trigger warning: brief mention of suicidal ideation.
I refuse to let my ship get wrecked! Damn you Whedon! (you annoying, sublime genius!)
Clint Barton watched the freight train vanish around the bend before crossing the misty fields toward the farm. Covering the last thirty miles between the small town motel and the old homestead by stowing away on a box car felt like the final link in the chain of secrets he had forged to protect his family.
He didn't think anyone was following him, but the high profile of the Avengers made keeping secrets hard for even their least visible member. Not only did he have to worry about Eastern European gangsters tracking him, now he had to evade fucking TMZ as well. He would feel bad if he had to drop a paparazzo or two, but not THAT bad.
He waved away a persistent insect as he crested the hill and absorbed the view of his home. The scudding clouds obscured the moon and in the wavering shadows, he thought he could see the crumbling facade of his family farm looking as it had before he and his wife had fixed it up.
Bit by bit, Laura and he had restored the ramshackle house. Under their handiwork and dedication, the nightmare of his childhood had been replaced by this sheltered utopia. Laura ran the farm and he came home as often as he could and played with his kids, worked on the house, basked in the idyllic peace of the chaos of the days and made love to his wife each night.
The moon emerged and bathed the old house in light; revealing the sanctuary they had created for their children, far from the peril of his job and safe from the threat of exposure.
Safe.
He wondered if there were leftovers in the refrigerator, but his aching hunger was quickly supplanted by his desire to hold Laura in his arms and kiss his sleeping children.
Natasha sprinted up the gravel driveway toward the anguished cry; still not sure how he got here before she had.
She found him crumpled in the open doorway, a heap on the decaying porch. Clint stared unfocused at the stained floor boards, his P30 unholstered as he flicked the safety on and off. He didn't look up when she said his name; didn't resist when she gripped the barrel of the gun and eased it from his hand.
"They're gone," he said flatly.
She doubted she'd completely disarmed him, but taking his high-calibre sidearm still flooded her with relief. She checked the chamber, removed the clip and stowed both out of reach before folding her distraught partner in an embrace.
"No, Clint," she said gently as he buried his face in the crook of her neck, "they were never here. Ever. There is no Laura, no kids, no farm. It's not real; none of it. This...," she hesitated and cast a sad glance around and stroked his back, the light cotton of his shirt clinging to his skin in the damp air. "There is nothing here, it's all a false memory. You have no children and you never have. This is the house you grew up in, but no one has lived here in thirty years. I'm so sorry."
The moonlight caught the thin tracks trailing down his cheeks. She wiped the wetness away with her thumb. His lashes clung in clumps as he saw the house as it truly was: years of detritus and debris strewn on the floors, ancient wallpaper dangling from the walls in mildewed strips and the moth-eaten curtains rotting off rusting rods. Just an old, abandoned house; not a home. Not his home.
"...Loki." His voice shook with a cocktail of rage and sorrow.
Natasha nodded. "He did it to punish us. To torture you when you remembered the truth and..." She swallowed thickly to keep her voice even. "And to take you away from me."
"Is that why you took my P30? You think I'm going to blow my brains out."
She let his blunt words glance off her but held him tighter as he voiced the worry that had shouted at her wordlessly for the entire duration of her breathless pursuit.
"Fuck," he declared, realizing that he had been considering it, "thanks, but I'm ok." He hauled himself up and paced the length of the creaking porch; trying to pull the false memories out like broken teeth. His boot scraped across a protruding nail head and he remembered teaching Cooper how to remove a rusted nail without tearing up the surrounding wood by pulling out this exact one and replacing it. The image of his son's intent face as he absorbed this simple lesson slammed Clint so hard in the gut he had to brace on the railing for support. After fighting the wave of nausea and tilting vertigo, his world fully righted itself and the false reality became so clearly that: false.
With the spell broken, it was easy to sort the fabricated memories and the reconstructed ones from the true events. The fake ones popped like soap bubbles when he reached for them. At the thought of that metaphor, a memory of his children playing upstairs in the claw foot tub, foamy soap stacked to make elaborate hairstyles and asymmetrical beards on their little faces, rose up in his mind and then shattered at Lila's joyful cry of "Daddy!" That single moment snagged in his chest before it, too, evaporated.
Maybe it was a good thing Tasha took his gun. He ached for the weight of it, for the tension of the bowstring, for the pressure of his quiver across his chest and his holster on his thigh.
As it all crushed back, it became obvious; the amount of time he spends in New York and on missions... "How have I even been functioning?" he asked.
"As nearly as I can tell, you wake up some days with a memory of a week or two spent here, usually right before or after a mission so you never seem to notice the chronological impossibility."
