She wakes with a start, heart pounding. Her hand darts instinctively under her pillow, but her gun's not there. Slowly, the adrenaline drains from her jittery limbs, and she forces herself to relax. Her gun is not there because she is at Stark's and she has one strapped to her thigh anyway. She lets out a long, irritated breath. The first night after is the worst. Tomorrow she'll get a decent night's rest. She glances at the clock and makes a face. It's one in the morning. She feels the other side of the bed; it's warm but very conspicuously empty. She allows herself one whispered Russian obscenity before she swings her legs over the bed. Of course she woke up.
"Clint?" she whispers, on the off chance that he's still in the room. No answer. She swears again under her breath and snatches a pair of sweats and a jacket. It's cold outside.
He's on the roof, as she knew he would be, perched motionless on the corner. The portal is next to him, dead and silent, but she gives it a wide berth anyway. The city spreads beneath them, battered and bruised - their path of destruction is clear and broad. Nevertheless, the city goes on; the sounds of traffic and sirens float up to them from below.
"How'd you get past Stark's security? He's blocked off all damaged parts of the building."
"I took the easy way." She cracks a smile. "I'll never get the vents thing. Too cramped." The shadow that is her partner rocks back on his heels, deliberately positioning himself so his back is to her. Natasha sighs.
It's like this, sometimes, when the what-could-haves outweigh the what-dids, when the unspeakable If overwhelms reason. It doesn't matter that they are here, safe. It doesn't matter that his mind is his own. It got too close. And that is enough.
She kneels beside him, prying his hands from his face, but he has gone somewhere she cannot follow; he's seeing ghosts, not her.
So she sits next to him, presses her cheek into his shoulder with a fierce, protective possessiveness. Seduction comes so easily to her; it's just a part of her arsenal, no different than a gun or any other weapon. Affection, though...it's unfamiliar territory in her line of work. Should she murmur empty words of consolation? Make him a glass of warm milk? Pat him on the head and send him off to bed as if the terrors that grip his mind are imaginary when they are so very, very real? It all seems so juvenile, so useless. Better not to talk. Better to just stay with him until it passes.
His hand finds hers and locks onto it painfully. She squeezes back. He takes a careful breath.
"Seventeen arrows, Nat." Natasha stays still.
"Clint."
"Seventeen arrows missing." He twists to look at her, eyes hooded with something dark, something that prowls around in the back of Natasha's mind when she stops to remember. "Why didn't you kill me?" He's actually angry, damn him. She feels her defenses go up, and her answer is sharper than she intended, factual if brutal.
"Because I owe you." He shakes his head, jaw tight.
"You don't owe me anything." Her nails dig into the skin between his fingers, more to keep her hand from trembling than anything.
"I owe you a whole damn lot, Barton," she whispers fiercely. "You didn't give up on me." She's breaking out in a cold sweat. It's never easy, this part, but it's never been this hard. "I didn't give up on you."
"Natasha..."
And now she's doing her best not to recoil from him, to shut down, because she'd been prepared to kill him, would have killed him, only he said her name, and all her training, all her instincts failed because this was Clint in front of her, Clint saying her name, and old habits die so hard.
"We made it," she reminds him, reminds herself, refusing to give either of them any ground. "We're fine." His head drops.
"I almost killed you," he whispers back. His eyes are bright and wet and hard. "Like I killed the rest."
"Loki, Clint. Loki, not you."
"My arrows. My knife." Her patience snaps.
"You only got Fury in the shoulder when we both know that from that distance you could have gotten him through his one goddamned eye. You've beaten me a thousand times sparring, but you didn't even come close on the bridge. You fought it. You were in there. You fought it."
He doesn't reply. He doesn't, usually, when things get like this. So she stands and crosses her arms and waits. He takes so long that she begins to shiver, and she's actually debating just getting a pillow and blanket because he is not winning this one, dammit, but then he unfolds his feet and lets her lead him back to their room. She gets them settled and comfortable in what must be the thousandth unfamiliar bed they've ever shared and sits against the headboard, pulling him down so that his head is in her lap. For a long, long while, she rubs his temples, trying to lull him to sleep, but he's always been an insomniac. She'll be lucky if she gets him to doze off, much less actually get any real rest.
It's just past four o'clock when his hand encircles her wrist.
"I love you," he says into the dark. She strokes a bit of hair out of his face.
"Love is - "
" - for children, I know."