She visibly pulled herself together and then looked at Peter with her weird intense ex-assassin eyes. "I think we need to talk."

"Uh, sounds good," Peter gulped, "what do you want to talk about? I read this really good book recently. We could talk about that. It was about a baker? She makes cinnamon rolls the size of your head. I wish I could make cinnamon rolls the size of your head. I mean I could, I guess, but they'd taste like cardboard or something awful. But if you really want to try them then I guess I could look up a recipe or something. We'll have to go shopping first because I don't have the ingredients for a cinnamon roll the size of your head… or my head if that's better. I'm not picky about head differences. In fact, do you think the other Avengers would want one too? I could make a whole batch. But then when the cinnamon rolls came out shit they might think I was being petty by serving them crap food as a peace offering, so maybe that's not the best—"

"So you do feel guilty about your almost infidelity with Deadpool?"

Peter gulped and nodded slowly, hoping that he was making the right decision. By the right decision, he meant the decision that would allow him to leave with his life. Or at least most of his limbs.

Natasha had obviously picked up on his uncertainty because she raised one elegantly shaped eyebrow and asked, "You aren't sure?"

Peter flinched back reflexively and Natasha gave a little frown before that too slipped behind her mask of impassivity. "I..." He wasn't sure how to say this. If there was one thing about Natasha, it was her astounding ability to pick out lies when she was looking for them. The only way he'd even been in the running to be winning last time was because he wasn't actually lying, just creatively avoiding the truth through omission, and that she hadn't been looking for Tony's intern to be a big fat liar. Lying to her face now wouldn't work. He wanted to say that yes he felt guilty about it, but really he didn't. Wade was his fiancé, there was nothing to feel guilty about. And he couldn't say it was just a mistake because no it wasn't. And if he specified that, yeah, it was a mistake that they got caught, sure he'd be telling the truth, but that was not a truth that would let him walk away from this conversation completely uninjured.

He sighed. "I guess the most I can say is that if I had known that W—Deadpool would have gotten this sort of back lash I would never have met him on that rooftop."

"So this liaison was planned?"

Was she reaching for a knife? Put that hand away, Nat! "No...at least, we weren't planning on having sex on the rooftop of his apartment building."

Her hand did not move away from the knife holster, but at least it stopped moving towards it. "What were you going to do then?" It was intimidating and Peter could only be thankful that his bladder was completely empty at the moment.

He gestured jerkily to his costume. "Sometimes we work together?" She raised both of her eyebrows and Peter amended his statement, making it more solid. "Sometimes we work together." She said nothing, and Peter's shoulders tensed. "I mean, all the time actually, and that time we had just saved some kids from a sitch at their school and it was a big deal and then we were just so excited and the moment got away from us, and that's when you guys showed up."

"So this sort of thing has never happened before?"

Peter gulped. Cannot lie. Cannot lie. Cannot lie. "We've worked together for a long time. We always try to keep it professional on the job."

"So this...attraction," she said it like some people might say rats, or Tony might say iphone, "has existed for a while?"

Why couldn't he just tell her? He could just pull off his mask and say "Actually yes, there has been an attraction between us, but that's ok, because we are getting married. So..." And then she'd probably slit his throat for lying to them all, but at least it would be a worthy death, and he'd be able to stop feeling guilty, and Wade could keep working with the Avengers and it would be totally cool.

Wait, why couldn't he tell her again?

An image of Wade's face rose before him in his mind, like when k-pop Stars rise dramatically from the floor of the stage during performance. His face was flushed with pride, happy that he'd been able to keep Peter's secret despite the trying circumstance. He had been so pleased, Peter couldn't disappoint him now.

Peter shrugged helplessly. "Deadpool's a good guy, and he's funny. We—ah…" he shrugged again.

He tensed up, prepared for an onslaught of awful things to be spat at him, but instead Natasha let out a long sigh and sagged forward. "Spiderman, listen, I understand what you think you're feeling. I can't tell you that your emotions are wrong. However you have to understand that you can't go around sleeping with people in relationships."

Peter nodded slowly and opened his mouth, but Natasha waved him off. "Walk with me." Peter nodded and they began their slow trek over overturned asphalt and crumbling sidewalk beside destroyed buildings and cops and firefighters and rescue workers. "A long time ago I worked for some not very nice people. For them I did some things I'm not proud of, but at the time it didn't even occur to me to think of not doing those things. It was my job."

