A/N: that was very long hiatus. not confident about this oneshot but i guess i'm testing the waters once again (with my impeccably slow writing process!) so i hope ya like it. i still love you all; i didn't forget about you awesome people. (how could i?) xx
Anyway, how is AOS working out for you? I personally LOVE the series now (Thor crossover this week asdfghjkl) plus they convo-cameod clintasha last week so heheheh.
Disclaimer: disclaimed.
He holds her by her arms, both ultimately worn from weather and from harm with razors and knives and things that might kill. Deep, parallel lines carved over skin that take shape from older scars, and others that are raw and barely healing from newer ones. This doesn't scare him, not even a little, for they both ravel in rather similar histories. He's just like her, carrying around an equally burdened, fractured soul.
While she has cuts, scrapes, burns and gashes in which she finds her solace in, he has broken his wrist thirty seven times and his arm seven times in four different places in the past ten years he has been a part of SHIELD. Those exclude the ones solely classified under occupational injuries. It goes as far as intentionally dislodging sturdy calcium ribs from their proper places, and heading into the field to hurt more right after.
Natasha's scarlet hair has lost its glow somehow under the sickly fluorescent light of the stark white infirmary. The curls in her hair have lost their volume to grief and hours of sleep, now flattened to dull, bare waves. They are lifeless like her skin, like her sullen features like the deepened hollows under her highly sculpted cheekbones and like her sunken eyes.
Despite her silence and her perfectly delivered lies, he knows she doesn't eat, or regurgitates when she does; similarly, she knows about his substance abuse issues with methaqualones and barbiturates. He doesn't support her anorexic tendencies but he doesn't push her to eat, and she knows - and detests - the lifestyle of a junkie but only hovers by him with vodka in her system when he has narcotics in his.
Her lips and skin are pale with the lack of blood circulating in her arteries and veins. She looks as white and as sickly as she could ever be alive, and as if all that is holding her together is the bandage around her neck.
In the tenseless silence that they share, her empty eyes stare blankly at the place between his shoulders, where his muscular and prominent clavicles meet. Clint runs both his thumbs over the thin, swollen, parallelistic bumps in her bonier wrists. He presses his lips to her scars with a kind of unfathomable affection and anguish in the eyes that hide halfway beneath his eyelids, and he kisses her knuckles and lets his breath linger so slightly upon her fingers.
His demeanor gives away the fact that he's defeated and close to tears, and the undying sob at the back of her throat just goes upon noticing the contusions on the undersides of both his wrists, as if the scene before her hadn't already left her in immeasurable guilt.
The discolorations are so much more severe than the ones before, and her wrists throb at the sight of them, just as much as the way his neck tugs and burns where she had inflicted upon herself a fatal gash across her neck that was deep enough to need 78 stitches – layer after layer, inside and out. The hospital gown doesn't even bother to cover up the bandage wrapped around them.
The way her breaths catch silently is a little heart wrenching. It draws his attention from his thoughts, and Natasha moves out of the ward bed and shifts into a comfortable position on his lap. He embraces her, being very careful with the IV wires - that she ever-so-surely disregards - that are pumping her with pints of packeted blood.
She can hear the still beats of his heart bounce right off the hollows in his chest with a ear near his left collarbone, and he can feel the beats of hers through both their skins. Her ribs feel more prominent against his skin in this embrace, but he doesn't care. All that matters to Clint is her pulse, for he doesn't want to be reminded of the moment he found her gashed and bloody on her bathroom floor, no vitals and seeming too far gone that his knees gave way and his lungs caved in.
He remembers her frantic, senseless screaming at him in words he didn't understand, and he hadn't expected much of the simple gestures of frustration. He had been nursing the nauseating effects of a withdrawal, and she had been acting like she was nearly insane, as if he wasn't already in enough of a fix, banging wrists and breaking ribs just to curb the burn of withdrawal. He yelled at her, she yelled back, and he didn't bother to understand anything.
And for the fraction of a second, he'd wished that she would just - somehow - drop dead for a minute, or even half of one, just for a little peace throughout his indescribable physical turmoil. And she did, with a slice into her neck about half an inch deep into her skin. He got his moment of silence, and immediately he wished he hadn't.
There had always been a part of Clint that believed in her to crawl into his bed or pull him to a corner, or dial him on his phone with a continuous sob latched in her throat, and tell him how she was too fucked up or how she did too many unforgivable things to deserve to live. That she was terribly afraid to live and didn't want to either.
And he'd be there to say that they were very much the same - same desperation, same desire to die to live, same fears, same ghosts - and draw the blade away from the veins in her neck that led right to her worn and tired heart.
But she isn't one for help and she isn't one for tears; she isn't one to believe in ghosts or in penitence. For years, she had been numb from grief, from sorrow and from endless years of excruciating pain and suffering that the only thing that kept her alive was a silent cry for help while being strung up by her throat and gasping for just a little bit of air.
