Avengers 1. Chapter 1: Brewing In Relationships

**A/N: so all of you that are waiting for One Last Song, i don't think i'm gonna update that any soon. my mind's just popping new ideas faster than i can think about one story! plenty of one-shots and two-shots planned since i have officially started my holidays... TODAY!(: so, here's one two-shot one for you!(: oh, and, this IS a Clint/Nat shipper story! but there's a lot of Tony/Nat friendship too!(: so... Look out for the update of this (hopefully soon, because i'm already on it!) and the debut of another story named Hurt Locker! (see what i did there? ;] ) **

**disclaimer: the chances of owning this pair itself, is when cows can fly and go oink. if there's one, IMMA BE READY. **

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Right. He's been gone for five months, sixteen days, thirty-one minutes and seventeen seconds now. She's been counting since the day they'd parted with a deep, longing kiss. Right now, she kind of missed all his chatter, all their banter, and all those little arguments that he ended up pacifying her with stupid, adorable actions. When is he coming back?

The Avengers had moved into the Stark Tower after they'd assembled back in Manhattan just a few weeks after they split up. Stark never could get past not teasing Steve, or aiding Banner, without the slightest thought. It's a good thing, though, that they were all together. A family was supposed to stick together, as they work stronger like that, wasn't it? Natasha sprawls herself out on the leather couch in their little living room, down at the twenty second floor, flipping channels absentmindedly as she listens in on Tony and Pepper's daily quarrel. Oh, as well as the crazy roaring and howling, clapping and hollering that's coming from the other room at the end of the hall.

Tony huffs in amusement. "Come on, Hawaii was the best place out of the lot! I mean, you liked the fish, right? And the island mojitos and- and..." He drifts off, trying hard to please Pepper, whose face turns sour after that one second of thought. "There were _no_ fish to admire! Your ARC reactor drove all of them away." Her eyes turned to slits, glaring at her other half. "And then halfway through our _honeymoon_you run off with your suit! It scared me half to death when the Director dialed me and told me you were critical! And that was after two whole days of fretting, you bastard!"

"I feel the love, honey. Me, my reactor, and my heart." Tony grins cheekily, holding her shoulders in his hands. The way she sulks in worry, he finds, is simply adorable. Her eyes soften and her lips pout. Natasha leans over the backrest of the couch and drops an indifferent comment. "He's not going anywhere, Pepper. I bet he fears leaving you in the lurch more than the shrapnel in his chest." Yes, he does, and they talk about it so casually that it doesn't scare the two of them anymore. Except for Pepper. "Easy for you to say, Romanov. You drop three aliases on me all at once, and I wonder why Barton still follows you around like a puppy." The deadly fatal glare he earns from the agent is enough to send his pride running back to mommy.

They all miss Clint Barton. Yes, they _all_ do. The archer didn't fail to make an impression on any of them, in fact. Even Tony's mind had a way to express his longing, not omitting the stupid methods it uses. The silence lingers for an elastic second before activity resumes, and the lovely couple continue their argument of concern. "Anthony Stark, I don't care if your reactor scares away the fishes or not. Don't you _ever_let me see that little bright light of yours die out again! If that thing even flickers a slight bit, I'm hauling your ass to the lab." She worries about the shrapnel reaching his heart and shredding it apart. The simple thought about it, about the possibility of Tony Stark dying, allows tears to well up in her eyes.

Tony leans in nearer, presses a gentle peck on her forehead, and smiles sincerely to pledge his existence to his worrying wife. He's about to shift over to her and whisper promises into her ear, but a booming crash captures all their attention. They see the Captain strolling out into the central part of the room with a bashful grin, looking mostly apologetic. "Man of iron, what is this sorcery that mirrors me in its glowing sheet of transparency? It is broken!" Thor's authoritative voice demands of Tony. The man's fingers move to the top of the bridge of his nose and massages it, elbow on table. Well, there goes their KINECT. And television. Pepper smiles ruefully, and is maybe even slightly amused from the Asgardian's actions.

"I... guess you kinda know. Already..." Steve says. "I swear, he did it _all_ by accident!" Natasha wonders if the captain had said that to right a possible misconception with Tony (that was, if he did have one about him being the destroyer of his expensive electronics.) or if it really was to be Thor's loyal buddy. Pepper and Tony sit for awhile, sighing. That has to be the fifth time within that year. The toaster, the fridge. Once, his apartment nearly got flooded because the demigod broke a water pipe! And, well, nobody well-versed with reparation was present at that time, and he didn't know JARVIS. (He always thought that JARVIS was a God's voice from up above, and that Tony had somehow managed to crawl over its head and take control. _Such defiance!_He said once, upset over the reversed roles of authority and respect displayed between Tony and JARVIS.) The truth is still discreet on how he had managed to destroy that much.

Natasha simply sits patiently on the couch, leaning over the edge as she glances at Steve. /_If only Clint were here._ She knows what he's thinking in an instant. It only took the whole lot of them seven months (that was before he left) to have their friendship/companionship swing back into its usual momentum, and maybe even stronger. They could say, Clint was a piece in each of their puzzles. With Steve, he was a friend. And with Thor, Clint was the only one that could control his destructive actions from breaking every console, pipe and wall. Bruce, - speaking chemically - a calming reactant that never seemed to have a fuse. And Tony! Oh, Tony! Somehow, the agent had managed to win the brotherly side of the chauvinist, over. And now he was on everybody's good terms. It will be no wonder at all if they start complaining about his absence. Especially the boys. (Yes, _boys_.)

The dreadful silence is easily broken by the sound of JARVIS' voice, enunciating an announcement. "Sir, there is a visitor looking for Miss Romanov. Do you wish to send him up?" Excitement bubbles in their chests. Surely, it's Clint! And he's finally home, calloused fingers seeking the slender curves and tender skin of the love of his life, clouded but crystal eyes searching for the saltwater green of hers. It's no hesitation when she replies JARVIS with a quick "Yes". The feeling of liberation finally comes easy to her. After... She glances down at the digital table clock. After those five months, sixteen days, fourty-eight minutes and three seconds of laboured breathing and troubled thinking, her partner is finally coming back!

Automatically, as if it had all been orchestrated, Pepper and Tony scurry into the room with the broken electronics, having Steve tag along by their backs. Though, Tony did attempt to look over Steve's towering trapezius muscles and shoulders to enjoy the scene. Maybe make a remark or two, like, "Damn, Barton. You look like crap!" if he really does appear in apparel that's stained with several shades of brown all over. Or a "Welcome back, Legolas." to express his "man-love" kept under wraps, as well as tons and tons of cold, heartless lies and despicable comments. Pepper shoves him into the room with an annoyed glare, clicking her tongue at the little kid she can't believe she tied the knot with. So much for privacy.

Natasha, herself, can't contain the glee that makes her heartbeats drum faster. She knows that she won't care about his scars, his clothes, anything that will distract her from walking straight into his arms and placing a kiss on his dry lips. _The last one I leave with, and the first one where I'll be greeted_. It's what he had said, as a promise to take care and run his mission down as fast as he possibly can to return to her. When she hears knocks on the door, she jumps to her feet, a wide grin plastered perfectly on her face. She doesn't know what it is, actually, that leaves her heart weighing heavier instead of lighter as she closes in on the barrier. She doesn't even realise the majority of it, because she's only pushing the feeling down to the back of her head, leaving it all for later. It's all about him right now.

"Clint!"

_**-cookies!-**_

Yes. They really can't help it. They really can't help but poke their heads out of the hallway and into the living room, knowing that they're obscured from being seen. Even Pepper can't help it! They can make out Natasha's slim silhouette in the darkness of the doorway, and surely beyond that is their friend, whispering sweet little nothings under his breath, only for _her_ears to hear. And that they're talking, greeting, all that and making sure he's fine and he's alright. That sweet couple, it's actually a story none of them know. Far from the publicity of Bonnie and Clyde in their time. Maybe the two will tell them, soon enough.

Tony just can't keep his legs (and eyes) to himself, and wants them two to share the welcoming. How the /hell/ did they talk so soft? So, with Pepper's absolute - and physical - protest, of clinging onto his shirt and arm and having her filed nails clawing into his skin, he covers the distance from where they are to the doorway in a couple of strides. The rest of the group follows, like a pack to an alpha.

When they see it, most of them know what happens next. What all that silence is about.

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**TBC!**

**okay, i don't know why i spelt my page breaker like that! randomness. reviews, my lovelies, are much appreciated!(: guess the next chapter, or just drop your favorite line/paragraph(: anything, really. so... TOODLES!**


	2. Chapter 2: The Man With The Ring

**A/N: well, hello there, smart people. lovely reviews you have there!(: so, here's an update as promised! and sorry to break it to you: this is going to be a few-more-chapters-shot instead of a two shot, because - WAIT MY FEET FELL ASLEEP - my itchy bitsy fingers just couldn't seem to get enough of wasting time and words! sooo... here's to this, and keep the lovely reviews coming!(: **

**WARNING: MAJOR MAAAAJOR CHARACTER DEATH. **

**Disclaimer: Zilchhhh shall i own of the Avengers characters! now let's get dow to shakespeare in the park! Doth thou mother know you weareth her drapes?**

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The man at the door wears a suit. An expensive suit, as his eyes can see. The kind of suits that men from the FBI, or the CIA are needed to wear. But no, this man isn't from the FBI, or the CIA, or any mainstream law enforcement agencies that require such a smart outlook and dress code. He's just a man, with deeply compassionate eyes and an apologetic smile, as well as being the man Tony recognises almost instantly.

Knowing so, that he's seen this man before about a year ago, Tony knows that he can easily relate his situation from a year back, to their current predicament. The suited man shoulders and delivers grief and guilt all the way to a person's doorstep, breaks the news to them and watches their body fail and go weak. Right, of course Tony recognises him! He had been in the very same position one year ago. He forgets to spare a glance at Natasha. He doesn't need to.

Immediately, he walks right up to her. He doesn't bother about her typically requested "personal space", and he doesn't bother about courtesies, leaving his act of chauvinism and joker's mannerism to fall straight to the floor. He just wraps in arms around her tightly, one which she doesn't reciprocate or let alone even push him off, and whispers into her ear. "Oh God, Natasha..." If there's anything obstructing him from being right there for her - as he had slowly crawled up to ever since she aliased on him in New York two years ago - it's whatever she's holding in her hands.

The rest of the group have no slightest idea about anything. About what's happening. Why Natasha's silent. Why Tony's not taking everything as a joke. Why the man at the door isn't Clint Barton. Nothing. That is, until the man speaks up again. "As I shall give my condolences again, I am terribly sorry, Miss Romanov. And Mr Stark. We unfortunately do not know what had happened during his mission..." Natasha's vacant eyes just stare at him as if she's trying terribly hard to comprehend whatever he's saying, the impossible. The man, watching SHIELD's strongest female agent crumble in front of him, can't help but feel lump rising into throat. He swallows it back down, then presses the comm. in his ear with a finger, listening to someone on the other side. "Director Fury says that his body is in the morgue, and that it's your decision on what you want to do with it."

Natasha can swear that no tears could come to her eyes, how much they screamed, and _she_ screamed, for some burning hot moisture at the back of them. Maybe it's just the shock that is leaving her too stunned to think of anything, or to take in whatever that is around her. She doesn't catch the last sentence the man says, or whatever commotion goes on afterwards. Her lips are too numb to form words, her mind too frozen to think of what to say. _No. No, he can't be. Clint. Clint isn't dead!_It's what her head sirens, repeating itself over and over to make sure she's convinced. Because he doesn't cop out on her like that. He'd promised, and never on them. Her fingers grip harder on whatever that's in her hands - something they had collected from Clint - as her heart knows those words are true. If they weren't, then why isn't Clint standing in front of her now, right..? That realisation feels like a blow to her chest, or at least something in it, pushing all the air from her lungs until it's difficult to breathe.

Tony's impulse starts to grow, as it has been festering in his chest since Phil Coulson's death, and he feels his hands shaking. Maybe he's shaking all over too, he doesn't exactly know. His head's too consumed with deciding how to handle their Director and his bluntness, which words to use, and which bone to injure. It's as if he doesn't know himself anymore, all the while hanging in the middle of both the knowing and the unknowing. His arms release the frail girl in his embrace, his face feeling red and hot. For some reason, he's seething with anger, blood boiling in rage under his skin, and that one dark, sickly demented part of his brain rising up to the occasion and seeking a yelp of pain from the director and his messenger.

The next thing they know is that Tony's up at the man's neck, fists gripping his collar as he pushes him up against the wall. The group of them don't know what he's muttering into the man's comm., but they, after snapping out of their momentary shock, start to access the situation and peel the men apart. Bruce, probably feeling the same sour taste in him mouth like Tony and everyone else, doesn't join in the struggle in fear that his 'other guy' will be angered and phase him. Instead, he helps Natasha, whose back had slid down the wall until she was in an unbalanced crouch, up and to the couch.

He watches her face closely, so void of any emotion and so blank it actually scares him. She really _did_love him that much. Not that any of them pulled any doubts on them, just that they had never thought that agents - nearly heartless killers nonetheless - like them, top notch and standing by the pinnacle of their profession, would just let their guard down and put their lives in the other's hands and heart. He looks down at her hands, revealing something small and glimmering through the loose gaps. At first glance, his guesses are uncertain, only that it's probably a piece of jewellery. He loosens Natasha's fingers, with no objection, and picks up the little piece of jewellery with his two first two fingers.

It's a _ring_. A simple silver chain, a necklace, is looped into it, but it doesn't look like it's been worn before, if his eyes aren't failing him. The silver isn't scratched, nor does it possess any scrapings, but it's stained with deep red blood that he knows is his friend's. So the pang smacks him in the chest, creating a swell. Bruce's fingers brush over the interior of the ring, and over all the dry blood he feels an engraving in the expensive metal. He turns to read what it says. The words are in a beautiful cursive font, engraved perfectly into the silver and filled with black. _Marry me._

He wonders if Natasha has read the engravings. Will it bring tears to her eyes, or will they similarly stay vacant? Clint was planning to propose to her when he came back from his mission, _if_he came back from his mission. But now the ring is the last of what she can have of him, if Bruce is right. The last of what she can carry of their ever-venturing love. He presses the ring back into Natasha's palm, the cold of the metal leaving his fingers as he finds a voice to speak. How the hell did Clint die? He just might be thinking the same thing as the enraged Tony now. Just maybe. It makes him feel a little angry, and also a little sad, and he wonders what Natasha can be feeling right now, if she even can. If words help, he'll try.

"I'm so, so sorry, Natasha." But she doesn't look at him, and only gets up and leave. Maybe even crying.

_**-cookies-**_

Yes, death is a card that is easy to deal but hard to forget. It's hard to overcome the loss, even if it's just a speck of dust on the earth's population. A tiny little red dot that might just appear like a gargantuan dent in the heart. Nobody walks out of that, after multiple deals from the maker, without the feeling of dread and apathy, nor without a change of heart. Not even Tony_. But nobody sees it, because to the rest of the world, the dents are simply just the world empty of a few specks of dust, isn't it?_

After Thor, Steve and Pepper are successful in their attempt to tear Tony from the suited man, Tony bears a glare at all of them before he storms off to god-knows-where. Pepper frets immensely on his sudden impulse, and the way his glare had been almost feral, nothing she's ever recognised before. It looked just as if his demons had resurfaced in his head, making their grand appearance to ruin his sanity. As soon as she wonders how she hasn't noticed such a change in her own husband until now, and that she doesn't know how to help him, she breaks down in tears too. Tony wasn't like that.

Thor sighs. "The man of iron is probably just upset. Men in Asgard settle unease and anger the same way. Do not be affected, Pepper in the Potts." He places a hand on her shoulder and guides her back into the room, making sure his words - pun intended on her name - make her crack a smile that touches her eyes. Whereas, Steve chases after Tony, searching every corner possible until he finds the man on the roof outdoor. Tony's hands grip tightly onto the railing, it looks as if it will crush and snap if he squeezes any harder. The bones stretch his skin so stubbornly that it turns as white as his fingertips.

