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"It's a bit of a project," he says apologetically.
She sees it in his eyes, the odd bit of gentleness he'd had when he offered her the lighter centuries ago when she was another person and had still been reeling in shock. She'd lit it up, let her fingers do what her brain was commanding, as though she hadn't been entirely numb.
(It wasn't that long ago, less than two years, and this time, he's holding open the door on the way in, not handing her the flames to burn it down.)
She opens her mouth, begins to let his name roll off her tongue, then catches herself and makes it a comment, "Airy." The windows are open, the curtains blowing in gentle breezes, and he smiles a little, so it crinkles the edges of his eyes.
"I thought you might like that."
And this time, he tells her as he shows her the kitchen, the wooden floors, the stairwell winding upward, this time she won't be alone trying to make beauty out of a dusty old house that everyone else has forgotten. This time, he'll be the one working so she has time to work on her projects and her science, and she won't be alone.
She hesitates in the doorway of the master bedroom, looking for a long time before he comes to a halt beside her and looks with her. Their breaths space out together, and finally he says softly, "We don't have to do this."
(It wasn't that long ago. "You've done enough for me.")
But she turns to him, slides her arms around his shoulders, and makes herself swallow down his name without speaking it before she smiles. She hushes him as if he's sick again, and it's something more than gratitude that wells up inside her when he leans his head against hers and sways with her to the same rhythm.
She still loves the science.
She still can't publish, can't talk about her work, can't even let anyone know she's a scientist anymore. She's disappeared into the anonymity of midwestern farmland and a new identity crafted by the person in charge of an organization that doesn't even know she exists.
It's good in a way. She can finally feel the tension in the back of her shoulders ease and know her own coworker, friend, someone she trusts won't come in the door and raise his gun to shoot her. The hackles on the back of her neck finally stop rising any time there's an open door or window behind her. Now, she has something other than Aaron to keep her safe.
(He's the one she worries about when she catches him staring out the window with that keen gaze the day before he leaves for work. He's the one going back into the belly of the beast where anyone could see him, find him, where one day they might raze a program to its roots again.)
She's just an ordinary military wife out here, running a farm while her husband rotates out for parts unknown. It explains the injuries when he blows back through town, laughing over bruises and sprains he can't quite hide. It hides that Fury sends him home to recover so no one will figure out how fast he does it and how little he needs.
She still looks at him sometimes, amazed at what she helped to accomplish, at the man he's become from the broken boy he used to be long before she ever met him. It's almost strange how all the tenderness she feels is at war and at odds with the wonder.
(He's an ordinary human, and he keeps up with demigods and supersoldiers. He comes home, hands shaking, and lets her hold him gently in her arms as she hushes him in that old familiar rocking rhythm, kisses his hair, and reminds him he is extraordinary.)
First there are the stars over their boat, then the child under her heart, then the way he looks at her in that knowing way when she almost calls him Aaron.
"Stop that," she orders, pausing to wave the spatula in his direction.
That knowing smile becomes his knowing grin, and he answers, "Yes, ma'am," because he doesn't really care to call her Laura.
(They swallow down their names, accept his missions that keep him sane. There were side effects. There are always side effects of behavioral modification, and he has an unhealthy dose of paranoia to go with his keen intelligence, endless curiosity, and enhanced senses. He keeps taking orders, but they don't come from Outcome anymore and SHIELD is just the agenda he works his way down. She never used to want to know. Now she weighs and considers and gives him her blessing.)
First they are lost because they want to be lost, and she lets his hand warm her through with one rub of his thumb over the back of her knuckles as they buy scissors and dye for her and hair extensions and tinted contacts for him. They practice new names and become new people, and she learns to be more than an asset when they run.
Then a man with a patch over his eye and a distinctive swagger that her newly practiced eye could pick out of a crowd too easily makes them an offer. He swears that SHIELD's been burnt to the ground before and they managed to do it without killing all the assets.
Things are still new (and ancient) between them. They look at each other, and she feels his hand on hers as he asks with his eyes.
"No one can know about us." She shudders. "I can't work in a lab again."
Fury doesn't look surprised when he murmurs, "Yes, ma'am," obeying orders from someone who will do exactly what he tells her.
First they are lost, then they are forgotten, buried behind false trails and a lack of paperwork that implies Clint Barton was born at home and disappeared into the foster care system at a young age before becoming a runaway. Then they are found, in that Laura has friends in the midwestern farmland she has disappeared to and Clint has a handler he knows and likes that thinks Clint is an ex-carnie with a patchwork past.
Then there is Natasha, and he goes off the grid, becomes someone else he used to be, and helps her run from a program trying desperately to burn her to the ground.
("It's a bit of a project," he told her when he brought her to the house, a bit of a project to make a dusty old forgotten place into a home where their children can play safely, where science can sing to her without making the backs of her shoulders tense in fear, where he can bring home another agent from another program that's decided she's too much of a liability.)
"I was loyal," Natasha tells her. "I gave them everything." Her life, her death, the blood on her hands, her obedience to orders a sane human would have questioned, even the ability to have children.
Natasha sits at the dining room table in a farmhouse kitchen with a woman who used to have degrees in biochemistry, virology, and genetics and a man who once failed to meet the minimum score on intelligence for the army.
(Is it paranoia if it always happens?)
She sits at the dining room table for lunches and dinners, sits beside a former doctor on the porch swing while her husband sits on the porch railing with the patience of a sniper and sticks his nose in where it doesn't belong. She sits with them until she's sitting with a child in her lap and another behind her head trying to braid her hair and laughing as they call her Auntie Nat.
SHIELD falls and Nat is the one who burns it to the ground.
"I told you I prefer to keep my assets," Fury tells a highly upset military wife in the middle of farm country not more than a couple of weeks later.
No one knows she exists, that she knew better than anyone else what made supersoldiers and demigods the way they were, and when her husband has to fight off another friend turned enemy, she finds comfort that no one comes to sit her down at the kitchen table and shoot her in the head.
("Are we lost?" she whispers, lying on her back in the grass behind the house.
His fingers are still warm, thumb rubbing over the back of her knuckles. "Just trying to figure out our options." He doesn't realize what he's said until he realizes what he's said, the breath going out of him in a rush, and Natasha isn't here. It's just them, their memories, their history, and she's still herself when she answers.
"I was hoping we were lost.")
He's never stopped being an Outcome agent, never quite stopped being Aaron in her head. He's paranoid and curious and doesn't let things go, even when he pretends to for the sake of a friendship or a job. He calls her honey when he comes in the house, kisses her gently, calls her Laura to the Avengers as he turns around.
(She's never stopped being Marta in her own head.)
She smiles and gestures. "I know all your names."