8. Take Me Back To the Start
The client chairs were too low for the desk, giving Bruce the distinct feeling as he peered slightly upward to make eye contact with the woman seated behind it that he was a kid in the principal's office. It didn't help that he associated visits to the principal with social workers. He'd never been a troublemaker at school, yet the trouble at home always seemed to follow him there, in the form of concerned teachers who never failed to notice when he showed up with suspicious bruises and even more suspicious excuses for how he acquired them.
"How's the autobiography going?" asked Bonita Juarez. "Have you had a chance to begin?"
"Some," Natasha replied, the monosyllable hoarse.
Bonita looked to Bruce. He shifted in his chair. Uncrossed his legs, then re-crossed them again, the other leg on top this time. Bent to scratch his ankle where it rested on his knee and his slacks rode up. His gaze flickered out the windows behind her to the red brick high rise across the street, a typical Manhattan view.
"Honestly," he replied as he sat back again, "I've been spending most of my time preparing lectures for the semester. Classes resume on Monday."
Evading social workers' questions came naturally to him-See, Natasha? It's not just you-and he had a feeling Bonita was probably as accustomed to being on the receiving end of the tactic as he was to using it. However, she gave an understanding nod and picked up the latte they'd brought her from Blue Spoon, a coffee shop a couple blocks away, which felt so much like bribery.
"What do you teach?"
"Um…" Bruce hadn't expected her to be conversational. "A few senior-level biochem courses, and I'm teaching graduate level seminars on high energy particle physics."
Bonita sipped her coffee, then looked to Natasha. "Was that English?"
"We have some communication difficulties from time to time," she replied without smiling, and Bonita's faded, too, as she set down her coffee and clasped her hands on her desk.
She'd had a manicure since their last home study, Bruce noticed, black with red, orange and yellow flames extending downward from the tips. "Beware," she said, noticing his stare, "some of the girls at St. Agnes are aspiring nail technicians."
"That would save us some money," Natasha said, not quite injecting humor into her voice. "I'm referring to Bruce's trips to the salon."
Was that in reference to the beard? He curled his fingers around the arm of his chair, reining in the impulse to rub his hand over his chin.
"The autobiography's proving difficult for you," Bonita stated, rather than asked. "Congratulations- you're just like everybody else who's ever gone through the adoption process."
"Does everybody reach this point and want to put the brakes on the whole thing?" Natasha asked.
Smile returning, small, sympathetic, Bonita replied, "I wouldn't say everybody, but some do. The invasiveness of the questions can make you feel like it, but truly we're not out to weed out the unsuitable."
"Isn't that exactly what you're out to do?" Bruce blurted out.
Bonita raised her eyebrows. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Natasha's hand start to move, as if to reach out for his hand, only to curl around her armrest instead.
They hadn't touched since she'd reached out to him and he'd jerked away from her, shattering a glass of water in the process. Only on accident, if they happened to bump each other in bed. He didn't know whether he was relieved or not that she refrained again now. The only thing he was certain of was that he hadn't felt this much distance between them when he was in space.
The lapse in conversation stretched, and the itch began to claw its way up the edges of his shoulder blades again as the small sounds of the office assaulted him-the tick of the wall clock behind them, the intermittent knocking in the radiator, the muted blare of horns from the traffic outside. He hadn't actually transformed when he'd walked out of the house, but he had been in a state of sensory overload ever since Natasha told him about her trip to Ohio.
Finally, Bonita said, "There's no rush on the home study process. We want our adoptive parents to be as ready as they possibly can be. However long it takes them to get there."
That was the point. Bruce wasn't sure how much longer he could contain this.
"We're in over our heads," Natasha said. "Our past traumas…"
Bruce's shoulders cinched so hard that they began to ache.
Thankfully, she abandoned the dangling thought, changing tacks when she spoke again. "It feels like this process has undone a lot of the progress we made in functioning normally."
"May I suggest you adjust your language?" Bonita said. "Instead of normal or not, refer to it as functioning in a healthy way? You're not abnormal."
Bruce let out a sharp bark of a laugh. "I don't know what your definition of abnormal is, when one of us turns into a big green monster." He felt Natasha frowning at him. "But I would agree about the status of our current relationship health."
He glanced over at her, hoping to convey that at last they'd found a point of agreement, but when he saw her fold her arms across her chest, hunching in on herself, he wished he hadn't looked or spoken.
