Work Text:
2016
ATLANTIC OCEAN, INTERNATIONAL WATERS
“Oh, my God,” says Scott Lang. “Oh, my God. Captain America is here to break us out. Captain America is here to break us out!”
Steve turns to give him a look, still in the middle of unlocking Sam’s door. Natasha looks around the circular room and its cells, her shoulders lighter than they should feel after the haircut.
Wanda’s in a straitjacket, her cell not even containing a bed—bastards, all of them—and Natasha gets to work unlocking her door first, meeting her eyes with what she hopes holds some kind of reassurance.
“Lower your voice, man,” says Clint, voice like the ocean and the sun and the rich earth all at once.
Clint.
Natasha doesn’t let herself look at him. Not yet. Because lately she hasn’t been able to keep her mind off him, all the way through fastening her lucky charm around her neck on her way to Norway, Budapest (fucking Budapest), and slipping out of Ross’ grasp. Because she’s been in love with him for years now and she might be able to survive without him but she’s not sure she wants to, and the knowledge that he’s been locked up for so long has been burning her alive. Because if she even takes a second to look at him, she knows she will stop giving a fuck about anyone else in the room and blow the whole place up to make sure he gets out safe.
“It’s okay,” she tells Wanda instead, and before she knows it the jacket is on the floor and she’s safe in her arms. “We’re getting you out. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
She gives Wanda a few pats on the back before helping her up to join Steve, Sam and Lang. Then, finally, she lets her gaze drift to the cell she hasn’t spared a glance. Clint’s been watching her wordlessly and his eyes send a jolt through her body.
Natasha turns to the three others. “You guys go on ahead. We won’t be long.”
“Okay,” says Steve, arm already around Wanda’s shoulders. “C’mon.”
The room clears out, like it makes a difference. Whenever Clint and Natasha are in the same room, they are the only people in it, and she’s tired of pretending he isn’t the only person who will ever be on the same wavelength as her.
Natasha gets to work on the lock, trying not to acknowledge her heart slamming against her ribs. “Before you say anything about the hair…”
“Wasn’t going to,” he replies, snap-quick, and she’s missed these little pieces of banter, multitudes of layers of emotions buried under fleeting three-word sentences. He stares at her through the glass. “You’re the same, Natasha. Same as you’ve always been. Trying to get me out of trouble and risking it yourself—God, you are so stupid. Jesus. I love you, I ever tell you that?”
“Shut up,” she says, and the door finally gives. They move at the same time, him grabbing her face and her hands settling aimlessly on his shoulders when he kisses her, not sweet but urgent like they’ve been drowning for a decade and they should’ve done this sooner, goddammit, shouldn’t have waited for a maximum-security prison break.
Natasha breaks the kiss by pulling her chin in, her forehead pressed tightly to his only because she’s selfish. “Clint. Laura. You got kids at home.” If you’re forced to remind someone that they’re married, you know you’re fucked.
“I don’t care,” he damn near says into her mouth. “I don’t care about that, Natasha. They’re not my home. I’ll mail the divorce papers to the farm if I have to; Jesus.”
She kisses him again, lingering longer than she should because they’ve never tasted each other like this and it’s already getting addicting.
“Jesus,” she echoes in a whisper, tracing his jaw with her fingers, “missed you,” and the both of them leave the Raft with hooked pinkies and flushed cheeks.
2014
VORMIR
“How’s it going?” Clint throws the half-joke into the howling air and laughs as accompaniment; it falls flat but that’s hardly his fault. “Jesus. Maybe he’s making this shit up.”
“No.” Natasha doesn’t have to tear her glance away from the nothing she’s staring at for her brain to bring up the grotesque image of the red alien, the one that’s floating maybe two meters next to her. “I don’t think so.”
Clint keeps pacing. “Why, ‘cause he knows your daddy’s name?”
“I didn’t.”
It feels like a confession, like she’s admitting a secret, except that Clint already knows—he knows she was robbed of her chance at a normal life when she was just a baby, he knows she’d have preferred for the Stonekeeper to tell her what her mother’s name was instead, he knows everything about her. Secrets don’t exist, can’t grow between them because they’re entwined so tightly there’s no room.
“Thanos left here with the stone, without the daughter. That’s not a coincidence.”
He does stop pacing then, looks out over the cliff. “Yeah.”
“Whatever it takes,” Natasha says lowly.
“Whatever it takes,” Clint echoes.
Natasha stands up with a swiftness that’s been trained into her, taking a few steps closer to Clint and his warmth. She should be saying something. Something about how if they don’t get that stone, billions of people will stay dead. She should be launching herself off that cliff by now.
She’s not.
Instead, it’s Clint who opens his mouth. “Aren’t you tired… Nat?”
She exhales, relieved in a sick way that makes her feel guilty inside. “I’m so tired. God.”
She’s horrified when her nose prickles at this sentence and reminds herself: she’s an Avenger. The universe does not have it in itself to care if she might be getting tired, if she might not want to save the world anymore. It doesn’t, because right now half of humanity is but dust and ashes, and it expects two perfectly human spies on a foreign planet to save all of their asses, something way above their paygrades combined.
But maybe, just maybe…
“Natasha,” Clint whispers, so soft she barely hears the first syllable, then his lips are on hers and she doesn’t want it to stop, doesn’t want him to pull away even though they’re probably getting stared at by the skull in the hood, because she’s had so much taken away from her and if she can’t even have this… well, then maybe she doesn’t really believe in the universe anymore.
“Please,” she says, tearful, except she’s not really sure what she’s begging for. Another way out, perhaps, that doesn’t involve losing any lives.
