Title: Inked
Author: aerrin
A Gift For: andacus
Rating: PG13
Warnings: None
Pairings: Clint/Natasha
Summary/Prompt Used: . Tattoo (However you want to run with that, go for it.)
Authors Notes: Notes at the end!


Banner by frea_o



“I look ridiculous.” Clint scowled in front of the mirror, his head craned to check the spread of black ink that snaked across the back of his shoulder and up the column of his neck.

Natasha pushed away from the wall, pulling her arms out of their fold to hang loose and relaxed at her side as she stepped forward to circle him. Clint’s frown deepened, and he folded his hands into tight balls at his sides in a concentrated effort to not squirm under the studious intensity of her gaze. She paused at his back, close enough that he could feel the tiny shifts of air currents as she shook her head to answer, “No. You look like you belong to the bratva.”

The whisper-light touch of her fingers against the spread of stars that had been stained across the sloped line of his shoulder and up one side of his neck raised goosebumps in its wake.

Swallowing against the sensation, Clint set a smile across his features, all easy denial and joking laughter. “I look like a prison reject,” he countered with a spin to catch Natasha’s hand in his own. “Hands to yourself, Tasha,” he chided. “You’re gonna get me all hot and bothered.”

Natasha’s smirk was an insufferable thing as she grew still in front of him, wrist caught by the tight grip of his fingers, and tilted her head back to meet his eyes with a slight flutter that he knew was entirely feigned. All these years, and Clint still felt himself rising to all the little signals he knew she gave off on purpose. His head told him that she could have him flat on his back and howling with pain before he’d even realized she’d moved. His instincts still told him to draw her back from danger and keep her safe, this tiny little thing with the innocent face and the fluttering lashes.

It was pretty much the fault of the fluttering lashes, Clint decided as he held her gaze. Damned lashes.

“Fine,” Natasha answered. She twisted her wrist away with a neat, efficient move and stepped back to put space between them as she lifted both hands and quirked her brow and one corner of her lips. See? Clint read in the familiar expression. I’m being good.

And she was. She folded her arms over her chest again and indicated the elaborate five-steepled cathedral inked across his chest with a tip of her head. “You look like you belong,” she repeated. “They will see what they expect to see, Clint. The stars, the steeples. They will look at you and know that you are dangerous and loyal, and they won’t ever question whether you speak Russian.”

“Maybe they cut my tongue out in prison,” Clint suggested. He twisted in front of the mirror, leaning in to study the detailed work of one spire. “That seems like the sort of thing they do in Russia, right?”

Natasha snorted, a sound that was clearly biting back laughter, and Clint grinned at his reflection.

“I guess they make me look kind of badass,” he allowed, straightening. “Though I gotta say, Tash. A church? Really? Why not just paint bunny rabbits and adorable kittens down my arm?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Natasha answered. She studied him for a moment more, letting a beat of silence pass between them before she stirred abruptly. “You want something badass?” she wondered as she crossed the room to claim the tiny-bristled brush their hired artist had left behind. Her fingers crooked, and Clint stirred to follow at her beckon.

He always did. Always would.

This time he at least managed to look a little dubious.

Natasha met his expression with a slight smile and a gleam in her eye that he didn’t trust, but when she gestured with the twirl of one finger, he turned anyway. He dropped into a chair, leaned forward to straddle its back and rest his chin on the fold of his arms. “I don’t know about this, Tash. Since when are you an artist?”

There was a hint of real annoyance in Natasha’s voice when she answered, “I can handle this, Clint.” When he lifted his head to turn it toward her, she responded with an impossibly strong hand pressed flat against his shoulder and a disapproving sound deep in her throat. How someone so slight could press so hard was beyond Clint. Not that he was complaining. One of the things he loved about Natasha was the way she never, ever stopped surprising him.

The stroke of the brush against his back was light, though not quite ticklish. Clint let his eyes fall closed as she worked, occasionally interjecting smart ass comments like, “You know I want to look dangerous, right? Can’t do that with some kid’s sloppy scrawl all across my shoulder, Tash,” just to hear her mutter at him in Russian. He grinned into the fold of his arms as she worked.

When she pulled back, Clint lifted his head and turned to give her a wary look. “That didn’t seem long enough for flaming skulls,” he complained.

Natasha hooked a hand under his elbow, urging him upward. “Shut up and go look,” she ordered.

Clint paused, and for a moment the urge to break their unspoken agreement and just kiss her senseless, now, here, with the mission still hanging over them, was almost unbearable. Damn the mission. Damn the job and damn distraction. Clint was pretty sure kissing her wasn’t going to distract him any more than not kissing her was.

