Trust My Rage

Natasha sat up at the sound of the door opening, her eyes looking out over the back of the couch to see Clint dragging himself back into their apartment. This latest mission was a long one; he'd been gone for just over a month. She was glad for the reprieve, honestly, for the opportunity to work and come home without needing to worry about how anyone else felt about her actions, but she knew better than anyone that the distinction between "long" and "too long" on a mission was an important one. Regardless of how she happened to feel about him, she cared about Clint and was glad to see that he was home in one piece.

"Hey, you're back! You alright?" she called to him, a welcoming smile stretching across her lips.

He shut the door and then looked up at her for the first time, and her smile immediately faltered. Clint's jaw was set and his brows were furrowed, his grey eyes stormy as he regarded her. "No, I'm not alright," he said, and his voice shook with restraint.

Natasha narrowed her eyes warily and set her copy of The Luzhin Defense on the coffee table. "What happened?" she ventured, getting to her feet. Her eyes never left Clint. He didn't look like himself.

The archer advanced on her, but he came to a stop when he reached the back of the couch, leaving the piece of furniture between them. "Why the hell did you take that thing out of his cage?" he asked, voice still trembling.

Natasha valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes; this was the big problem? "Seriously, Clint? You've been in Moldova a whole month and this is what you want to ta—"

"Yes, this is what I wanna fucking talk about!" he shouted at her, his expression wild. Silence rang through the room after his outburst, and Natasha leveled at him a glare so icy it broke through his rage. Somehow he reined his temper in again and forced out, "What you're doing is stupid, Tasha. Loki is not human. You can't appeal to a human nature that's not there. You are not gonna get through to him and he is never gonna give anything up. According to Fury, he's already said he doesn't know anything, so what the hell are you trying to accomplish by parading him around all the people who nearly died trying to stop him?"

Natasha swallowed, hard. It took effort for her to ignore Clint's use of the nickname she repeatedly told him not to call her, but there were more important things that needed to be addressed. Her own voice low and controlled, in stark contrast to his barely contained rage, she returned, "What makes you think I'm appealing to his human nature?"

Clint balked at her. "Are you listening to me? Jesus Christ, I'm standing right here practically shouting at you! Aren't you paying attention?"

"Are you?" she countered, her own volume rising just slightly. "I know what I'm doing, Clint. I've had a hell of a lot more experience interrogating people than you."

"It's been six weeks! What do you have to show for it?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said coldly, her eyes narrowing.

This seemed to bother Clint more than Natasha could have expected. His eyes widened, his hands balled into fists, and he grit his teeth so hard she almost expected them to break. A long moment passed in silence, and then he said, in a voice filled with dangerous calm, "Explain it to me. For once."

A weight dropped into Natasha's stomach at his request. She denied him so much, she wanted to deny him this as well, but somehow it didn't seem right to her. She might choose to ignore a lot of things but she wasn't blind; she could see how badly her determination to crack Loki affected him before he left, and since Fury had apparently let the cat out of the bag at Clint's debriefing, she didn't think she could maneuver out of this even if she wanted to. Still, she wouldn't tell him the whole truth. Even if it was Loki they were talking about, some things were supposed to stay in the dark.

She measured each word meticulously as she began, "We don't know the whole story behind the Chitauri war yet. There's something he's not telling us, and whatever it is, it's important. I have a feeling it's got something to do with why he faked his death, but I don't know for sure. His behavior's also...He doesn't always act like Loki. I've taken him to the tower to see the team three times, and every time he just sits next to me and doesn't say a wor—"

"You've taken him there three times?" Clint interrupted, actually shouting a little.

Natasha huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. Of all the important things she'd let slip in those few sentences, that was the thing he latched onto. "Yeah, that's what I said," she stated tersely.

"Natasha, what are you doing?" he implored her, his confusion mixing with the anger he was still trying to restrain. "You can't just take him out and play with him! He's dangerous—did you forget how many people died during that fight?"

"How can you ask me that?" she nearly growled, her fingertips digging into her arms as she made the effort to keep her hands in place.

"Because you talk about this guy like he's a person with feelings! He's a monster, Nat! He's fuckin' crazy and all he wants is to get under your skin and pull your strings and turn you against the rest of us—"

"How do you know what he wants?" Natasha heard herself shouting. She wasn't sure where the question had come from, but as soon as it was in the air, slapping Clint in the face and stopping him in his tracks, she wanted to stand by it.

"Wh—do you hear yourself?" he stuttered. "How can you defend him after everything he's done? To all of us, to me—"

"Because you don't know the first thing about him," Natasha said sharply. "I told you, you wouldn't understand. This is why I don't talk to you."

Her words seemed at once to wound him and to anger him all the more. Clint stared at her, open mouthed, working around for something to say until he simply shook his head, dumbfounded. "Natasha—I don't know what this guy has done to you to make you, what, sympathize with him? But whatever it is, you gotta snap out of it right now. He's a lunatic, a killer, and you're nothing like him. You've got nothing in common," he told her with the forced calm of someone trying to reason to with a person who was losing their mind.

The tone of voice, as well as the words it carried, only made Natasha angrier. Clint's fury burned like a closed flame, but hers was cold, solid ice at the core, covered in glittering, razor sharp frost. "Don't tell me who I do and do not have things in common with. You don't know the first thing about me, either," she said, her message cutting a path straight through Clint.