Peter stepped around an overturned hotdog stand and scratched the back of his head. "I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I wasn't going to sleep with Deadpool for a job or because someone told me to."

Natasha narrowed her eyes. "How old are you?"

"What?" Peter squawked and nearly tripped over a brick in his path. Natasha caught his arm and helped him up, despite the fact that he was perfectly capable of helping himself up, thank you very much. She squeezed his upper arm and frowned again.

"What are you, twelve?"

Peter gapped at her. "Fuck you, Na— no, I'm a legal adult thank you very much."

Natasha shook her head and gave him a patronizing smirk. "But can you legally drink?"

Peter had been able to legally drink for many a year now, thank you very much. But he didn't think for a minute that Natasha was really that concerned with his age. She was playing at something, he just wished he knew what. "Black Widow. What do you want?"

The smirk dropped from her face like it had never been there. "You may not be a child, but you are still young. Much younger than me. Let me tell you, at your age it may not seem like a mistake, it may even seem like something to take pride in, but once you grow up a little more you'll start to realize that you have more regrets concerning the situation than you'll ever know."

Peter jumped over an upside down chunk of asphalt and skipped around so that he was facing Natasha, walking backward as she continued forward. "Are you comparing me almost boinking your coworker to working for the KGB?"

A strange expression crossed Natasha's face, but she said nothing.

"Look, I promise not to have sex with any guys who are dating other people, alright?"

Another strange look crossed Nat's face, but this time Peter could guess at what it meant. He wasn't lying about what he'd just said. Not at all. He would never sleep with someone in a relationship. But he would, you know, sleep with Wade... who was in a relationship… but only 'cause Wade was in a relationship with him.

Natasha crossed her arms and slowed to a stop. "Why the change of mind? You didn't seem this apologetic when we caught you with your pants down on that roof."

Peter rolled his eyes and put his hands on his hips. "You didn't catch me with my pants down. We had barely progressed to necking, Jesus! And the change of mind—"

"Or was it heart?" She interrupted him. Peter glared at her but she kept going. "Maybe the draw of the Avengers is too strong. Maybe you're dumping your somewhat mild fascination for the ex-Merc, still with a mouth, in order to try to appeal to us, the rest of the Avengers. Maybe when you heard we were going to ask you to join you realized that you should have been safer with who you let in your pants. Maybe you're trying to make up for it now by helping us with the monsters in New York." Peter blinked and tried to interrupt, because no, that was not what was happening, but she steamrolled right over him. "You've never actually fought alongside us before. And don't think I didn't notice the way you sent off Deadpool when he tried to talk to you just now, he's no longer as important to you now that you know that it's because of your relationship with him that we vetoed asking you to join…Maybe the only reason you were boinking him in the first place was to get him on your side, to get us to let you join us. Everyone wants to be an Avenger, and some people will do anything to get what they want. We already know that you have no scruples, sleeping with an engaged man shows that. But maybe you're worse than we all believed and you were sleeping with Deadpool not despite having a fiancé, because you never really cared. You were only ever doing it to get into bed, metaphorically speaking, with the rest of us."

Peter was gaping, honest to god gaping at Natasha by this point. He couldn't help himself. To think that she'd go so far as to accuse him of sleeping with a member of the Avengers to convince them to let him join them was ludicrous.

And what was more, he could tell that, for the most part, she didn't really think he was capable of that sort of thing. She was just saying it to rile him up. Make him angry and watch as he slowly talked himself into a corner, that was Black Widow's style.

(And he wasn't even that angry. Really, he wasn't. It was actually really interesting being fully on the other end of Nat's manipulations. Usually when she tried to mess with his mind [Like that time she tricked him into angrily making her and the rest of the Avenger butter pecan pancakes for breakfast to prove that he did not have prosthetic fingers…the entire incident should be completely forgotten] she was half-joking, but here she was full blown trying to explode his pre-frontal cortex. It was a thing. Peter was impressed. If she could just teach him her skillz, one spider to another, well then he'd be on doing pretty swell, wouldn't he?)

And he really wasn't angry, and the only thing he could think to do was laugh. He chuckled at the extreme fantasy she'd cooked up just to mess with his mind, and sat down. He'd been standing, and swinging, and punching, and kicking, and all to no affect. Now he was going to sit on the rubble of what had once been concrete stairs leading to a post office and have a good laugh because he deserved it, god-damnit. And at least Nat had tried to spin his head in on itself and hadn't shot at him with arrows or back-handed him with giant Norse god hands. Or whatever.

