*******
“Today’s the day,” Clint announces. “I’m asking her out.”
Natasha barely looks up from the gun she’s cleaning. She should have put a towel down; the pieces are hard to make out amongst the garish designs on the motel bedspread. “Gita? The flower girl?”
“Gita the florist woman,” he corrects archly, then hesitates, rethinking the word combination. “Floral woman?” he tries. “Fuck if I know. She’s Gita the beautiful. Gita the rapturous. Gita with the long black hair!”
“You’re supposed to be watching your mark, not scoping out women,” Phil observes mildly, not even breaking stride in his machine gun fire typing. The senior agent can do it all—make a plan, make a contingency plan, scold, console, and remind—all while maintaining a steady ninety words per minute.
“You’re not the only one that can multi-task.”
*******
“There’s this guy,” Clint says. “At the library. I met him in the periodicals. He was standing in front of Time Magazine, blocking the Newsweeks.”
Once upon a time Natasha might have been shocked by Clint’s varied romantic tastes, but after two years together she’s come to accept that he’s a little interested in everyone, and that none of it matters. Most of his unsuspecting romantic targets have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the backstories and qualities he’s assigned them in his own head.
“He has brown curly hair, kind of like—” he waggles his fingers above his own scalp in a vague swoopy gesture “—and the best freckles and glasses. You know the boxy, black kind? God, I love those.”
“Kind of like a nerdy, sexy librarian that you happened to meet in a library?”
“He’s not a librarian,” he insists testily. “He’s a paralegal.”
Only Clint Barton can make that sound mysterious and exotic.
*******
He flops down next to her, aligning his bare feet with hers. “She said no.” He groans and rolls over to bury his face dramatically in the pillow.
“The fake bake girl?”
Maddie is the receptionist at some seedy suntan place near to the safehouse, and Clint has mooned over her for weeks, finally screwing up the courage to ask her out just as the op—one of their more boring ones, surveillance only—is drawing to a close. This is the man who literally leaps into firefights and he spent the whole day quaking in his combat boots at the thought of asking ninety-five pound Maddie out, is now crushed beyond reason that she’s apparently refused him.
“Eeeooaaaoogerrl,” he mutters indecipherably. Natasha slaps the back of his head until he lifts it to glare balefully at her. “She just works at the Fun Tan. That doesn’t make her a fake bake girl.”
“Well, she’s a moron. You’re a catch.” He looks so pathetic that Natasha feels compelled to throw him a bone now and then. Not that she encourages this ridiculous behavior. Clint looks dubious so she adds, “You can scale a building with a bow in one hand and a knife between your teeth. Who wouldn’t love that?”
“Ex sorority girls working on their future melanomas, apparently,” he points out, putting the pillow over his face. Then he must decide that’s not dramatic enough, because he takes Natasha’s and puts it over his face as well.
*******
“Do you believe in soulmates?” He’s scrubbing away, careful to get the blood out from under his fingernails. They have to be on a civilian plane in four hours, and that kind of thing is a little conspicuous.
“No.” She pulls the shower curtain back just enough to glare at him, blinking water out of her eyes. “Give me your razor; I want to shave my legs.”
Clint scrunches up his face unhappily but hands it over anyway. “Awwww, I hate that.”
“I don’t care.”
“Why don’t you get your own scented, pink colored razor that comes encased in a seashell?”
Natasha braces a foot up against the tiled wall. “Because I prefer the manly, steel plated ones with two hundred blades.”
“Well, not that I want to discourage you from using my hygiene products or anything…but you should know that I have ebola. And scabies. And pinworms.”
“Good, so do I.” That shuts him up for a bit.
“So...do you believe in soulmates?” Clint asks again, voice pitched to carry over the pounding water, a careful nonchalance in his tone.
“I just said that I don’t.” Natasha knows what’s coming next, even mouths the words along with him.
“Because I think I met mine.”
Well, of course he has.
“She works at the mall. You know, that one over on Greenbrier? She works at the Piercing Pagoda.”
