Archive of Our Own

They're supposed to have the weekend off: sleep in, not get dressed in anything but sweatpants and T-shirts for forty-eight hours. But the vacation days SHIELD gives out are more suggestions and if-it's-convenient than set in stone, especially for those Fury trusts to get the job done no matter what. So now it's 11 AM on Sunday, and instead of having a lazy morning in bed like they're supposed to, Clint and Natasha are sitting in the waiting area of London-Heathrow, like they have been for the past seven hours, killing time until their delayed connection to Vienna is ready to take off.

Natasha has read through the stack of magazines she bought in New York twice by now. She hasn't found a single thing that actually interests her in either of them, but at least she's gained small talk fodder to last her for hours. Clint's fiddling around with his phone, cursing under his breath, and they're allowing themselves the small indiscretion of entwining their fingers and resting their hands on the seat between them. Their mark is waiting for them in Vienna, and if someone knew where they’re going and followed them here all the way from New York, they'd be screwed anyway.

The waiting area is packed, people sitting and standing and leaning on their luggage, others hectically trying to orient themselves. There's a young woman a few feet away, looking particularly puzzled, glancing from her ticket to the display and back. Natasha can relate; airports are part of her daily routine, but she still finds them terribly confusing.

A little to their left, a man's raising his voice at a girl of maybe ten, presumably his daughter. People are already turning their heads to see what the turmoil is about, and soon it catches Clint's attention as well. He looks up, following Natasha's line of sight, watches with a frown as the father moves on to outright yelling and the girl starts to cry. Natasha's learned that, no matter how violent his day-to-day life is, something in Clint deeply objects when it's children. More than once she's seen him get in the face of a parent he's considered out of line, when they were out in private. But they're not. They're on the job, he's a professional, and they both know this is neither the time nor the place to draw attention. Nevertheless, she notices him shifting in his seat, trying to divert his attention back to his uncooperative phone, but glancing up on every other blink anyway.

Meanwhile, the father's working himself up further, calling the girl names Natasha wouldn't even use towards an adult while people rush past with their heads lowered. The girl only sobs harder the more he barks at her to stop. Even though the backhand straight across the girl’s face doesn't come entirely out of the blue, it still makes Natasha flinch in sympathy. Clint's seen it too; he doesn't react, but his grip on her hand tightens and he presses out a deliberately measured breath.

The father drags the girl away, her crying still audible to anyone who cares to listen. Natasha squeezes Clint's hand back, just this side of too hard to give him something else to focus on, until they're both out of sight.

***

The mission continues to be a clusterfuck. They find their hotel overbooked, have to find another one with another one with open vacancies. Adding the extra time to the delay that already has them way behind schedule, they’re left with no wiggle room left to catch up on some sleep, take a quick shower or get a good look at the area to figure out escape routes for when bad comes to worse. It shouldn't matter – the smuggler they're supposed to bust isn't exactly upper class, not likely to mind a whiff of sweat on his buyers or bring extensive backup. According to the intel, he happened upon leftover alien tech by accident and is now trying to get as much money as he can out of something he doesn't understand.

After the day they've had so far, Natasha isn't the least bit surprised when he doesn't show and they get ambushed at their meeting point instead. Murphy's law, she's read about that.

There's three of them, waiting in the shadows in awfully cliched black ski masks. Dilettantes, probably thinking they're sneaky while they could’ve just as well signaled their presence by shooting a flare gun into the sky from a mile away. She taps Clint's shoulder. He tenses just as soon as he gets a good look at her, reading her perfectly well and following her gaze while he reaches behind himself to get a hand on his gun. Natasha holds up three fingers, and he rolls his eyes and nods. Yeah, I saw that. Quietly, she readjusts her hold on the briefcase with the money, steps past him and takes point.

“Mr. Meyer,” she says, loudly, “are you there? We've got the money, forty thousand, as it said in your email.”

She's pretty sure the ski masks know how big a score they're in for here, but it can't hurt to dangle the potential payday in their faces once more, appeal to their greed and hope it makes them even sloppier. As if on cue, the first steps into the dimly lit alley, pressing a gun to her temple and reaching for the briefcase. It doesn't take her more than two well-aimed kicks to get him to the ground, one more to knock him out. Meanwhile, Clint's used the element of surprise to put ski mask number two out of commission, and Natasha's tempted to think that their luck might have actually turned.

That's when the remaining ski mask peels back his battered leather jacket to reveal the very piece of tech they're here to secure. It looks a little like a stun gun, small and with two wires protruding from a short barrel, dark blue, silver markings engraved all over it. His hands shake as he aims first at her, then at Clint, and back again.

“Hey,” says Clint, hands stretched out in a gesture of surrender as he positions himself in front of her. “No need to do anything stupid. We can still sort this out, right?”

Ski mask's hand sways back to aiming at Clint, and Natasha mentally curses him out. Truth is, were their positions reversed, she'd have done the exact same thing, offered herself as a target instead of him, but that doesn't mean she doesn't get to be angry. It's a stupid move, born out of protectiveness rather than strategic thinking. Something coils itself into a ball in her belly, anticipation of disaster, foresight, a bad feeling – whatever you want to call it.

Ski mask lowers his... well, gun, for lack of a better word, and runs a hand down his still-masked face, which Clint seems to mistake for a sign that the guy is indeed about to give up. He takes half a step forward, causing ski mask to panic and raise the alien weapon again. Natasha can't see a trigger or anything being pulled, but suddenly there's a cloud of green particles shooting out from it, dancing around Clint's head and upper body for a moment before they dissipate and fade away. Ski mask stares at the gun in obvious disbelief, like he expected a different outcome, and Natasha uses that moment of confusion to step in, knock it out of his hands and subdue him. She registers out of the corner of her eye how Clint shakes himself, blinks, and shakes leftover particles out of his hair. He doesn't seem hurt, but she hurries to assure herself of that, patting him down while he tries to bat her hand away.

“Hey, Nat, stop,” he protests, frowning as he takes hold of her wrist. “I'm okay. Doesn't even itch or anything.”

She eyes him suspiciously, squinting at the remainders of the cloud that still sparkle in his hair. It'd almost be a funny sight, but the bad presentiment in the pit of her stomach hasn't gone away yet. She doesn't feel like making fun of him while they set about hiding the three unconscious ski masks, or while securing the weapon before any conspicuous passers-by get a chance to call the cops.

***

By the time they're back at their hotel, the sky's already glowing orange and pink and there's a yawning clerk at the desk giving them the stink-eye. From the way she's rubbing her eyes Natasha concludes that she had herself a nap on her desk, and she doesn't blame her, but she can't manage to feel sorry either.

Once they're in their room, Clint announces that he's calling dips on the shower – the one who gets covered in pixie dust earns that right, he says, and glowers at her when she stops him with a hand on his chest.

“No. First, I need to collect some of these,” she says, pointing at the last leftover particles that still sit in his hair. They've stopped glowing, but alien tech is alien tech, and protocol demands they take samples.

Clint scowls some more, looking to all the world like an overgrown petulant teenager. But he shrugs his shoulders and holds still while she picks particles out of his hair with a pair of tweezers to put into one of the vials that come with the standard SHIELD medical kit.

She pulls up the mission report on her tablet while he's in the bathroom, sitting on the bed and searching for any hint of information that might show the higher-ups actually knew what they were sending them after – her and Clint have been told that it was unknown tech but then again, that's what everyone always says, and she's not dumb enough to think Fury even remembers what full disclosure means – but she comes up empty. If there's any info to be had, it's not in there. While she hears the water get turned off on the other side of the thin wall, she tries to convince herself that it doesn't matter, nothing happened, he's fine, they have the weapon, it's all good.

As good as she may be at lying and playing everyone else, she's never quite figured out how to believe the lies she tries to tell herself.

It becomes a whole lot easier to put all that out of her mind, though, when Clint steps out of the bathroom bare-ass naked, still wet and glistening, hair standing up in spikes. She raises an eyebrow, doing her best to keep a grin off her face.

“You've got plans for the rest of the night, I take it.”

