I felt like some Clintasha angst. So here's a little excuse for it. Please enjoy.
:D
Clint was the one who came. Whether to draw her out, or to confess, it was always him. Natasha was the one who waited.
But Clint wasn't coming this time.
It was supposed to be just a favor. Fury had requested Barton's expertise on a SHIELD operation. Clint had agreed and took a break from the usual Avenging to run the op with a recently promoted agent. The guy was capable, clear headed, and Clint respected him. None of that was enough, though, because the whole thing went to hell pretty quickly. They were ambushed, the agent shot through the head, and Clint outnumbered, drugged, then captured.
He had been kept for six days, tortured for six days. That wasn't new. He'd been in that position before and he knew how to deal with the pain, but somehow the experience had been different.
After returning home to the tower, his friends were only able to make him stay barely twenty four hours in medical. Banner, especially, was insistent that Barton be properly looked after. As the doctor among them, he made sure there was a focus on getting nourishment back into Clint, and, as a friend, kept a close eye on him. Clint acted like he was alright, but he looked like hell and, unlike the old days, he couldn't just disappear to recover on his own, or with only Natasha. They had all joined the search for him, and had all feared the worst. He couldn't escape the fact that there were others to worry about him now, and more than a little mothering.
Natasha sat in the room with him while he slept off most of that first day, just watching him. He wasn't ok. There was a darkness, a secret, but she let him keep his secrets. She trusted that he would come to her eventually.
After leaving medical, Clint sat alone in a conference room where SHIELD debriefed him remotely. They wanted details on the actions of the, now deceased, agent whose name Clint refused to sully. They needed the specifics of exactly how the mission was blown. He was asked to give the circumstances of his capture, details on his captors and the nature of their interrogation. Clint gave them only the necessary details. The people who managed to strap him down for a week had no questions for Hawkeye. They required no information of him. They were scientific sadists and he had been their unlucky subject.
Two weeks had passed since Clint's extraction, and he was not himself. Not only was he barely sleeping at all, but he had said nothing to Natasha about it. After two weeks his blatant avoidance of her was no longer possible to ignore. It wasn't in her nature to flush him out of hiding and there had never been a need to, but she couldn't watch him slip for much longer.
Two weeks, one day and three hours after his return, Natasha did something she had never done before.
.
Clint sat, sunken into the couch, feet up on the glass coffee table, eyes blankly watching TV. He would have looked comfortable if not for the hollow expression that sleeplessness left on his face.
"So when are you going to tell me about it?" She said, coming to stand behind the couch. The words felt terrifyingly foreign on her tongue.
"Who says I was planning to?" He said without inflection.
Assuming her method had failed, and suddenly afraid that he was out of her reach for the very first time, she turned to leave him. Now she felt the need to hide.
"I don't want to talk about it." Came his voice from the other side of the couch.
Nat stopped, recognizing the invitation. She went back to lean over the couch.
"Since when has a little torture bothered you?" She asked, speaking to the top of his head. He was still staring at the tv.
"It wasn't a little torture."
Natasha tensed, then came around to listen. She muted the television, sat down on the edge of the coffee table and watched him speak. He continued while the light from the tv flickering in his darkened eyes.
"It was drugs and mind games... It was him, all over again."
"Clint.-"
"And I don't want to talk anymore."
She nodded. He had done as she'd asked and she could ask no more of him.
. . .
Natasha awoke in the night. She lay there in the silence, not knowing the reason.
"They took my ring." Clint's voice came from beside her.
She turned to look at him, but he was seated on the edge of the bed, his back to her.
Natasha hadn't noticed that his wedding ring was gone, not yet. He wore it on a chain under his shirt, and she had accepted the distance he'd been keeping between them over the last two weeks.
She could have asked why. She could have said something, anything, but she didn't. She waited.
"Told me I'd killed my wife." Clint continued. "...I could hear him inside my head again. There was no reality, ...I couldn't make distinctions. I saw myself attacking you again. ...One hundred and forty four hours living with what I did. I can still feel it in my fingers."
Natasha moved from where she was lying and sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder. She said nothing. In the darkness Clint was looking down at his hands.
"I didn't want you to know…" He said quietly.
Natasha took his empty hands, closing them and wrapping them in her own.
The wait was over.
.
.
I'm such a sucker for these two!