The irony of it all is that the Natasha Tony knows is probably the more trustworthy. Sure, her loyalty lies with SHIELD (though always with herself and Clint first -- long gone are the days of blindly following any and all orders), but she's more reigned in, controlled. And honestly, there are certain situations where she would value Tony's life above her own. Not many but a few.
The younger self that she's been thrown back to though? She has the morals of a particularly vicious predator. Okay, that's not fair, she has some morals, it's just that they're horribly skewed from the way she was brought up to perceive everyone outside of the Red Room as either a threat or an asset to be used or disposed of. At any rate, she's dangerous, unpredictable and extremely volatile. Especially now that all her strings have been cut. She hasn't learned yet how to control herself without an outside force guiding her. The last time when she found herself outside the Red Room's control the death toll was immense and it was only brought to an end when Clint was sent after her.
But, then again, Tony probably doesn't know that. Because Clint wouldn't give up Natasha's secrets without a Norse god probing through his mind. And though everyone at SHIELD knows that Natasha used to work for the other side, few are aware of the details of the jobs she took when she went freelance.
If it came down to it, Natasha'd smash Tony's arc reactor to pieces and leave him gasping and dying on the floor. Except-- Right now? With his hand pressed against her stomach and her hand pressed against his stomach in turn? She thinks that maybe she'd feel bad about it afterwards.
Of course, there's no reason for her to kill Tony. Or anyone in the tower. Even if there was, the tenuous connection she has built with Clint is probably going to hold her back, because these people matter to him. And he is her guiding star in the darkness she's found herself in.
But Tony's right, there's no secret agenda here, just the burning need to find out who she is and where she fits into this new world.
His dry smirk draws a flicker of a real smile from her in return. "Like a vacation, I imagine. Except far better than some tropical island somewhere." Her voice has gone from dry to joking, and she's also surprised at the ease of their conversation and how quickly this-- thing between them has settled her. Because she feels settled. What tension had worked its way into her muscles between crawling into the air duct and now has simply dropped away, leaving her not relaxed exactly, but not achingly tense at least.
Natasha catches the way Tony's voice breaks ever so slightly mid-sentence, but she doesn't know how to interpret it. For all she knows, the surgeon may've been instrumental in torturing him or something. Because it doesn't sound like he was in that cave voluntarily. Slowly, she's working things out from the few clues he's giving her, and unlike piecing together the bits of and pieces of her own history, this is intriguing rather than frustrating. "They had one of those lying around in a cave?" Natasha's eyes flick up to the arc reactor again, her fingertips twitching against his stomach in the effort of keeping herself from just reaching up and touching it. She knows that she can't, but damn she's curious.
He's not going to pretend that being more comfortable with Natasha now than before makes any real sort of sense at all. His subconscious has its own opinions on things and arguing with it never gets him anywhere. He's seen her file - after all, when hacking into exceptionally classified SHIELD data anyway it only seemed reasonable to take a look at the other interesting bits while he was in there - and it's one hell of a read.
Of course he knows better than to assume it's complete, or accurate. His own file is a tissue of complete lies in places. But there was enough there to make him really curious about the bits that have to have been omitted.
There's a huff of breath that's something close to a laugh and he grins at her. "Oh yeah. It was a lovely spot. All the sand you could eat, hot and cold running rats..." Hey, at least he's not the only one way more at ease than is in any way sensible right now.
He feels that little twitch of her hand and his own fingers tense almost imperceptibly in response. "I built it," he responds, and for all that this is an awful set of memories to recall, there's a note of fierce pride in his voice. There are plenty of things in his past he's not proud of, but goddamnit, if he's proud of anything he's proud of this. Of the reactor, of the fact that it all came together in his head in a cave in Afghanistan when he was facing blackmail or death and in so much pain he could barely think straight.
Steve asked him, once, what he was without the armor. It was a question aimed to hurt, to strike at the fact that his strength in the field is entirely artificial. It was also completely missing the point. So maybe he doesn't have the raw brute strength Steve and Thor and the Hulk do, or the decades of training Clint and Natasha do. But although he might be vulnerable out of the armor, he's never been weak; when backed into a corner he will change the world to fight back if that's what it takes.
It's his mind that makes him dangerous. Why would he ever be ashamed of wearing the armor to fight when it's his design every step of the way, his hands that built it, with tech that was supposed to be impossible lying at its very heart?
