in our bedroom after the war (avengers; clint x natasha; ~2000 words)
PART i. WE ARE BEGINNING
a clint x natasha au (in our bedroom after the war)
There is, in the woods directly south of ---- (which is to remain nameless for the purpose of this story and the privacy of those involved), a cabin, surrounded by trees and decomposing bark from an oak that collapsed the year before it was built.
People don’t go there, not because it’s haunted or because there are rumors surrounding the people who live, and have lived, inside, or because it’s not their house, but because most people don’t know that it exists, and wouldn’t care to, anyway. The post doesn’t come, except on Sundays, when the daily paper is carried in, seven at a time, by the same old mailman who has been paid to do it for years.
He remembers, somewhere in the back of his age-addled mind, the face of a small girl with red ringlets who lived there once. She lived there only briefly, with a pair of parents who looked nothing like her, during the year when he first began delivering the post on Sundays. The money was weak, even then, but now he does it more for himself than for anyone who does or does not live there. More often than not, the newspapers pile up and disappear at intervals.
He doesn’t ask. He hardly even thinks about it. He just accepts the check when it arrives, with no return address, and delivers the paper to an empty house. And sometimes it is brilliant. Sometimes, he stands at the edge of the clearing, looking up past the rotting wood and dripping leaves, to the windows lit up violently and watches the silhouette of a tired woman pass from room to room.
He listens to the birds and leaves the post on Sundays- six days of it, for years and years and years -and feels terribly, impossibly old.
Clint is aware of very little before December 14th, beside a sore sprawl of his limbs, and the foggy red light that penetrates his eyelids. He is aware of a childhood that belongs to him, which holds onto the unraveling threads of his memory, laughing, and the vague notion of the present, which looks like a worried woman, and tastes like a glass of water spilling down his chin and soaking through his shirt.
When he wakes up, he thinks that he is drowning. A woman is screaming, and her foot lands a particularly vicious kick against the leg of the bed when he opens his eyes. The dim, half-light is almost blinding, and he blinks, and his eyes are disgusting and crusty. His mouth betrays him, too, when he asks ‘who are you’ and it comes out ‘choo’r yew’ and his voice is that of a child.
She looks down at him, plain-faced and beautiful. She is rosy from kicking the bed, and her eyes are wide and dark. She’s taken his hand.
‘Oh, thank god,’ she says. ‘Clint.’ That’s his name; the childhood inside his head laughs viciously at him as he recognizes the word. But he does not know her, this woman with the pale face and bright hair, who looks tired and has taken his hand.
‘Who are you?’ he asks. He manages this time.
‘Oh,’ she says again.
Her hand flies from his with a snap and a crack that he is certain must have been inside his head.
His clothes smell like sweat and feel chalky beneath his palms. She gives him a clean pair, and takes his dirty pair, and in return he looks away when she is crying. There is silence between them, heavy and rank, charged with what they both know. He does not know her, and she is beautiful, but he can tell that he was supposed to.
He searches mercilessly, all the hidden boxes in his brain. All he finds is weakness, and a boy that might have been his brother, and so much fear, which his childhood wears like a cloak as it mocks him. There is no woman, no bright, flaming woman; he does not remember her tears. He pulls a shirt over his head, and it smells like a woman’s detergent.
Outside it is green.
She is standing in the hallways when he steps out. His bare feet feel lewd against the carpet, but she did not give him socks or shoes. She is in bare feet, too, and it feels too intimate for two people who have never met. She still hasn’t said a word.
But she is beautiful, and he trusts her. It does not occur to him, then, that beauty can be evil. He sees in her a little girl with red ringlets who he has never met.
‘We’re hiding,’ she tells him, over a meal that tastes as though she cannot cook, and he is so afraid to find out why that he does not ask, and pretends that trust is this easy, and that it is green outside, and that sometime before morning he does not hear the thunk of the paper on the porch downstairs.
He pretends, and he has to, since the plain-faced and beautiful woman in the other room had told him it was Sunday.
It’s over breakfast that everything falls apart, that he begins to wonder about the doors lining the hallway. He knows which room is his, and which is hers- wherein she sleeps with the door closed at night -and which is the bathroom with the lipstick that she, plain-faced, does not wear and the shampoo that smells like his t-shirt did when he found it in the morning on the edge of his bed.
