"The world has changed, and none of us can go back.
All we can do is our best, and sometimes,
the best that we can do is to start over."
- Peggy Carter in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
It all felt very familiar, well, at least to her. A little past twelve midnight, standing on a quiet street in the rain, a kaleidoscope of fluorescent colors from neon banners staining the slick tar surface.
She could recall the ache in her feet, from all the running that she'd done. The heaviness in her chest, from whatever she'd been attempting to run from. The cautiousness in her manner, when she had felt his presence like a change in the air, a presence that made her hairs stand and her fingers ball up into white-knuckled fists. He hadn't drawn his weapon when she had turned around to face him, but she remembered having a steady hand on hers.
Clint had used to remark that she had been like a deer in the headlights, when they had first met.
Jesus, she was beginning to forget the sound of his voice, how the words had sounded like on his lips, from his throat; it'd been two years since he'd vanished into thin air, after all. Two years since she had brokenly assumed that he was gone too.
She remembered weeping quietly to herself over the fact that the last time they had spoken to each other before the fateful event, they hadn't talked about anything important. In fact, all she had done was chide him over his rookie mistake of eating way too many barbecued chicken — a belly wasn't going to mend the bitterness he carried within him over the house arrest.
Of course, barbecued chicken was good for the kids because they loved it, but it was much less so for him.
But she hadn't said she missed him, missed seeing him, missed teaming up with him — all of which she did, especially after being on the run for two years. She hadn't apologized for hitting him a little too hard in the airport in Leipzig. She hadn't told him to kiss the kids for her, didn't even say she missed them too.
But there Clint stood now, barely recognizable, the sole to his boots drenched with rainwater and fresh blood pooling from his mark. Middle of the street at midnight, fingers gripped firmly around the handle to his blade, ready for a reckoning.
Natasha would have spoken up. She should have.
The archer had eased her then-rabid mind by dishing out a dad joke, before introducing himself on a first name basis. She remembered her limbs freezing into place, not that the night had been cold back then, but from absolute fear. A coldness in her blood that the man had very quickly helped to warm up.
She remembered his offer, one he had made by pushing damp hair out of his face with one hand, and extending the other out to her, beckoning her to take it. To let him help her. To let him guide her out of the dark, angry, anxiety and death-ridden corner that she had been backed into for far too long. To let him take her to shelter, from the cold and from the rain.
To let him bring her home.
Natasha had had so much blood on her hands, so much red colored into her existence, and she recalled how he hadn't cared one bit. How it didn't matter, not to him. She had been so full of violent, erratic colors meant to scare and deceive, and Clint had been colorblind. And so she had let him.
Standing there now, in the rain, the assassin could see their roles in reverse. A man with a reputation so dirty that even the Yakuza daren't cross him, and instead warmly welcomed him into their ranks as an ally. The man with blood stained across the surface of his blood, drenched up his dark leather sleeves to his elbows. A man so angry, so violent, so dark, so... broken.
They were the best of friends, and she nearly didn't recognize him.
Dread was beaten into his back, and he carried himself like weights had been strung around the back of his neck, resulting in a slight hunch. She wondered long and hard, if this was how Clint had found her, all those years ago? With her small frame struggling to carry the full weight of her sins?
And then he must have felt the air change, or rather, the lack thereof. Natasha had stood calm and firm as he had sharpened his blade across his steel wrist guard, probably not something one would normally do. And so he felt it, the stillness in her manner to match the adrenaline in his, and so he stilled too.
She watched as he straightened out the hunch broken into his back. She watched as he pulled the mask from over the top of his head. She watched his hair dampen in the rain, and that same faint brush of his hand across his forehead, to push the hair from his now-damp face.
Then, he looked at her, wide-eyed and suspended in space and time — like he was a deer, and her presence was a pair of headlights in his path.
The blonde mustered the courage to look into his eyes, and spent the long seconds — where they had their gazes locked — worrying about who was going to be staring right back. She wouldn't know how to react, if there was nobody at home. And that was exactly what she was met with when their eyes met.
Clint had once told her a knock-knock joke, back when she was just freshly inducted into SHIELD. It had started off as a joke, an almost funny one at that, and then it had ended off as an offhanded remark about how it always seemed like the lights were off with her. Emotionally unavailable, scarily present in person yet absent behind the eyes, like her body was a vessel and the vessel was vacant.
He had called her out and said that he feared what it meant, and she had gotten overly defensive, and that was their very first major tiff. And he had been right.
It was scary, indeed. And Natasha was a woman of many feats, her bravery being one of them these days, and her fearlessness being another, but there she stood, fingers trembling with small panic. She adjusted the grip of her fingers around the handle of her umbrella, and felt the spray of rainwater against her face.
She had stared right into the abyss with a straight face so many times before, but none of that ever felt the way it did to stare into the void behind his eyes. Crescent shadows colored the bags beneath his eyes, a gauntness in the hollow of his cheekbones to match. He looked like he hadn't eaten, hadn't slept for years.
