FIC: It Seemed Like a Good Idea (for franztastisch) - PG-13
Title: It Seemed Like A Good Idea
Author: lar_laughs
A Gift For: franztastisch
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: deception and lies
Pairings: Clint/Natasha, implied Tony/Pepper and Jane/Thor
Summary/Prompt Used: Rock Star AU (and there will be dancing!) - No one knows anything about Natalie Rushman that the musician doesn’t want them to know. Every reporter wants the real story but none of them have figured out how to break through her security. It’s a good thing that Clint knows how to drive a touring bus because it’s gotten him that much closer to the group of important people that surround the singer. Now all he has to do is keep from falling in love.
Authors Notes: Dearest, franztastisch, time ran faster than the words. This is only HALF the story. The other will be to you by the end of the month!
Banner by frea_o
It had been years since he’d driven a touring bus but Clint figured it was just like riding a bike. Not that he’d ever ridden a bike when he was a kid. His childhood hadn’t really been typical. So, maybe it was like never forgetting the alphabet (he knew it backwards and forwards) or never forgetting the way home (he couldn’t pass by a circus tent without getting nostalgic) or, in probably the best analogy, having the muscle memory to know just how far to pull back the string of his bow to get the perfect shot.
He hadn’t really expected to like the job of driving the bus for Natalie Rushman’s band but it was handed to him and he couldn’t very well turn it down. Not if he wanted to pay those last few payments on the sweet little GTO body he’d found for a song. Unfortunately, it was still rather a steep song but he would have been a fool to let this opportunity pass him by. It had come with a few extras that would help him get this new car up and running in no time flat.
It had been painful to turn the key that last time on the storage unit, knowing he wouldn’t be able to work on his beauty until after the main portion of the tour was over, sometime in September if he’d read his contract correctly. He was using the down time to make sketches of what he wanted the finished result to look like, jotting down notes in a little notebook that he always kept with him.
The first thing anyone ever said to him was, “What’s in that notebook of yours?” He’d handed it over to the hulking man working security, conscious of the fact that he could be crushed under one of the man’s hands without any real effort. It’s what had kept him from laughing at the man’s name the first time he’d been introduced. His mother must have hated him to name him Thor.
After the notebook had been passed around and the normal questions asked (You draw cars? No, I rebuild them. What’s this? A short hand I started using since there’s not much room on the picture itself for all the notes I have. What’s this say? The catalytic converter needs to be reformatted for optimal output.), he was left in peace. It was a test passed, and in record time, too. He’d expected to be the odd man out for the first few weeks of the tour. Instead, he was deemed to be safe.
Or, in all actuality, safe enough. There was still an inner circle where this close-knit group was concerned. He was allowed to drive the bus. That was all.
But it was enough. Who else could say they’d toured with Natalie Rushman, the most secretive and enigmatic performer of the last decade? There were those who tried to keep their private lives private but they were usually sidetracked by something that kept them in the public eye. Who could forget Michael Jackson’s extravagant mansion and the eerie stories of his private amusement park? Or Britney Spear’s melt down front and center where everyone could witness it? On a much smaller scale, it was old news what cigarettes Adele smoked (although it was always up in the air which tense to use) or what sort of drink Rhianna got at Starbucks. Open any magazine or internet site and a fan could find every little tidbit they wanted to know about any of their favorite musicians.
Not Natalie Rushman. The facts that were known about her were few and far between. She had blonde hair that didn’t appear to be touched up at any hair salons in Beverly Hills. She asked for normal bottled water and fresh fruit (of every variety available but she was never picky about the finished product) to be stocked in her green room. She toured for four months every year, right after putting out an album, and was a mystery for the other eight months of the year. While she was on a major label, they had no idea where she recorded the album or even where it was mixed. It arrived at their main office by courier, finished and ready to be mastered.
The only pictures that anyone had of Natalie Rushman was on stage. As far as anyone knew, she’d never given an interview or spoken to anyone in the media. She’d never been on Letterman to help with the Top Ten or on MTV to talk about her videos that surfaced, every other month, on YouTube. Most of those were footage from her concerts but it was something. The Natalie-starved public took whatever she was willing to give.
But Nick Fury, managing editor of Shield, a monthly magazine that liked to think it was where all the real music news came from, was tired of being one step behind all the time. “We take what she gives us but that doesn’t sell magazines. These days, what sells magazines are the photos that they don’t want us to have,” he thundered in the weekly meetings that his staff was beginning to dread. “I want to break the story of Natalie Rushman. I want to know what she does when she’s not on stage. I want to know what her influences are and where she gets her ideas for those wild costumes she wears on stage.”
“Lady Gaga was wild and look where that got her,” someone in the back pointed out before withering under Fury’s glare.
