FIC: my body the hand grenade (MCU, Natasha/Wanda, NC-17)
SUMMARY: We are weapons of mass destruction.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for sevenofspade for Every Woman 2016. Set between Age of Ultron and Civil War. Title from the Hole album of the same name.
Natasha’s fingernails scratch lightly over Wanda’s scalp as Natasha threads her fingers through Wanda’s hair, as she pulls Wanda’s hair away from her face.
“Your face is a weapon,” Natasha says. “Your body is a weapon.”
***
Wanda isn't sure how Natasha got this detail, or if it's even a detail at all-she could just be doing it to be nice, although she has seen enough tiptoeing through Natasha's mind to know that Natasha’s motives are usually strategic. Wanda knows what qualifies her, though; she has seen that in Natasha's mind, too, the ballerinas coming to pointe and Natasha at eight years old comfortable with a gun in her hand. She pulls the trigger and doesn't flinch.
Natasha sets up exercises in the great open space of the hanger in the Avengers headquarters in New York. Archery targets and arrows for Wanda to move with her mind. A car to pick up, dye packs with explosions to control, shooting gallery targets to knock down. Natasha prepares a series of chain locks; she slides each lock in place, then turns to Wanda, arms crossed over her chest.
“Open them,” she says.
***
Wanda buys twelve bruise colored tulips wrapped in white tissue. She walks the path alone to Pietro's grave.
Wanda kneels before the stone, places the flowers at its base. They had a small ceremony, no one speaking but Clint. Wanda hadn't had any words; every cell in her body was hollow, aching with the pain of something severed, aching with the pain of being half a thing. They say missing limbs hurt, too.
On her knees, Wanda wonders if Pietro would have liked to be buried in Sokovia, but then, there's less left of Sokovia than of Pietro, and he's only ashes in the ground.
“I miss you,” she says.
Wanda places her palm on the cool soil. The grass is growing up already. She's lost track of the days. She's older than Pietro now, though she can't count the hours. The tulips are too dark, and she regrets them, but it's a minor regret.
She speaks in Russian. “I miss you,” she says. “I miss my heart.”
***
Natasha, Wanda realizes a few days in, has the room next to hers in the dorms. She planned it that way, Wanda imagines. She is keeping an eye on her.
Once Natasha leaves, Wanda peeks through the crack in the door into Natasha’s room. The lights are off, everything cast in shadow. On the dresser there are makeup brushes and fragrant powders and a vial of perfume. There is a gun case under the bed, locked. Wanda visualizes the contents, counts the bullets. Wonders if she could turn the lock without the key.
As if Natasha can read minds, too, Wanda shows up to the hanger to discover Natasha has gotten her a safe to pick. Wanda visualizes the inner workings of the locking mechanism, urges the tumblers to turn open. It's too hard. In her frustration, Wanda pulls the safe’s door off. She watches the heavy metal door zoom through the air until her irritation subsides and she drops it. It falls to the hanger floor with a dramatic thud, and Natasha studies it for a moment, mouth pursed.
She wheels in another safe.
“Again,” she says.
Wanda flushes violently. “Jump through this hoop,” she snarls, “jump through that. I am not some weapon forged through fire.”
Natasha studies her for a moment. She parks the dolly, and approaches Wanda. Natasha gently tucks a loose tendril of Wanda's hair behind her ear, her fingers running over Wanda's burning cheek.
“Not yet,” she says.
***
Wanda lays awake in her bed in the dorm. She lays on her back like the dead, her hands folded beneath her sternum, watching the shadows and light move across the ceiling. Next door, she hears Natasha moving around. Wanda wonders if she sleeps.
Wanda sneaks into Natasha's mind. Natasha is sharpening knife blades against a wet stone. Wanda wonders how something so blunt can make something so sharp. Natasha spits on the stone and scrapes the blade against its edge.
Natasha is twelve years old in the Red Room. Wanda can feel the weight of the knife in Natasha's hand until Natasha releases it, hitting the center of the target with just the flick of her wrist.
Natasha is neither surprised nor proud. She walks to the target, pulls out the knife. She walks back to her spot and throws again.
***
Steve is with the boys elsewhere. Tony and Clint are gone, Thor. Bruce, of course, an ache she can feel in Natasha's chest. Wanda wonders again how Natasha got stuck with her, if she volunteered to take her on, maybe.
