He gets it.

That's the best part, and the worst—Loki gets it. I don't know how, and the spy in me wants desperately to know, but somehow our lives are open books to this man. It's the best part because the easiest way to get a lie past anybody is to hide it in truth.

It's the worst part because it is true.

I've told other people that, what I told him. That I have red in my ledger. It's what I told Fury when Clint arranged our first meeting, and I could see Clint nodding as I said it, proud of me for admitting it.

Loki knows I have nothing to be proud of.

I still don't know why I'm alive. Clint had no reason not to kill me, not really. He was the first man I'd run across who I couldn't seduce into seeing things my way. He has too much heart for that. I'll never forget his low laughter when I tried it.

"Do you ever go for the truth?"

I felt insulted because by this point my mark wouldn't usually be in the mood for questions, and irritated for caring enough to feel insulted. "I always get the truth," I replied coldly.

"I mean from yourself."

"Nobody deserves to know it."

"Not even you?"

Three words broke me. And then I was crying—and I don't cry, not off-duty crying, anyway—and struggling to keep it silent, take my control back. He looked the other way and pushed his cocktail napkin closer to me, and I thought that this man was either the stupidest person I'd ever met or the best.

Loki knows all of that, too.

And it's from Clint himself that he knows. Surprising how much it hurt, hearing my crimes recited back to me, even though I knew to expect it. Coulson told me at the beginning of all this: Barton had been compromised, he'd said, and I knew you couldn't get one of us without getting us both. It was none the less of a betrayal. And none the worse than any of the betrayals I've inflicted on others.

When I engaged Clint as an enemy, it wasn't with any intention of saving him, not in the way some people think of saving. Saving as a way to make things easier. I can imagine no form of penance more crushing than simply waking up and facing yourself. Stark knows, I think. Underneath all his bravado, he knows what it's like not to be proud of your past. Banner knows. Even Thor—I've seen the look in his eyes when we talk about his brother.

But sometimes it's better to get hit really hard in the head—figuratively or literally—and live with the consequences than to be happily deceived for the rest of your life. It's hard to explain. Unless it's happened to you, maybe you can't know. Maybe that's why Loki doesn't get that part.

We all dance around each other, trying to be on our best game, be a team, see each other as the heroes we can't see ourselves to be. Not even Rogers, "greatest generation" though he may be, thinks he's good enough to make the cut.

Loki gets that. But that's as far as he goes, reveling in knowing we're all a bunch of screw-ups wondering how on earth this is going to work. He stops at the failures.

Clint gets the failures, gets it when I tell him about the red in my ledger that he already knew about, but he forgives it all because he's been there himself, and the red that stands out most boldly to him is his own. And where Loki sees us on the brink of dissolution, Clint sees the red in our ledgers, covering them, as the strongest bond we have. His heart, his honesty, made possible something that I wouldn't have ever even had on my radar.

Because this whole honesty-in-the-face-of-yourself thing?

I get it, now, too.

It's all we've got.