InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "who let you in my house!"

ʙᴀʀᴛᴏɴ (cauterising) wrote in somerealityrpg,
@ 2019-06-28 18:26:00

Entry tags:

active: clint barton, active: natasha romanoff

WHO: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanoff
WHERE: Out&About, then Nat's suite
WHEN: June 22nd.
WHAT: Clint's arrival and breaking some news to Nat.
WARNINGS: PG-13 (cussing) note: blanket warning for spoilers re: endgame
STATUS: Complete

Something tugs at his muscles, like falling through time and space and reality all over again, but without the safety net of Stark and Scott’s devised suit keeping all the important him parts where they should be. If he’s honest, it feels worse, and that’s almost a relief, because it feels like something.

Slipping back from Vormir had been numbing, the stone clutched in his clenched fist, blood echoing in his ears. He’d barely heard the questions, on the stand, the promise of something changing lying ahead, but the sacrifice dragging him back. This, at least, feels like it might hurt, and that’s something.

It’s not a jarring pain though; the dizziness as his feet find something solid, the roll of his gut something he rarely really experienced much more since the pilot training. But there’s firm ground underneath him, sun heating his face and something feels wrong. Lang said it enough times for him to know, resolutely, that they didn’t have enough Pym Particles for more trips, there wasn’t any way this was a malfunction because he couldn’t go back through the Quantum Realm.

But this wasn’t home, he could hear too much to think it was home.

The letter that drifts down, like something from one of Lila’s fantasy movies, it just an extra layer of confusion. Clint isn’t one to take things at face value, he’s known of too many people with powers that warp, illusions and what not to trick. But Loki’s dead, and Wanda’s gone, along with half the world and SHIELD with it, so he’s not sure how anyone could’ve gotten past the Avengers compound, as much of a ghost town as it was, to pull something like this.

Out of options, with no sign of the others, the best thing to do is start walking. He’ll find something, eventually. His shoulders are tense and his head still hurts from… everything, but numb as he is there’s no point in just standing around.

He’s not one to just wait for whatever to come to him, and if he needs to find some ostriches to figure this out, well he’s always been good at tracking things down.

In the few days that she’s been in Goodland, Natasha has developed a routine. She always does, she probably always will. Get up, get dressed, make coffee, go for a run, although for the moment, it’s more of a fast walk than a run. While nearly everything looked and felt like New York City, some things weren’t in the right places. Central Park apparently being one of those places. She’d woken up there and had found her way to Ostrich’s Villa from there but when she tried to go there the next day, she couldn’t find it. Which was strange because Natasha was not someone who got lost. Just more proof that this place was not what it seemed.

The streets were no different though, people are everywhere, knocking into one another, not paying attention to anything but their earbuds or the screens of their phones and she has to skirt a group of people who are standing in the middle of the sidewalk arguing about which way to go next. She couldn’t help them because she didn’t even know which way to go next.

As she gets further down the street, the crowd thins out and she looks around trying to locate some things to use as landmarks. A deli, she knew there had to be one nearby since she and Tony had already found a bar with a Chinese restaurant across the street. A couple of newstands, always good to have around but what kind of news would be in the papers? Nothing that was true, she thought.

It was when she passed the second newsstand that she saw him and she stopped in her tracks. It couldn’t possibly be but watching him move, the way he was taking in things around him, the paper in his hand, so many little things that no one would notice unless they knew him as well as they knew themselves He was getting closer to her but she still didn’t, couldn’t move, all she could do was stare and then he looked up and she saw his eyes and her heart jumped into her throat. “Clint?” she said.

There were plenty of things to bother Clint these days; things he’d done, people he’d lost, choices he’d made. Most of them festered in his head like infected wounds, but the manifestation was never during waking hours. Nightmares weren’t a new concept though, and Clint had a better handle on things than some people did.

But they never crept up on him while he was conscious, hallucinations and fleeting images, they weren’t something he dealt with. Call it a side effect of being able to focus intently for hours on end.

So hearing Natasha, it wasn’t exactly normal.

Since the Incident, when Laura and the kids vanished in front of him, he hadn’t once seen or heard them, not even in manifestations of his guilty mind, not even when he went on his own quest to work out his anger in a somewhat productive way (he didn’t claim it was smart, or even right, but it was his).

