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we need to bring back old school tumblr communication and im so serious. sending an ask to a mutual just to say hello. seeing three different asks in your inbox all asking how your dentist appointment went. seeing a post you think one of your mutuals would enjoy and tagging them/sending it to them in the dms. nowadays its just silently liking a post or (if youre feeling extreme) replying under posts. WHAT HAPPENED TO US!! we used to be a proper community!!!! #LetsBringWhimsyBack
summary: baran thinks you’re just a huge flirt, but when you make another appearance in the ED and she gets to know a little more about you, she realizes maybe first impressions aren’t everything.
word count: 2.3k
tags: SUPER medically inaccurate; mcsteamy reader; female reader; mentions of overdose, vomit and blood (patient related); slowwwww burn; baran has a crush; you’re a flirt; cassie and yolanda make appearances
sequel to impressive first impressions
Baran could not stop thinking about you.
Ever since you’d showed up in the ED a couple weeks up, stitching up your own face, Baran found her thoughts constantly drifting to you. Your casual, flirtatious nature paired with competence and the obvious respect you garnered intrigued her. The more Baran thought about you, the more you became like a puzzle she was determined to solve.
When she had brought you up to Dana, the charge nurse simply waived her off. Thinking Baran had had a problem with your flirting, Dana told her, “Don’t worry about her. She’s a lover girl stuck on a surgeon’s schedule.”
Baran had asked a couple other people what they knew about you—subtly, of course—and the message was generally the same: you were a flirt, but a damn good doctor. She only wished you stopped by the ED more often so she could decide for herself.
As if you had heard her thoughts, your voice rang out, coming from the ambulance bay. “What’s open? I need a room prepped for a trach!”
“Trauma 2!” Someone yelled back, but Baran was focused on you, your crazed eyes and the way your entire front was splattered with blood.
Rushing over to walk alongside the moving gurney, already snapping on a pair of gloves, Baran called over McKay to assist.
“What do we have?” she asked as you entered the trauma room.
“Oxy overdose. Emesis and aspiration blocked the airway, so I went emergency circ,” you explained, barely giving her a second glance before turning to the paramedics. “On my count.”
As you transferred the man onto the trauma table, you started giving out orders, so naturally, Baran would have thought you were the trauma attending on call, not her.
“Somebody get Garcia in here,” you barked out to anybody who was listening as you readied yourself for a tracheostomy, putting on a gown, glasses, and gloves.
“Dr. Al-Hashimi.” Your urgent voice brought her out of her momentary shock from your commanding presence. “Lend a hand?”
As if like a switch, your tone changed from stern to flirtatious, and she wondered if this was how you always were. She ignored the slight coil in her stomach at the sight of the smirk pulling on your lips and stepped up to the table.
“So, you come here often?” Baran asked, trying to match your teasing tone, as she watched you carefully remove the emergency tube.
You laughed, looking up at briefly and wiggling your eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I would actually,” Baran responded very matter-of-factly as she raised a challenging brow, her mouth forming a smirk of her own.
McKay snickered, causing you to glare at her.
“You ever do an emergency cric, Cass?” You put your friend on the spot, causing her to shake her head. “I’ll teach you,” you said slyly before looking back at Baran and winking. “You gotta be able to handle anything when you’re on street team.”
Baran’s eyes narrowed at this new piece of information about you. She’d thought learning more about you would help clear things up for her, but if anything, this only further confused her. Why would a plastic surgeon spend her off-time doing street team?
“Wow, you look like shit,” Garcia snarked, as she pushed open the door, hands already gloved and ready.
“All for you, Yoyo,” you replied smoothly with a flash of your signature smirk, earning an eye roll from the other surgeon.
Baran did her best to ignore the twisting feeling in her stomach as she watched the exchange between you two. You really were like this with everyone. Maybe your reputation did precede you.
“What’d I miss?” Yolanda walked over to stand by the patient’s head.
“Emergency cric conversion to trach,” you explained before asking Princess for a ten blade.
“First a slach trach and now this?” Garcia shook her head, clearly annoyed.
You looked up, your curiosity piqued. “Slash trach? Someone did a slash trach?”
Instead of responding, Yolanda transferred her stare from you to Al-Hashimi, causing you to do the same.
“You did a slash trach?”
Baran’s expression instinctively became defensive, which told you all you needed to know, and you let out a low whistle.
“Impressive.”
The warm hum of your voice caused Baran’s cheeks to warm, and she mentally chided herself. She was a middle-aged divorcée with a son, and here she was acting like a middle schooler with a crush.
“Dr. Mckay?” Your switched back into surgeon-in-charge mode as you addressed the resident. “Would you like to do the honors? I’ll talk you through it.”
“You never stop, do you,” Cassie quipped under her breath, picking up on your teasing suggestiveness that seemed never quite absent from anything you said.
You handed her the tube and moved to stand next to Yolanda.
“I’ve already created the window at the third and fourth tracheal rings,” you told McKay. “Now what?”
Cassie looked up at Baran, her attending, who nodded, giving the go-ahead.
“Insert the tube from a lateral position and twist in,” Cassie answered. You raised your eyebrow, prompting her to continue. “Once in position, inflate the cuff and insert the inner tube.”
“Good.”
As you observed the resident insert the tube, Yolanda leaned towards you, muttering in your ear, “I thought you hated the ED.”
“Street team,” you answered her unspoken question. Yolanda gave you a once over, and finally noticed you weren’t dressed in your usual scrubs.
“Missing your MSF days?”
This caught Baran’s attention, and she looked up from the patient and over to you. “You were with Médecins Sans Frontières?”
Everything she learned about you just continued to confuse her even more. Why would a plastic surgeon do a stint with MSF?
Tilting your head slightly, you met her gaze with a soft smile. “I spent some time with them in Yemen,” you replied curtly.
Baran could tell this wasn’t a topic you enjoyed discussing, and based on what she knew about the hospital airstrikes in Yemen, she could understand why.
“Tube’s in place, cuff’s inflated, and airway is sealed,” Cassie declared, bringing you back to the moment.
“Good work, Dr. McKay.” You nodded shortly, your words tired.
Yolanda noticed your shift in demeanor, and she could tell you were crashing. There was a reason you chose plastics over trauma.
“I got it from here.” She squeezed your elbow lightly as she motioned for transfer. “Go clean yourself off, Carrie.”
You took a deep breath and ripped off the gown. Following Yolanda as she escorted the patient out of the trauma room, you peeled off the latex gloves and threw them in the trash. Your hands were still caked in blood from your emergency procedure earlier, and you realized they were starting to shake.
Catching your faint reflection in the glass of the trauma bay, you saw your face was splattered with the man’s blood and your shirt was completely stained. As your mind caught up with what just transpired, you felt your anxiety start to crawl in your gut.
You rushed over to the nurses’ station and found the nearest trashcan before emptying your insides. The sight of your bloodied hands gripping the rim of the bin made you even more nauseous. Shakily, you pushed yourself off the ground and tried to ignore the stares, some of worry and some of disgust.
“I’m fine,” you announced to no one in particular, but you could see Dana’s motherly concern watching you, and you could feel a certain pair of brown eyes following you.
“I’m fine,” you repeated to yourself. Weaving through the ED, you were in a daze, your only focus being on getting this blood off of you, and didn’t hear Cassie calling your name.
Before the resident could chase after you, someone calling her name pulled her in a different direction. “Dr. McKay–” Perlah approached the station with a tablet in her hand– “x-rays are back on your CP patient in thirteen, and the mom is asking for you.”
Cassie sighed and took the tablet, sparing a glance back in the direction of where you had retreated, an imperceptible action that Baran had noticed.
“I’ll go check on her.” The attending gave the other woman a small, reassuring smile.
“Thanks.” Cassie nodded as she walked away.
When Baran pushed open the bathroom door, the last thing she expected to see was you without your shirt on using the article of clothing as a cleaning rag, but alas there you were. For a moment, she could only stare, letting her eyes linger on the way your back muscles flexed with each movement and on the few patches of scar tissue that contrasted against your smooth skin. Baran couldn’t help but wonder what your skin would feel like under her fingertips.
“You know, if you wanted to see me naked you could’ve just asked,” you joked weakly as you met her stare in the mirror.
“You’re not naked,” Baran deadpanned, causing you to smirk lazily.
“Maybe next time then.”
Taking a couple steps forward, Baran leaned against the sink next to you, the cool tile digging into the small of her back. She didn’t say anything, though, simply observing you.
“What?” you chuckled nervously, suddenly feeling very exposed under her watchful eyes.
Noticing the goosebumps that started to decorate your skin, Baran tilted her head. She had only met you once before today, but she couldn’t imagine you were one to shrink easily. Yet, she had to admit she liked seeing you squirm.
Deciding to put you out of your misery, she finally asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” you answered reflexively. Both of you knew that was a lie, but neither of you said anything. “I just need to get cleaned off. I’m actually need upstairs in—” glancing down at your watch, you sighed and ran your hands over your face– “ten minutes ago.”
“You sure you want to work after that?” Baran frowned, and you smiled softly at her concern.
“I just have a cleft palate and a free flap reconstruction on my plate today. Then on-call for the evening,” you said flippantly, causing the other woman to scoff.
“You say that as if both those operations aren’t multiple hours long.”
“I’ve had worse.” You shrugged, and after all that Baran had learned about you in the last hour, she believed you.
“Uh—” you held up your blood-soaked t-shirt awkwardly— “thanks for, um, checking up on me.”
Baran didn’t need to know you well to see how uncharacteristic your stuttering was, and she bit back a grin. As you moved towards the door, she realized you were still clad in only your sports bra.
“Wait.” Her voice echoed lightly against the empty stalls as she slipped off her jacket.
“Woah,” you laughed, turning on your heels. “At least buy me a drink first.”
Baran merely rolled her eyes. You were relentless.
“As much as I’m sure many people would appreciate the view, I’m not sure HR would want you walking around the hospital without a shirt.” She held out the jacket, which you accepted with a raised brow.
“Are you included in these ‘many people’?” You lowered your voice as you put on the jacket, zipping it up in one motion.
Ducking to hide the tint on her cheeks, Baran shook her head. “You wish,” she muttered.
You let out a noncommittal sound before tugging at the sleeves of the jacket.
“Thanks,” you said, your voice returning to a gentler tone.
“You’re welcome.” Baran saw her opportunity and pushed herself off the sink. “Though, I think you looked better without it.”
Your eyes widened, visibly taken-aback by her forwardness. With a satisfied smile, Baran slid past you and exited the bathroom, leaving you to swallow a taste of your own medicine.
The sound of the door closing behind her shook you out of your momentary stupor. Taking a deep breath, you were immediately enveloped by the smell of the faint perfume that clung to Baran’s jacket.
There was something about the scent that exuded a quiet boldness, a scent so undeniably her, and you couldn’t get enough.
I love that the modern-day tumblr post equivalent of chain emails only requires me to reblog a relatively pleasant image instead of forward an email to a bunch of my friends and family members to quell my raging anxiety.
Warnings: 18+! MINORS DNI! Age gap (N=31, r=24), gore, allusion to sex, intimacy, slight choking
Word count: 15,1k
A/N: Thank you so, so, so much for all the support, I honestly didn’t expect this at all 🖤 The next part is definitely going to start…interesting 👀 oops
Part 1
Morning came like a summons and definitely not in any way that reminded the team of home.
There was no hum of machinery waking beneath them, no distant elevators, no coffee, no city traffic blending into a recognizable human rhythm. This place woke with bells and horns and the muffled thunder of life moving through stone. Somewhere deep below the guest wing, doors opened, boots crossed ancient floors, voices rose and vanished again like smoke caught in the throat of the castle, even the air felt different here.
By the time Natasha stepped into the common chamber, the others were already gathering there one by one and for a moment she simply stood in the doorway and took it in. The room was full of tension disguised as preparation.
Bruce looked like a man who had spent the night trying to prepare himself for a fairy tale and had failed completely. He had been given formal robes in black and bronze. He was checking them for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, tugging lightly at the sleeves, smoothing the front, staring down at the embroidery as though he half expected the fabric to reject him at any moment for not belonging on the body of a scientist.
Bruce glanced up. “Do I look ridiculous?”
“You look like an academic who got trapped in a historical epic.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“No, but it is accurate.”
Bruce exhaled through his nose and looked down at himself again anyway. Then the chamber changed when T’Challa stepped out. The room quieted without anyone meaning for it to. He was not wearing an armor, that was what Natasha noticed first. The garments he wore were dark and severe in the way only true luxury could be, black layered with subtle silver patterning that only revealed itself when he moved. He looked as if he had chosen every thread with care because he knew exactly what sort of room he was about to walk into. Shuri emerged after him and if T’Challa looked like kingship forged into elegance, she looked like intelligence dressed for battle.
Natasha should have been thinking about the audience ahead. About the king and queen, about whatever bargain the team would try to strike. About the dragon that had escorted them across the sky or Vision and the clock ticking down invisibly toward catastrophe. Instead, as she crossed to the long bronze mirror and reached for the comb laid there beside folded cloth, her mind betrayed her completely.
It went back to the tavern. Natasha had spent years mastering the art of leaving a night behind her when dawn came. She had survived by it, face blurred and touches became memory and memory became function. But this woman had stayed. Not just the sex, though God knew that alone would have been enough to haunt a weaker woman. It was the way she had looked at Natasha and the way she had seemed amused by the world rather than impressed by it.
Natasha had woken with the taste of her still half remembered and the absurd, dangerous thought already settled in the back of her mind: I’m going back tonight. She had already accepted it. If the day went badly, if the court was unbearable, if the weight of prophecy and dragons and kingdoms pressed too hard against her nerves, then maybe that evening she would find her way back through the streets, through the lantern light and back into that tavern.
Shuri appeared beside her before Natasha realized she had entered the bathing chamber. “Good morning.”
Natasha met her eyes in the mirror. “Good morning.”
“How was your..walk?”
Natasha almost smiled. “My walk.”
“Yes.”
Natasha picked up the comb. “Surprisingly scenic.”
Shuri folded her arms. “Mm.”
Natasha saw the question there, but also the restraint. Shuri was curious, absolutely. Natasha had disappeared into an unfamiliar city and returned well after dark with a look on her face that probably counted as incriminating in seven languages. But Shuri was also too intelligent to push Natasha Romanoff where Natasha had not invited her.
“Did you survive?” Shuri asked.
“Barely.”
That won the smallest twitch of amusement. “So it was a productive walk.”
Natasha laughed under her breath and started gathering her hair. The red spilled through her fingers and began dividing it automatically, sectioning it into a braid out of habit, out of practicality, out of years spent favoring function over softness. Then Shuri moved fast enough to catch her wrist before the braid had even begun.
“No.”
Natasha turned her head. “No?”
“You cannot wear it like that.”
Natasha looked at the loose sections of hair in her hand, then back at Shuri. “Again with my hair.”
Shuri did not smile this time. “I am serious.”
“So am I.” Natasha gave the mirror a meaningful glance. “It’s hair.”
“You cannot enter their throne room wearing braids like that.”
Natasha turned from the mirror then “Why this time?”
Shuri folded her arms. “Because here, hair is not just hair.”
“Enlighten me.”
For a moment, Shuri only looked at her, as though deciding how much explanation someone from Natasha’s world would need before she understood that this was not some court fashion rule meant to inconvenience foreigners.
“When their people were still at war..” Shuri said at last, “before walls like these, before treaties, before the throne became what it is now, men and women rode into battle with their hair loose.”
Natasha said nothing and Shuri continued. “Loose hair meant you had not yet earned the right to bind it. It meant you were untested and unproven. Still carrying the face the world gave you, not yet the one you had forged for yourself.” Natasha’s eyes stayed on hers now.
“The first braids..” Shuri said, “were not made for beauty. They were made after battle. A warrior who returned victorious had their hair bound by witness. Not by themselves but by witness. A comrade, a commander, a parent, a ruler. Someone who had seen what was done and could say: yes, this blood is earned, this triumph is real, this person came back changed.”
The fire cracked behind them and Natasha looked at the comb in her hand. “So every braid means something.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of something?”
Shuri’s gaze moved to Natasha’s hair again. “That depends on the braid. Some mark the first kill in open war. Some mark command over men. Some mark a siege survived, a banner taken, a rival house broken, a city defended, an heir born during wartime, a duel won before witnesses, an oath completed. There are mourning braids. “And there are braids no one wears lightly because once seen, they cannot be unseen.”
Natasha gave a small, skeptical exhale, “You’re telling me a hairstyle can be a declaration of war.”
“In this kingdom?” Shuri said. “Yes.”
The answer came without hesitation. Natasha studied her for a long moment, then looked back toward the mirror. Her red hair was still sectioned in her hands, halfway to becoming something it was no longer allowed to become. “I’ve fought wars too.”
Shuri didn’t answer at once. Natasha’s voice stayed even, but there was iron under it now. “I’ve been fighting since I was a child. I’ve killed people, more than I could name. I’ve survived places that were designed to break girls into weapons and call it patriotism.” Her eyes flicked to Shuri’s reflection, “So if this is about earning something, don’t mistake me for soft.”
Shuri’s face changed then “I do not.” She took a step closer. “I know what you are.”
That could have sounded cruel in another voice but in Shuri’s, it did not. It sounded like recognition. “I know you have survived war, Natasha. I know you have made yourself into someone lethal because the world first tried to make you into something less. I know that”
Natasha’s fingers tightened slightly around the comb. “But it is different here.” Shuri said and Natasha’s jaw shifted once. “Different how?”
Shuri’s eyes did not leave hers. “Because where you come from, war is hidden. It is buried in files, denied by governments and given polite language so that men in offices can sleep after sending children to kill each other. Your victories disappear into classified reports and sealed orders and medals pinned in private where no one dares ask what they cost. Here war is witnessed.”
Her gaze dropped to the unfinished sections of hair in Natasha’s hand. “It is worn.”
Natasha looked down too and Shuri stepped nearer again, “If you walk into that room with warrior braids, the soldiers will read them before they read your face. The court will read them before it hears your name. They will look at the pattern and ask themselves what right you claim and who bound it for you.” Her voice lowered. “And if the answer is nothing they recognize, then you will not look strong. You will look false.”
For a long moment neither of them spoke. “I did earn mine.”
Shuri softened enough to be seen. “I believe you, but not here, Natasha..” Shuri said and Natasha let out a breath through her nose and slowly lowered her hands. “All right.” she said at last and Shuri watched her carefully. “All right?”
“I’m not here to insult a throne room before I even enter it.”
A small flicker of relief passed over Shuri’s face. “That is wise.”
She looked at her loose hair, at the flame bright strands now left unbound down her back. “So what does loose hair mean?”
“That depends who is wearing it.”
Natasha glanced sideways at her. “On a child? It means they have not yet been blooded. On a court woman, it can mean mourning, or protest, or freedom from oath. On a foreign guest…” Her eyes flicked once to the red. “It means you are wise enough not to claim what has not been given.”
“And on a warrior who’s tired of being told what she is?”
Shuri’s mouth curved, “In this castle? It means she should survive the morning first.” Natasha snorted softly and Shuri stepped back toward the door, then paused. “One more thing.”
Natasha looked up. “When you enter the throne room watch the soldiers’ hair.”
“Why?”
“Because then you will understand I was not exaggerating.” And with that she left Natasha alone again with the mirror and by the time Natasha stepped back into the common chamber, her hair loose over her shoulders and the last edge of annoyance smoothed into composure, Lord Vaelar was already there. He stood near the center of the room with his hands folded behind his back, as still and upright as one of the carved pillars in the halls below. “Their Graces will receive you now.”
The walk to the throne room felt intentional in the way all royal things did here. The further they went, the less it felt like they were moving through a residence and the more it felt like they were being drawn inward through the body of an old and sleeping beast. The stone beneath their boots changed from pale polished flooring to darker slabs worn smooth by centuries of use. Tall iron braziers burned at measured intervals along the walls, their flames breathing gold and red into the dimness.
Natasha moved with the others, her face calm, but inside, she was split in two. Part of her was alert in the old familiar way, counting doorways, noting guard positions, measuring lines of approach and retreat, studying the people they passed. The other part of her was still in the tavern. Still caught on the memory of a low laugh and storm colored eyes. Still thinking, absurdly, stupidly, traitorously, of the woman from the night before. Even now, with every step taking her toward a royal audience in a hidden kingdom guarded by dragons, some reckless pulse inside her still wondered whether she might see her again. Not here, perhaps and not this morning, but maybe later.. Maybe if the day ended without disaster-
Lord Vaelar stopped and the others halted behind him. Ahead of them stood the doors and they were enormous, towering high into the stone arch above them, fashioned from black wood banded in iron darkened nearly to the color of blood. Two royal guards stood to either side and Natasha saw at once what Shuri had meant.
Both men wore it braided back from the face in intricate rows and cords with bronze rings held sections in place with bone and black metal had been worked into some of the braids closer to the nape. The patterns were not random, even Natasha, who did not yet know how to read them, could see that and once she looked, she saw it everywhere. In the line of guards farther down the hall. In the warriors stationed at the crossing behind them. In the severe set of the men who stood at the gates with spears in hand and old scars cutting through brow and cheek and jaw.
Lord Vaelar turned. “The court is assembled.” he said. “Stand where you are placed and speak only when addressed.”
His gaze moved over them all, lingering for half a breath on Tony, then Wanda, then Bruce as if he had already measured who among them was most likely to let nerves become noise. Then he faced the gates again and the guards struck the butts of their spears against the stone. The sound boomed outward and seemed to travel through the walls as if the castle itself had answered.
Then the gates began to open and the throne room revealed itself and for one breathless, staggering moment, the team forgot everything else. It was vast in the way mountains were vast, in the way cathedrals were vast, in the way things built by people who intended to outlive memory were vast. The walls rose impossibly high, black stone cut into towering planes and columns that climbed into shadow so deep the ceiling vanished above them. Fire burned everywhere in braziers taller than a man.
Around it, the room was packed. At the outer edges stood the ordinary people of the kingdom, gathered shoulder to shoulder behind low carved barriers and between the pillars. Mothers held children close, hands firm on little shoulders or over small mouths when excitement threatened sound. Old men leaned on staffs and young boys stared with huge unblinking eyes. Girls in dark dresses craned forward until older sisters or grandmothers drew them back again.
And at the front..soldiers. Rows upon rows of them lined the approach to the throne, massive men and women in dark armor and red black cloaks, each holding a spear upright in one hand. They looked rough in a way no polished ceremonial guard ever managed. Most wore their hair braided back in patterns more complex than those at the door, with iron rings, bone pieces, strips of dark leather and clasped lengths of metal woven in among them. Natasha saw what Shuri had meant then with full force.
No braid here was casual. Every one of them looked like a story she could not read and did not need translated to understand was paid for in blood. These were not men wearing style..these were men wearing proof.
The soldiers did not look at the guests, they looked toward one single point at the far end of the room. And there, at the end of the massive aisle upon a broad black dais, sat the king and queen. For the first time, the team saw them and understood at once why no one in this kingdom spoke lightly inside these walls.
The king sat straight backed and broad shouldered, his presence striking even from this distance. A circlet of dark metal rested against his brow and his face was older than T’Challa’s, sterner, the bones of it sharpened by rule and battle and years of being obeyed. The queen beside him was stunning in a way that made beauty feel dangerous. Her white hair had been drawn back from her face and crowned in dark bronze set with stones that burned red in the firelight. She looked at the room not like someone receiving subjects, but like someone measuring the worth of everything she saw.
Lord Vaelar led them down the aisle. Natasha could feel eyes on them from all sides, but no one spoke, no one whispered, no cloth rustled loudly enough to break the spell of the room. When they reached the foot of the dais, Lord Vaelar stepped ahead of them and turned.
Then his voice changed and it became larger, trained for distance, for ritual, for names that had to land correctly or not at all. He announced T’Challa first in full, with titles that rolled across the chamber in measured force. Then Shuri, then each of the Avengers in turn. The team stood silent, listening, because there was nothing else to do. The air in the room felt too large, too old, too heavy with the power concentrated inside it and deep beneath all of it, beneath the awe and the heat and the tension, Natasha knew they were all looking for the same thing now.
The princess. The legend T’Challa had named in a glass tower in New York like someone speaking of fire in a room full of paper.
No one asked or turned their head openly. But the question pulsed through the whole team anyway. Where is sh- Then the roar came. It tore through the throne room from somewhere above and behind them, huge and violent and so sudden that every team member flinched before they could stop themselves. No one else in the room moved, not even a child. That, more than the roar itself, sent a cold current down Natasha’s spine.
The team looked upward instinctively, searching the vaulted dark for the source, but there was only firelight, shadow and stone lost in impossible height. Then the room shuddered and a low, rolling tremor passed through the floor beneath their feet just enough to remind every living person present that whatever had made that sound was big enough to move architecture by existing near it. Then smoke began to spill from behind the throne. Thick black smoke pouring out from the dark space behind the raised seats of the king and queen and winding around the dais like something alive.
The smoke thickened and then heavy footsteps. Each one landed with the awful certainty of something that had never in its life needed permission to enter a room. Then two great eyes opened in the dark and suddenly a dragon’s head emerged behind the throne. No language in Natasha’s mind could shrink it into anything manageable. Old scars cut pale across its face and throat and when it moved farther into the firelight, the room changed around it as if some hidden signal had been given.
People began to kneel all at once and the sound of drums began. Slow at first, then gathering into a rhythm that felt older than language. The beats rolled through the hall like a second heart and with them came voices, echoing a chant or call rising from the people in answer to the drums, the words foreign to the team and yet immediately understood in the body.
The army turned in perfect formation, not directly toward the team, but enough that their bodies shifted and their spears angled, their focus no longer solely on the throne but on the space around it, on the witness of what was happening. T’Challa dropped to one knee so suddenly it stole the breath from the moment. Then he looked at the team and Steve knelt first and the others followed.
Natasha lowered herself with them, the drums continued. The chant rose and fell around them and the heat from the flames and the dragon’s breath seemed to thicken the air. Her gaze stayed lowered because she was afraid of what looking up too soon might mean.
The drums stopped and the chant stopped with them. Silence hit the room so completely that Natasha could hear one of the fires split and hiss inside its brazier. Carefully..carefully she lifted her eyes and at first she saw only smoke, dark steps, the curve of the dragon’s lower jaw above and beyond the throne. Then movement and a figure stepping forward from beneath that vast shadow.
A girl and it was just a small glimpse. She saw the line of a mouth, the fall of white hair..the shape of a body she..knew. Natasha’s heart stopped. It truly, physically seemed to halt in her chest before slamming back to life hard enough to hurt. No.
She looked down at once. Her thoughts broke apart all at once, a thousand violent fragments colliding in panic. How could she be this stupid? How had she not known? Every sign, every single sign. The way people had moved around her, the confidence, the damn white hair..The sense, so clear now, that she had never once been in danger of being denied anything in that room above the tavern, not because she was reckless, but because the entire city had already belonged to her. And Natasha..Natasha Romanoff, who built her whole life on seeing what other people missed..had followed her upstairs. Had touched her. Had kissed her. Had-
Her spiraling thoughts were cut cleanly in half by a voice ringing out through the chamber. A deep voice began announcing the princess to the throne room, title after title rolling through the firelit dark like thunder over stone. Daughter of the Crown, blood of the First House, victor of wars and then..
“Khaleesi.”
No one moved until you did. The entire throne room seemed to wait on the smallest shift of your body, on the angle of your hand and on the direction of your gaze. Even the dragon behind the throne had gone still in that terrible, living way only predators mastered..
Then you turned and you moved with slow, unhurried grace, as if you had never once in your life needed to rush toward anything because everything that mattered would wait for you to arrive. The dark skirts of your gown whispered over the black stone steps as you ascended the dais and your dragon lowered its head fractionally behind you, watching.
You reached the twin thrones and, after the briefest pause, took the seat to the right of your mother. The room changed again enough for Natasha to feel it in the air. The king and queen still sat above them all, crowned and enthroned and radiant in their authority, but you seated beside them did not diminish their power. You completed it.
No one in the room could have mistaken the truth of that. Not the nobles, the soldiers or the mothers still clutching children at the edges of the hall.
Slowly and carefully, the gathered court rose from its kneeling posture. The soldiers stood in perfect unison, spears striking the floor once as they straightened, the sound cracked through the hall like a single hard heartbeat. The common people lifted their heads more slowly, only the Avengers still moved like people who had stepped into the wrong reality and were trying not to show it.
Natasha rose with them, her pulse had not settled, it had not even attempted to settle. She lifted her eyes despite every instinct telling her not to and there you were. Fully visible now, fully lit by the throne room’s great wall of flame. Natasha had thought the tavern had shown your beauty..It had shown her almost nothing. Here, beneath the heavy glow of braziers and the watchful eye of a dragon, you looked carved from everything men had ever feared in stories and then knelt before anyway.
You were like a force given shape and Natasha, to her own humiliation, could not stop seeing the overlap. That mouth, now set in composed stillness, had gasped against her skin only hours ago. Those hands, one resting now on the arm of a throne dark with age and power, had tangled in her hair in a room above a tavern. That white hair, gleaming like something holy now, had spilled across furs and over Natasha’s bare stomach while dawn still hid outside the shutters.
T’Challa stepped forward first, just enough to stand clear of the team and speak into the silence with the respect the hall demanded. He bowed his head first to the king and queen. Then to you.
“Your Graces.” he said, his voice carrying cleanly through the chamber. “Princess.” The king inclined his head once and the queen did not move at all, though her eyes remained fixed on him with frightening intelligence. You sat with one hand resting lightly against the black stone of your throne.
T’Challa continued. “We thank you for receiving us beneath your roof and under your protection.” His voice was formal, measured, “We would not have crossed into your lands without cause grave enough to justify the asking.”
He did not waste words after that. He spoke of Vision, of the Stone in his forehead, of the being who sought it and of. Of what the universe would become if the wrong hands gathered power meant to break worlds apart. He spoke of armies that had already crossed planets, of slaughter without conscience, of a force moving toward Earth with the patience of certainty.
The facts were terrible enough and when he said plainly that if Thanos took the Stone and completed what he was trying to complete, their world..every world would be left at the mercy of destruction on a scale no kingdom could outrun, a current moved visibly through the throne room. The reaction this time was not subtle. Gasps broke from the outer ranks near the walls and whispers moved among the common people before being hissed down.
Natasha heard none of it properly. It all reached her as distant noise, a muted storm at the edges of a room she could no longer fully occupy because her focus kept dragging itself back to one point only.
You.
You had listened through all of it without interruption. That alone was power. You knew how to sit still and let the room gather around you. You knew how to listen in a way that made every speaker aware they were not merely presenting information but offering themselves for judgment and several times while T’Challa spoke, your gaze passed over the team..and Natasha. Only a glance each time, never lingering long enough to become a statement and never careless enough to seem accidental either. Natasha could not tell whether she was remembered or being deliberately made to feel remembered. That uncertainty was its own cruelty and still, even with panic sitting cold and sharp in her stomach, a treacherous part of Natasha’s mind kept circling back to one humiliating thought:
She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. The realization came with the force of surrender and she hated it for how true it was.
When T’Challa finished, silence followed. A real silence, not the awed one of your entrance. This was the silence of a room measuring the weight of a plea and the cost of answering it. Then you spoke and your voice was lower than Natasha remembered from the tavern, or perhaps not lower, only changed by the room around it. There it had been smoke and laughter and danger held close. Here it was cool iron beneath velvet.
“You come to us..” you said, “with the end of the world in your mouth.”
No one in the room moved while your gaze rested on T’Challa first. “You say this force seeks one thing. One Stone. One life bound to it and if he takes it, then not only your world, but all worlds stand on the edge of ruin.”
“Yes.” T’Challa said simply and you tipped your head a fraction. “And you know this with certainty.”
“Enough certainty to cross into your lands for help.”
One corner of your mouth almost moved. Then it was gone. “How?”
The question cut clean but T’Challa did not hesitate. “Because I have seen the one who comes.” That was enough to shift the room’s attention briefly to Bruce, then back again. T’Challa continued before anyone else could.
“My people have seen his armies. My allies have fought his children. This is no rumor brought by frightened merchants, no prophet’s wind sick vision. He is real. His force is real and his purpose is real.”
You listened and asked, “And how do you know that if he reaches your lands, he will not turn elsewhere? How do you know the road of war you place before us ends where you say it ends?”
“I do not.”
A whisper moved through the court and your gaze sharpened. “No?”
“No king can promise the shape a war will keep once blood is spilled,” he said. “I can promise only this: if he is not stopped, there will be no shape left to protect.”
That landed. Natasha saw it in the faces nearest the throne. In the way the queen’s fingers stilled where they had rested at the arm of her seat. In the way one of the generals near the left column narrowed his eyes but did not scoff. You leaned back the slightest amount, “And why..” you asked, “should my people bear the price of a war brought to our gates by strangers? Why should I risk my lands, my soldiers, my skies for a world that has survived quite comfortably without knowing we exist?”
No one answered at once, so you went on and this time your gaze moved over Vision, over Wanda, over the team as a whole.
“If we answer this plea, we do not merely send spears into battle. We expose ourselves. We place secrets older than your nations beneath the eyes of an outside world that has never once earned them.” You paused. “You ask not for aid. You ask for revelation.”
The sentence struck harder than shouting would have and T’Challa inclined his head once. “I ask because I believe the thing coming will not stop at borders simply because maps insist they are there.”
Your eyes returned to him. “Belief is not proof.”
“No.” he said. “But wisdom sometimes means moving before proof arrives wearing fire.” At that, something unreadable flickered through your face and suddenly the king spoke. “It is not enough.”
The hall went still around him as he looked at T’Challa not unkindly, but with the merciless steadiness of one ruler examining another and finding sincerity insufficient. “You ask much of a house you barely know.” he said. “You speak of endings and universes and forces from beyond the sky and I do not call you liar. But I know too little of the hands stretched toward my throne.” His gaze moved over the Avengers then, slow and exact. “Too little of the loyalties among you. Too little of the wars you have already failed to keep from your own lands.”
That one struck and Steve took it like a blow. Wanda went white with anger and fear, but the king continued. “You ask trust where there has been no time to build it. You ask risk where there has been no proof of return. You ask that I place the old blood of my house in the path of an enemy I have not seen because men from beyond my borders swear he is coming. “That is not a small thing.”
“No.” T’Challa said quietly. “It is not.” Natasha barely heard any of it by then because you had looked at her fully this time. The look lasted only a second, perhaps less, but Natasha’s heart lurched so hard she felt it in her throat. There was nothing obvious in your face, n softness or anger. No recognition anyone else in the room could have named and pointed to. But Natasha knew she had been seen. And worse..she could not read what she had been-
You rose and the movement was enough to change the room at once again. Every whisper died, every wandering eye snapped forward. Even the dragon behind the thrones gave a low, rumbling growl that rolled through the stone floor and up into Natasha’s bones.
You descended one step from the dais. “Then hear my answer.”
Wanda’s grip on Vision turned almost painful as your gaze went first to T’Challa. “I do not question the danger you name.”
A flicker of hope moved visibly through the team.
“But danger alone is not command.” And the hope died. “I will not open my borders in fear. I will not cast my people into a war whose shape is not mine to read, whose enemy I have not measured with my own eyes and whose cost may expose every secret this kingdom has bled to protect.”
You paused. Then, clearly enough for the whole court to hear and carry it home by heart: “No.”
The word fell into the hall like a blade and for a second, no one moved. Then the meaning reached the team all at once and Wanda took a step before she fully knew she meant to. Tony’s hand hit her chest instantly, “Don’t.” he said under his breath and for once every trace of irony had burned out of him, it sounded almost like pleading.
Wanda stared at the throne, eyes bright with grief and fury and T’Challa stepped forward again, but only a little. “Princess-”
Spears shifted as aline of royal soldiers had moved as one, the points not leveled at him enough to mark a boundary. Enough to say another step would be taken as more than desperation, so T’Challa stopped. He saw the message clearly.
You did not even look at the soldiers. You didn’t need to, because the command had gone through the room before you ever gave it aloud. T’Challa bowed his head the slightest amount but your face gave nothing back. Then, at last, your gaze moved once more over the team and over Natasha. The look caught on her for the barest second and she felt heat crawl under her skin and ice through her stomach all at once.
Then you turned away and the dragon lifted its head as you moved. The court parted itself without chaos and without command needing to be given. You crossed behind your parents’ seats and vanished back into shadow and black breath and the low furnace rumble of the beast that followed you. Only when you were gone did the room seem to remember how to breathe. The refusal remained hanging there anyway.
No.
That one word kept echoing through Natasha long after the sound itself had died. Lord Vaelar stepped forward almost immediately. Men like him existed to restore structure the moment emotion threatened to stain ceremony. “Guests.” he said, his voice formal once more, “you will be returned to your chambers.” It was not an invitation..it was dismissal wrapped in courtesy. No one argued, because what could they say here, in this hall, beneath this throne, after that?
The walk back felt very different from the walk in and this silence had edges. They should have been thinking about strategy now, like about what came next. About how to salvage a plea refused before an entire court. About whether there was still some path through this.
By the time Lord Vaelar led them back into the guest chambers and the doors closed behind them, the whole team looked as if they had returned not from an audience but from the edge of some cliff none of them had known was there until they were already falling toward it. The doors closed behind them with a weight that seemed to echo through the stone and for a long moment no one spoke, no one moved very much either. It was as if the throne room had followed them back somehow, its fire and silence and refusal pressing at their shoulders even here.
Then Wanda pulled away from Vision and turned sharply toward the center of the room.
“No. No, no! You can’t just say no.” Her voice rose with every breath, “She listened. She heard all of it and you just-”
“Wanda-”
“No!”
Vision stepped forward, “Her refusal was not irrational.”
Wanda stared at him in disbelief. “Vision-”
“It was not.” he said softly. “It was devastating, but it was not irrational.”
“That makes it worse..” Sam muttered, dragging a hand over his face before dropping into one of the carved chairs near the fire. “Because irrational, I know how to deal with. Rational means we’re out of luck.”
