#ask avian

An audience consisting of Wanda and Okoye stares at him when he pivots. Each woman holds a black concoction that resembles witches’ brew, and it’s his partner who’s provided the mixture. Among several others at the gathering, Natasha has also fallen victim to her own tincture. Intoxication stares at him through her expanded pupils. Other than that, though, she’s steady on her feet.

His eyebrows elevate toward the ceiling in an act of surprise and jest. He shifts his gaze from Nat to their friends.

“Not my idea,” Wanda defends, sipping black brew to prevent further questioning on the issue of his buttocks.

Okoye, on the other hand, shoots her brows up right back at him.

Any potential duel with her is not one he cares to enter, or inevitably lose. He turns to Natasha. “Having a—”

“Where is your drink?” Okoye cuts in.

“Uh…” Emptiness burns in his palms. “I had a drink.”

“Was it one of these?” Okoye brandished her half empty glass like a piece of damning evidence.

Though caught off guard by this whole exchange, he grins through his sputtering, “N-no, but Nat made me something else.”

“She makes very good drinks.” Wanda says, slipping into a hint of a slur.

The intoxication of others inspires confidence in some. Not him. His uncertainty is a fog, thickened by a whirlwind of factors including, but certainly not limited to, the spectrum of drunkenness before him. For that reason, he flings out the first thing his mouth can manage, “She’s very multitalented.”

Wanda snorts and tries to hide it behind a sip. Okoye, on the other hand, makes no attempt to mask the widening of her eyes, the judgmental drop of her face, the downward tilt of her chin. It’s so apparent he almost doesn’t notice Natasha snickering into the scant space between them. Honestly, he’s not sure what he said to get that reaction or whether he should reply—he’ll probably make it worse.

Maybe detecting this—and probably in search of something more worth her time—Okoye walks away, drink clutched like a gavel. Natasha emerges from his shoulder to lock eyes with Wanda, who gestures vaguely with her glass and says, “I’m gonna go…over there. You two have fun.”

It’s not until after she and Nat exchange smirks and he’s left with his partner that he can piece together a coherent sentence—or, rather, a simple question, “What just happened?”

“You made it sound like a sex thing.”

He’s in his daytime clothes, yet he feels the heat of the spotlight she’s shining on him. She’s a vision, and he’s the one exposed. He’s also practically drooling, with his face making no effort to hide the wide surprise and attraction.

To be honest, they’d done the whole “christening” of their first home a little prematurely (they’d had sex—really great sex—the night they’d signed the papers). Yesterday, move-in day, had them exhausted. The sight of her right now, however, has erased spices and sleepiness from his mind.

“H-hey,” he says, a little lamely. He removes his hands from the spice cabinet as though it’s a body not hers.

She doesn’t respond, not verbally. His reaction is exactly what she wants, and she soaks it in with a sly tilt of her lips. He’s not self-conscious about how stunned, even hungry, he looks. No, he’s more than happy to give her this to bask in.

She crosses over to him. Obviously her footsteps are still audible against the wood, it’s just that he doesn’t hear them. She might as well be floating or walking across water to his shore. Ogling isn’t something he really does, but it’s a bit hard to resist given the current situation. Perhaps it’s the lowered inhibition that comes with fatigue, or the comfort between them. Whatever it is, it’s far too difficult to keep his gaze from roaming over the violet fabric across her breasts, the valley between, the sleek edges of her panties and what they cover—the part he’d like to drink in.

“Having fun?” The question is simple, yet she fuses the essence of sensuality into it. For all that he’s speechless, she is just as smug.

He fumbles for his own tongue, which would rather do other things than talk. “Uh…not—no, not really.”

The narrowing of her eyes, their journey down his body and sojourn on his mouth, is enough to make him melt. Knowing full well how she can choose words to attack or, in this case, undress, he fears implosion when she speaks.

“Well,” a palm slides across the counter in his direction. “Goodnight.” She pivots and makes for the exit.

What?

For half a beat, he stammers, then manages a quick, “Hold on.”

Once again, he blames his next action on lack of restraint. Her leisurely pace makes it easy enough to beeline toward her, catch her on the other side of the counter, and pull her into him. Their mouths meet, fast, open, and starving. He’d have taken her by the hand, but that’s gone now. His are mixed between her jaw and side, whereas both of hers are at his waist, pulling him flush against her.

He wants more than this.

She said it with a smirk. Despite the purple-brown bruises, her torn lip, the sprained ankle resting somewhere offscreen—despite yet another fracture in the outside world—she mustered a tilt of a grin. He wished he could be so strong.

They exchanged goodnights before she disappeared from his screen. The image of her battered skin projected in his mind in the absence. He couldn’t wipe it from the backs of his eyelids.

