outside heaven's door
rating: g
warning: angst
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
summary: 'Cause I want nothing more than to sit outside of your door / And listen to you breathing / It's where I wanna be.
author's note: Written for the LJ comm be_compromised's Valentine's Day promptathon, prompt: Breathing, by Lifehouse.
I'm looking past the shadows in my mind into the truth
And I'm trying to identify the voices in my head
God, which one's you?
Let me feel one more time what it feels like to feel
And break these calluses off me one more time
The moonlight through the window begins to slowly turn everything shades of white and gray, running over the bandages on his knuckles, the livid bruises on his cheek. He's exhausted, past the point of breaking, past all trying but he is, he's trying, because his best friend and his life is hanging on with a ventilator and an IV drip behind this door, is hanging onto her own life by threads and fingertips. So in the shadowed white light he sits with his back to the door and breathes and wishes she'd open it up and smile down at him, with that slow and amused and beautiful smile, and ask him what he thought he was doing.
It's a good question, and he doesn't know the answer.
It hurts to feel, hurts to try, but for the sake of her he pulls off all the numbing layers he's built up, all the defenses, lays it all bare and sits with his hands on his knees and his head bowed and lets the ache in his muscles remind him that he's alive, that she's alive, and so hurting because he's broken and unable to fix her, hurting that tastes like blood and dust and the last dregs of a coffee from twelve hours ago, hurting like this is good.
Clint Barton doesn't cry, not anymore, not in a long time, but the weight on his chest and the sound of her breathing (breathing, breathing, keep breathing) make him tired all the same.
"Do you remember," she asks, crouching in front of him, one hand reaching out slim and slender in the moonlight to almost touch his knee, "that time in Bulgaria, when everything went sideways?" Her voice is soft, the gleam in her eyes pale as starlight.
"Everything always goes sideways in Bulgaria," he tells her, worn out, and focuses on the play of light and dark on her skin. She half grins, he knows because he knew she would, and there is something sharp and feral in her expression.
"I thought you had cut me out," she says, still balanced on the balls of her feet. "I thought you had written me off and left me in the cold."
"Yeah, I remember," he says, a weary smile making a half-hearted attempt to cross his face.
"I cornered you in that office," she continues, "ready to put a bullet between your eyes, and you said-"
" 'The way it works is, I'm never going to let you down unless you choose to walk away,' " he finishes, gaze skirting the edge of her shadowed face just in time to catch how her smile softened and changed.
"Everything does go sideways in Bulgaria," she says, "but you know what? That's where I found a way to go forward."
He opens his eyes to see a hallway full of shadows, the moonlight slipping away in the hours after midnight. And in the mixed light, never truly dark but painted all in grays and whites, Clint takes a breath, takes another one, and keeps breathing.
'Cause I am hanging on every word you're saying
Even if you don't wanna speak tonight
That's alright, alright with me
'Cause I want nothing more than to sit outside of your door
And listen to you breathing
It's where I wanna be, yeah