Bruce had not sat down yet, he stood near the long table with his hands braced against the edge, staring at nothing, his mind clearly still trapped somewhere between prophecy, dragons, and catastrophe. “She believed us.” he said quietly. “That’s the part I can’t get past..she believed us.”
Steve turned from the window. “Believing us and agreeing to fight are two different things.”
Shuri looked up sharply, but she said nothing. T’Challa stood near the center of the room, his face gave little away, but Natasha had learned by now how to see the pressure beneath his stillness. He had not expected ease here, but he had expected more than that. He had expected a chance. Instead they had been given a lesson in the shape of power and escorted out beneath it.
Sam leaned forward. He looked around at them all, at the despair hardening in the room like a second wall. “Okay.” he said and his voice was gentler than usual. “Okay. So this didn’t work. That doesn’t mean we stop.”
No one answered and Sam tried again. “We’ve been in worse spots.”
Steve stepped in “Sam’s right.” And a few eyes turned toward him. “We came here because we needed help, that hasn’t changed. But if help doesn’t come, then we fight with what we have. We’ve done it before.”
Wanda’s laugh this time was brittle enough to hurt. “Against this?”
Sam stood, trying to drag some sort of momentum back into the room by force. “Then we do what we always do. Adjust. We get Vision somewhere safe, we keep moving, we make it harder for this guy to get what he wants, and if he comes anyway, we make him regret it.”
“On our own?” Bruce asked, looking up at last. “Against what T’Challa described? Against what I know is coming?”
Sam’s jaw tightened. “What other option do we have?”
There it was. The thing sitting in all of them. No one wanted to say it aloud because saying it made it final. They had crossed the world, crossed secrecy, crossed into a kingdom people wrote off as myth and even here the answer had still been no. Natasha stood a little apart from the others and should have been thinking tactically. She should have been adding up alternatives, exits, damage control. Instead, all she could feel was the afterimage of that throne room and the white haired figure seated inside it like the center of a storm. She had said no, and the whole room had bent around the word.
Natasha had spent years among powerful people. Men with armies, men with money, men with access codes and satellites and the power to start wars from leather chairs. She knew domination when she saw it and she definitely knew command. But your power was something else.
The room had gone quiet again when a knock came and everyone looked up at once. The guard stationed outside opened before anyone inside could answer and the door swung inward and the room stopped breathing when Khaleesi entered.
Four soldiers followed you in, two remaining just inside the threshold and two taking up silent positions farther in, spears upright, faces carved from pure duty. The effect of her entrance was immediate because every person in the room knelt..again.
The room had only just gotten over you once. Now you were here, in their chambers, in private..or as private as anything could be with armed soldiers at her back wearing a different kind of authority than you had in the throne room.
“Rise.” The word was calm and everyone obeyed. Your gaze moved across the room once, assessing everything. Natasha could not tell whether you were measuring them as people or as variables in a war you had not yet agreed to touch. Then you asked, with no preamble at all: “This force.”
The room tensed. “You say it comes for the Stone.” Your eyes shifted toward Vision. “You say it destroys worlds. You say its armies do not stop where ordinary wars stop.” You looked back to the others. “Tell me again.”
The surprise in the room was almost visible. T’Challa did not speak immediately, he just watched you carefully, as if this change in ground required equal care in answering. It was Bruce, of all people, who stepped forward first, nervous and thin and somehow brighter the moment information became useful. “Yes..!” he said. “Yes, of course.”
He moved quickly toward the low table where Stark had left one of the tablets. His hands were clumsy with haste at first, but steadied as soon as he had the device in them. “If you’ll..if you want to see-” He activated the screen, swiped, pulled up files, maps, images. He turned the tablet outward, then cast a small holographic projection from it, bright blue and trembling above the table. Thanos appeared first in rotating image, huge and terrible even as light.
You did not move closer immediately. You stood where you were and watched the image turn. “This is Thanos.” Bruce said and the nerves in his voice began to burn away beneath purpose. “He isn’t mythology or isn’t rumor. He’s a warlord and e’s been moving from world to world collecting the Infinity Stones.” He switched the image and six points of light appeared suspended in the air between them. “There are six. Each one controls something fundamental. Time, space, power, reality..,mind and soul.”
At that, your expression changed. Not visibly enough for everyone, perhaps, but Natasha saw it. Bruce saw it too. “You’ve heard of them.”
Your gaze remained on the hologram. “Stories.”
Bruce nodded quickly. “Yes. Most people only know them as stories. That doesn’t make them less real.” Your attention sharpened on him at that and Bruce..God help him, actually seemed to gather confidence from it.
He showed her everything. His hands moved as he talked, his whole face lit by the blue of the shifting images and for a moment Natasha saw the old scientist in him rise above the frightened man. You listened with unnerving concentration and Natasha barely heard half of Bruce’s explanation. Because every time you shifted even slightly, every time the braid over your shoulder moved, every time that cool, measured voice entered the air with a question, Natasha felt her body answer before her mind.
It was humiliating..It was far too much like the tavern. The way you occupied space without apology. The way your focus made the rest of the room fall away. The way your damn voice could turn from soft to cutting without ever rising. Natasha had known intimidation all her life and this was far more dangerous because she wanted the source of it.
Bruce finished at last. The final hologram dimmed, leaving only the low firelight and the pressure of the room returning in its wake. You looked at him for one long moment, till she inclined her head. “Thank you.”
Bruce, who had probably never in his life expected to be thanked by a dragon riding princess in a hidden mountain kingdom, went visibly blank for half a second. “You’re- yes. Of course.”
You turned and the soldiers at the door straightened almost imperceptibly, preparing to move with you and the room shifted with unease all over again. Why come here only to leave? Why ask if nothing had changed? Why bring soldiers? Why not speak before them all instead of in the chamber?
Natasha felt all of those questions moving through the others. Then you stopped at the door and turned back. Your gaze moved through the room once, over Steve, over Wanda, over Bruce still holding the tablet like a shield he’d forgotten to lower and came to rest on Natasha.
“I would have her company.”
The words entered the room like a thrown blade. For one terrible, suspended second Natasha actually thought she had misheard. Then the silence around her confirmed she had not because Sam’s eyes widened. Bruce looked from you to Natasha as if trying to solve an equation that had abruptly stopped obeying mathematics. Even T’Challa’s face changed enough for Natasha to know he had not expected that either.
Natasha herself felt as if the floor had shifted under her. She stepped forward before hesitation could harden into visible fear. “Of course.” she said and was faintly disgusted to hear how steady her own voice sounded. You gave the smallest nod, as if this had been the only answer worth imagining.
Then you turned and left with Natasha following. The chamber doors closed behind them and the full weight of the team’s shock was cut off as neatly as a severed rope.
No one spoke in the hall as you walked ahead, flanked by soldiers and Natasha went where she was led because there was no world in which she did anything else. The corridors they took were not the ones Lord Vaelar had used. These were narrower at first, then higher, then stranger. Less public, more private and way heavily guarded.
Their footsteps echoed as the soldiers’ boots struck the stone in disciplined rhythm behind and ahead of them, but Natasha’s attention kept pulling forward. To the braid. Your hair had been fully worked now, drawn back from your face in intricate sections and bound with dark metal and narrow pieces of bronze. It was so beautiful and intimidating in exactly the way Shuri had warned her such hair could be. She watched it move between your shoulder blades and thought wildly inappropriate things about unbraiding it with her own hands.
They passed more guards at each turn. None spoke but each lowered their gaze as you approached, then resumed stillness the second you had gone by. Once they crossed an open hall where cold light poured in through tall slitted windows and turned the stone silver. Another time they descended three shallow steps into a quieter wing where the walls were hung not with war tapestries but with dark woven draperies edged in old symbols Natasha did not know.
At last they reached a door and it was guarded, of course. The soldiers there stepped aside at once and opened it. Natasha followed you in and stopped. The room was not what she had expected. Not a council chamber or a receiving room..it was a private room. A fire burned lower here, warmer, banked for comfort and beyond an archway Natasha could see the gleam of a bathing room.
Your chamber, Natasha realized with one heavy thud of understanding.
You crossed into it as if nothing in the world could possibly feel strange about bringing the woman you had slept with the night before into your private rooms under armed escort after refusing her allies before an entire court. Then she turned to the soldiers. “Leave us.”
They obeyed instantly, bowing their heads once before withdrawing. The door shut behind them and the silence that followed was so complete Natasha could hear the fire settle in its grate. You crossed to one of the chairs near the window and sat. Only then did you look fully at Natasha. “Is it true?”
“Which part?”
“The force. The man who comes for the stones.” Your gaze was direct, impossible to evade. “Is what T’Challa said true?”
Natasha held it. “Yes.”
You hummed once and looked away toward the fire. A full minute might have passed in silence after that and Natasha had stopped trusting time inside this kingdom. “Did you truly not know who I was?”
Natasha went still. There it was. Of everything she might have said, that was somehow the one that stripped all the courtly distance away and brought them back brutally to the room above the tavern, to white hair across dark furs, to wanting and not asking enough questions.
She remembered. Natasha nearly laughed at herself for ever imagining otherwise. “No. I didn’t.”
Your mouth curved. “And if you had known?”
Natasha’s heart knocked hard once against her ribs when you rose and crossed the room until you stood directly in front of her. Near enough that Natasha could see every detail the throne room had put at a distance: the fine pale scar near one wrist, the darker ring around the storm-colored irises, the controlled breath lifting your chest beneath black fabric.
“If you had known.” You repeated, “would we have had the same night?”
Natasha should have lied. This was a princess.. a damn political force. A woman who could move soldiers with a shift of tone and dragons with, apparently, less than that. There were a hundred safer answers.
No. I would have kept my distance. It was a mistake. I would have been more respectful. All of them would have been false and Natasha, for all her many sins, had never been especially good at lying once desire had become truth. So she looked at her and said, “No.”
Your expression stilled as Natasha continued before courage failed her. “It wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
For the first time since entering the room, something genuinely warm moved through your face. Like amusement touched with something deeper and you stepped even closer. “Like I said, I like your honesty.” Your voice was low enough now that Natasha felt it almost as much as heard it. “And your bravery.”
“I’m not sure this counts as bravery.”
“It does here.”
The silence that followed pulled tight between them. Natasha could smell smoke in your hair still and thefaint clean scent of the cold air from the window. Beneath it, the memory of the tavern seemed to return all at once so strongly Natasha almost had to lock her knees, but you stepped back first.
“I want to hear more about Thanos.” You said and Natasha exhaled slowly. “All right. You gestured to the low seating near the fire. “Then sit.”
This time it felt less like command and more like invitation, though Natasha suspected with her there might not be much difference. They sat opposite each other first. Then, as the conversation began, not quite opposite anymore. Natasha told her what she knew and you listened. Sometimes you interrupted with a question so exact it startled Natasha. Sometimes you went very still and simply absorbed what you were hearing. Once or twice you asked about something Bruce had shown on the tablet and Natasha had to admit she only understood half of it herself. That won the faintest smile. As they talked, the room shifted from unbearable to merely dangerous and beneath every word, beneath every explanation of war and Stones and death moving toward them all, there remained the unspoken thing burning between them.
You know. I know and neither of us has chosen yet what to do with it. Natasha had the strange, disorienting sense that the real conversation had not even begun but this one here right now mattered. Because Khaleesi was listening..you had come after saying no. Because you had asked for Natasha, specifically and that meant something whether Natasha wanted it to or not.
Hours passed so quietly that Natasha stopped noticing time as something separate from the room. At some point the fire had burned lower and then been fed again by silent servants who never lifted their eyes too high and vanished before the air fully shifted around their absence. Light moved across the floor, then withdrew, turning from the pale silver of late day into the richer amber of afternoon and finally the slow deep gold that came before evening. Still they talked. The longer they spoke, the more Natasha found herself startled.
Not because you were intelligent, that much had been obvious from the moment you opened your mouth in the tavern and made Natasha work for every answer. No, what startled Natasha was the scale of it. You did not gather information merely to possess it. You turned it, tested it, set one fact against another and listened for the crack where truth lived. And somehow, against all logic, the hours with you did not feel strained. They felt easy. There were pauses that should have been awkward and weren’t. Silences that settled between them without demanding to be filled. Natasha found herself answering more honestly than she had planned to. You found yourself asking less like a ruler interrogating a witness and more like a woman trying to see the shape of the storm before deciding whether to ride into it.
By the end of the third or fourth hour, Natasha had the deeply disorienting feeling that they had known each other far longer than one night and one impossible day. Not because they knew everything, but because they listened as if what the other said mattered. At last you rose from your chair and Natasha, who had been leaning forward over the low table where they had spread maps and rough sketches and hastily drawn constellations of threat, looked up at once. You crossed to the great window and unlatched one side of the carved doors that opened onto the balcony beyond. “Come.” Natasha followed you out.
The balcony overlooked the kingdom from a height so severe it made the body aware of its own bones. Below them the city spread in layers of black stone, bronze roofs, pale roads twisting through torchlit squares and terraces. Somewhere lower, bells rang once and were answered by another farther off. Beyond the city walls the land opened into valleys and ridges and dark forests touched gold by the dying sun. Farther still, mountains rose one behind the other until they blurred into shadow and sky.
It was too beautiful. That was the first honest thought Natasha had. The kind of beauty that made a person angry for every map that had lied and every history book that had acted as though the world was already fully known.
You came to stand beside her, close enough that Natasha could feel the warmth of you through the colder air. “Well?”
“It’s nothing like my world.” You turned her head. “No?”
Natasha looked out over the city. “Not like this. Not…held together this way.” She searched for the right words and found them harder than she expected. “Where I come from, beauty is usually built over damage. Glass over old wounds. People move fast enough not to think about what the ground used to be before it was turned into something useful.”
You were quiet for a moment. “It was not always like this.” Natasha glanced at you. “War followed us too.” You said quietly. “It found us wherever we ran. It burned fields, halls, children, oaths. It took things from us long before it took land.” Her eyes stayed on the kingdom below. “Almost everything you see there had to be built again. Or carried out of ash and made to stand because grief alone could not be allowed to inherit the future.”
Natasha did not answer at once. She remembered T’Challa’s voice in the Quinjet. The chained dragon, the doors barred from the outside..the slaughter beneath guest right. She remembered Bruce’s old book, the crude drawing of a girl in the middle of the dead and suddenly the weight inside you not in the throne room made even more sense than it already had.
“You know what war means.” Natasha said and your mouth moved without becoming a smile. “Yes.”
“And you can’t take ours on faith.”
“No.” You turned then, fully, leaning one hand on the stone of the balcony rail. “I cannot gamble a kingdom on a story told by strangers, no matter how honestly it is told.”
Natasha nodded once, because there was absolutely nothing to argue with in that. You glanced upward and then back at Natasha. “How do you find Vhassar?”
Natasha frowned slightly. “Who?”
That won her the faintest real smile Natasha had seen since the tavern. “My dragon.”
The word still did strange things to the room whenever it was said plainly. My dragon. As if one might equally say my horse or my hound or my sword. “What do I think of him?” she said, buying herself a second.
You inclined her head and Natasha let out a breath she had not realized she’d been holding. “Unbelievable..” she said and the honesty came easier than anything else had all day. “Majestic..terrifying. Wrong in the best possible way.” Her voice softened despite herself. “Like seeing a myth refuse to stay dead.”
Something in your face gentled. You had been waiting, perhaps, for fear. Or for flattery so obvious it insulted them both, but Natasha gave you neither. Instead Natasha added, “I have about a thousand questions.”
“I know.” You looked at her for one long, unreadable moment, till you pushed away from the balcony “Follow me.”
They went back through the chamber. You did not call for permission or warning, you only crossed to the door, opened it and the guards outside straightened instantly. “You can stay here.” They bowed and stepped back without the smallest sign of surprise.
They moved through another series of private corridors, then down a narrow stone stairway that curved around the inside of the mountain. The air cooled with every turn and by the time they emerged again, they were no longer inside the castle proper but on a high mountain path cut into black rock. Natasha stopped without meaning to because the view was devastating.
The kingdom spread below in layers of darkening beauty, every torch and hearthfire beginning to glow brighter now that the sun had dipped lower. Far cliffs caught the last red light like embers and rivers turned to silver ribbons. The ocean in the distance looked like a plate of beaten metal beneath the dying sky. For one suspended moment, it felt as though the entire world had pulled itself open just so she could understand how small she was in it.
Then a shadow crossed over her and Natasha barely had time to turn before something vast dropped from the sky and hit the mountain ledge before them with a thunderous, earth shaking impact. The sound drove through rock and bone alike and even stones jumped. Natasha staggered half a step back on instinct, one hand already moving before her mind had fully caught up, because every part of her body had just screamed predator.
Vhassar landed up close there was no language left for him. He was too large for the human brain to place comfortably in the same category as any other living thing. His wings folded in with a rush of membrane and old power, dark and scar-lined, their span seeming capable of blotting out whole streets below. His scales were not simple black as they had looked from afar. In the fading light they held depths of color, charcoal, iron, old red buried under soot, hints of bronze along the edges where years and battle had worn them.
His head lowered slowly until one enormous gold eye was level with Natasha’s face. She did not breathe, she just couldn’t..Every story she had ever heard, every child’s drawing of dragons, every old film and fantasy painting and whispered impossible legend collapsed in that instant under the weight of reality. Those had all been symbols..but here it was real. This was an animal..no, not merely an animal, something older and stranger and more deliberate than that looking at her with living intelligence from behind an eye the size of a shield.
Natasha stood perfectly still, every training instinct conflicting at once and through the pounding of her own blood she heard your steps on the rock. Then you moved beneath the dragon’s lowered head as if stepping under the arch of a cathedral doorway. One pale hand rose to rest against the rough black scales of his jaw. “Natasha.” she said, and her voice was quieter than before. “Breathe.”
Natasha let out something that was almost a laugh and definitely not steady. “That’s..very easy for you to say.”
“He will not hurt you.”
“That is an outrageous thing to say while I’m being inspected by a mountain with teeth.”
You smiled as Vhassar’s eye remained fixed on Natasha. The slit pupil narrowed fractionally, as if adjusting to her rather than threatening. “He knows you are with me.” you said. “And he knows I would not bring harm to him.”
That sentence settled between them with more meaning than it wore openly. Natasha swallowed once and made herself look properly. His horns swept back from his skull in ridged black curves scarred pale in places where battle had marked him. A long jagged wound crossed the left side of his chest where the scales grew thicker and more armored, old now but brutal enough that Natasha could not believe he had lived through it. Smaller scars scored his throat and neck, some like lines from blades, others broader and warped by heat or iron or something worse. He was so beautiful.
“He had once two brothers.”
Natasha tore her gaze from the dragon’s eye long enough to look at you and you did not take your hand off him. “All three were born to the royal line. Vhassar was the oldest.”
Natasha hesitated, suddenly aware of how easy it would be to step wrong inside someone else’s grief. “I read…” She stopped, hating how inadequate it sounded. “I read that one was chained and killed in the war. And the other died later.”
You laughed softly once. “That.” You said but now there was steel in your voice, “is exactly the problem.” You turned her face toward Natasha. “That is the story told outside these mountains. The story copied into books and journals and passed among scholars who never touched the ash they wrote about.”
Your hand stilled on Vhassar’s scales. “One was chained, yes, but the other one didn’t died at the gates.” Your eyes darkened. “He died hours before it ended. He fought beside his brother and me until his wings were in ribbons. He bled into the sea because they struck him from the ocean while he still had enough strength left to turn back toward me. His body fell beyond the cliffs..We never recovered him and for all I know, his bones are still on the ocean floor.”
Natasha said nothing because there was nothing right enough to say into that. You looked back toward the kingdom below and then to the dragon at your side. “That is why I do not hand trust to strangers because they arrive carrying fear. Your world does not know my story. It records fragments and calls the fragments truth. It writes down what it can bear to understand and lets the rest rot into myth.”
She looked at Natasha again. “And I do not know yours. So why..” You asked, “would I believe without question that what comes toward us is exactly what you say it is? Why would I not consider that this could be a trap? A way to draw my people into the open. A way to bring men here who would learn what this kingdom holds. What I hold.” Your hand moved once more along Vhassar’s neck. “Why would I not fear for him?”
Natasha let out a slow breath because you were painfully right. Natasha understood fear for family better than perhaps anyone alive should. “I can’t tell you not to fear that.” Natasha said at last and you watched her.
“I would, if I were trying to win an argument.” Natasha continued. “But I’m not. You’re right. If our positions were reversed, I’d be asking the same questions.”
Something in your face shifted at that and you stepped closer. The dragon remained still beside them, but his presence filled the mountain ledge like another weather system. “Do you trust your people?” You asked and Natasha answered immediately. “Yes.”
“Without doubt?”
Natasha considered only long enough to be honest. “With doubt, sometimes. But yes.” Her voice softened. “They’re my family.”
Your eyes held hers. “Do you trust me?”
That one landed harder and Natasha should have paused longer. She knew that..she had every reason to because this was a princess, a ruler, a woman she barely knew outside a single night and a single day stitched together by danger and desire and impossible timing.
But then again..you had listened. You had come back after saying no and had brought Natasha here, to the mountain, to the dragon, to truth spoken without a court around it. And somewhere between the tavern and the throne room and the firelit hours in her chamber, trust had begun anyway.
“Yes.”
You smiled then. “Good.” Before Natasha could ask what that meant, you turned and walked toward Vhassar’s side. You placed one hand against the base of his wing, found a hold among the ridges of scale and harness and in one fluid motion began climbing.
“What are you doing?”
You looked down over one shoulder, “Come.”
“Excuse me?”
You settled onto the dragon’s back as though you had been born there. Which, Natasha realized, you almost might as well have been. You looked entirely at ease, one hand resting near the harness, the other braced lightly against one ridged spine. “You heard me.”
Natasha looked from her to the dragon, then back. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am very serious.”
Natasha glanced at Vhassar, who was now very deliberately looking back at her with one slitted gold eye. “That is the problem..”
You actually laughed. “Follow me, Natasha.”
Natasha muttered something sharp and Russian under her breath that would have scandalized several governments and at least one priest. Then she stepped closer and her hands shook. She lifted one hand and laid it, very carefully, against Vhassar’s side and a shock went through her.
The scale beneath her palm was warm and the texture was unlike anything she had ever touched..hard, yes, but not dead-hard. There was grain to it, ridges, slight give between plates where living muscle moved beneath the shield of scale. She dragged her fingertips the smallest fraction and felt the truth of it ring through her whole body.
Dragon skin.
Natasha stared at her own hand as if it belonged to someone else. Then she looked up and because apparently she had fully abandoned reason sometime around the throne room and simply never gone back for it..she climbed. It was awkward at first, definitely more difficult than she wanted you to see, but you reached a hand down at the last second, not because Natasha asked, only because you knew exactly when the offer was needed and Natasha took it.
The contact sent a different kind of shock through her, but then she was up and settled behind you on the dragon’s back, rigid with disbelief and trying very hard not to consider all the ways this could end in immediate death.
You turned your head just enough that Natasha caught the curve of your mouth. “I like your bravery.”
Natasha opened her mouth to answer with something dry and clever, but Vhassar shifted beneath them, muscles rolling with terrifying power and Natasha shut up instantly and grabbed for the nearest secure hold. Your laughter came bright and unrestrained into the mountain air and Natasha, in spite of herself, felt a grin break through her terror.
“You enjoy this far too much..” Natasha muttered and you went still for one tiny charged beat. Then you looked back at her and your eyes dropped, just once, to Natasha’s mouth and then rose again. “I’ve heard that before.”
The words struck with immediate, merciless clarity and Natasha was back in the tavern room in an instant. The air between them changed, Natasha felt it happen, but neither of them moved right away or looked away first. Your mouths were too close for strangers, way far for what the memory wanted. And Vhassar, as if deeply offended by the human tendency to drown in silence at inconvenient moments, shifted again with a rumble that rolled all the way through his body.
You smiled first and said something under your breath in your own language with one hand moving briefly along the harness near his neck. Then you asked, “Are you ready?”
Natasha blinked once. “Ready for what-“ Vhassar surged forward so powerful Natasha’s whole body snapped into awareness. He ran along the mountain ledge with astonishing speed for something so enormous, “Y/N..!-”
Then the ledge vanished beneath them as Vhassar leapt. For one impossible, endless second there was nothing under Natasha at all. Only the sickening, exquisite drop of empty air opening beneath them and the violent beat of wings wider than belief.
The first downstroke hit like the world itself had chosen to move. Wind exploded around her and the mountain fell away. The kingdom dropped beneath their feet in a rush of distance and torchlight and darkening valleys. Natasha’s breath left her in a sharp involuntary sound that was part terror, part awe, part something too enormous for either. They were flying. Not in a jet with steel beneath her boots. Not in a Quinjet wrapped in technology and noise and systems that made sense. Flying. On the back of a dragon.
The air was freezing and clean and alive. It tore at her hair, at her clothes, at every thought that had ever insisted the world was already explainable. Vhassar climbed with terrifying grace, each beat of his wings lifting them higher into the evening until the castle itself looked smaller, then the city, then the roads threading through the valleys. Natasha clung tighter somewhere between harness and you and sheer stubborn survival and then, because there was no longer any point pretending otherwise, she laughed. You heard it and smiled into the wind too and below them the kingdom burned gold and black and silver under the first stars.
Above them the sky opened and for the first time in her life, Natasha understood exactly why human beings had made gods out of anything that could command the air. Vhassar climbed like the sky belonged to him.
The first moments were all wind and instinct and the violent, breathtaking wrongness of it. Natasha could not have said where her hands were at first, only that she was holding on to something and that the world had fallen away beneath her in a rush so immense it left no room for coherent thought. The mountain dropped, the castle shrank, the city opened like a map made by gods, and the dragon beat his wings again with a force that seemed capable of moving weather.
You glanced back over her shoulder and the corner of your mouth curved. “Still alive?”
Natasha laughed again, “Barely!”
The kingdom opened fully beneath them. It was one thing to see it from a castle balcony. It was another to see it from the back of the creature that ruled its skies. From above, the land seemed too vast to belong to a single hidden nation. Valleys spread in long green sweeps between black mountains. Rivers flashed like drawn silver through the fading light and roads of pale stone wound through hills and forests in elegant lines, crossing old bridges thrown over impossible drops. Villages dotted the lower slopes, each one ringed in fields or pastures or clusters of dark trees.
Your voice came back to Natasha over one shoulder, “To the east.” You said, pointing, “those ridges were once all watch-fires. Before the last war, every peak burned red through winter because no one trusted dawn to come without warning.”
Natasha followed the line of your hand. Even from this height she could see that some of the peaks still held the ruins of towers or old beacon circles, black stone scars against the land. “And there.” You continued, “the valley cut by the river, that was where my grandfather broke the horse clans that sided with the southern lords. Not by slaughter but by waiting until the thaw and trapping them in their own arrogance.” There was a note in your voice that Natasha had begun to recognize over the long hours in the chamber: not pride exactly, but intimacy with history, as though these stories did not live in books for her..they lived in the ground.
Vhassar banked lower and now Natasha could see roofs and market squares. Women carrying bundles beneath awnings and children darting through narrow alleys in the last of the evening light. As they passed above the city, something happened that stole Natasha’s breath more quietly than the flight itself had.
The people looked up and smiled. They were far too high for any ordinary rider to be recognized by face. Too high for detail and too high for anyone to know exactly who sat astride the dragon against the darkening sky.
Hands rose from the streets anyway. Children pointed so hard they nearly fell over and had to be steadied by laughing mothers. Men in aprons and leather vests paused in their work to shade their eyes and grin up into the light. Women on balconies leaned out and waved cloths and hands alike. Along one rooftop a cluster of children reached both arms upward as if hoping joy alone could bridge the distance.
Natasha felt something in her chest turn over. “They know it’s you..” she said and your answer was soft. “They know it is him.”
Vhassar gave a low rolling sound deep in his chest, not quite a roar, more like satisfaction given voice. Below them the city answered with movement and light and uplifted faces.
You showed Natasha the training fields first, broad red-brown plains marked by old fences and newer scars, where horse lines moved in disciplined arcs and spear drills flashed in rows. You showed her the upper nesting ledges carved into the mountainside, old stone platforms blackened by heat, where once three dragons had landed shoulder to shoulder and now only one came home. You pointed out temples built into caves, where the oldest songs were still kept by memory because paper had once burned too easily to trust. They passed over lakes so still they reflected the reddening sky like polished metal and over forests dense enough that the roads vanished completely beneath the canopy.
Everywhere you had a story. Sometimes a history of battle, yes..a ridge where a betrayal had turned the tide of a siege, a river crossing where blood had frozen black in winter, a field where your mother’s brother had died beneath a broken banner and become an oath no one dared forget.
But sometimes the stories were smaller, like a village that still held a spring festival because once, during the war, children had hidden there while armies tore each other apart a valley away and the old women had sworn that if even six of them survived to adulthood, there would always be music there again.
Natasha listened to all of it and at some point she stopped gripping the harness so hard. At some point her body adjusted to Vhassar’s movement and began to move with him instead of against him. The beat of his wings became rhythm rather than shock. The rise and dip of his flight passed through her like something ancient and astonishingly easy to trust. Once, when he dove slightly before leveling out again over the sea cliffs, Natasha made an involuntary sound of delight so unguarded that you laughed aloud. “You are enjoying this.”
Natasha smiled into the wind. “That is not an accusation you can prove.”
“I do not need proof. I can hear it.”
“You’re very smug for someone currently chauffeuring me on a dragon.”
You looked back just far enough for Natasha to catch the brightness in your eyes. “I am Khaleesi. Smugness is one of my oldest rights.”
The hours softened around them and the sky darkened by degrees, but slowly, beautifully. The sun stretched lower and lower, setting fire to the edges of clouds and turning the mountains bronze. Vhassar seemed tireless, he carried them farther than Natasha would ever have believed possible, through cold high air where stars began to appear one by one and then down again over warmer valleys where evening bells drifted up from distant towers. More than once, you fell quiet and simply let Natasha look. Perhaps you understood that some beauties needed witness more than explanation.
By the time Vhassar climbed high above the last western ridge, the sun had become enormous and Vhassar slowed. He was just simply shifting into a great circling glide above the world as if evening itself had asked him to witness it properly.
Natasha did not realize she had gone completely still until you spoke. “This..” she said quietly, “is what you ask me to wager.”
Natasha looked at her. The softness that had lived between them throughout the flight had changed and your face had gone serious again. You lifted one hand from the harness and gestured downward, not to any one village or tower, but to all of it.
“My people.” You said. “My family.”
Your hand lowered to Vhassar’s neck instead, fingers brushing slowly through the scales there with the ease of long practice. He answered with a low sound, calmer now, deeper and Natasha followed the movement of your hand as the dragon leaned almost imperceptibly into the touch.
“I cannot risk this lightly. Not for a danger I have not seen with my own eyes. Not for a world that, until yesterday, did not know my people existed. Not when every answer I give could place all of this under the gaze of men who would turn wonder into conquest the moment they learned where to point their ships.”
Natasha looked below at the city, the scattered lights beginning to bloom one by one across the land, the roads and villages. This wasn’t a kingdom to you.. It wasn’t a strategic entity or a military asset or a line on a map to be defended in theory. It was people and family.
“If Thanos comes.” she said and her voice sounded smaller than the sky around them, “and he gets the Mind Stone, the last one he needs..your people suffer too.”
You did not answer and Natasha continued anyway, because truth was all she had left to offer her. “He won’t stop at our world because your mountains are hidden. He won’t stop at your borders because your history is old. He’ll control everything, every land, every sky and life he can reach.” She swallowed once, looking not at you now but at the kingdom below. “No one stays untouched by that.”
For a moment Natasha thought perhaps they had failed to reach you at all. Then she saw your hand still against Vhassar’s scales and saw the way her fingers moved there, once, twice stroking a path you knew would soothe him, or perhaps yourself. Vhassar gave another deep rumble and adjusted beneath them. At last you exhaled and turned Vhassar with the slightest shift of your weight and knee and he banked away from the dying sun and began the long flight back toward the castle.
Natasha did not press, she knew enough now to understand when silence was work and you needed it. They flew in quiet over the darkening kingdom and below them the cities had become constellations of firelight. Natasha found herself watching you as much as the land. The line of your profile against the sky. The loosened pale strands escaping your braid and the way you looked down at your people not as a ruler inspecting possessions but as a woman measuring the weight of what you loved.
Vhassar came in low and sure toward your balcony and Natasha barely had time to register how impossible that was, how natural it seemed for a dragon to treat a balcony as landing ground, before he reached it in one great final beat of wings and settled with a heavy, controlled impact that rattled the stone but never felt wild. He lowered himself enough for them to dismount and Natasha slid down more carefully this time, still reluctant to break contact with the great warm living certainty of him. When her boots touched stone again, the world felt smaller than it had an hour before. You dismounted after her with effortless grace.
Then you turned to Vhassar and rested your hand once more against the side of his face. You murmured something in your own language and smiled in a way Natasha had not yet seen you smile at anyone else.. Vhassar’s great head dipped fractionally, as though receiving the words rather than merely hearing them. Then, with a final low rumble that passed through the balcony floor, he pushed away from the stone. For a brief second the whole balcony drowned in shadow and wind and the beating power of him and then he was gone, lifting back into the darkening sky, black against the last bruised color of evening.
Natasha stood at the edge of the balcony watching until he disappeared. When she finally looked back, you were still there in the open doorway, the fire from your chamber warm behind you, the night and kingdom at your back and the silence between them full of everything they still had not yet said.
You stood near the edge where you had watched Vhassar go, one hand still lowered from where it had rested against his scales and Natasha could almost feel the thinking in you from where she stood.
If Thanos comes, your people suffer too.
Natasha had seen powerful people think before. She knew the difference between someone waiting to speak and someone whose world had just shifted by half a degree. You were silent in the second way but At last you turned just enough that your profile caught the firelight spilling from the chamber behind you.
“Did you say my name?” she asked and Natasha blinked once. “What?”
“Before Vhassar took off.” Your eyes moved over her face. “I thought I heard you say it.”
Natasha remembered it instantly. The split second before the dragon launched into the sky, when panic and wonder had hit at once and her body had reached for the nearest anchor it knew. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Natasha gave the smallest shrug, though her pulse had begun to pick up again for reasons she did not entirely trust. “Because it’s your name.”
Something in your expression shifted. You looked away for a second, out over the lights below. “I rarely hear it..” you said quietly. “My birth name.”
Natasha said nothing. “Not like that.” Your gaze lowered briefly. “Not from people who are not family. Or very old friends..or ghosts.”
Natasha took one step closer. “When almost a goddess is standing in front of you.” You said and now the edge of irony had come back a little, though it sat over something more vulnerable, “most people do not reach for the girl she used to be.”
Natasha held your eyes. “Maybe that’s because most people are cowards.”
That won her the faintest curve of your mouth, but Natasha went on before it could fade. “You’re not just what they call you in that throne room.” she said. “You’re not just Khaleesi or heir or legend. Or whatever else the world hangs on you because it’s easier to worship something than to understand it.” Her voice softened, “You’re also human.”
You stilled and Natasha’s breath was steady now, though she could feel the danger in every word. “You have feelings..” she said. “You have grief, Anger, wants. You have a history that still hurts when people get it wrong.” Her gaze dropped for only a second, then rose again. “Goddess to them, maybe. War hero, certainly. But none of that takes away your right to be treated like a person when it matters.”
You said nothing and for a moment you only looked at Natasha as if trying to decide whether you had truly heard what you thought you’d heard. Then a faint smile touched your mouth because you were amused, but because something in you had eased without permission. You took in Natasha’s words slowly and Natasha could see it happening.
“You speak strangely for someone from the outside world.”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
“I believe that.”
Natasha smiled despite herself and silence settled again, but it had changed shape. It no longer felt like distance..it felt like a threshold.
“Are you afraid of me?”
The question was direct enough to strip any easy answer out of the air. Natasha thought about lying, then decided against it almost immediately. You seemed to have made it impossible to do anything but tell the truth around you, which was rapidly becoming either a virtue or a serious tactical failure.
“No.” Natasha said and you studied her with unnerving calm. “No?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
Your head tilted slightly. “Would you kneel for me?”
Natasha’s first instinct was to smile or to throw it back lightly. To answer with flirtation and dodge the real weight of the question. The smile did come, but it died almost at once, because you had not asked it lightly. You meant it.
Natasha felt her own pulse in her throat. “Yes.”
“Why?”
This time Natasha did hesitate, not because she lacked an answer, but because she had too many and most of them would sound dangerously close to surrender. She took another second, trying to read your intention and finding, as always, that you gave away very little unless you wished to. There was no mockery in your face, no trap, only seriousness and beneath it something more fragile than the throne room would ever have allowed anyone to see.
So Natasha gave her honesty. “Because you’re intimidating.” Natasha said first and a flicker passed through your eyes. Natasha went on, “I’ve met powerful people. A lot of them enough that most of them stopped impressing me years ago.” She took a breath. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Natasha’s voice had dropped without her meaning it to. “You walk into a room and everyone changes. Not because they’re told to. Because something in them already knows they should.” Her mouth curved once, faintly. “You could ask for almost anything and people would hand it over before they understood they’d agreed.”
“And you?” You asked and Natasha held her gaze. “I’d want to.”
Your expression changed just slightly, but enough. Your breath caught so quietly Natasha might have missed it if she weren’t standing close. “I don’t want to kneel because you’re a princess..or because you sit on a throne. Or because your people call you a goddess.” Her voice roughened, “I’d kneel for you.” The words landed hard. “For you as yourself.” Natasha finished. “Not for the title.”
That did it. Natasha saw the impact of it move through you in real time. A stilling first, then a flicker of something bright and deep in your eyes, as if some private suspicion had just been answered and found true. Proof. That was what it looked like.
Proof that Natasha had not been lying in the tavern. Proof that she had not been performing in the throne room. Proof that whatever impossible pull had sprung up between them had roots in something more dangerous than attraction alone. You looked at her for a very long moment and when you finally spoke, your voice was quieter than before. “That.” You said, “is why I believed you in the bar.” Natasha felt her breath catch.