Bonita's chair creaked as she tilted back so she could open a desk drawer and see its contents. "The adoption process can strain the healthiest of relationships. That's why I often recommend seeing a couples' therapist anyway. I'll give you the number of one I highly recommend."
She slid the drawer shut and pushed a business card across the desk. This, too, felt like an experiment. Which of them would reach for it first, and thus demonstrate greater concern about the state of their relationship?
They did at the same time, hands brushing. Natasha looked up at Bruce, green eyes bright with emotion as her gaze held his for a moment. Then she withdrew her hand, leaving Bruce to take the card.
As he pocketed it without looking at the therapist's name, Bonita spoke again:
"You don't have to work through the questionnaire in order. If you get stuck on a question, move on to something else and come back to it later. Like taking an exam," she added, looking at Bruce.
"Just what I tell undergrads," he felt obligated to reply, and reached for his own cup of tea on the desk, though he felt through the paper cup it had gone tepid now.
"For example, the section on your relationship. How did you two meet?"
Aunt Susan asked that question just a few weeks ago, over tea and cinnamon toast in her dated but cozy kitchen, and he and Natasha had jointly narrated it as if they were summarizing the plot of a screwball romantic comedy.
There was nothing funny about the answer she gave now. "I was sent by SHIELD to recruit Bruce to the Avengers Initiative. In 2012, just before the Battle of New York."
"Was it love at first sight?"
More like eyes narrowed in suspicion, predators circling their prey, Bruce thought.
"That took some time," Natasha replied, quietly.
"Friends to lovers?"
"Once we learned to trust each other."
"And ourselves," Bruce added.
His gaze had dropped again to his ankle, and he noticed a loose thread in his sock, a slight pull in the knit.
Now, it wasn't himself, or the Other Guy, he didn't trust.
"So you saved the world together, developed a friendship based on mutual respect and trust, fell in love, saved the world together several more times along the way, bought a house, and now want to start a family."
"Can you ghost write our autobiography?" Bruce asked.
"Do you have plans to marry?"
Just when he thought this meeting couldn't get any worse… "Are you conspiring with my aunt?"
"I think what Bruce means," Natasha said, "is that marriage isn't a requirement for adoption, is it?"
"Of course not," Bonita replied. "We regularly place children with unmarried couples. There are many ways to express commitment outside of traditional marriage. Many reasons why partners choose to do so."
She regarded them for a moment, as though expecting them to state their reasons. Seconds ticked by on the clock, and neither did. Bruce hadn't known his reasons when Susan posed the same question to him, and he didn't know now, either. The errant thread on his sock beckoned to him to pull at it. He resisted, knowing he'd only rend it, and he really liked this pair.
"I'm sorry," he said, taking off his glasses instead, tucking them into his breast pocket as he met Bonita's eye, "do we really need to get into this right now? We asked to meet with you because we feel we were mistaken about this being the right time for us to start our family."
"I'm very sorry you're both feeling so discouraged at the moment." Bonita stressed the word both, looking to Natasha as if to confirm this was, indeed, the case.
Discouraged wasn't exactly the feeling. Bruce rubbed the back of his neck, the collar of his shirt itching.
"We don't have to continue this meeting," Bonita went on, "or schedule our next one."
"I'm not sure you understand," Bruce began. "I meant-"
"But I won't close your case," she said over him. "It would be a shame to have gotten this far and have to start over."
"People just keep bringing up marriage at the wrong time," Natasha said as they exited the office building after the meeting.
Bruce didn't respond except to grunt, which might just as easily have been at the cold as her comment. He turned up the collar of his coat, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and started up the street. Natasha didn't question his decision not to hail a cab, didn't signal for one herself. Just fell into step with him as though she understood his need to move in the open air, no matter how bracing it was. Maybe she'd felt constrained, too. She looked it, arms crossed, huddled against the cold. Or it could've been that she didn't know what to do with her hands when one of them wasn't twined together with his.
"The thing is," she went on before he could convince himself to sleep his hand out of his pocket and take hers, "I'm starting to wonder if there will ever be a right time for it. Kind of like how there's never a right time to talk about your father."
"Natasha-"
Bruce caught himself just before he said, Not now, not here in the middle of Manhattan, which would have proved her point. He puffed out a breath, watched the roll of the steam in the air.
"Nobody bugs Tony about marrying Pepper," he muttered.
"Tony being monogamous is more than anyone ever hoped for."
Another huff, this time a chuckle. "Fair point."