“Lady Gaga was a hack. She was looking for a fast fifteen minutes. Her meat dress was nothing but garish. Besides, it smelled horrible.” Fury had never been a fan of Lady Gaga or anyone who arrived abruptly on the music scene and then, just as quickly, faded away. He liked the ones who earned their fame, who were around for ages and became a part of history. Very few artists who were considered truly famous were on his lists of the greats. Still, he had to report on those that were a flash in the pan, even if they set his teeth on edge.
Natalie Rushman was not a flash in the pan. Her first song had been played on local radio stations around the Dallas/Fort Worth area for a few months before jumping to indie rock stations in Portland and Seattle. That’s where she really began to turn some heads so that when she started to get play on both the West and the East Coast, she already had some backing. It wasn’t until her second album shot up the charts faster than any other that year that the critics began to take notice and a cry was raised to know more about her.
No one stepped forward. Not a grade school teacher or childhood best friend. No one had a yearbook picture of her or knew where she’d learned to play the guitar. No one claimed her. In an industry where secrecy was a myth, she was as insubstantial as vapor.
After her third record went platinum within six weeks, it was announced that Natalie Rushman would go on tour for four months and only four months. She wouldn’t just hit the big cities but would make her way across the country and back again in an orderly fashion. In another surprise move, she refused to let her tickets be sold on the internet. A call center was set up to meet the three day demand for tickets. The critics were aghast at the security she employed to ensure that the majority of her tickets went to fans and not to scalpers. They said that nothing about the plan could possibly work.
She proved them wrong that first summer. In fact, the North of the Sun tour was such a success that it was duplicated the next summer when her Year In Review album hit stores only two weeks before the tour started. Natalie Rushman was a phenomenon of epic proportions.
And, still, no one knew where she’d come from or where she went when she wasn’t crisscrossing the country on her sold out tour.
“Go get me the story,” Fury ordered, pointing at his ace-in-the-hole. He had just the man for the job. As far as anyone knew, the reporter had never had his picture in any publication or on any website even though he’d broken several hard-to-crack cases. He’d followed Kennedys to day spas that turned out to be detox centers and brought back the photographic evidence for the world to see. Because of his intel, several video cameras were at the ready when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt called it quits so that everything was nicely documented.
Clint Barton might look like a washed-up circus carney to the public but he was a world-class reporter with a nose for where the heart of a story lay. He’d been given the directive to bring back something big on Natalie Rushman.
And so he sat in the driver’s seat of the long touring bus, sketching his dream car or pretending to finish the sudoku puzzles in the back of magazines, sending them both off in his weekly letter to his ailing aunt. Nothing to report they spelled out, over and over again. Fury couldn’t have really thought he’d get something in the first few weeks, especially seeing as he was driving the band’s bus. The star’s bus was being driven by Bruce, a seemingly mild mannered man who whistled Hayden and read Chaucer. There was a rumor that he had a nasty temper, one that Clint believed because he’d learned early that it was the quiet ones he needed to watch.
Part of the problem - the part that Fury, with any luck, would never know about - was that Clint could have cared less about trying to spot Natalie because he was a bit obsessed with her lyricist. He didn’t know why a big name artist needed a wordsmith along with her on tour but he wasn’t going to complain. Not with the deep red hair that he found himself searching for in a crowd or the dark eyes that mesmerized him every time he was fortunate enough to get caught up in them. He didn’t have a single thing listed for Natalie but there was a growing number of observations in the back of his notebook (in the funny shorthand that he and his brother had made up as kids) of all the things he knew about Natasha.
For instance, he knew she liked her coffee plain with only a single packet of sugar (the good stuff and not any of the artificial sweeteners that were quickly falling out of vogue), her pasta al dente and covered in white sauce with just the barest hint of pepper, and her books from the non-fiction side of the bookstore. She preferred wearing comfortable clothes, her closet holding a good supply of jeans and yoga pants to go with t-shirts that clung like a second skin and looked like they would be as soft as silk.
Best of all, she was starting to soften toward Clint. She wasn’t quite smiling at him the same way she did to some of the other crew but it was coming. It was just a matter of time.
***
The routine was always the same. After the concert, he started the engine and waited while his riders filed silently onto the bus. They’d all head for the rooms at the back of the bus while Clint drove through the night. He had no idea what it was that they did in those dark hours. For all he knew, they slept soundly until the first daylight stop. It wasn’t his business to know, he told himself as he fought back the desire to invade the tight knit group. His business was Natalie, not Natasha.
After the concert in Cleveland, they didn’t just walk on past him as if he was part of the furniture. Clint found himself part of a celebration. Jane, the compact costume designer who also played a mean bass and happened to be dating the head of security, clapped him on the back as she passed. “You missed one hell of a show.”
“Yeah, you never come inside.” Tony, the computer expert who ran the sound and lighting, held out his fist and Clint flinched, thinking it was going to keep coming until it made contact with his face. When it stayed where it was, hovering in the air, Clint realized his secret hadn’t been uncovered. This was one of those gestures that meant Welcome to the club between guys. He was being offered friendship from a group of people that he was planning on using to get a story that would splash across the world in a way that would probably end up ruining their current lifestyle.
