"Do you realize what today is?" Clint asked Lucy, shifting two-month-old Raven on his lap and putting her on her back on their picnic blanket so that she could look at the clouds floating through the sky over the roof of Avengers Tower.
"No…" Lucy said, looking at him and drawing her eyebrows together as she tried to come up with the answer.
"One year today, you became Lucy Saint."
Lucy smiled, realizing he was right.
"She's a pretty awesome woman," Clint added as Lucy curled close to him.
She slapped him playfully on the arm, muttering happily, "Stop it!"
"I will not," Clint answered. "Because I love you and you're worth bragging on." He stopped, took a deep breath, and finished, "And that's why I want to give you this."
Then he had an open ring box in his hand, and a diamond and sapphire ring was glinting in the sunlight. Lucy gasped as she realized just what Midgardian tradition he was carrying out here.
"Clint?" she said breathlessly, searching his eyes.
The arm that wasn't holding the ring tightened around her shoulders as he said, "We're a couple of very screwed up people, Angel, and one year ago, I was bound and determined that it was going to be impossible for us to live together… but now I don't want to live without you. I've made mistakes, and I'll make even more of them before I die, but I need you to be there to help me out of whatever holes I dig for myself. I heard a saying once – a really fruity, stupid Dr. Seuss thing – but it fits us perfectly. 'We're all a little weird and life's a little weird. And when we find someone who's weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.' I love you, Lucy Saint, and I want to spend the rest of my life living with you, however long that is. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?"
"Yes!" Lucy laughed with glee and disbelief. "Of course I will!"
Clint's hands were actually shaking as he took the ring out of its box and slid it onto her ring finger. Once the piece of jewelry was settled comfortably where it belonged, Lucy took his face in her hands and kissed him, leaving him as breathless as she was.
"You know," she suggested. "I'm sure Natasha would understand if we asked her to watch Raven for a little while so we could have some grownup time…"
Clint smiled and started cleaning up their picnic while Lucy scooped Raven up into her arms. "I can definitely get behind that idea."
Clint knew that Lucy and Natasha had become friends over the past year and a half that the former had been living in the tower, but it had never crossed his mind that they might be close enough for Natasha to end up being Lucy's maid of honor.
"I'm not her maid of honor, Hawkeye," Natasha corrected when he referenced her as such as he passed through the living room – read: wedding planners' headquarters – while five women sat clustered looking at wedding dress options.
"Then what are you?" he asked, leaning against the doorway, halfway wary of getting any closer to the scene in front of him.
"It's called a matron of honor," Jane told him, though all five heads – Lucy, Nat, Jane, Pepper, and Agent Maria Hill – stayed bent over magazines and cutouts.
"Is there even a difference?" he asked with a role of his eyes, stooping down to pick up eight month old Raven when she crawled away from her Aunt Jane in favor of her daddy.
"Matron means the woman standing in that spot is already married," Natasha supplied. "And you will recall that there was a wedding last month between Steve and myself?"
"Yeah, yeah," Clint answered. "I stood up there, remember? Speaking of standing up there… why you?"
"I beg your pardon?" Lucy asked, glancing away from her magazine and up at him.
"Of all the women that are involved with the Avengers, Natasha's the last one I would expect you to ask to be your maid-matron of honor, that's all."
"Where do you think I got all of my tips and tricks for dealing with you?" Lucy asked teasingly.
"And to be honest," Agent Hill piped up. "Weirder things have happened."
"Name one!" Clint demanded.
There was a dead-silent pause and then Natasha snorted, Agent Hill raised her eyebrows at him, Jane choked on her soda, and Pepper just cracked up with laughter.
Seeing the sudden look of confusion on his face, Natasha chucked a throw pillow at him with deadly aim, ordering, "Get out of here! If you actually have to say that, then you're not worthy of our presence right now."
"Well, fine," Clint muttered, all too glad to head down to Tony's with a declaration of "Raven's coming to watch football with me and her uncles!"
The game was halfway over before Clint realized that all of those women upstairs considered his and Lucy's relationship the "weirder thing that had happened."
"Raven," Clint murmured into his daughter's ear where she sat comfortably leaned back on his lap with a bottle. "Should I resent that? I don't know; what do you think?"
"What are you muttering about over there?" Dr. Banner asked him.
"Nothing important," Clint answered easily.
Since Raven didn't seem too keen on piping up with her opinion anyway, Clint kept his thoughts to himself, eventually deciding that there was no point in resenting what Agent Hill had implied. The truth was that she was right; he couldn't have seen falling in love with Lucy coming either, but he had, and what was the point in being offended when someone pointed out the truth?
The truth was what he had said to her when he had proposed half a year ago. They were screwed up and weird in their own ways, but they were in love with one another, and he could no longer imagine himself doing anything but living with Lucy forever.
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