Archive of Our Own

At eighteen, Laura shoots a gun.

She doesn’t like the sound, or the feeling of pulling the trigger, or the fact that it means she’s putting the lives of other people in the fate of her own two hands. So, Laura decides shooting a gun is not for her.

What Laura decides is for her, however, is languages.

She moves around to many places as a child -- her father is a foreign service officer with the State Department, which means different homes and different cultures and different embassies more times than Laura can count. It also means that a fast mind combined with a love for learning allows her to soak up the language of each country her family settles in, like a well-worn sponge. By the time she arrives back in the United States, determined to put down some semblance of roots at her family’s farm in North Dakota, she will admit to full fluency only in Greek and German and Dutch, even if she can find her way around the menus and map directions of a handful of other languages. She spends a month after college in Brussels on a fully-funded trip from the State Department, and her father recommends her for employment in SHIELD when daunting men in suits come to her house to meet with him for a networking hour that Laura suspects isn’t quite as random as he makes it seem.

Laura’s mother is surprisingly okay with her going off and working for a secret government spy organization -- perhaps it’s her father’s traveling, years spent being protected and always on guard, Laura thinks. Still, she scoffs when Laura tells her she’s decided to pursue a career rooted in desk duty rather than field work.

“It’s boring,” her mother says.

Laura responds, “I fail to see how working with languages is more boring than accounting, mom,” and then follows that up with, “aren’t you glad I’m going to be behind a desk and not out in the field, where I could get killed?” for good measure.

Her mother raises an eyebrow in reproach but Laura knows she’s won the argument; anyway, Laura doesn’t find linguistics or languages boring at all. She’s always been interested in patterns and problem solving, she’s always liked trying to figure out answers to complicated enigmas of questions that the world doesn’t provide simple boxed explanations for. She likes getting parts of the puzzle and figuring out how they relate to the whole. Languages, studied correctly and pursued correctly, could be brutally dense and complicated, and Laura joins the signal intelligence department and spends hours poring over the many reports that come in from various field agents. She sits at a small desk, tapping her owl-shaped pen against thick stacks of papers while mainlining terrible break room coffee from her mustache mug, deciphering Arabic and Russian and German, weeding out the real information from the unnecessary information and connecting the small pieces with current events or with what’s being talked about.

“It’s like the war,” she tells her mother excitedly when she calls to check in, her head spinning with visions of bomb girls and secret telegrams, stories of Peggy Carter and the Howling Commandos streaming through her brain. Laura’s mother harrumphs to herself, because “you have an excellent life filled with opportunities, Laura, and you shouldn’t compare this to being in a war.”

For the first few months after Laura officially comes to work at SHIELD, things are mostly cut and dry. A majority of her interactions are faces passing in the night, but there are a few people she gets to know better than others -- the ones who bring her reports more often than others. There’s Sitwell, the soft-spoken Latino, always too sharply dressed. There’s Hill, the imposing Acting S.O., always managing to commandeer respect even when she doesn’t open her mouth. There’s Barton, the master marksman who hands her reports stained with coffee, always with pages half-bent at the corners, always harboring an apologetic smile, always looking like he’s half-drunk and needs about ten naps.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: Everyone assumes she met Clint first. After all, he had a farm, and he had kids, and he had a life that seemed like it came well before Natasha Romanoff and the Avengers.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: The real truth is that she fell in love with Natasha Romanoff first.

***

Laura is two days into her period, one week into the last year of her twenties, and four months away from her first anniversary of being recruited when someone stops at her desk, places a hand on top of a report containing very confusing Russian, and says, “mne nuzhna vasha pomoshch.”

I need your help.

Laura glances up, taken aback at both the red-haired girl standing in front of her and the fact that she’s been spoken to so curtly; most people at least give her a warning before they plant themselves in her path and demand her time and energy.

“Why?”

“Because. No one else in this damn organization will.” The girl waves towards the rest of the bullpen, where everyone is hunched over desks and murmuring quietly to themselves, more or less ignoring the world. Laura leans back in her chair and nods slowly, running her hands through long brown hair.

“Okay,” she allows. “What can I help you with?”

“Not here,” the girl says cryptically, motioning towards the break room. Laura’s brow arches in confusion but she gets up anyway, making sure to sweep her latest reports under a large paperweight in the shape of a dolphin before she walks across the room. There’s something strange about the way the girl is walking, Laura notices, and she only pays attention because she once tore a muscle in her knee and had to walk on it uncomfortably. When Laura steps inside the empty break room and closes the door, locking it behind her upon request, she finds out why.

“Oh my god,” says Laura when the girl takes off her pants unceremoniously, displaying a pink thong and a large, bloodied gash. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Become one,” says the girl, sticking her leg out, and Laura swallows down bile as she stares at the congealed skin. “I have some stuff in my bag that you can use to stitch me and clean me up.”

“Stitch -- I’m...I decode languages. I went to school for linguistics --”

“Stanford. I know. You’re way too smart to be working on the simple cases they give you, Laura,” and more than wondering how she knows her name, Laura finds herself wondering how she’s not in more pain, considering she’d obviously been keeping this injury under wraps.

“You know my name?”

“It's on your necklace,” the girl answers, gesturing to the golden chain holding a collection of letters, a college graduation gift from her parents. “Do you know who I am?”

Laura nods. “Natasha. Natasha Romanoff. You’re Level Five.”

“Six, actually,” Natasha responds proudly. “Just got promoted today.”

“Was this the reward?” Laura asks dryly, and Natasha barks out a laugh.

“Not exactly. Come on, Laura. I don’t have all day, and I really don’t want to bleed out on the floor of the break room. If I’m going to die at SHIELD, there are better places I could choose. Also, places with better coffee.”

Laura finds herself smiling as she reaches for the bag Natasha had mentioned, opening it to reveal a sophisticated first aid kit.

“I don’t understand,” Laura says as she unpacks supplies with slightly shaking hands. “The med bay accepts walk-ins all the time. They could do this a lot better than I can. Why didn’t you go down there to get help?”

Natasha shrugs. “Because I like you and I wanted to talk to you,” she says, as if the answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “Also, I thought you might be bored of sitting at a desk all day. Don’t you crave excitement?”

“Not really, no,” Laura admits, inspecting the wound. “I like working with languages. I think I actually like getting your reports the most.”

“Oh, really?” Natasha teases. “Why is that?”

“They’re complicated,” Laura responds without thinking. “The places you go, the things you see, the cases you take on...they’re actually interesting, unlike people who spend their entire days sitting in a warehouse and listening to people talk about things that mostly end up being slang rather than actual intelligence. I could spend hours trying to figure out what your reports mean. And I get to use languages I never use otherwise.”

“I like that answer,” Natasha decides. “Also, you should probably irrigate the wound with boiled water first, before you start stitching.”

“And there’s boiled water?” Laura asks sarcastically, but a part of her is tingling at both the alone time she’s getting with Natasha and the excitement of secretly helping her.

“Of course there’s boiled water,” Natasha scoffs. “Why do you think I chose to do this in the break room?”

Laura smiles, getting up and walking to the coffee station. She runs a few streams of hot water in the Keurig to weed out leftover coffee grounds and then brings a freshly filled mug back to where Natasha is more or less lounging on the chair.

“How did this happen?” Laura asks as she dips a clean cloth into the water, pressing it gently to the wound and gently wiping the injury.

“Vultis scire scire?” Do you really want to know?

Etiam. “Yes,” Laura responds.

Natasha grins. “My partner’s arrow.”

Laura’s brow furrows as she removes the cloth and picks up the needle, dipping it in the water to sterilize it, because she does know at least that much about suturing. “Why did your partner hurt you?”

“Oh, no,” Natasha corrects offhandedly. “My partner didn’t hurt me. The arrow was meant for one of the guys we were chasing. Should’ve taken him out, really. But he miscalculated and took me out, instead. For someone who never misses, it was kind of ironic.”

Laura snorts quietly as she threads the needle and Natasha clears her throat.

“You want to space the stitches at least a quarter-inch from each other and from the skin edges. Otherwise, it’s going to pucker.” When Laura looks up again, Natasha smirks. “The skin, obviously.”

“Right,” Laura mutters, bending down and pushing the needle through Natasha’s skin. She barely flinches, and Laura finds herself impressed, even though she knows she shouldn’t be. SHIELD agents -- particularly those of Level Five, Six, or Seven -- were used to things like this. There was a reason they were considered top tier, always competent, the best of the best.

“So what’s the deal with your partner?” Laura asks as she continues to stitch, trying to make conversation that doesn’t leave both of them awkwardly sitting in silence. And, well, she’d be lying if she didn’t admit part of her was curious about whether it was a boy or a girl that Natasha was working with.

Natasha laughs loudly. “Come on, Laura. You’re smarter than that. How many marksmen do you know in SHIELD?”

Just one, Laura thinks, settling on the coarse, scarred face of Clint Barton. It would figure, the spy and the soldier -- or perhaps, the soldier and the spy. She never would have pegged him for being partners with Natasha, though it makes enough sense. They were two of the best agents she’d come across since working at SHIELD which meant together, they had to be something extraordinary and certainly something SHIELD would want to take advantage of.

“They call you Strike Team: Delta,” Laura says, working through the realization. “Who was Strike Team: Alpha?”

“Does it matter?” Natasha asks nonchalantly, before cocking her head. “Come on, Laura. You really didn’t know?”

Laura shakes her head, avoiding Natasha’s gaze. “No. We just get the reports from you individually,” she says as she finishes stitching. “Or, well, from whoever brings them to us. Barton usually brings his own.”

“That’s because I make him,” Natasha says smugly. “I swear to god, if I have to listen to him talk about how hot that girl in signal intelligence is one more time, I might actually knife him in the face.”

Laura’s cheeks color furiously at Natasha’s words and heat rises along her skin. “He said that?”

“Mmmhmm,” Natasha hums and all of a sudden, Laura’s brain slots the information together.

“Wait. So this was --”

“A ruse to get me to talk to you about him? Kind of,” Natasha admits. “But I didn’t lie. I really wanted to talk to you, too.” She winks. “Anyway, you should do yourself -- and him -- a favor, and ask him out.”

“Me?”

“You think I’m going to ask him out?” Natasha raises an eyebrow. “I mean, maybe eventually. But --”

“But, this is completely insane,” Laura finishes, tying off the stitch and cutting the thread away. “I can’t ask him out.”

“Why not?” Natasha asks innocuously, and Laura suddenly feels like she’s being overly scrutinized. She swallows hard.

“Because...because agents don’t date other agents,” she answers lamely, and Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Agents don’t date other agents, sure. We don’t sleep together, either. Also, you’re not an agent.” She adds the last part with a sly smile. “You’re a language analyst. That makes you available. And last I checked, Clint Barton was also very available.”

Laura manages a smile as she meets Natasha’s eyes. “He’s cute. Really. I’m just not quite sure I’m ready to date yet. I like working.”

“So do I,” Natasha answers, flipping her long auburn hair over one shoulder. She gets up, testing out her leg, and Laura finds herself suddenly short of breath as she watches her move her body around. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun.”

***

Laura has had experience dating. There was the serious boyfriend in college, and the non-serious boyfriend during her month-long stint in Denmark, and the “we’re kind of fucking but not really all the time and maybe we’re serious and maybe we’re not” boyfriend in graduate school. The point is, Laura knows guys, and she knows that when they want to go after a girl, they more or less make their move quickly. And so for at least a week after Natasha’s confession, Laura prepares for Clint to ask her out.

She dresses a little cuter, and spends more time on her hair than she normally would, at least when it comes to going to work. When she spies Barton coming down the hallway with his reports, she pretends to be busy and very invested in her coffee, so it doesn’t look like she’s anticipating his arrival. But no matter what she does or how coy she acts, he never does more than grunt out “hello” with that slightly crooked apologetic smile, shuffling his feet or turning away before she can even say hello back.

“Has he asked you out yet?” Natasha asks when she comes to drop off her own reports a few days into the week. Laura realizes it’s the first time Natasha has come down to the bullpen since she intentionally came to be stitched up.

“No,” Laura admits, accepting the file that Natasha’s holding and placing it carefully on top of fifteen other “prioritized” assignments she’d promised other agents.

“Ugh.” Natasha wrinkles her nose. “Well, in that case, can I interest you in dinner? Maybe at my place? I have some extra paperwork from last week’s assignment in Bahrain I’d like to ask you about. It’s complicated, and I don’t want to overwhelm you with it while you’ve got other things going on during the day.”

“So you’re making me work during my off hours?” When Natasha doesn’t respond, Laura shrugs. “Sure. What’s in it for me?” She asks the question as a challenge, almost flirtatiously, before she can stop herself. Natasha, for her part, looks amused.

“I make a mean risotto. Or so Clint says. I trust him, since he normally demolishes my cooking. And by demolishes, I mean he licks the plate clean after dropping half of it on himself by accident.”

Laura laughs. “Typical Clint Barton. His reports always have coffee stains on them. Hazelnut, I think, from the smell.”

“Don’t be fooled by the I’m a mess act,” Natasha says dismissively. “He’s ten times more competent than you’d think.”

“Oh, I know,” Laura says lightly, because she does, and because she never thought, for one second, that Clint Barton was the stumbling idiot who couldn’t match his socks (even if he couldn’t, by her observations). “Who do you think makes sense of his files?”

She agrees to go to Natasha’s house, because Natasha’s offered, and because Laura’s apartment -- a nice-sized studio in the West Village that her parents helped her rent when she started at SHIELD -- was perhaps too small for an impromptu dinner. Natasha’s place, by comparison, isn’t much larger. Laura figures the one bedroom is about the size of her own apartment, but the way Natasha has the place decorated makes it look much larger and much more inviting than the cluttered walls Laura knows are a staple of her own home.

“This is...nice,” Laura remarks when she walks inside, because she’s not sure what else to say. Despite being transient for most of her life, she’s always had a good number of close friends, though none of them lived in New York. Going to the home of someone she works with -- and someone who is a Level Six agent, no less -- makes her a little wary.

“I take that to mean that you like it?” Natasha asks as she procures two large wine glasses and takes an oversized bottle of Yellowtail out of the refrigerator. Laura nods, watching Natasha pour generous portions of red, and lets her eyes rove over the large bookshelf in the corner. The wooden Ikea slats are filled to the brim with books, some thick and some paperback, and what Laura can tell is a healthy mix of recreational reading and case studies.

“It’s similar to the size of my apartment, but it’s...well, I kind of live in clutter,” Laura admits as Natasha offers her wine. Natasha purses her lips.

“Is this is a bad time to assume that because you’re so put together at work, you must be OCD at home?”

Laura finds herself laughing, a comfortable ease unfurling in her stomach. “Yes,” she says, wrapping her fingers tightly around the stem of the glass, though she doesn’t feel offended by the comment. “I like the clutter because it’s organized, for me. I’ve never really had a thing for pristine living spaces. My family always lived on the go, and having someplace look...well, nice...I had enough of those places that I could never settle in. I never really felt like I had somewhere I could live in long enough to create clutter.”

Natasha nods. “I can understand that. Before SHIELD, I didn’t really have much of a place to call home, either. I guess I was the opposite, though -- SHIELD helped me set this up, and I kind of made it nice because I never had anything of my own.” She moves to the couch, picking up a packet of papers, and Laura follows.

“Do you want to take a look at these?” Natasha asks as she sits down, scooting closer to where Laura has positioned her body. Laura puts her wine on the table and glances at the reports Natasha has strewn all over the coffee table.

“When did you go to Bahrain?” Laura asks curiously, leaning forward. “I don’t remember Clint going there.”

“No,” Natasha acknowledges. “He didn’t. Or he hasn’t, as far as I know. We take our own missions sometimes. I wasn’t sure if these were too much, I know you get enough work as it is --”

“It’s fine,” Laura says, waving her hand around, and Natasha catches her fingers expertly, folding them in her own. Her touch is soft, softer than Laura would expect for an assassin who spent most of her life living on the edge, and she swallows down a thrill of excitement as she turns her head.

Natasha holds her gaze, burgundy stained lips turning up slightly, and Laura watches as they part slowly, seductively, methodically.

“Potseluy menya.” Kiss me.

Laura does. Laura’s not quite sure why she does, but the moment her lips touch Natasha’s, she knows that this whole evening hasn’t been about risotto, or reports, or wine. Natasha had been courting her in the strange way a spy might court a target, in the strange way a black widow might invite another spider into her web, hoping to ensnare her. And, Laura realizes, ever since Natasha asked her to dinner, she’s been secretly hoping that Natasha wanted to do more than spend time with her reading reports.

Natasha kisses her long and deep, languidly running her hands through Laura’s dark hair while Laura’s fingers thread through Natasha’s complicated heavy curls. At some point, she stops wondering about when she should pull away to breathe, and the wine glass shatters on the table when she shifts too far in one direction, and the outside world falls away completely. Laura feels empowered, different than she’s ever felt with serious boyfriends and not-so-serious boyfriends and “we’re kind of fucking but not really all the time and maybe we’re serious and maybe we’re not” boyfriends.

The thing is, Laura doesn’t plan to fall in love with Natasha Romanoff. Laura doesn’t even plan to like Natasha Romanoff. But Natasha is exactly what Laura loves: a complex mess that on the surface can’t be figured out, not until you dig deep through the layers and pick them apart to find something beautiful, something personal, something that only the smartest and luckiest people can discover.

***

Three days later, Laura and Natasha are grabbing a mid-afternoon coffee, and Laura finally decides to ask the question that’s been nagging her since the night they kissed.

“This isn’t some sort of game, is it?”

“What?” Natasha turns around from where she’s in the middle of ordering her coffee and shakes her head quickly. “Of course not. Why?”

“It’s just…” Laura trails off as Natasha takes out her wallet and pushes a couple of dollar bills across the deli counter. “I mean, you and Barton...”

Natasha looks amused. “Are you asking if we’re sleeping together?”

“No,” Laura says quickly, though she’s more than a little curious about that particular aspect of their relationship. “But, I mean, you said that Clint wanted to ask me out.”

“Yes. Well.” Natasha shrugs and hands Laura her iced coffee. “He was too slow. I gave him a week after he mentioned it, and when he didn’t make his move, I decided I had every right to make mine.” She smiles. “I couldn’t just assume that you would stay single forever. You’re way too pretty.”

“Is that how Black Widows work?” Laura asks sarcastically, trying to deflect the compliment.

“Kind of,” Natasha teases, slipping her hand into Laura’s and kissing her on the neck. She lets go as soon as they pass through the large glass doors indicative of SHIELD’s Manhattan headquarters, breaking away and walking briskly towards the security portal. Laura watches her go, watches her slide through the turnstile, watches her take the elevator up to what she knows is the fifth floor, where she’s got a debrief meeting with both Coulson and Hill. Laura smiles to herself, brushing back hair with her free hand, her fingers lingering on the spot where Natasha’s lips had been seconds before. She ducks her head to grab her own security badge from her purse --

-- and looks up directly into the face of Clint Barton.

“Hi,” Laura says with a smile that she hopes isn’t too big, because up close and looking at him for more than five seconds when he’s not handing over a report, he really is cuter than she’s let herself realize. His sandy blonde hair is unkempt and overgrown and flopping into his grey-blue eyes, and his face is more youthful than she’d noticed previously, though it’s also lined with what Laura can tell are stories that span years. Clint’s breathing suddenly quickens and he drops his gaze uncharacteristically.

“Uh. Hi. Laura, right? From --”

“Yes, from signal intelligence,” she says, still smiling. “You’re Clint Barton. I know you.”

“Right. Of course you do.” He gestures towards her coffee. “I’d, uh, I’d ask if I could buy you a coffee. You know, to thank you for all the work you do for me, but I guess you’re kinda covered.”

“For now,” Laura says slyly, thinking of Natasha. She sticks the straw in her mouth and chews on it thoughtfully. “I’ll probably need another coffee run later, though.”

“Oh.” Clint looks excited and also relieved. “Really? I mean, if you’re not too busy --”

“Aren’t you late for your meeting?” Laura asks, glancing at the large clock above the security desk, and Clint’s face becomes the epitome of oh shit.

“Here -- uh --” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crisp SHIELD business card. “I’ll come by your desk later, I promise.”

“You better,” Laura calls as he hurries away, taking note of the way his jeans hug his ass. World peace, Natasha had mentioned when she was explaining the more attractive attributes of Clint Barton, and Laura had been inclined to agree even before she started looking more closely.

The thing is, she has no idea what her and Natasha actually are. They hadn’t had a chance to hang out outside of work yet, aside from Natasha’s impromptu dinner. They hadn’t done more than kiss each other passionately, or secretively, because Natasha knew all the best hiding places and every nook and cranny at SHIELD, despite SHIELD being a place where you were scrutinized every moment of every day. But they’d never discussed dating, and they’d certainly never discussed sleeping together, and Laura’s not sure if this is just a fling or an actual relationship, or something more.

But Laura likes Natasha. No, Laura loves Natasha, and she loves her in the way that you fall in love with someone without realizing it, all at once, the way you fall in love with someone because you keep learning things that inspire you and surprise you. Laura loves the way Natasha’s hair feels between her fingers, the way Natasha can smile at Clint and then smile at someone in the lunch line and then smile at Laura and make Laura feel the sentiment is just for her, the way she can talk with her eyes and say one thing but let Laura see an entirely different expression and meaning.

Laura loves Natasha, and she knows Clint likes her, and she’s not really sure what to do about it.

She decides to deal with her feelings the way she always has: by going to work and staying busy. She interacts loosely with her coworkers, sits at her desk and files reports for the rest of the day, and she loses herself in numbers and letters and languages until a shadow falls over her papers. She takes a deep breath, because she can tell from both the silhouette and the throat-clearing that it’s not Natasha.

“Hi,” Laura says, looking up at Clint Barton. He looks different than he had looked earlier in the day, refreshed and alert, and Laura wonders if maybe Natasha has talked some sense into him knowing that he was finally going to follow up on asking her out in some way. “Ready for that coffee break?”

Laura technically shouldn’t take more than one break during the work day, but she figures she’s put in enough hours that she’s earned a bit of overtime, so she leads Clint past the break room and down the hall, walking him outside to the small enclosed garden and patio SHIELD has set up adjacent to its building.

“I think the coffee is that way,” Clint says, jerking his thumb in the direction of the street.

“I know. We’ll get some before we go back. I just wanted to talk.” She sits down on a bench and smiles up at him. “I want to get to know you.”