The Americans have an expression, to take someone under one's wing. Wanda imagines a shivering baby bird finding shelter beneath the feathered protection of its mother's wing. That is not what this is. Paint splatters Wanda's face as she fails to hold in the explosion of the dye pack. Natasha watches. She doesn't say anything, just places another dye pack in front of Wanda. Wanda rubs paint away from her eyes; it stings.
“Again,” Natasha says.
***
Natasha sleeps, finally, and Wanda creeps into her head. Natasha dreams of Banner, of snow on the hills, a gun in her hand, his hands on her body. Wanda pushes past the dream, pushes deeper.
Natasha is fourteen. She meets a boy from the village at the foot of the hill where the manor sits, its dark face half hidden through twisting trees with bare branches.
“Have you heard of what goes on up there?” the boy asks. He mistakes her silence for fear, and slips his arm around her waist.
Natasha turns in his arms as he pulls her close, pressing her mouth against his. He closes his eyes for the kiss, though she does not. Later that night, back in the manor, Madame B places her hands on Natasha's shoulders.
“There is no room for heart in this work,” she says, and the next night Natasha buries the boy from the village beneath one of the twisting trees on the hill.
***
“Do you regret it?” Wanda asks.
Natasha is setting up glass bottles on a table, her fingers deftly removing the broken glass of the ones Wanda has already shattered. She never cuts herself.
“Regret what?” Natasha asks.
Wanda could break the bottle in Natasha's hand. She wonders if Natasha bleeds like she does. Maybe Natasha's blood is made only of iron. Wanda imagines it running grey and dark through Natasha's veins.
“Nothing,” Wanda says. Her own rabbit heart beats. “Again?”
***
It is their birthday, and Wanda spends the morning with Pietro. She walks up the hill to the Avengers facility, smearing mascara under her eyes as she wipes away the tears.
She hadn’t expected anyone to know about her birthday, or care, but when Wanda reaches the hanger, she finds Natasha waiting for her. In her hand is a cupcake with pink frosting and one lone candle. Natasha flicks a match to flame with her thumbnail, touches it to the wick of the candle until it smokes, then burns.
“Make a wish.”
***
Wanda lays in bed, watching the ceiling. She can feel her pulse throb through her chest, pushing her blood to every cell.
When Pietro’s power first evidenced itself, they thought he was going to die. He collapsed, and when they got the heart monitor on him, his pulse was over 200. He and Wanda were the only two subjects left; everyone else had died under the serum and the radiation, or struggling to contain their own burgeoning powers. Wanda had pushed through the throng of scientists to take Pietro’s hand in hers. He opened his eyes, a smile blooming on his pale face.
“Gotcha,” he said.
***
Natasha is fifteen in the Red Room. In the next room, the young ballerinas are in first position, spinning in quick chaînésturns. Their arms are held in front of them, wide, and their eyes are always turned to their destination.
Natasha’s flesh is still, her heart in her chest beating in adagio. The man in front of her is bound to a chair and his mouth is taped shut. His eyes are on her as she pulls the trigger.
Her eyes never leave her target.
***
Wanda steps out of the shower to find a message written on the fog of the mirror:
My room when you’re ready. Come as you are.
Wanda hugs her towel around her and pads barefoot to Natasha’s room. The door is open, and Wanda shuts it behind her.
Natasha is standing ready to meet her. She is, Wanda notices with a slight blush, fully dressed.
“You have more than one weapon, you know,” Natasha says.
Natasha selects a dress for her, stockings, heels. Delicate pearls to clip back her hair and fasten around her neck. Natasha curls Wanda’s hair and traces the lines of her mouth with lipstick.
Natasha stands behind Wanda at the mirror. Wanda doesn’t recognize herself. Natasha’s hands curl over the crests of Wanda’s hips.
“You’re a grenade,” Natasha says, low against Wanda’s ear. “You can make them hurt.”
***
Natasha loses her virginity in a honey trap. She is young and beautiful and she carefully pulls down the rollers from her red hair until it falls around her shoulders in soft curls. She taps pink lipstick to the flesh of her lips. It is an American government official, and so she is a Russian snow bunny, speaking breathy English with a silky Slavic accent. It’s not even hard. He takes her virginity and she takes blueprints for a nuclear facility in Indian Point, New York.
