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I know I'm a day late on my update, so thank you for being patient with me!

Things start picking up a little bit more in this chapter, so I hope you guys like it!

As always, please keep reviewing. Y'all have been spoiling me with loads of reviews, so I always get worried whenever I don't hear from you guys as much as I have been in the past!

For extra emotions, listen to "All My Days" - Alexi Murdoch =)

Enjoy! =)


Chapter 3

Natasha set the last dish in the dish drain and folded the small, wet dishtowel she'd been using to dry the dishes before she hung it over the side of the dish drain. Beside her, Clint lifted up his hands and let out a sharp, low snort.

"My hands look like prunes," he remarked. Natasha held her hands up and smiled in response.

"Mine don't," she said. He made a face at her and wiped his hands off on his jeans as if that would actually do something to help.

"Next time you can wash, and I'll dry. How about that, hmm?" he asked.

"Deal." She leaned against the counter and watched him move about the kitchen. She'd missed watching him in the kitchen because he was so relaxed and at ease there, but she'd also missed watching him in general. He moved with an easy grace that not many men had, and that was only because of his training. He was aware of himself physically as a body moving through space, and he moved with that awareness printed onto his muscles. "So when do I get a tour of the farm? First time we were here, we weren't exactly in the right state of mind or body to do the whole official tour thing."

"We can go now if you want," Clint suggested. She caught the curious, almost hopeful glance he sent her way.

"It's almost dark outside," she said.

"What? Scared of the dark? Bad guys running around?" Clint shot her a smirk that made her inwardly roll her eyes but outwardly narrow her eyes at him.

"Fine. Show me around," she said. "Wow me with your farm."

Clint's eyes darted down to her socked feet. "Closed-toed shoes. No heel."

"Roger that." She grabbed her flat sneakers and slipped them on, catching Clint's disapproving gaze as he saw the shoes she was wearing. "What?"

"We're going to have to get you Timberlands," he said. "Where are your Timberlands from home?"

"Those are at the New York place, not the D.C. place," Natasha replied. "I kind of left D.C. as soon as I could. Didn't really think about flying all the way to New York just to grab my Timberlands."

"That wasn't smart," Clint said, but she saw the small smile in his mouth that let her know he wasn't being serious. "Your shoes will get gross in no time here on a rainy day, so tomorrow morning we'll head into town and get like, real stuff."

"Good thinking." Natasha shoved her heel into her remaining shoe and stood back up. "I barely have clothes here or anything, and what I brought probably doesn't fit the farming lifestyle."

"Natasha Romanoff…the Black Widow. On a farm," Clint said with a smirk. "Never thought I'd see the day. Ready, Nat?"

"Yeah." She followed him out the front door and down the steps of the porch. The sky was more dark than it was light, but she could still see enough to make out her surroundings and where general places were located. She saw several buildings out in the distance and one building several hundred yards away from the house, and squinted her eyes through the darkness to see them.

"Barn," Clint said as he lifted a hand to point towards the closer building. "The horses and chickens are there. Cows are a little farther out."

"Cows?" Natasha repeated. "You own cows."

"Yeah. Kind of." He gave a small shrug. "Their milk does well locally at the farmers' markets. The farm kind of has a name for being organic."

"So you sell stuff," Natasha says, again stating and not asking.

"Technically, the—"

"—people who work for you sell stuff," she finished for him with a glance tossed in his direction. "How long have you been doing this?"

Clint's smile came out wry and vague, just like he'd been about everything else surrounding the farm so far. "A long time."

She followed him in silence as they walked towards an open field out towards the buildings in the distance. She sensed Clint beside her, and she sensed him in a new way she hadn't noticed before. He was relaxed. He was quiet and relaxed and completely unconcerned about anything, the complete opposite of her. She was tense, unable to wind down from the past few days of running from and shooting anything that might possibly be linked with HYDRA.

