Title: Beautiful Disasters
Rating: PG/K
Originally posted: December 2023
Originally written for: dreamerfound/fadedwings
Characters/Pairings: Clint & Nat; Bucky/Nat
Notes: for the Be_Compromised Secret Santa 2023 at Dreamwidth and AO3

"I need help."

"Send me your co-ordinates. I'm heading for the weapons cabinet now and-"

"No, not that kind of help!"

Maybe Natasha could've chosen her words more carefully, given the situations she and Clint had found themselves in during times past. Maybe if she had given her phrasing more thought, he wouldn't have leapt up off the couch so fast and almost started a commotion that disturbed the whole household. Still, it was good to know it was more of a general call, rather than a Strike Team Delta emergency.

"Okay, so what kind of help do you actually need?" he asked curiously.

Natasha was quiet for a moment or two, not quite long enough for Clint to start worrying again, but enough that he knew something weird was going on.

"I'm... baking."

"What?" Clint was aware that his response came out strangled and strange, before genuine laughter took his voice entirely.

It was probably a good thing he was on the other end of the phone, since Natasha would almost definitely be giving him a death-glare or worse by now if they were within punching distance of each other.

"You clearly heard what I said," she told him then, "so please, could you just get beyond the fit of hilarity and come over already? Help me out by being the domesticated man I know you can be."

"I'll be right there," he promised, still smiling as he heard her sigh with apparent relief.

Baking. Natasha Romanov, the greatest of all the Black Widow assassins, was trying to bake and no doubt failing at it. The picture in his head was amusing as hell, Clint wouldn't deny, but it was interesting too. The fact she was calling for a domestic emergency for the first time in her life, it was very telling. Not because she was calling him, since they always had each other's back, but the fact that she was even trying to do something like this. Clearly, she and Barnes were as serious as they seemed and then some.

"Honey? I'm borrowing some stuff from the kitchen," he called to Laura, as he packed what he needed into a couple of large bags.

"Should I ask why?" his wife wondered, poking her head in from the living room.

"Nat needs a little help," he explained, piling cake pans and utensils in with the bags of flour and sugar.

He glanced up, watched confusion cross over Laura's face, then clear seconds later, as she smiled.

"Ah, March 10th," she said, tapping her hand on the calendar that hung by the fridge.

"March 10th?" Clint echoed, unsure if he should know what that meant or not.

"It's his birthday." Laura grinned. "If I told you to tell her she's adorable, you think she'd come by later just to kill me?"

"Probably." Clint grinned back at her. "But there's a good chance I'm gonna tell her anyway, so we may just have to take our chances."

"Sounds fair. Oh, there's ready-made icing in the top cabinet, left over from the kids last cookie-fest. I don't think we have any candles though."

"Given how old Bucky actually is, that's probably a good thing," he considered, loading up the rest of what he needed, then kissing Laura goodbye for now and heading out to Natasha's place.

When he got there, he wasn't exactly surprised to find the whole apartment smelt like burning, or that Natasha had flour in her hair and what he hoped was red icing smeared on her face.

"Wow. Just... I should've brought a camera." He smirked at her.

Of course, she rolled her eyes. "Looks like you brought everything else," she noted then, eyeing the large bags he carried, one in each hand.

"I didn't know what you had and what you didn't, or how many attempts you made at this thing before you called."

"More than one," she admitted, but no more, leading the way to the kitchen.

It kind of looked like a bomb hit it, which was also no real shock to Clint. She had clearly made some attempts to wipe away spills and dispose of the burnt offerings she had produced so far, but everything was in disarray, to say the least. She was clearly getting pissed about the failing and starting to care less about the carnage she caused. Clint knew Natasha too well not to easily second-guess almost everything she did at this point.

"Okay," he said, putting down his bags and literally rolling up his sleeves. "So, job one is clear out all the crap, then we can start over."

Natasha sighed, stepping up to do her part. "I don't even know why I'm trying. It's not as if it matters."

"No, of course not." Clint shrugged. "I mean, why would it matter that you wanna do a nice thing for your boyfriend's birthday? Nobody cares about birthdays anyway, and it's not as if you actually like the guy or anything," he deadpanned, even as he swept debris from the worktop with his hand and dumped sticky utensils into the sink to be washed.

"You're an ass, Barton," Natasha told him sharply, though the smirk pulling at her lips gave away that she didn't mean it.

Clint laughed at her, then with her, as they got seriously into the clean-up. A half-hour later, he was unpacking all the ingredients and kitchenware they might need, to add to what little she already had.

"Did you have a recipe you were at least trying to follow?" he asked tentatively.