Her eggs are better than dinner, and there is ketchup in the middle of the table. She squeezes the little packets into the big bottle rather than buying new; Clint isn’t sure how he knows that.
‘My name is Natasha,’ she says uncomfortably, with no preamble, and her eyes are expecting a joke. There is none, so he says nothing and chokes on his toast.
There is something unsavory about captivity, as unspoken as it is, and perhaps all the worse for it. There is something in the part of his brain that won’t stop laughing that reminds him of hatred for the captor, and the tingling in his limbs caused by the desire to run but the necessity of staying. Even so, he knows the memory is separate from the now, and that he does not hate this woman, and that he does not even know her.
He does, though, that much she has told him, and now her name, twice, and these two things at least cannot lie on the spectrum from true to false. They either are, or are not, and he cannot decide which he would prefer.
She chews on her fork. He is thinking about the hallway, and the doors that remind him of his memory. Like those in his mind, he cannot be sure which ones to open, because there is nothing to tell him that there will be anything there to find. And the potential of an alternative- the long drop into oblivion -is more terrifying than a certainty of sameness and absence of a missing piece. He is suspended, permanently, in the idea that there was once a past that belonged to him, the preamble for a future that he has lost. Natasha sits across the table from him, and every time their eyes meet he becomes more and more sure that in the moment before he asked her who she was, he could have kissed her, and she would have kissed him back.
‘Do you remember-‘ she chokes off. Her bare foot knocks into the table leg. ‘What do you remember?’
He cocks his head at her, defiant. His confusion makes him want to lick his wounds and blame her for imagining them up. ‘What have I forgotten?’
She looks as though she might burst into tears, or slap him across the face, when she tells him that she doesn’t know.
‘A boy,’ he says finally. His fork clatters against the plate and the napkin is coming apart like his brain in his hands. The post is sitting on the counter across the room and when he sees it, it makes him irrationally afraid. ‘My brother.’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Your brother.’ When it becomes clear that he hasn’t more to say, she frowns. ‘Do you remember the circus?’ she asks hesitantly.
He thinks for a moment, about to tell her that that is ridiculous and why- but then he knows it, knows it so familiarly and unflinchingly that he begins to laugh. She seems startled, and when her foot accidentally brushes his she recoils so violently that her chair nearly topples over. A bird is watching them through the window with large, yellow eyes.
Natasha gets up, her tremulous, plain-faced beauty suddenly horrifying in the sunlight that streams through the window. Clint watches with trepidation as she makes her way across the room, into the hallway. He hears a faceless door open and close, and the sounds of her shuffling back.
‘What about this?’ she asks. ‘Do you remember this?’
She is holding what at first appears to be a roll of fabric, but it unfurls in her arms and he sees that it is a costume. The color, above all, is overpowering; a royal purple that he detests. There are rips and scorch marks on the arms, and the cowl is nearly torn away. In her hand are a bow and a quiver of arrows, which she holds just out of his reach. The string on the bow has snapped.
Clint feels a sudden urge to mend it, and then nothing. He does not remember these things, and they repel him, even though he knows that he is supposed to.
‘No,’ he says quietly. She sets a yellowing piece of paper on the edge of the table and slides it toward him with the bow tucked under her arm. ‘No,’ he says again, but he takes the paper, which is not as yellow as he thought, and the date is written on it in a red felt-tip pen.
The picture is of him and Natasha. She is covered in dust, her red hair flying everywhere. He is unconscious in her arms, head tipped back at a disturbing angle. His neck and jaw are covered in blood, but it is unmistakably him, with the cowl distended and pulled back from his skin.
Not much of the title is left from when she ripped it from the paper.
idow and Hawkeye: MIA?
He looks at it for a long time, frowning, while something bangs the doors inside his head open and closed. They echo in the emptiness, and the bird on the windowsill squawks and flies away.
Clint looks up, finally. She extends her hand for the paper, and her fingers are cold when he hands it to her, and she looks at him as though he is a stranger.
She is beautiful, and he does not trust her.
Suddenly, his lungs hurt as though he has been running for a very long time.