Chapter Text
When Natasha Romanov is sent for undercover work at Stark Industries she knows that it’s a honeypot mission, that she’ll be reduced to nothing more than an object of sexual attraction for the coming days. It doesn’t make it any easier when that does happen. When she has to watch Tony Stark almost undress her with his eyes. When he looks for the modeling photos SHIELD had planted, when the woman beside him doesn’t say anything. So when she gets asked to enter the boxing ring only to be diminished again by the asshole inside it she snaps and promptly throws him to the ground. She leaves shortly after that, being in that room made her almost want to tear the skin off her body if it made people stop looking at her like that. Like she was some kind of eye candy for them. She finishes up the paperwork and updates Fury that the mission is going successfully, she doesn’t mention that as soon as she was able to leave Stark Industries she got the cheapest vodka she could find and sat in her bathroom half-unconscious cutting away at her thighs. She doesn’t mention that she can’t separate herself from all of these different covers anymore, she doesn’t mention that she just wants to disappear. She spends about half an hour cleaning the blood off her bathroom floor the next morning.
She gets notified that Stark has made her his assistant, which means the mission is going well. Except Natasha doesn’t want it to, she wants to go back to the helicarrier and listen to Clint ramble about something utterly idiotic and spar with Maria. It’s all too late for that though so Natasha shoves on a dress (Applies bandages to thighs because the pain still runs in waves up and down her body) and gets on a plane to someplace in Europe to help Stark. She knows Pepper doesn’t like her, still, it stings slightly when both her and Tony are equally dismissive of Natasha. Tony decides to compete in the Grand Prix, it goes wrong. Obviously. Natasha doesn’t step in to help, it would blow her cover (She also can barely stand, she’ll need to stitch herself up if the cuts are causing this much pain). They go back to the US the day after, Natasha notices that the palladium poisoning is affecting Stark worse. She takes a few days off, she’d already planted a bug on Tony so it wasn’t like she had stopped monitoring him. She just needed to get away for a while, so she goes back to her apartment. She feeds the stray cat that lives in her house again, she still calls him a stray even though he’s been living in her house for a few months now. She doesn’t want to get too attached (The Red Room told her that love was for children, she still believes it). She doesn’t really know what to do with herself, she’s still adjusting to being able to make her own decisions. She ends up on the sofa with a set of James Bond movies, she knows them all off by heart now but she still likes them. There’s something comforting about them, how predictable they are. She falls asleep on her sofa, the stray curls up next to her. Natasha knows that she has to go back to being Stark's assistant soon but at this moment she just wants to be herself. It’s not like she was ever allowed to before.
Fury tells her she needs to go back to supervise Tony, that the palladium poisoning is getting worse by the second. Natasha hates how as soon as she sees that notification she’s running to get a blade and pressing it into her skin until she can see a layer of fat, she passes out after that. When she wakes up the first thing she does is stitch herself up, (She doesn’t know when she started to want to cut so deep.) and then take a handful of ibuprofen (It was probably too much, she doesn’t care). Fury sends her another message, she needs to try and seduce Tony. So Natasha does, all her life she’s followed orders. This is no different. Tony gets drunk, too drunk. He ends up fighting with Rhodes, he gets his ass kicked. Natasha doesn’t understand how Tony is able to only focus on himself, every move she makes she always considers its impact on those around her yet he seems to only pick the options that work best for him. Fury tells her that she can break cover and Natasha doesn’t remember the last time she felt so relieved. They go to find Tony. Natasha enjoys the look on his face when he realizes that he was never in control of her far too much. They force him to figure out how to fix his heart. Natasha essentially gets babysitting duty. Fury sends her back to work for Pepper after that though, something about maintaining cover on the inside. It goes well, obviously, it goes well because Natasha is nothing if not efficient. Then Tony shows up.
He brings strawberries for Pepper, which was idiotic on so many levels before promptly trying to sabotage Natashas cover. She desperately wants to throw him out of the window, Happy and Pepper leave. Then he talks.
“Boy, you’re good. You are mind-blowingly duplicitous. How do you do it? You just… Tear things apart. You’re a triple imposter. I’ve never seen anything like you. Is anything about you real?”
Natasha can almost feel herself fall apart as he says that because he isn’t wrong, she is duplicitous. She was trained to be. She doesn’t know what about her is real either, she can’t tell which parts of her are from SHIELD or the Red Room. Which parts of her she actually has control over. She snaps back at Tony just so he doesn’t realize how deeply that little speech landed with her. When she gets back to her apartment she starts to drink and then she's desperately trying to find a blade to dig into her skin. She comes back to conscience in her bathtub with blood pooling around her body, she stitches up her thighs again. She only notices later that she had smashed every mirror in her apartment as well.
Things go wrong (They’ve always done that though), Natasha ends up taking down nearly an entire facility in order to get back control of a weaponized suit of armor. That’s something new to add to her resume. They win, or at least Tony wins. He’s one whose life got saved. Natasha on the other hand? She’s forgotten about, Fury moves her to another project after she hands in her report on Tony. She doesn’t think he’s fit for SHIELD, or for anything that she’s involved in really. She goes back to her apartment. She keeps cutting. She watches Tony receive a medal on TV, she knows that he doesn’t think about her. That he doesn’t realize just how much people are giving up for the sake of his ego. She can’t look in mirrors anymore without hearing his words ring around her head.