Chapter Text
Natasha does not have emotional problems. Or, at least, she certainly did not have them before that SHIELD psych suggested she had emotional problems. They were required, Hawkeye and herself, to attend a joint psychiatric debrief after a mission went bad and both agents who were their backups were killed (knives and throats don’t mix, not unlike Natasha and psychiatrists). Natasha liked both Utley and Hamish, don’t get her wrong, but they died because they disobeyed Clint’s orders and they nearly got him killed in the process, which makes them a little closer to unforgivable in Natasha’s mind.
“Do you see,” said the psychiatrist in a gentle, encouraging tone that made Natasha want to drive her big toe into his throat with force, “how blaming dead people only serves to alievate your own anxiety and guilt? The dead cannot carry our blame.”
Natasha did not say, I don’t need them to carry my blame. I carry the blame of people after they died and managed well, didn’t I? She did not say much. She crossed her arms and stared distantly into the psych’s eyes. She knews better than to play him, to seduce him, even a SHIELD psychiatrist who may not be immune to her beauty would call her out on that. But she could stare at him in that absent way that freaked people out because they began to imagine what she was imagining and no matter how far they were from the truth, she won. She would always win.
Next to her, Clint shifted, sticking a pen down his cast on his left arm and scratching at the healing skin beneath the bright green plaster. Written on his arm is I Am Not Allowed To Hit People With This. Please Tell Phil If I Do and that has been enough to keep others from signing his cast in an absurd tradition that Natasha does not understand but participates in. Under the top of the cast around his upper arm, in a very small black letter, it just says, NR and she noticed that he penciled a heart around it.
She flicked him with her hand and signed, I do not heart you.
He grinned and signed back, Of course you do. It says so, right here on my cast.
The psychiatrist sighed. “Denial keeps you in a child like state, Agent Romanov, which, given your childhood—“
Natasha stood and left. She had enough. Behind her, Clint rose fluidly, his balance unaffected by the additional weight on his left side. She heard him say something faintly to the psych and then he was behind her, closing the door, and walking with her down the hallway.
She turned to him and signed, I am not emotionally stunted.
His eyes were grave. He said aloud, quietly, Emotionally stunted and emotionally guarded are different and the dickwad didn’t know the difference.
She closed her hand around his, let him walk with her back to her apartment, demonstrative and open. It is her gratitude.
She mulls over the session for a few days, trains with it in the back of her mind, watches other people’s faces in debriefings, strategy meetings, security tests, the mess hall. She watches for the ways they understand human emotion and the display it. She understand this. It’s like math for her: there is a calculation. Their emotions + her needs = her response. It’s very simple. But it is different to think about whether she could school her face into the same expression if she meant it. When Natasha is given bad news or good news, she is calm and neutral, always, because she doesn’t know how to react until she sees the other person’s reaction.
Phil sits down next to her in the mess while she is reading over the day’s international news over a cup of coffee. His face is gentle and sad. He always looks like this. Natasha wonders what she always looks like. He slides a portfolio over to her. “An assignment. You don’t have to take it.”
Natasha lifts an eyebrow. “That’s unusual.”
He shrugs and says, “It won’t be easy.”
Natasha opens the briefing material, looks at the first sentence, and shuts the folder with a palm on top of it, as if to keep it from opening on its own accord. She exhales slowly. She says, “Sao Paolo.”
He says, “It’s beautiful this time of year.”
“Who is on my team?”
He shakes his head. “Just you.”
Natasha fingers the edge of the folder. “You told Clint already.”
Phil gives her a quiet smile but only with his eyes. “I spoke to Clint about the last mission, the psych eval, and whether he thought you were capable of going on a mission alone after a mission gone bad.”
Natasha schools her face to look neutral. “What did he say?”
“That you do whatever you put your mind to, and that he can’t tell me anything because you’ll kick his ass.”
Natasha’s mouth curves into a very small smile that Phil thinks she reserves just for all things Hawkeye. She says softly, “Smart man.”
Phil nods. “Think about it. Get back to me.”
Natasha looks up at him as he stands. “Do you think I’m emotionally stunted?”
“I think you wouldn’t know a feeling if it danced naked in front of you and shot arrows at you,” Coulson replies dryly.
Natasha flinches. “I know feelings.”
“What’s this you are feeling right now then?” Coulson asks.
Natasha knows what she is feeling right now. It is a catalog, a list of symptoms. She feels: tired and achy from her morning run, the desire to get to the gym again, concern over the latest rounds of security tests on a SHIELD facility north of Seattle, confusion over Coulson’s facial expression, and a strong pulsing refusal to open the briefing material in front of her.