“Oh.” He nods, sitting down next to her. “I thought you already knew me. Well, kind of.”

Laura laughs. “Not really,” she admits. “I know that you’re Level Six -- or at least, you have been for a few weeks now. You like hazelnut coffee, because that’s what I smell the most when you hand in your reports. And I’m guessing from the way you write that you once broke your index finger and it never healed properly.” She pauses to gauge his reaction. “Either that, or your handwriting is just terrible.”

Clint smiles more widely. “It’s both -- broke my finger when I was a kid, and my handwriting really is terrible. Before I came to SHIELD, I was kind of…private security.”

“Like Natasha?” Laura asks before she can help herself. Clint gives her a sideways glance, and Laura tries to pretend she doesn’t really notice. She has no idea if Natasha has told her partner that she liked the girl he had a crush on, let alone how much she liked her back.

“Kind of,” Clint says after a long pause. He runs a hand through his hair. “I worked freelance. Mercenary stuff, basically. Natasha and I, we were partners for years, took a bunch of jobs whenever someone needed assistance. It paid the bills, at least. Turns out everyone always needs someone to save them, y’know? Once SHIELD recruited us, we started as agents, and I worked my way up from there."

“So you were always a marksman? Or a sniper, I guess?” Laura asks curiously, tucking her legs underneath her, thankful that she’s decided to wear pants to work instead of the skirts she’d been dressing in, mostly to potentially impress Clint.

“Yeah,” Clint says. “I mean, I have other skills. I swear. But archery is my strength.”

“I’ve noticed,” Laura says, though she’s never actually seen him shoot in person. She’s only seen the videos, and, okay, maybe she studied the videos a little more when she learned that he was into her but not really saying anything. And maybe she had also forced Natasha to show her the videos that didn’t make their way to SHIELD’s files, but she thinks that has to be on the more innocent end of privacy infringement. “If you ever want company, by the way, during practice -- I mean, I’m sure Natasha’s great…”

“Nah,” Clint says a little too quickly. “Natasha hangs out with me sometimes when I shoot, but it’s a little distracting, to be honest.”

“And I wouldn’t be distracting?”

Clint’s looking at her in a way that’s making Laura feel more and more brash, as if a switch has been flicked inside of her, one that makes her feel like she can take on the world.

“You definitely would be distracting,” Clint says, breaking into a laugh. He shoves his hand across his mouth and shakes his head. “God, sorry -- you’re just really pretty, and I don’t know why this took me so long.” He lets out a long breath. “You’re a linguist, right? What’s a word for being an idiot because you don’t see what’s right in front of you?”

“Well, there are many,” Laura says with a small smile. “But the one I’d use to describe you is…” She stops, squinting at his lined face and thinks hard. “Dummkopf.”

“Dummkopf?”

“Dumbass,” she clarifies, and Clint grins in a way that makes her want to shove him against the wall and fuck him right at this moment. She settles for being okay when he leans over to kiss her instead, and she doesn’t care who might see because technically, they’re still on work property.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: Everyone assumes she met Clint because she fell for him while she was working at SHIELD.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: The real truth is that she met Clint because he fell for her, first.

***

Laura and Natasha sleep together for the first time the night Natasha gets back from a seven-day long stint in Kazakhstan.

She’s taken the week off from work, her first vacation in years, and she wonders as she signs the papers if she’s doing herself a favor or making a horrible decision. Laura has always used work as a distraction, as a way to keep herself busy when her feelings or emotions or stress levels got to be too much or when things in her life went south without any notice. Having Natasha away doing dangerous things and knowing she had to wait a week before kissing her or even talking to her was now something Laura counted as contributing to any of the above.

Nonetheless, she leaves Friday afternoon as soon as the falcon-shaped clock on her desk turns to seven, deposits her work in the “outgoing reports” bin, double checks to make sure her out of office email is turned on and her answering machine message is updated, and calls her parents to let them know she’ll be around later if they want to catch up. She spends the weekend sitting around binging almost every episode of FRIENDS, until she feels like she’s earned herself the right to get off the couch and actually be present in society. Natasha’s on a singular mission -- recon things Laura’s not exactly sure of -- so she calls Clint and asks him to meet her on the roof of the Met.

It’s not cheating, not technically, she thinks when she sees him finally arrive. It’s also the first time she’s really seen him out of SHIELD. He’s wearing a simple plaid shirt and jeans that, predictably, hug his assets in all the right places (it’s the toned archer thighs she notices this time, rather than just the ass). His smile is wide and his hair is longer and lighter, or maybe that’s the hazy summer sun but Laura can’t quite tell.

“Catch,” Clint says, throwing her his wallet. Laura fumbles slightly, but manages to grasp it between her palms right before it falls onto the ground.

“Good reflexes,” he says with a smile. “Since you caught, you’re buying lunch.”

“Thanks for that,” she grouses, but she’s smiling, too. She rocks up on her tiptoes to kiss him, because they’re not really dating, but then again, neither are her and Natasha, and she kisses Natasha all the time. “Also, thanks for meeting me.”

“Hey, my crush called and asked me out, and I would be a...what’s the word? A dumbass to say no.”

“Dummkopf,” Laura says with a small smile. “It’s also the middle of the work day, you know. And I don’t think you’re on vacation, like I am.”

“Eh.” Clint shrugs. “Told Coulson I had a doctor’s appointment uptown -- not entirely untrue, I had to stop by the med bay and pick up more painkillers.” He reaches into his pocket and shakes a bottle of pills at her. “Dunno how much he believed me, but he’ll probably just think I’m moping because Nat’s not here.”

“Does she take solo missions a lot?” Laura asks because she realizes she doesn’t really know. Until recently, she just assumed Clint and Natasha always worked together, the way most partners did.

“Depends,” Clint says, popping a piece of strawberry gum in his mouth before offering her the package. “Sometimes it’s stuff that only she can handle -- spy stuff that she has a better idea of, things that don’t need two of us so she gets the upper hand. Sometimes, it’s the other way around and it’s me that has the experience, so I take missions and leave her in New York. I think she hates that more than I do.” He gives her a sidelong glance. “You ever think about being in the field, since you’re stuck behind a desk all day?”

“Not really,” Laura says honestly. “I like being behind a desk. I shot a gun once when I was eighteen -- my dad and some of his military buddies took me to a shooting range.” She shudders. “I hated it.”

“You didn’t like shooting?”

“I didn’t like the sound,” Laura clarifies, leaning on her elbows and resting them against the marble slab of the roof. She stares out over Manhattan’s skyline. “I didn’t like how it made me feel. It was too final, and it was too scary to feel like I was putting someone’s fate in my own hands.”

“But you didn’t mind shooting,” Clint emphasizes. “You just didn’t like shooting a gun.”

“What exactly are you getting at?” Laura asks, though she has an idea when Clint grins crookedly, showing all ten of his coffee-stained teeth.

“Come on, I’ll show you. Unless you really did want to see the art here.”

She had wanted to see the art, because Laura loves art. But she also likes Clint and maybe she loves him, and so she’s willing to give up her cultural interests in favor of where she suspects he’s taking her, which turns out to be exactly what she’s figured, based on their conversation: a shooting range.

“Maybe you should stand back,” Laura says as Clint hands her a bow that she can barely handle. It’s a thirty-five pound draw, standard for her body type, and she knows from Natasha that he usually shoots with one that's at least two hundred.

“I trust you,” Clint says as he moves behind her, steadying her by placing his body against hers. “You’ve got the stance down pretty well. Just curve your elbow and keep it back. Eyes up, shoulders relaxed. Try not to think too much. Just shoot, cause you miss every shot you don’t take.”

Laura takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, releasing the arrow and letting it fly through the air. She likes it, she realizes -- the twang of the arrow’s release is soft and simple, and there’s no loud permanent crack, and she feels in control.

“Better than a gun, right?” Clint asks when she turns around, and Laura nods mutely. Clint grins. “Here, try again.”

He helps her string a second arrow, and then a third, and then a fourth. Eventually, Laura’s arm becomes tired and she steps away so that Clint can shoot. Laura watches as he effortlessly raises his bow, arching his back and shooting blindly, each shot fluid and perfect, as if God has created him for this purpose and this purpose only. It’s mesmerizing, and it’s beautiful, and Clint shoots like he’s never had anything to hold him back; on one shot he closes his eyes and makes a perfect target, on another shot, he pauses to down half a cup of coffee and then picks up his bow and makes two bullseyes.

(Laura, meanwhile, wonders if there’s a bathroom somewhere that sells condoms in one of those metal dispensers.)

But Clint Barton is nothing if not a gentleman, and he smiles when he’s done shooting and kisses her and says, “that was fun,” and all Laura can think is, yes, it definitely was, and all Laura can think is, I know what I’m thinking of tonight if I can’t think of Natasha before I go to bed. He drives her home and sits in the car and kisses her again, and Laura realizes when she finally leaves him alone that she’s falling in love, and she’s falling fast, and she’s falling hard.

Natasha comes home a few days later, and the first thing she does when she walks into the apartment after Laura has buzzed her up is take her in her arms and kiss her, barely giving Laura time to take in the fresh bruises along her body and the wide stitched cut along her forehead that bleeds into her eyebrow, and the dyed black hair that she’s still getting used to.

“You’re hurt,” Laura points out, also noticing that Natasha’s skin is flushed and heated, as if she’s feverish.

“Shut up,” Natasha orders, breathing heavily, as if she’s just run a marathon, even though Laura knows she’s only taken a cab and then an elevator. She pushes Laura onto the small twin-sized bed and starts to kiss her again, and when Natasha takes off all her clothes and presses herself to Laura’s body, she realizes her skin feels like fire.

“Maybe...maybe we should wait,” Laura tries tentatively as Natasha shoves her shirt up and sucks on her nipple, moaning quietly, allowing Laura to catch the still-healing cut on the back of her neck and the blood that's matted in her dark hair from a large gash half-hidden by messy curls.

“I don’t want to wait,” Natasha says, almost in desperation, and Laura tries to understand because she does want this, and she does want Natasha, and more than that, she’s missed Natasha. So when Natasha pulls down her pants, Laura doesn’t protest, just keeps herself in the moment enough to be aware that Natasha’s either operating on all cylinders or possibly none, and that she’ll have to deal with that fact when it’s all over.

But it’s worth it, Laura realizes, when Natasha makes her come, and one orgasm is pretty much all that she has the strength for. Laura waits until Natasha’s breathing has calmed down and then gets out of bed and kisses her on the cheek, pulling the covers over her body. She re-dresses her in clean clothes and brings her Tylenol and water and wakes her up enough to take the pills, and then sits by her side for the rest of the night, stroking her hair and whispering broken Russian lullabies in her ear.

***

“I’m going to invite Clint over for dinner,” Laura tells Natasha during a bathroom quickie two weeks later. Natasha nods, wiping sweaty hair from her forehead.

“Good,” she manages breathlessly, walking to the sink to wash her hands. “It’s about time. You guys have been beating around the bush and it’s kind of annoying at this point. You know he just really wants an orgasm, right? And not one that comes from masturbation.”

“It doesn’t mean --” Laura stops. “I don’t know if we’re going to sleep together.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow and shrugs. “Well, don’t let me stop you,” she says as she finishes washing her hands, wringing them out and placing a quick kiss on Laura’s lips. Laura swallows and bites down on where Natasha’s lipstick has probably left a mark.

“Isn’t this weird? For you?”

“Why would it be weird for me?” Natasha asks.

Laura sighs. “I don’t know. Because...because we’re a thing, and we’re sleeping together, and we like each other. A lot. And Clint’s your partner and I don’t know if you’re sleeping together, but either way, I like Clint a lot, too. And I want to sleep with Clint. And you.”

“I still fail to see how any of this is a problem,” Natasha says, folding her arms. “You are aware that Clint and I aren’t married, right? And neither are we. And neither are you and Clint. And you know about open relationships? Triads, polyamory?”

“It’s not about the labels,” Laura tries to protest, even though part of it is. She’s confused, and she wants to love these two people in front of her, but she’s not sure how she’s supposed to do that. Natasha sighs.

“Okay, Laura. Look, if you want to sleep with Clint, I don’t have a problem with that. If you want to sleep with me, I don’t have a problem with that. If you want to sleep with both of us at the same time, go for it. You love Clint, right?”

Laura hesitates, but only because she’s not sure whether or not she should tell Natasha how much she had fallen for Clint in the short time since Natasha had gone away. “Yes.”

“Well,” Natasha says, looking around. “Love is love, right? That’s all that matters. You love Clint and he loves me and I love you and you love him. Who’s to stop us from being happy as long as we’re the ones who are happy?”

It sounds so simple when Natasha says it, so by the book and practical, that it makes Laura feel a little better about the whole thing. So she washes up as best she can in the sink and then texts Clint on his private cell phone and asks if he wants to come over at some point this week to hang out.

Do I bring anything? Clint texts back. I’m not really great with dates. I always say the wrong thing. Or Natasha yells at me. He includes two emoticon frown faces and it makes Laura laugh.

Bring liquor, she decides, adding a smiling emoticon for good measure. I can always use liquor.

Two days later, Clint Barton stands on the other side of her apartment door, holding up a large package and wearing a sheepish grin, which is plastered across a face dotted with fresh scars.

“Boxed wine?” Laura raises an eyebrow and watches Clint’s face color.

“Well, I mean -- sorry, I didn’t -- y’know --”

Laura smiles and shakes her head. “Boxed wine it is,” she says, opening the door to allow him inside. “I like your taste.”

“I would have gotten a bottle of something, but honestly, I didn’t peg you for a classy girl,” Clint says as he enters, and then his face pales even more. “Shit. No, that’s not what I meant, Laura --”

“I know what you meant,” Laura responds levelly. “And you’re right, I’m not really a classy girl. My apartment looks like a mess, I drink half my alcohol out of cans and bottles, and I’d rather be in sweatpants than in designer jeans. So calm down, Clint. I’m not going to throw you out. I may even still sleep with you.” She catches his eye and watches the crinkles around his mouth grow more prominent.

“The line at Trader Joe’s was out the door,” he continues, following her into the kitchen as she struggles to open the spout hidden inside the box. “It took forever just to get this one box of red and I didn’t want to show up empty handed. I know you’re probably making something nice, and I really tried.”

Laura rolls her eyes to the wall before turning around. “Look, Clint, I love you, okay? I --” She stops, realizing what she’s just said, and stumbles slightly, catching herself on the back of the kitchen chair.

“You…” Clint trails off, looking apprehensive. “You love me?”

And this is the point where Laura thinks SHIELD would, if she was an agent, have taught her about fight and flight, about following your instincts, about taking leaps of faith and talking your way out of situations you’re not quite sure how you got yourself into in the first place.

“Yeah,” Laura breathes, watching his face and the way the lines even out, the way his eyes fill with relief and surprise, the way his shoulders slump not in disappointment but in happiness, and the minute she says the words, she knows they’re absolutely true. “I do.”

***

Laura’s parents ask about the new boyfriend she’s spending all her time with, and all Laura says is that she’s met someone, and yes, he works at SHIELD and yes, he’s an agent, and no, she’s not going to be in any danger professionally or otherwise.

“Are we ever going to meet him?” Laura’s mom asks pointedly. “You know, he could come out to North Dakota for a visit. I’m sure you have a lot of vacation time banked. And doesn’t he go on missions?”

“He does, but he’s just really busy,” Laura tells her mom, which isn’t totally a lie. She decides to ask Natasha’s advice, given that Natasha’s been with Clint forever.

“I don’t really do the whole parents thing,” Natasha says when Laura starts to talk about her family. “It doesn’t go over well. You know, the whole orphaned assassin story and all. He’s much better with that.”

“He doesn’t really have a family either,” Laura points out, because she knows enough about Clint’s past now.

“Doesn’t matter,” Natasha says, flicking a finger across Laura’s nose. “He’ll totally charm your parents if they meet him. I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“Do you...do you think you’d ever want to meet my parents?” Laura asks tentatively and Natasha looks forlorn.

“Trust me, Laura,” Natasha says with a tight smile. “I’m not exactly parent material.”

Natasha may not be parent material, but Natasha is definitely relationship material, because she sends Laura secret texts reminding her that she loves her and she always saves her the best seats in the SHIELD cafeteria during busy afternoons and she always shows up after work at Laura’s apartment with the promise of a massage and an extra pair of fuzzy socks when she’s had a long week of walking around and sitting at her desk.

“Maybe we should go away together,” Clint suggests one day while they’re cuddling in bed.

“Maybe we should go away with Natasha,” Laura suggests at the same time, her legs folded over his calves. They both look at each other and Clint shifts under the covers, moving away slightly.

“Just how much do you see Natasha?”

Laura finds herself feeling uneasy about the question, remembering what Natasha had told her about being free to love whoever she felt like loving. “Why does it matter?”

“Um. Because you’re my girlfriend? And I mean, not to be rude, but I’m with Natasha ninety percent of the time and I’m with you during the rest of the time, so I’m curious about how much time she spends with you.”

“We see each other when we want to,” Laura says. “It’s not like our schedules allow us to be flexible, you know.”

“So you date regularly?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“What about sleeping together?”

Laura feels her face grow hot. “Why are you suddenly interrogating me about this?”

“Because!” Clint bursts out, shooting up straight in bed. “You don’t tell me anything! I don’t even know how serious you might be about my partner, and it’s my business to know at least whether or not you’re sleeping with her!”

“It’s not your business!” Laura yells back, and then she takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “Clint.” She reaches for his shoulder, folding her fingers around a fresh scar. “I love you. You’re my boyfriend, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Clint says with a long sigh. “Of course I am.”

“And you trust me, right? You trust us?”

Clint nods and then lies back down. Everything about his body language screams defeat and resignation, but there’s uncomfortable tension hanging in the air that refuses to abate. Laura lies down with him and places her head on his chest and listens to his heart beating steadily. She tries to make herself feel better about the whole conversation, but when she wakes up after falling asleep without meaning to, Clint is gone and the space beside her is cold.

“I’ll be in a little later,” she explains when she calls her supervisor the next morning. She makes herself coffee and straightens up her apartment and puts on ten layers of foundation to hide her red eyes, and she keeps her head down for most of the day, praying that one of the people putting reports on her desk won’t be Clint Barton, or even Natasha Romanoff.

Clint keeps his distance, which Laura isn’t surprised about, but Natasha doesn’t and it takes her about two seconds of looking at Laura’s face before she’s hauling her outside and down the block, forcing her to give details about what happened, because Clint was apparently just as moody but not as forthcoming. Laura tells her the whole story, about how the conversation had started and what Clint had said. She manages to keep it together but by the time she’s done, Natasha’s positively fuming, her face almost as red as her hair.

“I cannot believe how dumb he is. He’s one to talk, considering we sleep together regularly!”

“Do you?” Laura asks before realizing she doesn’t need to know, because she’s always known that Natasha and Clint were a thing beyond work partners. It was clear the more time she spent with them that they’d known each other longer than anyone would assume, that they were closer than anyone would expect, and that they might as well be married in that regard.

“Yes,” Natasha says simply after a brief pause.

“For how long?”

“Since way before we met you,” Natasha admits. “But I was telling the truth about not being married. We’re spies, Laura. Domesticity isn’t for us. Well, maybe it is for him. It isn’t for me.”

Laura nods, and Natasha puts her hand against her cheek. “I’m sorry this is so difficult,” she says quietly. “I do love you. And even if you decide you want to be with Clint all the time, I don’t want us to lose what we have.”

“I know,” Laura replies softly. “I love you, too.” She leans in to kiss Natasha and when Laura returns to work she feels slightly better. When she gets home to her apartment later that night, waving off Natasha’s suggestion of coming over for a bubble bath because she honestly just wants to be alone with a bag of popcorn and possibly bourbon, she’s surprised to find Clint sitting on the stoop of her building. There’s a bag next to him, and when Laura gets closer, she can see the top of what she recognizes as a fancy bottle of Pinot Noir.

“The doorman doesn’t start working until nine,” Laura says, stopping in front of him, and Clint raises his head slowly.

“Does that mean I haven’t totally fucked this up and you still want to see me?”

“Dummkopf,” Laura replies. Dumbass.

Clint smiles sheepishly. “I’m sorry I was angry before. About the whole thing with Natasha. I didn’t realize how close you guys were and it kind of...I guess I was a little jealous. It made me feel weird.” He chuckles to himself. “It’s funny, Natasha’s always been fine with me sleeping with someone, whether or not it was for a job, and I’ve always been fine with her sleeping with people. We always knew that we loved each other but we didn’t think we could ever...well, we’re spies, you know? Natasha would never marry me, she can’t give me that life, and I was okay with that, because I’ll love her forever no matter what. But you’re different, Laura. I’ve never been in love with someone the way I am with you. And you’re not an agent, and you don’t come from some assassin past. You have a family and parents and you had an education and maybe we could one day be something if I don’t screw it up and...anyway, I never asked her about you because she made it seem like it was just something that happened naturally.” He’s talking too fast and the words are tumbling out of his mouth like vomit, but Laura understands them all even when they start to become garbled.

“You do realize Natasha started dating me before I went out with you, right?”

Clint looks embarrassed and nods. “Yeah. Guess that one is my own fault, right?”

Laura can’t help but smile. “Pretty much.” She steps closer and hugs him, and he hugs her back tightly, burying his face in her hair.

“I love you,” says Clint. “I really do. I want to be with you. Even if you’re sleeping with Natasha or if I’m sleeping with Natasha...I don’t want that to stop us. I love you.”

“I know,” Laura says, pressing herself to his broad chest and feeling both content and safe. She pulls away and finds his eyes. “Still my boyfriend?”

“As long as you’re still my girlfriend.”

She kisses him in response and unlocks the front door, leading him upstairs.

***

This is how Natasha tells Laura about her impending marriage proposal: over limp french fries in SHIELD’s cafeteria.

According to Natasha, the story starts in Singapore, and Clint has a broken arm and Natasha has a bruised rib. They’re nursing their injuries with alcohol at the nearest dive bar, fending off leering requests, and then Clint clears his throat, and the conversation goes something like this:

“So, uh. Here’s the thing.”

“You want to marry Laura,” and Clint is so surprised he spits his beer onto the table. Natasha makes a face.

“How --”

“Oh, come on.” She reaches for a napkin and starts mopping up a combination of alcohol and spit. “I’m a spy, Clint. Also, you’re not exactly subtle.”

Clint glares. “Fine, okay? I want to marry Laura.”

