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Natasha once spent three weeks in a rainforest in western Costa Rica, learning about the lifecycle of a wasp. It wasn't the kind of assignment she'd normally have been given, but Zhang came down with mono and Robinson was on paternity leave, so there Natasha was: stuck playing Jessica, the laidback undergrad from Indiana University with a burgeoning fascination for entomology and parents rich enough to foot the bill for a summer in Central America.
"I mean, helping out with this is getting me college credit, which is awesome," she said as she retied the elastic around the end of her long, brown braid. "But I totally wanted to come even if the credits hadn't transferred. Beats looking at fireflies in suburban Fort Wayne, right?" They were in an elderly Land Rover, whose suspension was getting a workout from the back road they were taking to the entrance of the nature reserve. None of the other passengers were targets of Natasha's, but she wanted to make sure that she had a reputation as likable around the camp before she took out Kostyshyn—less chance of her being singled out as a suspect.
"Trip of a lifetime," agreed the woman sitting next to her. She had a vaguely Californian accent and was cradling a bulky camera on her lap as if it were her own child. "George is just the best guy to have around to introduce you to fieldwork like this, you're going to love it. He has crazy good luck with this sort of stuff."
"Oh, like what?" Natasha said. From where she was sitting, she could keep an eye on the Land Rover ahead of theirs in the convoy. The back of Kostyshyn's head, shining and bald, was clearly visible even through the mud-spattered back window. He'd been an active man in his youth, and though the breadth of his shoulders testified to the fact that he was still strong, Kostyshyn now had two bum knees and a hip replacement scheduled for next year. It might have been even odds as to whether Natasha could have taken him in a fair fight when he was at the height of his powers—but then again, Natasha would never have fought fair.
"Okay, so last year, the very first morning we're here, George realises that in a tree like, right next to my tent, there was a web of an infected Leucauge argyra." The woman opened a bag that was clipped to her waist and flipped through a stack of SD cards before finding the one she was looking for and putting it into her camera. She turned the camera on and started hunting through images.
"Leucauge, that's a spider genus, right?" Natasha asked, leaning in and feigning interest in the series of photos that the woman was showing her. Natasha's experience with photography was mostly confined to surveillance and blackmail, but even she could tell that these weren't the kinds of images you came up with as an amateur who messed around with a point-and-shoot on vacations or holidays. They were crisp and vibrant even in a close-up so magnified that Natasha could almost imagine the insect was right there in the Jeep with them, ten times as large as life.
"Uh huh. Beautiful markings, see? Makes these neat little spiral-shaped webs. You can find them anywhere from back home all the way south to Brazil, but here in Costa Rica is where it gets really cool. There's this wasp called hymenoepimecis argyraphaga that lives here, it's a parasitoid wasp. It paralyses one of these spiders with its venom temporarily, and lays an egg on its abdomen. The egg incubates there, then it hatches into a larva that injects a chemical into our poor little spider." The woman flicked through the next series of images. "See how the web is totally different to anything you'd expect from an orb-weaver? The larva drugs the spider into spinning a web that can support its pupal cocoon, and then it's just sitting there at the middle of a web that it thinks is of its own making but really isn't."
"I think I can guess what happens then," Natasha said, leaning back in her seat.
"Poor little spider," the woman said with relish. "Killed, sucked dry, and discarded as the wasp moves in. Ain't nature grand?"
It took two and a half weeks for Natasha to get all the intel that she needed from Kostyshyn, another three days for her to get the opportunity to make the kill, and another day of feigning near hysterical shock and horror over the discovery of his body before she could get a flight back to Chicago. From there it was a quick trip back to New York where she debriefed, got a manicure to repair the mess that the rainforest had made of her nails, and promptly put the mission behind her.
She hadn't thought of it, not in years, not until she was sitting, half-stunned, in the bedroom of Sam Wilson's apartment. Poor little spider, she thought to herself; all that time, she'd thought she was free, she'd thought she was atoning, but really the Black Widow had been spinning Hydra's web all along.