Wanda is still a virgin. She replays Natasha’s memory over and over as she lays in her bed in the room next to Natasha’s in the Avenger’s facility. Wanda watches the American take off Natasha’s clothes, watches Natasha eyes widen and her painted mouth form an ‘o’. Natasha parts her legs and Wanda parts hers, rubbing her fingers over her slick sex.
Wanda wonders if she can use her weapons against Natasha.
***
Natasha lines up bottles of champagne, and Wanda pops the corks, fountains of fuzzy pale gold erupting like fireworks.
“What a mess,” Natasha says, smiling. She picks up one of the bottles, sucking errant drops of champagne from her fingers, and pours Wanda a drink.
Wanda knows that this is a graduation ceremony. “I’m ready,” she says.
Natasha nods, but she asks, “For what?”
Wanda swallows the champagne. “For anything.”
***
The team takes Wanda on a mission. “We probably won’t even need you,” Steve says. “No pressure,” Sam says.
They give her an earpiece, and everyone is in her head, for a change. She listens to Steve joke with Sam, slightly breathless in the wind, as they take up positions outside. She listens to Natasha grunting softly as she infiltrates the building through the airshaft. Everything is going well until suddenly it isn’t, and the boys are chasing Hydra agents and the building catches fire after an explosion on the second floor, and Natasha is still in the ducts somewhere. Wanda walks into the building. Hydra agents come at her with guns; she sticks their bullets in their barrels, and there is a flash and the smell of gunpowder as the guns backfire.
Wanda stands inside the burning building, the walls dripping with flame, smoke choking the air. Natasha is silent on the earpiece. Wanda takes a deep breath. She concentrates. She moves her arms up like a conductor, and all around her, the flames freeze. The building is covered in flames, but they are crystallized as in amber; the building is covered in flames, but it is not burning. Natasha groans in Wanda’s ear, and Wanda walks up the stairs, the flames frozen around her, hanging in the air like dew on a spider’s web. Wanda climbs onto a desk in an abandoned office, and she pushes up on the ceiling until the panel lifts. Wanda takes Natasha’s barely conscious weight into her arms; the two of them sag back down to the desk. Wanda is sweating, straining under the weight of holding the fire at bay. Natasha wheezes, and Wanda presses their mouths together and blows air into Natasha’s lungs until Natasha’s eyes open.
Wanda holds Natasha upright as the two of them leave the building, the flames suspended around them as if caught in amber.
***
The doctor lets Natasha out of the medical bay after hours on oxygen. Her skin is pale and her hair smells like smoke.
Wanda walks Natasha up to the dorms. Natasha closes them in her bedroom, the lights low.
“Well,” she says finally, and her voice rasps. “That was exciting.”
Wanda starts to speak, but then Natasha says, “I knew you could do it.”
Natasha twists Wanda’s hair in her hand, takes her by the waist. Natasha kisses her, tasting like cordite, and Wanda doesn’t know which of them is the blade and which the stone, but they grow sharper together. Wanda doesn’t enter Natasha’s mind now, but she knows exactly what she is thinking, what she is feeling, because it is exactly what she is thinking, it is exactly what she is feeling. Wanda’s heart expands in her chest. Her head swims, and her mouth goes dry. Their legs give out beneath them and they fall to the floor, the carpet burning their knees and palms. Natasha is unzipping Wanda’s pants, and she is biting into the pulse point in her neck, and Wanda has one hand tight in Natasha’s hair and the other up under her shirt. Natasha’s body is hot and keen, but also so much softer and more vulnerable than Wanda had expected. Wanda slips her fingers up under the cup of Natasha’s bra, the pads of her fingers rubbing across Natasha’s nipple, and Wanda pinches down just to feel Natasha’s back arch and hear her moan. Natasha bites her again, hard, and her fingers are inside Wanda and Natasha holds her gaze with such ferocity that it is almost a dare. Wanda can hear her own breath and she can hear her own heartbeat, and she rides up on Natasha’s hand and kisses her, kisses her so hard there is the taste of copper on their tongues.
For a moment, the world stops, this moment perfectly crystallized, as if preserved in amber.