapped him on the shoulder. “Then she’s interested. Go get her, man.” And sauntered off. He didn’t find he much minded the idea of Tasha and Stark any more. When the second most incredible person you’ve ever met in your life tells you that you’re their father and their mother, their sister and their brother, their one and only friend and love, forever and ever—well, shit, you don’t have to be their insurance agent and their friendly neighborhood postal employee, too. So to speak. He felt good as he jogged down towards the lower levels of Avengers Tower—so good, in fact, that he decided to visit the doctor.
Banner looked surprised by Clint’s knock. “Come on in,” he said, the words muffled by the windows, and Clint fiddled awkwardly with the keypad, which didn’t seem to work like any of the other pads in the Tower. Banner seemed embarrassed; he took off his glasses and moved towards the door, mouthing his words clearly so as to be heard through the thick glass. “You have to specify whether you want entry or lockdown.”
“Hey, Doc,” Clint said on his way in. “What’s up with your keypad?”
“Hello, Agent Barton,” said Banner, tucking the stem of his glasses into his shirt collar. “It’s a precaution. Your code overrides my settings.”
“Ohhhh, right,” Clint said, the penny spinning an unusually long time before the drop. “In case the other guy comes out.”
Banner smiled painfully. “Precisely.”
“Well, Doc, not to worry. I come prepared.” Clint undid one of his many Velcro’d pockets, and pulled out a small plastic baggie. “Swedish fish?”
Banner laughed, his whole body relaxing. “Sure. How’d you know I liked them?”
“Simple,” said Clint. “Of all the geniuses in this building, you’re the only one went to U-Penn.”
Banner blinked, selected a Swedish fish, rotated it and carefully bit off the tail. “OK. But how did you know about that, the local thing for Swedish fish? You’re not from Pennsylvania.”
“I grew up in the circus, dude. We traveled a lot. So what’s shaking down here?”
“Not a lot. I’m looking at some soil samples Fury sent over from Alamagordo. Unusually high levels of gamma radiation, and as it turns out I’m one of the world’s leading experts on that.”
“Is that so. Figured out what caused the contamination?” Clint sauntered over to the microscope, took a gander. Yup. Soil.
“Not really,” said Banner. “It could actually be from any number of sources, I’m just trying to determine how long it’s been there.”
“This got something to do with half-lives?”
Banner’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “Yes, it does. I’m impressed, Agent Barton.”
Clint barked a laugh. “Yeah. I watched a documentary on Chernobyl once when I was fourteen. I’m a real expert.”
“Still, a lot of SHIELD agents wouldn’t remember a documentary they saw when they were fourteen, much less go on to connect the abstract knowledge to a concrete problem. That’s good recall.”
Clint said nothing. At fourteen, the news that there were some kinds of contamination that could take hundreds of years to dissipate had not been a surprise.
1996, Florida Panhandle, Leon County Fairgrounds.
Clint lays on his belly, high up in the auxiliary canvas trailer. He’s climbed the folded stacks of old, decaying tent rolls and shoved one of the bundles of struts aside, shimmying his skinnyass self into the dark, hot slot on top of the tents. It’s sweltering up here, and the back of his skull is pressed right up against the goddamn ceiling, but no one ever comes in after the primary tents are pitched, and he can feel the Coors he stashed up here yesterday with his boot. Now, if he can just manage to snake his arm down past his ankle and grab it, he’ll be all set. Maybe he’ll just catch his breath a little before he tried it. He pants like a dog, mouth open and eyebrows constantly shifting as he watches the entrance of the trailer, wary for any trace of EJ Sr., who was bad news, really bad news, and Clint had only realized how bad when he got close enough to EJ Jr. to let his guard down a little, and then EJ Sr. had found out what he liked to do with dudes, and now it was just a fucking disaster. Lesson number one: if you’re going to practice jerking off with someone, make sure your buddy isn’t just looking for some fresh meat to throw in the path of his genuinely terrifying father, who actually likes to do scary sex stuff with kids and thinks it’s, like, romantic. Barf. No wonder EJ’s all fucked up in the head. Clint’s not a faggot, he’s sure of it. He just likes to jerk off with dudes. They don’t, like, talk about it. Even Clint knows that it’s the emotions, not the sex, that makes you a faggot. Men can jerk off together and it doesn’t mean anything. Faggots cry and hug and buy valentines and stuff for each other. He’s seen faggots walking together, holding hands, getting beat up in the dark dangerous spaces behind the trailers. Those places, the places beyond the lights, are where bad shit always happens, and now Clint’s gonna have to watch his back in the corners for months, or at least until fucking EJ finds someone else to distract his old man with. Fucking EJ. Clint’s asshole still hurts like a motherfucker, and his nose is still full of the scent of stale cigarette smoke, and the smell is making him sick, and he hasn’t had anything to eat in over ten hours and EJ Sr. got the jump on him less than two ago, and he needs that beer goddamnit. Wriggling slowly, scraping his shoulderblades against the aluminum rafters, ignoring the twinges coming from his lower regions, he gets his hand all the way down past his ankle and wrapped around the can; he pulls it back up his body and pops it open and swigs it down, hot and foamy, all without taking his eyes off the crack of light that’s seeping under the door. That light is the only thing between him and being caught by surprise, and Clint is never gonna get caught by surprise again.