"I thought I knew whose lies I was telling, but… I guess I can't tell the difference anymore," she told Steve. Natasha thought of Coulson, sending her into Copenhagen, Lagos, a village sixty kilometres southeast of Coimbra. He'd always seemed earnest, purposeful, sending her out after people who trafficked in guns and drugs and warm bodies—had he ever suspected? Had Nick?
"There's a chance you might be in the wrong business," Steve said. His tone was a little wry, but mostly serious, and Natasha felt her mouth twitch into the ghost of a smile because it was either that or flinch.
"I owe you," she said, though she had no idea what kind of math was needed to keep the ledger balanced at this point.
"It's okay," Steve replied.
Natasha looked up at him, and something occurred to her. "If it was the other way around, and it was down to me to save your life—and you be honest with me—would you trust me to do it?"
"I would now," Steve said, and that rocked her a little bit. She had expected him to say no—that he didn't trust her not to put a bullet in him, because she was a poor little spider who didn't know what kind of web she was spinning. Natasha didn't quite know what to do with a yes.
*****
"Are you sure you're ready for the world to see you as you really are?" Pierce asked her. The edge of command in his voice would have been more convincing if Natasha hadn't heard the desperation that lay beneath it. That made it all the more satisfying, being able to dump everything onto a Wikileaks server and watch the internet react in real time—knowing that this, at least, was an action that Hydra didn't want.
But there was no real release in it—not then, and not later, not even when she'd retreated to Iowa to sit on the Bartons' front porch with Laura and get thoroughly drunk on some local microbrew. The sun was fading below the horizon and the kids, long since drooping from an afternoon spent running around in the sticky heat, were already in bed. The radio in the kitchen was playing. Through the open window Natasha could hear the NPR hosts, with their usual unruffled calm, discussing the latest on the attacks on Washington and the treason found at the heart of the United States government. Natasha thought that if she got through another six-pack, she might be able to reach that level of detachment herself.
"Uh, no," Laura said, nudging the beer bottles away with the tip of her foot. "The kids had a stomach bug last month, I'm already at my year's quota for holding people's hair back while they puke."
"I'm not going to puke," Natasha said.
"You know, those were the first words Clint ever said to me," Laura said, once she'd drained the last of her one, carefully nursed bottle of beer and set it down next to her. "And then he puked everywhere."
"In his defense," Natasha said, closing her eyes, "he had been shot with a bullet coated with a really powerful neurotoxin."
"That's what they all say," Laura said easily.
On the radio, they had moved on to talking about the international response, parsing the social media reaction. It wasn't the first time that Natasha had been the cause of protest marches and riots, but generally her involvement had been slightly more indirect. Or at least more hidden, much like poor Barnes' had been. Her stomach roiled suddenly, and Natasha regretted at least the last three bottles of beer. That was something else she'd lied about to Steve, how well she knew Barnes—or at least, she'd been very deliberate in phrasing how much she'd known. That would be a bridge she'd have to cross when they came to it, if they ever worked together again.
A thought occurred to her, at once banal and new. "I don't have to go back."
"Nope," Laura agreed.
"But SHIELD will be regrouping," Natasha said, frowning. Even if half of them had been turned by Hydra, and another half again had been killed or severely wounded, there was still the best part of two thousand agents scattered around the world, waiting for orders. Natasha's appearance in front of all those cameras on Capitol Hill had ensured that she would never again be a viable candidate for any covert ops, but she had a broad skill set. Someone was going to come looking for her, and likely soon.
"Yup," Laura said.
Natasha opened her eyes and stared up at the porch ceiling. The paint was starting to peel and flake in spots; beneath the white, she could see traces of older yellow and green. "This is where I point out that I know that you minored in psychology, right?"
"And then I say that I know that you know, and then we get into triple and quadruple reverse psychology, and my head ends up hurting as if I'd drunk just as much beer as you. If I'm going to have my first hangover since the kids were born, I want to earn it."
They were silent for a long while. Natasha had known Laura for almost as long as she'd known Clint, Nick, Coulson, Hill. Reverse psychology: Natasha could anticipate all the points and counterpoints that Laura was likely to make. The one problem was that in face of the fear that her actions still weren't—would never be—her own, logic couldn't do much. That kind of fear was hard to manipulate.
Natasha sat up. "I'm going to go back anyway."
