Happy 9th December. This one is a Natasha/Clint fic because I'm just a little bit in love with her at the moment. I actually think this is one of my favourite advent fics that I have written so far.
I: If I Go – Ella Eyre.
Anyway, I really hope you enjoy reading it and thanks for taking a look. As always, I don't own anything to do with Marvel.
If I Go
The first time Natasha ran off after he brought her in, Clint thought he had been played.
It wouldn't have been the first time that a woman had got the better of him – his ex-wife was proof of that – but it would have hit him harder, personally and professionally.
He had taken a huge risk, bringing her in instead of taking her out, and he knew that a lot of people in Shield weren't happy that he'd first gone off the grid and then changed the aim of the mission. Coulson had accepted it without even blinking – he trusted Clint enough to know that he had a reason for pulling his target at the last minute, even if he didn't understand why at first – and Fury and Hill had argued back and forth for about twenty minutes before telling him that Natasha would need a tracker to keep tabs on her and that if anything happened, they would come down on him like a ton of bricks. Others had been less understanding though – Sitwell, Hand, Garrett – and had made it very clear that if their enemies got even the slightest hint of what Shield was up to, then they would blame Natasha and Clint would be taking the fall with her.
On a more personal note though…he liked her.
It was a strange bond the two of them had, but he was fairly certain that he had gained some, if not most, of her trust, just by not putting an arrow in her skull when he'd had the opportunity.
So when she disappeared early one Friday about six months after he brought her in, Clint panicked.
Frantically, he had checked the tracker, only to find that she had somehow extracted it and then disappeared off base.
He had run around the whole place about three times searching for her before admitting defeat and shuffling along to Coulson's office, prepared to tie his own noose. When he had got there though, Coulson had looked up calmly from his paperwork.
"She hasn't gone back," he announced without inflection before Clint had even said a word. "She's on a kill list in every country apart from her own. She hasn't gone back; there's nowhere else for her to go unless she wants to be hunted by the USA as well."
Clint froze, the welling panic in his chest subsiding slightly. "You know she's gone?" He shouldn't be surprised really; Coulson knew everything.
His handler shot him a look that said more than any reprimand could.
"I was alerted when she disabled the tracker at 02:34 this morning," Coulson stated. He looked back down and began filling out what looked like an accidental damage form.
"You knew she had disabled it?" Clint felt very slow on the uptake and the expression on Coulson's wasn't helping.
"Of course. Although it was rather amusing to watch and see at what point you realised she was gone and then decided to come and alert me. I thought you'd give in and tell me twenty-six minutes before you did." He gestured towards the security camera feed beaming down from one corner of his room. "She's good though. She would have managed to evade all surveillance if it wasn't for the tracker. It shows great promise for her future as your partner on the field."
Clint swallowed hard. "Does Fury know?"
An eyebrow raised. "Do you think either you or she would still be alive if Fury knew?"
Clint rubbed his hands over his face and then sank down into the chair on the other side of the desk. "God." Coulson's pen scratched quietly over the paper. "I don't know what happened. I just woke up this morning and she wasn't there and I thought…" He waved a hand dismissively. "Never mind."
Coulson paused in his work – it was only for a fraction of a second, but Clint noticed it.
"I imagine she left because she was spooked after your kiss yesterday evening."
Clint shot upright in the seat. He was about to ask Coulson how he knew about that, but then remembered the cameras behind him.
"Right." He didn't say anything else. That was the first rule he had learnt at Shield. If you don't speak then you can't incriminate yourself.
Coulson put his pen down and looked directly at Clint then, his face serious.
"Miss Romanova has had a very hard life, Barton. One that would make yours look like a dream childhood. She has been trained over many years to not feel any emotion that would hinder her work in any way. I have no doubt that she would treat any feelings that come to the fore with some misgivings." He picked up his pen again. "Give her time."
It was clearly a dismissal and Clint stood up and headed over to the door, mind racing.
Coulson knew. Coulson knew and wasn't going to kill him. Coulson knew that he had kissed Natasha the night before.
