Assumptions, Clint/Natasha, PG-13, 1/1
Title: Assumptions (one-shot)
Pairing/Character: Clint/Natasha, The Avengers
Word Count: 3122
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Clint and Natasha's romantic history helps Steve Rogers cope with the discovery of Wikipedia.
Spoilers: If you haven’t seen the movie, this won’t make much sense
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and will not be making any money off of this.
A/N: I've been snatching up Clint/Natasha fic like nobody's business and workerbee73 inspired me to try and finish one of my own. Not beta'd - all mistakes are my own.
Everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. assumed Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton started sleeping together when he first went to kill her and brought her in instead. Why else would he save her, right? Upon signing on with S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha was immediately paired with Clint, ensuring that everyone assumed their assumptions were correct. The assumers were wrong, of course, but neither Clint nor Natasha cared enough to correct them.
As it so happened, the two assassins didn't begin sleeping together until they had been partners for two years. It happened when the two of them returned to their hotel in Prague after a particularly difficult mission during which each of them had come very close to dying. Clint walked in the door first, put his bow and quiver on the end table, turned around and reached over Natasha's shoulder to shut the door.
He looked her straight in the eye, signaling silently what he was about to do, giving her the opportunity to stop him. She didn't blink. Clint's mouth descended on hers, at which point Natasha attacked him in return. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and the next truly coherent thought either of them had was a few hours later.
Clint's hand drifted up and down Natasha's spine as her hand played with the hair on his chest. Clint laughed low in his chest, earning a look up from the woman draped on top of him.
“What?” she asked with a subtle smile.
“I'd say that was inevitable,” he answered, the sexy laugh continuing.
She laughed in return. “Well, it was a stressful day.”
He pulled her closer to him, pressing his lips to her hair.
“I almost lost you-”
“And I you,” she cut him off.
“It brings things to the surface,” he said, continuing to hold her tight.
“It certainly brought things to your surface,” she purred as her hand drifted lower.
“I love you, Tasha.”
Her hand stopped.
“Love is for children,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“So what, that makes me 10? And you're what, nine?” he smiled at her.
“Hello! I'm 10. You're nine,” she humphed.
“Shall we see, then, exactly what trouble a couple of children can get into?” he asked in a low tone, the smile evident in his voice, as he rolled on top of her.
TheAvengersTheAvengersTheAvengers
Having been partners and eventually best friends for two years by the time they became more, Clint and Natasha had long since shared certain stories about their backgrounds and childhoods. For instance, she knew what Clint thought about family - it had come up one week as they conducted surveillance on a pair of elderly married drug dealers who used their age and marital status to cover up some pretty ruthless business practices. The malevolent couple had been taken out, and Natasha and Clint learned a great deal about each other's attitudes towards the concept of family.
Growing up in the circus, Clint spent most of his youth high up in tent rafters looking down over the families that came to see the sights. Over time, there was a certain kind of family that young Clint looked for, that he yearned to be a part of. After enough years, Clint could pick the five families out of a crowd of 5,000 that went past being related to each other to genuinely wanting to be there together, to liking each other, who went past doing anything for each other, to doing anything to be with each other. Sometimes there were two parents, sometimes one and gender or combinations thereof were immaterial, as were the number of children. In fact, there were couples without children whose obvious devotion to each other went past love and lust to the deeper connection Clint sought - though those were the hardest to spot. Those families, those connections, were what Clint Barton grew up wanting.
As Clint grew into his chosen profession, he had come to realize that his career path would preclude children. Children as a whole were helpless, and any child of his would be a target from the moment they were conceived. Clint Barton, plain and simple, would never make a child a target like that, not in this life or any other. And any woman he committed his life to would have to be not just strong but skilled enough to protect herself even when he couldn't be there. Eventually, while Clint still believed in deep, abiding love and the kind of family that could be built around it, Hawkeye didn't exactly see it as being much of a possibility in his own life.
