A Gift From: anuna_81
Type Of Gift: fic
Title: Da Capo (al Coda)
A Gift For: enigma731
Rating: mature
Warnings: canon compliant non descriptive violence, dark themes, nudity and some explicit content
Summary/Prompt Used: the song "Heart starts" by Matt Nathanson. I can't really pick out a part of the lyrics that grabbed me the most, entire song is just perfect. :)
Author's Note: My dear recipient, I hope you'll enjoy this. All of your prompts were interesting, but this gorgeous song grabbed me the moment I heard it and I decided to use it as my secret santa writing prompt. It mostly screamed "Clint" at me, so I went with it. There is some speculation based on some things we've seen in Thor 2, but what I wrote doesn't really spoil the film, and you don't have to watch the film to understand what's going on in fic. Also, in my headcanon Bobbi Morse is a SHIELD scientist.
Dear recipient, I hope you like your gift! I loved writing this for you :) Merry Christmas, happy holidays!



all I know is that world is filled with broken things …. all I know is that with all the walls I built, I can't get to what you need



It's a pattern.

Everything happens in patterns. That's how world around you revolves – sounds and words and birds flying south. Life is a loop of circles, a spinning stairwell leading you past the same window, and the same paintings and you pass them until you don't notice them any more. You're born, you live and you die. Things happen in between, shaped according to your choices or maybe according to something written somewhere. If such thing exists, he doesn't know where it is. (In the stars, in the wind, it doesn't really matter. The sooner you learn what to expect, the better.

(Heartbeats. Heartbeats are a pattern. The beat and the pause that keep you going.)

It's funny how things work out when you have to pack up and leave. Three years of him and Bobbi, two spent living together (or rather trying and failing), and everything he owns and everything he can take with him fits in two boxes. The part he can't take is much bigger, but he was never the one to dwell on loss.

He met Bobbi unexpectedly, inside a dull lab at SciOps. She was motion, concentration and knowledge, chemistry and laws of physics applied to his future arrows. It took him two months of banter, horribly cheesy pick-up lines and actual intelligent conversation (he can do that) to talk her into having lunch with him. Lunches became dinners and dancing and making out under narrow roofs. Walking bare headed in the rain. He didn't mind getting a bit wet. She was, after all, the best thing that happened to him.

He still believes it, he knows it. She is still his brightest star and the person he loves the most, but her idea of life – cozy lounge chairs, bookshelves, a thick carpet and a warm kitchen – it isn't the life meant for him. He isn't truly wrong for her, but simply badly designed.

*

The night is cold and crystal clear; and the snow is a frozen blanket covering the street. The shot is an easy one – a bullet, not an arrow – straight to a man's chest. A bad man, a very bad man, a man who cannot be allowed to continue (doing what he does). The sound of the rifle cuts through the air. The man collapses, black coat and red blood spilling over immaculate white.

Time to go. Clint leaves the spot, swift footsteps on cold concrete, and the echo of “Silent Night” follows him like a ghost. He doesn't feel sad or sorry, but rather relieved, and accomplished.

On his phone unanswered calls and messages await, all from the same person. She wants him back home, safe and warm, reading his book with his feet comfortable in thick socks. She wants him to be safe. He could do that. He could switch to a job that doesn't require risking his life. He is not that man, he will never be him and he can see how this will lead them to ruin. There are boxes waiting by his door, and the room in her life and her apartment awaiting him. He can see where it leads. He was always good with patterns.

*

In the end it's not that he didn't love her enough, or that she didn't love him back. It's not even that they ran out of love, because that's not something you can run out of. Not if you love. It's the saddest thing of them all: the two of them are people who can't align with one another and never will, not without making each other scream and yell and cry. He isn't the guy who'll work behind the desk and come back home after five. He is the shadow, the hand holding the ax, the executioner.

He doesn't want to stay because of her, because she'll never be able to stop caring, and despite the love, he won't care enough to stop, so he packs his things, all of the two boxes, like nothing has changed, like she didn't even touch his life.

He packs his boxes and carries them away. What he leaves behind is so much bigger, a thing living and raw that he can't put anywhere, or carry with him, so he leaves it behind.