"I'm sensing a but."
"It's been my life for…" Natasha shrugged. "It's been my life. If I walked away, I don't think I'd know how to retire, and I don't know that I'd want to work for any other companies that would hire me. And I owe Clint, I owe Steve."
"And the but?"
"It's been my life," Natasha continued, "but I don't think it can be all of it, not any more."
*****
Natasha was sitting in the parking lot of a Panera when Stark called her. She was heading east, Iowa to D.C. with a detour through Nashville to pick up some new sets of papers there from someone she knew who did neat and efficient work. The phone was new, with only a handful of contacts programmed into it and none under their real names, but it didn't come as any surprise to Natasha when the screen flashed 'Tony' in all caps underneath a picture of Stark smirking on the front cover of GQ Japan. It was downright predictable that he'd also somehow managed to make it so that her ringtone was "Whatta Man", played at top volume—in the confines of the car, it was deafening.
Natasha set her little cardboard cup of soup over on the passenger seat with a sigh and tapped the screen to answer. "No," she said preemptively, figuring that was her safest option.
"Oh c'mon," Stark said. The call quality was just fine, but it was still hard to make out his words over a noise in the background that sounded like someone repeatedly hitting a metal pipe with a wrench. From what Natasha knew of the man, that wasn't particularly far-fetched. "What if I was in serious trouble, life or death, and here I am, reaching out to you, this is like R2-D2 carrying that message for Obi Wan—"
"Only if Princess Leia had decided to irritate him so much with terrible early 90s R&B that there was no way he'd ever help her. What do you want?" she asked, putting the call on speaker and picking her container of soup up again. If she drove through the night, she should be back in D.C. around dawn. That would give her time to scope out her former apartment, see what could be salvaged. Natasha had no doubt that it had already been picked over by every federal agency there was, from the FBI all the way to the Farm Service Agency, but though she had never been amateurish enough to have stored anything sensitive there, her closet was home to at least two hoodies and one pair of boots that had been broken in to a peak level of comfort.
Natasha never underestimated the importance of sturdy but comfortable boots in the field.
"See, you're giving me all this sass, but I'm the bigger person, I'm magnanimous—"
"Stark."
"—I'm offering you a position."
"I'm not going to work for SI." Once had been more than enough for her, even if her stint as Natalie Rushman had earned her a tentative friendship with Pepper Potts.
"Well, it wouldn't be working for me, as such." The banging sound in the background of the call intensified, then abruptly ceased. "Think of it as like an adjunct position in ass-kicking, funded by Stark Industries. Contract law would tell you that that's like two entirely different things."
Natasha wasn't going to touch that line of argument. She'd seen Stark and Clint get into it about unions once, and that argument had lasted three days and crossed state lines. Soup finished, she set the cup down and started to unwrap her sandwich. "Whose ass do you want me to kick?"
"There is no particular ass, I'm thinking more about asses in general," Stark said. "Bruce, don't look at me like that, if you walk into a lab of mine in the middle of a conversation, that's pretty much the least traumatising thing you could expect to hear on any given Wednesday. Anyway, freelance ass-kicking, essentially, that's what I've got in mind. You do the you-equivalent of what Iron Man does, SI picks up the bill, and possibly along the way we track down Loki's nasty little Pixy Stix thing before it gives anyone else the world's weirdest sugar rush. Not to toot my own horn here, but that's like the definition of a sweet deal."
"So what, I'd be your sidekick?" Natasha said around a mouthful of turkey and avocado.
"No, that's Rhodey's gig," Stark said, "just don't ever tell him I said that. It'd be you, Cap if I can get him, Legolas, and Bruce. Bruce, Bruce, your mouth says no but your heart says yes, trust me, it'll be awesome. Anyway, you all just get the resources to do whatever you want to do, and then in your free time you can do—well, whatever it is you do in your free time. What kind of hobbies do former KGB assassins have, huh?"
Working for SHIELD had never really given Natasha the time to find that out. Trying to set Steve up on dates had probably been the closest to one that she'd had.
"So you're in, right? Because I want to—"
Natasha hung up on him. She was sure that he'd already presumed a yes, anyway, and working with Tony Stark aside, this was probably as good an offer as she was going to get.
