Chapter Text
Natasha finds Natalie enjoying Tony's company maybe a little too much.
She laughs at all his jokes — because, the thing is, they're genuinely funny. She finds him smart and witty and entertaining, he spins the night of the line between obnoxious and charming, but before you know it you just love him. She sees why he has all that success, it's not even the nepotism (okay, a little the nepotism) but it’s him.
And she learns him, learns to interpret what he'll do or say or ditch and before she knows it she’s ringing to cancel his appearance at a fundraiser while sitting on the bench in the workshop, watching him design.
It's not love. Natasha does not know such a thing, such a weakness.
Still. It’s close and warm and makes her feel secure and safe — but not safe, exactly. It makes her kind of scared, kind of worried about things she wouldn't normally even think about, like who she really is. Natasha has never had a relationship like this, real human connection
It’s all fun, it's all a laugh with Tony, and Natasha can feel herself being sucked into the ride, into the glee of it all. Party, drinks, work, party, party, party. Like the car rides, with Tony sprawled across the seat, finding champagne and packets of nuts and devouring them, passing half-full wrappers to her and pouring two glasses, and it’s nice to be included, for once, because at the Red Room and everything she's ever been a part of, it's been about fighting for scraps. Not drinking from the faucet of wealth like Tony does.
Even the charity events can be fun.
They always go the same way: Tony sweeps in, Natasha clattering behind him, gripping notes nervously, playing the part. Everyone parts like the red sea for them, only a few brave businessmen attempting to make conversion and network. Tony waves them off, totally uncaring, and makes it to the bar. He takes a scotch and passes her a glass of champagne, even though she never asks for it. He leans against the bar, takes a long look at whatever event this is, then starts whispering jokes and comments and gossip to her for the whole night.
The event is about white guilt and savior complexes, and saving children in Africa— with no specification where in the massive continent.
There is a dinner and a long speech where the hostess calls Tony out hy name, and he raises his glass, nods at her without looking up from his phone.
They ditch soon after that, slide into the backseat of the car happily waiting in. Tony demands they get fast food and Natasha can not be angry.
So they gorge themselves on fat and calories and slightly cardboardy meat, Tony proclaims over and over again the only thing he cares about in this world is good American cheeseburgers. Natasha wants to say wherever these ingredients are from, it's probably not America but Tony is happy, so she doesn't.
She's licking salt off her fingers and finishing her chips, Tony is already done, spaying his finger over his stomach like he’s pregnant, collapsed into the seat like a foldable deck chair.
Natasha smiles, Happy tells some joke that Tony springs to life at, and they drive.
He tangles against her, in the leather interior. It is all dark and warm and happy with Tony laughing and Happy laughing and Natasha laughing. Natasha almost feels at home. No, she decided that if she had a home, this is what it could be like. Then they pull up to the house, bright and beaming white against the sky.
They stagger out of the car, Tony sliding against her, skin on skin, rubbing electricity. He leans against her and they tilt and twist, Tony hollering something obscene into the night air and laughing raucously. Natasha waves back at him, and Happy and the car roll away, crunching over gravel.
Jarvis lets them in easily, and by the time they reach his bedroom Tony has dissolved against her, turning into a doll with dragging feet and a lolling head.
“Come on, Nat," he murmurs, too close to her. There's something new in his eyes.
Her bosses would like it, sure. They’d call it an in. Natasha feels crawly, like she wants to jump out of her skin. “Tony, you've — you've had too much to drink," she insists, pushing him away.
He chuckles to himself and falls back into the bed, the pillows and sheets puffing up around him.
“Go to sleep, Tony," she asks him, weary and tired. She feels all soft and melting around the edges. Natasha wants to protect him, something strange and new and maternal is aching in her chest, in the center. Funny, she thought they cut that out when she became a widow.
“Plenty of assistants do this job just to sleep with me, you know," he tells her, indulgently. He's moved away from seduction to comedy, now, and Natasha is glad.
“Do they really?" Natasha laughs.
