The whole thing started small, ages ago now, when Natasha and Clint were doing surveillance in North Dakota. There was no danger for once, just laying out prepwork for some other team to come improve upon later. It was easy, it was boring, and it was also cold as hell.
They had hats and coats from SHIELD, of course, heavy and of good quality. Clint grumbled the entire time he wore his, hating the constriction on his chest and arms, antsy and bored and far whinier than usual--which could be plenty whiny even on a good day. So one day, on a whim, Natasha had ducked into the YMCA thrift store in town and bought him a scarf.
She hadn't gone in with that intention; she'd gone in looking for a book. Thrift stores were, and still are, her favorite place to buy books--pay twenty-five cents for one and then, when finished, leave it in a waiting room or gas station for some other person to pick up and enjoy--and when she was poking around for a new trashy novel, she saw it. The scarf.
It was obviously handmade, knitted or crocheted crudely, lumpy with gapped stitches and garish colors. One end had a ragged fringe while the other did not; it had either been snipped away or the person just gave up on making it. The scarf cost a dollar and she presented it to Clint with savage glee.
"It's...repellant," he announced with almost reverent horror.
"I washed it," she told him, "in case you're, you know, worried about bed bugs or fleas or something."
"Christ, I'm worried about anthrax." He wound it around his neck; it was an odd length and only went around one and a half times. "The person who made this abomination was not mentally healthy."
But he ended up wearing it every day for the remainder of the op, because as much as Clint hated constrictive clothing he loved a good joke more, and the ugly thing made Phil and Natasha laugh every time he put it on.
And that's how it started. Phil claimed jealousy of Clint's ugly scarf until she found him a similarly unpleasant one. Then ugly scarves turned into ugly hats--nothing too distinctive, because in their line of work that was frowned upon--but more of a bland ugliness, something that was nondescript but still unappealing. They had to be handmade, and when a new hat was purchased the old one was retired. There simply was not room in their lives to keep random items for the hell of it.
There was a gray formless thing that Phil found in a Goodwill and wore all winter, cheerfully and willfully oblivious to all the double takes he received at SHIELD. The lumpy brown stocking hat that Natasha picked up at a flea market, which Clint insisted looked like an actual pile of shit on the top of her head. It was their shared joke, harmless and fun.
*******
Now things are different.
Natasha and Clint live in Stark's Tower, though she insists as they move in that it is only temporary, that it is not permanent, not forever, not something to get used to. It's only until Clint regains his footing and is strong again; he's still on edge after being attacked by Loki, still targeted by fellow SHIELD agents who like to find him alone and exact a little private justice for the Helicarrier attack. The way they keep going after him, the way he does nothing to stop them, is why Natasha agrees to Stark's offer in the first place. His black eyes take weeks to disappear, but around the time they do, she's in a thrift store, looking for a new ugly hat, and sees the blanket.
It's bigger than a hat, but she supposes that, for the first time, she has the room for it. It's a rag quilt made of deliberately mismatched pieces, and she likes the idea that it looks unappealing on purpose. She's still vacillating on whether or not to buy it when she notices in one corner a handmade tag, and written on it with felt marker: Love, Gran.
It is creative and sweet, and suddenly Natasha, who was never allowed to want for things, and never had a place to keep them even if she did, wants that quilt. She imagines an older woman cutting the fabric and sewing and tying, eyes tired and fingers bent with arthritis, but still doing it, still creating and crafting, out of love for a grandchild she had known their entire life. A person who probably thanked her and kept the quilt around a bit, maybe bringing it out when Grandma came to visit, until one day when they donated it to a charity shop with a bunch of other things they didn't want anymore.
Natasha has no grandmothers. No one has ever created anything like this for her, thinking of her with every cut, every stitch. Nothing beautiful has ever been made in her honor, and she suddenly hates the person that cast this gift away. She buys it, rescues it for the measly price of five dollars.
She and Clint share an apartment--there's no need for separate apartments when they really won't be staying long--and both enjoy lounging around watching bad movies. Blankets are really a requirement for proper lounging, and he perks up with interest when she throws the quilt over the back of the couch. She points out the tag in the corner, wondering if he'll see the same thing she does. At first Clint looks confused, then frowns.
"Don't worry, Granny," he says finally, running his hand over it. "We like it."
He understands. And that leads to the rest of it.
*******
Natasha finds another cross stitch sampler that she hangs in her room. These are her favorite--needlepoint, counted cross stitch, anything fine and delicate that took someone ages to complete. Weeks or months of work and then gifted, only to be cast aside in a moment by the whim of the receiver. There are parallels to her profession and life that she chooses not to examine too closely.