He gives a little over-the-top gasp, runs a hand through his hair and leans against the door frame. “You think?”

She lets her eyes roam over his body, watches him watching her do it, knowing that's the whole reason he's presenting himself like that. His face doesn't give anything away though, and it's funny how, sometimes, when there's nothing at stake and it's just the two of them, he's better at playing pretend than she is. He's not going to get them started either; that is and always has been her move. She's asked him once why he does that, why he doesn't initiate, and after a minute of letting him fumble his way through an answer that involved her past and the way her work used to include seduction for a purpose and not wanting to push her, she had to shut him up with a kiss. As noble as his reasoning might be, it's nowhere near the truth – Natasha had quite a bit of sex as a means to an end, but she never had sex she didn't want.

Putting the tablet away, she slowly gets up and sashays over. Inches away from him, she stops, runs a finger down his chest, licks the water she collects off it and revels in the way his pupils widen.

“I should maybe grab a shower first, too. I stink,” she says, breaking eye contact to glance towards the bathroom contemplatively.

Despite the way his body betrays him – she's close enough to have noticed his breathing picking up a little, as well – he still doesn't bite. “I wouldn't say that, but hey, if you'd like. I think there's still enough hot water left.”

But she's had enough of this game, takes the last step forward and kisses him experimentally. He deepens it almost immediately, apparently tired of playing around, too. She grinds against him, a hand on each of his hips, pulling him towards her until she feels him harden. She has half a mind to just drop her pants and do it right here, hard and fast against the wall, but it's been a long day, and she's tired. She knows he is too, and it's not a bad option, but right now simply not what she wants. Wriggling one hand between their bodies and wrapping it around his cock, not stroking, just drawing lazy circles around the head with her thumb, she breaks the kiss, pressing their foreheads together.

“Bed?” she simply asks, and Clint nods. Another quick kiss, and then she takes his hand, leading him to the bed and stepping out of her pants and underwear along the way. Once he's let himself plop down, she straddles him, not lining up yet, and pushes to make him lie back. She undoes her blouse and discards it, her bra follows, and he groans, hands coming up to palm her breasts for a moment before he twists away to reach for his travel bag. She hears a condom wrapper being ripped open, waits while he rolls it on.

The fucking itself is artless, a testament to how exhausted they both are, but Natasha almost likes this better. It's more intimate, the way he moves in her with need, but no urgency, head thrown back and pressed into the pillow, eyes closed, his hands loosely gripping her thighs as she rides him. She takes them off, entwines their fingers and makes him bear her weight, giving her more room to move as she pleases. Her orgasm sneaks up on her, the kind that slowly spreads from her core and takes her breath away, and she feels him pick up on that, thrusting up and opening his eyes. His gaze is pinned to hers while she finally ups their pace, and she watches his face screw up with the effort of holding his own climax at bay until she's reached hers.

Afterwards, she slides off him, and once he's thrown the condom into a bin next to the nightstand, she fits herself into the space he makes for her, lying back with his arm spread wide. She falls asleep with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat while he draws circles on the small of her back with his fingertips.

***

Natasha wakes to the sun warming her back, the thick European blanket having fallen from her hips, leaving most of her body exposed to the otherwise chilly air of their hotel room. She yawns, stretches out like a cat on a balcony, just that little bit sore in all the right places. She reaches out to touch the body next to her, assuring herself of his presence even before she bothers to open her eyes and see, smiles to herself when she feels him shift and turn around to face her.

When she does look at him, she’s recoiling so fast she almost propels herself off the bed.

The man next to her isn’t Clint. It’s hardly even a man. Underneath the cover on the other side of the bed, the one she’s rapidly distancing herself from as far as she can without jumping right out, lies a teenager of maybe sixteen or seventeen years. He’s naked as far as she can tell, and staring back at her with both worry and horror. The expression is familiar, eerily so, and she shakes her head to clear her thoughts.

“What?” the kid asks. “Nat? Everything okay?”

She sits up and squints at him, mentally taking stock of where she remembers putting her gun, where the suitcase with her suit and her gear is, and how close the kid is to Clint’s weapons. “Who are you? How did you get here?”

The boy’s face darkens, mistrust and something that isn’t quite fear joining the worry that’s still there. “What do you mean? I fell asleep right here, next to you, last night. You don’t remember?”

Natasha swallows around a growing lump in her throat. She looks at the kid, really looks. The hair is a little bit lighter in color, the features of his face so much smoother and younger, but the eyes are the same. Could he really…

“Clint?”

“Yeah. Of course.” His shoulders sag with relief, and he smiles, although his expression is still lined with worry. He’s pronouncing every word more clearly than he has to, like he’s dealing with a small child or someone on the verge of a breakdown. “You scared me, are you alright? Do you feel okay?”

He reaches out to touch her shoulder, smile falling when she evades him.

“I am,” she says, trying to keep her own voice level. “You, I’m not so sure.”

His forehead creases with confusion. “Me? Why?”

She opens her mouth to reply, but doesn’t quite know what to say. You woke up as a teenager would probably be the most accurate assessment, weird as it may be, but she can’t bring herself to say it out loud. Suddenly she’s terrified that there’s nothing actually wrong with him and it’s her own head that’s playing a prank on her. She points to a mirror in the corner of the room instead, watches as he climbs out of bed and steps in front of it.

Natasha doesn’t need to wait for him to speak to know that it’s not her mind playing games, that this is real and he’s seeing the same thing she does. His shoulders go rigid. He takes a step back as if he wants to escape the sight of his reflection and inhales sharply.

“How’s that possible, what the fuck, I…” He trails off, turns around to her. “The alien tech. Do you think that’s what it does?”

Of course, that must be what this is, and she chides herself for not thinking of that sooner. The green particles, they must have triggered a delayed reaction and somehow…made him younger? She can’t see how that would be a useful weapon, but then again, it’s not been intended for humans, and who knows what it was originally designed to do. Maybe they got lucky that it didn’t kill him on the spot, or for that matter, didn’t poison or paralyze him.

Looking at a face that is all wrong, attached to a body that’s too small and too narrow and too fragile looking, Natasha doesn’t feel very lucky. “Yeah. It must be.”

“Okay.” He scratches his chest, frowns when he looks down at his hand. “Then let’s call it in. The techs are gonna know how to fix this. They’ll work their magic, or, like, un-magic, I guess, and I’ll be back to normal.”

Natasha isn’t sure who he’s trying to convince of that, her or himself, but either way, he’s right. They’ll call for immediate extraction, let SHIELD’s science team do their thing, and everything’s going to be fine. If there’s anyone who would be prepared to deal with an incident like this, it’s them. She picks her phone up from the nightstand and dials, punches in her key code to interrupt the bullshit greeting message and get forwarded directly to their clearance level, and waits. The call gets picked up almost immediately and a tired-sounding Maria Hill all but spits a hello at her. Natasha isn’t in the mood to calculate time zones right now, but it must be the middle of the night in New York. She doesn’t have any sympathy to spare, though. She digs for the right words to explain the situation they’ve found themselves in, but when she looks back up at Clint, her mouth goes dry.

He’s doubled over, palm of one hand pressed to his temple. His face is contorting with pain while he’s grabbing at the cupboard below the mirror for support with the other. He must feel her attention shifting to him because he looks up, silently mouthing her name.

“We need immediate extraction. Same location that I logged last night. Medical emergency,” she shouts into the phone before throwing it onto the bed and stumbling towards Clint.

She barely gets to him in time to keep him from sprawling onto the floor as he loses consciousness.

***

He doesn’t wake once during the flight back to the nearest SHIELD facility, somewhere outside of Vienna, and Natasha can’t decide if she’s grateful for that or not. She doesn’t leave his side while set up a room for him in the infirmary, silently daring the nurses and doctors to shoo her away. Hill arrives late in the afternoon, and Natasha’s watches as she reads the local head of operations the riot act. The rationally thinking, pragmatic agent in Natasha is alarmed by the fact that Hill bothered to come herself, but all the rest of her is simply glad to have a familiar face around.

Right now, she’s not sure Clint counts as such.

