Chapter Text
Maria is slumped on a couch, arm out stretched atop the cushions, head resting on her shoulder when Natasha sits beside her. She feels the sofa sink, but doesn’t shift her gaze from the back of Vision’s cape, which bounced every so often as he turned his head to look at Thor and Steve respectively when they spoke. They were having a kind of anti-party—which is to say they all had to eat (minus Vision), so pizza was ordered, and then once they were all gathered in the common room, it made more sense to mope collectively. So recently, they had partied on the top floors of the Avengers Tower overlooking New York City—actual revelries. Now they were in upstate New York in a remodeled warehouse. Now victory didn’t quite mean the same thing.
Natasha pokes Maria beneath her ribs, which finally snaps her focus to the woman beside her.
“I asked how you are doing,” Natasha said.
“And I didn’t answer you?” Maria’s holding a beer bottle, now warm, in one hand. She raps her fingers against it.
Natasha shakes her head. “Guess I couldn’t hear you over the boys having a grand time.” Considering who was gathered, the room was actually quite quiet, but Maria hadn’t heard her ask, and so Natasha couldn’t have heard her respond regardless.
“It’s been a long week.” It didn’t feel like it had been a long anything. She had been sitting on the floor with the Avengers, watching them all fail to lift the hammer, laughing at Steve’s properness. She had been working at SHIELD HQ, assuming they were making real progress neutralizing threats to human life. That was before Tony built something that resulted in something (the fuck if she knew what was happening anymore) trying to save (read exterminate) humanity, before she had to crash three helocarriers over DC, into SHIELD HQ because they too were about to save (read kill) humanity. “It’s been a long year.”
“You saved us—a lot of us-es,” Nastha’s wearing a hoodie with sleeves long enough that she can clench the bunched fabric between her fingers and her palm. Maria is watching Natasha’s hands although (because) she knows Natasha’s eyes are fixed on her. It wasn’t her—she didn’t really save anyone. She hadn’t been the one to repair the helocarrier, been the one who programmed the targeting system that took down Project Insight. Okay, that had been her—but at that point, it had been her and Fury. Steve, Sam and Natasha did the more difficult work though, the real world saving.
“That’s the job. We save people.” Maria says this with no emotion, no inflection. But after a few seconds, she does peak through the corner of her eyes at Natasha’s face to gauge what she’s thinking (as if she could). Natasha isn’t wearing much make-up. Her green eyes blink periodically—less often than normal (as if Maria knew the normal rate for blinking).
“You’ll stay the night?” Natasha asks, giving Maria’s thigh a pat.
“Yeah. I’ll stay until things are settled.”
“You can live here with us, you know. We have a history of taking in strays.”
Maria crosses her arms across her chest. Natasha and she are friends, probably as close as possible when one of you is (was) deputy director of SHIELD and the other is (was) their top agent who is (was) frequently sent out undercover. But they respected one another, tried to see each other when they could. Which is why Maria couldn’t fathom why Natasha was now basically patting her on the head and offering her figurative cookies to hopefully lure her out of the figurative corner in which Natasha thought she was brooding, to get a smile to replace Maria’s blank stare.
“Speaking of…” Maria ventured, still with Natasha’s hand lightly squeezing her thigh, “how is Wanda doing?”
“Ah,” Natasha sighs, moving her eyes from Maria to the floor. There was a silence between them. Maria considered breaking it, bringing the conversation back to herself—because apparently, if nothing else, her emotions were fair game. Maria wondered if one of Natasha’s teammates asked how Maria was doing (which they wouldn’t), would she sigh and look away in a telling silence.
“Wanda is…it is difficult, Maria. I suppose if there’s anything, there’s the fact that I happen to know someone who also came here from Eastern Europe after deciding to use my skills to help the good guys—someone else who lost the chance to live a normal life.” Natasha shrugged after she finished speaking, raised her eyebrows and gave Maria a tilted grin. “We’ll survive though.”
Maria then feels a wave of dizziness. She imagines herself flinging the bottle across the room, flipping a table, kicking a wall or committing some other form of pointless aggression—a microscopic version of the hell she sees daily. Except if she raged, the Avengers would hold her down, talk her down, and no one would get hurt, would die in the cross fire. At most, they’d have to sweep up some glass, re-plaster a wall—much better (an almost insulting understatement) than bulldozer-ing the ruins of a city, doing whatever the hell you do in the face of death and destruction. Not healing. They were past that.
Maria had long (especially since the battle of New York though) imagined if she had watched her be crashed to the ground, her family get crushed (or substitute any such tragedy), she wouldn’t be able to go on. And it would in no way matter, Hell, after the moment (second, nanosecond or some such impossibly small time) Fury had informed her SHIELD was comprised, she wouldn’t have been sure if she could go on if she promptly hadn’t had to plot, to act to save millions of lives, including the one who was now watching her think through this frustrated agitation.
