franztastisch

geckoholic

Natasha likes her job. It’s quiet, and unusual, and solitary, but she doesn’t mind any of those things. And sure, some people look at her strangely when she tells them what she does, but she’s long past the point of caring about those types of people. It’s important and it suits her. That’s enough.

She works out of a little shop off Callenish Street. The place has a blue door and extravagant bars on the windows and more shelves than a library. Her card index hasn’t been updated since she inherited the business from the late Mr Fury, and there’s a faint smell of damp under the smell of acrylics and solder and glue, but it’s clean and she waters her little forest of pot plants and she’s retained Mr Fury’s 4.8 Yelp score even seven years after his death.

The bell above the door tinkles.

Natasha looks up to see a young woman, mid-twenties or perhaps older, with sad eyes and the eternally familiar box tucked gently under her arm.

“Hello,” Natasha says quietly.

She gets a brittle smile in return.

“Hi.”

The woman shifts from foot to foot, clearly unsure.

“Can I see?”

Natasha doesn’t hold out her hands, doesn’t make any movement at all. People don’t like that and the best Menders know it. Instead she sits quietly behind her clean-but-chipped desk, surrounded by pot plants, and waits.

People have to hand over their hearts willingly. It’s the only way this works.

Really, it’s the only way anything works. More people could do with remembering that, in Natasha's opinion.

The woman’s lower lip trembles and her eyes cut away, but eventually she shuffles forward, placing the cardboard box gently on Natasha's desk.

“He – he was married – ” the woman chokes out, cutting herself off as a tear escapes to cut a track down her cheek.

“It’s okay,” Natasha cuts in, her voice clearly audible despite its softness, “I don’t need to know anything, not to do the work. But I’ll listen, if you need it.”

Menders learn more than just their craft, after all. Natasha's taken lessons in counselling, sat quietly in funeral parlours as grieving families are comforted.

She’s very good at her job.

The woman nods, though Natasha assumes it must indicate understanding rather than thanks because she doesn’t continue. Instead she asks, “How long will it take?”

Natasha reaches for the box, meeting the woman’s eyes in a silent question. When she nods Natasha opens the box and looks inside, casting a professional eye over the contents.

“You know there’s no set time,” she says eventually, closing the box again. “But I don’t think you’ll have to wait too long.”

The woman nods in reply. “Do you need… anything else?”

And so to the practicalities: Natasha gets the woman’s name – “As written on your birth certificate, unfortunately. It’s a legal requirement.” – her social security number and contact information. All in all, the entire interaction takes no more that fifteen minutes, though she’s the sixth customer Natasha's had this morning.

Today is a bad day for lovers, it seems.

Natasha closes for lunch, the afternoon set aside for Mending.

The box – now labelled Taylor, Ellen Louise [423-55-1296] – is taken through to the back and filed along with all the others. Today is not the day to work on it though, Natasha can tell. Instead she walks down a different set of shelves, pausing in front of boxes, deciding if it’s today that Cornell, Paul James Edward [782-80-0028] will get his heart Mended, or Owusu, Esther Onjali [626-33-4492], or Wheatley-Smith, Nina Valentine [794-28-4820].

But today is not their day either and eventually Natasha is drawn to several different boxes, enough to ensure she’ll be working until late tonight, but she doesn’t mind. Perez y Gonzales, Eduardo Juan Sebastian [824-28-5878] left his heart with her nearly eighteen months ago. She’s pleased that tomorrow she’ll be able to call him and tell him his heart is Mended.

She gets to work.

The next day, after placing several calls to people whose newly Mended hearts are now ready to be collected, Natasha finds herself once again sitting behind her pot plant strewn desk, waiting for those unlucky individuals she relies on for her income.

Her first customer is an elderly gentleman who, to Natasha's trained eye, must have lost his partner perhaps two days ago. He speaks only to give her his details – O’Malley, Euan Thomas Padraig [394-48-2943] – and Natasha presses a cut daffodil into his palm just before his leaves. Then comes Morse, Barbara [834-42-4722] who seems more resigned than anything, and Makafitu, Lisa Kahurangi [83-475-371 – NZ] who had come from New Zealand for her former partner and felt she couldn’t leave until her heart had been Mended.

But it’s the guy who comes just as she’s closing up that really sticks in her mind for the rest of the day.

He skids to a stop in front of her door just as she’s about to flip the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’, eyes wide blue and a plastic bag – like the type they hand out at K-Mart – dangling from one wrist.

“Hi! Sorry, sorry. I – over-slept?” he says when she opens the door for him.

“Are you sure about that?”

“What?” He ducks ever so slightly to get in her door, though she’s not sure if it’s from genuine need or just force of habit. He is tall though. “Yes. I was… I work in a bar? I got in at six this morning. Also, there was an… incident.”

She stares at him, nonplussed. He stares back. He doesn’t look heartbroken at all. He does look like he’s slept in a dumpster.

“Anyway, here.” He thrusts the bag at her – the K-Mart bag, like he has absolutely no sense of self-preservation at all. “It’s… not bad? I don’t think. But also, um. Well.” He flaps his free hand in lieu of finishing the sentence and Natasha, in a move so unprofessional she’s almost immediately ashamed, looks into the bag without asking the man if that’s okay.

Generally speaking, hearts come in three main types. Ones made from something that looks like felt but isn’t felt, ones made from something that looks like metal but isn’t metal, and ones made from something that looks like ceramic but isn’t ceramic. Professionally known as kolk, oriann, and esper, people prefer ‘felt’, ‘metal’, and ‘ceramic’ – or even ‘pot’ or ‘pottery’ – because they rhyme better in all those awful ‘romantic’ pop songs Natasha avoids like the plague due to the fact that they claim utterly untrue things like metal hearts are harder to break and ceramic hearts shatter. It’s all bullshit.

However.

This man’s heart is made of esper, and while it’s not one of those terrifying, horrible heartbreaks that takes weeks and weeks of Mending, pieces so small they’re practically dust, Natasha's not sure she’s seen a heart quite so… bruised, before. And it looks like he’s tried to Mend it himself at least once before.

