Note: I don't own The Avengers, Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 60, or Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by Bob Dylan
Chapter 3
It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
Ilhabela. He wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it, but one thing was certain – it sure beat the hell out of his apartment back in New York. If it wasn't for the small armory hidden in their luggage back in the hotel room, he could fool himself into thinking it was a vacation they were on, not a mission.
Off the coast of Brazil's mainland, the island wasn't huge – just a little over 100 square miles, but it had a thick, dense rain forest that was going to be a bitch to hike through to find their target – a fact he'd worry about in the morning. For the moment, he was going to focus on the beach and the ocean and shut out the rest of the world. The waves were gently lapping against the shore, the water was so blue it looked fake – like an artist had gone a little overboard with his paint and sacrificed realism for beauty. Clint just stared out, the stillness of it all washing over him.
"If I didn't know you better," a voice said from behind him, "I'd say you were out here writing sonnets to the sunset or some other romantic nonsense like that." Natasha took a seat next to him on the sand, her attention on the sun slowly fading, leaving vivid stripes of color across the sky.
He bumped her shoulder with his and grinned. "Who's to say I'm not?"
She tilted her head toward the fading, golden light, an exaggerated dreamy look on her face. "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore …" she quoted.
He raised an eyebrow. "Forsooth I swear?"
"Shocked I know a little Shakespeare?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of There once was a man from Nantucket …"
"That's because you're five and still laugh at fart jokes."
He leaned back on his elbows and sighed. "You need to broaden your horizons, Agent Romanoff."
She leaned back as well, mimicking his pose. "And you, Agent Barton, need to take a quick nap because tonight, you're taking me out dancing."
"Dancing? Is that part of the mission?"
She shrugged. "First night in paradise. We're not sitting in the hotel room and watching HBO. Consider it part of our cover, honey."
"Oh right, that." They were a married couple on their first real vacation away from their kid since getting married six years ago. Clint was a little surprised when Natasha suggested it, but he realized that, like him, she found the assignment a little pedestrian and sometimes they liked to spice up the easier missions with covers that could maybe prove to be more challenging, acting wise. Not that it was hard to act like a couple with Natasha – it was a cover they often used. It was the married with a kid part that freaked him out a bit. He didn't know the first thing about being domestic – his brief fling with actually having a family ended abruptly when he was just a little kid and it wasn't like his drunk of a father was any great example of how to act around a wife.
She was right about the nap, though - between the flight down there and the ferry out to the island, he was beat and more than ready to lean back onto the sand and sleep for a month. His body needed it – hell, his mind needed it. He couldn't imagine that the nightmares would find a foothold in a place like this, but the little voice in his head, the one reminding him not to get too comfortable, that they had a job to do, also found it necessary to point out that he was more than likely full of shit. Loki and his blood soaked dreams were just as at home on the beaches of Brazil as they were on the streets of New York.
He stretched out, laying back completely, not caring that he was going to be covered in sand. Closing his eyes, he crossed his arms behind his head and yawned. "Wake me in year, Nat."
He didn't have to look to know she rolled her eyes at him, but he peeked anyway and grinned. It was one of his life's many missions to annoy her at least once every hour or so. She liked to put up a front of being calm, cool, collected and badass, but he knew she had a dozen different sighs when she was annoyed and that the corner of her mouth quirked up when she was trying not to laugh and that when she arched an eyebrow, you better have on your best Kevlar vest because the words she was about to throw at you could do more damage than a perfectly aimed arrow.
"Twenty minutes," she said.
"An hour," he countered.
"Thirty minutes."
Shit, he thought, that barely counted as a compromise.
"Fifty-nine minutes."
"Thirty-one minutes and not a second more. I have a gun and I know how to use it." She stood up and brushed the sand off her hands … onto his face.
He turned his head quickly, trying to keep the sand from getting in his eyes. "Fine. I give. You win. Forty-five minutes." He heard the unmistakable sound of a round being chambered in a semi-automatic pistol. "Of course, by forty-five minutes, I meant thirty-one," he quickly amended.
"That's what I thought you meant."
XxXxXxXxXx
"Tasha," Clint yelled, hoping to be heard over the hairdryer going at full blast in the bathroom.
"Yeah?" Natasha stuck her head out the bathroom door, her dripping hair hanging in her eyes.
He held up the shirt that she'd left lying on the bed for him. "What is this?"
