Sometimes, you lean against a brick wall outside a coffee shop to take a selfie with your coffee, and nothing happens. In fact, go ahead and replace “sometimes” with “usually,” or “99% of the time.” It’s highly unlikely, after all, for a wall to be anything other than what it appears to be.

            However. Were you to be in, say, Bedford-Stuyvesant, perhaps in an alley between a fancy coffee shop and an even fancier makeup boutique, you might find a wall less committed to that state of being. Having been graffitied with the outlines of a door some weeks prior, this particular stretch of wall is having an identity crisis. Which wouldn’t matter, except that this is the patch of wall Clint Barton leans against for a coffee break selfie. More accurately, this is the patch of wall Clint Barton falls through.

            Generally speaking, falling through a wall having an identity crisis isn’t recommended. Clint drops both his coffee and his cellphone on the alley pavement, but there’s nowhere to land, nothing to break his fall. Through the wall, there’s only the high whistle of the wind and the scream ripping from his throat as he plummets endlessly down, afraid to think, afraid to open his eyes and see the nearing ground.

            With his eyes screwed so tightly shut, he avoids seeing who or whatever catches him. One moment he’s being forcibly reacquainted with the word hurtle; the next, his freefall stops so abruptly that a visit to the chiropractor feels inevitable. “Forgot how to fly?” It’s a nice voice, low and melodic, throaty.

“Fly?” Clint repeats. Convinced that his splattered demise has been, for the moment, deferred, he opens his eyes. He has to squint, so close and bright is the sun, but he can still make out that his rescuer is a woman with hair the color of—well, to be honest, it’s hard to pay attention to details like that. He’s a little too distracted by the wings blooming from her shoulders: broad, powerful, and gently curved, the same grey color as mourning doves. "You can fly?" he blurts.

With an air of great patience, the woman looks down and says, “Duh.” Clint follows her eyes down and discovers that they’re hovering in midair, not on solid ground as he’d previously thought. In fact, there’s no land in sight. And while he’s grappling with that terrifying discovery, she adds, “You can, too,” like he should know this, like he’s forgotten something obvious, like he hasn’t just fallen straight out of the fucking sky. 

Rather than let her prove this statement by dropping him, Clint curls his legs around the woman’s waist and his arms around her neck. This close, he can forget about the whole wings situation for a moment in favor of finally looking at her face. Unfortunately, being this close also affords him the realization that this woman is wildly attractive, with big green eyes and hair like a sunset, making their position awkward. “Look,” he says, mostly to her shoulder. “I don’t know who you are or where this is, but considering that I was just falling faster than an ACME anvil, I’m pretty sure that I can’t fly.”

When he chances a look at her face, it’s surprisingly sympathetic. “You’re real,” she says, thoughtful. “And new, I’d guess.” She squirms and Clint understands that he is becoming uncomfortably heavy. “Look, this would be easier if you’d just give it a try. Can’t you feel them?”

No, Clint wants to say. I feel lost and confused and embarrassed, but not fucking wings. He’d say it, too, but the woman looks at him with an expression that suggests she already knows. He sighs. “This is stupid,” he tells her, and feels her nod against his ear. Feeling foolish, he closes his eyes and catalogues his body from the bottom up: wide feet and bony ankles, legs tight with adrenaline, stomach growling for missing coffee, sunburned shoulders and hollow wing bones, tense neck, clenched jaw—wait. He scrolls back down the list and focuses on the unfamiliar weight on his back, the feeling of something other like an itch under his shoulder blades. In a deliberate way that feels foreign, he thinks unfurl and feels power like a wave across his back, thinks flap and is immediately rewarded with a small gust of wind. 

“I can fly,” he tells the woman, and then, pushing off into the air like a backstroker, “I can fly!” He does exactly that for the next few minutes, getting a hang of how to dive and swoop and soar. Whirling through the wisping clouds is an indescribable exhilaration: the absence of the ground is much less concerning now that he doesn’t need it, the stack of questions like how and where and why entirely lost on the wind. Like a bird cheerfully unaware of the human world around it, Clint twines with hot air vents, careless and jubilant for a moment in time. It could be minutes. It could be hours. It could be days.

He forgets that he has an audience until he finishes a spectacular dive and finds the woman sitting on the edge of a cloud. “Having fun?” she asks with half a smile.

“Yeah,” Clint says, unable to tamp down the earnest enthusiasm in his voice. How she’s managing to sit so calmly, to sit at all, is beyond him. “Aren’t you?”

The half smile switches to the other side of her mouth, as if she can’t come straight out and say what she wants. “Plenty of fun,” she assures him, patting futilely at her runaway red ponytail. “I was just getting ready to leave, but I’m glad I stayed to watch.”

It’s hard to wish for anything else when he’s hovering uncounted miles above ground, embodying the phrase free as a bird in new and exciting ways, but he wishes the wind were a bit quieter here. If she didn’t have to shout, if he could hear the nuance and crest of her voice, maybe he could stop feeling like he’s only comprehending a quarter of what she says. “How long have you been here?” he calls. “Also, where is here?”

“Oh, forever,” she says, waving a dismissive hand. “I’m shocked it took you this long to ask about time. You’ve been flying around for at least two hours at this point.”

The reaction hits him in the chest and he loses a few feet of air, pale gold wings flapping anxiously to right him. Two hours? He’d only been in that alley between the fancy coffee shop and the even fancier makeup boutique because he’d promised to meet his friend Kate at said makeup boutique. By now, she’d have traced his phone, panicked, drank his coffee, and called Missing Persons. “Shit,” Clint says, not loud enough for the wind to drag it her way. “I have to—I have to get back.”

“Hang on—” says the woman, but Clint shoots upward, looking for whatever hole he’d fell through. Distantly, below him, he hears, “Wait, just—” but he ignores this in favor of scanning the sky for anything even remotely door shaped. You’re real, she’d said, you’re new—how does he know she’s not trying to trap him in whatever, wherever this is? Maybe he’s still in the alley, but hypnotized. Maybe this is what a coma feels like. Maybe—

Above him, a pair of clouds separate to reveal an incongruous dark archway in the middle of the bright sky. In a burst of speed, Clint closes the gap and, without acknowledging the woman calling after him, dives straight in.

