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A Gift From: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scribble_myname
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: Burn With Me Tonight
A Gift For:krilymcc
Rating: T
Warnings: No archive warnings apply
Summary/Prompt Used: He demanded leverage. She gave it. She let him claim her and her child legally in the form of marriage and adoption papers. That was the bargainónot affection. Prompt: any kind of kid!fic/or Baby fic
Author's Note: Title from the song "Fire Meet Gasoline" by Sia; I picked the title when I still thought I had a chance in anything of getting this story further along in the storyline, so it doesn't fit as well as it could. Hope you like.
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"The Black Widow's gone dark," Coulson said quietly, and the words weren't anything Clint wanted to hear.
The Black Widow was serious business and his current target, the highest priority target on SHIELD's radar right now. She had initially shown up as one of several new graduates of a top secret Russian program, codenamed Black Widow. The initial four graduates had dwindled to one active agent, now dubbed by the program name. All were female. All were trained in assassination and espionage. All served officially through the KGB before three of them disappeared and all the kills went to Widow #4, a dangerous young woman who did more than make a name for herself across Europe as the unacknowledged black ops specialist Russia deployed with impunity.
Clint Barton, or Hawkeye, was SHIELD's top assassin and the only one Fury thought might be able to bring her down.
"You're just the right amount of crazy," the Director had told him, half pride and half chagrin in his tone.
Clint and his handler, Phil Coulson, had taken to haunting the same office together as they tracked her movements and threw together an operation based on providing healthy bait and a target Russia wouldn't ostensibly own. But their plan would only work if she was still active.
"Wasn't she just in Guatemala?" Clint asked, flipping back to their intel on her last known operation.
"With a stop by a few countries on the way back," Coulson answered calmly, folding his hands. "But she fell off the map somewhere in Lisbon two weeks ago and hasn't resurfaced as expected."
"Job take her longer?" Clint suggested. He wasn't ready to throw in the towel that she'd honestly gone dark. She was too valuable an asset for Russia to let her go and too good at what she did to stay dormant long.
"She's been showing up every two or three days," Coulson pointed out, "with an op done and in hand. At a week, I thought perhaps it was just a tricky job or an injury, but two weeks? We have to acknowledge that she's off the grid."
Clint frowned as he considered. She had been fairly predictable lately. He had been starting to wonder if the whole thing would be a walk in the park—or as much of one as one could get when going up against one of the top assassins in the world. He flipped back through a few pages and reports. She'd been fairly predictable... lately. He looked before that when her work was quieter. He recognized her handprints all over this job, that quiet assassination, this piece of impossible to gain intelligence, but she'd been invisible, a ghost, and without reputation.
"She was prepping to go freelance," he said suddenly.
Coulson looked up, surprised, then grimaced as he too connected the dots. Defecting would bring Russia down on her tail hard, but it wouldn't gain her any work unless she had credit for the missions she had already accomplished. It was quiet credit but the organizations with the deep pockets and teams of intelligence and analysis could put together that all the work had been done by one person, and it wouldn't take much for her to land jobs now if she defected.
"You don't go dark when you hang out a shingle," Coulson pointed out. His face showed he was putting together the jigsaw pieces of her profile and data into a working plan. "Do you think she was caught?"
Clint had gone dark when he hung out a shingle, but it wasn't because he was caught exactly. He'd found out there was a higher price to pay for answering to himself than he'd expected. He shrugged off memory before it could turn dark and bloody and shook his head. "Something happened. I'll need to follow her in."
"No." Coulson was protesting almost before the words were out of Clint's mouth. "The last time you did that—"
"I got her out," Clint answered, cutting him off. "Mockingbird fell off the grid, and I got her out. This is what I do, Coulson."
It wasn't, not entirely. He was a SHIELD asset and the best sniper they'd ever seen, but he had other talents than perching in high places and eliminating threats. He could do more than lead a team and hash out tactics. He could go dark and crawl through the dark underbelly of the world of intelligence and espionage where blood seeped out at the cracks and he could follow a Black Widow graduate into the darkness from where she'd disappeared.
"Cut me loose," he said, pressing his case with a look. This is my assignment. Fury trusted it to me. You trusted it to me.
Coulson finally agreed with a sigh. "Very well."
This hadn't been the plan.
Natasha Romanova moved quickly through the dark streets, a red-haired woman slipping through shadows, avoiding the sparse foot traffic and pools of light from yellow street lamps. She slid into the cramped, narrow doorway of one block apartment among many and carefully worked her way through the security she'd installed on this particular safehouse. It wasn't one of the KGB's or her former handlers. It was hers and hers alone. Even Yasha hadn't known of its existence.
This hadn't been the plan.
She stepped inside, and the room's air was stale and cold. Dust swirled up from the carpets at her noiseless steps. Natasha closed the door, reset the security, and pressed one hand to her abdomen as she quickly cased the safehouse with her eyes. Untouched. Safe still, for a little while at least.
"We're okay," she said quietly, almost as though she were talking to herself.
She was off the grid. She was safe. They were safe.
Natasha moved deeper into the safehouse. She carefully checked through the weapons caches, the food supplies, and the medical kits she'd packed in months ago. None of them reflected her current predicament, but all were at acceptable levels for a few weeks' stay. She made a quick mental list of whatever else she would need. She needed to hole up and stay safe, stay quiet and dark long enough to... To what? She had no easy way to resolve this.
For one brief moment, she allowed herself to wish for Yasha, then she knuckled down and did the necessary, as that is what the Black Widow did.
He followed her faint trail down carefully developed networks the woman had clearly spent some time cultivating. Hawkeye was not yet a known quantity in his chosen field, but he was known in the underworld as the one-time carnie, highly-skilled mercenary he'd trained for years to be. He could navigate this world too easily, looking to put together a team that included the best in their business.
He questioned sources, called in favors, and tracked down every Russian or female assassin he could locate. He paid special attention to the low-flying ghosts, whose trails faded off into mist. He followed where another name picked off close enough to where one left off until finally he was ducking down an alleyway in Brussels and pausing in sight of a secure safehouse. He knew what he was looking at, knew that it was no ordinary apartment, and moved in cautiously to case it. A quick evaluation of the sightlines, then he moved out again where he would be less suspicious, just one passerby among many.
The Black Widow was the best at what she did. He had no intention of letting her take him down.
Natasha froze suddenly in the middle of heating up dinner. She hadn't really wanted the food, not with her stomach churning and her dwindling supply of ginger, but she'd known she needed it and in the end, that was more than enough. Natasha did what she had to do.
She didn't know what brought her hackles up, but she forced herself to drop lightly below the line of the countertop, sacrificing speed for safety, and took cover while scrabbling for the knife she kept under her clothes. She'd stopped carrying the gun inside the safehouse, but that had clearly been a foolish mistake and Yasha would have broken her fingers for it were he still her trainer. Not now, though, not now when she was on the run and carrying.
The silence was too silent, too still. All her senses tingled with tense danger, but no matter how she strained, she heard nothing, not even the click of a gun. Why didn't they just blow the house up? It's what her handlers should do, and that thought stopped her. She stifled a shiver as she realized Russia hadn't come for her. Russia wouldn't have tried to minimize the collateral damage.
She held her knife at the ready and one arm protectively around her stomach as she tried to think of any way out of this. Her safe exit was past the bubbling pot of soup and out a window with insufficient cover. She'd be taking a risk and there was no way to guarantee safety.
"Who is there?" Natasha demanded in a low Dutch growl and waited. If one of the Western countries had come for her, perhaps there would be mercy long enough to make a difference. Oh, they'd kill her at the end of it, but she just needed a few months.
And there was her shooter, standing at a horrible angle for her to get off a shot if she even had a gun and worse for the knife in her hand. He had an arrow nocked on a modern version of an ancient weapon and studied her with hard eyes. He was staring at her stomach.
Natasha felt it churn in rebellion, but she gritted her teeth, clenched her jaw, and forced herself to hold still. "You kill innocents?" she asked, tilting her head in question, using what skills she had because otherwise, she was at his mercy. He'd cut off her exit with that bow and she'd die before she made it out.
"Stand up," he ordered roughly, also in Dutch.
