❝no one will bend until one falls; we used to fight, you for me and me for you❞

[eugenides]

the art of dreamless sleep | marvel cinematic universe | clint barton and natasha romanoff | 1050 words | g

He watches in silence as the cobblestones far beneath him turn three shades darker in the rain. His perch is a rooftop, two stories up. He’s shielded, at least, from the rain, which is more than he can say for his partner. He grows bored, waiting for her; arrow knocked and muscles stiff, Clint reflects that sometimes being the backup sucks.

After what seems like hours, she appears—her hair like a flame against the gloomy London gray. She has the package is tucked under one arm, the opposite hand clutches a gun. Because, he sees immediately, she’s not alone—three men follow her, two in the lead and one lagging behind.

Natasha takes out one of them in a matter of seconds, her elbow hitting him with enough force to shatter his jaw. His partner is smarter, hanging back for a moment, so that she has to actively go after him, a charge from her wristlets missing him by a hair.

Clint’s alert, watching the scene, not really worried about the man in Natasha’s sights because he has no doubt she will handle him. But while she is, the third man is coming up behind her, and she’s using one arm to guard against a jab from the fist and can’t do more without dropping the package.

He acts almost without thinking, the arrow flying fast. Natasha probably feels it fly an inch or two from her neck, sailing past her to embed in the third man’s shoulder. He springs back, crying out, and in the next moment Natasha has thrown him to the ground, and his last partner with him.

She races down the cobblestone street, needing to make the drop in the next few minutes, but he sees her, as she knows he must, when she turns her face in the direction of his perch and offers him a slow, thankful smile. From that high up, he shouldn’t be able to make out the detail.

But in reality, he sees everything, and she knows it.

⋙

The next thing they know, it’s another mission successful and another transatlantic flight back to New York. They’ve done this what seems like a million times, and know each other’s patterns perfectly. Regardless of shifts in time-zone, if he can’t see the sun Clint is asleep in a matter of moments. If there’s light out, he spends the trip staring out the window, perhaps imagining the vacations he’d be having if he visited all these different cities under normal circumstances. Either way, he always ends up in New York red-eyed and cranky.

Natasha is harder to predict. Sometimes she spends the whole time filling reports so she won’t have to do them once they touch down. Or she pulls out a novel or a play, and spends the hours filling her thoughts with someone else’s lives and ideas. Once, Clint asked her what she was reading. In response, she read aloud to him, Tolstoy in Russian. He’s never had a knack for languages, and she thought he’d tire of it quickly. Instead he sat, fixated, as she made her way through an entire chapter. He just liked listening to the sound of her voice.

Tonight, however, it’s different. Clint has long-since taken his seat in the jet when Natasha comes down the aisle, a thick shawl wrapped over her uniform. He’d forgotten she spent the entire day in the rain, probably chilled to the bone. He isn’t expecting it when she sits down beside him, is taken aback when she leans her head against his shoulder and falls quickly into a sound sleep.

It’s dark out, and by all rights he should be asleep, too. But instead he spends the entire flight wide-awake, sitting still and watching the motion of her breaths, the steady rise and fall of her chest and memorizing the lines of her profile. After a while he curves one arm around her, and is surprised when she still doesn’t stir.

It’s a sign of the trust she has in him, and he savors the thought of it as much as the warm feeling of her weight against his shoulder.

⋙

She’s a private person by nature, and he knows better than to ask what she’ll be doing now that they have time off. So once they’ve spoken to their superiors and wrapped the mission in every way possible, he watches her leave HQ as he has so many times before. After that, Clint heads home, back to his small tucked-away apartment in a corner of New York City.

They’ve been gone a week and a half, so he knows whatever food he had will be spoiled by the time he gets there. So he stops at a corner market and gets a gallon of orange juice and a handful of apples. His penchant for the fruit has garnered more than a few William Tell jokes around SHIELD headquarters, but he figures the break from Robin Hood is good enough.

It’s almost midnight by the time he unlocks his doors and slips into the apartment, kicking off his boots and dropping the groceries on the counter. His apartment is as bare as it possibly can be; there are no photographs, no personal affects. If he ever stopped to think about it, he’d realize that most of his time there is spent either eating or sleeping. But he doesn’t think about it, or at least never for very long.

He strips off various articles of clothing on his way to the bedroom—his gloves and jacket find themselves on the kitchen floor, and his shirt is shed just before he flops on top of the neatly-made bed. Muscles sore from hours spent crouched on rooftops and brain exhausted from days without sleep, he finally closes his eyes and lets his body shut down.

And if, in the night, he shifts until he’s curled around a phantom body, his arms outstretched as though to hold on to someone, he doesn’t think about that either when he wakes, and dresses, and downs half the orange juice. And he certainly doesn’t think about it when he returns to HQ, and Natasha says good morning, and they walk into the briefing room, rested and ready for another mission.