Clint looks at her for a long moment. “Screw the mission?” he finally says, and Natasha sighs, heart flooding with relief.
“Screw the mission,” she agrees. “We have time before we need to go back. Is it really that bad to want to be selfish for once?”
“It’s not,” he promises. “Look, we have a fucking spaceship. We’re gonna walk off this gigantic cliff, then we’re gonna fly back to Earth, or wherever you wanna go. We got the whole galaxy.”
“The whole galaxy,” Natasha repeats, and she thinks she can see it in Clint’s eyes. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
He reaches down to grab her hand, and the both of them turn to start heading off the cliff without bidding the Stonekeeper goodbye. It feels wrong and selfish, but Natasha can’t bring herself to care anymore when she feels Clint’s pulse in his hand, alive and fast. Not when she has never asked the universe for a single thing in return, and she loves this man terribly, she really does, more than anything else the sun or moon has ever touched.
They don’t get further than five steps away from the edge before a strange sound warbles in the air. A semi-opaque glowing rectangle opens out of thin air in front of them and Natasha and Clint halt their footfalls in confusion.
A few people walk out of the rectangle in identical uniforms and helmets. The last one, the captain, Natasha presumes, surveys the scene indifferently. Her eyes finally land on Clint and Natasha.
“Standard sequence violation.” She nods in confirmation to no one in particular. “Variants identified.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha gauges Clint’s reaction. When he pulls his sword out and points it at the leader, Natasha does the same with her guns.
Without losing a second, the people behind the captain pull their own weapons out. They look like ordinary sticks, except Nat has an ominous feeling about how they’re probably capable of a little more than just sticks.
“Fucking hell,” Clint mutters under his breath. “Can we get one break? A single one?”
The leader speaks again. “On behalf of the Time Variance Authority, I hereby arrest you for crimes against the Sacred Time—”
A quick blur jumps out of the glowing doorway, which has been left open. It knocks the captain down to the jagged, cold ground and she stays unconscious.
Clint and Natasha stagger backwards, too shaken to react. Her hand grabs his automatically. The remaining helmet people twist something on their weapons that turn them on, and the ends of them start glowing.
Yep. Definitely more than just sticks.
Fortunately, they don’t have to worry about it. A second person jumps through the doorway, taking all the agents down in less than fifteen seconds. The doorway finally closes, collapsing in on itself.
It’s impressive, to say the least, and Natasha would even say the style reminds her of someone she used to know, but her attention lands back on the first person to jump in and save the day. Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness of Vormir, especially after the quick flashes of light from the glowing sticks, but she’d recognise that silhouette, that stance anywhere—
“Steve?”
“Hey, Nat,” Steve says sheepishly. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Barton,” he nods to Clint, who nods back as a professional courtesy more than anything.
“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in New York?” asks Nat. “And, wait—what do you mean by that, haven’t seen me in a while? What’s it been, thirty minutes?”
“Thirty minutes for you,” Steve elaborates unhelpfully. “Look, we’ll tell you everything, but we have to get you somewhere safer first.”
“We?” quotes Nat.
The second person steps out of the shadows, a bit more melodramatic than necessary. His brown hair is down to his shoulders, and his arm glints just the same under a different moon—
“No.” The word is stolen from somewhere within her throat. She didn’t even mean to say it, but: no. “You’re dead. You died. The whole reason we’re on this cliff is because of that.”
“Okay. Okay, so ghosts now. Delightful,” says Clint sarcastically, seemingly handling everything calmer than Natasha is. “What, you die on the mission too, Rogers? Here to give us a lecture on whatever it takes?”
Natasha bows her head, afraid to meet Steve’s eyes after betraying the team.
“We’re not dead,” enunciates Steve. “But the TVA is going to notice your branch continuing on. We don’t have a lot of time. Buck?”
“TVA, branch,” Clint lists to Natasha, just quiet enough to be out of Steve or James’ earshot. “None of this makes sense, Tasha.”
James bends down to pick up something like a console the leader’s been holding, then taps around like he’s been operating it his whole life. “We’re all set, Captain.”
Steve nods, and James taps a button decisively. A new glowing doorway appears in front of the four of them, waiting for someone to step through.
“This way, guys,” says Steve. “You two go first, just in case anything happens.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Clint eyes the doorway, suspicious. “Is that even safe?”
James grimaces. “Not entirely. Someone got vapourised once.”
Natasha’s eyebrows go up, certain she’s heard him wrong. “Someone got what?”
“Bucky, don’t scare them,” Steve reprimands. “It happened once, and we’re not even sure if it was related—”
James scoffs. “What was I supposed to do, lie to them?”
“Yes,” says Steve.
“Please shut up,” Clint says. “You’re giving me a headache; it’s been a long day. Now, I’m going to step through this creepy portal because you guys are making it seem like we’ve got no other choice, but if I get vapourised or torn to bits or whatever, Natasha—” he meets her eyes— “it’s been an honour being in love with you.”
“Oh—” She doesn’t have time to formulate a response before feeling his hand slip out of hers as he steps through the doorway and disappears into nowhere.
They wait maybe two seconds. Nothing happens, and Natasha’s palm already starts itching for Clint’s. After a last look at Steve and James, deciding she’d risk everything to stand beside Clint wherever he is, she closes her eyes and takes a big step, bracing for the worst.
0079
POMPEII, ITALY
Natasha stumbles into Clint’s arms, fitting into him perfectly, but she doesn’t have a lot of time to relish in it. Steve and James step out of the glowing doorway before it closes, one after the other.