“What did they do?” Natasha asks before she can stop herself. Christ, she’d give herself a one star Yelp review for this level of professionalism.

“Oh, it was mostly me. She was great, all things considered.”

His words are flippant, but there’s a twist in his mouth that tells Natasha that he’s not as unaffected as he’s trying to come across. As if he could hide how he actually feels, when she’s literally holding his heart in her hands.

Natasha has nothing to say to that, so instead she reaches for that professionalism that has apparently eluded her for the past ten minutes and asks for the usual name-social-security-number-contact-information just so he’ll leave and stop being strange and confusing. Which is why, fifteen minutes later and after watering her many pot plants, she has to tear apart her tiny office in search of a suitable box because she’s not shelving Barton, Clinton Francis [616-37-4704] packed into a K-Mart plastic bag. She has standards and she’s sticking to them.

That afternoon, as she fixes Cortez, Luisa Plokhy [928-41-9933] and Lang, Scott Edward Harris [816-33-1184] and Rogers, Steven Grant [381-44-2713] she’s distracted. She can tell that very little work will happen tomorrow – none of the hearts on her shelves are calling to her all that strongly – but at the same time she’s got this overwhelming urge to order more turquoise lacquer and blood red silk thread. And gold. 22 karat, or maybe 24. But pure, for sure.

Menders trust their instincts. Those who don’t rarely remain Menders for long. But urges to buy gold are… unusual and, today, the thought of buying gold has Natasha circling back to the guy’s hair. Barton, Clinton Francis. What a mouthful. But he was very… blond. She only really noticed because the light had been streaming in through the window behind him, and it was scruffy and sticking up every which way. Still, it had been a really rather lovely colour; burnished.

Getting gold is such a faff, and expensive to boot. But regardless, she places the order, filling out the twenty or so forms needed to ensure it’s all legal and above board and by the end of it Natasha is annoyed enough that she decides that work is done for the day. She closes up shop and calls the Marias.

Tonight, she wants to go out.

Maria Hill and Maria Rambeau have been Natasha's closest friends since high school, and have supported her through five years of Mender training, her apprenticeship to Mr Fury, and the turbulent months just after his death. She loves them both unreservedly.

They’re also awful.

“Hey,” Hill says, her slightly unfocused gaze the only indication of how much alcohol she’s had, “have you ever dropped one?”

Maria laughs uproariously at that, slapping at Hill’s arm and nearly dropping her drink. Her wife Carol is looking after their daughter Monica tonight, giving Maria her first free evening in months. Carol’s Air Force career means she’s away for long stretches of time and, while Natasha knows Maria never resents that, she also knows that Maria needs evenings when she’s not being Mom.

“Can you imagine?” she chokes out, just as Natasha cuts in with an exasperated, “It doesn’t work like that.”

And it really doesn’t. Normal physics doesn’t work on hearts. One could be thrown from ten thousand feet and come away completely unscathed. But still. Natasha doesn’t drop the hearts in her care. She’s a Mender. But still they carry on.

When it’s clear the topic isn’t going to be changed unless she changes it, she cuts in with, “I had the weirdest guy come in today.”

Natasha doesn’t reveal details about any of her clients; personal details, names and all the rest. For one, it’s illegal, but also confidentiality is important in building trust and she doesn’t maintain a 4.8 Yelp review by being bad at her job.

She can be abstract though. So she tells them about the guy with his heart in a K-Mart bag, conveniently editing out all instances of her own lack of professionalism. She tells them, in the vaguest terms she can manage while pretty drunk, about the tape and staples and PVA that clung to the esper, how it looks like this guy has been having his heart broken since he was too young and had never had anyone do anything about it. How he looked about as badly bruised as his heart.

“And now I have to buy gold,” she says, a little too much whine in her voice. But she’s entitled. Gold is expensive.

“I thought it was illegal to pay for that?” Hill says with a frown, her police-instincts pinged.

“I’m not being blackmailed. It’s just… I need gold. Someone from today needs gold. Or maybe someone tomorrow will need gold? I don’t know. I just need gold now.”

Both Marias faces hold identical expressions of scepticism-slash-incomprehension, but Natasha is used to that. Mending is a borderline esoteric profession, for all that it’s scientific and technical and whatever else. There are a lot of feelings involved, no pun intended.

“I think it’s tacky,” Hill says after a while.

“Kintsugi?”

“Yeah.”

Which is fair. An awful lot of Westerners feel this way. It’s not even because of the art itself, but more because of the increase in conspicuous consumption that started under Reagan in the 80s and lead to two, frankly awful, trends. Firstly came the habit of the ultra-wealthy to display their hearts, like they were an accessory rather than a vital organ – a practice which continues to this day, though there has been considerable backlash. Then came the increase of those self-same ultra-wealthy paying vast amounts of money to have their broken hearts Mended in gold – kintsugi – again as some perverse fashion statement.

Happily, that practice – payment for kintsugi – was banned thanks to the twin pressures of the Japanese Government and the World Menders Association. Now, kintsugi is only given to those whose hearts demand it and Menders have to fill out a millions forms to carry it out.

Personally, Natasha thinks it’s beautiful.

“It only really works when it’s done… properly.”

Natasha is too drunk now to articulate exactly what she means so that’s the best she can do, but it’s essentially correct. The hearts in her shop speak to her. Once she had a heart that she just knew was to be Mended with sheep’s wool pulled from hedges – not dyed, not processed, just washed so it didn’t have shit on it. She once Mended a heart with an awful hot pink lacquer that practically glowed. She’s used lead, and flour-and-water paste, and once, actual duct tape, which she’s never told anyone because somehow that fact is most intimate thing she knows about any person, ever.

She’s only used gold once before. It looked beautiful.

They stay in the bar until Maria gets unsteadily to her feet around 2am and says, “I better get back. Carol had a friend coming over to have dinner with her and Monica. He’s getting a divorce and apparently wants to talk the one person guaranteed to say ‘I told you so’.” She shakes her head and nearly falls. “He’s a weird one, but Carol likes him so…” She shrugs. “He’s great with kids though.”

