Work Text:
Clint likes to think he’s been some sort of help to this girl.
He’s aware, after all, that she’s been more help to him than she knows. He just looks over and she’s there, sometimes- complaining about his coffee or reading his newspaper or cleaning her bow in his chair, real and alive and shockingly normal, for a teenage girl who spends her spare time in a purple costume shooting bad guys full of arrows. But that’s Kate- no-nonsense and kind of glamorous and sharp as a tack and more put-together than Clint thinks he’s ever been, maybe ever will be. Ever since she snuck in and stole his bow back when she was a full-time Young Avenger and he was newly back from the dead, he’s had some vague awareness of her, somewhere in the back of his mind, a sort of respect that mostly sat there indifferently. And then one thing led to another and she’s proved herself more than worthy of that half-assed respect more times than he cares to count.
And somehow they started... whatever this is. They work together, obviously, when he’s not working alone or Avengering and she’s not being regular-Kate-Bishop - Kate-who-isn’t-Hawkeye - or Young Avengering or whatever. But then she does that showing-up-out-of-nowhere thing, and she attends those damn rooftop barbeques with enough frequency that his neighbors know her by name, and this also happens- they’re sprawled out on Clint’s old, nondescriptly gray, unforgivingly flat couch, eating shitty pizza and watching some movie. Kate’s swathed in a giant, fuzzy lavender blanket, and Clint’s slowly drinking a slowly warming beer, and they’re both being sarcastic assholes in the general direction of the movie, and it feels stunningly normal. Well, Clint assumes this is what ‘normal’ feels like- he’s not really an expert on the subject, but he’s pretty sure that’s what it is about Kate that soothes him. It’s the normal, he thinks, despite the fact that neither of them is anything resembling normal.
Thing is, Kate’s gone through more shit than most people three or four times her age. Kid’s watched her best friends die- hell, she’s watched them kill each other, and watched them level entire city blocks, and she’s leveled entire city blocks or helped to do it, in the pursuit of justice or whatever the fuck it is they all fight for anymore, and yet she’s Clint’s version of normal. It boggles the mind a little.
He makes some comment or other about the movie, which doesn’t even stick in his mind for more than a few seconds after he’s said it, and grabs another slice of shitty pizza, and leans a little more against Kate’s knees where they’re pushed up against his side and she sort of nudges him back with her toes and rebutts his naturally pithy and brilliant sarcastic-asshole movie commentary, and he thinks he could really get used to this kind of normal.