Chapter 1
When it begins, no one knows it. Not then, not later, and not any of the times between.
On the first day, they get ready for bed.
*******
“You left all your dirty dishes on the counter.” Natasha’s hands are on her hips, but she doesn’t look particularly mad.
“Whoops.” Clint’s head is upside down and dangling between his legs; he grins up at her and she raises an eyebrow. “I’ll take care of them in the morning. Promise.”
“And you also left your socks on the coffee table.” He shrugs awkwardly and she sighs. “Are you almost done?”
“Twenty more minutes. I’m all invested now; I need to see who the killer is.”
“Alright.” Natasha disappears and returns with a magazine—some science journal she’d swiped earlier from either Tony or Bruce. She arranges all the pillows on the bed, his included, into a huge mound, pushing her shoulders back into them with a happy sigh.
Clint stands in the open space beside the bed, keeping one eye on her—the way he has ever since the day he met her, the first time he tried to kill her; in their unique history it amounts to the same thing—and the other eye on the television, where a true crime program drones in overly dramatic tones. When he shifts into the warrior pose, his knees crack loudly, and he coughs in a poor attempt to somehow retroactively cover the sound. Fucking yoga.
“I think it was the wife,” he observes, not caring that Natasha isn’t paying the show any attention. “The husband probably had a life insurance policy worth a million dollars.”
“If you could go to space, but couldn’t come back again, would you go?” she asks, focused on whatever she’s reading. She turns a page, scowls at what she sees there, turns it back.
“Why couldn’t I get back to Earth?” Clint lets his shirt ride up a little as he twists; he has good back muscles and even better abdominal muscles. He peeks at her surreptitiously under his arms to see if she’s looking.
She isn’t. “That’s not the point. The point is the question. Would you still go even if it was going to be a one way trip?”
“Would I go to space—” He changes to a downward facing dog, frowning at his feet, wondering exactly when and where he’d shed his socks “—just to experience going to space? To experience dying there? I guess I’m not seeing an upside.”
“The vast majority of humans have never gone, and will never go, to space. Any person can live out a normal life and die in some unoriginal way. To live the remainder of your life there and die above everyone else...would you do it?”
She would, that’s clear enough from the way she says it, even if Clint wouldn’t have guessed as much already. “Hell no. I’m going to live to be super old, then jump off Stark’s Tower. If I can’t walk by then you can take my wheelchair to the roof and tip me over the edge. One last rush of excitement before the big finale.”
“You could jump out of the space shuttle,” Natasha counters. “That’d be even more of a rush. You would see nothing but endless stars while you just—“ she flutters her hand vaguely “—float away.” She looks disturbingly delighted at the idea.
“Natasha, this is the kind of morbid conversation that I will not entertain,” Clint intones in his best Phil Coulson voice, and she laughs, breaking the spell of the moment. Clint changes poses again, grinning also, picturing Phil and feeling a faint surprise that it doesn’t hurt. Three years later the thought of Phil has become only dull ache somewhere inside, where the old nostalgia for his mother and brother and even his father still live. It’s almost more painful because it doesn’t hurt anymore, that he’s finally gotten over it, that they both have.
Phil’s dead, he tells himself, testing, but there’s just that ache again. He sighs and pushes Phil away, settling further into a lunge, his hamstrings protesting. He’s not as limber as he used to be. He looks back up at the television.
“I bet the wife killed him.”
“The wife is always the killer,” Natasha mutters, absorbed in a picture of Jupiter. “That’s the hook of the entire fucking show.”
“The husband probably had a life insurance policy.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time.”
Clint raises up in salutation to cool hued bedroom lights instead of the sun. “The wife did it,” he says confidently. “You just wait and see.”
*******
“You look good,” Tony tells his reflection, laughing a little, maybe a little drunker than he had intended to get tonight. “No, you look great. You look like a million goddamned bucks.” He shoves his toothbrush into his mouth and scrubs absently, then frowns at the mirror. “A billion bucks,” he corrects thoughtfully around a mouthful of foam, then spits and calls into the next room “Pepper? How many bucks do I have?”
“All of them,” her voice drifts back, and Tony nods at himself.
“Yeah, that’s right. Alllll the bucks.” He grabs his toothbrush and gasps to find it already wet. “Gross! Did you use my toothbrush? Cooties are a real and serious thing, Miss Potts!” She says something back that he can’t make out, just slathers on extra toothpaste and brushes his teeth with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu.