Natasha's smile widens at his grin and she actually laughs at the joke. The sound is unexpected in the near silence of the workshop, and cut short when she catches herself at it. She can't remember the last time that she laughed without an uncomfortable twist of her stomach reminding her of her rather unique predicament. It gets to her belatedly of course, as punishment for noticing the lack of it in the first place. "All the luxuries one could wish for," she says with mock-wistfulness. "Tell me, did you splurge and get the cockroaches as well?" She is too aware of Tony's touch against her skin (ready to pull his hand away in a heartbeat) not to notice the sudden tension to his hand in response to the light twitch of hers. The cause and effect of that shouldn't be fascinating, but somehow it is. It makes them feel… connected.
"You built that?" Natasha asks and there's honest to god wonder in her voice. Even without touching it, and without any knowledge of advanced engineering, she can tell that it's a complicated piece of technology and he built that. "In a cave?" Natasha has always responded well to talent and skill, and building that thing would've taken both, plus an ingenuity she could never hope to possess. Now, Natasha can tear things down, burn them to ground and pull them apart. But she could never build something. Much less something as intricate as the arc reactor.
Glancing down at the softly glowing circle, her eyes are caught instead by the scars scattered across Tony's chest and abdomen and the realization slowly sinks in that not only did he build that thing in a cave, he must've been in incredible pain at the time. Natasha's never taken a direct shrapnel hit, but she's seen it happen and heard the screams of the survivors. When her gaze returns to his face, there's a new kind of respect in her eyes. Pain is an old friend of hers. She's learned how to deal with it and accept it. But, most people haven't, and that he could go through something like that? Well, it's damn impressive and it pushes her image of him even further away from the one perpetrated by the media.
The subject of pain brings up a question that hasn't crossed her mind before, but ought to have been obvious. It makes her forehead crease in a light frown. Her hand slides up -- slowly and easily -- to the base of his ribs, her thumb brushing along the sweep of the lowest one on the left. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, the slight movement pressing her abdomen closer against his hand, her fingers curling a little tighter around his wrist in unconscious response. "Does it hurt still? The shrapnel?"
His grin broadens at the laugh, and for a moment he's caught by how young she seems. It's a strange impression to be getting. Physically she hasn't changed. But it's in the way she speaks, the way she carries herself, an edge of uncertainty he's never seen in her before. If he was anyone other than him it might inspire a protective urge. But he's not, and in any case, he's entirely aware that she could still kill him with her bare hands. "Oh yeah," he says, amusement gleaming in his eyes, "We really went for the five-star treatment. They even laid on the spiders."
He can't help but look pleased at her reaction to the arc reactor. He also can't help but wonder if she'd always had some level of respect for this if nothing else, somewhere beneath the personal distaste. "Yeah, in a cave," he confirms with a nod, "Had to cannibalize a few missiles to do it." It was...a challenge, to say the least. Even leaving aside the less than favorable circumstances - whoever said the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind obviously wasn't speaking from first-hand experience - the equipment left a lot be be desired. Seriously, oxy-acetylene torches. Who the hell still welds with those?
His breath catches ever so slightly at the movement of her hand, his fingers flexing where they're still pressed against her skin, and he gives a soft, strange little smile. "All the time."
Young isn't that far off the mark, actually. This is Natasha with ten years worth of experience and growing up stripped away from her. Back when she was still struggling with the idea that she could ever be anything but the weapon they raised her into. Mentally, she's currently one messed up teenager right on the verge of adulthood. At least technically. Actually? Natasha never had much of a childhood, and her teenage years were spent training or going out on missions. It's like she skipped her youth and just emerged a fully-fledged spy and assassin. Can you blame her for being a little bit fucked up as a result?
At the moment though? She's caught up in his wide grin and their ridiculous joke, and the smile on her face is solid and momentarily unguarded. "Shit, you guys got spiders as well?" She makes a show of looking around at the state of the art workshop, which may not be exactly pristine, but still must be a hell of a lot cleaner than a goddamn cave. "I have to say, I'm surprised you can live in a hovel like this after that experience."
Natasha's eyes are drawn back down to the arc reactor and they widen just a touch. Damn. Not only did he build it in a cave, he built it out of missiles. And it's about the size of her fist and can -- if he's not lying to her, which to be honest, he might be -- power a whole city. She's going to have to ask Clint to verify everything that Tony tells her. Because it can't all be true. "You're kidding me..."
The flex of his fingers against her skin earns him a light press of her fingertips in return. Her eyes snap back up to his at the answer to her question though. She gives him a long and searching look. Sometimes, you see pain in people's faces, in the lines around their eyes and mouth. But Tony just looks like he's a quirk of the mouth away from a grin all the time. Natasha isn't even aware that her fingers have unfurled from around his wrist -- leaving her wide open to attack -- until her hand is halfway to his face. You can see the moment when she catches herself at it, her hand sort of hesitates in the air like she's not sure if she should continue the motion or capture his wrist again. In the end, she slowly makes herself finish what she started. Her hand cups the side of his jaw, thumb nearly touching the corner of his mouth. Her other hand follows the curve of his ribs to his left side and settles there. Her eyes meet his, and she's frowning as she tries to catch so much as a flicker of pain in them.
