SHIELD had lit a fire under his ass since Natasha walked out, and now it wasn’t just Hill chewing him up in conference rooms. Now Fury was getting involved, straight from the top, roasting Clint like Sunday dinner. Hill he could shrug off, but Fury? Ending up on Fury’s blacklist was a short walk to a long drop.
Every conversation nowadays circled back the same way: Why didn’t you stop her, Barton? Why didn’t you see it coming, Barton? Why the hell are you still here, Barton?
And Clint didn’t have an answer worth speaking. The truth was worse than anything they suspected. He didn’t stop her because he didn’t want to. Natasha was the most electrifying thing that had ever happened to him. By far. And he wanted to chase it—and her—even if it dragged him off a cliff.
What he had wasn’t an affair with the hot chick at work, but a very dangerous addiction. And not the kind you could scrub clean with twelve steps and folding chairs in a church basement.
No, this was the game. The constant, gnawing rush of being one step behind Natasha, yet somehow still one step ahead of everyone else.
Laura could never give him that. She gave him the safe place to land. Natasha gave him the reason to jump in the first place.
Hill handed the failure-in-the-making off to Rhodes, washed her hands of the entire affair, and boarded a jet back to Washington. With any luck, there would be better news waiting for her there.
Clint Barton was expected back from Europe today. And, reportedly, he’d made contact with Romanoff.
Hill reserved the right to question on how literal that contact had been. Based on her own unfortunately vivid secondhand exposure, she knew two things: one, Clint Barton had a thing for oral. And two, he had an even bigger thing for Natasha Romanoff.
Frequently in tandem.
Workplace affairs weren’t uncommon at SHIELD. They were officially discouraged, vaguely condemned, but ordinarily—they were ignored. People needed outlets, and most coped how they could.
But when she’d walked in on Barton and Romanoff in that locker room, it hadn’t been just another workplace indiscretion. It had been personal. Laura Hayes—now Barton—was Hill’s friend. Not in the weekend-wine-and-texting kind of way, but in the quiet, mutual-respect-under-fire sort of way. Laura had been a sharp analyst with the kind of gut instincts Hill actually trusted.
Shame she couldn’t apply them to her own marriage.
Hill’s hand had been on the phone that day, halfway through dialing, walking—no, practically running—out of Barton and Romanoff’s impromptu love nest. Thankfully, she’d managed to hold off on the impulse long enough for Natasha to seek her out.
That had surprised her. She’d expected Barton to make the effort to defend his marriage, if not his honor. But instead he’d sent the affair to clean up after him. That also stirred something she didn’t want to name—an old, uninvited (and probably entirely inappropriate) echo of her own parents.
But anyway, Romanoff had come to bargain.
Hill had kept her cards close during that first conversation. She listened, but offered nothing in return. She said she’d think about it. Then Romanoff walked, and Hill did think.
She thought about Laura, who’d given up a promising career to play homemaker in the woods with a man whose loyalty couldn’t survive a mission rotation. She thought about Romanoff, a woman who specialized in dismantling men and had now apparently also taken up doing it recreationally.
And she thought about Barton.
Barton, who, in every way that mattered, reminded Hill of her father. She didn’t hate him. That would have required the energy. She simply saw him for what he was—a man, doing what men did. Why did every woman have to learn that truth for herself? Some later, some the hard way, but all eventually. Her mother had. Now Laura would, too.
And Hill—caught, as ever, in the middle—wondered if maybe, just this once, she could do something about it.
She thought longer. More deliberately.
And slowly, carefully, the answer came. Yes, she realized. She could do something. She could do the thing she’d wished someone had done for her when she was a teenager listening to her parents scream in the kitchen. She could intervene.
So she did not tell Laura.
Instead, she decided to teach Barton and Romanoff a lesson.
First order of business: disband their notorious little STRIKE Team. Coulson made his usual polite objections, but Hill didn’t waste time entertaining them. Phil Coulson belonged to the second category of men: well-meaning, but completely declawed. He posed no threat.
Barton, on the other hand, got the message directly.
Hill pulled him into her office and laid it out in terms he couldn’t misread. One twitch in the wrong direction—figurative or otherwise—and she’d be on the phone to Laura before he could zip up. She didn’t have much more than that single locker room encounter, but the guilt was written all over him, uppercase and underlined. He knew what he’d done, and at his core, he was a spineless coward.
Romanoff was more complicated.
