VII. Chrysalis
And there is ev'n a happiness
That makes the heart afraid.
~ Thomas Hood
Natasha bides her time by cleaning up and changing clothes, trying to ignore the fire burning beneath her cheeks when she thinks of Loki. Her personal life used to be comforting, the one thing she was certain would not shift or change even when a mission dropped her on the other side of the world. She would wake leisurely and share breakfast with the other Avengers in the family-sized kitchen upstairs. In her bedroom, she would read a few pages of a novel from her bookshelf until she fell asleep. She did not deviate until that fateful night Loki had shown up at her door, out of his head with grief.
She had not bargained for this. Had she known she would come to care for him, she would have thought twice about letting him inside that night.
In all of her life, she's never come across someone for whom she felt such an inexplicable pull. Her profound bond with Clint had been the strongest relationship she'd ever had-at least until Loki showed up; he'd made her question everything she'd believed in and made everything feel wrong and right all at once.
She leans over the sink to dry heave, hoping to expel this twisted desire from her chest-her blood, her heart-before it ends her. Unable to do so, she slides to the floor in frustration. She rests her head on her knees and allows herself sixty seconds to break apart, letting the sobs wrack her body until she's out of time. She tucks the agony away for later, stands up, and carries on.
Steve, Tony, Pepper, Bruce, and Clint are gathered in the upstairs kitchen for breakfast when Natasha joins them. Tony stands in front of a menacing-looking contraption on the kitchen counter while Steve supervises. Everyone else looks like they're bracing for impact, as if the machine will backfire any second.
"Do I even want to know what's going on?" Natasha asks.
Tony beams her a proud smile. "You're about to witness the first waffles ever made in this kitchen by Tony Stark."
Natasha looks at the machine, then back to Tony. "You know that's not a toaster, right?"
"It's a new and improved toaster," he says, "with labor-saving capabilities and artificial intelligence." The machine's hands grope around on the counter before grabbing a fork and a stick of butter. "Whoa, whoa." Tony reaches for the items and replaces them with frozen waffles. Steve gives him a disapproving glance. "Okay, so the AI's still at an early stage."
"What stage? Research and development?" Bruce quips. Steve chuckles at that, earning a wounded glare from Tony.
"Just for that, you don't get any waffles." Tony presses a button on the machine's base, and its hands drop the waffles into a square container in its center. Then the hands reach out again, finding the syrup bottle and a knife. The knife slices a small wedge of butter off of the stick and stabs it in the middle. Thirty seconds later, the waffles drop out, cooked to perfection, and fall onto the plate waiting beneath the toasting mechanism. The hands drizzle syrup and lather butter, then retract into their long sheaths at the top of the machine.
Everyone waits with bated breath, anticipating some comical mishap. Nothing. "Even I am surprised that worked," Tony says, retrieving his plate. "You're all welcome to help yourselves. Except Steve."
"Aww, Tony, c'mon," Steve whines.
"See, if you hadn't scoffed at my valiant attempts to make breakfast for us, this wouldn't have happened."
Natasha laughs to herself, drowning out the rest of their bickering as she sits beside Pepper at the counter. She takes an apple from the fruit bowl and pares it with a knife.
"Oh my God!" Pepper says in a hushed whisper. "What happened to you?" Natasha looks at Pepper, who's staring at her so intensely Natasha thinks she might be on fire. "Or who, for that matter."
Oh fuck. Natasha realizes what Pepper's looking at: the twin oblong splotches on her neck. Hickeys. Evidence.
She tries to stay calm and answers, "Oh, it's nothing," as she casually brushes her thick curtain of red curls to hide the marks from other prying eyes. Natasha's lucky Clint's too absorbed in watching Tony's breakfast machine perform its tasks, otherwise she'd have some explaining to do.
"Was it Clint?" Pepper asks, her gaze flicking over in his direction. "I bet it was Clint."
"It wasn't Clint," Natasha hisses. "It's not anyone you know." Sort of a lie, but admitting it's someone Pepper knows will only end in a guessing game.
"Oh, is he cute?"
Natasha realizes this is not a conversation she can easily avoid. Heat burns beneath her cheeks. "He's attractive, I guess." If you're into demigods with mile-long legs and perfect cheekbones.
"Do you like him?"
"More than I should."
Pepper raises an eyebrow. "Trouble in paradise?"
"No, it's not paradise. It's confusing and awful and the worst possible thing that could happen."
"I'm not following you."
Natasha sort of turns in her seat so her body faces Pepper. "If I start...feeling things, that means I care about him. If I care about him, he becomes a liability."