"Your shirt for tonight."
"But …" he started, holding the offending article of clothing at arm's length like it was a bomb about to go off.
She stuck her head out again. "Disguises. Our cover."
He mentally added the "Duh" for her. "Disguises I get. But am I also supposed to be colorblind?"
"It's fine."
"It's ugly."
"It's what a middle-aged guy wears on vacation," she said as she closed the door.
"Not this middle-aged guy. And who said I was middle-aged?"
"Your file," she hollered above the hairdryer.
He knocked on the bathroom door and she opened it. He caught a glimpse of the white towel she had wrapped around herself but he didn't let it distract him. "You read my file?"
She gave him a pointed look. "Like you didn't read mine?"
"That was different."
Tilting her head, she asked, "How?"
"You were a target. I was sent to kill you," he reminded her.
"Well, I had to see if I could trust someone who would disobey their orders." She started to shut the door, but he blocked her.
"You wouldn't be here if I didn't disobey them."
She made a tsking sound and touched her finger to her chin, like she was solving a puzzle. "It is a bit of a conundrum isn't it?"
He narrowed his eyes at her. "You're just trying to distract me from the shirt."
"Did it work?"
XxXxXxXxXx
"So the middle-aged husband wears a bright orange Hawaiian shirt with hula girls and Mai Tais all over it? What does the middle-aged wife wear?" he asked several minutes later, wearing the shirt and a scowl.
"She wears whatever she wants to," was the answer. Natasha came out of the bathroom, hair pulled back, with soft curls framing her face, a mischievous grin on her full lips. She did a little twirl, the filmy skirt of her dress billowing out around her. It was white and strappy and he felt a wave heat rush through him at the sight. "Oh, and she's not middle-aged," she reminded him. "You married a hot young wife."
"That I did," he said, raising his eyebrows in appreciation. "You look bangin', Mrs. Brown."
She put her hand to her chest and batted her eyelashes at him. "Be still my heart," she said in her best Scarlett O'Hara accent. "Keeping it classy, Mr. Brown."
"Always."
She went to the dresser and picked up a necklace from the traveling case. He stepped up behind her before she even had a chance to ask and took the necklace from her hands. His fingers brushed against the back of her neck as he closed the clasp, catching a curl that was trapped under the gold chain, letting it slowly unfurl around his finger and fall to her shoulder. He fought the urge to trace the path of that curl and see if the skin of her shoulder was as soft as it looked.
Clearing his throat, he shook his head, hoping to knock some of the fog out of his brain. He never had trouble keeping things professional before … for the most part … usually. This assignment was no different and he could blame Loki six ways to Sunday for most of the shit that was going wrong with his life right now, but fantasizing about the back of his partner's neck wasn't something he could spin as being caused by a bad bout of mind control.
She turned around, completely unaware about the torrid affair they'd almost had in his suddenly over active imagination and she picked up the file she had placed on the desk before getting her shower. The file he should have finished reading on the flight down there but instead stared blankly at as the buzzing in his head grew louder, drowning out his thoughts and making concentration impossible.
"Let's go over this one more time."
He took a seat on the bed. "Sure thing."
"We're Chuck and Natalie Brown."
"Do I really look like a Chuck to you?"
She ignored him and continued on, hoping on one foot and then the other as she pulled on a pair of red high heels. "You are an accountant and I teach third grade."
"Here's hoping no one asks me to do their taxes while we mingle tonight." He leaned back on the bed and stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. "This mission will be over before it starts."
"If you actually left your nest once in a while, you would know that in party atmospheres, no one ever asks an accountant about accounting things."
"Party atmospheres? Bit technical there, Natalie."
She gave him the finger and he forced himself not to grin in response. "We're from Delaware."
He held up his hand like he was answering a question in class. "That was the one thing I had a question about."
"The one thing?" she said dryly.
"Well, main thing." He sat back up. "Why Delaware? Who actually says they're from Delaware?"
"No one."
"Oh, and I guess that's the point?"
"Exactly."
"Okay," he said, "about our kid. He's five and his name is Buster and I suppose he's smarter than all the other kids in class and a world class athlete?"
She shook her head. "Sadly, no. His name is Henry and he takes after his father. No attention span, in trouble in school all the time, drools while staring at cartoons. Quite the handful."
"Seriously?"
She sighed. "No, not seriously. Henry is your average five year old. Nothing particularly special about him."
