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Finding a public explanation for the girls turns out to be easy. Of course, it's easy because of something really horrible. Gutting a HYDRA base always turns up some nasty thing, of course, but this one is special. Steve finds a disused lab near the heart of the installation, and opens the heavy doors only to slam them shut again, his face dead white.
“Cap?” Clint mutters, looking uneasy.
“It's bad,” Steve says, taking a deep breath and visibly getting a grip on himself, “but it could be worse. They're all dead.”
“Oh, shit,” Tony says, scanning the room. “I can't get all my wavelengths here, but is that... shit, man.”
“What is it?” Natasha asks, so flat it's almost not a question. Everyone reeks of stress hormones, and Steve's scent gets more acrid every time he glances at her.
“It's... it's real bad, Tasha,” he says, and she sighs.
“I know that.”
He stands aside, hauling one of the heavy doors open enough to let her slip inside. It is pretty bad. Eight of the ever-popular vertical glass tubes, each one with a twisted monstrosity in it. They look like her, the parts of them that turned out. They're atrophied in strange ways and stranger places, and have duplicated and re-duplicated limbs and a sick smell. This only gets worse when Clint gets a look over her shoulder and has to turn away to vomit. Mammals always take these things harder. Natasha is mostly just disgusted, and says as much, which makes Clint laugh and then groan that he's gonna puke again.
“What should we do with them?” Steve asks Natasha, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
Natasha shrugs. “Burn them? It doesn't really matter.”
“Save the tubes,” Clint croaks, rinsing and spitting with a bottle of water.
Natasha blinks, realizes what he's getting at, and smiles. “Yes. Save the tubes.”
By the time they get home, Natasha and Clint have hammered out their story, and are working on the right amount of details for everyone. They of course break off to see their beloved brats, who have been called up from a game of no-holds-barred spidertag to greet their parents. They're still growing like weeds, but at a high human rate, so these days they have real clothes and look like anyone else's children in their jeans and leggings and t-shirts. After the first flurry of hugging they ask how the mission went, and Clint smiles, his eyes sad.
“Well, we found something really creepy, but it's probably going to be a help.”
They sit the children down and explain that HYDRA had tried and failed to clone Natasha, and their plan to tell the public that the cloning had been a success and that the girls are the result. Marina thinks it's funny, but Alisa and Zhanna are creeped out and need to sleep on it, and Oksana is a bit grumpy at having to hide their truth.
“We have time,” Natasha tells them, and spends the evening hugging everyone and giving them dainty tidbits of raw steak. Oksana creeps off after a while, but JARVIS says that she's with Clint, so that's all right. Once the twins are playing 'Amnesia' for the entertainment of the rest, Natasha goes in search of her mate and daughter. She finds them up on the roof, Oksana sitting in Clint's lap as they gaze out at the city. They glance up when she's ten feet away, smiling their near-identical smiles.
“Feeling better?” she asks, settling down beside them.
“Yeah,” Oksana says. “Even if you did find us in a lab, Dad would still be our dad.”
“He would,” Natasha says, and gives each of them a kiss on the cheek, before leaning on Clint's shoulder to stare out at the skyline with them, lacing her fingers with Oksana's tiny ones and giving her hand a squeeze.
It only takes three days for Pepper to get a press conference in order, and Natasha is glad of that because her daughters spend almost the entire time agonizing over how to present themselves and arguing about whether or not lipstick is appropriate. The rest is taken up by a summit meeting to decide middle names. In the end they decide on old-fashioned Midwestern names from Clint's female relatives and that they should wear lipstick, but use one of Natasha's pinkish nudes because it's a daytime event. They really are tweens these days, attentively absorbing fashion rules and raiding their mother's closet for pretty things.
“We can't be too pretty, though,” Zoya is telling the others as Natasha comes into their room on the second day. “After all, we're supposed to be tragic clone-orphans.”
“And who says tragic clone-orphans can't dress up?” Natasha asks, smiling as they look up from a pile of her scarves and jewelry. “If I really had found you in that nasty cold lab, I'd help you deck yourselves out like princesses.”
“And I think I'd want to,” Alisa says, in her quiet little voice that everyone listens to because she uses it so rarely. “It would still be fun.”
“Besides,” Natasha says, “you can trust Mama not to let you make yourselves ridiculous.”
They really don't need much help. Natasha has long suspected them of having natural taste, with their enthusiastic input on the colors and prints of their near-disposable shifts. Now they belt tunics into dresses and put some of Natasha's smallest rings on their thumbs and loop necklaces into double and triple strands.
On the actual morning of the event, Natasha helps them line their big eyes in brown and apply their light lipstick. She has only had to veto one hat, and that only because of the time of day. She's proud of the girls, and Clint smiles fondly at all nine of them together when they're finally done.
“Ready?” he asks, taking Anastasia's hand when she reaches for him.
“Yes,” Natasha says. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I think I'll survive.” Clint hates public appearances even more than Natasha does, and she leans across the twins to kiss his cheek.
More than herself or her mate, Natasha is worried about the girls. Even with their uncles around, it's very bright and there are a lot of strangers moving around and making noises. As they get out of the car, Alisa's eyes get huge, and Ariandna grabs her hand. Natasha ushers her brood up to the podium and onto a line of folding chairs, and it's touching to see the way the team brackets them in, shading them from some of the light and blanketing them with familiar scent.
There are entirely too many questions, but the girls are very poised. They don't yawn and fidget like all-human children would, sitting with arachnid patience and stillness, but they're pale and tired by the end. Yes, they are genetically related to Natasha and yes, her custody of them is legal. They introduce themselves by their full names and say that they already feel very at home in the tower, which is in no way a lie.
All in all they do quite well, but afterward are drained and cranky, clinging to their parents and acting alarmingly close to their chronological age. As usual when they get really human, Clint knows what to do. He dims all the lights and they help the girls out of their finery and into fluffy bathrobes. And then Clint disappears into the weapons locker. They have a few knives hidden around the house, but the girls are forbidden to touch them and all the real ordinance is in the locker, along with contraband and apparently a whole drugstore bag of Abba-Zabas. There are more than two dozen of them, and Clint peels each wrapper down and passes the sticky treats to the girls, who begin to devour them. They look calmer after the first bite, and Natasha beams at Clint.
“What would I do without my human mate?”
“Deprive the children,” he says mournfully, and they all giggle, cuddling with him as he sits in the center of their web and unwraps a bar of his own. Natasha settles in along one edge of the group, snuggling close and even taking a chunk of candy when Clint passes it to her, making exaggerated faces as it sticks to her teeth, peanut butter center making it bearable. It makes the girls giggle, though, and that's worth anything.