But Clint? That wasn't him. Not right now. Then again, Clint had always been different from her in a myriad of ways, and that was one of the thousands of reasons why they worked so well together. He was funny and upbeat, never afraid to go out of his way to talk to people and make them feel ok—she was quiet and observant with a suspicious, assuming air about her. Clint was patient, and he was genuinely kind. She was impatient, and it took a lot for her to want to be nice the way that he was. Maria always joked and said that between the two of them, Clint was the light, and she was the dark, and really, it was true.

"You're staring," Clint pointed out, ever in tune with his surroundings.

"I know I'm staring," she replied.

"What's on your mind?" he asked. He looked over at her, and she saw the softness in his eyes, the look he always got whenever he wanted to hold her hand or touch some part of her but didn't. Her eyes scanned over his body, again noticing how relaxed he was, and she just gave a small smile and a headshake.

"Nothing," she said. "I was just noticing how…calm you are."

He gave her an unreadable expression and then looked back out across the rapidly darkening land in front of them. "Why do I get the feeling that that's a bad thing?"

"Oh, Jesus. No. No, I didn't mean it as a criticism," Natasha said quickly because she didn't mean it that way. "It's just different. All of this is different, even from the first time we've been here together. And you're different, which isn't bad. You look…I don't know. Comfortable."

Clint looked back at her again, this time with surprise on his face. She waited for him to say something in response, but he didn't. Instead, he just looked down at the ground and kept walking, his pace ever slow but steady and strong. Despite his casual body language, she could tell that he wanted to touch her because he was doing that thing where he kind of wander over a little into her direction and then back out again as if he'd changed his mind.

"This isn't new to you. This whole farm thing with the—the cows and the fields and everything," Natasha said out loud, breaking the silence. Clint shook his head. "I didn't think so."

Clint slowed to a stop and gazed at her with softer blue eyes than she'd seen from him before. Just like his call name had earned him, his eyes were sharp—they needed to be. Natasha couldn't remember a time when he'd looked at her, and she hadn't been able to feel as though his gaze could piece through her soul. But just then, he looked at her with all the gentleness in the world, and it made her pause, too.

"We can do a full tour tomorrow," he said. "It's getting dark, and I think by the time we walk out to see the cows, it'll be too dark to even really see them too well."

"Ok," Natasha replied. She tried to gauge whether he wanted to postpone the tour because he didn't like that she'd noticed all of his differences or if he genuinely just wanted her to get a good look at the cows. It wasn't until they were walking up the steps to the house, and he placed his hand on the small of her back as she opened the door to go inside that she knew nothing was wrong.

Clint was many things, and even through all his new differences, he was steady. He would always be steady.


Clint surprised her one step further by curling up against her and holding her that night. She was used to being greeted by sex—many hours of long, varying kinds of sex, and admittedly, she'd kind of expected that to happen tonight, but Clint surprised her by spooning her close and putting his face against the back of her shoulder.

"Rain check?" he asked, knowing what she was thinking—God, he always knew what she was thinking, and sometimes in moments like these, it still managed to catch her off guard—as he kissed the back of her shoulder.

"I hope that's a promise," she replied.

"Of course."


Natasha didn't wake up until 11 o'clock the next day, which she considered fair since she'd spent the last few days on the run for her life. And true to nature, Clint wasn't awake before she was. They both quietly started a new routine to their day of getting ready. Clint showered first, and while Natasha showered and got ready, he made breakfast. In a way, Natasha thought, it was exactly like being back home in New York or D.C. or wherever they'd been assigned by SHIELD to make their temporary base.

Everything felt somewhat normal and ok until Clint grabbed a set of keys by the door and started out to the car, Natasha by his side. She waited at the car in the dirt driveway while Clint looked up, and when he turned around, he grinned at her. "Oh, we're taking the truck."

Natasha's red eyebrows shot up into her hairline. "The truck."

"The truck."

She stared at him, and he stared back at her. Finally, she sighed and held her hands up in defeat. "Alright. The truck. Jesus, Barton, who the hell are you, and why am I just now finding out about your secret life?"

Clint grinned and gave her a cheeky wink as he started out in a different direction. "I'll pull the truck around front. You can stay here."

