Double-Edged Sword ─ age of ultron ✓

one

I wasn't going to post this tonight, but I might as well. I was originally planning on making this the second chapter, and doing one with Steve and Alex first, but...I already had this written, and it's cute as hell. It's just kind of an introduction to what life looks like now, almost a year after the events of Always Okay.

The NCIS scene I mention here is in episode 11 of season 4, and because I'm a child, I laugh at it every fucking time. Seriously, this is a real scene from the show. I could not make this up if I wanted to.

And, uh, brief NCIS season 5 finale spoilers...

★★★

THINGS looked so much different than they did one year ago. Natasha thought about that sometimes, the way her life used to be before S.H.I.E.L.D. went down. In those days, she and Sasha fell into a rhythm. They lived together, they periodically acknowledged each other, then they retreated into their separate lives that the other wasn't a part of. It was just that: her life, not quite their lives.

Without S.H.I.E.L.D. to send them off on missions or hang over their heads with the possibility of them taking Sasha away for whatever reason, there was no massive divide driving them apart. Natasha still had to be a freelance agent, and Sasha still had to be a part-time anonymous coder-slash-hacker for hire, because their savings were meager, but it was on their own terms. And Sasha, although still battling her demons, had made a lot of strides since the helicarrier incident, not only in managing her disorder but in being less closed off. The two of them were closer than ever before, and it progressed naturally. It wasn't just because they had no choice. The change wasn't instant. It took time and effort, and it would continue to do so, but they were getting somewhere. Certainly farther than they had in the four years prior.

In a strange, strange way, their cover helped too. For obvious reasons, Natasha did her best to remain in the shadows as much as possible, but it was unavoidable sometimes. Out in public together, for things as small as going grocery shopping, she and Sasha had to maintain the façade of being mother and daughter. "Shitty Gilmore Girls," Sasha once called it, a reference Natasha now understood after being subjected to more episodes than she'd ever admit. Sasha had to do things like call her "Mom" and show subtle signs of affection to make it believable. Sasha needed to do that in therapy too, a weekly occurrence. Eventually, it started to feel real just a bit, and not in that obligatory "we have to buy into it to sell it" kind of way. They may have been using fake names and fake stories, some terms for each other they definitely would not have used in any other context, but the feelings were real. The more they put on that show, the more those emotions followed them home. They gradually fell into a new rhythm, one that scared the living hell out of them both: they became family. A family they created themselves because they wanted to. A family that couldn't be taken away.

Natasha returned from her mission at about eleven-thirty p.m. A former S.H.I.E.L.D. higher-up with connections became the manager of a lot of other ex-agents looking for work, taking a cut of any profits her employees made. She connected Natasha with people in the market for freelance agents and was a liaison for exchanging information for money to keep clients on both ends anonymous. Today was a busy one, full of all kinds of trivial shit. For her final mission of the night, she had to infiltrate the office building of a major politician to snag some documents for a group looking to expose him for something Natasha did not know or care about. This was not exactly the job she was trained for or wanted to be doing, but she had to do what she had to do to pay the rent. It was better than killing, at least.

She expected Sasha to be hanging in the living room. Sasha had a tendency to be awake at all hours of the night, and she reveled in her alone time. Sometimes she used it to listen to her music on a speaker while she did homework or computer stuff. Other times, she sat there and watched way too many hours of Gilmore Girls or NCIS in a row. The girl barely slept. Natasha didn't know how she functioned that way.