Fic: Travelogue (2/5)
24/7/12 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchTravelogue
Avengers
Rating for all chapters: adult
(content notes, this chapter: brief introspection about past mind control.)
Characters: Clint/Bruce/Natasha, Tony Stark, Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Victor von Doom
Wordcount (total): 25,000 (this chapter): 2,600ish
Summary: Post-New York, Clint's still having trouble dealing with the whole Loki-controlling-his-brain situation, and Natasha seems to be avoiding him. Bruce Banner, meanwhile, just wants to get back to Kolkata.
A/N: another short chapter, but the next ones should be longer.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
A month or so after Sevastopol, Clint is in Bucharest as security for a SHIELD-sponsored diplomatic mission. It's dead boring, because nothing's going to happen to a top-secret talk about ball-bearing manufacture, but security needs to be there anyway. Clint treats it as a vacation - keeps his bow and knives close, but walks around on his off hours, instead of holing up in a nest to keep an eye on everything.
He's not surprised when he spots Banner in a crowd, watching some kids having a rap battle or something. Nat had said Banner was planning on going up through Bulgaria after Istanbul, and Bucharest is a big city near the border. Clint waves until Banner spots him, and then works his way through the crowd, making sure Banner can see him coming.
"Fancy meeting you here," says Banner. Clint starts to say something back, but Banner hushes him, his eyes on the two young women in the center of the crowd, one of them gesturing and speaking while the other sneers. Clint shrugs and lets the words wash over him, rhythmic and passionate and totally incomprehensible. But Clint can blend into a crowd - he chuckles when everyone else is laughing, and murmurs when the young man in front of him gasps. Bruce's gaze starts flicking over to Clint, and soon the show is over and the crowd is breaking up.
"Did you actually say 'rhubarb, rhubarb?'" Banner's half-smile is gaining strength.
"I had to say something," says Clint. "You think anyone else noticed?"
"They probably weren't paying as much attention to you," says Banner. They're the only people standing in the street, now, and Clint starts to walk, following an older woman with a leather briefcase before switching to a man with a powder-blue sweater. Directionless walking in a strange town reveals you as a tourist or a new-comer - if you don't have a direction, you can steal one from somebody else. For a second Clint thinks Banner is going to stay there and watch him walk away, but then Banner catches up with him and Clint slows to let him.
"You speak Romanian too?" asks Clint.
"Not well," says Banner. "But it's not that hard to understand. It's kind of like Italian."
Clint shakes his head. "I could really use your language skills," he says. "I've been leaning pretty hard on English and French while I'm here."
"It gets easier after your fifth language," says Banner. "You start focusing on similarities."
Bruce Banner: nuclear physicist, occasional superhero, polyglot. All Clint has going for him is a trick bow. Sometimes life really isn't fair.
Well, Banner would probably agree with him on that last part. It's not like life has been particularly easy on either of them.
"So I had to buy myself lunch in Sevastopol," says Clint. "And I still have your sweatpants."
"You were going to have to buy yourself lunch anyway. I didn't have any money. I still don't." Banner puts his hands in his pockets, pulls them inside out like he's in a cartoon. Clint waits to see if any moths want to fly out, but there's just lint in there. It makes Banner's point, anyway.
"Then let me buy you lunch too, this time," says Clint. He glances at the sky, the sun fading below the buildings. "Dinner. Whatever."
For a second Banner looks like he's going to argue, and Clint's not sure whether he would let it go or if he would inform Banner that dinner and his company is non-negotiable. He doesn't have to find out, because Banner blows out a breath and steers Clint's apparently-purposeful but functionally-aimless walk down a different alleyway.
"Is Italian okay?" he asks. "There's a restaurant around here."
The place is only a couple minutes away, and it's small, already filling up even this early in the day. They snag a table in the back, and Clint graciously takes the chair that's turned away from the rest of the restaurant, letting Banner to sit with his back to
the wall. A waiter drifts by with their menus.
"So," says Clint. "Romania."
Banner puts on a pair of glasses and peers at the menu. Clint glances down at his. It's all in Romanian, but the names look familiar, bar a few extra vowels. He can take his chances.
"You're not much closer to India," says Clint, when he's figured out what he's going to order and Banner still hasn't said anything. Banner looks up at him, over his glasses.
"Any more observations, Captain Obvious?"
"That shirt looks good on you," says Clint, which isn't true because that shirt is a muddy beige that doesn't suit Banner's coloring at all. But he can't resist, when Banner's handed him a straight line like that.
