yield
He is not by any means a submissive personality, but he never says no to her, even when she knows he should, and right away warning bells ring in her head at the realization and she shouldn't be encouraging this, she really shouldn't.
"You coming?" he asks, throwing back the blanket and patting a place on his bed beside him.
She lingers by the door, trusting her mind to toss out some excuse about how she has to go check the perimeters again or how they should take turns keeping watch or that she would call in with base and ask when exactly they would be extracted from this freezing cold tundra of a city but she can't think of anything except how cold they are and that he nodded along with her half worded suggestion of sharing a bed to keep warm too quickly and she shouldn't be encouraging this. That's the only truth sitting in the room with them. Not that they are partners, friends, the only close thing she has. Not that he has a gaping hole at his side that is still bleeding a little through the bandages she wrapped around him with steady fingers but eyes that ran like fucking waterfalls. Not that Budapest almost killed them both but somehow, someway, they conquered it.
Her mind is blank. His arms are open, waiting for her to warm his tired and injured body and she shouldn't be encouraging this but she slips out of her shoes and her jacket and throws them on the floor and crawls in beside him, and he wraps his arms around her and tosses one leg over hers like it's the most natural thing in the world, and her body is as stiff as a board as he molds himself around it, and it isn't cold anymore it's stifling, suffocating, burning hot.
"Jesus, relax," he says, rubbing her arms, her back. "It's like sleeping with a plank of wood."
"Clint, shut up and go to sleep."
"I can't, there's more vicodin in my blood than blood." His face stretches into a goofy grin. "You're gonna be listening to complete shit all night, 'Tasha. I am high as a kite."
"Oh, my God." She tries pulling herself out of bed but he locks his arms around her and she knows she can press the soft tissue between his shoulder and his neck to force him to release her but she doesn't.
"Look, just relax, okay? Do you want a massage?"
She gives him a look but he's dead serious and she doesn't want his hands on any other part of her body because she shouldn't be encouraging this, she shouldn't be allowing him to be this close to her, she shouldn't be on the fast track of ruining her one positive relationship.
She shouldn't.
He presses his fingers into her back and works the tenseness out of her muscles and she thinks she could fall asleep like this but the warning bells in her mind make her body go rigid and she bolts up into a sitting position on the furthest corner of the bed from where he is.
"Stop." Her voice is sharp, harsh, full of authority.
He follows without question, folding his arms across his chest and waiting. His eyes are patient. She can't stand it.
"Stop doing what I say," she says. She mumbles the words, "I don't really want any of what I say, okay?" but only because she has no idea what she actually means.
"Natasha," he says in a low voice, so low that she hardly hears it over the hustle and the bustle of the night life on the street outside. "What the hell do you want from me?"
"I want you to stop this," she says. Her voice cracks. She clears her throat and tries again, tries to say something profound and real but only comes up with, "Stay on your side of the bed," when she really wants to say, "don't ruin us," and "stop yielding to me," and "we are fragile enough without you tipping the balance" and she wants to burrow under his arm and fall asleep in his warmth and never move from that position ever but she shouldn't
"Come here, Natasha."
be encouraging
"It's cold."
this.
"Comfortable?" he asks, his voice a rumble in his throat she feels against her face.
She says something but she has no idea what it is and he chuckles, then winces as the movement disrupts the wound on his side. She leans away from him to look at his face and sees the pain fading from his eyes and feels a stab of guilt in her chest that is as sudden as it is unfamiliar and she doesn't know why. He got shot because he was reckless. She didn't because she had been careful. There is some underlying message here that she doesn't want to give too much thought to.
"It's cold as shit in this hellhole," he mutters fiercely, and his arms tighten around her reflexively. "Next time we go on a mission, I'm making sure it's in the Bahamas."
"And then you won't find any excuse to sleep in the same bed as me."
He raises his eyebrows. "Uh, last I checked, you were the one who suggested we sleep together tonight. I didn't beg you to come here, you came crawling to me on your own."
"Because it's cold and sharing body heat is the smart thing to do, not because of you see yourself as a sex god."
"I am a sex god."
"Okay, whatever you say."
His arms tighten more and she lays her head against his chest and listens to his heartbeat until her eyes start to droop.
"Sleep, Natasha," he whispers, his hand tangling itself in her hair, and she feels the press of his lips on her forehead and she is too tired and battle weary to care. "Don't worry about everything so much."
"That is the mentality that got you shot," she whispers against his chest.
"I'd choose this over safe any day," he says.
Her heart slams into her ribcage and jars her awake. "What?"
"I said I like this. Don't you feel safe right now?"
"I feel very not safe because if someone decided to step in and start shooting the place up, then I'd be on my own because you're incapacitated."
"Nat." He sighs in exasperation, as though she is missing something very obvious. "I'm not talking tactics."
"Well, what, then?" she asks, annoyed. "These are the drugs talking. I'm letting you suffer next time."
"High Clint is better than no Clint at all," he says, smiling at her expression, but there is something sad about his eyes, and she knows he doesn't want to be changing the subject but he is because she wants to.
After a beat of silence, in which she is almost asleep, he whispers, "Why not?"
