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barnesnmrnoble · 5 years ago

Text

Lilacs

(Picture is mine.)

Main Masterlist - Clint Barton Masterlist

The soft purple of the lilacs contrasted nicely against the dark colors of his casket. He always did love the smell of lilacs, they reminded him of her.

Word Count: 4655

Warnings: angst, fluff, character death, description of injuries

A/n: I’m throwing y’all into the deep end and starting this with some angst, so have fun! Anyways, I hope you all enjoy! If you do, leave a like and a reblog or comment! I’d love to hear what you think and honestly I need the validation.

Read on AO3!

The soft purple of the lilacs contrasted nicely against the dark colors of his casket. He always did love the smell of lilacs, reminded him of her, of the perfume she always wore.

The sounds of her heels clicking against the floor were muted by the carpet on the aisle way, but it did little to mute her heart wrenching sobs.

She missed him.

She dropped to her knees once she stood before the wooden casket and gently wiped her tears away. She missed feeling the callouses on the pads of his fingers as the swiped at her tears. She missed the sweet words he whispered to ease what burdens she was carrying. “It’s alright, sugar. I’m here, okay?”

She missed the raspiness of his voice in the mornings when he rolled to tell her good morning and assaulted her nose with his terrible morning breath. She missed how the bad things and the silly things and even the scary things made her smile because it was him that did it.

She missed him.

She was angry at the world. At the fact that she couldn’t hold his face between her hands anymore, that she couldn’t touch him and feel his skin, his heartbeat, the steady rise and fall of his chest as they fell asleep together, a tangled mess of limbs beneath the sheets of their bed. She was angry at the fact that she couldn’t see him anymore, couldn’t open the casket to say goodbye to his face because they’d never found his body.

She was angry at the world.

She remembered the day her world caved in, crushed her until she couldn’t breath, then left her alone. She remembers it like it was yesterday, even if it had been a year ago.

She heard the nearly silent swish from behind her and let the fletching glide past her ear, resisting the urge to shiver at its touch. An unmatched show of trust that he would never miss, and that no matter where she was she would know he had her back. Once the arrow had lodged itself in the chest of a measly enemy soldier, she turned her head to her left and gave a mischievous wink for him. She heard his deep chuckle through the comms and behind it was the sound of his arrowheads rotating and switching. She loved that sound.

She didn’t love the sounds of him struggling, a rustling through the comms as he tried to fight against the restraints of agents taking him away. She didn’t love the muffled shouts to reach his team, or the clanging of his quiver being thrown to floor. Her feet took off at a dead sprint, following the path they’d taken with him. She slammed through doors, emptying her clip into any agent that came into her vision. But tunnel vision affected everyone, including highly trained avengers, and she missed a few in her peripherals, a mistake that would cost her everything.

She felt her skin tear underneath the sharp blade of a knife, it stung but it was just across her shoulder so she soldiered on. But the bullet that lodged itself into her thigh stopped her for good. She watched in horror as she was stuck in place, watching him be taken away, following his scared eyes as they rounded a corner and she lost him.

She screamed his name, screamed for the team, and screamed in pain. She screamed until her throat was worn and she could barely make the sounds of sobs. When heavy feet clattered up behind her, she screamed for them to find him, told them where they’d taken him. They left in a flurry, shouting orders that didn’t reach her ears.

She hissed in pain when strong fingers pressed down onto the hole in her leg, soaking up the blood with a cloth she didn’t know the origin of. They grabbed her arm, settling it around their waist and holding her weight so she could walk.

She could hear the furious shouting of her teammates as the slammed against whatever barrier was between them and saving him. But his voice broke out above everything else. “Sweetheart, I love you.”

Bang.

One shot, one life taken. Her sobs turned into painful wails, cries that it couldn’t be happening, cries of his name because it wasn’t real. It was just a dream, right?

She doesn’t think she’s stopped crying since that day. She cries when she sees the arrows Steve had collected from the hallway where they’d thrown them. One sits in a shadow box frame on the mantle above her fireplace, his favorite place to sit with her in his arms, where’d he relish in the fact that even in his crazy life he had a girl that made him less crazy. It was his favorite arrow in the frame, one he never wanted to use but always had on him. The arrow tip a bright and shining silver, and the fletching a muted purple, like the lilacs.

