Chapter Text
The thing about Natasha Romanov is she watches. Not in a malicious sense, though she has been duly tempted, but in the sense that she has always been better suited to the background than the foreground. Seventeen years of Red Room training did not slip away with a decision to join the Avengers, though she likes to pretend they did.
Old habits are hard to break and old dogs cannot be taught new tricks, no? So, she keeps herself at an arm's length from the Avengers. It is not all deliberate, of course. They speak in a language she cannot understand sometimes. When it’s late after a mission, when they’re - god forbid - sentimental. They speak of childhood; of the singular luxury of tenderness, of all the wants and whims that being a child seemed to entail - so foreign they were to her -, of the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, of the reassurances of parents, of bandages placed on scraped knees and tears soothed.
Steve said once, months ago, tone tempered with affection of a type she has never known and will never know:
“My ma’-”
Natasha noted, silently, how the Brooklyn accent slipped in. Noted how Bucky turned to Steve upon hearing it. How his eyes softened, hand drifting towards Steves.
“She used to come back from work, she worked twenty-four shifts, and no matter what happened she’d always make lemon tea - Buck knows how hard lemons alone were to get - to soothe my chest. Every night without fail.”
She thought about how Dreykov had watched her kill a man.
But all that is by the by, part of the grief that sits on her chest like a clump of sodden laundry. Damp and heavy. Nothing for you to know about, Reader. What she is forced to think about now, as she sits with her knees pressed up against her chest on the bay window in the common room, is the watching.
This is for two reasons:
- It is a largely unhelpful coping mechanism, a taught instinct, that is preventative towards her mission - the same one she has had for a number of searing years - of assimilation into the Avengers. Filing away all the foreign little bits of herself.
- Tony's kid is currently in the same common room, shockingly clueless of her presence, baking cupcakes.
The cupcakes, admittedly, smell incredible.
The kid says:
“Mr Stark, are you sure the others are okay with this? I mean it’s just I’m here after, like, closing hours right? So, um, maybe they’d be uncomfortable with it?”
Stark says:
“Peter, I own the place”
Natasha files this under “information learned from watching that is not meant to be known”. The list includes the following items: Steve and Bucky are fucking, Wanda still has nightmares, Vision can recite all of the Bee Movie, Bruce doesn’t like looking in mirrors, Sam trains to the point of failure, and now, the kid is called Peter.
Peter sounds better than Spiderman. He’s too young to be doing that anyway. Too young to be fighting, too young to be sacrificing. It is hypocritical perhaps, she was an internationally renowned assassin by the time she was sixteen, but that was not a choice.
Tony takes care of the kid though, that is a set truth. Takes care of him in his own misguided way.
Peter. Derived from the Greek “petros”. It means rock or stone. Natasha had studied Ancient Greek at university once. It was a deep-cover mission, for what now she cannot remember. She had liked it though.
The kid isn’t very stonelike. He’s more of a bouncing ball. A spidery bouncing ball.
“You’re sticking to low level crime right?”
“Mhm”
“Peter.”
“There were just a few times and I was already there so it wasn’t like I was seeking it out - except for that one time but with context that’s better- plus I didn’t even break any major bones-”
He gets rambly when he lies.
“Kid. You have my number for a reason.”
“Ijustdon’twanttobotheryou”
“Breath.”
“I just don’t want to bother you”
“You couldn’t do that.”
Tony is better than this than she thought he would be. Less Tony about it. Shockingly empathetic for a man who’s caused more grief than should be humanly possible.
Of course, she knows that calls from Peter go straight through to Tony. She knows Tony has set Peter's suit AI - Karen, apparently - to notify him when any injuries occur. She knows there is a ridiculously large college fund that's been built up. The watching, remember?
Still, this is nice. Nice to know that Tony is trying to make sure that one of them isn’t going to end up quite as scarred, quite as scared.
Except, she forces herself to remember, that such domestic scenes are not for people like her. Peter is not someone who should be exposed to her, all sharp teeth and ill-adjusted manners, no. She is a weapon; he is a child.