"You can't even tell," she finally says and it's part compliment, part admiration, and part suspicion. He could be lying after all.
He gives a long-suffering sigh, assuming an expression of spurious forbearance. "Somehow I cope," he replies with dignity. There's a faintly bemused edge to his grin. This is...weird. He likes it, but it's undeniably weird.
"Scout's honor," is his response, coupled with a smirk. Clint will confirm everything he's said, as will the file SHIELD keeps on him. Many things have been said about Tony over the years. People have questioned his morals, his personal habits, and occasionally his sanity. But one thing that even the harshest critics have never questioned is that he's damn good at what he does. There's a reason Stark Industries is the leader in its field. He may get a bit too much of a kick out of tossing the word 'genius' around, but it really is merited.
Her hand hesitates in midair and he goes completely still, watching her with a strangely blank expression. The wariness in his stance ratchets up a few notches but he still doesn't pull away. One hand stays pressed flat against her stomach; the other moves, slowly and tentatively, to rest against the back of her hand where it's cupped around the side of his face. There's something almost vulnerable in his eyes.
"I don't-" he begins, and then stops, because he really has no idea where that sentence was meant to be going. What is he even supposed to say. It's always there. It's in every move he makes; underpinning every thought, every breath. Half the time it barely even registers on a conscious level it's so all-pervading, the dull ache radiating out from the hot, foreign weight in the center of his chest and cresting with every beat of his heart. Why would it be noticeable when there's nothing for it to stand out against? It is the baseline.
It's there though, when you're looking for it. In the shadows under his eyes which are so easy to attribute to insomnia, the tension in his shoulders, the occasional hitch of breath when he moves the wrong way; in all the little things that slip past the facade. And the 'genius billionaire playboy philanthropist' bit is and has always been a facade. Perhaps he never went through any of the training she did, but a lifetime spent always in the public eye, every move analyzed by a dozen different media outlets, teaches its own lessons about masks.
Natasha's heart stutters in her chest as Tony's hand covers hers. It's a good thing that he moves so slowly, giving her plenty of warning before his hand traps hers against his face. If he goes for her, if he really goes for her, that hand on top of hers is going to lose her valuable seconds. Every last instinct in her body is screaming at her to move away, but she ignores them and stays right where she is, meeting his eyes breathlessly, the world spinning out between them. It's like a wall between them has fallen away, and she thinks she might be able to see the shadow of something in his eyes. It might well be pain. Regardless, there's an openness to him that makes her believe him, even though she can't quite trust him. (Yet.)
The key to handling pain is to remember that it is transient. No matter how much it hurts, one way or another, it'll eventually stop. Except it doesn't for Tony. He has just learned to live with it. Another thing about him that impresses the hell out of her. "Wow. I--"
It all gets too much for her. Their eyes meeting, the way they're touching each other. The intimacy of it all catches in her throat and she damn near chokes on it. She ducks her head, her gaze dropping to his hand pressed against her stomach. There are a couple of oily smudges littering her skin where he has touched her, standing out like dusted fingerprints on a crime scene. Somewhere underneath his hand is the uneven scar from two years back. No. Longer than that. Two years plus the time she's lost. (Dammit.) Her stomach twists and she can feel the bile rising in her throat. She doesn't want to think about that. She wants to be here, in this downright scary moment and just-- not think for a little while. Except the moment is getting a bit too close to something she can't name for comfort.
"Do you see the, uh, scar on my right side. The crooked one?" she says, keeping her head bowed. If she's not looking at him, then it's a little bit less like she's opening herself up and letting her secrets spill out. It's also less like she's running away. The muscles in her stomach tense and shift under his hand. It's not impressive, and it's nothing as personal as what he's just told her, but it's the first thing that comes to mind. "That's from when I had my appendix taken out with a pen knife." Her eyes flick up to meet his and she gives him a quick, self-conscious smile, her fingertips twitching against his cheek and the corner of his jaw.
He has no idea what's going on here. None whatsoever. This is bizarre and he can't for the life of him work out how it came to be happening. They were never- no, actually. He wants to say he was never close enough to Natasha for something like this to happen, but the simple fact of the matter is that this sort of thing just doesn't happen full stop. With anyone.
