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i. flashback to my mistakes
On the Quinjet between Moscow and New York, Clint eats day old stroganoff and tries to make eye contact with the assassin he’s in the middle of smuggling across the Bering Strait. He’s not sure if she can sleep with her eyes open or she’s just that annoyed that he technically saved her life, but Natasha refuses to acknowledge him and the mess that he’s making on the front of his shirt.
Still, he holds his fork out to her. “Stroganoff?”
She stays still. Agent Riles rolls his eyes but doesn’t move his rifle from where it’s pointed squarely at her chest. Not everyone’s necessarily happy that he decided to spare her instead of dump her body in the middle of the Moskva; Clint thinks if he makes it that far, he’ll be able to convince Fury he’s not losing his mind. The rest of SHIELD may take longer to come around to the idea.
“You should eat,” Clint says. “Before we land.”
“Because they won’t feed you,” Riles says. “Least, not until you talk.”
Natasha’s gaze flickers to the other agent’s face, though her expression doesn’t change. If her hands weren’t restrained behind her back he’s sure that she would have punched Riles for making her doubt, even for a second, that Clint could be lying to her about her new home. He staked his bow on bringing her in. He’s not in the mood to play mind games.
“They are gonna feed you,” he assures her. “And if they don’t, I will. Just ignore Riles. He’s mad because he’s missing the Colt’s first game of the season.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Riles mutters.
Natasha says, “Ya khochu slomat’ yego kroshechnuyu sheyu.”
Clint smiles at her. “Yes, to whatever you just said.”
She looks at him then, for the first time since he buckled her into her seat like a child. At the same moment that Riles opens his mouth to protest, Clint sees a bright patch of red blood bloom on her shoulder; his last-minute attempt at stitches whilst waiting for evac haven’t held up the way he hoped they would.
“Hey!” Riles says, noticing the blood too. “I thought you checked her pockets.”
“She didn’t stab herself,” Clint says around a mouthful of soggy noodles. “I shot her. You know, before she decided to come with me.”
Natasha glares at him, but the edges of it are blunt. Her skin is pale and he’s pretty sure she’s running on even less sleep than he is. Plus, he’s not bleeding out of a poorly treated bullet hole; the least he can do is use real medical supplies to make the rest of her journey somewhat comfortable.
“Not convincing,” Riles says.
Clint tilts his head back towards the cockpit. “Give us some privacy, dumbass.”
He waits until the rifle is on the other side of the Quinjet before he shuffles over on the bench and unlocks Natasha’s handcuffs. She moves her hands to her lap and he notices the way she relaxes minutely, tension leaving the lines of her face as the pressure is taken off her shoulder. There are already purple and red marks around her wrists. Clint frowns and reaches under the seat for a first aid kit.
“Sorry about the shirt,” he says.
“All of my shirts end up ruined,” Natasha says. She takes a breath and pulls the bloodied material over her head in one fluid movement. Clint winces at the mess he’s made of her shoulder. “This means nothing.”
“Eh, sure,” he replies. “You want something for the pain?”
The look she gives him then is murderous. “Zasunut’ v zadnitsu.”
“Touche,” Clint murmurs. “You think I should learn Russian?”
He pushes a piece of gauze against the wound and makes her hold it there while he uses alcohol wipes to clean the blood from her skin. She sits still, unperturbed by the agents that line the opposite wall and stare at her like she’s a piece of meat. Clint cares. Clint turns back over his shoulder and flips them all off.
“Have some stroganoff before we land,” he says to her quietly. “Cafeteria food isn’t all that great. I can sneak you some snacks if they don’t suspend me.”
“Why?” She asks. “I eat what I’m given.”
Clint doesn’t feel great about pushing the needle into her skin without pain relief, but he pretends it doesn’t bother him. “One day you’ll eat what you choose. Soon, if everything goes to plan.”
Natasha watches his stitches critically. He’s never been neat and the skin around the wound has already been poked and prodded too many times for the scar to heal nicely. Medical will likely chastise him. He adds it to the list of people he can expect to yell at him over the next few days.
