Pacing around his quarters, Barton tried to make sense of the unease he was feeling. Days had passed since Natasha's medical, the routines of being on base swallowing them up and keeping them both busy. Natasha's time was taken up with medical appointments and trips to see the therapist that had been assigned to her, which she didn't seem to mind half as much as Clint had anticipated. Most of Clint's own time was spent training some of Fury's new recruits or working on the mission that he had lined up, a gift to Natasha that would prove beyond all doubt that she was worthy of the legend that had always been attached to her name.
Each morning since her exercise privileges had been reinstated, they had met for a run before breakfast, pushing a little further, a little harder each day as she moved back toward active duty. They ate their meals together and she sometimes came along to his sessions, watching from the sidelines as he worked but never joining in as she continued to feel uncomfortable when she found herself under the scrutiny of other agents, particularly those she didn't know.
She hadn't talked much about the therapy sessions and he respected that but he knew her well enough to know when something was bothering her. All the signs were there, the faraway look in her eyes when she thought he wasn't looking, the dark circles that hung beneath them, the lack of appetite she displayed at meal times and the way she pushed herself ever harder during their workouts. Although it took every ounce of his self-control, he didn't push at her. Years and experience had taught him that sometimes it was best to flush her out and other times it was best to wait until she found the words. She would talk when she was ready. He just had to be patient.
Tonight Natasha had skipped dinner claiming that she had meeting with Hill and would grab something afterwards. "I'm going to try to get an early night," she told him with a smile. They agreed that they would meet in the morning and head down for breakfast together before Clint had taken himself off to the range for some target practice.
The bow that he chose to use was an old friend, perfectly balanced and made specifically for him, the arrows flew time after time to his target, landing exactly where he wanted them. As far as practise went, it was perfect, peaceful, not a single distraction to offer him a challenge, so why was it that he felt so unsettled? Time and again his thoughts circled back to his partner and the way the closeness they had shared at the cabin seemed to be fading away since they had returned to work. It was true that they were being careful to avoid gossip but there was more to her withdrawal than concern about what people might be saying, she wasn't quite herself and often seemed to be somewhere else when she was right at his side.
Natasha Romanoff wasn't the caring sharing type, he knew this, she kept her cards close to her chest and had more skeletons in her closet than just about anyone he had ever met. Forged in a furnace of government science and self-hatred, she had been hammered into the mould of an assassin and manipulated until she no longer trusted her own instincts, until all she had and all she knew was the skill set that had kept her alive. By the time he had been sent to kill her, nobody saw the woman beneath her fearsome reputation and nobody considered that she had more to offer than the death she dealt so efficiently. He had never believed that about her, Clint had always seen the light intermingled in her darkness. Now, after recent events, he was beginning to fear that the darkness would overwhelm her.
The phone rang, startling him from his thoughts. In the early hours of the morning there were only a couple of reasons that someone would feel the need to place a direct call to his quarters, none of them were good.
"Hello?" he exclaimed, snatching the handset from the dock. Nothing, no sound, no words, and then he heard it. Breath hitched at the other end of the line, a sound that he had become intimately familiar with in recent weeks.
"Clint?" her voice was so weak, so broken that if he hadn't known it was her he would have doubted it, but he knew her voice and he would have recognised it anywhere. He had hung up the phone and was moving before his brain registered what he was doing, instinct driving him out the door and along the hallways to find her. He didn't care who might see him as he briskly covered the distance between his room and hers, didn't care what people would say if they saw him banging on her door in the middle of the night, or the conclusions that they would come to if they saw her let him inside. The thoughts and remarks of others meant nothing to him, the only thing that mattered was that she was suffering in some way and she had reached out to him.
She answered the door dressed in a black shirt that he recognised as one of his own and not much else, dark circles painting the skin beneath her eyes and evidence of hastily wiped away tears on her cheeks. It was immediately obvious to him that she hadn't slept in days, exhaustion evident in the haunted look in her eyes and the restless movement of her limbs. Tormented by something that she hadn't been able to voice, she had locked herself away, torturing herself until she reached rock bottom and could do nothing more than brokenly sob his name into the telephone.
