"Tash?"
"Yes, Clint?"
"Let me do it."
"No."
She eyes his reflection in the mirror, the way he's leaning over the back of her chair, his eyes trained on her mouth. His hands are on the arms of her chair, close to where she's got her elbows perched, so close she can feel his resonating body heat.
With his eyes on her mouth the way they are, she shifts slightly in her seat, she lets her lips part slowly, and he swallows audibly next to her ear when she catches his eye.
"Beg me." She says in her low, promising way.
"Please. God, please, let me do it." He's next to breathless beside her ear, breathing the words down into her collar, where they warm against her skin. She tips her head, considers him, then abruptly leans forward, resetting elbows on the dresser, and shakes her head.
"You're driving me insane."
"I'm well aware."
"Just let me do it."
"No."
"Tasha, please. Lookit, I'm begging all nice and everything. Please. Please lemme do it."
She heaves a long suffering sigh, curves the red line around her lower lip before taking it away to assess her handiwork, knowing he's doing much the same.
"No. No. I've said no, so don 't give me those hound dog eyes. They don't work."
"Then why don't you want me to do them?" he tries to purr, but it's more a growl, and she raises a brow at his attempts at being smooth with her.
"Keeping doing it, then, see if I care."
"Can I do your brows too?"
"Chrissake, Barton." Her patience is about to wear thin. "Walk away, or limp away, but go away."
Between the study-up for the mission, the sounds of various agents cleaning and clicking and recalibrating their weapons and tech, the survalience guys bemoaning their love lives and girlfriends and discussing how to best propose (the idea of anal), talking stupid and smack about the mission- not to mention, she's next to naked in a red silk dress, her nipples are pretty much cutting through the fabric and she's aware that they're all aware of that – she's not stressed, but she's not going to give him a lot of room to be the usual pain in the ass he tends to be.
He huffs, pushes off the chair, and goes to put one of his Mel Gibson movies on. There's a collective groan as the opening scene starts; they all know it by sound. Some of them are taking up Dany Glover impressions and some of them are attempting the Mel Gibson, but Barton is preoccupied by staring at her mouth in the mirror.
He gets up, casually saunters over, winds past two men who haven't yet seen the particular episode in the quadrilogy, and opens his mouth.
"Don't bother."
"Tasha, c'mon."
"I said no."
"I'm not above wrestling you down and doing it by force. I might hurt you, but it's for your own good, when you're teasing me like this."
He's said it that way because he's a bastard, and people are looking. He thinks he can exhaust her enough so that she'll give in and let him do it to be out of her hair, and clearly the quickest way to do that would be to involve other people. So she clarifies.
"You've done my hair, picked out my lingerie. You're not doing my makeup. I'm drawing a line."
"I know. That's why it looks so fucking horrible."
"Don't ask again unless you want to know how I can kill you with nothing but my thumb and forefinger."
"I'm not suicidal."
"No, but you're pretty stupid."
He leans back away from her then, removing himself from her immediate presence. She arches a (well maintained) brow at him, and waits for him to continue, though he doesn't. The various members of the team awkwardly adjust to the sudden and intense silence, beside the movie playing and Coulson sipping his coffee, everyone is keen to hear what happens next.
She levels a single flat glare and they abruptly retake to talking smack and most tune into the movie. She poises the pencil to her upper lip and draws the tiniest of lines-
"Jesus, that's horrid."
"Shut up, Clint."
"Your eyebrows are crooked."
"They are not."
"And you've lined the cupid's bow all wrong."
She sighs.
"I didn't know you'd be so particular about that."
"I'm a sniper, it's kind of my thing, to be pedantic about location. Like that rouge. It looks like you have a morbidly running fever."
Just-...ignore him. He'll go away. He doesn't want to die today. Not death by hairspray to the throat, anyway.
She continues to line her upper lip.
"Tash-"
"I'm going to skin you with the sharpener for my eyeliner if you say one more word about my makeup."
"I'm not saying a damn word, woman." He's actually frustrated with her over this. She doesn't know what's more amusing, the fact that this man is getting so frustrated over her makeup or the fact that she knows he could probably do it better.