The alley hasn’t changed—it’s still hot and scented faintly with garbage—but Clint has. He can’t feel the wings he’d just gotten used to, and when he spreads his arms out, he can tell they’re gone. Slowly, he crouches to pick up his phone and sloshed iced coffee, whose ice cubes strangely haven’t melted in the hours he’s been away. Even more strange, his phone is empty of notifications or missed calls. The time stamp on the selfie he’d sent Kate is 11:06, and the top bar of his phone says 11:07. Clint stares at his phone, at the wall, at his hands. Something is wrong here, and he can feel it in his empty shoulder blades, in his solid bones. When the phone rings, he nearly drops it. “I’m running late,” says Kate, breathless and unapologetic as always. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Katie,” Clint says slowly, “Something weird just happened.”

“What, like you ran into another ex-girlfriend at yet another coffeeshop?”

Clint snorts. “No,” he says. His free hand reaches for the door-shaped graffiti on the inconstant wall, nearly touching but not quite. “Like—” There’s nothing but brick under his fingers when he finally touches the wall, solid and rough. He frowns and pushes again: nothing.

Something is definitely wrong here.

“Whatever, I’m almost there,” Kate says. “Tell me then.”

 “Yeah, okay,” he says, hanging up and hurrying out of the alley, already deciding to make up something to tell Kate. He doesn’t look at the door again.

—★—

But he thinks about it.

             He dreams about it, about the wind rushing through his hair, about the air wrapping around his fingers, about weightlessness and freedom and the taste of ozone. He doodles in the margins during staff meetings, birds and clouds and a pair of tilted green eyes. He doesn’t go back to the door for a week, and then two weeks, but he keeps doodling, keeps dreaming, until  one Friday he spills his coffee down his shirt right before a presentation that goes terribly. Why am I here when I could be flying? Clint thinks, sharp and clear, right there in front of the blinding projector light. What am I doing?

            He keeps asking himself that question right up until he walks into the alley the next afternoon. This time he’s prepared for the fall: no coffee to drop, phone securely in his pocket. Freedom, he thinks, and throws himself through, and—

            And lands hard in a dusty alley between two stucco buildings. “Fuck me,” he grunts, giving his bones a moment to absorb the pain before he gets up. Dusting himself off leads to a consecutive pair of discoveries: his phone is gone, because his pants are gone. Shirt, too: all he has is a distressingly small loincloth that leaves far less to the imagination than he’d like. 

So… that’s different, and a little disappointing. He’d wanted to fly, and instead he’s in this dusty desert city. Instead of the open air, there’s crowds of people choking the street beyond the alley; instead of wind, there’s a bizarre sort of bellowing coming from all over the place, strident and unfamiliar. Trying both to blend in and identify the sound, Clint slouches into a crowd of excited people that sweeps him along. As the bellowing gets louder, so too does the crowd, until they’ve reached a massive gate of rock and bone, topped by the enormous roaring skull of what he recognizes as a tyrannosaurus rex.

            “What the actual fuck,” Clint says out loud, not that anyone hears him in the crush to get through the gate. He sees at least that everyone is dressed similarly to him, skins and furs and leathers, small bones braided into hair. Through the gate is a sunken coliseum carved directly into the rock, and in the center are—are—are dinosaurs, lined up in stalls like the Kentucky fucking Derby. “Those are dinosaurs,” he says to the man on the bench next to him.

            “Sure are!” says the man, unfazed. “Which one’s your favorite? My money’s on Thundertooth, you?”

            “Thundertooth,” Clint repeats.

            “There she goes now!” the man says, pointing to something that looks like a raptor and a swordfish had a baby, its grey scaly skin painted with red and black triangles. They watch as the rider, a woman wearing furred pants and a red-stained skull for a helmet, leads the dinosaur through some warm up exercises. “Nobody’s been able to beat her this whole season. Her rider’s something else.”

            “Something else,” Clint weakly agrees, glad his seatmate is too focused on the warm ups below to notice Clint’s brain exploding and leaking out of his ears. He’s in a literal Flintstones episode, the crowd so loud and the sun so hot that he knows he’s not dreaming. There are dinosaurs, and he’s dressed like Tarzan— It’s so much, too much to handle, and so Clint thinks fuck it and decides to suspend his disbelief and simply watch the race.

            When it comes right down to it, dinosaurs race the same as horses, their focus guided by woven palm blinders. The jockeys are lithe and compact, and it’s obvious even from the beginning that Thudertooth’s rider is the best of the lot. Each dig of her heels or nudge of her knees is precise, controlled, and she lies flat along Thundertooth’s fanned spine, one with her mount. The man beside Clint winces and cringes at every turn of the track, but to Clint, it’s no surprise that Thundertooth pulls ahead by a full length once they reach the final stretch.

            The coliseum erupts into cheers; the guy next to Clint hugs him, babbling about his winnings. On the track, Thundertooth’s rider easily rises to her feet on the still-moving dinosaur’s back, waving her way through a victory lap. There’s something about her that he can’t look away from, her edges golden and vibrant in the dusty sunlight. She’s clearly a fan favorite: the crowd roars and thunders their approval, growing even louder when she removes her skull helmet and lets her hair flow out like lava, hot red in the breeze.

            The force of his recognition draws Clint to his feet, staring hard and breathing fast. He knows, without being close enough to see the green of her eyes, that this is the same woman who taught him to fly. He wants to ask his seatmate the odds of this happening, if only he could look away, if only he could lick the dryness from his mouth. 

She shouldn’t be able to see him—they are hundreds of yards apart, after all, and she’s balancing on a dinosaur’s back—but somehow her eyes meet his, intentional. Her smile is friendly, victorious, a little smug, and Clint smiles back, helplessly bewildered. Hi, she mouths across the coliseum, lips golden in the sun, and the earth shifts beneath him. 

