Renovate
Natasha
From the outside, the farmhouse looked the same as I remembered it; but the inside told a different story. I let myself in quietly, stepping around sawdust and loose plywood. Nearly two years of house arrest had taken their toll as a series of renovations and projects.
I felt a wave of grief at the lost time. Two years. Baby Nat would barely recognize me by now. I shook the thought away quickly. I couldn’t visit with the children. I wasn’t supposed to be making contact at all. Slipping silently into the kitchen, I found a stool to perch on. Now to wait.
Dawn was just beginning to tinge the sky with pink when Clint padded out to the kitchen to start the coffee. He stiffened in the doorway, but relaxed as he recognized my silhouette.
“Nat?”
“I promise, no one will ever know I was here,” I reassured him, worried that he’d see my arrival as a threat to his plea deal, but he had already crossed the kitchen in two bounds to embrace me.
“Nat, oh my god, it’s been too long. Where have you been?” Clint pulled back to get another look at me.
I shrugged awkwardly. “Didn’t want to get you in trouble. How’ve you been doing? You’ve only got what, a couple weeks now?”
“Getting a little stir-crazy.” Clint gestured around him at the various, half-completed renovations. “You? The kids ask about you all the time.”
“Europe, Wakanda, you name it.” I allowed myself to laugh. “Steve and I, and the rest of the crew that didn’t sign the Accords, have been dabbling in some vigilante work. But I really needed to talk to you.”
Clint grew serious, pulling up stools to the island in the middle of the kitchen. He wiped away a small pile of sawdust. “Any time, Nat. You know that. Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please.” I took the chair he offered and waited while he started the percolator. “How much have you heard about the Asgardian resettlement efforts?”
“Can’t say I’ve heard anything,” he admitted, retrieving two deep mugs from the cupboard. “What happened with Asgard?”
“Well, the short of it—Thor fell through an Einsten-Rosen Bridge to another planet where he happened to find the Hulk living as some sort of gladiator. Asgard went under attack by a goddess of death who turned out to be the older sister Thor never knew he had. Thor, Hulk, and Loki managed to get to Asgard and evacuate the people, but Asgard and Thor’s sister have both been destroyed by a fire monster, so now they’re attempting to rebuild their civilization. In Norway.”
Clint rubbed his forehead. “This is gonna call for more than one cup of coffee, isn’t it,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “Wait, so Thor and Bruce are back?”
I nodded. “That’s where it starts to get interesting.”
“Starts?” He poured steaming coffee into one of the mugs and passed it to me. “Hate to break it to you, Nat, but to any normal person, you passed ‘interesting’ lightyears ago.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. “After they were mostly settled in, Bruce pulled a Bruce and disappeared again.”
Clint shook his head. “Any leads?”
“Turns out that destroying a planet and traveling through space together can really bring people together in unexpected ways. I know you’re probably going to disapprove, but a few days after Bruce disappeared, Loki contacted me about trying to track him down.”
“How’d he find you?”
“Wakanda has been a big player in getting New Asgard recognized on the world stage, so Loki was able to contact us pretty easily.”
He took a swig of the lighter coffee he’d poured out for himself and mixed with more cream and sugar than I would ever deem necessary. “Please tell me that you didn’t do anything rash.”
I shrugged. “Depends on if you count teaming up with the god of mischief to track down a friend as rash.”
Clint was quiet for a moment. “Definitely rash, but I’d have done the same for a chance at bringing Bruce home. Did you find him?”
“Yeah. Not until after Tony did, though. He’s in pretty rough shape, but they’ve patched him up pretty well.”
“Good.” He paused for a moment, allowing silence to blanket this kitchen. “That’s not all you’re here for, though, is it?”
I sighed. “Clint… when you found me, decided to give me a chance… why? Why not just shoot me?”
He studied the coffee for a minute. “Nat, I shoot to protect, not to kill.”
“Still,” I pressed. “Taking the shot was the mission.” We’d had this conversation once before, years ago. But back then, we hadn’t been friends….only hesitant allies. The talk had been brief. I thought you could use a little redemption, Romanoff. You’ve got a lot of red in your ledger.
We had grown from allies, to friends, to family over the years, but anything more to the story of that first encounter had remained unspoken, left behind in a closet of the past. I needed to know.
Clint met my eyes frankly. “Why now, Natasha?”
“Curiosity.”
“Very well.” He realized I wasn’t going to give more, not yet anyway, and chose not to press further. “You know the goal was ultimately to take down the Red Room. Well, I’d been part of the strike team tracking a couple other assassins with ties to the KGB before you. Lost a lot of people that way. The mission before yours…” his voice cracked and he swallowed.
I stretched a hand across the table and took Clint’s, squeezing it for support. He looked up, eyes wet with unshed tears.
“She was just a kid, Nat. We didn’t know… After all the losses trying to get the other marks, we’d started trying to take them remotely. I was tracking the live feed from the helicopter. Right before the explosives went off, I saw her. Scared, lost. No escape. But it was too late, I couldn’t stop the detonation in time…”
“She would have killed you,” I said bluntly. “Any of us would have.”
Clint nodded. “I know that.” He was quiet again. “It really rocked me. So when I had you in my crosshairs and you just stood there, staring me down, waiting for me to kill you…I didn’t see an assassin anymore. I saw a kid with no way out.”
It was my turn to sit in silence.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Clint prompted after a few minutes.
“Glad we shut down that hellhole,” I muttered, clenching my hands into fists as I thought of the place that had stolen my innocence and turned me into an unflinching killer. “Got anything stronger than coffee?”
