A Gift From: gsparkle
Title: no poetry about beds
A Gift For: kiss_me_cassie
Rating: G
Warnings/Choose Not To Warn: none
Summary/Prompt Used: Clint and Nat have shared beds before. It's no big deal. But lately there’s something about one's bleary eyes and mussed hair in the morning that just makes the other one... feel things.
Author's Note: merry happy!!


no poetry about beds

There is only one mattress, dusty and bare, in the safehouse.
“Hmm,” says the archer, looking around as if another bed is hiding in the corner of the tiny room. “Sort of thought this would be a more impressive hideout.”
Natasha shrugs. She doesn’t know much about this man besides the badge he’d flipped open after dragging her out of the Danube: Clint Barton, SHIELD. He’s the first SHIELD agent she’s met with a sense of humor, and certainly the first one who’s informed her that he’s supposed to kill her, but isn’t quote-unquote “feeling it.” She rather suspects that the job he offered her instead is going to be struck down immediately once his superiors get wind, but hey, he’d gone out of his way to fight off the Red Room’s latest assassins and save her life; she can play along for now.
“No sheets, either,” he says now, glaring at the empty closet. “Can’t say this is the best first impression I’ve ever given.” He gives her a big sigh and an exaggerated wink: where is SHIELD recruiting from these days, the circus? “Looks like we are, unfortunately, going to have to share.”
“Share?” Natasha repeats, watching without comprehension as the archer brushes pointlessly at the mattress before lying down and rolling to the far side.
“Verb,” he says into the wall, speech muffled and tired. “To use jointly or divide equally.” When she says nothing, he continues, “Used in a sentence: Clint offers to share the bed with the scary Russian assassin.”
Natasha’s lips twitch despite herself. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to kill you in your sleep?” she asks, settling gingerly onto the mattress and realizing, all at once, that nearly drowning really takes up a lot of energy. “It would be foolish not to watch me. As far as scary Russian assassins go, I really am the scariest of them all.”
“Nah,” the archer--Clint--yawns, shockingly close to sleep. His next pronouncement pushes her beyond shock and into disbelief: “You got my back, right?”
“I absolutely do not,” Natasha thinks she retorts; but it turns out that she’s already fallen asleep, and that maybe she’s just as foolishly trusting as he is.


There is nothing that Clint seems to want.
Well. No. Clint wants a lot of things, apparently: a shorter line at the coffee cart, someone else to file his post-mission paperwork, for the dingbat going the speed limit in the left lane to move over. Natasha observes that he always wants to be getting somewhere faster, with fewer obstacles. She wonders if he knows how impatient he is.
But when it comes to her ongoing quest to repay him for saving his life, Natasha misfires again and again. He might want someone else to file his paperwork, but that someone is nebulous and nonexistent, not Natasha. He does not want her to take the fall for accidentally inciting some sort of standoff in the cafeteria over pie. He will not let her be his wingman at any bar, even though she is clearly the perfect person for the job. He refuses to let her clean his horrifyingly messy apartment and firmly instructs her to destroy any copies of his keys she may or may not have made.
Everyone wants something, though; this is a fact the Red Room taught her well. She waits for their next mission, their next little safehouse, their next undersized bed. Her hands have long known how to be girlish or commanding as needed, but she falters, her touch unsure on his shoulder.
“Go to sleep,” Clint grumbles, bleary, and then, when her hands slide more confidently down his back: “Woah, hey now. What’s happening?”
“You know what’s happening,” Natasha reassures him, feeling his muscles firm under her fingertips.
“Pretty sure I don’t,” Clint says, sliding off the bed and out of reach. “Because what seems to be happening is some sort of seduction, and that is a hard no from me.”
He doesn’t glare so much as look at her with profound pity, disappointment palpable even in the dark, and maybe that’s what makes her admit defeat. “I don’t know what you want, then,” she says, beyond frustrated that Clint, after everything, is the puzzle she can’t solve. He opens his mouth, then closes it when she snaps, “Don’t say you want to sleep.”
“Well, what do you want me to say, then?” he asks after a long moment, his voice the only thing about him that’s still groggy.
“I want,” Natasha says, as patiently as she can considering it’s the middle of the night, “a step by step explanation of how I can repay my debt to you.” Her voice hitches. “Please.”
The bed sags as Clint sinks back on it. “I assume this is not about paying me back for last week’s coffee,” he says; even in the dark, she can hear the kindness of his smile. “In which case, what if I don’t want to be repaid?”
Natasha scoffs. “Nobody does something for nothing. Everybody wants compensation, even if it’s just something dumb, like feeling good about yourself.”
“Right,” Clint laughs, “Feeling good about yourself is terrible, got it. Well, you’re just going to have to accept that I already have all the repayment I need.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” Natasha wheedles, flopping back onto the bed. “You gotta give me something.”
Clint stretches out next to her. “Just do good things,” he says, as if it’s that simple. “That’ll be enough for me.” There’s a long pause, long enough that Natasha is nearly asleep when he shoves his icebox feet between hers and says, sleepily, “And if you wanted to keep my feet warm, that would be nice, too.”

