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1.
Fury lies. It’s a fundamental fact of the universe: like gravity, the speed of light in a vacuum, and everybody poops. Natasha’s worked for SHIELD long enough to never take anything he says at face value, so when Fury expects her to take his word for it that Coulson’s dead - of course she’s suspicious. She’s not getting her hopes up, because that’s childish, and this isn’t the same as being seven and wanting pointe shoes for Christmas. But: Natasha doesn’t trust Fury as far as she can throw him.
She never looks at the cards. Steve and Tony and even Maria Hill all mention the cards to her, but Natasha never even glances at them. She’s lived her life surrounded by blood. She knows it intimately - its look, its feel, its smell, its taste. If it is not blood on the cards, it is one more lie she has caught Fury in. If it is blood on the cards... there are other places it could have come from, and she knows how it dries differently if it is frozen or if it is fresh...
Natasha averts her eyes, and they never see a body. They scatter ashes, but she doesn’t get close enough to tell if it is real, human ash. Because she knows that, too, the smell and the feel and the look and the taste. If she avoids it, then she doesn’t have to confirm or deny. Fury’s lie and Phil’s fate become quantum. Schrodinger’s Agent is both dead and alive until you look at the cards.
She can throw Fury a decent distance when push comes to shove, but she still doesn’t trust him.
2.
Tony hides behind words. Natasha’s known this since she met him, mostly because she does the exact same thing. The difference, she thinks, is that all of her words are perfectly considered, and Tony Stark talks to hear his own voice. Sometimes she even catches him talking to himself, although he always claims to be addressing Jarvis. After a while, he starts going suspiciously silent whenever she enters the room.
He hasn’t forgiven her for the months she spent pretending to be Natalie Rushman, even when she promises him that there’s not another layer underneath Natasha Romanov. As if he expects her to peel off her skin and become someone else, but believe her, people have tried. This is the ground floor and you can only build up. Strip it back and all there is underneath is flesh and bone and sinew.
When she tells him this, he makes a quip about x-rays and she asks him to guess how many metal pins she has in her ribs. (He is off by five.)
They spend entire afternoons in silence. Frankly, he thinks it’s creepy how she only rarely replies, but they tolerate each other’s company nonetheless. The lighting in the lab makes it a good place to read. Stark fidgets like a child when he’s quiet, brimming with manic energy, caught with no place to hide. It’s so distracting that Natasha has no choice but to speak up, if only because it might make him stop.
“What are you working on?” She asks innocently. She’s been running it over in her head for at least a minute, picking the exact intonation she wants. Tony blinks at her for a moment, as if he doesn’t believe that he’s actually just heard her voice.
“Oh, thank god, I was starting to worry you’d died over there,” he finally says, and launches into a vivid description of his latest invention that will revolutionize the world. His words surround her, all sparkle and pop. Tony vanishes into syntax, hyperbole, and that funny little twist she occasionally catches in his pronunciation whenever he thinks he’s being especially clever.
She wishes she could tell him that he doesn’t need to hide behind sarcasm and charm with her - but she doesn’t think he knows what he’s made of underneath his verbal quirks.
3.
Natasha tries to convince herself she doesn’t have a problem with Bruce, not really. It’s the Hulk that she takes objection to, and anyone who thinks less of her for that should be required to go a round with Mr. Big, Green, and Irrational. She would say she’s seen Hulk take orders from Captain America, but then she’s pretty certain that telling him to smash when smashing is what he’s predisposed to do doesn’t count.
The only person that Hulk really likes is Tony. She’s sure enough of that. Bruce might also only really like Tony, and the problem with both of them, Bruce and the Other Guy, is that they’re hard to read. Natasha relies on staying one step ahead of the game and predicting her opponent’s next move, so when Bruce beats her at that game in India like it’s nothing, she can’t decide if she thinks he’s admirable or terrifying. Sorry, that was mean, he says, like it’s nothing. Like he fools international secret agents for breakfast.
