Across the Universe

Sleep remained elusive for Scarlett even after she’d checked on Tony twenty times to make sure he continued resting somewhat peacefully. There had been a short period of time where he’d woken up and had needed help into the bathroom but thankfully he’d managed to resist throwing up. She’d given him some water to drink and then some aspirin to take in hopes that it would help with the hangover he would inevitably be dealing with when the morning came.

Ever since then it’d been completely silent in Scarlett’s penthouse. Quiet and dark. No matter how many times she closed her eyes and tried to convince herself to sleep and stop thinking so hard one thing or another popped into her mind. The longer she kept her eyes closed without finding rest the more horrific and vivid the images playing along the back of her eyelids became. Some of the visions were things that hadn’t even happened to her.

Now her mind was just being a jerk.

Scarlett tugged the sheets off of Tony just enough to see the glow of his arc reactor. What would happen to him if someone took it out of his chest? How long would it take for the shrapnel in his body to pierce his heart and lungs? Would it constrict his breathing first and strangle him slowly? Or would it go straight into his heart and kill him quickly? How would she be able to stop that from happening if someone destroyed the reactor? It wasn’t the first time Scarlett had tossed this horrible scenario over and over in her mind.

Sometimes she’d have nightmares of someone ripping it out and crushing it in front of her then leaving her to watch him choke to death, powerless to save his life. She hadn’t, of course, told Tony about these nightmares but they had happened; always vivid and horrific. Nothing scared her more than that. Scarlett could handle pain; she could handle almost anything that was thrown at her. But Tony in such trouble and on the brink of death? She wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Maybe that was the same thing that plagued him in his sleep. Was the idea of being unable to save her haunting his subconscious?

The only difference between their fears was that Scarlett knew she couldn’t ask Tony to step out of harm’s way. When it came down to it the simple truth was that Scarlett was handling the threat of injury better than him. Danger was inevitable for them. There was no way around it. He was Iron Man and she was… well, she was still figuring out what she was. Even if she quit what she was doing and became barefoot and pregnant in the next year and Tony gave up his life of being a super hero there would still be people from their pasts who would want to hurt them. Someone had told her once that fear couldn’t dictate her life. She wasn’t sure if it was Tony or if it had been someone far wiser than him.

Scarlett brushed her fingers over the metal rim of the reactor as he slept. He seemed troubled now, even as he slumbered, but also so drunk that he didn’t seem to notice that she was touching him while he rested. Defeated, she shifted on the bed and moved just enough so that her shoulder reminded her of her wound with a nasty ache.

Finally she got out of bed. There was no way she was going to sleep, not that night. Between her shoulder continuing to twinge and her nightmarish thoughts compounding on top of one another there was no point in lying around torturing herself. Scarlett left the door to her bedroom open and took the step down into the living room. Making sure she could still see Tony, she set herself up at the couch in front of the coffee table.

Twenty minutes later and she had pulled out each of her stitches, resting them on a tray in front of her on the coffee table. Some of them had been pulled after Steve had helped her fix her shoulder. What was it about this wound that was making it so hard to stay closed? The skin around the initial injury was jagged and torn, more fragile than it should’ve been. So many times her flesh had been pricked and pulled at that it was hard for her to find a way to sew it up a third time that night.

Her blood was a sickly color in some areas; yellow and green with pus and infected tissue. It hadn’t looked like that a few hours ago, what had changed? More time passed as she pulled and pried at her shoulder. The pain was oddly refreshing, bizarrely calming. If nothing else in the world made sense, at least this one thing still did. While she’d been out on the field she’d struggled with her pain responses and how to deal with them, which was a problem she hadn’t dealt with since her youth.

It was a sign of vulnerability, which Scarlett had felt increasingly prey to since she’d moved to New York. Letting someone get close to her was far more difficult than she had expected. Maybe if she hadn’t been such a hard ass while she’d dated Scott and had let him get a little closer she would’ve seen his betrayal coming. Instead she’d avoided emotional ties, avoided settling down, avoided all the simple things that went into a relationship and wound up with the wool pulled over her eyes.

