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There was a slight shift in the air. Kate could almost smell it, taste it on the edges of her tongue, tangible as it was with airborne festivities.
It was finally about to be Christmas, and Kate could feel that shift in the air right down to her bones. It was visceral, exciting and—
“A bit too early for this, don’t you think?” grumbled her partner from the doorway right behind her, and Kate jumped in shock.
“I’ll never get used to you sneaking up on me like this!” she shifted in her chair to turn around towards him, but he was already walking towards the chair opposite her.
Clint barton. Avenger. Legend. Her childhood icon slash inspiration slash obsession. Her partner.
She still did a little internal jig whenever she repeated those words to herself. It was hard to believe her life, dangerous and daring and so utterly fulfilling, everything she had ever dreamed of having ever since she was a fatherless little girl going through changes so massive she couldn’t even begin to comprehend the vastness of them. Much less, how they would affect her life in the long run.
Clint was grabbing a coffee mug off the shelf and settling down in front of her in the rickety chair, comfortable in his skin and currently, sleep ruffled. Kate tucked her knees into her chest tightly, feeling a slight shiver journey down her spine.
“Why are you awake?” Clint poured himself coffee as he got straight to the point, blunt as the day she’d met him.
Kate shrugged as if the answer should be quite obvious to him. “It's about to be a new year.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Kate only shrugged again. “It's about to be a new year, I have no idea why you were even expecting me to sleep much.”
Ever the succinct man that took personal offense at drawn-out small talk, he grunted in response as he gulped down another large sip of his steaming beverage. Kate watched his arm leave and release the coffee cup as she pondered on how convenient it was, having someone not plod into the whys of things. He could just let things be the way they were, without feeling the need to comfort her or mollycoddle her, treat her like the troubled teenager she hadn’t quite grown out of just yet.
No, there were other ways he could condescend to her and treat her like she was made of china, like she couldn’t take care of herself against the world that only wanted to tear down. Make her feel like she wasn’t capable of defending herself against the ones who wanted to harm her.
This, again, she couldn’t think of any bitterness. It was something she rarely, if ever, admitted to herself, but she liked it sometimes. She liked it when he made her feel like she was worth taking care of.
“We have a mission today.”
Kate stared at him, her eyes suddenly wide out of surprise, and now she was alert. “Something new?” Excitement grew in her eyes. Her coffee mug came back to rest on the table on its own accord.
“Something new.”
“Gangs, vigilantes, aliens, which one is it?”
Suppressing a smile, he took another leisurely, frustrating sip, as if none of this excited him in the least. “None of that. You’re getting way too hyped about this, I haven't even told you what it is yet.”
“I don’t need to know that to be about it, Clint!” she stared at him. “I’ve been locked up in this tiny apartment since Christmas, I’ve eaten nothing but week-old pizza and sleeping pills, my mom’s in some serious deliberation to go to jail, and you’re telling me to chill out about a new mission? This is the best thing in my life since Christmas, clint!”
There was hardly anything new about his expressions since the second she started ranting to him about how frustratingly boring her life had suddenly become, and that annoyed her a little bit even more. “How are you so blasé about this?”
He scrunched up his nose. “How am I so— what?”
(She tried to not get hung up on the nose scrunch.)
“So casual! About missions? Don’t you feel even a slight bit of adrenaline when you think about potentially saving someone’s life? How doesn’t that excite you?”
“This is a weird conversation for barely 8 in the morning. No, Kate, that doesn’t excite me. I don’t do it for the adrenaline, because I'm not an adrenaline junkie.” he started to get up off the chair in front of her, leaving her sitting down while he towered over her. She looked up as he kept speaking. “I suggest you work on that aspect of your job a bit more too. That’s… not the correct attitude for it. At all.” and then he walked back to the couch, lying back and becoming dead weight against the squeaky springs. He was probably going back to sleep.
The springs squeaked a little more as she shifted to lie on his side. She should replace that old thing,
She was too busy replaying his nose scrunch from earlier in the conversation to feel even the slightest bit of the sting he’d probably intended with his words.
Huh. a weird conversation. she’d have to agree.
“So it's… what is it again? I’m sorry, my mind is still kind of frozen from the shock of how utterly stupid this mission you’re taking me along for is.”
Clint tightened his glove around his arm, yet again. It was probably draining the life out of his arm at this point, Kate thought to herself with mild bewilderment.
“A car thief. In my hometown.”
“Right, right, but that’s not what you just said.”
Clint furrowed his brows with genuine confusion. “What did I just say?”
“Second-hand cars and bicycles! That’s what this person’s stealing!” Kate put on a hat and turned around from her backpack to face him again. “Is this even worth leaving for? I mean, second-hand cars, clint. They were second-hand. Probably a million years old, and had it coming for themselves anyway, we could just sit around watching more Christmas movies and order takeout—”
“Like you said you were so tired of doing?” Clint cut her off, quizzically. “I’m genuinely confused, kate, you were so excited just this morning about having a new mission—”
“—This is hardly a mission!”
“There’s still a thief out there, and you’re going to be helping people.” he walked closer to her, picking up his jacket from the table right behind her. “Isn’t that all it’s about for you anyway, kate?”
And suddenly, without Kate realizing, without her noticing, the distance between them was too less. Way too less. Too less for comfort. Way too less for concentration. She could feel his body heat permeating through her clothes and his breath on her forehead. It was warm and light, and so close.
“What’s it all about for me?” she breathed, and he’d already backed away from her. And then, she realized what had just transpired.