“You okay getting home?” Hill asks before Natasha can.

Maria waves her phone at them. “Uber.”

So Hill and Natasha pour Maria into her Uber before swaying their way to the Subway station.

“You know,” Natasha says, too drunk to sensor, “I fixed Carol’s heart after whassername.”

Hill kisses her on the temple. “I know.”

“I’m glad they’re happy.” It’s the kind of happiness that aches though.

There’s a long silence and Natasha can tell Hill is gearing up to say something she’s not going to like.

“You’ve had your heart back from Coulson’s for nearly four years now.”

“I know,” Natasha says, scowling.

“You can’t let Ivan – ”

“I know, Maria.”

Hill sighs but drops it, merely pressing another kiss to her hairline and leading her home.

It’s a good job it’s a Saturday the next day, because it’s been years since Natasha could drink that much and not end up with a raging hangover. She doesn’t get up until midday and when she does it’s only to move as far as the couch before giving up on being human and marathoning Mended on Netflix instead, a show she refuses to be embarrassed about liking because the interpersonal relationships are beautifully thought out and the Mending is actually pretty accurate for a TV show (the less said about Heart-Breakers the better).

That Monday, her morning is so slow she pops out around eleven to pick up coffee and snacks and manages to walk into a guy taking his dog for a walk a block from her shop. Her coffee ends up on her shirt as a result and the guy, who looks weirdly familiar, apologises profusely despite the fact that it was clearly Natasha's fault, and insists on buying her a replacement. As a result, she manages to miss the FedEx guy dropping off her lacquer and gold, which is supremely annoying as she can tell she’s going to need that turquoise lacquer soon.

On the other hand, she now has a much better coffee than the one she’d started out with. The place the guy had taken her to was called Hearth. She’ll have to remember that one.

The rest of the week passes with very little of note happening. The turquoise lacquer ends up being used for Lee, Aurora Harmony [381-44-1294] and the blood red silk is used on Ryu, Aaron Tae-joon [381-35-1102] and Hammond, Jacob Marius Parker [312-78-7955]. There is absolutely no proof supporting Natasha's theory that Aaron Ryu and Jacob Hammond will meet and fall in love, but Natasha hopes for it nonetheless. The same silk for both, and so close together? Hill is adamant that Natasha isn’t a romantic, but she has her moments.

But Friday – oh Friday is wonderful – because on Friday Natasha wakes up knowing that today is the day. Today Keinig, Cerys Elizabeth [429-11-3513] will finally have her heart Mended, after having it sit for six years, seven months and two days on a shelf in Natasha's storeroom. It’s the longest Natasha has ever looked after someone’s heart for. Natasha had hoped, when she’d woken knowing it was Cerys Keinig’s time, that the gold had been for her, but no. Instead she gets a stunning salt glaze shot through with silver and Natasha grins as she works, calling Cerys Keinig before the glaze has even set, and organising her heart to be sent to Swansea in Wales, where she now lives.

Natasha then calls up the Marias, and Sam and literally anyone else she can think might be free, and tells them to get their asses to the Orangery for drinks because she wants to celebrate. Apart from Maria and Carol are having a Date Night, and Natasha has forgotten Hill is working tonight, so it ends up being just her and Sam.

“You don’t have to sound so disappointed.”

“Shut up, Sam. Today was exciting, okay? I wanted to celebrate.”

“I can totally bring the party all by myself and I’m offended you thought otherwise.”

Natasha sticks her tongue out at him in response.

The Orangery isn’t a new place, but it seems to have come under new management since Natasha was here last. Lots of the old, uncomfortable chairs have been replaced and Natasha's fairly sure it’s been repainted. Plus she only recognises two of the bar staff.

Or… maybe three. That tall guy looks weirdly familiar.

“Corona?” she asks Sam, already moving towards the bar.

“You know it.”

It’s the tall guy who serves her and she realises who he is just as he, seemingly, recognises her.

“Hey!” he says, smile wide. “Hope your shirt suffered no permanent damage.”

The shirt was old, to be honest. The coffee had just been the last in a long line of indignities and it’s now in a better place – namely, being used as a rag for her turpentine.

“Nah, it’s fine. That coffee you bought me was great though.”

He lights up at that, his whole face practically shining with excitement, and he talks about coffee and Hearth and his dog for so long that Sam comes looking for their drinks. Natasha would feel bad, or guilty for ignoring Sam, or anything else really, apart from the guy is bright and gentle and magnetic in a way that she hasn’t felt in so long.

And Sam likes him immediately, which Natasha always thinks is a good sign.

So the three of them chat, the guy – Clint – popping away to make cocktails and pull pints, but always returning for a quip or an anecdote, making Natasha smile and Sam out-right belly laugh. They talk sport, and politics, and the plots of Dog Cops and Mended, and Natasha feels lighter than she has in ages, buoyed up like she’s filled with helium, laughing more easily and contemplating, in the back of her mind and for the first time in years, whether it would be worth inviting someone back to her place on a whim.

But it turns out that Clint’s shift ends at 4am, and Natasha's staying power is less than what it was, so she calls it a night at half past twelve, two hours after Sam taps out, and gains a quick kiss on her cheek for her troubles. It burns like a brand, and the smell of Clint’s skin somehow sticks in her nose for the entire night; salt and sweat and lemon peel.

She goes back on Saturday night and Clint smirks when he sees her. But it’s not a genuine smirk, not the kind used by men so sure in their appeal that they’re unsurprised that they’re wanted. It’s more like he’s trying to appear confident, but can’t hide his surprise.

Natasha doesn’t even think twice before asking when his next break is.

It’s not even midnight before Natasha finds herself pushed up against the back door of the Orangery, standing on the step so neither she nor Clint have to strain to meet each other’s mouths and kissing like she hasn’t had the opportunity since she was sixteen.

