As always, none of this is mine.

Break The Silence

It isn't perfect.

Clint has three days leave before being shipped off to New Mexico and the Malibu sun is blinding on him. She's in six inch heels and a pencil skirt, blouse open to reveal a hint of black lace, when she kisses him in front of a backdrop of sand and palm trees.

"It's good to see you," she babbles, beaming. "Do you want a drink? Or I could order dinner…"

Clint's hands come down suddenly on her shoulders, putting distance between them. He swallows, eyes wary.

"Tasha," he says carefully, slowly. "Who are you right now?"

The greeting. The smiles. She might even have giggled.

Oh.

"It's been a long week," she replies after a moment, stepping away. What she means is it's been a long time playing Natalie.

Clint tries to hide a sigh but Natal- Natasha spots it anyway.

She slips off the heels, squares her shoulders and concentrates on shifting her posture into a relaxed fighter's stance, away from Natalie Rushman's pouted lips and head tilts, the eyes that linger a second too long on preening business men. Breathe in, breathe out. Blood, fire, training mats. Volgograd, Cairo, an attic in Ekaterinburg. She was not born in Boston, and she only went to Princeton to kill a man.

When she turns to look at Clint he reaches out for her and looks resigned when she turns from him with an apologetic smile.

"I'll take the couch," he says.

Natasha reaches out and grabs his wrist before he can walk past her. "No, don't."

They order the greasiest pizza on the take out menu and watch an action movie on his laptop until she leans against her shoulder. When they go to bed, still clothed, he lies behind her, his arm coming round to gently fit around her waist.

"We'll figure it out," he breathes into her hair, his lips brushing the back of her neck. "You're here. You're here."

The first time they fuck is in Seoul, after a mission went south and a bullet barely missed her, and they crash together against the safe house wall, her clothes heavy with rain and her hair made redder by someone else's blood.

"I thought they- I thought you-" Clint gasps as he fumbles with her wet clothes, and Natasha's mind is a whirlwind as she grinds her hips against him.

She digs her fingernails into shoulders while he unzips his fly and sucks a bruise onto her neck, and it is rough and brutal and over far too soon.

Clint moves to the opposite side of the room afterwards, his pants still undone as he reaches up to touch the scratches on his jaw, and for a horrible moment Natasha thinks he might say sorry or something equally stupid, and she pulls her shirt back on with a glare. "Don't think that I didn't have a choice in this, Hawkeye," she snaps, and they don't talk until they reach New York.

The second time she comes to him is almost six months later, when she returns from the first solo mission S.H.I.E.L.D declared her fit for. She's been alone with her thoughts for so long that her stitched together memories are starting to fray, and here is Clint, in blue jeans and a grey t-shirt that stretches across his shoulders, Agent Barton, from Iowa, so obnoxiously American she could not have made him up.

She can feel his need when he places his hands on her waist, not moving, the unspoken question hanging between them. She kisses his mouth, gentle, uncertain. He wants shy? She can do shy.

His breath hitches, but his hands don't move. "Do you want this?"

She tilts her head, goes for coquettish instead. "What do you want?"

"Nothing, if you're not willing," he rumbles, and it's so him she has to bite back something that is not quite a laugh.

"How noble of you."

He flinches like he's been stung. "Is that really so hard to believe?"

"Sure you don't just want a project?"

"Is that what you- Damn it!"

He turns away from her and leans against the window, forehead resting on his arm.

She wraps her arms around him, feeling his body tense and his pulse race, solid muscle against her chest, and he is real, so real.

He turns and she attacks his mouth, all pretence at shyness gone and at last he responds, one hand twisting in her hair, the other coming down to grip her ass.

She breaks off the kiss to pull his shirt up over his head, tracing the map of scars across his skin, trying to commit them to memory.

She hears his barely stifled groan and he brings her back to eye level, fingers cupping her cheek.

"If you're doing this because you think you owe me, you'd better walk away now."

"I'm not."

It's not a lie.

When she wakes up with the ghost of steel fingers around her throat she grasps for tangible things; the weight of the heavy blanket tucked under one arm, Clint's heat at her back.

In other cities with other names she opens her eyes to satin sheets and designer wallpaper, craving juice she doesn't normally drink, or to the dull ceiling of some freezing bolthole that looks too much like grey ceilings half a world away. She sorts through faces- Laura, Sonya, Natalie, Natalia- before finding Natasha in the smooth grip of a gun or the scar on her elbow that isn't from a bullet, in a train station in Siberia and an apartment in New York, bits of her scattered across the globe in splatter patterns, cyanide capsules, empty gasoline drums.

Sometimes Clint will give her a humourless smile and ask what she's doing with an old soldier like him, and she wants to tell him that for all her youth she has never been young.

There are mornings where she remembers who he is before she remembers herself, and nights where he can't touch her without risking getting kicked in the face. He doesn't understand, but he does not question. He has monsters under the bed too.

It never becomes perfect.

It does get better.