But he is, again, and again. By the time he turns eighteen, Clint is strung tighter than one of his bows and never ever sleeps through the night, and when he does fall asleep—always jammed up in a high and swaying place no adult would dare climb—it is shallow and sweaty, the kind of sleep that you get in a war zone. He is malnourished and short and he fights nearly every night, with anyone who will take him on. He gets arrested twice for assault, and on the second arrest he does time, and it’s in the Wyoming juvenile prison system that he gets regularly fed for the first time in eleven years, and the sudden uptick in nutrition (in combination with his continued fighting) turns him into something bulky and intimidating, more than just a convenient victim. When he is finally released, he is nineteen years old and can drink, play poker, and shoot an arrow while hanging upside down from a trapeze, and that is his entire skill set. He does not know his own Social Security number. (Years later, he and Tony Stark will have a moment over this, and it will be one of the most surreal of Clint’s exceedingly surreal life.) He cannot spell, has poor math abilities, and isn’t quite illiterate, but is certainly some variety of sub-literate. He thinks he knows his basic legal rights (he is mistaken). The few teachers who have briefly detained him in their classrooms think he has a learning disability (they are mistaken). He hates men, hates and fears them, and has no use for women whatsoever. He has no friends, no family, a bow named Baby and two hundred and eighty-seven dollars to his name. He has never been kissed.
When he meets Natasha, he has been pulling small-time bank jobs with a crew in Queens for a few months; because he is young and ignorant, he has no idea that the only reason he is not already in a federal prison is because said feds are so damn amused by a bank robber who uses a bow and arrow that they are kind of waiting to see what he does next. What he does next is rob the wrong bank at the wrong time, a bank that happens to have a Black Widow inside it. His crew blows the door on the vault just as Natasha, who has broken in for shits and giggles and a hard drive containing the password to—well, basically the password to Holland—is preparing to depart said vault through the ceiling hole she came in from. Unfortunately, his crew is bad with dynamite, and the ones who aren’t blown to pieces by the initial explosion die pretty quickly afterwards in considerably more distress. (Natasha hates being startled.) Clint, however, isn’t aware of any of this; the blast concusses him so badly that he can’t even stand up; three ribs are broken and his ears are so far past ringing they’re beeping in harmony. His vision is going out, and this wouldn’t be so bad except it’s alternating—one eye keeps going out just as the other is coming back in. He struggles and tries to stand, wobbling on his feet and drawing his bow without realizing he’s actually aiming squarely at his left foot, and through the vertigo and the smoke he sees Natasha coming towards him with a look that most people usually don’t get to see for more than about two seconds, and he’s so hazy that all he sees is: hey, red. Pretty. Tasha tells him later that what saved his life is this: in the split second that she approached him, trying to decide whether to go for his windpipe or his balls, he didn’t look afraid. Instead, he met her with a smile, and he tried to say hello, and then he shot himself in the foot, pitched forward and fell unconscious at her feet.
When an alphabet soup of government agencies collectively raid the place about eight minutes later, finding nothing but bodies and rubble, there is one agent who notices that Clint Barton is not among the dead, and smiles. Or rather, on him it’s a smile. On anyone else it might constitute a twitch.
When Clint wakes up about three hours later, he’s tied to an armchair in a small, shabbily furnished apartment somewhere near a train track; he can tell because the whole building is shaking. His left foot is bandaged tightly and propped in a bowl of ice, and his socks and shoes are sitting in the far corner, along with his jacket, his quiver, and Baby. He is still bleary, but this one is just too easy.
“Hey, nobody puts Baby in a corner,” he slurs, grinning at the red-headed woman who squats on a chair in the middle of the room, watching him. She has apparently been trying to puzzle him out for some time: her fingers are tented in front of her lips and her head is tilted at a quizzical angle. The reference is apparently lost on her. He decides to try another angle, and gets as far as “Hey, I’m Clint, what’s your n—” before she is up and across the room, an exposed hypodermic in her hand. The needle is jabbed deep into his neck muscles, and he’s down for another three hours.
This goes on for some time. Every time Clint is roused to consciousness, he cheerfully greets Tasha, and every time she puts him down within about fifteen seconds. As the day wears on, her face darkens in increasing frustration and perplexity; she seems to be waiting for something that’s not happening. Clint, for his part, is fine—he’s higher than he’s ever been in his life, and every time he opens his eyes there’s a pretty redhead in front of him, and he can’t remember who she is or why his neck stings, but man is he well-rested. He hasn’t had this much sleep in ever.
