Bring Me to Life
Their "Victory Meal" at the shawarma joint is quickly coming to an end. Stark is the first to depart when Jarvis announces "Incoming call from Pepper Potts". He jumps out of his seat while simultaneously answering the call. From the one-sided conversation the rest of the team can hear, it soon becomes apparent that he's in a whole lot of trouble with Pepper.
"I would have called you sooner, but...you know, I was kinda busy saving the world," Tony says while walking away and motioning for Banner to follow.
"Well, it was a real pleasure saving the world with you guys instead of my usual M.O. of tearing it down," Banner says with a hint of a smile.
"And the bonus is I get to play with some high tech stuff at Stark Tower." He quickly wipes his mouth with his paper towel and heads out after Tony.
The remaining four Avengers continue to dine in silence. After polishing off his fourth plate (apparently, gods eat a lot), Thor also makes his goodbyes, mentioning that he needs to go see where Fury is holding Loki.
Left with Clint and Natasha, Steve soon begins to feel something in the air. He may not be from this time period, but even he knows when he's a third wheel and soon leaves the pair alone.
Natasha keeps her gaze fixed on Clint but he still refuses to catch her eye. She knows that, despite her warning, he's taking things personally. He's blaming himself for the agents that died or were injured during his Loki-controlled attacks. The fact that, logically, he understands that Loki had complete and utter control of his mind, does nothing to assuage the guilt.
She gives up trying to catch his eye and simply walks out of the restaurant. She knows that he will follow and is not surprised when she feels, rather than hears, his presence behind her. She leads him to the dingier parts of the city and into the dingiest motel she spies. The kind of motel where the front desk clerk has only two items on his job description. The first; make sure payment is in cash, upfront. The second; forget clients' faces as soon as they pay.
She pays and collects their room key. Once in the room, she immediately heads to the shower wanting to get rid of the grime of the day.
She's sitting at the edge of the bed, slowly towel drying her hair, when he walks out of the bathroom looking delicious in nothing but drops of water and a towel wrapped low around his waist.
He makes a B-line for the mini-bar and pours her a vodka, neat. He hands it to her and turns back to fix himself a bourbon.
They haven't spoken a single word since their banter in the heat of the battle. She's ruminating on how to bring him out of himself when the words come out of her mouth before she can stop them.
"I almost died today." She doesn't know why she says it. The last thing she wants is to pile more remorse onto his sagging conscious. Yet, although her words were barely a whisper, he hears her and understands. He knows her well enough to comprehend that she's not simply talking about the "Apocalypse", where all of them put their lives on the line, but something deeper.
He swallows his drink in one gulp, turns around and grabs the single chair positioned next to a low table in the corner. He places the chair directly in front of her and sits down without a word. He leans towards her, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped loosely together and finally...finally looks at her. He doesn't say anything, doesn't ask any questions but simply waits.
She's so happy to finally look into his eyes that she doesn't speak. For a long time, all they do is stare at each other unblinkingly until the left corner of her mouth twitches into a slight smile and a soft snort escapes her.
"You know, I always thought that if I died it would be at the hands of a sniper." She shakes her head a bit at her hubris. At the very idea that she could predict her own death given the varying degrees of danger she encounters regularly in the course of her work.
She knows that he's recalling the circumstances of their first meeting, when he imbedded his arrow mere millimetres from her scalp. Enough to trap her hair and let her know that he could have killed her if he had wanted to. That knowledge had made her stand still and wait to hear what he had to say instead of putting a bullet right between his eyes.
"I can hold my own in hand-to-hand," she continues. "I can shoot a dime from 100 yards. And, of course, I'm a spy." She doesn't need to elaborate that one of her greatest skills is using what she knows about a person to gain the upper hand.
"I never once envisioned an enemy that would be immune to all my skills." Her mind flashes to Bruce and she remembers how his eyes had looked like disappearing into the Hulk. The helplessness held in their depths. He had known that he had absolutely no control over the "Other Guy"...had known with complete certainty that he wouldn't be able to protect her once he took over.
"He came after me like he didn't even know me," she whispers. She sees Clint's eyes darken as he remembers behaving exactly the same way.
"He was so fast, so strong, and completely focused. He cornered me and was about to deal the deathblow when Thor came flying out of nowhere and knocked him out of my range."
"I froze." Natasha's brow furrows as she remembers herself curled up and shaking with shock. "I completely forgot that we were in the middle of a fight, in a dropping helicarrier and just...just sat there having a breakdown."
Now, it's her turn to look away. She stares at a point past his left shoulder. Afraid to look into his eyes and see the shock that she imagines is there at this confession; that the Black Widow can falter.
The silence between them stretches on again as Natasha grapples with her weakness in that moment. If her handlers from the Red Room had seen her then, they would surely have put her out of her misery with a bullet in her cowardly little heart.
"I don't know how long I would have stayed that way. Don't know how long it would have taken to get the image of his hand poised to strike out of my mind."
She slides her gaze back to his. "Then I heard the call over the comms saying that you were heading towards the detention level."
She reaches out and grabs both of his hands in hers. He doesn't pull away. "You snapped me out of it Clint." Her voice is strong, firm, no longer wavering with the shame of her cowardice. "I didn't want anybody to hurt you. I knew I could bring you back and I wanted you back. You brought me back from the brink of a breakdown so that I could bring you back."
She holds his eyes with intensity, letting him see her conviction. Her eyes tell him that it is finished, done, over. She will never again speak of her breakdown in the carrier, allow her fear to follow her into the future, or hold any of it against Banner.
His eyes finally soften at that and she knows that her unscripted words have done more than she could have ever hoped.