Chapter 2
Natasha furrowed her brows together in confusion as she tried to follow the unnecessarily heated argument Phil and Clint were engaging in. Something about baseball? She wasn’t sure, but it was definitely meddling with her many and failed attempts to catch some shut eye before landing.
“Alright, I’m going to catch some shut eye,” She muttered to nobody in particular. Of course, her companions, always so perceptive and quick to catch onto things, immediately quieted down, though Natasha heard Clint deliver one last punchline smugly and silently cackle in Phil’s face.
Feeling the lull of sleep pull her eyelids down, Natasha stifled a yawn as sleep actually came to her, but smiled a few moments later when her head was smoothly repositioned to pillow a body all-too-familiar. Clint lightly raked a hand through her hair, just the way she liked it, shushing her to go back to sleep. Soon after, she was fast asleep, with the feeling of Clint’s thigh muscles slightly relaxing under her head, indicating he, too, was dozing off.
When she woke up, it wasn’t because of turbulence or a rough landing. Phil was in the cockpit, and he was a trusted man to pilot an aircraft. Nor was it due to her dreams; she’d been having less and less of those recently, though she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. No, it was the feeling of Clint’s muscles becoming taut, his breathing more rapid and uncontrolled, and the minute twitches of his hands, as if he was maneuvering something with precision — a memory in a nightmare.
Very slowly, Natasha rose up and stepped away from her partner’s entranced state, taking note of the knife tucked away under the waistband of her pants. It wasn’t often, but there had been instances where they’d easily — and not intentionally — maimed one another while coming out of a dream.
“Clint,” She whispered. Clint’s eyes remained shut, his hands becoming wilder with movement. “Wake up, мой яастреб.” Wake up, my hawk.
Natasha’s lips thinned into a straight line as Clint showed no signs of returning to reality. This usually meant only two other options: one, she could physically get Clint to wake up, which would definitely work, but put her at risk of getting hurt by whatever Clint reacted with, or two, wait for Clint to realize that he was in a dream. The latter was just as effective as the former, but usually required more time for both Clint and Natasha; Clint would be forced to relive his memories longer, while Natasha could do nothing but wait. And yet, the latter choice seemed to be the better option, considering they were en route to an active op.
But it was too late for Natasha to call out to Phil for help, because in the blink of an eye, she was getting stared down the barrel of a Makarov she’d recognize anywhere, the unerring aim of Clint Barton’s unfocused eyes still sharp and true. One wrong move, and Natasha would be dead.
“Clint, it’s me.” She spoke slowly, wary of the gun aimed right between her eyes. Shifting her balance slightly, she held back a sigh of relief as she saw the safety clip still on.
“Who are you? How do you know my name?” Clint ground out, his grip on the gun tight.
“It’s Natasha, remember? Твой огненный паук.” Your fiery spider.
“Таша?” Tasha? Subconsciously, Clint’s unoccupied hand traveled up and across his body to his ribcage, where Natasha knew lay a scar that made pain flash in Clint’s eyes just by the reminder of its existence. He cocked his head, as if he was stunned by how easily he switched into another language, one considered intimate for both her and him.
“Просыпайся, любовь моя,” Wake up, my love, She nodded, despite knowing Clint wouldn’t be able to see her doing so.
“Таша,” Tasha, Now he spoke of her with more reservedness, her pleas clearly sinking into him.
“Yes, it’s me, Tasha. You’re just dreaming, alright? It’s a dream.”
“A dream…” Clint murmured, his grip on the gun faltering. The gun fell out of his hand, clobbering on the jet’s hard floor.
Natasha internally thanked whatever God that was out there as Clint’s eyes began to clear, shame, pain, and ruefulness flashing through his eyes. She mustered a weak smile, smoothly picking up her fallen Makarov.
“Shit, sorry, Tash,” Clint rubbed the space between his eyes, his head hanging low.
“You okay?”
“I will be.”
“Tell me?” At that, Clint raised his head to meet her concerned stare, quirking up a corner of his lips.
“Barney,” He shrugged, clearly not wanting to offer anything more. Natasha nodded; Clint was never one to talk about his family in the place, and that was especially the case for Barney.
Instead, wordlessly, she stepped forward into Clint’s space and snaked an arm around his torso, purposely brushing a hand past the scar on his ribcage. Clint, though quite imperceptibly, flinched under her touch, but soon drew her completely into his arms, pressing a light kiss against her temple.
“Welcome back to the real world,” She whispered, and the deep rumble of Clint’s chuckle made Natasha smile, too.
“Safety?”
“Nah, you didn’t take it off.”
The small sigh of relief Clint let out made Natasha tighten her arms around him even more, a silent message of reassurance that no harm was done, nor was any offense taken. Since being partnered with Clint, she’d come to realize that he carried an undercurrent of fierce protectiveness for the people he cared for, and he easily beat himself up whenever he thought he failed those people. And despite Natasha reminding him that he had nothing to worry about, after learning of Clint’s complicated history with his family — Barney, to be exact — she’d quickly learned that there was no way to get Clint to let go of the unspoken burden of responsibility he carried on his already heavy shoulders.
“I‘m gonna be fine,” Clint said into her hair. “Just knife me next time, I don’t care.”
