A/N: Went way off a tangent on this one, but what really matters is that we have a fondue.
"And I hope I won't go and give it up for nothing,
But I know I don't feel what I feel for nothing.
Don't you know by now that I keep returning to you?"
- Myriad by Gordi
The moment they had arrived at his quaint little apartment, Clint shared that he was going to take a shower. They shared between them no more than a quick nod of acknowledgement before he had disappeared into the bathroom.
Now alone, the voices in her head grew on her. The voices had been a staple in her everyday life since she was barely a teen, not one that she was proud of, but one that she had since managed to live with rather than live under. Again, yet another crisis that Clint had helped her maneuver all those years ago.
These days though, these voices and these thoughts were invasive and intrusive. Memories of the fight, memories of so much more than the fight, and everything else that she had seen along the way over the past three years, they came to her constantly these days.
It would be simple things like an old memory from her Red Room days that she had since become well adjusted to. And then there would be recollections if watching her friends turn to dust right in front of her, which she had to admit still stung a little.
On top of that, there were scenes that never left her mind — barren restaurants and offices that hadn't been filled since the decimation, streams of untouched alleys and highways riddled with still-empty cars and buses that nobody dared to move, in case they returned. For when they returned. Massive riots taking to the streets of Atlanta and New York and Berlin and Mexico and India, and so many more.
Mothers still sobbing on the street three years after the disappearances of their children. Husbands, over their wives. Shrine after shrine after shrine being set up for those lost and gone, finally seeking closure to their departure, and the riots setting these shrines on fire because, to them, nobody was allowed to accept the Decimation as it was.
If one hurt, then everyone had to hurt. Everyone had to remember, and nobody was allowed to forget. That was what many of the survivors of the Decimation had succumbed to.
The world should've moved on, like Natasha herself had been trying to do, but half the world had disappeared without a trace and nobody that was left behind would ever be able to forget. With all these memories of how the world had descended into chaos as a result of the team's failure, neither could she.
The blonde shook her head, to shake the thoughts away. She had begun to tense up, letting her mind run from her in quiet, lonesome moments like these. She knew she was better than this. She had to be. She owed it to her partner.
"God," she sighed to herself with her eyes shut. She swallowed against the rising lump pressing into her throat, and sighed once more.
Opening her eyes again, Natasha huffed to herself, determined to pull herself together. To busy herself while she was alone in the apartment, she worked her gaze throughout the room. She internalized every wall and corner, every nook and cranny of the simple, decent one-room apartment.
As she paced throughout the room, her coat off and hanging over a kitchen chair and her gloves stuffed in the pockets of her coat, she felt the polished wood of the room's minimalistic furniture beneath her bare fingertips. Touching them only served as a reminder of how different things were now.
Back in his Iowan homestead, Clint was a handyman. When he wasn't busy shooting crooks in the chest or sending one too many reminders to her about finishing her paperwork — because the STRIKE teams were just glorified hit men, and glorified hit men did paperwork to stay glorified hit men, otherwise we'd all just be murderers — he would be in the shed of his homestead, working on more self-made furniture.
He liked it rough and raw, and always said that things that were rough around the edges had better personality than something that was prim and proper and polished.
That was how he had helped to rationalize every single scar that she ever had, and how he had convinced her that there was more to her scars — and to her — than just bad, bitter, traumatic memories.
Honestly, now that she thought about it, it dawned on her that he'd used the same excuse when he'd first attempted to introduce her to the wonders of Black Sabbath, not that it ever stuck. Natasha felt a smile tingle on the edges of her lips, but it soon watered itself away, a response to the bittersweet taste that had then landed on her tongue.
She kept her fingers and tucked them under her arms instead, and continued to pace the room. Intrusive memories and voices in the background calling for her attention, she scanned the room.
The walls were clean and clear, where she would recall seeing a handful of Lila's many masterpieces lined up along the homestead's walkway and stairwell. The tables were empty, not a single book or magazine in sight, and she remembered how Cooper used to leave his books lying around everywhere in the house. She'd join him on the family couch to see what new series he was reading, and would find a hardcover tucked away between the cushions, and they would always have a good laugh. As a kid, she was the same way too.
Again, Natasha shook the thought away.