She likes wedding samplers, embroidered names of people she does not know--Cory and Tina September 5, 1992. Two Become One. She wonders if Cory and Tina are still together, if this present had inoculated them against marital disaster, or if they are now divorced, one of them throwing this keepsake into a pile of unhappy memories to be shunted away.
She also likes flowery, inspiring verses and other platitudes. She has three cross stitched copies of "Footprints in the Sand" hung in a neat row above her bed, all the same pattern and only subtlety different. One a little more skilled than the others, the stitches neater, the threads woven through the back with no lumps showing. The frame of another gouged and chipped on one side. A small stain on the fabric of the third, faint where someone had tried to rinse it away. And on the backs are her favorite part--the inscriptions.
For Daniel, Love Mom.
Love, Erin.
To my sweet Madeline, I love you forever.
*******
Clint finds a bunch of paintings at the Salvation Army, all by the same person, all signed JESSE in blocky, black letters on the bottom.
"An art student, probably," he suggests, hanging four of them in the dining room.
They don't go together, really, but they also kind of do, since Jesse had made them all. A bowl of fruit, a chair, a bunch of bottles, a plant. A lopsided painting of a couch that Clint inexplicably hangs in his bedroom.
It's a slight deviation from tradition--Jesse hadn't made these paintings for anyone else, but they were done in pursuit of a dream, and discarded for whatever reason. Clint suggests it was because he just ran out of room to store them, and donated them because he couldn't bear to put them in the trash. Natasha suspects that they were cast aside because Jesse gave up on his dream, realizing that he wasn't that great of an artist. Still she smiles a little whenever she looks on them, imagining a college student in the art studio, hoping for a passing grade and dreaming of being the next Van Gogh, only for his efforts to end up in the (temporary, only temporary) home of two professional assassins.
"I hope he improved, or found a different field of study," Natasha observes.
"They're fine; I just need to get them better frames," Clint argues loyally. His love for those shitty paintings is profound, and every once in awhile he toasts them at dinner with his drink. "To our pal Jesse--I hope you become an artist after all. I hope you make it, buddy."
*******
There are lots of kids' crafts. Natasha finds two little handprints pressed into dried clay, the words I love you, Mommy on the back of each in childish writing. She thinks they'd look perfect hanging at the end of the hallway between their bedrooms--one for him, one for her.
But when she shows them to Clint he goes quiet. He lays his large hand carefully over the tiny one, then leaves without a word. Natasha does the same, puts her hand over the child's handprint, and doesn't understand. She thinks that if she'd had a mother maybe then she would.
Natasha puts the little hands away, hiding them in a dresser drawer, and avoids childrens' things afterward.
*******
Safer are things like t-shirts, of which there are many. Dominique's 30th Birthday Extravaganza! is Natasha's favorite; she imagines a bunch of giggling adult women in matching shirts, bar hopping and being vaguely obnoxious in their good time. This shirt is probably the closest she will ever come to being a part of something like that. She sees herself ordering girly drinks with fruit around the rim, laughing loudly and encouraging her friends to drink more and dance, then flirting a little with the bartender, just because.
Natasha pairs the shirt with pajama pants and wears it whenever they get the odd day of relaxation. Clint comes up behind her as she's making popcorn, preparing to host the team movie night, and runs a finger over the printing on the back of the shirt.
Dominque, Sarah, Allison, Amy, Dena, and Bernice. Chi Delta Alpha sisters forever!
"And Bernice," he says, laughing. "That's the part that gets me. And Bernice. Like she's the tag along friend, lucky to ever be invited in the first place."
Natasha scoffs. "Are you kidding? Bernice is the ringleader, the biggest hellraiser of them all. On her 30th birthday they didn't bother with shirts, because they all ended up in jail. Good old Bern is just that wild."
********
Clint's favorite shirt is one Natasha found shortly after Gran's quilt, a worn, purple thing with an unraveling hem and flaking letters that were only barely legible. Heavener Family Reunion 1998, Truman Lake.
Neither of them had known what a family reunion was, other than what they could reasonably guess. They googled it and marveled over the idea, of having so much family that a concerted effort had to be made to gather them in one place, of spending time with so many loved ones, having fun, playing games.
Clint wears that shirt one night to a team dinner and Tony squints at it questioningly.
"Are you really a Heavener, Barton?" he asks. "Or did you just find that ratty thing in a trash heap somewhere?"