Part of him wants to pull away. To put some distance between them figuratively and literally, step away behind the workbench again with a few flippant remarks in passing. But he knows he's not going to. He can't help it. He's fascinated but what he sees in her face, in those reactions that just aren't quite as guarded as he's used to, and he can't help but want to see more. The little glimpses he's catching of the effect his words are having are driving him wild with curiosity.
And maybe it entails showing more of himself than he's strictly comfortable with. But that's just the price to pay, apparently. It only seems fair.
His eyebrows go up as he considers the scar, as further up as she elaborates on the story behind it. "That must have sucked," he says concisely. His eyes flick up to hers. "Did you at least get to get drunk first?"
At some point, they're going to have to stop touching each other. But, Natasha just isn't ready for that to point to be now. Because this is the first time in days that she's felt settled, all that restless energy that's been burning her up from the inside suddenly at peace.
When she first touched her hand to Tony's abdomen, she never intended for it to turn into this. In fact, if she'd've known this is what it'd turn into, she probably would've kept her hands to herself. But, now that they're here and so achingly close, she doesn't want to lose it for the world.
'Sucked' doesn't cover half of it. Especially not the bit where the wound got infected despite their best efforts and she was delirious for days before the extraction team got them. Natasha shakes her head. "We only had a quarter of a bottle of vodka, and we needed it to sterilize the wound and the knife." Her slides down to rest more comfortably against his hip, dropping all pretense of touching him for anything but for the sake of it. "It wasn't too bad," she adds with a shrug. "I've had worse. And-- you know, it didn't last." Unlike his pain. Her eyes flicker unbidden to the arc reactor before returning to his face.
He really needs to step away. They're too close, somehow, and something really isn't right here...beyond the obvious. He has a strong feeling that Natasha is probably going to kill him for this if and when her memories return. Not that he's sure what, if anything, he's done wrong - she seems far more relaxed now than she had when she first came into the workshop - but he can't quite shake the feeling that this is going to in some way get him stabbed again.
"Yeah, but surgery's always less fun when you're awake for it," he responds lightly. But for all the easy tone he's more tense now than ever, uncomfortable with her hands on him in a way he can't even pin down. It's clearly not about the scars any more. He can't work out what it is about, but whatever it is, he's not sure he's okay with it.
Natasha doesn't know what's changed, but suddenly Tony's tension level sky rockets. She can feel his muscles practically locking up underneath her hands. And she doesn't understand why. A moment ago, they were both perfectly at ease and then something changed and now Tony might as well be on the moon for how far from ease he is. The worst thing is that she can't figure out what she did wrong.
Her brow creases lightly in question for about half a second, before she catches herself at it and it smooths out again. She can't quite hide the flicker of sudden and unexpected hurt in her eyes though, or how the tension from earlier and then some snaps back into her.
"I don't know about that," she says with a one-shouldered shrug, her tone as easy as Tony's. Spy, remember? She can lie with the best of them. Like it's nothing, she untangles her hand from under his and pulls it away as she lets her other hand drop from his hip. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans, curling them up tightly. "You never know what they're going to do with you while you're out."
He relaxes ever so slightly as she steps away. Not fully; some level of tension remains in the line of his shoulders, the way his hands wander restlessly over the partially disassembled engine components spread out on the workbench. But here in his workshop...here of all places he doesn't feel the need to put up the front of cavalier indolence that was his armor long before Iron Man was the barest spark of inspiration.
It shouldn't reassure him that she's looking tense again too. It really shouldn't. But this at least it familiar, having her at a distance, behind various defenses. It's infinitely easier to deal with than the strange intimacy of a moment before. He has no idea what he was thinking. Not that he didn't want to help, but like this she was like a wolf in a trap. No matter how much sympathy you might feel there was still a fair chance of getting your hand ripped off if you got too close.
"I figure once they've got you sliced open they can probably do pretty much whatever the hell they like anyway," he responds, quirking an eyebrow.
It was only a matter of time before the tenuous sort of intimacy between them broke. But Natasha sorta thought she'd be the one to break it. And the hurt twisting up her stomach probably has more to do with the unfamiliar feeling of rejection than anything else. Because of course it couldn't last.
She wanders away, putting some distance and the length of a work bench between them. She makes a great show of peering curiously at the little bits and pieces littering its surface in between surreptitious glances darted in his direction, flickering over the tense set of his shoulders or the way his hand flits over the engine parts like a particularly indecisive butterfly.
