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It’s after midnight when Clint makes it to Natasha's door, the small package in his hand making his palm itch. It's hot outside, a New York summer night, but he feels chilled by the echoes of his nightmare still throwing him off balance.
He's spent the last three weeks dreaming of Loki, of long nights and cold rooms, of killing and recruiting people to hurt his colleagues. He goes to see Natasha most nights since she came to him with the ropes. She lets him into her apartment and her bed, comforts him in her own way - sweat and skin and pain - and doesn't complain that he's gone before the sun comes up.
Tonight, though. Tonight is different. Tonight he has a plan. Tonight he has the package in his hands, and the sharp little secret it hides.
He could let himself in, has his own code and knows how to disable her security system, and he's done that most nights in the past weeks. But this is about giving her control, so instead he knocks and stands waiting on her doorstep. Clint knows she’s probably expecting him; she’s probably been awake and listening to his approach from the moment his foot hit the first stair in the hallway. Still, it takes her a few minutes to get there, out of reluctance or confusion or both. She’s wearing a threadbare t-shirt that used to be his and a pair of gym shorts when she finally peers around the door, her hair damp and in utter disarray.
“Forget how to let yourself in?” she asks, in a tone that tells him she knows better.
"No," he says, brushing past her and into the apartment. "I-- I needed you to do it."
She raises an eyebrow. "Because you've become a vampire?" she asks. "You need an invitation now?"
Clint shakes his head and hold out the package. "Because of this," he says, thrusting it into her hands.
Natasha looks at it and Clint wishes she had more obvious emotions, wishes that he could read the thoughts she's having. But at the end of the day, she's still Natasha, and even with him, she holds her feelings close to the chest. He watches with his heart in his throat as she unwraps the butcher paper and the light catches the glint of steel within.
"The fuck is this?" she asks, her voice carefully steady, though Clint wishes that, just this once, she would show anger, or anything.
"It's a knife," he says.
"And what," she growls, sounding dangerous and deadly, "do you want me to do with it?"
“I want--” Clint swallows, trying to find the words for everything that he needs. He thinks the pain might feel like absolution, might excise the panic that’s racing through his veins. He craves the comfort of knowing she’s in control, knowing she could take him out in a heartbeat if she needed to, and that when the moment came on the Helicarrier, she made a different call. “I had another dream.”
Natasha pulls the knife from the paper and twirls it in her fingers with a deftness that makes his skin bristle with hot desire. “And this is your idea of therapy?”
“Beats talking, right?” says Clint, and he’s meant it as a joke, meant it to bring some amount of levity to his own insane request, but he knows it’s a mistake as soon as the words are out of his mouth.
It’s a subtle shift, and maybe nobody else would be able to see, but he doesn’t miss the way her face sharpens into anger for just a split second. He’s wished for it, and even confronted with it now, he can’t quite bring himself to feel regret.
“Right,” she says sourly. “Because we couldn’t have that. How long are we supposed to go on like this, Clint?”
He shakes his head."Just--" he swallows hard. "Just until I can shake him. Please."
Natasha sighs heavily, resting the weight of the knife against her palm. "I really-- I'm not sure this is a good idea."
"Well, then what's your idea?" he snaps. "What would you have me do?"
"Talk to me," she says softly. "Come on, Clint. Use your big-boy words."
Frustration and anger flare inside of him, because she should know better than that, should know he doesn't want to talk about it. Still, he wants this from her. Needs it. And he'll pay the price.
"If you do this," he breathes, "I will. I'll talk to you. About my feelings and shit."
She's still hesitating, he can feel her reluctance stretching out in front of him.
"I tied you up," he says, softly. "When you-- when you asked me to."
“Yes,” says Natasha, though it doesn’t feel anything like true agreement. “Because I thought it would help you. And I wasn't emotionally compromised when I asked.”
“Bullshit,” Clint says, the frustration bubbling over. “Maybe it did help me, but you asked because you wanted it. And don’t--don’t even try to pretend you weren't emotionally compromised, Nat. It’s actually insulting.”
She doesn’t react to his outburst, just watches, her face illuminated by the light from the city outside so that her eyes glint like the blade of the knife. “Then tell me why,” she says finally, her voice smokey velvet in the dark. “Give me one good reason why it would help you, and I’ll do it.”
Clint sucks in another shaky breath, his heart starting to race again as he realizes that this is the breaking point, the kill shot he needs to sink if he’s going to get what he wants. “It would--” He pauses again, clears his throat and runs a hand through his hair. “I want you to make me yours. Because--because then he can’t fucking have me.”
