when it trembles and it roars
the path below your thunder
rating: pg-13
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff, Phil Coulson, Maria Hill
warnings: none
summary: There’s a storm rising on the horizon, gray and growing quickly, and they have weathered its like together before - but all things change. Wing!fic.
author’s note: Follows the water is wide and salvation in a sky of stars.
"What’s this about?" Clint asks, because Phil’s face is calm but his hands are flat against the table, his pens are coded black red black instead of coordinated with his suit. He asks because Maria sits next his handler with her Council face on, distaste for what is coming creeping under the edges of her mask, and they both sit across from, not beside, him.
He asks because he can feel his hackles rise with the faintest tension in his shoulders, because there is danger in the air and he can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.
But his hands are in his pockets, his voice is easy as he turns to the unfamiliar agent standing by at the table’s head, and ‘Montenegro’ doesn’t see the threat that’s buried there.
”Have a seat, Barton,” is the response he is given, not from his handler, not from the woman in charge of SHIELD’s field agents, and the seats Montenegro gestures towards are empty and set apart.
He follows the instruction, slouches back despite his unease to cede the high ground to the Internal Affairs agent who remains standing, as if to pass judgment on them all.
Something is wrong, and Clint knows with a sinking feeling what it is.
"Natasha didn’t get invited to this shindig?" It’s simple to add the inflection, unconcerned and amused, right up until the thin-boned desk jockey with his pretentious suit and soft hands almost smiles.
And Barton learns why his partner isn’t there.
In the recorded video Natasha breathes ever slow and steady, gaze never wavering from the woman seated opposite her.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to get at.” It’s a statement, not a question.
The therapist hesitates and appears to consider her words before answering, the nearly imperceptible impatience telegraphing her eagerness.
“Can you say your actions have nothing to do with his wings?”
For a beat there is only silence, is only Natasha’s façade shutting down into controlled blankness.
“His wings.”
“Yes. The nature of your relationship appears to be almost entirely built on your possession of these wings, on maintaining a connection with their former owner. Natasha, no one has ever encountered a situation like this before. We honestly have no idea what effects they’re having on you. But given your record, can you say that your decisions are entirely your own?”
“Meaning?”
"If you didn’t have his wings, would you feel this way about him?"
Clint catches the subtle signs on the monitor as she processes this, as she excises the decades she has spent with feather and sinew grafted into her spine, the years in which they have ingratiated themselves with her mind. Her hands move minutely, the corner of her mouth draws slightly downwards; there is a shift in her shoulders that pulls them back, as though the wings themselves itch between her shoulder blades.
"No," she replies, to damn them both.
Natasha’s eyes are distant and terrible in the camera’s lens, and the feed cuts off.
"Effective immediately, SHIELD Psych is recommending a suspension of your partnership. Both Psych and IA believe its unhealthy aspects endanger yourselves and the organization," Agent Montenegro says, while Clint wants nothing more than to wrap his hands around the book-keeper’s neck, to do something instead of sit here with his head and heart being examined by committee. But his poker face is good, is better than any desk jockey can read; it’s only Coulson and Hill who might understand that something is going on beneath his motionless expression.
Who know the order of things well enough to keep their concerns to themselves.
That’s what it is, isn’t it? Bitterness skews his mask. In the end, it’s every man for himself - or, and he laughs bitterly at the thought, herself. There’s nothing more permanent than passing words; everyone in this shark-infested tank is ready to turn on each other at a moment’s notice. At a simple question.
There’s no mistaking Montenegro’s reaction when the anger boils up enough to draw Clint’s calloused fingers into clenched fists, to tighten the curve of his jaw until his teeth grate together. Didn’t plan on that, Barton wants to drawl. You’re sitting in a room with a killer. With three of them.
And this man has unseated a major relationship that will affect them all.
"Agent Barton," Montenegro begins, falters. Clint scrapes his chair backwards, enjoying the hair-raising screech of metal over tile, and stands.
"Permission to be excused, sir?" He asks, staring straight ahead rather than acknowledging the idiotic paper-pusher running this sham of a meeting. Hill nods.
"Permission granted."
And Barton leaves a room full of traitors behind him.
He finds her in the corridors, in the gun-metal gray halls and sterile walls that line the housing quarters, and it is easy to push her against the wall, fists knotted in her jacket, alarm and surprise and nothing like terror in her wide eyes.
"So that’s it?" He snarls, keeping her pinned even as her arms flex under his hands, pull outwards as if wings will follow. "You’re going to pretend it’s just my fucking mutation that’s been keeping us together all this time?"
There is the comprehension, the moment of understanding, a light that brightens and dims for detachment when Natasha steps aside for Romanoff, for the killer he saved by a dusty canyon too long ago.
"What else could it be?" She is cold, distant, the curl of contempt in her lip. "Do you honestly think I would tolerate you if I was in my right mind?"
"You’re going with my stolen wings make me crazy?” The space between them is nonexistent, is his body pressed against hers when his face is inches from her cool disgust. “You’re really going to claim you’ve been insane this whole time, this whole damn time, and just realized it?”
"Who says I haven’t known?" His partner - no, not after this, God, not after this - bites out with precision, her teeth white and predatory in the fluorescent lights. "It has been easier to accommodate the desire than lower myself to training another agent." Disdain would drip from the words, from her lips, if it could.
And Clint is speechless.
"This desire?" He asks, after a broken heartbeat, after a pain he didn’t know he was capable of, and leans into her with the anger that lashes out in defense. She responds, no less willing than before, but mockery dances in her eyes when they break apart, come back together.
They make it into someone’s quarters - his, he thinks in a red and furious haze - and it is not kind or gentle, but it is loving… for as much love as an assassin and sniper are capable of, with the truth laid bare between them. And when they lie tangled together, his nose tucked under her cheek, her nails leaving red scores over the scars on his back, Clint murmurs
"Got your message."
He feels her exhalation in response, a silent affirmation of receipt, the barest brush of her lips against his skin. Someone wants them driven apart; someone wants them separated. They will play this out until they find who is pulling these strings, they and Coulson and Hill, and even apart they will still have each other’s backs.
She leaves a few minutes later, pulling her discarded clothes on with the languid grace of a queen after conquest, and Clint lies staring at her shadow until the door slides closed behind her. Though his face will tell anyone watching the cameras that his world has been shifted, has rocked on its axis, he cradles the truth of it in his heart: only those with feather-kissed spines will understand.
It is because of his wings that Natasha grew, flew, broke out of the Red Room’s hold; it is because of her wings that he is alive. Were the hollow spaces along his own back still filled with down and bone, they would never have become the people who met in glass and dust anddebts.
They would never have found that another person could be equal to the freedom of the sky.