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Mack's mark is on her right arm. It showed up after she fell in love with biochemistry and decided she wanted to do it for a living. Hartley's mark was on her left arm. It disappeared after the divorce, fading gradually along with the personal trust that used to lie under the professional.
Bobbi is right-handed, and she knows what the marks mean. Mack's her partner for life and once upon a time, Hartley was her best friend in the whole world.
Hunter's mark is on her hip, nestled comfortably where his hand would always slide whenever they cuddled in bed. Bobbi's mother always told her it made for a good lover but not a good husband. Bobbi, being Bobbi, married him anyway.
She's got the heart mark—marks rather, but if she's ever met the matched set, she doesn't know it. They showed up when she decided to become a field agent, right around the time she wondered why she'd had that mark on her hip since high school but never anything more special, more married forever, less on and off the rollercoaster with Hunter.
Bobbi hasn't actually met anyone else with five marks, though she knows she's not the only one out there, nor is five as high as it goes. She's settled in who she is. That's one of the sure things about marks. They never show up unless you know who you are and what you want.
"Hey, Mack, can you do my back?" Bobbi's finished covering up the mark over her heart above the neckline of her dress, but she's got one on both sides of her body.
Mack obligingly pushes her hair aside and brushes concealer over the other one. "Ever try the database?" he asks.
She shoots him a rueful look in the mirror. "I'd be a lousy spy if my identifying marks could be found in a database, especially the soulmate database."
Mack shrugs. "Just thinking it might be good to move on."
From Hunter. Bobbi can't honestly say she wants to.
"Let's not talk about that." She turns with game face on, her 'I will eat you for lunch' smile. "How do I look?"
"Like Brandis won't be able to keep his eyes off you."
Her smile turns genuine and she pecks his cheek. "I'm off then. Don't wait up."
He watches her go, and she ignores the concern behind his eyes.
Mack is a big brother, always has been. He had a baby brother less than two years after he was born, and he next door to raised his youngest sister.
Bobbi's not Mack's little sister though, and she's never had a strong track record listening to advice. She knows she's got to move on, let Hunter go; it's not like he even close to wants her anymore. But truth be told, she still loves him sometimes, and sometimes her heart still aches a bit when she thinks about what they used to have, and sometimes Mack sighs and tells her the truth because it hurts too much to hear the placating lies: there's a part of Hunter that's always going to love her.
Hunter doesn't have a mark over his heart, and it bothered him more than a little bit that she was destined to have someone closer to the love of her life than he was.
Bobbi is nothing if not good at what she does. She may have started out in biochem, but Fury stuck her in deep cover when he needed a scientist, and they were both a little surprised to discover she made a fantastic spy.
She's in and out, and she's got the intel she needed just by plying a willing Brandis with champagne, wandering fingers, and a pretty smile under adoring eyes. She didn't even have to go anywhere afterward, and maybe she's a tiny bit disappointed at how incredibly easy that was. It's not like she's got anything else to do with the rest of her night.
She goes back to the safehouse, washes off the makeup, hangs up the dress, and slides into something more comfortable but still a bit flashy, still good for a night out. She'll make the drop at the mom and pop that never was just a restaurant, then she'll find somewhere else to be. It's worth a shot anyway.
She never makes it to the club or bar or wherever she was going to go next.
She gets to the drop point and there's another agent with a professional smile and great arms, then his gaze drops to the mark showing above her dress. A wall comes up over his expression and recognition flickers in his eyes.
Oh.
"Hey, Mack." She's doing something else, running another scan on her samples actually, and the words actually feel casual instead of just pretending to be. "You ever met Hawkeye?"
Bobbi doesn't have to specify. Everyone in SHIELD has pretty much heard of Hawkeye.
He does surprise her by knowing a little more than she did. "Clint Barton?" He looks up from his own pet project.
She doesn't really want to know what he's working on. It looks small and nasty, built to explode or worse.
"Yeah." She drops in two more beads of red liquid and swirls the petri dish for a moment before picking up the scanner again. "He was at my drop point."
"Great arms."
Bobbi's eyes roll upward without her thinking about it. "Shut up."
Mack grins at her as he wipes his hands on a rag. "You asked."
"Shut up." But she smiles. "So do you know him?"
"In passing. He might make a good friend."
It's cautious but not hostile. Mack really does want her to move on.
Bobbi finds his file and looks at the attached rosters and public missions data available, which is… not a lot. She's not the only agent Fury likes to keep close and send silent.
She rubs at the lines over her heart on her chest. They always felt like a target, a bullseye neatly placed over her most vulnerable organ, but it's the mark on her back that itches when she thinks about Barton. It feels more like something they have in common.