So, gingerly, she opens the window. Scales down the drainpipe until she’s standing amongst the grass, wet with dew, and her face is lit for a moment by the moonlight. As if she were a ghost, some pale creature not meant for the day. Not meant for the world.
🕷
Life continues on after that. She watches. Still just a step behind the rest of the team. Still scrambling to cover up the little bits of herself that mark her out as other.
The kid, however, keeps popping up.
He’s managed to bond with everyone else on the team. Done in a few months what she has been unable to do over the course of years. He paints with Steve, he fixes Bucky's arm, he paints his nails with Wanda, he teaches Vision how to reference “pop culture”, and so on and so forth.
Except. She watches.
And although she hates to admit it, she likes the kid. It is a dangerous thing for her to care about him, the people she cares about have a unique way of - how to put this gently - dying. Still, Peter is good. For fucks sake if you looked the word “good” up in a dictionary his name would be definition.
She watches; she notices
She notices how visibly he tenses up whenever people get too close to him, about an arm's length away, and how he tries to hide it. How he flinches when any sudden movement is made near him. How she’s seen the faint hint of a bruise when his concealer - poorly, rapidly, applied - is too light. How he seems to be spending more and more and more time around the compound.
She does not like what she notices. She does not like how she is forced to recall her own habits and their causes. She does not like what is implied.
🕷
Here is the thing: Peter Parker is not an idiot. In fact, though he wouldn’t say it out loud for fear of sounding braggish, he is smart. IQ of 147 smart.
So he knows that Natasha knows. He just doesn’t know what she knows. What he does know is that he doesn’t want her to know and the number of times he’s used the word “know” borders on unintelligible but perhaps that's the point.
Everything is very abstract right now. Unclear. Peter Parker does not like unclear things, does not like ambiguity, it has led him nowhere right.
And she just watches.
Peter feels disgusted in himself partly, so inclined to self-loathing is he. He has lied to the Avengers. He has lied to Tony. He has not told them what happened. He has not told them what is happening. Natasha watches and he is reminded that he is being seen for what he is, for the depths of deception he has put everyone else through.
They deserve to know and yet he cannot bring himself to tell them. Cannot bring himself to ruin their perception of him, to see all the shame, all the scars, because he likes them. Because he trusts them. Trusts their opinions so that when they say he’s a “good kid” he can do nothing but beam because they are good people and he is not. They are good people and if they think he is good maybe, maybe, he is.
So that is what he clutches onto when it is late at night, when it is him and him in the house. When his hands shake. When his breathing speeds up. When it is not Spiderman but poor Peter Parker left alone in the dark.
🕷
Natasha corners Tony when she notices Peter wincing as he breathes, hand over his ribcage. Tony is in the lab, obviously, Tony has also been spending less time around the kid, not obvious.
“Tony?”
“Mhm”
“Tony.”
“Yeah just a sec-”
Natasha punches him in the arm, hard, at that. He looks up.
“What’s going on with your kid?”
“My kid-”
“Peter, you Mu-dak”
“That doesn’t mean anything nice does it?”
“No. The kid?”
Tony sighs at that, spins his chair around until he is actually meeting her eyes.
“I don’t know, he’s been- he’s been pushing me away.”
Natasha adds that to the list of warning signs.
“He’s just snappy now. Out of nowhere, y’know? He doesn’t even let me near him anymore. He just stands off to the side. I’m just giving him his space, I just- I think I did something wrong I don’t want to make it worse.”
“Have you been checking up on him?”
“No- I just. I don’t want to smother him. I don’t know Tasha. He’s a teenager right?”
And Natasha winces at that.
“Right. Yeah.”
And maybe teenagers are like that, maybe that is what they do. She wouldn’t know . Internationally renowned assassin at sixteen and such.
But it all seems so wrong.
“Tasha?”
“I’m gonna go- maybe drop him a message. I’m sure he still wants to talk to you Tony.”
It all seems so wrong