Clint's been gone for three hours when she starts to get suspicions that he hasn't just gone to the grocery store like he said he was going to. He'd gone because it was his turn, even though it was Tony who wanted more beers. The shopping rota had fallen to the Hawkeye to brave the store, and he'd headed out a while ago with the list of things that Tony wanted, and the list of things on the back that Steve insisted they needed. Wants and needs, food and drink, thus was the every day life of Stark Tower; taking it in turns to brave the crowds - some more willing than others.

But Clint's been gone for three hours when the store he usually chooses is only an hour away including the return trip. Like her, he was almost a slave to regular time-keeping, planning and exit strategies, even when it came to grocery shopping. The only reason she'd failed to notice his prolonged absence before now was because a rare quiet afternoon had given her a chance to read her book in an empty communal room, and it was only when she'd gone to refill her coffee mug that she'd realised there wasn't any coffee left...which meant that Clint hadn't refilled it...which meant that Clint wasn't back from the store yet.

Suspicions were settled, however, when only moments later the main door opened and she heard the audible voice of J.A.R.V.I.S greeting Clint. It was impossible to convince the A.I. Unit not to announce their arrivals, even though she'd attempted to go through his mainframe once. Clint shuffled into the kitchen area, and clutching two bags against his jacket and looking stunned to her there.

"Umm...hi."

Clint Barton was nervous.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Hi," she replied back casually. "What took you so long?"

"Shopping," he mumbled, sliding the bags onto the counter and quickly turning away from her, hurrying away with another bag of a different colour cradled to his stomach.

Suspicions alterted, and plus, she really didn't like it when he so blatantly hid things from her, she followed him, following him into his private room and sliding through the gap in the door before he could close it. He clutched the bag to his chest. "Nat!"

She just stared at him, leaning back against the door, blocking his exit. "What are you hiding?" she asked him.

He frowned. "I'm not hiding anything."

"What's in the bag?" she challenged.

"Nothing."

"So it's empty," she assumed.

"No."

"Then there must be something in it."

He stood, caught between mumbling apologetically and holding his ground, and that's when she realised she was arguing against a proverbial hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar. She kind of wanted to laugh at that, because this was a game she was familiar with. This was a game she could win, because she was the only one that Clint would allow to play this particular game. He knew that the Black Widow always got what she wanted from her clients, but the Natasha beneath the Widow always wormed his secrets away from and that was why she knew he was lying.

"There's food in it," he told her defensively.

"Then why didn't you leave it in the kitchen with the other bags?" she asked.

He had no answer, he just bit his tongue a little.

She grinned to herself, only allowing a smirk in his direction and then gestured out her hands. "You don't want the food to spoil. I'll take it to the kitchen."

And then three things happened. Natasha smirked. Clint's grip tightened on the bag. And Clint's jacket yelped.

And then there was silence and neither of them moved for a long time.

"Clint?" she asked, the question she needed to ask dying on her lips.

"Yes?" he asked innocently. But really, how innocent can one appear after something in your jacket has made a noise?

"What do you have in your jacket?"

"Keys, wallet, phone..."

She lunged and grabbed the bag from him and watching his hands fly to protect the lump it had been concealing in the front of his jacket. "You are hiding something from me!"

And there was that noise again, and her eyes narrowed and Clint looked at her as though taking the bag from him had caused him emotional damage. "Don't move so fast, you're scaring her!"

"Her?" she questioned.

Caught with nowhere to go and no way to avoid it, he slowly unzipped his jacket, revealing the reason for the yelping jump within his coat. He pulled out the incredibly fluffy lump and cradled it in his arms like a mother with her newborn, and Natasha just stared, and stared, until there was only one thing left to say.

"Clint...that's a puppy."

He gave her a grumpy expression. "What did you think it was, a giraffe?" he drawled sarcastically.

"Why do you have a puppy?"

He shrugged somewhat, barely even blinking to the fact that this puppy, a St. Bernard, was gnawing on his thumb. "She followed me."

"It followed you and jumped in your jacket?" she raised an eyebrow. "Clint, how did you get it here? Stark's going to freak, you can't have a puppy in a research building like this."

"She," he corrected softly, lifting the puppy in his arms a little more and all she could think about was how big it was already, and how big it was going to grow... "It's a girl, I checked."

"Yes, because you're a reliable vet," she shot back.

"I couldn't leave her, okay!" he cried back, eyes seeped with desperation. "She was dumped in a box, someone had been getting rid of puppies for good homes and she was the last one left, and it was starting to rain, and I couldn't leave her!"