“Uh-huh," he hums, rolls over. Then looks back at her, over his shoulder, “What, you never would?”
“Go to sleep, please," Natasha begs him, the champagne making her own head spin too.
“Sure," Tony says, and his head drops down to the pillow. “Sure, Nat.”
—
They're in Malibu, by the pool at some fancy-shmancy spa resort, and Natasha's sitting by the pool, watching Tony swim over her book. She's just pretending to read, too anxious to absorb whatever love triangle is going on The mission isn't progressing fast enough. SHIELD wants more. She needs more.
“Hey, Nat!” she snaps herself back to attention. He peers at her over the pool’s tiled edge.
“Yeah?” she calls, brushing the hair off her forehead.
“Could you get me a drink?”
She laughs, “I'm not a waitress.”
He clicks his tongue, tilts his head, kicks his legs to stay above water. “Come on Nat, don't you love me?”
Natasha laughs and maybe thinks she does, even though she's not exactly sure what kind of love she has for him. She says something smart and funny about paperwork to do and swings her legs over the side of the chair to get up.
“Another mojito, please!” he yells after her, and we both know she's sending one.
She stops at the poolside-bar, leaning across the counter to the employee. “Can I get a mojito for the guy at the pool?” she asks, then looks at him over the rim of her sunglasses, “but cut him off after another three, yeah?”
The waiter nods, eyes glued to Tony Stark, currently doing an underwater hand-stand.
Natasha moves away, hurrying to the room. Tony might get bored, come chasing after her. She only has a few more minutes.
She uses the room key he left behind to get inside and darts to his bag, unzipped and abandoned on the white-linen bed. She digs through carefully, not displacing anything. Her fingers encounter paper at the bottom and she hisses quietly in success. She pulls out confidential weapon blueprints he wasn't meant to remove, a few scribbles of new, experimental guns he’s fiddling with. Dangerous stuff. Tony's a very good inventor, even she knows that. Even a little sketch half-drawn on a napkin would go for millions on the black market. There. That’ll keep Fury off her back for a while.
“Sorry, Tony,” she murmurs to him, below her in the pool, and takes a picture. “Job’s a job, you know.”
—
He's coming back from a bar, she's just picking him up, Happy’s upfront, her workplace appropriate skirt is sliding up her knees and it's a good day. She's got everything down, there's no one enraged at Tony for something he’s done, and he’s drunk and happy and not odd like he sometimes gets.
Happy turns on the radio, they belt out some song Natasha learnt in the Red Room, then he's throwing peanuts at her and they’re caught in traffic. God, it’s warm and it’s loving and Natasha thinks of a little hidey-hole above a Budapest subway station, three days above the warm rumble of the tracks, playing tic-tac-toe with Clint. It wasn't so bad, really, if you ignored what kind of mission they had to accomplish.
She holds up her hands, yelps, “Stop!” through her belts of laughter.
“You're not even trying to catch it!” he yells, and throws another handful at her face, one bouncing off her cheekbone.
“You’re so horrible.”
“Am i?”
She giggles, then realises his voice has lost that joking tone.
“What?” she asks, and pushes the hair out of her face.
He leans back in his seat. The radio continues. Happy stares forward, as if they aren’t even there. Natasha half-glances around, wonders what's changed. Her eyes always lead back to Tony, stern and imposing like one of the faces on Mount Rushmore have been imposed into the backseat of this car. All of a sudden, he seems rather sober, like someone flicked a switch.
"You know, Natalie, we've all done bad things.”
“What do you mean, sir?" She asks, blinking. Natalie’s such an idiot.
"I mean, sometimes choices are made for you, when you're a kid,” he chuckles, “then you grow up, and it becomes your choice, even if you don't really want that." She doesn't know who he's talking about, her or him, but she is waiting all the same. He rearranges himself, moving around his elbows and limbs and sliding his torso closer to her. “It's your fault then," he chuckles again, even if it's an odd thing to be laughing about.