Clint would scold himself for teasing the Hulk if Banner didn't look so damn amused. It shouldn't be this easy to get a smile out of the guy, but Banner walks around with that half-smile all the time, and now half the things Clint says seem to make Banner broaden it into something real.
"I'm trying to figure out how to get to India without going through Afghanistan or Iran." Banner takes off his glasses, folds them up and puts them in his pocket. "This may be just me, but I don't think it's a good idea to get anywhere near an American military operation or an aspiring nuclear power."
"You could go up through Russia," says Clint. That's a long and difficult journey to make over land with no money, though, and from the look on Banner's face he knows it.
"I'm exploring some options," says Banner, and then the waiter shows up and Banner orders in a careful knot of syllables that Clint doesn't understand, and Clint points to the menu and hopes.
"SHIELD could fly you over," says Clint, when the waiter's taken their menus.
"I don't think I trust Nick Fury to let me go, once I'm under SHIELD's auspices again." Banner shakes his head. "Sorry, Clint, but it's better for everyone if I make my own way."
Clint stares at Banner for a minute. He'd looked good at Sevastopol, but traveling on no money seems to be taking its toll. The lines around his eyes are deeper, now, and his skin hangs loose, like he's lost some weight. And, as mentioned before, his shirt is terrible.
"Yeah, this looks better for you," Clint drawls, and Banner's fingers tap tap tap on the table.
"SHIELD was supposed to cut me loose," he says. "That was the deal. I helped save the world and I destroyed a lot more buildings, and now I'm supposed to be left alone."
"We are leaving you alone," says Clint. "Word is, keep distance from the Hulk. I'm breaking that by seeing you now."
"Why would you do that?" asks Banner. He sounds genuinely curious, but still a little hostile. Clint needs to give him a good answer.
Too bad he doesn't have one. Why is he here? Clint doesn't like it when he doesn't know why he's doing something, but there it is. He's not operating on much more than a whim here.
"You said it," Clint tries. "We saved the world together."
Banner's fingers tap faster on the table, and the waiter puts two plates down in front of them. Clint didn't get what he thought he had ordered, but whatever, it's food. Banner's still looking skeptical at him when Clint looks up from his pasta again.
"You know what I think?" asks Banner.
Clint doesn't say anything about mind-reading or tin foil hats, because he is restraining himself.
"I think you two are following me." Banner stirs the noodles with his fork. "First you in Sevastopol, and then Natasha in Istanbul and Burgas-"
"Wait, Burgas? Nat didn't say anything about Burgas." Clint takes a sip of water. Nat was supposed to be running an op in Venezuela, not running after scientists-in-hiding in Bulgaria.
"It was about two weeks ago," says Banner. "She said she was tracking-"
"Ex-Hydra agents, right," says Clint. That was another mission, but it shouldn't have run as far east as Burgas.
He should call Natasha. He will, when this mission is over. It's been too long since they spoke, face to face, and it's easy to leave things out of infrequent texts and hurried phone conversations.
"Look," says Clint. "I'm running into you by accident, straight up. But you're probably right about Tasha. I can't guarantee that she's not acting on orders, but I think it's probably something else." That's about as much as he can say, given that he doesn't actually know why Natasha's been tracking Banner. Clint's all out of answers today, and if Banner keeps pushing him, he'll start making stuff up.
"Why else would she be tracking me?" asks Banner.
And Banner had to push him. Clint looks Banner up and down, and then raises one eyebrow. Then the other eyebrow. He waggles them, because if you're going to try and imply something, you might as well go all the way.
Banner shakes his head, that little smile becoming self-deprecating. "No. Me? Natasha the superspy? No."
"Have it your way." Clint takes a mouthful of noodles, speaks around it in the way Nat hates but Bruce doesn't seem bothered by. "I don't know what she wants out of you."
"Anyway," continues Banner, "I don't really want to get in the middle of your-"
Clint cuts him short, jabbing his fork at Banner. "There's nothing going on. We're buddies."
"Buddies," says Banner, flat.
"Codependent SHIELD operatives who steal each others' clothes," concedes Clint. "Buddies."
The look Banner is leveling at Clint is exactly the same as the one the mandatory counselor had whenever Natasha came up.
"Shut up and eat your food," says Clint.
"How does anything she owns fit you?" asks Banner.
"Badly," says Clint, and stuffs his mouth full of pasta before Banner can ask him anything else.
