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Famine calls it The Little Apocalypse That Couldn't, because he's an asshole first and a cosmic power second; Pestilence calls it a hassle, because he's never been anything but lazy. Death, being Death, doesn't have much to say about it, and Red Zubinger dies a bloody, vicious death and calls it something new.
Natasha Romanov is War, but War is not Natasha Romanov. It's a fine distinction, but the important ones always are. She is very, very good at being a secret agent; one might even call it her calling.
--
The first time Natasha meets Pepper Potts, she has to hide a smile behind the most boring kind of battle--if there's neither first blood nor last blood, it's not really worth her time. In this case, though, she's willing to make the trade, flips the bodyguard when the farce becomes excruciatingly dull; Pepper's older, of course, and her name has changed, and her accent's gone American, but disguise doesn't count as a lost art for those it never worked on to begin with.
"Thanks, Pippin," she murmurs, walking past her. Pepper's head whips around, and Natasha smiles blandly at her, lets War spark up in her eyes.
Pepper decides to dislike her after that. It's endearing; War's always enjoyed a good fight.
--
"How do you know who I am," Pepper says, no emotion behind it, while Tony Stark does his level best to blow up a house behind them. He'd be Death's, Tony, if Death played these games the way the rest of them do; he spends so much time screaming for him, after all. It'd be a mercy, if Death were to take him on, but then, she supposes that's not really in Death's repertoire.
"Who says I do," Natasha says, and if she adds a little bit of flame to the fire, sparking out from the whorls of her fingertips, it's not like anyone sees it.
She carved those whorls herself, as it happens, a new shell with new perks to be had. They spell a dangerous word, but not in any language a human tongue could handle.
--
Three nights after the Expo gone awry--an exercise in restraint for Natasha, which is the kind of challenge she lives for, restraint being a far more difficult task for her than, say, razing a city--Pepper Potts shows up at her door. Natasha isn't surprised, because Pepper's ruthless competence has only sharpened with age, and she planted the knowledge in the back of her mind weeks ago in any case. Organized chaos, she has learned, is the best kind. More collateral damage, for one thing; less boredom, for another.
"I remember you," says Pippin Galadriel Moonchild.
"I thought you would," says War. "How's Adam?"
Pepper grins at her; there's an edge to it, sharp enough to cut, and her eyes are fever bright. Her hair is as red as the motorcycle Natasha's parked on the street (tickets are things that happen to people, after all) and she's got long, tapered fingers, the kind War likes to see wrapped around a sword hilt.
"Last I heard," she says, "he's raising hell."
--
SHIELD gives Natasha something to do; the Avengers give her Thor. He's an unexpected gift--not like Pepper, whose life is as much an open book as any mortal's, whose thighs are open now, too. Pepper tastes like a history of women carved in dirt and stone and alabaster, like the final act of a play War's been waiting in the wings of, like every last futile attempt to sew up what War herself has torn asunder.
Thor, though. Thor is a hoot.
"You are not of this world," is what he says eventually, after he's circled her for a full three minutes, Mjolnir resting on the table next to him. Natasha's been waiting him out, flicking dirt out from under her nails; now, she smiles.
"Wrong," she says, "but I can see where you made your mistake. I'm certainly not human."
"What are you, then?"
She lets her smile deepen, darken; she lets her nails go a rich, furious red, just for effect. She curls her fingers around Mjolnir and lifts it up, twirling it easily between two fingers, and doesn't waste the breath laughing when Thor chokes.
"I imagine you know," she says, "but you'd rather not think it, am I right? I'll let you have that, if you want, so long as you don't get in my way."
"I have no interest in interfering in your plans for this world, my lady," Thor says, recovering himself to bow low, eyes fixed on his hammer in panic. "Though I must warn you that I cannot speak for my brother."
"Excellent," says War. "I would be heartbroken to be robbed of the chance to hear him speak for himself."
--
Banner, she knows, belongs to Pestilence; the Fantastic Four, too, play host to him, not that any of them are the wiser. He says it's the flavor of the toxins that created them; War, privately, suspects that he is lonely.
Famine, who thrives on loneliness, takes the archer. Barton knows it, too, if the way he looks over his shoulder is any indication; he eats full, hearty meals, defiant to the hilt, but there's a reason his skill lies in such a precise weapon.
War would take Tony, but he clearly won't settle for anything less than Death, and anyway, he's Pepper's. War would take Rogers, but she, like the rest of them, is quite certain he's already chosen a Side.
The horsemen don't take Sides; they just ride. She takes Bucky Barnes. He is the right choice.
--
"You know," Pepper says, an autumn afternoon in Manhattan, "it should bother me more that I don't know what we're doing."
"You know exactly what we're doing," Natasha counters, absently clearing a path for them through the crowded sidewalk. In the street, a cab driver clips a bike messenger, gets out of the car and starts screaming; in twenty minutes, one of them will have killed the other, but who's who is anyone's guess. It's nice to leave some things to Chance. She does get so predictable otherwise.
"I really don't," Pepper says.
"Lies," War breathes in her ear. "Lies, Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, nothing but lies. Who changed her name to a joke the most dangerous man on earth might enjoy? Who came to my door when she knew who I was? There's only one type who comes to me by choice, Pepper, and you've known what you are since you watched the world fail to end, have you not?"
"You are a terrible influence," Pepper says, which is capitulation, which is agreement.