“And now.” You added, stepping closer by the smallest fraction, “I know you are telling me the truth about what is coming.”
They stood almost chest to chest now and the night air pressed cool against Natasha’s skin, but the space between them had become unbearable with heat. She could see every detail of your face at this distance. The pale lashes, the storm gray of your eyes deepened by darkness. The faint rise and fall of your breath and Natasha lifted one hand before thinking better of it.
She touched a strand of hair and tucked it back and you did not stop her. The silence that followed was no longer uncertain..it was permission. Natasha’s fingertips lingered just for a second against your skin and your eyes dropped to Natasha’s mouth. Natasha felt it happen inside her like a slow collapse.
When you leaned in, it was not rushed. The first touch of your mouth against Natasha’s was soft enough to feel almost careful, as if they were both still pretending they had a choice in where this was going. Then Natasha kissed you back and whatever restraint either of them had managed to build over the course of the flight gave way all at once. The kiss deepened with a kind of inevitability that was more dangerous than urgency. Natasha’s hand slid to the back of your neck, fingers slipping against the edge of your braid and you made a small sound into her mouth that nearly undid her on the spot. Natasha broke the kiss only long enough to breathe and immediately regretted it.
Your forehead rested briefly against hers. “You are very dangerous..” you murmured and Natasha laughed softly, “That seems unfair, coming from you.”
Your mouth curved and you kissed her again. This time there was less thought in it and more want. Your hands slipped upward, one catching lightly in Natasha’s hair, the other at her waist pulling her closer with a quiet decisiveness that made Natasha’s knees feel less reliable than she preferred.
“Still not afraid of me?” You asked against her mouth and Natasha kissed you once hard, before answering. “Not even a little.”
“Liar.”
“Maybe..” Natasha whispered and you smiled into the next kiss, but the smile didn’t last. One of Natasha’s hands found the stone wall beside your head. The other traced the line of your throat, then the edge of the dark collar there, then lower before discipline barely caught up with desire and your breath hitched. That tiny sound nearly ruined Natasha.
The push came then and want tipping into action. They were both suddenly moving at once, half laughing, half breathless, kissing between steps as they stumbled back through the open balcony doors and into the warmth of the chamber. Natasha caught you by the waist again and kissed you with all the tension the last day had built into her body: the throne room, the fear, the dragon, the sky, the trust, the honesty, the impossible dangerous fact of wanting someone who could ruin her with a word and instead had brought her flying.
You answered with equal force now. No more court distance, no more measured royal calm. You pulled Natasha in as if you had been holding yourself back by pure discipline and had decided, finally, you were done with that. The edge of the bed found the backs of your knees and Natasha stopped just enough to give you an out. You looked up at her, flushed and bright eyed and every bit as terrifying as you had been on the throne, only now with none of the distance left between them.
Summary: Natasha thought keeping things casual would be simple, that is, until the lines between what’s casual and what’s not start to blur.
Warnings: fluff, light angst, sexual themes
Words: 5768
The Avengers Compound kitchen is unusually calm that afternoon. Just the quiet hum of the coffee machine and the soft afternoon light spilling through the large windows as the two agents engage in a deeply serious debate.
“No, but listen,” Clint insists from the other side of the kitchen counter. “They made a good point.”
Natasha barely looks up from where she’s resting her forearms against the counter as she waits for her coffee to finish, but the faint curve of her lips shows she’s listening.
“If we put Thor’s hammer on some sort of tray,” Clint continues, gesturing with both hands to illustrate the concept, “and then pick up the tray…technically that counts as lifting the hammer, right?”
Natasha hums thoughtfully, tilting her head in exaggerated contemplation.
“Hmm,” she says slowly. “Interesting point.”
Clint brightens immediately.
“But,” Natasha adds, her green eyes glinting with amusement as she turns to him, “would it be you who’s worthy…or the tray?”
Clint opens his mouth and then pauses. His brows slowly knit together as he processes the loophole she just introduced.
Natasha watches him rub his chin in concentration, a small, amused huff leaving her nose. She shifts her weight slightly against the counter, enjoying the rare moment of downtime.
It’s peaceful, which is exactly why she doesn’t notice the footsteps approaching before a pair of arms suddenly slips around her waist from behind.
The action comes with a familiar ease as the warm body settle lightly against her back. Before she can turn, a chin rests comfortably on her shoulder.
“I know who’s worthy,” you murmur, your voice low as your words brush against the shell of her ear.
Natasha’s smirk appears instantly. She tilts her head just enough to glance at you from the corner of her eye, one brow arching in amusement.
“Do you now?” she asks, playing along.
You nod, a confident little grin spreading across your face.
“Mmmhmm.”
Your arms remain loosely wrapped around her waist, casual and unapologetic. One of your hands slips beneath the hem of her shirt, fingertips lightly brushing the skin at her side.
“And she’s pretty cute too,” you add offhandedly. “Especially when she wishes me luck before I leave for my mission.”
Natasha snorts softly under her breath.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then we’re going to have a problem,” you warn in playful threat.
Natasha simply raises her brow, unmoved by your words.
When it’s clear she’s not budging, you tilt your head and respond with an exaggerated pout, batting your eyelashes at her with ridiculous enthusiasm.
“Come on,” you say dramatically. “Don’t leave me hanging, Romanoff.”
Natasha chuckles at your antics, shaking her head. Still, she turns within your arms until she’s facing you. Her hands rise to your face, cupping it with easy familiarity as her thumbs brush gently across your cheeks.
For a moment, the playful noise of the room fades into the background.
“Good luck on your mission,” Natasha says softly.
Your smile appears instantly, but then—
Flick.
Her finger taps your forehead.
“Hey—!” you protest, instantly bringing your hands up to soothe the spot.
Natasha’s lips curl into a small, teasing smirk.
“Don’t do anything reckless,” she adds.
You respond with an exaggerated pout.
Before you can retaliate, the calm kitchen atmosphere is abruptly interrupted as FRIDAY’s voice echoes through the room, calling your name.
“Mr. Stark has requested me to inform you that if you are not in the hangar bay in the next sixty seconds, he will leave without you.”
A beat passes before she continues.
“Fifty-eight…fifty-seven…fifty-six…”
You roll your eyes and sigh.
“Alright, guess I’m going now.”
You back away, already heading toward the doors, though you pause long enough to point a warning finger at Natasha.
“This isn’t over,” you tell her with mock seriousness. “I’m getting back at you when I return.”
Natasha leans casually against the counter again, folding her arms.
“Sure you will,” she replies, entirely unconvinced.
You point at her again as if issuing a formal threat. Then you disappear through the doors.
Natasha watches them slide shut behind you before a quiet chuckle escapes her.
When she turns back around, she finds Clint staring at her with a raised brow. It’s the look he gets when he thinks he’s figured something out.
Natasha narrows her eyes.
“What’s with your face?”
Clint leans forward slightly against the counter, folding his arms.
“So,” he says carefully, “are you two together now?”
Natasha’s expression immediately flattens.
“No,” she says, her tone firm. “You already know what kind of relationship I have with her.”
Clint waves his hand vaguely.
“Right, right. The whole casual friends-with-benefits situationship.”
He points toward the door you just exited through.
“However…”
Natasha already doesn’t like where this is going.
“…that just now seemed a bit on the coupley side of things.”
Natasha rolls her eyes at his ridiculous observation.
“It was a hug, Clint.”
“Uh-huh.”
Clint nods thoughtfully.
“I mean,” he continues, “Laura hugs me like that all the time.”
Natasha gives him an unimpressed stare at his comparison. What you did just now is not the same thing.
“It’s just a hug,” she insists.
“Sure,” Clint says with a shrug. Then he tilts his head slightly. “But have you seen her hug anyone else like that?”
Natasha opens her mouth, but then she pauses. Her eyes narrow slightly as she thinks about it.
Because…no. Not really.
You’re friendly. You joke with everyone. You throw your arms around someone’s shoulders sometimes during celebrations or victories.
But that kind of hug?
Arms around the waist. Chin on the shoulder. Body pressed against hers.
That was different. You don’t usually do affectionate stuff like that outside the bedroom.
Still, Natasha quickly pushes the thought aside.
You and she spent last night together. Maybe it was just leftover affection from that.
Except, for some reason, the thought of you hugging someone else like that causes a strange irritation in her chest.
Natasha frowns faintly at the feeling. Then she shakes her head, brushing the thought away.
“You’re overanalyzing,” she says firmly. “It meant nothing.”
Clint raises both hands in surrender.
“If you say so.”
His expression, however, clearly says he doesn’t believe her. Still, he’s learned not to push Natasha when she uses that tone.
Instead, he nods toward the counter again.
“So,” Clint says casually, returning to the earlier debate, “picking up the tray with Thor’s hammer on top?”
Natasha smirks again.
“Doesn’t make you worthy.”
Clint sighs dramatically.
“Damn.”
~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~
The room is quiet.
Not the brittle, suffocating silence that sometimes settles over the Compound after a mission. Not the kind that presses in from all sides and demands to be filled.
This one is softer. Almost fragile. The kind that lingers in the aftermath of something warm.
Natasha lies awake on her back, eyes fixed on the ceiling above her.
Sleep refuses to come.
It hovers just out of reach, close enough that she can feel it pulling at her, but never quite close enough to take hold.
Beside her, your body is warm. You’re tucked into her side beneath the sheets, your presence a steady, grounding weight against her. Your arm rests loosely around her waist, fingers curled just slightly against her stomach like you’d fallen asleep mid-thought.
Your breathing is slow and even. Soft against her skin.
You usually aren’t here this long.
Most nights follow a pattern—one that neither of you ever bothered to name, but both of you understand perfectly. It starts the same. You come together, lose yourselves for a while, share a few quiet moments afterward. Sometimes, a conversation drifts lazily between nothing and everything. A few smirks, maybe a teasing remark.
And then you leave.
Always before it lingers too long. Always before it can become something else.
But tonight is different.
You had just gotten back from a mission, longer than usual, rougher by the look of it. Natasha had seen it in the way your shoulders carried tension, in the way your movements were just a fraction slower than normal. And so, the moment you stepped off the jet, she had taken you into her arms and pulled you straight into her room.
Instinct. Habit. Maybe something else.
Clothes hadn’t lasted long. They never do.
But afterward, after a momentary respite of just losing yourselves in each other, instead of leaving, you had just curled into her side, exhaled once, and fallen asleep almost instantly, like your body had finally given out the moment it felt safe enough to.
And Natasha had let you stay.
Slowly, her gaze shifts, and she looks down at you.
Your face is half-hidden against her collarbone, your hair slightly disheveled, messy in that way that comes from both sleep and everything that came before it.
For a long moment, she simply watches you.
There’s something unguarded about you like this. Something softer than the version of you she usually sees—the one who jokes, who fights, who moves through the world with sharp edges and practiced confidence. This version of you seems like it’s reserved for her eyes only.
And Natasha doesn’t know what to do with that.
Inevitably, her mind drifts. Back to the kitchen. The hug. Clint’s words.
Her chest tightens slightly at the memory, the feeling subtle but persistent. Annoyingly so. And with it comes the thought she had pushed down at the time.
Did it mean anything?
“You’re thinking really loud,” you mumble against her skin. The words are rough with sleep, barely formed, but they cut cleanly through her thoughts.
Natasha blinks, startled, her gaze snapping back down to you.
Your eyes are only half-open, unfocused, like you’re hovering somewhere between awake and asleep.
“You’re awake?” she murmurs quietly.
“Barely,” you grumble.
You shift slightly, adjusting your position so your chin rests more comfortably against her shoulder. Your arm wraps firmly around her waist in an absent, instinctive movement.
Natasha’s gaze flickers downward to your hand, resting against her stomach. Then back to your face.
“What was with that hug before you left?” she asks quietly.
You lift your head just enough to look at her properly, blinking like you’re trying to piece together what she’s talking about.
“What hug?”
“The one in the kitchen,” she clarifies. “Before your mission.”
Your brows draw together slightly.
“What about it?”
Natasha shifts onto her side, propping her head up with one hand so she can see you properly. The movement creates a small distance between you, just enough for her to notice.
“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “Clint was saying some things, and it just seemed…”
She trails off, searching.
“…intimate.”
The word lingers between you.
You go still for a second, thinking.
“Oh.”
It’s quiet. Almost too casual. But something changes.
Without seeming to realize it, your arm slips away from around her waist. It’s subtle. But the absence is immediate.
The space you leave behind feels colder than it should.
Natasha hates how quickly she notices.
You run a hand through your hair, still looking thoughtful.
“I guess I didn’t really think about it,” you admit. “It just sort of happened.”
Natasha nods faintly. That’s what she expected. Clint had been reading into it. Overanalyzing, like he always does. The hug didn’t mean anything.
It was just—
Nothing.
For some reason, that revelation doesn’t bring the relief she thought it would.
You sit up with a quiet stretch, a tired yawn slipping past your lips. The sheets fall away from you as you move, revealing the tank top and underwear you must’ve pulled on at some point.
Natasha’s eyes track the motion automatically. She remembers exactly how those clothes had ended up on the floor earlier.
The urgency. The heat. The way neither of you had slowed down long enough to think.
Now, you stand beside the bed, scanning the floor for the rest of your clothes.
The contrast is jarring.
Natasha stays quiet, watching as you dress—pulling your shirt back on, stepping into your pants, smoothing each fold as if putting yourself back together piece by piece.
When you finish, you turn toward her again. You lower yourself onto the mattress beside her, leaning in. Your hand lifts to her chin, gently guiding her eyes back to yours.
Then your lips press softly against hers.
Natasha responds without hesitation. Her hand slides up to the back of your neck, fingers curling lightly into your hair as she kisses you back.
For a brief moment, the thought crosses her mind.
Pull you down. Keep you here. Start it all over again. Lose herself in something easier than this feeling sitting in her chest.
But before she can act on it, you pull away.
“Sorry about that,” you murmur, your voice still close enough that she can feel the words against her lips. “I’ll try not to do anything like that again.”
Natasha’s brows knit slightly. She tilts her head upward, chasing your mouth for another brief kiss.
“It didn’t bother me,” she says quietly.
You smile, soft and small.
But when she leans in again, you pull back. Just enough to be out of reach. Her hand lingers in the air where you had been.
“But you’re right,” you continue gently. “That kind of thing’s too intimate.”
Your expression softens further.
“At least when we’re not hooking up.”
The words settle heavily in the quiet room.
“We agreed this was casual,” you remind her.
Natasha nods slowly. She remembers how this all started. Months ago, at one of Tony’s infamous parties. Too much music. Too much alcohol. Too many people packed into the living room.
The night had blurred into laughter, dancing, and eventually, one very impulsive decision.
The morning after had been awkward. Not because either of you regretted it, but because you both understood exactly what it could become.
And what that would mean.
In this line of work, relationships don’t come easy.
They come with risk. With distance. With the constant possibility of loss.
Neither of you had ever been particularly successful at making relationships work in the past. Neither of you had ever been good at holding onto something like that.
So Natasha made it simple.
No expectations. No attachments. Just something to take the edge off between missions. Something steady in the middle of chaos.
And it has worked so far.
You lean down again, pressing one last, gentle kiss to her lips.
“Let’s not blur the boundaries, Natasha,” you say softly. Then you pull away. You slide off the bed, your movements quiet as you head toward the door.
“Sweet dreams.”
The door clicks shut behind you, and the room falls silent again.
Natasha exhales slowly, her head sinking back against the pillow. Relief settles over her. Or something like it.
The misunderstanding is gone.
Everything is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
What you have is casual. Simple. Safe. It’s better this way.
She repeats it to herself as she closes her eyes.
Again. And again. And again.
Eventually, sleep begins to take her.
But no matter how many times she repeats it, it doesn’t quite erase the faint, persistent ache in her chest.
~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~
Natasha takes a slow, measured sip from her glass, letting the burn of the liquor settle before she swallows. To anyone else in the crowded living room, she looks perfectly at ease, just leaning casually against the bar at one of Tony Stark’s increasingly extravagant parties.
The room is alive with movement and sound. Music pulses through hidden speakers, low and rhythmic, blending with the hum of overlapping conversations. Laughter erupts from every corner. Glasses clink in celebration of yet another successful mission. The Avengers are relaxed, off-duty, and untouchable for the night.
Everything appears normal.
But if anyone cared to look closely, they would notice the cracks beneath her surface.
The subtle tension in her posture. The way her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around the stem of her glass. The faint clench of her jaw.
And most telling of all, the fact that Natasha’s gaze hasn’t shifted in several minutes.
She isn’t watching the party. She’s watching you.
When you told her you would avoid doing things like the hug, the things that blurred lines, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. A new boundary drawn, respected without argument.
At first, Natasha thought she wouldn’t even notice the difference.
But she had been wrong.
It started small.
A movie night in the common room.
Where you used to drop onto the couch beside her without hesitation, your shoulder pressed comfortably against hers, your presence warm and familiar. Sometimes you would lean into her without thinking, your head resting briefly against her arm as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Now, you sit on the opposite end. A pillow placed neatly between you two, creating a quiet, deliberate space.
Then in the gym.
After sparring, when both of you were catching your breath, Natasha had paused in front of you, expecting, without thinking, that same absentminded gesture where your hand fixes a loose strand of hair behind her ear as you made some teasing remark about her fighting skills.
But this time, you passed right by her, reaching behind her instead and grabbing your towel and water bottle without so much as grazing her skin.
Even during mission briefings, the difference was impossible to ignore.
You used to lean over her shoulder to read the screen, your presence close behind her. She could feel your warmth at her back, your breath near her ear as you murmured observations only she could hear.
Now, you stood at the table with your own tablet.
Still beside her but never close.
Always careful. Always just far enough away.
Natasha swirls the amber liquid in her glass, watching the way it catches the light.
So this is what you meant. This is the new boundary.
And she had agreed to it.
So why does it feel like something is missing? Why does the absence of those touches that “meant nothing” feel so…loud?
Her gaze sharpens slightly.
And more importantly, why are you giving them to someone else?
Natasha’s jaw tightens at the sight.
Across the room, you’re laughing. There’s a looseness to your movements, a little more relaxed, your smile a little brighter. Tony’s been generous with the drinks tonight, and it shows. You’re not out of control. Just…lighter.
Your arm is draped casually around Carol Danvers’ shoulders as the two of you talk, the two of you caught in your own bubble of conversation.
Carol laughs, her head tipping back at something you say. And you laugh with her. Then, without hesitation, your arms slip around her from behind, pulling her into a playful hug.
Natasha’s grip tightens around her glass.
It should mean nothing. It is nothing.
Just like how it is for her.
But to her irritation, the hug lingers. Your arms don’t drop right away from the other woman.
Carol nudges you with her elbow and says something in response, prompting you to lean closer so you can hear her over the music. You lean in a little too much, your face drifting into her space with an ease that feels overly familiar.
A sudden, sharp heat twists in Natasha’s chest.
Before she fully registers her own reaction, she downs the rest of her drink in a single motion. The glass meets the counter with a quiet yet decisive sound.
Then she moves.
Natasha crosses the room with clear intent, weaving through groups of people without slowing.
You’re still smiling when she reaches you, still caught mid-laugh as you turn to greet her.
“Hey—”
Her hand closes firmly around your wrist as she pulls you away from the other woman. You look at her in surprise, but you do not resist as she leads you through the crowd.
Behind her, Carol calls out, her tone light and amused.
“Hey, Romanoff, what’s the rush?”
Natasha does not respond or look back. She continues forward, guiding you toward the hallway.
You glance over your shoulder, your smile lingering.
“I’ll catch up with you later, Danvers!” you call.
The promise sharpens Natasha’s irritation. Within moments, she pulls you into her room.
The door closes behind you with a quiet click, and the atmosphere shifts immediately.
You move first. Your arms slide around her neck as you pull her into a deep kiss.
Natasha responds without hesitation. Her hands grip the front of your shirt, fingers curling into the fabric as she kisses you back.
There is nothing gentle about it. The kiss is intense and consuming as she steps forward, erasing the space between you until your back meets the door with a soft impact.
She barely notices. All she feels is the heat building inside her.
For a brief moment, an image flashes through her mind of you standing with Carol, your arms around her, leaning in without hesitation.
The feeling tightens inside her, and Natasha presses into the kiss with greater intensity.
Her hand slides to the back of your neck, holding you in place as though anchoring you exactly where she wants you. Where she feels she needs you.
Mine.
The thought hits her before she can stop it. She resents it immediately, hating how natural it feels and how good it sounds.
Because the truth is, you do not belong to her. You never have. That was always the agreement.
When she pulls back, it is only for a brief breath. Her eyes move over your face, taking in your flushed cheeks, your softened expression, and the way you are looking at her, completely unaware of the conflict inside her.
“Hey, what’s wr—”
She silences you with another forceful kiss.
Your words dissolve into a soft sound against her lips.
Her hands rise to cup your face, drawing you closer as though she fears you might slip away if she lets go.
“Natasha…” you murmur.
The sound of her name on your lips sends a dull ache through her chest.
Still, she continues to kiss you. Again and again, her lips lingering briefly before moving to the corner of your mouth, your jaw, your cheek, and then back again. The rhythm becomes restless and searching, almost desperate, as though she is trying to remind both of you of something unspoken.
Eventually, your hands move to her waist and pull her closer.
The contact draws a quiet breath from her.
Your touch feels exactly the same as it always has, and she hates how much she has missed it.
Your fingers trace along her sides and slip beneath the hem of her shirt. The warmth of your touch against her skin sends a shiver through her.
But the sensation is complicated.
Even as she leans into it, something inside her aches. This is the only time you touch her like this now, hidden away behind closed doors.
Outside of this space, there is distance. No casual contact, no easy closeness, and no quiet affection shared without thought.
Yet tonight, Carol received that version of you.
The realization sharpens the ache. For a moment, Natasha allows herself to sink back into the kiss, into the feeling of you, into the illusion of being chosen.
But the thought does not fade.
Only here. Only like this.
Abruptly, Natasha pulls away. Her hand catches your wrist, stopping your movement beneath her shirt.
She shakes her head.
“I can’t do this.”
The words feel as though they tear something open inside her.
You blink at her, confusion crossing your face. Your head tilts slightly as you try to understand, and then your expression softens.
“Are you worried about the drinks?” you ask gently. “I’m fine. I only had a few.”
She shakes her head again and steps back, creating distance between you.
“No,” she says quietly, gesturing between you. “I can’t do this with you anymore.”
The words settle heavily in the space between you.
Your hands lift slightly, as if you intend to reach for her, but you stop yourself at the last second and let them fall back.
For a moment, you simply look at her. Then something in your expression shifts. Your arms fold loosely, your fingers gripping your sleeves.
“Oh.”
The sound is soft, almost lost, but the way your shoulders drop afterward makes her chest tighten painfully.
You look hurt, though you try not to show it.
Every instinct in Natasha urges her to move, to close the distance, to pull you back and say something that will erase that look from your face.
But she remains still.
What right does she have?
She agreed to something simple and uncomplicated.
Yet standing here, watching you try to act as though this does not matter, she finally faces the truth she has been avoiding.
She does not want something simple. She does not want something casual.
She wants you.
Not just in this room or within some boundary. She wants you openly and completely.
The realization arrives all at once, clear and undeniable, and entirely unhelpful.
Because the words still refuse to come.
You offer her a small smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.
“If that’s what you want, Natasha,” you say softly.
Her throat tightens as she tries to respond, but no words follow.
You nod once and turn toward the door. The quiet click as it closes behind you echoes through the room.
Natasha remains where she is long after you have gone, her chest tight and aching.
Only now does she understand why.
~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~
Natasha exhales slowly, releasing a quiet sigh as she leans her hip against the kitchen counter. One hand remains loosely wrapped around a ceramic mug whose warmth has long since faded, yet she makes no effort to refill it.
She is waiting, though she cannot fully define what she expects. Perhaps she is waiting for the coffee machine to finish, for the silence to shift, or for something deeper that she cannot quite name.
The steady drip of coffee fills the otherwise empty room.
It reminds her of how things were only weeks ago, before everything changed and before words were spoken that cannot be taken back.
Sunlight stretches across the polished countertops, catching along the edges of steel and glass. Somewhere within the walls, the faint hum of the tower’s systems continues, a constant reminder that life is still moving forward.
However, she doesn’t feel as though she is moving with it.
Her thoughts wander without restraint, circling back to that previous night. Every word, every glance, and every moment she wishes she could change plays repeatedly in her mind.
A dull ache settles in her chest, familiar and unwelcome. Despite how hard she tried to ignore it, it never truly fades, instead lingering with quiet persistence.
She closes her eyes briefly, hoping for relief, but nothing changes.
The sound of footsteps echoes faintly from the hallway. The rhythm is steady and unmistakable.
Natasha’s attention sharpens immediately, her body reacting before her thoughts fully catch up. She glances over her shoulder and straightens as soon as she sees you standing in the doorway.
You appear just as surprised to find her there.
For a moment, neither of you moves. The space between you feels heavier than it should, weighed down by everything that was said. The silence stretches, pressing in from every direction.
Eventually, you offer a small smile. It is soft and genuine, familiar in a way that causes something in her chest to tighten.
But you do not step closer.
Instead, you remain where you are, leaning casually against the doorframe as though an invisible boundary separates you. The distance itself is not large, but it is undeniable.
And Natasha notices it immediately.
You clear your throat, the sound quiet but enough to break the tension.
“I am heading out for another mission today,” you say, your voice careful and measured. Your head tilts slightly, a habit she knows well, one that always made her smile without effort. “Wish me luck?”
The words are the same as always. The tone, the phrasing, and the moment itself are all familiar.
Everything surrounding them, however, is different.
There is space between you now, a deliberate distance that marks the line she has drawn.
Natasha swallows, her throat suddenly dry.
She understands what this moment means.
You are trying in your own way. You are trying to show her that things are still manageable between you, that you respect her decision, and that you can stand here and speak with her as though nothing has truly been lost.
Her fingers tighten slightly around the mug before she sets it down with a soft clink.
“Good luck,” she says quietly.
The words feel small and inadequate, but they are all she can manage.
Your smile lifts just a fraction more, and relief flickers across your expression. It is as though you expected resistance and are grateful not to find it. You nod once.
“Thanks, Natasha.”
Just like that, you accept it. You seem satisfied with that small offering, with the careful and restrained version of whatever exists between you now. You push away from the doorway and begin to turn, ready to leave things exactly as they are.
That is what breaks her composure.
It is the ease with which you accept the distance without question.
Something twists sharply in Natasha’s chest. In that instant, with startling clarity, she realizes she cannot continue like this. She cannot stand there pretending that polite smiles and quiet farewells are enough.
Her body moves before the thought fully settles.
“Wait.”
The word is soft, barely above a breath, but it stops you immediately.
You pause mid-step and glance back over your shoulder, confusion flickering across your face.
Natasha is already moving. She crosses the kitchen quickly, her steps decisive as she closes the space between you before doubt can interfere.
Before you can react, her hands rise, warm and steady as they cup your face.
Then she kisses you.
There is no hesitation, no restraint, no careful distance. There is only her, choosing you.
A soft, startled sound escapes you, muffled against her lips. For a brief moment, you freeze, caught off guard as you try to process what is happening.
Then instinct takes over.
Your hands find her waist and pull her closer as you return the kiss.
In that instant, everything falls back into place. The warmth, the familiarity, and the connection that never truly disappeared all return at once.
Natasha leans into you and deepens the kiss, pouring weeks of restraint, frustration, and unspoken emotion into it. Her grip tightens slightly, as though anchoring herself, as though afraid this moment might slip away again.
Your hold mirrors hers, firm and certain.
When she finally pulls back, both of you are breathing unevenly. She rests her forehead against yours, her thumbs brushing softly over your cheeks as she steadies herself in the moment.
“Don’t do anything reckless,” she murmurs.
The words are familiar, but their meaning has changed. This time, they carry everything she left unsaid before.
Your eyes open slowly as you study her face, and when your expression softens, Natasha knows that you understand.
This was not an accident or a lapse in judgment. It was a deliberate choice.
Before you can respond, FRIDAY’s voice cuts through the moment as she calls your name.
“Mr. Stark has requested that I inform you that if you are not in the hangar bay in the next sixty seconds, he will—”
“FRIDAY,” you interrupt calmly, “I got it.”
You do not look away from Natasha.
There is a brief pause.
“…Understood.”
Silence settles again, softer now.
Your hands remain at her waist, your fingers idly tugging at the edge of her top.
“So,” you say carefully, a hint of teasing in your voice, “are we establishing new boundaries?”
The question sounds light and joking, but Natasha knows what you’re really asking. You’re trying to understand what she is offering.
Natasha exhales sharply, her nose wrinkling slightly in slight irritation at the word.
“Yeah, new boundaries,” she mutters.
Your brow lifts slightly.
“And they are...?”
She rolls her eyes, though there is no real sharpness in the gesture. When she looks back at you, her expression is completely unguarded.
“Whatever lets me love you.”
The honesty is blunt and unfiltered in a way that’s entirely her.
For a moment, you simply stare at her in surprise. Then your smile spreads slowly, bright and certain. Your hands shift, slipping just beneath the hem of her shirt as your fingertips brush against her warm skin.
Natasha relaxes at the contact. Her eyes flutter closed, and a quiet sigh escapes her as relief washes over her.
The distance is gone.
Your arms wrap fully around her, pulling her into a tight embrace.
She melts into you instantly, burying her face against your shoulder as though it is the most natural place for her to be, as though she is finally allowed to rest there.
For a moment, neither of you moves.
Then, softly near your ear, Natasha speaks with quiet curiosity.
“That hug in the kitchen the other day…?”
You hum softly in response, waiting for her to finish.
“…Did it mean something?”
After a brief hesitation, you nod gently against her temple.
“Yeah,” you admit gently. “It did.”
Her arms tighten around you. And for a few seconds, the world narrows to just this moment, to the two of you standing in the quiet kitchen, holding onto something that never truly left.
“Forty-eight…forty-seven…forty-six…” FRIDAY'S voice counts softly in the background.
You groan quietly and pull back just enough to look at her, offering a reluctant, almost apologetic expression.
“This is not over,” you say with mock seriousness. You lean in and press a brief kiss to her lips before whispering, “I am going to tell you exactly how I feel when I get back.”
You begin to turn, but Natasha catches your arm and pulls you back against her. She arches a brow, a playful smirk forming on her lips.
“You honestly think I’m going to let you leave now?”
She leans closer to your face, close enough to steal your focus again.
Your grin returns instantly.
“Oh?”
Your arms slide around her waist once more, drawing her tightly against you.
“Are you planning to hold me here with you forever, Romanoff?”
Amusement flashes in her eyes.
“Maybe,” Natasha says, her smile widening. “Unless there is another boundary you would like to set.”
You rest your forehead gently against hers, a soft laugh escaping before you answer.
“No,” you murmur quietly. “That actually sounds perfect to me.”
~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~
a/n: hope you enjoy the fic and thank you for reading! (love/hate relationship with this one but I needed to get it out of the drafts so that I can stop editing it every time I see it 😅)
A/N: First chapter out of three!! I hope the royal language makes sense-
The conference room at the top of Avengers Tower had seen gods argue with soldiers, billionaires threaten monsters and the end of the world laid out across glass tables more times than anyone cared to count.
But tonight, the room felt different and that was the first warning. No voices overlapped or no one paced except Tony and even his restless movement felt muted, like the tower itself had decided to hold its breath. New York looked distant from up here, completely unaware that somewhere beyond the stars, something ancient and merciless was moving toward them.
The hologram above the table glowed blue. Vision’s face turned slowly within the projection, then his body, then the Mind Stone in his forehead. He was now a target, which meant..death sentence. A silence followed every rotation of the image. Steve stood with his arms crossed, jaw tight and Wanda sat beside Vision, her fingers wrapped around his hand as if physical touch alone could keep him anchored to the earth. Tony flicked his wrist and the hologram zoomed in on the Mind Stone.
“So, we’re all agreed that letting the big purple grape collect the magic forehead jewelry is bad.”
No one laughed and Tony’s mouth tightened. “Right. Tough crowd..” Shuri stood on the other side of the table with her arms folded and eyes bright with the kind of intelligence that made even Tony look like a man holding a candle beside a star.
“It is not jewelry.” she said and Tony pointed at her without looking. “I am aware.”
“You keep calling it jewelry.”
“I cope with world ending trauma through sarcasm. It’s a system.”
“It is a poor one.” Shuri stepped forward, tapping the holographic display. The image shifted, peeling back layers of Vision’s synthetic tissue and the luminous threads connecting the Stone to everything he was.
“The Stone is not merely attached to him.” she said. “It is integrated. Poorly, in some places but elegantly in others..and it can be removed.”
Wanda looked up. Vision’s expression softened, but there was fear beneath his composure. “How long?” Steve asked.
Shuri’s gaze flickered briefly to her brother before returning to the projection. “Long enough that we would need a controlled environment. My lab and my equipment.“
“Wakanda.” Natasha said.
T’Challa stood near the windows, he had been listening more than speaking. A king in a room full of warriors, letting others spend their panic first.
“Yes.” he said. “Wakanda.”
Tony exhaled, already moving to another screen. “Okay, good. We have a destination. We get Vision there, Shuri does her genius thing, we keep the Stone away from Thanos and maybe, for once, the apocalypse can make an appointment instead-“
“No.”
The word did not come from T’Challa, it came from Shuri. Steve’s eyes narrowed. “No?”
Shuri was looking at her brother now and he did not move, but something changed in his face. “We need help.” he said quietly.
“No.” she repeated, sharper this time. “Do not even think it.”
“We may not have a choice.”
“We always have a choice.” Shuri said. Her voice trembled, but not from weakness, but from the effort it took to hold something enormous back. “You taught me that.”
“I taught you that kings choose for their people before they choose for themselves.”
“You are not talking about Wakanda.”
“No.” T’Challa said and the room seemed to grow colder. Natasha straightened from the wall. “What are you talking about?”
T’Challa was silent for a moment. He looked at Vision first, then Wanda, then Steve. “If Thanos comes for the Stone..” T’Challa said, “he will not come alone.”
“We know.” Steve replied.
“No.” T’Challa said and this time there was steel in it. “You do not. Thanos does not conquer like men conquer. He does not send soldiers to claim land, or kings to demand surrender. He sends hunger and he sends teeth. He sends nightmares that do not understand mercy because mercy was never put into them.” Bruce’s face had gone pale because he had seen Thanos. He knew.
T’Challa continued, “Wakanda is strong. Stronger than any nation your world believes exists. Our shields may hold. Our warriors may fight. Our weapons may cut down thousands. But if an army falls from the sky with no fear of death, no need for rest and no desire except slaughter, then strength alone will not be enough.”
Shuri turned away, her jaw clenched and Tony looked between them. “Okay, I’m officially not loving the direction this is going.”
Steve stepped closer. “You know someone who can help.”
T’Challa’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “I know of a people.” He turned slightly, looking out over the city as if what he was about to say did not belong under electric lights and glass ceilings. As if it belonged around a fire, under a red sky, spoken by men who had seen gods bleed. “They live far from the world you know. Farther even than Wakanda, though not by distance alone. They are not on your maps and do not come to summits. They do not trade with presidents and they definitely do not ask permission to exist.” The room was utterly still.
“They are a kingdom.” T’Challa said. “Though that word is too clean for them. They are bloodlines and banners..Ash and bone. They are a people built by war, shaped by it, fed by it.”
Wanda’s hand tightened around Vision’s and T’Challa looked at her, “For centuries, they fought a war the rest of the earth never knew was being waged. Not for politics or for oil. Not for borders drawn by men in rooms. Their war was older than that. A war of oaths and prophecy. A war that swallowed generations.”
Bruce slowly lowered himself into a chair. “Who are they?” he whispered.
“Their society is harsh.” he said. “Law exists, but loyalty is stronger, blood..is stronger. A promise made before witnesses is worth more than paper and a coward’s word is worth less than the dirt beneath a horse’s hoof.”
Natasha’s face remained unreadable, but something in her eyes changed. She knew societies like that. Not the horses, not the banners, perhaps not the myths. But fear as language? Obedience as survival? Children raised to become weapons before they understood the shape of their own names? Yes. She knew.
“Their warriors wear their victories where all can see them. Long hair braided with rings of bone and metal. Battle trophies and proof of survival. Their riders are elite beyond anything I have seen outside Wakanda. They do not simply ride horses, they move like storms given bodies.”
Clint, who had been silent until now, frowned. “And you think they’ll fight Thanos?”
“I think..” T’Challa said, “that if they choose to ride, even Thanos will hear them coming.”
The words lingered till Shuri spoke, “They will not come for you.” Everyone looked at her. “They do not fight because someone asks. They do not send armies because the world is in danger. The world has never cared about them and they have returned the sentiment generously.”
“Then why bring them up?” Tony asked.
Shuri looked at him. “Because there is one person they would burn the world for.”
T’Challa closed his eyes for half a second, as if hearing the name before it was spoken.
Steve’s voice was careful. “Their ruler?”
“No..” Shuri said and T’Challa opened his eyes. “Their king and queen still sit the throne.”
The word daughter should have softened the room..It did not. “Age means little among them. She ended the war her ancestors could not. She broke armies that had been bleeding her family for centuries. She took men who had known nothing but vengeance and made them kneel. Not with speeches, not with treaties. With victory.”
Natasha’s gaze did not leave T’Challa. “What’s her name?” Shuri’s head snapped toward her. “Do not.”
Natasha’s brow lifted slightly and Shuri’s voice dropped. “Do not ask that lightly.”
Tony gave a humorless laugh. “We’re really doing the forbidden name thing now?”
T’Challa looked at him, and Tony’s expression faltered, because the king of Wakanda did not look irritated. “In their language, names have weight.” T’Challa said. “Hers more than most.”
“What do they call her?” Steve asked and T’Challa’s eyes lowered. For the first time since he entered the room, the king looked reluctant. “Khaleesi.”
The word fell like a blade laid flat on the table. It was not a name, not exactly, it was a title. But even without understanding the language, the room felt the shape of it. Shuri looked away as if even hearing it here, in this glass tower in the heart of New York, was wrong.
