"Someone's given the academy recruits a scavenger hunt."
"Huh?" He was listening, he really was, but the ice cream is running down his hand and he hates that sticky ice cream feeling so he's focusing on working the angles so it doesn't run down his sleeve.
Natasha pulls out her smart phone, punches a few buttons and then holds it out in front of him, clearly not trusting him to keep it lactose free.
On the screen is a photo of a list, neatly typed in SHIELD font (Yes SHIELD has it's own font. Clint thinks someone needs to give marketing more coloring-in books to keep them busy).
He rattles off a few dot points. "Two unusual locations Dr Ames has performed surgery. One schematic drawing signed by Master Technician Klein (originals only). Photographic or video evidence of Agent Hand in the lunchroom. Photographic or video evidence of Agent Sitwell in the gym. Huh!" Clint snorts at that but does a double take when he sees a small tick beside the dot point.
"They told him Carter was running an intro yoga class." Natasha fills in. Clint shakes his head. Yoga pants will be that man's undoing.
"What is this, the world's worst game of Clue: SHIELD Edition? I'll take Hill in her office with the crazy, thanks." He licks the last bit of ice cream out of the cone and then discards the wafer in a nearby bin, regretting that he didn't have the foresight to grab a napkin in anticipation of his sugar-induced state.
His partner eyes him with contempt. "If you're not going to eat the cone, why not order it in a cup?"
"Because they fit more into the cone and it's cheaper. Better value."
Even if his hand is now attracting flies.
Natasha pulls an anti-bacterial wipe from her pocket and tosses it to him. Aw, Tasha, you've always got my back. He gives her shoulder a bump in thanks.
"Hill has asked them to be a little more subtle about it in future." She presses a button on her phone and then returns it to her jacket. A moment later he feels his own phone vibrate with the picture message.
"Well" he says, pulling out his map of the Nuremberg Animal Park. "The first item on our scavenger hunt is…monkeys."
They don't end up near the monkeys though because Clint's German isn't great and he refuses to give Natasha the map. Natasha, it's part of my learning process. Instead they end up near the birds…. and he swears its a coincidence.
They take their seats in a small amphitheater with a dozen other tourists and sit through a parade of various avian species. His partner is silent by his side and he's not sure if Natasha is actually interested in hearing about the standard diet of a snowy owl, or still a little pissed about his map reading skills.
"This is ok, right?" he asks. It's kind of a funny question because he knows his partner and she wouldn't be at the Nuremberg Animal Park if she didn't want to be at the Nuremberg Animal Park.
They are technically on some SHIELD sponsored downtime or as Fury had put it, 'You both have so many days accrued you are now legitimate financial liabilities. Stop giving payroll a heart attack and take the damn days.'
So they had finished an assignment in Stuttgart that was really just a very elaborate dead drop and decided to stay a few more days in Germany. Clint won't tell Nat that he thinks it's actually one of their esteemed leaders better ideas. He doesn't really want the time off but she's been acting a little strange lately, as if she can't switch off after a mission.
"It's fine. It was your turn to pick." He'd let her drag him to a museum yesterday but for all his sulking it hadn't really been that bad. He'd even walked away with a mini-catapult that doubled as a pencil sharpener. Coulson was going to hate it.
To his surprise, Natasha's hand briefly finds his and squeezes before returning to rest by her side.
It's a simple gesture, one she could easily pass off as playing at a cover they haven't bothered to establish, but Clint knows. There's no job today, no need for deception and so every touch or gesture is just Natasha. He likes that. Confident she's not planning some terrible revenge plot for his itinerary choices, he settles in to watch the show.
He can't hold back his grin when the handler on stage finally brings out what he was waiting to see. It's a very impressive bald eagle and if Clint was feeling a little patriotic at the sight then he was going to forgive himself. The bird spreads its wings and completes a full circle of the amphitheater and the archer momentarily loses himself in the feeling of awe.
It doesn't go unnoticed. "Come on" Natasha whispers when the demonstration finishes. She tugs on his sleeve to get him to follow and he does so without question.
They move to the side of the stage where she approaches the bird handler, a young man with short-cropped blonde hair, blue eyes and muscles that threaten to burst from his shirt. His pupils dilate as he sees Natasha draw near.