1. hospital bed
He tries to downplay it, but Natasha knows a bad break when she sees one.
“How long are you in for this time?” she asks, earning a glare from the departing nurse as she drags the ugly hospital chair to his bedside. “Don’t tell me two days, we both know that’s a lie.”
Clint sighs, dramatic to his core. “At least ten days,” he groans, draping his arm over his face and wincing at the shift of his bruised muscles. “Probably more, if I’m being honest with myself.”
“Which you never are,” Natasha points out.
“Which I rarely am,” Clint corrects. He makes for a pathetic figure, what with his black eyes and double-broken leg; in the depths of her heart, something twists and pulls. “But hey, at least they’ve upgraded the beds since either of us were last in here. C’mon, get on this thing.”
There is no real good reason to climb into someone else’s hospital bed, but increasingly, Natasha struggles not to give in when Clint smiles at her the way he is now, like a kid with his heart in his hand. Based on his unsuppressed grin as she rearranges him in the bed so he doesn’t further injure himself, she’s pretty sure he knows her sigh of complaint is fake, but it’s important to keep up appearances.
“Wow,” she says, finally tucked awkwardly next to him. “It’s a bed. How impressive.”
“Ye of little faith,” Clint proclaims, jabbing at the bedside control panel. “I present to you--” abruptly, the upright half of the bed begins pressing knobbily against her back-- “massage bed!” He throws his head back, closes his eyes, and slumps comfortably against the buzzing mattress. “Heaven.”
It does feel incredibly nice, nicer than any hospital bed has any right to feel, but the vibrations of the mattress seem to jolt directly into her veins as she takes in the long line of Clint’s exposed neck, the sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek. He lets out a small groan as the knobs push at their lower backs and her mouth goes dry.
Whatever this feeling is, it’s dangerous. Natasha shoves it away and reaches for the remote instead. “You know what you need?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “Daytime television. That always helps me fall asleep.”
“TV always keeps me up,” Clint protests, once again refusing to be honest with himself. He’s asleep before Judge Judy kicks the plaintiff out of the courtroom, snoring with surprising delicacy and leaving Natasha with an ache no massage bed can fix.


