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“Hey, you’re seeing Maria tonight, right?” Clint asked Natasha quite suddenly as they were finishing up training.
“Yeah,” she lifted the edge of the mat they were putting up and waited for him to grab the other side. “She’s got dinner with the ambassadors and then I’m meeting her afterwards.”
“You want to get some grub with me beforehand?” Clint was not entirely casual about the way he asked it as they lifted the mat and put it away against the wall.
“Sure,” she studied him. “Something the matter?”
“Oh no, no,” he turned to grab his bag of gear off the floor, flustered. “Just wanted to get something to eat, thought you’d like to join me.”
Frowning, Natasha followed him.
Clint’s behavior was mostly normal at dinner, except for one thing. He kept trying to get Natasha to eat more. He ordered a couple of appetizers for them to split, kept suggesting the items with the largest portions on the menu, and when Natasha tried to pass on dessert, he ordered one for himself and then insisted that Natasha split it with him.
He never did explain his strange behavior and Natasha couldn’t figure it out from any of the context clues, though she did ponder them later while lying in bed with Maria.
“You seemed a bit off tonight.” Maria could do tact but after an evening of diplomats she didn’t have the energy for it.
“I ate too much at dinner. Clint was determined to feed me up.”
“Something wrong with him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he’s projecting issues from Laura, you know how she worries.”
“Mmmm, maybe,” Maria curled up against her side and pulled the blanket up over both of them. “I suppose he’ll tell you eventually if there’s a problem.”
“Could just be Clint being Clint.” Natasha reached out and turned out the light and they let the matter go for the night.
Clint did not let the matter go though. The next day it was snacks. He had snacks available for Natasha every time they took a break. Her attempts to turn them down got her worried looks in response and she ended up resorting to sleight of hand to hide half eaten foodstuffs when his back was turned.
“I think he’s turning into a hobbit,” Maria commented that night while an exasperated Natasha was emptying all the leftovers from her pockets and gear bag. “You know, elevensies, second breakfast, that sort of thing.”
“It’s fine if he wants to grow hairy feet, but he should leave me out of it.”
“Well, you are his best friend. Maybe it’s a pack bonding thing.”
Natasha turned her irritated gaze on Maria, who only smiled teasingly back at her.
“If he doesn’t come out with what’s bothering him soon, I’m going to start upping the training schedule and see how he likes it when people force their coping mechanisms on him.”
“Oh, so you admit that you use training as a coping mechanism?” Maria’s grin was huge and Natasha couldn’t help but shake her head in fond annoyance.
“Come to bed, love. I’m sure he’ll tell you, or you could always use your super special spy skills to work out the reason.”
Natasha let herself be persuaded to drop the subject for a few days. It wasn’t that hard.
Maria was less amused by the matter when she began to realize that indulging Clint’s newest craze for convincing Natasha to eat everything but the table at meals was beginning to interfere with her sex life.
“I am so full I can barely move.” Natasha lay on her back on the bed but she didn’t care one bit if she looked enticing. She did, of course, but she also couldn’t do much to take advantage of Maria’s interest, much to both their annoyance.
“Okay, this was funny to begin with, but it’s less funny now.” Maria muttered.
“Oh, it was funny when it was just me being encouraged to devour piles of pasta?” Natasha enquired from her prone position.
“It was funny when it was an occasional thing, but this is every day and it’s gone on for far too long. It can’t be some sort of nesting syndrome, right?”
“Okay, one, Laura is not pregnant again, I already checked, and two, did you just make a bird joke about Clint?”
Maria rolled her eyes. “This needs to stop. Have you tried talking to him?”
“Oh yes, but when I try to do that he just pulls on his stoic mask of non-information, which he has unfortunately had years to practice against me. I can’t figure out what the problem is. The only pattern to the situation is that when he knows I’m going to see you he starts increasing the food amounts rapidly, like he…” Her voice trailed off.
“Like he?” Maria asked.
“I may have a theory,” Natasha said tentatively, “but I’ll need your help for direct confrontation. He can avoid me, but I don’t think he’ll run away from you.”
“Given how this little game of his has interfered with our plans three nights in a row, if he tries to run, I’ll shoot him.”
Natasha smiled. “You say the sweetest things in the bedroom.”
They worked around the issue of Natasha’s overly full stomach. They also made a plan for dealing with Clint, although Natasha firmly refused to tell Maria her theory.
Through careful planning, they managed to stage a meeting in the hallway outside of Maria’s office.
Maria had to give Natasha full credit, she was subtle about starting her plan, simply greeting Maria with a kiss that left Maria’s knees a little weak and gave her a growing desire to pin Natasha against the wall. Or be pinned by her. Either one would work. Okay, maybe it was not so subtle, but Maria didn’t care, so long as they could continue, preferably in a room with a locking door, but just at that moment she didn’t feel terribly picky.
As soon as they broke apart though, Clint inserted himself between them, producing a candy bar from nowhere and offering it to Natasha. “Snack break?”
Natasha turned and leveled him with a glare that had broken lesser men.
Maria glared daggers at him for the interruption. “Clint. What. The. Hell.”
With a completely straight face Clint looked at her and said, “Wikipedia says: ’Contrary to popular belief, the female black widow does not always murder and eat her mate. If she has been recently fed, the mate is often allowed to live.’”
As his words sank in, Natasha, the queen of stoicism, the woman with the champion poker face to beat all poker faces started laughing. Maria and Clint could only stare at her. She was laughing so hard she ended up needing to hold onto the wall for support.
Maria looked in bewilderment at Natasha and then saw the slight grin on Clint’s face and rolled her eyes. “How long have you been waiting to use that?”
His grin broadened. “Since the first night. Took you long enough.”
Maria tried to keep her face impassive, but failed. It was hard with Natasha still chuckling as she leaned against the wall. So she rolled her eyes and went for plan B. “Clint, the whole point is for her to eat me, so stop interfering,” Maria admonished him as she reached out and pulled Natasha into her office, slamming the door in his face.
Clint blinked and then laughed before turning away, taking a bite of the candy bar as he walked off.
Natasha and Maria made good use of the leftover stashes of food Natasha had been forced to store in Maria’s office at various points over the last few days, though they had a meal of an entirely different sort first.