And maybe Nat was worried that she'd broken a twelve-year-old or maybe she was still trying to play him, but she took a seat next to him and was silent as he chuckled out the pure frustration of having all of the people he'd grown to love and trust come back at him with spit and indignation and the kind of disappointment that made bile rise in his throat like the tide.

Fuck them all.

He should just call up Wade and tell him to buy that damn cabin, he'd kidnap that bear back. Wade could even name him Teddy because Peter was nice like that.

"Spiderman," Natasha said, popping the little bubble of fantasy that Peter was building in his head. He sighed and realized that the laughter had stopped a long while ago and that even the sun had given up and had begun to set. He glanced at Natasha, and seeing her face filled with only kindness, compassion, and empathy, knew that she was deep into manipulating him for her own cause. He sighed again.

"No matter what you might think, there is no way I'd have sex with someone in order to get a job. Wade is my friend. Whatever happened, or might have happened on that roof before you guys showed up in no way relates to the Avengers. And I really wouldn't jeopardize Wade's job with you guys because he loves it. You all have no idea the lengths he would go to in order to stay in the Avengers. Sometimes I think he likes being an Avenger more than chimichangas, and if you know Wade than you know how serious that is."

Natasha raised a skeptical eyebrow (Nature Documentary voice: The Eyebrows are the most skeptical of all of the body parts. They are able to ascend in levels depending on the amount of skepticism they are showing. Alternately, the rear-end is the most trusting and naive, and therefore the body part that most often gets taken for a ride.) and Peter had to smile. It was just ridiculous that Natasha could see through people so easily, note their every lie, but refused to see something so obvious as Wade's hero worship.

"Seriously," Peter insisted, "Wade worships the ground you walk on. All of you. I would never try to tarnish that by sleeping with the guy just to try to get to the rest of you. That would be ridiculous and cruel. And who says I want to even be part of your little Robin Hood and his Merry Men scheme anyway?"

Yeah, that sounded a bit petty, but he could be forgiven. He was having a strange day.

Scratch that. He was having a strange life.

Natasha raised both of her eyebrows, and it was comforting to see that all of her emotions (fake or otherwise) had once more receded behind her mask of neutrality. "Are you telling me that you didn't come to help out just now in order to convince us that you should be an Avenger? I call it pretty suspicious timing that the first time you join us on a fight was after Cap told you that you could have been one of us, but that you had to prove your worth first."

"Well that's hardly my fault," Peter whined good-naturedly. "You guys usually handle everything before I show up, or are too busy with aliens trying to destroy the planet or take all humans as slaves to worry about a big bad in the city, and then it falls on my shoulders. Honestly, if you guys were home more often we'd have so many side-by-side battles under our giant, collective super-hero belt that we'd be tripping all over ourselves trying to figure out what do with them all."

Natasha did not look convinced.

"And," Peter said, channeling his inner Wade-slash-inability to shut up, "I didn't even want to join the Avengers. No really, I didn't. You guys are great, but I like swinging solo, not having to answer to anyone."

"We get paid," Natasha taunted, somehow zeroing in on the one thing that had always appealed to Peter: a steady income. Imagine if he could actually get paid for doing what he already did! Imagine! No more getting home from work just to go right back out and rescue bank robbery hostages.

Psssh! Yeah right.

"I know. It'd be a sweet deal, but the loss of freedom would be too much bad stuff."

"Very eloquent."

"Thank you. I'm a regular old Shakespeare." He made an exaggerated head roll. "Or a Doctor Suess, if you want to get all rhymey. I could dig that."

"You're hiding something from me," Natasha declared calmly, and Peter's heart-rate picked up.

"Not really… I mean, the usual, I guess. Secret identity stuff."

Natasha did not roll her eyes, but she did that thing with her neck that Peter tended to translate into an eye-roll. "No worries, little spider. I'll figure it all out eventually."

Peter grimaced. "I'm still not sure what you're talking about?"

Natasha smirked. "And I'm sure we'll run into each other again soon enough." She rolled from sitting to standing so seamlessly that Peter almost missed it. She gave a little nod. "Until then Spidey, Mama Widow will figure it all out later."

She winked and a full blown shudder racked Peter's body. Horrifying.

She sauntered away, and Peter stood as well. Best to get back home, relax, maybe try and work out everything that had happened in Peter's life. Something must be to blame for it. All of it.

Peter shook his head.

And maybe Wade would be home and they could get some take-out Chinese or something.

Ahhh, the domestic bliss of the superhuman lot.