"But at least you know what they're doing to you," she argues with a wince. "You won't go in to have a bullet dug out of you and wake up with a kidney gone or a bomb nestled in your guts." The latter had happened to one of the girls. Marusya. Sweet little blonde thing. She was failing out of the Program and determined to get at least some use out of her the Red Room turned her into a human bomb without telling her. Then on her next mission, they detonated her once she was in range of the multiple marks that needed taking out. Her death was messy and immediate, but most of all useful.
"I woke up with blonde hair once," she offers, picking up a screwdriver and turning it over in her hands, digging the business end against the pad of her thumb and twisting it absently. "Gave me one hell of a shock."
Eventually he does settle to the involved process of reassembling the engine. With every gear and piston that slots neatly back into place, a little tension ebbs from his stance. This is as close as he ever comes to being at peace; hands moving with unhesitating precision, the components scattered over the workbench coming back together into an intricate whole under his touch. In a startlingly short space of time what had been an apparently chaotic jumble of cogs and levers is becoming recognizable as the engine it started out as.
"I guess that makes sense," he concedes, lifting a bolt and inspecting it for a moment before screwing it into place. He hadn't ever really thought about it from that point of view before, but now she comes to mention it- yeah, that's a whole new level of uncomfortable and disturbing. And seriously, what kind of life has she had that she thinks about things like this?
"Huh." He pauses and gives her a long, speculative sort of look. "...I can't picture you as a blonde. That's weird."
There's something almost soothing about watching all those little pieces growing into a whole under Tony's hands, and one of Natasha's quick glances over just sort of... sticks. She doesn't know where this strange sort of fascination with things being built rather than torn down comes from. Because she never used to have a problem with being what she is. Tearing things down gave her purpose, made her feel alive. Used to be it was the only thing that filled up the aching emptiness that seems to have settled in the center of her, spreading a little with each passing month. But, regardless from where it stems, the fascination is there now, and as Tony works, a little bit of the returned tension bleeds out of her.
It's strangely comforting the way that he'll talk to her without looking at her. Clint looks at her all the time, and it's nice not to have such a captive audience for once. She sets the screwdriver down on the workbench opposite of the one he's working on, puts her hands flat against the scarred surface and jumps up on it in a smooth motion. Her feet dangle in the air and her left heel bangs lightly against the solid table leg.
"It's different," she acknowledges with a small shrug. Seeing herself in blonde hair for the first time had been unsettling. "It makes my face look softer. Younger. I never liked it." But it got the job done, and it was easier to blend into the crowd afterwards. But it wasn't her, and there aren't so many facets of her that she could afford to lose one.
His eyes flicker to her as she hops up to sit on the workbench, hands not pausing, and there's a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he returns his attention to the engine. He's pretty sure their Natasha would hurt him for thinking this - he's pretty sure this Natasha would hurt him for thinking this - but there's something weirdly endearing about her right now. Which, he absolutely did not just have that thought and would not admit to it even facing a firing squad. But...yeah.
"I went blonde once," he comments, leaning down to bolt the sump pan back on. "Tried to, anyway. It didn't really work out that well." He smirks to himself and elaborates. "Some stupid bet. I must have been...what, about fifteen?"
The younger self that she's been thrown back to though? She has the morals of a particularly vicious predator. Okay, that's not fair, she has some morals, it's just that they're horribly skewed from the way she was brought up to perceive everyone outside of the Red Room as either a threat or an asset to be used or disposed of. At any rate, she's dangerous, unpredictable and extremely volatile. Especially now that all her strings have been cut. She hasn't learned yet how to control herself without an outside force guiding her. The last time when she found herself outside the Red Room's control the death toll was immense and it was only brought to an end when Clint was sent after her.
But, then again, Tony probably doesn't know that. Because Clint wouldn't give up Natasha's secrets without a Norse god probing through his mind. And though everyone at SHIELD knows that Natasha used to work for the other side, few are aware of the details of the jobs she took when she went freelance.
If it came down to it, Natasha'd smash Tony's arc reactor to pieces and leave him gasping and dying on the floor. Except-- Right now? With his hand pressed against her stomach and her hand pressed against his stomach in turn? She thinks that maybe she'd feel bad about it afterwards.
Of course, there's no reason for her to kill Tony. Or anyone in the tower. Even if there was, the tenuous connection she has built with Clint is probably going to hold her back, because these people matter to him. And he is her guiding star in the darkness she's found herself in.
But Tony's right, there's no secret agenda here, just the burning need to find out who she is and where she fits into this new world.
His dry smirk draws a flicker of a real smile from her in return. "Like a vacation, I imagine. Except far better than some tropical island somewhere." Her voice has gone from dry to joking, and she's also surprised at the ease of their conversation and how quickly this-- thing between them has settled her. Because she feels settled. What tension had worked its way into her muscles between crawling into the air duct and now has simply dropped away, leaving her not relaxed exactly, but not achingly tense at least.