He had to keep his heart rate down. Even though somebody abused her—no matter how minor or routine she said it was—he had to check the pace of blood careening through his body. It wouldn’t help her if he exploded out of his skin. Letting his insides ignite into rivers of fire would change nothing. It wouldn’t even change the fact that scum on the earth would persist, would continue to lash against her, would continue to use their fists as weapons of arbitrary brutality. Even that he couldn’t prevent.

Never did he blame her for staying an agent, though they were both aware of the grueling work that entailed. Even when not existentially threatened, corruption and terror permeated through the world, corrupting its veins. She was on of the best people to lead the counterstrike. That didn’t make calls like that any easier, nor did it defuse his rage.

No, not rage. It couldn’t be rage. He drilled his elbows into the desk, sank his skull into his palms, and counted as he breathed.

His desk accepted all his weight and more. His shoulders formed a cage around his ears, blocked out the silence of his office, of the sleeping tower, with his own. A slow geyser of air funneled out of his mouth past his hands, which pressed into his skull, threatened to make the bone cave in on itself. He crossed his ankles, then uncrossed them. Every movement, every bodily function, went on manual mode. He’d forgotten how to survive through moments like this, where his physiological functions were balanced, his amygdala in check, but the hurt persisted. It dominated. Somehow, he had to remember his ways of resistance.

Come morning, he would text Natasha, remind her how she was adored, strong, supported. She was resilience incarnate, and no wound would change that. There were so many reasons she would undoubtedly return from that mission alive.

Alive.

Their hands covering each other, pulses held between them. The constant metamorphosis of her hair. The consistency of the smiles that greeted him before the “hello.” Her banter with Tony and Steve, regardless of the time of day or state of fatigue. Calls with Clint and/or Laura she made while he cooked (he trusted her with everything except a kitchen). The breaths they shared when their mouths met and met with each new moment they found.

Despite how she was transient to the rest of the world—a footprint in shore sand—she was always there for him, even when she wasn’t. Before some trips, she’d hide a note in some strange somewhere. Other times, he’d find a strand of hair, its shade random but always hers. Some of his shirts now held wisps of her.

Most of the time, he was fine when she was gone. Thoughts of her were simply common yearning. His days would consist of lab work, contemplations, theorizing, reading.

Then, once in a great while, something would go wrong. An unlikely outcome became real, became her blood and battered bones.

He’d do anything to be with her, be there for her as she slept and recovered. If it wouldn’t hinder a mission or threaten vulnerability, he’d do it.

He’d run to her in an instant. And he couldn’t.

She seizes his hands in hers and leans down to capture his mouth. His palms slide into her grip, their fingers interlace, and their lips meld in a slow dance. Fixed between him and the dresser, she remains, kisses lazy and long, her thighs where their joined hands rest. A grin tips onto her mouth when his thumb strokes the pillow of skin near her underwear.

It doesn’t make sense when the flashback hits her. She’s safe, she’s settled, yet it rams into her.

Too many tongues slither onto her skin. There’s her body and a horde of snakes clambering onto her, over her. They make her a burial ground, except she is still breathing. Her lungs are painfully functional and, without even blinking, she is back in the Red Room.

“Nat?”

His voice, along with the entirety of the present, stir in the back of her skull, all under gelatin with leeches suspended in it. Everything in front of her is a cursed crimson with a bleeding teenage corpse strewn across a mattress of nails. Fixating on the destruction itself is better than the images of the trauma inflicted against her, what she feels happening to her. The men allowed into the room, allowed access to her without her say, revoking possession of her own limbs—

“Natasha.”

Then she’s back. With questioning fingers brushed against her cheek, Bruce’s arms sturdy under her palms, she’s out of the red.

He folds a hand so his knuckles rest on her cheekbone. All of him is a support for her. She’s slumped further down the dresser, crouched halfway between standing and sitting on the floor. He’s right there with her.

“You’re here. Nat,” he murmurs, “I’m here.”

“I’m gonna…”

She doesn’t need to finish for him to know. “Yeah.”

He slides his arms back until both her palms cover his. He waits for her to latch on, then tugs both of them upright. There’s a threat of wobble in her legs, which she refuses. She will stay on her own feet. This is her body, and she will use it how she pleases. In this moment, that means walking to the bathroom and into the shower.

When Bruce pauses in the doorway as she enters, her stomach drops into fast nausea. Come with me. Her tongue won’t accept the words. Her throat is thick with suppression, gagged by the past. She reaches for Bruce and he’s at her side, in her grasp, in an instant. What’s supposed to happen next seems so obvious and, yet, she can’t find the will to do it.

The two of them linger on the tiles, joined palms like a liferaft, adrift toward an endless horizon. Who knows where she’ll sink if she lets go, if she’s left to tread in the dark depths of history too long.

It’s time likes this when Bruce steps in, does what she needs without hearing her verbalize it. There are other ways to speak.

