I'm really not sure what this is, I'll be honest with you. It's something I just started writing this morning, then kept writing, then finished and I still wasn't sure. I think it's all just part of me testing things and trying things out and trying to find my voice. So please, please, please read and review, so that I can get a feeling about what's working and what isn't. Most of all though, I hope that you enjoy reading this!

Y.A.

After their last mission, stopping biological terrorists from unleashing an epidemic in Africa, Clint had got really, really sick. Pneumonia, the doctors said but then, as Tony had scoffed, who the hell manages to get pneumonia in the middle of the desert?

Clint does, Natasha had countered coolly, just like he also managed to get heatstroke in the Arctic. He didn't have the best luck in the world. She had noticed the minute they stepped onto the quinjet to return to Stark Tower the cough and slight tremor in his body that he tried to mask, because she knew every part of him and wouldn't miss something like that.

She had watched him with her keen eyes all the way back, not even cracking a smile when he caught her looking and made goofy faces at her. He had resisted her insistence on getting a doctor to check him out right up until the point when he had collapsed in a coughing fit in her arms and even then he had looked at her with cheeks flushed with fever and glassy eyes to say, 'Know what Tasha, I think I've got a cold.' Natasha had rolled her eyes and put him to bed and tried to hide her worry from the others when the doctor made his prognosis. Of course, she had seen him much worse, far closer to deaths door, but pneumonia was still serious and Clint seemed to have a penchant for deteriorating rapidly and scaring her massively.

Not that she would ever admit that to him, or anyone else. But she thought that he knew.

It seemed as though he was ill forever. In that time she found a kindred spirit in perhaps the most unlikely place. Pepper had taken it upon herself to be Clint's chief nurse during his illness, sensing that while it was something that Natasha would have liked to do she just didn't know how. Natasha was more suited to medicine in the field, popping back in dislocated joints, sewing crude and hurried stitches and telling Clint to suck it up. Efficient she may be, gentle certainly not.

So Pepper had assumed that role, checking his temperatures, administering his medicine and wiping a cool cloth across his forehead. She would sit by his bed and read to him in a soothing, calm voice, which also served to soothe Natasha as she sat, as she always did, in her guard post on the other side of Clint's bed. Sometimes when Clint had drifted off to sleep Pepper would keep reading until Natasha too slipped into the slumber that she constantly resisted.

The others, Tony and Bruce and Steve and Thor, they all took it in turns to take up her post by Clint's bed, tag-teaming so that they could bully her into eating and sleeping and actually move in some way.

It was after one of these breaks that it had happened. Thor had used his pretty impressive talent of being able to cry at will to guilt her into going to eat some dinner. The mere threat of tears had her running for the door because there was no way she would be able to deal with a giant, lumbering and bawling god. Tony took up her place at Clint's bedside grumbling about it all the way, although secretly glad to be able to help out in some way. Inevitably Pepper had joined him, first wiping sticky sweat from Clint's forehead then sitting back in her chair to pick up where she had left off in her book from the night before. 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', Tony quickly realised as Pepper's voice carried him back to his own childhood when, as a small boy, his mother would sit by his bed at night and read to him. She would do all the voices for him, bringing the stories to life night after night. The tales of Narnia had been his favourite and he had begged for them over and over even when she had suggested something new. Comforted by these memories he sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and let the sound of her voice and the words of the tale to carry him away.

Until. 'Why...you doing…this?'

The voice was small, hesitant, weak. Tony opened his eyes a crack to peer at the bed where the pathetic noise had come from. Clint's eyes were open slightly, fighting against heavy lids. He was trying to keep them fixed on Pepper but the fever pulled them away, wandering to whatever spot was easiest for them to land on. He was utterly exhausted by the illness.

Pepper marked the place in her book, frowning she leaned forward, 'What do you mean, Clint?'

He breathed in and out, heavy, laboured breaths, 'Why…looking…after…me…why…so…good…to me?'

Pepper smiled softly, that same smile that Tony loved to see on her, so full of affection and warmth. She leaned forward in her seat, reaching out to push Clint's hair back from his face which he instinctively leaned into. 'Because,' she chided gently, 'Because you need a bit of mothering. You all do, and god knows Natasha doesn't fit the bill.'

She was rewarded with the slight upturn of his lips and continued running her hand through his hair.

'Don't…remember…her face,' Clint breathed and Tony thought that finally he had really lost the plot.

Evidently Pepper had the same idea because she asked, 'Who, Natasha? She's only been gone for 15 minutes!'

'My…mother…too…young…died…' Pepper looked up at Tony, alarmed, her hand frozen in Clint's hair. Obviously the pneumonia was doing something to him because he never talked in any way about himself or his family and neither liked how vulnerable the fever was leaving him. Tony frowned, about to say something but Clint wasn't finished, 'Remember…daddy's face…coming for me…angry….but…not…mama…'

He trailed off, completely spent and closed his eyes as he let the darkness overtake him once again. Pepper held Tony's gaze, her eyes stricken as she tried to comprehend what Clint had unwittingly told them.

