Battle Scars.

“Hello?”

Things had gone so fast in the past couple of days, that Natasha isn't sure how to tell Laura everything truthfully. Maybe, it's more of a way to tell her that her husband is back on track. She hopes that maybe Laura saw the news footage which was on every single news channel in the world, and she hopes that Laura understood what it meant.

“Hey, Laura!” she starts, and a smile spreads to her lips. Last time she talked to Laura, she had been on the verge of a breakdown. But not now. Not really. There are things that need time to heal, sure, but she feels complete again. Clint is back. Mostly, anyway. And, he seemed to be himself. Mostly. “It's Natasha!”

“Oh, Natasha!”

She can hear Laura's cheer and she knows that she knows about Clint. It had been a shitstorm to live through – getting him back, Steve – Captain America himself – asking them for help, ditching SHIELD protocol to go save New York and the battle that ensued... Natasha almost has to pinch herself at every living moment to make sure that it had happened for real.

“How are you? Are you alright? You're hurt, aren't you?” Laura is almost too enthusiastic to be so worried, but Natasha understands. It's the relief to know that her husband must be safe. Maybe he texted her, maybe he told her, even though he hadn't told Natasha anything. But Natasha had promised Laura to keep her updated. (And, the two women know pretty well that Clint sometimes has trouble getting things out. He'll tell Laura that he's 'fine and will be out of medical in two days' when he got shot in three places and has to stay in for a week).

“I'm fine,” Natasha replies, quietly, as she settles down on the bunk she has been appointed in her helicarrier quarters. They haven't gone to the Triskelion yet, because they need to clean up the New York mess. (And, they also need to send Loki off back to Asgard with Thor, but that will happen the next day. Not today. Today SHIELD takes over their duty of watch dogs for the god of mischief and allows them to rest.) “I'm tired as hell, but I am fine.”

She can feel herself calm down as she thinks and listens to the children's voices. (She can hear Lila call for her daddy, hoping that it's him on the phone. Laura replies that it's Aunt Nat, and Lila shrieks something that Natasha expects to be baby/young child version of her title and name. She smiles.)

“How about your ankle? You told me you had broken it last time we spoke,” Laura then asks, and Natasha can feel herself blush. Of course Laura would have remembered that detail. She didn't have super healing like Steve Rogers, and, looking down at her boot, she almost winces at the idea of taking it off. It has to be swollen to some degree.

“Still broken, but I haven't had time to think about that just yet,” she half chuckles into the phone. Everything's been so high in adrenaline and fight, blood and sweat, dust and yelling, that she hasn't had time to check into medical. (Or maybe she just doesn't want to, she's not sure. Clint got dragged down there by force by SHIELD staff.) “I think I'm going to have to cut open the boot with a pair of scissors to get to it,” she adds, arching her eyebrow, and Laura makes a sound that she thinks is the sound moms make when their kids make a bad joke.

“You should go down and get it checked out, it wouldn't be good for you if your foot fell off,” Laura states, calmly but surely, and Natasha smiles again, closing her eyes. She wants to shower. Get out of the catsuit. She wonders if Clint got to take a shower too? What they're going to do to him? He seemed fine, except that- oh right. He sprained his ankle too.

“Clint sprained his ankle too, you know.”

There's a pause at the other end of the line, and suddenly Natasha feels a shift in the mood of the conversation. No, she thinks. Not yet. It felt nice. I don't want to think about that now. Laura takes a deep breath before she speaks again.

“How is he?”

And, with that, Natasha knows that she has no way out. No way to kid herself and tell Laura that Clint will shake this off. He had been spot on during the Battle of New York, but- He had also not. The jokes, the worry, it had all felt pretty real, but he had been hiding something. Something that Natasha had been to busy to decode, and she hoped that he would come clean with it.

Natasha sighs, as she rubs her face. She doesn't want to talk about this now, but she dialled Laura's number to give her updates. So here it comes. “He's... not good.” She doesn't like saying it out loud, because it feels like it's making it more real than if it was just in her head. “He's been acting alright, regular ass as he does, you know. But- but he's also been different. I think he's hiding something that he doesn't want to tell me, and he probably won't. They shipped him off to medical for the full body and mind scan, and I'm not sure how ready he is for it.”

She sighs. There it is: Clint's mind had taken a serious hit. Loki carried a big stick, and he had gone down with it.

