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?"
Instead of the screwdriver, Natasha picks up what looks vaguely like two wide cogwheels stuck together on a metal rod which is about the length of her hand from the heel of her palm to the tip of her index finger. She turns it over absently in her hands. The pad of her thumb catches against the teeth of the left cogwheel, and it turns with surprising ease. But, her attention doesn't actually waver from Tony and whatever he's building.
Natasha tilts her head to the side and frowns as she considers Tony's face. Her eyes narrow slightly and then she nods slowly. "I can sorta picture that?" She crinkles her nose slightly. It's not a bad mental image as such. Let's just say she's glad that he stuck with the brown. "Did you at least win the bet?"
"I did," he confirms. And that's the main thing, right? With a smirk he elaborates; "I got into an argument with my lab partner about whether or not the peroxide we were using was the same stuff they put in hair dye. Turns out I was right, but I'm not sure it was worth it." He'd be the first to concede that the overall effect had been kind of ridiculous. But hey, there's no end to the number of poor judgement calls that can be excused by being fifteen and stupid.
Natasha shoots Tony a wide grin in congratulations on the victory. Whether it's a bet, a mission or a game, the only thing that matters is winning. All other things are secondary to that. Well, maybe not all things... "Depends, I suppose. How long did you spend as a blonde?"
He gives a faintly bemused little smile in return, spanner twisting in his hands as he pauses in the act of tightening a bolt. It's strange to see her grinning at him like that. Nice, but strange. "About a month," he replies. Just long enough to satisfy the demands of pride - what, like he was going to admit it'd been a terrible decision - before he surreptitiously acquired some actual dye to return his hair to something approaching its natural color.
Natasha tilts her head to the side, and the grin is replaced by an exaggerated frown as she pretends to think it over; weighing winning the bet against a month of blonde hair. "Worth it," she finally says with a decisive nod of her head. "But just barely."
She ducks her head and twists one of the cog wheels two times around its rod. "They dyed my hair back after two weeks that time," she offers, darting a quick look up at him. "Would've been sooner, but the mission was a bitch to finish."
"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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Natasha tilts her head to the side and frowns as she considers Tony's face. Her eyes narrow slightly and then she nods slowly. "I can sorta picture that?" She crinkles her nose slightly. It's not a bad mental image as such. Let's just say she's glad that he stuck with the brown. "Did you at least win the bet?"
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She ducks her head and twists one of the cog wheels two times around its rod. "They dyed my hair back after two weeks that time," she offers, darting a quick look up at him. "Would've been sooner, but the mission was a bitch to finish."
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