A part of Clint rebelled at the idea of hitting the guy’s knuckle with his own. It yelled at him in a voice very much like Fury’s, “You weren’t sent here to make friends. You have an assignment that you have apparently have forgotten about. These people are not your friends.”
It howled with frustration as he kept his fist up as each person, in turn, gave him the same greeting. At the very end of the line stood the woman that even his inner voice quieted down for, as if he was complete in his desire to see what she was going to do. They stared at each other, messages sent without any hope that the other person might respond in kind but Clint thought he saw enough to give him hope.
Slowly, so as not to scare her away, he turned over his hand and extended his fingers out so that his palm was now held out to her. Her eyes flickered down and back up again. With the same slow movements that set his heart to pounding, she lay her fingertips in his hand. Without thinking it through (because that would have meant giving into the voice that demanded he go back to staring out of the windshield instead of interacting with any of them), he drew her hand up to his lips and placed a soft kiss along her knuckles. He barely touched her but his lips felt scorched, as if her skin was the temperature of molten lava.
As Clint pulled away, licking his lips to stop the sensation that he was going to suddenly combust into flames, he expected her to pull her hand away. Instead, she left it there as she watched his tongue circle around. He became self-conscious, tucking his lips between his teeth to hide them from her perusal.
She caught the meaning behind his movement, her low laugh causing the blush to creep up his cheeks. “Can you count cards?”
“What?” That was not where he figured this conversation was going.
“Can you count cards? Or, better question, can you drive this bus while counting cards?”
“I... think so.”
“Good. Deal him in, Pepper.” She didn’t pull her hand from his grasp until both their arms were stretched out to the limit, as if she wouldn’t have minded if he was following her to the seating area right behind the driver’s seat that no one had ever used before. Natasha looked at him over her shoulder. “Go on, then. Start the bus. We’ve got miles of road to drive down tonight.”
“Almost to New York,” Tony reminded the group and they nodded, as if that meant something to them all. Pepper reached over and rubbed a hand along Tony’s shoulder in an odd show of support. From what Clint heard, the two of them were normally at each other’s throats during sound checks.
The bus rumbled to life and began moving before anyone spoke again, as if they were giving Clint a moment to get everything situated before they started demanding his attention. He heard the cards shuffling but didn’t think anything of it until Natasha called out, “You’ve got a three and a six.”
Clint made the mistake of looking up into the huge rear view mirror - and snaring himself in Natasha’s gaze yet again. “What?” he finally asked when he remembered she’d said something. At the rate he was going, they were going to think he was a complete dunce. Of course, it could only help his cover story if they didn’t think he could string together two words in a row.
“Your cards. A three and a six. I could tell you the suit, if you like, but it’s sort of pointless information, considering you’re just trying to get to twenty-one and not gaze in adoration at hearts and clubs. Got the hang of it now, Barton?”
His slow smile cracked her own expression until the smile got a little brighter than he’d ever seen before. If he hadn’t already been head over heels for this woman before, he would have been in this instant. “Yes, ma’am,” he drawled, placing a little more south into his speech than was ever usually there. “I think I’ll just take the numbers.”
“Good boy.”
For a moment, Clint forgot where he was and what he was doing until the blast from a horn brought him back to himself. No one seemed to notice their near collision with the minivan that roared off into the night in case he decided to continue on with his veering into the other lanes. He was good and kept his eyes on the road with only a few glances up at Natasha. Tonight had whet his appetite for more of her, until he was convinced he would never be able to have enough of Natasha Romanoff.
***
What does a star reporter do when an obsession began to push at the bonds of sanity? He pulled up the internet and began to research. When nothing came up, he tried variations of her name. Still nothing.
So he decided to call in a favor. He’d been holding on to this one for years, hoping to hold on to it for the perfect moment when he really needed something vital. This seemed like that time.
“Maria?” The connection was crap but he was hiding out beside the bus, conscious to the fact that they were in the city where he was familiar to people who could ruin this situation for him. The Shield offices were only about twenty blocks away which meant his nerves were running on high octane as he just waited for this stop to come to a horrible end. “Hey, you there?”
“What do you want, Clint?”
Ah, she was in a good mood, not that anyone would know from the tone of her voice. Still, she’d called him by his first name and not by any of the other imaginative nicknames she came up with for him.
Taking a deep breath, Clint gave himself a few more precious seconds to reconsider his request. If he could have conned her into thinking she was doing his work for him, that would have kept her in the red but she’d soon figure out that he just wanted the history of a normal, run-of-the-mill person. This was far more like stalking than anything he did for a living, that was for sure.
“I need some info. Nothing’s coming up when I do a straight search and I’m not anywhere I can get to a real database.”