Natasha and the German poster boy converse a little, and maybe it's just Clint's imagination if he thinks her hand rests on his arm a few seconds too long, her voice dips just a bit lower than normal.
Finally, as Clint begins to wonder if he has time to go get more ice cream, Natasha looks at him and waves him across. The German model parading as a bird handler gives him a once over before handing him a leather glove and ducking back behind the stage, just as Clint realizes what is going on.
"How'd you get him to agree?" He asks before he can stop himself, because it was very obvious how. Is it possible to have a delayed onset brain freeze from his ice cream?
"I told him I'd come back tomorrow without you."
"Oh," he says, aiming for casual, "are you?" And yes, definitely a delayed onset brain freeze.
Natasha gives him a look that's a little bit surprised and a little bit pissed off. "I've got tickets to the Hamburg Ballet tomorrow. Two tickets. Unless you'd like to be somewhere else?"
"I like the ballet." Clint lies and ignores the feeling in his chest that feels a lot like relief.
The German Abercrombie ad reappears with the eagle and Clint feels the rush of excitement in his fingers, the kind of childish enthusiasm that hasn't touched him in years. When they make the exchange, the eagle's talons bite through the glove, sharp and powerful. It was larger than he expected but deceptively light. Its weight was perfectly balanced, moving in sync with the tremors of his arm, like an arrow made real. The bird spread its wings and yeah, okay, now he was enjoying his time off.
"Say cheese," Natasha calls and holds up her phone. Clint grins like a kid with too much teeth.
"Photographic evidence of Agent Barton with an item related to his call sign."
"I'm on the list?"
"You're on the list," she confirms. He really should read the rest of that list.
He does so outside of the snow leopard exhibit while the animal itself is pawing despairingly at the glass trying to eat the squirrel on the other side. The squirrel seems blissfully unaware of its good fortune.
"Can I ask what Hill was thinking with this scavenger hunt business?" he says, dragging the image back up on his phone.
Natasha stretches before parking herself down on a bench to watch the snow leopard whine some more. Such a majestic creature.
"It's an idea she got from that Harvard seminar she attended. I believe she was particularly taken with a discussion about the use of unstructured learning to further develop cognitive competencies in talented individuals with regards to highly specific skill acquisition."
…Clint has to consult his inner thesaurus on that one.
"So like, wax on, wax off?" Clint asks and gets an impassive stare in response. What really, how has she missed this?
"Aw, Nat, no! Next movie night we are watching the Karate Kid and you will take notes!"
He can see her eyes roll behind her sunglasses.
"It's not a bad idea in theory," she continues, ignoring his mock outrage. "It'll teach them a little about spy vs spy surveillance, information gathering and introduce them to their superior officers."
"Yeah, if someone doesn't kill them for sticking their nose in where it doesn't belong." He's scrolling through the list when a familiar name catches his eye.
"You've read this right?" He asks. And he knows of course she's read it all but he also knows she'll see the real question behind what he just said.
"We discussed the merits of my inclusion on the list." Natasha shrugs a shoulder, "Hill feels my work with some of our colleagues is being disrupted by existing perceptions. She suggested the idea as a way to humanize me in the eyes of the other agents."
"Screw the other agents." He says, keeping his tone casual but gripping his phone a little harder than required.
Her apparent acquiescence doesn't stop him frowning at the crisp letters on the screen. Item 24 – Evidence of Agent Romanoff smiling (photo, video or a visual account).
Natasha runs a hand through her hair, pushing out a breath that's not quite a sigh. "When I queried Williams from logistics about that delayed stop over in Moldova, he hyperventilated and passed out. When I consulted with Agent Yori on the Russian hacks to CISBA, I had to stand in the next room while she worked; her fingers trembled so much she kept missing the keys. If a few smiles here and there help them realize that I'm not going to bite their head off for assigning me a window seat then that's not too bad."
Clint makes a face. Sometimes SHIELD feels like a high school for the highly talented but socially inept. "They're professionals, they can get over it," he bites out.
Is this what's got her acting strange? He can't properly put into words what strikes him as just so wrong about it. Probably all of it. But definitely the implication that who she is right now, isn't human enough. So he tells her. "You're human. You don't need to smile all the time to prove it."