"Come in," she murmured, opening the door wide enough to let him pass. She said nothing as he entered the room, just met his gaze with weary green eyes that were filled with more ghosts than he could count.
He surveyed the room, attention drawn to the top of the bureau that stood against the furthest wall. No matter where they went, no matter how long the job, Natasha always had somewhere to write. Her room it seemed was no exception to the rule. He'd never asked what it was that drove her to write in the small hours of the morning, what thoughts poured from her pen onto paper when she was bruised or bleeding or so exhausted that she should have been crawling into bed and collapsing against the pillows as soon as the chance arose. Once she told him, during a rare drunken blow out, that she felt she had to get the poison of their work out before she slept so that she wouldn't be as tormented by the nightmares in her sleep. Tonight there were a dozen or more pages scattered across the desktop, each densely packed with her neat Russian script and beside them stood an almost empty bottle of vodka.
She didn't drink often, and she never drank alone. Sometimes on missions she'd have a couple, sometimes when everything was over she would relax with a beer but vodka was a different scenario entirely for a woman like Natasha, vodka she could drink like water. Vodka was where she turned when she wanted to forget: when her ghosts were howling and her ability to keep them at bay was compromised, the heavy glass bottle with the Cyrillic lettering was an old friend. For Natasha, drunk meant vodka in catastrophic amounts.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, knowing that she would understand what he was really asking. Guilt chewed at him. Nothing had ever undone him the way her tears did. She had tried so hard to show everyone that she was okay that she had run herself into the ground again and she had hidden it so well that he'd had no idea she was in pain. As she closed her eyes trying to stem the flow of tears, she might as well have put her gun to his heart and pulled the trigger.
"I can't sleep," she admitted, "Ever since the medical and the therapy sessions I just can't seem to block the memories as well as I should. Every time I close my eyes it's right there, so much blood, so much pain, just waiting for me. I feel like I'm losing my mind..."
Sleep deprived and spiralling, a frame of mind that he remembered well from the days after New York when Loki still haunted his every waking and sleeping moment. He opened his arms to her. "Come here," he commanded softly. She came to him hesitantly, awkwardly, as if she were unsure of her welcome but as soon as he closed her arms around her she clung to him with a desperation that frightened him.
"I'm scared that I'm not strong enough to get through this Clint," she admitted, keeping her face buried against his chest where he couldn't see her. "What if I'm not strong enough?"
"You are the strongest person I've ever known," he told her honestly, glad that she wasn't looking at him because he was almost sure he would lose his nerve under the weight of her gaze, "all you need is a little sleep. You can do it Nat and if you aren't strong enough right now then you lean on me and I'll bear it for you. I'll be strong enough for both of us until you're ready to stand alone again."
The subtle shift in her posture was enough to have him worried that he had said too much, enough to make him think that she was about to pull away from him. She didn't. Natasha lifted her head, looking up at him with haunted, knowing eyes. The eyes that looked at him were those that had borne the weight of the world and now found the burden was not so heavy with him there. "Stay," she said softly. He nodded his agreement, knowing that there was nowhere else he wanted to be. While Natasha was vulnerable, he would stay no matter the cost.
They ended up on her bunk, his back propped against the headboard and pillows while she curled against his chest. He moved his hand closer to hers, offering it silently. She observed it for a second, then placed hers over it and wrapped her fingers around his own. It didn't take long for her exhaustion to catch up with her. He knew from the slight change in her breathing as she relaxed against him that she would soon be asleep.
"You trust me right Nat?" he asked, stroking her hair soothingly.
Though she didn't life her head or open her eyes, her response was instantaneous, "with my life."
"Then trust me when I tell you that you can get through this."
She was fading, he knew it when she spoke again, the words slurred by sleep. "Can't keep coming to my rescue Barton," she murmured.
Clint smiled at that, he knew very well that Natasha Romanoff didn't need a man to come to her rescue. "I know that you don't need me to rescue you Sweetheart," he told his sleeping partner. Planting a gentle kiss against her forehead and settling as comfortably as he could, he closed his eyes, "but maybe I'm not the one doing the rescuing here."