Natasha shuts off the water with a loud sigh. “Clint Barton—Agent of SHIELD, international spy, and world’s greatest marksman.” She throws the shower curtain open dramatically and crosses her arms—his razor balanced carefully against her hip bone—while he just waits, eyebrows raised. “Clint Barton’s soulmate works at the Piercing Pagoda.” There's no need to roll her eyes; she's pretty sure her entire being is one giant eyeroll at this point.
“Sure, why not?”
*******
They’ve been partners five years when something terrible happens, and he falls for someone too close, someone at SHIELD, and for once it isn’t irritating and it certainly isn’t funny, because this time it can actually hurt. Phil and Natasha are immediately wary; bad schedules, aggressive personalities, and secrets make in house dating amongst SHIELD employees a terrible idea for everyone.
It would be better if Clint had fallen for someone like Maria Hill, someone accessible but still unattainable, someone he can safely pine over from a distance. Instead he’s totally besotted with a rather mousy, unremarkable woman that works the dinner shift in the cafeteria.
“She always saves me a piece of chocolate pie on Thursdays,” Clint tells them. “That’s spaghetti day. And…chocolate pie day,” he adds unnecessarily, and Phil and Natasha exchange an unhappy glance.
“I just hope you’re not reading too much into it,” Phil says carefully.
Natasha and Clint almost never get to dinner early—everything is always picked over, the lasagna all burned around the edges from the heat lamps, the only dessert the jello with fruit chunks that nobody else wants. But Analise with her big eyes and braided hair always saves a little plate just for Clint, and he’s decided that means something, that it’s a nudge, an indication that she’s interested in him, too.
“She has to wear her hair up because of the food.” Clint always positions himself so that he can watch her while he eats. “But I love the way little pieces fall out and—” he gestures up around his own cheekbones with his fork, in serious danger of stabbing his eyes out “—kind of frame her face.”
Natasha sighs. “You’re embarrassing yourself. You know that, right?” Clint gives her a dirty look and she warns, “Don’t do this.”
But he does a few days later, and it goes terribly, with Analise bursting into loud tears and calling him an asshole before she runs out of the cafeteria, Clint standing there with his tray in his hands and a dumbfounded look. They sit down at a table in the corner, Clint still redfaced and studiously ignoring all the curious looks around them, Natasha attacking her spaghetti as though it were the woman herself, incensed on his behalf.
“Jesus,” he says finally, with the least convincing laugh she’s ever heard. “I should give up forever.”
“You’ve got to leave the normal people alone,” Natasha tells him, because it’s kinder to be blunt sometimes, especially now that he’s escalated from making a fool out of himself in front of her to doing it in front of everybody. “Someone like you isn’t good for someone like her.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Natasha just frowns at him, because he knows perfectly well why, just as he knows why the woman had reacted as she did. Analise had liked the idea of flirting with Hawkeye, conveniently forgetting that Clint Barton came as a matched set. He’d romanticized the idea of a regular person looking past the monster and seeing a person beneath. Analise has bought into the social hierarchy of SHIELD, convinced that super spy Barton would never be interested in the woman that dished out assembly line dinners, that it must be a cruel joke on his part. And he’d understand that reaction, too, if he’d ever bother to reconcile reality with his hopeful fantasies.
“Real people don’t want people like us; they just think they do. People love to look at tigers, but they don’t ever bring one home and pretend it’s a pussycat.”
“So…what? Accept that we don't get have something good? Something normal?” He sighs in frustration, then slams his hand on the table suddenly, not liking all the eyes still on them. “Show’s over, dicks!” he snaps, and a dozen heads duck down, quickly refocusing on their meals.
“Maybe not,” she says. “I don't think that happens for people like us.”
*******
Natasha and Phil are sent undercover at a university, one of their more unusual assignments. Natasha’s real strength has always been infiltration, and Coulson has a sort of everyman blandness that makes him rather forgettable. Their cover is of a married couple relocating and looking for jobs—she’s hired to tutor Russian and he’s a registrar, analyzing transcripts and ticking metrics. In addition to these jobs, which are actually sort of fun in their sheer simplicity, they perform their real job, which is to scope out some professors causing problems and bug their offices…the usual.
