If anyone has any interest, the song that mainly drove my muse for this story was "In Our Bedroom After the War" by Stars.

The day she was finally allowed to be on her feet for longer than five minutes at a time was the same day that Tony put the final touches on, "The one and only pair of hearing aids Stark Industries will ever produce," as he put it. "Well...at least until you bust these doing something stupid and need a new pair." He helped Clint put the aids in and showed him how to switch them on before slipping a thin black metal bracelet around his wrist.

"I got the idea for this from Petrovitch's suit," explained Tony, shaking Clint's wrist. "Only take it with you on missions or you could go into sensory overload."

Frowning, Clint looked down at the bracelet. "What is it?"

Tony grinned at Bruce and Natasha, who were there for technical and moral support. "Guys, keep it down really low. Like, try not to breathe, and Clint, fasten together the ends of your bracelet at the eyelets."

Clint did as he was told, squeezing the bracelet until the ends were tight together, and nearly swore out loud. Not only could he hear, but he could hear everything. Natasha's hairs brushing against one another when she moved her head. A fly buzzing in the other room. Blood rushing through his own veins. The hum of Tony's arc reactor like feedback from a microphone. Pepper and Maria laughing three floors down. Their heartbeats were clear as bells, and underneath them, something smaller that almost completely floored Clint.

"I-" Holy shit, voices were like thunder. He would be able to hear a whisper a hundred feet away. Clint pulled the ends of the bracelet apart and shook his head like a wet dog as the world immediately went back to normal. The normal he'd known before his kidnapping. Natasha was watching him with wide, anxious eyes. "I think I could hear the baby's heartbeat," he said, stunned.

The others beamed at him. "Just don't watch a movie while that's activated or your head might explode," Tony advised him with a pat on the shoulder.

He turned to Natasha. "Say something," he pleaded. "Say anything."

For a long moment she thought, trying to think of the perfect first words to hear from her since his kidnapping. I love you was too cliche. Maybe some code? Or another language? Another apology would only exasperate him, and yet despite the promise to restore his hearing she had still felt unerringly responsible for everything that happened.

"Katerina for a girl," she said before she'd even finished thinking it over. "And Vanya for a boy. I've decided. We can call them Kate and John if you want to, good sturdy Iowa farmboy names, and you can teach them how to shoot and I'll teach them how to fight, because even though you're good at hand-to-hand I'm better. They won't have to be like us, they won't be damaged and afraid to close their eyes at night. They'll go to high school and get into fights and fall in love like normal people. We will be the most terrifying in-laws." She shook her head, laughing at her husband's blank face. "You can hear me, right?" she asked.

A grin split his face as he pulled her into his arms. "I thought I forgot your voice. Oh my god, I love you." Over her head, he said to Tony, "Thanks for the new ears, Iron Maiden."

"Don't mention it, Carnitas. Now come on, guys, get your asses moving, there's a party waiting downstairs."

The elevator doors opened to the popping of Steve pulling out a champagne cork and Sharon calling hello. Agent Torres, Clint's new field partner who had kept him a lot of company in the hospital while Natasha was laid up, practically ran over and crushed them both in a hug. "Mom and Dad are back!" he happily declared. "Natasha, are you coming back to work soon? Because I have this replacement handler who's practically a dinosaur, man, dude's ancient! Missing my bro's bad enough without you being outta the mix!"

He clapped Clint on the shoulder and beamed at them. Even if he was two years older than Clint he still called them Mom and Dad. A lot of agents did behind their backs, actually, but the nicknames weren't degrading or presumptuous, like they were old or soft; they came with respect. Natasha and Clint had been through a lot more than most agents, and their experience was valued rather than shuffled away.

"I thought I had to be investigated before I was allowed back," Natasha frowned. Agent Hill had visited while she was laid-up to get her version of events. Even if Fury believed her, even if no one had been hurt, any signs of insubordination in a government agency had to be looked into.

Torres shrugged. "Dunno. Word around the rumor mill is that Fury met up with Legal, Legal met with Medical, and they're settling. Once they all knew the circumstances, the people in Medical decided not to press any charges," he explained. "But I dunno, they might hold onto the investigation anyway."

Across the room, Natasha met Sharon's eye and smiled. Her friend smiled back, very pointedly adjusting her hair so Natasha could see the ring on her finger, then made an exaggerated goofy happy face with her tongue sticking out. No wonder Steve looked so thrilled and was drinking even though he couldn't get drunk. Natasha was happy for them.