"Hey, that's our kid you're talking about."
She ignored him – something she excelled at. "He likes video games, doesn't do too badly in school. Keeps bugging us for a dog, but you're allergic and he had to settle for a goldfish."
"Making this all a bit complicated, don't you think?"
She stopped pacing and looked down at him. "I thought you liked it when we had some fun with this stuff?"
"The possibility of me answering questions about the tax code does not rank on my list of fun things to do. And you know, if had a dollar for every time I thought, 'gosh, what this mission needs is just a little more fun …'"
"See, now you're getting in the spirit."
He took his gun out of the nightstand and tucked it into the shoulder holster he had on under the orange monstrosity of a shirt. He hated leaving his bow, but a night out dancing didn't leave many opportunities for places to conceal a bow and quiver of arrows.
He ran his hands through his hair, feeling a rush of … something … frustration, maybe … rush over him. "What's really going on, Tasha?" he asked suddenly. "Dancing? Tacky shirts? Elaborate back stories? Those things don't gain intel and you know it. What happened to in and out in the quickest and easiest way possible?"
She shrugged and picked up her purse, checking the gun she had tucked inside. "Maybe I'm bored."
She snapped the purse closed and looked right at him, her big eyes wide and completely trustworthy. Her gaze was unwavering, but he could tell that her breathing had quickened a bit, that the gears in her brain were grinding away.
She was lying to him and he didn't like it.
XxXxXxXxXx
He picked up the Brazilian beat quickly – a little too quickly for Natasha's taste. "We're a married couple from Delaware, not contestants on Dancing with the Stars," she hissed in his ear.
"I don't know what the means, but you made me go out dancing," he spun her around effortlessly and caught her back in his arms right on the beat, "and I'm dancing."
"You're drawing attention to us," she scolded. They both had extensive training in etiquette and dancing and other forms of social interaction that could be required on any number of missions, so the fact Clint was a good dancer was not news to her, but the fact he chose this particular mission to display it for all the tourists gathered at the resort they were undercover at annoyed her to no end.
"This is about the shirt, isn't it?" she asked.
The corner of his mouth lifted as he shrugged. "Maybe."
"It was a joke," she admitted. "I'm sorry. Be thankful I didn't make you wear black socks and sandals."
"I don't know – now I'm disappointed that you didn't fully commit to your plan."
He dipped her suddenly and she had to grip his shoulders to keep from falling backwards. His face inches from hers, she could see the gold flecks that were scattered around the pupils of his eyes – not just a simple blue like she always thought.
Their breath mingled and she licked her lips as a flash went through her mind of him breaching those few centimeters that separated them and kissing her. He blinked, once, twice, like he was coming out of a trance and he shook his head, breaking their connection. "Um …" she said awkwardly as he helped her stand up. The song had ended and the dance floor was clearing off.
"It's getting late," he said gruffly and she nodded, still a little fuzzy after what had just happened.
"Wow, who knew an accountant had moves like that?" A guy stepped up, clapping loudly and Natasha forced a smile. His name was Jim and he'd shared a few drinks with them earlier that night. He'd clearly kept drinking long after they'd made an excuse to escape his company.
"Dance lessons," Clint answered. "You know how the old ball and chain can be."
Jim snorted a laugh, "Women." Natasha barely contained her look of disgust when he followed it with a belch.
Clint continued his improvisation, throwing his arm over her shoulder. "She insisted. Figured that if I ever wanted to get laid again, I better listen. Isn't that right, sweetheart?"
"Yes, honey." She ground her heel into the top of his foot … discreetly, of course. Clint didn't even blink.
"So how did that work out for ya?" Jim asked, swaying on his feet.
Clint tightened his grip on her shoulder and winked. "Let you know in the morning."
"You wish," she hissed under her breath.
Jim laughed. "Looking forward to a full recap."
She reached for her purse, but Clint reached across her and grabbed her arm, making a show of checking her watch. "Wow, is that the time?"
"Please let me shoot him," she whispered in her partner's ear. "Just a little."
Clint ignored her. "Guess we need to hit the sack. Lots of sightseeing to do tomorrow." He waved halfheartedly to Jim and started to steer her toward the hotel.
"Speaking of tomorrow," Jim called after them, "remind me to ask you about my taxes. There are some deductions I think my accountant missed. Could use a second opinion."
Clint groaned. "Fine, you can shoot him."