*

There's nothing quite like the sensation of being shot – it's more the punch than the pain that stops you in your tracks, your pattern disrupted or permanently broken – that depends on the shooter. The pain comes later. It stops you from getting up.

He's been shot five times. He doesn't count the grazes, but just those that stopped him in his tracks. This one was a close call, leaving him trapped in a tiny, sterile room of SHIELD’s medical facility for longer than he preferred. Two weeks and ten books later Nick Fury walks into his room, so there must be something fucking important going on. He sits up, or tries to at least, and his boss pulls up a chair. There's a thick folder of papers in his hand, and it softly lands on Clint's abdomen.

“What kind of assignment would you hand to an injured man, Sir?” he asks. What he feels is worse than just injured. It's like his body is refusing to recover, demanding time and peace and quiet to heal. Clint wonders if it will ever be done healing, and thinks he might be up for more painkillers because his ribs are determined not to let him move any time soon.

“One I can't afford to have messed up,” Fury says. “Read up,” he adds, and just before he leaves, he turns his one eyed stare at Clint. “You're not quite broken yet.”

Fury leaves and he opens the folder. The front page is white, with only two words. A title and a warning.

Black Widow it says.

*

Found a dead end girl to read my palm; she was into losing streaks, so I let her take me on.

This is how being shot feels. The punch stops you in your tracks, and the pain prevents you from getting up.

It's not that she's beautiful, because he's killed beautiful men and women before. It's not that she's young, or resourceful, or as ruthless as he can imagine. There's more. So when he looks down the barrel of his rifle, through the sniper scope and she looks up, up and at him, it feels like being shot, it feels like being thrown out of his orbit. Like recognition, like looking in a mirror. Then he has his answer. Nick Fury didn't send him after the Black Widow because nobody else could find a spot high enough to make a shot. Many would fail but one of them would eventually make it and she would be just another dangerous dead thing SHIELD has left behind.

Nick Fury didn't send him after her because he wanted her to die. It was, in fact, just the opposite.


*

He must be a crazy man – deeply, incorrigibly insane, but then she looks at him from across the table with a smirk that's real, and her and not something someone else expects to see on her. He cracks a smile of his own and if his cut lip and bruised cheek burn, he tells himself it's worth it.

“That's fifteen, Hawkeye,” she says, not bothering to mask the glee any more, and funnily that makes this even better. She says his nickname like something she owns, and if that should bother him, he doesn't care too much. “In how long? Three weeks?”

“Don't flatter yourself, kiddo,” he says, acting nonchalant even though most of his body is sore, and she wiped the mat with him again. She is pleased, he will suck it up. “You haven't broken me yet.”

“You sure, old man?” she says, all fire and light wrapped within danger and in that moment Clint can feel something shift, click and lock in. She is as dangerous as he is, as crazy as him; lost and scared and not giving in to any of that.

“I'm not scared of you,” he says, even if he probably should be, because fighting fire to fire was never a good idea. She tenses up like a cat, but doesn't leave.

“Maybe you should be,” she insists.

“Maybe you should just accept I'm a crazy old dude.”

“Just like that?”

He gives her a smirk bordering on mean. Her face is calm, deceiving like the unmoving ocean, only her eyes gleam in return.

A mirror reflection is something that can't scare him away any more.

*


There are several boxes stacked next to her door, and a few more taking up the floor of her mostly functional kitchen. The apartment is stuck in a state between an almost finished project and an abandoned idea. Missions keep getting in the way, yet she keeps returning, always returning, with more books, shelves, silly, colorful, mismatched details. And still it feels like a canvas she's trying to paint entirely, use every bit of the surface for something.

Like a person who lacked color for way too long.

“To my new bookshelf,” she says, and her voice sounds heavy from the wine, but he suspects she's not drunk. She's under the influence, just as he is, but he believes she can hold a lot more drink than he can (Old man she calls him, and he feels like a cat about to purr. Maybe he is getting old).

