FIC: Of Spectrums and Spoons [The Avengers]
Title: Of Spectrums and Spoons
Author:
atraphoenix
Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Thor, Nick Fury and Maria Hill
Rating: G
Summary: Natasha had been taught to pretend – to make eye contact and to act and respond just like she was supposed to act and respond - from an early age.
Author's Note: Written for this prompt on
avengerkink. Special thanks go to sasha_lilyrat for her encouragement, her proof reading skills and her general awesomeness. For more information on the spoon theory, visit this wonderful website.
It was Bruce who noticed first, of course, but Tony was the next one to put the pieces together. That was partly because he was Tony Stark and he liked to keep a close eye on what was going on under his roof and partly because, as a child, it had been suggested that he was somewhere on the spectrum himself. He’d done his research at the time and, as an adult, he’d made sizable donations to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and been an outspoken critic of the ridiculous vaccination controversy. He’d once got into a heated argument – which he liked to think that he’d won, although Pepper had pointed out that it was impossible to have a logical debate with someone who was so hard headed and ignorant – with one of the board members from Autism Speaks at a party in Los Angeles. He was definitely not on Jenny McCarthy’s Christmas card list.
“I don’t care that Natasha’s autistic,” he griped, picking up a screwdriver to toss idly from hand to hand as he leaned against the laboratory bench. “I just want to know why she didn’t tell us.”
Bruce looked up from his microscope, removing his glasses with the long suffering sigh of someone who had realised that Tony Stark was up to something that would stop anyone else from getting any work done that day.
“Maybe because it’s nothing to do with us?”
“We’re supposed to be a team.”
“We are a team.” (If someone had told the Bruce of a year ago – the Bruce that had declared the Avengers Initiative to be a time bomb rather than a team – that he’d come to believe that wholeheartedly, he’d have laughed aloud.) “That doesn’t mean we have to tell each other everything.”
“We need to show her that we don’t think her autism makes her a liability.”
“As simple as that?”
Tony jabbed at him with the screwdriver. Bruce swatted it away with a roll of his eyes.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Tony shrugged.
“The plan’s still a work in progress.”
“Maybe you should talk to Clint. He’s known Natasha the longest.”
“Yeah, we should start there.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Come on, jolly green. I’m calling a team meeting.”
***
It started with the perfume.
Five months after the battle against Loki and his Chitauri, and nearly two months after Jane Foster had completed the calculations required to open a permanent bridge between the Earth and Asgard, the Avengers had been rushed to Brazil for an urgent mission. They hadn’t had time to pack. They’d barely had a chance to prepare. They had been waiting for Fury’s helicopter to arrive when Bruce had noticed that this was having a negative effect on one member of the team in particular.
Natasha rarely relaxed. Given her profession, that was more than understandable. A relaxed assassin wouldn’t survive for long. This was different. She was anxious as well as typically tense. Bruce knew the difference. He was, after all, a bit of an expert on stress. He didn’t get a chance to ask what was wrong or how he could help, though. Before he could speak, Clint appeared, a travel sized bottle of perfume in his hand.
“I thought you might need this.”
He held out the bottle. In her eagerness to take it, Natasha all but snatched it out of his hand to dab a little on her throat and wrists. It wasn’t until much later that Bruce worked out that the perfume was an important part of her routine before missions. And that the positive and familiar scent kept her anchored in the potentially chaotic world of the battlefield.
***
He started to notice other things after that. It had been clear for a long time that Natasha didn’t speak unless she had something to say (and, sometimes, not even then). At first, Bruce had attributed her stoic silences to what she was rather than who she was. After all, assassins weren’t really known for being loquacious and she’d worked alone or with only Clint for company for as long as she’d been with SHIELD. She wasn’t used to being part of a group. She wasn’t used to having that many people to talk to. As the Avengers started to spend more time together both on and off duty, however, it became harder for Natasha to conceal the way that she occasionally went nonverbal. Or the way that she occasionally said a bit too much, even in inappropriate situations. (Nothing compared to Thor’s pronouncements or Tony’s antics, of course, but enough to attract Bruce’s attention now that he was keeping an eye out.) Or the way that she could occasionally be found with her knees hugged to her chest, rocking gently backwards and forwards. Or her rigid resistance to certain types of change.