Clint’s got one large hand curled around her neck and the other low on her waist, and he’s kissing her in a way that’s aiming for unhurried but not quite hitting the mark. He smells of alcohol and lemons, and that shouldn’t be doing anything for Natasha but apparently tonight it does because she ends up pushing harder into his body, jamming a thigh between his legs and making him groan.

“This is such a bad idea,” he says, almost too low to be heard.

“Why?” Natasha pants out, and she senses a slight hesitation in his hands at her words, like he didn’t expect her to hear him. Well, he’s an idiot. His mouth is right there. “Work can’t spare you for five minutes?”

Clint laughs suddenly, then, and it rumbles right through Natasha's chest. “You think I can’t last?”

Natasha bites his lip. “I dunno. Can you?”

He slides his hand up from her waist to her breast, giving her a grope over her shirt. “Guess you’re gonna have to find out.”

But they don’t really escalate past kissing and groping. Natasha's not one for exhibitionism and they’re outside in an alleyway and, really, she has never been that person. Plus, just kissing is nice. Clint knows what he’s doing, and he’s so warm, and eventually he’ll have to go back to work anyway. This is nice.

It’s been so long.

Eventually they slow, sharing breath more than kisses until Clint pulls away just far enough that the security lights catch on his eyelashes.

“I should probably get back.” Natasha smooths her hand over his t-shirt, almost reflexively, and he kisses her again in response. “I probably shouldn’t have taken my break so early,” he says ruefully when they part again.

“Finishing at four again?”

“Yup,” Clint hands settle on her hips. “There’s an event on upstairs tonight and I volunteered to clear up afterwards. I get Monday off though.”

Natasha snorts gently. “Lucky you. I don’t.”

Like she doesn’t set her own opening times. She could have a lie-in whenever she wants, but she never lets herself. Her customers deserve her professionalism, and she’s not losing Mr Fury’s 4.8 Yelp score, not after everything he did for her.

“What do you do anyway? I never asked.”

Gently, Natasha pushes Clint far enough away that she can straighten her shirt.

“I’m a Mender.”

She’s not sure how she can tell, the light being low as it is, but she just knows that Clint has frozen in place, eyes wide. Please can he not be one of those people who are weird about Menders.

“On Callenish Street?” Clint asks, voice tight, and Natasha looks up in surprise.

“Yeah.”

Clint stares at her for a long moment before breathing out a vehement, “Fuck.”

“What?”

He scrubs a hand over his face, every line of his body reading resignation.

“I’m getting a divorce,” he says and Natasha fights the lurch of something she feels at those words. A divorce is a piece of paper, just like a marriage. It takes more than paper to define a relationship. Just because the paper hasn’t arrived yet doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t over. Still, that doesn’t stop her from –

“I knew you looked familiar.”

And realisation crashes over her.

“I have your heart.”

Clint nods.

“You were the guy with the K-Mart bag.”

Clint grimaces, but nods again.

“You’ve had a haircut,” she says when nothing else presents itself.

“And a shower,” he concedes, aiming for a smile but missing by a country mile. “And I’m wearing proper clothes and haven’t had any run-ins with my brother or the weirdo Russians who live in my building recently.”

“I have your heart,” Natasha says again, at a complete loss. She has his heart sitting in her shop; has a direct barometer to knowing exactly how ready or not he is for a new relationship. She has his heart and not once since it arrived has it spoken to her.

“What were you going to do?” she asks eventually. If I hadn’t been a Mender, she doesn’t say. If I hadn’t been your Mender.

Clint shrugs, a little rueful and a little tender. “Try, I guess.”

No wonder his heart looks tender and bruised. He gives too much of himself. He tries, before he’s ready. God, it makes her like him more.

Natasha doesn’t know what to say and, by Clint’s expression, he can tell. He smiles at her again.

“It’s okay,” he says, and he kisses her cheek. “It’s a bad idea. I know.”

And then he’s gone.

Natasha's life doesn’t change after that weekend – not really, not noticeably, not to anyone else. She Mends Bottini, Mario Luciano [372-41-4317] and Edwards, Claire Jessica [533-41-7986] (James Edwards; he/him) two other long term inhabitants of her shelves. She gets half way through Mending Mombo, Solomon Fela [523-87-5598] before the feeling leaves her and his heart is returned to her shelves. She has busy days and quiet days. She finishes reading The Vital Organ: A Global History of the Mending Arts and Day of the Triffids, and she gets to the end of season four of Mended.

She starts watching Dog Cops too, and she doesn’t think too hard about why. She also takes her heart from its box in her room one evening, opening it and pretending it’s for professional reasons that she checks the forest green kolk for tears or fraying.

She doesn’t go to the Orangery and she doesn’t see Clint at Hearth or walking his dog. Not that she’s looking.

And in all that time, the box Barton, Clinton Francis [616-37-4704] doesn’t call to her once.

“Hey,” Maria says when Natasha picks up her phone one Tuesday night, some two months later. “Carol wants to host a dinner party. You’re invited.”

“What?”

The idea of Carol Danvers hosting a dinner party is so utterly alien to Natasha that it slides off her brain like Teflon. Carol cooking; Carol in an apron. Almost involuntarily, Natasha pictures Carol as a fifties housewife and has to forcibly stop herself from laughing.

“Yeah, I dunno. My wife is an eternal mystery.”

“Can she even cook?” Natasha asks.

“Surprisingly,” Maria answers, “she can. This Friday, 7pm. A couple of Carol’s friends are coming and Monica’s got her best friend Cassie coming too.”

“Hill?”

“Of course.”

Natasha pretends to think about it, but of course she’s coming. It’s Maria. Plus Monica is the cutest.

“Sure, I’ll be there.”

“Cool. Bring wine.”

At the appointed time Natasha turns up at Carol and Maria’s place with a bottle of red wine, and a bag of Pick ’n Mix for Monica and her friend. Maria will probably be mad, but there’s a reason Natasha is the favourite fake-auntie and it’s only partially because Hill understands children about as well as she understands astrophysics.

Only, Monica doesn’t rush over as soon as Natasha walks into the front room. She and her friend are too busy painting the nails of a guy who looks far too familiar and what the fuck even is Natasha's life. Honestly.

