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“Well...this could be worse.”
“Normally, Doc, I'd be all for jokes to lighten the mood, but you might want to rethink that one.”
“Okay, this really couldn't be much worse.”
***
“You doing okay over there?” Natasha asks, tipping her head back against the wall of the elevator, eyes closed, palms flat on the floor. Not that she particularly needs to ask – she's been keeping careful track of Bruce's respiration for the past ten minutes, and it's still comfortingly steady – but it feels like the thing to do.
“Sure,” Bruce says, from the other side of the tiny space. “Trapped in an elevator with a beautiful woman, what could go wrong? As long as it stays just you and me, everyone should be happy.”
Natasha shoots him a sideways glance, but he's not looking at her. “If I didn't know better, I'd ask if you were flirting with me.”
“Yeah, if you didn't know better.” A short laugh follows that statement, and she can't quite decide if it's endearing or annoying, this tendency of his to use laughter as a defense. In Calcutta, it had made her edgy, the way he smirked and joked his way around the edges of the issue, but things change, and if anybody knows how to adapt, it's her.
She leaves that for now, shuffling it away to the back of her mind, and taps at her earpiece. “Stark, you having any luck getting this thing unstuck yet?”
“Um, maybe.” Stark's voice sounds almost strange, without the tinny, overlaid quality the suit gives it. “The elevators happen to be a very complex system – security issues and all, you know, so-”
“Aren't you supposed to be some kind of mechanical genius?” she interrupts. “How hard can it be to fix an elevator?”
“You're welcome to take a crack at it, if you'd prefer. I could just jet off to Malibu, cause I got Pepper waiting for me and all kinds of modifications I could be working on – ah!”
There's a mechanical hum, but instead of the elevator jerking into motion, a frigid blast of air hits them.
“Yeah,” Stark's voice says, after a long minute. “That is totally not what I meant to do.”
Twenty minutes later, the elevator's reminding her of nothing so much as Russia in the wintertime, and her fingertips feel like ice.
“You're probably used to this, huh?” Bruce says. “SHIELD training and all that, they probably put you through situations like this all the time, right?”
Yeah, she thinks, stuck in a freezing cold elevator with a potential wrecking bomb, while the most annoying man in the world tries to free me. Of course that's in the training. Though, come to think of it, the time she'd been stuck in an airplane bathroom with Clint had been pretty good training for this.
“Yeah,” she says instead. “All the time. Here, move over.” She scoots over the few feet between them, nudging him with her shoulder when he doesn't respond, looking at her warily like she's some kind of deadly animal instead. “If I'm cold, you must be freezing,” she points out, sighing. “And I'd rather not find out how the Other Guy feels about hypothermia right now.”
“He's not overly fond of it.” Bruce shifts enough for her to press herself into his side, wrapping her arms around him, resting her cold cheek against his chest. “Though on the plus side, he'd be a lot warmer than me. And you wouldn't have the whole 'stuck in an elevator' problem anymore.”
“Think I'll stick with what I've got, if it's all the same to you,” she says, feeling his arm settle lightly over her shoulders, like she's made of eggshells. The sound of his heartbeat, fluttering just on the edge of her hearing, stays regular and steady as his breathing, almost enough to soothe down her jagged edges.
“Natasha,” he says, a few minutes later, “you know there's one of those doors up there, right?”
When she stirs, raising her head from what had become a far too comfortable position, she sees he's looking up, at the small hatch in the ceiling she'd considered and discarded half an hour ago, when the elevator had first ground to a halt and refused to move again. “Yeah,” she says. “So?”
“So you could probably get through it and – I don't know, shimmy up some cables or something.”
“I could,” she says, and shrugs, tucking her head back down. “But you couldn't.” She doesn't say the rest, but it hangs in the air between them, and Bruce tends to be a pretty perceptive guy.
“So you actually want to be trapped in an elevator with me?” It's a little harder to tell since she's not looking at him, but the smile in his voice still sounds off, still sounds like the deferential pieces of armor he covers himself in, to make himself seem calmer, safer, normal.
“I can think of worse ways to pass the time,” she says, and listens to his heart, to the tiny increase in its speed.
“If I didn't know better, Agent Romanov, I'd say you were flirting with me,” he says.
She'd grown to like danger a long time ago; anybody who didn't get off on adrenaline just a little bit couldn't keep doing what she does and stay sane. Maybe her sanity's debatable, since she's sitting here contemplating how best to proposition a man who's part monster, but that doesn't exactly change the rest of it.