Flash!Natasha blinked through the haze in her eyes and saw Peter sheepishly put his camera down to hang on its strap. "Sorry, Natasha, I thought I turned that off," he said, and she put an arm around his shoulders. Clint and Torres had vanished across the room to play with Maria.

"You keep taking pictures of me."

"Well, we spiders gotta stick together." He leaned up and kissed her cheek with a dopey grin; she gave him a playful shove. "What? Come on, I like taking pictures of you, so sue me! I'm a photographer, I can appreciate a good aesthetic when I see it. Besides, you need more pictures. Every time I go to your apartment it's like you've just been staying in a hotel all this time. When's your birthday, again? You're just gonna get a stack of framed pics to hang around from me, spoiler alert."

Natasha laughed softly to herself and told him her birthday was December 14th, because she didn't remember her real one. It was the day Clint pinned her to a dirty alley wall like a butterfly, ninety pounds, sick with pneumonia but still deadly as a viper, and offered her a second chance. It was as good as a birthday anyway. She realized her error when Peter's eyebrows shot up; December 14th was only a few weeks away. "Tell no one," she warned him.

Looking over her shoulder, Peter's eyes suddenly widened and he muttered an excuse before hurrying away. Natasha didn't have to turn to know who was behind her.

"Winter."

"Don't call me that," sighed Bucky. "You know that's not who I am."

She turned and met his eye with an unconvinced look. "You wanted to kill me. You would have done, and you tried to," she pointed out.

It was only when Bucky stepped in close that Natasha remembered he was almost a foot taller than her, wearing thick-soled boots and practically towering over her head. "You remember as well as I do how it feels to be locked in the freezer, only you were lucky enough to be put through it a few times. I didn't have a serum to slow down my aging. I'm still young because of how many times they put me away, and you were going to do it again! It was a reaction, I was protecting myself, I couldn't help it!"

"You shot with the intent to kill me. What would you have done if Tony and Bruce didn't get between us on the Quinjet?"

Bucky tried to take another step toward her, arms outreached, but Natasha stepped swiftly to the side and pulled him down with his own momentum.

"Hey!" A chorus of alarmed yelling rang out from across the room. Steve was pulling Bucky to his feet and away from her while Clint and Sharon rushed to her side. "Natasha, you just got off of bed rest; you need to stop throwing people," Sharon tried to warn her, but she couldn't hear anything over her heart pounding and ragged breaths.

Looking at Winter, really looking and seeing something buried deep in his psyche snap in two, she remembered when they were forced together by the Red Room, when they would finish a mission and secretly make love so violently that they emerged bloody and damaged, and felt something in her break too. What they had couldn't have been called love. It was a constant struggle for power over the other. It was war. Had it carried on any longer, it would have ended with one of their deaths, of that Natasha was certain. The Black Widow had been preparing for it before the explosion that ended so much of the Room. So had Winter, most likely.

She could see the war hiding in his eyes now, and revulsion crawled up her throat.

"I know how it felt to be locked in cryo! I know," she shouted at him. "Why else do you think I wanted to go back for the Red Guardian?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you!" Bucky howled from where he'd been dragged to the other end of the room. "I went back for his body and the chambers were standing empty! There was no sign of a body anywhere!"

The room went still and silent as Natasha reeled from the news. Bucky disentangled himself from Steve's hold to come closer. "I don't know how far back this goes, Natasha, but the Red Room, or whatever's left of them, wants you dead. They sent me first, and who do you think built Ivan that body? If he failed, the task would have gone to Shoskatov, and now his body's missing. Don't think he won't be right around the next corner to carry on where Ivan left off. You're putting everyone you care about in danger just by being around them!"

The world melted away as Bucky's warning danced through her mind. It was true. Everything the Red Room had done to have her skill set at their disposal came at the expense of those she cared about. Her parents, her daughter, her husband, her unborn child, all lost or endangered at their hands. Her hands.

Clint snapped her free of those thoughts with a hand brushing her waist. Bucky was gone with whatever levity there had been to the party. "Whatever you're thinking, Tash, cut it out right now," he scowled.

And she tried. Natasha had never tried harder to push anything from her mind, and was able of going days, sometimes weeks without thinking about it, but always, always it came back to her. Every time she touched the scars around Clint's ears and watched him wince with remembered pain, every time her eyes passed over the rosewood box containing Rose's lock of hair, every time the baby inside of her kicked or turned serenely over she remembered.