For the most part, Natasha knew all of this - not that Clint had detailed the emotional depths of the sentiments, but once he opened the door, she had enough training and psychological insight to see into the room. She, in turn, had shared her lack of faith in almost all of the societal constructs existing in the world they occupied. The Soviet system had done an effective job of convincing its young protegee of its intended goal - that natural families were subservient to the state, and of an unintended goal, that the state itself was not to be trusted, thus leaving the burgeoning assassin with nothing and no one to turn to but herself.
By the time Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Hawkeye and the Black Widow, acknowledged their love for one other (more or less - him more, she less), she knew that he believed in true and lasting commitment, nigh unto marriage, while he knew that she believed in nothing beyond the rare individuals she chose to. Taking all of that into account, the admittedly odd arrangement they settled on shouldn't have been too surprising to the very few who later learned of it. Not that anyone else would have all of the back story to take into account.
Their lives as master assassins necessitated that Clint and Natasha travel to various and sundry parts of the world, many of which hardly anyone had ever heard of. One of those places was a tiny country in central Africa called Zunibia, so tiny that the human trafficking arm of an international terrorist organization that set up shop there were counting on the fact that no one could find the country, much less them and their illegal activities. The terrorists didn't count on S.H.I.E.L.D. and its agents' determination to cut off the group's most profitable enterprise.
So it was that two months after they became lovers, the two of them approached yet another decrepit shanty, Clint muttering to himself more than to Natasha, “Missionaries. The cover story had to be missionaries.”
Natasha sighed and, knowing that it fit in with who they said they were, took his hand in hers. They had been knocking on doors all morning without any success. They had, however, talked to several children and their mothers about the horror of their lives and how the two assassins-as-missionaries would try to arrange humanitarian aid from the U.N. to help them. Inured to the world the two of them might be, but it would take the human traffickers themselves to remain unfeeling to the plight of the people Natasha and Clint had spoken with that morning.
Natasha knew that all of this was hitting Clint harder than it was her, and she couldn't bring herself to quell the piece of humanity within him that allowed him to feel such. Instead she raised the hand not holding his to knock softly on the door of the next shanty in front of them.
A thin boy of about seven answered the door. In the local dialect, Clint identified Natasha and himself as Danish missionaries and asked if his mother was home and if they could speak with her. The boy looked back questioningly, and a woman's soft voice instructed him to let the visitors in.
The dust and grit that covered the village hadn't taken as firm hold inside the one-room home. The boy and a girl, perhaps one year younger, moved to sit on a neat, if worn, pallet of blankets next to the woman who was most likely their mother. It was clear that the woman was in the advanced stages of AIDS, a disease afflicting a high percentage of both young and old in the area. Natasha recognized that these children, like so many others in this area, would be orphans soon. Clint's hand squeezed imperceptibly tighter in hers and she turned her head to look at him.
“Mistress,” Clint addressed the sick woman whose age was indeterminate - she could have been 20 or 40 - according to local custom, “my partner and I would like to make a proposal to you.”
We would? thought Natasha.
“Tradition in your village requires that in order to be recognized, a marriage must have one adult witness, is that correct?”
“Yes,” murmured the prone woman.
“If you will serve as the witness for my partner and I, we will see to it that your children are moved to Europe and receive an education there.”
Natasha Romanoff, known and feared the world over as the Black Widow, did an actual double-take at her partner's words. What the hell?
Seemingly unaffected, the children's mother asked softly, “Why would you do this?”
“We have personal reasons for keeping our marriage quiet, mistress. And you want to a better life for your children.”
“I am not the only mother near death in Ka'awani,” she replied softly.
“You are the only one we are asking.”
The ageless woman regarded them both for a moment.
“I would do anything for my children. Even take the word of a Westerner who would say anything to get what he wants. I will do this for you. I ask only that if you do not see my children to a safe place that you see to their deaths. For that would be preferable to what awaits them as orphans in Ka'awani. My only regret is that I have not been able to bring myself to do this.”
“We will see your children to a safe land, mistress,” Natasha assured her. She might not have any clue what Clint was thinking or where this had come from, but she was his partner and she would always have his back. Just as he would always have her heart.
Clint turned to her and took her hands in his. Again in the local dialect, he spoke.
“I marry you. I marry you. I marry you.”
Looking right back into his solemn eyes, Natasha repeated, “I marry you. I marry you. I marry you.”
