Fixing What Is Broken

[bornrussian]

Time doesn't fix it. They settle into something approaching their normal routine, but there's a chasm between them that's never been there before. Natasha bites her tongue rather than tease Clint and Clint tries to give her space. Natasha gives it a week, during which -- except for a few nights early on spent on the sofa together and bitterly regretted in the morning when they're nowhere near back to how they used to be, and plus aching joints and backs and cricked necks -- they relearn how to sleep alone. Though Natasha sleeps in fits and starts, never sleeping through the night. They meet in the kitchen in the small hours of the morning and have tea and biscuits together in an aching kind of silence before dragging themselves back to bed.

At the end of the week, one good thing has come from the new distance between them; Clint is finally ready to make it on his own.

Natasha leaves in the middle of the night. She hides a note folded in the tea tin for him Time to stand on your own two feet for a while. I'm going off-grid. Good luck!

She goes to Russia. Makes Fury dig up a mission for her and throws herself head first into action. Before she leaves, she visits the burned out hull of the orphanage where she spent her first couple of years. From under the remains of the swingset, she digs up a banged-up and rusting metalbox. Inside, there's a smaller wooden box. She takes it and packs it up tight in her luggage.

Through it all, she thinks of Clint, twists the wedding band and engagement ring he spent five hours buying for a cover story (and then slid on her finger with a far more solemn look than was strictly speaking warranted) around on her finger and doesn't sleep.

She hits Heathrow in the middle of the night exactly two weeks later. She gets her car from long-term parking and drives through the night. She's at their remote cottage, perched on the cliff towering over the crashing gray waves of the sea, at dawn. Walking into the house (crossing the threshold that Clint carried her across with his usual smugness), she half expects to find it empty, Clint's seemingly infinite patience finally run out.

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[usedtoberussian.livejournal.com]

All the conflicting emotions that have been raging through Natasha on the entire drive back -- the fear that he might be gone balanced by the hope that he is, the need to see him balanced by the awkward weight of the turn their relationship has taken, and the things she'll never put into words; the ones that have kept her awake in endless strange beds, staring up at the ceiling and aching -- they're all drowned out by the sheer and overwhelming relief that he's still there. Not to mention the genuine pleasure of seeing him again. Hell, but she's missed him.

There's a wide and genuine grin on her lips when he pulls her into that rib-crushing hug and she wraps her arms around his shoulders to pull him in even closer, hugging him back far too tight. Their bodies press flush together -- fitting like they always do -- and it's hard to breathe, but that doesn't fucking matter. It's been far too long since they hugged like this and she has missed it. She has missed him. Missed them. More than there are words to describe it.

"You look like shit," she informs him by way of greeting, her voice slightly breathless and very teasing, but there's a core of unending fondness beneath it all.