“Okay. So ask her,” Natasha says. “I hear rings are on sale this weekend if you need a deal on a diamond. Or, I suppose we could go back to that hideout and pilfer a few hundred from the thug we tied up. I think he’s still breathing. Though, I’m not sure how easy it would be to do that with your arm out of commission.”

“It’s not that easy, Nat!” Clint looks dejected and worried, and Natasha stares at him in confusion until the realization hits her like a truck.

“I -- oh. Clint!” She laughs and then winces against the pain it causes her ribs. “You think that because we’re a thing, you can’t marry her?”

“I can’t!”

“Of course you can,” Natasha says with a groan. “You love each other. You’ve been practically doodling the name LAURA BARTON on mission reports for weeks. Do you need me to give you some sort of written explanation of my approval?”

“No, it’s just --” Clint stops, downing the rest of his beer, and Natasha smiles thinly.

“You know, it’s funny,” she muses. “I’d kissed girls before Laura, but Laura is the only person I've ever found myself truly in love with. And I love her as much as I love you. You’re the only two people in the world who I love like that, and I'm not used to someone like Laura loving me back. But I wouldn’t consider myself gay, or even bisexual, and I'm pretty sure Laura wouldn’t consider herself gay, either.”

“So what would she consider herself?” Clint asks curiously. “Demisexual?”

Natasha laughs. “Laura would never put a label on herself. Though.” She stops with a half-grin. “I suppose it’s not a bad assumption to make. Our relationship really evolved after we had created an emotional bond.”

Clint’s quiet for a long time. “If we get married, what happens to you? How do you fit into this?”

Natasha shrugs carefully and takes a sip of straight Bacardi. “Maybe nothing happens to me. Maybe we just continue doing this -- sleeping on the side and having a relationship and being in love.”

“While we’re married,” Clint says flatly. Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Fine. Maybe we all get married.”

Laura listens to her recount the conversation and takes a french fry with two fingers and finds herself wondering how that would all work, if she would have one or two rings, if that’s something that’s even legal to do, how she would tell her parents, where she would live.

The thing is, it’s not the craziest idea Natasha’s ever had.

“It’s not the craziest idea you’ve ever had,” she says out loud, reaching over to tuck an errant curl behind Natasha’s ear.

Natasha raises an eyebrow. “You’re seriously considering it?”

“Maybe,” Laura hedges. “I mean, I love you both. It makes sense.”

“And I told you that I’m not really the marriage type,” Natasha says. “Clint knows that. I mean, he’s so much more suited for that kind of stuff, anyway.”

“I don’t care,” Laura says defiantly. “I love you. I don’t need a white picket fence, or a house in the country, or anything you might think comes with a domestic married life. I don’t need you to cook me dinner or run errands. I just want to be with you.”

Natasha looks sad. “But you deserve that stuff, Laura. You deserve the life Clint can give you.” She leans in and twists their fingers together, a moment that feels more private than Laura knows it is -- they’re two fish in the middle of a large sea, but no one is paying them much mind, figuring that if Natasha Romanoff, Level Six, happened to be friendly with someone other than Clint Barton, her partner, they don’t want to know the details.

“So I’ll let him give me that,” Laura agrees. “But Natasha, I don’t want to do this without you. Besides, how many people can say they’re in love with and married to two people who they consider their best friends?”

In the end, Clint does propose. He buys a ring with Natasha while they’re in Rio de Janiero, a fourteen carat white-gold band with a small diamond set in the middle, and he gets down on one knee while they’re walking in Bryant Park a month later and asks her to spend the rest of her life with him. Laura, who has an idea that the proposal’s coming thanks to a well-timed text from Natasha, still finds herself surprised, and laughs and then cries and accepts within seconds. Clint takes them out to celebrate and invites Natasha; at the end of the night, when they’ve returned to Laura’s apartment and have snuck up onto the roof to continue the celebrations with slightly fuzzy eyesight and another two bottles of wine, Laura drops down on one knee in front of Clint’s partner.

“I want you to be my wife,” Laura says, and even Clint looks shocked when she pulls the rose-gold ring from her pocket. Laura takes comfort in the fact that Natasha doesn’t look surprised or apprehensive, she just nods slowly and accepts the ring with shaking fingers, letting Laura put it on. Clint stands in front of them, eyes agog.

“This is insane! No, not insane, this is amazing! I’m going to marry my wife, my best friend...how the hell did this even happen?” He’s laughing and crying at the same time, the way Laura was doing during her proposal earlier, and he envelopes both of them in a big tipsy hug. Laura pushes him away playfully.

“Think I’m good enough of a spy now to be Level One?”

“Nah,” Clint says with a wink. “This is definitely Level Ten material.”

“Are you sure?” Natasha whispers later, when Clint has left them alone on the roof. It’s approaching midnight, and the stars are stretching out across the sky like a blanket of diamonds, and Laura’s own diamond sparkles on her finger. She brushes her hand across Laura’s cheek, and fire burns in Laura’s heart.

“I have never been more sure of anything in my whole life,” Laura whispers back, the words rimmed with truth, and Natasha places her head on her shoulder, and it feels like she's found home.

***

Laura’s mother is fine with Laura shooting a gun and going off to work at SHIELD, but when Laura tells her that she’s engaged to the SHIELD agent she’s been dating and that they’re going marry quietly and probably without much fanfare, she pitches a fit. Laura’s father steps in to mediate, reminding Laura of his many friends at the State Department who would be more than happy to help out with a quiet ceremony, but Laura brushes his suggestion off as nicely as she can, confirming that she’s going to get married on her own -- which doesn’t go over so well.

“I don’t know what to do,” Laura says miserably when she calls Natasha. It’s a Saturday afternoon and Clint is over at her apartment, avoiding the conversation and cutting up tomatoes and celery for their tuna fish salad lunch.

“We’ll tell her SHIELD is taking care of it,” Natasha soothes, her voice a comforting blanket of support.

“I told them that, and they still got upset,” Laura says morosely. “They want to at least be there, and they can’t understand why I don’t want them there.”

Natasha hesitates for a long time, and Laura focuses on the sound of Clint chopping steadily in the kitchen. “We could do two ceremonies,” she says finally. “You could get married to Clint, the way your parents expect you to get married, and have them come to New York, or wherever you want to go. And then we can do something with the three of us. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, right?”

“And you’re...you’re okay with that?” Laura asks uncertainly, because it feels like they’re just erasing Natasha’s presence, throwing her under the rug when she's such a vital part of both of their lives. She hates that feeling, and it makes her want to hide, because she's being shameful and terrible.

“Don’t worry,” Natasha assures her. “We’ll still be married. We’ll still have our own ceremony. You’ll just have to get emotional over vows twice,” she teases, before hanging up. Laura still feels like she’s being unfair, though, and Clint ends up cuddling her on the couch when she starts to cry.

“I’ve known Natasha for years,” he says, stroking her hair. “She’s being honest, Laura. She loves you, but she’s not hurt by this. She understands.”

“I hate that this has to be so secret,” Laura says, pressing her face into his shoulder. “It feels wrong, like I'm ashamed of our relationship because it's not normal. What we are, who we are…”

“Who we are and what we are means nothing to anyone else,” Clint promises, kissing her. “We love each other, and we’re all committing to each other. The world doesn’t need to know how or why.”

In the end, Laura’s parents come to New York for three weeks in late September to meet Clint and watch their daughter get married. Laura takes them on a small tour of SHIELD, unsure of whether or not she wants to run into Natasha while she’s got her parents in tow, and they go out for a fancy dinner at Peter Luger's, where Clint mutters to Laura that the last time he had food this expensive or this good was when he was undercover and infiltrating the office of the Prime Minister of Canada.

“So. Clint. Laura tells me you work with a partner,” and Laura’s hand stills on the butter knife.

“Yeah,” Clint says with a big smile. “Natasha. She’s great. Keeps me in line, and keeps the thugs off my back.”

“And she’s okay with you getting married?” Laura’s father asks as he pours wine for them. “You know what they say about men who get married to strong-willed women.” He winks at Laura, who tries to smile against a churning stomach. Clint, however, is all genuine smiles, and entirely the charmer Natasha has promised he would be.

“I’m pretty sure my partner will understand,” he says, raising his glass “to Laura and Clint and many happy years together.”

Laura allows one of her father’s friends to officiate the ceremony between her and Clint, which takes place in a small spot behind one of the bridges in Central Park, underneath trees that dangle canopies of golden brown over their heads. Clint rents a tux and Laura wears a simple white dress with steady beading along the waistline, and she says “I do” while staring into Clint’s eyes, her face promising him the world. Clint kisses her, and she knows that they’re both thinking of Natasha, though neither of them say anything.

“How’d the ceremony go?” Natasha asks when they stop by her apartment later, still fully dressed, after dropping off Laura’s parents back at the hotel. She’s not wearing makeup, and her hair is darker red than usual, a product of a recent undercover mission. She’s pulled it up in a high ponytail and Laura spies a yoga mat in the living room.

“Fine,” Laura says, wrapping her arms around Clint as he walks through the door. She hugs him tightly. “He’s officially my husband now, which means for once, I get to beat you in something.”

Natasha laughs. “Enjoy it while it lasts, Laura. Once we get married, he’ll be my husband AND my partner.”

“Ugh. I never thought you’d be my wife,” Clint says as he takes off his shoes and accepts a beer that Natasha hands him from the fridge. “I mean, no offense.”

“None taken,” Natasha says smoothly. “I did always tell you that I’m definitely not wife material. Seems Laura changed all that.”

“I did not!” Laura insists, though she can’t help the pride swelling up inside of her.

“Oh, no?” Natasha sits down at the table, eyeing her. “We’re two SHIELD assassins who never once thought about putting down roots, let alone with someone who wasn’t even in our profession. We were fine sleeping together and loving each other on our own. And then you came along and made us re-think everything that could be possible about loving someone, and now, here we are -- my partner is married to you, and we’re all about to get married to each other, and it’s honestly the strangest thing that’s ever happened.”

“Stranger than chasing ostriches around Africa?” Clint asks eagerly and Natasha snorts, settling back down on her yoga mat. Despite her “just married” status, Laura has to stop herself from tackling her to the ground and pulling off her clothes.

“Well. Maybe not stranger than that.”

***

Laura, Clint and Natasha get married a month later, in October, out on Long Island, in the middle of a winery dripping with green leaves and rose-red grapes the same color as the wine Laura remembers Natasha pouring her on their first casual date.

No one knows about it, and no one officiates the ceremony, and that suits Laura just fine. They stand in front of each other, Clint wearing his tux and Laura wearing her beaded dress, Natasha wearing a white dress that looks similar to Laura’s except Natasha’s is silk and it shows off all the curves of her slender and toned body.

“She wore that to dinner with the Head of State in Bali,” Clint confirms as Natasha smoothes down her dress. “Right before she shot someone.”

Laura smiles, because this is the life she’s letting herself into now, and it is kind of exciting.

They exchange rings with murmured declarations of love and promises of forever and protective agreements to put each other first, always, in every way. Laura cries, and Clint smiles, and Natasha kisses both of them deeply, leaving red marks on their lips, like stains of blood.

“I love you,” Natasha whispers to Laura as the wind picks up along the open pastures. She takes Clint’s hand and interlocks their fingers, and Laura notices she says the same thing to him, except without opening her mouth.

They keep their separate apartments, and the only thing that changes after they get married are their mindsets, the fact that they spend more time together out of work, and the rings on their fingers, which they all hide anyway. Laura wears hers on a chain around her neck, prompting people to ask if she has a new secret admirer, if they look too closely (Hill is particularly interested) while Natasha doesn’t wear hers at all until she gets home, and Clint keeps his in the pocket of whatever he’s wearing that day. Clint is hesitant to do any and all of the paperwork that implies he’s no longer single, mostly because he doesn’t want anyone at SHIELD to know that his personal life and professional life have blended so thoroughly and mostly because he can’t really do anything without it looking suspicious.

Laura gets a summon to report to Director Fury’s office a few weeks after their wedding, and she feels nervous and then worried as she half runs and half walks down the halls of SHIELD. Before she even reaches the office, she can hear the arguing going on inside.

“Natasha’s my next of kin!”

“Not anymore. Laura should be your next of kin now. That’s how it works.”

“Laura’s not going to be in the field with me if I get shot to death by some guy who can’t see straight!” Clint argues loudly as Laura steps into the room, her heart pounding against her ribcage.

“Um.” She holds out a piece of paper with shaking hands. “You requested to see me, Director Fury?”

Fury turns from where he’s been locked into a three-point triangle with Natasha and Clint, and takes a breath.

“It seems congratulations are in order. I assume the rest of the signal intelligence department doesn’t know about your recent nuptials.”

“I --” Laura realizes she has no idea how to respond. “Thank you, sir.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised you got Agent Barton settled down enough to commit to something that’s not making coffee,” Fury remarks casually and Clint glares.

“Hey!”

“Sir, we’re getting off track,” Natasha says impatiently. “I’d like to formally request that Laura be added to Clint’s paperwork as next of kin, now that they’re married.”

“You’ve been my next of kin since SHIELD started caring about whether I lived or died!” Clint protests again, and Laura avoids Natasha’s eyes in case she makes an expression that gives herself away. She looks down at the polished mahogany floor, instead.

“Agent Barton.” Fury’s loud monotone silences both of them easily. “I should remind you that Agent Romanoff has a point. While we can keep her on your paperwork, SHIELD should have a way of contacting your wife if something happens. It’s standard protocol for those who have families in our line of work.”

Clint glares at everyone in the room, his mouth settling in an impudent line. “Fine,” he says shortly. “I’ll do it. Where do I sign?”

Natasha instructs him on where to fill out names and addresses and signatures (“Natasha’s always taken care of his paperwork,” Fury mutters to Laura with a sigh, and Laura’s done enough of both of their work to believe it) and after they leave the office, Natasha takes off for the gym in what Laura knows is an attempt to funnel her aggression and frustration into something non-lethal.

“What the fuck was that all about?” she hisses as soon as the door is closed. Laura pulls him into the first empty room she finds, which happens to be a storage closet a few doors down from Fury’s office. “You don’t want me to be your next of kin? I know Natasha’s your partner and has been practically since you were born, but I’m your wife!”

“I know, Laura. I know.” Clint sags against the wall, his face ashen and sad. “I just...it’s not that I don’t want you to be my next of kin. I just don’t want you to be responsible for me. At least Natasha’s used to my fuck-ups. She’s used to sitting by my hospital bed all night. I don’t...if something bad happens…”

“You don’t want me to know?” Laura interrupts icily. “You want me to sit around and worry about you all day, so you can walk through the door and then fall over from a bullet wound I can’t fix?”

“Laura --”

“Do you know they won’t even let Natasha into the hospital if anything happens?” Laura continues angrily. “We’re not legally allowed to be married, Clint! I can’t just say she’s my wife when you're my husband, according to paperwork! What if something happens and she can’t be there, but I can, and I’m not, because I don’t know?” She shoves him hard against the wall, until his back smacks up against the hard cement.

“Laura, I’m sorry,” Clint says softly, allowing her to beat him up. She hits against hard skin; she’s not exactly weak but she knows Clint is all bulk and muscle, an impossible wall. Still, it makes her feel better to have something tangible to punch, and she knows she can hit her husband and he won’t take it to heart, or even be angry about it. Laura hits him until she loses steam and then falls against his chest, and in the darkness of the room, they comfort each other, Clint whispering promises Laura knows he can’t keep in her ear.

She lets herself believe them anyway, because she knows she can’t predict the future, though she wishes she could.

***

Laura finally gives up her apartment in the West Village four months after she marries Clint (and Natasha).

“You could move in, too,” Laura suggests as she helps Clint carry boxes into the small unit.

“Me? No way,” Natasha says, looking around. “This place is a minefield as it is, and two people are going to make it way cramped. Besides, I’m used to breaking in through the fire escape. It’ll be like I live here, anyway.”

“Great,” Clint mutters and Natasha grins.

“I honestly can’t wait to see what happens,” she remarks from where she’s perched on the armrest of the couch, eating a sandwich. “You’re either going to love each other more or kill each other.”

“Says the girl who once had sex with me four times in under an hour because we were trapped in the smallest underground bunker of all time,” Clint throws over his shoulder.

“We actually did want to kill each other, by the time we got rescued,” Natasha reminds him. “You stunk.”

“I had an infected wound! And the space had no air circulation, of course I stunk!”

“If we ever have kids, I’m going to make sure they never walk out the door without a first aid kit,” Natasha says and Laura tries not to think too much about Natasha’s words, because while she’s okay with not having a domestic life, she does want kids. Clint, for his part, would be a great father, and Laura’s known that since the first day she met him. He was all business when it came down to it, calculated and hard and just as brittle as Natasha was, but he was a child at heart who put the people he loved first.

“We?” Laura asks, unable to help herself as she turns around. Natasha’s mouth slots itself into a circle.

“What?”

“You -- you said if we ever have kids,” Laura says tentatively, frozen in place, holding a box marked FRAGILE -- KITCHENWARE. Clint, who has been continuing to move boxes in and out of the doorway, stops and straightens up.

“Laura?”

“Do you want kids?” she finds herself asking bluntly, even though they’ve been married for less than six months collectively. Natasha takes a few deep breaths and glances at Clint, who leans against the wall, and they have a conversation with their eyes that Laura is beginning to learn is normal when it comes to their relationship.

“Do you?” Natasha asks, softly, gently, and Laura finds her hands shaking. She puts down the box before she can break everything inside by accident.

“Yes,” she says, looking at Clint when she stands again. “But...I want you to want them, too.”

Clint and Natasha exchange another one of those silent spy looks, and it makes Laura want to scream.

“We’re SHIELD agents,” Clint starts. “Assassins, really. Marksmen and spies with fancy names to hide what we really do for a living.”

“You’re also my wife, and my husband,” Laura argues. “You didn’t seem to have a problem committing to a relationship even though you were both assassins.”

“Being in a relationship, even being married...that’s different than having a kid,” Clint continues. “It’s an entirely new level of complications. For us, for work…”

“What about for me?” Laura asks in frustration. “I don’t know if I’m going to do this job forever. Maybe I’ll be a freelance translator one day. Maybe I’ll retire completely. Maybe I’ll take a job at a small company where no one watches my every move. My life isn’t complicated, even if it feels like it is right now.”

“Laura. Clint’s just being realistic.” Natasha slides off the couch, her feet landing softly on the floor with all the ease of a practiced spy. “If we have kids, that changes everything about who we are and what we do. This isn’t a normal life for us.”

“So I’ll have the kid,” Laura says forcefully, clenching her teeth. “And you guys can go shoot people or screw each other and come home when you want, I don’t know.”

“Laura, listen to yourself,” Natasha pleads gently, and Laura shakes angrily.

“I am listening to myself!” She fixes her gaze on Natasha, and then on Clint. “I love you, both of you, and I want a baby! I want us to be a family...why is that so hard for you to accept?” She feels the tears on her face but she can’t stop them, and she falls to her knees knowing that she looks as pathetic as she feels. Clint’s at her side in seconds with Natasha on the other side of her, rubbing her back and kissing her head.

“Laura,” Clint says softly. “I love you and I want a life with you. If that life includes kids, we can try to make that happen. Okay?”

Laura wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m forcing you to do this,” she says, feeling sick. “I’m forcing you to start a family when you don’t want to.”

“No one said we didn’t want to,” Natasha corrects, stroking her hair. “You’re not forcing us, Laura. It’ll be complicated, and it won’t be easy, but if this is what you want, we’ll help make it happen. We’re married, remember?”

Laura closes her eyes, biting down on her lip. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes. “I didn’t mean to -- god, I’m such a mess.”

“You’re allowed to be a mess,” Clint says, hugging her more tightly. Natasha puts a hand on Laura’s arm.

“Laura, if we do have a child, you have to carry it,” she says quietly. “Even if it means conceiving between you and Clint only.”

Laura looks up, confused. “That doesn’t have to be the case, Nat. I know what I said, but I was angry, and I don’t want this to be so exclusive that you can’t be a part of the process. We can still talk about it, if you want. If --”

“No,” Natasha says tightly. “I’m telling you, Laura, that if we do this -- now, or down the line -- you need to have the baby.” There’s a finality to her tone, something that she doesn’t say, but Laura sees the reasoning clearly in her eyes. Her heart tears apart, because she doesn’t know how or why -- she doesn’t want to know how or why -- and Laura finds herself blinking back more tears.

“I didn’t know.”

Natasha smiles sadly. “I didn’t expect you to. It’s not exactly something that comes up in job interviews or during first dates. Or in wedding vows,” she adds, trying to keep her voice light. “And it wasn’t something that was Clint’s place to talk to you about.”

“Did it --” Laura steadies her voice. “Did it hurt?”

Natasha breathes out slowly. “It was more psychological than anything else,” she says, her eyes looking as distant as her voice sounds. “The things they did to me in the Red Room...they made sure I could never be anything more than a killer and an object. In every way.”

Laura reaches out, taking Natasha’s hand and bringing her fingers to her lips. “You’re not a killer or an object in this relationship, Natasha. And you never will be.” She kisses her skin. “I’ll carry our child. But I still want you to be a part of bringing it into the world, if we can do that.”

Natasha shakes a little as Laura touches her. “Are you sure?”

Laura looks at Clint, who wraps his arm around her protectively, and then nods. “Yes, Natasha. I’m sure.”

***

For a few months, things are quiet. Laura adjusts to living with Clint, and Natasha spends more and more time with them, to the point where she starts leaving her own clothes at their house as well as a toothbrush and some hair products. Eventually, Natasha gives up her own apartment altogether, moving in with Clint with the caveat of, “I basically live here anyway. Might as well make the deed final now that we’re married, right?”

Natasha and Clint take a few missions overseas -- Lagos, Abidjan, Jakarta -- and Laura gets used to them being away, even it contributes to making her feel more lonely. She spends her time at work; Fury’s imposed a strict rule that restricts her from getting Clint and Natasha’s reports now that she’s married, and it’s both frustrating and annoying as the reports she does get aren’t nearly as complicated or interesting.

It’s not the right time to start trying for a baby, Laura realizes. Still, she’s glad the conversation is one that’s now out in the open, and it allows her to breathe easier. Her and Clint could easily have a child, she knows, but she also knows that child wouldn’t belong to Natasha in the same way. And while she hadn’t been aware of things like Natasha being unable to have children, Laura remains firm in her stance of wanting Natasha to be a part of her pregnancy, in whatever way possible.

