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i. came in like a vision from the old west wind
The yellow roses are new. Clint pauses and looks at them, because yellow roses on the rooftop are probably the weirdest thing to happen to him all week and that’s counting the fact that he dragged an angry Russian assassin into the country on Tuesday. He only goes to the roof to escape the absolute shit show that his life has suddenly become and he doesn’t really want to share that with whoever is growing a secret garden at SHIELD, but whatever. He can probably deal with the flowers if he doesn’t also have to deal with his paperwork.
Still, yellow roses are weird enough for him to go over and investigate. He sniffs one experimentally and wonders vaguely if they would be poisonous, then plucks it off the bush anyway and twists it between his fingers. Roses aren’t his favourite flower by far; he likes the little blue ones that he only ever sees in the garden of his elderly neighbour, their delicate little petals scattered like van Gogh’s Starry Night across her windowsill, but he can find the beauty in roses in the same way that he found beauty in a woman who had everything stripped from her. There if he squinted hard enough.
He hasn’t been to see her. His excuses are stuck in his teeth and it’s kind of a dick move, to abandon her in the depths of SHIELD and expect her to be fine on the other side of it all, but he doesn’t know what to say. She’s world-weary and more than a little mad. He thinks that he would be too, if the roles were reversed.
Clint spends the elevator ride down cutting the thorns from the stem of the rose he’s going to give Natasha. It sounds like a good idea in his head, because once he had seen her admire a bouquet of peonies after assassinating a royal and not everyone stops to literally smell the roses, but she had and maybe that means that she’ll like it. He’ll tell Coulson they’re not poisonous. He eats a petal, just to be sure.
They let him into her cell. Natasha is lying on the bed with her wrists handcuffed to her side, and when he enters she barely glances at him. He has the rose and the tiny keys to the cuffs and it kind of feels like he’s standing on the edge of the world. One step and he falls and he has no idea where he’ll land.
“I asked for them to restrain me,” Natasha says.
Her voice is husky. Clint remembers it dripping like honey, but everything he remembers about her is a little different to what he sees now. It’s like someone has sharpened her edges a touch too close to the bone, and he wonders if it was SHIELD or if she was always like this and he just couldn’t see it through his scope.
Clint shrugs. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
Natasha turns her head to look at him properly, eyebrows knitted together. “You’re not going to ask?”
“I don’t care what you do, sweetheart,” he says. “Just don’t kill anyone while you’re doing it.”
“It’s so I can sleep,” Natasha elaborates. She looks like she wants him to say something, so he waggles his eyebrows at her and pulls words from thin air.
“I use whiskey for that.”
He sets the keys down on the tiny side table they’ve allowed her and holds the rose out between his thumb and pointer finger. Natasha stares up at it unblinking for far too long, then slowly pushes herself into a seated position that allows her to use her mouth to accept the flower. She drops it into her open palm and flips it over her fingers.
“A rose?” she asks.
“To say sorry for not visiting sooner,” Clint explains. “I found it on the roof. Not poisonous, in case you were wondering.”
Natasha’s lips quirk. “It’s a rose.”
“I know,” he replies. “How have you been, anyway?”
“Fine,” Natasha replies airily, then tries to hold the flower out to him. “Do you know what this means?”
He doesn’t, because he’s pretty sure flowers don’t actually have real meanings, but it keeps the smile on her face for a little longer so he plays along. She’s the kind of person he thinks he could actually get along with, if given the chance, and a part of him wants to hold onto the threads that are tying them together. So he smiles too and asks her about the flower and learns about friendship yellow and in the end he’s spent more time talking to her than he did trying to kill her.
Later, when she uses the rose stem to pick the lock on her cuffs and sneak into the middle of his debriefing, he’ll plead the fifth to Fury and offer her an olive branch. It will be the most important flower he ever gives her.
ii. like a bright new dream that i was stepping in
Nothing happens in Buda. Everything happens in Pest.
Clint likes people watching because it means he can order more than three coffees in one sitting and it looks perfectly normal. Natasha, he learns, likes undercover missions because she can buy things on SHIELD’s account and cite them as necessary work purchases. She’s probably the best agent he’s ever worked with and that’s why their Strike Team has lasted two years longer than even Coulson had hoped. That, and he really, really likes her.