Natasha stares at him for a long moment. Clint waits, his breathing slow and even as she considers. Finally, she blinks slightly.
"Is this the knife," she asks quietly, "that you pulled when we fought?"
"Yes," he says, softly.
"And you want me to use it to take you back from him?"
"Yes."
Natasha turns her back and walks toward the bedroom, leaving Clint stunned in her wake.
"Is that--are we doing this?" he asks, his heartbeat pounding in his throat.
She turns back, a sinful smile playing across her lips. "Not if you stay out there."
Clint doesn't reply, he just follows, his breaths coming faster as excitement starts to mix with the panic and uncertainty.
Natasha doesn’t bother to turn the lights on, just tips the blinds in her bedroom so that the rays of the security lights on the building next door flood in, soft strips of silvery white across the bed and floor. She grabs the blankets, which are already in disarray, and throws them in the corner. Clint leans against the doorframe as he watches her, feeling once again as though he needs permission to cross the threshold, to enter her space.
She stays silent until she has everything ready, the knife on the bedside table and the now-familiar ropes looped over one arm, then turns to him and raises an eyebrow. “Well? Are you coming?”
Clint sees the challenge in her eyes, like she thinks she's calling his bluff. Like she thinks he'll back down, change his mind. So he strips off his shirt unceremoniously, and drops his pants, leaving him in boxers and moonlight as he climbs onto the bed.
"How do you want me?" he purrs, arching his back.
Natasha rolls her eyes, and makes a little gesture with her finger. "On your back," she says, testing the point of the knife against the pad of her thumb, and smiling at the bead of blood that appears, lapping at it with her tongue.
Clint complies, a shiver running down his spine.
"You want me to stop," she says, looping the first strands around his wrist, her fingers moving deftly - she's more practiced at this than he is, "you have a word?"
He shakes his head. "Never needed one."
"You do now," she says, securing his first wrist. "You want me to stop, you say boomerang."
Clint makes a face. "Boomerang?"
"Like the arrow," she says, and her expression softens into something like fondness for a moment. "It's the only one I ever remember."
He nods once as she starts wrapping the next strand around his other wrist. "Any other rules?"
She shakes her head. "The rest come from you," she says. "How far do you want this to go?"
"Make--" Clint swallows hard. "Make me bleed," he grits out.
Natasha finishes tying his wrists and smiles, spinning the knife in her palm, and gently tracing the blade down his torso. She hooks her thumbs into his boxers and he lifts his hips, letting her strip him.
She wraps her hand around his rapidly hardening cock. "If you want to stop, what do you say?"
Clint rolls his eyes at her. "Boomerang," he says, "I get it. Safewords. Whatever."
Natasha strokes him once, quickly, then pulls her hand away, grinning wickedly when he whines. “You wanted me in control.”
“I did,” says Clint, biting his lip. He’s beginning to feel better, the icy fingers of the dream falling away as hot anticipation, the delicious thrill of danger takes its place, and he decides to push her just a little, test her will. “Now I’m wondering if I should be offended, though. You don’t remember all my arrows.”
She smirks and sits back on her heels, picking up another length of rope and gracefully tying it around his ankle. “The day that you know what to call my knives, I’ll memorize your arrows.”
Natasha finishes tying his other ankle down, surveying her work with a feral hunger in her eyes that makes him so hard he can barely stand it. She’s left the blade he’s given her lying on his chest, a clearly calculated move, a threat in its own right because he’s utterly powerless to grab it, to move it away.
“Well,” says Clint, trying to keep his voice light and failing miserably. “At least I don’t name my arrows like they’re pets.” He shudders, pulling instinctively at the ropes around his wrists as he aches to guide her hands to where he wants them, to peel her clothes off and run his own palms over the expanse of her skin.
Natasha grins, sharp and deadly as one of those knives, as she straddles his hips and looms over him. "That's because the way you kill is impersonal," she says, her breath hot and wet on his neck. "The way I kill is intimate." She has the knife in her hand now, and Clint can feel the cold brush of steel up under his chin, along his neck, and he shivers. "The way I kill means I see the blood and the pain. The way you kill is--" she licks his exposed throat, tracing the path the knife took. "Clinical."