Laura stays silent on the other end of the line, and Natasha knows that she's thinking.

“They're probably going to ask him to debrief everything that happened since he was taken by Loki, and I don't know what sort of protocol they'll have him go through,” Natasha starts, and she remembers how the council had ordered a nuclear missile onto New York. They're probably going to ask for a strong punishment of the members of SHIELD involved in the incident – Selvig, Clint, the other agents that Loki took under control. She doesn't want to think about this now, but suddenly her mind is racing.

What if they decide to pull Clint's card? They'll probably have him go through a trial of some sort, have to defend himself. Psych tests. Like the crap she went through when she came to SHIELD first. Word association, physical training.

And suddenly, Natasha doesn't want Clint to go down to medical on his own. She wants to be down there with him, and tell him things are going to be alright again.

“I don't think he's ready for it, to be honest,” she finally says, and Laura takes in a deep breath at the other end of the line. There's a little pause, before the other woman speaks.

“Clint is going to be fine down there,” Laura says, and there's a strain in her voice which wasn't there earlier. “He eats a psychoanalyst from SHIELD for breakfast every day,” she adds, but there is no hint of amusement in her voice. Good, now she's worried too, Natasha thinks to herself and she wants to bang her head against the wall she's leaning on.

“He's my husband, Natasha,” Laura states, her voice suddenly iron strong. Natasha has no doubt of her devotion to her husband, nor has she any doubt of the devotion of Clint to Laura. Absolutely not. “Believe me when I tell you that he is going to be fine. Fury will see to it,” she finishes, and Natasha frowns.

Fury? How does he come into this? She's heard him speak to the council about Clint in this situation, and she knows that Nick will protect his agent no matter the cost (She's read Clint's file about a dozen times. There are still areas that are blacked out that she can't find, no matter how hard she tries, and neither Clint, Laura nor Fury have allowed her in on what those parts mean, but she is sure it's got to do with how Clint came to SHIELD in the first place.)

“How?” she finally asks, and Laura huffs.

“Just you wait and see.”

Natasha doesn't want to wait. She wants to know now what's going to happen. She needs Clint here, she needs him to be by her side and she wants to joke about having to walk on crutches with him. She wants to hear him joke without that cloud on his mind. She wants to see him be himself again.

“He's a Barton, Natasha. SHIELD will realize that the best way for him to heal is to come back to his roots. He's always done that.”

Natasha knows what she means. She has an idea of how Clint works, but she doubts SHIELD will let him. But then again...

(When he brought her in, all those years ago, when she was just a teen, right out of the Red Room, he hadn't shown up for a couple of weeks. When they'd ended up in that shitstorm in Budapest, a couple of years later, he had been on a leave of three months. When the mess had gone down in Puerta Antigue in New Mexico, he had gotten a week's holiday, no official missions, no official contact, nothing. She guesses that this time will be no different.)

(Except, that it might take longer for him to heal.)

She lets out a long sigh, and rubs her temple again.

“I think he'll call you next time, he's going to be out of medical in no time,” she states, avoiding the subject and not wanting to keep on it. “I'll go shower no, and debrief with the team. Stark's a pain in the ass, as always, but he did just sacrifice himself for New York and the world.”

“Go do that,” Laura says, kindly. Natasha feels like she should hate Laura's warmth and her kindness in these situations, but she likes it. It feels like having some sort of maternal figure in her life, somehow. Nobody knows about Laura anyway. So, she assumes it's safe for her to feel that way.

“We'll talk soon again,” Laura says, and Natasha hears her call for Cooper and Lila to say bye to Aunt Natasha. The children's voice turn into a fit of shrieking – Natasha blames Lila for blurring out her older brother – and she smiles again. A long time ago, she hated children. With her entire heart. Hated their screams, their tears, their poop and their smell. But not now. Now she understood Clint. And right now, she felt a part of their family.

“Talk to you soon.”

She pulls the phone from her ear, and she looks down at the screen until Laura disconnects the call. Clint is down there somewhere, being interrogated for everything he's done and she's sitting her, almost undisturbed. It's not fair.

She pulls out the sim card and battery of the phone and throws them against the opposite wall.

Clint'll be fine as soon as he gets home to his family. But what about her?

Natasha doesn't know how long it'll take her to heal from this, but she's sure that it's going to take a while too. Maybe she should see if SHIELD can spare their two top assassins for a while...