This was supposed to be a PWP, but then the feels exploded, and the characters just would not cooperate. Alas!
Once again, if you're looking for all my Avengers fic, you won't be able to find it here. Check out my Ao3 (archiveofourown dot org slash users slash sidhera) or my Tumblr (tumblr dot com slash sidhera).
This one is for all the wonderful people who have read and reviewed all my stories up until now. Thank you so much for your support as I get back into fic - it means the world to me! Love you all!
Enjoy, and do let me know what you think!
Natasha was laughing, a bubbly, delighted sound that rang through the air, drawing the attention of most of the people in the room. It was a rare delight to hear that sound from her, a bit of music that she reserved almost exclusively for the job.
It wasn't that she was humorless, Clint knew, far from it. She made him laugh like no other ever had, ever could, their shared experience making for what Stark deemed a maddening number of in-jokes. But hers was a cutting, pointed wit, one that took time to learn, and her reactions were those where a slight quirk of the lips meant the same as someone else's riotous guffaw. Natasha did not laugh like this when she was free to be herself, did not react to the antics and wisecracks of others anything like she was doing now.
She was captivating when she did, though, and she was well aware of that fact and used it to her advantage in the field. He often thought that the greatest part of her natural reticence was the desire to slip out of focus, to fade into the background and simply observe rather than be observed. Not tonight though, tonight she was hard at work, all Black Widow and no Natasha, sauntering around a ballroom on towering heels, vodka in hand.
She was beautiful, bewitching, and a thousand other adjectives inadequate to the task of capturing the primal pull she exuded. He loved watching her at work, loved watching as she charmed men out of their pants and their secrets, and then left them gasping in the lurch as she walked away, carefree and victorious. She was the epitome of the femme fatale, a siren who lured her targets in with false promises and a dazzling face, and took them for everything they were worth. She was peerless and splendid, competent and deadly, and had he looked a thousand years, he would never find a better partner or friend.
Tonight, Natasha had come to the party on the arm of one Bogdan Popovic, Serbian national and close friend of the man throwing the bash, a man who not so coincidentally was a prominent commander in one of the major branches of the Serbian mafia in Belgrade. The party was not in Belgrade, however, but New York, so of course Stark had been invited, and despite the fact that there was a fair to middling chance that this evening would end in bloodshed, Pepper Potts was there with him, draped in French silk and working the crowd just as expertly, if somewhat differently than Natasha herself.
Clint, of course, wasn't there with anyone at all, but had gained entrance to the building as a member of the wait staff, though he'd ditched the nametag the second he was unobserved. Sipping from a flute of champagne, he stuck to the edges of the room, on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary, anything that meant Natasha's cover was blown or Stark had managed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Natasha giggled again, leaned into the side of her date, and shifted her head toward Popovic's mouth to better hear whatever he was saying. Popovic's hand sunk lower on Natasha's body as she moved closer to him, and even from across the room Clint could see the man's hand flex on the flesh at Natasha's hip.
Clint swallowed and looked away, scanned the room for Stark while he snatched a canapé off the tray of a passing waiter. He found Tony strutting around the dance floor, twirling Potts dramatically in his arms, and Clint had to force himself not to roll his eyes. Trust the man to force his way to the center of attention no matter where he went. The man had moves though, Clint was forced to admit.
A crowd gathered around the dance floor, all eyes on Tony and Pepper, and Natasha chose that moment to whisper into Popovic's ear once more, then led him off down a side hallway. Clint followed, walking nonchalantly around the room, taking up a position near the corridor in case Natasha needed him. Not that she would, but he liked to hedge his bets.
He could hear her flirting with the Serbian over the comms, and one of the lines she fed him made him smirk into his glass; she'd obviously said it for Clint' benefit. During one particularly interminable mission in Southeast Asia, he and Natasha had spent an afternoon trading the most ridiculous come ons and pick up lines they could think of; it always amused him when she broke one out on an unsuspecting mark, and it was even funnier when they actually bought it. She really was amazing.
Tony and Pepper had stepped away from the crowd now, Pepper off to the bathroom and Tony signaling a waiter. Once he had successfully procured another beverage, he made his way over to where Clint stood.
