brushpass | threads

Natasha usually prefers much subtler methods, so the state of the apartment she’s holed up in is a pretty clear testament to her current predicament. It’s a bad neighborhood and the building itself is even worse. The window she broke to get in doesn’t stand out, and the shattered glass is sprinkled across the living room carpet in the dark apartment.

She’s not particularly happy that she had to ask for help, but Peter has always been a decent guy and she can think of worse people to bring in. She’s leaning against the far wall in the dark, and she watches as he climbs in through the broken window. Once he seems to have avoided the minefield of broken glass, she steps away from the wall.

“What’s a fella like you doing in a place like this?” Her voice is full of dry humor. It’s a stark counterpoint to her limping gait, disjointed shoulder, and the blood smeared on her uniform. There’s a beat before she tacks on, “most of it’s not mine.”

Natasha is almost 100% certain that Loki being her drinking buddy is baffling to at least half the people she knows. But it's thanks almost entirely to the fact that she's pretty sure she's figured him out. Or mostly figured him out. He's not inherently evil, he's just inherently an absolute shit.

And she's spent the better part of the last decade wrangling Clint Barton. She knows how to get along with absolute shits.

The only difference this evening is that she has very clear instructions that she will be the one hitting the drink a little harder than strictly necessary. She gives him a dour look as she knocks back a shot of vodka. Her mouth is curled in a half smirk as she sets the glass down.

"When I said you were paying tonight, I meant with your own money."

It had been one hell of a week.

One hell of a month, really. Natasha had hoped that becoming a global fugitive overnight would have been her last trick for a while. But as always, life seemed to have other plans for her. She hadn't thought that she would ever hear from Yelena again. Or that the Red Room was still active and significantly broadened in scope. It sort of had a way of making the global fugitive thing seem inconsequential. The chemical subjugation the new classes of Widows had been put through was unthinkinable. So was the damage that they could do if left unchecked.

And she knew it was, in many ways, her fault. She'd broken the hold Dreykov had on her. She'd escaped. Only now it felt like she'd never truly be free of the Red Room.

There was only one person she could think of that would understand. One place she could go when she and Yelena agreed to split up temporarily to reduce the chances of Dreykov getting his hands on the antidote. Which led her to a run down apartment block in Eastern Europe. Natasha left two deactivated Widow's bites hidden in the stairwell as she made her way up and took the liberty of letting herself into his apartment.

It was tempting to poke around because it the same way it always was, but she resisted the urge. Instead she sat in a chair facing the door and put one foot on the table next to the vials of antidote she'd taken with her. Her eyes closed as she turned over the extremely limited options ahead of her. It wasn't long before she heard steps outside and she opened her eyes as the door swung open. Her mouth curled in a half smile as she met Bucky's eyes. Despite the bravado of it, she was visibly exhausted.

"What's a fella like you doing in a place like this?"

If you could say one thing about Natasha Romanoff in the months after her escape from the Red Room, it was that she absolutely did not discriminate. So sure, maybe she had absolutely decimated a criminal cell in London. Who could blame a girl? They'd been involved in human trafficking. But she'd also picked up the odd job for some shadier figures. An assassinated scientist here, a politician framed for infidelity there. Black Widow assassins were among the most feared in the world for a reason. And now that she was freelance, without the oversight of the Red Room and its machinations, well. Business was good.

So. Her next target: an arms dealer in Eastern Europe. A minor player in the global theater, but he'd been playing both sides of the local conflicts. He had a lot of enemies. And he was about to meet his end. Too bad she'd already rigged his store of weapons to explode. She knew that the person that hired her had been hoping for a free for all raid.

She was waiting on a crowded street, dressed like a tourist as she leaned against the wall out of the flow of foot traffic. A thoughtful frown turned down the corners of her mouth as she stared at her map, as if she were lost. Finally, she turned the corner onto the less busy side street and walked right into her target. "Oh my God, I'm so clumsy, I'm so sorry," she apologized with a laugh as her map unfolded right up over his face. Her feigned American accent was flawless. With a flick of her wrist, her knife slid out of the brace hidden on her forearm underneath the sleeve of her jacket. She caught it in her palm and angled it toward his ribs.

