Chapter 5
“Hi.”
Her voice is quiet. She doesn't know if the number she got is even the right one, but right now, all she wants to do is talk to Natasha. Clint had come home a week prior, after being cleared by SHIELD's medical staff, and it had been a week since Laura had seen what Loki had done to him first hand.
Of course, Lila and Cooper had been over the moon to have their daddy back. Cooper has promptly gone into the usual frenzy that he always went into when his father set a step into the house, and Lila had taken a couple of days to readjust – in her entire short life of 5 years, she hadn't seen Clint very much and had needed time to fall back into the trust of having dad back in the house.
“Hi Laura,” the reply comes, and Laura lets out a long breath. She didn't realize she has been holding it. “Everything alright?” Natasha asks, and Laura isn't sure what she wants to talk about.
There are the nightmares, of course, but those she can handle. She's seen Clint come home with nightmares like this before, it's just... There are moments where he phases out, and when Cooper or Lila ask him something he doesn't react for a while, and when he does, he needs to concentrate hard on what they're telling him.
The worst part is the waking up to an empty bed, Laura thinks. The first night, she'd woken up at the same time as him, asked him where he was going. And when he hadn't answered, she'd gotten up and watched him walk out the front door to go for a run.
She sighs, and she replies. “Yeah, it's just... I don't know. It feels different. I mean he. He feels different.”
Natasha's been staying behind with SHIELD to help Steve Rogers adjust to modern life and be his guide through the world of modern day espionage. (And the occasional SHIELD mission, she knows from what Clint's been cleared to.)
(Would you believe it? Captain America is real again, and he hasn't aged a day? She still remembers finding a Captain America shirt in some of Clint's childhood clothes that had been stored up in the attic in all the time the farm had been abandoned.)
“I know.”
Natasha's reply comes as a sort of a good thing. Laura isn't sure how to explain it. She just feels like her husband didn't really come home. Not yet. It's like he's still fighting something, and she doesn't know what. Natasha had told her, of course, what had happened. Loki, mind control, etc. She's kept it from the children, because they don't deserve to know. The amount of damage to Clint's mind... It breaks her heart to see him like this. It does. And she feels powerless.
“He's gone out running again.” Laura says, as she looks down at the clock. It's 03:08 am, and Clint's been gone for half an hour. She trusts him to know how to come back and she trusts him to actually come back, but every time he walks out the door, it feels like she isn't helping. That she can't help. If he runs, he is running for something. He hasn't touched his bow or asked for it in all the time he's been here – even when Cooper had been asking for his dad to teach him again.
“Has he said anything yet?” Natasha asks, and Laura hears her shuffle around. There are muffled voices in the background, and she knows that Natasha is somewhere in Asian, in a timezone about 15 hours ahead of herself. So it's six in the evening for her. She's probably been through a debriefing already. Why is she bothering Natasha with this again?
Before she answers, Laura looks over at the staircase, leading up to the bedrooms. Lila and Cooper share a room, Clint has started working on one of the rooms which had been empty for a long time to make it a proper room for Lila. And he'd promised to make Laura a work room too. And to fix the tractor. And the barn. And- “He keeps talking about fixing the house, like it's something that is absolutely fundamental. He hasn't talked about you or Loki. Or New York, really.” She sighs, as she rubs her eyes.
She hates this. She hates seeing him fight on his own, and she hates that the kids know something is going on. Lila had asked the night before, as Laura tucked her into bed, why daddy was acting weird. Laura had told her that it was just because he had done some things for his bosses and he needed time to sort it out. “I know I'm not cleared to know exactly what happened, but Nattie... I mean. He's not letting me in.”
She thinks back to all the other times he's been like this – how he hadn't ler her in right after he had been asked to take in Natasha. Alright, he'd been in the hospital right after that mission and Laura had almost knocked Fury's teeth out over the sheer rage she'd felt when Fury had told her that he'd sent Clint after an 18 year old kid. But that didn't change anything.
Natasha stays silent for a while, as Laura picks at her hair. “Where is he now?” the voice at the other end of the line asks, and Laura looks at the open front door.
“He went running again, he's been gone for half an hour,” she replies, and before she knows it, she's started talking again. “He had another nightmare, about an hour ago. You know how he talks in his sleep, right? Well, he was talking about Loki and a debt. He kept saying that he'd never tell Loki about his heart, and that his heart was important.” She takes a deep breath as she tries to remember exactly what Clint had been saying.
“That he didn't want to kill you, Nat. Or me. And then he woke up in a sheer fit of night terror, because I had turned on the lamp so I could go downstairs and get him a wet water towel, and he just stood up and went out to run. Again.”
Laura puts down her hand on the table and looks at the wedding ring. She knows what it means to Clint and she knows what it means to her. When she'd met Clint, all those years ago, she had agreed to this. Monsters and magic was a hard way of looking at it, but still... She starts playing with the ring with her thumb, before Natasha speaks up.
“He'll come round again. Have you tried playing some background noise when he sleeps? Thunderstorms, running water, ambient noise?” she asks, and Laura shakes her head even though Natasha can't see her.
“Yeah, but it doesn't work. He always wakes up sweating like a dog, and then he runs off. When he comes back, he lies on the couch and he finishes the night there. When I get up to get the kids to school, he's already started doing some work on the fences or digging up a ditch somewhere for water, or I don't know.”
She pauses.
“He's not been inside the house more than 5 hours a day, at least. He can't stay still and he doesn't talk. Sure, he talks to the kids, but the most time I've ever heard his voice was last night when he was speaking in his sleep.”
She stops playing with the ring, and walks over to the fridge to get out Clint's cold water bottle as she hears the continuous 'thwap thwap' of his feet on the dirt outside. “He's coming back, I'll talk to you later, alright?” she says, and she hears the beginning of Natasha's 'alright' as she hands up and places the phone on the counter, before heading to the front door, picking up the woolen blanket from the couch where it had been hanging to dry.
Clint's soaking wet of sweat, and he takes the bottle she hands him, telling her thanks. She puts the blanket over his shoulders, and she holds her hand on the back of his neck, looking anywhere but his eyes. She knows he doesn't hold eye contact anyway, so there's no need to look for them. Not now, anyway.
She smiles, as she turns around and heads back up to bed. It's 03:24 am, and the night is dark outside. The floor creaks under her step, and she isn't sure if she wants to go back to the cold bed without Clint by her side. But she does anyway, as she wonders when Clint will be completely back.
Because what SHIELD has sent home isn't Clint. Not really. It is a shallow version of her husband, and she doesn't like it at all.