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ICARUS (IN MY VEINS)

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Icarus is flying too close to the sun

And Icarus's life, it has only just begun

And this is how it feels to take a fall

Icarus is flying towards an early grave

~ "Icarus," Bastille

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1.

The twin graves are cleanly carved of sheer white stone, their edges smooth beneath Clint Barton's shaking hands. Eyes leaking, he lays a bundle of mismatched flowers between the headstones. He swallows a sob as he traces the engravings of their names (in his heart, they will always only be Mother and Father.)

When he tips his head back to the sky and looses a shriek – such an awful, barbaric sound – the sky is idyllic, blue and cloudless. The sun turns the edges of his vision red, red, red, and as more tears come (from the heat or his sorrow, and don't they both burn just the same?), he vows he'll catch the light someday, and maybe it doesn't make sense, but he's only an (orphaned) child, after all.

Clint screams until his throat is raw. As he turns away from the graves, he repeats his promise to himself (to rise and rise until he catches the light that laughs at his plight, that shines above such pitiable mortality,) a silent swear.

It is the quiet things that kill.

~x~X~x~

2.

Clint Barton longs for flight, dreams of inexplicably soaring above that which lies within (the barren soul that asks why he's still breathing when they're not.) One day, it's raining. An absent performer at a carnival hands him a bow and a quiver as if it's a challenge (like the sun above their graves.)

When Clint aims the arrow, his breath catching in his chest as he tenses and releases, it hits the target's center and strangers are cheering and maybe it's something like being airborne, this peculiar lightness inside of him.

Clint makes flawless shots again and again. After a while, strangers find it less impressive, and there's only the arrow and the target and a habit that would take seven lifetimes to break, so he doesn't try.

It's easier to bear pain, he thinks, when there's something to wound.

~x~X~x~

3.

Clint Barton shoots the hawk with lethal intent, but the arrow pierces the bird's wing instead of its heart, and when it falls to the earth below, screeching, it's still breathing shallowly (like Father in the split second after the accident, before the abyss overwhelmed him.) Clint binds the animal's wing, bringing it food before every nightfall. They sleep side by side, two forsaken predators in search of better prey, each with their own fractured pieces to mend.

The hawk heals, day by day. When it flies away at long last (not unlike his parents,) tears trickle down Clint's cheeks, but by the time he tastes salt, he's smiling.

To save a life is to extend a trembling hand, and to brush the surface of the sun.

~x~X~x~

4.

Serving S.H.I.E.L.D. is like flying in circles – an infinite orbit, keeping him ever faraway from the sunlight that haunts his troubled sleep (if his restless tossing about can even be called that.)

Once, on a particularly trying mission, he fires an arrow at a reckless assailant (his best arrow, one of the first Fury ever built for him,) and the shaft snaps in two upon piercing its target. Clint spends hours on end wide awake, fumbling with a repair kit, his eyes heavy as he struggles to reassemble this – his first and finest true weapon – but it is all in vain.

Clint buries the arrow's shattered pieces beside his parents' graves. Three broken things, he thinks, and as his heart thuds against his ribs, he looks at his shaking hands and amends, Four, because perhaps he is broken, too, and perhaps he cannot be reassembled, either.

The sun sets (like everything else,) and he wipes his eyes and leaves the graves behind.

~x~X~x~

5.

The Black Widow is an elegant specter, a cruel silence, the embodiment of bloodshed (as red as the sun in his eyes.) She is deception and seduction, passion and ice, and when he brings her to her knees, he expects her eyes to be empty – but they're glassy and wet, and no one ever told him that assassins could cry.

All Clint Barton sees in her eyes is the barren devastation of an unloved child.

Around them, Budapest is burning – a firecracker amidst a black night – the gilded, unearthly city reduced to ashes in their wake. Clint thinks of a poem he once read (before his tears smudged the ink, rendering the letters illegible.) So dawn goes down to day... Nothing gold can stay...

The assassin waits for the killing blow. It strikes Clint that she is beautiful, all scarlet curls and soft curves and bright eyes, and like all beautiful things, she is destined to burn, as well. She reminds him of the poem – elegant in simplicity, the piercing pain in her eyes all too acute. Foolish, defiant, he takes her hand (like his father used to,) whispering promises he can't keep as he leads her away from the flames.

As she slips from consciousness, her small, tired smile is like sunlight, and Clint could never regret anything that makes her lips do that (it isn't long before that smile enters his dreams.)