She refused to be interrupted during her training routines and she was the last one of the group to move into the newly renovated Stark Tower. (Tony had done his best to make her rooms comfortable for her – “So, how many guns do you think you need to make a place homey?” – but she’d responded to his efforts with a cool indifference.) Maybe the change in accommodation had been one change too many. Maybe she had been unwilling to share a kitchen with a god who destroyed toasters on a weekly basis and ate an impossible amount of pop tarts. Bruce didn’t know and he certainly didn’t mind. The Black Widow was a consummate professional. None of the things that he’d picked up on inhibited her ability to do her job and do it well.
He wouldn’t have noticed anything if the Avengers hadn’t started to spend a lot of time together and that wouldn’t have happened if Natasha hadn’t started to trust her new team mates. They all needed time off, but Bruce got the impression that having so many people to spend her time off with was new to her. It had just been her and Clint for a long time. (Which was hardly surprising, given what he knew of her life before SHIELD. He didn’t know much about her past, but what he did known often felt like far too much.) She wasn’t sure how to act around her new friends, so she tried to act how she thought the world expected her to act.
It wasn’t going to be easy to prove that they were not only aware of her autism but accepting of it. And if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be worthy of her trust.
***
It was with great trepidation that Clint made his way to the meeting that Tony had called, but, in the end, he didn’t have to make use of any of the threats that he’d had lined up in his head. The team had the utmost respect for Natasha. (They’d respected her from the moment that they’d met her – or, in Tony’s case, been introduced to Natasha instead of Natalie – even if they hadn’t necessarily liked her very much at first.) That wasn’t going to change just because there was a new label involved.
“So, that’s it?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “You don’t care?”
“Were we supposed to?” Bruce asked.
“I thought it would be more of an issue. So did Natasha.”
“Hey, why’s everyone looking at me?” Tony asked, “I’m not totally insensitive.”
(“That’s news to me,” Steve muttered, not quite under his breath.)
“Look, I don’t want to piss her off either,” Tony continued, not missing a beat, “And not just because I’m pretty sure she could kill me with her pinkie. We might be the world’s most dysfunctional family, but we’re still a family. It doesn’t matter where she is on the spectrum …”
“You know,” said Natasha from the doorway, “I’m pretty sure this is a conversation that I should have been included in.”
Her expression was so cold that even the normally unflappable Tony Stark hesitated when she stepped inside.
“Hey, Natasha. We were just …”
“I know what you were just discussing.”
“Tasha, it isn’t like that,” said Clint quickly, “They were just trying to work out how to let you know that they know.”
“Well, now I do.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Tony continued, “We all know how good you are at what you do. The way you read people …”
“Which isn’t my ‘special skill’,” she interrupted, fixing Tony with a hard stare, “If that’s what you’re about to say. It’s my job. It’s something I’ve learned to do. And I’m good at it.”
To his credit, Tony looked suitably contrite.
“Point taken.”
“Look, Natasha,” said Bruce, speaking apologetically rather than defensively. “We weren’t having this meeting to try and decide what’s best for you. We just want to make sure you know that it isn’t going to be an issue.”
It was harder for her to stay angry at Bruce Banner than it was for her to stay angry at, for example, Tony Stark. He was so earnestly honest. He always tried to do the right thing. Not just because he wanted to atone for the damage that the Hulk caused, but because the alternative simply didn’t occur to him.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said, eventually. “We’ll see if anything changes when we’re out in the field.
“It won’t.”
It was a promise. She wanted to believe him, but she’d been a professional liar for so long that she was used to thinking the worst of people.
“Like I said, we’ll see.”
The Black Widow left the meeting as quickly and as suddenly as she’d joined it.
***
“Well, that could have gone better,” said Tony, breaking the awkward silence that followed her departure.
“I can understand why Natasha didn’t say anything,” said Steve, eyeing Clint thoughtfully. He’d been surprisingly quick to grasp the concepts that Tony had wanted to discuss. It had turned out that Steve had passed an anti vaccination picket during one of his many trips exploring and reacquainting himself with New York. Given how sickly he’d been as a child, it wasn’t a surprise that he was a supporter of vaccination. Bruce also suspected that the ‘cure’ rhetoric that was endemic to the movement had reminded Captain America of some of the attitudes he’d seen in Germany. “But why didn’t you tell us? We’re a team.”
“It’s not my business, it’s hers. Besides, I didn’t know how you’d react. I mean, I was pretty ignorant until I took an arrow in the knee.”
“Wait, you play Skyrim?” Tony interjected, to blank looks from the rest of the group.
It was Bruce that tried to repair the conversation that Tony had derailed.
“Natasha shot you?”