"Want to settle it out? Throw a punch, throw a kick. Get it out of your damn system and get your head in line!" Steve's voice is almost yelling, deep down knowing that his heart aches for Clint, and that his blood boils for revenge. The anger isn't completely aimed at Tony, but it's a good way for both of them to cool off and clear their heads.

"Don't push it, Rogers." Tony growls, voice injected with so much venom it can kill a town. He doesn't turn to look at Steve.

"Right." Steve chuckles heartlessly. "Says the man that walks right out and makes his wife cry. Masculine, huh! Now he's acting humble." He chooses his words carefully, properly; making sure every word gets Tony in his nerves and leads him on into a brawl. Maybe his fists are itching for one.

Tony inhales deeply, then sharply releases the air in his lungs. "I say it again, Rogers_. Don't. Push. It._" He breathes again, quivering from the inferno bursting in his chest. "Just leave me be, I need to be alone."

"Or maybe it's because you're afraid. You don't dare to throw a punch because it's a bruise to your pride. You're nothing without your suit, Stark. Nothing. Powerless! Just some egoistic wimp that needs a few pathetic lessons on how to maintain his anger. Maybe I've got one right here." Steve's hand reaches out to grip his shoulder, and is caught by Tony's hand when he finally pushes himself away from the railing and really throws a punch.

Steve grabs his wrist and throws him over in a toss. Tony slams hard on the floor, but trips Steve and aims a few punches freely anyway. The bigger man stands up again, the other following, and they continue their exchange in combat until their arms are weak, their faces are slightly sore from bruise, and Tony is in the floor, beat. He finally takes a breath and finds his head a little clearer before he hisses. "Not everything damned thing I do is about worthless pride."

"What in the world happened to you, Tony? The man I know wouldn't say that." Steve pants out the words, holding his hand out to Tony to pull him back up onto his feet. He accepts it and replies the man. There is much grief and apathy in his sorry voice, notorious as it is. "Coulson happened."

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**TBC**

**Ain't so suspenseful today ain't it :( well, i'm bad at the element of suspense! and i'd love you very much if you'll just drop a line or two if you click the little blue box right down theeeeeree! VVV (: well, i'll update soon!**


	3. Chapter 3: Tears For Her Beloved

**A/N: i should tell you, this is a filler chapter! and about 1/3 of the chapter is twisted. so, if you want to get heartbroken, AGAIN, please proceed on reading this filler chapter and i.. should... be... sleeping... now... :( HERE YA GO!(: drop me a tip, favourite line, advice? whether you'd rather want to use a PM, or just press the little blue box below(; adios!**

**disclaimer: disclaimed, like in every single chapter i write! we should change that, right? all shippers shall own these characters! 8)**

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If she knows herself well enough, when the shadows in her mind close in and she flounders in the black misery and aberration of it all, how atrocious it may seem, the only thing she knows to do is to cry. But she's ever only cried with Clint by her side, comforting her into calmness with his presence alone, as she neglects her desire to appear as a tenacious woman to her peers.

To be crying _for_ him, without his hands to soothe and silence to comfort, the dead silence in the room is overbearing and too much for her to take. A piece of her, maybe even a whole, feels chipped off. Simply put, _nothing_feels right without his shadow lingering by her bedside. Lingering by her balled up figure, body wracking along with her deep sobs. Lingering by her with his arms wrapped around her shoulders. Without Clint, none of her feels complete.

In the dark of the night, the blinds all drawn and the room completely void of light at all, those stubborn tears just choose to finally march down her face. _Alone_, Natasha recognises. They travel alone. Tear by tear, silently slipping from under her eyelids where her eyes are burning and her mind is screaming and shrieking like cat claws against the chalkboard. It's so noisy in her head; everything's creating a ruckus and not leaving her in peace! The ache in her head pounds, and she cries even harder, feeling as if her head is about to explode. She lets loose a groan, sinking further down into her pillow and bed. _Clint..._

Maybe the sound of his name, in her mind, clears her head a little. The screaming stops, and it allows her to at least cry in ease. Natasha rolls over to her side, listening to her own breathing on soft sobbing. The sound lulls in her ears like a lullaby, and she hopes to sleep soon. Get one night over with and drag through the next, when the sun comes up and pesters her face with awakening. All she wants to do is sleep, yet it doesn't come easy at all.

_**-cookies!-**_

It's three in the morning, and he just can't sleep. Maybe none of them can sleep tonight. He rolls over the look at his wife, completely exhausted and in such disturbed sleep, he feels apologetic for making her fret. Tony takes time to process the captain's words, even though he knows majority of it was used only to anger him into letting the steam out. Actually, it _is_somewhat true. Steve wasn't wrong at all, pulling words like that on him.

Tony needs some air, so he goes back out onto the roof again to get a breather. This time, he freely dangles his legs over the edge of the roof, throwing down all caution of the possibility that someone might come and push him on his back so that he falls. Kudos to Clint, actually, for having found such a breathtaking place up here. It's no big wonder anymore on why he climbs up here all the time. The gravitational pull on his legs down to the centre of the earth, threatening to topple him over and splat him all across the pavement of the Manhattan streets, feels comfortable, in fact. Tony has never noticed how beautiful the Manhattan skyline is from the roof to his own tower until now.

"The man always has ways to amaze people." He hears a voice that he recognises almost instantly. Steve walks out into the opening and slings his arms over the ledge as he gazes out into the skyline. "So this is where he goes every time he disappears. Can't believe the man didn't share it sooner. I never knew such a place existed until today."

Tony chuckles briefly. "Never been up here myself either. I never did take the time off of the electronics to venture my own building, and the magnificence that lies beyond it." Their eyes watch the lights of the nightlife burn in exuberance, existing in a kaleidoscope of colours that comforts their vision. The wind breezes gently behind their backs. It's really the kind of place for peace and quiet, a little thinking, and it comes to thought that Clint and Natasha might have cherished time and friendship up here. Like they always. Tony's eyes catch on the tower in the midst of all buildings, the one they might be visiting tomorrow to pay their last respects to their buddy. And how the director must be sitting in his chair in one of the rooms right at the top, thinking nothing about Clint Barton, but instead, picking out whom to send off to their next mission.

"What if he did it on purpose, you know? Send him on an extended mission half across the world to separate them?" Tony asks, and Steve holds that thought. It _might_be possible, even if he doesn't want to believe it. "What if he wanted them to learn the hard way? That he doesn't stand by relationships between SHIELD operatives?"

"I doubt that the director did it on purpose, Tony. He's not that ruthless." The man tries to reason out, going back to beige the loyal operative of SHIELD's anti-terrorism assemble, all under the call of Director Fury. He doesn't know much about that upright man, but he sure looks like the kind that thinks things through thoroughly enough.

Tony sighs defeatedly. "I dropped that assumption about a year ago." His voice is taut but tired, so they let silence sink back in until one of them speaks up again. "How do you think she feels now, losing her partner? If Coulson is already that bad, I can't imagine what she's going through."

"Lost, unguided. I know how it feels. But Natasha's a tough nut to crack, she'll be alright I guess." Steve replies. He's lost his loved one before, and that didn't go so well for him until he got over it.

"That's because he'd been there for her all along. Clint came up to me once, asked me what to do because she was sinking deeper into a breakdown. He told me that she had nightmares of them dying so graphically, bloody, and that he didn't know what to do but just to be there for her and hold her as she sleeps." They shiver at the thought of how wild her nightmares might have been. _Gory, gushing red_. "She's never been alright her whole life; it makes me wonder why she's been trying to hide it from us."

"It doesn't take all of us to answer that. I think you know it very well too. The reasons."

"So, we're not done with that, huh?"

Steve shakes his head. "You haven't given an answer yet. On why the impulse started to grow on you." Tony glances back at the other man, then looks back out into the horizon again. He sighs, clicking his tongue in thought. "There's only so much you can take, you know. I mean, you can't lose two of your closest friends just like that and just walk off with a bounce in your step. It just piles on, and on, and it doesn't stop until you snap. Make an irrational decision and bust your ass."

Steve only grunts at his answer. That might be the first, of all things, that they can agree on.

**_-cookies!-_**

Clint's just... standing there. Standing there staring at her. His eyes are bearing into her skull, until she turns to face him. How near he is. It's within the reach of her fingertips where she can feel the lifeblood of his gushing through every vein under his perfect skin. Perfect skin, no battle scars.

It's too surreal. He's too _flawless_. He's not real, and she knows it, but all she wants to do is embrace his unreal being and be there forever. It's what her heart tells her to do. To wrap her arms around that beacon of light and feel his presence on her skin again. Let her overcome her loses and stay in this dream where they are together and he is alive. Where she can feel his heart drum against her ear. Where she knows he's warm and strong and wanting.

So she does that. But the slightest touch upon his skin turns all of him to shattered glass. His eyes, those that she's stared into a million times before, just disintegrate right before her. _He's gone._She's stepping on broken glass now and they're all stained with red. The deep, sticky red of his blood. Her surroundings turn dim until it's completely dark, and Natasha knows that she's nowhere. Lost between what she has and what she doesn't. What is real and what isn't.

In her dreams - nightmares to be exact - she is as vulnerable as a man to all terrible things in the world. Everything from emotions, to injuries, and to death. The way her epic bravado is skinned down to the bare minimum, and she's just as weak and powerless and unable, it makes her mind a paradox to the reality. She's in pain. So much pain, as her feet continue to step on the broken shards. She doesn't know where she's going, and - demented and twisted as it is - her bone white honesty can scream out at her weaknesses right now.

_Natasha._ She hears his voice call her name, and her heart immediately races. He's out there, somewhere. She just has to find him. Her footsteps steady, she ventures out blind, following his voice. But it's everywhere! Natasha doesn't know which direction it's from. _Natasha._His voice is more urgent now. She picks up her pace, throwing one foot in front of the other and giving no thought to how the glass shards are hurting her feet. Clint is somewhere, in all that darkness, calling out her name, in need of help.

Her feet sting, but she doesn't care. _Natasha!_He's practically screaming now! The trepidation in his voice, as well as the shrillness, pulls daggers through her chest. Her nightmare evolves again, and now she's bleeding into the cotton of her white top, soaking every inch of it with her blood.

Yet, she continues running even when she's growing weak and her feet are cold and numb. When she finally falls, her tears cascade down her face, like the blood gushing from her wounds. The shards of glass get embedded in her skin, but the physical pain doesn't bother her. It's her chest, her heart, that's burning. It feels like it's Clint's anger, asking her why she hadn't saved him. Why she hadn't found him sooner. Why is he dead? Why fucking why!

She just curls up on the floor, when all the pieces of blood-drenched glass disappear, letting these demons chew at her skin and eat her alive. Why hadn't she loved him sooner? Her tears turn into rain, each droplet being a white hot burn in her skin. Like acid. Hell, Natasha wants to scream. _Needs_to scream. But her lungs work against her and steal the air she feels she doesn't necessarily need anymore. "I'm sorry... I'm so, so, sorry Clint…" She's pleading.

She really _is_ alone, and she really needs _Clint_. But now he just seems so far away...

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**well which one of you lovelies understood the last part?(; ****drop me a tip, or your favourite line/paragraph in the part(: CCs are always welcome! **

******G'night from the SEA!(:**


	4. Chapter 4: Just Feeling

**A/N: sorry for the little hole in the middle of frequent updates! i've been having some excessive training the past two days, and was only free today to finish this whole thing up. i hope the length of this one repays that :) so, this is me trying to get into everyone's heads, and pardon me if the last part gets confusing! just remember that it's all happening in current time(: i'm loving the reviews and advice that i'm receiving too! so thank you!(: **

**disclaimer: disclaimed. **

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He hides in the darkness, playing with his fingers as he watches her sleep. Troubled, he recognises. She's talking in her sleep, crying in her sleep, and even with them hidden under her eyelids, he knows her eyes will reflect all the fear and anguish she has ever felt just like a mirror. And mirrors reveal the demons that roam your mind like prisoners with a hall pass, bashing the walls and destroying every corner until the place is burnt to the ground. Poor Natasha. Nobody deserves to take such an emotional roller-coaster when it's going into its grand plunge, and being an assassin with a rock in her chest isn't an exception from feeling such pain.

He makes the greatest effort to keep his footsteps quiet, barely making a sound that's a decibel higher than her whimpering and murmuring. The sounds that escape her lips are getting louder, too. Maybe she's having a bad dream. He closes the distance with equal strides, all the way up to her bed where he towers right over her. Like a protector. He reaches out his fingers to wipe away the mix of tears and sweat that trickles down her face, expecting the assassin to tear out a gun from underneath her pillow upon his slightest touch and point it right in between his eyes.

Yet, for some reason that just can't be explained with the right words and believable logic, she doesn't. A trained espionage agent that has probably slept with her eyes open since the mere age of fifteen, and she doesn't draw a gun in his face. That, surely, has to be the start of her patience and attention to her survival wearing thin, until it finally burns out and she snaps painfully without elasticity.

He sits down on the floor, right beside her bed where he has perfect view to her face, her fingers and her arms. She has the tendency to dig her nails into her skin when she has a bad dream, if they have all noticed correctly. So, for the next couple of hours, he will serve as her fellow guardian until the sun comes up and emblazons her skin with the calling of another dreadful day for her, and for all of them. By then, it will be as if he'd never been there. That is, unless he feels that there is a need to send his hammer crashing through the wall and leaving yet another gaping hole in the room, and another incident that Tony can add to his list of destructions.

Thor likes it, playing the eyes, ears and hands of the unprotected damsel in mental distress. Guarding her in every way as she barely sleeps through one of her roughest nights. It's not anything to be ashamed of, really, because he'd do it for anyone of his buddies. His family. To see them suffer is, by far, something he detests the most. And to say that he doesn't care, it has to be the mother of all lies. Thor, although a god and a king, is a sentimentally closeted man, like many of the others. But his heart is big and giving, and the generosity and heartfelt concern that he willingly provides, without the need of consent, is as vast as an ocean. It never really seems to end if you look out into the horizon, until the sea splits with the sky and the sun. He has heart.

So he doesn't mind hushing her when she starts to sob in her sleep, and he doesn't mind loosening the puncturing grip of her fingers on her arm. He doesn't mind covering her back up when she kicks the sheets off in case she gets cold, and he doesn't mind losing sleep for a friend like Natasha. No boundaries held.

The click of the doorknob turns his attention from her to the group of men standing at the door. "She okay?" Bruce whispers as he walks over to her bed and sits right on the edge, eyes scanning her face. Her forehead wears a glossy sheen of sweat, finding glow in the littlest of moonlight that filters through the gaps between the curtains. "Nightmares..." Tony's voice is small as he enters the room last. It sounds guilty, almost. "Pepper's been having them too, you know, ever since our honeymoon when I-" He sighs, punctuating the unfinished sentence as he settles down on the floor beside Thor and hangs his throbbing head. Steve claps him on the shoulder, and if he normally shrugs it off, he doesn't today. Instead, he mumbles a word of thanks and rests his head in his hands, his fingers massaging the temples on both far sides of his forehead.

"You've been here all night?" Steve addresses the blonde haired man hiding by the side of Natasha's bed. Thor nods. "Couple of hours. Her night has been rough for the silent lady she is. Very." He continues after the gesture. The men turn their gazes to face the floor, and after deep exhalation, Steve finally breaks the silence. "So what do we do now?" He asks, voice softer.

"What _can_we do? Mourn, grieve, and get us though this horrible setback? Because that's pretty much whatever options we're left with." Bruce answers. His voice is clearly stained with defeat. They all sigh heavily, nonetheless agreeing with his words. What, really, can they do except rot in the mourning of their close friend? Tony finally coughs up an answer. "We act."

All their heads turn to look at him, faces plagued with question. "What?" Bruce gasps.

