Author's note: This is the sequel to the story "Widow Down." It is possible to read this and more or less get what's going on without having read the previous, but I strongly recommend reading Widow Down first or else there will be a lot of confusing back story that will be hard to understand. If you choose to go ahead with it and forgo the previous, you need to know that Clint and Natasha are in a new-ish relationship, Pepper and Tony are engaged, and neither story is Age of Ultron complicit.

Widow Gone

Six weeks after Christmas day:

She stands under the streetlight for once, in clear view of anyone who passes by or looks out the four story building's windows, but it doesn't matter. At four a.m. no one's out and no one in the entire building is awake but me. I smile at her from my place in the dark but I don't bother to move. She'll come in when she's ready.

Her clothes drip the rainwater all over the old linoleum as she silently walks inside, dirty from the contact with her bloody and muddied up body. The floor becomes littered with the once expensive ruined dress, thigh high stockings, and broken heels in a short trail leading to the run down apartment's only bathroom.

I hear the shower turn on, it's pipes rattling with the force of the running water in the walls and I can imagine the water running over the curves of her dirty body, how the water will run brown and how she will meticulously scrub out all the caked blood from each of her fingernails. I've seen her do it enough. I've helped her wash dried blood out of her hair on occasion. It would be easier it the colors didn't blend in so closely.

When the water finally turns off long after my estimation of when it would have ran cold I watch, motionless on my side, as the bathroom light clicks off by the tangled string, and feel the mattress dip just slightly in front of me. Her hair is still wet when I pull her to me, but I bury my face in the long wavy curls anyway as she settles in with her back to my chest. For a long few minutes after I wrap a lazy arm around her torso covered in one of my old t-shirts and yank the blankets up to our necks neither of us say anything.

"Plane will be here at ten." She drowsily mumbles into my arm, her breath tickling the skin there a bit.

I stare up at the patterns the cracks in the ceiling have been forming in my imagination for the past couple weeks. It isn't surprising that she wrapped things up on her own, even if our plan had originally put us here for a few more days. I know better than to ask for the details. If she called for pickup that means its been taken care of.

"You good?" I ask, just in case, though I doubt much of that blood is hers. We always ask each other, knowing how unlikely it'd be for either of us to bring it up on our own accord, and sometimes stitches needed sewing or splits set.

"Yeah." And from her voice I know that she's more asleep than not, so I shut my eyes and drift out as well.

The ride back to H.Q. is unremarkable. Nat sits toward the back of the small pickup plane, meticulously dismantling and cleaning her guns and then moving on to sharpen and polish each of the eight knives she brought on the mission. I shoot the breeze with the pilot for a while; him telling me about his kid's fifth birthday and how they are going with a Frozen theme, even though four other kids in her class have already had the same theme at their parties. I kick my feet up and smile at the information. Basham's one of the few that I don't mind flying the plane instead of me.

"It's a mess because she still wants everything to be pink, but all the frozen theme stuff the stores have are in blue."

"Try amazon?" I suggest.

The guy sighs. "Amazon, walmart, party city, target...it's all the same!"

Abruptly, I hear what I could swear was a choked back giggle from Natasha behind us. I crane my neck over to check, but all I find is a half hidden smile playing at her full, red lips and then an eye roll. Apparently, the conversation was entertaining to her.

Whether or not Basham notices, he keeps his eyes glued forward, having learnt a long time ago never to dare a glance at whatever she's doing in the back after she...corrected him...one time after he accidentally saw her halfway through changing out of her tactical suit.

"Well, it can't turn out any worse than last year." I joke. Last year Matt Basham and his wife Laurie had done a Brave theme and somehow I got suckered into showing up to his rural New York home to do an archery demonstration...which would have been fine except that he forgot to tell me he was having another buddy of his show up dressed like a bear.

"How's the therapy from that one going, by the way?"

"Pretty good I think! Were down to having nightmares now only once a week or so and she doesn't scream anymore when we take her to the zoo...so that's progress, right?"

I nod enthusiastically.

"Of course, we did have to send out notes inside all the invites assuring the parents that there won't be any bloodshed this year and we haven't completely resolved that lawsuit Sophia's parents threw at us for emotional turmoil."

"Yeah..." I scratch the back of my neck and shift around a bit. "Who would have thought that would go south so quickly..."

He waves me off "Don't worry about it. That one was definitely on John for being so...convincing as a bear. Besides, having kids is a minefield, man. An absolute minefield. I mean, I love my little Avery more than life itself but I don't want anymore. Of course, that's not how the wife sees it. Now...she wants another one if you can believe that. Like one isn't hard and stressful and expensive enough."

I nod at him without really being able to agree or disagree with so little knowledge on the subject. Tasha can't have children thanks to the Red Room and so that's the end of it. Once again I mentally relive the two of us taking that place down years ago and inwardly smile. Knowing that we killed every member of that organization is the only way I can deal with the serious anger issues thinking about all the bullshit they pulled on Tasha still brings on me to this day. She still wakes up occasionally panting with her silent tears from nightmares about all the people she was forced and manipulated into killing in the name of dear mother Russia, although not nearly as often now as when they first started.

I shake the idea off with an almost visible shutter. I don't need to mentally go there again and neither does she. She's had it rough enough lately and I swore to myself up and down that this year would be better than the latter half of the last one...not that it should be difficult given that time was spent watching my partner who've I've loved for the better part of a decade almost die on me before I even got around to telling her. And, while it was nice having all the down time with our teammates, taking care of an deathly sick version of Natasha (which meant a very angry and annoyed Natasha) while I had no idea what the hell was wrong with her or how to get her better was no picnic either. I'm still marveling over the fact that she and Tony Stark lived in the same tower for that length of time without any resulting deaths or serious property destruction.