But still, she had a job to do. So everyday, no matter the pain she rolled from her bed and got to work. She made herself breakfast, letting her hands move in the routine they always did, each movement was a chore, but her body did it anyways. She skipped past the coffee pot, hadn’t been able to touch the drink since he’d died. She tried once, hoping that it would be a moment in her day in memory of him and his absolute love and need for his coffee but she just ended up sick knowing it only reminded her of him and what had happened that day. She never tried again.

She mindlessly walked to the training area, wrapped her hands and punched against the bag until she had nothing left in her and all but collapsed to the ground in a fit of tears. She’d let her tears flow freely until there was nothing left and her legs fell asleep, pins and needles raging all the way up to her knees. Then she’d cut away the wrapping on her hands, sweat drenched and withering away with the moisture. She’d walk back to her room, and let the scalding hot water of her shower wash away what it could of her pain. It wasn’t much.

The rest of the day would be spent doing her paperwork, and filing reports that needed to be done. Busywork until the next mission, until she disassociated from the pain and focused it on those who deserved it, those who made the world such a shitty place, those that made her world bleak. Today wasn’t much different from everyday. The Irish lilt of Friday’s voice sounded through her room, mission briefing in 10 minutes, suit up.

She swings low at the man attacking her, swipes his feet out from underneath him and jams her knife behind his kneecap. It hurts like a bitch she knows, and the man’s howl of pain confirms she did it well. She’d realized a few missions ago that killing them didn’t relieve the ache in her chest or fill the whole in her heart but making them suffer like they had made her do, letting them curl into themselves from the pain of her strikes washed away her pain more than any shower ever did.

Another wave of them are heading towards her, it’s probably more than she can handle by herself but she doesn’t care, she still wants them to feel the pain. She’s taking care of one of them, almost has him to the ground and misses the one coming at her from behind. She delivers a final slam of her fist to the jaw of the soldier in front and he drops like a sack of potatoes but she doesn’t miss the sounds of the one behind her dropping to the floor as well, groaning and writhing in pain. The glint of a metal arm slides into view and he smiles, tells her he has her back and to give ‘em hell.

She gives a half hearted smile and surges forward. She grasps the handle of a knife holstered at her back, and in one fluid motion sends it flying down the hallway to root itself in the soft spot between armour plates of an incoming. She runs past door after door of housing cells, most of them empty but a few house victims, all of them curled away from the noise and the terror outside their thick metal doors. She knows she should go back to them, help them escape but she has to finish clearing the way , ridding the halls of the soldiers that keep them here.

When the wave starts to clear, and her selection of weapons has started to thin out, her feet skid to a halt at the end of the hallway and her eyes widen at what she sees. She turns back to see the hall clear and Bucky making her way towards her but she waves him off tells him to get the civilians out because down the next hallway is the blinking timer of the soldier’s back up plan.

She has no idea how to disarm a bomb, doesn’t even pretend to try and knows Bucky isn’t exactly proficient at it either. It’s best to just clear out before the timer finishes it's daunting countdown. She yells into her earpiece for everyone to get out, they comply. She struggles with the locks, the complex tech needs fingerprints and pass codes and she isn’t a hacker. Bucky isn’t faring any better, hacking new age tech still isn’t something he is good at, they only have a minute and a half left and it takes them a minute at least to find their way out of the building’s maze.

And so they make the hardest decision they’ve ever faced.

Their teammates are yelling at them, screaming for them to get out before it’s too late but they keep saying there are civilians, if they could just get past these locks. But they can’t, they know they can’t and that timer is beeping ridiculously fast now, and they run. She can feel her stomach churning with the thought of leaving innocent lives behind to waste away in the heat of fire and pain but there isn’t anything she can do.