There was no reason to draw his sword, or his bow, or a gun, given that Natasha was, most likely, not even there. His fist clenched, because --- It was different, something was off, not even just because his memory was muddled or slotting pieces together from various points in time. “Nat.” He was sure, positive, that acknowledging her would make her vanish, maybe shift into an actual different person, but he knew to face it head on rather than ignore it and hope it went away.

He didn’t need to drive himself crazy while he was wherever this was.

Something wasn’t right, she’d known it as soon as she’d gotten closer to him. She hadn’t seen any of the others when they had first arrived so maybe everyone looked shellshocked. Hell, she’d puked in the middle of Central Park, but this? She’d only seen him look this way once before, the empty eyes, not quite focused on reality, and her blood ran cold but then he said her name and she let out a breath. He hadn’t recognized her then, not when Loki had control of his mind, and besides she knew that couldn’t have been it anyway since he would have made himself known long before now. No, whatever this was, it wasn’t that.. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was something more than a side effect of the journey here.

She moved closer to him, not wanting to startle him but also confident that if he did make a move, she could handle it. Doing it on the street wouldn’t be her choice but no one seemed to be paying any attention to them. That was also weird but she’d think about that later. Right now she had to get Clint to the building. Reaching out, she took his hand in hers and said “Yeah, it’s me. You got one of those freaky invitations too I see. Come on, I’ll take you there, it’s not that far.” He’d go with her, she knew that and once they were inside, hopefully he’d relax and then she could tell him about this crazy place. First though she had to say one thing because it was bugging her and she had to lighten the moment.

“What the hell is with the hair? Did you decide to change your name to Mohawkeye?”

She felt solid, that much he could focus on, her hand in his -just like in Japan- felt like something of an anchor. Wasn’t a hallucination. She wasn’t a fabrication. “How…” He couldn’t say he understood anything about the Soul stone, all of the stones in general were a little above his pay grade. He killed people, that was what he did, he wasn’t a brain like Bruce or Tony, not really a leader like Steve. He shot people from a distance -and more recently got very up close and personal, but world ending power crystals were not something he could fully wrap his head around.

Even when his head had been messed up by one.

But he’d made it back from Vormir, without her, she’d launched herself from the cliff edge, escaped his grasp and plummeted, and then the cliff had been gone and he had a stone and no Natasha.

But she was here. Right now.

“You’re dead.” He didn’t answer her comment about his hair, something she’d already teased him about, just like he teased her, on the flight back from Japan to the compound with the promise of maybe fixing the world and playing hero one last time. And even if a comment should roll off his tongue about her blond hair, it just stuck in his throat. His fingers tightened around hers, “I saw you die.”

She stared at him, unable to comprehend his words. She was dead? How was that possible? Everyone here had gotten the same note, none of them believed they were dead, they all remembered where they’d been what they’d been doing, it wasn’t possible that they were all dead. Then she remembered what Sam who was not the Sam she knew had said. He’d said the same words, “You’re dead.” but there was no mistaking that this was Clint, herClint even if he wasn’t hers to claim. He was the Clint that she knew, the one that would always be part of her so there was no need for her to question him.

“I’m not dead,”she said. “Not here. The last thing I remember is falling asleep on the Quinjet. Sam, Steve and I had been in Scotland to get Wanda and Vision away from Thanos’ goons. You were on your farm, I had sent you an email earlier that day. I don’t remember what it said but I tried to send you things as often as I could.” Heavily encrypted of course and more often than Fury or Steve would have liked but she didn’t care. Not being able to talk to him or see him was like having only half of herself.

It explained a lot though. Why Wanda and Bucky had seemed surprised to see her, why Tony remembered what must have been further along the timeline than what she remembered. “Different points but at different times. What year was it? It was 2018 for me. Are you saying that I…..died?” It was hard to say the word but she had to if she was going to understand this. “Did I die fighting Thanos? We were together?” Of course they were, they always fought side by side even when they were supposed to be fighting each other the way they had in Berlin. “But I didn’t make it.”

