Chapter Text
This is no place for a child to sleep let alone to raise a child, hell, he hasn’t slept in going on 39 hours and he’s pretty sure if he had any kind of choice he’d keep going until he found somewhere else to sleep himself. He hasn’t had time for choice since he got back. He’s got whiplash from the sheer speed of that information dump, the one that hit him the second he found her again.
He gets up and stretches, weighing his head down with his hand and feeling the tense muscles give and lengthen. This place gives him the creeps, too many disjointed and forgotten memories left lying around. He drags his head to the other side and feels a tell-tale pop of synovial fluid. He’d groan but she’s finally conked out on the couch and no one’s crying for a change. If he’s the reason either of them wake up there will be more then hell to pay.
A week and a half ago when he’d tracked her new alias down to a crappy apartment in a shitty end of a buttfuck nowhere kind of town, he’d thought they’d need to make a getaway. He knew Natasha and Natasha would say if he could find her so could Hydra and he’d argue a little, kiss her a lot, push her up against the wall and do what they’d both be desperate to do and then they’d run. The Natasha that opened the fucktastic door of that crappy apartment though was a damn sight different from the Natasha he’d last seen going on seven months ago.
“No fucking way,” was the first thing out of his dumb mouth.
“Barton,” she’d said, “You took your sweet time. Where’s the Starbucks?”
“No fucking…” he’d repeated transfixed by her swollen belly.
“Way,” she finished for him, “Get in. I’ve got a bug out bag but you’re later than I’d hoped.” He sidled past her into an apartment that could belong to anyone, there were even picture frames with people he’d never seen and he’d be willing to bet Natasha’s never met resting against the baseboards fostering an impression of a person who has just moved in and might just move out again.
“You’re pregnant!?”
“You’ve got a car?” she asked in reply. Her hair, still red, longer again but looped in a messy bun, is tucked under a winter cap while he scanned her. It’s always red, the one thing she never changes.
“Yeah. Natasha, give me the damn sit rep at least!”
“Yes pregnant, 37 weeks, healthy apparently, despite the fall of SHIELD. They’re not expecting a pregnant black widow, an upside in maintaining this cover.” She shrugged a little then slid a hand down over the bump, stretching the black tank top that tucks somewhere he couldn’t see into what he assumed were maternity jeans. The only thing he’d really registered was the gestational count.
“37 weeks?” He wanted to drop all pretence of getting out of there and throw himself down on the nondescript beige couch. He wanted to start what he knows will be an argument with a frankly pointless ‘and you didn’t fucking tell me?!’
“Hawkeye,” she said as if reading his mind, a small rebuke in the way she shook her head and a ‘get your head in the game’ in the way she used his call sign.
“Yeah, yeah where’s the bag?”
She indicated a large black sports bag beside another open doorway. He kept talking as he hoisted the bag onto his shoulder, “I haven’t got a tail as far as I can tell. You need anything else not in the bag? Pregnant stuff? Baby stuff?”
“No,” a smile graced her lips telling him how awkward he sounded.
“Right.”
“In transit. I’ll explain in transit.”
“Yeah,” he said accepting the pragmatic olive branch.
He shifted his bow to make room for her bag and caught himself staring as Natasha lowered herself into the passenger seat far more gingerly and slowly than he’d ever seen her move. He had begun to regret the four or five protein bar wrappers that had littered the front seat by the time he got back to her. If she’d been the Natasha he was expecting he would have grinned and shrugged off her annoyance but she wasn’t that Natasha, she was somebody’s mother or soon to be mother and he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should be more respectful or something.
He waited as long as he could for her explanation to come. He’d take it however it came, a clipped sit rep, a melodramatic declaration, a heart stopping confession that it was Cap's kid she was carrying. Nothing came. She wiggled in the seat, arching her back then huffing into silence.
“So the kid? The kid's mine,” he asked taking a stab in the dark. They’d been fucking for a while before he left but they’d never defined anything.
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“I wasn’t certain you were still alive.” Quick and perfunctory, the words came, despite the wasp like stings they brought. He’d done his best to get back when everything went… what’s worse than pear shaped? Gourd shaped? Banana shaped? When everything went Loki level fucked. He’d ducked and covered, he’d zigged, he’d zagged. He’d even taken out his own handler when it turned out she was one of those heads Hydra kept talking about. “I made the best decision I could with the information I had.”
“Decision?” he asked confused, turning to look at her despite the long road ahead. She kept her eyes firmly on the road and he’d wondered if he’d ever find a way to ask for forgiveness for the things that he had not been responsible for. “To have the kid? Tasha, you gotta know if I’d been here… I’ve got your back, no matter what.”
“Is that true even now?” he heard her ask as he turned back, her voice strangely small.
“Yeah, of course it is.”
“And the?” in his periphery she spread her hands over her stomach.