He climbs into bed to curl up behind Pepper, who adjusts his arm over, then moves it up higher. She pushes her back into his chest, adjusts his elbow again, reaches back and smooths down her hair where it’s been caught up in his beard. She’s always seeking more contact, can never cuddle close enough, burrow deep enough into him, especially on nights like this one, before one of them has to go away. Whether it’s him going on a mission or one of them leaving for a business trip she looks for that extra contact, that connection.
“One of these days,” he says, “I feel like you’re just gonna go ahead and hollow me out, crawl inside like Han Solo did to that tauntaun.”
“Luke was in the tauntaun,” Pepper points out smugly, and pulls his arm around herself more securely, making a happy noise when he gives her a squeeze. “Don’t roll away. Stay here, just like this. It’s happened—we have finally achieved the perfect snuggle position.”
Her feet are like icecubes against his shins, but Tony knows better than to point that out. “I’ll wait as long as I can, but my left arm will, at some point, require actual blood flow.”
“Hmmph.” She sighs and rearranges his arms. He lets her do it, making sure his fingertips are left touching the middle of her chest. Maybe she thinks he’s just copping a feel—and that is, admittedly, a happy coincidence—but he really wants to be able to feel her heartbeat beneath his fingers.
On the second day, they fight.
“Punch him in the balls!” Tony yells from across the gym, then says something to Steve, who laughs.
Natasha ignores them as she and Clint continue to circle around each other. This sparring bout has already fallen into what she would consider a light round, Clint seeming a little automatic, a little off in his reactions, responding half a second or so beyond his usual standard. She swings at his jaw and he blocks it at the last possible second.
Lazy, she thinks.
Clint settles back onto his right foot, his next swing telegraphed so blatantly he might as well have sent notice via certified letter. He looks a little bored.
Sloppy. She sighs to herself, putting her forearm up to knock his fist away. Predictable.
But at the tail end of that thought comes another idea—Hawkeye got the drop on you once, and rather easily, when it was real. When it mattered. He has never held that over her head but her own brain can’t ever quite let her forget it. Clint had taken her down once and changed her life; of course it had all been for the better, but the fact remained the same. Lazy, sloppy, and predictable he might be today, but he’s always had the potential to be something very different.
The thought shoots an odd shiver of unease down her spine as she continues to jab at him with a steady one-two rhythm, and though she knows it’s coming, even stepping back lightly in anticipation, somehow the sight of his bare fist arcing down toward her mouth still somehow sets something off. She blocks him easily and twists her body to hit back suddenly and violently, breaking the spell of their usual dance, their old sedate pace, the one that apparently bores him so.
Clint moves just quickly enough to receive a nasty bruise to his forearm instead of the broken elbow she’d intended. They grapple a few seconds more until he’s holding both her wrists, Natasha allowing it to happen, her heart still racing too fast with the unexpected surge of adrenaline.
“In the balls, I said!” Tony calls in a disappointed voice. It all happened so fast and fluidly that neither he or Steve have noticed.
Clint watches her with raised eyebrows and a careful wariness, ready to catch any other wild hits. “You okay?”
“Of course.” I thought back to when we met and suddenly had the need to actually hurt you, she does not add. Clint is easy going almost to a fault, but even he wouldn’t care to hear such a thing. “Just had a bad moment,” she adds, and that’s a cheat, that’s a copout, that’s exploiting their shared history and language to pass off a moment of unreality as a flashback or PTSD, or whatever regular people call such things.
“Sure.” Clint obviously doesn’t believe her, but they’ve always had an unspoken agreement to honor the other’s surface lies, when they aren’t dangerous, and releases his grip on her wrists. He stands there, considering, almost too long, almost long enough for Steve to catch wind of the situation and look over. If Steve senses anything amiss he’ll begin his careful questioning, which usually she doesn’t mind but will undoubtedly drive her insane right now, when her blood is up and everything feels vaguely wrong.
Natasha turns to grab her towel off the floor, scrubbing at her face an extra moment to give herself a chance to regain her composure.
Clint rubs at his arm showily, with an exaggerated pout that ends in a wink, an acceptance of the apology she’ll never voice.
The smirk she gives in return almost feels genuine.
On the third day, they try to go to lunch.
At least some of them do—Thor’s gone away with Jane, Bruce is wrapped up in something “very important, please go away”, and Natasha is making herself oddly scarce. But Tony and Clint are game when Steve asks; those two love nothing better than getting out, getting away, being anything but cooped up, even when the walls are as gilded as those in Stark’s Tower.
