Written for katla for the Hulkwidownet Fanwork Exchange, with the prompt "Bruce doesn't notice how often women flirt with him. Natasha does." This is a reposting of a fic I put up on ao3 a few months ago, but never managed to post here.

title from "You Were a Kindness" by The National.

set post ca:tws, not aou compliant.

It starts like this: Bruce and Natasha are watching each other drink their coffee, and they are not in love. They have to look the part, though, put on a show for everyone else in the upscale coffee shop, so Natasha drags her fingers along the seam of his wrist and calls him darling, sweetheart, love, calls him anything but Bruce. Bruce, God help him, is terrible at undercover work, but he can force a smile in her direction that doesn't look like a grimace and has finally gotten the hang of calling her Nora, so she's counting her wins where she can.

They're practicing their covers, Nora Rourke and Rob Greene, a pair of low level art collectors who drink overpriced wine together and met on business. She's ambitious and he's quiet, and if Rob doesn't pop the question soon, Nora'll do it herself.

This isn't standard practice for Natasha, taking covers for a test drive, but this is so far out of Bruce's wheelhouse, he is so tragically, almost dangerously, unqualified for this, that he needs to take the time to settle into the role. She likes Bruce a lot, he's as dependable as he is kind, so brilliant that it's staggering, and somewhere along the line between their awful first encounter and now, they've come into something that feels a lot like trust. All of that aside, she needed someone who speaks particle physics and there isn't a single SHIELD scientist she trusts to have her back. Bruce, though, despite a hundred reasons not to, she does.

They have the morning's Times peeled out across the table, sections parceled out in accordance with what Nora and Rob would read, and they absently talk about getting a cat. Bruce is good at this part, at lying by the seat of his pants; it's the cloak and dagger business that's got him spooked. He is wondering if maybe they travel too frequently to have a cat when Natasha's phone rings. It's Clint. "Hon," she interrupts gently, holding up her cell. "It's my brother. Do you mind?"

"Of course," Bruce smiles. "Take your time."

Wordlessly, Natasha pushes the arts section of the paper towards him and steps out to the door, waiting to answer the phone until she is on the sidewalk outside, safe from being overheard. All that caution, it turns out, is unnecessary. She'd been expecting an update on mission parameters; instead, Clint invites her to see Cooper in his school play. He's going to be Tree #2, and, already, Natasha can't wait to see it.

When she gets back to their table, the woman from the next table over has angled her chair towards their table and is reading the Arts section with Bruce. She looks about a heartbeat away from laying a hand on Bruce's arm, but Bruce looks far too wrapped up in the paper to notice.

Natasha clears her throat. Even as Nora Rourke, civilian art dealer and nature documentary enthusiast, it sounds like a threat.

"Who's your friend, dear?" Natasha says, as pointed as you like, and the woman recoils. Bruce looks puzzled.

"Oh, this is, um," he turns to the woman, "Anna Marie, is that right?" She nods, and Bruce smiles at her. "She saw I was reading film reviews and we got to talking."

"How nice of you," Natasha says blandly, with her coldest smile in Anna Marie's direction. The other woman pushes back in her chair immediately, putting distance between herself and Bruce. Nora Rourke, as it were, tends more than a little towards jealousy, and Natasha nods in approval when the other woman scoots closer to her own table than theirs.

"What was that about?" Bruce whispers when she sits back down, leaning over the table to look at her quizzically.

"C'mon, Rob," she says, putting a barely-there emphasis on his fake name, trying to drive home the difference between who they are to each other and who they're pretending to be. "Do you know anybody who doesn't dislike people flirting with their boyfriend?"

"We were just reading the paper," Bruce insists.

"Read the paper with me."

"Yes, dear," he rolls his eyes but pushes the arts section back over towards her, so Natasha is willing to chalk this one up as a win too. And if maybe she feels a little satisfaction when the only woman Bruce looks twice at for the rest of their time out is her, nobody needs to know.

"This is getting ridiculous," Natasha grumbles.

