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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[stillnotlegolas.livejournal.com]

It's not entirely a surprise when she leaves. He's been expecting it since almost the moment after they arrived because he knows her and knows she doesn't do well with being in once place for long, and holding such a mundane alter-ego was just as grating. Add on him being fucked in the head and saying things he shouldn't right at the wrong moment and then the awkward tension that spilled between them any time there was any sort of daylight and it was pretty much a matter of time--

--Not that he was really expecting it when he woke up to an empty cottage (sleeping alone was getting to him, making him jittery and unsure of exactly when he was able to sleep deeply, and when he should be awake and trying to reconcile whatever he'd ripped asunder), bleary and looking for coffee.

There isn't any, and he finds the note when he goes after tea, reading it over and over again before it sinks in completely what it means. Off-grid could mean any number of things, could mean she's gone to one of her safe-houses, or she's taking a mission or she's going back to New York or the Helicarrier. And then, he realizes quite suddenly, that he's alone.

So he does what anyone might in this situation, what he thinks people are supposed to do. He walks the two and a half miles to town, finds the open liquor store and buys three bottles of decent whiskey, comes home and drinks them. He spends the first three days she's gone lost in a haze of alcohol. He doesn't drink often, only every now and again, but he can put it back when he wants to, and he does that now, drinking until he can't remember why he's so drunk and sprawling on various bits of furniture in the house until he can move again. He comes out of it when he runs out of booze, and suddenly wishes he hadn't even begun. His head is full of cotton and pain, pounding at every sound and bit of light, his mouth tastes like something has died in it, several somethings, and perhaps they have rotted there, and the spends the fourth day she's gone parting with everything he tries to put in his stomach. He catches sight of himself in the mirror--covered in stubble, unwashed, pale and weary and decides he's not quite that pathetic.

So on day five he starts the process of pulling himself back together. It begins with perching again, as it always does. He is at home in high places--it's why he'd asked her to find a place on a cliff, and he climbs his way out onto the roof, appreciates the surprisingly bright sun and settles in. There is quiet then, and stillness, and it's just him and the surf and the air and the birds and the few animals he can hear rustling in the field around the cottage. He remembers what it's like to have absence from the world and not just from emotions.

It turns into walking by day six. He travels the walking paths from the cottage for hours, crawling over rocks and walking through fields and employing every bit of field training he has to try and regain his equilibrium. He finds abandoned ponds and spends time throwing rocks at the water so they skip, climbing trees and resting with his back against them. He sleeps out in a field that night, quiet and listening for the owls, watching as they take down mice and sleeping rabbits.