---
Nothing happens in Bucharest, and then there's a day of debriefings on the Helicarrier about how nothing happened, and it all ends with Clint in his room, too tired to do anything useful and too awake to think about sleeping.
He should watch something. Cartoons, or one of the TV shows that he keeps up with when he remembers. Clint fusses around with his laptop in the darkened room, and finally he brings up a file from an encrypted cloud server.
Clint's not supposed to have footage from Loki's appearance at the Joint Dark Energy Mission. No one is supposed to have this footage, since that incident is classified, but especially not Clint. But if Clint isn't going to have his own memories of what he did, he'll get his information from other sources.
Clint watches himself, grainy and out of focus, as Loki taps his chest with his scepter. Watches himself as he talks to Loki, walks with him. Watches himself as he shoots Director Fury.
He's seen this half a dozen times, but it still feels like it's made up, unreal. Clint pauses the video and brings his arm up, hand clutching an imaginary pistol, pulls the trigger at the tiny Fury on the screen. Maybe muscle memory will retain something that his brain has lost.
Clint doesn't feel anything. The movement isn't unfamiliar, it's too familiar, he's aimed and fired under other people's orders so many times that his body can't pick one incident out of hundreds, thousands. Clint hits play again, watches himself walk away with Loki and Selvig, and Fury get up and use his radio, and then the building starts breaking up and the camera is smashed, the picture blurring into static.
So much for that. Clint pulls up another video, of the Helicarrier on the day he attacked it.
His phone rings, and Clint rubs his eyes, closes every window and shuts his laptop before answering.
"Bruce is still in Bucharest," says Nat, when Clint picks up the phone.
"And you're there with him." Clint gets up, stretching his legs. "You know, I was in Bucharest."
"I was still in Valencia," says Tasha, and if Clint thinks about it hard enough she sounds apologetic. "I'm only here for the day, and then I'm meeting with Stark and Potts. Liaison work."
"Okay," says Clint. He's in his room and he's pacing, hand tapping against his thigh. He must be tense, because he's usually still when he talks, and he likes that, likes the calm. He breathes and tries to force the stillness back as they chat about nothing in particular.
"So you told Bruce we weren't in a relationship," says Nat, because there's only so much pointlessness she can stand.
"I told him we weren't romantic," corrects Clint. "Buddies is a relationship."
There's a pause. Clint decides to call that an agreement and not worry about what Nat would call their relationship. But he's still allowed to worry about what kind of relationship Natasha and Banner have.
"I was trying not to step on your toes," Clint adds, fishing.
"Thanks," says Tasha. Clint decides to give up on subtlety.
"And what are your intentions to the good doctor, Tasha?"
"He's hot, right?" asks Nat. She's always been good at avoiding questions.
"If you like time bombs," says Clint, sharply.
There's silence on the line. Clint sits down and feels like an asshole.
"Yeah," he says, when it's been a minute and Nat hasn't hung up on him yet. "He's got the friendly professor thing down. I like his glasses."
He can hear Tasha smiling, or he can imagine that he does. "I've been bringing him briefings with extra-small print," she says.
"You," Clint breathes into the receiver, "are evil."
Buddies gossip about their crushes and laugh at each others' jokes.
Clint can do buddies, for as long as Tasha needs him to.
---
Natasha keeps her fears close, drawing them in nearer and nearer until they're a part of her, little targets painted on her back the same color as her flesh.
That's not an metaphor Clint would come up with if he was more than half-awake. But it's late at night and he's drifting, aware enough that he knows his nightmares aren't true but asleep enough to believe in them anyway.
Clint pushes his fears further and further away until he can only see them glinting out of the corner of his eye and he can't remember what he was afraid of. That's not self-awareness, that's three different therapists' 'original' insight wrapped in another bad metaphor.
There's growling in Clint's ears and a flash of ice-blue in his periphery, and his hand reaches for his bow and only finds his pillow.
He tries some of that lucid dreaming, maybe he can beat Loki's head in with the pillow, and it'll all be ridiculous and he'll fall back asleep, but he's got a headache and Loki's laughter in his ears and no threats anywhere, nothing real, and Clint doesn't sleep anymore that night.
Agent Hill doesn't look concerned when he reports the next morning, but Clint knows what he looks like, the circles under his eyes. Hill doesn't say anything, either, but Clint's next three missions are easy, routine, just the thing for an operative who might need to be sent back to medical if you push him too hard.
Clint's fourth mission is in Doomstadt, though, so maybe SHIELD was just trying to give him a break before throwing him back in the deep end.