Clint looks around, still supporting Natasha’s weight with his hands under her bent elbows. “This is a lot to take in,” he breathes.
No one around them is wearing what they’d consider to be normal, modern clothes. People are talking to each other in a language Natasha had thought dead, and in the distance looms a giant mountain.
Wait. Not a mountain. “Is that…”
“Mount Vesuvius, yes,” answers Steve from behind her. “You may have heard of it.”
“May have—” Clint scoffs. “No big deal, it’s just the volcano that buried an entire… city…”
Natasha picks up from where he trails off and rounds on Steve. “Did you bring us to Pompeii?”
“Short answer, yes,” says Steve, concise.
Natasha throws her hands up in the air. “God damn it, Rogers, this is ridiculous—how are we going to get back home?”
“You’re not,” James says, maybe a little sadly, which halts the conversation.
Clint sighs and sits down on the ground, cross-legged. When no one says anything more, Natasha joins him and so do Steve and James. The four of them make a little circle and Natasha feels the rocky ground prickling her skin through her suit.
“We’ll start from the beginning,” Steve says after a while. “The Sacred Timeline.
“Apparently, the universe has been policing our every move. There are things that are meant to happen, and things that aren’t. And if you stray off that meant-to-happen timeline, decide to do something else…”
“You get apprehended,” James finishes for him.
“Which is what happened to us, and very nearly you.”
“Wait,” says Clint, “if they got you guys, how did you escape from… wherever they took you?”
Steve smiles. “I’m Captain America. He’s the Winter Soldier.”
James rolls his eyes, fond. “We stole a TemPad.” He holds up the console-like thing in his hand. “We’ve been running ever since. Shit goes down whenever someone tries to take away Steve’s precious free will.”
“We didn’t find it fair for them to prosecute us just for doing something they were blindsided by.”
“They call those Nexus events.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” asks Clint.
“The TVA.”
“Time Variance Authority,” Natasha says, remembering what the agent had said on Vormir and putting two and two together.
“What year are you from?” Clint asks. “What was your Nexus event?”
“2014,” Steve says.
James says, “When Steve said my name on the highway, I recognised him.”
“There was a shootout,” says Steve, not meeting their eyes. “HYDRA ended up killing Maria Hill.”
“And you,” James adds softly, looking timidly at Nat with eyes greyer than usual.
Clint brings his arm around her waist, pulling her closer subconsciously.
“It’s easy to guess what your Nexus event was,” James continues.
“Neither of us jumping,” she agrees and raises her gaze to meet Clint’s. He’s looking at her incomprehensibly, and without speaking she knows he’s thinking of the same thing, of how one of them losing the other can’t be something scripted and ordained, because it doesn’t make sense at all. It’s always been Clint-and-Natasha. Neither of them can exist without the other.
Except that it does make sense, because they’ve always known they were going to die for each other. It makes sense, and Natasha doesn’t know if that’s worse.
Someone down the street shouts in English, and Clint and Natasha turn around, shocked, to find a herd of goats escaping from a caged vehicle and someone oddly familiar standing on top of it, who goes on to give a loud speech in perfect Latin.
Natasha whirls back around to face Steve and James, her braid flying in the air. “Is that true? You brought us to minutes before that thing’s gonna erupt?”
“More importantly,” Clint says slowly, “is that Loki?”
Natasha places her hand on his shoulder. “Clint—”
“Let me at him, God damn it—”
“Calm down, Barton,” Steve orders. “Stuff like this always happens. Fugitives of the TVA flock to apocalypses because they can’t find us here.”
“How long do you have to be running for to know that?” Natasha asks.
“Longer than we’ve actually lived,” Steve answers honestly.
“We have to go,” says James, standing up and looking at his TemPad closely. “Natalia’s right; the eruption’s getting closer.”
Steve stands and dusts his hands off. “Let’s show you two where we’ve been hiding.”
James opens the portal again.
“That’s a Timedoor, by the way,” Steve explains as the ground starts rumbling, and after a last look at the ancient city, Clint and Natasha step through the threshold again with no idea where they’re going next.
2018
HONG KONG, CHINA
The stairwell is desolate and grey, and Clint catches himself on the handrail before he tumbles down the stairs. He has got to get used to this. The landing is too small for four adults to be standing on and Bucky opens the closest door to lead them onto the empty floor.
There are sirens outside and flaky dust on the floor. Bucky takes a look out the window before closing the curtains.
“Welcome back to the Blip,” Steve says unceremoniously, “maybe five seconds after it’s happened,” and Clint steps away from the dust on the floor, suddenly horrifyingly conscious of what it really is.
“This is one of the rare buildings where everybody inside got snapped away,” explains Bucky solemnly. “We come here all the time just because it’s so spacious, but we make sure to never repeat floors so we don’t accidentally bump into, well… us.” He pulls a face. “We still don’t really know what’d happen.”
“So you’ve spent your whole life,” asks Clint, “hiding in empty rooms?”
“Essentially,” Steve shrugs after a moment. “We know everything that’s going—supposed—to happen: the fight with Tony; Thanos; me leaving… and frankly, we’re not fans of it.”
Natasha exchanges a glance with Clint. “Neither are we.”
“So, what do we do?” he asks. “Follow you and keep running?”
Running’s not the hard part. Running for too long, however, takes a toll even on people with the strongest stamina. Clint knows, and he knows Natasha knows even more.
“That’s always an option,” Bucky offers and Natasha half-smiles. “But we understand if that’s not what you want.”
“When we picked up a Nexus event that involved you two on our TemPad, we thought you’d like to have familiar faces to explain it to you instead of good ol’ propagandistic Miss Minutes—”
“Fucking Miss Minutes,” curses Bucky quietly.