By the time she’d escaped the cloud of deceit the light of the truth was so bright she’d been blinded and left in a haze ever since. When she’d felt that pain after fighting that strange woman from the portal, Scarlett had inwardly panicked. As she did in all situations that involved dramatic emotional responses Scarlett swallowed the panic and moved on. Everything would be dealt with later, but when would later be? That last part worried her at an alarming rate these days.

She was going to end up in the nuthouse at this rate! Here she was pulling and picking and a horribly infected looking wound on her shoulder and instead of worrying she was thinking about how being able to ignore the sting that ran through her to the tips of her fingers and even through the muscles of her chest and back was cathartic. Nothing messed up about that, not at all.

The more Scarlett pulled the more rot and decay she could see within her shoulder. Would it ever heal? Was her mind playing tricks on her? She knew it’d only been a day and she couldn’t expect miracles but something about the wound felt wrong. It didn’t look normal, it didn’t seem right. Something was horribly off about it and she was inclined to hide those thoughts. Why? Maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe it was a delusion from lack of sleep and she really was starting to lose her mind.

Was she actually afraid of losing her mind? At this rate it had become a distinct possibility. Who knew when her dreams would finally blend far enough with her reality that she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference? Scarlett had leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and closed her eyes before she’d even realized it. It was possible she’d fall asleep without closing her wound if she stayed trapped in her thoughts.

Her phone buzzed annoyingly on the table and she jumped alert at once. Quickly, she snapped up the small device and pulled it away from the glass table. With one glance back at the bedroom she could see that Tony was still asleep and hadn’t been bothered by the sound.

Everything seemed amplified when she was trying to be quiet for him. Her caller ID flashed to let her know she’d missed the call but before she’d gotten to read who it was it rang again. Natasha Romanoff was calling her. Why would she be calling so late at night? It was nearly midnight now, and while in the span of things that wasn’t very late, it was still late enough. What could she possibly want? In the past Scarlett would’ve picked up the phone in an instant because surely if Natasha was calling her that late then it had to be urgent.

Today, however, answering the phone didn’t seem as though it were in her best interests. She turned her attention instead back to her shoulder and silenced the ringer on her phone. Maybe she would have to get the tissue surgically repaired. It seemed impossible to avoid going under the knife if this sort of deterioration continued. Tomorrow she’d call about getting a stronger antibiotic. Something in Scarlett’s gut told her she needed to keep track of the progression of this wound. So she got up from where she sat and after stealing a glance at Tony slumbering in her bed, she walked down the long hallway, past an office where her paperwork was strewn across her desk, and to a door at the very end.

She entered a code on a keypad then opened her eyes wide for a retinal scan before the door clicked open and allowed her access. There had been additional security precautions she’d wanted to add but Tony had thought they were overkill. Jarvis was one of the most advanced security software systems on the planet, after all. Scarlett had insisted, with an apology to Jarvis, that if she could hack it then there were skilled professionals out in the world who could also hack it. Tony insisted that between the two of them constantly updating his software there would be little to no chance of that. Scarlett hadn’t been entirely convinced but arguing with Tony was futile at times, particularly when it came to his genius.

After climbing down a flight of stairs Scarlett reached the lab that Tony had designed for her. It got very little attention despite how beautiful it was. Seeing as Tony was with her nearly all the time, when he wanted to work on something he wanted to use the bigger lab he’d designated for the both of them on a different floor. Scarlett only used this one when she couldn’t sleep and when Tony was managing to find rest, which had been a very rare occasion.

Holding a cloth over her wound to keep it from bleeding further, Scarlett slid behind one of the desks. She opened drawers until she found a set of phials that she could use to keep samples. Sloppily she wrote a number and a letter designating the date and month of the sample she would take from her wound tonight on the side. Then she removed a piece of tissue from the wound, gritting her teeth to keep from making any sound in reaction. There was something particularly grotesque about cutting away her own flesh.