Her snort was as good as any indication that she wasn’t writing off his plea. This was a better reception than what he thought he’d get but he figured she smelled a way to wipe their slate clean.
“Do you think you can dig something up for me?”
“Of course I can. The question is really: Will I? Say the words, Clint. Say the words and I’ll help you get whatever it is that you think you need so badly.”
He let out a breath loud enough that she could hear it through the receiver. “Fine. Please, Maria. Will you get this information for me?”
“And?”
“And I’ll consider your debt paid in full.”
Her triumphant sound could only be called a full-throat crow of delight that must have made the others in her vicinity look up in irritation. “I’ll consider that a handshake,” she replied in a much calmer voice. “Okay, give me a place to start.”
“Natasha Romanoff. Do I need to spell that?”
“I think I can figure it out,” she answered in such a way that he could almost hear her eye roll. “Any other particulars?”
“She could be as young as twenty-five or as old as mid-thirties. I’d bet easy money that she’s never been to college. I thought she might be from Texas but her accent isn’t a twang, that’s for sure. She’s not hoarding a box of belt buckles in her closet.”
“And you would know a buckle bunny on sight, wouldn’t you?”
He did his own eye roll. “Start with that. See what you can come up with. Surely it’ll be more than I found.”
“Sure thing.” Without another word, Shield’s best fact checker hung up the phone. Clint was surprised that she wasn’t going to try another sling at his ego but he was paying for this information, the same as if he was a client handing out six-figure checks.
He wished he’d thought to tell her that he didn’t want Fury finding out about his request but decided that Maria wasn’t the kind to spread something that was clearly his business, and his alone. Still, it made him uncomfortable that he’d had to rely on anyone else for this.
“Concentrate on Natalie,” he reminded himself as he climbed back into the bus. “It’s the reason you’re here.”
***
“You’re coming with us.”
As it turned out, Jane and Pepper were very strong. He’d been lounging against the side of the bus, pretending like he was enjoying the moon when, in fact, he was scoping out the comings and goings on Natalie’s bus. He hadn’t seen a lot of the musician lately, other than her hooded figure being scurried back and forth between the bus and the concert hall. His sixth sense, the sensation that told him when things weren’t exactly one hundred percent on the up and up, was letting him know that things weren’t as they seemed. Something was most definitely strange here.
But now he was being dragged in exactly the opposite direction by two members of the band that had recently taken a shine to him. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say they were trying to sway his attention. When they manhandled him like this, it was hard not to say yes to their requests.
“Where are we going?”
Jane looked up at him through long lashes, giving him a smile that promised a lot of secrets. “We’re going dancing. The whole crew. That means you, driver boy.”
Everyone seemed to be taking Natasha’s lead and giving him nicknames with boy attached to them. It was cute when Natasha did it but it was getting annoying when everyone else did it.
Clint liked to dance, especially when it involved a darkened night club with a lot of pounding music and sweaty bodies all moving together in a crush that pressed body parts together in a way that society didn’t always deem acceptable.
The only problem was his job. Specifically, the job that required him to find out what it was that was going on in Natalie’s bus. He tried to pull away until Pepper leaned in and whispered, “Natasha’s going to be there. She wants to dance with you.”
His body took over for his brain and decided that dancing was exactly what he needed to be doing at this moment and there was nothing he could do to convince it otherwise. His phone was doing a good job of reminding him that he had a job to do, especially considering the name on the screen was one he wanted to hear from.
“Hey, Maria. Just a minute.” He held the phone out, pointing to it in case Jane and Pepper hadn’t noticed him answering it. “I’ve got to take this. Do you mind?”
“We’ll meet you over there.” Jane pointed to a brightly lit entrance across the street. “Don’t be long. You’ll need to go in with us if you don’t want to stand in line. Alright?”
He nodded, watching until they got halfway across the street before he brought the phone back up to his ear. “I’m assuming you found something.”
“Something? No, I found everything. Your Natasha Romanoff is actually Anastasia Romanova, a Russian orphan who was adopted and brought to the States when she was ten. Kind of old for an orphan but she was part of a group of girls that were adopted by a couple in Dallas. She officially changed her name when she was adopted.”
Maria paused, her silence heavy as pieces began to fall into place. Tiny things, really, that he might never have noticed if certain facts hadn’t been placed in front of him.
“What was the name of the couple that adopted her?” he asked just as Natasha rounded the corner. She lifted a hand to show that she’d seen him, a tiny smile lifting the corner of her mouth.
“Robert and Sue Rushman. Nice couple. I’ll email you the particulars. Figure you’ll need them for your article on Natasha or, should I say, Natalie Rushman.”
Clint didn’t answer before hanging up. To ensure extra safety against any other phone calls that might ruin this one last, perfect night, he turned off his phone and put it in his pocket.
