Chapter Text
April 28, 2015
“Why can’t I ever go to Europe for something fun?”
Dani chuckled at his grumbling, most likely made worse by the fact today’s trip cut into Clint’s sleeping time.
And boy did he get grumpy without enough sleep.
He flitted around the apartment, hastily packing his quiver with some spare arrows from his personal stash in the room lit only by an overhead light. Hunched over, he picked through the piles of boxes marked in what looked to be crayon.
“Hunting down evil Nazi organizations not exciting enough for you?” she joked from the bed, watching him with interest and wondering what exactly a ‘putty’ arrow did.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” she chuckled. “And all things considered, I think you’re allowed to whine.”
Quiver abandoned on the floor beside the boxes, he collapsed onto the bed beside her. Her thumb traced the rings around his eyes; the creases in his forehead were especially shadowed in the dim light. Dani ran her fingers through his hair and smiled as he leaned into her touch, eyes closed, face completely at ease for a brief moment.
“Good, because I’m very good at it. Excellent even,” he mumbled against her thigh, head quickly having found her lap.
This was generally how they handled him leaving for missions. The quiet moments of just the two of them, intimate and slightly subdued, but still in good humour. Some mornings (or middles of the night) she wished she could haul him back under the covers and hold him just a little longer, but this was their life.
And as unconventional as it was sometimes, she loved him enough to know it was what he needed to do.
Her boyfriend was off to do his job, help people, hunt down rogues, thieves and killers. Some nights she wondered if he thought he had a price to pay back, sins to cancel out, a sense of duty to the cause. Other nights, other assignments she just knew that he couldn’t sit around and see people around him in pain.
“Ugh, I have to go,” Clint groaned, looking at his phone. “I love you. I’ll see you later, OK?”
He pulled himself off the bed and pecked her on the lips.
“Love you too. Be safe.”
“Aren’t I always?” he joked, giving her his signature grin.
“I’m serious, Clint.”
He mock saluted as he walked backwards out the door, “Yes, ma’am.”
So she waited and hoped that he’d returned safely, setting out the comfy blankets and cleaning their space. And regardless of what time he got back, she’d be there to cook a hot meal when he did, wrapping him in her arms if he needed it, or giving him space if not. The missions and the outcomes varied, the days were good, bad and everything in between.
Clint’s assignments had become more frequent of late, though most of the leads they’d followed up on had been fruitless. Mostly henchmen, small-time splinter groups. Just the shells of a predator that’d already managed to escape.
Not that she worried any less. The concern was still there; she’d just found ways to distract herself from the fact she definitely wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep.
Most days she’d try to find some human contact. But today, it was early; Sam was off on some mission, so it wasn’t like he could bother him. And Maria Hill, well, she wasn’t stupid enough to try to bother her while she was working. After-hours Maria was a different story, but all fun and games with her usually ended in a hangover.
She’d already cleaned the entire suite a couple of days back on a full-day mission. The sun was just starting to rise when she finished reorganizing her closet to pack away her winter clothes, and Dani even managed to fit in a workout in the exceptionally empty gym. If she didn’t stop soon, she was going to end up detailing the inside of her fridge, and that was a smidge past the line between productive and desperate.
But everyone had their own coping methods.
On days like today, when there was no word from Clint or the team and she was on her own, she’d have JARVIS play some music for her or end up quizzing him on useless facts. The chatter, the background noise, the thought of someone nearby was important to her.
She wasn’t sure if the attack had amplified that need in her, but if she was alone, she needed some sort of distraction to help drown out the incessant thoughts in her brain. So she asked JARVIS to continue where she left off in the audiobook version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and set herself on the couch.
Everyone seemed to be in good spirits.
That fact solidified the annoyance bubbling in the pit of Dani’s stomach. Not about the vague and scary text she woke up to from not Clint (which in itself was worrying), not that she dropped everything to immediately head to the labs to see him, not even that her heart was pounding at a thousand beats a minute.
It was knowing that she had to be annoyed right now.
Otherwise, she would be a total wreck. So, knowing that A) that wouldn’t be helpful to anyone and B) she couldn’t take that right now, her jaw stayed tense, her body rigid as she rushed out of the elevator and crossed the floor. Dani had been lucky, she realized; Clint hadn’t come back from a mission hurt in months. So this was all probably just some cosmic payback for having too good of a go at things lately.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
“I’ve been told my idiot boyfriend got himself injured again?” Dani icily asked a passing Nat, who quickly pointed her in the direction she came from with a bemused expression.