Absent-minded wandering landed her in front of Clint's closet, right by the side of his bed. She felt his clothes, took a sleeve to her nose and sniffed it. After that many years apart, and her memory of his scent having begun to leave her as quickly as his presence had, it warmed her heart a little that his clothes still smelled the same: scents of sandalwood and cedar, with a hint of jasmine to balance it out.
She didn't know just how much she had missed the smell of him, and how much comfort it gave her, until she felt the heavy pang in her chest as soon as the familiar scent hit her nose.
Natasha let the sleeve go and smoothened it out again, looking through his wardrobe of simple clothing.
And then, her eyes had caught sight of it — the SHIELD-issued handgun that he had stopped carrying over a decade ago. It was tucked underneath a stack of cleanly folded sweatpants, hidden neatly out of sight from the untrained eye. She pulled the gun out from beneath the stack, and felt it in her hands.
She hadn't carried for a long time either. Much like his current weapon of choice, she had turned to close-range weaponry over the past couple of years. Plus, it brought her closer to the fight, and in contrast to her then-partner, she didn't see as well from a distance unless it was through a zeroed-in scope.
Gun in hand, she took a seat on the nearby edge of his bed. She observed twisted sheets, and concluded that he'd begun having nightmares again. Clint always slept better with someone else by his side, and never did do as well alone. They were the same, in that way. She turned her attention back to the gun.
Releasing the catch to unload the magazine came like second nature to her, despite the many years. She found the magazine to be completely empty, which was odd, if Clint had kept this handgun in his wardrobe as an emergency weapon. They always carried their handguns fully loaded, and with two spare mags for reloading.
Confused, she pulled back the slide, only to find one live round loaded into the chamber. Only then did it dawn on her — this wasn't meant to be a weapon, but instead, a tool. A one-time tool, and she knew exactly what for.
The thought made her feel absolutely sick.
Holding the handgun in the palm of her hands, and seeing the live round in the chamber, it brought her messy mind back to very early days, to days when she'd had her fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun very similar to this one. Same standard SHIELD issue, same weight, same bullets, one that she nearly used on herself.
She contemplated long and hard on whether she trusted Clint enough to leave the round in. After all, he'd been the one to talk her out of it that one time, and then the next one, and the subsequent ones that came as well.
As she moved the slide back into place, chamber still loaded with the live round, she heard a loud bang! from the bathroom. Her body jumped at the sound of the bang, and her heart skipped a beat or two.
If she didn't know better, she would've thought it was the sharp echo of a gunshot that reverberated in her head, right beside her ears.
An odd grunt that came next from the bathroom was enough to tell her that the bang had probably been from Clint hitting his shin against the medicine cabinet's hollow wooden door. He followed it up with an expletive, and then, with further silence.
Natasha sighed with a heavy heart, feeling the weight on her chest closing in again. She pulled the slide back and unloaded the live round from the chamber, letting the bullet fall to the floor. She then reloaded the empty magazine back into the catch, stood up from her spot on the edge of his bed, and proceeded to stuff the gun back beneath his stack of pants, as if it had been untouched.
She picked the round up with her fingers, observed it for a good two seconds, and walked over to the kitchen.
Taking a seat on the kitchen chair this time around, and feeling the damp fabric of her coat against her back, she rested her elbows on the empty table top and leaned into them wearily. The fingers of one hand pressed into the bridge of her nose with pressure, a loose attempt at warding off the headache that she could already feel coming, drumming dully at the back of her head.
The background voices and shit memories on replay like a broken record, both choosing the worst possible time to rage on more intensely than ever, didn't make it any better.
The blonde rolled the bullet between the fingers of her other hand, then finally dropped it back into the flesh of her palm as she dropped her head. She could feel it coming in waves now, the fear, the anger, the frustration, the despair, the worry and unresolved grief. Whether it was directed at him or at herself, she couldn't differentiate it. It all felt the same, really.
Her bottom lip began to quiver, her throat growing tight for the nth time that evening.
"Fucking hell, Clint," Natasha whispered beneath her own breath, as she worked to breath through the waves of emotion that crashed into her, right smack square in the chest.
She pressed the fleshy side of her balled fist into her forehead, making a point to focus on the coolness of her own skin to keep herself grounded, to make sure her mind didn't run away from her again. She counted from one to ten, and ten to one, then both sequences all over again in her native tongue.
