Author’s Note: I promised archers_and_spies I'd write something happier after I filled another prompt of hers with SADNESS. I'm not totally sure what this is, but there's banter and no one dies!


Natasha has experienced a lot of emotions in her life.

Fear. Pride. Disgust. Bloodlust, if you counted that as an emotion (and Natasha does).

But pure, uncut mortification? This is new.

Yet here she is, standing outside of a little church in Uptown, her hand grasping the iron handle of the heavy, old oak door as her mind wages war with itself.

She can go inside and make the biggest damn fool of herself she’s ever made. Or she can turn around and go home.

Which would be acting the fool in a completely different way.

Natasha huffs out a groan and stamps her boot on the pavement in frustration. Fucking hell.

This is all Clint Barton’s fault.

—

It’s been six months since he lowered his bow and somehow managed to convince her that defecting to SHIELD would be a noble adventure instead of a suicide mission.

They’ve officially been partners for three months, and Natasha would be lying if she said she wasn’t shocked at how well it’s going. On paper, they’re both deadly headcases who might as well have giant neon signs above their heads that read: DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.

But they seem to get each other.

It unnerves Natasha, this feeling like she knows Barton even though he’s barely more than a stranger. Well, she supposes he’s a coworker now. Perhaps a maybekindasorta friend, but she can’t be sure because she’s never had much experience with friends. Informants, accomplices, and marks? Sure. But not real friends.

Her whole life she’s been trained not to trust anyone — not to count on anyone.

But there’s something about Clint Barton — some heady mix of his lethal accuracy out in the field and his soft, genuine you doing okay, Natasha? when they’ve come down from the adrenaline — that makes her feel like maybe he might be the right kind of person to put her faith in.

Which is why she’s absolutely gobsmacked to discover that she actually doesn’t know him at all.

They’re coming off a ridiculously easy mission — sent to gather intel on a seemingly squeaky clean Silicon Valley wunderkind who is secretly selling data on the dark web to the highest bidder. All Natasha had to do was drink three aperol spritzes and actually pay attention to the man’s lonely new wife and voila, Clint had all the intel he needed to crack the guy’s laptop password and get everything they were sent for.

Child’s play, honestly.

“Marriage is for suckers,” Natasha says when they’re in the clear, speeding up the 101 to catch the extraction plane at a tiny airport south of San Francisco.

Clint smirks. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He keeps one hand on the steering wheel as he reaches into the backseat to grab her duffel bag so she can change clothes in the passenger seat. “What if I told you that I’m engaged?”

Natasha rolls her eyes as she shimmies a pair of jeans up under the dress she’s wearing. “Very funny.”

He laughs lightly. “I’m not kidding.”

She stops, her jeans still unbuttoned as she turns to stare at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you engaged?”

He shrugs, looking vaguely amused. “Because that’s what people do when they’ve been dating someone for a long time.”

Natasha realizes her mouth is hanging open and her pants are still undone. She should remedy both but instead she says, “That’s what people do. But we aren’t people.”

“We’re not?”

He smoothly maneuvers the car across two lanes of traffic and onto the exit ramp.

“We’re not like other people,” she amends, finally snapping her jeans closed and turning her back toward Clint so he can lower the zipper on her dress with one hand as she pulls a t-shirt on over her head.

When she turns back toward him, he’s looking at her expectantly, patiently waiting for whatever she’s about to say next. But Natasha finds that the words don’t come. She’s strangely dumbstruck at the prospect of explaining something she thought he already knew — that they’re both fucked up basketcases. They get sad girls drunk to steal their secrets and race each other to the shooting range when one of the techs hands them a shiny new test weapon.

They know 20 ways to kill a person and make it look like an accident, and they’re the kind of people who don’t lose sleep over it.

They are not the kind of people who get married, for fuck’s sake.

It’s Clint who finally speaks first.

“Would it be so bad?” he asks softly, his voice just a touch vulnerable. “Being like other people sometimes?”

They hold each other’s gaze for a few moments before she sighs and turns away.

