Clint Barton couldn’t hear a sound.
He knew she was coming, but he still couldn’t hear her come into his apartment.
He couldn’t hear her say his name to announce her presence, he couldn’t hear her say his name before her mouth found his, and he definitely couldn’t hear the way she said his name after it was all over.
He learned to act first think later when it came to Natalia Romanova. She hadn’t disappointed him yet, although the opposite was far from true. They laid in his bed, a mess of sheets and limbs and warmth. He was still inside of her, and made a move to pull her closer, she keeps her head in the crook of his neck breathing heavily.
He couldn’t hear her crying, but he did feel the tears fall on his neck. That alone scared him more than any former Nazi spy organization could.
After The Battle of New York (not the best name they could have come up with, in his opinion), Clint hides. He wishes the action was more masculine, but God knows masculine is a far cry from where he’s at the moment.
Waverley, Iowa isn't the best town in the world. It’s ability to breed traditionalist assholes never ceases to amaze him as he spots yet another confederate flag on his drive through town. Waverley, Iowa isn’t the best, but it sure as hell hasn’t changed. He technically still owns the house that he grew up in and everything that comes with it. He walks directly to the loft hidden in the stables that haven’t been taken care of in a decade. He climbs up easily and collapses on the remnants of his childhood. Clinton Francis Barton has had a tough life and as he curls into himself he doesn’t think about the smell of whisky, nor his mother’s negligence, nor the injuries he suffered at that house. He thinks about flashes of blue, the death of his colleagues at his hands, and those green eyes looking at him with his knife under her neck, and he falls apart.
He spends the next eighteen months in Waverley, Iowa. He brings the farm back to life.
He milks cows, collects eggs from a hen house and even buys a horse.
Natasha calls it retaining his childhood, he calls it weak. They agree to disagree.
Instead of making small talk with the neighbors, he should be high above a city, calling the shots and watching her back. She knows he needs the time off. He knows she’s being nice. Natasha doesn’t do nice. They agree to disagree.
It’s simple and it’s work he can do with his hands without seeing arrows bringing down the hellicarrier. It’s work that doesn’t cause stress or anxiety and keeps the panic attacks at bay. It’s hard work that leaves him exhausted at the end of the day and gives him a couple hours of sleep before the nightmares consume him.
She pretends not to care that he’s not in D.C. with her. He pretends not to care when she starts getting put on missions with Steve. Neither of them have mentioned The Battle of New York once.
It’s almost a year and a half later when he works up the courage to walk into S.H.I.E.LD. Headquarters again. He’s definitely not as put together as he wishes. His hands shake with anxiety as he walks in. He wishes he had his bow, he actually wishes he could hold his bow without cracks of blue covering his vision. He needs something to do with his hands so he stuffs them in the pocket of his jacket and breathes.
He doesn’t know what in God’s name convinced him to catch a flight to the capital. It’s actually a picture of Steve and Natasha on the cover of People Magazine even though he’ll never admit that out loud.
Eyes land on him as he walks into the lobby. People whisper in groups and point as he walks straight to the elevator. He wonders how many of them were in danger that day. How many of them had friends, colleagues, partners murdered by his doing. He wonders if this was the right decision. He wishes it didn’t affect him as much as it did, but it does, and that’s something Clint had been working for over a year on.
He’s not surprised when the elevator doesn’t take him up to his desired floor. He is however surprised when instead of being greeted by a group of S.W.A.T. team members, he gets the Russian, who has a hundred reasons to be angry at him, but voices none of them.
She’s always been able to read him, even when he was chasing her on rooftops in Prague trying to convince her to come to his side and they barely spoke the same language. So when she see’s him clenching his fists together so hard and hears his labored breathes, instead of screaming and shouting like she had planned, she puts the elevator into an emergency stop and pulls Clint onto the floor, holding his head into her neck and he cries.
It feels like home.
Fury doesn’t immediately put him into the field. It’s only after lying his way through about six psych evaluations as well as two physical ones. He still doesn’t feel comfortable carrying his bow, so he slides the gun that doesn’t feel quite right into its holster and hops into the helicopter. He figures this level two mission can’t be that bad.
It was worse.
The target was a rogue member of Mossad in hiding in Miami, David Bobeck, and by hiding he was actually spending counterfeit money buying anything and everything. Including a couple of dirty bombs, that slip amazingly under Clint’s radar. Also slipping under his radar, the tail David had placed on him, the tail that comes out of the shadows when the first bomb explodes, grabs two arrows from the unconscious archers holder and jams them in Clint’s ears.
It was supposed to be easy.
He’s woken up in hospital beds before, but this is the first where he is not greeted by the gentle beeping of the heart monitor. Before he opens his eyes the only thing he notices is the pressure wrapped around his hand. He squints his eyes open and is greeted by an irate Natasha, at least he thinks she is, but the lack of sound reaching his ears is making it difficult for him to understand her. This isn’t his first rodeo without sound so he quickly moves his hands formulating a sentence and her eyes drop to read them. She runs to get the doctor, but not before kissing him on the forehead and signing back “It’ll be alright.” He knows alright is a far cry of where he is now, but he likes that she’s trying.
He decides to never openly criticize Tony Stark again. Little pieces of metal jammed in his ears make him physically field ready again, but mentally he is even further. Fury benches him for a while, telling the world security council that he needs time to adjust to the aids, but really he just sticks him into a gym and has him shoot for hours.
