Chapter Text
Natasha is not used to being anxious.
She does not like this feeling of not knowing what’s going on, and that hollow feeling she gets when she thinks something’s wrong. She hates that Steve stares at her when she gets anxious and she hates that he knows when it happens.
So she leaves.
Simple as that.
(“Hey.” He’s leaning on the doorway with that Steve™ worry look, with his arms crossed, looking very buff and concerned, a look that she and Wanda have both seen and complain about on their girls’ nights. She lifts her head from her hands and makes a sound almost like a laugh but also a snort.
“Hi,” her voice sways up and down.
He wrinkles his forehead in the more concentrated version of the Steve™ look.
“Did it happen again?”
She flops back on the bed. It crinkles.
They’re holed up in an old condo on the outskirts of London, where the beds are crinkly and smell like mildew, but with luck they won’t be here long. Sam and Steve are sharing the upstairs room and they’ve given Natasha the room in the basement. It’s cold, crusty and there are spiderwebs in the corners, but Steve is the one who has to suffer through Sam’s weird sleep gymnastics, so she can’t really complain.
“Steve.”
“Nat, I’m worried.”
“You’re always worried,” she retorts.
There’s a silence between them. He lets out a loud sigh.
She cuts her eyes over to him.
He moves over to her, making the mattress crunch under his weight. It makes a crater in the plasticky mattress and she slides towards him. Her legs press into him and for a minute they sit in comfortably tense silence.
This is where she thrives, in the uncomfy situations she creates.
He tentatively puts a settling hand on her ankle.
“It’s okay to be-”
She sits up on her elbows. She cocks her head with a neutral expression and bats her eyelashes.
“Nat.”
“Steve.”
She lets him give her five more seconds of the Look™.
“You okay?” He asks.
“Steve, we’re running away from safety, away from our family and our lives. How do you think I am?”
He drops the look ™ and rolls his eyes.
“Nat, I think that that’s your life. But You’re stressed. You’re anxious. That’s fine.”
She stares at him.
“You should go.”
“Nat.”
He leaves anyway.
She’s gone in the morning.)
She chews her gum loudly when she makes the call because she knows Stark hates background noise on his calls.
“Romanoff.” He’s cheery. The call is crisp and quiet in the background, which means he’s on a plane or in a car. He thrives on transport because there’s nobody there to hand him things.
“Stark.” She blows a bubble and honks the horn at some asshole on the highway. “I’m coming to the compound to stay.”
He scoffs. “You can’t just do that. As much as I hate to admit it, you’re still-”
“A criminal? Yep.”
“Let me work something out. Gimme like, two days.”
“Here.”
She wakes up in a cold sweat with the sudden urge to take a piss. That never happens.
Something’s wrong. Something’s going on with her.
She wipes sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. Her heart is racing.
She creeps downstairs.
The kitchen light is on- not that atypical seeing as Stark does not care about losing money on electricity. She does not have that luxury with Steve and Sam, although now she's not with them anymore.
She wraps her arms around herself, silently pressing her back to the wall. She’s caught a glance of them hunched over the kitchen island through the windowed corner.
There’s someone in there.
There’s someone in the kitchen who doesn’t have Tony’s familiar tics - he has 49 minuscule ones, and this person is not exhibiting the most prominent: tapping his fingers in Morse code. Especially while he’s focusing and his body is still.
She instinctively reaches for the gun in her thigh holster, which, of course, is not there.
God, she’s getting sloppy.
Natasha backs up and looks through the kitchen window. There’s a framed picture on the block of plain wall. Closed cabinets, to use to slam heads, a vase on the table on a wood platter. Her eyes land on the thing she’s been looking for the most. The knife block.
She darts to the knife block and dives over the table. In a second flat she has the boy on the ground with a bead of blood forming at the tip of the knife.
His eyes are so wide, but he’s not breathing heavy, his heart rate isn’t reaching record highs and he’s not trembling like the people she usually tries to kill.
He looks more…
“Ohmagod!” His voice is high and reedy. A smile spreads across his face. “You’re Black Widow! Oh my god!”
She presses the knife deeper. He slaps the ground like it’s a friendly spar.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?”
“Peter…Peter Parker, sir- I mean ma’am. Black Widow ma’am. I …. Live here?”
She backs off him and stands up.