Natasha watched him walk off, and she frowned just a little bit. Clint looked like he was ok. And really, she was fine with that. She wanted him to be ok—for Christ's sake, she'd spent all of her time in D.C. with Rogers and Wilson worrying about him and hoping that he'd be ok. But this was just…new. It was new, she told herself. Natasha was a woman of guns, bullets, fake disguises, and correctly executed mission plans. She lived for rules because she liked knowing which ones were ok to break.

But a farm. Agriculture and animals were kind of foreign to the redheaded assassin. No, not kind of. They were very foreign to her. She looked out and around the land in the daytime sun and saw the places more clearly. If she squinted her eyes, she could make out what she thought were cows out in the distance. Clint has cows, she thought. Jesus, the man I'm in love with has cows, and I'm only finding out about it after nine years.

Suddenly, movement caught her eye, and she re-directed her gaze towards it, only to find Clint pulling a black truck up around front. She let out a quiet sigh of relief to see that it wasn't one of those stereotypical, falling-apart-everywhere kinds of trucks that movies always portrayed farmers having. The truck looked only about 10 years old and in working condition, and by God, she would be very happy to ride in that instead of some beaten up farmer vehicle.

She crossed towards it and opened the passenger's side door, fluidly leaping up into the seat. "Clint Barton owns a truck."

"Kind of," Clint said.

"Belongs to one of your workers?"

"It's a long story."

She knew when she wasn't supposed to ask questions, so she just nodded and let him fiddle with the radio as he eased down out of the dirt driveway. She was about to make a comment about how she liked men who drove trucks just to make him smile, but she noticed that he looked different than how he'd looked all of last night. Today he looked a little nervous and only the slightest bit uncomfortable.

"You good?" she asked.

"Yeah," he replied with a nod. "I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure, Nat." He sent her a look and a half-smile that Natasha knew was meant only to appease her if nothing else. She leaned back in her seat and looked out the window. She might as well get used to the scenery, she reasoned silently to herself. They had no idea how long they were going to be there, and so it made sense that the best thing to do was get acquainted with her surroundings. That's what a spy always did, first and foremost. She might have been on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but she was still a spy.

"Dammit," Clint sighed. "There's only country music here." Natasha wrinkled up her nose, and Clint nodded sympathetically at her reaction. "I know. I'm thinking the same thing. There used to be a classic rock station, but even then it was a bit iffy because not many people listened to it. I bet the guy who ran it got cancelled or whatever."

"Not a fan of country," Natasha added.

"Well, I think that's all the music we're going to get here, so we should probably learn to enjoy it," Clint sighed. He glanced over and caught her glare, and he winced. "Yeah, you're right. I don't think I'll be able to learn to enjoy it."

"You and me both," Natasha murmured. "Do you have one of those cords to hook your phone up to the radio? We can always plug our phones in."

"Dammit, mine's back in the D.C. apartment."

"Mine, too. I didn't even think that this would be a problem, or else I would have grabbed. Actually, I probably wouldn't have since I was just grabbing whatever I needed before I got out of there." Natasha made a mental note to pick up one of those cords in downtown or to order one off the Internet. It wouldn't be that difficult to open a new Amazon account and add one of her super secret, nearly untraceable credit cards in order to get what she needed.

"Hey, so…when we go into town…we might get a lot of weird looks," Clint said suddenly, distracting her from her thoughts about cords and credit cards. She looked over at him and saw him looking more nervous than she'd seen him look this entire time.

"Well, we're new," she said. "At least I am. The people will recognize you?"

"Yeah. Maybe. I don't know." Clint shrugged, again not meeting her eyes. "Just as a heads up. You know with these smaller towns…people stare at newcomers. They talk."

"Ok," Natasha replied. Clint was nervous about something, but she didn't know what. He didn't have that same nervous look about him whenever he was worried a mission might go wrong—even then, he never looked nervous. He just got incredibly quiet and focused, ready to get into the zone and finish whatever needed to be finished. She knew that inside, his mind might be screaming nervous words at him, but on the outside, he'd never show it. So seeing Clint nervous and kind of jittery in the car didn't really make sense to her; Clint Barton was a thousand things, but nervous wasn't exactly a word she'd use to describe him.