The proximity had barely lasted a second. It lasted less than a second. And Clint hadn’t even noticed that he’d leaned closer to her while he picked up his jacket from the table right behind her.
Oh. That was it, that was just it. The jacket. Nothing more than that, it wasn’t like he was trying to—
“Helping people?” Clint was talking. She had no idea what he was saying. Her breathing felt erratic and loud.
“Helping people is what it’s all about for me, yes, you’re right. You’re right.” she wanted that conversation over. She wanted some privacy. And she wanted a moment to herself, alone. She turned her back on him again as she pretended to fidget with her backpack.
What the fuck was wrong with her?
“You want me to take your bag down to the car? I’m going to go wait downstairs.” clint was so oblivious to her… predicament. He was
“I can take it, go on ahead. I’ll be down in a minute. Just locking up and stuff, you know how it is.”
He grunted once again as he picked up his bag, barely unpacked since he’d come back to New York City after Christmas with his family, and glanced at her suitcase once again. “You sure you don’t want me to—”
“Barton, no, your services won’t be needed today—”
“Fine, fine,” he mumbled under his breath as he walked to the door, and Kate went to the bedroom to do some last-minute dallying— checking the windows, tucking the edges of the already-made bed again, anything to delay going down to the car beside him. When there was nothing else for her to check in the room, she came back out to the tiny drawing room of her apartment, Clint was gone, but so were her bags.
Bastard.
The drive to his hometown was 4 hours long, and Kate was, for some frustrating reason, dreading every minute of them. But there wasn’t any time for further panicking or mental preparation when she heard Clint’s old car’s old, already noisy engine rev in impatience, and she hurried down the stairs yelling, “Yeah, I’m coming!”
It was silent in the car in between them, because of course it was. Clint didn’t like to talk, and he liked to listen to people talk even less, so conversation was something that was very rarely something he was genuinely interested in. Kate had gotten used to that.
She sat there silently, trying to avoid movement, trying to be as still as possible so, for a moment, she could almost make Clint forget she was there altogether. Maybe if he didn’t feel like he was being watched, he’d let her see more of him, open himself up for her to prod and stare at a little more. She wanted to see more of him, all of him. The part he kept locked up behind deep, dark walls of protected invulnerability. He wasn’t as caged as he was a cave, impenetrable and dark.
Maybe she could make his hands, which gripped the steering wheel with a vice-like grip, loosen for once if she made herself invisible. The bruised knuckles, dark red and purple-ish from years and years of lethal battle, never looked anything less than rough and intimidating on his best days.
Her fingernails dug into her palms in restraint. Restraining herself from what, exactly, she hadn’t quite figured out.
“Are you bored?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the road, even though he didn’t need to necessarily keep them there. They were almost out of city limits, skyscrapers and grey roads getting increasingly distant, and ahead of them was a startling blue sky, cold and warm with white sunshine on the windows. Her cold, pale skin rejoiced when she felt the brittle light touch her face.
“Nope. The road’s keeping me preoccupied. Very interesting roads,” she quipped in reply. “I could use some music, though.”
“I’m not listening to the radio. You just told me the road was interesting to you.”
“I was joking,” Kate chuckled in shock. “You really can’t tell the difference between sarcasm and sincerity?”
“Your sarcasm will never even come close to that of my best friend of decades,” he retorted. “My daughter is easily more sarcastic than you. So if there’s anyone who understands the difference between sarcasm and sincerity…”
“Wow. Ouch.” Kate pouted. Clint laughed, and once again, Kate only stared. And stared. She couldn’t stop, and he wasn’t even laughing anymore.
He seemed to fidget with his hands on the steering wheel for a second, as if hesitating about telling her something. Then he pointed at the glove box, “There are some CDs in there. Music my wife and I used to listen to. Take your pick, if you want.”
That mildly broke the staring spell Kate was under, and she shifted her eyes away from him and towards the front where she opened and started fingering through the CDs. There were so many. So many CDs that Kate didn’t recognize and some that she did, murkily, as if she’d known the names of the bands and albums in a different life. It was a different life, maybe, when she’d last listened to them.
“What do you mean, you and your wife used to listen to this music?” she picked up one, and it was a Queen CD, A Night At The Opera. She turned in her hand, examining the album cover in the front and the blank back.
“I’m not home all that much. There’s hardly any more time to listen to music, just between the two of us. The kids hate listening to the old stuff. Boring, they call it.” he smiled endearingly at the mention of his children.
Kate felt something sharp and dull in her chest, and she wasn’t sure if it was at the mention of his dwindling relationship with his children or the lack of time he spent with them.
He seemed… happy when he spoke of his wife and the times they’d once had. As if they had been good enough to still leave him smiling like that at the mere mention of them.
As if he wanted those times back.
She was still going through the CDs, five minutes later. She didn’t know a majority of those, at least not by name, and she didn’t want to end up playing something that would make the atmosphere in the car feel awkward, or trouble Clint’s hearing, or play something overtly violent and loud, and the pressure of selection made anxiety plant in her chest.
“I can’t choose,” she muttered under her breath.
“What?” Clint asked loudly. Yeah, he probably didn’t hear her low complaining.
“I can’t choose,” she repeated, louder. “You tell me what to play, I have no idea about pretty much any of these.”
He smirked, at least she guessed he did. His smirk was a small smile tilted to the left of his face. “Yeah, you’re probably too young to know any of these. Your generation listens to different kinds of… music, if you could even call it that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I’m not an avid enjoyer of dad rock , and I apologize for being born after all the good music died out, I guess my parents should’ve had sex much earlier for that.”