Ah, no, it’s just the stampede of her adoring fans swarming down into the coliseum pit, mobbing poor Thunderfoot, lifting the woman up and through the crowd. Eye contact broken, the weight of confusion and the hot sun fall heavy on Clint’s shoulders. Fighting the current, he makes his way back up the stands and out of the coliseum, back to the dusty alley with the ripped green awning, back through the doorway, back into the real world where there aren’t any dinosaurs and he gets to wear pants.

—★—

            They say the third time's the charm, and nothing looks too weird the third time Clint steps through the wall. He’s in an alley very similar to the one’s just left, and aside from the phone missing yet again from his pocket, the world seems normal. Emerging from the alley, he’s presented with the perfectly mundane windows of what appears to be a Starbucks. Normal, Clint thinks, grateful to open a regular door and study a regular menu while waiting in a regular line. Perhaps this is just a slightly different New York where the only difference is that Reagan lost his election or the US bought Nova Scotia instead of Alaska. Maybe this is a world where every important life event takes place in a coffee shop. Maybe—

            “How can I help you today?” Clint looks up and finds the register manned by a squid-faced monstrosity, countless tentacles making tea and heating pastries and drawing elegant latte-foam squids. “Sir?” says the cthulhu, directly into his mind. “We have a buy one, get one pastry special today. Are you interested?”

            “Gah,” Clint manages aloud, but his order is apparently received telepathically because three minutes later, the same voice says his name inside his own brain and he walks away from the counter with his coffee and two scones, orange chocolate chip. 

He finds a table in the window. He sits. He moves his coffee to the side and carefully, gently, lays his head on the cool metal surface.

“This seat taken?”

“Yes,” Clint says, still staring at the label on his coffee cup. It’s a cthulhu, he now realizes, not a mermaid. The chair across from his scrapes back and someone drops into the seat. Clint sighs. “Does ‘yes’ mean something different here?”

“No, but—” There’s a nudge against his foot and he looks up, planning to be irritated, to find the dinosaur racer, the woman with the wings. “I sort of thought you might like to see a familiar face.” She smiles into her coffee. “Plus, you’ll make Mike sad.” When Clint stares at her, nonplussed, she goes on, “You know, Mike, at the register,” and waves at the cthulhu, whose mottled green skin flushes a little as a tentacle waves back. 

“His name,” Clint says, strangled, “is Mike?”

“Well, no,” the woman admits, brazenly picking up one of his scones and taking a delicate bite. “I guess his real name is in, like, some ancient language that would melt our mortal souls to hear, so he just goes by Mike.”

A long minute passes in which Clint tries to make anything, anything, make sense. “Okay!” he says at last. “Sure! Fine!” He drinks deeply from his coffee and wishes fervently that it was splashed with Irish cream. “Could you at least tell me where the hell we are?”

The woman hums. “I’ve been calling it my random pocket dimension,” she says. “I didn’t know there was anyone else real in here until you started showing up. Honestly, I’ve been getting a little bored of eldritch horror New York, so I’m glad you finally showed up.”

            “Finally?” Clint repeats, feeling a little like one of those pull-string dolls, only able to speak in brief, confusing blurts. “How long have you been here?”

            “Oh, a week,” she says. “Not long at all. I was dinosaur racing for probably two months, though, it was just too cool to leave.” She catches the way Clint’s scone drops from his hand. “It’s no big deal,” she soothes. “Time doesn’t pass in the real world. I’ve checked.”

            “So… It’s like a dream? One that changes every time you enter?” He can get behind that: a miniature vacation right in the middle of Brooklyn, a retreat, an escape.

            “Every twenty-four hours,” the woman clarifies. “One entry ticket only. And once you leave a world, you can’t come back in. I learned that the hard way with the lunar colony. That’s why I stay so long, now, if I like a place.”

            “Oh,” Clint says, disappointment creeping into his voice. “So I can’t bring a friend, then?”

            The woman is equally quiet, full lips tilted down. “Not in my experience. Honestly, it was starting to get a little lonely in here with only recycled dream figments to talk to.” Her smile flashes, brilliant but brief. “I’m glad you showed up. We can be friends, if you want.”

            She’s still eating his scone, but the mischief in her eyes is tempered with something nervous. He smiles, tentative. “I do want. I’m Clint.”

            Her hand, when she takes his, is sticky with scone crumbs. “Natasha.” There’s a moment where they sit like that, like this single handshake is going to ripple around the world. Then Natasha grins. “Let’s go see the Statue of Liberty. You won’t believe how many tentacles she has.”

—★—

            If his life was a movie, Clint thinks that would be the ending: this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

            But his life is not a movie, and so that handshake is only the beginning of the story. They become swashbuckling pirates and water breathing merpeople, and there’s a pretty bizarre experience of becoming Barbie and Ken dolls that they’re both glad to leave behind. They find beautiful worlds and terrible ones; lands of kindness, of peace, of milk and honey, deserted wastelands and post-apocalyptic nightmares where they choke on the ruined air. Clint wonders more than once if there’s someone or something watching them weave story after story in each dimension they visit, hastily scribbling down their actions or broadcasting, Truman Show style, to a dedicated audience. Do they have fans? Is some four-armed alien out there wearing a t-shirt with his face on it? He poses the question to Natasha, who, in contrast to Clint’s twisting gut, finds the possibility thrilling and hilarious.

But then, Clint’s always been a bit of a homebody. He ran away from home and joined a circus at a young age, but that was escape, not adventure. Alone for most of his life, he’s dreamed of warmth and friendship and security, not jungle explorations or imaginary worlds. Clint’s a normal guy—sensible, mostly, and despite having minimal adult role models throughout his life, doing his best impression of a responsible adult as often as he can. To come back here again and again, to spend weeks of made up time turning out every corner of this pocket of fantasy for the simple sake of it, is dreamlike in and of itself.  

So he has to attribute this pivot in behavior to Natasha. Before the handshake in the coffeeshop, he’d thought to bring Kate here, somehow; but there’s a special kind of friendship formed in polar wastelands and the vacuum of space, in holding hands and jumping into the unknown. Entering the terrifying reality where everyone is a cat would be nothing short of horrific without Natasha making jokes about jellicles and asking everyone they meet if they really arefull of rage, or if that’s just her cat? She’s game for every challenge, fearless, unerringly locating the highest adrenaline competition available and proceeding to dedicate herself to its practice until she can comfortably wipe the floor with both Clint and the rest of the competition. More than once, she saves him from finding out if dying in this dimension has real life consequences, always with a joke and a smile. In a hoop skirt, in a space suit, in the body of a giant: she’s irreverent, sharp, clever, a beacon to which he can’t resist being drawn.