"So, all of you have known. How long?" His voice took on a confrontational edge and she remained crouched in the doorway as he paced.
"Fury and I knew right away. The others," she cleared her throat, "... just after Ultron."
"How did that work... I brought them all here. I fucking remember that like it was yesterday. If not here, where?"
"We did come here. I was so messed up, I didn't realize where you were bringing us until it was too late. I expected you to lose it, but you were... fine." She looked to see if he bristled at the implication that he was not fine now, but it was clear that he was not.
"You brought us all here and we regrouped—the upstairs is in better shape, so we were able to stay here. You never mentioned Laura or the kids. You just said it was a safehouse. Fury met us here and we..." She shrugged and brushed a lock of hair from her face as he gestured that he understood and to continue.
"And then a few weeks later, you started talking about your wife getting Tony to fix your tractor and your son following Steve around and Thor letting your daughter brush his hair. I... I didn't know what to make of it." He looked incredulous, shoulders tense and his white knuckles threatening to crush the old railing.
"Wanda thinks that her powers may have interrupted the spell," she continued, "or that your brain knew that you couldn't fall apart because the rest of us already had, so you didn't. She wasn't there, obviously, so no one really knows. We can't explain it and we couldn't dig into without you knowing the truth."
"Why am I still on the team? How can you, any of you, trust me knowing that he is STILL fucking with my head?" Frustration and despair started to coalesce into anger at anyone complicit in this charade. "You've just been riding it out. Waiting for this moment? Why?"
Say it, she thought, he needs to know...
"You've all just been humoring me?" he accused, "you all smile and nod when I talk about my non-existent family?"
"You don't talk about them. Not to anyone but... me." Her voice nearly cracked at the last word and he regarded her, his confusion so comical she wanted to punch him.
"But…. you and Bruce?"
"Fucking-A, Clint," she laughed without mirth. "I think you came up with that to explain why I withdrew from you so much."
"You seemed so sad..." she looked at him miserably. "Oh…." he whispered and the last bits of memory clicked into place.
"You loved your wife and family. Not me. You forgot me. You were still here, but you were...gone." She placed a shaking hand on his arm, taking comfort in his solid presence. The second part of her explanation finally penetrated the cloud of his own pain:
'Loki did it to punish us... To take you away from me.'
"Oh, Tasha, I'm so sorry. I'm back. I'm here." He finally saw her and the stark reflection of his own loss in her eyes. "It's over now. I'm sorry. I remember. I remember. I'm here..." He repeated these professions like a mantra as he gathered her in and held tightly.
Her face flushed and she pursed her mouth against the words she knew she should say, but she couldn't. Not again. Not then. She just couldn't do it.
He studied her and noted the uncertainty in her eyes. Decidedly, he kissed her, cupping her face and pretending not to notice the brimming, unshed tears.
She shifted her weight as she eased off the clutch and onto the deserted highway. Her thighs ached with the urgency of their reunion and her skin felt pleasantly sensitive even a few hours after she had disentangled her legs from his.
Clint dropped into a deep sleep as soon as he climbed into the passenger seat and still slumbered, emotionally-exsanguinated. Making love in the back of the converted government-issue SUV shouldn't have been as erotic or as stupidly tender as that but she relished the stolen moment with him. She released the gear shift and rested her hand on his thigh. He grunted and covered her hand with his and slept on.
The sun rose over the farm lands, burning off the mist and speckling the dew on spring buds with bursts of gold. Clint stirred as more cars join them on the road. He blinked around, stretched, saw her and smiled at his friend. "Morning. That was too short a visit, but at least I finished up the nursery. I'm glad you could see it. What did you think? Laura wants to move Nathaniel in there next week."
Her heart sank; she didn't even get four hours with him. Seventeen times she'd been through this and it hurt just as much as the first time. Each time she picked up the pieces, it got harder, knowing that the spell would soon take him again. Each revelation was the first and only time for him, but its cumulative effect on her was a vice at her throat.
Clint rooted around in the console for a bottle of water and a protein bar and continued, "I know what I need to do. A treehouse! Cooper's always wanted one. Do you think the oak in the back pasture is too far from the house? And I still haven't finished Lila's dollhouse. I was going to paint it white like the farmhouse but now I'm thinkin' blue. What do you think, Nat?"
Natasha fumbled her oversize sunglasses over her eyes to hide the twitch of emotion and forced her lips to smile. He did not notice the defensive change in her posture. That alone would have been enough to let her know the veil had already settled over him; Clint—her Clint—was ever attuned to her body language, the slightest shift communicating more than her words ever did. Laura's husband blithely ignored her body in almost every way imaginable.
She steadied her voice and answered, "I think blue would be perfect."
TBC