Is This What It's Like To Be Lost?

fortune seemed to favor us

After the clusterfuck that had become her life after Sokovia, Natasha had never been more grateful for a simple espionage mission. S.H.I.E.L.D. had fallen and the Avengers had filled the vacuum left in the intelligence community. Talent was recruited, uniformed, and put to work. Between liaising with Stark’s people, with Hill’s people, with her own people and training up the new team, she’d barely had a chance to breathe. So when the name Yuri Klementiev popped up on her radar again, she had cleared her schedule, grabbed her go-bag, and taken the first flight to Lisbon.

It had been a delight to stretch her old muscles, slipping between identities and disappearing in a crowd. Part of her had wondered if she’d ever be able to hide again after New York, after HYDRA, after Sokovia plummeted from the heavens. Her face had been plastered across millions of television sets, her mission logs exposed for the world to see, and her covers had gone up in smoke. She’d spent the whole flight wondering if someone would make her—but no one had spared a glance for the woman in 14B. Outside of that iconic leather suit all it took to hide was a new passport, longer hair, and some gentle facial adjustments courtesy of a photostatic veil. Natasha was almost disappointed.

Lisbon was sunbaked streets and bustling crowds of tourists. Without S.H.I.E.L.D., her intelligence was scarce—all she knew was that Klementiev was here, and he’d been making deals with an up and coming arms’ dealer based out of Madripoor that was funneling money to the Ten Rings. Whatever qualms he’d had before about working with the group seemed to have vanished. Maybe he’d drunk the kool-aid, maybe it was simply business; whatever his intentions were, he’d put several million dollars in the hands of an organization that, annoyingly, refused to die.

It was a long, beautiful week of making contacts and chasing whispers across the city. She tracked Klementiev to a remote mansion some fifteen kilometres outside of the city, where he was wining and dining a wide variety of traffickers and arms dealers. After bugging the lavish estate, she’d set up shop in a small motel room, listening into a dozen delicious conversations, her laptop humming away on a rickety table. It was very ‘Zen and the Art of Hacking Arms’ Dealers’, as she’d told Clint once in an abandoned warehouse in Sochi, a wry little smirk twisting her lips.

It was more than a little surreal to think that he was gone. Not dead—dead she might have known how to handle—just absent. He wasn’t watching her six, running commentary over the radio. He’d never patch into her frequency to shoot the shit while working a job halfway around the world, would never thin the herd for her with his stupid trick arrows, would never groan at her stupid jokes in backwoods motels and run surveillance with her ever again.

In all the years Natasha had spent with S.H.I.E.L.D., she’d never really considered that Clint might one day be gone. She had planned for it, of course, had understood more than most that nothing was forever, that she might one day have to take him down herself, but… Natasha furrowed her brows as she finally broke through the last shreds of Klementiev’s security. The radio crackled in her ears, fingers dancing across keys in flickering shadows. A phone hummed on the cheap desk, lights flashing blue. Natasha answered.


Fifteen minutes later, she had packed her things, and booked a flight back to New York. Vacation’s over.




Her Brooklyn apartment was, mercifully, not burned down nor swamped with reporters. It was only a matter of time before someone managed to track it down; it was one thing to hide in plain sight in Lisbon. It was another thing entirely to hide in Brooklyn, a stone’s throw from where a portal had once vomited chitauri into the streets. For now, her home remained quiet and, after half an hour of checks, safe.

Natasha dropped her go bag onto her neatly made bed, running a pale hand along her face to snag the corners of the veil. It came off in a rush of static, her features blurring back into their own as she padded to her bathroom. The veil found its home in a small, metal case in the sink drawer. Her fingers brushed against the Glock 26 beside it, one of a dozen stashed throughout the small apartment. Satisfied, she peeled out of her charcoal grey top, intent on washing off the smell of a seven hour flight.