After the fifth time, Tasha is out of tranquilizers and ideas. She tells herself that this time, when he wakes up—if he wakes up, she’s never hit someone with this much tranquilizer before and she’s not sure what constitutes a fatal dose for a concussed teenager—she will kill him. Problem is, he hasn’t pissed her off enough. She’s been waiting for him to snap, to yell at her, to call her a bitch and struggle against the chair he’s tied to. If he did any of that, she’d have no problem settling down nice and easy with her thighs around his neck, bracing her thumbs in his ear canals, and, well, pop. It’s nothing she hasn’t done a dozen times before, and yet—every time this fucking kid wakes up, he smiles at her, and tries to tell her his name, and would all but shake hands if he weren’t tied down, which incidentally he doesn’t even seem to have noticed. She is frustrated and confused, and has been taking it out on him, jabbing the needle in with greater ferocity each time, trying to get just one growl out of him, just one muttered curse, something she can hook her anger on. He won’t give it to her, and she is becoming upset in a way she rarely does, shivering as the adrenaline runs off of her like ice water. He looks warm, a little sweaty even, and as he sleeps she notices flakes of blue gel in his hair. Hair gel. He’s just a kid. What was he doing in the middle of a bank robbery with a goddamn bow and arrow?
“Are you retarded?” she asks when he wakes up the fifth time, and it’s this question, not the jabbing-with-needles or the being-tied-to-a-chair or the not-knowing-where-he-is, that gets the first grimace out of him. He covers quickly. “No.” He shifts and reconsiders. “Maybe. Probably.” He meets her eyes, his chin defiant; his gaze holds a whole lot of So What and Fuck You.
She smiles. He’s just an angry, undereducated kid. No shortage of them, though granted, she hasn’t met many in the upper echelons of the international-mercenary-espionage scene. Her next question is gentle. “Are you hungry?”
He shifts and frowns off into the corner. Okay, fair enough. She gets up gently, brushes off her hands, and unties him. “Well, I’m hungry. Shall we order food?” He stands up, and she watches for sudden movement—one twitch towards that bow and he’s dead. But he follows her into the kitchen, left foot dragging, wary as an injured cat. She fetches a battered Yellow Pages from atop the fridge and opens it to Delivery, flicking away a desiccated mouse turd from between the pages. “Chinese, Indian, pizza?” she asks.
He shrugs, which on him is a gesture faster than a blink, a clenching, full-bodied flinch. She picks up the phone and calls Fat’s for sweet-and-sour pork and potstickers, Lotus River for samosas and tandoori chicken, and then Union Street Pies for one large with everything, plus two liters of Coke. She hangs up. He is looking at her with something approaching real fear.
She nudges a chair out with one foot. “Sit.”
He sits. They wait in total silence, Natasha trying not to glare and Clint trying not to throw up, for over fifteen minutes. When the doorbell rings, they both jump almost out of their skins.
Three delivery boys are standing in the hallway, looking at each other warily. Natasha pays in cash and closes the door with her foot, spreads the food out on the table, and is nearly ready to dig into her tandoori chicken when she realizes he hasn’t moved a muscle. “You eating?” she says, and he looks miserable.
“I can’t pay you back,” he mumbles.
She swallows, a whole new swath of his psychology coming into nauseating focus. She hasn’t been hungry, poor, or proud for a while now, but you don’t forget it. She points at him with chopsticks. “Kid. You think I’m going to eat all this by myself? It’s on the house. But if it’s like a point of honor, you can pay me later in trade.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you’ll help me out with something, using a trade or a craft that only you can do. Maybe you’ll show me what you can do with that bow and arrow. Besides shoot yourself in the foot, I mean.”
That gets a tiny smile, but he’s still not eating. “No, I know what being paid in trade means. I meant the other thing you said. What’s appointive honor?”
Oh. “A point of honor. It’s a saying, it means, hmm. How do I say this. If something is really important to you, personally, and you take it as a serious morally important rule for you to follow? Not because anyone else is looking, but because you believe in some kind of a code? Then it’s a point of honor. Like for instance me. I have a point of honor about skinny kids I find shooting themselves in the feet in the middle of bank robberies. I don’t leave them to get arrested when they get themselves in real trouble. Not for them. For me. Because I don’t want to be the kind of person who does that.” She leaves the not any more unsaid, and it seems to be good enough for him, because after holding her gaze for another moment, he gives her a jerky kind of nod, and the tension in the room evaporates as his stomach gives just a tremendous growl. She smiles, shakes loose a paper napkin from the top of the stack, passes it to him. “Go on, eat up. I’ll bet you anything you can’t eat as many samosas as me.”
He grabs a plastic-wrapped fork and bangs it once or twice on the table to break through the wrapper. “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t bet me,” he tells her, craning over the food to survey the choices.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Now, what’s a samosa?”
And that’s the way it goes on, for days at first, then weeks, and soon it’s been a year of takeout and teasing and learning about and from each other. Clint is serious about pulling his weight in any way he can, Natasha learns that pretty quickly when he pushes back from their first meal together and he says, “Well, shall we go up on the roof?” and for a second she thinks—well, she doesn’t know what she thinks, and he catches the look in her eyes and clarifies: “So I can teach you about archery. I figure we can rig up a target up there and no one’ll bother us.”