“They bow to her?” Rhodey asked and T’Challa’s mouth tightened. “Everyone bows to her.”
“To the princess?” Sam asked.
“To the victor. She is not first on the throne.” he continued. “Not yet. Their laws do not allow it while her father lives. Their family tree is old and cruel and tradition does not bend quickly, even for those who have earned more than a crown.”
“And yet?” Natasha asked.
“And yet..” T’Challa said, “her parents rise when she enters a hall.” That landed harder than anything before it. “Her brothers, cousins, generals, blood riders, priests, servants, enemies taken into chains, all of them lower their eyes. Not because she demands it, because they have seen what happens when she is opposed.”
Shuri looked back at the table, “They treat her like a god.” she said and the blue glow of the Mind Stone projection flickered between them all.
“They fear her.” T’Challa said. “They love her. They would die for her. They would kill for her. And there are many among them who do not believe there is a difference.”
Steve’s voice was quiet. “That kind of loyalty is dangerous.”
“Yes.”
“Can she control it?”
T’Challa looked at him. “She ended a war that had eaten centuries.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only answer that matters.”
Bruce was staring at nothing now, his mind clearly moving too fast, dragging old myths into new light. “You said prophecy..” he murmured and T’Challa’s eyes shifted toward him.
“What myths?” Bruce asked. “What exactly are we talking about?”
Shuri inhaled. “Dr. Banner-”
“No.” Bruce stood suddenly, chair scraping against the floor. “No, wait. Because there are stories. Old ones, not just Norse, not just Greek, not just the usual gods with bad parenting legends. There are expedition journals that were dismissed as fever dreams.”
Tony stared at him. “Banner.”
Bruce turned to T’Challa, stunned. “No..” he said softly. “No, that’s impossible.”
T’Challa’s face did not change and Bruce’s voice thinned. “They’re stories. Children’s stories.” Bruce said. “Myths..Dragons are myths.”
The word struck the room like thunder and for a second, no one seemed to understand it. Then Sam let out a breath. “I’m sorry, did he just say dragons?”
Thor, standing near the back with his arms folded, “Dragons are not so impossible.”
Tony turned on him. “You do not get to normalize this.”
“Many realms have them.”
“This is Earth.”
Bruce stepped away from the table, shaking his head. His eyes were wide with the horror of a scientist watching myth become evidence. “I thought they were symbolic.” he said. “I thought the fire was metaphor. The wings, the scales, the whole thing, I thought it was power exaggerated by people who didn’t understand what they were seeing.”
T’Challa’s voice was very soft. “They understood.” The room died around him. “They were real?” Wanda whispered.
“They are real.”
No one moved and Natasha felt the words settle beneath her skin. Not were..are.
“How many?”
T’Challa looked at Shuri. She shook her head once, pleading without words, but he looked back at the Avengers. “Once, the royal family had three.”
“Three.” Bruce repeated.
“Born from a line older than any record I have ever seen. Not pets or weapons in the way men understand weapons. They were bound to the family through blood and fire, through rituals older than their kingdom. During the last years of their war, the dragons changed everything.” His eyes lowered. “And then the war took them too.”
Wanda’s voice was barely there. “They died?”
“Two did.” The number moved through the room like a living thing. But..one dragon is still alive. Still enough to make a king of Wakanda speak with caution.
“And the last one belongs to her..?”
T’Challa’s gaze lifted. “No. She belongs to no one.” T’Challa said. “But he follows her.”
Natasha pushed away from the wall at last. “You’ve seen it.”
T’Challa looked at her. “Yes.”
Shuri’s expression tightened, but she said nothing now. The memory seemed to pull T’Challa somewhere far from the tower. “A few years ago..My father believed that Wakanda could not remain blind to the other hidden powers of this world. He took me beyond our borders, farther than our aircraft were tracked, farther than our maps marked with names.”
He paused. “Their land is not like Wakanda. Wakanda hides beauty behind illusion. They hide brutality behind distance. I remember the first sound.”
His voice lowered, drawing the room with it. “Thousands of them. The earth moved before they appeared. Then the riders came over the ridge, hair uncut and braided, blades curved, faces painted in ash and red clay. They did not slow when they saw us. They circled close enough that I could see the scars on their horses. Close enough that my guards reached for their spears.”
A faint, humorless smile touched his mouth. “My father told them to stop and their king came, but none of them were the reason the riders parted.” The room waited. “She was.”
Natasha’s fingers curled slightly at her sides. “I had heard the title before I saw her.” T’Challa said. “Whispered by men who did not whisper for anyone. She was young, but already riding a black horse with no saddle. Her hair was braided down her back with iron rings, each one marking a battle won. She wore no crown, she needed none. The riders lowered their weapons before she passed. Men twice her age touched their foreheads to the ground. Her own father stepped back to let her speak first.”
Shuri stared at the hologram, but her eyes were distant. “She was seventeen then.” T’Challa said and Bruce made a quiet, disbelieving sound. “At seventeen.” T’Challa said, “she had already won the eastern war.”
T’Challa’s eyes remained fixed on the past. “I did not understand it then. The way they looked at her, like she was salvation and execution wearing the same skin. I thought it was fear, then one of their prisoners spat at her feet and she did not flinch.” T’Challa said. “She did not raise her voice..only looked at him.”
“What happened?” Steve asked. T’Challa’s expression darkened. “The entire field went silent and one of the shadows came.” T’Challa said. “At first, I thought a storm had crossed the sun, but storms do not have wings. They do not blot out the sky with scales black as burnt metal. They do not breathe fire so hot that stone remembers it.” The room seemed to shrink around his words.
“One of her dragon landed behind her and she did not turn. The beast lowered its head over her shoulder like a mountain bowing to a girl.”
His voice became almost reverent despite himself. “And then I understood.”
Natasha whispered, “Understood what?”
T’Challa looked at her. “Why no one challenged her.”
For one bright instant, the tower windows reflected everyone’s faces back at them: soldiers, spies, gods, kings, monsters in human shape, all gathered around the image of a dying man with a Stone in his head. And somewhere beyond all their maps, a woman with a forbidden title and a dragon that followed her waited in a kingdom built from war.
Tony broke the silence, but his voice had lost its edge. “Okay..” he said. “So we ask dragon girl for help.”
Shuri’s head snapped up. “You do not ask her like that!”
Tony lifted both hands. “Noted.”
“You do not summon her!” Shuri said, voice hardening. “You do not bargain with her as if she is one of your politicians. You do not lie. You do not threaten. You do not look at her people like they are savages, even if they frighten you. Especially if they frighten you.”
Natasha watched Shuri closely. There was not only fear there. “You’ve met her too. ” Natasha said and Shuri’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“And?” For once, Shuri did not answer quickly. “She was kind to me.” she said at last. “She showed me their healing tents. Their forges. Their histories carved into bone and stone because paper burns too easily. She asked questions about Wakanda’s technology and understood more than she should have.”
A small, unwilling smile appeared and vanished. “Then a man interrupted her and she had him dragged from the hall.”
Tony blinked. “For interrupting?”
“For forgetting where he was.” Shuri said. “For forgetting who she was.”
“What kind of person are we inviting into this war?” he asked and T’Challa answered without hesitation. “The kind who can win it.”
The honesty sat between them and Natasha looked back at the Mind Stone. A creature like Thanos was coming..A thing with no mercy, no doubt, no hesitation and T’Challa was speaking of a woman raised in a world where hesitation read as weakness, where loyalty was blood deep, where gods were not prayed to but obeyed when they entered a room.
Steve drew a slow breath. “Will she help us?”
T’Challa turned toward the windows again. “I don’t know.”
Wanda’s voice was fragile “Can you reach her?”
“There are ways.” he said. “Old ways. Wakanda has kept them secret for generations, but understands this before I send word. If she comes, she will not come as a soldier under our command.”
His gaze moved from face to face. “She will come as Khaleesi. And where she goes..” T’Challa said, “..her people follow.”
Bruce sank back into his chair, stunned. “Dragons..” he whispered, still trying to make the word fit inside the world he knew.
Hours later, the Quinjet waited like a black blade against the gray dawn. The city below was waking without knowing it had almost died in a conference room hours earlier. And high above them, the team boarded a ship that would take them toward a country that did not exist. No one said what they were thinking.
A century long war? A hidden kingdom? A royal family with dragons? A girl worshipped like a god? It was impossible and absurd. The kind of story told by dying men around fires. The kind of thing carved into old ruins and dismissed by scholars. The kind of thing people stopped believing in when the world invented satellites, missiles, news channels and men like Tony who could map half the planet from a screen.
And yet..No one had known about Wakanda. The world had seen a poor country with cloth markets, shepherds and dusty roads. It had not seen the mountains open like the mouth of a god. It had not seen vibranium woven into cities. It had not seen aircraft without wings, weapons without bullets, medicine that could humble death itself. So no one
Vision was helped aboard first, Wanda never leaving his side. He walked under his own power, calm as ever, but there was something too careful in his movements now. As if the Stone in his forehead had become heavier since they had spoken its fate aloud. Steve followed, carrying a shield he hoped he would not need and knew he would.
When T’Challa entered, everyone was looking at him. “We have permission to enter their country.” The words landed like a sentence passed by a distant throne.
Steve gave a single nod. “Then we go.”
The sky changed from iron gray to pale blue, then to the molten gold of late afternoon, then to darkness so complete the windows became mirrors. Tony tried to track their route twice but the systems failed both times, as if the world beyond a certain point refused to be measured.
Inside the Quinjet, tension grew teeth. Natasha sat alone near the middle of the aircraft, she wanted to watch everyone else. That was how she survived, they was how she had always survived. Read the room and the breath before the lie and the fear before it became betrayal. And was full of fear. He sat hunched over, the old book open on his knees and Natasha watched him turn one page, then stop. “Hey.” She slid into the seat across from him. “You’ve been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.”
He blinked, then looked down as if surprised to find the book there. “Yeah.” he said softly. “I know.”
“That bad?” A humorless laugh escaped him. “I’m not sure bad is the word.”
Natasha leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. “Try me.”
Bruce looked at her for a moment, then carefully turned the book so she could see. The leather cover was cracked and darkened by age, the corners reinforced with dull metal. The pages inside were thick, uneven, yellowed at the edges and covered in ink that had faded from black to brown. On the page Bruce showed her, was a drawing. A girl stood at the center of it and was lifted above a field of bodies, her hair flowing behind her like smoke, one hand outstretched, the other holding a curved blade slick with black ink meant to be blood. Around her, men knelt with their foreheads to the ground. Some still held weapons, some had dropped them. Behind her, wings spread wide enough to swallow the sky. The dragon in the drawing was monstrous. Its neck was long and armored in jagged scales, its horns swept back from its skull like broken crowns. Its mouth was open and the artist had drawn fire spilling from it in twisting lines that consumed towers, horses, men.
Natasha stared at it and Bruce’s voice was quiet when he spoke. “I was told about them when I was a student.”
Natasha did not look away from the page. “By who?”
“A professor at Culver. He specialized in pre modern myth cycles. The kind of thing no one funded unless it could be tied to something famous. He used to talk about the hidden war, the fire line, blood riders and the last daughter.”
Natasha looked up at him. “The last daughter?”
Bruce nodded. “That’s what some of the older texts call her. Not because she was the only daughter, because prophecy loves making things sound dramatic and impossible to verify.”
“Prophecy.” Natasha repeated.
“I know.”
“That’s a dangerous word.”
“Yeah.” Bruce tapped the page lightly, careful not to damage it. “This book refers to her as the daughter of storm, smoke and slaughter. Which, you know, not exactly comforting.”
Natasha’s eyes returned to the drawing. “What does it say?”
Bruce hesitated. “Banner.”
He sighed, dragging a hand through his hair. “It says that when the old war reaches its final winter, the daughter without a crown will call fire down from the sky. It says kings will kneel before she sits a throne. It says her enemies will speak her name only once.”
Natasha’s face did not change. “Why only once?”
Bruce looked at her. “Because after that, they’re dead.”
The Quinjet hummed around them and Natasha studied the girl in the drawing. The artist had not made her look soft, that interested Natasha more than the dragon. Men loved turning dangerous women into either monsters or saints after the fact. They painted innocence over rage, beauty over violence, tragedy over choices. But whoever had drawn this girl had not softened her. Her face was young, almost painfully so, but her eyes were hard. A child drawn like an execution.
Bruce turned another page and there were more illustrations. Three dragons circling over burning siege towers. A young woman kneeling in mud with two massive dragon skulls behind her, her hands pressed to the earth, her mouth open in what might have been grief or might have been a scream.
“What happened to her?”
Bruce looked down. “I don’t know all of it. The texts contradict each other. Some make her sound like a liberator. Some make her sound like a curse. Some say she was beloved. Some say she was never human at all.”
“She’s still human.” Natasha said and Bruce looked at her. “People who are worshipped are always human underneath.” she said. “That’s usually the problem.”
Bruce was silent for a moment till a voice spoke from behind them. “You are right.” T’Challa stood in the aisle, he had moved silently despite the aircraft’s faint vibration.
Bruce shifted slightly. “You recognize this?”
T’Challa nodded. “It is a poor copy.” he said. “But yes.”
Bruce’s face changed, the last thread of skepticism in him snapped. “So it’s true..”
“Yes.”
Natasha leaned back slowly. “All of it?”
“No.” T’Challa’s eyes hardened. “Stories are never all true. They are shaped by fear and pride. By men who were not there and wished to sound as if they were.”
He touched the edge of the page, not quite making contact. “Before the Great War..She was not what she is now. She was kind.” T’Challa continued. “That is the first thing people forget because it frightens them less to believe she was born terrible.”
Shuri’s face softened, just barely and T’Challa saw it, then looked away. “She was loved.” he said. “By her people. By the riders. By servants who had no reason to love royalty except that she knew their names. By old warriors who had buried sons and still smiled when she passed. There are songs about her from before the war.”
Natasha looked again at the drawing of the girl surrounded by corpses. “Everyone wanted her so badly..” T’Challa said, “that the royal house created a private unit to guard her before she ever commanded an army. Not because she was weak, because she was precious.” His voice lowered.
“They called them the Silver Guard. Forty men and women sworn to her alone. Their oath was not to the king, not to the throne, but her breath.”
Steve’s jaw tightened, that kind of oath never ended cleanly. “When the Great War began, it did not begin with a battlefield.” T’Challa looked at the book, but it was clear he was seeing something else.
“An alliance was offered, a union meant to end generations of bloodshed. Her family believed it would hold, so they came under guest right.” T’Challa said. “And when the horns began, the doors were barred from the outside.” The Quinjet’s engines filled the silence.
“The Silver Guard died first, not because they were outmatched..Because they put their bodies between her and the blades. Forty sworn.” He paused. “Forty dead.”
Bruce looked down and Natasha kept her face still, but something in her chest had gone tight and sharp. “Her loved one was killed in front of her. Her people were slaughtered around her. One of her dragons was chained in the courtyard and pierced with scorpion bolts until the stones ran black beneath it.”
Shuri turned her face toward the window. “The second dragon broke its chains.” T’Challa said. “It burned half the keep trying to reach her. It died over the gate hours later.” Wanda’s eyes filled with tears and Vision, gentle lowered his gaze.
“The stories say she did not scream.” T’Challa said. “I do not know if that is true. I think perhaps men prefer women silent in grief because it makes legends easier to carve.”
Natasha looked at him then. There was a weight in his voice that had not been there before. “What I do know..” T’Challa said, “is that she survived and it changed her.”
Bruce whispered, “Rage took over.”
T’Challa nodded once. “Rage, grief..Duty. Perhaps all three became the same thing. She did not beg for justice. She did not wait for her father’s banners. She did not ask the old gods why they had allowed it. She walked out of the ashes with blood in her hair and called the last dragon.”
The words slipped through the Quinjet like smoke. “The enemy army was still beyond the walls. Thousands of men and lords already dividing lands they had not yet conquered.”
He looked around the cabin. “And then the sky opened. Fire came down first on the siege towers. Then on the horses and on the men who ran.”
T’Challa’s voice did not flinch, but the image did. It filled the aircraft without needing a screen. Men clawing at burning armor, warhorses screaming and flesh splitting beneath heat.
“She brought fire to the world.” T’Challa said. “Not in one night, not in one battle..That would have been mercy.”
His eyes grew harder. “She hunted them. Every lord who broke guest right. Every commander who ordered the slaughter. Every house that hid them. Every man who swore he would hurt her, touch her, chain her, breed her, break her-” T’Challa stopped himself. “By the end, those who had once promised to drag her through their streets were kneeling in the dirt, pressing their swords at her feet. Some begged forgiveness, some offered loyalty. Some called her chosen by the gods.”
“And she accepted?” Steve asked.
“She accepted their surrender.”
Bruce looked down at the book again, at the prophecy, at the inked girl surrounded by men bowing and fire blooming behind her. “She wasn’t a myth.” he said.
“No.” T’Challa replied. “She was a warning.”
Natasha stared at the drawing. Before, the title had sounded distant. Exotic in the way all foreign titles sounded until you knew the blood behind them.
A few rows ahead, Wanda spoke softly. “What is her name? Her birth name?”
Shuri stiffened and T’Challa did not answer. Wanda lowered her eyes, understanding she had stepped too close to something sacred. “You will hear it when she gives you leave to hear it.”
Tony looked toward the cockpit. “How much longer?”
“A few hours.”
And the hours passed. The Quinjet flew through weather that did not behave like weather. Then T’Challa stood and everyone’s attention snapped to him. “We are entering now.”
Steve moved first, then Sam, Rhodey, Clint. Wanda helped Vision stand, though he did not need it. Tony came forward slowly, one hand braced against the ceiling. Bruce carried the book against his chest like a shield and Natasha rose last. They gathered behind the cockpit and ahead, there was nothing but cloud.
“This is the border?” Sam asked and T’Challa nodded. The Quinjet entered the cloud and white consumed them. For several seconds, the world disappeared. There was no sky, no ground or direction. The windows showed only pale vapor rushing past like the breath of some sleeping giant.
Then the cloud broke and the world opened. Below them lay a country that should not have existed. Not hidden in poverty like Wakanda had once pretended to be. This land did not hide by shrinking itself..It hid by becoming too impossible to imagine. Mountains rose in vast black ridges, their peaks crowned in snow and gold sunlight. Valleys spilled between them, green and wild, crossed by rivers that flashed like silver wounds. Forests stretched farther than the eye could follow, deep and ancient, broken by roads of pale stone winding through the land like veins. To the east, the ocean struck cliffs so high the waves shattered into mist before reaching the top. Ships moved in the harbors below, their sails dark red and black, marked with symbols Natasha recognized from Bruce’s book.
Cities stood along the coast and hillsides, built of black stone, bronze roofs, white towers and bridges suspended over impossible drops. And ahead..the castle. It dominated the horizon. The fortress was carved into the side of a mountain and built outward as if the mountain itself had decided to grow teeth. Black walls rose in tiers, jagged and severe, banners streamed from every height, red and black against the wind.
Wanda stared down at the land, one hand pressed to the window. “All this time..” she whispered and Vision’s eyes moved across the landscape. “Humanity has always been better at hiding wonders than preserving them.”
Before anyone could ask anything, something moved in the corner of Natasha’s vision. A shadow over the sun. At first, she thought it was cloud, but then the shadow curved. The Quinjet’s warning systems screamed and red lights flooded the cabin.
Tony jolted forward. “What the-”
A roar split the sky, it slammed into the aircraft hard enough to rattle the frame, hard enough that Wanda grabbed Vision, Sam cursed, and Bruce nearly dropped the book. The roar rolled through Natasha’s ribs and sank into something older than fear.
Outside, the clouds tore open and the dragon appeared beside them. For one impossible moment, it was all the world contained. A body longer than the Quinjet, larger than anything that should have been able to stay in the air. Wings stretched wide, the thin membrane between their bones scarred and dark, catching the sun in veins of deep red. Its neck curved with terrifying grace, armored plates overlapping like shields. Horns swept back from its skull, cracked in places, each fracture pale against the black.
The dragon flew beside them as if the Quinjet were no more than a strange bird allowed, temporarily, to live and its eye fixed on them through the glass. Natasha had been looked at by killers, by monsters and gods. This was so much different..This was not a creature deciding whether she was dangerous. This was a creature deciding whether she mattered.
Bruce made a small sound behind her. “Oh my God..” Tony’s hand hovered over the controls, frozen. For once in his life, he had no joke ready.
The dragon’s jaw parted, rows of teeth appeared, each one curved and long as a knife. A low growl rolled out first, vibrating through the Quinjet’s metal skin, then came the roar again. The windows trembled and a panel sparked overhead. Wanda flinched despite herself and Vision stepped slightly in front of her.
The dragon’s eye moved to him and to the Stone. For one terrible second, the creature’s pupil narrowed and the cabin went cold. Then T’Challa lifted one hand and placed it flat against the glass. The dragon’s gaze shifted to him and recognition passed there.
T’Challa bowed his head and the dragon watched him. Then, with one powerful stroke of its wings, it rose above the Quinjet and the entire aircraft shuddered under the force of displaced air. Its tail swept past the window, ridged with spikes, close enough that Natasha saw old scars carved deep into its scales. Some were pale and healed, some were darker and newer. One jagged scar crossed the left side of its chest, a wound that looked like it should have killed even a creature born of fire.
Bruce stared at it, eyes wet behind his glasses. “The second dragon died over the gate..” he whispered. “And this one survived.”
The dragon wheeled ahead of them, black against the sun, and dove toward the castle. Far below, horns began to sound, warning the kingdom and welcoming the guests. Or announcing them to something far more dangerous than a king.
“Okay..” he said. “I believe in dragons now.”
No one laughed, no one even looked at him. The Quinjet continued toward the castle, escorted by the shadow of wings and ahead, beyond walls blackened by history, beyond banners snapping like blood in the wind, beyond a kingdom that had survived by becoming legend, she was waiting.
The Quinjet descended through the last coils of cloud and from above, the fortress had looked impossible. The platform was vast enough to hold half a fleet, carved directly from dark volcanic rock and veined with metal that caught the dying light in dull red flashes. Massive chains hung from iron posts along the edges, each link larger than a man’s torso. Beyond the platform, the castle gates rose in layers and above it, banners snapped violently in the mountain wind.
No one moved when the Quinjet touched down and for a breath, the cabin remained silent except for the low cooling hum of the engines. Then the ramp lowered and it definitely smelled nothing like Wakanda or New York. Sam stepped closer to the ramp and his eyes narrowed against the wind. “That’s a welcoming committee?”
Natasha followed his gaze and saw how soldiers waited on the platform. They stood in disciplined formations along both sides of the landing area, spears upright, curved blades at their hips, armor dark and matte beneath cloaks of red and black. Some wore helmets shaped like snarling beasts, others had their faces uncovered, revealing high cheekbones, scarred brows, dark eyes, pale eyes, brown skin, bronze skin, weather worn skin and hair braided with rings of iron and bone.
A man stood ahead of the soldiers, waiting at the center of the platform. He was older than most of the warriors, perhaps in his late fifties, though the harsh lines of his face made age difficult to measure. His eyes moved over the ramp as the Avengers began to descend. T’Challa went out first and the older man’s attention sharpened immediately. Then he bowed like a man recognizing another man of power under laws older than comfort.
“King T’Challa of Wakanda.” he said in accented English, his voice carrying across the platform despite the wind. “You return under guest right and old witness, your name is remembered.”
T’Challa inclined his head. “Lord Vaelar.”
The man’s mouth twitched faintly. “You remember mine.”
“My father taught me that forgetting a man’s name at these gates is an insult best avoided.”
This time, there was nearly a smile. “Your father was wise.”
“He often reminded me.”
Lord Vaelar’s eyes shifted to the others. Natasha felt every stare settle on them because she knew the sensation well. It was how predators looked at unfamiliar things before deciding whether they were food, threat, or weather. Steve stepped forward half a pace, but T’Challa lifted one hand slightly because he understood the rules here and everyone else would be safer letting him speak. “We bring wounded need and grave warning.”
Lord Vaelar’s gaze flickered to Vision and for a second, something in his expression changed.
“The royal family has been informed of your arrival.” he said. “You and those under your protection will be housed tonight. Tomorrow, you will be brought before the throne and heard.”
“Tomorrow?” Wanda’s voice cut across the platform before anyone could stop her. Her fingers tightened around Vision’s arm and red beginning to glow faintly at the tips. “We do not have until tomorrow.” she said, stepping forward. “You do not understand, something is coming. An army, a force you cannot imagine. He will come for Vision and if he gets what he wants, half the universe dies.”
Lord Vaelar’s face did not change but the soldiers’ hands shifted closer to their weapons. Shuri moved faster than anyone expected. “Wanda.”
Wanda turned on her. “No. I am tired of everyone speaking like we have time. He is being hunted and we came here because T’Challa said they could help and now we are supposed to wait for an audience?”
“Enough!” Shuri snapped and Wanda stared at her. Shuri’s eyes were fierce, “You are afraid, I know. But you will not stand on their stones and speak to their blood speaker as if he is delaying you for sport! You will not make threats with your magic glowing in your hands! Not here..”
Wanda’s breath trembled till Vision touched her hand gently. “Wanda.”
Her eyes flicked to him and the red faded. T’Challa turned back to Lord Vaelar, face composed, though Natasha could see the warning beneath his stillness. “Forgive the breach. Fear speaks quickly when love is threatened.”
Lord Vaelar studied Wanda for a long moment. Then he gave a small nod. “Fear is understandable.”
T’Challa continued, “The matter is urgent. If there is any way we may be heard tonight-”
“No.” Lord Vaelar said and Shuri’s shoulders tensed. Lord Vaelar did not look apologetic, “The king and queen do not receive unsummoned pleas after moonrise when the heir of fire is beyond the walls.”
T’Challa’s expression shifted subtly. “She is not within the castle?”
“No.”
“Will she return tonight?”
“That depends on the success of her..business.” Something about the way he said business made Natasha’s attention sharpen. It was a court word, a veil thrown over something everyone here understood and no outsider was meant to question.
Lord Vaelar continued, “Until morning, you are guests and guest right protects you. You will be fed, housed and left untroubled so long as you do not trouble others.”
Sam muttered under his breath, “That sounded friendly right up until it didn’t.”
Rhodey murmured back, “That’s kind of their brand..”
Lord Vaelar turned and the soldiers parted. The movement was perfect and the gates opened without a sound. The team followed and Natasha walked near the middle, her eyes moving everywhere. The entrance hall beyond the gates was large enough to swallow a cathedral and the floor was polished dark stone, worn slightly uneven by centuries of boots. Along the walls hung shields, banners, old weapons and enormous tapestries depicting battles in thread so vivid the red looked wet. Everywhere, people stopped to stare and children were peeking from behind pillars until older hands pulled them back but when T’Challa passed, several people lowered their heads, not in submission, but in recognition.
The castle was beautiful in a way Natasha distrusted. Built to awe and intimidate in equal measure and each arch was carved with flames. Each doorway was guarded by stone beasts with wings tucked close to their bodies. Bruce stopped once and Natasha stopped with him. He was staring at a mural stretching across one wall.
Three dragons flew above a battlefield, wings wide, mouths open, fire pouring down over towers and men. Beneath them, a young woman stood with her hair unbound and a blade in her hand. Lord Vaelar noticed but did not pause. “Your chambers are prepared in the eastern guest wing.” he said. “You will find water, food and attendants should you require them.”
The guest wing was warmer than the halls, though no less imposing. Their chambers were large and high ceilinged, furnished with carved beds, thick furs, bronze basins, low tables and windows that opened toward the city below. Vision was given the largest chamber so Shuri could examine him in private and Wanda followed him inside and did not come out again.
Bruce did not sleep at all. Natasha found him later standing by one of the tall windows in the common chamber, both hands braced against the stone ledge, staring out at the darkening sky. The sun had gone down behind the mountains, leaving the city below lit by thousands of fires.
“You’re going to burn holes in the glass.” Natasha said.
“There’s no glass.”
She looked closer and he was right. The window was open to the air, protected only by a carved stone lattice and a drop that would kill anyone unfortunate enough to test it.
“Then you’re going to fall out.”
“I saw a dragon..” Bruce said and Natasha leaned one shoulder against the wall beside him. “I noticed.”
“No, I mean…” He laughed once, “I saw a dragon. A living, flying, breathing dragon. It looked at us..looked at me. The mass to wing ratio alone should be impossible unless its bone density is unlike anything on Earth.”
“Maybe it isn’t.”
Bruce looked at her and Natasha shrugged. “Or maybe Earth has always been bigger than we thought.”
He looked back outside, expression softening into wonder edged with fear. “That’s what scares me.”
Behind them, the common chamber was quiet. The team had scattered into uneasy rest, or something pretending to be rest. Natasha felt the walls pressing in despite their size and she looked down at the city again.
“I’m going out.” she said and Bruce finally turned. “Out where?”
“City.”
His eyebrows rose. “Nat.”
“What?”
“We just got here.”
“I’m aware.”
“Where we were specifically told not to trouble anyone.”
“I’m not planning to trouble anyone.” Bruce gave her a look that suggested he had known her too long to believe that. Natasha smiled faintly. “I want to see what kind of people worship a woman like that.”
Bruce glanced toward the door. “Maybe ask T’Challa first.”
“I wasn’t asking permission.”
“No.” T’Challa’s voice said from behind her. “But you should listen to advice.”
Natasha turned and he stood in the doorway, still wearing the dark clothes he had traveled in, though he looked less like a guest now and more like a man remembering how to move in a place full of knives. Natasha raised an eyebrow. “You’re getting quiet again.”
“I have always been quiet.”
“Not like that.”
His mouth almost curved. Then his gaze moved to the window, to the city below, and the amusement vanished. “You should not go alone.”
“I can manage.”
“I know that.” T’Challa said. “That is not the concern.”
Natasha folded her arms. “Then what is?”
“You do not know the streets. You do not know the customs, know which houses are loyal to which bloodlines, which colors should not be worn after dark, which songs should not be requested in taverns, or which insults are insults until someone has already drawn a blade.”
“Sounds like most cities.”
“No.” T’Challa said. “It does not.”
That gave her pause. “I just need some air.” she said and T’Challa studied her. He saw more than most people, that was one of the reasons Natasha liked him and one of the reasons she was careful around him.
After a moment, he sighed quietly. “If you insist on going, cover your hair.”
Natasha frowned. “My hair?”
“Yes.”
Bruce blinked. “Why?”
T’Challa’s eyes remained on Natasha. “Red hair will draw attention.”
“It draws attention everywhere.”
“Not like here.”
Natasha touched a strand near her shoulder. “Should I be offended?”
“No. You should be practical.” Shuri entered behind him carrying a folded length of dark cloth. “He is right.”
Natasha looked between them. “Is red unlucky?”
“No.” Shuri said. “Rare and associated with old battle songs, foreign omens and women who appear in stories right before men do something stupid.”
She held out a cloth. It was fine, soft and dark enough to vanish in shadow and edged with subtle bronze embroidery. Natasha took it. “You were prepared for this?”
“I assumed one of you would make a poor decision before morning.” Shuri said.
Sam poked his head out of a doorway. “My money was on Stark!”
“So was mine.” Shuri replied. Natasha wrapped the cloth over her hair with practiced ease. She had worn enough disguises in enough countries to understand the language of fabric. She tucked the red beneath it, adjusted the fall near her cheek, and watched T’Challa’s expression.
“Better?”
He looked at her for a long second. “Yes.”
Natasha’s smile softened into something more genuine. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“I know.” T’Challa said. “Be more careful than that.”
The city took her in quietly, that was the first surprise. Natasha had expected noise, drunken shouting, brawls spilling from taverns, riders thundering through narrow streets, violence barely chained beneath torchlight. T’Challa’s warnings had painted a place where every wrong breath might invite blood.
Instead, the city at night felt controlled. The streets were paved in pale stone that glowed faintly beneath lanternlight. Buildings leaned close overhead, built of black brick, white plaster, carved wood, and bronze balconies draped with heavy fabrics. The soldiers were everywhere, they stood at corners, bridges, gates, watching without appearing to watch. Their presence explained the quiet more than any law could have. This was a city where violence existed, perhaps even thrived, but it had rules. It had places. It had consequences.
Natasha respected consequences. She wandered without seeming to wander, keeping to streets with enough people to disappear among but not enough to trap her. Eventually, she found a tavern, the sign above the door showed a black cup surrounded by painted flames.
Natasha went in and the room dipped in volume for half a second. That told her everything she needed to know. She crossed to the bar as if she belonged there. The bartender was a broad woman with gray hair braided over one shoulder and arms muscled from years of lifting barrels or bodies. Her eyes narrowed at Natasha’s clothes, her covered hair, her boots.
“You drink?” the woman asked in English that was rough but understandable.
Natasha rested an elbow on the counter. “That depends what you’re pouring.”
The woman’s mouth twitched. “Foreign.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“Then give me what you’d give someone who wants to stop being obvious.”
The bartender stared at her and she laughed. It was not a friendly laugh, “You want heavy?”
“I want to understand the local culture.”
“Then heavy.” the bartender decided and reached for a dark clay bottle from beneath the counter. The liquid she poured into a short bronze cup was nearly black, with a reddish sheen where the firelight caught it. It moved too slowly, clinging to the sides like syrup and the smell hit Natasha a second later.
Natasha picked up the cup, then someone crashed into her side. The drink spilled across both of them and Natasha reacted before thought. One hand caught the stranger by the waist to keep them from falling, the other steadied the cup, though far too late to save more than a mouthful. Dark liquid splashed down the front of Natasha’s borrowed tunic and across the stranger’s cloak.
The body against hers was warm and smaller than she expected, but strong beneath the layers. “I’m sorry.” Natasha said immediately, because apologies were cheaper than scenes and she had promised not to trouble anyone.
“No, no!” The stranger pulled back with a breathless laugh. “That was my fault. I was watching the door and not my feet, which is a very poor habit in a place with both furniture and witnesses.”
A young woman, her voice was low and smooth but threaded with amusement and Natasha looked at her and forgot, for one dangerous second, that she was supposed to be watching the room. The woman’s face was partially shadowed beneath a deep blue head covering, the fabric wrapped elegantly around her hair and throat, leaving only her face visible. But that was enough...more than enough. She had the kind of beauty men wrote wars around and then blamed on fate.
Her skin was pale beneath the tavern light, warmed by the gold of the flames. Her mouth was full and curved with the beginning of a smile and her cheekbones were sharp enough to make softness seem like a choice. Her eyes were dark at first glance, then not dark at all when she shifted beneath the light, but strange, luminous, somewhere between violet and gray and storm clouds before lightning. Natasha had seen beautiful people. She had been trained with beautiful people. She had used beauty, weaponized it, dismissed it, survived it. This was different.
The woman glanced down at the stain spreading across both of them. Then she touched two fingers to the wet fabric near her collarbone, lifted them to her mouth and tasted the drink. Natasha’s attention fixed briefly on her lips and the woman’s eyebrows rose. “You were going to drink that?”
“That was the plan.”
“Willingly?”
“I like to live dangerously.”
The woman’s smile widened. “There are easier ways to die.”
Natasha leaned against the bar, letting her gaze move over the stranger’s covered hair, layered cloak, fine gloves and boots that looked too well made for someone trying not to be noticed. “And here I thought you were about to apologize.”
“I did apologize.”
“You also insulted my drink.”
“I insulted your judgment.” the woman corrected. “The drink is blameless. It does what it was made to do.”
“And what is that?”
“Punish arrogance.”
Natasha laughed softly despite herself and the woman’s eyes brightened. The woman turned to the bartender. “Another.” Then she looked back at Natasha, “I spilled it, I replace it.”
“Generous.”
“Practical. I dislike owing strangers.”
“Then we’re strangers?”
“For the moment.” Natasha angled her body toward her. “And later?”
The woman’s smile turned slow enough to be dangerous. “That depends on whether you survive the drink.”
The bartender set down a fresh cup. The woman picked it up before Natasha could and lifted it in a small toast. “To poor footing.”
“And dangerous judgment.” Natasha replied.
The woman drank. The dark liquor disappeared past her lips and her expression did not change at all. No cough, no blink, no tightening around the eyes. Nothing. She lowered the cup and passed it to Natasha. The challenge was silent and Natasha accepted it. She had survived Russian vodka, contraband Balkan spirits, poison-laced champagne in Prague and something Fury had once called whiskey despite all evidence to the contrary.
She could handle a drink, so she took a mouthful and fire detonated behind her teeth. The taste was smoke and iron and pepper and old fruit left to ferment in a dragon’s throat. Heat punched down her throat, spread through her chest and tried to climb back out through her nose. Natasha turned slightly, because she refused to spit it across the bar, but a cough escaped her anyway.
The woman laughed, it was a beautiful sound and an infuriating one. Natasha set the cup down with great care while her eyes watered. The woman was still laughing when she reached for a pitcher, poured water into a plain cup, and offered it, “Here.”
Natasha took it, throat burning. “I’m..fine.”
“Of course.”
“I am.”
“You look very fine.”
Natasha drank the water and the woman watched with undisguised delight. The woman leaned closer. “Take your time.”
There it was again, that confidence. Natasha was used to watching people respond to her. The shift in breathing or the moment they realized she was flirting with intent and keeping up with her, but this woman was not struggling to keep up. She was enjoying herself.
She was young, yes. Young enough that Natasha should have held the advantage through experience alone. But the stranger flirted like someone born in a court where language had always been a weapon and desire was simply another battlefield. She knew when to answer or to deflect. When to offer enough truth to make Natasha chase the rest. Natasha liked skill..she liked it too much.
“You’re enjoying this.” Natasha said.
“I am.”
“At least you’re honest.” Natasha lowered the cup and smiled. The woman’s laughter softened into something warmer, but her eyes remained sharp. She leaned one hip against the bar, close enough that Natasha could smell the night air on her cloak beneath the spilled liquor. “You still haven’t told me your name.” Natasha said.
“Neither have you.”
“Mine is harder to earn?”