It’s not that she doesn’t know him at all.

It’s that she’s still learning him.

And Natasha is realizing that he trusts her enough to let her see this other side of himself.

“It’s official. You’re even crazier than I thought,” she says finally, her voice purposefully light as she kicks off her heels and slides into a pair of boots. “Just don’t come crying to me when she spills all your secrets to MI6 after two cosmopolitans.”

Clint chuckles as he pulls their car into a dark corner of the airport parking lot. “She’s a nice girl. I’ll introduce you sometime soon.”

A nice girl, Natasha thinks. Whatever floats your boat, Barton.

But she just says, “Sure. Sounds good.”

—

It’s been four months and Natasha still hasn’t met this mystery nice girl — or mystery nice fiancée, she should say, but the word feels prickly on her tongue so she never says it.

More interestingly, neither does Clint.

In fact, he never mentions her at all and really, it’s starting to drive Natasha a little bit crazy. Maybe she actually was drunk during that getaway drive in California. Maybe she hallucinated the entire conversation. Or maybe this was some kind of fucked up final SHIELD test.

Honestly, all of those seem more likely than Clint Barton — who didn’t even flinch when she accidentally split his lip open during a sparring session last week, then swiped her thumb through the blood to streak a crimson red line across his cheekbone — having a normal, nice girl fiancée.

But Natasha doesn’t bring it up. Not through the Buenos Aires opp or the Tokyo mission or even the Madagascar assignment.

It takes the Kazakhstan disaster to finally break her, though.

Natasha doesn’t necessarily believe in fate or curses, but she’s been in this business long enough to recognize that some opps are just fucked from the word go. This Kazakhstan shit is one of them, but somehow they’ve managed to make it to a tiny shack of a safehouse perched on the side of a cliff. It was so covered in snow that they almost missed it, and honestly it’s not all that much warmer in here than it is outside, but their extraction helicopter isn’t coming until morning so this is the best they’ve got.

Clint is busy setting up a tripwire on what counts as the door of this godforsaken place, while she busies herself pulling the SHIELD-issued warming packets and their sleeping bag out of her rucksack. Clint’s bow and her two handguns are between them, still in arms reach on the off chance that someone managed to follow them up the mountain through the whiteout conditions.

It’s the matter-of-fact way they’re prepping for the night — both bruised and exhausted, but ready to restart the fight at a moment’s notice if necessary — that seems to unlock something in Natasha’s brain.

“Does she know what you do?”

Satisfied with his work on the trip wire, Clint is turning to toss her a protein bar from his pack.

“Who?”


“Who?” Natasha gapes. “Your fiancée.”

“Oh…” he stops short, like she’s said the last thing he expected her to say. “Um. Ish.”

“What the fuck does ‘ish’ mean?”

Clint shrugs out of his snow-covered jacket and spreads it out flat on the floor to dry. “She thinks I’m a government consultant. Which is sort of true.”

Natasha’s eyebrows shoot up as she unlaces her boots. Then she peels off her wet socks and takes the new dry pair that Clint is handing her from his bag.

“What happens if you die, though?”

He’s stripped down to boxer briefs and tank by now, and she can see him shivering as he slides into the sleeping bag.

“I try very hard not to die.”

“That’s what most dead people say,” she retorts, rolling her eyes.

Natasha is also down to her last layer, and the frigid air in the cabin is almost unbearable. But they both know that it’s easier to build body heat without layers of damp clothing between them. Clint scoots himself over as far as he can so she can slide into the sleeping bag too, and once they’re both zipped inside she presses her back up against him. She’s trembling a little, so he slides his arms around her, pressing every expanse of their exposed skin together so they can quickly build warmth.

“Why are you asking me all of this?” he murmurs after a while, his voice a soft rumble against her hair.

Natasha doesn’t quite know the answer. Or maybe she doesn’t want to know the answer. So she just says, “You shouldn’t lie to people.”