She rounded the corner into Bruce’s lab, finding a smirking Clint Barton in a room with Dr. Cho and Dr. Banner. Somewhere between the lasers pointed at his abdomen and the intrigued look on Bruce’s face told her this had been more than just a scrape.
And judging by the fact they already look half-done, they — no, probably Clint — had likely waited to tell her to spare her the gory visual. It was fruitless, because her brain was already visualizing just how bad it had been, frown setting itself on her face.
“What are you smiling about?” she said with as severe of a face as she could muster, arms crossed over her chest.
“You said idiot boyfriend with so much love in your voice, honey,” he cooed playfully, clearly trying to lighten the mood.
She shot him a silent ‘we’re so going to talk about this later’ look.
“Suddenly I’m wishing you had gone to Europe for something fun,” she sighed, sinking into a chair beside Clint as he lay on the exam table. “What am I going to do with you?”
The frustration masking her worry was starting to crack, the relief settled in at him being safe, and Dani slumped in the seat, a tired and stiff feeling whooshing in with the rush of emotions.
“Love me and make me recovery pasta?” he tried, giving her his best impression of puppy dog eyes.
Dani, sighing, knew she couldn’t say no to those big blues, but she wasn’t about to cave without getting some more information out of him.
“So what happened?”
She knew they’d been searching for something, taking mission after mission to clear out the larger Hydra-operated bases around the world. At least the ones they’d been able to locate. In all likelihood, it would take them years to really snuff them out, and by then some of the splinter cells might have developed their own offshoots.
The post-SHIELD, post-Triskelion landscape was a mess and that was far from secret, even to the public.
“We found it,” he explained. “I got hit, sure, but we ended up finding the damn thing.”
“All this for a staff?” she questioned, chewing on her bottom lip.
“A sceptre,” he corrected, as if that made any difference to either of them.
Something about alien artifacts weirded her out; might have been the whole Clint mind control thing with Loki, or maybe the attack on the Helicarrier. It made her nervous to even have it in the same building as them.
“Got it. Acquire a World of Warcraft weapon and then?”
It was anything but funny, but if she didn’t try to lighten the mood in true Stark fashion, she’d probably lose it. Laugh or cry; it was always one extreme or the other in these sorts of situations, and if it wasn’t insufferably clear that Dani hated being vulnerable in front of others, her sense of self-deprecating humour always gave it away.
“Tony and Bruce are going to study it, and then it goes back to Asgard.”
Great. Another project for Tony to throw himself into. She couldn’t stop her forehead from wrinkling, hand reaching up to smooth the line and massage her temples. But Tony seemed to think this one was different. Not that he was the best judge of things.
He’d been so in the weeds lately she’d had to ask JARVIS to remind him to eat on more than one occasion. And she’d be lying if she claimed not to be worried every time she stayed at Clint’s.
Sure, he was a grown man with a multi-billion dollar company, and sure he had a whole building full of staff at his disposal, but without Pepper around to moderate him, Tony had been in a free-fall. He knew it, she knew it, pretty sure even Bruce knew it.
But no one could tell Tony Stark what to or not to do, and that was the problem.
“You OK?”
She wasn’t.
“Yeah, just tired.”
The concern didn’t drop from his face as he told her, “You don’t have to cook if—”
“No, it’s no trouble,” she assured.
“JARVIS keep you company?” he asked knowingly, as Dr. Cho and Bruce stopped their chat across the room and started inspected the machine’s work.
She nodded.
“Looks like you’re all done here,” Dr. Cho declared. “And no, no additional recovery time needed. You’re good as new,” she added in response to Dani’s raised eyebrows.
Clint ran his fingers over the newly formed skin and smiled, “Can’t even feel the difference.”
“That’s the whole point,” Bruce chuckled. “It’s quite remarkable.”
Dani traced her own fingers over the spot and agreed, it felt like nothing had changed. Her stomach still churned at the thought of what had been there, a couple of tangents whisking her thoughts in directions of what might have happened if they hadn’t had this technology.
For now she’d have to settle herself with the knowledge they did, and Clint was fine.
With that, Clint hopped off the table and thanked the doctors before taking Dani’s hand. She gave him a weak smile, and they headed toward the elevator, passing Tony and Bruce as they frantically switched between projections in the fishbowl of their lab.
Thor was hanging around just outside, looking a little unsure at interrupting the science bros. While she hadn’t seen a lot of him since The Incident, he’d been around a lot more lately in the team’s hunt for the sceptre. A wide grin was already stretched across his face at the sight of Clint walking around, and he greeted them from across the room.
“Ah, I see you’re fully healed, Barton.”
“That I am,” he confirmed. “Just glad this whole hunt is over.”