The water was hot and clean—it should have been a delight after a week of cold showers in motels without security cameras. It was better than any shower she’d had on the Helicarrier, and the quiet of her apartment should have been steadying, shouldn’t have left her feeling restless. Natasha frowned, shutting off the water sharply. Everything was off-kilter again, and she couldn’t quite find her footing anymore. She dressed in the dark, plain leggings and an old S.H.I.E.L.D. sweater she’d stolen from Coulson years ago, sleeves cuffed around her elbows.

Footsteps shattered the stillness of the apartment. Natasha glanced over her shoulder to meet a pair of golden eyes. Her lips quirked into a small grin. The cat meowed plaintively, bounding across the floor to butt against her legs. Scoffing, Natasha scooped the animal into her arms, padding silently towards the kitchen.

“Stop whining, Лихо. I know Baba fed you while I was gone,” she remarked, absently scratching Liho’s head before depositing the cat on the counter. Half past six—Natasha put on a pot of coffee. If she knew Barton—and she liked to think that she did—then he’d be at her door soon enough.

He proved her right only twenty six minutes later. Liho jumped from her lap, pouncing across the hallway towards the front door. Natasha followed a moment later, rising from her rarely-used sofa. The whole apartment had the sense of barely being lived in—it was just a little too neat, a little too sparse to be more than a stopover. It was supposed to be her haven, a place where she could recalibrate after the catastrophe of the week so she could leap back into the fray in the morning.

Deft fingers worked through the array of locks, a deadbolt clicking open decisively. Swinging open the door, she stepped back, cocking her head to one side. Clint, on her doorstep, bow in hand and with what could be a pair of go-bags. She could almost believe that he was picking her up for a mission, that they were off to save the world from itself again. It was a bittersweet thought.

Liho sniffed his bags warily, before slipping towards his legs, rubbing up against a shin. Natasha stepped back, nodding her head towards the apartment to invite him inside.

“Coffee’s ready,” Natasha informed him simply. “Hope you’re not hungry. I haven’t stocked the fridge recently.”

round every dark and twisted bend

fortune seemed to favor us

“You’re not exactly complicated, Clint,” Natasha drawled. Liho purred appreciatively, rearing up on two hind-legs, clearly relishing the attention. Any moment, she half expected him to hand her a manila folder with a mission. There’d never be another manila folder again—the Avengers had gone all-digital with the move upstate.

There was a chill in the night, cutting through the cotton of her stolen sweater, knifing down the nape of her neck. Natasha stepped aside as Clint and his things crossed the threshold, Liho hot on his heels. She glanced across the empty courtyard, catching a rush of curtains. Her lips twitched as she shut the door, fingers running through her numerous locks. They wouldn’t stop much more than common burglars, but they might buy her an extra moment against something worse.

In the warm light of the hallway, Natasha finally studied Clint’s features. He’d looked better—between the two of them, she would have assumed he’d been the one chasing after arm’s dealers. The lines in his brow were deeper than they had been that long ride home from Sokovia.

“No need,” Natasha shrugged a slim shoulder. “I was expecting you anyways—“ she hesitated for a fraction of a moment, searching Clint’s expression, before continuing—more softly, perhaps. “Laura called.”

She nodded down the hall, stepping back and burrowing deeper into her grey sweater. ”Spare bedroom’s the second door on the right, bathroom’s across the hall.”

Presumptuous, perhaps, but Natasha knew Clint, knew that he had his own hidey-hole in the city, and he’d come to her doorstep with his bags. He didn’t squirrel himself away when things went to hell—that was more her play. No, Clint had always gone home to recalibrate. Of course, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

round every dark and twisted bend

fortune seemed to favor us

In all the years that Natasha had known Clint, she’d only seen him like this once. Clint had always been solid earth beneath her feet, no matter how many feet of empty, empty air separated them. He’d lowered his weapon in a burning warehouse, when all she knew was red and terrible and red and dragged her from the smoke, gripped her arm and pulled her to her feet.

