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Bruce has been listening to the phone ring for only a few seconds, but what if Tony doesn't pick up? He has no idea what to do with the girl curled up in a blanket on his couch. She accepted the tea, but she doesn't appear to speak English, and Bruce found her in his garden on the balcony eighteen stories up. What is he even expected to do with that?
"'lo?" Tony finally answers, because it's before noon.
"Tony, there's a girl in my apartment." He starts to interrupt, bitching about being woken up for a one night stand who won't leave, but Bruce talks over him. "I found her on my balcony and I think she only speaks Russian. You speak Russian, right?"
There’s silence on the other end of the phone for long enough that Bruce wonders if Tony hung up on him. It is a time that ends in ‘am’, but he’d thought Tony would detect the panic he’s not doing a great job of concealing. The girl on his couch tips her head curiously when he glances at her and Bruce immediately whips around to look at Not Her again.
“Bruce. Darling.” Something stupid is about to come out of Tony’s mouth. “Don’t tell me you banged a Russian model and didn’t have the decency to invite me?” There it is.
“I didn’t have sex with anyone last night.”
“More’s the pity.”
“Tony.” Bruce can already feel his headache increasing to migraine proportions. “I need you to get up and come translate Russian for me, and if you can’t do that, I’m going to have to rely on google translate.”
“…low blow. I’ll be there in ten.” There’s the sound of shuffling, so he’s probably not bluffing on the time estimate. “Don’t let her seduce you in the meantime. I wanna be there if anyone ends up getting laid.”
Bruce sighs. “Sure, Tony.”
What follows is the most awkward round of The Quiet Game Bruce has ever been witness to. Ten minutes stretches into eternity with him seated in the armchair across from the girl and being careful not to stare at her. She’s at least a handful of years younger than him, though something about her gaze makes him think maybe she just has a young face, and she has red hair that’s cut short and slightly crooked. Every so often she hitches the blanket back up over her shoulders. Bruce fidgets and then tries not to and repeats that in a cycle for a solid eight minutes.
He’s just gotten up to wander hopefully through his kitchen for some kind of food that isn’t ramen or more tea, when there’s a knock on the door, followed immediately by Tony shouting ‘don’t be naked!’ through the wood.
Bruce isn’t even annoyed, he’s so relieved.
“Come in,” he says unnecessarily while Tony barges into the living room. “She’s just- I don’t even know how she got there, but she was in with the hydrangeas.”
The girl is sitting up straighter, eyes narrowed, and rattles off something that sounds threatening.
Tony stops short and blinks in surprise. “Well. She’s not happy to see me,” he says. “Apparently I’m a capitalist pig. A little late for radical communism to still be a thing, but she’s definitely speaking Russian.” Tony says something after that that sounds decidedly less threatening.
The girl shakes her head, hunches the blankets up further on her shoulders, and glares like she’s going to set Tony on fire with her mind. He says another something, gestures at Bruce, and the girl stays silent a little longer. After a moment though, she drops her shoulders a bit and says something quiet but lengthy.
Tony takes it in, exchanges a few more sentences, then turns to Bruce.
“Congrats, you have an escaped Russian spy in your apartment.” Bruce blinks at him a couple times. “Or, at least, that’s my best guess. She says she doesn’t really know where she is, besides Manhattan, but your balcony looked safe.”
Bruce examines the possibility that he’s actually housing a Russian spy – he’s best friends with the leading industrialist/inventor/diva on the planet, it could happen – while Tony asks her a few more questions.
“Her name’s Natasha, and she likes your tea,” Tony says. “I told her you’re Bruce and also a giant teddy bear.” Bruce rolls his eyes, but he’s been called worse, so whatever. “Also she thinks someone’s following her, but she doesn’t remember if they’re bad or not, and we should probably talk to Fury about this.”
Bruce raises an eyebrow at that. “You hate Fury.”
“Yes, I know,” Tony says. Whines. “But I’m actually pretty sure she’s mind-control KGB or something. You don’t deserve to get murdered in your sleep for being an innocent, naïve man with a safe balcony.”
Natasha is watching them, and for some reason, the whole Russian spy thing sort of makes sense. Bruce gets the feeling she understands what they’re saying, but weirdly that she still doesn’t know the language. It puts him off-balance, definitely, but he can’t say he feels threatened. Natasha doesn’t look angry or deadly so much as defensive and still a little cold. Bruce can relate.
This is how Natasha comes into Bruce’s world. He learns how to say basic phrases in Russian and messes it up a lot of the time. He learns that Natalia was the name of a girl who died the moment Bruce offered his hand and a blanket to her. He learns who Clint Barton is, and how he found Natalia somewhere in Zagreb and told her to get to safety, not expecting her to cross a continent and an ocean to do it. He learns about the Red Room and wishes he didn’t have to. He watches Barton mother Natasha and act as her mentor at SHIELD and connect with her through shared memories of blood and duty, and then Bruce watches Natasha show up to sleep on his couch for months anyway.
He can’t place everything that happened in the interim, but one night he wakes up with Natasha’s hair stuck in the corner of his mouth and her hand gripping his shirt, and what he remembers is grey eyes in his hydrangeas. He wouldn’t call it a sudden realization, but Bruce knows the garden is hers now.