*****
Stark's job offer turned out to be exactly as he had characterised it, though Natasha suspected that was as much down to Pepper's managerial skills and Steve's stubbornness as anything else. There was money to fund Natasha's personal projects—she had a particular fondness for putting human trafficking rings out of business with great finality—and Steve's globetrotting efforts to track down a stubbornly elusive Barnes. Every few months, Stark would get a lead on the whereabouts of Loki's sceptre, or someone would try to blow up Dallas, or they would be requested to assist UN Peacekeepers on a particularly tricky mission, and they would all team up. Steve and Natasha; Stark and Banner; Clint, who flew in from Iowa with his bow on his back and inevitably a smudge on his cheek from fingerpainting with the kids; and, once he had finished being fêted by every country in Scandinavia, Thor.
Less often, there were press conferences and photo ops—far more than anyone on the team was comfortable with, but much less than there was demand for.
"You guys are a hot commodity right now," Pepper said one evening. She was as dressed down as Natasha had ever seen her, in faded yoga pants with her hair falling loose over her shoulder; that Pepper didn't expect to be called back into the office this evening was also clear from the distinctly alcoholic nature of the cocktails that she was mixing for the two of them. "The interest will die back once the news cycle starts getting bored with you—the cable news channels are fickle."
"Maybe," Natasha said, hopping up onto one of the stools that lined the wet bar, and accepting the bright blue concoction that Pepper handed her. It tasted very strongly, and very deliciously, of curaçao. "It'd be easier if Steve didn't deliberately needle them about politics, though."
"Honestly," Pepper said, wrinkling her nose, "I think it's as close as he comes to a hobby."
Natasha got an apartment in Midtown, within easy walking distance of the Met. She thought that art was something she might like to explore, some little part of herself that she could cultivate that didn't belong to SHIELD, or Hydra, or her past. But it wasn't easy, making herself walk slowly through a museum while paying more attention to the works of art on the wall than the people around her or where a sniper might get a good line of sight. It wasn't what she'd been trained for, either deliberately or by circumstance.
First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk, she remembered saying to Steve.
So once or twice a week, when she could manage it, Natasha walked through the galleries as slowly as she could, and breathed, and tried to think of nothing but line and colour and form. Sometimes it was easy, and sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes Natasha was more aware of what was in her peripheral vision than of what was right in front of her.
"Howdy, stranger," she said. "You're up early."
They were in one of the modern art galleries on the top floor. It was the first fine Monday in Spring and tourists and locals alike were outside enjoying the sunshine. Natasha and Banner were the only people in this particular room. Its walls were covered in a series of abstract paintings by an English artist, though they made Natasha think of the south of France and the bright bloom of lavender beneath a blue sky.
"Not technically true," Banner said. He looked rumpled and sounded rueful, but coming from him, that didn't mean so much. "Pulled another all-nighter. I haven't been to bed yet. Our simulations aren't turning out the way we'd hoped and sometimes when Tony gets frustrated it's better if I get out of the lab for a few hours. Means I don't, you know…" He shrugged.
"Let the big guy out to play?" Natasha asked, quirking an eyebrow.
"Swear," Banner. His tone was such a complicated blend of wry and sheepish that it startled a smile out of her.
"Well, we wouldn't want that," Natasha said, remembering that there were different kinds of anger, could be different kinds of dissatisfaction.
She still didn't know Banner very well—or at least, she knew everything that a very detailed SHIELD file could tell her, but that didn't provide Natasha with much fodder for small talk outside of a mission situation. Banner kept to himself. When the Hulk wasn't needed for a mission, Banner tended to spend most of his time in the lab Stark had constructed for him, or headed downtown to consult with some colleagues of his at ESU. Most of their interactions had happened in the kitchen on the floor of the Tower shared by the whole team, when one or both of them was in search of caffeine or when Natasha had a craving for Speculoos eaten straight out of the jar. Banner was polite, and reserved, and very careful to remain in Natasha's line of sight. That, Natasha was pretty sure, was a sort of kindness, and so she nodded at the doorway that led to the next gallery and said, "Want to go look at the pop art? I hear it's ironic."
