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It has been such a nice day, the kind of lazy, early-summer day when Natasha's cycle would be kicking into high gear if she didn't already have a brood to guard. They're much larger now, each one three feet tall and apparently about eight years old. They went to have a nap a little while ago, and Natasha is just feeling sleepy herself when JARVIS lets off the alarm code for the girls being badly hurt, and she feels like she'll never sleep again.
The whole team assembles and she shares everyone's raw, mammalian panic as they charge into the girls's room, but then everything smells like healthy growth and peaceful sleep and she's smiling, even as the others stare at the little shrouded forms on the web in horror. Clint is on his knees beside it, and the broken look on his face jolts her back to human language.
“It's okay!” she yells over the alarms and Tony's usual mid-crisis monologue. Everyone goes quiet, and she kneels next to Clint, hugging him. “It's okay, and I'm so sorry I didn't warn you.”
He takes a few deep breaths, eyes shining with unshed tears. “Jesus, Tasha! Look at them!”
She sighs. “I know. I've only just started remembering this part, I didn't realize it would happen so soon.” She supposes that through entirely mammalian eyes, the girls do look pretty terrible. They threw off their shifts some time before it started, and their uncovered skin is so thin and so pale that every vein is visible. They're only breathing once every minute, each swathed in a thin layer of silk that really is a lot like a body bag in structure. She kisses Clint's cheek. “Our little girls are growing up, Clint. It's all right.”
“...Is this like their first moult?” he asks, voice cracking a little, and she smiles.
“Yes. They're healthy and resting peacefully.” She sighs, petting tiny little Alisa. “They cut us out of our bags, so I don't know how long this will last on its own.”
“I guess we're gonna find out, then,” Clint says, and hugs her tightly. The others shuffle away with various awkward farewells that Natasha barely hears, busy holding and comforting her mate. It takes a long time for him to smell normal again, and she holds him for longer than that as he watches the girls with those sharp eyes, seeing the tiny movements of their slow breathing.
“Wow,” he says at last. “They're basically in a coma, huh?”
“I think so,” she says. “We dreamed in the egg sac, but I don't think any of us did for this part.”
Clint nods, eyes still on the girls. “Okay.”
For the next two weeks they guard their sleeping beauties, and watch them grow. After the first day it's actually visible, and by the time Natasha starts to expect them to wake up they're petite but human-sized preadolescents who could be anywhere from nine to eleven. There's still room for all of them in the web, but it's a much tighter fit now. Anastasia's hair has darkened, and Oksana looks more like Clint than ever.
“God, they've grown so much,” he says one day, and he actually sounds a little sad.
Natasha sits down beside him. “Clint?”
He shrugs. “Hey, I love my spider colony, it's just going by so fast.”
She chuckles rests her head on his shoulder. “I think normal human parents say that, too.”
“Yeah, but we've gone from conception to... what, pre-puberty? in less than three years.”
“Pre-puberty is a good term, I think,” Natasha says. “Menarche comes a bit after this.”
“Thank god,” Clint mutters. “There's only so much I can take at once.”
Natasha laughs, kissing his cheek.
As the girls slumber and grow, their hair and fingernails show the same rapid cell division as everything else, becoming lush, princess-length manes and long, curved claws, respectively. Clint's jokes about talons come true when Rada finally opens her eyes and shreds her way out of the silk. Natasha is just coming through the door with food for herself and Clint.
“Daddy?” Rada asks, blinking. Her voice is husky from disuse, but doesn't sound dry. Natasha beams and finds a place for the plates as Clint reaches for Rada.
“Right here, spiderling,” he says. She climbs into his arms and curls up, yawning and nuzzling his shoulder.
“I'm really hungry, but I'm too sleepy to eat you.”
“Good,” he says, chuckling and sweeping bright red locks out of the way to kiss her forehead.
They feed Rada every bit of their meat, and Natasha goes to cook more as Clint trims Rada's nails as they talk about whether or not to cut her hair. Natasha makes plenty of food, and is vindicated when she returns to find Marina clinging to Clint's back, still mostly asleep as he helps Zhanna and Zoya, whose cocoons have gotten tangled with each other.
“Meeeeeeet!” they trill, waking Marina, who joins in. Natasha laughs and plucks her from Clint's back, helping her settle into one of side of the web with her waking sisters, the other girls breathing faster but showing no other signs of waking. Natasha remembers how tired she was when they cut her from her cocoon, and tries not to laugh at Clint's disappointment when they go to sleep again as soon as they've eaten. This is their usual sleep, though they don't wake as Clint keeps grooming them with a fussy, primate tenderness that makes Natasha love him so much that it's hard to bear. He trims their claws and combs their hair and looks at them in that helpless way he looks at Natasha sometimes.
“I love them so fucking much, Tasha,” he whispers, and she hugs him from behind.
“I know.” She gazes over his shoulder and studies the twins, who have gone from chubby to coltish. She needs to feed them. The others are all similarly spindly, and Natasha is very glad when Oksana joins them for breakfast, looking more like Clint than ever and wolfing down steak. Alisa and Ariadna emerge that afternoon, but Anastasia stays in her bag for another day and a half, and Clint won't stop fussing over her. She has always been the biggest of the brood, and the difference is only more pronounced now. She gets thinner and thinner, and she has hollows around her eyes and under her cheekbones by the end, but at last tears open the silk and yawns as widely as she physically can. She's more awake than the others, so hungry that she bites Clint when he hugs her. He doesn't complain, just wads more of his shirt into her jaws and holds her close until Natasha can finally offer her some meat.
After about five pounds of steak with only one bathroom visit, Anastasia stops looking quite so gaunt. Her starved and anxious smell has woken the others, and for hours Natasha and Clint feel more like they have a brood of birds than spiders, cramming food into their offspring as fast as they can. Natasha remembers how hungry she was, and vows that her girls will never eat human flesh if they can help it. She and her sisters hadn't been able to help it, turned loose on nameless prisoners. After that terrible feast no one had done anything for their aches and pains besides giving them a pill every six hours that had nearly made them vomit.
Growing so much so quickly is hard on muscles and ligaments, and the girls start to notice the pain after they've finally eaten enough. Anastasia actually starts to cry, it hurts so badly, but Natasha knows how to do what no one ever did for her. She takes Anastasia's wrists and Clint takes her ankles and they pull gently but firmly, helping Anastasia realign herself and releasing a barrage of little popping noises. They stretch each of the other girls in turn, and come up with exercises to help them limber up again. Among their other advantages, Natasha's daughters have loving uncles, so there are almost enough people to keep up with their demands for massages and assisted stretches over the next week.
It takes the girls at least another three months to really get used to their new size. Alisa has overtaken Ariadna at last, who is now the shortest of the brood at four-foot-eight, but still staggers around and trips over her own legs as if they're miles long. All the girls do, and have some nasty tantrums over all the hiding places they can't fit into anymore. In this trying time, their Uncle Steve is a great help to them. He knows all about vast and sudden growth, and is always willing to run and play with the girls as they get the hang of their bigger bodies.