Chapter 3
For the most part, they avoided each other while preparing for the op. Clint didn’t like the circumstances much at all, but she seemed to know and respect that. At least, she didn’t deliberately provoke him. She sat on the other side of the room. She didn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t rise to his bait. He got yelled at by Coulson a hundred thousand times in the first two days. He didn’t care. Clint Barton knew what a grudge was and boy could he hold one. There were rules, and there were unbreakable rules. She had broken an unbreakable rule. It was pretty damn clear that forgiveness was off the fucking table and in case she forgot it, he’d remind her. Often.
The others just ignored him after a time. It took him a few days to realize it was really weird that Natasha wasn’t rising to his bait, that she was meekly in the corner, that she didn’t even glare at him or roll her eyes. He thought maybe she was doing it behind his back but it didn’t take him long to rule that out too. Clint’s heart momentarily twinged at the thought that he had been such a monumental asshole that he broke the fucking Black Widow. Then he reminded himself that she’s the queen of deception. That in the art of tricking people into feeling things they don’t need to feel and don’t want to feel, she wrote the motherfucking book.
So it surprised him that the morning he and Raines were supposed to drop in for recon that she sat across from him. She didn’t look, and didn’t say anything, but he was nostalgic and sad for a moment. The morning of missions, they used to eat breakfast together, in bed. He’d cook for them both and she’d sleep in because fuck if they didn’t both know how little she’d sleep out in the field. He’d wake her up and they’d eat pancakes and eggs and bacon in bed. And then he’d get to kiss the syrup off her mouth and their morning would go from there.
Sitting across from him was a cruel and unnecessary trick. He scowled at her for a moment until he noticed she hadn’t touched her breakfast. She stared at it, intent, and a little pale. He kicked her under the table and her shoulders flinched. He rolled his eyes. “Hey. You’re not going into the field. Eat.”
“Leave her be,” said Amy fiercely. She had become a bit of a Natasha fangirl lately.
“Natasha,” Clint repeated. “Eat.”
“I wish I was going with you.” Her words hang between them, heavy and soft, like her hair, like her body against his, like the Russian that slips from her lips when she’s unguarded. Clint saw everyone’s heads rear up and turn toward them, despite how softly she spoke. She looked up, her blue eyes wild, red rimmed, and she looked so fucking like—
No. He was not going to go there. He forced himself not to drop eye contact. “Raines and I got it.”
Her smile was sad, and incredibly small. He wanted to reach over the table and run his thumb over her lips to the corner of her mouth to push up her cheek in a fake smile, like he used to do to make her smile. She shrugged a little. “I know.”
Clint looked at his limp mass produced SHIELD eggs. “Yeah.”
He didn’t know what he meant by that, and he didn’t think she did either, but it was their first civil conversation in a year. That seemed to matter. He looked at her a few times over that breakfast. She barely poked at her food, but she conversed with the others, and seemed a little lighter to him when they all stood to leave the cafeteria. The whole team went to the aircraft hanger where Raines and he prepared to parachute into enemy territory. They had good odds of being seen in the air. The key was to disappear once they put their boots on the ground.
When the first equipment check time came before they got on the plane, Natasha bit her lip and stepped away from him. Her look was almost apologetic. He wouldn’t have let her anyway—what if she left something wrong just to get him hurt?—and maybe she knew that. But he watched her watch Raines with sharp eyes that didn’t miss a single thing.
He had been on a dozen missions in the last year without her. It was really weird to stand next to her and not kiss her, touch her, reach for her. That was weird. Clint shook his head. He needed to focus on the mission ahead of him. As they loaded onto the plane, he turned to Coulson. “If anything happens…”
“Nothing’s going to happen, Barton,” said Phil calmly.
Clint studied his calm hazel eyes and then nodded. He got into the plane and shut the door behind him. He sat across from Raines and reached for the necklace dangling around his neck. It was the one thing he kept from before. He wrapped his hand around Saint Sofia, the patron saint of Wisdom, and held onto it for the entire flight.
“You were dying. You were basically dead,” Coulson argued, watching Clint pace around the room.
Clint pointed at him. “You fucking know I have problems with things against my consent. Especially fucking unnatural things, Phil. That’s just not fucking right. And she fucking lied to me. Is she even fucking human?”
“Try talking about her without profanity.”
“Fuck you.”
Coulson rolled his eyes. “Barton, pull your shit together. She saved your life.”
“I’d rather die than have someone use—god, what do you even call it?”
“A prenatural ability.”
“Magic.”
Coulson shrugged. “Why do you care what it’s called?”
“Because it’s not right.”
“Right,” Phil said softly, “And everything else we do here is right.”
“There are rules, Phil,” Clint said after a pause. “There are rules to the world and she just violated all of them.”
“You need to get out more. And stop calling her by a pronoun. She has a name and she’s your partner. She’s your wife. Enough of this. You can handle things personally however you want, but if you lay a hand on her, I will make you rue the day you were born.”
“I already do,” Clint said and then stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly. “Phil. I’m pissed, but I’m not going to hit her.”
“Say her name.”
Clint’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to hit Natasha. Besides, she’d win.”
“Right now, not so much.”
Clint looked out the window. “What does that make me? What did she do to me, Phil?”
“All of our tests said that she only saved your life. None of your parameters have changed.”
“I didn’t get that from her.”
“No, her unique abilities do not appear to be contagious.” The stiffness in Coulson’s voice should have alarmed Clint but he didn’t really care that much.
“Who gave her the right to do that?”
“To use her ability to give you a blood transfusion from her own body and then to use her abilities to whisk you back here faster than we could have gotten you out of there to save your life? If you don’t know the answer to that, Clinton Francis Barton, I can’t help you.”
Clint didn’t answer. Coulson left. Everyone always did.