Here it is! The significantly plottier (but still occasionally pornographic) sequel to Stumbling Home. I'm still working out some kinks with the later chapters of the fic, but the entire thing is drafted. Look for an update every two or three days!

Many thanks are owed for this fic. First and foremost to the hive, eiluned, Amanda, and Bees for listening to me gripe about this since November, for reading huge chunks of it during the writing process, and for telling me when something sucked and when something was awesome.

Secondly, to all the people who have followed me here and on tumblr because of SH, to all the people who left me reviews, and to all of the people who asked me when this thing was going to come out - I would not have gotten this far without you guys!

I hope this story doesn't disappoint! Happy reading, and if you've got a moment, I'd love to hear what you think!

Natasha hated waiting.

She hated sitting around uselessly, twiddling her thumbs while events rushed on around her. She hated that itchy feeling of idleness and the accompanying feeling that she should be somewhere elsewhere.

She hated it, but waiting was all she'd been doing lately.

After she and Clint had gotten back from Asgard, they'd waited for their next assignment, waited for the team to have a purpose again. Something would come up; it was just a matter of time. At least she'd had Clint to wait around with (and with whom she'd twiddled a lot more than her thumbs), but two weeks ago, Fury had called asking for a favor.

Unfortunately, it had been a favor suited particularly to Clint's expertise and not her own; sitting around, watching and waiting was more of his thing. So even though she probably could have gone with him, could have probably gotten Fury to ask her along for the ride, too, she didn't ask because if she was going to cool her heels, she'd rather do it within walking distance of a Starbucks.

And, quite possibly, a teeny, tiny part of her (as it were) wanted some time alone to think through . . . things.

As much as she loved him, there were some parts of herself that were still a little raw and uncertain, parts of her that were still stunted, stuck in the past, in the five year old child she once was, and she needed to figure out what she wanted. And figuring out what she wanted? Well, that was going to take a significant amount of alone time, even discounting all the time it took for her to work up the courage to contemplate what amounted to the rest of her life.

All of that was well and good, but for the moment, it left her alone and bored. So, bored, in fact, that she'd contemplated signing back up with SHIELD just to have something to do with her time. At least then she'd be doing something productive with her time.

Well, that, and she could hack their system to find out what Clint was up to.

She had a good idea, of course, not least of all because of Tony's top of the line communications array. Military chatter over the radio had recently been abuzz with a series of assassinations in southern Africa. She was fairly certain she recognized Clint's hand in the work, but there had also been a coup in central America that could have also been helped along by the Hawk.

In any case, while Clint was off shooting things and saving the world, she was sitting in New York, waiting.

It was driving her nuts.

She wasn't sure what she would do without the other members of the team to keep her company. She'd forged strange kinships with the men that made up her team, and she shocked herself, moreover, to find that she didn't mind several of the people that worked for Stark. She was a solitary creature by nature and habit alike, but it was nice not to feel like the last person on Earth once in a while. With Clint gone, that feeling was stronger than ever.

Especially because of certain suspicions she'd been having, impossible as they were. But then, she was starting to get used to impossible things.

A little over three months ago, she and Clint had been injected with a drug they'd come to discover was an Asgardian fertility drug, one that had strained even their considerable libidos. She hadn't even been able to be in the same room as him without wanting to push him to the ground and have her way with him, and for her, for someone so used to being in control of herself, her body, and her hormones, it had been an adjustment.

After the effects had mostly run their course, they'd gone to Asgard to learn more about what had been done to them (and not a little bit because Clint had been giddy with excitement at the prospect). Frigga, Thor's mother intimated that the drug was more powerful than she could imagine, that it had never once failed. If she'd felt vaguely uncomfortable about the drug before, the idea that she could be . . . pregnant (God, it even gave her pause to think the word) made her feel violated.

Natasha had done her best to put all of that out of her head. The Red Room had made damn sure that none of their female operatives would ever be so inconvenient to them as to get pregnant, and she was too practical to entertain impossibilities. In all her years since then, in all the years since she'd met Clint, started sleeping with him, there had never been a cause for concern. There had never been so much as a scare. Never. Not once.

But then the drug happened, and she'd started feeling ill around strong smells, her body was unusually sore, and she hadn't had a period since . . . she couldn't even remember. In idle moment, she kept wondering just how permanent the Red Room's changes had been. She was starting to wonder just how strong the Asgardian drug was, wondered if Frigga's words had been true. She'd even started to wonder about things that she'd always assumed were never meant to be hers, stupid, inane things like red haired, blue eyed children with perfect aim and smart mouths.

She couldn't afford such thoughts, though, couldn't afford to hope for a future that wasn't meant for her. She'd always been sensitive to strong smells; it was one of the things that made her a good spy. The soreness could just be from all the working out she'd been doing, throwing herself into exercise to distract herself from the other parts of her life. And she probably had been missing her period because of the stress in her life. It wasn't as if it had never happened before.

She'd avoided finding out for certain though, was even a little scared of it because as much as the thought of having a child frightened the shit out of her, the alternative was somehow just as devastating.

She'd gone so far as to head to the corner store twice, pulling one of Clint's hats down over her hair and hiding behind her biggest sunglasses. She'd walked up and down the feminine products aisle, gingerly fingering the pale boxes for the little plastic tests, and both times she'd chickened out, had bolted from the store rather than facing her fears.

She wasn't a coward, but she didn't know how to feel about any of this, didn't know how to feel about not knowing her own body.

So she waited. Clint would be back soon, and then maybe they could figure something out.

Clint hated waiting, especially in sweltering hot backwaters where the most interesting thing to do was count the tsetse flies that danced across the lens of his scope.

He shouldn't have taken the job, wouldn't have taken it except that Natasha had convinced him, had pointed out that there were only a handful of people in the world who could make the type of shots that Fury was asking for and Clint was the only one of them playing for the home team.

He'd called Fury the next morning with his answer.

He'd still left reluctantly, lingering longer than he should have in bed, sipping his coffee more slowly than usual, dragging his fingertips over Natasha's body without hurry as if he could stave off leaving by delay alone.

He'd wanted to stick around; Natasha had been acting weird lately, quiet and evasive, and he wanted to suss out the root of it. He hated seeing her like that, hated not know what he could do to make it better, but when Nat got into moods like that, well, it was easier to wait it out.

It had been a hard thing to give her space, though. There was something terrified and hopeful in the back of her eyes when she looked at him these days, a look not dissimilar to the one he saw in the mirror each morning when he shaved. They'd gotten through a lot of shit in their time together and whatever it was, whatever was bothering her, whatever was keeping her up pacing at night, she'd tell him eventually. It just might take some time to get it out of her and into the open.

That was kind of hard to do from the other side of the planet, of course.

The worst part of it was that he hadn't even been able to talk to her since he shipped out; his unit was under strict orders not to break radio silence. They were ghosts, leaves in the wind, and no one would know where they blew until the mission was done.

He'd had too much idle time on this mission, more than he was used to. He missed Natasha fiercely, desperately, craved her like a drug (something he knew a thing or two about), and to be cut off from his supply was slowly driving him mad.

It was not comforting to imagine that she was going through the same thing back in New York. It only made it worse to recall the forlorn look she'd given him for a split second before covering it up with a grin and a kiss as she wished him a safe job.

So he watched and waited and did his job because the sooner he was finished, the sooner he could be back home, back to New York, back to Natasha.

He just fucking hated the wait.