He slinks back up to his chair, resting his hand on the textbook he’s reading (molecular physics). It looks much too advanced for a twelve-year old like him.
Her thing is to not be fazed. So she will not be fazed.
She walks over to the sink, fills a glass with cold milk and squeezes Hershey’s syrup into her glass. (Tony doesn’t eat the stuff. It makes Pepper throw up. So it must be the kid’s or Tony just restocks from the old shopping list from when they all lived together)
She opens the drawer with one hand and pulls out a glass straw.
The kid is staring at her with huge doe eyes, his lips slightly parted.
She refuses to meet his eyes and strides out of the kitchen.
The next day she has a meeting.
And another.
And another, all to make amendments to the Accords. She finds it harder and harder to deal with Ross’s bullshit with every meeting.
Tony is sitting next to her, playing on his phone the whole time while Ross goes on another tirade about catastrophes and nukes and metaphors and blah blah blah.
“Romanoff.”
Ross’s voice cuts into her thought process, making the pain level of her migraine climb up. The only sign she shows of it is a slow motion blink.
“Ross.”
“Do you agree?”
She glances at Tony. He makes an almost imperceptible head motion. One single nod upwards, so she knows at least he’s been listening while she’s been spacing.
“Yes.”
The meeting is called to a close after Tony fakes the loss of internet at the compound and Friday starts making the hologram of Ross and the foreign officials glitch. Natasha knows this trick all too well- it’s a primitive way of trying to get out of meetings, but more often than not just delays them so that they take up even more time.
“I met your kid last night,” she tells tony after popping three Advils and hoping for the best.
“You watch the Daily Bugle too much. I don’t have a kid, Romanoff,” Tony says smoothly, like he’s rehearsed it. Knowing him, he probably has. He’s currently exhibiting nineteen of his twenty eight microexpressions that tell her that he’s lying. She stares at him.
“Peter Parker. He was in the kitchen.”
Tony crosses his arms, affronted. “Why were you in my kitchen?”
“He was in mine,” she replies. “On my floor.”
Technically, it’s not her floor - it’s the avengers communal one, but because Vision is off doing who-knows-what and the others only stay here when they’re in town, it’s hers and hers alone.
“Did he say why he was down there?” Tony asks worriedly. It’s amusing to her that he immediately jumps into Dad mode.
“It was a brief encounter. Looked like he was studying.” She rolls her shoulders back and stretches out a kink in her neck. “He’s cute.”
Tony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s his claim to fame. Thinks he can get anything with those puppy dog eyes.”
“With you he probably could.”
He cracks a grin. “Probably.”
She returns the smile halfway, turns on her heel and strides out.
She’s going to have to do some background research on this kid, seeing as Stark is being surprisingly tight lipped.
He’s down in her kitchen again that night, this time with what looks like a middle - grade fantasy book and a steaming mug of tea when she makes her way down.
Tonight was different than last night.
While last night she woke up heightened, tonight she woke up sluggish with blurred vision and a ringing in her ears. Before she went downstairs, she had splashed her face with cold water and started to gasp, like she was drowning, unable to catch her breath.
This time she doesn’t take milk, instead she sits next to the kid. The background info she found wasn’t much, Stark must have taken or erased most of his legal and personal documents from the general public.
She had found just the basics: dead parents, lived with his aunt until she passed away a month ago, almost sixteen years old and enrolled in one of the most prestigious tech prep schools in the city.
He looks over at her, his face lighting up. She takes this time to really process his facial features.
He has huge brown eyes, swollen with lack of sleep and circles that look like bruises under them. His curly hair is well-trimmed, out of the way, kind of nondescript, a normal warm brown color. He doesn’t look like much, but he does give off the impression that a newborn puppy might give off.
Natasha refuses to be swayed by the puppy vibe.
“So. Spider-Man.”
His eyes widen so much that she’s sure they’ll burst.
So that’s a yes.
“No…no! Why…why would you- why would you think th-that?” He stutters out, which is about as much confirmation that she needed. “Ma’am. Black widow,” he adds, very unnecessarily.
“We Spiders gotta look out for each other,” Nat tells him. His eyes well up with excitement.
“Really?” He whispers. Nat purses her lips in a smile.
She retreats from the kitchen with a glass of water a minute later, no more words spoken to the awestruck boy.
As soon as she’s alone, she starts to attack herself again.