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“So, you and Barton. Care to explain that to me?”
Natasha turns slowly from the window. She’s aware that Bruce won’t be able to see her expression, the moonlight through the narrow rectangle behind her being the only illumination for both of them, yet the head movement remains, and she feels they all know her well enough now to recognise the expression that might match a silence.
This light does strange things to Bruce’s face. She’s not entirely sure if she likes it – the strange glint in his eye, the altered shadows and mysteries revealed within a familiar face. It’s an effect she knows all too well, but it isn’t what she expects from Bruce. For all his tragedy – and yes, she will use such a word, she has lived a life she divulges to few and more than most she can identify the reality of Bruce’s life – for all that, his appearance remains oddly comforting in its mild-mannered absent-minded controlled disarray. She doesn’t need to see the Hulk; she’s not entirely sure that’s what she’s imagining now, either.
“Odd choice of topic. Stark put you up to this?”
“I’m not allowed to be a little curious?”
“You tell me.”
She returns to her examination. There’s no doubt that she could get out of this – she’s been climbing through holes all her life, and meeting Barton only made it all easier. Only Bruce can’t – or rather, neither of them would risk it, Bruce because he’s careful and Natasha because the words I will get you out of here still hang around her , a damning unfulfilled promise.
Natasha hates to leave anything unfinished.
The thought that a woman born and raised in Russia would ever be inconvenienced by snow in Manhattan is laughable. Unfortunately, that thought leaves out some of the other perils of this island – such as, for example, alien attacks and their influence on structural integrity.
Stark would have had them out of here within minutes, she has no doubt (it’s alright to think these things, any advances in telepathy – accidental or otherwise – connected with Stark Industries are being subtly but firmly discouraged, largely due to a mole by the name of Potts sympathetic to the cause). However, Cap has told her over the comms that Stark took a particularly good shot to the suit, and the strain in his voice had been more than enough for her to waive his concern and insist that they would be fine, now get him to medical before he wakes up.
Bruce doesn’t want to Hulk out down here. He’s scared for her, which from anybody else would lie somewhere between highly amusing and deserving of death, but here, it just seems like Bruce. After all, it hardly takes a woman trained for decades in psychological evaluation and warfare to recognise that more than one person feels responsibility for what happened on the crashing Helicarrier. Nevertheless, in this case, despite her insistence that she will make it through the window before any damage can be done, Bruce insists that their fragile cell wouldn’t take it, and proceeded to sit back and wait.
Bruce is good at waiting. Natasha has learnt patience, but only when there is a hunt and a prey to be stalked. For Bruce, it’s more like a state of being.
“Why?” she asks, Bruce’s question nagging at her. The moonlight offers her a shrug and a flash as he adjusts his glasses.
“Like I said, I’m curious. You two were a thing, and now you’re a different thing. Whatever it is, it’s important to you.” He waits a beat, then adds, “But if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine too.”
Of course it’s fine. Everything with Bruce is ‘fine’. She knows the sense in it, only that doesn’t stop her sometimes wanting to shake him because the calm the Hulk has forced on him doesn’t feel natural to her.
“It’s a long story.” That usually works.
“We’ve got time.”
She lets out a sigh. How far does she want to go?
Not very far, she decides.
“I guess,” she says, sitting down at last to watch him, “it’s actually a short story, when you tell it.”
“So you haven’t told it before.”
She frowns, but it’s not in annoyance. If anything, it’s amused, and also slightly surprised. For all his restraint, Bruce is relaxing around them, and as the shell draws back, it reveals the wonderful shade of humour beneath. “Most people who’d be interested can see it on our files. Clint found me, recruited me; we had sex; we decided it was a bad idea; SHIELD breathed a sigh of relief.”
Bruce doesn’t seem satisfied. “I meant what you are to each other now. I…” He hesitates, fingers twitching, the nervous tic caught in the light as he instinctively reaches to run his hands across a shirt which ripped apart several hours ago. (Nobody at SHIELD was willing to yank Bruce Banner out through that window, but they were at least more than willing to provide him with a blanket, and after the moment passes he runs his hand along that instead.)