The ease of living with Phil, who’s quiet in the way that only people very sure of themselves can be, going with him to get coffee before work, walking from the parking lot to their offices arm in arm. Sometimes she has lunch with other women in her department, sometimes Phil shows up with his bagged lunch and sits on the other side of her desk, talking about his day, asking about hers. It’s probably the most conversation she’s ever had with him that didn’t revolve around SHIELD.
Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about the "American Dream"—this peaceful, easy, cozy life, where the only thing to argue about is what to watch on television that night, where the only thing to dread is a boring meeting or a loudmouthed colleague. A life where all the horror happens on television, to someone else, somewhere else—and these weeks are some of the happiest of Natasha’s whole life. If Clint could be here too, somehow, it would be truly perfect.
But it isn’t real. It’s all an act—that house isn’t hers, the pictures of a happy history with Phil were all created by SHIELD technicians, even the “Somebody Has a Case of the Mondays” mug she uses for six weeks isn’t hers, will be packed into a case for some other agent to use in a life that also isn’t theirs. The mission—because that’s all it ever was—comes to an end and they go back to SHIELD, back to sterile rooms in the barracks, back to being Agent Coulson and the Black Widow.
Clint returns a few days later, full of woeful tales from his dark days of temporary reassignment to Team Echo. “I missed you guys. I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad, too,” Phil agrees, barely looking up from his computer, in his element already.
Natasha doesn’t say anything.
She missed Clint, but she isn’t glad they’re back.
*******
As always, Clint is late to dinner, so late this time that there is no main dish left, his tray full of limp broccoli, canned pears, and, of course, the inescapable jello with fruit chunks. There isn’t anyone saving him good desserts anymore.
“Guys. Guys.” He’s flushed with excitement and Natasha is immediately halfway to irritated, even moreso when Clint realizes he’s forgotten to get a fork—again—and snatches the spare one Phil always picks up for him without missing a beat. “I met the most amazing man on the bus.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Natasha mutters under her breath, and Phil’s cough is a carefully stifled laugh.
“What?”
“Let me guess—he was carrying a bag from a store you like, or his hair had adorable cowlicks, or he was wearing something purple and that’s a sign from God that you’re going to get married.” She picks up her own tray, also a pretty poor showing of food due to her own tardiness—everyone before had already picked all the beef out of the stroganoff, leaving only gummy noodles—and launches it into the kitchen window with more force than is necessary.
The last thing she hears is Clint’s loudly whispered “What’s her problem?” and another of Phil’s stifled laughs.
*******
“Whose. Hand. Will. I. Hold. When. I. Wake.” Clint’s tongue is between his teeth, his worst stress tell, but he doesn’t bother to hide it, not from her.
“Not only is it bad poetry,” Natasha interrupts, “the most obnoxious thing to read, but it’s poorly translated bad poetry. Cataclysmically bad.”
“Shut up,” Clint mutters. She is the only person he’ll read spontaneously in front of—pointing to each word and using the clipped monotone that most children abandon by third grade. “Who. Will. Tell. Me. T...t...” He squints and frowns. “Twas? Twas. But. A. Dream. That. Scared. Me. So.”
“Why the hell are you doing this? You are not going to recite this abomination aloud to someone. Secondhand embarrassment is a real thing, and it’s killing me. Clint, I won’t let this happen.”
He’s still staring hard at the page but smiles anyway. “Poetry’s romantic. This is going to get me all the sex in the world. I’m so fucking cultured and romantic—who can resist me?” He looks up then and bats his eyelashes dramatically.
“No one.” She sits down beside him with a loud sigh and resists the impulse to offer to read it to him, because he’d take it as an insult. They work so well because they’ve always honored one another, and she’s not going to ruin that now, not over a cheesy love poem. She rests her head on his shoulder, half out of affection, half out of a last flung hope to stop this foolish endeavor. He presses back into her, briefly. “At least pick something with a little musicality to it, for God’s sake.”
“Why? This is perfect.”