Natasha was sprawled at ease on the couch in his living room, looking for all the world as if she hadn't just interrupted him mid-date. When he emerged from his bedroom, one eyebrow arched as she looked him over, and her mouth curled into a smirk. "Did you take my advice about lying down first?" She had neatened up as much as possible for someone that had crawled in the window unannounced - hair back in a ponytail, shirt tucked in to her jeans, one of his hoodies pulled on over it to hide the bloodstain on the sleeve. "Way better than having to do the shimmy."

It didn't feel like a serious kind of, asking someone out with any kind of expectation of anything. She'd just thrown a suggestion out there and he just took it like he did any other suggestions for things he'd missed out over the course of the twentieth century. He had fully planned on checking out this taco place on his own the next day, but he didn't mind at all that he would have company.

Well, at least, until the nerves kicked in. Maybe it was just getting there a little early and sitting on his own for a bit, and having that time to overthink instead of doing what normal people do and scroll through useless things on their smartphones. Maybe it was the fact that it was quite a popular place, there's a bit of a crowd milling around, the background noise volume is up just loud enough that he could be snuck up on if he didn't check over his shoulder, and he's a little uncomfortable with how many people are standing around so close to him. Or, you know, maybe he's just stupidly stressing himself out over nothing. More likely than not, it was a little bit of everything.

At least they're not meeting at his place. And he doesn't need to explain the state his place is in. Not complete squalor or chaos but it's evident enough that he has been having good days and bad days, despite whatever semblance of having his shit together, living some kind of normal, well-adjusted civilian life than he can convey over text. Lately, there's been a few more bad days than usual. This could be the first time he's gone out for a proper meal in a couple days.

Surely that wouldn't add to any kind of nerves or anything.

(From here.)

[Natasha was punctual - in fact, she was already outside the bar when she texted him, making a mental map of the exits and of who went in and out.

By the time Doyle arrived, she was at the bar and dressed for the part in leather pants and riding boots. When in Rome. With a grin, she tipped her head to indicate the four tequila shots that were waiting on the bar top next to her.]

Have you been here before?

"You know, of all the ways for the world to end, I figure this is only the second or third worst."

The comment is light and bone dry, like maybe she's commenting on how beautiful the weather's been the past three days. Conversation for the sake of conversation. But the list of topics has considerably narrowed over the last - what, five or six weeks? Ever since it all went to hell.

Ever since Ulton won.

At least - at the very least - the team had been able to stop Sokovia from crashing into the earth. But Ulton had a back up plan. Twenty sentry units in a factory on the other side of the world, working around the clock to get new units up and running while the Avengers were busy in Eastern Europe. They'd been completely blindsided. The only thing they could do was scatter in teams of two and go radio silent, hoping that at least one team would survive. Maybe find a way to stop Ultron. It was a big maybe. But it was better than nothing.

Which brings them to the sad little cave they've been holed up in, waiting for some semblance of cloud cover to come back so they can continue their trek north. It's literally never this nice in Eastern Europe. It would be funny if it wasn't starting to get so annoying. Natasha's head tips to the side a little as she looks over at Steve with a half smile. "I think the first is - "

He sentence clips off abruptly when she hears the familiar sound of one of the Ultron sentries moving through the sky above. They have the patrols timing down to a matter of twenty seconds now. But more importantly - they know exactly how long it takes for the sentries to upload information back to their mainframe. Thirty seconds.

She gestures for Steve to go first, and then holds her hands up to indicate she wants to use the shield as a spring board. There will be at least two sentries. If he can get her up there to start taking out the first one, it'll call out the second so he can throw the shield at it.