“No, a rogue agent did. Tasha saved my life. There’s no one I’d rather have watching my back. I don’t give a damn what her medical records say.”
“Neither do we,” said Steve, firmly.
“I am glad we shall all rally to defend the Lady Romanoff’s honour,” said Thor, speaking for the first time in a low rumble. “Even though she has no need of our protection, that is what allies should do. I have only one question.”
“Which is?” asked Tony, speaking in the tone of someone who knew exactly what was coming next.
“What is this spectrum of which you speak?”
***
Bruce slipped away while Tony and Clint were using an old fashioned game of rock, paper, scissors – “Come on, Barton! That wasn’t fair. Best out of three?” – to decide who had to try and explain autism (and, by extension, neurodiversity and ableism) to a well meaning but thoroughly confused demigod. He came from a warrior culture and Bruce suspected that he’d have trouble understanding why anything less than a limb lost in battle would even be considered a disability. He’d manage it, though. Despite his ongoing battle with the toasters of Stark Tower, Thor was far from unintelligent and he had a good heart underneath all that muscle.
He found Natasha in the gym, sitting on one of the benches with her knees pulled to her chest, rocking gently back and forth.
“What happened?” she asked. She didn’t turn her head to look at Bruce when he sat down next to her. “I know Clint won’t have talked. Did Stark hack my medical records?”
“Actually, we worked it out.”
“Worked it out?” she repeated, fists clenching in anger.
He nodded.
“You don’t have to be angry because you didn’t … what? Act ‘normal’ enough to fool us?”
Her stony silence was an answer in itself.
“Look at the people you’re working with, Natasha. There’s Tony Stark, Captain America, one of the world’s best professional assassins and the god of thunder.”
“And you.”
“And me.” Bruce gave her a wry smile. “And together we protect the world from aliens and supervillains. What do any of us know about normal any more?”
***
From an early age, Natasha had been taught to pretend – to make eye contact and to act and respond just like she was supposed to act and respond – but, in the end, that wasn’t what she’d learned. She’d learned to play a thousand different roles. She’d learned to trick people into seeing exactly what they wanted to see and to use their foolishness and vulnerability to uncover exactly what her employers wanted to know.
As she got older, it became even easier. Not just because she’d had more time to learn how to read people but because she was beautiful, apparently. When her targets saw her beauty, they didn’t see anything else until it was far too late for them. The real Natasha – the girl who had once been Natalia Romanova and who had sat in silence while the other orphans in the Red Room wept and screamed, lining up her toys in the same way that she now lined up her weapons – and her habits remained largely unchanged. Everything that people thought they knew about her was a mask. An act. Until meeting Clint and joining SHIELD, she had never stayed in one place long enough for anyone to catch a glimpse of who she really was.
She’d saved Clint’s life on a bloody battlefield in Volgograd and, three months later, he’d disobeyed a direct order from his superiors in order to pay off his debt to her. He’d even encouraged them to offer her employment instead of a prison cell. It wasn’t an equal trade. She might have saved his life, but he’d given Natasha a life that she’d never had in the first place. She could fight by his side for a thousand years and never pay off that sort of debt.
That wouldn’t stop her from trying.
Somewhere along the difficult road from their first meeting to the Avengers Initiative, mutual respect had developed into a real friendship. SHIELD were the ones who had diagnosed something that she hadn’t realised needed a diagnosis, but that wasn’t the moment when everything had changed. It was only a label. Everything had changed when she’d let Clint in on the secrets of the routine that she always followed before a mission. (She’d followed it for as long as she could remember. Daily routines weren’t really an option for someone with her career, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t fond of routines in general.) Neither of them had commented on the intimacy of the moment – they never would – but they knew what it meant. It meant that she trusted him. It meant that she’d really let him in.
Despite her relative disinterest, Natasha had done her own research into autism after receiving her diagnosis. For every website that had struck a chord with her and every story that had been almost familiar, Natasha had found a stereotype or assumption that made her grit her teeth. On the whole, however, it didn’t bother her. The people who mattered weren’t that stupid and the people who were that stupid were usually marks on a mission. She never let them see anyone other than her assigned persona and she rarely saw them again when her business was concluded.
She could only think of one moment when ableist ignorance had made her snap. It was a relatively recent memory and, consequently, still raw. She’d been on edge since Clint’s disappearance and one of the few members of SHIELD to have read the contents of her file expressed surprise when it came to her concern for him. She’d reacted so quickly that Coulson and Fury hadn’t had a chance to reprimand him before she’d grabbed him by the throat.