"We act. We hack into SHIELD's database and dig out his mission file, find out what went wrong and when it did. If someone's waiting for an offence, a reaction from the opposing, they've got it." The man continues, explaining his answer with a few more words. Steve instantly retorts. "That's illegal. If the Director knows it's us, which he will, he'll-"

Tony raises his voice over Steve's, pulling in some valid points. "I've had my fill of give and take for this man, and I'm done giving him any more options. I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore. He doesn't tell us what he knows, doesn't discuss his plans, and after sending our friend for a mission half across the world, all of a sudden and for no good reason, Clint ends up dead and he's not talking." He hisses, getting a little more agitated with each word he spits. He inhales deeply and continues with a calmer pace and tone. "A man like that doesn't face up to other men when he's done something worth suspecting about. He has to be hiding something he knows from us, something that happened during Clint's mission. If he's not telling us, then for Clint, Natasha, and for all of us, we're breaking in. So you in, or you out?"

After much rationalising, the rest of the group finally replies with positive answers and a symphony of agreeing words. The room falls into silence again, as if waiting for another pained moan or whimper to subconsciously form on Natasha's lips. They watch her roll over a little more, as if acting on well practiced instinct, and bite back a scream that surely begged to escape her. The soft but shattering sound, like a cry from a voiceless throat, is slightly muffled by the pillow as her muscles tense up and she curls up tautly. Asleep, she pushes her face further into the pillow as her fingers have a tighter grip on the cushion, and she writhes almost soundlessly.

"God! Is this what Clint's been handling all the while?" Steve questions, worry staining deep in his slightly fractured voice. Tony shrugs. Bruce rubs and squeezes her leg, trying to relieve the contracting muscle, while Thor goes back to loosening her fingers and rolling her over again. Steve rubs her back and shoulders and hushes her until she stops screaming, and Tony simply strokes her hair in grimace. When Natasha finally stops resisting everything that's torturing her in that pretty little dark mind of hers, the men stand back and really take an extended minute to think about what hell she's been through.

What hell she's survived, and what deaths she has escaped, and how everything that's supposed to ruin her and drive her to insanity really did take a toll on her, but before everything that's happened, they just didn't seem to think that she was affected by them at all. Sleep really does reveal every true thing about a person. Sadly to say, her sleep reveals every little piece of hell she has managed to keep inside of her. "I guess we're all worried about the same thing." Another female voice sighs hoarsely from the door. Pepper walks up to Tony and he wraps his arms around her, kissing her forehead. "We're all having a rough night." Bruce sighs.

"We were just about to go do something down at the lab. You should go back to sleep, maybe drink some water before that, okay? I promise I'll be back before dawn." Tony murmurs into her hair tiredly. He doesn't know how long it's been since he's caught even a wink of sleep. "I think I'll stay here with Natasha. Don't over exhaust yourself, Tony. It does more harm than good, and you haven't slept since last night." Pepper says, rubbing his wrist as she speaks into his shirt. He tousles her hair softly before croaking a sound that seemed like agreement and leaving the room with Bruce and Steve flanking him on his heels.

Thor turns to look at Pepper. "Any chance that you might have some cards on your hands? I learned a new game, Go-Fish if I'm not wrong, and it might be an amusing way to pass time." She chuckles slightly, shaking her head. She sits down on the floor beside him and rests her elbow on the bed. "Not right now, Thor. I think we need to pay more attention to Natasha than to a round of Go-Fish. How is she, anyway?"

"Not too good." He ponders for more words to say, because the silence is just too overwhelming sometimes. "You know, there is this... gut feeling, ah yes, gut feeling in me that makes me think of Jane when I look at her. Troubled, lost, and knowing that she might never see her loved one again." Thor isn't one to pour his heart out in words, but Pepper encourages him to go on. It's healthy, isn't it? "When I left for Asgard to save my father two years ago, after promising Jane that I would be back for her, I broke a bridge that connected my world to yours. I never went back to her, never had the chance to find her, and now I just wonder if she thinks that I am completely gone, like Natasha with Clint.

"Yet, a part of me feels that because I am a king in my land, I am not allowed to feel, and feeling just feels... wrong. But I cannot help this gut feeling that is killing me inside!" She listens attentively as Thor spills out a bunch of words and emotions, watching him throw his arms up in the air and holding them grounded to his knees. Then, she clicks her tongue and thinks of a reply as she is reminded of something from the past.

"You know, Thor, I had an aunt when I was a kid, and she worked in the hospital. I went there to visit for a day, and you know what she told me?" Pepper starts. Thor frowns, then shakes his head at her question, so she continues. "She told me that, no matter how thick-skinned we try to be, there are millions of electrified nerve endings in our skin, open and exposed and feeling way too much..."

* * *

_Natasha can't escape this. Everything about this terribly warped unreality feels just as real as it shouldn't be. She wants to escape it because it's pulling her through so much pain with every little nerve that lights up upon the slightest touch on the surface. Like razorblades on her skin, the torture is simply unbearable. So exposed and raw and naked. Why is she watching Clint disappear every time she opens her eyes to nothing but the nightmare? And why does it feel so real?_

* * *

"Some of them burn out while the others spark, and it might feel painful, surging as fast as the impulse of anger that fuels the mind..."

* * *

_When he's alone, he's alone. And everything hurts and feels as if his body is about to fall apart. Perfection be damned and forgotten. His head throbs, his chest swells, and his arms and legs are just dead weight acting with gravity. It's not the lack of sleep, he knows, because it feels completely different. Feeling... Feeling... Feeling. Everything is about feeling. Even as his fingers slam against the keyboard and punch the keys with frustration, it's still about feeling. Steve is only there to keep Tony in line, while Bruce is working on doing the same thing he is. Hacking. And it really isn't working, with both men tired and not thinking on the right level, they can't crack the encryption codes_.

_Tony feels like putting a fist through his screen, because it's all just so frustrating! It's an act of impulse, but he doesn't have the mind capacity to control himself anymore. He just might drop dead on the floor if he doesn't output his uncalled for anger somewhere. He almost does it, when Steve makes him back away from the device and looks him in the eye. _You're just tired. Calm down._ Steve tells Tony in a firm tone, catching the attention of Bruce. Tony takes in a deep breath and clears his clogged mind, letting through the anger from the back of his head to the front, injecting a little more awareness in him and letting him feel a little more awake. He nods Steve off, and then continues to work his fingers a little faster to find conclusion in their search._

* * *

"The spark might feel like something hot burning your flesh, and it might hurt a whole lot, more when you try to push it away."

* * *

_Thor's heart is in half. The desire to protect his loved one, Jane, from all the terrible things in the world is soaring. Yet, that desire is whatever that's draining life from him in the form of incurable pain. He knows that he's not human, and he's supposed to be a calloused man and ruler. So he tries to forget Jane, tries not to think about her all the time and tries not to miss her. But love is tricky. Unfulfilled, it is a hurt locker. It hurts twice as much when he tries too hard to change what he feels._

* * *

"Try as we might to keep from feeling the pain, sometimes it's just unavoidable."

* * *

_Do her screams escape her lips in real life? She's already doing the best she can. Running in opposite directions than she did before, hoping to find an end to this never-ending abyss of torture. They come in the form of hallucinations. Sometimes, it's his voice. Others, it's his smell. Then, there's his being, where a scene plays out right in front of her, and every time the story takes a turn for the worst and it ends with death. Every single time. And all these tear a million shards through her chest, punctures every vessel and cuts her all over until she wishes to just die and end it all. Feel painless. But with every scream she bites back, growing every single time, Natasha knows that it's never going to end. Not in this life._

* * *

"Sometimes, that's the only thing left to make everything feel real. Just feeling."

* * *

_After an hour of key punching, Bruce's screen finally reveals the inside of the SHIELD database. He punches a few more keys to get around it and find Clint's mission file, and when he does, he's stunned. "Guys..? I think I found it, but you wouldn't want to read this..."_

* * *

__**TBC!**

**sooo... drop me a few lines as you lovely people always do?(: it's really helping me write this better, really. xx.**


	5. Chapter 5: All The Right Places

**A/N: so here you go! update!(: and i have to warn that i wrote this chapter over three days, all half asleepin the late hours of the night because i've been busy in the day! so i can't say i make any sense in this chapter, so enjoy!(: by the way, Jeremy Renner in Dahmer = ahgdkjd *le melts* hotttt. though the movie is really disturbing and creepy!**

**disclaimer: disclaimedddd.**

* * *

_Slam!_

It's the sound the icy, metal wall makes when Tony takes Fury by the collar and shoves him right against the wall. Steve and Bruce flank him, faces dark and sullen as the man's. They are right outside the morgue, creating a scene as Thor and Pepper accompany Natasha inside. _Where Clint is._Yes, where Clint Barton and his lifeless body is. "Stop lying to us, Fury." Tony growls cautiously.

His fingers curl up tighter in the director's black leather coat. Fury just eyes the man coolly, not willing to say anything, so Tony shoves him again. The wall shivers, making a weird little clanging sound upon impact. Steve is almost certain that by the end of the day and Tony's torture-interrogation session, the director just might be lying in the infirmary for a concussion. Rationally, Fury didn't deserve to be treated like a doll. Irrationally, Steve knows that Clint Barton is dead, and Natasha is about to snap and go loony in need of a place in a mental facility, and it's all because of him. The truth, at least, is something that should be admitted.

But will he? Fury became a director for a reason, right? Surely, the man had been an agent climbing up to promotion. It would be a rare chance that any truth would let slip. "Stop playing with us!" The wall rattles solidly again. Bruce's hand rams against the metal, and his tone is firm. He had been enraged enough the night before after reading the contents of the mission document. It's surprising to the rest that he hasn't hulked out yet and smashed the director's face to the dirt for Natasha and the team.

Tony chuckles morbidly, throwing a glance at the seething man beside him. Then, he turns his gaze back to drill holes into the director's skull, tilting his head to the side a little in amusement. "O-ho-ho-kay! It's not my problem if he hulks out and kills all of us. Just sayin'." Tony's hands flit away from the director's collar like it's in surrender. He leans against the wall adjacent to them in the narrow hallway.

Steve, being the calmest, most reasonable and rational person among the team, decides to take his turn. He leans closer to Fury and takes the place of Tony. "Look. We mean no disrespect, but we need answers. Answers we believe you should give us. You know what's left of Natasha, don't you? Look at her." They all peer inside the dark room, seeing fingers rake scarlet red hair tightly. Natasha then supports herself on the edge of the table again, biting back sobs. She looks away from the body, anguish reflected on her face. "She's given up completely to steel up, and the truth, the reason he's dead is the least you should offer."

Fury throws a look over Steve's shoulder, right into the darkness of the morgue. He sees the dullness of the girl. She's trying to breathe. "I'd be damned if you've seen how broken she is and you still don't feel the least bit of guilt. Shot her in all the right places." Tony pipes up from behind the towering, blonde haired man.

"We tried." The director finally sighs, and the iciness in his gaze melts. It reveals a little compassion. "We tried everything we could to get Agent Barton back. Tracking his cell, radio towers, anything that existed that could help us find him. But he just... _dropped_. Went off the grid just as if he dropped off the face of the earth." He ticked off his methods with his fingers.

"How about sending men out to look for him? Ever thought of that to _exist_?" Bruce finally spits. Tony warns him to back away quietly, with a simple hand gesture to push him away. "Go cool out." He nods Bruce towards the doors of the morgue, to join Thor and Pepper. He can't deny that the same accusing fire burns in his own chest too.

The director glares at them. "I know you guys breached the database last night to search up his file. Why are you asking me if you already know? If you're wanting to know about what _we_know, I'm telling you its nothing."

"Right... Then, is this the part where I'm supposed to retort with a chunk of expletives asking what the hell you were doing after he went missing? Because if I remember quite clearly, you had three months." Agitation creeps upon Tony's voice, even though he's simply leaning against the wall again and carrying a faint burn of disdain in his blank gaze to the floor. "Three fucking months, Fury. You knew he stopped communicating and mysteriously went under the grid after two months, and somehow you decided to sit in that chair of yours and brood about when he's going to appear again!"

"Barton is a professional. You and I know how he prefers to work. He always disappears, and he works well like-"

Tony cuts him off when he's heard enough. "And how did that work out for you this time? With his body washing up on shore, far past deceased, because you felt that dispatching agents to investigate was too difficult a job." He eyes Fury in disgust. Steve turns to look at the man with a look of question, eyes bemused. Well, he sure didn't know that.

It was of his own accord, after the other two had went to get some disturbed sleep, that Tony searched up the mission response. And it made him seethe in anger when he read up on how Fury made the decision to wait for Clint to magically appear again. One month, then two months, and finally three, where SHIELD received a call from the bigger agencies that they found his body washed up ashore. Because he waited. Tony didn't shout this out for all of them to hear, for once.

Fury clears his throat, yet again leaving no space for anyone to read him. His face remains cool and calm, even after the impulsive remark of the goateed man. "Sending men out to find him, under no severe circumstances, would have jeopardized his identity. He would have been compromised, and Agent Romanov should know how dire the situation would have become. The mission would have been, like him, compromised, and we can't afford that."

"The mission. The mission. The mission! It's not all about the mission! Clint Barton, your own agent, and you left him for dead in the hands of those French arms dealers. And that's even when you know damn well how they work with the Mexican weapon cartels, how dangerous they are if you get made!" Tony booms. Enough with the easy talk.

Maybe it's just his increasingly tired eyes, but he thinks that he'd just seen Fury's eyes dart around for means of escape. _Cornered._He smirks in his head. The director sighs. "We didn't think-"

"Hallelujah! The truth!" Tony yells sarcastically, hands waving in the air as if something had answered his unmade prayers. Then, he looks back at the man with the eyepatch. "Took you long enough to admit, Fury, that you give concern to your missions more than your agents."

Steve huffs in disbelief. Fury had said it, pretty much admitted that whatever he did wasn't thought through thoroughly enough. Saving Clint, it could have been possible. But that bastard hadn't tried hard enough. If he could /just/ knock Fury so hard that his injured eyeball pops out of place, eye for an eye.

"Agent Barton... Clint, he was one of our best in the agency. And if it's anything to Agent Romanov, or any of you, we recognise his bravery."

For once, Steve finally scoffs at the director's nobleness. Because it's plain stupid. Being irrational or not isn't an option anymore. There's no space to be. "She won't get any closure. There won't be a rational reasoning to why you hadn't done all you could to save the only person she truly ever trusted. You shackled her up."

_All the lies._ A little voice lulls the words into his ears. _All the right places._

_**-cookies!-**_

If anyone asks, they'll tell them that she needs a break from bravery. That she needs a break from wholeness to feel a little more of nothing. It's all she can afford now, now that half of her is gone. And she just can't believe that he had went like that, just left her in the lurch to deal with the world's screwed up mess. Where did companionship go? Where did his promise to keep her forever by his side, go?

If anyone asks, she'll tell them they came as a team. And if they were to burn out, they burn out together. Twin flames dancing weakly about the room until they finally disperse, and all life is gone. Yes, unfortunately, that is the way they plan to love, and she plans to leave. Because it's wherever she will go, like a puppy to its owner, when he decides to tease her with his last disappearing act. But she has one more thing to do, one more selfless act before all her actions are selfish, and stupid, and foolish, and any other word that can describe how powerful love and longing can be.

She's not brave enough to do this, she thinks. To see his face with his eyes closed. She's not brave enough to understand that she can't see his eyes anymore. And to run her fingertips over every scar and wound inflicted on his now sandpapered skin. She's not brave enough to face the fact that his skin will never feel warm again whenever her fingers touch him. Most of all, she's not brave enough to look at him and know that she had done all that she could. Hell no, she can't. Because all she had ever done, while he took on death alone, was sit in front of the television and flip channels as none of them gave her sufficient entertainment! All that she could? Well, that's just complete bullshit.

Natasha drags one foot after another, feeling like deadweight, until she reaches the only metal table that has a body laid out nicely across the area. She doesn't want to open her eyes, but she does. Whatever she sees, it scares her. Given that she's a supposedly cold-blooded, stone-hearted assassin that doesn't bat an eye when she caps a man dead, the sight of _her_partner, her everything, lying stone white on the table makes all that professionalism crawl back into its hole. Replacing it is ten thousand - and counting - ounces of fear.