As soon as it was relatively safe to do so, Natasha went to her doctor and had tests done to detect any defects or illnesses in the baby caused by the anti emetics; when they came back clean she locked herself in one of her secret places and cried until she hurt her throat. Every time she left the tower she was unable to stop looking over her shoulder, watching for the next disaster to find her. She may as well have been twelve years younger, freshly salvaged from the KGB, waiting for the hand that fed her to strike again. There was no escape, no salvation, not until the threat was gone.

Eight days before her due date, Clint was on his last assignment before going on paternal leave, expected home before midnight, when Natasha woke up with the worst backache since the beginning of her pregnancy. It faded slightly when she rolled onto her other side, but as soon as there was some relief she was walking with as much dignity that could be mustered toward the elevator. Everything ached. She could barely move without grimacing most days, she was swollen and ungainly, had never felt so graceless, but Clint insisted she was beautiful.

"It comes with the whole 'sacred vessel' mindset," Pepper told her weeks before. "You're carrying his baby; no matter how swollen and saggy you might feel he still looks at you and sees Aphrodite incarnate. Take advantage of it. He'll do anything you ask if you sound pathetic enough, all of the guys will."

Bruce, in fact, treated her like a concerned older brother might and it was oddly comforting. Combined with his medical experience, she was well taken care of for any dietary needs, and almost overnight Clint knew exactly where to press on her back to relieve tension. Thor literally treated her like royalty as soon as he heard the news, ferrying to her gifts of jewels and weapons from Asgard.

"I told my father that Midgard's bravest and fiercest warriors had such joyous news, and he bade me extend this favor to you, to strengthen the kinship between our realms," he explained as he presented them with a veritable caravan of gifts, such as rich silken swaddling clothes for the baby and jeweled combs (including compartments to lace the teeth with poison) for Natasha among them.

Now, though, she had no use for pretty combs or gold daggers. Halfway down to the penthouse another lance of pain shot through her back, and she had to grip the handrail along the back of the car and bend as near to double as she could reach. Even when the doors slid open she couldn't bring herself to move. Mind clouded by the fog, she barely heard Bruce approaching or calling her name. Then he touched her elbow and she snapped back to attention. "Natasha, breathe," he told her. She sucked in a breath as the pain peaked and started to ebb. "Are you having contractions? You should have called me instead of coming down."

"It's not labor, my back is just killing me," she complained, a little breathless as Bruce guided her in to sit down. "Can you help?"

"Of course, I'd be happy to."

Fifteen minutes later she clenched her jaw as Bruce's hands suddenly made no difference on how badly her back hurt. A soft sound crawled up her throat and he pulled away. "You know back pain can be-"

The pain flared and she shook her head. "Put your hand back! Oh my god!" she complained as the pain wrapped around from her back to the front of her abdomen and squeezed. Immediately Bruce replaced his hands and pressed with the heel of his palm.

"Natasha?" he said once she'd been able to relax again. "I'm pretty sure you're in labor."

It was the longest day of her life. Clint only made it with an hour to spare before his daughter was born, bursting into the tower's medical bay covered in ashes and still clutching his bow. By that point Natasha had been too inwardly focused to even be angry with him and was only relieved that he was on time.

The moment the doctor said, "Go," she gripped his calloused hand and pushed until she thought she was going to die before anything happened. At least two hours passed that way. It felt like she was being turned inside out and crushed like a tube of toothpaste, but then there was suddenly an enormous release and the baby, a bloody writhing mass, was laid shrieking on her chest. Gasping, Natasha wrapped her arms around her child and shuddered as Clint said, "Oh my god, oh my god, she's here, oh my god," into her hair.

They named their daughter Katerina. Her middle name was Bishop, after someone Clint knew in the circus. He cut the cord binding her to Natasha, then he held his daughter as she cried and would openly admit later that he probably cried even harder. "Hey, Kate. Hi, baby girl," he whispered as tiny pink fingers clenched in a fist around his thumb. His wife had already fallen asleep beside him.

Natasha gave herself a month. A month to get back into fighting shape, for her milk to dry, to know her new daughter. There was nothing more extraordinary in the world than the sight of Katya nestled warm in the crook of her elbow. Natasha wanted to know everything about this child she made, every secret and whispered breath, every snuffle, every wide yawn, the brush of her coppery hair, her bleary eyes... Clint barely had time with her at all, Natasha was so enthralled. No one did unless she was training. Peter took pictures of them together and her heart felt fit to burst when he showed her the developed prints. Katerina looked like Rose.