"So shut up," dangerous, red lipped smile. "And leave me alone."
Pause. Peace. She makes the mistake of reclining slightly, and beginning to fill in what mistakes she's made.
"You've got too much shit on."
"Go away."
"Focus on the brows, lashes, lips-"
"You're full of shit, Clint."
"You've ruining the canvas!"
"Back off." Now people are staring again. Because he's gotten louder, and she's gotten quieter. She put the lid on the lip liner to give her hands something to do, and mostly so she doesn't try and stab him in the throat with it.
"Let me reline your mouth."
"I'm going to reline your face."
"Please. You've done it wrong."
She actually turns to see him then, and he raises both hands in apology. She is the Black Widow; she doesn't do wrong. When the message is clear she returns to her original position and takes a soothing breath in.
"Do you want to know what it's like to draw a bow with an over extended bicep?" she asks, quite pleasantly.
"Not particularly."
"Then shut." She flicks her eyes to his.
"Your." She drawls the word, makes it last a good long purr.
"Mouth." And she clicks the lip off her liner, positioning it to her lip.
He huffs, folds his arms across his chest. For all of thirty seconds, Natasha can try to refocus on the swell of her bottom lip, and try to fill it in with a pencil base before she goes anywhere near the three different shades of red lip color beside her mascara.
"If you let me fix your makeup I'll fill in your report for you."
She snorts.
"Who are you kidding?"
"Just let me-"
"Coulson?"
The agent looked up from his schematics, nursing his Captain America coffee mug to his chest. He's lucky the cap's shield insignia is on it, he's going to need all the shielding he could get. He was giving her his mildly surprised look – they didn't usually involve him in these little forays into flirtationship.
"Do you think I've done anything wrong?"
"Oh c'mon, what the hell would he know? He's not an expert." Then he thinks about that. There's a lot of things Coulson is qualified in. There's a reasonable chance makeup is one of those things. "Or are you, Phil?"
"It doesn't matter if he is or not. You're far from an expert."
"I'm a trained marksman. Codename Hawkeye. I'm trained to see, so I'm pretty much the closest thing to expertise in this room." He glances Phil's way to see if he contradicts this, and when he doesn't, glances back to Natasha. "And what I see you doing to yourself just makes me want to curl into a ball and die."
"Don't let me stop you." She murmurs, and colours her mouth.
"Woman, if you just let me-"
"Coulson. If you didn't know me, would you want me?"
Barton laughs, loudly. There are snickers all around, though they're at least attempting to pass it off on something the movie had just done.
Coulson, steady as ever, just blinks slowly, wonders if there's a safe way out of this conversation without choosing a side. He's Switzerland, when it comes to these two, he has to be.
They're like children. Well, 'like' is a loose term, when it comes to each other, it seems that sometimes, their years of mental anguish melt away, they become much more simple creature. 'Like' is an incredibly loose term, when one considered how they were frightening, expertly trained, stealthy, sneaky. So children in mind, not in body, which was unnerving at the best of times and intensely unsettling at the worst.
The fact still stood that they were somewhat child-minded, completely capable of doing terrible things to him, should he pick the wrong side.
Like unsanitary equipment, unfinished paperwork.
Or laxatives.
"Oh come on," Clint notices the look on the handler's face. "You can't ask him that."
"Why not?"
"Because, that's flat out rude."
"I'm not being rude, I'm asking a question. You tell me you want me all the time."
"And that's of my own doing, you can't just ask a man to give that up."
"I can." If she were anyone else, he'd continue to contradict her. But she wasn't, so he was inclined to agree. "Now Coulson – if you didn't know me, if I approached you in a bar, would you be thinking about the dawn on shape of my mouth?"
Phil levels a very deceptively calm stare her way, contemplating his response.
"I knew that his stint in makeup artistry would be more harmful than helpful. I did try to talk Fury out of it." Is his carefully worded reply, letting her know he's pretty much on her side. Clint looks let down, sagging dejectedly onto the end of the hotel bed, propping his head on his palm. He knew that the doughnut thing would come back to bite him in the ass.
