It was hard, Natasha imagined, to figure out how to be able to be there for someone who didn't know what she herself needed. Who had so much swirling around in her head and her heart, and who wasn't, generally, used to sharing the contents of either with people, even the people she cared about. Evasion was easier, and so many of the people who had been on the team over the years had their own soft spots, they all tended to allow evasion in each other, as though it was a point of courtesy. It wasn't the healthiest habit, and it meant people were nervous to poke and pry for fear that it would be done to them in turn.
And this was a harder thing to muddle through. Harder because it involved being honest with herself, too, about how difficult the last few years had been, how hard it had gotten. How she had tried to hold the team together and form them into something new while her own edges had frizzled.
She was laying here now with a man who loved her; who'd loved her steadfastly over years and separations, memory wipes and physical torture and the ever-present specter of execution. There was a thick, ugly scar trailing her abdomen in proof, another circle at her shoulder, burned and seared. How was it that talking could be the place where she let herself be tripped up? If Natasha was going to make a mess of this relationship - this thing the three of them had fallen into and the individual ones it contained inside it - she didn't want it to be because she hadn't...
Because she hadn't fought. She didn't want it to be because she gave up and told herself she was never enough.
Natasha turned to her side, just a little. Circled his chest with her index finger. "This is nice," she repeated, "and I'm sorry that I'm... that I'm sad, under it, when I don't want to be. I don't know how to talk to Clint about it without hurting him, at least not yet, when the subject of Clint-from-my-world comes up - it makes him unhappy, so. I don't know how, yet, but I want to... I want to at least try. With you. I want you to know that it doesn't mean I don't want to be with you, or that I don't love you. If that's okay. Is it?"