He hates sitting in the back seat, where his knees are folded uncomfortably into his body, but Clint insists on driving and Tony insists on riding shotgun, claiming a highly suspect and previously unmentioned personal history of motion sickness. Steve dislikes being uncomfortable but he dislikes hearing the others bitch endlessly even more, so he resigns himself to an uncomfortable twenty minutes...or maybe more, if traffic is bad.
“This is gonna be awesome. It’s going to be a world of carbs and goodness where everyone tips well and nobody hurts,” Tony insists as he slides into the passenger seat, as if putting the words into the universe will help them to become true. “Can I get a little bro love, here? Can I hear a whoop whoop?” He elbows Clint, making him fumble and drop the keys he’s holding. “I said, let me a hear a whoop whoop!!”
“Whoop whoop,” Clint mutters. Then, distractedly, “Where are my keys? You made me drop...where are the...” his voice gets quieter as he casts his hand around blindly by his feet “...keys?” He peers down owlishly into the floorboard, then growls in frustration as he raises up to look between and under his legs. “Ugh, come on.”
“Only Hawkeye would completely lose something in the same one foot radius as his own body,” Tony observes cheerfully, popping on the flashlight on his cellphone to give Clint a little light to work with. “I’m pretty sure I heard them hit the floor.”
“Maybe they’re still in my—“ Clint pats his jeans carefully, takes out his wallet and blinks at it, puts it back in his pocket. Looks between his legs again, then turns to Tony. “Did you take them? The keys?”
“What? Why would I? I want to go. They’re on the floor where you dropped them, Clint.”
Clint swings his head around to look at Steve, looking uncertain but also suspicious, as if sure they’re having a joke at his expense. “Do you have them? Come on, guys.”
“You. Had. Them. In. Your. Hand.” Tony clips each worth off with irritated deliberateness. “I saw them. Steve saw them. They were jingling right in my face, for God’s sake!”
“Well—“ Clint looks down by his feet again, raises up in his seat, looking behind and under himself. “I think I dropped my keys.”
“Knock it off, Clint,” Steve says, not liking this. Tony’s eyes meet his in clear agreement. “It’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not. I can’t fucking find—“ Clint brightens suddenly with inspiration and checks the ignition, expression falling when there’s nothing there. He looks at Tony again, confusion painted all over his face. “Come on... Do you have them?”
“We’re going back inside,” Steve says firmly, not annoyed anymore but afraid. Maybe Clint is having some kind of seizure or stroke or something, and even if the keys turn up this very second they’re sure as hell not letting him operate a motor vehicle. “You know, I bet they’re still in your apartment.”
“You think?” Clint says hopefully. “Yeah, maybe. Yeah, no, I bet you’re right.” He shakes his head in consternation and opens the door, and Steve breathes a sigh of relief until they’re all standing in the parking garage and Clint starts up again. “Where the hell are my keys? Oh man, I hope I didn’t lock them into the car.” He pats at his pockets again, pulls out his wallet, frowns at it.
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Tony snaps, defaulting to anger, so much easier to deal with than fear. “Move it!” He pushes Clint aside roughly and opens the driver side door, immediately plucks the set of keys from where they sit in the middle of the floorboard. “Here they are, crazypants. Let’s go inside now.”
*******
“That did not happen!” Clint insists. He looks both furious and terrified as he points accusingly at Tony. “Stop saying that!”
Tony scoffs. “You stop it. You were acting totally crazy. And now? Acting even crazier.”
“That didn’t happen,” Clint says again to Bruce. “I don’t know why they’re doing this, but none of that happened. It didn’t.” He glares at Steve this time. “It didn’t.”
“Let me take a look at you. You know, to give Tony and Steve some peace of mind. They’re obviously upset about something.” Let’s just humor them, goes unspoken with the easy smile on his face. “Did you start any new medicines today?” Bruce gets close, trying to look at Clint’s pupils without being too obvious. “You seem a little worn; maybe you should lie down for awhile.”
“No. I have to go to SHIELD.” Clint narrows his eyes angrily, but the look crumbles quickly when the other three men go still, and turns to confusion instead, as if the thread of the conversation just got ripped from his fingers. “What? What??”
“SHIELD’s gone, Clint,” Steve says carefully.
Clint pales, but recovers quickly. “I know that. I didn’t mean SHIELD. We were going to lunch. That’s what it was.” The naked terror on his face is reflected in the others.
*******
Steve and Bruce have Clint bundled off to a hospital less than twenty minutes later, only forgoing an ambulance in an attempt to not freak him out any more than he already is. Tony leaves them to it, stays back at the Tower because he and hospitals are historically an unhappy mixture. Of course, staying behind also means that he has to tell Natasha what’s going on, and in hindsight he’s not sure that’s preferable.