“But now that we’re done…” Steve hands Natasha the TemPad taken from the agents on Vormir. “Take it. And good luck.”
“Thank you,” Natasha nods. She pulls Steve into a hug, then Bucky next, albeit more tentatively. Clint’s not quite there with either of them yet, so he settles with two handshakes that’ll hopefully somehow convey the same thing.
Natasha leads Clint a few steps away to a different corner of the floor. She gets the hang of how to operate the TemPad quickly; she presses a few buttons and looks up at him.
“So, where do you want to go?”
Clint swallows. “Home.”
2019
MISSOURI, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Clint hasn’t visited the farm since Natasha broke him out of the Raft and Laura sent back the papers she’d signed.
Visited, not come back to, because the farm has never really been a home to him. His real home has red hair and a shy smile she reserves just for him, and he’s never doubted that for a single second. And yet…
And yet, Clint is still dismayed to find that the farm isn’t occupied anymore. All the furniture is still perfectly in place, covered with a thick layer of dust. When Clint takes a step, a not-so-small bug scurries from its undisturbed hiding place, and it tells him all he needs to know.
He’s being quiet and it’s scaring Natasha, who comes up behind him to hold his hand. “Clint,” she says, impossibly close, “you don’t owe them anything.”
“I know I don’t,” he answers. “They made my life miserable,” but he chokes on it all the same.
There are still framed pictures in the living room. He picks one of them up, revelling in Lila’s frozen smile and Cooper in his oversized baseball hat and the fact that Nate can—could—stand without any help.
“They’re so big now.”
Natasha buries her nose in his shoulder; Natasha who’s stepped foot into the farmhouse more times than he can remember, Natasha who his daughter calls Auntie, Natasha who may not be the kids’ mother but watched them grow up nevertheless.
“I should’ve come back, Nat,” Clint says and chokes down a sob. “I should’ve—”
“Hey,” she interrupts. “No regrets, Clint.”
Natasha knows better than to actually mean it. The both of them are filled up with a lifetime’s supply of regrets, drowning in them on some particularly bad days, and yet they’re still standing here today with the hard-earned privilege of staring at each other with unreadable, sad eyes. The best they can do—the best anyone in this business can do—is pretend.
“No regrets,” he echoes, clenching his jaw a little too hard.
He ends up sitting on the steps of the front porch. Clint can’t bear the thought of going back in when no one else is inside, and Natasha can’t bear the thought of the stifling summer heat.
“Should’ve picked a cooler season,” she remarks while folding her legs under herself next to him, handing him the whiskey bottle she’d taken from the top cabinets. Without asking, he knows she’s smart enough to have already collected food, water, clothes from the guest room that’s always been reserved for her.
Clint wants to say something about how he’s taken enough from Laura and his supposed family, but right now that family is dust that’s been scattered by the wind throughout a five-mile radius, and if neither Natasha nor Clint are catapulting off that purple cliff, they’re not about to come back anytime soon.
Helpless and choiceless, Clint accepts the bottle and takes a swig. If he were anyone else he might wince at the burn in his throat.
The sun is setting. The sky is beautifully muted; poetic but right now just rudely insensitive. That’s just his luck, Clint supposes: the awesome outer-space planet is saved for the suicide mission and the colourful sunset is left for him finding out everyone in his family is dead.
“What are we going to do, Nat?” he asks, hoarse, the question unfair because there’s no objective way to correctly answer it. “We can’t run forever,” he says next, pointing out the obvious, even if Steve and Bucky have been running for most of it.
“No,” Natasha agrees. “But we can try.”
She stands back up and bends down to press a kiss against his temple. Her silhouette against the sun dizzies him until he’s not really sure what time means anymore.
2019
PARIS, FRANCE
The cathedral is a sight; it really is. Clint remembers how his mother used to teach him to say prayers but not the prayers themselves, then flashes forward to now, all the times he’s sworn on God then done the opposite, or moaned His name into Natasha’s mouth. Sorry, Mom.
“Shame,” he remarks, looking around, and he does mean it. It’s still bright outside and the daylight shines in through the colourful windows; Clint’s eyes follow the pillars as they go up, up into the arched ceiling and his head spins.
Natasha snorts, walking a little faster than he is. “C’mon, Hawkeye—how many churches do you think we’ve destroyed in the course of our avenging? We should be happy we’re not gonna be the cause of this one.”
She pauses in the middle of the aisle and steps to the side, leaving space for Clint on the bench and sitting down herself. When he sits, she turns to look at him patiently.
“What are we here for?” he asks.
Natasha shrugs as if she’s been expecting this question. “I don’t know. I remember seeing this on the news, and… now that we’re relieved of our assassin duties, I wanna go places. See stuff.”
“And are you satisfied, Tsarina?” He gives her a fancy bow, eliciting a laugh out of her. It’s golden, and Clint wishes he could clasp it in a locket forever.
“You’re here with me,” she shrugs again. “That was never a question.”
He leans forward to capture her lips in a kiss, slower than they should be able to afford.
“Mm-mm,” she hums into his mouth, then pulls away to sit straight. “Not in God’s house, honey.”
Clint snorts. “What do you expect me to do, pray?”
Clint prays. Clint rests his forehead on the back of the bench in front of them, squeezes his eyes shut and thinks as hard as he can, please get us out of this. Please let us be okay. Please.
When he opens his eyes, Natasha is looking out the window, watching molten lead fall from the roof. Clint thinks he can smell the smoke.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—
2001
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“Any day now,” mutters Clint, looking out the window. Natasha follows his gaze and notices the first plane in the far distance.