Clint groans, tilting his chair back on two legs at an impossible angle. Maria reaches out across their table and grabs Clint by the collar, stopping him before he can topple over.

"Careful," Maria warns, letting Clint go a little more roughly than was completely necessary. Clint rolls his eyes and makes a face at Maria, like someone a third of his age. "And I think it's nice. I'm glad that one of you is making friends. It'll make PR's day when I tell them there's hope for at least one of you three."

The three of them and Bruce have taken to getting drinks together in any of the local bars around the tower. It's impossible to take Steve, Thor and Tony anywhere, but nobody ever recognizes Bruce, and even after SHIELD had been blown sky high, Clint, Maria, and Natasha are experts at being unrecognizable.

"Well, I don't give a damn about PR. I think it'd be nicer if Bruce could just hurry up with the drinks a little," Clint scowls.

Natasha sits up from her chair and gives him her least impressed stare. "If you're going to whine about it, I'm going to get the beers myself." Clint calls something obscene at her back, but it fades into the general clamor of the pub, and Natasha ignores him easily. She's got plenty of practice at it.

At the bar, Bruce stands talking to a woman Natasha doesn't recognize, with the tray of beers sitting in front of him. The woman's body language is clearly flirtatious, leaning in towards Bruce when she speaks, looking up from under eyelashes, all textbook stuff. And Bruce, just as clearly, is picking up on none of it.

Natasha slips in beside Bruce, eyes on the woman before him. "Bruce," she says, stepping closer by his side, and watches the woman's eyes fix on her and narrow. Of all the things she'd left behind when she became more superhero than spy, this fascination with the way people tick, what makes them move, hadn't been one of them. People are just simple machines, and Natasha loves to wind them up and watch them dance. Just from the way this woman's eyes jump back and forth between Natasha and Bruce, Natasha can predict every move she'll make.

"Clint and Maria were worried you couldn't carry all these beers back on your own. I thought I'd offer a hand."

"Natasha," Bruce smiles, looking rather surprised. Even though they're about to run a mission together, he still sometimes forgets that she isn't afraid of him, even after her close quarters exposure to the Hulk. There is something refreshing, she can't help but think, about a man who is too busy being afraid of himself to be afraid of her.

Bruce's friend shuffles pointedly when he spends a moment too long looking quietly at Natasha, and this nonverbal cue, it seems, is so pointed even Bruce can't miss it.

"Oh!" he says, ducking his head and looking up with an embarrassed smile. "This is Carolyn, a colleague of mine at the university. Carolyn, this is my," Bruce pauses, looks at Natasha almost as if asking for her permission, before finishing with, "my friend, Natasha."

Natasha smiles at Carolyn, a comfortable enough smile to let the other woman read too much into Bruce's pause, too much into the way Natasha stood nearly shoulder to shoulder with him. Carolyn's smile in response is canned, and her body closes in on itself. "Nice to meet you, Natasha," Carolyn says, just this side of embarrassed.

She beats a hasty retreat after that, grabbing her drink and throwing a quick, "I wouldn't want to keep you from your friends, Bruce," over her shoulder.

There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that it's still as easy as ever to nudge people into place, to push them into doing exactly what she expects. It's harmless enough, no real loss in saving a woman from the dead-end that is attempting to get a date out of Bruce Banner, but it's still fun. Natasha figures she's earned her fun where she can find it.

"Since you offered," Bruce turns to her with half a smile, "think you could help me with these drinks? Wouldn't want to keep Clint waiting."

"You would not believe," Natasha says, leaning in like she has some secret to share, "how he was carrying on. I came over here to get away from him."

"And here I was thinking you just wanted to help me out."

"Maybe there's that," Natasha shrugs, and picks up two of the beers. She looks over her shoulder to watch Bruce's reaction, then says, "Sorry about breaking up the hot date, Doc."

He blinks. "Hot date?"

"You're joking, right?"

"If I am, then I really don't get the joke."

She laughs at him. "Maybe I'll explain when you're older."

"I'm mid-40s. Any older and I'm just embarrassing to be around."