He’s not sure if she was dancing or doing pilates or jazzercising because she stops the second the door opens, her arms crossed and her face stony at the intrusion. At least in this case he’s got the nuke when it comes to diffusing Natasha-type rage.
“Something’s wrong with Clint.” Her eyes widen fractionally, but there’s no other visible response. “Bruce thinks he’s having a some sort of walking seizure. Or...whatever.” He waves his hand dismissively. “I don’t know about health things.” Tony sighs and shifts uncomfortably, put off by her continued lack of reaction—usually by now she would have already comandeered a helicopter and then rappelled into the first open hospital window.
“Alright,” she says finally, still not moving.
“Alright,” he echoes, and turns to leave, then turns immediately back in an almost comedic spin. “Actually? Not alright. What the hell is your problem? I just told you that your boyfriend, or best friend—or whatever the hell he is to you—is in the hospital. I expect a little more of a response.”
“Coulson will keep me updated on my partner,” she says cooly.
“Uh, how’s that, via Ouija Board? Or do you know something I don’t?” He tries to make it a joke but feels a creeping dread behind the manufactured smile.
Again Natasha doesn’t respond in any way, just keeps staring at him.
“You know what? I think I’ll just—“ He doesn’t bother finishing the thought before leaving.
*******
The others come back from the hospital a few hours later with no answers, but a referral to a neurologist and a written prescription for an anti anxiety medication that Clint tears into tiny pieces while Bruce frowns.
It takes every bit of restraint Tony has not to comment on the bits of blue and white paper all over the kitchen table. “Feeling better, then?” he asks instead.
Clint just glowers back and Bruce answers “The brain scans didn’t show anything”—and here Tony heroically again refrains from a snarky remark that would be both utterly hilarious and totally unappreciated— “and neither did the EEG. They said maybe it was just a stress thing, but to follow up with a neurologist anyway.”
“That’s right” Steve says, encouraged. “And we can do that, can’t we?”
“We,” Clint mutters darkly, rolling his eyes and tearing the prescription into even smaller bits, then dumps most of them into Steve’s water glass. “Oh, we can, can we?”
“So...” Tony says, going for casual and missing by a wide margin. “Something is up with Natasha, also. She seemed...off, like she wasn’t quite sure where she was, what was going on. She referred to Coulson as though he might come strolling through the door any second.” He shrugs.
“Okay.” Steve doesn’t sound as confident as he had moments before. “What does that mean? That what Clint has isn’t a stress thing? That it’s something contagious?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce says cautiously. “It would explain why the tests didn’t show anything, but I’ve never heard of a contagious illness like this. Is everyone else feeling okay?”
Of course he means Tony, the only other team member that is minus an enhanced, monstrous, or godlike metabolism and thus likely to get sick. Stark rolls his eyes and snatches the glass away from Clint, all the bits of paper bobbing on the surface of the water, holds it up. “You don’t see me doing this kind of shit, now do you?”
“If it’s contagious then it’s just a—a, you know, virus or something.” Clint looks hopeful. “No big deal, right? We’re tired, we’ve been running hard the last few weeks. A few days off, and we’ll be right as rain. Coulson will understand and Fury can just...he’ll—“ His words drift off at their unhappy looks, the way no one will meet his eyes. He swallows hard and stands, intent on marching off with all the dignity that he can muster, then pivots at the last minute to sit back down forcefully at the table, covering his face with his hands.
“Clint?” Bruce asks carefully.
“I don’t know the way to my room,” he says, his voice ragged and muffled by his palms. “Fuck. Help. Fuck.”
On the fourth day Bruce and Tony look for answers.
They don’t find any.
Clint hides out in his apartment, pretending to sleep and wondering why Natasha is avoiding him.
On the fifth day, Steve calls Thor.
He’s not sure exactly what he hopes will be gained by this; the Asgardian knows nothing about human medical matters and can’t give anything other than moral support, but he figures Thor would want to know, all the same. Even when it doesn’t help, it’s easier when they’re all together.
Thor is on his way back to the Tower without even hanging up the phone; Steve’s not sure quite how long he’s been talking to dead air.
*******
Tony also makes a phone call.
“Don’t come home,” he tells Pepper. “Go even farther away and don’t come back here. Run up a huge tab at some posh hotel on another continent. There’s nothing here at the Tower you need to come back for. Your things, our things—they might be...contaminated.”
“Tony,” she says, sounding terrified. “Tony, what’s going on?”
