Ten minutes later, still trailing wisps of shower steam, Veyric dropped into the passenger seat.
The engine's low rumble tore a seam through the silence.
Natasha drove without headlights, one hand on the wheel, weaving the black SUV through Brooklyn's maze of abandoned side streets like a ghost. The main roads were out of the question. Too many aimless hordes shambling through the dark.
Neither of them spoke. The only sound was glass crunching under the tires.
The car stopped in front of an unremarkable red-brick apartment building.
They climbed single file up a dim fire escape, all the way to the top, and pushed through a rust-eaten iron door.
Wind hit them the moment they stepped onto the roof, carrying dust and the faint stench of decay.
Veyric's gaze swept the empty rooftop and settled on one corner.
A rusted folding chair sat there alone. Beside it, an empty vodka bottle.
He walked over and looked down at the worn-out chair and the dead soldier next to it.
"One glass and one bottle." He turned toward Natasha as she approached. "You used to come up here alone?"
"This was one of the KGB's highest-level Cold War safe houses in New York." She walked to the edge and rested both hands on the weathered parapet wall. "After every... off-the-books mission, I'd come here by myself."
She looked down at the lifeless city below.
"Watch the skyline. Have a drink. Pretend I was still a person living in the world."
A pause. Night wind tangled her red hair.
"After I joined the Avengers, I stopped coming for a long time. But after Sokovia... I started again."
Veyric said nothing.
But he understood. Sokovia hadn't been the end of Ultron alone. It was the fuse that split the Avengers apart and sent them hurtling toward civil war.
The woman standing beside him, the one who had craved a home more than almost anything, had probably felt that familiar sensation of everything crumbling all over again.
He walked to the ledge and leaned against the wall the way she did.
Manhattan's skyline in the distance was nothing but a few broken black silhouettes now. Without its neon, New York looked like the carcass of some enormous beast.
Wind slipped through the gap between them.
Nobody tried to fill the silence, and somehow that was fine. The quiet didn't sting.
Veyric's gaze drifted across the street to a building on the opposite block.
A crumbling Russian ballet theater. The graffiti on its facade had been painted over by dark, rust-colored bloodstains.
High up on the wall, half a massive poster still clung to the brick, faded and torn. A woman in a white tutu, poised on the tips of her toes, weightless. Swan Lake.
He stared at it for a while, then glanced sideways.
Natasha was looking at the same thing.
Her eyes rested on the dancer's ruined face, and there was nothing extra in them. No sadness performed for an audience. They were deep and dry, like a well that had gone empty a long time ago.
Their gazes met.
Wind flapped the torn poster. Neither spoke first.
"I used to think I'd become a ballerina." Natasha's voice came soft, barely holding against the wind.
"In the Red Room?" Veyric kept it casual.
She tilted her head slightly, unsurprised that he knew the name.
"Fourteen hours of training a day. Not just killing. Dancing too." Her finger traced a slow line across the rough brick. "The instructors said flexibility and grace were the best disguises a killer could have."
"Terrible teaching philosophy."
The corner of her mouth twitched, but no warmth reached it.
"There were no names in that place. Only numbers. Botch a move or show mercy in a fight, and you didn't see the next sunrise."
Her gaze dropped to the calluses on her knuckles.
"Later, to turn me into a weapon with no weaknesses left, they gave me a little surgery."
Something tightened behind Veyric's ribs.
As someone who'd watched her story unfold countless times from the other side of a movie screen, he knew exactly what that "graduation ceremony" meant.
He didn't offer pity. Didn't rush to comfort her. He listened.
"They thought that if they stripped away every possibility of having a life, you'd turn into a machine that served forever." Veyric turned around, put his back to the wall, and looked up at the dim sky. "But a machine wouldn't be down in a basement julienning potatoes for a bunch of people she barely knows."
Natasha's fingers stilled against the brick.
"Whether it was S.H.I.E.L.D. before, or that bunker now..." He looked at her, his voice gentle. "You've always been quietly turning whatever place you're in into somewhere people can feel safe."