The woman’s smile turned wicked. “You assume yours is the prize.”
Natasha nearly laughed and that actually caught her off guard. The stranger saw it and looked delighted. “There.”
“What?”
“You did not expect me to bite back.”
“I expected it.”
“No.” The woman stepped closer until the edge of her sleeve brushed Natasha’s wrist. “You hoped for it.”
Natasha’s expression did not change, but inside, something sharpened. This girl was good.
“Maybe.” Natasha said and the woman’s eyes dropped to her mouth again, “I hoped you would stay.”
Natasha’s answer came softer than she intended. “I haven’t left.”
“No..” the woman murmured. “You have not.”
The tavern became smaller around them. The singer’s voice blurred into the warmth of the room and a chair scraped against stone. Somewhere behind Natasha, someone laughed, but it sounded far away. The space between her and the veiled stranger was suddenly the only place with heat. “So what should I call you?”
“What do you call women whose names you do not know?”
“That depends on what I want from them.”
The woman’s eyes flashed. “And what do you want from me?”
Natasha let the silence stretch and a slow smile touched her mouth. “I was going to start with conversation.”
“Liar.”
“Was I that obvious?”
“You say that often.”
“I am right often.”
Natasha leaned in until her voice was just for her. “Careful. Confidence can be mistaken for arrogance.”
The woman did not retreat. “Only by people too small to recognize it.”
Natasha stared at her. “You’re trouble.”
“Yes.”
“No denial?”
“I thought honesty pleased you.”
“Depends how it’s used.” The woman’s fingers brushed the back of Natasha’s hand where it rested against the bar. A mistake if either of them wanted to pretend. “And this?” she asked.
Natasha looked down at the touch, then back up. “That depends how it’s used.”
The stranger’s thumb moved once, barely there, over Natasha’s knuckle and Natasha’s breath stayed steady by training alone. The woman noticed anyway and her smile softened into something slow and victorious. “You are easier to read than you pretend.”
Natasha turned her hand, catching the woman’s fingers before she could withdraw. “And you are enjoying pretending not to be.”
The woman looked at their joined hands, then at Natasha. “You are very bold for a guest.”
Natasha’s eyes narrowed faintly. “How do you know I’m a guest?”
The woman did not miss the slip. “You are not a merchant. Not a rider or temple sworn. Not court born. You entered under someone’s protection or you would not have crossed the border at all.”
Natasha’s thumb traced once over the side of the woman’s finger. “Then you already knew I wasn’t from here before I said anything.”
“Yes.”
“And you still spilled my drink?”
The woman’s smile grew dangerous. “Perhaps I was curious too.”
Natasha should have pulled back. Instead, she moved closer. “How curious?”
The woman looked at her as if weighing how much truth would make the game sweeter. “Enough to ruin your drink.”
“That all?”
“No.”
Natasha had to remind herself where she was. Hidden kingdom, strange laws and royal blood. Vision with a Stone in his head and Thanos somewhere beyond the sky. But then the woman’s fingers tightened lightly around hers and Natasha thought, one more minute. Just one.
The stranger tilted her head. “You are thinking too much.”
“I’m usually praised for that.”
“Not by anyone trying to kiss you.”
Natasha’s smile was immediate, “There it is.”
“What?”
“The first honest thing you’ve said all night.”
The woman leaned close enough that her breath touched Natasha’s cheek. “No.” she said softly. “The first honest thing was that I was interested.”
Natasha turned her face slightly and their mouths were close now. Too close for the tavern, but not close enough for Natasha. The woman’s eyes flicked down, then up again. She was waiting and she was letting Natasha feel the space and choose what to do with it.
Natasha respected restraint but respected temptation more. “You do this often?” Natasha asked.
“Almost kiss strangers in taverns?”
“Make them want to forget why they came.”
The woman smiled, but something darker moved beneath it. “No. Do you?”
Natasha could have lied, instead, she said, “Not like this.”
For the first time, the stranger looked truly surprised. Then her expression changed as if Natasha had offered something more intimate than a name.
“Good.” she said and Natasha felt it like fingers at her throat. A man brushed past behind them, giving the veiled woman a wide berth despite the crowd. His shoulder nearly clipped Natasha’s but swerved at the last moment. He murmured something in the local language without looking up.
The stranger caught Natasha catching it. “You are important.” Natasha said and the woman withdrew her hand slowly, but not because she was embarrassed, but because the game had turned dangerous.
“Many people are important.”
“Not like that.”
“You do not know what that was.”
“I know deference.”
The woman’s eyes sharpened. “And do you offer it?”
Natasha leaned against the bar, letting her gaze move over the hidden face, the elegant veil, the mouth that had already become a problem.
“Depends who earns it.”
That pleased the woman so much she looked almost angry about it. “You would be difficult to command.” she said.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I did not say I dislike difficult things.”
Natasha laughed softly. “You are young to sound so sure of yourself.”
The woman’s smile vanished with warning. “I am old enough to know what I want.” the woman said.
Natasha held her gaze. “And what do you want?”
The stranger stepped closer again. “You.”
The answer struck harder than flirtation should have and Natasha did not move. For all her training, all her control, all the years she had spent using desire as tool, cover, weapon and shield, she found herself briefly, absurdly, without words.
The woman saw that too and a smile slowly returned to her face. “Did I steal your tongue?” she asked and Natasha recovered with a slow inhale. “No.”
“No?”
“I was deciding whether you meant it.”
“And?”
Natasha’s eyes dropped to her mouth. “You meant it.” The woman’s voice softened. “Yes.”
The honesty changed the air. Natasha felt the pull then, fully. Not curiosity anymore, not simple attraction, but something heavier, wrapped in risk and heat and the intoxicating knowledge that both of them were hiding almost everything except wanting.
The stranger turned slightly, looking toward the tavern’s side passage. “There is a quieter place..” Natasha’s pulse shifted and T’Challa’s warnings came back. She looked at the woman, at the veil hiding her hair, at the eyes that knew too much. At the mouth still curved like it expected Natasha to follow and would be disappointed if she did not.
“You invite strangers to quiet places often?” Natasha asked.
“No.”
“Should I believe that?”
“No.”
Natasha smiled and the woman’s smile answered. “But it is true.” she added.
Natasha looked toward the door, then back to her. “And if I say no?”
The woman’s gaze moved over her face, lingering just enough to make Natasha feel it. “Then I finish my drink and wonder whether you are as disciplined as you pretend.”
Natasha laughed under her breath. “You make saying no sound like losing.”
“It would be.”
“For who?”
The woman stepped in close enough that their sleeves brushed again. “For both of us.”
Natasha knew, in that moment, that this woman had come into the tavern wanting distraction. Maybe amusement or power without ceremony. Maybe a night where no one bowed, no one feared, no one begged her for anything. Natasha did not know the shape of that truth, she only knew its shadow and she was already stepping into it.
“Lead the way.” she said and the woman’s smile turned brilliant beneath the veil. And Natasha, who should have known better than to follow secrets into the dark, followed her anyway.
The woman led her deeper inside. Past the bar, past the crowded tables, past the hearth where the singer’s voice curled low and rough through the smoke. There was a side corridor half hidden behind a hanging curtain of dark beads and leather strips. No one stopped them when the woman pushed through it. No one even looked directly at them, though Natasha felt the awareness shift around the room.
Natasha followed close behind, close enough to see the elegant line of the woman’s neck beneath the veil, close enough to notice how she moved. She walked like someone used to doors opening before she reached them, like the world had always made space for her and she had grown bored of pretending not to expect it. But when she glanced back at Natasha, there was nothing cold in her eyes. Only amusement.
The sounds of the tavern dulled behind them, swallowed by heavy stone walls and thick rugs beneath their boots. Lanterns burned low in iron brackets and the air smelled of wine, smoke and something floral Natasha could not place. At the end of the corridor stood a dark wooden door carved with the same black horse that marked the tavern entrance. The woman took a key from inside her sleeve.
“Private room?” Natasha asked and the woman inserted the key without looking away from her. “Did you think I would take you somewhere public?”
“I was wondering how bold you were.” The lock clicked and the woman smiled. “Still wondering?”
Natasha stepped closer, close enough that the woman’s back almost touched the door. “No.”
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. The tavern was only a few steps away, but it felt distant now. The music had become a pulse through the walls and the firelight from the corridor touched the edge of the woman’s veil, the curve of her mouth, the sharp brightness of her eyes. Natasha should have thought. She should have slowed down. She should have remembered the mission, Vision, the Stone, T’Challa’s warnings, the impossible kingdom above them, the dragon somewhere in the sky.
Instead, the woman opened the door and backed inside and Natasha followed. The door closed behind them and they reached for each other at the same time. There was no careful beginning or slow approach. The tension from the tavern snapped the moment privacy wrapped around them. Natasha caught the woman by the waist and pressed her back against the door and the woman went willingly, laughing once against Natasha’s mouth before the laugh broke into a kiss.
The woman kissed like she did everything else: with confidence, control and a wicked awareness of exactly what she was offering. Her hands found Natasha’s jacket, fingers curling into the fabric and pulling her closer instead of pushing her away. Natasha felt the strength in her grip, the poise even in the rush of it, and it made something low in her stomach tighten. This girl was definitely not overwhelmed by her and that was the part that made Natasha burn.
The woman let Natasha lead her back from the door, but not because she was yielding. She allowed it with the grace of someone granting permission, step by step, mouth never leaving Natasha’s for long. When Natasha turned them and walked her backward toward the table, the woman followed the pressure of her hands easily, almost elegantly, her body answering without losing its own rhythm.
Natasha melted a little at that and hated that she did. The woman noticed and she pulled back just enough to breathe, lips parted, eyes bright beneath the shadow of the veil. “You like being obeyed..” she murmured and Natasha’s fingers tightened at her waist.
“I like being understood.”
The woman smiled, “Then understand this.” She caught the front of Natasha’s jacket and pulled her back in and the kiss deepened. Natasha’s hands slid under the edge of the woman’s outer cloak, feeling warmth through layers of fine fabric. The cloak was loosened with a practiced tug and the woman let it fall from her shoulders, not breaking the kiss as it dropped to the floor. Natasha’s own jacket followed a moment later, pushed down her arms by impatient hands.
They stumbled toward the low couch near the wall, though stumble was not the right word for the woman. Even half blinded by kissing, even breathless, she moved like a dancer who had once learned war instead of music. Natasha could not stop noticing her. The elegance and the danger under it. The way she let Natasha press her down onto the edge of the couch and still somehow made it feel like Natasha had been invited exactly where the woman wanted her.
Natasha kissed her again, slower now, one hand braced beside her shoulder, the other at her waist. The woman arched into her touch with a quiet sound that made Natasha’s thoughts scatter. Then Natasha’s fingers found the fastening near the woman’s throat and the veil shifted. T’Challa’s voice cut through the heat in her mind and Natasha froze. The woman felt it immediately and opened her eyes. “What is it?”
Natasha breathed once, steadying herself. Her hand was still near the veil. Too close to a truth she had no right to uncover without thinking. “I..can’t.” Natasha said quietly. The woman’s expression changed, but not with offense. “Can’t?”
Natasha pulled back enough to put space between them. Her own scarf had loosened during the kissing, but most of her red hair was still hidden beneath it.
“I was warned.” she said and the woman sat up slightly, “About me?”
Natasha gave a breathless little laugh. “About everyone.”
That earned the smallest smile, but it faded quickly. “What warning stopped you?”
Natasha touched the edge of her own scarf. “My hair draws attention here.” The woman’s eyes dropped to the movement and Natasha hesitated. Then, slowly, she pulled the scarf away and red hair spilled loose around her shoulders. The woman stopped moving and for the first time since Natasha had met her, the stranger looked genuinely stunned. Her eyes moved through Natasha’s hair as if she had never seen anything quite like it. The silence stretched so long that Natasha, impossibly, felt almost self-conscious.
Then the woman reached out and stopped just before touching, asking without words, but Natasha allowed it. The woman took one strand between her fingers, careful and fascinated. “Is it natural?” she asked.
Natasha blinked, then she smiled, That was new. People had called her hair beautiful, dangerous, pretty or a target. A disguise ruined by genetics. No one had ever asked with that kind of wonder. “Yes.” Natasha said. “It’s natural.”
The woman looked up at her and the fascination had not faded. “It looks like flame.”
Natasha’s smile softened despite herself. “That’s what they’re afraid of?”
The woman’s thumb brushed the red strand once before letting it slip free. “No.” she said. “That is what they would remember.”
The woman leaned closer again, but Natasha did not move yet. “You said you were warned..” she murmured. “And now?”
Natasha’s gaze flicked toward the hidden veil. “Now I’m wondering what you’re hiding.”
A slow smile returned to the woman’s mouth. “Something less rare than yours.”
“I doubt that.”
The woman’s eyes glittered, then she reached up and loosened the pins beneath her veil. Layer by layer, the cloth slipped away and at first, Natasha saw only pale strands at the temple. Then more and all of it. Long snow white hair fell over the woman’s shoulders in a shining wave and Natasha stopped breathing. The room seemed to go silent around her, the tavern beyond the walls disappeared.
White.
Not silver, blond or gray. White as moonlight on fresh snow. It spilled down over the woman’s dark clothing, over her shoulders and chest, luminous in the low light, impossibly soft looking and impossibly striking. It changed the shape of her beauty into something almost unreal. Before, Natasha had thought her stunning. Now, with her face fully revealed and that white hair loose around her, she looked like something from the old tapestries in the castle. A girl from bloodlines people wrote laws around.
Natasha stared, she knew she was staring but couldn’t stop. The woman watched her closely and this time there was no teasing in her expression. Natasha’s mind moved, because Natasha’s mind always moved, even when her body wanted to forget how to stand. T’Challa had said snow white hair belonged to royal blood. Royal blood, not only one woman..
Certain branches tied closely to it. Noblewomen wore veils, royal cousins wore veils. Court women moving quietly through the city without drawing the wrong eyes. And Lord Vaelor had said Khaleesi was not in the castle tonight. Surely that meant away from the city..Away from taverns and from private rooms with foreign spies. Surely the woman a whole kingdom lowered its eyes for would not be here alone, smiling beneath a veil, tasting spilled liquor from her own shirt, flirting like the world had never placed a crown shaped blade above her head.
Surely, if this woman were Khaleesi, someone would have bowed. Someone would have whispered or would have panicked. But no one had..People had given her space, yes, but that could mean noble or royal adjacent.
Not Khaleesi. Not the dragon’s chosen. Not the almost-queen they had crossed the world to beg for help.
Natasha let herself believe the simpler danger, because the other one was too impossible. The woman was looking at her now like she did not want to be recognized. She wanted to be wanted and Natasha wanted her.
“You’re beautiful..” Natasha said before she could make the words clever. The woman’s expression shifted and for all her confidence, for all her sharpness, that seemed to reach her. “Careful..” she said softly. “You sound honest.”
Natasha stepped closer. “I am.”
The woman looked at Natasha’s red hair, then back into her eyes. “Then I do not care about the warning.”
Natasha’s breath caught. “No?”
“No.” The woman’s hand rose, fingers slipping carefully into Natasha’s hair. “I like it.”
Natasha’s gaze dropped to the woman’s mouth. “And your hair?” The woman smiled faintly. “Will you run?”
Natasha lifted her hand and touched one white strand, letting it slide between her fingers like silk. “No.”
“Will you kneel?”
Natasha’s eyes returned to hers. That question should have sounded playful. It did not. It sounded like something from a throne room, dragged into candlelight.
Natasha’s heart slammed against her ribs. She was older than this girl, had seen more wars, more beds, more ways desire could be used as both weapon and surrender and yet here she was, utterly undone by snow white hair and storm eyes that looked at her like she was something precious instead of dangerous. She wanted her. God, she wanted her. The kind of want that made every trained instinct short circuit.
Natasha sank to her knees without hesitation, the thick rug cushioning the fall. Respect and hunger twisted together until she couldn’t tell them apart as she looked up, eyes dark with need. The woman’s breath caught, surprise flickering across that beautiful face before it melted into something warmer, almost tender. She leaned back slowly on the fur draped bed, white hair fanning out like moonlight, thighs parting in open invitation. “You…chose that so easily for me?”
Natasha nodded once, crawling forward between those spread legs because she needed to be closer. “For you.” she answered, voice rough. “Only you.”
The woman’s smile softened, eyes glittering with delight and something deeper. She reached down and brushed her fingers through Natasha’s hair, not tugging, just stroking like she couldn’t quite believe this was happening. “Then show me..” she whispered.
Those words snapped the last thread of Natasha’s restraint. She leaned in and pressed her mouth to the inside of one pale thigh, kissing reverently before dragging her tongue higher. When she reached the heated center, she licked a slow, hungry stripe up the glistening folds and moaned at the taste, sweet and warm and addictive.
The woman’s hips jerked, a surprised little gasp escaping her. Then the first real moan spilled out completely unguarded. Natasha’s mind went white..It hit Natasha like fire in her veins. Her self-control, the careful distance she always kept, the calculated moves, the older woman composure shattered completely. She was supposed to be the one in control…but right now all she could think was more. She needed more of that sound, needed to be the reason it kept happening.
She dove in like a woman possessed, her tongue circled the swollen clit with desperate hunger, sucking it gently between her lips before licking back down to push inside her. The woman’s fingers tightened in her red hair, not pulling, just holding on as another moan tore free, richer this time, longer, trembling at the edges.
“Gods…you feel so good..” the woman breathed, voice already cracking with pleasure. She rolled her hips up to meet Natasha’s mouth, white hair spilling everywhere as her head fell back against the furs. Natasha lost herself completely. Every moan from those pretty lips made her spiral harder and licked and sucked with shameless need, tongue fucking into her in deep, wet strokes before pulling back to lavish attention on her clit again. Her own thighs pressed together, soaked and aching, but she didn’t touch herself, this was all for the woman beneath her, all for those gorgeous sounds that kept ripping Natasha’s composure to shreds.
The woman’s hand trembled where it rested in Natasha’s hair, guiding her gently higher when the pleasure peaked. “Right there- yes..just like that…” Another moan broke free, louder, sweeter and Natasha whimpered against her slick heat, the vibration pulling an even prettier sound from the woman’s throat.
Natasha’s mind was pure heat and reverence this woman, this impossible, beautiful girl was moaning because of her. Because Natasha couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t do anything but worship with her tongue and fingers and every desperate breath. When Natasha slid two fingers inside her, curling them just right, the woman’s back arched clean off the bed with a moan so raw and beautiful it made Natasha’s head spin.
The woman’s voice cracked, amusement long gone, replaced by pure overwhelmed pleasure. Her fingers tightened gently in Natasha’s hair, guiding her rhythm without force, just need. “G-Gods, don’t stop, Please..!”
“You can.” Natasha’s mouth was right at her ear now. She twisted her fingers just right on every thrust, grinding her own soaked core against the woman’s ass in time with it. “Come for me again. Let me see your face when you do.”
The woman’s moan broke into something higher, sweeter, completely undone. Her hands fisted the furs, back arched beautifully under Natasha’s chest, white hair pulled taut in Natasha’s grip like silk ropes. Every thrust drew another gorgeous sound from her, breathy, helpless, overwhelmed and Natasha was losing her mind at the sight.
The woman’s thighs started trembling. Her moans turned into broken little cries, face flushed and open and devastatingly beautiful as Natasha kept fucking her through it. “Come on..” Natasha breathed against her neck, “Let me feel you. I need it..I need you..”
The woman came with a long, shattered moan that echoed off the stone walls, clenching hard around Natasha’s fingers, back bowing as pleasure crashed through her all over again. Her eyes squeezed shut, mouth open, white hair glowing against the dark furs while Natasha watched every second of it, chest pressed tight to her back, heart hammering like it wanted to climb out and give itself to this girl.
Natasha didn’t pull her fingers out right away. She kept them buried deep, stroking her gently through the aftershocks, face still hidden in that soft neck, breathing her in like she was the only thing keeping her alive. Natasha smiled against her skin, pressing a slow, open mouthed kiss to the pulse fluttering under her lips. “I’m not finished with you yet.”
What followed was hours of heat and hunger that blurred the edges of time. The woman repaid every single second Natasha had spent worshipping her. She rolled them over with surprising strength, pinning Natasha gently beneath her, white hair falling like a curtain around them both. Her mouth was everywhere, kissing down Natasha’s throat, sucking marks into the older woman’s collarbone, then lower, until she settled between Natasha’s thighs like she belonged there. The first slow drag of her tongue had Natasha’s back arching clean off the bed with a broken moan of her own.
The woman was relentless in the softest way possible. She licked and sucked like she was savoring every sound Natasha made, fingers sliding deep inside her and curling just right while her tongue worked her clit in slow, devastating circles. Natasha came the first time with a sharp cry, thighs trembling around the woman’s shoulders, fingers tangled in that impossible snow white hair. But the young woman didn’t stop either. She kept going, murmuring soft praises against slick skin, “You taste so good…let me hear you again” until Natasha came a second time, harder, hips bucking helplessly as pleasure crashed through her in waves.
They switched again and again, bodies sliding together in the low lantern light. Hours passed like that and the tavern outside had long since gone quiet. The only sounds in the private room were gasps, moans and the wet slide of bodies moving together in the dark. Eventually they collapsed, utterly spent.
The woman lay on her back, chest heaving, one arm draped lazily over Natasha’s waist. Natasha was on her side, red hair sticking to her damp forehead, body boneless and glowing with the kind of satisfaction she hadn’t felt in years. She couldn’t remember the last time sex had been this good..this raw, this endless, this right. Every nerve in her body still hummed with it. She felt wrecked in the best possible way, like the younger woman had reached inside her and pulled out every hidden piece of want she’d been carrying.
Natasha turned her head slowly, still breathless, and just…looked at her. The girl beside her was flushed and glowing, lips kiss swollen, eyes half closed in pure bliss. She looked unreal..like something carved out of moonlight and fire and every impossible story Natasha had ever heard.
Natasha’s voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper. “So…What’s your name?”
The woman turned her head, a slow, sated smile curving her lips. Her eyes met Natasha’s with something soft and open and a little amused, like she’d been waiting for the question all night. “Y/n” she said simply.
The name settled between them like a secret finally shared and Natasha stared at her, heart still pounding, the weight of everything they’d just done sinking in deeper with every second. And for the first time since she’d stepped into this hidden kingdom, she had no idea what came next.
Y/N: What's all that about? You mad at me or something?
Wanda: I don't know. Did you do something to make me mad? Because then I am. But if you didn't, then I am not.
Y/N: I didn't do anything.
Wanda: Then I am not mad.
[ASIDE TO CAMERA]
Wanda: I am mad. Last night, Y/N had a sexy dream about someone. And I know it wasn't about me, because they know that I hate when people call me baby. And, yes, people are allowed their private thoughts, and I shouldn't be so angry, but I am Sokovian, so I get to feel whatever I want.
Probably nobody cares but I'd like to inform you that my whole personality for the foreseeable future is being absolutely and completely obsessed with Sepideh Moafi
Warnings: Age gap (N=31, r=23), parents death, infection, sickness
Word count: 14,1k
A/N: Because I got spammed, I split it again! The final part will be posted tomorrow at the same time.
Part 1
The first few hours after the quarantine sealed felt less like time passing and more like being pinned inside it.
The emergency lights had long since stopped flashing, but the red seemed to linger anyway, smeared into everyone’s vision and staining the edges of the lab with that same low, hostile warning. Tony had not left and Natasha had not expected him to, but there was still something brutal in witnessing the exact form his guilt took. He had moved with the kind of focus that looked almost calm from a distance, but only if someone didn’t know him.
Within an hour, the layout of the quarantine space had changed entirely. Tony had torn apart half the adjoining lab and rebuilt it into a secondary containment chamber connected to the infected room by a sealed transfer corridor, a pressure locked extension with transparent walls and independent filtration, meant to give you more space without breaking the quarantine. He’d converted a storage wing into a livable unit with a speed that should have been impossible even for him. New air scrubbers hummed behind reinforced panels and a narrow bed had been bolted to the wall and then softened with actual blankets Pepper had sent down at some point without entering the room. Tony had even rigged a food transfer system into the far wall, a compact stainless steel compartment that could be sealed from both sides and sterilized between uses so things could pass through without direct exposure.
It was the closest he could get to making the situation survivable and Natasha knew enough about the way Tony loved to understand that every added square foot of space, every welded seam, every upgraded filtration cycle was him trying to say the only thing he could not fix with words.
Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.
Now, hours later, the rebuilt containment suite glowed under sterile white light. On one side of the transparent barrier, the lab had become a war room. Bruce stood at the central console with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand braced against the table while the other moved through a field of molecular mapping. Dr. Cho had arrived not long ago and slipped into the work with two more specialists Bruce had called in remotely were patched onto side screens.
The virus had not spread beyond the sealed chamber, but that was the only good news they had. Because the more they studied it, the worse it became. It was not only biological..the nanite substrate supported the viral structure, allowing it to replicate and adapt through both organic and synthetic pathways. It could drift in particulate form, respond to environmental conditions and alter its own behavior depending on host contact. It behaved like a pathogen written by something that hated the difference between machine and body and intended to erase it.
And you had been standing in the middle of it. Natasha sat on the floor beside the barrier, one knee drawn up and one arm folded loosely over it, posture so still she could have been mistaken for calm if anyone had looked only briefly. But Natasha had long ago learned how to hold herself like stillness while everything underneath strained hard enough to crack bone.
On the other side of the glass, you sat on the floor too. You had spent the initial stretch moving around the new space with the uneasy caution of someone inhabiting a room that had been built too quickly and for terrible reasons. Natasha had watched you test the edges of it, the bed first, pressing a hand to the blanket as if uncertain whether to laugh or cry at the fact it was there at all. Then the sink, the table, the sealed transfer compartment. You had looked at each new addition with that same bright, careful expression you wore whenever you were trying to make other people feel less guilty about the effort they were making for you.
When you realized Natasha was still there, you had crossed the room and slid down against the glass opposite her. Now your shoulder rested lightly against the transparent wall and yours was the first face Natasha had seen uninterrupted for hours.
You looked pale and Natasha’s fingers curled once against her sleeve, then loosened. She had not cried, the tears had risen more than once, but she had not let them fall. Not here and definitely not while Tony and Bruce were tearing themselves apart to understand what was happening. Not while you were trapped inside a room designed to keep the rest of the world safe from what was around you. Someone had to stay steady.
Natasha had built a life out of being steady. So she sat there with the ache in her throat and the pressure behind her eyes and the girl she had finally, finally been brave enough to ask on a date only to have the universe answer by slamming a quarantine door between them.
You gave her a small smile, it was tired and a little uneven but it was yours. “Well.” you said through the speaker system, “This is cozy.”
Natasha’s mouth almost moved. “You have a bed.”
“Yes.” You glanced back at it with exaggerated approval. “I’m basically in luxury containment.”
“Tony overcompensates when he’s panicking.”
“Yeah.” Your smile gentled at once. “He does.”
Across the room, Tony’s hands stopped moving for the briefest fraction of a second at the sound of your voice. He did not turn around and did not say anything, but Natasha saw the line of his shoulders pull tighter. And you saw it too, because your gaze dropped away from him almost immediately and returned to Natasha’s.
For a while neither of you spoke, Natasha listened to the room instead. Bruce asking Dr. Cho for another pass on the structural integration between viral shell and nanite framework. Cho requesting environmental variance simulations. FRIDAY reporting contamination density inside the initial exposure zone. Someone on one of the remote screens saying, in clipped disbelief, that the code seemed to be “learning from the medical scans.”
The tension in the room never dipped, it only shifted shape. At some point the sealed transfer compartment clicked softly and a tray slid into your side of the wall: water, a bowl of soup, a protein bar, utensils sealed in sterile wrapping. Tony had designed the system in less than twenty minutes and Pepper had evidently decided that if he was going to keep rebuilding the laws of engineering instead of sleeping, then at minimum food would be involved.
You looked at the tray and then at Natasha. „I feel like a very sad zoo animal.” you murmured and this time Natasha did smile, though it was more in her eyes than in her mouth. “You’re comparing Stark technology to a feeding enclosure.”
“I’m saying it’s efficient.”
From the central lab, Tony’s dry voice cut in without him looking up. “You’re welcome.”
You startled just enough to betray that you hadn’t thought he was listening. Then you leaned slightly toward the speaker. “Thank you.”
That got him to glance at you finally. “Eat.” It should have sounded rude but it sounded like pleading. You obeyed because everyone in the room knew it mattered more when you did. You opened the soup and managed a few spoonfuls before Natasha saw the first shift. The smallest pause between one movement and the next. Your hand had been steady enough a moment earlier, but when you lifted the spoon again it trembled once before you corrected it.
Natasha’s gaze sharpened and you noticed. „It’s just weird eating while being observed by five geniuses and Natasha Romanoff.” you said lightly. “The pressure’s unreal.”
“You’re deflecting.” Natasha said.
You rested your head back against the glass with a quiet huff. “That’s not a denial.”
“No.”
That made you smile again and you reached for the water instead and took a sip. Then you coughed..just one sharp catch in your chest, one interruption too sudden for how still the room had been. But it happened again immediately after and folding you slightly forward.
Everything in the lab changed. Tony was moving before the second cough finished leaving you. His chair scraped across the floor so hard it nearly tipped. Bruce looked up at once and Cho was already pulling your live biometrics onto the main screen before anyone asked.
“Y/n?” Tony said too quickly and you lifted one hand at him without looking up, still coughing into your elbow. Natasha was on her feet before she consciously decided to stand. When you straightened, your breathing had gone shallow. You smiled immediately and Natasha wanted to shake you for it. “I’m fine.”
No one believed you, “That wasn’t nothing.”
“It was coughing.”
“That’s generally implied by the sound, yes.” he snapped, the words firing out too fast to be anger and too jagged to be anything else. “What does it feel like?”
You hesitated for less than a second, “Dry..” you said. “Maybe a little pressure.”
“How much pressure?”
“Tony-”
“How much?”
Your eyes flicked toward Natasha then and she hated the answer she saw there before you even gave it. You were calculating him and measuring how much truth he could survive without breaking further.
“A little.”
Bruce muttered something low and frustrated under his breath while Cho pulled the respiratory curve apart in three separate windows. Tony leaned both hands against the central console, staring so hard at the data it looked like he could force it to rearrange into something less dangerous.
You tried to lighten it and Natasha knew you were going to before you even opened your mouth because your expression shifted into that too bright thing she was beginning to understand as its own kind of shield.
“This definitely wasn’t how I pictured going out.”
The room froze around the sentence and no one answered. “I assumed it would be something cooler. A dramatic sacrifice, maybe in an alien invasion. Maybe I’d finally get crushed under one of Tony’s morally questionable ceiling projects.” You gave a weak little shrug. “I don’t know..hero death. Something embarrassing but noble..Kind of like my father.”
Tony’s hands stopped moving and Natasha’s head turned. He had gone still in a way she had learned to recognize as dangerous. He did not look at you, he did not let himself, but Natasha watched the memory move through him anyway.
It crossed his face in one shadowed flicker and then vanished, buried under motion as he turned back to the interface with even greater force than before. Natasha had heard enough from Pepper and seen enough in Tony’s silences to understand what that sentence had done.
A cave of scrap metal and blood dark stone. A man in military gear on the dirt floor, the wound too catastrophic for improvisation and too human for all of Tony Stark’s genius to stop. Hands slick with someone else’s blood while they try to press life back into a body. Him looking at him not with blame but with urgency, telling him the one thing that mattered more than his own pain.
Take care of her.
Natasha could almost hear it in the silence after your joke.
Take care of her.
Tony’s jaw flexed once so hard it looked painful. Bruce, bless him, chose not to force sound into the space. He only shifted closer to Tony and began running a secondary analysis on the cough as if giving him somewhere else to put the memory.
You, on the other side of the glass, seemed to realize a second too late what you had touched. Your smile faltered and Natasha saw it happen. Saw the flicker of regret, the immediate instinct to patch the moment before it could wound anyone further.
“Hey..” you said more softly. “I’m sorry. Bad joke.”
Tony did not turn around. “Don’t.” he said and you went quiet. For a long moment there was only the sound of systems working. Natasha lowered herself back to the floor because her knees had gone tight enough to hurt. She sat closer this time, until the side of her shoulder nearly brushed the barrier. You followed without thinking, shifting a little too until there was only inches of reinforced glass between you.
“I’m sorry about the evening.”
Natasha looked at you sharply. Your eyes were on the floor now, on your own hands. “I know tonight was supposed to be…” You let out a thin breath that might have become a laugh in another universe. “Less plague adjacent.”
“No.”
You looked up and Natasha’s voice was immediate, “No. Do not apologize for that.”
“But-”
“No.”
There was more force in it than she had meant to show and the result was that you stilled completely. The room behind Natasha continued to move around data and fear and urgency, but between the two of you everything narrowed.
“You do not apologize.” she said again, „Not for the evening. Not for what happened. Natasha held your gaze until she knew you understood she meant it. Behind her, she heard Tony shift. Evening..
It had caught him too because evening meant something now. Not a future date with hopeful edges and a restaurant reservation no one would keep. Evening meant promise interrupted and it meant a few feet of glass and a girl he had sworn, years ago in a cave that smelled like metal and blood, that he would protect.
When Natasha glanced back only briefly, she saw him staring not at the screen but through it, eyes unfocused. His hands had gone slack on the console and the memory had him again. Your father’s breaths getting thinner and thinner, while Tony told him to stay awake, stay with him, don’t do this, don’t and your father, in some final terrible clarity, saying your name.
Look out for her. Promise me.
And Tony, because what else could he do with a dying man asking for the only thing that might outlive him, saying yes. Now the promise stood on the other side of a quarantine wall surrounded by a deathly haze and a system no one yet knew how to beat.
Tony blinked once and came back into the room with the kind of brutality only grief could make functional.
“Cho. I want host response modeling based on the pulmonary shift. Banner, isolate every environmental trigger we’ve logged since exposure. I don’t care how small, I want all of it.”
You watched Tony for a second longer, your expression softening in that pained, helpless way Natasha was beginning to despise because it meant you were worrying about him now too. Then you looked back at Natasha and gave a smaller shrug.
“I really am okay.” you said quietly and Natasha said nothing. Because that was the thing. You weren’t okay and both of you knew that pretending otherwise did not make it less visible. It only made it lonelier.
So instead of contradicting you, Natasha asked, “Can you breathe?”
You looked almost surprised by the question. Then, “Yes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
Natasha nodded once, as if the answer were manageable simply because it was honest. The hours after that settled into a strange shape. The lab worked around the clock and without mercy. Bruce and Cho built models of the viral nanite interface while Tony chased every hypothetical route to destabilization, interruption, purge. Remote specialists came and went from the monitors as fresh data replaced old assumptions. Every breakthrough lasted minutes at most before the next layer of the
No one ate properly and no one rested. Tony refused a chair for most of it. Bruce drank coffee that had gone cold long before he noticed. And through all of it, Natasha stayed where she was. Eventually, when the first shock burned down into something steadier and crueler, you disappeared from the glass for a few minutes and returned carrying a deck of cards.
Natasha lifted one brow and you sat down again, “I found these in one of the drawers.”
You held one card up to the glass. “War?”
Natasha looked at the deck, then at you. Then she shifted closer and nodded once. So that was how the next stretch of night passed: the world tilting toward catastrophe around you while the two of you played cards separated by reinforced barrier glass. You dealt on your side and Natasha mirrored the draw on hers with a second deck Tony must have shoved at her hours ago without comment.
It would have been ridiculous in any other circumstance. Maybe it was ridiculous here too but it gave your hands something to do and your breathing something to settle around. It gave Natasha a reason to keep looking at you without calling it watching.
Sometimes you talked, sometimes you didn’t. Sometimes Bruce asked you questions through the speaker about timing, symptoms, what the air had smelled like when the chamber first vented. Sometimes Cho requested that you move to a specific scanner panel so they could compare thermal data across progression markers. Sometimes Tony pretended not to be listening to anything but the code while hearing every sound you made.
At one point you won three rounds in a row and looked unbearably pleased with yourself for it. “At least I’m thriving somewhere.” you said.
Natasha placed another card down. “You’re cheating.”
“Through the glass?”
“You’d find a way.”
“That is, frankly, the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today.”
Natasha’s gaze rested on your face a second too long. “That’s not true.”
Something in your expression flickered, warmed, then turned careful again. “No.” you admitted. “It’s not.”
Hours kept moving. At some point the cough returned, softer this time but more frequent. Not enough to stop everything each time, but enough that Natasha heard it before anyone else now. Enough that she watched you brace your hand on the floor after one of them passed. Enough that she saw the way Tony’s shoulders twitched every single time even when he didn’t turn around.
Near what had to be somewhere past midnight, though the lab had lost all relation to real time, the room quieted in a different way. Tony was staring at three branching cure models at once, each of them wrong in a different direction. On the floor by the glass, Natasha drew another card and didn’t place it. She looked at you instead and you noticed after a second and glanced up. “What?”
Natasha was silent for long enough that you straightened a little. Then she asked, “Why did you do it?”
The card in your hand stopped moving. Behind Natasha, the room did not pause but for her, it narrowed instantly again, just as it had earlier. All the background motion blurred into nothing compared to your face.
You knew what she meant. Not Why did you close the seal, that answer was obvious. Not Why did you save everyone, that answer existed in facts and systems and consequences. She meant why had you been the one to run back without hesitation. Why had your body chosen before fear could. Why had you thrown yourself toward the thing everyone else was fleeing from.
You looked down at the deck and then at your own knees. Then somewhere over Natasha’s shoulder where no answer waited.
“I don’t know.” You let out one breath through your nose, almost a laugh, but not amused. “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer.”
“It’s honest.”
You turned one card over and over between your fingers. “I saw the countdown..I saw the door hadn’t sealed.” You swallowed. “And then…” A small helpless motion lifted one of your shoulders. “I don’t know. I just moved.”
Natasha watched you carefully as you went on more quietly. “I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t trying to…” You searched for the word and failed to find one that didn’t sound unbearable. “I just knew if nobody hit that override, it wouldn’t only be us.”