“I appreciate this, Laura, but it’s just not possible,” Natasha says with a small sigh when Laura returns from work one day with an armful of brochures and papers she’s printed out about pregnancy and open relationships. “When I said I couldn’t have kids, I meant it. I can’t get pregnant. I’m sterile, as far as I know. It…” She pauses, fighting emotions Laura can see her trying to hide. “It’s something I never thought I would care about or have to deal with, but I can’t do anything about it.”

“I’ll find something we can try,” Laura promises. “We’ll go to a doctor, or maybe someone at SHIELD knows something. We’ll see if we can find a way...IVF maybe, or something similar. There are experimental treatments that people try all the time when it comes to relationships like these.”

“And usually, they cost a fortune,” Natasha reminds her gently. “Laura, remember how I said that I loved Clint, but there were things he wanted and needed that I couldn’t give him? This is one of them.” She takes her hand. “I can’t give him a stable life and a family. I can be a good wife to you both, but I can’t be the person he needs for things that he wants, like a baby. You can give him a baby, and you should. And I’ll find a way be involved in the process, I promise.”

Laura knows Natasha intends the conversation to make her feel better, but it doesn’t. It only makes her feel worse, the same way she felt when she had to hide the fact that she loved Natasha as well as Clint when her parents asked about coming to her wedding. But she doesn’t want to push the issue further, and so she drops it altogether, and tries to focus on acclimating to married and domesticated life with her two partners.

One month later, Laura’s in the grocery store, filling her cart with items for a mundane dinner in preparation for Clint and Natasha’s return from London the next morning, when her cell phone rings loudly in her pocket.

“It’s me,” Natasha says, and she doesn’t give Laura a chance to speak or breathe before she keeps talking. “I’m at SHIELD’s hospital. Get here right away and meet me outside.”

“Why?” Laura asks, her stomach curling with fear, but Natasha’s already hung up. Laura stands frozen in the middle of the bread aisle at Food Emporium, busy shoppers pushing past her rudely with all the fervor of New York’s hustle and bustle, and she shakes herself out of her stupor enough so that she can finish her shopping and get the groceries home. She hastily deposits the frozen food in the freezer and leaves all the non-perishables in a mess on the floor, hailing the first cab she can find.

“Natasha!”

Clint’s partner is standing at the top of the stairs of the hospital. Laura sees her immediately when she bursts out of the cab and stumbles up the steps, practically running into her arms. Natasha hugs her for a moment longer than Laura knows she normally would in public, and then puts her arm around Laura, leading her inside.

“As far as everyone is concerned, you’re the wife and I’m the partner, and I’m comforting you because of your husband,” Natasha says levelly as they walk together. Laura realizes her legs are still shaking.

“Stop here,” Natasha orders, halting against a wall. “And breathe, okay?”

Laura thinks that’s a silly thing to ask her to do, because she’s already hyperventilating, because something is obviously very wrong. And given who is and isn’t in front of her, she has a good idea of who is on that end of something being very wrong. She sucks in a deep breath of antiseptic hospital air.

“Why are we doing this?”

“Because,” Natasha says seriously, putting two hands on her shoulders. “I need to prepare you for what you’re going to see.”

“What I’m --” Laura swallows as the realization of why she’s standing here finally hits her. “Oh, god. What happened?”

Natasha keeps her grip steady on Laura’s body, holding her upright. “Explosion at the site we were sent to check out. He was caught in the blast and suffered second-degree burns and a few broken ribs and other internal injuries we're waiting for confirmation on."

"Head injuries?" Laura manages to ask, and Natasha looks grim.

"We’re not sure yet. I'm still waiting on some tests. But he’s got a tube in, because he can’t breathe on his own right now, so he’s not going to be able to talk to you.”

“Oh, god,” Laura says again, choking back bile. “I can’t...I can’t.”

Natasha leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. “Yes,” she says quietly. “You can. I’ll be right next to you, and I’m not going to leave your side. And you don’t have to leave his side, either, okay?”

Laura nods, taking another deep breath, but the air disappears from her lungs the moment Natasha opens the door and she sees Clint lying in bed, surrounded by beeping monitors. Unmoving and pale, he doesn’t even look like the Clint who gets himself hurt every so often, complaining of broken bones and concussions and fevers. He looks foreign, different, like someone else’s husband altogether.

“Clint…” She manages to whisper the words out loud as she makes her way to his bed, gripping the rails. Up close, he looks even worse, his face covered with blood, a swollen patch of skin above his eyebrow, and multiple lacerations and bandages covering his hands, where Laura suspects the burns are the worst. “Oh, Clint.” She starts to cry, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to do, because as much as she’s married to two spies, this isn’t the life she’s used to. Natasha hugs her from behind, kissing her neck.

“He’s going to live,” Natasha whispers and Laura cries harder at that.

“How do you know?”

Natasha strokes her hair. “We’ve been partners for years. He already knows he can’t die on me when we have unfinished business. And now he’s got you, and we’re going to have a child eventually, so he’s basically mandated to pull through.”

“He promised me he’d never leave me alone,” Laura says haltingly, staring at Clint’s prone body. “He should’ve just told me he loved me. It would’ve been enough.”

Natasha rests her chin on Laura’s shoulder. “The first mission we had together, he pulled me aside in the quinjet before we got on comms. He told me that I was his responsibility, that he would do whatever it took to protect me, because he owed me that, now. He loves you, and when he loves you, he wants to do more than just say the words.” She pauses. “He wants to be everything in the world to you, and he does too much to try to put you first, and sometimes, he’s dumb and he makes promises he knows he can’t keep. Like saying he’ll stay safe when he knows what his job is. But Laura, I promise, we’ll never leave you. We love you. Remember why you fell in love with us.”

Laura leans back against Natasha and lets her anchor her body, trying not to cry again, and then reaches down and puts her hand on Clint’s arm, wrapping shaking fingers around his bandages.

Three weeks later, Clint’s home after being released from the hospital and on a strict diet of painkillers, physical therapy appointments, and threats to lie low or else. Fury helps pull strings that allow Laura to take some extra vacation days and he also manages to get her clearance to work mostly from home, which means lots of basic cases or sometimes, no cases at all. Laura doesn’t mind, because her priority is taking care of Clint who is both a nuisance when he’s uncomfortable as well as horribly dependent. But he's also one of the most endearing patients, especially when he’s pouting about taking medication.

“I was thinking,” Laura starts one day while sitting on the couch with a bowl of hot water and a razor. “About the kid thing.”

“Laura, I love you, but I can barely move,” Clint says as she shaves off parts of his fully grown beard with careful, practiced ease. “And I'm pretty sure I can't have sex right now.”

“I know,” she says, trying not to look at where his loose shirt hides the scars and bandages from the burns, or at the cuts that still cover his arms like red angry track marks. “I’m not saying that we have to have a kid now, or soon. But I have started to think about it, and also the things that come with it.”

“Such as?” Clint asks slowly, and Laura takes a deep breath, letting it out, concentrating on her work.

“A house,” she says finally and Clint jerks just enough that Laura manages to leave a smear of shaving cream across his nose and mouth.

“A house?”

“Yes,” Laura says, reaching for a towel and gently wiping the foam away as Clint shakes his head.

“Do you know how much houses cost in New York? Or around New York? Even with SHIELD’s salaries, yours and mine and Nat’s --”

“I didn’t mean a house in New York,” Laura finishes quietly, putting the towel down, and Clint narrows his eyes.

“Where did you mean, exactly?”

Laura swallows. “I’m not sure,” she admits, fiddling with the plastic razor. “Maybe somewhere far away from the city. Maybe somewhere like where my parents are. Not necessarily as far as North Dakota, but somewhere a little bit remote.”

“And how do we work?” Clint asks pointedly. Laura bites her lip, because she honestly hadn’t thought that part out fully enough to make a good case.

“You travel anyway -- you and Natasha. It wouldn’t...it would just take you a little longer to get home,” Laura says quietly. It’s not a compromise that she particularly likes, especially as she watches his face, but she also knows that they had both been talking about taking on less missions. “I don’t know, Clint. I know we’re not always going to live here and I want to live in a place that feels like a home. I moved around a lot as a kid. I never had one place to settle down in...it would be nice to put my roots down and start a family, with my own family, and with the people I love.”

Clint shifts painfully on the couch. “Did you ask Natasha about this?”

“No,” Laura confesses. “I wanted to talk to you, first. I wanted to see if it was something that you even wanted. I know we need to ask her, too, I just…” She stops, looking at him. “I think it would be good for us, to get away from New York.”

“You’re talking about buying a house,” Clint says. “And we just agreed to have a kid.”

“I know,” Laura says helplessly, because even with three salaries, there was having money and there was having money. “I know it's a lot, all of this. We don’t have to make a decision now. Just...please think about it?”

Clint nods. “I’ll think about it,” he agrees, leaning over to kiss her. His face is full of shaving cream and some of it gets on her face, but Laura doesn’t mind; she’s come too close to losing him to care about things like that.

“I heard you wanted to buy a house,” Natasha says when she comes home a few hours later. Clint has been moved to the bedroom and is sleeping, knocked out by multiple painkillers and a still-healing immune system that’s left him more exhausted than usual. Laura is sitting at the kitchen table, nursing chamomile tea in her favorite green mug, trying to settle her mind and her stomach.

“Yeah,” she admits quietly and Natasha smiles as she takes off her shoes, walking to the cupboard and kissing Laura on the head as she walks by.

“Tea?” Laura asks. “There’s still some hot water left.”

“Nah.” Natasha gestures towards the Keurig. “It was a long day, and Sitwell didn’t shut up for more than five seconds at a time. I need caffeine. And I need to be in the presence of my favorite girl.” She puts a Dunkin’ Donuts pod in the holder and presses the silver button, waiting for the drip to finish before she joins Laura at the table.

“What did he say? About the house?”

Laura swallows. “He said he’d think about it. He wanted to know if I talked to you -- how did you know?”

Natasha winks. “Word travels fast.” She takes a long drink of coffee. “Don’t worry. I swear he wasn’t talking about you behind your back. He knows better. Even if he’s my husband, too.”

Laura manages a smile. “I don’t know how it would work,” she says. “I don’t mind quitting my job, but you both travel so much, and he loves his job. Not to mention how it would look if I packed up and moved away with my husband and also his partner.”

“Stranger things have happened to Nick Fury, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Natasha says offhandedly. “But Clint loves you. It doesn’t mean you have to compromise. You’re in this marriage together.”

“So are you,” Laura says softly, reaching out and taking her fingers. “Would you...would you move with us?”

Natasha suddenly finds her own mug extremely interesting. “Would you want me to move with you?”

“Of course I would,” Laura says sharply, amazed Natasha would think otherwise. “You’re my wife. We’re married. And we want children.”

“It's not a matter of what we want,” Natasha says, her eyes straying to the bedroom. “Agency is important to me, Laura. To us. And I need you to be sure that this kind of life is what you want. If you want us all to uproot ourselves and start a new life in a place that’s not a shoebox…” She trails off, closing her eyes. “You just need to be sure.”

“But it could work,” Laura presses. “Right?”

Natasha heaves out a long sigh. “It would mean more time away, when we had to travel. But I think you know that Clint and I have been talking about scaling down our missions, thanks to everything that’s happened lately. So yes, Laura. I think if we did it right, it could work.”

With Natasha’s acceptance and Clint’s grudging permission, Laura spends her free time searching for houses and running numbers on properties everywhere from Connecticut to Long Island to Washington D.C. to Missouri. She finds a few pictures of places that look appealing online, but when she shows them to Clint and Natasha, she’s met with a neutral face and a dismissive glance, which she frustratingly knows means that they’re not too keen on what they’re seeing for one reason or another.

She stops actively looking for homes once Clint gets better enough to return to work full-time, mostly because when that happens, things start to go back to normal -- Natasha takes a few missions, Laura sits at her desk reading written pieces of stories unfolding halfway across the world, all with their own contexts and meanings to connect. Clint isn’t quite cleared for active duty thanks to his injuries, but he’s afforded desk duty and a few menial assignments that don’t push his body too hard. Laura’s father calls her on a random Wednesday when she’s about to head out for lunch, and she answers largely because her parents hardly ever bother to call her at work.

“I heard you’re looking for a house,” her father says. “For you and Clint.”

“Yes,” Laura says, feeling a pull of guilt at still pretending that there’s no one else in the relationship. Her father clears his throat.

“I might be able to help you with that.”

That night, Laura sits down with Clint and Natasha on the worn tan couch with glasses of Pinot Noir, and takes a deep breath, and says, “I have good news, but there are conditions.”

“What’s the good news?” Clint asks at the same time that Natasha, brows arched, asks, “what are the conditions?”

“My father has a few friends from the State Department who are pretty well off,” Laura begins. “One of them has a property that their parents are selling. It’s in Iowa. It’s big -- bigger than anything we could get here or even out of the city -- and it’s quiet and rural, and it’ll probably come fully furnished, since they’re not taking any of their things when they move. They want to be out by the end of the month, and as long as we agree to sign the papers, they’ll let us have the place for free, except for any maintenance work and mortgage and upkeep.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” Clint mutters, looking at Natasha. “What else?”

“Don’t laugh,” says Laura, looking at each of them in turn. “It’s a farm.”

“A farm,” says Clint flatly, and Natasha snorts quietly.

“A farm.”

“Yes,” Laura clarifies. “A farm.” She pushes the photos across the table. “A working farm, but there are no cows or chickens or roosters. There’s a tractor, and a barn, and a few crops. But that’s it, as far as I know.”

Natasha snorts again and Clint leans back slowly, wincing from still healing injuries.

“A farm.”

“I think it’s perfectly respectable to live on a farm and raise a family there,” Laura says defensively, even though neither of her spouses have said anything else. “And I want this.”

Natasha looks at Laura and then back down at the papers. “It was going to be hard enough to explain to someone that I lived in a real house, if it ever came to that,” she says slowly. “I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to explain why I live on a farm.”

“Eh.” Clint shrugs. “If anyone asks, we’ll just tell ‘em SHIELD set it up.”

“You can’t talk your way out of everything by using SHIELD,” Natasha retorts with an eye roll. “What if one day, SHIELD’s not even here anymore?”

“Oh, c’mon, Nat.” He leans over to kiss Laura. “What are the odds that’s going to happen? SHIELD’s like, indestructible.”

“So does that mean you’re on board?” Laura asks hopefully, turning to her husband.

“Well, I don’t know if I can be out of here in a month -- between work and packing and figuring out moving logistics, we might have to stretch our timing. But yeah. I am.” He bows his head. “I think you finally wore me down, Laura Barton.”

“You’ve been worn down for years,” Natasha says, throwing a pillow at his face. “I should know.”

Four days later, Laura officially quits her job at SHIELD, despite shocked protests from her mother and two different meetings with Nick Fury.

“You know, we could arrange for you to do work out in Iowa,” he offers. “The nearest field office isn’t too far from your new place. It’s not ideal, and I’d have to run around a lot of red tape, but we’d hate to lose you, Laura. You’re one of the best language analysts SHIELD has ever seen.”

“I appreciate it,” Laura tells him with a genuine smile, because she honestly does. “But I think I’m ready for the next chapter of my life to start. I want new challenges. Besides, I’ll still technically be working for Strike Team: Delta, if they have anything to say about it.”

Fury sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’m losing my best analyst and my two best agents all at once. I doubt anything could make this week worse.”

Laura wants to argue that he’s not really losing Clint and Natasha, that if anything, they’ll probably be seeing him more frequently for check-ins and missions. But she offers her apologies anyway, and when Fury dismisses her to take a call from someone named Stark, she figures by the sound of his voice things definitely somehow got worse.

Three months later, after packing boxes and then saying goodbye to Clint’s apartment with a picnic on the bare floor and a lot of loud sex, Clint, Laura and Natasha move to the farm.

“Holy shit,” Natasha says in awe when she gets out of the car they’ve rented, having finally pulled up the dirt road. The house stretches before them, wide and welcome and opening, a grey Victorian-style establishment with a long porch, a barn, another long driveway, a wooden fence and a long line of crops waving delicately in the distance.

“I think this is bigger than what we planned for,” Clint says as he stares up at the house, shielding his eyes against the bright sun. “Guess we don’t need to worry about stepping on each other’s toes.”

“If you think I’m actually letting you have your own room, you’re crazy,” Natasha informs him as she starts walking. “We’re going to get an even bigger bed so Laura and I can cuddle, because you take up all the space. Especially when you’re overtired. Or drunk.”

“Brat,” Clint mutters and Laura grins as she takes his hand, following him up the steps. The house is indeed fully furnished, though Laura figures they’ll probably have to update most of the furniture, some of which looks older and worn. She finds that she likes it, though -- her father had told her that the previous inhabitants had lived in the space for over fifty years and made their home here, in addition to making a home for their children and grandchildren. It was a house that came with a history of being lived in, a house steeped in building lives and loving people, and Laura thinks she can see it in the walls, in the cracked parts of the floor that haven’t been retouched, in the slightly sunken couch cushions and on the dusty windows.

“What do you think?” Laura asks nervously as she lingers in the doorway, watching Natasha walk around the living room.

“Don’t grow crops,” Natasha warns, moving into the kitchen. “Or corn, or beets, or anything that I have to run a tractor for.”

Hear that, Laura?” Clint yells out the words from upstairs, his voice echoing through the large house. “Nat says we can’t grow anything to eat!”

“I heard,” Laura says dryly, but her heart is singing and her insides are jumping around in excitement. She backs out of the door, leaving it open, and stands on the porch with fingers wrapped around the painted railing, staring out over the vast, midwestern sky that seems like it stretches into infinity.

“Hey,” Clint says softly when he finally makes his way outside, his voice causing her to jump in the disturbance of the quiet. “You okay?”

There’s another hand circling her waist, Laura realizes, a softer, smaller palm that’s protectively touching Laura’s skin. She sighs into the air, letting it carry her breath across the open lawn, into the trees, and into the purple and golden sunset that’s carrying the sun out of their reach.

“I’m fine,” Laura says, looking at Clint and Natasha. “I’m home.”

***

Home means settling into a routine that doesn’t include work or running off every five minutes. It means lazy mornings and a lot of cleaning and homemade breakfasts and way too much coffee, and take-out dinner on the porch and cuddling in front of the television, and getting used to a house that feels sometimes too big, until Clint kisses her or until Natasha hugs her and she’s reminded of what she’s lucky enough to have.

“Remember when I told you that I didn’t need you to be domestic to be my wife?” Laura asks as they shower together, wiping wet strands of dark red out of Natasha’s eyes. “I meant it. I don’t want you to think that you have to get up early and make cookies, or that you have to try to be someone you’re not, now that we have a house like this. I’m just really happy you’re here with me. I’ll always be happy that you’re just here.”

Natasha runs a hand over Laura’s arm, massaging her bicep with body lotion. “It may take me awhile before I’m making turkey sandwiches for lunch every day like Clint,” she admits. “But I promise I’ll get up and make the coffee.”

“I can definitely live with that,” Laura decides, shivering despite the warm water that runs down her back.

Home also means that Laura is absolutely immersed in their SHIELD lives, even more so than she’d been while living with them in New York.

“Natasha was shot,” Clint announces as he falls through the door after coming home from Odessa. He helps Natasha over the threshold, and Laura drops the cup of orange juice she’s been pouring, splattering messy pulp onto the floor.

“I had a vest,” Natasha says through gritted teeth, but Laura notices her arm is wrapped around her middle.

“You didn’t have a vest on every inch of your body,” Clint argues, guiding her to the couch as Laura beelines into the room. “And that wasn’t a regular gun. Honestly, I let you take one mission for twenty-four hours, and you end up on death’s door.”

“I am not on death’s door,” Natasha retorts with an eye roll. “And if I hadn't tried to cover that engineer, he would have been shot even worse. Get me some whiskey and let me pass out.”

“Not before I check you,” Laura says, finally finding her voice. She grabs a pair of scissors and cuts off what’s left of Natasha’s thin t-shirt, not bothering to wonder where her uniform is, then unhooks her bra.

“I thought this was a doctor’s appointment, not a striptease from my wife,” says Natasha with a small grin that turns into a wince and a moan of pain as Laura presses two fingers to Natasha’s chest, working her fingers gently along her ribs.

“Slight fracture, if I’m feeling correctly,” Laura says grimly, pressing down harder on the spot just below Natasha’s left breast. “Does that hurt?”

“Of course it does,” Natasha snaps. “Just let me sleep it off.”

Laura looks at Clint worriedly and then helps her put her bra back on as Natasha motions to her stomach, folding back the gauze hiding the jagged hole in her belly. Laura sucks in a breath; Clint had already cleaned and patched the wound to the best of his ability but she can tell it’s going to leave a visible scar.

“Bye bye bikinis,” Laura says, swallowing down fear. “I hope SHIELD catches the guy who did this.”

"Don't count on it," Natasha grunts, glancing up. “Soviet slug. No rifling. Clint, get me a fucking whiskey before I kill you. I’m in pain, I’m not dehydrated.”

A month later, before Clint and Natasha are supposed to go back to New York for another round of work and briefings, Laura brings up what she’s been thinking about since that morning, when Clint had lazily turned over in bed and told her he loved her, his eyes shining with happiness and contentment and adoration.

“I think we should start trying,” she says as she places salads on the kitchen table. “I know you’re still working, but I don’t think there’s ever going to be a good time if we keep putting it off. At least for now, you’re both here.” She waits with baited breath as Clint and Natasha exchange glances, trying not to concentrate too much on her food.

“Let’s do it. And I can watch,” Natasha offers. Laura looks up from her lettuce to find her giving a tight smile, and her stomach twists as she remembers their conversation from a few months ago.

“I want you and Clint to have the baby,” Laura says, and Clint practically chokes on his tomatoes.

“What?” he asks when he can speak again, after gulping down an entire glass of water to stop his coughing.

“I know Nat can’t have kids,” Laura continues, heading off what she knows Natasha is going to remind her of. “But it doesn’t mean that we can’t take Clint’s sperm and your eggs, assuming that your ovaries are still intact. And then if we do IVF, I can carry the baby.”

Natasha’s looking at Laura with her fork frozen in mid-air. “IVF costs money, Laura. A lot of money. Not to mention the doctor appointments, the medications, and treatments that we’d have to undergo even before we got to the point where we could successfully implant you, and --”

“And we didn’t pay a dime for the house,” Laura reminds Natasha, turning to look at Clint. “I still have all my savings, and you have some, too. All we need to do is go to the doctor and have them confirm Natasha still has viable ovaries, so that we can combine the embryos and the sperm.”