“Ready to go dancing?” he called out to Natasha as she got closer.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She tucked her arm under his and let him lead her across the street.
Author: lar_laughs
A Gift For: franztastisch
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: deception and lies
Pairings: Clint/Natasha, implied Tony/Pepper and Jane/Thor
Summary/Prompt Used: Rock Star AU (and there will be dancing!) - No one knows anything about Natalie Rushman that the musician doesn’t want them to know. Every reporter wants the real story but none of them have figured out how to break through her security. It’s a good thing that Clint knows how to drive a touring bus because it’s gotten him that much closer to the group of important people that surround the singer. Now all he has to do is keep from falling in love.
Authors Notes: Dearest, franztastisch, time ran faster than the words. This is only HALF the story. The other will be to you by the end of the month!
Banner by frea_o
It had been years since he’d driven a touring bus but Clint figured it was just like riding a bike. Not that he’d ever ridden a bike when he was a kid. His childhood hadn’t really been typical. So, maybe it was like never forgetting the alphabet (he knew it backwards and forwards) or never forgetting the way home (he couldn’t pass by a circus tent without getting nostalgic) or, in probably the best analogy, having the muscle memory to know just how far to pull back the string of his bow to get the perfect shot.
He hadn’t really expected to like the job of driving the bus for Natalie Rushman’s band but it was handed to him and he couldn’t very well turn it down. Not if he wanted to pay those last few payments on the sweet little GTO body he’d found for a song. Unfortunately, it was still rather a steep song but he would have been a fool to let this opportunity pass him by. It had come with a few extras that would help him get this new car up and running in no time flat.
It had been painful to turn the key that last time on the storage unit, knowing he wouldn’t be able to work on his beauty until after the main portion of the tour was over, sometime in September if he’d read his contract correctly. He was using the down time to make sketches of what he wanted the finished result to look like, jotting down notes in a little notebook that he always kept with him.
The first thing anyone ever said to him was, “What’s in that notebook of yours?” He’d handed it over to the hulking man working security, conscious of the fact that he could be crushed under one of the man’s hands without any real effort. It’s what had kept him from laughing at the man’s name the first time he’d been introduced. His mother must have hated him to name him Thor.
After the notebook had been passed around and the normal questions asked (You draw cars? No, I rebuild them. What’s this? A short hand I started using since there’s not much room on the picture itself for all the notes I have. What’s this say? The catalytic converter needs to be reformatted for optimal output.), he was left in peace. It was a test passed, and in record time, too. He’d expected to be the odd man out for the first few weeks of the tour. Instead, he was deemed to be safe.
Or, in all actuality, safe enough. There was still an inner circle where this close-knit group was concerned. He was allowed to drive the bus. That was all.
But it was enough. Who else could say they’d toured with Natalie Rushman, the most secretive and enigmatic performer of the last decade? There were those who tried to keep their private lives private but they were usually sidetracked by something that kept them in the public eye. Who could forget Michael Jackson’s extravagant mansion and the eerie stories of his private amusement park? Or Britney Spear’s melt down front and center where everyone could witness it? On a much smaller scale, it was old news what cigarettes Adele smoked (although it was always up in the air which tense to use) or what sort of drink Rhianna got at Starbucks. Open any magazine or internet site and a fan could find every little tidbit they wanted to know about any of their favorite musicians.
Not Natalie Rushman. The facts that were known about her were few and far between. She had blonde hair that didn’t appear to be touched up at any hair salons in Beverly Hills. She asked for normal bottled water and fresh fruit (of every variety available but she was never picky about the finished product) to be stocked in her green room. She toured for four months every year, right after putting out an album, and was a mystery for the other eight months of the year. While she was on a major label, they had no idea where she recorded the album or even where it was mixed. It arrived at their main office by courier, finished and ready to be mastered.
The only pictures that anyone had of Natalie Rushman was on stage. As far as anyone knew, she’d never given an interview or spoken to anyone in the media. She’d never been on Letterman to help with the Top Ten or on MTV to talk about her videos that surfaced, every other month, on YouTube. Most of those were footage from her concerts but it was something. The Natalie-starved public took whatever she was willing to give.
But Nick Fury, managing editor of Shield, a monthly magazine that liked to think it was where all the real music news came from, was tired of being one step behind all the time. “We take what she gives us but that doesn’t sell magazines. These days, what sells magazines are the photos that they don’t want us to have,” he thundered in the weekly meetings that his staff was beginning to dread. “I want to break the story of Natalie Rushman. I want to know what she does when she’s not on stage. I want to know what her influences are and where she gets her ideas for those wild costumes she wears on stage.”
“Lady Gaga was wild and look where that got her,” someone in the back pointed out before withering under Fury’s glare.