It wasn't easy like it should have been: she wasn't graceful, she was pregnant, but she clambered to her feet, leaning hard on the counter and keeping the arm over her unborn child. She clenched her teeth to bite down on the anger burning in her mouth that this assassin had reached her and endangered the last part of Yasha she had. Natasha had no illusions. She expected to die in this fashion eventually, but she refused to let her child die as well.
"It's not her fault I'm her mother," she said quietly, voice low and soft. It as close as she would come to vulnerable. He would not believe more, for he would be a fool if he did.
He nodded sharply at her. "Lift your shirt a bit."
Natasha's anger burned a little brighter, but she obeyed, eyebrow lifted. He could see that it was real: she was pregnant.
He swore in English and it startled her.
She switched languages. "Will you kill me?"
"If I let you live, you'll try to kill me," he countered.
It was all negotiations. She knew then he would not kill her until he'd determined how to save her child. Not all Americans had compassion or cared about acceptable losses, but this one did. She kept her knife but considered how to sway him.
"If you protect my child," she said, "I will value your life above all but hers."
He studied her for a long moment, the intensity of his gaze seeing into her more deeply than she thought any other had. "You want me to not shoot." He shrugged dismissively, hands never wavering on the bow. "Anyone could promise that."
"I can't raise her," Natasha spat out. "I need to give her away."
He hesitated. "You'd hand her over to the first sniper trying to kill you?"
She glared at him. "I'd bargain for her life and mine." He could call anyone, now while she was still without options, call down the entire black ops community upon her head. "At least you don't want to kill her."
"Drop the knife."
She dropped it and kicked it toward his feet.
He lowered his bow a notch, just barely.
She caught her breath at where the arrow would strike her if he let it go.
"I will agree to protect her only if you give me a reason I can trust you," he said. "I won't just take on your cause with nothing to hold you."
It was a concession.
"Who are you?" she asked. "How do I know you can protect her?"
They locked stares long enough to weigh each other, assess. He had gotten the drop on her despite the security measures she put in place. He knew her reputation but it was doubtful whether he knew that she'd never had much choice in the matter. The child had been an accident, a piece of Yasha she wanted but that Russia would also want if they knew, so she could not let them know. She was desperate.
"Hawkeye," he said at last.
She furrowed her brow as the pieces came together. She'd heard of him, the archer who never missed. She hadn't thought he was international. "Who do you work for?"
"SHIELD."
Natasha made herself breathe. "They'll take her. They'll study her."
"They won't," he said quietly. "I won't let them."
She looked at him and she believed him.
Many thought of the Black Widow as a killing machine, the bloody hand of Russia's black ops, but Natasha excelled more than even that at espionage, ferreting the truth from anyone necessary and turning it to her own ends. She had made a grudging and untrusting ally, one she would have to handle cautiously.
He demanded leverage. She gave it. She let him claim her and her child legally in the form of marriage and adoption papers and let him remove all traces of her compromised safehouse from the trail he'd followed. She watched his work to evaluate him and determine whether he could indeed make good on his promise. He would do.
"Will you try to kill me?" he asked quietly when they settled in opposite beds in a tiny hotel room.
Natasha met his eyes because Americans cared about such things. "No." Her promise was as good as his.
He looked at her and she could not tell if he believed her.
Kate Bishop heard Lucky's whining before she even got her key in the lock, scraping it against the handle as she struggled under too many bags of groceries. "I'm coming!" she called through the door and muttered a prayer under her breath he didn't jump her when she got it open.
Of course, he did jump her and she groaned and played keepaway with the groceries. "Down, Lucky! You wonderful mangy mutt, you!"
Kate laughed as she shoved in the door and shoved it closed behind her with one worn combat boot. While she was looking forward to Clint getting back from who knows where, preferably sporting few to no new injuries, she wasn't actually looking forward to returning her neighbor's dog. Clint's frequent trips out of town (or the country, she wasn't blind) gave her plenty of bonding time with Lucky and she was starting to feel possessive of the enthusiastic mutt.
"You're hungry, aren't you?" She offloaded her bags on a counter and gave him a good petting. "Yeah. You know I love you. Yes, I do."
Lucky's entire body wagged along with his tail. She rubbed his ears affectionately and got up to fish out his dinner.
A knock on the door interrupted Lucky's munching. His ears perked and he turned his one good eye to the door and sniffed before bounding for it with excited barking.
And that would be Clint.
She clambered carefully over and around Lucky, barely keeping her balance with a dog constantly getting underfoot, then opened the door with an out-of-breath grin.
There was a woman standing behind Clint. A pregnant woman. A woman with a possessive hand around Clint's arm who watched with blatant interest as he greeted his canine canonball with a torrent of verbal affection and vigorous petting.
"Thanks for watching him, Kate." Clint grinned at her.
She nodded, still keeping her eye on the woman.
"This is Natasha. Natasha, this is Kate. She's my super helpful, wonderful neighbor."
"Your girlfriend?" Natasha prodded, a remarkably unjealous question from what Kate could tell.
But Kate and Clint shook their heads simultaneously.
"He could be my dad," she protested.
"Too good for me," Clint added at the same time.
Kate glared at him.
He shrugged and started to move away with Lucky. "Thanks. Lifesaver."
"Welcome." She watched as they crossed the hall, he undid his ridiculous number of locks, and they went into his apartment. She watched until the redheaded woman disappeared with him. "What was that about?" she demanded of the empty hallway.
Natasha could have stood to demand with her. It didn't make sense that he would have no one or care to put his life on hold for her, but perhaps Hawkeye was as buried in his work as field agents and operatives became when their skills were in high demand.
"Do you have anyone?" she asked, raising a brow, as he settled the dog down in his apartment and dropped his duffel on the living room floor.
Hawkeye looked up at her, seeming surprised. "I have you."
She balked and backed up. "The washroom?"
He gestured and she went.
Clint fielded the third silent message from Coulson and texted back simply, 'I'm bringing her in.'
A long pause.
'Fury will live up to his name.'
Clint couldn't decide whether to grin or grimace. He sent back, 'I cut her a deal. You'll see why.'
When she emerged from the bathroom, silent and radiating tension, he wordlessly handed her a glass of water.
She took it and drank. "Thank you." Her voice was cautious but even, disguising any hint of uncertainty.
"When we get to headquarters, hold your stomach."
Her look was unreadable, more unreadable than the one she'd walked out with when she was trying to hide weakness. Finally, she nodded.
It was time to go.
Natasha did as he said and covered her stomach gingerly with one arm when Clint helped her out of the car, and he could have sent up a prayer of thanks as agents did a double take and noticed that she was pregnant, that she had a reason for looking vulnerable and accepting the deal he had offered her. He walked her down to Medical, skipping straight past Holding, and Coulson met them at reception.
"Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Romanoff," he said, not offering his hand, merely nodding pleasantly.
Natasha nodded back and her grip tightened slightly on Clint's arm. He didn't know whether she'd chosen to play couple with him for the effect or because of something real, but it was working well enough that Coulson didn't glare at him for putting them all in this position in the first place.
She kept playing that part, going through her checkups and sharing her due date (in about four months) as if she'd always been their agent or his wife, and f—, his wife. Clint sat beside her, keeping the strain from his face as well as he could and playing the supporting, protective role because that's exactly what she'd bargained for.
Then she moved to Holding in a room he could watch her through the one-way glass where Coulson, Hill, then Fury debriefed her of more intel than SHIELD could have imagined being at their fingertips. They signed contracts guaranteeing the protections Clint had promised and guaranteeing her a place as agent when she came off maternity leave. It was hectic, it was long, and they had to break more than once due to doctor's orders, though Clint could tell that frustrated her enough to make her mouth form a hard line each time. Natasha was the Black Widow and she had more than enough endurance to not need coddling.
"The baby needs the break more than you do," he told her at the end of her lunch.
She nodded, acknowledging his words, but otherwise did not respond.
The afternoon passed slowly but it did, eventually, pass.
"I expect they've prepared your quarters," Fury commented in closing.
Clint disagreed. "She stays with me."
Natasha looked between them, mildly interested. It was certainly a test whether he could hold up his end of the bargain.
Fury stared at him for a long moment before finally agreeing. "Very well, Agent."
"Thank you, sir."