So, it's his body on the table. Clint Barton. Best known as her partner, her best friend, and her lover. And now all of that is reduced to an inequality of each equation. Because the man is here, lying cold and naked in a morgue with only a rag of cloth, that's thrown over his lower area, being his only sense of modesty left. Eyes closed, the body stares back at her with an enormous intensity of guilt that her eyes burn bloodshot and blur moistly until she looks away. The way his face is bruised, battered and swollen to no recognition at all, where even _she_ can't make out any of his features anymore, tugs at her heart and forces calmness to snake out of her veins. She walks around the table, up to the other side of his head. That head of brunette hair that appears in her many memories of them. It seems to have lost its colour, bleaching into a duller, paler brown that has 'dead' written all over it like neon signs to a street shop.

_Dead._A dark, little voice whispers mournfully at the back of her head, as if to remind Natasha of what's real and what's not. The word itself draws a blurry line between reality and fiction, although she knows she can easily trip over and land on either one of the opposite sides. Her fingers grip onto the bloodstained ring in her palm a little tighter, as of holding on to will and faith. But it's like standing in the desert and waiting for rain. She receives nothing. There's no lifebuoy out in the sea when she's about to stop her tough struggle and drown, tired from the effort of breaking the surface.

Then, the precious droplets of salt start to drip. One... Two... Three, on his shoulder as she attempts to blink them away. As the tears fall unchecked, again and again as her heart disagrees that she should keep this all in her head, she heaves deeply. Natasha's lower lip doesn't tremble, she's positive about it, but she bites on it just to make sure that her tenacity doesn't give away. It's one thing she doesn't understand. Why is she so afraid to neglect strength, to lay emotionally bare and naked for her friends, and her only family, to watch and learn to comfort? "Could you... uh, give me a minute... or two, please?" Her throat feels like scratchy sandpaper, all coarse and dry that it cracks every time she pauses. She can feel it quiver, too.

"Anything you want." Thor manages with a dim smile, voice low, and soft, and without the edge. Pepper can't help but feel awful for Natasha, after all she had done to save Manhattan, and Tony, the other time round when they had first met. If there's anything that they can do to revive Clint, or to jump back in time and give them a chance to save their friend, she knows they will. But there isn't, so they can't, and she simply acknowledges Natasha instead before walking out with Thor.

When there is finally a metal door that separates her from the two of them waiting at reception, and an additional one more from the other three with Fury, there are cracks in her mask. Her bravado burns and gets destroyed until there's nothing left, and she feels like pulling her hair out. Natasha's fingers rake through the roots of her hair as she leans her back against the table edge, unwilling to look at the frozen corpse. Every glance of him that she's snatched in the last three minutes, when they first came in, turns around and bites her in the ass now. When she slides down the side and stares at the cold, grey floor, clawing fingers grabbing at her fiery curls, all she can see is his paper skin. Naked. White. Brittle. Injured. Bruised. Marred with scars. It doesn't get out of her head, and instead, threatens to explode.

She doesn't know what to feel, because she doesn't even know what she should feel. Her head throbs like crazy! Maybe she's supposed to feel this way. A little confused, completely disoriented. And that is why the heavens pity her. Because Natasha is groomed to kill or be killed, emotionless and detached. Finally, they give her that one chance to slip from her full metal jacket.

Emotions are messy, and hell, she gets that now. To be good at what she does, she learns the hard way. Tuck the wounds neatly away and step into a clean sterile room where the procedures are simple to almost everyone. Cut, suture, close. Just that simple. Cut, suture, close. Then to get on with her life. But sometimes one is faced with a wound that is just too stubborn to heal. A cut that rips it's stitches wide open and hurts like a bitch. And now she hurts. Like every other time Clint ends up in the hospital, or when he decides to disappear with his life for a momentary minute or two after he's shot in the heart and she's begging him to wake up in the middle of an empty street. It seems that this hurts the worst. No voice can reach him to breathe life again.

Practice makes perfect. The more Natasha does it over the minutes - cut, suture, close - the harder it becomes to turn it off. Just to feel a little human again. And now she wishes, more than anything, to stop the frequent procedure that never heals this stubborn new wound of hers, and just say it; she's hurt, she's destroyed, and she needs him there to catch her tears when she cries. And a year hadn't been enough to get that message through, on how needy she was for his presence.

Natasha's legs are too numb to move. She can barely feel them. She can barely feel herself. She's cold, not cold but just cold. She doesn't know what's missing other than a thesaurus, and whether or not she needs something there to make it a whole. All she knows is that she's cold, and she's shivering, but still, she doesn't move. She can't move. Or think. Or speak. Her only alternative, the only thing she can commit to, is to let her tears escape without restraint, if that will heal the gaping hole in her chest right now.

In silent cries, as well as obstructed, laboured breathing, the capacity of oxygen she inhales is a little too much for her liking. Yet, it's all Natasha can do. To breathe, breathe, breathe, until she's ready. So she breathes, and breathes, and breathes, always staring hard at the floor until she feels light arms wrap around her. The light arms stand her up, and its voice whispers - like chimes - into her head.

_Be brave._

Can she? He holds her thawing heart in both hands, watching it fizzle and beat as long as she lives. He's gone, but she still doesn't own her heart. Breathing deep, Natasha reaches for the file that is slotted in the pocket of the table, right beside her. 'Autopsy report.' is the first line of words that appear under the cover of the thin Manila folder. _Clinton Francis Barton._The typewriter font solidly prints her partner's full name in black ink right below it. The name sounds easy on her tongue, the first name she had grown fairly accustomed to. Whether in passion or in anger. They'd shortened it to Clint, because he likes it short and sweet, just like hers changing from Natalia to Nat.

Natasha's heart aches at the memory, but she also chuckles genuinely at the thought. She remembers how they had fought about their names. How he shouldn't call her Natalia and she couldn't call him Clinton, or Francis. Barton was fine. And he wasn't allowed to call her Romanova. It had just been their first year being partners in action when they bickered over it.

A slight drop of water stains the paper and sinks through to the next page. Tears, she knows. So the back of her hand rises up to her eyes and cleans them off her dampened face. Still, they inconveniently roll down her cheeks over and over again. Natasha flips the page regardless.

**(A/N: I cannot write autopsies! Pardon this! I may emit some content in the list. And I don't think my injuries make any sense!)**  
_**Date Of Autopsy:**__ 17 July 2013__  
_

_**Full Name:**__ Clinton Francis Barton_

_**Probable Cause Of Death:**__ Respiratory Failure, Internal Bleeding From Left Lung, Cardiac Arrest_

_**Time Of Death:**__ Between 5th May to 26th May (6-8 Weeks) Time Undetermined._

_**Body Found: **__Washed Up On Mexican Shore, Reported By The FBI._

_**Manner Of Death: **__Possible Homicide. Torture._

_**Victim's Marks and Wounds-**_

_**Suspension:**__ Deep lacerations to both wrists. Dislocated shoulder joints. Might have been hung by wrists (tied at back) from a height - La Bandera (A/N: Consists of tying down both wrists on the back of the victim and then suspending the person by the hands.)_

_**Penetrating Wounds:**__ Gunshot wound to femur. Multiple freshly healed slash cuts to skin. Ruptured skin in arms from whipping._

_**Electrocution: **__Severe skin burns to forearms. In direct contact to source of electricity multiple times. Voltage possibly fatal. Involuntary loss of muscle control/Overly strenuous muscle contractions. Cardiac arrhythmia. Organ paralysis (Heart/Lungs)._

_**Skeletal Wound:**__ Several broken ribs. Multiple fractures. Fractured skull. All possibly from blunt force trauma. Shattered femur from penetrating wound._

_**Internal Injuries:**__ Minute bleeding in the brain. Fatal penetrating wound from formerly deformed rib (previously unset whilst healing) into left lung - bleeding in lung._

_**Autopsy Ordered.**_

She stares, stunned. Her legs feel weak with disgust, and even weaker with distress. In her head, something's screaming in anger for Clint's murderer, and it swears that it will avenge him one day. As Natasha reads off the list again, she almost falls to the floor. It's not about his time of death, because it doesn't matter anymore. However, it's the number of injuries he had sustained, in all its different forms.

As she reads the way he's tortured, with guns and knives and electricity, the way they use gravity to render his arms useless from his suspension, she can't even compare. All of her past injuries from being taken captive aren't even sufficient to compare with half of his. That's why she's sobbing now, and the sobbing wracks her body and sways her abruptly.

Natasha's eyes grow a little more swollen, and she feels so much emptier right now.

_You could've saved him, and you didn't. You're the reason he held out that long, thinking he'll live through it and manage to propose to you to make you his wife. Now, you're the reason he's dead._The darkest voice her mind can muster accuses in her mind. She fears going insane, knowing that there are voice inside her head.

_No._ She doesn't want to believe the rational part of her brain when it starts to oppose. _Clint died from physical abuse. He died from that rib that he broke last year when he fell on his bow, because he didn't wish to make a trip down to SHIELD's medical facility to set it right._

Natasha thinks that the sound that erupts from her lips, in a cry of pain, might have been a scream. It's a whimper, because all her strength centrals around her mind now, blood pulsing in the vessels under her skin. She almost sinks down onto the floor again in fatigue, but she catches herself on the edge of the table with her shivering hands.

Her breath hitches in her throat, mind refusing to calm down, as the thoughts run through her mind in impulse. Natasha knows every nook or scar in Clint's skin. She knows every inch of his body, recognises, with her own hands and fingertips. And all of a sudden, it completely slips away. From right in between her fingers, she feels Clint slip away from her. Her best friend, her partner, her ally, the man she knows she loves, the man she knows very well is 80% deaf in both ears where Tony had, miraculously, mechanically restored them. All that she knew of him. Gone.

The only memory that clings onto her with a dying effort is when he told her: _Remember that as long as your heart feels like it knows, you'll know I'm alive._Because he believes her heart will warn. She remembers how he kissed her forehead after that, and held her.

Now replacing all that knowledge is an empty space, which drives her right out the morgue without taking one last look at him. Natasha walks past Thor, Bruce and Pepper, leaving their eyes to stare until she disappears behind the next set of doors. The further dullness in her eyes, having magnified since the night before, scares the hell out of Tony when he sees her. When Steve gently touches her shoulder, she simply looks at him with morose punctuation, then shrugs his hand off and walks away.

She wants to run. Run from all of them. Run from this goddamn building and from this city. When she takes a turn and she disappears from their sight completely, her knees almost buckle. Natasha is _tired_. And she knows the rest are, too, when she hears anger reverberate through the impact in the wall, and when Tony starts to raise his voice and accuse Fury again.

So, if anyone asks, she'll tell them they came as a team. And if they were to burn out, they burn out together. It probably makes her the most selfish person in the world, but even in death, she will follow like there's an invisible thread tying their fates together.

Natasha whispers his name under her breath, and there is an immediate pang in her chest once it is a word on her lips. Believing his words, she follows. So it gives her hope once again when she hears a yell from a room. It's _his_ voice, and she recognises. She starts to run.

* * *

**TBC!(:**

**YAAAY. i forfeited character death! (probably for now.) three cheers and three cheers and three cheers for no character death! who thought he was really dead? I DID. i think my ending was really OOC though, and the last paragraph made no sense at all! but regardless, hope you enjoyed this installment! drop me your favorite line(s)? or a little criticism or chiding for being that evil to make you believe Clint had died for four and 1/8th of the story?(; toodles! *knocks out* **


	6. Chapter 6: Drowning On Dry Land

**A/N: well, here's to getting the next installment to you guys a little faster! it's kinda short, so i'll make sure the next chapter will knock you off your feet!(: i had wanted to combine the chapters together, but that would have made 6,000-7,000 words! so i just wrote this shorter one first! thank you for the reviews, guys! i swear you guys are so sweet!**

**OH! i watched 28 Weeks Later yesterday afternoon, and i swear that the show is really sad! Doyle (Jeremy Renner's character) died! He was literally set on fire by his own team. :'( *cries***

**disclaimer: disclaimed. **

* * *

There are times, many, when Russian roulette is played with six bullets. It makes the game harder, but lets death come easier and make its noisy way to a seat on your couch to claw at your ears with metal talons.

There are times when poison seeps into the heart and kills you from within. There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker until you just now you'll disappear.

Death, as many are fooled, is inevitable.

Yet, there are also times when a gun is stalled, or an overdose doesn't kill, where a fatal poison doesn't take a life, and there is speculation that cancer can be survived. Although not frequent, they do exist.

That time, Natasha thinks, is now.

She dashes through the door to the infirmary. It's a small room, with a single hallway branching out to give access to an operating theatre. She knows his voice came from here. This facility. It's what her gut is telling her, it's what her mind is convincing her, and it's what her heart is telling her.

The agents that pose as nurses in the room are trying to force her out of the area as she screams his name. "Clint!" She begs for him to reappear, to emerge from one of those wards and scoop her into his battered arms. To have those nurses release her at once and let her fall into his feather-like touch. "Clint, please! I heard you!" The way her voice is scratchy and pitchy all over reflects all her fears. She's never screamed like that before.

"We need hands in here!" One of the attending surgeons yell. She hears that voice, _his_voice, turn into a shrill scream again, and then sirens start to wail across the hall. The nurses disappear into the operating theatre, Natasha following, as they all break into a run. "How the hell did he get off anaesthesia?" A blonde-haired resident demands, holding down the man in surgery.

The room starts to become frantic, with nurses flying in and out the door carrying equipment and appliances, some with bloody towels. Natasha is thrown out of the way several times as she stares through the glass window at the man writhing on the operating table.

His midriff reveals the guts under his skin, pooling with blood as he continues to move. His eyes bulge with such intensity that it looks like he's about to burst a vessel. The way his jaw protrudes with distinguished lines shows how much force he is exerting on his teeth, which is unhealthy.

The man yells again, as if it's a battle cry, and his torso lunges forward awkwardly, in which the nurses try to hold him down again. His movement causes a second cry of pain, and his muscles tense up like solid until the machine screams. It screams and wails in sirens, the line on the screen spiking up and down at extremities.

Natasha looks back at the man, and his body goes completely limp with his eyes rolled to the back of his head, and the machine bursting with emergency as the man loses life by the second. His eyes. His eyes are blue. They are blue. Not the saltwater green irises that she finds complete comfort in. The man isn't Clint, obviously. But she takes his face into recognition. Agent Langley Bryant.

But it was Clint that she heard! She heard him cry out in pain! It was his voice! And who will believe her? No-one. Yes, no-one at all. The only person that just might believe her is the therapy nurse, who will use that little act of mutual understanding to put her in a mental facility occupied by the crazy and delusional. So, yes. No-one will believe her, and that's because she's starting to lose faith in herself too.

Natasha knows it's all in her head. How many times today has she looked over her shoulder, with her mind whispering about Clint's presence, when he's not even there? Several, and the mental fatigue is starting to wear her patience and her sanity thin. And it's easily proven with the way she had screamed and created a ruckus at the infirmary reception just three minutes ago.

It is simply the denial sinking in, clinging onto every cell in her brain and making sure it takes a place. Every little part of her doesn't want to lose the one she loves, and so they all march down the lane of fantasy-freedom.

Her eyes pretend that they see him, and her ears deceive her with the memory of his voice. The smell of his favourite coffee and her favourite cologne on him, it hits her right in the nose.

And the scent of his dry-cleaned clothing. Even after they had moved into the Stark Tower, Clint had never gone a week without visiting the old lady that lived under his old, rickety apartment. The simpleton woman enjoyed to do his laundry while talking over her morning brew before he went to work. Natasha remembers what he told her, that he would go on and on to the old lady about how 'beautiful, and capable, and absolutely perfect Natasha is' and the diminutive English woman would tease him about inviting her to his wedding when it was time.

How will she handle his passing? They were old friends, and she had watched him grow up from a mere teenage ne'er-do-well playing with pocketknives and other weaponries, into a man running with the supposedly crime-fighters (He had never fully explained to her about his duties in SHIELD.). Maybe Natasha will pay a visit to the lady, one of the days.

Clint Barton. He never fails to appall anyone, nor does he ever fail to divulse the hearts of the people around him when he leaves. _That bastard._ She scolds. _He didn't change at all._And that's what makes her feel like there's a bullet in her chest, laced with cyanide as death wraps a rope around her neck and pulls life right from beneath her skin.