“We don’t know yet, just that Barton and Romanov are sick. We don’t know if it’s contagious or how it happened. It could be something from our last mission. Or it could be something they were exposed to elsewhere. But I can’t take the risk that there’s something potentially toxic in the Tower, not with you. I’ve cleared all the SI employees out as well. They can chalk it up to my largesse in vacation time, or to my paranoia and wacky eccentricity. Frankly, I don’t care what the fuck anyone thinks, as long as no one else catches this thing.”
“What about you? You’re still there!”
“I gotta go, Pep,” he says, eyeing Bruce, who’s scrubbing his face with his hands, the very picture of tired misery. “Just don’t come home. Go. Go far away and don’t come back here. Run up a huge tab at some posh hotel on another continent.”
“Tony—!!” she cries out, but he’s already hanging up, not wanting to hear any more. His phone starts ringing immediately and he silences it, stuffs it into his pocket. Pepper has to stay gone. She has to stay safe.
*******
“I just wish Natasha would let us draw some blood,” Bruce says for the millionth time. “If I could just compare hers to Clint’s...”
“I know.”
Whatever is wrong with Natasha has manifested very differently than with Clint—he seems like his usual self but incredibly distractible, losing track of conversations and thoughts and forgetting things that have happened. When they try to reorient him it seems to work, only for him to forget again soon after. Tony is already bone weary of the “Sorry, Coulson is dead” conversation, which results in Clint getting upset, then forgetting they told him, only for the process to be repeated exhaustingly. Natasha, on the other hand, seems to have reverted back to some previous Black Widow version of herself, watching them all with guarded, suspicious eyes. It’s hard to know exactly what she is and isn’t thinking, because she will barely speak in an attempt to give nothing away.
There’s no way in hell she’ll set foot willingly to the lab, much less give a sample of blood.
“Is the difference between their symptoms a difference in the manifestation of the illness between men or women? Or is every person affected differently? Or are their symptoms actually exactly the same and she’s just hiding it better?”
Bruce isn’t even really talking to him, just repeating these same questions aloud as he’s done endlessly for almost two days now. Tony would worry that this was a sign of Bruce’s own confusion if the scientist didn’t approach every single problem this way, though usually with much less worried, frenetic energy.
Tony picks up a stack of their last five mission reports, carefully composed by Steve and Natasha and sloppily assembled by everyone else, studying them again to see if there’s anything they had missed. Any indication of experimentation or enemies acting strangely or...anything. He doesn’t even really know what he’s looking for, and the magnitude of the task and remoteness of finding anything makes it hard to focus.
Hawkeye’s reports are especially awful, completely absent of any capitalization or punctuation or effort, reading like terrible stream of consciousness poetry that makes Tony’s head throb even harder.
romanov shot some guys i shot some guys stark said get the hell out so i got the hell out because there may have been a fire it was very hot at any rate then cpt rogers said it was over so i packed up my shit and we left the end
“Fuck you, Clint Barton,” Tony mutters.
Bruce’s report from the same mission isn’t much better. I transformed into the Hulk and aside from brutally murdering some people, the rest is a blur. End of report. —Dr. Bruce Banner
“But no one else is sick,” Bruce says, again, a now well known mantra that Tony can almost mouth the words along to. “We can hold onto that, at least. That no one else is sick.”
“That’s right,” Tony says, the way he always does, and sighs. He fingers the phone through his pocket, thinking that he should call Pepper soon, warn her to stay away.
On the sixth day, Natasha takes a bath.
People that are on the run don’t pause to take a bath. People that are in danger don’t even shower, much less linger about enjoying themselves chest deep in a pool of hot water. Not that she’s enjoying herself. She sits grimly and stares straight ahead, watching the faucet form an occasional fat drip, which pauses dramatically and dangles infuriatingly before it plinks into the water’s smooth surface.
It’s a luxury to be able to get clean before running. Usually that just means a hasty shower, washing essential areas with ruthless efficiency, then tying up a mass of wet hair into a bun. But not now. There will be no rushed retreat, no panicked exit. For her, this time, it’s a bath, and it’s not as much to get clean or to avoid the others when they show up as it is to show them how unconcerned she is about this situation. That she isn’t afraid in the slightest. To prove that she’s so goddamned secure that she can sit here and bathe slowly. Everything is normal and perfectly okay.
It’s not a hotel. It’s not a prison. It’s not the Red Room. It’s not SHIELD. It’s not a typical house, but it’s still somebody’s home. Many somebodys’ homes. How she came to be here, she can’t remember. She doesn’t think she is a prisoner, but the way they watch her signals that they won’t just let her leave. She thinks she knows their faces, but can’t quite remember their names. They are both strangers and maddeningly familiar, their names and histories like words that dance on the tip of her tongue.