All these years later and she could still recall with perfect clarity the crushing gravity of walking under her own power for the first time. Maybe it wasn’t the first time—maybe she’d found herself once, twice, a dozen times before in all the red, but it was the first time it had stuck. He’d done that—kept her grounded when the world went fuzzy around the edges, dragged her back from the brink of red and back to reality.

Standing here, in her plainest safehouse with all his things packed in two bags, Clint looked like he was scrambling for purchase in his own thoughts, like something old and alien and laughing had reached into his skull and twisted. He looked tired and old and lost. But there was no infinity stone glow to his eyes—cognitive recalibration wouldn’t clear this fog.

“She did,” Natasha said simply, stooping down to accept Liho into her arms. The cat purred appreciatively as her nails found home behind a slightly mangled ear. Rising to her full height, Natasha cocked her head to one side, studying Clint. “She’s worried about you, Clint.”

It wasn’t the first time Laura had called. In the years they’d known each other, Natasha had always kept a line of communication open for Laura—anything from information on Clint’s well-being when S.H.I.E.L.D. had him squirreled away to helping Lila with her homework to the simple need to hear a friendly voice. Natasha had found Laura’s trust in her fascinating—when she implored Natasha to keep Clint safe, it was with such conviction. She’d never once seemed to worry that she was asking this of an ex-KGB assassin. Natasha wasn’t sure what Laura had seen in her that made her so willing to look past that; she just knew that she couldn’t let that faith be misplaced.

“I can’t say I know what you’re going through,” she said after a long moment, looking down to the black cat in her arms suddenly twisting about. Letting the cat spring off and race down the hall, she scoffed, shaking her head. Looking back up at Clint, she wrinkled her nose. “But I do know that you should take a shower before you sit on any of my furniture.”

It’ll make you feel better went unsaid, but Natasha trusted Clint to find the sentiment. The quirk of her lips wasn’t quite soft, but it wasn’t cruel—bittersweet, perhaps. Clint was here with his bow and she knew it was selfish of her to find that steadying.

round every dark and twisted bend

fortune seemed to favor us

After nearly a decade at his side, Natasha had learned to read Clint better than most anyone. To say that he was troubled was an understatement; he looked lost at sea. But for all this knowledge, she had no idea how to bring him back to solid ground. It was ironic, really; Natasha had been trained to be a manipulator, a spider in her web, and while she could play a mark to her whims, she was easily the shittiest Handler in S.H.I.E.L.D. history. She’d completely fucked up her mission with Banner. She’d tugged on his heartstrings, hating herself every time she drew him in, for doing this to a friend. In the end, it hadn’t been enough—he’d left, and Natasha knew that every person he might hurt in his exile would be red in her ledger. The job had been to keep him close and under surveillance—she couldn’t have fucked it up more if she had tried.

But this was so much more important and doubt gnawed on her every bone. If she couldn’t keep Banner from defecting, how the hell was she supposed to help Clint even out? She’d always deferred to Laura, feeding her useful information to help keep her closest friend of sound mind. Natasha was a weapon and weapons didn’t fix people.

“That absolutely was an insult, Barton” Natasha returned, lips quirking into a crooked smirk. Clint lifted his bags and she stepped aside, letting him through the hallway, before moving into her silent, barren kitchen.

She settled into a quiet rhythm. It was odd, perhaps, how easily she settled into the little sounds of another person in her apartment--the shuffling of feet, the muted hum of a shower, disrupting the customary silence. Except, it was Clint, and he’d always fit into her world. Staying in the compound upstate was exhausting, like being stuck in the Helicarrier, but without the hidey-holes where she’d watched clouds and stars when she needed to breathe. The compound was loud and demanded everything of her. She’d have to go back in a few days—for now, she was recharging.