She turned away from him and headed for the bedroom. He called after her as she made the door, but she shut it forcefully behind her and turned the lock. Two minutes later she was fully outfitted, her catsuit and gear replacing the comfortable pajamas she'd been lounging in earlier. She left the bedroom once more, and as soon as she stepped into the living room, Clint was on his feet and walking toward her. "Tasha—" he tried to say, but she put a stop to the rest of his sentence.

Whirling on him, she flashed him an icy glare and warned, "Don't call me that." A tangible silence hung in the air for a brief moment, thick with hurt and anger. The front door slammed, and Natasha disappeared.

Loki stretched out on his cot, his hands folded behind his head, his ankles crossing one another as his feet poked out over the edge of the hard mattress. His brows were furrowed, his unblinking gaze trained on some distant point in the metal ceiling. It had ceased looking like metal hours ago.

His imagination transformed the dull silver sheet above him into a world of red and white. Pale moons gleamed beneath delicate sunlit horizons. Roses bloomed amid soft, snow-covered hills. Elegant red ribbons curled over a sculpted porcelain figure, and a steady flame burned, unflinching, in a world clouded and coated in frost.

It frightened him that he could think of her this way.

After all, what was Agent Romanoff to him? She held the keys to his cage. Occasionally she walked him like a dog, and when she decided he'd had his fun for the day, she would lock him away again. She was cruel, manipulative, determined to force him to stare into the eyes of his most terrifying demons while she watched on in mute satisfaction. She stripped away his armor, his illusions, and made him see himself for what he was. Monster. She had said it herself.

He should kill her for saying it. He wanted to kill her for saying it. And yet...

Loki sat bolt upright, the sound of hard, marching footsteps reaching his ears. He was on his feet and standing close to the glass barrier in a flash, interested to see who was coming to visit him tonight. He knew it wasn't the agent; her footsteps were quiet, little more than whispers over the concrete floor. She'd come to see him enough throughout the past six weeks that he'd learned to recognize the sound.

Natasha entered his field of vision then, her expression livid, her dainty curls thrown over her shoulders like wildfire. The sight of her this infuriated took him aback, primarily because he knew that he wasn't the cause. He hadn't seen her for three days, ever since their last excursion to Stark Tower, and even then he'd merely sat silently beside her, attempting to avoid the gaze of everyone else. Tony continued to goad and insult him, Thor perpetually hugged the line between literally hugging him and offering him his space, and everyone else simply ignored him. Natasha was consistently the only person who acknowledged him but didn't encroach upon him.

Tonight, however, seemed as though it would be a different story. She didn't so much as glance at him through the glass as she went straight to the cell's door. A moment later it swung inward to allow her admittance, and he was still in the process of turning to face her before her tiny fist swung at him, connecting with his cheekbone. In her rage she had apparently neglected to bring his shackles so the blow did little more than turn his head, but it took him aback so thoroughly that he retreated a step in shock.

Loki's eyes widened in mute incomprehension as the agent advanced, a snarl on her lips and murder in her gaze. She swung at him again, and again, her fists connecting with his chest, stomach, beneath his chin—anywhere she could reach, it seemed. He continued to take step after step backward and still on she advanced until he decided that whatever this confrontation was, it needed to stop.

And then he realized that she was talking to herself.

Her lips were moving, muttering something he couldn't hear, but as the ineffectual blows continued she began to propel the words forward with more and more force until she was barely restraining full-bodied shouts.

"Ugly!"

Punch.

"Lunatic!"

Punch.

"Killer!"

Punch.

"Not—"

Punch.

"—human!"

Punch.

"Monster!"

Loki's arm shot forward, his hand closing around Natasha's wrist at the word. She froze in her tracks momentarily, and then she drew back her other fist to continue the beating before he reached out and took hold of that wrist as well. She began to struggle, and without thinking he lifted her clear of the ground and turned around, taking one swift step forward to pin her firmly against the metal wall behind her.

"Let—go!" the agent demanded through gritted teeth. Her rage, apparently unabated by his sudden intervention, was so fierce that she continued to attempt to fight back. She began to raise a leg, and as Loki had no desire to get kicked as well in the midst of this tantrum she was throwing, he promptly threw her to the side and shoved the front of her body against the wall this time. His hands closed around her wrists again, pulling them together so he could bind them both behind the small of her back.

Loki pressed in closer as Natasha struggled in his grip, pushing his chest against the backs of her shoulders to hold her more firmly against the wall. Her cheek was flat against the cold metal and her eyes were closed, her red brows forming an angry ridge and her mouth shaping barely voiceless curses. It disturbed him to see her this way, so full of fury, so emotional. She was like him in the way that she could maintain a lie throughout her entire body, never once allowing a hint of her true feelings to crack through. She was so good at it, in fact, that he had still never fully discerned her motivations for spending as much time with him, or discussing certain subjects, as she did.

It seemed that in this moment, when the rage finally won over the forced calm, she was like him as well.

Several very long seconds passed, and as they did, her struggles came with less force, less determination. After about a minute the agent went nearly limp against the wall, his body and her knees bent into the metal being the only things preventing her from falling to the floor. Her breathing was a bit labored, slow and heavy, and Loki almost imagined he could hear her thunderous heartbeat begin to slow.

Even after she stopped inexplicably trying to reduce him to tenderized meat, after she grew calm and her eyes opened, neither of them attempted to move from their position. Loki's grip over her wrists slackened but he didn't let go; she didn't try to make him. He let his forehead rest lightly against the cool wall, his chin hovering above the top of her head. She breathed deeply, just deeply enough that her wild curls brushed against his cold skin.

Loki thought about speaking, about asking her why, in her rage, she had come to him instead of one of her friends, but the desire was fleeting. In some sad way he already knew.