He hadn't meant for it to happen. He was too old for her, too damaged, too world weary. And she was a former Russian spy who watched him warily every time they trained together. She trusted him though – she trusted him to watch her back and sometimes he thought that she even liked him. She was young and beautiful and talented and he…wasn't.
That hadn't stopped him last night though. They had just finished training and while he was better than her at using long-range weapons, she could kick his ass to kingdom come and back in hand to hand without even breaking a sweat. Last night though, he had managed to sweep her feet out from underneath her while she was off balance and pin her to the ground.
She had laughed at his triumph as he helped her to her feet, a grin creasing his face.
"Not bad for an American," she had joked, hair plastered to her scalp and chest heaving with the effort she had exerted in the fight. She looked sweaty and dishevelled and not at all like her usual perfect self.
So he had kissed her. And after a short moment where he cursed himself in his head for pushing her too far, she had kissed him back.
She had squeezed his hand softly before they had said goodnight and then parted for their separate quarters. Then he woke in the morning to find her gone.
He went back to his quarters silently and stayed there for the next two days. If anyone had asked, he would have said he was resting, but deep down, he knew he was hiding from his superiors. He was sure that Coulson had covered for him and Natasha as neither Hill nor Fury came down to chew him out or throw him in a cell, so he guessed that was something to be grateful for.
On the evening of the second day, there was a knock at the door of his bunk. His time had obviously run out.
Heaving a great sigh, Clint pulled himself out of bed and schooled his face into an easy grin – his version of Coulson's famed blank face – and swung the door open, one arm leaning casually against the frame.
"You took your…"
Warm, soft lips meeting his cut him off mid-sentence and he experienced a moment of shock before he was responding, wrapping one arm around Natasha's waist while his other hand buried itself into her loose hair.
She pushed him a little and they stumbled back into his bunk, his knees hitting the back of the bed as they continued to kiss, small biting nips and long, drawn-out presses of their mouths.
Eventually, she pulled back. "Hi," she smiled at him.
"You came back." He couldn't keep the disbelief from his voice.
Her smile faltered a little before turning a little shy. It was an expression he had never seen before.
"Yes," she nodded, "I didn't want to let you down."
Clint blinked at her for a moment, unable to compute his thoughts into words. Her smile dipped. Finally, he just reached out and pulled her into a tight hug. She clung to him back, her own grip equally as fierce.
Eventually, he pulled back so he could look at her again.
"Next time you need to go, just let me know," he said, the tone of his voice practically begging. "I was worried."
Her mouth curved upwards again before she leaned forward and pressed it to his again.
"I'll let you know," she promised.
That was the first time, but it wasn't the last.
Natasha, he had come to learn, with Coulson's prodding and barely concealed eye-rolling, didn't deal well with emotions. Anytime things became too much or a sudden change came about she would take off, sometimes for hours, mostly for day and occasionally for months.
She left the first time she killed a man under Shield's orders, the first time they had slept together and when they had been split up as partners for him to accompany Coulson to New Mexico to investigate a 084.
She always left a note though, warning him that she was going, and she always came back to him eventually. And while this was happening, she gradually crept under his skin until there was no Barton anymore, just Barton and Romanov, Clint and Natasha, Hawkeye and Black Widow.
He would be lying if he said he didn't like it, and that was why he always waited for her to return to him in the end, because to not be waiting for her would be unthinkable.
But then came the Tesseract. Then came Loki and New York. Then came his every thought and action being unmade – stripped back and turned against his instincts. Then came Coulson dying at the hands of someone who was only free to hurt him because Clint had been weak.
He had tried to kill Natasha and she had stopped him and brought him back.
Clint pulled himself together long enough to fight by her side against aliens and whale monsters and all sorts. He laughed and joked and quipped with the others during the battle and then over shawarma. He stared Loki in the eyes as the god was sent back to Asgard in chains for sentencing.
And he ran, disappearing off the grid, just like Natasha had all those times. He barely just remembered to leave a note before he took off.
Two years and the fall of Shield later he stumbled into Stark Tower, bloody, bruised and barely able to grip his bow properly in his broken fingers.
She was waiting for him, a soft smile on her face, because for Natasha to not wait for him would have been unthinkable.
He had crept under her skin.