the rose coloured glasses of life
tony & nat | canon compliant (iron man 2 to endgame)
She recognises the deep, inconsolable sadness in him the first time they meet, even though he holds her at a distance masked by coquetry and levity, and she understands why Fury sent her to keep him alive.
The mission comes first, but on the night of his birthday party, the one that he thinks will be his last, she caves as much as a Black Widow can. They talk about an inconsequential thing, a gold-faced Jaeger. She sits on the arm of his chair and looks down at him, sad eyes and sad mouth and a bruise on his cheekbone, and she foregoes the powder puff and uses her bare fingers instead.
“Can I ask you a question, hypothetically?” he asks. “A bit odd. If this was your last birthday party you were ever gonna have, how would you celebrate it?”
“I’d do whatever I wanted to do with whoever I wanted to do it with,” she says. She almost lingers, a flicker of something terrifyingly sincere in her chest, but she leaves him alone to finish his drink after all.
Are you alright? She wants to ask.
They have comparable body counts both ways, enough blood on their hands and empty beds left in their wake.
So where the wide-eyed innocence and childlike fear comes from when Coulson dies and leaves them to take on an alien army alone, she doesn't know. Everyone has dead people. She does. Tony does. Coulson is just the first of many they'll share.
Tony takes them to shawarma after and the hole-in-the-wall's card machine has been crushed to bits, so he peels all the hundred dollar bills he has from his pocket, pauses when he sees the smashed tip jar, and puts the money in the owner's hand instead. She watches.
"You alright?" she asks when he comes back.
"Of course," he says with a smile, the blood on his face not even dry yet, and she can tell he almost means it.
His name is on the list and her gaze flicks to the Tower on the New York skyline for just a second as she thinks, I'll drag you to hell myself before I let you take him from this world.
She knows Tony visits Steve in the hospital while he's unconscious. She knows Tony tries to pay for her lawyer.
"You alright?" Tony texts her on her way out of the courtroom.
"Why, didn't you feel on top of the world after you told the court to screw off?" she texts back.
"You know what, Romanoff?"
She smiles and calls him a friend after that.
She goes to his party and takes his arm and talks to his best friend and she feels like a person again, until.
This time, he answers before she asks, before they head out into the ruins of this night.
"I'm alright," he says. "Don't look at me like that."
Barnes shows up out of nowhere and things get worse from there.
"You alright?" she asks him after Barnes wipes the floor with the pair of them, and she's looking down at him and there's a bruise on his cheekbone again and he's rubbing at his chest like he's about to have a heart attack, but he glances her way with those big sad eyes and says:
It's two years after that.
He texts sometimes. She texts back. She knows he and Steve talk, too, and she smiles when Steve isn't looking, a secret soft thing.
He's just making sure they're alright.
It's another five years and no one on Earth is okay, but he invites them to stay for lunch and after, she catches his elbow and asks anyway.
"Are you alright?" she asks.
He holds her gaze for a long time and she wonders how much older she looks to him, all these years later.
"Trying to be," he finally says.
There's one last time, before she goes, before he follows.
He kisses his wife and daughter goodbye, packs light and moves into the Compound for a few days and they will cemeteries' worth of dead people back to life, theirs and everyone else's.
"We're alright," he says out of the blue one night, laying on the table next to her with his glasses in one hand and a cushion between his knees to help his back. She blinks the fatigue away and considers the possibility that he's getting too old for this. "This is gonna work out. Everything's gonna turn out the way it's supposed to. Right?"
"Right." She nods and can't tear her gaze from his eyes, the tiredness and the warmth and the crow's feet and the world-saving kindness and she thinks, look how far we've come. "We're alright."
When they go, they're okay with all of it.
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