But she suspects this is not what Coulson means. He gives her a sad smile, touches the top of her head affectionately as he leaves, and she is left staring at a red folder with images in home that fit too close to her heart.
“I have feelings,” she says aloud to reassure herself.
Maria Hill sits down at her table and snorts. “Right. All you feel is the desire to beat the pulp out of innocent people.”
Natasha’s lips curl upwards. “I didn’t lay a finger on Darcy. She’s all yours.”
Maria says, “She can’t even walk right.”
“You have only yourself to blame,” Natasha waggles, letting her eyes glint wickedly at her friend.
Maria throws a French fry at her which Natasha caught and ate. Maria rolls her eyes. “Go beat the shit out of Clint.”
“I like that idea,” Natasha announces, taking her cue. She stands and says, “I’ll go easier on Darcy tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Maria mutters, her eyes back down on her own report now.
Natasha picks up her red folder and walks back to her rooms where she is sure Clint is filching from her library of old movies while he cleans his bow. If there is one thing Hawkeye is, it is meticulously and highly regimented. He stuck to a schedule like glue and apparently ten am after working out was “Sit in Natasha’s apartment and Clean my Bow and Use her Netflix/Movies” hour.
She isn’t disappointed. He’s disheveled after his post-workout shower, his hair sticking up at odd angles, his knees holding his bow steady as he carefully eyes up the string and rubs resin into it. It’d be erotic if she didn’t have something to ask him.
“Mission anticipation is not a feeling,” she tells him, dumping her gym bag on the floor, tossing the mission brief onto the table, and carelessly pulling her shirt over her head and peeling off her pants on her way past him to the bathroom.
He glances up at her, blinks, his eyes running down her, and then he returns to his bow. He says evenly, “No, it isn’t.”
She starts the shower, leaving the door open. It isn’t an invitation, and she knows that he won’t take it as one. She wants to continue the conversation. She unwinds her hair from its bun and shirks her bra and underwear into a pile on the floor. She steps under the warm spray of water and exhales slowly.
“And refreshed isn’t really a feeling is it.”
“It could be. But I don’t think that’s what they are talking about.”
They. It is an us versus them thing then. Or maybe, a Natasha versus the psych and Phil thing. She isn’t sure what he means. She dumps shampoo into her hair and lathers it up into her hair.
“I know I feel things. I have to, don’t I?” she asks him, and she can almost hear the quake at the edges of her own words. Almost. She thinks she controls it enough.
He appears in the doorway, watching her with his arms crossed over his chest. There is no lust in his eyes, but Clint always had better control of himself than anyone ever gave him credit for. He says quietly, “Right now, what you’re feeling is any of the following: lost, vulnerable, scared, or confused.”
Natasha tips her head back and rinses the shampoo from her hair. Her first instinct is to roll her eyes at him and tell him that she is Natasha Romanov and Natasha Romanov does not do lost, vulnerable, scared, or confused. Natalie Rushman or any of her alias might, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t do those things but maybe she feels them. She tries each on for size in her head. I feel lost. I feel vulnerable. I feel scared. I feel confused.
She says abruptly, “Confused.”
She lathers up her skin with soap and looks over her shoulder at him. He is still watching her with a careful, neutral expression. She says, “What are you feeling right now?”
“Concerned,” he answers immediately. “I think you’re more out of sorts than you realize, and I realized, and I don’t know if I need to talk to Coulson about whether you’re fit to take a mission by yourself or not. Especially one that has to do with hospitals and children.”
She casts him a dark glare. “I am fine to go on a mission. I’ve gone on missions feeling more out of sorts than this.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to this time,” he isn’t arguing, just positing the counter-argument to her own.
She turns off the water and steps out of the shower. He takes a towel off the wall and wraps her in it, pulling her close and kissing her damp head. She presses her palms against his chest and closes her eyes. She almost says, I feel safe, but she doesn’t say it and she doesn’t know why.
That night, when he is kissing his way down her body, and she feels that anxious tension building in her body when he reaches the inside of her thigh, she pulls him up to her mouth again and he murmurs against her, That is a feeling. Exposed is a feeling. And when she comes around him, like rain falling against a battlefield in the angry aftermath of war, she whispers back, You make me feel whole, and he crushes her against him as he finds his own release.
She still does not understand feelings, even after that. She does not understand what she feels when it is late and she is awake, and Clint is asleep, snoring at her side, his nose resting on her arm, his lips against her skin, his bright green cast strangely alien against her pale skin glowing blue in the darkened room.
Feelings, she decided, are more complicated than the beings that possess them.