Still, he has to ask: “Are you like this, y’know, out there?” He waves to encompass everything beyond their current perch on a medieval castle’s turret.

Natasha pulls off her helmet and shakes out her jagged, sawed-off hair. It’d been long and lovingly brushed when they’d first met up here, but she’d gotten bored of playing princess after a week and convinced Clint to cut it all off so she could fit into a suit of armor. The sunset bounces off her chain mail at random, making her an edgy, dazzling Joan of Arc. “Like what?” she asks over the clang of her discarded armor.

Clint strips off his own chain shirt and collapses on the turret’s stone floor, trying to stretch out so his shirt doesn’t stick to his sweaty skin. “I don’t know, a badass?” He’d won the archery competition today, but she’d unseated the king’s champion jouster, determination and grace in every gilded edge of her armor. It’s not like he’s sitting on his hands on all these adventures—he’s learned today that he’s not half bad with a longsword, of all things—but c’mon. “I mean, I just work a boring office job, but I feel like you must do something infinitely cooler.” 

There’s a long, jingling pause as Natasha sheds her chain mail and heavy gauntlets, pours half their pilfered jug of water over her head. Clint looks away from the way her throat moves as she swallows, the plaster of her shirt to her skin, so he almost misses when she speaks. “I’m a dancer,” she admits, stretching out next to him, the darkening sky reflected in her eyes. “Ballet. I’m pretty good, actually.”

“Of course you are,” Clint agrees. Her profile, when he turns to look, says it all: the slight curve of her graceful nose, the set of her lips, the controlled rise and fall of her stomach as she breathes. Of course she’s a dancer, always in motion, committed to perfection. Someone as vibrant as Natasha isn’t making slides of data, checking office memos, signing retirement cards. “Well, I’m a pretty good marketer, if you ever need that.” He holds his breath, stares at the shag of hair over her ears, releases it. “In New York, if you’re ever there.”

There’s no light pollution in medieval times: here on this turret, they’re alone in a sky white with stars. Natasha turns her head and considers him, her gaze palpable. “I’m from Russia,” she finally says, a funny catch in her voice that Clint doesn’t know how to interpret. 

“Russia,” Clint repeats. “That’s far.” He looks back up the sky and lets it absorb the pinpricks of disappointment he shouldn’t allow himself to have. He feels her scrutiny on his for a long minute before she turns her eyes skyward again.

 “Only out there,” Natasha says, so quietly that her fingers linking with his feels loud in comparison. 

—★—

He’s the same every time, but different. Going into the pocket dimension never fixes his hearing, but sometimes he’s got tattoos, weird scars, a purple ombre undercut. Today Clint steps through and feels broader shoulders, sharper eyesight, a sense of his body and its power that he’s never known before. 

“Natasha?” he calls into the dark warehouse. There’s something square and heavy strapped to his back and what he recognizes as some kind of bow in his hand. Peering into the gloom, he takes a few steps forward and calls again, “Nat? You here?” but the only response he gets is a shuffling sound and the twitch of unease down his spine. “Nat, if this is a joke—”

Not a joke: the punch that comes out of the darkness, flashing past the impulse to reach for the apparent quiver at his back. Not a joke: the crunch of his skull as his legs are swept from under him and he crashes to the concrete floor. Not a joke: the dull throb of his aching head as he wakes, gagged and bound to a chair in the middle of the warehouse now flooded with glaring fluorescent light.

“Mr. Hawkeye,” says the man standing over him. He’s tall, narrow, and dressed all in expensive black to accentuate these facts; his hair is combed straight back from his sharply handsome face. “How nice of you to join us.”

“Mfm hufuks mdum,” Clint tries to say.

“Pardon?” the man says in what is, of course, a slick Russian accent. With two fingers, he extracts the silk handkerchief stuffed in Clint’s mouth. 

“Mr. Hawkeye is my dad,” Clint repeats with the sort of insolence his father would never have actually tolerated. It isn’t surprising that the hankie gets shoved back into place before he can say, call me Clint.

“Charming,” says the guy, who Clint decides to call Dick since he’s been so rude as to not introduce himself. “Now listen,” Dick goes on, “we don’t care about you or your little team. We only care about the Black Widow.” He pauses as if the name should be familiar to Clint. “So. I am going to remove your gag, and you are going to tell us where she is. Then, you fly away. Yes?” He prompts Clint to nod, then removes the gag. “Now. Where is the Black Widow?”

“Get fucked,” says Clint. Dick jerks his head to someone over behind Clint, resulting in a tooth-jarring slam to the head with the butt of a gun. “Sorry,” Clint says, “where are my manners?” he grins up at his captor, tasting blood between his teeth. “Get fucked, please.”

Dick tsks. “That’s quite rude of you,” he says, affably patronizing. “All I’ve done is ask you a simple question. Perhaps you misunderstood? Where,” he repeats, each word capitalized, “Is. She. Hm?”

As best as he can, Clint leans back in his chair and smirks. “Can’t help you.” He shrugs in his bindings. “And hey, you know what? Even if I could—” he winks— “I wouldn’t!” it doesn't take a genius to put together that the Black Widow is Natasha, but it's not like he's lying: he had no idea where she is, if she's even in the dimension at all, and he's certainly not going to offer anything remotely useful to a man doing a terrible audition for the next Bond villain, no matter how many times he gets hit. “I gotta say, your hospitality sucks,” he says around his newly split lip. “I’ve had a better time at the roach motel.”

“You know she’s not worth protecting,” Dick hisses, composure fraying at his expensive seams. “She’s a criminal. A killer.”

Clint does his best to whistle, inadvertently spitting blood. “Sure,” he agrees, “but she likes me, whereas I get the impression she’s not your biggest fan.” A dark shape swoops past the window high above; Dick and his friend, too focused on introducing Clint’s stomach to his spine, don’t notice. “Seems to me—” Clint gasps, working desperately to keep his lunch, “—like you might not—wanna stick around.”