"Mark on your back, he'll watch your back. Mark on your chest, he'll be your rest." Bobbi murmurs the old wives' words to herself. She wonders.
He finds her.
Bobbi lifts her head and eyebrows in the same 'What are you doing in my lab?' expression. Apparently she's not the only one who drags her espionage tendencies into her personal life.
"So I was wondering if you like coffee?"
Her eyebrows climb higher and she has to bite back a laugh. "There's a functioning, working adult who doesn't?"
Hawkeye shrugs. "Nat doesn't."
The laughter dies at the back of her throat. She looks at him for a long moment. "So you've met the other one."
He just looks back until they've both felt each other out enough with mine eyes only. "I'm Clint."
"Yeah," she says and tosses her hair as she pushes away from the worktable. "I know."
"I've never been friends first. It's always been one or the other."
"You ought to try it," Clint comments dryly. "Both is nice."
Bobbi takes another swig of beer and sets the bottle down carefully beside her. "So you and—"
"Natasha."
"Natasha." She nods. The Black Widow. That's not a name Mockingbird really quite competes with.
Clint holds up his hand slowly and reaches out to brush the crossed lines over her heart, giving her ample time to protest. She doesn't. She feels like she's holding her breath as he touches her, but maybe she just can't catch it. He pulls his hand away only to brush her hair back over one shoulder and lightly run over the traces of wings she knows are back there.
"That's us," he says quietly.
She turns and reads the quiet intensity in his eyes, fingers tightening on the bottom of his shirt. He doesn't pull away and she slowly pulls it up and off. He takes it and tosses it a little to the side.
The line on his chest is more jagged than hers and it crosses a circle instead of another line. She traces across it with her fingers, scraping over the mark and hears the difference in his breath.
"That's her," she says and looks up.
Clint nods.
She tugs on his shoulder, and he turns obligingly so she can see the feathery wings on his back over his heart. They match hers, but she doesn't touch, just looks, then nods and hands him back his shirt.
He pulls it back on and returns to the subject with, "How'd you get to be friends with Mack?"
"We work together." Bobbi shrugs. "Actually, we kind of do everything together anymore. Hang out. Plot and scheme for world domination."
Clint laughs and it's a pleasant, genuine thing as he lies back on the grass beside her.
"I'm being serious," Bobbi says, grinning, and he just laughs harder.
"No, you're not, but Natasha will like you."
"Will she?"
"You're an excellent liar."
Side effect of being a spy. Lying comes to Bobbi like breathing and, apparently, so too to Natasha.
"Friends, Natasha," Clint stresses when the Black Widow is sizing Bobbi up with hungry eyes and appraising tilt to her head.
Bobbi laughs softly, glad to know she's not the only one of the three who's impatient. "I've heard a lot about you."
Natasha smiles, sweetly curving and thoroughly made of amusement and masks rather than genuine friendliness. "I suppose you have. Clint's not as strong, silent type as people make him out to be."
"Hey," Clint protests, but he slings an arm around Bobbi, so friendly, and grins back at Natasha as though he's not at all offended. "I only told her good things."
Natasha shoots him a wry, unimpressed look and orders a refill on her vodka.
"She can't get drunk on that stuff," Clint tells Bobbi lightly.
"I was born Russian." Natasha shrugs.
"I knew a Russian girl who drank it like water," Bobbi agrees. "Hand her one glass of wine and you'd have to carry her back to her room."
Natasha smiles, slighter and more sincere than whatever the gesture meant earlier. "I can hold my wine too."
"Of course, you can. You're a spy." Bobbi grins and sips her beer.
Neither comments on the fact that Clint's drink is nonalcoholic. Everyone has the right to their own old stories left off the table.
They talk, they laugh, they exchange stories about the same gruff stick-in-the-mud at the SHIELD outpost in Hungary. It gets late enough for Clint to tuck a hand under Natasha's elbow and look at Bobbi when he asks, "Let's get out of here."
They want to see everything, hands curling under her shirt and fingers brushing over the mark on her arm, her hip, lips pressed to the wings against her back. She can't quite breathe and there's Natasha gently pressing fingers to the crossed lines at the top of her breast.
"Knives?" she murmurs.
"That would be you," Clint corrects, commenting directly into Bobbi's skin.
It's hard to think, but she gets out an answer. Just. "Battle staves. Eskrima."
Natasha's hand stills against Bobbi's hip. She shrugs with an eyebrow, hard to know what else to call it, then leans down and puts her mouth to Hunter's mark.
