A/N: This was written originally for a prompt meme over on tumblr, but became a oneshot of sorts in itself.
Any feedback is always greatly appreciated!
He gives in before her, but it is only because she is stubborn to her very core. She'd outwait time itself if she was trying to prove a point, and he has learnt that the hard way. He does his best to wait it out too, is far better with the heat than she is, but his shirt is quite literally sticking to him, and while he can't imagine the temperature outside being much cooler, he has to escape the close heat of their two-man tent.
It is around one in the morning when he quietly unzips the tent door and slips outside as silently as possible, not that she could possibly be asleep in this heat. She hates warm weather, is a child of the angry, icy winters of Russia, had known snow so deep it almost swallowed whole landscapes, and had cowered from winds that howled so loudly that even the wolves were afraid to raise their voices against it.
They're a couple of miles out of Mocoa, the two of them forced to make an emergency exit from the city when they'd been made by a drug cartel they were supposed to be tracking, and they'd run quite literally for the hills, through dense forestland, barely looking over their shoulders and stopping only once they were certain they'd lost their tail. Neither of them knew how they'd been found, but they could tell from his tone of voice that Coulson had wanted to kill them almost as much as the drug lords had when they checked in with him on the sat-phone later, and Clint suspected their delayed extraction wasn't quite a coincidence.
They'd trekked around with little real direction until they'd found a semi-decent spot to set up camp for the night, pitching a tent they'd hoped not to have to use amongst a thicket and atop a slight incline. It wasn't ideal, but it was sheltered enough, and the surrounding scenery was beautiful, even if he he'd rather not think too much about the possible venomous snake and spider population out here as he settles himself down on the slope, head underneath his arms, happier now that he is outside in the fresh air, even if it is still stiflingly hot and humid outside.
It takes only about fifteen minutes before he hears movement to his right, and she emerges from the tent, hair slightly tousled.
"You know, something will probably kill you if you stay out here too long," she tells him in hushed tones, and he snorts softly.
"Yeah. I can think of at least one," he says, raising his eyes up to meet her own pointedly. She rolls her eyes at him, biting back half a smile.
"I mean, I was thinking more pit vipers, tarantulas, or dengue fever but yeah, there's always that," she tells him as she joins him on the ground, lying down beside him, nudging him with her shoulder gently.
"With how hot it was in there, I'm gonna take my chances for five minutes," he tells her with an awkward shrug, and she hums her agreement.
They lay in silence for a moment, peering up at the night sky between the canopies of leaves above them, the branches swaying in the warm breeze. The smell of frangipanis rides on the air as the light winds waft around them, and the sweet smell mingles with the sour tang of gunpowder that clings to her clothes. He breathes it in as he stares up at the sky above him, a deep indigo carpet, so dark it was almost black, and dusted liberally with bright yellow stars, so clear and vivid it nearly took his breath away.
"One of those is Orion, right?" he asks, not really expecting an answer, but she responds anyway.
"Yeah, but it's further over there, look," she tells him, following his eye-line to where he's staring, presumably, at an entirely different constellation. Of course Natasha Romanoff, ex-KGB assassin, SHIELD agent, spy extraordinaire, and secret occasional knitting enthusiast (he'd been sworn to secrecy over that latter, was bound by his word and the fear that Nat had probably already killed a man with a singular knitting needle) would also be an amateur astronomer.
This is all but confirmed when raises her hand to point out Orion to him.
"Wait so which one was that?" he asks, gesturing to the one he'd initially misidentified.
"Uh," he watches as her eyes dart from side to side as she gets her bearings, "Taurus, I think. Yeah, that's Taurus", she points again, "doesn't really look much like Orion," she tells him slyly and he jabs at her with his elbow. "And look that there," she traces a long line of stars that zigzag out across the sky, "that's Eridanus."
He nods, staring up at the two constellations with her in silence, both of them watching as the odd shooting star passes by.
Finally he asks, "do you know any others?"
"I think so," she replies after a pause, eventually pointing out Perseus, and then Gemini. He has known Nat for nearly five years, but had no idea that she knew so much about constellations until tonight. He loves that, loves that he still finds out new things about her all the time, both the good and the bad. He wonders if they aren't all mixed into one now anyway. He takes every new snippet of information for what it is; a sign that she trusts him with another piece of the puzzle she has cut herself into. He doesn't think for a second that he'll ever get to hold every piece, is close to certain that no one at all will, but he is happy to take what she offers him and guard it closely. He has amassed a fair collection by now too, one that he is proud to cherish and put together, arranging the pieces and calling the resultant creation 'Natasha'.
"I never learnt the names of them all," he tells her with another awkward shrug. "But I always used to stare at the stars for hours when I was a kid. Before my – before me and Barney ended up at the circus, I'd creep out of my window and lie out on the flat roof below. I think it half terrified me, staring into space like that. But it calmed me down too in a way, I guess I kinda liked realising I was small. And I mean, there wasn't all that much light pollution out where we were, but the sky never looked like this." He hadn't meant to say so much, but once he'd started the words had just kept coming. She listens intently all the same and when he stops speaking he hears her take a deep breath in beside him. There is something heavy about the brief silence that follows, and he understands that she is thinking about her past, steeling herself to speak about it.
"For a long time in the Red Room I didn't see the sky, day or night. We were trained initially in an underground facility and we weren't allowed out for God knows how long. I don't remember much about who I was before, but I do remember being outside. I remember running my fingers against stalks of corn that had grown taller than me as I ran through the fields, looking up at the sky above me, amazed because it was so blue. I remember staring at the stars while someone – a man, I can hear his voice, but I never see his face – taught me the names of the different constellations. And that was almost the worst part about the early days in the Red Room I think; that throughout everything they forced me to do, I could never, not even for a moment, get back outside and just look at the sky. So I taught myself the constellations from the books I could find, tore pictures out of books and kept them hidden on me."
She stops speaking abruptly, probably realising, as he had, that she had talked for longer than she had intended, that her words had gotten away from her. They had always found it almost too easy to talk to each other, especially about the past.
There's never a lot he can say to her at times like this, and there's absolutely nothing he could say that she really wants to hear. So he opts, as ever, for silence, placing a gentle hand on top of hers for a brief moment before pulling away; she has never especially wanted anyone's sympathy, least of all his, and he is content to quickly let her know that he is here for her before letting the issue go.
His five minutes of cool air have long passed when he feels her head dip down to his shoulder slightly, gradually feels her relax beside him as they continue to watch stars skitter across the sky without another word passing between them. He has always thought that it is in their silences, and at times like this, that they have grown the closest, always in their wordless moments that they have shown the most of themselves to each other. Risk of poisonous arachnids aside, he does not know when he was last as comfortable and content as he is now, is almost thankful to have been chased out of the city and away from their mission.
He isn't sure nods off first out there beneath the night sky, but it is not until he wakes after the best night's sleep he's known in a while that even registers that they had spent all night outside. It was incredibly stupid, he acknowledges as he scrambles to find the sat-phone, the noise of its ringing having woken him up, to have risked deadly mosquito bites, or being discovered by their pursuers, but it had been a strange luxury to have woken to the early morning sun on his face and the feel of her pressed up against his side.
She too is unimpressed by her own, extremely uncharacteristic lack of vigilance, when she wakes a moment later, and although she gripes to herself about it as they pack up their tent and begin the trek to the extraction point Coulson gives them the coordinates for, she doesn't seem to dwell for too long on it. And even as they meet Coulson's unimpressed look a few hours later, he cannot help but return her slight smile as they pull themselves onto the SHIELD jet, knowing that he'll hold the memory of the previous night at the back of his mind for a very long time to come.