“Lady Gaga was a hack. She was looking for a fast fifteen minutes. Her meat dress was nothing but garish. Besides, it smelled horrible.” Fury had never been a fan of Lady Gaga or anyone who arrived abruptly on the music scene and then, just as quickly, faded away. He liked the ones who earned their fame, who were around for ages and became a part of history. Very few artists who were considered truly famous were on his lists of the greats. Still, he had to report on those that were a flash in the pan, even if they set his teeth on edge.
Natalie Rushman was not a flash in the pan. Her first song had been played on local radio stations around the Dallas/Fort Worth area for a few months before jumping to indie rock stations in Portland and Seattle. That’s where she really began to turn some heads so that when she started to get play on both the West and the East Coast, she already had some backing. It wasn’t until her second album shot up the charts faster than any other that year that the critics began to take notice and a cry was raised to know more about her.
No one stepped forward. Not a grade school teacher or childhood best friend. No one had a yearbook picture of her or knew where she’d learned to play the guitar. No one claimed her. In an industry where secrecy was a myth, she was as insubstantial as vapor.
After her third record went platinum within six weeks, it was announced that Natalie Rushman would go on tour for four months and only four months. She wouldn’t just hit the big cities but would make her way across the country and back again in an orderly fashion. In another surprise move, she refused to let her tickets be sold on the internet. A call center was set up to meet the three day demand for tickets. The critics were aghast at the security she employed to ensure that the majority of her tickets went to fans and not to scalpers. They said that nothing about the plan could possibly work.
She proved them wrong that first summer. In fact, the North of the Sun tour was such a success that it was duplicated the next summer when her Year In Review album hit stores only two weeks before the tour started. Natalie Rushman was a phenomenon of epic proportions.
And, still, no one knew where she’d come from or where she went when she wasn’t crisscrossing the country on her sold out tour.
“Go get me the story,” Fury ordered, pointing at his ace-in-the-hole. He had just the man for the job. As far as anyone knew, the reporter had never had his picture in any publication or on any website even though he’d broken several hard-to-crack cases. He’d followed Kennedys to day spas that turned out to be detox centers and brought back the photographic evidence for the world to see. Because of his intel, several video cameras were at the ready when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt called it quits so that everything was nicely documented.
Clint Barton might look like a washed-up circus carney to the public but he was a world-class reporter with a nose for where the heart of a story lay. He’d been given the directive to bring back something big on Natalie Rushman.
And so he sat in the driver’s seat of the long touring bus, sketching his dream car or pretending to finish the sudoku puzzles in the back of magazines, sending them both off in his weekly letter to his ailing aunt. Nothing to report they spelled out, over and over again. Fury couldn’t have really thought he’d get something in the first few weeks, especially seeing as he was driving the band’s bus. The star’s bus was being driven by Bruce, a seemingly mild mannered man who whistled Hayden and read Chaucer. There was a rumor that he had a nasty temper, one that Clint believed because he’d learned early that it was the quiet ones he needed to watch.
Part of the problem - the part that Fury, with any luck, would never know about - was that Clint could have cared less about trying to spot Natalie because he was a bit obsessed with her lyricist. He didn’t know why a big name artist needed a wordsmith along with her on tour but he wasn’t going to complain. Not with the deep red hair that he found himself searching for in a crowd or the dark eyes that mesmerized him every time he was fortunate enough to get caught up in them. He didn’t have a single thing listed for Natalie but there was a growing number of observations in the back of his notebook (in the funny shorthand that he and his brother had made up as kids) of all the things he knew about Natasha.
For instance, he knew she liked her coffee plain with only a single packet of sugar (the good stuff and not any of the artificial sweeteners that were quickly falling out of vogue), her pasta al dente and covered in white sauce with just the barest hint of pepper, and her books from the non-fiction side of the bookstore. She preferred wearing comfortable clothes, her closet holding a good supply of jeans and yoga pants to go with t-shirts that clung like a second skin and looked like they would be as soft as silk.
Best of all, she was starting to soften toward Clint. She wasn’t quite smiling at him the same way she did to some of the other crew but it was coming. It was just a matter of time.
***
The routine was always the same. After the concert, he started the engine and waited while his riders filed silently onto the bus. They’d all head for the rooms at the back of the bus while Clint drove through the night. He had no idea what it was that they did in those dark hours. For all he knew, they slept soundly until the first daylight stop. It wasn’t his business to know, he told himself as he fought back the desire to invade the tight knit group. His business was Natalie, not Natasha.
After the concert in Cleveland, they didn’t just walk on past him as if he was part of the furniture. Clint found himself part of a celebration. Jane, the compact costume designer who also played a mean bass and happened to be dating the head of security, clapped him on the back as she passed. “You missed one hell of a show.”
“Yeah, you never come inside.” Tony, the computer expert who ran the sound and lighting, held out his fist and Clint flinched, thinking it was going to keep coming until it made contact with his face. When it stayed where it was, hovering in the air, Clint realized his secret hadn’t been uncovered. This was one of those gestures that meant Welcome to the club between guys. He was being offered friendship from a group of people that he was planning on using to get a story that would splash across the world in a way that would probably end up ruining their current lifestyle.