For a few moments—less than fifty seconds—he relinquishes her touch, traverses over to the shower and turns it on. As the water warms, they wait. His shirt on her is a safety net; if she really wanted to—and she does—she’d shower with it on, and he’d have no qualms. She wouldn’t have gotten this far in life without pushing herself, though. She strips.

The shirt lifts and sinks to the floor in a parachute of navy blue fabric. Her underwear follows, and so does Bruce’s pants, his boxers. He looks to her for a signal, any direction. In response to the tiny nod she gives, he steps in, paving a path for her.

As soon as she enters, hot water hits her magma skin and, somewhere between, it becomes steam; it beckons the old infection out of her skin. The toxins seep out, the present replaces them. Bruce is right in front of her.

The phantoms of fingers stick to her skin like tiny spiders. She scrubs at her arms and stomach, swiping away rivulets of water and invasion. In here, in this square of a space dedicated to cleansing, she permits herself this outward rebellion against her memories.

“Nat. Nat.” Bruce murmurs. His touch whispers over her, brushes onto her jaw. She breathes, refocuses. Water, which rivals her burning skin in temperature, thickens the air with steam. Her pores sigh into the damp, her hair slicks into a wet sheet. Bruce cradles her face as the showerhead rains around them, splatters soft onto the glass barrier. He said her name and she holds it as an echo in her ears. He’s with her in one of the two spaces in the world where being viscerally herself is the default. He’s as there as she is.

She lifts her hands from herself to cover his, press them more firmly into her. Her head tilts forward, bowing ever so slightly into the space between them. It’s something she does out of instinct rather than thought or intention, but he nudges in the next second and strokes her crown with a kiss.

“You’re here. I’m right here with you.” He assures into her skull.

“I know,” she tells him.

“Whatever you need—whatever you want me to do—”

She lifts her mouth to meet his, not to quiet him but because this is what she wants: the person she loves, trusts, whose resonance matches hers, as close to her as possible. She wants his love beating right beside her heart. She wants him loud and utterly himself with her when she blocks out the rest of the world with her walls. He is the quintessence of what she wasn’t supposed to have.

She clutches him to her like he’s an oxygen mask, kisses him as though they’re raising a mountain together and not even the shower spray can get between them. He gives right back, melding into her mouth without overwhelming her whole body.

When they part to breathe something other than each other, he asks, “How are you feeling?”

They’re barely apart, so her noses brushes against him when she nods. “Better.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to get the water?” He gestures behind her to the shower handle with a flick of his eyes.

She nods and he cuts the spray. Emerging from the shower is easy—it’s existing beyond the bathroom she’s not prepared for.

He gets a towel for her before himself. She constricts her chest with the cotton, eliminates the nooks and crannies where shadows of the past can haunt her. As she stands there suppressing, Bruce bends down and retrieves his shirt from the floor. It’s a tranquil offering he holds out to her, which she gladly accepts. The scent of their detergent gusts over her when she tugs it on, trades the towel for the swath of him. While she does that, he slides back into his boxers, maybe his pajama pants too.

“Do you want these?”

She turns to see her own underwear held up to her. A glimmer of a grin cracks through the cement that’s settled on her face. Each action slow and steady, she takes the arm extended to her, plucks the fabric from his grasp, tosses it aside, and pulls him to her. She directs his hand to her waist, where he can keep them steady as their mouths press together. They create a gentle ebb and flow, his hands mirroring where hers drift on him.

“I, um—” He pecks her lips before continuing. “I have an idea—if you’re feeling up for anything. It’s okay if you’re…”

“I’m here with you,” she assures. “I’m okay.”

“Okay. Uh,” a sidelong look reveals what he has in mind before he says, “Could you…sit on the counter?”

An eyebrow quirks, more play than critical, but she doesn’t question. A thin layer of condensation makes sliding on effortless. In the interim, Bruce scoots a towel over and positions himself on it, kneeling. It’s second nature, the way her legs part for him.

He deposits a kiss onto her knee, slides his hands over her calves. When he looks up at her, his full eyes and lingering creases of concern in his face are nothing except loving. “If something doesn’t feel right, or you get another flashback—”

“I’ll let you know.” She promises, passing her fingers through his short curls.

He nudges his nose where he’d kissed her, lets her maneuver however she wants in the meantime. Knowing this part well, she drapes one leg over his shoulder and leaves the other propped against the cabinets below. Her hands don’t wander far from his head, which migrates toward her crux, a butterfly trail of kisses and the stroking of his fingers.

The warmth of his breath breezes through her lower hairs, coasts over her folds. She settles into his touch and trusts him to make her melt.

With the leftover moisture from the shower, he could enter her with a two fingers and she’d have no issue. It wouldn’t be him, wouldn’t be his typical touch, if he jumped to that without her asking. He dips into the damp with his tongue, eases her into the thaw. Out of the shape of her, he finds art, tracing her in a slow, fluid motion. An arm curls around her thigh, lighting scrapes up the taut skin on her hip, then slides back down. When he widens her part, he applies a slight pressure, just enough to spark the right nerves and get her to sigh the ghost of a moan.

