It happens at the farm when she first sees it. Pepper's pregnant, Tony tells them all after the chaos has settled and they've retreated to the farmhouse to hide from the media before real life steals them away. Everyone's a perfect mix of excited for Pepper and terrified of Tony becoming a father, but overall it's a good night, the light at the end of the blocked tunnel Ultron had left them in. Tomorrow everyone will go back to their real lives, face the media and the government, and Tony makes them promise they'll see each other more often this time around not just read about his kid in paparazzi stories. ("Stark loses kid. Again.")

That's when she first sees it. She sees Tony's face actually elated once he's gotten through the initial mind-numbing fear that did last several hours, and past his shoulder she sees Clint making a drink. His face is turned down, but there's a hint of jealousy written over his features.

There are many reasons to be jealous of Tony Stark. He had a lot of money, a lot of cars, a lot of houses. These are not the reasons that Clint Barton is jealous of him though. Natasha knows this.

Clint is jealous that Tony is going to be a father.

Natasha pretends that this is only the first time she sees this.

Natasha cannot have children. This is a fact.

She was once a girl who danced, and sang, and carried a doll while innocently dreaming of motherhood. Things change. Specifically; everything. She was engineered in ways that little girls should not be touched, and this changed everything.

Now, she is capable of everything she could ever wish to do. She is an impeccable athlete, acrobat and fighter. She knows as many styles of martial arts as she does languages. She knows weapons better than she knows her mother tongue. Her body is resistant to aging and disease, she heals faster than she should. She has memories that may or may not be true.

She pretends to sympathise when Pepper, Jane, or Darcy comment about cramps. Sometimes she joins in when they demand tea and other comforts. In truth, she hasn't had a period since her first one. Right after her first show of blood she was taken away for a procedure she never consented to at the age of 12 and after that she never had another.

She can do everything she needs to do to be a soldier. A spy. The Black Widow.

But she cannot have children.

Nothing changes straight away. Nothing changes for a year.

Tony and Pepper's child is born. A girl. Steve and Bruce are named Godfathers, for which Clint isn't jealous, but Natasha is named Godmother on the grounds that she is to make sure that she's the most protected little girl on the planet. That wouldn't be hard. It takes exactly 3 seconds for the Avengers team to become collectively smitten with her.

She knows Clint isn't jealous of the godparent situation. By now they're a matching set anyway. A package deal. But she sees his eyes during the baptism when she's holding the baby and it's not even pained.

They're filled with longing. An ache for something you can never have.

And that's when she realises he doesn't simply want a child. He wants their child. A child with her specifically.

So she makes a decision. Science once took something from her. Science once told her she'd never have it back.

But she knows better scientists now.

"She's getting big," Clint comments one night as an evening scroll through his laptop tablet brings up another news alert about Tony and the most spoiled little girl on the planet.

"I'm surprised Tony hasn't lost her yet," Natasha says. Always their exchange when the pictures surface, whether by media or Tony's insistence of emailing them weekly pictures. They comment on the baby's size and then marvel in the knowledge that for all his screwy upbringing, Tony's actually a decent father.

Clint doesn't comment, and she sees over his shoulder that he's fixated on that image of Tony's little girl hoisted up on his hip and kissing her father's cheek.

"Do you want that life?" she asks before she can hold the question back.

Clint freezes. It's not a conversation they've ever needed to have.

"Money, cars...what's not to want?" he replies without turning, and she sees him scroll off the photo and onto some ridiculous bird game he insisted on constantly beating his own record on.

"I don't mean the Tony Stark experience, Clint, I mean the-"

"I know what you mean, Nat." His voice is snappy, short, more to-the-point than she's ever heard him speak outside of a mission. This is closed-down Clint. Barriers-up Clint. "I know what I signed up for. I know what was taken away from you."

He makes it sound like a mission roster. Something he agreed to by falling in love with her. But she understands what she means. He knew her file by heart before he'd ever seen her in person, before he'd put an arrow to her throat and chosen not to kill her. He knew about her infertility before he'd known how she took her coffee.

He'd chosen life with her over as close to white picket fences as a SHIELD life would allow. So there was only one more thing to say.

"What if there was a way to reverse it?"

It takes extensive tests, highly invasive ones that have all but stripped her bare, but after only four months, Natasha has found out exactly what had been done to her and how to fix it. She does her research, finds the best surgeon across the country that could perform the surgery, and Clint pays for it. He's got more than enough money saved, like she has, and he refuses to let her pay for it.

"Let me do this for us," he tells her. "Let me help get back what they took."

He also tells the surgeon, in no uncertain terms, that he will kill him if any harm comes to Natasha during the surgery.

The doctor doesn't even blink, and asks them to return first thing the next morning.