A part of Clint rebelled at the idea of hitting the guy’s knuckle with his own. It yelled at him in a voice very much like Fury’s, “You weren’t sent here to make friends. You have an assignment that you have apparently have forgotten about. These people are not your friends.”
It howled with frustration as he kept his fist up as each person, in turn, gave him the same greeting. At the very end of the line stood the woman that even his inner voice quieted down for, as if he was complete in his desire to see what she was going to do. They stared at each other, messages sent without any hope that the other person might respond in kind but Clint thought he saw enough to give him hope.
Slowly, so as not to scare her away, he turned over his hand and extended his fingers out so that his palm was now held out to her. Her eyes flickered down and back up again. With the same slow movements that set his heart to pounding, she lay her fingertips in his hand. Without thinking it through (because that would have meant giving into the voice that demanded he go back to staring out of the windshield instead of interacting with any of them), he drew her hand up to his lips and placed a soft kiss along her knuckles. He barely touched her but his lips felt scorched, as if her skin was the temperature of molten lava.
As Clint pulled away, licking his lips to stop the sensation that he was going to suddenly combust into flames, he expected her to pull her hand away. Instead, she left it there as she watched his tongue circle around. He became self-conscious, tucking his lips between his teeth to hide them from her perusal.
She caught the meaning behind his movement, her low laugh causing the blush to creep up his cheeks. “Can you count cards?”
“What?” That was not where he figured this conversation was going.
“Can you count cards? Or, better question, can you drive this bus while counting cards?”
“I... think so.”
“Good. Deal him in, Pepper.” She didn’t pull her hand from his grasp until both their arms were stretched out to the limit, as if she wouldn’t have minded if he was following her to the seating area right behind the driver’s seat that no one had ever used before. Natasha looked at him over her shoulder. “Go on, then. Start the bus. We’ve got miles of road to drive down tonight.”
“Almost to New York,” Tony reminded the group and they nodded, as if that meant something to them all. Pepper reached over and rubbed a hand along Tony’s shoulder in an odd show of support. From what Clint heard, the two of them were normally at each other’s throats during sound checks.
The bus rumbled to life and began moving before anyone spoke again, as if they were giving Clint a moment to get everything situated before they started demanding his attention. He heard the cards shuffling but didn’t think anything of it until Natasha called out, “You’ve got a three and a six.”
Clint made the mistake of looking up into the huge rear view mirror - and snaring himself in Natasha’s gaze yet again. “What?” he finally asked when he remembered she’d said something. At the rate he was going, they were going to think he was a complete dunce. Of course, it could only help his cover story if they didn’t think he could string together two words in a row.
“Your cards. A three and a six. I could tell you the suit, if you like, but it’s sort of pointless information, considering you’re just trying to get to twenty-one and not gaze in adoration at hearts and clubs. Got the hang of it now, Barton?”
His slow smile cracked her own expression until the smile got a little brighter than he’d ever seen before. If he hadn’t already been head over heels for this woman before, he would have been in this instant. “Yes, ma’am,” he drawled, placing a little more south into his speech than was ever usually there. “I think I’ll just take the numbers.”
“Good boy.”
For a moment, Clint forgot where he was and what he was doing until the blast from a horn brought him back to himself. No one seemed to notice their near collision with the minivan that roared off into the night in case he decided to continue on with his veering into the other lanes. He was good and kept his eyes on the road with only a few glances up at Natasha. Tonight had whet his appetite for more of her, until he was convinced he would never be able to have enough of Natasha Romanoff.
***
What does a star reporter do when an obsession began to push at the bonds of sanity? He pulled up the internet and began to research. When nothing came up, he tried variations of her name. Still nothing.
So he decided to call in a favor. He’d been holding on to this one for years, hoping to hold on to it for the perfect moment when he really needed something vital. This seemed like that time.
“Maria?” The connection was crap but he was hiding out beside the bus, conscious to the fact that they were in the city where he was familiar to people who could ruin this situation for him. The Shield offices were only about twenty blocks away which meant his nerves were running on high octane as he just waited for this stop to come to a horrible end. “Hey, you there?”
“What do you want, Clint?”
Ah, she was in a good mood, not that anyone would know from the tone of her voice. Still, she’d called him by his first name and not by any of the other imaginative nicknames she came up with for him.
Taking a deep breath, Clint gave himself a few more precious seconds to reconsider his request. If he could have conned her into thinking she was doing his work for him, that would have kept her in the red but she’d soon figure out that he just wanted the history of a normal, run-of-the-mill person. This was far more like stalking than anything he did for a living, that was for sure.
“I need some info. Nothing’s coming up when I do a straight search and I’m not anywhere I can get to a real database.”