Natasha pulled out her cell and scrolled to the page to show him. Clint was pretty sure his eyes bugged out of his head as he looked it over.

"Yeah, no," he told her definitely. "First of all, that's way too ambitious for an amateur. Second of all, there are two of you, you'd be eating cake for weeks just to get through it."

"I wanted it to be special." Natasha was every inch an indignant child, complete with pouting lip, when she said that.

Clint tried not to smile, reminded a little too much of his own kids in moments like these. Poor Nat. She really was trying. Also, he knew all too well that she really wasn't used to being bad at things she wanted to do. Of course, they didn't teach baking in the Red Room, or maybe they did, but it would certainly not be the kind Clint wanted to think about at all.

"Okay, step one..." he said, handing Natasha a fresh bag of flour and telling her how many cups to measure out.

Each ingredient was duly weighed and measured, and Clint gave clear instructions, which Natasha followed carefully. He pre-heated the oven and prepared the cake pans, while she mixed and stirred under his watchful eye. It was tough trying not to let himself oversimplify like he might with the kids when they were little and needed similar help in the kitchen, though he hoped by now Natasha would know better than to take offence if he slipped into dad mode at all. She was concentrating so much on getting everything right, he doubted she would have noticed if it did happen anyway.

When the two layers of cake were safely in the oven, at last, they cleaned up all over again, and he talked to her about decoration.

"I brought some ready-made icing, the stuff you roll out to put on top, and also the writing kind, but if you wanted to go with frosting instead..."

"Icing is fine." Natasha nodded, though her attention seemed to be elsewhere as she dried off the bowl in her hands.

"Nat?" he checked, trying to figure out what was on her mind now.

"What? I'm fine," she said, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders - she really should've known that Clint wasn't buying that, and proved it when she sighed. "How come you get to be good at this stuff, on top of everything else?"

Clint shook his head as he dried off his hands, turning to lean back against the counter beside her. "The first time I cooked a meal for Laura, I almost burned the house down, literally. The first time I tried to bake a cake... well, it probably looked a lot like one of your first attempts today," he said, peering down into the trash can at what had to be three, maybe four disasters, at least one of which got as far as decoration before it went horribly wrong. "Obviously, there's such a thing as natural talent, but for everything else, you know as well as I do, you work at it. You work and you practice and you try, and sure, it's going to go wrong, a lot, but in the end, you figure it out. If it's worth all the effort, which it obviously is, then you just keep trying until you get there."

He knew she wasn't dumb enough to believe he was just talking about baking. This cake thing had metaphor written all over it, long before he ever showed up to help. A serious romance was not something Natasha ever expected to have in her life.

What she and Barnes had before was more than a little complicated and pretty much doomed from the start. When they found each other again, the both of them pulling for the good guys and really wanting to build something real and normal, for lack of a better word, it was never going to be easy, but Clint believed they could make it if they tried. There was no-one he knew more determined than Natasha, and from what he knew of Bucky, that guy came a close second in the rankings for tenacity. In the end, they would be fine, he just knew. In any way he could, Clint would help too.

"Thank you," said Natasha, almost too softly to be heard. "For... everything."

"I'm not in control of everything," he told her, a smile pulling at his lips. "I just make it seem that way."

That made her laugh, as it was supposed to, then they got right back to the job at hand, him laying out options for cake decoration and her trying to decide exactly what she wanted to achieve. Halfway through the process, a thought occurred to Clint.

"Hey, isn't there usually a cat hanging around here somewhere?" he checked, realising he had seen neither hide nor hair of Alpine up to yet.

"She ran and hid a while back," Natasha admitted, looking a little guilty about it. "Somewhere between the cake burning and the icing disaster. There may have been cursing."

"Smart cat." Clint nodded. "By the way, are we going with candles?"

"Given his actual age, I'm not sure he would appreciate it."

"And there's probably been enough things burned in here already today."

"Exactly."

By the time the cake came out of the oven, they had a plan, though of course, that couldn't be enacted until the cake had cooled. Clint watched and advised as Natasha flipped each pan over and the delicate sponges landed neatly on the cooling rack.

"See, you did it."

"Do I get a gold star sticker on my achievement chart?" she deadpanned, smirking the way only she could.

"Since we just sailed past lunchtime, I was actually going to offer you a beer and thought maybe we'd order something to eat," he suggested, pulling bottles from his bag with one hand and finding the app on his cell with the other. "Pizza sound good?"

"You know it does," she agreed, smiling genuinely.