Hill’s still fuming when she joins her in Clint’s room, muttering curses and calling the doctors halfwits, among other things, but she falls silent as soon as she steps close enough to see him. “Oh, wow. That’s uncanny.”

“To say the least.” Natasha doesn’t turn to look at her, doesn’t dare to take her eyes off of him. “What did they tell you?”

“Not much,” Hill says. “They don’t have a fucking clue, apparently. He’ll be evaluated again shortly, to see if he’s fit to be transported back home. I don’t see a problem with that, he can be just as unconscious on a plane, but, you know. Doctors.”

Natasha nods, and they wait in silence until the doctors stream back in, poke and prod at him, then prepare him for transport. Hill makes her step out to shower and change clothes while they do, threatening to have her removed from his room with force if she refuses, and it’s way past midnight when they get him onto a plane.

***

Clint doesn’t come to until around noon the next day. He blinks awake silently and takes a look around, brows furrowing when his gaze comes to rest on Natasha, who’s been sitting vigil by his bedside from the moment they put him into the medical bay.

“Hey,” she says, relief falling over her like a warm blanket. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m…”, he starts, but whatever he’s about to say gets abandoned in favor of another assessing look around the room. “Where am I?”

“New York headquarters. They flew you back in. We’re home, and they’ll get you back to normal in no time.” She tries for a smile, but can’t quite muster it up.

“Headquarters,” he echoes, biting his lips in a nervous gesture that Natasha doesn’t recognize from the adult version, the Clint she knows. “Of what?”

Her previous relief at seeing him regain consciousness gets replaced by an unfocused, aimless fear. She wants to ask him if he knows who she is, but can’t figure out if she’s prepared for a no, so she answers his question. “SHIELD. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I think?” He squints in thought, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Tasha, I… I feel wrong. All of this feels wrong.”

That, at least, answers the question of whether he recognizes her, but somehow it doesn’t do anything to calm her down. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

His eyes widen slightly, right before his face closes off, and that reaction is close enough to adult Clint that Natasha has no doubt the next thing he says is at least partly a lie. “The mission. Alien tech. Green cloud. Then waking up and, uh. Being like this.”

“Okay,” she says, trying to keep the irritation at him trying to bullshit her out of her voice. “And now tell me the truth.”

He averts his gaze, clears his throat, but doesn’t reply right away. That, at least, isn’t new. He sometimes needs a bit of time to get something past his lips that he doesn’t want to talk about, and Natasha waits him out.

“I do remember it,” he says eventually, still not looking at her. “But it’s… distant? Like it happened years ago, to someone else. I know we were in Austria, and that we were supposed to buy that piece of tech. I know we ran into those goons with ski masks, and I remember getting hit with those particles. I know we went to the hotel afterwards, and we… And I know that I woke up like this.” He gestures down the length of his body. “When was that? How long have I been in here?”

“Yesterday.” Natasha replies, and her heart sinks when his eyes widen further in obvious disbelief. It’s been more than a day for him, she suspects. Far more. “What else do you remember?”

He looks back up at her then, shaking his head, silently begging her not to make him answer that. She doesn’t. She gets up, walks out of the room, and gets in the face of the first doctor that has the misfortune to cross her path.

***

For the rest of the day, Natasha stays out of his room. She hovers in the hallway. She glares at every doctor and scientist that enters or leaves it like this whole mess is their fault and they’re taking their time to fix it on purpose. But she can’t bring herself to face Clint again. Not that Clint. All she wants is to have her version back, talk to him, ask him what she’s supposed to do, but that’s not possible. Her Clint currently doesn’t exist. In his place there’s this kid, scared and confused and raw in a way she can’t put her finger on. Because she doesn’t know him, not really, not like this, and that thought is just too much for her to wrap her head around.

A young female doctor takes her aside eventually, tells her about age regression and cellular changes, his brain going back to an earlier imprint like a virus-infected computer and trying to cope with two different sets of memories, and Natasha can only make sense of about half of it all. He remembers her. He remembers SHIELD, and all their missions and aliens and Loki and Coulson and New York, but it’s not his present anymore. He’s been thrown back into his own past, and Natasha reluctantly admits to herself that she has no real idea what that means. She read his file – he’d shoved it at her during her second week at SHIELD, to level the playing field, he had said, make her know as much about him as he knew about her – but it didn’t contain a lot of information about his childhood and adolescence, his history before becoming an agent. The bare bones, sure, his parent’s death when he was eleven, the orphanage and the circus, then military and a detour into more shady ways to make living before he got recruited by SHIELD. But Clint at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen? She doesn’t actually know what that means, what the past he remembers more clearly than their shared present would be like.

On day three, she calls Stark. Fury isn’t going to like that. He prefers to keep SHIELD’s internal affairs within their own walls and an age-regressed agent is just the thing he’d like to keep on the need-to-know, but Natasha couldn’t care less.

She’s pleasantly surprised to get put through to Stark’s private cell immediately upon giving her name. Once Stark is on the line, she probably falls over her words more than she’d like while she explains what’s going on, but what’s important is that, once she’s finished, he assures her he’ll drop everything else and come by right away.

She doesn’t have to even wait an hour before he marches in, Dr. Banner and Pepper in tow, and demands to be shown every record, every scan, and every other shred of evidence that could possibly be useful. While he and Banner proceed to upend the whole medical and science division of SHIELD, Pepper joins Natasha by the door of Clint’s room, peeking in through the frosted glass. Natasha figures that’s why she came along: to offer moral support.

“They’re going to put this right,” she says, placing a hand on Natasha’s shoulder. “And in a few weeks’ time, when he’s back to his usual self, they’ll make fun of him over a couple of beers for having been a baby-faced kid or something equally ridiculous.”

Natasha squints to make out his form in the bed, faced away from the door and still too small. “What if they don’t?”

“They will,” says Pepper. “And in the meantime, you should be in there with him, not out here. He needs you, whether he knows that right now or not.”

Natasha watches him toss and turn, sit up and adjust his pillow, lay back down, and it’s both comforting and disconcerting. She’s seen Clint like this, after New York, ordered to rest under the watchful eyes of SHIELD psychologists. Twenty-four hours in this very medical bay, and he had been antsy and impatient then too, pacing around like a caged tiger, unable to keep still for longer than five minutes at a time. She’d been with him then as well, but it wasn’t anything like it is now. They’d seen it as protocol, an obstacle to get through before he’d be cleared, and simply sat through it together. She told him dirty jokes in Russian, grinning as he put them together with his substandard knowledge of the language, to take his mind off things. He taught her to play card games, none of the popular ones – those she’d known – but dumb, impromptu games he’d picked up… Well. In the circus, right around the age he's been regressed to.

What Pepper doesn’t seem to get – and how could she, this is probably one of those you-have-to-be-in-them-to-get-it situations – is that Natasha doesn’t think Clint won’t need her right now. She’s not entirely sure he wants her around, not this version. But they have been through enough together for her to know that he’s not as keen on suffering on his own, away from prying eyes, as he likes to insist.

No, the problem is that she’s not going to be of any help to him before she’s worked this out for herself. The first step in that direction would probably be to stop thinking of them as different versions. They’re the same person, just at different ages. The boy in there and the man she knows would be operating on the same moral code – frayed and a little opportunistic, but strict. They’d have the same opinions, the same convictions, the same sense of humor; they’d both like their coffee strong and with nothing added but a hint of sugar, their showers steaming hot. They’d both snore when they’re drunk.

They’d both rather take home a stray they decided was still worth saving and risk their job, their last chance in life, than blindly pull the trigger.

“I’m going home,” Natasha announces, whether to herself or to Pepper or to anyone else who might be around to listen, she doesn’t know. “Take a shower, sleep in my own bed. Clear my head.”

Pepper squeezes her shoulder before taking her hand off it and nods. “That’s probably a good idea. I’ll stay here as long as the brainiacs do. If they find anything, I’ll call you.”

Natasha just nods, trusts Pepper to inform anyone that needs to know where she is, and leaves.