Coulson shook hands and left, doubtless to organize the crew who would be monitoring both of them offsite. It would do.
Natasha noticed the carefully divided team that followed them back and/or met them in the area of Clint's apartment building. She saw his gaze pick them out one by one—the homeless man across the street, the van down one side of the building, ostensibly outside the back of a Chinese restaurant, and the birdwatcher on a higher sidewalk under some trees—but he said nothing, and she deduced quickly they were SHIELD agents and he'd expected them.
It spiked a wave of irritation that he hadn't warned her, but she followed him up the stairs. Perhaps he merely assumed she'd expected them herself.
They were met by an overly cheerful Kate and a casserole.
"I know you can't cook," she informed Clint soundly, to his visible amusement, "and no one deserves to be inflicted with your idea of takeout on the first night. Trust me on this." She tossed this last to Natasha as if she wasn't the least intimidated by a quiet, stern stranger.
Either that spoke well of Clint or poorly of Kate. Natasha decided not to guess and thanked their neighbor politely for the food.
"Disparaging my taste in pizza," Clint muttered a complaint as he opened the door. "After all I've done for you!"
Kate rolled her eyes. "You need real food, call me," she told Natasha.
"I'll feed her. I'll feed her." He fended off Lucky and let Natasha safely past and into the apartment. "You want to go shopping? For groceries, I guess, and the baby?"
Natasha slipped into the guest bedroom he'd set her up in and shut the door. She didn't stop to listen to whatever his response might be, too busy heading to the bathroom to throw up—again.
She picked out furniture in a catalog and let Clint talk her into telling him where to set it up in the other guest room.
"You don't have to give her away," he pointed out. "I'll be here."
"You're an international assassin, Hawkeye," she replied coolly. "You have as many enemies as I do."
"Not quite," he muttered under his breath, low enough that she could pretend not to hear him over the sound of hammer and nails.
SHIELD had very definitive ideas of what was and was not safe for a woman to do in the intelligence and defense industry when pregnant. Field work was out of the question as even small skirmishes or nonlethal combat could result in miscarriages. She was welcome to use the gym and training facilities as she pleased, but only in pregnancy-safe exercises.
It grated on Natasha, but she put a smile on over her irritation and nodded agreeably because it got her some options to deal with her increasing restlessness. Clint noticed how much it bothered her and got her more to do with advising on missions related to the intel she'd brought with her and told her when she made a good impression with the higher-ups.
"I'm pretty sure Fury likes you. No, really," he insisted at her look of disbelief. "They're not going to kill you after she's born. They're going to put you in the field."
For the first time, Natasha considered whether she'd still want to go. She did really. A baby didn't change that she was the Black Widow and she needed to make herself useful if she wanted to stay alive and not imprisoned. A baby wasn't in the cards for her. Natasha needed to give her up to keep her safe and keep herself free to work.
If one could call that freedom at all.
Natasha grew more tense leading up to Clint's first weeklong mission out of the country since bringing her in. Her usual stiffness went brittle and the faintest flicker of a frown moved in permanently about the edges of her mouth. He tried at first to reassure her but gave it up quickly as a lost cause, choosing instead to enlist May, Carter, and Kate to befriend her.
"Can you just check in on her while I'm gone? I promised her she wouldn't have to take care of Lucky."
Kate just gave him that look. "She'd probably like to."
"Kate."
"I'm just saying, Barton, you've got it bad."
So maybe he did. He kept thinking about her on the mission, glad when he finally got into his perch that he could still clear everything out of his head to shoot. Natasha had become more than a distraction with the way she stared at him as if trying to figure him out, with her tentatively offered wry sense of humor, with the way she ran one finger along the crib as if trying to believe it was real. He wanted desperately to give her the life she'd never been allowed to have (and he could read between the lines as well as she could), but he wasn't sure she'd ever trust him enough to do it.
He took out the head of a foreign cartel and three other major players and heard Coulson call it clean in his comm. Then he got out of dodge.
He wasn't sure what to expect when he dragged himself back in after a too-long debrief and a four-hour stint in medical because they had thought they'd run his annual while they had him trapped. Coulson, traitor, hadn't helped at all, just advised him to be more thorough about getting his check-ups on time in the future.
What Clint hadn't expected was silence. At barely eight o'clock at night, he had somehow expected that Natasha would be up somewhere, doing something. He found her sprawled indelicately across the couch with Lucky passed out across her legs.
He simply stood there watching her for a long moment. Her red curls had gotten long enough to come down her arms and her face looked innocent in sleep, if still guarded, a restless line of worry between her brows. He knew he should move on, take a shower, and crash in his own bed but he didn't want to leave her there either.
"Tasha," he said softly.
Her eyes opened. She stared at him. He could see the muscles in the back of her hand clench and he wondered for a moment if she had a gun tucked behind her. Then the worry smoothed out and off her face and she sat up, gently shooing Lucky down off the couch. "You're back," she said simply.
She stood and stretched.
His gaze fell abruptly to her stomach. She was showing a little more obviously now, but she still wasn't very big. The doctor had said that was normal enough for a first pregnancy, but it still surprised him.
When he brought his eyes back up to her face, Natasha was staring at him speculatively as if deciding something. She stepped forward suddenly, closing the distance between them.
Clint forced himself not to step back or reach for his knife.
She stood on tiptoes and kissed him.
"Whoa! Tasha." He shoved her back by her arms. "What are you doing?"
She stared at him coolly. "I'm your wife, aren't I?"
He stared back. "Of convenience," he reminded her. "You don't have to— Just don't."
She swept him one contemptuous glance and disappeared into her bedroom.
Clint stood there for another few minutes, cursing. Lucky's head bumped up under his hand. He leaned down and rubbed the dog's neck absently. And what was he supposed to do with that?
Natasha stared at the soft pink blanket and the small pile of baby care supplies Clint had collected on his third shopping trip in as many weeks. He was going overboard, excessively doting on a child who hadn't even been born yet—while rejecting the child's mother, Natasha remembered a trifle bitterly.
"She's not yours," she said slowly. "Why are you doing this?"
Clint's head popped up from behind the remaining heap of grocery bags he was unpacking. His look was incredulous. "I'm going to pretend you just forgot and not be offended, but you do remember I adopted her?"
She stared at him for a long moment, then sighed. "Yes, I remember."
"Good." He watched her fingering the blanket until she gave him a look for noticing. He put up his hands and disappeared back in the bags.
Natasha yanked the blanket out viciously, as though it personally offended her, and took off for the nursery. She looked around at the rocking chair and the crib she'd picked out and set the blanket in the crib, still running her hands over its softness. Babies and nurseries and children weren't for people like the Black Widow.
She backed out and paused long enough to study Clint's frown as he checked his list to see if he'd missed something. He was growing attached to her child but not to her. She needed to do something to ensure her own safety when all of this was over. It would be over. Neither of them pretended he'd spared her for her own sake.
She sighed and went into her own bedroom to change. Perhaps Kate knew something about Clint she'd missed.
"The man can see through anything," Kate told her as she fed Lucky a scrap of the homemade pizza she had just pulled out of the oven. "He turned down his ex-wife looking for pity-sex and kept her up all night watching funny movies and talking until she felt better. I'm telling you, I'd probably want the sex, but then I'm not his ex." She trailed off with a shrug.
Natasha was almost beginning to regret her choice to milk the neighbor for details. Clearly, Kate knew far more than Natasha wanted to know. "His ex?"
"Bobbi. Brilliant, friendly, and better off his friend than his wife." Kate plunked down and handed Natasha a slice of pizza.
The smell made Natasha wrinkle her nose. "I'm sure it's wonderful, just..."
"Morning sickness."
It was easy enough to pretend to be friendly. She'd worked harder on a persona for less. "All day sickness," she shared openly.
"So is it Clint's?"
The question was innocent enough, but it drew Natasha up short and she found her mouth opened and shut once in surprise. "No. Yes." She frowned. "He's helping me."
Kate had pretended to be caught up in petting Lucky and suddenly Natasha realized she'd been maneuvered into letting down her guard enough to admit it. "He's like that, Clint. He'll help everyone, even people who end up biting him later, even after they've already bitten him."