She found a bottle of vodka and a nearly empty container of piroulines in her cupboards, lips twisting into a frown. She couldn’t feed Clint coffee and vodka, no matter how on board with that he might be. Of course, any moment now…

A rhythmic knocking echoed through the apartment. Chuckling under her breath, Natasha followed an over-excited Liho, moving to the door. Army of locks snapped open, she opened the door to see a slip of a woman. Her exquisitely patterned head scarf was wrapped around lush, grey curls, and her black eyes glittered in a sea of deep wrinkles.

“волчонок, котёнок, look at you,” The woman bustled in, a massive casseroled dish in hand and a bag in the crook of her elbow. She waved off Natasha’s attempts to take the burden. She bee-lined towards the kitchen, chattering at both Natasha and Liho in heavily accented English, periodically devolving into Russian.

“Good to see you too, ба́бушка,” Natasha murmured rather wryly, unable to suppress her amused smirk.

“I know you have nothing to eat,” The elderly woman remarked plainly, “You need to take care of yourself, волчонок.”

She busied herself at the oven, popping in the dish and fiddling with the temperature with all the ease of someone well acquainted with the kitchen. Natasha had spent months trying to discourage the old woman, but had eventually caved. It wasn’t her fault—Ulyana kept tempting her with home-cooked meals and delicious gossip on their neighbors.

“I make pyrohy for you and your guest,” Ulyana’s voice dripped with delight as she rounded on Natasha, hands on her hips. “Who is handsome young man?”

Young man, Natasha snorted, lips twitching into a grin. He’d get a kick out of that. Of course, she was the oldest one here, but she opted not to mention that.

“A friend,” she decided on, moving to help Ulyana with her bag. The air was filled with the flavors of home—pampushky, a massive thermos of what she hoped was pryazhene moloko, and a variety of groceries. She helped Ulyana put them away, making a mental note to wire the money back into the woman’s accounts.


“Hmm,” Ulyana smirked, eyes dancing. Natasha shot her a firm look, moving to prepare Clint’s coffee.

“<No meddling>,” she instructed the wrinkled woman in Russian, slipping out of the kitchen to the spare bedroom. Knocking on the door, she leaned against the door jamb, speaking in a low voice through the door. “I come bearing coffee and a warning. My neighbor’s conquered my kitchen, and she’s quite taken with you.”

round every dark and twisted bend

fortune seemed to favor us

Natasha leaned in the doorjamb, looking up at Clint, privately appraising him. He looked not exactly better, but he looked less worse. She gave him his coffee automatically, as she had done undoubtedly hundreds of times before. It had become almost a ritual of sorts; he’d bring their mission, she’d ready the coffee, and they’d get to work, devouring files and talking strategy. He seemed refreshed enough to function, and her lips curved into a teasing smirk.

“You say that now,” she warned, “But when she’s driven you half mad by somehow adopting you, I’m looking forward to saying ‘I told you so’.”

The teasing was good-natured. Natasha was rather fond of the elderly Ukrainian woman. She couldn’t remember anything before the Red Room, but sometimes she hoped that she’d had someone like Ulyana in that life. The woman was overbearing and entirely too nosy, but she filled Natasha’s kitchen with spices of something indescribably warm, of scattered smiles in all those years of endless winter. And as chatty as she could be, Natasha was amazed at how easily Ulyana kept her secrets.

“I just got back today,” she remarked when Clint went a little starry-eyed over the prospect of food. She peeled away from the doorframe and moved towards the kitchen, trusting Clint to follow her. “I haven’t had the chance to restock yet.”

The kitchen was warm and inviting—it only ever managed to look this way when Ulyana was here, Natasha noted with some amusement. The woman was wrapped in numerous shawls, her white hair perfectly coifed beneath her scarf. Blue eyes glittered with mischief as she turned from the stove, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel that Natasha knew did not belong in this kitchen.

“ба́бушка, this is Clint. Clint, my neighbor, Ulyana.”

