Convenience, Natasha decided, was too often underrated.
People were odd. They put so much stock in sunsets and flowers and elaborate dances. Such useless, pretty things. Natasha preferred the quieter displays: leaning on someone during a long flight, not caring whether or not you were beautiful or looked like shit. Waking up in the middle of the night and not having to answer naïve, senseless questions that comforted no one.
If people like her and Clint even knew how to be comforted anymore. Or comfort someone else. She'd done such an outstanding job of it, after all, back in New York.
But that was the best part about convenience. You could give what you could at the time and hope it was enough and then usually it was. No second-guessing. You took what you had and were grateful for it.
Sometimes too grateful, she thought, though she tried not to. Tried to preserve any such thoughts for after the battles were down and she had time for herself to sit and wonder if it all really was just convenience, in the end.
Maybe the security she felt when she turned her back and knew that he'd be there behind her was something more. Maybe the way he held her late at night was…bigger, somehow, than they ever admitted it could be. Maybe when she woke at night—terrified, panting, her entire vision filled with nothing but green, green, green—and they both reached for each other, she thought for just a few short moments that maybe it wasn't just convenience, maybe it was better, maybe it was—
Well. That didn't matter. Not really. She and Clints were adults—not children—and they couldn't afford to think like that. It was just convenience, that was all.
(Once, when she'd been taken under by a group of Hydra scientists and wondering where in the world Clint was, she'd opened her mouth to talk and one of them spit in her face. Do not speak to us, spy. Every word you speak is lie.
Spies were the best liars. Even to themselves.