Rather than dealing with this like an adult, she avoids the matter entirely. To co-opt Banner’s own terminology, the guy’s a bag of cats, and Natasha has better things to do than to figure out how his mind works. His appearances in Tony’s lab send her scurrying (well, not really scurrying, more walking with purpose) to alternative reading nooks, and she’s sure that they talk about her after she’s gone.
He catches up to her eventually, cornering her while she waits for the coffee-maker. “Natasha,” says Bruce, sounding surprised, as if he’s forgotten what he even came into the kitchen for (but she honestly doubts that). She raises an eyebrow at him from her perch on the counter. The coffee burbles. It’s brewing too slowly for her tastes.
“Yes?” she asks, after a moment, trying to figure out what this is about.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he says, which is putting it mildly, and she doesn’t snort with laughter because she isn’t seven.
“Oh,” says Natasha. Inscrutable as Bruce is to her, she’s pretty sure he’s being honest.
“Truth is,” he explains, grabbing a mug, “You bringing me in was the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. So thanks.”
“I was just doing my job,” replies Natasha tacitly, and when the coffee finishes she pours some for each of them
“The Other Guy would probably thank you, too,” Bruce says between sips, and she gives him a small smile. It’s a concession, a peace offering, or else some kind of positive reinforcement.
4.
Thor hits the mat hard, and the floor shakes from the impact. He never holds back against Natasha, even though she’s half his size. He grins, blinking stars from his eyes. “I yield,” he says, rolling onto his side. Natasha offers him a hand, helping him up, with no fear of a dirty trick meant to send her sprawling to the floor. She doesn’t think Thor would know false pretense if it punched him in the face.
Thor bobs to his feet. “That was an honorable fight, Daughter of Roman,” he says, which is what he’s called her ever since someone explained to him how Russian surnames work. She doesn’t think about Phil Coulson, or even her own parents, instead directing her focus to their handshake. Besides, there’s no harm or malice in the nickname - Thor has integrity, and unlike some people who prattle on and on about honor, he actually means what he says. Thor, Son of Odin, knows where he comes from.
“Thanks,” she replies, smiling gamely. “You almost had me, for a second.” She can read Thor like a book, but his tremendous size and strength still make fighting him a challenge. “Hit the showers,” she suggests, because he’ll stand around basking in his warrior’s stink otherwise.
Thor raises an eyebrow. “I do not think Tony would appreciate striking the plumbing fixtures,” he says.
“It’s an idiom,” sighs Natasha. “Go bathe, and then we can order some food.”
Thor nods and bounds off in a way that brings to mind a Labrador retriever chasing a stick, which isn’t entirely incorrect. Natasha watches him go, feet planted on the mat and hands on her hips and sweat trickling down the back of her neck. There is no reconciling Thor’s earnest cheerfulness with the god she knows is his brother. Coming from that kind of family, he should know a thing or two about the cruelty of the world. Does, probably. Accepts it and carries its weight on his broad shoulders every day of his life until he hardly feels it, even if it’s still there.
She heads for the locker room, buoyant on adrenaline and forward momentum.
5.
Stark insists that the whole team skip the SHIELD Christmas party to come to a private gathering at his mansion, although “private” turns out to mean “you, me, and one-hundred of my closest friends, shareholders, celebrity fans, and hangers-on.” Because it’s a Stark party, there’s an open bar, which sincerely helps in reducing the awkwardness of the situation, and as soon as Natasha gets over being mad at Tony for making her come, she spends the evening pretending to be an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, doing vodka shots and taking incriminating cell phone pictures for later.
It’s sometime past 2 AM when things start to wind down and the endless string of guests thins out and Natasha makes her way over to Steve, who she’s pretty sure is the only other sober person left in the room. She kicks off her Louboutins and flops onto the sofa beside him, and decides, based on the lighting and the room’s collective blood alcohol content, that no one is going to remember that Natalia Ramsay ended her evening with a heart-to-heart with Captain America.