"I don't know how you can stand it," Tony said, finishing off his drink and placing the empty glass on a neighboring table.
Clint already had a pretty good idea of what Stark meant, but he took the bait anyway, keeping an ear on Natasha's conversation in the other room. "Stand what?"
"Just standing by and watching Natasha . . . shake her groove thing." Stark gestured rudely with one hand.
Clint repressed a smile. Stark didn't get it. "She's my partner," he said. "It's what we do."
Stark shrugged, put his hands in his pockets. "All I meant was that I don't think I could sit by and watch someone grope Pepper right in front of me, much less drag her off into a side room."
Clint did chuckle at that. "It's our job."
Stark raised an eyebrow, grabbed another cocktail off a passing tray. "Well, aren't you just a regular old Amelia Bloomer."
Clint chuckled as he started his circuit down the corridor, and Tony elected to follow on his heels, not quite done dogging the topic.
"So where do you get your zen calm about all this? What's your big secret, Hawk man?"
"You know she can hear you, right?" Clint asked.
Tony shrugged. "It's just my natural curiosity, which, I'll have you know, is what keeps you and Mrs. Legolas stocked in arrows and bullets. So, uh, fess up, kid."
Clint shook his head and sighed. "There's no big secret. Honestly," he added when Stark stared disbelieving at him.
"It doesn't get you all worked up watching scum like our Serbian friend run his hands all over her?" They paused briefly in front of a particularly nice copy of the Laocoon group, pretending to analyze its features in case of prying eyes.
And, yes, of course it bothered him, but that was hardly Tony's business. "There just isn't anything I need to get worked up about. Natasha can take care of herself."
Stark scoffed exasperatedly at Clint as they walked back into the main room, then clapped him on the shoulder. "Well, my friend, whatever you're doing, it's obviously working, so, uh, keep up the good work." Then Tony was off, stepping quickly back toward Pepper who was now chatting with a dark haired woman at the other end of the room.
Natasha screamed then, a pathetic sound, and even though he knew she was okay, recognized the scream for the bit of acting that it was, it still took all of his power not to react, to stay where he was and not rush to her aid. If she were really in trouble he would know, she would have given the signal, and a scream, in particular that scream, was not it. Tony and Pepper looked in horror over to Clint and started toward him, but he stopped them with a curt shake of his head, warning them away. They'd been briefed, had seen Natasha in action before, but she was a very good actress, and it was hard to distinguish the line between acting and reality.
Clint heard the slap of skin on skin, and he knew that Popovic had struck her before he yelled, could picture the impact of his hand as it glanced across her face and the way Natasha surely raised her arm in front of her head in a protective gesture. A long silence followed, and Clint's heart briefly stopped in his chest, but then the tables clearly turned because Natasha was using her threatening voice, the one she has used to topple dictator and petty thief alike, and pretty soon, Popovic was babbling away all the important secrets he'd once sworn to protect with his life.
From the sound of it, Natasha had just knocked her date out, having gotten all that she could out of him, and he has watched her do the next bit often enough that he could practically see everything just by listening to the rustling she was making. There was a grunt of exertion (she must be arranging the man on a couch in the room), then the sound of a glass being set down on something wooden (she's sprinkled some of her vodka on the man, an explanation for whoever finds him passed out), a loud click (the door shutting behind her), and the sharp clack of heels on marble (she's walking down the hall). It was like clockwork.
Soon the sounds on his earpiece merged with the sounds of the room around him, and when a slim arm twined itself with his, he wasn't surprised.
"You shouldn't encourage Stark." Natasha took Clint's half-empty glass from his hand and drank the remainder of the warm champagne with a grimace. "Ugh, Barton. Haven't I warned you about drinking this shit?"
Clint smiled at her, the toothy grin he knew she found charming even if she would never admit it. "You know I gotta do something terrible or I would be perfect."
Natasha rolled her eyes theatrically at that, the barest hint of a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. She'd just laid the champagne flute on a waiter's tray when a shout arose from behind them, in the direction of the room where she'd left Popovic.
"Stop her!" Someone shouted in Serbian, and with a little shake of the head in Tony and Pepper's direction, he and Natasha were off.