Clint had always been a soft touch when it came to animals, she knew that. She knew all to well that Clint would readily offer his windowsill to a nesting bird and would happily feed the squirrel that he'd been somehow keeping up on the roof. She knew that Clint, above all else, had a soft spot in his heart that had been reserved for lost causes - starting with the day he hadn't been able to kill her when SHIELD ordered him to. It had given her a new start, and had opened him up to becoming a one-man zoo as far as she was concerned. Clint slipped away to admire wildlife on the tail end of missions, and once she'd covered for him missing a targets arrival when he had been sitting close to an actual hawk in a tree.

And now he'd found himself a puppy. Strangely, she always knew this day would come. Just like she was still waiting for the day when she walked in and found him with a bird on his shoulder. She could make all the suggestions in the world but he wouldn't have left that puppy alone in a box if there had a been a $10,000 price tag around its neck.

"I couldn't leave her there," he mumbled again when she didn't reply. "Look at her, Nat..."

He held the puppy's face towards Natasha, and she was present with two shining, beady eyes radiating adoration. Of course, she knew how this story went. Clint walked past with the groceries, came across the puppy who looked at him with these big, sad eyes, and he was drawn in and fell in love with the damn thing.

"Clint," she said softly, putting her hand over his. "I understand that she's very sweet, but you didn't think this through, did you? It's not good for her to be here."

"Why not?" he asked. "I'll take care of her."

"Where is she going to run? When she needs to go outside and do her business, do you think she's just going to wait for the elevator to take you downstairs? The roof terrace isn't large enough for her to run around on-"

"But-"

"And who's going to take care of her when we're on a mission? Did you consider that? You can't just leave her on her own for long periods of time."

"But-"

"Or even short periods of time in this building. Think what could happen if she got into one of the lab rooms."

"But-"

"Or what if-"...she trailed off, her eyes falling on something shimmering from around the puppy's neck. She moved her fingers from the back of Clint's hand to around it's neck, coming into contact with the red, leather collar and the silver crown shape of an identity tag. "Clint, tell me you didn't name her already."

His eyes widened a little as he met her gaze. "I didn't name her," he mumbled.

She looked closely at the tag, ignoring the way that the puppy licked the back of her hand when she admired it, reading the name from it aloud. "Apollonia." Her eyes lifted again to Clint. "You didn't name her?"

He shook his head, saying nothing.

"So, you just happened to find a dog, free to a loving home, completely alone, already wearing a collar and bearing the name of a Godfather character?"

"...yes," he decided to mumble.

She sighed, letting go of the tag and removing her hand from the puppy's grasp. "Clint, the only way you could be acting more guilty is if it had 'Corleone' written around it's neck."

He scrunched his eyes up and gave her a strange expression. "Well, that would be stupid, because she's not a boy."

She sighed again, pinching her hand to the top of her nose and counting slowly back from five. Puppies needed love, and affection. Clint could deliver that in spades, she had no doubt. It was the practicality of it that she was arguing. What would it eat, where would it sleep, what would they do with it while they were on missions? She wanted to reel of the realities of it to him, tell him the horror stories from the dog training show that Bruce had started watching reruns of at 4am, and yet she couldn't.

She couldn't shatter him because he was already in love with this creature. He could overlook the dog slobber on his wrist and the shed hair clinging to his t-shirt, and even the claw scratch she could see on the inside of his arm from where he'd been holding her inside the jacket. He was letting this puppy - this very large puppy - snuggle in his arms and he was holding her like he'd protect her from the world.

It was already too late.

She released her forehead and looked up and him with the dog, not at all suprised to see that Clint was letting the puppy lick underneath his chin with a boyish grin on his face. "I want to hold her," she said softly.

He looked at her, directing his attention away from the puppy. "Only if we can keep her," he grins back.

They keep her together, that goes without saying. Anything Clint does she instantly becomes a part of because they're partners. He's there when she brings home more wounds than planned on a mission so she's there when he brings back the puppy from the box outside the grocery story. In fact, in all the time they've been partners she can't remember a time that they've dealt with something of any importance separately, so it only makes sense that it becomes a team effort to keep the puppy hidden from Tony.

Tony wouldn't stand for a pet in his home, and they don't even bother hinting at the idea. Clint wants the dog. Clint wants her, and after a few days of keeping her hidden away in his rooms even Natasha is growing attached to the ball of fur that greets them when they slip into Clint's room at every opportunity.

Apollonia, or "my baby" as Clint so often refers to her, becomes their best project. It's not easy to keep her hidden as she pines whenever Clint leaves the room at first, even to go into the adjoining bathroom, and as much as he makes a fuss of her when he returns only thirty seconds later and tells her that the sound hurt his heart a little, she knows that this is the first time he's felt relied on, needed, wanted by someone who couldn't defend themselves, and she knows that he's enjoying it.

She can't bring herself to compromise that, to take that away from him, because this puppy he bought home signifies the normal life outside of SHIELD that they'll never have.