Hill hadn’t known what to do with her at first. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to deal with her at all. Romanoff reminded her of all the women her father had cycled through, and she’d grown up resenting those women. But eventually, Hill reached a decision. Flawed as she was, even Natasha Romanoff deserved a chance at redemption.
She would be kept close, under direct supervision. There would be no more freelancing, no informal favors, no mysterious side ops. Hill would assign every mission personally, and she would know exactly where Black Widow was, and what she was doing, at any given time.
If Romanoff was going to chase men, then men it would be. Let her perfect the thing she was so eager to use.
Again. And again. And again.
And—would you believe it?—it actually worked.
Barton fell back in line, Romanoff kept her hands (and other parts) occupied elsewhere, and about a year later, Hill received a breathless phone call from Laura. She was glowing, thrilled, talking a mile a minute about how good things had been lately between her and Clint.
What could it be, Maria? Do they serve different food in the canteen these days?
Hill had laughed, made some non-answer. Then Laura had said she was pregnant again. Clint didn’t know yet, but she just had to tell someone.
Hill sincerely congratulated her. After the call, she also congratulated herself. Sometimes people had to be forced into their happy endings, it was as simple as that.
Bolstered by this rare and quiet success, she even thought (for the first time in years) about calling her mother. She would say something meaningful. Maybe she could still make a difference there too.
But she never made that call, because by then, the Stark situation was starting to unfold, and Hill didn’t have time for personal resolutions anymore.
She just hoped to God that Barton brought good news. She could use the lift, and caffeine had stopped working on her years ago.
But Clint Barton did not bring good news.
“You let her go,” Hill said, and it wasn’t even a question. The truth clung to him like a bad smell. He looked like a man awaiting execution.
“Tell me how badly you screwed it up,” she said, then caught herself before saying how badly you screwed her. But that part was implied. They’d probably done it like animals.
Natasha let the NVGs dangle from her fingers, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Below her, Madripoor was asleep… but Madripoor never slept deeply, and its dreams were always uneasy.
This stakeout wasn’t the kind of thing to normally keep her up at night. A young man, messed with the wrong people, had now made himself the latest target on a very long list. It was a story as old as sin.
What was new was how many of these cases were stacking up, all of them leading nowhere good. She’d been in the game long enough to know when trouble was brewing, and this job had that bad taste all over it. Like they were poking a wasps' nest and just waiting for the sting.
“Hey, get a load of that Code 69,” Clint said beside her, his voice cutting through the quiet. “Third window, seventh floor. Jesus, what a hot mama.”
He pointed toward an apartment building a few blocks away. Natasha didn’t bother raising the NVGs again. It was too far to see anything worth the effort, and she had no interest in whatever late-night peepshow had caught Clint’s attention this time.
She heard his quiet chuckle, the faint hum of his zoom lenses clicking into place. Stark’s latest tech had gifted him eyes that saw everything. He was running the beta for Extremis 3.1.4—still under wraps for the wider public, but Stark had chosen a select few to test the upgrade, and Clint was one of them.
He ran night vision now, extended magnification, even thermal imaging. The first few days after the upgrade, he’d been so overwhelmed by the avalanche of details, he’d almost clawed out his shiny new eyes from all the migraines. But once the headaches wore off and the nanites settled into his brain chemistry, it was a whole different story. Like an artist stumbling onto a new color no one else had ever seen. Or, in Clint’s case, more like a kid gone wild in a candy store.
Who’s more dominant: Clint, hands down. Even if he likes to let her play at it every now and again.
Who’s the cuddler: I’m gonna say both. Clint cuddles the unconscious and Natasha cuddles back, which makes him smile.
Who’s the big spoon/little spoon:Honestly, when the spooning mood strikes Clint that likely means he’s feeling pretty needy and vulnerable, so he’d be the little spoon. But never admit it, of course.
What’s their favorite non-sexual activity:That’s such a loaded question… Because what most would think non-sexual, these two would think very sexual.. But, I’m gonna say… shopping. Wait- in public? with people? Shit, that’s sexual too. >.< Oh well.
A head canon:If Clint didn’t have Natasha he’d be a wreck. Honestly, he could have become something that no one could see. He’d have bipolar freak-outs, he’d kill more than he needed to, he’d be far too unstable to be the hero he is. Natasha, even as twisted as she is herself, makes him be a good person. Whether she, or even he, realizes it. She lets him live out his fantasy life, but her warmth and willingness to stay with him, keep him grounded, keeps him from breaking down and losing his soul.
Their relationship summed up in a gif:that’s tricky… um…
