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A Gift From: findthesea
Type Of Gift: Fic
Title: Winter In The Pub
A Gift For: alphaflyer
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary/Prompt Used: Natasha and Nebula, over drinks (plus good ol’ fashioned Clint and Nat, because of course)
Author's Note: Hi Secret Santa! Hope you enjoy this – I had fun writing it!

Winter In The Pub

The call comes through on her SHIELD email on a cold winter afternoon when she’s jetted off to Pennsylvania after finishing another job -- a note from Fury asking (politely) if she’d mind doing some recon work for him.

Send Clint, she replies when she emails back from her phone, and it’s all she can do not to whine like a child. It’s a small thing, really, but she’d been really looking forward to one small day of actual relaxation with wine and maybe some food indulgences before retreating back to the hellhole of New York. The city made her annoyed on a normal basis and winter was Natasha’s most hated time of year for both the tourist reasons and the over-decorated reasons. Despite the fact that SHIELD tried to make things as festive as possible and Clint always put a small tree up in his apartment, she had remained pessimistic when the time of year rolled around, though she admittedly had grown a little fond of Clint’s drooping tree -- but only because Clint insisted on decorating it with stupid ornaments they picked up from their assignments overseas and refused to hang those stupid twinkling lights.

(“I could kill a man with those,” Natasha had remarked the first time she peeked into his stash of decorations, pulling out the long strings.

“Christ, Nat,” Clint had muttered, rubbing a hand over his face, clearly disturbed even though Natasha knew he had to be used to her remarks by now. “Show some goddamn respect for the holiday.”)

This is a Romanoff job, Fury writes back, before sending her another message. Natasha opens it with her thumb and squints; it’s a file containing information on a girl by the name of Nebula.

“Nebula,” she mutters to herself, scanning the black and white photo of a woman who looks like she’s made of both human and metal. She opens her keyboard to type again.

Robot, or something else?

Not Red Room, that’s for sure.

Thank you for stating the obvious, sir.

She’s not exactly sure what Fury wants her to do with this information or this girl. Upon further scrutiny of her file, she realizes she’s not even sure why she’s supposed to do anything with this at all; while Nebula looks human in some sense (mostly thanks to her features, because Natasha has learned that the most important things to focus on when meeting someone or studying someone for the first time are their facial expressions and how much they can show with them) everything else about her – from her bald head to her metal arm to her cybernetic enhancements – screams that she isn’t from this world.

Where is she from?

That’s to be determined. We think somewhere in space.

Somewhere…in….space. Natasha pauses, looking up in the middle of the busy street, and ducks behind a corner to get out of the ways of pedestrian traffic. Well, space would be better than America in the middle of the goddamn holiday season.

So there are aliens.

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of things out there, Agent Romanoff.

*

She can’t exactly tell her boss she won’t follow through on his orders, especially when her only excuse is that it’ll cut into her “me” time. She does send Clint a quick text through their encrypted comm unit that just says I’ll be home a day later than planned. Don’t wait up for me, which prompts a response of wow, whose ass did you have to kick today, Tash?

Natasha’s job is really not much of a job at all so much as it is a chance to start a game. She has no idea why Nebula is on Earth, why Fury needs her to start some kind of peaceful (however misleading) communication, but it’s not the first job where she’s felt like she’s flying blind and she knows it won’t be the last. Truthfully, she would’ve liked at least a little more information before walking into the bar Fury has directed her to, but if there was one thing she felt confident about doing at any point during a mission it was drinking and bullshitting -- especially if that kind of bullshitting was because she was trying to lead someone on or into a trap.

Despite a cloaked appearance and an obvious attempt to blend in to the patrons loudly shouting across the bar in what Natasha recognizes as gross holiday cheer, she spots Nebula easily, wedged into a corner near some garlands, holding a glass of clear liquid in her hand. Natasha scans the room, trying to make herself look casual in case she’s been noticed, then walks confidently towards her and takes an open seat.

“Vodka, on the rocks.” She has no idea if Nebula understands her language or for that matter, any other language -- did aliens have some kind of understanding about languages? Did they even speak English? -- but she doesn’t pay her attention until she looks up in the middle of downing her drink, catching a pair of curious eyes.

The first thing she notices about Nebula’s eyes is that they’re real; if nothing else about Nebula is actually human, at least her eyes are, which means something. Natasha only lets herself stare at her for a second before she averts her gaze.

“Bad day,” she says by way of explaining after she finishes her drink, signaling for another. Nebula doesn’t say anything, but takes a small sip of her own drink.

