FIC: on the vine (MCU, Bruce/Natasha, PG)

[carlyinrome]

on the vine(mcu, bruce/natasha, pg)

The smell of the blood collects on Natasha's tongue, raw and sweet and metallic. She changes Bruce's bandages, the pads of her fingers pressing the gauze against the wounds until they knit closed.

“You heal fast,” she says, and Bruce fails to hold her gaze.

Maybe the calm after the storm is better. Trees are felled, billets razed. The ground is beaten soft by boots, and you can sift the earth to find spent bullets.

It's familiar. Natasha can manage it.

It's better when things are over. It is painful to begin, impossible. She doesn't know how to birth; she exists in the moments after the battle breaks. She has never wanted to nurture something fragile before.

Natasha ties the bandages. Before, Bruce frostbitten and shrinking into the delta, Natasha had tightened the tourniquet until the strength in her hands wavered.

She forces a smile. “All better,” she says, and Bruce's lip curls.

“I'm not so bad, am I?” she asks, and it's meant as a joke, but Bruce looks at her suddenly like she is gold coins at the bottom of the sea, an idol on a pedestal, and she cannot bear being something so precious. It's easier to be ugly. Natasha’s fingers ball to fists. She wants to wound him, to craft a devastating barb on her tongue, to sink her fingers into his bandages until blood soaks the gauze, her fingers.

“Natasha,” he says. He fights to hold her gaze.

“I want--” she says, and she feels desire fill her chest, spreading like poison through the tissues of her body, choking her breath from her, smothering her heart. She has never wanted something for herself before.

“Don't cry,” Bruce says, and Natasha reaches up to feel the tears slip beneath her fingers. She hadn't realized. She hadn't meant to.

Bruce puts his hands on her shoulder, her back, palm pressing to her spine. Natasha takes his wrist, holds it like the grip of a gun. At 13, she had her first kiss beneath the bare branched trees outside Madame B’s manor. The next day, she buried the boy at the tree’s base. She can still feel Madame B’s hands on her shoulders, hear her say, “There is no room for heart in this business.”

After the Winter Soldier, Natasha's covers are blown. Perhaps it isn't her business anymore.

“I just--” Natasha says, and her thumb presses to the pulse point in Bruce's wrist. She feels his heartbeat.

He moves slow, but Natasha doesn't see it coming. Suddenly Bruce is kissing her neck, her cheek, her mouth. Natasha keeps her eyes wide open. She sighs against him, her free hand threading through the hair at the nape of his neck. She feels awake, like she's been sleeping her whole life. Snow White in a glass coffin, the prince pressing his lips to her cold mouth. She warms, the color returning to her skin, the colors of the sky and the earth and his eyes coming into focus.

In her mind’s eye, Natasha sees herself holding a newly budding flower. Her fingers curl around the petals, protecting them from the elements. Thirty years of armor fall away, and she wants, for the first time in her life, to be soft.

Bruce will protect her like the nascent bloom, she knows, as his arms tighten around her. Natasha closes her eyes. She feels her equilibrium swing, the horizon tilting. Bruce leans her back, kissing her deep, and she lets him.