They made quick time through the ballroom, neatly sidestepping people in their way, and by the time they made it to the stairs, Natasha had lost her shoes and he no longer had his tie. He never liked that particular tie anyway, but he saw some serious shoe shopping in his near future. Natasha hated to lose a good pair of heels.
Six guards surrounded them on their way toward the stairs, big, bulky men, and Clint focused on taking out the two nearest him, leaving the other four for Natasha. By the time he'd taken care of his share, he had just enough time to turn around to see Natasha taking out the last of the goons, flipping the man to the ground with her legs and knocking him out cold. Her hair was a wild halo around her face, slipped from the chignon she'd neatly twisted it into earlier, and she was breathing from her mouth, chest heaving. It took less than a second for each of them to assess that the other was okay and then they were moving again, through the door and into the stairwell.
"Ground floor or roof?" He asked, deferring to her superior knowledge of the building.
She started up the stairs. "Roof. Too many civilians downstairs."
As they ran up the stairs, Clint radioed in for extraction, and he received the confirmation of pick up in ten minutes as they burst out onto the gravel topped roof. Natasha pulled a small device out of god knows where and pointed it at the door as it closed and locked behind them.
"What I wouldn't have given to have one of these in Kiev," she mused aloud. He laughed a little at that, remembering.
"How well does that thing work, anyway?" He asked, checking out the roof for any stray guards. It wasn't that he didn't trust small devices that supposedly scrambled electronic keypads, he just preferred more physical means to his ends.
Natasha tucked the device away and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. "Even assuming they figure out where we are, unless they have something that can cut through steel before the extraction team gets here, we're fine. That door won't open for anything." He wasn't worried; even if they did manage to get someone through the door, Clint had a grappling hook on him and enough rope to get them safely to street level. Worst case, they had to meet the chopper elsewhere.
After he finished securing the perimeter, Clint walked back to where Natasha shivered in the night air.
"Ah, the wonders of Stark tech!" He exclaimed, and Tony's chuckle rumbled over the comms.
"You're welcome. We'll keep 'em busy down here," Tony added, and Clint smirked, knowing precisely how distracting Pepper Potts in a full on rage could be.
Natasha was still trembling when he turned back to her. "Cold?" He asked, already removing his jacket. She nodded her thanks as he settled the coat around her shoulders, then pulled her in closer to him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, then stepped up on top of his feet to keep her stocking-clad feet off the gravel.
"Thanks," she said. Her shaking had mostly stopped at this point, but he still held on to her, happy for the quiet moment after the rush of adrenaline. She leaned into him, her head pressed against his chest, and if they weren't on top of a roof waiting for extraction from a blown mission, maybe this could be one of those perfect moments everyone was always talking about.
Though, he admits, maybe for two people as fucked up as they are, this could be one of those rare moments, a brief glimmering moment where they can just be themselves, Clint and Natasha, Natasha and Clint, clinging to each other on a rooftop.
He could hear faint music through the comms, just barely, playing in the background underneath the tirade Pepper was launching into, berating the host for not providing adequate security for his gathering.
And because he didn't have enough of these perfect moments in his life, he seized the opportunity that presented itself to him and started swaying, rocking back and forth to the beat of the music. Natasha lifted her head from his chest to look up at him, eyebrow raised and an exasperated look on her face, the special look Natasha reserved just for him, the one that said, "You're an idiot, Barton."
But she didn't pull away or tell him to stop, just put her head back down and steadied herself against him as they swayed, and for a few minutes it was just them, dancing on a rooftop.
He was never sure what to call this thing between them, this deep, abiding trust that grew from less than nothing, this thing that everyone knew about, but the two of them tried to keep private anyway. Maybe it was an attempt to have something special, just for themselves or maybe they just didn't want to listen to stupid questions that didn't have good answers. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was theirs and neither of them relished the thought of sharing it with anyone else.
It was out of that need that they broke apart when they heard the beat of the helicopter blades, though he noticed she still kept his jacket on for the ride back, silently daring the men inside to question her.
Fury wanted them back at SHIELD headquarters immediately for debriefing, and neither one of them bothered to fight it. Putting Fury on hold always led to unpleasantness, and it was frankly easier not to fight it.