She laughs dismissively. “Let it rest for a while. If I get any fuller I might fall through the roof,” but he keeps after it, reminds her after two hours and again after three days, won’t let her rest about it until she agrees to go up on the damn roof and lets him rig up a paper target on an air duct. She stands back, smirking a little bit, ready to let the kid show her whatever Soldier-of-Fortune shit he thinks makes him so special, and he wipes the smirk right off her face. She makes him do it again, just to make sure she isn’t seeing things, and then she makes him do it again just because it’s so damn cool. They stay up there until the evening light turns from orange to purple, and he shoots behind his back and over his head and left-handed and right-handed and then, because he is apparently serious about teaching her to do what he does (though she’s honestly not sure anyone can do what he does), he shows her how to string and unstring a bow, and gives her some beginning instruction on grip and finger positioning. When it gets too dark to see, they stay up on the roof talking aiming and theory, and as the night turns everything orange and black, the conversation shifts to targets. Natasha’s still not sure about the practical applications of archery in close quarters, but she’s seen enough to know that with this kid on her side, she won’t have to be in close quarters anywhere near as often. Besides, she likes him. He triggers something unfamiliar in her, something not-quite-maternal but close, and the feeling gets her spooked enough that she kisses him, hard and dirty, just to put the relationship back into an arena where her authority will be absolute, and as he surges into her and cries her name into the black rain-sparkled night, she’s only a little sorry that it works.
Their partnership takes time to get ironed out, as these things do, especially when one partner is younger and less experienced; the first couple of jobs Natasha takes Clint along on are fucking disasters, rife with miscommunication and missed opportunities, and their partnership nearly disintegrates before they hit upon the tactic of first having angry sex to burn off the frustration and then talking through the job’s mistakes, calmly and rationally. More than a few cheap motel room desks and coffee tables shatter under the brunt of their bodies’ impact, and their sex is like a prison riot only with more punching, but their partnership survives, and it is in those post-coital debriefings, lying on their bellies in the bed, sketching out their positions in finger-drawn lines on the sheets, talking over what went well and what could have gone better, that they start to become genuinely intimate. Clint reaches out with a finger to trace a scar near Natasha’s hairline, and she asks after the massive purpling black eye she hauled off and gave him, both-handed, about forty minutes prior. Clint kicks sheets off and Natasha rolls in them. Clint brings water to bed and Natasha brings vodka. Clint asks how you say “pussy” in Russian and Natasha almost falls out of bed laughing at his pronunciation, but his sweet white brow wrinkles and he keeps trying to get it right, and slowly their sex becomes honeyed with dirty Russian words and carnal endearments, not all of which she tells him the meaning of, so he doesn’t know that what’s making her sob with pleasure as he stretches her is not actually a compliment to her tightness or her wetness or her heat, but is actually the phrase “little darling”. (Natasha never tells him that one, and so he never tells her when, years later, he found a phone app that translated it for him. It doesn’t make a difference, anyway. If Natasha wanted to be someone’s little darling, he’s glad it got to be him.)
When SHIELD finally tracks them down, about four years into their partnership, they don’t have much time to agree on a game plan. Clint thinks SHIELD will try to recruit him but will write Natasha off as hopelessly compromised, a theory proven correct when they first recruit him (on threat of imprisonment), then turn around and send him to kill her (on threat of, Clint doesn’t know, detention or the naughty chair or something). They act out her surrender like it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing, and thankfully Clint’s new handler Coulson goes along with it, because if he hadn’t Clint would have had to turn around and do a whole lot of killing to get him and Tasha out of there alive, and Coulson was already on the very short list of people Clint would have minded killing. (Later, Fury told Coulson, and by proxy Clint and Natasha, that SHIELD’s intent was always to recruit, rather than kill, Black Widow, which was why Clint was sent after her in the first place—his healthy disrespect for authority and past history with Romanov all but guaranteed he would disobey a kill order. “Besides,” Fury had said, “If you can think of anyone else who could get within a mile of the Black Widow without getting his nuts removed through his eye sockets, I want to hire that motherfucker and fire Barton, because I know he crawls around in my ventilation system.”)
But they were in, and that was all that mattered. A roof over their head, a warm bed at night, food, health care, steady paychecks. It made them both extremely nervous.
“So when we have to run, how much do you think we can run with?” Clint would ask Natasha, pulling aside her headphones on the shooting range to murmur into her ear, his hands at her waist. They’d taken a page from the book of Angelina and Billy Bob; by being ostentatiously, unnervingly sexual with each other in public, they spread unease amongst the baby agents, which was good for their reputations. They were starting to get nicknames, mythology, an invisible force field of glamorous rumor—all promising signs. But what the baby agents didn’t know, and couldn’t tell, was that the more obscene Clint and Natasha’s interplay grew in public (bouts of mixed-martial in the gym that ended with long, sloppy tongue-kisses all over every exposed patch of skin; Natasha sitting on Clint’s lap in briefings; the two of them hand-feeding each other in the SHIELD cafeteria), the less sexual their behind-closed-doors relationship was becoming. Simply put, Tasha and Clint were falling in love, not as a man and a woman, but as a boy and a girl. Their private quarters told the tale: filled to the brim with cheap plastic toys, action figures, Legos, bright plastic blowguns that shot pellets of goo and discs of candy, it was a haven away from a world full of risk and loss.