"They're my mom's cousins." Clint lies almost reflexively, and he's good at it; his everyman quality, his ability to blend into beige backgrounds, is his preferred way of stealth. "This shirt's from the year we went boating and fishing...my Uncle Walter ended up falling out of the boat. The man was a doofus, but he could grill a burger better than anyone in the Midwest."
Bruce laughs. "That sounds like a good time."
"It was," Clint agrees with a fond grin, deliberately not looking at Natasha. "Every year I think I might go to the reunion, but it never seems to work out. And every year I think...maybe next time. Maybe next time I'll show up and surprise them all."
*******
It's a little sad, and Natasha recognizes that, for these to be their dreams--of Grandmothers that sew, of friends that make samplers for weddings that will never happen, of families and groups of old friends that don't exist, reuniting en masse and laughing over potluck. Simple things.
People things.
As the months go by and their teammates spend more time in her and Clint's apartment they see the art and the samplers and the random knickknacks, and start to understand a little. Tony eyes Clint's reunion t-shirt knowingly sometimes, but doesn't call him out on the old lie.
*******
Natasha gives Steve a pair of handmade woolen mittens. There is a small stitched heart on the inside--no signature this time, just that tiny heart. "Someone made these for you, Steve."
"They're great," he says with a smile, "but no one made them for me. Not really." He's caught on to their game now.
"Of course they're for you," she tells him. "It's alright if the person didn't know it at the time. But they were always meant for you."
*******
"Why does it say 'Becky'?" Thor asks curiously. She'd taken the charm off the chain and fastened it to some jute string, and it looks surprisingly good lying delicately against the Asgardian's forearm.
"Because Becky has the other half," Natasha tells him. "Hers says a name, too, the name of whoever she gave this to originally. When you put the halves together, they form a circle."
He frowns. "She might not wish that I had it now, if it was intended for a friend."
"You already are Becky's friend, helping to save her world a dozen times or more," she points out. "And you don't have to wear this, you know. Just...keep it."
Thor smiles at the token, still a little perplexed, but liking the idea. "I will wear it in battle," he decides. "It will be a good reminder--that I fight for more friends than just the ones at my back and in my sight." He thinks for moment. "Would Jane like such a thing, with our names carved upon it? I could buy one, or even try to make it myself."
"She would like it," Natasha tells him with certainty. "And do make it yourself--she'll love it even more."
*******
Bruce sees a family portrait sitting beside a dumpster full of moving boxes and brings it home. It shows a huge family, several generations of vaguely similar-looking people all facing the same direction with a smile. "It's the Heaveners!" he declares with a delighted grin, winking at Natasha and Clint as he and Tony hang it in the common room.
Tony tucks a tiny picture of the team, smiling, with arms around each other's shoulders, into the corner of the frame. They all stand back and admire it.
"We didn't make it to the reunion again," Tony says apologetically to the picture.
"Next year," Bruce adds wistfully. "Maybe next year."
*******
The Avengers get 'thank you' letters often, from all over the world, in many languages. At first they would sometimes read them, but usually they just ended up piled somewhere until someone got tired of the mess and threw them away. Now they make more of an effort, and keep them. It's a reminder that their work is meaningful, helpful, is more important than maybe any of them had guessed.
There's a bulletin board in the kitchen that they use to post notes and reminders (Team Dinner Sunday Nights--BE THERE, Who keeps drinking all my pop?, If you explode something in the microwave then CLEAN it afterwards!, Team Dinner Now Also on Wednesday Nights) and Steve starts tacking parts of those 'thank you' letters up there. Not the whole thing; the space is too small and the letters too numerous to fit. Instead he cuts just the signatures off the bottom of the letters and staples those to the board. It quickly fills with names, hundreds of them--all people they had helped, rescued, saved--until Tony puts up a second, then a third, bulletin board rather than remove a single one.
Natasha is drinking coffee and reading through the names absentmindedly one morning when she notices, small and hidden among the others, 'TONY' written in Stark's distinctive handwriting. She blinks in surprise for a moment, then searches some more, and, sure enough, there's a 'Steve Rogers' in cursive near the top. She doesn't see Clint or Bruce's names, but she doesn't doubt that they are there, or if not, that they soon will be.
She finishes her coffee, then digs a pen and paper out of the junk drawer. If anyone notices 'Natalia Romanova' in tiny letters in the bottom corner of the second bulletin board, they never mention it.
*******
Natasha has no idea where Clint finds the watch, which is horribly tarnished but still functional. She watches as he laboriously polishes it, as meticulous as if it were made of rare metals instead of gold plated tin.