They swing open the last door when the timer finishes. They feel fire lick at their heels, and can barely stay on their feet with the rumbling beneath them. It eventually wins, leaving them on the ground and pieces of debris falling around them. They protect their heads and vital organs, let out a grunt when a decently sized piece of concrete covers the both of them. But it’s lifted quickly after, familiar hands reaching out to help them up from the ground, and she stands up, only to bend over and dry heave. Her stomach is still churning from leaving them behind, and they assure her that they can go back and scan for civilians. She just hopes they survived.

Tony has his suit scanning over the debris for weak spots, also scanning for heartbeats or any sign of life beneath the smoldering rubble. Her and Bucky are stuck on the jet getting checked over, they are both fine, other than being perturbed they can’t go out and help. It was their mess anyways. From what she can hear, Tony says he has only found one or two heat signatures, both lifeless beneath the rubble. It makes her heart clench, she knows if she just had more time she could’ve saved them, but she chose to run away. She was a coward and-- Bucky’s hand lands on her knee, bobbing up and down from her anxiety. He tells her there was nothing more they could do, and she can’t get to beat up about it. She doesn’t believe him.

“Steve! I’ve got a heartbeat!”

Her head shoots up fast enough to pop spots in her neck and give her spots in her vision. Maybe she wasn’t all fine. She watches Steve gracefully leap over piles of debris, narrowly avoiding the rebar that sticks out. They work in tandem to remove the concrete piled on top of the body. It takes a minute or two, there had been so much on top of the body, she was surprised they were still alive. She works herself up into a frenzy, her breath is erratic and her heart is pounding. Bucky is beside her trying to calm her down before she can make herself pass out, but it doesn’t work and her head lulls to the side, her eyes closed.He sets her down onto the bench they were sitting on, placing a parachute pack beneath her head before rushing out of the door.

At least she is calmer now.

Bucky’s feet mold to the odd shapes of broken concrete as he runs across it, Steve is calling for him, needing another set of arms to help pull the last piece of debris off the body. He nearly trips several times but manages to keep himself upright, and lands softly on the ground beside the team. His chest tightens when he can just make out what looks to be a leg stretching out from beneath, it’s almost so tight he can’t breathe. It takes the entire team to finally get the piece moved and the smaller pieces cleared away, but when they finally do, they freeze.

“Oh god.”

Steve is the first one to release his breath, but his shoulders are slumped, and heavy like he is carrying the ton of bricks that he was just hit with on his back. The disbelief in the air is palpable, so much so Bucky is sure its wrapping around everyone and squeezing the life out of them. It’s hard to move but they do it anyways, they need to do it.

Tony’s shaken voice cracks over the comms and calls for Bruce, he isn’t sure the best course of action now. His brain is short circuiting, its something he has only done a few times in his life, but he thinks this might be the worst. His heart is at his feet and his stomach is inching up his throat, and his feet are glued to the ground. It helps everyone once Bruce makes it out to them, he is barking orders and giving tasks. It helps break them from their haze, pulls their mind away from what is going on and gives them tangible tasks to do and to make them feel helpful. Steve and Nat run back to the jet to grab the backboard and other medical supplies, Bucky, Sam, and Thor are working on clearing out more concrete giving Bruce more space to work. And Tony drops down to his knees assisting Bruce in checking for unseen injuries, it takes him a few more prompts from Bruce before his fully back to himself, piecing together new ideas and finding the most efficient ways to get this done.

They all feel the guilt as Tony and Bruce carefully rolled the body over and confirmed what they already knew. His clothes are tattered and worn, it’s hard to tell what was from the building collapse and what was from whatever had happened to him before. Beyond that, his skin is marred, dry and cracked in some places, black and blue and purple bruises in others. He has a dark shiner underneath one of his eyes and a gash across an eyebrow, it’s mostly consistent with the situation and for him it’s relatively unscathed, he’s had much worse.

But when Tony reaches his legs, he nearly loses his lunch-- not that he ate anything more than a quick snack on his way back to the lab, but the metaphor stands. It surprises him a bit, that it made him react so strongly, he has seen much worse. Maybe it’s because seeing a four inch piece of rebar sticking out of your friend’s and teammates leg is a bit different than seeing it in the leg of an enemy.