She looked around as if suddenly remembering where they were and squeezed his hand. ”Let’s go to my apartment, you can tell me what happened. I need to know, I need to understand this. Then we’ll find where you’re supposed to be staying.” Not that she was going to let him stay there tonight. He was going to stay on her sofa or in one of the other bedrooms, she wasn’t letting him out of her sight, she didn’t want him to be with strangers and right now she didn’t want to be alone.

He’d got the odd correspondence, news about what they were doing, where they were going, how things were. He knew that she was trying to keep him updated, and a small niggling of ‘just in case’ had always been at the back of his head, but after the raft and running, it’d been too hard to leave Laura with three kids and the constant threat of repercussions for his choice. He knew that’s why Lang made the same deal he did.

2018. Had she seen everyone vanish yet? Probably not, Vision and Wanda being alive hinted that she hadn’t gotten to the part where the world was sliced in half, population wise. “It’s 2023.” Five years longer, and while his mind was able to accept different time frames now, given his trip into the past with her, and Rhodes and Nebula, it wasn’t hard to just let that one go.

But it meant she didn’t know, didn’t know how or why or where, that for the first time in a long time their general awareness of things didn’t sync up. “We were together,” because would either of them really give it up otherwise? Dying wasn’t a foreign concept, for either of them, so many possibilities, so many close calls. But it wasn’t fighting Thanos, not head on.

Getting off the street though, that made sense, getting somewhere without sights on him would, most likely, help to unclench the coiled muscles in his shoulders too. He just nodded, ready to follow her lead, and it might be a trick, might be some manipulation, but he could see too much of his Natasha in her eyes, even if there were differences, she was still right. “Yeah. Okay.” Maybe explaining it would make some sense too.

“It’s this way,” she said, not letting go of his hand as they started in the direction of the building. Natasha knew he was in shock and she didn’t like seeing him this way. If it was 2023 where he’d come from, then what had happened in those intervening years. There was too drastic a change in the way he looked for there to have been nothing. He wasn’t the kind of person who changed their appearance on a whim. There had to be a reason which she’d no doubt be finding out soon.

They reached the building and entered the lobby. There were a few people milling about but none that she recognized. Natasha had wondered if there were other people in the building besides the ones that had been arriving the same way she had and it seemed that there were. When they reached the elevator bank, she pushed the up button and was relieved when the doors opened and no one got out. She didn’t want to talk to anybody right now, she just wanted to get Clint somewhere that would make him feel safe because she could look at him and know that he was confused and not entirely sure of her. Well, she couldn’t blame him.

When they got to the fifth floor, it was only a few steps down the hall to 5-A. “This is the under eighteen floor and the Entity or whoever sent those notes assigned me to be the chaperone. Which is kind of funny,” she gave a little smile and shook her head. “Right now there are just three boys and they live next door. Two are fourteen and the oldest is seventeen. I told him that he could let me know if they needed anything. What do I know about teenage boys?” She got the door open and led him inside. “There are four bedrooms in this apartments. It’s just me right now. I don’t know if that will change but I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t.”

Now that they were inside she was overwhelmed with the fact that he was here. She hadn’t thought she would ever seen him again for all that she hoped some day their paths would cross a way, they’d find a way even if was just a short visit, she just wanted to see his face again. That moment had come but not
in the way she’d hoped. “Just go have a seat,” she said, waving toward the living room. “Do you want anything? Water,coffee, I don’t know what else I have. I’d suggest alcohol but that might be needed more after the conversation.”

Clint was surprisingly okay with just letting Natasha talk, although it was odd. Usually he was the one filling weird silences with meaningless noise, thinking out loud or just running through whatever new idea popped into his head. The notion of an apartment building made him a little twitchy, but nothing he couldn’t deal with, logically.

Normally, under usual circumstances, he’d had a joke to make about putting her in charge of teenage boys, but nothing came to mind then, because it was still a raw wound to think about and Clint was doing his best to not think about those things on the whole. “We all know how you like your space.” It felt needed like he should interject. Although Natasha would possibly get company if the whole floor filled up with numerous under 18’s and she wasn’t the only person minding each and every one of them. He’d had to mind three kids, three kids who weren’t overly chaotic on a farm, he was sure teenage boys would be worse in a city.