"It's kind of tacky," she points out.
"No, it isn't. It's perfect."
Clint Barton is either the walking embodiment of morose self loathing or a font of boundless optimism, with almost no steps in between. It looks like today the happy, hopeful Clint is winning out, refusing to see anything wrong with his find. Natasha is loathe to discourage that happiness, but she's also pretty certain that Clint has feelings for Tony and is desperate to spare her best friend the embarrassment he is sure to face.
"Stark is a gazillionaire," she tries again. "He has more than one Rolex. He won't wear that cheap thing; it'll turn his wrist green."
But Clint just shrugs at her and keeps working on it, and when it shines like new he gives it to Tony.
"When I saw this, I knew it was for you," he says. "I rescued it."
And Tony understands, because that's become the team's word for it, what they've all been doing for the last year, reclaiming these cast away treasures and inserting them into their own lives. Tony holds it differently then, knowing that it's not just a random gift but something meaningful, and turns it over, also knowing that there will be an inscription there.
Proud of you. Love, Dad
Tony's smile is a little forced, his dark eyes fixed on the words.
He doesn't mention the watch ever again, but the team notices him wearing it sometimes.
*******
Then Steve gives Natasha a gift and the spell is broken.
"It's not secondhand," he says awkwardly, scratching at the back of his neck self consciously. "I know that's the...rule, or whatever. But I made it for you."
Natasha is excited for the space of a few seconds, her small grin vanishing the moment she tears off the paper. It's a rectangular wooden board either stained or painted in a cacophony of color--purple, red, gold, green, blue, and black.
HOME SWEET HOME
When she doesn't say anything Steve adds shifting from foot to foot to his 'terribly uncomfortable with this' dance. "It's just a, you know, silly sentimental thing. I thought you could put it up with the other stuff." He is already edging toward the door, eager to escape this moment. "I thought it would kind of...tie everything together."
"Thank you, Steve," she says tonelessly, and he nods and darts out, obviously regretting the gesture and surely unlikely to ever attempt something similar.
Natasha leaves the painting on the kitchen counter and backs away, as if it were toxic. This isn't home. It can't ever be, not really. This was always meant to be temporary, just until Barton was better.
He's better now, and she's stayed too long.
*******
Clint strolls in a few hours later, as she is folding her clean clothes on the coffee table--they are the only ones that refuse to utilize Stark's laundry service--and sorting them into duffel bags. There's more clothing than she had come in with, and she starts a separate pile to donate or throw away. Clint's grinning about something and bouncing on his heels a little, but his face falls when he takes in the scene.
"What are you doing?" He doesn't really need to ask. He knows.
"It wasn't supposed to be permanent," Natasha reminds him. "It was never forever."
He sits down heavily on the couch, watching her work, his expression unreadable, quiet for a long time. She wonders what he'd been so happy about when he came in, then decides it doesn't matter.
"It felt like it could be," Clint says finally.
"You don't have to come with me. You can stay here, you know."
She starts folding the last pile and freezes when her hand settles on a well worn t-shirt. Dominique's 30th Birthday Extravaganza! Her bags are full; she's already bringing too many clothes to fit into SHIELD quarters. There's no room left, especially for sentimental nonsense.
"I have too much stuff," she says, feeling a little sick. "How did I let that happen?"
"You could keep it." He intercepts the shirt before it reaches the 'donate' pile. "You could keep it all."
"I can't, Clint."
"You can." He takes a deep breath, then nudges her with his elbow until she stops folding. "You know, this reminds me of a story I read once," he begins meaningfully, then pauses, watching her out of the corner of his eye and smirking in anticipation.
Natasha shoots him a withering look. "This had better not be one of your stupid parables, because I am not in the mood for that shit right now."
Many years ago Coulson had given Clint a book of fables, the volume small enough to carry amidst his other gear, in an ongoing attempt to get the archer to read more. For the next year Clint had read the book to tatters and driven them crazy with pithy metaphors. Now he only brings them up sporadically, but the book is still, as far as she knows, the only one Clint owns.
"But it's a good one," Clint insists with a crooked grin, and she sighs in resignation, leaning back against the couch cushions with him. "Once upon a time a brilliant musician grew old and sickly. He began to see Death out of the corner of his eye everywhere he went, and knew that soon enough Death would come calling at his door. He could have run. He was smart, and could have run and hid for a long time, and maybe he wouldn't have ever been caught. But instead of running he stayed where he was, and Death walked right into his home."
