bakerstreet | They have a stripper pole on their deck. Normal.

Nat canted her head, staring into the middle nothing as she mulled a few bets over. When at last she had settled on something, the red-head turned to Clint with a grin that was more smirk and mischief than anything. "Loser has to do Banner's laundry for two weeks. And when I say Banner, I mean the other Banner. Winner...gets an I.O.U. for shawarma."

She kept it small this time. He was usually one to take a challenge for the sake of it, but she liked added to it once in a while. And it was only fair, seeing as they were running on little to no recovery from last night.

After another once-over of the arena he nodded, "Works for me." To be fair, he didn't actually mind laundry duty, no matter whose, he'd been a bachelor this long, he knew what he was doing. And it gave him a chance to not be around people for an hour or two, and he needed that now and again.

"We on a time limit?" Sure, a timer would drastically cut down on the whole 'target practice is zen' thing, but it made things more interesting.

Natasha slide her eyes at him sideways, debating. "Nah. Wouldn't want to make this too easy for me."

She winked and said, "Count of three, then?

One...two..."

But before she reached three, Nat started after two, sprinting and shooting, something akin to a cackle drifting back at her partner.

He'd actually been expecting that, given as how that was his tactic as often as not, he also knew that he could take her reload time as a chance to catch up, if he needed it.

He was already off and moving as well, taking the opposite side, just because they were technically against each other didn't mean they couldn't work together to clear the area, more or less.

It was automatic to work with him, no matter the situation or the level of seriousness. Even when it was for sparring or practice, Nat still found minor ways to hone his skills. There had only been once, maybe twice, when she had needed to deliberately act against him. It was one reason she still harbored a grudge against Loki.

When Barton was near enough, Tasha shot one of his arrow into a confetti of splinters to steal one of his targets. Bullets were faster to get off than arrows, but he could keep going where she needed to reload, and it cost her sometimes.

"Cheater." Was all he said, though there was amusement in the tone, the set of his shoulders as he got off another couple shots, going for targets that had been out of view previously. That did tend to be how they worked best, she was the first charge and he was the cleanup.

Unless they were bored and decided to do it the other way around, of course, they were nothing of not versatile, especially when working together.

Nat licked her lips and gave it back to him. "'S'why you love me, Agent."

He was in the lead already, a minor frustration, but she saw to catching up or making it difficult on him. The woman snuck up behind Clint, though 'snuck' was a relative term when she had been within his sights for most of the duration. So long as she could bump into him and achieve botching his shot.

"What was that about cheating?"

He snorted at the bump, and at the question, "That you're doing it, and pretty damn well, I might add." he shrugged, just once before lowering his shoulder again to take his next shot, "But we already knew that was one of your skills."

"Yeah, well, you make it so easy sometimes. I can't help but resort to it around you. That...might be a compliment?" She pulled a face and slipped away, carrying on with the targets.

"I'll keep it in mind." He called after her, just continuing on, keeping up with the same pattern, taking out the hidden targets or ones out of her immediate range. He finally stopped, waiting until there was a break in her firing before he said: "That's twenty six to me, unless I missed one."

She scowled, sighing with defeat. "No. You got right, loathe as I am to admit it."

Nat pocketed her guns into their holsters, meandering back towards Clint. "Maybe I'll get lucky and Hulk will just tear his way through the clothes. Can't have him running around with ripped clothing all the time, makes us look less professional or something."

The thing about Natasha and jokes was that it wasn't always clear when she meant it in all seriousness or to prod. More often than not, her voice kept close to monotone or of softer volumes. She only revealed tiny cracks to Clint, maybe one or two of the others.

He had a slightly better idea than most as to when she was joking, but even that wasn't infallible, just a more educated guess, "Don't think anyone can make us look less professional than Tony." He said with a shrug, shouldering his bow and debating going to retrieve his own arrows versus leaving them for a clean-up crew.

"But hey, at least you know nobody will say anything about you getting laundry duty." Mostly because they'd all be too afraid of being stabbed in their sleep.

She actually laughed at that, briefly closing her eyes with a quick shake of her head. "I swear, sometimes, that man."

Tasha yawned, politely covering it with her hand and looking at him through one eye. "Please, like you'd miss any opportunity to harass me. I worry when you're not causing me more trouble."

He shook his head, "Not any opportunity, just the ones I know I'll survive." Like when there was another outlet for her ire. Despite his seeming lack of self-preservation sometimes, it was there, just not in the same place or the same quantity as other people's, and he knew when he could piss her off and survive it.

He also knew, now more than ever, not to make himself the target for the full brunt of her not unimpressive skill set. A flicker of a smile followed, "You want me to tuck you in, princess? Read you a bedtime story?"

She rolled one shoulder, lips pursed. "Same thing."

Only, it wasn't and she acknowledge that. As an after-thought, Nat said, "We'd only end up taking each other out if I tried to kill you, anyway. So, lose-lose kind of deal."

Tasha gripped her hips, tilted her head down, and raised her brows, at first only giving him this look and letting Clint stew in the silence. Had it truly pissed her off or was she only dragging things out for torture?