After that she spun in her chair and glanced around the room, tapping the fingers of her right hand on her knee. She found a needle and a plunger and walked to the other side of the room. The wound still looked awful (though she noticed not quite as terrible as she thought upstairs), but at least down here her tools were sterile and she could properly clean it up before continuing on with her night. She planned to replay the night’s events in her head and try to understand what about the gamma radiation had caused the portal to appear and if the woman on the other side was the cause.

Scarlett got the feeling that the woman was using the portal to her advantage but might not have been the source. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have wasted her time fighting Scarlett and instead would’ve tried to get past her. The idea of other universes and alternate timelines swam through her head and made her dizzy. Scarlett couldn’t think about what catastrophic results this could have on the world as she knew it if the two timelines intersected.

She hated time travel. The theory had always been immediately dismissed in her mind because of the infinite amount of paradoxes it would cause. But now she would be forced to consider that it was possible and the consequences could rip apart their world through space and time.

“I definitely need alcohol for this.” Scarlett murmured before at last sticking the needle into her flesh as close to the wound as she could and extracting a plunger filled with blood. Much to her relief the blood looked relatively normal outside of the wound. She had really started to worry for a little bit there. In fact, in the bright lights of her lab she didn’t think the wound looked as bad as she had earlier thought.

Maybe she really was losing her mind. Scarlett transferred the blood to the phial and then set both inside a small refrigeration unit at the far end of her lab underneath a table. She would leave it locked and secure for later. In a week, if things hadn’t gotten any better she’d take another sample, mark it, and then begin tests in comparison to blood she’d taken on a previous occasion. It may have seemed like a strange thing to do at the time, but Scarlett had been so paranoid that MedCo may have infected her with something while she was unconscious that she had done a series of blood tests when she’d gotten to New York.

Much to her relief there had been nothing of note except for the antibiotics she’d been taking for the infection she’d picked up while traveling all over Africa. Once she got the chance she was going to add those extra security measures she’d mentioned to Tony in the past, at least to her fridge. No one was going to get their hands on her blood. It may have been the paranoid thing to do but Scarlett was beginning to care less and less what was paranoid and what wasn’t. This was how she functioned, and if someone else (Tony) had a problem with it, then they would have to get over it.

Years of paranoia had served her well and the moment she’d stopped being paranoid had been when she’d gotten into trouble. It would be a cold day in hell when she let that happen again. Once finished taking her blood samples and locking them away Scarlett stitched the wound up again. The needle pushed far too easily into her flesh, without the resistance she had expected. Then again, she had stitched the damn thing up three times in a row that day, so perhaps she’d worn down the exterior tissue.

It was much harder to sew the wound up without someone else to help but it hadn’t been the first time she’d done it. For some reason, doing it on her own had made it easier to remove herself from the pain she should’ve felt. Afterward she cleaned what remained of the wound with antiseptic which stung but in a way also felt nice, then she covered the wound tightly with gauze and cleaned up her mess.

Upon returning to her living room she found she’d missed two more calls from Natasha Romanoff who had left her a voicemail upon her last attempt and then had given up on trying. What was so important that Natasha would keep calling? Had there been information on her mission that night with S.H.I.E.L.D? If that had been the case then Coulson would’ve called her repeatedly and annoyingly at that.

No, it had to have been something personal which felt all sorts of wrong to Scarlett. Had she heard how things had played out that night with Steve? Maybe. But if she had, then she likely would’ve known that Scarlett had to have been playing an angle for most of the night. It wasn’t like Scarlett to get petty over stupid things, and Natasha knew that. She was the closest thing Scarlett had to a friend besides Tony.

The screen of her phone lit up again, alerting her that she had several text messages, all of them from Clint Barton. Sometimes Scarlett forgot what a decent guy Clint could be, mostly because he was always getting her into trouble. Trouble just followed Clint, it wasn’t his fault. Well, much of the time it actually was his fault, but that was another story entirely.

Had there been something in social media about Tony’s shenanigans that night? Scarlett’s stomach turned as she pictured it. Sometimes she forgot that Tony was a media pariah and everything he did was splattered all over tabloid magazines and gossip websites. Part of her considered flipping on her laptop to check and see what the hell had happened now but she completely resisted. She didn’t want to know.

If Tony’s story hadn’t been the truth then she just didn’t want to know.

