AN: On the subject of things I do when I should be doing other things...
"Black Widow is down."
Roger's voice sounds muffled and far away, and some detached part of Natasha's brain registers the fact she's no longer wearing her comm unit, but just then she has more pressing concerns. Everything's gone dark and there's something holding her down, restricting her movements, and the more she struggles against it, the more she gets tangled, the more she feels panic rising in her throat. One second she's pushing and fighting off whatever has her pinned down, the next she's out in the open and on for a bigger shock, because the whole world has changed around her — everything gone impossibly large.
"Holy fuck." She jumps, turning in one fluid motion only to see Iron Man hovering above her like something out of Gulliver's Travels. "Cap," he says, his voice slightly distorted through the armour's speakers, "we have a bit of a situation. Fuck. Watch out."
Natasha doesn't hold still long enough to watch him shoot down whatever is hurling towards them. The moment for stunned shock is over and now there's only panic and the instinct to seek shelter, a place to hide, anywhere that isn't the impossibly wide expanse of street and open sky. She dives under a parked car, huddling behind a wheel, her whole body shaking. Panic crowds out rational thought in a way that should have been impossible — the Black Widow does not panic — but even through that haze of fear and confusion she's aware of the fact that she's wrong: wrong size, wrong shape, a world of wrongness in the rush of terror flooding her brain.
She holds very still, making herself small, listening to what's going on around her. There are shouts and explosions and the breaking of glass, and then silence. Footsteps approach the car, and she backs away from the sound. For a second nothing happens, and then a metal hand is lifting the front of the car as if it were weightless. Natasha hisses at the forms looming over her — desperate to flee but unwilling to turn her back on them. And part of her knows them, part of her recognises Steve and Tony and Wanda, but a bigger part of her is too freaked out to view them as anything but a threat.
"Iron Man, are you sure that's the Black Widow?" Steve makes to move closer, but Natasha jumps back, growling and hissing and ready to bolt.
"Dead sure. Fucking magic. No offence, Wanda."
"None taken." The Scarlet Witch drops to a crouch. "Natasha, it's us. It's okay. You're okay."
But none of it feels okay. Everything is too big and too loud and too bright, and every instinct she has is yelling at her to run, except she has nowhere to go — there are people all around her now and her only shelter is still being held up by Stark. Wanda reaches towards her only to snatch her hand away when Natasha claws at it.
"Now, that's not very nice," Tony says, a hint of a smile in his voice. "It's hardly her fault that—" He stops talking, and by the way they all go still, Natasha knows there's someone talking in their ear. Tony looks at Steve, who nods once, his expression troubled.
"Just so you know," Tony says, lowering the car back over her. "This is why people think you're prickly."
Everyone falls back — the Avengers, the agents who had been slowly approaching the car from behind, the two EMTs who had been hovering just a few feet away — until she's all alone, her heart hammering in her chest. She barely has time to be relieved before another set of footsteps has her tensing up again. The car rocks slightly when a man leans back against it.
"Do you ever miss the good old days?" Coulson's tone is even, conversational, as if he is commenting on the weather. "When all we had to contend with were drug lords and small-time dictators, and the occasional coup? The paperwork was so much easier." His voice is soothing, like a lullaby, reassuring in its familiarity. "Budapest, now that was a nightmare. And that time Barton managed to accidentally bring down the government of Tajikistan. I'm still filing forms on that one, three years after the fact. I think Hill comes up with new ones whenever she wants to punish me for something, like the SHIELD version of a rolled up newspaper to the nose. And that was before." Natasha slowly edges closer to him, her body low on the ground, almost a crawl. "Supervillains mean a lot of paperwork. Supervillains that destroy half of Manhattan on a regular basis mean even more."
Her heart-rate spikes when she abandons the relative safety of the car, but she's got enough control back that she holds her ground, stopping next to Coulson, her body almost flat against the asphalt. He looks down and their eyes meet.
