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“Right,” Clint says. “So, this looks bad.”
“You think?” Natasha sets the bag of takeout down on the counter in order to fend off a lapful of the most beat-up (but somehow, simultaneously clearly well-loved) golden retriever she’s ever seen. “Clint, did you get a dog?”
“The world was ending. I had a crisis. Lucky, down. Off. Whatever.”
The dog gives Natasha’s chin one more lick before trotting back to the couch, where Clint, as battered and bruised as ever, gives him a proud pat on the head. The dog rewards him by climbing on to the couch and settling himself comfortably on Clint’s broken leg. Clint yelps, pushes half-heartedly at the dog’s backside, and then gives a disgruntled sigh, flopping back. He looks hopefully at Natasha. “Did you bring food?”
“Yes, though I’ll be surprised if you have anything to eat it on.” Natasha looks gingerly around the messy apartment. Clint’s quarters at SHIELD were always regimentally neat, but mess is and has always been his natural state. “Do you have a single clean dish?”
Clint makes a wounded noise. “Cut me some slack, Nat, I’m injured.” Natasha picks up the bag of takeout--she’d asked them to include utensils; she’s nothing if not prepared--and carries it to the coffee table. “And how did that happen, exactly? SHIELD is gone, and the Avengers haven’t assembled in two years. What did you get yourself into?” Clint ducks his head and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like hit by a car and Natasha sighs. “I’m amazed you keep yourself alive without me around.”
“Didn’t have much choice, did I?” Clint says, picking up the bag and peering inside. “Oh hey, pad thai. Thanks.”
His tone is deceptively casual, but Natasha can hear the prickle of hurt in it. She narrows her eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Clint stills. He looks at her, the goofy persona gone, the intensity he’s always capable of but so often hides suddenly visible in his eyes. “Are we going to do this now?”
Natasha gets to her feet, crossing her arms. It’s a cheap move, she knows, standing when he can’t, taking the high ground, but she does it anyway. “It looks like we are.”
“You left, Nat,” he says, and now he’s not trying to hide the hurt. “After SHIELD went down, you just left.”
“I was compromised,” she says flatly. “We all were.”
“You could have at least told me where you were going.” Clint holds her gaze, his eyes stormy. “I think I deserved that much.”
Natasha feels a twinge of guilt at that. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Would it have made a difference?”
“Of course it would have!” Clint spreads his hands, an almost helpless gesture, as if he needs to move but isn’t sure how. “It would have given me something, Nat, not just a year of radio silence and then a text asking for what I can only assume was going to be a booty call.”
He’s right, and it makes her bristle, her defenses up. “I still would have left,” she snaps. “And you’d still be here. Is this what you are without SHIELD, Clint? A bum in a crappy apartment, lying around with a beat-up dog?”
Clint’s face shuts down. The dog lifts his head from Clint’s knee, growling softly in Natasha’s direction, and Clint places a bandaged hand on its head. The dog settles, licking Clint’s fingers, and Clint seems to relax slightly. “I’m not like the rest of you, Nat,” he says softly, looking down at the dog and running his fingers through the tufts of hair on its ears. “I’m not young, or rich, or a genius, or a super-soldier. I’m just the guy with good aim. But I can fix pipes and change lightbulbs, and it looks like I can take care of a dog okay.” A smile touches his lips and the dog wags its tail slightly, thumping against the couch cushions. “So yeah, I bought the building where my crappy apartment is, and I rescued a beat-up dog from some Russian mafiosos, and I got hit by a car rescuing Simone’s kid’s bike because she can’t afford a new one.” He looks up at her. “This is who I am without SHIELD, and I like it. But I would have left it in a second, all of it, if you’d asked me to.”
It’s far more than she’s used to hearing from him all at once, and Natasha swallows the lump in her throat. She sits back down on the coffee table, placing herself back on Clint’s eye level. “I needed to run,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s really admitted it out loud--that she was running, and running away. “I burned all my aliases, and I couldn’t--I needed to disappear. Be no one for awhile. No expectations, no names, no history. I needed to try to remember--to relearn who I am when I’m not pretending to be someone else.”
