Work Text:
They weren't really trying, but they weren't really not trying either. Clint hadn't gotten the snip yet -- just when he thought he could get it done without the Avengers being called up, SHIELD fell. The doctor scheduled to do the operation had been a Hydra operative. So, you know, it was probably for the best the appointment got cancelled. Besides, Laura had just turned 40 and if a single study done based on French birth records from the 1600s was to be believed, her eggs weren't cracking. Also: Clint had done plenty of weird shit for SHIELD or the Avengers; he privately thought his balls had been irradiated into irrelevance during any one of a number of missions involving glowing alien artifacts and/or attempted megabombs made by tinpot dictators in countries with a lax attitude toward environmental safety regulations.
The odds of them getting pregnant1 were not good, especially when they'd been flying without a net, so to speak, for six months with no results other than the usual good moods after trying.
Besides, what was wrong with a family of four? Clint and Laura even had the requisite one of each, a boy and a girl.
If he could travel back in time -- and Clint wouldn't be surprised when that happened, because the universe was filled with fucking lunatics who treated the laws of physics as hilariously irrelevant suggestions2 -- and tell his younger self, "One day, you'll have two kids and a wife, and you won't be able to imagine living without any of them, and none of them are afraid of you or hate you --"
Well, his younger self would have probably laughed as a way to shake the mark before letting a short, sharp arrow fly. His younger self was an asshole .
But to the point, Clint thought, his family life now was amazing just the way it was4. Coop still liked talking with his old man. (Thank Laura for keeping Clint's Kindle stocked with the books Coop was reading.) Lila adored him, in a way that was both baffling and delightful. His wife somehow still welcomed him home with a smile. What else did he need?
The week after Thanksgiving, Clint was finishing the dishes and trying to luxuriate in the ordinariness of family life. Three weeks off mission, weeks filled with finishing the winter prep for the farm, and walking Cooper through Watership Down, and drilling Lila on her spelling words, and arguing amiably with Laura over whether or not the walls in the sitting room should be lined with board-and-batten wainscoting. He had not shot at a Nazi5 in nearly three weeks. The shoulder sprain he got from falling sideways out of a tree before a missile took it out had nearly healed. Nobody had tried to kill him in 20 days.
God, he was bored out of his mind.
He loved his family. He really did. Clint prided himself on his preternatural focus during missions, but that focus would not have been possible if it weren't fueled by his fierce love and delight for Cooper, Lila, Laura and their lives. Every step of every mission was for them. When he was wet, cold, tired, in pain, harried, or uncomfortable, it was the thought of being home and comfortable with his family that kept him calm and focused.
And then when he was home and comfortable with his family, he felt his life settle around him, and something in his brain sparked and fizzed and demanded to blow it all up so he could feel alive in his skin again. It was perverse, this impulse. And he had no idea how to get rid of it -- or whether he wanted to.
Laura, to her credit, never once asked why Clint looked around at his beautiful home and his beautiful family, and said, "I need to introduce you to the possibility of being widowed or orphaned. Again."
Clint loved Laura for a lot of reasons, but her calm acceptance of who he was topped the list6.
He finished the dishes, helped wrangle the kids to bed, then steeled himself for a night on the couch, reading or half-watching a movie until one of them fell asleep. Soon, he'd be pretzeled into some perch in a godforsaken part of the planet, and then he'd miss the soft, warm weight of Laura leaned up against him, he reminded himself. Appreciate it now.
After Coop had been negotiated down to a half hour with the light on and that's it, young man, Laura closed the door, took one look at Clint, and said, "Clint, go to the barn and shoot targets for a while."
"It's that --?"
" Go ," Laura repeated.
Clint went out and lost himself in shooting. He aimed and let fly, fetched the arrows and did it again, set harder challenges, met those, thought up new angles, scaled the beams of the barn, switched arms, did it again. Then he shot with his eyes closed, with his soundproofed headphones in, with the lights off in the barn, with the kliegs turned high to try to impair his vision. For a long, golden moment, the world fell into place: Clint knew who he was and what he could do, defining and refining a world of angles and targets.