“You were thinking about them.”
You shook your head slightly. “I was thinking there wasn’t time.”
That landed harder than heroism would have and maybe because it was truer. “You do that all the time.” you said.
Natasha’s brow drew in slightly. “Do what?”
“Run toward horrible things because there isn’t time.” Your mouth softened around something that was not quite a smile. “You go out there with the Avengers every day knowing any mission could be the one that doesn’t end well. You could get shot, hit by a car or lose a fight.” You glanced down again. “I could’ve died in a car accident today too. Or choked on bad coffee. Or gotten flattened by one of Tony’s ceiling disasters like I said.” Your voice turned quieter. “Life doesn’t exactly file a warning notice first.”
Natasha stared at you and there it was again, that infuriating, impossible way you had of taking the sharpest truths and holding them out gently anyway. “That’s different.” Natasha said, though even to her own ears it lacked force.
You tilted your head. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Because I’m not supposed to be the one doing it?”
Natasha’s jaw tightened. “No, because you weren’t supposed to be trapped behind a wall while the rest of us watch.“
You set the card down and on the other side of the glass, your hand came up and rested flat against it without ceremony, as if the movement had happened before you fully decided on it. Natasha looked at it for a second, then she lifted her own and set it opposite yours. Only glass between them..again.
“You’re watching because you care.” Natasha did not blink. “That’s not a bad thing.”
A sound broke across the room then. Tony had braced both hands against the console again to signal he’d just hit the edge of control and forced himself back from it. Bruce shifted closer to him, speaking too quietly for the words to carry. Cho kept her eyes on the screen and gave Tony the grace of pretending not to have seen.
You looked over Natasha’s shoulder toward him and the concern in your face cut cleanly through the already unbearable night. Natasha saw it and thought, not for the first time, that maybe the cruelest thing about you was that even now, even in there, you had not stopped loving outward. When she looked back at you, your eyes had gone softer again. “Natasha.”
She leaned closer without realizing she was doing it. “What?”
You looked like you were deciding whether to say something risky. Then, perhaps because the room was full of too much fear and too little truth, you chose honesty. “I’m glad it was you.”
The exact same words as the night before. The exact same sentence and not remotely the same meaning. Natasha felt something pull hard in her chest and her hand flattened harder against the glass. “I’m here.”
Behind them, the lab kept working. Tony and Bruce and Cho kept trying to understand it the virus, to break it, outthink it, cure it..But on the floor at the edge of the barrier, with cards scattered between them and exhaustion wearing through every layer of defense, Natasha sat with you in the cold white light and watched every slight change in your breathing, every careful smile, every cough you pretended didn’t hurt.
Natasha did what she knew how to do when someone she cared about was standing too close to pain. She asked questions.
Had you always liked science fiction, or had Tony simply indoctrinated you into it before you had legal recourse? Which Avenger had the worst taste in music? Why did you own three identical screwdrivers and insist they each had a different “emotional purpose”? Did you actually prefer tea to coffee or was that some elaborate rebellion against lab culture? You answered all of it with increasing animation as the hours wore on, your hands moving when you forgot to keep them still, your smile turning real more often than fragile.
And Natasha against all logic, against the room, against the fear pressing against the back of everything..found herself relaxing into it too. She learned that your favorite food changed depending on the day but that you could always be bribed with dumplings. That when you were little, you’d once tried to build your own radio because Tony had told you not to touch one of his and the resulting explosion had singed your eyebrows clean off for a month. You told that story with enough deadpan dignity that even Bruce, half lost in viral models at the far console, let out a faint strangled laugh.
Natasha gave less of herself at first. Then, bit by bit, more. You asked what her favorite meal was and she answered before she could decide not to. You asked what kind of weather she liked best and she said cold, overcast mornings because they made the world feel honest. You asked what she’d wanted, years ago, before everything became this. Natasha was quiet for long enough that you looked as though you regretted asking, but then she said, “Peace.” and your face changed into something so soft and understanding that she almost wished she hadn’t said it after all.
By late afternoon the light outside the tower had begun to change, that was when Natasha finally stood. You looked up from where you were sitting cross legged on the floor by the glass, “Where are you going?”
Natasha smoothed one hand over the side of her pants, more to give herself something to do than out of any need. “To take a shower.”
Your expression shifted immediately into suspicion. “That sounds fake.”
„Everything sounds fake when I say it now?”
“Mostly, yes.”
That almost got her. “I’ve been down here for hours.”
You considered that. “Fair.” A small smile touched your mouth. “You’re allowed to leave the haunted science bunker for hygiene reasons.”
Natasha inclined her head as if granting you a tremendous favor. “Good.”
You watched her a second longer than necessary and there was affection in it now so open she could feel it from where she stood. “Come back?”
The question was light, if someone only listened briefly. But Natasha heard what sat beneath it. “Yes.”
That answer satisfied you enough that you leaned your head back against the wall again and let out a quiet breath. “Okay.”
Natasha turned before the expression on your face could settle too deeply into her chest and walked toward the doors. Halfway there, she caught FRIDAY’s sensor light shift toward her. In the corridor just outside the lab, Natasha slowed and spoke low enough that the others inside could not hear. “FRIDAY.”
“Yes, Natasha?”
“I need you to keep her distracted for a while.”
FRIDAY was far too advanced not to recognize the tone and for all Tony’s impossible habits, his systems knew when not to ask unnecessary questions.
“Of course.” FRIDAY replied.
Natasha nodded once and kept moving. She did take a shower quickly, but more to wash the cold chemical scent of the lab from her skin than for any true sense of refreshment. She changed afterward, standing in front of her room’s mirror for longer than she wanted to admit, trying and failing to pretend she wasn’t thinking about what to wear for a date that should have happened somewhere else entirely.
In the end, she chose something simple. She looked at herself once, sharply, as if daring her reflection to comment on how absurd this all was. Then she left before she could talk herself out of it. On the way back down, she ordered takeout from a place she had meant to take you eventually anyway, a restaurant Tony would have called pretentious and then stolen half the menu from if given the chance.
When Natasha returned to the lab floor, FRIDAY was doing exactly what had been asked. You were in the containment room standing near one of the side screens while the AI projected a rotating set of absurdly specific trivia questions at you. Something about obscure historical engineering failures.
You were arguing with the display. “That bridge collapse was not user error..” you said with sleepy indignation. “That was aggressively avoidable design arrogance.”
“Would you like me to log that as your final answer?” FRIDAY asked.
“Yes.”
“Incorrect.”
You gasped. “This system is rigged!!”
Tony, from the far side of the lab, said without looking up, “You’re arguing with a computer I pay to be smarter than all of us.”
“And yet she still enables you!” you shot back and Natasha felt warmth spread through her before she had even stepped fully into the room. In the few minutes she had been gone, someone..most likely Bruce at Natasha’s request conveyed through FRIDAY, or Pepper through sheer practical force of will, had cleared a small space not far from the barrier. Natasha carried in a foldable table from one of the side storage areas herself, setting it carefully in the open spot near the glass. She draped a spare dark cloth over it, smoothing the corners with more attention than the makeshift setup probably deserved.
From a cabinet she took two plates, two sets of cutlery, two glasses. Then, because she had found one in a forgotten holiday box shoved behind old Stark Expo decorations, she placed a single battery lit candle in the center. Bruce looked up first, blinked once, then deliberately looked back down as though granting privacy through studied noninterference. Tony noticed last, because he had buried himself inside a live model of the viral matrix so deeply he was halfway to forgetting his own pulse. When he did finally look up, his gaze moved from the table to Natasha and then somewhere softer.
Once everything was set, Natasha turned toward the containment room. You were still near the monitor, distracted enough by FRIDAY’s nonsense that you hadn’t yet properly seen what she was doing.
“Y/n.”
You turned and stopped. For one second you only stared, then your eyes moved over the little table, the candle, the plates and the takeout bags resting neatly beside Natasha’s hand. The lab seemed to hold itself quieter around the moment and Natasha’s voice was lower now, “We still have a date.”
It was such a simple sentence but it shattered you. Natasha saw it happen in real time, the surprise first and followed immediately by something deeper and far more fragile. Your face crumpled not into grief exactly, but into overwhelming feeling, the kind that arrives too fast for a person to hide. Your eyes filled before you could stop them and you blinked hard once, then again, as if trying to keep the tears from actually falling.
Then you laughed once under the breath that followed, not because anything was funny, but because your heart had nowhere else to put itself. “Oh my God.”
Natasha’s own chest tightened painfully. You looked down for a moment and when you looked back up, your eyes were wet and luminous under the containment lights.
“..You did this?”
Natasha rested one hand lightly against the back of her chair. “Yes.”
“For me?”
Her gaze never left yours. “Yes.”
That was what did it and one tear escaped despite your effort, tracing down your cheek almost absently and you laughed again, this time smaller and embarrassed by your own emotion and unable to stop it.
“Hang on..” you said, already turning away, swiping quickly at your face with the heel of your hand. “I need..I need a chair. I can’t…give me a second.”
Natasha watched you hurry awkwardly across the room to the small table Tony had installed earlier. There was one chair tucked near it and another folded against the wall. You grabbed the nearest with slightly clumsy hands, dragged it across the floor, then set it down opposite Natasha’s position at the barrier so that if the glass had not been there, the two of you would have been seated exactly across from each other.
You sat, smoothing your hands over your knees once as if to compose yourself, and by the time you looked back up your smile had returned, though your eyes were still shining. “Okay.” you said softly.
Natasha sat too. Then, carefully, she began unpacking the food. One by one, Natasha loaded part of the meal into the transfer compartment: dumplings, noodles, vegetables, a small container of sauce, even dessert folded into a neat paper carton. She sealed the outside door, activated sterilization and a moment later the inner lock on your side clicked green.
You looked at the food, then at her. “This is absurdly romantic for a woman who claimed she doesn’t make a thing of things.”
Natasha poured water into her glass. “You talk too much.”
“Only when emotionally compromised.”
“I noticed.”
You retrieved the meal from the compartment with a care that suggested it mattered far beyond hunger. Natasha hated how much she loved watching your face shift from surprise to tenderness to that bright helpless happiness she had come to crave without permission. For a little while, the room around you disappeared.
Tony, Bruce and Cho still moved across the lab, still worked, still chased an answer with the kind of relentless focus desperate people bring to impossible problems. Now and then voices rose and fell behind you, indistinct enough to fade into atmosphere. But the center of the room changed because there was a date happening.
“Tell me if the food’s terrible.”
You took your first bite and closed your eyes for half a second. “If this is terrible, then I’m willing to lower my standards permanently.”
That got a real smile from her. You looked absurdly pleased by it, and took another bite. For the first few minutes the conversation stayed easy in the way all careful things do before they trust themselves enough to deepen. Natasha learned that your answer changed based on mood, weather and whether you were in the middle of a project severe enough to destroy your ability to remember hunger.
You declared dumplings “universally healing” pasta “emotionally dependable” and good fries “the final proof that civilization deserved to survive.” Natasha informed you that this last category was too broad to be taken seriously.
You told her the tiny noodle place two blocks from the tower was better than any expensive Stark approved dining room and that Tony had once tried to buy the building because they refused to add truffle oil to the menu. Then, because dinner and candlelight and your soft expression made honesty easier, the conversation shifted.
“What do you want?” you asked after a while.
Natasha looked up. “In what sense?”
You gestured vaguely with your chopsticks, then immediately lowered them and swallowed because Natasha’s look suggested manners still existed in quarantine. “In…general. In a relationship, I guess.”
For a second Natasha simply watched you. The question itself was vulnerable enough. But the way you asked it..a little shy, a little hopeful, trying to sound casual and failing with such earnest sweetness that it hurt was worse. She leaned back slightly in her chair. “You ask dangerous questions over takeout.”
You smiled. “You asked me out. I’m capitalizing.”
Her eyes lingered on you, then dropped briefly to the candle between them, “Honesty.“ she said finally and went on, “No games, no guessing. I’ve had enough of both.”
“That makes sense.”
“And loyalty.” Natasha added. “Calm. Someone who doesn’t turn affection into performance.”
Something in your face shifted with painful tenderness. “Okay.” you said, barely above a murmur and Natasha tilted her head. “And you?”
You looked down at your plate for a second, then up again. “Safety. Not boring safe..Just…” You searched for it carefully. “The kind where I don’t feel like I have to be useful every second to deserve being kept around. The kind where I can be a mess sometimes and it doesn’t scare the other person off.” You smiled a little, embarrassed by your own honesty now. “Someone who stays.”
Natasha felt the whole room narrow around that. Because whatever defenses she still had left did not stand much chance against you saying something like that while trapped on the other side of a glass wall she could not break.
“You should have that.”
The speaker carried your next breath between you. “I know.” Then, “I think I could. With you.”
Natasha’s hand tightened around her fork and you seemed to realize what you had just admitted only after it was already there in the room. “Sorry. That was..maybe too much for one date.”
“It wasn’t too much.”
Your expression turned openly relieved, so Natasha asked another question before either of you drowned in the one she actually wanted to. “Favorite movie.”
You laughed, recognizing the rescue for what it was and accepting it anyway. “That’s not fair. I need categories.”
“No.”
“Natasha.”
“One answer.”
The conversation went on like that, wandering and returning and wandering again. Favorite books, worst music, what kind of mornings you both preferred. Whether either of you believed in fate or whether that was only something people said when trying to make chaos feel polite. You admitted that you hated being interrupted when reading but secretly loved when someone brought you tea without asking. Natasha confessed she had once learned three languages at once simply because she was bored and angry. You stared at her across the glass as if she were personally unreasonable. At some point you laughed so hard at one of Natasha’s dry observations about Tony’s “creative relationship with safety regulations” that you had to set your fork down and wipe at your eyes.
At some point Natasha forgot to track the room..at some point you both did. The candle glowed low and warm between you and the food disappeared gradually from both plates. Your posture loosened andNatasha’s did too. There were long stretches where neither of you spoke immediately because just looking at each other seemed enough. In another place, in another world, it would have been easy..
The glass became invisible. Your voice came through the speaker so clearly, your expressions reached her so immediately, your laughter landed with such warmth that for long stretches Natasha stopped feeling the barrier as a thing between you and started experiencing it only as a forgotten detail in the architecture of the room. Until the end of the meal, when the illusion broke.
It happened quietly, you had just said something and Natasha could not have recalled what afterward, only that it was soft and teasing and made her look at you in that unguarded way she had been doing more and more all evening. You smiled back at her with the same openness, the candlelight catching in your eyes and there was a moment then where nothing in either of you seemed interested in distance.
Natasha set her hand on the table and without thinking, you did the same. Fingers were drifting, only following the pull that had been there all night and all the nights before it. Then your fingertips met cold glass and the sound was soft. Both of you froze and the illusion shattered so cleanly it almost hurt physically.
There it was again..the barrier, hard and transparent and absolute. The wall you had both somehow managed to forget for an hour. Your hand flattened against it on instinct and Natasha’s did too, but where skin should have met skin there was only the sterile chill of reinforced separation.
The mood in the room changed instantly. Your expression dimmed first and the brightness in it folding inward. Natasha saw the exact second disappointment flickered across your face before you tried to hide it. Her own chest tightened with such force it almost qualified as pain.
For a long moment neither of you moved. Then you let out the smallest breath and looked down, smiling faintly in the way people do when trying to make something gentler than it is. “Well..” you said quietly. “That was aggressively rude of reality.”
Natasha almost laughed, though it came out as something rougher and softer at once. “It has bad timing.”
“Yeah.”
Then, because both of you were trying, you looked back up and lifted your brows with determined lightness. “On the bright side, at least I can’t steal your dessert.”
Natasha took the paper carton from beside her plate and held it up slightly. “You assume I was going to share.”
“I told you what I want in a relationship and you respond with emotional cruelty.”
“Correct.”
That finally got your smile back and after that the evening wound down slowly. You both stayed at the table longer than necessary, stretching the conversation into smaller corners now that the meal itself was done. Natasha told you about a city she once visited and never had time to actually see. You told her about the kind of tiny house you used to imagine building when you were younger, all windows and bookshelves and too many plants for any reasonable person to manage. Natasha said you would absolutely kill at least half the plants. You admitted this was likely but insisted love should count for something.
The other scientists faded further into the edges of things. Cho eventually left the main console for a side station and Bruce’s movements got slower with fatigue. Tony remained at the center of it all, tireless in that dangerous way that meant collapse would only come after someone forced it. Now and then Natasha felt his eyes flick over them before returning to the screens.
Eventually you rubbed one hand over your face and tried to hide the movement but Natasha noticed immediately. You saw her notice and made the universal expression of someone caught being more tired than they wanted to admit. “I’m okay.”
She stood and that seemed to startle you more than it should have. “What?”
“Go to bed.”
Your mouth curved faintly. “That sounded very authoritative.”
“I meant it that way.”
You looked toward the narrow bed built into the side of the containment space. The blankets were still turned down from earlier and the sight of it..so temporary and clinical made something in Natasha twist.
You pushed your chair back and stood too, a little more slowly than you had sat down in it, that did not escape Natasha either. You carried your dishes to the transfer compartment with exaggerated competence, clearly trying not to look as tired as you were. Natasha mirrored the motion on her side.
When everything had been cleared, you crossed the room and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. The containment lights had dimmed slightly into evening mode and you pulled one leg up onto the mattress and tucked the blanket around yourself with a small huff of movement. Then you looked over and found Natasha lowering herself back to the floor beside the barrier.
You blinked. “What are you doing?”
Natasha leaned one shoulder lightly against the glass, close enough that if the wall had not been there she would have been sitting at your bedside. “Staying with you.”
The answer came so simply that for a second you only stared. Then your whole expression changed and all the humor and careful brightness and stubborn composure softened into something quieter and deeper, a kind of wonder Natasha did not think she deserved and yet could not look away from.
“You don’t have to do that..”
“I know.”
Your throat moved with a swallow. “Natasha…”
She lifted her gaze to yours. “Go to sleep.”
You lay back slowly, pulling the blanket up with you. One hand stayed curled near your chest, the other drifted down to the mattress near the edge, almost unconsciously seeking the place closest to where Natasha sat on the other side.
For a while you kept talking. You asked if she was comfortable on the floor and Natasha said she had endured worse. You accused her of being impossible even while half asleep. She told you to stop talking and rest. You murmured that she was very bossy for someone who brought candlelit takeout to a biohazard containment zone.
Then even that thinned. Your eyelids grew heavier and words slowed. The room beyond you continued its relentless motion, all data and desperation and hope sharpened into labor, but around the bed a pocket of stillness formed. Natasha sat in it and guarded it with everything she had and at some point you opened your eyes again just enough to look at her.
“Hey.” you whispered.
Natasha looked up immediately. “What?”
“Thank you. For not letting tonight disappear.”
“It didn’t disappear.”
You looked at her for a second longer and then your mouth curved into the softest smile of the night. “Good.”
Your eyes closed again after that and Natasha stayed. She stayed while your breathing gradually evened out, though not entirely. There was still a faint catch in it every now and then that made her hands curl against her knees. She stayed while Bruce walked past once with a mug in his hand and deliberately did not interrupt. She stayed while Tony barked a frustrated order at one of the simulations and then went silent again. She stayed while FRIDAY dimmed the outer lab lights by five percent, perhaps sensing what kind of vigil this had become.
And when, sometime later, you shifted in sleep and your hand slid nearer the edge of the mattress, Natasha lifted her own and placed it quietly against the glass opposite your fingers. On the other side of the barrier, you slept in the bed built too quickly for a life that should not have needed saving like this. Outside it, beneath cold lab light and the hum of desperate machines, Natasha kept watch. She did not move and not sleep. And if, once or twice in the silence, her eyes burned with the tears she had refused all day, there was no one close enough to see them but the glass.
The next morning did not bring relief. It brought the kind of hope people manufactured by necessity, thin and careful and handled like glass because everyone in the room already knew what would happen if it cracked too hard. Natasha had not moved much during the night. At some point Bruce had draped a blanket over her shoulders without comment and gone back to his console or Tony had stopped pretending not to look over every few minutes just to make sure you were still breathing.
You had slept in fragments. Natasha knew because she heard every shift in the bed, every uneven breath, every low sound your throat made when sleep dragged you too quickly through dreams that were clearly not kind. Once, near dawn, you woke coughing again, quieter than before but longer, enough that Natasha was on her feet before the sound had fully broken the room. Tony had looked up so fast he nearly knocked over two sample trays and Cho had checked the monitors.
By morning the monitors proved it. The virus was progressing. Not through the containment room, but inward, inside you, it had changed its pattern. The particulate saturation in the original chamber remained dense but stable, while the readings tied to your own body had become more complex and more frightening. It was no longer just exposure..it was integration and the virus wasn’t merely spreading, no, it was learning how to live in you.
No one said that sentence aloud. Natasha saw it in the way Cho’s mouth tightened while reviewing your blood oxygen. In the way Bruce kept rereading the same molecular map as if he could force it to confess a weakness. In the way Tony worked with increasing speed and decreasing patience, his hands moving through six screens at once, jaw set hard enough to make every muscle in his face stand out.
And in you. It was in you too, though you kept pretending otherwise. The day wore on in intervals. Fluids through the sterile transfer and more talking than any of you wanted to do about your own condition because the second the room went quiet, everyone heard the coughing.
Natasha noticed the changes first because she had stopped paying attention to almost anything else. Your smile took longer to reach your eyes now. Your energy came in bursts and vanished faster. You held yourself too still between movements, conserving strength without wanting anyone to call it that. Once, when you stood too quickly from the chair by the little table, the room tilted visibly around you and your hand shot out to brace against the wall. You recovered almost immediately and pretended you had only stumbled because your sock had caught on the floor.
Natasha didn’t say anything, she only moved closer to the glass. You noticed and gave her that look..that infuriatingly gentle one that said yes, I know you see it, please let me keep pretending a little longer.
And Natasha let you. Not because she believed you..because dignity mattered and she had known too many people stripped of it by pain. By midafternoon Cho had enough blood panel data to begin constructing a targeted host response model. That was the first time the room shifted.
Because “progress” was a dangerous word in a place like that and yet the science had finally offered something that looked enough like a pathway to tempt everyone into believing it. Bruce called Tony over to the central display. Cho projected the nanite matrix in layered colors: viral protein structures in red, synthetic lattice in silver, the portions already binding within your bloodstream in a deep pulsing violet that looked too alive to be on a medical screen.
“It isn’t stable by itself.” Cho said, “That’s the first thing in our favor.”
Tony folded his arms. “Clarify ‘favor.’”
Bruce zoomed into a specific section of the pattern. “The viral shell depends on the nanite scaffold to maintain cohesion once it binds to host tissue. Without the scaffold, it degrades.”
“And without the virus..” Cho added, “the scaffold loses its propagation model.”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”
Bruce looked up at him. “Meaning if we can break the bond between the two without triggering dispersal, both sides collapse.” There it was..The word no one said, but everyone heard anyway.
A cure.
Natasha saw it hit Tony in real time. Something sharp and dangerous and bright enough to make him stand straighter for the first time in hours. He turned back to the data with a focus that bordered on violent. “How?”
Cho brought up a molecular inhibitor sequence. “Not biologically. It adapts too fast..we just target the substrate.”
Bruce nodded. “A destabilizing pulse, narrow enough that it attacks the nanite support without aerosolizing the viral load.”
Tony was already three steps ahead. “Coupled with a suppressor to keep the host response from crashing when the bond breaks.”
“That’s the idea.” Cho said.
“And if it works?” Natasha asked and all three scientists looked at her. Bruce answered because Tony was already building the simulation. “If it works, it interrupts integration. Stops progression, maybe gives us a chance to clear what’s left before it rebinds.”
“Maybe?” Natasha repeated and Bruce’s face tightened. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Tony cut in, not looking up. “Then we build the part that’s missing.”
That set the next hours into motion. The lab transformed again, this time not into a containment ward or a war room but into something feverish and almost holy in its concentration. Tony built the prototype delivery system himself, hands moving with sleepless precision as he reconfigured a med pulse emitter into something far more specialized, everyone worked together.
Even FRIDAY sounded more alert, cross referencing model after model and for the first time since the quarantine had sealed, the room let itself lean toward something.
Hope.
You saw it in them too. From your side of the glass, sitting wrapped in a blanket on the bed while your oxygen monitor glowed faintly against your finger, you watched the shift happen and your whole expression changed in answer. When Natasha looked at you, you gave her the smallest smile.
“They found something..” you said quietly through the speaker and Natasha nodded once. Your eyes flicked to Tony, then Bruce, then Cho, following their movements with exhausted concentration. “Do you think it’ll work?”
Natasha had become allergic to promises in the last twenty four hours. She had no intention of making one she couldn’t keep. But she also could not bear the look in your face if she gave you nothing. So she sat down again by the glass and answered honestly in the only way she could.
“I think they believe it might.”
You absorbed that for a second. Then your smile tilted faintly. “That is the most Natasha Romanoff answer ever.”
“It’s accurate.”
“It’s terrifying.”
“Yes.”
That made you laugh softly, though it ended in a cough you tried to turn aside from the speaker. Natasha heard it anyway and her fingers curled against her knee. You caught that too and straightened a little too quickly, trying to recover. “Still okay.”
The prototype took shape by evening. It was ugly in the way most brilliant things were before anyone polished them. A narrow injector line housed inside a sterile cartridge. Tony tested it first on isolated substrate samples in sealed dishes. The first run failed instantly, the nanites destabilized too fast and triggered a cascade that nearly breached the microchamber. Tony swore, Bruce recalibrated, Cho altered the damping sequence.
The second run held longer but didn’t fully separate the structures. The third produced breakdown. On the screen, the silver lattice shuddered, collapsed inward and the viral pattern folded with it. After the fourth one, the room went silent and Bruce looked at the result, then back at the model as if expecting it to vanish if he moved too quickly. Cho leaned forward, studying every line of the data with disciplined caution that barely concealed her own shock.
Tony let out one breath and it sounded almost like disbelief. You were on your feet before anyone told you to stay seated. “What happened?”
Bruce turned toward the barrier. “It collapsed the bond.”
Your whole face opened with hope so immediate and so bright that Natasha had to look away for a second because seeing it felt too much like watching someone stand in the path of something fragile and beautiful enough to die from touch.
“Does that mean-” you started.
“It means..” Tony interrupted, “that it works on the sample.”
He would not let anyone rush ahead of the science..Natasha respected him for that and hated him for how much she needed him to be wrong. So they tested again and again. Each time the isolated sample collapsed cleanly.
Bruce ran cross model comparisons. Cho mapped inflammatory outcomes and FRIDAY predicted the host response under various load thresholds. For the first time, probability curves moved in their favor. Enough that even Natasha felt it happen in the room, the impossible, reckless softening of people who had been braced for loss too long and suddenly saw a door crack open where there had only been wall.
Tony turned toward you and Natasha would remember that moment later because of how carefully he handled it, as though even now he was afraid that saying the words aloud might break them.
“We’re not there yet..” he said and you nodded too quickly. “Okay.”
“But we may have a path.”
Your breath caught and the look on your face was not joy. It was hope filtered through fear and exhaustion and the desperate need not to be heartbroken by another maybe. Still, it was there. You sat down hard on the edge of the bed, your hand lifting to cover your mouth for a second before dropping again. “Oh.”
Tony looked away almost immediately after saying it, as though he could not withstand your hope directly and still stay functional. “We test the final sequence on live adaptive substrate first.” he said, already turning back to the console. “Then we talk about application.”
Nobody objected..they all knew the danger of mistaking a pathway for an answer. Still, the atmosphere changed and Bruce drank fresh coffee and didn’t seem to notice it was hot this time. Cho requested a second round of fabrication samples with something that sounded suspiciously like steadier breath beneath her usual composure.
And Natasha…Natasha hated herself a little for what happened next. She let herself imagine only for a second. Only because she was tired and you were looking at her through the glass with those bright, wet eyes and because the entire room had just spent hours clawing a possibility out of the impossible.
But she imagined it anyway. You alive and out of there. A real date somewhere without fluorescent lights and sterile walls and the hum of containment systems in the background. Your hand in hers without glass in the way. Your laugh somewhere ordinary. Your body warm and living and not attached to monitors or watched by five people trying to outthink death. She imagined it and the image struck her so hard she had to set her jaw just to stay still.
Maybe that was why she did not notice how tired you had become in the meantime. Or rather, she noticed, but she wanted to believe the hope explained it away. That the strain of the day, the coughing, the scans, the adrenaline of hearing they had something..any of it accounted for the slight tremor in your fingers when you reached for your water. For the way you sat down more heavily than before and for the shallow breaths you tried not to make obvious.
Hope made people stupid. Natasha knew that better than most.
Night settled fully beyond the hidden windows of the tower and under the lab lights the final test was prepared. This one would not be on the simple isolated samples from the first chamber. This one would use the adaptive hybrid substrate drawn from your blood work and bonded in vitro as close to the host integrated structure as they could safely create without touching your actual system.
Tony set the sample chamber into the stabilization cradle himself. Bruce checked the inhibitor sequence twice, then a third time and Cho entered the monitoring thresholds and host-response projections while FRIDAY synchronized every sensor feed.
The room grew very still, even you stopped moving. Natasha stood from the floor and came a little closer to the console without realizing she’d done it. You were there too, near your side of the barrier, one hand braced lightly against the wall, all the fatigue in your body hidden beneath sheer concentration and need.
Tony’s fingers hovered over the command sequence. “Final substrate adaptive test.” FRIDAY confirmed.
Bruce looked at the screen. “Pulse at twenty percent to start.”
“Too low.” Tony said immediately.
“Too high and we trigger collapse too fast.”
“Too low and it adapts before we finish.”
Tony spared her one glance, then nodded. “Running on my mark.” he said and no one breathed.
“Three.” Natasha felt her heart pounding in her throat. “Two.” On the other side of the glass, your hand flattened fully against the barrier. “One.”
The pulse fired and on the main screen, the hybrid substrate lit in branching lines of silver and red. The inhibitor entered and the nanite lattice reacted, shuddering under the pulse. Viral shell markers spiked, then dipped. The bond began to separate.
It was working. Tony saw it first and Natasha knew because the line of his body changed, not much, but enough.
“Nanite support falling.”
“Viral shell destabilizing.”
“Host mimic response within tolerance.”
Hope exploded through the room so hard it nearly had a sound. You made one tiny, broken noise behind the glass. Natasha turned her head just enough to see you staring at the screen with your eyes full and shining.
Then everything went wrong. At first it was small, a fluctuation in one corner of the display. A rise in the host mimic pattern. Bruce’s brows pulled together before the numbers had even fully changed. “Wait.”
The silver lattice should have collapsed. Instead, it bent and reconfigured. On screen, the nanite scaffold did not die. It folded in on itself, consumed part of the inhibitor structure and reemerged denser than before. The viral shell, rather than degrading, altered its pattern to bind around the new architecture.
Cho’s voice changed. “No-”
Tony’s hands flew across the controls. “Increase pulse.”
“Tony-”
“Increase it!”
FRIDAY obeyed and the pulse intensified. For one split second the entire structure flared white hot under the energy surge and Natasha thought, absurdly, please, please, please-
Then the sample split. Not into collapse but into replication. The chamber flooded with new branching structures, the hybrid substrate duplicating itself through the very cure meant to kill it. The inhibitor was being broken down and repurposed as scaffold fuel. Every line on the screen turned catastrophic at once.
Bruce swore and Cho stepped back. FRIDAY’s warning tone cut through the room.
“Adaptive resistance confirmed.” she said. “Cure vector compromised.”
“No!” Tony snapped. On screen, the virus devoured the model. The final structural reading blinked once and flatlined into failure.
Silence hit and Natasha felt it like a blow to the ribs. She looked toward you and you had gone perfectly still. Just staring at the dead screen as if your body had not decided how to absorb what it had seen. Hope was a crueler thing to lose once it had put down roots. Natasha could see the exact shape of the hurt opening in your face, not dramatic, not loud, just a slow, stunned collapse inward.
Tony did not move either till he broke. The sound of it wasn’t grief at first, it was impact. His hand swept across the workbench with violent force, sending instruments and tablets and two sealed trays crashing to the floor hard enough that one of the screens flickered. The noise cracked through the lab like a shot.
Tony shoved the stabilization cradle so hard it slammed sideways against the counter and rebounded. “No!”
His voice was raw now, stripped down to something Natasha had rarely heard from him and never in front of so many people. “No. No, no, no!!”
He grabbed the nearest tablet, looked at the failed model on it as if it had personally betrayed him and hurled it across the room. It shattered against the far wall in a burst of sparks and broken glass. The remote scientists on the monitor feeds went abruptly silent.
“Tony..” Bruce said carefully.
“Don’t!” Tony turned on him so fast the word came like a blade. “Do not tell me to calm down!”
He turned back to the main display, hands trembling now not with fear but with the force of keeping all of it inside his body..or trying to. His breathing had gone uneven and Natasha saw the way his control was shredding in visible layers.
“It worked..” he said to no one and everyone at once. “It worked on the isolated matrix. It held on the bonded mimic. It should have-”
“It adapted.” Cho said quietly and Tony rounded on the screen so violently Natasha thought for half a second he might hit it. “I know what it did!”
The words tore out of him louder than the room could hold and You startled behind the glass. That made Natasha move and she crossed the space between herself and the barrier in three fast steps, eyes flicking over your face. You looked pale enough now to frighten her properly, your hand still braced against the wall as if without it you might fold.
On the other side of the lab, Tony was still going. “This thing takes everything!” He slammed a fist against the workbench. “Every model, every inhibitor, every goddamn solution we build, it takes it and learns and comes back worse!” Another object hit the floor, some sensor module, expensive and innocent and utterly unable to bear the force of his grief. “I am so sick of burying people because the world keeps finding new ways to be smarter than us!”
The room froze around that sentence because that was what it was about. Not only this lab..Not only you but Afghanistan, the cave and your father. Every person Tony had ever failed to save despite all the machinery and brilliance in the world. It was all in the room now with him, decades of guilt finally finding an object physical enough to throw itself against.
Bruce stepped closer, cautious the way one approached a blast radius. “Tony.”
But Tony was beyond hearing gentleness. “I promised..” he said and this time the words were lower, “Do you understand? I promised him.”
Natasha’s breath caught and Cho looked away. Bruce went still and Tony’s eyes were on the failed screen, but he was no longer seeing it. He was somewhere else entirely, somewhere dim and blood dark and impossible to survive twice.
“I told him I’d look after her.” His voice cracked on the last word and then hardened immediately after, as if he hated himself for allowing the weakness to show. “And now she’s in there and I can’t-” His hand came down again, harder this time, sending an instrument cart rattling sideways.
“Tony.” Bruce said again firmly and Tony laughed once. It was the ugliest sound Natasha had heard in a long time. “What, Banner? You want me to stop throwing things so I can what, exactly? Accept it?”
“No.”
“Because I’m not going to.”
Bruce’s expression tightened with its own grief. “I know.”
“And I don’t need you to tell me probabilities. I don’t need calm. I need something that works.”
The last word rang through the room and shattered against everything. On the other side of the barrier, you made a small sound. Natasha turned fully then and you were trying to straighten, trying to push yourself away from the wall as if you meant to speak, but your body had gone too light with exhaustion and strain. One hand came up to cover your mouth just before the coughing started.
This time it was bad. Not the dry, manageable kind from earlier. This was deeper, harsher, wrenching hard enough through your chest that Natasha felt her own stomach drop with each one. You bent forward, shoulders tightening around the force of it, and the room changed all over again.
“Y/n.” Natasha said sharply and Tony whirled.
His breakdown vanished on the spot and replaced by pure fear. You couldn’t answer immediately, the coughs kept coming, tearing through the room one after another, your free hand groping for the edge of the chair and missing it. By the time you caught yourself against the wall, your breathing had gone ragged.
Bruce was already at the monitors and Cho pulled your live stats into the center display. “Her saturation’s dropping.”
“Heart rate spiking.”
“Pressure’s up-no, wait, now it’s falling.”
Tony crossed half the lab before he remembered the glass would stop him. He hit the barrier with the flat of one hand instead, eyes fixed on you with a terror so naked Natasha almost couldn’t look at it.
“Kid, look at me.”
You did, eventually and your face had gone gray. Truly gray now beneath the fluorescent light. The cough finally eased enough for you to suck in one shallow breath, then another, and Natasha saw the moment you realized everyone was watching too closely. Instantly, reflexively, you tried to smile, but it came out wrecked. “I’m okay.”
Natasha closed her eyes for a fraction of a second because hearing that from a mouth still shaking with the effort to breathe nearly split her open.
“No, you’re not..” she said and you looked at her. And because you were too tired now to protect everyone as carefully as before, the truth flickered plain in your face for just one heartbeat. No. I’m not.
It vanished almost immediately behind another attempt at composure, but Natasha had seen it and so had Tony. That was worse than the failed cure, maybe. The proof that even you could not quite keep performing okay anymore.
Cho’s voice cut across the room, “The integration markers jumped during the stress response. The viral lattice is feeding on systemic inflammation.”
Bruce stared at the data. “It’s reacting to her body fighting it.”
Tony dragged both hands through his hair so hard Natasha thought he might rip it out. “Then suppress the response.”
“We can suppress some of it..” Cho said, “but too much and we crash her.”
Bruce looked toward the failed model still frozen on the side screen. “And now we know the destabilizer won’t hold.”
Silence again, only this time there was no hope inside it. Tony stood with one hand still against the glass, his head lowered for a second as if he no longer trusted his own face to be seen. Then he straightened, slow and mechanical, grief forcing itself back into motion because stopping meant surrender.
“We keep working.” he said and no one answered because what else could anyone say? Bruce moved first, already rerouting the failed cure data into new simulations even though everyone in the room knew they were farther from an answer now than they had been an hour earlier.
Tony did not apologize for breaking the room. He simply picked up the nearest intact screen and kept going. Natasha returned to the glass and sat down again because if she did not stay close to you she thought she might actually come apart.
You had made it back to the bed by then, though Natasha wasn’t sure how. One of the blankets lay twisted around your knees and your breathing had steadied, but only in the fragile way that meant it had cost you something to get there.