“Congratulations,” said the woman on the pallet with a smile. “You can now visit the town elder and be given a grand home of your own.” She gestured feebly to the walls surrounding them.
Despite the insane circumstances and the bizarre events of the last five minutes, all three adults started laughing as the children looked on in confusion.
TheAvengersTheAvengersTheAvengers
Three years later, Natasha Romanoff (not even the all-knowing and much-missed Phil Coulson had known that legally her last name was Barton) strode into the communal Avengers kitchen to purloin a carton of milk. She and Clint were out.
“Hi, Steve,” she said to the man staring intently at a laptop as he ate a bagel at the kitchen table.
“Hmm,” he acknowledged her greeting.
“Is something wrong?” she asked him as she opened the refrigerator and took out the milk.
“What? Oh,” he shook himself as he looked up and really looked at Natasha. “I, uh, no, no, I'm fine, yeah. Yeah. Thanks, though.”
“Seriously?” she asked, taking the milk with her to the table and sitting down. She couldn't think of another instance in which Steve Rogers hadn't gone out of his way to be polite when a lady entered a room. “Steve? What is it?”
“It's just-” he waved at the screen. “Tony introduced me to - he showed me -“
The tall superhero couldn't seem to get the words out. Natasha was confused. Had Tony Stark told Captain America about online porn? Steve seemed more depressed than embarrassed.
“Something on the Internet?” she prompted Steve.
“Wikipedia,” he finally got out.
Natasha tried not to laugh.
“How long have you been on it now?”
“Um, a few hours,” he replied. He looked down at the bottom of the computer screen and sat up straighter. “Oh, wow. More like six hours.” The captain blinked. “I'm really hungry, come to think of it.”
Natasha gave in to her laughter as she got up and pulled cereal, a bowl and a spoon out of various cabinets.
“Wikipedia is like that,” she said as she moved around the kitchen. “It sucks you in like a Chitauri wormhole. You're lucky to make it out alive.”
“Yeah,” Steve affirmed. “I started out reading about World War II. I'm not sure how, but for the last little while I've been reading about marriage statistics in the U.S.”
“Been there,” Natasha affirmed as she set the food down in front of her teammate and filled the bowl with milk. “Not that exact chain of links, of course, but the same idea.” She sat down next to him. “You know you can't trust everything you read there, right? Anyone can make edits to Wikipedia. That's the point.”
“I know,” he answered, absently picking up the spoon and beginning to eat. “Tony told me. There are links at the bottom, though, that take you to more reliable articles.”
Natasha decided now was not the time to discuss the trustworthiness of the Internet as a whole. Better to stick to the issue at hand.
“So the marriage statistics are bothering you?”
“Well, yeah,” Steve said, looking morosely at the computer screen. “It's just that so much has changed since I fell asleep, but I thought that - I mean, I know a lot of people live together - you know, outside of marriage, but I didn't realize how many married couples get divorced and how many couples never get married at all. Call me old-fashioned, I just thought that, you know, marriage was still around.”
“It is still around, Steve, maybe not in the ways you remember, but it's still there.” Wow, she was feeling over her head in this conversation.
“Does it ever last, though? I mean, does anyone who gets married ever stay married? Does marriage mean anything at all anymore?”
“It does to some people,” she said softly.
“Name one person at S.H.I.E.L.D. who's happily married,” he responded bitterly. “I thought it was because agents and soldiers were too busy, too focused, but it looks like it's because marriage and commitment barely exist anymore. I mean, come on, Romanoff, what are we even fighting for? What are we trying so hard to save?”
Natasha took a deep breath and Steve continued.
“One person, Natasha. That's all I ask. Name one person that I know who's in a happy, committed marriage.”
“I can name two.”
Steve looked at her in surprise.
“Who?”
“Me and Clint.”
The silence stretched between them like a tangible thing, growing larger and larger until finally Steve choked out, “What?”
“Clint and I have been married for three years.”
“But you - I mean, you two don't even live together. You have separate apartments.”
She smiled. “On the same floor, Steve. Everyone else assumes we've been sleeping together since we met. We haven't, by the way, just for three years. And we're married - happily. Albeit privately.”
