Sam and Pepper are actually really good at organizing floor events. If you ignore the debacle of Cards Against Humanity with HYDRA, that is, but their movie nights tend to be pretty solid. The next event, which Sam first mentions at a floor meeting, is even better than the last, since it's only open to the floor. And it doesn't get resolved in one night, either, because (as Sam announces rather grandly) they're playing Assassins.
Clint hasn't played Assassins before, but luckily Sam is quick to explain when a few other people give him confused looks, too.
"Essentially," Sam says, "everyone has a target. Your goal is to mark your target with a marker on their arm, meaning that you've assassinated them. Once you've done that, their target becomes your next target, and it goes on until there's one person left, and everyone else has been 'assassinated.' Some places are off-limits, so your rooms, bathrooms, and the elevator. Anywhere else on the floor is fair game."
Clint, along with a bunch of other people, sign up for it. It seems really interesting, even though Clint isn't sure he'll even be able to recognize his target (there are a lot of people on the floor). But as Pepper had said, it's a good way to get to know the people around you. Probably.
Phil bows out gracefully, saying that he's always in their room, so it wouldn't work for his assassin. Clint rolls his eyes at him, but then his attention is directed in a whole 'nother direction when Loki laughs loudly.
"You're going to play? You can't even see," he sneers at Matt Murdock, a blind political science major who asked Natasha to put his name down. Thor visibly flinches as everyone turns to stare, but Loki doesn't seem bothered. If anything, he seems to relish the attention.
In response, Matt flips him the bird.
Loki rolls his eyes, but he doesn't say anything else. He does, however, sign himself up for Assassins.
Once everyone who wants to play has signed up - basically everyone except for Phil and Bruce, who explains that he gets really violent when surprised and he doesn't want to hurt his assassin - Sam shoos everyone off with the promise of e-mailing everyone their targets, and a reminder to keep a marker with them at all times.
The next morning, a poster with all the players' names is posted next to the elevator, at the top of the event board. No one's name is crossed out, not yet. But by the time Clint comes back from Professor Xavier's office hours (biology sucks ass, and who the fuck sets office hours at 9AM anyways?), Pepper's name has been crossed off.
Pepper's not really unaware of her surroundings or anything, or at least Clint doesn't get that vibe from her, so he's a little surprised that she's the first one off the list. If anything, he would have guessed Tony, whose loudness kind of just makes him an easy target.
As they walk to Erskine Hall for their history lecture with Professor Lehnsherr, Maria tells him what happened. Sort of unsurprisingly, Tony was Pepper's assassin, and she hadn't tried to fight him so much as she let him mark her.
Sounds like Pepper, Clint thinks. She doesn't fight, not physically, and she makes decisions based on how things will affect other people. They continue to make small talk, which Clint can proudly say he does not fuck up this time, until they get to class and absolutely have to be silent.
(Professor Lehnsherr is strict as fuck about everything - cell phones, talking, food, even laptops. This is definitely Clint's first class where no electronics are allowed.)
When they get out of class finally (sort of unsurprisingly, Prof. Lehnsherr goes over by at least five minutes every lecture, as if two-hour lectures without a bathroom break still isn't enough time) and make it back up the hill to the dorms, two more names are crossed off - Tony and Thor.
Since it's been half a day, and three people are already out, Clint gets a little paranoid when he's not in his room, or when he gets off the elevator. He doesn't know who his assassin is (part of the fun, after all), but he definitely keeps his eye out for his own target, Loki.
Only, Loki is a slippery piece of shit. He rarely leaves his room, slips out to class at weird times, and is generally just hard to get. Clint starts to feel like he should just hang out in the hallway and wait for Loki. And he probably would if he didn't have his own assassin to worry about. Not to mention, that looks a little bit pathetic, and it's too early in the year to look a complete loser.
Actually, Matt is the reason he gets Loki. Well, Matt and some girl he'd been talking to as he got off the elevator (Clint finds out way later, her name is Elektra and she's a political science major). They all finish Wednesdays with the same class (Professor Xavier's biology lecture), so they walk back together and complain about, well, biology. So while Elektra was leading Matt off the elevator, Loki had been crossing by them to get to the lounge.