“Come here, come here!” Ulyana cried out, capturing him in a hug. She pulled back and pinched his cheek—and Natasha found it all incredibly amusing. A tiny babushka pinching the cheek of an Avenger and S.H.I.E.L.D. spy, in the kitchen of an assassin—it was a strange world they lived in, “You are lookink pale! Come, you sit, pyrohy almost ready. Лихо, out of kitchen!”

Ulyana rounded sharply on Liho, who had leapt onto a counter and was stalking towards the stove. Natasha caught the cat smoothly, shifting the animal in her arms until he became compliant. Exchanging an amused look with Clint, she slipped into her familiar chair, sitting on a foot and leaning back. Ulyana was chattering away, more Russian than English, but she seemed happy enough to bustle about the kitchen and tell stories at her captive guests.

Natasha was the very picture of calm, fingers scratching behind Liho’s mangled ear, but she had never felt less safe in one of her safehouses. She knew, knew, that this location had not been compromised, but any moment now she expected everything to go to hell. An explosion would tear through her wall, a sniper’s bullet would catch Ulyana in the throat, aliens would pour into her living room—something would go disastrously long and her ledger would be drenched anew. Green eyes routinely flicked to the windows, her breath stilling as she tried to listen to everything and catalogue it all.

round every dark and twisted bend

fortune seemed to favor us

Even after all these years, Natasha would never fail to be surprised by how easy it was to simply be with Clint. From the first time she’d looked at him with her own eyes, he’d been the one constant in her life. He’d sparred with her fearlessly, forgiven her every relapse into red, and never failed to trust his life in her hands. For years she’d waited for him to turn and come to his senses, to slip an arrow between her ribs.

No one would blame him. Despite years of faithful service to S.H.I.E.L.D., to the team that had taken her in, the world expected her to turn on them. Even Fury hadn’t been able to trust her. He’d died before her eyes, tugged on heart strings she’d forgotten she’d owned, and let her think him gone. He still didn’t trust her.

She realised now that the only reason Fury let her live was because he trusted Clint. The archer had always been their beating, bleeding heart. He’d convinced Coulson of her loyalty, and between the two of them, they’d gotten Fury to let her join them in STRIKE Team Delta.

And when she’d been dragged back into Red, they'd said nothing to Fury of her knife at Clint's throat.

All that, and he'd never wavered.

To say that Natasha didn't deserve Clint was something of an understatement.

"волчонок, come set table," Ulyana called. Little wolf; it was an odd choice of nickname, however fitting. Natasha's lips quirked as she nudged Liho off her lap, rising to her feet in a smooth motion. She waved a dismissive hand at Clint, wordlessly forbidding him from rising.

Her table settings were plain, but tasteful. Everything about the safehouse was just shy of bland, clear of clutter and distraction. A few tasteful paintings hung on its walls, and while the furniture was unpretentious, it was well made. It was not a home.

And yet, with Ulyana bustling into the dining room with a massive platter of pyrohy, a spread of half a dozen different types of fillings, and Natasha with a carafe (that did not belong to her) of baked milk and an amused look, it almost felt like one.

With the table set and heaping piles of food forced upon them, Ulyana finally settled in, pale eyes glittering as she looked between them.

"We have pampushky after dinner. So, how are you knowingk Natalia? You work at--what was it?" Ulyana peeered at Natasha, who smiled placidly.

"Stark Industries, ба́бушка," She lied smoothly. It had not been her favorite cover, but it had been the most convenient one when she'd set up this home. Ulyana made an annoyed sound, shaking her head.

"Horrible man," She said sharply, drawing a shawl tight around her shoulders. "Bugle say he cause Sokovia. I do not blame you, волчонок, is job, no? Still, horrible. I have family two village over, you know."

Natasha shot Clint a faintly amused look. Tony would be ever so offended to know that Natasha's neighbor disapproved and that she did not leap to his defence. For such a massive ego, it was impressive how fragile it was.

round every dark and twisted bend