“Privately,” he repeated. “Why is that, exactly?”
The corners of Natasha's mouth curved up slightly. “Aside from the fact that we're private people?” Steve smiled back at her. He couldn't argue that.
“Because in the long run it's safer for everyone to speculate as to whether or not we're a couple than to conclusively know that they could try to use one of us to manipulate the other.”
“But everyone knows how committed you are to each other -“ Steve cut himself off, unable to ignore the significance of his own statement. He gave her a nod and continued. “I think you can already be used like that, Natasha. Isn't that what Loki did?”
“And how do you think he knew it would be so effective?” she replied. “He knew what no one else did, that he wasn't just threatening Hawkeye's or even Agent Barton's partner, but that he was saying those things to Clint's wife. If anything else, that experience reminded us why we keep this to ourselves.”
“But now you're telling me.” While it was said as a statement, Steve's comment was clearly a question.
“The world is worth saving, Steve. Love exists everywhere in all kinds of forms.” She didn't mention the two pre-teens currently enrolled in neighboring Swiss boarding schools, but she thought of them as she contemplated the love that existed within families. It was the love he had seen in that small Zunibian home that prompted Clint to make the deal that he had. Yes, she knew what Steve was asking about, what he craved in the same way that young Clint Barton had. Sometimes it took only a small reassurance that such love still existed in the world to keep someone going.
There was a pause between them again, this one not quite as pregnant as the previous.
“Three years, huh?”
“Celebrated two weeks after the Battle of New York,” she affirmed with a smile.
“Does anyone else know?”
She just smiled in return. Picking up the milk, she stood and moved to exit.
As she did so, Steve chuckled. “It's probably best that Tony not hear about this - not if you two want it kept secret.”
“We made JARVIS promise when we first moved in that he would keep it to himself,” Natasha answered with a laugh of her own.
Steve's face sobered.
“Thank you, Natasha.”
She reached over and put her hand on his for a moment, then left to return to her own floor.
As she got on the elevator, Natasha thought to herself that her husband would understand why she had told Steve about them. After all, what good was family if they didn't support each other when they were needed the most?
/fin
Pairing/Character: Clint/Natasha, The Avengers
Word Count: 3122
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Clint and Natasha's romantic history helps Steve Rogers cope with the discovery of Wikipedia.
Spoilers: If you haven’t seen the movie, this won’t make much sense
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and will not be making any money off of this.
A/N: I've been snatching up Clint/Natasha fic like nobody's business and workerbee73 inspired me to try and finish one of my own. Not beta'd - all mistakes are my own.
Everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. assumed Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton started sleeping together when he first went to kill her and brought her in instead. Why else would he save her, right? Upon signing on with S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha was immediately paired with Clint, ensuring that everyone assumed their assumptions were correct. The assumers were wrong, of course, but neither Clint nor Natasha cared enough to correct them.
As it so happened, the two assassins didn't begin sleeping together until they had been partners for two years. It happened when the two of them returned to their hotel in Prague after a particularly difficult mission during which each of them had come very close to dying. Clint walked in the door first, put his bow and quiver on the end table, turned around and reached over Natasha's shoulder to shut the door.
He looked her straight in the eye, signaling silently what he was about to do, giving her the opportunity to stop him. She didn't blink. Clint's mouth descended on hers, at which point Natasha attacked him in return. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and the next truly coherent thought either of them had was a few hours later.
Clint's hand drifted up and down Natasha's spine as her hand played with the hair on his chest. Clint laughed low in his chest, earning a look up from the woman draped on top of him.
“What?” she asked with a subtle smile.
“I'd say that was inevitable,” he answered, the sexy laugh continuing.
She laughed in return. “Well, it was a stressful day.”
He pulled her closer to him, pressing his lips to her hair.
“I almost lost you-”
“And I you,” she cut him off.
“It brings things to the surface,” he said, continuing to hold her tight.
“It certainly brought things to your surface,” she purred as her hand drifted lower.
“I love you, Tasha.”
Her hand stopped.
“Love is for children,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“So what, that makes me 10? And you're what, nine?” he smiled at her.