Clint, with a quickness that still surprises him, sort of "ninja-ed out of elevator," as Tony describes it, and marks Loki on the arm. Unsurprisingly, Loki is not amused. He doesn't go on a tirade, but he does sort of huff angrily and reluctantly cross his name off the poster. He doesn't lose gracefully, but he doesn't act like a kindergartener throwing a tantrum, either. It weirds Clint out a lot. Nothing he does seems really genuine, except for all the arguments he gets into - those seem pretty legit, but only because he seems really relish pissing people off. Clint does his best to avoid talking to him, which both is and isn't hard. Loki doesn't seem to care of disabled people, like at all, and acts as if Clint (and Bucky, and Matt) are beneath him. But he also sees them like his own personal jesters or something, and loves to insult the fuck out of them.
Sam and Pepper have been breaking up a lot of fights for the past few weeks, to say the least.
By the beginning of the next week, almost everyone playing Assassins has been killed off. Steve is the next to go, after Tony and Loki, after Sam surprises him in the middle of the afternoon, right when he gets off the elevator. Rhodey and Bucky follow, with Rhodey getting Bucky after a particularly violent looking battle to the death. It would have been a good victory, except for Clint almost literally swooping in and marking the crap out of Rhodey.
Maria is out next, after Matt recruits his roommate Foggy in helping him recognize his target (more like, threatens to throw out all of Foggy's Cheetos). It works out for Clint, since Maria was supposed to be Clint's assassin. (That surprises Clint, since they'd hung out pretty often, and she hadn't tried to mark him. She tells him that he looked a bit too pathetic to mark right off the bat.) Well, sort of. Actually, it just makes the game more difficult, when Foggy doesn't help Matt escape Natasha.
The last people "alive" are Clint and Natasha. They've come to an agreement to not mark each other when they're walking to Dance History 10 together, but Natasha's just as slippery as Loki, or maybe more. She doesn't stay in her room all the time, but she's ridiculously quick, and she twists into the weirdest positions to get away from his marker. It's kind of terrifying, really.
Getting close enough to her to mark her is a battle in and of itself, actually, because she moves so fast. And because she's so tiny, she can be pretty hard to pinpoint.
In all honesty, Clint thinks that if all he wanted was to win then he would try to mark her from a distance. Marker arrow, or something ridiculous like that. He's had enough archery practice that he could probably make it work (not to mention, he's lived with the consequences of failure and he knows better than to miss).
He mentions it in the vaguest way possible to Phil first, who tells him that's breaking the rules. Not that breaking the rules is a bad thing, Phil continues, but that's not the point of the game. Which is true. Instead, Clint just waits. Not in a particularly creepy way, like camping out in front of her room or anything, but he does have Tony text him when Natasha's in the lounge (because there's no rule against having other people help you).
It sounds like something that could work, except that Natasha figures it out pretty fast. And by pretty fast, Clint tells Phil, he means inhumanly fast. Like, she is way too smart, and Clint is pretty close to giving up and letting her mark him, except that at this point, they've been dancing around each other for like, three days and it's too much time spent for him to give up.
He gets her when she comes back from dinner. He's studying in the lounge, waiting for Maria to come study with him before their history midterm - seriously though, who the fuck gives a midterm during week 3? Professor Erik fucking Lehnsherr, that's who - when Natasha comes back from dinner and stops by to say hello.
She's leaning in the doorway and absentmindedly pushes her sleeves up to her elbows, when Clint remembers that they're not supposed to be idly chit chatting, so much as he's supposed to be trying to mark her arm and win. He tries to reach for his marker while still looking subtle and relaxed, but she notices, because of course she would, and she takes off down the hallway.
