Chapter Text
The first time Natasha meets Stark’s kid, it’s almost three in the morning. The tower is usually empty at this point; everyone’s usually either asleep or pretending to be. Natasha’s used to having the place to herself.
But the kitchen light is on. And there’s a child sitting at the table.
It takes her a second to recognize the kid. He’s straddling a chair, his hands clasped around a mug of steaming tea, his lips moving soundlessly as he stares at an open textbook in front of him. He’s wearing a baggy, grey, long sleeved tee-shirt and a pair of fluffy Hello Kitty sweatpants.
Natasha clears her throat.
He looks up in an instant, brown eyes wary and unsure. She places him as soon as she sees his face—he’s Stark’s intern. She’s never officially met him, but she’s seen him around. He follows Stark around like a puppy dog, talking incessantly. She doesn’t know that much about their relationship, but she’s observant enough to know that he’s got Stark wrapped around his little fingers.
“Oh my god,” he says, and he shuts the chemistry textbook hurriedly. His eyes are rimmed with red, but their wider than should be humanly possible. “You’re the Black Widow.”
She sizes him up, from the Hello Kitty sweatpants to the weird wrist guards that are strapped to his hands.
“Nice pants,” she says critically.
He glances down, and his face flushes. “Thanks,” he says. “Mr. Stark gave them to me. Do you . . . want some tea, or something?”
Natasha raises her eyebrow, but doesn’t respond. She moves over to one of the many, many drawers Stark has, pulling one open. The fake bottom is still there. Her secret stash of Hot Chocolate is still hidden in the place where she left it, safe from Clint.
The kid’s mouth opens slightly. “Whoa,” he says. “How long has that been there?”
Natasha doesn’t answer the question. “If you tell Tony, I’ll . . .”
The threat of castration dies in her throat, because his eyes are wide and earnest in a way that reminds her eerily of Steve. Also, he’s just a kid.
Natasha clears her throat. “Don’t tell Tony.”
The kid bites his lip. “I shouldn’t lie to him,” he says. “But I can’t see it coming up in conversation, so your secret is safe with me.”
Natasha makes it just the way she likes it—two packets of hot chocolate mix, ¾ mug of hot water, the rest cool so it doesn’t burn her tongue. She adds two pumps of the creamer that Tony keeps by the counter. It tastes exactly like she remembers it.
She leaves without saying goodbye to the kid. It doesn’t matter; his face is once again buried in his chemistry textbook. She’s not sure if he even notices that she’s gone.
###
He’s left the compound by the time she wakes up the next morning, so she finds Stark instead.
Peter isn’t adding up. There’s something off about him, something Natasha doesn’t understand. And Natasha doesn’t like to feel like she’s in the dark.
Stark is in his lab, busy making edits to a new suit for the vigilantly that fought with them in Germany. Friday lets her in without much of a problem, which means that Stark is feeling more social than usual.
“What’s the deal with your kid?” Natasha says bluntly as soon as she’s inside the lab.
Tony doesn’t look up from his computer screen. His eyes are bright behind his large glasses, and he looks better rested than she’s seen him in a while.
“You’ve been reading too many tabloids,” Tony says absently. “I don’t have a kid.”
“Then who was doing his homework in your kitchen last night?” Natasha asks. “At three in the morning, might I add?”
Tony frowns, and a crease appears between his eyebrows.
“Peter? Why was he up at three?”
Natasha’s looking for answers, not questions. “Who is he? And why did he spend the night?”
“He interns for Stark Industries,” Tony says, with the practiced air of someone who’s been interviewing since childhood. “Can you sit down? You’re making me anxious, towering over me like that.”
“Why did he spend the night?” Natasha asks again, making no move to sit.
Tony finally looks up at her. “That’s classified.”
Tony Stark is hiding something important. Natasha knows all thirty-seven of his ticks, and right now he’s preforming approximately fourteen of them. Her lips quiver suspiciously.
“His voice sounds familiar,” she says finally. “Do I know him from somewhere?”
“You’ve probably seen him around the tower before,” Tony says. He goes back to his computer programming. “He talks a lot, I wouldn’t be surprised if you have his voice stored in your mental files.”
“He didn’t seem too chatty last night,” Natasha says. “At least, on a scale from Bruce to Clint, he’s a lot closer to Bruce.”
“He was probably just starstruck. Once you get to know him, you won’t be able to get him to shut up if you try. And of course he’s similar to Brucey Bear; Peter’s incredibly smart,” Tony says, and there’s something that sounds like pride in his voice.
Natasha raises an eyebrow. “Are you saying Clint isn’t?”
“Clint isn’t smart, he’s intelligent,” Tony says absently. “He’s a spy, I mean, of course he’s intelligent. And Clint’s has self-preservation instincts. Peter, unfortunately, is a little lacking in that department.”
Natasha doesn’t know what to make of that statement.
“And you sent him on his merry way at seven in the morning?” Natasha asks, checking her watch.
Tony shrugs. “He has school.”
Natasha leaves before she does something stupid, like water board Tony Stark until he answers all her questions. Because Tony can make interesting life decisions, but he’s not a mentor. Who does he think he’s kidding?
(Of course, it’s impossible to be an adult in Peter’s life without instinctively trying to nurture him. But Natasha doesn’t know that, yet.)
###
The next time she sees Peter, it’s two in the morning, and he’s once again studying in the kitchen.
This time its calc. Peter doesn’t like calc. She can tell by the way he’s chewing on his lip, his hands running through his hair every few seconds.
