Notes: I'm primarily active on ao3, and you can find this story at archiveofourown .org works/4179273.

This fic assumes an arrangement between Bruce and Natasha and a backstory to justify it, which I've hinted at here and intend to elaborate on in future fics. Their arrangement is canon-compliant if you squint; I can't resist a good secret relationship trope. Oh, and I clearly do not know how to science. Apologizes all around.

For extras (images, songs, videos, meta, etc.) related to this fic, visit monsters-blueincandescence .tumblr .com and click the Navigation button for the Lullabies for Sleeping Monsters: The Professor tag.


THE PROFESSOR

a Bruce Banner & Natasha Romanoff fic

from Lullabies for Sleeping Monsters series

by blueincandescence

— • —

1: Study Group

— • —

The old-fashioned gold and leather watch encircling her wrist ticked off one more minute — twenty-three to go. Natasha sat back with a long-suffering sigh. She raised her bare legs to prop them on the glass of the art deco table with two deliberate thuds. Steve's disapproving brow flicked over out of habit, but his only response was to echo her sigh. It was Stark's table, after all.

And that son of a smug bastard had jetted off to the French Riviera that very morning, lamenting hours of tedious meetings and corporate politics. He was barely out of the conference room before he was on the phone to Pepper making sure she'd packed 'their' favorite bikini.

The upshot was that Natasha, Steve, and Clint had to sift blind through a data pool of potential mad scientists and former business partners so dark and deep it dated back to Prohibition. It was appropriate that the Stark fortune would end up bankrolling the Avengers, in a ponderous, Pushkin sort of way. It had as questionable an origin as any of them. Half a day of diving into its murky waters later, they had the five biggest names in the dubious but dangerous field of mind control research matched up with hundreds of their students.

Points of light arranged into five portraits to hover over the table. Steve leaned over to rest his palms on the glass, his stance braced. "You know, professors never seemed this sinister when I was at college."

Natasha stretched out widely, the sleeves of her slouchy sheer cardigan falling around her elbows. "Art school in the forties? Bet the co-eds wouldn't agree." More innuendo played over her mouth than that comment strictly deserved. Natasha pushed away her preoccupation of the day by turning her smile too innocent. She had a long list of questions for Captain America and once more an opportunity had presented itself. "What were you doing in art school, anyway?"

Steve's attention still didn't leave the abridged dossiers floating under their suspect lineup. "I got a scholarship."

That much was on the record. "Uh-huh."

Steve's face began to de-granite in preparation for the ribbing he knew she was working up to. She liked to let him see it coming. Didn't feel so much like kicking a world-weary Golden Retriever. He did look over when he said, "And I thought I could work for a newspaper or an animation studio. Do my part."

"'Mickey Mouse socks Hitler in the jaw'?" Pushing off with her toes, Natasha swiveled her chair toward the propaganda posters Tony had put up in tribute. "Doesn't have as nice a ring to it."

"Har, har, Romanoff," Steve said, but they both knew she was letting him off light.

What could she say? 'Carter, Margaret Sharon' had come up more than once today as a Stark Sr., SRR-crossover connection. She kept those questions to herself out of respect for the Founder of SHIELD and former First Lady of Espionage. Natasha's soft spots were getting softer at an alarming rate.

"JARVIS," Natasha called, swiveling back to sketch out what she wanted in the space in front of her.

The AI picked up her train of thought and set about making a web with the most likely living candidates to be tapped by HYDRA, willingly or otherwise, to work on alien tech with properties of mind control. Stark had protested like a PTA mom at a book banning when she had originally suggested uploading the Project Insight algorithm into JARVIS's mainframe, but JARVIS had merely characterized its original coding as 'horrid' and integrated the benign form they'd stripped down into his own processing.

"What do you think?" Natasha asked, addressing the room as Clint wandered in to join them. "JARVIS is Stark's most redeeming quality?"

"Slushie machine in the video lounge," Clint countered, setting down his industrial-strength laptop. No one was less impressed with Stark's interface tech than Clint; not even Thor, who'd once been delighted to compare it with a toy he'd had as a child.

"Get your head cleared?" Steve asked. He hadn't said so, but obviously he counted Clint's decision to go work outside on the party deck level a break in productivity.

Clint hadn't said so, but obviously that had been the idea. "For a bit. Dr. Cho's Banner fan club went on break, and a couple of them saw me out there and wanted to talk wind resistance on arrows." He leaned back with his fingers laced on the back of his head, the picture of 'not even considering getting back to work.' "Kids had some pretty good ideas."

Natasha's lip had taken up a quirk at 'Banner fan club,' and it didn't seem to want to go down. She played it off as a smirk in Steve's direction.

There it was, that touch of a frown. "We could really use Dr. Banner's assistance."

"And Stark's and Thor's. Hill's — hell, Fury's." Clint shrugged. "We're what we got."

"Don't forget JARVIS," Natasha said, indicating the changing pattern of lights.

"Happy to be of assistance, Ms. Romanoff."

Of the five professors, the ones affiliated with MKUltra, the Freemasons, Unit 731, and Mossad disintegrated, leaving only the Leviathan angle in play.

"Never trust a Ruski," Clint said, as he did. He grinned when Natasha rolled her eyes. "Pavlovian response. Mind control."

"Dr. Johann Fennoff, also known as Ivanchenko," Steve stated. "Pull up that SSR file again."

Not that it wasn't a kick reading about Peggy Carter in action — not to mention JARVIS's fairly dashing human namesake — but if Steve wanted to go maudlin, he could do it on his own time. Instead, Natasha said, "JARVIS has Fenhoff's current active protégés ready."

