A/N: This chapter utilizes events and characters from Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and contains minor spoilers for the show. I've tried to make the plot clear for those of you who don't watch, and I'm sorry if you don't and were trying to stay unspoiled. I felt it was necessary to deal with those events and explore how they might impact Natasha's identity. Also, I forgot to mention it back in Chapter 3, but the reference to Bringing Up Baby was inspired by a stunning Vogue photoshoot Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo did re-enacting the film. I just couldn't resist a little nod to it, given the little old Hollywood roleplay Bruce and Natasha do in Age of Ultron. As always, thanks to my beta, malintzin, and to everyone who is following this story and has expressed such enthusiasm for it. It's a pleasure to share the BruceNat love.

5. Job Interviews

"Weird question for you," Natasha sad almost the instant the call connected, before the video synced up to the audio. "Got a sec?"

"Shoot."

At the appearance of Clint's face on her laptop screen, the pull of a grin was instantaneous.

"That's your specialty," she said, leaning back in her chair, swiveling to prop her feet on the corner of the desk.

"Was. Believe me, after a month in this funny farm, my ability to answer weird questions surpasses my marksmanship."

He was sitting at the kitchen table, back to the living room doorway. She could make out the TV faintly beneath the kids belting out an off-key rendition of Let It Go. Clint's hand moved out of the frame, reaching for something on the table, and returned with a beer. He took a swig.

"This morning Coop asked me why spiders run away when he farts."

"What'd you tell him?"

"To ask Aunt Nat."

"I'll say it's genetic." She waited till he raised the bottle for another drink, then added, "I run away when you fart, too."

"Amen," said Laura, passing behind Clint's chair. She paused to bend and wave at the webcam before going on to the living room to turn down the TV volume. The kids' noise level, on the other hand, remained the same.

"So…"

Clint crossed his arms over his chest, the sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows. He really did go all-out with the farmer thing, when he was at home. Though Natasha couldn't see the rest of him, she imagined his legs stretched out under the table, feet resting on the chair across from him. Sock feet; Laura didn't allow boots in the house.

"I'm guessing your weird question isn't about whether I have gas."

"It isn't about you at all." Natasha watched her fingernail trace the edge of the desktop, where the laminate joined. "It's about Coulson."

Looking up at the laptop screen again, she watched the subtle changes in Clint's demeanor: the flicker of muscle beneath his cheekbone, the inward curl of his fingers against his biceps, the dip of his Adam's apple into his open collar. It was rough losing a teammate, difficult not to blame yourself if they were taken down while you were out of commission, even for years afterward. She hated to do this this to Clint, especially now, when they were reeling from losing more.

To worse ways than death.

She drew a steadying breath and asked, "What do you remember about him and the cellist?"

"The cellist?"

"You know…in the orchestra. Big violin."

"I'm not a country bumpkin, Nat. I know what a cello is."

From nowhere, the image formed in her mind of Bruce blushing when she told him he had refined tastes.

"What are you grinning at?" Clint asked.

Natasha gave herself a little shake, glanced over his shoulder where she could see Lila twirling around the living room in her sparkly blue Elsa dress. "Just…when's the last time you heard music that's not from a Disney cartoon?"

Clint unfolded his arms, elbows leaning on the edge of the table, and cradles his temples between his palms. "I am never going to get that freaking song out of my head."

"Let it go, Clint."

Lowering his arms to rest on the table, he raised his head to look at her. "The cellist. Audrey Nathan."

Natasha slung her feet to the floor, swiveled back to her computer, resizing the video chat window so she could pull up the browser with half a dozen open tabs.

"She had a stalker," Clint went on. "Super-powered from some lab experiment gone wrong. How many times have we heard that story?"

"And SHIELD sent a team to take him out?" Natasha opened a text document, and had to rearrange the windows on her screen. She needed to see about getting a second monitor.

"Headed by Coulson. I was on it." Clint picked up his beer. "Hell of an answer to So how did you two meet?"

"Were they dating the whole time you were on the PEGASUS project?"

"I guess?"

"So it was serious?"

"You know Phil and me. We spent most of our evenings sharing bottle of wine and eating chocolate and gushing about how in love he was."

Natasha stopped typing and stared at him. Clint smirked around his beer.

"Honestly, Nat, I dunno. Coulson kept relationships pretty casual, and he didn't seem different with the cellist. It was mostly a long distance thing. Maybe he took more weekends off than usual? Oh, and he definitely texted her a lot. More than I text Laura."

"That's the comparison you're going with? Really? You've taken days to answer texts."

"I'm talking lightning speed texting. Like it was his superpower." His grin faded as he stared into space.

"I remember seeing her at the funeral."

Natasha remembered, too. Remembered seeing the woman with long dark hair and delicate features and thinking she bore more than a slight resemblance to Laura. And how close Laura had come to being the woman so devastated she could barely stand beside a freshly dug grave.

"I guess it was a lot more serious than I realized," Clint said, quietly.

"You know," said Natasha, "for an agent they call Hawkeye, you really suck at reading other people's relationships."

