An Unlikely Romance - The Avengers (Part 2)

Intoxicating Beauty

A few days after Clint's intrusion and your unusual dinner with Natasha, you thought things were sort of starting to fall back into a rhythm. Natasha and Clint actually picked up your training again on a more hands-on basis; Clint even went so far as to let you fire his bow a few times, and Natasha went through so many sparring matches with you that you almost started to wish they'd just kept acting strange and continued the break from your training.

<I>Almost.</I> No matter how hard Natasha kicked your ass, you were grateful to be doing something more meaningful than sitting around and surfing the web while desperately trying to find any new sites Fury hadn't already cut off.

You couldn't even use most of the news sites because half of them had comments sections, and apparently Fury thought that someone would believe a random internet comment saying something like "help, a top-secret deepstate government agency has kidnapped me!" That was why you were still stuck watching late-night cable news any time you wanted a real update on the world.

But your isolation from meaningful news about the world was hardly your biggest motivator. Having something to actually work toward and take your mind off of things was way more important. You'd experimented with a few hobbies, everything from more artistic hobbies to cooking and gardening. You definitely enjoyed them, but you couldn't really compare yourself to much. With your access to the outside world so limited, you had virtually no frame of reference for your own skill. It was liberating in one sense – you weren't constantly comparing yourself to others – but in another way it sucked to not be able to gauge your own progress.

Fighting, lifting, stretching, reacting... those were things with a clear-cut and simple measurement for improvement. You'd stopped counting days back in the original facility when the lack of sunlight and your own unstable sleep schedule left you uncertain as to how long had passed. The uncertainty was almost a blessing. Every day spent in captivity was a day wasted, one that you'd never be able to spend on something more meaningful.

In many ways, even when you still could, counting days was more depressing than hopeful. Training made time itself irrelevant, but made progress and improvement simple. You were good enough to win, or you weren't. You could lift more than the day before, stretch farther, react faster... or you couldn't. It was that simple, and usually, enough effort let you push yourself to the other side of the scale.

Well, except for the winning part. No matter how hard you tried, no matter how fast you moved, Natasha always seemed just far enough ahead of you to kick your ass thoroughly. But you tried not to let that bother you too much. Though, it did make you jump sometimes when you heard her voice.

"Hey, don't tell me I'm interrupting dinner prep again?"

Like just now. Thankfully you didn't accidentally break the fridge from slamming it shut as Natasha strolled in... you didn't want to find out if Fury would have taken that out of your allowance.

"Uh, kind of... do you count staring blankly into the refrigerator, starving but not able to find a single thing that sounds edible as 'dinner prep'?" You asked, grimacing as you looked over your options.

"Kind of. Should I come back later? Probably shouldn't have this on an empty stomach."

You glanced over, already having a hint as to what you were about to see. Sure enough, Natasha was holding a bottle... but it wasn't vodka, this time. It was actually a bottle of wine, one you didn't recognize even after her tutoring during your late night Italian dinner.

"Depends, why the fancy bottle this time?" You asked, half joking. "If there's something to celebrate, I'm down."

"You... don't know?" Natasha asked, seeming actually surprised.