“I’ve been there.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees, accepting another shot. “Who would’ve thought I’d end up here of all places? I mean, what do they call this place? The City of Brotherly Love? And I swear to god, every single person I’ve met tonight has treated me like shit. Must be something in the water.”

Nebula eyes her and then lifts her glass. “To being treated like shit,” she says with a bitter tinge. Natasha smiles inwardly; it had been a simple guess that her best chance of starting the conversation lay in some emotional or physical hurt. Alien or not, Nebula was a girl -- and as Natasha has learned (and experienced first-hand), there were few girls in the world who couldn’t relate to some shitty story about abuse, bad treatment, or unfairness, especially when they were alone at a bar.

Natasha looks down at the counter, wiping her finger over the sticky rim. “Tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

Nebula snorts quietly. “Like I’m going to fall for that trick. I’m not that easy.” She looks up, eyes flashing, and this time, Natasha can detect a fire inside her pupils that seems more deadly than normal. “I don’t even know you.”

“And I don’t even know you,” Natasha argues, cocking her head. “But if you want to fix that, I’m Nadine.”

Nebula hesitates, and when she speaks, she stumbles over the letters, as if she’s trying to think of something else to say. “G – Gabby.”

“Gabby,” Natasha says with a nod. “Well, if we’re going to trade stories, let me tell you about the guy who I just left. He was a real fucking asshole.” It’s a story she’s rehearsed before, a tried and true tale that she doesn’t even need to think about. Much like her cover, she knew this story inside out, just as well as she knew Nadine inside out – trauma survivor, outcast, orphan. A girl who went looking for love and found it in all the wrong places and all the wrong people and still hasn’t fixed anything in her life, which is why she’s alone at a bar with all the other sad patrons trying to not make the same mistakes over and over again. When she’s done talking, she drinks again, trying to gauge how Nebula will respond.

For using the same story over and over again, Natasha’s learned that it always invites different reactions. Some marks had lost it, their emotions breaking faster than a brittle twig. Some didn’t react at all, having seen it all before. Most believed her. Some didn’t, and those missions ended badly, or with a lot of yelling in Fury’s office about breaking protocols. She’d told her story to Clint once while they were stranded in Sao Paolo and waiting for extraction, and even though he knew the girl talking to him wasn’t being entirely truthful, he still yelled at her for making him want to hit a phantom person out of rage for what he had done to someone he cared about.

(They were tired and cold and starving and injured, and Natasha hadn’t had the heart to tell him that while the story wasn’t entirely true, there was definitely enough truth rooted in the things that she had talked about.)

And so Natasha’s surprised when Nebula laughs. She tries to hide it at first and then she can’t seem to help herself, bringing her gloved hand up to her mouth to hide her mirth and, Natasha supposes, her cybernetic parts that she’s trying to conceal.

“Find something funny?” Natasha asks.

Nebula shakes her head, reaching for her drink. “What a damn sob story,” she manages to get out. “I mean, really. It makes mine look like a fairytale.”

Natasha frowns, because she can tell Nebula’s being sarcastic. It doesn’t bother her (doesn’t bother Nadine, in any case), but she’s still not exactly sure what her mission is here aside from connect with Nebula the same way she would try to play any other mark. Fury hadn’t necessarily asked her to gain Nebula’s trust, but he also hadn’t warned her of the fact that she could be dangerous, and Natasha hasn’t missed noticing that in addition to probable damage that could be done with her robotic body, there’s a thick knife sheathed in her boot.

“I’m happy to talk shop if you have something you want to tell me,” Natasha says when Nebula finally stops laughing. Her face abruptly sobers, lips sliding into two straight lines, and the hood of her oversized jacket falls back from her head. Nebula quickly grabs for it, shielding herself again before she hunches forward.

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?” Natasha asks curiously.

Nebula’s lips turn up in sardonic pleasure and she sighs. “To be unmade.”

Natasha smiles grimly. “Try me.”

Nebula looks wary, but Natasha pushes the rest of her drink towards her in a show of support. Nebula stares at it for a long time before picking it up.

“My father is -- was -- is, I guess, he’s not dead or anything -- abusive. I had an adopted sister and he would make us fight each other all the time in a lot of violent ways.” Nebula pauses, her words stilted, as if it’s taking all of her strength not to burst with vitriol. “I’m not sure who I am anymore.”

So is that why you’re here on Earth? You’re running away from something? Natasha thinks. “And that’s why you’re sitting in a bar the week before Christmas, drowning your sorrows.”

“So are you, Nadine,” Nebula points out with narrowed eyes.

Natasha raises her own eyebrows. “Wasn’t getting defensive,” she says, putting down her glass and holding up her hands. “Just saying that I get it.”