(“Oh, I have emotions. Can you guess what this one is? This one is anger. My partner is missing. I’m autistic, not a robot. Of course I’m worried.”)
She had emotions and she understood emotions, even if she didn’t always enjoy them. The fear of losing Clint, the best friend that she’d never expected to have, had been more palpable and terrifying than any other fear that she’d ever felt.
***
Glancing over at Bruce, she saw that he was looking up at the ceiling instead of at her, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. The Avengers were the first people since Clint that she’d found herself caring about. She’d started to trust them, so she’d put up a mask to hide anything that might make them think less of her. That might lead to her losing them.
After a long pause, she finally replied.
“You’ve got a point,” she admitted.
Bruce turned his head, giving her a glimpse of his familiar self deprecating smile.
“It has been known to happen.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He gave her a softer, warmer sort of smile. “It’ll be ok, you know.”
“I know.”
One day, she’d probably believe that.
***
The Security Council were on the line again.
Nick Fury stepped away from the central console of the air ship and into a small side chamber that had been set up specifically for these calls. He hated these calls. Didn’t he have enough work to be getting on with?
Although, in theory, SHIELD worked for the council, Fury made sure that he kept a close eye on what the individual members were up to. Just in case. He knew, for example, that one of the esteemed members was having an affair with another. And he knew that they’d been reading the medical files of the individual Avengers very recently. Which was what this waste of time was going to be about.
“Director Fury. We’d like to know why we weren’t informed about …” He paused. It was the pause of someone who knew that he was about to say something offensive but was too ignorant to stop himself. “Agent Romanoff’s condition earlier.”
“That would be because it’s a non issue,” said Fury, implacably. The Avengers had put the pieces together a few days ago and, as Steve had so emphatically stated when Fury had asked if the new information was going to cause any trouble within the team, knowing the truth didn’t change ‘a damn thing’. “Romanoff is one of the finest agents we’ve got.”
(Besides, given the assorted dysfunctions of the rest of the team, Agent Romanoff was the least of his worries.)
“Nevertheless, the council thinks it would be a good idea to remove her from duty until we can be certain that she will not be a liability in the field.”
“She’s never been a liability before,” he pointed out, darkly. “And this is the same council that thought it would be a good idea to fire a nuclear weapon at a civilian population?”
He didn’t smile, but he felt a certain degree of satisfaction when they struggled to reply.
“Director Fury …”
“If you try and take her off the team,” he interrupted, “You’re going to have five extremely pissed off superheroes out for your blood. And you won’t like any of them when they’re angry, believe me.”
“This is your decision, Director. You will be held accountable for what happens next.”
“Nothing is going to happen. The Avengers are going to carry on doing what they do and you’re going to regret the day you tried to bring your bigotry into my organisation.”
“Your organisation?”
“Yes, my organisation. SHIELD is my organisation. The Avengers Initiative is my project. I put the team together and I’m proud of every single one of them.”
They blustered for a little longer, but Fury hadn’t given them much room to manoeuvre and they seemed eager for him to bring the discussion to an abrupt close. When he turned away from the wall of screens, he found Agent Hill waiting for him in the doorway to accompany him on the journey back to the deck.
“Proud of them, sir?”
“Hill, if you tell Stark I said that, I’ll make sure you’re on desk duty for the rest of your career.”
“Understood, sir.”
***
As soon as he’d understood the basics, a well meaning Thor had asked Clint if there was anything that he could do to make Natasha’s life easier. Clint’s response had been a vague shrug – “Why don’t you ask Tasha? She knows herself best.” – but, as usual, the demigod had not been deterred. Which was why he was currently sitting at the dining room with Clint, Natasha and the contents of the cutlery drawer.
The spoons were lined up in a row in front of him.
“And how many spoons will it cost me to prepare for a battle?”
“We’ll make it three,” said Natasha, removing them from the line.
“More if he wants to style his hair first,” called Tony from the doorway, waving at the trio as he passed on the way to the laboratory.
“Four,” amended Clint, taking away another spoon. “Which means you’ve only got six left for after the battle.”
“Five if you count the one you always keep in reserve.”
Thor furrowed his brow, regarding the spoons intently before looking back up at Natasha.
“Lady Romanoff, your comrades in arms will always be there to help you find an extra spoon when you have need of it.”
“I know,” she murmured.
As Clint squeezed her hand under the table and Thor gazed at her with guileless acceptance, Natasha realised that she was starting to believe that.