"And Steve's in his 90s. You don't impress me, kid." Natasha bumps her shoulder into his, careful not to jostle the beer, and Bruce laughs. He doesn't do it very often, and Natasha's started marking down the laughs she can startle from him as victories.

They reach the table before Bruce can say anything to that, and Clint is on them like a pack of vultures. By the times beers are parceled out and everyone's back on a stool, Natasha finds herself right across from Maria, with her knees bumping into Bruce's with every move. Maria watches her like she's seeing something Natasha can't and Clint is inappropriately drunk for the number of beers he's had and Bruce is unnaturally warm where he brushes against her side, but it's not a bad place to be.

"It's okay," Steve says, appearing in the kitchen out of absolutely nowhere, "to want things."

Natasha pauses halfway through eating her sandwich and stares at Steve. "I want plenty of things. For example, I want to finish this sandwich in peace."

"You know what I mean, Nat."

Raising both eyebrows, Natasha turns back to her sandwich. "I'm sure I don't."

Noisily, Steve sits down on a kitchen stool across the counter from her and watches Natasha hack the crusts off the half of the pb&j she hasn't tackled yet. "It's okay to want things for yourself," he continues. "You deserve to get things you want every once in a while. Good things."

"If we all got what we deserved," Natasha tells him, "the world would be a very different place."

Steve sighs. He does that a lot. "Sure. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't want things for yourself. There needs to be more to being an Avenger than just avenging. We're more than the people in our uniforms. Otherwise, what's the point?"

"I see what you're doing here, with this mysterious old man wisdom, but I'm not interested if you're just going to be intentionally vague. I get enough of that in my day job."

"What I'm saying, is that we both know Bruce is never going to make the first move. He's an awfully smart man, but he sure misses a lot of what happens right in front of him."

"No fair stepping in my territory, Rogers. Team doesn't need a second matchmaker."

Steve laughs at her. "If you're going to try and find me a date, the least I can do is return the favor."

"And you think that's something I want?"

Steve laughs. "For a spy, you're not all that subtle, Natasha."

"Maybe I'm not that interested in subtlety. You're all my teammates, not marks. I need there to be a difference."

"I'm glad that there is."

"Any more old man wisdom before I finish my sandwich and leave?" Natasha asks. She is getting better about talking about herself, better at being open and intentional about building trust and building a team, but it's still not easy.

"You miss every chance you don't take. Ask him out, Natasha."

"You sound like a Nike commercial," Natasha scowls, dumping her plate in the sink. "So I'm disregarding all of your advice."

"Technically," Steve calls at her retreating back, "Nike commercials sound like me. I'm pretty sure only one of us predates WWII, and it's not Nike."

Natasha ignores him on principle. Maybe, she thinks, if she doesn't encourage him, he'll forget about this conversation, and everybody in the tower can go on pretending she is in no way interested in Bruce. Maybe.

She wears a green dress. Steve raises his eyebrows loudly, but says nothing. Natasha waits by the breakfast bar for Bruce and pretends Steve isn't there. Lots of people wear green dresses. It's not a thing; she has nothing to defend.

Bruce rushes out of the elevator, carrying a bow tie in one hand and his dress shoes in the other, and he nearly chokes on his own tongue the moment he first sees her. His suit looks tailored, all clean, sharp lines that fit him well. Natasha suspects Stark's involvement. Bruce, she knows, doesn't bother with nice things for himself. He's always afraid he'll break them.

"You took your damn time," she grumbles, so she can pretend like she isn't giving her teammate a once over. She is though, and he kind of looks really, really good. Natasha votes he starts wearing bespoke suits on the regular. It would be good for team morale.

"Isn't being fashionably late the thing to do?" Bruce asks, fumbling helplessly with his bow tie. Natasha takes pity on him and steps in close to tie it for him. This close, she can feel him suck in a sharp breath when her fingers graze the skin above his collar. "I thought that was what people did?"

"Sure it is," Natasha says, "When they're not on the clock."

