In under a minute, she could easily concoct a hundred reasons as to why they shouldn't be together.
Workplace romances never worked out. In the nature of their work, it was a near 100% chance that either of them would most likely die before 40. Even if – by some miracle – they defied those odds, they already worked together, and spending more time together during off-work hours would’ve been suffocating.
Not that they had any issues before, as friends, but this was different.
And then there were the more domestic reasons. She hated the three cups of coffee he had to have every morning, how it was two sugars each with no milk. It peeved her how often he would leave the dishes lying around, waiting for them to clean themselves up.
It angered her that the space between his fingers always smelled of cigarettes, and that he lived on a stick in the morning, one more in the afternoon, and a chain combo of three at night.
She had warned him to get clean. If she was able to get clean from her narcotics, he would be able to get clean from his cigarettes. He was already much cleaner than before of course, the result of a lot of work, but he just couldn’t stay clean. So that was that.
Natasha could never stand the way he crumpled his freshly washed clothes back into his drawer, or the way he sometimes walked around his apartment with no pants on.
She hated the stench in his breath that he had in the morning, and all the times he’d set a sweating cup on the table without a coaster.
She couldn't understand how Clint could let him drink himself silly, or why he even tried chugging that fifth shot of whisky in the first place. Because every time he did so, the night always ended with someone - or something - sprawled all across the floor.
Yes, in under a minute, Natasha could easily come up with a whole hundred reasons, all of which that merely scratched the surface of the problems that lay beneath.
Working through such problems were, as she understood, the basis of any given relationship. If two people loved each other, then nothing else would matter, wouldn’t it? That whole list of the hundred problems she had with Clint, they would work through it. It would be dismissible.
That was why she, standing with cold feet right back at the side of the bed where they had first really met, had thought of reason number hundred and one. The summation of all reasons. The one reason that really mattered. The one that no one could dismiss, not even herself.
Her one last reason, that one solid reason that proved her theory.
No, they couldn't be together, not because he didn't love her now. Of course he did, through the simplest gestures like making her tea before his coffee, like reminding her to take care of herself every single morning, without fail.
It wasn't always saying I love you's, stay safe's, or don't go's. Even when it angered him when she would leave to something more dangerous than the space beside him in bed, he would set her tea between her cold fingers (not on the table), and say a bitter but yet endearing phrase like, "don't be a hero this time round".
They couldn't be together, because when he was four, he'd learned through the actions of his father and the reassurances of his mother that expressing his love for someone else meant balling a fistful of clothes and knocking someone around. It meant rattling the counters and breaking the glass. It meant noise. It meant violence.
And when he'd first expressed his affection to his childhood sweetheart, it led to two trips from school: one to the ER, and the other to the station.
They couldn't be together, because at the dinner party of his eighth birthday, he came to understand that there was more distance between his two parents than just the length of the dinner table.
The distance was in their eyes. It was in the exhausted hunch in their shoulders. It was in the way that his mother dared not to breathe in the same moments as his father. It was in the way that she could never look straight in the face of his father, and the only time she ever looked up from the ground was to eye the nearest exit.
It was in the way that the family and wedding portraits were always set up only when the guests were over and were set facing down the rest of the time.
It was in the way that, at age eight, he'd learned how to forge a signature, because a parental consent form would never fail to result in an argument between them both. At that age, he'd also learned how to hide unnoticed at the top step of the stairs to eavesdrop on one of those many arguments.
They couldn't be together, because by thirteen, his very own twisted definition of love was the adrenaline rush he felt every time he took a swig at the bottle or the drag of a cigar, and nothing else. And it stayed that way until he met his first true love at the SHIELD academy.
She was the very first person, of many that had tried, to understand him on all three levels: physically, emotionally and spiritually. When Natasha had first met her, the other half of the infamous Strike Team Bravo - and by Clint's word, a Wonder Woman of sorts - it was only when Natasha herself had recently gotten out of the academy.
And as much as it was heartening, and hopeful, and beautiful, Natasha had seen the intense spark of wonder that fueled him all this while, get brutally ripped and emptied out from the deepest, darkest corners of his skull on the day they broke the news to him.