“She can do nothing to me!” Dick snaps, the length of his tether apparently reached. He pulls a gun from his pocket and points it with cold accuracy. “I am her master! She will return to the Red Room, and no circus buffoon can stand in my way!”

“Look who’s being rude now,” Clint wheezes, paying as little attention as he can to the cold barrel now pressed against his forehead. “Look, if you’re going to do something, could you get on with it?”

For the first time, Dick looks perturbed. “You—you want me to kill you?”

“He’s talking to me, dummy.” It’s not a long jump from from the second level of the warehouse to the ground floor, and Natasha completes it with a graceful roll that brings her to her feet, fist extended to crack Dick directly on the nose. “We have to stop meeting like this,” she tells him.

“You are under my control,” Dick seethes, clutching at his gushing face. 

“Am I?” Natasha is terrible in the fluorescence, sleek and overtly powerful, hellfire in her shadowed eyes. There's a gun strapped to each thigh and another in her hand, but she uses neither, instead launching herself at Dick feet-first. Clint has spent what amounts to a year with Natasha at this point, but he’s never seen her move like this, coldly precise as her thighs clamp around Dick’s face and twist him to the ground. “I’m not going back, Ivan,” she says to Dick, who cowers below the gun she sticks in his face. Without looking away from him, she shifts the gun and shoots the guy guarding Clint in the leg. “Next time I won’t be so nice.” The staredown lasts for a minute, then Dick (Ivan) snarls and whistles sharply for his goon, who whimpers. Natasha stands impassively while they drag themselves upright and limp out of the warehouse. 

Only when they’ve cleared the threshold does she turn to Clint, and her face is carved with such thunderous fury that he leans back in spite of himself. She has never looked like this before, hardened and terrified, her gold edges flaring like a star about to explode. He can barely breathe as she stalks his direction, her razor-sharp beauty a knife against his airway, but her hands are careful and soft against his battered face, tracing cautiously over his swollen lip. 

“I—” she says, her voice ragged and thick with emotion. Her sentence hangs unfinished between them like a live wire, crackling and dangerous as her huge eyes look him over, until Natasha grabs his face and tugs his mouth to hers. She tastes unexpectedly of cinnamon gum and cherry chapstick, sweeter and hotter than any first kiss he's been able to daydream up. Clint does his best to kiss her back, straining against the zip ties cutting into his wrists until Natasha leans back. “Right,” she says, somewhat breathless as she draws a knife from somewhere in her tight catsuit and slices easily through each tie. “Sorry. Um—”

His wrists burn, raw in the open air, but Clint ignores the pain in favor of drawing Natasha entirely into his lap and kissing her again. This time he can hold his hands to the fire of her hair, warm himself on the racing pulse at her throat. Nothing has ever fit as perfectly as Natasha does within his arms, her hands clutching at his shoulder, his hair, his waist, until she brushes a blossoming bruise and he has to wince away.

“When we got the call, I thought you were dead,” she says, perhaps the most honest she’s ever been; he thinks she means it when she touches the cut above his eyebrow and says, “I would have killed him.”

Clint takes her hand from his face and kisses each fingertip, as light as he dares. “That would be messy,” he points out.

Natasha shrugs. “I’m an assassin in this universe,” she says, sliding fluidly from his lap and wandering off to peek behind stacks of crates. “You are, too. And we’re superheroes, so nobody would look at us twice for it.”

“Dark,” Clint says. He looks at her skintight, military-grade suit, then down at his absolutely normal t-shirt and tactical pants. “Hold on, we’re superhero assassins and I’m wearing a t-shirt?” It’s embarrassing, honestly. “Why don’t I get a cool suit?”

His bow and quiver come soaring from behind a pile of cases. Regular Clint would duck for cover, but he’s assassin Clint, which means he’s able to easily catch both. “You used to have a suit,” Natasha tells him, reappearing with a smirk. “Costume, really. I've seen pictures. It was obnoxious.”

Clint puts a hand to his chest. “Me? Obnoxious? Never!” He wants to reach for Natasha again, but now that he’s on his feet again, he doesn’t know where they stand. “Are we…” He trails hopelessly off. “Okay?” 

Natasha steps into his space, smiles crookedly, and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “We’re—” she begins, but the warehouse door bangs open to reveal a brawny man carrying Dick/Ivan over his caped shoulder and tossing what appears to be a huge stone mallet with ease. “That’s Thor,” she whispers, stepping back.

“Thor?” Like the god?

“Barton!” he says, more jovial than the setting really calls for. “Did you have fun being kidnapped?” To Natasha, he confides, “Tony’s in a snit about the jet again. We should be on our way before he takes it apart and builds another, er, murder robot?”

Natasha sighs. “Every fucking time,” she replies. Under Thor’s booming laugh, she promises Clint, “We’re okay,” and squeezes his hand, pulling him forward into a world that feels like it could be home.

—★—

“This is a bad idea,” Natasha says, her mouth right against his ear in the cramped, dark closet. “We’re going to get caught.”

“We are not going to get caught,” Clint murmurs, kissing the corner of her neck. “We’re going to do this just as fast as we did in Pisa.”

“Oh, you mean when we got caught?” They’d spent a few hours in a Pisa jail before being bailed out by their patron, some distant Medici cousin willing to spend all sorts of money to employ the best thieves in Italy.

“Technicality,” Clint says. “You ready?”

Natasha fists her hand in his hair and kisses him hard, biting his lip as she withdraws. “More than you are,” she says, and darts out of the closet while his mouth still hangs open.

It goes better than Pisa did, mainly (in Clint’s opinion) because Florentines actually know how to party, Natasha’s remembered to wear her wimple, and nobody’s trying to burn Galileo at the stake. Four hours later, they’re slightly drunk and stumbling home with the rest of the revelers, pilfered blueprints tucked safely under the billowing skirts of Natasha’s dress. For his part, Clint’s snagged a bag of gold and a few jugs of the house wine, the latter of which they climb up to the roof to open once they’ve wriggled out of their party clothes.