She taps the tiny bar in the corner of their TemPad to draw his attention to it. “I think it’s running out of battery.”
“What?”
“I said, I think it’s running—”
“I heard you the first time,” he interrupts. “I meant—what? Battery—that’s a thing? It’s an omnipotent authority organisation and it needs battery to run?”
Natasha meets his eyes over the TemPad. “We need supplies.”
2018
OTTAWA, CANADA
“Oh,” says Natasha, looking at the nearest clock. “We’re early.”
“Even better,” Clint counters. “It’s a free-for-all.”
Natasha starts out by feigning interest in the clothes hanging on the racks, but after a few minutes she’s just full-on taking whatever she can. The pile in her arms could rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Clint lets out an unfiltered laugh at the sight of it.
She’s already getting suspicious looks from everyone else in the store when the two of them make their way into the dark, cramped supply closet. Giggling in the dark, Clint slaps his hand around on the wall, and when he finally hits the light switch he realises Natasha’s standing right in front of him, lingering a few inches away, her pile of clothes already set down on the floor.
She looks beautiful. She always does, but not like this: her hair tousled in their hurry, her green eyes sparkling with laughter, buzzing with an energy he hasn’t seen her possess in a while. He kisses her then, sweeter than honey, feeling her smile into the kiss.
And then someone screams outside, blood-curdling, and Clint and Natasha break apart as more screams follow. It quickly turns to a wailing chaos, and Natasha sets her clothes down and checks the time on the TemPad.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get going. We don’t know how long this is going to take.”
Clint finds a power outlet on the wall and plugs the TemPad in. “We’re probably gonna be stuck here for a while.”
Wordlessly agreeing, Natasha sits down on the floor, bending her knees so there’s space for Clint to sit too.
“I got bread,” she announces out of the blue, opening her coat to reveal that she has, indeed, gotten some bread. Clint’s best guess is the huge bakery down the road, and he’s not even surprised that she managed to grab some without him noticing she went in. She holds a loaf out to Clint. “You want?”
Of course he does. They’re close to running out of usable currency, even if they do try to stick to a narrow time period for convenience, safety and familiarity, and stealing has become one of the easiest ways to get by. Stealing from the Blip is even arguably not immoral.
Clint and Natasha know how this goes; when the apocalypse happens, it’s every man for himself. The looting starts maybe a minute after Thanos’ snap, everyone snatching whatever they can and hoping they’re not the next ones to dissolve into thin air. The looting continues after that, doesn’t end until world governments and authorities start getting their shit together, which takes at least a whole week.
And, anyway, Clint’s been with Natasha those five years. He’s seen her work her ass off every day of every week, an assassin who never signed up to have the world strapped to her shoulders, whose legs trembled with every step but refused to let anyone else see. You give them a week, you give them five years or ten, those governments will still not have gotten their shit together. Maybe if they had, neither of them would be here right now.
Clint accepts the bread.
They end up staying in the closet for another five hours, waiting for the TemPad to charge. Natasha rests her head on his shoulder and naps while Clint listens to the screaming and sirens outside fade, though he knows better than to think they’ll be gone forever.
2015
NOVI GRAD, SOKOVIA
“You know, I’m starting to sense a pattern here,” Natasha remarks offhandedly, looking out the window at where the city’s starting to rise. The entire building is shaking and Clint can hear the screams coming from the cracking streets below them. “You notice how we’re kind of always involved in the apocalypses on Earth?”
He snorts. “I wouldn’t expect any less of us. Plus, the Blip? Technically, that wasn’t on us. We tried, remember?”
“I didn’t say it was on us,” Natasha rolls her eyes fondly. “Just that we were involved. And, yeah, we did try, if you count you shooting an arrow at Thanos and it just… bouncing off his armour.”
“I’m not the one who ran at him with tasers,” Clint defends.
Natasha shakes her head, smiling rather radiantly considering that the city they’re in is being transformed into a floating meteor—Clint has to swallow to get rid of that weird feeling in his ears. Her hair is down, blonde ends still visible, but it’s grown longer since Vormir and Clint thinks he could get used to this if he hasn’t been forced to already, be but content with glowing moments pinpricked and droppered from stolen time.
She just looks so goddamn pretty, and he pauses his fiddling with the TemPad for a second to kiss her.
Natasha pushes him away with a hand on his chest, her eyes going wide at something behind Clint. He looks out of the stone window she’s looking out, and in the distance he can see something red and gold zooming closer and closer. Right.
“The X-ray technology in the suit—he can see us,” whisper-screams Natasha, hurried. “Let’s go, let’s go—”
The both of them make it through the Timedoor and it closes just as Tony nears the window. He peers curiously inside, double-checking for any signs of life.
He opens his mouth, eyebrows starting to formulate a frown. “Barton, Romanoff—come in?”
“What,” comes Natasha’s exasperated voice from the other end of the comms.
“Kinda busy fighting robots,” says Clint, who grunts right after. A metallic noise makes its way in through the comms’ filtering system.
Huh. “That’s weird,” says Tony, who shrugs and flies away, checking other buildings for trapped civilians. “You guys will never believe what I think I just saw.”
“Was it Rogers saying a bad word?” asks Natasha smoothly, and Clint laughs at Steve’s disbelieving huff.
CRETACEOUS PERIOD
EARTH
“Goddamn,” Clint curses, panting when they finally find a cave to hide in. “I miss the 21st century. Those fuckers really are terrifying.”
“Good thing they won’t be around for much longer,” says Natasha. She sits on the rocky ground next to Clint, who checks the TemPad.