Steve and Nat come thudding back over, the long backboard is thrust at Bruce and he calls for Steve to hand him the c collar as well. Nat is tossing Tony the bandages for his leg, he can hear Bruce saying they won’t be able to remove the metal bar until they get back to the compound so he needs to wrap it, keep it steady so no further damage is caused. He does, he can’t say it was the best bandage job he’d ever done, but it’ll function as it needs to.

They almost have him ready, Bruce just needs to bandage one more cut he hadn’t seen earlier and then they can take him to the jet but he’d run out of bandaging supplies and sends Nat back for more. She turns on quick feet but is nearly tackled by another body. She’d woken up, barely able to sit long enough for her vision to clear before she raced out of the jet, needing to feel helpful after what she’d done. Bucky extends his arm out and picks her up by the waist and spinning her around gracefully until her face is pressed into his chest and she can’t see what’s happening.

He is afraid of how far down the hole she’ll fall if she knew the love of her life had been in the building when it exploded. He doesn’t want to test the theory either.

She shoves against him trying to pull away, she needs to feel helpful, she needs to know she wasn’t a complete failure. But each time she shoves against the broad expanse of his chest he holds her tighter, he is so afraid of what she’ll feel. She continues her relentless shoving for a few moments longer before realizing Bucky isn’t going to let her go anytime soon. He relaxes his grip a little once she finally relents, but he should’ve known better than to ever let his guard down, he’s sure he’ll never learn. Her knee meets his groin in a quick movement he had no time to even react to and he falls unceremoniously to the ground. He’d get her back for that one day in the sparring ring.

When she sees what his embrace had been hiding her from, she wishes she’d never left. She’s positive that even after all the fighting and how hard her heart had been pounding before, its stopped all together now. She’s gone completely numb, lets the constricting of her chest take over and her legs give out beneath her. Bucky catches her before she falls and hurts herself, she doesn’t need any physical pain to amount on top of the devastating emotional pain she feels now. He’s got his arm back around her waist, pulling her back to his chest. She latches onto his arm, digging her nails into his skin but he doesn’t dare try and break her grip, no matter if it’s starting to break the skin. He knows, he knows that feeling and needing to have someone ground you to the present. And so he lets her dig her nails into his skin, and he holds her weight, keeps her close to his body to provide a comfort he knew she needed.

“Clint!” She wails out his name, and Bucky remembers the last time he heard her cry like this. It had been the day they lost Clint, the day she listened to him die, at least supposedly. He hated how broken she sounded then and now, he could only imagine what she was feeling and the agony of seeing the love of your life alive and in front of you when you thought for so long they were gone but not knowing how long it would stay that way. She buries her head back into his chest when they finally pick him up and get him to the jet.

She’d spend the entirety of the flight home sitting next to the bench in the middle where he was lying, combing her hands through his hair until it was no longer matted from his blood and soot. Nobody dared trying to part her away from his side, Bruce and Tony worked around her as best they could, and Bucky came over periodically to lay a hand on her shoulder and reassure her things would be okay. She’d always lean into his touch for a moment before returning her attention to Clint, brushing through his hair or taking the wet cloth Bucky had given her at one point to wipe away some of the blood on his face. He knew it wasn’t much, but it’d make her feel less useless.

When they landed, she grabbed onto his hand, burying the pain she felt at its limp, almost lifeless state, and walked with them step for step down to medical. She didn’t part from him when they did the checks, nor when they pulled the nasty piece of rebar from his thigh, or when they stitched him up. She wasn’t going to leave him, never again. She had already lost so much time with him, she wasn’t about to waste another moment. Steve and Bucky both came down a few times, handing her plates of food, and a couple times handing her fresh clothes and supplies to take a shower.

She berates herself when he wakes up and she isn’t there, she is the damn shower after Bucky ordered her to take a break and let the hot water help work out the kinks in her neck. She comes out of the bathroom absentmindedly toweling off her hair to get the last of the drops before they drop onto her shirt, and she hears his chuckle. It’s raspy, from deep in his chest, and it’s a sound she hasn’t heard in a year. It makes her heart skip a few beats and her breath catch, because she can finally tell herself he is alive, that its real and it isn’t a dream.