Banner blinked at her for a moment. "Sure."
The two of them spent the next hour, unspeaking, working their way through three galleries of paintings which Natasha thought she perhaps partially understood. Natasha was surprised to find that she enjoyed herself a great deal.
*****
When she'd bought her apartment, the realtor had talked up the wonder of how Natasha would have access to not one, but two, balconies. "Such a great space for a little café table, a couple of chairs," the woman said, smiling widely and showing off some expensive dental work. "Can't you just see yourself out here in the mornings, reading the newspaper and lingering over breakfast?"
Natasha had better ways of getting her news than reading the paper, and most days her breakfast consisted of nothing more than a cup of very strong coffee. She bought the apartment anyway, paying cash through a series of shell corporations and dummy accounts that even JARVIS would find tricky to trace. Her first day there, she sat on the floor in the middle of her empty living room for at long while, looking out at the balcony and the patch of blue sky visible beyond it. Then she spent several hours online doing research before enlisting Steve's help to haul stuff back from the garden centre she'd found up on Park Avenue.
"You know I'm from Brooklyn, right?" Steve asked, dubious, as he filled yet another pot with rich, dark soil. The dirt had worked its way under his fingernails and embedded itself into his cuticles, looking at odds with his neatly combed hair. She still hadn't bought any furniture, so they were sitting on the floor on a plastic drop cloth. "Just because I was a kid in the Twenties doesn't mean I know anything about farming."
"This isn't exactly farming," Natasha said, amused, as she depotted a lemon balm plant.
"That's my point," Steve said. "I had to go to Italy to get up close to a cow for the first time. Couldn't you just go to the store instead?"
"I could," Natasha said, wrestling the lemon balm into its new container. It was a little crushed on one side, but that just meant she could smell it, sharp and fragrant. "But I don't have to."
She planted rosemary and mint and several different kinds of succulents, tarragon and beans, sweet potato vine and basil and two different kinds of tomato—cherry and beefsteak. Natasha ended up overwatering some plants and underwatering others, and having to go to Iceland with the team for ten days at short notice meant that only the hardiest survived. But next year, she thought, she'd know better what to do; she liked the idea of getting to try again next year.
*****
The Iceland mission took two weeks because there may not have been many people in the world who had Tony Stark's aptitude for dismantling alien technology, but there were more than a few who could wield it just as viciously. There was a healthy global black market in Chitauri tech, scavenged from Manhattan before SHIELD could get to all of it, and a cult leader with ideas that went beyond the run-of-the-mill megalomaniacal had decided that he wanted to use some of that tech to turn the island into his own personal fiefdom.
Why Iceland, exactly, wasn't clear to Natasha—but then again, the first few days were spent trying to push the fight out of Reykjavík and away from civilians, and the next week playing hide-and-seek in the bleak beauty of the central highlands. She had more pressing things to think about. The team split up fairly early on. Stark, Thor and Steve headed further east, aiming to use brute force to take out the cult's secret volcano base.
("Sometimes," Stark had said gleefully as he pulled the suit on around him, "it is worth getting out of bed in the morning.")
Clint and Natasha had split up, each on the trail of a separate group of stragglers to be picked off. Natasha had taken out her three and tagged their tech with a locating beacon so they could be retrieved by an SI drone. The firefight had taken out both of their vehicles, though, beyond Natasha's abilities to repair them. Now she was walking west and south, back to the city, across a flat and cracked expanse of black desert, anticipating that she'd cross paths with Clint before the day was out. She came across Banner first instead—or the Hulk, really, the great mass of him shockingly green against the dark soil and the cool sky. At first, Natasha thought that he must have caught up with some of the cult members, but as she drew closer she saw that there was nothing there—the Hulk was punching and kicking at the bare ground beneath him with a single-minded rage. Natasha couldn't tell why he'd decided this particular spot of Icelandic soil was what he wanted to vent on, but he was working on quite the crater.
There was no point in running. In an open landscape like this, there was no way that Natasha could outrun the Hulk, or hide from him. So she walked until she was at a respectful distance from him, and then she stopped, and worked on keeping her breathing steady and even despite the adrenaline, and waited for him to notice her. It took him a while, but when he did so, it was abrupt—he twisted around and rumbled at her, a basso noise that Natasha felt echo through her ribcage.
