Natasha wakes with tears streaming down her face, her whole body trembling inside the cocoon of white cotton. The black singlet that she wears to bed is riding up to her ribs, leaving her midriff exposed to the freezing air of the open window. As her grey eyes flick around the room as though searching for someone, her red fingernails reach up to hug the pillow to her chest. Once entirely sure she's alone, she flips over onto her back and stares up at the ceiling.
She doesn't like Stark Tower, she decides suddenly. It feels like a glowing beacon, saying 'come and kill us and mock us, why don't you?' and Natasha hates it. And she knows that Clint does as well, but he's spent so long trying to find a place he fits in that living in Stark Tower is a major improvement to living in a warehouse where he sits up on railing and watches people walk past all day and all night, tinkering with the stupid TESSERACT that almost destroyed the whole world.
And even though he won't admit it, he kind of likes having people around who he knows will protect him if he can't manage that.
That's a major contribution to why Natasha doesn't like living there. She's always hated relying on people – in Russia the night Phil called, she was aware she was being tailed – had been for about three blocks – and she knew that the next client she was supposed to see to was probably going to try to kill her. Valeriya would have called her insane, nuts, out of her mind for letting the tail get that far. But she was a mercenary, and if she was to do a job, she was going to do it right.
And Valeriya was dead, so whatever she said didn't really matter that much, now did it?
Eventually, driven mad by the cold breeze drifting lazily through the open window, she pushes the covers all the way back with her feet and struggles into standing, reaching out her hand to shut the damned window, but then she draws to a halt as she sees a shadow on the roof flicker in the moonlight. And then a flame strikes up, the heat of which she can feel down in her room – second floor from the top – and suddenly she's grabbing a blanket, jamming her feet into a pair of thongs, and she's pattering her way up to the roof.
At the entrance to the roof – still bearing the remnants of the destroyed portal opener – Natasha stops dead, staring out onto the snow-laden concrete roof. She can see him clearly against the outline of the sky, hunched over, shoulders shaking slightly with tears she cannot hear. Even with only her legs exposed to the air, the rest of her bundled up in a blanket, her whole body wracks with shivers.
She steps out into the air, pulls the blanket tighter, and walks over to where he has set up the fire, in the middle of the roof with two chairs surrounding it. Almost like he knew she'd be there. He doesn't look up when she lowers herself into the chair or when she leans forward to hold her hands above the open flame. Natasha knows that he can sense her, but he also knows that he's ashamed of the droplets of water that drip down his cheeks.
"He would have wanted you to move on." Tasha says as she leans back into the chair, the blanket wrapped around her skinny shoulders as she tucks her legs into a cross-legged position. Even though he doesn't meet her eyes, he inclines his head ever so slightly, giving her leave to continue. "Phil, whatever he may have been, was no idiot." For the first time that night, Clint looks up and meets her eyes with a look that says 'are you joking?'
Natasha reconsiders her first phrase for a moment. "Okay, so he might have been an idiot, but he didn't die for nothing." This drags a small smile to Clint's lips, but then it's gone and he's staring into the fire, the flames dancing in his eyes and lighting up his face.
"He died believing in magic." Clint says suddenly, and if Natasha hadn't been trained for things like that she would have leapt sky-high. But instead she folds her arms over her chest and cocks her head at him.
"Phil died believing in us." She replies. Clint lets out a dry, harsh bark of a laugh.
"Yeah. Us. We're magic, aren't we? Super serum, a hulking green thing, a fancy suit, a demi-god and then you and I, the best train-to-kill assassins out there. Aren't we magic?" there's an insane look in his eye that gives her pause, but then her eyes meet his – grey against brown – and she knows that he's wrong.
"No, Clint, we're not magic. None of us are magic. We're not!" She adds loudly when he scoffs. She knows exactly what they are. "We're science." He grows rigid and still, and she can tell that he's never thought of this before. "Steve with his super-serum, and Bruce with the same kind of thing, they're not magic – they're some fool's creation to make a whole 'nother human race. And Stark – much as I think he's a stuck-up bastard – is a genius. Thor is man of legend, but he's not magic. He's simply just a fairy tale brought to life. And you and I… well, you and I have been trained to kill since the day we could walk.
"So, no, Clint, none of us are magic. We're science." She feels quite pleased with her counter-argument because she knows she's right. Clint raises an eyebrow but otherwise keeps his mouth shut. Tasha knows she's won the battle.
They sit in silence for a bit longer – well, Clint in silence while Natasha hums the tune of 'Thinking of You' by Katy Perry. After a while, Clint leans into the seat and turns to Natasha, a question on his lips.
"There's one thing that's been bugging me for a while, Agent Romanoff." He tells her, and she tilts her head to show that she's open for questions. She can sense the hesitation in his voice, and can see it in his eyes, but then he suddenly blurts out in a rush;
"How did your parents die?"