“Venice next?” Natasha says, laughing and open as her jug of wine toasts his. “If we sell the plans there, we’ll make bank. And I hear it’s unbelievably gorgeous.”

“I hear you’re unbelievably gorgeous,” Clint says, drunker than he realized. He recovers: “Uh, yea, Venice. Um, verily. Posthaste.”

Her nose wrinkles in a small smile. “It’s cute what a dork you are,” she says, soft and serious at once. She sets her wine down and kisses him gently at first, then less gentle, insistent. Clint kisses her back, lost in it, until he realizes that he’s got his hand halfway up her night dress where someone could see them; in fact, judging by the candle burning in the window of the inn next door, someone probably already has.

“We’re definitely leaving for Venice,” Clint grumbles, hitting his head on the window sill as he climbs back into their rooms. “Tomorrow.”

★

“This is a bad idea,” Clint mutters in Natasha’s ear. “I don’t know how to dance!”

Serene as ever, Natasha sets one hand on his shoulder. “If you didn’t want to dance,” she says, tucking her other hand in his and leaning into the hand he places at her back, “then why is your name on every line of my dance card?”

There is no need to say because you put it there, and she wouldn’t be able to hear him over the swell of the orchestra starting, and anyway, he’s not all that mad that they’re finally getting to talk. It’s hard to spend time with women in this approximation of Regency England, with all its rules and formalities and chaperones. It’s taken him nearly a week to find her because he can’t ask a single goddamn question about a woman without getting challenged to a duel. 

“Follow my lead,” Natasha murmurs, her knees bumping his into a passable imitation of the waltz. Nobody is really paying attention to them: the haute ton has declared Lady Elaine Thistlewight the season’s most beautiful debutante, and the poor young lady has been mobbed with suitors and hangers-on alike. Natasha’s beauty, which bangs Clint over the head like a frying pan every time he so much as thinks about her, goes bizarrely unnoticed amongst the lovely but nearly identical English roses that crowd the ballroom. 

“I hate this world,” Clint blurts. “I miss you. These knee pants are stupid, and every man is a prime example of toxic masculinity, and what’s the point of coming here if we don’t get to be friends.” Natasha’s eyebrows lift in unison, but she ducks her chin as if to say, continue. “People keep calling me a rake, whatever that means! And this guy at my club—oh yeah, how is anyone supposed to say my club without sounding like an asshole—said that any woman who dances twice in a row with one man is not worth marrying! Like, who designed this place? Why does everyone want to dance with Lady Elaine instead of you? I’d dance with you forever if it wouldn’t cause a scandal.”

It’s rare for Natasha to smile in full; usually, he gets one half or the other, or just a smirk. But she does, now, in the candlelight, broad and glorious. Clint’s heart tilts on its axis. “Lady Elaine is extremely wealthy,” she says, dancing them towards the edge of the dance floor. “And Clint, there’s nobody else I want to dance with.” She bites her lip. “For several reasons.” 

They’re near the French doors that stand open to the garden now, and Natasha draws him onto the balcony. “We shouldn’t be out here,” Clint warns: he’s been paying attention to the ever-watchful eyes of the chaperones, the whispers, the gossip. “I don’t want to ruin your reputation.”

“Eh.” Her shrug is graceful, half in shadow. “I could stand for a little scandal.” The kiss she presses to his lips is chaste, but she rakes her nails down his shirt, untidying his cravat. “Come find me,” she laughs, hiking up her skirts and disappearing down the steps and into the ornamental garden more quickly than he’d thought she could move in that dress. 

“Nat!” Clint takes off after her, heedless of who’s watching him as he plunges into the hedge maze. Her laughter floats over the summer night, luring him deeper into the garden and stripping away the rigid protocol to which he’s tried to hold. The party feels like another world, like he’s stepped Inception-style into yet another portal; what does it matter if his cravat is askew, if he drops his kid gloves, if he’s alone with the woman of his dreams under the midnight sky? “Okay, seriously,” he laughs. “I can’t run anymore. These boots have no arch support.”

She swings out of a hedge, catching him around the neck. “At least you have boots at all,” she says, kissing him with no room for argument. A better use of his energy is lifting her into his arms, turning so her back is against some conveniently placed decorative column, pulling the myriad of pins from her hair, kissing and kissing and kissing her until they run out of time.

“You always taste like cherries,” he mumbles into her mouth, and she laughs. “It’s good,” he assures her, breathless on the low neckline of her bodice. “I love—” He hides his mistake in the hollow of her throat. “I like it.”

“Clint,” Natasha begins, her hands somehow in the middle of his unbuttoned shirt. “Look, I—” She freezes, and a moment later, he does, too: footsteps, hurried and unquiet, are drawing closer. “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she protests when he steps in front of her, shielding her body from view.

“I absolutely do,” Clint disagrees, thinking of every lecherous man he’s met at his stupid club. Half the party, it seems, has come out to see their disgrace, and leading the pack is the Duke of Eventon, who Clint just so happens to have embarrassed at the gambling table the night before. 

“You will marry her,” the duke demands, throwing his glove at Clint’s feet.

“Totally,” Clint says, feeling Natasha’s hand squeeze his and knowing it’s goodbye. “One problem, though.” He steps to the side so that everyone can see him alone in the courtyard, turning his head to catch her portal closing at her heels.

★

This is a bad idea, Clint tells himself, slouching against the rough, flier-papered wall outside the club entrance. He’s been in this world for a few weeks now, trying to screw his head on right, trying to find his center. There’s a Kate in this universe (or someone who calls herself Kate) and he kicks around with her, trying to convince himself that he can build the same connection with anyone, that he’s not as dumb as he feels.

And he’s doing a pretty good job of it until he’s walking along the river and sees the poster. SHIELD PRESENTS BLACK WIDOW, it shouts, and Natasha’s there smirking in the center, head half-shaved, eyes lined deeply with black. Don’t do this, he thinks. He knows himself, and he knows the truth: if he goes to this show, if he sees her again, he’s going to break the rules, however unspoken they are.