She had never been one to accept lies but if Tony had lied straight to her face she wasn’t sure how to deal with the emotional fallout. This was definitely not her strong suit. Give her blood, gunfire, computers, firewalls, tactical invasions, any of that over this romance nonsense. This was not some soap opera this was her life and she had worked very hard to keep from becoming an emotional wreck.

Scarlett ignored the text messages from Clint but seconds later another one popped up. Finally she decided she would have to at least read them before she deleted them. Maybe if she told him to go away then Natasha and Clint would both leave her alone for the night.

Much to her surprise the texts were not asking her any questions. On top of that, there was a missed call from Clint that she hadn’t noticed. Maybe he was the one who had left her a voicemail.

Hey Blackbird, you awake?

Scarlett laughed silently and shook her head. Why he insisted she had to have some kind of lame super hero nickname Scarlett didn’t know. She was who she was, not some woman hiding behind the anonymity of a pseudonym. Besides, this far in her career it was too late to change names, right?

I’ve got pizza with your name on it.

The text messages continued even though she hadn’t responded to them. Clint was good like that, but he was also becoming her source of pizza cravings. She decided in a quick second this was okay. There were worse things she could be reminded of. Pizza was pretty wonderful, after all.

I’m outside, if that wasn’t clear enough.

With pizza, I should’ve elaborated I guess.

As she read the last text message another popped up before she could turn off the phone or decide to reply.

It’s getting cold. You know how sad cold pizza is. L

Scarlett laughed and decided finally to go outside and at least talk to Clint. Tony was fine by himself for a little while and more importantly, there was pizza. Plus, she could probably use the distraction from her rotten day. Her shoulder didn’t bother her much at all now that she’d properly attended to it. Maybe she had thought too hard about it and her paranoia had caused her all that pain until she’d finally taken drastic measures to take samples of her blood. Stranger things had happened. Deciding that was indeed what had happened, Scarlett grabbed a long jacket out of the closet and wrapped it around herself before donning a scarf and casual shoes.

She’d changed into clean clothes instead of pajamas after her shower since she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. But the November air was chilly and as good as she was, Scarlett couldn’t keep the cold out for very long without the proper attire. Before she could head out of her penthouse she got another text from Clint that made her laugh out loud.

Okay, that was a lie. Pizza is delicious cold.

“Jarvis, keep an eye on Tony for me. Alert me if he stirs.” Scarlett got a quiet confirmation from Jarvis before leaving her penthouse, locking the door behind her. After a few steps she turned back around and grabbed a few paper plates and napkins before returning to the hallway.

Sure enough Clint Barton was waiting outside of Stark Tower holding a cardboard box with a plain pie in it, staring at his phone. He was surprised when the doors to Stark Tower actually opened and Scarlett came outside in her coat.

“Was an okay text too hard?” He joked but Scarlett could already hear sympathy in his voice. So the media had printed something about Tony. This wasn’t a surprise and she wouldn’t ask about it; at least that’s what she told herself. Clint was likely going to try to feel her out for how she was dealing with it or if she knew about it in the first place before touching on the subject. Scarlett would let him guess for the time being. For now, she wanted a slice of pizza, which somehow sounded even better than ice cream.

“Yes, it was.” Scarlett held up the napkins and plates and Clint chuckled. They sat down on the lengthy stairs near the far end, hidden in the shadows of the entryway. Somehow, Scarlett very much felt like a teenager, hiding after some dramatic fight with her boyfriend. Romantic problems all felt very juvenile to her, so how was she supposed to handle them with a clear, mature, level head?

“So I heard your first day at S.H.I.E.L.D. was sort of a nightmare.” Clint offered her a slice of pizza and Scarlett rolled her eyes.

“Someone made it sound far more dramatic than it was. I don’t get along with Captain Do-Good, so what’s the big deal?” Scarlett gratefully took the slice of cheesy goodness. “Besides, if he knew how I operated then it wouldn’t have gone so poorly.”

“I’ve never seen him that out of it after a mission, not since he first got confused by the changes to parachutes over the years. That was a pretty funny day…” Clint drifted off, amused by the memory of the incident. “Want to tell me your side of things?”

