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It wasn't that Natasha distrusted the others, necessarily, but the habit of observation was a difficult one to break, even if she'd cared to try. Her assessments of those close to her had been the difference between success and failure, life and death, more often than she cared to remember—sometimes more often than she could remember. It wasn't that she kept her distance from the others, but she watched them from the corner of her eye: Bruce one morning in the kitchen, thrown off kilter by how JARVIS offered him a choice of ten different breakfast cereals; Clint clearly ill at ease at first with sitting on a couch that cost more than they made in a year. With Tony it was different because he'd lived here long before they had and well, he was Tony. The signal-to-noise ratio was skewed compared to the others.
Tony referred to Thor as "House Targaryen, with the hair," and Clint was "Katniss" and "Legolas", Tony alternately winding Clint up about being a hick and peppering him with genuinely interested questions about the manufacture of his arrows and the refinements built into his bows. Steve was "Captain Stick-in-the-Butt" and "Gramps" and "Rip van Winkle"; Tony teased him about his AARP membership, and telling kids to get off his lawn, and not understanding how to work a VCR. Natasha understood what he was trying to do—his own version of feeling people out, seeing how far words could push them, trying to see if they'd go or if they'd stay.
It wasn't how Natasha would choose to go about things, but it amused her, to watch how Tony employed an approach so lacking in subtlety. At least, that was, until he tried it on her one day, standing at the living room's wet bar before dinner and offering her a drink. He waggled the bottle at her and said smugly, in an accent which he no doubt thought sounded Russian but which came across more like a South African with a bad head cold, "You want some? Unless in Soviet Russia, vodka drink you, Natalia Alianovna."
Later, Clint said, "The look on your face—I thought you were finally going to haul off and punch him one."
"Hmm," Natasha said, noncommittal, rolling over and tucking herself in closer to him so that their heads shared the same pillow.
"No one would've blamed you," Clint continued, resting a hand on her hip. "That stereotype shit is just annoying, like how he keeps buying me stuff with corn and the Iowa Hawkeye on it. Fucker knows I grew up in Ames. Go State."
"Yes," Natasha said, though that wasn't what had gotten to her at all.
No one had called her Natalia Alianovna in a very long time.
*****
It had been a week since Clint had brought her in, and she'd already managed to learn a significant amount about SHIELD, its headquarters and its operational methods, all from within the confines of a two metre by two metre cell. Yet still, when the cell door opened on the morning of the eighth day, the man Natalia saw was not at all what she had been expecting. The sense of quiet power, yes; that he was older and male, yes. Natalia had been interrogated before, and she had a reputation which was not undeserved. The prospect of breaking her was tempting for men with authority and the will to wield it. She hadn't expected SHIELD would be any different.
But she hadn't anticipated a man like this, a man in a sober three-piece suit and a wheelchair. He said that he wasn't there to question her, but to help her. Natalia flinched regardless when he closed his eyes and reached out, very slowly, and ran cool fingertips over her temples, brushing against the inch of red regrowth at the roots of her blonde hair. "Oh my dear," he said, and the earnest compassion in his voice was enough to make her shake, "my dear, what have they done to you?"
SHIELD hadn't brought her in alone. With her came Nadezhda Mikhailovna Volkova, Natalie Robinson, Thérèse Roux, Tessa Redbourn—not one of them could be left where Natalia had first found them. Natalia just couldn't remember where that was, or who had christened them.
"I don't know," she told the man, and that was a terrible thing—to know she was angry, to feel a rage that made her very breath burn in her chest, but not to know why.
"I could help you find out," he said, holding his hands out to her, palms turned upwards and empty, like a promise.
But Natalia said, "No," because she wanted to find out for herself. She hadn't intended to say anything more, but the man was still looking at her with quiet patience, like he knew what it was to hurt, and she found herself blurting out, "I want you to call me Natasha. Natasha Romanoff." She knew she couldn't leave behind Natalia Alianovna Romanova, not entirely, not ever, but Natasha could step to one side of her, take on the affectionate, the diminutive, the not-quite-heard-right and know it for her own name.
*****
Natasha was sitting at the table in the communal kitchen. She had a mug of peppermint tea at her elbow and the Sunday edition of the New York Times filleted and spread out in front of her, the sports section put to one side for Steve while she worked her way through the book reviews. She heard Pepper come into the room before she saw her, the clicking of her heels against the hardwood floors indicating that Pepper must have left straight from work and taken a red-eye from Los Angeles.
"Good morning, Natasha," Pepper said, her words pleasant but with a faint undercurrent of tension that spoke to more than just a delayed departure or Midwestern turbulence. It hinted at a woman with a lot of media training who was very, very good at hiding when she was angry.