Author:
atraphoenixFandom: The Avengers
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Thor, Nick Fury and Maria Hill
Rating: G
Summary: Natasha had been taught to pretend – to make eye contact and to act and respond just like she was supposed to act and respond - from an early age.
Author's Note: Written for this prompt on
avengerkink. Special thanks go to sasha_lilyrat for her encouragement, her proof reading skills and her general awesomeness. For more information on the spoon theory, visit this wonderful website.It was Bruce who noticed first, of course, but Tony was the next one to put the pieces together. That was partly because he was Tony Stark and he liked to keep a close eye on what was going on under his roof and partly because, as a child, it had been suggested that he was somewhere on the spectrum himself. He’d done his research at the time and, as an adult, he’d made sizable donations to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and been an outspoken critic of the ridiculous vaccination controversy. He’d once got into a heated argument – which he liked to think that he’d won, although Pepper had pointed out that it was impossible to have a logical debate with someone who was so hard headed and ignorant – with one of the board members from Autism Speaks at a party in Los Angeles. He was definitely not on Jenny McCarthy’s Christmas card list.
“I don’t care that Natasha’s autistic,” he griped, picking up a screwdriver to toss idly from hand to hand as he leaned against the laboratory bench. “I just want to know why she didn’t tell us.”
Bruce looked up from his microscope, removing his glasses with the long suffering sigh of someone who had realised that Tony Stark was up to something that would stop anyone else from getting any work done that day.
“Maybe because it’s nothing to do with us?”
“We’re supposed to be a team.”
“We are a team.” (If someone had told the Bruce of a year ago – the Bruce that had declared the Avengers Initiative to be a time bomb rather than a team – that he’d come to believe that wholeheartedly, he’d have laughed aloud.) “That doesn’t mean we have to tell each other everything.”
“We need to show her that we don’t think her autism makes her a liability.”
“As simple as that?”
Tony jabbed at him with the screwdriver. Bruce swatted it away with a roll of his eyes.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Tony shrugged.
“The plan’s still a work in progress.”
“Maybe you should talk to Clint. He’s known Natasha the longest.”
“Yeah, we should start there.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Come on, jolly green. I’m calling a team meeting.”
***
It started with the perfume.
Five months after the battle against Loki and his Chitauri, and nearly two months after Jane Foster had completed the calculations required to open a permanent bridge between the Earth and Asgard, the Avengers had been rushed to Brazil for an urgent mission. They hadn’t had time to pack. They’d barely had a chance to prepare. They had been waiting for Fury’s helicopter to arrive when Bruce had noticed that this was having a negative effect on one member of the team in particular.
Natasha rarely relaxed. Given her profession, that was more than understandable. A relaxed assassin wouldn’t survive for long. This was different. She was anxious as well as typically tense. Bruce knew the difference. He was, after all, a bit of an expert on stress. He didn’t get a chance to ask what was wrong or how he could help, though. Before he could speak, Clint appeared, a travel sized bottle of perfume in his hand.
“I thought you might need this.”
He held out the bottle. In her eagerness to take it, Natasha all but snatched it out of his hand to dab a little on her throat and wrists. It wasn’t until much later that Bruce worked out that the perfume was an important part of her routine before missions. And that the positive and familiar scent kept her anchored in the potentially chaotic world of the battlefield.
***
He started to notice other things after that. It had been clear for a long time that Natasha didn’t speak unless she had something to say (and, sometimes, not even then). At first, Bruce had attributed her stoic silences to what she was rather than who she was. After all, assassins weren’t really known for being loquacious and she’d worked alone or with only Clint for company for as long as she’d been with SHIELD. She wasn’t used to being part of a group. She wasn’t used to having that many people to talk to. As the Avengers started to spend more time together both on and off duty, however, it became harder for Natasha to conceal the way that she occasionally went nonverbal. Or the way that she occasionally said a bit too much, even in inappropriate situations. (Nothing compared to Thor’s pronouncements or Tony’s antics, of course, but enough to attract Bruce’s attention now that he was keeping an eye out.) Or the way that she could occasionally be found with her knees hugged to her chest, rocking gently backwards and forwards. Or her rigid resistance to certain types of change.