***

It never occurs to Natasha how much time they really spend with each other until she’s alone and doesn’t want to be. She manages to stay at her place for exactly fifteen minutes before she gives in and drives to his apartment. It seems like a violation, now, but she tells herself the place needs looking after anyway, so she would end up here sooner or later in any case. Might as well do it now. Plus, they were here before they got called in for the mission in Vienna, and they’d left in a hurry. There’s still plates from their breakfast that day in the sink, the bed is unmade, and Clint's work desk is covered in tools and materials. That she doesn’t touch; his arrows are his and his alone, but she draws water to do the dishes, washes them and puts them away. She clears the table in the living room, where he’d left a half-eaten bag of crackers from the night before that are now beginning to go stale. She takes laundry off a drying rack in the hallway and sorts it into a neat pile in front of his wardrobe.

When she reaches the bed, new sheets and linen in hand, she hesitates. The imprints of both their bodies are still there, how they’d slept tangled up before one of them – she doesn’t even remember who – had thrown the covers aside to answer the call from SHIELD. Natasha sits down on the bed, straightens the sheets as far as she can reach and bends forward to pull them out, but thinks better of it. She strips down to her underwear instead, slips under the covers, breathes in their combined scent. It doesn’t take long until two days on hardly any rest catch up with her and she drifts off into a fitful and dreamless sleep.

The buzzing of her phone wakes her what feels like minutes later, but a quick glance to the alarm clock tells her six hours have passed. She curses and untangles herself, rushes to fish her phone out of her discarded jeans, and scowls at the caller ID.

“Sir,” she says, bracing herself for the inevitable rebuke. She's not sorry, but knowing she's pissed off Nick Fury is still not a fun position to be in.

“If anyone asks you later, I expect you to tell them I yelled at you. Good and proper.” He pauses, and Natasha isn't sure if she's relieved or somewhat disturbed. “But I won't. Yell at you, that is.”

“Thank you, sir.” Natasha thinks about adding that, if he's looking for her to apologize, he can shove it. But she's not been raised to be that careless with her life, even if her head may be swimming and she might be a little south of fully awake.

“I do, however, insist that you return to headquarters immediately. Miss Potts has been called away on business, Banner and Stark are driving my whole science division mad, and if I get one more call from a doctor that Stark chased out of his own lab or got into a shouting match with...” Fury doesn't finish that sentence, likely aware that anyone who's known him for more than a day can come up with possible conclusions that are way scarier than anything he could have said.

“Of course, sir. I'll be back within the hour.”

“Appreciate it,” he says, and hangs up.

Natasha is left with a bed that still smells like her and Clint, in an apartment that's not hers and still feels more like home than any other place in this world, and an ache deep inside her that she knows she won't get rid of anytime soon. The only thing she can do is act like the seasoned senior agent that she is, get her shit together, and do her damn job. She stands up, picks a new set of underwear out of the drawer that Clint had ceremoniously assigned to her six months into their... thing, and goes to take a shower.

Even though he'd deny it to his last breath, Clint can be ridiculously sappy if he wants to be. Proof for that is visible for anyone who cares to connect the dots, resting just above her collarbone in form of the little silver arrow pendant. For days afterwards, he'd glared daggers at anyone who got reckless enough to stare or whisper; the fact that its two most valuable agents are sleeping with each other is the worst kept secret SHIELD has. Although such a thing is not supposed to happen, the general consensus is that it's in everyone's best interest to keep their mouths shut and let it slide. But, even at a workplace like theirs, some people have more common sense than others.

Natasha takes her time, lets the prattle of the water dull her mind, her eyes screwed shut so hard that she's seeing multicolored tiny dots on the back of her eyelids. She arrives back at headquarters on the dot of her estimated hour.

***

Her time undercover as Natalie Rushman made Natasha quite fluent in reading Tony Stark, and the intensity with which he chews out a bunch of uncomfortably squirming doctors tells her two things: he actually cares – for Clint, for her, for them both – and he’s encountered a problem he has no idea how to solve. When he's on the right track and happily working away, he's calm and focused. He only ticks out if he's invested and frustrated.

Banner stands to his left, somewhat embarrassed, but smiles when he catches sight of her. He's not as much of an open book to her as Stark, and for a second her heart flares with hope despite knowing better. It must show on her face, because Banner's gaze strays to the door of Clint's room before he looks at her again and shakes his head.

Natasha straightens her shoulders and gets on the task of reining in Stark. She listens as he techno-babbles at her, gesturing wildly in the general direction of the doctors, but quickly loses patience. “Okay. Stop. Can you repeat that in terms anyone without a degree may understand?”

“Alright, alright.” He huffs out a breath. “They're inept. Completely fucking useless. The analysis they gave me makes zero sense, and they don't fit the readings we've got from him. Someone's screwed this up.”

One of the doctors bravely attempts a defense, but gets cut off with a raised finger from Stark and shuts his mouth before he said one word. Still, he's marked himself as the one most likely to stand up to Stark and give her a straight answer, so she turns to him. “You. Can you explain that?”

“Yes. No. I mean, it's alien. Of course it doesn't make sense, measured with our instruments.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Mr. Stark expects it to, though, and frankly, I’m not sure he’s the right choice for this project. This isn't his field.”

Stark opens his mouth to fire back, but Natasha silences him with a murderous glare. Still, she isn't sure if that's supposed to be a dig at both of them, and her sympathy for the good doctor plummets. She directs the same glare his way, making him swallow and exchange a hectic glance with his colleagues.

“Well, then, make it his field. Explain it to him.” She turns back around to Stark. “And he's gonna listen. Right? Aren't you?”

It obviously requires him to scrape together whatever self-control he possesses, but Stark manages to bite his tongue and nod. Natasha decides she's done here. She leaves the brain trust to itself, squeezing Banner's shoulder in passing, in what's meant to be encouragement, and slips into Clint's room.

Clint's awake, and yeah, she hadn't expected anything else. The way he holds himself in here, every muscle in his body tense and ready for fight or flight, telegraphs to her that he doesn't feel safe. He's not going to sleep in here until his body shuts down on him and demands it, and for the first time in the past two days, Natasha feels her eyes burn with tears. She fights them down, pauses halfway to his bed to compose herself, takes a deep breath.

“Hey there, stranger,” he says, then swallows hard. “Oh. Sorry. I didn't mean –“

“I know you didn't.” Natasha points at the free space at the edge of the bed, down by his feet. “May I?”

“Sure. Of course.” He pats it for emphasis, shoots her a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. “I was wondering if – when you'd come back.”

Natasha sits, carefully making sure they don't touch. She tries not to get stuck on the if, with limited success. “I'm sorry. I just had to... I'm sorry.”

“You must think I've forgotten you. Us.” He reaches out to take her hand, and she lets him, resists the urge to pull it back. “I didn't.”

“Stark and Banner are out there,” she says, because nothing of what she actually wants to say quite lets itself be formed into sentences. “They're working on a way to fix you. It's going to be okay.”

“Yeah. I know. Stark came in here to put some electrodes on me, apparently he doesn't even trust the docs with that.” Clint inclines his head, and she feels the weight of his gaze on her, all the way to her core. “Wasn't Fury who called them, was it?”

“No,” she replies. She counts to three in her head, steels herself, then looks at him head-on. Looks him in the eye. She needs to figure out if she can still see the man she knew in them, or if he's... just gone. Clint holds her eyes, eyebrows raised, but silent. He's familiar, she finds, and he's not, but there's enough she recognizes that allows the roiling sea of desperate worry at the back of her mind to quiet and settle.

“Satisfied?” he asks eventually, and she nods. She doesn't flinch when he reaches out to touch the pendant around her neck and runs the pad of his thumb over it, brushing her skin in the process.

***

The next days are filled with sitting by Clint's bedside as he's poked and prodded, has blood drawn and x-rays taken and is looked at from every angle and also inside out. Discomfort and embarrassment come off him in waves, but there's nothing Natasha can do about it; it's no fun, but it's necessary.

He doesn't talk much. He sits around, looking out of the window, hardly sleeping to the point that the medical staff threatens to inject him with a sedative to get him to rest.

