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It starts with a glint of light flashing in the corner of her eye. A sunbeam through the window bounces off the edge of a metal pin. It’s a fleeting distraction. Nothing more.
Until her mind clocks the design of the pin.
The gold outline of a state. A bright red heart in the middle.
Ohio.
It’s enough to make her take a second look at the woman chirping brightly at Tony while he leads her and Doctor Foster around the facility. Brown hair, glasses, and a teasing smirk on painted lips. But it’s the pin that makes Natasha curious.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Darcy’s gotten used to strange, attractive presences in the lab. So used to it, in fact, that it takes her almost a week of working in the upstate New York Avengers facility before she realizes that there's a silent, drop-dead gorgeous redhead hovering on the fringes of her lab space on the daily.
She recognizes the Black Widow, of course. With the monster crush she’s been harboring since all the coverage of the Battle of New York it would be hard not to.
She puts a little extra swing in her hips and looks into Russian recipes.
Just in case.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Natasha is shaken just as much when Darcy asks her on a date as she was on that first glimpse of the Ohio pin. She’s been subtle with her curiosity. She’s a spy. The spy. And she’s been made by a doctoral student who lives on pop tarts and powdered drink mixes.
Darcy takes her to an arcade, beats her soundly at skeeball, and orders them a massive basket of chili cheese fries to split with their beer after.
Nat makes sure that Darcy doesn’t have to make the first move for a kiss at the end of the night.
~*~*~*~*~*~
When Natasha asks about her Ohio pin over breakfast months later, Darcy smiles across the coffee table where they’ve spread their IHOP takeout bounty and regales her with tales of her childhood in a Cleveland suburb. She talks about summer days on Lake Erie, spending hours wandering the halls of the free art museum, and all the concerts at less than savory venues when she was a teenager.
Nat quietly tells her that the closest thing she had to a childhood was also in Ohio. One little confession. Not much at all, but Darcy’s sure right then that it’s love.
~*~*~*~*~*~
They choose Kent when they decide to buy a house. Under the radar, through one of Nat’s contacts, and using airtight aliases. It’s a quaint little colonial one street over from an entire row of frat houses for the college. They paint the shutters bright blue to match a hue Natasha had in her hair when she was young. Darcy plants daisies in boxes on the porch rails and tells all the neighbors that she and her wife travel for work.
Their mailbox says ‘The Millers.’
But if the neighbors do suspect their real identities they never say a word.