FIC: island (MCU, Natasha/Bruce, PG)

[carlyinrome]

Post-AoU. On boundaries.

Where are my shores? I am formless without you. I have no edges; my horizon stretches on forever with no definition between sky and sea.

***

Some things cannot be contained. Natasha is used to robotics, to precision and calculation. There is no room for heart in this line of work.

But she doesn't do that anymore. She spends her days at the Avengers facility in New York, teaching what she knows. During the day, it's easy to wear the facade. At night, her longing is boundless.

She placed an advertisement in code in every scientific magazine of note. Her coordinates buried in the copy, a message: Come.

***

Where are your shores? The storm obscures the edges of your island; the rocks are treacherous and the waves are high. I am seasick, homesick, lovesick.

***

Bruce feels the pull to her like a magnet in his chest. She is his true north, and his compass spins to her.

It's for the best that he stays away. But some things cannot be contained, and his heart expands in his chest so he cannot breathe. He finds Natasha's message in a physics journal, and his hands shake.

He writes back.

***

The coordinates are for a place between. It is a land arid and poor with crumbling buildings lining the streets. Natasha wears sandals and rust-colored dust powders her toes. She climbs the earthen steps up the building with white linen curtains floating from windows, carried on a soft breeze. She knows that he is waiting, and it propels her forward. She could walk miles through the desert fed on this faith.

The door is unlocked. Bruce is standing, waiting for her just as she knew he would be. He looks haggard and thin and so beautiful in the orange light. There are bruises on his arms and chest, but his arms are open, hands reaching for her, and Natasha's need to fall into them out shouts every other thought in her head.

They come together. The kiss is desperate and brutal and not enough. Natasha wants to climb inside him, their bones clanking together, a noise like a hollow drum. She wants to tattoo him on her skin so that there is no separation and it will last.

Bruce lifts her in his arm and carries her to the bed like a groom taking his new bride across the threshold. Bruce takes off her shoes, his hands running up her legs, his tongue tickling her knees, and Natasha looks him in the eye and feels worshipped. It's not enough. She pulls him up and against her and soon he's inside her, not in her skin in her bloodstream in her marrow as she craves, but enough. It will be enough.

***

Natasha traces the bruises on Bruce's chest with a tickle of the pads of her fingers.

“What happened?”

“Infusions,” he says, and his eyes are off her and she can do the math.

“You're looking for a cure,” she says. Then, before he can answer, “You're going to kill yourself.”

He looks at her; the corner of his mouth twists. “There are worse things.”

She has felt the unbearable enormity of longing pushing outward against the muscle of her heart, stretching it so she cannot breathe, altering her. She understands.

Some things cannot be contained. Bruce scratches his nails lightly over Natasha's back, holds her close as she shivers. He breathes in her scent, wishing he could breathe her in particle by particle until he held her in his chest, cozying to his heart and trapped in the cage of his ribs. He has never wanted anything so badly as to be safe for her. The needles in his arms, in his chest, the pain of the serum pushing through his veins was unbearable, but not so unbearable as his boundless longing. He holds her in his arms and outside night falls, and they both wish at the same moment for the sun never to rise.

***

My shores are not so far. You feel them now, the beach beneath your feet.

I am safe from the rocks and the sea. The storm clouds the horizon, hiding it from view. I am defined by your borders, contained within you.

Comments

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Damn, this is utterly gorgeous.

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Thank you, dear. I've been thinking about you.