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“Do you know why we have eyes on the front of our faces, Natalia Romanova?” her handler used to ask her at the end of a day’s worth of sparring matches.
She would swallow a mouthful of spit sour with exertion, tongue parched and lips dry as bone. “Because we are predators. And every predator faces its prey head-on, with binocular vision. We don’t need to angle our heads or crane our necks unnecessarily. Like the hawk, we need only keep moving forward.”
His eyes were on the front of his face, like anyone else’s. Dark amber shot through with a deeper brown, restless and intense. Most people looked at such men and thought there was no room in them for anything other than the righteous passion that drove them and the desperation that fuelled it, but Natasha knew there were certain things you made room for whether you willed it or no. Certain dark passengers to whom you could not deny entry.
“Natasha…I really don’t think that’s a good idea.” He had that furrow between his brows he always got when he was beyond convincing, and he paced to and fro in the little conference room she’d cornered him in on the highest floor of Avengers Tower. He finally settled in the leather armchair opposite her own, resting his arms on the plate glass table that separated them.
“Are you kidding me, Doc? It’s the best idea I’ve ever had. You couldn’t ask for a better bodyguard. And I’m not asking, either, this is a done deal.” She smiled, not insincerely, and she knew he could tell. He was better at that than most.
His upper lip twitched and he bit it to keep it from returning her smile. He was worse at that than most. On the precious few occasions he smiled without it being a sneer of irony or a grimace of self-deprecation, Natasha knew he could be persuaded. An honest smile was all it took.
“I know you, Bruce. Both of you.”
“No. No you don’t. No one knows him, not even me.” He was wringing his hands as he always did when she pressed him on an issue about which he was undecided. Now, as then, she would persuade him. She leaned across the plate glass table and clasped his fretting hands with one of her own. They twitched at her touch then lay still.
“Especially not you,” she replied, eyes still fixed on his hands. Leaving herself open, allowing him to be the observer. He so seldom got to look at her without the knowledge that she was looking right back at him and through him.
“What do you mean?” She was surprised her assertion had not put him on the defensive. He would accede to her demands, in the end.
“I mean that I know him better than you do, Bruce. We’ve fought side by side and he respects me. He’s never harmed me, not since the helicarrier.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and she ran her thumb lightly over the back of his hand, smoothing the tension out of fingers taut with the pain of remembering.
He jerked his hands out from beneath hers and began pacing the room again, but not before she’d had time to notice the gooseflesh running up his arm. His sleeves were rolled up, as they always were when he was working. She settled back in her chair, keeping her eyes on the spot where his hands had been a moment before.
“But that could all change in an instant. You don’t know what could set him off, I don’t know what could set him off, and I can’t protect you from him, Natasha. I can’t be the reason you get hurt. Not again.”
She rolled her eyes and grinned. “And that’s where you’re wrong. Because I know you, Bruce, and the same things that set you off set him off. I know this firsthand, because I tripped all your switches almost immediately after meeting you, remember? A girl doesn’t forget that. Especially not this one.” She leaned back in her chair, her gaze roving over every inch of the room except the space he currently occupied. “You value sincerity and can’t abide a lie. You crave acceptance and dislike being patronized. You desire to be useful more than anything and fear nothing more than the possibility that you might become a weapon in the hands of institutionalized evil.” She finally turned her gaze back onto him. He was looking at her the way a man does only when he’s certain he’s not being watched, with a naked admiration made plain by his upturned brows and slightly parted lips. His features scrunched up into a frown when he realized she was watching him again.
“I’m not a complex man, Natasha, I’ll give you that. No doubt you’ve got me figured out, because that’s your expertise, figuring things out. But you can’t figure out a force of nature. You can’t find reason in a monster.”
“Wrong again.” She was staring him down now, without any pretence of playing coy. She didn’t want his admiration, she wanted his submission. “I know a man who did, once. He was sent to kill me and when he had me at his mercy he chose not to bargain for my life but for my very soul. He chose to trust in the humanity of a woman who wanted nothing more than to dash his brains all over the parquet floors in the Parisian hostel where he’d found her. Stark told me how you said you don’t get a suit of armor, and that’s true. But I don’t get to take mine off. I live with the screams of every man, woman, and child I’ve ever killed echoing through my waking thoughts.”
He stood stock-still, and for the first time that day, she could not read his expression. Give a little, get a lot, she told herself. “Yes, I’ve killed children, little girls, when I was no more than a little girl myself. If your handler gave the signal, you did it without question. I couldn’t understand that the ability to kill my classmates without a second thought wasn’t just an asset, it was a sure sign that I’d shed the last of my humanity liked a second skin…But I dumped my files a while back. None of this should be news to you. You’ve been working with a monster on your side all this time, and I don’t mean the Other Guy.”
His face assumed the practiced blank of someone accustomed to suppressing their emotional responses, but he didn’t do it fast enough. The telltale clenching of his jaw told her all she needed to know that this information was new to him and she could no longer meet his gaze - she didn’t want his wide-eyed pity.
Leave it to the good doctor to leave her file untouched even when the rest of the world had left their dirty fingerprints all over it. She envied him. He could conceal his own dark passenger deep within himself until necessity compelled it to surface. He could slough off his skin whenever he wanted, but her own was little more than a thin sheath, barely concealing the dark shapes twisted and coiled beneath.
Her handler had always told her that once she broke a sightline, she should withdraw and regroup. It was time to withdraw.
On her way out of the room, a hand found her shoulder and gripped it tightly. “Don’t go, Natasha. Please.” A strangled sound escaped her throat and she knew it would not pass for laughter.
“I was going for the pity play but I ended up hosting a pity party. You’re not invited, Doc.” But he wouldn’t let go of her shoulder.
“You’re right about him. About me. I was just afraid…”
“Afraid I couldn’t handle a monster? I think I’ve made it quite clear that I have plenty of first-hand experience with them. One in particular. Trust me.”
“I do.” His hand was large and warm and big enough to reach from the top of her shoulder to the edge of her clavicle. “With my life. I just wasn’t sure I could trust him with your life. But if you do, well, who am I to disagree? I don’t know anyone less willing to take uncalculated risks than you.” He gave her one of those lopsided apologies of his that passed for a smile. “And about what you said-”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got more than enough monsters under your bed to deal with already. You don’t need the skeletons from my closet to join them.“
She reached up and gave his hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it and he shivered, not unpleasantly, and was silent. It was as good a way as any to change the subject. “Then it’s as much of a done deal as it was when we started this conversation. Next time we go on a mission, I’ll be sticking closer to you than your own shadow.” She turned to face him and quirked a slender brow. “Think you can handle that?”
He nodded, that same naked admiration present in his features again. Natasha smiled and left him like that, one hand still outstretched. She’d never touched his hands before. They were the honest hands of an honest man and she liked the weight of them and the width of them and the calluses that ran up and down their length, the result of long hours bent over his work in the tower. He loved her and she would have to deal with that. She loved him and he didn’t know it and that was for the best. She was a hard thing to love.