But this time he has Natasha.
In their history, he always helped her. She would wake up from nightmares of memories that never happened, in tears over the Red Room finding her, taking her back and wiping her clean. She always felt that she needed him more than he needed her, after all he was the one to pull her down off that rooftop all those years ago. But he always felt that he needed her more. He was going through the motions before he saw her, a passive member in his own life. He did what he was told by his father, and that only ending in fists. At the circus he preformed what he was taught, doing what he could to make his own money. The army and S.H.I.E.L.D. fell together seemlessly, killing who he was told and taking orders from his superiors. He never made an active choice in his life, until he brought her back alive and not in a body bag.
He’s in the archery range, shooting targets that move or stay static or look like people or whatever else S.H.I.E.L.D. cooks up, all while Natasha tells him of New York. She starts in New Mexico, where his eyes turned blue, and his heart was taken. She weaves through Russia and Calcutta and Brooklyn, as the team assembled and ending in the air when he came back to her. He answers the only question she asks, telling her in detail how he told Loki he would end her life. With every detail he pulls another arrow and releases all the anger and aggression he’s built up in the past two years, hitting targets with force that shatter both the target and the wall he built up around himself.
He empties his quiver and turns to look at her. Her eyes catch his gaze and he feels the relief wash over him. She looks at him they way she always looks at him. Everything and nothing have changed at the same exact moment. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to feel, but he wraps his arms around her waist and swings her around. He’s laughing and so is she, things make sense again. They both agree, Strike Team Delta is officially back.
Except it’s not. Fury calls them into his office, he thinks something is about to happen but he isn’t sure exactly what. He wants Clint on observation in New York, Clint hates New Mexico, and he wants Natasha here, with Steve collecting data off some ship in the middle of whatever. Clint’s angry. He’s finally back and this happens, he should have her six, not star spangled awesome whoever. He actually doesn’t hate Steve, not even close, and rationally he knows he see’s better from a distance, and she is best in the thick of everything, but God, he just wants the normalcy of a mission with her.
Natasha takes both of their files and grabs his hand and pulls her out of the office, down the elevator, and doesn’t let go until they’re outside his D.C. apartment. It’s small and secure but it’s where they both need to be.
He orders Chinese and she gives him the spark notes version of what he’s supposed to do. It’s the picture of normalcy, her hair is loose and his feet are on the table. Anyone looking in the window would think they were the picturesque couple, but they’re not. But he still craves that normalcy. He reaches an arm out and grabs the end of her hair in his fingers. She meets his hand with her own and holds his hand against her cheek.
“Tash?” He asks.
Her eyes meet his in response.
“Thanks for waiting for me to come back.”
“Always.”
It’s hard to say who kisses who first, but it happened. This isn’t the first time they had fallen together. Missions in Dubai, Budapest, Belfast, Santiago, have all ended in similar in this manner. Clothes are taken off, hands wander, and he fucking cries when it’s all over. He cries because it’s home. He has apartments all over the world, and no where has ever felt as safe as he felt with her. They've never exchanged "I love you's." They always showed in missions, or ordering chinese food without asking, or simple touches when they need help getting the world to look the same again. She always says that love is for children, and it might be because he’s not sure if what he feels is love, because she is the world to him, love isn’t a big enough word to describe what she means to him.
They fall asleep and she’s supposed to pick up Steve at 1000 and he needs to catch a jet at 1030, but he leaves his apartment at 0830 to go to a jewelry store.
He kisses her goodbye in front of all of S.H.I.E.L.D. because he deserves to be happy.
She drives away in the car and he swears he sees her play with the necklace at the red light.
He’s goddamn whistling on the flight north.
Shit hits the fan the next day.
Fury’s dead, Cap’s a fugitive, and Natasha is his accomplish.
He stays quiet because something worse is coming he just doesn’t know what is actually happening.
Days later, after the hellicarriers fall into the Potomac, and he’s put way too many arrows in people he thought were on his side, he get’s a text from her. 99% of what they text is code, and he knows exactly where to meet her, so he hops on the subway, probably scaring some people with all the dried blood on his face. He unlocks the apartment, drops his keys on the table, and turns on C-Span. Tony always lets him know when something important is going to happen, and he wasn’t wrong this time. Natasha is wearing a fucking blazer and tearing apart Senator stick up his ass. He laughs, pulls out his aides, and takes a shower.
She kisses his neck and brings him back to the present. Her eyes are bloodshot, she looks exhausted, and she is still painfully beautiful to him. He reads the devastation in her eyes. S.H.I.E.L.D. was home to her. S.H.I.E.L.D. always meant more to her than it did to him. For him it was a new life, for Natasha is was a chance to change her life. He decided quickly that his home was with her, no matter if that took him to the Motherland. S.H.I.E.L.D actually being H.Y.D.R.A. means that everything she worked to change, actually never changed.
And so she cries. He holds her close, speaks to her in whatever language will bring her back to him. He tells her in Hungarian that things will be alright. He tells her in Creole about some dumb thing he did as a child. He tells her in Russian that even though her world had fallen apart, his never would as long as she was there. He tells in a really bad Irish accent that she’s done so much good in the world, and that her ledger is clean. He tells her in English that he loves her.
She sits up and in sign language tells him that she loves him too.