i got infinite ammunition

[barton_me]

Roughly three hours ago, Clint had been skillfully monkeying his way down the side of a building, the grips sewn in the palms of his gloves helping him to twist and turn his way through a fire escape that had, long ago, become nothing more than a tilting mass of rusted metal leaning haphazardly against a wall of brick. Roughly three hours ago, he'd been burning with a purpose, the heady sensation of a job completed but with the bitter caution of knowing he was not yet out of danger. Landing silently on his feet in the alleyway, he had kept to the shadows. Three blocks over he heard sirens, but of course it was too late.

The room he had torched had been filled with hardware containing information on several SHIELD operatives, including their alternate identities. It had already been copied, placed under safe keeping, but the originals had to be wiped clean. When it came to fires, Clint often volunteered; too often when the spark was set by a rookie it spread and harmed civilians. Besides, there was really no place quite like southeast Asia to disappear to for a bit when you wanted to clear your head of things.

At the next building down, at the opposite end of the alley, he had made quick work of the lock. But upon going through he was not in an abandoned service hallway for an insurance firm. Even if there hadn't been windows full of sunlight when he knew it had to be the dead of night, the very air told him that he had experienced something very, very odd.

It took some time to ascertain he had not had a stroke, was not going insane, and really was in what appeared to be a pretty nice hotel, far nicer than the ones he usually stayed in. Dimensional doorways weren't completely out of his grasp, of course, but the ones he knew about required a bit more pomp, circumstance, and energy fields than the single, quiet door he had walked through.

Since a few tries had told him that returning was not an option, he ended up going immediately into what he called 'airport mode' - when waiting for a flight, train, or similar, it was always best to procure three things: book, coffee, and a sandwich. Even if you didn't even want those items. So there he was in the Bistro, a third of the way through a book he had found in the gift shop, wondering how long it was going to take before he could either a) get back home or b) panic. At least his gear was more or less subtle, and he had his compound bow and quiver on the floor and tucked along the side of his leg, mostly out of sight.

Comments

[barton_me]

"I'm the perfect wife," Clint replied, well aware that, even if he had been female, that was far from true. He was terrible, romantically, and he knew that. It was easier with friendships and companionship, and much easier with Natasha. Maybe it was the fact that she seemed to demand so little of him; then again, she was one of those people for whom he tried his best. Sometimes he felt she had a completely unreal vision of him, and it made him uncomfortable, but he prized her too much to correct her most of the time.

He moved to sit down next to her, leaning his shoulder against hers. He could feel the heat of her body, close to his, and it was comforting. Like being close to a bomb that would explode just for you. "What about other places?" he asked. "What are you doing now?"

If she had leaked her entire, sordid history onto the internet - well. She didn't like to discuss it most times, much less admit to it. She had given him her trust, once, and he had betrayed it to Loki, and he couldn't see her happy about willingly letting all of her secrets go when brainwashing hadn't been involved. For that Clint would never stop feeling guilty, but if she was upset about what she'd felt she had to do, that was more important for the time being than his own mixed feelings. "Have you gone back home, yet?"

[regimes_fall]

“Better you than me,” Natasha said with a bit of a snort, though she supposed of the two of them it seemed far more likely, at least to her, that Clint would be the one to eventually settle down if it ever came to that. Perhaps it was just projecting and perhaps, if asked, he might’ve had the same sentiments concerning her, but Natasha had the notion that there was a fatherliness in Clint that some child could benefit from. It was a quality that she herself definitely did not possess.

When he settled in beside her, his shoulders broad enough to infringe on her personal bubble in a way she found more comforting than anything else, she shrugged in response to his question. Her recent time at the Nexus could be described as ‘loitering’ more than anything else, but with the way she’d left things in Washington she wasn’t sure there would be anything but that left to her for at least a few more months. She had not gone home, though she had thought of doing that more than once, if only to check in with Clint. Now she supposed she could put that trip off for a little longer.

“I’ve just got to lay low for a while,” she said. “I’ve been attempting to manage things from here, since I can’t really do anything about my present life I tried a little recon. Things with Loki and the American, since they’re both here.” She moved without thinking then, shifting so that she could rest her head on his shoulder. Against the top of her head she could feel the cartilage of his ear and beneath her cheek his shoulder was surprisingly comfortable. Maybe she really was getting drunk, or maybe it was just Clint. “We’ll have to plan some things out with that,” she said after a moment. “Someday later, when I have a clearer head.”

[barton_me]

He didn't expect Natasha would eagerly go back into a world that knew all of her secrets. When you considered the fact that most people, whose secrets were far less dark or deep than hers, would prefer that they never saw the light of day, it was easy to understand that she probably felt bare to the world. Natasha was heavily armoured, he knew; she had built her protections from the ground up, inside of her head. She'd had to do that in order to survive, and he didn't fault her in that or anything else she'd done in her life. She was a different person, now, and nothing demonstrated that more clearly than her act of leaking the entirety of SHIELD onto the internet.

When she leaned her head onto his shoulder, he felt her hair against his neck, but was a bit too tipsy to find it ticklish. He patted her knee. "I'm proud of you," he said. A bit vague, but it literally applied to everything she was doing. She was good at doing whatever she focused on, and her focus had shifted in a way that he knew was good for her. Whatever they had to plan, they could plan later, though. If this was a place where he could remove himself slightly from his life and unpack his head, well, he'd been planning on attempting that, already. Besides, it wasn't like they appeared to have a schedule to keep to here. "But Vegas first."