Of course, Natasha was even better.
"Morning," Natasha said, turning to the next page of the supplement and carefully not looking up. "There's more tea in the pot, if you want some."
"What kind?"
"Peppermint."
"Thanks, but no," Pepper said with a sigh. "I need something with a lot of caffeine."
"Bad flight?" Natasha looked up, watched Pepper walk over to the red enamel coffeemaker and set it to percolating.
"The flight was fine," Pepper said, leaning against the kitchen counter while she toed off her shoes, coiled her hair up into a loose bun. "But the meetings were not." She looked tired; she looked a little, Natasha realised, the way Bruce did after a long day, brittle like a thin clay pot left too long near too much heat. Natasha had read SHIELD's reports on Extremis, watched what little footage existed. She knew enough to be impressed by Pepper's control.
Natasha tilted her head. "I thought it was just a rubberstamping session with the foundation's board?"
"It was," Pepper said, folding her arms, looking down at her feet, her toes with their neat coral pedicure. "But, you know, most of them are still appointees of Howard Stark's and so it's all…"
"Ah." Natasha could imagine.
"One of them," Pepper said, nose wrinkling, "kept patting me on the back of the hand and calling me Virginia. Ugh."
Which was not something that Natasha understood precisely, but she'd picked up just enough to know that Pepper had no more had an idyllic childhood than had the rest of them, and that there was a very good reason why a grown woman with an MBA would choose to go by something so apparently childish instead of the more dignified Virginia. Natasha could appreciate just how irritating it could be, to hear someone call you by a name you hated over and over and not feeling able to say anything because to do so would be to admit a weakness.
Natasha picked up the teapot, poured the last of the tea into her cup. "You know," she said, putting the pot back on the trivet, "Tony called me Natalia Alianovna yesterday."
That got her a sharp look from Pepper. Pepper might not know any more of the specifics about Natasha than Natasha did of Pepper, but Pepper had undoubtedly read the unredacted version of Natasha's SHIELD file. You didn't get to become, and remain, CEO of Stark Industries without having a certain kind of ruthlessness, and an ability to acquire information through some slightly shady channels.
The difference between Pepper and Tony was that Pepper would never have paraded her knowledge in front of Natasha as Tony had, as if it were merely one more way of scoring points in a game without consequences.
"So there was something in the water this weekend, huh?" Pepper said, pouring herself a brimming cup of coffee and then coming over to sit at the table with Natasha.
"Looks like it," Natasha said easily. "Clint thought I was going to punch him."
Pepper hummed. "Not that I don't love Tony, but I understand the temptation sometimes. You want to tag team him again?"
"Only if I get to be the good cop this time," Natasha said.
"Subverting stereotypes?" Pepper said, mouth curving up into a wide, sly smile.
"Deciding which one I want to play," Natasha said, and the two of them clinked their mugs together, conspiratorial.
*****
Natalie had played at homemaking with a programmer working for a multinational bank in the City of London; Thérèse had been an ambitious middle manager in a Swiss investment firm with links to North Korea. Tessa had been an au pair, shy and quiet and perfectly placed to watch the goings on in the embassy in Buenos Aires; Nadezhda had been the dancer.
Natalia had never known what to make of all of them, had resented fiercely the mornings she would wake up and suddenly have their memories crowded in there with her own. Sometimes Natasha thought that she'd gone with Clint simply on strength of the promise to never have to meet another one.
Objectively, Natasha knew little more about them than Natalia had, and it wasn't that the anger had ever entirely gone away. She was always going to be a little angry, always going to be a little lost; but when Colonel Fury had offered her the job, he'd called her Natasha without hesitation, without question, and that meant something. If she couldn't answer to everything in her past, she could still know how to answer to a name in the present.
*****
They managed to provoke Tony into apologising for hacking her SHIELD file and using it against her, though Tony being Tony, half of his apology involved an extended meditation on how Pepper and Natasha could be likened to harpies, vicious, vicious harpies.
Cap overheard that last part, and decided that Tony needed to be spoken to about his disrespectful attitude towards women, and Tony looked so thoroughly chastened that Natasha couldn't help but laugh. When Clint walked in and saw it all—Steve with his hands on his hips, Natasha laughing, Pepper hiding a smile behind her hand—he looked sharply over at Natasha and said, "Is this about the vodka thing?"
"No," Natasha said mildly. She turned back to Tony and then pointed at Pepper. "What's her name?"
"Pepper," Tony said, shamefaced.
"Uh, guys?" Clint said.
"And what's my name?" Natasha said.
"I'm really confused right now," Steve said.
"Natasha Romanoff," Tony said, and Natasha smiled.