“Clint?”

Clint’s head snaps up, eye’s bush-baby wide.

“Natasha?”

“Stop moving!” Monica cries, holding Clint’s hand tighter against his leg in order to continue her assault upon his fingertips. There’s sparkly purple nail polish everywhere. He doesn’t even have a dishtowel to protect his jeans.

“Do you two know each other?” Maria asks, looking between them.

Gently, Clint pulls Monica away from him before standing. Natasha had forgotten how tall he was.

“Um,” Clint says, just as Carol comes in. Oh great, everyone’s here. Just what Natasha wants.

“What’s going on?”

“Clint and Natasha know each other, apparently,” Maria tells her wife.

“Oh really? How?”

“I’m Mending his heart,” Natasha says, just as Clint says, “We made out.”

All eyes swivel to Clint, apart from Monica and her friend, who loudly declare all the adults in the room to be boring and leave, presumably to raid more of Maria’s makeup.

“When?” Carol asks, eyes narrowed.

“Two months ago. Ish,” Clint says, attempting to avoid everyone’s eyes.

“Clint,” Carol says softly, after a moment of awkward silence.

“I know.”

“Was this – ?”

Carol sounds gentle, which is always strange to Natasha. Carol’s usually so loud and bombastic and borderline careless.

“Yes.”

Carol sighs. “You’re an idiot, Barton.”

“She was nice!” Clint says, throwing a hand out in Natasha's direction. “She is nice.”

It takes Natasha a moment to realise that Maria has left. So it’s only Natasha there to witness, like a fucking voyeur, Carol sigh again and reel Clint into a gentle hug that says a million things that Natasha can’t work out but can tell are deeply personal.

She shouldn’t be seeing this, whatever this is.

“I know,” Carol says, softly. “She is.”

Natasha leaves to find Maria with an ache in her chest. She’s in the kitchen, not really doing anything of use as far as Natasha can tell, just randomly stirring things and drinking Bud Light like a loser. She looks up when Natasha walks in.

“You okay?”

Natasha shrugs.

Maria leans back against the counter and fixes her with a calculating look, like she can see every wish Natasha's ever breathed out, every gentle memory of warm hands, every sense memory of lemon and skin. It was literally one fucking weekend. Why has this happened? He’s just a guy. Just a guy with a dog and job at a bar. There are literally thousands of them.

“Clint’s a mess,” Maria says eventually. “He’s a mess the same way that Carol’s a mess. It’s… worn and comfortable. Bobbi didn’t realise – or didn’t want to realise – that he wasn’t going to change, not really. But at the same time, Clint just…”

“Gives?”

Maria nods. “And gives and gives and gives. He has a stunning lack of self-preservation.”

“I know,” Natasha says after a moment, because she does.

Because she’s gone to that box labelled Barton, Clinton Francis [616-37-4704] and opened it about once a week since that weekend, much to her perpetual disappointment. She’s lifted out that heart, despite the fact that it doesn’t call to her and isn’t ready to be Mended, and catalogued every fracture and break and chip. She’s noted that his heartbreak started in childhood, old hairline fractures spiderwebbing over its surface, and that more often than not, the heartbreaks haven’t been romantic – because whatever TV and pop songs say, it’s not just romantic love that can break your heart. If Natasha was the betting type, she’d guess familial for Clint; a crappy parent, for sure, and maybe this brother he alluded to last time they spoke.  

He’s definitely tried to Mend it himself, and he’s definitely trusted before he should have, layering new hurts over old ones. Trying before he should. Giving, when he should take time for himself.

Maria looks like she wants to say something else, but she’s interrupted by the doorbell. “That’ll be Hill, probably.”

She makes a move towards the door but Natasha jumps in.

“I’ll get it. No worries.”

She wants to stop standing around. She wants to… leave maybe. Though she knows that’s not really what she wants at all. What she really wants is to go and sit with Clint and talk about Sargent Whiskers’ character arc through season five of Dog Cops because a show with such a dumb premise shouldn’t be so emotionally complex and damn him for getting her into it anyway. And then she wants him to smile.

Instead though, as she passes by the door into the front room, she hears him say, “I should just go, Carol. I don’t want to make her uncomfortable.”

Natasha immediately changes tack, detouring into the front room. Hill can wait a little, she’ll be fine.

“Don’t do that,” she says, making both Clint and Carol jump and look up.

There’s a tense silence where Clint just stares helplessly at her.

“Just – it’s okay. Stay.”

Clint nods like he expects her to change her mind immediately, but all Natasha does is nod in return and then go to let Hill in.

Natasha worries that the evening is going to be awkward after that. But it isn’t, not really. Sure, she and Clint are cautious around each other to begin with, but it doesn’t take long for both of them to fall back into that easy conversation that had typified the two – only two, Christ – times they’ve met before.

Soulmates are not a thing. Heartmates are also a bullshit made-for-TV concept. People work or they don’t, nothing’s predetermined.

But Christ, Clint is so easy to talk to.

They talk about how pointless melon-balling is, of all things. They talk about how crap The Undercroft is as a music venue, and how come no one is allowed to ugly-cry on TV. They discuss Sergeant Whisker’s character arc, because of course they do, and Hill calls them nerds, but she also has some very interesting insights from her knowledge of police work which means she’s watched Dog Cops too and is therefore a hypocrite. Then, after Carol’s frankly amazing dinner, Natasha is coerced to being a hair model for Monica and Cassie while Clint helps drying all Maria’s irritating not-dishwasher-safe kitchenware. So Natasha chats with Carol and her Air Force buddy Ben Talos as Monica and Cassie tug a little too hard at her hair.

It feels a little like Christmas – or, how people always imagine Christmas. Not the presents and food aspect of it, but the comfort and warmth. She feels like she should be inside an Instagram moodboard – all thick blankets and open fires and wood panelling. Ben is funny in a deadpan-longsuffering-dad way, Carol and Maria curl together on the couch and, once he finishes drying all those annoying dishes, Clint gamely sits on the floor and lets Cassie finish painting his nails, neater than Monica could ever manage. Monica isn’t biologically Carol’s kid, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Patient she is not.