So sitting in a café on the Buda side of the Danube doesn’t seem like the worst way Clint could be spending his day. Natasha is sweet-talking their mark and he’s keeping track of the wife, making sure she doesn’t leave her lunch early and stumble upon whatever forces are being employed on her husband to get him to talk. Clint waits and doesn’t think about Natasha kissing another man. He tells himself that she likes using her knives too much to actually seduce him.
Natasha meets him at midday with a smile and a secret. The wife is long gone, and Clint’s replaced his coffee with a sunflower the size of his palm. It’s bright and yellow and had reminded him of her face four months ago in the Waitomo Glow-worm Caves; luminescent and joyful, so struck with wonder that he couldn’t help but feel wonderful too.
“That for me?” she asks, not giving him a chance to reply before she’s walking away from him again. “You know what sunflowers mean, Barton?”
“Uh, nope?” he says. He jogs to catch her and slips the sunflower behind her ear. “Suits you, though.”
“Loyalty,” Natasha says.
Clint shrugs. “Okay then. I just thought cause it was yellow it was the same as the rose.”
“You remember that from three years ago?” she says, voice caught on the back of a breeze. Clint remembers almost everything that’s happened between them since he tied her thread to his, but he doesn’t know how to tell her.
“It’s one of those facts that sticks in your head,” he defends. “Like, because it’s so weird.”
“Or maybe I just left a good impression,” Natasha teases.
Yes, he wants to say. Yes you have.
“Don’t flatter yourself, babe,” he says instead. “It does look good on you, though.”
Natasha twirls in her party dress as they cross the Danube and it feels like the kind of night that seems endless, but for a good reason. It’s so easy, with her, even though neither of them are any good at the talking side of things. He can taste words that have been swimming in his chest for months now, and he just wants to tell her. How he picked the sunflower because he knew it meant loyalty, but he knows it means love, too.
They’re barely a foot into Pest when Clint spots their marks security. He doesn’t have time to ask Natasha if they would recognise her, because in a second she’s got him around the neck and she pushes him against the railing of the bridge, fuses her lips to his like they were always meant to fit there. It’s a divertive tactic if he’s ever seen one, so he wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her just that bit closer, shielding her face with some of her hair and the giant sunflower and his lips.
He kisses her back because he’s not an idiot, and all he can smell is the sunflower in her hair, and when she pulls away much later than she should have he knows she feels it too. The way the knot in their threads tighten, just a little.
iii. i saw your face and knew it was a sign
Natasha gets hit by a car.
Clint wants to laugh when he first hears that she leaves her mission unscathed only to be run down on the street half a block away, but there’s something in Coulson’s voice that makes his throat fill with cement, until all he can do is choke on his panic and race to her hospital bed. By the time he gets there they’ve already operated to release the pressure on her brain and he thinks, fleetingly, that she’s not going to be happy they had to cut her hair.
He sits with her for a day or two, losing time between ventilator breaths that sound like rusty angel wings. Coulson takes a turn when Clint finally showers but he’s not there for long; when Clint comes back, he’s got a new bag packed and a bouquet of peonies to brighten the room. Coulson doesn’t ask anymore. Not since Budapest and the three days they spent AWOL in bed.
(The flowers mean I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being there. I’m sorry for not stopping it.)
Natasha is asleep for longer than any of them expected. The doctor tells him that the colour in her cheeks is a good sign, that they expect her to make a full recovery if she ever opens her eyes. Clint reads to her, or holds her hand, or plays the kind of soft music she likes to sway to in the mornings. He knows that, now. He knows that she likes to dance in her underwear and eat peanut butter off the spoon and leave food out for the stray cats. He knows that because she let him.
“Got you some fresh peonies,” Clint says on day six. “You know I saw you smell the peonies in that big ass mansion back in Bulgaria. That was years ago. I remember because I remember you and – ”
He stops himself. Takes a breath. Starts again.
“Peonies mean sorry, too,” he says softly. He holds her hand because he’s never felt so disconnected from her. “Trust you to be hit by a car. God, Tasha. You got any more bright ideas in that pretty little head of yours?”