She isn't going to respond. She isn't going to encourage this. She is going to stay quiet and go to sleep. If she ignores it, it'll be like he never said it, and tomorrow they can go to the extraction point and then back to base and continue being friends and partners and forget this night spent huddled together in the same bed as she yielded to him as much as he yielded to her.
She doesn't ignore it. She ignores the flutter in her stomach and the rush of something hot in her veins, the same something that powers her mind in a gunfight.
"It could be a mistake," she tells him.
"Or something really good," he says.
"Or something we'll both regret."
"Or the best thing that ever happened to us."
"Or shut it," she snaps, trying to lean away from him again, but he doesn't let her move an inch. "Goddamn, Barton, let me sleep. It's been a long day."
"No."
She stares at him, watches his lips form the word, but she can't believe he said it because he never says no to her, not that she wants to encourage this because she doesn't.
"What did you say?" she asks slowly.
He doesn't repeat himself, but he takes her face in both his hands and kisses her, and she forgets everything. Boundaries and fragility and partnership and his wound and her carefulness, it's all a muddled mess in her mind that she can't pull a single thought out of except one that slams into her consciousness over and over again and it isn't that she shouldn't be encouraging this, it's that she should, because nothing has ever felt as right as this, not the familiar weight of a gun in her deft hands or the feeling of air in her lungs or the syllables of her native language rolling off her tongue. She is sure nothing will ever be as right again. He has ruined it all for her, just as she had always known, just not the way she had thought he would.
"Stop trying to control everything," he tells her. He looks stupid, like he's been hit over the head by something heavy. "Don't think. This isn't a mission. This is you and this is me and what else matters?"
She knows what else matters. She knows that protecting her friendship with him is the most important thing in the world. She knows that he is reckless and rash and ridiculous and a thousand other things and also jacked up on drugs and not aware that if this doesn't work, as so many things in her life haven't worked, then she will lose him. And she cannot, she will not go back to the way things were, abandoned and mistrustful and wary and alone.
And when she pauses to take a shuddering breath, she realizes her mouth has been running this whole time and his eyes are wide and open and he is so warm and welcoming against her cold body that she knows she will yield to him, do anything he asks, if he would just stop looking at her and
"Say something, you bastard."
He blinks a few times and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. The action is both familiar and alien to her. He has touched her hair, her face, countless times, but never like this, never with such care or tenderness and she didn't even know hands that she had seen pick men apart, doused in as much red as hers were, were capable of such lightness, such tenderness.
"I won't leave you," he says. "Not even when you want me to. Especially when you want me to."
"Dammit, you are too high for me to be discussing this with you." She pinches his pressure point and his muscles slacken until she can crawl out from his embrace and sit up straight as an arrow on the bed, gazing down at him and feeling the ghost of his lips on hers and knowing that something critical has just happened. She can't tell if it's good or bad and it's terrifying. She's the fucking Black Widow. She only deals in absolutes, not in shady half-truths and unknowns and drugged partners professing God only knows what.
He knows. She sees understanding in his face as plainly as though it were written there. He sits up with some difficulty and takes her hand and they look at each other until the edge of the horizon is stained with orange. She lets all her fears find purchase on her face, everything she hides away from everyone but him and when the sun chases away the black and his face is illuminated by a blast of dawn light, she sees a small smile, one he must not even be aware of, one that whispers reassurance and promises and maybe it'll be okay but she doesn't know for sure and they're just going in blind, aren't they?
"What if-?" she begins, but he doesn't let her finish.
"Shh," he says, and he lies back down and puts his arms out expectantly.
A beat passes, in which the instinct of self-preservation is almost too much to ignore and she is a hair's breadth away from running back to her room and hiding under the covers and forgetting this ever happened, but the moment is gone and she is tucking herself in beside him.
She shouldn't be encouraging this. She really shouldn't. But his lips find her cheek and he whispers, "Can we sleep now?" against her skin and she doesn't push him away, she pulls him closer, until there is nothing between them but the clothes on their backs and his chest rising and falling slowly until the drugs overpower him and he falls into the dreamland.
She stays awake until the call comes in for the extraction and Clint wakes up, his eyes blank for a moment as he regards her.
She says, "You forgot everything that happened, didn't you?" and she raises her hand to slap him but he catches it and plants a kiss on her palm and gets up to brush his teeth and she can't stop smiling the whole way back to base, even though the creeping doubts and blinding fear is barely kept at bay unless she is around him, looking at him or having him sneak a kiss or a caress somewhere and there is so much at stake. This is so fragile, it could shatter if she gave it a wrong look, it could break and break her.
She shouldn't be encouraging this. She tells him as much in the chopper, as his hand absently rests on the small of her back and he unwraps a protein bar with his teeth and eats the whole thing in one bite then still tries to kiss her with his mouth full.
"That's just what I think," she says when he gives her an impatient look. "It's what I was thinking all night."
He chews slowly, mulling it over. His eyes are glinting with something she has never seen before, something that makes the blues bluer and the whites whiter and she looks away before she can do something stupid, because of course it's stupid if it's making her light headed and warm.
"Fuck thinking," he replies.
And it's gone, and she yields.