"I could Google the SSR file for you," Clint offered, never missing a chance to censure what he'd verbally eviscerated as her 'suicide move' of dumping all of SHIELD's files onto the public domain.

He had very nearly been right, as it turned out. But 'very nearly' was a long way from 'dead and buried' in Natasha's book. She'd had a very large, very angry ace up her sleeve that Clint hadn't considered as a part of her survival strategy. Why would he? Even she'd refused to play it until the last possible hand.

After eight hours of inputting data, the algorithm had narrowed the population of the Earth down to eighteen potential HYDRA recruits to work on the Staff. "Give me six," Steve said, so Natasha further narrowed the candidates to those who had family or debt — standard coercion parameters. They weren't going to get very far with the fanatics, anyway. That got her seven, so she bumped the Russian woman just to spite Clint.

He noticed and approved. "Probably a true believer."

Natasha said, "So we have six people who might be now be HYDRA, might, as we speak, be working on unlocking the Staff's mind control potential on a planet-wide scale."

"Yup, 'might be,'" Clint echoed, in his usual unhelpful way. "If mind control is even what they dummied up a Staff and switched it out for."

Natasha pulled up the mission specs she'd been working off and on again, feeling another long-suffering sigh coming on.

It was stifled by the miracle that was Maria Hill. She'd somehow found time on the floor of the United Nations to plug in all the placeholders Natasha had set, making sure they would have access to blacked out safe houses and contacts too buried to have gotten backlash from the file dump. If anyone could convince the General Assembly it was enough that the Avengers operated in the spirit of the UN Mission, nothing more formal required, it was Maria. Thor was just regal window-dressing.

Steve, who had been silent for a long moment, finally said, "The fact is, we don't have any facts. Your observations on site, Barton, tell us the Staff was likely switched out four months before SHIELD fell. That's half a year's jump they had on us before we even realized alien tech was in play. Now add six more weeks of blind raids and dried up leads. So we start with our best guesses — "

"Or we wait for a bunch of blue-eyed zombies to start scaling the walls to get at us," Clint said. "I'm with you, Cap." He jerked his head toward Natasha. "It's just someone's gotta balance out that one's optimism."

Steve hung his head for half a second, amused in spite of himself, before he pushed off the table to stand upright. "Just tell me neither of you are planning vacations."

"Captain Rogers," JARVIS interjected. "Mr. Stark has instructed me to remind anyone using the word 'vacation' in reference to him that he has gone to the Riviera for a work function."

Natasha watched as the minute hand made the switch to 5:15. Self-imposed boundaries were the most important to stick to. She deserved a break hours ago, and now she had a reason to take one. "Think of it this way, Cap, we all have a role to play."

"Sure," Clint agreed. "Thor's playing ambassador for aliens, monsters, and — " he indicated the three of them " — others under UN suspicion."

"And Stark is keeping us bankrolled." Natasha stood up and slipped her feet into her flats. "Pity he has to do it from afar, but we'll think of him in the blessed silence."

That got a snort. "Okay, okay. You're dismissed. We'll figure out what to do — "

Natasha flicked a wrist, and the specs formed above Steve and Clint's heads. "Fact-finding mission, multiple stops, tag-team, under the radar. We can hardly hope for undercover, but no shield, no arrows. Call it a week and half, if we're efficient, which means one day in Marrakesh, Barton. One."

"Oh, come on, Cap's never been." As an aside, he told Steve, "There's this dive off of Djemaa el-Fna square — all the usual stuff, but I know guys who would sell their mothers for the kefta tagine they have in there. We'll pack it away. You'll thank me."

"Well, I liked the Shawarma," Steve said gamely.

Over them, Natasha said, "I'm going to put Banner to work on supplying us an hallucinogenic convincing enough to shill-by-proxy as mind control. Be ready to leave at twenty-one hundred."

"Do you really think Banner can whip something like that up in a few hours?" Clint all but scoffed.

Well, no, but, "How do you think he got that fan club? Don't keep me waiting."

She left the room to a salute and a "Yes, ma'am."

Unlike SHIELD, the Avengers had a lot less in the way of mind-numbing bureaucracies and hierarchies. Since Maria hadn't cleared the Stark Industries staff for direct Avengers operations, the trade-off was a hell of a lot more legwork, or, ass-work, really. Natasha rolled out her body as she walked. She hoped she never had to understand how the nine-to-fivers did it.

Still, the beauty of micromanaging was that she'd given herself plenty of time before they headed off to maybe slip out of the Tower for some much-needed exercise. In the privacy of the elevator heading up, Natasha indulged a hum of satisfaction to be had. She ruffled the A-line skirt of the patterned mini-dress she'd pulled from the back of her civilian stash, admiring the calculated subtlety of the Lolita effect mirrored in the metallic doors.

Also unlike SHIELD, the Avengers had no mandatory discloses on fraternization to scare off the deeply private and charmingly repressed.

Throughout her SHIELD tenure, she'd let it be widely assumed that the Black Widow was breaking protocol to have cold, punishing sex with any number of colleagues. The rumor mill self-supplied the identities of her victims — Barton, always, sometimes Fury or Hill, and whatever STRIKE asshole wanted to earn his stripes that week. It had been a useful reputation to have in place for the build-up to her debut as a traitor but tedious to keep up later on.

In reality, she'd always kept her personal life profoundly professional — undercover, afterhours, and off the record.

Those three tenets held fast and true for her arrangement with Bruce, except that he was in on the game. And that fact was proving all the difference. Identity crises and near death experiences were a bitch to come back from, but this wasn't the first time Natasha had made the climb. This time around, it wasn't going to be all blood debts and red ledgers. It had taken her actual years to learn how to enjoy her life; no one — not HYDRA, not the KGB — was taking that. Sex was fun again, and not a moment too soon.