He didn't spell it out any further. They both understood.
Natasha turned and leaned her back against the wall, standing shoulder to shoulder with him.
She studied him in the darkness, a thread of something complicated winding through her gaze.
"Back in the training room, your learning curve and your combat instincts don't belong to an ordinary person." Her eyes settled on his profile. "And you know my history. You know about Peter's scars. You even know how to deal with those creatures. You know too much. Enough to be... strange."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Who are you, really, Veyric?"
"Me?" A self-deprecating laugh. "I'm an ordinary guy who happens to know way too much about this universe. Ordinary enough that my biggest worry used to be scraping together rent money."
"Rent?"
Natasha blinked. A rare flicker of confusion crossed her face.
The word belonged to a world she'd never inhabited. From the Red Room's underground training camps, to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s classified facilities, to the Avengers' gleaming tower, her entire life ran on a track that never once intersected with something as mundane as rent.
She looked at him and shook her head. "Sometimes I genuinely can't tell if you're joking."
"Honestly, it confuses me too." Veyric nodded with full sincerity.
Then he straightened up, walked to the rusted folding chair, and brushed the dust off.
"But knowing too much does come with one upside. It makes certain things crystal clear."
She turned to look.
"No matter what shape the world's in, how nasty those things get, or even if we run out of potatoes to julienne..." His eyes met hers, and every trace of his usual wisecracking had burned away. "I came into this world, and that makes it my mission. As long as I'm still breathing, I'll be standing right here, holding the line on everything we've got."
In the night wind, something shifted in Natasha's eyes. The vigilance and scrutiny she wore like armor flickered, just barely.
Her lips pressed tight. The muscles along her jaw tensed, then slowly released.
She said nothing.
A pale blue light bloomed across Veyric's vision.
[Ding!]
[Deep emotional response detected from Black Widow]
[Black Widow Affinity +20. Current: 140]
[Bond status updated: Attitude shifted to "Moved"]
Veyric stared at that glaring "+20" and thought, System really knows how to pick its moments.
The night deepened. The wind turned colder.
They retraced their steps, heading down the stairwell side by side.
At the battered iron door on the ground floor, Natasha pushed it open but didn't step through.
She turned back.
Moonlight spilled through the broken lintel above, pooling on her face.
Those eyes, the ones that always kept a thousand secrets locked behind them, were clear. Not a single shadow in them.
Veyric's heart skipped without warning.
"Veyric." Her voice was quiet.
"Yeah?"
"Next time we come here, I'll bring a second bottle."
He cleared his throat and looked away. "I'm more of a soda guy, if I'm honest."
A faint, wet squelching sound stirred between his shoulder blades.
Venom's gravelly whisper slithered through his mind: "...Could you ask her to make mine chocolate milk?"
Natasha frowned, head tilting with a flicker of alertness. "Did you hear something?"
"Nope. Wind." Veyric coughed loudly, raised a hand to his shoulder blade, and pressed down hard, a silent warning for a certain chatty symbiote to stay quiet.
Late that night, the SUV rolled back into the bunker's concealed garage.
They climbed out and walked side by side down the long corridor toward the dormitory wing.
The comfortable silence held the entire way.
At their respective doors, Natasha stopped and glanced back.
"Goodnight, Captain."
"Goodnight."
Veyric pushed into his room and locked the door behind him.
The instant it clicked shut, a blob of black surged from his shoulder, forming a head no bigger than a tennis ball.
"I sensed everything." Venom's white eyes squeezed into gleeful slits, his tone dripping with mockery. "Up on the roof, and again at the door. Your heartbeat spiked at least three times."
Veyric peeled off his jacket without changing expression and headed for the bed.
"Cardio from the stairs. Shut up."
Venom wriggled in midair and dropped one last line, oozing satisfaction:
"Veyric, I do hope that when the time comes, your mouth isn't the only thing that's hard."
Veyric: ???