FIC: At Home at the End of the World (MCU, Tony/Natasha, PG-13)
At Home at the End of the World
Tony/Natasha, post-cacw, pg-13
Tony and Natasha find themselves alone... together. Written for superhero_land challenge 2.13.
Tony should probably be in the hospital, but instead he is sitting at the conference table in the Avengers facility. His posture is slack, limbs loose like he's comfortable, but in reality his lack of animation is a sure sign that something's wrong. He's like a discarded marionette; Natasha doesn't know if she's ever seen him still before. It's unnerving.
Natasha comes out of the doorway, approaches the table. She rests her hands on the back of a chair opposite Tony, waits. Tony is watching her in a resigned sort of way, like he's on the railroad tracks and he sees the train coming, but he's decided not to move.
He speaks, and his voice is as tensionless as his posture.
“So,” he says, “what now?”
***
Tony has people and probably machines looking for Cap and Bucky and everyone who escaped the Raft, but he isn't actively doing it himself. He goes with Rhodey to therapy, and he works on the suits in his lab until something inside him gives, and then Natasha hears breaking glass and metal on metal and sometimes the same noise an injured animal makes when cornered, no purpose, involuntary-not a cry for help, just a cry because some things cannot be lost quietly.
Natasha ghosts about the rooms of the facility. She walks the halls at night, the empty dorms, Wanda's room with her belongings still on the dresser, her sheets on the bed, the smell of her perfume lingering. Natasha goes to Tony's lab when he's somewhere else, sitting at his bench with her feet up and her eyes on the scorch marks on the ceiling. Sometimes she cleans up the things he's broken, sometimes not.
At night she lays in her bed and tries to fit all the pieces of the last year together to form something that makes sense. Sometimes she sleeps, sometimes not.
Tony watches Pepper on the news but shuts it off when anyone comes in the room. Natasha makes black marks on maps, crossing off the places she knows Bruce isn't.
When Tony eats, which isn't all the time, he orders some for Natasha. At first they eat separately, tucked away wherever they are, but one night Tony orders Chinese, and Natasha takes her carton of pepper beef and sits next to him on the couch. She tucks her feet underneath her, her knees against his thigh, and they watch The Dirty Dozen and split the last egg roll.
The credits are rolling. Natasha selects a fortune cookie from the grease-spotted bag, but she doesn’t even open the little cellophane wrapper.
“Can you tell me,” she says, in a tone that gives no clue as to whether she’s speaking to Tony or herself or maybe even the fucking cookie, “how things go bad?”
“I can tell you why I drink,” Tony says. “Would you like a drink, Agent Romanoff?”
He usually drinks scotch, but she’s Russian, so he breaks out the vodka. He has all sorts of mixers and gadgets behind the bar, and he’s not a bad bartender, but this is not that kind of drinking, so they drink the vodka neat in the bottom of highball glasses, the bottle between them.
Tony picks up his fortune cookie. It says, YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONES YOU LOVE. Tony decides he’s too sober for this, and fills his glass up another few inches. Natasha still hasn’t opened her cookie.
“I told Loki I was fine with regimes falling,” she says. “Turns out I lied.”
He has exactly zero comforting things to say in response. Instead he fills up her glass, and says, “Don’t read your fortune.”
“I never do,” she says, and downs the glass in one gulp. He’s preparing to fill it again, but Natasha puts her glass on the coffee table next to empty takeout cartons, and then she takes the bottle from him and puts that on the coffee table, too, and then she weaves his hair through her fist to hold him in place while she kisses him.
Tony looks at her when she’s done.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
“I couldn’t stop you if you were.”
“I doubt that very much, Natasha,” he says. He puts his arm around her, and she puts her head on his shoulder and relaxes against him. They make it through the night like that.