NOTES: For a friend who asked for "Clint and Natasha looking back on the weirdness of their lives after the movie". Probably done to death by now...
All The Perfumes Of Arabia
The wind off the Vltava bites through the fleece of her jacket, but Natasha doesn't hesitate as she picks her way along the tiled ridge. He didn't tell her where he was going when he left the garret in Budapest this morning, but she gave him the whole day to run.
They both knew he wouldn't go far.
She hangs her satchel off one of the pigeon-deterrents and hunkers down beside him on the ridge of St Vitus' cathedral. Far below church and castle, the river gleams, spangled by the lights of the city and spanned by the bridges that reach across the width of the sinuous curve like lovers' arms across a chasm.
"I like the view."
He takes a moment to reply, the murmur of tourists and cars and the recorded mass inside the cathedral filling the silence. "You shouldn't be here."
"You are." It's an answer and not just a statement.
"You know, I thought about jumping."
"But you won't."
"Would you try to stop me?"
It's not a cry for help; he asks it dispassionately, like the monster Loki made him into. But this is Clint. "No. If I thought you wanted to jump, I'd let you."
"Really?" That stings him out of his lethargy. Just for a moment. She almost smiles. There's nothing in the universe that's as easily pricked as the male ego.
"I know better than to try to change your mind when you've made it up."
"And yet you're here."
"Where else is there for me to go?"
It's been a week. A week of moving restlessly through Central and Eastern Europe, never saying much, flowing with the tides. They didn't arrange to leave SHIELD together. It just happened.
He hasn't asked about the helicarrier; she hasn't asked about Loki. They sleep in separate beds. They always have - partners bunked down together, gender and sexuality and physical attraction irrelevant. But there's something else in the room with them now - someone else. Stalking through their dreams, turning a comfortable partnership into a nightmare.
Sometimes Natasha swears she hears the echoes of his laughter upon waking.
And if she can, she wonders what Clint hears when he jerks awake and stalks for the bathroom, dread tensing every muscle in his back, horror at what he was made.
He looks at her now, blue eyes, but not that kind of blue. "You know what Loki had planned for you, don't you?"
Still, there's cruelty in him, independent of what he was reshaped, reformed, remade. There always has been.
Loki's words hiss through her mind yet again slowly intimately, in every way he knows you fear...
"He told me himself."
"Jesus, Tasha..."
It amuses a part of her: he knew Loki told her, but he's still appalled to hear it. Or maybe appalled that she still trusts him after knowing what Loki would have made him do. That seems more likely.
"He didn't get us, you know." When he frowns, she turns her gaze from the gleaming city to him. "He thought he understood us, but...he didn't."
"What do you mean?"
"I have red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out." The first statement she ever made to him - long after 'Why?' and 'What will you do?' had been demanded and answered.
"You said that to him?"
"He threw it back in my face." It stung. It bled like a shallow wound - painful and visual, but not dire. Not as dangerous as letting Loki see how she valued Clint.
"You were playing him."
"I got what I needed. It was almost enough."
"Tasha..."
"When you woke up, you wanted to know the bodycount. But there's no bodycount of the living, Clint. We don't get to see what might have been. And we don't get to wipe the score clean."
His words to her – the first time someone understood. There's no forgiveness for people like them, no absolution. The ledger drips, yes; all you can do is manage the damage.
They sit in silence for a while, long enough that she thinks he's thinking it over, but not so long that he can't eventually ask, "Is this about the Avengers Initiative?"
"A little. We're not the poster kids for heroism - maybe that's the point."
"Amends?"
"As much as amends can be made."
He begins to speak, then hesitates, looks away. Things unspoken hover between, the unsaid triplines that lie in the no-man's-land of their relationship. Navigating them won't be easy; Natasha thinks their partnership is worth it. Since Clint hasn't gone to ground, beyond her ability to track, she figures he thinks it is, too.
Something buzzes, set to vibrate rather than ring, but loud in the quiet on the ridge. Clint fishes in his jacket pocket and comes up with his cellphone. He holds it up between them and answers the call.
"Lieutenant Hill."
"Agent Barton. We've discovered some of the alien head-units from New York have been taken and shipped to Gdansk. They're due to arrive in the next twelve hours. Can you and Agent Romanoff intercept them?"
They don't question how Hill knows where they are, or that they're together. SHIELD has its ways and means of knowing. And they're dangerous – together and individually.
"Does this mean the holiday's over?"
Of all the questions Natasha expected him to ask, the lighthearted one didn't even make the list. Even more surprising is Hill's answer - in much the same vein.
"Temporarily interrupted." The dry humour vanishes with the next sentence. "SHIELD can scramble a retrieval team in the next twenty-four hours, but you're close and you know the area. You'd be providing intrusion intel - and formulating delays if it looks like the materiel is being moved out."
Clint looks over at her. "Mind a temporary interruption?"
She almost smiles, and knows he sees the hunt in her expression. "Let's go."
It's not what it was - it'll never be what it was - but it's still good.
At least for now.
"All the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand."
~ Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, scene i ~
- fin -