“Look out,” Clint would say, balancing a naked GI Joe on top of a purple My Little Pony and balancing himself atop the bed so he could fly the duo up to the ceiling: “My boss unicorn queen has rescued her wounded bodyguard and prepares to seek bloody vengeance on your Barbie Palace of Lies and Deceit.”
“Whatever, cupcake,” Natasha would reply from the floor, not batting an eye as she racked a marshmallow gun and placed it carefully on the shoulder of a Holiday Celebration Kira in the manner of a rocket launcher. “My imperial palace guard is ready and loaded for bear.”
They were discovering childhood, these two adults who’d not had one between them; nestled in the covers, locked away from the world, they wrestled each other like lion cubs for food, for toys, for the remote control. When one would pin the other, the standard way to acknowledge the victory was a slobbery, phlegm-coated lick down the side of the face, culminating with a wriggling tongue stuck into the ear; the shrieks and howls of disgust and delight that made it through the door were mistaken for sex-noises by everyone who passed by the door—well, everyone save one agent, now a handler, who always noticed and smiled. Rather, on him it constituted a smile. On anyone else it might have been mistaken for a twitch.
They became closer, which was a bit counterintuitive, given that they now had sex with about the same frequency as El Niño. Instead, their physical intimacy had alchemized into a strange, predictive bond, a mind-meld that allowed them to fight in proximity to each other with an uncanny foreknowledge of the other’s actions, covering each other in effortless, impossible-looking ways. Natasha could now swing herself up and over the body of an attacker and hoist him on her back for Clint’s easy arrow into the center mass, then turn around and skewer a second bad guy on the feathered end of the first bad guy’s arrow, effectively shish-kabobing them with only one projectile. (Coulson approved of this move, calling it “cost-saving”, which, coming from Coulson, was the equivalent of a big clap on the back and a round of beers.) They worked so well together in the field that Fury overlooked the fraternization rules completely and formalized their partnership, assigning Coulson as their shared handler and not even bothering to assign Clint and Natasha separate quarters, because what would be the point. It wasn’t like they’d be discreet even if they were ordered to; Agents Barton and Romanov’s usual way of celebrating a successful mission was to crash into each other full-tilt and start publicly making out like lovers reunited after the Bataan Death March or something. It was awkward and weird and the first eight or nine times it happened everybody, including the paramedics, stopped to watch as Barton picked Romanov up and carried her off, his hands gripping her ass and her hands in his hair, kissing like they’d just invented sex and feelings. Coulson usually yelled at people to get back to work, but it was kind of half-hearted; whenever Hawkeye and Black Window left the scene, they took some visceral charge with them, and the people left over to clean up the rubble and stabilize the wounded and write the reports did so with a projector running in their minds of Jesus what Romanov must be doing to Barton right now and I bet he doesn’t even pull her underwear all the way down and Please God, let me have sex that intense just once before I die. Little did they know that behind closed doors, a very different scene than the one they were envisioning was playing out: kisses became nuzzling caresses; hands that had groped now checked for hidden injuries, and the two orphans pulled each other into an embrace no less desperate for being sexless, a tangling of hedgehog-y hair and soft pressed skin under the covers, a secret tented world of whispered secrets. Under the covers was where Clint first built up the courage to say the word “rape” as applied to himself, and where Natasha held him as he shook with the runoff of fear and adrenaline for hours afterwards. Deep in their nest of blankets, Natasha became Nat and then Tasha, just as Barton became Clint and then Hey You, a phrase coined by Tasha after a particularly frightening extraction. “Hey you,” he whispered back, his tears coming freely now. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“You’ll never lose me. Where you go, I go.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
These were their only vows, and they took them seriously. So when, a few years into their partnership, Natasha informed Clint (not the other way around) that he was falling for their handler, he didn’t take it well. Not well at all. They had sex for the first time in over a year that afternoon—by this point in their relationship, sex almost always signaled a problem they were trying to avoid, which was definitely the case on the afternoon of the angry Clint-tries-to-prove-he’s-not-attracted-to-Phil sex. That sex broke two panels of their closet and cleared an entire wing of SHIELD personnel quarters, because no one wanted to be around when either Clint or Natasha emerged, presumably dragging the dead or unconscious body of the other. Neither of them succeeded in killing the other, though, so they had to talk. That didn’t go well, either. “I should never have told you anything,” spat Clint, “Not one fucking thing. I should have known you’d get it all twisted up in your crazy fucking Russian fucking brain, who knows what the fuck goes on in there, cause Christ knows I don’t.”