“Fuck, yeah, wow there’s like a person in there isn’t there.”
She grimaced, squirmed again in her seat and most certainly rolled her eyes, “Yes, kicking me in the ribs.”
“Well, we know for certain it’s yours then don’t we? Fuck, a kid!”
“Your kid.”
“My kid? Fuck and I thought you and Captain Underpants publishing all our shit on the World Wide Web was the…” and then a stupid grin spread across his face, he felt his lips pull upwards and he fought the way his voice threatened to crack, “My kid.”
“The… child… you have its back too?” she stuttered out the question in an act of un-Natasha like uncertainty. If she’d noticed the goofy grin he could not tell.
“Tasha,” he’d said riding the endless waves of doubt and fear on the one thing he was absolutely certain of, “I ain’t gonna promise to be an awesome father but I’m not gonna let anyone get to you or that midget…. Fuck, a father.”
In the rear view mirror he saw her shoulders lower infinitesimally. “Clint Barton as a father is sure to be better than Natasha Romanoff as a mother.” The twist to her mouth made him want to break something.
“Now why you gotta go and say that?” he said reaching out for her with his right hand and realizing that there was less leg to grip now, he hesitated, retreating back to the steering wheel and bouncing the heel of his hand against the spoke. “Far as I can tell you did a fine job of keeping you both safe while the kid’s deadbeat dad was off being a deadbeat.”
“Running for his life in several countries with extradition treaties and an interest in appeasing the US government or in settling old debts?”
“You say potato,” he said shrugging as he flicked on the turn signal.
“I am glad you’re back, Clint,” she replied softly, her eyebrow raising as if she were surprised by that fact as much as he was.
“Yeah? Gotta say if I’d ever imagined this scenario, and I never have, I’d have figured you’d be more pissed off.”
“I was.”
“So the great Hawkeye timing hasn’t failed me yet?” he smirked.
“Don’t push it hot shot,” she said, the space between her eyebrows creasing as she gazed up at his reflection in the mirror, “I can be pissed with you like that.” She clicked and then dropping her hand back to its resting position on the make shift self of her stomach she sighed, “Right now I’m just relieved I don’t have to do the next bit alone.”
“Next bit?” he said without thinking, “Oh fuck. Yeah. Okay. We got this.”
“I am glad you’re so confident.”
“While you’re not pissed at me can I ask how this happened?”
“Hmm? Really?” she said suddenly grinning.
“Yeah I mean I thought…”
“When a man likes a woman very much certain physical changes occur to his…” She blinks one too many times when she’s being facetious, no one would believe the legendary Black Widow loves bad jokes as much as she does. He supposes, in the end, that ones on him too.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh riot,” he answered dryly knowing that if he didn’t cut her off she would keep going, finding delight in bad puns and dad jokes. “SHIELD has all its agents on active duty on birth control and….”
“SHIELD is gone Clint,” she said and like that the joy had left her voice. Every sentence was a new alley they could go down, a new conversation they should be having.
“37 weeks ago SHIELD was, apparently infested with Hydra, but still extremely around and, Tasha, I thought… well, the red room…”
“So did I… should be impossible,” she said quietly.
“How impossible?”
“Impossible isn’t gradable.”
“Thanks for the grammar lesson. Impossible like the two of us should have bought a lottery ticket between sex positions or impossible like Hydra had a plan and it wasn’t plan B.”
“The former, as far as I can tell. I don’t have the resources I once had. I’ve been operating on the assumption that I can’t rule out the lat ahh,” the last syllable was swallowed by a disconcerting yelp.
“You okay?” he asked, his eyes flicking between Natasha and the road with concern.
“Contraction,” she answered breathlessly.
“Contraction?! Like kids coming? Shit.” He'd hurriedly evaluated the highway ahead. There had to be somewhere he could pull off. There was supposed to be welcome home sex and your ribs are bruised noises of concern, there was supposed to be real pizza while he told her how his contacts went dark and his handler had been all ‘let me kill you and hail Hydra’. There was supposed to be a hell of a lot of sleep. Then a sandwich. Then another nap. In less than half an hour he’d become the loser husband in a sitcom that’s just about to jump the shark. He wasn’t getting that nap.
Then her hand was on his thigh, warm and firm. There was something in the way she touched him that reminded him of the way she would say to people they’d rescued, it’s not your fault. “Relax. Braxton Hicks. It’s not labor.”
“Jesus Tash,” he said and she made to take her hand away. He caught it just in time, suddenly aware that it was the first time they’d touched in seven months. He brought her fingers to his lips, pressing a single kiss to them. She always told them it wasn’t their fault, she’d even told him that once. She must have known that she did it, a trademark, an idiosyncrasy she allowed herself. She must have known she was telling people the thing she most wanted to hear but would never believe of herself.
