Chapter Text
Natasha meets Tony his senior year of college, her... fourteenth year of the Red Room.
Sometimes the Red Room gives her time off, a holiday of sorts. She thinks it’s for social development, you can't teach everything about human behaviour in a classroom. They drop her off in New York, and tell her roam for the next three months. Usually the girls only get a week. They trust her because she is the best. She will not desert Russia.
...Right?
She stays in New York for half a week but gets bored. It's too busy, there's so much going on but she can't tap into it, it’s a channel that goes right past her.
Then, as she’s counting the days until she can go back and riding the subway to pass the time, maybe gain some knowledge for a future mission, she meets a group of students from MIT.
“I’m Kent,” one tells her, pushes his glasses up his nose. “What’s yours?”
She freezes for a moment, unsure. Her teaches call her Natalie, but that doesn't feel right, not here, not talking to this little smidge of a ma. The western diminutive of Natalie is Natasha. Nicknames could be Nat, Tasha, Tash. Common enough, but not obviously so. “Natasha. I’m Natasha,” she smiles, like it’s true.
"Well, hullo, Natasha," Kent says, and shakes her hand. She smiles back, bored out of her mind but playing along anyway. They hang out, go to a restaurant, and they suggest she goes back with them to MIT
She shrugs, figures it’s something to do and it won't kill her. “Sure,” she says to the nerd that's trying to chat her up. “Okay, I'll do it.”
She likes it on campus better, the air is cleaner, the people are less intimidating. They're all just kids. The same age as her, eighteen years old but still so different.
She hangs around for a while, in cafes and bars, all the popular student hot spots. Sometimes, she can sneak into the back of a classroom.
The lectures are great fun, she learns so much, about science or chemistry, psychology is boring, she knows everything already, but still. It's fun.
Then, she gets invited to a party by the nerds who she's 'couchsurfing' with, it’s the practice to stay temporarily in a series of other people's homes, typically making use of improvised sleeping arrangements. She's not sure how they got the invitation but doesn't question, and goes.
…
Parties are pretty boring if you don't know anyone, Natasha decides. Everyone just drinks and laughs and talks, doesn't really do anything. She knows how to mingle, how to seduce, all of that. But, what's the point? No one here has any gain.
She's debating leaving when she sees him.
He’s sitting on a creased leather couch like it’s a throne and he’s a king.
He’s a dried out, cynical husk even at seventeen, she can see it in his eyes, the way the guys around him are clustered like vultures, like disciples, in a strange way. They’re all clutching red solo cups filled with piss-beer, and there’s a matching, hungry look in their eyes. They want him, a piece of him, fame, money, influence. Whatever it is, they want a chunk.
He looks casual, on the other hand. He’s bored, leaning back. While the others laugh and make jokes, he just watches the cigarette smoke drift up from his hand.
He taps the ash out onto the arm of the couch, and then dust it off onto the carpet. Doing so, he looks up. Locks eyes with her.
She can’t move, she won’t move. Normal people would look away. She doesn't even blink. There’s nothing, for a moment, and then he smiles.
It's the smile of someone like her, someone smart and tired and someone that sees through everything, until all that's left is the void.
Look into the void long enough, it looks back.
She’s heard that somewhere, she's not sure where.
...
It’s later, and she’s standing on the porch, in the frigid night air. There’s a couple sloppily making out around the side of the house, but she doesn't care. She needs air.
“Alright there?” a voice asks from behind her, she turns, it’s him. He’s abandoned his followers and is standing there in his acid-wash jeans and MIT hoodie, with eyes that are too soft to make sense.
Her arm itches, She feels overdressed in her jacket and jeans.
He blinks, twice, and she realises she hasn’t said anything.
“Yes, yeah,” she remembers to use a causal spelling of yes. It makes her seem more normal. American.
He tilts his head, smiles, again. “That’s good.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets, rolls on the balls of his feet in an odd rocking motion. “I saw you in there.”
“Me too,” Natasha says back. “You smiled.”
“I did. You were looking.”
“I was,” she returns, indulging in this odd little game. “You were smoking.”
“So I was. Why?”
“I don't know. You don’t seem like someone who smokes.” She loses the game.
“Really. What does someone who smokes look like?”
She laughs, a little. “Not like you. You get your fix on work binges and...ooh, a good line of coke every once and awhile, I’m guessing.”
He straightens up. “How do you know that?” She’s hit a nerve. Her first instinct is to push harder, she has to restrain herself.
“Ah. Well, you’re smart. Have many early accomplishments, that speaks to the binges. You get tense, you relax by working, but sometimes, that doesn't work, does it? And then you're at a party like this one, or maybe something a little more high-priced than,” she looks around, “a second-rate frat party. There’s some coke floating around, you take it. It’s a way to unwind, it realises that energy in your chest.”