But this space, these rooms, somehow are hers.
Everything about the apartment tells her so. She picked these things at some point—her signature touches and pieces of her are woven into every corner of the space. The canned food in the cabinets are stacked and all facing at an angle, since she always approaches cooking from the side, never the front, to keep her sightlines open. There’s a print of Blake’s “Jacob’s Ladder” in the living room, and no one could know that’s her favorite piece of art, much less hang it directly across from the chair she would automatically choose to sit in, the one that would hug her body just right, the pillow positioned perfectly to hit her lower back.
The bedroom, which she finally convinced herself to peek into, is almost aggressively girlish, with pinks and yellows and pale lavenders everywhere. The bedspread is a pink chenille so soft that she had to force herself to stop petting it, crossing her arms instead and fisting her hands. This kind of room had been her dream bedroom when she was younger—she can’t picture herself in such a place now, and yet she also still sort of can. She can see someone else in there, too, the blankets tucked up under his chin, saying I don’t give a fuck what color things are, so long as you’re happy.
It all means that she hung the Blake picture. She chose the chair across from it, she placed the pillow. She chose these things—or at least most of them—and based upon the clothes in the closet she has a pretty good idea who chose the rest.
Barton is also here, and that’s the most confusing part of all. They say he’s sick, but he doesn’t look sick, at least not by her definition of the word. He looks suspicious and unsteady, as if he can’t get his bearings, like he can’t make sense of what’s going on any more than she can. They haven’t been paired together long, but even though they are still getting to know one another she knows him more than the other men, and she clings to that fact like a lifeline.
From the look of this apartment they are together. She’s not sure what would be worse—that it’s all a setup to fool her, to fool both of them, or that it was somehow real, or at least had been real for awhile, and she’s forgotten. That overly pink bedroom, the pictures on every single wall, even fucking placemats on the table—everything looks artificial and too perfect to her, like a carefully orchestrated dream, like two overgrown children playing house, playing at love.
She’d had dinner that night with the group when they insisted, and it was stiff and formal and uncomfortable, everyone giving each other meaningful glances that meant everything to them and nothing to her. Natasha suspected there was something in the food or drink, squirreling every bite into her napkin. It was an old trick, but obviously not one Barton was interested in bothering with; he just kept flipping the same forkful of noodles over and over until it started to congeal into a starchy ball.
“Eat something; it can only help,” the man in the glasses said, his voice a combination of scolding and commanding and caring. Natasha always wondered if that’s what fathers sounded like. “Please try to eat.”
“I want to call Coulson,” Barton said, not looking up. He flopped the mass of egg noodles over again, the gravy overworked into an unappealing gray slime. “Give me my phone back.”
They’d thrown around more of those pointed looks. The bearded man threw his fork onto his plate and swore, and the man in the glasses wanted to run “more tests”. She wondered if she could stop him before the others intervened, but Barton just rose to his feet and didn’t resist, throwing her one dismayed look before letting himself be pulled away.
She excused herself soon after, intent on following them but quickly becoming confused by the layout of this not-house-not-prison-not-SHIELD. Luckily her own instincts led her straight back to the apartment, where she went almost weak kneed with relief to see the familiar things again. Even if all of it was an elaborate trick, these things are a piece of her. A touchstone, even if it is only temporary.
Natasha knows that she needs to get out, and that she needs to take Barton with her. She’ll pull him out and they’ll escape together, and everything will be better. He saved her once and that debt will be repaid, and will also assure her place with SHIELD, prove her loyalty to the other agents who always look at her with such thinly veiled suspicion.
How she can get them away, and how they will get to headquarters afterwards, that’s more of a mystery to her. It doesn’t help that she can hardly hold a thought in her head before it flies away, and she exists in a constant state of trying to find the thread of a thought, a constant sense of deja vu. Nothing feels quite real, as if it’s all a dream and she just needs to shake herself fully awake to move on. The ways out she knows and can usually see so easily—she suddenly can’t see them anymore.
So, for now, she takes a bath.
She washes her hair and brushes it carefully, braids it tightly to dry against her scalp. That will do for many scenarios; if she needs to fight, if she needs to conceal it quickly. She can wear a wig if necessary and keep her hair, one of the few things in the world that is solely hers.