"Oh, she looks just like you," Pepper beamed with Maria in her lap. Biting her lip all the while, Natasha very carefully placed Katerina in the toddler's arms. To be safe, Pepper made sure to brace them both while Natasha hovered.

She shook her head and stared at the baby. "I don't see it. I don't see how she's like me at all."

There was too much good in her. More good in an infant than ever there was in Natasha. A noise far off on another level of the tower made her insides quake. She was falling apart at the seams and didn't know what to do.

"Natasha?"

Looking up from the tablet in her hands - showing her a live feed of Katerina sleeping in her crib - she met Sharon's eye. "Hi," she said, then looked down again.

Sharon sat beside her on the sofa. "Clint asked me to come and check on you. He says you haven't been sleeping," she explained. A comforting hand smoothed down her back but she tensed, strung too tight, and kneaded a hand over her eyes.

"I have a newborn, of course I'm not sleeping."

"Nor are you eating," added Sharon pointedly. "You are, however, spending a lot of time training and brooding over the baby monitor. You are taking it easy, right? You realize that you gave birth just over three weeks ago and your body's still healing itself?"

Natasha sighed but didn't bother arguing with lies. She hadn't been taking it easy even if she did know that her body needed more time than it used to. There was no Russian super serum to save her if she got an infection. Katya coughed in her sleep and Natasha's hands spasmed around the tablet so she could look more closely.

A hand closed around her wrist and the intensity of Sharon's disapproval nearly burned her. "Natasha, look at me. I know you're a new mom and things are pretty intense, but you need to eat. I will not have this discussion with you again, do you understand me? You're my best friend and I need you in one piece to be my maid of honor in a month. No excuses! Just put down the tablet for a few minutes; I'm making you a sandwich. Cripes. Come on, Romanov, I'm not your mother."

No, you aren't, because I never had one, a deep-buried part of Natasha's mind spoke up. But she didn't speak again. There wasn't anything she could say to explain how disjointed she felt.

At night, when Clint took out his hearing aids and wrapped himself around her, she lie staring at the ceiling and wishing she could sleep. Every rustling of wind out the window made her snap to attention, convinced that Alexei was coming for her baby. She slid from between Clint's arms and the soft sheets, and silently padded to the nursery to check on Katerina for the fifth time. Some mornings she woke up on the floor or in the rocking chair to Clint nudging her with a toe.

Tonight, though, was different.

"Ya lyublyu tebya vsegda," she whispered to Katya, rocking her in the dark and quiet on the 30th day since her birth. Something hot and tight wound its way up her throat and pushed free from her eyes. "Don't let Daddy treat you too roughly. It's alright to wear pink and be gentle if you want to, and if anyone says it's un-feminist then they're idiots who went to community college, and you shouldn't listen to them. Listen to Aunt Sharon and take your medicine. Talk to her when you get your first period, not Pepper, Pepper won't even know what to do when her own daughter menstruates, but Aunt Sharon's a nurse and knows exactly what she's doing.

"If SHIELD offers you a place or training before you're 18, don't take it. Just don't. Be a child for as long as you can. Those years are precious. Don't play with the box on the mantel. And remember that I love you."

She kissed her daughter's head and replaced her in the cradle before secreting back to the bedroom, where she silently dressed and tugged her bag free from under the bed. Even if she weren't silent Clint wouldn't have heard. She only have to be careful to tread lightly or he would feel the vibrations. In the kitchen she left him a note saying goodbye, and on the communal floor she left a note saying, Look after them.

Then she slipped out into the city streets with her bag slung over one shoulder, red hair bright as a beacon in the pre-dawn light, and a gun on her hip. It was time to end the nightmares.

THE END

(Natasha said "I will always love you," in Russian and I just wrote it phonetically according to Google Translate.)

We made it through another! Wow, this one was exhausting. I had no idea where it was going for a while, but everything finally settled right where I wanted it to, for the most part. Thanks to all of you who've been sticking with me through this, I really owe you one!

As of yet, I have no definite plans for a sequel, but that really isn't saying much, since I never intended to write THIS sequel. Or have the original story turn out longer than a one-shot. Also the fact that I started writing something that could be a sequel yesterday. This universe just won't let me go! You may or may not be hearing from me again soon!