Natasha is still. The peonies are bright and he thinks that if she opens her eyes tomorrow he won't have to replace them again. She doesn’t like him fussing, even if she’ll spend hours running her hands over his skin to make sure he’s okay after a mission. He lets her. She hangs the sun in the sky. He would let her do anything.
“I love you,” Clint whispers. “You know that. I love you, Tasha. I miss your smile.”
He sleeps with his cheek against her hand. And when he wakes she wakes too, eyes fluttering around the room in thinly-veiled panic. She catches sight of the peonies, of him, and after the doctors stabilise her and they finally get a second alone, he feels all of his guilt melt away in a second. She’s okay.
Natasha tilts her head a fraction of an inch towards the bouquet. “Sorry, right?”
Her voice is husky. It sounds like honey.
iv. and i still think about that moment all the time
Clint never meant to agree to letting the stray move in, but Liho has her claws firmly in Natasha’s heart and no amount of arguing was going to get her to change her mind. So he’s delegated to feeding the cat in the early mornings when she screeches to let him know of her displeasure, and it astounds him that Natasha sleeps through it all when the sound of a lock clicking can have her on her feet in seconds.
He’s not mad about it today. He crawls from her bed and lets Liho weave between his legs, trying her best to get him to break something. He feeds her and hisses right back when she tries to bite his ankles, then begrudgingly lets her into the bedroom so she can curl up with Natasha for another hour. He’s convinced the cat is a demon, even if she doesn’t act it around Natasha.
Clint sneaks out to the bodega and manages to return home without disturbing Natasha once; he’s not sure if he’s just that good or if she’s only grown used to him coming and going at all hours. This is domesticity and all of its perks: living together, growing together, trust and honesty and love. He knows that they are safe together, and that’s all that really matters.
He makes pancakes and pours juice and carries it all into the bedroom for her with a giant pink chrysanthemum. Liho doesn’t bat an eye when he leans over her to press a kiss to Natasha’s bare shoulder, but she does protest to being moved. Clint nearly loses a finger, though it’s worth it to watch the first rays of light cross over Natasha’s face. She smiles at him lazily, eyes still ringed with sleep.
“Happy Birthday, sweetheart,” he says softly. He kisses her slowly, gently, like they have all the time in the world. They do, in the cocoon they’ve created for themselves. The Earth orbits her and he’s just glad he’s here for the ride.
“Thank you,” Natasha replies. Her gaze lands on the chrysanthemum and her forehead crinkles. “What’s this?”
“November birth flower,” Clint replies, feeling a faint heat rise to his cheeks. “I had to google it. It’s not the prettiest flower I could have bought, but – ”
Natasha cuts him off with another kiss. Her fingers play with the short hair at the back of his neck, inadvertently pulling him closer to her. It’s the kind of kiss that makes Clint fall in love with her all over again, and the feeling of it all pulls something deep inside his chest. He loves her. He wants to spend the rest of his life with her.
“I love it,” Natasha whispers when they finally pull apart. She lets him settle down beside her and accepts the tray of pancakes with a smile that sends electric currents right down to Clint’s toes. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world.”
“You gotta have breakfast in bed on your birthday,” Clint says matter-of-factly. “Otherwise what’s the point?”
“No point at all,” Natasha rolls her eyes. She offers him a bite of pancake, then snuggles into his chest. “Best birthday ever. I love you.”
Marry me, Clint thinks. God, just marry me.
“You getting sappy on me, Romanoff?” he teases instead, and when Natasha smacks him in the chest it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the words that are stuck in his throat. If he swallows, he might lose them.
He kisses her again and hopes she tastes the truth.
v. you know that i could never make this up
It’s a balmy day in Paris, and Natasha is wearing a beret and a dress and Clint can’t take his eyes off her. They have a whole week off, and spending it in French hotels had seemed like the only logical option. He holds her hand as they wander down the Place de la Concorde and it feels nice, to just blend in and act like tourists. His accent leaves a lot to be desired, but his knowledge of the language could rival Natasha herself. That’s why he likes Paris; he understands it.