And then the moment faded and Clint figured he had better clean up. The kids would have questions about how the arrows got up in the hayloft.
He didn't realize how sweaty he was until he left the barn and the cold air hit him all at once. The den was dark, the downstairs was dark -- and Clint pounded upstairs to take a shower. Laura would probably complain about the steam getting into the bedroom -- he had to reroute the vent because it was somehow still leaking through the closet -- but he was freezing and him shooting arrows in the barn had been her idea anyway.
The bedroom was dark, but Laura's voice came floating out, husky and amused. "Did you hit all the targets, Hawkeye?"
He-lo. Laura rarely used his callsign. Around the house, he was usually Dad or Clint. He had always supposed it was Laura's way of helping him compartmentalize.
Clint's eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he saw Laura's skin, smooth and gleaming as a pearl. There was a lot of skin to see.
"Hawkeye, huh?" He peeled off his shirt, kicked it toward the hamper.
"I know you," Laura shifted. Hello, naked wife. "You've got good eyes and a pair of hands for fixing any situation, whether you think you're being Clint or Hawkeye."
"Is this a situation where my hands can do the fixing, ma'am?" Clint asked, dropping his pants and kicking them somewhere else.
Laura stretched and smiled at him. "Oh, I'm sure you'll hit all the right spots, Hawkeye. I know a thing or two about your aim."
Clint did not need any more inducement to leap on to the bed and reward every assumption his wife made about his ability to aim at targets and get the results he wanted.
After, way after, as in "after they had ended up launching into round two during a mostly-well-intentioned suggestion to save hot water after showering together," Clint was buzzing with endorphins and general good feelings, and enjoying the soft weight of Laura sprawled out across him. He was just about to apologize for feeling restless with his family when Laura spoke up.
"The next time Nat wants you out in the field, you should go."
"That eager to get rid of me?"
"Don't tell me you're not eager to go."
"That obvious, huh?"
"You do a good job of feeling guilty about it," Laura replied. She kissed his chest and added, "Don't. I love all of you. Even the adrenaline junkie part. I wouldn't want it any other way."
"I don't want to miss Christmas," Clint replied, and was surprised by how much he meant it.
Laura chuckled. "Don't worry about that. Just … when you need to go, go ."
The next day was easier, quite possibly because once he had permission to go, he didn't need it any more.
Still, Clint would be lying if he wasn't secretly thrilled to get a call from Natasha the day after that . And when he was wheels-up in the quinjet ten hours later, he felt at home there too, Dad and Clint quietly sinking into his soul, the unseen focus and invisible spine for the Avenger.
Clint settled into Hawkeye with only a few cracks about holiday nostalgia not including Nazis, and so Hawkeye kept one eye on the team while Clint kept the other on the calendar, because this damned hunting expedition was taking forever. And so it was with a great deal of catharsis that he shot his last Nazi in the Erg Chigaga on December 19.
As most of the team flew back in the quinjet -- Tony flying outside and hijacking the radio to complain loudly about the sand everywhere, and Jarvis asking if Sir preferred holidays when his houses were being blown up -- Clint swore he could feel everyone actively avoiding mentioning Christmas. On one hand, he was relieved: A tiny part of him had wondered if Tony would try an orphan's holiday and he had been dreading the effort it would take to escape that. On the other hand, while he didn't ever regret keeping knowledge of his family separate from his team, he did kind of wish he could brainstorm Santa presents for a five-year-old girl with them. Thor was uncannily good at gift suggestions, he'd noticed.
Steve kept the mission debrief short and ended it with a curt "It was a good year, team. Happy holidays," and Clint caught Natasha's look of sympathy as she watched the young-old leader of the team7.
"I almost wish I could ask him home for the holidays," he told Natasha later as they swept west on I-90.
"Sam's going to spend it with him," Natasha said. "I made sure of that."