As her mind cleared up, she noticed that there were no sounds from the shower. No splash, no swoosh, no running water. Clint had been in there for the better part of twenty minutes, and on any other day, he would've had his hair dried out by this time.
"Clint?" The blonde called out from across the apartment.
No reply. She deposited the round into the pocket of her coat, feeling a burn on her skin where the bullet had laid in her palm, and pondered over her innate worry urging her to check on him.
Basing things off the character that she used to know of him in the past was, of course, not the brightest decision, but he was getting uncharacteristically quiet. And judging from experiences of her own, quiet always meant something bad — the worst was when it was a result of being too much in one's own head.
It had nearly been the death of her, both literally and figuratively, time and time again so many times before. And whenever it got way too quiet for her, he was always there.
It only seemed fair that she filled his silence with her presence the way he had always used to fill hers with his.
Finally convincing herself with yet another excuse, yet another sorry attempt at overcompensating for the three hellish years that she had left him completely and utterly alone in his own head, Natasha stood from the kitchen chair and paced towards the closed door.
Her hand on the door's handle, she pushed it open slowly and without warning.
She found him sitting over the closed lid of the toilet, fully clad except for the pairs of boots and heavy-duty forearm guards that he had removed and chucked messily to a corner. He had his elbows resting over his knees, head hung. Whether it was in despair or defeat, anything else in between or something else altogether, she couldn't tell. But the voices in her head were creating an uproar at the sight.
In between one voice blaming her for his sorry plight, and another throwing insults at her with utmost disgust that she 'even dared show her face here, or anywhere at all,' Natasha found her fingers half an inch away from him. They were, again, contemplating whether to touch him.
She wanted to, so very much. But then there they were again, those innate fears deep in her bones that took the voice of her own worst energy — herself — to lament her:
Who the fuck was she to help him feel any better? She wasn't the hand of God. Her hands were supposed to save the world and now their failure had caused the Decimation. His entire family was dead now because she had failed. She was the reason he was in this state. She caused this. She did this. So what right did she have to be there, that little shit, that useless bitch, that fucking c-
She rested her hands on his drenched shoulders, and zeroed in her mind onto just about anything else, exactly how he'd first taught her.
The sensation of residue raindrops on the material of his jacket. The smell of iron and humid rain, and hints of leftover mint-scented toothpaste dried up against the ceramic of the sink. She worked to tune out the noise, focusing on the sounds of her every deep breath, and the barely audible ones of his.
At first touch, Clint had been apprehensive. The tension held throughout his entire body had tightened even further first, and then it vacated his body, slowly and then all at once. As if he had been holding onto the world's longest breath, he finally let it all go and seemed to nearly choke up as he did.
Her fingers moved to work on the belt restrained around his waist and the zipper to his jacket, and he didn't resist. She helped the jacket off his body by the arms, disregarding the slickness that had transferred from the article of clothing to the palms of her hands.
She removed the darkly colored shirt that still clung to his skin as well. It revealed a long gash tearing down across his right flank, a recovering week-old wound that was haphazardly sutured back together. Unsurprised, she worked around the wound carefully.
Once she had managed to remove both articles of clothing over his upper body, she dropped them into the pile beside them and was ready to help him out of the rest of it.
She found Clint looking up at her this time around, his brows knitted into a slight frown. He did so quietly. And frankly, she missed the way his voice always used to fill a room, whether it was his words of wisdom, passive snarks, bad dad jokes, or championing a karaoke session of power ballads. But all he did now was glance at her in silence until she caught his muddied eyes.
Then, he looked down at her hands, and she looked at them too. Stained a sobering, dense, red color from her fingertips to the flesh of her palm, she felt an odd, hollow sensation in the pits of her stomach that faintly resembled the early stages of nausea. She wasn't a stranger to this sight, but it'd just been a long while since she had gotten someone else's blood on her hands.
When she began to move, he reached for her wrists. He stared at them intensely, at the thin blanket of crimson that stained her palms. He glared at them, scowled at her hands with heavy disapproval, like they were the devil. And then, his head fell with his gaze, his chin close to his chest and his eyelids even closer together.
This was a slippery slope, or was already one to begin with, and it was something that she herself was familiar with.
She looked at him through his hooded eyes. "Clint," she said in a low murmur.