'Well he's never told me that.'

They whipped their heads towards the door, where they found Natasha lounging against the doorframe, looking mildly affronted.

Tony moved to leave his chair and offer it to her, but she waved him away and pulled up another chair next to Pepper, who still had a facial expression that strongly resembled a gaping fish.

'I don't understand,' she said to Natasha, with tears in her eyes. Tony could see from the way that she was gripping her book, so tight that he knuckles were white, that she was trying very hard to keep her emotions in check. That was something that he loved about her, that she was almost too compassionate and felt the pain of others as keenly as though it were her own.

Natasha hesitated before answering her as she scrutinized Clint to see if anything had changed dramatically in the fifteen minutes she had been away. If anything had she would have given Thor something to really cry about.

'Clint's parents died when he was young, 7 or 8, I'm not sure really. He was in an orphanage for a while I think before his brother made him go to join the circus, which sounds unbelievable but is actually true, and that's where he learnt his archery.' She said it simply, without embellishment because there was none.

The two of them were incredibly close and trusted each other more than any other person in the world, but their line of work left them with little time to be emotional. There was no holding hand and sharing secrets like little girls at camp for them. Over the years they had let each other in, little by little, Clint more than her and usually it was in a situation similar to the current one. When he so ill or injured and slightly out of his mind we would let something slip, as though he tried so hard to keep it in but couldn't quite manage it. Sometimes she thought he was weak and that whenever he did this it was a cry in the dark that no one in his life had answered, but that was before she had figured out that what he buried deep within him was so painful that this the only time his mind allowed him to let pieces of it out was when he wouldn't remember it later. It was smart, she mused, he could let people in without them seeing the shame in his eyes and him seeing the pity in theirs. Protection and self-preservation, two things she understood and admired in him.

But Tony and Pepper didn't know this, they only knew what Clint had feverishly said, and what she had just told them. In the time that they had been a team the two master assassins had been the slowest to open up to the rest of them, especially Clint who had residual feelings of guilt from what they had termed 'the Loki Affair'. Tony himself knew the pain of losing both his parents, although he had been much older and practically an adult by that time. He could hardly imagine how he would have coped if he had been 7 or 8 and his mother had not come home one day. No more hugs, no more kisses, no more Narnia.

No boy should grow up without a mother, he thought, but then corrected himself. No child, no child should grow up without a mother, and he wondered if these were the secrets Clint kept buried deep, what did Natasha also keep hidden?

He glanced over at Pepper and saw from the thin line of her pursed lips and the steely glint in her eyes that she was thinking the same thing as him. Nothing more was said and they both excused themselves from Clint's bedside, leaving Natasha alone with her partner. Neither mentioned it to the other but that night they held each other a little closer and Tony's eyes lingered on the small picture of his mother that was propped up in the corner of his room, memorising her every feature as though he, too, might wake up in the morning and find her image erased from his mind.

No more was said, to each other or to Natasha and Clint, but after that Pepper made even more effort to mother Clint in the most gentle and unobtrusive way. She spent longer reading to him, gradually making her way through the Narnia series, even when Clint was almost better and would lie listening sleepily but not feverishly. More often than not both Tony and Natasha joined them in what turned into a kind of ritual that they all would miss when Clint was completely recovered. Not that they didn't want him to get better, of course, but they knew that soon whatever kind of connection they had forged between them would be loosened as Clint would pull back from them, inevitably taking Natasha with him.

He did retreat from them, as they had all expected, but to a lesser extent than before he was ill. He seemed more willing to make an effort with them, especially with Pepper. He came to her slowly and hesitantly, with small problems in the beginning but over time Tony found them talking together more often, but only when Pepper was occupied with something else at the same time, cooking or working, and Tony suspected it was so that the focus would never completely be on Clint.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, Clint let them in. There would always be some distance between them but he didn't push them away and let them mean something to him more than just some people he had to work with. He brought Natasha to them as well and they all found within each other a sense of family that had been missing from their lives for so long. Of course Pepper continued to mother them all and they all found themselves enjoying it, even when they teased her for it. After all, everyone needs someone to take care of them once in a while.

The following Christmas Pepper received the full set of the Chronicles of Narnia and although there was no note attached to it she knew exactly who had given it to her.

From that point forward, every time one of them was injured or ill, usually an accident prone and frankly unlucky Clint, they would all pile into the room and enjoy listening to Pepper read from the series.

After months of looking, searching any and every database and source that he could find, Tony had finally unearthed a picture of Clint's mother, her high school yearbook photo. He was taken aback by her beauty and startled by her eyes, eyes which lived on in her son. He had left the photograph in Clint's room, wanting to spare them both the awkwardness of some uncomfortable presentation.

He had been unprepared for Clint coming to him late that night, seeking him out down in his workshop. Clutching the photograph in his hand Clint had thanked him with tears in his eyes, for the first time that Tony had seen him, completely unashamed.

'I remember,' he had smiled shyly. 'I remember more, now that I know her face.'

That was all they both needed. To remember what was once lost. That was enough.

Well, for now.