It comes as no surprise that she'd stopped crying, stopped breathing, stopped feeling, stopped living. No cracks of desperation, no fear, no cry for help. Somewhere along the way of being saved and being condemned by the dark nothingness of life, the breaths she'd drawn had stopped feeling whole. And so did his, he had to admit. The past ten years have intermittently taken whole parts from their souls and left them empty.
Natasha breathes. She feels warm. Her breaths linger on the layer of stubble on his chin that hasn't been shaven for three days. She seems so... normal. And everything he feels of her right now does hide the fact that, in fact, she'd been carrying for years just about as many disorders as a weighted soul could carry. It's supposedly their little secret to know that she's that far defected, more than what she brings forth that meets the eye.
He punishes himself for forgetting, for neglecting, and nothing as scary as watching his parents bleed to death in the front seat can ever compare to that moment - hearing aids out and feeling her body drop through the floorboards. The anticipation, the guilt, the fear, the urgency.
A thump. He can still hear it - ironically - every time he closes his eyes. He can still feel it in his feet, the way the sound resonates and ricochets off his bones to settle in an empty crack within himself. The exact concoction of frantic anxiety, panic, and urgency that had sent him pacing - then running - down hallways and knocking on (and down) doors, because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know how a body falls.
Looking down at one free hand, Clint can see his partner's dried blood under his fingernails. It reminds him of how he'd only found Natasha when she was three minutes dead, how he'd ripped a stretch of cloth from the hem of his shirt and held it to her neck to soak up the wound. The taste at the back of his throat that had been a fine mix of salt and bitter adrenaline, calling the first name he could find on his cellphone and pleading for help with a thick voice.
He had patterned her then paper white face with the viscous crimson liquid on his fingers. He had held her to his chest like he holds her now. He remembers the silence; it rang in his ears so much it hurt, as if it could have drawn blood. A silence so great and intense-
Cold fingers gently circle around his right wrist, and it pulls him right out of his thoughts. It throbs a little, but it's nothing the archer can't let roll off his shoulders. Natasha's fingertips very barely brush the bruises that bloom on his wrist, and sometimes he actually wonders how those hands could both be so gentle and so brutal - being able to be on both ends of a balanced beam. She swallows weakly.
She frowns slightly and stares intently at the bruises, at the same time brushing comforting circles along his wrist like he caresses her prominent shoulder with his thumb. She's in just as much pain as him, carrying just as much guilt and just as easily forgetting - and then remembering in this instant - just how much they affect each other, because they both mean so much. It's not the first time something tugs at her heart and makes the hollows of her chest throb. Most of the time, the reason is Clint.
Natasha then rests her head back in the nook between his neck and shoulder, nose nuzzling the side of his neck for a bit. He chuckles for a brief moment, because it tickles, but happiness is always short lived when it comes to either of them.
When the coolness around his wrist is gone, he brings his hand to caress her cheek and jaw, fiddling with her ear. "You tired, Tasha?" He asks. He'll leave if she is, probably feel a little less whole than when he's sharing this moment of living proof that she's breathing. He'll let her sleep, and not get a few hours of his own. Nobody's counting, but he probably hasn't slept in three days just making sure he doesn't make another mistake and let Natasha's existence slip through his fingers like sand.
She leans further into his neck, warmth of his skin on one cheek, the coarse texture of his stubble on her other. "No... Not yet." She replies in a barely audible whisper.
The archer turns his head without upsetting the comfortable position she rests her head in, and presses an affectionate peck against her hairline. She has her hand lingering limply by his midriff.
"-kay." Clint says.
His voice is strained and taut, and she catches it. She can nearly picture how his insides might be tightening, from muscles to throat, to have produced such a terrible, vulnerable sound. Like a coil winding up to the point of breakage; it mirrors his resolve.
Natasha shifts, to look at him, read his features. He's tired, on-edge, not that he'd admit. And she can definitely see that, because they're pretty much alike. That's why she doesn't say anything to call him out on it.
He's lonely, has been tragically lonely all his life, and she has never once learned to love herself more than being just a living, breathing, dead behind the eyes sex toy for her former superiors. Both equally broken in the most different of ways, but maybe it never really mattered how, or why. Being quietly fragile was their common ground, and nothing else really mattered in the equation.
He mirrors her look, and for a moment his eyes stray a few inches south from her eyes, to where the poor excuse of a proper bandage covers the sutures in her neck. He knows it is amongst four other silver scars, all worn and faded a very long time. Both equally broken. The words resonate in his mind.
He gazes right into her soul like she gazes into his, both emptied out, and the room is just remarkably silent - save for the familiar hum of the SHIELD building. He sighs, tearing his gaze away and holding her tired body close. It's just another day at the office.
But not really.
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."
― Kahlil Gibran