He looked even further away from her, cowered a little more into himself than he already was, and was somewhat startled at the sound of his name on her lips. She hadn't noticed it earlier that evening, as they stood in the shadows, but she noticed it now. He flinched away, and fought flinching away, and there was an internal struggle over something as simple as his own identity.
It was as if the whole of him on the surface didn't recognize the name, had willingly disavowed it, but yet a smaller part of him deep in his bones and his chest and his head knew. The small part of him worked to remind him of who he was, before all that had happened.
"Clint," repeated Natasha, softly.
His hands were still wrapped loosely around her wrists. She could feel his tremors.
He was a sharpshooter, and sharpshooting came with specific traits. Being sharp meant that he'd always have the steadiest hands, the steadiest gaze, the steadiest resolve, the steadiest mind, the steadiest everything. Seeing him unsteady, feeling him unravel, she hated this. She wanted to fix this. She needed to.
But Natasha, as collected and as intellectually-abled as she was, didn't know how.
The blonde crouched down to meet her partner's downcast eyes, both their wrists falling into full view from where they both sat and stood. Clint worked the pads of his thumbs into her palms, working pressured swirls into her flesh. It took her a good minute to realize what he'd been mad at, and what he was trying to do now.
"Clint, stop," she sighed. He persisted to work the stains off her palms anyway. "Stop, it's okay," she continued to insist, this time a little more firmly.
The last time she repeated it, she wrung her hands from his reach and kept them. His breath caught abruptly, and she heard yet another shrill, familiar bang from a firearm. She knew it was all in her head, but it startled her anyway. She nearly jumped in her own skin.
This time, the raw and deafening sound came much closer, right in her left ear where there was nothing else but the pile of filthy, bleeding clothes stashed messily in a corner. Natasha pressed her eyes shut to recover from the shock, and when she opened her eyes again, it wasn't just a heap of clothes in a corner anymore.
Even in her peripheral vision — for she didn't want or dare to look — it was red stains, blood and bits, in a patterned spatter drawn against porcelain white tiles.
Blood, thick in crimson and viscous, spreading in area from puddle to pool, emerging from beneath the crumpled pile.
It was his body in those clothes, in that crumpled heap, with his limbs laying limply over the dirtying floor. She could see where the bullet — the bullet she knew she'd removed — had entered from beneath his chin, and exited at an odd angle at the crown of his head. She could hear the back-flow of blood gurgling in his throat.
The fired gun laid on the floor, just by his fingers. By the dead man's fingers.
Natasha froze. She only dared to breath when she heard him heave where his breath had caught. She breathed out too, in tandem with his, and she glanced sorely down to her bloodied hands. Without sparing any second thought, she wiped it against the fabric over her thighs, a dark colored skirt where the crimson stains disappeared into.
When she looked at her hands again, when she showed them to Clint, she saw that they were still slick with blood. Or rather, in her head, they were.
This was routine to her, smoothing her palms over her thighs to wipe away something that wasn't, yet was, there. The sensation of grime on her skin never did leave her hands, be it whether or not they were scrubbed clean.
"See? It's nothing," the blonde spoke quietly as she presented her hands to him, trying a smile. She searched for his eyes. "It's fine."
"It's not," the man barely choked out, doused in shame. He spoke through a heavy frown and gritted teeth. His hands were, again, balled in two tight fists. "It's not, I'm sorry."
"For what?"
He frowned. "Everything, I guess."
Natasha cupped her hands to the sides of his face, looking at him intently and making sure he caught her eyes too. It took Clint a good handful of seconds to pull himself together long enough to do so. The shame, the quiet yet fervent rage that hid carefully behind his eyes, behind the cool and impassive exterior that she'd first met with earlier that evening, she could see it now.
Her thumb caressed his cheek gently, feathering over the crisp edge of his gaunt left cheekbone. His first instinct was to inch away. His second was to lean right into it and collapse right into her light touch.
"You have nothing to apologize for," she pressed a quick peck into his hairline. She felt him sigh underneath her.
"You say that now."
She watched him glance away, and then back at her again. "And I'll say that every other day as well, because it's the truth," she said.
The distance between them was minimal now, and they were nose to nose. Right there and then, she knew that something had fallen into place. It was an emptied out hole in her chest carved in the shape and form of James Barnes that she never thought could be filled by anyone else.