Natasha looked at her again. Kate was protective of him. "I'm not going to bite him," she said, surprising herself with the admission. She had no need to prove anything here.
But Kate grinned. "Oh, don't rule it out. There's a reason Bobbi wanted the sex."
Natasha stayed in character and let herself blush. Inside, she started working the intel. So he liked helping people. She could work with that.
Upon reflection, it was obvious. Lucky could only see in one eye. Kate brought her taxes over to harrass Clint with, though neither seemed particularly talented at them and Natasha was obliged to shove them both over and give them a lesson on their own country's tax law. "I am Russian, and I know this," she snapped, and Clint just grinned at her while Kate arched an eyebrow expressively. Clint covered for his coworkers, more frequently than Natasha actually liked, and he had been the one to offer her protection in the first place. Of course, he liked helping people. He was almost as pathological about it as she was paranoid.
It was why she couldn't seem to incite any attraction in him. To him, she was a need, not a person to be taken advantage of. The only people she'd ever made care for her, for her own sake, had gotten something out of it, usually sexual. It was frustrating that she couldn't figure out what to give him that would keep his protection once the baby was born.
She started to find her own place at SHIELD, a bit. Few trusted her but Melinda May was willing to work out with her and teach her tai chi while Sharon Carter made sure she was eating enough (for two, Natasha ignored that part) and spent time introducing her to all the handlers using her intel on missions. Clint was there, but he treated her very professionally at work unless he was going with her to doctor appointments. She was only another two months out when he went undercover again—for two weeks.
Natasha woke up to the sound of Clint getting in. She recognized his heavy tread when he was tired and Lucky's welcoming whine before Clint hushed him and sent him back to bed.
She made herself lie there as she listened to the heavy thumps of bags or equipment hitting the floor and the water tinkling briefly on glass in the kitchen. She wanted to get up and see him for herself that he was okay. Knowing that there were those in SHIELD who were beginning to like her for her own sake, knowing there was a contract protecting her meant very little in light of everything. It was Clint who stood between her and a kill order and she didn't feel safe when he was in the line of fire.
Something deep inside her niggled that lies were all well and good directed at targets, but she wouldn't get very far if she lied to herself.
Slowly, quietly, Natasha slipped out of bed, gingerly allowing for her shifted center of gravity and the weight of a baby pressing against her kidneys. She stepped to the bedroom door and looked out into the dark living area. He hadn't turned on a light. She could just make out the outline of Clint leaning on the kitchen counter with both arms, head drooped wearily, still dressed in full tac gear. She glanced over the floor to identify a quiver, a bow, and a duffel bag, the sources of the earlier thumps.
"Clint," she called out softly.
He looked up, eyes tracking her unerringly in the darkness. She was reminded forcibly of his working handle.
She made herself approach slowly, as though he might spook at any second. She had the distinct feeling he was still riding adrenaline in order to be standing upright. She turned on the kitchen light over the stove and stopped a foot away to regard him.
His gaze ran over her like a heated, physical sensation, pausing on the swell of her stomach. He always stopped there. This time, he reached out and touched.
She felt a faint flutter that had little to do with her daughter's kicking. His hand was warm. The arm above it was cut in three places and bruised above the largest gash. She could see other small cuts elsewhere.
"You fell?" she asked, one finger tracing the pattern of bruising.
"Among other things." His tone held warm humor under the slur of exhaustion.
She made a small sound of discontent in the back of her throat and realized suddenly she was not playing a part. His vulnerability bothered her. "You need to rest," she said, covering the reaction and tugging him toward his bedroom.
He followed, perhaps too tired to protest.
She drew him toward the bed where he sank without a word. She knew where the first aid kit was and opened it on the bed without further ado.
"The cuts, they'll keep," he said softly but shrugged at her admonishing look.
He let her clean him up and bandage him, then stopped her. "I need a shower."
She stared at him, suddenly feeling tense sitting next to him on the bed. He was her husband, she remembered abruptly. She nodded and left him to it.
The next morning, Clint found her in the kitchen making coffee at the unholy hour of five a.m. She was standing in front of the stove, one hand over her stomach, a small smile on her face. He wondered if the baby was kicking, and it struck him with a sudden pang that she still wanted to give it up.
"Natasha."
She turned toward him and reached out to draw him closer, then placed his hand under hers.
The baby was kicking. She was kicking.
"Hey there," he said softly. He couldn't help the smile that spread across his face. He looked up at Natasha and found no displeasure at it.
"You're up early," she said simply, faint amusement in her eyes.
He'd gotten in late, very late, late enough that he would normally excuse himself for having forgotten painkillers, but now he was sore as the day after a sound beating and the pain had woken him up. "You're making coffee," he pointed out. "Not supposed to drink that."
She rolled her eyes and smiled as she poured a cup. "It's for you." Her eyes danced as she handed him the mug.
He accepted it with thanks and leaned back against the counter to drink. She was absolutely beautiful, and Clint realized he'd become comfortable with her presence around his apartment. It no longer felt like home without her.
"You're staring."
"Yeah. I am."
Natasha looked at him sharply. Her gaze softened into thoughtfulness. "Do you really intend to keep her?" she asked.
He froze. "That was the bargain," he said slowly, watching her carefully for her reaction. He didn't want to state the obvious, that he wanted more than just the bargain, too afraid she'd remind him that she hadn't offered affection.
But the sound she made was displeased. She turned around and wiped the counter around the coffee pot, clearly taking any excuse for something to do with her hands that didn't involve looking at him.
"What do you want?" Clint asked, still slowly, still very uncertain of where this was headed.
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter what I want. I don't get choices. People like the Black Widow don't get choices."
It was the most she'd ever said on any of this and he reeled with it for a moment before gently touching her shoulder to get her attention.
She jerked her head up to look at him. He rarely touched her without asking permission with a word or a gesture first.
"Do you want out?" he asked quietly. Out of their marriage of convenience, her contract with SHIELD. He didn't let himself think about the baby and where she would go if she took her daughter away.
But she shook her head and he felt like he could breathe again. She meant something to him, more than just another stray he'd dragged into SHIELD.
"I want..." Her words didn't come easily, and he wondered if she'd ever said something she wanted out loud. "I want to raise her. I want—" She leaned up suddenly and kissed him.
This time, he didn't push her away.
It was soft and it was brief, but he felt a little dizzy when she pulled back, blushing, and a hint of embarrassment in her eyes.
"I'm not playing you," she said at last when the tension had stretched far too long between them.
He hadn't thought of that. It gave him enough distance to clear his head for a moment and back up. "We can do that," he told her. "You're here now. I'm here. Kate's here. She's already offered to babysit when we're both working, and eventually there'll be school."
School. He was looking so far ahead and Natasha was still wondering if it was safe to look ahead at all.
But she smiled at him, even if it was weak, and nodded. "School."
They went into the next doctor appointment with Natasha's hand tucked in Clint's. This time, he knew the way she clung to him wasn't an act and the smile when he squeezed her hand was genuine.
Natasha had hated labor. She hated feeling out of control of her own body, and the first thing she planned on doing once the doctor finally let her was go to the SHIELD gym and reclaim her strength and grace and reflexes from pregnancy. In the meantime, she let Clint soothe her irritation by placing a small warm bundle in her arms whenever she got too snappish.
Natasha wasn't sure what to make of the sentimental feelings that washed over her when staring down at her daughter's button nose and blue eyes. The baby squirmed and flailed her arms until Natasha tucked her in gently to the soft pink blanket and hushed her with a Russian lullaby almost forgotten beneath the memories of her own childhood.
"We do have to name her eventually," Clint reminded her as he cleaned up after the diaper change. He was remarkably willing to do the things Kate had warned her most guys failed to.
"Merry," she said, bringing his head popping up in t hat way he had when surprised. She spelled it for him, lest he get the wrong idea. "Merry Barnes Barton."
He stared at her for a long moment, then grinned. She hadn't had to use his name and he'd probably be insufferable for weeks now that she had.
"Don't let it go to your head," she sniffed as she rocked Merry gently in her arms.
Clint washed his hands and came over to kiss the top of her head then Merry's. "Never," he whispered and wrapped his arms around her.