"Hi there," he says, a soft smile on his lips. "I think you hurt Captain Rogers' feelings." The sound she makes is embarrassingly close to a whine — low and miserable — and Natasha is beyond glad Stark is nowhere near them. "I'm going to lean down," Coulson continues, "and pick you up. We'll go back to SHIELD headquarters, and a medical team is going to make sure there's nothing wrong with you apart from the obvious. And if you feel tempted to bite me, just remember I have it in my power to have you reassigned to Antarctica."
"SHIELD can't keep her from us." Steve doesn't shout, but his voice still fills Coulson's small office. "We have a right to see her and to take her home."
"Captain, there's a protocol in place-"
"SHIELD has a protocol for when one of your agents gets turned into a cat?" Sam sounds more amused than surprised.
"There are very few things we don't have a protocol for. As I was saying, Agent Romanov is under observation and will be kept here overnight. You may see her tomorrow."
"No offence, Coulson, but your science division is a joke that wouldn't know a cat if one hit them over the head. Seriously, those people need to get out more, loosen up some, interact with things not inside test tubes. And anyway, why go to the little leagues when you have me and Bruce right here? Give us some time with her and we'll figure it out. And if not, well, I always wanted a pet."
"Please, Stark," Bucky says, "let me be there when you call Natasha Romanov a pet to her face."
"And when she kills you," Sam adds, "I call dibs on the Porsche."
"Enough." Steve's voice is strained, tense. "This is not funny. Coulson, we're her team. She shouldn't be alone."
"She isn't, Captain. You have my word on that."
It takes a few more minutes and a lot more arguing before the Avengers finally leave, the door clicking shut behind them. For a moment everything is quiet in the office, the only sound the click-clack of the keyboard.
"You can't hide from them forever," Coulson finally says.
Natasha makes no reply but gets up from where she's sitting, in the darkest corner under the desk, and lies down closer to him, her head pillowed on his shoes.
She's not hiding. She's considering her options. Under a desk. Where they can't find her.
Natasha trusts her teammates as much as she has it in her to trust anyone, but it should surprise no one — it certainly does not surprise her — that her trust stretches no further than her ability to outfight, outwit or outrun any of them should the need arise. It's not something Steve would understand, not something any of them would, except maybe Bucky. Natasha doesn't do vulnerable well, and she certainly doesn't do it willingly. It's one thing to look harmless — and she's played that angle often enough — but a very different thing to actually be harmless.
So she's hiding. Under a desk.
At least until she gets her bearings.
"I've contacted Victoria Hand." Coulson gets up, careful not to jolt her. "She's sending Barton back ahead of the rest of them." And wouldn't Hand just love that? She was always accusing Coulson of playing favourites with his agents.
The man disappears from view for a few seconds and comes back with a SHIELD backpack, which he opens on the floor in front of Natasha. "Hop on."
Coulson's apartment is much like Coulson himself — quiet and unassuming, and home to a surprising amount of Captain America memorabilia. There's a small living room that opens to a smaller kitchen, a reasonably-sized bedroom, a study and one bathroom. The windows in the living room open to the fire escape, there's no alarm, and the lock on the front door makes Natasha want to smack Coulson. She knows there's virtue in appearing unremarkable (No agents of secret, quasi-governmental agencies living here, folks), but the keyword is appearing. A child could pick that lock.
"Don't give me that look," he says, loosening his tie. "I've lived here six years without any problems." She'll remind him of that when Hydra agents try to kill him in his sleep. "I'm going to go change. Make yourself at home. And Romanov," he adds, pausing on the door to the bedroom, "if I see claws anywhere near the couch, I'm dressing you up in an Iron Man onesie and handing you to Stark."
Cats can't roll their eyes, but she takes comfort from the fact that she's rolling them in spirit.
Despite the glaring security problems, she's still glad she's there and not at the Tower. Avengers Tower may be home, but just then she'd rather not deal with its open plans and bright lights and all-seeing JARVIS. Natasha the cat and Natasha the spider both understand the value of shadows when things are unsettled. Coulson's home is small and cosy and lived-in, with plenty of small spaces where she can hide when evildoers inevitably come to murder the fool of a spy who won't invest in a half-decent lock.