She washes up a bit more and then just sits there, watching the drops slowly form and fall from the faucet. Baths always sound nice in theory, but then whenever she has the luxury of taking one she always just ends up sitting there feeling hot and bored. She reads the instructions on the bottle of soap sitting on the edge of the tub. Pokes her toes in and out of the water. Her toenails are a glittery purple. There are faint water spots on one tiled wall and she scrubs at a few carefully with her pinky. There’s no polish on her fingernails.
Finally she hears what she’s been waiting for. The sound of Barton coming back, someone—no, two someones—with him, all talking to one another, his voice louder, angrier.
“Fuck off!” she hears him shout, then slam the door to his bedroom. The bedroom. Their bedroom.
The other voices murmur to one another in the hallway some more, and damn the insulation in this place—it might be nice otherwise, but it really sucks when trying to eavesdrop. Finally there’s a interminable silence, long enough for another drop to plink! out of the faucet, and then a hesitant knock on the bathroom door. She knew it was coming, vaguely surprised it had taken this long. Her fingertips, with their unpainted nails, are all pruned.
“Natasha?” a man says quietly. “Are you okay in there?”
“Yes,” she calls back, affecting a slightly irritated quality. They are supposedly interrupting her leisurely, nonchalant bath, after all. “I’ll be finished in a bit.”
“Okay,” he says, and God his voice is so maddeningly familiar that she could almost weep, if she did such things. “We’ll go, but...call us if you need anything, alright? Or if Clint needs anything. Just have JARVIS get us, no matter what time it is, we don’t mind.”
“Of course.” She gambles and adds “Thank you” then winces internally—judging by the pregnant pause that follows it was the wrong thing to say.
Another misstep; usually she’s much smarter.
“Good night,” the man says finally.
********
Clint sits up with a start when the bedroom door bangs open so hard that the doorknob leaves a divot in the wall. His hand moves automatically for a weapon under his pillow, but it isn’t there, he’s left grasping only sheets and the pillowcase.
“We’re getting out of here,” Natasha says.
“What? What’s going on?” he asks, but he’s already getting out of bed, his body trusting her even if his mind is too sluggish to keep up.
“Just get dressed.” He can hear her accent for the first time in years, and wonders why she’s let it slip. She has a gun in her hand and he feels a flash of jealousy. He wants a gun.
“I lost mine,” he says sadly, staring at it.
She narrows her eyes. “You didn’t lose it,” she snaps. “They took it from you. They took all your weapons away when they decided you’d lost your mind.”
He doesn’t remember that at all, but overprotectiveness is an Avenger family trait, and he has no doubts Steve and Bruce would do just that if they felt justified. Thor and Tony might leave him a knife or two because they’re considerate that way, but he’d really rather have a gun. It’s not fair that she has one and he doesn’t.
“I said to get dressed!” she snaps, annoyed, and opens drawers, throws clothes in his direction.
He kicks a shirt off the top of his foot and gestures toward the gun. “I want it,” he says, because it’s the most reasonable thing in the world. There’s only one weapon available, and he’s better with a gun than she is. He should have it. And he wants it. Suddenly nothing seems more important than that, and he thinks that if she won’t give it over then maybe he’s just going to take it. He moves toward her.
“Fuck you, this is mine,” she hisses, guessing his intention immediately. Clint takes another step closer, too close, and her hand darts out to pop him in the mouth.
It’s both a surprise and not a surprise at all, and Clint runs his hand along his nose, which is already bleeding. He inspects the red fingertips and then holds them out to Natasha. See what you’ve done. “You get that hit for free,” he says evenly.
Natasha is quick, everyone knows that, and as confused as Clint may be even he knows that—he knows her in his marrow, certain of her even when everything else seems unstable. But he also knows something that maybe only she is aware of; that’s he’s quick too, and just as strong, and she may win most sparring matches because she’s the best, but also because she’s a dirty fighter one hundred percent of the time, whereas he can’t help but pull most of his punches when they’re landing on the face of the person he loves best.
But there won’t be any pulled punches now, no balletic, acrobatic hopping around, no feinting back and forth, no good natured teasing. Because she has the gun and he wants it.
“Make your move, Hawkeye,” the Black Widow challenges.
He does.
*******
Tony runs a hand over his face. His eyes hurt from staring at computer screens but then he thinks of Clint and Natasha and knows he has to keep working. Something’s wrong, maybe something in the air or the water, maybe something to do with the mission last week—whatever it was they got hurt somehow and now they’re depending on Tony to make it right.
