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Deaf.
And Clint Barton is seven years old, and everything seems blurry and hazy, and he can’t quite understand words that well –
Deaf – been deafened –
And Clint Barton is twelve years old and he’s trying to read lips from the teachers at school, and Barney is trying to teach him sign language in his spare time, and his father still hits him when he’s had too much drink, and –
Hearing loss, equilibrium has –
And Clint Barton is twenty years old and he’s being told that active duty isn’t an option despite the fact that he’s proven himself at the range, despite the fact that his intuition is off the charts where any potential S.H.I.E.L.D. agent should be concerned –
Deaf.
And Clint Barton is thirty years old and he’s got a girl on the other end of his arrow, and his hearing aids short out at the exact moment that he’s supposed to release his bow because of course they do, and –
I’m deaf.
And Natasha Romanov looks at him strangely, as if after days of playing cat and mouse across the country it’s this of all things that she finally understands, is willing to break down her walls for, and puts down her gun and starts to sign.
***
[We deafened girls all the time. In the Red Room.] Or at least that’s what he thinks she says because although her lips are moving slowly, he doesn’t quite catch some of the words. He knows that she’s telling the truth, though, because he can see the way her shoulders are relaxed, the way the skin around her eyes has smoothed out in a form of nonverbal trust.
“Is that where you learned?” he asks, staring down at his palm, at the now useless aids lying flat in his hand. She shakes her head, moving to sit next to him on the bed.
[Can fix] she signs, prodding at the miniscule screws, before raising her head to look him in the eye. [If you want.]
And Clint Barton lets Natasha Romanov fix his ruined hearing aids, and he even trusts her enough to let her work without paying attention to make sure she’s not fitting them with miniature bombs or sharp blades, and he doesn’t exactly know why.
***
They have a short hand, and it works, until it doesn’t, until a blow to the side of the head knocks one of his aids clean out and causes him to become disoriented. He knows at this point that it’s a lost cause, especially given the amount of assailants he’s trying to battle, but he can still hear enough over the grunts and screams of pain to be functional. As he unleashes another arrow, he tries to concentrate on what he can make out of the words coming over the comm unit in his other ear, where one hearing aid still remains intact.
“Tasha.”
“Backup – left –“
“What?”
“Left,” she all but screams shrilly into his ear and Clint turns just in time to see a man with a mask descend from one of the far walls, his camouflage making him nearly invisible. He grabs an arrow and nocks it within seconds, releasing it into the man’s chest before he can get two steps forward, before a blur of red flies into his peripheral vision and gunshots permeate what remains of his senses.
She drops to her knees when she’s done, a huddled tangle of limbs between still sprawled out bodies, and glares up at him while wiping a hand across her face, smearing blood as her lips move furiously.
“What?” he asks again, yanking out his comm and his other aid, silence taking over in the wake of the fight. Two hands, both stained with red, start flying wildly.
[Where the fuck are your aids?]
He gestures guiltily towards the ground, too tired to actually explain the whole story, and Natasha huffs out a frustrated breath that he swears he can hear before dragging herself to her feet.
[You’re a mess] she signs while making a face, and he shrugs as he helps to pull her up, responding with his own fingers. She rolls her eyes, though there’s a noticeable smile creeping over her face that she can’t seem to hide.
[Yes, I know. You’re my mess.]
And Clint Barton lets Natasha Romanov walk him to the van waiting a few blocks over, and he lets her clean his injuries, and later when he’s sleeping off his mild concussion she brings him a pair of brand new hearing aids that she leaves by the side of the bed, where she waits until he wakes up.
***
At night they lie on the couch together wrapped in a web of their own bodies, and the television drones in the background, and even though he can’t hear it he doesn’t mind because it’s a comfort, a normalcy, a silence he likes because he can hear her laugh by the way that her breaths quicken against his stomach.
[Ask me anything] she signs against his bare chest, fingers lazily brushing against the Chinese take out boxes littering the coffee table. He thinks, then taps his fingers against her back, indicating for her to raise her head.
“You never told me how you learned.”
Natasha sits up fully, squares her jaw as if contemplating an answer that he thinks should probably be quite simple, and points to her face.
[Sign? Or lip reading?]
“Doesn’t matter,” he answers honestly and she keeps her head level, her mouth working slowly to form words, keeping their eyes locked together.
“Taught myself a basic alphabet to get by. All the girls did. To make us better assassins.” She stops, giving him time to process what he can of the sentence, and waits for him to nod his understanding before she continues.
“But I learned because of you.”
She lowers her head down to his sternum and he smiles a little crookedly as he flexes his fingers against her back, and her hands dance along the side of his collarbone, and she moves her mouth along his skin, a stream of communication that is and has always been uniquely and unequivocally theirs.
And Clint Barton lets Natasha Romanov tell him the one thing that he’s never needed to see on her lips, or watch with his eyes, or hear with his aids, and he waits until she’s finished before drawing his own response on her skin while she settles into his hold.
[I love you too.]