Feels Like Coming Home | +arrowsandradiation
Natasha’s watched regimes fall, children die at her hand, even killed those who had raised her from childhood - but she cannot watch this. When she’d told Clint she was compromised all that time ago, she had meant like this.
She can see him shaking through the curtain of hair, but the tremor in his voice would give him away regardless. Clint, who has been through so much more than he deserves already, and she’s reduced him to this.
It’s kinder, a part of her mind insists, but she sees no kindness here. This is only the brutality she’d thought she’d long since left behind.
How could she not slip off of the sofa, sinking to her knees and taking his hands in hers? She is made of ice, but ice is transitory - it melts just as easily in warmth as it does in fire.
“Clint,” she says, and her own tears track down her cheeks as she finally looks up at him, bringing his knuckles up to press her lips to them gently. “Don’t ask this of me. Please, don’t ask me to do this to you. Just walk away from me.“
The archer just stays where he is, his mind storming and the clouds getting darker over his head with every passing second of silence between them.
He can’t do this. He can’t go on without her, can’t leave her behind. The moment he’d held his hand out for her, back where they first met, he’d fallen for her soul.For her grace and her will, her strength and her warmth. In a matter of seconds. He’d fallen for her, not regretting a single second of it, not one. Not the fights, the loss they lived through. Nothing.
He was hers and he would always be just hers, but if she really would shove him away, he couldn’t do more than beg for her not to.
Her fingers are around his own, the warmth of her hand slowly coming through the fog of cold inside of him, of pain and tears as he hears her words, clear as day.
"Please don’t leave me, Tasha… Please don’t make me leave you. I don’t… I… I can’t.. Please.. Don’t… I’m lost without you..”
Closing her eyes, Natasha tries to stem the flow of the hot, traitorous tears. For the first time in a long time, all she can see is the unfairness of it all. In another place, another time, they could have been happy. Together, whole, as they should always be.
Maybe somewhere out there they are. She’s seen things she could never have conceived of, nightmares made real - maybe the dreams are real somewhere else too.
These are a child’s notions, she chastises herself. This whole thing is proof of why love is something to be turned from, a game for those who cannot face life as it is.
Why then is it that she cannot draw her hand back from Clint’s, not with all the will in the world? She stays exactly as she is, knee pressed against one of his, hands linked in her lap as her thumb strokes over the back of his.
“I have to,” she tells him. “Or I’ll destroy you too. I… ”
It takes a deep breath and the knowledge that not telling him might harm him further one day to push the words past her lips, barely more than a whisper.
“I don’t know what happened on the mission. Not really. I blacked out, and when I regained my senses, Devreau was dead.”
arrowsandradiation reblogged this from inheritorofmemories and added:
When she’s burying her face in his shoulder, he thinks things are going to be okay, before he blinks, looking at her as...
inheritorofmemories reblogged this from arrowsandradiation and added:
Natasha steps forward, burying her face in his shoulder for just a moment before taking herself across the room. She...
carmy-w liked this