“Yeah, not being able to find love is the same thing as being forced to fight your own sister for someone else’s pleasure, like you’re some sort of tournament champion who is just disposable,” Nebula responds dryly. Natasha bites down on her lip, weighing the careful balance of how to respond without actually giving anything away. Regardless of what Nebula did or didn’t believe, Natasha didn’t just hand out her past on a silver platter, inviting people to take a bite of the assortment of horrors like a gift. She used parts of her history in cover stories, she used what she’d learned in the Red Room in her missions with Clint, she kept the nightmares boxed up underneath her bed and that box was rarely opened unless Clint could finagle the lock on it. (And fuck, she doesn’t want to admit that he’s becoming better and better at it.)

But Natasha notices that Nebula’s eyes have emotions in them that she can clearly read, that Natasha thinks she might not even realize that she’s showing. And for whatever reason, she feels for this cybernetic possible alien woman, this alien, this maybe assassin, this abused girl, this person who Fury has, for whatever reason, decided she should talk to on a random day in December.

“I grew up in a really bad place,” Natasha says finally. “No one cared about me. Everything I did made it clear that they saw me as an object. I was trained to be tough, but I never got to learn how to have any emotions and I could never feel for the trauma I went through.”

“Well.” Nebula swallows and takes a long breath. “I guess we’re even.”

Natasha lets herself smile briefly. “You could say that.”

They both lapse into silence, and Natasha finds herself thinking about Clint -- his stupid apartment with too many coffee makers and creaky floors, his stupid droopy tree, the way he tried to get her gifts every year even though she always managed to figure out he was planning to surprise her, thus ruining the mood. She finds herself feeling warm, and she knows it’s not from the alcohol; the holidays were shitty, sure, and she hated New York during Christmas and she was never going to join in on Maria Hill’s cookie contests or SHIELD’s White Elephant exchanges that Coulson liked to run. But she had somewhere to go, even if she bitched and moaned and didn’t want to. She didn’t know if Nebula did -- she assumes she doesn’t, based on what she knows from the file and what she’s talked about -- and the thought makes her feel a little sad.

“I hope things get better,” Natasha finds herself saying as she takes out a handful of bills and shoves them across the bar, indicating she’ll pay for both of their shares. “And Merry Christmas, Gabby.”

She gets up and heads towards the door, moving out of the warm embrace of the bar and into the chilly wind. She doesn’t turn to look back -- she’d never give herself away that easily, it’s an amateur move of a spy -- but she thinks about Nebula as she turns a corner and steps into a small convenience store, ducking into the pasta aisle as she pulls out her phone again.

Did my job. Talked to her. Will give you a report tomorrow if you want. Now I’m going the hell home. Don’t call me until the New Year.

You know that’s my job, Romanoff.

She smiles at the text, and then shakes her head and presses a button, bringing the phone to her ear.

“Is this the Grinch Who Stole Christmas?”

“You can’t steal Christmas if it’s not here yet,” Natasha responds with a small smile. “How’s the tree?”

“Eh.” Clint sounds distracted. “Falling apart, as usual. But don’t worry, she’s still got some life left in her. How was the thing Fury asked you to do?”

“Fine,” Natasha says quickly, not wanting to go into detail. It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Clint about anything, but she thinks this is another part of her that she might keep in her box, another thing to compartmentalize, at least for the time being.

“Well, that’s good,” Clint says, and Natasha can hear faint carols in the background of his words. She raises an eyebrow.

“Are you playing music because you know I’m not there to shut it off?”

“You’re a mean one, Mrs. Grinch.”

Natasha rolls her eyes at a bottle of vodka sauce. “If I say I’m really looking forward to coming back and being at the apartment, will I still get to be a Grinch?”

“Depends,” Clint teases. “Do you still want to strangle someone with Christmas lights?”

“Well, that’s a given,” Natasha responds immediately. “And double my need for that if it’s any international tourist around Rockefeller Center.”

Clint laughs, and Natasha can’t help but smile at the sound.

“You know, I know it’s only been a few days, but I missed you.”

Natasha grips the phone a little more tightly on instinct and laughs. “Even with my hatred of the holidays?”

Clint snorts. “Yeah, even then. Get home safe, okay? Call me if Fury throws any more last minute missions at you. It’s the holidays, dammit.”

He hangs up, all business and protocol; quick succinct conversations filled with banter indicative of what they’re used to having when they’re on the road. As Natasha is putting her phone back in her pocket, something compels her to take it out again and open a text thread.

Don’t wait up for me, Hawkeye.

When the response comes through a moment later, she finds herself smiling, the warm feeling in her stomach returning and melting away some of the ice that she knows has collected over the years.

Can’t make that promise, Tasha.