They talk about the local food market, about why Heart-Breaker is terrible, about politics and US military interventions and which are the best pizza joints in Brooklyn.

The thing is, Natasha's spent a long time keeping herself apart. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, not really. Natasha likes people and she has good friends. But she can look back now and see that Ivan managed to isolate her in a way she wasn’t aware of at the time and she’s carried that with her, unintentionally, even after Phil had Mended her heart, despite the best intentions of the Marias. And her job doesn’t help. Obviously it’s quiet and solitary but, more importantly, it surrounds her with heartbreak, albeit not her own. Keep apart, her brain interprets it, and avoid this.

But the flipside of that is this, this cosy front room of friends and makeshift family. The comfort of laughter and fleeting eye contact with a guy she likes who respects her boundaries.

Clint asks for her number before he leaves, ducking his head like he’s shy but grinning like he’s not.

Natasha scowls at Carol and the Marias as they whoop, but doesn’t even contemplate saying no.

 Turns out, Clint messages a lot.

They’ve had conversations about public infrastructure and how it would change with the addition of daemons from His Dark Materials. They’ve ranked radio DJs from most to least annoying. They’ve had a very long discussion about representations of working class people in popular media, something Clint has a lot of opinions about as, it turns out, he grew up dirt poor in rural Iowa.

On the other end of the scale, he’s sent her pictures of his dog in an eye-patch, pictures of his friend Bucky when he got stuck trying to get pans out of an awkwardly designed cupboard, and photos of weird graphic tees from around the world (“you are my love my angle don’t treat me like potato” was Natasha's favourite, though “the pig is full of many many cats” came close).

He also once sent her a long, rambling series of messages about how amazing legs were: “They’re just there, and they respond when you think and they stop you from falling over all the time and imagine the road rash you’d get on your ass if you didn’t have them they are a m a z i n g Natasha.”

Natasha had assumed he was drunk, but it turns out he’d not slept in nearly 48 hours due to some clash in his jobs he refused to tell anyone about and his friend Bucky had eventually turned up and forced him into bed after yelling at him for a full half hour. Or at least that’s what Clint said had happened after the, now very strange, twenty-four hours of complete silence that had followed.

But for all his messages are ninety five percent ridiculous rubbish, there’s something endlessly comforting about his constant chatter. Her occasional lack of reply doesn’t bother him and he’s always there with a kind word if she needs it.

Which is why, when she passes the place where the heart of Mombo, Solomon Fela [523-87-5598] was supposed to sit a couple of months later, only to find it empty, Clint is the first person she tells.

Natasha has been Mending the heart of Mombo, Solomon Fela [523-87-5598] on and off for about fifteen months or so, picking it up and putting it back several times. She’s Mended it only to find her Mendings have unravelled in her time away, and once she came back to find a whole side had sheared away. She remembers Solomon Mombo when he’d come in; tall and willowy and like a strong breeze could knock him over. But at no time during the fifteen months she’d had his heart had she seriously thought this could happen.

Hearts only disappear when the person they belong to dies.

“The worst thing is I have no proof,” she says to Clint. “But what am I supposed to think when his heart kept breaking over and over, even when I’d Mended it a bit?”

Clint puts an arm around her, but otherwise says nothing. There isn’t really much to say.

“He was so sad,” she says after a moment, remembering Solomon Mombo’s large wet eyes and hesitant manner.

“You did everything you could,” Clint murmurs, giving her a little squeeze.

“Did I?” she retorts, though she knows full well that she did. Menders are forbidden by law to contact their clients for anything other than letting them know their hearts are ready to for collection, and there is too much discrepancy between what a person can be going through and what their heart actually shows to allow Menders to act as some sort of barometer for a client’s mental health.

So yes, she did do everything she could. But she can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t enough.

“He could have died in a car crash,” Clint says quietly. “Or from an overdose, or completely naturally. You can only Mend, you can’t do anything more.”

But Natasha can still see that sheared off piece of oriann in her mind’s eye. She’s a professional. She knows what that implies.

“C’mon,” Clint says after a long, laden silence. “You’re done working for the day. Let me take you out. A walk in the park will clear your head.”

He’s right. She can feel herself calming as they walk towards Highland Park. They hardly speak to one another the entire time but Clint is a comforting presence beside her, always taking one step for her two. He buys her a cinnamon pretzel from a roadside vendor and occasionally detours so he can say hello to “particularly handsome doggos” but otherwise they just meander through Highland Park and into Woodhaven. So, when they finally decide to head home, it seems the most logical course of action for Natasha to invite Clint over.

They’ve hung out in person a lot since that dinner party at Maria and Carol’s, but never at either of their apartments. It’s always been at Hearth, or the Orangery, or Prospect Park. Or at Maria and Carol’s place largely due to various tissue-thin reasons Natasha knows are only excuses to get her and Clint in the same room. It’s the distance they agreed to without speaking about it, the boundaries they put in place because Natasha is still Clint’s Mender. But for all that, they’ve managed to reach a level of familiarity Natasha would normally only reserve for her closest friends, skipping  a whole host of usual milestones and instead settling into a solid kind of relationship that can as easily fall into comfortable silence as anything else.

But this still feels important.

She throws together some pasta, and they get into an argument about the plot of various trashy 80s movies – Clint loves Ghostbusters, but Natasha only ever saw it as an adult and therefore can’t find Bill Murray’s character anything other than supremely creepy – and they end up on the couch, Natasha's back against Clint’s front as they finish up their wine.

Their conversation slows incrementally, until all that is left is the sound of the fridge humming from the kitchen and the cars on the road outside. Clint is running his fingertips feather-soft along Natasha’s shoulder, up her neck, and back again. Over and over. Her skin prickles with the movement and with every pass she becomes aware of some other tiny thing about Clint; the way his chest expands when he breathes, the constant citrusy smell of him, the quiet click of his throat as he swallows. They’re on a precipice, she can tell; poised at that point where things could tumble in any direction, dependent only on their decisions in the next three minutes.