Maybe. Maybe today's the day their luck runs out. But they're both determined. And she'll be damned if she gets taken out by a robot before she makes it to Siberia.

"Do you think we're getting too old for this?"

The question is delivered thoughtfully, as if she's a patron of the arts, weary in her search for the latest ingenue. Which is maybe the exact opposite of the truth, considering she is in fact a career spy sitting in the back booth of what might be the shadiest bar she's ever seen. It's shady enough that she's starting to wonder if they inadvertently wandered into one of the dens used by the Russian mob.

Which would track, given a) her luck b) Sharon's luck and c) the fact that they're still somewhere in Romania waiting for extraction after a very long, very tedious mission.

Still, they're here now, and the best way to blend in at a shitty bar is to act like a shitty person. Natasha slinks down in her seat and props her feet up next to Sharon on the bench she's sitting on. Her brow arches pointedly as she takes a swig of her beer, which - now that she's looking at it - is labeled Michelov Ultra.

Oh yeah. They're definitely in for a fun night.

"If you say yes I'm telling everyone you beat someone up with a cardboard cutout of David Hasselhoff."

One day, the universe is going to stop throwing Natasha curve balls. But it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

Even though she has what she likes to think of as a world class poker face, it takes every ounce of her training to keep her expression neutral when she realized that the Winter Soldier is not only James - her James - but also Steve's best friend that he lost in the war. It's an awfully small world.

After settling their score with SHIELD and HYDRA, Natasha had shared some of their history with Steve. Some of it. She could tell he was hungry for more, but not all of it was her story to tell. He deserves the opportunity to share what he wants of the bad parts. But she can at least tell Steve that there were times that they were both improbably happy, together in the Red Room.

So she spends a few weeks shaking off her existential crisis now that her whole history is available for free on the internet, and then sets off to find him. Steve and Sam are doing a decent job, but Natasha works differently than they do. And it's not long before she picks up his trail. Even if she doesn't make contact right away, preferring to study the impressions he's leaving on the world from a distance. It's not that she's delaying, exactly. Except for the fact that she is.

Because she's still mad at him. Not for shooting her in Odessa, or in DC, but for the way he'd sacrificed himself in the Red Room so she could leave. She never wanted that from him. But she has the life she has now because of that sacrifice, and it's not until she convinces herself that he deserves to know that he did some good while he was in the Red Room that she makes her move.

She lets herself into his - well, really sad little apartment - while he's out on an errand. She puts a bag of fries down on the table and then reclines in the rickety chair like it's an armchair, leaning back with her feet up on the table. When she hears him in the door, she holds her hands up so he can see her palms, though she doesn't move out of that relaxed position. Considering how well armed she is, it's the least insulting way she can think of to say 'I'm clearly not here to hurt you.'

"Hey there. Thought you could use something to eat that didn't smell like cabbage."

(From here.)

I think the appreciation of implicit threat might technically still fall under the umbrella of masochism.

[Technically. There's a certain inevitability of injury in their line of work, but he does tend to end up hurt more often than she'd care to see. She moves her hand to idly trace her fingers along a scar on his shoulder. She gives him a guileless look.]

You mean other than break into your apartment and make myself at home?

[A pause, before she admits:]

Again.

[Because it's not the first time. And it certainly won't be the last.]

(cont. from here)

Oh yeah?

[A moment later, he gets a selfie of her slumped on her couch wearing sunglasses and an oversized sweatshirt with the hood pulled over her head.]

I'm thinking of calling it 'how not to blend in in a crowd.'

There are many words to describe the multiverse. Some of the facets reflect each other, with only subtle differences - a coin flip that causes a new branch to unfurl through the darkness. Some are as different as night and day.

In one universe, Natasha Romanoff is a vampire.

In another, she's one of the few people left to fight against an endless wave of the walking dead.

In many, she leaps off the cliff on Vormir while someone she loves yells from above. Clint. Yelena. Bucky.

And in others, they grab her grappling line before she thinks of it and jump first.