Silence lapsed as they came to a red light, where a crowd waited for the signal to change, and he hoped she'd drop the subject. As soon as they crossed to the other side of the street and their walking speed dropped to a more leisurely pace, Natasha resumed it.
"When Susan asked if we had marriage plans, you said it made you feel like she was questioning your commitment to me."
"It did," Bruce said. "And that's how Bonita made me feel today. Did you not?"
Natasha's shoulder brushed his with her shrug. "It's kind of a fair question. We bought a house together. We're planning to adopt. Why not get married? Is it a cage? Something that makes it harder to run away?"
Bruce stopped dead on the sidewalk, only vaguely registering that the person walking behind him barreled into him and swore. "You think I'm going to run?"
Natasha had stopped, too, turned back to him. "You walked out on me in the middle of a conversation the other night. Not that it was much of a conversation."
"You went behind my back!" His hands came out of his pockets, gesturing with splayed palms.
"Is that unforgivable? Did I fuck this up for good?"
The rapid blink of her eyes might have been because of the wind that whipped against her face, but there was no mistaking the tremor in her voice. Her arms were still folded over her chest, only now it seemed like a protective gesture. Some of the heat went out of Bruce's flaring temper. He sighed, heavily, raked his fingers back through his hair to stop it flapping in the wind.
"I don't…No."
"You don't know?"
"No, I mean no, N-O." His hand fell to his side, and he took a small step closer to her. "Look, I know you meant well, it's just…I need you to be on my side in this."
Natasha looked at him in disbelief. "Bruce, I'm always on your side. How could you ever think I'm not? We're a team."
A team. Bruce's gaze drifted past her, over the tops of the high rises to one of the skyscrapers towering over the city, the gigantic A of the Avengers Tower illuminated against the backdrop of January clouds though it was early afternoon.
Turning to see what he was looking at, Natasha said, "Surely if you learned anything from being an Avenger, it's that teammates don't always see everything the same way."
"Hey, I wasn't here for the Civil War," Bruce quipped.
A howling gust of wind around a corner sent them into motion again, though not quite as rapidly as his thoughts.
"Do you think Bonita could be wrong about starting over?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
He gestured up at the Tower. "Maybe that's exactly what we need to do."
Had the uniform always felt this tight? No, not tight, exactly. Stiff. Restrictive. Ill-fitting. The second the quinjet touched down on the helicarrier, Natasha unstrapped herself and stood.
"Hey!" came Stark's voice from the cockpit as he piloted the grounded jet into the hangar. "I didn't turn off the seatbelt sign."
Natasha continued to tug at her catsuit where it had bunched up uncomfortably around her thighs during the flight, while Jessica Jones watched with a smirk.
"Too much retirement?"
Not enough retirement. Natasha did her best to let the thought roll off her back as she rotated her shoulders to loosen the clinging fabric around her arms.
Mirroring Jess' expression, she replied, "More like too much of Bruce's holiday baking."
A glance showed him to be fidgeting, too, though not necessarily because he was self-conscious in the Hulkout-proof stretchy pants Tony had dubbed "broga pants"back in the day.
"Don't pay any attention to her, Bruce," he said as he came to the rear of the jet, now parked in the hangar. "Those pants do not make your ass look big."
Bruce had gotten so used to this sort of comment that he barely reacted, and even the accompanying swat on the butt Tony gave as he strode past to punch the bay door control didn't seem to phase. His jaw did tighten almost imperceptibly as the doors creaked apart, the lower one forming the boarding ramp. Natasha couldn't help but recall the first time she'd watched him board a helicarrier, when he'd been a state of constant hand-wringing as he dodged pilots and technicians, looking as bewildered as if he'd stumbled into a hive of worker bees. Today he was no less tense, but she didn't detect anxiety at its root. He was the one who'd suggested putting themselves back on the Avengers roster, after all.
Phil Coulson stood at the bottom of the ramp to meet the Avengers team: Stark, Jessica and Luke Cage, Thor, and of course Bruce and herself.
"When I saw your name on the roster," Coulson said as she disembarked, "I thought it must be a mistake."
Once again Natasha had to put conscious effort into tamping down the emotion that swelled when she remembered the last conversation they'd had about staying in retirement and confronting the past, when she saw the unspoken question in his eyes as his gaze flickered briefly away from her to Bruce.
"Who can resist the siren call of a villain who wears ram horns and wields energy weapons?" she quipped, referring to the Zodiac leader responsible for the recent attack in Chicago.
