Written to: Summer - Malbec, crosspost from AO3.
Rantipole: A wild, reckless young person; to be wild and reckless; wild and reckless.
"Hey, Nat." Clint walks through the door of their bedroom, where Natasha is lying on the bed and looking at an action film playing on the plasma screen mounted on the wall.
She reaches out, takes the bag of microwave popcorn from his hand, shakes it to coat all the pieces with salt and butter before tearing it open in a puff of steam. She takes out a piece, examines it, places it between perfectly red lips and crunches it with a little squeak before turning her attention to him.
"What is it?" she asks, looking at him with a sweet smile that reminds Clint how easy it is to love her.
"It's a Friday night."
"It is," she agrees, licking a smear of butter from her index finger. Clint follows the path of her tongue along her nail with his eyes. "You're rather observant, though I guess they can't call you Hawkeye for nothing." She turns her attention back to the TV screen, where a man with silver-blue eyes and a rather dashing suit is running across the glass ceiling of some skyscraper, guns blazing. "But what about this particular Friday night causes you to mention it?"
"Well, we're strapping young people," he says reasonably, sitting down beside her and taking a big handful of popcorn; the butter and salt spread slick grease across his fingers and the kernels squeak in protest between his teeth. "And we're doing what old people do, you know, sit down with each other quietly on Friday nights and watch movies about other strapping young people having adventures that we should be having. Making the most of it."
Natasha just rolls her eyes and flicks her attention back to the movie. "Perhaps we're already an old married couple trapped in young people bodies," she says. "A love that spans ages, when we'd rather just stay in with a good film and a bag of popcorn than go out on the town." The way she says it makes Clint's heart flutter in his chest, much more than it has any right to, and he wonders, not for the first time, when would be the appropriate time to pull out that powder blue Tiffany's box that hides in the closet of his own bedroom, which has hardly been used for the past few months.
"What did you have in mind, anyway?" she asks, looking back to him. "We've already been to well over ninety percent of the clubs in New York."
"Not necessarily clubbing," he says with a shrug. "Maybe some daredevil things. Stealing a police car, drag racing, going to that new cupcake place on the corner of 5th and Main that just opened up...they're supposed to have fantastic cheesecake cupcakes, or so I heard. Tony told me Pepper ate no less than fourteen in a day, but that might just be the baby."
He can see the wheels and sophisticated cogs turning around in Natasha's head as she mulls over this information. Unexpectedly, she stands up, takes Clint's hand and jerks him up off the bed into a kiss that tastes intensely of salt.
"God, sometimes like these I remember exactly why I love you, Mr. Barton," she says breathlessly as she hurries him down the tower stairs.
Two hours later, Clint is clinging onto three pink boxes of assorted cupcakes for his dear life as Natasha races the police car down Grand Avenue, sirens blaring and blue and red lights flashing for all they're worth.
"Don't you dare screw up the frosting," she says, laughing as she tosses a swirl of red hair over her shoulder and floors it.
Clint shudders, shields the cupcakes with his life, and thinks to himself it might have been better to just stay in and watch a movie instead.
Forty-five minutes after this, as Natasha is licking whiskey-laced frosting off his chest, Clint grins up at the ceiling and thinks that it was totally worth it.