Clint raised one eyebrow. “At quarter of five in the morning? Laura would have my head.” He rinsed his cup in the sink. I focused on the sound of rushing water to still the tumult of my mind. The faucet turned off.
“I had ways out,” I blurted out in the vacuum. “I just… I was too scared to take them. And after a while…they were all I knew. I tried to fail, but they always knew. Eventually I craved the success, I needed to make them proud.” My whole body shuddered. My fingers dug deep enough into my palms that I could feel the pressure of my low-clipped nails. “By that mission, I was in so deep, I didn’t think I could ever get out. I just focused on the next target. That’s all there ever was. Then there was the shaft of an arrow staring me down, and I thought that finally—” my voice broke and I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Clint looked like he wanted to offer comfort, but I put up a silent hand to ward him off. The thought of being touched when my mind was disorganized like this set off alarms across the surface of my skin. I shivered.
“Nat? You okay?”
I shook my head slowly as I regained control of my emotions. “I’m fine,” I said dispassionately, straightening.
“You don’t have to go mission mode right now unless you want to,” Clint reminded me gently. “It’s okay if you want to let out those emotions.”
“Too late. Already locked back up.” I forced a laugh.
“It’s been years,” Clint pointed out. “Why the sudden interest now, after all this time?”
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” I said. “I was an assassin, once. Then, for a while, I had this crazy dream where I was an Avenger, and that I had a purpose there. But since the team fell apart, I’ve been drifting. You gave me a sense of direction when I was lost the last time. So I guess I came back to the one place where my life ever made sense.”
Clint laughed. “Really? An archer’s family at an off-the-grid farmhouse in the 21st century makes sense?”
“You know what I mean. When you brought me here and introduced me to your family, and your kids started calling me Aunt Nat, that’s when I realized I wasn’t the person I thought I was. Nobody brings an assassin home to play with their kids. When your daughter drew me a picture of Black Widow and the Avengers saving New York, I felt like I knew who I was. That my life made sense.” I sighed. “I’m trying to figure out what’s next. Who I am, apart from the Avengers. All my life, I’ve always been focused on the next mission. It’s how I blocked out who I’d become in the KGB. It’s how I’ve dealt with the past. But now? There is no next mission. And without that… well, it’s left me with a lot to still come to terms with.”
“What have you decided so far?”
“I’m not sure who I am is something I can just decide,” I contested.
He shrugged. “Isn’t it, though?”
I frowned at my coffee mug. “There’s still a whole lot of red left in my ledger, Clint.”
“Look at me,” he ordered. I did. “People are a whole lot more than just a list of pluses and minuses. And it’s a damn good thing that we are.”
I considered his words for a moment. “So where do I go from here?”
“If you’re asking me,” Clint said carefully, “I think you know where you want to go from here. But you’re scared of a future that doesn’t involve running anymore, afraid of making yourself vulnerable.”
“Nothing scares me.” We both knew the cynical statement was a lie, but the armor around my emotions had already opened up more than was comfortable for one day.
Clint raised one eyebrow, but didn’t comment. “I’m not going to judge you for going back to the compound, Nat, if that’s where you want to go. Tony made some rash, stupid choices, but he wasn’t the only one. I think if we could go back in time, we’d all do things a little differently.”
“Not sure there’s a home for me there, either,” I mumbled, staring down at my coffee. “Tony’s pretty worked up about whatever went down in Siberia with Steve, Rhodes was almost a casualty of the fallout, so I can’t help but feel guilty around him, and—” my voice trailed off.
“And the doctor took off to be a green space gladiator,” Clint finished perceptively. “You can’t blame yourself for any of that. We’re all adults, and we made our own choices.”
“We had talked about starting a new life together,” I admitted. “But I broke his trust, and he left the planet to get away from me.”
“If I had to make a wager, I’d bet he was trying to protect you, not get rid of you. Honestly, it might look like Bruce is keeping you at arm’s length, but that’s still closer than he’s let any of the rest of us get.”
“Still. What if they don’t want me to come back?”
“That’s on them.” Clint looked at me seriously. “Look, Nat—the Avengers broke up. It hurt. Not because we were enemies, but because we cared about each other and trusted each other. I don’t know if we can come back from that. But one of these days, the world’s gonna need us and we’re going to have to decide who we are as a team and how we can possibly move forward. If anyone can lay the foundation for healing, it’s you.”
I laughed in disbelief.
“Here’s the thing,” he pressed. “You put this team together, just as much as Fury did. You were the one out there in the field, keeping Tony alive, convincing Bruce to give up his life on the run, acclimating Steve to our present. And now, you know why everyone made the choices they did. Our teammates, on both sides—I guarantee you they all think things have happened that can’t be forgiven and can’t be undone. You know that isn’t true. After all, you rebuilt a new life for yourself after being deprogrammed from being a Russian murderbot. If you can forgive yourself and rebuild, so can they.”
“Have I?” I asked simply.
Clint held my gaze. “I don’t know. But I sure hope so.”
I took a deep breath. “Maybe I do need to process some emotions.”
“I’ve got some targets, a couple of punching bags, and a mostly-completed climbing wall over in the barn,” Clint offered.
“Perfect.”
“Knock yourself out.”
I paused on my way out, running my eyes analytically over yet another pile of pine boards and construction tools lit up by the gentle dawn. “I’m not sure this place can handle another week of you on house arrest. There won’t be anything left.”
"There will be plenty left," Clint protested. "It just might not look like what we started with."
Perhaps he was right in more ways than one.