Having a seat would likely help, in the least he would be less likely to do something stupid, but it also meant shedding some layers, because sitting in restrictive leather wasn’t the best idea. The quiver was easy to detach and settle with his bow, and the swords still sheathed beside them, the top layer of the armoured tac suit following to lay over the side of a chair, leaving him in a t-shirt and his lower half of his tac suit. It wasn’t like they’d known what to prepare for going to space.

“Water’s fine.” It’d mostly be something to do with his hands, he was sure if he started drinking he might not stop and he’d been through that already, right after the Incident, drying out the house and losing about three days worth of memory at the bottom of a bottle or twelve and then dealing with the hangover afterwards. “How long have you been here?” It felt like his mind was starting to deal with things, sliding little pieces into sections he could deal with. Right now the main focus was that Natasha hadn’t died. Not yet.

She kept an eye on him while she went to the kitchen to get them both some water. God, but she’s missed him. For her it had been two years and the last time she’d seen him, he hadn’t known she was there but that was deliberate. Steve hadn’t wanted her pulled into it if he’d been caught on the Raft so she’d taken care of what she could behind the scenes. For him though it hadn’t been that long and his words I watched you die wouldn’t stop ringing in her head. Was it bad luck to know how you died? Natasha didn’t know but she felt like she had to know.

Taking the bottles back into the living room, she sat down beside him and handed him a bottle of water. “A week now, maybe a couple of days longer. I don’t remember what month is was at home but it’s June here. Everybody comes from different places and times so we’re all adjusting to it.” She took a sip of water and debated what to say next. It would just be easier to come out and say it so that’s what she did. “How did I die? Tell me everything, you know that I’d rather know than only know part of it.” Natasha didn’t like partial truths, she never had. She could lie like a dog when she had to, it was often part of a cover, but in her own life, she wanted the truth. Just say it and then deal with the fallout. And she trusted Clint to tell her what she needed to know.

Adjusting to another new reality, he was going to start having to worry about his sanity if that started to become something normal, something easy. The concept was… It wasn’t that out there. Considering he went to an alien planet, in the past, it wasn’t that far out there anymore. He could sort of wrap his head around time travel in that regard.

Dimension travel was something he hadn’t rightly gotten a grip of, didn’t think he really should get a grip of it either, but that might be something to wait for the laymans terms on.

Taking the water, mostly for his hands to busy themselves, he tried to pick a point to start where it might make sense, without having to open all the slowly scabbing wounds. “Thanos got the stones. I wasn’t there, I don’t know how it happened, but he got the stones and … wiped out half of humanity.” The blink of an eye and several billion people, gone. “Laura and the kids…” He probably didn’t need to fill that one in beyond that, it wasn’t like Natasha couldn’t tell.

“Lang came back from the quantum realm with an idea, him, Bruce and Tony put together this… insane plan. We split into groups, travelled through time to get the stones from different places, we went with Rhodey and Nebula to space and went after the Soul stone.” It already feels like years ago, it was literally minutes ago from his perspective, he’d barely made it back to the compound and present time before he was there, in this place with so many questions and a different Natasha.

“Oh god Clint, I’m so sorry,” she said. Nat knew how much he loved his family and seeing them disappear like that? Well she could only imagine how much that would have hurt him. “The alien…..thing….that we saw in Scotland mentioned Thanos and told us he was going to cleanse the Earth or something. I know he was after the stone in Vision’s head.” He must have gotten it because she knew Vision was gone, she’d put that much together from Wanda so what Clint was describing was part of that she supposed.

“Lang? Oh the ant guy from Berlin,” she had to think for a minute, so much had been happening that she barely remembered him. “And the idea worked? We travelled through time? I can’t believe that. Wow.” It would have been an amazing thing to think about except for the fact that the look on Clint’s face was more than enough to tell her that it hadn’t been amazing at all. “So we went after the Soul Stone and then what?” She didn’t want to ask because she didn’t want to hear how she’d died but she needed to know, she had to know or she’d never be able to go forward here and she wanted to help Clint, she didn’t want to see his eyes look so empty, she wanted to see him smile again so she had to know.