When you saw Natasha lower herself to the floor again, your eyes softened. You didn’t say anything for a while, neither did she. The room behind them kept moving through wreckage and work and the low hum of machines that did not know enough to stop when human hope did.
Finally, in a voice so quiet Natasha had to lean closer to hear it through the speaker, you asked, “Did it almost work?”
Natasha looked at you and thought about lying. About saying no, because maybe it would hurt less if you believed it had always been impossible. But you would know..you always knew.
“Yes.”
Your eyes closed and one tear escaped this time. It slipped down toward your hairline as you lay back against the pillow and you did not wipe it away. Maybe you hadn’t felt it, maybe you were too tired, or maybe you were done pretending that every hurt in this room had to be swallowed before it was allowed to exist.
Natasha lifted her hand and placed it against the glass beside your bed. On the other side, after a second, your fingers found the same place.
By the time the lab settled after Tony’s outburst, something fundamental in it had changed. The work continued because it had to. Broken equipment was cleared from the floor and new trays replaced the old. No one said anything about what had happened, because the room had no energy left for comforting the people who were trying to save it. But the hope that had briefly lifted them all was gone now and everyone felt the shape of its absence.
Natasha stayed by the glass, it had become less a choice than the only position her body recognized anymore. The floor beside the barrier had molded itself around her through the last day and night, a place she knew in the set of her spine and the ache of her knees. She sat there now with one hand folded over the other and looked at you while the rest of the room tried, once again, to outthink death.
Your skin had lost what little warmth the containment lights could fake. There was a strain in your breathing now even at rest, a carefulness to it that made every inhalation sound measured. The energy you spent on smiling had started to outpace the energy you had for anything else. When you sat up, you did it more slowly. When you stood, you looked like you were negotiating with your own body each time. And still, when you noticed Natasha watching too hard, you smiled at her.
For a while neither of you spoke. Natasha knew you were exhausted because your eyes kept drifting half closed and then opening again with stubborn effort, but each time she considered telling you to rest, you seemed to sense it and would sit a little straighter or lift your brows in quiet challenge.
Eventually you broke first. “Are you ever going to sleep again?”
Natasha’s gaze stayed on your face. “Eventually.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
You gave her a look over the rim of the blanket. “You know, most people say things like ‘I’m fine’ when they’re clearly not fine.”
“Do I seem like most people?”
“No..” you said softly. “That’s sort of the problem.”
Something in the way you said it made Natasha lean closer to the speaker. “Problem?”
Your smile thinned into something more thoughtful. “You don’t fake things for comfort.”
“No.”
“You don’t say things just because they sound nice.”
“No.”
“That should be terrifying.” Your eyes held hers. “It isn’t.”
Natasha felt that somewhere too deep to defend against. You looked down at your own hands for a moment, then began smoothing an invisible crease in the blanket with careful fingers. “I keep thinking..” you said after a while, “that if I weren’t in here, this would all feel completely unreal.”
“What would?”
You glanced up. “Us.”
The word hovered there between the crackling machinery and the low hum of filtration and all the impossible circumstances pressing in around it.
Natasha said nothing and you smiled faintly, embarrassed now that you’d said it aloud. “Not in a bad way.”
“I know.”
“It’s just…” You exhaled. “I spent so much time thinking you were impossible to read.”
“That was accurate.”
You ignored that. “And then suddenly you were asking me to dinner and then somehow you were sitting outside a quarantine wall with takeout and a fake candle like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
“The candle was your favorite part.”
“It absolutely was not.”
“It was.”
You pressed a hand lightly to your chest. “This is slander.”
“It’s observation.”
You laughed softly, but the sound faded too quickly into a breath that caught midway. Natasha saw the way your shoulders tightened before you forced them to ease again. She stayed still because she had learned that lunging at every sign only made you spend more energy pretending not to need anyone.
Your voice, when it came again was lower. “I liked last night.”
Natasha looked at you and the room behind her vanished for a second. “Im glad.” she said.
“I mean really liked it.” You shifted, pulling the blanket a little tighter around yourself. “I’m glad it happened before…” You stopped, the rest of the sentence did not need saying.
Natasha’s jaw tightened. “I’m glad too.”
Your eyes softened. “Even with the glass?”
That one landed harder and Natasha looked at the transparent wall between them, its surface nearly invisible until it caught a line of overhead light. Then she looked back at you.
“Especially then.” She said. “Because you were there..” she clarified. “Because it happened and I didn’t wait.”
For a moment you only stared. Then something inside your expression opened with a sudden, painful tenderness that made Natasha feel exposed in ways combat never had. You looked like she had handed you something fragile and priceless just by telling the truth.
“I would’ve waited.”
Natasha’s gaze sharpened. “For what?”
“For you.”
The air left the room for one impossible heartbeat. Natasha had lived through interrogations, gunfire, betrayal, gods, monsters and the collapse of empires. She had not been prepared for a sentence spoken softly by a girl wrapped in a blanket behind glass.
Your cheeks colored the second you realized how naked the admission sounded. “That was..wow. Okay. I did not mean to say that so intensely.”
Natasha felt the pull of a smile, though her chest hurt too much to let it fully form. “No?”
“No.” You ducked your head. “Maybe a little.”
She should have said something clever then. Instead she said, “I’m glad you didn’t.”
You looked up so quickly it would have been almost funny in any other room. But what crossed your face then wasn’t humor, it was relief so deep it looked like grief’s kinder twin.
The room behind Natasha continued to work. Bruce moved to another console and Tony asked FRIDAY for a tighter replay of the substrate collapse. For a little while, it was just the two of you. “What did you think it was going to be like?” Natasha asked.
You blinked. “What?”
“Our date. I mean..In real.”
That made you smile despite everything. “Oh.”
You leaned your head back against the wall behind the bed, eyes going slightly unfocused as though looking into a version of the evening that should have existed somewhere else. “I thought I was going to spend three hours pretending I wasn’t nervous and failing.”
“You did that anyway.”
“That is so rude!” But your smile deepened. “I thought maybe there’d be some ridiculously expensive restaurant Tony would be offended he didn’t get to approve.”
“He would’ve been.”
“I thought maybe you’d order something elegant and I’d try to seem like the kind of person who knew what to do with tiny forks.”
“You don’t know what to do with tiny forks?”
“I reject their authority.”
You glowed under it, then kept going because once started, the imagining seemed to soothe you. “And I thought maybe afterward we’d walk somewhere quiet and I’d say too much because I’d be trying to fill every silence before it had the chance to turn awkward.”
Natasha’s eyes stayed on yours. “You don’t make silences awkward.”
Something in you shifted at that, quiet and touched. “No?”
“No.”
Your voice softened almost to a whisper. “You don’t either.”
The speaker carried it too clearly and Natasha looked down once at her hands, then back up. “I was going to take you somewhere small.”
You stared. “You had picked somewhere?”
“Yes.”
A tiny crease appeared between your brows, startled and pleased. “Really?”
Natasha nodded. “Not loud or public enough for people to bother us. Food you would’ve liked.”
You smiled then, helpless and aching all at once. “That is dangerously thoughtful.”
“I know.”
“Would I have been allowed dessert?”
“I was considering it.”
You made a wounded noise. “Considering?”
“You talk too much.”
“And yet you keep choosing to be around me.”
The words were light but the look between you was not. Natasha felt it then again, the almost unbearable tenderness of being known in the middle of fear. She had spent years armoring herself against the world, and somehow you had found your way in not by force but by patience and laughter and seeing what lived beneath the steel.
On the other side of the room, Bruce suddenly straightened. It was a small movement, but Natasha saw it because she had learned to monitor all of them without turning her head. Cho moved closer at the same moment and Tony, who had been staring at the residue data from the failed trial, snapped his eyes toward the central screen. The shift in the room was immediate and sharp.
Natasha glanced back and on one of the enlarged molecular displays, the remains of the failed cure vector, what the virus had not fully consumed in the first collapse had been re rendered at a different scale. Instead of total degradation, there was a surviving pattern in the residue. A piece of the inhibitor had not simply been eaten.
It had changed..Bruce zoomed in further, lines of code and structural overlays blooming around the pattern. “Wait..” he said quietly.
Cho’s expression sharpened. “It’s not random.”
Tony was already moving. “FRIDAY, isolate the remnant sequence from the failed substrate.”
“Done.”
He stabbed a finger toward the highlighted structure. “That’s what it used to stabilize itself after the first pulse.”
“No.” Bruce said, stepping closer. “That’s what it borrowed.”
Cho looked between them, mind racing as fast as theirs. “The virus didn’t just adapt around the cure. It incorporated part of the cure’s vector to maintain cohesion during reconfiguration.”
Natasha rose to her feet without realizing it. On your side of the glass, you pushed yourself upright too and Tony was staring now with that terrifying stillness he got when genius found a door it hadn’t seen before. “Run the sequence backwards.”
FRIDAY obeyed and on screen, the remnant pattern inverted through several theoretical states until a new model emerged, not the original destabilizer, not the version they had tested, but something altered by the virus itself. A tiny difference..One structural pivot in the inhibitor arm and a change in timing measured in fractions of a second.
Bruce saw it at the same time. “It needed a stagger.”
Cho nodded once, almost disbelieving. “The initial vector collapsed the scaffold too cleanly. That’s what triggered full adaptive compensation. If we make the bond unstable in phases instead of all at once…”
“We force it to keep choosing structure over replication..” Tony finished.
“And it can’t use the same adaptation path because the phase lag blocks the scaffold handoff,” Bruce said.
There it was. Not a new cure…but the same cure, understood too late. The virus had shown them how to fix it by surviving the first version. For a second nobody in the room moved because the realization was too specific..
Tony’s face changed in a way Natasha knew she would remember for the rest of her life. It was horror, because one structural phase delay..one timing correction in the transfer pulse..And the first cure would have held.
Your breath caught audibly through the speaker. “What does that mean?”
No one answered fast enough. Tony turned toward you slowly, in his face now was something Natasha had never seen so nakedly on him before: hope and guilt so violently fused they became indistinguishable.
“It means.” he said carefully, “..the virus didn’t destroy the treatment.”
Bruce looked at the revised model. “It taught us where it failed.”
You stared at them from behind the glass, body swaying almost imperceptibly from the effort of standing. “So you can fix it?”
Tony didn’t say yes but this time he didn’t say maybe either. “We can rebuild it.”
The room took that sentence and held its breath around it. Then the work began again, only now it had a shape..
Warnings: Age gap (N=31, r=23), parents death, infection
Word count: 14k
A/N: I apologize if the spacing looks weird, I had to fight once again to fit everything in. I won’t spoil too much, but don’t get your hopes up for this one…it might be my first cruel work on here. 🥸
The ramp of the quinjet lowered with a hydraulic hiss. Steve was already halfway down and barking something over his shoulder to Sam about debriefing.
Natasha remained seated for a moment longer, one elbow resting on her knee and her weapon dismantled in her gloved hands. She pulled the slide back again, testing the resistance and her jaw tightening when it caught just slightly, but enough. Enough to matter and to have nearly cost her on the mission.
Clint noticed, because Clint noticed things other people didn’t with her, “That thing still giving you trouble?”
“It jammed twice.” she said coolly. “And the recoil feels wrong.”
Clint winced in sympathy. “That bad?”
“It nearly got me shot.” That sobered him. He shifted his bow from one shoulder to the other. “Did you have Y/n look at it?”
Natasha’s brows drew together. “Y/n?” she repeated, unfamiliar with the name. Clint blinked as if surprised. “You don’t know you?”
Natasha gave him a flat look that should’ve answered the question on its own. He huffed out a laugh. “Tony’s little tech nerd.”
Her expression sharpened instantly. “Tony’s what?”
Clint held up both hands. “Not like that!! She works in the lab. Tiny thing with a scary brain. Fixed my bow trigger assembly once when it kept locking under tension.” He gave his weapon an affectionate pat. “Actually improved it, I’m still mad about it.”
Natasha snorted softly, but the tension in her shoulders didn’t ease. “And how old is this genius?”
Clint shrugged. “Young.”
“That inspires confidence.”
“I’m serious.” He fell into step with her as they headed inside. “She knows her stuff.”
“So does Tony.” Natasha replied.
Clint gave her a look. “Yeah, and Tony also tends to ‘improve’ things until they explode or develop sarcasm.”
She almost smiled at that. “Besides..” Clint added, pushing through the glass doors into the tower, “if Stark couldn’t figure it out, she probably can.”
Natasha slowed a fraction and that caught her attention more than she wanted it to. “You’re exaggerating.”
Clint shook his head. “Nope.”
There was an irritating sincerity in his voice that made it hard to dismiss. Natasha glanced down at the weapon in her hand. Something about entrusting one of her guns, one of the few things in this world she relied on without hesitation to an unknown person made her instincts bristle. Minutes later, when the elevator doors slid open with a soft chime, noise spilled out immediately. Something sparked with a sharp snap followed by an irritated mutter and music played low from unseen speakers. Natasha stepped out and paused.
The lab was a disaster. Tools lay scattered across half the available surfaces. Open blueprints overlapped each other in messy stacks and an Iron Man gauntlet sat disassembled beside what looked suspiciously like an upgraded toaster. Natasha’s gaze flicked over the wreckage with thinly veiled judgment. Of course Tony would call this organization. Then she heard it, the sound of someone bumping into something solid. Natasha turned toward the noise and moved silently through the maze of workstations. That was when she saw her.
A young woman, crouched beside an open cabinet and one hand buried elbow deep in wires and components, the other gripping a screwdriver between her teeth. She looked up at the sound of Natasha’s footsteps and Natasha knew that look. She had seen intelligence in Bruce, calculation in Tony, precision in Vision. This was different and for a beat, neither of you spoke, then Natasha said, “I’m looking for Y/n.”
The girl blinked and then, to Natasha’s immediate irritation, laughed. “Well.” She said, removing the screwdriver from between her teeth and rising to stand, “that makes this easy.”
Natasha’s expression didn’t change. “Why?”
The girl wiped your hand on her shirt and offered a small smile. “Because you already found me.”
Silence and Natasha let her gaze travel over you slowly now. Young, far too young and no visible signs of combat training or calloused knuckles. No scars she could immediately see from where she stood. You looked like a university student who’d accidentally wandered into the world’s most dangerous workshop. This was the person Clint trusted with precision weaponry?
Apparently you caught every shade of doubt that crossed Natasha’s face, because your smile thinned with practiced patience. “I get that look a lot.”
Natasha folded her arms. “Do you.”
“Mhm.” You tilted your head. “The ‘you look twelve, why are you allowed near expensive equipment’ look? Very common.”
“You don’t look twelve.”
“That is somehow worse.” Your gaze flicked to the dismantled weapon in Natasha’s hand. “You came for a reason.”
Natasha hesitated only a second before extending the gun toward you grip first. “It’s misfiring. Slide resistance feels off and jammed twice in the field.”
Your whole posture changed the moment the weapon entered your hand. The shift was immediate and startling. You turned the gun over once, fingers moving with familiarity rather than carelessness and eyes scanning its construction.
And then, without missing a beat, you said, “Modified Glock platform. Custom balancing on the frame, reinforced internals, personalized grip pressure compensation…Tony didn’t do this. Someone older, way more patient.”
Natasha stared at you. That was the first crack in her certainty. Most people saw “gun.” Maybe “expensive gun.” Very few could identify custom work from a glance, and fewer still noticed the old craftsmanship buried beneath later upgrades.
“Go on.” Natasha said carefully.
You looked up then and for the first time there was a flicker of satisfaction in your expression. “You’ve got wear here.” you murmured, thumb brushing lightly along the side. “Not enough to matter by itself. The real issue is probably in the recoil spring housing or the feed alignment. Maybe both if you’ve been using this configuration for a while.”
Natasha said nothing and you took that as permission to continue and walked toward a marked shooting lane built into a reinforced section at the far end of the lab. Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“Testing it.”
You opened a case of ammunition with casual efficiency and Natasha moved instantly, “Stop.”
You looked over your shoulder and Natasha stepped closer. “You don’t load a weapon unless you know how to handle it.”
For one suspended moment, the lab seemed to hold its breath. You turned fully then, one hand resting lightly on the workbench and the other still holding the magazine. “I’m twenty three, by the way.” you said evenly. “And I know what I’m doing.”
Slowly, Natasha dropped her hand, “Well, then.”
You loaded the gun with deliberate movements and checked the chamber, adjusted your stance and faced the target downrange. Natasha expected awkwardness, some hesitation in the shoulders, some weakness in the wrist, some sign that this was theoretical knowledge at best..Instead, you planted your feet, lifted the weapon and fired. Three shots cracked through the lab in controlled succession. The sound reverberated off metal and glass and Natasha’s eyes flicked to the target.
Centered.
You lowered the gun, expression thoughtful rather than impressed with yourself. You fired twice more, slower this time, clearly listening to the mechanics between each shot. Then you pulled the slide back, tilted the weapon, and made a small considering sound.
“Huh.”
Natasha crossed her arms tighter. “You found something.”
“Yeah.” You ejected the magazine and set the gun on the table. “It’s exactly what I thought. Slight feed misalignment and a worn spring assembly that’s compensating badly under pressure. It’s subtle, but at your fire rate?” Your eyes lifted to Natasha. “Subtle is enough to get you killed.”
Natasha glanced at the gun again, then back at you. “Can you fix it?”
You gave her a look that was almost offended. “Yes.”
That actually pulled the ghost of a smile from Natasha. “How long?”
You picked up the weapon again and walked toward a crowded workbench lit by an overhead lamp. “A few hours. I want to take it apart properly, check whether anything else got thrown off by the wear, and make sure it’s field-stable after.”
Natasha leaned one shoulder against a nearby pillar. “And if I need it before then?”
You set the gun down on a black mat and reached for tools. “Then I’d tell you not to use it.”
There was something unexpectedly calming about the answer and Natasha watched you for another moment, watched the way you moved through the clutter with total ease, as if this maze of metal and madness were an extension of yourself. You never seemed to search for tools, your hands just found them. Natasha let her gaze drift around the lab, there were signs of you everywhere once she started looking. A mug abandoned near a terminal, filled with cold tea rather than coffee, blanket thrown over the back of one chair and a stack of scientific journals marked with sticky notes in different colors. Not a visitor, then.
“Who are you?” Natasha asked finally.
You didn’t look up from the weapon you were dismantling. “That’s a broad question.”
Natasha’s gaze moved to the side wall and stopped. There, half hidden behind a hanging holo-display, were framed photographs. In one, Tony looked years younger, thinner in the face, his smile less curated somehow. Beside him stood a man in military uniform, broad shouldered and stern, though there was warmth in the way he looked at the camera. Another photo showed that same man crouched beside a much younger you, maybe seven or nine, holding a little toy robot with an expression of absolute delight. In another, Tony had one arm around the man’s shoulders and the other around little you, who were perched on a lab stool and grinning. Something in Natasha’s chest went unexpectedly still and glanced back at you. You hadn’t turned or followed her gaze. But Natasha knew you’d noticed anyway.
“You work here.” Natasha said, quieter now.
You smiled faintly, still focused on the internal pieces laid out before you. “Pretty much.”
Natasha studied you for another moment, sensing the edge of something private there, some line she could cross if she pushed harder, so she chose not to. “I’ll have it ready in a few hours.” you said. “You can come back then.”
Natasha inclined her head once. “I will.”
She turned and left the lab with quieter steps than she had entered with. But by the time the elevator doors closed, the image of you standing in that pool of workshop light and grease-stained, unbothered, frighteningly competent had rooted itself somewhere in her mind.
When Natasha returned later, the tower had fallen into the softer hush of evening. She stepped out of the elevator expecting the same controlled chaos as before, instead, she slowed.
Tony was there, that alone wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the way he was sitting. Tony was not a man who sat still unless he was performing stillness for someone else’s benefit. He lounged, sprawled, prowled, gestured, paced. He filled silence so it didn’t have the chance to become uncomfortable. But now he sat on the edge of a worktable, shoulders squared, elbows on his knees and listening. You stood in front of him with a datapad in one hand and a wrench in the other, speaking quickly about something Natasha couldn’t fully hear from the doorway.
She stayed where she was for a moment. The dynamic between them was…startling. Not assistant and employer or mentor and student, not exactly. You didn’t perform deference for him and Tony, who bulldozed through most conversations like they were designed for him to win listened when you spoke.
Pepper appeared at Natasha’s side so quietly that even Natasha was mildly annoyed she hadn’t noticed her approach. “Well.” Pepper said, amusement threading through her voice, “that expression means you’ve either found a new problem or a new mystery.”
Natasha turned her head. “Maybe both.”
Pepper followed her gaze toward Tony and you and sighed “Ah.”
Natasha hesitated, which for most people would have looked like no hesitation at all. “Who is she?”
Pepper’s eyes softened immediately. She crossed her arms, looking out into the lab for a moment before answering. “That depends how far back you want me to start.”
Natasha said nothing and Pepper took that as permission. “Her father worked for Tony years ago.“ she said quietly. “Not lab staff, but security. He was former elite military, very good at what he did, very serious, very impossible. He was assigned to Tony during some of the uglier weapons contracts overseas.”
Natasha glanced back at the old photographs in her memory. The uniformed man.
“He was with Tony in Afghanistan.” Pepper continued. “In the convoy.”
Natasha’s attention sharpened. The convoy and the attack that changed everything..The one that ended with Tony captured, wounded, dragged into that cave where the first Iron Man suit was born from blood and scrap metal and desperation.
Pepper’s voice lowered further. “He went with Tony when they were attacked. He made it through the initial hit and made it all the way to the cave.” She swallowed once. “But the people holding them…they made an example of him.”
For the first time in a long time, Natasha had no immediate response. Pepper stared out at you, who were now pointing at something in a holographic display while Tony argued with exaggerated offense. “They killed him in front of Tony.”
The words settled heavily between them and suddenly the shape of everything shifted. The pictures, the familiarity..the way you belonged here.
Natasha looked at Pepper. “What about her?”
Pepper shook her head. “Gone before that. She didn’t really have anyone left. Tony never says it outright, because guilt makes him defensive and weird and louder than usual. But he blamed himself..For all of it. For the convoy, for the weapons and what happened to her father. So when he came back…” She exhaled softly. “He made sure she had a place. At first it was supposed to be temporary. Safe housing, schools, support, all of that.”
Natasha looked back toward the lab floor. You were laughing at something now, shaking your head while Tony pretended to look wounded. “It wasn’t temporary.” Natasha said.
Pepper smiled sadly. “No. It wasn’t.”
“She grew up here.”
Pepper nodded. “Around the lab, around Tony, around every terrible influence this tower had to offer. Mostly Tony.” A pause. “She’s brilliant. Honestly brilliant, Natasha, the kind that makes people uncomfortable because she sees things too fast.”
Natasha thought back to you diagnosing her weapon in under a minute, Yeah..that fit.
“She used to sit on a stool and watch Tony work for hours.” Pepper continued. “Then she started asking questions. Then correcting things. Then solving things before anyone else had the chance.” A small smile touched her lips. “The first time she told Tony one of his calculations was sloppy, I thought he was going to faint from indignation.”
Natasha let out the smallest breath of amusement. Pepper’s expression gentled. “He loves her. In his own impossible way. Not always perfectly, but completely.”
Something in Natasha tightened unexpectedly. Maybe because she understood imperfect love better than she understood perfect versions of it. Maybe because families built from loss always struck closer than she liked. Or maybe because the girl she had dismissed on sight was suddenly no longer just some overconfident twenty three year old in a grease stained shirt. She was a survivor. A child of violence who had somehow grown into brilliance instead of bitterness.
Natasha looked at you differently after that and perhaps she hated that she had to be told the story to get there. Pepper nudged her lightly. “You came for your gun, didn’t you?”
Natasha’s gaze flicked to your workbench. “I did.”
“Then rescue it before Tony decides to redesign it into a satellite.”
That, at least, sounded believable. Together, they stepped fully into the lab. Tony looked up first. “Ah, the assassin returns. For legal reasons, I assume not for me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Natasha said.
You turned at the sound of Natasha’s voice and the moment you saw her, you straightened immediately and set aside the datapad. The easy humor in your face shifted into focus again, though this time Natasha noticed it came with something else too. Without a word, you reached for a case on the bench and opened it. Natasha’s gun rested inside on dark foam, cleaned, reassembled, every piece gleaming with careful attention. You picked it up with both hands and offered it to her.
“I replaced the spring assembly, corrected the feed issue, and rebalanced the internal tension.“ you said. “Also adjusted the slide response slightly so it should feel smoother under rapid fire. I didn’t change anything major without asking.”
Natasha took the weapon and it settled into her hand like something familiar and newly sharpened at once. She checked the weight firs, then the slide.
“Try it.” you said, almost too quickly, then visibly reined yourself in. “If you want.”
Natasha moved to the lane and loaded a test magazine. Tony, Pepper and you all watched. She raised the gun, narrowed her focus, and fired. Each shot landed true and the recoil settled exactly where it should. When the magazine emptied, Natasha lowered the gun slowly and for a heartbeat, the room was quiet.
Natasha turned back toward you and you stood very still. And there it was again, that contrast Natasha found herself noticing too much already. The confidence was real and the intelligence, undeniable. But beneath it was something softer, harder to earn. A kind of old watchfulness, as if part of you was always bracing for dismissal anyway.
“It’s better.” she said and because apparently Natasha had not been clear enough, she added, “Much better.”
A flash of relief lit your face so quickly it was nearly gone before anyone else could have noticed, but.
“Good.” you said, trying and failing to sound casual. “I told you I knew what I was doing.”
Natasha looked at you for a long moment. “Yes.” she said quietly. “You did.”
Something passed between you both. A shift in the air like the beginning of static before lightning. You seemed to feel it too, because your finger tightened slightly around the edge of the bench. “If anything feels off after extended use.:” you said, voice softer now, “come back.”
Natasha’s gaze held yours. “I might.”
Tony looked between you with immediate suspicion. “I don’t like whatever this vibe is..”
Pepper sighed. “No one asked, Tony..”
You laughed softly under your breath and ducking your head as if to hide it. Natasha found, to her annoyance, that she liked the sound and she holstered the gun and turned toward the elevator. But when she reached the doors, she glanced back once, you were already back at the bench, talking to Tony again, one hand moving animatedly as you explained something technical. It should have been easy to leave the moment there. Natasha had spent most of her life walking away from moments. But later, alone in her room, cleaning a gun that no longer needed cleaning, she found her mind drifting back downstairs.
Natasha lay back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling, irritated with herself. It was ridiculous, she barely knew you. You were a scientist, too young and too clever. Far more interesting than Natasha wanted you to be. And yet she could still hear your voice. I’m twenty three. And I know what I’m doing. She closed her eyes and for the first time in a while, someone had surprised her. And somehow, that was the most unsettling part of all. Because she had a feeling this would not be the last time you got under her skin.
Days later, the party had started out louder than Natasha expected and she had, for reasons she still wasn’t entirely sure how Tony had talked her into, ended up behind the bar. But not that she minded, it gave her something to do with her hands. She moved with effortless precision behind the polished counter, pouring whiskey, sliding glasses across the surface, opening beer bottles with economical movements. “Another?” Sam asked, raising his empty glass with a grin.
He laughed and took the drink from her hand. Natasha turned toward the shelf behind her, reaching for another bottle just as she heard a voice at the bar.
“Am I too late to be dramatic and order something impossible?”
Natasha turned and paused. You stood on the other side of the counter, half leaning against it, smiling at her. For one strange, stupid second, the noise of the room dulled. Natasha had seen you in the lab, in grease smudged shirts and oversized clothes and a halo of static energy that seemed to belong to solder smoke and machine light. But this..this was different.
You looked softer tonight, though no less bright. You wore dark jeans and a simple fitted top beneath a loose jacket, like you still hadn’t fully accepted that this was a party and not just a temporary interruption before you returned to the lab. Your hair was down for once, falling around your shoulders in a way that made you look younger and older at the same time. There was no grease on your cheek now, no ink on your fingers that Natasha could immediately spot. And somehow that was more distracting than it should have been.
Natasha recovered quickly, “That depends.” she said. “Do you have ID?”
You stared at her for half a heartbeat and then laughed and Natasha felt something unexpectedly soft unfurl low in her chest. It was such an open sound, like the kind that slipped out before someone could decide whether to hold it back..And Natasha hated how much she liked it.
“God..” you said, laughing harder now. “Was that a joke?”
Natasha leaned one forearm on the bar. “I’m capable of humor.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t. I’m just…pleasantly surprised.”
“You say that like it’s rare.” You tilted your head, smiling at her with that same impossible brightness. “It feels rare.”
For a moment Natasha only looked at you. Then she reached for a glass. “What are you drinking?”
You glanced over the bottles lined behind Natasha, all expensive and gleaming under the lights, then back at her. “Cola.”
Natasha blinked once. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re at Tony Stark’s party.”
“Yes.”
“There are bottles behind me worth more than some people’s rent.”
“I know.”
“And you want cola.”
You smiled, a little sheepish now. “I’m not a big fan of alcohol.”
Natasha picked up a clean glass and filled it with ice. “Bad experience?” There was no pressure in the question, just quiet understanding. You watched the cola fizz into the glass. “No dramatic story, actually. I just don’t like feeling out of control.”
Natasha’s hand stilled for the smallest fraction of a second before she slid the drink toward you. “That.” she said, “I understand.”
Your eyes flicked up to hers and something softer entering them. “Yeah.” you said quietly. “I figured you might.”
Their fingers brushed briefly as you took the glass. The contact was slight, still Natasha felt it and apparently she wasn’t the only one, because your smile shifted just a little afterward. Natasha straightened and glanced at the room. “You don’t usually come up for these.”
“I know.”
“So why tonight?”
You took a sip of your drink before answering. “Because Pepper threatened to drag me upstairs herself if I stayed in the lab all night.”
“That sounds like Pepper.”
“She said and I quote, ‘You are twenty three years old. Go stand near people and pretend you’re not married to a circuit board.’”
Natasha snorted into a laugh before she could stop it and you looked absurdly pleased with yourself for causing it. “There it is..” you said.
Natasha narrowed her eyes. “Don’t make a thing of it.”
“Too late.”
The conversation came easier than Natasha expected. That was what unsettled her most. She was good at talking when talking had a purpose. Extracting information or manipulating a scene. But this didn’t feel like that. It felt…easy.
You stayed at the bar long after receiving your drink, and Natasha did not ask you to move along. They talked between orders and interruptions, in fragments at first, then longer stretches. About the music, which you claimed was “Tony trying to prove he has mature taste.” About Steve, who looked like every loud laugh in the room physically stressed him. Natasha learned that you didn’t sleep enough, forgot to eat when you were working, and had a habit of carrying around three different pens despite claiming you were “fully digital now.” You learned that Natasha preferred bourbon over vodka, which shocked you on principle, and that behind the dry remarks and unreadable face was a sense of humor sharp enough to catch you off guard whenever it surfaced. And every time you laughed, Natasha felt that same warmth again.
Eventually the crowd shifted toward the center of the room where Thor, with all the grandeur of a king and all the smugness of a man very sure of his own mythology, had set Mjolnir down on the low table like a challenge. Natasha stepped out from behind the bar and somewhere in the movement you ended up beside her, the two of you settling close together on the edge of a couch with the easy momentum of people who had already decided, without saying it, to keep each other company.
“Ah, yes..” you murmured, sipping your cola as Rhodey rolled his shoulders dramatically. “Male ego. Nature’s most renewable resource.”
Natasha turned to look at you, and the deadpan delivery nearly made her smile outright. “You’ve been around Tony too long.”
You kept your eyes on the scene in front of you. “That implies I had a choice.”
Rhodey grabbed the hammer first and nothing happened. You clicked your tongue sympathetically. “A strong showing.”
Natasha crossed one leg over the other. “Very graceful.”
Then came Tony, of course, because Tony would rather combust than let Rhodey fail alone. He used both hands. Then the gauntlet. Then logic, as if somehow technology would convince an ancient magical hammer to reconsider. Steve gave it a try next and the room grew subtly quieter. Even Natasha leaned forward slightly, watching the set of his jaw, the way his hand tightened around the handle. There was the faintest shift, so slight Natasha would’ve missed it if she weren’t trained to notice impossible things. Thor sat up so fast it was almost comical, but it stopped and Steve let go. The room erupted into noise again, but Natasha felt you shift beside her, both of you catching the same detail and filing it away without comment.
Someone, Sam, maybe, or one of the others looked over at you suddenly and said, “Your turn.”
You nearly choked on your drink. “What? No.”
“Come on!”
“You built half the weird stuff in this tower.” someone else added. “That’s basically wizard adjacent.”
You held up both hands. “Absolutely not.”
“Scared?” Clint asked from across the room, grinning.
You pointed at him. “Deeply, yes.”
The room laughed and Natasha angled toward you. “Try it.”
You turned to her in mock betrayal. “You too?”
“You’ve been making comments all night. Back them up.”
You narrowed your eyes. “You do it.”
Natasha’s expression remained cool. “I have nothing to prove.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why are you panicking?”
“I’m not panicking!” you said quickly. “I’m preserving the mystery.”
Natasha looked pointedly at the hammer. “Afraid it’ll crush your ego?”
You clutched your chest. “That was mean..”
“It was accurate.”
You leaned in a fraction, lowering your voice conspiratorially. “You know what I think?”
Natasha did not move away. “What?”
“I think..” you said, smiling wildly now, “you should do it.”
Natasha let out a soft incredulous breath. “No.”
“Do I sense fear?”
Natasha turned fully toward you then, one eyebrow arched. “Careful.”
That only made you grin harder. For a fleeting second the room and the hammer and the noise around them seemed to blur at the edges. It became just this, your bright eyes, the playful challenge in them, the warmth of your shoulder nearly brushing Natasha’s and then the world split apart.
A metallic crash tore through the air and glass shattered somewhere to the left. The room lurched from laughter into violence so quickly it barely felt real. Natasha was on her feet before the first scream fully landed and she moved on instinct, grabbing the nearest civilian and shoving them behind cover just as one of the drones opened fire across the bar. Then she heard it, “Y/N!” Tony’s voice completely in panic.
Natasha snapped her gaze through the chaos and found you half crouched near the couch they’d been sitting on, helping a woman to the floor behind overturned furniture.
“I’ve got her!” Natasha shouted back.
She didn’t wait to see if Tony heard, she was already moving. A drone lunged into her path and Natasha shot it clean through the head and grabbed you by the wrist just long enough to pull you behind the nearest pillar as bullets tore through the space you’d occupied a second earlier.
“You okay?” Natasha demanded and you nodded too fast. “Yes.”
“Stay down.” That should have been the end of it.
But fights never stayed simple. Another drone crashed through the upper railing and landed hard enough to shake the floor. Natasha fired twice, rolled under a spray of sparks, came up low and fast and then something slammed into her side. Pain burst through her ribs and her gun flew from her hand, skidding across the floor out of reach.
She hit the ground hard and breath punching out of her lungs. The drone turned toward her with terrible mechanical precision, arm lifting and weapon charging. Natasha twisted, reaching for a bla- a shot rang out.
The drone jerked once and dropped beside her in a heap of sparking metal. For a second Natasha didn’t understand what had happened. Then she looked up and stood a few feet away, Natasha’s gun still in your hand. Your face had gone pale and you stared at the weapon like it had burned you. Then immediately, almost violently, you dropped it. The gun clattered against the floor and Natasha pushed herself upright despite the ache in her side. “Y/n..”
Your eyes snapped to hers. “Are you okay?” Natasha asked. It was the same question as before, but now it meant something different.
“Yeah.” you said, though the word came thin. “I’m okay.”
Natasha rose fully and picked up her weapon. “You saved my life..”
There was no time to answer properly because another drone shrieked somewhere behind them and Natasha touched your arm only briefly. “Stay with me.”
Together you moved, Natasha fighting, you staying low, helping steer terrified guests out of open lines of fire. You weren’t built for battlefield chaos, not like the others, but you adapted. And then, as suddenly as it began, it ended. The room fell into a ragged silence of smoke, sparks, broken glass and everyone breathing too hard.
Natasha stood among the wreckage, chest rising and falling. Around her, the others regrouped and Tony’s face had gone hard in the way it always did when fear turned directly into anger. Then his first gaze went to you. “You hurt?”
You straightened from where you had been helping someone up. “I’m fine.”
He looked unconvinced, but there were bigger fires burning now and they all moved to the lab. The mood there was nothing like the warmth of the party before. Broken drone parts had been dragged in for analysis and FRIDAY’s voice had replaced JARVIS’s familiar calm, and the absence of him was its own kind of wound. Natasha stayed near the back at first, leaning against one of the tables while the others argued in widening circles. Everyone was talking and no one was listening, in the middle of it all was the gaping fact that Tony had created something catastrophic and kept it to himself long enough for it to breathe.
You stood near one of the side consoles, silent now. You looked tired in a way the others didn’t yet. Not physically, though that too, your shoulders were too tight and your hands flexed and curled at your sides when you thought no one was looking. Once, your eyes drifted toward the place where JARVIS’s core systems usually displayed and something in your expression changed. You stepped forward and everyone else was still fighting with each other when you cut in, voice not loud, but precise enough to slice through all of them. “Stop!”
It worked. Maybe because you rarely demanded the room unless you had something worth saying. Maybe because they all knew it. Tony turned first. “Y/n-”
“No!” You moved closer to the main display, “You’re all arguing about who’s responsible and yes, great, that’s definitely a conversation, but it doesn’t matter if we don’t figure out what he wants next!”
You pulled up fragments of code, satellite maps, intercepted data, broken command strings salvaged from the drone they had brought down. “He talked about peace.” you said, eyes scanning. “He quoted Stark. He called the Avengers a roadblock. He didn’t attack this tower just to scare us.” Your fingers moved faster. “He’s not thinking like a person. He’s thinking like a mission with no moral limiters.”
Natasha watched Tony watch you and there was fear there still, yes. But also trust, absolutely and immediate. You zoomed in on one data trail and then another. “There.”
Bruce leaned forward. “What?”