Together they keep her hidden. It takes Natasha only two hours to programme/threaten J.A.R.V.I.S into not responding to the noises the puppy makes while Clint holds Apollonia above his head and tells her that she's his beautiful princess. She's never seen him as open as he is around the dog, 'their' dog, he tells her. And she supposes that it is 'theirs', because it's not just Clint that she snuggles up to at night, and she's becoming very fond of running her hands over Apollonia's fur when she's reading in the evenings.

The others become suspicious of how much time their team mates are spending shut away in Clint's room. When they assume that they're sleeping together they don't bother to correct anyone. They've actually been sleeping together for years, and have never spent a night apart with the exception of work reasons, and none of them have noticed that Clint makes Natasha's coffee in the morning and that Natasha rubs his shoulders after a long day training. If they have noticed, they haven't said anything, not until most of their downtime is spent in Clint's room with the puppy. The sneak her onto the roof terrace in the dead of night, letting her scamper around in the gardened corner that isn't overlooked by any of the bedrooms and that she has no chance of tumbling from.

Natasha goes to the pet store one day and brings back a large bed, sneaking it into the building with expertise that Clint never questions, and a guide book for the breed, and his eyes do widen when he sees how large this particular breed is going to grow. That's the main reason for the large bed that they decide she'll grow into, and also because they haven't had sex in a week where they've been focused on keeping her hidden and she refuses to get intimate with Clint with the dog in the bed.

They end up not having sex that night, because every time a kiss becomes a caress, Apollonia makes a noise from her new bed on the floor that Clint insists is breaking his heart and eventually they have to let her sleep in the gap she forces between their pillows because otherwise this whine is going to wake everyone in the building.

Apollonia becomes a part of their partnership, and she makes them both softer. They don't realise how much so until Clint's brave enough to slide a hand over Natasha's knee beneath the table during a briefing, and she completely understands when he's trying not to shed tears when he's sent to Morocco for a week and she stays alone at Stark Tower with the dog. Clint calls them a family three weeks after they start keeping her, and when she's successfully been kept for two months Natasha finally resigns herself to the fact that Clint is the dog's "daddy", but she still has to go and shoot things for nine hours when Clint speaks to the dog and refers to her as "momma."

But she is Clint's baby, and she can't deny him that. There might not be a life away from SHIELD and the Avengers where a family is in the future, and that could be denied on her history of injuries alone. She never looked into it before, never wanted to know, and she doesn't want to bring up the issue now, not when Clint's found a focus that makes him - them - happy. Because they are happy. Because love is for children and the childish assassins-turned heroes can laugh insanely and reach for a camera on the day that they try to give the rapidly growing puppy a bath, and wrapping her in a towel afterwards catches the folds of her snout in a way that leaves her tongue dangling wildly from her mouth. Because they can laugh at three am when for once, they call her to come to whoever she loves the most and just once she picks Natasha because she's hiding treats in her pocket. Because she relaxes as the dog slides against her thigh when she reads and Clint can't fight the grin when he enters the bedroom and the dog leaps against him, crushing him into the wall.

No one discovers that the two assassins have been hiding a puppy in Stark Tower until one night they're watching a movie together. It becomes a thing that Tony insists upon weekly, since Thor has been visiting more often for Jane and Steve's movie knowledge isn't up to Tony's requirements. Tony selects the Godfather, which no one has any complaints about and it's not until that moment, when Sicilian hills roll onto the screen and Michael Corleone is walking across them and he looks up and he sees her and -

"I forgot to feed Apollonia!" Clint cries, leaping from the couch where Natasha had been happily dozing on his shoulder.

Clint's halfway to the bedroom when the others are following, because "feed" generally goes with a living creature, and Natasha chooses not to witness the downfall of having a one-year-old St. Bernard puppy discovered in the Tower, but she does choose to photograph the group of men later as they sit around and fuss over her.

It goes well, considering they're angry that they've been hiding her for a year, but there's really only so much anger Tony can get away with because he's still not-so-secretly afraid of Natasha. Bruce thinks she's adorable, Thor thinks she's the best thing on the planet, Steve thinks she's not that bad and Tony thinks that there's a dog in his house, and Clint is...frowning.

Natasha glides over to him where he's leaning against the wall with a scowl on his face. "I thought you'd be happy, we don't have to hide her any more," she smiles.

But Clint is scowling because Thor is cradling his puppy, because Thor and Steve are the only one strong enough to lift her from the ground at the size she is now, and he's grumbling under his breath.

"What was that?" Natasha asked.

"My baby loves them too," he complained.

She laughs some, leaning her head on his shoulder again - she can get away with holding his hand, too, because the others are so engrossed in the dog that she'll let public displays of affection slide. "Don't worry, Daddy Clint," she smirked at him, planting a kiss on his cheek. "We all know who her favourite is."