Avengers
Rating for all chapters: adult
(content notes, this chapter: brief introspection about past mind control.)
Characters: Clint/Bruce/Natasha, Tony Stark, Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Victor von Doom
Wordcount (total): 25,000 (this chapter): 2,600ish
Summary: Post-New York, Clint's still having trouble dealing with the whole Loki-controlling-his-brain situation, and Natasha seems to be avoiding him. Bruce Banner, meanwhile, just wants to get back to Kolkata.
A/N: another short chapter, but the next ones should be longer.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
A month or so after Sevastopol, Clint is in Bucharest as security for a SHIELD-sponsored diplomatic mission. It's dead boring, because nothing's going to happen to a top-secret talk about ball-bearing manufacture, but security needs to be there anyway. Clint treats it as a vacation - keeps his bow and knives close, but walks around on his off hours, instead of holing up in a nest to keep an eye on everything.
He's not surprised when he spots Banner in a crowd, watching some kids having a rap battle or something. Nat had said Banner was planning on going up through Bulgaria after Istanbul, and Bucharest is a big city near the border. Clint waves until Banner spots him, and then works his way through the crowd, making sure Banner can see him coming.
"Fancy meeting you here," says Banner. Clint starts to say something back, but Banner hushes him, his eyes on the two young women in the center of the crowd, one of them gesturing and speaking while the other sneers. Clint shrugs and lets the words wash over him, rhythmic and passionate and totally incomprehensible. But Clint can blend into a crowd - he chuckles when everyone else is laughing, and murmurs when the young man in front of him gasps. Bruce's gaze starts flicking over to Clint, and soon the show is over and the crowd is breaking up.
"Did you actually say 'rhubarb, rhubarb?'" Banner's half-smile is gaining strength.
"I had to say something," says Clint. "You think anyone else noticed?"
"They probably weren't paying as much attention to you," says Banner. They're the only people standing in the street, now, and Clint starts to walk, following an older woman with a leather briefcase before switching to a man with a powder-blue sweater. Directionless walking in a strange town reveals you as a tourist or a new-comer - if you don't have a direction, you can steal one from somebody else. For a second Clint thinks Banner is going to stay there and watch him walk away, but then Banner catches up with him and Clint slows to let him.
"You speak Romanian too?" asks Clint.
"Not well," says Banner. "But it's not that hard to understand. It's kind of like Italian."
Clint shakes his head. "I could really use your language skills," he says. "I've been leaning pretty hard on English and French while I'm here."
"It gets easier after your fifth language," says Banner. "You start focusing on similarities."
Bruce Banner: nuclear physicist, occasional superhero, polyglot. All Clint has going for him is a trick bow. Sometimes life really isn't fair.
Well, Banner would probably agree with him on that last part. It's not like life has been particularly easy on either of them.
"So I had to buy myself lunch in Sevastopol," says Clint. "And I still have your sweatpants."
"You were going to have to buy yourself lunch anyway. I didn't have any money. I still don't." Banner puts his hands in his pockets, pulls them inside out like he's in a cartoon. Clint waits to see if any moths want to fly out, but there's just lint in there. It makes Banner's point, anyway.
"Then let me buy you lunch too, this time," says Clint. He glances at the sky, the sun fading below the buildings. "Dinner. Whatever."
For a second Banner looks like he's going to argue, and Clint's not sure whether he would let it go or if he would inform Banner that dinner and his company is non-negotiable. He doesn't have to find out, because Banner blows out a breath and steers Clint's apparently-purposeful but functionally-aimless walk down a different alleyway.
"Is Italian okay?" he asks. "There's a restaurant around here."
The place is only a couple minutes away, and it's small, already filling up even this early in the day. They snag a table in the back, and Clint graciously takes the chair that's turned away from the rest of the restaurant, letting Banner to sit with his back to
the wall. A waiter drifts by with their menus.
"So," says Clint. "Romania."
Banner puts on a pair of glasses and peers at the menu. Clint glances down at his. It's all in Romanian, but the names look familiar, bar a few extra vowels. He can take his chances.
"You're not much closer to India," says Clint, when he's figured out what he's going to order and Banner still hasn't said anything. Banner looks up at him, over his glasses.
"Any more observations, Captain Obvious?"
"That shirt looks good on you," says Clint, which isn't true because that shirt is a muddy beige that doesn't suit Banner's coloring at all. But he can't resist, when Banner's handed him a straight line like that.