Natasha wants to offer him distraction, but can't quite figure out how. It used to come naturally with him, but now there's a barrier between them that she can't get past. She makes a few attempts of joking with him, but those are mostly rejected with a half-hearted smile. All she can do is watch while he retreats further into himself, and feel slightly guilty for the frustration that wells up in her alongside of feeling helpless and more lost than she'd ever admit to out loud.

Banner shows up at the end of the week, and it takes Natasha one look at his expression to figure out that he doesn't come bearing good news. Clint seems to pick up on that too, shooting her a look, which she shrugs to in response. She's not been keeping track of the results and printouts, not having much of an idea what either of them mean anyway.

She offers Banner her chair, moves to the edge of Clint's bed, and they sit in loaded silence for a few moments.

“Just spit it out,” says Clint, and Banner adjusts his perfectly sitting tie.

“Tony and I, and, you know, the SHIELD team, have come to the conclusion that your, uh, condition is irreversible.” He lets that hang for a moment, continues just in time that Natasha manages to not reach out and strangle him with the aforementioned tie. “What the particles did, exactly, still isn't clear. But they fused with your biology so tightly that we can hardly identify them within your body, let alone extract them without damaging the cells they're now embedded in.”

Clint's face remains stoic. “Could you try?”

“We could,” Banner says, sending a glance to Natasha. He doesn't want to have this conversation any more than either of them, she’s sure. “But it's likely that...” He sighs. “If I had to bet, I'd say you're not going to survive that procedure. I would strongly advise against it. I'm sorry.”

Now there's a flash of emotion on Clint's face, something like fear, or maybe resignation, but it's gone as fast as it came. “So it's Seventeen Again for good, hm?”

Natasha has a hard time not whipping her head around at that; no one's mentioned an actual age yet, not any of the doctors, not Clint himself. But she schools her features into the same indifference he's displaying. She's a professional, too. She smiles. “Thank you. For letting us know.”

Banner scratches his neck, smiles back, nods curtly at both of them and excuses himself.

“When did you figure that out?” Natasha asks after the door's fallen shut behind him. “The age?”

Clint rolls his shoulders. “Yesterday, in the shower. There's a scar on my upper thigh that I got the summer after I turned seventeen. So I took stock, and one on my shoulder that I got a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday isn't there. Or any others that came later. Simple math, really.”

Even at that age, he's already had a diary of scars imprinted on his body. Natasha feels like she should've been aware of that, but it still hits her like a physical blow. It's not like the same can't be said about her, but... She never realized just how similar they were, in some aspects. No wonder they understand each other so well. Or did, at least. Right now, he's a riddle she doesn't have the right tools to solve.

***

A couple of days later, Clint gets released. He gets a note that informs him he's on paid absence, standard SHIELD protocol after an injury sustained at work, and that he's free to stay in for more tests but may also leave the medical bay and go home.

He's out of bed just as soon as he's done reading the note out loud, throws it onto the nightstand.

“Do you want me to, I don't know. Come with you?” Natasha stands, rubbing her hands on her jeans. This shouldn't be so hard, but navigating his moods without being able to read him throws her off.

Clint, who went in search for his clothes in the meantime, is just pulling up is jeans. He stops mid-motion, eyebrows knitting together. “Yeah. Sure. Unless you don't want to?”

She swallows her irritation at the implication that she might not and nods. They run the gauntlet through SHIELD together, up towards the main exit, him with his head held high, eyes straight ahead, and her doing her best to silently promise bloody murder to anyone who gawks at him or so much as mumbles as they pass. It feels a little bit like walking around side by side the first few weeks after she was cleared for active duty, only that back then she was the one who stubbornly ignored everyone's reactions and quietly dared people to yeah, asshole, just say something.

Natasha flags them a taxi, but finds herself tripping up when the driver asks for an address. “Do you, uh. Do you want to get home, or should I get us a room somewhere?”

Clint seems to consider that, and it takes him a moment to answer. “No, my place. I do want to go home.”

Before she has the chance to, he rattles off the address and leans back, looking out of the window. She does the same.

It’s her who digs out her keys and opens the door, and when they walk in, he looks around like he’s seeing it for the first time. He almost runs into a cupboard in the hallway, has to step around it at the last minute. He runs his hands along the frame of a print in the living room. Walking by the bedroom, he stops for a moment, and looks back at her. The door is ajar and the bed still unmade, the way she left it after Fury called her back to headquarters.

“We never did get our weekend off, huh?” he asks, accompanied by a smile that’s sad rather than suggestive.

She shakes her head. “Downside of being good at our job, I suppose.”

“Not just good. The best.” His shoulders sag, and he briefly closes his eyes, like he’s bracing himself for something. “Come here?”

Natasha closes the distance between them, and when he wraps his arms around her, burying his face in her hair, she realizes it’s the first time since he got regressed that they’re sharing physical contact beyond a quick touch. And it’s wrong. He’s wrong. Different height, too wiry, and he’s careful, hesitant, although she doesn’t know if it’s for her benefit or his. Nevertheless, she breathes him in, and they stand there for several minutes, neither of them willing to part.

He steps back first, pressing a kiss to her forehead, before he pushes the bedroom door open all the way, stopping with his hand on the door knob. “Gonna grab a shower, get the hospital stench off.”

She recognizes it as the behavior of someone who’s not used to being around someone else, sharing a space, and not usually in the habit of announcing what he plans to do. The thought of him on his own when he was this young sneaks up on her before she can quench it; one of these things she knew about him, technically, but that has never quite sunken in. She remembers herself at that age, scared and alone and maintained rather than raised, and the fact that she can relate makes it so much worse.

***

Natasha settles in front of the TV while he showers. He emerges after twenty minutes, fully dressed but hair still wet, a few stray rivulets of water leaving dark spots on the SHIELD-issued sweater he’s changed into. It’s a little too big for him, but not quite so much that he’s swimming in it.

He stops in front of the couch, eyebrows raised, and sits down after she nods. There’s another moment of hesitation before he inches closer, but then they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder and she shifts so that their foreheads all but touch. “Feel better?”

“Yeah,” he says. “More like a human being and less like an experiment gone wrong.”

Whatever she wanted to say next gets sidelined by the way he’s looking at her, then, tired and worn down but like none of that matters. He’s kissing her before she knows it, and at first it’s wonderful – he tastes and smells the way she remembers, and with her eyes screwed shut it’s so, so easy to forget the last few days and just get lost in him.

But that’s exactly the problem. Her hand curls in the edge of his t-shirt, slipping underneath it and resting on his stomach, and she’s reminded that this isn’t the body she knows. It’s not the man she knows, and she can’t be kissing this boy while she imagines he’s another version of himself.

She draws her hand back and breaks the kiss, gently pushing him away. “Not now, okay? I’m tired. You must be, too.”

“Yeah.” He licks his lips, seemingly unfazed by the rejection. “Okay. I am.”

Half an hour later, he’s out like a light, and Natasha is stupidly grateful for the opportunity to leave him under a blanket on the couch and go to bed alone.

***

Natasha wakes to the sound of him rummaging around in the kitchen and cursing up a blue streak, neither of which is a novelty. She smiles, relieved in spite of herself, gets out of bed and walks into the kitchen with the comforter wrapped around her shoulders. “I see you still can't figure out how the espresso machine works.”

His shoulders tense slightly, but not so much that she's worried she’s startled him. He's noticed her before she spoke, just as usual, of that she's sure.

“That thing is an abomination,” he complains, his flat hand coming down on top of the offending device for emphasis, making it rattle. ”I don't know why I even bought it.”

“Because you love me, and I love espresso.” She shoves him out of the way with her hip, reaches up to get the grounds out of the cupboard and goes to work.

He comes up behind her, presses his lips to the knob at the top of her spine. “I forgot this relationship is a threeway”, he says, voice muffled against her skin.

“That it is, and it works beautifully as long as everyone knows their place.” She pulls the lever down and turns around, intending to kiss him, but she stops when he leans in. Once again, it feels wrong, worse still when his face falls and his gaze drops away. He's not stupid; between last night and just now, he's got to start putting two and two together. Natasha wants to say something, explain herself, makes it sting less, but she doesn't know how to put words to any of this and so she stays silent.