Natasha catches the way Tony's voice breaks ever so slightly mid-sentence, but she doesn't know how to interpret it. For all she knows, the surgeon may've been instrumental in torturing him or something. Because it doesn't sound like he was in that cave voluntarily. Slowly, she's working things out from the few clues he's giving her, and unlike piecing together the bits of and pieces of her own history, this is intriguing rather than frustrating. "They had one of those lying around in a cave?" Natasha's eyes flick up to the arc reactor again, her fingertips twitching against his stomach in the effort of keeping herself from just reaching up and touching it. She knows that she can't, but damn she's curious.
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Of course he knows better than to assume it's complete, or accurate. His own file is a tissue of complete lies in places. But there was enough there to make him really curious about the bits that have to have been omitted.
There's a huff of breath that's something close to a laugh and he grins at her. "Oh yeah. It was a lovely spot. All the sand you could eat, hot and cold running rats..." Hey, at least he's not the only one way more at ease than is in any way sensible right now.
He feels that little twitch of her hand and his own fingers tense almost imperceptibly in response. "I built it," he responds, and for all that this is an awful set of memories to recall, there's a note of fierce pride in his voice. There are plenty of things in his past he's not proud of, but goddamnit, if he's proud of anything he's proud of this. Of the reactor, of the fact that it all came together in his head in a cave in Afghanistan when he was facing blackmail or death and in so much pain he could barely think straight.
Steve asked him, once, what he was without the armor. It was a question aimed to hurt, to strike at the fact that his strength in the field is entirely artificial. It was also completely missing the point. So maybe he doesn't have the raw brute strength Steve and Thor and the Hulk do, or the decades of training Clint and Natasha do. But although he might be vulnerable out of the armor, he's never been weak; when backed into a corner he will change the world to fight back if that's what it takes.
It's his mind that makes him dangerous. Why would he ever be ashamed of wearing the armor to fight when it's his design every step of the way, his hands that built it, with tech that was supposed to be impossible lying at its very heart?
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"You built that?" Natasha asks and there's honest to god wonder in her voice. Even without touching it, and without any knowledge of advanced engineering, she can tell that it's a complicated piece of technology and he built that. "In a cave?" Natasha has always responded well to talent and skill, and building that thing would've taken both, plus an ingenuity she could never hope to possess. Now, Natasha can tear things down, burn them to ground and pull them apart. But she could never build something. Much less something as intricate as the arc reactor.
Glancing down at the softly glowing circle, her eyes are caught instead by the scars scattered across Tony's chest and abdomen and the realization slowly sinks in that not only did he build that thing in a cave, he must've been in incredible pain at the time. Natasha's never taken a direct shrapnel hit, but she's seen it happen and heard the screams of the survivors. When her gaze returns to his face, there's a new kind of respect in her eyes. Pain is an old friend of hers. She's learned how to deal with it and accept it. But, most people haven't, and that he could go through something like that? Well, it's damn impressive and it pushes her image of him even further away from the one perpetrated by the media.
The subject of pain brings up a question that hasn't crossed her mind before, but ought to have been obvious. It makes her forehead crease in a light frown. Her hand slides up -- slowly and easily -- to the base of his ribs, her thumb brushing along the sweep of the lowest one on the left. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, the slight movement pressing her abdomen closer against his hand, her fingers curling a little tighter around his wrist in unconscious response. "Does it hurt still? The shrapnel?"
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He can't help but look pleased at her reaction to the arc reactor. He also can't help but wonder if she'd always had some level of respect for this if nothing else, somewhere beneath the personal distaste. "Yeah, in a cave," he confirms with a nod, "Had to cannibalize a few missiles to do it." It was...a challenge, to say the least. Even leaving aside the less than favorable circumstances - whoever said the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind obviously wasn't speaking from first-hand experience - the equipment left a lot be be desired. Seriously, oxy-acetylene torches. Who the hell still welds with those?
His breath catches ever so slightly at the movement of her hand, his fingers flexing where they're still pressed against her skin, and he gives a soft, strange little smile. "All the time."
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At the moment though? She's caught up in his wide grin and their ridiculous joke, and the smile on her face is solid and momentarily unguarded. "Shit, you guys got spiders as well?" She makes a show of looking around at the state of the art workshop, which may not be exactly pristine, but still must be a hell of a lot cleaner than a goddamn cave. "I have to say, I'm surprised you can live in a hovel like this after that experience."
