"I know," Natasha said. Because she did know, exactly, all the attendant frustrations that came along with it. It wasn't just the fear, dull and gnawing in the quiet pit of her stomach that she tried to pretend didn't exist; it was the frustration of the thing. That was what made her want to lash out, wreck something with her bare hands, the sense that she had done everything right but she was once more exactly as helpless as she'd been as a child. The way Clint had been helpless, too, the way they had all been, even the volunteers. The pile of bodies they'd left behind them in an effort to not be so helpless ever again.
Though she was willing to believe that it might be different, for Clint. Natasha's anger had been a constant companion since well before her reaping, it was only that she'd figured out how to distill it into something comfortable, familiar, that she was used to living with. A weapon when she needed it, but most of the time something she could keep under her own control. Clint was different. Clint hadn't wanted anger; in all the years she'd known him, the only thing he'd ever wanted was a little bit of peace. Comfort. He had wanted to build a version of himself entirely separate from the desperate boy in that desert arena with all its blood and lizards and skewered bodies, and now...
"You're still you," she told him, her voice getting quieter as his got rougher, angrier, such a reversal from how it had been for the last few years that it almost surprised her. "It's not as though that's all there is to you, Clint. It's just a part. There are other parts, too. There are parts of me that I hate, too, but they're there. You don't have to cut it out to make the good things better."
She lifted her head from his shoulder so she could meet his eyes, his fingertips rough - not unpleasantly so - where they rested against her pulse. "And like I said - at least you're trying. I know there's nothing here we can count on, I know there's nothing concrete. But if all you were made of was an angry fourteen year old with a bow, if twenty years hadn't changed some things, then you'd be - I don't know, grasping for something desperate that only saved your own ass. Or just mine." Clint had looped her in on his conversation with Steve's girlfriend, and Natasha's reaction had been largely the same as his, for any number of reasons, but it was nothing surprising, not after her own conversation with Bucky.
"And you're not doing that," she finished, then raised one eyebrow. "At least not as far as I know, anyway. Don't you go full martyr on me, Barton, I don't think I could stomach it."