And Natasha hated to admit it — especially since their relationship in earlier years had ended up in shambles due to bad decisions and bad places and bad timing, and more so since he'd then started a family with Laura — but her partner used to fill it out nicely, and honestly still did.
It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was close enough. Had history been a little kinder to them both, maybe they would've made something work.
The blonde knew in that instant that Clint must have shared the same sentiments too, perhaps even felt the very same pieces fall into place with a subtle click. He had holes imprinted into his soul in the shape and form of dead ex-girlfriends and dead wives too, holes that she knew she could fill out just as well, judging from their history, as well as from the forlorn manner in which he glanced at her lips now.
She was impervious to fearing most things, but she feared the way her body ached to touch him too. Lip to lip, skin on skin. She feared exactly how badly she wanted it. She feared the way her body had inched closer and closer to him on instinct, by habit.
Then, with another gunshot resounding in her head, Natasha pulled away very abruptly — and so did he — and she collected herself and her thoughts. She glanced over to the side where the sound had come from, only to see his lifeless corpse still sprawled in a heap in the corner. The stench of iron and decay shot right up her nose with a sharp sting.
So, she settled for caressing circles into his skin. Something simple, something reassuring.
"You should go shower," she offered her partner another smile.
She knew how difficult something like this, something as simple as moving to take a shower, would be in the state he was in. The simplest things were always the most impossible in that headspace, and she could attest to that. Because letting yourself go completely was far easier than grappling for anything else. It was just less effort, and the path of least resistance was always the best route forward for someone that had burned himself out and had since been reduced to cinders.
Clint nodded quietly, and looked down to his fingers and his feet in silent defeat. She gave him one last stroke on his cheek, then moved her fingers through his haphazardly trimmed hair and felt his new haircut under her palm, and then she moved out of his way. She leaned the small of her back into the sink instead, and tucked her hands snugly under her arms.
He worked his own way out of his belt and pants, and the rest of his clothes, and dropped them into the enlarging pile. She watched as he did. She wasn't a stranger to seeing him bare-skinned before her eyes. She observed him closely, the manner in which he paced about with heaviness in his steps, and how his fingers felt for the towel on the drying rack before he took it into his hands.
As he moved quietly past her, she ran her eyes over the skin of his bare back; it was as if she was playing a game of Spot The Difference, against a memory of how his back had looked like in the past.
When her eyes trailed upwards, an unsightly scar caught her attention. The scarring was scratched in right behind his left earlobe, and she was sure that if she looked behind his other earlobe, she'd find the same scar too. The scar tissue was located over the area where, if she recalled correctly, his Stark-tech implants had been fused into his auricular nerves.
Judging by the gross scarring that had since formed over the formerly cleanly-healed incision, he must have tried to cut his aids out.
Natasha reached for his hand as he walked past, and barely caught his fingers. He responded with a low hum.
"I'm here, if you..." Her words tapered off as soon as she realized that she didn't know the right words to use to continue. So instead of finishing the sentence she'd begun, she squeezed his hand lightly.
Her partner didn't look back at her, but he did squeeze back. "I know."
With that, he retreated to the shower. The blonde hadn't taken note that she had been holding her breath the entire exchange, only until she heaved a sigh as soon as she heard the water from the shower-head begin to run.
She flipped herself around, moving from the small of her back to the front of her hip bones pressing into the countertop of the sink. She glanced to the floor beside her, as if expecting to see something other than the hallucination of a disfigured corpse taking the face of her best friend. She looked to her hands, as if convinced that if she stared at them long enough, that if she scrubbed them under scalding tap water for a full minute, that the thick sheen of blood on her hands would go away.
Feeling her blood run a little colder, her anxiety peaking as the voices in her head went from low mumbles to drastic uproars, she bent herself over the edge of the sink and planted her arms into the counter as an intense bout of nausea and vertigo came and went. It felt like fire ants on her skin, nibbling away and consuming her bit by bit until they took her as a whole.
Once the nausea had gone, she pressed her palms into both her eyes, and sighed. She let one Russian expletive slip, and then another, and then she cussed out softly at herself.
When she opened her eyes again, Natasha watched her own reflection come into focus in the mirror in front of her. Along with her own reflection was the distant figure of someone else, standing an arm's length behind her. The figure leaned against a wall.
"You know, three years is a long time to keep up a pretense," it said, quietly. The voice was barely a peep, but she would recognize it anywhere, even if it was just in her own head.