But not-Kate says, “Hey, America and I are going to grab dinner,” hooking a thumb at her girlfriend’s feet on Clint’s worktable, and dinner turns into drinks, and drinks turns into clubbing, and suddenly they’re in line at SHIELD and Clint’s wondering if this is all just inevitable. 

She is, of course, a fantastic DJ. Natasha is nothing if not thorough, a perfectionist of every craft she encounters. The beat throbs and hums, accelerating his pulse, shaking through his bones. Clint keeps his head down, for once trying not to catch her eye, and loses himself in the music, in the steamy press of a crowded room. Not-Kate and America dissolve into the crush of bodies, leaving Clint to dance alone until the back of his shirt is soaked with sweat and he needs to push outside and gulp the cool night air. The sky is clear, and he’s the sort of club-drunk that means it makes perfect sense to lie down on a divider and watch the stars slowly pass him by.

Her golden glow precedes her; he sees her exiting the club from the corner of his eye. “Look,” he says, pointing directly above him. “Cassiopeia.”

She stops next to him, her record bag thumping against her hip. “Sure looks like it,” she agrees. “Need a hand?” He lets her haul him upright, knowing even as he asks that she won’t let him carry her record bag. Instead, she asks, “What’d you think?”

“You were good,” Clint says, taking her hand and starting the walk home without asking. “Like, you really understand music. It’s—you’re a dancer, so it makes sense. I just never really thought about it.”

Her shoulder bumps his as they cross the bridge. “You’re a musician, too, I understand,” she says, patting her record bag. “I’ve got some Hawkeyes albums in here and they’re actually not bad!”

“All this praise is going straight to my head,” Clint laughs. “Not bad, what a glowing review!” This part is easy, walking and talking and laughing as they’ve done thousands of times, pointing out the stars, alone in a world that shapes itself around them. He could do this all day, but that’s the problem; no matter how much he wants to, he can’t do this in real life. 

And yet, when they get to the crossroads where he should keep going, he lets her tug him a different direction. The night is nearly over, and by the time she steps up onto the threshold to unlock her door, sunlight is creeping over the rowhouse roofs. “Aren’t you coming in?” Natasha asks, head tilted like she can’t figure him out. “I have cereal.” 

Clint looks up from his last defense of the sidewalk, up her long legs, her short shorts and giant tank top that doesn’t hide the ravens tattooed over her ribs, her always-cherry mouth, her clever eyes, her tumbling glory of hair. In the rising sun, she looks like every goddess he could ever dream to worship, and he’s only mortal in the end. “Yeah,” he says, feeling the rules breaking like the box around the fire alarm. “I’m coming in.”

Her flat is typical of every place Natasha makes her home: cozy, neat, filled with art and music. His eyes never leave her as she places her record bag with care on her kitchen table, pours a glass of water at the sink, leans against the counter. Her eyes meet his as she empties the glass, and she sets it down with a click. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, eyes deepening, knowing. “What?”

It’s two easy steps to cross the room, to grip her shoulders and see the storm inside him reflected in her eyes. “You know what,” Clint says, his mouth closing over hers before the words are even done. Her tongue is cool against his, her hands scrambling under his shirt. If there was a way to touch her everywhere at once, he would, but he settles for the soft nape of her neck, the curve of her ear, her full lower lip. 

He’d stand there at her kitchen sink forever, but Natasha pushes him backwards, shoving his shirt off and managing to remove her tank top by the time they reach her open bedroom door. They don’t talk about the desperation that jitters between them: there’s only the rush of skin against skin, huffed laughter as they wrestle with her strappy, strangley bra. Clint traces each tattooed raven with his tongue, taking his time no matter how much Natasha writhes and squirms beneath him. It’s only when he kneels on the floor, pulls off her shorts and underwear, and licks at the dark band tattooed around her upper thigh that she says, “Clint,” in a voice that can’t decide if it’s a warning or a plea. 

“In a minute, dear,” he says, determined to dedicate every inch of her to memory; but her hands dig into his hair and direct him elsewhere. “Bossy,” he says into the center of her, feeling her thighs shiver on either side of his head. “No patience whatsoever.”

“You’ve seen me take men down with these thighs,” Natasha points out, her hands digging into the sheets as he gives up the pretense and presses his tongue firmly against her. Whatever else she was going to say turns into a choked off gasp; her strong legs tighten at his ears as he drives her higher and higher, sliding one and then two fingers into her until she comes apart, golden edges brightening to white.

“Why haven’t we done this before,” Natasha finally says, flopping half off the bed to dig around in a bedside drawer. “Jesus, Clint, a mouth like that and you’ve been keeping it to yourself? Should be a felony.” She tosses him a condom and makes her way back onto the bed, slow and boneless. “Against the law.”

“They’d have to catch me first,” Clint says, stepping out of his jeans and underwear and kneeling back onto the bed. Natasha holds her arms out to him and pulls him down to her, her mouth hot on his face, his neck, his chest, his hands. Sunlight pours through the curtains of her bedroom, painting her body rosy and gold. “Nat, god, I wanna—” She cuts him off with a kiss, which is just as well: the end of the sentence would destroy everything they’ve built. He fumbles with the condom, feeling impossibly green when Natasha takes it from him and rolls it on with teasing hands. “I just—” he starts to say, pushing into her all at once. 

“I know,” Natasha says, saving him from himself once again. “We’ve been stupid, I think.” Clint laughs into her neck and she rolls herself against him in a way that electrifies every cell in his body. After literal years together, it takes no time at all to find the right rhythm, to bring each other to the edge and jump off, as always, together.

“I’ve never told you this,” Natasha says later, when she’s mostly asleep and tucked under his arm. “Did you know that—that in every world, you’re outlined in gold?” Her yawn tickles his chest. “I knew—I knew from the first time I saw you, that—”

That what? He wants to shake her awake, to make her say the words: that you were the one for me, that you would love me forever, that I’d never love anyone else. Then maybe he could stop feeling like the idiot who’s fallen for a woman whose life is on a different continent, and who has never given any indication that she wants to meet in real life. This is what Clint gets for breaking the rules of this friends-with-adventuring-benefits arrangement: caught feels and a heart broken in case of emergency, blaring an alarm that he can’t turn off.