Natasha didn’t rise to the bait, kept calmly filing her nails. She was sitting on Clint’s collarbone and had her knees braced—hard—on both his wrists, which was the only reason he was still here, arguing with her, instead of halfway across SHIELD’s campus at the firing range. He’d already called her a spy and a bitch and a traitorous little cunt and a fucking liar and a crazy person, and he was beginning to repeat himself. After nine years with Barton, Natasha knew this meant he was beginning to run out of steam; let him rant a while longer and he’d be reasonable. Until then, she had a whole lot of fingernails to file.
“I knew this would happen,” he muttered, half to himself. “Tell a woman anything, tell a woman that you were held down and raped, fucking raped by a man, and she thinks you’re trying to tell her you’re fucking gay, like you’re fucking sensitive or some shit. Well I got news for you, I was fucking raped. It didn’t turn me fucking queer. I’m no psycho-fucking-therapist like you seem to be all of a fucking sudden, but even I fucking know that’s not how people become gay. Let me the fuck up, I got better places to fucking be. You’re cutting off my circulation.”
Natasha narrowed her eyes at him. He seemed to realize that wasn’t going to work and fell back onto the bed again, eyes fixed on the ceiling so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “Well if you’re going to fucking sit on me then fucking say something, I’m getting bored here.”
Ahh. An opening. She let her weight readjust minutely, moving slightly off his collarbone and onto his ribcage, and he huffed out a relieved-sounding breath she hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Impressive. Barton could curse her out for nearly half an hour on restricted airflow. She knew there was a reason she loved him. “I don’t think you’re gay,” she said.
“THANK YOU.”
“But you’re definitely bisexual.”
His head slammed back onto the pillow. “Oh, for FUCK’S sake.”
“And you want Coulson. And you’re scared to death of it, which is why you’re putting all these words in my mouth. Look back over our conversation. Not once did I say anything about what happened to you.”
“Yeah, you didn’t need to. The implication was perfectly clear.”
“No, that’s all you, that’s what you’re afraid of. Secretly, you’re still a homophobic teenaged boy who is terrified that what happened to him might make him gay. And it didn’t, because you’re right, it doesn’t work that way. You were bi before you were raped, and you were bi afterwards except now you had an excuse to hide from it.”
“How the fuck does that even work? You just called me a homophobe. Ergo, I am not a fucking homo. Let me up, we’re done here.”
Natasha rolled forward onto his windpipe again. “First off, language. I will let you call me a fucking bitch if that’s what you need to do, or even a cunt, which incidentally no man has ever called me and survived, but I’m tired of hearing you call yourself names. Second, you can be a homophobe and still want men, haven’t you ever seen “Brokeback Mountain”?”
“Oh, my GOD,” said Clint, banging his head and squeezing his eyes shut. “She sees one fucking chick flick and thinks she knows shit! FUCK MY LIFE. Let me up, woman. We’re done here.”
Natasha finally hit the end of her patience. “We’re done when I say we’re done,” she growled, uncurling atop him and pressing her forearm across his larynx.
“Oh yeah?” said Clint, his voice half-choked. “Whaddr’ya gonna do, Tasha? Huh? You finally gonna kill me?” With that, Tasha’s vision cleared. For the first time, she saw herself: not as the straight-shooting, truth-telling friend she’d flattered herself she was at the outset of the conversation, but as just another person holding Clint Barton down to get what they wanted. And he was hiding it well, glaring up at her like an angry, trapped, animal, but the plain fact was he was scared. And she was the one scaring him. She instantly released him, retreating across the room and giving him a clear path to the door. She was too ashamed to look him in the eye as he rose from the rumpled bed with as much dignity as he could muster, deliberately wiped away a trace of spit from his mouth, and stalked out the door, taking nothing with him. They did not talk for two months.
When they did speak, it was Clint who initiated the conversation. Natasha was still too ashamed to see him, had been actively avoiding the cafeteria and the firing range, hid in the women’s restroom when she heard his voice in the corridors. He found her in an empty conference room where she’d set up a knife target. She felt his eyes on her back but could not bring herself to meet his eye. A slight hesitation after her wind-up, the only sign she’d heard him coming. She knew he’d notice. He let her throw two, three more; as she was collecting her knives from the bulls-eye, she heard his voice, softer and sadder than she’d ever heard it, floating over her shoulder.
“You weren’t wrong about everything, you know.”
The words “I’m so sorry,” were on her tongue; when she turned to speak them he was gone.
Clint applied for a transfer, a security detail on some excavation in New Mexico. When Coulson called Natasha into his office and asked what happened, she could not answer. The tears falling uncontrollably down her face apparently said enough, as he signed the transfer papers and left her alone to pull herself together. A hand on her shoulder on the way out, the only sign he understood.