Then the mission happens and he’s hurt and too many are dead and Phil’s a mess. Clint forgets all about the poem, and certainly never memorizes it. Natasha forgets about it too, having never figured out who he was learning it for.
*******
They’re stuck in the city for a few months, waiting for Clint’s wounds to heal and for Phil to slog through counseling that Fury quickly changed from voluntary to mandatory. Natasha sits vigil in Medical through the scary days, then quickly starts to feel bored and superfluous. Clint has actual nurses to take care of him, leaving the only support she can provide the emotional kind, which is what she's worst at. They’re both happier when she stops coming by so often.
Natasha exercises and goes to the range and checks on Phil. She takes an overdue CPR class and rereads briefings for missions that are months away, starts reading a trashy novel and abandons it in a breakroom where it can torture the unsuspecting fool that picks it up. She goes to dinner alone and glares at Analise, and that’s when she decides that maybe spending a little time outside of SHIELD would be the emotionally healthy, well adjusted thing to try.
She’s self aware enough to avoid a ballet class and takes modern dance instead. It’s full of off Broadway actors and dancers looking to expand their skillset make themselves more marketable, and she’s almost intimidated by their lithe, liquid movements, like a bunch of jungle cats in human flesh.
Natasha suspects she’s in trouble when she stumbles into another dancer due to distraction. The distraction is named Ahmon and he’s all long lines and dark skin and stern-eyed focus. By the third week she knows she’s in trouble when he still hasn’t so much as glanced in her direction, and she feels foolish, imagining herself turning into the terminally lovestruck Barton—I saw him at dance class and he was beautiful and flexible and do you think I should ask him out?
Of course she doesn’t actually mention any of this to Clint, who now also has pneumonia from being laid up in Medical, or to Phil, who still spends too much of his office time not accomplishing anything. Natasha doesn’t know how to help them beyond sending Fury a terse email—Coulson’s sinking again, fix it—or sitting helplessly beside Clint, watching him gasp and cough and nagging at the nurses to come change his IV bags the instant the last drip falls. There’s nothing she can do for them, and Fury won’t send her out yet, so Natasha gives herself a new mission.
She knows how to make Ahmon start noticing her, knows how to manipulate him into asking her out, knows how to get him into bed when she’s ready. What she doesn’t know is how to read his smiles, how to not search every expression and sentence for guile, or how to give a real answer when he asks about her interests. What Natasha doesn’t know how to keep him, how to make it turn into something real.
By the time Clint is up to walking laps around Medical as she holds his arm, the whole thing is over. Natasha doesn’t let it affect her; missions fail sometimes. She gives Clint a rundown of the whole affair, thinking he’ll laugh—they could use a little levity after the dramatics of the last month—but he doesn’t, bracing against the wall instead, trying to hide his exhaustion.
“I’m sorry, Natty,” he says, then clarifies, “Sorry for you.”
“Don’t be,” she snaps. “I don’t have time for a relationship anyway. Now that the two of you are getting better, we’ll be back in the field soon.”
Clint sighs at her and pushes away from the wall, his stiff legged shuffle the complete opposite of Ahmon’s feline grace. “What was he like?” he asks finally, eyes fixed determinedly on the door to his room, where a pain pill lies waiting.
Natasha clutches his arm, holding him steady till they get there. “He was lovely.”
*******
And a few months later Clint actually blunders into a relationship, almost as if he’s willed it into existence just to prove it can happen, just to prove Natasha wrong. He treats them all to a dinner out to introduce a youngish woman with the improbably insufferable name of Kimmie (“That’s with an ‘ie’ and not a ‘y’!”). Phil is skeptical but cautiously supportive, but Natasha is appalled, because no one on Earth, no one in the history of time and space, has ever been worse than Clint’s new girlfriend.