But then, "Depends on the story," and without waiting, she pivoted and started to head back. Her pace, however, was slow enough to allow Barton to catch up.

"Poky little puppy always puts me right to sleep." He said with a shrug, catching up to her easily enough, falling into pace beside her. For once he hadn't actually been worried about that Look™, which he figured meant that he was tired, regardless of what he felt.

"Mm, yes, I love stories about you most, Clint." She managed to say that in a deadpan manner, eyes locked straight ahead of them. But she couldn't hold back the elbow that she poked at his ribs.

She paused at the entrance, turning to him. "Your bed or mine, then?"

There was nothing sexual in Natasha's question at all. She just slept better with him around some nights, when the nightmares were at their worst, when the regret was damn near suffocating. Some of the nightmares he shared by presence alone. Some he caused.

"Good, because I love stories about me most too." He replied, smiling crookedly, though he gave another shrug at the question, "Mine's closer." And he knew for a fact that it wasn't any more or less comfortable than hers, not that either of them tended to care about that.

He also had his own suspicions about her nightmares. After all, Loki had rummaged around in his head for information about her, and what he hadn't found that way he'd asked about, and it just had seemed reasonable at the time for Clint to tell him. Of course, he wasn't even sure how to go about apologizing for that, aside from the fact that she'd already told him not to.

She lazily rolled her eyes at his echoed self-love. "Your room is it, then."

Natasha matched her pace to his and she would have been content in the silence if she knew his mind was at ease, too. But they weren't one in the same for nothing. She looked over at him and inquired, "What's up, Feathers? What are you dwelling over now?"

"That's a new one." He commented with a flicker of a smile, "What happened? Get tired of calling me 'birdbrain'?" For something that could have been snippy -as he was, on occasion- it really was just genuinely curious.

He palmed open the door to his windowless box of a room, likely much the same as her own, though perhaps with the bed, chair, dresser and workdesk in a slightly different configuration, and, of course, with his clothes strewn over the chair instead of packed away tidily like hers would be, "Here we are, home sweet home."

"Need to mix it up sometimes. If you always know what's coming, where's the fun in that? Before I know it, you would start finishing my lines for me. And that'd get old fast. I happen to like feathers, anyway."

Nat was well aware he averted her question and she came back to it while shedding the layers of her outfit. She'd long since developed this sort of comfortable attitude around Barton, though honestly, she had more important things to worry about most days than something as trivial as modesty. If they couldn't be mature enough to be in her presence when she needed to change or undress for whatever reason, than maybe they needed to reconsider their line of work. And with Barton, well. It was nothing he hadn't seen before.

"You avoiding my question deliberately or making me wait for suspense?"

She watched him while picking at the discarded articles of his around her, sniffing for something clean enough to don.

Most of the strewn laundry was clean, at least, any of it on the chair and over the desk was, the ground cover layer was what still needed to be washed. Getting undressed, and sometimes redressed, around each other was nothing new, in fact, sometimes it was a necessity, as there had been more than once that they'd had to patch each other up in a hurry and get the hell out.

He should have known she'd realize the stalling for what it was, she was better at that than he was, likely because she'd been trained for it and he'd just sort of picked it up along the way. He gave a shrug, whipping his shirt off over his head and kicking off his shoes at the same time, he had this down to a science, "You already told me not to apologize for it, so I'm not."

Tasha sighed and crossed over to him. Her touch to his forearm was more firm than gentle. She wasn't one to freely offer hugs, the sentiment usually lost on her, but she wasn't completely black hearted either. The contact was meant to reiterate her point and to ground him.

"Hey, I told you to forget it. That wasn't you, Clint, that was all the bastard, Loki. You know we're good. I don't hold any of it against you."

She dropped her hand back to her side and snickered. "Besides, we got a good scrap out of it, right?"

Teeth biting and hair pulling, all.

He still wasn't sure what part of it had been Loki's control and what part of it had just been him, or if it had all been Loki. Which Natasha seemed to believe it was. He was just going to rely on her certainty despite his own nagging doubts, it had pulled him through before.

There was a small, crooked smile at the question, "Yeah, guess we did. Just like the schoolyard, and I'm going to be lucky if you didn't give me rabies." He added, giving her hair a gentle tug. There was still a swatch of bandage around his arm where she'd bitten him, though it was just to keep it covered as a precaution, since there was no sign of infection.

She rested her hands on her hips, arching both brows at him. "Are you indicating I'm diseased or something, Agent Barton?"

Though her tone was suddenly deadly serious, Nat was teasing with a glint in her eyes, and was more than happy to turn things back to the lighter side. She was never quite comfortable with dealing with sympathy in situations beyond people's control. In her eyes, it seemed unnecessary to apologize for such things, though it offered whatever level of help to the confessor.

They have a stripper pole on their deck. Normal.

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He can win this round. ^_^

Hee! He'll let her have a rematch. Because assassin-bros, it's what they DO.

Trufax. <3

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