Does she show it? Does she reveal her soft spot as she stumbles, dumbfounded, out of the bustling room and down the hallway? Does she express such helplessness as she climbs onto the bench chair, completely disheveled and looking like a complete wreck? Does she show it? The panic? She does, all in front of her peers. Natasha only, and naturally, plays it down.

She doesn't rock herself back and forth in her seat until she falls asleep. She doesn't reek of heavy alcohol from a night spent in a bar. She doesn't scratch at her skin until it feels raw. She doesn't do all that. Instead, Natasha sits around and bottles it all up. When one runs out, in comes another. Her tighter-than-blood family can only wonder about what happens when she finally combusts.

The panic seizes her, all of a sudden. There is no proper explanation for such puny fears, but feelings aren't rational. So it claws onto her and keeps hold of her as she falls apart, second by second, on the inside. Natasha listens to the devious laugh at the back of her head, so dark. _Worthless. You can't even protect the man, alive. He's dead now, because you're pathetic, and undeserving. And he trusted you to save his life, as his partner._

The next scene that illustrates in her head is Clint taking a bullet for her. Clint bleeding out for her. Clint saving her ass for her. Clint. Clint. Clint! And everything is for her! The scene is far from fantasy, far from imagination. It's memory. Memory of a simple little mission escalating into a fatal injury when she disobeyed his orders and went right into a gunfight.

He abandoned his post on the top of a nearby building and, out of pure impulse for her safety, tried to snatch her from the gunfight. Natasha had all but one man down, and by the time she even noticed the bullet was for her, Clint had jumped right in front of the gun and killed the man before he fell to the ground and bled from his heart. Her arms were so bloody as he turned paler and paler, the first time she had ever cried for him because she didn't understand his stupidity.

His chuckle was weak. _I didn't let you live for nothing, Nat./_Clint had slurred. _Sure... as hell... I'll do anything to make... to make sure you stay..._Alive. He had meant to say that, as he tells her every time after that incident, but he had passed out with a gurgle in his throat.

He was revived, and they fought about it one day after he was fit enough to come out of the infirmary. She started yelling, and he started soothing her to a point that she was begging him to leave her alone, to let go off her when he held her. Oh, the guilt. But he didn't, because he didn't plan to see her fall apart over a commonplace man like him, and made sure that when she finally went to sleep (beside him, because it kept her assured that he wasn't dead from her actions) she was free from guilt. That had been their first year working as partners. So ever since then, she's been overly indebted to him, ever more than she should, and the memory sticks to her like superglue.

Natasha is a walking travesty. Well, she's a sitting travesty, actually. So her head is right. She's just a little piece of mockery that should receive well-deserved insults, and well-deserved death. Her, with Clint? She can imagine the guests laughing in the stands at their wedding, making speculations on how she's a curse on him and the rest of mankind.

_How long will he last before he's gone?_ One will say. _Why marry such a fool, so selfish and wretched? She won't live up to his name! She's just a killer!_And the other will reply. Just a killer, yes. She's just a killer.

Clint will laugh too, and say that he's so stupid to even think about marrying such a girl who's probably given up her body to hundreds of men before for her missions. He'll say she's worse, so dumbly believing such a farce, that any of their love will ever follow through.

Then, the cocky man, unveiled from his act of honour and respect, will leave her broken heart on the altar and parade off with shame at numbers no more than a zero. And Tony, Steve, Bruce... Everyone! Everyone will laugh at the joke that stands alone on the stage with such appalling stupidity. One of the men will then come right onto the stage, snatch the ring right from her finger and-

"Natasha." The voice breaks the never-ending laughter in her head. Silence slowly fills in, and so does a little anxiety, making Natasha jittery all over. Everything in her grief magnifies into believable emotions, so calmness slips and she appears shocked at the call of her name. She lifts her head from her hands and takes in the person in front of her with exhausted eyes. It's Agent Maria Hill. "What brings you here?" She asks, curious. Does she even know?

Natasha breathes for a second. In, then out. Then in, again. "I don't know..." She exhales. Her voice is edgy. Her fingers comb through her hair briefly. "I just- I thought I heard Clint's voice coming from here, somewhere. But... He's dead, right?" And she's just complying with futile hope, she forgets to add. Agent Hill watches her quietly as her voice tightens and lets loose a chuckle. "I guess I should really go now... Pay a visit to Psych and let them haul my ass into an asylum for delusional lunatics because I'm hearing things."

Agent Hill sighs and sits beside her. "You're not hearing things. That was Agent Bryant. You can blindfold me and put me in a dark room, have three agents that I know yell out, and I'd get it all wrong because they all sound the same."

"I just thought I'd know better, Maria." Natasha replies. "I'm Clint's partner, and after everything he's done for me since the day he decided not to take my life, I thought that the least I could do, if I can't repay his debt, is to be able to have his back. Now I can't even differentiate his voice..." She fiddles with the bloody ring in her hand with her fingers. Agent Hill notices the gesture.

There is a short silence before she speaks up and Natasha lifts her head again. "Give me a moment, will you? I've got to make a call." The agent disappears behind a wall, seemingly to have a glimpse of how Agent Bryant's operation is handling. Then, she comes back.

Agent Hill chirps. "How about you follow me for awhile?" She gestures for Natasha to follow her into the room, a quiet and probably empty trauma ward, adjacent to the scarlet-haired lady with a simple nod.

_**-cookies!-**_

"Hill. Just do it. I think we've kept it in long enough." Fury speaks into his comm. device with a low voice. The three men and Pepper stare at him in disbelief. Bruce then exits the morgue and shakes his head. "Can't identify him. They look almost the same, but I can't be certain without a clear view of his face. It's battered as hell."

Fury grunts as he walks down the narrow hallway, gesturing for them to tag along. "You son of a bitch!" Tony yells from behind and lands a fist on one side of his face. It definitely felt good to release all that on the director after he dropped two bombs on them. And screwed Natasha's head up into a complex battlefield. "Easy, Stark." Steve commands as he tears the man from Fury's skin. Still, he glares at the eye patched man too, clearly unhappy with all of his games.

"Will you just follow me? I'll explain on the way."

Reluctance. It's what the whole lot of them feel. For stone-cold and dead Clint. But they still follow the man with his goddamn lies, and only pray that this isn't yet another one.

**_-cookies!-_**

He's pale white. His lips and fingertips are slightly blue, yet still nearer to the simple colour of white. He looks just like the body in the morgue, pale and bloodless. Dead. Yes, that's the word. He looks dead. Clint looks dead.

_Looks._

According to Agent Hill and the doctor in charge of attending to him, the only thing that distinguishes him to be alive than to actually be dead is the worrying beeps from the monitor. The intervals are barely enough to account for a beating heart, and his pulse is barely strong enough to signify that he's alive. It's barely even there, but it is.

"We've been trying to warm him up over the past three days. His temperature is really low, and he's barely heating up, but he's doing it. Fury gave an order, to do everything in our power to find a pulse. We managed to find it, eventually, and now we're doing everything we can to keep him that way, or wake up, even, if luck is on our side." Agent Hill explains.

The doctor, Dr. O'Donnell, continues, from wherever Maria stops, with the Scientifics. "Yes, as Agent Hill has said. His EEG shows signs of activity, although minimal. Once his vitals are stronger and his body warms up, we will take him into a long procedure to repair his wounds. Probably reconstruct skin grafts for his burns, and repair his heart and lungs. Hopefully, he will be able to regain complete use of his muscles top, though we are not exactly certain how much harm has been done to his body. Right now, Agent Barton's entire system is on shut down. It isn't exactly functioning, and because it isn't working enough, the wounds aren't able to affect him yet."

All the information is too much to take in. All Natasha knows is that he is alive, and somewhere in that mangled, destroyed, ghastly looking shell of what was once his body, Clint is in there, fighting like hell for his life. And these IV wires that are springing everywhere from his skin, and the breathing tube lodged down his dry throat which makes his chest rise and fall, they are his accessories.

They have lined him up with heaters, dressed him in twice the amount of clothes beneficial for surviving a blizzard, and covered him with two more layers of blankets that are as thick as sheep's wool. Yet, he's still as cold as ice. Natasha barely feels any life in him.

Hypothermia. They keep repeating that his is severe, and that Clint is lucky to an extent of one in ten thousand that he still survives at all. She looks him over again and concludes that she has never seen him so lifeless and sickly pale since that occasion. That memory where he got shot in the heart.

Tubes had sprung out from him as if they were tethers between his life and death, and they were holding him to the soil of being alive. But he had been warmer. Much more warmer, and livelier. Now, he's a little more unlikely to feel human under her fingertips.

So is he really alive, inside? Whether or not he is, she prays. Because after all that she's been through and he's been through, the life and the death, he still ends up here, and their story hasn't ended. She did say before that, although not frequent, miracles do exist, didn't she?

* * *

**TBC!**

**WELL. i wanted to add a little more family in it, but i guess this focuses more on Natasha's insecurities! and yes, heeding your advice, i really did make Tony punch Fury in the face(; drop me a comment, kay? or which part you felt was your favorite. or if you really want to strangle me again for medically alive, technically dead Clint! **


	7. Chapter 7: Another One Bites The Dust

**A/N: this is a long one, because i decided we needed an extra scene to make this chapter a mind-blowing bazooka! okay, i'm joking! i just promised you a good kick-your-pants-off chapter, right? so here you go! and - We Bought A Zoo was a lovely show with Scarlett and Matt. but i'm still Rennerson all the way!(; and Jeremy Renner can sing like a god! **

**disclaimer: disclaimed.**

* * *

Whenever you wear wet socks to sleep, whilst in an air-conditioned room, your feet turn ice cold and you feel sick the next day. Well, that is what's happening to Clint. More specifically, it's the rough condition of what his body is in. A terrible hypothermia that isn't giving him any space for warmth.

The doctor explains to Natasha in layman terms - not that she hasn't been into the infirmary enough times to learn a little bit of anatomy - that his body is frozen and that they're just waiting until he thaws out. It didn't take a medical genius to know that his body was rejecting all that heat.

The Avengers. It's an assemble of superheroes, pulled together by Nick Fury (Director of SHIELD), whose jobs are to save the world from all the terrible things. (A/N: someone should be happy I used the name of your favourite song!) Millions of the public assume that they are untouchable. Fact is, not exactly.

Physically enhanced Steve can very well bust an ankle in a sprint, and Tony without his suit can have his wrist broken from his punch ricocheting off the wall. Bruce might just walk into a moving door and have his nose broken and set, and though very unlikely, Thor can have his brother's knife stuck deep in his skin.

Point is, all these superheroes are equally subjected to harmful injuries like that. So, what had originally made all of them think that someone as human as Clint wouldn't be subjected to the worser kinds of harm? And what makes a person believe that Natasha can't subject herself to feelings? Anyway, it's all that's left when you take away human anatomy, right?

Well, from there, once Tony had undeniably made an accidental comment on how Clint looked like a dead smurf when they revealed him, the whole family has been bugging Fury for the full story. That including the down-to-the-bone details on how SHIELD had found him and how Clint's body was reacting - if it even could - to the heaters.

The team hangs around with Natasha watching over Clint, completely relieving Agent Hill of her duties. Bruce makes an effort to check over his monitors on an hourly basis, in which he will then sigh over Clint's next-to-none heart rate. He checks in with the doctors too about Clint's condition, then does all the research he can do to see if there is any way at all that they can warm him up.

Thor learns to persuade the concerned woman to take a nap, or at least have a change of clothes when she looks like she needs some time away. If she doesn't abide, he carries her away without her trying to resist. His eyes know when she's tired. If he really needs more help, Pepper's always there with her husband.

Then there's Tony and Steve, being Natasha's two greatest pillars of support, whether physically, mentally or emotionally. She always has them to lean on when the chair doesn't provide her with enough comfort to put her at ease. Funny, that is, because there had once been a time when Clint solely played the role.

The whole group of them realise the imminent possibility of change that will soon occur within the woman. She barely even talks now, only conversing in simple nods or the shaking of her head. When Fury calls them all in, and Natasha doesn't follow, they raise their growing concerns. "That's why we enforce rules, rules that apparently our agents don't exactly choose to abide to." He replies with a sigh.

Then, he reveals every piece of truthful information to the team. About his mission. And the lies.

_**-cookies!-**_

The door clicks shut slowly, and the disturbing sound of forced ventilation and the incredibly long silence between each beep of the machine invades his ears like gushing water. The shadow of the agent's skin is a shade of grey, since it's late at night and the lights are off.

With the slightest bit of the hallway light peaking through the blinds of the ward, Clint's arm takes the pale colour of white with the tint of blue. Like Tony's injudicious comment, he really does look like a dead smurf. So the man is guilty as charged.

The image of Clint in his head is pretty much the reason why he can't get any sleep tonight. Or any nights before that, and so will the nights after. The very thought of his best male agent, buff and active with his peaked senses and vigilance, finally coming off so weak and struggling for life, it's ridiculous. And the way that Natasha's evidently losing her head over the numbers to his mortality rate instead of increasing her body count makes Fury worry.

Have two of SHIELD's best agents subjected to the terrible things in life, and allow it to impact so greatly on them that they can't control. Even the best can't hold out for long, and these two have been alternately doing it for years. Fury knows he shouldn't be shocked because they are bound to give in.

No matter what the body count that these two hold, even if it's sinful to a point, they are human. Not about the flesh, or the blood, or the lack of chemical engineering part thereof. They are human, which is to say that they aren't isolated from their fears or their emotions.

It's how every human is tied together and packaged to face the world. They just handle it differently, they handle themselves with such care and finesse that it's brutal when it all falls apart. Doing what gets the job done, even if it kills.

_Even if it kills._Well, now it's chewing both of them out. Natasha is simply biting the bullet, hard. She's clinging on to dear sanity like that, whether it means chipping her teeth or eventually having the bullet sink through.

Fury knows that she's pulling hairs from its roots and walking around with crosshairs on her back whenever she has to leave the ward, because every second spent away from the comfort of the beeping monitor lets her mind venture into the unknown. Natasha feels that when she goes, their tether is on a risk to snapping, and then Clint will bite the dust.

He sighs, watching the over-clothed man's chest rise and sink out of pure force. He doesn't know if Clint's lungs are even working. Poor Natasha, Fury thinks. Does she just sit here every day and watch Clint's progress peak only a little next to none? Listening to his heart beat less than half the times it should per minute? It's stressing, he doesn't dare to deny.

The agent had wanted to propose, picking up the engraved ring in Mexico before proceeding with his mission. When SHIELD came in a medic hovercraft to retrieve his body (the FBI had said he was most likely dead.), the ring had dropped out of his pocket when they loaded him from the sand to the stretcher, wrapped up in towels. Fury picked it up and kept it, until he made the call to have Agent Bracken send it to her doorstep.

"Come on, Agent. You've been playing dead long enough now. Get your lazy ass back up and get back to work. I have a pile of missions for both of you." Okay, so he isn't good at talking to the technically dead. In fact, he sucks at it. Using all the wrong words and method of approach.

The emptiness of the silence is filled with ventilator gushing and machine rumbling, and it lasts a whole elastic second before Fury broke Boss. He just can't stop thinking of the struggling Natasha. How helpless she is even though she keeps it under wraps. The vacant look on her face already tells everyone that Natasha is _gone_, or maybe she's lucky enough to have only one foot out the door for now.

"Look." Fury's voice is dead serious. "You left that girl hanging, barely holding on, on a thread. She's waiting for you to come back. Don't give her yet another blow in the gut." _Because one touch is all she needs before she crumbles like a house of cards._

"She's driven, and I trust it's all because of you. And for days now, nearly weeks, everyone's watching her turn numb. All that belief when she first started out, and all that confidence, gone." _I swear, I'm trying._

"So if you don't come back from this, it's gonna change her. _You_ will change who she is. Can you bear to watch that happen?" _No, it kills me. Her voice, the way it always shakes when she talks to me, it kills me. It kills me because it sounds so empty! But she can't hear my conscience. She can't hear how I'm begging her to stop! And you can't hear it too..._

Somehow, Clint's heart rate picks up a little. It stays stable for a while, where Fury smirks a little. Genuinely. Then it dives back down to where it usually wavers around. "Try harder, Barton. She needs you. You're not gonna leave her a widow, are you? When all of us can't, you gotta be awake to reel her in if she can't swim."

