Title: measured to fit right (on you)
Author: earlofcardigans
A Gift For: oresteia
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Pairings: Clint/Natasha
Summary/Prompt Used: Natasha has an answer for Clint’s important question.


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Link to the mix: measured to fit right (on you)



“You need to move around to the front.” Natasha tapped the side of her head, and Steve nodded in understanding.

Natasha stood in the doorway watching Steve try to get Clint’s attention. Steve popped his head up when James rounded the corner to stand too close to her, but went back to signing as much as he could to Clint.

“So. How long are you going to keep him waiting, Natalia?” James crossed his arms, mimicked her stance.

She rolled her eyes at him. Of course, he knew. And of course, he was teasing her about it.

“I hadn’t thought it was your business, Barnes. Why are you so keen to know about my life plans?”

“Just looking out for you, Tasha darlin.” He bumped their elbows together before he leaned in closer and said in all seriousness, “Honestly though. Don’t push him away just because he asked.”

“I’d hug you if we were alone.” Instead, she turned to him and smiled softly. “I’m not pushing him away. I just needed some time to myself to process pulling him closer.”

“You’re amazing.” James squeezed her shoulder and walked off.

“And you are an idiot.”

His chuckle brought a smile to her face and had Steve moving to follow him.

Natasha pushed off the wall and headed toward the door.

She didn’t want to intrude even if Clint wasn’t in a mood where he had taken his hearing aids out and needed to be left alone. If that were the case, he’d be closer to the sky not on the main floor couch watching a ridiculous cartoon about a princess of fire.

She tapped the back of Clint’s neck on her way across the room. He didn’t look up, but she knew that he knew where she was headed.

They were getting ready for a party. Pepper and Bruce had already been to the main floor to ask questions. Pepper had cornered her and Darcy earlier that morning to figure out the best way to hang some gigantic wreath.

Natasha suggested the Iron Man suit. Darcy suggested people stand on Steve and Thor, make a human ladder of sturdy men.

Pepper had laughed, Natasha had smiled, Clint had asked her later what could possibly have been so funny that had Bruce and Steve running from the room.

Natasha had gone to the main floor to escape into the presence of other people. It was always likely Tony would be around swallowing everyone up with his too big personality. Or James and Steve would have been there, talking old times and missing times. Natasha had needed to lose herself in something like that.

Clint had asked her a question. Something important and that might change things on paper. Natasha wasn’t sure how to respond correctly. How she had to word the sentences so Clint wouldn’t feel let down or guilty.

Clint eventually would need an answer. He was more demanding than anyone she’d ever known. Mostly because the other people demanded things of her that her body was quite capable of handling. Clint demanded things from her that she didn’t know she had the heart to give him.

She didn’t know if she even had the heart to let him hope. For a long time, she had no heart at all.

James teased her about Clint putting her back together, but she had seen how Steve pushed his hand into James’s, how James could fall back into the solidness that was Steve, how they were both grounded and more whole than she’d ever seen either of them.

And she’d seen so much of James. Probably more than Steve. More than anyone else here.
But she wouldn’t ruin that for them. They needed it.

Just like she watched Pepper move slightly over to accommodate Bruce in Tony’s life. Just like she watched Thor do the same for Jane.

Clint needed an answer because he needed to know that Natasha had budged over slightly, just enough to let him fill a space Natasha had long since given up as just another emptiness inside her.

Of course, she’d seen more of Clint than anyone else, as well. And despite her past with James, Clint was the one that opened her up, took root inside, made her believe.

She owed him an answer for that alone.

She had made her way to their rooms, sat on the small couch under their window. She was wearing Clint’s sweatshirt, the one with the hole in the cuff that she always pushed her thumb through.

She waited for Clint to come back to her. Look at her in that way he had that told her that no one had ever looked at her like that before. No one would since.

Natasha felt like she had an answer after all. It was always there, if Clint chose to look.

Clint never missed anything.


When he came back to their rooms, they both remained silent. The comfortable, lazy sort of silence they never got enough of in a building full of consuming people.