“Hello! I'm 10. You're nine,” she humphed.
“Shall we see, then, exactly what trouble a couple of children can get into?” he asked in a low tone, the smile evident in his voice, as he rolled on top of her.
TheAvengersTheAvengersTheAvengers
Having been partners and eventually best friends for two years by the time they became more, Clint and Natasha had long since shared certain stories about their backgrounds and childhoods. For instance, she knew what Clint thought about family - it had come up one week as they conducted surveillance on a pair of elderly married drug dealers who used their age and marital status to cover up some pretty ruthless business practices. The malevolent couple had been taken out, and Natasha and Clint learned a great deal about each other's attitudes towards the concept of family.
Growing up in the circus, Clint spent most of his youth high up in tent rafters looking down over the families that came to see the sights. Over time, there was a certain kind of family that young Clint looked for, that he yearned to be a part of. After enough years, Clint could pick the five families out of a crowd of 5,000 that went past being related to each other to genuinely wanting to be there together, to liking each other, who went past doing anything for each other, to doing anything to be with each other. Sometimes there were two parents, sometimes one and gender or combinations thereof were immaterial, as were the number of children. In fact, there were couples without children whose obvious devotion to each other went past love and lust to the deeper connection Clint sought - though those were the hardest to spot. Those families, those connections, were what Clint Barton grew up wanting.
As Clint grew into his chosen profession, he had come to realize that his career path would preclude children. Children as a whole were helpless, and any child of his would be a target from the moment they were conceived. Clint Barton, plain and simple, would never make a child a target like that, not in this life or any other. And any woman he committed his life to would have to be not just strong but skilled enough to protect herself even when he couldn't be there. Eventually, while Clint still believed in deep, abiding love and the kind of family that could be built around it, Hawkeye didn't exactly see it as being much of a possibility in his own life.
For the most part, Natasha knew all of this - not that Clint had detailed the emotional depths of the sentiments, but once he opened the door, she had enough training and psychological insight to see into the room. She, in turn, had shared her lack of faith in almost all of the societal constructs existing in the world they occupied. The Soviet system had done an effective job of convincing its young protegee of its intended goal - that natural families were subservient to the state, and of an unintended goal, that the state itself was not to be trusted, thus leaving the burgeoning assassin with nothing and no one to turn to but herself.
By the time Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Hawkeye and the Black Widow, acknowledged their love for one other (more or less - him more, she less), she knew that he believed in true and lasting commitment, nigh unto marriage, while he knew that she believed in nothing beyond the rare individuals she chose to. Taking all of that into account, the admittedly odd arrangement they settled on shouldn't have been too surprising to the very few who later learned of it. Not that anyone else would have all of the back story to take into account.
Their lives as master assassins necessitated that Clint and Natasha travel to various and sundry parts of the world, many of which hardly anyone had ever heard of. One of those places was a tiny country in central Africa called Zunibia, so tiny that the human trafficking arm of an international terrorist organization that set up shop there were counting on the fact that no one could find the country, much less them and their illegal activities. The terrorists didn't count on S.H.I.E.L.D. and its agents' determination to cut off the group's most profitable enterprise.
So it was that two months after they became lovers, the two of them approached yet another decrepit shanty, Clint muttering to himself more than to Natasha, “Missionaries. The cover story had to be missionaries.”
Natasha sighed and, knowing that it fit in with who they said they were, took his hand in hers. They had been knocking on doors all morning without any success. They had, however, talked to several children and their mothers about the horror of their lives and how the two assassins-as-missionaries would try to arrange humanitarian aid from the U.N. to help them. Inured to the world the two of them might be, but it would take the human traffickers themselves to remain unfeeling to the plight of the people Natasha and Clint had spoken with that morning.
Natasha knew that all of this was hitting Clint harder than it was her, and she couldn't bring herself to quell the piece of humanity within him that allowed him to feel such. Instead she raised the hand not holding his to knock softly on the door of the next shanty in front of them.
A thin boy of about seven answered the door. In the local dialect, Clint identified Natasha and himself as Danish missionaries and asked if his mother was home and if they could speak with her. The boy looked back questioningly, and a woman's soft voice instructed him to let the visitors in.