"So you don't think the target will be worried about whether or not my lip liner is up to par?" she proceeds, fixing him with the unblinking stare of doom.
He looks back at his schematics, sighing quietly.
"I'd give him ninety five percent odds that he'll be thinking about your mouth, Agent Romanoff. As for what he thinks, that's far and beyond me. I'm not a physic."
"Excellent. Thank you, Phil."
"You're welcome."
And silence, but for the sounds of sassy Mel Gibson.
"Tash, can I just-?"
She aimed her tweezers at his forehead, not bothering to look over her shoulder to throw them. He fell to the floor to avoid getting impaled, and pushed up, checking to see that yes, those tweezers were now imbedded in the wall. Several agents had duck-and-rolled out of the way, and Phil sighed, wondering what the hell kind of incident report that would've made, if those agents hadn't been highly trained as they were.
"If he asks again," she says with a pretty smile. "I'll skin him with my eyeliner."
"I don't actually think that's possible, Agent Romanoff."
"Well I'm keen to try." She fixed a steady cat eyed look in the mirror. "I mean it."
"I'm sure it wouldn't bereave Agent Barton to leave you alone for once."
"But-" Clint was startled when she turned in her seat, held the lip liner out to him. She rose her brows at the expression on his face; it was a rare victory, when they went head to head in matters such as these. "Really?"
"I have a condition." She says, mild and calm, so he knows he's not going to like it.
"If you wanna do mine in return, I'd be up for that."
"As pretty as you'd look in drag, not what I had in mind." She flicks her eyes between him and the television, the mullets and eighties music. "Bring me Lethal Weapon."
"Why?" He's gone sniper still, his eyes trained on her face.
"It's my condition."
"What are you planning?"
"If you don't want to, then." She curls the liner into her hand, hiding it from his view.
It takes him a second, but he stands, goes over to the t.v, pops the DVD from the player. There's a small rebuttal from those two members who hadn't yet seen that one, but it's only half hearted. His shoulders are bunched, forearms tense – he returns with it balanced on his forefinger.
"Now snap it." She says, and unrolls her hand to reveal the liner, his reward for the great disservice he's about to do himself.
"You're so-..." his face has fallen, how could she do this to him? It wasn't even a bad movie. She hadn't even sat down and watched it. He'd only put it on as background noise once or twice...or thirty, or eighty times. He wasn't keeping count. "-Cruel."
"Agent Romanoff." Phil decided then to step in. He hated precisely one more thing than Barton's horrendous paperwork abilities, and that was when he sulked. It was kicking puppies and sitting on kittens, and smashing Captain America mugs, when he sulked. "That's a little hard. You could ban the movie."
"My condition is that you snap it." She checked the clock. "I'll give you thirty seconds. This is my final offer."
"But- do I, get to do your make up in future? At least, most of it? Because seriously, your eyebrows-"
"You can do the lips and nothing else." Because she could chose to go with a nude mouth, something he would just have to deal with. "Twenty seven seconds."
It was, apparently, an easier task than she had imagined it would be. The disk was cracked straight across the middle, and he tossed the pieces her way, before taking the liner and holding her face steady in one hand. In the other, he lined her mouth carefully, narrowed eyes in his precision. Before she could protest he was wiping away the eyebrows, filling them in with a much softer pencil. He smoothed out the harshness of the blush and applied fake lashes, all in a matter of minutes.
She didn't mind the pampering, it was the smug look on his face when he finished that she could do without.
"So. Much. Better." He assessed, and took a step back. "You're welcome."
"Uh huh." She gave herself a once over. Of course she looked good, he was, after all, a precise kind of guy. "I'm just glad that I don't have to listen to that stupid movie again."
"Oh yeah. About that." He grinned, sauntered over to his bag, and withdrew the rest of the movies, earning a collective groan from everyone in the room, an exasperated sigh from Phil but not much else. But she just smiled, because she'd accounted for that already. Of course she had.
"There's still the lashes, brows and cheeks, Clinton. But by all means, enjoy your movies." Then she stood, self dignified, and swung her hips as she when to mount weapons of her person.