He also likes Paris for the croissants Natasha eats every morning, and the way they can spend a whole day in the Louvre without needing to say a single word to each other. Natasha glows and the rest of the city dulls in comparison, until not even the Eiffel Tower can capture his attention for more than a few seconds.
“Fury seems to think that the new Widows Bites prototype doesn’t have a high enough voltage,” Natasha is saying to him. “They nearly killed Agent Rook.”
“Isn’t that kind of the point?” Clint says absently.
Natasha throws their joined hands up in exasperation. “That’s what you would think. But according to Logistics, we’re not allowed to do that.”
“Weird,” Clint mutters. “Coulson will fix it.”
“I hope so,” Natasha agrees. “We’ve been working on them for so long, and I thought they would be ready for next week.”
They stop in the middle of the Concorde and Natasha gazes up at the sky. Clint can’t take his eyes off of her. He wants to ask her more about the Bites but can't make himself say the words. He can't really say anything.
“We should go bike riding tomorrow. And we can have a picnic. Then we can go to Versailles and see if we can break into the palace. Or maybe we should leave that until we can blame it on Fury.” She finally notices him staring at her, and pulls her bottom lip between her teeth in confusion. “What? Bad idea?”
“Marry me,” Clint blurts. He has a crumpled tulip in his pocket that he presents to her, and he hopes she knows what it means. It means perfection, it means deep love; it means you are my soulmate Natasha and I want to marry you, so please say yes. Please say yes.
Natasha accepts the tulip. “Of course I’ll marry you, idiot.”
“Really?” Clint says on a breath. He could float away if she wasn’t holding him down. “Fuck, Natasha. You really wanna marry me?”
“Yes,” Natasha says simply. “You better get me a ring. And now we are definitely breaking into the palace for a quickie.”
“I love you,” Clint says like a prayer; like his soul hasn’t been entwined with hers from the first day he met her. “I want to kiss you.”
Natasha doesn’t waste any time. And this is why he likes Paris: because of her.
+1. i'm gonna love you for a long time
“Hey handsome.”
Clint spins around at the sound of the voice, then immediately closes his eyes before he can fully take in Natasha standing before him. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s our wedding day,” Natasha says. “We do what we want, and I want to see you.”
Clint cracks one eye open, and then the other when he realises Natasha is alone. He feels a wad of something lodge in his throat at the sight of her; hair pinned up in curls that frame her face, a gorgeous white dress that makes the emerald green of her eyes only sparkle that much more. She’s got something blue from Coulson and something borrowed from Hill and something old from Fury, though Clint’s not sure where she’s hiding them all.
She’s beautiful. He doesn’t have the words to tell her just how beautiful she really is, and he wishes that he did. He wishes he could give her the universe in the palm of his hand. But he also wishes that this quiet moment between the two of them will last forever, because it’s always been the two of them; their threads fused together, now, forged with blood and sweat and tears and love.
“I can live with that,” Clint says. “Tasha… You’re beautiful.”
“So are you,” she replies, smiling just a little. “I wish I could say… I’m not good at that.”
She gets him, more than anyone. “I know the feeling.”
Natasha rolls her eyes and crosses until she’s right in front of him. He can smell her perfume, and he really, really wants to kiss her right now and forget about the whole ceremony. She convinced Fury to wear a suit, though, so he’s not about to take that away from her.
“I got you something,” Natasha tells him. He notices the little blue flowers in her hand, the same ones he used to see at his old apartment in his neighbour’s garden. She pins them to his suit, brushing a finger over the delicate petals. “Forget-me-nots.”
“You’re a little hard to forget, Tash,” Clint teases gently, winding his arms around her waist. “Don’t need a flower to tell me that.”
“It means true love,” Natasha whispers. She rests her chin on his chest and looks up at him, and he sees a whole new universe swimming in her eyes. “You’re my true love.”
Oh. Clint brushes a strand of hair away from her face and allows himself one kiss, just for luck. Because Natasha is his and he is hers and the universe always destined it that way, and if he had known it would lead here maybe he would have given her a forget-me-not that first day in the cell. She would have looked at him in confusion, and he would have smiled, and eventually she would have smiled too, even though she barely knew him then.
And he would have said, “just trust me. It all works out in the end.”