It was his job to sing in the shower. Whether it was the three in the morning and they had just been dancing the night away at a gala or it was seven at night after they had been unable to save a group of children from being killed in guerilla warfare; even at noon, when Natasha was about to kill a Slovenian diplomat, Clint was always singing. To Clint, it was a way to relieve or at least acknowledge the stresses of the day, to unearth the tension that seemed to always be present in the crook of his elbows. To Natasha, singing in the shower meant everything was going to be okay. As long as Clint still sang, things were going to be okay. It was as much a promise as anything else in her eyes.
When she is still just the Black Widow, she hears him singing Polly in the husky growl of his as she lurks beneath his windowsill. Even at the time as she plotted to kill him, the ridiculous idea of an assassin sent to eliminate her, singing this song before doing so, brought a smile to her red lips. Then, after they have fallen into bed together for the first time, when each of them is stained with battle wounds inflicted by the other, he sings in the morning. Natasha can imagine him washing away the blood from around the gash where she'd stabbed him, as he croons Who Let You Go? They fight on their first mission together, harsh words flung at one another, with the intention to kill. They're posing as a married couple and then Natasha takes a few risk, nearly gets her head shot off. But because she's Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow, she lives. She barely survives Agent Barton's dangerous threats before he slams the bathroom door shut retreating to the shower. She slides down to rest her head against the door, listening to the Violence he sings with such raise, slipping away before he exits. When she slips up, and sleeps with a mark, Clint doesn't talk to her for a week. They still share a room and the silence between them is so much more obtrusive than the normal softness they share. This time, he barely sings, rather he's screaming out You Oughta Know with a pain in his voice that she hadn't known him to have. That mission is never mentioned until Barton goes out drinking alone one night when Natasha just wants to sit in their quarters and read. He returns after midnight, disgustingly drunk and through his slurred words, he reminds her hatefully of the incident. He's swaying as he says this and Natasha carefully helps him into bed, stroking back his hair before crawling in next to him. When the sunlight streams through the shades the next morning, she wakes and hears him softly singing For the Nights I Can't Remember.
No matter what has occurred, they have made it through, they have survived, everything has been okay. Everything will be okay as long as Clint sings in the shower. And she can always count on him to sing in the shower.
But he doesn't. Not the night of the Manhattan attack but she convinces herself he's just exhausted like she is. Not any of the days after.
He is like a robot in those days, eyes hollow of any emotion. His skin has a red rawness to it, as if he's tried to rub away all the sins committed over the last week. She has plucked every shard of glass out of his back, has given him pain killers, and held him tight to her when nightmares take over. She helps him walk and massages his feet, trying not to recall that the ritual is him massaging her's. Every night she kisses him on the forehead when they go to bed but each morning he is found sitting on the edge.
Clint talks but his responses are preprogrammed into him, and she catches him staring at the mirror sometimes, as if searching for traces of that chilling blue. "He's in there, Nat" he murmurs when she walks in on him. "He's not" she promises, curling up next to him and lacing kisses up his neck. His face is like a stone.
"I'm going to take a shower" Natasha tells him softly, trying not to break him from his reverie. He doesn't seem to acknowledge her.
She steps into the cool porcelain of the tub, embracing the hot gushes of water that fall across her still bruised face. She sighs in delight and thinks of her partner for a moment. She lets fear strike across her heart in that moment, that things are not okay because Clint is not singing in the shower. An aura of desperation captures her, and her throat opens her voice raspy.
The Black Widow sings "When the world gets too heavy, put it on my back. I'll be your levee"
She has never sang in the shower before and despite the upbeat tone to the song, her adaptation of it is the sort of raw and heart wrenching thing that feels far too private to describe further. "I'm a fly that's trapped in a web but I'm thinking that my spider's dead".
As she exits the shower, hands shaking from the steam, she convinces herself, she still sings in that wavering choke. "That I'm skin and bone, just a king and a rusty throne"
Natasha reenters the room and she is paralyzed by what she sees. Clint holds the gun that she keeps in her bedside table to his temple, his eyes meeting those of his reflections. His face is neutral; this is not a heavily emotional moment. Natasha doesn't have the time to feel her heart sink; she doesn't have the time to want to yell out. This is no slow motion movie scene.
This is the clearest thing the Black Widow has ever seen. She's all about webs, all about confusing and tangling the truth up until she's caught her prey. Hawks are different; they swoop in for the kill in one fatal movement, no mystery behind their actions. Almost like a math equation, Natasha sees it. The bullet exits the gun, and enters Clint's flesh. It passes through his skull and exits the other side with blood and brains smearing the walls of their room.
Natasha does not blink. She does not cry. She does not beg any god for mercy or throw herself at the corpse that has now hit the floor. She does not yell at Clint for his stupidity. She does not think about how nothing will ever be okay again because Clint can never sing in the shower again. She does not do any of this because she is dead.
Natasha-Nat-Tasha-Agent Romanov dies the second the bullet grazes her partner's flesh. Natasha dies and the Black Widow is all that is left, the shell that Clint had saved her from becoming years earlier.
The Black Widow lifts a comm. link from off the dresser, and speaks into it. "Barton is down; shot self through the head at 2:02 p.m. today. Clean up is requested and pass along the message that Romanov would like a new sleeping assignment". Before the unlucky agent on the other end can react, she clicks it off.
It was always you falling for me,
Now there's always time, calling for me,
I'm the light, blinking at the end of the road,
Blink back to let me know.
(It was always you)