Natasha isn’t scientifically minded. Not like Stark or Bruce. But her instincts tell her something is off about the kid, so she runs an experiment.
It’s a test, not attempted murder.
At a speed that only years of training could elicit, Natasha has her gun out and pointed at his head. He reacts quicker than she would’ve thought possible. He’s off his chair in an instant, calc textbook crashing to the floor. His wrist flicks, almost too quickly for her eyes to follow, and in a second the gun is out of her hands and stuck to the wall.
The kid is breathing heavily, staring at her. He’s dropped into a defensive crouch, arms extended and eyes wary. He’s stopped blinking.
Natasha can’t stop the corner of her lip from torqueing upwards. She decides she likes the kid after all.
“So,” she says. “You’re Spiderman.”
The kid is practically hyperventilating, staring at her with those damn eyes. “You . . . you . . .”
“Relax,” she says, heading over to her secret stash of cocoa. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. Do you want some hot chocolate?”
She thinks she can handle him, now. She can’t really deal with children—sometimes she feels like all her maternal instincts were removed with The Surgery. But she can deal with Spiderman, the hero who fought with her in Germany.
“You weren’t supposed to find out,” Peter wails, scooping his textbook up from the ground. The tips of his ears are bright red. “Mr. Stark specifically said . . . ooh, he’s going to kill me.”
Natasha doesn’t respond. It hurts, a little, just how much Stark doesn’t trust her. But she gets it. She silently hands him a mug and melts her face into an impassive mask.
Peter’s shoulders set, as if he’s bracing himself for a fight.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he says dully. “I’ve had this fight, with, like, one hundred different adults. Well, actually only two, but—”
“I very much doubt that you know what I’m going to say,” Natasha says, sipping her hot chocolate calmly.
“You’re going to say I’m too young,” Peter says bitterly. “That Mr. Stark was wrong to let me—,”
“I was younger than you, when I started out,” Natasha says, tilting her head to one side. “And I definitely wasn’t helping firemen get cats out of trees.”
She’s seen the YouTube videos.
Peter’s eyes widened. “I’ll have you know that cat gave me a real run for my money.”
Natasha almost laughs.
Peter smiles at her again, and opens his calc textbook back up. Natasha leaves as soon as her cup is finished. They don’t speak again.
###
He’s back in the kitchen almost a week later, this time at four thirty in the morning. His lip is split and both of his eyes are blackened, but he still manages to give her a genuine smile.
He’s reading a book. Nonfiction, she thinks. It’s about Georgia O’Keef. Maybe he’s just trying to keep her on her toes. She like to figure people out, and she can’t do that if he’s alternating between STEM textbooks and books about famous artists.
She makes him hot chocolate silently. She doesn’t leave after she’s finished this time, she just sits and watches him instead. She keeps expecting him to talk—lord knows he talks enough around Stark, but he keeps his mouth shut and his head down.
“What happened to your face?” she finally asks, breaking the silence.
“A couple of drug dealers thought they’d make some trouble at a local bar,” he says, and there’s tension in his voice. “I had it under control, Mr. Stark didn’t have to . . .”
He trails off, and his eyes flicker up to hers for a moment. She can see shame buried deep inside them.
She tilts her head to the side, wondering why he stopped talking.
“You don’t talk as much as I thought you would,” she prompts. “At least, not around me.”
Peter looks up, surprised. “I guess I just assumed you wouldn’t want me to ramble. Also, you’re, like, one of my heroes. And I have a really tough time filtering, so. Yeah. And—”
“There it is,” she says dryly. “Look who found his voice.”
Peter flushes. “I didn’t think you liked idle chitchat. Which is fine, I mean, obviously you have more important things to do, lots of people don’t have time to just talk. I figured you were here for something.”
“Do you want to talk?” Natasha asks him, making sure to keep her face a mask of apathy.
Peter flushes. “You sound like a therapist,” he complains.
“Is that who you want me to be?” she asks, because, for the life of her, she can’t figure out who he is. He’s socially awkward, but intelligent enough to know exactly how to react at any given time. He talks nonstop, but stays quiet if he doesn’t think people want to hear what he has to say. He’s a mystery, but seems to be a completely open book.
“Dude, you don’t want to be a therapist,” Peter tells her. “They kind of got the shaft, you know? Because they have to go through a ton of school, but they can’t even prescribe medicine, not like psychiatrists, you know? My friend MJ says she might want to be a therapist, but she gives really, really terrible advice, so—”
Natasha interrupts, because she’s not entirely sure how to handle Peter. She’s so used to having people figured out instantly that all this confusion is sitting in her gut like a lead ball.
“If you don’t want me to listen, what do you want me to be?”
Peter closes the biography and meets her eyes. He looks as confused as she feels.
“I don’t understand.”
She hears the words, but doesn’t quite comprehend them. What isn’t there to understand?
Stark wanted a yessir, a badass woman who could help Pepper run his company while giving him something pretty to look at. Maybe that’s not fair, because later he wanted something more intimate, a confident of sorts. Bruce wanted someone who loved him, who’d still be there even when he was the other guy. Especially when he was the other guy.
Fury wanted a merciless superspy. Clint wanted a partner.
Steve wanted a friend.
Well, there’s a chance you might be in the wrong business, Rogers.
“No, I think I do understand,” Peter says quietly. He’s looking at her with something akin to pity in his eyes. “I want you to be yourself."
Natasha leaves, because she’s done with Peter Parker and her inability to figure him out.