“What side? There’s no side. We went in to do a job and we did it.” Scarlett shrugged her good shoulder and then sighed when Clint’s gaze flitted toward the one she didn’t shrug.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Not anymore. I took good care of it when I got home.”

“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“Not in the least.”

“Fine, then tell me how on earth you managed to pick a fight with the nicest guy I have ever met.”

“Oh, come on, he is not that nice!”

“Blackbird, he sure is that nice. Honestly, he’s like the inventor of the moral compass.” Clint teased. “What did you do to provoke him?”

“What makes you think I did something?”

“Fine, if it wasn’t you then what was it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Would I have brought you middle of the night pizza if I didn’t?”

“I don’t know, it wouldn’t be the first time.” Scarlett laughed. After they joked for a few more minutes, Scarlett filled him in with detail about what happened that afternoon with Steve Rogers in Pennsylvania and the things Tony must have said about her to embarrass him. When Clint pried about what had happened with the woman in the portal who had looked like her and then the stranger that had been written as unidentified in their report after arriving at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, Scarlett told him about the secret rendezvous she’d had with the woman.

Clint wasn’t going to rat her out, Scarlett already knew him well enough to be aware of how worthy of trust he was. Besides, even if he did tell someone, that someone would be Natasha and Natasha would know that if Scarlett kept it a secret she had her reasons. Thankfully there were still a few people working with S.H.I.E.L.D. that she knew she could talk to freely without penalties or legal repercussions. What Scarlett didn’t mention was her distrust of S.H.I.E.L.D. and how uncomfortable she was in her new position.

No one needed to know that. Besides, she wasn’t aware of how deep S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance went when it came to her and Tony. She was going to make a point over the next few weeks to scrub her penthouse at the very least to make sure that no one was listening to her conversations or spying on her actions. She would take every precaution necessary to provide herself with a way out. In fact, she may even hack S.H.I.E.L.D. systems to see what their procedures were for bringing one of their own into custody if they crossed a line.

By the time she’d finished telling her tale they’d each finished two slices of pizza. Scarlett wasn’t very hungry anymore but instead sat holding her plate and napkin to make sure they wouldn’t fly away on the chilly, windy night in Manhattan.

“Sounds like it wasn’t the first day you were hoping for.”

“I wasn’t hoping for anything.”

“Come on, you have to be kind of disappointed that Cap thinks you’re slutty.” Clint laughed, biting his pizza. Scarlett practically snorted.

“People have thought much worse of me, trust me.”

“Yeah, but you had such fun working with him that day outside of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Tell me about it.” Scarlett sighed and then leaned back against the stone wall near the corner of the stairs of the Stark building. “Of course I was a little disappointed. But not because of what he thinks of me.” Scarlett didn’t elaborate. She didn’t feel the need to. She wasn’t disappointed by Captain America, she wasn’t even disappointed that he thought ill of her. No, Scarlett had hoped that working with S.H.I.E.L.D. would help her feel less out of place in her new life.

It hadn’t.

“So…”

“Why are you here, Clint?” Scarlett diverted the conversation away from things she was definitely not going to discuss. The Avenger was taken aback by the sudden accusation and actually stopped mid-bite of his third slice of pizza to think about it.

“What do you mean? I brought you pizza.”

“Which is very sweet, but it’s not why you’re here.” Scarlett knew there was something more to it. There had to be. People didn’t show up randomly in the middle of the night with comfort food for no reason. Everyone had an angle, nearly all the time. Scarlett was too tired to try and deduce on her own what it was, so she asked outright. Besides, Clint was an ally. If he had secrets to hide that was fine, she didn’t care, but when they involved her she wasn’t going to pussy foot around. “So, what is it?”

“Look this may be hard for you.”

“I’m a big girl, Clint, stop treating me with kid gloves.”

“Fine.” He smiled a little bit and then from beneath the pizza box pulled out a tabloid newspaper. On the cover of it was a picture of Tony with two women, locking lips with one and the other with her hands all over him. Scarlett felt the bitter taste of bile in the back of her throat, but not out of upset. Before she’d met Tony Stark she’d despised him and his reputation. She was beginning to remember what that felt like. Not that she didn’t love Tony, she most certainly did, but his reputation was gross. Gross!