“What does Fury look like?” Natasha asks after a beat.
Clint scoffs. “Scary, but probably not the scariest person you’ve ever seen. He has an eyepatch.”
“Does that mean something?” She says.
“Nah, guess not. You got another shirt in that bag?”
Clint knows that she doesn’t, having watched her haphazardly shove weapon after weapon into the one backpack he’d allowed her to bring and not a single item of clothing. There’s a toothbrush in there somewhere, and a pair of ballet shoes he hopes SHIELD won’t confiscate. The fact that evac even let her bring the bag onto the Quinjet is a small miracle in itself.
“No,” she says. “I have a Boker Swiss Dagger—”
“No,” Clint interrupts. “We’re not talking about weapons when you’re supposed to be the prisoner. Here.”
Clint shrugs out of his own shirt, then gathers it up to push over her head. She flinches, at first, eyes guarded; from somewhere behind him, he hears the sound of a gun cocking. He doesn’t think threatening her with a gun is the right way to get her to put on a shirt, but it does the trick. He helps her pull her arms through and then recuffs her wrists for appearances sake.
Natasha swims in his shirt. The SHIELD logo looks good, proudly displayed on her chest. He’s not embarrassed by the food stains. He just picks up his stroganoff again, stabs a mushroom, and offers her the fork.
“You need a shirt,” she tells him.
“I’ve got plenty,” he says. “You can borrow that for as long as you need. You’re part of the team now.”
It’s not at all official yet. Natasha’s lips twist anyway; he thinks it might almost be a smile before she leans forward to eat what he’s holding out to her. Clint smiles too.
Yea, he made the right call.
ii. my rebounds, my earthquakes
“You want to what?”
Natasha blinks at him, as though he’s the one who is making bizarre requests at breakfast. “Did I use the wrong word?”
“Nope,” Maria assures her, laughing around her hand. “You said exactly the right thing.”
Natasha frowns, confused. She’s five months into SHIELD and still adjusting to American life—or rather, normal life in general—and Clint should be used to the weird questions by now. She’s had to learn how to trust that the food isn’t poisoned and is only just warming up to the idea of taking a seat in Coulson’s office, but this ? This he doesn’t know how to handle.
“Well don’t leave her hanging,” Sharon says. “Yes or no, Barton. Do you want to have a sleepover?”
Clint knows from the looks on their faces that they were the ones to put the idea in Natasha’s head. He kind of wants to shake them. He settles for socking Maria in the arm, hard enough that she lets her spoon fall from her hand.
Natasha is on her feet in an instant, fists raised, and Clint feels guilt creep up the back of his throat.
“Don’t worry,” Maria says, still laughing because she’s the biggest pain in his ass since Barney. “Clint didn’t mean it.”
He doesn’t tell her that Natasha wasn’t about to attack him. “Sit down, Nat. Sorry.”
She sits and eyes him carefully. “I’m confused.”
“Sleepover?” He changes the subject, then blows on his third cup of coffee. “Uh, I guess? What do you want to do?”
“My therapist said that handcuffing myself to the bed at night is preventing me from recovering from the emotional trauma that was inflicted on me as a child,” Natasha recites. “She said that I’m allowing them to continue to control my life. I told her umeret’ v yame.”
Sharon whistles. “That was deep Romanoff.”
“You handcuff yourself to the bed?” Maria asks. “That’s weird.”
Clint sighs. “Why the sleepover then?”
“Maria said it would be fun,” Natasha says. “And maybe I trust you enough to break the habit for a night.”
Clint’s touched, though he doesn’t think it’ll be as easy as Natasha just not using the cuffs. He agrees anyway, sure that he can show her some fun, and they organise a recreational pass with Coulson for the following Friday. Natasha doesn’t say it, but he can see the joy on her face.
She appears on his doorstep on Friday night with the same backpack he gave her back in Moscow, except this time she has pyjamas and fluffy socks and an assortment of scrunchies to choose from. They eat pizza and watch a movie and he sets up the couch with sheets and everything, then leaves her, sans hand-cuffs, to pass out in his own bed sometime around midnight.