“You’re not drunk,” Steve observes.
“Neither are you,” she replies, because Natalia Ramsay isn’t Russian and can’t use that excuse. She gestures to the gin and soda he’s holding. “Not for lack of trying, I see.”
“I’ve seen you do shots with everyone who’s anyone tonight,” he says. “How on Earth are you not drunk?”
There are a lot of ways this conversation can go from here and Natasha would rather not have any of them in public, but of course this would come up now. She grew up on Captain America’s legacy. One might even say she only exists because of Captain America’s legacy, because Soviet scientists can’t leave any kind of super-weapon alone. She glances around the room. There’s a drunk actor trying to get the bartender’s number, a Stark groupie in a shareholder’s lap on the far side of the room. She thinks Bruce and Tony have gone outside with Pepper. Clint told her to have fun and snuck off three hours ago. Thor’s in New Mexico.
She turns back to Steve. Dropping her voice, she asks “Did you really think you were alone?” She’s seen Steve do his bewildered, fish-out-of-temporal-water, everyone-I-know-is-dead act enough times to know he thought exactly that.
“What,” he hisses to her. It’s not even a question. It’s hardly even a word.
“I mean,” she says, barely above a whisper. “That you’re not drunk, and I’m not drunk, for the same reason.”
Steve looks at her, really looks at her, like all the other times he’s ever looked at her in the last six months he hasn’t really seen her. “How old are you?” he asks, like he’s brimming with questions and it’s just the first one to burble out.
“Eighty, give or take,” she smiles. “I look good, don’t I?” Steve blushes, his whole face going red. He looks like he’s going to ask something else. “I was awake for all of it,” she offers, apparently preempting his next question since he shuts his mouth. Natasha studies him, trying to figure out how his brain is twisting and turning behind his eyes. She’s probably given him more questions than answers - at least being alone is simple.
“Someone made you,” says Steve, sounding pretty shaken. “Who?”
Natasha presses a finger to her lips, smiles primly. “It’s Christmas,” she says.
6.
They bring him back into the fold and that should be the end of it. Is the end of it, because nothing builds camaraderie like aliens and shawarma, in that order. No one talks at dinner, and Natasha is grateful for small mercies. It spares her having to listen to more of Tony’s snark, or any of them from articulating what price their victory came at. It’s better not to think about how, outside, Manhattan is burning, or about today’s body count.
Except: It’s not that simple.
Later, she sits on the bed and watches Clint sleep, wishing she had warned him. It isn’t like she didn’t have time to do so. They’ve certainly known each other long enough, but every time the topic came up she steered them away. Natasha is good like that - conversations go her way. She’s not sure he ever realized what she was avoiding, how she wouldn’t tell him about all the times someone has reached inside her head and pulled out all the parts they didn’t want there. How she’s built herself up time and time again. How she is an end result, not an original product.
Clint’s brow furrows. He twists in his sleep, and Natasha pulls his head into her lap. He’s not okay yet, even if he pretends he is when he’s awake. He can’t fool her when she watches him dream, not when the adrenaline is long gone and his subconscious takes over. That’s when the ego screams like an open wound.
“I could have protected you,” she says quietly, addressing the air more than her sleeping partner. “I could have told you how to protect yourself.”
Clint slumbers, and his face contorts and she cannot soothe him and she doesn’t dare wake him, not when he needs the sleep so badly. Natasha purses her lips.
“I could have,” she confesses. “But I didn’t.”
7.
She has pins in her ribs that she can’t take out. The bone has grown strong, but it’s grown to encase them, and now they’re part of her. There is a scar on her side like a jagged seam, where she has been opened up and put back together a dozen times or more. She spent a long time thinking that she was somehow less of a whole, because her body and her mind have been changed so many times since she was born.
Now, Natasha knows better.
She has pins in her ribs that make her stronger, and her mind is tempered steel. She has been made, and unmade, and remade. She is not who or what her mother gave birth to. This is okay.
Every child must grow up.