But before she can speak, there's a clicking noise, and the rush of air turns from icy cold to a heat that feels blistering in comparison.
“Well, good news,” Stark's voice says. “I've fixed the a/c issue.”
Natasha looks up, hair ruffling in her eyes. “Stark's a dead man.”
In such a small space, the temperature alters quickly; going from freezing to comfortable to stifling takes all of ten minutes, and her nerves are beginning to feel stretched.
“I'm going to kill him,” she says, kicking off her shoes and pacing in a tiny circle.
“I could boost you up to that door,” Bruce offers, from the floor; he hasn't moved an inch, watching her pace around like all his tension's being channeled through her. “Though if Tony was dead I'd probably have to destroy the elevator to get out. And half the building.”
The back of her neck starts growing damp. “I'll bet he's not even trying. He's probably sitting up there laughing at us.”
“Cool your jets, Nat,” Stark's voice says. “And Bruce, don't offer to help her commit murder! What kind of a friend are you?”
“One who's slowly overheating,” Bruce mutters.
“Okay, this is stupid.” She briefly wonders, as she tugs her shirt over her head and off, just how many cameras Stark has installed in this elevator, before deciding she's past caring. “Take off your clothes.”
“Wow, okay, now we've moved right past flirting.”
“Oh, be quiet,” she says, tossing her jeans at him in retaliation, almost forgetting for a moment that this isn't Clint, that he isn't someone she should feel so comfortable with, that this shouldn't be so easy.
Pushing her hair up and off her neck, she tries not to watch him undress; they've all seen Bruce naked at one time or another on missions, due to the Hulk's unfortunate relationship with clothing, but somehow this feels different. There's an element of choice to it, she decides, almost like a deliberate admission of intimacy.
“Aren't you uncomfortable?” he asks abruptly, and she turns to see him watching her, discarded clothes all held in a bundle in front of him.
“I promise you, I've been seen by a lot more men in a lot less than this,” she says, but his head shakes before she's even finished the sentence.
“No, not with that. I mean – with me,” he says. “With all...this.” 'This,' she decides from his gesture, encompasses the elevator, and probably more than that. “The last time we were stuck together, things didn't go so well.”
She shrugs, letting her hair fall back into place. “Things change. It's different now between us.” They've never really talked about it – at first there wasn't time, and after the battle, after gods and aliens and everything else, it hadn't really seemed important enough to stir back up again. “He blamed me, didn't he? For luring you there, for putting you back in danger.” She keeps a careful watch on him while she talks, but there's nothing there, no hint of green. “You blamed me.”
“You know what the hardest part was?” he asks. “Feeling again. When I was in Calcutta, I didn't really have to feel. And then suddenly I've got Fury depending on me, and Tony trusting me, and you -” He stops then, and looks up at her, like he's run out of words to say, and maybe she can guess what he means – it's her job to guess what he means – but that doesn't mean she can't want to hear him say it.
“What about me, Bruce?” she asks softly, closing the distance between them with two steps.
“You were...infuriating,” he says, so close now she can see the warm brown of his eyes, and knows why she's not afraid. “Challenging me, not letting me hide. Nobody had done that in a long time.”
“Yeah?” she asks, moving even closer, his skin sticking against hers along her thighs as she backs him into the wall.
“Yeah,” he says. The heat of his hand on her hip, when it comes, feels like a brand, and she knows her breath is coming faster now, fast enough to match his. “And I remembered how much I liked it.”
He doesn't add, and how dangerous it is, before he kisses her, or maybe it's that she doesn't let him say it before she kisses him, but either way, it's still there between them, in the adrenaline in her blood, in the way she keeps her hand over his heart, like a signal of impending danger, even while she lets the rest of herself go.
Her only track of time passing is the beating of his heart; it's been about 320 beats before she's aware of the air stirring, uncomfortably cool, along her back, accompanied by the sounds of a very exaggerated throat-clearing.
“Can I get in on this, or is it more of a private party?” Stark says, from the other side of the now-open doors. “Though technically, you're not allowed to make a mess in my elevator. The only one allowed to get down and dirty in there is me.”
“Shut up, Stark,” Natasha says, without turning around, and reaches out, groping blindly for the buttons until the doors slide shut once more, Bruce's chest vibrating with laughter, real and honest, under her fingers.