Natasha's eyes are drawn back down to the arc reactor and they widen just a touch. Damn. Not only did he build it in a cave, he built it out of missiles. And it's about the size of her fist and can -- if he's not lying to her, which to be honest, he might be -- power a whole city. She's going to have to ask Clint to verify everything that Tony tells her. Because it can't all be true. "You're kidding me..."
The flex of his fingers against her skin earns him a light press of her fingertips in return. Her eyes snap back up to his at the answer to her question though. She gives him a long and searching look. Sometimes, you see pain in people's faces, in the lines around their eyes and mouth. But Tony just looks like he's a quirk of the mouth away from a grin all the time. Natasha isn't even aware that her fingers have unfurled from around his wrist -- leaving her wide open to attack -- until her hand is halfway to his face. You can see the moment when she catches herself at it, her hand sort of hesitates in the air like she's not sure if she should continue the motion or capture his wrist again. In the end, she slowly makes herself finish what she started. Her hand cups the side of his jaw, thumb nearly touching the corner of his mouth. Her other hand follows the curve of his ribs to his left side and settles there. Her eyes meet his, and she's frowning as she tries to catch so much as a flicker of pain in them.
"You can't even tell," she finally says and it's part compliment, part admiration, and part suspicion. He could be lying after all.
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"Scout's honor," is his response, coupled with a smirk. Clint will confirm everything he's said, as will the file SHIELD keeps on him. Many things have been said about Tony over the years. People have questioned his morals, his personal habits, and occasionally his sanity. But one thing that even the harshest critics have never questioned is that he's damn good at what he does. There's a reason Stark Industries is the leader in its field. He may get a bit too much of a kick out of tossing the word 'genius' around, but it really is merited.
Her hand hesitates in midair and he goes completely still, watching her with a strangely blank expression. The wariness in his stance ratchets up a few notches but he still doesn't pull away. One hand stays pressed flat against her stomach; the other moves, slowly and tentatively, to rest against the back of her hand where it's cupped around the side of his face. There's something almost vulnerable in his eyes.
"I don't-" he begins, and then stops, because he really has no idea where that sentence was meant to be going. What is he even supposed to say. It's always there. It's in every move he makes; underpinning every thought, every breath. Half the time it barely even registers on a conscious level it's so all-pervading, the dull ache radiating out from the hot, foreign weight in the center of his chest and cresting with every beat of his heart. Why would it be noticeable when there's nothing for it to stand out against? It is the baseline.
It's there though, when you're looking for it. In the shadows under his eyes which are so easy to attribute to insomnia, the tension in his shoulders, the occasional hitch of breath when he moves the wrong way; in all the little things that slip past the facade. And the 'genius billionaire playboy philanthropist' bit is and has always been a facade. Perhaps he never went through any of the training she did, but a lifetime spent always in the public eye, every move analyzed by a dozen different media outlets, teaches its own lessons about masks.
In the end he just shrugs. "You get used to it."
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The key to handling pain is to remember that it is transient. No matter how much it hurts, one way or another, it'll eventually stop. Except it doesn't for Tony. He has just learned to live with it. Another thing about him that impresses the hell out of her. "Wow. I--"
It all gets too much for her. Their eyes meeting, the way they're touching each other. The intimacy of it all catches in her throat and she damn near chokes on it. She ducks her head, her gaze dropping to his hand pressed against her stomach. There are a couple of oily smudges littering her skin where he has touched her, standing out like dusted fingerprints on a crime scene. Somewhere underneath his hand is the uneven scar from two years back. No. Longer than that. Two years plus the time she's lost. (Dammit.) Her stomach twists and she can feel the bile rising in her throat. She doesn't want to think about that. She wants to be here, in this downright scary moment and just-- not think for a little while. Except the moment is getting a bit too close to something she can't name for comfort.
"Do you see the, uh, scar on my right side. The crooked one?" she says, keeping her head bowed. If she's not looking at him, then it's a little bit less like she's opening herself up and letting her secrets spill out. It's also less like she's running away. The muscles in her stomach tense and shift under his hand. It's not impressive, and it's nothing as personal as what he's just told her, but it's the first thing that comes to mind. "That's from when I had my appendix taken out with a pen knife." Her eyes flick up to meet his and she gives him a quick, self-conscious smile, her fingertips twitching against his cheek and the corner of his jaw.
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Part of him wants to pull away. To put some distance between them figuratively and literally, step away behind the workbench again with a few flippant remarks in passing. But he knows he's not going to. He can't help it. He's fascinated but what he sees in her face, in those reactions that just aren't quite as guarded as he's used to, and he can't help but want to see more. The little glimpses he's catching of the effect his words are having are driving him wild with curiosity.