"We all sort of take that risk anyway. I mean, say some nutjob like Loki wanted to hurt Tony." Natasha feels her skin flush at the name. "They could take Steve-really hitting him to the core, but also pretty hard to overpower-or they could take me instead. I'm easier to abduct-they'd probably pick the puny, non-superhero girl over the guy who could bench-press Thor." She shrugs.
"You're just assuming he's someone equally as strong as me, aren't you?"
Pepper gives her a "duh" look. "Of course. Why wouldn't it be?"
"But that means he'll be putting himself in the line of fire as well."
"So do all of these guys. You care about them like family. If one of them didn't come back..." She swallows the lump in her throat.
"So, what do you think?"
"I don't think the potential for pain is worth giving up on being happy. If you really like this guy, and I think you do"-she grins-"then go for it."
"What if I don't really like him? He challenges me, and he sort of scares me. But what if that's all there is behind the attraction?"
"Then it'll wear off. But I think it's deeper than that."
Natasha sighs. "If the world worked the way it's supposed to, I would be making googly-eyes at Clint, not...this asshole."
"If the world worked the way it's supposed to, Tony would have died in that desert. Steve wouldn't have been frozen for almost seventy years. Bruce wouldn't have the Other Guy. Sometimes miracles happen. And I like to think that they happen for a reason." Natasha wonders about that for a moment. "If you do keep seeing him, are you ever gonna let me meet him?"
"He's sort of...hesitant about meeting everyone."
"Aww, he's shy? Then just get me a picture."
Natasha makes a face. "Wha-No, that's weird!"
"Just tell him it's for a friend."
"Right, that'll make it less awkward."
"Well, he doesn't have to know."
"That's even weirder!"
"You could be really sneaky about it-"
Natasha turns to face forward. "No."
"Just tell me his name then."
"This conversation is over." Natasha leaves the table to try her luck with Tony's new machine. It turns out that an apple isn't very filling. She reaches into the cupboard for a plate when she feels someone sidle up beside her. Taking care to keep her neck obscured, she turns her head to see who it is.
"Oh, ye of little faith, are you finally relenting to the genius of my labor-saving devices?" Tony teases her.
"Not all of us are as lazy as you," she says, slowly backing away from the cupboard and making her way to the kitchen counter. She drops two frozen waffles into the toaster.
"It's not being lazy, it's being efficient," he argues. "Time management is a skill, Natasha." Tony doesn't say anything for a moment until he snorts a laugh and brushes her hair back. "Whoa, I didn't think Barton had it in him."
Clint's head whirls to face them as if attached to a string. "Didn't have what in me? What?"
In horror, Natasha flinches away and smashes her socked foot down onto his. Tony yelps in pain, and Steve chuckles with amusement. "That's what you get, Tony," he teases.
Tony makes a pouty face at Steve that elicits an eyeroll from Natasha. "Why must you laugh at my pain?"
"Because it's funny," Steve admits with a shrug and an impish smirk as he moves over to Tony, encircling his arms around his waist. "You sort of deserve it sometimes."
"Now that's just rude, Steve, and I'm going to have to consider revoking your 'special' privileges." Steve just smiles and steals a kiss. "Like that one." Natasha watches them, amused by their moment of joy and life and love.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have something like that for herself.
#
The next week, Loki shows up at her door with a bouquet of gorgeous silver and gold flowers. Natasha nearly drops the coffee mug she's holding.
"What are those?"
Loki gives her a mischievious smile. "I believe you call them flowers."
Her jaw tightens. "I know that, smart-ass."
"I don't think my ass is particularly smart," Loki says with an impossibly straight face.
Natasha hopes she's not as red as she feels. "Why do you have flowers?" she asks in an attempt to distract herself from thinking about his aforementioned ass.
His confident expression falls, replaced with sad eyes. "You don't like them?"
"No, no, I do! They're beautiful, I just...don't know why." She lets him inside and sticks the flowers in a vase, enjoying their pleasant lavender aroma. "Tony'll be pissed if he finds out you raided his greenhouse."
Loki laughs a self-conscious chuckle and looks at the floor. "They're not from this realm; they're from Asgard."
Natasha freezes in shock, almost dropping the vase. Loki needs to stop saying these kind of things when she has breakable objects in her hands. "You're serious?"
"Quite. They'll have to do until I find a way to truly capture the beauty of Asgard for you." She swears he's blushing.
"Th-thank you, they're lovely." She gives him an almost apologetic smile as fire scorches her cheeks. Even one of Tony's clumsy robots could tell that Loki is smitten with her at this point. She wonders if her feelings for him-whatever they are-are as obvious as his.
"Are you drinking coffee?" he asks her after an unbearably long period of awkward silence.
She wonders what the hell he's talking about before noticing the coffee cup she'd placed on the table. "Oh! No, it's hot chocolate. See?" She tips the mug a little to show him. He looks thoughtful. "Try it." She hands him the mug, and he takes a sip. His face scrunches-which she finds kind of adorable-and he licks his lips.