He can't argue with her point, though he wants to, wants to tell her she's wrong and ridiculous. Instead he lets out a low groan. "Is that what you call it?" he bites out. "Sleeping with men and taking their lives? Intimate?"
Her smile doesn't waver. "Is that what you want from me?" she leans down to bite his collar bone, leaving a bright red mark there. "Intimacy? Death?"
Clint shakes his head. "No," he breathes, but he doesn't say anything else.
Natasha nods and sits up, turning the knife in the dim light. "Here's the deal," she says softly. "I'm not going to hurt you permanently. I'm not going to leave scars. And you are going to talk to me after. Understood?"
Clint nods. "Yes," he breathes.
She holds the flat of the knife to his lips and inclines her head, like she's waiting to see how far he'll go. Clint closes his eyes, and kisses the blade. He can feel her smile, and it spreads like warmth through his body. She shifts, then, and he looks up again, just in time to see her running her fingers along the cool metal, caressing the place where his lips have just been. He shudders, wanting her hands on him, but mesmerized by the knife at the same time. Natasha laughs softly when she sees him watching, almost a noise of surprise, though he’s certain his reactions are exactly what she’s wanted, all a part of her game.
“See something you like?” she asks, fully committed now, all traces of her earlier doubt and annoyance gone. She’s all confidence now, all fluid predatory grace in the shadows. Clint isn’t sure whether it’s a real transformation or just a mask, but he’s not sure he cares just now.
“I do,” he says, his own voice going high and thin, a fist of emotion closed around his throat. “Touch me, Natasha? Please?” He shifts his hips a little, but there’s no give to the knots she’s tied, and even if there were, she's far beyond his reach--she always has been.
“Not yet,” she says lightly, pressing a delicate kiss of her own to the knife’s blade before laying it on the bedside table again.
Clint feels its loss like a blow, a hot punch of disappointment in his gut, and he whines again, shifting against the ropes like he might somehow be able to stretch them far enough to retrieve it. Natasha says nothing, but there’s a glint of victory in her eyes as she strips off her shirt, arching her back and running a hand down the length of her torso before slipping out of her shorts as well.
Clint feels his heart start pounding, feels the blood start to race through his body and, for the first time in weeks, he feels alive. "Please," he breathes, and Natasha just smiles at him, stretching lazily before leaning down to peck his lips softly.
"No," she says. "You don't get to ask."
He pulls on the ropes that bind his wrists and shivers, feeling exposed and alone and vulnerable like he was when he was under, when he was Loki's.
"Natasha," he whines, his eyes screwed shut, panic starting to surge in his chest.
She presses a finger to his lips, shushing him gently. He tries to concentrate on that, on the point of connection that is her finger, hot and alive and human. In the next second he feels it, feels the slight prick of the knife on his chest.
Clint's eyes slam open and he watches as she works, as she starts drawing lazy patterns with feather-light touches on his chest. He tries to slow his breathing, tries to relax into it.
"What are you drawing?" he asks, his voice high and tight.
Natasha just eyes him for a long second, her face inscrutable, and presses the knife into the soft skin on the right side of his chest.
Clint hears the noise he makes in a detached way, like someone else is making it, and scares him beyond anything else he's ever felt. He spent days in Loki's bunker, hearing the words he spoke in the same detached way, seeing himself take actions that hurt. Hearing the disconnect in his voice sends fear racing through his brain, followed by pain and lust and probably hunger or something. He loses track, can't quantify all the things he's feeling, all the things Natasha is bringing out in him.
She makes another shallow cut for symmetry, parting the skin on the other side of his body, and Clint makes another animal noise.
Natasha sits back on her heels, watches him pant for a moment before smiling. "Do you want my neighbors to think I'm killing you?" she asks, her voice cruel and cold.
"No," he breathes, though some part of him knows that's not possible, knows the apartment is too well soundproofed for that.
Her smile is worse than the pain - at least the pain is an escape - as she leans down and licks up the trickle of blood from his first cut.
"Then tell me," she breathes, tracing the knife along his sternum, "what's really going on here."
Clint shakes his head a little frantically at her words, as she stills again and his focus tunnels in to the press of the knife tip against his skin of his neck, pricking him with every movement, every heaving breath. “Don’t stop. Please, just. Natasha, don’t stop.” Her name on his lips is a three-syllable gasp, a plea all its own.
“Then talk,” she repeats, pulling the knife away too and balancing herself on both arms above him so that the only thing he feels is the ghost of her breath.
