AN: I started this for the kissing post at be_compromised and somehow it felt complete before the kissing. But someone said grease smear and someone said chocolate smear and I thought, why not both? Just dabbling my toes in writing these two. I do not own anything, but Marvel has owned my zombified self since I was 5, I figure it's all even.
There aren't many of these moments for them.
Moments when they might almost be ordinary, average hey, honey don't forget milk at the store people.
And, okay, maybe ordinary average didn't usually include a kitchen table covered in an array of knives, small and easily hidden, narrow and wicked, shining now and lingering in his memory as they were earlier dripping and sticky with blood. Enemy blood and his, where she'd dug a festering splinter out of the top of his thigh.
But Nat's sitting there, at Clint's table in his creaking wooden chair, in her panties and his t-shirt, comfortable enough to almost have her back to him. She's in his apartment more often than she's in hers, but she won't let Tony change anything in her gleaming pin-neat flat.
And he watches her draw the blade down the oil slicked whetstone. Watches her hold up the blade to the light, the deadly, thin edge glinting in the warm light, same light gleaming off the top of her head.
And he ought to be sitting, or lying down, but he's too buzzed still. Sat for two days in that hide in the top of a building falling down around him waiting for the mark, ignoring the throb, the burn. Doesn't want to sit, so he's here, limping around the kitchen, slowly folding cooled melted chocolate in to rich cream, trying to decide if he should actually make something with it. Between Cap and Thor, desserts in the Tower last about six minutes. Cake is always welcome.
There's something almost...tender about her when she's maintaining her weapons. Each blade needs just the right angle, the exact degree of force to bring out its potential. She drags this one down the stone one last time, whispering to it in Russian as she lays it beside its sisters.
Natasha wipes her hand across her forehead and the knife oil gleams in the light. And he's got the urge to take a cloth and go to her, to hold her chin and clean her face, gently.
And he thinks, "Fuck it. If she doesn't like it, I'll blame the blood poisoning."
So he sets down the bowl and, licking his thumb, picks up the flour sacking, skirts around the counter and kneels at her feet, letting the pain in his stitches keep him focused. And when she gives him one of her arched eyebrows he takes her chin between his fingers and says, "Hold still."
Her lips part and when Clint brushes the damp towel across her forehead honest surprise leaps into her cool green eyes.
"You had a little something..."
"You, too." She leans forward and delicately licks a smear of ganache off the corner of his mouth. And smiles.