A stiffness entered his smile, probably at the casual mention of sex, and Kate covertly covered her smile at his sheer dad-like behavior. She found her face feeling slightly hotter as well, although she wasn’t sure what that was about.
Great, now I’ve made things so awkward. And I haven’t even played the music yet.
She selected the first CD her hands picked up, and read the cover out loud.
“ Anthology. It’s a Grover Washington Jr. record.” she paused and looked at him. “Is that okay?”
“Hm? Oh, yeah, Anthology, I like this one. Pop it in,” he pointed at the CD player, old fashioned, and to Kate, kind of charming. She liked the idea that she was listening to music with him the same way he had with his wife.
She liked it a little too much.
She fidgeted with the CD player for a second, but she did end up finding the eject button, and when the tray came out, rattling slightly, waiting for her to place the disc on it, she tried not to look too wide-eyed; she could see Clint enjoying her inexperience from the corner of her eye.
Putting the disc in, she muttered, “Shut up,” and Clint played innocent.
“What, I didn’t even say a thing.”
“You don’t need to, I can feel you laughing at me,” and then he did laugh at her.
“Don’t worry, you’re not the first of your generation to be completely perplexed by that thing. My daughters still can’t operate it without wanting to get violent.”
She was internally grateful the music, a heavy, pleasant jazzy tune, started playing over her when she replied to him, much too low of a whisper for him to hear her over the music.
(“I’m not your daughter, though.”)
As the song played and Kate felt her body relax into the seat for the first time since she’d gotten into the car, she saw his hands loosen their grip on the steering wheel, as if he didn’t even realize he was doing it, and she felt a thrill of pride run through her. She’d done the right thing. She had made him relax his hands, feel calmer, and less scrutinized around her.
(oh, but scrutinize him she did anyway.)
As a woman’s voice filled the car, she settled herself fully against the seat, ready to sit back and enjoy the music and covertly stare at his hands on the steering wheel, so expressive and telling of his thoughts in their own right.
Give me the sun
I'll give you the moonlight
Love will set us free
If we just believe the best is yet to come
She was afraid to look at his expression, for some strange reason. Almost like she was afraid of him seeing her in her most natural, vulnerable state. As if she knew he would take advantage of her relaxation at the moment and use it against her.
Can you see what I see
On the road ahead
Do you know
there's a new life there
Her eyes felt tired of their unblinking stare, alternating between the road ahead and, yes, it was hard to admit to herself, but she was fully staring at his hands, his emotive, rough hands, rest on the steering while, immobile most of the time during to the simplicity of the road and lack of traffic.
What was going on with her? What had shifted? She couldn’t tell the exact moment something had shifted in her feelings towards him but she remembered a sharp ache in her chest the first time she had seen Laura Barton, barely a week ago. She remembered feeling utterly incapable of looking away every time he and Laura touched, as rare as that was. She had watched him and his— why was it so hard to utter it even in her mind , goddamn it— wife embrace, brief but intimate. They seemed to know each other more than anyone else in the world did.
She saw the look in Laura’s eyes when he got up to help her with some last-minute cooking. It was affection long lost, or simply affection that had lasted a long time, and it felt familiar. It was real, and it made kate’s eyes burn with the will to look away and confusion and something that felt a ton like hurt.
And she remembered feeling jittery on her way back home with him, her stomach feeling as though she had swallowed something electric and heat-absorbing, her skin rolling with goosebumps every time Laura’s face, especially that singular look in her eyes, flashed in her mind. That goodbye with him felt electric and awkward. She wanted to hug him, with his stupid blue eyes and soft, withdrawn smile. Her eyes rested on his face, roaming his chest and her own hands, as if that was the last time she’d ever see him.
Later that night, lying in bed, still feeling those annoying fucking jittery shocks run through her body, she did wish she never had to see him again.
But then again, he showed up at her doorstep the very next morning, real and ever-present, and all of her late-night wishes were out of the window, and the jitters came back in full force with a new quality that hadn’t been there before— attraction— and that was that, for her.
The last four days had been spent in his presence, in the tiny haven of her apartment, coming to terms with this new thing she was feeling, and she watched him closer than she ever had before.
She watched him so much she knew he had a very pale, very faded scratch at the back of his hand.
She knew he took off his wedding ring before going outside the house, probably because he was never truly convinced he wouldn’t have to engage in hand-to-hand combat out there in the world.
She knew that he talked about everyone in his life in detail and without reserve, other than his wife.
At some points, the sun shone strongly on her, causing Kate to blink rapidly whenever the beams of light hit her face directly, and squint her eyes. Clint, naturally, remained unbothered by it, but he seemed to sense her discomfort, that intuitive thing that made him glance down at her in mild concern. Or curiosity.
“Sun hitting you?”
“Uh-huh,” kate hummed as she shifted in her seat, finding an angle that didn’t cause the light to make her head throb in pain.
A single hand left the steering wheel and opened the glove box in front of her, damn near brushing her knee, oh my god, and took something out, dropping in her lap as his hand returned to the steering wheel.
“Sunglasses?”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Knock yourself out.”
She couldn’t help the smile that took over her face. She pretended it was out of relief.
The next time she opened her eyes, it was dark in the car, the CD player blinking the name of some track in white disjointed, old-fashioned letters. An old track, familiar as home, played at almost a whisper, and kate could barely find her voice.
“How long was I out?” she croaked, her voice embarrassingly child-like. Something about the whole environment made her miss the only safety blanket she’d ever known— her mother.
“Around 3 hours,” Clint mused, his voice low and rough, as if he was about to tell her to go back to sleep.