She arrives fully into the present on blissful tides, his mouth wading around her, replacing the shower’s wet with her own. When he attends to her clit, he starts with a tease of tongue before a full embrace. She could cry from the softness of it. Instead, she hooks onto his hair, encourages him on.

He shimmers and flicks her clit, obeys the hand telling him to give more, and adds a finger to the mix. A firm tip drags through her damp, leaving more in its wake. Worship replaces the feeling of cursed.

Her orgasm happens quietly, with a gradual increase in his tongue’s pace combined with the coaxing of her G-spot. Sighs elevate into gentle moans as her thighs quiver from this blissful undoing. This time, when she’s unmade, it’s entirely with her consent. Reconstruction happens in the aftermath, where she doesn’t desire his shirt on her, but Bruce himself.

Once he removes his finger, she tugs the sole piece of clothing off her body and drops it on his head. He startles, and his lips stumble across her folds. Without removing it, he rises, meets her with a grin as she takes the fabric off his skull and sets it on the counter. Before either can say anything, they’re kissing. The tang of her slides from his mouth to hers, mingles between them like sweet oxygen. For some span of precious time, they stand, bodies pressed close, and simply kiss.

Want of him lingers in her core like an itch not properly scratched. Loath as she is to pull away from his kiss, she does so to see what he’s willing to give. “Bruce—”

He responds with minor surprise, sans condescension or judgement. “More?” To her nod, he coasts his hands over her thighs, one on either side of him, and asks, “Do you want fingers or…”

“Fingers.” Though he doesn’t feel hard—and she absolutely won’t apologize for what she feels—the receding wake of her flashback compels her to add, “I don’t think I could—”

He crashes into her before she can venture down the spiral. His fervor has him tugging her closer to the counter’s edge, her legs clamping tighter, both of them caught mid-exhale. When air becomes necessity, they part and he tells her, “You don’t need to justify anything. Not to me.”

This time, it’s her who pulls him in. Their lips meet and melt, and she’s indomitable inside this haven and out. It’s her who takes his hand and directs it over her body, her muscle, her skin. What she wants is him and her, him knowing how to touch her, her loving with him here and now. He senses this and listens. His hand cups her crux, her fingers feathery on his wrist, and he swirls through her damp heat.

She migrates two fingers to her clit and, with just light pressure, her spine shudders and bows. Their heads knock together, her thighs tremble and he adjusts one of her legs in an effort to hook her more firmly to him. The same digit teases her entrance while, elsewhere, his hand wanders, cherishes. Subtle sparks under her skin follow his touch up her hips, her waist, her brief collection of scars, her ribcage. When he cups her breast, squeezes light, in just the right way, his finger plunges in and she’s ascending toward a euphoric peak.

He strokes into her, shows her how even the inside of her can be caressed. The circles she presses into herself start regular, have her humming from her throat to her core, but the pattern crumbles into erratic movements as he increases his pace. Keeping her legs up around him is both a challenge and the only option. She clings to his hair, goes to kiss him but he eludes her. He sucks on her neck’s pulse point, makes her veins feel like they’re a lava flow.

Just as her trembles turn to quakes, he retracts his one finger and quickly returns with two. She can’t help but emit an, “Oh—”

Then he’s at her ear, scraping with his teeth, and the only recourse in the world is to kiss him, the only sensation is a pleasure that overwhelms the senses, has her shaking. He thumps into her through it all.

When orgasm hits, it crashes into her. Her back arches as she moans into his open mouth. His palm on her breast gets caught between them, which he doesn’t seem to mind. Even if he did, there’s not much he can do as she comes, vibrating around him and his fingers within her.

Everything’s as she left it when she returns to her normal state, minus the trembling in her panted breaths. Other than that, Bruce is still between her legs, his mouth dropped to the junction between her neck and shoulder, and she’s sitting on the bathroom counter in the home they share. She’s safe.

She’s also a little tight in the legs—definitely not in other places—and her calves are starting to throb from something other than orgasm-induced pleasure. She kisses the top of his head, then stretches out. His hands lift from where they’ve settled on her thighs. They cup her face as their lips peck, then he reaches for the cotton bundle beside her.

The blue clump gets a smile out of her. “You got your shirt back.”

“Not for long.” He holds it between them without condition.

Before taking it—because his clothes are an offer she can’t refuse, and one he can’t revoke—she slides back onto the floor, onto her own feet. She tells him, “Thank you,” and hopes he recognizes how far that goes. To be sure, she kisses his cheek then, for herself, she pulls him in, wraps her arms around her partner in life and soul and simply exists in the squeeze he reciprocates.