She wraps the comforter tighter around herself and goes back to the bedroom to get dressed.

***

For all the time they've known each other, Natasha can't recall a single instance of them being really uncomfortably awkward around each other. They did have their loaded silences and have been pissed at each other to the point of glaring across their desks, but it never got overwhelming. In parts, that's probably been due to him, at least in the beginning; he wouldn't let it happen. He gave in first, filled the spaces where she didn't know what to say, found ways to make her feel comfortable and understood from the very start, as if he'd done it all his life.

Right now, though, everything points to that being a skill he acquired as an adult.

He avoids her, as much as that's possible when occupying the same small apartment. If she enters a room, he leaves it just minutes later. When she tries to talk to him, he turns up the volume on the TV or the radio. She catches herself thinking that he's acting like an actual teenager. It's an unnerving game of hide and seek, one that leaves her frustrated and strangely helpless, and yes, feeling awkward.

She considers going home and leaving him to sulk, but it's never been in her nature to run from conflict, be it life-or-death or on a much smaller scale. Plus, she owes him an explanation. If she still knows him at all, he's probably busy trying to figure out what he did wrong, and that's just the thing; he didn't. It's not about what he did or didn't do, it's about who he is, or rather, who he isn't yet, unfair as that may be.

It takes the better part of the day, but eventually it’s him who seeks her out. She’s retreated to the kitchen to read and has left him alone in the living room, and he all but sneaks in when she’s halfway done with the second chapter of some tome she’s grabbed out of his bookshelf at random. It’s terrible, long-winded and boring, but it’s served to kill time. She stops reading, but doesn’t look up from the book yet, not until Clint clears his throat.

“Is that good?” he asks, pointing. “Never read it.”

She closes it without even bothering to mark the site she was on, and lays it on the kitchen table. “Probably a good thing. It’s awful.”

He smiles a little, idly scratches at his neck. “Listen. Tasha, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... I dunno. Pressure you into anything.”

“You didn’t. It’s not that.” She pauses, still not having figured out how to lend words to what she needs to say. The thought of not being with him kills her, but so does the idea of being with him while he’s... like this. He’s seventeen, and he sort of isn’t, and she’s out of her depth. He’s the same, but he’s not. She misses him while he’s right in front of her. “I’m just having trouble adjusting.”

He pulls back a chair and sits down across from her. “You and me both. There’s two of me in here.” He points at his head. “And it's just... I try to shut his memories out, keep him at bay. I don't get him. It’s so confusing. He's me, and I am him, but there's so much I don't understand.” He reaches out a hand, but stops halfway, curls it into a fist on the counter top. “The only thing we both seem to agree on is loving you.”

And that’s when she knows what she has to do. He’s sitting there, trying to work out if he’s allowed to touch her and apologizing for things that are not and couldn’t possibly be his fault, when he should concentrate on sorting his jumbled mind, trying to find a way to cope with what happened to him. She’s a distraction. They are.

“I’m here for you. I’ll help you figure this out in any way I can. But...” Natasha inhales a shaky breath, takes his hand and makes him uncurl his fist so she can slide her fingers between his. “But we shouldn't be together right now.”

He physically recoils, as if his body is shying away from the words. “You’re breaking up with me?”

It’s a foreign way to put it, to her. They never outright called what they had a relationship, so breakup doesn’t quite seem like the right word for what’s happening now either. It sounds a lot more final than she means it, like handing each other boxes of the stuff they left at each other’s places and disentangling their lives and yelling and tears. She’s not sure their lives could be disentangled, a clean cut, even if that was what she wanted.

“No. I don’t think so. But right now, this, me and you, doesn’t help. You need to focus on yourself. Deal with what happened to you. We both do. And then, maybe later – “

He stands, roughly pulling his hand away, face set in a mask that betrays no emotion at all. “I’d like you to leave.”

Natasha doesn’t move. “That’s not what I meant. I – “

But he interrupts her again, stepping out of the kitchen into the hallway and nodding his head towards the door.

“Please. Leave.”

***

The rest of the day, and for days after, Natasha waits for her phone to ring. It never does. She considers calling him, of course, but he sent her away. She won’t beg, or insist, or try to force him to listen to more explanations. He’ll come to her, when he’s ready.

After a week, Natasha goes back to work. She calls in and asks for an assignment, takes on an observation in Kiev that is expected to last at least a couple of days and ignores Hill's questioning look during the briefing. Her partner is a young agent she's seen around once or twice, who introduces herself as Annette and looks at Natasha with something like awe. It goes smoothly, but not a second passes without Natasha feeling like she's missing a limb.

Back home, she resorts to desperate measures. She dials Pepper’s number.

Ever since Natasha’s undercover mission at Stark Industries, her and Pepper had... Well. A truce of some sort. Pepper is more forgiving of SHIELD’s antics than Stark and, as far as bonding experiences go, sighing in unison about Tony Stark’s bullshit is a pretty powerful one. They’re not quite friends, there are too many things they have to keep from each other in order to do their respective jobs properly. But it’s close enough to friendship that, when Natasha calls and asks to meet, Pepper gleefully accepts, promises to exile Stark for the night and inviting Natasha to come to her place within the hour.

Pepper opens a bottle of wine, folds herself onto the way over-sized leather sofa, and looks at Natasha over the rim of her glass while she sits down. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“I just needed to get out,” Natasha lies. Not very well, from the way Pepper’s eyes narrow, but then again, she wasn’t trying too hard.

But Pepper plays along. “Hmm. Okay. Have I ever told you that I’m on my fifth assistant since you left?”

“Technically, I wasn’t your assistant,” Natasha points out.

“No, but you still did a better job of making my life easier than any of the people I hired for that exact purpose.” Pepper takes a sip, then grins. “Maybe you missed your calling.”

Natasha grins back. “I’m just... very adaptable.”

“That you are. And I guess a career in corporate management doesn’t offer the same thrills as your day job.” Pepper pauses, taking another sip, and Natasha wonders how much access Stark Industries actually had into SHIELD files – officially or by virtue of Stark’s hacking skills. She wonders whether Pepper’s aware that Natasha didn’t get to choose her career, and that getting as good at it as she is today was a matter of survival. She knows better than to ask though; this is one of the instances where they wouldn’t tell each other the truth.

“Where did you cart Tony off to?” she asks instead.

“Ohh, I didn’t so much cart him off as send him a target. He’s still in the lab, working on a project that I might have told him I’m more invested in than I actually am.” Pepper’s gaze turns fond as she smiles. “And you, where’s your other half? How is he doing?”

Natasha is tempted to lie about that too, but then again, she’s here. Why seek someone to talk to if you’re not actually going to talk?

“Not good. We had a... I’m not sure you can call it a fight, it’s not like either of us got loud, but I haven’t talked to him in days. He’s so different, and then there’s these moments where he’s pretty much the same. It’s so confusing. I don’t know what to do with that.”

“I won’t even pretend I’m able to imagine what it must be like,” Pepper says, filling up both their glasses again. “Do you think you can get used to it? It’s no crime if you can’t, you know. You literally went to bed with a grown man and woke up next to a teenager.”

Natasha leans back, emptying the glass Pepper hands her in one go, wishing it was something stronger, something that’d burn going down. “I’m not sure. But I can’t imagine losing him either.”

And she really can’t. He’s been the only steady thing in her life for almost a decade, since long before they started to call what was between them love; that happened sometime along the way, when neither of them were paying attention. He hung on when she tried to bite him away, anchored her when she found herself floating, never ceased to believe that she could be more than what she was trained to be. She can imagine not being together, but the thought of not being them is unbearable. That’s the downside of being with your best friend – if you split, you risk not being anything anymore.

Pepper doesn’t reply. She gets up and putters around in the kitchen, emerging a few minutes later with shot glasses and a bottle of actual liquor.

***

It’s been awhile since Natasha’s been hungover. Not like she doesn’t drink, but it’s usually a controlled part of the job instead of a leisure activity, and now she’s reminded why. Her head is pounding, her throat dry, and she just wants to curl up somewhere and suffer in peace until it all goes away.