The panic starts to rise again immediately, the spectre of the memories and images far worse than anything she’s actually doing. He’s spent the past three weeks trying to avoid moments of stillness and quiet, trying to keep his mind focused at all times. Now he feels anger rapidly overtaking the fear, sour like bile in the back of his throat.
“After,” he snaps. “I told you I’d talk after.”
Natasha laughs, not nicely. “You are not the one in charge here, hotshot. That was the deal. Come on. I can wait.”
“This isn’t an interrogation, Nat,” says Clint, grunting with effort as he pulls at the bonds around his wrists and ankles, feeling the very real urge to run. Still it doesn’t occur to him to say the safeword, to use the escape she’s given him, because he’s backed himself up to the edge of a precipice and the idea of leaving without getting what he needs scares him far more than anything she could do.
She moves in a flash, her fingers hooking beneath his chin hard enough that they’ll leave bruises. “It is what I say it is. Tell me what’s going on. Why you’re here.”
“No,” he breathes, because this is the moment he’s been avoiding, the question that’s pulled him from her bed, made him leave before sunrise every night for the past three weeks. It’s the reason that he can’t move on, can’t accept any of the many forms of comfort she’s been trying to offer, and even now the words stick in his throat.
Natasha curls her fingers into his hair and yanks his head back, the blade of the knife at his throat a shock.
“Tell me,” she hisses, and he can feel a little trickle of blood running down his neck where the tip of the blade has cut him. “Stop fighting me, Clint. You wanted me in control. Tell me why.”
His pulse is thundering in his temples, his head swimming with adrenaline, and though he can barely breathe, he feels more lucid than he has possibly ever before. This is how she kills, he thinks. His life hangs on the steadiness of her fingers, the parts of herself she has given to him and him alone.
“He wanted me to use this knife,” he hears himself say, so quiet it’s barely audible to his own ears. “Wanted me to hold you down and fuck you and open your jugular with it. I can’t get it out of my head.”
There's silence in the wake of his confession, a crushing kind of emptiness that makes Clint want to be invisible, makes him wish he'd never been born. And then Natasha says his name, softly, like a sweet prayer.
"Clint," she breathes, and he pulls himself together long enough to look her in the eye. "Do you honestly think I didn't know that?" she touches his face gently. "Haven't you seen the tapes? Haven't--" she shivers a little, and it echoes through him. "Loki told me he wanted you to kill me slowly and intimately, in all the ways I fear. Which, if he thought having sex with you was that--" She shakes her head. "Clint, do you want to kill me?"
He blinks. "No. Of course not."
"Okay, do you have any plans to kill me?"
She's smiling now, and it looks alien but his lips curve up in an echo of hers. "Not at the moment, no."
"Then let me take this, " she says softly, touching the pommel of the knife to his temple. "Let me take this and take care of you. Let go."
Clint shakes his head, screws his eyes closed and just tries to breathe. It doesn't work, and sobs start to wrack his body, tears falling as he strains against the ropes. "I'm sorry," he rasps, the words gravelly as he tries to get control of himself. "Natasha, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
"What are you sorry for?" she asks.
He make a noise in his throat, unable to summon words for a moment. "For--" he chokes out, the sound strange in his ears. "Because I wanted to. I wanted to kill you."
“Was it you, or was it whatever he put in your body?” asks Natasha, looking impossibly calm. She sits back a little, stretches out on her side next to him and touches his face so softly that he shudders again, another treacherous sob slipping from his throat.
“I don’t know,” says Clint, miserably. The cuts on his chest and throat are still bleeding, he realizes, and everything hurts in a way that he’s pretty sure has nothing to do with nerves or torn skin. “I don’t know. It was like--like a reflex. Like I had to or I’d come apart.”
She nods, the expression on her face almost clinical. “He did that to you. With--magic or dark energy, or whatever. It didn’t come from you. No reason to apologize.”
“No,” he insists, his breathing quickening again. “No, it’s--He wanted me to kill you and you’re--Fuck, Natasha, I love you. And he tried to use it.” Clint breaks off as he realizes what he’s said, feels a fresh flush of adrenaline at finally having spoken the words aloud, at the fact that now she knows. If she’s going to kill him for it, he thinks, at least he’s made it as convenient as possible.
“I know,” she says again, so softly it aches.
“And?” Clint breathes, swallowing thickly. “Do you--Is there more to that thought?”
“It’s about time you told me,” says Natasha, and she stretches out against the length of his body as she kisses him, slowly and filthily.