And maybe it entails showing more of himself than he's strictly comfortable with. But that's just the price to pay, apparently. It only seems fair.
His eyebrows go up as he considers the scar, as further up as she elaborates on the story behind it. "That must have sucked," he says concisely. His eyes flick up to hers. "Did you at least get to get drunk first?"
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When she first touched her hand to Tony's abdomen, she never intended for it to turn into this. In fact, if she'd've known this is what it'd turn into, she probably would've kept her hands to herself. But, now that they're here and so achingly close, she doesn't want to lose it for the world.
'Sucked' doesn't cover half of it. Especially not the bit where the wound got infected despite their best efforts and she was delirious for days before the extraction team got them. Natasha shakes her head. "We only had a quarter of a bottle of vodka, and we needed it to sterilize the wound and the knife." Her slides down to rest more comfortably against his hip, dropping all pretense of touching him for anything but for the sake of it. "It wasn't too bad," she adds with a shrug. "I've had worse. And-- you know, it didn't last." Unlike his pain. Her eyes flicker unbidden to the arc reactor before returning to his face.
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"Yeah, but surgery's always less fun when you're awake for it," he responds lightly. But for all the easy tone he's more tense now than ever, uncomfortable with her hands on him in a way he can't even pin down. It's clearly not about the scars any more. He can't work out what it is about, but whatever it is, he's not sure he's okay with it.
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Her brow creases lightly in question for about half a second, before she catches herself at it and it smooths out again. She can't quite hide the flicker of sudden and unexpected hurt in her eyes though, or how the tension from earlier and then some snaps back into her.
"I don't know about that," she says with a one-shouldered shrug, her tone as easy as Tony's. Spy, remember? She can lie with the best of them. Like it's nothing, she untangles her hand from under his and pulls it away as she lets her other hand drop from his hip. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans, curling them up tightly. "You never know what they're going to do with you while you're out."
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It shouldn't reassure him that she's looking tense again too. It really shouldn't. But this at least it familiar, having her at a distance, behind various defenses. It's infinitely easier to deal with than the strange intimacy of a moment before. He has no idea what he was thinking. Not that he didn't want to help, but like this she was like a wolf in a trap. No matter how much sympathy you might feel there was still a fair chance of getting your hand ripped off if you got too close.
"I figure once they've got you sliced open they can probably do pretty much whatever the hell they like anyway," he responds, quirking an eyebrow.
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She wanders away, putting some distance and the length of a work bench between them. She makes a great show of peering curiously at the little bits and pieces littering its surface in between surreptitious glances darted in his direction, flickering over the tense set of his shoulders or the way his hand flits over the engine parts like a particularly indecisive butterfly.
"But at least you know what they're doing to you," she argues with a wince. "You won't go in to have a bullet dug out of you and wake up with a kidney gone or a bomb nestled in your guts." The latter had happened to one of the girls. Marusya. Sweet little blonde thing. She was failing out of the Program and determined to get at least some use out of her the Red Room turned her into a human bomb without telling her. Then on her next mission, they detonated her once she was in range of the multiple marks that needed taking out. Her death was messy and immediate, but most of all useful.
"I woke up with blonde hair once," she offers, picking up a screwdriver and turning it over in her hands, digging the business end against the pad of her thumb and twisting it absently. "Gave me one hell of a shock."
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"I guess that makes sense," he concedes, lifting a bolt and inspecting it for a moment before screwing it into place. He hadn't ever really thought about it from that point of view before, but now she comes to mention it- yeah, that's a whole new level of uncomfortable and disturbing. And seriously, what kind of life has she had that she thinks about things like this?
"Huh." He pauses and gives her a long, speculative sort of look. "...I can't picture you as a blonde. That's weird."
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It's strangely comforting the way that he'll talk to her without looking at her. Clint looks at her all the time, and it's nice not to have such a captive audience for once. She sets the screwdriver down on the workbench opposite of the one he's working on, puts her hands flat against the scarred surface and jumps up on it in a smooth motion. Her feet dangle in the air and her left heel bangs lightly against the solid table leg.
"It's different," she acknowledges with a small shrug. Seeing herself in blonde hair for the first time had been unsettling. "It makes my face look softer. Younger. I never liked it." But it got the job done, and it was easier to blend into the crowd afterwards. But it wasn't her, and there aren't so many facets of her that she could afford to lose one.
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"I went blonde once," he comments, leaning down to bolt the sump pan back on. "Tried to, anyway. It didn't really work out that well." He smirks to himself and elaborates. "Some stupid bet. I must have been...what, about fifteen?"
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