She had sat herself in the midst of that thick and heavy silence, one hand on his back and the other in his hand, waiting for him to grab back. Sitting there, she felt as cold as the chilling thought of how cruel it truly was to love something, or someone, that death could touch.
She had been there, by his side, when he had emptied the oceans within him at the foot of the grave of his first love. His only one, true, genuine love.
7 years later and still the occasional alcoholic, he had found for himself a deep, dark, twisted love in the redheaded woman that mourned next to him at the funeral of his former girlfriend and former soon-to-be wife.
Clint loved her. Natasha knew that he did, deep within the hollowness of her bones, within the spark and fizzle of electricity that raced erratically under her skin for every single time he touched her, or she touched him.
He did love her now, and she knew that. But she also knew that he wouldn't crumple to his knees to empty his oceans by her grave, if and when it came to that. He would have nothing to empty, not for her.
So, no, they couldn't be together, not like that.
But it wasn't entirely his fault either. She had faults of her own. Because at age five, what she had understood of love was only what she could see, and that was her father with the bottle and her mother with prescription pills.
She was wary of this cruel thing called love, because this love had hurt her parents. It rendered them barely coherent. It rendered them cold, and silent, and absent.
She was wary, because this love had hurt her elder sister. Her sister had loved her disease so much, it had left her rail thin and eventually dead.
She was wary, because the first time an eighteen-year-old boy said he loved her - the son of a friend of her father's - said boy ripped away her seven-year-old innocence just as easily as he'd ripped off her clothes.
She was wary, because what she thought was the love her parents had for her, was a tight slap to her foul mouth for lying about being hurt by said boy and being in pain down there in places she didn't yet understand.
She was wary, because by the time she was nine, what she understood of love had picked apart every thread of meaning left in her life.
What she understood of love, which were big, black slugs of depression that had made homes inside of her, had left her institutionalized at the tender age for two whole years with no one by her side. No one, that was, until the Red Room swiped her from that prison, only to put her in another of their own making.
They couldn't be together, because another few years into the Red Room had helped her regain a trickle of trust in this cruel thing called love. She had found it in the eyes of a tortured man with a metal contraption for an arm. And just as easily as he came, he disappeared just as easily as well.
First, he disappeared from time to time, and it tested her. It tested her, but she always prevailed. Playing a waiting game was easy for someone that had lost everything once before, and now had nothing else left to lose. He would disappear, and then he would come back weathered, but in love all over again., and this was everything.
And then one day he disappeared forever, and it dragged that trickle of trust right through the mud and left skid marks, like it did to her heart. Once again, she had lost the one person that represented everything that she had left to live for in life.
She carried her black slugs for the remainder of her days, until it pushed her to drown herself in her work, until it pushed her to compartmentalize. Until it pushed her out into the freezing streets of a cold and typical night in mother Russia.
Until she met someone else that challenged her will and her belief and her life, and that someone proved to her that she wanted to live much more than how much she preferred to die alone.
Clint Barton, professional heartthrob, she remembered his first words, and well, he definitely delivered.
They couldn't be together, because by the time she turned nineteen, she could only watch as this blue-eyed mentor of hers stared at the love of his life with stars in his eyes. She could only watch, with a skeptic's hope that one day, someone would stare on endlessly at her with stars in their eyes too.
She could only watch as something so beautiful existed in her presence, and she watched it exist, until it didn't.
It broke her calloused heart, but definitely not nearly half as much as it had broken him.
They couldn't be together, because when she was twenty-two, he would tell her that he loved her. And she would not know how to respond because even up till three years later, he still visited the grave of his ex-lover on the 17th of every month because it used to be her favorite number.
Because by the time she turned twenty-seven and he turned thirty, and they were sharing clothes, beds, their deepest thoughts, and everything else in between, she would be two months pregnant with his child and he would have just proposed to her with a ring and only half his clothes on, but with his whole heart exposed.
When he proposed, it would have been in between drinks and tangled legs and sheets. In the midst of a high, he would suddenly dig for a velvet box in the pocket of his winter coat on the floor and, with her belly down on the mattress, he would sit on his knees on the floor before her and ask her to marry him.