Clint groans into her mouth, overwhelmed with relief, with the sudden hot press of her skin against his that he’s been craving so desperately all along. The sobs seem to evaporate, leaving an odd kind of giddiness in their wake “Can we please fuck now?” he asks, when she breaks away.
Natasha throws her head back and laughs.
"Does that mean you don't want me to cut you anymore?" she asks, her voice deceptively light for a woman who has him tied to the bed and bleeding.
Clint squirms again."I-- I do," he says slowly.
Natasha grins. "Good. But this," she holds up the knife so he can see it, "is out. I want to do this right."
Clint whines as she gets out of bed, missing the heat of her skin, but he doesn't have to wait for long; she crosses her bedroom in two strides and drops his knife on her bureau. She opens a drawer and stands for a moment, letting him admire the long lines of her silhouette as she deliberates.
She returns, a new knife glinting pale in her hand. "This," she says, holding it up to his mouth for him to kiss, same as he did the other, "is the first knife I ever bought myself. I saw it in a window and I had to have it." She smiles fondly, running her thumb over the blade. "I've never killed anyone with it, never held it to the throat of anyone I love." Her voice is soft and poisonous, the intensity of it running through his veins. "So I'm going to hurt you with it, and you're going to love it."
Clint inhales sharply at the promise, his heart pounding and his cock suddenly hard as a rock.
She starts slow, teasing, tracing the arch of his foot with the tip of the blade. Clint can feel his focus narrowing again, but it's different now, it's different and he can give this to her, he can let go. She moves up his leg, taking a moment to trace a love poem over his thigh before wrapping her hand around his dick and kissing the head lightly.
He whines in the back of his throat, but does his best not to flex his hips, doesn't move against the blade that's threatening to break his skin.
"Good boy," she hisses, kissing the skin of his stomach and using the blade to trace the contours of his abs, her breasts brushing against him in a teasing, tantalizing sway. Clint lets his head fall back against the pillow, allows himself to stop watching and feel, to give in to her movements.
She keeps moving up his body, trading slight traces with kisses and licks until she's at his chest, above his heart. He opens his eyes to see her above him, her body radiating warmth. She smiles and leans down to kiss his mouth, hardly a peck.
"Say it again," she breathes, her lips mere centimeters from his.
"I love you," he says, and her face changes, sharpens and softens at the same time as she breathes the words in, as she takes them from him and makes them her own.
She presses the knife in, gently, just hard enough to break the skin on his left pec, above his heart. She draws three quick lines, and Clint makes a small noise as pleasure radiates out from them.
Natasha bends down to kiss one of the lines, and when she leans up to take his mouth again, Clint can taste the copper-salt of his blood on her lips.
“Fuck,” he breathes, shifting his hips on the bed when he can’t take it anymore, the pleasure-pain mix leaving him unbearably hard, straining against the ropes in search of any sort of friction. “‘Tasha. What are you doing to me?”
“Making you mine,” she breathes, her tongue darting out to catch a drop of his blood that’s coloring the corner of her lip. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” says Clint, the word getting lost in a strangled gasp when she traces a fingertip along the fresh cuts she’s just made, hot and wet and stinging. “I’m yours. Natasha, make me yours. Please.”
"Mine," she growls, and holds up her hand, letting him watch as she licks the blade and then her fingertips.
She draws a line down his torso with the knife, pressing just hard enough to leave a mark, not quite breaking the skin. He’s still fixated on the exquisite way it burns when she wraps her hand around his cock again, and Clint rolls his head back on the pillows, straining until the ropes start to rub his wrists raw as his hips cant upward.
“Fuck,” he grates out again, the word turning into a rough cry as she twists her wrist. “Fuck, fuck, Natasha, I love you.”
She goes still again at that, looking up at him for a moment with an intensity that he can't even process. Then she ducks her head, and Clint lets out a strangled shout as she takes him in her mouth with a soft hum of pleasure that vibrates all the way through him, makes the world fall away.
Clint closes his eyes again, tries to control his breathing as she sets in to her work with an earnest pleasure that marks the best parts of sleeping with a skilled seductress. She knows exactly how to move, how to breathe and moan and lick and suck to get his blood pumping, to get him ready to follow her wherever she goes.
It's Natasha, though, so it's not free and never easy; Clint can't help but notice how the sharp press of the knife on his stomach makes him want everything just a little more, makes him need whatever she'll give.
