"Oh, well that was unexpected."

Natasha Romanov had a lot of money, like a lot.

She had money strewn across the globe; cash in various currencies stashed in mattresses and under floorboards of safe houses; numbers on a screen in bank accounts under more aliases then she would care to admit; she had it invested in shares of companies both legitimate and some...less so; and even the odd locked cash box buried under specific trees in the middle of forests only she, and maybe a certain archer, would ever be able to find.

The fact of the matter was, years of freelance work as an assassin and a level six salary from SHIELD, meant that if she wanted, Natasha could retire and live out the rest of her life, and potentially thirty more, in luxury, without ever having to lift a finger again. And although she had no intention of doing so, it was nice to have the option.

For all the shit she had put up with in her life, all the crap she had been through, worrying about money had never been a issue, even in her darkest times.

"What?" Clint asked, standing up from behind the open door of the fridge and swigging from a carton of orange juice.

Natasha looked over from her position on the sofa and rolled her eyes. "We have glasses."

"Actually, I broke one this morning while you were getting milk so now we have…glass."

"Whatever." Nat smirked, making a mental note to drag him to IKEA for more tableware; when they had any more than one other person around, it left at least one of them drinking shiraz from a coffee mug.

Nat looked down at the small piece of paper in her hands, and back up at the television where a muted show continued to play and a blonde hostess paraded around a gaudy set in a push-up bra and $20 stilettoes. "Hey, come look at this."

Clint placed the carton of juice back in the fridge door, kicking it shut with his foot, and wandered over to where Natasha was siting. At some point since moving in she had dragged the coffee table in the middle of their apartment closer to the couch, so that her feet could rest next to the scattered pile of old magazines they were accumulating. The fact that for months now the table had not been in the centre of the rug and was completely off-centre in the room, did wonders to infuriate Steve. It was perhaps eighty per cent of the reason neither of them had bothered to move it back.

He dropped down next to her and mirrored Nat's position, putting his feet up on the table and kicking off the top layer of magazines in the process. 'Guns and Gardens' – a subscription Stark had found far too amusing not to gift to the assassins for Christmas- slid to the floor, startling the black cat on the armchair and causing the dog under the table to crack open his one eye.

"What's up?" Clint asked, slinging an arm over Natasha's shoulder.

"When I went to get milk, this morning, I got this." Nat held out a small folded piece of paper slotted in between two outstretched fingers.

Clint plucked it from her hand and unfolded it. He glanced over the printed text for a moment before turning back to the redhead with creased brows.

"You bought a lottery ticket?" he questioned incredulously. "Nat, we got more money than Stark-,"

She raised a brow.

"-Well, maybe not quite." Clint corrected. "But we got more money than we could possibly spend. Why'd you buy into this crap?" He waved the ticket in her face.

"Actually," Natasha flicked the paper in his hand away from her face, "the dude behind the counter bought it for me."

"Fabio?" Clint leaned away from her slightly in order to see her whole face. His frown got deeper. "I told you he had a thing a for you. I swear to God, every time we're in there together he just stares down your shirt at the counter. What a creep, I'm gonna go down to that store and stick an arrow so far up his a-,"

"It wasn't Fabio!" Natasha interrupted.

"Oh." Clint's frown dissipated slightly. "Then who was it? Henry? Because sometimes the kid gives me free gum because he thinks I'll buy him beer. I never have!" Clint clarified at Nat's slight change in expression. "But I always take the free gum."

Nat rolled her eyes. "It was Joe."

Realisation dawned on Clint's features as he put the name to a face. "Oh," he dragged out, "Joe?" Natasha nodded. "Good guy, Joe."

"Yeah he is."

"Y'know, sometimes I see him at the Starbucks on fifth."

"I think he works there weekends." Natasha mused.

"I swear that dude works harder than any of us. And for better reasons."

Natasha's brown knitted together. "What do you mean?"

"A few years back I used to go down every morning to get coffee, y'know, before you came in and brought-,"

"An actual coffee maker." She smirked.

"Right. But I saw him every morning for months, and we would chat-,"

Nat raised a brow. "You would…chat? Manly."

"Chat. Talk. We weren't gossiping or anything."

"Manly." Natasha affirmed.

Clint flicked her with the lottery ticket. "Shush. My story."

Nat mimed zipping her mouth and throwing away the key.

"Okay." Clint continued. "So we'd talk about stuff, manly stuff, and this one day I go down get my coffee and Joe's not there, some other dude is behind the counter."

Natasha listened intently to the story, all evidence of the smirk gone from her face.

"And when I asked where Joe was, the guy tells me," Clint's eyes flicked away from Natasha to a photograph of the black cat and one-eyed dog snuggled up together on their bed, hanging on the wall, "his wife died."

"Fuck." Natasha breathed.

Clint's gaze fell back down to his partner's unreadable expression. "Yeah. I didn't see Joe for a while." He shrugged. "A few weeks or something. I thought maybe he'd just took off or something, but then one day, I go down and there he is, all smiles for the customers, behind the counter."

"Poor Joe." Unreadable began to morph into sympathetic.

"Poor Joe." Clint repeated. "We never really talked about it. I mean it's not like we were even friends, but, I once told him it was good to see him back, and he told me 'When you got a reason to smile, you smile. When you got a reason to continue, you continue. When you got a reason to work, you work'."

Natasha nodded. "That's true." A tiny smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

Clint's grip on her shoulders tightened and he pressed a kiss into her hair. "Yeah." He nuzzled the side of her face. "Very true. I told Joe that was a good philosophy to live by, and he said he had four reasons to smile, to continue and to work."

"Four?"

"His kids." Clint clarified. "Little kids too, I think. He once showed he a photo."

Natasha dropped her head to Clint's shoulder, snuggling closer to him on the couch. "Good old Joe." She said quietly.

"Good old Joe." Clint agreed, but then turned slightly to look at her. "So what's the deal with the ticket? Joe never gave me a free lotto ticket."

"Oh." Natasha sat up slightly and eyed the paper in Clint's hand, having seemingly forgotten it was even the original topic of conversation. "Well, he said he found a scratch-off outside yesterday worth ten bucks, so he decided to buy ten tickets and hand them out to the first ten customers."

Clint grinned. "Good old Joe!" He laughed. "We should introduce him to Steve, I bet he'd get along with Captain Chivalry really well."

"I bet. Anyway," Nat steered the conversation back to its initial direction, "I think we should give this ticket back to Joe."

"Why?"

Natasha tapped the ticket and gestured towards the mute TV. Six numbers in red and blue graphics lay over the moving images of the show. The jackpot amount stood out in bright yellow at the top right of the screen.

Nat smiled coyly. "Because it's worth forty-five million dollars."

"Well, shit." Clint grinned. "Let's go see good old Joe."

A/N: Hey! Thanks for reading, reviews are loved. Let me know if you would like an extra chapter or two to go with this. Marking it as complete for now, but if people fancy it, I'm up for doing a couple extra chaps. xxx