“Oh, that.” Scarlett sighed. That must have been why Natasha had been calling her earlier.

“It’s all over the place. The internet, magazines, gossip rags. It’s kind of hard to avoid. I caught sight of it on my way home and called Nat.” Clint shrugged and then turned the magazine over. Much to his surprise Scarlett grabbed it from his hand and looked over the cover again. There were multiple pictures of the encounter after she unfolded it. From what she could tell, Tony had been honest in regards to what had transpired. Much to her surprise, Scarlett saw James Rhodes in some of those pictures outside of the same club. Maybe she’d ask Rhodey what happened just for confirmation. After all, it wasn’t like gossip magazines were known for their honesty.

“Pretty fast turnaround, considering this happened tonight.”

“You know how the American media is. They get their hands on a juicy story and it’s all over the place faster than you can tweet.” Clint smiled sympathetically, trying to judge whether or not Scarlett was upset. She didn’t seem to be. For some reason he expected something worse when he’d shown her that. Maybe she had already known. Surprise hadn’t registered in the least on her face. Or maybe worse, maybe it hadn’t been the first time this had happened and Clint just didn’t realize it. He was hoping it was the former and not the latter.

“You forget how bad it is here when you live in the third world most of your life.” Scarlett handed the paper back to him. “That still only kind of tells me why you’re here.”

“I wanted to give you a heads up in case you didn’t get a chance to see any of this before the morning.” Clint closed the pizza box at last, having his fill. He’d give some of it to his dog when he got home since he knew Scarlett would refuse the extras. “And if you already knew I wanted to make sure you were okay. I was going to send Nat over. She’s better at this than I am.”

“Pizza’s a pretty good move, Clint. You know Natasha would’ve probably taken me out to get drunk and get even.” Scarlett laughed a little bit. Maybe Clint didn’t realize just the type of duo Scarlett and Natasha were when they were together.

That was probably for the best.

“I’ll let Nat know that when she inevitably shows up to make sure I got to you.” Clint laughed, scratching his head but then looked to her seriously. “So, are you going to tell me what happened or…?”

“I already knew.” Scarlett looked out at the empty sidewalks of Manhattan. In a few weeks it would be cold enough for them to be covered in snow. She was hoping for a brutal winter. Why? Maybe she’d spent too many years in the desert. Or maybe she was hoping for another distraction.

“You seem pretty calm for a woman scorned.”

“It’s not what it looks like.” Scarlett knew Tony hadn’t lied to her. He’d been way too drunk to be that creative. It didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt that it had come to that but she wasn’t exactly going to sit and cry about it either. She might beat the hell out of something, but crying over Tony Stark relapsing into old habits for a night wasn’t worth crying over. He was a good man, and she knew that, this didn’t make her doubt him. It was disappointing, but it had happened and all she could do was deal with it and move on.

“You’re not just saying that...”

“Oh, trust me, this building would be on fire if it was.” Scarlett scoffed and rolled her eyes. She wasn’t lying, exactly. She would have at least gotten her stuff out first. “I’m okay, Clint.”

“You know you’re not alone anymore, right?” Clint looked over to her knowingly, almost interrupting her. Scarlett cocked an eyebrow in surprise. “That was the hardest thing for me when I was transitioning. And for Nat, too. You’re not alone anymore.”

“I don’t need a lecture.”

“I’m not lecturing you. I’m just letting you know that if anything happens you don’t have to be so damn stoic. You can relax a little now. Hurt if you’re hurt. It’s normal.”

“I don’t really feel like relaxing, not yet.” Scarlett thought that would be giving up. Honestly, she wasn’t sure she would ever feel like she wasn’t truly alone. Alone was how she survived. The entire notion seemed anything but normal. Then again, Scarlett hadn’t experienced normal in years.

“It’s not. It’s just different. If anything happens to you, Nat and I… well, we’ve got your back. I know you two have known each other for a long time and well, you were never exactly good at friendship. But this is probably the longest running friendship she has.”

