There has been too much death!fic for me lately, so I wrote this to cheer me up.

Caveat lector: here be shameless, unadulterated fluff. Sure, there's a smattering of angst, but it's only to make the fluff fluffier.

Enjoy!

Five Times Clint Woke Up in the Middle of the Night and One Time Natasha Did

1.

He wasn't sure why he woke up at first; he glanced around for the digital readout of the clock – 2 AM. He noticed that Natasha was no longer in the bed beside him, which in and of itself was not a cause for worry; she usually slipped away in the middle of the night. Judging by the coolness of the sheets, she'd done so a while ago.

As he came more awake, he realized that there was more light in the room than there should be for the time of day, and he searched around for its source, finding a golden glow peeking out from under the bathroom door. He hauled himself out of bed with a grunt and padded over to the bathroom, tugging his pajama pants higher on his hips.

"Nat?" he asked raspily, opening the door a crack and poking his head inside. She was sitting curled up on the toilet, her knees to her chest and her head buried in her arms.

"Nat?" he hurried toward her, squatting back on his heels. He reached a hand out to her shoulder. "What's wrong? Are you feeling okay?" She shook her head and looked up at him, pale faced and terrified.

Clint put his hand to her forehead, truly worried now. She never looked scared, not like this, not even when she was seriously injured. He ran through all the possible scenarios in his head – an infected wound, a flu she'd picked up on the last mission, cancer . . .

He shook himself mentally, brought himself back to the present. "Can you stand? Let's get you downstairs to the med lab."

He started to tug her up, but she stopped him, resisted.

"No."

Her voice was unusually rough, as if she'd been crying recently, a sound he'd only heard from her once before, long ago, when she'd confessed the worst of her misdeeds to him in a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere.

"Please?" He pleaded, knowing she would take convincing. "You don't look good at all. Let me take you downstairs."

Natasha shook her head more violently this time, dropped her feet to the floor. "I don't need a doctor, Clint. I'm fine."

He knew she hated hospitals, and he didn't blame her, but this was going a bit too far. "You don't have to act tough. Everyone knows how tough you are. You can tell everyone I made you go, just please, let's get you checked out."

She didn't budge though, just smiled a bit ruefully. "It really isn't something for a doctor." She rolled her eyes a bit. "Well, not yet anyway."

His brow crinkled and he dropped back down into a crouch in front of her. "Then tell me. What's going on?"

She took a deep breath, in, then out, and she motioned with her head toward the counter top. He tracked the motion, spied a thin piece of white plastic on the counter. He reached out to it, picked it up, and he fell backward onto the floor, shocked. He stared at the plastic stick for a long time.

He considered his next words very carefully, weighing each of his option in turn. Then, before he could make a rational decision, he found himself saying, "Oh."

Natasha snorted. "Pretty much my reaction, too."

He didn't have words for this, didn't know what he was thinking or feeling, and so he just stared, open mouthed and wide eyed at the little piece of plastic that just changed his life.

Natasha broke his reverie with a whispered, "Say something."

"Uh," he was at a loss, didn't understand how this could have happened.

"'Uh' is not an acceptable answer," she chided, half serious.

"I didn't think . . . how did this . . .?" He stammered, flailing for the right words.

Natasha leveled her gaze at him. "The usual way, genius."

"Well, yes, I know that," he said, then scrubbed his hand across his face. "I just meant, I thought that you, you know, weren't able to . . ." He was afraid to say it, afraid that saying it might make it real.

She stared at her hands in her lap. "I know. I shouldn't be able to. When they took me, they took that away, too." He didn't need to ask who "they" were. He knew perfectly well what the Red Room was and what they did to turn little girls into perfect super spies.

So he asked, "But then, how?"

"I have no idea, but I am." She looked over at the garbage can, which he now saw was overflowing with cardboard packaging. "I took like, six different tests."

"Those things can be wrong, you know," Clint noted, not sure if he wanted them to be.

Natasha shakes her head. "Maybe one or two, but six? Besides, there have been other . . . signs, too."

Now that she mentioned it, he did seem to recall those signs himself, but he'd discounted them at the time, wrote them off as something else. On Tuesday, for example, when she'd thrown up in the kitchen, he'd blamed Tony's cooking; Clint had very nearly lost it alongside her.

He cleared his throat. "Gotcha. But, still, how is this even possible?"

"I don't know, maybe they screwed something up, or maybe it happened since I'm no longer getting doses of the serum, or maybe, fuck, I don't know, maybe I'm just going to fucking miscarry anyway, oh, fuck." She started shaking then, rattling on nervously, and Clint put a hand on her knee.

"What do you want me to do?" He asked.

"I just . . . Just say something, please."

He stared at her, feeling light headed and out of breath. "I don't . . . I don't know what to say."

She bit her lip, looking nervous. "It doesn't matter. I need you to say something. I need you . . ." she started to add something else, but broke it off in the middle, and it was the crack in her voice that gutted him, took all the rational thought out of him, and brought a tear to his eye.

"Fuck, Nat," he hissed as he grabbed her, pulled her off the toilet and down to his level. She scrambled willingly into his lap, straddling him, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, clinging and breathing deeply into his neck. He gathered her into his embrace, threading his fingers through her hair, and suddenly, he knew exactly what he needed to say.

"What do you want to do?" he whispered into her hair, and he felt his heart constrict as he waited for her response.

She sat back, but didn't break his embrace. She didn't quite meet his eyes when she spoke, but stared at his chest instead.

"I'm not sure." She ran her fingers over his collarbone, met his eyes tentatively. "There are options. But I'd hoped you would know what to do."

Clint brushed his fingers over her brow, trying to smooth out the wrinkles he found there, then he let out a chuckle. "I'm as new to this as you are, babe. Didn't exactly plan for something like this."

She sniffed and swiped a hand across her eyes. "Yeah. Me either." Her hands dropped to her waist, and behind the pained expression, he thought he saw longing, a desperate glimmer of want. "Do . . . do you . . ." She couldn't quite ask it, but he knew her well enough to understand anyway.

"Yes." It was simple, as declarations go, and he was surprised to discover that he meant it.

She looked up at him, her face scrunched up and tears welled up in her eyes as she curled her fingers around the waistband of his pants.

"Really?" She asked in a strangled sob.

He nodded, feeling wetness in his own eyes. "Yeah."

"It won't be easy," she said.

"Don't care."

"We have enemies," she pointed out.

"We'll handle them."

"I might not even be able to carry it to term."

"We live with two of the world's greatest scientists; they'll figure something out." And when he said it, he knew, without a doubt, that it was true.

She was running out of excuses, he knew, and he could see the grin starting to tug at the corners of her mouth. "We don't know how to take care of a baby."

At that word, baby, he grinned right back at her, heedless of the tears streaming down his cheeks. "We'll learn."

"One of us will have to leave the field."

"I'll take a desk job." Shit, he'd walk right out the fucking door of SHIELD if he had to, never to look back.

"Fury will be pissed to lose his best sniper." She wasn't even really arguing anymore, and they both knew it.

"He'll get over it." He brought his hands up to her face, searched her eyes for lingering doubt and found none.

"We'll be terrible parents," she finished lamely.

He nodded, brushed a tear from her cheek. "Yeah. But we'll figure it out."

And then he pulled her in, kissed her, and the world started spinning again.