“It’s traumatic.” Natasha frowned, and she had moved her hand from Maria’s leg back to her own lap. She was gripping the lose fabric of her sleeve again.
Traumatic. That was the damn word Maria had been looking for. Sure, she had worked every day including weekends since the battle of DC, except, and only because of, a time when she had simply been too sick to move—a time which Maria distinctly remembered very much enjoying. She had been dealing (again understatement but there is no word adequate to capture the experience) with the government in the aftermath of the leak of SHIELD’s records, having to make some (more) shifty decisions, working at Stark Industries, helping Coulson, keeping an eye on the Avengers. But she had been disassociating through it all. And no one had noticed because it wasn’t like constantly working, constantly wearing a look of severity and a demeanor of indifference was anything new for her.
“Maria…”
Except maybe Natasha noticed. Natahsa had disappeared herself for a while after everything with SHIELD and thus, hadn’t seen Maria to try to take care of her (is that what this was?) sooner. Natasha who almost never opened up—although with them, not opening up was often opening up—who was as much of a shapeshifter as Maria was cement.
“We’ll survive,” Maria finally spoke again, or she assumed she did. Sometimes she wasn’t so sure. But Natasha nodded so she must have done something that stimulated a response.
“Give it some thought, Maria, staying here, I mean.”
“I said I’ll be around. I’m also going to be around Stark Industries though.”
At that, Natasha frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay then.”
They both take a second to breathe.
“I just want you to take care of yourself, Maria.”
And you’re an expert on taking care of yourself now? Or so Maria wanted to say.
“Noted,” she actually said.
More silence. In fact, the room itself had gotten more quiet it seemed. Vision had left, and Steve and Thor were now watching something whose volume Maria couldn’t hear.
“Did you eat, Maria?”
“Really, Natasha?”
Natasha didn’t flinch at Maria snapping. But her face wasn’t Natasha’s usual calculating spy look. Her eyes reflected the concern evident in most of the damn words she had spoken to Maria since sitting down. Which made Maria feel small. Natasha was in no way being condescending, but Maria recognized that Natasha was responding to something she was doing, something about her. And that disconcerted her. At that point, Maria could probably attack Natasha, and she’d just let her—the apex of pity coming from someone who never let anyone fuck with her.
Maria needed to say something. Her silence and the fact that she knew Natasha knew that her heart was racing were not helping. She needed to refocus on the present, where she was trying to convince Natasha not to worry while she was wanting to hurt something.
“I’m okay, Natasha. You can stop.”
“Alright, Maria. But I just wanted to check. I know how it is to go a long time without anyone asking.”
“It sucks?” That last line of Natasha’s should probably have been a rhetorical statement, left to hang wisely and painfully in a new silence between them. But no.
“Yeah.”
Maria stares off, no longer particularly aware of what Thor and Steve were doing, the positioning of her own body relative to anything in the room.
Natasha eventually speaks again, “How much longer are you planning on sitting here?”
Oh. Right. Maria was splayed out on a sofa in the living room of the compound belonging to a superhero team. A superhero team whose functioning she had a part in. Right.
“I should go to bed.” Maria said what she figured Natasha wanted to hear.
“We should all go to bed.” That Natasha said loudly, for the guy’s benefit.
“I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be tired,” Maria says as she tries to will herself to move.
“When we first got back, I had to tell people to stop talking at me. I had to keep repeating to them I needed to sleep, you know, now that we weren’t not in any immediate danger anymore. That wasn’t tiredness. That was…painful. So no, I don’t remember what tired feels like either.”
Now that they weren’t in any danger. She forgot (or never knew) that as well. She’s wasn’t going to go there with Natasha though.
“Did you bring your own cloths to sleep in, or do you need to borrow some?”
“I have cloths.”
“Good, I’m running out since I’ve been letting Wanda wear mine. I need to make time to take that girl shopping. Maybe tomorrow…”
Maria stands up, confused that the ground feels so firm beneath her, just confused really.
“Say good night to Maria,” Natasha says this to Thor and Steve.
“Sleep well,” Steve says back, turning toward them and smiling.
Maria goes to walk away, but then Natasha puts her hand on her shoulder, stopping her.
“Good night, Maria. It was good seeing you again.”
“Yeah. You too.”
After Maria exits the room, and starts down the hall, she looks back at Natasha—Natasha who would probably go then to check on Wanda, who now was an expert on caring too much, who once upon a time, Maria had given Clint the order to kill.