Chapter Text
Natasha’d never given much thought to her soul mate or the time on her wrist that counted down their arrival. She’d had that instinct beaten and trained out of her at a good young age. Love is for children.
Love is for children and the Black Widow was never a child. As a residual force of habit left over from the days when she still dreamed of being a ballerina, or dreamed at all, she always wore something between her wrist and prying eyes. Today it was a chunky bracelet.
Targets were so much easier to sway when they weren’t eyeing your timer for blackmail opportunities, not that she could be blackmailed, but the point stands. Nothing gets between her and her job, but funny how one phone call can change things.
“Barton’s been compromised,” Natasha notes the small catch in Coulson’s voice. The Black Widow has a new mission: Be Phil Coulson’s emotions because Fury’s “one good eye” can’t be distracted not even now. So Natasha will worry and seek and fight it all and do everything in her power to get Clint back because Coulson can’t.
Then it’s, “Oh, I’ve got Stark. You get the big guy.”
She is the Black Widow: master assassin, spy but the idea of seeking out Doctor Bruce Banner makes her stop in her tracks. She is what she is because of her training and control. Doctor Banner is the antithesis of that control and he terrifies her.
A soul mate was the other half of your soul. Since the other guy, Bruce would never acknowledge his timer. With his body so twisted down to the atomic level by the radiation he thought his soul just might be twisted too. But, often, in the dark of night with only the sounds of life to fill his mind, he would rub his thumb over his timer, over and over. Even if he did still have a soul, who could love a monster.
During the daylight or when he was working he could forget his timer. It had always been erratic anyway, maybe it was broken and there never was a soul mate waiting for him even before the other guy. He jumped at the chance to help people because if he couldn’t end his pain he could at least make it worth something. The people he helped, they wouldn’t remember him as monster that could and did take out an army. They would remember him as a good man even if he wasn’t really a man anymore.
And out the window. Of course. “You should’ve got paid up front, Banner,” he thought aloud. His mind had just begun to churn with the possible reasons for the girl to lead him all the way out here just to run off when a voice spoke to him from the opposite corner of the small open house.
“You know, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress you picked a hell of a place to settle.” From the moment she stepped around the curtain Bruce saw she was a person with blood on her hands. She wasn’t the calm demeanor and unassuming eyes she was portraying. She extruded a hard won confidence with each subtle sway of her hip. She terrifies him.
“Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,” he tells her, though he wasn’t sure why. But he was stressed all the time, worried that the other guy will find new ways to work to the surface and rampage out of control again. He was nervous and angry and scared. All the time, but this felt a lot like a negotiation and he fought not to let it show.
“Just you and me,” she tells him but there are lies in her eyes, so many he can’t see anything else.
“And your actress buddy? Is she a spy, too? They start that young?” his hands are twitching in that nervous way that he hated but somehow grew into after the accident.
She simply answers, “I did,” and he couldn’t help but believe it. Something in her step, that reminded him of a ballerina, felt like someone who had never had a childhood.
“Who are you?” Bruce asks, though he’s not sure why.
“Natasha Romanoff.”
She moved like a sleek black cat with a new toy she wanted to play with but wasn’t sure if it would bite her. Her gaze was cool, calm, and carefully blank. It was meant to tell him nothing about her but Bruce was so used to seeing fear in the eyes of those close to him it wasn’t hard to see hers. This was a woman who was used to being in control even when she didn’t appear to be but here, with him, she was trying too hard. They both knew he had a card to play, a trump card no one wanted to see.
“And what if the…other guy, says no?” they are playing a game here and they both know it.
Banner is nothing like what she expects, not really. She expected him to be more of the man she read about in the files on the jet. But this is not the nervous, awkward scientist the reports mentioned. Admittedly those reports didn’t have much interest in Doctor Banner, just the Hulk. The man before her was twitchy, true, but at the same time he had a wary confidence. Confidence built on knowing no threat presented can touch you, Natasha knew that confidence well, even if she was having a more difficult time hanging on to it at the moment.
She gave him the information she needed to with the patient “not going to hurt you” air she had long ago perfected. Banner was understandably wary but she had earned trust from far more paranoid sources before.
“Stop lying to me!”
Of course, those sources didn’t have a tendency to turn into a monster when she inevitably used that trust. For the first time she felt right and properly scared. He put her off balance and when she lowers her gun and raises her comm she catches a glimpse of her timer.
0000d 00h 00m 00s
Huh.