The alien thing he’d heard about, the ones that were hunting down Vision, even if Wanda killing him hadn’t worked in the scheme of things. Hell, Clint still wasn’t sure if Tony’s madhat time heist was going to fully work either. Hope was such a dangerous thing.

Travelling through time, through space, they were both so firmly still caught in the thrill of their profession that any other time it would’ve been a thrill on it’s own. If there hadn’t been so much in the balance, if the outcome hadn’t been such a big sacrifice.

“The stone comes with a price. It’s a trade. You get the stone, but you have to lose something too. Something important.” Neither of them had to weigh it up, or question if they meant enough to each other for the sacrifice to matter. They both knew, even when it was unspoken, buried, it was always there, it always would be. “As ever, you and I had differing game plans.” But Natasha always gave up what she wanted for others, didn’t she. Putting other people before herself and never even noticing it was what she did.

Or maybe she did know. Maybe that was just what she did.

“You stuck me on your grapple, left me hanging from the side of a cliff, and threw yourself down.” And if there was one thing, one image from all his years that Clint would like to forget, it was seeing her at the bottom. Broken.

Her mind got there before he finished the story and the tears started falling. She ached for him, for herself for the choice they’d both been faced with. It wasn’t hard to imagine the scene and she knew that she would have made that choice. Clint’s family meant the world to them and whatever had happened after they disappeared had affected him deeply, she could tell from looking at him, from the way he spoke, and then he had been faced with watching her die. She didn’t want to think about the reality of what she’d done.

Putting the bottle of water on the coffee table, she moved closer to him and put his bottle on the table beside hers and wrapped her arms around him. Nat needed that contact right now, she needed to feel alive, she needed to feel that he was really here next to her. He needed to feel that too she sensed, to know that wherever else he may have just been, right now they were here together. “I’m sorry,” she said through her tears. “I know I would have made that choice though. You should get back what you lost.” but she lost him in the process, she had made the choice and they had both lost. By giving him the chance to get his family back, they had lost each other. She pulled away and wiped her face, then laid her head on his shoulder. “It’s not fair, It’s not fair that Thanos made us, all of us have to make choices like that, that he could just take people away from us.” she shifted her head so she could see his face. “But we’re here, now and I don’t know how or why we ended up here but we’re together. Maybe it’s the universes’ twisted way of making up for what happened.”

In some distant way, Clint knew that they were possibly the only two who could've been there, who could've made that choice, made that sacrifice. Lang didn't have the connection needed to any of them, Stark would've spent too long looking for a way out, he and Natasha were the ones who could make those sacrifices, even if they wanted to be the one making it for the other.

Leaning into Natasha felt oddly reminiscent of Vormir; silent promises, unspoken truths, all of it passing between two people who shared so much with each other. In another life, in another world, maybe always hung in the air with them. "There's still something lost though," that was the big kicker. To get his family, he'd lose Natasha, a piece of him that had been there for longer than Laura had been, burrowed so deep into his very being that she was practically part of him, regardless of distance.

The closeness helped, almost enough to feel that she was there and alive, his arm slotting around her back, head leaning on top of hers where she leaned into his shoulder. Thanos seemed to only bring destruction; pulling apart the world, Clint had heard that he'd sacrificed his own daughter, Nebula's agenda against her father presumably in a quest to reunite with her sibling. Where Thanos was concerned, Clint didn't think there was a way to win without losing a lot in the process.

"The universe owes us a lot more that an apartment building in a city that looks like New York." It owed them big time for that they'd done, what they'd all laid down over the years. But his arm tightened around Natasha, keeping her close, "But I'll take it for now." If it got him a little longer with her still breathing.

“Yes, I’d say the universe does owe us one. At least it could have been a condo in Fiki,” she said, relaxing against him. This felt right, no matter what might be back home. It had always felt right, it always would and it suddenly hit her that this was it. She was here now for better or worse but if she got to spend that time with Clint, then she was fine with that.

”I’ll take it too. Fucked up New York with you is better than fucked up New York without you.” There was still a lot left unsaid but right now wasn’t the time, they’d get there eventually, for now she just wanted to concentrate on the fact that he was here and she was alive and whatever blanks came after Clint left Vormir would be filled in by someone. She really didn’t care right now.