"Goddamn," he gasps. "Natasha, your mouth."
She laughs around him, swirling her tongue and hollowing out her cheeks. His eyes roll back in his head as he shouts her name again.
"What do you want?" she asks, pulling her mouth off him with an obscene pop before stroking him lazily, the metal of the knife still hard against his abs. "Use your words. Clint."
Clint bucks and strains against the ropes, his mouth open wide. "Fuck--" he half-sobs, aching for her, for the sharp-sweet pleasure she promises with every movement. "Fuck me, Natasha, fuck."
She laughs and leans in again, licking a hot path up the bottom of his cock as she presses the knife into the skin of his torso, sparking dual sensations that he thinks could pull him apart in the best way.
"Oh," she breathes, and her breath is a cold shock over his wet skin, making goosebumps shiver along the length of his arms. "Is that what I was supposed to do?"
Clint whines again, his hips jumping as her hand snakes down to roll his balls in her palm.
She decides to take pity on him, he thinks, and she rises up on her knees before gripping his cock and sliding down slowly, drawing out every second of penetration and wringing another shout from his lips.
“This what you wanted?” asks Natasha, keeping her hips tantalizingly still as she runs her fingers up over his stomach and chest, impossibly soft and light after the bite of the knife. The contrast is too much and he groans as he struggles against the ropes again, trying futilely to find enough traction to move his hips, to start some semblance of rhythm of his own accord. It doesn’t work, though, and she laughs.
“Please, Natasha,” he grates out, his voice high and desperate as he meets her eyes, and suddenly he finds himself on the verge of tears again. It’s different this time, though, the fear and guilt abated for the moment, the only thing left the overwhelming need for release. “Please.”
She nods once, in a way that makes him think she knows exactly what he’s saying, what she’s made him feel, all of it. She kisses him again, almost tenderly, then finally starts to move her hips. Clint closes his eyes, his shoulders aching as he arches against her, losing himself in the sensation. Natasha bends forward over him, tracing the cuts she’s made with her tongue before sucking lightly, drawing a sound from his throat that’s nearly a scream. Then the knife is at his throat again--he’s lost track of it while reveling in her body--and he’s so achingly close, hanging on the edge of orgasm like he's dancing on the blade.
“Come for me,” she hisses in his ear, and he does, letting out another sob as he loses his grip on everything but Natasha, her hands and her mouth and her cunt wet and tight around him. He’s never felt quite so exposed before, his vision going dim as he struggles to find breath.
He doesn't know how long he lies there, languishing in the afterglow, the deafening pulse of his breath as he tries to to come back, come down to earth.
He gets there, eventually, and he finds that Natasha's untied him, and she's sitting next to him on the bed, facing away.
"You okay?" he asks, touching her back.
She smiles over her shoulder at him, her eyes flashing with something he doesn't understand.
"Yeah," she says, picking something up from the bedside table. "Drink."
He takes the cup and sits up, leaning heavily against the headboard. Somehow, the idea of sitting up, of being any kind of upright, is just exhausting. It's juice of some kind, tart and sweet, and he smiles into the glass as he drains it.
Her fingers are nimble and light on his chest - she's doing aftercare, he realizes, vaguely. Natasha Romanoff is taking care of him, spreading disinfectant on his wounds before she bandages them. It sends a new pulse through his body, the idea of a kind Natasha, a Natasha who might never tell him she loves him, but a Natasha who does, who shows it in every little moment and movement.
"Hey," he says softly, when she's done applying gauze to his nicked-up chest. "What did you-- you wrote something."
She smiles and touches the bandage above his heart. "It was-- it was just an N. For Natalia. Because you're mine."
Tears stand out in Clint's eyes at the words, at the fact of it. He's hers.
"You didn't come," he says, and she bends over to kiss him.
"I got something better," she breathes, and she stands to grab the blanket from where she threw it, curls into bed next to him and rests her head on his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her, pressing a soft kiss to her forehead.
"You can go," she says softly. "If you don't want to stay."
It’s a test, he thinks, and for just a moment there’s a shred of doubt that his answer is the right one.
"No," he replies, reaching out to pull her closer, still feeling weak but getting stronger, feeling like she's given him something to hold onto for the first time since everything went to shit. "No, I'm gonna stay here."
He feels her smile against his skin. "Good," she breathes, and for just an instant he thinks he sees a flicker of her own relief.
"Thank you,” he whispers, and he closes his eyes, allowing sleep to take him.