Chapter Text
The Quinjet fell into an idle as Clint shut it down.
Standing, the man glanced at her only long enough to see that she’d already gotten dressed before he continued into the back of the plane to open up the zipper of a garment bag lying on top of a crate containing old weaponry.
Natasha didn't look up or acknowledge him moving, pretending to be absorbed in playing the stupid tower-defence game she’d picked up on Peter Parker's suggestion.
The engine lulled to a stop, the only sound becoming Clint’s clothing moving as he carefully adorned himself in the fitted suit. They'd had to stop by the Avengers Tower to pick up the specially-tailored outfits that the garment bags contained, so the quality was assured even if they'd had to go out of their way to pick the clothes up. Which was probably why he was being careful with it, as Clint didn't have nearly as much patience with the few suits that had found themselves in his closet at the behest of SHIELD.
She was able to guess exactly what item of clothing he was slipping on simply by the sound of the man's movements, so she raised her eyes questioningly when he moved back up front before his shoes were even on- though when a small glass bottle with pink shimmery liquid was extended to her, her expression darkened along with her mood.
“You forgot.”
Clint knew she had intentionally left the bottle in her bag in the same way that Natasha knew that if she refused to take it from him, Clint would silently slip the glass bottle back into her bag without even trying to convince her otherwise.
There was no use for it, after all. Not this time. Not tonight.
Natasha took the object from his scarred fingers.
Clint stood at her shoulder in the space between the two pilots' chairs, watching as she leveled a look of disdain at the glass bottle before setting it on the top of the Quinjet's instrument panel.
She looked back down at her mobile game, tapping at a few green animated martians and using in-game 'coins' to level them up so they could fight tiny shambling animated zombies.
Leaving her to her usual routine of waiting as long as possible to apply the perfume, Clint returned to the back of the plane where he had been getting dressed.
The pink liquid shimmered in the glow of the planes' lights, mocking her.
It wasn’t a regular perfume, even if Tony Stark had done his damnedest to make it look that way- with an artsy label of a high-end brand carefully plastered on the bottle and shimmery glitter added to the perfume itself to make it seem like one of the normal light-smelling additives on the market that a classy omega would wear when they wanted to add a bit of ‘kick’ to their normal scent.
However, instead of an additive, the bottle was full of strong omega-pheromone perfume- Something usually only kept by older omegas that no longer produced as much scent or omegas with hormone disorders that kept them from producing natural scent.
Natasha was neither of those.
She was instead a third secret option that was the result of another in a long line of fucked-up gifts from the Red Room- She was a scent-burned omega.
Scent burning was the practice of pressing burning hot metal to an omega’s scent glands, cauterizing the skin into thick scar tissue that covered the glands and kept the omega from producing their normal full scent. It was a practice that had long been deemed inhumane and barbaric, with the last recorded instances of it being used falling sometime around when people began to overthrow the Kings and Lords who ruled them for the sake of democracy. Back then, the act of branding the flesh over an omega’s scent glands to hinder scent production hailed from a time when there was the superstition that omegas could control minds with their scents and unnaturally convince their alphas to become weaker and more submissive to them. (Or, if you read it in the light of how omegas were treated as little more than breeding stock, people felt natural shame at trying to abuse something that stank of fear-pain-helplessness, and that shame made it hard to conform to societal expectations of an ‘omega's place’.)
And though the practice of scent burning had almost entirely been done away with in history, the Red Room had made it a requirement for every single omega orphan that they ‘trained’. Not that they thought that the myth of omegas having power in their scent to cajole other people to do things outside their personality was true, but rather that it was more important to Hydra to produce a worthwhile weapon in the time after their crushing defeat at the hands of Captain America rather than use omegas in the ‘traditional’ way- Something that only became all the more clear when she’d graduated and they’d entirely removed her fallopian tubes.
Which left her with two problems.
One - Her scent glands were a mess of scars so thick and old that not even the knockoff super soldier serum that she’d gotten pumped into her upon ‘graduating’ could fully repair them, ensuring that the most scent she could produce was something stuttering and choked-off weaker than most betas.
And, two- Because of the tortuous, very much not FDA-approved bilateral salpingectomy that she got complimentary to graduating, her body no longer needed, or had a purpose for, full-scale breeding-heats. Though with the upside of never having to fully lose her mind during her cycle (even if it was still mildly uncomfortable to ignore without some sort of stimulation) came the downside that her body just didn’t produce as much scent as other omegas. Biologically, unlike the way Alpha scents were designed to keep control within their pack as well as seek out potential mates and Beta scents were designed to keep order as the steady middle between the unsteady hormones of the other designations, the base purpose of Omegaen scents were to entice mates (and, less importantly, to keep their packs happy). So, simply put- her body knew there was no need to take on the extra strain of protecting a neon sign reading ‘PUT A BABY IN ME’ if there were no longer any baby-making mechanisms left.
Because of those reasons, the barely-there scent of milk she’d had when she was a pup who didn’t truly understand what ‘Alpha’ meant past that it was a title belonging to the sharp-smelling men that beat her to the ground and called it ‘training’- not even old enough to understand that other people had different genitals other than what she saw from her and her ‘sisters’ in the Red Room - had only gotten weaker, and not even her late presentation as a full adult omega could make up what was missing.