Thinking goes out the window. Bobbi curses and rakes her fingers through Natasha's hair, arches back into Clint, who chokes out a sound she wants to hear again. He stops looking, feeling and presses his mouth to the back of her neck to rake his teeth and tongue across her skin. It's hot and messy and clothes are suddenly too rough on her skin, too much between them, just too much.
Natasha's mark on her chest matches Clint's, jagged and sharp through a target. Knives and arrows. She'd gotten her marks when she decided to become a weapon like they were. She runs her teeth over Natasha's neck, nails over the mark, feels Clint's hands under her shirt, working her jeans down.
She gets a little tangled up trying to get out of them and laughs. She loves the way Natasha's breath catches when she pulls on her hair, loves the swallowed groan Clint makes when she wraps her mouth around him, when Natasha's pushing up against her and she's pushing up against him, and there's no space between them, just the slide of hot, sweat-slicked bodies, and it was never quite like this with Hunter.
Clint doesn't let her take him over the edge, though he hisses softly when she swallows before letting him drag her up.
Natasha murmurs something in Russian as she sits up behind Bobbi, and Clint seems to understand as he pushes Bobbi higher. Natasha's hands slide down over Bobbi's hips, fingers worrying at that mark like she's claiming even the part that belonged to someone else.
"Here." Clint pulls her up and she gets it and sucks in her breath.
His mouth is hot on her clit and he's as good with his tongue as he is with his hands. Natasha slides over him and he groans into Bobbi as the three of them move together. Natasha's grip tightens on Bobbi, anchoring them together, rocking them forward in sync.
The moment shrinks to the three of them, hot and pressed together and intense with an upward winding note of urgency to everything. Bobbi can't quite catch her breath, but she doesn't want to, just presses her head back into Natasha, who's murmuring encouragement in her ear in a language she doesn’t understand, and they're not loud, but there's a frantic edge that gives away how lost they are.
The rhythm's slipping, too fast, too needy to hold on and Clint's hips jerk hard, he can't contain the sound working its way through his throat, or the way his reaction feels on Bobbi.
"Clint, please. Tasha." She's begging now and Clint's still right there with her, Natasha's hand sliding lower and sliding, swirling, pushing until Bobbi's gasping at the pleasure crashing through her.
She comes down slowly, snug between them on their bed, still trying to remember how to get oxygen in and out of her lungs without gasping.
Natasha tucks her chin against Bobbi's shoulder and traces over Mack's mark with one finger. "I'd like to meet him."
"Did you come?" Bobbi asks suddenly because she didn't notice, and it seems wrong that any of them wouldn't.
Clint smiles as he answers for her, "She's quiet, but yeah."
"Okay." Bobbi snuggles in a little deeper. She presses her own face against his neck. "He'll like you."
They don't really talk after that, and that's fine with Bobbi. She's asleep before she can think of anything to say.
She wakes curled up against Clint's shoulder. He's sprawled across half the bed and sound asleep. There's warmth in the covers behind Bobbi's back, but they're empty and Bobbi thinks she can hear Natasha in the kitchen.
Her ears weren't wrong. When she slips on Clint's shirt and wanders out, she finds the redhead in the kitchen making tea and coffee and singing softly to herself in Russian.
"I always liked that language," Bobbi says as she comes in. "I need to learn it."
Natasha shoots her a small smile and hands her a teacup. "I can help you with that."
"And that whole chokehold thing you do?" Bobbi bats her eyelashes over the rim of her cup as she sips. The question is entirely serious.
Natasha's smile enters her eyes, as good as a yes as far as Bobbi's concerned, then her eyes flicker.
Bobbi follows the motion, turns, and smiles.
"So much for friends first," Clint mutters from the bedroom doorway.
He's wearing loose-slung jeans and little else, bare feet padding across his creaky apartment floor, hair sleep and sex-tousled (Bobbi really liked tugging on their hair), and bare chest making her wonder if he's up for another round.
He isn't though. He's barely awake and Natasha sympathetically hands him what's left of the pot of coffee. He drinks without bothering to pour into a mug.
Bobbi rolls her eyes. "Now we're taking stereotypes to extremes."
He just chuckles. "I don't always do that."
"Good." She leans in and kisses him.
She hears the coffeepot clank gently on the counter and one of his hands wraps around her waist to tug her closer. The other tangles into her hair. Apparently, she's not the only one who likes doing that. She feels another, softer hand trace over her shoulder and smells Natasha's shampoo before she pulls away for breath only to not get any. Natasha's taking her turn, leaning up against the two of them and pulling their heads down enough to reach.
Definitely up for round two.