But Natasha was irresistible in many things, including her insistence that they focus, they work, and then they play. She was very good at compartmentalization, his Natasha.

Sometimes he hated it.

Clint stopped in front of the mirror, twisting again for an uncomfortable glimpse at the back of his shoulder. It took him a moment to recognize the narrow, swooping lines for what they were. A spider’s web was slung along the solid muscle of his shoulder, anchored at the corner of his neck and the point of his shoulderblade. He whipped his gaze forward to fix on Natasha, who was watching him with such casual ease that he knew to look for the uncertainty in her eyes.

Subtle, but there.

Well, that wouldn’t do.

“I guess it’s better than a church,” Clint told her with blithe reassurance, and he grinned as he ducked away from the slug she directed at his shoulder in scowling, but confident, response. He danced backward on the balls of his feet and held both hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine, it’s kind of badass.” He held her gaze with an upsweep of his brows over his grin as he asked, “So what’s this one mean?”

Natasha tipped her head, studying her handiwork in the mirror’s reflection. She smirked. “It means you’re an addict.”

“Tasha!”

Natasha’s shrug was dismissive, but the glint in her eye made her amusement plain enough.

“Addict isn’t badass!” Clint complained.

“It is in Russia.” Clint couldn’t see her expression as she turned to go, but he could hear the smirk in her voice plain as day, and he retaliated with a balled-up tissue that fell short of the back of her head despite exceptional aim. She moved too damn fast sometimes.

“Addict,” Clint muttered, craning for another glimpse of the webbing across his shoulder. After a moment he sighed, and his gaze slid toward the door Natasha had slipped through. “True enough, I guess,” he murmured after her.

----

In the end, the mission was almost insultingly easy. Clint stood in the back and glowered menacingly. It wasn’t much of a stretch to play the part of an armed, dangerous man obsessively protective of his employer.

Nothing seemed to be much of a stretch for Natasha, but there was something special about watching her work in Russian. Clint found his gaze drawn back to her again and again as she worked the room effortlessly. She knew exactly who to seek out, exactly when to ask a question and when to drop a hint with a demure smile, and when they left, she gave him a flick of her eyes that said they had all the information they needed. Exactly what they’d come to get.

Clint kept his glower in place until they’d slipped free and looped around several extra blocks checking for tails. He knew the instant Natasha decided they were safe. She never let her guard down entirely, but there was something small in the the way she walked when she felt confident a job was well and truly done.

He didn’t (couldn’t, didn’t want to) wait until they were secure in the safehouse they’d hammered out in the middle of Moscow. There was something about Natasha in Russia, and the feel of her fingers slipping along the line of his neck had been echoing in his mind all night. They turned a corner and he caught at her wrist, measuring its span with the curve of his fingers. Natasha paused and turned a look up at him, brows arched. Her smile started as a slow curve when she caught his gaze, and he lowered his head to steal it away with a hungry kiss and a step forward that bore her backwards into the nearest flat surface.

“Cold,” Natasha protested as her back found uneven brick.

“You’re Russian,” Clint answered to the curve of her neck. It was cold, which made kissing her all the more delightful. His lips dragged hot along her jaw to explore the frosty shell of her ear, and he grinned a moment’s triumph as Natasha responded with a soft sound caught in the back of her throat before it could escape further. “‘Sides,” Clint muttered, breath gusting warmth against her skin. “You’ve spent all day seeing me half naked. Turnabout’s fair play, Tasha.”

Natasha turned her head to catch at his lips. At some point her fingers had risen to twist in his hair, and she made good use of the leverage as she claimed a heated kiss and caught the curve of his lower lip between his teeth in a gentle nip. “Not getting any kind of naked out here, Barton,” she muttered.

Clint pulled back to grin at her and twisted his hand to release her wrist and twine his fingers with hers instead. “Sounds like a promise to me,” he said.

Natasha answered with half a smile and a gleam in her eye that made all sorts of promises, and Clint decided that it was definitely too cold outside. They should get back as soon as humanly possible.

Preferably sooner.

-----

It’s not that the sex wasn’t good. She was Natasha Romanoff and he was Clint Barton. The sex was fucking phenomenal. It’s that there was something on a whole other level to this bit that came after, when they were happy and naked and comfortable together.

A level that was just his.