Exhaling, he leans back into his chair and watches the agent throughout the night. Fury knows that Natasha comes in at five in the morning, so he makes sure he'll leave them alone. He watches Clint for the next two hours, and before the bustle arrives back into the infirmary, he leaves quietly.

_You_ _gotta reel her in if she can't swim, agent. I'm not gonna lose both of you._

**_-cookies!-_**

**TWO MONTHS LATER**

Natasha stands right outside the building. She hasn't visited his rickety old building and his common, rickety apartment in ages. She trusts that its kept organised and dusted by the old lady in his block. Auntie Sal. Yes, Auntie Sal. Two months ago, she remembers to have thought about visited his old Auntie Sal. She will now.

There is something that's making her reluctant to walk on further. To come face to face with each and every memory that reminds her of Clint. Like the smell of old Auntie Sal's house that lingers with her favourite scent of his clothing. Or the way the floors of the building creak and the leaking water from the broken faucet plops onto the ceramic sink, like the first time he had brought her here.

**(Flashback)**

_He looks like they're about to make a midnight heist, and his chuckle, along with the goofy look on his face, is priceless. He's barely this childish at work. "Are you ready?" Clint whispers from right outside the apartment._

_It's four in the morning and they decided that taking a look at his apartment after an overwhelming mission and extended three days stay in the hospital, and eating rotten mac and cheese on his greasy, untouched couch was a good idea. A great idea! She bites back her ever-feminine laughter and shakes her head at his eagerness with a brilliant roll of her eyes._

_Natasha watches her partner as he clumsily fumbles for his key, groping easily at the seemingly empty space over the door. "It's too commonplace, you know. Hiding your key above your door. Anyone could reach for it and rob you." She comments, watching the faint gleam of the key in his hand. She scans it over as she leans against the hollow wall. The complicated intertwining of the metal design and the dull silver implies that the apartment is from the 90s._

_He raises his eyebrows in a frown, then gives a half smirk. "I don't come back up here often, so the old lady below me cleans it out. I have to put the key somewhere, right?" Natasha shrugs without reply. "Ouch! Harsh, widow." Clint teases as he sticks the key into the lock._

_There is obviously something going on in his head. Something like denial. The way he had gulped down several bottles of chilled beer just an hour ago aroused her suspicions easily. It isn't like Clint at all. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she has a deep, long cut in her abdomen that's patched up with eleven stitches now. Because he didn't take down the armed man fast enough before he reached her._

_The lock clicks open, and the door creaks when he pushes it inwards. In the darkness, his home is fairly simple. There are no obvious pictures of him, nothing left behind to leave some memories. She strolls about the house as he fumbles for the light switch. The light burns for a while before the bulb blows and the room sinks into darkness again. "Well, the light's out."_

_Natasha acknowledges it with an inaudible sound from between her lips and continues about his house. Clint follows her, humming from behind her back, clearly intoxicated with alcohol. She chuckles, then comes across a picture of a beautiful blonde-haired woman and her husband, a dark-haired man. Two younger boys stand beside the couple, one with deep, blue eyes while the other has a distinguished jaw line that she fairly recognises. He's barely ten._

_"Is this the only family portrait you have?" Natasha queries, turning to face him. Clint expresses some genuine hurt when he hears her question, one she doesn't miss, then nods with a smile. "Yeah." He replies._

_"It's like twenty years ago!"_

_Clint sighs, clicking his tongue then pursing his lips. "I never told you the duck story, did I? I've known you for three years now, and I've never told you the duck story!"_

_"Clint!" Exasperated, she huffs. "Don't change the subject. Something happened. Probably when you were eight. Or ten-"_

_He swallows, avoiding Natasha's piercing glare. Clint's line of vision flies about the room, unwilling to reply. He does, eventually, as he walks to the fridge and pops open a newly stocked in bottle of beer. "Okay! I'll tell you. And listen well, miss. I'm not telling it again."__ Positively intoxicated. She grins. "__Nine. That photo you have there, it was taken a month before the accident. I was nine."_

Accident?_ She has read his file, but it had no record of an accident or any family history. Her brows knit into a fine frown, but the silence from her whispers for him to carry on. He lets the liquid slither down his throat, waiting for ease to kick in._

_"July 1983. Dad was driving, and... shouting. He was shouting at me for some reason. And Mom was screaming back at him. Telling him to stop... He just kept hitting her because she was talking back, making sure she was bruised one way or the other."_

_Clint's voice thickens audibly. "I just kept quiet and looked out on the road. Dad was busy hitting Mom, and she was busy screaming back. He didn't watch the road, and I was shouting in the car that he was about to run a red light."_

"'_Dad! Mom!' I called. 'Look out at the road!' And all that insane bickering was flying around my head! Dad shoving Mom and threatening to hit her again if she didn't sit down. They fought for a while, and all the time I was just wailing about that damned traffic post in front of us turning red!"_

_He's shaking, everywhere. His voice is shaking. His body is trembling. The worst thing yet is that Natasha doesn't know what is going on in his head. It's the scariest thing that she doesn't know what he just might do. "Calm down." Clint is just... shaking, shaking his head while it hangs, his elbows on his knees. And his breathing is escalated, sounding as agitated as his voice. _

_"Nobody was listening to me, and it was just so noisy! And my brother was shouting at me to shut up. Hitting, and punching me in the back seat because I wouldn't stop warning them about the junction. Mom took off her seat belt and held onto my brother's hand, and Dad just pulled at her though she didn't want to budge. She listened to me, finally, but it was too late... He drove right into the junction, full speed, and crashed into the car in front of us."_

_The hesitation in Clint's voice starts to grow, and he feels a tingly burn behind his eyes. With each able second he isn't speaking, he's brutally chugging down mouthfuls of beer like it's a poisonous addiction. "Mom... Mom flew right through the windshield when the front crashed right in. Both of them were shouting at me, saying that it was me. I caused this. I caused Mom to get into this! And then another truck rammed into our side of the car. Dad died instantly when the truck snapped his neck in half, while I escaped that impact almost freely, having been so small that I was able to cower behind Mom's seat. My brother got knocked out when he hit his head against the window."_

_"Car sirens were going off from everywhere. I climbed out of the car and I saw Mom... She was my fault!" Clint starts to raise his trembling voice, eyes reflecting volumes of deep regret. "And I keep drilling it into my head, keep saying that there was something I could've done. But I just _stood _there, recognising every shard of glass embedded in her skin. I remember the... the look on her bloodied face when she was lying on that hood. She was so scared. Hyperventilating as she stared at me with such wide eyes. And I was just screaming, and crying, not knowing what to do."_

_"Don't do this Clint. That wasn't you. You were just a child. You couldn't have done anything." Natasha warns pointedly. She isn't one for the easy coming anyway._

_When he smashes his fist down on the table with a silencing bang and stands up, she jumps a little. A hand flies to the back up knife she keeps at her back on the waist holster. "Hell I couldn't, Nat!" He yells, the rasp in his voice deeper with anger and guilt than she's ever seen before. "You don't know what it's like to see the people you love, die from your mistakes." Clint speaks through his teeth, one hand fisting up into a ball at his forehead. It cracks a little, and his breaths stay shaky._

_"Every time you get shot by a bullet, or stabbed by a knife, hell, even strangled till you turn blue! Every time you fall unconscious, you don't know how it's like for me, Nat! You don't know what's going on inside my head. How about I tell you?"_

_"It's scary. It's really scary when you don't wake up. It's terrifying when I watch you bleed out right in front of me, when you stop breathing. It just makes me feel completely helpless, like the nine-year-old back that day, standing on the street. Sometimes I don't even know if you're going to die... in- in my arms before the medics come, because Mom died before they came. Then I'm just so scared, so afraid, that you're not going to wake up anymore, that you're going to leave me the way she did because I didn't do enough to save you!"_

_"Three days ago, Nat. That guy stuck a knife into your stomach and you just fell! Did you know how scary that was? I know you think it isn't as worrying as the other time when you got shot it the lung, but it is for me. It is, because each time I do something wrong and you go down as collateral damage, it gets worse and worse! It just peaks a little bit more each time you get injured, and the fear gets worse. It killed me, okay? It killed me because I couldn't do one thing, and that I put you in a hospital!"_

_The unwilling glassiness - tears - in his eyes speak volumes, and his voice speaks more when it just loses it's edge and goes small. Timid. When Natasha closes the distance and holds his face with both her hands, he can't bear to look at her. He just lifts her shirt and gently traces the sutures with his finger. The tender skin around it is bruised. "I hurt you, Natasha. And I don't know how the hell I'm gonna live with myself if I hurt you too much one day... If it kills you... But that's what I really don't know! I don't know why I let myself- ... I-"_

_"Look at me." She finally says, firmly. It's just this... odd feeling in her chest that's bugging her to comfort Clint and making him stop blaming himself. For some reason, she can't bear to watch him fall apart like this because _this_, this isn't the Clint she got to know three years ago._

_She gets Clint to look at her. To look into her eyes and lock their connecting gaze so he stays tethered to her. "I'm perfectly fine, okay? I'm patched up, and I'm here. With you. You have nothing to worry about. Nothing else matters, no memories, no worries, no feelings. Just presence."_

_"No... I still remember every second of your blood on my ha-" Then, as if to shut him up or to satiate the oddly trustful, burning desire in her chest, she kisses him._

_She places her lips on his. Even though she's kissed hundreds of men before, whether to tease or taunt or poison, the typical taste of the usual Bloody Mary or hard liquor on any of their lips, fused with the revolting smell of handy breath mint, just cannot compare to this simplicity. Clint's lips just taste of bitter beer and salt, which makes the odd feeling grow, like mourning._

_Natasha feels his muscles turn taut, then relax. But his skin never touches hers, as if out of fear or out of guilt. They are assassins, detached and tucked away from the ordinary experiences of the commonplace man and woman. They don't trust easily, so fading and falling into each other like that is a cry of betrayal to their partnership, their friendship._

_To be in a job like that, they come and go with territory, and things like that always drive each other apart. So he's trusting too much, she's evolving, and her head tells her that she has to get far away from this man. But things like that put many others in perspective, and it doesn't matter if the world shifts from its axis. They'll move along with the world with a developing tether, if it's a risk they're both willing to take._

_"I love you, Nat." He blurts out, voice small and confused, when she pulls away from him. Then, silence. "I love you, and I think that's why I'm afraid of hurting you. I-"_

_It's only been three years. It may be a long time, and they might be closer than they should, but it's only three years. The risk, she realises she's not willing to take. The love, she knows she's unworthy of being trusted. There was indeed a time where the string of his bow was backed up tightly, waiting for the right moment to make its debut into her chest. But to stay? Judging from the three years working together, she makes the decision that the territory stays with him._

_"Shush." She commands, almost amused. "You've had too much to drink, Clint. And I'm loaded with painkillers."_

_He understands. Maybe she _is_ starting to like this perspective after all, because they've never been more bare to the other. And they don't even need to be together._

**(Flashback)**

She's never said it back. _I love you._She's never said it back.

Even though she's more than happy that she had made the right decision against leaving, it's one thing to avoid admitting you love someone because you don't want to lose your best friend. It's another to already be together and still want to fight, with words, over who dominates the relationship. To prove who handles the line between work and pleasure, better, and who blurs it.

It's all her. He wasn't taught how to speak, or where to walk, or how to kill when he was a child. He wasn't taught how to leave behind his emotions when he had to. He learnt them later, like how normal people do. But her?

Natasha is taught to walk on the pinnacle of her trade. Whether to kill, or to love. Which knife, or which gun, or which poison. Looking back, he only laughs along. Puts on a little smile when he tells her he loves her and she only kisses him back. When it's your best friend, little things like that don't matter, right?

No. He's not just her best friend. He's more than that. Clint is her lover. Clint is the person that puts her world on its axis. Clint is the person that carries her home when she's drunk on her past. Clint is the person that loves her with passion. Clint is the person, if she forgets how to swim, he'll teach her instead of reeling her in to safety.

Clint is who she destines to be. Not Black Widow, the killer with a body count that, if made known, can scare a city into submission to her feet in plead to spare their lives. Not Natalia Romanova, the girl with a handheld past. The altered past. But, Natasha, or better known as Nat, the one that finds comfort in being manhandled. The one that can love and not sin. The one that doesn't need to be the jack of all trades. Not a queen. But, free. Liberated.

So she's never said it back to him ever since that night. Realising only now, there's not enough time. There's barely enough time. Life is slithering from him, and his body is just a shell. She'll give anything to have him back, telling her he loves her so she can say it back just as much. Nobody ever knows, they might not be here tomorrow.

Natasha chokes back her tears. No more crying. No more tears. She doesn't need to make another scar in this town. Coming back with her heart on her sleeve, just the way they'd left it the first time she came here, she walks up the carpeted steps and into the hallway, finally knocking on the door.

Opening the door wide open is a petite old lady, around her sixties, with bushy grey hair tied into a low ponytail. She wears a head dress that matches the woven clothing, taken from the urban-style. The woman looks on with dark, spell-binding eyes but complements it with a warming smile. "What brings you here, dear?"

So that's why Clint loves talking to her. Auntie Sal's voice is fairly inviting, full of comfort and warmth. Clint. It brings a pang to her chest, and a bigger one comes in a bashing wave when the scent of elderflower hits her nose. The smell of his clothing... She downplays a slight flinch and struggles effortfully with a welcoming smile. "Auntie Sal, I'm Natasha." She introduces herself, choking on her next line. "Clint's fiancée. You know, the one that used to stay above you? I'm here to visit you, on behalf of Clint."

Auntie Sal's eyes light up at the sound of his name. It's probably been months since she's heard his name around here. She gestures Natasha in with a pleasant smile. "Please, take a seat!"

_**-cookies!-**_

It had been just any ordinary day, with Clint lying motionless in the hospital bed and the ventilators and machines creating all sorts of monotonous sounds that can lull a person to dreadful sleep. Natasha hadn't told anyone where she had went, which was a cause of worry for the rest of the team. Now, they put it as second priority while doctors and nurses turn Clint's room into a complete whir.

The team gets shoved and pushed around and out of the way abruptly as they stand in stun. One second he was fully clothed, and the next, the whole room is tossed into a frenzy of nurses rushing to and fro with medication and equipment, and the doctors are scissoring off all layers of his clothing to leave his chest bare.

The monitor sirens are wailing hysterically, with his usually near inactive ECG suddenly spiking into an overly fast pace. The doctors are screaming about a "V-Tach". According to Bruce's instant reaction, he calls it a ventricular tachycardia. It carries on for a few seconds, soon subsiding into a dreadful asystole. Simply put, as Bruce explains to them, Clint's heart stopped from an arrhythmia.

Should they be happy that his heart is finally responding? Or should they be worried out of their heads that Clint is flatlining right in front of them? The doctors continue with his external defibrillation to no avail, turning up the charges while the nurses keep track of his fifteen minute window of survival.

Several surgeons start to clear the operating room, scrubbing into their gear. Giving up on the defib pads, one of the doctors climb over Clint and does continuous CPR, to start his heart again, as the nurses pull the needles from his skin and wheel him into the theatre.

"Seven minutes down! We need cardio, stat! Patient requires open-heart defib!" That doctor yells out, pressing into Clint's ribs to start his heart again, even if it means breaking them. "Come on, agent. Don't die on us now." She says between gritted teeth.

They all soon disappear into the operating room, leaving the team stranded in bits, outside. Pepper starts to tear up and cry, with Tony glancing at the rest of them as he holds her tightly. "He's going to be alright, Pepper." That's what he says. Thor, Steve and Tony watch Bruce, hoping for some optimistic response.

Maybe all of them just don't believe these words of comfort either.

_**-cookies!-**_

Two blonde haired children, with their dazzling blue eyes, twins, squeal as they watch a children's show on the TV. Natasha watches them with a featherlight grin. She can almost feel their optimism radiating into her pores. Soon, Auntie Sal carries two cups of her morning brew out from the kitchen and sets them on the table, one in Natasha's hands.