The blonde cracked her lips apart, attempting to speak once more. How are you? Stupid question. Are you okay? Obviously not. What happened? The fact that she was here meant that deep down, she already knew.
Do you remember me?
She was afraid to know the answer. Perhaps he was so far gone that he'd left all of their history behind. After all, he did leave her behindwhen the world imploded, and he didn't have the mind to come back. So she pressed her lips back together, tightened it into a single taut line, and she watched him quietly.
They weren't that far apart, but not too close either, maybe eight feet. And so, with every step he took towards her, Natasha could see the gears churning out thought after thought, after thought of afterthoughts in his head. She could see the caution he put into each careful step, his boots crunching and splashing against moist gravel, his feet rolling from heel to ball to toe.
It was as if he was trying to prolong each step, stretching out the time needed to put one foot in front of the other. It was like he was making time for himself, so as to pull himself together and get his head set straight in a game that she didn't know they were playing.
Was he scared of her, like she had been scared of him all those years ago? Was he going to attack her, like she had been planning to back then? What would he do, if he didn't remember?
What would she do, if he didn't remember her?
Natasha wasn't a stranger to dark places — bouts of grief and anger and despair that left her reeling in a pain so great, so intense, that she thought she would've snapped. She did snap. She had snapped. She could recall how odd but fitting it felt to stop feeling like a person, in a world she didn't understand, and how easy it had been to dehumanize the person next to her too.
Because how could anyone live so humanly and humanely in a world that took and took and took, and never explained why?
She had struggled with that in the past, and found herself questioning the very same thought as of late. Clint had once told her that that was just how the world worked, and that it owed no one an explanation. If she had gotten his story straight, he must have questioned his own beliefs, lost a part of himself that helped him believe, and that must have led to how they both ended up here in the middle of an empty street in Japan, in the pouring rain at midnight.
So what would she do, if she found out that he had snapped and fallen that far? She didn't know. Her partner was always the one with all the answers, and she was always the one who only acted like she knew everything.
She would stand there, maybe, as he looked past her like she was an object he barely remembered. She would grieve, surely, because losing him to the decimation would have been a thousand times less painful than losing him to himself.
Perhaps she would cry, and have a drink, and then maybe she would have to learn to move on.
Natasha felt the prickling of hot tears at the back of her eyes, finding their way to the front. She could feel drops of water on her cheeks, but she couldn't tell if they were the rain or her own tears. Probably the rain.
And in those few moments, she didn't realize just how far she had let her mind run. Her cryptic fears and her anxieties were getting the better of her recently, and her head was beginning to run out of ground to race on.
She pressed the pad of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, fighting away the rest of the tears that burned at the corners of her eyelids. She would've blinked them away, but there was something about staring into the void of his storm-colored eyes that spoke to her to not look away. Like deep down, she was waiting for a miracle to happen, and that if she blinked, then she would've miss it.
By now, they were nearly toe to toe.
Clint's grip around his blade hadn't relaxed, but his jaw had. His mouth went lax, his two front teeth scratching loosely against the flesh on the inside of his bottom lip, like he was about to say something. Maybe even test her name on his lips, to see if it still felt familiar to him.
Her eyes drifted downwards to observe the bare movement of his lips, and when nothing came, her gaze traveled back to his eyes.
She had missed it, the shift. What once had been a void was now materializing into something more comfortable to her, and visibly less comfortable for the poor man.
Clint recognized her, she was sure of it. His hardened eyes had finally softened to the sight of her. The tension in his form had left from beneath his skin, and his muscles had defaulted into utter defeat. His breathing quickened, then slowed, then seemed like they wanted to stop altogether.
And then, with a glint in his eye from the shame that colored his manner, and a quivering bottom lip, the man looked like he was about to cry.
The former archer wasn't one for tears, and her knowledge of that only made the sight of him hurt so much more; the last time he'd wept was on his wedding day, and the last time he had collapsed into an absolute blubbering mess was when he'd held his first child for the very first time.
On pure, unbridled instinct, Natasha held an outstretched hand out to him, the way he had done for her the first time, and then so many times after.
She watched as he stared at it, worried herself that he wouldn't take it, reassured herself that he would, her eyes pleading for him to meet her halfway. She watched on as he looked away. She watched — in painful silence — as droplets of rain caught themselves on the eyelashes to his downcast eyes, and as the drops pelted onto and rolled off his cheeks.
That man didn't grab back.
Until, he did.
And the blonde breathed a sigh of relief as she tightened her grip around his. It warmed her, to know he was there. Maybe if she held on tight enough this time around, he wouldn't disappear from the cracks between her fingers again.
And then she pulled him in. And she guided him into the shelter of her umbrella and into the warmth of her arms. And the blood from his sleeves didn't matter one bit as it rubbed off onto her skin.
And finally, after two long years, six thousand miles, and a world of difference between them, he let her bring him home.
More chapters ahead. Comments & suggestions are super duper welcome! Cheers! xx