She paused and added, "And I might swing by that night."
"You got a jet parked near the farm?" Clint asked. "Because Laura and the kids are going to want to see you on Christmas morning."
"I'm sure I do now," Natasha replied, grinning. "Private ownership is such a western idea anyway."
"Commie," Clint smirked, but he was pleased that Natasha had widened her select circle. He loved her, but he worried about her not having what he did -- those ties to the wider world, a secure place where he could be all of himself. She was Aunty Nat and Laura's sister by another mister and his dearest friend, but … well, he liked that Nat had more people she could call hers.
In fact, on Christmas, the kids were more put out that Aunty Nat didn't invite her friends over than they were over the new-to-them possibility that Aunty Nat might have to split her time between them and someone else. Natasha promised that next Christmas, things would be different. Clint refused to think about how or why.
He focused instead on playing with the kids in the snow, keeping the barn snug and well-maintained against the ravages of the weather, and enjoying how much he was enjoying being home. Besides, Laura needed him home, even if she wouldn't say it. The holidays had really taken it out of her; she was exhausted and napping every afternoon for hours, and that still wasn't helping -- twice in the last week, she had fallen asleep on the couch reading Lila a chapter from On the Shores of Silver Lake before bedtime .
Clint spent a day watching Laura and wondering if all that weird Asgardian crap he had been exposed to had somehow made him radioactive and given Laura some strange disease that was only now manifesting. The next day, he took the kids to school so Laura could sleep in, stopped to buy more high-octane coffee for the family since the current brew was clearly not cutting it --
Then remembered ten years ago, when they were both younger and life was much simpler and Laura was sleeping fourteen hours a day because she was in her first trimester.
Clint counted back. Laura should have been surfing the red wave during Christmas and she hadn't been. He'd appreciated it at the time. But if he counted back … if she missed a period in December that meant …
That unexpectedly sweet night in November. When she called him Hawkeye.
He grinned all the way home from the store. He had always enjoyed figuring out when each of his children were conceived -- Cooper was made on the 4th of July and Lila had been a morning quickie when Nick Fury had come by to take "my man Coop" out for what he called "pancakes and man-to-man talk."8
Laura was going through the lunchtime motions when he got home -- planning out the garden and ignoring the soup she had made on autopilot -- and Clint asked, "How you feeling?"
"Still tired," Laura said. "I'm hoping when the weather breaks sunny, I'll get more energy."
"Really?" Clint asked. "You think the cloudy weather's why you're tired?"
Laura blinked at him and Clint remembered too late that a chronically tired Laura was a crabby Laura. "Human circadian rhythms are altered by light exposure. Didn't you tell me that?"
"I'm not disputing that. But I think you're pregnant," Clint said.
"I'm not pregnant!" Laura snapped. "I'm wrung out from doing the holidays all by myself while running a farm and raising two kids! I'll be fine with a nap."
"And about forty gallons of mint-chip ice cream, and an epidural and --"
"Nap," Laura tried to snap, but she was yawning too much for her tone to have any real bite. Clint remembered this phase. Laura would be dead on her feet when she wasn't crabbing at him, and then around week fourteen, she'd begin to get some energy back. Food would be the enemy until about week twenty. Her appetite would return, along with her libido.
He wondered for a moment whether it would be better for his marriage or worse if he volunteered to help Steve look for the Winter Soldier until Laura passed through the cranky, exhausted and barfy stage. He'd come back right when she was horny and getting her amazing pregnancy rack. With luck, that hormone wave would wash away the irritation --
He was a terrible human being.
Laura stomped upstairs in a cloud of gray, exhausted irritation. Clint began rooting through the freezer to see what he could pull out and heat up for dinner. Laura wouldn't want to eat but he and the kids still had needs. And as he pre-heated the oven for the chicken paprikash Natasha had made last summer after gleefully killing a hen that had pecked Lila one too many times, Clint began grinning.
A baby! They were going to have a baby by the end of the summer. His junk wasn't radioactive after all.
