#isjustprogress

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Updated June 2021

This is not an exhaustive list (and in no order whatsoever) of the brilliant fic that is out there. Please let me know of any i have missed or any recs to put in and I will endeavour to add it. I have not included warnings or ratings. Please make sure you look at the tags, judge for yourself and as always take care of yourself first. (16 authors under the cut)

“She’s been very touchy lately,” Laura says, as she lifts up the cat from her lap, and puts her down on the floor again. Immediately, the tabby moves back up onto the couch and spreads across her stomach and her lap.

Clint watches the little scene unfold another time, as Laura gently puts the cat down onto the carpet on the floor of the flat. Lucky’s ears and eyes have turned towards the scene, and his tail is wagging ever so slightly, as if him and Goose know something Clint and Laura don’t.

Clint shrugs. “I don’t know man, Fury said she was special, maybe she likes girls more than boys?”

Laura makes a sound, to which Goose responds with a chirp, and she giggles. “What’s wrong, buddy?” she asks the cat, as it slides along her crossed legs, before sitting down and watching Laura with its big eyes. “You know I don’t speak cat, right?” Laura continues, as the cat chirps again, and this time Lucky lifts his head from his pillow. 

Clint moves from the table where he’s sitting trying to figure out rent (that shit is hard), and comes to sit next to Laura. As soon as he’s sitting down, Goose jumps up on his leg and sits down, alert and demanding attention, which Clint acquiesces to. 

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

The cat then moves to Laura’s lap again and bends forward, to sniff at her lower abdomen, more or less around the area of her belly button. As Goose lifts her head again, she makes a repeated chirping noise, as her tail flicks behind her.

Clint and Laura turn their heads towards each almost at the same moment as the realization dawns on them.

Clint will later say that he screamed “you’re pregnant!” half a second before Laura did, and Laura will later say that she screamed “I’m pregnant!” half a second before Clint did, but they will both say that Gosse plopped down from Laura’s lap and headed to Lucky’s bed with a satisfied look on its face.

---

“One of the motion sensors went during the night,” Clint says as he’s pouring steaming hot coffee into his favorite SHIELD mug (it’s still got the old logo, and he thinks of it as an antique). 

Laura’s head perks up from feeding Lila, who’s decided the cornflakes they’re trying to give her are definitely NOT the food she wants this morning. “Anything we should be worried about?”

Clint stretches his back as he turns around, and Laura can’t help but peek a look at the little part of his stomach that gets exposed as he does so. Clint catches it. “No peeking,” he grumbles, before rubbing his eye with his free hand. “Apparently not, I did a perimeter sweep but didn’t find anything. It’s been raining since too, so if there were any traces, the rain will have gotten rid of them.”

He sighs, as he strokes his hair. Lila lets out a disgruntled shriek, and Laura puts down the spoon back into the bowl of cornflakes. Clint clears his throat, before taking a sip of coffee, as the little bell on the cat door jingles. Goose usually doesn’t go out that much, but she’d insisted on being let out last night, and when she comes into the kitchen, she’s filthy.

Clint immediately puts down his mug and picks her up, so she doesn’t leave any more footprints on the wooden floorplanks. Goose purrs as he does so, and when he puts her down in the sink, she looks at him before chirping again. “What the hell have you been up do, kitty?”

As he turns on the kitchen tap, Goose turns around to look out the window and if Clint didn’t know that cats will randomly stare at things humans can’t see, he still feels the hairs on his arms rise, as if something had been out there.

---

When Clint gets home from New York, from Loki, from everything, he is so defeated and broken that he barely registers most of what is going on around him.

He doesn’t really watch the television, and going out to take care of the horses gets his mind off things. He can feel the itch from where the scepter touched his chest, and whenever Laura is off to work and the kids are at school, he’ll often end up crying in the shower.

Today he’s sitting down next to the toilet bowl, his guts as empty as can be, dark purple bags under his eyes, as he heaves for air. The nightmare had felt so real. He realizes he hasn’t closed the door properly when the cat, that freaking cat, shoves it open with her little body, and climbs onto the towel that he managed to pull around himself.

She immediately starts sniffing at the scar that’s still grey on his chest, the little noises she makes as she investigates the burn helps Clint ground himself again. Loki had made him to terrible things, and he was still haunted by it. The mark from the scepter, from when a mythical god had come down from above to steal the Tesseract.

What if he had been successful in bringing the Helicarrier down? What if he had killed all those people on board, Natasha, Maria, Nick, Phil included? He feels his heartrate go off again, and closes his eyes as he tries to zone it out again.

He feels Goose’s paw on his mouth and he opens his eyes to find the cat staring at his eyes. “What are you doing, honey?” he asks, his voice broken and cracked, like his body feels, and the cat chirps a bit at him, before headbutting his chin.

“OMG, they’re touching and sharing comforting moments, Nat and Clint are definitely banging!”

Guys, @isjustprogress got married this weekend! And the whole trash compactor of the thing was there! (#andcody)

It was a very fancy, very lovely evening spent with some of my favorite people in the world! We ate a lot of food! (So. Much. Food. I never want to eat again.) And we danced a lot! (And will probably be on the wedding video dancing a lot because we stole Andrea for like, twenty minutes and were thus surrounded by photographers.)

On the way back from the venue, Sarah said, “I can’t believe how long we’ve known each other!” and it’s true. I first met Sarah at DCon in 2011, which feels like it was just last week when really it was seven years ago. We’ve been through so many crazy life things together in the meantime and there are so many more to go (a couple are even on the horizon already) and I feel so grateful that I have been there to see these ladies through all of it. 

thank you! my fic and i think it’s gonna be a long long time has pretty significant clint/nat/laura (set post-infinity war so read at your own risk).

if you want anything longer i’d definitely, highly, extremely recommend @isjustprogress and all of her fic. it’s amazing and wonderful and i cannot stress how good it is. if you have time to read upwards of 500k words about those three i would go and read her main series and when we’re there we’ll belong (although my personal favorite is all this comes back to me, then goes again, which is a lot shorter and way more focused on the nat/laura aspect of the relationship). the way that she writes these characters is just... amazing and so, so in character - she made sure that her series was canon compliant, which is really interesting to read and even more impressive when you consider the train wreck that was aou in terms of... clintasha and the like.

marvel moodboard | clint barton