One in the morning, and the mansion was quiet. Tony was down in the lab, and probably would tinker through the night; Natasha knew that he hadn't been sleeping, at least not much. She, on the other hand, was curled up in bed with a Fitzgerald novel she had found in the den. She was going to read for a couple more chapters before bed, get up early to work out in the gym downstairs, and then breakfast. And coffee; she was getting addicted to that stuff. She had to admit that she was enjoying the pattern life had settled into.

Then the door was thrown open with a crash and she grabbed the gun under her pillow and pointed it at her intruder.

A choking gasp of terror and he stumbled backwards at the sight of her gun. It was Tony. Natasha threw the gun aside carelessly and ran to him. His hair was tousled and his bloodshot eyes carried heavy purple bags under them. He was drunk out of his senses, Natasha could tell by his almost comedically exaggerated movements and the strong smell of alcohol that clung to his skin. Even so, he had panicked immediately at the gun, like it was a gut reaction. The thought made her heart clench painfully. She grabbed his arm to steady him. "Hey, it's okay," she said. "It's okay, Tony, it's just me. You scared me, that's all." He clutched at her arm, searching her face with wild eyes. "It's okay, Tony," she repeated. "You're safe." He calmed down at her words and trembled all over, leaning his back against the wall. His eyes were still fixed on her face, but now that the panic passed out of them he looked strangely lucid.

"C'mon, let's get you to bed," she said. And preferably a shower before, she added mentally, wrinkling her nose. It wasn't just the alcohol; he smelled like grease and oil from the workshop. A hand on his back, she led him out of her room and down to corridor to his own.

"Nat," he said, his voice only a little slurred. " 'm not goin' t'bed." He sounded like a pouty child rejecting his bedtime, which would have been adorable if he hadn't looked so pitiful.

"Yes you are," she insisted. "When was the last time you slept?"

"D'snt matter," he said, waving his hand around wildly in an exaggerated dismissive gesture. "I go back."

"Go back?" Her eyebrows pulled down in the center of her forehead. Then it clicked. "Oh." Afghanistan. He must be having nightmares; anyone would after… after whatever the hell he went through. "It's not real, Tony. Those are nightmares, you survived. It's over."

He shook his head. "I go back," he insisted.

Natasha opened the door to his room and guided him in. "You need sleep," she told him.

He shook his head. "Need you," he said. He took her hand and tugged her towards him. Before she could resist his lips were on hers, hard and insistent. There was something desperate behind his kisses, not only of sexual need but of an emotional one, of wanting to be comforted and wanting to be wanted. Of needing the reassurance and acceptance, if only through sex.

Natasha let him kiss her and run his hands over her body, even kissed him back. If she was honest with herself, which she was starting to be, she wanted him, too. But she couldn't let it happen under these circumstances, not when he didn't know what he was doing. She couldn't take advantage of his emotional vulnerability and fuck him. She didn't know where this newfound sense of morality came from, but she pushed him away. The look of hurt on his face almost made her kiss him again and never stop until he was spent and sated between her legs. But just almost. "We can't," she said. "Not now." She didn't expect him to understand. So she took his hand in hers and led him to the bed. To her surprise he complied and flopped down on top of the covers fully clothed. As soon as his head hit the pillow he was asleep. Natasha pulled off his shoes and socks and draped a blanket over him.

When she tugged up the duvet he grabbed her wrist, making her jump. "Don't go," he said, brown eyes wide and childlike, utterly lost and vulnerable. She didn't have the heart to tell him that she was just about to leave.

"I'll be right here when you wake up," she promised. Seeming satisfied, Tony hmmed and closed his eyes. He was snoring lightly within the minute. Natasha sat on the edge of the bed, watching his chest rise and fall with every breath. She was in too deep, she knew. Emotionally compromised. She had long since made up her mind not to kill Stark, but that didn't mean that she could be seduced by him. She remembered the first and last time she had been seduced – the flirtation that had been so new to her fifteen year old self, the way she drunk in his declarations of love, the triumphant look in his eyes when he climbed out of her bed, eager to return to his comrades to boast that he had taken Romanova's maidenhood. That had been the end of it, and she had resolved then to never be put in such a weak position again, to never be the prey but the predator.