The dust and grit that covered the village hadn't taken as firm hold inside the one-room home. The boy and a girl, perhaps one year younger, moved to sit on a neat, if worn, pallet of blankets next to the woman who was most likely their mother. It was clear that the woman was in the advanced stages of AIDS, a disease afflicting a high percentage of both young and old in the area. Natasha recognized that these children, like so many others in this area, would be orphans soon. Clint's hand squeezed imperceptibly tighter in hers and she turned her head to look at him.
“Mistress,” Clint addressed the sick woman whose age was indeterminate - she could have been 20 or 40 - according to local custom, “my partner and I would like to make a proposal to you.”
We would? thought Natasha.
“Tradition in your village requires that in order to be recognized, a marriage must have one adult witness, is that correct?”
“Yes,” murmured the prone woman.
“If you will serve as the witness for my partner and I, we will see to it that your children are moved to Europe and receive an education there.”
Natasha Romanoff, known and feared the world over as the Black Widow, did an actual double-take at her partner's words. What the hell?
Seemingly unaffected, the children's mother asked softly, “Why would you do this?”
“We have personal reasons for keeping our marriage quiet, mistress. And you want to a better life for your children.”
“I am not the only mother near death in Ka'awani,” she replied softly.
“You are the only one we are asking.”
The ageless woman regarded them both for a moment.
“I would do anything for my children. Even take the word of a Westerner who would say anything to get what he wants. I will do this for you. I ask only that if you do not see my children to a safe place that you see to their deaths. For that would be preferable to what awaits them as orphans in Ka'awani. My only regret is that I have not been able to bring myself to do this.”
“We will see your children to a safe land, mistress,” Natasha assured her. She might not have any clue what Clint was thinking or where this had come from, but she was his partner and she would always have his back. Just as he would always have her heart.
Clint turned to her and took her hands in his. Again in the local dialect, he spoke.
“I marry you. I marry you. I marry you.”
Looking right back into his solemn eyes, Natasha repeated, “I marry you. I marry you. I marry you.”
“Congratulations,” said the woman on the pallet with a smile. “You can now visit the town elder and be given a grand home of your own.” She gestured feebly to the walls surrounding them.
Despite the insane circumstances and the bizarre events of the last five minutes, all three adults started laughing as the children looked on in confusion.
TheAvengersTheAvengersTheAvengers
Three years later, Natasha Romanoff (not even the all-knowing and much-missed Phil Coulson had known that legally her last name was Barton) strode into the communal Avengers kitchen to purloin a carton of milk. She and Clint were out.
“Hi, Steve,” she said to the man staring intently at a laptop as he ate a bagel at the kitchen table.
“Hmm,” he acknowledged her greeting.
“Is something wrong?” she asked him as she opened the refrigerator and took out the milk.
“What? Oh,” he shook himself as he looked up and really looked at Natasha. “I, uh, no, no, I'm fine, yeah. Yeah. Thanks, though.”
“Seriously?” she asked, taking the milk with her to the table and sitting down. She couldn't think of another instance in which Steve Rogers hadn't gone out of his way to be polite when a lady entered a room. “Steve? What is it?”
“It's just-” he waved at the screen. “Tony introduced me to - he showed me -“
The tall superhero couldn't seem to get the words out. Natasha was confused. Had Tony Stark told Captain America about online porn? Steve seemed more depressed than embarrassed.
“Something on the Internet?” she prompted Steve.
“Wikipedia,” he finally got out.
Natasha tried not to laugh.
“How long have you been on it now?”
“Um, a few hours,” he replied. He looked down at the bottom of the computer screen and sat up straighter. “Oh, wow. More like six hours.” The captain blinked. “I'm really hungry, come to think of it.”
Natasha gave in to her laughter as she got up and pulled cereal, a bowl and a spoon out of various cabinets.
“Wikipedia is like that,” she said as she moved around the kitchen. “It sucks you in like a Chitauri wormhole. You're lucky to make it out alive.”
“Yeah,” Steve affirmed. “I started out reading about World War II. I'm not sure how, but for the last little while I've been reading about marriage statistics in the U.S.”