They continued the car ride in comfortable silence until Natasha saw the small buildings of downtown loom up in front of her. She shifted in her seat to get a better look, and quite honestly, she was surprised to see that it was bigger than she'd been expecting. In the back of her mind, she'd been thinking of a tiny, one-room store that had groceries and maybe shoes, but the downtown in actuality was a decent-sized place with store options on both sides of the street.

"So," Clint announced. "This is downtown."

"It's nice," she said. "Bigger than I was expecting."

"Hey, we have a college here!" Clint protested. "It's not some hick town. What were you expecting? Footloose shit where there's like, five stores or something?"

"Uh, yeah," Natasha deadpanned. She eagerly looked again out the window and looked around. "But this? I can work with this."

Clint snorted and rolled his eyes. "You can work with it. Huh. We'll see just how well you can work with it."

He pulled into a parking lot off the main street and jumped out to pay the meter as Natasha slid out of the passenger's side. The town was definitely much more urban than she'd been expecting, and she was pleasantly surprised to see that that was the case, but it still wasn't New York or D.C. She took a deep inhale and looked around her. She could get used to a small town. She could get used to something that wasn't New York or D.C. or Paris or Rome or any of the huge cities she'd had to spend time in her entire life.

When Clint was done paying the meter, they started walking out to the main sidewalk. He was a bundle of nerves beside her, and she wanted to say or do something to calm him down, but she knew better than to do that. Clint was in one of those moods where drawing attention to his negative energy would only make him more irritable. She followed him as they passed several stores and then came to a stop outside one. Clint slowed down and squinted up at the sign to make sure that this was the correct store, and then when he nodded, Natasha grabbed the door and started walking in, Clint right behind her.

The store was a large, typical clothing store that appeared to focus on hunting clothes and fishing gear. For a second, Natasha couldn't help the smirk that crossed over her face, but then she quickly wiped it off. She had to try to at least look like she blended in here, even though she had a feeling that this would be one of the very few times in her entire career as a spy in which she would not be able to flawlessly blend in.

It didn't take her long to find where the shoes were, and it took her even less time to find an average pair of Timberlands in her size. She looked over at Clint and saw him rubbing the back of his neck the way he did whenever he was stressed out about something.

"Hey," she said softly. He didn't hear her, so she crossed over to him, shoes in hand. "Hey."

He looked at her then and smiled, though it wasn't a very genuine smile. "Hey."

"Are you ok?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I think I'm still tired from everything. Yesterday was a pretty eventful day," he replied. "Find your shoes?"

"Mmhmmm. I think these'll do it." She lifted them up a little higher to inspect them. "Yep. Pretty sure these will look great on me while I wade through cow shit or whatever it is you're planning on having me do."

"I don't know, Nat, wading through cow shit soun—"

"Excuse me," a voice said, distracting the two spies. Natasha looked up to find an older man standing there. He wasn't dressed in any way to indicate that he worked there, but she couldn't imagine why anyone would approach them unless he was a store worker or if he knew Clint. If he knew Clint.

"Yes, sir?" Clint asked. Just like that, he was back to being professional. His cool had returned, even though she could detect some nervous energy beneath all of his easy demeanor.

"You're the younger Barton, right?" the man asked. Clint went rigid beside her, but he nodded with a smile on his face.

"Yes, sir, I own the Barton farm," he replied.

"I knew I recognized you from somewhere," the man replied, beaming brightly. "I don't know if you'd remember me, but I'm Andrew Davis. You've certainly grown up. Almost didn't recognize you there for a second." His eyes darted to Natasha. "Is this your—your—"

"This is my wife," Clint said with his smile still tight and uncomfortable. He put a hand on Natasha's back and smiled at her, though his smile seemed to grow a little more genuine as he looked at her. "Natal—"

"Natasha," she interrupted before he could get out an undercover name. If this man knew Clint's real name and not a cover name, it only seemed fair. "My name's Natasha."