She let him.
scribble_mynameType Of Gift: Fic
Title: Burn With Me Tonight
A Gift For:
krilymccRating: T
Warnings: No archive warnings apply
Summary/Prompt Used: He demanded leverage. She gave it. She let him claim her and her child legally in the form of marriage and adoption papers. That was the bargainónot affection. Prompt: any kind of kid!fic/or Baby fic
Author's Note: Title from the song "Fire Meet Gasoline" by Sia; I picked the title when I still thought I had a chance in anything of getting this story further along in the storyline, so it doesn't fit as well as it could. Hope you like.
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ohmydarlingdearCHAPTER ONE
"The Black Widow's gone dark," Coulson said quietly, and the words weren't anything Clint wanted to hear.
The Black Widow was serious business and his current target, the highest priority target on SHIELD's radar right now. She had initially shown up as one of several new graduates of a top secret Russian program, codenamed Black Widow. The initial four graduates had dwindled to one active agent, now dubbed by the program name. All were female. All were trained in assassination and espionage. All served officially through the KGB before three of them disappeared and all the kills went to Widow #4, a dangerous young woman who did more than make a name for herself across Europe as the unacknowledged black ops specialist Russia deployed with impunity.
Clint Barton, or Hawkeye, was SHIELD's top assassin and the only one Fury thought might be able to bring her down.
"You're just the right amount of crazy," the Director had told him, half pride and half chagrin in his tone.
Clint and his handler, Phil Coulson, had taken to haunting the same office together as they tracked her movements and threw together an operation based on providing healthy bait and a target Russia wouldn't ostensibly own. But their plan would only work if she was still active.
"Wasn't she just in Guatemala?" Clint asked, flipping back to their intel on her last known operation.
"With a stop by a few countries on the way back," Coulson answered calmly, folding his hands. "But she fell off the map somewhere in Lisbon two weeks ago and hasn't resurfaced as expected."
"Job take her longer?" Clint suggested. He wasn't ready to throw in the towel that she'd honestly gone dark. She was too valuable an asset for Russia to let her go and too good at what she did to stay dormant long.
"She's been showing up every two or three days," Coulson pointed out, "with an op done and in hand. At a week, I thought perhaps it was just a tricky job or an injury, but two weeks? We have to acknowledge that she's off the grid."
Clint frowned as he considered. She had been fairly predictable lately. He had been starting to wonder if the whole thing would be a walk in the park—or as much of one as one could get when going up against one of the top assassins in the world. He flipped back through a few pages and reports. She'd been fairly predictable... lately. He looked before that when her work was quieter. He recognized her handprints all over this job, that quiet assassination, this piece of impossible to gain intelligence, but she'd been invisible, a ghost, and without reputation.
"She was prepping to go freelance," he said suddenly.
Coulson looked up, surprised, then grimaced as he too connected the dots. Defecting would bring Russia down on her tail hard, but it wouldn't gain her any work unless she had credit for the missions she had already accomplished. It was quiet credit but the organizations with the deep pockets and teams of intelligence and analysis could put together that all the work had been done by one person, and it wouldn't take much for her to land jobs now if she defected.
"You don't go dark when you hang out a shingle," Coulson pointed out. His face showed he was putting together the jigsaw pieces of her profile and data into a working plan. "Do you think she was caught?"
Clint had gone dark when he hung out a shingle, but it wasn't because he was caught exactly. He'd found out there was a higher price to pay for answering to himself than he'd expected. He shrugged off memory before it could turn dark and bloody and shook his head. "Something happened. I'll need to follow her in."
"No." Coulson was protesting almost before the words were out of Clint's mouth. "The last time you did that—"
"I got her out," Clint answered, cutting him off. "Mockingbird fell off the grid, and I got her out. This is what I do, Coulson."
It wasn't, not entirely. He was a SHIELD asset and the best sniper they'd ever seen, but he had other talents than perching in high places and eliminating threats. He could do more than lead a team and hash out tactics. He could go dark and crawl through the dark underbelly of the world of intelligence and espionage where blood seeped out at the cracks and he could follow a Black Widow graduate into the darkness from where she'd disappeared.
"Cut me loose," he said, pressing his case with a look. This is my assignment. Fury trusted it to me. You trusted it to me.
Coulson finally agreed with a sigh. "Very well."
This hadn't been the plan.
Natasha Romanova moved quickly through the dark streets, a red-haired woman slipping through shadows, avoiding the sparse foot traffic and pools of light from yellow street lamps. She slid into the cramped, narrow doorway of one block apartment among many and carefully worked her way through the security she'd installed on this particular safehouse. It wasn't one of the KGB's or her former handlers. It was hers and hers alone. Even Yasha hadn't known of its existence.
This hadn't been the plan.
She stepped inside, and the room's air was stale and cold. Dust swirled up from the carpets at her noiseless steps. Natasha closed the door, reset the security, and pressed one hand to her abdomen as she quickly cased the safehouse with her eyes. Untouched. Safe still, for a little while at least.
"We're okay," she said quietly, almost as though she were talking to herself.
She was off the grid. She was safe. They were safe.
Natasha moved deeper into the safehouse. She carefully checked through the weapons caches, the food supplies, and the medical kits she'd packed in months ago. None of them reflected her current predicament, but all were at acceptable levels for a few weeks' stay. She made a quick mental list of whatever else she would need. She needed to hole up and stay safe, stay quiet and dark long enough to... To what? She had no easy way to resolve this.
For one brief moment, she allowed herself to wish for Yasha, then she knuckled down and did the necessary, as that is what the Black Widow did.
He followed her faint trail down carefully developed networks the woman had clearly spent some time cultivating. Hawkeye was not yet a known quantity in his chosen field, but he was known in the underworld as the one-time carnie, highly-skilled mercenary he'd trained for years to be. He could navigate this world too easily, looking to put together a team that included the best in their business.
He questioned sources, called in favors, and tracked down every Russian or female assassin he could locate. He paid special attention to the low-flying ghosts, whose trails faded off into mist. He followed where another name picked off close enough to where one left off until finally he was ducking down an alleyway in Brussels and pausing in sight of a secure safehouse. He knew what he was looking at, knew that it was no ordinary apartment, and moved in cautiously to case it. A quick evaluation of the sightlines, then he moved out again where he would be less suspicious, just one passerby among many.
The Black Widow was the best at what she did. He had no intention of letting her take him down.
Natasha froze suddenly in the middle of heating up dinner. She hadn't really wanted the food, not with her stomach churning and her dwindling supply of ginger, but she'd known she needed it and in the end, that was more than enough. Natasha did what she had to do.
She didn't know what brought her hackles up, but she forced herself to drop lightly below the line of the countertop, sacrificing speed for safety, and took cover while scrabbling for the knife she kept under her clothes. She'd stopped carrying the gun inside the safehouse, but that had clearly been a foolish mistake and Yasha would have broken her fingers for it were he still her trainer. Not now, though, not now when she was on the run and carrying.
The silence was too silent, too still. All her senses tingled with tense danger, but no matter how she strained, she heard nothing, not even the click of a gun. Why didn't they just blow the house up? It's what her handlers should do, and that thought stopped her. She stifled a shiver as she realized Russia hadn't come for her. Russia wouldn't have tried to minimize the collateral damage.
She held her knife at the ready and one arm protectively around her stomach as she tried to think of any way out of this. Her safe exit was past the bubbling pot of soup and out a window with insufficient cover. She'd be taking a risk and there was no way to guarantee safety.
"Who is there?" Natasha demanded in a low Dutch growl and waited. If one of the Western countries had come for her, perhaps there would be mercy long enough to make a difference. Oh, they'd kill her at the end of it, but she just needed a few months.
And there was her shooter, standing at a horrible angle for her to get off a shot if she even had a gun and worse for the knife in her hand. He had an arrow nocked on a modern version of an ancient weapon and studied her with hard eyes. He was staring at her stomach.
Natasha felt it churn in rebellion, but she gritted her teeth, clenched her jaw, and forced herself to hold still. "You kill innocents?" she asked, tilting her head in question, using what skills she had because otherwise, she was at his mercy. He'd cut off her exit with that bow and she'd die before she made it out.
"Stand up," he ordered roughly, also in Dutch.