"So," Auntie Sal rasps with a slight chirp. "How is Clint? I've been keeping his apartment tidy, like I'd promised."

Natasha sips on the lukewarm brew in her hands, deliberating her reply. "Pleasant. He's been overseas at work for a few months now, but he says he's coming home fairly soon. He tells me that he'll come back here again when he's back. Says he hasn't visited you in a long time!" A lie, the only one she can manage because the truth can't reach her lips. Clint's cold, and dead, and obviously not improving in that bed he's been laying in for a little over two months now. He's lifeless, not walking around in the streets of Moscow, tailing his target.

When her voice is about to waver, she sips on the brew again. The diminutive lady chuckles joyfully, sipping on hers too. "It is nice to know that the kid hasn't changed a bit, and that he's doing well." Natasha feigns the same amount of happiness, pulls it off perfectly, and replies with a quiet 'yeah'.

"Auntie Sal? How did you meet Clint?" She asks. The old lady sighs, then shakes her head with a frown. "He was a fifteen-year-old kid, defenceless. It was just by the alley where I found him beaten delirious, blood everywhere. The other kid, the one beating him up, Clint kept saying it was his brother. Kept mumbling 'No! Don't call the cops. My brother is a good man.' and I was worried sick about whether he had a concussion."

"So, I carried him in and set him on that couch," She points at the dull coloured sofa across the room where the two kids are sitting. "and asked him where I could contact his parents. He didn't exactly reply me, but he went on and on about how something was his fault. The way his past collided with such brutality, I have to say, he's actually the survivor. Ever since that night, in which he swore us to secrecy of the night's events after he was well awake, I made him my son. Took care of him for the next few years until he could stand on his two feet without diving back down."

"Well, enough about me, dear." Auntie Sal finally laughs. "Clint always talks about you. So how are you? Is he treating you well?" Natasha smiles sweetly with a nod, heart aching like a throb in her temple. She's feeling horrible. She's feeling stranded, like those characters in Lost. And Clint? Her chest constricts easily. "Well. We're doing... well."

Auntie Sal nods with content. She throws a glance to the two twins sitting on the couch. "Those two are my grandchildren. Clint has seen them before. He loves them, and talks about having children quite a bit." She calls the kids over, calling out their names.

Naomi and Niall. The shaggy-haired four-year-old climbs right onto Auntie Sal's lap, while his twin, Naomi, holds her arms out in front of Natasha. She leans down and picks her up to settle her on her lap, and the little girl smiles proudly, crystal blue orbs reflecting the divine child-like innocence. Naomi then chuckles, bringing a smile onto Natasha's lips itself.

"Yeah..." She grins inwardly, continuing with a tinge of sadness in her voice. "He asks me about it too, but he prefers to stay a man of virtue. He keeps saying he wants to marry me first. But... Yeah, we are, soon." Natasha has seen him with children countless of times, and the joy etched on his face just makes her heart flutter. He has his way with children the way she has hers. So they /have/ talked about it, both the good and the bad.

Both of them live their days by the hour, all right down to the second that distinguishes them from life and death. A second between a bullet shot and when brain matter bursts from the perfect hole in their heads. A second between a beating heart and a still cardiac muscle. A second between breathing and losing.

To be parents, it's every couple's dream. But can people like them, people that roll the dice in every occasion they pick up their weapon and head out, ensure their life to their child? No, they can't, so that's why it isn't exactly an option.

Natasha strokes the little girl's hair over and over, playing with little smirks and grins when Naomi stares intently at her with soulful connection. Slowly, she starts to pull into a playful frown that makes her face muscles ache, and pout her lips ever so slightly. Irresistibly, the little girl engulfs herself in happiness of a new friend.

When her phone rings, she settles the girl down on her seat and walks over to a quieter corner to answer it, away from their eyes. One voice from outside this house just hits her with realisation, and from there, things undoubtedly go south. Before Natasha even knows it, the line ends and her hands are numb, weak and trembling. "Dear god-" She paces, trying hard to keep the feeling in her feet too. The phone almost slips from her hand.

Her breathing starts to quiver, and all her muscles start to turn sore. The one thing about her now is that, somehow, her eyes are dry from tears even though they burn like hell. She's out of tears to shed, and she's at loss of what to do.

"Everything alright, dear?" The old lady calls from the table.

Breathe, Natasha. Breathe. In, then out. In, then out. It isn't helping! The words are just stumbling over each other in her head. "Something came up, and I- I really have to go! I'm sorry!" She does it quick, then runs right out the door without acknowledging her soft goodbyes. There are just more things to put in priority now, if she can find a cab.

_**-cookies!-**_

Clint's damage control had went on for 94 straight hours, with doctors stepping in and out by the progressing hours with their gloves bloody and their scrubs bloodier. The somber looks on their faces as they worked in cycles had been undeniably worrying. And for God's sake, it was Clint's blood on their hands! The lifeblood of the person she never had enough time to cherish. Make memories.

If it was called taking a turn for the better, one of the scrub nurses had said on her way out that for Clint to have lasted a day cracked wide open on a table and prodded with scalpels and other materials, it was something to feel optimistic about.

So, after 94 hours of Fate's cruelty, and arguments and silent crying, it was surrender. Fate had surrendered and returned Clint to where he belonged, all patched up and waiting to be opened like a Christmas present.

"His heart is weak, and we've pumped him on sedatives to knock him out for a few days. If he's smooth sailing for the next 24 hours, he's going to be just fine." Says the doctor who has Clint wrapped up in so much gauze that there's barely any skin left to see other than his face. He pats Natasha on the shoulder when her worried expression doesn't change. "He's lived through the worst, Agent Romanov. Although it is a fact that Agent Barton will be in a lot of pain when he wakes up, he's all well and better now. He's stronger."

They all believe the doctor, and watch Clint's monitors closely for the essential hours until the doctor confirms again that he's definitely out of the woods. Tony invites them out to the cafeteria for drinks, knowing that they can only cheers on mineral water and sandwiches, while Natasha doesn't move from her side of the bed.

She finds his rough fingers with one hand, and she smiles at the warmth. Finally, he isn't cold anymore. He's Clint, and that just reminds her of the man that blurted the words out from their third year together. The man with the duck story, in which she will ask him to tell her when he wakes up.

Her other hand travels to his face. She recognises every pore in his skin, every bump and wrinkle. She recognises the way he usually feels warm under her fingertips, and it's just like today.

So they get a happy ending. They get the house on the hill, and the brunette haired children with his beautiful eyes. They get the sweet vows that represent endless love. The happy ending. Natasha, like the rest of the team, is just waiting for him to wake up, and when the family of doctors and nurses are there to watch his eyes finally flinch and flutter open...

"Who are you?" His voice rasps quietly, almost voiceless from inactivity. The feeling in her chest sinks, and her heart drops to her stomach. But... It's just the haziness from the long sleep. She's done these loads of times with him. Even the doctors say so.

"Hey. You're awake." She manages a smile. "I'm Natasha, your partner. Do you remember me?" She speaks in a small, hoarse voice. There is a quick flicker of recognition, which she doesn't miss, in his eyes. "Natasha..." He repeats, nodding. Clint's eyes wander around the blank white room, light bright from the ceiling that it accents the clear, saltwater green colour of his irises. "W-Where am I?" _The infirmary_, she replies warmly. He jumps at the sound of her voice, and his suddenly alert eyes dart back to stare at her like as if she was an enemy.

"Who are you?"

* * *

**TBC TBC TBC! **

**i'm starting to doubt that that flashback was necessary. or that it made any sense at all! but i just reaaaally wanted a kissing scene, and a Clint breakdown and the reason why he's always here and there and everywhere about wanting to keep her safe. so... MR. FLASHBACK was born! and... cliffy(: and it was extra long...**

**please review if you can! on your favorite line or sentence or scene. what you liked or disliked. (:**


	8. Chapter 8: Even The Stars, They Burn

**A/N: your chapter. a happy chapter! (at last!) i'm thinking this story has about one or two more chapters to go before it reaches its time. but, forget that(: happy reading! i'll go to sleep now because this chapter took me up till 7AM to complete. but i'm pretty contented with this! hope you feel the same way too!**

**disclaimer: what's zero in chinese? i completely fail my papers at that language! **

* * *

She looks in the mirror and thinks... _Who am I?_ With the wild, fiery scarlet hair and the tear-stained face. _Who am I?_ She isn't the Black Widow. Or Natasha Romanov. Well, not to Clint. Her name burns in his head like tragic fire, then extinguishes within seconds and he's back to square one. _Who am I?_Maybe that, Natasha thinks, is what she doesn't know at all if Clint doesn't too.

Natasha can feel her heart fall and crash over and over again, slicing clouds and creating destructive flames. Why?

When you love someone that holds such credible place in your heart, they are a part of you, if not a whole. Each embrace, each kiss, each touch, shared. You love someone so much that the impossible becomes possible. That's the way she loved Clint. So, how can Natasha be okay, be fine, when she can only watch Clint be stripped of their every tear and smile that they held together?

When you love someone like she loved him, to an extent that it hurts without salvation, you surrender. She does surrender, with tears trickling down her face. She surrenders, knowing that he doesn't know her anymore. That for some ridiculous and unanswerable reason, Clint left her behind. And that, when one half of her is gone like he is, is when she stops knowing who she is, herself.

So, who is she? To Clint? To Tony? To Steve? Who is she? Is she a girl wrapped in a vortex of presidential beauty? Is she the world's most renowned assassin? Is she the woman, the agent, that has been working with Clint Barton? Or, is she the person that doesn't trust enough?

She doesn't exactly know. Is she, or is she not? _He_doesn't exactly know either. Is she an enemy? Or is she a friend? What's her name? Clint asks her that again and again and again, and it's killing her with each question he forgets and asks the second time. Then, the third. After, the fourth.

It just continues until she's had enough, where she'll stand up on near-flaccid legs and struggle to leave the room with a seemingly constipated expression on her face while she holds back tears and sobs.

When she doesn't take any chances with listening to the doctors anymore, after all that had happened from Clint's death, to his hypothermia, and finally the green light after his surgery, Bruce comes to explain the symptoms to Natasha. She's sitting outside his room, right on the same bench of chairs that she had sat on two months ago, thinking he was dead. Bruce looks into the room through the window and sees the gravely bandaged man staring up at the ceiling in distinct confusion.

"How are you?" He asks, hand on her shoulder as he sits down. He's not the outspoken man, unlike Tony, so maybe the silent response is what they both appreciate. Natasha sits with her legs tucked up on the chair, the grooves of her shoes as frictional support on the edge, and her head rests over the cushion of her two arms crossed over her knees.

She whines eventually, expressing her tire. "Well, the doctors came to a conclusion today, after half a month of discussing with the rest of the doctors around the globe. Clint is..." Bruce deliberates on his choice of words, making sure that they aren't too direct or too sophisticated, nor too sympathetic. "He had a head injury, and... His lack of recollection of his past is a symptom of retrograde amnesia. The injury was severe, so he might only recall things like his name, the things he revises in his head everyday before the incident."

Silence. He wonders compulsively if he should continue or not. "Well... As for his lack of ability to form memories, the transition of a memory from short-term to long-term memory, they call it the anterograde amnesia. Both symptoms seldom develop together, and there are barely five cases reported, but Clint's head scans came back slightly damaged."

"Severely damaged." Natasha revises.

Bruce squeezes her shoulder supportively. This isn't the girl he hulked out on last year. She wasn't that dark, twisty and timid. "It's just going to be temporary. The swell will go down and he'll be back to normal within weeks. Don't you worry."

"And what if it doesn't?" She looks up and glares at him with hopelessness and self-directed anger. "What if, like all the other times, he just gets thrown more and more problems to handle by himself?"

"There hasn't been a permanent case since the illness was discovered. Even so, it's just a one percent-"

"Just one percent? Like how it was a one percent that he was made in Mexico? One percent that they threw him in the sea and was left for dead? One percent that he developed hypothermia over all those injuries and didn't wake up for two months?" She ticks off with her sore fingers. They look like they've been in fists for ages that the palms of her hands have crescent fingernail depressions.

"One percent, Bruce. One percent that he'd forget everything and screw up his brain. I'm not confident with the one percent that this isn't be permanent and that he'll remember all of us."

"And that one percent where he wakes up from a sudden motivation and decides to pull through his hypothermia? That happened, didn't it?" He holds her gaze steady, firmly. Yet, the memory of how he knew that Clint had barely gotten out of that so-called improvement, alive, it shakes him to the bone.

"Do you see the way he looks at us? And at me, a person that he's known for six years? I look into his eyes sometimes and see that flicker of recognition in them, and then it's gone and he thinks I'm there to kill him!" Natasha says, letting her fingers rake through her curls abruptly with agitation.

There's a certain kind of sadness in her eyes, and she looks away when she notices Bruce frowning ever-so-slightly at her outburst. Finally, she lets out a breathy, hesitant but dead comment. "Some days, the torment I see behind his cluelessness makes me think that he'd rather be cold and dead with his hypothermia."

"He'd never, Natasha." Bruce's eyes widen for a second before he regains his composure and continues. "You should know that better than me."

Natasha uses his shoulder as a pillow and rests her cheek on him, squeezing her eyes shut tightly. "I don't know, Bruce. I don't know his head anymore." Did she just groan? Bruce slings a friendly arm over her shoulder, looking at the blank, frowning man in the ward bed through the darkly tinted windows. "Don't give up on the guy. I bet he's trying to remember, too."

"I won't, and that's my duty, to help him until I end up in tears and leave the room in seek of solace." She expresses openly. An upgrade! "Thanks to all of you for deciding to leave his cruel memory to mess with me." Her eyes narrow teasingly, and she pettily shrugs his arm off her shoulders.

"Ow, harsh!" Bruce mocks in feign hurt. Then, almost matter-of-factly, he explains his intentions with a light laugh. "He's your fiancé, and that's called a little privacy. Also, you don't know how much effort it took for all of us to prevent Tony from bursting into the room and ruining your bonding time." Natasha rolls her eyes subtly. Typical Tony. "Now go, you've got a very important duty." He pushes her to get off the seat.

Before walking back into the ward again, Natasha turns around and the doorway to look at Bruce. "Thank you, Bruce. Really." She says sincerely to her friend. A brother. He nods courteously at her words of gratitude. "I don't trust theirs, but I do trust your one percent."

_**-cookies!-**_

Every time he looks at her, that woman with the scarlet red curls and the mesmerising emerald eyes, he gets this sense of protectiveness that runs through his veins. An odd feeling to protect the woman whose face is one of the only few memories he sustains, but name he cannot recall.

She must have been a significant person in his life, because the feeling is strong. It feels like it weighs over the scientific scales of measurement, like it's something stronger. Each glance at her, no matter how cautious or cruel or confused, never fails to send a tide of possessiveness to crash into him, some stronger than the others whenever her eyes are sad, or when her voice sounds dead and there are shades of purple beneath her eyes.

That feeling, it's more like a... an invisible tether. The unexplained connection, devised to hold them together no matter how far apart, pulls at him if she tugs the rope. He can feel it. For three seconds, at least, before he completely forgets.

It's like waking up. One minute you're happy, then another you're sad. It's like having a bipolar disorder. And when she says her name... Her name... Her name was... It was... Ugh! That's the problem. The biggest wound of all is that he can't remember her name! N-Nat... Or was it Tasha? Wait... Maybe it was... Naya? No, it sounds wrong. It was, uh... Nat...asha? Natasha! Yes, her name was Natasha, and count on his mind to forget it in three, two, one.

It sucks when his mind reboots every five seconds. Just when he's about to grab hold of a memory, it slips away, right from his mind. It works like a silent thief, this severe amnesia of his, as it sneaks around and confiscates everything he should know. Well, at least he knows his name is Clint.

Yet, dissatisfaction smacks him in the face whenever he can't identify the beautiful lady shedding mournful tears for him. Isn't he putting her through so much pain? She, her face, takes up seventy percent of all memories he can retain within him for some reason.

The first one, if he recalls correctly, is when he sits atop a building with a bow in his left hand, and an arrow to the taut string in his right. He's an archer? Anyway, he watches her sleep so soundly under her duvet through the open window of her hotel room. It vaguely looks like a place in Hungary. After an extended moment of silence, he puts his weapon down and leaves. The memory ends right there.