Clint would scold himself for teasing the Hulk if Banner didn't look so damn amused. It shouldn't be this easy to get a smile out of the guy, but Banner walks around with that half-smile all the time, and now half the things Clint says seem to make Banner broaden it into something real.
"I'm trying to figure out how to get to India without going through Afghanistan or Iran." Banner takes off his glasses, folds them up and puts them in his pocket. "This may be just me, but I don't think it's a good idea to get anywhere near an American military operation or an aspiring nuclear power."
"You could go up through Russia," says Clint. That's a long and difficult journey to make over land with no money, though, and from the look on Banner's face he knows it.
"I'm exploring some options," says Banner, and then the waiter shows up and Banner orders in a careful knot of syllables that Clint doesn't understand, and Clint points to the menu and hopes.
"SHIELD could fly you over," says Clint, when the waiter's taken their menus.
"I don't think I trust Nick Fury to let me go, once I'm under SHIELD's auspices again." Banner shakes his head. "Sorry, Clint, but it's better for everyone if I make my own way."
Clint stares at Banner for a minute. He'd looked good at Sevastopol, but traveling on no money seems to be taking its toll. The lines around his eyes are deeper, now, and his skin hangs loose, like he's lost some weight. And, as mentioned before, his shirt is terrible.
"Yeah, this looks better for you," Clint drawls, and Banner's fingers tap tap tap on the table.
"SHIELD was supposed to cut me loose," he says. "That was the deal. I helped save the world and I destroyed a lot more buildings, and now I'm supposed to be left alone."
"We are leaving you alone," says Clint. "Word is, keep distance from the Hulk. I'm breaking that by seeing you now."
"Why would you do that?" asks Banner. He sounds genuinely curious, but still a little hostile. Clint needs to give him a good answer.
Too bad he doesn't have one. Why is he here? Clint doesn't like it when he doesn't know why he's doing something, but there it is. He's not operating on much more than a whim here.
"You said it," Clint tries. "We saved the world together."
Banner's fingers tap faster on the table, and the waiter puts two plates down in front of them. Clint didn't get what he thought he had ordered, but whatever, it's food. Banner's still looking skeptical at him when Clint looks up from his pasta again.
"You know what I think?" asks Banner.
Clint doesn't say anything about mind-reading or tin foil hats, because he is restraining himself.
"I think you two are following me." Banner stirs the noodles with his fork. "First you in Sevastopol, and then Natasha in Istanbul and Burgas-"
"Wait, Burgas? Nat didn't say anything about Burgas." Clint takes a sip of water. Nat was supposed to be running an op in Venezuela, not running after scientists-in-hiding in Bulgaria.
"It was about two weeks ago," says Banner. "She said she was tracking-"
"Ex-Hydra agents, right," says Clint. That was another mission, but it shouldn't have run as far east as Burgas.
He should call Natasha. He will, when this mission is over. It's been too long since they spoke, face to face, and it's easy to leave things out of infrequent texts and hurried phone conversations.
"Look," says Clint. "I'm running into you by accident, straight up. But you're probably right about Tasha. I can't guarantee that she's not acting on orders, but I think it's probably something else." That's about as much as he can say, given that he doesn't actually know why Natasha's been tracking Banner. Clint's all out of answers today, and if Banner keeps pushing him, he'll start making stuff up.
"Why else would she be tracking me?" asks Banner.
And Banner had to push him. Clint looks Banner up and down, and then raises one eyebrow. Then the other eyebrow. He waggles them, because if you're going to try and imply something, you might as well go all the way.
Banner shakes his head, that little smile becoming self-deprecating. "No. Me? Natasha the superspy? No."
"Have it your way." Clint takes a mouthful of noodles, speaks around it in the way Nat hates but Bruce doesn't seem bothered by. "I don't know what she wants out of you."
"Anyway," continues Banner, "I don't really want to get in the middle of your-"
Clint cuts him short, jabbing his fork at Banner. "There's nothing going on. We're buddies."
"Buddies," says Banner, flat.
"Codependent SHIELD operatives who steal each others' clothes," concedes Clint. "Buddies."
The look Banner is leveling at Clint is exactly the same as the one the mandatory counselor had whenever Natasha came up.
"Shut up and eat your food," says Clint.
"How does anything she owns fit you?" asks Banner.
"Badly," says Clint, and stuffs his mouth full of pasta before Banner can ask him anything else.