“Been there,” Natasha affirmed as she set the food down in front of her teammate and filled the bowl with milk. “Not that exact chain of links, of course, but the same idea.” She sat down next to him. “You know you can't trust everything you read there, right? Anyone can make edits to Wikipedia. That's the point.”
“I know,” he answered, absently picking up the spoon and beginning to eat. “Tony told me. There are links at the bottom, though, that take you to more reliable articles.”
Natasha decided now was not the time to discuss the trustworthiness of the Internet as a whole. Better to stick to the issue at hand.
“So the marriage statistics are bothering you?”
“Well, yeah,” Steve said, looking morosely at the computer screen. “It's just that so much has changed since I fell asleep, but I thought that - I mean, I know a lot of people live together - you know, outside of marriage, but I didn't realize how many married couples get divorced and how many couples never get married at all. Call me old-fashioned, I just thought that, you know, marriage was still around.”
“It is still around, Steve, maybe not in the ways you remember, but it's still there.” Wow, she was feeling over her head in this conversation.
“Does it ever last, though? I mean, does anyone who gets married ever stay married? Does marriage mean anything at all anymore?”
“It does to some people,” she said softly.
“Name one person at S.H.I.E.L.D. who's happily married,” he responded bitterly. “I thought it was because agents and soldiers were too busy, too focused, but it looks like it's because marriage and commitment barely exist anymore. I mean, come on, Romanoff, what are we even fighting for? What are we trying so hard to save?”
Natasha took a deep breath and Steve continued.
“One person, Natasha. That's all I ask. Name one person that I know who's in a happy, committed marriage.”
“I can name two.”
Steve looked at her in surprise.
“Who?”
“Me and Clint.”
The silence stretched between them like a tangible thing, growing larger and larger until finally Steve choked out, “What?”
“Clint and I have been married for three years.”
“But you - I mean, you two don't even live together. You have separate apartments.”
She smiled. “On the same floor, Steve. Everyone else assumes we've been sleeping together since we met. We haven't, by the way, just for three years. And we're married - happily. Albeit privately.”
“Privately,” he repeated. “Why is that, exactly?”
The corners of Natasha's mouth curved up slightly. “Aside from the fact that we're private people?” Steve smiled back at her. He couldn't argue that.
“Because in the long run it's safer for everyone to speculate as to whether or not we're a couple than to conclusively know that they could try to use one of us to manipulate the other.”
“But everyone knows how committed you are to each other -“ Steve cut himself off, unable to ignore the significance of his own statement. He gave her a nod and continued. “I think you can already be used like that, Natasha. Isn't that what Loki did?”
“And how do you think he knew it would be so effective?” she replied. “He knew what no one else did, that he wasn't just threatening Hawkeye's or even Agent Barton's partner, but that he was saying those things to Clint's wife. If anything else, that experience reminded us why we keep this to ourselves.”
“But now you're telling me.” While it was said as a statement, Steve's comment was clearly a question.
“The world is worth saving, Steve. Love exists everywhere in all kinds of forms.” She didn't mention the two pre-teens currently enrolled in neighboring Swiss boarding schools, but she thought of them as she contemplated the love that existed within families. It was the love he had seen in that small Zunibian home that prompted Clint to make the deal that he had. Yes, she knew what Steve was asking about, what he craved in the same way that young Clint Barton had. Sometimes it took only a small reassurance that such love still existed in the world to keep someone going.
There was a pause between them again, this one not quite as pregnant as the previous.
“Three years, huh?”
“Celebrated two weeks after the Battle of New York,” she affirmed with a smile.
“Does anyone else know?”
She just smiled in return. Picking up the milk, she stood and moved to exit.
As she did so, Steve chuckled. “It's probably best that Tony not hear about this - not if you two want it kept secret.”
“We made JARVIS promise when we first moved in that he would keep it to himself,” Natasha answered with a laugh of her own.
Steve's face sobered.
“Thank you, Natasha.”
She reached over and put her hand on his for a moment, then left to return to her own floor.
As she got on the elevator, Natasha thought to herself that her husband would understand why she had told Steve about them. After all, what good was family if they didn't support each other when they were needed the most?
/fin