The face to the voice, the figure itself, took the form of the James Barnes that she'd known a long time ago, and had kept to herself for a long time coming. It was the soldier without the now-shoulder length hair, his brunette locks untrimmed that rested right by the edge of his jaw and no further than that.
The color of his eyes, as she remembered it, was never a constant shade of blue. Depending on the day, the hue to his irises always changed. They were never the same texture more than twice. Right now, his eyes were dull and sinister, and she would best describe it as a storm encroaching upon her, laying waste to everything in its path.
Even if this was just a hallucination, she didn't like this sight of him.
The man inched closed to her. "I know you don't. But you're the reason I'm here. You're the one doing this. It's you. You're a sick fuck, you know that," the voice chided.
Natasha chewed on her bottom lip as she glared at the figure. She felt him press into her back, with his cold breath tickling her neck and warranting goosebumps. He set his arms down beside her, as if to box her into wherever she stood now. Her next breath left her lips with a slight tremble.
"You're scared," he said, and his eyes watched her squirm through her reflection. And the man was right. She was, only because the last time she had let her mind run this far into a hallucination, it didn't end well. "That was over fifteen years ago. You made the right call, going over that ledge, exactly as you were told. Pity, you weren't as weak as I'd thought."
The voice that had told her to do so, that had screamed in her ear for days and nights like the voice of God to do the deed until she finally did, it had been the voice of an older sister. Natasha was an only child.
She was admitted after that, first in an ICU for a multitude of crush injuries, and then a psych ward where they put a diagnosis to the wreckage that was the inside of her head. Then came all the medication, and as soon as things had improved, she never let herself get that bad ever again.
"You know they don't work, at least not anymore. You're on them right now and I'm still here. He's still here," the figure pointed to the mangled heap in the corner. "You're never going to get better. This is it. This is as good as it's ever going to get from now on."
Natasha was unfazed. Since the day she'd been admitted for the first time, she had been waiting for the very day that her medications would stop working. She had prepared herself for that day. She had learned to live with the voices, and not under their control.
The man scoffed, a gentle rush of air cooling her earlobe. "Have you, though?"
Then, he leaned in even closer to her, his scratchy stubble grazing her skin as he did. His voice was low, and she could hear the menace in his voice. "You know exactly how to end this, to get rid of me. You've done it before. Maybe make it count, this time."
As much as she detested the words leaving his lips, and as much as she knew that this was all just in her head, Natasha missed his voice. Her chest ached to hear him speak to her, because they hadn't spoken in nearing two decades.
And as much as the hallucination of him was attempting to intimidate her into a corner, she didn't feel cornered. Not one bit. Instead, she missed his touch, and the way he always felt massive in comparison to her tinier frame.
She missed the callouses on the knuckles of his flesh hand, and the polished grooves of his other. She missed listening to his every breath as he fell asleep. She missed his coolness as much as she missed his warmth. She missed the way his eyes always changed with the tide, and the way they revealed the depths within him that made certain that there was a man behind the mask of the vicious Winter Soldier.
She missed him greatly. And oddly enough, it was the ruins of her own fucked up head that gave her the only way that she could keep him around. A delusion, a hallucination, a waking nightmare. Sure, the voices would probably drive her to her own death one day, but... she missed him.
The man's eyes, cold and brutal, unmoving and unrelenting eyes that had been watching her as intently as the corpse on the ground beside them, they softened. He was taken aback, and he let out a huff, and he chewed on the inside of his cheek.
He maneuvered her to a side, a freezing fingertip against her chest in the space between her collarbones. She swallowed at the apprehension that crept its fingers around her throat.
He pulled his finger down the length of her chest slowly. "So much heart, for someone you don't deserve," he whispered.
His fingers worked off the top button to her blouse easily, released it from the catch. She felt the fabric fall open against her chest. "A man who hurt you."
And then, another button. "A man who left you."
Then, another. "A man you've killed for to save."
Then, one more. This time, the figure's cold, steel fingertip gently grazed the inch-thick scar that began at the bottom edge of her sternum. The remaining length of the scar disappeared beyond the fastened hem of her skirt.
There were grooves to the scar tissue, bump and dip, bump and dip, and Natasha preferred not to remember how she'd gotten all of them. Each rim burned at his touch.