She refused to be interrupted during her training routines and she was the last one of the group to move into the newly renovated Stark Tower. (Tony had done his best to make her rooms comfortable for her – “So, how many guns do you think you need to make a place homey?” – but she’d responded to his efforts with a cool indifference.) Maybe the change in accommodation had been one change too many. Maybe she had been unwilling to share a kitchen with a god who destroyed toasters on a weekly basis and ate an impossible amount of pop tarts. Bruce didn’t know and he certainly didn’t mind. The Black Widow was a consummate professional. None of the things that he’d picked up on inhibited her ability to do her job and do it well.
He wouldn’t have noticed anything if the Avengers hadn’t started to spend a lot of time together and that wouldn’t have happened if Natasha hadn’t started to trust her new team mates. They all needed time off, but Bruce got the impression that having so many people to spend her time off with was new to her. It had just been her and Clint for a long time. (Which was hardly surprising, given what he knew of her life before SHIELD. He didn’t know much about her past, but what he did known often felt like far too much.) She wasn’t sure how to act around her new friends, so she tried to act how she thought the world expected her to act.
It wasn’t going to be easy to prove that they were not only aware of her autism but accepting of it. And if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be worthy of her trust.
***
It was with great trepidation that Clint made his way to the meeting that Tony had called, but, in the end, he didn’t have to make use of any of the threats that he’d had lined up in his head. The team had the utmost respect for Natasha. (They’d respected her from the moment that they’d met her – or, in Tony’s case, been introduced to Natasha instead of Natalie – even if they hadn’t necessarily liked her very much at first.) That wasn’t going to change just because there was a new label involved.
“So, that’s it?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “You don’t care?”
“Were we supposed to?” Bruce asked.
“I thought it would be more of an issue. So did Natasha.”
“Hey, why’s everyone looking at me?” Tony asked, “I’m not totally insensitive.”
(“That’s news to me,” Steve muttered, not quite under his breath.)
“Look, I don’t want to piss her off either,” Tony continued, not missing a beat, “And not just because I’m pretty sure she could kill me with her pinkie. We might be the world’s most dysfunctional family, but we’re still a family. It doesn’t matter where she is on the spectrum …”
“You know,” said Natasha from the doorway, “I’m pretty sure this is a conversation that I should have been included in.”
Her expression was so cold that even the normally unflappable Tony Stark hesitated when she stepped inside.
“Hey, Natasha. We were just …”
“I know what you were just discussing.”
“Tasha, it isn’t like that,” said Clint quickly, “They were just trying to work out how to let you know that they know.”
“Well, now I do.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Tony continued, “We all know how good you are at what you do. The way you read people …”
“Which isn’t my ‘special skill’,” she interrupted, fixing Tony with a hard stare, “If that’s what you’re about to say. It’s my job. It’s something I’ve learned to do. And I’m good at it.”
To his credit, Tony looked suitably contrite.
“Point taken.”
“Look, Natasha,” said Bruce, speaking apologetically rather than defensively. “We weren’t having this meeting to try and decide what’s best for you. We just want to make sure you know that it isn’t going to be an issue.”
It was harder for her to stay angry at Bruce Banner than it was for her to stay angry at, for example, Tony Stark. He was so earnestly honest. He always tried to do the right thing. Not just because he wanted to atone for the damage that the Hulk caused, but because the alternative simply didn’t occur to him.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said, eventually. “We’ll see if anything changes when we’re out in the field.
“It won’t.”
It was a promise. She wanted to believe him, but she’d been a professional liar for so long that she was used to thinking the worst of people.
“Like I said, we’ll see.”
The Black Widow left the meeting as quickly and as suddenly as she’d joined it.
***
“Well, that could have gone better,” said Tony, breaking the awkward silence that followed her departure.
“I can understand why Natasha didn’t say anything,” said Steve, eyeing Clint thoughtfully. He’d been surprisingly quick to grasp the concepts that Tony had wanted to discuss. It had turned out that Steve had passed an anti vaccination picket during one of his many trips exploring and reacquainting himself with New York. Given how sickly he’d been as a child, it wasn’t a surprise that he was a supporter of vaccination. Bruce also suspected that the ‘cure’ rhetoric that was endemic to the movement had reminded Captain America of some of the attitudes he’d seen in Germany. “But why didn’t you tell us? We’re a team.”
“It’s not my business, it’s hers. Besides, I didn’t know how you’d react. I mean, I was pretty ignorant until I took an arrow in the knee.”
“Wait, you play Skyrim?” Tony interjected, to blank looks from the rest of the group.
It was Bruce that tried to repair the conversation that Tony had derailed.
“Natasha shot you?”