Tasha tried to get used to it, working solo. She tried not to resent the fact that Coulson had gone to New Mexico with Clint—Coulson had always been good about not playing favorites, but when push came to shove she’d always known that Clint came first. She thought that Clint might actually have a shot with Coulson, and tried to feel happy and hopeful for Clint. Mostly, she failed. Mostly, she felt self-pity and self-recrimination for having pushed away her life’s only friend. She found herself awake at three A.M., howling, upside down in the bed, a G.I. Joe clenched so tightly in her hands that the plastic left dents in her skin. She had crying jags in the shower like she’d never had before in her life, so intense her eyelids hurt. She had a temper tantrum that left the rest of her closet door in splinters. Her hair was wild and her eyes were dead and they assigned her to fucking Stark, which was a horrible miscalculation on SHIELD’s part, they didn’t hit it off at all and the whole fiasco resulted in Stark mistrusting SHIELD even more than before. (Espionage agencies have a grievously over-simplistic strategy when it comes to powerful men. The thinking goes: put a pretty woman in their way and let her lead them around by their dicks. It works, but only with certain types of not-too-bright middle-management goons, and it doesn’t work at all with gay men, or asexual men, or men with IQs above room temperature, and it definitely definitely doesn’t work with Tony Stark, because while he may be an easy lay, he is also a genius, and people who treat him like a not-too-bright middle-management goon get summarily fucked, because Tony Stark gets offended.) Anyway, so her attempt to recruit Stark didn’t go well and after the Expo blew up they pulled her off his detail and cooled it for a while, let Stark know they didn’t think he was ready for the Avengers initiative, tried to inspire a burning desire to join the club that wouldn’t have him. (Natasha wondered, sometimes, whether the psych profiles for SHIELD were written in crayon or Magic Marker.) She went back to SHIELD headquarters. She sat on her hands. She played a lot of solo Pong. And when she got a call from Coulson saying: “I’m in town for the afternoon. New Mexico is weird. Meet me for coffee?” she nearly leapt out of the bed and ran down the hallway to the cafeteria, where she found him, already sitting with a coffee, on the sunny side of the room. She slid in opposite him and he fixed her with that mild gaze that could mean anything.
“Agent Romanov.” He says, and her name in his mouth sounded warm.
Her jaw hurt from trying not to ask after Clint. “Is everything OK?”
“Yes.”
Fuck it. “Is everyone OK?”
His eyes went distant, and he looked out the window, edging his jaw around like he had a loose tooth in there somewhere. When he looked back at her, it was with an odd, vulnerable, tired expression, one she’d never seen on Coulson before.
“I don’t know,” he said simply, and in that admission Natasha read everything she needed to know. She slid her hand across the table and covered Coulson’s, and they sat wordlessly together in the square of sunlight for some time.
When Clint came back from New Mexico, everything was different and the same all at once. She waited in the pink-purple twilight for his jet to touch down on the tarmac at SHIELD, and she knew, as soon as she saw him walk off the plane, that things had changed: his walk was bouncier, more elastic, and the invisible tension that had gripped his shoulders for as long as she’d known him was gone. This Clint moved loosely, confidently; the desert sun had given him some new lines around the eyes, and they showed as he laughed and gestured to the agents spilling off the gangplank behind him. He looked like he might have looked in a different life, had all the horrors of his adolescence not happened—it hit Natasha like a punch in the gut, just how happy he looked, and she was getting ready to slink back into the night, into the shadows where she belonged, when Clint caught sight of her. His whole face transformed—waving off the other agents in a “catch up with you later” gesture, he jogged up to her, stopping right before her. “Tasha?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” she mumbled, unsure for the first time in her life where to look. She was so busy avoiding his eyes that his hug caught her completely off guard, unbalanced her and sent her stumbling into his shoulder.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he murmured, gathering her securely into his arms and stroking the back of her skull, turning to press his lips to her hair. Overwhelmed, she could only hug him tighter, cling to his solidity. They stood there for a long time, the shadows gathering, the ground crew working around them, holding each other as the darkness fell.
When it was finally only them, standing under the wing of a parked jet, Clint pulled back to look at her, stroking her hair with a thumb. His eyes were wet.
“Clint, I’m so sorry,” she began, and he shook his head.
“No, no, you don’t have—“
“No, I do, I’m so sorry, I never meant to—”
“Tasha. Hush. You were right, you were right about everything, and I ran away like an asshole. I’m the one who should be sorry, and I am. I’m so sorry, Tasha. Forgive me?”
She nodded, mutely, and he kissed her, and it was chaste and teary and kind of snotty, but she didn’t mind. They turned to head inside, and his arm found its way around her shoulders, and her arm fell around his waist, and it was both familiar and utterly changed.
“So are you my gay best friend now?” she asked as they waited for the elevator, and he barked with laughter.
“Right, I’m totally gonna be your shopping buddy, ask me about fuckin’ shoes,” he scoffed as they got in and the doors closed. “I know all the secrets of the sisterhood now.”