3 hours, holy shit.
“Why’s it so dark out? How long have we been driving?”
“It’s just 4 in the afternoon right now, Kate.” he sounded amused.
“But it’s dark, ” she complained.
“And it’s winter in new york. It makes perfect sense to me.”
And then it all came back to her, in a wave, all together.
She was alone with Clint, in his car, on the way to his hometown, for the second-hand car theft mission.
Oh. Oh.
“Clint,” she murmured, trying to regain some composure in her seat. She had slumped all the way down sometime in her mystically deep nap.
“Hey,”, and she could feel his hand in her hair. His hand. In her hair. “You can go back to sleep, I’ll wake you up when we reach.”
“Clint, “ she said, louder and more insistent, and his hand was out of her hair as if it was never there, to begin with. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Why would I do that? You haven’t been sleeping gre—”
“I wanted us to switch! You’ve been driving for 4 hours straight, I could’ve taken over and let you rest for some time.”
He laughed, and there was a shocking gentleness in it. “You didn’t do that last time.”
Muttering, “well, I wanted to this time,” under her breath, she sat up fully, letting her head settle from the sudden queasiness of panic and unfamiliar surroundings, and an errant tune playing in the background caught her attention. She turned the volume up slightly.
It was like parts of her she didn’t even know existed were suddenly coming together, fitting as comfortably as puzzle pieces.
“I know this song,” she said softly.
“You do?”
Kate almost didn’t hear him. Every beat, every lyric of the song felt loud and old and new to her, something she wanted to get away from, but physically couldn’t. She wanted to cry with joy that she’d found that song and fling herself out of the car because she had.
“Kate?”
“Yeah,” she finally replied. “Yeah, my dad listened to it.”
Clint grunted as if he understood. As if he was about to do the same patronizing sigh and the same old apology at bringing her father up.
As if that would make her forget his death more easily.
But Clint offered nothing, and she kept waiting for him to say something. Something like everybody else had, something that they obviously had meant to be comforting and apologetic and yet were somehow not either of those.
He sat there, quietly, letting the song play, as she processed… everything.
Kate thought of NYC afternoons, knit caps, a thermos of coffee, and one of sweet, weak tea. Picnics in a park, swings, nights at home, eating spicy pasta that made her young self’s eyes water, laughs. She also thought of yells and bangs and the clattering of plates.
And then the song got over, the silence between Kate and Clint bled into the next one. She couldn’t care less about the one that played next, so she asked him the question that she most wanted to know the answer to.
“What was the name of that song? Just for the sake of curiosity?”
And when he told her, she nodded as if she hadn’t just committed it to mind for life.
“You listen to so much old music.”
“Well, I
am
old,” he chuckled. “That might play a slight role in my music tastes.”
“No, but like really old music. You can’t be that old. How old are you?”
He was silent. “Old enough.”
“Old enough for what?”
“Enough to not want to go around advertising the exact number.”
“Oh come on,” she coaxed. “You’re, what? 42? 45?”
“Somewhere around that,” he humored her. He was humoring her. She really must be close.
“It doesn’t really matter now, though. We’re almost here.” He ducked his neck, looking out at the neighborhood outside their windows.
“Almost?” That looked nothing like the ranch he lived on. “Clint that looks nothing like your house.”
The neighborhood around them looked dark and… shoddy. Lower-income. Probably very prone to crime. Ah. I see.
“What do we do now? Do we—”
“We camp out here. There are rumors of the new great heist happening right there—” he pointed at the cycle repair shop she could see right down the corner.
“They’re stealing cycles and cars, a repair shop seems like an obvious target. Are you sure?”
“I have solid intel.” he unbuckled his seatbelt. “And, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want you to get too excited about this, but our thieves might just have ties with some mafia around here. The mafia. The new york city mafia.”
Kate’s eyes grew wider with every word out of his mouth. “Mafia? Are you serious, why didn’t you—”
“This is exactly why, kate.”
“Right, right,” she grumbled, unbuckling her own belt. “So now… what? We just sit out here, waiting for them to turn up?”
“Exactly.”
And turn up they did.
“I told you to wait for me,” Clint hissed in her ear, panting as he supported most of their weight on his shoulder.
“Only because you couldn’t catch up with me,” she teased, but her light tone didn’t quite land when it was punctuated by three pants dividing the sentence into three separate phrases. “Holy shit, I can’t put even a little bit of weight on my leg, it hurts so bad.”
“ —and you used two acid arrows. Two. Kate, we could’ve gone this entire time without using one of those things and you used two! Do you know who’s going to—”
“I really couldn’t give a shit about the arrows right now, Clint,” she gritted out through her teeth. “I think I broke my fucking leg, and you couldn’t care about anything but your damn arr—” his shoulder was gone from under her arm so quickly she almost fell. They were now in the stairwell of the building they were staying in for the night, a cheap motel with barely enough people to call it one.
His eyes were very close to hers. “Hear me out here, kate. I care about nothing more than I care about your leg at this moment. The fact that you got hurt almost made me miss a shot, and I told you to wait, if you’d just waited—!”
Kate was staring at him, something shocked and soft about her eyes.
“Just… let’s help me get to my room, Clint. We can talk about the loss of two of your acid arrows tomorrow, and you can yell at me as much as you want then.”
He nodded desperately, and placing her arm over his lowered shoulder again, they made their way up the stairs together, avoiding eye contact and much conversation other than the occasional “you good?” and “watch that step, there”.
“We have connected rooms, here,” Clint muttered, checking the number on the keys to the room once again. He opened up a door, and let her walk through it, unsupported at first.