“I think we’ve still got four minutes before the asteroid hits,” he informs her.
Natasha leans on his torso, chuckling quietly. “We haven’t gotten a night’s sleep in so long.”
Clint puts an arm around her shoulder, concerned. It shows on his face, in his frown. “You can sleep, Nat. Go ahead; I’ll wake you.” He knows she’s perfectly capable of minute-long naps, though he’s still skeptical about whether or not those are actually effective.
“Nah,” Natasha smiles. “I’d rather be here. Awake, with you.”
Clint’s eyes soften before he kisses her and tries to tell her everything through it. The skin of her cheek is smooth under his hand and he’s never loved anybody this terribly.
“Natasha,” he whispers. “I love you.” His frown makes its way back onto his face. “But I think we both know what we need to do.”
He watches her face change, her smile slipping away and his heart dropping just as quickly.
“Isn’t it getting tiring for you too?” he asks. “My love?”
Natasha shuts down and gets up from where she’s been sitting next to him, nothing like the open woman she was half a minute ago. “We need to go.”
“What?” Clint frowns. “We still have three minutes.”
“We need to go,” she repeats like it’s a computing instruction. Clint sighs and opens the Timedoor.
1963
TEXAS, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“What do you know,” Natasha exclaims, all smiles as she opens her arms for Steve. “I’ll be honest, this is the last place I’d expect to run into you—and especially you.”
This earns a shrug from James. “I don’t remember where I was, but I’m confident no regular person would be able to find, well, me. As long as we don’t go poking our noses somewhere they don’t belong, there’ll be no running into past selves today. Especially past selves getting ready to assassinate a president.”
Steve pats Clint on the shoulder once he’s done hugging Nat. “Hey, Barton.”
“Captain,” he nods back, smiling. “You don’t know how good it is to see you.”
“No one understands time fugitives better than time fugitives,” he agrees.
The four of them find a spot where the crowd’s thinner, away from the main road. Natasha’s been having a blast pretending the (mostly one-sided) conversation they’d had a few Timedoors ago hasn’t happened at all, and it’s driving Clint insane.
The autumn sun casts an ethereal glow onto Natasha’s hair as she laughs and catches up with Steve and Bucky. They have no idea how long it’s been since Vormir for them, but after countless doorways and reset watches and clocks that go backwards, they’ve lost all sense of time. They haven’t got any idea how long it’s been since Vormir themselves.
They get a drink and a snack from a nearby stand, so engrossed in the relief of finding each other again that they nearly don’t notice the roaring cheers of the crowd increasing in volume. Clint stands on his tiptoes and barely makes out the president’s car coming around the corner.
Natasha sighs, catching on. “This is it?”
“Yeah,” confirms Steve. The sun is higher in the sky than when they’d first spotted each other in the crowd, but Clint doesn’t want to leave, even if Natasha is the only one he’d choose as a time-hopping partner.
“It’s been so fun,” she smiles wistfully. “Glad I got to see you one more time.”
Clint looks at her, curious.
“You too,” echoes Bucky. “But someone’s about to die in the next minute, and we should probably go before that, hmm?”
She smiles again and whispers a last “bye,” before the two pairs part ways. A few shots ring out from where they’re walking away from, and screams start to erupt through the crowd.
Clint pays no mind to this as he asks her, “What did you mean by that? See them one more time?”
Natasha shrugs. “You never know. Maybe we’ll never cross paths again.”
Clint holds her hand when they step through the Timedoor.
7810000
(or some time around that)
EARTH
“Okay,” says Clint, breathless and wide-eyed. “What the fuck did we do to this planet?”
“Irreversible shit, that’s what,” says Nat, taking a seat on the closest boulder and drinking from a water bottle Clint stole from 2021. “This is what Stark tried to prevent.”
Clint takes a look up at the sun that looks brighter than he remembers, then sits down next to Natasha filled with existential dread. “So this is how it all ends.”
“Ended,” amends Natasha. “We’re already extinct.”
Clint sighs. “So why does it matter? Why is the stupid TVA still after us and why are Nexus events so important if we all die anyway? Important enough to… chase us away from our home and everyone we know.” He swings his leg and kicks at a pebble.
“Because,” Natasha chuckles. “I think it does all matter. Even if it doesn’t in the end. It matters now. And all we can do is our best now. For the present, and not the future.”
“Kind of a contradictory thing to say in a young adult, science fiction novel setting,” remarks Clint quietly, a little taken aback.
Natasha gives him a sad smile. “You were right.”
“Don’t say that. You’re scaring me.”
Natasha cuffs him on the shoulder.
“Sorry. Go on, Your Majesty.”
“We’ve had more time than we were supposed to,” says Natasha, staring off into the horizon. “And this way… at least one of us gets to live.”
Clint snaps his head up. “You. You get to live.”
Natasha shakes her head slightly. “You can’t be sure of that, Clint.”
Yes, I can, Clint wants to snap. I swear to you, I will do whatever I have to to make sure you get out of this alive and back to your friends and your home; they’re waiting for you, Nat, but instead he settles with a lackluster, “Neither can you.”
The two of them drink each other in until the sun almost blinds their eyes: and wouldn’t that be funny. This is them at their simplest, barest forms, nobody alive on the entire globe except for the two of them. This is how it is and how it will always be: Clint and Natasha, together even at the end of time, hearts swaying dangerously close, imprinting themselves on each other until they are one and the same.
This is how it is. Clint doesn’t want that to change, and he kisses her with vows on his lips and promises on his tongue.
“One last visit,” he prompts, not looking back at her so he won’t cry, and punches in a string of coordinates into the TemPad.