He stretched across the bed on his stomach, letting his fingers slide along the curve of Natasha’s hip in the laziest caress possible. The aftermath of orgasm made his limbs feel heavy, and the slow fade of post-mission adrenaline only made it worse. Clint felt like he couldn’t move. In fact, “I’m pretty sure I’m not moving for at least a week-- Tasha! Cold!”

“Mmm,” Natasha murmured in reply, all sympathy and smiles as she left him sprawled naked and blanketless on the bed with a quick yank. She wrapped the fabric around her shoulders against the chill of the room, and Clint’s scowl deepened.

“Ruining the view, too,” he objected.

“Shut up and stay put, Barton.”

Clint muttered to himself, a running string of half-hearted complaints that he’d only managed to start when Natasha returned. “What--?” Clint began, pushing up on his elbows to twist toward her.

“Shut up,” Natasha answered, her voice firm and a little exasperated, “and stay put. Barton.” She planted a hand on his shoulder blade, fingers fitting against ink-black stars, and pressed him down into the mattress.

It wasn’t until he felt the feather-light touch of the brush that he realized where she’d gone. Clint lifted his head in a twist, and Natasha threaded her fingers through his hair in warning. Clint lowered his head to the bed again. There were times you just didn’t argue with Natasha. Clint had learned most of them well enough to gauge whether he wanted to give it a go anyway. Just now, he was far more curious about her sudden artistic inclination.

That didn’t mean he had to give into her every wish, though. Staying still was one thing. Shutting up...

“You ever think about getting a tattoo, Nat?”

Behind him, Natasha made a sound of clear concentration, and there was a beat of silence before she answered. Clint had long since learned to wait them out.

“I’m a spy,” Natasha said. She was bent close enough that Clint could feel the brush of her hair against his neck while she worked. “We try to keep identifying marks to a minimum.”

“You’ve got scars,” Clint objected instantly. “Some of ‘em pretty damn identifiable.”

Natasha’s laughter was silent, but the breath of it warmed his neck, and the brush stilled for a moment. “Those I can’t avoid.”

Clint grinned, flicking his eyes sideways as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of her expression. Failing that he added, “I could make a list. Map ‘em all out. You think SHIELD might want that? Just in case, I dunno, dopplegangers show up someday or something?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Natasha answered, always practical. “They have the major ones on file. Though I think they’re more likely to be useful if I turn up dead.”

“Wow, Tash, way to kill the mood.”

This time Natasha laughed aloud, and she paused in her work to lean down for a lopsided kiss. “Not worried about the mood, Barton.” She pulled back, tapping him on the nose with the end of the brush, and added, “You’ll be asleep in twenty minutes anyway.”

“Oh, ouch,” Clint answered with broad-feigned hurt. “My pride! You hit hard, woman!”

“That’s why you like me.” Natasha rocked back on her heels, twisting the brush between her fingers with a measuring gaze. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Clint ventured a glance at her before he dropped his eyes to the top of his shoulder where she’d been working. The drooping lines of his cobweb were clearly visible, and if he hunched forward a little, he could almost make out the entire shape of it. At one corner, eight spindly legs now converged on a bulging abdomen in the unmistakable profile of a black widow. She’d worked carefully enough to leave the identifying hourglass in bare skin.

When he lifted his eyes to her again, she was sitting still, watching him with that same earlier hint of uncertainty. Clint pushed upward, drawing to sit next to her.

“What’s this one mean?”

“It means you belong. To me.”

For a moment, it felt like the entire world had stopped. There were levels, ones that were Clint’s, that he was familiar with and comfortable with and even possessive of.

And then there were levels.

Levels he’d given up on in favor of appreciating the ones he had.

It took Clint a long time to find his voice. When he did, what came out was, “You know this ink shit’ll wash off in a few days, right?”

He probably deserved the slug to the shoulder she gave him in return. He definitely didn’t deserve the look she fixed on him, serious and quiet and full of levels he wasn’t sure he’d ever even imagined. “Doesn’t matter,” Natasha said. She pressed three fingers above her breast, then shifted to touch them light against his shoulder. “They say there are scars you can’t see. Invisible wounds. Why can’t tattoos be the same?”

She was still talking when he swept her up and caught her last words in the press of his mouth against hers.

“It’s a tattoo, Clint. Forever.”


Notes: The internet tells me that stars on the shoulder mean the bearer is a man of discipline, status, and tradition. The number of spires on a church, cathedral, or monastery represents the years or number of times the bearer has been in jail. And a cobweb, of course, means that one is an addict. I love tattoos, but I can’t ever quite wrap my mind around either Clint or Natasha having one, so this was my attempt to have my cake and eat it, too.