Age Ain't Nothin' But A Number

Clint finds the first grey hair two weeks after New York, staring into the mirror of a bathroom of a safehouse in Paris.

He remembers the day Phil started shaving his hair short – not too long after he recruited Clint out of a prison in Arizona.

Nice cut.

The older man hadn't smiled – they hadn't been at the smiling stage of their relationship at that point. My uncle made me promise never to affect a comb-over. He said it was a crime against hair.

It cramps in his chest now as he plants his hands either side of the basin. Harsh as the moment when Loki sucked his heart out through the staff – agonising pain that steals his breath, his will, his thought – and then it just hurts, like the moment he woke and realised what he'd done, what he'd become.

I feel old, said Phil after Mjolnir landed in New Mexico and Thor waded through S.H.I.E.L.D. agents like golden retriever through a field of black poppies. Dr. Selvig had taken 'Donald' away, and Phil had looked at the carnage left by one man who'd turned out to be his very own army and sighed. It's one thing to grow old. It's quite another thing to grow old gracefully.

And now Phil will never grow old, gracefully or not. And that's thanks to Clint.

It's only one grey hair.

He plucks it out.

They sit in front of the Eiffel Tower and people-watch, just for the fun of it.

No intel to gather, no habits to follow, no missions, no news, no contact – just a couple sitting together, her hand in his jacket pocket, his arm around her shoulder, casual and comfortable.

Ordinary.

As ordinary as two people fine-tuned in the delicate art of death and killing can be, anyway.

They're having a picnic day – cheese and baguette, a small spread of ham, sun-dried tomatoes, and cornichons. A small, casual thing which Clint organised because Natasha can cook but she doesn't have the faintest idea how to put a picnic together.

"Hill says there may be work in the next week. Organised crime groups have been offering money for any alien bodies and alien tech."

"I understand the tech, but the bodies? What are people going to do – mount it on the wall like a trophy?"

Natasha spreads crumbling cheese on a slice of baguette. "There's always biogenetic modification."

Clint looks away. They still don't know the full extent of the experiments done on her – Natasha's the only graduate of the Red Room who got out even vaguely close to sane – but they can guess.

In the ten years he's known Natasha, she hasn't aged. When she pushes herself she can remember fragments here and there – things that happened before her time, events that took place before he was born. They estimated she could be older than Phil, who had a couple of years on Clint, but that's just a guess. Her body renews, repairs, restores itself with a resilience that had the geneticists scratching their heads and reaching for the needles. They'd never seen the like – not until Cap was dug out of the ice.

The truth is that Natasha might someday grow grey hairs, but Clint probably won't be there to see it.

Later that afternoon, on the metro back to their safehouse, they slide into a space between a man with a pink tie and a woman whose upswept hair is still perfectly coiffed after a long day at the office. In the crowd of rush hour it's not a space made for two people. So they stand together, his front against her back, his arm around her waist, their hands sharing a handhold.

They've done this before on missions. Physical closeness, implying intimacy. They do it without thought, to the point where most of S.H.I.E.L.D. thinks they're fucking each other.

Most of S.H.I.E.L.D. is wrong.

The train sways and his arm instinctively tightens around her waist, pulling her back against him. The curve of her butt presses into his hips, and the line of the knife and sheath under her jacket burns against his ribcage.

He's hot and cold and sweaty-palmed and dry-mouthed all at once.

It's nothing you haven't done before.

He used to be better at this. Better at keeping his distance, at keeping the trust that stretches between them and always has since the day he let her get the jump on him, then offered her a job with S.H.I.E.L.D.

That's not your call to make. But there'd been that moment of complete and utter stillness – that split-second of shock. And he knew he'd made the right call.

But that was before.

Before Loki pulled his brain out of his body and sucked his heart and compassion and all the things that he'd slowly come to believe he was in spite of being a trained assassin, a cold-blooded murderer, and a vicious killer because Phil told him, reminded him every time he laid out the mission.

"You okay?"

He looks down at Natasha – her eyes, not her mouth – and her expression is questioning.

He smiles, bends his head to dab a kiss on her shoulder, like they really are lovers and not just pretending, and shakes his head. "Nothing."

His dreams gleam, sharp outlines of the street tinged in blue coronas. There's a pointed, malicious smile behind the eyes of the people he passes. It might be an ordinary street in an ordinary city, but for the people who turn to look at him as they pass him.

They're all dead.

Some are known – faces he studied for days, weeks, months, both with and without names. Some are strangers, vaguely familiar as thought once glimpsed and then never again.

Clint killed them. A city street's worth of people, and they just keep coming, an unending flow of dead—and the faces are becoming more familiar.