“No, a rogue agent did. Tasha saved my life. There’s no one I’d rather have watching my back. I don’t give a damn what her medical records say.”
“Neither do we,” said Steve, firmly.
“I am glad we shall all rally to defend the Lady Romanoff’s honour,” said Thor, speaking for the first time in a low rumble. “Even though she has no need of our protection, that is what allies should do. I have only one question.”
“Which is?” asked Tony, speaking in the tone of someone who knew exactly what was coming next.
“What is this spectrum of which you speak?”
***
Bruce slipped away while Tony and Clint were using an old fashioned game of rock, paper, scissors – “Come on, Barton! That wasn’t fair. Best out of three?” – to decide who had to try and explain autism (and, by extension, neurodiversity and ableism) to a well meaning but thoroughly confused demigod. He came from a warrior culture and Bruce suspected that he’d have trouble understanding why anything less than a limb lost in battle would even be considered a disability. He’d manage it, though. Despite his ongoing battle with the toasters of Stark Tower, Thor was far from unintelligent and he had a good heart underneath all that muscle.
He found Natasha in the gym, sitting on one of the benches with her knees pulled to her chest, rocking gently back and forth.
“What happened?” she asked. She didn’t turn her head to look at Bruce when he sat down next to her. “I know Clint won’t have talked. Did Stark hack my medical records?”
“Actually, we worked it out.”
“Worked it out?” she repeated, fists clenching in anger.
He nodded.
“You don’t have to be angry because you didn’t … what? Act ‘normal’ enough to fool us?”
Her stony silence was an answer in itself.
“Look at the people you’re working with, Natasha. There’s Tony Stark, Captain America, one of the world’s best professional assassins and the god of thunder.”
“And you.”
“And me.” Bruce gave her a wry smile. “And together we protect the world from aliens and supervillains. What do any of us know about normal any more?”
***
From an early age, Natasha had been taught to pretend – to make eye contact and to act and respond just like she was supposed to act and respond – but, in the end, that wasn’t what she’d learned. She’d learned to play a thousand different roles. She’d learned to trick people into seeing exactly what they wanted to see and to use their foolishness and vulnerability to uncover exactly what her employers wanted to know.
As she got older, it became even easier. Not just because she’d had more time to learn how to read people but because she was beautiful, apparently. When her targets saw her beauty, they didn’t see anything else until it was far too late for them. The real Natasha – the girl who had once been Natalia Romanova and who had sat in silence while the other orphans in the Red Room wept and screamed, lining up her toys in the same way that she now lined up her weapons – and her habits remained largely unchanged. Everything that people thought they knew about her was a mask. An act. Until meeting Clint and joining SHIELD, she had never stayed in one place long enough for anyone to catch a glimpse of who she really was.
She’d saved Clint’s life on a bloody battlefield in Volgograd and, three months later, he’d disobeyed a direct order from his superiors in order to pay off his debt to her. He’d even encouraged them to offer her employment instead of a prison cell. It wasn’t an equal trade. She might have saved his life, but he’d given Natasha a life that she’d never had in the first place. She could fight by his side for a thousand years and never pay off that sort of debt.
That wouldn’t stop her from trying.
Somewhere along the difficult road from their first meeting to the Avengers Initiative, mutual respect had developed into a real friendship. SHIELD were the ones who had diagnosed something that she hadn’t realised needed a diagnosis, but that wasn’t the moment when everything had changed. It was only a label. Everything had changed when she’d let Clint in on the secrets of the routine that she always followed before a mission. (She’d followed it for as long as she could remember. Daily routines weren’t really an option for someone with her career, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t fond of routines in general.) Neither of them had commented on the intimacy of the moment – they never would – but they knew what it meant. It meant that she trusted him. It meant that she’d really let him in.
Despite her relative disinterest, Natasha had done her own research into autism after receiving her diagnosis. For every website that had struck a chord with her and every story that had been almost familiar, Natasha had found a stereotype or assumption that made her grit her teeth. On the whole, however, it didn’t bother her. The people who mattered weren’t that stupid and the people who were that stupid were usually marks on a mission. She never let them see anyone other than her assigned persona and she rarely saw them again when her business was concluded.
She could only think of one moment when ableist ignorance had made her snap. It was a relatively recent memory and, consequently, still raw. She’d been on edge since Clint’s disappearance and one of the few members of SHIELD to have read the contents of her file expressed surprise when it came to her concern for him. She’d reacted so quickly that Coulson and Fury hadn’t had a chance to reprimand him before she’d grabbed him by the throat.