Natasha lets her fingers curl around Pepper's wrist, tucks their bodies together. When War smiles against Pepper's neck, every light in a mile radius blows out.
--
Loki is chaos incarnate, so young and so bitter, all brute force and no control. He reminds War of War, so long ago now that the memory is cobwebbed; even the way he moves speaks to all that thrums within him, a maelstrom of destruction with nowhere to go.
Natasha would try to help him, but she's not really that kind of girl.
--
"I humbly request that you do not kill him," Thor says, when Natasha's brought Loki to his knees with a flick of her wrist to make a point. The city of New York is in ruins, but she likes it that way. Pepper Potts is in hospital, and while that won't be true for long, she doesn't like it that way at all.
"She will not kill me, brother," Loki sneers, false bravado, he really is so sweet. "After all, war is the art of killing the masses, is it not, Agent Romanov?"
"You know nothing of war," says War, "and nothing of humanity, and nothing of this world. Your power does not lie in your ignorance, but you are too young yet to understand. I will happily allow you your parlor games, but there are those that are mine, and they will not be touched."
"I am the greatest sorcerer in the history of Asgard," Loki spits, and War smiles at him, blood-red in the dim light.
"And this is not Asgard," she cants, tipping his chin up. "Or haven't you noticed?"
--
She fucks Pepper creatively, which is to say everywhere, which is to say without any abandon at all. She fucks Pepper in the bathrooms of the finest restaurants in the city, in the darkest reaches of the sewers, in the back of a taxi cab that drives on and on through rush hour traffic, the thrum of the surrounding aggravation running hot in her veins. She fucks Pepper on the top of her motorcycle, tongue working inside of her, the laws of physics disregarded for a better sort of order.
"You're going to keep me," Pepper says one night, tripping unsteadily between her fourth orgasm and her fifth, tapered fingers curled in Natasha's hair. "Aren't you? Tell me you will, tell me I'm more to you than--"
"Queen Elizabeth was?" Natasha murmurs, grinning slyly up at her, lips slick and well-worked. "More to me than Joan of Arc? More to me than Cleopatra, than both of the Trung Sisters, than Artemisia? Is that what you'd like to hear, Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Pepper Potts of Lower Tadfield and Malibu? Is that what you'd like me to tell you?"
"Lie to me, then," Pepper gasps, her voice picking up in pitch, "lie to me, I don't care who I am to you, I don't care what am to you if you won't make me go back to the way it was before, to the between, you're better than Adam ever was, you're better than Tony will ever be, tell me you'll fucking keep me, Natasha, I know who you are and I want it, I want it, tell me you'll keep me!"
"Til the ends of the earth," War says, indistinct but binding, against the soft curve of her flesh. It is many thing, that statement; it is not a lie.
--
Death comes for Bucky Barnes six times in three years. War fights for him every time, mostly for the thrill of it. Death is letting her win, but even that is a luxury--there is no opponent quite like him, entirely by design.
Death comes for Tony Stark many times, but never stays. It's cruel, really, which makes War wonder. Death is harsh, callous, unexpected, inevitable, unyielding and entirely without pity, but he is never cruel.
"Are you taunting him?" she asks, once, on one of her more human days. "Is that what this is about?"
"YOU ARE TOO INVESTED," Death says. "SOMEONE MUST RETAIN PERSPECTIVE."
"He is yours, in his way, isn't he?" War says, and Death, if he were capable of sighing, would sigh.
"THEY ALL ARE," he says. "THAT IS ENTIRELY MY POINT."
--
The apocalypse, as it was always going to, comes on a Saturday. Agent Coulson delivers the sword to Natasha's Manhattan apartment, as grim as she's ever seen him, which is saying a lot. She presses her fingertips against the signature line, smiles faintly when the dangerous word comes up. She would say it aloud, but she'll have time for that. Won't be long now.
"You know what this is, don't you," Natasha says, and Coulson's mouth twitches up at one corner.
"Of course I do, Agent Romanov," he says. "It was a pleasure working with you."
She goes to Thor first, more a courtesy than anything else. "It is today, in case you were wondering."
"It will upset the balance," Thor says, head tilted. "So, of course, I have known for some time."
Natasha hides a smile behind a roll of her shoulders. Thor has aged a thousand years in the two days since she last saw him; he has been in Asgard, then, avoiding the inevitable. "You will fight for this world?"
"I will bear witness," he says. "I will do what I can for as long as I can. I owe a debt."
"You are a fool," she tells him, and he smiles.
"I am a warrior, my lady," Thor says, "aren't we all?" and Natasha's laughter carries her to Pepper's doorstep, drifts away on the wind.
--
"It is the end of world," War says, a helmet in one hand, a sword in the other. "Have you chosen a side?"
"Yours," says Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Pepper Potts of Lower Tadfield and Malibu. "But you knew that already."
"Perhaps," War admits, and Pepper grins at her. It's a feral smile, learned from hellhounds and antichrists, from War herself; she has been chasing this day all her life, the way Red Zubinger once chased ambulances (or, as it happens, made them chase her). Sometimes, when things align just so, the universe creates a singularly perfect disaster. Pepper Potts is a black hole. Pepper Potts has always been ready for War.
They climb aboard the bike together, Pepper's tapered fingers at War's trim waist, their hair as red as the shuddering sky. They climb aboard the bike together, and ride for the horizon.