The quip snapped him out of the brooding mood. "Maybe if all my friends weren't spies who are really good at hiding them. Or possibly I cracked one too many about Coulson's type being damsels in distress, and he decided I was a lousy confidant."

"That's why I never confide in you about my love life."

Although she expected him to comment on her nonexistent love life, as he loved to do, Clint said, "You gonna confide in me about this?"

Natasha stared at her computer desktop, the news articles and her own brief typed notes which held so little information she might as well not have bothered.

"It may not be anything." She clicked the exit button, ignored the prompt to save the document. "It may just me reading things that aren't there because I'm bored."

"Well, I've been reading about Portland suburbs without unexplained power outages, so. It may not be."

"I'll let you know if anything comes up."

"I'll do the same. Are you bored?" Clint asked. "How could that be, with the science bros for company?"

Laughing softly, Natasha couldn't help but think how when Tony accused her of being bored, she'd responded defensively, but with Clint, she didn't deny it.

"You know I got all that experience hanging with Selvig," he went on. "I can give you tips, teach you some catchphrases so you can pretend you know what the hell they're talking about."

"I may be the best spy in the world, but somehow I doubt even I can fake science for the leading expert in gamma radiation."

"Seriously." Clint caught her with the piercing gaze that earned him his code name. That saw more in her than a cold-blooded assassin. "You doing okay with the Big Guy?"

Natasha wanted to glance away, but forced herself to continue making eye contact.

"I'm good. He's keeping me well fed." She folded her arms across her chest. "Banner doesn't seem too great with the Widow."

"Well, maybe if you didn't talk about feeding. Or was that some kind of euphemism?"

"Yeah," she said, rolling her eyes. "For vegetarian biryani."

"You know you can come back here, right? Any time."

"Home, home on the range…"

Now she let her gaze drift from her computer screen to the children's drawings which hung above, the only personal touch in the room, as Pepper pointed out.

Going back to the Barton farm was tempting. Very tempting. She couldn't pretend hanging out with Pepper the last few days hadn't made her want to be among friends, that she hadn't called Clint mostly because she missed his face.

But he needed this time with his family. They needed him. She'd sworn to herself even though she counted Clint as her best friend she would never come between him and his family, even though they counted her as part of it.

If there was a place for her in the world, she'd have to find it on her own.

"I know," she said. "For now I'll stay put in the Tower. Where I won't have Let It Go stuck in my head."

"God, I might just join you."

Seeing her former colleague out of SHIELD uniform was going to take some getting used to but, wearing a tailored red blouse and a smile as she invited Natasha into her office, Maria Hill seemed fully at ease in the Stark Industries HR department.

"I thought I might see you today," she said, gesturing for Natasha to take a seat across from her desk. "Stark emailed."

"Let me guess." Natasha crossed one leg over the other, combed her fingers through the front of her long straightened hair to push it back from her face. Blow drying and styling it took too long this morning; she really should get it cut. "He sent you a list of ridiculous jobs for me to apply for."

Maria touched her computer screen, then swiveled in her chair to catch a sheet of paper as it emerged from the laser printer. Handing it across the desk to Natasha, she said, "It is a list of jobs, but they're positions I'd actually hire you for in a heartbeat. Are you in the market? Because all the applications that have come in so far are pitiful."

Curious in spite of herself, Natasha perused the list. IT Consulting, Systems Analyst, Customer Relations-Overseas Division, Security Management, among others. She'd known Tony had it in him to be kind. If he wasn't, Bruce never would've consented to stick around after the Battle of New York, and apparently he was a season ticket holder to the Portland Philharmonic purely to support a grieving woman. This was the first time Natasha had been a recipient of Tony's particular brand of behind-the-scenes benevolence. With the exception of Personal Assistant, which he'd struck through and put a winky emoticon next to, these were all jobs she was qualified for, and not overly so, that she'd feel like a charity case. He'd put thought into it, and considered her feelings. Which was more than he'd done at dinner the other night.

She was weirdly touched that he'd give her access to the company's network. It indicated a greater level of trust than she thought he had in her since she revealed Natalie Rushman was not her true identity.

"Can't you see me in IT, resisting the urge to break people's fingers every time I have to say, Did you try restarting your computer?"

"Imagine all the skeletons you'd get to dig out of closets if you were doing background checks."

"I've been doing a bit of that on my own," Natasha replied, laying the paper on Maria's desk. "Audrey Nathan."

There was a pause, as if Maria did not immediately recognize the name, though Natasha was fully aware that this might well be an act.

"The cellist?" she asked after a moment. Then, with a catch in her voice, "Coulson's girlfriend?"

Natasha explained how Tony and Pepper had gone out to Portland expressly to see her, and how this had been going on for the past three years, because Audrey took Coulson's death so hard.

"I didn't know that," Maria said, "but I'm not surprised. Pepper and Coulson got pretty close while SHIELD was watching Stark. I think they even went out a few times."

While Maria's claim not to know about the couple's relationship with Audrey may not have been genuine, Natasha truly didn't know Coulson dated Pepper. Obviously Tony didn't, either.

Trying not to let this information distract her, Natasha went on: "Pepper said the fall of SHIELD was triggering for Audrey."