(“Oh, I have emotions. Can you guess what this one is? This one is anger. My partner is missing. I’m autistic, not a robot. Of course I’m worried.”)
She had emotions and she understood emotions, even if she didn’t always enjoy them. The fear of losing Clint, the best friend that she’d never expected to have, had been more palpable and terrifying than any other fear that she’d ever felt.
***
Glancing over at Bruce, she saw that he was looking up at the ceiling instead of at her, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. The Avengers were the first people since Clint that she’d found herself caring about. She’d started to trust them, so she’d put up a mask to hide anything that might make them think less of her. That might lead to her losing them.
After a long pause, she finally replied.
“You’ve got a point,” she admitted.
Bruce turned his head, giving her a glimpse of his familiar self deprecating smile.
“It has been known to happen.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He gave her a softer, warmer sort of smile. “It’ll be ok, you know.”
“I know.”
One day, she’d probably believe that.
***
The Security Council were on the line again.
Nick Fury stepped away from the central console of the air ship and into a small side chamber that had been set up specifically for these calls. He hated these calls. Didn’t he have enough work to be getting on with?
Although, in theory, SHIELD worked for the council, Fury made sure that he kept a close eye on what the individual members were up to. Just in case. He knew, for example, that one of the esteemed members was having an affair with another. And he knew that they’d been reading the medical files of the individual Avengers very recently. Which was what this waste of time was going to be about.
“Director Fury. We’d like to know why we weren’t informed about …” He paused. It was the pause of someone who knew that he was about to say something offensive but was too ignorant to stop himself. “Agent Romanoff’s condition earlier.”
“That would be because it’s a non issue,” said Fury, implacably. The Avengers had put the pieces together a few days ago and, as Steve had so emphatically stated when Fury had asked if the new information was going to cause any trouble within the team, knowing the truth didn’t change ‘a damn thing’. “Romanoff is one of the finest agents we’ve got.”
(Besides, given the assorted dysfunctions of the rest of the team, Agent Romanoff was the least of his worries.)
“Nevertheless, the council thinks it would be a good idea to remove her from duty until we can be certain that she will not be a liability in the field.”
“She’s never been a liability before,” he pointed out, darkly. “And this is the same council that thought it would be a good idea to fire a nuclear weapon at a civilian population?”
He didn’t smile, but he felt a certain degree of satisfaction when they struggled to reply.
“Director Fury …”
“If you try and take her off the team,” he interrupted, “You’re going to have five extremely pissed off superheroes out for your blood. And you won’t like any of them when they’re angry, believe me.”
“This is your decision, Director. You will be held accountable for what happens next.”
“Nothing is going to happen. The Avengers are going to carry on doing what they do and you’re going to regret the day you tried to bring your bigotry into my organisation.”
“Your organisation?”
“Yes, my organisation. SHIELD is my organisation. The Avengers Initiative is my project. I put the team together and I’m proud of every single one of them.”
They blustered for a little longer, but Fury hadn’t given them much room to manoeuvre and they seemed eager for him to bring the discussion to an abrupt close. When he turned away from the wall of screens, he found Agent Hill waiting for him in the doorway to accompany him on the journey back to the deck.
“Proud of them, sir?”
“Hill, if you tell Stark I said that, I’ll make sure you’re on desk duty for the rest of your career.”
“Understood, sir.”
***
As soon as he’d understood the basics, a well meaning Thor had asked Clint if there was anything that he could do to make Natasha’s life easier. Clint’s response had been a vague shrug – “Why don’t you ask Tasha? She knows herself best.” – but, as usual, the demigod had not been deterred. Which was why he was currently sitting at the dining room with Clint, Natasha and the contents of the cutlery drawer.
The spoons were lined up in a row in front of him.
“And how many spoons will it cost me to prepare for a battle?”
“We’ll make it three,” said Natasha, removing them from the line.
“More if he wants to style his hair first,” called Tony from the doorway, waving at the trio as he passed on the way to the laboratory.
“Four,” amended Clint, taking away another spoon. “Which means you’ve only got six left for after the battle.”
“Five if you count the one you always keep in reserve.”
Thor furrowed his brow, regarding the spoons intently before looking back up at Natasha.
“Lady Romanoff, your comrades in arms will always be there to help you find an extra spoon when you have need of it.”
“I know,” she murmured.
As Clint squeezed her hand under the table and Thor gazed at her with guileless acceptance, Natasha realised that she was starting to believe that.