He thinks that maybe, she could reassemble him.

~x~X~x~

6.

The assassin has nightmares, night after night, and every time, she wakes with strangled screams, her fingernails buried in her palms, blood staining her porcelain skin. Clint locates bandages at unholy hours, binding her wounds while she shudders and shakes. He washes her red away.

One night, she grips his hand and breathes his name like it's a secret, and suddenly her lips are on his, and everything is sunlight as he kisses her back – softly at first, but quickly gathering his courage, his fingers tangled in her scarlet curls as buried hope becomes touch, as he pulls her closer in the dark.

In the morning, he's breathless and sweaty, and he's certain that this must be what flying feels like.

~x~X~x~

7.

One night, when they're skin against skin in the dark, he breathes against her lips, "I love you," and he waits and waits for a reply, but she merely gasps and chokes, wordless. When he traces her cheekbone with his thumb, trying in vain to comfort her (why does he always worry about someone else?), her skin is wet with sudden tears.

She tells him she's sorry, and it's like the sun burned out. He doesn't speak, but he holds her trembling body close, listening to the lullaby of her heartbeat and her breathing until sleep takes him away (and maybe he's crying, too.)

He wishes she would lie to him for one more night.

~x~X~x~

8.

He loses her, or maybe she was never his to love, or maybe he could not keep pace with her on such wounded, weary wings (he thinks, bitterly, that even the fallen hawk's were stronger.)

She vanishes in the middle of the night, leaving only the lingering scent of perfume and a note, the brevity of which will always torture him.

Dear Clint,

I'm not a good person, but you already knew that. I made a mistake. I don't expect you to forgive me.

Don't look for me,

Natasha

Clint does, of course, but she's volunteered for mission overseas, the details of which are classified. It will months before he sees her smile again (everything is dark.)

It's everything he should expect and everything that should not be, and it makes perfect sense but that only makes it worse. He's stronger and weaker at the same time; desolate in her absence, soaring in the memory of what they might have been. It's the hawk and the arrow and Budapest – and the things he wants are always the things that crumble to ashes in his palm – but wanting is a kind of broken faith, and he has always dreamed of flying upon these battered wings.

The object of desire is gone, but the desire goes on – the abandoned child's clumsy grasp at belonging – ringing in his head like the echo of a gong, its reverberations rattling him to the core, startling him awake in the dead of night (he thought he imagined a woman beside him.)

Nothing gold can stay, he thinks, and he almost laughs, but the sound dies on its way to his lips (lips that will always belong to her and no one else.)

~x~X~x~

9.

She never stops being sorry. He never stops wishing she weren't.

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10.

The assassin never loved the hawk.

She's his sunlight all the same, and when he flies too close, she burns away his broken wings.

~x~X~x~

Oh, you're in my veins, and I cannot get you out

Oh, you're all I taste, at night inside of my mouth

Oh, you run away, cause I am not what you found

Oh, you're in my veins, and I cannot get you out

~ "In My Veins," Andrew Belle

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A/N:Clint losing his parents in an accident and learning to shoot arrows at a carnival are both canon in the comics, though I took creative liberties. I know this because Google is a beautiful thing.

The cover image is from a user called Sheridan-J on deviantART.

I wrote this one-shot on my cell phone's Notepad app between 11 PM and 2 AM (then completed it this morning) because my brain always gets ideas at absurd hours, and all the symbolism of Clint as a hawk suddenly merged with the Greek myth of Icarus in my head (which has been on my mind a lot lately, though I hardly know why,) and I remembered the Bastille song, and everything sort of started writing itself. I don't work on my novel on weekends, so I managed to get away with scribbling this thing out before getting back to revisions, which remain my priority.

This is a companion story to "Seven Devils," another one-shot which explores the one-sided Clint/Natasha relationship from Natasha's perspective instead (via flashbacks as she flees from the Hulk in AVENGERS.) This one-shot also fits neatly into the fanon established by my longest Marvel story, "be my shield (five times we touched)", which chronicles the developing relationship between Natasha and Steve, beginning after AVENGERS and continuing beyond THE WINTER SOLDIER (it also explores Natasha's past relationship with Bucky because I couldn't resist.)

Please review this, if you don't mind – and if you liked it, maybe read the interconnected other stories? Just a thought. ;) Regardless, thank you for reading!