This Natasha returns from Vormir with a red stone clutched in her hand and an ache in her jaw that's easier to tend to than the ache in her chest. They fight Thanos. They win. And life...goes on. Sort of. Fury used to tell people that she's comfortable with everything, and she doesn't like that she's finally found the thing she doesn't know how to bounce back from. So she retires.

And it doesn't suit her, exactly, because sure - they did it. They brought back the world. But there's still a hole where her world should be. She finds a way to live around it. And she keeps taking missions (because of course she does). She's tailing an undercover Skrull when the world fractures around her, cracks of light opening up to another sky and her mind is working a hundred miles a minute to try to figure out what the hell is happening and -

That's definitely a weird little bald dude watching her through the crack, reaching for her and -

She's falling again. For just a second, she wonders if she's back on Vormir, and then the world rights itself and she lands in an ungainly pile on the ground.

There's a beat of silence and then she takes a deep, shuddering breath as she lifts her head and looks directly at Bucky. There's no disguising the absolute surprise and confusion in her expression.

(cont. from here!)

[It's hard to picture herself in that setting, and she was there. There's days it feels like a peculiar dream. Other times she thinks she could reach out and brush her fingers over the fabric of the curtains in the living room. The side effect of those long years in the Red Room means that many parts of her life have the same feeling. Real but not real all at the same time.

Her eyes catch those little stifled movements, and she takes another quick glance at him. Like he's trying to hold something in - clamping down on it so hard it squirms between his fingers. She understands the urge. And moreover, she thinks she gets where it comes from. Her hands fall still for a moment as she listens to him, still holding the underside of his arm as he grinds up the words.] Just tell me when.

[And though it's a rare crack in her easy composure, she hesitates before she continues. What she's saying is a lot. And she knows it's a lot. But she has to be honest.] I think I should say there are things I do miss about the Red Room. I'm grateful in a way for the skills that I have, and that I can use them to do some good in the world. And there's times I miss not being accountable for what I do. But I know I don't want my life to be like that. [Accountability hurts, but it's the part that's real. Just real. And that's what's important.

She lowers her head again to resume her work, carefully manipulating the slime around so she can keep pulling it off.] If there's something you want to tell me, I'll listen. It doesn't have to be now. Just wanted to make sure you knew.

(cont. from here!)

I'll have you know there's nothing unkempt about a handlebar mustache.
You might even argue that it's more dignified than a party hat.
I should be back home by then. I want to pick up food.

(cont. from here)

[Every plan she makes comes with that unspoken unless. There's an endless number of things that might come up. It makes it hard for her to be in the lives of normal people. Lucky, then, that most of the people in her life aren't normal. Except for her crotchety old neighbor that is by turns suspicious of Natasha and concerned for her well being.

Which, honestly, is a pretty fair assessment on a day to day basis.

Her brow quirks at his question, and she finally draws the lines between the different items he's requested. She lets out a quiet chuckle.] We're not going to shock your landlord. Unless he pulls a gun on you. [She straightens up, ambling towards him with a thoughtful expression on her face. Finally, she gives him a grin.]

Let's start slow. He's a landlord, so the place that will hurt the most for you to hit him is in his wallet. I'll introduce myself as your lawyer. You glower. Maybe break something. [One shoulder lifts in an easy shrug.] We'll escalate from there if we need to. Maybe I can get him to forgive your rent for a few months. [It's a little left from the center of menacing, but she's confident in her assessment. People don't get into landlording because they don't want to rake in money hand over fist. Typically by any means necessary.

Something that she knows more than a little bit about.]

(from here)

That's the spirit.
I don't have tequila shots in me tonight, but I'll come grab a beer and encourage you in taking shots.

Natasha remembers falling.

Oddly enough, there's no fear associated with the memory. It's almost like flying. She knows with bone deep certainty that she's doing the right thing. Clint has three kids. A wife. She can't go back to Earth with a stone clutched in her hand and an empty heart. So she just pushes off that cliff face and lets go. The team will bring everyone back. Clint will find Yelena. Everyone's going to be fine.

