An Unlikely Romance - The Avengers (Part 2)

Professional Atmosphere

When your adrenaline and emotions died down you were a bit more aware of the situation that you were in... and in addition to making you appreciate it more, it also made you start to question exactly what was going on. Adrenaline mixed with caution as you found yourself at a backroom table in the corner of a fairly upscale bar, eyes always wandering as you questioned every person around you. This scene - no matter how classy or respectful - didn't really line up with your impressions of your SHIELD babysitters.

Clint you could kind of get - he had basically been laid back the entire time you'd known him, minus the brief period after you first pissed off Natasha. Not that you held that aggression against him; apparently, he and Natasha were even closer than you would've guessed originally. Still, you remembered his early days, and the times that came after you befriended Natasha again. Taking shots in a high-end bar didn't seem at all out of character for him. Natasha, on the other hand...

You'd never really seen or heard her go against Fury in the slightest, even after he hinted at her background when you grew curious and persistent. She never seemed out of step with him before this... yet despite all that, something was scratching at your subconscious as you tipped back glass after glass with both her and Clint. Even if Fury believed your story, even if she herself believed it, she had never let her guard down before - not even around Clint, as best you could tell. Why would she have such interest now? Maybe she really believed you were her antithesis, proof that forgetting one's past didn't necessarily make you more forgiving, or make you appreciate life more... maybe...

But that didn't ease your uncertainties nearly as much as you wanted it to, and no matter how you tried to convince yourself, you couldn't fully let your guard down. Whether it was the subtle crackling noises of the diary pages in your pant leg or the ever-present eyes of the others on you even then, always glancing over at you when you least expected it, you couldn't quite put yourself at rest just yet.

Even as you were pulling up outside some place named "Club 616" you couldn't shake the hesitation and nervousness that still clung to you. Smiling at Clint as he opened your car door, throwing a playful smirk at Natasha as she took you arm-in-arm toward the club entrance, even confidently grinning at the bouncer as you somehow strolled past without being identified... none of it gave you any real confidence in what you were doing. Until the first drinks were poured and you three were alone at a corner table, you didn't feel like you were safe. Even now, after having been inside for almost an hour, you still felt like there was something crawling up your spine.

"You alright? You seem a little on edge. Drink more, it helps," Clint advised, shifting a little in his seat to lean closer to you. He downed his glass almost immediately after, as if trying to set a "good" example.

"In fairness, the last time the three of us went outside together, we were running from HYDRA," Natasha pointed out accurately, still lightly sipping her own glass.

"Do you guys always talk about stuff like that so freely in public? I mean, aren't you... secret agents or something?"

"That's why we come here," Clint said easily, gesturing to the bar and offering his hand. You tipped back the last of your drink and passed the empty glass to him to return.

"What, some kind of SHIELD run bar?"

Clint didn't answer before striding away toward the bar, but he did quirk an eyebrow in a way that seemed almost surprised. Natasha just smirked at the question for a moment, taking a long draft from her glass before speaking.

"Running a nightclub? Not really their expertise, even if we like to let our stress out sometimes," Natasha teased, allowing herself the slightest smirk as she turned her attention back to you. "You're overthinking things."

"In what way?"

"Remember what Fury and Clint told you about me?" Natasha said quietly, raising an eyebrow. You had a feeling what she was referring to, but didn't get a chance to respond before she continued.

"People know everything about my past. Pretty sure Fury still has anything on SHIELD locked out of your ability to read, but anyone else can look up everything SHIELD had on me from my personnel file. That includes just about everything about me - who I was, where I came from, what I've done... everything before and after I joined SHIELD. I released... well, I released everything I tried to keep secret before then. So you're overthinking things, because this bar doesn't need to be SHIELD to know everything about us at a glance. The whole world recognizes me on sight, same with Clint. We don't come here because they know who we are, we come here because they pretend not to."

You let yourself lean backwards in your seat as you tried to let Natasha's words sink in. You tried to imagine what that was like, having to live your entire life knowing everyone else around you probably recognized you on sight, and knew all of the little things that you'd tried to keep secret. You had known about that for a while, of course... but being out and about with other people in the real world made you realize how pervasive it must have been for her, how hard to escape the effects.

She couldn't even go out to the grocery store, to the mall, to the bar without being recognized and judged. Her situation was almost the exact opposite of your own, where not even you yourself knew the details of your past, and yet somehow... the result was shockingly similar. She was locked away from the world in her own way, in her own form of cage, shackled by judgements and impressions she had made before even entering the room.

"A toast to telling people to take their judgement and fuck off with it."

"Shit, I don't know what I missed, but I'll drink to that," Clint agreed, setting down your glass in front of you while taking a long draft from his own. The line of thought you were on was so troublesome you downed a full third of the glass before even realizing you were drinking.

"You'd drink to anything," Natasha teased, smirking wryly at Clint. He didn't bother to respond verbally, only winking as he tipped his glass back a little further and took an extra swig with his eyes locked to hers. Something seemed to pass between the two of them, but you weren't quite sure what it was.

You three spent the next several hours chatting and relaxing. You eased up on the drinking after the first couple hours and just sipped idly while alternating between pool, darts, or just sitting and enjoying the music. You had to admit one nice thing about having no memories was that you more or less never got bored... although sometimes you did have the strange feeling of wondering if you'd done something like this before. Maybe you were even in this bar before, standing where you are now, lining up the same shot...

The feeling of déjà vu that line of thought gave you was pretty disconcerting, and you did your best to put it out of your mind.

But what was bothering you more was that even after a few drinks and a lot of time spent with your friends (or whatever the three of you were), you were still just as nervous as the moment that you walked into the bar. You tried to tell yourself it was social anxiety, or that you were just too stressed out over your first real trip to really relax...

But if that was the case, why did it seem like the bartenders and other patrons were always staring at you? Not at Clint, barely at Natasha.

Just you.