When Coulson comes back, he heads straight for the kitchen and Natasha follows. It's not the first time she sees him wearing something other than a suit — they've been in too many missions together, spent too many days holed up in the same safe houses — but there's something incredibly domestic about a Coulson who walks around barefoot in his own home, dressed in nothing but sweatpants and an old army t-shirt.
"I'm not sure I have much that's edible in here," he says, eyeing the contents of the fridge. Natasha can't see much from where she is on the floor, so she hops on the kitchen island. "There's left-over Chinese and left-over pizza. Can cats eat pizza? I could also make an omelette." He picks up the carton of eggs and frowns at the label. "Okay, I cannot make an omelette." He tosses it in the trash. "Pizza or Chinese?"
Natasha points at the Chinese food container with her paw, quietly judging his housekeeping skills. Really, the only thing the man has going for him is that a common thief is likely to do him in before he can die of malnutrition. She has seen terrorists living in holes in the desert who eat better than this.
"I once saw a Youtube video of a cat using a toilet. If he could, I'm assuming you'll figure it out."
Natasha doesn't dignify that with an answer, but carries on eating. When she gets her opposable thumbs back and finds out exactly who did this to her, she is going to take her sweet time making sure they understand in great detail why they should not have messed with the Black Widow. It will be slow and painful and will break a number of state, federal and international laws, but it's only a crime if she's caught, and she won't be, because she's Natalia Alianovna Romanova, star pupil of the Red Room, the Black—
"Don't make a mess," Coulson says, scratching the top of her head in passing. Natasha instinctively pushes against his fingers, closing her eyes with a contented sigh, and only then catches herself.
Murder. She's going to murder them. She's going to hunt them down and tie them up, and feed them their own bowels.
Coulson plops down on the couch, props his feet up on the coffee table and turns on the TV, and Natasha has but a second in which to hope he'll watch something half decent when he switches to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Because being turned into a cat wasn't bad enough.
She still hops down from the counter and makes her way to the living room. The food's gone, and she's cold and sleepy and vaguely curious about what's going on with Kendall, who was having some sort of crisis the last time Coulson made her watch an episode.
"Mind the upholstery," he says when she jumps on the couch, and Natasha really doesn't see why he should care; the thing looks like a rescue from goodwill.
She honestly means to sit on the opposite end, but for reasons known only to her cat brain, she ends up turning a few circles next to Coulson before lying down with her head on his leg.
Whatever. She once stopped him from bleeding out in Riyadh. He owes her.
After a second he places his hand on the back of her neck, running his fingers from the top of her head down, along the curve of her spine, every now and then stopping to scratch behind her ear, and Natasha has never felt more relaxed in her life. She no longer even cares that she's a cat, and when she finds whoever did this to her she might even decide to be generous and kill them quickly, and it's all because of Phil Coulson's magical hands. If Clint knows about these hands, it's no wonder he's been pining like a love-sick teenager for the better part of five years.
She startles herself by starting to purr, and Coulson chuckles. "Your secret is safe with me, Natasha." And really, with the amount of blackmail material she has on him, it better be. She closes her eyes and drifts off, lulled to sleep by bad reality television and Phil Coulson rubbing little circles on the back of her neck.
A noise outside wakes her up and she lifts her head, tense and alert, staring at the door.
"What is it?" Coulson sits up and reaches for the handgun she'd noticed earlier, attached to the underside of the coffee table.
The doorbell rings, loud and shrill, and Natasha barely has time to realise she's flown off the couch before she finds herself hiding under Coulson's bed, shaking.
Fucking cat reflexes.
She listens carefully to the sound of the door opening, knowing that whoever is on the other side is unlikely to be a threat, but still unable to convince the feline part of her brain that villains and evil organisations don't go around announcing their presence by ringing. The feline part of her brain doesn't care about villains or evil organisations. The feline part of her brain thinks doorbells are heralds of doom. Or possibly evil and out to get her. Or both.
The one good thing about being a cat, though, is that all her senses have been heightened, so she has no trouble hearing and recognising the voice that asks, "Where is she?"