Chapter Text
Present.
2012
Two Months After the Battle of New York.
She was halfway undressed when Tony Stark’s face appeared on her phone, giving her his trademark shit-eating smirk as his glazed, unmoving eyes somehow seemed positioned to stare directly at her chest. Natasha hit the answer button with her forefinger and set it on speakerphone before bending down to scoop her discarded dark crimson blouse off the ground and opening her drawer to find something more comfortable. The yellow light from the small lamp in the corner was just enough to distinguish colors by. “What do you want, Stark?”
“Natasha?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised on the other end.
“Tony,” she replied.
“I was trying to call Steve.”
“I’m not Steve,” she said helpfully, pulling on a blue T-shirt and following it up with a light jacket.
“So is it still a butt-dial if I was trying to call Cap and JARVIS called you instead, but my phone was still in my pocket?” Stark asked.
Natasha rolled her eyes. “No, it’s not. But since when does JARVIS get numbers mixed up?”
“Never,” Stark replied. “Unless his brilliant and did I mention philanthropic creator recently did an upgrade to his system and forgot to check the backwards compatibility with the mainframe…which he did.”
Natasha slipped off her shoes and set them in her closet amongst the many other pairs, then picked up her phone and walked out with it into the kitchen. It was dark until she flipped a light on except for the twinkles of buildings and far-below traffic lights that came in through the sliding glass door to the balcony. “So can I hang up on you now?”
“Actually, while I have you, I had a few more questions about Avengers Tower,” he revealed. She nearly rolled her eyes again, taking out a clean glass. Of course he did.
“You mean Stark Tower.”
“But it won’t be, once all—”
“I’m not living as a permanent guest in your multi-million-dollar, experimental-green-energy, controlled-by-an-AI-butler skyrise,” Natasha said flatly, moving to fill her glass at the sink.
Stark made an indignant noise in his throat. “What part of any of that description makes Avengers Tower seem like a place you wouldn’t want to live?”
“The part where it’s yours,” she said simply. Natasha smiled. “I’ve been under your thumb before, Mr. Stark. I wasn’t a fan. Except for that one time I got to take down Happy in the boxing ring.” She turned off the faucet.
“You know, he never talks about that,” Tony told her. “But okay, okay. If—hypothetically—you were to come live in my tower, would you want a floor above or below Barton? And would you want me to put in a personal gym like Cap’s so you can punch the crap out of things and cost me a small fortune—which is okay, because I have a large one—in bags, or are your Black Widow skills too advanced for punching bags?”
“Above,” Natasha answered with a smirk. “And you’re never too advanced for a good-old-fashioned punching bag.” She sipped at her water.
“I am,” Stark pointed out. “Just point my repulsor and—pew!” He made his best vocal imitation of something blowing up.
“Goodbye, Stark,” Natasha said, pulling the phone away from her ear.
“You know, because I am Iron Ma—” She hit the ‘end call’ button.
Natasha sighed as she set her phone and the glass down, shrugging her shoulders to get the tension out of them and opening her cupboards. She perused their contents to find nothing but a small bag of flour and half a box of cereal. Not really hungry anyway, she closed them again and looked around her apartment. Restless.
It wasn’t even that the op Fury had sent her on had been particularly harrowing. Standard, really—infiltrate, nab the guy heading up all the firm’s illegal activities from his office, and ship him off on a one-way trip to the Fridge, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s highest security storage locker for the worst of the worst. And everything had gone as planned.
But sometimes…sometimes she just needed her partner.
Natasha straightened, heading for the door to her apartment. She could tell him about Stark’s latest batch of questions, tease him about taking the top bunk—the Hawk always liked the highest vantage point and she knew it. Closing and locking her own door behind her, she padded four steps down the hallway to reach his and grasped the handle, giving the S.H.I.E.L.D. tech fingerprint sensor a few extra milliseconds to establish her identity and detect her heartbeat. The door clicked open.
“Clint?” she called. “You here? Stark’s at it again, thinks we’re going to be living one above another like rabbits.” Something dark seemed to flit across her vision to her right, but when she looked there was only his coffee pot and dish drainer sitting there like normal.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t shake the sense of unease, letting the door swung shut quietly behind her as she reached for her thigh holster. Her fingers swiped at empty space next to her leg. Damn. She knew exactly where it was, sitting on her bureau twenty feet away through the apartment wall.
Another flicker of movement caught her eye outside the window and all thought of her gun left her mind as she sprang forward towards the figure illuminated as the only dark patch in the sea of New York City lights below. She ran to the sliding glass door and burst through it onto the balcony, leaping up onto the wooden chairs instead of taking the time to go around them. The man in black was not Clint, everything about him screamed it—wrong height, wrong build, wrong way of movement as he shot out his arm directly in her path, expecting her to crumple on impact.
Natasha tucked her body under it, momentum carrying her forward until her feet crashed into the concrete edge of the railing, sending a jolt of pain up her legs. A large foot entered her vision about to smash down on her head but she quickly rolled away, hooking her smarting ankles around his calf and twisting. With a grunt of pain the man dropped to one knee and she flipped herself back onto her feet, wasting no time in planting a kick directly to his temple. His head jerked to the side with whiplash, and she ripped the ski mask off of him. “Where’s Barton?” she demanded.
The man spit out a globule of blood before looking at her, deep-seated malice in his eyes. “Любовь для детей, Romanova. Кажется, вы забыли,” he growled. Shock infused her, giving him just enough time to launch himself forward, one foot and both hands balanced for a split second on the railing. She threw herself after him and caught hold of his dark jacket just as he plummeted over the edge. For a second it caught, snapping her arm straight and throwing her body against the railing with two poles cold metal biting diagonally across her chest and stomach. Then the fabric ripped with an awful shredding sound, and the man tumbled downward. Screams echoed upwards from below and then a giant crash. Clutching the torn piece of cloth, she could barely make out a mangled body in the cavity of a crushed car roof. The angry blare of the car alarm soon joined the shouts of shock and surprise, but Natasha ignored it all. She sprinted back inside, checking every room of the apartment for blood or a body, any trace of her partner. Nothing. Adrenaline coursed through her body as she went for the phone. She dialed, then held it to her ear, waiting.
“Fury, tell me you have a location on Barton,” Natasha said as soon as he picked up.
“I’ll have Hill ping his phone,” Fury said immediately. “What’s the situation, Romanoff?”
“Just get me a location. Is he at home?”
“He should be at his apartment,” Fury told her. “Yes, Hill’s trace puts him there right now. Where are you?”
“Same place. There’s a mess on 5th Avenue that you might want to have some agents clean up,” Natasha said grimly. “Barton’s been taken. Meet me at the Hub in twenty, and I’ll explain everything.” She ended the call, dropping the phone back down on the table with a dull thunk.
“Love is for children, Romanova. It seems you have forgotten.”