"Hey, big guy," she said. "Pretty late in the day for you to be on the scene."
The Hulk stared at her for a while, and Natasha considered her options. They'd fought—well, not side-by-side, exactly, but at least on the same team on several occasions by now. There was a chance that he might ignore her and go back to what he was doing before, but there was a chance he might not. The Hulk was unpredictable; there was a reason they tried to deploy him only on rare occasions. Instead, he surprised her. He reached out a hand. Not a fist, a hand—palm outstretched, and just close enough to her that the meaning was unmistakable. This was trust, of a kind.
Natasha watched, as if from a distance, as her trembling hand reached out and touched the Hulk's. His palm beneath hers was cool, and smoother than she'd expected. She looked up, and the Hulk was watching her; not with any real kind of intelligence, but with his own kind of assessment, she thought. He rumbled again at her and then huffed out a breath before pulling back.
Natasha flinched in the anticipation of pain, but there was none. The Hulk turned away from her and threw himself down on his side before going loudly and ostentatiously to sleep. Natasha exhaled, and watched as the Hulk slowly melted away, shoulders shrinking and skin fading, until it was just Bruce Banner, naked, curled up and unconscious under the northern June sky. Then carefully, feeling the adrenaline leaching from her system and leaving exhaustion in its wake, Natasha sat down on the ground. She turned to face the west, where she could watch the sun slowly descend towards the horizon, and away from Bruce. She knew that most people had a thing about co-workers seeing their genitals while they were unconscious.
By her reckoning, Clint showed up an hour later, driving a Jeep that had seen better days; by the sounds of it, so had the Jeep's gearbox. Natasha sat and watched him approach. Being the Hulk clearly took it out of a guy, because Bruce slept through the whole thing, even when Clint got out and slammed the door behind him.
"Hey, Tasha," Clint said. He had a long scratch down his left forearm and was carrying a couple bottles of water, one of which he tossed to her. Natasha twisted off the cap and drank greedily. "You okay?"
"Peachy," Natasha said.
They finished their water in silence: Natasha sitting on the ground, Clint rummaging in a pants pocket until he produced a handful of Dora the Explorer bandaids to use on his cut. Behind them, Bruce slept on.
After a while, Clint said, "Still not the weirdest workday we've ever had, though."
Natasha bent forward to press her forehead against her knees, and laughed.
*****
The lemon balm plant was one of the few that survived Natasha's absence. In fact, it seemed to have thrived, spilling in lush abundance over the side of its pot. Natasha eyed it suspiciously, but when she ran her hand over the leaves, they released nothing more than a pleasant, sharp scent: citrus leavened with mint. She took out her phone and took a picture of the plant which she then sent, without comment, to Laura, Steve, and Clint.
Clint responded almost immediately, his reply consisting entirely of a string of colourful and random emojis which Natasha translated as meaning, "I'm not really sure why you're sending me this but I'm happy you're happy."
Steve, fifteen minutes later, sent a message that said, "Looks like you've got two green thumbs, there. Good job :-)"
She didn't get a reply from Laura until evening, and then got a whole missive that sprawled out over several messages: an update on the kids and the joys of the telecommute and how the piece of shit dishwasher had broken again. The last part said, "another new hobby? lemon balm hardy makes nice calming tea good for stress kids say hi & you should come for dinner soon," and ended with a slightly out-of-focus picture of two beaming faces, both liberally smeared with tomato sauce.
Natasha sent back a photo of a thumbs up, silhouetted against the view through her living room window of Manhattan at sunset.
The next morning, when she went over to the tower for her debrief, Natasha brought several little sachets of lemon balm leaves with her. She left them on the shelf in the kitchen cupboard that had, by unspoken consent, become the repository of Bruce's tea collection.
When she came out of the meeting, it was near noon. Bruce was sitting at the big table in the kitchen, frowning down at his StarkPad. With his right hand, he was tapping away at something on the screen; his left hand was wrapped around a steaming mug of lemon balm tea. Natasha stood there and watched him for a moment. Bruce looked up and saw her and smiled—tiny but real.
