Natasha crests the rim of the impact crater, this time in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse store. Banner's puddled in a depression, improbable bulges of muscle jumbled together like a still frame of a pot at a roiling boil.
She shrugs off the straps of the Hulk Extraction Life Pack (for) Expedited Retrieval, and hunkers down behind the debris. He's out cold, but she readies a tranq the size of a large marine flare just in case.
~*~
People make assumptions, each one of them a handle and a crank for her use just like their mass and momentum and the bends of their joints can be used to turn and pull and spin them any way she chooses. She embodies their assumptions nearly to the bone (not to the bone, not anymore). She spins out verisimilitude like ribbons, the pieces of herself artfully rearranged for effect. Read, respond, reap, in a pas de deux in which she writes the music.
She has done this so well for so long that it isn't even like breathing or heart beat, it's like blood pressure, only noticeable when it falters. It hadn't faltered for a long time, before Banner came along.
~*~
One assumption people make is that she knows she is pretty and doesn't care: the opposite is true. She has looked at her face for so long, changed her brows and expression and hair to suit so many purposes, that she can no longer judge. Rarely, in a glimpse of reflection at the corner of her eye, she will see herself at an unrecognized angle, a flash of a face that is unhindered by anyone she has had to be...but the sight is too ephemeral to determine beauty.
~*~
The other guy had arrived with the sound of ripping flesh, like a gash torn through muscle. Banner returns with the whisper of skin against skin, a shushing sound.
~*~
It occurs to her that the reason she missteps repeatedly with Banner is the same reason Drakova was able to throw her so badly. Little children are willful and make no assumptions about you. A tiny target refusing her hand and going dead weight into a tantrum, becoming true dead weight after Natasha let fear mar her judgement (she'd aimed for unconsciousness but the girl was so small and fragile).
And though Banner is easily read despite his contradictory layers, the other guy is a toddler's irrational tantrum writ large, an avalanche of impenetrable emotion she cannot work with (except this time she is the fragile scrap of life, effortlessly extinguished).
~*~
Another assumption is that sex is one of her weapons, as if years of honing mind and muscles and reflexes were simply an adjunct to her main qualification, as if that was the definition of an effective woman in the field. The truth is that sex and torture are both terrible methods for obtaining intel
Seduction, on the other hand, is a different game entirely. It's a little black dress and bare feet. It's being hyper-efficient and just nervous enough to impress. It's becoming a valet and a confessor. It's shivering before a seething god as he falls flat on his face.
Sex, well...she'd never technically needed to get around to that.
~*~
What galls is not just that she's so cack-handed when dealing with him, but that he sees it, and averts his eyes as if she gives a damn about dignity. As if her emotions are something to protect, and not simply tools to hand.
He gets that the fear is real (she may be cold, but cold things are hard and remain preserved) but he willfully doesn't get that it doesn't matter (from the right perspective, everything is meaningless).
Barton had figured all this out from a distance before he brought her in, as they tangoed for weeks as though the capital of Hungary were mere inches between them: Natasha holds her own heart in her hands, bloody and beating, because using her pain toward an end is the best way to feel it. He'd said, in so many words, why not use it for good?
Banner sees through the personas, through the technical genius, and recognizes that some of the blood on her hands is hers, and then hurts for her. He is infuriating and terrifying.
~*~
He is bleary and covered in sun-baked dust, watching her skim down the side of the crater and blinking slowly as if taking in a sunrise. His nakedness is so beyond the point that he shakily stands and brushes debris from his chest hair before she can hand him the pants from the H.E.L.P.E.R. He groans, bruised and exhausted as she shoulders much of his weight and hauls him back out of the crumbling crater.