She feels him shift, his breath fanning across her temple and ear, lips so close she can practically feel their heat. His hand stops its teasing, instead curling gently around her shoulder and, for a split second, they are completely, utterly, still.

“Clint,” she says, low and not as firm as she’d like.

 “Yeah?”

Clint’s voice is so quiet and low she feels it more than hears it, vibrating through her chest and sparking the air in her lungs. It’s intoxicating, having him this close. This person she has let into her life, who knows her views on pop socks and mint hot chocolate as well as politics and TV and the military-industrial complex. But she’s still his Mender, no matter how many of her favourite ABBA songs he can remember.

“Don’t,” she manages to get out. “Please.”

Clint doesn’t move for a long moment, but then he sighs and moves away, removing his hand from her shoulder and giving her enough room to pull forward and move away.

“You know,” he says after a moment, and Natasha makes the mistake of looking at him. His eyes are dark, pupils wide, the blue of his irises only a thin ring. “Hearts aren’t the only way to gauge people’s readiness for things.”

Suddenly Natasha knows that looking back, this will be the moment she can point to, where she can say, this is when I knew.

“It’s what I have,” she replies.

“No, it’s not. You also have me.”

Clint’s t-shirt is rumpled, the collar slightly skewed thanks to Natasha leaning against him. His hair is sticking up every which way and there’s a shadow of a bruise peeking out from his sleeve. He is a totally ordinary man, with mismatched socks and a habit of losing his keys, and Natasha wants to keep him in this room with her forever.

“You have,” she says, pressing her finger gently against his chest, “a fracture in your right ventricle. It runs up towards your interior vena cava” – she traces this path on his t-shirt – “before turning and running behind you coronary sinus instead.” She taps his chest twice indicating the approximate point on his internal heart. “I think you got it when you were a kid. It’s not Mended, obviously, but it’s… healed. I won’t need to do anything to it, I don’t think.”

Explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t gone through Mender training can be difficult, because hearts can fix themselves but it’s not the same as being Mended. But Clint just nods.

“Your heart is covered with fractures like that, Clint.” She spreads her hand out against his chest, feeling the skin and muscles move as he breathes in and out. “And you never did anything about them, not once.” It was Carol who had told her that. Apparently she’d worked for fifteen years to persuade Clint to take his heart to a Mender. Natasha pulls her hand away and sits back on her heels. “I’m not going to be something that hurts you, not if I can help it.”

Neither of them speak then, not for a long while. They just stare at each other in a way that probably would look creepy to any outside observers, but it’s only the two of them here, in this little delicate bubble.

Eventually Clint breathes out heavily, cutting his gaze away and breaking whatever spell they were under.

“Okay,” he says eventually, gently cupping her cheek and pressing a kiss to her temple. “Okay.”

“How are you and that guy?” Sam asks over dinner one evening. He’s been away studying in Wakanda for a couple of months, because Sam is the embodiment of the idea ‘go big or go home’.

Natasha doesn’t even pretend to not understand him.

“Turns out I’m his Mender, so we’re talking it slow.”

“Shit.” Sam gives her a considering look over his plate of pasta, like he’s remembering how hard she laughed at Clint’s crap jokes when she and Sam first met him at the Orangery. “And how’s that working out for you?”

“I’ve watched all eleven seasons of Dog Cops,” she replies, “and I could probably start my own sex toy shop.”

Sam grins. “That good, eh?”

“Fuck off, Wilson.”

Natasha is exhausted. For some reason, this week is the week people are suddenly okay again, so she’s been frantically Mending hearts left right and centre. She’s Mended a frankly alarming number recently. Seven on Monday, requiring her to work until nearly midnight, five on Tuesday, eleven on Wednesday, causing her to pull her first all-nighter in four years, and a much more reasonable three on Thursday, so it doesn’t even register with her on Friday that anything unusual is occurring until she’s halfway through preparing the gold she’d ordered all those months ago.

Blearily, she casts an eye over the hearts she’s collected for this afternoon’s Mending: Singh, Mandeep Jeevan [284-66-1389], Parkavakulam, R. A. Aadalazhagan [135-62-8442], MacDonald, David Charles [GS-13-75-57-F – UK], Abbassaggi, Federica Eloise [513-63-3152].

And there, at the back: Barton, Clinton Francis [616-37-4704].

She stares at it in shock, partially because she’d somehow managed to miss the fact that she’d picked it up this afternoon, and partially because – yes. The gold was for him.

Fuck.

The Marias are never, ever, ever going to let her live this down.

The implications of Clint’s heart finally being on her desk to be Mended are slow to filter through her overtired brain, so it takes a moment for her to realise that, holy crap, this means she can date him now. Even better, this means she can take that delicious, gentle man, lay him down on her bed, and do every single filthy thing she’s dreamed of doing to him since she walked away from him in that ally behind the Orangery almost nine months ago.

She has to work hard to tramp down her excitement, to focus so Mandeep Singh and the rest get the very best Mending she can possibly give them, but it’s difficult when she can see the familiar curves of Clint’s heart in her periphery, can smell the lacquer and gold mix where it’s sat on her counter. He’s going to have gold lacquer with a subtle blue-and-earth-tones salt glaze and a tiny row of pewter staples. She can see it now. It’s going to be beautiful.

Her tiredness suddenly gone, Natasha gets to work. She’s got a hot guy to fuck tonight and she’s not letting Mandeep Singh or David MacDonald get in the way of that.

The problem with her plan is twofold. To start with, her tiredness comes back with a vengeance in about two minutes flat. It’s the type of all-consuming tired that means that she starts zoning out towards the end of Mending Clint’s heart which is probably fitting, or something, but not useful for any sort of grand declaration she might want to carry out. The second problem turns out to be Mandeep Singh, because Natasha can tell Mandeep Singh’s heart needs to be partially Mended with navy wool, partially with a makeshift papier-mâché made from PVA and purple tissue paper, and partially with cream crêpe paper and can she find her crêpe paper? No, she cannot. Not until past eleven at night, in a box marked ‘misc. stuff’ tucked into the back of the cupboard under the sink in her workroom.