There’s something in Natasha’s eyes that Laura thinks might be fear, but before she can settle on it, Clint speaks up.

“Let’s do it,” he says, and Laura’s heart starts beating faster.

“Really?”

Clint smiles and nods. “Yeah. Really. I’m ready to be a dad, I think.”

“That’s even better than you telling me that you want to marry me,” Laura says. Natasha doesn't say anything, finally bringing her fork to her mouth and chewing a mouthful of salad.

“At what point are we going to talk about names?” she asks when she swallows, and the conversation quickly turns to Laura throwing down the gauntlet on naming her child after her husband.

It only takes a quick ultrasound at the office of a local gynecologist to confirm that despite Natasha’s infertility, her ovaries have indeed been left intact, thanks to the treatments that Laura suspects have been less than orthodox. The night they come back from the appointment, Clint decides it’s his turn to make dinner and Natasha disappears outside, citing alone time. Laura finds her sitting cross legged on the porch.

“Hey,” Laura says quietly. She notices Clint’s laptop is open on Natasha’s legs, but she's not looking at it, instead staring out into the quiet landscape, her eyes unfocused.

“I was curious about the procedure, so I looked it up,” Natasha says, her shoulders sagging. “Did you know that they put you on all this medication, and then you get an injection, and then they put some needle in you to take out your eggs?” She laughs, but it’s a nervous titter rather than the sarcastic sound Laura’s so used to hearing. “I hate doctors. I’ve never liked doctors. Not after what they did to me.”

Laura immediately feels a pang of guilt, realizing she’s been so focused on how they’re going to have this baby that she’s been completely oblivious to her wife’s biggest fears and worries, the ones that have been so obviously in front of her the whole time, staring her in the face.

“I’m sorry,” she says as she sits down next to Natasha, putting an arm around her shoulders. “I never even thought of how much this could hurt you. I...I was so stupidly obsessed with having a child with you that I never thought of anyone else’s feelings. I should have paid more attention.”

“It’s okay,” Natasha says softly, though her eyes tell her that it’s not. “I do love you, and I’m willing to put aside things that are hard for me, to give you what you want. To give him what he wants.”

Laura blinks back tears. “You shouldn’t compromise just because you love us,” she says when she finds her voice. “You said it yourself, Nat. Love is love. We make these decisions together.”

“And it’s important to you to have a child that belongs to all of us biologically, rather than just you and Clint,” Natasha says. “That’s something I want, too. I just wouldn’t have ever been brave enough to say it.”

The words hurt Laura’s heart, because even though Laura sees all the vulnerable sides of Natasha, all the softer edges that are hidden underneath the brittle exterior she so coolly displays, Natasha is the strongest person Laura knows, aside from her husband. She hugs her and kisses her on the cheek, and they watch the sunset together in silence until Clint calls them in for dinner.

Natasha starts on a fertility drug and plans her doctor’s appointments, which both Laura and Clint accompany her to, with thankfully little questioning from the doctors. When Natasha lies on the table to have her eggs removed, Laura holds her hand and smoothes back her hair and whispers that she loves her, while Clint holds tight to her other hand and talks confidently about meaningless things like diner food until the procedure is over.

Later, when they take Natasha home and she wakes up in the middle of the night screaming from nightmares before throwing up on the bedroom floor, Clint is the one who forcefully holds her down until she comes back to herself, and Laura is the one who holds back her hair and cleans up the mess.

“They took me away,” Natasha says through her tears, shuddering, hunched over as her body spasms. She spits up the last of dinner onto the floor and Laura kisses her clammy skin while Clint goes to the bathroom to bandage where Natasha’s scratched his arm raw in her distress.

“No one is going to take you away,” Laura whispers after she cleans her up. "You're safe." They sit together and cuddle on the couch, with Laura forcing her to drink small sips of hot green tea until she calms down enough to become exhausted. “We won’t let anyone hurt you, Natasha. I promise.”

There’s a waiting period before the doctors are able to find an appointment and a time to transfer the fertilized eggs, and in that time, Clint and Natasha schedule a mission to Fiji, their first lengthy mission together since moving to Iowa. Laura stands at the door of the farm, unsure if she’s prepared to be alone for the first time in a long time in their new home.

“What happens if I find out about the pregnancy and I can't reach you?” Laura asks worriedly. Clint takes her in his arms.

“We’ll both be checking our phones, even when we’re on site,” he promises. “And the minute something happens -- if anything does happen -- you’re going to call us.”

Laura kisses Clint and Natasha and gives herself credit for not crying until after they leave in a cab to the airport, and then goes about finishing small projects around the house, busying herself in the large space, blasting music from her iPod. For the first time, she adjusts to free time without SHIELD paperwork to keep her company.

Two weeks later, on her doctor’s orders, she takes a pregnancy test that comes back positive, and cries in the bathroom. Despite what she’s promised Clint, she decides the only way that she wants to tell her partners is in person, however long it took for them to come home.

A week after that, she opens the door to reveal a tired and bloodied Clint and Natasha, both of whom are riddled with minor injuries, slight concussions, and ripped uniforms.

“I need a beer,” Clint says as he limps through the door, favoring his right leg.

“I need a shot,” Natasha adds as she follows him, cradling her wrist to her stomach. By the time Laura makes her way into the kitchen, Clint has managed to open a bottle of Sam Adams and Natasha is drinking straight from the neck of the Jack Daniels bottle.

“What’d you want, Laura?” Clint asks roughly, his eyes practically half-lidded. “We owe you something for making you wait this long.”

Laura presses her lips together and shakes her head, trying to hide a smile that she can’t help. “I can’t drink alcohol right now,” she says, and it takes both of them a moment in their respective states but Clint gets it first, almost dropping his beer bottle on the floor as his eyes widen.

“You’re pregnant?”

“It worked?”

Laura can’t find words and she nods, trying to swallow down a cry. Natasha puts the liquor down on the table and makes her way slowly towards Laura.

“Oh, Laura...oh, Laura,” she murmurs, resting her non-injured hand on Laura’s belly. Clint’s at her side in an instant, hugging her tightly, dried blood coming off on Laura’s skin.

“Our baby,” he whispers, his voice hoarse and rough with fatigue and tears. Laura smiles through her own tears and Natasha kisses her cheek.

“Our baby.”

***

A month into her pregnancy, Laura starts to regret that she’s been so enthusiastic about carrying their child. Morning sickness hits with a vengeance, making her irritable and miserable, and Clint spends a lot of time in the bathroom while Natasha repays the favor of reassuring Laura she loves her while holding back her hair. But Laura finds out that having two partners who are also two SHIELD agents makes for pretty much the ultimate pregnancy partner team.

Birthing classes and prenatal vitamins are a part of the deal like anything else, and Natasha and Clint take turns helping Laura around the house, minimizing their missions so that they can spend as much time at home as possible. When Laura gets too overwhelmed or too hormonal, when she snaps too much or cries too much, Clint and Natasha end up on the couch together in their own little world -- Laura finds this out one night when she walks downstairs after waking up due to discomfort and sees them cuddling on the couch discussing what color they’re going to paint the baby’s room. It’s Clint that goes out at ten at night to get another batch of mint ice cream, and it’s Natasha that deals with sending back the pizza when Laura has a breakdown over the fact that they put too many onions and not enough mushrooms on the pie.

They all agree to find out the sex beforehand, and Natasha and Clint are both present for the ultrasound where the doctor proclaims they’re having a boy. After curbing their emotional reactions and listening to Clint’s wide-eyed babbling about what he’s going to teach his son, Laura buys a large book of baby names and they write out different options on pieces of scrap paper, passing them around while offering pros and cons.

“I like Cooper,” Clint offers, reading off of Laura’s paper. “It’s different. And we can call him ‘Coop’ for short, when we get lazy.”

“Cooper's like, a ninety-two in popularity ratings on baby center dot com,” Natasha points out with an eyebrow raise.

“Since when do you actively pursue baby center dot com?”

Natasha shoots Clint a glare. “Shut up.”

“Fine. We’ll make his middle name...I don’t know. What about Michael?”

“I like Michael,” Laura says. “What number is that, so Natasha can feel better about our baby’s relevance to the world?”

Natasha double checks a list on her phone and grins smugly. “Two.”

When Laura’s water breaks, Natasha drives to the hospital and Clint sits in the back with Laura, holding her hand so tightly she thinks that he might break all the bones in her fingers. It’s easy to explain that Clint is the father when they get into the delivery room; it’s less easy to explain who Natasha is and why she needs to be involved.

So Laura looks the nurse in the eye, thinks of the baby pressing down on her uterus, and says, “Natasha’s my wife.”

The nurse does a bit of a double take. “Do you all live together?”

“Yes,” Laura says firmly. “We love each other, and we created this baby together. It’s our first child, and it’s important for us to stay together and experience this as a family.”

For a moment, there’s no response, and the nurse exchanges glances with the doctor on call, and Laura wonders if she’s played this whole thing wrong. But then the nurse smiles widely and looks at Natasha and Clint and declares, “this is the most wonderful thing I’ve seen all day!” And Laura breathes a sigh of relief and almost cries when the nurse announces the Barton family is not to be separated for any reason, which is only slightly awkward, because Laura’s parents are there, too. When they arrive, Clint feeds them a song and dance about working and being close and just coming back from a mission -- Laura’s not sure how believable it is, but she’s in too much pain to care.

Almost twelve hours and one epidural later, Laura’s pushing Cooper Michael Barton out of her body and the baby is taking its first breaths and crying loudly in the delivery room, and Clint and Natasha are holding Laura’s hands. After Laura requests some privacy, gently urging her parents out of the room, she cradles the baby in her arms

“This is our baby,” Laura says through her tears when the nurse places Cooper in her arms after cutting the umbilical cord. “Our baby.” She adds the emphasis with a whisper as Cooper coos and cries, cradled tightly, and Clint’s smile is mile-wide, and even Natasha looks like she’s going to cry as she puts two fingers on the baby’s small skull.

“He has your eyes,” Natasha says softly as Cooper blinks, trying to focus, taking in the world.

“He has your eyes,” Laura says, because the more she looks, the more she realizes it’s true.

“Well, I hope he got something of mine,” Clint mutters sarcastically under his breath. Laura laughs in exhaustion, and Cooper cries again, and Laura thinks it's the most beautiful sound in the world.

***

Despite studying intricate languages, working at SHIELD, and learning how to exist in a polyamorous relationship while loving a man and a woman at the same time, Laura thinks that being a first-time parent is the hardest job she’s ever had. And while Cooper is the best thing that’s ever happened to Laura, it means adjusting to sleepless nights, endless crying, sore nipples from too much nursing, and constant stress. Natasha and Clint pitch in for double duty, and Laura thinks Natasha changing diapers is one of the most amazing things she’s ever seen, second only to Clint playing with Cooper like an airplane.

“Do all babies smell this bad?” Natasha asks skeptically as she deposits a soiled diaper in the trash while making a face, and Laura chokes back a laugh from where she’s folding clothes in the corner of the bedroom.

“Only the ones you have a hand in making,” Clint responds as he rocks his newborn in the chair Laura’s parents had given them as a gift.

Clint calls Fury to alert him of Cooper’s birth, and asks him to hold off on giving assignments, citing a need for personal time. Fury grumbles and groans, but the next day, a large bouquet of flowers along with a wrapped package containing a blue rattle and a cow-shaped bib appears on their doorstep from “Nick,” and Laura tucks away the card for thank you notes and sentimental reasons. Laura’s parents stay a few extra days to help out and only question Natasha’s continued presence a couple of times (“she’s staying with us until our next mission, it doesn’t make much sense for her to go home,” Clint explains), but when they finally leave with promises of FaceTiming every other day to see their new grandson, Laura’s relieved to be back in the presence of just her two partners.

“You know, when I first met you, I never thought it would end up like this,” Natasha says as she makes another round of coffee, putting aside three white mugs with GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE written on them.

“So what are you saying? That Clint shouldn’t have shot you?” Laura asks with a tired smile as Cooper tugs at her nipple. Natasha turns around, her eyes serious.

“I never thought I’d be a mother. I never thought I’d want to be a mother,” says Natasha, looking down at the floor. “It wasn't like I didn't want kids growing up because of something that happened to me.”

Laura wants to get up and kiss her, hold her, tell her how happy she is that she’s part of their family. But she can’t exactly get up while nursing, so she just says, “I love you,” and takes comfort with how it sounds to be able to say the words out loud.

“I don’t know why.” Natasha looks wistful. “If you hadn’t met Clint…”

“If I hadn’t met Clint, what?” Laura asks, trying to keep her voice low so that she doesn’t disturb her son. Natasha shrugs listlessly.

“Don’t pretend this would have happened if it was just me.”

For a moment, Laura is too shocked to respond, and her still-hormonal body urges her to burst into tears. She holds them back, focusing on Natasha’s face, the way her body is drawn and meek as she stands in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a coffee cup in her right hand.

“Natasha. I fell in love with you first. I fell in love with Clint, too, but Clint being your partner has nothing to do with how much I love you.”

“Would you have wanted a kid with me?” Natasha asks bluntly, looking up. Laura hugs Cooper a little closer to her chest.

“Yes,” she says. “I always wanted to be a mother. And that need to be a mother didn’t change because I found a man to love. It changed and it became more important to me because I found people to love. People who I wanted to share a family with.”

Natasha smiles half-heartedly, walking forward and sitting down in one of the kitchen chairs. “He really is perfect,” she says after a moment of watching Cooper nurse contently. “It’s hard to believe that he’s mine.”

“Mostly,” Laura teases, and this time, Natasha’s smile is a little more prominent.

Laura brings Cooper to his first playgroup a few months later, when the baby is close to four months old, and despite Natasha’s hesitancy, she accompanies Laura while Clint goes to a dentist appointment.

“I don’t think I fit in here,” Natasha says uncertainly as they walk into a bright playroom decorated with colorful shapes and marine animals. She’s holding Cooper in one arm, and the baby is grinning around his pacifier.

“You fit in just fine,” Laura promises as she leads them further into the room. “Just think of it as going undercover.”

“Usually, I don’t care about people when I go undercover,” Natasha mutters as Laura approaches a smiling blonde with a long ponytail. She offers out her free hand.

“This is our first day here, and I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Laura Barton, and this is Cooper.” Laura indicates the baby who is flailing around in Natasha’s arms. “Can you say hi, Cooper?”

Cooper grins and opens his mouth to drool in response, dropping his pacifier on the ground. Laura swoops down to pick it up, quickly switching it out for a new one.

“Very nice to meet you Laura," says the blonde, before turning her attention to Natasha. "And who are you? Her sister?”

Natasha hesitates, and glances at Laura. “I’m her --”

“Natasha is my wife,” Laura says before she can stop herself, and the woman’s eyebrows arch considerably.

“Well,” she says when she recovers, smiling at both of them in turn. “That's wonderful. You have a very lovely child, Laura. Welcome to the group.”

“Hope you didn’t want to join the PTA,” Natasha says dryly as they get in the car an hour later, an exhausted Cooper worn out from continuous singing and clapping. “I think you just sealed your fate socially.”

“She didn’t seem to be bothered,” Laura says, trying not to think about the reaction. “Besides, we’re a family, and people have to deal with it.”

Natasha shrugs, twirling a strand of hair around her finger, and Laura suddenly feels like she’s had enough. She stops driving halfway out of the parking lot, pulling over and shoving the car into park.

“I don’t care,” she says bluntly, and Natasha looks over in surprise.

“What?”

“I said, I don’t care,” Laura repeats, gritting her teeth. “Nat, how many times do I have to tell you that I don’t care? I’m not going around telling people I’m bisexual or gay or that I love women, and I can’t be open about this relationship around my parents, or around work, but no one is going to force me to hide my family when there’s no reason to. No one. You’re the one who told me to love who I wanted to love, and I chose you. I chose you, and I chose Clint, and I don’t care that the world might think that’s something that’s not normal. I married you!”

“You did,” Natasha allows quietly, fingering her wedding ring, which Laura realizes she hasn’t taken off since they’d moved to the farm. She takes a deep breath, and looks at Cooper, who is fast asleep in his carseat.

“You should leave it off,” Laura says finally, tears springing to her eyes when she notices how Natasha is tugging at her ring. “It’ll cause an indent if you keep wearing it so much before you and Clint have to go back to work.”

***

Natasha does go back to work, or at least, ‘work’ in that she’s relegated to being Tony Stark’s personal assistant.

“I’m not a babysitter!” she protests loudly when the memo comes through on her email, and she immediately gets on the phone and calls Fury until he picks up. Between both of them, the conversation is loud enough that Laura hears it all from the living room, where her and Clint are playing with Cooper.

“You said you didn’t want to go on any large assignments, and so I’m not sending you to Paris or Germany. I’m sending you to Los Angeles.”

“Paris is wonderful in the springtime,” Natasha spits out angrily. “I like the flowers.”

“That’s great. This is non-negotiable, Romanoff.”

“Stark is a child!”

“He’s a child on the edge of destruction, and that is exactly what you will be responsible for detailing to me,” Fury says. “We’re not going to be the cause of World War III because Howard Stark’s only son is losing his mind.”

Natasha hangs up furiously and then leaves the house for what Laura presumes is a walk, rounding the property numerous times before finally walking back inside.

“There are worse punishments, I’m sure,” Laura offers tentatively from the floor and Clint looks up from where he’s grabbing onto his son’s leg.

“Look on the bright side, Nat. Maybe you can pick up some new sex moves. I’ve heard that Stark’s really popular with the ladies.”

“Ugh,” Natasha groans, faceplanting onto the couch. Clint seizes the opportunity to pass off his son to Laura and immediately climbs on top of her, which causes Natasha to flip easily on the small couch, catching him by the arms.

“Careful, Barton. You know what happens when you piss me off while I’m relaxing.”

“I don’t know,” Clint says, his face twisting into a playful grin. “Do I? It’s been awhile.” He leans down to kiss her, and Laura thinks that she could watch them make out all day, if she didn’t have a child to worry about.

Natasha leaves a few days later, whispering small goodbyes to Cooper as she carries him around in her arms, rocking the baby softly, and Laura catches her telling him, “mommy will be home soon, I promise.” She kisses Laura and Clint and tells them, “please pay attention to when I’m coming home so I can drown myself in alcohol,” and then closes the door.

“Well. Just you and me, I guess,” Clint says in the quiet, looking around the large house. “And him.” He gestures to the baby Laura is holding, who is stretching his short, stubby arms towards Clint’s body.

Laura misses Natasha every moment she’s away. She misses her cuddles and her kisses and showering together, she misses the way she makes her coffee -- less strong than how Clint makes it but still rich enough to be enjoyed. But she also loves that being alone gives her and Clint time to become even closer as husband and wife, even if one less person in the house means less time for them to cuddle or sleep.

But Clint gets up early and makes coffee, and sometimes he brings her breakfast in bed, and he takes walks with Cooper and Laura and takes Cooper to the playground, and reads to his son while rocking him to sleep every single night. Laura holds Cooper on her lap while Clint goes outside to shoot his bow, helping him clap every time Clint makes a bullseye, trying to explain her husband’s archery in the hopes that some of it will stick in his still-developing brain. Sometimes, Laura catches Clint singing in Russian when he’s putting Cooper to sleep, and she stands in the doorway watching the scene with all the love in her heart, because Natasha’s not really there with them, but she might as well be.

Cooper grows bigger every day -- he learns to crawl and he gets his first teeth and he tries to say words -- and Natasha sees it all through Skype when she calls to check in.

“I’m exhausted,” she complains. “I had to do damage control in Monaco. The stupid idiot decided to race and almost got himself killed! I don’t know how Pepper puts up with this shit.”

“You look good,” Clint offers, peering into the video camera as Natasha steps back to show off the outfit she’s decided to wear to that night’s birthday party -- a simple black belted number that shows off all her curves, complemented by black pumps, her curly hair brushed to one side and softly styled. “Maybe I should cover our son’s eyes. He’s still pretty innocent.”

Natasha snorts. “I need to put on a good impression with my cover. But I’m glad you approve.”

“We both do,” Laura cuts in from where she’s feeding Cooper in his high chair. “And we miss you.”

“You have no idea,” Natasha says with a sigh. “I wish I could tell Stark that I have a wife and a husband, just to see the look on his face, but it would probably shock him into death at this point. Actually, that may not be a bad thing.”

Natasha comes home a few days later, looking more tired than Laura’s seen in a long time. Per her partner’s request, she has a glass of bourbon waiting for her, which Natasha downs before heading upstairs to the bedroom, where she collapses for hours.

“Tony Stark really wore you out, huh?” Clint asks when they enter the bedroom sometime later, Laura carrying a plate of grilled cheese with tomato and a mug of coffee. Natasha edges up in bed, wiping sleep out of her eyes, and Laura immediately picks up on the fact that Natasha’s fatigue is rooted in more than just tiredness.

“What, Nat? What is it?” She places the tray on the floor and picks up the plate, offering it towards her. Natasha carefully puts it down on her blanket-clad legs.

“I had to write an assessment,” she says slowly, picking at the crust of the sandwich. “It was easy enough. I said all the right things, turned in my papers, Fury approved it all.”

“And?” Clint prompts gently. Natasha finally looks up, meeting their eyes.

“And I saw myself,” Natasha says quietly. “Stark wasn’t just acting out because he was a child. He was in over his head. He thought he was dying. And he was, for awhile, until we knocked enough sense into him. But he hurt people close to him, because he really thought he had nothing to lose. What did it matter, if he was going to die anyway? What would his legacy be, other than a reckless fool?”

Laura swallows down a lump in her throat. “Nat --”

“It could’ve been me,” she continues, still playing with the sandwich. “It was me at one point. It’s so easy to act out and forget that people in your life matter. And he had people to ground him, people who cared, someone who loved him, and he still lost sight of himself, of who he was hurting.” She stops, looking at Laura. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I keep making it hard on you, with us being a family. I know that I get strange about what people think about us, about me being your wife and us being a threesome like this. I do love you. I do love Cooper. I really do.”

And Laura knows -- she knows, she’s known since the first time Natasha kissed her that she was more than just an agent looking for a cute girlfriend -- and so she leans over and says it, just for good measure, and Clint cuddles up in bed with her while Laura holds her coffee, and Natasha eats her lunch while Laura makes her tell them all about Tony Stark’s drunken escapades and about the details of Nick Fury’s very horrible no-good terrible week, and the stories settle in the walls and in the cracks of the floor until the house creaks with the memories they’re making their own.