Clint lets out a mirthless sort of chuckle, and his breath feels warm against her neck. “We lie to people all the time in our line of work.”

“That’s not the same.”

“Tasha,” he sighs. “It’s…complicated.”

“I don’t lie to you.”

Natasha feels him tense against her for a few moments. Then Clint lets out a long exhale.

“I don’t lie to you either,” he finally admits.

The air in the cabin feels suddenly heavy with words unspoken. Nothing has happened, exactly, but there’s this feeling of something hovering between them — a charged sort of energy snaking its way around and between their entwined bodies.

But Natasha knows better than to test the limits of an already fucked mission.

“I’ll take the first watch,” she says suddenly, her all-business tone a sharp contrast to the soft confessions of a few moments ago. “You sleep.”

Clint doesn’t argue and he doesn’t say anything else.

But it’s a long time before Natasha feels him slip into the steady, even breaths of sleep.

—

Some people would look at Natalia Romanova’s childhood and see only horror.

But Natasha Romanoff? She’s more pragmatic than most people. She knows that the trick to surviving horror is figuring out what the horror can do for you.

And what did the horror of the Red Room teach her to do? Well for one thing, compartmentalize.

They make it out of Kazakhstan in one piece, and Natasha tells herself she’s not going to bring it up again. She’s just going to accept that there’s a Clint Barton who can get off a perfect kill shot with his gaze pointed in the other direction and a Clint Barton who brings her Mike & Ikes when they watch movies together (even though he says they’re disgusting) and a Clint Barton who insists she read The Hunger Games after he does because he just really wants to know who her favorite character is.

And then, there’s also (apparently) a Clint Barton who is getting married to a nameless woman who (maybe) doesn’t ask questions when he comes home from his “government consulting job” with a black eye and 13 new stitches across his abdomen.

These two Clint Bartons seem so completely, utterly at odds that it’s genuinely easier for Natasha to imagine one doesn’t exist than it is for her to try and make the two versions fit together.

That is, until he walks into the kitchen one morning and drops a thick, cream-colored envelope onto the table where she’s sipping her coffee.

“What’s this?”

“It’s, ah, my wedding invitation,” Clint says. He’s got both hands in his pockets and he’s staring at the envelope instead of her face.

Natasha nearly spits out her coffee, but manages a strangled sort of cough instead.

Clint furrows his brow in concern. “You okay?”

“Too hot,” she chokes out. Now it’s her turn to avoid his eyes.

She can see her name written on the envelope now, in that ridiculous, sweeping calligraphy all wedding invitations use. She wonders if questions had been asked — if Clint had shrugged them away and said just my coworker.

Something about that idea makes her stomach twist and her skin feel itchy.

“You should come,” Clint says after the silence between them stretches on long enough to become uncomfortable. He sounds uncertain, though — not like himself at all.

Natasha finally looks up to meet his gaze, and the weary resignation in his eyes hits her like a blow to the chest.

“Clint…” she says, unable to stop herself. “Are you sure about this?”

His face seems to cycle through several emotions. She tries not to be unnerved that she can read every single one.

“It’s just time,” he says finally.

Natasha is a very good spy.

But even a shit spy would know that wasn’t a real answer.

—

THAT'S IT????

Although I'm not really sure where I'd want to see it go. I don't like the idea of a break up from Laura but otoh... AGGGHHHH! THanks for such ambiguousness (no, really, I mean that.)

Okay, 1. There’s actually a final scene to this fic in the next comment because it was too long for one comment.

And 2. Hand to god, I actually didn’t think of the fiancée as Laura in this because I didn’t like how that made me feel. This is truly just a nameless, faceless fiancée (which also felt weird, but I just ran with it.)😅

I commented over on AO3 first.
I read the fiancee as Laura too, but I'm evil😈
as long as Clint and Nat end up together, that's all that matters, right?

the way they were so in sync in this story..Clint unzipping her dress without a word🥰

I already told you how I feel about this one over on AO3, but I'll say it again: I LOVE THIS. Clint trying to "people" is priceless.