He bites his lip. “Spot on,” he says finally. “That's good.”
“I know it is,” she raises her eyebrows back. A sudden fit of daring takes her. “Wanna do me?”
His mouth drops, “what,” he stammers.
“Do you wanna read me?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Yeah, sure, I’ll have a crack.”
“Okay...immigrant, you have an accent, but you're trying to hide it. I’m guessing some sort of Slavic, I would say Yugoslavian, but that's not quite right. Russian? I'm guessing that you are ashamed of yourself, no one else. Poverty, maybe, hey, you mighta been communist. Apart from that, I think you're smart. You're actual smart, what the real Alumni of this stupid university are made out of. But still, you don't understand people, and that's okay, because... neither do I.”
“Huh,” is all she says.
“Did I get it right?”
She thinks, for what feels like more than a moment, but really, it’s only a half-second. “Yes. You might have.”
“Right pair we are, a Russian genius and an American one.”
She laughs, “oh, that's a wonderful summary.” And it is.
…
They’re at the Massachusetts Gun Range one day, because Tony keeps going on about making them, knowing how to use them, so she gives in and goes along.
She’s slumped in a chair, watching, well, kind of. She’s reading a magazine, some trashy thing she nicked from that frat party a while back. It's a good prop.
He’s got a gun in his hand, cigarette out, held between two fingers but not to his mouth. His earmuffs are around his neck, hers are firmly over her ears.
“You fire yet, rich boy?” she draws in a (not) fake Russian accent.
He huffs out a laugh, considers the gun held slack in his hand and the cigarette in the other.
“Here,” he holds the cig out to her.
She raises her eyebrows and takes it, “what am I meant to do with this?” she says in her American voice, lifting one earmuff from her ear, flipping over a page in her magazine.
“Aren't you the one that smokes?”
“I never said that,” she argues, and lifts the cigarette to her lips. It tastes like wildfires on the hills and late nights in the dark.
“Ah-ha,” he laughs, “but I'm right.”
“Oh, you always are, you American genius,” Natasha swoons in her accent.
Tony turns around and fires.
…
Blam, blam, Tony never misses.
It's his first time, but he never misses.
...
“You should cut your hair,” Tony says, one night, as he’s laid sprawling on the bed in his dorm. The lights are hurting her eyes in a chemical, burning scorch, so she reaches up and flips them off, then flops back into the dark. Tony doesn't say anything about it.
“What,” she laughs, mouth open.
“Cut it,” he says, twists a lock around his finger, tugs it a little until she winces and bats his hand away. “Trust me, it’ll be cool.”
“Oh sure it will, bald is the new black.”
He scoffs and hits her shoulder. “No! Like...shoulder length, I think.”
She considers for a moment. “All right.”
“Now?” he asks, propping himself up on the bed with one elbow.
“No,” she rolls her eyes, “it’s four in the morning.”
“So?” he asks.
She laughs, rolls over and tucks herself under the covers next to him, and laughs some more. She doesn't mind sleeping without a handcuff tonight.
...
He’s wonderfully free, wonderfully dark, wonderfully reckless. She loves it. She’s never been reckless, her life has been a series of carefully made moves and manipulation.
He dips fries in shakes and even as she squeals in disgust, shoves one into her mouth, and yes, she likes it.
He turns up at three with a bottle of vodka, so, obviously, the only logical choice is to get drunk in the middle of the night then get up for classes the next day.
They do cut her hair, he takes her to a fancy, high-price salon in New York that probably cost more money than she's ever seen. The look on the hairdressers face is jaw-dropping when she just asks for a plain, no bells and whistles cut. Still, she does it. Natasha looks at it for a moment in the mirror, then just nods and grabs her bag.
They go camping, out in the wilds of upstate New York for some reason, probably Tony’s on a nature kick. There’s a lake some ten minutes away from the camp, so the only logical conclusion is to go skinny dipping. The water is cold, but it burns like an old friend. Tony whines the entire time and then ditches after three minutes because 'hey, I'm already wrinkly enough down there !' She laughs and laughs and floats on her back to stare up at the sky.
Tony ditches his nature kick for a bar one sometime after that, so they go to the college bars, eat pizza and drink beer, get drunk to the karaoke. There’s a particularly memorable instance where the entire bar slings their arms around each other, and slurs the words to Take On Me.
They get in a bar fight, eventually. She still has no idea what it was about, they just joined in. Tony jumps up on the table and kicks pints like footballs, lotta help that does. Natasha punches a man on the face then uses her thighs to take him down (not permanently, that would be too suspicious.)
Then, red-and-blue lights flash and, oh, they run. Tony grabs her hand a block or two down and yanks her into an alley.
“That….was, fun” he huffs, doubled over. “Didn’t know...you cou — could fight.”
Natasha shrugs, brushes some glass off his shoulder, and lies, “did kung fu when I was a kid.”