She sits stock-straight swiftly, her irises ablaze, watching him like the spider after which she was named. Clint meets her cold grey eyes and doesn't let go, even though he's secretly scared of what she'll do to him. And then she abruptly folds in the middle and rests her head on her knees. Clint makes a jerk of movement, but she holds up a single finger, and he draws still. He watches her for a few moments, waiting for her to speak, and when she does her voice is scratchy and raw.
"In a fire. A week after my fifth birthday. We were at my house in Stalingrad. It was about midnight, I was asleep in my bed, but I remember my parents talking before I fell asleep."
"We need to get her out of here, Denis!"
"Alexia, how can we do that without looking suspicious?"
"So what are we supposed to do? Let out daughter die by a fire?"
"I have told you countless times that he will be here! We must have faith, he owes me a debt!"
Her eyes are taking on a misty, reminiscent look, and it's scaring Clint a little. She inhales a shaky breath, and he can tell that she needs a little push. He gets to his feet, kneels next to her chair and entwines his fingers with hers. "Go on." He says quietly. And so she does.
"I was just a baby. I didn't know what my parents were talking about that night – they always whispered weird things in the middle of the night when they thought I couldn't hear. But I could always hear. I remember when the fire broke out, I was asleep, and I remember waking up to the smell of smoke. I thought it was Matushka making breakfast, but when I opened my door, the smell was far too strong to just be eggs and bacon. And I couldn't see past five feet in front of me, maybe even less.
"I called out for my parents, but my voice couldn't have gotten far because of the smoke. I just kept screaming and screaming and screaming, but no one replied at first. And then I could hear a faint voice in my parent's bedroom, calling out for me. It was Batushka – my dad – telling me to run, I know now. But back then I ran to the voice. And I was met with a wall of flame." She feels the fire, licking its way up her arms, scorching her skin to toast, burning everything in its path. She's never spoken of this incident before, but she has a feeling that she probably should have.
"Batushka and Matushka had known about the fire, had planned for someone to come and save me. And someone did – a man named Ivan Drakoff, a good friend of my father's and a man I knew and trusted well. He had been over to my house many times, and I had always liked him. But when the fire started, he wasn't there yet, and I was confused and scared, so I panicked, screamed and ran down the stairs just before the whole top floor collapsed on itself. I just sat and waited for almost half an hour in the flames – I locked myself in the bathroom, thinking that if I'd shut the door, the flames wouldn't be able to hurt me." She laughs at her own stupidity, and Clint squeezes her hand a bit tighter.
"When Ivan turned up, I was about a minute away from the flames choking me. He pulled me from the bathroom and brought me outside. I remember quite well that it was snowing, and all I was wearing was a simple bed slip, but Ivan wrapped me in one of his jackets and carried me home through the snow, back to his huge house. And I spent the next 10 or so years living under his care, being trained as an assassin, and in all those 10 years, I never once thought about my parents – I was too solely focused on training well enough to be able to do what I was sent to do." She sucks in a sharp breath and shuts her eyes, tears spilling from her lashes, and Clint understands that story time is over. And he also knows that this is as much emotion Natasha has shown in a long time.
But as he moves to untangle their fingers and go back to his seat, Tasha's other hand latches onto his arm and she looks him dead in the eye, her cold grey irises almost silver from the tears. "Don't." She begs, her voice meek and small as she clutches his arm tight to her chest. Clint searches her eyes, and then very slowly he stands, lifts her bridal style from her seat, sits down and positions her on his lap like a child. Oddly, she doesn't argue, just curls her slim legs under her and tucks her head into his shoulder, her hot breath sending shivers rolling down his spine.
Silence overcomes them for a while, with just the sound of their breathing and the fire crackling in front of them. Clint can feel her shaking with tears, but he doesn't say anything – her eyes are trained solely on the fire and it doesn't seem like she wants to look away. "Tasha?" He whispers eventually, and she slowly turns to him, her eyes glistening in the fire. They stare at each other for what seems like an eternity, and then, as if drawn by a string, her hand draws up and touches his cheek, her fingertip running along the harsh cut that reaches from his temple to his jaw, and he winces.
"Does it hurt?" She asks quietly, her voice full of a compassion he's never heard in her before.
He gives her a crooked smile. "I've had worse."
It's almost instantaneous, what happens next. Both her hands fly to his cheeks, one of his winds in her hair, the other wraps around her waist and pulls her closer, and then their lips are meeting and their tongues are together and her nails are digging into his face, and it feels so, so, so right to them. She breaks away for less than a second to press her forehead against his so that their eyes are level, and she whispers doggedly, "Promise me this means something to you."
"I promise."
And then they're kissing like there's no tomorrow.
He's the one to pull away, but he does it gently, never once taking his hand away from her hair. As he searches her eyes, tears still clinging to her lashes, he comes to a jolting realization, and before he can even think it through, his mouth is already forming the words, the letters rolling off his tongue.
"I love you."
Natasha could swear that her heart stopped beating. Love, love, love, what did she tell Loki about love? She can almost hear his snide voice in her ear:
"Why, is this love, Agent Romanoff?"