As a result, she finishes Mending Clint’s heart at close to four a.m. that morning and only manages to stay awake long enough to pin a note saying ‘closed today 11/07 sorry for inconvenience’ on her door before face-planting onto her bed and passing out. In fact, Sam ends up being the sole reason she doesn’t sleep the day away, calling her up around midday asking if she wants to join him for lunch. She doesn’t quite make it out of the house to meet him but she does at least get up to stare blearily at cereal for twenty minutes before taking a shower, and by three in the afternoon she feels human enough to realise that simply turning up to Clint’s place of work with his heart in a box and expecting to be able to hop on his dick is about the worst way she could go about this.

Sleep-deprived Natasha makes poor decisions. She sends a silent prayer of thanks to Mandeep Singh and their insistent need for cream crêpe paper.

However, discarding this plan leaves Natasha slightly at a loss as to what to do. Hearth will be closing soon, she doesn’t know where Clint lives and, now that she’s actually awake, she realises that this isn’t something she wants to do in a bar. That seems… shallow somehow. Or. She’s not sure, but it doesn’t seem right, with all that low lighting and loud music and the smell of alcohol permeating everything. Really, she should do this the proper way: leave him a message like he’s any other customer and let it play out from there.

Only, Clint isn’t any other customer.

Almost unconsciously, she opens the box containing Clint’s newly Mended heart, tracing the gold with her eyes and the tiny pewter staples with her fingers. She was right; it is beautiful, but still scuffed and slightly battered, much like its owner. It makes her smile.

The little park by Hearth, she decides. Taking Lucky out makes for plausible deniability and the short walk there will give her a little time to maybe stop smiling like a maniac; a good idea in theory but in practice unsurprisingly pointless because she can’t help the smile that unfurls across her face as soon as she sees him.

Shit, it’s borderline embarrassing how much she likes this guy.

“Hey you,” Clint says when he notices her approaching, pausing in his game of Frisbee with Lucky to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey.”

Natasha tries to supress the joy in her voice but fails so obviously she isn’t remotely surprised when Clint gives her a perfectly arched eyebrow.

“Someone’s happy,” he says with a smile.

“Yup,” Natasha replies, cheeks already sore from the force of her smile. If she were a dog, her whole butt would be wiggling with happiness. She feels giddy with it. “Got something for you.”

“Yeah?” Clint grins. “I love presents.”

Lucky noses at her hand as she watches Clint lift the box from its bag and his heart from its box, wonder and elation and incredulity stealing across his expression in waves the longer he stares. The low sun glints off the gold and Natasha watches as his beautiful long fingers trace the evidence of hours of her work etched permanently on his heart.

“Jesus Christ, Natasha,” he breathes out eventually. His eyes are huge and awestruck when they meet hers and it fills her with so much feeling that she’s wouldn’t be surprised if she actually floated away.

“Wanna go on a date?” she asks, because it’s so blatantly obvious what this means and there’s no point is dancing around it.

Clint stares at her for a split second before bursting out laughing, clutching his heart to his chest and causing Lucky to bark and prance around his feet in excitement.

“You are something else, Natasha Romanov.”

Natasha's smile gets, if possible, even wider. “So that’s a yes, right?”

Clint grins, wide and bright, and kisses her directly on the mouth and she’s so caught on the unexpected press of his lips against hers that she almost misses his reply.

“That’s a ‘hell yes’, Ms Romanov,” he says, but he doesn’t get much further before Natasha is pulling him back and slotting her mouth over his.

She’d wondered about this, of course she had, but that wondering was so flat, was so underwhelming, when faced with the actuality of kissing Clint Barton. The scrape of stubble had, for some reason, not factored, though she’d never known Clint without at least a little scruff. The way she had to tilt her head up because he was so much taller than her also hadn’t factored. Neither had the faint taste of coffee on his tongue, or the press of his heart against her side, or the smell of grass and sweat on his skin.

Her imagination was a paltry thing when it came to him, not even coming close.

She pushes more fully into his body, tilts her head and sinks further into the kiss, and she swears the world drops away, leaving just him, and her, and the remaining hot inches between them; their own little universe. At least until Lucky barks, unhappy at being ignored, and Natasha and Clint part with a laugh that’s more relieved incredulity than amusement.

Natasha grins at him. God, it’s finally happening.

“Cool,” Clint says, totally inanely but apparently too happy to care. “Amazing. Jesus, you’re – ”

He cups her cheek in his palm and looks as though he’s going to say something horrible and sappy, but Lucky barks again and instead he just laughs.

“Shut up, mutt. I’m having a moment.”

Lucky barks again and Natasha can’t hide her smile.

“Okay, okay.”

Clint hands Natasha Lucky’s leash so he can pack his heart back into the box and K-Mart bag. He then loops the bag around his wrist so he can hold the newly leashed Lucky in one hand and Natasha's hand in the other. Natasha can’t stop smiling; her face actually hurts now.

“Okay, how do you feel about that little Italian just over there?” He points at a little, undoubtedly family run, Italian place over the road with a red and white striped awning. “They’re dog friendly, causal enough that they won’t care how I’m dressed and – ” he cuts himself off, giving her a considering look. “How do you feel about people who put out on the first date?”

Clint’s growing grin contains all the car-crash charm that drew Natasha to him in the first place and she can’t help but laugh. This man. This man. So beautifully average and wonderfully unique, smiling at her like he’d be fine if she said no.

“Largely unimpressed,” she answers, like this actually is their first date and not an event ten months in the making, “but I’ll make an exception for you.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Clint grin widens and he tugs her towards the Italian. “My place is only two blocks away on Quincey.”

“Wait, two blocks away?” She stops Clint with a tug of their joined hands and about faces, pulling him down Tompkins Avenue instead. “Fuck dinner. We’ll have it after.”