Now that made Natasha narrow her eyes; she could understand the self-loathing to a certain extent. At the end of the day, they were both killers, forced to spill blood for survival. But Clint’s near-obsessive level of self-hatred and willingness to feel pain was one she couldn’t, no, wouldn’t understand.
“Clint,” Natasha frowned, hoping her disapproval was clear. Based on the air of ignorance and avoidance, Clint was just refusing to acknowledge her disapproval.
“We’ve done worse to each other when coming out of dreams, Nat.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to knife you on purpose so that you can wake up, идиот.” Idiot.
“Aw, you going soft on me, Tash?”
Natasha rolled her eyes at her partner’s insistence to avoid the note of concern she was trying to address. As expected, they had their bad days, but Clint’s version of a bad day usually meant that he was far more moody, broody, and practically a ticking time bomb, except the bomb was to explode within himself and only, for the most part, was intended to hurt himself. And whatever put Clint in a near-moody and broody state was clearly doing its job, considering Clint was resorting to cracking jokes as a defense mechanism.
“Only you, мой яастреб,” Only you, my hawk, Now it was her pressing a soft kiss on his shoulder, a touch so light that it was as if a feather had brushed against his arm.
“Just a dream, yeah?” Clint brushed his lips over her temple one last time before pulling away to slump down on the bench.
Frowning, an uncontrolled sigh slipped out of her. Natasha shifted her eyes away from Clint’s seemingly nonchalant figure to meet Phil’s expectant eyes. A similar frown plastered on his face, Phil shook his head in exasperation before returning to the cockpit.
Whatever was putting Clint on such a sharp edge, Natasha needed to know, and she needed to figure it out soon.
“Goddamn it!”
Clint swore furiously as he spat out grains of sand that blew into his mouth, stomping his feet as more sand somehow found its way into his military combat boots. He really hated any deserted regions, and Egypt, especially more so, considering the horrified face of teenager Andrew Broz was engraved into his memory.
“Almost there, kid,” Phil tossed, his windbreaker ruffling and wrinkling under the violent gusts of wind. He, too, batted away at his mouth as sand no doubt bombarded him. Only Natasha remained unbothered, saying something about surviving blizzards in Russia.
“‘Oh, we have a new op,’ he said,” Clint grumbled. “‘Egypt’s not going to be like Monaco,’ he said. Not like Monaco, my ass. Hell, we’re already off to a horrible start.”
“You say something?” Holy mother hen, of course Phil’s spidey senses knew exactly when Clint was mocking him.
“Yeah, that you’re a mother hen,” Clint smirked, revelling at the way Phil’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “Are we there yet? Old man,” He added discreetly.
“Hey, I heard that.”
“Well, are we there yet?”
“Lucky for you, you absolute child, we have arrived,” Phil rolled his eyes, stopping in front of a suspiciously crumbling-looking building.
Clint glanced over at Natasha, who was gaping at the sight of their so-called safe house in disbelief. Fucking Maria Hill, he bet she’d been laughing her ass off when she found “the perfect place to remain inconspicuous”, as she would’ve said.
“I don’t know about you, Phil, but that building’s going to fucking collapse.”
“Just… don’t say anything about it, please,” Phil massaged his forehead.
“You said it, not me. Anyways, shall we enter?” Clint mocked a bow, motioning for Phil and Natasha to go ahead. The obscene creaking of the rackety door made Clint visibly wince; when he got back on the Helicarrier, Hill was going to need to bet her ass that he was going to make her ears bleed with the number of complaints he was forming, starting right fucking now.
The interior, not surprisingly, was just as bad as they’d expected. Frankly, Clint was impressed that they even had a bathroom, considering the entirety of the crumbling shack that was their “safe house” seemed like the size of a child’s doll playhouse from the outside.
“Well, um, I guess we can start scoping out the op now?” Phil chuckled weakly, the laugh quickly dying out into a bitter sigh. If a Mr. Positivity-and-Optimism guy like Phil Coulson couldn’t find anything nice to say, the circumstances were real bad.
“Alright, then,” Clint clapped his hands together. “Tasha will go in first, scope out the general layout and dynamics of the cartel. Next day, I’ll enter and buy time for Nat to mark down some suspicious areas. We’ll report back to you, Phil, in staggered sequences, while looking into Broz’s big picture. Then we take the place down, get Broz’s head, some samples, and we’ll be out of here in no time, bam.”
Fucking Egypt, Clint groused silently. He couldn’t wait until he was out of this country.
“And approximate time needed to finish?” Phil asked, nodding along to Clint’s rough summary of the plans.
“Three or four days, assuming everything goes accordingly,” Natasha arched an eyebrow, her face silently incredulous at the prospect.
“Yeah, well, we wouldn’t want to jinx that, would we, Tash?”
“I’m just saying, we tend to get ourselves into the worst case scenarios pretty often.”
“I second that,” Phil quietly chimed in.
“Whatever, I just want to get this over with so we can go home,” Clint rolled his eyes.
Never mind about this mission ending well, Clint was pretty sure Cairo had something maddeningly special waiting for him. And he wasn’t looking forward to it, not one single fucking bit.