“Yeah?” Clint watches her with a sniper’s concentration, total and patient and calm. Once, it might have made her uneasy, but now it fills her with a certain sort of peace. “What’d you learn?”
“Lots of things.” Natasha folds her hands. “That I’m an introvert. That I like the ambient noise of people talking. I like tea more than coffee. I don’t actually like modern art, but I do like classic literature. I like French, but not when it’s spoken by Americans. That somehow, I started liking country music.” Clint snorts at that, and it makes her smile. “And that as much as I needed to be alone--as much as I loved every moment of learning to be myself by myself--”
She breaks off, unsure of how to continue. Clint watches her, patient, but she can sense his eagerness. It should make her feel rushed, or nervous, but instead, she feels warm and comforted. She laughs, softly, at the strangeness of it, the warmth of another person’s gaze--at Clint’s gaze, directed to her and only her, after so many months apart.
Clint raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“And I would have given all of it if I thought you had needed me.” She spreads her fingers wide, a can you believe it? gesture. “It was so much easier to run, to disappear, but something kept pulling me back. As happy as I was--and I was, Clint, I really was--I’d rather have been with you.”
Whatever Clint had been expecting her to say, it must not have been that, because he blinks at her. “Oh,” he says.
Despite herself, Natasha laughs. “Oh? That’s it, Barton? Really?”
“Well, I’d like to kiss you,” he says, reaching up to scratch the back of his head. “But there’s a dog in the way. Plus I’m on a lot of painkillers, so up until you said all that, I wasn’t totally sure you were real.”
Natasha feigns offense. “You thought I was a hallucination?” She pauses, thinks about it, and then wonders if she should be offended for real. “Wait,” she says. “You’d hallucinate a me that comes in, brings you food, and then picks a fight?”
Clint blinks. “What, like that’s something you wouldn’t do? C’mon, Nat, I might hallucinate on narcotics, but at least my hallucinations are true to character.”
It’s true, and such a Clint thing to say that she laughs, a laugh that only comes from being around this ridiculous, infuriating man. She leans forward and catches his lips in a kiss, and Clint meets her, still smiling. One of his hands curls into her hair, a warm, familiar touch, and Natasha leans into the kiss, wondering vaguely just how injured he is and just how far she can push him.
Something cold and wet touches her cheek and Natasha jerks back in surprise. Clint’s dog has shuffled closer and is now sitting right beside them, his tongue lolling happily. Clint has dropped his head onto her shoulder, snickering. “Good boy, Lucky,” he says, grinning. “Good guard dog.”
Natasha snorts. “That’s good dog behavior?”
“He’s guarding my virtue,” Clint says, scratching the dog behind its ears. It wags its tail enthusiastically. “Strange woman barges in, yells at me, then starts kissing me in my injured and vulnerable state? You could have been taking advantage of me.”
“Really.” Natasha turns to the dog. “You should know, dog, that I’ve seen this man kill a room full of mercenaries while in much worse shape than he’s in now.”
“Don’t you listen to a thing she says,” Clint tells the dog, who licks his face.
“Now, off.” Natasha says, pointing to the floor.
The dog hops off the couch, sitting primly at Natasha’s feet. “Traitor,” Clint tells it.
It thumps its tail on the floor. “Good boy,” Natasha says, patting it once on the head. She picks up the bag of takeout and gently shoves Clint over so that she can sit between him and the arm of the couch, letting him lean against her while still keeping his bad leg sprawled out on the pillows.
They sit together in comfortable silence, passing containers of pad thai and drunken noodles back and forth. In the wake of everything that’s just been said, there’s no need for more words. When the food is gone, Natasha throws away the containers and helps Clint to bed, stripping down to her tank top and underwear and climbing in beside him. He curls around her, kissing the spot where her shoulder meets her neck. “Welcome home, Nat,” he mumbles.
She hums contentedly. Home has always been a fuzzy concept for her, tied up with too many hopes and dreams and failures and expectations, but this, warm and comfortable and familiar--if this is what home is meant to feel like, she’ll take it.
The bed dips beside her and something large and furry curls up in the spot next to her. She hears a soft snuffling, a contented sigh, and then a quiet snore. Natasha smiles. “Good dog,” she says. “Good night.”