It wasn't easy like it should have been: she wasn't graceful, she was pregnant, but she clambered to her feet, leaning hard on the counter and keeping the arm over her unborn child. She clenched her teeth to bite down on the anger burning in her mouth that this assassin had reached her and endangered the last part of Yasha she had. Natasha had no illusions. She expected to die in this fashion eventually, but she refused to let her child die as well.
"It's not her fault I'm her mother," she said quietly, voice low and soft. It as close as she would come to vulnerable. He would not believe more, for he would be a fool if he did.
He nodded sharply at her. "Lift your shirt a bit."
Natasha's anger burned a little brighter, but she obeyed, eyebrow lifted. He could see that it was real: she was pregnant.
He swore in English and it startled her.
She switched languages. "Will you kill me?"
"If I let you live, you'll try to kill me," he countered.
It was all negotiations. She knew then he would not kill her until he'd determined how to save her child. Not all Americans had compassion or cared about acceptable losses, but this one did. She kept her knife but considered how to sway him.
"If you protect my child," she said, "I will value your life above all but hers."
He studied her for a long moment, the intensity of his gaze seeing into her more deeply than she thought any other had. "You want me to not shoot." He shrugged dismissively, hands never wavering on the bow. "Anyone could promise that."
"I can't raise her," Natasha spat out. "I need to give her away."
He hesitated. "You'd hand her over to the first sniper trying to kill you?"
She glared at him. "I'd bargain for her life and mine." He could call anyone, now while she was still without options, call down the entire black ops community upon her head. "At least you don't want to kill her."
"Drop the knife."
She dropped it and kicked it toward his feet.
He lowered his bow a notch, just barely.
She caught her breath at where the arrow would strike her if he let it go.
"I will agree to protect her only if you give me a reason I can trust you," he said. "I won't just take on your cause with nothing to hold you."
It was a concession.
"Who are you?" she asked. "How do I know you can protect her?"
They locked stares long enough to weigh each other, assess. He had gotten the drop on her despite the security measures she put in place. He knew her reputation but it was doubtful whether he knew that she'd never had much choice in the matter. The child had been an accident, a piece of Yasha she wanted but that Russia would also want if they knew, so she could not let them know. She was desperate.
"Hawkeye," he said at last.
She furrowed her brow as the pieces came together. She'd heard of him, the archer who never missed. She hadn't thought he was international. "Who do you work for?"
"SHIELD."
Natasha made herself breathe. "They'll take her. They'll study her."
"They won't," he said quietly. "I won't let them."
She looked at him and she believed him.
Many thought of the Black Widow as a killing machine, the bloody hand of Russia's black ops, but Natasha excelled more than even that at espionage, ferreting the truth from anyone necessary and turning it to her own ends. She had made a grudging and untrusting ally, one she would have to handle cautiously.
He demanded leverage. She gave it. She let him claim her and her child legally in the form of marriage and adoption papers and let him remove all traces of her compromised safehouse from the trail he'd followed. She watched his work to evaluate him and determine whether he could indeed make good on his promise. He would do.
"Will you try to kill me?" he asked quietly when they settled in opposite beds in a tiny hotel room.
Natasha met his eyes because Americans cared about such things. "No." Her promise was as good as his.
He looked at her and she could not tell if he believed her.
CHAPTER TWO
Kate Bishop heard Lucky's whining before she even got her key in the lock, scraping it against the handle as she struggled under too many bags of groceries. "I'm coming!" she called through the door and muttered a prayer under her breath he didn't jump her when she got it open.
Of course, he did jump her and she groaned and played keepaway with the groceries. "Down, Lucky! You wonderful mangy mutt, you!"
Kate laughed as she shoved in the door and shoved it closed behind her with one worn combat boot. While she was looking forward to Clint getting back from who knows where, preferably sporting few to no new injuries, she wasn't actually looking forward to returning her neighbor's dog. Clint's frequent trips out of town (or the country, she wasn't blind) gave her plenty of bonding time with Lucky and she was starting to feel possessive of the enthusiastic mutt.
"You're hungry, aren't you?" She offloaded her bags on a counter and gave him a good petting. "Yeah. You know I love you. Yes, I do."
Lucky's entire body wagged along with his tail. She rubbed his ears affectionately and got up to fish out his dinner.
A knock on the door interrupted Lucky's munching. His ears perked and he turned his one good eye to the door and sniffed before bounding for it with excited barking.
And that would be Clint.
She clambered carefully over and around Lucky, barely keeping her balance with a dog constantly getting underfoot, then opened the door with an out-of-breath grin.
There was a woman standing behind Clint. A pregnant woman. A woman with a possessive hand around Clint's arm who watched with blatant interest as he greeted his canine canonball with a torrent of verbal affection and vigorous petting.
"Thanks for watching him, Kate." Clint grinned at her.
She nodded, still keeping her eye on the woman.
"This is Natasha. Natasha, this is Kate. She's my super helpful, wonderful neighbor."
"Your girlfriend?" Natasha prodded, a remarkably unjealous question from what Kate could tell.
But Kate and Clint shook their heads simultaneously.
"He could be my dad," she protested.
"Too good for me," Clint added at the same time.
Kate glared at him.
He shrugged and started to move away with Lucky. "Thanks. Lifesaver."
"Welcome." She watched as they crossed the hall, he undid his ridiculous number of locks, and they went into his apartment. She watched until the redheaded woman disappeared with him. "What was that about?" she demanded of the empty hallway.
Natasha could have stood to demand with her. It didn't make sense that he would have no one or care to put his life on hold for her, but perhaps Hawkeye was as buried in his work as field agents and operatives became when their skills were in high demand.
"Do you have anyone?" she asked, raising a brow, as he settled the dog down in his apartment and dropped his duffel on the living room floor.
Hawkeye looked up at her, seeming surprised. "I have you."
She balked and backed up. "The washroom?"
He gestured and she went.
Clint fielded the third silent message from Coulson and texted back simply, 'I'm bringing her in.'
A long pause.
'Fury will live up to his name.'
Clint couldn't decide whether to grin or grimace. He sent back, 'I cut her a deal. You'll see why.'
When she emerged from the bathroom, silent and radiating tension, he wordlessly handed her a glass of water.
She took it and drank. "Thank you." Her voice was cautious but even, disguising any hint of uncertainty.
"When we get to headquarters, hold your stomach."
Her look was unreadable, more unreadable than the one she'd walked out with when she was trying to hide weakness. Finally, she nodded.
It was time to go.
Natasha did as he said and covered her stomach gingerly with one arm when Clint helped her out of the car, and he could have sent up a prayer of thanks as agents did a double take and noticed that she was pregnant, that she had a reason for looking vulnerable and accepting the deal he had offered her. He walked her down to Medical, skipping straight past Holding, and Coulson met them at reception.
"Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Romanoff," he said, not offering his hand, merely nodding pleasantly.
Natasha nodded back and her grip tightened slightly on Clint's arm. He didn't know whether she'd chosen to play couple with him for the effect or because of something real, but it was working well enough that Coulson didn't glare at him for putting them all in this position in the first place.
She kept playing that part, going through her checkups and sharing her due date (in about four months) as if she'd always been their agent or his wife, and f—, his wife. Clint sat beside her, keeping the strain from his face as well as he could and playing the supporting, protective role because that's exactly what she'd bargained for.
Then she moved to Holding in a room he could watch her through the one-way glass where Coulson, Hill, then Fury debriefed her of more intel than SHIELD could have imagined being at their fingertips. They signed contracts guaranteeing the protections Clint had promised and guaranteeing her a place as agent when she came off maternity leave. It was hectic, it was long, and they had to break more than once due to doctor's orders, though Clint could tell that frustrated her enough to make her mouth form a hard line each time. Natasha was the Black Widow and she had more than enough endurance to not need coddling.
"The baby needs the break more than you do," he told her at the end of her lunch.
She nodded, acknowledging his words, but otherwise did not respond.
The afternoon passed slowly but it did, eventually, pass.
"I expect they've prepared your quarters," Fury commented in closing.
Clint disagreed. "She stays with me."
Natasha looked between them, mildly interested. It was certainly a test whether he could hold up his end of the bargain.
Fury stared at him for a long moment before finally agreeing. "Very well, Agent."