"A man who did absolutely nothing for you, who only watched blankly as they tore you apart right in front of his eyes, over and over, and over again, like a worthless lab rat," he sneered, taking his finger down each groove as he counted.
Then, he leaned into her, lips hovering just beside her left ear. "You're pathetic," he scoffed. Immediately after, he brushed her away and swept her off his hands like she was filth.
Natasha glared back at the figure. He offered her a smug grin, one that was more her than it was the real him, and turned his back to her.
"This is embarrassing, Natasha," the voice said as his figure retreated towards the door. The voice had become distorted, a mangled mix between the sound of his voice, and the sound of her strangely enough, there was a bit of the Madame's thrown into the mix too, her words as haunting as always. "I taught you to be better than this."
She watched his back as he disappeared out of the bathroom, and presumably out of her mind as well. As soon as the last of him had retreated out of her line of sight, she leaned her back into the edge of the sink and forced herself to breathe.
It didn't work. It was as if there was a large gaping hole at the centre of her chest that was creating a vacuum in both her lungs. The scar over her midriff burned white hot. Her stomach hurt, and she felt like her clothes were eating her alive.
With trembling fingers, she silently struggled with the rest of the buttons to her blouse, as well as the concealed zipper at the back of her skirt. It didn't help that her clothes were loose against her skin, because they still stung with every light brush. She needed them off, and so she fought her way out of them as well, until all that was left clad on her body was a pair of undergarments.
Feeling was beginning to relieve itself from the blonde's two legs, and so she sat down on the closed lid of the toilet just in time, before her legs had given way. She clasped a hand over her nose and mouth, trying to compose her labored breathing as quickly and as quietly as possible.
It wasn't until she blinked a sixth time at the heap that she was face-to-face with, that her breaths began to settle down. It was only then that she noticed that her hallucination of her partner's corpse in those clothes had went as well. All that laid before her was a pile of clothes — no gun, no blood, no body, no disfigured face.
Natasha watched the pile, and she chewed on a fingernail as she waited. She didn't know what for.
And then she got to her feet a minute later, stripped herself down to bare skin, and she stared herself down for a good two seconds in the mirror. Her eyes went over every scar that she could see littered across the front of her body, and she took a mental note on just how many she could spot from this view alone. The sight made her uncomfortable. The number made her uneasy.
But none of that mattered as soon as she slipped quietly into the shower to be met with the sight of his back.
The blonde took a step closer to him, and then another, and by the time she met him at his feet, her fingers were drawn to the familiar patterns on his back. Each dip and rise, each nook and cranny, each slight wrinkle caught snugly between toned muscles, each flat-surfaced and raised scar. She remembered them all, as if no time had passed between them both.
She walked her fingers up a trail of linear scars along his spine, doing so with the lightest touch. The scars had been from the surgeries he'd received after the accident that killed his parents.
A little further up his back, her fingers slid over the long sliver positioned just beneath his right shoulder blade. She recalled that Clint had gotten this one a couple of years back, crash-landing through a window during the Battle of New York. There had been a stray shard of glass imbedded deep into his upper back, which the man hadn't paid much mind to until the adrenaline from the fight had worn off later that evening.
By the corner of his right shoulder, Natasha's gaze lingered over the cylindrical wound that nicked his skin. She felt a slight smile grace her lips at the sight.
He'd gotten that from her gun, at three in the morning on the third night of the wildest bender, both of them inebriated out of their minds. Wanted had just been released into theaters that very weekend, and for some drunken reason, the both of them had thought that mimicking James McAvoy curving a bullet was a completely logical idea.
Cue one ludicrous movie, two full bottles of tequila and three hours later, and Phil had gotten surveillance alerts and had rushed into the apartment guns blazing to find his two idiots keeled over their stomachs and in full-on tears. Both were short on breath, having giggled and guffawed non-stop for a full twenty minutes at the bendy bullet mishap, even as Clint's arm had begun turning slick with streams of blood.
She'd greeted Phil as a balding Christmas tree. Her partner had started to pale by then, lips chapped as he grinned drunkenly at their handler and greeted the four Phil's standing before him, as if that was perfectly fine.
Natasha brushed her lips over the scar, pecking it gently. She then leaned her cheek against his shoulder and snaked her hand down the length of his arm to intertwine her fingers with his. She felt a warm thumb stroke her finger back endearingly, for what seemed like seconds.