She hovers for a moment once she's finished with the bow tie, tugs at it a little until she's satisfied with how it sits. Steve's gaze rests heavy on her back, and when she steps back from Bruce and looks out of the corner of her eye at him, he has the biggest, smuggest I-told-you-so grin on his face. Bruce tugs on his dress shoes, and Natasha makes a note in her phone calendar to kick Steve's ass in the gym in the morning.

"Ready?" Bruce asks miserably. He looks like he's going to his childhood dog's funeral, not on a fake date to a private gallery opening to do science for spies. The only reason he was on this assignment was because she had asked for him specifically, and Natasha hasn't missed the fact that he would do something he hated so much, just because she asked.

"Waiting on you."

"Bring him home before midnight!" Steve shouts, as the elevator doors open. Natasha gives him the look Clint tells her makes her look like a particularly murderous android, and Steve just grins. "You know how Tony worries!"

As far as ops with Bruce in the field went, this was the least catastrophic yet. The last Code Green had ended with the Hulk throwing a tank through the ceiling of a Hydra bunker, so on the whole, dealing with Andrew Forson, mad scientist of the week with aspirations at art collecting, was small potatoes. Mission parameters were simple enough; get into Dr. Forson's home in the guise of guests to his private art gallery premier, find the plans for the weaponized meson pulse emitter he was believed to have designed, let Bruce determine if they were at all legitimate, and destroy them either way. Simple.

But walking into Forson's mansion with Bruce on her arm feels anything but simple. She can't help but think of Steve's ridiculous sports slogan advice, and think of what it might be like to go on a date with Bruce as Bruce and Natasha, not as imaginary people.

"I'm going to case the house," she whispers in his ear, after half an hour of mindless small talk with everyone who so much as looked in their way. "Keep a low profile."

"That does seem like the best idea for everyone involved," Bruce answers with a wry grin.

For a man trying to market a homemade weapon of mass destruction, Forson's security is embarrassing. She is in and out of his office in the space of one song, the sounds of the mediocre string quartet following her throughout the mansion. His blueprints are in an unmarked safe, exactly the worst place in the house to hide them, but Natasha isn't too upset about the cliché; she takes the easy jobs when she can get them, few and far between as they are for her. She can't make heads or tails of the blueprints, but that's where Bruce comes in, after all. She's a spy, not a scientist, and it's his job to tell her whether these plans were worth the panic.

Natasha slips back into the party in the gallery, stopping to gaze at what looked like an early Dali painting, from before he was doing anything more than imitating the old masters, and absently thanks the art history dossier Nick had forced her to study. Art isn't something she's ever had the time to develop an interest in, and she doubts it's something she ever will, but in the here and now, it's good to know.

She looks away from the art to find Bruce, ready to pass a verdict on the blueprints and begin their extraction. He is across the room, standing in front of an oversized watercolor, and the sight of Bruce leaning in to talk with a young, blonde woman makes Natasha irrationally irritated, in a way that has less to do with how Nora would feel and more with how Natasha does. This is something she isn't sure she wants to unpack, the way she wants Bruce, more and less than she thinks she should.

And Steve was right, Natasha wants so few things. She wants to make amends for things she has done, she wants to hurt everyone who ever helped make her more weapon than woman, and she wants to trust people who trust her in return. She allows herself to want so few things, that those she permits herself she wants impossibly fiercely. And here and now, it comes as a surprise to her to realize that Bruce Banner is one of those very few things.

"Am I really so boring," Natasha says, coming up behind Bruce, "that even the art can't hold your interest?"

Bruce doesn't so much as blink. They had prepped this; Nora is flighty but jealous, prone to wandering off, but unlikely to leave Rob alone with other people. It gives her a reason to wander, it gives her a reason to come back the moment Bruce has to keep their covers. It is exactly what he expects to hear.

"It's only boring when you're not here to keep me interested," Bruce says. Natasha smirks, impressed despite herself. For a man who couldn't tell when someone was flirting with him, he had game.