"Thank you, sir."
Coulson shook hands and left, doubtless to organize the crew who would be monitoring both of them offsite. It would do.
Natasha noticed the carefully divided team that followed them back and/or met them in the area of Clint's apartment building. She saw his gaze pick them out one by one—the homeless man across the street, the van down one side of the building, ostensibly outside the back of a Chinese restaurant, and the birdwatcher on a higher sidewalk under some trees—but he said nothing, and she deduced quickly they were SHIELD agents and he'd expected them.
It spiked a wave of irritation that he hadn't warned her, but she followed him up the stairs. Perhaps he merely assumed she'd expected them herself.
They were met by an overly cheerful Kate and a casserole.
"I know you can't cook," she informed Clint soundly, to his visible amusement, "and no one deserves to be inflicted with your idea of takeout on the first night. Trust me on this." She tossed this last to Natasha as if she wasn't the least intimidated by a quiet, stern stranger.
Either that spoke well of Clint or poorly of Kate. Natasha decided not to guess and thanked their neighbor politely for the food.
"Disparaging my taste in pizza," Clint muttered a complaint as he opened the door. "After all I've done for you!"
Kate rolled her eyes. "You need real food, call me," she told Natasha.
"I'll feed her. I'll feed her." He fended off Lucky and let Natasha safely past and into the apartment. "You want to go shopping? For groceries, I guess, and the baby?"
Natasha slipped into the guest bedroom he'd set her up in and shut the door. She didn't stop to listen to whatever his response might be, too busy heading to the bathroom to throw up—again.
She picked out furniture in a catalog and let Clint talk her into telling him where to set it up in the other guest room.
"You don't have to give her away," he pointed out. "I'll be here."
"You're an international assassin, Hawkeye," she replied coolly. "You have as many enemies as I do."
"Not quite," he muttered under his breath, low enough that she could pretend not to hear him over the sound of hammer and nails.
SHIELD had very definitive ideas of what was and was not safe for a woman to do in the intelligence and defense industry when pregnant. Field work was out of the question as even small skirmishes or nonlethal combat could result in miscarriages. She was welcome to use the gym and training facilities as she pleased, but only in pregnancy-safe exercises.
It grated on Natasha, but she put a smile on over her irritation and nodded agreeably because it got her some options to deal with her increasing restlessness. Clint noticed how much it bothered her and got her more to do with advising on missions related to the intel she'd brought with her and told her when she made a good impression with the higher-ups.
"I'm pretty sure Fury likes you. No, really," he insisted at her look of disbelief. "They're not going to kill you after she's born. They're going to put you in the field."
For the first time, Natasha considered whether she'd still want to go. She did really. A baby didn't change that she was the Black Widow and she needed to make herself useful if she wanted to stay alive and not imprisoned. A baby wasn't in the cards for her. Natasha needed to give her up to keep her safe and keep herself free to work.
If one could call that freedom at all.
Natasha grew more tense leading up to Clint's first weeklong mission out of the country since bringing her in. Her usual stiffness went brittle and the faintest flicker of a frown moved in permanently about the edges of her mouth. He tried at first to reassure her but gave it up quickly as a lost cause, choosing instead to enlist May, Carter, and Kate to befriend her.
"Can you just check in on her while I'm gone? I promised her she wouldn't have to take care of Lucky."
Kate just gave him that look. "She'd probably like to."
"Kate."
"I'm just saying, Barton, you've got it bad."
So maybe he did. He kept thinking about her on the mission, glad when he finally got into his perch that he could still clear everything out of his head to shoot. Natasha had become more than a distraction with the way she stared at him as if trying to figure him out, with her tentatively offered wry sense of humor, with the way she ran one finger along the crib as if trying to believe it was real. He wanted desperately to give her the life she'd never been allowed to have (and he could read between the lines as well as she could), but he wasn't sure she'd ever trust him enough to do it.
He took out the head of a foreign cartel and three other major players and heard Coulson call it clean in his comm. Then he got out of dodge.
He wasn't sure what to expect when he dragged himself back in after a too-long debrief and a four-hour stint in medical because they had thought they'd run his annual while they had him trapped. Coulson, traitor, hadn't helped at all, just advised him to be more thorough about getting his check-ups on time in the future.
What Clint hadn't expected was silence. At barely eight o'clock at night, he had somehow expected that Natasha would be up somewhere, doing something. He found her sprawled indelicately across the couch with Lucky passed out across her legs.
He simply stood there watching her for a long moment. Her red curls had gotten long enough to come down her arms and her face looked innocent in sleep, if still guarded, a restless line of worry between her brows. He knew he should move on, take a shower, and crash in his own bed but he didn't want to leave her there either.
"Tasha," he said softly.
Her eyes opened. She stared at him. He could see the muscles in the back of her hand clench and he wondered for a moment if she had a gun tucked behind her. Then the worry smoothed out and off her face and she sat up, gently shooing Lucky down off the couch. "You're back," she said simply.
She stood and stretched.
His gaze fell abruptly to her stomach. She was showing a little more obviously now, but she still wasn't very big. The doctor had said that was normal enough for a first pregnancy, but it still surprised him.
When he brought his eyes back up to her face, Natasha was staring at him speculatively as if deciding something. She stepped forward suddenly, closing the distance between them.
Clint forced himself not to step back or reach for his knife.
She stood on tiptoes and kissed him.
"Whoa! Tasha." He shoved her back by her arms. "What are you doing?"
She stared at him coolly. "I'm your wife, aren't I?"
He stared back. "Of convenience," he reminded her. "You don't have to— Just don't."
She swept him one contemptuous glance and disappeared into her bedroom.
Clint stood there for another few minutes, cursing. Lucky's head bumped up under his hand. He leaned down and rubbed the dog's neck absently. And what was he supposed to do with that?
CHAPTER THREE
Natasha stared at the soft pink blanket and the small pile of baby care supplies Clint had collected on his third shopping trip in as many weeks. He was going overboard, excessively doting on a child who hadn't even been born yet—while rejecting the child's mother, Natasha remembered a trifle bitterly.
"She's not yours," she said slowly. "Why are you doing this?"
Clint's head popped up from behind the remaining heap of grocery bags he was unpacking. His look was incredulous. "I'm going to pretend you just forgot and not be offended, but you do remember I adopted her?"
She stared at him for a long moment, then sighed. "Yes, I remember."
"Good." He watched her fingering the blanket until she gave him a look for noticing. He put up his hands and disappeared back in the bags.
Natasha yanked the blanket out viciously, as though it personally offended her, and took off for the nursery. She looked around at the rocking chair and the crib she'd picked out and set the blanket in the crib, still running her hands over its softness. Babies and nurseries and children weren't for people like the Black Widow.
She backed out and paused long enough to study Clint's frown as he checked his list to see if he'd missed something. He was growing attached to her child but not to her. She needed to do something to ensure her own safety when all of this was over. It would be over. Neither of them pretended he'd spared her for her own sake.
She sighed and went into her own bedroom to change. Perhaps Kate knew something about Clint she'd missed.
"The man can see through anything," Kate told her as she fed Lucky a scrap of the homemade pizza she had just pulled out of the oven. "He turned down his ex-wife looking for pity-sex and kept her up all night watching funny movies and talking until she felt better. I'm telling you, I'd probably want the sex, but then I'm not his ex." She trailed off with a shrug.
Natasha was almost beginning to regret her choice to milk the neighbor for details. Clearly, Kate knew far more than Natasha wanted to know. "His ex?"
"Bobbi. Brilliant, friendly, and better off his friend than his wife." Kate plunked down and handed Natasha a slice of pizza.
The smell made Natasha wrinkle her nose. "I'm sure it's wonderful, just..."
"Morning sickness."
It was easy enough to pretend to be friendly. She'd worked harder on a persona for less. "All day sickness," she shared openly.
"So is it Clint's?"
The question was innocent enough, but it drew Natasha up short and she found her mouth opened and shut once in surprise. "No. Yes." She frowned. "He's helping me."
Kate had pretended to be caught up in petting Lucky and suddenly Natasha realized she'd been maneuvered into letting down her guard enough to admit it. "He's like that, Clint. He'll help everyone, even people who end up biting him later, even after they've already bitten him."