In that moment, Natasha would remember that one fleeting thought from years ago. That he would cry oceans for the love of his life who was now long gone, and that she would never be her. That she wasn't what Clint had asked for, that she would never be the love of his life, that he could love her with all that was left of his heart but he would never be able to cry oceans for her.
And despite all these thoughts, she would still say yes.
By the time she turned twenty-eight, and the child made out of their love would be less than a year old, a profound darkness would have resurfaced in her in a new form. She would be bitter, and fall apart in the mornings, avoid glances at her child throughout the afternoon and scream at the yelling child in the middle of the night.
She would be too exhausted to move, but she would move anyway, just to get out of the suffocating walls of their suburban home. And he would lose his patience, because what he once understood about her depression, he wouldn't understand anymore.
At twenty-eight, they would have their first big fight, and then their second, and then their three hundredth.
At twenty-nine, she would wrap her hands around the throat of their child just to get the child to just shut up. He would hit her hard, and that would be the beginning of their end.
At thirty, they would talk about divorce. Even though the twisted thoughts about her child would have had stopped by now, and she would now love her child more than the world, Clint would never let her into the same room. She would not be able to touch her own child for months at a time. Sometimes, she would agree, afraid of her hands. Other times, she would be convinced that this was her right, as the mother of her child. They would fight about this too.
And either of them would start to think that maybe they never should have met the other, that maybe he should’ve killed her like he was supposed to, or that she should’ve just offed herself when she had wanted to so very much.
They would start to think that maybe they should have first figured themselves out before bringing an innocent child into this world, just for it to get caught in the crosshairs of their mess.
Because when the child that they'd made out of love turned ten, he would finally see the tens of thousands of miles of distance that stood between his parents, either one sat at either end of the dinner table.
Because when their child turned sixteen, she would finally work up the guts to steal $600 of safety cash from Natasha's bedside drawer just to run away from parents that were barely there. Her uncle Phil would work up a headache tracking her down, while either parent wouldn't even know that she was gone in the first place.
Because when he turned twenty-two, his speech for valedictorian of the year would pay no credit to his parents' bitter divorce. Because when she turned twenty-eight, it wouldn't be her own archer of a father walking her down the white-washed isle and into the arms of the love of her life, but her fiancé's father instead.
Because when their child of love would turn thirty-three and has to hold the cold, dead body of his own once warm and lively daughter, he would turn to his father, only to find a good-for-nothing drunk with a persistent tremor in his left hand still nursing the year-old grief from when his mother fell asleep to prescription pills and never woke up, aspirating on her own vomit. He would have no-one to turn to.
And when he had no-one to turn to, the distance between him and his own grieving wife at the dinner table would grow.
Because at age thirty-three, Natasha and Clint's child, made out of a long and lost idea of love, would finally understand why the distance between his parents always felt much further than the expansive length of a dinner table.
Because at age thirty-three, he would finally find it within himself to empty the oceans that flooded the cavities in his chest, all at the grave of the uncaring mother he'd been given. The mother that would never touch him. The mother that he'd hated. The mother that he'd so mistakenly misunderstood.
He would finally understand that nothing in life would ever be as cruel as being forced to love something, or someone, that death could touch.
And within him, the big black slugs would fester with an air of heaviness about them. It would weigh 10 pounds heavier on his shoulders. It would feel like the plague, like a disease of melancholy upon the body that one could only try and fail to scrub away with the scent of antiseptic soap.
He would live the life he was given and learn the lessons from both his absent parents all on his own, and it would be unbearable.
And that would be exactly why Natasha knew that she and Clint could never, ever be together. That would be her one last definite reason, and it would be the only one that really mattered.
Because seeing the ugliest, most complex sides of a person as a separate entity didn't always mean it would get any prettier when together. A common misconception of love was that people completed one another, but really it was all about accepting the empty gaps in each other's lives, until each didn't.
Because time was trying, and people changed with time. Things that once made sense, would begin to differ a few years down the road. And people were weak, and they were undetermined. They would change with the times, and they would change what made sense to themselves until neither lover seemed to make any sense anymore.
Because "I love you" didn't mean "I'll stay", and it made all the difference.