Kimmie teaches kickboxing class at five different gyms, wears too much makeup and laughs too much, one hand gripping Clint’s arm or leg with possessive familiarity while the other gesticulates wildly. She calls Clint “Sweetie” and says it far too frequently while stressing the first syllable obnoxiously. Phil chuckles politely as she recounts how she gave Clint a private kickboxing lesson and how horrible he was at it and isn’t that just so funny and he was just so cute and—
Clint grins throughout, only a little embarrassed, trying to look like a forensic accountant that gets his ass kicked by his grandstanding girlfriend instead of a man who has snapped necks and gouged out eyeballs with the same aplomb as ordering a meal.
Natasha does her best to tune out Kimmie’s earnest trilling and Clint’s insipid smile and is doing great with both before “—and he’s great with the kids, too!” filters through.
“Excuse me?”
The quality of Natasha’s voice stops Kimmie cold and Phil is as stunned as he ever gets while Clint looks suspiciously nonchalant.
“I need to talk to Sweetie for a second.” Natasha grabs him by the collar and pulls him out of the booth, leaving a pursed lipped Phil behind to attempt to explain away the swift change in mood. She drags Clint over to the alcove that hides the restroom doors. A man heads in their direction and Natasha gives him her best warning glare; he wisely decides his bathroom break can wait and veers off back toward the tables.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She gives Clint a shake, surprised when he allows it. “Kids? You’re dating a woman with kids? Like she would want you around her children if she knew what you are capable of. You’re putting her family in danger all because of your kink for something ‘normal’.”
“Don’t project your shit on me.” He pushes her hands away and smooths imaginary wrinkles out of his shirt, a stiff collared thing that is undoubtedly Kimmie’s favorite color. “You’re just jealous.”
“How dare you,” Natasha growls, because she isn’t.
And she is. Not because she wants a relationship with Clint—she has that already, something better than whatever Kimmie will get from him—but of that piece of normal he’s somehow caught hold of. That easy comfort she’d glimpsed on the mission with Coulson, that hope for a connection that she hadn’t been able to make work with Ahmon.
“This is going to end badly,” she warns, and Clint just scowls at her before heading back to the table, megawatt grin already back on his face.
******
Somehow, impossibly, he makes it work for months and months, through two deployments. Maybe it’s understandable that Kimmie never questions why a forensic accountant with the FBI travels so much, but she also buys his explanation for the stitches along his hairline, the bruises all along his back, and that confirms Natasha’s long held theory that the woman is an actual idiot.
Just to twist the knife Coulson starts dating someone too, a long haired demure little musician named Audrey, and it’s almost like a slap in the face, as if he’s doing it just to establish how easy it is, to snatch away Clint’s victory and make it his own. But of course it’s Clint’s doomed love affair that crumbles first.
“Who was the dumpee?” Natasha asks him, throwing a bottle into his lap.
He checks the label—not that he would know quality vodka from a bottle of hairspray—and takes a long swig, wrinkling his nose before handing it back. “Me.” Of course it was; Clint held onto that relationship with clawed fingers and would have never given it up willingly. “Kim wanted to take things to the ‘next level’. And I can’t do that. Obviously.”
“No,” Natasha agrees, then, “How’d she do it?” Clint has been in New Mexico guarding the Tesseract for the last three weeks; Natasha only has a few days to visit before she’s on a mission of her own.
“Over the phone. But I saw it coming from the ‘call me when you can’ text beforehand. The lack of emoticons and x’s and o’s was a pretty big giveaway.” He sighs. “She was perfectly nice about it. It was all very civilized.”
“I’m sorry, Baby Bird.”
“Yeah, well." He swings his legs back and forth over the side of the roof. "It was fun to pretend for awhile.”
She doesn’t have anything to say to that, so they just drink, tipped back onto their hands, watching the night sky. She tells herself it’s the same sky as in the city, but it seems bigger out here somehow, maybe because of all the stars.
“You’ll find someone new,” Natasha says—she hates his schmoopy romanticism but hates this glum misery even more. “Someone the exact opposite of Kimmie. A tall, dark, and handsome man that swoops dramatically into your life and makes you forget everyone that’s come before.”
“That’d be nice.” Clint’s already drunk, lightweight that he is, leaning too hard into her side. She lets him do it. “Someone I could never hurt.”
“A fellow tiger,” she agrees.