“As if you didn't have three already,” he jokes as she drinks and steps close to him. He can feel his smile faltering, losing shape and certainty in the shadow of her upward gaze. He isn't often taller than her, since she is rarely flat on her feet, but she is, right now, with him. And just when he thinks that means something, somehow translates into division of power and trust and all that complicated shit she tips the balance when she kisses him, mouth full on his. Moments later she is under him on the bed, more naked than dressed and his mouth is between her legs and she is trashing against him like a wave. And it hits him, after he's broken her and she'd broken him and he needs air like a man almost drowned, that this feels familiar in a ruined kind of way, an imprint of a larger pattern he doesn't immediately recognize. When she gets up all too suddenly, her back naked and porcelain white, he doesn't want to look and doesn't want to know, doesn't want to predict like he usually can.

She sits on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, tense, and all he wants is to touch her. And because he's always been honest with her, always, he does, his hand looking large and rough on her skin. She looks at him over her bare shoulder, and in her eyes he can almost discern all the unspoken things, twisted together like a rope he could unwind between his fingers, if he dared touching it.

“I can't do this,” she says, gesturing between his naked chest and hers, “like a relationship thing.”

“Okay,” he says, breathes, breathes, because it's relief and he doesn't understand it, he just feels it. She smiles a little, her arms loosening and he smiles back and it's like she looks at him after she beats him at something again, does something he doesn't expect and instead of facing his distrust all he gives her is wonder, because the world around him stopped paying him surprises a long time ago. “We're okay, right?”

She nods, smile easier now, slipping from her and transforming her face and her eyes. “We're okay,” she says fondly, and he would really like to touch her, do all of that again, and judging by her inching closer to him, she is of the same mind.

“We can do this and be friends,” he offers and she nods, eyes slipping down to his lips.

*



A million miles away, lost at sea; she burned like a fire only drowning men could see.





The world slips down through his fingers in hues of red and blue and green, and colors mix but make no sense. His head still works but everything around him feels backwards, and for a moment he ignores it – the wrong colors, sound and scent and motion all melting together until he can't tell one from another. He can't miss, he won't miss, he will make each and every arrow count. He will figure the rest out later.

He will.

*

But it doesn't go away. Instead the skewed perception settles within him like a fresh scar, and he knows his hope of fading is in vain. He doesn't have to calculate the trajectory, because he can see it, almost like precognition, the arrow landing where his eyes lead, his feet already in motion before the car hits the boy running after an orange ball. The people screaming around him is just an echo, the perpetual state of deja vu. Future is present and present is past and things align in front of his eyes, lines revealing complicated patterns, things connected and human stories intertwined in a fine web of imbalance, bordering on chaos, barely slipping back to safety. It's fascinating and beautiful and absolutely terrifying, and even though he will never miss again, he hates it, and wishes he could claw it out of his brain because it's him who did it.

Does cursing a god – like creature even make any sense? He isn't sure, he is just tired of remembering, tired of things flashing back within his mind, tired of chasing Loki away, because he won. Like taking Clint, his will, his body, his entire mind and skill and all that death from Clint's hands wasn't enough. He left an imprint so deep Clint can never wipe it away, and he even though he doesn't want to be changed by the monster who made him kill so mindlessly, much less in a way that makes him more efficient, Loki has won. He didn't break him, and he didn't ruin him. No, he did something so much worse: he made Clint more precise, more deadly. He turned him into more

*

Natasha comes in and pulls the blinds up, lets the sun in, lets the colors creep back inside. Clint knows her steps before she makes them, knows that she will make black tea because he wants black tea, and she knows that he wants it. She will set that box next to his bedroom door and unpack it three hours later, after she relearned his body again and again and again.

The colors creep back, halfway into the room while he sits on the floor, his back against his couch, far away from the light, but it's a losing fight. Sooner or later it will reach him. One can't keep his eyes shut forever.

The pattern starts to take a form, like a melody connecting, the form of his life repeating itself, running towards the coda and colliding with her; one broken melody slipping into another, aligning until he couldn't tell them apart. Natasha unpacks her box three hours later, her toes naked on the carpet of his bedroom, and he realizes he can't predict everything. He is standing within the door frame, watching: one box, one box precisely. Not many things to carry, but so many things to bring; two bad designs fitting together.

She walks up to him, skin against skin and kisses him long, and colors slowly creep back inside. They might be still mismatched, reds in the place of greens, and yellows mixed with blues, but somehow it doesn't feel wrong any more.