If Clint expected to corner her in the hallway, he's wrong. Of course he's wrong. She reaches the end of the hall and goes down the staircase, instead of just stopping. As fast as she is on her feet, though, Clint's just as fast, and he's more used to obstacles than she is (he doesn't know this about her yet, but her ballet training did not include instructions for moving up and down stairs as fast as possible, so much as moving across a stage quickly). Still, she's quick enough to get away from him, at least until they read the emergency exit at the end of the staircase; if she continues on, she'll set off the alarm, so the only real way for her to run is to go through another door and make a mad dash for the elevator.
But it's too late for her to try. Clint's caught up with her, in the split second it took for her to consider her options, and she's basically cornered. He goes to mark her, not quite grabbing her arm to hold her still but sort of lightly grasping it, and she's immediately on the defensive, kicking back at his knee instinctively and throwing her weight away from him until he lets go of her, which is pretty much immediately.
Her face, when Clint looks down at her, is blank. She looks absent, empty. Maybe removed from herself.
"Nat?" He has to ask, to make sure she's okay. He doesn't want to have fucked anything up for her, or accidentally cause her to remember some past trauma. She shakes herself, just a little, and her eyes focus on him.
"Clint." She tries for a smile, but it only half works. "Hi. Sorry. Are you alright?"
He shrugs noncommittally. His knee hurts from where she kicked it really hard, but it's not fucked up or anything. Give it a day and it'll be fine, which he knows from experience. Might need ice, but that's alright. He's more concerned about her right now.
"Don't worry about me. You okay?" He looks at her, trying to see if she's okay or not. Except, of course, she won't look at him or answer the question. Actually, she changes the topic entirely.
"Looks like you've won."
That surprises him. "What?"
"You have a marker. I don't. You win." She's doing her best to look nonchalant, and ignore the fact that she had… Clint's not sure what to call it, a flashback or a panic attack or something.
"Natasha," he starts, but she gives him a look that says drop it. Instead, she holds out her arm and waves it in front of him.
"Tasha, seriously. Are you alright?" She glares at him a little more angrily, more death glare now, but then Clint blinks for a moment and when he opens his eyes again, she looks normal. Not angry, not scared or blank, but she has a neutral expression on her face, and her body doesn't scream "leave me alone" anymore.
"I'm fine. Are you going to win, or not?" She shoves her arm in his face again.
He swallows, then nods. He takes her arm in hand, looking at her for panic or some other kind of bad reaction (there's nothing), and draws a little arrow on her arm. He lets go, then holds out the marker to her before she can move away. "Your turn."
"What?"
"It's your turn. Do it." Her eyes narrow in confusion and… suspicion, Clint thinks, but she doesn't move. So he starts to talk again. "Come on, Tash. You'll save yourself from all of Tony's jokes, and Loki's snide comments."
She's still looking at him weirdly, but she draws a tiny hourglass on the inside of his wrist. He smiles at her, a giant grin and his eyes even crinkle around the edges, and she wants to smile back. Instead, she hands the marker back to him, and then walks back up the stairs to their floor. He follows behind her.
When they make it back to their lounge, Maria is waiting for Clint with a raised eyebrow. She watches as they both cross their names off the poster, handing the marker back and forth between each other, and then Natasha disappears silently down the hallway.
"Did you do something to her?" is the first thing she asks, once Natasha's gone and the door's slammed closed behind her.
Clint looks at her. How the hell did she know? Maria reads his face pretty easily, though, because she explains immediately. "I live with her, Barton. I can tell when she's putting up a front, and you guys were gone for like, ten minutes. That's more than enough time to kill someone off in Assassins."
"I kind of grabbed her arm. She didn't react well." Maria looks kind of skeptical, like she knows that there's more too it. But Clint doesn't feel like it's his place to tell her anything else. It's Natasha's life, and he doesn't want to make things uncomfortable for her; he tells Maria that, and she just nods.
"Makes sense," she tells him, but she still sounds doubtful. She seems to brush it off, though, and changes the topic. "Did you still want to study? I picked up an old midterm from the Test Bank, it might help."
"What? Yeah, sure. Let me get some coffee first."
Maria rolls her eyes, but she lets it slide.