"Love is for children, I owe him a debt."
Abruptly, she jumps to her feet, her nails making deeper wounds into the scar that already mars his face as she drags her hand upwards. He watches her with cautious eyes, almost like he expected this reaction.
"I do not deal in love. Love is for children." Her Russian accent is thick – it always is if she's mad. "Do not play games with me, Agent Barton; I do not think it will end well for either of us." And then she swivels around on her heel, rips the blanket from underneath him, and marches away, her head bent low against the biting wind, leaving Clint alone and confused.
However, once in the cover of the stairwell, she leans back against the cold concrete wall, tears gushing down her cheeks, her whole body shaking from tip to tail. Natasha leans against the wall for a few seconds to get her balance, and then she begins to make her way back to the 98th floor, leaning against the handrail for support the whole time, in case her legs give out and she falls.
Once in her own bed, she cocoons herself in all the blankets she owns, turns on every heater in the room full blast (Stark has too much money, he won't mind) and shuts all the windows she can, even the ones highest up, and she still can't stop shivering like a wet dog. After too many failed attempts at sleeping, with the flames of the fire still jumping to her window, she flips over onto her stomach and bursts into tears. They run salty into her mouth, and she gulps them down like water. It's a harsh, bitter reminder that all this is true, and that nothing can change that.
You're a liar, Natasha Romanoff, a voice whispers in her mind, sounding eerily like Loki's. A liar and a fraud. She doesn't really have the heart to disagree with him because he's most likely right. He is, she knows that he is. She's a liar and a cheat and a fraud.
Because when she told Clint that love was for children, the only thing that was running through her mind was 'I love you too.'
The next morning, Natasha drags herself from her bed at Banner's insistence, throws on a pair of jeans, a singlet top and a cardigan, runs a hasty brush through her hair and walks out into the dining hall with a confident swagger in her step. But that confidence almost falls to pieces when she locks eyes with Clint and sees the red rings that surround his eyes. Steve seems to have noticed it too, because as Natasha lowers herself into her designated seat – Ms Potts' orders – he shoots her a pointed look, which she pointedly ignores.
Breakfast is good – Tony and Bruce keep the conversation going, with witty remarks and added biscuits of Bruce's dry humour. Clint and Natasha don't say much, though they never really do during breakfasts, and Steve and Thor add in their own little comments at whatever the two geniuses may say. Natasha picks at her food, ignoring the way Clint's eyes bore into the side of her skull and the way Steve's seem to penetrate her mind.
When the dishes have all been cleared away – well, if you call blowing them to pieces using a booster 'clearing away' then yes – Natasha is the first one to jump to her feet and bolt from the room, down about 10 flights of stairs to the training level, where she grabs the first knife she sees – a long, pointed blade with a swishy handle that could inflict serious harm either way – and throws it at the nearest padded upright block. She puts so much force into the throw that the knife rips through the padding and clatters to the ground.
"STUPID…FUCKING…IDIOT!" She screams as more knives hit the walls, and when she runs out of those, she kicks around everything within a two foot radius: training pads, helmets, shin guards, anything that can be, is kicked.
"Do you want to tell me what's going on?" A low voice asks at the door, and Natasha whirls around, red hair flying, eyes manic, to see Steve leaning against a wall, his arms over his chest, and the muscles on his arms pushing through his shirt, trying to rip apart the thin fabric.
"No, I don't." She snarls, standing up straight with her arms on her hips. Steve shrugs and steps into the training room.
"Well, it looks like you might need to." He says flippantly, pointing around the messed up room. Her lip curls back and her eyes go to slits, but he doesn't back down.
"It's something between Barton and I. Nothing that concerns anyone else in the team." She tells him, her voice catching slightly. Steve raises an eyebrow and takes a careful step toward her.
"Tasha, look, if you wanna talk"- She suddenly flies at him, tackling him against the wall, her elbow pressed against the weak point in his neck. He gasps and sputters for breath, fingernails clawing at her to release.
"I don't want to fucking talk!" She shrieks at him, her face so close to his that their noses are touching. "I don't want to talk, I don't want to cry, I don't want to do anything. I just want to be left alone! Is that so much to ask?" Natasha pulls away from him and stumbles to the floor, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth, her breathing ragged and shallow. "He told me he loves me." She whispers brokenly to the floor, not caring who hear this small piece of information.
Steve drops next to her and wraps her in a warm embrace, his muscles crushing her thin frame against his chest. She leans into him while she cries, and as she does a single thought crosses her mind:
Even though she's got Steve right next to her, holding her, letting her cry, giving her support and letting her know that he's there for her, she's never, ever felt so alone.
So, I hope this is okay for you all, and that it kind of portrays a bit of Nat's past. I will do a full chapter on her life with Ivan later, and how all that panned out, but at this point in time, I'm still working on a few other ideas, so be patient. I've also created my own community (I Owe Him A Debt) which is Clintasha based, so if you know any good Clintasha stories, that would be fantastic. Drop me a review to let me know what you think!
no white horse for me