Her eyes focused on the cig in his hand. She doesn't remember him lighting that, but now it’s spit-wet at the filter and ashy at the end. "I thought you were going to quit.”
He pulls it to his mouth first and then back again, looks at the lit end, “I was, then it got too hard."He rearranges himself all over again, folding his legs and arms over each other jumpily. Natasha watches nervously. "I think that's part of it, too. It's too hard to quit doing what you've been doing forever, so you don't.”
Natasha thinks of her sisters, the other widows, and how they had died and died and died, dropping like the flies they were supposed to catch.
The air becomes static, Natasha cannot focus on anything or anyone, her mind is buzzing. She thinks something might be wrong, with her, with the mission. Is she drugged? She thinks back to the charity function they're coming home from. She’d had champagne. Tony had handed it to her, but he’d gotten it right off the waiter. "Are you going to admit it, Ms. Rushmore?" Tony asks, eyes big and dark.
She sucks in a ragged breath. She must keep her cool. She must keep her mission.
“Admit what?" She tries to keep her voice light.
Tony turned his face away, to the window and the dark city outside. passing through LA, driving home to the mansion, and she can hear nothing but the rumble of the blood in her ears, the tires grinding smooth on the tarmac, and her heartbeat in her chest.
A bit of silence passes, then another and another.
Tony sighs, smoke coming out with his breath in a furrowed stream of air and carcinogens.
"Get out," he says, quietly. He leans forward, hunched on himself, and rubs his forehead.
"What?" she blinks with surprise. Happy looks at her through the mirror. She makes eye contact with him, and he flicks them back to the road.
He’s already indicated. Already pulling off to the side of the road.
“What?” she asks again, her brain moving seven steps too slow. She can’t process this right now.
He tuts at her as the car settles at the curb. He reaches out, brushes a curl behind her ear. It’s sweet, and strange. He looks her right in the eyes and says, sweetly, softly, burning, “Думаешь, ты сможешь меня обмануть, птичка?”
She blinks, thrown terribly off-kilter, struggling to process everything. "You speak Russian?" that wasn't in his file.
"I'm a prodigy, Nat, what do you think?” he says, all cocky and smug, then tilts his voice and adds, patronisingly, “by the way, I really was serious about the ‘get out’ thing.”
She stammers. “No, please. Don't do this.”
Tony is almost gentle, “All jobs end, Nat. You should know this.”
“Do you know who I am?" Natasha asks, desperate to know.
He smirks at her, raising his eyebrows, and leaves right into her personal space, mouth hovering near hers, and arm sneaking around her. She feels the heat of the cigarette as it passes her side.
Natasha holds her breath, eyes stuck on his.
Then the latch on the door clicks and pushes open, and a gust of cold air blows through, shattering the false world of warmth and happiness that Natasha had created for herself in the back of the car.
She looks out the door and then back at Tony. He nods, as if to say, go on.
Natasha doesn't know what to do, so she just follows instructions and steps out shakily, like a newborn deer. She grips the side of the car, the wind ripping through her and her little business-casual dress.
Tony's face looms out of the darkness as he leans across his seat, closer to her. “Fury will be notified of your position, Nat.” She just stares at him. “Any last words?” he suggests, with a nightmarish grin. It's only nightmarish because her head is spinning. Tonight, she would have thought it charming.
"I'm sorry your father fucked you up so bad,” Natasha manages to push out past her broken tongue, and it’s not even rough and rude and biting like she wants. It’s just sad and true.
Tony laughs harshly, the sound reserves around her ears, vibrating in all the wrong places. "Natasha, that’s all me." Tony sticks a cigarette back into his mouth, and stares at her as he swings the car door shut.
Natasha is left shaking on the curb, still floating in the dream world Tony created for her with whatever he put in her drink. Oh, she should have seen that coming. Stupid. Stupid. Dumb girl next door naive girl who doesn't think people she can trust can hurt her.
Happy starts the engine with a hot growl that makes Natasha shiver down her spine.
Tony flicks his still-burning cigarette butt out the window and it lands, pathetically, in the gutter.