Natasha looked at her again. Kate was protective of him. "I'm not going to bite him," she said, surprising herself with the admission. She had no need to prove anything here.
But Kate grinned. "Oh, don't rule it out. There's a reason Bobbi wanted the sex."
Natasha stayed in character and let herself blush. Inside, she started working the intel. So he liked helping people. She could work with that.
Upon reflection, it was obvious. Lucky could only see in one eye. Kate brought her taxes over to harrass Clint with, though neither seemed particularly talented at them and Natasha was obliged to shove them both over and give them a lesson on their own country's tax law. "I am Russian, and I know this," she snapped, and Clint just grinned at her while Kate arched an eyebrow expressively. Clint covered for his coworkers, more frequently than Natasha actually liked, and he had been the one to offer her protection in the first place. Of course, he liked helping people. He was almost as pathological about it as she was paranoid.
It was why she couldn't seem to incite any attraction in him. To him, she was a need, not a person to be taken advantage of. The only people she'd ever made care for her, for her own sake, had gotten something out of it, usually sexual. It was frustrating that she couldn't figure out what to give him that would keep his protection once the baby was born.
She started to find her own place at SHIELD, a bit. Few trusted her but Melinda May was willing to work out with her and teach her tai chi while Sharon Carter made sure she was eating enough (for two, Natasha ignored that part) and spent time introducing her to all the handlers using her intel on missions. Clint was there, but he treated her very professionally at work unless he was going with her to doctor appointments. She was only another two months out when he went undercover again—for two weeks.
Natasha woke up to the sound of Clint getting in. She recognized his heavy tread when he was tired and Lucky's welcoming whine before Clint hushed him and sent him back to bed.
She made herself lie there as she listened to the heavy thumps of bags or equipment hitting the floor and the water tinkling briefly on glass in the kitchen. She wanted to get up and see him for herself that he was okay. Knowing that there were those in SHIELD who were beginning to like her for her own sake, knowing there was a contract protecting her meant very little in light of everything. It was Clint who stood between her and a kill order and she didn't feel safe when he was in the line of fire.
Something deep inside her niggled that lies were all well and good directed at targets, but she wouldn't get very far if she lied to herself.
Slowly, quietly, Natasha slipped out of bed, gingerly allowing for her shifted center of gravity and the weight of a baby pressing against her kidneys. She stepped to the bedroom door and looked out into the dark living area. He hadn't turned on a light. She could just make out the outline of Clint leaning on the kitchen counter with both arms, head drooped wearily, still dressed in full tac gear. She glanced over the floor to identify a quiver, a bow, and a duffel bag, the sources of the earlier thumps.
"Clint," she called out softly.
He looked up, eyes tracking her unerringly in the darkness. She was reminded forcibly of his working handle.
She made herself approach slowly, as though he might spook at any second. She had the distinct feeling he was still riding adrenaline in order to be standing upright. She turned on the kitchen light over the stove and stopped a foot away to regard him.
His gaze ran over her like a heated, physical sensation, pausing on the swell of her stomach. He always stopped there. This time, he reached out and touched.
She felt a faint flutter that had little to do with her daughter's kicking. His hand was warm. The arm above it was cut in three places and bruised above the largest gash. She could see other small cuts elsewhere.
"You fell?" she asked, one finger tracing the pattern of bruising.
"Among other things." His tone held warm humor under the slur of exhaustion.
She made a small sound of discontent in the back of her throat and realized suddenly she was not playing a part. His vulnerability bothered her. "You need to rest," she said, covering the reaction and tugging him toward his bedroom.
He followed, perhaps too tired to protest.
She drew him toward the bed where he sank without a word. She knew where the first aid kit was and opened it on the bed without further ado.
"The cuts, they'll keep," he said softly but shrugged at her admonishing look.
He let her clean him up and bandage him, then stopped her. "I need a shower."
She stared at him, suddenly feeling tense sitting next to him on the bed. He was her husband, she remembered abruptly. She nodded and left him to it.
The next morning, Clint found her in the kitchen making coffee at the unholy hour of five a.m. She was standing in front of the stove, one hand over her stomach, a small smile on her face. He wondered if the baby was kicking, and it struck him with a sudden pang that she still wanted to give it up.
"Natasha."
She turned toward him and reached out to draw him closer, then placed his hand under hers.
The baby was kicking. She was kicking.
"Hey there," he said softly. He couldn't help the smile that spread across his face. He looked up at Natasha and found no displeasure at it.
"You're up early," she said simply, faint amusement in her eyes.
He'd gotten in late, very late, late enough that he would normally excuse himself for having forgotten painkillers, but now he was sore as the day after a sound beating and the pain had woken him up. "You're making coffee," he pointed out. "Not supposed to drink that."
She rolled her eyes and smiled as she poured a cup. "It's for you." Her eyes danced as she handed him the mug.
He accepted it with thanks and leaned back against the counter to drink. She was absolutely beautiful, and Clint realized he'd become comfortable with her presence around his apartment. It no longer felt like home without her.
"You're staring."
"Yeah. I am."
Natasha looked at him sharply. Her gaze softened into thoughtfulness. "Do you really intend to keep her?" she asked.
He froze. "That was the bargain," he said slowly, watching her carefully for her reaction. He didn't want to state the obvious, that he wanted more than just the bargain, too afraid she'd remind him that she hadn't offered affection.
But the sound she made was displeased. She turned around and wiped the counter around the coffee pot, clearly taking any excuse for something to do with her hands that didn't involve looking at him.
"What do you want?" Clint asked, still slowly, still very uncertain of where this was headed.
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter what I want. I don't get choices. People like the Black Widow don't get choices."
It was the most she'd ever said on any of this and he reeled with it for a moment before gently touching her shoulder to get her attention.
She jerked her head up to look at him. He rarely touched her without asking permission with a word or a gesture first.
"Do you want out?" he asked quietly. Out of their marriage of convenience, her contract with SHIELD. He didn't let himself think about the baby and where she would go if she took her daughter away.
But she shook her head and he felt like he could breathe again. She meant something to him, more than just another stray he'd dragged into SHIELD.
"I want..." Her words didn't come easily, and he wondered if she'd ever said something she wanted out loud. "I want to raise her. I want—" She leaned up suddenly and kissed him.
This time, he didn't push her away.
It was soft and it was brief, but he felt a little dizzy when she pulled back, blushing, and a hint of embarrassment in her eyes.
"I'm not playing you," she said at last when the tension had stretched far too long between them.
He hadn't thought of that. It gave him enough distance to clear his head for a moment and back up. "We can do that," he told her. "You're here now. I'm here. Kate's here. She's already offered to babysit when we're both working, and eventually there'll be school."
School. He was looking so far ahead and Natasha was still wondering if it was safe to look ahead at all.
But she smiled at him, even if it was weak, and nodded. "School."
They went into the next doctor appointment with Natasha's hand tucked in Clint's. This time, he knew the way she clung to him wasn't an act and the smile when he squeezed her hand was genuine.
EPILOGUE
Natasha had hated labor. She hated feeling out of control of her own body, and the first thing she planned on doing once the doctor finally let her was go to the SHIELD gym and reclaim her strength and grace and reflexes from pregnancy. In the meantime, she let Clint soothe her irritation by placing a small warm bundle in her arms whenever she got too snappish.
Natasha wasn't sure what to make of the sentimental feelings that washed over her when staring down at her daughter's button nose and blue eyes. The baby squirmed and flailed her arms until Natasha tucked her in gently to the soft pink blanket and hushed her with a Russian lullaby almost forgotten beneath the memories of her own childhood.
"We do have to name her eventually," Clint reminded her as he cleaned up after the diaper change. He was remarkably willing to do the things Kate had warned her most guys failed to.
"Merry," she said, bringing his head popping up in t hat way he had when surprised. She spelled it for him, lest he get the wrong idea. "Merry Barnes Barton."
He stared at her for a long moment, then grinned. She hadn't had to use his name and he'd probably be insufferable for weeks now that she had.
"Don't let it go to your head," she sniffed as she rocked Merry gently in her arms.
Clint washed his hands and came over to kiss the top of her head then Merry's. "Never," he whispered and wrapped his arms around her.
She let him.
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