The next hour was spent eating lunch and preparing for the assembling and decorating part of the cake project. Natasha was obviously nervous about screwing up what she had achieved so far, but trying desperately not to show it. Clint was kind enough not to point it out and determined not to let her fail. After all, given the cake-as-a-metaphor-for-the-Bucky/Nat-relationship thing they had going on today, it seemed safer to avoid any further disasters.

"So, where is the birthday boy anyway?" he asked curiously, checking the cream Natasha was whipping for the middle of the cake, advising her with hand motions to whisk harder.

"He's been visiting with Steve in DC for a couple of days, due back tonight," she explained, eyes only on the contents of the bowl she was holding so tight as she beat the living daylights out of the cream. "Not that he's expecting this. He hasn't even mentioned his birthday. Probably would've been fine with me letting it slide by too, but I just wanted to..." she trailed off, giving up on the whisking too, looking at Clint like there was a lot more she meant to say, but the words weren't quite there. "I know it's dangerous to compare relationships, because everybody's different. Still, that party you threw for Laura last year, it got me thinking. No part of my life has really been normal. I never had a conventional family or a traditional childhood or anything. A fake one once, but never anything real. Then there was you and your family, and SHIELD, and the Avengers. I started to get... comfortable. Now, I have James back, and things are... nice," she said, making a face even as she said it. "I never had all that much nice in my life. I don't hate it. I want to make more of it. Weird, right?"

Clint shook his head. "Not so weird," he assured her, his arm around her shoulders just for a moment as he kissed her temple. "Okay, so I think we're ready to put this thing together," he said then, clapping his hands once. "We're looking for steady hands, so think bomb defusing," he advised, knowing that was probably the best example he could come up with if they were really going for precision here.

In the end, the cake didn't look half bad. Sure, it leaned slightly to the left and the lettering varied in size here or there, but it certainly could've been worse. Clint also assured Natasha it would at least taste good, which was most of the point anyway.

"Besides, if all else fails, it's the thought that counts," he told her definitely.

Natasha smiled across at him. "I take it back," she said then. "You're not an ass."

On that note, they parted ways, the both of them highly aware of the time and the fact the birthday boy would be home soon. Not that it would matter if he found Clint in his home, but Natasha would much rather be alone. After all, the cake was only half of his birthday surprise and the rest of it certainly didn't require anyone else's company.

Thankfully, the kitchen was clean and everything was ready when, finally, a key in the door signalled that James was home. Leaning over the table, Natasha adjusted the angle of the plate with the cake on it, stepping back just in time as he walked into the room and found both her and what she had made there.

"Welcome home, and happy birthday," she greeted him with a smile that she hoped didn't show how weirdly nervous she was.

"Wow," he said, bag dropping to the floor with a thud and eyes a little wide as he approached the table to get a closer look at the cake. "You did this? All by yourself?"

"Obviously," Natasha told him, wearing just as innocent a look as she could muster.

When James looked up then, raising an eyebrow and looking sceptical as anything, she crumbled.

"Do you have to be the one guy in the world that can always tell when I'm lying?" she grumbled, folding her arms across her chest.

He smirked as he pulled out his cell. "One of two anyway," he told her, speed-dialling with his metal hand, while the real one reached out to pull her closer and he planted a quick kiss on her lips.

"Hey, Barton," he was saying into the phone then. "Thanks for the cake."

He was grinning when he said it and she had no doubt Clint made comments at her expense too. Natasha didn't really care all that much. The fact her best friend and her boyfriend got along was kind of a miracle, and one she was grateful for every day, whether she made it clear to them or not.

"Yeah, I figured that out already," James was telling Clint then. "Okay, talk to you later."

"He could've at least lied for me," she said, moving further into her boyfriend's arms, the moment he was done on the phone.

His chest vibrated against her ear with a hint of laughter as he held her close and kissed the top of her head. After a few moments of comfortable silence, he proved he must have been looking at the cake over her head when he suddenly spoke again.

"How many times did you redo the decoration?"

"Only twice." Natasha told him, glancing up. "Why?"

It was only then she realised his eyeline was far left of the cake on the table.

"Because my cat used to be all one colour."

That made Natasha turn around fast, just in time to see Alpine wander by, her usually pure white fur stained with blobs of red and blue. At least Natasha knew it was natural colouring and wouldn't hurt the poor girl, but she still felt stupid. With a groan, she hid her face in James' chest again, trying to see the funny side when he did.

"I don't think I'm ever going to be the domestic goddess type," she admitted, finding a genuine smile when his fingers lifted her chin until her eyes met his own.

"You're good at a lot of other things," he told her fondly.

"Happy birthday, James," she said, gazing up at him.

"Thank you, Natalia," he replied, as their lips met in a perfect birthday kiss.

The End