She kept seeing him stretch his arms up to her as if he was scared she was going to fall face-first any second, and it made her flush in self-consciousness.
The room was average, brown and cream color palette all over the furniture and bed and minimal decorations, so impersonal and distant as they always were in hotel rooms. She hated all of them, so this wasn’t any different.
“You like it?” he asked, eyes cautious. “I know it isn’t much, there are very few mote—”
“It's perfect,” she spoke over him. Maybe a little too quickly. She slapped herself mentally, and in her state, it hurt even then.
“That’s great, then,” he replied wryly, pointing at the bed. “Sit down. I’ll have to take a look at your leg, see if it's really broken. A broken leg on your first mission ever doesn’t sound too good.”
“It really doesn’t,” Kate agreed, compliantly, feeling a tad bit stupid in doing so.
She awkwardly hobbled towards the bed. Clint eyed her warily.
“I’ll go get the first aid kit from the car. Will you be okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” she joked, but clint obviously didn’t catch it because he very seriously replied, “well, you could try to get a drink of water and break your other leg too.”
“I swear I’m not even going to try to move, just go, Clint,” she finally broke in frustration and he disappeared down the hallway once again.
Kate got up anyway ( so much for not moving, huh) , and feeling the chilly floor underneath her sockless feet, winced every step closer to her suitcase. She quickly opened it, took her PJs out, and ducked into the bathroom, quickly changing into bedtime clothes before clint reappeared with his medical kit.
She was hobbling back to the bed when he reached her doorway again. Crossing over the room in a few steps, he stood over the edge of the bed and reached for Kate’s braised left leg. It was going to be bruised, that was for sure. She had hit the metal pipes enough times to be more than certain about that.
Clint stared at her leg with a slightly alarmed and yet not quite surprised look in his eyes. “Well, you really messed up your leg here,” and he told her to move further into the bed so he could take a seat as well.
Kate tried so goddamn hard not to feel anything but the pain of her leg at the sight of clint in the same bed as her.
Taking her foot in hands that were far gentler than they looked, he turned her leg towards the left ( not a lot of pain ), pressing the center ( yeah, a little more pain) , and on turning it to the right, she winced violently, and he also had his answer.
“It’s not broken,” he explained calmly, “but it’s not quite simply sprained either. I feel like you did some bone damage, right here—” she almost pulled her foot away with an exclaimed “no!” when he tried to press the right side of her foot again— “fine, fine, but other than that, I don’t think you did a lot of damage, luckily. If you feel any pain that’s too much for you to handle, I have some medicines here. That should help some.”
Kate still felt… a lot of pain, but she tried to smile and look grateful for his whole diagnosis. “You seem to know a lot about fractures and sprains and… bones.”
“I worked for SHIELD for over a decade,” he smiled, almost shyly, and Kate found her heart feeling so expanded that she felt afraid of it bursting. “And my partner… Natasha,” he forced himself to say her name, she could see it on his face, “ —got hurt a lot. She was not a very well-coordinated person for an internationally renowned spy.” He forced a brittle laugh as he handed her a single pill.
Kate felt the joy she had felt barely a minute ago recede, and in its place was bitter grief, as she was sure he felt exactly as well. She swallowed the pill dry, as she’d done for years now, knowing they worked faster that way, and willed herself to keep her smile soft, and nodded her head slightly.
And just as he had done with her that afternoon, she said nothing more to him. She knew she didn’t have to.
“Can you stay with me tonight?” she asked, as she watched him get off the bed. A sort of uneasy neediness filled her voice, and she couldn’t bring herself to care. “Please? I hate hotel rooms, I swear, they make me feel so scared when I wake up randomly in the middle of the night.”
His eyes were careful and yet understanding even as his face betrayed nothing. “Our rooms are connected, kate. You know that, right?”
“I do,” she whispered, even as she made eye contact with him that she couldn’t maintain. “I do.”
“I’ll have to sleep on that couch,” he mentioned, wryly. And she knew she had won.
“That’s alright with me,” She nodded quickly.
“I’ll stay for a while.” kate had already laid her head on her pillow, and her eyes were closed.
“Just a little while,” she heard as she felt exhaustion pull her under almost immediately, and she might’ve felt his hand touch her hair lightly, but that probably wasn’t real anyway.
The dryness of her mouth was pretty much the first thing she knew when she regained consciousness.
The second thing, to her utmost confusion, was the darkness around her, and to her further bewilderment, the utter unfamiliarity of it. In her cramped up apartment, the door would be pretty much right there in front of the bed, and—
Oh.
She wasn’t at home. She was at a hotel, in a new town, with Clint, who wasn’t there, on the couch, as he’d said he would be.
He wasn’t there.
That was the third thing she knew as consciousness came back to her in doses of little facts.
“Clint?” she found herself questioning the darkness, expecting an answer even though she knew for a very sure, strong fact that there wouldn’t be any.
He was going to be in a room connected to this one, she remembered. It was all coming back to her in doses.
“Clint?” she asked again, whisper-light, as she tried to get out of bed, and—
Holy fuck. The pain.
She felt as if her leg was on fire and had needles pierced in it all at the same time, and she almost lost her balance right then and there, but somehow she held on to the edge of the bed and tried to keep herself upright.
Her head felt woozy, and she was confused, maybe even more confused than she usually was, waking up in strange new places. Balance felt hard to accomplish, and so she held on to the edge of the bed till she was confident she wasn’t going to trip on her own feet.
Well, her single, functional foot. But whatever.