Her snort was as good as any indication that she wasn’t writing off his plea. This was a better reception than what he thought he’d get but he figured she smelled a way to wipe their slate clean.
“Do you think you can dig something up for me?”
“Of course I can. The question is really: Will I? Say the words, Clint. Say the words and I’ll help you get whatever it is that you think you need so badly.”
He let out a breath loud enough that she could hear it through the receiver. “Fine. Please, Maria. Will you get this information for me?”
“And?”
“And I’ll consider your debt paid in full.”
Her triumphant sound could only be called a full-throat crow of delight that must have made the others in her vicinity look up in irritation. “I’ll consider that a handshake,” she replied in a much calmer voice. “Okay, give me a place to start.”
“Natasha Romanoff. Do I need to spell that?”
“I think I can figure it out,” she answered in such a way that he could almost hear her eye roll. “Any other particulars?”
“She could be as young as twenty-five or as old as mid-thirties. I’d bet easy money that she’s never been to college. I thought she might be from Texas but her accent isn’t a twang, that’s for sure. She’s not hoarding a box of belt buckles in her closet.”
“And you would know a buckle bunny on sight, wouldn’t you?”
He did his own eye roll. “Start with that. See what you can come up with. Surely it’ll be more than I found.”
“Sure thing.” Without another word, Shield’s best fact checker hung up the phone. Clint was surprised that she wasn’t going to try another sling at his ego but he was paying for this information, the same as if he was a client handing out six-figure checks.
He wished he’d thought to tell her that he didn’t want Fury finding out about his request but decided that Maria wasn’t the kind to spread something that was clearly his business, and his alone. Still, it made him uncomfortable that he’d had to rely on anyone else for this.
“Concentrate on Natalie,” he reminded himself as he climbed back into the bus. “It’s the reason you’re here.”
***
“You’re coming with us.”
As it turned out, Jane and Pepper were very strong. He’d been lounging against the side of the bus, pretending like he was enjoying the moon when, in fact, he was scoping out the comings and goings on Natalie’s bus. He hadn’t seen a lot of the musician lately, other than her hooded figure being scurried back and forth between the bus and the concert hall. His sixth sense, the sensation that told him when things weren’t exactly one hundred percent on the up and up, was letting him know that things weren’t as they seemed. Something was most definitely strange here.
But now he was being dragged in exactly the opposite direction by two members of the band that had recently taken a shine to him. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say they were trying to sway his attention. When they manhandled him like this, it was hard not to say yes to their requests.
“Where are we going?”
Jane looked up at him through long lashes, giving him a smile that promised a lot of secrets. “We’re going dancing. The whole crew. That means you, driver boy.”
Everyone seemed to be taking Natasha’s lead and giving him nicknames with boy attached to them. It was cute when Natasha did it but it was getting annoying when everyone else did it.
Clint liked to dance, especially when it involved a darkened night club with a lot of pounding music and sweaty bodies all moving together in a crush that pressed body parts together in a way that society didn’t always deem acceptable.
The only problem was his job. Specifically, the job that required him to find out what it was that was going on in Natalie’s bus. He tried to pull away until Pepper leaned in and whispered, “Natasha’s going to be there. She wants to dance with you.”
His body took over for his brain and decided that dancing was exactly what he needed to be doing at this moment and there was nothing he could do to convince it otherwise. His phone was doing a good job of reminding him that he had a job to do, especially considering the name on the screen was one he wanted to hear from.
“Hey, Maria. Just a minute.” He held the phone out, pointing to it in case Jane and Pepper hadn’t noticed him answering it. “I’ve got to take this. Do you mind?”
“We’ll meet you over there.” Jane pointed to a brightly lit entrance across the street. “Don’t be long. You’ll need to go in with us if you don’t want to stand in line. Alright?”
He nodded, watching until they got halfway across the street before he brought the phone back up to his ear. “I’m assuming you found something.”
“Something? No, I found everything. Your Natasha Romanoff is actually Anastasia Romanova, a Russian orphan who was adopted and brought to the States when she was ten. Kind of old for an orphan but she was part of a group of girls that were adopted by a couple in Dallas. She officially changed her name when she was adopted.”
Maria paused, her silence heavy as pieces began to fall into place. Tiny things, really, that he might never have noticed if certain facts hadn’t been placed in front of him.
“What was the name of the couple that adopted her?” he asked just as Natasha rounded the corner. She lifted a hand to show that she’d seen him, a tiny smile lifting the corner of her mouth.
“Robert and Sue Rushman. Nice couple. I’ll email you the particulars. Figure you’ll need them for your article on Natasha or, should I say, Natalie Rushman.”
Clint didn’t answer before hanging up. To ensure extra safety against any other phone calls that might ruin this one last, perfect night, he turned off his phone and put it in his pocket.
“Ready to go dancing?” he called out to Natasha as she got closer.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She tucked her arm under his and let him lead her across the street.