"We can still back out," Clint tells her later, when they're holed up in their cheap hotel room in Seattle. She needs somewhere to recover after the surgery for a week before they can move her, but she heals quicker than most so Clint's only booked them in for three nights - the first night she'll spend in the hospital.

"We always see a mission through to the end," she recites. He doesn't respond, just stares at her from across the mattress. "We'll be fine."

"Surgery's risky."

"I'll be fine, you'll be there when I wake up," she tells him again. Fifth time.

Clint's there when she wakes up, just like he promised. The doctor just left, so he's the one who gets to tell her they think that it was a success. Time will only tell. It's always complicated to reattach tubes that have been disconnected, but it only took an extra hour of surgery to fix the mess that the original surgery had left her in. She can read each second of that extra hour in the bags under Clint's eyes.

She's too groggy to speak, the curse of anaesthesia that she's always despised. But they have something now, she realises. Something they never had before.

Something to look forward to.

Clint takes better care of her the next few days than the nurses care to. He changes her bandages with precision he's built over the years, though he needn't do it. Everything was carried out laparoscopically, and there's only three incisions on her lower stomach and a fourth at her navel. Each measures only a centimetre in length, and she's in very little pain from the surgery. While they aim to have beaten at least one of the Red Room's adjustments, the enhanced healing she inherited from her early life seems to have remained and the small incisions fade to pink scars within a few days.

"See, I'm a great nurse," Clint brags when he runs his fingertips over the brand new skin.

There's a few weeks of anticipation as they wait to discover if it has truly worked, and after twenty seven days of waiting, nature gives them the answer they need. Natasha's stomach cramps in all the familiar ways she's heard the other ladies grumbling about in the past, and Clint tries not to feel shunned when her immediate reaction is to go for lunch with Pepper.

She comes home only an hour later, and he promises not to tell anyone about her evening spent in sweats and an oversized jumper as she devours a tub of ice cream.

"I told Pepper," she tells him while he's changing the discs between their movie marathon. "I thought someone should know."

"Okay," Clint replies as he settles back into his place at her side on the couch.

"She'll probably tell Tony," she pointed out.

Six months pass, but there's nothing but disappointment. The hope that had precariously taken up residence in Natasha's eyes faded a little more each time she started rubbing her lower stomach on the third week of the month. They persevere with what they were told. She takes her vitamins every morning, she cuts down on foods that may not act in their favour. She makes Clint suffer the same fate.

He doesn't fight her. She doesn't fight her smile when he grumbles that she'll be the mean parent who forces vegetables on the child.

As if he'd be anything other than a pushover.

After eight months, Natasha discovers that the scent of Clint's meat-lovers pizza makes her stomach churn. At that moment, she knows.

"If it's a girl, she should do ballet," Clint insists, his hand resting over her stomach on a bump that hasn't even grown yet. He does it every night, while they're laying in bed. He's already planned their future son's nicknames, possible birthday party ideas and decided a sports team for him that was non-negotiable. All he wants for his daughter is for her to be like Natasha. She disagree more.

"She can do whatever she wants," she humors him, willing to grant him anything as long as she can rest here with his fingers dancing around her navel.

Clint makes plans. It's what he does. Natasha is the master of the extraction plan, but they don't need one this time. They have a scan, she asks Bruce to do it. It's too soon to tell what they're having but it's healthy, and that's enough.

His hand slides onto her stomach the moment they're alone, and the grin on his face is something she could never have imagined. She can tell he's thinking about middle names and Christmas mornings and what it will be like when his child holds his hand crossing the road. She's terrified of consequences, of her child having nightmares in the middle of the night, of old faces resurfacing and ruining their happiness, that this is all a fabricated dream.

His smile stops those thoughts, replacing them with far sweeter ones of lullabies and sleep-deprived nights.

This is the happiness that he envied of other men. This is the happiness that she has given him.

On Christmas morning, they're wrapped around each other in a hospital where they've given false identities but the pain is real. She woke in a pool of blood and Clint has to stand there for a moment and gather himself. She's crying. Natasha, /his/ Natasha, is crying, and he's never seen her cry like this before. He doesn't know what to do when she cries.

There's nothing he can do. The baby's already gone.

Clint doesn't argue when she takes a mission. She's forced herself into a teaching schedule while they were trying because the thought of anything happening was heartbreaking. It was. So she needs to get it out of her system. Someone needs to suffer at her hands. She needs to feel in control after control was taken away from her. He lets her go with a small brush of her hand.

In her absence, he takes over her teaching schedule. The newest version of Hawkeye is stone-faced and terrifying.

"We don't have to try again," he says, when they eventually talk about their loss. Some conversations are easier in the forced confines, and being locked down on a security drill in their shared S.H.I.E.L.D office is a better time than any other. He's been trying to find a way to tell her that for weeks, but the prospect of letting go of this dream is something he can hardly accept.