Jess gave a snort, but Thor spoke gravely. "When I first saw him, I thought he was of Asgard."
"That was Aries," Coulson said. "This time we've got Cancer in Houston, complete with crab claws."
"Zodiac's taking their theming way too far," said Cage.
"What'll it be next?" Jess asked. "Siamese twins in Minneapolis-St. Paul?"
"Um, one, conjoined twins is the more PC term," Tony said. "Two, God I hope not, Minnesota in January?" A full-body shiver rippled down him. "And three, crab claws, mmmm." He closed his eyes, looking practically orgasmic. "I could really go for seafood. Houston has a seafood scene, right?"
"Not like it used to, thanks to the oil spills and the terrigen," answered Coulson, who once upon a time would have been annoyed at Stark's interjections. "But we could hop across the bay to New Orleans to celebrate a job well done."
"What is the job?" asked Bruce. No, he definitely wasn't anxious, Natasha thought, except in the sense that he anticipated this mission. Her stomach twisted, but she tried to focus on the matter at hand.
"Agent Mackenzie will brief you all," he said, and directed the team to the command deck where the deputy director was waiting to brief them.
"The mission's kind of a twofer," Mack began when they were all seated around the gleaming dark conference table.
"Thanks, Zodiac, for your plan to dominate the world at bargain prices," Tony said, swiveling his chair like a kid at his father's desk.
Giving him the tolerant of look eerily reminiscent of Coulson, Mack went on with his briefing. Just like in Chicago, Zodiac had targeted the Port of Houston in what they could only assume to be a play to control shipping. Unlike in Chicago, the exports in question were volatile, given the Bay Area dealt primarily in oil and petrochemicals.
"You know," Tony interrupted again, examining his fingernails, "if everyone was using clean energy and driving electric cars, we could not only go out for seafood in Houston, we also wouldn't be dealing with this little attempt at world economic domination…"
"Was this ad paid for by Tesla?" Bruce said.
Tony gaped at him, offended. "Are you accusing me of being in the pocket of a corporation? Besides my own?"
"How does Pepper feel about your shameless promotion of Tesla when you skipped out on the press conference about SI's new clean reactor?"
Huffing, Tony leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. "Gave me the self-driving car," he muttered into his hand.
Bruce actually met Natasha's eye as his mouth curled in a small, satisfied grin.
"Look," Jess cut in, "I get that you guys are used to pre-battle banter or whatever, but once again let me remind you we're paying for a sitter."
"What does Squirrel Girl charge?" Tony mused. Jess leveled him with a glare, and his hands shot up. "Just think of all the money you're saving with these two missions for the price of one! The second one being…?" He looked to Mack, though Natasha had a feeling that was more to avoid Jess' deepening glower than anything.
"Johnson Space Center," Mack answered, looking relieved to get back on track. Beside him, Coulson just looked relieved not to be the one responsible for this briefing. "They've infiltrated the Astromaterials Research Office, which supports our theory that the Zodiac Key didn't originate on earth."
"That's what we've taken to calling the ankh," Thor attempted to whisper to Bruce, whose jaw muscle flickered again.
"Forgot to pack my lab coat," he said.
If Natasha didn't know better, Bruce sounded almost disappointed. Of course, that they were here at all proved she didn't know him as well as she'd thought.
"You won't be needing it," Coulson said. "I'd hoped you packed for a Code Green."
"I told him those pants were very flattering," Tony said.
"Agents Fitz and Simmons will have the science covered, given their past experience with this kind of thing," Mack added. "After we've worked out our plan of entry, we'll need someone to cover them getting into JSC-" He looked at Natasha. "-but we'll more than likely need the Big Guy ready for action down at the ship channel."
They weren't going to be teamed up? The knot in Natasha's stomach tightened. Well, they hadn't been much of a team lately, had they? Ironically, Bruce looked the most relaxed he had since the home study.
"Because that's the other thing," Mack said. "They've commandeered the USS Texas."
"The Navy battleship?" Natasha asked. "Isn't that a museum?"
"Not anymore."
Coulson added, "Our intel leads us to believe it'll soon be fully armed and operational, as they say."
"Star Wars, Phil, really?" Tony shook his head.
"Understanding Star Wars references, Stark, really?" Jess said, and he scowled.
"Speaking Bruce's language," Natasha joked, lamely.
At least somebody was.