She decided to let him tell her about Coulson when he was ready. She would never again push him the way she had that horrible afternoon before he left for New Mexico. And their new state of friendship, tender and vulnerable as it was, had some surprising benefits. For starters, Clint was happy. Not just secure and safe, but happy—she hadn’t realized there was a difference, before. This new version of Clint was goofy in public, not just behind closed doors, encouraging Natasha to laugh in front of other people for the first time in her life. New Clint would catch her eye in briefings and mime death by strangulation, hanging, gunshot—all the usual I-am-bored-to-tears mimes—but also death by “Alien” facehugger, death by samurai-style disembowelment, and, once, memorably, death-by-erection-lasting-more-than-four-hours. New Clint had no apparent interest in the mysterious superspy image they’d once cultivated. Instead, New Clint gave hugs, great warm bear-hugs that scooped Tasha up from behind and lifted her feet off the ground. He would carry her around SHIELD offices like a child carrying a too-large dolly, his arms clasped around her ribcage, her boots dangling just over his ankles. “Look what I found, sir,” he said to Phil, who was on hold with three different government agencies and one actual government. “Want her?” He tilted Natasha slightly over Phil’s desk, just enough to put her off-balance, offering Phil an armload of squirming, cursing Russian. “No? You sure? All right then.” New Clint flirted with everyone. New Clint didn’t see why they couldn’t play Never Have I Ever with the JSOC liaison. New Clint absolutely could not shut up on the comms. And Natasha nearly fainted the first time she walked into the cafeteria and discovered him in an honest-to-God food fight. “Tasha!” he crowed as he beckoned to her from under a table, a plastic tray held like a shield over his head. “Come help me fight these little fuckers, they’ve got the salad bar so they think they’re hot shit.” Three junior agents, their hands full of radishes, peeked cautiously at Tasha from behind the sneeze shield.
She had to admit, after she got used to people nodding and smiling at her in the hallways instead of scurrying for the exits, that Clint may have been onto something when he started inviting other people to play. As it turned out, a great deal of what had been making Clint and Natasha so nervous in the early days of their recruitment was… Clint and Natasha. By obsessively rehearsing the moment it would inevitably go tits-up, they’d closed themselves off, become a tiny star system unto themselves, two pulsars orbiting only each other. Only Coulson’s gravitational pull had been enough to tear them apart, halt the inevitable implosion. They didn’t even miss the sex—much. Except sometimes, Natasha would get a tiny feline smirk, and Clint would tilt his face at a certain angle and study Natasha from under lidded eyes, and they’d both know that they were thinking about that night, before SHIELD, before co-dependence and crying and feelings and Phil, when they’d been spies and bank robbers and super-badass assassins-for-hire, and she’d been straddling him in the cheap white light of an un-air-conditioned hostel in Capetown, a cool fresh spring night outside, and she’d been riding him for hours, and at a certain peak of feeling she’d opened her hand, hauled off and broken his fucking nose, and the mood that night was so primal that it was simply the right thing to do, and he grinned up at her through a red smear of blood as they fucked. (Natasha never told him that she loved his newly crooked face, and so he never told her that, years later, he still felt a sharp twang of pleasure-pain across the bridge of his nose every time he came. It wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. If someone had to break Clint Barton’s nose, he’s glad it was her.) Usually, when they caught themselves reminiscing, there was no cure but to get in the ring bare-knuckled and beat the everliving shit out of each other for a few hours. And thank God, Phil was okay with them showing up with busted faces and bruises on their bruises, hanging off each other like horribly damaged newlyweds, sometimes so punch-drunk that they couldn’t form complete sentences and would giggle and wheeze at each other until he intervened with medical attention. And he was always firm and loving and gentle when they did this, like a weird sort of mother when they needed it, a mother who would sit on bedsides and nonjudgmentally tape foreheads torn on turnbuckles and knuckles sliced open by teeth. The first time Natasha and Clint got in the ring together after New Mexico, Phil helped Clint to his quarters first and then stayed up late helping Natasha get settled in the infirmary, which surprised the hell out of her. She said as much, and he looked mildly surprised and said, “You’re my asset too,” which, coming from Coulson, was the equivalent of a big hug and a mug of hot cocoa. They didn’t talk after that, as Coulson gently wrapped her wrist in athletic tape, but the silence was warm.
And then Loki, and Phil. And… well. Clint compartmentalized like a motherfucker, and so did Natasha, and between the two of them they managed to hold it together until they could get away, escaping together in a rented car to Florida, where they had angry resentful sex for the first time since the horrible afternoon she’d held him down and tried to get him to admit his feelings for Coulson. The whole way through it she thought, I deserve this. Afterwards, she lay on the bed, not touching Clint and trying not to let him hear the sounds of her grief, grief she knew paled in comparison to what Clint must be going through. She felt guilty, horribly guilty—she’d lead Clint to Coulson, practically forced them together, and what for? So Clint could get his heart broken by a man with no more common sense than to confront a god with an untested rocket launcher, that dumbass, and oh God, that dumbass had bandaged her wounds and sat up with her in hospital and never once told her to stay away from Clint even when Clint became his boyfriend and Natasha was just the third wheel who regularly brought Clint home from the gym with bruises and cuts and probably brain damage, and oh God, if she could trade places with Coulson she would have. Deep into the bottle of self-pity, Natasha thought that Clint would have been better off without her. She was thinking of running away and never coming back, out of respect to Phil, when Clint rolled over in his sleep and reached out, mumbling, in the night. If he’d said Coulson’s name, she might just have gotten out of bed and left, but he didn’t. He said golubka. Little darling.
She didn’t run away. It was a point of honor.