FIC: What I Am Now (MCU, Natasha Romanoff/Bruce Banner, PG)
TITLE: What I Am Now
RATING: PG
FANDOMS: MCU
PAIRINGS: Natasha Romanoff/Bruce Banner
SUMMARY: After Vormir, Natasha goes traveling. Written for Day 4 of Writer's Month 2019 for the prompt road trip.
Natasha wakes up on Vormir, and the first thing she sees is Steve. He’s kneeling beside her, smiling down at her.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she says uncertainly as Steve helps her sit up. Her fingers probe experimentally at her neck. She felt it snap. She felt it.
Steve helps her to her feet. She can feel his fingers curl against her ribs, can feel the wind on her face. She didn’t know she’d get to feel anything ever again. They’re walking, the sun at their backs.
“How-?” she asks, but she can’t bear to finish the question.
“A soul for a soul,” Steve says. “I gave the stone back. After we did it. After we won.”
Natasha throws her arms around him, and she’s smiling and crying both at once.
***
She goes to see Clint first. As soon as he sees her, he runs up the hill toward her, and he throws his arms around her, holding her as tightly as she’s ever been held. Before she knows it, all the Bartons are circled around her, holding her tight, holding her so tight.
***
She makes some calls. Makes sure everyone knows. She tells Fury and Maria and she calls Pepper and cries with her on the phone. She sends Carol a message, and swears that there’s a shooting star in the next moment. Sam asks her to visit, and then Wanda does, but there’s someone she has to see first.
***
It’s Bruce when she next sees him. Just Bruce. He is wearing a grey sweater and twisting the ends of the sleeves around and around in his fingers, and when he sees her, he stops moving. Even stops breathing, maybe, for a moment.
Natasha jumps into his arms, and he catches her. She knew he would.
***
They spend almost a full week holed up in Bruce’s apartment, and then one day they get in the car for what is intended as a quick supply run, but the second Natasha’s in the car, something hits her.
“I just want to drive until we hit the horizon, and then keep driving,” she says.
Bruce nods. “Okay.”
***
They walk parts of the Appalachian Trail. They swim in both oceans. They camp in the red deserts of Utah and the cool forests of the Pacific Northwest. They eat pralines still warm from the pan and grapes fresh from the vine and oysters plucked from the dock behind the restaurant.
They get married on a Monday, on a beach in their bare feet.
Natasha spent her whole life fighting. She died for the fight. And then she was reborn, and maybe she can be something different now. Just for a little while.
Maybe she already is.