"If you'll excuse us," Natasha says to the woman beside Bruce, and tucks her hand into his arm. She's more than ready to get back into that safe and get out of this house, and hopefully she'll find a poorly armed security guard she can punch out in the process. Art, she has decided, is very much not her thing. And for once, she is tired of pretending.

"Right," Bruce nods when they've left the woman behind. "Thanks for the save. I was dangerously close to exhausting the limited art history knowledge I retained from Art History 101 as an undergrad."

"You looked like you were holding your own," Natasha says. "You have that whole likable but forgettable thing down."

"Then why cut in? Not," he rushes to assure her, "that I'm not grateful for the save. I just thought you'd want more time to do your whole secret agent thing."

"I think you'll find that Nora Rourke is a very jealous woman," Natasha says. It's her favorite kind of lie, the kind that true that covers up the real lie. If Nora is jealous, nobody needs to know that Natasha is too. "And I've done the whole secret agent thing. I'm gonna need you to do the whole science thing, if you've got a minute."

"Lead the way."

Later that night, Natasha goes to Bruce's apartment in the tower, and tells him the truth.

Bruce answers his door in pajamas, looking comfortable and warm, and now that Natasha has decided she's going to do something about this problem of her wanting him, she feels comfortable admitting to herself that she kind of would like nothing more than to wrap around him like a blanket until they both feel as warm and content as he looks. It's a little alarming, finding all of these small, soft emotions inside of her that she thought she had choked out long ago, but the longer she spends with the Avengers, the more time she is in the company of people who see her as a person and a teammate and a friend instead of just another weapon, the more softness she finds herself capable. She can work with it.

"Natasha," Bruce says. It's just her name, but it's enough. He is hopeful and confused and terrified of what she might say; he has never been transparent, but she has learned to read him. Nobody in the world is an expert on Bruce Banner, maybe not even Bruce, but Natasha thinks she knows him more than most, and that might just be enough.

She bites the bullet and tells him, "I lied to you." Bruce raises an eyebrow and waits for more, so she says, "When I told you that I was just staying in character. That was a lie."

"Okay," Bruce nods, nice and steady. "Then what's the truth?"

"I was jealous." Admitting this feels like offering up her lungs to him and hoping for the best, but she is too far in to walk away now. "Not just Nora; me, Natasha."

"I'm not sure I understand."

"I thought you were a genius. Don't tell me I need to spell this out for you?"

Bruce laughs weakly, tugs a hand through his already disheveled hair. "Humor me?"

"I'm not an expert on things like this," Natasha says slowly, choosing her words carefully before she says them. This is delicate in the way an interrogation is, like the hardest ones always are, where you have to offer up a little of yourself to draw out the truths you need to hear. "On account of thirty some years of brainwashing and dysfunctional relationships. But, I think that I want to be the only person who gets to flirt with you."

"Oh," Bruce says, like he thinks that's an appropriate answer. "Really?"

"I don't think I was being very subtle, Bruce."

"There's a chance," Bruce smiles, "that I'm not much of an expert on things like this, either."

Natasha steps closer and looks up to meet Bruce's eyes. Despite being a head taller than her, he's not a particularly tall man; in many ways he is smaller and softer than everyone else she has ever known, and it makes her warm to think of how different he is from all the other things she's allowed herself to want in her life. "That's nothing a little research can't fix."

"Ah, and you know how I feel about research," Bruce says. He ducks his head to stare at his bare feet and then meets her gaze again. He's wide eyed but still smiling, equal measures terrified and hopeful, and he's still staring down a woman named after the original maneater. Maybe it's in his nature to avoid every fight he can, but he has no absence of spine. He doesn't blush half as easy as they always seem to expect him to, and backs down even less.

She reaches out a hand to touch the side of his face. "I'm going to kiss you now, if that's okay with you."

"That's okay with me," Bruce smiles.

And, finally, Natasha takes what she wants.

fin.

come talk to me about brucenat at any time on tumblr, where i'm tumblr user brucebannur.

any/all feedback is appreciated & helps me write better brucenat in the future.