Last chapter! Thanks to Katie MacAlpine, Wonderous wonder, and TimeBlaze for your reviews!

It takes her longer than she'd like to admit to find him, but then again, he's always been good at what they do. But she knows all his tricks, all his trails, and she knows how to find him when she really needs to.

She doesn't know him as well as she thinks, though, because his location surprises her. She'd expect him to be halfway across the world by now, running as if running would do much good in this situation. There's nothing to run from. The snap is done, it's over, it's not going to happen again. All that's left to deal with is the fallout. And the consequences.

Natasha tracks him to a shabby apartment near New York's Chinatown, only four blocks from one of their previous safehouses, where she finds a mess of a bed and clothes strewn all over the floor and a very Clint-less living area for it being three o'clock in the morning. There's no sign of children's things, though, and Natasha doesn't like to think about what that might mean.

So she heads into the night, armed with a black umbrella and a long coat and a handgun that she hopes she won't have to use. Since the snap a week ago, New York's not proven to be the safest place, but it's doing remarkably well compared to some large cities adjusting to the new normal, perhaps because of its long history of recovering from alien invasions.

It doesn't take long to find him, not with the rumors running about. A man all in black carrying a short katana with slotted swordbreaker along one side. She recognizes the description of that weapon instantly, even though she's only seen it once, and knows its his. A relic from his time with the circus—the sword-swallower's sword, after the company decided they needed to spice up his act with something less medieval and more exotic.

When she finally sees him, she's walking along the street, and she sees the bodies first, lying on the ground with the scent of fresh blood mixing with the rain. She would know that stance anywhere, legs set apart as if ready to draw back a hundred-pound bowstring. The sword is in his hands, pulled against his sleeve as he wipes off the blood.

"Clint."

He reaches toward his head, lowering his hood and pulling off a ski mask. He turns around.. The light from the neon shop signs illuminates his face, pain written all over the blank mask it's set in.

"Clint," she says again, lowering and folding to umbrella.

"It's Ronin."

"Who is?" she asks, stepping closer.

"Me. Ronin."

"All right," Natasha nods, willing to play along for now, until she gets the answers she needs and can finally understand what he's gone through, what's driven him to this. She gestures to the bodies on the ground. "And them?"

"You should go."

"I'm not going. It took me a week to find you; you didn't exactly make it easy." She pauses. "Clint, what happened? Who…?"

"When someone is hiding from you, generally it means they don't want to be found," he grunts, sheathing the katana behind his back.

It's obvious he's in pain, it's obvious that he's trying to cope, but she doesn't know how to break through to him. She says it with the softest, kindest tone she can manage. "Hawkeye, report."

"Hawkeye is dead," Clint says bluntly. "I told you, it's Ronin now." He doesn't sound like he wants to say it again, but he doesn't need to—she recognizes that name, the one he was almost forced into legally changing by the circus before they decided that a moniker like Hawkeye was better.

Regimes may fall every day, but he is her partner and she is his, and they are still agents, still Avengers. In some ways she is still the Widow Madame B raised from infancy and he is still the abused carnie armed with nothing more than a bow and arrow against the world.

"All right, come on." She beckons to him with her fingers.

She doesn't quite know how, but it's a testament to their past that Natasha gets him safely back to the crappy hole of an apartment he's been living in. Once inside, she makes coffee, because even master assassins need warmth and caffeine sometimes and to be honest she doesn't know quite what to do with herself. That, and it's the only edible thing in his apartment.

He ignores the coffee pot when she sets it down next to him on the bed, where he's sat stiff as a rod the whole time she was making it. She sits down next to him. "Talk to me. Please."

"Nothing to say." He picks up the pot and practically pours the scalding liquid down his throat.

"Then I don't want to talk to Ronin; I want to talk to Clint."

"You got the text. Clint's not here anymore."

Natasha stood up. "You can stop the psychotic break cover or I can take you to see a psychologist. I know how much you love therapy."

He's silent for a moment. "Clint doesn't want to be here anymore." Her lips purse, and her heart breaks, just a little, even though she's been preparing for this moment since the second she knew what it was the snap had done.

"I'm so sorry, Clint."

"They're gone. All of them." He looks up at her, looks into her eyes for the first time since they've been reunited. "You said you'd protect them, Nat. You said I shouldn't go to help. And now…"

Natasha's eyes close against the tears threatening to overtake them. "I know." Her hand finds his and she squeezes hard. She is terrified for a moment that he won't squeeze back. But he does, and then she's holding him and he's holding her, and he's the one crying into her shirt. His shirt, actually, if he remembers back that far, but it doesn't really matter now. It's not soft crying either, but loud, broken, shuddering sobs that spread to her own body, wracking it with emotion.

Once he's all cried out—and, if she's honest, when she is too—they separate and are able to look at each other once again. "Nice hair," he says, voice wobbling, but she can appreciate the some semblance of normal he's trying for, even after his whole world has been shattered apart.

"I would say the same to you, except I can't." She says it with such a straight face that it takes him a second to get that a) it's an insult, and b) she's teasing him.

"Hey, you go dark, you change your hair. It's the rule of superheroes," Clint argues back.

"Is that what we are now?" she asks, lifting an eyebrow.

The mask snaps back on, just a little bit. "You, maybe."

"You were just as much an Avenger as I was, Clint."

"So this is a problem of my priorities?" he asks, anger lacing his voice.

"Of course not. Your heart has always been in the right place."

"Ironic that the optimist in you only chooses to come out when you find a friend surrounded by dead bodies."

"Partner. And I understand. It's not okay, but I understand," Natasha says, meaning every word.

His voice cracks. "I've got red in my ledger. And I'll never be able to wash it out."

"What happened is not your fault. There was nothing you or I could have done."

It takes him a second, but he finally nods. "This is monsters and magic and nothing we've ever trained for," he echoes, bringing her back to a world where the biggest threat they had to face was a trickster god and a little mind control that was nothing a good whack to the head couldn't fix. "I wasn't looking at her. Laura. When she...went." Her hand goes back to his, squeezing. "Cooper was though, and he tried to get to her, and his mother disappearing was the last thing he ever saw. Nathaniel just winked out of existence as if he'd never been born, and Lila...Lila…" He choked. "I was holding her, Nat, I was holding onto her so hard and she was crying and asking me to fix it and then she was just...gone."

"It's not your fault," she says. "And the team, what's left of it—if there's a way to fix what happened, we're going to find it. I can't promise anything, but...we're going to try."

"What have I got left to lose, right," Clint says, no humor in it. "What are you asking me to do?"

"Just come back," Natasha says. "I don't know what you've been doing or who those men were—"

"Chinatown gang. Offshoot of the Hand. And one was a girl."

"—but your equal opportunity crime-fighting isn't much use to us. We could use you, back at the compound. I don't care who you come back as, Hawkeye, Ronin, whatever, but we could really use Clint." She pauses. "I could really use Clint."

He nods. "You have him."

Hope you guys enjoyed the fic! Only 6 days until Endgame and it's all contradicted by canon :)