***

There are fewer missions, after that.

Natasha and Clint head to various countries, but always manage to make it home within a few days and with little to no injuries, which Laura considers a win. Cooper’s first word is “cup,” which Clint takes great pride in given that he’s feeding his son when it happens. And Laura’s parents visit, fawning over their grandson during the periods where Clint and Natasha are away, always asking questions about what her husband is doing and why she’s sitting around making cookies and cooking dinner and cleaning the house -- a house which, all in all, is shaping up nicely, Laura thinks, with pictures on the walls of her and Clint and a few photos in the bedroom of her and Natasha and of the three of them.

“You really need to look into getting a job, Laura. You’re too educated and too smart to be sitting around like this. You shouldn’t be a housewife.”

“I’m not a housewife!” Laura defends. “Anyway, I’m thinking of putting in a few hours at the bookstore, when Cooper is old enough to be left alone.” It’s not even a lie, because she has been thinking about taking on some part-time work, and she thinks working in the local bookstore in town is something that’s both interesting and easy enough to keep her busy.

“Well. Some people go back to work a month after their child is born,” her mother reminds her while bouncing her grandson on her knee, and Laura has to grit her teeth against reminding her mother that she’s not some people and she never has been.

And then, one day, while Laura is actually filling out a job application in the five free seconds she has between waking up and making sure her toddler doesn’t kill himself running around the house, Fury calls and tells Clint, “I need you in New Mexico.”

“What the hell is going on in New Mexico?” Clint asks curiously as he sticks the phone between his ear, wrestling his son into his arms.

“That’s classified,” Fury replies. “I’ll tell you more when you get here.”

Classified turns out to be something funded by the World Security Council called Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., according to what Natasha can get out of Fury after a long phone call.

“Damn, you’re good,” Clint muses as she walks triumphantly into the house and throws the phone onto the couch.

“I know. Do I get a present?”

“Yes,” Clint says, looking at Laura, who seductively pulls down her shirt, and he blinks a few times before turning his gaze back to Natasha. “Yes, hell yes, you definitely get a present.”

Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., by all accounts, is essentially about analyzing something called a tesseract, a cosmic cube with extraordinary properties. But Clint’s job isn’t to analyze the cube, or even offer help in figuring out what its properties are. His job is to sit and make sure that the facility, and SHIELD’s prized possession, is safe from any kind of harm. It sounds boring and like nothing Laura would even be interested in, but Clint doesn’t seem to be bothered.

“Aren’t you going to be bored?” Laura asks as she watches Cooper run around the lawn, cringing when she realizes she sounds just like her mother.

“Probably, but it’ll just give me more time to sit around and think of threesome fantasies,” Clint says with a grin. Natasha groans.

“Please don’t give Fury any reason to think he needs to show up and give us dad talks,” she says. “Please, Clint. I’m begging you.”

“Fury’s barely gonna be with me,” Clint says with an eye roll. “I’ve got detail on an Erik Selvig, who apparently just got his ass kicked by an Asgardian.”

“Really?” Natasha looks skeptical and Laura shrugs, continuing to watch her son, because there’s a lot that Clint and Natasha talk about openly, that she doesn’t really understand or care about knowing, unless it relates specifically to their family.

Clint takes Cooper to the local fair with him for some father-son bonding, while Laura and Natasha work on the crops and then cook dinner together. That night, they sit around with Cooper roasting marshmallows in the fireplace, and Clint leans his head on Natasha’s shoulder while she holds Cooper gently.

“I love you,” Clint says, looking at both of his wives, and it’s the last thing he tells them before he leaves, all optimism and professionalism, a gig Laura assumes will be just like any other.

Two days later, Natasha calls Laura while Laura is in the middle of weeding the garden, with Cooper playing with his own plastic tools in the dirt next to her. She says, “Laura, I need you to sit down,” in a voice so serious Laura doesn’t even bother to mask her worry.

“Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. has been compromised. Clint’s missing.”

“Missing?” Laura’s heart starts to beat faster, and Cooper looks up and grins from where he’s happily scooping up piles of dirt. “You mean you don’t know where he is?”

“We…” Natasha trails off. “No. Not exactly.”

“But you can find him, right?” Laura asks the question without even thinking about it, because that’s what Natasha does, and that’s what Natasha has been trained to do. When Natasha doesn’t answer, she keeps talking. “If you can get me information on where he was taken or when he was taken, maybe if you let me look at some reports, I can figure things out. I can help.”

“No, Laura. You can’t.” Natasha says the words with such finality that Laura’s shocked into silence, and she suddenly realizes why. Even when Clint and Natasha had been hurt on missions, even when Natasha had to tell Laura about one of Clint’s life-threatening injuries, there had always been a shred of Tasha, or Nat, or even Natasha, a soft part of her psyche that she had been able to offer Laura because Laura was her wife, and Laura was her partner. This is the first time in their relationship that Natasha has spoken to Laura and been strictly Agent Romanoff.

“Nat?”

“Clint’s been compromised,” she says shortly. “Video surveillance shows what we would consider mind control. He shot Fury.”

“Oh my god.”

“He shot him in the shoulder, where he knew he had a vest,” Natasha continues. “It’s good enough to assume that he was trying to fight whatever was controlling him, because otherwise, he would shot at his head. Shot at Hill, too, and deliberately missed. In close range.”

“Clint doesn’t miss,” Laura whispers, watching her son continue to scoop dirt.

“Clint doesn’t miss.”

Laura breathes deeply, taking in the sweet smell of afternoon summer, the scent of the growing crops, the sound of the tractor from the next farm over, the dog barking faintly down the road. “How are you going to find him?”

“We have resources,” Natasha answers. “But I’m on my way to talk to someone who might be able to help find this tesseract thing, which would basically lead us to Clint. Finding Clint is our priority, Laura, I promise. Mine and SHIELD's.”

“He’s not their husband,” Laura says, trying not to cry, and then, “what do I do?” She feels small and alone as she sits back on her heels; it’s the best day they’ve had at the farm all week, every cliche moment of the birds singing and sunlight streaming from a cloudless sky feeling earned and beautiful.

“You stay at the farm and make sure you’re safe,” Natasha says. “You don’t open the door for anyone who isn't me or Fury. He’s working on making sure there are security measures in place.”

“Okay,” Laura says softly. “Natasha -- what -- why would we have to worry about opening the door?” She feels out of her element, confused and uninformed despite the fact she’s been entrenched in this kind of work every single day for years, despite feeling like she knows all the aspects of dangerous missions or outcomes of missions that end badly.

“Because we don’t know what Clint’s capable of saying,” Natasha says, and Laura can detect the whir of an engine in the background. “People who are compromised...their heads get screwed up and sometimes, they say things they’re not supposed to and they put people in danger. And we don’t know what information he’s giving out, but we need to err on the side of safety. So don’t open the door, okay?”

Laura nods to herself, letting a single tear run down her cheek. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Natasha repeats. “I love you. I’ll call you when I know something.” She hangs up and Laura wipes water from her eye, and Cooper drops his plastic shovel and crawls across the ground, curling up in Laura's lap, mud and all.

“I miss daddy,” Cooper says, sticking a dirty thumb in his mouth. Laura holds her son more tightly, staring wordlessly at the ice-blue sky.

***

Laura doesn’t open her door, and lets the mail pile up until she feels safe enough to leave Cooper alone for five seconds to walk down the driveway. She cooks all of her meals at home, even when Cooper wants pizza or another form of take-out, or an ice cream sundae from Friendly’s. She wakes up in the middle of the night when things fall off the dresser or when a car alarm goes off next door, her heart pounding and her body sweating, and then walks around the house with Clint’s loaded .9 mm that he keeps on the top shelf of the closet until she’s absolutely sure no one has made their way inside.

The Avengers form. Loki rages hell. The skyline of New York falls and, according to Natasha, everyone sends Loki back to space. (“Go to hell, Asgardian,” Laura mutters to herself as she watches the scene via a private security feed Natasha has helped orchestrate through Fury).

Clint doesn’t come home.

Everyone sees the news and worries about Laura’s husband, and Laura wants to scream because she’s worried like all hell about Clint, because she doesn’t know anything except that Natasha was able to find him and rescue him from whatever mind control he was under. But she’s worried about her wife, too -- her wife who went through hell and back to find her own husband, who fought and bled and cried and lost and sacrificed, who no one asks about because no one knows how important she is to Laura.

“I’m so sorry about your husband,” the baristas at the coffee shop say, because they’ve all seen the news, and Laura wants to throttle them and say she’s not crying because of her husband.

“I want to know where Clint is,” Laura says when Natasha calls her a few hours after leaving Central Park, learning that Clint is being taken to a safehouse so remote Natasha won’t talk about it.

“He’s safe,” Natasha says. “I promise.”

“Let me speak to him,” Laura pleads, looking at Cooper from a distance. Her son is gleefully shoving melted chocolate in his mouth, leaving dark smears across his lips.

“He doesn’t want to talk right now,” Natasha says, and her voice is cryptic and broken. “I’m sorry, Laura.”

I’m sorry, Laura. I’m sorry, Laura. Those are the words that Natasha feeds her wife over and over and over again when she asks about Clint. Sometimes, she calls and it sounds like she’s been crying; other times, she calls and it sounds like she’s angry at the entire world. Every so often, Clint does get on the phone to say hello, his voice weak and tired and not at all like the person Laura knows and loves.

Laura can figure out languages, she can take a third of a jigsaw puzzle and figure out how it makes an entire picture. Laura can figure out an assassin wife who had so many layers piled on top of her that the person who she met when she stitched up her leg turned out to be an entirely different person than the one she ended up marrying, even though they were both people she fell in love with and continued to love.

Laura can’t figure out why her husband just won’t come home.

She’s on her way back from picking up Cooper from pre-school when she realizes something is off; there are tire tracks in the dirt that are fresh and a soft shadow of footsteps in the grass and the portion of crops that she’d forgotten to attend to that morning have been taken care of. Natasha is sitting on the couch, legs crossed and body tense, when she walks inside the house.

“Tasha! Mommy!” Cooper runs through the door and into Natasha’s arms. Natasha scoops up the little boy, hugging him tightly.

“Hi, baby. I missed you.”

“Did you bring daddy?”

“Daddy’s on his way home right now,” Natasha says with a smile that Laura feels is too bright and too manufactured. She finds herself feeling out of place, despite the fact that Natasha is finally home, a part of her she’s been desperately missing.

“Coop, go upstairs for a little bit,” Laura says encouragingly to her son as Natasha puts him back down. She waits until he’s disappeared up the stairs before she turns to Natasha, grabbing her arm.

“Where the hell have you been, Nat?”

Natasha’s face is morose, her facade that she’d clearly put on for their son dropping almost immediately. “Away.”

“Away. Away, some remote cabin in the middle of nowhere, someplace off the grid that only spies know about. You never even told me why you left in the first place after New York!”

“Laura --”

“You left us! You took my husband and you left me and disappeared, and I can’t even talk to anyone about it! No one understands how worried I’ve been about my husband and my wife and they’ll think I’m crazy if I say anything,” Laura continues angrily, holding tight to Natasha’s arm. “This isn’t some sort of spy thing where you guys can go off and do your own assassin thing like you’re used to! You’re my family, and my husband still won’t come home, and no one will tell me why!”

“Laura, listen to me. Clint is coming home. I’m not.”

Laura drops her hand, confused and shocked. “What do you mean, you’re not?”

Natasha looks uncomfortable. “I think...it’s better if I stayed away. For a little bit. It’ll be better for both of you.” She sighs quietly, looking around the house. “It’s not safe for me here.”

“What are you talking about?” Laura asks desperately. “This is your home, Natasha. Cooper is your child. I -- if you’re worried you’re going to do something, I can tell you that I know you won’t. I know you. I’ve known you for years.”

“It’s more than that,” Natasha says, shuffling a foot against the floor, and Laura can’t figure out why Natasha won’t tell her what more than that means.

“Natasha...” Laura trails off helplessly. “You’re my wife.”

“I know.” She twists off her ring. “Here. You said it would leave an indent if I wore it too much, so I should probably leave it off while I’m away. Let me say goodbye to Cooper.”

Laura’s eyes burn with tears and when she blinks, they fall fast and freely. “Nat...Tasha…”

“Tasha,” she says softly, turning slowly, a sad smile making its way over her face, like a curtain being pulled back on a performer. “That’s what he called me when he came out of his mind control. It was the first word he said. Tasha.” There’s something about her voice that’s sad and wistful, and before Laura press her about it, she disappears up the stairs.

Natasha leaves, and Laura cries, and Cooper tries his best to make his mom feel better, to no avail. Natasha at least doesn’t lie; Clint does come home the next day and puts his bags on the ground and straightens up and just says, “I’m sorry.” Laura doesn’t even have the strength to get angry, because she’s still upset about Natasha and she’s so glad he’s home that all she wants to do is hug him until the world ends.

Cooper is excited to see his father, leaping into his arms, and Laura notices that Clint holds him a little more gently, a little differently than the way he had been holding his son before he left. That night, she serves him comfort food -- pasta with three cheese sauce and warm bread in blue bowls -- and Clint politely asks if they can use the green bowls instead. When he can’t get the butter off his knife because it’s a little too hard from being in the refrigerator, he angrily slams his fist against the table so violently that Cooper starts to cry, and Clint doesn’t even try to soothe his son before walking out of the room.

She remembers how Natasha would call and sound scared and sad and lonely, and she starts to realize why Clint maybe didn’t want to come home.

That night, there’s loud footsteps on the stairs and Laura wakes up as if it’s weeks ago all over again, shooting up alone in bed with a pounding heart and short, gasping breaths. Cooper wanders into her room, frightened eyes and a tear-streaked face, and asks for his father, and it’s all Laura can do to keep herself calm while trying to soothe her son for the second time in a few hours. She allows him to sleep in their bed, wrapping the covers around his small body, and then walks out of the room to get a glass of water. From the window, she can see Clint walking out of the house and across the lawn.

She brings her son his drink and then follows Clint slowly, making sure to keep her distance, just in case. She worries for a moment that he’s going to leave altogether, run away -- it wouldn’t be out of line, given his current mental state -- but he climbs the big tree in the front yard instead, settling easily into its branches, like a hawk perched in his nest.

“You forgot to take your meds,” Laura says softly when she climbs up next to him, her pajama bottoms catching and pulling on the messy branches. Clint grunts.

“If Natasha was here, she would’ve reminded me.”

“Natasha’s not here,” Laura says and it hurts, because Natasha has been gone for the longest amount of time since Laura had met her. Clint cranes his face to the sky, and Laura realizes thanks to the tear streaks on his cheeks that he’s been crying.

“I almost gave you up.” His voice is so soft, Laura has to strain to hear him, even in the quiet of the night. “He -- Loki -- he tried to get into my head. He tried to get me to talk about you. He reached into my mind, I couldn’t stop him…” Clint shudders, as if reliving a memory he can’t suppress. “I couldn’t give you up. I couldn’t, so I gave Natasha up instead. I told him how I felt about her, about how I loved her, about what she meant to me...I led him to the helicarrier, I killed Coulson, I almost killed her. I...I’m never going to be over that guilt.”

Laura listens to him talk, the admission of a statement that she knows is more serious than she could have imagined. “You wanted to protect me,” she says quietly. “You wanted to protect this family. You were doing the right thing.”

“But Natasha is my wife, too!” Clint bursts out. “She’s my family, too! I made that choice! I had to choose between the two people most important to me, and I chose to put her in danger!”

Laura’s heart twists in pain. “Is that...is that why Natasha left?”

Clint swallows and nods. “I tried sleeping with her because I didn’t trust myself. She let me, she trusted me every single time we got intimate, and I still almost killed her. It was like my body was telling me that no matter what, I was always going to choose you and Cooper. I couldn’t...I had to get away. I needed space.”

“So you told her to go,” Laura says shortly, feeling angry and upset that Clint had decided to make a decision about Natasha and her place in the family without thinking clearly or without asking her.

“She told herself to go,” Clint says slowly. “She said she didn’t want to be around while I was like this. She needed space, too.”

Laura stares out at the sky, through the branches of the trees that, in the dark, look foreboding and eerie. “You could never hurt me,” she finds herself saying out loud, putting a hand over his own. “Not now. Not ever.”

Clint shakes his head. “I can’t touch you. Not here.”

“Not here,” Laura agrees, motioning to the branches. “But I will let you touch me, if you come down.”

Clint shakes his head again but Laura keeps her hand steady on his arm until he finally moves, climbing down from the tree with her. When they reach the ground, they stand in front of each other silently, staring into each other’s eyes, like nervous teenagers on a first date unsure of who is going to make the first move.

Laura does, bringing her hand to his neck and pulling him in, gently placing her lips against his and kissing softly until he starts to deepen the kiss, and until she feels okay enough to push back, her hands gripping his shoulders. He seems to be fine with kissing, she realizes -- it’s when things go further that he tenses, pulls back, shudders, flinches at a touch or a murmur of a word or a sound from the farm.

Laura is a language analyst. She looks for patterns and figures out how to apply that pattern to figure out a problem; she does her work by taking what she knows is in front of her -- the facts, the hard truth -- and she puts it together with everything else she knows and can infer about her situation, in order to fill out the picture that she’s responsible for creating. And so Laura figures out how to carefully re-learn things when it comes to being intimate with her husband. She lets herself understand what Clint won’t say, she recognizes when he needs to stop, what he is and isn’t okay with, even if things like careful penetration and rough sex were staples of their relationship for a long time. When he stops halfway through, abruptly pulling back because he’s worried he’s started to hurt her by holding her too savagely, she gently guides him back into rhythm, while telling him they don’t need to continue if he’s not okay, but that she trusts him and loves him anyway.

A few weeks later, Laura gets pregnant for the second time.

***

Natasha comes home after almost four months. During that time, Laura has, more or less, adjusted to life as a woman with one partner, and Cooper’s grown into something of a real person, talking constantly and running around and climbing trees. He starts banging on so many pots and pans that Laura eventually forces him to sit down with a book; all it takes is one toddler story to entrance him, and then Cooper is asking Laura to read to him every single day. Laura makes Clint adhere to a bulk of the book requests, more or less forcing him to spend time with his son, because Clint is still slow to return to the father and husband Laura knew him as before Loki took hold of his brain. Reading together at least gives Cooper a chance to understand that his dad isn’t completely ignoring him.

Laura urges him to go to therapy despite his disinterest in talking to someone, until she gets fed up enough to lay down an ultimatum.

“If you don’t get help, I’m going to take Cooper and we’ll go to my parents and we won’t come home,” Laura announces when she finds yet another list of phone numbers sitting in the trash. She wonders how Natasha would deal with her partner if it was just her and Clint, the way it was before they all tangled themselves together in this relationship, and she has an idea when Clint hits a wall in frustration, putting his fist right through the hole he’s carved out for the fireplace in the bedroom, before storming out of the house. He returns two hours later smelling like stale liquor and sweat, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy. Laura quickly puts Cooper in his room with a book and holds her husband as he cries, bringing him to the sink so he can throw up before putting him to bed on the couch.

Despite the fact that their baby isn’t yet born, it’s their newest life that helps Clint the most. Laura will often wake up to find Clint stroking her belly, which grows a little more prominent every day, and sometimes she finds him sketching by himself, what she realizes are drawings of toys he wants to make for his new child. When they sit around in a circle during breakfast, eating chocolate chip pancakes on the floor of the living room while talking about possible baby names, Laura sees Clint’s entire demeanor change, a shift and focus that allows him to realize there’s still something good that can exist in this world, a spark coming back to his eye.

Natasha arrives a week after Laura’s made Clint start therapy, opening the door at midnight, letting tentacles of night worm their way into the warmly lit house. Laura’s jerked awake by the sound of her arrival, bolting up from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch, lazily dozing in front of a still-running television.

“Tasha?”

Natasha closes the door and takes a deep, long breath that sounds like howling wind in the silence, and Laura thinks maybe she’s remembering how it feels to breathe again, like a swimmer coming up for air after almost drowning.

“Hi.”

Laura stands up slowly, rocking to her feet as easily as her growing belly will allow, and she hears Natasha gasp quietly as she squints into the dark.

“When?”

“Right after Clint came home,” Laura says softly, putting her hand on her stomach. “It...wasn’t exactly planned.”

Natasha pushes a bandaged hand through her hair, and her eyes shine brightly. “Shit.”

“Natasha --”

“I was away too long,” she says tightly. “I should have been here. I should have checked in. I...I shouldn’t have run.”

“I can forgive you,” Laura says in the same soft voice, feeling like there’s so much more she needs to say to the woman she loves but not knowing how. She looks into Natasha’s eyes, sees fear and apology, and she wonders if she’s learned what she was always jealous of Clint and Natasha for having -- a way to say everything without words.

“Do you...do you know…”

“The sex?” Laura asks with a small smile. “Yes. It’s a girl. We found out a few days ago.” She holds out her hand and Natasha walks forward slowly, until Laura can close her palm over her fingers. She can barely see any indication of where Natasha might have, at one time, worn her wedding band, and tries not to pay attention.

“I missed you,” she whispers as she kisses her and it feels like the first time they kissed all over again, a rediscovery but also something familiar at the same time. Natasha kisses her back -- I missed you more -- and when they break apart, she leads her to the couch.

“I’d ask if you want something to drink, but I think both alcohol and coffee are off limits,” Natasha says.

“Not for you,” Laura answers, motioning towards the kitchen. Natasha nods, and Laura retrieves a bottle of Ketel One from the cupboard, pouring a small shot and bringing it back to the couch, where Natasha is curled up like a cat trying to acclimate itself back into its favorite spot.

“You’re growing a real family,” Natasha says as she takes the cup. Laura sits down next to her and swallows hard.

“I didn’t know whether we wanted another child,” she admits. “I wanted to wait until you came home to talk about it. I didn’t know if we were even ready...but in a way, she helped Clint heal, I think. She’s our little girl.” Laura takes a deep breath, turning to Natasha. “It’s not too late, you know.”

Natasha shakes her head, her eyes downcast. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Laura threads a hand through her wife’s hair as Natasha downs her shot.