"What a moron."
He shrugs. "Death probably thought the same thing, because it asked the musician why he stayed. Why he did not escape when he'd had the chance. And the man said it was because he had a piano."
"A piano." Natasha rolls her eyes contemptuously.
"He had this beautiful grand piano," Clint goes on, undaunted. "Music was his passion, was everything he loved. He could have run, but he would have had to leave his piano behind. It was too heavy, too permanent. He thought it was better to die beside his piano than to run forever without it."
"Your allegories are shit," Natasha growls darkly. "Okay, Buddha Barton, I'm guessing that you're suggesting that this...junk could be my piano." She gestures angrily to the things that surround them--the t-shirt, Gran's quilt, Jesse's pictures, so many other things. "But the musician in your story? He was a fool. Because he could have run forever and bought himself a hundred other pianos, all over the world. He could have still made music. And furthermore, he may have loved his stupid piano, but it never loved him back, and didn't shed a tear when he died beside it."
"It didn't need him," he agrees. "It was strong on its own."
"That story is so incredibly dumb."
"I'm not suggesting that you make these things your personal piano. I was suggesting that it could be me. The team. All of us together."
And that takes all the wind out of her sails. Natasha stares at him, and he shrugs again, self consciously, uncomfortably. Neither of them is good at this kind of thing. "Maybe we could do it," Clint adds, out of storytelling mode, his voice quieter now. "Maybe we could try. We could think about...keeping them."
They'd offered their friendship, and she could accept it, the way he seems to. Really accept it, be willing to keep it. Natasha touches the quilt she bought so long ago now, the first thing that she thought she might have room enough to keep, wanting to rescue an item that had been made of love and then thrown away. That's what the quilt, and all these little things that came afterward, had come to mean--to accept love when it was given, to not cast those gestures aside as if worthless.
"I'm not like the guy in your story," Natasha warns, but she's wavering, and he knows it. "I'm the piano. I'm strong on my own."
"And that's why someday I will gladly die beside you," Clint says with a grin. He presses back into the couch, pleased with himself, putting his feet up on the coffee table and knocking off half of her clean clothing, accidentally on purpose.
"You are God's perfect idiot. You know that, right?" But she smiles back, and leans into him, their arms fitting perfectly around one another, as they always have.
"Oh, I do. And if I ever forget, I have you to remind me."
*******
They hang Steve's sign.
And she unpacks, putting everything back where it belongs.
*******
Epilogue
Tony and Natasha are in Nevada on SHIELD business when he spots a flea market near the diner they grab lunch in. He's been eager to find something comparable to the watch to give back to Clint, so he suggests they go in and poke around, pick through the junk and oddities.
Natasha's eyes zero in on a tiny jewelry box, tarnished, the words Mom's Treasures etched into the lid. It's easy to find these things, now that she knows how to look. Tony comes over and Natasha holds it up wordlessly for him to examine.
"I don't know what's sadder," he says finally. "That all these love tokens are cast away, or that we all go around and gather them up afterwards, bring them to one another like bouquets of broken flowers."
Natasha just shakes her head. She doesn't know either. Tony drifts away a little as she examines the jewelry box and then puts it down again. She is just about to suggest to Tony that they head out when his voice carries over from the corner of the store, loud and obviously excited.
"Holy crap! Natasha, look at this!"
It's a painting, and it's by Jesse.
It's done in the same style as the others, but it's also a little bit better than the ones in her and Clint's apartment. Maybe Jesse had graduated, become an artist. Or maybe he's just a regular guy that likes to paint but doesn't like to keep his work, and is also unable to just throw it away. Maybe he likes leaving his paintings around the country for other people to discover like buried treasures.
"It's probably not the same Jesse," Tony frowns, a little doubtful now after his initial excitement. "It's not an uncommon name, and the odds that his paintings would be in New York and here have to be infinitesimal."
"Why? We're in both places," Natasha argues, and he has to concede the point.
It's the same signature as ever, a big, black, blocky JESSE in the lower right corner. She isn't even embarrassed by her undoubtedly sappy smile as Tony carries it to the register, grinning from ear to ear as well.
She can't wait until Clint sees it, and she smiles some more in anticipation of his excitement. Tony is right, finding this painting is almost miraculous; as unlikely and amazing as finding a message in a bottle. It's a hello, a wink across time and distance, a gesture of love from a painter to a bunch of friends he doesn't even know he has.
"Jesse," Natasha whispers, shaking her head at those big bold letters, and at the delight in Tony's eyes. "You made it."
*******