He scribbles a note and sticks it to her record bag, holds his boots in his hand as he sneaks down the stairs. He takes a taxi to his doorway, steps through, and goes home to stare at his ceiling for the rest of the day.

—★—

“You have been acting so weird lately,” Kate says.

“Have not,” Clint responds automatically, clicking away from the Jane Austen movie on the TV.

Kate sniffs and shifts to sit on his coffee table, directly and unavoidably in front of him. “You can’t ignore me forever,” she says. “I’m very persistent, you know.” She leans close, her nose bumping his. “Is it girl trouble?” Clint pushes off the couch and stomps to the kitchen for a beer. Kate follows, triumphant. “It is girl trouble! I knew it! What happened? Tell me. Tell me!”

“You’re a goblin,” Clint tells her, though his heart really isn’t in it. His heart hasn’t been in anything the past month; it’s nearly Christmas and he can’t muster even the slightest excitement. “Look,” he says, popping the tab on his beer and slurping off the foam. “I met this girl online. Uh, gaming.” Kate looks skeptically at his beat up laptop that can barely run Youtube. Hastily, he goes on, “It’s, uh, text based. Anyway, we played together a bunch, talked a lot. I’m pretty sure I love her. But she lives in, like, Russia, so there’s really no chance.”

Kate comes around the kitchen counter and hugs him, tucking her head under his chin. “That sucks,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Clint sighs, hugging her back. “Yeah,” he says, his throat thick. “Thanks.”

“Listen,” Kate says, stepping back and swiping a sip of his beer. “I’m going to this party tonight. You should come.”

He steals the beer back and drops back into his couch. “I don’t know, Katie, I’m the worst kind of company right now.”

“Even better,” she says. “You know Bucky Barnes, that really grouchy guy in the Records department? It’s his boyfriend’s party. There’s no possible way you could be a bigger buzzkill than that.”

As previously mentioned, Kate is persistent, and Clint recognizes that she’s going to be unbearable if he doesn’t agree. “Fine,” he says, resigned to being miserable in another location for the evening. “Can I at least wear what I have on?”

Kate glances pityingly at the detached cuff of his sweatpants and the coffee splotch at the collar of his t-shirt. “No,” she says, gently bullying him into the shower and fresh clothing that makes him look, at least on the outside, like a functional adult. “It’ll be fine,” she says as they stomp the snow off their boots and ring the doorbell. “Maybe you’ll know someone—ooh! Maybe you’ll meet someone!”

“Seems unlikely,” Clint mutters, trudging behind her up the stairs once they’re buzzed in. The door swings open before they can knock and they’re greeted with a group hug from Bucky’s apparent boyfriend, a tall, muscled blond in a blinking Christmas sweater.

“Come in!” he says, taking their coats and pointing out where they can leave their wet shoes. “So glad you could make it!” Clint, feeling like wretchedness come to life, can’t handle the enthusiasm and doesn’t pay complete attention as the guy goes on to introduce himself as Steve and point out the location of the drinks. Ignoring Kate’s attempts to drag him into a conversation, Clint beelines for the eggnog, determined to engage as little as possible.

He’s halfway to the drinks on the counter when he hears someone yell, “Dibs!” and another someone patiently reply, “You can’t call dibs on everyone who walks into the room, Nat.”

“You said that if I stopped moping and came to the party, I could call dibs on whoever I wanted,” Nat points out. The nickname alone makes Clint’s chest constrict, and he busies himself with a drink as the argument goes on. The patient voice tries to explain that Nat is still moping, and has now called dibs on each of the twelve people attending the party, including the hosts; Clint identifies this voice as Bucky. With a full drink and no other excuse not to socialize, he sighs and turns around.

Across the room, Bucky’s head is tipped close to a woman with curling red hair that’s escaping the knot she’s secured with a chopstick. Clint’s chest constricts again, but he can’t be so rude as to ignore the person hosting the party. “Barnes,” he says, raising his glass in greeting.

“Barton,” Bucky responds, nodding. He waves to the woman next to him. “This is Natasha. She’s usually friendlier. Say hi,” he mutters in her direction. “You’re being rude.”

“Hi,” she mumbles; but then she looks up and her eyes, impossibly green, widen. “You,” she says.

Clint’s eggnog nearly slips from his hand until Bucky grabs it away, looking between them with blatant curiosity. “Natasha?”

She’s already on her feet, yanking him out a window and onto the snowy fire escape, window barely shut before she rounds on him. “What is wrong with you? What kind of person leaves a note that says Sorry, I fell in love with you and never comes back!”

As if operating on a delay, his brain whirls into motion. “Hang on—what kind of person says that they live in Russia when they clearly don’t!” 

“I—” she says, snow melting in her hair. “I don’t know! I was falling in love with you, okay, and I was afraid you wouldn’t love me, and—and I really am from Russia.” All at once, the fight goes out of her and she turns away, defeated. 

Clint breathes hard through his nose, trying not to reach out to her. “Maybe it was a bad note,” he admits, “but I didn’t know what else to do! I can’t move to Russia, I wasn’t going to try to convince you to leave, and I can’t spend my whole life in love with someone who only exists in my dreams. Natasha,” he says, hope like a buoy in the sea of his stomach. “Listen, I love the pocket dimension, but I want you in real life, too.” 

When she turns back to him, her eyes are alight and, for the first time in a month, he feels like he can breathe. “When you said you lived in New York, I wanted to find you,” she confesses. “But real life is—complicated. Things are easier there.”

Kate and Bucky are twin faces pressed against the window, but Clint ignores them and pulls Natasha closer. “What you said, in your apartment?” he says. “You were golden for me, too. I was in love with you before I even knew it.”

The thing about existing forever in a pocket dimension outside of time is that it’s easy, so easy, to live an entire lifetime in the blink of an eye. Clint has known Natasha for years, knows how her mouth will square off when she concentrates and exactly which way she’ll rebel against a system. He kisses her now in the falling snow, tastes cherry chapstick tart against his lips. The warm light of the party spills out the window, outlining them both in gold to show that this too is a universe worth exploring together.