“Because I’m not her mother,” Natasha says after swallowing. “We didn’t even use my eggs…I wasn’t even a part of her conception. I can’t be her mother after not being here. I can’t be a part of this pregnancy and pretend I was a part of everything I missed, when I was too selfish to come home.”

Laura watches Natasha’s face, the epitome of regret and misery, and then reaches for the necklace she’s been wearing every single day since Natasha has been gone, the one that’s smartly hidden underneath her long shirt. As she pulls it up over her head, she sees Natasha’s eyes widen in both surprise and happiness.

“You may not be her mother, but you’re still my wife.” She gathers the necklace in her hand -- a chain looped through a rose-gold band -- and holds out Natasha’s ring. “If you want, you can be her aunt. Her very motherly aunt,” Laura adds, and Natasha looks at the ring for a long time.

“Okay,” she says softly, taking the ring and putting it back on her finger. She places her hand on Laura’s stomach, settling her fingers against swollen skin, and Laura feels like finally, every part of the puzzle she’s been slowly trying to piece back together has found its place. “I can do that.”

***

The day before Laura goes into labor, Laura finds Clint sitting in the barn looking at his bow, a few arrows lying next to him. Natasha has taken Cooper to dinner and a movie, mostly because Laura is too pregnant to walk around for long periods of time without feeling tired, but also because Natasha’s still trying to insert herself back into their lives and into her son’s life after being away for so long.

“You haven’t shot for months,” she says, knowing why. Clint clenches his fingers tightly.

“Every time I pick up a bow, I’m reminded of what I did,” he says, his voice shaking. “Every time. If I don’t see another agent I killed, I see Natasha, and I see how she knocked the bow out of my hand and made me fight her.” He closes his eyes. “I can’t shoot without seeing him. I can’t love you without seeing him. I can’t look at Cooper without seeing him. I still can’t sleep with Natasha, not without feeling scared about it. He took everything from me.”

“He took nothing from you,” Laura argues firmly. “He tried, but he failed. He didn’t win, Clint. We’re still a family. Even with what happened with Natasha.”

“I can’t shoot, Laura.”

Laura puts her lips together and carefully sits down, slowly lowering herself to the floor. “We named our daughter Lila. And Lila, in some languages, means beauty,” she whispers as she picks up an arrow and places it into his palm. “You made our baby girl. You made a beautiful thing out of something terrible and you brought something wonderful into the world, something defined by love and happiness, even when you were scared.” She puts her head on his shoulder. “He tried to take everything from you, but you beat him. Love won, because you loved me. You came home. You saved the world. You’re a good person, Clint. You have always have been. One God in your brain isn’t going to change that.”

Clint’s fingers tighten around the arrow and when he stands up, and glances down at her.

“Stay with me?”

“Always,” Laura agrees as he picks up his bow, his hands trembling. Laura watches as he strings an arrow and lets it fly, and she watches the way his lips move silently, like a prayer.

Laura. Lila. Natasha. Cooper.

Laura’s water breaks during breakfast the next morning, and Cooper screams excitedly when Natasha tells him he’s going to have a new sibling soon. Although Natasha hadn’t been with Clint and Laura when they’d gone to the earlier check-ups, Laura has already gone ahead and spoken with the doctors and on-call nurse about their relationship situation, allowing Natasha to, again, be in the delivery room during the birth. Because Laura’s parents have come to the house to watch Cooper, Laura also doesn’t have to deal with the emotional stress of figuring out how to tell them about that particular part of her birthing experience, and she can pretend that maybe, she doesn’t have to live her whole life hiding a part of her that she’s so fiercely protective of, a part of her that still feels like it’s dangerous to show the whole world.

“You think we didn’t believe you’d come back?” Laura asks when she tells Natasha, who looks at her, shocked face and all.

“No,” Natasha admits. “I didn’t.”

Laura holds her hand, relishing in the feeling of Natasha’s skin in her own, and Lila Barton is born with three parents looking on as she takes her first breath. Clint holds his daughter and cries for reasons Laura knows and also thinks she might not know, and Natasha cradles the baby in her arms, and Laura, who looks at patterns and languages for a living, looks at both of them and thinks, this is my family with a swelling heart.

Lila Barton comes home and is immediately doted on by her brother, who wants to do everything that his parents do, including holding her and feeding her and changing her. Clint and Natasha and Laura have their hands more than full with a baby and a five-year-old, which means that they miss a few things they should be paying attention to, like the fact that Cooper’s becoming more and more curious about his baby sister.

“Where do babies come from?” Cooper asks one day during dinner, and Laura chokes on a potato.

“Oh boy,” Clint mutters under his breath as he tries to feed Lila in her high chair, and Natasha calmly turns to Cooper in her seat.

“If you eat all your vegetables tonight, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. I promise.”

Cooper eagerly cleans his plate and then some, and the next day, Natasha takes Cooper to the bookstore and buys him What Makes A Baby, and they read together underneath the big tree in the yard.

Thank you, Laura mouths when Clint’s taken Lila for a walk and she finally has some time alone. Natasha looks up and winks, holding Cooper, who has fallen asleep, in her lap.

I’ve got your six, Laura.

Clint goes away for a few small assignments here and there, and Natasha accompanies him, but they’re always home within a few days of their departure. Lila says her first word while they’re all sitting around waiting for Cooper to come home from kindergarten, Laura peeking out the window every so often to watch for the bus.

“Tas!” the little girl suddenly blurts out, grinning through a mouthful of drool and a few teeth. Natasha whips her head up from where she’s cleaning toys and Clint barks out a laugh.

“Did she just --”

“Tas!” Lila says again, clapping her hands in Natasha’s direction. Laura’s mouth opens in awe and wonderment.

“She’s trying to say Natasha,” Laura says slowly, and Natasha bites down on her lip.

“I don’t -- she’s trying to say something else.”

“No,” Laura breathes, watching her daughter look at Natasha and giggle. “She’s talking to you.” She can’t help the smile she feels coming over her face, or the way her eyes are watering. For a long time, all of them stare at the baby who is happily clapping in the middle of the room and then Natasha curls onto her stomach, stretching out on the floor with Lila, as if she needs to be closer to the little girl.

“Hey, Auntie Nat,” Clint calls out from the couch, breaking the silence. “Look at that. You were so worried about not being here, and this kid still thinks you’re her mom. That’s kind of awesome.” He grins and Natasha shoots him a look before turning her attention back to the baby.

“Auntie Nat,” Natasha muses, brushing a finger against Lila’s cheek, and Laura watches the scene without speaking, except to communicate silently with her two partners.

It’s meant to be a joke, but it sticks.

***

In the spring, Fury assigns Natasha to a new location (D.C.) and a new partner (Steve Rogers). Clint is left off the assignment memo, with Medical citing their reasoning as him being “unfit for field duty and unable to perform with the mental capacity necessary to comply safely with other operatives in active SHIELD situations.”

“Respectfully submitted, SHIELD Medical,” Clint rages when he gets on the phone. “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” Fury says curtly. “And you’re a new dad, again. Natasha’s got this. Stay. Home. That’s an order.”

“Fuck this!” Clint spits out angrily when he hangs up, and the only reason Laura doesn’t admonish him about his swearing is because Cooper is at school and Lila’s napping. “Fuck this, fuck everything!”

“You’re overreacting,” Natasha says sharply and Clint whirls around, eyes flashing dangerously.

“Am I?”

“Yes,” Natasha says. “You think I’m any more excited to work with someone who is at least ninety-five years old?”

Clint slams his hand on the dresser, and Laura jumps at the sound.

“I can shoot!”

“No,” Natasha says firmly. “You can’t. The reports are right, and they’re true -- you’re not stable enough for field duty yet, Clint.”

“It’s been over a year!”

“Soldiers who deal with post traumatic stress from their tours sometimes don’t return to any kind of like-minded duty for years,” Natasha reminds him. “And your situation is just as pertinent as theirs are. Besides, I’m not risking my partner’s -- my husband’s -- safety and putting your life on the line just because you need to prove something to the world. You’ll go back when you’re ready.”

“And you’re just gonna be okay with going off and doing missions with Rogers?”

“Of course not,” Natasha scoffs. “I don’t want this, either. I don’t want him to be my partner, for however long that term is relevant. I want you. I’d even take Laura. She’d be able to decipher any strange language in two seconds and tell me if I’m about to walk into a trap.”

“I’d try,” Laura offers, the only breadcrumb she’s offering during the fight. Clint glares at both of them.

“Be a dad,” Natasha says gently. “Look at your life, Clint. Look at what you have right now. Things have changed...I don’t get the opportunity to even try to be a mother, but you’re here. It’s enough.”

“It’s not enough,” Clint grumbles, but Laura notices the fire has gone out of his eyes and his face looks a little calmer.

Natasha leaves for D.C. with an arrow hanging around her neck, an anniversary gift from Clint and Laura. She kisses Lila multiple times and makes sure to tell Cooper she’ll be back quickly, just in case he thinks his mother is still planning to leave and disappear. Laura and Clint continue to go about their days which include driving Cooper to play dates and school and sports, and they help their daughter grow up, and the book collection keeps growing until Clint builds another shelf for the bedroom.

This is how Laura and Clint learn that SHIELD has fallen: by a phone call from Natasha when they step out of the movie theatre, with words like “HYDRA’s back” and “don’t trust anyone,” and “I’m safe, I promise, but you have to trust me and don’t worry.”

This is also how Laura and Clint learn that SHIELD has fallen: from Maria Hill showing up on their doorstep an hour after they get home, looking worse for the wear.

“Fury’s dead.”

“What?” Laura feels sick and ushers Hill inside, serving her iced tea infused with vodka while Clint settles Lila in the newly refurbished playroom before sitting down, his body shaking as Hill describes the deadly car chase and what came after.

“SHIELD’s been compromised,” Hill says as she sips her drink, and Laura suddenly feel like she’s living in a world of deja vu, even before Hill continues with, “we don’t know who is on our side right now, so I need you to stay vigilant, and don’t open the door for anyone that you don’t trust. We’re working on making sure there are still safety measures in place, but we want you to be aware.”

“We’re not leaving,” Laura says, cutting Hill off before she can say anything else. Her hand curl protectively around Clint’s arm. “I have a baby and a son and I don’t want to uproot them. And if Natasha needs to come home, she should know where to find us. Clint can protect me, and I can protect my family.”

Hill regards them both carefully. “Frankly, this kind of situation is out of our league,” she says. “We’re not just dealing with HYDRA. We’re dealing with an assassin known as The Winter Soldier. He could bomb your house without anyone knowing, if he had the right information.”

“So let them come,” Laura says, standing up and arching her spine. “I know SHIELD. I worked there just like everyone else did.”

Hill lifts an eyebrow. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to know Romanoff is currently fine,” she says, looking straight at Laura. “She’s with Rogers and they’re working on trying to find out how deep this mess goes.”

“She called,” Clint says, getting up and standing next to Laura. “Said she was safe. I trust her.”

“Romanoff probably won’t be able to contact you until this is over, however long that takes,” Hill says. “I came to make sure you were both okay, and to tell you what’s going on so you knew the real story from someone you trusted.” She turns to Laura. “You’ve gotten close with Barton and Romanoff over the years.”

“We were already close,” Laura says, looking around the house, feeling like she’s trying to talk her way out of a situation that’s so transparent, there’s not even a point to it. “I’ve known Clint and Natasha for years. We all worked together.”

“Still.” Hill hands back her drink. “I’m used to this kind of pushback from Agent Barton, but you in particular seem to care a great deal about Agent Romanoff’s well being. Which is interesting, for a former language analyst.”

Laura fights down the urge to down the rest of the alcohol. “That's because she’s my wife,” she says and even Clint double takes at the abrupt admission, glancing back and forth between the two women.

“Shit, Laura,” he mutters. For a moment, Laura regrets saying something out loud; it’s been years and she’s gotten used to hiding in plain sight, to just assuming maybe people who knew they all lived together figured there was something more between them. Hill smiles slowly.

“I know,” she says lightly as Laura and Clint both try to hide their shocked faces. “You’re not the only ones who think they can keep secrets.”

Laura and Clint spend the next two days in full-blown anxiety, trying to hide their worries from their kids, feeling sick when they watch the news and see the helicarriers falling from the sky, which Laura quickly tries to shield from Cooper, who wanders into the living room when no one’s paying attention.

“Cool! Planes!” Cooper exclaims, and Laura thinks fast and announces they’re going for ice cream to celebrate Cooper’s latest flawless report card.

“She was right,” Clint says quietly while they’re folding laundry later, awkward tension spreading between them like a dark cloud. Laura looks up.

“What?”

“Nat.” Clint gestures to the window. “She said I couldn’t always assume SHIELD would be there. I thought it was some KBG crap, but she was right.”

Laura doesn’t know what to say to that, so she continues to fold laundry and tries to wrap her mind around everything that’s going on.

Natasha comes home a day later, limping up the steps. Laura and Clint take her in with the practiced ease of so many years of missions, bandage her wounds, and put her to bed, watching over her with shared worried glances. When she wakes up the next morning, she stays in their bedroom despite Cooper's insistence to see her, and sits behind the closed door showing Clint and Laura files and videos of SHIELD’s fall.

It hits Clint hard, Laura notices, as she watches him look at names and faces of people she knows he had to be close to. There are faces she recognizes, too -- Sitwell among them -- and she feels her stomach churn as her eyes rove over colleagues she knows she’s sat next to or shared a laugh with or bumped a friendly shoulder against in the lunch line.

“We buried Nick,” Natasha says tiredly. “His cover is more or less secure. I need to fly back to D.C. tonight.”

“Why?” Laura asks, moving closer to Natasha, not wanting to let her go after everything that’s just happened. Natasha puts her head on Laura’s shoulder.

“They’re asking me to testify.”

Laura stiffens. “They?”

Natasha sighs. “Hill. Fury. I just need to make a public statement because Rogers and Wilson are kind of...unavailable.” She smiles. “You know me, Laura. Always putting out the fires.”

Laura tries to match Natasha’s wry expression but it comes out feeling forced, and even Clint looks uncertain.

“What if HYDRA --”

“I think anyone that’s going to do anything is lying low, for now,” Natasha says smoothly. “Between the helicarriers, Fury, and Pierce, we leveled them pretty good. I wouldn’t worry. I’d be more worried that those idiots on Capitol Hill are going to try to ask me to explain myself ten times over.”

“You’re going on Capitol Hill?” Clint asks sharply, his voice rising.

“It’s the Senate,” Natasha answers, and Laura thins her lips in worry.

“Nat,” she starts tentatively. “Are you sure you want to do this? After everything you just went through?”

“Regimes fall every day,” Natasha says with a shrug. “And this is just another mark in my ledger. I’ll be okay, Laura.”

Laura and Clint send Cooper and Lila to a babysitter on the day of Natasha’s hearing so they can sit at home and watch C-SPAN uninterrupted and with their full attention. Laura holds her breath when she sees Natasha enter the courtroom, barely breathing as she delivers her testimony and more or less tells the government to go to hell.

“Good ol’ Natasha,” Clint murmurs next to his wife, squeezing her hand. “She’s still the same girl we fell in love with.”

“Which time?” Laura asks and Clint kisses her on the cheek. Natasha strides out of the courtroom with all the fluidity of someone who has just mic dropped, a spy’s departure through and through, her mannerisms and body language saying more than her silence. The minute the screen goes dark, the house phone rings.

“How’d I do?”

“Good,” Laura says when she picks up, eyeing the television. “And you looked good, too.”

“Yeah? I’m not sure,” Natasha muses. “This straight hair is really getting to me. I feel like it makes my face look too long."

“Stop it. You looked beautiful,” Laura says, because it’s the truth. “And I’m very proud of you, Nat. We both are.”

“Told the government to kiss my ass and made my wife and my husband proud...can’t ask for anything else, right?”

Laura laughs quietly. “No,” she admits. “You really can’t.”

“Good.” Natasha’s voice softens, her tone sagging into relief. “Because I’ve had enough adventure and backstabbing to last me for another decade. I’m ready to come home.”

***

Natasha comes home. Clint stays home. Laura, once again, adjusts to life with two partners and two parents.

The reprieve gives them time to build up her family again in the wake of HYDRA and Loki, and she’s anxious at first, worried that Clint or Natasha will get called away and they’ll have to keep uprooting their feelings and starting all over again. But Natasha’s right, and HYDRA seems to have leveled out, and with no more SHIELD, the life Natasha and Clint have always had becomes less prominent. Rogers is off on his own mission, Natasha tells her, on a hunt for the Russian assassin who was apparently a former childhood friend, and Stark’s own demons have caused him to take another personal break from the world. Laura’s glad for it, especially when she puts dinner on the table and Lila and Cooper come running, or when Lila jumps into Natasha’s arms after returning from pre-school, or when they take walks into town together and stop at the local bookstore, Laura feeling proud and happy to display her family that she’s brought together and kept together. Natasha lets her straightened hair grow longer and longer, until she cuts it back up to her shoulders, and Laura notices once she does that she looks happier, as if a literal weight has been lifted.

“We should go away,” Clint says one day in the middle of summer. Laura throws a dish towel at him.

“Are you going to yell at me this time for including Natasha?”

“Ha. No,” says Clint, catching the towel. “I think marriage and two kids have changed that.”

“I can get someone to watch the kids,” Laura suggests. “And we could make it a real vacation.”

“A real vacation,” Clint repeats, crossing his arms. “Wonder what that’s like.”

“Oh, right.” Laura fixes him with an amused stare. “Spies don’t get real vacations.”

“I hear Paris is lovely in the springtime,” Clint throws back and Laura sighs.

“Did you guys ever do anything on a mission that wasn’t screwing each other or drinking in a bar or chasing bad guys?”

“I think we climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower once,” Clint comments and Laura snorts.

“That was not the answer I was looking for.”

Natasha is more than ecstatic about the opportunity to take a break from daily life at the farm, telling Laura “I could do with a vacation somewhere that doesn’t include getting shot at,” and Laura shoots Clint a look, and Clint responds with, “we really did climb the Eiffel Tower!” She disappears one night during dinner with Lila and comes back with a printed out reservation for a small cabin a few hours away from the farm, what looks to Laura like an idyllic cottage in the middle of nowhere surrounded by lush green forestry. Four days later, they’re driving away from the farm in a car that’s not filled with kids music or snacks or screaming, the only sound coming from the radio and Clint’s loud laughs and Natasha’s occasional snoring in the back seat.

By the time they pull up at the cottage Natasha’s reserved for them, Clint is practically crawling out of the driver’s seat, his hand inching towards Laura’s leg in a manner she recognizes as him initiating desperate contact for the first time since New York.

“Clint,” she says quietly, in case she has to ground him and remind him of actions he may not be aware of displaying.

“Yeah,” he says breathlessly. “I know.” He glances into the rearview mirror, where Natasha is stretched out comfortably along the backseat. “I can do this.”

“I didn’t ask if you could do this,” Laura says as Natasha sits up, leaning forward and putting her hand on Clint’s shoulder.

“You didn’t ask,” Clint acknowledges. “I said it.”

They bring their bags inside and it takes Clint two seconds after that to grab Natasha by the wrist. He pushes Laura down on the couch and Laura quickly realizes the three of them aren’t going to get very far if they stay on the furniture, so she moves herself to the large hardwood floor, allowing them to follow. Natasha immediately starts kissing Laura while Clint snakes his hand down her pants, and Laura is taken aback by the intensity of passion from her husband and her wife, who are both kissing her and touching her as if the world is ending. When Natasha’s hands grab her hair in a particularly savage way, Laura finds herself thinking that she’s trying to possibly reclaim something.

They’ve all lost themselves, she realizes, as Clint tears off her clothes -- Clint has lost himself and Natasha has lost herself and, to an extent, Laura feels like she’s lost herself too, trying to find a foothold again after both of her partners' setbacks. They’ve all lost the place that’s been so sacred to them, the place that they’d found themselves in initially, but Laura thinks that maybe they can rebuild that foundation now.

“Coffee?” Laura asks when they’ve satisfied themselves, spread out naked against the floor. She gets up and puts her shirt and underwear back on, but leaves her pants off.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Natasha says from the floor, still out of breath.

Laura smiles and walks to the kitchen, where she’s already unloaded a bag of food, including coffee that she pours in the drip machine provided for them. When she comes back carrying two large mugs, Clint and Natasha have re-dressed themselves and Natasha is sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyeing Laura.

“Have you considered having another kid?”

Laura almost drops the cups she’s holding. “Now?”

Natasha shrugs, glancing at Clint. “Sometime.”

Laura hands over the coffees and sits down in one of the chairs in front of the couch. “I don’t know,” she says honestly, before realizing the answer is a lie. “Yes. I mean, I would have another kid in a second, if we could. But Lila’s still young. And Cooper’s still young, too.”

“Cooper’s growing up,” Clint interjects. “Lila’s getting older, too. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, to think about having another child.”

Laura looks down at her hands, twisting them together. “You both really want to do this again?”

“I think the question is, do you want to do this again?” Natasha asks, smirking and glancing at Laura’s stomach. Laura laughs quietly.

“Maybe third time’s the charm with morning sickness.” She rubs her eyes. “We don’t have the income that we used to, with SHIELD gone. We have savings, but a third child…”

Natasha and Clint exchange looks again as Laura trails off, and she raises an eyebrow warily.

“I know that look.”

“You’ve adopted that look, I think.”

“Clint.”

“Natasha and I have money,” Clint continues, talking over Laura. “A joint savings account that’s completely separate and under the radar. SHIELD doesn’t even -- didn’t even -- know about it.”

Laura opens her mouth and then closes it just as quickly. “You’ve had money all this time, and I never knew?”

Natasha shrugs. “We started the account years ago when we had to go undercover as a married couple,” she says. “Total Mr. and Mrs. Smith style, by the way. And then we decided to just keep it. Most of the investment is from our days before SHIELD, but every so often, we would take something extra from our paychecks and add it to the mix. We never mentioned it because we had jobs and a steady income once SHIELD took us in, but we figured maybe the funds could be used for a rainy day.”

“Like a house,” Laura says, the thought dawning on her suddenly, and she feels strangely emotional knowing that the two people closest to her were always determined to help her live out her dreams.

“Or IVF,” Natasha adds quietly. “Both things we didn’t need to use the money for, because of other circumstances. But it’s a cushion, if another child was a possibility. And if it’s possible, we could use my eggs again.”

Laura remains silent for a long time, staring at both her partners, trying to figure out what to say. “Years ago, I had to twist your arm to get you to even think about having a baby,” she says finally. “Now, you’re practically asking for it. What changed?”