(Except her.

But that's okay. She's never expected her story to end with happily ever after.)

Instead it ends with a flash of pain, and the bolt of a flat world washed in red (is it blood? it's always blood) and the distant sounds of a language she can't understand and -

The world inverts around her.

The sky is red and flat and it goes on forever and below her is a dark swirl of stars and she doesn't even have enough time to process what the hell is happening before she crash lands into an alley.

There's a long pause. A rat scurries underneath the dumpster shoved haphazardly against the wall.

"Okay. That hurt."

From there on out, pretty much nothing makes sense. She's in New York, but she's supposed to be dead. She has no bank account. No apartment. Nothing to her name but some scattered memorials and a shattered network that she at least is able to tap for a few hundred dollars and a shitty hotel room in the Bronx. She just missed Christmas in the city and everywhere she goes she can see people gearing themselves up for the next holiday at the end of the weekend. And she can't walk more than five minutes without overhearing some snippet about Hawkeye and Fisk. She finds a TikTok of Yelena rappelling down the side of a building set to Chandelier.

Which makes her next step pretty obvious.

It takes a couple of days for her to pin down Yelena's movements, to find a place she can intercept her that won't end with Yelena trying to kill her before she can tell her what happened. It's been years. She's been dead. (She is dead? Existentially speaking, she's not sure how mentally sound she's feeling these days.) It's going to be a weird reunion.

It's technically the 31st. But it's late enough at night that you could get away with calling it early in the morning. One of those rare hours that New York is almost quiet. Natasha picks up Yelena's trail somewhere in Manhattan and from a block behind her, she lets out that whistle, the one thing they can carry with them from the only good part of their childhood.

The week following New Year's Eve goes by surprisingly fast. Natasha secures their spot at the supper club for Saturday, bringing the evening up to a total of 25 attendees. There seems to be some trouble brewing in DC, and she's on hold, thinking that she might have to cancel so she can fly down there to literally kick someone's ass when Fury tells her that the situation is "resolved." The information is so sparse that she has little doubt that a second shit show will be happening by the end of the month.

But that's a problem for later.

Saturday rolls around along with the email that tells her they'll be spending the evening in Manhattan. Natasha dresses in a pair of leather pants with a silky emerald green wrap top and the dressiest ankle boots she has that she can still walk in. She's just finishing up her lipstick when she hears a knock at the door, and her phone buzzes at the same time.

It's only a few moments later when she pulls the door open for Bucky with a smile. "Look at you picking me up at my door. Come in for a second, I just got the notification for where we're going." She steps back so he can enter the front hall of her little two floor townhouse apartment, eyes down on her screen so she can skim the notification. Her smile widens. "Looks like we're going to the Hall des Lumières. Have you heard of it?"

(from here!)

They're pretty independent. But they still like having company.

[Don't worry, Barnes. She has cat sitter recommendations thanks to her own stray-that's-not-really-a-stray.]

Thankfully. There was no back up plan.
We get along well. I call her Liho.

[Yes, as in the embodiment of misfortune in Slavic mythology. She thinks she's hilarious.]

(from here!)

Oh, yeah. That's Smirnoff, of course it's trash.
I kind of get the nail polish remover thing now.
Though Smirnoff has less alcohol content.

(from here!)

Good thing you're the only person I'd let get away with that.

(Continued from here!)

Because the temptation to hit them with poison darts is too high?
I could replace them with ones that will just make them nap for five minutes.

[Probably she shouldn't encourage this.

Oh well.]

So confident. Especially considering she'll be on the lookout the second she sees a cane in your hands.

[Don't pretend like you're not just going to give him the mead anyway, Natasha.]

(Continued from here!)

Clint says "bonus points for pizza."
See, we were just convinced that the moonshine, arrows, and blindfolds would make it less appealing.
Should've known better.

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