Natasha went downstairs and spent some time at the gun range that Stark had had installed, read over some reports Nick had sent her, went for a run around Central Park, and went back to her quiet apartment. She showered and moved through some stretches, and then curled up on the sofa with a bowl of spaghetti and a novel that Maria had recommended to her. Her hair was still a little damp when she climbed into bed. For a moment, she hesitated, considering reading for a while longer, but then put the book onto her nightstand and slid down under the covers.
She didn't intend to think of him when she touched herself, but it felt good—a release Natasha could take her time over, thinking about the curve of Bruce's back as he'd lain next to her, the breadth of his hands wrapped around that mug, his mouth. She rubbed at her clit and wondered what his touch would be like; rocked down on her fingers and imagined the way she'd have to stretch around him. Natasha imagined that he'd take his time, that he'd make sure she was relaxed and ready, because she'd watched him: Bruce was always trying his hardest not to hurt people. That was good, that thought, and she arched her back, slow, and listened to the way her breathing came loud in the silence of her bedroom. Natasha could have been noisy—a sound-proofed apartment had been a necessity—but she liked this pretense at intimacy. It was warm under the comforter and she could pretend that was from the heat of another body, pressed against hers, even if the blanket's weight was nothing like what his bulk would be between her legs. That drew a shiver out of her, and Natasha brought herself off to the thoughts of Bruce's weight on top of her, his mouth against her breast; shuddered again when she thought of the ways he might try to make it good for her.
By the time she was done, a rainstorm was pattering in an off-beat rhythm against her bedroom window. Natasha lay there and watched it, and felt sleepy; content.
*****
Two weeks later, Manhattan was in the middle of a heat wave. People who could get out of the city got out, those who had to stay grew steadily more grumpy, and the tourists grew visibly more appalled at the stench of overheated sewers and subway sweat with each passing day. Natasha stayed. She was on the trail of an Australian who was a key player in an Asia-Pacific trafficking ring. He went for a walk in Central Park most mornings, something which Natasha was pretty sure was a cover for him meeting with his deputies, so she acquired the same habit. A lone woman ambling around the park at the same pace as Morton several times a week would probably attract attention sooner or later, so Natasha acquired a dog, too.
Natalie Rushman had met Drew a few times back when she worked for Stark Industries; Drew worked in SI's financial division, knew some pretty funny knock-knock jokes, and also nurtured a pretty spectacular and all too blatant crush on Natalie. It took Natasha one carefully planned accidental meeting with Drew in a coffee shop, her hand on his forearm, an off-the-cuff remark about wondering if she should get a dog to protect her now that she'd moved back to the big city, but gosh, could she handle the commitment? And there she was, walking Ziggy the antiquated mongrel three mornings a week while she kept an eye on Morton.
"Ugh," she said on the phone to Laura one morning. Ziggy was squatting on the grass next to her, eyes cast up to the heavens as if he, too, were trying to ignore the indignity of it all. "I forgot there would be shit. I hate picking up shit."
"I'm a mother of two and their father is Clint Barton," Laura said dryly. "There is no poop story you could possibly have that I could not top."
"Point," Natasha conceded. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Morton take a seat on a nearby bench with someone and relaxed a little. She'd bugged that seat earlier and could retrieve the audio later. She bagged and disposed of Ziggy's shame, and then the two of them meandered on down the path: a gossiping girl and her dog, very conspicuously not a threat to anyone.
"So," she said, "I think I'm going to try a new hobby."
"Huh. Well, quilting's real big around here," Laura said thoughtfully. "I could bring you to Jo-Ann's next time you visit to buy some fabric, you can make all the nice Mennonite ladies feel uncomfortable."
"Don't need to quilt to do that," Natasha replied. "I'm going to try dating."
There was a long pause before Laura said, "People in general or a person in particular?"
"A person, maybe," Natasha said, stopping to let Ziggy sniff industriously at an intriguing tuft of grass. "A guy."
"Oh, now I get it," Laura said, and there was a knowing tone to her voice that Natasha absolutely didn't like. "A guy."