She shakes her head just a little and he half expects a lecture on why he has no right to be angry about her situation. He has that lecture memorized. But when she looks at him, eyes hidden behind tinted lenses, he knows it's something different. "What's wrong, you don't like my smile?"
Maybe the question is supposed to lighten the mood but her voice is too low, the same one she used on the bird handler earlier in the day. When she turns to look at him, Clint sees the Black Widow, abandoning her observation of the snow leopard to flash him a smile that he knows is fake. He knows, because he's seen the real thing and it's infinitely better.
He thinks about seeing that fake smile too often back at base. About being on the receiving end of it here, when it's just supposed to be them, Clint and Natasha, with no mark or mission to play.
Screw the other agents.
He crosses the distance between them with sure steps. She doesn't flinch, doesn't question him when he resettles her sunglasses on top of her head. His eyes find hers, green eyes that were open and honest and Natasha.
The Black Widow can smile all she wants but Natasha doesn't need to be humanized. Clint knows, he's known from the moment blue eyes met green, that Natasha is devastatingly human. But maybe she needs to know that too.
"I like your smile." He tells her. "I liked the one yesterday at the museum when you saw the Degas painting. I liked the smile you had when that old lady asked me for directions and you just let her even though you knew I couldn't understand a word she was saying. The one you get when there's real tea in the cafeteria, not the cheap bagged stuff. The dangerous one that comes when you get behind the wheel of a sports car. Even the one you have when you laugh at your own bad jokes. I like all those smiles."
His eyes don't leave hers and he lets his words hang in the space between them. If she wants a rational reason on why she shouldn't play the game, something logical with lots of polysyllabic words and researched based evidence like that of Hill's Harvard seminar, well he can't give her that. He can only give her what he knows to be true, what he feels is right. And hope it's enough.
It's a long minute before she responds.
"My jokes are funny," her voice is quiet but she leans into his space just a little bit. He feels the tension roll from his shoulders.
"You keep telling yourself that." The corners of her lips turn just a little and she makes to punch him but she telegraphs the whole thing so he catches her hand and tugs.
"Come on," he says and he can't help but grin, "we're getting more ice cream, in a cup, and then I've saved the best for last."
He leads her through the park, almost all the way back to the entrance.
"Donkeys?" she asks incredulously.
"Donkeys" He nods and leans against the wooden fence post. She takes a moment, as if waiting for him to explain but when he doesn't she rolls with it and mimics his stance with her elbows resting on the fence, leaving her hands free to hold the cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream they had acquired. Clint had to admit; it was a lot less sticky this way.
The donkeys continue to graze, unperturbed by the two assassins.
They stay that way for a while; content to watch some very hairy donkeys meander about the fields. The pleasant silence is only broken by the warning growl Natasha gives when Clint tries to steal the rest of her ice cream.
"Why aren't other agents scared of me?" He wonders out loud, rubbing the knuckle she'd hit with her spoon.
"It's hard to be scared of a man who routinely turns up to mission briefings with his shirt inside out."
"It's the fashion now days, lots of shirts are reversible." He goes for the cup again and this time she doesn't protest. Simply hands it and the spoon over.
"Not the ones with the tags on." She licks her lips and leans back against the fence. "So, why donkeys?"
Clint shrugs; there was no special reason, he kind of just wanted to lighten the mood.
"I like Donkeys. Plenty of them in Afghanistan. Yeah they're not as pretty as horses or as exotic as some of the other animals around here but they're solid and reliable and they get the job done without all the prancing about. They're honest creatures Nat…." he trails off because she looks like she's biting back a laugh.
"What?"
"Projecting much?" She asks and smirks at the indignation that crosses his face.
"Oh, Har-Har" he groans.
"I think you mean He-Haw" And her smirk grows to a full-blown smile at her own joke. He can't help it. With deft fingers he whips out his phone and takes a picture.
"Hey," she growls, still unable to fully remove the smile from her face.
"Photographic evidence of Agent Romanoff being a dork. Now we're even."
Her smile is softer but still there. "You know, you could sell that for good money back at base."
"Probably could." But he has no intention of it and she knows it. He leans back on the fence and he feels her relax at his side.
"Hey Clint"
"Hmmm?"
"I like the donkeys too."