Not that she cared about that, mind you.
She’d lived almost fifty years without a full scent, using her good looks and the way people naturally assumed that she was a Beta to do her best to complete the missions she’d been assigned (for the Red Room, then for her own profit when she’d burned the Red Room to the ground, and then eventually for SHIELD).
However after forming a team with the ‘Avengers’ (and the process of them earning her trust enough that she started to consider them part of her pack), she’d let a subvocal purr of calming slip from her throat one too many times when one of her team was injured- And the truth had come out, as the truth always did.
The other Avengers had been horrified to find out the team member they’d been treating like a particularly sturdy beta was, in fact, an omega.
Not that it changed much, as she’d immediately shut down their protests about her going out onto the field by beating their asses one by one in hand-to-hand combat... but it had changed enough.
And with the appearance of James ‘Bucky’ Barnes- the man that she’d called ‘Alpha’ on instinct when she’d been complaining about him not remembering her and the man who had shown up in her room of the Avengers tower two months after SHIELD's fall, startling the piss out of Clint who had found him standing over her sleeping form like a sentry when he’d come to pry her out of bed after a long day of dealing with the United States Government- came the truth about the sordid past she’d had as ‘Natalia Alianova Romanova, the Black Widow’ before she’d become ‘Natasha Romanoff, Shield Agent’.
Tony Stark and Bruce Banner had been horrified (and scientifically fascinated) when it was finally revealed why exactly their pack’s omega was so often mistaken for a Beta by everyone she came across. And after more than a few long heated arguments with the different members of her Pack, she had finally reluctantly agreed for Stark and Banner to enlist the help of Helen Cho as well as many other prominent scientists the two doctors knew to undergo an experimental treatment that would remove as much of the scarred glands as possible before facilitating new growth using the closest thing to Vision’s ‘Cradle’ as Helen Cho would allow to be built anymore.
The news of Natasha being an omega, rather than a beta like the media had always assumed, almost broke the internet- as even in the age of superheroes like Captain America and Superman and the X-Men, omegaen heroes were few and far in-between.
Though with the lack of anonymity that had come with her stepping forward into the public eye to explain to the US Government exactly how she and Tony (with JARVIS’s help) had done their best to sort out sensitive information from SHIELD's files but how the HYDRA data-dump had been necessary to keep the secret organization from rebuilding in the shadows, came the problem of her fame.
Natasha Romanoff was now a publicly-known omega agent who had worked for SHIELD 'since she was a pup', having been trained under HYDRA (which wasn’t a lie) before killing her trainers (also not a lie) and joining ‘SHIELD’ when Clint Barton hunted her down and gave her an option because she thought that they would protect her from HYDRA while not knowing they were the same thing (which, unfortunately, was also not a lie).
(And if she allowed for all the files on ‘Natasha Romanoff’ to be included in the data dump, it was both to prove that she hadn’t known about HYDRA or been knowingly involved in their actions since she’d been ‘recruited’ as a young woman... as well as making sure that no one would look any further into her past than that.
Not that they could, as all the files on who she’d been pre-Natasha were hard copies that Fury had squirreled away ages ago when he’d gotten them from the former director of SHIELD, aka Peggy Carter... But still.)
So with the world expecting her to smell like sunshine and rainbows and candy like most good-looking omegas were known for, she went under an extremely strong anesthetic to fix some of the damage to her scent glands.
Natasha woke up from the procedure to find her collarbones bore a different type of scarring and her muted scent of oranges had deepened with the addition of the smell of red wine and a spice that Vision had identified as star anise- combining into the heady spiced scent not unlike the mulled wine Laura Barton liked to start making almost a full day before Christmas until the whole farm smelled like tannins and spiced citrus. And though the team was supportive and Clint had buried his face into her shoulder in delight at how she smelled like home to him, Fury and Maria Hill had sat her down to discuss her image going forward. Because now that she was in the public eye and representing Omegas everywhere, it would have been best if she had a traditionally ‘omegaen’ scent (as well as allow people to overlook how dangerous she was).
And though the scent of mulled wine was very pleasant on its own, it went against every norm for omegaen scents that existed, as it’s slightly-acidic spiced notes were far more ‘Beta’ (or even ‘Alpha’) in character than the normal mouthwateringly-sweet or alluringly flowery scents that much of the world held in high esteem for omegas.
As well, there was the issue with her scent betraying her emotions far too clearly for her line of work, as since she’d grown up and lived for so long without her scent, she didn’t know how to manipulate it or hide her feelings from others.
(It had only taken her a single hour of being mortified by how her scent gave away her clear fondness for her pack members as well as subverted her ability to lie to anyone before she demanded Tony make her scent-blocking patches- But that hour was more than enough.)
But with clear scent-blocking patches specifically designed by Tony to mute her real scent down to where it had been before her scent glands had been re-grown, she had to make up for the missing scent somehow.
Thus... the perfume.