She somehow hobbled all the way to the door that connected her room to Clint’s— it felt miles and miles long to her— and to her greatest luck, it was open. It was unlocked. He had left it unlocked, probably for a situation exactly like this. At that’s what she told herself.
Opening the door with a creak that was all too loud in the dead silence of the door, she stood in the doorway watching his figure in the bed right before her, he was moving slightly.
He was awake.
“Hi,” she murmured, suddenly feeling very stupid and shy and giggly about the entire situation.
“Kate?” he got up, and to her eyes, it was a very quick motion. “What are you doing? Are you okay?”
She forgot to answer as she made her way to his bed, which felt like the world’s greatest effort to her, again. Reaching the bed, she finally laid down, resting her head on the pillow right next to Clint’s. She giggled almost silently.
“Hi?” she said again.
“Yeah, you already said that.” his gaze was piercing on her face, and then it looked like he finally understand. “ Oh. Right. Of course. You’re a little high.”
“I’m what?”
“High. Drug-addled. it’s the medicine I gave you. It’s stronger than the ones you usually get at your drugstore but they’re effective at numbing the pain completely. They’re usually what I take.” he sighed. It was the most exhausted, dad-like sound she’d ever heard. “I shouldn’t have given them to you. Goddamn Natasha. Go to sleep, kate. You’ll feel better tomorrow, I promise.”
She didn’t understand a goddamn thing he’d just said. But: “I still feel the pain.”
“What?”
“My leg still hurts. That should’ve gone away, right?”
“Not if you tried to stand on it deliberately. Go to sleep, Kate.”
“Mmph.”
And then kate did go to sleep.
It was a dream, and Kate knew she was dreaming because she knew no one was touching her in reality.
It had started pretty low on her body. To be precise, her feet. She felt the slightest press at the juncture of her ankle, and her body sighed in relief. There was no pain. Her foot was fine again. In her dream.
It moved up, higher, her calves, a press here and there, and it all felt so much better than it ever would in real life… because she knew she was dreaming.
Things got a little less dreamy but all the more pleasurable when the hand, belonging to a faceless entity, faceless, floating, unreal, moved further up. And yet it did belong to someone. She knew that hand like the back of her own.
It went back and forth between her ankles, her calves, tracing little patterns on the back of her knee, and it went down again. Her ankle and it felt so good she wanted to cover her face, and her calves, she was weeping it was just so good, and then it finally, finally did something new.
The hand had traced figure eights on the back of her knees and in doing so, had moved up, up, up, so gradually she almost didn’t feel it do so.
At least not until the figure eights stopped, and she realized the hand was the back of her thigh, spanning the width of her entire thigh.
In her dream, she couldn’t keep still at the slight stroke of the hand, as it reached her inner thigh, almost there, almost home… and the patterns had begun again. Figure eights, waves, straight lines, an infinite loop of one agonizing pattern after another agonizing painful fucking pattern. The pain wasn’t just originating from in between her thighs anymore, it was spread all over midriff, her stomach, her back, and it was so bad, and it was so good, and she wanted it to stop and it never did—
And then the hand shot up, in a second, in a millisecond, it could’ve been less than that. It could’ve been far more than that for all she knew when for a second, it was right where she wanted it to be, and she was in tears, she had wanted this all along, and oh it was so—
It was over. And out of nowhere, the dream had collapsed. The dream was nowhere to be found. The dream was over.
Kate was awake now, and she was alert, and she was crying. All this time, in her dream, when she felt like she could cry? She was crying.
The thought of that made the hot, sticky tears on her face feel all the more weighty, and a wracking sob escaped her. And another one, even though she was covering her mouth, they kept coming. They were loud, they were going to awake Clint, and it would be way too embarrassing to ex—
“Kate?” the alarm in his voice, as sleepy as it was, was tangible. She felt like she could’ve touched it if she had been facing him.
“Kate, turn towards me. Kate. Kate!” he caught her upper arm, making her turn towards him. Her arms were around her torso, her hair sticking to her face due to the tears, and oh god there was something in between them—
Oh fuck. Oh, fucking hell. Oh, fuck as if this wasn’t already difficult enough?
Clint Barton, her partner, her mentor, her idol since she was a little child looking so hard for someone to look up to, was hard against her ass in some hotel a million miles away from her home.
He was hard. Aroused. Sexually needy, biologically, if not mentally. Just like she was.
God. Help me out here.
“Kate?” he was still asking her what was wrong with her as if somehow that was the focus of the conversation they should be having.
“I had a dream,” she muttered quietly, her voice low and husky and so needy, she might as well have just told him what she wanted.
“A dream?” right. He was still confused.
“Yeah.”
“A bad dream?” his face was barely inches away from hers.
Kate laughed. This situation was hysterical. So hysterical she could’ve only either laughed or cried. “Yeah, bad dream. You could say so.”
“Right,” he grunted, and turned away from her for a second, running his hands through his hair—
Those hands. Those were the hands. These hands are exactly the ones that tortured me in my dream.
And something about the combination of the motion of his hands in his hair, the erection he probably still didn’t realize was pressed against her, and the look in his eyes when he turned back towards her… well, all and any of those could be blamed for her undoing.
Kate pounced, one small, fluid motion, and she was pressed against his entire chest, her hair on his cheek holding his face determinedly, and her leg that slowly crept around and hooked on the back of his.
It was everything she ever truly wanted, she thought as she kissed him with reckless abandon, so good, so real, so perfect, and it was all of those things till he pulled away. For a second, she knew there was nowhere else she had belonged more, ever.