“He took something before he left.” You pulled up a set of missing files, then connected them to external systems. “Not just access.“ You looked from screen to screen, putting the pieces together so fast Natasha could almost see the pattern forming in real time. “He’s building toward something bigger. He’s not running, he’s preparing.”
“For what?” Steve asked.
“To end the fight permanently.” you said. “His definition of peace is extinction level control.”
The words settled like ice into the room and Tony moved beside you. “Can you track where?”
“Not exactly yet. But I can narrow the likely targets if you stop arguing long enough to let me work.” That might have been rude coming from anyone else. From you, in this moment, it was simply true. Natasha saw the subtle shift then, everyone recalibrating around your conclusion, not because you demanded authority, but because you had earned it. After some minutes, when everything settled again, Tony looked over at you and asked quietly, “You sure you’re okay?”
You didn’t look at him when you answered. “I’m okay.” But Natasha heard the difference. She knew what “I’m okay” sounded like when it meant please don’t ask me to feel this right now. Eventually, after too much adrenaline and too many revelations, the room thinned. You closed out one last screen and stepped back too, “I’m going to bed.” you said quietly. Tony looked like he wanted to argue or stop you to check you over again just to make sure you hadn’t hidden an injury because you thought everyone was too busy. Instead he only nodded. There was something achingly paternal in the way he said it.
You gave him the faintest smile and turned toward the hall. Natasha found herself moving after you before she had quite decided to. The corridor outside the lab was much quieter, the noise of the tower fading behind you both and for a few moments, neither of you spoke. Then Natasha said, “You’re not fine.” You glanced over, tired but amused. “That was fast.”
“You dropped my gun like it had insulted you.”
“I probably would’ve preferred it insulting me.” You shook your head once, as if trying to throw off the whole moment. “I just..” You exhaled shakily. “I hate that.”
Natasha’s gaze softened almost imperceptibly. “Shooting?”
“I can shoot. I know how. My dad made sure I knew how to protect myself. But I don’t like it..I don’t want to.” A pause. “Not people.not even things pretending to be people.”
They walked a little further and the adrenaline had burned off enough now that the emotional aftermath was settling in. Natasha knew that feeling intimately. The emptiness after violence and the way your body realized all at once what it had just survived. “I really am okay.” you said after a moment. “Just…not good with things that sound like that.”
Natasha understood more than she said. “You did what you needed to do.”
“I know.” You stared ahead. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“No.” Natasha said. “It doesn’t.”
That seemed to ease something small in your expression. You reached a long stretch of hallway lined with doors and quiet art Tony had almost certainly bought to prove he had taste and you slowed a little.
“Thanks.” you said.
Natasha looked at you. “For what?”
“For earlier.” You hesitated. “At the party. At the fight. For…not making me feel stupid after.”
Natasha stopped walking and you stopped too, “You could never look stupid.” Natasha said before she had fully decided to say it. Your eyes widened just slightly, caught off guard and then your smile came back,
“That..” you said softly, “might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Natasha crossed her arms, „You’ve known me for two conversations.”
“Exactly. High praise.”
That drew a real smile from Natasha this time and you noticed it immediately. Then you smiled too, almost wildly happy in a way that made you look younger than twenty three and somehow even more luminous. Natasha had the absurd urge to just keep you looking like that.
You resumed walking, slower now, neither in much hurry to end the moment. “I liked talking to you tonight.” Natasha said at last.
You turned your head toward her so quickly that Natasha almost regretted it, not because it was wrong, but because the look on your face was so unguardedly pleased it hit harder than expected.
“I liked talking to you too..” you said and Natasha held your gaze for a beat. “Even when I made fun of you?”
You grinned. “Especially then.”
They had reached your door now and you paused in front of it, one hand resting lightly on the frame, suddenly looking less like the brilliant scientist from the lab and more like simply a girl at the end of a very long night, standing in the soft hallway light with tired eyes and a smile you couldn’t quite hide.
Natasha stopped beside you and for a second neither of you moved. “Goodnight, Y/n.” Natasha said.
Your smile softened. “Goodnight, Natasha.”
The use of her first name, spoken so gently, sent a quiet warmth through her chest she chose not to examine too closely. You opened the door, then hesitated and looked back over your shoulder.
“I’m glad it was you.” you said.
Natasha’s brow furrowed slightly. “What?”
“At the bar.” you said. “When I came upstairs. When the robot attacked. After.” Your smile turned shy, but no less sincere. “I’m glad it was you.”
For once, Natasha had no immediate clever answer. So she told the truth, “I’m glad it was me too.”
You looked like that sentence might keep you awake all night. Then you slipped inside your room and closed the door softly behind you. Inside, leaning back against the door the second it shut, you pressed a hand to your own face and let out one breathless, disbelieving laugh. You were smiling so hard it hurt. Not because of the party..Not because you had survived an attack, or helped decode a global threat, or held yourself together in front of Tony and the Avengers and everything else pressing in from all sides. But because Natasha Romanoff had walked you to your door. Because she had smiled..because Natasha had said she liked talking to you.
You slid down onto the edge of your bed still grinning helplessly at nothing, heart too awake to let the rest of your body catch up and out in the hallway, Natasha stood there for one beat longer than necessary. Then she turned and headed toward her own room. Halfway down the corridor, she realized she was smiling too.
The next morning, Natasha woke earlier than usual. Not because she had slept well, it really was the opposite. She had spent most of the night drifting in and out of shallow rest, her mind sliding helplessly between images she did not especially want to revisit. And, far more distracting than any of those should have been, the memory of you standing at her door in the dim hallway light, smiling like Natasha had handed you something precious without realizing it. That one stayed.
Natasha stood in the kitchen now in gray training clothes and bare feet, one hand wrapped around a mug of black coffee she had let go lukewarm without noticing. She was alone at first and then she heard footsteps. She looked up automatically and you walked into the kitchen with the particular kind of exhaustion only highly intelligent people and people who refused to sleep ever seemed to perfect. Your hair was a mess, tangled from sleep and there was a faint pillow crease still pressed into one cheek.
Natasha’s chest warmed instantly so suddenly, so quietly, that for one stupid moment she only stood there holding her coffee and staring. There you are, some traitorous part of her thought. You looked up, spotted her and smiled. It was sleepy and soft and so immediate that Natasha felt the warmth in her chest deepen into something almost dangerously tender.
“Morning.” you said, voice still rough with sleep and Natasha swallowed once before answering. “Morning.”
You shuffled toward the coffee machine, paused, then glanced over your shoulder. “Are you judging me?”
Natasha lifted one brow. “For what?”
You gestured vaguely at yourself. “Existing like this.”
Natasha let her gaze move over the oversized sweatshirt, the mismatched socks and the unruly hair. There were many things she could have said, “You look tired.”
You snorted softly. “That was kinder than what I expected.”
“I’m full of surprises.”
“I’m learning that.”
The coffee machine hissed to life and you leaned against the counter while it brewed, your shoulders still a little slumped with sleep and for a few seconds neither of you spoke. It should have been awkward but it wasn’t. Natasha found that unsettling in the now familiar way you unsettled her by making silence feel easy.
“How’d you sleep?” Natasha asked.
You made a face. “Badly.”
“Nightmares?” You glanced at her, then away. “Not exactly. Just one of those nights where your brain keeps replaying everything in the worst order possible.”
Natasha’s fingers tightened slightly around her mug. “Yeah.”
You looked back at her then, and there was no performance in your face. “You too?”
Natasha gave the smallest nod and the coffee finished. You poured some into a mug, then added an amount of sugar Natasha found mildly offensive and enough milk to turn it a lighter brown. She watched you in quiet disbelief. “That is not coffee anymore.”
You pointed the spoon at her. “This is a hard morning. I’m adapting.”
Natasha almost smiled. “To sugar?”
“To survival.”
That got a soft breath of laughter out of her and you looked unreasonably pleased. You took your mug and crossed to the island, stopping on the opposite side from Natasha. For a moment Natasha only looked at you, she should say something else, she thought, something casual, something that would stop this dangerous, slow feeling from unfurling every time you entered a room. “You sure you’re okay?”
The same question from last night and your smile changed. “I’m okay.” you said. Then, after a small pause: “Still don’t like guns. Still don’t like robots trying to kill people. Still slightly offended the universe ruined my cola.”
You both smiled then and you wrapped both hands around your mug and studied Natasha for a moment over the rim. “And you?”
Natasha tilted her head. “And me what?”
“Are you okay?”
The question landed differently coming from you. Natasha was not used to being asked things she didn’t know how to deflect. “I’m fine.” she said automatically and your expression turned knowing in a way that was becoming increasingly dangerous. “That sounds fake.”
“You’re bold before nine in the morning.”
“I’m observant before nine in the morning.”
Natasha looked down into her coffee. “I’ve had worse nights.”
You nodded like you understood what that answer really meant and wouldn’t force more from it than Natasha was willing to give. It should have made Natasha feel relieved, instead, it made her feel seen. Which was worse.
“Good.” you said quietly. “I mean..not good that it was bad. Just good that it wasn’t worse.”
Natasha looked at you again. You, clearly realizing how badly you’d phrased that, groaned and dragged one sleeve over part of your face. “I should not be allowed to talk before coffee..“
Natasha did smile then. “There.” you murmured. “Worth embarrassing myself for.” Natasha shook her head, more amused than she wanted to be and then the morning ended. FRIDAY interrupted with updates and footsteps started appearing in the hallway. The tower woke around them and you both had work to do.
But the day dragged. Natasha told herself that was because everyone was strained after the events of the previous night. Because Tony was impossible when he was guilty or Steve was angry, Bruce withdrawn, Thor absent, Clint restless, and the whole tower felt like it was bracing for something worse. All of that was true..still, it did not explain why she read the same report three times without absorbing a single line. Or why every passing thought seemed to drift, irritatingly, toward the kitchen that morning.
By midday, Natasha was irritated enough with herself that she went to the gym and put an hour into the punching bag. It helped! For almost twenty minutes..And then by late afternoon she found herself standing outside the lab with her gun in her hand and an excuse she knew was weak. You looked up the second Natasha entered and smiled. Natasha hated what that did to her pulse.
“Hey.” you said, straightening. “What happened?”
„I think it broke again.“ you blinked and walked over, took the weapon gently and looked at it. Then you looked at Natasha, then back at the gun. Natasha held steady under the scrutiny.
“There’s nothing wrong with this.” Natasha folded her arms. “You checked quickly.”
“I don’t need to check slowly.” You turned the gun in your hand once, then held it out toward Natasha but did not let go right away. “The slide tension is perfect. The balance is exactly where I set it. Also, you cleaned it.” Natasha narrowed her eyes. “And?”
“And you only clean it like this when you’re restless.”
There it was again..that infuriating perception. Natasha exhaled once through her nose. “You’re assuming.”
“No.” you said lightly. “I’m observing.”
You handed the gun back and Natasha took it, but instead of leaving, she stayed right where she was. “You caught me.” Natasha admitted.
You laughed, “You came all the way down here pretending your gun was broken just to see me?”
It sounded much worse when you said it out loud..Natasha resisted the urge to retreat immediately from the conversation and hated that the urge existed at all. “I came..“ she said carefully, “because I was in the area.”
You stared at her. “The area?” you repeated.
Natasha kept her expression perfectly neutral. “Yes.”
“You were in the basement tech lab area.”
“I move around.”
That made you laugh harder and Natasha, despite herself, stayed to listen to it. “Okay.” you said, still smiling. “Sure. Of course.”
Natasha gave you a dry look. “You don’t believe me.”
“Not even a little.” You leaned back against the bench, crossing your arms loosely. “You could’ve just come down here, you know.”
Natasha looked at you. “Without a reason?”
You held her gaze. “Seeing me can be a reason.”
For a heartbeat neither of you moved. Then you looked away first, suddenly busy with a screwdriver that definitely did not need adjusting and a faint flush had risen into your cheeks. Natasha felt something low and warm settle inside her.
She stayed for twenty minutes. Long enough to ask what you were building, long enough to watch you explain it with increasing animation, your hands moving faster as you talked, your eyes lighting in that unmistakable way they did when your mind fully caught fire. Natasha understood perhaps half of the science and almost none of the equations, but she found she liked listening anyway. She liked the shape of your thoughts. The way excitement transformed you and the ease with which you moved from brilliant to awkward to teasing and back again.
By the time Natasha left, the restlessness that had driven her downstairs had gone strangely quiet. That should have warned her but it did not.
Two days later, she returned because she claimed the grip felt different. It did not, you knew it instantly. This time you took the gun, squinted at it dramatically, and said, “Terrible..I’ll need at least six hours alone with it.”
Natasha crossed her arms. “You’re mocking me.”
“Yes.” you said. “But gently.”
Natasha should have left, instead she leaned one hip against the workbench and asked, “What are you working on?”
You brightened at once. “I’m glad you asked..”
She had not asked because she was glad, she had asked because it was the fastest available cover for the fact that she was standing in Tony Stark’s lab again with no legitimate reason to be there. But within minutes you had launched into an explanation of drone interference shielding, a new stabilizer for one of Clint’s ridiculous trick arrows, and three separate complaints about Tony’s filing system, which apparently involved “vibes, arrogance, and complete disrespect for naming conventions.” Natasha listened and watched..and left much later than she meant to.
After that, the pattern formed almost without permission. A missing knife sheath buckle, a comm unit that “sounded strange“, a holster strap that “might not be sitting right.” Once she came down carrying nothing at all and had the audacity to claim she was looking for Tony. You, who had long since stopped pretending to believe her, just leaned against a table and said, “Tony is upstairs.”
Natasha looked around the lab. “I know.”
“You’re very bad at this.”
Natasha arched a brow. “At what?”
You smiled, far too fondly for Natasha’s peace of mind. “Lying to me.”
There were other moments too. Natasha passing the kitchen and finding you half asleep over toast and scientific journals, then quietly taking the burned piece from the toaster before it could set off the smoke detector. You appearing at the shooting range door with a tool kit because Clint had mentioned Natasha was there, and you “just happened to be nearby.”
Natasha discovering, after a late briefing, a cup of black coffee already sitting on the counter near her usual seat in the conference room because you apparently remembered how she took it. You asking once, very casually, “Do you always scowl when you read, or only when the report is boring?”
Natasha replying, “Do you always hover in doorways, or only when you’re trying to distract me?”
You grinning. “Only when it works.” .And it did work. The problem, Natasha realized slowly and with some alarm, was not just that she liked being around you. It was that she was beginning to look for you.
In rooms, in passing conversations, in the spaces between one task and the next. Natasha would enter the kitchen and check automatically if you were there. She’d hear footsteps in the hall and know, absurdly, whether they were yours before turning. She found herself memorizing the difference between your work clothes and your sleep clothes, between your distracted smile and your delighted one, between the laugh you gave everyone and the quieter, softer one you seemed to save for when Natasha said something unexpectedly kind.
And you..you noticed. Natasha could tell you noticed because you started waiting less carefully. Smiling sooner. Letting your eyes linger a beat longer but neither of you said anything. But something was happening. Natasha had spent so much of her life around false intimacy that genuine tenderness felt almost more destabilizing than violence ever had. And yet she kept returning.
It went on like that for weeks. Time lost shape around the pattern of finding each other. Every excuse Natasha invented became thinner. Every smile you gave in response became more obvious in its affection. There were moments where the air between you felt so charged Natasha could almost hear it, when your hands brushed passing tools, when Natasha leaned too close to look at a screen, when you said her name in that softer voice you seemed not to use for anyone else.
Still, neither of you crossed the line. Until one afternoon Natasha walked into the lab and found you humming under your breath while sorting through a tray of tiny metal components. You looked up at the sound of Natasha entering and immediately laughed. “No.”
Natasha stopped. “No?”
“No fake equipment emergency today.” You pointed a screwdriver at her. “I’m setting boundaries.”
“That confident?”
“You’ve used gun problems twice, communication issues three times, and one completely fictional knife imbalance.”
Natasha lifted a brow. “You noticed.”
You stared at her. “Natasha.”
The way you said her name was almost enough to undo her on the spot. She stepped further into the lab and you set the screwdriver down slowly. Something in the air shifted and Natasha stopped on the other side of the bench and looked at you for a long moment, letting the silence stretch.
There were many ways Natasha knew how to do difficult things. This one felt absurdly harder than most of them. She had faced weapons pointed at her without blinking. Had lied to kings and killers and monsters. Had survived rooms built to break people. And still, this..standing in warm afternoon light with one brilliant girl looking at her like she mattered made her pulse feel less manageable than combat.
“You know.” Natasha said at last, voice lower than usual, “for someone so observant, you’ve missed something.”
Your breath caught just slightly. “What?”
Natasha held your gaze. “I keep coming back.” she said, “because I want to see you.”
Natasha took one step closer and the space between you narrowed. “I don’t need an excuse.” she continued, “Not really. I just…” She exhaled softly, something like a laugh at herself. “I wasn’t sure how not to make it obvious.”
At that, you smiled and then smiled harder. And then, to Natasha’s helpless affection, smiled so much it looked almost impossible for one face to hold. “You are saying this..” you said with happiness, “while standing in front of a week and a half of evidence.”
Natasha actually laughed once under her breath. “Yes.”
You put both hands over your own mouth for a second as if trying to physically contain how much you were smiling and failing completely. That made Natasha’s chest ache in the gentlest way.
“There it is..” Natasha murmured.
You lowered your hands. “There what is?”
“That smile.”
You looked positively luminous now. “You did that.”
For a beat, Natasha could only look at you. Then she decided there was no point in halfway measures anymore. “Come to dinner with me.” she said.
You blinked and Natasha went on before either of you could retreat. “A real dinner. Somewhere outside this tower. No broken weapons or fake emergencies. No pretending I was in the area.”
Your eyes widened just slightly and Natasha’s voice softened. “A date.” And that did it..you smiled so widely Natasha thought, absurdly, that if Tony walked in now he’d probably assume some major scientific breakthrough had happened.
“Yes.” you said immediately. Natasha felt warmth spread through her so suddenly and completely it almost left her unsteady. You laughed again, softer this time, shaking your head at yourself. “Sorry. I could’ve played that cooler.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
Your expression turned almost unbearably fond. “You asked me on a date. There was never any chance of cool.”
Something in Natasha’s face must have softened, because your own smile gentled in response.
“When?” you asked.
“Tomorrow night?”
You nodded too quickly. “Tomorrow night is perfect.”
“You don’t know where we’re going.”
“I don’t care.” Natasha’s brow lifted. “That sounds irresponsible.” You leaned forward slightly over the bench between you, eyes bright. “I trust you.”
The words hit deeper than they should have or perhaps exactly as deep as they should have. Natasha looked at you for a moment longer, then let herself smile. “Tomorrow night.” Natasha repeated.
“Tomorrow night.” you echoed, still smiling like the sun had personally chosen you. Natasha turned to leave before she could do something reckless like stay there just to keep looking at you.
Halfway to the door, she heard you call after her.
“Natasha?” You stood where she had left you, hands braced against the workbench, happiness still written all over your face in ways you had clearly made no effort to hide.
“I’m really glad your gun was broken all those times.” you said.
Natasha smiled and the sight seemed to light you up even more. “Me too.”
The next day, Bruce was at the central console, reading through streams of salvaged code with the deep frown that meant his mind was moving too fast for his body to keep up. Tony stood a few feet away, one hand braced against the edge of a workbench, flipping through projected diagnostics with terse and irritated flicks of his fingers. And you sat cross legged on a wheeled lab stool in the middle of it all, staring at a broken Ultron processor fragment as if you personally intended to insult it into revealing its secrets.
There was a difference in you today. Tony noticed it first because Tony noticed changes in the people he loved with the intensity of a man who would rather die than admit how often he worried. “You’re smiling at dead code..” he said without looking up. “That’s either deeply concerning or wildly adorable. I haven’t decided which.”
You didn’t glance away from the screen. “Maybe I’m in a good mood.”
Bruce looked up briefly over the rim of his glasses. “That’s suspicious.”
You gasped softly in mock offense. “Wow. Betrayed by both of you in under ten seconds.”
Tony finally turned his head, narrowing his eyes at you. “No, no. There’s a thing here.” He pointed at your face. “That expression. That is not your usual ‘I’m about to defeat technology with hatred’ expression.”
You rolled your stool back a little with a nudge of one socked foot. “I have more than one expression.”
Tony snorted. “Questionable.”
Bruce, far kinder and therefore far more dangerous in moments like this, asked mildly, “Does this have anything to do with tonight?”
You blinked once and Tony straightened immediately. “Oh my God.”
“No.”
“Oh my God!” he repeated, more delighted now. You dragged both hands over your face. “Please don’t do this.”
Tony’s grin went wicked in under a second. “Romanoff..” Bruce tried to hide a smile and failed. “Tony.”
“What?” Tony said innocently. “I’m just connecting data points. Bright mood, distracted behavior..Rechecked one outfit three times in the reflection of the vibranium cabinet this morning..”
You whipped around on the stool so fast it squeaked against the floor. “How do you know that!?”
“Because this is my lab and you are not subtle.”
Bruce coughed into one hand, clearly suppressing laughter now. You groaned and slumped forward until your forehead nearly hit the console. “I hate both of you.”
“No, you don’t.” Tony said immediately, “You are glowing and I’m very happy for you and also personally offended.”
You lifted your head just enough to glare at him. “You are impossible.”
“And yet beloved.”
Bruce, still scanning the code, added quietly, “You seem really happy, Y/n.”
That softened something in you and you looked down at your hands and tried very badly to hide a smile. “I am.”
Then the doors to the lab slid open and Natasha stepped inside. It was ridiculous, the way your entire face changed. It happened in an instant, like someone had turned a light toward you from the inside.
Natasha saw it and despite all the training in the world, despite every hard lesson that had taught her to contain every visible reaction before it could betray her, she felt that same quiet warmth bloom low in her chest. It had been happening more often lately.
Natasha leaned one shoulder against the doorframe as it shut behind her. She had changed out of training clothes and into something simpler. The kind of look that always seemed effortless on her even when it absolutely wasn’t.
“Hi.” you said, and even that one little word sounded too bright.
Natasha’s mouth curved at one corner. “Hi.”
She stepped further into the room and for a second, neither of you said anything else.Not because you had nothing to say, but because you had too much and there were people here and the air had changed again in that charged, delicate way that always seemed to happen when you looked at each other too directly for too long.
Tony, naturally, ruined it. “She’s been weird all day..” he announced and you whirled. “Tony!”
Natasha arched one brow. “Weird?”
“Glowy“ Tony corrected. “Distracted and smiling at inanimate objects.”
“They’re not inanimate, they’re inactive!” you shot back automatically.
Bruce murmured, “That wasn’t really the point..”
Natasha folded her arms, eyes still on you. “Is that true?”
You looked somewhere between horrified and delighted. “I am being publicly slandered.”
Natasha let the silence stretch just enough to make you squirm. Then she said, very quietly, “A little.” And just like that, your expression softened into something almost helplessly fond.
Bruce removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We are working.”
“Yes, Doctor Banner, we’re aware.” Tony said. “Unlike these two, who are apparently starring in a deeply irritating subplot.”
You reached behind you without looking and threw a rolled up cleaning cloth at him. He caught it midair with a look of personal betrayal. Natasha stayed where she was a moment longer, then moved closer to the main console.
“What are we looking at?”
Bruce’s expression shifted immediately, all humor draining out beneath the seriousness of the work. He tapped one of the projected files open. “Recovered fragments from one of Ultron’s secondary processing cores. We thought it was dead. It wasn’t.”
“Anything useful?” Natasha asked.
“Maybe.” you said, rolling your stool aside so Natasha could see the data. “Or catastrophic..still deciding.”
Natasha glanced at you. “Comforting.”
You smiled. “I try.”
Bruce pointed to a dense string of layered architecture. “This section doesn’t map cleanly to the rest of Ultron’s behavioral code.”
Tony’s jaw tightened. “Which means if he built it as a contingency, he expected to lose parts of himself and survive anyway.”
Natasha looked back at the processor fragment on the containment platform. She had lived too long to trust things that looked harmless. “You think it’s still active.”
“We think..” Bruce said carefully, “it might become active if it finds the right pathway.”
That did not improve anything. You spun slowly on your stool, studying line after line of code. “We’ve kept it isolated. Sandbox only. No live connection to tower systems. No remote access, nothing it should be able to jump through.”
Tony folded his arms. “Should being the important word there.”
Natasha’s gaze lingered on you for a beat. “And after this?”
You looked up. “After this what?”
“Tonight.”
It was a simple question and it landed like a spark. Your entire face lit again before you could stop it. “Tonight..” you repeated, trying and failing to sound calmer than you felt. “Right.”
Tony muttered something about needing stronger alcohol and Bruce looked fixedly at a blank corner of the lab. Natasha let herself enjoy your visible happiness for just a second longer. “Are you almost done here?”
You glanced at the processor shard, then back at Natasha. “I should be.”
“That doesn’t sound confident.”
“It’s science..” you said. “Confidence is how things explode.”
Tony lifted one finger. “Correct!”
Natasha’s mouth twitched. “Should I be worried?”
You leaned in just slightly, lowering your voice like this wasn’t a room full of people with excellent hearing. “About the date or the lab?”
“Both.”
A tiny laugh escaped you. “Date? No.”
“And the lab?”
You glanced at the processor again, and for the briefest second something in your face tightened. “Undecided.”
Natasha held your gaze another moment, then nodded once. “Don’t be late.”
Your expression turned wonderfully stricken and pleased at the same time. “I won’t.”
Natasha almost smiled, then pushed away from the console. “I’ll leave you to it.”
But she didn’t go far. Only to one of the side stations, where she pretended to check a tactical update while the voices behind her rose and fell through the rhythm of work. For a few minutes, the lab felt almost normal. You were alive in this room in a way you were nowhere else. Natasha listened with half an ear and found herself already thinking ahead to later, to where she might take you, to what you might wear, to whether you’d be nervous or smiling or both.
Then suddenly every screen in the lab flickered and Bruce stopped typing. A tone sounded overhead, but not yet an alarm but close enough to make every nerve in Natasha’s body sharpen. “FRIDAY?”
The AI answered immediately, but her voice carried a subtle distortion Natasha had never heard before. “Sir, I am detecting unauthorized activity within the isolated processor chamber.”
You were already moving. You slid off the stool and crossed to the containment platform, bringing up diagnostics in a blur of blue light. “That’s not possible..”
On the sealed tray in the center of the chamber, the damaged Ultron fragment pulsed once red, the color hit the room like a gunshot. “Back up!“ Bruce said sharply.
Natasha was already moving closer to you, not away and the red pulse flashed again. Then the chamber glass filled in one terrible second with branching silver black threads, like frost racing over a window except this frost moved with intention. It spread across the inside of the containment case in writhing, microscopic filaments, splitting and rejoining, devouring the surface in spiderweb patterns too fast to track.
You went pale. “What the hell-”
Bruce’s voice changed first. “Tony..?”
Tony was already seeing it. “I know.”
Code erupted across the nearest screens in violent bursts. “FRIDAY, lock it down.” Tony snapped.
“I am attempting containment.” she said and this time the distortion in her voice was worse.
The chamber itself gave a high mechanical shriek and Natasha saw it then , a seam opening beneath the processor cradle, venting a faint silver vapor into the reinforced casing. Not smoke, but particles. Thousands of them, moving like dust with a mind of its own. Bruce’s face lost what little color it had. “Oh no.”
“What?” Natasha demanded.
Bruce stared at the readings with naked horror. “It isn’t just code..”
You were typing so fast your hands blurred. “It’s built into a nanite substrate-”
“A hybrid vector.” Bruce finished, already moving toward another terminal. “Digital transmission and airborne replication. If the chamber breaks seal-”
“It spreads through the lab.” Tony said and Bruce looked at him. “Through the tower.”
Natasha’s stomach dropped cold. “How far?”
Bruce didn’t answer fast enough, but you did. “If it gets into the main ventilation or system core, not just the tower..” you said, voice thin now, all the brightness burned out of it. “Outside..Hospitals, defense grids, anything what’s connected. Anything breathing near enough to inhale particulate expos-“ Now, the first real alarm went off.
The lab shuddered and heavy blast shutters began dropping over the exterior glass with deafening force. Internal doors disengaged with a series of mechanical clanks. The central chamber hissed as pressure systems shifted around it. On the main display, a tower map lit up red and yellow in spreading sectors.
Your eyes flicked over it once and widened. “No.”
“What?” Natasha snapped.
You pulled up the quarantine sequence and felt the blood drain from your face. “The inner seal didn’t engage.”
For one impossible second nobody moved. Then everything happened at once. On the display, one quarantine door, the final barrier between the infected chamber and the rest of the lab remained half open, jammed on some internal fault. Past it, silver black particulate already streamed into the air like glittering ash.
“If that door doesn’t shut..” Bruce said, voice low with dawning certainty, “..the whole floor is exposed.”
Tony was already running toward the emergency override panel. “FRIDAY, manual seal!”
“Manual seal unavailable from current terminal.” she replied. “Override required at interior control station.”
Natasha turned sharply. The interior control station was on the wrong side of the spreading breach, way too far and too late: “Everyone out.” Tony ordered.
“Tony-” you started.
“Now!”
The command in his voice cut through all argument and Natasha grabbed your wrist. “Move.”
They ran. Bruce was ahead, sprinting for the outer corridor and Tony slammed one control after another as he moved, trying to trigger backup containment from every available point. The lab lights strobed red white red white. Behind them the infected chamber screamed as metal warped under pressure. Screens burst one by one into static, code spilling and crawling. Natasha kept hold of you as you ran, fingers locked around your wrist and for one split second in the middle of the catastrophe, she felt you squeeze back. Then you looked over your shoulder and saw it. The main quarantine display on the wall to their left flashed a single brutal message in red:
FINAL SEAL FAILURE - MANUAL ENGAGEMENT REQUIRED Below it, a countdown began.
00:09
00:08
“No..” you breathed and Natasha saw you see it and tightened her grip immediately. “Don’t.”
But you had already turned enough to understand what it meant. If the final seal stayed open, the virus would leave the chamber entirely. It would get into everything and everyone. Natasha yanked at you harder. “Y/N!”
Tony had reached the outer threshold, Bruce just ahead of him, both of them shouting now, the exit corridor only a few yards away. But the countdown kept falling.
“I can close it!” you said.
Natasha’s heart lurched so hard it felt like impact. “No!”
“There’s an interior override-”
“Y/N, no!”
Tony turned, hearing it and his face changed in a way Natasha would remember for a very long time. “Don’t you dare.”
00:05
There are moments in life that do not feel like decisions until after they are over. This was one of them. You pulled free, a sharp twist of your wrist, and a burst of movement, instinct carrying you before thought could catch up. Natasha’s fingers slipped and for one stunned half second she thought you were only stumbling. Then you ran back toward the interior station.
“No!” Natasha shouted, the word tearing out of her raw and uncontrolled and Tony was yelling too now. Bruce swore and turned as if he might go after you, but the chamber behind them cracked with a noise like splitting bone and a stream of silver black particles burst wider into the open air.
00:04
You reached the panel ans slapped one hand against the glass screen, the other flying over the controls with terrifying speed. The inner barrier began to descend.
“Y/N, GO!” Tony screamed, but you were already too deep. The final seal came down with catastrophic speed and the outer quarantine doors, sensing the containment completion, roared shut in automatic sequence. Natasha lunged too late. The blast door slammed between them with a force that shook the floor and silence hit like a physical blow. Someone was breathing too hard, maybe all of them, but the kind of silence that comes when reality fractures so violently the mind cannot keep up.
Natasha stared at the sealed glass and steel wall in front of her. On the other side, through the reinforced quarantine barrier, you stood frozen at the manual override station. Your hand was still resting against the panel and your chest rose and fell too fast. The red emergency lights painted your face in flashes and for a second you only looked at the door, not understanding, but then it arrived. Natasha saw the exact moment it did. You stepped back once, eyes widening, gaze flicking from the sealed barrier to the spreading silver black haze still trapped in the inner chamber behind you. You hadn’t meant to stay, that was the unbearable part. You had only meant to save them..
“O-Oh my God..” you whispered, though no one could hear it through the glass. Natasha hit the barrier hard enough that pain shot through both palms.
“Y/N!”
The sound of her own voice shocked her too loud, too raw and stripped of every layer of control she usually wore like armor. Your head snapped toward her. On the other side of the barrier, you looked impossibly young all at once. Not because you were weak, because shock had peeled everything else away. Tony reached the glass an instant later. “Open the damn door!” he barked.
Tony whirled toward the nearest terminal like he might tear it apart with his hands. “I said open the-”
“Tony.” Bruce’s voice was quiet and terrible. He stood a few feet back, staring at the containment readings projected overhead. The numbers changed too fast, pulsing with contamination growth, airborne density, system corruption markers. His face had gone deathly still.
“If that seal opens..” Bruce said, every word forced out through horror, “..it gets out.”
Tony looked at him as if he had spoken in another language. Bruce swallowed once, “Not just here. Everywhere.”
Natasha’s hands stayed pressed flat against the glass. On the other side, you took one shaky step towards her. You stopped just inches from the barrier, your face when you looked at Natasha..God. It was shock, yes. Fear, absolutely. But beneath both there was something worse. You looked apologetic, like you were sorry.
“Open it..” she said, voice low and lethal now, not looking away from you. “Find a way.”
Tony was already doing exactly that. He tore through one interface after another, dragging up release protocols, purge options, venting pathways, reverse seals. “There has to be a bypass. There is always a bypass.”
“There is..” you said, but they couldn’t hear you through the barrier, but they saw the shape of the words. Tony stared and you lifted a trembling hand and pointed once toward the exterior control panel. Then you shook your head. No bypass they could use, not safely.
Bruce reached the same conclusion a second later. “She’s right.” Tony rounded on him with a fury so sharp Natasha half expected the room to ignite. “Don’t.”
Bruce didn’t flinch. “The viral particulate is stable only because the quarantine is holding pressure and temperature around it. If we break the seal now, we aerosolize the entire substrate.” He looked toward you again, devastation cracking through his voice. “We wouldn’t just lose the tower.”
Natasha could barely breathe around the pressure in her chest. On the other side of the glass, you pressed one hand lightly against the barrier and it wrecked Natasha. Without thinking, sh lifted her own hand to match it on the opposite side. Glass between them..Only glass and it might as well have been the end of the world. Your eyes locked on hers, you looked stunned still, like part of you had not caught up with what your body had done. You looked like someone who had been on the verge of leaving for dinner and had instead stepped directly into a nightmare. Natasha’s throat tightened so hard it hurt.
Tony’s voice broke the air behind her. “FRIDAY, I want every containment model, every antiviral option, every nanite disruption sequence, every goddamn solution you can think of.”
“Yes, boss.” FRIDAY replied immediately.
Bruce was already moving toward another station. “We need to know whether exposure’s begun, whether it’s only airborne, whether it can cross skin, whether it mutates-”
Tony snapped, “Then figure it out!”
“I’m trying!”
Natasha barely heard them. All of her attention stayed on you. A thousand things crowded at once behind her ribs, all fighting for the same impossible space, fear, helplessness, rage and beneath all of it a terrible, piercing tenderness she could no longer deny or control. This was supposed to be your night..She had been thinking, only minutes ago, about dinner and laughter and where to take you and whether you would smile like you always did when you got nervous and excited at the same time. Now there was a reinforced quarantine wall between you and a virus on the other side that could kill millions if it escaped.
Your eyes flicked down once, then back up. You mouthed something and Natasha read it instantly. I’m sorry. Something inside her snapped. “No.” Natasha said, fierce and immediate, even though you couldn’t hear. She shook her head hard once. “Don’t.”
You stared at her and Natasha swallowed against the burn in her throat and forced the words out anyway, slower this time, so there would be no chance of misunderstanding. “You do not apologize.” Recognition flickered in your face and then pain. Then something so soft and shattered in your expression Natasha had to curl one hand into a fist against the glass just to keep from breaking with it. Behind her, Tony spoke again, but his voice had changed. It had gone quieter, which was somehow worse.
“She saved us..” No one answered because what answer was there? That was the truth sitting in the center of the room, bright and merciless. You had seen the failed seal..You had understood what would happen if no one acted..and you had run back and now you were sealed inside because of it.
Tony stopped moving altogether. He stood at the console staring through the glass at you, and for one terrible instant Natasha saw not Iron Man, not the billionaire genius, not the man who always had another idea, another machine, another impossible save. Just Tony. Just a man who had once watched your father die because of the world he built and now stood helpless on the other side of another door. His face crumpled for only a second, so brief most people would have missed it. Bruce looked between them all and seemed to age five years in as many breaths. “We’ll find something.” he said, and it was impossible to tell whether he was promising them or himself. “We’ll find something.”
Natasha’s hand stayed where it was, you’re stayed there too. And in the awful quiet between alarms, Natasha remembered the way you had smiled that morning in the kitchen. The way you had promised not to be late. The way your whole face had lit when Natasha walked into the room. The way you had looked seconds before everything went wrong, alive with anticipation, with happiness, with the fragile hope of something beginning.
All of that was still here. Trapped and held in place by glass and steel and the knowledge that opening one door could condemn millions. Tony took one step toward the barrier. “Kid.” he said, voice breaking on the word and your eyes shifted to him. He put his palm flat against the glass too, a few feet away from where Natasha stood.
“I’m getting you out.” he said and no one in the room believed in impossible things more stubbornly than Tony Stark. And the first time, Natasha needed him to be right. Your lower lip trembled once before you caught it between your teeth and steadied yourself and nodded.
The sight nearly undid Natasha. She pressed her hand harder against the barrier and on the other side trapped in the poisoned light of the sealed lab, you fought to hold back your tears, while the virus hissed and shimmered behind you like a living threat. The date never came, the night had not even started and still, somehow, everything had already changed. Three people outside the glass stood there in helpless, brutal clarity, staring at the girl inside and knowing with absolute certainty that if that door opened before they found a cure..millions would die.
So no one touched the release and you remained on the other side of the barrier, alive, frightened, brilliant and unbearably out of reach.