Mornings, she decides, are the worst part of living in the Tower.
They are worse than Tony’s AI, or Tony’s cute but annoying robots, or even, somehow, Tony himself (and that is really, really saying something). They are worse than Steve and Thor’s giant barrels of protein powder taking up space in the pantry; they are worse than the paparazzi that crowd constantly around the front door.
It is only in the morning, after all, that Clint slumps into the kitchen wearing only his boxers and slippers, hair sticking up at odd ends. It is only in the morning that he leans unself-consciously against the counter, half-snoring as he waits for the coffee to finish brewing. It is only in the morning that his eyes turn that particular shade of smokey blue. It is only in the morning that she has to confront her coward of a heart.
“I need you to stop,” Tony says, cutting into Natasha’s daydream with his typical lack of tact.
“When have I ever done anything for you?” Natasha says, sipping her coffee. “Also, stop what?”
Tony emits one of those dramatic playboy sighs. “I need you,” he repeats,” to stop staring at slash drooling over Barton.” He smirks when she startles. “And people think I’m the lecherous one around here.”
Surreptitiously, Natasha checks the corners of her lips. “I don’t drool,” she informs Tony, pushing away from her seat which was, lamentably, the best angle for watching Clint stretch. “And the people who think you’re lecherous are one hundred percent correct.”
She leaves before Tony can say anything back, and the next morning, she stays in her apartment. There is no need, after all, to eat breakfast in the community kitchen when she has a perfectly good kitchen of her own. No semi-naked men, no wild accusations from unstable geniuses; just Natasha, her favorite soft robe, her perfectly steeped tea, and her breakfast she intends to eat in bed.
What she should have expected is for her leisurely lie-in to be interrupted by Clint, because that is exactly what happens. No sooner has she slid off her robe does he shuffle in and throw himself directly onto her bed, narrowly missing her tea cup. “You weren’t at breakfast,” he grumbles, breath warm at her hip. “Tony broke the coffee machine again.”
“So you’re just here for coffee,” Natasha sighs, her wave of affection crashing back down.
Clint pushes himself up to his elbows; his eyes are, for once, not one bit bleary. “I’m here because I missed you at breakfast,” he says, too honest for the time of day. “I’m here for you first, always.” He grins. “There just also happens to be coffee here.”
She can’t look away, and doesn’t want to, anyway. “Do you ever think,” she begins, less confident than she has ever, ever been. “Do you ever think we could--”
An alarm blares; her plate glass windows are overlaid with blue text. “Wheels up in fifteen,” JARVIS politely interjects. Clint shoves his head under a pillow and groans; Natasha is tempted to do the same.


When asked what she’s afraid of, Natasha’s first response is always, “Nothing.”
But that’s, you know, a character, the version of Natasha that lives in a catsuit and pins her hair up with stiletto. (It can be done, of course, but that’s just impractical.) After a long night out with Maria, she’ll say she’s afraid of the impending hangover, maybe, and that wouldn’t really be true, either. When it comes right down to it, Natasha has only really admitted a specific fear to Clint, and that’s only in the most dire of situations: there’s no choice, after all, but to reveal that you’re afraid of snakes when you’re on the verge of falling into an Indiana Jones-like snake pit.
(And this admission doesn’t even get at the kind of fear that gnaws in the night, the kind of which Natasha has several: that she will never find redemption, that she is only capable of violence, that she will never truly find rest or peace. The only person to successfully pry this type out of her is Steve, who so easily lays his truth down on the table that it would be cowardice for Natasha not to do the same.)
But she’d rather admit those fears--would rather rent a Jumbotron in Times Square that says WILL I EVER KNOW IF I AM TRULY HUMAN? next to a picture of her face--than tell anyone, anyone, that what’s really scaring her today is a bed.
Specifically, her bed.
Specifically, Clint, who is currently occupying said bed.
Specifically, the way she woke up curled under his shoulder after the Stark holiday party.
Not that there’s anyone to tell, anyway, because she’s been reduced to hiding in her bathroom. What else is one to do, after all, when one falls asleep with the object of their probably-unrequited affections and wakes up in his very nice arms, a breath’s distance from his mouth? It’s not like she can live in the bathroom forever, but she also knows with true certainty that, if she gets back into that bed, she will kiss Clint Barton before she leaves it again.
Which would be… bad, right? Definitely bad. For real reasons that she has currently forgotten, but will surely return to her soon.
Right?
But she waits, and waits, and waits, listening to Clint snore away on the other side of the door, and all she can think about is how sleepy his smile will be when she climbs back into bed, how warm she’ll be in his arms. Maybe these aren’t the reasons she was waiting for, but they’re certainly real all the same.
“I was wondering where you went,” Clint mumbles when she finally slides back into bed. “I was cold without you.”
Natasha curls deliberately against him, no artifice in her smile. “You run at like 200 degrees,” she points out. “You’re never cold.”
He’s more awake now, but his eyes are still smokey, his laugh still rough. “Untrue on many counts,” he says. “I’m always cold without you.”
“Just your feet,” Natasha says, not quite able to roll her eyes as he draws her even closer against him.
“Don’t talk about feet,” Clint says, suddenly very close. “You’re going to ruin the moment.”
“What moment,” Natasha says, no question mark needed as she kisses him, warm and soft and gentle as the bed they lie in. Eventually, long after he leans over her and kisses her back, long after the sheets are in tangles, she laughs. “Oh, you mean that moment?”
“Yeah,” Clint says, his smile like sunshine on Christmas morning. “That’s exactly what I meant.”