"You got you a pretty wife there, son," Andrew Davis said, grinning. "I always hoped you'd turn out ok, and from what I see right now just in these few seconds—"

"Oh, yeah, Natasha's great. She's so great," Clint said. "I'm sorry to be abrupt Mr. Davis, but we've got an appointment to keep. I'll have to catch up with you at another time, but we'll be here for a little while so plenty of time."

He started guiding Natasha away from the older man and towards the register before she could process what had even happened. She looked up at his face and found his jaw clenched, his eyes fierce with a thundering emotion she hadn't seen in a long time. Quietly, she set the shoes on the counter and let the young cashier check her out. She paid, grabbed the bag, and started walking to the door with Clint, still not saying anything. When they opened the door and walked out, Clint didn't look back in.

Natasha waited for him to say something, but he just started walking back to the truck. "Clint. Clint, we have more things we need to get while we're here."

"I know," he said shortly. She followed him down the street and around the corner into the parking lot. He leaned against the side of his truck and didn't say anything, didn't look at her. He just looked down at the ground and kept his gaze focused there.

"Are you going to tell me what that was back there?" Natasha asked. Clint shifted his jaw to the side, but he didn't say anything. "Clint?"

He looked up and away from her towards the brick wall of the building beside him. Natasha took a step in and tried to get in his line of sight. "Nat…"

"Yeah? I'm right here," she said, careful not to sound angry because she didn't want him to think that she was. He inhaled deeply and then let out a long sigh, finally turning his head to look at her.

"Nat, I think you already know," he said in an even, matter of fact voice. "I think you've known the truth about the farm since we were here two years ago."

Natasha paused and didn't look away. She'd had suspicions. Clint moved too comfortably there at the house for it to just be a farmhouse that he'd bought 10 or so years ago. He knew the area and the land, and when he'd looked out at it last night, she'd seen a spark in his eye that she knew she got whenever she looked at him.

"This is where you grew up," she said quietly. Clint smiled blankly and nodded.

"I knew you'd know," he replied. "Don't know why I've been secretive about it this whole time."

"It's the way you hold yourself," Natasha offered as if she were apologizing. "You're far more relaxed here than I've seen you anywhere else. And I knew you grew up on a farm…lived in Iowa…it was just a lot of circumstantial stuff adding all up, but it was watching how comfortable you were there that gave it away."

"Which is funny because my best memories do not have to do with this place at all," Clint remarked out loud. He tried to sound light about it, but he just sounded sad. "Spent part of my childhood there…then when you were injured, and I had Loki in my…" He looked away again. "And now. When SHIELD's gone, and we don't have anywhere else to go."

"Those are the only times you've been back?" Natasha asked curiously. Clint shook his head.

"Every few years I'd come check on things, but I've never stayed for longer than two or three days," he replied. "So…I guess we're staying there a while, and I'll just have to…I don't know."

"We can't always change past memories, but there's always something to be done about future ones," Natasha offered. Clint peered up at her through his eyelashes in such a young way that it both melted and broke her heart. Stepping forward, she reached up to his face and laid her palm over his cheek. "And remember…this time you're not alone. I'm here with you. I might be poor company but…"

Clint took her hand and held it in his as he smiled gently at her, this time a real smile as small as it was. "You're the best company."

"You're biased," Natasha replied, her voice gentle and fond.

"A little bit." He stared at her with those soft eyes of his, and then he gave a little tug on her hand to bring her closer. Pulling in for just a brief moment, he leaned his cheek against the top of her head. "I love you. Thank you, Nat."

"For what?" she asked. He pulled away and let his blue eyes search her face. For what, she didn't know, but she couldn't say that she minded being the topic of his gaze when he looked at her so gently like that.

"For knowing without me having to say," he replied simply. She brought her hand back up to his cheek, and she kissed him, soft, slow, and brief.

"I love you, too," she said in reply as she studied in him in return.

I know when you lie to me, she thought.

I know when you keep secrets, she wanted to say.

I know I'm your best-kept secret.