Barely fifteen minutes have passed when he feels the bed dip. “What’s up?”
He can feel Natasha’s fuzzy socks against his legs. “Can I borrow this side?”
“Yea,” he mumbles, smiling into his pillow. Borrow is Natasha’s favourite word, even though he hasn’t seen his SHIELD shirt since the Quinjet. “Borrow away, sweetheart.”
Between their bodies her hand finds his. He holds it for the rest of the night, thumb brushing over scars left by metal. She borrows his bed, but she also, unknowingly, borrows his heart.
iii. even in my worst lies
Clint’s in Utah when Natasha becomes Natalie Rushman. There’s not much going on there, so he spends his free time playing online poker with Maria and fielding calls from Nat when she gets bored of babysitting Stark. He misses her; he doesn’t tell her, hopes that she can just hear it in his voice every time he cracks a joke about billionaires being adult-sized babies. He wants his partner back.
“I want my partner back,” he tells her, Thursday night with a basket of wings in his lap. The motel TV flickers from bad reception. He sandwiches the phone between his shoulder and ear so he can open a beer. “I’m bored.”
He imagines her eye roll. “Fill out my report for the therapist.”
“No way. Mandated reports suck ass. You don’t even need these check-ups anymore.”
“It’s only because I beat up Riles last week,” she reminds him. “Which was your idea—”
“Nope,” Clint interrupts. “Romanoff. You were gonna knock him out whether I egged you on or not.”
He hears her breathy laughter. He misses her face and her hair and her goddamn hand in his in the middle of the night. He misses his partner, but he misses his friend more, because maybe she’s not just a friend anymore; maybe she’s more, and he hasn’t known how to tell her for over a year because he’s too scared of fucking things up. But he misses her eyes.
“I’m calling for a reason, actually,” Natasha says eventually. “I need to borrow your bike.”
That piques Clint’s interest. “Which one?”
“The fast one,” she replies. “Can I? It’s to prove a point.”
“Course you can,” Clint says. “I’ll ride it down to you.”
“Tomorrow?”
He smiles. “Yea, tomorrow.”
It takes a whole day for Clint to get the motorbike to Malibu. He doesn’t care; he would drive across the whole country if it meant he could just see her once. She’s wearing a pencil skirt and shockingly high heels when he meets her outside of a fancy restaurant, and the smile that lights up her face when she sees him is enough to make his knees weak.
“Thank you,” she says. “I can pick it up from your hotel tomorrow?”
“Sure thing, hot stuff,” he teases. “What kinda point do you need a motorbike to help prove?”
“It’s a long story,” Natasha says. “Stark is just inside. I should go back in before they see you.”
“Can’t risk the mission,” Clint says softly. “Hey, I thought you could borrow this too.”
He pulls an arrowhead out of his jacket pocket and presses it into the palm of her hand. Her forehead crinkles as she holds it up to inspect the points, but he’s never told her this story before. His heart leaps to his throat and he folds his arms across his chest to stop his hands from shaking.
“Lucky arrow,” he tells her. “From the arrow that got me the job. Anyway, you can give it back when you’re home.”
Even with her heels, Natasha is still shorter than him. She leans up on tiptoes and kisses him, so quickly that for a second he thinks he might have imagined it. Then she smiles, tucks the arrow into the purse that’s slung across her shoulder, and squeezes his bicep. “Home. Sounds good.”
He watches her go and feels the echo of her lips on his for the whole night.
iv. you saw the truth in me
Getting an apartment together happens a lot sooner than Clint had predicted. He brings Lucky and enough junk to fill the shelves they have no other use for, and Natasha brings all of the nice furniture and booby traps. They live in Bed-Stuy. Clint doesn’t think he’s ever killed anyone in Bed-Stuy.
They’re sitting on the couch together, pizza box between them. Maria’s passed out opposite them, having returned from a mission concussed at the exact moment that Sharon took off for Berlin; Clint never thought Maria could be any more annoying than what she already is, but having to wake her up every half hour is slowly proving him wrong.