2012
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“By the way,” Clint says loudly, “snitches end up in ditches, JARVIS. Don’t tell anyone we were here. Not even Stark.”
“Especially not Stark,” says Natasha, disgusted.
Stark Tower—because it’s not exactly Avengers Tower yet; they’re maybe three letters off from that—stands high and mighty above New York. Natasha probably has her legs wrapped around a man-killing alien right now, Clint cracking some sort of Budapest innuendo, but the Clint and Natasha that matter, the pair that’s been to indigo Hell and back, are stealing drinks from Stark’s display stands, weighing the bottles in their hands.
“Not to worry, Miss Romanoff, Mr Barton,” replies JARVIS, a voice they haven’t heard disembodied in a while, and it kicks up a few of Natasha’s memories involving a friend turning monochrome with a hole in his head that she’d rather stay buried. “The Avengers’ time-travelling secret is safe with me.”
Clint and Natasha exchange a look. He thinks we’re from 2023, Natasha mouths to him and Clint stifles an amused grin.
Natasha knows what she’s promised the man sitting next to her, swinging his legs on a barstool. She’s promised to die.
She’s promised to die for him.
A lifetime ago, when someone’s rough hands washed the blue out of her hair and she was handed a gun with every piece of knowledge needed to operate it forced into her brain, weakness like this would’ve gotten her killed.
A lifetime has passed, and she knows for sure now. Weakness like this will always get her killed. The existence of the golden boy beside her just ensures that she’ll walk off that cliff willingly.
The golden boy smiles and it takes the breath out of her lungs. He is the same Heaven that he’s doomed her to. “We’ve only got a few minutes before the God of Grease crash lands on Stark’s deck, so—what?”
Natasha grounds herself. “What?”
“What’s that look you’re giving me?”
“I just,” she says, then finishes honestly, “love you.”
“Oh. I love you too, Nat.” Clint leans forward to kiss her hesitantly, but she still holds him there for as long as he’ll stay. She knows for sure she’ll miss him, even if there won’t be any more her to miss him. Hell, maybe she’ll come back from the dead just to do that, just to haunt him.
Clint knows better than to ask why this feels like a goodbye (because it is) and Natasha knows better than to tell him she’s going to die so he can live (because she is). This puts them at a stalemate, neither of them making a move or saying anything for a few moments, and Natasha can feel their precious seconds ticking away. Time is almost up.
“A drink,” she proposes, and pours the rye into the glasses Clint’s brought to the bar.
“What do we toast to?” he asks, drink already half-raised into the air.
“The end of the world,” she smiles ironically.
They clink glasses and watch aliens swim in the air outside. Natasha wants to say, to you too. To you, Clint Barton, my happiest place, who gave me a purpose instead of leaving me to die. My debt and my vows are long overdue, and, hey. Promise me you won’t be too sad about it, hmm? Make new friends. Maybe even forget about me. And everything will be okay, in the end. Do you trust me, Clint Barton?
“To the end of the world.”
He trusts her.
2014
VORMIR
“We’ll do it,” yells Clint over the howling wind. The Timedoor closes after Natasha steps through behind him. There’s another pair of Clint and Natasha a not-quite eternity ago, standing shell-shocked at the sight of them.
Clint gulps, then averts his attention to the TVA agents, who have already arrived. “We’ll do what you want. We’ll go with whatever the stupid Timeline’s dictated. We’re tired of this, man.”
The agents pull their weapons out and turn on the ends of the sticks. Past-Clint and past-Natasha are stabbed with no warning. However, instead of injuring them in any way, they disappear into thin air with a sickly magical glow, sharing one last frightened look before they’re entirely gone.
“Go on, then,” the leader prompts, giving them no time to process that those past versions of them probably just died, as if this was a daily occurrence for them. “Fix the Timeline.”
Feeling awkward, Clint pulls Natasha aside for a moment. “Baby…”
Natasha sighs. “Clint, I need you to know that I love you. Okay?”
Clint stares at her with what he hopes is an indecipherable look. “Yeah. Okay.” He loves her too, and he is so, so, sorry, and he could tell her but it’d hurt even worse.
Taking advantage of her confusion, he takes a knife out from where he’s been hiding it under his shirt and stabs it into her stomach, nowhere vital but enough to hurt like a bitch.
Something flashes in her eyes, urgency or maybe understanding. “Clint,” she chokes out, and it makes his heart splinter.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he breathes, laying her on the ground gently. “Close your eyes, sweetheart.”
Her hands go to her stomach to try and keep the blood in. “Clint—”
He stands up and throws his bow sideways, not giving a fuck where it’s ended up. She’ll be okay. She will, because she’ll be back at the Compound in no time, where they’ve got Stark and Banner and all the medical resources she could ever require. In no time.
Clint keeps his eyes trained on Natasha. He wants her to be the last thing he sees; maybe it’ll make the fall shorter. He’s got a reason to be doing all this. He’s got a purpose, and he leaps off the edge of the cliff with his eyes closed, letting Natasha’s smile envelop him when there’s dark nothingness all around. The wind soars in his ears, or maybe it’s just his blood.
Clint prays again, the way he had in Notre Dame and every cathedral before that, stained glass windows and the feeling of his hand in his mother’s. The feeling of Natasha’s hand in his. Please.
Please let this be it.
In the name of—
A Timedoor opens beneath him. In his freefall, his heart drops further into his stomach, and he’s crying by the time he lands on the ground—back at the top of the cliff. The momentum should’ve killed him anyway. He should be dead.
