shield falls and not everyone climbs out of the rubble alive. bobbi is a bruise, an exhausted scrap of a woman with a heart that beats for panic and bleeds for survival, but doesn’t do much else.
clint’s the one to tell her when the dust settles (he was atlas with a clenched jaw and a tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth - bobbi spares him the full explanation after one syllable, her name; he hates talking on the phone, and she doesn’t have any words to give him). they’ve lost a child together before, so he understands the desperation with which she clings to rage. to lose her footing is to surrender to the paralysis of grief, and neither have been good at dwelling on that (for better or worse). he hangs up after three minutes of silence with a sigh and the promise of brining her home. but babs wasn’t theirs - she was bobbi’s, an almost-daughter, her responsibility; her family. clint can’t unburden her this time by shouldering some of this weight, this terrible guilt. she’s failed at the most important job she’s ever been given, and bobbi knows she’ll have that to bear for the rest of her life.
waiting for extraction, shattered on the floor of her safe house, the mountains press in around her, deafen her, press her into something cold, bitter and hard. agents don’t take their own revenge, but this is a new world - she has an unlimited supply of bullets with HYDRA scratched into every one of them, and no one to tell her to stop firing.
My muse is dead. Tell me how yours is dealing with it.