He thinks of Clint a few hours ago, his arm out across a table, watching passively as Bruce took vial after vial of blood, so much that Tony finally had to call him on it—Clint was barely functional already, he didn’t need to be made anemic on top of that. As Bruce taped a cotton ball to the crook of his elbow the archer said quietly “Can you at least tell me what it is that I’ve done?” and Bruce had thrown the last vial of blood against the wall and fisted his hands into his hair.
Thor and Steve took Clint away and Tony was left to comfort Bruce awkwardly, hoping he didn’t Hulk out but moreso hoping the scientist didn’t cry, because as far as uncomfortable scenarios went that one would be a hundred times worse.
He settled on the staccato pat pat pat on the shoulder that usually worked on Pepper, though he couldn’t very well add the kisses and hugs that usually went along with the tri-pat attack. “He’ll be okay,” he said instead. “And Natasha, too. It’s just science, Bruce. Just science that we haven’t figured out yet. That’s all it is. If we keep looking long and hard enough, we’ll find it.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said hollowly. “I know we will.”
It’s too quiet everywhere. Natasha and Clint are barely speaking, and the rest of the team just hovers around them in a silent, anxious orbit. It’s also quiet because there aren’t any people. The Avengers like their privacy but there are still people about—the cleaning service, the guy that delivers the groceries, various people wanting signatures from Tony about various things. The Stark Industries employees are many floors down and separated by infinite layers of soundproofing, but Tony can feel their absence and their silence just by knowing they’re gone, knowing it’s lifeless beneath his feet. Cut off from everyone else he feels like one the few survivors in an apocalyptic world.
“We’ll figure it out,” Tony says now. He looks over to where Bruce sits sprawled out over a table, head resting on his arm. He’s likely to have a nasty imprint of his wristwatch on his cheek when he wakes up. “We’ll find it.” He squares his shoulders, cracks his knuckles loudly. “Science is the answer!” he announces, sending a plea into the ether as much as trying psych himself up. “The answer to all our problems.”
“In the meantime,” he adds, because it’s fine to talk to himself if Bruce is rude enough to fall asleep and leave him all alone, “we just need a little mood music in here. Music gets the creative juices flowing. It soothes the savage beast. That’s why Hulkie over there is sleeping. He’s soothed.” He laughs at his own joke, a little taken aback by the sound. It doesn’t sound like his own laugh, but instead as if someone else just laughed through his mouth. That’s stupid, he thinks just as quickly, but the whole thing unsettles him a bit, makes him feel off balance.
“I’ll fix it, JARVIS,” he says, because talking to JARVIS is less weird than talking to himself, and waits for the AI to agree pleasantly, like he always does, then blinks in surprise when the words never come. “With the right music, the right idea, I can do it. I just need the right song. The magic words. Don’t you believe me, that I can fix it? Because I can.”
“Sir, might I suggest a good night’s sleep to assist you in that endeavor?”
“No, you may not.”
Tony walks over to the chem work station and then stops short, trying to remember what he was going to do, or look up. He mentally runs through the last few moments—reading, griping at JARVIS, looking at Steve sleeping, then coming over here—because that usually jogs his memory quite neatly when he has a brain skip, but nothing happens. He shakes his head a little, and okay, maybe JARVIS was right, he should go to bed, is obviously too tired for this if he’s short circuiting in the space of three feet between desks.
“Sir?”
“...Yeah?” Tony wants to move but can’t summon the willpower suddenly, feels like his feet have been anchored to the floor, the expanse of the laboratory all the way to the door too wide suddenly, too insurmountable. Making it all the way to his apartment, to his bed...that’s farther still. Too far. Too fucking far.
“Do you require assistance, Sir?”
Jarvis. Thank Christ. Tony closes his eyes in relief because Jarvis is there and can help, help Tony get to bed where he’ll sleep for awhile and everything will be fine again. “Yeah, that’d be great. Can you give me a hand?” There’s a long pause and Tony waits for Jarvis to take his arm, maybe scold him a little while helping him anyway, ferry him to his bedroom before either one of his parents wakes up and sees that he’s come home drunk again.
“As Dr. Banner is sleeping I have summoned Captain Rogers to come assist you. He is quickly making his way to the lab.”
“Steve?” Tony says doubtfully, because Steve is already in the room, napping on top of his work, but then he blinks and that’s Bruce there instead, and Edwin Jarvis isn’t here at all but JARVIS is.
The actual Steve bursts into the room and Bruce wakes up at the sound, blinking rapidly.
“Oh God.” Tony sags into the nearest chair, staring at his hands as if they’ve betrayed him. They aren’t shaking at all. They’re not. “I think maybe I’ve caught it, whatever it is.”
He knows he sounds scared but that’s probably okay, because the others look frightened too.