That, of course, isn’t an option. She has a briefing at 9 AM, and Hill expects the performance review for the junior agent she did her last mission with by noon.

On her way back from the briefing, however, she does allow herself to stray a bit, not take the direct route, maybe have herself a quick training session in between. The thought of hitting something certainly sounds alluring right now, despite knowing that her headache might disapprove, and so she takes the elevator down to the facilities.

When she walks past the shooting range, checks it more out of habit than because she actually expects Clint to be there, she finds herself rooted to the spot. He is there, bow in hand, sending wary glances towards the flock of agents that have gathered in the back. Natasha almost springs into action upon seeing them, to shoo them off and tell them to leave him alone, but Clint never did take kindly to someone trying to fight his battles in his stead. Plus, his age regression didn’t suddenly leave him less capable of standing his ground. This isn’t something he needs protecting from.

But it is the kind of thing they used to face together. A year ago, Natasha would have marched in there, stood beside him, let them stare at both of them and not just him. More importantly, last year he would’ve let her. Appreciated it, even. Now she’s not so sure.

That’s why she stays in the shadows, picks a spot that allows her to watch him, but that’s out of his line of sight. She sees him take a deep breath, steeling himself, then walk up towards the mark that’s furthest from the target. He gets in position, feet slightly apart, closes his eyes for a moment before he takes aim. The muscles in his torso tense in the same way she’s witnessed an endless number of times, concentration obvious in every line of his body, and the result is also the exact same as it always is: a perfect shot. He seems to relax after that first one, fires a few more in quick succession before he retrieves them. The agents watching him get bored at some point, filter out one by one to return to whatever task they abandoned in order to play spectator.

After the last one left, Clint sets down the bow and turns. “You might as well come out, Nat. I know you’re there.”

She should have known he’d notice her; being hyper-aware of the other’s presence has practically become second nature, what with spending so much time covering their respective asses in the field. “I didn’t mean to snoop around. I was on my way to the training area, and saw you in here. But I wasn’t sure you’d want me around.”

“Of course I want you around.” His eyes track her when she enters the room, but he doesn’t look at her directly, gaze avoiding hers, and there’s an accusing undertone to his voice, like he assumes the same isn’t true for her.

It makes her feel defensive, angry even, although not necessarily at him. He trusted her on the spot the first time around, all due caution abandoned and acting on instinct, took to her so easily that she couldn’t do anything else than trust him back. Now he's wound so much tighter than what she's used to. The way he moves and holds himself is slightly different, more than just careful, but like he's walking around on eggshells, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s learned behavior, and one she recognizes from herself. Someone made him that way, taught him trust is a risk and may come with a high cost, and she wants to strangle whoever planted that seed almost as much as she wants to help him unlearn it again, do for him what he did for her years ago.

The thing is, she doesn’t quite know how, what to say, where to start. He’s so much harder to read like this. All she can think of is to repeat what she said in his apartment, assure him she cares and she’s not going away and she’ll be there when he needs her to be, but that didn’t exactly do wonders the first time around.

She settles for something else entirely, to keep the conversation going. “So... are you back? At work, I mean.”

“No,” he says, collapsing his bow. “Fury’s still not sure if employing a teenager is something he can sneak past the authorities.”

The mental image of Hill trying to comb through the rules and regulations for a loophole blinks into existence, and Natasha smiles. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out sooner or later. Not the first time SHIELD had to get creative in order to sneak someone into lawful employment.”

He smiles back and, for a moment, finally meets her eyes. “I remember the angry emails I got from Hill when I brought you in.”

“Me too.” He’d shown them to her, later, after she’d been approved to work with him and sharing SHIELD correspondence, no matter how informal, didn’t basically amount to treason anymore. Feeling encouraged, Natasha points at the training area. “Do you want to join me?”

Clint stares at his shoes for a heartbeat or two, then shakes his head. “Nah, I shouldn’t even be here. Just.” He holds up the bow. “Had to know.”

***

The door bell of her apartment causes Natasha to shoot up ramrod straight in bed. It takes a second until the surge of adrenaline subsides and her brain makes it past her reflexes, manages to convince itself that everything's okay. A quick glance to the watch she left on her nightstand tells her it's 2:15 AM. She's at home. She's safe.

Another ring of the bell and she swings her legs out of bed, pulls on sweatpants and hooks a gun in the waistband at her back. She doesn't bother switching any of the lights on before she opens the door, ready to yell at whoever dared to wake her at this hour, but the tirade dies in her throat.

It's Clint. He stands there in her doorway, back lit by the overhead lights from the floor, wearing nothing but jeans and a T-shirt. It’s the first she’s seen of him in weeks, since they met at the range. She can smell alcohol on him from where she stands, and he's swaying slightly. He's also staring at her with wide eyes, blinking rabidly.

“I woke you,” he says, running a hand down his face. “Sorry. Nat. I didn't mean to.”

“It's okay. Don't worry about it.” She reaches for his wrist, leading him inside so she can close the door behind them. “What's wrong? Did something happen?”

He snivels and shakes his head. “No. I just... Hey, did you know that older me has a pretty well sorted liquor cabinet? Cause he does. Did. Whatever.”

Natasha's been aware of that. It's not exactly the first time she's been around when he’s decided to raid it. This is something she knows how to deal with. Hopefully, at least.

“Go sit down. I'll get you a soda,” she says, and leaves him standing in the middle of the room to get a bottle of soda water and a glass. He's not in the living room, when she comes back, and for a moment she fears that he's left, going hell knows where while dead drunk, but then she hears him knock something over in the bedroom. It's her own fault, probably. She did neglect to tell him where she wanted him to sit, and he went ahead and interpreted it freely.

She follows him with a sigh, finds him half-sitting, half-lying on the bed, an arm thrown over his face.

“Your soda,” she says, and holds the glass out to him while he slowly works himself up into a sitting position.

He takes it, empties it in three gulps. “Thanks.”

She crouches down in front of him, not quite sure she wants to be on the bed with him right now. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I dunno.” He squints, turns the glass around in his hands.

Natasha smiles, hoping it comes across as reassuring rather than patronizing. “You don't have to. You can just stay here, I'll sleep on the couch and drive you back in the morning. No questions asked.”

He gives an exaggerated nod and bends down to untie his shoes, pulls them off with his heels. She turns away when he shuffles out of his jeans, gets herself a spare pillow and blanket out of her wardrobe, but as she's about to leave the room and let him go to sleep, he says her name, under his breath, low enough that she's not sure she's heard it.

She turns back around. “Yeah? What is it? Can I get you something else?”

He shakes his head again. “Just. Can you stay? With me? Here? I won't... I promise I'm not going to, like, try anything.”

It's a bad idea. Potentially disastrous. She knows that. But she can't refuse either, not now, when he's finally asking for something she can give. She can be there for him, tonight. She can do that.

“Okay,” she says, stripping out of her sweatpants and lying down across from him. He settles in next to her, far enough away that they don't touch, and for a few minutes she listens to his ragged breathing, willing him to calm down, go to sleep, stop thinking about whatever it is that had him drinking in the first place.

He doesn't. He lies there in the dark, next to her but miles away, and she can practically hear him turn things over in his head again and again. They've done this before; sometimes he told her what had him so upset, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he didn't have to.

“I never told you about home,” he says eventually, and that's about the last thing she's expected. It makes sense, though, she guesses. This Clint lost his parents a couple of years ago, not more than two decades.

“No. You didn't. Is that what this is about? Your parents?”

“Yes. No. Kinda.” He draws in a breath, lets it go in a swoosh. “I'm not grieving, if that's what you think. I'm glad they're gone.”

She doesn't want to ask. This is uncharted territory, and her Clint must've had a good reason why he never talked about it. Getting to know about it now, like this, feels somhow like a betrayal, like she's obtaining information by fraud. But the silence hangs heavy between them, and this Clint, the one that's here now and the one that's not going to go away, isn't very subtle about wanting her to ask him what that means. “You are? Why?”