“If we let her sleep, the odds of her not waking up are actually pretty slim.”
Natasha elbows him in the side. “We’re not risking it. She’s a friend.”
“More like a sister that wants to make life Hell,” he mutters. “Carter really left us to deal with this shit, huh.”
“Don’t complain,” Natasha scolds. “She helped me with my food poisoning, remember?”
Clint grumbles but has to agree. Natasha was bed-ridden for three days and he was stuck in Australia, of all places, only able to trust Maria’s word when she told him over the phone that the doctor said it would pass. So he owes her one, whatever. He wasn’t ready to have it cashed in so early.
“Let me borrow your phone,” Natasha says.
Clint snorts. “Where’s yours?”
“I dropped it out of a plane last week. They haven’t given me a new one yet.”
Clint doesn’t ask. He doesn’t think he needs to anymore. They’ve fought aliens and he’s had a God inside his mind, so something like Natasha losing her hundredth phone of the year isn’t as surprising as it once might have been. He reaches into his pocket and fishes the phone out, handing it to her just as Maria rolls off the couch.
“Please don’t tell me that thud was her head,” he moans.
Natasha, predictably, snaps a photo before she goes to check on her friend. “Up and at ‘em, Hill. We need to check in with Sharon.”
“Oh good,” Maria slurs, letting Natasha man-handle her into standing. “Barton, you look ridiculous.”
“So do you,” he counters. “There’s an egg on your forehead.”
Maria swipes at her face. “That’s impossible. Natty, I think Barton has a concussion.”
“It’s definitely you,” Natasha mutters. She’s almost managed to get Maria out of the living room when he hears something that sounds too similar to vomiting. “Oh my God.”
He peers over the back of the couch and winces at the mess. “That’s rough.”
“Clean this up,” Natasha growls, using her free hand to point at the floor. “I’m putting her in the shower, and then I’m borrowing your hoodie. The good one, with the hole in the pocket.”
Clint doesn’t tell her that she doesn’t have to borrow anything, anymore. What’s his is hers, but when Natasha curls up against him later that night wearing said hoodie and promising she’ll give it back in the morning, he can’t find it in him to say a single word.
v. and i woke up just in time
Without Coulson around, Clint and Natasha drift between missions, between handlers, between any semblance of control they might have once had over their lives at SHIELD. It’s disjointing, and it makes Natasha jumpy.
Him getting himself blown up on a solo mission doesn’t really help matters.
All of his bones are still inside his body, which he thinks is important enough to let her know via text. He’s out of the hospital in less than 36 hours and sitting in a debrief before Natasha has even touched down on the Helicarrier. It doesn’t mean she’s any happier to see the bruises that cover his body.
“Can I borrow you?” She asks softly, head peeking through the door of the debrief room. She’s not often quiet when she wants something; he had almost expected her to come in, guns blazing, demanding to see him alone. “Please?”
Clint doesn’t ask the new handler for permission. “We’ll continue this tomorrow.”
He follows her down the hall, limping on his twisted ankle. She takes him into an empty office and locks the door behind them, and then she stands in front of him, hands shaking against his cheeks as she checks him herself for injuries.
“You don’t have to ask to borrow me,” he tells her gently. “I’m yours.”
“You scared me,” she whispers, voice hoarse. “God, Clint. You really scared me.”
“Sorry,” he says. She wraps her arms around his torso, touch featherlight, and he nuzzles his nose into her hair so he can breathe in the familiar smell of her deeply. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m borrowing you forever,” she says against his chest. “I’m not giving you back. SHIELD can fight me on it.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” he murmurs. “Tash, I’m okay.”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I just… The thought of being a widow—”
“Not happening,” Clint says. He tilts her chin up and kisses her, long and deep, hard enough to make his broken ribs ache. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she replies. “Ya tebya lyublyu.”