When we get back...after the half an hour debriefing and additional hour of meaningless paperwork, we fall into the nearest of our old bunk rooms- Natasha's, I think, but I really can't bother to pay enough attention to those kind of details to be sure- and Tasha's legs are up and around me and her back is pinned to the mostly closed door frame...no...wait...that's definitely not closed...shit. I kick a leg out and slam it much harder than I had intended as I hear more than feel my zipper getting yanked down. I'm sure the entire hallway heard that door slam but everybody here has assumed we've been screwing around with each other for years (even though we haven't until very recently), so it doesn't really matter much. She's still wearing her standard black tank top and dark skinny jeans, so I pry my lips away from her neck just long enough to pull it over her head and throw it somewhere behind us before I launch an all out attack on her neck and collarbone. She takes the moment to support her weight on the top of the doorframe with one arm while using the other to quickly strip herself of her pants without ever touching a foot to the ground.

I grab her by the ass with both hands and pull her to me, her long porcelain legs wrapping themselves back around my waist as I enter her with a grunt. Once, when I was still traveling around with the circus, I dated a trapeze artist and the sex wasn't as acrobatic as Natasha can get sometimes. As soon as I'm all the way in I hear her moan into my neck- something Russian, but I don't hear it well enough to be able to translate what exactly. Instead, I focus on pounding my hips into hers hard like I know she likes- almost, but not quite, as hard as I'm capable of. Even now slow sensuous love making isn't exactly her preferred style when given the choice and she rarely sticks to containing our activities to a bed.

At first she tries to continue marking up my neck with her lips, but after a few seconds she loses her ability to focus on that and ends up just clutching fistfuls of my t-shirt, accidentally ripping it, and then clawing into the skin of my upper back as less and less of her Russian curses make any sense and my hip movements become more erratic. We finish at almost the same time and I haphazardly stumble over to the bed with her still wound around me and land on top of her, her legs unwinding then and falling to either side of my hips with me still buried deep inside her. I take a moment longer to recover my breath than she does, her eyes studying mine in the meantime and then my hand coming up to stroke the side of her face.

Her skin is soft under my calloused over fingertips, hardened from decades of working with my bow and climbing every building I've been given any excuse to and even more that I haven't. Her cheeks are flushed a light pink hue that only serves making her hair seem an impossibly deeper red and I wish I had a picture of her just like this. Right now she isn't the Black Widow or a deadly assassin, but simply a carefree grinning woman looking up at me with shining emerald eyes and I'm not a sniper; I'm simply an out of breath man who's wildly, stupidly, deliriously in love.

"Man, a few months out of the field an your huffing like Happy does after a mile on the threadmill." She teases, reaching up to take my cheeks in both hands and pulling me down to meet her lips.

"Yeah, well not all of us run on super-serum like you and Cap." I manage in between ever deepening kisses.

"We both know mine isn't nearly as potent as Steve's. His metabolism is so high he can't even get drunk. Mine just supplements on endurance and healing speed a bit." Her tone is a little more defensive than I would have figured, but it doesn't come as a huge surprise to me. She's been eager to re-prove herself ever since she's been back in the field. No one else had time to doubt her abilities after the way she decided to make her re entrance into S.H.I.E.L.D. before any they might have had got physically knocked out of them, but proving it to herself is a different matter. Since we've been back on active duty, our mission rate has been one hundred percent successful. I think in another month or two she'll drop the lingering insecurities, but until then I'm doing the safer thing and keeping my mouth shut on the matter. A sharp knock on the door saves me from any further discussion anyway and we both grab up our discarded clothes and scramble to throw them back on as quickly as we can. I have less to find than her, still mostly fully dressed except for my newly ripped shirt, so I focus on tossing her black tank top I find on the floor while she shimmies back into her jeans.

In less than ten seconds she has the door opened, standing as professional as ever to the junior agent knocking.

"Hey...sorry, I um...Hill just...um..." Natasha gives her a smile that's somewhere between coldly professional and menacing as she patiently waits and the younger woman takes an actual step back away from the door. "She...um...just told me to tell you to meet her in her office. I...um...I tried to flag you down on your way in but...um...you didn't seem to notice."

"I see." I pull the door wider open from behind, revealing myself standing very closely behind the Widow and placing a hand at her waist. She tenses a bit, microscopically, really, but noticeable enough for me. I smile down at the agent from behind her. Natasha's been making people uncomfortable around us for years, giving off the impression that we've been fucking each other, probably violently, ever since she came to S.H.I.E.L.D. Now that we actually are sleeping together, I have every intention off having a little bit of fun with her like she used to do to me.

The girl, a little blonde thing that must be on the paperwork side of operations and doesn't look any older than twenty one, blushes a little at the very obvious situation she's found us in and I smile wider at her in genuine amusement.

"Tell her to use the phone next time." Tasha holds up a disposable cellphone to her as though to illustrate its usefulness. "We'll be there in ten."

The girl scurries away as quickly as she can without all out running and I know Natasha's rolling her eyes even though I can't see her do it from behind. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s standards are getting dangerously low." She comments as she leans back into me a bit, arms still crossed, before abruptly breaking the contact taking off down the hall towards Hill's office.

"How are they supposed to be able to keep all the good recruits active when you scare off every one you see?" I call after her, shaking my head, smiling, and then jog to catch up.