Maria looked down at her desk, so Natasha couldn't read her eyes. Of course, this might have been a reaction to the fall of SHIELD, which affected Natasha, too.

"I was the one who notified Audrey of Coulson's death," Maria said, straightening a pen so that it was parallel to the edge of a legal pad beside her computer keyboard. "It was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. She was..."

"Devastated."

"I was going to say she was so in love with him."

Natasha smiled slightly at that. Clint had no idea the relationship was serious, but Maria talked about it in terms of love.

"It makes sense that finding out about SHIELD agents being exposed as members of HYDRA would upset her, if she's been grieving."

"Definitely." Maria withdrew her hand from her desk, curled her fingers over the edge of her chair's arm rest as she looked at Natasha again. "How awful for her."

"It's not just that, though."

Maria raised her eyebrows in an expression that said this, too, was news.

"Apparently reports of power outages around Portland," Natasha explained. "Communities entirely without energy. Sounds a whole lot like that Darkforce guy who was stalking her when Coulson first met her. Marcus Daniels?"

"Sounds right, but that was four, maybe five years ago? I don't recall the details."

"You probably recall we put him in the Fridge. Which means chances are he's not anymore."

"Chances are," Maria agreed. "Doesn't mean he's in Portland, though."

Natasha leaned forward in her chair. "Maria. The power thing? That's Daniels' MO."

Maria made an open-palmed gesture. "Why would HYDRA release him just to send him after a cellist who once dated a dead agent? Surely they have better uses for Darkforce?"

"Something made her miss a performance and fly out to DC to visit Coulson's grave. You know about that, don't you? That someone dug it up and took the body?"

"And you think that's connected with Daniels?"

Releasing a breath, Natasha leaned back in her chair, turning her head to look out the glass walls of the at the office bustle beyond. "I thought you'd know something that would help connect the dots."

"I'm sorry," said Maria with an apologetic smile. "I don't have any more contacts than you do. With these hearings…my lawyers advised distancing myself."

"Of course. Sorry, I…" She needed work. Real work. Loneliness and boredom were liabilities. "I need to find something to do that's not googling and going to the gym."

"Well you came to the right place."

Natasha gave a snort of laughter as she read the words etched on the office door, backwards from where she stood on this side of the glass. "Human Resources." She pushed to her feet, took the paper off the desk. "If I get desperate enough to actually apply for one of these, I'll let you know."

"I wasn't talking about for Stark Industries."

Natasha stopped in the doorway, folding her arms over her chest as she turned back to Maria.

"I'm listening."

"What's a girl gotta do around here to get a fella to notice her?"

Bruce startled at Natasha's voice-well, not quite Natasha's voice; it was a more nasally tone than her natural one, and she'd used a mid-Atlantic accent-sounding suddenly from the living room doorway. He didn't react as strongly as the last time she surprised him watching Bringing Up Baby-thank God. Dropping the bowl of leftover biryani in his lap would have been even messier and more embarrassing, and crawling around on the floor chasing popcorn kernels had been bad enough. Still, she caught him enough off his guard that he was at a loss to think of a clever reply.

"Natasha," he said, leaning to place his bowl on the coffee table and pick up the remote control to pause the movie, which now regretted watching without her. But he'd thought her rain check comment the other night had just been politely blowing him off. "Sorry, didn't see you there."

Obviously. He cringed inwardly, but Natasha breezed into the room as though he hadn't said it.

"That's how they talk in these old movies, right?" She glanced at the TV as she seated herself on the leather arm of the sofa.

"You'd give Katharine Hepburn a run for her money. You and Cate Blanchett."

Natasha pursed her lips together in a small smile. "And then what would the leading man say?"

Bruce's own grin fell as he furrowed his brow at her. "I don't…"

"Just run with it," she said, and flipped back into the old Hollywood accent. "I said, what's a girl gotta do around here to get a fella to notice her?" As she spoke, she reached up and tucked a curling lock of hair behind her ear.

"Did you cut your hair?"

Again, the pleased little smile. "Yes. But stay in-character."

Bruce let his gaze wander to the TV, considering the stilled image of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the midst of their leopard shenanigans.

"A girl like you?" he said. "Nothing at all, sweetheart."

"I might've known you'd be cruel." Natasha looked away sharply-then back again when Bruce caught her wrist.

"A fella can't notice anything else when you're in the room."

She stared at him for a heart-stopping moment during which he couldn't tell whether her surprise was genuine or part of the act. He had definitely gotten carried away. He looked down at his fingers wrapped around her delicate wrist, and released it. Natasha sat up straight, but continued to study him.

"You're not a bad improviser, Banner."

Bruce let out a shaky laugh and ducked his head, causing his glasses to slip down his nose. "Thanks," he said, pushing them back up. "You'd certainly know," he added, then immediately wished he hadn't, remembering how he'd accidentally offended her the other night at dinner.

But she only said, "It'll come in handy on our mission."

Bruce chuckled again as she slid off the sofa arm, only for it to die abruptly as he words reached his befuddled brain.

"On our…Wait, what?"