She tried this for him. He'd let it go for her.

"I'll understand if you can't do this again," he continues in her silence.

"I want to," she confesses quietly. "I want us to have this."

"I can't see you in pain like that again," he adds.

"It'll be different this time."

It's not. They lose another two babies.

They agree to stop trying. It's too hard. They know they put too much hope into the reconstruction of Natasha's body, and that some scars can never be healed. They decide to go about their lives in a semi-normal manner. If it's meant to be, it will happen. It's more faith than they've ever put into something that isn't each other. But they've spent more time infirmaries in the last year than they've ever spent, and they can't patch each other up from this.

The night they make the decision, Natasha sneaks out of an empty bed and finds Clint drinking beside the crumpled scan photograph from their first failed pregnancy. He's speaking, but not to her, to his brother's ghost. He's telling Barney to take care of their three kids, the three they lost, the three they'd never hold, and she sinks to the floor in the hall and cries silently as she listens to him give instructions to his dead brother.

"I'd have loved them so much," he says to the ghosts that surround him. "But I love her more than anything, and I can't watch her lose herself over this again."

A year later, Strike Team Delta has regained the top spot of S.H.I.E.L.D's success rankings. Mission after mission leaves them with little time to think about that short period where they tried to have a normal life. Sometimes it creeps up on them, like when a newbie recruit exposes the scarring on Natasha's stomach and makes a snide remark about getting them reduced. Natasha wears her surgery scars as silent tributes to what they lost, but this isn't what she uses as her excuse when Hill writes her up for breaking two of his ribs with a single punch.

Autumn hits them one year far too quickly, and between the travelling and the climate changes, Clint picks up a flu that renders him a slave to his bed for at least a week. Natasha catches it off him, and he's never seen her physically weakened by sickness before. When she's well enough to think clearly, he poses the idea that undoing what the Red Room did to her may be undoing other parts of her physiology as well. Maybe they do need to be careful of diseases she could now be susceptible to and vaccinations she never received. He still got vaccinated before overseas missions, but she never did, and they've spent a lot of time in some less than sanitary places lately.

"She's not sick, Clint," Bruce tells him for the sixth time before the news sinks in. "She's pregnant."

The first time they were cautious. The second and third times they were scared.

This time, they're terrified.

Clint tells her in no uncertain terms that if it doesn't hold this time, then he'll get a vasectomy and take that pain away from their future. She's had enough surgery already, while she poses the solution of contraception, he's kinda liking the intimacy of not using it. Besides, no contraception is entirely reliable, and now that he's watched her bleeding out three times he won't take any more risks.

This is their last try. They prepare early on for the reality that it isn't going to work.

Except it does work.

Morning sickness passes, and she's still pregnant. Her stomach starts to grow in ways it never did before. She swells with the baby that doesn't just survive, she thrives. She. Their daughter. They're having a girl and she doesn't call Clint out on the way that he tears up when he looks at the scan photo of his daughter. She lets him tell everyone they know because they'll only experience this once, she knows that, and she has done this for him.

But she feels the baby move first, and that's when she truly falls in love.

It's odd to feel her baby move within her, to feel her body betray her with sickness and aches that only exist because she is carrying a child. Her body has been her own for so long and to feel it being used for a purpose not her own brings back memories she'd rather not lose herself in.

"I don't belong to myself anymore," she says one night into the darkness of their bedroom.

Clint rolls to face her. "We belong to her now," he said.

Everything is for her now.

"They used my body to end lives, and now I'm growing one," she says, as if the idea of continuing life was suddenly confusing her.

Clint's quiet, and this time when his hand traces over her stomach he does feel a glimmer of movements beneath his fingertips. He hadn't felt it earlier when she did, but now his little kicker is there and strong and she's /there/.

"Thank you," he whispers into the dark

Four percent of babies are born on their due date. Clint knows this, Natasha has told him countless times, but on April 19th, Clint doesn't leave Natasha's side. This is their child. Her child. Of course her child would be born right on schedule. It's what Natasha's made up to do, and biologically his child has to be the same.

Natasha points jokes that maybe their child will take after him and turn up three days late with a stowaway in tow.

Clint tries not to pale at the thought of twins.

Alexis Barton is born on April 20th, three minutes past midnight, graduating the Barton school of timekeeping in screaming honours. And boy, does she scream. They'd thought with two very guarded assassins for parents that she'd be a quiet girl, but that's not at all the case. The first time Natasha holds her baby girl the little bundle is loud enough to be heard in the next wing of the infirmary but she can't bring herself to care. She's here, with ten fingers, ten toes, and a strong, healthy heartbeat. She's six pounds and nine ounces of perfection and for the first time in his career, Clint's hands shake.