They ended up cooling their heels in the conference room for twenty minutes until Tony and Pepper arrived; apparently Fury had something on Stark good enough to haul his ass across town on a Friday night for a simple debriefing.
Fury's questioning was simple, straight forward, and between the four of them and Pepper's not so subtle nudges, they ran through the entire operation in under thirty minutes. Natasha's interrogation techniques, as ever, had been successful, and with a little luck, one more gun trafficker would be out of business by the week's end. With a thank you and a promise to return the next day secured, Fury sent them home.
Stark's limo was waiting outside, and the group rode back to the tower in relative silence, worn out from the evening. They took the elevator up the tower together, Pepper and Tony exiting on the floor below Natasha's, but when the doors opened on her floor, Natasha just let them slide back closed.
The doors chimed and opened once more, Clint's floor, and Natasha grabbed his hand and led him out of the elevator into his darkened flat. He could see the last of her masks fall off as she padded back toward his bedroom, he could see the tension slip out of her shoulders and her gait adjust ever so slightly, the way it always did when it was just the two of them.
She wasn't charming or fake with him, and she did not giggle or simper or shake her hips to catch his attention. She was just Natasha, marred and perfect in her ripped stockings and torn dress, and when she stopped inside the threshold of his room to press herself against him, she was a little too cold against his body, and smelled like a strange blend of perfume, vodka, and sweat.
She was perfect.
He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, as if there were nothing else in the world that mattered, and perhaps that was true. By the time he came up for air, they were both panting and clutching at each other's clothing and he wanted her so keenly he ached.
Without speaking, they took a step back, stripped out of their clothing, and Natasha left the small arsenal she'd had strapped to her person on the table by his bed. When she turned back to him, naked and open, he saw the bruises, dark blemishes forming on her skin, the promise of turning technicolor before fading. He could see the outline of a hand, Popovic's, on her waist, a reminder of what she went through to get the information for Fury.
Once, long ago, the sight would have sent him into a fit, angry at SHIELD, the mark, the universe, but over time he had learned to accept it, knew she would suffer that and countless other things if it meant wiping her ledger clean. He understood that, respected it. She didn't shrug it off or shy away or try to hide the marks from him, she just stared right back, watched him as he pressed his lips to the fingerprints on her skin.
They were both tired, stretched thin, so when they climbed into bed there was no time for foreplay, he just laid on his side and drew her against him with her back against his chest. He entered her slowly, feeling her walls quiver as they stretched to accommodate him and when he was fully inside of her, he paused, asked if she was okay.
She rolled a little bit onto her back and twisted one hand behind his head in reply, dragging his mouth down to hers, rolling her hips and encouraging him to move. He slid his hand up from her hip then, massaged her breasts with the calloused tips of his fingers, and it didn't take much to have her thrusting back against him with all the force he was directing into her. He could feel her start to come, felt her muscles tense as he watched her eyes flutter closed, and he hugged her closer to him, caressed her face while she spasmed around him, crying out.
He kept thrusting, slowly, purposefully, drawing out the tremors as they slowed, but then he pulled out and rolled her onto her back. Knowing what he was after, she spread her thighs for him, hitched her legs up around his waist, used the strength there to pull him closer. Clint reached down to guide himself into her, and hissed at the sensation of her enveloping him so completely. They didn't often fall into this position, but when they did, he never lasted long, loving the way it felt to have her ankles hooked around his back and her fingernails biting into his shoulders, loving the intimacy of moving in and out of her face to face, kissing her, watching the play of expressions on her face. She met him thrust for thrust, panting, and even though he knew she wasn't going to come again, she let him know how good he felt by her vocalizations, heady, breathy pants from deep within her chest. Almost without warning, his orgasm washed over him, shorted out his brain, and he shouted her name against her lips while he pumped into her and he swore he saw stars behind his eyes.
Maybe they'll talk about Popovic tomorrow, maybe they'll drink coffee together. Or, just as likely, maybe she'll be gone when he wakes up, already in the gym. But for now, he simply pulled the blanket up over them, and held her close. They'll cross that bridge when they come to it.