“That’s a little sad.”

“Tell me it’s not the same for you.”

“…Touché.”

“Just know we’re here for you. Even if you don’t want us to be.” Sometimes Clint came off as a lovable dork. Even if he didn’t mean to and even if he wasn’t, sometimes he didn’t think things through before he acted or spoke on them and it was mostly endearing. In this moment he was surprisingly touching. Scarlett wondered if she could trust those words. What if S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed? What if they turned out to be the evil seed of a company that MedCo had become so quickly? Would Natasha and Clint still be there to help her through the wreckage if it came to that? If they had to go on the run and survive under the radar for the rest of their days would they do it together?

Scarlett wasn’t sure that was possible, but Clint spoke with such sincerity she was inclined to believe him. No, it didn’t mean Scarlett would trust that either of them were there for her, at least not now, but she was touched by the notion that they could be.

“I’m uncomfortable with this conversation.” Scarlett finally broke the tense silence between them. Maybe it wasn’t that she didn’t get emotional over these sorts of things but rather that she preferred not to. She didn’t know how to deal with this kind of stress, this kind of hurt. And it did hurt, even if she ignored it. It was swallowed down deep, hidden under nerves and stubborn integrity, buried with the pain in her shoulder, surely turning into a horrible ulcer of some form.

“It’s fine, we can talk about something else.” Clint chuckled. He knew all too well what Scarlett was going through even if she couldn’t believe it was the truth. Everything was changing around her and Scarlett couldn’t figure out how to change with it. He thought that she was doing a decent job of keeping herself together for now. She hadn’t become an alcoholic or a drug addict and that was already a pretty good sign. “Do you like the name Blackbird? You didn’t yell at me when I used it a few times.”

“It’s a little too Paul McCartney for what we do.” Scarlett laughed at long last, grateful to be off of disconcerting topics. Even though she had objected to the notion of being comforted by someone who claimed to be a friend, she was grateful for the company. Being alone left her to her thoughts and her thoughts were becoming seriously masochistic.

“Paul McCartney? Come on! That’s where your head went?” Clint chuckled, swatting the pizza box next to him. “I was thinking it was mysterious, yet sinister, and a little sexy. It fit!”

“That song is about human rights, you know. I don’t think it’s best fit for me.”

“But I wasn’t talking about the song.”

“Well, it’s all I can think of now, so I’m sorry but it’s voted out. I don’t want a stupid nickname anyway Hawkeye. Or is it Ronin today? Wasn’t there another one…”

“Hawkeye. For now, it’s always Hawkeye.” He held his hands up in objection. “What about the Scorpion?”

“Do you just sit around thinking of these things in your spare time?”

“Do you like it or not?”

“Do I look like I listen to Rock You Like a Hurricane?”

“Why is everything a music reference with you?” Clint argued.

“Because I like music. It’s the one thing I’ve held onto over the years. But I veto. No Scorpion.”

“Come on, that’s a good one. You’re throwing out all the good ones! One day there’s only going to be cruddy ones left and you’re going to be sad about it.” Clint said with a pout.

“If I was the Scorpion I would have to make Mortal Kombat references constantly! That sounds exhausting.” Scarlett argued logically but Clint burst into laughter. After composing himself he continued.

“Fine. Night Shade.”

“That’s a good one!”

“Wait for it…” Clint knew there would be a catch. Scarlett didn’t want a nickname. He was determined to find one that would stick, at least between them.

“No, really.”

“Wait, you actually like that?” Clint was surprised, wondering if their little game was finally coming to an end.

“Calm down, Tim Burton, I’m not interested.” Scarlett rolled her eyes. The two sat on the front steps of Stark Tower, joking for the remainder of the night. Scarlett wasn’t sure what had actually possessed Clint to join her that evening, if it was concern or he had some other motive, or had even been coerced by Natasha. Whatever his reason she was glad that he was there. Eating pizza and joking with Clint seemed like a far better way to spend her night than obsessing over portals, other universes, potentially cheating boyfriends, and mental instability.