Natasha's daughter is the pride of her entire existence. She spends nights half-asleep draped over her the side of her crib just to hear breathing. She holds her against her chest whenever she can, the closest she can bring her daughter to her heart now she's no longer cradled inside of her, and the only person she feels comfortable allowing to hold her is Clint.

Alexis is their world. Lexi, they call her. Everyone calls her that. Alexis becomes a precious name spoken in the middle of the night in tiny whispers when she just won't settle. Sometimes it becomes a game. Sometimes they lean in and tease her with an "ahhhh" sound before her tiny smile demands the addition of "lexis" before she descends into giggles.

Mornings become a ritual of time spent in bed. She sprawls between them with one arm thrown over her head, the grace of her mother and the spacial awareness of her father. She is beautiful. She is perfection. She is healthy. Clint is a wonderful father. Natasha is a wonderful mother.

This is what they have come to know about themselves.

This is not what they expected.

"She's gonna talk soon," Clint announces one day, when she won't close her mouth over the plastic spoon because she's babbling away to a toy giraffe.

"She'll talk when she's ready," Natasha tells him. Clint's been training her to say "dada" since he first heard her make a sound, and she's not sure he's prepared for the rush of emotion that might follow it.

She only knows because one of her nonsense words the other day was a "muh" sound, and Natasha almost dropped her in surprise before she realised she was just reaching for her bottle.

"I always wanted her," Natasha tells him, when their baby girl is seven months old and sitting upright in the centre of their living room, carefully deciding which of her toys would give her the most amusement. The giraffe is an old favourite now, sure, but the new toy from Uncle Tony makes silly noises and she can't resist silly noises.

Clint looks at her from where he'd been tempting her with the giraffe, a questioning look on his face. "I know," he assures her. "We chose this, Nat, she's not a mist-happy accident," he corrects himself.

"I mean it," she said, sitting cross-legged on their daughter's other side, adding the choice of a third toy into play which simply astounds the little girl. "I didn't just do this because you wanted it. I wanted this too."

He smiles at her like he always does. "I know."

He'd already decided that it would be his final mission, but he loses far more to it than he ever planned to give. His eyes are void of life when Natasha finds him in the infirmary, grey storms barely visible beneath the mass of bandages wrapped around her head. She signs to him that it'll be okay, that this is an obstacle that he can survive as they have survived all others.

Two days later they go home, and he holds Alexis in his lap while Natasha cooks dinner. She babbles so fast in the baby language he hasn't learned to speak and it strikes him that any one of the sounds that leave her lips could be the first word he won't be able to hear.

His daughter is speaking nonsense, but he cannot hear her. Won't ever hear her. That baby laugh he's fallen in love with is something he'll never hear again.

He cries into the top of her head, and thinks she's far too much like her mother when she sits still and allows him that comfort.

Alexis doesn't speak. She signs instead. She stops seeking out the sound of her father's voice and crawls to him to watch him sign out the words to what she is asking for. She learns to sign for 'food', for 'bottle'. Her first word is never spoken. When she's nineteen months old, and her dark blonde hair is finally starting to curl, Natasha signs to Clint over her crib.

She needs to speak.

There's only one way.

Tony spends three months working on the perfect hearing aids. They're durable, long-lasting, and a damn sight better than the ones he turned down from the hospital. Tony worked with Bruce and the top S.H.I.E.L.D doctors, and through the help of the best technology the world had to offer and some of the best medical advances of the century, Clint's new hearing aids are a combination to not only give him back his previous hearing level, but to work on repair on working on the damaged tissue at the same time.

He never hugged Tony on the days that their daughters were born. They shook hands when Alexis was born and he can't even remember what happened on the day that Maria was born, but he does hug Tony when first hears Natasha's voice thanking a deity because his sign language wasn't really up to scratch with hers.

Alexis runs to him on legs that are far more confident now. She once stumbled but now has a clumsy grace about her, always on the verge of falling but never quite there. Her steps are steadier than ever, but Natasha still has an urge to follow at arms length behind her. She watches her daughter run into the arms that always open for her, because Clint is, without a doubt, her favourite person the planet. Momma is the greatest in many ways and quite obviously the head of this family, but her eyes light up for Clint in a way that brings his heart to life.

She easily spots the new addition of the minute earpiece that allows her father to hear, and tiny gasp as she reaches for it makes his chest tighten.

"Careful, sweetheart," he whispers to her, with his voice and not his hands.

Her eyes flicker to his, her mothers eyes, and her uneven toothy grin is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. She makes a few mindless babbles as she presses her tiny hands to his cheeks, tracing his smile to match her own. Then with a clear, delighted giggle, she speaks the word she's been saving for him, and the word he's waited his whole life to hear.

"Daddy!"