Man, I just cannot leave these two alone. This will have at least one more chapter and will be smutty eventually.

And credit goes to gisela tinuelena for the drinking game idea.

The game had been Tony's idea, of course. He had about a thousand dollars' worth of expensive liquor, and after the day they had all had, getting drunk seemed like a great plan. Well, except that Steve couldn't, of course, and Bruce never had more than one drink in a night. But still, going through the motions was worth something.

When Tony had suggested Never Have I Ever, Clint had agreed enthusiastically (as had Thor, after the game was explained to him) so the rest had just shrugged and went along with it.

"Never have I ever… been a soldier in an army."

"No!" Tony shouted as Steve, Thor, and Clint each drank, "That's no fun. You have to talk about dirty stuff! Come on, Cap. I'm sure there's plenty of juicy stuff you've never done, you sanctimonious—" Natasha smacked him on the back of the head.

They had been playing for nearly an hour and Tony was sloshed (partially because there wasn't much he hadn't done, partially because he downed half his glass every time). Clint had a pleasant buzz, enough that he didn't find Tony irritating and could be amused by Steve's discomfort.

"Um. Okay… Never have I ever… had sex."

Everyone laughed and started talking over each other ('Come on, Cap, handsome chap like you?' 'I'm sure Stark wouldn't mind helping you out there.') but Clint was barely even aware of that, because something far more interesting had just happened.

Despite picking up her glass and bringing it to her lips like everyone else in the room, Natasha hadn't drunk. She was watching the men around her steadily, and when she realized Clint had noticed, she locked a hard gaze at him. Threatening him to speak up. He didn't, of course, he wasn't suicidal, but he definitely had something to ponder when they all finally said goodnight.

When he thought about it, really, it made sense. A strange, worldview-shattering kind of sense, but sense nonetheless.

Natasha Romanoff trusted no one. Until he had met her, Clint had considered himself very guarded—a stoic, war-hardened loner. And maybe he still was, by almost any human standards, but Natasha made him look like a fucking care bear. "Abusive" might have described his youth, but it was hilariously inadequate when it came to hers. And even after that was over, she had lived most of her life among the true scum of the earth. It wasn't surprising that she hadn't met a man she felt comfortable allowing to touch her.

But still.

Everyone knew why Steve was a virgin; he had all these sentimental hang-ups from a by-gone era. That wasn't Natasha. Natasha didn't do sentiment. And Clint had seen too many powerful, handsome men salivate over her to understand why she had never used even one of them to take care of her needs. Honestly, he had sort of assumed she had fucked Tony, just from the way they interacted.

Clint just couldn't see what was stopping her. And his curiosity was going to get the better of him sooner or later.

For the sake of his own skin, he waited until they were alone.

Clint woke early the next morning for his daily training session with Natasha. They had settled into a routine at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, and moving into Stark Tower hadn't so much as dented it. Every morning at the crack of dawn they met for a warm-up and a long sparring session, and then they went to the shooting range.

He had a set of arrows with rubber tips that stung like a bitch but didn't do any real harm, and it was a competition—a hit was a point in his favor, a miss was a point in hers. They had established early on that if his goal was only to hit her, he was going to win every time. But when he started trying for pinpoint targets like her knees or palms and it became a matter of predicting her movements, they became far more evenly matched and the exercise was fun for both of them, allowing both to work on their strengths.

It was quite a show, and they frequently drew an audience, but that morning, thankfully, it looked like everyone was busy sleeping off hangovers. When he got to the training room she was already there, stretching, which for her meant doing splits over two benches and giving him a brilliant view of her ass. He tore his eyes away from her and shook himself.

Even though he checked Natasha out all the time, it felt different somehow. Knowing she was a virgin made looking at her feel wrong. It made him think about how young she really was compared to him, how… innocent. Not really, of course, intellectually he knew that 'innocent' was practically an antonym to Natasha Romanoff, but that was how he felt.

"You just going to stand there and stare all day?" she asked without even glancing at him.

"Quite possibly," he said smoothly. Banter was par for the course with them, and he couldn't let on that last night's revelation had changed his attitude toward her so dramatically. She wouldn't like that. Instead, like he did every day, he walked over and offered an arm for her to grip while she brought her legs under her and stood up.

"I always wonder how you get out of that position when I'm not around. It seems like your only choice is falling over."

"Yes, but extremely gracefully," she said as she brushed herself off. She cracked a smile at him—he always noticed how much easier her smiles came when they were alone together—and then gestured at the mats. "You ready?"

"Sure."

Fighting her was always fun. He was stronger, but she was so much faster, it made them a great match and a constant challenge. They were several minutes in, still in the exchanging-blows phase and not yet to the grappling match their sparring sessions always became, when Clint had to bring it up.

"So," he said as he landed a knee to her ribs, "I have to ask…" She tried a take-down sweep, but it was one of her standard moves and he (usually) didn't fall for it anymore. "You're a virgin?" She ducked under his next punch and struck him in the stomach with her elbow, harder than she might have normally.

"Shut up," she said, avoiding another strike and skipping out of range for a minute. "The whole idea of virginity is just a construct of a puritanical society obsessed with slut-shaming." They had taken a pause for a moment, both out of breath.

"Okay, well, that isn't really my point. You've never had sex?"

"Who did you think I was having sex with?"

"I don't know. It's not like I keep up with you every minute. I kinda thought you had something going on with that guy from the long con in St. Petersburg?" S.H.I.E.L.D. had a man deep undercover in the Russia mafia, and Natasha had played his girlfriend for several weeks to facilitate a particularly difficult information exchange. The guy had been handsome, smart, and they were living in the same apartment; he had just assumed.

"You thought I was fucking someone on a job? Come on, Barton, you know me better than that." At some point during this conversation they had non-verbally reached an understanding that they were done sparring, and now they had headed to the edge of the mats for towels and water.

"Well he certainly acted like he was getting something."

She snorted. "Maybe he really thought he was; he got black-out drunk pretty much every night." Clint chuckled.

"What about Bosnia?" he asked. Now it was her turn to laugh.

"I had a knife to his throat the entire time. There was no way I was going to let that scum touch me. He was barely worth my pretending to fuck him."

They had been working a brothel suspecting of human trafficking, and she had taken one of the bosses into a private, curtained-off area and, apparently, made sex noises for fifteen minutes while threatening his life. That particular mission was very distinctly ingrained in Clint's mind, because the sounds she had made had been incredibly erotic. Even thinking about it now he was starting to get hard. Better to turn back to the subject at hand.

"Well, then, someone at S.H.I.E.L.D, maybe? I don't know; the 'who' isn't really the point, Tasha. There isn't a straight man on the planet who would kick you out of bed. Most of us would swim across an ocean of thumbtacks just for a chance."

She gave him a strange look, and Clint realized he maybe shouldn't have said 'us.' Whether he meant it or not.

"Then what is the point?"

He shrugged. "You've got needs, just like everyone else, right? I just can't figure out what's stopping you from taking care of them." Considering he should have seen her next words coming, it was probably a bad idea to take a drink of water right at that moment.

"Don't worry," she said with a smile. "I take care of them just fine on my own." And without even pausing to acknowledge his sputtering cough, she walked away, hips swaying hypnotically.

Teehee. Like I said, one more chapter. Probably.