The shiny liquid in the glass bottle held the artificial scent of a sugar-packed donut with sweet vanilla icing. It was expertly-made, crafted lovingly in tandem by Vision, Tony, Bruce, and Tony’s new teenage intern Peter (who it seemed was a chemistry genius in the making)... but her respect for their effort in making it for her didn’t take away from the fact that some days she would rather burn off her scent glands again than apply it to her skin. On the best of days, Natasha could only stand smelling the perfume- much less wearing it - for about six hours before the urge to claw at her skin got to be too much.
And today was by no means one of those days, as she and Clint had been so busy decommissioning their old safehouses around the world in preparation for the green light to the amended Accords and the final death of SHIELD that they’d barely had time to breathe.
There was no energy in her to spare for the type of bullshit that came with being an unmated omega in public- Especially one that smelled like personified sugar.
She would honestly rather walk into a trash compactor and let it smush her into a messy mash of red-haired pulp.
Staring at the glass bottle she’d set aside, even as the timer on her level of the mobile game she’d been playing surely timed out, she genuinely considered staging her own gruesome death (as it wasn’t like she hadn’t done it before).
“Nat.” Clint’s voice drew her from her thoughts where she was frowning as she half-heartedly tapped at the stupid game she’d been allowing to work as a medium for her to space-out, the alpha’s scent of nutmeg and cloves curling around her in something like tired-exasperation, though it had a hint of concern in it’s undertone. He had his bowtie and shoes on by now, straightening the lines of his suit jacket as he stood in the hull of the plane. “You ready?”
That was the other thing about having had her scent glands repaired- as even if it was muted, her scent was still stronger than before, which meant that Clint could read her like a book. The alpha had known her for fifteen years before she’d had the procedure, which was almost ten years longer than any of the other avengers, making him a pro at being able to read her even when her scent was muted. (Plus, he’d been her Alpha for almost twelve years, which didn’t help her.)
...no gruesome death for her today, then.
“Come'on- We're already late.” The man padded over to lean against the arm of the other pilot's chair.
She could always slit his throat.
Clint’s face shifted into something flat and unamused not a second after she had that thought, as he had gained the uncanny ability to smell the scent of bloodlust off of her a mile away (probably due to how wild she had been when he’d first been partnered with her right out of being a mercenary-for-hire). “Natasha.”
She heaved a deep, dramatic sigh specifically curated to tug on Clint Barton’s guilt complex surrounding her and reached out to swipe the glass bottle off the dash of the Quinjet as she stood. Tossing her phone at the man, she sprayed the perfume into the empty air and moved her wrists through the mist in the air to create a light dusting that she then rubbed along the underside of her jaw to fully create the effect that the sugar-sweet scent was hers.
A light dusting of sweet- soft- friendly- come fuck me- I’m so pure and innocent and I need a knot~
It was the type of thing you’d normally scent from an omega with a big smile and flirtatious eyes at parties like the one they were headed to where everyone was dressed to impress. Though she didn't doubt that by the end of the night when it stated to wear off and someone got close enough to smell the real her, she’d be a burning mess of bitter acidic wine able to scorch the tongue with the warning that she could (and would ) stab someone in the fucking face if they fucked with her.
Re-capping the bottle, she moved to stuff it into the large black duffle bag that contained everything she had picked up from her numerous safehouses over the years.
With a thankful rumble of warmth, Clint hit the button to lower the Quinjet’s ramp and picked up his packed duffle bag before heading out into the night air of the Summerset Private Airfield.
Natasha padded after the man a moment later, hitting a button to raise the ramp and lock down the Quinjet before stepping off. Following Clint to where a black car was waiting with the trunk open and the driver already ready, she stored her bag away before removing the thick knitted shawl she’d been keeping herself warm in- as it didn’t fit with the rest of her outfit for the night.
“Got everything?” Her partner sent her a head-to-toe glance even as she nodded, surely identifying the blades she had hidden strategically out of sight under the floor-length black gown she was wearing. He shut the trunk purposefully and then moved to his door as she moved to hers, sliding in at the same time.
Thankfully, the front of the car was paneled off for privacy, so she didn’t yet have to act the part of the scent plastered onto her skin, but she still reached up to adjust the black fabric collar that the fabric of the backless dress rose into.
Clint let out a small sigh and turned more her way as he tugged up the sleeve of his suit as far as possible so he could rub his wrist’s scent glands along the fabric of the dress covering the collarbone closest to him. “...I knew we shouldn’t have gone to Brazil.”
“We promised we’d decommission all of them.” Her voice was a murmur, feeling significantly more settled now that she smelled like something familiar, even if that was her Alpha rather than herself. But they both knew that her words weren’t a disagreement either, as they were both exhausted (both of travelling and of each other, as they’d spent far too much time attached at the hip without needing at least a little bit of space from one another.)
The man nodded before he fished out her phone from her pocket and flipped it through his fingers to hold it out to her.
With a hum of thanks for remembering- even if she would surely give it back to him before they got into the gala, as she didn’t have a good way to keep it on her- she sank back into her seat and rebooted her stupid game.