Then, the scene in front of him appears to be in a cell. Or a... a housing facility. It probably isn't a cell, and more of a high-tech sleeping headquarters, judging from the equipment he can place. The red-headed woman is seething, almost yelling at him about how he can't 'cop out on her like that' anymore. He's not allowed to, her independence be damned.

She must have meant something to him, a big something, because his arms are so openly willing to accept her fighting, psychologically self-mortifying demeanour. They wrap around her soul, harder when she tries to push him away, screaming, in octaves higher than he'd expect, to let go until she resorts to begging.

"Please, Clint! Please, just let go off me! I can't take it!" She cries, losing strength in her arms. She can't take the guilt, especially when he's smothering her with his live flesh. Warm and beating. He just says no, immediately feeling warm tears seep through his shirt. She doesn't fight anymore.

And then, there's them. His head is pounding and he's somehow drunk. The familiar woman stands in front of him and listens to him say something before her lips connect with his. He's kissing this unnamed woman in his memories, and he doesn't know why. Are they sensual? Does he love her? Does _she_love him?

He doesn't know, but still, it's among the memories that he thinks about the most.

Then, there's the burning question in his head, waiting for the perfect answer. Who is she? Why does he have a feeling he knows her so well?

_**-cookies!-**_

_**FOUR WEEKS LATER:**__**  
**_  
Love is a bullet. It hits you when you least expect it, and somewhere in that entry, it leaves a hole. The bullet can ricochet under your skin and leave your bones destroyed, for all you know. But once the love is gone, like memory, it rips open an exit wound for you to bleed from both hollowed sides.

Love is a scar. It mends on the surface, but it never goes away completely. Time can be like bleach, wiping away everything, but it will only sear the wound. It will still leave a scar. Scars. It doesn't represent weakness, but it represents strength. Losing love is just another lesson you never forget.

Love is a battle. You fight like hell to win the war, and you may get tired or deprived, but that doesn't mean you wave the white flag. Funny thing about this is, when love starts to slip, you fight. You fight it with bravery and with risk, even if it hurts. At the end of the day, the battle cry you hear is an achievement. It says: You tried.

So, Natasha takes the bullet, and she takes the scars. She fights the battle, and what is she now? After the following four weeks of lasting chats with her amnesiac fiancé, only being able to remember movements instead of words, and sometimes almost giving up, she has learnt to be a survivor, the will, and the soldier.

"Hawkeye. SHIELD. Archer." Clint repeats, finding more interest in Natasha's flawless locks that he plays with her hair with his fingers. He twirls the tresses of her loose, scarlet updo with his finger, flinching subtly at the tugging pain in his ribs when he moves nearer, and repeats again. "Hawkeye. SHIELD. Archer... Friend?" The man adds unsurely.

His wavering tone, when he makes that addition, invites a melodious chuckle from her to lighten the silent atmosphere. "Of course." Natasha assures softly. "You really like my hair, don't you?" She muses, pulling her face into a comical frown and sideward grin that accents on the right.

"You kept it longer, compared to what I can remember. The colour is brighter too." Clint replies easily, feeling almost proud that he remembers those little things. "Can you sing?" She stifles a laugh with the back of her hand. Can she sing? "Maybe."

She remembers how Clint used to say that the world would stop to listen whenever she starts to sing. Sometimes he serenades her, and then she can't stop thinking that he had placed that compliment on the wrong person. Maybe it's the job description, that you have to be able to sing in case you're needed to work undercover in a burlesque club or a countryside lounge.

And with that, his forty seconds are due and she waits for his psychological system to kick start again.

"I'm Natasha, your partner and your friend." She repeats, for the two hundred and twenty-seventh time that day, the words that will eventually bring her to some heart-wrenching, tear-jerking, stress-inducing hopelessness like it never fails to. "Remember those things, I'm going to give you a test later." Natasha jokes with a pointing finger, then continuing to pick at his stubby fingers. He hasn't worn his archery gloves in a long time.

Clint sighs, keeping still. This is one of his quieter moments, where he feels the lack of need to talk at all and that tormenting himself with nameless memories is a better idea. As Natasha has learnt from many occurrences every day, she doesn't want to look him in the eyes just yet. They just reflect the almost hopeless being in him.

Natasha can feel his gaze leave hollows in her skull. Slowly, he wraps the same lock of her hair around his finger in silence. "You're a... Your alias is Hawkeye. You work with SHIELD. You're an archer." _Hawkeye. SHIELD. Archer._

"You have a preference... for strawberry ice cream, over chocolate, because I smeared it on your face once after a mission. And... you enjoy sitting on the edge of high-rise buildings for some reason that you never tell me."

"Suicide?" Clint chokes. "Everyone just leaves like how you walk out the door sometimes. It's enough guilt to watch them go and know you're the existing problem. Who loves trouble, right? Then, you'll want to take Trouble away."

He plays with her hair numbly, noticing that the tresses that frame her face are brushing her shoulders now. Her hair has certainly grown longer because she can pull it into a messy knot. Also, her curls are slightly looser too, almost wavy. How long has it been again?

"But everybody hurts, whether you leave or not. It feels like that right now, because everybody that told me they'd stay, they left. Did I tell you that before?"

That leaves her stunned. By his words, by his... openness. Not that he wasn't open to talking to her in the past. They just didn't really feel the pressing need to talk about how brutal the past was. In the very end, the two of them just end up stealing each other's Chinese takeaway and sitting on roofs for no given reason.

So when he says it, the reason, she has no words. Not an utter. No voice, no nothing. He's trouble? Oh god, the irony. He wasn't the one running around with a body count above hundred, drawing exploited attention to his existence that Fury had to have SHIELD's best archer hunt him down in a foreign country!

Trouble? How about writing that name down and tagging it proud and large across her chest? It's far more reasonable like that. Although cross at her significant other for labelling himself like that, her lips can't bear to form any harsh words, let alone _one_word. She firstly manages with mouthing a 'what?', and honestly, it sounds more like a whimper.

Oh, the helplessness. The sudden feeling of weakness that her want to puke. The one that makes her lips shiver and her eyes tear. "Clint..." Natasha exhales with genuine affliction. The intensity of hurt that is shown on her face, with her knitted brows and the anguished lines, feels just as painful in his chest, where his heart is.

She pulls herself away from him and stands up, the back of her hand lingering over her nose and pursed lips. Just like that, the lock of her hair slips right from the gaps in-between his fingers, and it feels like she's left. Like all the others. His mom. His dad. Barney. All of them left!

And now, she left, too.

She left…

She left..

She left.

And that petrifying hole in his chest tears right open as he torments himself with the departure. He's hurt. "I'm trying! I look at you and I try. I try so hard to remember that my head hurts because there's this feeling inside of me, telling me that you'll leave, too, if I don't! All I want is for someone to stay, for once, and that want tramples right over me every single time." Clint's voice is clipped with frustration, and a fear of something bigger than him. Something that pushes him to the edge.

His chest tightens, and his throat thickens. The signs of flight. "I just need somebody to stay, just this once." Words strangled, he just gives up. Clint is seeing the way his need of affection and motivational presence is affecting Natasha. No, his mind says he doesn't want her hurt.

"But I'd rather be dead and need nothing from you, than to be alive and watch you suffer like _this_. I'm hurting you, aren't I? I'm being selfish. I'm sorry..." Then, as his eyes cloud over to stare into nothingness, she watches his memory burn away again. Listening to his words replay itself over and over again in her head, she knows she doesn't want to walk away.

She wants to be there. Even the stars, high up, they burn. They burst into exuberant flames and extinguish like water to the fire. Finally, some fall to the earth. Well, not literally. Reconnect the words to the daily lives of humanity; everyone has their own worst days, and their dark moments. She can't walk away just because Clint is stumbling through one of his. He's been beside her all along when she needs him and when she doesn't like it's some unspoken rule with God.

As he lies there, dazed, Natasha walks back over, leans forward and kisses him gently, nipping his lip. Her forehead lingers on his for a memorable second before she pulls apart and, like the hand that cups a side of his face, their gazes connect. She watches his glassed-over eyes and deep down, she knows that he knows her. He really does. It's just getting a little hard to make it surface. He does want to make her proud.

When Clint looks alert again, and he's about to shoot his mouth off once more, she cuts right in, in a delicate whisper. "I'm Natasha, your partner, and I'll never leave, because I love you, no matter what."

He'll forget it in about... Thirty-nine. Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven seconds, and counting...

_**-cookies!-**_

_"You're a spy, not a soldier. Now you want to wade into a war. Why? What did Loki do to you?" He inquires, concerned. Her intentions, her actions, they are invalid. Completely unexplained.__  
_

_Other than sending him on to her, did that damned demigod do anything to Natasha? She rarely, and almost never, acts on impulse like that. She cherishes her longevity more than that than to become a soldier, firing at front line in war.__  
_

_"He didn't. I just..." Then she pauses. She doesn't know what to say. What can she say? Natasha doesn't exactly know why she's doing it, either. Or maybe she doesn't want to know because it's too brutal for her.__  
_

_(A/N: OKAY. I can't find any video clips of this next part of the scene, and I only know what he said but not what he did! So, I'm putting this the way I completely prefer.)__  
_

_His eyes filter through her unease, and finally, from averting his vision to the hand nearest to him, Clint brushes over it with his. "Natasha..." He gasps. Loki must have did something to her. Took something, or said something. Implied something. Something that would instill such fear in her.__  
_

_She takes a deep, confident breath, then looks at him with discipline. "I've been compromised. I've got red in my ledger, I'd like to wipe it out." They both know it isn't the case.__  
_

_That night, after Tony's shawarma dinner date even though they're all battered and bruised and completely beat, they pay it with passion. They pay their distance with passion on their lips, and Natasha straddling him over his hips, until the throb in her chest makes the woman, with a heart seemingly replaced for a stone in her chest, cry.__  
_

_Natasha starts with hitched breaths and averted attention, sorrowful tears pooling over her lids until they drip down her face and moisten his skin. He notices immediately, and even as she pushes to feel his tender lips to keep her tethered and together, Clint firmly asks her what's wrong, a hand at her cheek.__  
_

_He's looking right into her eyes to make her bare her soul. It's all behind closed doors, with walls that shouldn't have ears and skies that shouldn't have eyes. She prevents it, a change in her game. Of course, Natasha is afraid of him.__  
_

_He remembers every hook, punch and kick that had left bruises on her skin. He memorises every fatal blow, every wield of the dagger and every use of his bow intended and executed on her, intent on making that living and beating heart of hers, stop. Clint detests himself for that. How could he even _think_ of wanting Natasha dead, when he's been trying to keep her alive all along? He just can't-__  
_

_"Nat, please! Trust me. Feel me. Tell me." He pleads. One thing Clint hates more than himself is seeing her morph into the epitome of a victim, his victim, right in front of his eyes. He has never wanted Natasha to become his victim, not since the night that he'd disarmed his bow and decided to spare her life (And that is, by far, the best decision he knows he has, and will ever make).__  
_

_She starts crying harder, sobbing harder, and it takes him long, far longer than it suits his taste, to soothe and comfort her into ease. Clint makes sure that she's affirmed of how he is real. That he's not one of Loki's jokes, sent there to seduce then silence her when she's at her weakest. Loki's methods are completely beneath the man he wants to be, for her. Eventually, when her emotional balance is at equal halves, Natasha explains everything to him.__  
_

_It's not as simple as a kid stealing toys at the playground around the corner. Loki /took/ him from her feeble grasp and plotted him against his own will, as a form of martyrdom for the both of them. And it kind of worked. Loki managed to take away the only thing Natasha ever really felt for, the only thing she felt she owned.__  
_

_Her name is written all over Clint. To a certain point of possessiveness for the both of them, there was, somehow, an unwritten and unsaid rule that declared them both the belongings of the other, and no one else. With Loki taking away Clint like that, she feels completely violated of her property. Of her... feelings. Genuine, real-to-a-terrible-fault feelings.__  
_

_A kid, having a stolen toy, will just cry because it's gone. Because he has one toy short to play with. But with Clint, it's completely different. Loki messed her up, made her fear over the things and the people she ever truly trusted._

_Her tears are for what Loki did. Her tears are for her inability to distinguish between what to trust and what she mistrusted. They are for her stupidity, unable to decide whether she should fear or she should trust, the confusion. They are for the unspeakable reasons for fearing him, which she knows she shouldn't.__  
_

_He listens with compassionate understanding. Then, he chuckles because he doesn't want to scare her further by making a neat, round dent in SHIELD's metal wall, the more inanimate-object abusing sight of him. He smiles, because he doesn't want to be their weaker half and start to shed tears of anger, and anguish, and sorrow. No, Clint wants to and has to be the stronger of them both, to be strong enough to lift both of them. It makes everything easier for her.__  
_

_He strokes Natasha's cheek with his thumb and wipes away the last of her lingering tears, and the last of those stains across her blood-warm cheeks. He shushes her dearly. If their impromptu over-shawarma plan today was to unrobe with their fingers and teeth, and have hot, sensual, needy sex, scratch it._

_He doesn't need that, as long as her smile is a little brighter and her spirits are a little lighter before she goes to sleep, within his embrace._

The undying throb in his head is terrible, so horrible that it startles him awake. It's merciless. Clint can feel the blood pulsing through the swollen, visible veins in his forehead. Everything underneath, his skull, his brain, it hurts like hell. It feels like a war stirring in his head, with guns and swords and pitchforks, pricking the insides of his brain until it spews clear, grey matter. Brain matter.

Clint squeezes his eyes shut tighter, ignoring the jolting bone-knocking pain in both his previously dislocated shoulders to press the bonier part of his palms into his temples. A groan quietly escapes his lips, and it's so god-awfully painful where it scratches in his throat. God! Does Natasha have any painkillers at all? Doesn't SHIELD provide morphine or something-

_Wait._His eyes shoot wide open. Natasha. He said Natasha in his head. And SHIELD. Natasha. Natasha Romanov. Natalia Romanova. The Black Widow. The woman that he'd granted life six years ago in Croatia. The woman that smeared strawberry ice cream on his face because he, jokingly, didn't want to taste it. The woman whom he bought the ring for, to propose.

He remembers. Clint remembers! And all those vague memories of his amnesia, the hurt he sees on Natasha's face, he can almost recall, and that kills him. _I'm Natasha, your partner, and I'll never leave, because I love you, no matter what._It is one of his clearest recollections, even though it has been a little over two weeks since she'd said it.

But, _oh god_. What complete crap did he tell her?

Disregarding for later, he remembers her best in how her hair is longer, brighter and straighter, and that almost jovial character of hers that he hasn't seen in months. And the ring on her finger, however it got there. Clint remembers it.

Natasha rests, tired and sleeping, at the side of bed. The way her serene expression rests on one of her arms and almost faces him, with the other of her two hands lingering over his thigh, leaves him comforted. At least tonight, she's feeling fine. And she'll feel fine again tomorrow and then for the rest of her life.

But, no. Even in darkness, he notices a streak down the more obvious side of her face. It glimmers when subtle light shifts over it. Tears. Of course, she'd been crying. Clint remembers a 40 second lapse where she had been talking about what ifs. What if he didn't recover? If he was the 'one percent'? Six weeks down, and obviously she'd be worrying about his condition.

Shifting his attention away from the throb in his head, Clint focuses on his hand. He focuses on _her_. He strokes Natasha's hair lightly, then her cheek, making sure he barely touches her. He would pull Natasha into a hug, kiss her, apologise to her, and kiss her again, and do it all over and over because all he wants to do is feel her and know that this is real. Yet, he doesn't want to wake her.

Content, and making sure that her jacket was covering her frame, he whispers her name on his lips because it feels amazing.

"Natasha." And he smiles.

* * *

**TBC! **

******so. Clint plus memory equals happy readers! but this gets an ending, and a Tony Stark. happy people click happy review button for a happy review for this happy cookie?(: too many happy's in a sentence. yup, i'm sleep deprived. **


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Avengers, Hurt-Comfort, Romance