S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel: men and women who passed him in HQ corridors or on the helicarrier, who held down the enemy while he went in for the killing blow, who handed him his equipment, asked for his opinion on mission situations, served his lunch, and ran his paycheck.

People he worked with in the field, in the mission planning, colleagues, co-workers, friends.

Junior agents, senior agents...

Phil Coulson, smiling.

Out of all the people in this dream-city, Phil is the only one smiling.

It's not a nice smile.

He jerks into wakefulness in a cloudy and dim dawn. A cool breeze slides in the open window, chilling the damp sheets amidst the folds of the tossed blankets.

He sits up and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, breathing slow and deep in an attempt to calm down his heart. Just a nightmare. You've had them before.

Red in his ledger, blood on his hands.

Loki was right; there's nothing that can wash away that much blood.

It's silent in the apartment – he can't hear Nat moving around which probably means she's out. But, no, there's a shift on the couch—

Clint pauses, then reaches quietly for the weapon off the bedside table.

"I'd appreciate if you didn't shoot me." Maria Hill's voice floats in from the main room, and Clint exhales slowly, but keeps the weapon beside him as he pulls on a pair of sweats, then tucks the gun in the waistband of his sweats.

"How'd you get in?"

As he walks into the living space of the apartment, Hill gives him the look that says he's being stupid – the one she's perfected in the years she's been working with S.H.I.E.L.D. "Romanoff let me in when she went to get breakfast. How else?"

"Right." He regards her – in civvies rather than in uniform, but with a USB thumb drive on the coffee table between them. Business, not pleasure, presumably official. "What do you want?"

"To apologise for trying to kill you."

He snorts as he sits down in the sofa chair, sinking into the upholstery, old and well-worn. "Hill, I'd've been more worried if you hadn't tried to kill me."

"Most people would take offense to being shot at."

"And am I most people?"

Hill shrugs. "I like to keep my balances level."

"I was shooting back at you, so it's not like I was unarmed and helpless. Fine," he says. "I forgive you for shooting at me and telling the Council that I'd turned, and you forgive me for shooting at you and helping Loki infiltrate the helicarrier. Are we level?"

She looks at him for a long moment. It's the same look she gave him on the day they met, as though she measured him to an internal standard which he might or might not meet.

"I was doing my job when I shot at you. Natasha was doing hers when she stopped you. Phil was doing his when Loki stabbed him. This is what we do, Barton."

"And what I did? Whose job was that?"

"Loki's." Her eyes watch him, cool blue. "Is it that much worse than what you did before you joined S.H.I.E.L.D?"

"I killed," he reminds her. "I didn't betray."

"There's a difference between being a participant and an instrument. Which were you when you were mind-controlled?"

Clint reflects that Maria never did pull her punches. While he's thinking, she stands and regards him, fine wisps of hair drifting down from her ponytail.

"The memorial service for the operatives who died in the helicarrier attack is next Friday. Transmissions will go out to all S.H.I.E.L.D. Regional HQs, but it would be advisable if you were there in person."

"Will there be a lynch mob?"

"I can organize one if it makes you feel better." Now her irritation seeps through, and it gives Clint a small amount of satisfaction to have needled her to this point. "And if you finish with the pity party in the next week, I can also organize a psych evaluation to have you back on the roster by the time the mission on that USB drive goes green."

There's a second where Clint thinks he's misheard. It gives her time to reach the entryway.

"They'd let me back into the field?"

She pauses by the kitchen bench. "You're a needed asset."

"And it's that simple?"

"No. But you're never going to atone for what happened by hiding from it, so you might as well get back on the horse."

Red in my ledger.

Clint stares down at his hands, at the signs of age creeping up on him. It occurs to him that the woman watching him from across the room has faint creases at the corners of her eyes now, her features no longer the soft, round one of the girl whose eyes were too old for her face. She's grown into her authority, into her pain.

He's grown into his over the years. And this is just one more thing to which he has to adjust – another burden, another weight.

Growing old gracefully, says Phil in his head with a sigh. You should try it.

Hill is waiting for his response. Clint could let her wait. He chooses not to. "I'll think about it," is what he says.

And she nods, as though she expected nothing less and heads for the door. But as she's walking out the door, she pauses and turns back.

"Barton." The corridor window casts the morning's light on her features – and the brightness shows the tiredness in her features. "Nobody forgets. But most of us eventually forgive."

This time, she doesn't wait for an answer, but lets the door slip closed behind her.

Clint listens to her bootsteps echo all the way down the stairs.

Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life.
- Sophia Loren