Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The shrinks get a lot of details about his time under Loki’s thumb, because he’s well aware that he won’t be allowed back in the field without their approval, which won’t be granted if they think he’s holding back—or compromised.

He’s good at giving them the right answers, the misleading intel that will pass their tests (even, sometimes, by making things sound worse than they actually were).

It’s only with Natasha that he lets out the really important details, trusting her not to pass them along—and even then, he doesn’t tell her everything (not that she’d expect him to).

The shrinks know that Clint handed over intel as fast as Loki asked for it, that his brain was an open book whenever Loki wanted a peek.

To Natasha, he’s confessed that he’d been thrilled to share his knowledge and expertise where they could be truly useful, even aware that ‘useful’ meant helping Loki take over the world. And that after Loki was done with the useful intel, he’d moved on to questions about Clint’s family, seemingly at random. That Clint had been just as happy to supply the details: where they lived, where the kids went to school, how to bypass their defenses. The passcode to make Laura trust that Loki was her husband’s friend.

What he’s never told Natasha is that somehow, despite everything Loki made him do, despite all that Loki did to the world at large, Clint still trusts that he won’t go after his family… and he can’t tell her that because he can’t say exactly why.

The shrinks know that Clint bound Loki’s wounds, and he had to fill out a chart of every detail he could recall, the marks of blades and whips and burns.

Natasha knows that he’s upset about this, but he hasn’t told her why. An invasion of privacy, sure, she gets that (they already caught the guy, already sent him back to Asgard; what’s the point of putting his wounds on display?), but it’s more than that.

What he hasn’t yet dared to tell her (what he’s hoping she’ll work out on her own so he doesn’t have to) is that the wounds convinced him that Loki wasn’t here of his own free will. Someone tortured him, extensively, and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. Not SHIELD, not Fury, not any of the Avengers, not even Thor—and Clint’s not about to speak up (no, not even to his most trusted friend) because he’s walking a razor’s edge as it is, trying to convince them all that he’s back to normal and that none of his head (or heart, or loyalty) still belongs to Loki.

The shrinks know about his nightmares, of course, though he gives them only enough info to make them stop barking up that tree. His sleep is rarely pleasant, or lasting, but that’s something he’s dealt with before, and it’s one of the common side effects of trauma; it’ll pass. (Or, at least, get better with time. Somewhat.)

What he shares with Natasha goes a little deeper: that more than once a week he ends up sitting on his bed all night, just trying not to think about anything in particular, and half wishing he could drown his dreams in alcohol or pills. He doesn’t, and she’d be able to tell if he did; a few all-nighters are nothing compared to hangovers and lingering brain-fog.

She doesn’t know that sometimes, when he’s staring into the darkness and listening to the night tick away, he remembers watching Loki sleep. That the two times Loki had let himself sleep—just for half an hour, not even that—were the two times Clint got to see the expression behind the mask. And it was terrifying: a man caught in the grip of a nightmare he couldn’t escape even by waking up.

With the shrinks, he carefully avoids any hint of sympathies toward his erstwhile captor; he knows how quickly that could lead to a cell or even some creative reconditioning (and at this point he wouldn’t blame them).

With Natasha, he cracks his shell just a little bit more, discussing the way he’d felt while under Loki’s thrall. A helpless sense of devotion, akin to and yet stronger than he’d ever felt for her, or Laura, or the kids. That if Loki had asked it of him, he would have sacrificed wife and child and every last person on Earth to further his master’s plans.

What he doesn’t share is that sometimes, even now, he wonders where Loki is—not out of fear, but some residual care for his safety, like a father worried over his missing son.

While he was under thrall, every target lined up in his mind with no hesitation, no question that he was doing the right thing. The shrinks know that much.

Natasha knows that he’s not used to that kind of clarity—that his childhood was bad enough that he’s always struggled with issues of self-worth. That he joined SHIELD in part because he could turn his worries over to his handler and just follow orders, and that, for the most part, that’s worked out pretty well for his mental health. That he misses having a handler like Coulson, one he felt he could trust implicitly.

What he refuses to burden her with is the knowledge that Loki gave him something he’s yearned for his entire life: that sense of perfect purpose, no worries or cognitive dissonance, just losing himself in the task before him and letting someone else take the wheel. It was a high even Coulson couldn’t give him, and it’s hard, so hard, not to collapse under the weight of yearning for it again.

Eventually, when he’s scrubbed his psyche raw and handed over a substantial part of whatever he can find under the remnants, the shrinks agree that he’s probably not a threat to the world anymore, and they clear him to return to field work. His new handler isn’t anything like Coulson, but she’s good enough to point him at the right targets, and he tries to get back into the rhythm again, to lose himself in the missions.

He visits home a time or two, reassures Laura and the kids that he’s fine, he’s fine, it’s just the kind of thing you run into when you’re a secret agent who deals with the weird stuff that nobody else knows how to deal with. And between family and friends and teammates and coworkers, nobody really questions him anymore. He’s careful not to give them reason to.

It’s only with Natasha that he lets himself visibly grieve for what he’s lost—and he lets her imagine for herself, almost certainly incorrectly, the specifics of his grief.