And then he was pulling away, and the sudden rush of air into her lungs did more damage than good as he gripped the back of her hair, and the hold wasn’t exactly gentle.
“Kate,” he breathed heavily into her ear. “Are you still high? That’s all I need to know. Are you high?”
She could feel his lips at her ear, almost bucking her hips at the sensation of them traveling down to the sensitive spot just below, and then down to her jaw.
But he wasn’t stopping his touch, neither did his grip on her hair get looser in the slightest.
There was never another choice for her. She couldn’t turn him down even if the situations, as fucked as they were even now, were even worse. “I’m not high, I’m not. I swear.”
His lips on her jaw, which had been continuing down to her mouth in the most devastatingly leisurely pace she could imagine, suddenly disappeared.
“On your front, sweetheart. Turn around.”
Her body obeyed as if possessed. She disentangled her arms and legs from his, and turned around to her front, reclining her head on the pillow, eyes closed. Her body felt robotic, ready for compliance, but her mind was in a different space altogether. No sound, space, or vision existed in the state of mind she had unintentionally slipped into, and it was the newest and strangest experience she had ever had.
She felt his hands at her hips, a feather-light touch, yielding with a fair grip, as he slowly pulled it higher up her torso, making her do a slight plank and he pulled the top off her chest, her bra exposed fully now, and for a second she thought he would take it all the way off her when he stopped taking the top any higher up when it reached her eyes, and it finally hit her.
He was using her top as a blindfold. A shiver of… dread? Anticipation? Ran down her spine, and she knew her arms were covered in goosebumps at the sudden obstruction of vision, which she had never felt the lack of more.
It was more thrilling than she had ever expected it to be,
“Turn around again, on your back now.” his voice, soft and rough as always was above her, the only thing she could hear other than the shifting of the sheets and her own breathing, erratic and slightly louder since he’d completely blocked off her vision. “Don’t disturb the blindfold.”
She complied easily again, realizing another thing as she did. Her arms were now stuck raised above her head, making movement and touching him from difficult to impossible. How very conveniently done, she marveled mentally. He barely had to tell her to do anything. He just did it all himself.
“Now raise your hips a little.” she heard another quiet instruction, feeling his hands gripping both of her thighs, one hand on each. She must’ve hesitated a second too long because she suddenly felt his lips right below her belly button, tongue swirling around in small, tight circles tantalizingly, distractingly, coaxingly. She gasped and shifted her legs, her toes curling around nothing but air as his hands started sliding her pants down her hips.
“Now, Kate.” And a frustrated whine escaped her as she finally did as he asked again. He slid her pants down her legs immediately, not wasting any time in teasing.
“Tell me, sweetheart, what was your dream about?” not a single part of her body was being touched by him, and the quiet ominousness of his voice made her brain freeze over trying to come up with something, anything , she could tell that didn’t sound completely deranged and obsessive. Something, she suspected, she had been for quite a while. Only for him.
“I had… a bad dream.”
“A bad dream? Was it really that bad?” he paused, drawing a single, long, sure finger over her right there, and she could feel the goosebumps rise over her skin with every place he traced over.
The next time he spoke, his voice was right there, right next to her ear, and she almost moaned due to the ache that resonated over her entire body, originating from her trembling, wet center.
“I heard you. You said my name. You said it over and over again.”
She felt two fingers stroke her clit surely through her panties, and the moan that escaped her was so loud, she heard him hush, amused and hot, in her ear. “Did you dream about this? Hmm? What was it that you imagined me doing to you, Kate? Tell me,” another lazy, long stroke, moving down, just a little, and oh did her entire body clench up. She whimpered, needing him to touch more, and harder and faster , but he did none of that. He seemed to be satisfied taking his sweet time winding her up, watching her reactions, probably waiting for her to beg him to finally take mercy on her.
He hadn’t ever been one to prolong the pain of his victims, even as the murderer that he had been not very long ago, but he had enjoyed playing him them. Making them think they had an option other than the one he had planned out for them.
“I dreamed about this,” she whispered, “I’ve wanted this. I want this, I want nothing more.” and that was it, she had finally admitted to her shameful secret. She was half expecting him to stop whatever it was that he was doing to her then, and tell her how inappropriate she had been and how delusional she was to imagine something like this could ever happen in between them. She could almost picture him telling her that they were probably never going to be the way they had been before this night and that working together had become impossible after what she had initiated.
He did none of that, instead choosing to sigh to himself, self-satisfied but probably disappointed in her. A single sigh made her mind cloud over in catatonic bliss again.
“That’s what I thought. And that’s what I wanted to hear.” a single finger hooked on her panties, the last article of clothing left on her. “Don’t worry baby, I’ll give you what you want.”
And with the disposal of her panties, everything that happened after that was a haze of orgasms and tears, so much pleasure it almost felt like pain most of the time.
The first time she came was with his fingers on and in her, his voice whispering things she never thought he would ever utter in the daylight in her ear, and she had almost been way too loud by the end of it, her throat feeling achy already.
“Hands above your head,” he instructed her for the third time, as she panted, coming down from the first orgasm. “I don’t want to have to handcuff you, but I will.”
She couldn’t see his eyes, but she knew he wouldn’t possibly do that. How would he even have handcuffs with him? “You wouldn’t,” she teased him breathily, smiling slightly. He had to be joking, right?
He wasn’t. He really wasn’t. She found herself wishing he had been.
For a second, the weight of him above her completely disappeared, her eyes still blindfolded, and she heard him rustling around in his backpack for a second.
When she heard him walk back towards her, and then felt something cold and solid and so much more restrictive keep her arms in place, she started to regret teasing him pretty much immediately.