And then he turned around until they were face to face and eye to eye, taking the sides of her face by his massive yet gentle hands, and he pulled her under the running shower. Clint rested his forehead against hers, the suds tangled in his hair shifting and flowing right into hers, before they slipped right down to the shower floor.
His hands slipped lower as well, and she could feel his fingers drawing circles into the scar on her chest that had burned like wildfire just minutes earlier. He calmed it down even further, and her with it. He always did.
She squinted her eyes away from the soapy water. He closed his as he sighed. "What are we doing, N'tasha?"
The blonde felt herself smile, peeking at his shut eyes and hearing his voice — soft, low and raw with restraint, and maybe even a little longing — say those words. It was at the back of her mind, probably wasn't in his at all, but her partner had asked her the very same question a long time ago.
Long before bad thoughts and bad people and bad timing, or being bad for each other. Long before the meetings, long before she'd dragged Laura over to him and introduced them at one of those meetings, long before marriage and kids and a house in Iowa instead of an apartment in Bed-Stuy.
Long before the Avengers Initiative, before the universe got bigger than just this one world, before life as they knew it all went to shit.
Back then, she had an answer, an answer that was simple, straightforward, and uncomplicated. These days, she wasn't so sure, and she couldn't find the words for what this was supposed to be.
A charity case, a pity fuck, a moment of weakness shared between them both? Perhaps maybe even a reconnection, for lack of a better word?
Sure, she loved him deeply and was one of a handful of people that she cared for most in the world, but Natasha wasn't in love with the man. And neither was he, and that was the contrasting difference between what they had back then, and what this was now.
They were, to each other, simply placeholders to loved ones whom had up and gone after an unworldly decimation that made no sense. How could anyone put words to that?
Her slightest smile fell away with the lukewarm water racing down the length of her cheeks, spilling right over her lids and lips. "I don't know," Natasha responded quietly. "I don't want to know," she then admitted.
Clint pulled a little further away, his face maybe an inch from hers, and for the first time in the few trying years she'd had since the traumatizing, cataclysmic event, he held her gaze. There was a look in his eyes that she couldn't place, a look that was forlorn. A kind of exposed sadness that took no shape and form in his eyes, a bit like molten glass, something to which she'd just pulled the sheets right off of.
There was a lot in his head that she didn't know anymore. And she wanted to, would make it her duty to, but just not right now.
Now, she just wanted to kiss him. To put her lips on his and let their bodies do the work to rid and distract them both from how fucked up everything else had become. She wanted him wholly, deeply and badly. And while he was apprehensive — he always was, always concerned that one misstep would trigger a multitude of bad memories that she hadn't learned to stop, at least not then — she was far from it.
She hooked her arms around the nape of his neck and took him in entirely.
Clint returned the favor, first softly and treading his every nip, tug and graze with caution. Then, backing her up against the shower-stained walls, he consumed her deeply. Passionately. Desperately.
In that instant, lips against lips and bare skin against bare skin, the voices droning on in the background began to tune out. They always did, whenever they came together. The voices could never once put up a good fight against his touch, or the slight tingle of his breaths atop the surface of her skin. Not then, and certainly not now.
Natasha could only hope, between each starved kiss and every next needy inhale of her breaths from between her own two lips, that she did the same for him too.
As his warm lips left hers and his teeth began to graze lightly at the skin on the side of her neck, and he propped her up by both his arms, she found herself looking over his broad shoulder. While he left a trail from jaw to collarbone, which all felt like electricity coursing through her nerve endings, her eyes focused on something else.
A corpse, back as part of the heap of clothes on the floor. She saw it through the glass of the shower, and its empty stare right back at her left her feeling cold and paralyzed.
She found herself being unable to peel her eyes away from the haunting sight, at least until she felt the warmth of Clint's hand caress the side of her face again. He came into view, and she turned her eyes to him, and him only.
And she smiled endearingly, and she enveloped him with the warmth of her own lips and the prick of her fingernails into his back. And for however long the hallucination had chosen to linger quietly for the remainder of the time they'd shared, she didn't try to count.
Instead, she pushed it to the back of her mind, where it should've stayed, and where it finally did for the first time in the longest time.
Stay tuned, Clintasha fam!