"What is there to get?" Natasha asked. "It's just, you know—"
"There is so much to get," Laura said. "You have a crush. This is the most exciting news I've heard since half the people at the town meeting about whether to put in a roundabout over by the new Lowes got into a fist-fight. Who is it? Is he dreamy?"
Not for the first time, Natasha was glad that she hadn't attended an American high school. "Aren't you supposed to be more supportive than this?"
"Oh, young padawan," Laura said with a happy sigh. "You have so much to learn."
*****
Natasha had expected that he would say yes. He found her attractive, she was confident of that—she'd seen the way his gaze lingered on her when he thought she wasn't looking—and if her romantic record so far wasn't exactly conventional, it wasn't as if it was barren, either. It had never been difficult for her to get someone into her bed. Plus, she started with an invitation for coffee at the Starbucks on the corner. She'd read Bruce's files, she knew just how badly his last relationship had ended, so Natasha very deliberately hadn't asked for anything other than a caramel latte and the possibility of more.
He said no.
"No," Bruce said, juggling a stack of papers with one hand and pushing his glasses back up his nose with the other. He was avoiding eye contact with her. "No, that wouldn't be… smart. No."
It stung when he walked away, his shoulders hunched and his steps hurried, as if he couldn't bear to be near her.
"How long before you trust me?" Natasha asked him several weeks later, flying back from Sokovia with the sceptre finally secure. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to keep trying with him, but Natasha was very deliberately trying not to be rational about this.
"Not you I don't trust," he said softly.
That might have been true, Natasha thought, but then again, Bruce Banner was a smart guy—she was pretty sure he'd read her files, too. Not trusting her would be wise; saying no should be something that she could respect.
The problem was that it turned out that once Natasha let herself really want something, it was very difficult to stop wanting it. Bruce didn't trust himself and mostly he didn't trust her but when he was at his angriest, he did. That mattered; the way he looked at her at Tony's party mattered, all big dark eyes and diffidence and a hint of something beneath it all that gave her hope.
"Never say never," Natasha told him, and walked away with her drink. Let him have some time to think about it, she thought. If the Hulk could learn to trust her actions, maybe Bruce Banner could learn to believe her words.
*****
"I have no place in the world."
Natasha had said that once, or thought it, or Maximoff had made her remember it being said to her. It didn't really make much difference. What made a difference was sitting on that ship, the stink of stagnant sea water and gun oil and old sweat in her nostrils and being certain that she was back in the Red Room. Maximoff pulled out the things that had happened, and the things that Natasha had feared happening, and shook them around, jumbled them up with everything else: the terror, and the satisfaction that had come with being useful, and the music and forced it all at once back into Natasha's head. She shook with it, from it, her heart racing, as Clint helped her back to the plane and then brought them silently home. The Black Widow had been trained to fill whatever place in the world someone designated for her—but Natalia Alianovna Romanova didn't have one, Natasha didn't have one.
Poor little spider; never more than the assassin they made of her.
A thing like that could make a girl desperate. First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk, but sometimes Natasha wanted to run, regardless. She begged Bruce to go away with her, because maybe if she gave it all up—her team, her friends, Laura's hugs and Clint's terrible jokes and Lila's laborious paintings and the bliss of reading a novel in her apartment on a rainy afternoon—she might have one last chance at being someone new.
She stood in front of Bruce in a borrowed bathrobe, as vulnerable as she ever had been, and offered him up all the possibilities of her half-formed fantasies. He still said no, and that made something settle, leaden, in the pit of her stomach, a nauseating certainty that stayed with her all the way to Korea and beyond. Natasha had had opportunities to leave SHIELD before and she'd always gone back—maybe it never had been possible, for her to be someone new. She adored Bruce—she was pretty certain she did, as much as she ever had anyone—but when he found her, when he stood in front of her and told her that she was worth staying calm for, all she could think in return was that a drop from this height should be enough to bring out the Hulk.
Natasha should have known that that was always how it was going to be. When Leucauge argyra was infected, it spun webs that were all askew, its life's efforts spent in the service of another being. But the wasp picked it for a reason, after all. The poor little spider was always a predator—it would have spun a web regardless.