A baby. They'd be exhausted. He was 44, Laura 40. They'd gotten soft -- used to sleeping through the night and dealing with people who knew how to use the bathroom without needing an adult to wipe their bottoms. And oh God, they were going to have to switch from man-on-man defense to zone defense on parenting.
Also, Cooper was old enough to know where babies came from and God only knows how he was going to deal with the reality that his parents may have actually had sex.
Also, Steve was hellbent for leather on wiping out Hydra. Trying to swing paternity leave without letting the team know exactly why he needed to be out was a challenge Clint was not yet ready to ponder. Maybe he'd just throw the problem to Natasha and hope her idea of solving it was not "Throw a surprise baby shower."
A baby. For some reason, the thought of leaving Laura alone with three kids while he ran around with the Avengers seemed like a much worse idea than leaving Laura alone with two kids while he ran around with the Avengers. Maybe it was because he figured Coop and Lila would remember him if something happened, but this one ... Clint wouldn't wish an absent father on any child, and he'd do his damnedest to make sure he was there for this one too. He'd talk to Nat and Nick about exit strategies once Laura had the anatomy scan in a few weeks.
But … a baby. A person with Laura's big dark eyes and maybe his sense of balance. Another person in the world who could know him as Dad, another person in the world making it a better place simply by being there. A baby ...
The oven dinged its announcement of a perfect paprikash-thawing temperature and Clint grinned foolishly at nothing and everything. A baby. If it was a girl, they'd name her Natasha. The world would spin on, becoming a better place for all the people in it and the places they called home.
1. Clint was aware that, technically speaking, Laura was the one who would be gestating a human being. However, he had a firm appreciation for ground support and logistics teams, and he'd already run those roles in two prior Operation: Baby Barton missions, so insofar as he was concerned, he was taking on this pregnancy too. [Back to story.]
2. At least two of those lunatics were friends of his, and he wouldn't be surprised if one day, Tony punched a button on a gauntlet, the smoke cleared, they all ended up sprinting away from dinosaurs. Or, in Thor's case, merrily skipping toward a T. Rex while chortling in delight 3. [Back to story.]
3. Clint had already thought through all the probable reactions of his fellow Avengers for most of the likely periods Tony would send them to, because sometimes, he needed to keep himself amused on the quinjet and imagining Steve Rogers hijacking the American revolution was good for a half hour of tactical what-ifs. However, he was personally rooting for the 14th century, because Crecy, duh. [Back to story.]
4. Clint would always, always be proud of the fact that even when the Norse God of Douchebags hijacked his brain, he had managed to keep Loki from knowing about his family. Not only had that kept everyone safe from Asgard's leading crazy royal export, it had kept everyone safe from Nick and Natasha using them as pawns in the battle for the world. Clint loved both Nick and Nat, but he suffered no illusions about what lines they would or wouldn't cross to save the world. [Back to story.]
5. And how was it possible that there were Nazis in the 21st century? How? In Clint's ranking of "Things That Should Not Be On My Planet," "Actual Nazis Nazi'ing around like Nazis never went out of style" had rocketed to number one. [Back to story.]
6. Although, to be honest, her rack was also in the top five -- even after breastfeeding two kids. He was not a huge fan of super-secret supersoldier projects -- for every Steve Rogers, you got a raft of evil bodybuilders -- but if any aspiring superserum scientists had asked him for pointers, he would have thought, "Check out whatever makes my wife's breasts so amazing" immediately before shooting the mad bastard. [Back to story.]
7. Clint had noticed that most of their strategic or tactical thinking came from Steve, who had an unholy talent for creative warfare. It was Clint's honest opinion that Steve was the most dangerous of them all -- because a good man acts with a moral certitude and swiftness that a morally compromised man does not have. [Back to story.]
8. There was a reason Lila's middle name was Nicole and she believed her godfather when he told her he was a reformed pirate who still liked to wear an eyepatch. [Back to story.]