Her second orgasm was with his mouth down at her center— pretty much the most intense thing she had ever felt in her life. He was sadistic, and dreadfully patient when it came to sex, that was one thing that was already abundantly clear to her. That patience was the single most painful thing she had ever encountered.
By the third time, again with his fingers teasing her wet and aching core and his mouth biting and licking in the most evilly slow and competent ways, as if his fingers knew just how they could make her want to lash against her restraints, and eyes tear up due to the pain generated in just how pleasurable she was starting to find sex could be.
It had been the fastest she had come thus far, and the orgasm and washed and spit her out so badly that her eyes had squeezed out tears and her throat, which was raw and husky already, had now resorted to sobs in favor of moans and whines.
Her blindfold felt cold and wet with shed tears when his mouth licked all the way down her stomach, as if hinting to her, or perhaps warning her about a fourth orgasm.
“Clint,” she whispered, and did her voice sound absolutely fucking terrible, and raw, and so small. “Please, i d-don’t think I can. I really- I really don’t. Please.”
“You can, sweetheart, you’re the strongest girl I know. You can do whatever you want. You’re my brave girl, aren’t you?” his hand grazed her chin, as if prompting her to answer. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”
She paused, and her body responded by coiling in tension. She wanted to go again. The graze to her chin made her skin feel singed, and feverish. “I am.”
“What are you again?” his hand stroked her hips, soothingly, slowly, strongly.
Purposefully.
“I’m your brave girl.”
“Exactly,” she heard murmured into her stomach, and the stroke of his tongue against her clit had already started fresh tears to collect in her eyes. She moaned as he did it again, and again, as his fingers thrust into her in twos and threes alternatively. Her thighs were probably locked around his head so tightly he should’ve started complaining about not being able to breathe but he never did, nor did he show any signs of wanting to stop once.
It hurt, every time he touched her now. The pain was equally balanced with every little stroke and lick of pleasure that it took to chase her to her orgasm, or perhaps it overshadowed it now. Every time Clint touched her it felt like pleasure had morphed into pain, or had it always been like that? Had she been getting off on pain instead of pleasure all this time?
She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t tell apart the roof from the floor if she were asked right now. She was in a different parallel of existence, where the perpetual pain in her chest that had been there for as long as she could remember, was the most forefront thing in the world, perhaps the only thing to ever exist.
And then, her parallel of existence, her safety, and every little bit of obliviousness she had felt from it was gone, and her blindfold was ripped off her eyes.
She could see only his closed-up, and yet slightly alarmed eyes through her bleary vision. And then she realized that she had been fully sobbing. Her cheeks were feverishly hot, and wet with tears, her eyes hurt with how much she had probably dried them out, and her throat was a different story.
A dam in her chest, a treasure chest of pain had somehow been ripped open and gutted out of her for his eyes, and his inspection and for him to do with it as he pleased. She had been split in half, and in the center was her own pain.
He could do whatever he wanted with it now, and she probably wouldn’t object to him. Like there were any hopes of her doing that, anyway.
Clint only stared at her face with an inscrutable expression on his face for an uncountable number of minutes, and finally, when she thought he didn’t have anymore use of her, and she was free to dispose of, he started to undress. He had only been wearing pants without a shirt in bed when she had arrived, and now he was naked. She was too high up in her own universe to really notice anything about his naked body.
“I think you’re ready for me now,” he murmured in her ear, and lined himself up and— oh. He was inside her, so deep, so fast, she barely had time to prepare. A shocked gasp escaped her way too late, but aligned with his slight groan of pleasure as he pulled out. And then he thrust again, too fast for her to react but not hard enough. Not nearly hard enough.
“Yeah? You want harder?” he asked, and either he had gained access into her mind or she had said that out aloud. Not trusting herself enough to speak, she nodded, and god it only got so much worse and better. His thrusts, previously measured and excruciating, were now reckless and hard , somehow still hitting that spot within her that had held her in captivity for so many orgasms, so long now.
She came before he did, almost silently screaming this time around. A thunderstorm, contained and stirred to perfection, had now been launched inside her, her skin feeling vibratory and yet calm and simply belonging to her for the first time… ever. She had never felt so self-aware in her life, she thought as he pulled out of her, panting slightly as he rolled onto his back beside her. She could hear his breaths sync in time with her own, though hers had returned almost completely to normal.
He didn’t spend five minutes fully next to her, before he got out of bed, put on his pants in the most automatic, careless way possible, and went out through a door she hadn’t noticed ever since she’d stepped into the motel— the balcony.
The sky outside, was a bruised blue with highlights of orange and dark pink, had only started to lighten, as she could see from a little crack in the door that clint had left open.
She got off the bed too. Put on a robe she found on a hanger in his closet, and opened the balcony door.
There he was, tall and solitary, a creature of the dark. He seemed to fit in there, lounging with a cigarette in between his fingers. There was still something stiff and incomprehensible about his shoulders.
He had never looked older and more experienced to her than he did at that moment.
She stood next to him. Glancing down at her, he sighed. “Can we talk… later? When we’re both slightly more awake?”
Kate only nodded in response.
“You smoke?” he asked, not really offering her a cigarette. As if he already had made up his mind he wasn’t going to give it to her.
“Nope,” she croaked in response, and held back a wince at the sound of truly bad her voice sounded.
“Fair enough.” he stared into the sky in silence, and kate wasn’t there for conversation anyway.
It was just two people, standing in the middle of nowhere in a growing lightness as the darkness around them died, wide awake.