Rating: T and up
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine. I do not know them in any shape form of fashion. I just let my imagination run away with them every once in a while
A/N: So this is my first piece with this pairing. Its a mix of movie cannon, head cannon, and comics cannon. I'm still figuring out my writing style as it applies to the two of them...but this piece wouldn't let me alone. I would love to know what you think. You can also find it Here on AO3.
Love Like Children
The tiny nesting doll feels heavy in his natural hand; he can feel the chiseled designs under his fingers, the carved face, the roses that make up the dolls painted on dress, the seam that connects the top of the biggest doll to its bottom. He feels, he is, a little silly for getting her anything at all. But he can still remember a time, way back when, before the stasis and the brain washing and his death. Before his mother died and his father left. A time when his dad would bring him back trinkets from his business trips, little gifts from the hotel gift-shop. And he can remember being so excited for the pile of jacks or new baseball card.
It’s something he wants to do. Natasha didn’t get a childhood; he likes to make up for that.
She doesn’t wait up for him. Or so she claims. And he’s long since learned that telling her not to does not make a difference. “it’s what lovers do,” she had said around the ninth time he caught her in the living room waiting for him after a mission. And he repeated it every time she crept home at four in the morning to find him tired but still awake, waiting for her.
He’s well past the time he was supposed to arrive home. Time is an irony of exacts and relevance in their business. She’s asleep on the couch curled up in a ball. The house is cold and she doesn’t have a blanket. He can see the goose bumps on her skin. He knows she hates the cold, that she always has.
He can make out a piece of a memory all dim and grey and scratched of Natasha in a ball in the middle of his cot, way back when they were children of Mother Russia. She had been shivering, nearly blue with the cold, it was middle of winter. He had blankets but the girls didn’t. His memory becomes more crisp when he thinks of a year ago when she’d remembered all the cold in a night mare and told him she never wanted to feel like that again, explaining in an instant why there were two duvets and a down comforter on her bed even in the middle of July.
He moves sure and steady through their living room, past the kitchen, to the bedroom and
gathers the top down comforter, holding it gingerly away from his sweaty, grimy body.
He’s been silent for the last two weeks, crouched in corners, between windows, on roof tops. He takes in a deep breath, and it sounds loud. He rolls his shoulders back, and tries to brush off the mission. His tread is heavy as he moves towards her, creaking their intentionally loose floor boards, easing her awake before he picks up her feet, places them in his lap and tucks the down comforter around her. He rubs his metal hand gently over her comforter covered legs, in slow strokes. Sweetheart, he thinks though she’s softened to hearing the endearment aloud, Sweetheart, don’t freeze for me.
“Sweetheart?” it’s a remnant from days long ago, picking up women in dance halls, a life he barely remembers. He likes the way her eyes light up a little when he says it, like she feels special, they negate the frown she puts on just for show.
“mmumph,” she says sleepily, rubbing a hand against her eyes, in a fist, before stretching out, her hands and feet long lines before she looks up at him. She looks so young, just tossled from sleep. “You're home.”
Her smile almost erases the failed mission, dead children, and two weeks he’s been away from her. Almost. He could live off that smile, the way her eyes light up, how he knows it’s just for him. Let me, he thinks, let me live just for this.
“Brought you something.” He hands her the doll. She rolls it along her palm, looks up at him. Her eyes bright as she unwinds the pieces, breaks the nine little dolls down to the smallest.
“I’ve always wanted one.” She says it so quietly that he barely catches it. Her eyes a little lost.
She so rarely looks lost that he doesn’t know what to say as she puts it back together, piece by piece (the way she did him) until she looks up at him with an expression on her face that says he isn’t as broken as he thinks he is, “it reminded me of you.” He explains.
She sits up on her knees, keeping the cover up tight around her. Her left hand clutches the doll and her right one rubs up against the scruff of his jaw. He can feel her callouses, between her palm and her fingers, the rough one on the inside of her trigger finger. He closes his eyes.
“Thank you,” it’s almost hoarse, “I thought I had one,” she says, “and I never did.”
It’s not the first time that he’s wanted to kill everyone that ever hurt her regardless of whether or not they hurt him. To break them, shatter their bones. Feast on their remains.
He clasps his metal arm against her waist and runs his nose against her neck, breaths in her hair. Her expression eases just a little. The darkness receding as much as it can. Smile for me, he wishes, let me earn it. I’ll do anything.
“You’ve always had me,” he reminds.
She kisses him for good measure.
The Red Room may have taught her how to spy and steal and kill. How to speak. How to win. Brutality and deprivation and what the cold felt like. But he taught her this: how to kiss, how to yearn. How to love. I could teach you as long as I live. She’s moved on to his jaw. He breaths and it’s the first time it’s felt easy in a weak.
She slips her arms around him then, pressing him close to her body. Like she’s always known who he is. Even when she hasn’t. Even when he hasn’t. Her left hand is still furled in a fist around the nesting doll but her right one is painting pictures on the back of his tactical vest. He’s not sure who’s comforting who anymore.
Like most things between them it’s equal, reciprocal.
He doesn’t know how long they sit like that, breathing each other in and out. Remembering and forgetting Russia in a way only they understand. She’s soft against him, all hard muscle and smooth curves, but soft and relaxed.
“You smell like grease and gun powder.” She whispers it in his ear matter of factly. He almost laughs, “shower then bed?”
She asks it. As in a question. Like he’d say no.
“Mmm. Sounds perfect.”
She gives him an almost smile…and then a smirk.
“I got a present for you too.”
She’s already up off the couch, comforter dragging behind her.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“You’ll have to catch me to find out.” It’s the wink that does him in.
He could spend the rest of his life catching her.
“You got it sweetheart.”