“Indeed,” he mused. “I’ll be happy to get this sceptre back to Asgard.”
As if that reminded Thor of something, he turned to Dani.
“And you, fair Dani, will you be joining us in revels?”
“Revels?” she parroted, staring at Clint.
She knew the definition of the word, having studied more than enough Shakespeare in school growing up. No, Dani’s confusion came more from the context, hoping Clint or Tony hadn’t promised she’d be there.
She felt Clint’s grip on her hand tense slightly at her clear hesitation.
“Oh, right. Well, Tony’s having a get together Friday to celebrate getting the sceptre,” he says aloud, his eyes asking silently both if she even wanted to go and if not, if she wanted him to handle the response.
“Of course he is,” she muttered.
Thor obviously hadn’t been in town when the attack happened, and while most in the Tower were well-versed, it wasn’t really anyone’s favourite topic of conversation. It wasn’t his fault, but even if she hadn’t just been woken awake by a text warning her of her boyfriend’s injury, she didn’t have the energy to try to explain the why without making it awkward.
After all, how do you sum up ‘I still very much have issues from the last party I attended and my brain won’t actually let me relax in large crowd environments anymore’ in a way that doesn’t scream broken?
“I uh, don’t think I’ll be able to make it,” she offered not-so-smoothly, the only words she could find feeling clunky as they drifted off her lips.
This was one of the first times she’d had to bow out of an invite to someone other than Tony, someone who didn’t know the backstory behind the scars she’d been able to hide throughout winter and spring.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Thor says. “Another time.”
She smiles and nods, the non-answer seemingly satisfying him. Clint rubbed her back soothingly as she swallowed hard and wondered when this whole thing gets easier. Should she be able to be at a party? Is it normal for her to still be this worried?
“Hey, it’s almost a year to the date, Dan. It’s totally understandable why you wouldn’t want to go,” he said quietly as if he could see the cogs whirring behind her eyes.
“You can go,” she says resolutely, knowing that’d be his next train of thought. “You shouldn’t miss out on a night with the team.”
“No, I don’t—”
“I’m a big girl, Clint. I’ll be just fine in my suite,” she assured with a wry smile, feeling a little better that Thor hadn’t questioned her answer. “Only a few floors down.”
He held her in the elevator, arms wrapped around her front, and face tucked into the crook of her neck. She loved that he knew just how to wordlessly comfort her, how to ground her in those uncomfortable moments without fanfare. To anyone else, it would seem like a normal embrace, but she could read between the lines of every touch.
“Shouldn’t I be comforting you? You were the one injured in the field,” she asked, voice small.
“I love you is all,” Clint mumbled. “And this is comforting to me.”
They made it to her suite, but Clint never left her side. He shadowed her in the kitchen as she flitted back and forth between the stove-top, the cupboards and the fridge. Dani always made sure to have the ingredients for Clint’s favourite pasta on hand for post-mission comfort food.
She doesn’t remember exactly when that became their tradition, but it did.
His hands barely left her, tracing circles on her hips, well-timed kisses to her neck, lips pressed into her hair. She wasn’t sure if it was for his benefit or hers. Maybe it was both. But either way, this homey feeling was nice, it was something she craved more of on the days and sometimes weeks he’d be gone from the tower.
So she’d gladly take it whenever she could get it.
“We should go on vacation,” Clint said suddenly after demolishing his bowl of pasta.
She wasn’t sure where that came from, staring at him skeptically. Sure, he’d been working more than usual lately, but he’d never broached this subject before.
“A vacation? Mr. Workaholic wants time off?” she asked his skeptically.
“You’re one to talk,” he retorts. “But seriously, we deserve some time away.”
She hummed, thinking through how to play along with his fantasy (because that’s definitely all it was), “Where would we go?”
“I think I’m still allowed in Thailand. Set ourselves up on a nice little beach there…” his voice drifted off dreamily.
“Allowed?”
“Oh,” he chuckled nervously. “Yeah, because of what Nat and I used to do, there are some countries we’re technically banned from.”
Her eyebrows raised to her forehead, but she quickly flattened them. “I don’t know why I found that so surprising,” she muttered, chiding herself on her naiveté. “Makes sense.”
A wicked smirk crossed his face, “Not that it would stop me if there was a good enough reason. I mean, it’d only be bad if they caught us.”
A roll of her eyes led into her reply, “I’m so not ending up in some overseas jail for a vacation.”
He bumped his elbow against hers and pouted, “You’re no fun. Nat would totally break us out.”
Dani pursed her lips and raised a brow.
“Something tells me you don’t really know how to take a vacation, Clint.”