He knows this Russian, so he kisses her again, lets his hand tangle in her hair so he can show her how alive he is. She keeps her arms around his neck when they pull apart, up on tiptoes so she can look him in the eye. Her smile is shy and it makes his stomach somersault in anticipation.
“What?” He asks.
“I mean it when I say I’m borrowing you forever,” she says. “I need you to help me raise this kid.”
“Really?” Clint says.
“Really,” Natasha replies. “Now kiss me again. We can talk about it later.”
+1. now i wake up by your side
“I can’t believe I’m about to ask this.”
Natasha looks up, eyebrows quirked in amusement. She’s got a baking tray full of cookies in one hand and a disgruntled cat in the other; curiosity makes him want to ask, but the waiting four year-old in the next room makes him reconsider.
“Is this about trick or treating?” Natasha asks. “Because you specifically told me that you were taking Katie on your own so I couldn’t police the candy this year.”
Clint’s kind of regretting banning Natasha from Halloween. “It is about trick or treating, but… Not what you think.”
There’s the thunk of a plastic arrow suctioning to the front of the fridge, inches from the cat’s head. Liho yowls and leaps out of Natasha’s hand, skidding around the corner and out of sight. Natasha sighs, yanks the arrow off the fridge and puts the tray of cookies down on the counter.
“Aim is good,” Clint comments idly.
“I will truly never know peace.”
The two of them enter the living room to find Katie hanging off the back of the couch, Nerf bow clutched tightly in both hands. She grins at them toothily and Clint’s heart soars. It makes what he’s about to do worth it.
“What did mama say about shooting arrows inside?” Natasha says.
“Ne delay etogo!” Katie recites, shaking her finger. “But daddy said I have to pwactise.”
Clint winces. “Daddy made a mistake?”
“Daddy looks so pwetty,” Katie sing-songs. “Vody, pozhaluysta?”
He follows Natasha back into the kitchen, watching her pour a cup of water for their daughter. “Are you really gonna make me ask?”
“Of course I am,” Natasha replies. “Katie, come to the kitchen please.”
Katie races around the corner, accepting the cup and gulping down the water too quickly. Her Robin Hood hat slides down over her forehead and she laughs, peeking out at them with her big blue eyes. Clint melts. Clint forgets any and all reservations he has in the wake of his baby's excitement.
“Can I borrow your lipstick?” He asks Natasha. “Maid Marion needs a little help in the face department.”
Natasha snorts, eyes shining with hidden laughter. Katie had wanted to go trick or treating as Robin Hood, and there was no way that Clint was going to say no to her. Except she had insisted on Maid Marion accompanying her, and Clint’s premature decision to ban Natasha led to him wearing the dress and a wig that made his scalp itch.
“Yay!” Katie cheers when Natasha returns with the lipstick. “Daddy is gonna be so beautiful like mama.”
“Thank you, baby,” Natasha says, pressing a kiss to the top of Katie’s felt hat. “Now, part your lips, Barton.”
He does as he’s told, watches her carefully while she applies the lipstick with a slight furrow in her brow. It feels like kissing her, tastes like kissing her; he does, leaning forward and smudging her handiwork against her own lips, but she laughs and wraps her arms around his neck to keep him there a moment longer.
“You’re the sweetest, you know that?” She whispers to him.
“Anything for my girls,” he replies.
Natasha snaps pictures of the two of them: tiny Robin Hood grinning from ear to ear with her fake bow strapped across her back, Maid Marion pulling a muscle trying to curtsey. When they’re halfway out the door Natasha presses the lipstick into his hand, eyes soft.
“Borrow it for the night. You might need a touch-up.”
“Love you, Nat,” he tells her, and she’s wearing his shirt from the first day on the Quinjet all those years ago; the shirt she borrowed and never gave back, and he thinks that she’s probably been borrowing his heart ever since then, too, returning it in the shade of Katie’s curls, the scrunch of her nose.
“Love you too, Clint,” she replies. “Go make your daughter’s day.”
He salutes her, takes Katie’s hand, and keeps the lipstick in his pocket all night; a promise formed over the Bering Strait, for them, and only them.