“Welcome to the party Barton,” she said instead, giving him a fond yet exasperated look that said she both pitied and loved his sentimentality. He was glad of it, that that much at least had survived the last seven months.
“This doesn’t look like a party.”
“No.”
He let her have her hand back. He wondered in the silence if he was brave enough to reach out and touch Natasha, if she would let him run his hand over the skin that hid his unborn child.
“It’s your op Tash, you take lead and I’ll run point.”
“Just like Budapest?” she echoed, a call and response that made him smile.
“You and I remember Budapest very differently.”
“We can’t risk a hospital.”
No, they couldn’t, not with Hydra out there. Not with Hydra with a possible hand, a possible head, in the making of this child. Not with countless relics of the cold war with an interest in a pregnant Chyornaya Vdova. The alternative of course was to risk Natasha and to risk the infant she was carrying. It was her op, he reminded himself, it was very much her op.
“Right.”
“I’ve got a fetal heart rate monitor and the head was engaged at my last scan.”
“We’re doing this on our own then?” he asked.
“We’ve both got field medic training, you’ve kept me alive more times than we both could count.”
“You and I remember field medic training very differently.”
“I trust you,” she said and in an instant cut through every layer of bullshit what if, of shouldah, wouldah, couldah. Pregnancy, it seemed, would not change that ever rational surgeon’s knife at the heart of Natasha.
“I missed so much.” And he meant that he did not want to miss anything else.
“Yeah,” she said abruptly grinning, shifting the mood with a turn of her head. “Where the fuck were you Barton? Knock me up and leave me to take down SHIELD on my lonesome.”
“You were pregnant when hellicarriers were falling outta the sky!”
“You are usually much quicker with the math.” A curl fell from her knit cap as she spoke.
“Natasha!”
She rolled her head back against the head rest looking annoyed that her gambit to lighten the weighty mood had failed. “If it helps, I didn’t know.” Of course she didn’t, there was a time, he had to remind himself, that she didn’t know either. Then there had to be a moment when she knew, for sure, that she was pregnant and he hadn’t been there. He’d been running across roof tops, forging passports, hacking the backend of ESTA websites and wishing she was there.
“When did you, you know, find out?”
“Congressional hearings.”
He nodded sharply. He’d been so happy to see her. Her hair was longer and straighter and he’d been so proud when she’d stared those overpaid figureheads down. “I saw shots of you, sometimes, between the dub, I got to hear your voice.”
“How’d I do?” she asked, shifting in her seat to move closer to him, a wicked twinkle in her eyes reflected in the mirror.
“I would have said you were at your black widowyest… now with context… I dunno if I should be turned on by your magnificence or pissed at the risks you were taking.”
“I went with glad you’re back; you can go with turned on,” she answered, poking him in the side as punctuation.
“Did you really think I was dead?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Yes,” she corrected equally as firm and then finally, “No, I couldn’t get any accurate intelligence and eventually I wasn’t sure if it was gut instinct or hormones telling me you were still alive.”
“If I’d known…”
“You would have been more reckless about getting back?”
“That too.”
“Are you angry?” She was curling up in the car seat as she spoke, clearly no longer able to throw her feet up on the dash board as she used to. There were darkish shadows under her eyes and he wondered if it was being alone or the pregnancy that had tired her the most.
“I dunno now. Doesn’t feel real.” He reached behind his own seat for his coat and passed it to her. “Are you angry?” he asked as she wrapped the dark grey wool over her. “You were?”
“I… it’s strange, I must have been angry with you, with the situation, with… but there are so many other selves between me and the world. Without you to make me ask those questions, I just didn’t.” Natasha could be whomever you wanted her to be, a skill set turned survival strategy. Natasha could be whomever you wanted her to be unless you asked her to be herself. He’d come to accept that she was Clint’s Natasha with him and it might not be just Natasha but it was a close as she could manage. He’d come to accept that the attempt was a show of trust.
“And now?” he asked, only now realizing that she might not have asked herself how she felt about being pregnant, about the child, about the future and even about his returning. Maybe she had, like him, only thought of survival.
“Now? I’m tired and swollen.”
“Yeah right, did you have a place in mind?” Those questions and their answers wouldn’t go anywhere if they told them to fuck off till morning.
“There’s a farm house,” she yawned looking more like a pregnant woman by the second.
“A farm?”
“Mmm Waverly.”
“Waverly Iowa?”
“You know the way.”
“Tasha,” he said, her name becoming half a plea and half an argument.
“It’s safe. You kept it hidden. Well hidden.”
She would not be argued with. What choice did he have, really? “Right. You sleep. I’m gonna…process.”
“You were supposed to show up with Starbucks,” she mumbled, a throwback to the way she had greeted him.
“Got no idea what that means Red,” he said and tucked the errant curl back into her cap, pausing a moment to stroke her cheek as her eyes closed. “Just sleep, kay, it’s gonna be a long drive.”