Until now, when a genius billionaire playboy turned genius billionaire-with-an-identity-crisis made her heart throb with his pain. For so long she had been struggling between the choices of whether she should kill him, and now that she had firmly decided against it, she didn't know what her options were. She had, at first, planned to walk out of his life and leave him or someone else – Pepper or Rhodey – to glue him back together. But she understood him, she realized; she knew what it was like to be unmade, to have everything you cared for, everything you believed in, called into question and to realize that everything in your existence up to this point had been wrong. She understood that, understood Tony in a way no one else around him could remotely come close to.

And that was when what she was going to do became clear. She was going to stay, and stay as Natalie. She would be with Tony, piecing him back together, helping him reshape himself. She had once been Natalia, she was now Natasha, and she could become Natalie. Tony Stark was her ticket out of the killing, out of the blood and the screams of the innocent that still haunted her dreams. Maybe then they could put an end to each other's nightmares.

She must have fallen asleep sometime in the night. Her neck was sore from leaning against the headboard in an awkward angle when she woke up. It took her a moment to realize what had woken her; Tony was twitching in his sleep. His breath came in short, sharp intakes. Occasionally an arm would thrash and his face scrunched up, all the while mumbling unintelligibly.

"Tony." She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. "Wake up." She shook him again, rougher. He started awake with a gasp, his eyes darting in fear over her face for a few seconds before recognition set in. His breathing was still shallow and quick, and his forehead was shiny with sweat. "It's okay," Natasha said. "It was just a dream."

"Not a dream." His voice was deeper than usual, still thick with sleep and probably a hangover. "Memories." He rolled onto his back, his breathing deeper but still shaky.

"I know," she said with a grimace. "I've had shit happen to me, too." Tony gave her a surprised look and she added quickly, "but probably not as bad as yours." She was Natalie, she reminded herself; Natalie who hadn't been through a spy training programme as a child, Natalie who's never had to kill prisoners at the age of nine; Natalie who didn't have to fight through years of brainwashing to become her own person. She wasn't sure how much her expression betrayed, but Tony seemed to recognize something in her face and nodded, believing her.

"Do you still have them?" he said so softly that she could only just hear it in the still silence of the bedroom. "The nightmares?"

"Sometimes." The thought of it sent a shudder down her spine. Tony must have felt it because he lay a hand on hers.

"But not as much as before?" he said, a trace of hope in his voice.

"No, not as much," she confirmed, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

"How'd you do it?"

"Time, I guess," she said, aware of how clichéd that was. "And I knew that what had happened to me – that was all in the past. I was free, a blank slate, and I could start over again."

"I wish I'm free." Tony sighed heavily. "Free to start over. To make things right." He met her eyes with a piercing look. "Do you know what I've done? My company? That's one of the things I've been working on since I got back – finding out what my company's done behind my back, or what I've sanctioned without realizing the consequences. I'm going to be responsible now," he vowed. "I'm going to make things right. Start Stark Industries over."

"And you can," she told him, an invisible pressure squeezing her lungs.

His dark eyes glimmered in the dimness of the room with almost childlike hope. "You really think so?"

"Yeah," she said, conviction in her words. "I think that if you stick to it – if you don't back down, if you trust in your gut even when the world tells you you're wrong, you can do it." She had done the same, leaving all she had been taught was true when she left the Red Room. But she had swapped her Soviet career for one as a freelance assassin, a calling no more virtuous than that she had been trained for. She could only hope that Tony had found the moral compass she never possessed.

Notes:

I'm so sorry for the delay! I've been super busy with my internship, my other writing – both fanfics and original stuff – and life in general. This is a very very mreh chapter that I kind of threw together, it's so filler-y but I felt it was important. The next one will be a major one, which I will try to upload asap.