---
Nothing happens in Bucharest, and then there's a day of debriefings on the Helicarrier about how nothing happened, and it all ends with Clint in his room, too tired to do anything useful and too awake to think about sleeping.
He should watch something. Cartoons, or one of the TV shows that he keeps up with when he remembers. Clint fusses around with his laptop in the darkened room, and finally he brings up a file from an encrypted cloud server.
Clint's not supposed to have footage from Loki's appearance at the Joint Dark Energy Mission. No one is supposed to have this footage, since that incident is classified, but especially not Clint. But if Clint isn't going to have his own memories of what he did, he'll get his information from other sources.
Clint watches himself, grainy and out of focus, as Loki taps his chest with his scepter. Watches himself as he talks to Loki, walks with him. Watches himself as he shoots Director Fury.
He's seen this half a dozen times, but it still feels like it's made up, unreal. Clint pauses the video and brings his arm up, hand clutching an imaginary pistol, pulls the trigger at the tiny Fury on the screen. Maybe muscle memory will retain something that his brain has lost.
Clint doesn't feel anything. The movement isn't unfamiliar, it's too familiar, he's aimed and fired under other people's orders so many times that his body can't pick one incident out of hundreds, thousands. Clint hits play again, watches himself walk away with Loki and Selvig, and Fury get up and use his radio, and then the building starts breaking up and the camera is smashed, the picture blurring into static.
So much for that. Clint pulls up another video, of the Helicarrier on the day he attacked it.
His phone rings, and Clint rubs his eyes, closes every window and shuts his laptop before answering.
"Bruce is still in Bucharest," says Nat, when Clint picks up the phone.
"And you're there with him." Clint gets up, stretching his legs. "You know, I was in Bucharest."
"I was still in Valencia," says Tasha, and if Clint thinks about it hard enough she sounds apologetic. "I'm only here for the day, and then I'm meeting with Stark and Potts. Liaison work."
"Okay," says Clint. He's in his room and he's pacing, hand tapping against his thigh. He must be tense, because he's usually still when he talks, and he likes that, likes the calm. He breathes and tries to force the stillness back as they chat about nothing in particular.
"So you told Bruce we weren't in a relationship," says Nat, because there's only so much pointlessness she can stand.
"I told him we weren't romantic," corrects Clint. "Buddies is a relationship."
There's a pause. Clint decides to call that an agreement and not worry about what Nat would call their relationship. But he's still allowed to worry about what kind of relationship Natasha and Banner have.
"I was trying not to step on your toes," Clint adds, fishing.
"Thanks," says Tasha. Clint decides to give up on subtlety.
"And what are your intentions to the good doctor, Tasha?"
"He's hot, right?" asks Nat. She's always been good at avoiding questions.
"If you like time bombs," says Clint, sharply.
There's silence on the line. Clint sits down and feels like an asshole.
"Yeah," he says, when it's been a minute and Nat hasn't hung up on him yet. "He's got the friendly professor thing down. I like his glasses."
He can hear Tasha smiling, or he can imagine that he does. "I've been bringing him briefings with extra-small print," she says.
"You," Clint breathes into the receiver, "are evil."
Buddies gossip about their crushes and laugh at each others' jokes.
Clint can do buddies, for as long as Tasha needs him to.
---
Natasha keeps her fears close, drawing them in nearer and nearer until they're a part of her, little targets painted on her back the same color as her flesh.
That's not an metaphor Clint would come up with if he was more than half-awake. But it's late at night and he's drifting, aware enough that he knows his nightmares aren't true but asleep enough to believe in them anyway.
Clint pushes his fears further and further away until he can only see them glinting out of the corner of his eye and he can't remember what he was afraid of. That's not self-awareness, that's three different therapists' 'original' insight wrapped in another bad metaphor.
There's growling in Clint's ears and a flash of ice-blue in his periphery, and his hand reaches for his bow and only finds his pillow.
He tries some of that lucid dreaming, maybe he can beat Loki's head in with the pillow, and it'll all be ridiculous and he'll fall back asleep, but he's got a headache and Loki's laughter in his ears and no threats anywhere, nothing real, and Clint doesn't sleep anymore that night.
Agent Hill doesn't look concerned when he reports the next morning, but Clint knows what he looks like, the circles under his eyes. Hill doesn't say anything, either, but Clint's next three missions are easy, routine, just the thing for an operative who might need to be sent back to medical if you push him too hard.
Clint's fourth mission is in Doomstadt, though, so maybe SHIELD was just trying to give him a break before throwing him back in the deep end.