“No!” he screams, getting up and rushing to where the TVA agents are dragging Natasha up. Her eyes are confused and bleary.
“We said fix the timeline,” says an agent. “You got one more chance. This is it. We’re handling this from now.”
“No,” he thrashes, trying to break through to get to Nat. “No, God, no, please let it be me—Natasha—let it be me, let me do it, I’ll do it again—”
With a particularly vicious shake, Natasha gets the agents off her for a moment. Pride flares up inside Clint—that’s my girl—and then she’s rushing to him, hugging him as tight as she can, snow in her hair where there used to be fire.
The agents grab Natasha again, snapping a collar around Clint’s neck. He doesn’t realise what it does until he’s running after Natasha being dragged along by the agents, keeps running after her, keeps running and keeps running.
He’s being fucking reset.
“It’s okay,” he thinks she hears her yell through her scared sobs. “Clint, it’s okay—”
“No,” he screams again even as he ends up in the same spot over and over again, “Natasha,” until he gets reset one last time and Natasha’s not there anymore, the agents peering over the cliff ten feet away, and he stops in his tracks, petrified, his feet aching and his heart hollow.
Natasha is gone. She’s gone, dragged inhumanely off a cliff by people who never knew her, who never knew just how big her heart was and how deeply she loved.
Clint can’t bring himself to walk to the edge and look. Turns out he’s not meant to anyway, it isn’t ordained in the Sacred Timeline, and the agents make their way back to him.
“You’re coming with us.”
“What?” he says, voice shaky. “No—no, I’m supposed to either die, or go back to New York. I’m supposed to die, it was supposed to be me—”
“You went time-hopping, Variant,” says the agent. “You’re coming with us.”
Clint gets dragged into another Timedoor. He’s sick of those, but he doesn’t have it in himself to resist.
????
TIME VARIANCE AUTHORITY
Clint notices a number of things when he comes to:
- He’s been drugged with something he never has before. His limbs are heavy and his mind blurry; he tries wiggling his fingers and fails.
- The room he’s in is lit with a dim yellow.
- He’s been seated in a chair of some sort, like he’s an experiment or something put on display.
- There are two other people in the room, talking in low voices. Likely about him.
- Natasha isn’t with him.
- Natasha isn’t here.
Natasha isn’t here, and yet the world spins on. Clint tries concentrating a little harder. The people aren’t that far from him, and he catches snippets of their conversation.
“It’s not like anything we’ve ever seen.”
“Just wipe everything after and before Vormir. This is standard.”
“We tried. We can’t. His memories, they’re too… too tied to the girl. It’s like his subconscious is refusing to let anything with her go.”
“Wipe the girl, then. We don’t have time for this.”
“We have time for everything.”
“Wipe the girl. That’s an order.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The door closes when she leaves. The other agent presses a button, and Clint feels the drug flood his system so quickly he can’t even react before he feels himself being dragged under again.
2023
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Clint lands on the glass platform on his knees, feeling like something’s missing, like something’s been wrenched unwillingly out of his insides. There’s a glowing stone in his hands.
He doesn’t remember how he got it.
“Clint, where’s Nat?” someone says. He looks up. Bruce, his mind supplies. Bruce, and Steve in front of him—Steve. He thinks that name should mean something else too. Steve. But what?
Steve opens his mouth. “Clint, where’s Natasha?”
Clint meets his eyes and recognises the blue from somewhere—somewhere.
“Who’s Natasha?” he says instead.
——
Wanda finds him by the lake after the funeral. She wraps an arm around his middle.
“This is what she would’ve wanted,” Wanda tells Clint.
“I loved her,” he realises, thinking about how everyone’s been tiptoeing around him even lighter than they’ve been tiptoeing around Pepper and Morgan.
“You did,” she says, “and she loved you.”
“Thanks for everything, Wanda,” he says. “I hope you’re okay, too.”
Wanda gives him a grim smile. “I will be.” She rubs his back one more time before stepping away from the lake and giving him a moment.
Clint takes his wallet out of his pocket. He’s been carrying it with him everywhere since he found the photo inside. He stares at the photo now, wrinkled and black and white in its glory, the woman named Natasha he doesn’t remember grinning back at him. The team doesn’t know about this; maybe some things are meant to stay secrets.
The team tells him she had red hair, and even though he can’t see it, he believes it to be true because it’s the same shade of the fire behind her. He wonders what happened to make her smile this wide, wonders if she got out from the fire unscathed. But most of all, he wonders about the story behind the back of the photo, where the woman he knows he should love, the woman he still does love somehow, made her mark and signed her name.
The black marker’s been smudged a little, but it’s dried since, and the words are still easy to make out:
Here’s to forever, my love.
Natasha ♡
1945
NAGASAKI, JAPAN
“Hundreds of thousands of people are about to die,” Clint points out, “and you’re drooling on my shirt.”
“You’re the best pillow I’ve ever had,” mumbles Natasha as an explanation.
“Okay, Princess.” He tries to shake her awake. “It’s time to go; c’mon.” He opens the Timedoor and it waits patiently for them to step through.
“Wait,” she says. “Take a picture of me.”
Clint rolls his eyes and grabs the camera on the other side of their cramped room. “You’re insane.”
“But…?”
“But you’re beautiful, and smart, and I wouldn’t trade you for the world, and I love you.”
Natasha grins, brighter than the morning sky outside. “I’d run forever with you.”
The world is fighting and the bomb drops, but Clint manages to get the picture and pull her through the portal by her hand.
Clint hears Natasha’s laugh in his ear. This will be how he remembers her for the rest of time—laughing eternally, brighter than fire, and a little too close.