“Everything,” Clint says honestly, sipping his coffee. “Maybe that’s a good thing, Laur. SHIELD was a fresh start for both of us when we came in, and we became closer, and then we met you. Maybe this is another new chapter for us. After all, we can’t exactly become HYDRA agents.”

“Well, we could,” Natasha says dryly. “Sitwell’s an utter idiot and he managed, no problem. It wouldn’t be an issue.”

“Eh.” Clint wrinkles his nose. “I’d rather just retire. Build a few treehouses for the kids, work on the roof or something, maybe learn how to make beer.”

Laura laughs again, looking at Natasha and Clint, who both give her small, comforting smiles, and afternoon light streams in through the windows of the house, like a new day shining with promises of new memories.

A few weeks after getting home from their semi-getaway, Laura, Natasha and Clint do research and go to the doctor and confirm that Natasha’s eggs are still viable, thanks to the impromptu decision to freeze them years ago. They make the decision to undergo the procedure of implanting them into Laura so she can carry another child, and the whole experience -- from the conversations to the feelings to the emotions -- is like deja vu. Unlike Natasha calling her or Hill coming to the farm, however, it’s a deja vu Laura doesn’t mind.

One day, she’s standing in the kitchen showing Lila how to make bread when the little girl suddenly starts complaining of ear aches. Laura frowns, gives her medicine, but becomes more concerned when Lila keeps complaining over the next week, and won't stop rubbing her head.

“I’m taking Lila to the doctor,” Laura says, feeling that something is wrong but not knowing exactly what. Clint, who has been looking for more medication, straightens up from the cabinet.

“You want me to come?”

“No,” Laura says, shaking her head. “I just took the first appointment I could get with the pediatrician. Let me see what’s wrong first. I’ll call you if you need to come down.”

Clint nods, kissing her on the cheek before she enters her child’s bedroom, gently rousing her from her nap and helping her into the car. A short drive and a check-up from Lila's pediatrician, followed by another trip a week later for a CT scan, ends with the confirmation of both an infection and also the suggestion that, due to the shape of Lila's ear canal, they should look into putting tubes in her ears.

"She's just a kid," Natasha says when Laura sits down to talk with both of them about the news. "She shouldn't have to be poked and prodded this early in her life."

"Without this, she might be in more pain for the rest of her life," Laura reminds Natasha, knowing exactly where her hesitancy and fear is coming from. "I know what it looks like, because most children don't get surgery. But this is a common procedure. And I'd rather have Lila be healthy, if we have the opportunity."

Clint helps schedule a surgery date, and Laura takes Lila to the hospital ahead of Natasha and Clint, who both plan to stop by after Lila's been settled. Laura's sitting with her daughter, talking to her quietly in the hospital room, when a nurse suddenly appears at her door.

“Mrs. Barton.” The nurse looks uncertain. “There’s a situation at the front desk that requires your assistance.”

Laura gets up in confusion, and when she gets to the end of the hallway, she finds Natasha standing at the nurse’s desk looking harried and upset.

“This Mrs...Romanoff.” The nurse pauses to glance down at Natasha’s ID. “She says that she’s the mother of Lila Barton.”

Laura looks at Natasha, who is harboring a face full of anger and worry, and takes a deep breath.

“That's true," she says, and when the nurse opens her mouth again, Laura doesn't give her the chance to say anything else. "Natasha is my wife. She has every right to be beside her child during this procedure.”

The nurse looks utterly surprised. “Mrs. Barton," she starts slowly. "We have no documentation on file for hospital visitation rights for Mrs. Romanoff. I apologize.”

“Natasha was there for her daughter’s birth and she is going to be there during her surgery,” Laura says strongly. “Call my husband and have him fax over paperwork, if you need it.”

The nurse raises an eyebrow. “Your husband,” she repeats, glancing at Natasha, and Laura resists the urge to curse in another language.

“Yes,” Laura confirms. “My husband. Also, last time I checked, a 2011 law said that hospitals are denied the opportunity to restrict visitation privileges based on race or gender or sexual preference. I'd rather not have to call the cops when my daughter is about to go into surgery.” She holds the nurse’s gaze, until the nurse heaves out a long, dejected sigh.

“Please have your husband fax over the necessary consent documents,” she says, nodding towards Natasha. “You may go back and see your child before surgery, Mrs. Romanoff, but unless we have the proper verification, we can’t let you into recovery. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes,” Laura says, speaking for both of them. "We understand." She grabs Natasha’s hand and leads her down the hall quickly, before the nurse can change her mind.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, when Natasha continues to stay silent. “I had no idea they would be this strict, after all our births...I’ll talk to Clint and have him fax over the documents before he comes down here.”

Natasha still doesn’t say anything, not until they stop in front of Lila’s room, and then she turns around with tears in her eyes.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” she says finally, and Laura feels her own heart break in half. "They wouldn't let me see her. They wouldn't let me see my daughter."

“But they did. And you’re here now,” she says softly, brushing back her hair and kissing her on the cheek. "No one is going to keep you away anymore." She gives Natasha a moment to compose herself and when they open the door, Lila’s face changes entirely, her scared eyes turning relieved.

“Tasha!” She holds out her arms as Natasha walks over to the hospital bed, sitting down. “Tasha, stay with me.”

“I’m going to be right here when you wake up from your nap. And you’re going to be very brave while they fix you and make you feel better, right?” Natasha asks, stroking her hair. Lila nods and Laura watches the scene from a distance, feeling emotional, until the surgeon comes in to prep Lila and wheels her away in the bed. Laura stands next to her wife, squeezing her hand hard.

“Kids recover quickly,” Laura promises. “Like you guys do. She'll be fine, Nat. I swear.”

After Laura is permitted to take her daughter home, a few hours into her recovery, she tucks her into bed and sleeps next to her the floor on an old air mattress. The next morning, before breakfast, Laura calls Cooper into the room after summoning Clint and Natasha, who have been getting ready to go out and pick up medications.

“Mommy’s going to have another baby,” Laura tells her kids, and Lila’s face lights up like a Christmas tree despite the obvious discomfort she's still getting used to.

“I get a baby?!”

Natasha laughs and kisses her on the head. “You get a baby,” she repeats as Cooper grins and Clint squeezes Laura’s hand. It’s Natasha’s face during that conversation and also the moment at the hospital that convinces her of the thought she’s been mulling over, and she waits until they’re all cuddling in bed that night to say the words out loud.

“I want to name this baby after Natasha.”

Natasha, who has been almost asleep, suddenly snaps awake and turns over abruptly. “What?”

Laura sits up, extracting herself from the hold of Clint’s arm. “I want to name this baby after you,” she repeats. “You can’t birth it, I know. And you can’t carry it. But it’s yours the same way it’s ours, and we want to honor that in some way.”

Natasha’s eyes fill with tears that Laura can see even in the darkened room, and she reaches up to stroke Laura’s hair.

“Is this because of what happened with Lila at the hospital?”

“No,” Laura says, though part of it is. “This is something we should’ve done a long time ago. But I was stupid, and I let you and Clint troll baby naming websites too much.”

Natasha laughs shakily. “I can’t give you anything in return,” she says helplessly, and Laura kisses her. 

“You’re my wife, Nat. You’ve already given me the world. Technically, you also gave me my husband.” She smiles gently. “Let us give you something for once. Let us show you how much we love you.”

Two months after Lila’s surgery, Natasha returns from taking Lila for a walk, the little girl holding onto her fingers tightly as they enter the kitchen.

“We need to talk,” Natasha says after Lila lets go of her hand, wandering upstairs to change.

“About what?” Laura asks curiously, looking up from where she’s mixing brownie batter for Cooper’s birthday party. Natasha takes a deep breath.

“About the Avengers.”

While Cooper and Lila play in the living room, Natasha pulls up a chair and explains to Laura the whole deal -- how the team is getting back together to look for a lead on the last remaining tentacle of HYDRA on Fury’s orders, how all of them are expected to play a role, how she understands if Laura doesn’t want her to go. Laura nods, listens, takes her wife’s hand and kisses it and says, “I’ve never stopped you from doing the job you love. And I’m not stopping you now, even with this pregnancy.”

When Clint gets home from running errands, he takes one look at Laura and Natasha, who are sitting on the porch playing with Cooper and Lila, and creases his brow in the very definition of knowing something’s up.

“There’s something you need to know,” says Natasha when they sit on the bed together after dinner. She pulls some files from her bag, and Clint rubs his forehead.

“What would I need to know?”

“What we’re trying to find. What this mission is about,” Natasha says, and Clint looks at Laura.

“I thought it was about stamping out the last of HYDRA.”

“And getting this back,” Natasha says quietly, holding out a photo. Laura watches as Clint visibly reacts, his spine tightening and his breathing quickening, and Laura wraps two arms around his waist, cuddling him gently.

“You don’t have to do this,” she says as he stares at a photo of Loki’s scepter, the blue stone glowing dangerously against black and white film.

“Yeah,” Clint says, letting out a breath that’s far too shaky for Laura to feel comfortable with. “I do.”

“Stark and Thor will most likely be the ones dealing with it,” Natasha says after a moment. “We’re basically just back-up for whoever tries to fight us.” She finds his eyes. “Laura’s right, Clint. They’d understand if --”

“They wouldn’t,” Clint breaks in. “Listen to yourself, Tasha. No one else has backed out of a mission just because it was hard for them.”

“No one else had experiences like you did,” Natasha points out. “Not even me.”

Clint chews on his lip and shakes his head. “What kind of model do I set for my children if I can’t face my own fears? They already saw me unable to handle my life.”

Natasha looks at him sadly as he stares back at her, defiant, acceptance settling in his eyes. Two weeks later, Laura is standing in the living room with Cooper and Lila, hugging Natasha and Clint, who are dressed in their uniforms and holding large bags of gear.

“I’ll miss you, daddy,” Lila says around her thumb as Clint hugs her, and Natasha cuddles her in turn.

“I promise I’ll be home soon.”

“Promise promise promise?” Cooper asks from where he’s pushed into Laura’s side. Clint smiles.

“Promise promise promise. Take good care of your mom for me, okay?”

Cooper nods and Laura kisses both of them, feeling sad and lucky all at once. She tries not to worry while they’re away, trusting that if nothing else, they have each other for support -- until she gets a phone call that Clint’s been hit in the field, and hears that it’s bad enough to require evac.

“Are you okay?” Laura asks hysterically, hormones cycling out of whack, and Natasha promptly takes the phone from Clint.

“He’ll be okay,” she promises. “We’re on our way back to New York now. There’s a doctor meeting us there, who is going to help him. Trust me, Laura. He’ll be as good as new when she’s done with him.”

"I don't want him to be as good as new. I want him to be my husband," Laura responds angrily, but she's learned to trust Natasha. She remains worried until Clint calls her, sounding more like himself and assuring her that he’s mostly healed, “totally like new and definitely better enough to drink coffee again, so don’t you dare worry about me. I have a baby to come home to.”

Laura smiles, cries, holds Lila’s hand and asks him to come home, because according to Natasha, the scepter has been retrieved and the team’s mission is more or less over.

And then Tony Stark creates Ultron, and Laura’s world -- the idyllic, not-always-perfect-but-somehow-always-perfect world -- goes to hell.

***

Clint doesn’t tell her that he’s bringing the Avengers to the farm. He just does, and Laura’s honestly grateful that given the time of day, both her kids are dressed and she’s not in a bathrobe when Captain America shows up in her living room.

The kids are, predictably, excited to see their dad ahead of Laura warning about his homecoming. Lila, filter still developing, blurts out her love for Auntie Nat loudly, and Laura thinks that there could definitely be worse things for Clint’s teammates to realize other than the fact that he has a family, a house, children, and a partner that was clearly a part of this secret life no one else knew about.

“I can’t believe we’re having a boy,” Natasha bemoans as she helps Laura get dinner together, hair still wet from the shower. “I appreciate the sentiment, Laura, but Nathaniel sounds like the name of a wealthy statesman. It doesn't sound like a Barton child.”

“He’s gonna be a dapper child,” Clint says with a grin as he throws a dart, and Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Whatever. He'll drop food on the floor and crack his head open just like every other Barton child. And he’ll always be Natasha to me. I just won’t embarrass him in public the way you do with Cooper.”

“Hey!” Clint says indignantly.

“Anyway,” Natasha continues over his outburst, “I can’t wait to see what everyone says about this since they assume we’ve been fucking from day one.”

Clint snorts. “I mean, we have.”

“Clint, go help Cooper with the porch,” Laura interrupts warily, waving him off. “And watch your idiot friends and make sure they don’t kill themselves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Laura waits until Clint has left the room and then turns to Natasha with a frown. “Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, Clint told me what happened out there.”

“I’m fine,” Natasha says cryptically, her voice signaling that she’s clearly done with a conversation that’s barely started. Laura takes a breath.

“I don't know what's going on, but if you and Banner --”

“Laura,” Natasha says firmly and coldly. “Drop it.”

Laura does, mostly because she’s scared to push Natasha any further on the subject, but also because her phone beeps signaling Nick Fury’s arrival, and Laura breathes a sigh of relief at his message that he’s almost at the farm. Clint had alerted Hill of where he was going, and Hill had talked to Fury, and Fury had wisely contacted Laura instead of anyone on the team, knowing they would all probably be too distracted.

Clint walks out the door promising “last project,” and Laura watches the quinjet leave underneath the glow of an oncoming night. She thinks of her children sleeping upstairs and tries not to think about the dangers her husband is unknowingly throwing himself into; she had missed most of the conversation that had taken place in the kitchen, but Clint and Natasha’s eyes had alerted her to the seriousness of the exchange and she can’t help but feel this isn’t going to be as simple as stopping an army of robots.

Clint walks in the door a few days later without Natasha, without his uniform, and Laura hugs him tightly and attempts to forget the dreams she’s been having, the ones that have led her to believe he wouldn’t come home at all.

“She’ll be back eventually,” Clint says after spending some time with his children, finally addressing the question Laura hasn’t been able to ask out loud. Laura smiles sadly.

“I understand why she wanted to see if it would work,” she says slowly. “Her and Banner. I don’t fault her for it. I love what we are, and I know we’re not exactly conventional. And I know what it feels like to find someone you think you connect with because of certain things. But she belongs here.”

“And she’ll come home,” Clint promises, putting a hand on her stomach. “She’s got a responsibility, after all.”

“So do you,” Laura says pointedly, because Clint’s just told her the whole story about Wanda and Pietro Maximoff.

“Yeah?” He looks concerned and nervous. “Are you sure? I mean, I know it’s a strange request.”

“It’s not that strange," Laura responds. "And it’ll be a hell of a name on the birth certificate. But yes. I’m sure.”

Clint sighs. “Wait til your parents try to buy him monogrammed clothing.”

“And I bet explaining that will still be easier than explaining my relationship specifics to them,” Laura mutters, drinking her tea.

Natasha comes home two weeks later with red eyes and wrinkled clothing, walking in during dinner. “Couldn’t call my ride,” she says as Cooper and Lila jump excitedly from their seats to shower her with hugs. Laura doesn’t ask what happened, not until they’re alone after dinner and Clint is putting the kids to bed, and she’s sitting on the couch with her head resting on Laura’s belly, two hands cupping the swell of skin.

“I’m over it,” Natasha says in a voice that clearly tells Laura she’s not.

“Do you want to talk?” she asks, brushing back her hair because she can’t bend over far enough to kiss her. Natasha shakes her head.

“No. It’s not a matter of what I want. I have to be over it.” She sighs into Laura’s stomach. “It was a stupid fling, and he’s not my family. You are. This little guy is. The Avengers are. Well, what’s left of them.”

When Nathaniel Pietro Barton is born, Laura allows Natasha to take the baby before anyone else. She watches as the small, squirming bundle is placed into her wife’s arms, sees the tears fall, and she suddenly remembers sitting in a small break room, trying to convince herself she absolutely couldn’t be attracted to a female SHIELD agent, or any SHIELD agent, for that matter. Fury calls to congratulate them while grumbling, “Hill’s sending a fruit basket. I wasn’t sure what to get child number three, I’m sure you have everything by now.” Natasha’s made the decision to help Steve Rogers train the newest collection of Avengers, a decision encouraged by Clint and Laura, who take the baby home together while Natasha drives.

“I’m thinking we can call him Nate for short,” Clint says as they approach the farm. “And that way, it’s almost like you’re calling him Nat.”

“I’m going to be bitter about this for the rest of my life,” Natasha says grumpily.

“You can’t mess with human reproduction, Nat,” Clint says. “Plus, come on. He’s still your namesake without a vagina.”

Laura kicks Clint so hard that he doubles over in the back of the car, tugging Nathaniel’s tiny hat over even tinier ears.

“Je te detese,” she mutters in French. I hate you.

Laura thinks one of the best things in the world, aside from watching Natasha hold Nate for the first time, is having her children hold their newest sibling and seeing the careful way they touch his head and his hands, marveling at their brother.

“I’m gonna put him in all my doll clothes!” Lila announces and Natasha puts a hand on her shoulder and gently explains that a human being is not the same thing as a toy. (The next day, Lila returns home from the mall with a decently realistic looking baby doll and a full bag of miniature clothing.)

Natasha spends two weeks with her namesake before she leaves to go back to New York, and Clint and Laura send photos and videos and talk to her daily. They check in with Wanda, who is acclimating easily to her new role as an Avenger and to her new teammates, though according to Natasha, she still finds herself mentally unstable sometimes. Clint takes to having long phone conversations with Wanda at night, and starts including her on the update notifications about Nathaniel.

“I wish I could do something more than talk her through a nightmare or send photos,” Clint says wistfully as they sit on the beach with Lila and Cooper playing in front of them. “I feel like I owe her. I feel like it’s not enough.”

Laura reaches up and adjusts her floppy hat so that it shields her eyes better from the sun. “Do you want to?” she asks, almost afraid to hear the answer. “Go back?”

“Nah,” Clint says, looking at his children, his lips relaxing into a smile. “Retirement sounds pretty good. And I haven’t been shot in ages, which is a plus. Just let me pick up my bow every once in awhile so I don’t get too bored.”

Laura smiles and kisses him on the lips. “You got it, Hawkeye.”

Retirement sounds pretty good, until Laura gets a call from Natasha, who is supposed to be home in forty-eight hours for chicken dinner, who tells her that there’s been a situation and that she needs to stay away from home a little longer.

“Of course there’s been a situation,” Laura says in annoyance as she warms the oven, holding Nate in one arm. “Who am I killing, now?”

She listens as Natasha talks about Thaddeus Ross and Lagos and Steve Rogers and winter assassins from Russia, and she lets her head swirl with information that she carefully tries to catalog and break down, as if she’s taking in information for a report. Natasha asks to speak privately with Clint, and when he gets off the phone, his face is a mess of emotions.

“I need to go help Wanda,” he says shortly, before walking out of the house and slamming the door behind him. Nate cries at the sound, and Laura soothes him until Clint comes home sometime later, looking a little less upset and a lot more tired.

"She's being locked up," Clint says, his voice hoarse, as if he's been crying. "She's being held against her will. I need to go to her."

“You know if I didn’t tell you to go, I’d be lying to both of us about my real feelings,” Laura says as she hands him a sponge to clean the table, because she's determined to keep her life as normal as possible, and normal includes doing housework, even if you get angry and upset and try to disrupt the balance. “I love you too much to keep you from helping someone you care about.”

Clint slumps down in the chair, throwing a sponge at the vase of freshly picked flowers. “Yeah. I know. What’s that word for dumbass again?”

Laura turns around from the sink, her eyes shining with tears. “Dummkopf,” she says quietly, watching as Clint nods and pushes a hand through his hair.

“Dummkopf," he repeats. "I guess in your words, I'd be a dummkopf not to go.”

Clint leaves with promises of coming home to take his children waterskiing on a vacation that's been planned for weeks, one that Laura decides to cancel in the wake of both him and Natasha being gone. Laura helps Cooper learn Spanish, and finds out while watching the news that a group of superheroes have been captured in Leipzig, including one Hawkeye, a.k.a Clinton Francis Barton.

“Mierda,” she curses loudly. Cooper looks confused, and Laura doesn’t bother to explain that particular word to her son. She gives Natasha an hour before she calls her, pressing the redial button incessantly until Natasha finally calls her back.

“Don’t tell me,” she says when she picks up the phone. “Don’t open the door for anyone that we don't trust, and someone is making sure there are security measures in place.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to lie about it,” Natasha says with a sigh, and Laura wonders how many more times she’s going to have to worry about her family’s safety, including the safety of her wife and husband.

“I saw the news,” she says, instead of asking the question out loud. “Will he come home?”

Natasha pauses, taking a deep breath. “Yes," she says, a warning tone coloring her voice. "But if and when he does, he’s going to be a fugitive. They all will. He’ll come home, but it doesn’t mean he’ll be off the hook. He might never be able to work again.”

“You said that after New York. You said that after Sokovia.”

“That was because of what he went through mentally. This is different,” says Natasha, who sounds uncertain, like she’s on the verge of losing a battle, and Laura remembers what she had told her about fighting for a family, what she had told her about keeping the people who were important to her together, no matter the cost.

“So then maybe we just don’t work for awhile,” Laura suggests. “It’s not like he doesn’t have three kids and two wives to keep him busy.”

“We tried that once,” Natasha says wryly. “When we moved to the farm. It didn’t exactly last.”

Laura shrugs. “Then we’ll figure out other ways to keep our family going. You’ll stay at home with the kids, and we’ll rebuild ourselves, like we always have. We’ll put our lives back together. Assuming that you are, of course, going through with this jailbreak idea you texted me earlier.”

Natasha laughs softly. “All the years I’ve known you, Laura, and I never thought SHIELD’s former language analyst would be up for a jailbreak.”

“All the years I’ve known you, Natasha, and I never thought I'd still find ways to surprise you.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Natasha says, sounding comforted. “Ya lyublyu tebya.”

Laura smiles to herself, clutching the phone tighter. “I love you, too.”

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: Everyone assumes that because she’s the mother of three kids, that because she has a spy husband who runs around with superheroes and a partner who does the same, she’s constantly wondering if she’s made all the right choices.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: She fell in love with a dangerously sly red-haired girl first, and then fell in love with her partner, and never thought about the kind of life she could be getting herself into, because all she knew was that for the first time, she felt loved.

Here’s the thing about Laura Barton: The real truth is that she couldn’t imagine having it any other way.