"Why is it warm?" he asks.
"It's supposed to be that way. That's why it's called hot chocolate and not room-temperature chocolate or cold chocolate."
Loki furrows his brow; he's pretty good at that, she thinks. "Aren't beverages supposed to be cold? This is peculiar."
Natasha wants to say something clever about how good things sometimes come in unexpected packages, but his curious stare is not helping her form profound thoughts, so instead she just asks, "You don't like it, do you?"
"It's different," he says, taking another sip before she pries the mug from his hands.
Natasha's trying very hard not to laugh at him. "You don't have to drink it if you don't like it."
"I didn't say I didn't like it. I said it's different. I can acclimate to 'different.'"
"You were clearly using 'different' as a euphemism for something else," she argues, taking the last swallow. He just frowns, but it's sort of pouty and makes her blush a little. "So," she says, attempting to distract him from noticing the effect his face has on her nervous system, "is that the only outfit you own?"
When the hell did talking to Loki become so difficult, she wonders. Stupid fucking feelings.
He laughs a bit. "It didn't used to be. When I had my magic, I could change my attire at will."
"Too bad you didn't get stuck with a nice suit. At least you wouldn't look as ostentatious."
"Do you continue to slight my clothes because you think they look better on the floor?" he asks with a grin.
"Well, that's one reason," she teases back, playfully nudging his shoulder.
They fall back into their usual routine of trading talking for touching, hands and mouths roaming over exposed skin. He nips at her shoulder and the back of her neck as he works into her, his hands locked around her wrists and pressed against the headboard. Her sighs spur him on, her hips jerking back needily as her inner muscles start to tense around him. When he comes he's in Valhalla and Niffleheim all at once, bending the headboard rather than her bones beneath his hands. Loki moans soft satisfaction in her ear as they recover, and it isn't until Natasha rolls them over that she speaks again.
She sighs something in Russian, staring up at the ceiling with a naked god in her bed beside her. She runs a hand through her messy hair, and Loki sees the violet bruises beginning to bloom on her wrists. He gently takes the bone between his fingers, examining her porcelain skin like a fine diamond. His voice is low and laced with agony. "I hate that I do this to you. I wish it were...easier for me."
She shrugs. "It's not your fault. You're learning. I'm sure your brother had to do the same thing."
Loki frowns, both at the mention of Thor and her erronous assumption that they are equals. "Don't delude yourself. The son of Odin would never struggle."
"Is that what he told you?" she asks with a knowing smile, rolling onto her stomach to watch his face. "Of course he isn't going to admit his shortcomings to his little brother. You've looked up to him since you were kids, right?"
He nods, wondering about that.
"He's not perfect, no matter what he tries to tell you." She smiles a little, and Loki feels something strange bloom in his belly and flood his throat. He doesn't understand why she cares enough to console him and insist that his shortcomings don't make him a monster. No one other than Thor has ever done more for him.
Loki moves to kiss her, to show his gratitude with light lips, and they move slowly, devoid of haste and primal need, instead exchanging chaste kisses and breathy sighs. Her fingers glide through his hair while her magic lips dance in chorus with his, giving and taking, pushing and pulling.
There's been a shift, he thinks, in her view of him, that she might see him as someone worthy of her love. The thought warms him like a slow fire and makes him feel like a new man, a man who could resurface from the drowning waters of his past and prove her right.
Soon, her eyelids grow heavy, and she rests her head in the crook of his arm as the peace of sleep blankets her. He watches her through the night, unable and unwilling to sleep, preferring the sight of her tranquil face to the black, dreadful torment that waits for him.
At some point in the night she stirs, her limbs thrashing violently against an imaginary attacker, agonized wails pouring from her throat. He gathers her in his arms, letting her fists beat against the stone of his chest as he murmurs soothing words in her ear until she calms.
When her eyes open, she shoves him away and turns her back to him. He can see the slight quiver of her shoulders.
"I'm sorry," Loki whispers, fearing he's somehow the cause of her pain. "I won't let anything hurt you. You're safe."
Natasha swallows something hard in her throat. "It's not me I'm worried about."
His heart breaks anew, loathing the words he'd spoken about Barton so long ago. "I won't disturb even a hair on his head." A clamour of panic swirls in his brain at the thought of having lost the trust he'd struggled to build with her.
She just shakes her head, curling close to press his cool skin against her hot forehead. He loathes that she's still afraid of him, that he hasn't yet done enough to earn her faith, but he's a little scared of her himself; Natasha is just as cunning as he is, and he is fool enough to trust her.
Loki watches over her until the sun breaks through the clouds.