“Did I ever tell you he punched me so hard once that I lost my hearing for a few months? When I was, I dunno, nine or so? I thought I'd never get it back, had to learn sign language and everything. I thought I'd be deaf for the rest of my life.”

He hasn't, he never breathed a word about any of that, and she suspects he knows that all too well. Now he's lying there in the dark, punch-drunk, spilling his best-kept secret in a toneless, detached tone of voice that hurts to listen to, and she doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know if it's okay to touch him, or if that'd be a smudging a line she drew for herself just a little over a month ago, if she'd be leading him on. She doesn't know anything anymore, she doesn't know him anymore, and it makes her want to scream.

“No. You never told me that.” Even to her own ears, it sounds more accusatory than she intended. But she had no idea. She knew there was something he kept to himself, and that was okay, she didn't tell him every single thing about her past either. But now... She had no idea.

“Ohh,” he says, sounding defensive, angry. “You want to know more? Yeah. I can tell you more. Shattered kneecap at eight, when he pushed me too hard and I landed on the floor at a bad angle. Broken pelvis at six. I don't remember what that was from, but I was in the hospital for weeks and as soon as I got back home he went and twisted my arm and almost broke that too, because he was furious about the bill. More concussions than I can count. One time – “

“Stop.” She's heard enough. She gives in and wraps herself around him, her heart breaking a little bit when he doesn't relax but tenses further. “Please stop.”

When he starts to heave with silent, subdued sobs, she's almost relieved. She holds on to him, not even caring how wrong the different shape of his body in her arms feels, until the tension finally drains out of him and his breathing slows as he drifts off to sleep.

There are tears in her eyes too, but she bites them back.

***

He’s still asleep when Natasha wakes, his chest rising and falling in a slow and even rhythm. They’ve drifted apart a little during the night, but he’s near enough that she can feel his body heat, breathe in his scent, and it shouldn’t make her so lightheaded to think about how at least in that regard nothing has changed. Waking like this, tangled up together, still warms parts of her that she grew up thinking would stay cold and lonely forever.

She slowly rolls over to get out of bed quietly and without waking him, but he must feel the bed dip, because his hand comes out from under the blanket to grab her wrist when she’s about to stand. Whatever else may have changed, his instincts and senses are still sharp as ever, maybe even sharper. More alert. Less likely to get comfortable and forget who and what he is.

“Don't go,” he says, voice rough with sleep. And she stays, even though she shouldn’t, because this is too irresistible, a taste of what they had, what she’s set on denying them for both their sake. She leans back against the headboard of the bed, not quite lying down, but stretched out somewhat comfortably. It’s a compromise. A weak one, but she lets herself get away with it.

Clint yawns, burrowing into his pillow. He squints up at her, and she suspects he must already have a headache coming on. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” She inclines her head.

He sits up a little, eyes narrowed. “For getting weepy at you last night. Shouldn’t have happened. I should've kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t have put that on you.”

She wants to tell him that the opposite is true, that she’d wanted him to put that on her a lot earlier, shared it with her, allowed her to know. But she gets why he didn’t, and she gets why he’s embarrassed about it now. “You weren’t weepy. And you don’t have to feel bad about it. I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me.”

And that’s really the core of why all of this is so hard. He doesn’t trust her. He's protecting himself, can’t let her see the bad and the ugly and make himself believe that she’ll keep by his side regardless. Which is a crippling brand of doubt she knows all too well, but him behaving that way towards her is what hurts the most about all this.

He makes a face, and looks away. “Your version of me had a picture of his mother, hidden away in a drawer, under lots of random shit. I got rid of them all at some point, because I couldn't look at pictures of her without thinking about him. Still can't. Guess older me figured out how to miss her in her own right, later on. He sought the picture out, printed it, and kept it. I remember that, kinda. But I don't feel what he felt.”

Natasha doesn't know what to say, can't find words to help him figure out how to join up who he was and who he is, especially not when she still misses who he was so fiercely. So she settles for the next best thing: honesty. “I wish I had something useful to say. You were good at that. Saying what I needed to hear. Me, on the other hand... I've never been good at puzzles.”

“And yet, you put me back together once before,” he says, looking up at her, his eyes too knowing, too wistful for the face they belong to now. Or maybe they were always like that. It's funny, she’s imagined Clint's life up to being orphaned as normal and happy, thought the rough ride didn't start for him up until circus and military. Wishful thinking, probably, attributing some of the things she never had as a child to him, filling the blanks with an ideal.

She wonders how well she ever really knew him. She's tempted to ask, but once more is afraid of the answer she might get. And there's no sense in asking, anyway, when she can't be sure he'd tell her the truth.

Turns out she doesn't have to, because even this Clint has a sixth sense when it comes to what's going on inside her head. “He wanted to tell you. So often. He just didn't know how. But he did want to, for what it's worth.”

The kiss comes out of nowhere, and that she didn't see it happen at all goes to show how off kilter she is. He's not even sneaky about it, signals his movements as he leans forward and in, and yet she's so taken aback that she kisses back at first, losing herself in it for a moment before she gathers her wits about her and pulls back.

He's off the bed in an instant, mumbling apologies at her while he gathers his discarded jeans up and pulls them on, backing away from the bed and into the hallway. She considers going after him, but decides against it, waits until she heard the front door open and fall shut before she climbs off the bed herself to look for her phone.

I'm not pissed, she texts him. Run now, if that’s what you need to do. But don't you dare think you can't come back.

***

Natasha has to wait for the better part of the day, but sometime around sundown, there's another knock on her door. He's changed clothes and shaved, smells like the generic shower gel he buys in bulk for seventy cents apiece because, hey, Tasha, don't be a snob, it gets the job done.

“I'm sorry,” he says by the way of hello. “For earlier. I feel like all I do today is apologizing to you, but... You made it clear that you don't want me like this, and I respect that. I do. It was a fluke, is all. And I really am sorry.”

She barely refrains from taking him by the shoulders and shaking him until he gets it as a last resort, and she might’ve done just that if he was his older self, knowing he could take it, following it up with the sort of sex to leave them both breathless and bruised but absolutely, irrevocably sure of each other. That was then, though; the other Clint isn’t coming back, and the last thing this one needs right now is to have someone try and convince him of anything by physical roughness, no matter how well-intentioned.

“And I told you already, you don’t need to apologize,” she says, shepherding him into her living room with a hand at the small of his back. She makes him sit down, and sits beside him. “I never meant it as no. I'd never tell you no. It's a not now. It's a later. When you're ready.”

“But I am – “, he starts, and she stops him by raising her hand.

“When we're both ready. I need to get to know you again. It wouldn't be fair to either of us, if I'd be with you before I've stopped looking for traces of him.” She takes his hand in hers, brushing her thumb over the back, and hopes he'll understand. That what's left of his older self will help him see where she's coming from, why he wouldn't have been able to be with her either, were their places reversed.

He doesn't get it, though. She sees it on his face even before he opens his mouth. And of course he doesn't; he's seventeen. Everyone thinks they have it all figured out at seventeen, and that probably goes double for someone who has the remnants of a grown man sitting somewhere in his mind. “I am him.”

“Not yet,” she says, very gently. He's not; he doesn't trust her the same way, he hasn't yet figured out how to rely on someone, let his guard down, give himself over without a safety net. And if they’re supposed to be together, she needs him to make that leap first, time and time again, so she can do the same. It's how they work. “You're going to become him. Probably. Maybe you'll become a little different, but I doubt there's a version of you I wouldn't want to be with.”

He averts his eyes, but doesn't pull his hand away. “How long? A year? Two? Five? Ten?”

“No idea.” She hopes it won't be that long, though it's been a slow process the first time around too. They didn't fall in love; they tip-toed into it. “I can't say. I can't give you a time frame.”

“I'll wait,” he says, and when he looks up again, there's a shimmer of what she's lost – what they've both lost. Understanding, patience, determination. The man she's used to isn't gone. He's dormant.

She edges a little closer, close enough that she can place her head on his shoulder, their fingers entwined in his lap. “I know you will.”