He is signing with Bucky, both smiling and laughing. He looks so happy, she wishes she could capture this moment and relieve it over and over again. She missed his thousand watt smile, his touch and-- she misses his touch and she realizes how silly it is that she hasn’t made a move to feel his touch. He doesn’t hear her as she approaches, she didn’t expect him to, he doesn’t have his hearing aids in. Everything in him softens when her thumb glides across his jaw, and he sees her for the first time in a year, a long long year. He doesn’t waste any time pulling her down to him and crashing her lips against his. It electric, perfect harmony are so long hearing only the discordant cacophony. She can’t help the smile that spreads across her lips, parting from him to rest her forehead against his. He can feel the cool mixture of both their tears on his cheeks and he can’t believe it’s real, and so he reassures himself, planting chaste kisses on every available inch of her face. Her lips, her forehead, her closed eyelids, the tears that trail down her cheeks, her nose, every part of her until they are both laughing watery laughs.

She questions it for a moment, lets her brain fall into a loop of overthinking and its bad she knows but she can’t help it, nor can she help the words that slip past her lips before she can tell herself the answer. “You’re alive? You’re real? Not just some cruel dream?” He decides words or signs are going to convey what he needs them to convey and so he relies on his actions. He grabs a hold of one of her hands, bringing it to her chest where she can feel his heart beating away, despite the beeping of the monitor next to him. He spends the moment watching her, memorizing her eyes and her smile, like it’s the first time all over again.

And then, he is trying sit up and she is trying to get him to stay down and rest but his is relentless, signing at her that he is fine and he just needs to sit up for a moment. She knows how stubborn he can get and knows she won’t win this fight so she backs away. He motions at Bucky --who she hadn’t even realized was still in the room, and he reaches into his back pocket and fishes for something, eventually pulling out a pair of Clint’s hearing aids and hands them to him. They have a silent conversation between them and then Bucky’s hand is the small of her back and he leads her away from the bed a bit.

Behind her, Clint is trying to get out of the bed and struggling and she is worried about him but Bucky is doing everything he can to keep her attention on him. He finally gets her attention and works fast because if Clint wasn’t bed ridden, oh he’d be dead. She gasps loudly when Bucky pulls a small black box from his other back pocket and bends down to one knee, revealing a beautiful ring. She gapes at him, and turns to Clint, who looks outright furious at Bucky.

She barely registers what’s happening before something shiny and metal is flying past her face. And she watches in horror as the bedpan from the cabinet is slamming into the side of Bucky’s head. He falls to the ground, laughing his heart out, rubbing his head and she still has no idea what’s going on. But he stands eventually, and levels a glare at Clint who only smirks. He is proud of what he did.

But then as quickly as it happened, the two of them act like nothing happened. Bucky grabs Clint’s arm and supports his weight as he tries to stand. She freaks out a little, her heart jumping around when he winces and stumbles, it’s still to early for him to be putting weight on that leg but damn it, he is going to do it. She is so paranoid about him hurting himself, and in her mind she lets herself slide so far to think she is going to lose him again and she should wrap him in bubble wrap and keep him away from the dangers of the world--

And then she comes back to reality, and time stops for a minute.

He managed to get down to one knee, he’s smiling like the cat that got the canary. He’s chuckling waiting ever so patiently for her to come back to him and his grin widens when she does. He reaches behind him and Bucky gives him the ring box and she only thinks it a bit weird that he is still here, but she doesn't care. She listens to every word that comes from his mouth, and it’s immediately tattooed on her heart.

“There is a lot in this life I could’ve regretted, and I did for a while. But I don’t think I understood what a regret was until I thought I lost the chance to ask you to become my forever. I’ve never regretted anything more than that and I don’t want to waste another minute of you not being my fiance, my wife. So, will you do me that honor? Will you become my wife, my forever?”

Her eyes were glossy, happy tears begging to be let past the barrier. She smiled brightly at him and couldn’t begin to fathom the emotions raging inside her, but the one she could pinpoint above the rest was the feeling of relief, that the world had righted itself again and she was going to spend her forever with him.

“Yes.”

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