“I guess I want to understand it.”
“Why?” Sharper this time; sharper than she meant it. She sees him flinch, and really, that was inevitable. (That doesn’t make it better.)
He shrugs, shadows suggesting a disarming expression (in a more literal sense, perhaps), distancing himself from the possibility of conflict. “I guess because it’s you?” he offers, turning his words into an inoffensive question. “I like trying to understand you.”
Maybe others might have been offended by that. Then again, Natasha is not and has never been ‘others’.
Resigning himself and retreating, Bruce tucks the blanket around himself and fits himself against the opposite wall, vanishing from the direct light if not her gaze. Not for the first time, she recognises the escape into the foetal position, and something pulls unhappily at her.
She gives him his minutes, letting him sink into some solace in the darkness. It’s the least she can do, to give him that space.
Then – ever-so-quietly, not raising her voice, not even talking as if it’s addressed to him – she tells him.
“I trust Barton not to stab me in the back, and at the same time I trust him not to show the same regard for our enemies. That’s the truth of it.”
Confessions in the darkness. She wonders if Bruce realises just how easily he pulls these things out of her.
“That makes him special?”
She smiles, and makes a sound like a laugh in case he can’t see it. “The rest of SHIELD, at least when it mattered, I couldn’t trust to do the first. They didn’t train me that way, and Fury didn’t train them that way either.
“If you’re wondering about the Avengers, most don’t fit the latter. It’s a hard world, mine and Barton’s, and I guess a very relative sense of empathy goes a long way.”
Natasha isn’t used to being this honest without an ulterior motive. (Does she really lack one? They have time to kill, and it seems to do Bruce good to talk.) Aside from Clint, Bruce is the only one to draw these things out of her, both suddenly intimate and full of surprises. She likes the latter, at least.
They fall into silence again – an easy silence, between two who know how to appreciate it. There are no wails or screams or sirens for either of them, and not merely thanks to the snow beginning to fall once more outside. (Natasha might not be looking, but that absence of sound signals something very deep – ‘childlike’, as far as the word ever applied to her.)
Perhaps half an hour later – she could give the exact time, yet down here, it doesn’t seem to matter – she hears Bruce stir.
“Where do I fit in?”
Those are the words he says. However, she hears it a little differently.
Do you trust me not to kill you?
“You?” she asks, an oddly playful lilt sneaking its way inside that simple word. “I haven’t quite finished categorising you yet, Banner.”
“And the other guy?”
She doesn’t say anything.
What she does do, however, is to rise from her seat and cross the room, briefly casting a shadow that looms larger than she’d like (trick of the light, she tells herself), before curling up beside him.
There’s no other guy, she’ll say one day. There’s just you. Except she has to wait until he’s ready to hear it, or else the words will twist into what his mind is constantly ready to hear. She knows this, because she recognises it.
For now, though, the conversation slips away again. They sit and listen to the drifting silence, and that is good.
Ever the gentleman, he waits long enough for her to prove she doesn’t need it, and then offers a share of his blanket.
She awakens the next morning to the sound of Stark cursing SHIELD equipment and nanny super soldiers and freakish weather, and the sense that things are shifting overhead. When she finds herself reflecting that naturally he’s not used to this cold and snow, since whatever the season, Stark flies south, like a bird, she realises that her mind feels sleepy and warm. It’s startling enough to bring her fully awake and back to herself, sitting straight upright and feeling a sudden chill as a blanket falls from around her shoulders.
Bruce had still been asleep, but now she hears him making drowsy noises as her movement disturbs him. Looking down at a face once more familiar in the sunlight streaming through to them – warm colours, happy, the way he should be – she is surprised to feel something in her chest wrench at the sight.
Or perhaps, reviewing the previous night with a trained spy’s recall, it’s not that surprising at all. It’s the subtle nuances of trust that matter most to her, after all.
They’re not there yet.
But once again, Natasha thinks that it’s worth taking this risk.