He smiled at her slow and soft. She tracked his movements across their room, watched him put his hearing aids back in, shake his head in that way that meant even in their room with the heat running low, it was still jarring to hear all the tiny sounds again.

“Have a good break?” Natasha’s voice was low and even.

Clint met her eyes in the mirror. “Wasn’t a break.”

His voice was soft and crooked. Natasha always liked being the first person that talked to him when he could hear himself fully.

She stuck her hand back out of the sleeve of her borrowed shirt and signed as she asked, “What was it then?”

“I didn’t want to help with the planning.” Clint grinned at her.

“Trying to get out of the heavy lifting, I see. For shame.”

Clint sat down across from her, pushed his leg between her drawn up knees.

“I didn’t see you doing anything.”

Natasha drew lazy circles on his ankle. “I have no shame.”

“I already knew that.” Clint wasn’t looking at her. He was tracing patterns of his shirt on her wrists, but he wasn’t looking in her eyes, wasn’t tracking her face like he normally did.

“You going back down there?” Natasha was hoping to have him to herself for the rest of the night.

Clint would want to celebrate.

“Yeah. Bruce and Phil asked me to help with something.” Clint waved his arm around.

He was nervous and tired.

Natasha felt the slightest bit guilty, but she had said that she needed to think about things. It had all sounded so cliché at the time, but she didn’t think Clint cared much.

“So Barton.” Natasha took one of his hands, forced him to look at her. She outlined the shape of his face, carved his happy-worried expression in her memory to sit with all the other people she held there, close to her. “Did you have a plan beyond what you said last night? Or.”

“I have several plans. None of them involve moving back to my own room in the event you say no, but yeah. You know I do.”

“I want to ask you if you know what you’re getting into, but I think you already know all those answers.”

Clint shrugged, but he had that half-smile on his face that Natasha had formed such an attachment to.

“I’ve been in jungles and swamps with you. Covered in ice and dying with you, Natasha. There isn’t anything you could say that would make me believe that I don’t know what I’m getting into.”

“Clint,” Natasha sighed.

“You said we weren’t gonna make Avengers as long as we have, and here we are.”

“Clint.” Natasha put her hands on the sides of his face, turned him to meet her head on. “I don’t doubt you.”

“Then—“

“I just want you to understand what you’re setting yourself up for. I understand the conditions, the costs. Do you? We become liabilities to each other. I don’t owe you anything unless you’re compromised because of me.” Natasha got up and walked to her dresser. She didn’t have many things, most of what was on top of the dresser were from Clint. Tiny things he’d brought her from a place she hadn’t followed. Pictures of her, him, the two of them that he’d scavenged off the others.

She turned back to him. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.

“I don’t want us to be defined in terms of our occupation. I don’t want you to feel like you are obligated.”

Natasha didn’t finish that thought.

“I told you the first time I met you.”

She finished his sentence with him. “There are no obligations when it comes to you.” She shook her head. “Do what I want. I know.”

“So?”

Natasha wasn’t giving up, or even giving in. She felt that her life was moving in a distinct trajectory that she didn’t always plot for herself.
She was starting to get used to it.

“I don’t want to do it here.”

She crossed to Clint and kissed him, soft and deep. It wasn’t like any of the rest of their kisses, so far from their first kiss. Natasha cupped the back of his head, threaded her fingers through his hair, kept going.

When she pulled back, ran her thumb over Clint’s bottom lip, she looked at him fully, smile in his eyes, hand tapping words on her back.

“I say we take Coulson and Pepper and go away for a weekend. Get it finished in a hurry and come back to plan our next personal mission.”

“Not Bucky? I’d figured you’d want him there for something like this.” Clint dipped down and kissed her quick.

“James can’t keep a secret from Steve. I don’t want an audience.”

Natasha smiled at Clint’s laugh.

“Fine. Just you and me, then.”

“For once.” Natasha kissed him again.

“Oh by the way, what was Bucky saying to you earlier?”

“Oh you know, dinner plans, seating arrangements, if he needed to find matching suits for him and Steve.”

“Right. Definitely just you and me, then.”